One More Good Adventure

From time to time I check out the online edition of the Cape Cod Times, the old hometown newspaper. I used to trudge around half of the Town of Orleans delivering it when I was in high school and then worked as a general assignment reporter in 1964. It was called the Cape Cod Standard-Times back then.

I happened to look at it Wednesday and there was this video of Leo Cummings, one of my favorite people from the old days. Leo owned the Sunoco gas station in town and also drove the school bus we all used to ride to school on. He’s looking pretty good for 90.

Anything with sharp teeth eats meat

Most power tools have sharp teeth

People are made of meat

(Stolen from Soundman on the excellent Australian forum http://www.woodworkforums.com/)

And never forget: A borrowed saw will cut anything!

When you spend quite a bit of your time alone a person has to do something to pass the time. I don’t know how others spend their alone time but me, I think about strange things, most of which never make it past my cranial cavity.

One thing I’ve wondered about for years is who in hell figured out coffee? Coffee isn’t simple. In their basics certain things are simple and it’s fairly easy to figure out how they came to be. Tea is simple. Take some leaves from a plant, put them in some hot water and voilá, a tasty beverage. Wine? Somebody was really thirsty and didn’t care that the grape juice had bubbles all over the surface. They gulped it down and WHOA! Altered state of consciousness. Even the beginnings of cheese is fairly simple in its origins. Some hungry camel herder carrying milk in saddlebags made from animal skins, and possibly made from the stomach, which contains the coagulating enzyme known as rennin. Or, fermentation of the milk sugars  would cause the milk to curdle. The galloping motion of the horse or camel, acting as churning, would effectively separate the milk into curds. The result, curds and whey, provided a refreshing whey drink as well as curds, which would be drained through perforated earthenware bowls or woven reed baskets, and lightly salted to provide a tasty and nourishing meal. All accidental discoveries that were later expanded on.

But coffee isn’t simple. It’s complicated if you think about it a bit. I don’t buy that story of some Ethiopian herder saw his goats getting frisky after eating the fruits off some bushes and suddenly we had coffee. It’s a multi-step process. First you have to pick the fruit, known as “cherries.” Then  the pulp has to be removed and the bean inside has to be left out in the sun to dry. After that the husks of the beans have to be removed. Then the beans must be cooked (roasted), ground up and infused with boiling water. That’s a bunch of work. Who in hell figured that all out, anyway?

Since I’m moving to Panama there are several blogs I read on a daily basis. Richard Detrich actually grows coffee on his place and has some good posts about how he does it at http://richarddetrich.wordpress.com/ and Don Ray who authors Chiriquí Chatter http://www.chiriquichatter.net/blog/2009/10/21/rancho-gotta-coffee/ has this good story of his recent visit to a coffee plantation.

If I knew where Kenneth Graham was buried I’d go there, dig him up and piss in his mouth for having written “There is nothing – absolutely nothing – half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.”

Every idiot in the world who has ever stepped foot into something that floats and has then gone on to write about it uses that quote. When I’m in charge of everything in the world anyone who even utters that quote will be sentenced to life at hard labor and if they actually put it into print they will be executed on the spot.

The second most despised quote is: “Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take but by the moments that take our breath away.” People who repeat it verbally will be whipped. Those who wear it on a tee shirt will be flayed in the public square and those who actually write it down for others to read will be sentenced to having head phones strapped to their ears and forced to listen to “Duke of Earl”  for the rest of their lives.

Another thing that will change when I’m in charge concerns drivers who weave in and out of traffic and end up one car ahead of you at the stop light. You will be permitted to get out of your car and go up and slap the crap out of those people, breaking their windows if necessary to gain access for the slapping. There will be severe penalties and imprisonment if they try and retaliate. If, somewhere down the road, those people are involved in an accident in which they are injured you will be allowed to approach them and jab at their cuts and bruises with a sharp stick.

A lot of things will change when I’m in charge of everything, so pay attention and don’t screw around with people!