You Have To Keep Active

I must admit that since I retired, lo these nine years ago, I have experimented with any number of ways to creatively waste time. There are many people who would say that this blog shows that I have elevated it all to an Art. I’m not going to argue with them. I don’t think that I could win such an argument.

So…(aside from this blog) some of my other temporal thumb twiddlings have included belonging to a Dart League for three years. I suck at darts but that doesn’t stop me from proudly displaying my three championship trophies. I was the worst player on the team, but that was my role – to lower the team handicap to balance the presence of a Dart Savant on our team. That guy couldn’t miss. He was scary good. I was just scary bad.

In another effort to fill my days with something passably interesting that would also get me out of the house before my wife, the lovely and patient beyond the statute of limitations, Dawn, started arranging kayak lessons for me, I began doing plays with the local Community Theatre. I did four shows with them before my endurance for late rehearsals wore thin. I’m a Geezer. I need my sleep.

Other avenues needed to be explored.

I think I may have found the perfect thing to occupy my mind that doesn’t involve sharp objects or driving home at midnight when the streets are filled with marauding raccoons. I am part of a Barroom Trivia Team.

Every Monday evening at 7:00 PM I haul my trivia loaded brain to a nearby Pub for a two hour long test to see who knows more useless information. My kind of game!

I feel that I’m there representing all of those Liberal Arts Majors who are still under-employed twenty years after graduation, but who can to this day name every major artist in 16th century Belgium. On our team I am far and away the oldest member. That gives me an edge when the question involves History or Early Television Programs. Most of the other players are under 30 years of age. They wouldn’t know Calvin Coolidge if he walked into the room or who played Tonto on The Lone Ranger . Of course, I’m totally in the dark when it comes to things like “Who was the biggest selling Rapper in 2014?”

I had a birthday recently. Which one is not important except to my Cardiologist and to the people who keep sending me junk mail peddling Hearing Aids and Cemetery Plots. I did receive one gift from my lovely and forward thinking wife, Dawn, who knows what I need even if I don’t.

She bought me a book – “The Ultimate Book Of Trivia.”

This thing is 349 pages jam packed with more trivial information than PBS and Congress combined! It is the ideal book to have with you when you are seated in the loo after a Twelve Course Taco Bell Banquet or entering that Fourth of July Hot Dog Eating Contest I see on ESPN. You will have plenty to read.

I hope that this book will help me on my Monday night Trivia contest. It couldn’t hurt…unless i drop it onto my foot. It could easily break a toe or two. Next week I am going to wow them all at the Pub when I toss out the fact that the shortest U.S. President was James Madison who was only 5’4″ tall. If they ever make a movie about him Tom Cruise will play him…in lifts.

The Heat Is On

I will be the first to admit it. I am easily amused. You want to see me giggle – just start telling me “Knock -Knock” jokes. It doesn’t take much to get me laughing. I’ve been known to cut loose with a belly laugh even when it’s me who has slipped on the banana peel.

Laughter is a good thing. It is even therapeutic. Laughter has super healing properties. Those properties are enhanced tenfold if a whipped cream pie is being thrown. That’s a Scientific Fact. I saw it on my TV last Saturday morning.

For the last few months the world has been engrossed with contemplating it’s own navel and avoiding anything that might involve enjoyment or other people. I’m sorry, but that will never do. If I can’t slap my own knee at least twice a day I might get awful surly and start making bad puns. My funny bone needs tickling on a regular basis. Fortunately in the last few weeks I have found something that appeals to my 11 year old sense of humor.

What is funnier than seeing grownups playing a kid’s game and looking really silly in the process? Nothing!! That is why I am glad that we have discovered the #1 hit show on Netflix : “The Floor Is Lava.”

This show pits teams of adults against a room where they must jump from tables to chairs to sofas that are immersed in a roiling sea of Special Effects lava. They must try to cross the room without falling into the lava and disappearing forever into syndication. The team that completes the challenge and escapes the room wins $10,000 bucks and a $29 dollar Lava Lamp.

Big Time Show Biz this ain’t. It’s more of a combination of “Survivor”, “American Ninja Warrior”, and anything on “C-SPAN.”

I did a little research into this show, at least seven or eight minutes worth, and learned that if you want to be a contestant on “Floor is Lava” the producers want you to be in good physical condition. That leaves me out – something for which I will be eternally grateful. I guess they don’t want to have a contestant keel over dead on camera. Even with that fitness restriction we have seen some players take some serious head shots when they leap from a chair to a table and land face first and then slip below the surface of the “Lava.”

I don’t know how long this show will be on the air. They have only 10 episodes “in the can” as they say. It would not surprise me to learn that it will be picked up for another season. After all, “Gilligan’s Island” ran for three seasons, but they had Ginger and Mary Ann. “The Floor Is Lava” only has a “Host” who looks like the stock boy at the Dollar Store.

“The Floor Is Lava” is one of those things that has appeared on the scene at just the right time. This world needs something to laugh at that doesn’t require any thought or analysis. “The Floor is Lava” is nothing more than self-induced slapstick humor. It makes no sense. It has no real purpose. There is no “Message,” and who wouldn’t want to have their very own $29 dollar Lava Lamp?

Couch Potatoes need not apply.

The Big Brushoff

 

I GOT A BIT OF A PLEASANT SURPRISE THIS MORNING when I turned on the TV. Most mornings when I turn on the tube I am inundated with infomercials of all sorts and reruns of Roy Rogers and The Lone Ranger. I don’t mind the last two, but nothing great.

This morning however I was greeted by a blast of something both fascinating and cultural. On channel 198 here I bumped into a show that I had been watching while in Ireland. On what is called the Ovation Channel here was a program called “Portrait Artist of the Year.”

“Portrait Artist of the Year” is a painting contest. I know what you’re thinking, “Boy that sounds as exciting as…as…as watching paint dry.” But it is fascinating in my diseased mind.

Thank You, Calvin Coolidge

THREE HUNDRED MILES OF DRIVING THROUGH A CAR WASH. And I didn’t even get one of those little pine tree air fresheners to hang from my mirror.

Three hundred miles from Terre Haute (That’s French for, “Make sure the windows are closed.”) to Adrian, Michigan (Yo! Adriaaaaan!). The last time we made this trip was four years ago and, if memory serves me well, it did not rain. This time it rained for almost the entire time we were on the road. Combine heavy blowing rain and the spray from the 7,234 semis passing us at 85 mph and you can see why it felt like being trapped inside a car wash.

Siss – Boom – Baaaa

HERE WE ARE IN LATE JANUARY and, strictly by coincidence, I have not seen any football – College, Pro, or local High School, this year. Some people might interpret that in terms of over-extended Socio-Economic-Historic-Politico-Religious opining.

Nah.

I’ve just been either sick or busy. Mainly sick. Sick of being busy too. I don’t mix Sports and any Politico-Etc. ideas I may harbor. The Sports part is much too important.

I’m Tempted

I’M TEMPTED. I’LL MULL IT OVER FOR A WHILE AND DECIDE; YES OR NO.

While I do this blog almost every day I also have other, larger, projects that I’m working on. Short stories, Full length novels, and other junk are what I have percolating on the other burners.

This morning I got an email about a contest – a contest for Writers calling on them to churn out 10,000 words of a novel. The contest does not offer fame and fortune which would be an immediate signal to hit the Delete button. What it did offer was feedback and, frankly, that is much more valuable than any prize or promise.

I am tempted.