Tuesday, October 2, 2012Good morning crew,
I recently picked up a book called "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid" which is roughly an autobiography of the author, Bill Bryson, but is more specifically a look at what life was like growing up in the midwest in the 1950s. Following is a hilarious excerpt...
Most things that were supposed to be fun turned out not to be fun at all. Model making, for instance. Making models was reputed to be hugely enjoyable but it was really just a mysterious ordeal that you had to go through from time to time as part of the boyhood process. The model kits looked fun. The illustrations on the boxes portrayed beautifully detailed fighter planes belching red-and-yellow flames from their wing guns and engaged in lively dogfights. In the background there was always a stricken Messerschmitt spiraling to earth. You couldn't wait to re-create such lively scenes in three dimensions.
But when you got the kit home and opened the box the contents turned out to be of a uniform leaden gray or olive green, consisting of perhaps sixty thousand tiny parts, some no larger than a proton, all attached in some organic, inseparable way to plastic stalks like swizzle sticks. The tubes of glue by contrast were the size of large pastry tubes. No matter how gently you depressed them they would blurp out a pint or so of a clear viscous goo whose one instinct was to attach itself to some foreign object--a human finger; the living room drapes, the fur of a passing animal--and become an infinitely long string.
Any attempt to break the string resulted in the creation of more strings. Within moments you would be attached to hundreds of sagging strands, all connected to something that had nothing to do with model airplanes or World War II. The only thing the glue wouldn't stick to, interestingly, was a piece of plastic model; then it just became a slippery lubricant that allowed any two pieces of model to glide endlessly over each other; never drying. The upshot was that after about forty minutes of intensive but troubled endeavor you and your immediate surroundings were covered in a glistening spider web of glue at the heart of which was a gray fuselage with one wing on upside down and a pilot accidentally but irremediable attached by his flying cap to the cockpit ceiling. Happily by this point you were so high on the glue that you didn't give a shoot about the pilot, the model, or anything else.Laugh it up,
Joe
joe@gophercentral.comP.S. Are you on Facebook? If you are, check out the Deal of the Day fan page. You get exclusive offers and a new deal every day. It is easy to become a fan, just click here and hit the like button...
'Like' Deal of the Day Here***"For sale," read the ad in our hospital's weekly newsletter, "sleeveless wedding gown, white, size 8, veil included. Worn once, by mistake."
***When hiring new staff at the public library, I always ask applicants what sort of supervision they'd be most comfortable with. One genius answered, "I've always thought Superman's X-ray vision would be cool."
***My niece was thrilled to hear that a new car wash was opening up right in her neighborhood. "How convenient," she said. "I can walk to it!"
***My wife cannot ride in a car without telling whoever is driving what to do, when to do it, etc. She is, bar none, the worst back seat driver in the world. I have long thought this, though she would deny it. She claimed she seldom, if ever made comments about my driving. I, of course, claimed the opposite. Now I have proof.
The other day we were headed for the mall and my daughter piped up, "Daddy, before you married Mommy, who told you how to drive?"
*-------------- Guaranteed to Roll Your Eyes --------------*A woman visited a psychic of some local repute. In a dark and gloomy room, gazing at the Tarot cards laid out before her, the Tarot reader delivered the bad news: "There is no easy way to say this so I'll just be blunt: Prepare yourself to be a widow. Your husband will die a violent death this year."
Visibly shaken, the woman stared at the psychic's lined face, then at the single flickering candle, then down at her hands. She took a few deep breaths to compose herself. She simply had to know.
She met the Tarot reader's gaze, steadied her voice and asked, "Will I get away with it?"