A covfefe of January's best tweets

Follow me at 8days2Amish! Or don’t.

Either way, I hope you’re all ready for the Big Day. Yes, only two shopping days till Groundhog’s Day! Punxsutawney, here we come! Or not.

Have a great day!

• Astronomers calculate earth is 93,000,000 miles from sun. I stepped outside today and, I swear, it felt more like 93,000,002.

• You shouldn't be allowed to demand U.S. impose order around the globe until you can prove you can impose order on your own family.

• Trump’s repeated declarations that "deep state" is out to get him lead me to believe he runs the shallow state.

• I vow to continue saying 'Happy New Year!' right up thru July 5 when it'll become seasonally appropriate to resume saying "Merry Christmas!”

• I wonder if any of the fabled explorers ever considered naming a prominence "Moot Point" but decided the gesture would be meaningless.

• We have blankets of snow and sheets of ice. Anyone know where I can find a good slush pillow?

• So Oprah may run for prez. Has anyone bothered to ask her her party affiliation? I mean, yeah, she's wealthy, but that doesn't necessarily mean she's GOP. Right?

• I have to think giraffe parents take it far more seriously than human counterparts when they catch giraffe teenagers necking.

• The Stooges are to comedy what porn is to drama: it's still satisfying even when the plot's a little thin.

• That twilight -- a halfway point of solar illumination -- is one of my favorite words compels me to use "twi" prefix more. "I got twidrunk last night but the missus became twihomicidal when I told her I was feelin' twihorny.”

• I don't flirt with disaster. I slip something in its drink, say "Cheers!" and shove my tongue down its throat.

• The cumulative weight of the '78 Super Bowl champion Pittsburgh Steelers starting offensive line was 1,277 pounds. The five starters in those same positions today weigh 1,604 pounds. Somewhere in this calculation is a solution to world hunger.

• For many, the advent of social media means our greatest fear is no longer death. It is the fear of appearing too ordinary.

• People say "not a snowball’s chance in hell,” like they know forecast. In my hell, there will be tons of snow.

• The seemingly simple act of driving to the store for bread, milk and toilet paper would be much less stressful if only I could have the roads all to myself.

• I have read that tribes native to Arctic climes have 47 words to describe snow. I have just as many to describe farts.

• If Monica Lewinsky was a consenting adult then I guess that makes porn star Stormy Davis a really, really consenting adult.

• World will be a better place when all those scheming to find the means to an end instead worked on finding an end to the means.

• Anyone who aspires to teach the whole world to sing in perfect harmony has never spent a minute at a karaoke bar after 10 p.m. 

• It’s been 2 months. Which do you think Matt's missing more? The carefree cooking segments or all that predatory sex?

• One of the things I most admire about dogs is they never pause to read a nutrition label.

• Perfect casting: Nicest guy in Hollywood (Tom Hanks) to play the nicest guy in the world (Fred Rogers).

• Beer drinkers who believe their bladders are half empty should be called pissimists.

• The name Ivanka Trump sounds like a punchline to one of the prank calls Bart makes to Moe on "The Simpsons.”

• There are 310 million people in America. That means a million-to-one-shot happens 310 times every day. Maybe today 1 will happen to you

• On the recommendation of friends, I just finished reading autobiographies of Bruce Springsteen & Ray Davies, two of my favorite rockers. Both men, composers of so much joyful music, have spent long stretches of their lives depressed. Maybe they should read my book.

• We live in corrosive, often cruel times, but I'm grateful we don't live when the phrase, "There's more than one way to skin a cat," become part of the vernacular. I don't know of even one way to efficiently skin a cat.  

Related …

Tweets of the Month ‘13

TotM ’14

TotM ’15

TotM ‘16

TotM ’17

Saved from indoor Siberia by The Big Bazoo!

(701 words)

Hardships endured by our ancestors included fetching well water, shoeing the family horse and having to be vigilant for hostile native Americans on the midnight dash to the outhouse.

A hardship for our children involves having to leave the room to charge the phone when all the living room outlets are occupied.

So it was a modern sort of hardship last week on one of the coldest nights of the year the furnace went cold. A fuse had blown. The lights in the whole house were flickering, pipes were in danger of freezing and, gulp, none of the TVs were functioning.

It was like we’d become marooned in an orbiting Apollo 13.

I shined a flashlight on the fuse box, thus exhausting the sum of my furnace repair expertise. When that didn’t work, I said a prayer. 

Nothing.

In Latrobe when prayers don’t fix the furnace, there’s only one thing left to do.

Call The Big Bazoo!

One of the things I enjoyed about doing the Arnold Palmer book about why he never left Latrobe (to be published everywhere May 15) was it allowed me to celebrate in print why so many, Palmer especially, love living here.

It’s full to busting with larger than life people, real characters.And few are larger or livelier than The Big Bazoo. He’s a semi-retired electrician who lives on a street named for him,  Bazoo Way. That tells you plenty. We don’t name our streets after villains.

People know him as Bazzy or Bazoo and I once heard his wife, Mrs. Felbaum, call him Barry.

We’ve golfed and drank together many times. He’s just a lot of boisterous fun. And competent. He’s one of those small town guys you call in the middle of the night when you need someone who’ll come over when it’s minus 7 degrees out.

Really, it was alarming. The pipes were freezing; the fritzing electronics meant fire seemed a legitimate concern. Bazzie rushed over and shut it all down. He’d need to replace two pivotal breakers in the pitch dark basement. 

It was almost two hours of him standing above me on a step stool grunting and exerting over taut cables and me standing directly behind and beneath him holding the flashlight and hoping he hadn’t dined that evening at the local Mexican joint.

By the time the furnace came roaring back to life, the temperature in the house had dropped to 53 degrees, sort of what it was that day in Oymyakon in Siberia about 3,300 miles east of Moscow.

See, when it was 53 in my house it was 53 in Oymyakon, too … 53 below zero!

And that was the high. The low that day was minus 67.

They’re enjoying a bit of a thaw today. The high is minus 29. The record low in this, the coldest inhabited place on earth, is minus 79. 

I keep Oymyakon on my phone’s weather app whenever I feel a need for some bracing perspective. The town of 500 Russians has never recorded an above freezing day between Halloween and St. Patrick’s Day.

Who but an ambitious insulation salesman could endure in such a climate? How does a place so barren ever become a settlement?

Did the leader of some Siberian reindeer wagon train observe the scenery and say, “This feels like as good a place as any to build a new life. Everyone get a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow we begin constructing the golf course!”

I read an Associated Press story that says eyelashes freeze as soon as you step outside (above) and exposure is — duh — a common cause of death. It says grave diggers need to spend hours out of doors building huge bonfires to get the ground thawed enough to bury the dead, which leads me to believe digging Oymyakon graves is a common cause of death.

The short story left me with a blizzard of questions: Does the town have an ice cream shoppe? Does anyone see any point to attending Groundhog’s Day festivities there? Did the streaker phenomenon ever strike Oymyakon?

And does Oymyakon have a Big Bazoo of its very own?

I’m sure it needs one. Every town does.

You just can’t have ours.

Related …

Global warming making it cool to be cold

In praise of, yikes, winter

Winter’s over; Keith heads south

My affections for inanimate objects

Winter forecasts all folked up

All snowmen are abominable

My medical bills, issues & the $10,000 DAT scan

(735 words)

Mary had a pleasant, patient phone voice, non-antagonistic and experienced in knowing if I got TOO testy she could always pass the buck.

Or bucks — $820 of ‘em to be precise. That’s how much anesthesia cost for the August removal of half my thyroid gland and a potato-sized (non-cancerous) lump.

I’m contesting the fee because I never asked for anesthesia and would never have dreamed of having any had I known they were going to charge me a whopping $820 for something I could do myself with salt, lime and a bottle of cheap tequila

“That’s not an approved reason for refusing payment,” she said.

Not approved, but perfectly reasonable.

Should I have to pay for something I didn’t ask for?

It’s a violation of what we can call the Pizza Delivery Code: If you order a large pizza with pepperoni and sausage, but they deliver you a pizza with pepperoni, sausage and green peppers you get to keep the mistake and eat it for free.

Shouldn’t we expect at least as much from our nation’s health care providers as we do from our nation’s pizza makers?

The poets say you never know how much you love something until it’s gone. I guess that means I loved the left lobe of my once-whole thyroid.

It’s taken five months for me to feel almost like my old self. That’s how long it’s taken to properly adjust the medications to eliminate a restless anxiety that was making sleep impossible.

At least I think the missing thyroid was to blame. It could very well be that restless anxiety is an obvious side effect of just me being me, a perpetually under-employed writer prone to sublime bouts of laziness.

I should have known I was in for a bad year when when I woke up in March with an engorged tick embedded near my right testicle. If waking up to a tick nibbling your nut’s not a bad omen, I’ll eat my Ouija board.

Besides the infernal tick bite and the thyroid removal, this year also saw the deaths of my Mom and Tom Petty, losses that affected me deeply. I miss Mom, but Petty was still so essentially vital, still headlining Bonnaroo. 

Mom? In the grand scheme of things, it was like she’d been consigned to doing Branson matinees. She’d stopped touring. Hadn't had a hit in years. We were prepared for her passing. Not Petty’s.

To top it all off, I now have a Jan. 30 appointment for a $10,000 nuclear MRI — don’t worry; it’s covered — to try and determine the cause of a vexing weakness that’s been plaguing my left arm for two years.

I have difficulty lifting a stack of plates onto the cupboard shelf. I have trouble buttoning my shirts and putting my deadened arm into winter coats. A limp in my left leg from hip pain may or may not be related.

It’s all mostly on the nuisance level of life’s annoyances, the biggest being the left hand is becoming near useless when it comes to crisp typing. That which was once second nature is now chore.

Because another symptom is an occasional mild shaking mostly when it’s cold (and right up to this morning it’s always been cold), a neurologist ordered a so-called DAT scan to see if it’s Parkinson’s Disease. I’m not exactly sure all that the $10,000 test with medicinal nuclear injections includes, but for $10,000 it had better include a complimentary hooker.

My doctors are all optimistic about the outcome. There’s no pain. It doesn’t seem to be getting worse. I’m otherwise fit and the symptoms are more annoying than troubling. A summer MRI and other anecdotal tests show nothing of concern, which leads me to wonder if we’d be better off using the $10,000 to make level the Fun House 3rd floor here at the Tin Lizzy where I come to type. 

My posture’s gone to hell since I started writing here in ‘15. The floor’s so damned uneven it’s like trying to type on the deck of a pitching ship.

So that’s some of why I was glad to see 2017 ebb. My fear, however, isn’t that I’ll look back on ’17 as a really bad year.

My fear is I’ll look back on it as my last really good year.

Please join me in being defiantly cheerful about the New Year.

I won’t back down.

Neither should you.

Related …

Update: Me 2, tick 0

RIP Mom: why feeling sad is so elusive

Echoes of loss: Missing Mom and Tom Petty

Surgery today! Kissing my thyroid goodbye

My new Tin Lizzy office!

Results of my 1st physical … in 18 years