The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The other day Mt. Vernon decided it was high time their tulip-blighted burg put its mark on the international map.  A lot of towns around here are content to sink quietly into the mudflats while celebrating their past glory days, but Mt. Vernon, looking to the future, decided to seize the moment.  Think Big, the Downtown Bizness Association declared, and so, given that ‘Spirit of the Spud’ was this year’s theme and mantra, they aimed their sights rootward and prepared a full frontal shock and awe assault on the Guiness World Record for …. wait for it …. largest potato au gratin.
Well sir, they blew away the old record, the one held for just over a year by Netherlanders also eager for tuberous fame.  They nearly doubled the tonnage, now tipping the Guiness scale at 16,000 pounds, no sneezeable au gratin, that.
Now I come from the great potato state of Maine and my granddaddy was a potato farmer his entire life.  I eat the buggers fried, baked, boiled, mashed, chipped and grautined.  Spuds are no doubt a huge percentage of my genetic make-up.  And sure, I look forward to Tulip Town’s probable upcoming  art inspiration:  giant potatoes the size of glacial boulders on every street corner, sponsored by local biznesses and inflicted on all those artists weary of competing for the Tulip Fest Poster year after year after year.  Let the Spud Spirit soar, I say.  Let it shine through!  Let it heal the sick and inspire the young.  Sing the praises of the tulip colored tubers, reds and yellows and Finn purple.
A curmudgeon might have hoped for, oh, a slightly grander vision.  A cynic might fault a society fed on the pablum of American Idol instead of nutritious values.  A wag might wonder aloud if the volunteers and the donations might have served, well, needier, loftier purposes.  But I am not one of those.  No, I salute Spud City, au gratin capital of the civilized world!!  And tomorrow I’ll be calling my broker to buy up as many shares of Frito Lay as I can lay hands on.  When the chips are down, I say, buy chips.

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/CLICK-TO-HEAR-the-lfie-you-save.mp3[/podcast]CLICK TO HEAR —the life you save

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I know I don’t have very many fans judging by the sparcity of hits I get on the Skeeter Daddle blogsite,  but occasionally someone acknowledges they read something in the Crab Cracker and then usually they offer me ideas for my next so-called humor sketch.  I assume they figure, possibly a bit too accurately, that I’ve run out of my own ideas.

Recently a friend said I should write one about Zumba.  I don’t actually know jack about Zumba.  Course, I don’t know doodley about much of anything and that hasn’t stopped me, but my friend was kind enough not to mention that.  We got Zumba down at the South Grange.  Looks like a rock concert parking lot out there where they’re zumba-ing.  Without the drugs and drinking.  I got a buddy who goes so I asked, hey, Zorba, what’s the deal with this Zumba stuff?  And he looked at me the way Lance Armstrong would look at the jerk who asked him why he didn’t just buy himself a Harley.   To meet women, he said, what else?

Now, I’m not politically opposed to organized exercise.  You want to get in shape, I’m okay with it.   Really.  But there is something about group sweating I’ve never warmed up to, no doubt a personal failing, a flaw in my communal DNA, and probably the reason my career as quarterback in the NFL took a small detour.  I drive by a gym and see those panting bodies cycling maniacally with headphones strapped on next to dozens of other aerobiscists and I get the deja-vu of a high school locker room crammed with week old jock straps and the pheromones of pre-steroid sadists and I think to myself I’d rather have two teeth extracted without novacaine than join back in with the athletic crowd.

I chop wood and haul brush and clear land and build outbuildings and, well, all that old school exercise that wasn’t considered exercise, just an active lifestyle.  A study recently (and I KNOW we don’t believe science anymore) said exercise for folks who are basically sedentary really didn’t offset the deleterious effects of entire days spent in a cubicle or at a desk.  Not that you should give up and wait for that aortic stent….

Then again, maybe you should do like we do down at Nature’s own gym of the South End:  quit your job, go back to the land, find your natural aerobic center.  The life you save might just be your own.

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/CLICK-TO-HEAR-saving-time.mp3[/podcast]CLICK TO HEAR —saving time

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Even down here in the bucolic nettle fields of the pastoral South End, our laid back, porch-rocking, garden hoeing pace is definitely picking up speed.  More and more satellites are whizzing through all that space junk overhead to bring us faster weather reports, more TV channels, instant text messaging and close-up photos of the rocker on the porch from Google Earth we don’t have so much time to sit in anymore.  Our attention spans now aren’t long enough to make it through the Stanwoodopolis Weekly Gazette so we check Yahoo headlines on the computer that rockets in on DSL.  If you’re younger than 30, you never looked at a newspaper in your whole life.  Why bother, you can get the only news you’re really interested in on Facebook, what your ‘friends’ are doing, news enough, I guess, these days.
Our old shack has its share of 21st century gizmoes.  Microwave oven, digital telephone answering machine, ma’s nano-pod, two computers (his and hers) and all the peripherals right down to a podcast microphone.  We got lazerized CD players, DVD players, a remote controlled TV antenna, digital alarm clocks, electric guitars.  We look like the Jetsons without the robot maid.  And that’s on back order from Amazon….
This is all the stuff advertised as Time-Saving Devices back when.  Help do your chores more efficiently.  Give you leisure time galore.  Free you to live your dream.  Be your True Self, not a slave to the menial tasking days.  Right…
Maybe I’m too old and too cynical.  Maybe Facebook updating IS your true self.  Maybe bad TV IS the dream.  Maybe what we wanted all along was something to keep us busy, keep us constantly entertained, keep us from sitting too long on the rocker contemplating the front yard that needs mowing.  The world is smaller and definitely accelerating.  The question I got, rocking to an older rhythm, is what the hell was the point of saving time if everything got speeded up so fast all our free time is gone?  Well, I could waste more time on this, but I have to hurry up and update this blogsite.

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/CLICK-TO-HEAR-retro-chic.mp3[/podcast]CLICK TO HEAR — retro chic

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This past weekend we gave our old record collection to a young friend who’d bought a 1959 Motorola phonograph player powered by a tube amp with a turntable and two detachable speakers that could be separated nearly 8 feet apart  to create stereophonic  sound.  Quite the innovation back in the Eisenhower era!  Her buying this 50 year old vintage electronica was probably the equivalent of me buying a Victrola when I was her age.  Progress marches on……
I’m told folks are going back to vinyl.  Oh ho, right!  And next we’ll return to the magic of 8-tracks.  You bet.  Every album I ever listened to in my lifetime would download on an I-pod and play back through a home entertainment center’s 7 surround-sound speakers, not necessarily a vast improvement over the quadrophonic leap forward of the 70’s, but nicely compact and certainly easier to use than a turntable and its scratch-and-pop aesthetic.
Sure, it was a hard psychic journey deciding to get rid of hundreds of old albums and all that rich cover art, a veritable time trip through our musical pantheon and those many nights, listening with roommates and friends.  Probably the same with our grandparents and their 2 pound 78’s listened to on Edison’s magic invention.  We have lived long enough to be retro chic, sad to say.
Now I’ve got boxes of cassette tapes, VHS tapes and beta movies.   Sure, I could save em.  Beta’s coming back, rumor has it.  You hang onto anything long enough, it becomes a collector item.  I guess that’s why here on the retro chic South End, we keep our cars up on blocks back in the weeds at the edge of the nettle forest.  When the world is ready once again for ‘K’ cars, we got the market cornered.  You want to beat the rush, order now…..  Our operators are standing by.

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/CLICK-TO-HEAR-ATTENTION-DEFICIT.mp3[/podcast]CLICK TO HEAR — ATTENTION! DEFICIT

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We all got such short little spans of attention these days, we’re like deer in the median strip of the 6 lane digital highway.  Used to be we prized skills like concentration, stick-to-it-ness, focus, diligence, all those traits that are long lost to anyone unlucky enough to own a television or a computer.  Now we admire Multi-Taskers, jugglers of e-mail, news crawls, Facebook, text messages and a cellphone conversation while whipping up a dinner for the family between commercials during Fox news.  Call me Old School, put a dunce hat on me and make me sit in a corner, but I don’t buy this multi-tasking one little bit.  I taught school awhile before I took an early retirement and I’ve tried to teach attention deficit kids whose sole operational mode was switching from one thought to six others in the space of a minute.  Trust me —this is a prescription for not learning much of anything, plenty of little.

Deep thinking seems to be a Lost Art.  Down at the South End even Shallow Thinking has taken a hike.  We got computers, TV, You-Tube, Linked-In, all that stuff like you-all, meaning, we got 3 minute max attention spans.  My pals can’t listen to a whole CD — they hit random play and make a radio station out of their CD players.

The world is on constant Channel Surf, snippets of one crummy show, check out the ball scores, click to the news crawlers, bounce through 37 channels of Nature/Food/CNN/chopped liver then start over.  The internet should be banned unless we’re on Ritalin.

I just hope there are people, few though they may be, living in some remote island of the Digital World, maybe its south tail end, who can still Concentrate, who can plan and build — from start to finish without checking their stock quotations — a nuclear reactor or a Boeing 747 or a skyscraper or a cure for brain cancer.

I had hoped to end this on some pithy, humorous, neatly bundled conclusion — I really had.  But … damn if I can remember where we started.  Something about crummy memory, I think.  All I can say is Alzheimer’s should hold no fear for most of us.  We’ve already programmed ourselves for it…..

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