I HAVEN’T actually talked to any of the workers, but I’m fairly sure that the crew with all the digging equipment on Sunset Street are trying to get to China.
They’re digging and digging. They may be trying to distract us with scarely-believable stories about underground telephone cables, but I KNOW the real reason. It’s to give Comrade President Trump a secret passage to China so he can go over there and develop golf courses and get away from the lying media.
Also, I’m fairly sure he’s using Chinese math to file his tax returns so that none of us understand.
A few years ago, during one of our typical Sahara Desert summers, the ground cracked in many places. One of the guys at Western Auto told me that he put his ear to a deep crack and could hear Chinese music. I thought that was pretty clever, so I’m returning the favor with a twist.
• • • • • • • • • •
IT WAS MOSTLY pleasant outside during the past weekend, so naturally I was a couch potato.
One day I despaired of finding anything to watch on tv even though I probably had the choice of about 200 stations.
There was a ton of cooking shows, and a handful of preachers promising great wealth and salvation if I’d only send them $100, and there were jewelry auctions and, of course, the always-interesting Brazilian Butt Lift exercise girls.
I almost went outside to work in my yard when I happened to see an upcoming movie listed. It was: “The Enemy Below.”
I had seen this movie before. Robert Mitchum is the commanding officer of a Navy destroyer during WWII, and he is chasing a German U-Boat.
When I was in Fleet Sonar School, Key West, the Navy showed the movie to every class because the movie is about sonar vs. submarine (Pinnnnng … bip! Pinnnnng … bip!), and that is precisely what the Navy was training us to do.
Robert Mitchum and the German sub captain, played by Kurt Jurgens, engage in a cat-and-mouse game using sonar (I used to know what s-o-n-a-r stood for, but there’s been too many tsunamis under the bridge since then). The sonar angle was apparently fairly realistic at the time.
If you’ve ever watched “The Hunt for Red October,” you’ve seen more modern sonar stuff at work.
Now, the Navy sonar operators mostly just listen to the whispers left by enemy subs. A computer tells them which enemy submarine it is; what depth; what direction it is going, and how fast. Also, probably, what movie the crew watched last night.
I wasn’t a very good sonar operator. Once I tracked a whale for most of an hour, and had half the Pacific fleet alerted to the presence of an Roosian submarine before the animal abruptly decided to change directions 180 degrees.
I’m lucky I didn’t pick up a nickname from that fiasco.
Pinnnnng …. bip!
• • • • • • • • • •
A VISITOR here last week, was 2011 NHS grad Logan Webster, now a communications guy with Tyson. As a student, he worked for the old ‘Nashville News,’ and he later studied journalism at the University of Arkansas where yours truly is still accurately remembered by the journalism faculty as being a worthless wastrel and a skirt chaser.
Logan was here to record the presentation of a $100,000 Tyson check to the Bread of Life.
Isn’t Tyson a great neighbor?
• • • • • • • • • •
ANIMAL CRACKERS. I really enjoy watching them but I’m dreading the outcome. I’ve got some beautiful bluebirds nesting in a birdbox on my patio. They are very, very skittish birds. Anytime I walk within about 20 yards of the birdhouse they panic and fly away. Or divebomb me from the overhead telephone lines if I walk past their front door.
Last summer I had two batches of bluebird babies. Both times ended tragically with the birds emerging too soon. They flopped their way into my pool. Once I was able to catch a baby bird and put it back in the birdhouse. Soon, however, it found its way to the pool anyway.
The bluejays, cardinals and thrushes continue to enjoy the feast of peanuts which I leave on a low table near the landscape bushes.
• • • • • • • • • •
THE TWINS. Hail and Farewell — you don’t know if they’re greeting you or bidding goodbye.
• • • • • • • • • •
THINGS I LEARNED from opening email: An ear of corn always has an even number or rows of kernels, usually 16.
• • • • • • • • • •
HE SAID: “Today I choose life. Every morning when I wake up I can choose joy, happiness, negativity, pain … To feel the freedom that comes from being able to continue to make mistakes and choices – today I choose to feel life, not to deny my humanity but embrace it.” Kevyn Aucoin, makeup artist and photographer
• • • • • • • • • •
SHE SAID: “Fiction was invented the day Jonas arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale.” Gabriel Garcia Marquez, novelist
• • • • • • • • • •
SWEET DREAMS, Baby
