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15 Oct 08 - 09:07 PM (#2466855) Subject: BS: Folklore? Tales Tall And Otherwise From: Rapparee Art Thieme wrote in another thread: Lies get a bad rap! I've made a living telling them for many years. Tall tales are outright bold faced lies. They were an exagerational American way of injecting humor and finding that too rare commodity in disasters and hard times. Belittling the often horrendous things that nature often provides, and that our flesh is heir to. Tragedy, being basic to life, is the norm---the normal state of things. Everyone's life is tragic ultimately. It is left to comedy to be comic relief FROM that basic tragedy in life. On the American frontier, at least, during the 19th century, LIES were often utilized to play down the heavy stuff. As I did, you too can learn to stop worrying and love lies!! Tall tales only here! Originals preferred, but stretch the blanket, pull the long bow! I'll give ya one when I get supper finished. |
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15 Oct 08 - 09:24 PM (#2466860) Subject: RE: BS: Folklore? Tales Tall And Otherwise From: maeve This should be fun...of course Tall Tales are found in cultures all around the world! I can hardly wait to read the anticipated contributions. |
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15 Oct 08 - 10:16 PM (#2466870) Subject: RE: BS: Folklore? Tales Tall And Otherwise From: Rapparee I grew up on the Upper River -- on the banks of the Mississippi about 200 miles above St. Louis, on the Illinois side, in Quincy. Quincy is east of and across the river from West Quincy. About 20 miles downstream on the Missouri side is the sleepy little town of Hannibal, best known as the hometown of Bill Lear, who invented the Learjet and other stuff, and some obscure 19th Century riverboat pilot who went on to be a flop in the writing biz. Anyway, I wanted to tell you all about the Winter and Spring of '54 or mebbe it was '55 or possibly '56 -- backaways, anyway, around there. I was just a young snot, but I remember it like it was yesterday. Cold. It was gosh-darned cold. And snowy. The snow was so deep that it made our daily walks to and from school a real trial. School was only about four blocks from home, and no, it wasn't uphill both ways. It was only uphill in the direction we had to walk. Otherwise is was your normal uphill and downhill and flat sort of walk. And the snow that year did NOT come up to our head. It came up way over our heads and so we just tunneled our way to and from. Had to tunnel both ways because as we tunneled we'd throw the snow behind us. Anyway, it was cold that winter. We weren't wealthy and only had one winter coat for the four of us kids. I'd wear it on Monday, the next brother would wear it Tuesday, the next youngest on Thursday, and Friday my sister would wear it (Wednesday we let a poor family use it). When it wasn't your turn to wear The Coat you tucked some coals from the furnace into your overshoes and at least your feet were warm all the way to school. Coming back you tunneled as fast as you could, your feet wrapped up in old newspapers from the school library. When we got home we would read the news from each other's feet. We called them "foot notes" and that was where we learned that the Prussians had beat the French in the war. Whenever a house would burn the Fire Department didn't hurry. That winter was so cold that any flames just froze solid. The firefighters would just chop them off at the base, toss the flames in their firetruck, and stack them up on top of the frozen river. And it was frozen! Clear to the bottom, even the bottomless holes where the giant catfish lived. All the fire was stacked that way: house fires, chimney fires, fire buckets, all the fire. And it was safe as houses, as we used to say, because it was all stacked up nice and neat on the ice. Problem was, next Spring the flames thawed out and thawed the river water too fast. Turned it all to steam, which caused a blanket of fog to cover a good portion of Western Illinois, Eastern Missouri, and Southeastern Iowa plumb till August, when the heat evaporated all the steam. Those flames also dried up the River from Lock and Dam 20 down by Hannibal clear up to Lock and Dam 22 near Keokuk. Smoked all the fish, too. Folks had so much smoked carp, catfish, spoonbill, sturgeon, perch, bass, and minnows that they were still eating it year later. You can still buy smoked fish there, because all you had to do was walk out and gather it up and stack it up in your basement or root cellar. Having the River dusty dry for all those miles caused problems for the riverboats and barge traffic, lemme tell ya. Shipping was backed up clear to Memphis in the South and LaCrosse in the North. Of course, they couldn't see where they'd be going anyway because of the fog, but they were getting pretty angry about it. Finally, a little trickle of a creek started running down the river channel. Wasn't much, and it stunk. Turned out it was runoff from Henry Schmuckle's pig farm up on Rock Creek, down in the bottoms west of Mendon. A bunch of brave souls decided to try to take some diptheria vaccine up that trickle to Meyer, on the Illinois side. They rowed and made it just in time, too. As they plied their oars the runoff they were floating in was beaten to a froth. Some smart guy went out with buckets and gathered up that foam, molded it into cups and stuff, varnished it to keep it hard, and sold it. He called it "Sty row foam" and you can still buy stuff made from it today. |
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16 Oct 08 - 05:30 AM (#2467040) Subject: RE: BS: Folklore? Tales Tall And Otherwise From: gnu Excellent, Rap! |
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16 Oct 08 - 09:32 AM (#2467203) Subject: RE: BS: Folklore? Tales Tall And Otherwise From: Rapparee C'mon. Who thinks they can top me? Kendall? Art? Gnu? Spaw? Little Hawk? Amos? Stilly? Just remember, that ain't my best one. |
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16 Oct 08 - 01:59 PM (#2467505) Subject: RE: BS: Folklore? Tales Tall And Otherwise From: gnu Ah... how can we remeber if we haven't read it? |
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16 Oct 08 - 02:37 PM (#2467545) Subject: RE: BS: Folklore? Tales Tall And Otherwise From: Rapparee Just imagine how much better my best one is. It has hot, steamy sex; violence that would make Attila the Hun blush; humor that makes statues break out in belly laughs, and demonstrates intelligence that would make Einstein jealous. |
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16 Oct 08 - 02:51 PM (#2467557) Subject: RE: BS: Folklore? Tales Tall And Otherwise From: Bee-dubya-ell Okay, here's one I just made up, but it's so far-fetched nobody would ever believe it. Back in the days when giants walked on Wall Street, a particularly greedy giant came up with a new idea for how to make money from next to nothing. His idea was that he would loan money for home mortgages to anyone who wanted it, regardless the borrower's ability to pay it back. The payments would start out cheap and then suddenly inflate to something the mortgagee wouldn't be able to afford. Then the giant would foreclose on the propery and resell it at a profit. After all, real estate prices had been increasing for as long as anyone could rememember. The scheme worked pretty well as long as there were just a few giants in on it, but the day came when so many giants were playing the game that real estate prices started to fall. It turned out that even giants weren't immune to the laws of supply and demand. When that happened, the giants weren't able to sell their foreclosed properties at all, much less at a profit. Poor giants. It would be a sad enough tale if it had ended there, but it didn't. You see, the money the giants had loaned in the mortgage game hadn't really belonged to them. They had borrowed it from even bigger giants. And since there was no money coming in on the foreclosed properties, they weren't able to make their loan payments to the even bigger giants. And guess what! The even bigger giants didn't really "own" the money either! They had borrowed it from humongous giants. And the humongous giants had borrowed it from the really huge monstrous giants, who had borrowed it from.... You get the picture? Nobody was able to repay the money they'd borrowed and, ultimately, the whole giant society collapsed into a heap. And that's why there aren't any giants around today. |
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16 Oct 08 - 03:09 PM (#2467572) Subject: RE: BS: Folklore? Tales Tall And Otherwise From: Rapparee You're right. Nobody would believe that one. Who would be foolish enough...well, it's a tall tale, right enough. |
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16 Oct 08 - 04:07 PM (#2467617) Subject: RE: BS: Folklore? Tales Tall And Otherwise From: Bill D You've heard of the goose that laid the golden egg? Back in Kansas, my Uncle Louie knew that story and, though he knew that was not possible, he liked the idea of renewable resources. So when he was in high school, he read in biology class about certain frogs and lizards being able to re-grow lost legs or tails. "Hmmm...", said Louie, and set out to see what could be worked out to feed his family. (Louie was not one to hold a steady job.) He messed about in a pond behind his house with various amphibians & lizards, doing random experiments with eggs, severed limbs and odd bits of chemicals he scrounged from the school lab. Well sir! It just happened that he heard that the local zoo had acquired an alligator, so Louie snuck down there one night and 'acquired' some alligator DNA..(don't ask about the details...it's too graphic for family forums) Now he went home to his home lab and started mixing stuff in petri dishes....he never would tell everything, but it involved lizard scrapings, alligator ...ummm.. DNA.., something from pond frogs, and various little bits of chemicals he was fond of and which didn't 'seem' toxic when dabbed on the tip of his tongue. Sounds scary, but Lucky Louie struck gold! He ended up with a beast that layed dozens of eggs, grew rapidly to about 150 lbs, liked water and lived in the pond, Winter & Summer...and with the added feature that a loud noise would cause its tail to fall off...said tail being 92.061% tasty 'meat' which tasted vaguely like frog legs, but kinda 'gamey'. Those tails would re-grow in just a couple of weeks if you fed the 'frogizlators' on their favorite food, which was, luckily, cheap dog food with peanut-butter mixed in...didn't take a lot, as the metabolism of the frogizlators transformed over 80% into....tail. Nice huh? Not much waste in the ponds, and what there was stimulated the growth of watercress..(he grew it right IN the pond)..which was a nice salad side dish for deep-fried frogizilator tail. Louie tested the stuff on his family, and got 'em liking it, and cut the family food bill by 87%, and had big plans to breed frogizilators for awhile, then sell the secret (and maybe give it away to poor countries first) and retire as a hero. So...why aren't YOU eating frogizlator stew tonight? Well, Louie didn't count on those easy-come easy-go tails as being both the core benefit and the Achilles heel of the whole enterprise. He was just getting ready to harvest the 1st commercial batch of tails and take 'em to the county fair...(he would lure a frogizlator out of the water with a bait of Alpo and Skippy, then blow up a paper bag and BANG it right over the hungry frogizlator's head....and scoop up the suddenly detached tail, slip it into a commercial sized Glad Bag (usually sent to Scotland for haggis storage), and freeze it till needed. So, as Louie was getting ready, one of those sudden prarie thunderstorms blew up.... rain, lightning, thunder...and Louie ran for the barn to wait it out. After 30-40 minutes of wild weather, Louie went back out....and found all 127 on his frogizlators standing nose down in the shallow pond...drowned! That half hour of thunder had caused ALL the tails to drop off and their nose-heavy owners to be unable to come up for air! Not only that, the severed tails were contaminated at the open end and unsalvagable! Poor Louie had no breeding stock left....and though he tried for a few weeks to recreate the experiment, the closest he came was a strange thing that looked like platypus with scales and smelled like old sweat socks. Not even Louie would try cooking one...and besides, they wanted caviar to eat and cost more to feed than to breed. All was not lost however, for the time that his family ate frogizilator gave them this strange ability to absorb peanut-butter through the pores and assimilate it totally! Now, food is still cheap at Louie's place, but Thanksgiving dinner is not a pretty sight. |
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19 Oct 08 - 01:19 AM (#2469649) Subject: RE: BS: Folklore? Tales Tall And Otherwise From: Art Thieme I've put a ton of my favorites in many threads since about 1998. I wish I knew how to access them through the Forum Search---and then get 'em here in this thread. I'm not up to writing those all out again. Alas, whatever book I might've written is here in these threads. Onward! Art. |
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19 Oct 08 - 08:15 AM (#2469797) Subject: RE: BS: Folklore? Tales Tall And Otherwise From: quokka Art, maybe if anyone else remembers which threads they were, they could link to them, and get them altogether in one thread? Would that be possible? I always keep my favourites in my personal page. Cheers, Quokka |
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19 Oct 08 - 11:30 AM (#2469936) Subject: RE: BS: Folklore? Tales Tall And Otherwise From: Rapparee Ya know, maybe we ought to collect all those tales and publish them. I can see it now: MORE THAN THE TRUTH FROM THE MUDCAT CAFE Oughta be an international best-seller. |
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19 Oct 08 - 12:17 PM (#2469969) Subject: RE: BS: Folklore? Tales Tall And Otherwise From: Ebbie I suggest a pithier title, Rap. Maybe "The TRUTH - and MORE" I await the next tale with bated breath- the 'bait' was used on the frogizlators. |
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19 Oct 08 - 12:25 PM (#2469973) Subject: RE: BS: Folklore? Tales Tall And Otherwise From: Uncle_DaveO I'm going to violate the rule of this thread. What I'm going to tell you is the gospel truth, which I know about because it's from my own family, but it's so strange that SOME people are going to refuse to believe it, and will think it's a tall tale. I live in Indiana, but I originally came here, almost fifty years ago, from Minnesota. Why did I leave Minnesota, you ask? The answer, in a word, is "mosquitoes". Minnesota mosquitoes are not your ordinary, garden-variety 'skeeters; they're huge. To explain, I need to tell you about my grampaw. He had a little farm in Minnesota. He made a living, of sorts, but had a hard time at it because of the huge mosquitoes. One day he went out with his mule to plow the back 40. But along came two mosquitoes and, between them, picked up the mule and carried him away, dragging the plow behind them, over the next hill. As they flew away, Grampaw heard one of them say to the other as they crested the hill, "Where shall we take him, where the big fellows won't take him away from us?" Grampaw had a shotgun strapped to his back, with the idea of shooting any 'skeeters that came around, but he realized too late that it wasn't loaded, so loading it held him up for a few minutes. He chased after them, hoping to somehow save the mule, but he was slowed down by the shotgun loading time just enough that when he crested the hill he saw the 'skeeters in the next valley. They'd eaten the mule, and were pitching horseshoes to see who would eat the harness! Dave Oesterreich |
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19 Oct 08 - 02:55 PM (#2470105) Subject: RE: BS: Folklore? Tales Tall And Otherwise From: Ebbie I believe every word of Uncle Dave's mosquito story because we have the same situation in southeast Alaska. Not all the time, because a new hatch comes out about every three weeks and mosquitoes bother humans for only a portion of that time. Only when the young require the protein of blood do the skeeters - always the female, only the females- harass us. Those periods do overlap so there is never a time from breakup to freezeup when you can really rest easy. There is a bright side, however; although Alaska mosquitoes are big they are also dumb. They don't mind dying and a judiciously applied baseball bat can take out a goodly number in a speedy fashion. |
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19 Oct 08 - 03:35 PM (#2470143) Subject: RE: BS: Folklore? Tales Tall And Otherwise From: katlaughing GREAT thread, Rap! Art, if you can give me an idea of which ones you might have posted and want to find, I'd be glad to see what I can do. Way back when, I started copying and pasting your stories of others and tall tales and asked others to point out the ones I missed. Whatever I had was lost on my oldest computer which went belly up. My older computer may have some on it and I will look and copy them to here if I find them. The one I am on right now, has a few things you've written about others in recent times, but no tall tales. ATB, kat |
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19 Oct 08 - 07:24 PM (#2470311) Subject: RE: BS: Folklore? Tales Tall And Otherwise From: Rapparee I know about Minnesota skeeters. Used to go up there to Camp (now Fort) Ripley. I remember one time we were out in the field, playing war games. The skeeters were so bad that some guys from a tank company "buttoned up" (closed all the hatches and stuff) to get away from them. Didn't work. The skeeters just drove their stickers right through that tank and flew away with it. As they left one was heard to say, "Just like lobster -- you gotta break away the shell to get to the good stuff." |
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19 Oct 08 - 09:19 PM (#2470370) Subject: RE: BS: Folklore? Tales Tall And Otherwise From: Cluin Can I post a copy of my resumé here? |
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20 Oct 08 - 11:40 AM (#2470793) Subject: RE: BS: Folklore? Tales Tall And Otherwise From: quokka Tall tales have a long tradition here in Australia. Bill Wannan I think was the guy that has published a few books, one called 'Beyond the Black Stump'. Cheers, Quokka |
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21 Oct 08 - 02:44 PM (#2472023) Subject: RE: BS: Folklore? Tales Tall And Otherwise From: Rapparee WASHINGTON (PA) – Telling her bridge club that "America needs and deserves better than what they've had for the last eight years," Laura Bush today "unequivocally" endorsed Barack Obama to be the next President of the United State. Playing with her friends in the family quarters of the White House, the First Lady bid three spades and then made the startling statement. Maggie Dwyer, who was Mrs. Bush's partner at the time, said that she couldn't believe it. "Why, she couldn't have held enough spades to answer my initial bid of one club like that," Ms. Dwyer said to reporters later. "There was simply no way we could have made such a bid." The White House refused to comment. |
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21 Oct 08 - 03:11 PM (#2472061) Subject: RE: BS: Folklore? Tales Tall And Otherwise From: kendall I'm not going to try to top Art Thieme! He is one of my favorite storytellers, and he doesn't steal my material! I was talking to my Uncle Curt a few years ago, and he was telling me a story about picking Blueberries way the hell and gone out on the ridge about 10 miles from his house. Not paying much attention, he was suddenly confronted by a huge bear that stood right up in front of him and let out a blood curdling growl. He says, "I had no gun, so all I could think to do was run.Well, I ran as fast as I could for a long long ways, and every time I looked back that damn bear was right on my heels.I couldn't run fast enough to get away, and he couldn't run fast enough to get me. That went on until I finally came to a river. It was frozen over just enough to hold me, but that bear was twice my weight, so when it got out onto the ice, it fell through and I got away." I says, "Uncle, wait a minute, you know, I'm not as foolish as I look. Now, first you are picking Blueberries; that had to be in mid summer, then you ran across the ice? That makes no sense." He says to me, "You are right, you're not as foolish as you look, I simply left ot the fact that the bear chased me from August to Christmas." I think I put this one into my book "Stories Told In The Kitchen" |
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21 Oct 08 - 03:52 PM (#2472097) Subject: RE: BS: Folklore? Tales Tall And Otherwise From: Rapparee Aw, hell, Kendall. I was up in the hills last Fall, I think it was just about a year ago yesterday or mebbe tomorrow in fact, just hikin' along mindin' my own business, when I walked plumb into the side of a grizzly bear. I backed up a couple steps and that ol' bear whirled around, stood up on its hind legs 'til it was about ten feet tall, stuck its front legs up in the air and said, "ARRR!!!" in the meanest way you can imagine. Well, I remembered talking to some guys who told me that the best thing to do when you come upon a bear sudden-like was to mimic everything the bear does. So I drew myself up to my full height, put my arms up the air, and went, "ARRR!" just as mean as I could. That bear dropped its arms and I dropped mine. It said "Woof?" and I said, "Woof?" Then it squatted down and left a big, steaming pile right there in the middle of the path. "HA!" I said. "I did THAT the first time you went 'ARRR!'" |
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21 Oct 08 - 07:36 PM (#2472289) Subject: RE: BS: Folklore? Tales Tall And Otherwise From: kendall I think a grain of truth in these tales would be nice. For instance, I did have an Uncle named Curt. |
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21 Oct 08 - 09:12 PM (#2472379) Subject: RE: BS: Folklore? Tales Tall And Otherwise From: Rapparee I did go walking in the hills last Fall. This Fall too, for that matter. |
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21 Oct 08 - 09:12 PM (#2472380) Subject: RE: BS: Folklore? Tales Tall And Otherwise From: Rapparee More than that Kendall, I can show you the very underwear I was wearing that day. |
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21 Oct 08 - 09:49 PM (#2472398) Subject: RE: BS: Folklore? Tales Tall And Otherwise From: Bill D Heck... *I* had an uncle named Louie who showed me about how to deal with amphibians in ponds! |
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22 Oct 08 - 02:23 AM (#2472474) Subject: RE: BS: Folklore? Tales Tall And Otherwise From: Cluin Dear Penthouse Forum, I have been reading the letters you've published for years and, to tell the truth, I never believed they were true stories. Or at least, that anything like that would ever happen to me. Then one day this summer, as I was driving along the dirt road leading to my favourite fishing hole, I came up to a familiar crossroads and noticed a few vehicles had been involved in a small accident. Amazingly, nobody was hurt, though there were 4 vehicles involved. I stopped to offer assistance. Incredibly, the 4 vehicles hasd come from the 4 different directions serviced by the crossroads. They had all met head-on in the middle of the intersection, so I couldn't have driven through if I wanted to. There was a small bus carrying the contestants of the Miss Nude America contest and they were standing about their vehicle in full uniform. There was another bus carrying a dozen teenage girls from the local 4H club and their pet sheep, on their way to the County Fair. There was a large flatbed trailer carrying a load of mattresses, feather dusters and Wesson oil. And, lastly, there was large transport truck with a refrigerated trailer full of Budweiser. As I walked up to the crowd, that's when The UFO appeared overhead and the extraterrestrials descended with their anal probes... |
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22 Oct 08 - 01:06 PM (#2472894) Subject: RE: BS: Folklore? Tales Tall And Otherwise From: gnu Gosh, I love tellin tales, but I ain't got any of my own what ain't true. |
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22 Oct 08 - 05:03 PM (#2473114) Subject: RE: BS: Folklore? Tales Tall And Otherwise From: kendall So you want to sink to the truth? Oh well, if you must. :-) |
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23 Oct 08 - 12:41 PM (#2473854) Subject: RE: BS: Folklore? Tales Tall And Otherwise From: GUEST,leeneia Thanks for the tales. It's lunchtime and I still have my pyjamas on, so I better not spend time trying to think of my own tale. Art, you can find your old stories by bringing up a thread you've posted to and double left-clicking on your name. This will bring up a list of your posts, and I bet you can tell which ones tell stories by the thread titles. |
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23 Oct 08 - 03:49 PM (#2474022) Subject: RE: BS: Folklore? Tales Tall And Otherwise From: GUEST,crazy little woman As one of the world's great weather-producing areas, we don't need tall tales. Not here in the middle of the Midwest. Like that last ice storm we had. When was that, 2003? Ice dropped out of the sky for days, freezing to trees, cars, and pavement. All was silent except for the crashing of limbs and the exploding of transformers. Everybody who could stayed home and tried to keep warm. (Some burbies, of course, could not survive without cable TV, so they fired up generators which put-putted day and night, driving the neighbors crazy. The weaklings way out!) For most people, the way to keep warm was to get under blankets, get out a flashlight and read a book. IQ's were up and crime was down, areawide. Of course, some people's fancy turned to thoughts of love, but when the first reports came out of hospitals treating frost-bitten buttocks, that trend died out. Besides, what can you really get up to with three kids, your dog and your cat in the bed? People soon realized that it had not been a good idea to buy that fancy stove with the electronic ignition. Natural gas was available, but there was no way to light it! (Same for the furnace, of course.) Instead of roasting a turkey to both feed and warm, dads had to slide out to the icy yard and fire up the barbecue grill. This turned to a source of profit when somebody thought to capture the frozen smoke and ship it to New York in refrigerated trucks. New Yorkers will eat anything if you put it on a bagel. Work has started on an electronic-ignition device which is powered by a charcoal briquet, but nobody has figured out the carbon-monoxide problem yet. Never mind that. The smoke sales led a group of Kansas City Art Institute students to start another profitable venture. They captured the frozen tendrils of mist from hot baths and sold it to Martha Stewart, Inc., which marketed it in northern Canada for Christmas decorations. They look real pretty if you put colored lights behind them and stick them on the igloo. Finally, some food producers shipped ice-covered twigs to California, calling them 'Celestial Sparkle Brand, 100% natural, high-fiber frozen treats.' Sales were pretty good in the health-food stores, but they dropped off once the makers tried to switch to bottled water. They just didn't taste the same. Things got so bad that the DH and I actually spent one evening at his office (which had power) and watched a movie on his computer. 'Caddy Shack!' Yuck! Even that was better than spending hours in a house that's winter cold and has no fireplace. Words can't convey how my heart leapt up when we left the office, turned the corner to our street and saw that the streetlights were all on. |
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23 Oct 08 - 05:28 PM (#2474136) Subject: RE: BS: Folklore? Tales Tall And Otherwise From: Rapparee Shucks, I remember an Illinois ice storm that was so bad that when we put the turkey in oven it froze and when we put it in the fridge it cooked. And that was at my Aunt Cornelia's house, and she used a wood-burning stove. (She'd tried a wood stove and nearly burned the kitchen down.) |
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23 Oct 08 - 08:59 PM (#2474327) Subject: RE: BS: Folklore? Tales Tall And Otherwise From: Rapparee The following is a true story from my youth and that of my two bothers...er, brothers: A thousand dollars was a lot more money then than it seems to be now. When we were growing up, a thousand dollars could buy a nearly-new car or be the down-payment on a house. And the prize in the decennial Adams County Cup sailboat race was a thousand dollars. We weren't the top-notch sailors that would be needed to win the race. We weren't members of the Yacht Club, and we didn't have the hundred dollars non-members had to pay to enter the race. And of course we didn't have a sailboat. Nevertheless, Ted thought that we should try. He said that we could sail up to the starting line just as the cannon boomed the beginning of the race and then they couldn't stop us from racing. And when we won they'd have to give us the prize, because we would be the winners. We could pay the entry fee from the winnings. Naturally the boat would have to be built in secret, but it would have to be near to the water so that we could sail to the Bay easily. The Swamp, then, was the obvious place for our secret boatyard. The race was the second weekend in August, and we began building out boat in early March. Actually, we'd started in early January, making a boat out of snow. We thought that it would be faster than any other boat because snow is frozen water and we'd be sailing through water, so there wouldn't be any resistance to our boat and we could beat everyone in the race who had a wooden boat, or fiberglass, or anything. Unfortunately, our boat melted and we had to build one out of wood. Our keel was made from 2-by-4s we salvaged from an old house that was being torn down. In fact, most of our boat came from the wood of the old house. We'd walk to it on a Saturday morning when the people tearing it down weren't there and take whatever we needed from the pile of scrap wood. We knew that it was scrap because we'd ask them, and they had told us to "help ourselves to the scraps." It was too hard to bend the 2-by-4s into a curve for the bow, so we just cut angles on a couple of pieces and nailed them together. It was also difficult to bend the boards which we used for the sides, so we just sort of angled them too. The side boards were really hard to put on because they were so short and we had to use so many of them. The bottom was easy. We just followed Ted's advice and nailed a bunch of boards on without worrying about the outline of the sides of the boat. When they were all nailed in place we trimmed off what stuck out over the shape of the boat. Ted said that we needed tarred oakum to caulk the boat, but we didn't have any and didn't know what it was. So Tony and I stuck lots of dried grass and mud into whatever cracks and holes we found. Of course, we didn't use that on the bottom because we knew that it would wash out. On the bottom we put a nice, thick coat of concrete. Tony expressed our thoughts when we said, "Let's see that wash away!" When the concrete had dried we stepped the mast. This means that we put it into the hole that the mast goes into and nailed it in tight. Stepping the mast wasn't easy, either. Our mast was the straightest tree we could find that was also long enough to be a mast, but was still short enough to work with. We finally used a dead tree about twelve feet long. It was pretty straight, too. Sails were easy. Grandma had brought some old canvas awnings with her when she moved into our house. We didn't use them and she said we could have them when we asked her for them. They were pretty, too: red and yellow stripes with scalloped bottoms. After the mast was stepped and the sails readied, we painted our boat. Ted painted his part green, Tony painted his part blue, and I painted my part yellow (to match the stripe in the sails). Naturally we didn't paint the concrete bottom because nobody would see the bottom unless we sank, which we weren't about to do. And then, one June afternoon, we launched her (boats are always referred to as "her"). Ted bought a bottle of Kayo Chocolate Soda to break over her bow as he said, "I christen thee" and he got as far as the "I christen thee" when we realized that we hadn't decided on a name for our boat. So we sat down and shared the soda while we decided on a name. We figured that the reason for a christening was to break the bottle, which was to see if the boat was built well enough to break a bottle on, and we didn't need to waste the soda if all we needed to do was to break the bottle. After some little debate, Tony and I convinced Ted that our boat should be called "Queen Anne's Revenge" (after Blackbeard's boat) instead of "Petunia." He agreed, so we let him up. We decided to call her "Revenge" for short. We'd planned well when we built "Revenge" because we built her along side of a stream. Mom was always telling us to think ahead and we had! Launching "Revenge" was supposed to be easy, since there was a stream close by and all. It wasn't -- she weighed a lot more than we thought! But after two days she was afloat, and we were glad school was out so that we could spend the time we needed with her. She filled the stream nearly bank to bank, and it wasn't possible to float her to the nearest larger body of water. We tried, too, but whenever one of us got into her her bottom came to rest on the bottom of the stream. So we tied ropes to her bow and pulled her along. We knew, of course, that we'd be okay when we got to deeper water. "She sure pulls hard," said Tony. "Aye, that she does, matey," I agreed nautically. "But when we've got her afloat and the mains'ls mizzened and the gunnells are off to larb'rd, why, blast me barnacles, but we'll be bending the sheets off the jibs'l!" "Right!" Ted agreed. "Whatever you said. Whatever it means." And then Ted said that he knew why she was pulling so hard. "Simple," he explained. "You guys coated the bottom with concrete. You had to leave rough spots, right? So what we need to do is to smooth the concrete and she'll just zip along! It'll give us an edge in the race, too!" "Hold it!" Tony exclaimed. "Right now the banks along the stream are six feet high. The water is six inches under the boat. I, for one, am not going to pull "Revenge" up the bank to work on her bottom, or try to dive under her with a piece of sandpaper!" "Come on, be a sport," I urged. "I'll hand you the sandpaper if you'll dive under the boat to sand the bottom. I'll even stand in the boat to help you when you're under her." "No!" said Tony, and I knew that he meant it. Ted said, "We don't have to do any of that. Sandpaper is just sand, right? And there's a pool of quicksand right ahead. It's deep enough to float "Revenge" so all we have to do is put her in the quicksand and sail her across to the other side. It's about a half a mile straight across, or about two miles if we drag her around the edge. So we sail her across, testing her seaworthiness with the voyage, smoothing her bottom and saving ourselves from dragging her an additional two miles!" "I dunno," I said. "I dunno," Tony said. But by the time we got "Revenge" to the edge of the quicksand pool we were all for sailing her across. The breeze was brisk and scudding puffy white clouds across a bright blue sky. "Revenge" floated easily on the quicksand, her green and blue and yellow (and brown and white and red and black -- we had run out of paint) hull brave against the green of the Springtime trees. We jumped aboard (carefully) and before you could say "Jack Robinson" (assuming you wanted to say it) we had the sails up and were skidding across the surface of the quicksand like a duck! And she worked well, too! Oh, sure, we had some few problems to work out but we knew that was to be expected on every new boat. And once we convinced Ted that the rudder really did belong in the back of the boat instead of at the bow, why, there wasn't a boat to beat her in the entire Swamp! We lounged back, letting the wind do the work, listening to the grains of sand smoothing the hull of our racing sloop. "This sure is the life, isn't it?" asked Tony. "This sure is the life, isn't it?" asked Ted. "Why has the wind died?" I asked. And slowly we lost way and became becalmed in the middle of the biggest, deepest quicksand pool in the entire Swamp. "Now what'll we do?" asked Tony, after the wind hadn't blown for a couple of hours. "Let's eat lunch!" said Ted, brightly. "It's on shore. Bring mine back too, when you go get yours," I replied. "Oh," Ted said. "I know!" Ted exclaimed. "Mike's the best swimmer. He can swim to shore with the anchor rope in his teeth. Then he can tie it to a tree and pull us in!" "Let's let him swim to shore with the anchor in his teeth," Tony said. "Let's let Ted swim to shore," I said. "After all, sailing across was his idea." "There's merit in that," Tony agreed. "Wait!" said Ted. "Let's throw out the anchor!" "Why?" asked Tony. "We're not moving now." "Because then we can pull on the anchor rope and we'll be pulled forward to where the anchor is. And then we do it again and again until we reach shore!" explained Ted. "Great idea!" said Tony, and tossed the anchor about a hundred feet forward of the bow. "It would have been an even better idea for Ted to have tied the rope to the anchor," I allowed. "Nice splash, though," Tony observed. "I wonder how big of a splash Ted would make." Time went by and finally I asked them for their shirts. There was a some skepticism expressed after I explained my plan, but since neither of them had a better one we put it into practice. I tied two pieces of wood into an "X" and rigged the shirts (I used mine, too) to it. Then I tied a short piece of rope to the front of the "X" and a weight to it. The rest of the anchor rope was tied to the middle of the other side of the "X". "How quaint," observed Ted, "a sea anchor. If a storm comes up we'll be thankful that we have it." But I threw it from the bow, not from the stern, and when I pulled on the anchor rope the shirts resisted the quicksand just enough for us to move the boat forward! After the first five or six tosses Ted and Tony caught on and helped. In another hour we were getting near to shore. "Has it seemed to you," I asked Tony, "that the boat is getting harder to pull forward?" "It has," he responded. "It is getting harder," said Ted. "There's a hole in the bottom which has been leaking for the last ten or fifteen minutes. I didn't tell you guys before because I didn't want to worry you." Boy, was there tossing and pulling after that! But the boat was getting lower and lower and harder and harder to pull forward, and we were getting more and more tired. Finally, Tony and Ted fell to the deck exhausted! "Leave me to the quicksand!" said Ted faintly. "I'm the captain and I'll go down with my ship." "Who's the captain?" asked Tony. "I'll be going down with my ship!" "I'm going ashore," I said, and stepped off of the bow! They jumped to their feet crying "He's crazy! He's jumped overboard!" and they rushed to the bow. And there they saw me, standing on dry ground and watching "Queen Anne's Revenge" slowly sinking by the stern into the quicksand. "Care to join me, gentlemen?" I asked graciously. We did salvage our shirts, even though they were pretty well used up, but "Revenge" slipped into the depths below a few seconds after Ted and Tony came ashore. She rests there today, part of the vast flotilla of vessels which have through the ages came to rest in Neptune's realm. |