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Echoes from the

Loafers’ Club Meeting

It’s a cold, dreary, miserable day.

No, it’s not. It’s a beautiful day.

Why do you always have to take the weather’s side?

Driving by Bruce’s drive

I have a wonderful neighbor named Bruce. Whenever I pass his drive, thoughts occur to me. Election signs bloom. They are the closed captioning of the elections. Do they change anyone’s minds? Kind of, sort of. We might have thought the neighbor was an imbecile until he put up a sign of a candidate we favor. It gives each of us a way to tell where our fellow geniuses live. I expect to see lawn signs reading, “No signs allowed” or “Space for rent.”

Did you hear about the man whose birthday lasted only one minute? It was his sixty-second birthday.

I walked a trail when I met a man I knew a little but not a lot, who was walking his beautiful dog. He told me the canine was blind. I enjoyed a visit with a seeing-eye man.

Curt Krause was a farmer, an agriculturalist for Birds Eye and a devotee of Peanut M&M’s. The line was lengthy (possibly crossing several states) at his visitation. Those waiting in line were offered a bag of Peanut M&M’s for sustenance and in memory of a good man.

I spoke at a remarkable reunion of a class of 1969. Prizes were given to the ones who stayed awake throughout the entire meal. They had graduated without the help of Google and grew up when Spam, Wonder Bread and a Twinkie was a wholesome meal in the time before roundabouts were built around potholes. They had played flutophones, bad breath captured in musical instruments. Gas was 35 cents a gallon. Few people knew what mileage their car was getting. In 1969, Sager and Evans sang “In the Year 2525,” a song predicting that technological advances would negatively impact man’s thoughts, relationships and body. We have 500 years to deal with that because we don’t want to wait until the last minute.

I’ve learned

I’m thankful squirrels can’t drive.

The rules for the 100-meter dash are pretty straightforward.

My archenemy is plantar fasciitis.

I can recall the numbers 33 1/3, 45 and 78 at a record speed.

The mascot for Eastern Michigan University is an eagle. It should be an emu.

The Flat Earth Society has members all around the globe.

Half a hole is a whole hole.

Bad jokes department

Did you hear the statistics joke? Probably.

Was Chuck Berry ever arrested for tossing small fruits?

What can we use to sit on, stand on and brush our teeth? A chair, a ladder and a toothbrush.

What does James Bond’s doorbell sound like? Dong. Ding dong.

What do you call a typo on a gravestone? A grave mistake.

Only one thing makes me throw up. A dartboard on the ceiling.

Why did the baker fire his apprentice? Because he was a whisk taker.

If you walk like an Egyptian long enough, you’ll need to see a Cairopractor.

Nature notes

The latest recorded measurable snow in Minnesota was 1.5 inches at Mizpah in Koochiching County on June 4, 1935, and the earliest documented snow in Minnesota was a trace that fell at the Duluth Airport on Aug. 31, 1949, with the earliest measurable being .3 inches at International Falls on Sept. 14, 1964.

I watched a long, twisting line of blackbirds flying on my way home from a church where I’d done readings and led prayers at a funeral. The deceased’s wife hugged me and said she and her husband had been arguing over the identification of a woodpecker and a finch—red-headed or red-bellied, house or purple. “We each said, if Al were here, he’d know.” She paused before adding, “Thank you for being here today.”

Ruby-throated hummingbirds don’t travel in flocks during migration. Each bird follows its instincts as to departure dates and routes.

Multi-colored Asian lady beetles and minute pirate bugs sampled me. They are biting beetles and bugs. I’ve not been stung by a wasp this year. Yellowjackets are hangry at this time of the year. They were well-behaved pollinators and beneficial predators until they lost their jobs and encountered food insecurity.

University of Minnesota research published in The Natural Areas Journal found that 2% of buckthorn seeds passed through goat guts intact, and of the seeds that appeared in the goats’ feces, 11% were viable. For comparison, 63% of seeds not eaten by goats were capable of germination.

Meeting adjourned

“A knife wound heals but a tongue wound festers.”—Turkish proverb. Keep a kind word at the ready.