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Greetings, my fellow port swillers!
Ol’ Robbo cannot recall ever before getting sick as a result of a visit to the doctors, but it certainly seems to have played out that way this time.
Went to consult on lab results from my physical on Monday feeling perfectly okay.
Tuesday, started developing a prickly cough, which has since then mushroomed into a full-blown (so to speak) bronchial event. My lungs feel like they’re full of asbestos, my throat like it’s coated with sandpaper and my ears like they’re corked.
One is faced with a dilemma: Do I go back to the doc for this? Will she be able to cure it? Or will I simply upgrade to something more exotic – Beriberi? Dengue fever? The plague? On the other hand, am I better off taking my usual self-cure, which involves crawling under a rock until it all blows over?
I’m sure there’s a Fahrenheit 451 firemen joke in all this somewhere, but the truth is that I’m too worn to sink that shot.
Greetings, my fellow port swillers!
Have I mentioned before how much I dislike Tuesdays? I have? Well, let me just top up that cup o’ gripe for you.
I couldn’t help noticing that Pravda on the Potomac, apparently with nothing better to occupy itself, decided to run a front page, over-the-fold sympathy article on a transgendered five year old this past Sunday. I’ve nothing much to say about this biznay (well, nothing much printable at any rate) except this: Always remember that “sex” is a matter of biology, while “gender” is a creature of politics. That’s pretty much all you need to know to navigate these things.
And, as Peej O’Rourke famously noted, politics is the business of gaining power and status without merit.
Why do they call it a “Fun Fair”? I never have any fun, and I think it unfair that I have to go. (I repeat this observation here because my doc laughed when I mentioned it to her yesterday. It’s gold, Jerry! Gold!)
The Mothe recently alerted me to the fact that Jeep is recalling some of its 2010 Wranglers because of the risk of fire caused by some flaw in the automatic transmission system. This caused me to fetch the soft cushions and the comfy chair: The very notion of a Wrangler with automatic transmission is downright heretical, IMHO. I mean, half the fun of driving one is the stick-shift, right? Confess! CONFESS!!
I completely agree with Mr. FLG’s latest pet peeve.
Henry Rodriguez causes a cold, cold feeling in the pit of my stomach every time he comes in to close a game for my beloved Nats. Help me, Drew Storen! You’re my only hope!
I saw a soon-to-be middle aged woman with the words “Live, Laugh, Love” tattooed prominently across her back. Why? Why on earth?
On a brighter note, I pick up the new glasses this evening. Perhaps this will put me in a less churlish frame of mind. Perhaps not.
Greetings, my fellow port swillers!
Ol’ Robbo collected his first official sunburn of the season this gergous day. (Robbo’s doctor has been fussing at him recently about Vitamin D deficiency. A few more outings per month like today’s and that problem ought to rectify itself.)
First, he spent the morning bench coaching the younger Misses Port Swillers’ softball team to a 12-7 victory. (They now stand at 8-1 on the season). Among other things, he was delighted to discover that the youngest gel has the apparent super power ability to become two-dimensional at will, this being the only explanation of how she managed to slide under a tag at home plate. I’d swear when she pancaked, she went absolutely flat.
Next, he spent the afternoon puttering about in the yard, mowing, trimming, weeding and (just to mix things up a bit), giving the front door portico its yearly scrubbing.
We are paying the wages for our sinful slothiness in not having got round to cleaning out the gutters last fall, insofar as one of the ones on the front of the port swiller mansion, chock full of dead leaves, mulch and new maple saplings, recently wrenched itself away from the fascia board and started bowing out ominously. Yesterday, we finally got them cleaned. Today, we had a local handyman out to re-attach the bowmeister. As I stood about jawing with him, I discovered that he is a licensed bow-hunter and helps the county with keeping the local deer population within something approaching reasonable limits. When I mentioned that I used to hunt deer myself in my misspent yoot and that venison sausage was amongst my very favorite foods, he replied that he makes his own (among other products) all the time and would I like to have some of it?
This looks like the beginning of a bee-u-tiful friendship.
So now it’s just a matter of waiting for five o’clock to roll around. As a treat for a productive day’s work, I hied me to the butcher’s counter at the local Gourmet Giant (pronounced “GER-may GEEE-aunt”) and nabbed one of their extra thick ribeyes. Yum. After dins, it’ll probably be Buckaroo Banzai. The Nats are playing tonight, but I feel I need a break from watching them strand so many base-runners. Not good for ol’ Robbo’s ulcer.
Regular friends of the decanter know that ol’ Robbo is fond of gassing on about his progeny here. (Well, why shouldn’t he?)
Anyhoo, although I don’t usually do so, I thought I’d post this pic because it so perfectly captures the word portraits that I have been building up over the years of the two younger gels. They are off today with their classmates from St. Marie of the Blessed Educational Method for their annual performance down at the Folger Shakespeare Theater. This year, the class is doing Twelfth Night (or, more accurately, an extremely stripped down selection of scenes therefrom), with the Middle Gel starring as Viola (whose quiet Machiavellian scheming drives the action of the play) and the Youngest, Gawd help us, serving up Feste the Clown (her rendition for me the other night of “O, Mistress Mine” still has plaster falling from the ceiling of the port swiller mansion.
Type casting? Just a bit!
The New Robbo Look?
Greetings, my fellow port swillers!
Last evening, Mrs. R and I trudged over to Hour Eyes to pick out a new set of frames to sit athwart the port-swiller nose, Mrs. R eager and enthusiastic, Self with that feeling of dread and tedium that comes over him whenever he is forced to go shopping for anything other than wine or books.
Mrs. R, having been blessed with hawk-like eyesight, has never had any experience with the realities of glasses shopping for the legally blind. (She has taken recently to wearing off-the-shelf naughty librarian glasses when reading, but I strongly suspect this affectation is grounded in motives other than the need to correct her vision. But that’s a different story.) Thus, I had to do a goodish bit of spade work to persuade her that, no, with my progressive prescription, I could not wear those narrow, rectangular, hipster-doofus frames, even if I wanted to, because they would give me a vertical field of vision of approximated six inches, tops.
And so we slowly made our way up and down the display cases. Being a guy, of course all I wanted to do was to find something decent and get out in the minimum possible time. Mrs. R, however, in typical female shopping mode, had to check every single frame and every single miniscule change in lens shape with the air of a judge at the Westminster Dog Show. She also kept making me try on different frames and check myself in the mirror. We had the same conversation at least fifteen times:
Mrs. R: How do those look to you?
Self: Um, Dear, I don’t actually have my own glasses on. I can’t tell how they look.
In the end, we settled on some thin, gun-metal flex half-frames with a sort of mid-sized, rounded-corner rectangular lenses. As I say, I have no real idea what they will look like on the Robbo face. My hope is that they will be quiet enough as not to be particularly noticeable one way or the other. At any rate, they passed the uxorial censor, so if Mrs. R decides later that she doesn’t, in fact, like them, she’s only herself to blame this time. (Friends of the decanter may be tempted to point out that it doesn’t work that way under spousal law. Hey, we’re just a few weeks short of our nineteenth anniversary, so tell me about it. A guy can still dream, though.)
As I say, Mrs. R is something of a novice at this biznay, while I am a grizzled veteran. Once we had the frames sorted, I believe she thought it was all just about over. Hardly. The next part, of course, was to sit down and start talking about lens – the material, the thickness, all the whistle-and-bell extras. In the end, I had to plunk for the really high-end stuff. Mrs. R balked at the cost, but I explained that anything of a lower grade would require a pair of lenses the thickness of a couple of coke bottle bottoms, which would not only look ridiculous in a thin frame, but would also be a literal pain to wear. In the end, she came round, taking the opposite tack that if I was going to be wearing the things full time, then yes, it made sense to go with the best quality.
As we walked out, Mrs. R asked how long my new prescription would last. I hadn’t the heart to tell her that it would be two or three years if I was very lucky.
Eldest Gel: What’s the Nats’ record now, Dad?
Self: Well, with last night’s win, we’re, lessee, 20 and 12.
E.G.: Wow, we’re doing really well this year, aren’t we.
Self (knocking on kitchen table): Yes. So far, at any rate.
E.G.: Uh, what are you doing?
Self: Touching wood.
E.G.: Why?
Self: So as to ward off the Baseball Gods. They don’t like anything that resembles boasting.
E.G.: There are no baseball gods!
Self: Oh, yes there are. We must be prudent.
E.G.: Dad! You’re the most religious person in the house! “Thou shalt have no other god but me.” How can you believe in God and the “baseball gods” at the same time?
Self: I can’t explain it theologically. I just know what I know.
E.G.: I’m telling Father S about you!
Self: I’m sure he’d back me up.
Greetings, my fellow port swillers!
Nothing of sufficient gravitational weight in ol’ Robbo’s brain this morning to cause a coalescing of post-length thoughts. (I’m not even going to bother addressing the whole “evolution” meme splashing around the headlines today. Regular friends of the decanter will know already what I think about that unfortunate biznay. However, I will just point out that the Golden Rule does not mean “Whatever turns you on.”) So instead, a few smaller items:
♦ No movement on the glasses front, yet, as it’s almost impossible during the week for Mrs. R and Self to actually get enough time alone together to go frame-shopping. I continue to feel a certain oddly comfortable relief in the knowledge that all the symptoms I’ve been suffering of late – dizziness, light-headedness, headaches – come not from some lurking cancer, alcohol poisoning or other sinister sources, but from good, old-fashioned eye-strain.
♦ My second prescription, the one specifically for working at my computer, came over from the doc yesterday. He said, “Now, you may have trouble getting this filled at Hour Eyes because they’ll tell you it just can’t be done. However, I happen to be able to do it in my own shop and I can give you a good deal……” Did I say ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching the other day? Add a couple more.
♦ They sure play Etienne-Nicolas Mehul’s “Young Henry’s Hunt” Overture an awful lot on the local classickal station. I suppose the theory is that anything with horns is a natural crowd-pleaser.
♦ The organist at RFEC is after me again, this time tempting me to help the choir sing the Mozart Coronation Mass. I’ve wrestled with the idea and finally come to the firm conclusion that I’m perfectly comfortable tagging along to services as my family’s “guest” but that I cannot, in good faith, do anything that might be construed as aiding and abetting the service itself, even if it is something as heavenly as singing Mozart. I’m pretty sure the organist does not know of my RC conversion, and perhaps it’s time to e’splain it to him.
♦ Planning ahead for a family movie night this weekend, I decided it’s time to expose the gels to that great classick, The Blues Brothers. Said the middle gel when I explained it to her, “1980?? Is it in color?” Whippersnapper.
♦ I’m off on another biznay trip the first part of next week. The first leg of my travel takes me down to Atlanta. The past couple trips I’ve been on, I’ve been forced to fly exclusively in those dinky little regional jets. This time around, the flights between DeeCee and Atlanta will actually be on large liners – an Airbus A-320 in one direction and a Boeing 757 in the other, to be exact. I’ve been so cooped up in the sardine tins of late that I actually find myself looking forward to these flights. I’m never, ever going to enjoy air travel, but I seem to have managed to get my fears under reasonable control.
♦ How do I know that I’ve reached True Fan Status with my beloved Nats? By the fact that they’ve dropped three straight this week and that each said loss has put me in a thoroughly grumpy mood as I’ve gone to bed.
“Wha happened?” has made its way into the Robbo family lexicon.
If by chance you aren’t yet an afithionado of Christopher Guest mockumentaries, well, here’s a Netflix queue assignment for you because you ought to be.
Greetings, my fellow port swillers!
I see where many pixels are being – what, spilled? illumined? electromagnetized?- over the death this week of Maurice Sendak. Much of the virtual ink focuses on Sendak’s standing up against the alleged orthodoxy of presenting our childs with kiddy stories swathed three feet deep in bubble-wrap:
He contributed to more than 80 books, but it was Where the Wild Things Are, which has sold more than 10 million copies worldwide since its publication in 1963, that brought him international recognition. At the time, to Sendak’s irritation and surprise, the story provoked a collective gasp of disapproval from parents, teachers and child experts. Not only did the young hero, Max, yell at his mother, but the pages were also populated by hideous monsters that grown-ups felt sure would terrify young readers.
Not having been a child in 1963, much less a parent, I could not say what the prevailing fad was in those days. All I can say is that, in my own misspent yoot, we had (indeed, I still have) a multi-book collection of Grimm and Christian Andersen stories, graphically illustrated, that were far more terrifying to me than anything Sendak ever dreamed up: dragons, hags, evil trolls and the like, most of them occupying dark, smokey, bat-haunted lairs or wolf-infested forests. I remember in particular a full page depiction of a hero fighting a large, black cat (a witch in disguise, I believe) in a spooky castle or house, surrounded by on-looking evil spirits. The hero has one hand around the cat’s throat, while with the other, he’s driving a dagger into its chest. The cat, in turn, eyes bulging in rage and terror, has all four claws firmly embedded in the man’s arm. That gave me more than one nightmare, I can tell you, especially as we had our own black cat of uncertain temperment.
At any rate, so far as Sendak’s appeal goes in this respect, historickally speaking I think it’s more accurate to say that he represented a swing of the pendulum back in the direction of these tradition fairy tales (which, themselves, have roots in the Hobbesian life of the European Dark Ages), and not so much a ground-breaking revolution.
Not that I disagree with Sendak’s sentiments: The fubsy-wubsy has always given ol’ Robbo the guts-ache. For example, I remember when the gels went through a Berenstain Bears phase. In order to preserve my already questionable sanity whilst reading all about sporty Brother, trying-harder Sister, sensible Mama and dopey old Papa Bear, I would indulge myself with fantasy titles for a whole line of Alt-Berenstain stories: The Berenstain Bears and the Mob Enforcer, The Berenstain Bears and the Maori Feast, The Berenstain Bears and the Great Bear Country Jihad, The Berenstain Bears Get A Pet Green Mamba. You get the idea.
On the other hand, I was not a fan of Sendak for the simple reason that I never much cared for his art work. It has a certain near-pointillist quality about it that doesn’t appeal to me. Also, I just didn’t much like the monsters, which were really not much more than pot-bellied hippies with fangs, horns and claws added. (I admit that I was also put off by the fact that Sendak was idolized by the Baby Boomer crowd. You take my word for it, boys and girls: Whenever you want to get a good compass bearing on matters of morality or taste, check and see what the Boomers are up to. Then do the opposite.)
Anyhoo, R.I.P and all that, but the nooz doesn’t really affect me very much.
Greetings, my fellow port swillers!
Regular friends of the decanter may or may not have gleaned from ol’ Robbo’s postings over the years the fact that I am a firm believer in propriety, defined by Webster’s as, “the quality or state of being proper or suitable : appropriateness.”
It’s not that I’m a prig or a prude. It’s just that I think everything has its time and place (just ask my family, who hear me use that phrase ad nauseam) and that I also think there are, in fact, some things which ought to, as it were, remain behind the curtain at all times.
This came to mind last evening as I stood in the kitchen, clutching the local fishwrapper and trying to divert my attention with an examination of the real estate listings, as a highly technical conversation was carried on in voices calculated to call home the cattle across the sands of the Dee, between one daughter locked in the downstairs loo and another apparently upstairs in her bedroom, the lines of communication being kept open by the third who stood at the top of the stairs and acted as a signal relay. I won’t go into the details: Suffice to say that when I finally had had enough, I burst into the hall yelling, “For God’s sake, girls, too much information ! Too much information!”
Evidently, I have not been plain enough heretofore with my hints about discretion and decorum. I now feel I have no choice but to print several poster-sized notices entitled “Words, Phrases and Topics Verboten Within Earshot Of Dad!” and tack them up around the port swiller house. It pains me to have to take such a sledgehammer approach to enforcing what is a matter of nicety, but I feel I have no real alternative in order to avoid going barmy.
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