Skip to main content

Conundrum

I have tried to accustom myself to medical waiting rooms.  It isn't easy.  And maybe not possible.

It is bad when all the magazines are intended to make good use of the time people have to spend there by educating them about kidney disease, or by convincing them to eat only the food labels that are printed on recyclable paper.

It is worst when the waiting room has a television set.  It is inevitably tuned to "daytime" TV.  Oh god!

Today there was no TV, and all the magazines were published before Gutenberg invented moveable type.  I focused my good eye on something in Guam, and listened to the conversation of two old guys who might have come for hearing tests.  One was a World War II veteran, and the other had apparently been born just a few months too late to have been shot at.

The Shipwrecked Sailor said, "I was in that lifeboat for seventy-two hours!"

"Holy cow!", his logical friend said.  "You didn't drown?"

It reminded me of the Norwegian joke about two farmers meeting in town:

"Hallo Olaf!  Is that you?  Are you here in town, too?"

The Shipwrecked Sailor was called by a Clipboard Engineer to his Interim Reward off to the left somewhere, so the Logician decided to talk to his wife.  They rehearsed something they had rehearsed before.  The Logician snorted of someone, "That woman didn't know what she was talking about!  She told me she didn't know.  That is how I know she didn't know!"


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

Caliche Busters and Government Work

When I was young and both stronger and smarter than I am now, I put my might and brain to work doing nothing useful, unless it might be thought that hand/foot/eye coordination might come in handy.  Those were skills to be learned and practiced.   I found an iron bar our grandfather had shaped in his blacksmith shop.  He took old car, truck, or wagon axles, and made tools from them for digging post holes.  He sharpened one end to a tip, and the other to a blade.  Washington State, like many places, had a hard layer of soil, probably created by water and limestone, or some such materials, that made digging holes a miserable chore.  The bar chipped through the natural concrete so that a shovel could take it up.   I found Grandpa's iron bar, and since I was young and dumb and strong--or so I thought--decided to punch a hole down to hardpan and ultimate truth.  I knew how to do that.  Raise the bar vertically with both hands, and then slam in straight down.  On the second try, aimi
Post a Comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them.  Even when all they wanted to do w
Post a Comment
Read more