Summertime (George Gershwin)
Summertime,
And the livin’ is easy,
Fish are jumpin’
And the cotton is high.
Your daddy’s rich
And your mamma’s good lookin’,
So hush little baby,
Don’t you cry.
Summer in Florida. The punishment we Floridians pay for living in The Easiest State. It’s not the whole summer, really. Pretty much just July and August, when the temperatures invade the mid-nineties and the skies open up on a daily basis. And don’t even bring up the humidity. Then, of course, in August we get hurricanes or the threat of them, at least, extending throughout September. The local weather mavens are not satisfied with the true two-month hurricane season so they had a meteorology meeting years ago and came out of it with an expanded SIX MONTH scare period. According to Eddie Skyfall and his pals on Channel 20, the official hurricane season now extends from the beginning of June to the end of November, thus giving those wacky weathermen way longer to scare the starch out of little old ladies hiding in their closets with a candle and a latitude/longitude chart. What kind of heartless beasts are these weatherpeople, anyhow? Who actually sets out to be a weatherman? I mean, I understand that a lot of dermatologists start out with visions of surgery dancing in their heads, that a lot of would-be doctors wind up pulling teeth. Do weathermen start out to be astronomers? How do you fail at THAT?
God knows, weathermen want to be likeable. Have you ever seen a male weatherperson not nattily attired in a nice, spiffy suit and tie, the better to gain audience love and respect? Of course not. And they’re always showing up for these charity 5K runs and girl-scout carwashes and ribbon-snipping events to benefit the victims of Adducted Thumb Syndrome or Arthrogryposis, stuff like that. I guess it’s just that everybody has to have their own personal Superbowl and for meteorologists it’s Hurricane Season. And I’m okay with that. It’s just that the boys are a little too…shall we say enthusiastic…about their typhoon reportage. I mean, here comes your average Hurricane Barney, trending toward an upward and harmless swing out into the nether regions of the Atlantic, but Eddie Skyfall and Cap’n Buckwheat are not giving it up just yet:
Eddie: Well, I don’t know, Cap’n B., all signs currently point to a dramatic right turn well off the coast of Florida. BUT….if the Gulfstream is hit with a massive infarction brought about by sunspots on Proxima Centauri in the Rigil Kentaurus system, well, you just never know!
Cap’n Buckwheat: Roger that, Eddie Skyfall! Not to mention a new threat from a massive storm system now forming off the coast of Guinea-Bissau. That one could be a real clusterfrig when all is said and done!
Now, in the interests of fairness, I would like to point out that these practices are pretty much limited to male weatherpersons. The girls seem more interested in wearing fetching frocks which make their upper anatomy pop out and being likeable, which is certainly more appropriate. I mean, if following the elephants in the Big Parade with a bucket and a scooper is the first rung on the show business ladder, weather analysis is only slightly above it, so it pays to be humble and maybe that’s why more and more of these meteorology jobs are being taken over by busty young ladies.
On the other hand, there ARE occasions when the horrible predictions of alarmist weathermen come TRUE and then you’re glad to have them around. Nine or ten years ago, when our area was double-hurricaned within a ten-day period, Siobhan got a little jumpy and called the local TV station for critical information. After all, the local weather guy said he would be there all night long to aid and abet, so what if it was three a.m.? And guess what? He was actually there and he was able to deliver assuaging advice to Siobhan and she was eternally impressed with his devotion to duty. The prognosticators say we’re in for a particularly busy hurricane season this year, but when don’t they? I can’t remember the last time a weatherman said, “Oh, no problem—light year for hurricanes coming up!” I mean, it’s like Phil the Groundhog up in Pennsylvania—does he ever say Winter will be over soon? Not very often.
We’re ready for whatever we get. Unless it comes sometime between August 3rd and the 11th, when we’ll be on vacation in Colorado, where they almost never have hurricanes. If anything scary approaches then, it’s up to Siobhan’s brother, Stuart, the astronomer, to handle matters and he won’t be bamboozled easily. Stuart is sort of the Las Vegas oddsmaker for cosmic exceptionalism and he posts daily odds for likely mindnumbing incidents. Right now, he’s got the likelihood of August sunspots on Proxima Centauri at 6,000,000,000-1. Not a sure thing for the weathermen, but pretty good for the rest of us.
Special Delivery
It’s almost two years after the famous Fairfield EVENT, the combination wake/party/memorial celebrating the too-short life of our old pal, Stuart Bentler, robbed of another twenty or so years by the onset of amyloidosis, a nefarious disease which attacked several of his organs simultaneously, confusing his doctors mightily and making diagnosis difficult. By the time everybody settled on the true culprit, Stuart was a goner. This horrified a lot of people, Stuart having legions of friends, but none were more disappointed than us because Stuart was First Among Equals at appreciating The Flying Pie. He understood the nuances and subtleties undetected by others, he got the humor almost before it arrived, nothing went over his head. Stuart Bentler, despite the dire circumstances, could even laugh at his own plight, he the victim of a disease which absolutely nobody got. Instead of “Why ME?” with Stuart it was “You might know I’D be the one!” He hated leaving the party but he didn’t whine about it and he ended up in an okay place. He’s not willing to call it better, what with the liquor and sex restrictions, just okay. We got this letter from him the other day:
Hi Guys!
Another year up here since I last wrote. Unlike down there, time does not fly up here…perhaps because it’s irrelevant. Nobody ages, we just operate on Status Quo Time. Thanks to the influence of Stuart Jr., who is a VERY big shot up here, I have moved to nicer surroundings on a gentle grassy hill. On a daily basis, the lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea. More important, the ice-cream man shows up every night at seven and I’m right there at the designated stop with all the other kids, who consider me one of them, and with good reason. I am, after all, the only one of them with an electric yoyo which lights up in the dark—or, it would if we ever got any dark.
You’ll be pleasantly surprised to know that I have been awarded my first choice of jobs, that of bartender. We’ve got a good crowd of bullshitters at my bar and the sessions go on all night because everybody remains comprehensible due to the Big Guy’s insistence on moderation…he’s got something in the drinks that restricts the patrons merely to the “tipsy” level. Before the new policy, it seems John The Baptist tied one on every night and nobody knew what to do with him, there being no jails and all.
Hey, I saw Betsy Harper the other day—said to say howdy. She was wearing that same dress she had on for the Valentine’s Day dinner…or she was in my mind, anyway. Ted Hansen is up here, too—he’s the local deejay. Looks like old Gator Aaron Hernandez is going to miss the train for this place. I was looking at the Futures chart the other day and they had him right at the top for eventual delivery to Red Rock Canyon, and not the one in Utah. Breakin’ rocks in the hot sun, he fought the law and the law won.
You might be surprised to learn that a couple of current Earth celebrities, Julian Assange and Ed Snowden, heroes to all your leftie friends down there, are also persona non grata up here. The Big Guy likes whistleblowers who work to benefit humanity as opposed to those who work to benefit themselves. They’re building a special wing down in the Canyon for those guys.
Listen, a request for Siobhan. It’s getting a little…um…BUSY in my area of the garden. Next time Mario comes out to do the landscaping, how about taking a little off the top? I know you’re a big tycooness these days and you can afford the extra labor.
Okay Bill, that’s it for another year. I’m casting all my influence towards the complete recovery of Cosmic Flash and things are looking pretty good on that front. I was watching him gallop the other day with Walter Matthau and he thought he looked terrific. Say hi to Irana and all my old pals, what few of them are left. Good to see Katherine moving onward and upward with her life. Sometimes I get together with Stuart Jr. and we beam the special juice in her direction. He’s got a lot more of it than I have but life down there is hard and every little bit helps.
Still no old humor mag editors or head-shop bosses up here. You have a chance to make history. You’re not on any of the lists yet, so it could go either way. Remember—it never hurts to be nice to somebody. Look where it got me!
Your heavenly pal,
Stuart Bentler
Racing Report
For those of you who grew enamored of racing during our Triple Crown days, the three-year-old picture comes back into focus during the End Days of Monmouth Park and August at Saratoga, where all the principal performers will reappear and attempt to glom the 3YO championship. The Travers on August 24 is the premiere event of the season and will certainly be nationally televised, perhaps also the earlier Haskell Stakes on July 28th.
As Stuart Bentler mentioned, Cosmic Flash is back on the track at Eisaman Equine and working famously in a bid to get back to the track in Miami sometime late next month. Siobhan and I are getting ready for Colorado. She’s trying to make me feel old by telling me we shouldn’t hike so far but I think there is a little self-interest involved there. If we keep making all these compensations to old age, pretty soon we’ll be…well…OLD. I’m holding out for a twenty-miler. (I just put that in to see if Siobhan was really reading this.)
That’s all, folks…
Summertime,
And the livin’ is easy,
Fish are jumpin’
And the cotton is high.
Your daddy’s rich
And your mamma’s good lookin’,
So hush little baby,
Don’t you cry.
Summer in Florida. The punishment we Floridians pay for living in The Easiest State. It’s not the whole summer, really. Pretty much just July and August, when the temperatures invade the mid-nineties and the skies open up on a daily basis. And don’t even bring up the humidity. Then, of course, in August we get hurricanes or the threat of them, at least, extending throughout September. The local weather mavens are not satisfied with the true two-month hurricane season so they had a meteorology meeting years ago and came out of it with an expanded SIX MONTH scare period. According to Eddie Skyfall and his pals on Channel 20, the official hurricane season now extends from the beginning of June to the end of November, thus giving those wacky weathermen way longer to scare the starch out of little old ladies hiding in their closets with a candle and a latitude/longitude chart. What kind of heartless beasts are these weatherpeople, anyhow? Who actually sets out to be a weatherman? I mean, I understand that a lot of dermatologists start out with visions of surgery dancing in their heads, that a lot of would-be doctors wind up pulling teeth. Do weathermen start out to be astronomers? How do you fail at THAT?
God knows, weathermen want to be likeable. Have you ever seen a male weatherperson not nattily attired in a nice, spiffy suit and tie, the better to gain audience love and respect? Of course not. And they’re always showing up for these charity 5K runs and girl-scout carwashes and ribbon-snipping events to benefit the victims of Adducted Thumb Syndrome or Arthrogryposis, stuff like that. I guess it’s just that everybody has to have their own personal Superbowl and for meteorologists it’s Hurricane Season. And I’m okay with that. It’s just that the boys are a little too…shall we say enthusiastic…about their typhoon reportage. I mean, here comes your average Hurricane Barney, trending toward an upward and harmless swing out into the nether regions of the Atlantic, but Eddie Skyfall and Cap’n Buckwheat are not giving it up just yet:
Eddie: Well, I don’t know, Cap’n B., all signs currently point to a dramatic right turn well off the coast of Florida. BUT….if the Gulfstream is hit with a massive infarction brought about by sunspots on Proxima Centauri in the Rigil Kentaurus system, well, you just never know!
Cap’n Buckwheat: Roger that, Eddie Skyfall! Not to mention a new threat from a massive storm system now forming off the coast of Guinea-Bissau. That one could be a real clusterfrig when all is said and done!
Now, in the interests of fairness, I would like to point out that these practices are pretty much limited to male weatherpersons. The girls seem more interested in wearing fetching frocks which make their upper anatomy pop out and being likeable, which is certainly more appropriate. I mean, if following the elephants in the Big Parade with a bucket and a scooper is the first rung on the show business ladder, weather analysis is only slightly above it, so it pays to be humble and maybe that’s why more and more of these meteorology jobs are being taken over by busty young ladies.
On the other hand, there ARE occasions when the horrible predictions of alarmist weathermen come TRUE and then you’re glad to have them around. Nine or ten years ago, when our area was double-hurricaned within a ten-day period, Siobhan got a little jumpy and called the local TV station for critical information. After all, the local weather guy said he would be there all night long to aid and abet, so what if it was three a.m.? And guess what? He was actually there and he was able to deliver assuaging advice to Siobhan and she was eternally impressed with his devotion to duty. The prognosticators say we’re in for a particularly busy hurricane season this year, but when don’t they? I can’t remember the last time a weatherman said, “Oh, no problem—light year for hurricanes coming up!” I mean, it’s like Phil the Groundhog up in Pennsylvania—does he ever say Winter will be over soon? Not very often.
We’re ready for whatever we get. Unless it comes sometime between August 3rd and the 11th, when we’ll be on vacation in Colorado, where they almost never have hurricanes. If anything scary approaches then, it’s up to Siobhan’s brother, Stuart, the astronomer, to handle matters and he won’t be bamboozled easily. Stuart is sort of the Las Vegas oddsmaker for cosmic exceptionalism and he posts daily odds for likely mindnumbing incidents. Right now, he’s got the likelihood of August sunspots on Proxima Centauri at 6,000,000,000-1. Not a sure thing for the weathermen, but pretty good for the rest of us.
Special Delivery
It’s almost two years after the famous Fairfield EVENT, the combination wake/party/memorial celebrating the too-short life of our old pal, Stuart Bentler, robbed of another twenty or so years by the onset of amyloidosis, a nefarious disease which attacked several of his organs simultaneously, confusing his doctors mightily and making diagnosis difficult. By the time everybody settled on the true culprit, Stuart was a goner. This horrified a lot of people, Stuart having legions of friends, but none were more disappointed than us because Stuart was First Among Equals at appreciating The Flying Pie. He understood the nuances and subtleties undetected by others, he got the humor almost before it arrived, nothing went over his head. Stuart Bentler, despite the dire circumstances, could even laugh at his own plight, he the victim of a disease which absolutely nobody got. Instead of “Why ME?” with Stuart it was “You might know I’D be the one!” He hated leaving the party but he didn’t whine about it and he ended up in an okay place. He’s not willing to call it better, what with the liquor and sex restrictions, just okay. We got this letter from him the other day:
Hi Guys!
Another year up here since I last wrote. Unlike down there, time does not fly up here…perhaps because it’s irrelevant. Nobody ages, we just operate on Status Quo Time. Thanks to the influence of Stuart Jr., who is a VERY big shot up here, I have moved to nicer surroundings on a gentle grassy hill. On a daily basis, the lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea. More important, the ice-cream man shows up every night at seven and I’m right there at the designated stop with all the other kids, who consider me one of them, and with good reason. I am, after all, the only one of them with an electric yoyo which lights up in the dark—or, it would if we ever got any dark.
You’ll be pleasantly surprised to know that I have been awarded my first choice of jobs, that of bartender. We’ve got a good crowd of bullshitters at my bar and the sessions go on all night because everybody remains comprehensible due to the Big Guy’s insistence on moderation…he’s got something in the drinks that restricts the patrons merely to the “tipsy” level. Before the new policy, it seems John The Baptist tied one on every night and nobody knew what to do with him, there being no jails and all.
Hey, I saw Betsy Harper the other day—said to say howdy. She was wearing that same dress she had on for the Valentine’s Day dinner…or she was in my mind, anyway. Ted Hansen is up here, too—he’s the local deejay. Looks like old Gator Aaron Hernandez is going to miss the train for this place. I was looking at the Futures chart the other day and they had him right at the top for eventual delivery to Red Rock Canyon, and not the one in Utah. Breakin’ rocks in the hot sun, he fought the law and the law won.
You might be surprised to learn that a couple of current Earth celebrities, Julian Assange and Ed Snowden, heroes to all your leftie friends down there, are also persona non grata up here. The Big Guy likes whistleblowers who work to benefit humanity as opposed to those who work to benefit themselves. They’re building a special wing down in the Canyon for those guys.
Listen, a request for Siobhan. It’s getting a little…um…BUSY in my area of the garden. Next time Mario comes out to do the landscaping, how about taking a little off the top? I know you’re a big tycooness these days and you can afford the extra labor.
Okay Bill, that’s it for another year. I’m casting all my influence towards the complete recovery of Cosmic Flash and things are looking pretty good on that front. I was watching him gallop the other day with Walter Matthau and he thought he looked terrific. Say hi to Irana and all my old pals, what few of them are left. Good to see Katherine moving onward and upward with her life. Sometimes I get together with Stuart Jr. and we beam the special juice in her direction. He’s got a lot more of it than I have but life down there is hard and every little bit helps.
Still no old humor mag editors or head-shop bosses up here. You have a chance to make history. You’re not on any of the lists yet, so it could go either way. Remember—it never hurts to be nice to somebody. Look where it got me!
Your heavenly pal,
Stuart Bentler
Racing Report
For those of you who grew enamored of racing during our Triple Crown days, the three-year-old picture comes back into focus during the End Days of Monmouth Park and August at Saratoga, where all the principal performers will reappear and attempt to glom the 3YO championship. The Travers on August 24 is the premiere event of the season and will certainly be nationally televised, perhaps also the earlier Haskell Stakes on July 28th.
As Stuart Bentler mentioned, Cosmic Flash is back on the track at Eisaman Equine and working famously in a bid to get back to the track in Miami sometime late next month. Siobhan and I are getting ready for Colorado. She’s trying to make me feel old by telling me we shouldn’t hike so far but I think there is a little self-interest involved there. If we keep making all these compensations to old age, pretty soon we’ll be…well…OLD. I’m holding out for a twenty-miler. (I just put that in to see if Siobhan was really reading this.)
That’s all, folks…
