Echoes from the Loafers’ Club Meeting

It got down to 20 below last night.

It was supposed to hit -22°.

Life is sweet.

Driving by Bruce’s drive

I have a wonderful neighbor named Bruce. Whenever I pass his drive, thoughts occur to me, such as: I used my pen to fill in all the capital O’s and zeroes on the papers in front of me as I sat at a desk waiting for a phone call from a radio station. I typically limit my filling to those two things. It’s not a compulsion, it’s just a thing I do.

I’d gotten to the hotel in Lincoln somewhere between late night and early morning. Getting to my room, I discovered the TV was on and there was no remote control. I checked the TV and found no on/off switch. I went back downstairs to the desk clerk. He gave me the remote from the lobby TV. It worked on mine.

Commercials with a little football mixed in

A friend of mine has a radio show. Dennis Green, who was the coach of the Minnesota Vikings at the time, was her guest. My friend, not knowing much about sports, asked Green to sign her Homer Hankie, which promoted the Minnesota Twins. He did.

A guy asked how I liked the Super Bowl. He bushwhacked me because he didn’t say anything about the weather first. Common etiquette says you should never ask a man a question until you’ve mentioned the weather. I was stumped for an answer and said, “I took the good and left the rest.”

I didn’t watch the Super Bowl. I loved playing football, but watching can be a challenge for me — especially an NFL game. The Super Bowl runs 4 hours with 15 minutes of action.

I realize people watch the Super Bowl for reasons other than football. There are parties, betting, music and ads. I saw some of the commercials. Some were funny. I like the movie “Groundhog Day,” so I enjoyed the commercial featuring it. Some ads encouraged me to make poor food decisions and others urged me to buy a new vehicle to make friends, family and strangers envious. I’ll try to eat healthy while driving a car no one notices.

I enjoy reading George Will who wrote, “Football combines two of the worst things about American life. It is violence punctuated by committee meetings.”

I have people I know and people I love who are athletes. None of them are in the NFL, but I’ll watch them instead.

There are two sides to every argument and thousands are online

I used to stop at a Minneapolis cafe and order pancakes. They had a good rating from the Batter Business Bureau, but I came to watch a gifted guy flip the pancakes. I read a newspaper while eating.

A relative gets his news from social media. I tried that one day and now believe in 29 conspiracy theories and am certain the earth is flat. I learned what kind of doughnut I’d be and received more bad advice than a dozen ex-brothers-in-law could give. I discovered there is regular crazy and then there is online crazy. The internet gave my brain a painful twist. There were many sick and tired people commenting on the news. That noted philosopher, Will Ferrell, said, “Sleep is so cute when it tries to compete with the internet.”

Bill Nye the Science Guy said, “The information you get from social media is not a substitute for academic discipline at all.” Everybody knows that. Or do we?

Nature notes

There are winter days when it seems as if everything I’m even remotely interested in had been canceled due to weather. That’s when nature and its great cavalry of things come to the rescue. I watched rabbits dancing by the light of the moon. Red osier dogwood and willows showed color as if they’d been tanning.

February is National Bird Feeding Month. Feeders attract many species of birds, each an unexcelled beauty. American tree sparrows fed under the feeders. Poorly named, this sparrow nests on or near the ground. Woodpeckers drummed on resonant wood, making Pinocchio nervous.

Red squirrels moved through shallow tunnels in the deep snow. Traffic backed up. One squirrel peeked out of a hole, checking for those on its enemies list, when another squirrel goosed it from behind. The lead squirrel shot from the subway as if it were a miniature rocket launched from Cape Canaveral.

Meeting adjourned

Sheryl Young of Sandusky, Ohio wrote: “I saw a sign in a resale store in Canada. It said: ‘The world is filled with nice people. If you can’t find one, BE ONE.’”