YES, I AM STILL HERE peeking out my window on Main Street, and I can hardly wait to get my hands on the person who invented the kink-free garden hose.
This summer being one of the hottest, driest ever — I have needed several garden hoses just to keep the expensive yard plants alive. And when I bought those hoses (as in previous years) I talked myself into spending a few more bucks for the kind that promised to be kink-free.
I always seem to get the store’s only kink-free hose that isn’t really kink-free.
I always just grab the top one of the stack. My late wife would have handled every one. Picked each one up and examined it carefully from top to bottom, from stem to stern, from beginning to end — you get the idea.
But not me.
The one I take home always develops a tight twist every six feet once I get it home and unwrap it and throw away the guarantee.
As soon as I unkink the first kink, another pops up six feet farther down the line. The second kink is always juuuuust out of arm’s reach of the first.
Nose of the Hose
As soon as I get the unkinked hose near a plant that is desperate for water, another kink blocks the line. No water can get past a kink, and no matter how hard I jerk, the kink just tightens.
And another %#@&% hose-related thing — I can’t drag the %#@&% hose past anything, anything, without it catching. It’s as bad as a kink because now I must walk back and untangle the %#@&% thing! I can’t tell you how many clay pots I’ve destroyed just by dragging a kinky hose too near.
It’s almost as if the kink reaches out and grabs the clay pot which naturally breaks and spills potting soil and little bitty pieces of styrofoam at hard-to-reach spots on the patio.
And why does my imagination automatically picture a man as the inventor of the kink-free hose? Maybe it was a woman, and if so, I’d like to put a kink in her neck.
=—-= — =
PIKE COUNTY ARCHIVES: My thanks to the folks who keep up with things like the 100th anniversary of Murfreesboro Rattler football.
The Archives has a picture of the 15-member team and their coach, along with the notation that the team themselves selected colors red and white, and their distinctive nickname, the Rattlers.
In the picture the kids are wearing sweaters with a very large “M” on the front.
To the best of my shaky knowledge there is only one other Arkansas high school team named Rattlers, and they’re at Magazine at the foot of Mt. Magazine. Colors are also red and white.
“Our” Rattlers went through a period when they wore red and back, but they’ve corrected that.
Fang ‘em!
A side note which includes their principal rivals, the Mineral Springs Hornets and the Dierks Outlaws: Murfreesboro was the first of the three schools to have a marching band.
I have been blessed to have been friends with many former Rattler gridders, musicians and cheerleaders.
=—-= — =
LOOK OVER THERE! No, over THERE! I congratulate our Commander-in-Chief on his ability to take our attention away from the Epstein List. He has driven the liberals crazy with digging up the Rose Garden, adding his name to the Kennedy Center, going ahead with plans for a Grand Ballroom, racecars and wrestling in the District of Columbia, creating a wonderful Trump Triumphal Arch, renaming Lake Ontario and the Gulf of Mexico, Trump Bibles and coins and tennis shoes — well, the list goes on and on.
It has had entirely the effect he wanted. No one is talking about the Epstein List any more, much less the names that still hide unexposed there, much less the suspicious treatment of that Maxwell woman with the unpronounceable first tame, much less the defiance of a court order to release all files, much less the testimony of the victims. Well, the list goes on and on.
He is the shrewdest fox in the henhouse and I congratulate him and his devoted followers.
=—-= — =
AND MORE THINGS I have learned:
1. The Universal Law of the Alibi. If you tell your boss you were late for work because you had a flat tire, and then the very next morning you really did have a flat tire, that excuse isn’t nearly as good as the first time you used it.
2. The Universal Law of Variation. If you change lanes in traffic the one you changed to will immediately come to a halt.
=—-= — =
HE SAID: “How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in your life you will have been all of these.” George Washington Carver, agricultural scientist
=—-= — =
SHE SAID: “Our greatness has always come from people who expect nothing and take nothing for granted — folks who work hard for what they have, then reach back and help others after them.” Michelle Obama, First Lady
=—-= — =
SWEET DREAMS, Baby
