Not Too Naughty, Not Quite Nice

I am naturally very inquisitive.  I just have to find things out.  It is one reason I was going to be a journalism major in college, if I had only gone to the right school.  This sneakiness really came to the front at Christmas.  Hardly a year went by without me finding out at least some of my presents before I unwrapped them.  I had all the tricks.  Not only would I shake my presents, I knew how to peek under the flaps without greatly disturbing them.  I would even moisten light-colored portions of the wrapping to make it transparent enough to try and see images underneath.  One year, a great aunt had given me a water game, and I later would get the exact same game from a cousin.  I had to feign enjoyment, since I already knew I was getting another one.  My "best" year was 1980.  That year, I could figure out almost every single gift I had under the tree.  I wasn't that careful in hiding the fact, and my mother hid everything until Christmas, even the one I didn't figure out.  How was I supposed to know she had gotten my a giant teddy bear that she got as a special offer with one of her fragrance purchases?  Our house wasn't that big, so there weren't too many places to hide gifts before they were wrapped.  I would sneak around, frequently finding them and sometimes claiming them early as prizes in a successful hunt.  Not always, but I did sometimes play with them.  For instance, I easily found my Super Nintendo game system.  When I was the only one in the house, I took it from its hiding place, got it out of the box, hooked it up to the television, and played the first few levels of  Super Mario World.  I then put everything back before I could be caught.  My mother suspected something, but she couldn't prove anything.  This secretiveness also helped me when I started to buy gifts for my mother, as well.  Once, in the late '90s, on one of my infrequent forays outside of the house, I was just wandering a store, when I found something my mother had been wanting for some time:  a bonnet style hair dryer.  I managed to get it, and a Michael Bolton tape, and hid it in the trunk of my car and put in it so it wouldn't move around to make noise so my mother wouldn't hear it when I went to pick her up.  I managed to slip it into the house and wrap it without anyone knowing.  My mother took awhile to even notice it under the tree.  She was very surprised when she opened it up.  Unfortunately, she rarely had the time to use it, and it was ultimately thrown out years later.  I had a knack for picking good gifts, but my mother doesn't.  When I was in high school, she once got me a sweater I liked, but I couldn't wear because it was the wrong size.  I had tried it on weeks before and had to get a different one instead.  She thought I had grown enough so it could fit.  I hadn't.  She was so certain, she had thrown away the receipt.  Although I would grow a little more (as well as develop some muscle tone), that sweater never did fit me right.  That is one of the reasons why I don't ask her for gifts any more.  She always thinks I would like or need something, but she turns out to be wrong.  Christmas isn't as much fun when you have to ask for an exact gift, and nothing else will do.

The Rabbits Is Coming

I admit it, I am a rabbit person.  For some strange reason, I just connect to the furry critters.  I don't know why.  I felt the connection long before I even saw a real one.  I just share so much in common with them. I consider myself cute, timid, and somewhat cuddly; but I can get a little ferocious if backed into a corner.  I am prone to going fast, even when it isn't necessary.  I have that mysterious, mystical side that many east Asian cultures see in rabbits, as well as their lagomorph cousins hares.  I even have that playful, trickster nature that rabbits can have in folklore.  As for the remarkable fertility, I am still waiting.  Strangely enough, I had an even stronger tie to rabbits that I only recently discovered.  My grandfather's name, Arlie, actually means something along the lines of "from the hare's field/meadow."  I never realized that.  If I am ever lucky enough to have a daughter, I had actually been thinking about naming her Harleigh, the feminine form of his name and probably spelled that way. [As for boy's names, my top five, in rough order are:  Toby Jr., Jacob (or whatever name starting with J is my father's), Matthew, Lawrence, and Donald (as in the duck, not the President) {As for why I have more boy's names than girls, for some reason I always picture having more boys, particularly multiple births; probably that rabbit thing again.}].  Back in 2002, a rabbit colony just seemed to pop up in the hill behind my home.  Pretty much every day that summer, I saw at least one rabbit.  Morning and evening, totally at random.  Sometimes, I would have to stand in the back yard for minutes, just trying to catch a glimpse of once hopping by, but I saw one every day.  The best time was the following year.  It was a Sunday evening, just after a shower.  The front door was open, and I took a quick glance at the yard.  I saw some movement.  It was a baby bunny hopping in the grass.  Then, I saw another one.  And another one.  And another one.  In total, there were six or seven bunnies, hopping about.  Then, I saw the mama rabbit.  How did I know it was their mother?  A few minutes later, I looked out again.  There was the mother, lying on her back, with all the baby bunnies trying to nurse.  It was one of the most beautiful and sublime things I have ever seen.  I would have taken a picture, but I was afraid the light and sound would scare them off, and I didn't want to ruin the perfect moment.  While I have had a number of unusual animal sightings, both in my yard and elsewhere, this was still the best one.  [About that title.  I know it is grammatically incorrect.  It is a reference to an episode of the '80's cartoon U.S. Acres.  It is probably an allusion to something else as well, but I can't place it.  The episode was about a doomsayer prophet warning about a rabbit invasion with a sign.  Many characters commented that is was incorrect, too.  At the end of the show, a rabbit stampede came by and took down a bad guy, saving the characters.]

The Polar Opposites

It is the time of year for decorating for Christmas.  Because of the place where I rent, I don't really get to decorate my home.  Even when I was at my old home, we never decorated that much.  We usually only had the tree up for a week or two, due to my pine sensitivities and fire threats.  We never did much outside, either.  That is one reason why I like decorating my store so much, even if it turns out a little eclectic.  I even decorate it for other holidays, ones I never paid much attention to at my old house, such as Halloween and Easter (this is a hint for next week's post).  I know that some people can go to extremes with decorating, but I don't mind most of it.  I find religious displays are normally more sedate, although many can get elaborate.  I don't mind brightly lit houses, as long as I am not driving too late at night; I have very sensitive eyes that can get blinded very easily with harsh transitions from dark to light.  I actually love inflatables, even some of the weirder ones, such as Santa in an outhouse.  Some are bigger than the houses that they stand beside.  Some houses have over a dozen scattered around the yard, in all shapes and sizes.  Other homes are more sedate, especially on the inside.  Perfectly trimmed trees can get a little boring, but even trees in outre color schemes can be adorable.  The newest trend seems to be upside-down trees, although I remember seeing one on the '80's show My Two Dads, although it may have been the early '90's instead.  However, there is one type of Christmas decoration that I can't stand, and that is penguins, especially when they are paired with polar bears.  These two things can't go together, and definitely not at Christmas.  Traditionally, in the United States, Christmas and Santa Claus are connected with the North Pole.  As a far off point where it is cold, that makes some sense.  However, penguins are not native to the Northern Hemisphere.  Many are found in Antarctica, near the South Pole.  More are found in Australia, Africa, and South America.  Some might even be as far north as the Galapagos Islands.  None are anywhere close to polar bears.  This fact was even the major clue in an Encyclopedia Brown story I read when I was a kid.  Don't get me wrong, I actually kind of like penguins.  On a scale of 1 to 10, I would put them somewhere around a 4. (As for my favorite animal, maybe next week.)  They are find any other time of year, just not around Christmas.  Maybe they are a popular Christmas decoration somewhere further south, such as Australia.  I had a cousin who lived there once, but I don't really know them well enough to ask.  It just seems wrong to me to feature an animal so out of place as penguins around polar bears at Christmas.  Strangely enough, I don't seem to have much of a problem with other out of place animals, such as elephants, probably because they don't seem so ubiquitous as penguins are.  Many penguins don't even live in cold climates.  If you must decorate with penguins, at least keep them away from polar bears. That way, at least it will not go against the natural flow of the world.

Thanks

This might be one of the bravest or stupidest things I have ever done, possibly both.  I have always needed people to help me, as I sometimes have trouble getting myself to do things and I hate being lonely, even though that is usually how I end up.  This was most apparent in late January of 1996.  I was reading the local newspaper when I caught a months delayed wedding announcement of someone I knew.   I admit, I as a little jealous.  Here was someone I felt I was at least equal to, if not perhaps better in some respects, and he was able to get everything he wanted out of life, and I was a failure in most everything I tried.  I was also hurt, because I hadn't seen him in many years and I was no longer a part of his life.  I had tried to tell him how much he was a friend to me on one of the last times I saw him, but things turned out awkward and I didn't say anything, either then or later.  I swore not to make the same mistake.  When I graduated high school, I made sure that I wrote two of my best friends exactly how much they meant to me and how to contact me later.  For some reason, they never did.  It was always part of my plan to have at least one, if not all three of them, in my life for a little longer, at least through part of college, since I knew I would need extra help to get by many of the social aspects. Without them, I only had my mother to turn to and not all of her plans coincided with mine; I ended up in a mess having never found myself.  That spring, I decided to contact them, by any means possible, to help get me out of my problems and help me on my way.  Unfortunately, I only had my mother for help.  I wish I had someone else, but she was crucial to one part of my plan, which I will mention later.  I knew she wouldn't help with the friend who had gotten married the previous November.  He was a little older then me, and my mother never liked him.  She implied that he was a bad influence or worse.  I thought otherwise.  I looked up to him as a role-model/big brother type. For instance, I started wearing ties in high school partly because he was one of the guys who occasionally did so, and I wanted to be cool like him.  He taught me things, both good and bad, that I wasn't going to learn anywhere else.  Too bad not enough of them stuck.  My mother liked the second friend, but there was a different problem with him.  I barely knew anything about him, but I only realized that in hindsight.  That shows you how good a friend I was.  I still felt close to him, mostly because he was the last good friend I had contact with.  He transferred out to a four-year university a year early and without my knowledge.  It only hit me semester later that he was gone and I no longer had any close friends (I never made any in my four-and-a-half years of school).  When I had housing troubles when I transferred myself, I almost tried to reach him.  I didn't know if he was going to the same school I wanted.  Even if he were, I was to scared he would reject my offer, or worse, I wouldn't be able to handle living in a dorm with him due to my insecurities.  I would like to think he was there for my, even if I wasn't there myself.  My third friend was my ace in the hole.  This was because I though I knew something about him that he didn't know himself.  My mother and one of his parents graduated high school together.  I knew this because my mother is always on her class's reunion committee, and they always meet every five years, in not more frequently.  All she had to do was contact his parents, and they would contact him, and he would contact me.  It would have been perfect.  Except, I was to ashamed to ask for help directly.  So, I left my letters and instructions in a place where my mother could find them.  I also told her never to mention them to me, especially if she couldn't, or wouldn't, be able to help me.  After she found the letter, I waited a few weeks.  Nothing happened.  I thought either my friends had abandoned me or my mother didn't try to help, thinking I didn't need them.  Neither scenario was that promising.  I was left to fix my life on my own.  I took up some new interests, and that left me somewhat content, if not exactly happy.  I never had to confidence to apply for grad school again.  I didn't even try to pursue my dream jobs, ending up being set up in a business I didn't want; it has never been successful and should have closed years ago.  I never got to experience life, make new friends, or even think about learning how to date.  It is somewhat embarrassing, but I would imagine talking to them, over the years.  Some nights it would be the only thing that could calm my anxieties enough so I could to go to sleep.   I won't mention their names, as they can recognize themselves when they read this.  That is 'when' not 'if.'  I just need to say that I am sorry I wasn't as good a friend to you as I felt you were to me.  I should have let you more into my life, but I was too embarrassed and naive to do so and too scared and insecure to enter yours'.  I should have tried harder to be on my own, and I will always regret on all of the things in both your lives and mine that I missed out upon because of it.  I am sorry I haven't yet lived up to my potential and become the man you knew I could be.  This is one reason why I want to go back to school.  I messed up my life so much, that the best way for me to move forward is to start over.  I know I can't go back even more, even though I wish I could.  You three have been a great influence on me, even after all of these years.  For this, I will always be grateful.  Thank you.
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If I get all three of you to read this, it will be a major accomplishment.  I wanted to do this for Thanksgiving, but I lost my nerve.  Still, Christmas is just as appropriate.  I am getting ready to tell my mother I want to go back to school, both UK grad school in the fall and maybe some undergraduate work this spring if I can't make the grad school deadline.  I probably missed the spring semester deadline, even for non-degree, but we'll see.  She might say we don't have the money, or try to convince me to do something else.  Some days it seems like she is deliberately trying to sabotage me.  It is embarrassing.  I am 45 years old and I still live with my mother.  Technically, I work for her, as the accountant set the store up in her name only.   I need to grow up and be a man.  That is why I posted that topless profile pic for a few days.  I bet done of you would do that.  I might put it back up after the holidays.  I am not asking for help or support; it it good enough to know that I can still get in touch.  I messed up my life, but having even a part of you back has given me hope.   So I thank you R., A., and B.  Merry Christmas.  Hope to talk (and play) with you soon.

A Contest of Roles

I've been a fan of Games World of Puzzles magazine, in all of its incarnations and iterations, since the seventh grade, or so.  Unlike many other puzzle magazines, it has articles, as well as reviews of various types of tabletop and electronic games, although not as many in its current form as it used to.  Another feature it has is a contest.  Almost every issue over the years had at least one.  I enter them about a little less than half the time, usually only when it is a puzzle type I like or if the subject seems particularly interesting.  In the December issue, the contest was all about connections between actors and the television shows they appeared in, at least for one arc of one season.  Let me show you an example I created to explain thing a little better.

  ┏━━━━━━3,4,2,6━━━━━━┓     Orange represents television shows.  Yellow represents actors, of either
4,6                                5,5    gender.  Digits represent the number of characters in the words of a
  ┗━━━━━━5,3,4━━━━━━━┛      show's title or an actor's names.  Lines connect actors to the shows they 
                                               appeared on.  
The original puzzle featured show that date back to the 1970's.  However, my example has more recent shows.  In fact, one was one the air on Monday, November 6 (hint, hint).  Answers appear at the main bottom of the page. [By the way, it was a lot harder than it looks to come up with this example.  There are not that many current shows that feature two actors who starred together on a different show, and both are still working on it.  I could have used a few other shows and actors that would have been easier to identify, but I really couldn't find any with two actors still working there at the same time.  That is why I included the hint.]   The actual puzzle included dozens of shows and actors, almost all of them treated this exact same way.  Four shows and three actors were only represented by question marks.  The object of the contest was to determine these seven entries by their connections to the others. If I had a computer, I probably would have solved this puzzle in four to five hours.  Instead, it has taken me weeks to search IMDB (a few minutes at a time), entertainment magazines, a world almanac, and my own television viewing habits to finally come up with what I think are the correct answers just minutes before I typed this post.  I think I even came up with an alternative answer to one of the contest entries.  All of this is good, because I just got the January issue in this past weekend.  It took me under twenty minutes to solve that puzzle using only my solving skills and my general interest in the puzzle's ultimate subject matter. I would have hated having to enter the new contest before I has even finished with the previous one.

 Keep scrolling for the answers.




Answers, clockwise from the top The King of Queens, Kevin James, Kevin Can Wait, Leah Remini.

Who Am I This Year

Yesterday was Halloween, and, as usual for the last twenty plus years, I dressed all in black.  Many years I go casual, but this year I wore a dress shirt, no tie (I haven't needed to wear a tie since 1995, make of that what you will).  Some years, I even went as far as having black underwear (clean, of course), but not this year.  I started doing this in high school, as a way of dressing up without having to wear a costume.  I loved trick-or-treating when I was a kid, especially the costumes.  My mother would always hand-make them, but some years were better than others.  My first Halloween was when I was four.  I was a scarecrow.  I don't really remember that much about it.  Things were even better when I started school, because I got to wear my costume all day.  That first year, I was Raggedy Andy.  A girl had dressed up as Raggedy Ann.  We were sitting together for the class party, but my mother moved me to another table because the one we were at was too crowded.  The party wasn't as much fun after that.  The next year, I wanted to be a vampire, but my mother thought my hair wasn't dark enough.  To be fair, I was fairly blond until the second or third grade.  She made me into Little Sprout, the Jolly Green Giant's regular-sized sidekick.  I couldn't wear it to school because it was so fragile and elaborate.  It was also so cold that night that I had to wear a coat, and no one really got to see it anyway. For fourth grade, I got to be a dragon.  It had a huge cardboard mask.  My mother didn't want me to wear it to school because she was afraid someone would try and damage it.  I overruled her.  While waiting for the bus to go home, some kids did try and ripped off one of the Styrofoam eyeballs (that wasn't even the worst thing to happen to me waiting to go home, but for on that some other time).  It was easily glued back on, but she was still somewhat mad at me.  For sixth grade or so, the school was holding a special dance.  I actually went.  My costume that year was a mummy.  It was warm that year, and part of my costume was wearing long, thermal underwear under bloody gauze bandages.  I am not sure if it was the heat or the embarrassment of being in my underwear, but I was so uncomfortable that I had to leave after only a few minutes.  For my final year of costumes, I wanted something great.  However, my mother kept nixing each one of my ideas.  Finally, she decided that I was going as a scarecrow again.  I hated it.  To this day, I don't understand why she couldn't just listen to my and try out one of my ideas.  It looked so bad and uninspiring.  That was to be my last costume.  I did have a costume of sorts for my lead role in my eighth grade class's Christmas pageant, but we never got to perform it.  I would have tried acting in high school or college, but I never got the chance.  The best I get to do is dress in black, one day a year, and pretend it is for greater things.

I Don't Want Candy

When I was growing up, one of the best things I liked most about Halloween was being to get all the candy that I could never get at home.  As I have mentioned before, I had a very overprotective mother.  So much so, that she only let me trick-or-treat at the homes of relatives.  She wouldn't even let me go to most of our neighbors.  What she really didn't like was for me to eat hard candies.  She was afraid I would choke on them, even up to when I was seven or so.  Unfortunately for me, that was the type of candy that I liked best.  It was mostly because they were fruit flavored, as opposed to chocolate, which took me years to really get used to.  Don't get me wrong, I liked chocolate back then, only when it was a plain bar with no extras.  Especially not nuts, really hate them.  Anyway, I preferred fruit flavors.  At best, my mother would allow the occasional lollipop, but only because of the stick.  Halloween would be the only time I could get other favorites.  The only other type of candy I really liked back then were Jelly Belly jelly beans, which really weren't a Halloween type of candy.  Whenever I would go out, I would try to get a bag, especially when I could get to choose my own mix of flavors.  After I got too old for trick-or-treating, whole new types of candy became available. I remember when Skittles first came out.  I could enjoy them everyday, almost.  Then came the late '80s Gummi Bear craze.  I really got into that for a few years.  As I got older, though, my tastes began to change and I slowly stopped liking candy so much.  Part of it was being stuck with almost a full bag of Halloween candy, year after year, when fewer kids showed up.  Another was my push into exercise.  I had to watch out for extra calories, you know.  Even at my current address, which gets a lot more kids, I still have a little extra candy leftover each Halloween.  This is because I try to save a least a few pieces back of my few favorites.  Nowadays, it is mostly bubblegum.  For the rest of the year, I barely even look at candy.  I must admit, there was one type of candy I could eat by the box, or two.  However, it wasn't for Halloween; it was for Easter.  There was this one brand of chocolate covered marshmallow egg that I literally couldn't get enough of.  I think it was called Luden's, but it has been decades since I have seen it anywhere, so I might be mistaken.  For some reason, I just loved the stuff.  It was only carried by one or two stores locally, and both went out of business decades ago.  It had only been a few years since I have tried looking for it again, but to no avail.  No other marshmallow egg  has ever compared to it.  I just wish I knew what became of it.  Still, there was no better candy.