Category Archives: Thoughts @ Large

•  We have a loud, eleven-year-old dishwasher.  We call it Moaner.  I keep asking Moaner to use its “inside voice” when it’s running, but it just blankly returns my stare and grinds its teeth, like all adolescents do.

•  My favorite quote?  Undoubtedly a double quote, where the opening quotes curl inward toward the quoted material and the closing quotes also curl inward, except that the tails of the closing quotes are at the bottom.  That’s my favorite quote — thanks for asking.

•  If I were walking down the street and someone called “Young Man!”, I would probably turn around, even though I am no longer a member of that category.  Of course, I would also turn around if someone said “Old Man!” but no one except troublemakers say that these days.  Besides, I would go home much less happy.

•  Woody Allen is a talented writer and director, as if I needed to point that out.  But his world is so limited. He seems to be fascinated by, and populates his scripts with, gossippy self-absorbed cosmopolitans who are hard to care about.  I liked him better when he was just a mensch.

•  Someone near and dear to me in our household asked me to buy a bottle of Crema de Mezcal for a drink recipe.  Now, I have enjoyed many an apertif over the years, but this was like someone collected the discharge of the pipeline Andy Dufresne crawled through in Shawshank Redemption, then poured it over a bed of rotten quinoa, whose drippings were distilled ten minutes with a propane torch and then pumped into the air-conditioning system of a 1981 Buick Skylark, which was then driven 2,000 miles through the Ozarks (until the radiator cap blew off) before being filtered through four-day-old gym socks and hand-squeezed into a bowl of dead goldfish.

•  Just in case anyone didn’t get the message, you are welcome to what’s left of my bottle of Crema de Mezcal.  It’s nearly full.  Email me or leave a comment.

•  I keep waiting for someone named Cornelius Horatio Collins to become famous.  He will soon realize that no one spells Cornelius right the first time, and this will induce him to knock on my internet door and ask me to sell him the rights to my domain, chcollins.com.   Cornelius will say, I am sure we can come up with a price.  I will say, add a few zeroes and we can start hypertexting over the protocol.

•  I am a determinedly non-vocal participant.  I only mouth hymns in church and I would never chant om in a yoga class.  At dinner parties, of which luckily there are few, I occupy my lips with wine not words.  Those who share my affliction are often called introverts, from the Latin for turned toward oneself.  But a better term for people like me might be introvocative, or talking to oneself.  And this blog fits the description.

•  It is much easier to tune out of a bad movie on television than it is to walk out on one that you paid to watch.  I have walked out on two movies in my lifetime: Trash by Andy Warhol (1970) which we saw in a theater in Shadyside (Pittsburgh), Pennsylvania, and 200 Motels by Frank Zappa (1971) which was being shown at a drive-in near Wampum, Pennsylvania.  Strictly speaking, the latter was a drive-out, not a walk-out.

•  It is also much easier to flip the channel on an annoying television evangelist than it is to walk out of a church service — but we have done that also.  (Like good Presbyterians, we waited to leave until the congregation stood for the next hymn.)   I would be interested to hear the walk-out stories of my readers, if anyone would care to comment.

• The last time that this blog featured back-to-back editions of Thoughts at Large was over twenty years ago, when Charles Kuralt hosted the blog.  We obviously made a few changes since then: for one thing, we do not allow Eugenia Zuckerman to appear on the blog unless she agrees to play the kazoo, and our much-beloved nature segments are now sponsored by Monsanto.  Other than that, it’s pretty much sunshine as usual here.

• Mother Teresa (pardon me, Saint Teresa of Calcutta) is a Saint in the same sense that Barack Obama is a Nobel Peace Prize winner and Merrick Garland is still not a Justice of the Supreme Court.  There are criteria to be met, and then seven or eight old white men get together in a room and decide.

• Maureen Dowd and Ann Coulter.  Though political opposites, they reside on two sides of the same snarky coin.  They never seem to tire of voicing their gray, cynical negativity.  One difference between them is that I once enjoyed reading Maureen Dowd.  The other is that Ann Coulter traps and eats children.

• Our Artsy-Fartsy Line-of-the-Week award goes to Chrstine Aiken of Asheville Aerial Arts, as quoted in The Laurel of Asheville, September 2016:

Each piece addresses a transformation such as captive/free, dreaming/awake, same/different, grounded/flying, etc.  It is all about embracing and celebrating the inevitable changes that infiltrate our lifetimes.

Honorable mention goes to painter Deanna Chilian, as quoted in the very same magazine:

I began going crazy with color, first infusing it into quasi-abstracted landscapes I painted when I lived in Colorado.  Then came steps into leaving behind material representation altogether — then more discernment and sophistication in my palette.

• The reason that eating corn-on-the-cob is so much better than other ways to eat corn is because the gnashing of our incisors reconnects us with our inner cave-person.

• I have concerns about Target MarkeTeam, the firm that does direct-mail marketing for UNICEF as well as charities such as CARE and The Humane Society.  UNICEF just sent me this envelope, with a nickel glued inside, bearing the message “This nickel could save a child’s life!”  Wow!  To think they would entrust a child’s fate to the US Postal Service!

• Every second that you and I are alive, one hundred trillion neutrinos from the depths of the universe pass through our bodies.  I have no idea what these damn neutrinos may or may not do to us, but it’s no wonder we only live to be eighty, and that’s if we’re lucky.  Damn neutrinos.

• North Washington is 82 miles north of Washington, PA.  West Liberty is 52 miles north of East Liberty, PA.  Berlin is 123 miles west of East Berlin, PA.  Weston is 62 miles west of Easton, PA.  North Branch is 102 miles east of West Branch, PA.  Centerville is 134 miles south (or north, take your pick) of the other Centerville, PA, and both Centervilles happen to be 230 miles more-or-less west of Centralia, PA.  If you are planning to visit any of these Pennsylvania towns, pack a compass, and a lunch.

•  Lucy:     Ricky?
   Ricky:    Yes, Lucy.
   Lucy:     Do you feel them?
   Ricky:    Lucy, what are you talking about?
   Lucy:     The neutrinos!
   [Ricky looks up - barely - from today's edition of Variety.]
   Ricky:    The Neutrinos?  They haven't worked for me in years.
   Lucy:     Haah? 
   Ricky:    They couldn't do the rhumba -- I had to fire them!
   Lucy:     Ricky, do you know what neutrinos are?
   Ricky:    All I know is they are no good.
   Lucy:     Well... I just read... just a minute ago... that we... waaahhh! WAAAAAHHHH!
   [Just then, Fred and Ethel enter the apartment.]
   Fred:     What's all the wailing about? Did the washing machine break?
   Ricky:    Ay-ay-ay!  Lucy seems to be upset about The Neutrinos. I told her... 
   Lucy:     Waaahhh!
   Fred:     The Neutrinos?  They stunk!
   Ethel:    Gee, I kinda liked them.  Sort of... penetrating.  All over my body!
   [Fred and Ricky, mouths agape, raise their eyebrows and stare at each other.]
   Fred:     Ethel, we better beat it.  This is the Fifties. 
   Ricky:   Vamos, Fred.  I need to talk to Lucy!

• With the advent of comfort pets — dogs and cats who are considered service animals because they provide emotional support to their owners — the pet-free hotel room is in danger of becoming as laughable as the no-call list.

• In our 20s and 30s, we kept house as if it were a museum — most times, no one (not even ourselves) could tell that anyone lived here.  In our 40s and 50s, we began to tolerate more disorder but still felt a need to vacuum and tidy things up when we expected company.  Now, in our 60s, we have reached the point where the ironing board may be left standing in the kitchen overnight, where dishes and wine glasses remain unwashed until morning, and the bed may (rarely) be left unmade.  We no longer bother to put away the shoes that sit on the rug next to the door, when guests visit.  Maybe it means we are finally free of the obsessions of our parents, of the values that have been devalued without our noticing.

• Older = Wiser.  I see this as a pretty good trade-off.  Until I stop getting wiser.

• Real friendships involve shared experiences.  Friends can invoke past shared experiences for only-so-long until the power of those experiences decays into irrelevance.  If you want to be a friend to your friends, don’t just share memories but share more time with them.

• I have exactly three high-school friends.  I have blocked every other high-school friend who I knew or vaguely knew — not because I think highly of myself, but because I don’t want to be imprisoned by others’ remembrances of me.  So you will never find me at one of my high-school reunions, no matter how few remain.  I wish that I were not the product of my high-school town and its junior-high-school values, but in fact I am, and my denial of this reality is rather pathetic.

• “We are experiencing a high volume of calls — a representative will be with you shortly.” Translation: We do not have enough staff, and we don’t intend to do anything about it.   You can sit there and wait.

• A morsel of advice to my fellow anchovy-lovers: please do not buy the anchovy filets that are packed in a narrow jar, where each filet is standing on its end.  It may look pretty, but the filets are nearly impossible to extract from the jar in one piece, especially after the jar has been refrigerated (per instructions) and the salty oil has turned into a thick crystalline paste that binds the filets together into a mushy mass.  No, my friends, if you cherish the taste of a whole anchovy filet on your saltine, your best bet is to stay with the reliable but messy peel-the-lid-back tin can.

• On a political note, not that you really want to hear my political notes: I am voting for Hillary Clinton for one and only one reason — the composition of the U.S. Supreme Court.  Of course I think she would be a better, more reliable president (strange that I even have to mention reliability as a qualification) than Donald Trump.  But unless Clinton inherits a Democratic majority in the Senate, her term in office is likely to play out as Obama III, with McConnell and Ryan determined to obstruct whatever the uppity woman proposes.  In the event that the Democrats do not retake control of the Senate, I put 50:50 odds on McConnell refusing to consider any Supreme Court nominee for another four years and actually getting away with it.

•    The past tense of gave?  I say gavel.
      The possessive of grave?  Of course, gravel.
      And this may not make sense
      to the grammatically dense,
      but the plural of naval?  Try navel.