Today’s theme: Plants/seeds
Colorful Living Tip of the Day …
• Understand that some succeed by using heavy machinery to cut vast, scarring holes and remove precious medals from deep within the Earth, while others find fortune by digging many tiny little holes and planting seeds.
Related …
• Spend a warm spring afternoon planting tree saplings scattered along vacant land you pass every day on your way to work. Enjoy monitoring their growth during traffic jams.
•A single apple seed weighs 700 mg but sinks in water. A battleship weighs 45k tons, but does not. Question: What would happen to battleship full of apple seeds?
• Realize even the most successful vegetable farmers are doomed to live in the seediest parts of town.
• Am disappointed to learn Asheville, NC, was named after Gov. Sam Ashe and not piles of cigarette ash. Next question: Was Ashe a tobacco farmer?
• Why did the grass farmer cross the road? To get to the other sod.
• I’m on the verge of proving once and for all my office plants are talking to one another and conspiring against me. But every time I get close enough to record the treachery the bully ficus says, "Shut up! Here he comes again!" I'll not rest until I get conclusive evidence. Won't work either.
• Insist you’re not being superstitious, but that you’ll only buy things like thyme, basil and sage from farmers named Herb.
Zeitgust Word of the Week (a word I made up with the goal of getting it into a dictionary) …
Pompomposity: The act of being exuberantly aggressive and cheerleading others to say they think you’re great, too!!!
Bonus Zeitgust: Brand new word! EgoTESTicle!
Someone will one day identify an exclusively male condition in which men convince themselves they alone possess the virility and sex appeal to, if needed, re-populate the entire planet. These men are "egoTESTicle."
Related blog post …
“(To every truck) Turnip! Turnip! Turnip!” (from ’12)
I vowed two weeks ago that the very next time I heard or read someone claim they “didn’t just fall off the turnip truck” I was going to investigate. Boom, there it was in yesterday’s letters to the editor. And by investigate, I didn’t mean I was going to check their knees for scrapes or turnip truck tire tread tracks. No, I was going to dig at the very root of the claim, and that would be: Just what the hell is a turnip? I swear, I’ve spent my entire life, nearly 50 years, and have never tasted a single turnip. I’m unashamed of the admission. I’m friends with many paunchy carnivores who’ve never tasted a single vegetable.
(Interested in learning about the origins of the “fell off the turnip truck” line? Full story here)
Oddly enough …
“World’s Most Dangerous Job”
Think your job sucks? Rejoice you weren’t an18th Century Church Bell Ringer: To this day, many Medieval church bells are inscribed with the Latin phrase, "Fulgura frango," ("I break the lightning"). Had they been particular about accuracy back then, bells might have been scrawled with the Latin words for "Pray for my singed soul." Hapless bell ringers were routinely ordered to the ropes to ring the bells whenever storms rolled into town in the mistaken belief that the racket from the ringing would drive lightning away. Today we know that lightning strikes the dominant structures like church steeples, a fact learned centuries too late for 103 bell ringers who were killed during a 3 year period when 386 church bells were struck. Ignorants used to believe the ringing of the bells dispersed evil spirits; "enlightened" folks erroneously believed that ringing church bells broke the continuity of lightning.
Concluding words …
• Just occurred to me: Elvis Presley & Arnold Palmer will be seated near each other if there are homerooms in heaven.
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