RUMORS OF MY DEMISE

. . . have been greatly exaggerated. But if you just can’t get enough of me, hie thee on over to my flickr page.

SEARCH ENGINE ANSWER GUY #12

It’s back, for no good reason: My occasional half-bodyparted attempt to answer the bizarre search engine queries which have led people to this site.

are hootie and the blowfish considered country music

Naah. I think they’re just glad to be considered these days, period.

can i major in geology and suck at math

Yes. Whether you can graduate, however, is another story.

mercury topaz dies wont start right away

Look at the bright side: When it does, you don’t have to drive it.

therms of endearment

Ah yes, the little known Larry McMurtry novel in which Aurora Greenaway gives up on the astronaut, finally gets smart for once in her life, and takes up with the furnace guy. Very good book. Almost as good as Lonesome Dowel.

non religious benediction

Here you go.

top 40 song about a reuben sandwich

There have been several major hits about the well-known Reuben sandwich, from “(Thousand) Islands in the Stream” by Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton to “Rye Without a Face” by Billy Idol, but most experts agree the best pop hit about the Reuben was The Beatles’ immortal 1967 hit “Corned Beef, Swiss, and Rye with Sauerkraut” from their seminal album Col. Sanders’ Hungry Roadside Stand. Of course, it’s worth noting that the Reuben has inspired its own genre.

who owns hy-vee food stores

As they’ll be happy to tell you, they’re employee-owned. And if you’re stopping by there, pick me up a 2-liter of cherry cola and some AE cottage cheese. Thanks. You know I’m good for it.

pontiac t1000 wanted

Really?

garrison.keillor when.doves.cry

It’s been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, so quiet you can almost hear Florian Krebsbach wiping down the engine of his ‘66 Impala with a rag soaked in gasoline, just 33,486 miles on her and it still loks like no one ever sat in the back seat unless they were gift-wrapped. Uptown at the Sidetrack Tap they’ve been wondering if something is up with old Florian, not just because he is the sort of fellow, that salt-of-the-earth, keeps-his-lawn-mowed fellow who would lavish that kind of attention on an old, cheap Chevy that hasn’t gone further than St. Cloud since Jimmy Carter was president, but because, for the first time since anyone can remember, he won’t be helping with the Sons of Knute fish fry this spring. They’re wondering if he’s slowing down, if he is aging in the same way his car is not, like a backwards version of the Portrait of Dorian Gray. Maybe it’s cancer, they wonder, or maybe he’s had a stroke or heart failure, or maybe he’s just getting old, a possibility that many Wobegonians tend to forget can happen. But it’s hard to believe in aging when you live in a town where nothing changes, ever, not for the better and not for the worse.

The truth, if the truth were known, would probably caused a few raised eyebrows among the townfolk. At last year’s Sons of Knute fish fry Florian’s wife Myrtle thought he was being just a bit too chatty with one of the Thorvaldson cousins who had come up from Florida just to eat good Norwegian fish, the kind you can’t get down there. It’s a little funny, that otherwise well-adjusted people would fly all the way from their beachfront apartments in Boca Raton all the way back to Minnesota for a fish fry, when the very Atlantic Ocean in which those fish were caught laps right up against their front porches, but the fish tastes like home to them, and nothing else will do.

Anyway, ever since that unfortunate incident, Florian has carried a little grudge against Myrtle. He finds it hard to believe that after 55 years of marriage, 55 years of nothing but pure bliss, really, at least in that reserved central Minnesotan sense of bliss where you’re just glad you don’t have to eat the jar of dry-roasted peanuts all by yourself, that Myrtle would think, would even suspect, that he might step out with another woman, even just for a cup of coffee at the Chatterbox Cafe. He wants to tell her off, tell her that if he didn’t cheat on her back when he was young and handsome, he’s certainly not going to do it now that he’s old and not so handsome. He wants to let her know that, at this point in their lives, some things should be above question, and his fidelity to her should be one of those things. But he can’t do it.

When two people love one another long enough, one of them inevitably must be the strong, slient one; there isn’t enough room in any marriage for every single word anybody wants to say. Florian has taken his burden and decided that the best way to avoid an ugly situation where he’ll be serving up little nuggets of fish right from the big deep-fryer in the Legion hall while Myrtle sits at the table, alone, waiting for that Thorvaldson floozy with her frosted hair and her flowery blouse to come in and try to steal her husband, is simply not to go. He knows they’re wondering about him, if he’s lost some of his will or some of his balance or even some of his mind. But, he fiigures, it is better for him to give up something he enjoys in favor of something he enjoys more. It is almost enough for him to know that he would never go so far as to flirt with another woman, no matter what Myrtle may believe. But when the smell of codfish and hot oil spreads across Lake Wobegon next Friday, Florian and Myrtle will be sitting at their chrome and Formica dinette table, not saying anything, nothing at all. They have passed into a stange where deep, reverent silence speaks on their behalf, telling each other that what is unspoken now has been spoken before and need not be repeated. Most of the time that’s alright, but on that night, Florian will think of a song lyric he once heard entirely by accident while he and Myrtle were at the mall in St. Cloud and he was sitting on the old-married-guy bench outside JC Penney, waiting patiently for her to return with her new pair of shoes, and he will think, “No, this is what it sounds like when doves cry.”

TBP BOOK CORNER

Just throwing a shoutout to a couple of recently-read books:

Gilligan’s Wake by Tom Carson. Yes, it’s (sort of) what you think it is: a Joycean spin on the seven stranded castaways as they meander through American history in the 20th century. Every character has a chapter to call their own, from Gilligan’s pathological delusion that he’s Maynard G. Krebs and it is forever 1959 in San Francisco, through the Sikpper’s service with JFK and RMN in WWII, Mr. Howell’s unwitting role as a Communist fellow-traveller, Mrs. Howell’s morphine addiction (???!?), Ginger’s disastrous night with Sammy Davis Jr at Frank’s house, the Professor . . . well, you’d just have to read one to believe it, and Mary Ann’s bizarre physical condition, all coming together in a Tommy Westphal-type ending. The book bogs about 85% of the way through, but I enjoyed it anyway.

The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation by David Kamp. Think of this as a more focused and much more gossipy companion piece to David Brooks’ Bobos in Paradise and you’ll be on the right track. Kamp takes about a fifty-year view of the figures behind the rise of the Foodie Nation, looking unblinkingly at figures like James Beard, Julia Child, Craig Claiborne, Alice Waters, and the like. (There were several points in this book where I found myself wishing he’d blinked a little. Then I consider that maybe he did.) This book isn’t about what this figures did to change the American palate so much as it is about how they did it. I feel he could have spent more time discussing the recent influence of Food Network and how it’s elevated eating and the contemplation of eating into entertainment. Or how Food Network has now descended into VH1 without Michael Ian Black or Flavor Flav. Jane and Michael Stern told the story of America’s changing tastes better in their book “American Gourmet,” but that book wasn’t as entertainingly sleazy as this one is. It’s your choice.