Fripperies Galore

Fifth Friday footnotes, follow-ups and far-flung fripperies:

• My memory’s not as good as I remember it being.
• “Live and Learn” is the perfect name for St. Vincent dePaul’s latest project.
• Tell me again. Is chicken-fried steak chicken or steak?
• I heard the eclipse warning so many times that now I’m afraid to look up and stare directly at anything.
• How is “standoffish” even a word? It’s just so threeseparatewordish — which, bytheway, is not a word.
• You can walk on egg shells for only so long. Eventually, you run out of eggs.
• Don’t tell me something will be handled “as soon as possible” if I have no way of discerning what’s possible.
• It took me weeks to screen Al Gore’s new movie. All its showtimes were inconvenient.
• In retrospect, we should have become suspicious when we all suddenly needed an appliance called a “food processor.” They could have called the machine a semicolon, but few would have gotten the joke.
• I waste more money on avocados than on lottery tickets. (But this time, my luck will be different…!)
• Maybe it’s just me, but “ash” strikes me as a pessimistic name for a tree varietal.
• I hope whoever coined the term “legacy system” to denote “outdated” got paid well for their work.
• Why are green peppers always less expensive than their other-colored cousins?
• Enlightened self-interest has a heritage in our government, but not self-interest alone. Why would the purely selfish do the hard work required for governance?
• We often know more about a controversy than we do about the issue that caused the controversy in the first place. Being informed is harder than being inflamed.
• My soaker hose leaks.
• Awards are for those who dislike their work. If you need a Lifetime Achievement Award to make your lifetime worth it, you’re doing it wrong.
• The impossible is often more achievable than the difficult. Some assumptions are challenged better by trying than thinking.
• Just because it’s familiar doesn’t mean it makes sense. We’re often forced to choose between rhyme and reason.
• It’s a great improvement that Eugene’s parking garages are now painted a different color on each floor. Now, if they could add those colors beside the floor numbers in the elevator.
• Dogs learned to bark and cats learned to purr. Which has served its species better — aggression or seduction?
• Success bores me before it traps me. I’m lucky that way.
• Do funeral processions ever happen nowadays? (Do people still use the word nowadays?)
• Costco’s cheese pizza has more calories than its meat pizza. That was a revelation to me. Cheese pizza can have fewer — but not necessarily less — toppings.
• If only endings were as easy as they are important.
• Weeding is very like prayer, translating immediate attention into sustained care.
• Dr. Patch Adams says depression is a symptom of loneliness. I think he’s right.
• Ignorance is less dangerous than certainty.
• Better to tend than fend.
• Referring to supremacists as “fringe” and extremists perversely empowers our dominant culture of selective bigotry.
• Sometimes people applaud because they’re happy the show is over.
• The bully pulpit was easier to respect when there wasn’t a bully behind it.

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