It’s cold outside. Sweet sainted mother of Mr. Whipple! Right now my phone tells me it’s 4 degrees, FEELS LIKE -8. I don’t care for it. Yesterday I was out there cleaning off the cars and within a small number of minutes, it felt like my hands were on fire. This is bullshit. Yeah, yeah… I know about gloves. You’re missing the point. It’s cold, very cold. That’s the point.
One more move, my friends! That’s what I’m clinging to. You’ve got to have something to cling to, right? I know I do.
As I’m typing this I don’t have the Monday podcast back from the guy who makes it sound good, but I’m hoping it’ll be coming over any minute now. In it I talk about the times I got injured doing stupid shit. I’m fairly risk-averse, so my stories are not very dramatic. Hopefully funny, though… But I’d like to get yours if you have any. Or even the stuff you witnessed. There’s seemingly no shortage of people doing stupid crap that leads to injury. Tell us all about it, won’t you? Also, give the podcast a listen for my modest entries into this category. It’s a solid episode I think.
By the way, the Tom Petty CD linked as Now Playing below is one of my favorites. It’s a great album, without a bad song. And nobody ever thinks about it or mentions it. It’s all Damn the Torpedoes and Full Moon Fever and Wildflowers with that man. But he had other great records. In fact, he never made a bad one. Yowza! If you only know the hits, do yourself a favor and dig a little deeper. Petty was great, for a long, long time.
I was talking to Toney this weekend about how I can’t really whistle. Oh, I can manage a weak little whistle lite, but it’s an affront to purveyors of the true whistle. I don’t know why I can’t do it, but I can’t. You can file a lawsuit if you’d like. Sheesh. Anyway, I’d like to know about simple things you can’t do for whatever reason. I’ve known people who can’t snap their fingers. Ha! It’s hilarious to watch them try. Anyway, please share whatever you have on this one. Use the comments.
And the podcast was just delivered. You can listen to it here, or wherever you snag your podcasts. Here’s the summary:
The title says it all. In this one I talk about the times I injured myself doing stupid shit. Although to be perfectly honest, I’ve never really been a daredevil. So, my tales are not super-dramatic. I throw in some other people stories though, and I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out. I hope you enjoy it too. Thanks for listening!
Last week was terrible at work, my friends. One of the worst in recent memory. But I’m going to make this week better. We have a certain amount of control over things, right? If nothing else, our mood and general approach. So… to an improved week! Let’s all have a better one. And if you need inspiration here’s a little boost from one of my spiritual leaders, Ray Davies.
I’ll see you guys again on Thursday.
Have yourselves a fine week.
Now playing in the bunker
Support us by doing your shopping on Amazon! In Canada? Here’s your link. Thank you, guys!
Tom Petty is one of those polarizing singer/songwriters either you love them or it is just nails on a chalkboard time. Jackson Brown, Lyle Lovette, Jimmy Buffet, are all in this group. You either have all their music or turn the radio to NPR as soon as a snippet of their songs come on.
Putting Tom Petty in the same category as Jimmy Buffett hurts my soul.
Jeff, I don’t think he was equating the talent, just the propensity to annoy some.
I’m trying to decide whether a lovette is a piece of furniture on which to engage in small carnal pleasure or a partial love (yeah, we lived together for a while, but it was just lovette). In any case, I recommend Mr. Lovett’s first two albums.
jtb
Never been a big Tm petty fan, but I don’t think I’d put him in either the Lyle Lovett or Jimmy Buffet category. On the other hand, he’s no Warren Zevon, either. And if memory serves, Ray Davies took credit for a bit of piano playing on a Kinks album that rightfully should have been attributed to Nicky Hopkins. Interesting that todays topic of discussion is stupid shit we did that got us injured. Just this morning the furnace quit working here at the homestead, and I determined that by simply shimming the exhaust fan over about an eighth of an inch the problem is solved. However, in the process of splitting said shim, I managed to spilt through the small piece of wood and into my left index finger with a very sharp hatchet, Fortunately enough, my wife had some steri-strips and a fingertip bandage. That and a popsicle stick splint to keep e from bending the finger and reopening the cut seem o have stopped the bleeding, at least. Not often I get light headed over a minor injury, but that hurt bad enough that I had to sit down for a minute. My wife said I got, as she put it “white as a sheet”. Be a few days before I can unsplint this little oops.
Yea – that TP album is sort of forgotten except for You Got Lucky I think.
Speaking of the weather – I am having some odd stuff going on with outside temperature gauges. I noticed the other day the one I have on the porch was not moving from 40 degrees. I figured it was broke. I got another one – hung it in the same spot. And the same think happened. The needle stayed at 40 degrees. I moved both of them (after taking the first one out of the trash) to somewhere else on the porch. Now they both read about 20 degrees. They are working. But I think it is actually 10 or 11 degrees right now.
I can’t close my left eye by itself. I can close my right eye alone but to close my left eye both eyes close.
Great — so now my neighbor thinks I have some kind of neuromotor disorder.
John
This is hilarious; I’m the same but with the opposite eyes.
I may have gotten your whistling talent, Jeff. Sorry about that.
Stupid things done that resulted in injury? Slamming a door and having it bounce back open and hit me right in the face. Jumping from a high place into a pond and opening my eyes at the last second to see how far was left to go (hint: pond-water eye lavages hurt when administered at terminal velocity). Playing ninja with a friend and getting my thumb broken for the trouble.
All those things happened at least 25 years ago, so I’d like to think I’ve grown up since then.
I get that you were achieving humor through exaggeration and taking advantage of the ambiguity of the word terminal, but I was curious how high the cliff would have to be to achieve terminal velocity (I assume you did this on Earth). I calculated between 1,000 and 2,000 feet (turns out to be 1,500 feet). That lavage would be applied to more that the eye-hole.
Yeah, it’s kind of a slow day. Why do you ask?
John
Tom Petty was great. I personally don’t know anyone that doesn’t like him.
Cold here and a lot of snow. I guess it kills bugs as the Germans say.
11 degrees this morning. I’m enjoying the dearth of mosquitoes and yardwork. There’s a strip of ice at the foot of my driveway, but it’s narrow enough to momentum across.
Stupid shit… late at night one winter weekend I was simmering homemade stock on the back porch, as one does. After a few too many, I put my arm through the glass of the storm door. Lacerations ensued, and perhaps a bad word or two.
I can whistle a recognizable tune, but I’ve never been able to do the fingers-in-mouth whistle.
Wait, does fighting with my brother with broomsticks count as stupid shit? How about fleeing from a dog on my bike? I still have both scars, about 50 years later.
Insulated in the blue cocoon of the Puget Sound region of the Great Pacific Northwest, I might not know what my PA brothers and sisters mean by “porch”. (I spent a couple of years in Philadelphia, but almost no time in Pennsylvania). We have outdoor porches, which have the world on one side and an entry door on the other, and enclosed porches, which have openable windows and wicker furniture. Neither is suitable for simmering stock, homemade or not. So what’s a porch?
Thanks in advance, and for that matter, in retrospect.
John
The people from whom I bought the house had the surname Porch. Apart from that, the word means the same to me as it does in the Northwest Rainforest.
The porch in question is the outdoor kind, but it has a roof. Being otherwise open-air allows a propane burner to be used safely. The broken glass wasn’t the burner’s fault.
I’ve never been able to r-r-r-r-roll my Rs. Seems like it would be a fun thing to do every once in a while.
I WANT the horseshoe vase!! I would have bought it had I been there.
Nobody wants to hear this but we are bitching about 29 degrees here in Myrtle. The city does have a road crew for weather like this, 2 guys sitting on the tail gate of a city truck throwing salt on the street by hand. Yes I took a picture.
That’s hilarious.
A simple thing I can’t do: I can raise my right eyebrow all by itself (a la Col. Steve Austin, “The Six-Million-Dollar-Man”), but I cannot raise my left one by itself to save my life!
Dumb injury: while working on some old windows in our house, one of them was stuck in the frame, so I was pushing on the spring-loaded sides and told my wife to tap the window with a rubber mallet. When she did that, the window came crashing down on my hands and entirely ripped off my right thumb nail! That won an all-expenses paid trip to the ER to have it stitched back on until a new one grew back. That’s about the closest I’ve ever come to passing out because of pain. And frankly, it still makes me feel a little queezy inside just thinking about it!
Root you caused a flash back. I was putting up a black out blind in my south facing kitchen window. I had the bright idea to staple the bracket to the wall. BANG (loud staple gun noise), but no staple in the wall. I’m standing in the kitchen sink wondering what the hell was going on when I discovered I couldnt open my left hand. It was one of those new staple guns that are backwards, push down on the top instead of squeezing the handle. I had palmed the wrong end tightly in my left hand and stapled my ring finger tendon into the underlying knuckle bone. I had to drive myself to the ER in a truck with a stick shift. The best thing I learned that day was to stay out of New Jersey ERs. Scary place.
I can imitate a screaming fireworks sound that’ll make people jump! Usually they first look scared to death then they ask me to do it again…
I also have Wispy Whistle Syndrome. And I can’t tread water for the life of me. I can swim from point A to point B, but once I stop I better have something solid holding me up.
When I was about 11 I was across the street in the neighbors front yard and I threw a baseball across the street to my dad…except it went a bit high and right through our picture window. But that wasn’t the stupid part. That came when I was cutting a piece of cardboard to cover the window, using a box cutter. You know how they tell you never to cut towards yourself? Well, I learned that lesson the hard way when the blade traversed my finger. The ingenious part was when I yelled F**K at maximum volume and my dad backhanded me across the face, ramping up any crying I was about to do by 3 times or so. I think he may have felt bad after he found out why I had let loose, but I can’t be sure.
Was in the unfinished attic space above the garage pulling a cable wire and stepped in between the rafters. Fell through the dry wall and landed on the hood of my wife’s car. Evidently, when my feet went through, my arms automatically went straight out looking to grab something, anything. Had black and blue from armpit to elbows on both sides. Hurt like hell for days.
Found out a few years later that my neighbor also fell through his attic floor. However, he landed on his wife who was sleeping on the couch, and broke her femur. They are now divorced. Don’t know if there is any correlation to the event.
This is the only good funny real thing of all these comments and post. Well done Jeff and dicker. Nice of me.