we like more explosions

In which mr. a-go-go lists more of the dangerous explosive things that could have killed him in his youth.

As promised in the last episode here are some of the really dangerous things that I took delight in witnessing close up when I should have run far far away. My dad did all sorts of dangerous things but he always took precautions in his antics and he did his best to encourage my healthy respect for volatile chemistry. Unfortunately there were lots of other folks in my sphere who did not have such a healthy respect for dangerous things and I generally couldn't help myself when I had the opportunity to watch others do the crazy things.

Lets start with the spray can flame thrower... but first, another public service announcement. I said it in the last episode and I'll say it again... don't do this stuff. If you chose to do any of the things I describe here you may loose your fingers, your eye sight, and your life. With the hindsight of adulthood I can't believe I'm still alive and have ten fingers. Just from having been in the neighborhood of some of these idiot tricks, by rights I should be missing a few important parts at the very least.

So, back to the flame thrower. You may already be aware that the jet from many sorts of aerosol spray cans can be ignited to make a spiffy little flame thrower. Hours of fun! When I was a kid I had two neighbor kids as "friends" that were both a year older than me... a sure recipe for bad stuff. The spray can flame thrower was a favorite of one of these trouble makers. The rippling blast from a can of Rustoleum scared the small black poo poo out of me and I knew instinctively of the possibility of the can exploding but I could not turn away and flee. The pretty flame was captivating, even as my "friend" used it to blast the pile of oily rags in the garage. Their house eventually burned to the ground years later. Stunningly, it was the result of a grease fire in the kitchen. In light of the ever present strong gasoline smell from the spilled fuel for my "friend's" minibike, how did the house survive so long? The mini bike, by the way, was a 3.5 horse power lawn mower engine sans muffler, bolted to a bike frame with an ergonomic seat sculpted from a scrap of two by six lumber. Get yer saddle sores here! All of these people are still alive and well. Miracle.

But wait there's more.... When the Fourth of July came 'round my "friends" would egg each other on and soon they would be lobing ground bloom flowers high into the air with a wrist rocket sling shot. One of them would hold the little orange/pink cylinder at the ready in the sling while the other did the honors with a cigarette lighter (undoubtedly swiped from a cigarette sucking parent). The one holding the big rubber bands taught would stand trembling under the tension while the fuse sputtered and the other chanted, "Wait for it, wait for it." It just wouldn't do to launch the spinning devil into the air too early and have it spin into its wild color show after landing in the yard next door. They would carry this idiot dance to the very edge and let the fuse burn down until it was about to vanish. Then, zing! The ground bloom flower would do about half of its show during its high arching flight. Who knows where it would come to a spent smoldering end. Fortunately, I was considered too small and therefor unworthy of stretching the slingshot. I never had to turn down that honor. Still, I had to stay and watch when I should have taken myself far away from the probable fire emergency itching to happen.

Piccolo petes, those screaming road flares that normally stand on a small round plastic base, become wildly unpredictable missiles in the hands of your friend's pyromaniac older brother. This trick I witnessed in San Diego, and the close proximity of the inflammable beach sand and the large body of water saved many people's homes from these incendiary devices. Relieved of its plastic base and laid on its side, a piccolo pete will dart uncontrollably in a wild zig-zag and occasionally leap into a high arc of twenty feet or so all the while blowing its angry whistle. The flight is longer than a bottle rocket on its side and the mayhem is just that much more exciting with all the screechy noise.

Remember the model rockets I brought up in the last episode? In the hands of the same pyromaniac older brother these became so much more than a fast ride into the sky and a graceful float earthward on a little plastic parachute. The solid fuel engines that fit into the tail of these models are designed to spit some hot gas out the top end when the engine is spent. The intention is to deploy the parachute, but the mischief began when that same older brother discovered that this hot gas would ignite gun powder quite well. This revelation gave birth to a very dangerous series of Kaos rockets (in honor of the Get Smart villains). One of the early Kaos rockets just wasn't well engineered. A fin was torn off by the stress of launch acceleration and too much explosive had been packed too high in the rocket. The top-heavy monster turned and made three flips on the beach while I stood and gawked. Again, I should have been far away, but the anticipation kept me glued to the terrifying scene. One unfortunate bystander approached the dying rocket once it was stuck nose down in the sand and those of us who knew what it had in store yelled maniacal warnings to stay back. The charge blew soon enough that the naive innocent was still a safe distance away. The sand flew and the notorious older brother fled the scene. There were other Kaos rockets, but most were spectacular successes compared to this dud. The charge would blow high over the bay, and a litter of model rocket smithereens would be fluttering in the air before the loud report of the payload reached our ears.

Pipe bombs... yes, I said pipe bombs. These were improvised from PVC fittings and filled with home brewed explosives. These bombs were created at a friend's house and this time it was a notorious younger brother doing the mischief. I witnessed a few of these under construction, but I wasn't there when they made their craters. I suppose I was old enough by then to walk away, having at last outgrown some of my fascination.

So many things could have killed or blinded me. Old black powder sure is troublesome to ignite. When you get it sparking don't lean in to blow on it. You'll be enveloped in a sudden suffocating cloud of smoke and when the blur clears from your eyes you will find that your friend has only little shriveled smelly black knots where his eyebrows used to be. Sure it's funny now, but in the moment you stumble and think, "Ah! I'm an idiot!" and then you go and do it all again. I still love big bangs but I'll remain a distant spectator, thank you very much.

we like explosions

Flying cans, gas bags, and other things that go BOOM (or BOMB as it were).

Ah, the Fourth of July, that most wonderful time of year when the neighbors would cower near the phone waiting to report the next flash bomb to the local Sheriff. In southern California the Fourth comes in the middle of the dry season and living right on the brush line in the foothills of La Crescenta my dad was a stickler for fire safety, at least until the Fourth rolled around. We'd spend most weekend mornings from March to October clearing grass and brush in a 400 foot fire break between the house and the thicket of Laurel Sumac, Chemise, and Scrub Oak bramble that grew on the hills. This stuff grows to a tinder box of thatch with or without rain over the years. Honestly, the Southern California scrub brush is a miracle of fecundity in what should be a parched moonscape. Fire was a perpetual threat and any whiff of smoke on the breeze would prompt a panicked search of the local news and the fire radio scanner for any word of where the fire was burning and witch way the wind was blowing, but the fires and all our work to prevent them will have to wait for another post.

Today I'm talkin' about making fire and loud bangs with wild abandon (but just enough caution to avoid death, mayhem, or bodily injury). In spite of all the work to prevent fires and all the admonitions from my dad about fire safety, when the Fourth drew near the sparks would fly. I have to give the standard warning about not trying for yourself any of the things I describe below. Really and truly this stuff can get you killed or at least badly maimed. Even in the middle of all the crazy my dad held us to a few really important rules. We could only do this stuff with supervision and things had to be arranged just so. Fuses were lit only when the explosive thing was resting on the ground and we had a clear place to run away. Keeping a safe distance for ourselves, and yes, for anything flammable was a lesson that was hammered in over and again.

We would have the standard issue big variety box of illegal small arms; the requisite sparklers that dribble scorching embers on your sleeves, some screaming whistling road flares, and plenty of showers of colored sparks shooting out of brightly colored paper cones. Then there was the real contraband; the brick of firecrackers wrapped in red tissue, and the collection of small bombs in cardboard tubes with stiff green fuses sticking out of one side. Oooh, these little devils had some punch and each of the kids on the block would get a few chances to set one down, gingerly touch a burning punk to the fuse, then run like hell as the little green cord popped and hissed. Then, BANG! Wheehaw! the thrill never wore off. The brick of firecrackers had to be savored and only a few bunches would be fired off in the rapid fire they were designed for. In case you have never witnessed a Chinese New Year celebration the standard practice for the strings of firecrackers is to hook the unwrapped bunch from a small loop at one end of the tangled fuses and hang it all in the air at the end of a long pole. This lets the individual crackers drop as the fuses burn down and they pop in a staccato tumble in the air. Ah, but we had other plans for the bulk of that big red brick. Once more folks, don't try what comes next. There are lots of things I did with dad when I was a kid that make me wonder how I survived. I would feel awful if anyone tried what I'm about to describe and got hurt. This stuff will put your eye out if you slip just once. No, really!

My dad introduced all sorts of tricks to my weird little brain, but the soda can rocket is a favorite memory. It required one empty aluminum soda can and one of those funny shaped extra tall Coor's cans. Remember those? I'd have to collect the cans here and there as we didn't have soda around the house often and the special Coor's cans could be hard to come by. The anticipation of the soda can rocket was so great that some years I would hoard Coor's cans that I stumbled on walking home from the school bus. We had some delightful neighbors with empty cans in the ice plant filled front yard. The open end of both cans would be carefully cut away below the shoulder leaving razor sharp edges to make your fingers bleed. Now the soda can would slip over the narrower Coor's can making a swell little cannon chamber for the cracker. To complete the rocket a hole of just the right size had to be punched from inside the soda can through the curved bottom that would be just big enough for a firecracker fuse. A singe cracker could be unbraided carefully from its palls, the fuse poked up through the hole in the soda can, and the soda can rocket was slipped over the Coor's can. The whole mess was set upright with the cracker fuse on top, a lit punk was touched to the fuse, and then everybody ran. The cracker would drop into the chamber and (usually) go bang, shooting the soda can way up in the air. Weeehaw! can't get enough. Lets do it again... and again.... and.... all day long, until the alarm call went out and the Sheriff would come by. We'd hide for a few hours and be back at it before sundown. Sometimes the cracker was a dud, and here one of those safety rules would kick in. Any can rocket that didn't go bang had to be left sitting for fifteen minutes before it could be rescued and reset with another cracker. You never know when one of those dud crackers could go off, and it'll always do it right when you go to pick it up. The duds all had to be disposed of in a bucket of water where they could soak until the paper turned to pulp.

Our Fourth of July celebrations usually had some kind of finale, some big bang bigger than all the rest, and that brings me to the gas bags that produced the brightest flash, the biggest chest compressing wallop, and the loudest whump I hope I will ever experience. These were delivered by my dad's favorite pyrotechnics, the big guns that he would only roll out once every few years. I witnessed the gas bag only five times or so in my life but that was enough. The photo above documents the mischief of the gas bag. By the quality of the photo, how young my dad looks, and by identifying the other engineer crazy person in the picture I know it was taken in the early 60s before I was born. The background is July grape vines and squash growing in the heat of a Tustin summer, and with what do you suppose he's filling that polyethylene bag? Yes folks, it's good ol' acetylene. Really, don't do this at home. This is one of those things I remember fondly and with some jaw dropping hindsight. These guys seemed to know what they were doing and no fire or death or maiming ever resulted from their antics, but looking back I can barely believe that I'm still in one piece after being witness to some of these bangs. Oxy-acetylene welding seems to be a dying art quickly loosing out to the newer TIG welders and their ilk, but back in the 60s and 70s a tank full of acetylene dissolved in acetone was easy to come by in any well equipped shop. If you have ever been trained in the use of the stuff you know the gas by itself has all sorts of explosive potential requiring strict handling precautions. Ah, but that didn't stop the mischief.

The gas bag would happen after all the standard illegal Fourth of July whiz bang was spent. Then dad would conspire with a neighbor or another engineer nut who happened to be around. They would find an open space clear of flammable debris and prepare a plastic bag taped to the end of a long tube. Not a huge bag, just a medium size, not to get carried away. (The photo above showing dad filling the bag directly is atypical by the way. Perhaps with age and experience he learned to make some more distance between himself and the bag.) Then the conspirators would let the acetylene flow down the tube and loosely fill the bag at the far end. All the spectators were gathered at a safe distance, the lights in the house were all turned off and everyone waited partly covering their ears in anticipation. When a source of flame was touched to the end of the tube a queer buzz sound would fly down the length of it. In an instant... FLASH! WHOMP! The air in my chest would be squeezed and the instant of brighter-than-lightning brilliance would slowly fade to red on my retinas. The hose was quickly coiled (not a trace of the bag remained) several people would rush out to check for fire and then we'd all hide in the house with the lights off waiting for the inevitable visit by the County Sheriff squad cars. They would cruise the street and scan with their search lights but seeing no fire, burst windows, or mad bombers fleeing the scene they would have to move on and ignore the pleas of the fainthearted neighbors still cowering by their rotary telephones.

Stay tuned for the next episode when I'll fess up to all the other crazy explosive things I stuck around to witness when I should have known enough to run the other way. You know, all the really dangerous stuff the kids were doing out of range of the adults. Remember those Estes model rockets? Hmm... how we can give these things a bigger kick?

boobs, good ol' boobs

Remember the days when kids who had just hit puberty had to weasel around to get their mitts on pictures of naked people doing raunchy things? When I was a kid not only did I have to walk through the snow for miles to get to school but I had to be sneaky and find time alone to read about what happened at the doctor's office when the buxom nurse came in. How was it that these people found a doctor who's office wasn't chilled to a goose flesh inducing 58 degrees? And how did the nursing staff maintain such a high level of patient satisfaction all day? They worked an eight hour shift like everyone else, no?

In the new millennium, some really innocent sounding Google searches will produce images of the most atrocious things in people's keisters. Gadzooks! Who posts this stuff? Very little of the crazy weird porn floats my boat, but I am a really big fan of naked ladies. I can't get enough. If you want to careen off the road while I'm driving just mutter, "Naked people." We'll fly headlong into the gravel shoulder as I whip my head around trying to spot the aforementioned flesh while hollering, "Where? Where! I want to see naked people!" Naturally, with my particular orientation, I'd prefer the naked people be ladies... in their 20s or 30s... and jumping around... maybe wearing squirrel masks... Ahem... I could spend hours piddling around looking at boobs, good ol' boobs, and "Pictures of Lilly" by The Who could be my theme song. Other parts are good too but honestly the porn these days makes me grimace within the first few minutes after the initial excitement of, "Naked Ladies!" I don't know, I just miss the days when people still had some hairy bits and the porn was just kind of embarrassingly dumb. Now, so much of it is embarrassingly violent... and embarrassingly available. Plus the giant boob thing was more of an occasional side show and there were no inflate-o-chests with painful looking balloons sitting just below the collar bones. I'm not going to claim that the porn of yesteryear was less exploitative, more socially responsible, or that it had any resemblance to real human sexuality. The stuff has always been kind of ickified, but the old dirty magazine under the bed at least seemed contained... kept at bay... like it knew it shouldn't be out in public.

When I was five or six I laid eyes on one of my first boob pictures. It sticks in my head because it was on the cover of a High Society Magazine that I would encounter again years later during puberty. My first encounter with that issue didn't get beyond the cover photo because I didn't know what porn was yet and my dad was in the room when I spotted the thing. It had been left out in plain sight and I stared for a minute at the woman sitting there cross legged on a beach. Being cover art, she had sand demurely piled in front of her crotch and her arms were over her head as she had just pulled off her surf soaked shirt.

Boobs.

I don't think the cover gave me the intense funny feeling of excitement that I would have later but it made me stare anyhow. My dad noticed my focus and asked matter-of-factly, "Well, what do you think of that?" He neither waited for a response nor expected one. I just went blank as he encouraged me out of the room. I guess he didn't buy these magazines very often or trash any of them because this same issue along with a Penthouse or two and a couple of Playboy were what I would later seek out in a pubescent stupor when left alone in the house. That issue, by the way, also introduced me to the idiot fantasy of lewd nurses. In this case it was a dentist office thing. I think I realized right away how absurd the whole thing was, but that didn't stop me getting kookie thoughts when the hygienist leaned over to floss my teeth and her soft bits were mashed on my arm.

Dad and I never had the serious talk about sex, but the subject was not taboo so I managed to glean things here and there. Having two older siblings provided more chances to listen in. Then of course there were a couple of books left around the house in easy access bookshelves. Where Did I Come From? was cartoony but it got to the point, and Man's Body: An Owner's Manual was crazy technical but it answered all the worrisome questions. If you want to know about the reading material that did me the most good in the sack... lesbian erotica takes the cake, but you've got to be sure you're getting the stories written by and for lesbians. I had to go find it on my own when I went to college, but I have to say these are some people who know how to write about exactly what to do. If you want to help your young heterosexual son feel more confident, this is the stuff.

Dad could occasionally blurt out some astonishingly crude sexual things. Most people wish to avoid thinking of their parents as sexually active or even interested in that sort of thing. I was never really horrified by the thought... still, I think I ignored most of what I heard going on or at least didn't make much of it until later. Putting two and two together, hindsight revels that they were fooling around fairly often, and my dad's occasional explicitness made obvious his active libido. Once, when I was helping him with some carpentry project involving six inch lag bolts we found that cranking the socket wrench was getting too difficult. Dad showed me the old carpenter's trick of rubbing bee's wax on the threads of the lag bolts to ease the friction. "You know what this is called?" he asked grinning. "Love lube. You know why?" I resisted an eye roll. He couldn't help himself, "Because you put it on before you screw!" HA! Good one dad. This was far from the most crude thing I heard him say. The whoppers usually came along when he had other nutty engineer pals around. A few would take me years to decipher.

Out in the garage in the back of a drawer I stumbled onto and old deck of cards when I was deep in the teen angst. I wish I knew what happened to those. They were a 1940's cheesecake boob fest, but the deck had disappeared when I thought of them again later as an adult. I'm certain I could have made a small killing on Ebay, and I often wonder if that deck had been ferreted out of my grandfather's stash in another ignored drawer years before. The ladies all had something or other covering their happy place, but the boobs were all front and center. Some of the gals had the most awkward expressions like, "What the hell am I doing?" Some were making the most goof-ball cross-eyed fish-face nutty expressions. At least they seemed to be having fun, and I think they gave me the green light to think sex was amusing. And here I am married to someone willing to laugh with me after the deed.

I still favor the rare porn with people who look genuinely happy (and who still have their fuzzy bits). This tends to be older stuff so I guess I'm out of style. I get the biggest kick out of the photos of naked ladies who clearly were very fond of the person behind the camera. Boobs are always a really good thing. Present them with smiling eyes and a big grin, and you've got the best stuff on earth.

need a pocket in the shower? you're free to be you

Pop didn't look anything like the model here but the guy's sporting the bath skirt thing! As I've mentioned before, dad had that nutty engineer thing in his brain and he tended to do things his own way regardless of convention, social norm, or personal safety. Freedom was precious to him and this was often applied in novel ways like... a terry cloth bath skirt as casual wear. Bein' free, as it were, was typically the first order of business at the end of a busy day. Get home, hot shower, careen out of the bathroom naked as a jay bird, and at last get into something more comfortable... bath wrap (that's what the trade calls 'em as copious research on the subject determined) and a V-neck T-shirt. (I get a real kick out of having two in a row capital letters hyphenated to short words.) Then it was time to watch Wall $treet Week with Louis Rukeyser and let out all the day's pressure. Dad was a champion fog horn when it came to farts. The cat's pupils would dilate and she'd slink out of the room real slow-like and close to the ground.

But I digress... the terry cloth skirt, with handy pocket in front and snap or Velcro fasteners at the hip, made the most of a comfortable weekend working in the garage shop. In the garage dad could proudly wear that skirt with slippers and a plaid flannel shirt while cutting threads on a new piece of three quarter inch galvanized iron pipe for the water heater, metal shavings and cutting oil dribbling on his toes, and not give a damn. Still brilliantly etched in my memory are the few perfect weekend days when one last critical piece fell into place and he was submerged in his element. The religious folk would stop by to proselytise. Honestly, I never could understand why they didn't have a map with red marks for the houses to avoid... the places where they would be hounded with outrageous logical conundrums and soul searching ineffable enigmas.

Ah, just picture it... The big garage door is up (by the way, it was nothing like your garage door. No way! This door pivoted on huge pin hinges about a third of the way down and was counter balanced by lead blocks. Uh huh, I told you, it's that da Vinci "I do it-a my wey!" thing.) Anyhow, it's a sunny afternoon, the garage is open, dad's in his comfortable place busy beating the living hell out of some sorry piece of metal that wished it had never seen the light of day, and a couple of well dressed folks walk up the driveway hoping to spread the word and be on their way. Instead, they are confronted by our cur of a rescued stray dog at the end of his steel cable tether and a guy in a terry cloth skirt mashing something with repeated blows from a six pound hammer. Wham! Wham! Wham! crunk... "Shit! Hi folks, how are you?" he says innocently without really looking up from his mashing whatever it was helplessly clamped in the huge bench vice. "Run you poor idiots!" I'd shriek in my head, but the words never left my lips, it was too late. It was too late when they came to our neighborhood. It was too late when they took up whatever faith they had innocently paddled their little leaking boat into.

The dog gave his usual mixed message, growl-whimper-bark-wag, and pulled his dead weight a little closer to the visitors. Another fine invention of dad's... tethering the dog with a stiff steel cable to a big hunk of rusted scrap steel thing-a-ma-bobber. It was heavy enough that the dog couldn't get far but could drag it along instead. His short tether didn't get wrapped around things and he wasn't constantly getting stuck. It had the added benefit that the dog was free to menace visitors with out being able to move fast enough to bite them on the butt. Like I said, dad valued personal freedom, but the dog was not really the thing the poor slobs had to worry about. The barrage could last for hours. As long as dad had work to do in the garage he was happy to coolly slash jagged wounds in the peace and love offered by the proselytisers. Oh, the agony.

"Why don't you folks give it a rest here and move on down the block?" I'd wonder. The chilled venom, piss, and vinegar had a bottomless source and I have gleaned some bits of explanation over the years. It seems that there had been at least two cases in my dad's life of people he cared about doing what he viewed as incredibly dim witted things based on religious belief. In one particular case it amounted to suicide by refusing basic medical treatment. Well, to each their own. I know my dad believed this too, but when anyone walked into his space to tell him what he needed to believe in to be saved he figured they were asking for it. And deliver IT he did, between the continuing loud hammer blows, all while his junk had plenty of room to dangle in that bath skirt!... and you thought I had forgotten about the skirt.

Mind you, I'm not making fun of the skirt. On the contrary, I have had my own weirdo clothing flings and I too am a big proponent of doing your own thing. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree I suppose, but sometimes the apple doesn't wear terry cloth. I have yet to adopt the bath skirt, in spite of my spouse's joking suggestion that she buy one for me.

Inevitably, the religious folks would look at their watches, pat down their hair that had been blown all cocky-whompus by the gusts of diatribe, and walk backwards down the driveway muttering blessings. I hope none of them took it personally. I can't imagine it didn't leave a few scars, and dad never even raised his voice above the din of his hammering. You can believe in whatever you like but a guy should be allowed to proudly wear terry cloth in his own garage and fart loud enough to scare off the banshees.

keep yer pants on it's an old radio show

There was a good long stretch of history from about the time of the French Revolution up to just the last few years when menfolk didn't bother wearing uncomfortable clothes unless there was a wedding on. Putting on clothes with built in pain was at last seen as silly. The men said, "down with these ridiculous shoes, heavy wigs, and idiot britches of the court of Versailles!" and it was good. Then came low rise pants.

I'm not one to show the space below my navel in public so when I try on pants these days I like them to cover all that. Lately it has become a weird dream where you're trying to get all the wiggling fuzzy caterpillars into an ever smaller bag, but they keep getting out and there are ever more crawling around freaking out the onlookers. And I'm not even trying those labeled "low rise". Even the pants that are supposed to be "regular" have more and more make-believe ballroom too. Every top button is going south and more hairy backsides are being introduced to the sunshine in spite of most folks' desire to keep all that under wraps. Fashion, you cruel master.

And this, at last, brings me to my anecdote, all this about an old radio show, and what it has to do with dad. Following a recent pants buying excursion I complained about the shrinking space in all the pants, and my bellyaching briefly raised the dead. By way of mom, dad delivered one more lost gem of wisdom. Mom said, "Your dad called it the make-believe ball room." We laughed and then I had to ask where that came from as I had never heard him say this. The expression is funny enough by itself but learning the reference to a real radio program (and movie, that's the poster above) makes the gag all the more alive. The Make-Believe Ballroom started as an early stab at putting recorded music on the radio. It seems that the record publishers were loath to let radio have the rights to the recordings for fear that people would stop buying phonographs and the plastic platters that held the recordings (I know, I know, most of the people who will remember when music came on a plastic disk are dead now... by the way, they were black or sometimes in wild colors and later they were smaller and clear with a rainbow sheen). In 1935 Martin Block, an announcer on WNEW in New York, used records to fill some down time. Eventually the record companies found that playing recordings on the radio could encourage sales and Block's fooling around became the long running radio show Make-Believe Ballroom where you could tune in and, get this, make-believe you were in a ballroom... HA! And later it became a movie too. Huh... a movie from a radio show? I guess it beats writing novels and movie scripts from video games.

I was aware that dad never wore denim, Levis' or otherwise, or at least extraordinarily rarely. Turns out this was all because of the Make-Believe Ballroom. I guess he had more trouble with this than ever occurred to me. I've been wearing denim for at least 35 years and it has only been the last few years with the shrinking fly that it has become a problem for me. Hmmm. You know what? I just made the connection to those terry cloth bath skirts dad preferred to wear around the house. I won't claim that dad was a Leonardo DaVinci but he was a mad engineer and had to do things his own way in spite of convention and social norms much like the old Italian. So where there wasn't the social requirement for pants, that is... at home, he generally wore... no pants. Sometimes baggy underwear did the trick, sometimes it was a bath skirt (for the uninitiated this is just a towel equipped with Velcro or snaps so it hangs on one's waist), other times it was nothing at all.

Hence the occasional klaxon call, "dad! put some pants on! we have visitors."

I still manage to find pants with Mad Hot Ballroom instead of the imaginary kind but those pants are getting fewer and farther between. I hope the menfolk won't be talked into the kind of madness that some womenfolk seem to be willing to put up with.

Oh, and by the way ladies, it's been said before but it bears repeating... men don't care what you wear. If you are naked and smiling it beats the pants off any fashion.

creativity and paper snow balls

Yes, yes, it's been a while since I posted that first little bit and I swear I plan to pick this up and start writing bits about my pop and all the odd things that came along for the ride but first a tidbit about creativity.

The clan had a family dinner last night and my eight year old nephew was in attendance. He had brought with him a small clone trooper action figure to keep himself entertained while the adults gabbed. He got a hold of some white tissue paper from a gift bag and put it to quick use in what has to be the most surprisingly creative thing I have seen in a while. He balled up two small bits of the paper so that they would just fit into the permanently curled mitts of the clone trooper where ostensibly it was intended to hold a plasma rifle or destructo bomb or the like. Then he mashed up the rest of the paper to make a snow field, put the trooper in the middle, and hollered, "Snow ball fight!"

HA!

I know this will sound like a dumb little thing to most folks (not that anyone is reading yet anyhow) but I was slack jawed. I'm getting old and it feels like creativity is harder to come by these days, so this little display tickled my make-something-out-of-nothing bone.

I need to spend more time drawing cartoons and gluing lint to toothpicks.

who's son?

I don't have photo of my dad available to upload since I'm doing this at work. This will have to do for now. It was the first one in mrs. a-go-go flickr page that jumped out at me. Dad is gone so I suppose this is appropriate, "walk into the light," and all. I just needed to have a post up here so I could iron out how the page should look, but it got me started thinking. Dad's been gone now for close to four years. It was complications from ALS, what used to be called Lou Gehrig's Disease, that took him. He was only 72. Kinda stymied as to what else to say for an opener. I started putting this blog together to get me to write about my dad's nutty engineer life. I saved a big file box of stuff from all the many file boxes full of things that he had collected. Going through all of it I picked out the things that reminded me of something important about him. I miss him, and I can't think how else to work through it but to just write and muddle. I'm old enough now that I've lost a few close people due to age or disease, and too many other close people seem imminently threatened with health problems. Can you say mid life crisis? Am I old enough for that?