BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

…Even if you don’t follow them.

A classic line from a classic bit of spoken word, that being Baz Lurhmann’s “Wear Sunscreen.” (To give credit where due, it was written by Chicago Trib Columnist Mary Schmich, actually, and performed by Lee Perry… Produced by Baz, so he tends to get  all of the kudos…)

Now that we’ve set that record straight, suffice it to say, the advice is sound. Of course, as the song also says, advice is a form of nostalgia. A way of fishing the past from the disposal, painting over the ugly parts, and recycling it for more than it’s worth.

Problem is, when the recycling center isn’t open, all you can do is lob it over the fence and wait to see if they send you a check. By that I mean, teenagers aren’t all that good at reading directions. Maybe some are, but I can only speak from my own experiences. Hey, even I will admit that as a teen I often experienced DADD – Drooling Attention Deficit Disorder – by the time I reached the third sentence in any given set of directions.

It’s probably a hormonal thing, who knows… (Now that I’ve said that, someone with SDD – Satire Deficit Disorder – will be sure to explain it to me.)

The thing about teens afflicted with DADD is that they will do stuff that you just can’t make up. And, in their defense, I’m more than willing to believe that the advances in technology have contributed to this problem.

Case in point, my niece.

Yes, the one who paid someone to stab a carpet needle through the side of her nose and then plug it with a bejeweled booger cork.

Now, the incident in question occurred a few years before the age of Proboscis Piercing arrived, therefore I know it simply had to be a case of DADD, and not brains accidentally escaping through the third nostril. And, I will give her kudos for actually READING the directions. The problem is, she comes from a different time.

Allow me to explain…

It was Christmas as I recall. But then, I’m old, so maybe I don’t recall properly. What I can say for certain was that the family was all gathered at my mother & father-in-law’s house for some sort of all day celebration. Although we had consumed mass quantities of food at some point during this process, the niece was hungry again and wanted something different than the leftovers. In particular she wanted some manner of carb. My mother-in-law rummaged around and pointed her toward a bag of those frozen biscuit pucks.

All good. A biscuit puck or two should certainly fit the bill where carbs are concerned.

Niece read the directions and then set about puck preparation while the rest of us gathered around the table and talked about the various things that non-teenage folks talk about, which is to say, stuff that bores the living daylights out of the teenage folks. Yeah. Grown ups are mean like that.

Four or five minutes into the conversation an odd smell began wafting over the half-wall from the kitchen and into the dining room. I looked up just in time to see the interior of the microwave burst into flames.

Scrambling occurred, and I don’t mean eggs. In a matter of a few seconds the fire was extinguished before it could spread beyond the confines of the newfangled coffee re-heater. Once the crisis was over and the investigation into the origin of the fire began, we didn’t have to look far. There, smoldering in the center of the Pyrex turntable was a charred disc. Truth is, it looked far more like an actual puck at this point than a biscuit.

As one cohesive unit, the entire forensic investigation team turned to the niece (daughter, granddaughter).

“Wow…” she mumbled. “I wonder why it did that…”

We were dumbfounded. “What do you mean you wonder why it did that?” one of us asked.

She shrugged. “The directions said to cook it for ten minutes. It shouldn’t even be done yet.”

The moral of the story? We need to bring back Home Ec in schools. If for no other reason than to teach these kids the difference between an REGULAR  oven, a TOASTER oven, and a MICROWAVE oven before they burn the planet to a cinder. (We’ll save Infra Red and Convection for the advanced class…)

Just think, it could even count as a History credit…

More to come…

Murv

Some of you may remember awhile back I had a series of blog entries about “Merp the Tech Hamster.” If you don’t, then go here:

February Is Hamster Month

Just follow the “Next” at the bottom of the entry, and each subsequent entry, to see all eight. Suffice it to say, way back when I used to doodle a bit. I’m definitely not what you would call an artist, but I could come up with a passable stick figure when pressed to do so.

As it happens, I used to doodle all sorts of things. Some of them utterly worthless, some of them not half bad, some of them not fit for mixed company – but that’s a different story. At any rate, I was surprised and delighted to receive an email the other day from a former co-worker. We’ll call her the Tamminator. Mostly because her name is Tammi. That, and the fact that I once saw her stomp on a bug with malicious intent. His name was…  Well, that’s a whole ‘nother story too, suffice it to say I’m willing to bet he has a few scars to this day.

Either way, I worked with the Tamminator for several years, and as we know I tend to amuse myself by poking fun at stuff. Well, I tried not to poke fun at the Tamminator, lest I meet the same fate as that guy… I mean, bug… but I did poke fun at stuff around her. One thing in particular being her ferrets.

You see, she had pet ferrets. Now, I need to point something out here – I’m not a ferret person. I don’t have anything against them personally, but I’m just not a ferret kinda guy. I leave that up to Major Frank Burns (Gratuitous M*A*S*H reference for you youngsters out there)… So anyway, the Tamminator used to have pictures of her ferrets on her desktop, and used to babble incessantly about them like they were kids. Fair enough, everyone talks about their pets that way.

But you know me. It gave me fodder…

One of the things she used to talk about was the ferrets doing what she called the “weasel war dance” whenever they were getting ready to play tussle with one another, or attack an empty paper towel tube or some such. She also had a picture of one of them peeking through the blinds as if on some sort of stealth recon.

And, well… I just couldn’t NOT do something with that… So, here you have the attachment from that recent email. A doodling of the military ferret kind, inspired by the old Sgt. Rock type of comic books from my youth, where in the early pages they would introduce the members of a particular squad.

The Tamminator is pretty sure she has more of these doodles, and if she runs across them I’m sure she’ll shoot them my way. To be perfectly honest, until this showed up, I had completely forgotten about drawing them.

And so, without further rambling, I give you…

The 151st Airborne Attack Ferrets

Image Copyright © M. R. Sellars

"Taking stuff and hiding it is our mission..."

More to come…

Murv