Curling For Spuds

For some odd reason, this morning I found myself thinking about a particular curling bonspiel I participated in about 30 years ago. It did not go well.

I was on one of two teams from the Detroit Curling Club, and we had driven up to Forest, Ontario for a tournament. There were eight teams in each flight. And as I said, it did not go well. We finished seventh and eighth in our group.

But in the curling world, no one goes home without something. As a food chain was the sponsor of this particular spiel, most curlers won meat entrees. We won ten pounds of potatoes. Each. At four players per team times two teams, that's a lot of taters. And we had to cross the border with them.

On the way home, we pulled up to the gate at the US side and were asked for our IDs (we were travelling together in one big van). The border agent asked the driver, whom I'll call Cloyce just to give him a name, "Purpose of your trip to Canada?"

"A curling bonspiel," Cloyce responded simply.

"Anything to declare?" the guard queried.

Cloyce replied honestly, "Eighty pounds of potatoes."

Without missing a beat the man in the booth said with a smile, "You were in the losers bracket then?"

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Can we take our spuds and go home now?

Unnerved

My Shop is right by the corner of Rosa Parks Boulevard and West Warren in Detroit. There was one bad accident at it yesterday, I tell you what.

I didn't see it but I heard the braking and the impact from inside the old barn. The sounds alone told me it was bad. A Chrysler 300 was speeding and struck a Jeep, sending it into a telephone pole so hard it broke off the pole about three feet above its base, leaving the rest hanging over the intersection held up by the phone wires. This was no old pole either: it was only recently put up and was still green from the waterproofing applied to it. I was told by an eyewitness that the two young men driving the Chrysler jumped out and ran off, leaving that car blocking Warren. Clearly they were fleeing something.

The elderly gentleman driving the Jeep was badly shaken up, but thankfully not hurt. He was walking around and talking to the police almost immediately, and the EMS techs seemed to think he was fine. His Jeep was hit so hard that it broke off the passenger's rear tire when the vehicle hit the curb: it had spun off the telephone pole and struck the curb hard enough to do that. The tire was laying flat on the sidewalk supporting that side of the Jeep.

I don't mind saying that I was a bit unnerved. Not only because of the sound and the fury, but in thinking about how often myself, family members and friends have driven through that intersection. Life is scary sometimes, you know?

Marty on Humor

I like humor. Why, you might even say that I enjoy jocularity. But what's the best type humor?

No red blooded American male will ever say that he doesn't like the slapstick of the Three Stooges. Not. One. But the slapstick towards the end of Home Alone (the first one) is about the most inspired I've ever seen.

I like farce, and both overstated and understated jokes. One of my favorite lines is still, "Wait a minute, Doc. You're telling me you made a time machine...out of a DeLorean?" from Back to the Future. Silly humor can be fun if well done and without self-conscience. I think of the Canadians Wayne and Shuster in that sense. Loved their shtick. Did you know that they were Ed Sullivan's guests more often than any other performers? It's true.

Bob Newhart gets my vote for great understated humor. His stuttering and stammering are priceless. For farcical, outlandish humor it's either Monty Python's Flying Circus or the Marx Brothers. I give Python points for the often inspired cleverness of their insanity (Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!), but the Marx Brothers get the nod on comic timing. Even though it's been done a million, jillion times, you have to see Harpo and Groucho doing the mirror gag in Duck Soup. I still laugh out loud at it. Hell, I'm laughing out loud thinking about it.

Then there's unintended humor. Look up The Room or At Long Last Love for a taste of that. Sometimes people are so serious that it becomes funny. As the then movie critic Michael Medved said, "You haven't lived until you've seen the powder room scene in At Long Last Love." He's right. It's the pinnacle of unintended humor.

Yes, I enjoy jocularity. How about you?

Marty the Ghost Hunter

A storm with high winds knocked out the power awhile back. That was frustrating on several counts, not the least of which was that it reminded one of how much he relies on electricity.

No power? Well, let me check on the status of repairs on the Internet...except with the power out, there's no Internet.

Well, then, I'll watch T...V...

All right, I'll nuke a quick bite of something. Oh, yeah. No electric, no microwave. And you want to leave the fridge and freezer closed anyway.

Okay, I'll read then. Click, click, click on the light switch before remembering, stupidly, no power, no lights.

So you just lay in bed. Of course, you might as well silver lining the outage, right? So I became a ghost hunter.

Whenever I did venture through the house, I used my cell phone to illuminate where I walked. Not the flashlight setting, because that would use too much battery power. I simply flipped on the screen light, which gave just enough glow to light my way.

It also gave the hallways, stairs, and rooms that soft gray green light which ghost hunting shows seem to have patented. Then my mind saw all the movement which managed to escape into the shadows right before I could really see it. I could the feel the cold air presence of the poor souls trapped, doomed to eternal, earthly dwelling. Near whispers emanated from all around me.

Of course I never actually found ghosts. And a good for them, too, because I'd have given them what for if I had.

Shave like Marty does

I saw it on a shelf in a closet as we went through the house we had just bought. It was a boar's hair shaving brush with a orange brown handle and hair which had a black stripe near the tips. At that very moment I knew we'd be good friends. But I closed the door and left it to sit that day.

A few years later I was in a drug store and stumbled upon some cakes of shaving soap. I remembered that mug brush, bought two of those soaps, and came home. My wife gave me a coffee cup with a broken handle, of which the cakes fit into perfectly. From that day on I was fully old school. I have shaved with a mug and brush since.

I think I get a closer shave that way. My face feels better too. Wally, my old barber, said it was because of the oils in the shaving soap. I believe him; that's how he shaved customers. I'm at the point now that shaving with cream makes me feel like I just had a pie smacked onto my face. That might not be so bad if I were Soupy Sales, but I'm not. Even when I travel I just use soap for shaving.

We had a great relationship, that brush and I. Then the hairs popped out of the handle one day awhile back. I was beside myself wondering what to do. I didn't want to buy another brush: we had become too close, me and the old one. But fortunately the hairs came out in one big clump (I suppose I should have expected that they'd all be glued together at their base) and my wife had some waterproof glue which she used to re-attach the bristles to the handle.

Now all is well. I still have my old friend, and I still have the best kind of close shaves.

Pretend you're right here!

Me Grandpa Joe had a way about throwing himself into his work. Sometimes he literally threw himself into it. Or among it, between it; I'm not exactly sure how to describe what I'm about to describe.

I remember a day when I was just 16 and he decided I needed to learn how to back up a trailer. That was fair enough so far as it went. As I worked with him delivering welding equipment and we often delivered smaller machines with a two-wheeled trailer, it was a good idea. Yet his teaching methods left a few things to be desired.

Quiet and tact come immediately to mind. I love that old man and I miss him every day, but he truly subscribed to the concept that the louder he was the better you'd remember and the quicker you'd learn. Higher decibels equaled greater understanding.

The loudness of his screaming instructions did not seem to help me initially. Neither did his insistence on visual examples: I cannot tell you how many times he would jump right in between car and trailer as I vainly tried backing the trailer into place, each time yelling, "Pretend you're right here! Right here!" But you're right there Joe! Right where you're telling me to be!

As I recall, me Pops returned from wherever he was at that point and calmly took over. I soon mastered it, and I do mean mastered it. I could back up that old trailer perfectly into a space with four inches of clearance to each side. And I do wonder if maybe, just maybe, Joe's intensity actually helped.

I do know me Pops calm certainly didn't hurt.

Encino Ike

I had not seen a first run movie in a theater in I didn't know how long. So yesterday, rather than playing catch up at the old barn as I originally intended (honest) I played hooky. I caught an early show at a local movie house and watched Pressure. It's centered on the D-Day Invasion. 

As many of you may already know, D-Day was supposed to be June 5, 1944. Yet the weather wouldn't co-operate (hence the movie title Pressure, a play on barometric pressure and the press to invade France), so the Allies had to wait a day to launch the attack. Although all of the actors were great, I was mostly interested to see Brendan Fraser as General Dwight Eisenhower.

In the 1990s, Fraser played a series of fish out of water roles, and did them quite well, I thought. He was George of the Jungle and Dudley Do-Right in live action remakes of old cartoons, for example. But he started out in Encino Man, a comedy centered on a cave man melted out of an ice tomb who had to learn about the modern world. Not a bad movie, yet it wasn't shortchanged at Oscar time either.

I wanted to see Pressure both as a history wonk but also to see how a cave man might play Ike. And I think he did well, even though I had a little trouble separating the young newcomer I remembered from thirty plus years ago playing a middle aged American military leader. But time does pass, and it's called acting for a reason, isn't it?

Anyway, it's a worthwhile film, I think.