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Echoes from the Loafers’ Club Meeting

What do you know?

You don’t want to know.

That’s good to know.

Driving by Bruce’s drive

I have a wonderful neighbor named Bruce. Whenever I pass his drive, thoughts occur to me. Lefty loosey, righty tighty doesn’t apply to making turns with your vehicle. I know because I took a driver’s improvement class. I learned important things: not wearing seatbelts caused 44% of fatalities, hands on the steering wheel should be at 9 and 3 or 8 and 4, I need to stay 225 feet behind a tractor-trailer to avoid its blind spot, and I should stop at an intersection with enough distance to see the tires of the car in front of me touching the road. Trunk Highways (Interstate, US and Minnesota highways) are 8% of the road mileage in Minnesota, but carry 58% of vehicle travel. Memorial Day to Labor Day is the most dangerous time to drive. When meeting a vehicle, dim your headlights to low beams at 1,000 feet and 200 feet when following a vehicle. Don’t flash your brights if a car with high beams is approaching. This could cause accidents. Instead, focus on the right side of your lane or the white line near the shoulder.

I’d decided to go as a Star Wars character this Halloween. I can’t wait to see the Luke on my face. Multi-colored Asian lady beetles and boxelder bugs stormed the doors of our house. My bride and I fled to take in a football game. As we drove by a Fastenal store, I commented on how I found that business fastenating. My wife didn’t comment, but I could hear her eyes rolling.

I’ve learned

The hospital I was born in, shout out to Doc Olds and reasonable room rates, is being demolished. No one has found the “Birthplace of Al Batt” plaque. Perhaps there had never been one. They might have been waiting for my bill to be paid in full before putting one up.

I got a carton of 2% milk and a carton of almond milk. I grew up on a dairy farm and I’m not lactose-intolerant, I’m lactose-indifferent.

Lori Reyerson of Glenville owns an ancient blackboard that once graced a wall of the grade school I attended. Lori claimed it shows a stack of faded sentences in childish handwriting, which say, “I, Al Batt, will not talk in class unless called upon.”

You’ve been married for a good spell of time if you can finish your spouse’s sentences before they’re started.

There are too many TV channels, but I don’t have to watch any of them if I don’t want to.

There is no education in the second kick of a cow.

Teachers are important. Without them, we wouldn’t have the answer to a password recovery question.

Bad jokes department

My neighbor Crandall watched an eclipse through a colander and it strained his eyes.

Gravity is one of the universe’s fundamental

forces and without it, we’d be left with nothing but gravy.

“What kind of shampoo did the Headless Horseman use?” Shoulders.

“How did the mini-pumpkin cross the road?” With the help of a crossing gourd.

“What’s the time between stepping on a banana peel and hitting the ground called?” A banana second.

Nature notes

No season makes any promises, but ours all deliver wind. Aeolus, the god of the winds in Greek mythology, gave a bag of wind to help with Odysseus’s sailing. Today, we have politicians doing that work. Watch for storms when clouds are more wide than tall.

The science of dating events and variations in the environment by the comparative study of growth rings in trees and aged wood is dendrochronology.

Picnic wasps (yellowjackets) are responsible for most “bee” stings during outdoor dining events. Honey bees are fuzzy. Yellowjackets aren’t. Wasps are bees that have escaped from prison. Yellowjackets feed many harmful insects that might damage trees or crops to their young. They devour many houseflies. Shakespeare wrote in “The Taming of the Shrew,” “If I be waspish, best beware my sting.” Pope Paul VI said, “Anger is as a stone cast into a wasp’s nest.” In the Bible, God said he would send hornets to pursue the Canaanites and drive them from the Promised Land. He might have been willing to call upon swarms of stinging wasps or have been speaking symbolically for a plague of another kind.

Flower flies mimic bees and wasps, and don’t sting. Flies have only two wings. Bees and wasps have four membranous wings.

Meeting adjourned

“Gracious words are a honeycomb, sweet to the soul and healing to the bones.”—Proverbs 16:24.