Letters to the Editor
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GK reads the same books as GW?
"...and the guy in the book says, "Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.""
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The deal is....
...that every guy thinks he's misunderstood (or misunderestimated). In reality, only a very few are. Bush isn't one of them.
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James Thurber redux
I don't know why, but this GK essay made me laugh and brought to mind the story, "The Night the Bed Fell," so I Googled it (wow, it's online!) and read it again after all these years and laughed some more.
Thanks, times two.
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Here's how it works
On mother's day you take the kids to give mom a break.
On father's day you take the kids to 'bond'.
It's not about you. Sorry.
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Terrific column!
At last, a GK column that had me chuckling throughout. Funny stuff. So now I'll have to go read that Thurber story.
I read somewhere that Mothers Day is the day with the greatest number of telephone calls, and Fathers Day is the day with the greatest number of collect telephone calls. I guess it goes with the territory.
I have tinnitus too -- maybe I'll be the one toting around the box of cicadas (cicadae?). Who knew?
Our town had a Dairy Queen, not an A&W, but the end result was the same.
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Yo, GK!
...watsh you smoke befo' you rote dat?
Pretty funny. You are misunderstood. By me at least. Today.
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Help for Tinnitus
GK,
There are treatments. One involves biofeedback and retrains the brain not to hear the sound. I think you need a cognitive neuropsychologist...or something like that. This treatment is about 70% successful (as in complete permanent success) and involves no pain, just shlepping to the appointments.
The other is a hearing aid device worn in the ear canal that masks the noise.
I feel for you. When mine kicked in (walking out of a paper mill tour) I realized I would never hear silence again. It was a cause for grief.
In summer, running a fan in my bedroom helps. Also have a white noise machine. I've noticed that some medications, particularly painkillers, kick it up a notch, so you might review your Rx.
Best of luck with it.
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A few beekeeping facts related to drones...
"We may devolve into drones, hauling honey to the hive to feed the queen, leading short nasty lives and dying unmourned, big heaps of us, just like the cicadas. "
Hello Garrison,
As a former beekeeper, I have to point out that you are incorrect when you state that drones haul honey to the hive to feed the queen. Drones do not collect nectar in order to make honey, only the female worker bees do that job. Drones do not do any work in the hive. As a matter of fact, they are not able to feed themselves and have to beg for food from the worker bees.
Drones only exist in order to fertilize virgin queens, which they do in mid-air, by the way. Often, multiple drones fertilize the same queen. So, there are groups of worker bees in the hive who are half-sisters, because these groups have the same mother but different fathers.
An interesting fact about drones is that they are driven out of the hive during the late fall. Remember how I said that drones cannot feed themselves? Well, the worker bees stop feeding the drones and the drones starve to death. The reason for this is that drones are not needed during the long winter months and would only consume precious food without providing reproductive services, because there are no virgin queens flying around in the winter.
I hope you have enjoyed this little beekeeping lesson.
Regards,
Larry
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Blah blah blah
More gummy maledictions from America's favorite deliberately irrelevant gasbag. Awesome.
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Tinnitus
My tinnitus almost completely disappeared after I started taking 3 grams of EPA + DHA per day (about 10 fish oil capsules). My wifes hearing improved by 20 dB and she tossed her hearing aids. Her audiologist refused to believe his own numbers. A side effect is that with that much omega-3 in your system you are almost completely immune to sunburn. So we also tossed our sunblock.
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Drones get no respect...
Hello Garrison,
As a followup to my first letter on drones, I am compelled to explain how drones get even less respect as fathers than you do!
After a drone mates with the queen, he loses his male member and dies! How is that for disrespect? Drones and queens mate in mid-air, as I mentioned in my previous letter. The male mounts the queen from behind and when he has finished his sexual antics, flips over backwards, breaking off his, um, thing.
Now, how do queens and drones meet in mid-air? Well, the drones leave their hives in the early afternoon and hang out in areas called DCAs. DCA stands for drone congregating area, I kid you not. Think of DCAs as Dairy Queens, 7-11s, or any other areas where guys hang out waiting for cute girls in their summer dresses.
When a virgin queen flies by a DCA, all of the drones take off in hot pursuit. The virgin queen flies higher and higher in order to mate with the strongest drones from the group.
There you have it, sex in the honeybee world, and why drones have lousy lives as fathers. All father drones die after mating. Most drones die without successfully mating, and are therefore never fathers!
Cheers,
Larry
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So tired
of the poor hapless dumbass man trope. How the hell many men out there met their wives this way?:
Well, there is fatherhood in a nutshell. A big misunderstanding. We were young swashbuckling guys riding around in cool cars on a hot summer night and we pulled into the A&W for a root beer and these girls walked over in their little white summer dresses and the next thing we knew we had a house and a lawn and a teenager glowering at us and muttering something about us not understanding him.
I thought this was going to be a piece about the many great fathers out there. Instead it's another piece of bloated nostalgia for a never-reality combined with the most irritating and insulting (to men and women alike) gender stereotypes we have. Marriage is something that just happens to guys! The poor bastards just wake up to this without ever choosing it!
Well, any dad that views his marriage(s) and kids as an unnerving accident is an asshole, and that's why his family isn't making a fuss about him. My dad, like many others out there, never acted as though we were just something he stepped in. And that's why Father's Day at our house was rather more festive than Arbor Day.