Blog #451 October 30, 2025
This
morning, I went to McDonalds. As I was
filling my Diet Coke at the drink bar, a little Korean boy walked to the
bar. He was about 3-foot-7 and could not
reach the straws. He stood there with
his hand stretched up as far as it could, but there was no chance. I guess most people would have said, “Hi there, little boy. Do you need a straw? Would you like me to get you a straw? What’s your name? There you go; can you
say thank you?” I, being a highly
trained handler of small children, said not a word. I plucked a straw from the container and
handed it down to the little Kim Jong Short.
He accepted the straw, looked me right in the eye, gave me a 3-foot
7-inch smile and walked back to his Daddy.
I smiled too and walked to my car.
A Chinese proverb says, “A child’s
life is like a piece of paper on which every person leaves a mark.” Maybe I left a pleasant one.
Hi there and welcome back. I hope you’re feeling well. I have so many things to talk about today,
but I have to be selective because I place a limit on how long my blog can be. I don’t want you to get bored. So, let’s talk
about math. Wait, is math not your
thing? Have you always thought that
Isaac Newton was famous for making cookies?
Do you have trouble counting up the number of Barbra Streisand’s Farewell
Concerts? Ok, I’ll just mention
a few scientific theories.
Mathematics
has the Riemann Hypothesis.
Physics
has the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principal. Biology has Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. I would now like to introduce an analogous
principal for eating lunch at home. It
is called the Fox Conjecture of Infinite SpaghettiOs, which states that no matter
how much time and effort you invest in emptying a can of SpaghettiOs, you can
never get all of them out. I just spent
several minutes with a spoon, scooping and scraping out the little Os into a
bowl. I looked inside, then I scooped,
then looked again and scraped and scraped until I was absolutely positive that
no errant O had escaped. But when I
washed out the supposedly empty can, out came the reddened water and three
smiling, clever little SpaghettiOs that had somehow escaped my efforts. Q.E.D.
Q.E.D., our Weekly Word, is actually an abbreviation of the Latin words
"Quod Erat Demonstrandum"
which loosely translated means "that which was to be demonstrated".
It is usually placed at the end of a mathematical proof to indicate that the
proof is complete.
Ok,
now to more important things – my wife. Being
a husband is challenging. It takes a
long time to become fluent in Wife-Speak.
I have been married for fifty-eight years and I still don’t completely
understand Wife-Speak. I think I have a
few phrases figured out. For instance,
When
she says: Are you hot? she means - I’m hot, turn on the air conditioner.
When
she says: Are you going out like that?
she means - If you are, I’m not going with you.
When
she says: You look tired. she means - Take me home;
I’m tired.
When
she says: My hair looks horrible! she
means - You have three seconds to
compliment my hair. Three, two, …
When
she says: I like when you go shopping
with me. she means - Drop me
off at the door, Hop Sing, then come inside and hold my packages.
Anyone
who thinks that a man can control a woman – is a bachelor.
We
all watch Jeopardy, don’t we? It’s
fun! We get to see how much we know and
how awfully much we don’t know. I think
there should be a Senior Jeopardy. I
have some ideas along that line. First,
we have to get rid of that little clicker thing they use. Mechanical devices confuse us and we have
arthritis in our fingers. And which
button controls the volume? Second, we
need more time to answer. Who can think
that fast? And, of course, the questions
have to be senior-friendly, like “What is Miralax for?” This is
stuff we know about. I have a whole new
Double Jeopardy category for you called Who’s
the Dummy? Here are the answers;
you pick the ventriloquist’s dummy.
$200 Edgar
Bergen or Charlie McCarthy
$400 Meatloaf
or Lambchop
$600 Jerry
Lewis or Jerry Mahoney
$800 Topo
Gigio or Charo
$1000 Donald
Trump or Chuck Schumer
How’d
you do? Did you get them all right? The real dummies are Charlie McCarthy (held
by Edgar Bergen), Lambchop (Shari Lewis), Jerry Mahoney (Paul Winchell), Topo
Gigio (Ed Sullivan show) and – no, no, I’m not going there. Now you can try the
Final Senior Jeopardy Answer: “She was
the Indian princess on Howdy Doody.”
In
all my life I have lived in seven different homes, yet I have never lived more
than 12 miles from the place I was born.
Twelve miles in 79 years! Doesn’t
seem like much, does it? Raccoons move
around more than that. Twelve
miles! I haven’t retired to sunny Naples
or glorious Scottsdale or the fabulous Frisco Bay. I didn’t go away to college. Twelve
miles. It never occurred to me that St.
Louis was a great place to live, but now with all the disasters around us, I’m
rethinking. Hurricanes in Florida, fires in California,
Joy Behar in New York. Maybe our little
town, even with its crime problem, is doing just fine.
To live in St. Louis is heaven
On a scale of ten, it’s eleven
The Cards and the Blues
The Zoo and Ted Drewes
And the shootings don’t start until seven.
Did
you think I had forgotten this week’s limerick?
I’m not that forgetful, and you’re not that lucky. I will not forget to come back next week with
another one, so please stay well and count your blessings. I’ll see you then. And don’t forget to change your clocks this
weekend. Oh, the princess from Howdy
Doody was Princess Summerfallwinterspring.
Message from Shakespeare: O horror!
Horror! Horror! Tongue nor heart cannot conceive nor name thee! (Macbeth.) I hope you humans have a fun Halloween. But please be nice to black cats. Trick or treat, you weird humans, and Purr.
Michael
and Shakespeare Send comments to mfox1746@gmail.com