Isolated Thoughts for August

Well, here we are right smack dab in the middle of Dog Days… nothing happening ‘cept anticipation.

Every year, when the calendar turns to August, you can be sure there’s still another couple weeks of “nuthin’ much hap’nin”…but right around the corner is all that Back To School, Football Season Kickoff madness. (Until then, the onliest thing interesting enough for journalists to write about is how old Elvis would have been. Mark my words, you’ll be reading that exact theme within the next 10 days.)

That’s why I’ve decided to break the Dog Days monotony with another installment of “Isolated Thoughts”… basically, just whatever’s on my mind, plus a few things that weren’t really ON my mind, they just happened to flicker through my mind for just a brief second or two.

So here we go…

--Strawberries are much bigger than they used to be, I think.

I’ve been eating a lot of strawberries recently, because that’s a good way to lose weight, and I, once again, find myself in the position of being a Big-Fat-Giant-Hippo-Pig-Whale. So I’m eating strawberries. But I’ve noticed that the berries are a lot larger than I remember them as a kid. A LOT larger!!! They’re huge!!!

So I’m wondering why. What happened to make the strawberries five times as big as they used to be?

-- Since its August, I will renew my campaign to have the month renamed to “Elvis”. You may know that I have long pushed for this change… as of yet, to no avail. But it’s a cause I believe in, so I will continue to fight on. (If I’m ever successful, my Mom’s birthday would then be “Elvis, the 16th”. I think it has a ring to it.)

-- Some mornings, my Rice Crispies talk to me and tell me things. Other days, I see wee people inside the O’s of my Cheerios.

-- Each week, as a kid, our first, second, and third grade classes were visited by the music teacher for an hour or so of public school music. I couldn’t believe that it counted as a school class! All we did was listen to music, and occasionally slap blocks together in rhythm! What a breeze.

I do recall, however, being frightened by one song we sang: “Buffalo Gals won’t you come out tonight”. Being a second grader, and therefore totally unfamiliar with the geography of New York State, the words to the song had an entirely different meaning to me. I think I laid awake some nights worried that THIS might be the night that the buffalo girls would appear from nowhere. (I had no idea what “buffalo girls” were, but whatever they were, I’m pretty sure I didn’t want them to come out tonight.)

-- I think “rhythm” is an odd word. It has all those letters, but only half a vowel.

-- I’ve recently come up with two pre-inventions. First, is the pocket patch: a special patch designed for the hole in the bottom of your pocket. Second, is the windshield wiper lights-on switch: so whenever you turn your windshield wipers on, the lights automatically come on. Maybe we already have these two devices, and I’m just not aware of them because I basically live in a cave. But if not, they’re darn good ideas. That’s why I pre-invented them.

-- I also made up a new word: “pre-invent”. It means to come up with the idea for an invention, but not to actually figure out how to make it work. It’s a good word. A useful word. I’ll add it to the list of other words I’ve created – “ar”, “teafill”, you can find a list of them in my previous columns if you visit my blog online at www.doingthefirst.blogspot.com -- none of which have yet found their way into Websters.

-- Here’s a preview of yet another new word I’m currently developing. The word is “whump-whump”. It’s used to describe the sound your vehicle makes after you drive over the curb one time too many.

Okay, that’s it for this week. I need to stop now, so I can get back to sitting beside the phone, waiting for the people from Pulitzer to call.