When you come to the end of a perfect year

...let me know, will ya? Because it will definitely be a first.

This year was definitely less than perfect from my own personal perspective, dealing as I did with (among other things) a seven-month-long bout with shingles; its evil twin, post-herpetic neuralgia; the death of a dog; a week-long hospital stay that included an endoscopy, a colonoscopy, two blood transfusions, and the medical team of Thelma and Louise; and finally, in December, an out-patient procedure that involved my swallowing a camera and walking around all day wearing a monitor that continuously blinked yellow, green, and blue, which prevented me from entering a grocery store or a schoolyard or a commercial establishment of any kind for fear that I would be mistaken for someone with a bomb and tackled to the ground. As Jack Paar used to say, I kid you not.

Other than that, Ma, 2013 was a year like all other years, except (as Walter Cronkite said on many occasions) “YOU ARE THERE.”

But the world is bigger than my own personal interaction with it. Our own national treasure, humorist Dave Barry, has captured the year 2013, at least from an American perspective, in his own inimitable style in this column, which I heartily recommend to you. It is impossible in some places to discern Mr. Barry’s words from events that actually occurred.

I am facing yet another medical procedure on January 10th, after the completion of which it would be just fine with me if I never had to visit a gastroenterologist ever again.

Interesting fact #17,643: MoviPrep has absolutely nothing to do with attending the cinema, unless you are a gastroenterologist, and then in only the most tangential way.

You are now ready for 2014.

Interesting fact #17,644: If you lived in the American South, you would need to have ham hocks, hog jowl, blackeyed peas, and some form of greens (turnip or collard preferred) at the ready for your New Year’s Day dining pleasure. Don’t ask why. Some things are just self-evident.

We interrupt this blog to bring you an important announcement from rhymeswithplague headquarters

tap tap tap...is this thing on???

*clearing of throat, followed by ear-splitting feedback from microphone*

Good morning.

I am not a camera.

Do not come here hoping to find professional-looking close-ups of exotic insects or the vegetables in my garden or the maple tree in my front yard or the azalea blossoms under my bay window. Do not expect to see the gorgeous sunsets we enjoy daily here in my neck of the woods; they probably look very much like the ones in your neck of the woods. You won’t find snapshots of assorted small children smiling prettily into the camera lens accompanied by captions documenting the rapturous opinions of an adoring older relative. You will look in vain as well for any pictures of my own handsome self, except for the small one at the upper left, taken when I was two.

It ain’t gonna happen.

Neither will you find photos of me and the missus on horseback rounding up our multitudinous cattle in midwinter or our herd of wild mustangs in summer, the ones the U.S. government reimburses us for feeding. You needn’t search any time soon for my completely illustrated procedure of how to make my great-grandma’s gooseberry pie, beginning with the killing and cleaning of the goose (take one cup of sugar, insert photo, one stick of butter, insert photo, use a serrated knife, insert photo). What we do in and around the privacy of our own home, dear reader, ain’t nobody’s bidnis but our own. I know this may come as a shock to some of you, flying as it does in the face of our show all, tell all, bragging, boasting, overblogged, overtwittered, over-blackberried, over-iPhoned society, but it simply can’t be helped. As Walter Cronkite used to say, that’s the way it is.

Instead, I hope you will find, as newcomer Robert Brault -- my goodness, we share three-fourths of a name -- recently did, a “charmingly eclectic” little blog, which he also said he prefers to a “disarmingly dyslexic” one.

If you want your life to be an open book, fine. More power to you. But mine is not. I’m not planning to give you a peek at members of my family. I may write about them from time to time, but show them to you? Never! (In the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that in the past I have included old photographs of a few relatives who have long since departed this world. That was then. This is now.) As a famous coffee cup once said, “Just because I’m paranoid doesn't mean they’re not out to get me.”

So when a photograph appears on my blog, it will be because I searched online and found one that fits well with something I have decided to write about.

It will be because I am more a man of words than images.

It will be because I am an admirer of the alphabet, a lover of language, a veritable wizard with words.

Or it might just be because there are no digital cameras or scanners on the premises, and if there were, I wouldn’t know how to operate them, and everything I just said in this announcement is nothing but sour grapes.

Have a blessed day.

*turns and walks out of camera range, if there were a camera*


This has been a special announcement from rhymeswithplague headquarters.

We now return you to the blog in progress.

Tuesday ramblings #5

For some reason, I woke up today thinking of Bishop Fulton J. Sheen. He wasn’t in my dreams that I know of, just there in my head as I sat on the side of the bed, trying to get my bearings. He was the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Rochester, New York, and is buried in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan. For many years he had a television program on Tuesday nights, eventually drawing an audience of thirty million people. He even won an Emmy, and reruns of some of his programs still find their way onto EWTN and TBN. Since there is a Wikipedia article on just about everything, it turns out there is one about him, too. I’m much too lazy today to post a photo of him, so if you want to see one, you can check out the article here. It is really quite interesting.

Bishop Sheen said many memorable things in his lifetime. For instance, when a heckler asked him a question about someone who had died, Bishop Sheen said, “I will ask him when I get to heaven.” The heckler replied, “What if he isn't in Heaven?” and the Bishop said, “Well, then you ask him.”

Along the same line, another man told Bishop Sheen he did not believe in hell. The Bishop replied, “You will when you get there.”

But the one I like best was included in a newsreel clip in an old CBS-TV hour-long documentary called The Strange Case of the English Language. In the clip, Bishop Sheen had been asked to give the opening prayer at the New York State Assembly in Albany, and when he stepped up to the podium microphone he said, “Friends, I’m not going to pray for you today. There are three things every man must do for himself: Blow his own nose, make his own love, and say his own prayers.” Then, indicating he would pray with them instead, he launched into his prayer with the words, “Let us pray.” Think about that the next time you happen to be sitting in church and the person up front says, “Let us pray.” You’ll have a hard time just sitting there passively listening to what the other person is saying, I’ll wager.

The Strange Case of the English Language also demonstrated how questions about gender can sometimes trip a person up by showing President Lyndon Baines Johnson affirming that “Uncle Sam will keep her word.” And there was a funny segment where Harry Reasoner, the host, discussed how the placement of adjectives can change the meaning of a sentence. He pondered at length where the word “only” might best be inserted into the sentence “I punched Walter Cronkite in the nose,” as follows:

1. Only I punched Walter Cronkite in the nose.
2. I only punched Walter Cronkite in the nose.
3. I punched only Walter Cronkite in the nose.
4. I punched Walter Cronkite only in the nose.
5. I punched Walter Cronkite in the nose only.

The older I get the more amazed I am at the odd things that have managed to worm their way into my long-term memory storage banks. For example, here’s a little ditty, a jingle, that is either humorous or sacrilegious depending on which side of the bed you woke up on; it is sung to the tune of an old Pepsi-Cola commercial:

Christianity hits the spot,
Twelve apostles, that’s a lot;
The Holy Ghost and the Virgin too!
Christianity’s the thing for you.

What gives me pause is something a little more sobering that Bishop Sheen once said. I discovered it in my little computer search this morning: “Everything we do, whether good or evil, goes down into our unconscious mind... So at the end of every human life there will be pulled out of our subconscious or unconscious mind the record of every thought, word and deed. This will be the basis of our judgment.”

Now there’s a truly scary thought. He didn’t even need to add, “Let us pray.”