First up on the docket: after two weeks of seeing this billboard every morning on my way into work, I'm convinced that not one in one hundred commuters is reading the ad as its makers intended. It was simply the wrong campaign to launch in Minnesota during deer season.
Many people think Minnesota only has two seasons: baseball and football. We do in fact have four: fishing, deer, duck, and turkey. Turkey season in particular has seen a tremendous growth in popularity in recent years, as Minnesotans by the tens of thousands take to the distant fields and deep forests in pursuit of the wily and elusive wild turkey.
Aahh, I got your Mr. Wily and Elusive right here. Honestly, the stupid things are starting to become as obnoxious and ubiquitous as squirrels.
And yet the wild ones are (it is claimed) the MENSA members of the avian world, at as least compared to the domesticated ones. A friend who had a far more agrarian childhood than mine tells the story of her neighbor, who kept a flock of turkeys in a pen surrounded by only a three-foot-high fence. Apparently turkeys instinctively try to fly up to low branches to roost at night, but a three-foot-high fence is as much lift as the tubby domestic ones can manage, and so they'd all roost on the top wire of the fence at night.
The problem came in the morning, when the turkeys woke up and immediately fell forward, to plop onto the ground outside of their pen. Rather than seizing their freedom, though, they would then just spend the day standing by the fence, gazing wistfully at the food and water inside the pen and neither figuring out how to get back into the pen on their own nor gaining any weight. Any efforts to round up the wide-awake turkeys and force them back into the pen only resulted in a turkey stampede, of course, and so as a result, my friend's neighbor hired her and gave her her first paying job.
The trick, as she explains it, is that if you come along just after sunset and do it just right, you can grab a sleeping turkey, lift it off the wire, turn it around, and put it back onto the wire, all without waking the thing up. Then in the morning, when the turkey wakes up and falls forward, it plops into the pen: problem solved. And this is why, to this day, my friend lists "Professional Turkey Turner" as the first job on her curriculum vitae.
Is the story true? Who cares. It's a good story, at least as she tells it. But speaking of good stories, I must say, I'm feeling a bit like Han Solo at the beginning of Return of the Jedi here. I'm out of it for a few weeks, and all of the sudden everybody is acting different. I can't believe that not one of you submitted an entry for the 11/13/09 Friday Challenge. Jeepers, how could you not come up with a sport that could easily be made far more entertaining? I mean, take bowling. Please. Take golf. Didn't any of you see Happy Gilmour? Dodgeball? Balls of Fury? (Okay, scratch that last one; apparently no one saw it.) Caddyshack? Entire film careers have been built on telling stories that make "serious" sports considerably more entertaining than they really are.
I'm not angry; I'm just disappointed. So while I'm most concerned with your writing good entries for the 11/20/09 Friday Challenge, I also want you to remember this one, and think about it in the weeks ahead, because we're going to be presenting this challenge again, most likely next Spring. Because in addition to being disappointed, I'm also lazy.
Speaking of sports, parasports, near-sports, and myGodhowcanyoucallthata sports, this past week we discovered an entirely new and apparently hot-selling category of fiction that previously had escaped our attention: NASCAR romances.
I am not making this up. In fact, I am so not making this up, I've got a book here on my desk as I write this, A NASCAR Holiday, which—really, I am not making this up—is a collection of Christmas-themed NASCAR romances.
Okay, who wants to review it? Any takers? First one to speak up gets it. Don't everybody crowd in at once.
Also new on the review heap: Teaching the Trivium: Christian Homeschooling in a Classical Style, by Harvey & Laurie Bluedorn. I know we have quite a few homeschoolers, former homeschoolers, and hope-to-be homeschoolers in the crowd, so I'd like to place this one in a good home. Does anyone want to take a shot at reviewing it, or better yet, using it? Again, we have one copy only, so ask for this one only if you think you'll be reasonably serious about digging into it.
And finally on this subject, a minor apology: I've gotten behind in recent weeks and have a sizable mound of new books here waiting to be posted on both the Door #3 and Assignment Desk lists. Stay tuned for more details.
Finally overall, I want to take a brief moment now to allow myself a small modicum of smugness. Last May I wrote a short review of the latest Star Trek movie in which I posed an important question:
There are so many things I like about this movie that I don't have time this morning to catalog them all. At the same time, there are a few things that really bother me; for example, in this new Enterprise, is the engineering section supposed to be a brewery or a sewage treatment plant?With the release of the movie on DVD this past week, I not only was able to watch and enjoy the movie again—and yes, it does hold up on repeat viewing—but also able to browse through all the extras on the two-disc DVD set and learn that the engineering section scenes were in fact all shot in an Anheuser-Busch brewery in Van Nuys. So both guesses were right!
And th- th- that's all, folks.
~brb
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