Monday 🌘 Open Thread -12th of June

Took the kid to the airport today and got home around 3 PM. Tired, but that's my own fault. I'm typing this at 5:16 pm. This is a slapdash OT. 

Wife is a mess though it's only a week. She feels this is a warmup to next year when the kid goes off to college. I get it. I'll miss the kid too. Plane should land in Spain, or did she say Lisbon? first, in the wee hours of the morning here.

Since the news that former math professor and passionate environmentalist Ted Kaczynski's death was ruled a suicide, I remembered reading about his being subjected to MK Ultra experiments as a young student at Harvard. I rabbit holed MK Ultra and seeing there was a tenuous connection between the program and Jim Jones, proceeded to rabbit hole the Jonestown Massacre. Before I knew it it was 3 in the morning. My head is brimming with information about Jones now though, even if I no longer remember what the connection with MK Ultra was. 

My eyes are a little blurry. It's a short but congested drive out to O'Hare and back, and for some reason I typed an epic piece of BS in this morning's OT. I was trying to satirize Twitter stories that go on forever, and one user at the bottom summoning the spirit of THREADER DO YOUR STUFF or something so the 10 tweet bloc becomes an arguably more legible essay or short story. Someone's job was to create an app that does that. When Graeber wrote about bullshit jobs, he had no idea how far things would go. 

THREADER APP GO!

    In the seventies, my cash-strapped elementary school would sometimes host a motivational speaker/humorist  to teach us life lessons in a putative entertaining fashion for an hour. Sure, they could have spent the time teaching us about gerunds or prepositions, fractions and integers, basic photosynthesis, or maybe the food pyramid or something, but instead we got to sit in the auditorium and pay heed to strangers educating us about our changing bodies, the dangers of drinking and smoking, bootstrapping, peer pressure. Don’t succumb to peer pressure, guys.

    Later, I suspected these events were probably scheduled so the teachers could enjoy an extended smoke break, hit the flask hard, and complain about how their kids can’t learn anything anyhow and hoo boy the pay is lousy anyway and they expect me to babysit someone else's brats and teach them math? Haha. Yeah right. (It was the 70s. Teachers didn’t even have to go outside to smoke. I’m surprised I didn’t see a bowlful of keys. Anyone else remember being told to visit the teacher after school so they could lecture and interrogate you about missing assignments through a haze of cig smoke? I can still smell the whiskey on Mr. McArdle’s (7th grade - Constitution) breath as he exhorted some tenuous connection between civic duty and homework. My memory of Mr. O’Brien (8th grade - Social Studies) is Ray Bradbury hair and glasses, the bottom half of his face a grey puff of smoke, dripping disdain, “What should we do about the missing project, Mr. [SQRL]?“) 

    A different time. 

    Anyway. One event we had to sit through featured a terrible juggler telling his boring but heartfelt story about his struggles with self-confidence when he was our age. He grew up so poor his dad had to paint his feet to look like sneakers, and wow, look where he is now. Contemptuously performing in front of sad poor kids with snoozy tales about overcoming obstacles with maladroit juggling. Every dropped ball was followed with, "... and you pick it right back up," as though it were intentional, definitely a part of the lesson I’ll have you know. Big finish, dramatic sweeping bow, befuddled applause. A halfhearted boo.

    [aside] When I was working at a big box bookstore in the 90s, we held a kids' event with Garfield. For a brief time, I wasn’t the skinniest short guy working there so I didn’t have to wear the costume. That fell to Mohammed, the Nicest Guy in the World. Luckily Garfield didn’t have to speak. I’m not sure how well the kids, not to mention their lily-white moms, would have reacted to a South Asian accented “I don’t do Mondays.” At the end of the event, the kids got to go up and hug Garfield and take a picture. Poor Mohammed, TNGitW, who I’m sure never intentionally terrified a bunch of kids before or after this, leaned over a bit too far and his Garfield head fell off and rolled under a table. The bloodcurdling screams of children warm me to this day. 

    Of course that meant the next event - a visit from one of the wild things from Where the Wild Things Are - fell to me again.

    Remembering the juggler's performance reminded me of that episode.

    Back on topic. To be honest, I don’t remember whether I was in elementary or jr high at the event wherein a mustachioed guitar picking humorist told a long-winded tale about losing his wedding ring in the kitchen sink and being unable to retrieve it by conventional means, bought a baby ferret at the pet shop in order to train it to find the ring and bring it back up through the U-bend. Strumming major chords the whole time. I don’t recall the details of the story, but it ended with the ferret bringing the wedding band back to him, prompting him to name it Ferret Fawcett Majors. 

    I knew what puns were. I’m not sure I knew what a shaggy dog story was yet, but I think I learned more that hour than I did my entire school career. In a way he’s my spiritual daddy and is responsible for the man I am today. 

    Anyway, the photo of your new faucet reminded me of that story. Thanks for your time. End.

Epilogue: my tale is ~16.9% factual, ±7 pts.

I'll get back to you and the 9+ notifications when my eyeballs settle down.