nancynall.com » It’s just fun to say: Mulch.
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It’s just fun to say: Mulch.

Jon Car­roll wrote a col­umn about mulch ear­lier this week. It so hap­pens that I came across not one but two mulch crews on my bike ride yes­ter­day. Mulch is absolutely essen­tial for sub­ur­bia to exist, right up there with gaso­line and espresso. Ninety per­cent of it is use­less and/or dec­o­ra­tive; there’s no rea­son for a well-established tree to have a col­lar of mulch ris­ing halfway up the trunk, although it does make mow­ing around it eas­ier. So find­ing, say, a teenage maple with mulch piled at least eight inches high at its base is as easy as look­ing out the near­est win­dow. Over win­ter mulch will com­pact, degrade, etc., and in the spring a crew comes around and adds three more inches. Since it only lost one or maybe two inches over the win­ter, this is a net gain for the mulch pile, and you see some really stupid-looking mulch setups. I’m not a gar­dener, but my guess is, this can’t be good for the tree. If your feet needed to be wet you might wear wet socks, but adding wet pants is cer­tainly unnec­es­sary, and would be like lay­ing out a wel­come mat for pests that like moist, dark places to bur­row. But no one asks me. I’m just the dumb lady rolling past on the bicycle.

Any­way, one of the mulch crews I saw yes­ter­day was typ­i­cal, a bunch of dark-skinned men speak­ing Span­ish. I won­dered the same thing I won­der when I pick up, oh, say a small ren­der­ing of a stained-glass win­dow fea­tur­ing pray­ing hands and the “Foot­prints” verse, all exe­cuted in lovely plas­tic with “made in China” stamped on its base. I think of the sweat­shop fac­tory, the miasma of hot plas­tic com­ing from the non-OSHA-approved machin­ery, a life mea­sured out by cof­fee spoons while this crap goes by on the con­veyor belt. I won­der what the per­son who made it thought of the dis­tant Amer­i­cans who will dis­play this in their homes. And so I won­dered about how mulch is used in the Spanish-speaking world, if the vil­lage in Chi­huahua or Guatemala or wher­ever these men came from con­tains mulch, what they thought when they learned that Amer­i­cans in one of the wettest places on the planet grind up old trees and heap them up around the trunks of other trees for rea­sons no one can pre­cisely fathom.

I told myself I was going to think of story ideas on this bike ride, by the way, show­ing I’m capa­ble of pro­cras­ti­na­tion even in my recreation.

Blog­gage: From my ace adver­tis­ing source JohnC, I know the term for detailed pho­to­graphic adver­tis­ing placed on high-rise build­ings is a “wrap.” (GM fre­quently wraps the Ren­Cen; this was for the All-Star Game in 2005.) So. Warner Bros. build­ing in Bur­bank gets a wrap pro­mot­ing Madonna’s new album. Worker therein notes that his office seems to be in Madonna’s vagina, more or less. Post gets linked on Metafil­ter. Hilar­ity ensues: I used to work there until I got my pink slip. And so on, and on, and on.

GOP oper­a­tive gives the gen­der ver­sion of the “well, there’s black peo­ple, and then there’s n*ggers” defense, here.

One of my favorite news­pa­per blogs is the Detroit News’ Tax Watch­dog, writ­ten by reporter Robert Snell and ded­i­cated to the propo­si­tion that if you throw a rock in south­east Michi­gan, you’ll hit a tax dead­beat, and many of them are famous. At the top of the blog today, Anita Baker, on the hook for $481K and change. Bonus: A pic­ture of her Grosse Pointe house.

I also liked this audio slideshow about Red’s Jazz Shoe Shine Par­lor, a Detroit institution.

The News is rich this week: I also learned that Sam Wagstaff, the man who dis­cov­ered, pro­moted and loved Robert Map­plethorpe, did a three-year stint at the Detroit Insti­tute of Arts as a cura­tor, where he pro­moted avant-garde pieces such as “Dragged Mass Geo­met­ric”: Con­cep­tual art at its high­est and most abstruse, “Dragged Mass Geo­met­ric” involved two bull­doz­ers lug­ging a 35-ton slab of gran­ite across the ver­dant sweep of the museum’s north lawn, with the goal of embed­ding it in the earth.

Snicker.

And now, off to the gym for Rob’s Tor­ture Class, which I skipped Tues­day for my meet­ing, which means it’ll be even more torture-ific. Send moral support.

Posted on Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 at 9:43 am
in Uncategorized.

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45 responses to
“It’s just fun to say: Mulch.”

  1. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on May 22nd, 2008 at 9:58 am

    Mulch should stop at the sur­face roots and not pile around the trunk, since it pro­motes fun­gus and rot in the bark. Save a tree, pull back some mulch.

    Eas­ton shop­ping cen­ter near here has to put out lit­tle ele­gant signs stuck in the mulch when first applied — say­ing some­thing close to “The smell is actu­ally a nat­ural thing and not some­thing to get all both­ered about, peo­ple.” Sub­ur­bia is a strange, strange place sometimes.

  2. Connie said on May 22nd, 2008 at 10:07 am

    We are work­ing on this year’s big project: remov­ing all the stones that “mulch” our land­scap­ing in front, and replac­ing them with cocoa bean hull mulch. The lovely dark brown color that doesn’t fade will go nicely with our house, and my yard will smell like Cocoa Krispies after the rain.

  3. brian stouder said on May 22nd, 2008 at 10:29 am

    where he pro­moted avant-garde pieces such as “Dragged Mass Geo­met­ric”: Con­cep­tual art at its high­est and most abstruse reminded me of this guy who con­sid­ered it art, of a sort, to take an ‘Abstract Expres­sion­ist’ pen­cil work of another per­son, Willem de Koon­ing, and sim­ply erase it!

    Brood­ing seri­ous­ness and majes­tic aspi­ra­tions were anath­ema to Mr. Rauschen­berg and his art. “You have to have the time to feel sorry for your­self,” he once said, “in order to be a good Abstract Expressionist.”

    Sounds like a house painter, to me

  4. del said on May 22nd, 2008 at 11:04 am

    Cocoa bean mulch. Love that choclatey aroma. Used to walk by it on Wayne State’s campus…

  5. coozledad said on May 22nd, 2008 at 11:05 am

    Con­cep­tual art is worth­while mostly for the hilar­i­ous unin­tended con­se­quences. Dur­ing a dis­cus­sion in one of my fig­ure draw­ing classes, a fel­low stu­dent described an instal­la­tion that fea­tured rut­ting hogs doused in brightly col­ored wet paint. They spilled out of their inad­e­quate fenc­ing and pro­ceeded to rut among the board mem­bers and trustees of the museum, along with the rapt spec­ta­tors who learned that day that genius is pain. Or just a pain the ass.

  6. nancy said on May 22nd, 2008 at 11:15 am

    Well, I can tell you the trustees of the DIA were not amused by “Dragged Mass Geo­met­ric,” either. Some of them demanded Wagstaff pay to repair the dam­age to the lawn out of his own pocket.

  7. LAMary said on May 22nd, 2008 at 11:16 am

    Every­one in my office is now plan­ning to schlep up the street to Warner Broth­ers to wave to the guy in Madonna’s hoo hoo.

  8. Joe K. said on May 22nd, 2008 at 11:51 am

    Some of the remarks on the Madonna pic­tures are down right funny. Lots of clever peo­ple out there.
    Joe K

  9. MichaelG said on May 22nd, 2008 at 12:16 pm

    The fil­ters on my office com­puter won’t let me look.

  10. Julie Robinson said on May 22nd, 2008 at 12:57 pm

    On the other end of the Rauschen­berg spec­trum, this story on Morn­ing Edi­tion about a new museum in Port­land: the Vel­vete­ria. Yep, you got it: paint­ings on black vel­vet. Here’s the link, with some hilar­i­ous pho­tos. Dogs play­ing poker? Check. Lib­er­ace and Elvis? Check. Sammy Davis, Jr as Jesus? Got that too. And if you ask nicely, you can touch the portraits.

  11. Jen said on May 22nd, 2008 at 1:21 pm

    Ick, mod­ern art. It’s not that I don’t like good art — I loved my trip a few years ago to the Art Insti­tute of Chicago — but I only like the art that depicts some­thing rather under­stand­able, not “art” that looks like a 2-year-old threw his peas at the wall or instal­la­tions of var­i­ous pieces of con­struc­tion equip­ment lay­ing on the floor.

    I’m a tacky per­son — I’d much rather go to the Vel­vete­ria and see the paint­ing of dogs play­ing poker, because that’s just funny.

  12. Hattie said on May 22nd, 2008 at 1:28 pm

    Mulch is a good thing, but don’t put it right up to the trunk of the tree.
    And aban­don the idea that there is any­thing left in this world that is local. You will be much happier.

  13. ellen said on May 22nd, 2008 at 1:46 pm

    Most awe­some vel­vet paint­ing ever (spot­ted along road­side in the Ozarks): Semi truck curv­ing around a moun­tain­side on a rainy road, being watched over from heaven by Jesus and Elvis.

  14. Dexter said on May 22nd, 2008 at 2:14 pm

    I never noticed the hills of mulch around trees until the past few years. In this small city I reside in, jail trustees in com­i­cal cartoon-like horizontally-striped zebra jump­suits do the hard work at the city parks, which I am a denizen of, all year round, cycling and dog walk­ing daily, rain, snow , or shine.
    The jail­birds are given free, basi­cally unsu­per­vised reign over the land­scap­ing drudgery work, mulching away hap­pily.
    They trans­port loads of mulch from a depos­i­tory heap and make huge piles, then use trail­ered 4-wheelers to work from, shov­el­ing the stuff into cones as high as grav­ity allows all around every tree in the parks. It’s quite an oper­a­tion.
    On the plus side, the gen­eral pop­u­la­tion (of the city, not the jail!) has unlim­ited access to free mulch when it’s there in the home pile; on the neg­a­tive side, ya gotta make DAMN sure you lock your vehi­cle up good and tight, and it helps to have a LOJAK , just in case. Every now and then the most reli­able jail trustee gets, as Boss said in “Cool Hand Luke”, “…rab­bit in his blood…”

  15. Dexter said on May 22nd, 2008 at 2:22 pm

    Hopper’s “Nighthawks” has been my desk­top for years. I used to drive three hun­dred miles just to see a Peter Max exhibit.
    Here’s a paint­ing I have devel­oped affec­tion for in the past sev­eral years.
    I am sure you folks rec­og­nize it as a Van Gogh…it’s “Wheatfields”.

  16. Sue said on May 22nd, 2008 at 2:36 pm

    Ellen, I’m assum­ing it’s hang­ing in your liv­ing room now. Art­work like that is an investment.

  17. coozledad said on May 22nd, 2008 at 2:52 pm

    Hop­per was a sound drafts­man, and one of the styl­is­tic heirs of Winslow Homer. Rock­well Kent is also begin­ning to get his due as a painter, but his major con­tri­bu­tion is to book art, and almost sin­gle­hand­edly insti­gat­ing the Melville revival.
    I have to admit I just don’t get purely nonob­jec­tive art. I don’t know how the artist knows when they’re fin­ished with a piece, for one thing. But I hon­estly believe it’s a per­sonal fail­ing, and I’m poorer for it.
    Still, I think Wal­ton Ford can kick anyone’s ass, liv­ing or dead, in terms of paint­ing. Maybe it’s the black humor beneath all that lumi­nous color.
    http://​www​.pbs​.org/​a​r​t​2​1​/​s​l​i​d​e​s​h​o​w​/​?​s​l​i​d​e​=​1​7​8​&​a​m​p​;​a​r​t​i​n​dex=50

  18. Kirk said on May 22nd, 2008 at 3:21 pm

    By now, some­one must have added Dale Earn­hardt to the heav­enly guardians in that vel­vet semi picture.

  19. brian stouder said on May 22nd, 2008 at 4:00 pm

    Other words that are just plain fun to say:

    flum­mox

    befud­dle

    skedad­dle

    lugubri­ous

    ele­phan­tine

    fina­gle

    jejune

    caca­phone

    scin­tilla

  20. Danny said on May 22nd, 2008 at 4:04 pm

    On the plus side, the gen­eral pop­u­la­tion (of the city, not the jail!) has unlim­ited access to free mulch when it’s there in the home pile; on the neg­a­tive side, ya gotta make DAMN sure you lock your vehi­cle up good and tight, and it helps to have a LOJAK , just in case. Every now and then the most reli­able jail trustee gets, as Boss said in “Cool Hand Luke”, “…rab­bit in his blood…”

    Some men … you just cain’t reach.

  21. brian stouder said on May 22nd, 2008 at 4:28 pm

    jux­ta­pose

    extrap­o­late

    inter­po­late

    exac­er­bate (if you don’t stop doing that, you’ll need glasses)

    belit­tle

    ker­fluffle

    she­moz­zle

    PS — What we have heyah, is a fai­lyah to communicate!

  22. Dexter said on May 22nd, 2008 at 4:32 pm

    coo­zledad:
    Nearly nine years ago The Chicago Tri­bune ran a Hop­per fea­ture.
    They printed a photo and named the road Hopper’s Cape Cod home was located on.
    I spent an hour once I got onto the lit­tle road attempt­ing to catch a glimpse of Hopper’s home, which was totally obscured by brush and trees. That cured me of celebrity house-gawking.
    Oh well…we were vaca­tion­ing close by anyway.…36 years ago we vaca­tioned in Hyan­nis, and I drove to a point where I was told I could see the Kennedy com­pound from. I think I saw it, so damn far away , we couldn’t even tell. That should have cured me of that dumb prac­tice, but I guess the fuel was fired on a trip to LA and the movie stars’ homes tour.

  23. LAMary said on May 22nd, 2008 at 4:40 pm

    We made a lunchtime pil­grim­age to the Warner Bros build­ing, and we all waved at Madonna’s crotch. Then we went out for medi­anoche sandwiches.

  24. Julie Robinson said on May 22nd, 2008 at 4:41 pm

    Way back in 1985 we vis­ited LA, and naifs that we were, thought we would see movie stars every­where. And sure enough, there was Jeff Bridges and fam­ily at the air­port, with lots and lots of lug­gage. That ended up being our one and only sighting.

    We also did stu­pid things like stand in line all day for tick­ets to The Tonight Show and Fam­ily Ties. What a waste of time! I think that cured us.

  25. deb said on May 22nd, 2008 at 4:48 pm

    late to the party, as usual, but mild-mannered jeff and hat­tie are right: mulch heaped against a tree trunk is a bad thing. arborists call this a mulch vol­cano. cocoa bean mulch is pricey in the mil­wau­kee area, but oh, that heav­enly aroma!

  26. Dexter said on May 22nd, 2008 at 4:52 pm

    haha! My sight­ing was Bob Hast­ings (Lt. Car­pen­ter on “McHale’s Navy”, Kelsey on “All in the Fam­ily”) He was out of work and rel­e­gated to greet­ing us on our tour…but…helluva NICE man!

  27. coozledad said on May 22nd, 2008 at 5:05 pm

    Dex­ter: When I lived in Durham, NC, I kept try­ing to find where J.J. Lankes lived while his girl­friend was being treated for men­tal ill­ness at Dorothea Dix Hos­pi­tal. he was a wood­cut artist who illus­trated a num­ber of books of Robert frost’s poetry. The two were appar­ently good friends. Lankes did stun­ningly beau­ti­ful work, omi­nously sim­i­lar in tone to William Blake (who he admired greatly) and yet con­tex­tu­ally and styl­is­ti­cally worlds apart.
    He died in Durham the year before I was born, and I never got to talk to any of the old news­pa­per peo­ple who might have known him. Bob Sher­rill hadn’t started writ­ing for The Herald-Sun News­pa­pers then-he was still in Man­hatt­tan, being ele­gantly and hilar­i­ously drunk, and the paper didn’t keep back issues on micro­fiche at the time his obit would have been pub­lished.
    http://​www​.old​printshop​.com/​i​m​a​g​e​s​/​l​a​r​g​e​/​3​3​8​26.jpg

  28. nancy said on May 22nd, 2008 at 5:50 pm

    My favorite com­ment on Madonna’s giant coochie was one of the very first:

    Too bad the win­dow doesn’t open a bit. You could stick your hand out & wave at people

    And I would wave back, oh yes I would.

  29. joodyb said on May 22nd, 2008 at 6:53 pm

    the st. paul machine has a plan to wrap the sky­ways (for $$, cer­tainly) dur­ing the RNC. no word what kind of adver­tis­ers are inter­ested or if there will be any left in the metro by the time the GOP rolls into town. HA! (patented Chris Matthews laugh)

  30. coozledad said on May 22nd, 2008 at 7:17 pm

    I think it would be more appro­pri­ate if some­one were wav­ing fran­ti­cally and shout­ing for help from Madonna’s snizz.
    Help! I don’t believe in Kabala!

  31. caliban said on May 22nd, 2008 at 8:54 pm

    A remark­able let­ter from an SI writer to Jon Lester on the occa­sion of his pitch­ing a no-hitter. This is not just for Red Sox fanat­ics. Not even just for sports fans.

    PETA peo­ple take an unerr­ingly overly-optimistic view of their effect on the larger world, but maybe this is an authen­tic ray of hope in the brutish sphere of thor­ough­ly­over­bred­bred racing.

    NN‘s com­ments about fash­ion and Rachel Mad­dow reminded me of the OJ-trial makeovers. Greta seemed to make out bet­ter than Mar­sha, but she also seemed more com­pe­tent dur­ing the TV ordeal. Mad­dow is very smart, and she‘s funny by way of sar­casm leav­ened with good nature. Here‘s an inter­est­ing bit of analy­sis regard­ing the Dem nom­i­naq­tion race.

  32. Linda said on May 22nd, 2008 at 9:23 pm

    Damn. Cocoa hulls are the best mulch, but the smell makes me hun­gry. Stones, how­ever, are a pesti­lence for years. They make it hard to shovel and last for­ever, and weeds grow through them anyway.

  33. brian stouder said on May 22nd, 2008 at 10:06 pm

    Cal­iban — thanks for the link to Rachel’s arti­cle on the sim­mer­ing Clinton/Obama she­moz­zle. The fel­lows and I went to lunch today, and had exactly that dis­cus­sion. The clever­est one of us (the one who always wins at gamenight!) was firmly of the opin­ion that HRC will indeed go all the way to the con­ven­tion, and will press her case to the absolute end on the con­ven­tion floor, by fight­ing for a motion to release all the del­e­gates from their pledges, leav­ing them ALL as ‘super delegates’ — free to vote for her.

    I argued that this surely would be a case of destroy­ing the vil­lage in order to save it (if indeed it ‘takes a vil­lage to raise a child’, then in that case it takes a Clin­ton to raze the vil­lage to the ground, if the bas­tards there won’t vote the way they should!) — whereupon the ques­tion became: what’s the downside?

    Think­ing about it — McCain looks absolutely hope­less; he has no real oppo­si­tion to his cam­paign, and yet he seems to be floun­der­ing (when he’s not hold­ing cook­outs back home) and fumbling.…..and by God, one CAN imag­ine that Hillary Clin­ton sees this and knows that — what­ever dam­age is done to the Demo­c­ra­tic Party — she can whip McCain’s ass, six ways to Sun­day. That is to say, she may well believe mak­ing this fight with Obama HAS no down side for her, and who is to say she’s NOT right about that?

    ‘Course, no mat­ter how mas­ter­fully the Clin­ton folks play the game, they can­not make Obama’s cash reserves go away. If it comes to a bit­ter fight to the fin­ish, what is to stop Obama from run­ning in Novem­ber, even if HRC earns the Demo­c­ra­tic nom­i­na­tion? One sup­poses the Clin­ton logic will be that Obama has more to lose from that sce­nario, since at his age he could wait out 8 years of HRC and then run.….but that would be a very, very bit­ter pill to swal­low, I think.

    A gen­uinely split Demo­c­ra­tic party in Novem­ber IS the one way that John McCain might win the presidency.

  34. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on May 22nd, 2008 at 10:55 pm

    Y’know, i’m not here to pitch hand-grenades, but before every­body writes off McCain as a hope­less case who could only win if Karl Rrrrrrrove sac­ri­fices some babies to Moloch … look at the Elec­toral Col­lege num­bers (John King does it engag­ingly on CNN with his hyper-map) and check out some polling num­bers that make a key distinction.

    That dis­tinc­tion? Likely vot­ers, or reg­is­tered vot­ers. As Obama sup­port­ers have noted to their bemuse­ment, 50K at a rally doesn’t auto­mat­i­cally trans­late into votes. Some sup­port can be “a mile wide and an inch deep,” because a rally is a low invest­ment activ­ity, as is (today) giv­ing to a cam­paign (hellp, Pay­Pal), while vot­ing on a rainy day or even vot­ing at all is a higher invest­ment activity.

    So polls of “all Amer­i­cans” with Obama tap­ping 70% may be valid, includ­ing youth and non-registered and never voted folk, but doesn’t tell you much about a Tues­day in Novem­ber. When you poll for those who will vote, McCain is still very much in this thing.

    Every four years, we hear about how can­di­date X is chang­ing every­thing because the polls mean noth­ing because peo­ple will vote who never have or never will except for can­di­date X. Can Obama actu­ally do that? Some evi­dence indi­cates that he will gen­er­ate some new vot­ers, more than Dukakis or Kerry did. But the state-by-state, elec­torally dis­trib­uted, “likely voter” num­bers don’t sup­port a McCain pancake.

    A Repub­li­can ham­mer­ing, yes, but that’s not the same thing.

  35. moe99 said on May 22nd, 2008 at 11:55 pm

    Not to be too Machi­avel­lian, but with the excep­tion of the appoint­ments to the Supreme Court (which with a veto proof major­ity in Sen­ate could take care of that issue), I’m not sure I’m opposed to a Repub­li­can in the WH. Because the next 4 years we are going to see the wheels come off in Iraq big time, and if a Dem’s in office, it will all offi­cially be the Democrat’s fault. Regard­less of who put us there. Regard­less of who had no after the inva­sion strat­egy. Regard­less of who had no exit strat­egy. This would be a Viet­nam redux in other words. With a Repub­li­can in the WH the blame falls squarely where it belongs.

    I’ve become accus­tomed to try­ing to make caviar out of shit sand­wiches lately.

  36. Catherine said on May 22nd, 2008 at 11:58 pm

    The CNN clip is my final piece of proof that racism is not OK any­more, but sex­ism is still fine. As the mother of two daugh­ters, I’m, uh, not OK with that.

    And going back to yesterday’s com­ments & Jeff’s “effec­tive energy pol­icy” links, yes, absolutely. Imag­ine if we’d devoted every dol­lar spent in Iraq instead to achiev­ing energy inde­pen­dence. Would we be there? Prob­a­bly not. Would we be a darn sight closer than we are now? Yeah. Not to men­tion, not mired in an unwinnable war.

  37. Dexter said on May 23rd, 2008 at 12:37 am

    So.….four peo­ple here are root­ing for the Pen­guins and only I am a Red Wings fan. So be it. Be advised: Sid­ney Crosby will be cut­ting his Stan­ley Cup teeth on the puck McCarty shoves in his mouth and seven-million-dollar man Mar­ian Hossa will be going in for den­tal work on every off day! We do NOT mess around! Here’s an amaz­ing stat: Crosby, who has cap­tured the imag­i­na­tion of fans the way Gret­sky and Lemieux did a gen­er­a­tion ago, is paid just $850,000 per season…he’s worth fif­teen mil­lion, and he’ll get it within a few short years.
    Here’s some real bull­shit: both the NHL and the NBA have games on at the same time Sat­ur­day.
    C’mon! The NFL doesn’t go against the World Series on those Sun­day nights !!

  38. Cosmo Panzini said on May 23rd, 2008 at 7:36 am

    Small things, cer­tainly, but impor­tant nonethe­less: 1) The idiocy we’re involved in over in Iraq is not a war (and hasn’t been since about three weeks after our incur­sion), but an occu­pa­tion. 2) Just how many words are there for pussy?

  39. Jolene said on May 23rd, 2008 at 7:49 am

    Your sec­ond ques­tion occurred to me too, Cosmo. And for the thread­weaver award, how about words for pussy that are fun to say? One such is vajay­jay, which I first heard from Oprah.

  40. brian stouder said on May 23rd, 2008 at 8:24 am

    Hmm­mmm.…

    A few of the less pro­saic ones that I have come across (so to speak) include ‘kitty’, ‘cream dough­nut’, and ‘tun­nel of love’. In child-birth classes they kept refer­ring to “the birth canal” — and I thought refer­ring to that region as a “canal” lent itself to all sorts of silly puns!

    Steve Martin’s ‘The Jerk’ had his “Spe­cial Pur­pose”, which strikes me as a use­ful, uni­sex reference!

  41. MichaelG said on May 23rd, 2008 at 8:47 am

    I once heard a five year old call it a “shiner”.

  42. Kirk said on May 23rd, 2008 at 8:52 am

    cooter

  43. brian stouder said on May 23rd, 2008 at 9:44 am

    In “How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days”, what name did the female lead affix to Matthew McConaughey’s tool of man­hood,? (fun­ni­est cheap-novel euphemism for an erect penis: Steam­ing Stalk. Can’t remem­ber where I read that, but what made it par­tic­u­larly funny was that I think the author was not try­ing to be funny; I recall a sex scene in a Black­ford Oakes novel by William F Buck­ley, where he said some­thing about the woman’s hand “seek­ing its prey”.…which struck me as vaguely troubling!)

    non­se­quitur — our young folks, on the way home after a week­end at grandma’s

    http://​bp1​.blog​ger​.com/​_​T​M​n​B​K​L​C​N​A​c​M​/​S​D​D​S​o​A​K​L​f​e​I​/​A​A​A​A​A​A​A​A​A​I​g​/​R​F​Q​b​o​7​C​O​V​o​I​/​s​3​2​0​/​s​l​eeping.

  44. MichaelG said on May 23rd, 2008 at 10:07 am

    Brian, my daugh­ter was so bad she’d fall asleep when I was back­ing out of the driveway.

  45. brian stouder said on May 23rd, 2008 at 10:25 am

    I was dri­ving along, mut­ter­ing to myself about the cd Pam picked to lis­ten to, when I noticed she had fallen asleep, so I killed the cd and switched to a worth­while radio station*.…

    and then I saw that the young folks were all out cold…and then nudged Pam, so that she could see the sight…and then she: a) started her cd over (arrrggghh!!); b) groused about being awak­ened; c) fished the cam­era out of it’s bag and snapped the pic­ture; and then d) fell back into a light sleep (mean­ing, kept one eye on the cd/radio)

    * the rule is — if she’s dri­ving, she’s in com­mand; and if I’m dri­ving, her duties include run­ning the entertainment

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