Gurgle

What is the singularly most annoying sound in the entire world?

Fingernails on a chalkboard? No.

The squeaky sound of tennis shoes on a polished floor? Not even close.

The high pitched whine of a microphone feedback squeal? Try again.

The most annoying sound generally doesn't occur during daylight hours. Because when it happens during the day, it's a minor inconvenience. But, when it happens at night, it can frustrate the patience of a Saint and drive the Devil to distraction.

To what do I refer?

I am thinking about the mind jarring, sleep robbing irritant of a leaky toilet tank.

Since the water level never reaches its zenith, and the leaking flap at the bottom dispenses just enough water to make the Chinese water torture finals, there is the continual gurgle that goes on until you are compelled to arise from your bed in the pitch blackness of the sleepless night, dodge the sprawling places of various dogs and pairs of shoes that didn't walk themselves into the closet or the toys that mysteriously remained where they were dropped and into the appropriate bathroom to begin the ministrations on the toilet that will silence the nocturnal gargling that creates insomniacs.

Once the appropriate bathroom is detected, the fun really begins.

If it is the toilet lottery lucky night, you can guess not only the correct bathroom, but with a couple of quick jiggles of the handle, silence the toilet and return to bed before you realize that the pain in the arch of your foot is from the jacks you have just trod upon.

However, since this is generally not the end to our adventure, the game continues.

Seeking from the closest to the farthest of the three bathrooms for the offending toilet (pun not intended), when the guilty porcelain is discovered, it begins a process that involves a lot of whispered pleas for repair that will not include sticking a hand into the watery depths of the tank in the semi-darkness to press the flapper into the drain hole which will allegedly stop the trickly dribbles of water and restore the opportunity for at least a partial nights' rest.

The one thing worse than having to plunge your hand into the cold water to restore quiet is the return to the bedroom after washing, sanitizing and spraying down your arm with disinfectant only to hear another household member making the trek to the very bathroom you have just jousted with in order to catch some "Zzz's".

Trying to prevent the entire household from being jarred awake, loud stage whispers of "DON'T USE THAT BATHROOM!!!" go unheeded and the grousing begins as it is obvious that another trip to the jiggle station will be required.

The sleepwalker returns to their warm bed oblivious to the water antics going on in the night.

Lucky.

Makes you want to fill a pan with warm water and give them a little surprise, except for the fact that you would have to wash the sheets and air out the mattress while the household left for the days' activities.

Once again, the arm sinks into the cold waters filling the tank in the repetitive water ballet that bears no resemblance to Esther Williams and her girls. Jamming the flapper into place, the unthinkable happens and the little chain snaps into two pieces which will never be mated again.

Dang those manufacturers and their cheap plastic parts!!

Locking the door to the bathroom and carefully shutting the door so all other nightly visitors will be compelled to employ one of the other two bathrooms, sleep will finally come. Maybe.

I sink wearily to the mattress. My eyes close. My body begins to relax into the numbered perfection that is alleged to guarantee sleep.

Then the baby wakes up. To PLAY. No diaper change, no snack, no desperate need in the night. Oh no. This is just a midnight call for "Mom and Me time". Wonderful.

Where is that dang butterfly that puts people to sleep when you need it?

Cartoons

What happened to cartoons that were funny?

Saturday morning cartoons used to be a laugh riot with fun times and hilarious action.

Now, they seem to be more interested in being politically correct statements of how we should promote a particular agenda or ideology.

How I miss seeing Road Runner best Wiley Coyote and Bugs Bunny get Elmer Fudd so befuddled that he was seeing red.

Cartoons now seem to believe that they must have some high moral message and call themselves "edutainment" in order to be on television.

One of the funniest cartoons that I have ever seen is the one that features Bugs Bunny going head to head against a wrestler named "The Crusher". It is an impressive display of what a cartoon should be. Witty, funny and slick, Bugs takes on the Crusher and not only gets his goat, he barbecues it in a hilarious show of brains over brawn that turns the would be package of 'fresh meat' into the conquering hero.

Of course, a hysterical aside to the whole shtick is the 'gay nature boy' Ravishing Ronald who is the appetizer for the Crusher. Stuffing Ravishing Ronald into his own hairnet and using him as a speed bag for his warm-up, the mentally lightweight Crusher is enjoying what will be his swan song - only he doesn't know it yet.

And that is what makes the cartoon funny.

We KNOW that Bugs Bunny will best this cretin at his own game by use of devious and dubious means. And it makes it all the more funny because Bugs has the ability to frustrate the Devil himself in the antics he gets up to and out of during the course of the cartoon.

Sure, there are other laugh riots that Bugs has perpetrated. The outrageous activity just never stops when Bugs is on the screen.

I absolutely LOVE the episode where Bugs is playing the part of Leopold Stokowski in order to humiliate the high brow and musically 'superior' opera singer who has trashed his banjo and tuba.

That he does it with so many sight gags and improbable circumstances makes it funny. But the floating glove directing the whole note of the 'nice, fat opera singer' is beyond funny. It is a universe of humor unto itself.

Sending off a letter and waiting for the postal delivery of ear muffs while the singer holds out the note is just a comic reminder of what most of us decidedly low-brow folks feel about most opera that doesn't involve a boy named Peter or a wolf. It is a long note bore awaiting a final chord to spare us from the 'culture' that we just don't want.

Now, lest it be said that I am an anti-cultural snob, know that I have been moved by opera and absolutely love the grandeur of a well played Carmen and the seething evil of Mephistopheles. But I also appreciate the fact that most of us also want things to be a little more digestible from time to time.

Milk before meat, you might say.

Everything doesn't have to be a learning experience custom designed to fit in a time slot.

Sometimes, it's just nice to have a good laugh. Even if it is at the expense of an overblown or musclebound idiot who doesn't know the rabbit is going to win.

Crime & Punishment

Call me jaded.

But reading about the 'total change' of the pop tarts who spend slight amounts of time in rehab, jail and on probation makes me ill. How can anyone possibly glean anything useful and/or permanent from 82 minutes in jail? One day in rehab? 4 hours in rehab? And it makes me wonder, just who do they think they are kidding?

Frankly, I DO hope they will sort out their lives free of the cocaine, the booze, the rampant sex and the distorted Hollyweird value system that brings them to the brink anyway. They need to clean up, grow up, sober up and wise up. And buy some dadgum UNDERWEAR!

I just have to tell you that if it were me in all of those unflattering mug shots, the local constabulary and circuit court judge would be SO much less forgiving than the holier than thou crowd in California who believe the faux sincerity and drink it in like so much mother's milk. Makes me wonder just what kind of mother they all had as children. Mommy Dearest springs to mind, but I digress.

Since I am related to a police sergeant and grew up knowing several of the more prominent lawyers in the local legal system, I am quite sure that they would throw me UNDER the jail and throw away the key. None of this '4 hours in scary old rehab and I'm cured' crap.

No siree!

I'd be scrubbing the floors with my toothbrush for all eternity and sharing my spacious cell with some really 'attractive' woman named Wanda who makes meth while babysitting and spending all of my free time learning how to be a hooker in a small town from this woman with three teeth missing right in front.

Who knew? If you are a 'john', I guess the higher YOU are, the better SHE looks. GROSS!!!

Calls to Daddy would go unanswered as he would most assuredly let me experience the joys and sorrows of accountability for my actions. And he would say so on the evening news before God and everybody.

The judge in our community is all about responsibility here, and I am not talking about that PR spin version of responsibility that actually comes out more like 'who can I blame and still keep my career intact?'

His is more like the responsibility that involves 12 steps that you can't skip through, reporting to a probation officer and keeping your nose clean - inside and out. Basically, the judge here is a zero fun kind of guy for the pop tart crowd.

Rehab in the rural part of America understands that you can't get off the moonshine in a couple of hours. It also knows that addiction to drugs takes more than a sound byte to cleanse your body and soul of the craving. More than anything, rehab in this part of the country still involves good, old-fashioned SHAME about what you have done to family, friends, employers and self.

That is one particular element I find missing from the headlines, and the most disturbing.
None of the elite seem particularly shamed to be busted. They only seem annoyed that the party stopped. There is no sense of 'oops - my bad', but instead, it's more like they honestly feel the world should continue to patronize them and make it easier for them because they suffer under the tremendous burden of making more money than the rest of us will ever see for mediocre work performed under the influence.

In order for anyone to be successful in changing their lives, they need to make a complete transformation of all facets of life. They have to be willing to change, pure and simple. To do otherwise is to mock the sincere efforts of those who have realized that they are literally out of options and must change or die.

And that is a truth that you cannot manufacture like a fake tear.

I'd like to see all of those stars sent to our local lock-up. They stuff them into orange jumpsuits or the traditional convict wear of black and white striped pajamas and put their butts out on the road picking up dirty diapers, empty plastic bottles and a host of disgusting roadside refuse that clutters the shoulders of our rural highways. Sounds like photo-op time, boys. Fire up those cameras for the daily rags and make those digital cameras smoke.

Convicts here are given work 'opportunities' that are both public and humiliating. It's pre-arranged payback for the embarrasment their choices have brought into the lives of those who love them and previously trusted them. The trust part has to be earned back the hard way. Even a kindly old Grandma in the South gets sick of making excuses for Peanut's bad behavior and will come upside her head for a lick of sense now and again.

I have a novel idea for the pop tarts and their assorted groupies and sycophants. California judges should sentence the priveledged princesses to hard labor in the post Katrina garbage dump that is still the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans. The rich and famous should get the chance to clean up the mess that is no less devastating in their personal lives than Katrina was and is to the residents of the Big Easy while shoveling out some post storm damage.

And they shouldn't get any special treatment.

They should have to live in the squalor as they clean it. That seems to be good enough for the people of New Orleans to suffer through on a daily basis, so why can't the pop tarts and their entourage enjoy the same opportunity? Sentencing should be hard labor, 40 hours a week, for about a year or two in an area of the nation that has seen it's share of loss and devastation. No days of for a manicure or a massage. No weekends off to jet away to another cleaner location. No special foods, no personal trainer, no PR and definately NO managers. Unless we get to put the manager and the parents in on the ticket with the pop tart... that would truly be an interesting twist. Make the parents join the wayward child in cleaning up their image by cleaning up a town.
No buy - outs. No slick lawyers. And if they lawyer up, the lawyer joins them by day and does pro-bono work on the side by night for those who have lost everything in the hurricane and been robbed by the billion dollar a year insurance companies.

Maybe a stark dose of the reality of what suffering truly is would help the pampered princesses and their not so royal court to see just how pampered they really are. Even if it doesn't sink in and they return to their life of crime, the photo ops of the beautiful people dirtying their hands in the moldy remnants of the once heralded city would be a kind of penance that money can't buy.

I believe in the processes of repentance and forgiveness. But the part that is being skipped all too frequently in the equation of putting a shattered life back together is the part called 'restitution'.

You can't restore something without undergoing a major overhaul of every element from foundation to rooftop. This also applies to a person's life.

If these people are truly sincere about changing not only their life but the perceptions and beliefs about the sincerity of their purpose, they need to attach some serious financial and personal expense to the process.

Gilbert and Sullivan had it right when they said 'Let the punishment fit the crime".

Until the rich and famous feel the same intensity of punishment the great unwashed feel for the same crime, then they haven't experienced what it takes to truly make them sorry enough to desire change. Even then, the process has set backs and problems. Afterall, we are still sadly human.

But if you put the poptarts in a cell with someone who will not be impressed by their salary and Hollyweird career, it just might make an impact on them.

If it doesn't, then we can only hope and pray that the children of the world will somehow see through the phoniness and sham that is stardom and choose something better for themselves.

Diet food must die

While talking on the phone today to Beth, we were comparing notes on healthy and not so healthy choices for eating in order to achieve the invisible and unattainable nirvana of 'the perfect weight'.

Personally, I'd settle for weighing less than my deep freezer.

But, have you noticed that if it is labeled 'diet' in any way, the manufacturers are COMPELLED to make it inedible, thus rendering your money wasted and your taste buds murdered by the fiendish combinations of 'flavors' that are alleged to be just like the real thing.

For there record: cholesterol free, fat free, non-cheese shreds substitute is only useful to replace the tread on your old, comfortable tennis shoes. The flavor was nothing like the cheddar cheese Mom used to buy and the stuff didn't melt. I don't mean a little. I mean NONE. The little shreds of what had to be orange rubber just lay there atop the 'nutritious' casserole I was making that was certain to shave off the pounds, remove cholesterol from my arteries and restore youth and vigor to my body.

GROSS! I couldn't get to the bathroom fast enough!

I lost weight that night, but most assuredly it was not in the way I had intended. So much for cheeseless cheese.

Some time later, in the ongoing attempt I am making to reduce my body beyond heavyweight contention, I made the youthful mistake of getting a box of cereal that was advertised as a diet cereal that was 'oh so yummy'. Okay, I'll play along. I didn't pay anything for the alleged cereal since I had a coupon for a trial box and figured smugly that I was doing something good for both body and wallet.

Wrong on both counts.

I would have PAID somebody to slap the spoon out of my hand if it would remove the nasty taste from my offended palate!

Coming from the box, the cereal (and I use the term loosely here) resembling nothing so much as some sun dried worms. It looked nothing like the cheerful berry bedecked bowl full of nutrition that the box indicated was inside.

I think the worms would have tasted better, berries or not.

I dumped the remaining offending contents across the lawn out back. I figured the wild animals would eat it. Apparently even wild animals have standards and this cereal was CLEARLY not within the parameters of edible material. I should have consulted them first.

It took TWO mowings before the giblets were sufficiently chopped up to disappear into the thatch of grass clippings on the lawn.

Maybe that is the mistake. I should skip the shopping altogether and simply eat the grass clippings that accumulate in the grass catcher. They are free, when in season, and the decidedly oily taste from the mower would certainly reduce my desire to eat much of them and, in no time at all, I could be svelte, sexy and below double digit dress sizes.

Okay. STOP laughing. We both know double digits will ALWAYS be part of my future in clothing. I'd just like it if the first of the two numbers was a one. I know for a fact that there will never be a single digit because I have an ongoing love affair with food that will never end as long as I live.

Come to think about it, that is why I live some days. It's for the food. I know the old saying that you should 'Eat to live, not live to eat.' If food didn't taste so good and if I weren't a reasonably good cook, maybe I would like lettuce more. Or any rabbit food for that matter.

Since I know there must be some catalyst for the blame game, I will blame it all on the unhealthy preoccupation with beauty that led me to this sorry state of affairs. If I were a grizzly bear, my fat rolls would be considered desirable by the all the males in search of a winter home.

Sadly, I lack the ability to shape shift and I fear that even given the ability to do so, would somehow become the fattest hummingbird in recorded history. There is nothing so sad as a hummingbird who can't reach the nectar feeder. The other birds would point their wings and laugh, making rude comments about the size of my tail feathers and I'd be forced to stravage along on the leavings in cans and bottles that litter our roadways.

I guess the real issue here is finding something that has the word 'diet' somewhere in the description that doesn't make you focus solely on the first three letters.

For now, I guess the new rule of thumb needs to be 'if it tastes good, spit it out'. That brings up another disgusting habit, but at least I would be thinner.