Category: humor

No Need to Shout, I Can Hear You

The FDA just announced their final ruling on improving access to hearing aids. You can read the final ruling itself, but by the time you finish it, you’ll be dead and won’t need a hearing aid.

Every time I fail to follow Sena’s directions, I remind her of how a loud rock concert ruined my hearing. It was a Rare Earth concert decades ago in my wasted youth. What do you mean you never heard of Rare Earth?

And if you believe that, I have some prime farm land in the Florida Everglades I can sell you where you can grow all the alligators you want. Prices are slashed literally to the bone of any extra limbs you don’t think you need.

Anyway, I think I do have some hearing loss. And it would be nice to be able to get hearing aids that work without spending an arm and a leg (unless you want to talk about a real estate deal in the Everglades; make me an offer!).

A lot of people who develop hearing loss have a lack of insight into the problem. I think that might be why so many of us at least have the impulse to say things like:

“Speak up!” “Why are you mumbling?” “Quit talking with your mouth full!”

Hearing loss can lead to misunderstandings which can sometimes be hilarious. It’s probably the reason for some mondegreens, which are mishearing words in song lyrics (“Excuse me, while I kiss this guy,” Jimi Hendrix—actually the lyric is “Excuse me while I kiss the sky”).

I’m not sure when hearing aids that are effective, safe, and affordable will be available. Maybe after the aliens finish their human-alien hybridization program, which will make talking unnecessary. We can just read each other’s thoughts. That’s actually scarier than having trouble hearing.

Iowa State Fair Musings

We’ve never actually been to the Iowa State Fair, but we really like listening to the Iowa Public Broadcasting TV shows about it.

The first show covered a lot of activities. Food at the Fair is always intriguing.  We know there are a lot of foods on a stick, but we didn’t know you could get a rattlesnake corn dog—with venom sauce! It’s pretty good according to the food guy, Travis Graven. You probably won’t find it in your local grocery store.

The big animals are impressive. I always wonder why the handlers sort of guide some of the animals (like that huge boar) using those little boards.

The lemonade stand was a little thought provoking. Dad’s Old-Fashioned Lemonade stand sellers aren’t out there to make money. They do it for the nostalgia. I’m sure they do it for the tradition as well.

That’s a nod to keeping tradition alive. One of those is the 4-H program. According to the Iowa State University 4-H Youth Development web page, the 4 H’s stand for:

Head for thinking, planning, and reasoning

Heart for being kind, true, and sympathetic

Hands for being useful, helpful, and skillful

Health for taking care of yourself and your community

The Iowa State Fair is a longstanding tradition. It started way back in 1854. It was on hold in 2020 because of the Covid-19 pandemic and that was the first time since World War II it was cancelled and only the sixth time in the Fair’s 166-year history.

A tradition is defined as the transmission of a culture’s customs, beliefs, knowledge, skills and more from generation to generation. In order to do that somebody has to do the passing down of all of that. And somebody has to pick it up.

You can store some of it in electronic archives, but a critically important part of it relies on institutional knowledge in the hearts and minds of the culture’s older people. It’s a two-way street; the young listen, accept some, and improve more if we’re lucky. It’s more than facts and figures—it’s the wisdom we want to preserve.

And we want to keep the rattlesnake corn dogs, with venom sauce.

Why Do We Want to Believe?

I heard a song called “Marfa Lights” on the KCCK 88.3 FM radio program, the Friday Night Blues Show with John Heim aka Big Mo. The lyrics mention the Marfa Lights, describing them as UFOs or flying saucers. It was the first time I ever heard a blues song mentioning UFOs.

I looked it up later on the web. It turns out there’s a town called Marfa in Texas where people see strange lights. Years ago (and maybe even nowadays) a lot of them think they might be UFOs or some other paranormal phenomenon, like ghosts. A couple of studies in 2004 and 2008 pretty much debunked them as automobile lights triggered by atmospheric changes like temperature inversions. Still, some people want to believe they’re something weird or cosmic.

On the same evening I heard the song, I watched an episode of Ancient Aliens which is one of those shows which has a paranormal theme, mostly involving aliens. They talked about a blind seer named Baba Vanga, whose predictions about the future are thought to be 80% accurate. The speculation by the hosts of the show is that Baba Vanga might have been tapping into a phenomenon called the Akashic Record.

Encyclopedia Britannica on the web says the Akashic Record is said to be a “…compendium of pictorial records, or ‘memories,’ of all events, actions, thoughts, and feelings that have occurred since the beginning of time.” (Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. “Akashic record”. Encyclopedia Britannica, 29 Jan. 2015, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Akashic-record. Accessed 13 August 2022.)

It’s not a physical thing, but it sounds like an ethereal public library. The Ancient Alien enthusiasts suggest that anyone can access it, even aliens (of course!)—if you have a current, valid library card and don’t have any overdue books or have at least paid up all the fines you owe.

In fact, there are a lot of entries on the web claiming you can access the Akashic Record just by formulating a clear question, like “What does Kellogg really put in those so-called all natural Kashi Granola Bars—and what exactly is Pyridoxine Hydrochloride anyway?”

Then you have to get into a pretty deep meditative state, which is nothing like mindfulness meditation. You need to ask really specific questions and insist on talking to the head librarian if you start to get the run around about certain resources being on reserve only for high-level professional mediums who charge outrageously high fees to search the record for you.

People want to believe. That’s why you can even find a WikiHow with detailed instructions for tapping into the Akashi Record to check out any of the episodes from the first season of the X-Files.

The Akashic Record might even have the Cliff Notes on what is going to happen to humans in the remote future. Ancient Aliens guys seem to spin this a couple of different ways.

One is a version of the matrix theory, which means that we’re living in some kind of computer simulation run by aliens who set this up with a special code or script that absolutely must be followed—meaning that the future is strictly determined. That would be bad because it sounds like it ends with a tremendous nuclear explosion on Mars, which humans eventually colonize but then can’t get along with each other because there are not enough rib joints for both humans and aliens.

The other future scenario is that humans evolve into beings who can tolerate indefinitely prolonged deep space exploration and go planet-hopping for the rest of eternity looking for Douglas Adams’ restaurant at the end of the universe. Forget getting in if you don’t have a reservation.

Maybe the question for the Akashic Record keepers should be pretty basic.

Why do we want so hard to believe?

What About the Deer?

I saw a very thoroughly researched article the other day about the issue of deer population management in Little Village, a monthly news and culture magazine. You get an idea of the conflict between deer and people when you read the title of the article, which contains the gentle term, “Rats with hooves.”

I was reminded of it when Sena yanked the tall grasses out of her garden recently. Later, I could hear her tapping on the windows and yelling at the deer who could now see the garden is actually a salad bar.

I have lost count of the number of deer who ask me to light their cigarettes for them after they breed on our front lawn.

And I made a video in which they cavort and chew their way across our back yard on their way to parties. For some reason, it’s gotten over 1,280 views as of this writing (8/11/2022), and got about a 1,000 in one day.

I’m not clear on exactly why deer management by bow-hunting is such a failure. Iowa City has contracted with an outside company which can cull the population by the hundreds using sharp shooters who apparently do this for a living. I guess bow hunters see this as a form of recreation.

I’m ambivalent about people killing deer. On the other hand, a deer did run into Sena while she was driving the car a few years ago. They can leave a pretty good dent and can even kill motorists.

The Little Village article quotes somebody who said that neighbors call deer “1,200-pound rats with hooves.”

That sounded pretty heavy to me. I looked it up on the web and the average deer weighs a little over 100 pounds. If they’re seeing something that big in their yards, they might be confusing a moose for a deer. And that means we’ve got an even bigger problem.

There are other ways to control the population besides shooting them. I learned that you can surgically sterilize them. It costs about $1,000 per animal. Would these be veterinarians who might call their clinic, Pay to Spay?

The other way might be to introduce natural predators, such as wolves, into the areas where deer are making themselves a nuisance. Collateral damage could become an issue during backyard cookouts. And has anybody considered the risk of werewolf contamination?

Mmmm, venison!

Could we round up the deer and relocate them to a wilderness where wolves and other natural predators could control their population? I won’t mention the name of such a place, but it starts with the letter A-L-A-S-K-A.

Could Bigfoot get involved somehow? Maybe, if scientists could come up with a way to alter the deer genetic code to make them smell like beef jerky.

According to the article, the application for participating in the bow-hunt season runs through October 21, 2022. Property owners can fill out an application to allow them on their land. Anybody up for shish kabob at their cookout?

Should We Smudge the Attic?

We never did figure out what was making the knocking noise in our attic.  I guess we’ll have to find out what to do about it. We did get the ladder and check out the attic, though.

As a general rule, animals don’t knock. They usually lack good manners, especially the Chupacabra and its cousins. And I can’t figure out what a wild creature would eat up there, unless it likes insulation.

I tossed an old fruitcake through the hatch to distract the werewolf, demon or zombie or whatever might be haunting the place. I figured that would probably kill it or at least the candied fruit would gum up his fangs so bad his jaws would stick closed.

It was pretty dark up there. We didn’t hear any knocking, but we did notice a disconnected duct. We’ve scheduled a fix with a local HVAC company.

We might have to Smudge the attic. I looked this up on the web. It’s a way to spiritually cleanse a house. You can use burnt sage or other substances which you have to light with a match or a lighter (which you could accidentally drop)—something I’m not sure I want to do in an attic when it’s hot and dry and there’s a lot of insulation and wood all over the place.

You end up with a lot of smudges that way—from a fire.

Anyway, you’re supposed to work your way around the attic from right of the entrance all the way around counterclockwise until you get the left side of the entrance.

We have attic hatch that is about 22’’ x 30.’’ It’s a long way around the attic. It’s pretty big and some things can hide under the abundant insulation—like giant pythons, which can go a long time between meals.

Snakes don’t knock; they lunge, strike, and coil. And if they’re possessed by a demon, they’re not usually impressed by how hot it can get in an attic.

This is why the HVAC repair person is waiting a while before coming out to our house. They try to avoid doing work in attics in the summer heat—not because they’re afraid of pythons. Python wrestling is just part of the job.

This gives us a little time to work out a smudge technique that doesn’t involve adding things like heat and smoke to the attic. That reminds me. You’re supposed to open up windows to let the smoke out. There aren’t any windows in our attic. Come to think of it, do any attics have windows?

It turns out there are smokeless cleansing methods—that don’t involve sprinkling Copenhagen all over the joint.

You can bang on pots and pans or ring bells. This can wake up the neighbors, who might call the police.

You can dust and vacuum and mop, but I’m not keen on cleaning up the attic. Attics are just the right places for large piles of insulation, dirt, and shadows—which can hide werewolves.

 You can make a spray out of stovetop potpourri, which might be a mistake because it could draw people from miles around who think you’re throwing a cheese and wine party.

You could open some windows to let in light but not in our attic, unless we knock out a few walls. Vampires don’t care for bright lights and might take offense.

Magical sweeping with an ordinary broom might work, but it would just make a cloud of insulation particles and make you sneeze—which could startle the werewolf, who would then rip your lungs out.

I think we’ll just stay out of the attic for now.

Holes in Our Heads

I remember getting a trephination of my fingernail a long time ago when I was working as a surveyor’s assistant. We were out taking elevation shots with a level and a rod measuring the depth of sewer pipes.

This required us to remove the manhole covers, which are very heavy. I got one of my fingers pinched and man that hurt. My crew drove me to the emergency room where an ER doctor drilled a tiny hole in my fingernail. The immediate pain relief resulting from the release of the subungual hematoma pressure felt miraculous.

That was trephination of the fingernail. I’ll bet some of you thought of my skull when you read the word in my first sentence, though.

Trephination is just the word for the medical procedure of making a hole in the body for some reason. In order to relieve pressure and severe pain from getting your finger mashed, a doctor can make a hole in your fingernail.

Trephination can also mean making a hole in your skull to treat brain injuries or to let the evil spirits out. That was done thousands of years ago, but making burr holes in the skull for other medical reasons is still being performed, including to relieve pressure.

It’s the origin of the old saying, “Well, I’ll be bored for the simples,” where the term “simples” means feeble-mindedness and “bored” refers to the obvious treatment.

Anyway, boring holes in either your mashed finger or your head can relieve certain kinds of pressure and pain.

Figuratively speaking, we can feel under pressure in our heads for all kinds of reasons. In fact, we’re born with several kinds of holes in our heads that can lead to the pressures of anger, anxiety, sorrow and fear.

Our eyes can fool us, even to the point of making us believe we see Bigfoot when all we’re really seeing are pictures or videos that are very blurred and pixelated. I didn’t say nobody ever sees Bigfoot. I’m saying that there’s a term for some forms of visual misperception, one of them being pareidolia—the tendency to perceive meaningful images in random or ambiguous visual patterns.

Our ears can also fool us. Mondegreens are misperceived song lyrics. One of the most common mondegreens is a line I was very embarrassed by for years, “Wrapped up like a douche, another runner in the night” from the song Blinded by the Light by Manfred Mann’s Earth Band. It’s actually “Revved up like a deuce, another runner in the night.” A deuce is a kind of automobile that was often converted into a hotrod in the 1930s, usually a Ford.

Those are just a couple of examples of how holes in our heads can sometimes lead to trouble getting along with each other. All you have to do to prove this is to look at news headlines. Everybody’s slamming each other.

There’s no magic cure for interpersonal conflict, although there have been plenty of efforts to help us understand how it may arise from misperceptions and misunderstandings, often arising from missteps in communication. I doubt making more holes in our heads would be helpful.

For example, I could have chosen to show you a picture of which one of my fingers got pinched in a manhole cover. How I might have done that could have been unnecessarily provocative and even offensive—even if I only meant it as a joke. A prominent scientist recently published a picture on social media of what he called a new star he said was taken by the Webb telescope. It later came out it was actually a picture of a slice of chorizo, which is a sausage. Many people didn’t think it was funny, but that was his explanation for the post.

I don’t have to say anything more to convey the message that being mindful of what and how we are communicating is vital to making ourselves understood while remaining respectful and kind.

Practicing mindfulness is one way to facilitate clear communication that can help solve problems without hurting the feelings of others and triggering vengeful counterattacks. We’ve all been there.

Not everybody gets the idea about mindfulness. I think the blogger thegoodenoughpsychiatrist does a great job discussing it in the post “Reflecting on DBT and Mindfulness.”

As the blogger says, “Sometimes, you just need to be brought back down to earth.”

And if that doesn’t work, we can always try trephination.

TV with Heart

The other night I watched a show I’ve seen 3 times and it still makes me want to cry. It’s the Heavy Rescue 401 episode with Bear the heavy wrecker operator with the Ross company who lets an 8-year-old boy diagnosed with cancer hold the steering wheel and pull the horn as they take a drive around the farm where the family lives.

They hug and it’s tough to tell whether Bear is comforting the boy or the other way around. I guess it’s both.

I saw a Facebook page about the boy, who succumbed to cancer a few years ago. People are still leaving warm messages.

I watch a fair amount of TV and I make fun of most of it, including the paranormals. They’re pretty formulaic, re-investigating decades old cases that never get solved about alien visitors in spaceships, leaving behind evidence that goes missing from government storage warehouses. Because it gets lost, nobody has to explain why there is a notable lack of any convincing evidence for what most UFOs are and who might be flying them.

I can’t generate much emotion for the paranormals. I mostly laugh at them. How can you lose or throw out physical evidence of UFOs and aliens so many times?

“We need to make more room in here; can we toss something in the trash compactor?”

“Sure, get rid of those photos of military personnel taking selfies with aliens driving UFOs and drinking beer. That’ll make room for the 400-page binders of the syllabus for the graduate school course ‘Effect of Chimpanzee Eyebrow Dandruff on Prime Interest Rates During the 20th Century.’”

One of paranormal shows did an extensive review of the Kecksburg, Pennsylvania UFO, the one shaped like a macadamia. No wait, it was shaped like an acorn. It was dark and brooding, full of intrigue, veiled threats, and an alien pilot. As usual, evidence was lost.

Did you know Kecksburg throws an annual UFO-themed party? They just had the 17th Kecksburg UFO Festival just last month, replete with something called a burnout contest, fireworks, and crafts. The people of Kecksburg aren’t letting the government conspiracy get them down. They’re more than happy to let the paranormal producers visit because it gives the town leaders a chance to draw more tourists to the area.

I get a kick out of Men in Black (MIB) too, and I won’t tell you how many times I’ve seen the first one and the first two sequels. In Men in Black, Agent K shows the new recruit, Agent J, a special universal translator and says MIB is not even supposed to have it and says, “I’ll tell you why. Human thought is so primitive it’s looked upon as an infectious disease in some of the better galaxies.”

That’s why it helps to watch some other TV shows, the ones with heart where real people who are not acting but living do the mundane things which are seldom the most treasured of miracles. They remind you of the better human qualities like humor, kindness, love, generosity, gratitude, and the experience of sorrow that can sometimes humble a species which often suffers from overweening pride.

It can sometimes make you cry.

Is That You, Jason?

Yesterday, Sena and I were playing cribbage and we both suddenly started hearing a knocking noise which sounded like it was coming from our roof or the attic. We’ve heard a similar noise in the past, but it stopped and we forgot about it. This time it seriously interrupted our cribbage game.

It sounded like an intermittent knocking, which reminded me of some of the paranormal shows I like to watch so I can laugh at the ghost hunters scream and jump at every bump and reflection.

This knocking actually made us stop and listen intently. It sounded like it came from somewhere in the ceiling. There were several intermittent series of soft but clearly audible knocks.

I did remove my house slippers and turned the radio off so we could hear it more consistently.

Sena got a wooden spoon and tapped the ceiling 4 times in the area on the spots where the knocking noises seemed to be coming from.

Four knocks sounded, seemingly, in response. She did this a few times, but the responses seemed to become more random. This back and forth went on for a short while. The noises seemed to move around. It started in the kitchen, then moved to the pantry, next it was in the mud room. It was nearly always 4-5 distinct knocks with intermittent silence.

We were pretty sure at first that it was coming from either the roof or in the attic. But we couldn’t imagine why anyone (or anything) would be in either location.

I didn’t volunteer to check the attic. The door to it is high in the ceiling in a corner of the garage. I would have had to drag a lot of stuff out of the corner to make room enough to wrestle the adjustable ladder up to it. Let’s see, what was the other reason?

Oh yeah, I didn’t want to have a close encounter of the machete kind with Jason Voorhees.

I finally got the idea to look out our window and noticed construction workers were way down the street installing siding high up near the roof. I started to wonder whether the pounding they were doing were the source of the knocks we were hearing. Was it some kind of echo phenomenon?

I got my camera out and focused on them. They were high up on a scaffolding and were holding the vinyl siding, but I couldn’t be sure they were hammering it on the house. We couldn’t clearly prove that our knocking noises coincided with their hammering.

I tried to find out on the internet whether noises in our roof or ceiling could arise from noises occurring elsewhere. I tried to phrase it different ways, but it was hard to get anything back except the usual stuff about rafters buckling in the winter from ice, critters, water hammer due to high pressure water line valves shutting off abruptly, and other common reasons.

Anyway, the noises stopped and that seemed to be connected with the construction workers installing siding on the lower portion of the house down the street. I still think our noise was related to that.

And the most important part of this story—I won the cribbage game.

Sena’s Epic Bigfoot Expedition!

We know you’ve been waiting for Sena’s next Bigfoot safari and it turns out aliens from the third galaxy on the left have been dropping them into Sand Lake at Terry Trueblood Recreation Area.

The aliens shoot through a gravel road type of portal and beam their Bigfoot pets who’ve outgrown their homes into Sand Lake. They eat like growing teenagers and the interdimensional highway is a convenient way to get rid of them. It’s a good thing they can dog-paddle to shore.

The uptick in Bigfoot sightings probably has a lot to do with the incoming hordes of invasive insects, including the most recent pest, the Spotted Lanternfly. It’s not hard to figure out why. Bigfoot creatures eat the bugs by the handful.

What’s not so clear is where the Spotted Lanternfly actually comes from. Oh, I know the official report is that they’re from China, but that dodges the conspiracy theory by many people (I don’t know them personally) that the Iowa State University (ISU) Extension agents are cultivating them on the sly. Their website downplays the whole affair and says you can send them specimens preserved in hand sanitizer if you’re interested, but nope, there’s no infestation.

Sure; tell that to Thompson Aero, Inc, which has been dusting crops and park woods areas around the city lately, using what they want people to think is Neem Oil Spray. You can buy a product called Neem Oil spray at Walmart. They sell it claiming it kills the Spotted Lanternfly.

In fact, our sources reveal that the opposite is true. Neem Oil actually nourishes the bug and increases their reproductive capacity. The ISU Extension office is in on it because the real goal is to increase the population of Bigfoot creatures (who like Spotted Lanternfly more than beef jerky) in Iowa because the states in the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, and Wisconsin are snatching up all the tourism trade. You didn’t know it was all about money?

This whole business is run by the ISU Extension, which is why it’s called Area 41. Don’t buy into the hogwash about the name pointing to this being an ongoing April Fool’s Day joke.

There’s such a thing as the Freedom of Information Act and those in the know (who I don’t know at all) found out about this scheme. They planned a Storm Area 41 similar to the Storm Area 51 Raid in Nevada in 2019. That was said to have started out as a joke—and then really crapped out.

Anyway, Sena is keeping an eye out for Bigfoot. I can’t promise that she won’t launch another expedition in the future. Even the men in black with their big-ass neualyzers can’t stop us.

ZAP!

You know, I don’t think there’s any such thing as Area 41 or Bigfoot either. Hey, I just saw a tall guy and a pug both wearing black suits walk by my window. The pug was singing “Who Let the Dogs Out.”

That’s weird. It’s way too hot outside to be wearing black suits.