The Old Prof

“the Penrod twins are tall and thin. I caught a glimpse of them the other day. I wept as they passed and tipped my glass and sang please, please don’t walk away!”

I just spent over an hour reading articles from amishrobot http://www.amishrobot.com/
and papa november http://amishrobot.com/joe/.

They absolutely knock me out. And some of the comments on the posts are pretty hilarious too. I tried to make a list of my favorites and just gave up. I just sit and read and chuckle.

Posted by Old Prof at 10:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Hollyhocks

Love em

I like Hollyhocks. Always have. When I was a kid taking the watering turn on our five acres of alfalfa I used to pick hollyhock seeds, capsules?, and break them into the irrigation ditch and let them float down on other farms. It amused me to think of tall flowers springing up in the middle of the flat fields of alfalfa.

Later I chortled to myself when Hollyhocks grew in the middle of my neighbors, The Robbs, lawn. I’m pretty sure I didn’t really plant them there but they probably did move from our yard to theirs. They were not so sure. Ok, I may have thrown some seeds in but that’s not the same as planting. And I think I was quietly called Gary Hollyhock.

The thing is, Hollyhocks are tall, tough as any weed and good looking. I have always thought of them as a weed with an attitude. They aren’t some pansy like little flower that needs constant attention and cosseting to grow. Just strew a hand full of seeds here and there, perhaps stomp them in with your heel and they grow. They don’t care about the soil or water or anything. They will struggle up right through the cracks in your driveway. And if you wife has taken some odd dislike to them, they are hard to kill too. Stomp on a full grown Hollyhock and it regards it as an affront and springs into new life and throws teacup sized flowers right in your face.

If you keep picking the seed pods off they will keep growing. All you have to do is tie them to your garage and they have been known to grow thirteen feet high with three flowers right at the top and just sway there, in the wind, kind of arrogantly.

Sitting here I just figured it out. Well, it came to me circuitously.

I was thinking about Crows. I thought, “ you know how people are always saying , ‘if you could be a [bird] [whatever], what would you be?’” and I thought, if I had a little more confidence I’d be a Raven, but I guess what I am is, is more or less an isolationistic Crow. I don’t flock but I’m a crow alright.

Ah hah you say, and are and have been ahead of me all this time. Yep. I am a Hollyhock. Which I misspelled as hollyhawk. I am quietly not as humble as one [I] might think. (And I just misspelled humble as shumble. Humble shumble I guess) (Misspelled holly hock as holy hock too. That is just coincidence)

Ok, back to my designation of Hollyhocks as tall and tough and good looking. I can aspire. I think that’s what they did. They couldn’t have started out this great. This is evolution at its finest. So while I may not be any of those three things right now I’m not through yet. Well, I may be pretty close but, but … Think about this. My wife doesn’t like hollyhocks! She “hates the damn things”. Eh? Can that be coincidence? I think not. She can be very perceptive.

Oh. Have you ever heard a crow sing? Think of that too. yep, I’m a crow alright. No wait; we were talking about flowers weren’t we. I get distracted.

Just a side note here.

If Walt Greenwelll weren’t so dedicated a gardener, If he had just left the parkway in front of his house alone, he could now be enjoying rows of tall Hollyhocks waving in the breeze, accompanied by (the package said ) Gigantic sunfloweres ten feet tall with enormous flowering heads. But no. Hey, what can you do with guys like that. Dedicated weeders will never know the joys that could have been. I thought it was an amusing concept in neighborliness. He would never have guessed his benefactor.

Posted by Old Prof at 10:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Just saw Glory Road. The plot was the thinnest and the photography just told the story. No special effects and very few even effective shots. This was just a workman like film. There was no character development and no surprise denouement. Everything was foreordained before the opening credits rolled.

I don’t know if the acting was minimalist or the abilities were.

I know the time period so well.

1955, I got off a Greyhound bus in Kentucky. Colored drinking fountain (brass plaque on the wall above, announcing the fact), colored waiting room, colored restroom. Walgreen’s Drug store with a lunch counter. Halfway down the counter a small sign sitting on the counter proclaimed that everything to the left of the sign was the colored lunch counter.

Small town in Kentucky, Saturday night, the only restaurant in town had just closed because it was 6 pm. Pickup trucks parked for a half block, and the middle back section of the theatre “colored seating”.

Madisonville Kentucky, our baseball team, “white”, The Madisonville Marauders, waiting around on a diamond we had staked out, tried to play a pickup game with a “black” team who agreed and people, black and white, ran a for a block to block us.

Yes, the acting wasn’t very demanding but I came to hate coach Rupp and his smarmy bigoted assistant. He hardly said ten words but you could see what he was really like. And did you worry like I did that coaches wife, played rather woodenly, was going to leave him. She didn’t say anything but you could see she was conflicted and struggling. I’m glad she stuck with him.

It wasn’t anything special

But…

I spent most of the movie in a cold sweat with my hands like ice. From time to time tears rolled down my face and I once or twice trembled just ever so slightly. Thank heaven I stifled the sob.

Posted by Old Prof at 07:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Something just scratched against the House again.

AAARGH!

Posted by Old Prof at 01:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Do you know where the Old Prof is?

Hard to believe but I’ ve just come in from pruning a fruit tree.

Every few minutes a branch from an apricot tree has been rubbing on the wall near my bedroom window. No big thing. I could just ignore it. But then I found myself lying awake listening for the next scrub against the house.

It takes a lot to get me up into a cold wet night after getting all cozy and warm in my bed but the level of annoyance kept building.

By the time I got up, dressed (more or less) and went down stairs, ventured into the garage, found pruning shears and went out into the dark and cold I would not have been a good man to have come upon suddenly in the dark.

The Apricot tree will also never be the same. I figured while I was there and in a high level of irk I might as well take care of the branches against the house problem for the next twenty or so foreseable years.

If it were Done when it were done tis well t’were well done.

Done …

And now its 1:40 AM, I can’t sleep and am sitting here wide awake , surfing the net and come to think of it, freezing.

Dang

Posted by Old Prof at 01:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Je pense ego summa

I just found and accessed a site that takes you to your old high school. I spent ten minutes or so looking at the names there of people I had known from grade school through High School.

I feel strange. I have never been homesick. I don’t know how that feels but I wonder if this is what I feel now. It’s not a particularly good feeling. It seems like an odd mixture of nostalgia and … pain.

I remember last seeing most of them in 1952 when we graduated. I thought nothing of it at the time. I guess I thought I would go on seeing them now and then just as I always had (and if I didn’t, so what). And for a few years I did. Many of them were not my friends in the usual sense yet I was used to seeing them and it was comfortable having them around. Kind of like background noise provided by a baseball game on radio in the summer when you are not paying any particular attention but its familiar and pleasant. i would pull into a gas station and Gabe was running it or I would look across the quad and there was Sally. But thats long ago and far away. Now I feel like walking into the middle of a fileld and yelling, ” Eugene, Almo, Pat …. where the heck did you all get to.”

And what have you been doing?

How has it all rurned out?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Now I feel like I forgot to say good bye or something. It’s a funny feeling of lack of closure or a desire to see them around again from time to time. I guess I would just like to know they are there. Or I wish they were. Unfortunately home is 700 miles away. (Well, who knows where they are now. The internet is a great compressor of distances)

More than that I guess this has brought to mind those people who were close to me who do not appear on the “active” list of “members” of this site. And where are they? I hope this feeling goes away soon. It’s painful.

That was a time when small things loomed large and were almost impossible to deal with. (When was the last time you actually cheered at a ballgeme? Or did anything but look at the cheerleaders) Today I aim at making large events smaller just to get through them.

“Provo High School, Provo High School

The hills send back the cry”….

Posted by Old Prof at 06:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Silhouette

Another MSNBC story heading.

The caption under the picture says Senegalese dancers are silhouetted at sunset. I guess if you were going to silhouette the Senegalese that would be the perfect time and place. And sure enough the picture shows them being just that thing.

I wonder if it’s just a custom or, as the caption implies, more of an order. Are they always silhouetted at sunset or can they beg off some evenings if they were silhouetted at sun rise? Is there a punishment if they refuse? What does this mean to them? It can’t be voluntary. I mean this must be pretty boring after a few years. What about cloudy days? What then? And why just the Senegalese? For that matter why just dancers? This seems almost discriminatory. It can’t be politically correct. For instance:

As near as I can tell there are no women Senegalese silhouetted, dancing or otherwise. The trouble is that the photographer has thoughtlessly set up the shot so that we are looking right into the sun and everything is like all indistinct and blurry. It’s damn annoying.

So anyway, there seem to be no women. What about that then. Someone alert NOW.

Posted by Old Prof at 01:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Ha, talk about a comeback. My wife just said in regard to my more apparent than real confusing use of the words revelry, reveille and reverie in a convoluted but hilarious sentence, “Oh, you are just an idiot”. I laugh. (I am apparantly the only one who does) No I am not. As I explained, I don’t think anyone who knows me would say I was just an idiot. I am so much more.

Posted by Old Prof at 11:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

And The Lamp Post of Gloom

I saw Narnia yesterday. My wife and I have been looking for a movie we could both see. This movie turned out not to be one of them. I went alone. I don’t think there is one we can both see. We sat half way through the Aviator and one or the other of us got bored and we both left. Same thing with the Lord of the Rings. I don’t know how that turned out though I hope Frodo fell into the fires of Mordor. Imagine the little twit saying “Its getting Heavy Sam”. That “dear master” stuff was a little much too. Perhaps they held hands and jumped. One can hope.

I pretty well watched Narnia alone. I think there were all of ten people in the “Multiplex”. Funny, there were only about five people in the Harry Potter And the Goblet of Fire. They can’t be making that much on the popcorn; though I admit that charging five dollars for a small popcorn ought to put someone in jail.

It was ok.

I kind of enjoyed the straffing runs by the Griffins. That was very cool. The first frame of that series startled me. It looked exactly like a Harrier Jet popping up from some little borderland Welch or Scottish valley, all dark, dangerous and incongrously unexpected in that quiet pastoral beauty. Some of you will know exactly what I mean. And you know who you are.

And there was a story line behind it, and some good writing, unlike the Harry Potter thing which seemed like it was a story composed on the spot by someone without any particular moral code telling bedtime stories to young children over a period of about two weeks with gaps in between that confused the teller so much that she lost her train of thought and didn’t remember what if anything the story was all about. (Somewhat like that sentence)

I think my favorite part of the story was the lamppost. It looked nice in the gloom and snow. Reminded me of the alabaster lights at Hearst Castle. Marvelously mello. I could have watched it forever.

Posted by Old Prof at 01:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

(and the Goblet of Fire)

I just saw Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Harry looks older.

The photography was excellent.

The special effects were first rate.

The scenery was spectacular.

I loved the way each scene was framed and composed. Pure brilliance.

The music absolutely carried the film. Very impressive.

Does anyone know what the hell it was about?

Posted by Old Prof at 07:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)