Fate, Coincidence, and the Twitterpated--Curmudgeon's Corner (10)

      Smokey Burner, the Broken Stove's resident curmudgeon, has been Twittering for a while now, and mostly he likes it. Twitter lets him keep up with the daily doings of his friends, and also allows him to brush up against the goings-on of various other people he finds interesting. In moderation, it's a good thing.
      But Twitter also has the unfortunate side effect of reminding Smokey that, as a friend once explained to him, the masses are asses (Smokey already knew this instinctively, but he had never before heard his belief so artfully encapsulated in words). Today, Twitter is all aflutter with the sad story of Johanna Gunthaler, an Italian woman who escaped death on Air France Flight 447 by arriving late at the counter, only to be killed today in a car crash in Austria.
      "Fate," intone a distressingly large number of the tweets on the subject, "she couldn't escape Fate," "it was her time to die," "it's just like the Final Destination movies," and on and on and on. Of course what these purblind doomsters fail to mention, or even notice, is that her husband didn't die in the car crash. Shouldn't he be doomed as well? And I seem to recall reading that there were a handful of other would-be passengers of Flight 447 who only avoided being on the plane by the coincidence of being bumped, or waiting for a later flight, or whatever. Why aren't these people hurtling off various roads in their ill-fated cars? What's the statute of limitations on Inescapable Fated Death? If they die of heart attacks in three years, will people still tsk and say, "they were meant to die on that plane"?
      Don't be so twitterpated. "A" happens. Then "B" happens. It does not automatically follow that "B" was directly caused by "A", no matter how oddly reminiscent of "A" that "B" turns out to be. Johanna Gunthaler's story is strange and sad, but it's not Fate Writ Large.

Bilbo Baggins at Group

      Hey, everyone. My name is Bilbo Baggins, and I’m a ring of power addict.
      Hi Bilbo!
      Yeah, hi. It’s been 5 months and ummm 12 days since I last wore a ring of power. My nephew and some friends staged an intervention and they took away my stash, so I had to go cold turkey. Frodo--that’s my nephew--he got religion or something and joined up with that Gandalf cult. They cornered me in my hole and went on and on for like, hours, about how if I kept wearing the ring that Satan, or Sauron--or whoever their major evil dude is--was gonna sweep all through the land with his armies of darkness and the whole world would fall into some kind of age of shadow or something.
      Whatever.
      I just knew that if I kept on wraithing it was gonna end bad. It got to where I was getting invisible like two, three times a day—as soon as I woke up I was reaching for the ring. The first few days without it were pretty rough. I tried wearing like ten mood rings at once, but they didn’t do jack, not even a buzz. By day three I was hiding behind bushes and just pretending I was invisible, which, hearing it out loud right now, sounds really pathetic. Every day’s a struggle, but I’m getting better.
      Bruce here says that I won’t really be well till I apologize to everyone for all the bad stuff I did to them when I was wraithing. So here goes. Umm, Lobelia…wow, this is hard…Lobelia, remember how you thought those immigrant elves down the hollow were using one of their weird enchantments so you never caught them stripping your fruit trees? Yeah, actually that was me who stole your fruit when I was invisible. Sorry. No, I never knew you went down to confront them about it. That must have been pretty awkward. Is that why they put that spell on your donkey? Man, I have never seen so much manure in my life…no, you’re right; it wasn’t funny. Did you ever find out how they got him in your kitchen? Sorry about that.
      What else? Oh right, Toby. Toby, pretty much every weekend I’d get hammered on Barleywine, then put on my ring, sneak into your place, and watch you and Violet rock the ol’ hobbit hole. That time that you thought the dog had gotten onto the bed but then you couldn’t find him? That was me. But man! Your family’s not called Proudhammer for nothing! Wow! Yeah, no, that was totally…I’m sorry, Tobe, I’m sorry. Bruce, let him go now; it’s OK. Sorry, man. It was the ring. I was powerless, you know?
      There’s a lot of other stuff…no, right Bruce. I’ll save some for next week. Anyway, thanks for listening, everybody. Hey man, that’s a sweet cloak brooch—does it have any kind of magi…no, no, of course not.
      Sorry. Sorry.

Things That Keep Me Up At Night

      I wonder if Murphy really wanted that Law named after him, or was that just one more damn thing that went wrong?

      If a tree falls in a forest, and no one is around to hear it, who the hell cares? It's a TREE. In a FOREST. Which means there are lots more of them. Get over it.

      Sometimes, my dog smells like Fritos. Which makes me wonder what the Fritos people might be hiding from us.

The Lost Twitter Log of Captain Ahab

UPDATE: Captain Ahab's Twitter Log will soon be run by the fine folks at Yankee Pot Roast. I'll update with a direct link as soon as they post it.
And here it is.

Great Moments in Film á la Xtranormal (Rocky, 1976)

      OK, Xtranormal.com owes me another 30 minutes of my life back. This time, in honor of risk-averse Hollywood, rather than create my own original idea I've simply rebooted a popular classic. This way, I don't have to do any original work to create goodwill in my audience; nostalgia will do it for me! If I just remember to include enough of the taglines and iconic images from the original, I'm guaranteed to at least break even at the box office. First up, the final scene of Sylvester Stallone's beloved chump-to-champ crowd-pleaser, Rocky.

How Does Your Garden Grow?

      Quite nicely, thank you. August will mark the beginning of our tenth year here in Fuquay, which means both Donna and I have lived here longer than either of us has lived in any other one place in our lives. Our house may be tiny, but we've got a great, roomy lot, full of trees and bordered by some thriving green spaces (our back yard descends to what used to be a farm pond, and what is now a lovely wetland with frogs, turtles, deer walk-throughs, and all manner of happy, chirpy wildlife).
      Slowly--one corner, one perennial, one fruit tree at a time--we've been building the yard (organically!) into the peaceful haven that head gardener Donna was able to envision when we first saw the place. It's been a lot of work, but the results are increasingly rewarding. Donna is the true gardener in the family; for her, the actual work in the dirt is an end in itself, green therapy for the daily pressures of her job. I'm not a gardener so much as the hired help, and my gratification is delayed. For me, the digging and planting and weeding are pretty much a chore. The real pleasure comes as the plants mature and fill in, and I finally get to see in front of me what Donna saw in her head all along. I highly recommend it.
      I've posted some pictures at Flickr, including a couple of "time lapse" shots that show how things have progressed over the years. It's pretty remarkable to see how far it's come when I look back at the older pics.
      We're not at all interested in having a "lawn," by the way, though that's what many homeowners seem to obsess over. Grass holds little interest for us, and the mowable bits of the property are probably 75% weeds. It's all green when you mow it. The plants are the thing!

How Did I Get Here? Only Ninja Kitty Knows.

      Well the BHOC (Black Hole of Cuteness) has been settling in quite nicely--she's getting along with her siblings, happily crunching dry kitten food, and primly making use of the low-rider litter box we've provided her. So far, so good. Right now we're leaning towards Donna's suggestion for her real name: Cricket. It seems to fit her little black bug appearance as well as her tiny chirping meow. Of course she won't be tiny forever (or even for long), but Cricket seems to suit.
      Or perhaps we should call her Enigma, the Ninja Cat of Secret Stealth. I left the critters alone together this morning to go get some strawberries and veggies at Hilltop Farms, the CSA we belong to. When I got home, Greta and Porter greeted me as usual, but Cricket was nowhere to be found. I looked into all the places to which she has gravitated in her first few days with us, but nothing. She can barely jump high enough to grab and pull herself up into a kitchen chair, she wasn't on the floor or any of the low furniture, and I was beginning to get worried. Had she somehow sneaked out the door behind me when I left? Finally, me eyes rose a little bit, and there she was.

















      How did she do it? As you can see in the picture, there's nothing next to that tall bookshelf to leap from, and as I said, she can't really leap yet anyway. Look at her peeking out from behind the day-by-day calendar, (you can see her little eyes glowing from the top shelf in the picture on the right) smug in the knowledge that she's blown my mind with her mad ninja kitty skills. Spooky.
      Except I'm pretty sure she's going to need me to get her down.