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Festive Fifth Friday Footnotes, Follow-ups and Far-Flung Fripperies:

• Nostalgia keeps everything the same as it never was.
• Life is a wet soap bar. The surest way to lose your grip is to hold it too tightly.
• When banks gave us branded pens to use and keep instead of chaining them to the counter, the world got more confusing.
• Peace requires courage.
• Our year-end holidays make surprisingly little use of cheese, unless you count the Christmas carol, “A Whey In The Manger.”
• Is there a word for twitching a sugar packet back and forth between thumb and forefinger before opening?
• When the 2016 Ice Storm cut power, it prevented many housebound families from binge-watching anything but the weather and one another.
• Envy is the hidden force behind most unhappiness.
• Diversity is not a pizza. You cannot wait for it to be delivered. It must be “carried out” by those who want it.
• I learned a new word: “innumerate.” I can’t count the number of times I’ll be using it.
• Can we wish “godslow” for ponderers, as we wish “godspeed” for travelers?
• People tell you to live in the present, but that’s only because living in the future perfect will have been so much harder. I feel tense just thinking about it.
• If Republicans want to bring back internment camps, the troublemakers may have already done that work for them. Most liberals have corralled themselves into something we like to call “cities.”
• Our university’s two benevolent PKs should give Duck football coach Willie Taggart his own helicopter. Landing on high school football fields would turn heads, even if he’s not allowed to offer a ride home to the prized recruits he visits.
• When Trump flew into the White House, I blamed the Chicago Cubs. Before they won the World Series, pigs couldn’t do that.
• Practical jokes are usually one or the other.
• If Greater Eugene Inc. needs a marketing and recruitment slogan, they could do worse than, “Everything’s easier here.”
• Champagne claims to be its own category, distinct from other sparkling wines. Guinness could and should do the same.
• United States seems to have hit a limit. We just don’t know whether it’s biological, intellectual, or social/political.
• Maybe democracy and antibiotics don’t mix. We didn’t worry about herd mentality when the herd was continually culled. We respected our elders because they had defied the odds.
• If Trump’s inner dramas play out as greed versus vanity, root for vanity.
• I’ve avoided success, putting the “shun” in “congratulation.”
• The Irish have the best comfort foods.
• Put your bathroom scale in front of the fridge. Shift your attention from effect to cause.
• The Electoral College elegantly promoted this young nation’s two sources of wealth and security — its people and its land. (Slaves were regrettably counted as the latter.)
• Devotion can be spread without being thinned.
• We don’t know what 2% milk is. “Half the fat” would tell us.
• We use antiperspirant even on days when we have no intention to perspire.
• When the sign says “This Door Must Remain Closed At All Times,” why not just attach a handle to the wall?
• Partners should distinguish whether a dispute comes down to “you versus me” or “us versus not-us.”
• Who goes to a currency exchange to exchange currency?
• While we weren’t watching, Black Friday took over the entire month of November.
• Part of our morning caffeine routine is really about calibration. Getting something “just right” gives us assurance about the day ahead.
• Of all our nation’s perils, the loss of meaningful work frightens me most.
• I’m rethinking whether gossip is always bad. Oftentimes, it seems an excess of otherwise useful and helpful habits.
• What the heck is an organizational “bureau?” Besides the FBI, are there others?
• Destination weddings give couples who have been living together a way to invite their friends to the honeymoon.
• Fire escapes are cool.
• How long before we all feel a need for luggage with all-terrain tires?
• Why doesn’t every old person eventually move to the West Coast, where all the awards shows and most national sporting events are over before 9 PM?
• Shoe stores don’t serve the barefoot anymore.
• Mattress. Firm. Price. (Combine ingredients to make your own frippery.)
• Detractors use historic references to insist that blackface is abhorrent. By that measure, the labels “gay” and “black” should be disallowed.
• What percentage of your conversation topics concern what you’ve read or watched or heard others saying? How much do you talk about what you thought or did or saw yourself?
• Sometimes I can be wrong with a capital R.

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Don Kahle (fridays@dksez.com) writes a column each Friday for The Register-Guard and blogs at www.dksez.com.

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