"Use All The Crayons!" newsletter No. 39
Today's theme ... "Milk & Honey" (& Happy Boston Corbett Day!)
Happy Boston Corbett Day! Today is the day America’s Greatest Eunuch heard God tell him to kill John Wilkes Booth
You won’t see it anywhere in the news today. There will be no stirring memorials. Congress won’t pause to honor the actions of the man who should be acclaimed as America’s greatest eunuch by unanimous consent. All hail, Boston Corbett, the man who killed the man who killed President Lincoln! It happened 156 years ago this very morning. Really, can you even name a single other great American eunuch? I can’t. I guess we’re all stumped. And so are the eunuchs, but in a much more literal way.
Reader "Letter of the Week”
"Savored your Baby Boomer book (enjoyed would not have been the appropriate word since it was quite intense and at times disturbing...but I LIKE that...thought-provoking and very Stephen King-esque...is that perchance what you were going for?). Well done!"
Helen S., Pennsylvania
Dear Helen,
Few things warm my heart more than to read compliments on "The Last Baby Boomer." And comparing it to The (Stephen) King does just that. But, no, it was not my intention to trod that path. Too daunting. My goal was to take what I thought was an original premise, add lively flourishes to every paragraph and wind up with a successful enough book to snag the attention of industry bigshots who'd lavish me with praise, marketing support & book contracts for subsequent work. Your comments lead me to believe I did my part.
Purchase signed copies of "Last Baby Boomer" at www.ChrisRodell.com
Today’s theme: Milk & Honey
Colorful Living Tip of the Day …
• My understanding of human nature tells me that many of the people striving to get to the land of milk and honey will once they arrive immediately begin complaining everything is too sticky.
Related …
• My mind's been wandering so long I'm surprised it's not appeared on someone's milk carton.
• How would match.com profiles differ if men resumed judging women on how good they'd be around an ornery cow?
• Predict milk will be the next common food staple to get the luxury boutique treatment. People will have milk orgies in moo saloons: Cowligula!
• Ask dairy farmers if promiscuous bovine adolescents roll their eyes anytime a parent counsels them not to have a cow.
• How lackadaisical am I becoming? I now consider the act of me pouring milk on Lucky Charms meal prep. Anyone want to take a wild guess what's for dinner
• Point out how a honeycomb is a delicious sweetener. A honey comb is something no sensible hairstylist would dream of using. Ah, the power of the space bar.
Unrelated …
• Many writers are on shoe-string budgets. Me, I can't afford shoes with strings. I guess that means I'm on a flip flop budget.
• The idea of being a lab rat must seem so prestigious to rats so it must be a cruel disappointment when they learn what it involves.
• Asked 9 year old if she knew difference between carpenter bees and regular bees. Told her carpenter bees are the ones with the tiny tool belts.
• All my life people have been telling me, "Chris you can't do this. You can't do that." They've been right about 90 percent of the time.
Zeitgust Word of the Week (a word I made up with the goal of getting it into an actual dictionary) …
Slimitators: Impressionable teenage boys and girls intent on looking like fashionable Hollywood anorexics.
Related blog post …
“Moo! When wine trumps milk (Jack LaLanne says …)” (from ’10)
I don’t know how the conversation about milk got started, but it sounded like it was being conducted in a cafeteria full of fourth graders. “I hate milk!” “Eww! My mommy made me drink it all the time. Never again!”But these weren’t 9 year olds. We were old men in an old man’s bar. “Beer is living proof that God loves man!” is what sudsy sage Benjamin Franklin said. You can agree with that philosophical nugget, and still be surprised, as I was, to hear my fellow inebriates expressing such visceral disdain for milk. They talked about it the way they talk about the Taliban. To me it was like hating Girl Scouts.
Oddly enough …
“Gator Men 101: Keep head out of gator’s mouth”
Of all the lessons culled from an unintentionally educational jaunt through the Everglades, one noteworthy nugget remains attached to my brain with barnacle-like tenacity: Never, ever party with Gator Man. Refuse his offers of rum, jungle juice and swamp swill. Drink with Gator Man — any gator man — and the consequences could be a loss of a finger, a hand, a limb and rivers of swamp-tainting blood.
Tourist: “People ‘round here ever get bit?”
Gator Man: “Oh, sure, it happens all the time. We had an old Indian just last week nearly got his head bit clean off.”
Tourist: “Wow! How’d that happen?”
Gator Man: “He was drunk and somebody dared him to put his head in a gator’s mouth. He did and the gator bit him.”
(See full story here)
Concluding words …
• I’m intelligent enough to appreciate the contradiction of being a man who fancies himself an intellectual while simultaneously becoming furious at the failure to successfully navigate the marshmallow maze on the back of the Lucky Charms cereal box.
All Chris’s books can be purchased through www.ChrisRodell.com
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