Take two naps, call me in the morning

One of the most wonderful things to do in bed or on a desk in the afternoon is once again being disparaged by Type-A personalities, the same people who continue to find speedier and speedier ways to screw up this godforsaken world.

And I’m not talking about sex, which needs no defending from the likes of me. Types-A through Z love sex and are having it all the time all over the place. They have nooners in cheap hotels, handy closets and right out in the open and I’m all for it.

So is practically everybody else. We all enjoy a good romp and can agree that the more time people spend drilling each other the less time they’ll spend drilling things like deep sea oil wells so that’s a net positive.

What I’m talking about is another basic human act that can leave you feeling as refreshed as you do after sex without all the emotional entanglements, the texted lies to suspicious spouses or weeks of worry about exotic social diseases that’ll leave you feeling anything but sociable.

I’m talking about the nap, the doze, the 40 winks.

In some hard-charging corporate centers, office drunks get more understanding than anyone who’d dare to nap during company time.

And please don’t mistake that easy example for a bash on office drunks. I support them, too. In fact, it’s hard to find a human vice I don’t encourage in others or nurture in myself.

Napping is in the news because this week two high profile baseball figures have been exposed as on-the-job nappers.

Teammates of Seattle Mariners great Ken Griffey Jr. tattled to reporters that Griffey was unable to pinch hit one recent game because he was napping in the clubhouse. And doesn’t “pinch hit” sound like a fast escalating sequence of violence from someone with anger management issues?

And, hilariously, Keith Hernandez, a former New York Met great, “Seinfeld” guest and a team announcer, is making the YouTube rounds after being caught on camera napping while he was -- shhhh! -- broadcasting a game.

This, of course, led to predictable howls of snide humor at the expense of a game that’s always being bullied by freakish numbskulls devoted to professional football.

If Major League Baseball had any sense it would promote its games as a great place to nap. I’ve enjoyed napping during many baseball games. Heck, as a fan of the Pittsburgh Pirates, now in their 18th consecutive year of losing baseball, I’ve napped through many seasons.

I’ve become a nap aficionado in the last few years because of the little sleep bandit that lives across the hall. Like her sister before her, she comes unbidden into our room in the wee small hours, snuggles in between my wife and I, and spends the rest of the night kicking me in places no man likes to be kicked.

On top of that, once I’m awakened, my mind is off and running. I start thinking about why it seems I’m doomed to be broke. I think about great rounds of golf I’ve shot and courses I’d like to play. And I think about the thing I’ve thought about ever since I was 14 and I was surprised to learn there are things to do in beds other than doze.

I haven’t had a good night’s sleep ever since.

Just the other night, I had a romantic dream about my lovely wife. Really, it was great. Very fulfilling. But then I woke up angry that dream Rachel McAdams had blown me off.

Bitch.

What, is dream me not good enough for dream her?

So given all this, it would probably be wise for a guy like me to lay down for extended stretches on a psychiatrist’s couch.

But that’s not for me.

Naps are. I’m trying to build in a little nap time into any day when I feel a refresher is needed. Studies show that power nappers experience benefits in both the mind and body. It worked for renown nappers like Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill and Leonardo Da Vinci.

Maybe it’ll work for me. Maybe it’ll help turn my floundering career around. Maybe I’ll be an inspiration to sleep-deprived scores of others who’ll follow my lead.

I’ll be Johnny Nappleseed!

But that all sounds pretty ambitious for a sleep-deprived guy like me.

First, I need to make time for a little slumber siesta.

I hope stuck-up dream Rachel McAdams isn’t too busy for an afternoon quickie.

Get a haircut, save a fish

A flurry of offbeat news stories has me once again yearning to pursue my dream job.

I look good in a smock. I love to yap. I want to help save the planet.

Yes, I still dream of becoming a barber.

I’m perfectly charmed by the news that Matter of Trust is harvesting mountains of hair to sop up all the oil spilled in the Gulf of Mexico (and is it out of stubborn Anglo arrogance that no one ever calls it the Mexican Gulf?).

Here’s the note from their website:

"Anyone and Everyone: salons, groomers, individuals can sign up to donate hair and fur clippings and nylons for our Oil Spill Booms. Our Excess Access program sign up is FREE, fast and helps us to coordinate the masses of donations.



CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP TO DONATE HAIR / FUR / NYLONS and get a delivery address emailed. Warehouses are small, so we're not posting on the web, we're orchestrating how much goes where all along the Coast. We all get it. We shampoo because hair collects oil!



Thousands of pounds of hair and nylons are coming in by UPS and FED EX from every State in the US and from Canada, Brazil, France, UK... Booms are being made all along the Gulf Coast near beaches and marshes. What a community feeling!"

All I can say is, “Bravo! Hip! Hip! Hair-ay!”

This would be the focus of all the banter at my Main Street Barber Shoppe, (open Tuesdays through Friday, 10 a.m. -- 6 p.m., Saturdays 9 to noon). I’d share with all my customers the news that some fresh thinkers have found a way to combat a nasty pollutant with something so green, or in my case something so frosted brown.

I’ve always thought barbering would be the perfect job because it shares many of the qualities I enjoy in my primary occupation, that of avid bar patron.

I love to sit stationary and discuss the topics of the day, joke, listen to music and get a mild buzz on while more ambitious sorts are out nurturing heart disease through their stressful, driven lifestyles.

So if someone could teach me how to cut hair while seated and sipping beer, barbering would be ideal.

But that’s a dream for another day. Right now, my immediate goal is not to be a barber, but to become a person who looks like he really, really needs one. I want to donate something that even PayPal won’t take.

See, when disasters like the one in the gulf strike, I feel impotent in ways a middle-aged man still feels manly enough to discuss without blushing.

I wish I could do something to help. I want to clean up oil-smudged ecosystems. I want to patronize struggling businesses. I want to bath an oily fish and then give it to a bayou chef who’ll cook it up and serve it to me with some tasty red beans and rice.

I want to do something other than sit and get depressed about my inability to do anything but pray.

So now I’m excited because I’m helping by just sitting here and sprouting hair. In fact, growing hair for a reason might be my most productive endeavor since I started blogging.

One report I read said hair grows 1/2 an inch a month. That sounds skimpy to me. The exuberant hairs up my nose grow that much when I’m watching one hour-long episode of “Survivor.”

Still, given my track record, I know my efforts to grow enough boom-worthy hair would be half-assed -- and would still be even if I remembered to shave the unsightly patches from both sides of that plush region.

The idea is generating widespread interest. In an era when any 50 percent of the population thinks the other 50 percent are idiots, this is one solution that’s garnering universal support.

Everyone has a suggestion. Some are saying, “Shave all the hippies!” Some are saying, “Shave all the Rastafarians!” Some are saying, “Shave all the dogs!”

We’ll save the gulf with a Great Hairier Reef!

I’m wondering where we can find just one Rastafarian hippie dog for me to shave.

That’d be a good test case for a budding barber with sharp scissors and shaky hands.

Refined solutions to crude spills

The optimist in me says that any minute a giant oil-devouring robot is going to be deployed to clean up the spill in the gulf. It will scour the shores, cleanse the waters and sip crude off the tender wings of endangered Snowy Bayou Plovers.

If that happens, then the pessimist in me believes that man will have forgotten to install an “off” switch and the insatiable robot will turn inland to devour refineries and gas stations and won’t stop until it immobilizes my Saturn.

And the news junkie in me would prefer that to the drip, drip, drip of inaction coming from this disaster.

The whole story has such a primitive ‘70s feel to it.

The 1870s.

How is this happening in the 21st century? In the 1970s, my teachers all assured me by now we’d all be zooming arout the skies in jet packs fueled by things like grass clippings. Of course, these were the same teachers that assured me one day I’d be using the metric system to measure things like kilometers per liter.

Like my mythical oil-sucking robot, it seems like somebody forgot to include an “off” switch on the oil platforms that robotically suck fossil fuels from deep beneath the earth.

You mean no one saw this coming? No one thought to put a series of fail-safes in a mile-long straw stretching through choppy waters routinely ravaged by hurricanes?

We make a mistake entrusting these sorts of operations to people with more degrees than sense.

Me and my fellow idiots at the bar were talking about it just yesterday.

“You’d think they’d -- just in case -- have some sort of really big cork or seal that automatically deploys if the really big straw breaks off at the top,” said a regular Joe conveniently named Joe. “And then -- just-in-case -- you put another one down below that.”

“And then to be really, really, safe -- just-in-case -- you put one down at the very bottom so that if, God forbid, the whole thing breaks off you can just shut it off and start sweeping up the debris.”

Really, can such simple safeguards be that difficult to include in construction mandates with something so potentially devastating?

I think this gulf catastrophe would be working out differently if Jed Clampett was still involved in the oil industry.

He’d be full of common sense suggestions that infuriate investment bankers like Mr. Drysdale, but would ultimately prove beneficial.

Now they’re talking about lowering a giant dome over the source of the leaks. I like this idea, but wonder why each rig doesn’t come equipped with its own telescoping gigantic dome that it can drop atop leaks the instant they are detected.

Sure, hasty deployment might doom handfuls of adventurous scuba divers, but I’ll take a host of loggerhead turtles over scuba divers any day. No loggerhead turtle’s ever ruined my backyard barbecue by boring me with dozens of deep sea pictures from his last dive.

The whole industry seems rife with arrogance that, c’mon, nothing like this is ever going to happen, and if it does it’ll be minor and we can deal with it in a jiffy.

And up from the ground comes a bubblin’ crude.

I keep thinking the world changing innovations are just around the bend and I keep getting slapped in the head with stinging reminders that the bend is no where in sight.

We can only hope this spill will hasten our wisest intentions to slip free from technologies that were new about 50 years before our great-grandfathers huddled around sitting room radios to hear FDR talk about war effort oil rationing.

And, until then, we can all do our part.

Me, I’m going do a pencil drawing of what my giant oil-devouring robot will look like. Later I’ll ask the boys in the bar where they think we should put the big off switch.

All the conservative Rons

Two of the most persistent surprises to me about my blogging is the high percentage of Rons and political conservatives who admit to reading it.

I know six Rons who read www.EightDaysToAmish.com and other sites where I simultaneously post.

That’s seems like a lot to me.

I’ve never applied the widgets that’ll inform how many actual readers I have, but if I extrapolate based solely on the Rons then I believe the numbers must be substantial.

Why all the Rons?

Had I been blogging in the 1950s, the number of Rons would have been more understandable. That was when the name was 12th most popular among parents naming baby boys.

But now the name has dropped all the way to 249 on www.babynames.com behind even clunky male handles like Micah, no. 56, or the oddly equine sounding Colton, finishing way out of the money at no. 85.

Even more mystifying is the acknowledged number of conservative readers.

Fifty percent of the Rons are conservative. Plus, there’s Marty, Doug, Kyle, Susan, Max Power, Joyce, musicsmith, Betsy, Chuck and -- who knows? -- perhaps even Ann Coulter and Dick Cheney.

This is surprising because I’m not conservative, disdain conservative ideas and devote nearly one out of every seven posts to bashing conservatives for being stingy, humorless and stupid.

I try to be the opposite of all those things. I strive in all matters to bestow enlightenment, levity and a really swank gratuity with every check.

So why conservatives read this stuff is an enduring mystery to me.

Well, one of the Rons gave me some insight the other day.

We were golfing and engaged in a running argument about Ben Roethlisberger. The topic is upending traditional liberal/conservative law and order thinking.

Liberals like me tend to believe in redemptive third, fourth and fifth chances for miscreants, while conservatives are on record as supporting punitive three-strikes-and-you’re-out laws for petty crooks like shoplifters who steal canned tuna to keep from starving to death.

Of course, most petty crooks aren’t white multi-millionaires who helped the home team win two Super Bowls. So the Roethlisberger case instigates lively discussion.

Liberals like me believe there’s enough embarrassing evidence to warrant dumping him, while conservatives like Ron believe the Steelers should continue to pay him millions of dollars while ignoring his recreational rapes of underage drunks in squalid bathrooms blocked by beefy bodyguards.

It’s a bedrock philosophical discrepancy.

So neither of us was budging on the argument as it raged from the first tee through the fifth green, both of us failing to convince the other that he’s an idiot.

Then Ron laughed and said he was enjoying the back and forth. “What fun would it be if we all agreed on everything?’’ he asked.

“It would be hell if we all agreed with you,” I said, “but if everyone agreed with me it would a utopia.”

And, truly, that’s what it would be. Music would be better. Flowers would smell sweeter and at night happy families would gather in the streets to sing devotionals. If someone said, “Say, did you see last night’s episode of ‘My Name is Earl?” he or she would never be greeted with blank stares.

This blissful existence is my goal.

I devote two or three hours every other day to writing blog posts designed to get people to agree with everything I say.

I don’t do this for money, for prestige or peer acclaim. I do it because it is my goal to get everyone -- liberals, conservatives, wrongs and Rons -- to have a head-slapping eureka moment where they exclaim: “Gadzooks! He’s right. Conan O’Brien is an annoying spaz! The National Enquirer should win the Pulitzer Prize! And Dick Cheney is truly the logical successor to Simon Cowell on American Idol!

“It would be fun if we had scannable forehead bar codes that revealed things like name, astrological sign, political disposition, cereal preference and current level of sexual arousal. He’s right! You can’t have a party without the Stones and the overuse of exclamation points in casual writing is a pox on the grammatical landscape!!!!”

So, yes, it would be paradise if I could convince everyone that my liberal arguments were correct and everyone agreed it was thus.

The bigger question, I asked Ron, is why a conservative like him would ever bother to read me at all.

“It’s because it’s entertaining!” he said.

Even when I’m trying to make a non-humorous and thoughtful political point?

“Especially when you’re trying to make a non-humorous and thoughtful political point!”

So there you go.

Eight Days To Amish: Helping make Rons and conservatives jolly since 2008.

My mini-commencement address

Tonight is the last class I’ll teach this semester. It’ll likely be the last scholarly class many of my 16 grad students at Point Park University ever attend.

This, to me, is too momentous an occasion to let slide with yet another tedious dissertation about where to put all the commas.

So as is my custom, tonight I’ll engage the students in the grave life lessons I’ve learned over 47 years. I feel an obligation to deviate from conventional wisdoms and tell them -- political correctness be damned -- some of what I’ve learned.

Here is a summary of what I plan to say. Note: this version omits all the “uhs,” “ums” and other awkward pauses where I get distracted by the sounds of passing sirens or stop for as long as 90 seconds or so to scratch myself.

Good evening,

I’ve been privileged to be the instructional portal for teaching you how to navigate the choppy waters of basic storytelling and to provide you with a handy list of excuses for when the spellchecker fails to realize you meant ‘earthquake’ when you typed ‘earthquack.’

I’ve taught you all I know about how to be a successful journalist, which can be boiled down to five words: Do everything opposite of me.

Now I’m going to tell you how to be successful adults.

First, get the hell out of the passing lane. Remember, it’s not a left lane. It’s a passing lane. Apply your left turn signal and accelerate past slower drivers on the right. Then do the reverse with the right turn signal so you can get the hell out of my way.

Remember as you go through life to mute all the commercials. You’re a savvy bunch. You don’t need Flo or the Geico gecco to tell you you need insurance. Prime-time television devotes 23 minutes of every hour to selling you stuff you already have. Over the course of a year, you could earn a law degree simply by studying while the commercials are on mute. Keep a newspaper or magazine handy.

Wait until you’re 35 until you even consider getting married, then don’t get married until you’re 40. Willie Nelson says there is no such thing as ex-wives. There are only additional wives. Always aspire to the wisdoms of Willie.

Ask your parents important questions before it’s too late. Ask mom why she fell in love with dad. Ask dad about his greatest regret. And, remember, sometimes the most important question you can ever ask either parent is a sincere, hey, how are you doing?

Smile at strangers in elevators and talk to them when you’re sitting next to one another on airplanes. We’re all in this together.

I learned this by interacting with my 3 year old, but it applies to sweethearts, too. The four ingredients for any loving relationship are: play, tickle, cuddle and kiss. You can based on need divine your own proportions, but those are the essentials.

It’ll take three baseball-sized bean bags and about a month of stooping over, but learning to juggle will help you think through a lot of life’s problems.

Avoid going through life too drunk or addicted to drugs. Be careful, especially, of prescription drugs. We live in times of national madness when people consume more drugs than vegetables. It’s a sad, sad fact that strong drink and mind-altering drugs destroy many promising young lives.

On the flip side, avoid going through life way too sober. Excessive sobriety is a societal scourge with a host of nasty consequences all its own.

Both drunk and sober, I’ve devoted countless hours trying to figure out the meaning of life. I have failed. I have not the depth of wisdom to grapple with the answer to the greatest question.

But I know someone who did, someone with even more cerebral cred than baked, wise Willie. It’s Albert Einstein.

A 19-year-old Rutger’s University student in 1950 asked Einstein the purpose of life.

Here, in part, is what the genius said: “The answer is, in my opinion: satisfaction of the desires and needs of all, as far as can be achieved, and achievement of harmony and beauty in the human relationships.”

To paraphrase: the reason we’re here is to help each other. And to convince people to get the hell out of the passing lane.”

And that’s how I’ll conclude. That bit about the passing lane came from me, not Einstein, but I thought it would have more weight if I passed it off as coming from him.

And it is pretty darned important.

Boston Corbett, America's Greatest Eunuch

You won’t see it anywhere in the news today. There will be no stirring memorials. Congress won’t pause to honor the actions of the man who should be acclaimed as America’s greatest eunuch by unanimous consent.

All hail, Boston Corbett, the man who killed the man who killed President Lincoln! It happened 145 years ago this very morning.

Really, can you even name a single other great American eunuch?

I can’t.

I guess we’re all stumped.

And so are the eunuchs, but in a much more literal way.

A eunuch is a man who undergoes deliberate removal of his testicles for any number of offbeat cultural reasons. Throughout history, eunuchs have served royals as courtiers, harem servants and trusted guardians of virginal princesses

Some have even willingly become eunuchs so they could serenade a discerning king with a treble voice of unmatched loveliness.

It sounds extreme, but I’m surprised no one’s tried it yet on American Idol. I guess in these days of instant fame, making a real sacrifice for the sake of art is no longer fashionable.

Of course, Corbett makes each of those motivations seem like pikers by comparison.

Born Thomas P. Corbett in London in 1832, he eventually moved to Boston, where he picked up a nickname with slightly more dash than if he’d have moved to say, Passadumkeag, Maine.

In 1858, at the age of 26, is when things got interesting. Fired with the religious passions, he grew his hair long in an attempt to imitate Jesus.

Then he did Jesus one better. Two better, to be precise.

The history books say he was so consumed with lust for Boston prostitutes he resorted to dire remedies. So one night he took a pair of rusty scissors, dropped his trousers and -- snip! snip! -- cut off his troublesome testicles.

That’s taking safe sex practices to a whole other realm.

The he sat down and had a nice dinner and attended a Methodist prayer meeting before finally staggering off for medical attention.

Amazing. For literary purposes it would be great fun to discover that the entree was meatballs, but the menu is lost to history.

The man is testament to the fact that it doesn’t take real balls to be a real man.

In April 1861, he enlisted as a private in the New York Militia, was honorably discharged after his three-month commitment, then re-enlisted to fight again. He was taken prisoner in 1863 and was captive for five months in the notorious Andersonville prison before being freed in a common prisoner exchange. He would later testify for the prosecution in the death penalty trial of doomed prison commandant Capt. Henry Wirz.

After again re-enlisting, it was Corbett on this day in 1865 at the Garrett tobacco barn near Port Royal, Virginia, who against orders shot the bullet that struck John Wilkes Booth in the back of neck, about one inch from where the dastardly Booth slew Lincoln on April 14.

“Providence directed me,” he said when asked why he’d disobeyed orders.

Then, like today, you can get away with a lot if you can convince believers that God whispered in your ear, “Pssst, hey, buddy . . .”

Corbett’s post-war life became increasingly erratic, perhaps, because of exposure to mercury when he worked as a hatter in New York and Boston. Because of his fame, he was appointed doorkeeper of the Kansas House of Representatives, where he pulled a pistol on some men who he’d caught yawning about the morning prayer.

He was sent to an insane asylum, escaped and lived for a while in a hole that www.allaboutbikes.com today lists as the No. 1 scenic attraction in Kansas.

It may be a big state, but I’ll drive hundreds of miles out of the way if I can avoid a state where the most scenic site is Corbett’s hole.

He is believed to have died along with more than 400 others in the Great Hinkley Fire that consumed hundreds of acres of Minnesota forest where he’d built a cabin and was living when the fire spread on September 1, 1894.

His story is the reason I never fail to engage airplane seat mates about their lives.

I’m sure he shared many stagecoach rides with men and women too engaged in their 19th century iPad equivalents to hear the stories of this fascinating eunuch who killed the man who killed the president.

So, to honor America’s greatest eunuch, I suggest we all cut the work day short.

Please don’t feel the drastic need to cut off anything more significant.

And just to be safe, let's all steer clear of the prostitutes in Boston at least for today.

Related . . .

Change name of New England Patriots to Boston Corbetts

Marching on Gettysburg with daughter, 12

Of humdingers & sockdologers

For Earth Day, a recycled post

Earth Day 2010 is shaping up to be exactly the same as Earth Days 2008 and 2009: I'm heading to my kid's school to talk to the students about my work as a worm farmer.

So to celebrate Earth Day, I'm posting the exact same thing I posted last year.

If you've already read it, I urge you to turn off your lights, go outside pick up some trash, recycle it, and revel in this great big beautiful world.



I’d planned on spending Earth Day scattering dense trash on pristine lands and in deep lakes where the environmental obscenities will likely linger for centuries.

Some future explorer would find them in some distant age. She may shake her head at my carelessness and exclaim, “Wow, someone with a really nasty slice used to roam these lands. We’re miles from the nearest golf course!”

It is my Earth Day custom to bang Titleists deep in the western Pennsylvania forests. I lose about four or five golf balls every single time I tee it up. I putt good, my iron play is strong, but I can’t hit a straight drive to save my life.

Most people don’t consider lost golf balls trash. I do. I can’t sleep the night before I golf knowing there’s nothing I can do to prevent defacing Mother Earth with my dimpled, non-biodegradable spheres.

Maybe I take things too seriously.

Like the saving the planet. I take it very seriously.

I aim to reduce, reuse and recycle everything. I vowed last year I would never step over another piece of trash. Now I carry a recyclable plastic bag with me on my walks and usually have enough cups, wrappers and papers to get about half a bag full.

I could accumulate more if I wobbled along in a drunken sort of weave into the bushes and gutters, but that would take too long and would reduce the happy time I spend in the bar developing a true drunken weave the old-fashioned way

Still, I know I could do more. I’ve read that the average American discards 28 pounds of trash each week into our bulging landfills. Our family is way below that, but not near the average household in Oslo, Norway, where they produce just four pounds of weekly trash.

Four pounds! What, is Oslo populated entirely by Keebler elves?

Still, even they are pikers compared to the world’s best recyclers. For every single pound of trash you and I produce, this trash-devouring little superhero is capable of recycling it into an equivalent amount of something useful and nutritious.

Behold, the red wiggler worm!

I did a story about the practice of vermiculture four years ago and immediately became enthralled with the ambi-sexterous red wiggler worms. The tiny slimies simply fascinate. It takes a trained eye and, I’d guess, an atomic level microscope, but every worm is a hermaphrodite generously bestowed with organs of both sexes.

The condition is not enough to make me want to tune in to worm porn night on the Animal Planet, but I’ll never again look at another worm and believe it must endure a boring or lonely existence.

As it was explained to me, “These worms simply live to eat and reproduce. Basically, the worm is just a mouth, anus and a microscopic little brain.”

I asked, given these base characteristics, how do red wiggler worms differ from the typical radio talk show host.

“Well, the worm actually contributes some good to society. About 45 percent of all our waste stream comes from food and paper products, both of which are compostable materials. Worms can convert these common waste products into nutrient-rich soil fertilizer to energize your gardens.”

I was sold. I got a little bin, a softball sized ball of 1,000 little wigglers and soon our family started putting apple cores, banana peels, lettuce scraps, tea bags, potato peels, etc. into the bin along with showers of shredded newspapers. The warm worm poo makes great fertilizer.

So now when strangers ask what I do for a living, I always answer “I’m a worm farmer.”

And it’s true. Sure, I do a lot of writing, but there’s rarely even a penny of commerce involved in the exercise. I used to say blogging was the journalistic equivalent of running a lemonade stand until I realized that even 8 year olds know enough to charge a quarter for a glass of lemonade.

Worm farming is a productive pursuit that reduces vile pollution. Some critics would argue blogging is the exact opposite.

So instead of golfing on this Earth Day, I’m putting on my worm farmer bib overalls and am heading to Baggeley Elementary School to teach my daughter’s second grade class about the joys of vermiculture or worm farming.

I’ve done it the past couple of years and it’s always a joy to see the kids fussing over the bin full of worms as they frolick amidst all the rich worm poo.

But it’s not all fun and games. I don’t let the kids get too out of hand.

It might upset the worms.

And, take my word for it, no one wants to see a hermaphroditic red wiggler get all excited in front of a classroom full of second graders.