Here you go

Not that!

2009-07-09T18:06:00.000-06:00

Oh, Lord, not defenestrated. That’s too horrible to contemplate.

I was editing a wire story about the Romanian Revolution in 1989 when I came to a sentence that said two men had been defenestrated.

Defenestrated! I had no idea what the word meant, but it smacked of some complicated medieval torture – perhaps being flayed, boiled in oil and drawn and quartered simultaneously.

I checked the dictionary, and it turned out that defenestration means being thrown from a window.

I’m opposed to being thrown from a window, but it sure sounds better than being defenestrated.

Captain Kangaroo, evil, and me

2009-07-08T01:30:00.000-06:00

Who could believe that Captain Kangaroo had a demonic nature that was repeatedly revealed on his kiddie TV show – that he was a moral monster, reveling in his lack of empathy, finding pleasure in the unceasing torment of a helpless being?

I could. Captain Kangaroo was my introduction to the stunning malevolence that can lurk beneath an exterior as charming as Stalin’s smile.

Dancing Bear, a shuffling, human-like, furry creature, was a staple on the program I watched every weekday morning as a child. He danced and never made a sound. In the center of his face was a big, dark circle.

I thought the circle was his mouth, frozen open in a mute scream of terror, loneliness and despair, while the Captain made him dance for our amusement. Dance, bear, dance! Dance in your horror and anguish! Dance!

I would stare at our black-and-white television, feeling hollow, feeling as if I couldn’t even blink, unable to look away from the soul-chilling spectacle. The Captain could act so nice – what inner Beelzebub drove him to bring out the pitiful Dancing Bear, episode after episode? Why not just leave the pathetic half-human beast in the dungeon where he obviously lived?

School days ended my viewing of Captain Kangaroo, and over time, the horrible memory faded. It was years later when my mind wandered back and I realized: Hey, moron, that circle on Dancing Bear's face was his nose!

Sorry, Captain. I had you all wrong.

The world’s lamest ghost story

2009-07-04T01:37:00.000-06:00

Some people see loved ones who have passed away, providing consolation or warning. Some see a careworn Abraham Lincoln walking the floors of the White House. Some see orbs or wispy figures that pass through closed doors.

I saw rental trucks.

I was driving home from work late one night, a few days before moving from an apartment to a house. I was restless and decided to take city streets instead of my usual freeway route – just something to do, kill some time, see something different.

I was almost home when I drove by a fenced lot filled with U-Haul trucks. That’s pretty handy, I thought. I was going to need a truck for the move, and here was a place to rent one nearby.

I got up the next morning, looked in the phone book and found a listing for the business at the intersection where I’d seen the trucks. I called to reserve one, and mentioned to the guy on the phone that the location was really convenient.

That’s our old location, he said. The phone number’s the same, he said, but we moved to a new location several months ago.

I got off the phone and drove to the lot. No trucks. The fenced area was overgrown with weeds. There was no sign that any of the weeds had been driven over recently, even at the gate.

I didn’t stay long. There was nothing to see.

Another reason I went back to college

2009-07-01T00:37:00.000-06:00

There's no way to describe it without sounding like I'm exaggerating.

I'm talking about the most cockroach-infested home I saw when I worked in pest control.

The owner of a rental duplex called and said one of his residents was griping about roaches intruding from the adjacent unit. He seemed exasperated by the complaint and gave the impression that he was hiring us just to shut her up.

A co-worker and I treated her place first. Then we went to the other unit -- The Chamber of Horrors.

The door opened into the kitchen, where the sink, counters, oven and table were heaped with grease-caked pots, pans and dishes. The walls, ceiling, appliances and furniture were yellow-brown with grease. On the floor were paper grocery bags disintegrating from the rotting garbage that filled them. The linoleum floor was so sticky that there was a crackly sound each time one of us lifted a foot to take a step.

There were roaches moving on every surface. Usually you won't see roaches in daylight because they hide in tight spaces until dark. If you see some moving around in the light, that's an indication of a nasty infestation, because it means there isn't room for all of them in their hiding places. And if you see hundreds and hundreds of them moving around the room like reflections from a mirrored ball at a disco ... well.

We decided to treat the other rooms first so they'd already have insecticide in place when we hit the kitchen and drove some of those thousands of roaches into the rest of the unit.

The home appeared to be inhabited by a woman and her teenage son. The son's room was a shrine to drugs and Satan. The notable decor consisted of two rows of various kinds of drug paraphernalia that converged on a painting of the devil.

We made our way back to the kitchen and started spraying insecticide in the usual fashion, hitting the cracks, crevices and corners, using our feet to scoot the decaying bags of garbage away from the walls to reach the edges of the room as well as possible. We puffed insecticide dust under and behind the oven and refrigerator.

With a bad infestation, it was standard to use a fogger that released pyrethrum, an irritating insecticide that spreads through the air and flushes out roaches to speed up the killing process. I got the fogger and my co-worker, who had been on the job a lot longer than I had, said we should put on hard hats, turn up the collars of our coveralls, and tuck our pantlegs into our socks. That can’t be good, I thought. Then we put on our respirators and I turned on the fogger.

The fogger worked, for sure. Roaches came bursting out from every direction like they were fleeing a soccer riot. Dying roaches rained from the ceiling and rolled off our hard hats and shoulders. I danced around like someone was shooting at my feet, trying to keep frantic bugs from crawling up my legs. I wanted to bathe in hot Lysol.

As the roach storm subsided, the landlord stopped by and stepped on a few insects that weren’t quite dead yet, as if killing a dozen of them meant he was doing his duty as a responsible property owner.

And on the wall was a framed photo of the woman who lived there, wearing a pink uniform, with a plate on the frame that said: "Housekeeper of the month."

Getting deep

2009-06-30T01:32:00.000-06:00

Speaking of thermonuclear war ...

I was looking at comments on the post below when I had a fond memory.

Wichita, 1966: I saw the neatest room I could imagine.

We visited relatives who had an actual, way-underground fallout shelter, and this 8-year-old couldn’t believe how cool it was.

From their basement, there was a steep stairway leading down to a small room with a vault-style door. Inside were four bunkbeds, a hand-cranked air circulator, dry and canned food, bottles of water, a chemical toilet, some battery-powered lanterns, lots of batteries and a handful of board games.

What a great clubhouse! How cozy! Can’t you just picture Mom cranking the air circulator with one hand and rolling dice with the other for a lively game of Yahtzee? Who would ever want to leave?

Click here for bomb shelter FAQs

Not such a big deal after all

2009-06-29T13:36:00.000-06:00

I worry less after watching The House in the Middle, a film with the reassuring message that a well-kept house and lawn can stand up to an atomic bomb.

That's good to know! I had been concerned that there could be some big hassles if I found myself "on the outer fringe of an attack directed at a nearby city."

But no. After seeing this 1954 film, I know that if I keep my house tidy and well-painted and don't let dry leaves accumulate along my fence, I can get right back to watching I Love Lucy after the blast wave passes.

The House in the Middle was produced by an arm of the National Paint, Varnish and Lacquer Association. Regular painting of my house is crucial preparation for an atomic explosion, and I'm glad paint manufacturers discovered that their products provide such an important safeguard.

Click here to see the first part of The House in the Middle

Click here to see the second part of The House in the Middle

The Well House

2009-06-28T21:31:00.000-06:00

On the farm where I grew up,
the electric pump for the well was in a tiny plywood shed
with a light bulb and space heater

My parents and sisters did the things they did,
and I would go to the well house
and shut myself inside with the light on

I would sit on the concrete floor, reading and reading
in the sliver of space between the pump and the door

The pump would kick on and I would read
while the sound and vibration
meant that someone in my family was washing dishes
or flushing a toilet or taking a shower
or maybe filling a bucket to carry to the calves

No one knew where I was

Drifting bitter snow and bruising summer heat
and parents and sisters and relatives and church
and school and meanness and confusion and sadness
were a million miles away

I was always careful to turn the light off when I left
and to check for books or magazines before I closed the door

I got older and left the farm
and met a girl and we got married
We lived in cities and we had kids and jobs and bills

There was always something and another thing and another
and sometimes I would think
that I used to read in a place where nothing ever happened

Sometimes I would visit the farm and see the well house
with its flaking paint and secret

I was 33 years old when a tornado ripped apart the well house
and left the pump protruding from the concrete slab

The new pump went in the basement
and the wood from the well house went to the burn pile
where the wind blows ashes off blackened hinges and nails

After the fall

2009-06-28T16:00:00.001-06:00

When I was a college kid, I hitchhiked a lot.

One day, I got a ride from a man who told me about falling off a roof and breaking his arm.

I asked, "When did that happen?"

He answered, "About 10 minutes ago."

Shell game

2009-06-28T01:12:00.001-06:00

It was a big turtle, or a big story.

The "Beast of Busco" was reported in 1948 by two Indiana fishermen, Ora Blue and Charley Wilson, who said they saw a rowboat-size turtle in a pond near the town of Churubusco.

The pond's owner, Gale Harris, said he had seen the animal himself, and in 1949 came the claim that it had been trapped for a short time.

The story made its way into the news, and thousands began making the trek to watch the search. Divers, trappers and fliers looked for "Oscar," named after Oscar Fulk, a former owner of the pond who told reporters he had seen the giant turtle a half-century earlier.

Increasingly elaborate attempts were made to catch Oscar -- nets, a periscope outfitted with headlights, a harpoon, even a giant sea turtle on a leash in a bid to lure the possibly lonely leviathan. More sightings were reported, including a claim by spectators that they had seen Oscar attack live ducks that had been placed in a pen above a trap.

Harris developed vision problems from his relentless use of the periscope, but was determined to refute allegations that he was a hoaxer. He made a seven-week attempt to drain the pond with a tractor-powered pump, but was sidelined by appendicitis before he could finish the job and rain refilled the pond.

Debt forced Harris to sell his farm in 1950. Among the items auctioned was a 200-foot-by-32-foot turtle net.

People who have owned the pond in the years since have barred any searches, and except for a shadowy claim that the turtle was spotted in 1957 by an owner who kept mum, the story hasn't progressed beyond the question of 1949: Was Oscar real?

Harris, who risked his health and lost his farm in his expensive and time-consuming quest, certainly thought so.

The cave in the basement

2009-06-27T23:36:00.000-06:00

Beneath stately Jordan Hall on the Indiana University campus is a cave that gave the scientific world a new named creature -- and may have cost the world an undescribed one.

The cave opening -- properly called Jordan Hall Spring -- was uncovered by excavation for the building. When cave water seeped into the sub-basement, along came crustaceans.

A species of isopod -- a group of 14-legged animals that includes pill bugs -- was discovered and named Asellus jordani. There's something fitting about a creature bearing the Jordan name: The building honors David Starr Jordan, an IU president and scientist who named more than 2,500 species of fish.

Also discovered were two kinds of shrimp-like amphipods, one known only from that spring. And it may never be known again -- a termite treatment poisoned the spring, and the days of bizarre cave creatures in the sub-basement came to an end.

The Toledo War

2009-06-27T22:26:00.000-06:00

A war that didn’t quite rage – in fact, a war in which only one injury was inflicted – was fought in 1835 over the location of the border between Michigan and Ohio.

A mistake had placed the line a few miles north of where it should have been. Because of the error, what would become the town of Toledo was in Ohio, not Michigan.

When an 1818 survey ordered by Michigan’s territorial governor found the error, the stage was set for conflict … 17 years later.

By 1835, Michigan’s territorial governor, Stevens T. Mason (who had been just 19 years old when he took office), tried in vain to negotiate over the “Toledo Strip” with Ohio's governor, Robert Lucas.

Mason rejected a federal proposal for temporary joint control of the area. A Michigan posse, after firing shots that hit no one, arrested members of an Ohio surveying group.

In short order, the Michigan and Ohio militias moved into positions for battle, but they floundered in swamps for a week and failed to locate each other.

The only blood shed in violence occurred when Michigan authorities arrested the family of Benjamin Franklin Stickney, a major in the Ohio militia who had sons named One and Two. Michigan sheriff's deputy Joseph Wood was stabbed by Two, but survived.

President Andrew Jackson removed the insubordinate Mason as governor, and Toledo remained in Ohio.

The end of the story? Not quite. In 1973, the Supreme Court ruled against Michigan on where the boundary ran through Lake Erie. Ohio got half – that is, less than an acre – of Turtle Island.