“Lexophile” describes those that have a love for words, such as “you can tune a piano, but you can’t tuna fish”, “To write with a broken pencil is pointless.”
An annual competition is held by the New York Times to see who can create the best original lexophile.
This year’s submissions.
I changed my iPod’s name to Titanic. It’s syncing now.
England has no kidney bank, but it does have a Liverpool .
Haunted French pancakes give me the crepes.
This girl today said she recognized me from the Vegetarians Club, but I’d swear I’ve never met herbivore.
I know a guy who’s addicted to drinking brake fluid, but he says he can stop any time.
A thief who stole a calendar got twelve months.
When the smog lifts in Los Angeles U.C.L.A.
I got some batteries that were given out free of charge.
A dentist and a manicurist married. They fought tooth and nail.
A will is a dead giveaway.
With her marriage, she got a new name and a dress.
Police were summoned to a daycare center where a three-year-old was resisting a rest.
Did you hear about the fellow whose entire left side was cut off? He’s all right now.
A bicycle can’t stand alone; it’s just two tired.
The guy who fell onto an upholstery machine last week is now fully recovered.
He had a photographic memory but it was never fully developed.
When she saw her first strands of gray hair she thought she’d dye.
Acupuncture is a jab well done. That’s the point of it.
I didn’t like my beard at first. Then it grew on me.
Did you hear about the crossed-eyed teacher who lost her job because she couldn’t control her pupils?
When you get a bladder infection, urine trouble.
When chemists die, they barium.
I stayed up all night to see where the sun went, and then it dawned on me.
I’m reading a book about anti-gravity. I just can’t put it down.
It has been a few days since WordPress suddenly without warning turned half of my screen black. That caused me to panic and waste a lot of time trying to figure out what I did wrong. Even more time was lost trying to make the black screen go away. Evidently a reboot was necessary. If […]
When I was very young I enjoyed listening to the stories of my grandfather. He and his farm buddies often sat under the big willow tree sipping beer and spinning yarns. Most of the time they spoke in Hungarian and I could only decipher words they used most often and generously within their conversation. It […]
Chicago is a city surrounded by many suburbs. In fact the ring of suburbs encircling the city is quite varied in ethnicities. At the same time these same suburbs are examples of Americans using their freedom to engage in businesses that fill needs. Last week I traveled sixty miles, yes sixty miles, to get to […]
It has been a few days since WordPress suddenly without warning turned half of my screen black. That caused me to panic and waste a lot of time trying to figure out what I did wrong. Even more time was lost trying to make the black screen go away. Evidently a reboot was necessary. If it happens to me today, I will change to a new blogging platform. I’m too old to be wasting time shooting at invisible gremlins in my system.
I. and I spent a nice weekend relaxing in a community some seventy miles north of where we live. It was relaxing until time to come home on Tuesday. I can’t explain why, but the seventy miles took two hours to traverse. I was a stressed old driver at the homecoming.
I spent the entire next day catching up on my desk work. We are in a project involving the Department of Homeland Security and providing them with our personal info is scary. I spent the better part of the day scanning and uploading docs, pages upon pages of docs. To me they ask for stupid things which have zero relevance toward our case. If it weren’t so damned important to I. and I, I’d tell them what I think of their requests.
Leaving for a three day trip every week and a half really changes a lifestyle. I’m learning to pack things like chargers, and computers, passwords, toothbrushes, and razors so that I can try to have a more normal life experience while traveling. My conclusion is that I’m too old and crotchety to be traveling anymore.
The week before I set out to have my driver’s license renewed. I’ve reached a point where I must now do it every two years, and boy did that too years fly bay. I reached the Secretary of State building in Chicago Heights only to find it boarded up and empty. A Google search informed me that last year during COVID a BLM riot caused the building to self ignite and burn. On my way home, I stopped at a new Toyota dealer to check out a new car. It’s been a few months since I looked at a car. The last time it was February and I was at my dealer having an oil change. I spent the time teasing a salesman about buying a car. He gave me a quote which I felt was five thousand dollars too much. This time Ii went to a dealer closer to home, and did the same thing. This time the vote came in five thousand dollars higher than the last one. I’m keeping the Death Star for a while longer. At least until the auto shortage in our country disappears, or I die which ever event occurs first.
Every time I watch the news and listen to our communist president speak I get the urge to shoot the tv. Then I reconsider after I realize I like the tv better than I do this president. If there is anything more that he and his army of comrades can make go wrong they will do it, and do it fast. I give them credit for the speed with which they are destroying our country. They have about a year and a half left before the next election tips the balance of power away from them doing anymore damage.
Sending VP Kamala Harris to Guatemala was a great idea except she didn’t stay there. Her idea to get to the root cause of why people are running away from their country was spot on. Her solution which is to give the powers to be money to solve the problem is stupid. She is giving it to the wrong people. The money should go tot he people who are starving and need it to eat. The best thing I saw on the coverage of her event were the signs telling her to go home. I give them credit for seeing through her plan to make Guatemala the same as San Francisco.
While Kamala is pandering to the Guatemalans good old Biden is stammering his way through the G7 meeting in Europe. No doubt after his visit the entire globe will jump in to take advantage of his weaknesses. China will probably engineer another virus to release on us with a local epidemic. After the damage done by COVID the Chinese will predictably be able to put us out forever. They will probably be assisted in this effort by every one of the 196 countries in the world. After all who wants to follow a loser. The crowd always aligns with winners.
I quitting this piece while I am still getting black words on a white background, and before the Department of Homeland Security sends me another list of dumb questions to answer in writing with documents to prove my answers. I spoke too soon. The black veil of death just dropped on my post. As I began formatting this post with pictures the black screen happened again. Bye-bye WordPress.
When I was very young I enjoyed listening to the stories of my grandfather. He and his farm buddies often sat under the big willow tree sipping beer and spinning yarns. Most of the time they spoke in Hungarian and I could only decipher words they used most often and generously within their conversation. It was many years later that I learned that these words were obscenities, and curses.
Now it is my turn. I am the old guy who loves to spin yarns except not-one of my kids or grand kids listen. Instead I write the stories and post them onto WordPress to an invisible audience. I’ll never know if the stories I post made a difference in someone else’s life. What I do know is that writing stories about life experiences makes a difference in my life. It is cathartic to spill my heart into the computer chip of my laptop. What does happen sometimes is that I slip up and reveal too many clues of my personal life and a friend will write or call me to ask what I meant.
Slowly my writing has evolved from the third person style of reporting facts to that of the narrative which I hope means I show rather than tell the story. For years I was stuck in the style of report writing which is stiff and boring as hell, but is the style of my profession. At first, I couldn’t even recognize what showing meant. At least now, when I read I can tell when an author is showing, and I really can’t tell when he is telling. Does that make sense? No? Me either.
When I read fiction today, I am mesmerized by the amount of a page an author will devote to psychoanalyzing the character’s thoughts and feelings. I tend to spend time on physical traits rather than inner thoughts. Perhaps if I read another couple hundred books and write another thousand posts I will begin to develop characters that a reader will love.
I’m traveling now, but when I return to my home base I will visit the library to select some new reading. Our library is staffed heavily by women. Nothing wrong with women here. What they often do is select and feature books that are authored by women. Again, nothing wrong with women authors, but I tend to like male authors better. There is much more action and gore in a man authored book than in one written by a woman. That, of course, is only my personal observation and opinion. I have read many fictional tales written by women and have loved them. Many take place in the summer on a beach in a remote area away from people. Most I have read are loaded with love and the emotions stimulated by love. I have nothing against love, but I tend to lean toward action and intrigue. If an author includes love with action and intrigue I will eagerly read the work.
WTF! Suddenly the bottom half of my screen has turned black. Has that ever happened to you? The only way to see what I am writing is to change the background color to white, or to make the text color white on a black background. If this is a WordPress improvement I suggest they pull their head from their ass and shit-can this feature immediately.
I suspect this happened because I am typing on a laptop and inadvertently dragged my thumb across the touch pad while at the same moment I brushed over a magic key which then turned on some super secret feature invented by WordPress to make more money. I’m sorry, but I can’t continue this way. It is super annoying and creepy.
Chicago is a city surrounded by many suburbs. In fact the ring of suburbs encircling the city is quite varied in ethnicities. At the same time these same suburbs are examples of Americans using their freedom to engage in businesses that fill needs. Last week I traveled sixty miles, yes sixty miles, to get to a place called Buffalo Grove. My life partner is from the northern suburbs and as such all of her doctors and services are located sixty plus miles from where we live. The same services exist within a twenty mile radius but they aren’t the same. Why? Because they don’t speak the languages my soulmate needs to speak to explain her problems. (Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, and least of all English) I digress.
The small shopping center we landed in to pick up a her new glasses had a very large food store called in the middle. Similar to a Jewel or Meijer’s. The next step on our agenda was to do our weekly shopping for groceries, at our Frankfort Jewel. So why not use the Garden Fresh Market store right where we were? We decided we needed an adventure.
Random Selections From The Garden Fresh Market in Buffalo Grove, IL
The store is amazingly loaded with foods from many ethnic groups, but mainly Russian. Fresh foods, meats, fruits, vegetables, you name it they stocked it. We perused the aisles for two hours and selected many ethnic varieties. After paying in US dollars via American Express we passed several kiosks containing more unique Russian goods. Magazines, toys, videos, you name it they had it. Even plastic model kits of Russian fighter aircraft and tanks. I thought to myself, only in America will one find a pocket of Russians living freely in a neighborhood where they can continue to be Russians without worrying about Putin knocking on their door.
When we finally loaded the car we were hungry, and there right near the eyeglass shop was a Korean restaurant. I asked if she wanted another adventure by trying Korean food. Yes, why not. We donned our masks and entered The Golden Durebok. There were about ten people sitting in booths scattered all around the place. All appeared to be of Asian ancestry. We found a booth toward the back and waited for a waiter to show up. After a few minutes an old man wearing a baseball jacket and a short white apron dropped a couple of menus on our table then proceeded to clean tables.
Thank God there were pictures of food in the menu. There was also english descriptions but they were intended to address Asian customers. We looked through the eight page menu and selected something from the appetizer page. We ordered thinking we had picked soup. Wrong, it wasn’t even close, and my lovely was very disappointed. We asked the old man if they had soup. He just gave us a dumb stare. I finally told him to bring us some soup, he left miffed. It took several minutes for him to return with two small bowls 1/3 filed with something that looked like chicken consume with a few pieces of green onion floating in it. We thanked him and he left. Lovely just looked at me and her entree as if expecting me to turn it in for another dish. I took a piece of what was on her plate and bit into it. Not bad, I said. She did the same, then reached over to take one of my fried dumplings. She liked the dumpling, so we traded dishes and ate.
Meanwhile, across the room from us sat two asian men, one very large in size, the other rather skinny. Both were eating with ravenous zeal. The skinny guy kept picking up a fresh napkin about every two mouth fulls to wipe his forehead and face of sweat. He did this throughout his meal. It brought back memories of when I ate with my Singaporean friends in Singapore. They loved very spicy hot food. I asked why. One answer was that Singapore is very hot and humid, but asians don’t sweat like caucasians. To compensate they eat spicy hot things that make them sweat so they could enjoy the evaporative cooling provided by the ceiling fans.
We finished our meals and I took the bill to the register to pay. I looked at what it said. What I ordered for lovely was listed as Kimchi Pancake and not soup as described in the menu. I paid and we got the hell out of there as fast as we could.
Kimche Pancake
How appropriate that I am reading the book Out of Many. One. How many more ethic pockets exist around the metropolitan area, and in how many cities of the country do they exist? I know for fact that there isn’t a city in America without a China Town, but how about Hungarian town, or Polish Town? I know they exist in Chicago and there is no limit to others as well. I attest to how they contribute to making America great, and interesting to say the least. It is also fun to explore these areas and to eat in their restaurants. The opportunities for adventures are endless.
“Out of many is one,” is the motto of the United States of America. Lately my thoughts have been on immigration because of the reading I am doing and also because I now have a genuine immigrant for a life partner. The United States is froth with success stories of people who went through monumental hardships to get here just to enjoy the freedoms and opportunities afforded by our country. Of late, we have been deluged with stories about people crossing into the country illegally. Our country has laws and we like to say we are a country of laws, and for the most part we try to obey them all. Every law has consequences, break one and find out what it is. Most laws can be bent depending on who has broken it, and what relation he has with those in power. The powerful can bend, break, ignore, any law if it means advancing his fortune or position in the world. If you are a poor unconnected schlub like me you will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
Honduran migrants take part in a new caravan heading to the US with Honduran and Guatemalan national flags in Quezaltepeque, Chiquimula, Guatemala on October 22, 2018. – US President Donald Trump on Monday called the migrant caravan heading toward the US-Mexico border a national emergency, saying he has alerted the US border patrol and military. (Photo by ORLANDO ESTRADA / AFP)ORLANDO ESTRADA/AFP/Getty Images
What we see going on today is a gross mismanagement of immigration law at our southern border. Rules are being broken every minute of every day and no amount of policing seems to be able to control the flow. Of course much of the current control is window dressing to convince the rest of us that the administrators are doing something. Bullshit, they are looking up into the sky while waving them in. I know I sound ruthlessly unmerciful, but I am one of the people who believes in rule of law. Mostly because I have never found myself in a position to have to defend myself against the same.
Our history of laws controlling immigration goes back to the days of our first president George Washington. Since then there have been several iterations trying to control the flow of people. Each time the laws get more and more complex and each time they get more confusing. The result is that we have reached a quagmire that may only be corrected with a rest. In other words a complete cleansing of all immigration laws to be replaced by new laws which better define the twenty-first century demands. The trouble is that not a single politician has the balls to sponsor such an action. Currently, there are so many people in our country that have gotten here by by-passing the official government procedure that, it near impossible to play catch up. To wipe the slate clean which is an action people like to call amnesty is the only answer I ever hear. The problem with amnesty is that is evokes the ire of every red blooded citizen especially those who came as immigrants legally. Politicians both win and lose on this one. the result is a stalemate, and nothing advances.
The radical left uses this situation to advance the spread of communism in the country. The more people they can get into the country and onto the public dole, the sooner the country will go bankrupt and a dictator will be necessary to take control. I don’t know about you, but the thought of being controlled by the likes of someone like Fidel Castro, Saddam Hussein, Pot Pol, Xi Jinping, Nicolas Maduro, or the fat man of North Korea Kim Jong-un makes me want to puke. I’d sooner want to duke it out with guns and eliminate the entire population that thinks in that direction. Thats what happens in dictatorships. That his why Stalin and Chairman Mao killed millions of their own people to get the message across that it was their way, or a bullet to the back.
Yes, we are a nation of laws and we are a nation of immigrants, but there are limits. I believe we must allow immigration to continue but lawfully. We should base the number of people we let in on our ability to assimilate them. We can’t just let the entire world population flood into North America and turn us into a dung hole overnight. That is a sure fire recipe for disaster and the ruination of the land of opportunity. I would sooner take the countries that people are fleeing and make take them over as U.S. territories so they could be controlled by our system and thus open the doors of opportunity within the geographic location of the population.
Whenever I think this way I remember that Puerto Rico is one such an experiment. It is not a state yet, but a territory free to operate under our system. They are a dung hole already on the cusp of bankruptcy because of a heavy reliance on left wing democrats who like to spend freely, and to tax the constituency even heavier. The result is a two class system of very rich haves and the very poor the have nots. Without a middle class which our Republic relies upon to survive.
Back in the nineteen seventies I often debated with myself trying to solve the issue of using capitalism to solve world problems. Back then, labor unions in the USA were huge, but we were a manufacturing economy. In order to compete with the new upstart economies in Europe and Asia we needed cheaper labor, but the unions would not hear of it. There are only two ways to solve this conundrum I thought. Either we lower the wages of our work force, or we raise the wages of the rest of the world. It seems that lowering the wages of our work force is the direction our congressional leaders is taking us. They can’t do it by getting unions to negotiate lower wages, so the new tactic is to import people from very poor regions, who can live on a few dollars a day, to fill the jobs that union people will not take. The end result is the struggle we see happening today. Poor people are flooding the borders to get the jobs that we can’t afford to take. Eventually, these poor will succeed in lowering the cost of labor. High paying unions job will still exist, but not in the numbers needed to give all of our middle class people work. The idea is to force them to take what is available by competing with those who know how to live on a dollar a day. It is not going too happen.
This combination photo shows the cover image for “Out of Many, One: Portraits of America’s Immigrants” by George W. Bush, left, and a photo of former President George W. Bush. Crown announced Thursday that the book will be published March 2. It includes 43 portraits by the 43rd president, four-color paintings of immigrants he has come to know over the years, along with biographical essays he wrote about each of them. (Crown via AP, Left, and AP)
The book I’m reading is titled Out Of Many, One. Portraits of America’s Immigrants.” It is by George W. Bush our former president. He has selected 43 immigrants to paint portraits of, and to feature in a short life story vignette about their reasons for immigrating. There isn’t a single story without a happy ending. Yes, these are sterling examples of how people can succeed in our country. The problem is that for every one of these success stories there are probably a million that haven’t achieved a level of success. Too much immigration without the time needed for these people to assimilate is not going to work in our favor. Not everyone has the self motivation to get up from a failure and to keep trying again and again. Too many will opt for the short route to feeling good by taking drugs or alcohol. They might have done better had they had coaches pushing them hard to succeed. Instead we do things like our war on drugs to solve the problem. We all know how that works. It made the cartels stronger and they developed ta strong market for drugs by outwitting our drug enforcement efforts for decades. The end result is we make drugs legal, so they are easier to get, and then we stop sending drug abusers to prison. We tax the drugs and remove the prison cost so the state wins big time. The immigration problem continues.
