Sixteen or so years ago, a short but dense little book titled 14,000 Things to Be Happy About hit the bookstores. The author, Barbara Ann Kipfer, said it took her 20 years to scribe the little things that made her happy.
I agreed with many of her choices, reading a good book, small dinners at home, chocolate torte, and "this thing called love", though I disagree with many others, including French playing cards and declawing the canary. What makes us all happy is as individual as we are.
Some of the items are dated, Polaroid Land cameras, shower microphone soap (really that's a microphone!), Montgomery Ward, 3 1/2" inch computer diskettes, and "Boogie Dancing?"
Seeing as how it's probably time for an updated version, Home on the Range offers a few additional items.
Things to be Happy About:
* Polyester Pant Suit revival killed off due to the recent high oil prices.
* Presidential speeches aren't lip-synched to voice of James Earl Jones
* Haggis still not on the menu at McDonald's
* In Indiana, any person paid for a puppet show, wire dancing or tumbling act will be fined $3 under the Act to Prevent Certain Immoral Practices.
* No outbreaks of scurvy ever on Deadliest Catch
* Dillon Presses
* L.L. Beans Goose Down Condoms never caught on* Cheese in a Can not offered on most transatlantic flights.
* Honda Deal a Thon Days still a legal holiday in Hell
* William Shatner has no plans for remake of Kingdom of the Spiders.
* I was relieved to find out BJ and the Bear was about a trucker and his pet.
* Flaming tumblers of Sambuca still keep away mosquitoes.
* Less than two years until the next Presidential election.
* Less than two years until the next Presidential election.
* Kraft Mac and Cheese is still the cheesiest* Open Carry
* Trains song Hey Soul Sister going to be banned as torture under the Geneva Convention.
* Tectonic forces still working at removing New Jersey from Eastern Seaboard.
* More and more channels are showing Firefly.
* Reverse of California commemorative quarter did not feature Mexican flag
* Mark Knopfler and James Taylor still alive and well.
* Neither Metric system or fried crickets caught on in the U.S.
* Homeboys from Outer Space II not in the works.
* For the grandparents out there, a gift of Barney can now annoy YOUR children.
* Skype - where I can chat with video for free with someone serving very far away* For the grandparents out there, a gift of Barney can now annoy YOUR children.
* Coffee that doesn't taste like dirty water and Prist is available even in small towns.
* I can carry a gun, a tool to convert force into persuasion, just to go to that store and get that coffee. 
Yes indeed, many things to be happy about.Love - Brigid
25 comments:
Many wonderful things there...
But Prist!
Wow, that's a trip down memory lane. Hated that stuff.
Kinda like that shower of jet-A you get when you vent a MU-2 nacelle tank in order to fill it. Never missed that when I quit working the line at MTH.
TBG
I now have to go take a picture of my Hornady press in rebuttal. I am thankful for that!
Mark too. Telegraph Road will now be played as I get some press time!
:D
I introduced the boy to Kraft Mac n this past week. Yep, still the cheesiest.
My Internets are back up. :D
Happy that friends bring you Bonne Bell Lip Smackers (and that they still exist).
I guess extolling the virtues of the lee pro 1000 is going to fall on deaf ears. By the way, Cool blog.
Good thoughts...
Just don't mention all of them to the seven bears lined up outside that truck in Yellowstone...
Hope you're mending well.
Dann in Ohio
So Telegraph Road made it to this. One of my favorite tunes from this band. Love the horns. A friend a long time ago played a mean sax. His day job was repossessing cars. Long story!Your latest trick
My favorite words at the gun shows:
Not Legal in California.
Polaroid Land Cameras? Not so fast.
http://www.the-impossible-project.com/
And people like Mike Dillon, Ronnie Barrett and Mark LaRue who refuse to compromise or sell out when it comes to their products.
> * Neither Metric system or fried crickets caught on in the U.S.
Two of the best tasting things I can ever remember eating both were consumed during a weekend of survival training during AFROTC summer camp c. 1990. After a day or two without food, finding and eating (a) wild rhubarb and (b) grasshoppers were memorable.
Mmmm.
Grasshopper.
So, I respectfully dissent from this one line of your post.
I would add to the list your prose!
Happiness is accidentally finding the blog of a remarkable person while online looking for holsters.
There was some doubt that it really was a microphone?
Heh.
Bob
III
I would demur on the Mac 'n' Cheese. I think that Stouffer's frozenMac 'n' Cheese is cheesier. But it's a close-run thing.
On the crickets: I was immediately reminded of a scene from an NCIS episode. Tony and Ziva are interviewing the Burundian Prof. Abaka. (This is before we learn he's an evil death squad guy.) She's crunching down on some Burundian bar food that's OBVIOUSLY deep fried insects. AShe avers that they're delicious, to which Prof Abaka drolly replies:
"Well, then, I will not tell you what they are made of."
Mark Alger
The 2A (Indeed, the entire Constitution itself)
The US of A
Jimmy Stewart westerns
Wilson Combat
Milt Sparks holsters
Cummins Diesels
bikinis
Warm spring days
Dillon presses (yes, already mentioned but entirely worth mentioning again)
Cardinals (the bird, not the team)
Homemade ice cream
rhubarb pie
Hemingway novels
Hitchcock flicks
green eyes
Termites, grasshoppers and some nutty tasting caterpillars were common bush bar side dish food in the Congo. It wasn't survival. Just lunch. Burundians were far too urbane to go beyond peanuts.
Some friends forwarded me a link to your blog. You inspired me to go ebaying for a Firefly boxed set and I am eternally grateful for the nudge to renew my acquaintance with the show. Baldwin has always been a great thug.
It is good to see someone with a renaissance Heinleinesque battlewoman brain out there. I live in the wheatlands and as an attempted pragmatist I am afoul of extreme left and hard right most of the time. Keep making them think. Glad you do.
Geoff.
I'd add 1911's, Colt Pythons, good friends, and good food!
@ B.- LOL on the Dillon catalogs! The standard old joke is the comment about the cover: "There is a gun in that picture?? Never noticed."
L.L. Beans Goose Down Condoms never caught on
I worry that is precisely what they'd do...
Jim
"I can carry a gun, a tool to convert force into persuasion, just to go to that store and get that coffee." and the girls selling cookies will never notice nor worry about the old guy. Because it only matters what he does with it, not what others might think.
OK, so, did she really say that one of the things that made her happy was declawing the canary?
D.W. - declawing the canary was in there, not sure what that meant, I'v enot heard of doing that to a bird, as that would be how they grasp the perch.
:)
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