Here's Your Sign

Have you heard the comedian Bill Engvall do his 'Here's Your Sign' routine?  The sign he refers to says I'm Stupid!  The Sign jokes are about stupid questions - to which Bill supplies witty, sarcastic answers. Here's one of my favorites:

A trucker gets his truck stuck under an overpass, and the responding policeman asks "Hey, you get your truck stuck?" The trucker answers, "No sir, I was delivering that overpass and I ran out of gas. Here's your sign."

Secure Login Your password has been blocked Your password was blocked on 5/23/2015 at 11:50 AM Eastern. If you are unaware of this change, please contact us immediately at 1-800-544-6666. • For your security and privacy, please do not respond to this email. Instead, please log into your account at www.fidelity.com/securemessage and send us a secure message. • If you would like to verify this email was sent by Fidelity Investments, log into your account and select Research > Alerts > View Your Alerts History.

I received the above email yesterday after a failed attempt to log in to my Fidelity Investment mutual fund account online.  Thought I entered the correct user name and password but Fidelity thought otherwise.  After 2 abortive attempts, they blocked my password and directed me to call them to resolve the problem - a typical security measure used to discourage hackers.

Do you see anything screwy in the email verbiage?  Think about it a minute.  Let's take it step by step, from the top:
1.  In the green area on top there's a Secure Login link
2.  'Your password was blocked.....'  (yeah, I know).
3.  'If you are unaware....'  (I'm quite aware, thank you very much).
4.  First bullet: '....log into your account.....'
5.  Second bullet: '.....log into your account....'

They say my password is blocked and then direct me to log into my account.  What the hell kind of magic trick am I supposed to perform here, you stupid shits?  Can't log in without a password and you blocked my password!

Oh yeah, I'm gonna call 'em alright.  And, after I get the password squared away I'm gonna vigorously rub their noses in their stupidity.  Fidelity Investments, here's your sign!    

Catalogs

Sears and Roebuck, Montgomery Ward, J C Penney, Spiegel: in order of preference, those catalogs were our school clothing source in the mid 1900s.

Our home town (Perham, MN) was small, 1800 population.  It had one clothing store which catered mostly to adults.  The annual catalog order was an established tradition long before I came along, the last of 8 kids.  It never even occurred to me that we could have driven to a larger town like Detroit Lakes to shop for clothing.  Even if it had occurred to me, I knew darn well that asking Dad to drive the extra 20 minutes would get the same reaction as asking to be excused from milking the cows for a week.

I once had a sweater like the one on the bottom, 4th from right. 

Was I cool or what?

Getting the new catalogs each year was a big deal.  We'd spend hours paging through them, selecting just the right stuff.  When I got a little older I became attracted to the pages showing women's lingerie, bras in particular.  Fancy that!

Thanks to Sears, I thought breasts were perfectly cone-shaped,

 like those flimsy little dispenser Dixie cups.

 However, I wasn't disappointed to find out otherwise

when first I fondled the real deal.

Mom thought jeans were bad for you, said they inhibited circulation, was a great fan of bib overalls.  Dad always wore coveralls and now I wonder: was it by choice or in deference to Mom?  Most of the boys at our 2-room country grade school wore jeans, so we were oddballs.  Being oddballs in grade school is, to say the least, not a good thing.  After several years of heavy lobbying we finally got Mom to agree to jeans.  The day we first wore them to school we were ecstatic.  Oddballs no more!

We waited with great anticipation for the catalog orders to arrive, and when they finally did, we ripped into those packages like a starving man rips into his first decent meal in several weeks.  Ah, the smell of new clothes!  The finest perfume ever!  We immediately tried everything on, even the denims, which were stiff as a board.  No pre-wash back then.

Catalogs had other uses, of course.  I don't know if toilet paper was hard to come by in the 50s or was viewed as a frivolous, needless expense.  Regardless, many outhouses were stocked with catalogs instead of TP.  The ripped-out pages didn't do the job very well, though.  Corncobs, another item commonly found in outhouses back in the day, worked better - although, depending on the cob, you often came away with a classic case of chaff-butt.

A Bold Man

Trish is in Sacramento visiting her brother and attending an art show with BFF Holly, who lives in Portland.  So, I'm batching it for a few days.  I don't consider that a hardship at all, don't mind taking care of the dogs and fixing my own dinners.  I'm oh so appreciative of Trish's fine cooking, but her absence means I can indulge in foods that she doesn't much like - oyster stew, for instance.  I made it last night.  Yum!  Oyster stew was one of my dad's favorites, and a welcome change from our meat-dominated diet on the farm.  So, I grew up with it, liked it from the get-go.

The title of this post has an oyster connection, as you may know.  Here it is: He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.  Jonathon Swift c. 1700.  Even oyster lovers must admit that they look repugnant. The oysters, not the lovers.  A close friend is fond of saying that they look like small internal organs. Can't argue with that, never heard anyone declare them a thing of great - albeit understated - beauty.

My personal boldness level is limited.  Stewed, smoked and pan-fried, I'm all over it.  On the half shell, not so much.  I did try the half shell once, but only after a lengthy session of boldness bolstering.  It was in Madrid, the summer of 1983, while on one of the long Egyptian holiday breaks (I lived and worked in Alexandria, Egypt at the time).  Another single guy and I flew from Cairo via Athens to Madrid, spent a couple nights there, then rented a car and toured the Spanish riviera.

Madrid has numerous bars, called cuevas (caves), situated 2-3 flights of stairs below street level.  The cuevas are often visited by colorfully-costumed troubadour types who wander in, gather in a corner and play their instruments.  We visited a cueva and had one hell of a good time, shared our table with a hot Swedish tour guide who spoke both Spanish and English, and her bus driver, who spoke neither.  We'd buy the musicians a pitcher of sangria, then they'd buy one for us - and back and forth it went for several hours.

We staggered out of the cueva at 2 AM feeling no pain, ascended the stairs, and right there on the street was a guy selling oysters on the half shell.  My friend made a beeline for the oyster cart, bought a couple and snarfed 'em down.  I hesitated but finally succumbed and tried one myself.

Now, doesn't that look yummy?

An eye - less the eyeball - from some cadaver, 

and a large slimy loogie of unknown origin.

An oyster on the half shell looks like an enormous hocked-up loogie.  Feels like one in your mouth, too.  And it's cold so you know it can't be your loogie.  Uh-uh.  Somebody else hocked it up and spat it into that oyster shell.  It's best not to think about it.  Just tip the darn thing out of its shell, directly into your mouth and let it slither on down.  No chewing!  Chewing is verboten.  If a half-shell lover friend sees you chewing, you are beneath respect and will likely be un-friended.  Chagrin!  Horrors!

Once was enough.  Never again will I indulge - regardless of bottled boldness boosters.

So, who was that first bold man?  Or woman?  And, when did this great act of boldness occur?  We'll never know because the event took place long before recorded history.  The best guesstimate as to when is based on a 2007 discovery in a South African cave: anthropologists found evidence of shellfish consumption that dated back some 164,000 years.

Chloride, AZ

Chloride's General Store is the sum total of the 'retail district.'

We visited Chloride the same day we did Oatman.  Yet another boom and bust mining town, Chloride's name is derived from silver chloride, a white-ish translucent crystal also known as chlorargyrite.  Silver mining was primary but gold, lead, zinc and turquoise were also pursued.  In the late 1800s, there were about 75 mines in operation and the population was around 5000; in 2010 the population was 271.  

  

One of the alleged attractions in Chloride is 'lawn art.'

Lawn art, my ass!  Bunch of rusted out junk they were too lazy to take to the dump.  

This wall was as good as it got.

Murals above and below were painted by Roy Purcell in 1966.  They're located in a valley a mile out of town on the worst road ever.  I was unable to determine what Roy was smoking at the time, but it was obviously some darn good stuff.