Noodling for Flatheads

By Burkhard Bilger

ISBN 0-684-85010-9
Scribner 2000


About the Author

Has written for all the usual suspects: The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, and the New York Times.



Book Description

"Bilger kicks off the tour from his hometown in Oklahoma, where he 'noodles'--thrashes a limb around in catfish-thick waters--hoping to land a fabled 80-pound monster with his bare hands. In Louisiana, he challenges the misgivings any nonenthusiast might have about cockfighting.
Even though it's illegal in most of the country, the bloodsport is thriving in the Bayou State, replete with trade magazines, well-produced venues, and American Kennel Club-worthy breeding strategies. The same passion for efficiency goes into the moonshining business, where Bilger is taken under the wing of one of the few shiners willing to lead him through his sourmash operation. A few nights later, however, Bilger is on the other side, on a raid with the local sheriff.
Squirrel-brain consumption is still popular in hamlets throughout Kentucky, even after a report published in the New England Journal of Medicine blamed a neurological disease on the dish. Bilger treats each eccentric character with a distant respect and hints at the melancholy of losing tradition, no matter how bizarre."

Quote

"tick tick tick

I'm nostril-deep in murky water, sunk to the calves in gelatinous muck.

Noodling, I know, is the fishing equivalent of a shot in the dark. For his master's thesis at Mississippi State University, a fisheries biologist named Jay Francis spent three years noodling two rivers.

All told, he caught 35 fish in 1,362 tries: 1 fish for every 39 noodles."

To "noodle" is to dangle your arm in the water until a catfish swallows your hand. The fish record catch includes one at 111 pounds.

"When clamped on your arm, catfish also have an unfortunate tendency to bear down and spin , like a sharpener on a pencil."

... "once that thing gets to flouncin' and that sandpaper gets to rubbin', it can peel your hide plumb off."

Here's the trailer for the movie
Okie Noodling


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Soup is no Joke

A ladle humor

"Garçon, le mouche dans ma soupe!"

"Non, monsieur, la mouche"

"Mon Dieu, you Belgians have wonderful eyesight!"

Soup Jokes


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Sgt. Pepper

If you're old enough

The Oxford Dictionary presents an interactive version of the cover.
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography


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Schlub

a stupid, worthless, or unattractive person

"(Jerry is) an all-American schlub . . . He has turned these degradations into an animated Web site appropriately named ItsJerryTime.com, on which he battles a cast of tormentors that includes the Meal Moth, his landlord and an alleged telephone conspiracy perpetrated by a duo of old ladies" Wall Street Journal

ItsJerryTime.com


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Your Grand-cestors Swore

Your Grandmothers told them to stop

What is there about a well placed curse that spices a novel or a conversation?
Perhaps it's genetic or evolutionary.

"The Jacobean dramatist Ben Jonson peppered his plays with fackings and "peremptorie Asses," and Shakespeare could hardly quill a stanza without inserting profanities of the day like "zounds" or "sblood" - offensive contractions of "God's wounds" and "God's blood" - or some wondrous sexual pun.

Even the quintessential Good Book abounds in naughty passages like the men in II Kings 18:27 who, as the comparatively tame King James translation puts it, "eat their own dung, and drink their own piss."

Almost before we spoke

Refered to by:
LanguageHat.com
The Antiquity Of Cursing


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What if the Truth Teller Fibs

Who ya gonna believe?

Snopes.com is a great source for answers about urban myths, legends and computer hoaxes.

These articles appear on the Snopes site:

TRUE: The Mississippi state legislature removed fractions and decimal points from the mathematics curriculum of public secondary schools.

FALSE: The restaurant chain formerly known as "Kentucky Fried Chicken" changed its name to KFC to eliminate the word "fried" from its title.

TRUE: At the moment the Titanic hit an iceberg in the north Atlantic, the silent version of the film The Poseidon Adventure was being screened aboard ship.

After you stop shaking your head, look at the bottom left corner of the page and click on "More information about this page."
False Authority Syndrome


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Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®

A morning's home companion

The Writer's Almanac®, a daily program of poetry and history hosted by Garrison Keillor, can be heard each day on public radio stations throughout the country. Each day's program is about five minutes long.

Minnesota Public Radio will email the newsletter and link to you every morning.

It's a pleasant way to start the day with Garrison talking about some piece of literary history and then reading a short poem.

Try it, you'll like it.The Writers Almanac.org

Also, in keeping,
Prairie Home Companion Features


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Mother's Day +

Great clips

Paul Blanchard has produced a series of video clips, mostly based on his kid's elementary school.
Kevin Freitas has pointed out this addition to the Tacoma area.




You can also subscribe to his YouTube collection.


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Pigeon/Slug Power

One if by air. Two if by slime

"Never underestimate a pigeon carrying a memory card, hovering above your head, ready to download"-yossi vardi

Pigeons' Data Transfer Rate:

"Calculating the bandwidth by dividing the amount of data by the flying time of the last pigeon, show that the bandwidth achieved by the pigeons was significantly larger that that available through commercially available ADSL broadband Internet connections: about 2.27 Mbps (Mega bit per second) as compared to 0.75 - 1.5 Mbps. [Please note that all measured times are of an observer on the ground. If measured by the moving pigeon it self, times are a bit shorter, according to Einstein's relativity theory].

Yet the Wi-Fly TCP (Transmission by Pigeons) protocol of wireless internet has had its limitations. First, pigeons cannot fly through Windows. Second, since they don't fly in darkness either, this method's bandwidth drops to zero 50 percent of the time. Finally, there's the problem of droppings download."

Google Pigeon ranking

And:

"The use of snails as data communications agents was not considered before now. As we show in this paper, the negative attitude towards using snails in communications networks is an example of bounded rationality2 impeding bold and creative engineering.

Snails are widely assumed to be slow animals. Yet the literature on sluggish speed is surprisingly limited, and few have actually bothered to measure and record it formally. Further, reported gastropod speeds vary widely with species and circumstance, ranging from 0.0000233 to 0.00284 meters per second.

. . . a certain segment of the network's backbone was implemented by shuffling magnetic tapes in a station wagon in the Australian outback. This has prompted Andrew Tanenbaum to note that one should "never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes."

Sluggish Data.PDF


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Taxes, Audits, and Rock and Roll

Government You Can Dance To

"Louisville, Ky. recently launched a tax amnesty program, much like those elsewhere. Under the program, if your business pays its overdue taxes by May 31, the city will waive penalties and interest. If you don't, it promises to come after you using some new computer systems that, the government says, will finger the tax-dodgers.

But Louisville has added a couple of twists to its initiative: It has billboards around town warning people to pay up, a digital countdown clock that tells them the days and hours left until amnesty expires - and, of course, it has its own rock song. Huh? That's right. Louisville's amnesty program comes with its own rock anthem by a local group called, appropriately enough, the Accountants. Their song, is a hard-driving number that warns people owing occupational license fees and business profit taxes,

"You laid low and you've not paid,
But don't be afraid,
Your only chance to improve your finance,
If you come clean you'll save some green."

Also see:
The Accountants (www.CPArock.com)

Email Junkie

"When I get up at six I gotta get my fix
start the day with a couple of clicks
Forget the shower, forget the shave
forget the news in the USA Today
When I hear the hard drive hummin'
I know the buzz is comin'
I get a rush when I see
twenty one messages waiting for me"

Middle Man

"I used to be one of the front line guys
Till the bosses upstairs seduced me with lies
They said 'we'll promote you, and you’ll call the shots'
But I didn't know it was such a tight spot

In charge of these people who once were my friends
Now I'm their boss and that’s where it ends
Its not worth the small change that I make
Taking this job was my biggest mistake

Caught in the middle, want to quit every day
But I’ve got a family and mortgage to pay"

Suggested by:

Gwen Kopetzky
City of Tacoma
Assistant to the City Manager



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Jean Shepherd

"You filthy pragmatists, I'm going to get you!"

A Salute to Jean Shepherd:

FlickLives.com

"Those who have seen the 1983 movie "A Christmas Story" know Jean Shepherd as the voice of Ralph Parker as an adult. Others who grew up in the New York Metropolitan area during the 50's, 60's and 70's may recall the nightly radio show he did on WOR 710AM five nights a week for forty-five minutes and the two-hour Saturday night "Live at the Limelight" shows.

... a stunt he liked to pull, was the hurling of invectives. He would instruct his listeners to place their radios in the open window of their house and turn the volume way up. He would then yell over the radio things like, "You filthy pragmatists, I'm going to get you!"

Shep often said that there was 5 to 10 hours of preparation for each of his nightly shows, and yet fellow WOR personality Barry Farber, and one of his engineers, Herb Squire say that it all came from the top of his head. Herb claims that Shep would come into the studio with only a scrap of paper with a few notes, or perhaps an article someone had sent him. He would sit down behind the mike, and as the theme song would play Shep would ease into 45 minutes of non-stop chatter. He would start out talking about a particular subject, and through the course of the show, would side track to other related topics. But as his theme music at the end of the show came to a close he managed to tie it all together and bring the show to an end."

Jean Shepherd: Radio's Noble Savage
by Edward Grossman

"10:15 P.M. The WOR news and weather are out of the way. A bugle sounds, and a sprightly theme song comes trotting on the air. The theme has a double meaning: it is the one that calls the horses to the gate at Aqueduct, and it is the Bahnfrei Overture, composed for an operetta by Eduard Strauss, the only member of the Strauss family who did not make good. Presently, Shepherd's clear, rowdy voice intrudes. 'Okay, gang are you ready to play radio? Are you ready to shuffle off the mortal coil of mediocrity? I am if you are.' There is a noise like a mechanized Bronx cheer (BRRAPP!)- it is Shepherd blowing his kazoo. At other times he twangs his Jew's-harp (BRROING!). 'Yes, you fatheads out there in the darkness, you losers in the Sargasso Sea of existence, take heart, because WOR, in its never ending crusade of public service, is once again proud to bring you--(EROICA SYMPHONY UP)-- The Jean Shepherd Program!'"

Bob Kaye:
Shep In Concert! Video Clip

JeanShepardPodcast


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Population:485

By Michael Perry

ISBN 0-06-095807-3
Perennial 2002


About the Author
Michael Perry was raised on a small dairy farm near New Auburn, Wisconsin, and put himself through nursing school working as a cowboy in Wyoming. As of this writing, he is the only member of the New Auburn (nee Cartwright Mills) Area Fire Department to have missed the monthly meeting because of a poetry reading.
See:
SneezingCow.com



Book Description
A collection of stories about life in a small Wisconsin town. What it's like to be in the volunteer fire department with your brothers and your mother.
Unable to polka or repair his own pickup, his farm-boy hands gone soft after years of writing, Mike figures the best way to regain his credibility is to join the volunteer fire department. Against a backdrop of fires and tangled wrecks, bar fights and smelt feeds, he tells a frequently comic tale leavened with moments of heartbreaking delicacy and searing tragedy.

Quote

"... The village board sent someone around to recite nuisance ordinances chapter and verse, but beyond rearranging the bikes and aligning the camper with the speedboat - feng shui primitif - nothing has changed. You take what you can get in this life. Someone calls you white trash, you go with it, and fight like hell to keep your trash. You understand it is a matter of distinctions: yuppies with their shiny trash, church ladies with their hand-stitched trash, solid citizens with their secret trash. In a yard just outside town, a spray-painted piece of frayed plywood leans against a tree. It reads Trans Ams: 2 for $2000. It has been there for two years."

New Auburn, Wisconsin, 54757


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