WILL ROGERS WISDOM

At our house were two books that stand out in my mind: a book about the life and death of Will Rogers and Moby Dick. I only looked through the whale story book but spent a lot of time leafing through and reading about Will Rogers. Here are some bits of wisdom that have been attributed to Will. In case you are unaware of Will Rogers, he was probably the greatest political sage this country has ever known. Enjoy the following:

1. Never slap a man who's chewing tobacco.
2. Never kick a cow chip on a hot day.
3. There are 2 theories to arguing with a woman...neither works.
4. Never miss a good chance to shut up.
5. Always drink upstream from the herd.
6. If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.
7. The quickest way to double your money is to fold it and put it back in your pocket.
8. There are three kinds of men: The ones that learn by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence and find out for themselves.
9. Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.
10. If you're riding' ahead of the herd, take a look back every now and then to make sure it's still there.
11. Lettin' the cat outta the bag is a whole lot easier'n puttin' it back.
12. After eating an entire bull, a mountain lion felt so good he started roaring. He kept it up until a hunter came along and shot him. The moral: When you're full of bull, keep your mouth shut.

### There you go --- hope you got a smile or two out of this. Please forgive me for not editing Number 8, but then again, there might be others that could be offensive that I simply overlooked. So, keep the "forgiveness" spirit open as needed. LIFE is really not a great mystery to most of us. I did say it was Will Rogers that was supposed to have written these, not Bill Venrick, so that may be a little help in getting me "off the hook".

Posted by Bill Venrick at 10:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The passing of loved ones, whether it be parents, children or siblings, creates a need for us to "look back" in our mind's eye to conjure up sufficient memories to soothe us for the moment. Sometimes we are able to do a bit better by pulling out a photo album or digging through that box that has photos which had never quite made it to an album but you just couldn't throw them away.

Another thought of mine goes back probably twenty years when a friend of mine said his parents didn't leave any tracks of their existence. That is not the case with either of our parents but it certainly is a sad state of non-existence if that is the case with your family.

Even during hard times like the years of the Great Depression and the years shortly after, people found the few cents required to "take a snapshot" or even spend a few hard-earned dollars to go the professional photographic studio downtown and get a real portrait. My wife and I were born in 1932 which is about three years into the depression and it surprised us to find a precious photo of my wife standing at the end of a little building her father built for them to live in until their more adequate house was built.

My parents did not seem to be in the same financial straits that my wife's parents experienced because in addition to a photo album stuffed with snap shots we still have a few pictures where you got " all dressed up" and had a real photo made, you know the kind, where the photo is mounted in a decorated easel style folder you would see on mantels, bureaus or tables. Perhaps the exact reasons such photos were bought will never be known but suffice it to say it's good those photos were acquired. Recently we came across a photo of my wife and her brother when they were around eight and three years of age. The first thing we thought was her parents spending that kind of money because it would have been considered a luxury.

Whatever the reasons photos were taken, their very presence is proof that, even if money had to be put aside for a few weeks or maybe even put the expense on a charge tab, some kind of value was realized by leaving photographic tracks (or images). What is really sad and disappointing to descendants is to find pages of albums filled with people without any names - and no one is alive to help identify them.

True, trips down memory lane can be made in our minds but isn't it nice to physically look at photos "way back when they or we were kids" or when our parents got married and kids were only a gleam in their father's eyes.

Today's digital cameras have nearly brought the professional photo studio into your kitchen or living room table. And really, this has only happened during the last few years because only the wealthy could afford a digital cameras. The inexpensive digital cameras today, and the computer programs to crop, size and group pictures make preserving pictures as easy as taking the pictures - well, with the help of older grandchildren maybe! And we must not forget the cell phones with cameras!

A strange announcement was found in our newspaper about a photographic business shutting down and they wanted the public to stop by and look at photographs that were never picked up. It appears they have a bunch of them and they want to give people a chance to come in and look over these photos and simply take them (at no charge). They're hoping the photos will be appreciated by friends or relatives of people who never came to pick up their pictures. Whatever they have left will simply be trashed. When I heard this I recalled an incidence of several years ago when another photo studio closed after being in business over 75 years and they had a large quantity of glass negatives that were simply trashed! My, what personal photographic records were simply lost because someone did not place any value in that old-time method of printing photos from glass slides.

I have attended many auctions or sales where a box of albums are often on the tables, as well as professional studio photos. No one cared or had any interest in keeping or sending these photos on to descendants. Probably twenty years ago my wife saw two very large oval picture frames with photos of a local couple and bought them sheerly because of the frames. Years ago my wife's own family made the decision to trash many old large picture frames but they saved the photos which were, for the most part, photos that had been re-touched with charcoal techniques. It is not a simple matter to save or store such prints either and silverfish can cause damage to such photos stored carelessly. But some in today's society seem to say, "Who cares?"

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TAKE A PICTURE TODAY -- and leave tracks. But don't forget to identify the people in the photo! THE WORDWRIGHT

Posted by Bill Venrick at 11:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

T. J. RAY, Guest essayist, from Oxford, Mississippi
Retired English professor - University of Mississippi

Mom often rebuked Mr. Catledge for letting his hunting dogs, which he kept in his back yard near ours, bark and bark and bark much of the night. The problem and the dogs went away when he got too old to hunt. She always insisted that neighbors have some duty to those around them not to disturb their world.

Neighbor is a curious word, one that has lost much of the meaning Mom thought it included. In Anglo-Saxon it started as a verb, buan "to dwell." A person who dwelled close at hand was a neah gebur "near dweller". What one Anglo Saxon homeowner expected of his near dwellers I don't know, but in time the word began to suggest a friendliness, a willingness to be compatible to the neighborhood. People thought that folks in the "hood" were somehow special and greeted them with "Hi, neighbor." A cup of sugar or stick of butter was usually available in a pinch when it was too late to go to the store and the cake was almost ready for the oven.

Recently a friend (who is not a neighbor) shared his frustration with me about one of his neighbors. Seems the neighbor owns one or two large dogs, which he lets out of the pen about five o'clock each morning. These critters immediately set to howling, as though they have a major disturbance to deal with, keeping it up for almost an hour.

I asked my friend how he was dealing with it. His grim expression answered my question eloquently. He doesn't know how to deal with it. His first impulse was to confront his neighbor, as Mom used to confront Mr. Catledge, but he doesn't really know the guy, barely knows his name. Another solution was to call the law on the fellow, but he concluded without reason that the problem would return as soon as the law departed. In extreme moments of trying to milk those last thirty minutes of cozy sleep before giving up, my friend fleetingly considered just going up the street, standing in front of the "neighbor's" house and shooting the offending curs.

What choice did he make I asked: polite request for silence, calling the sheriff, or shooting the beasts. His answer with a sad shake of the head was "None of those." So there he is, almost waiting for the unwanted wake-up yelping and terribly frustrated by the fact that there is no good way to deal with the problem.

This case suggests that long ago, warm feelings neighbors once had for folks living near them have gone away. Perhaps it is instructive to know that the early Dutch word boer and the modern English word boor come from the same early Germanic "gebur." The Dutch word signified a peasant (the Boer War) or an insensitive person. Maybe our word for loud, insensitive, uncaring, rude, and thoughtless folks ought to be neighboor.

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THANKS T.J., for this word study. You've given us sufficient food for thought to ruminate about ourselves and our neighbors. THE WORDWRIGHT

Posted by Bill Venrick at 10:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

HUMOR FOR LEXOPHILES (LOVERS OF WORDS)
Volume One

Attribution is unknown -- many of these have been around and around for many years.

I wondered why the baseball was getting bigger. Then it hit me.

Police were called to a day care where a three-year-old was resisting a rest.

Did you hear about the guy whose whole left side was cut off? He's all right now.

The roundest knight at King Arthur's round table was Sir Cumference.

The butcher backed up into the meat grinder and got a little behind in his Work.

To write with a broken pencil is pointless.

When fish are in schools they sometimes take debate.

The short fortuneteller who escaped from prison was a small medium at large.

A thief who stole a calendar got twelve months.

A thief fell and broke his leg in wet cement. He became a hardened criminal.

Thieves who steal corn from a garden could be charged with stalking.

We'll never run out of math teachers because they always multiply.

When the smog lifts in Los Angeles, U.C.L.A.

The math professor went crazy with the blackboard. He did a number on it.

The professor discovered that her theory of earthquakes was on shaky ground.

The dead batteries were given out free of charge.

If you take a laptop computer for a run you could jog your memory.

A dentist and a manicurist fought tooth and nail.

A bicycle can't stand alone; it is two tired.

A will is a dead giveaway.

Posted by Bill Venrick at 11:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Words "make the world go around". Words make or lose the sale. "A word fitly spoke is like apples of Gold..." (Proverbs 25:11a. KJV). It has always been so. Even the wisest man in the sacred Scriptures dared to say, "...of making many books there is no end." (Ecclesiastes 12:12) WORDS make up such books.

The "makers of computers" have tried to convince us that the printed book is gone forever, which is tantamount to saying "we know we are not ". The doomsday prophets numbering the days for print don't give up easily but it will be a long time before all printed books have disappeared. True, the newspaper has bought into this theory and sometimes we have to admit, "rightly so" but let's face it, the newspaper has always been somewhat of a temporary collection of (sometimes) mindless words. "Fish wrapper" is something many newspapers are destined to be. And consider the bottom of the bird-cage --- not exactly a memorable place to be, would you say?

Do not be hoodwinked. Those CD's you get with computer software are today's substitute for books of yesteryear. But the consumers are the printers of those owner manuals! True, the contents of these plastic disks are not printed with ink onto paper which is folded, stitched , glued and bound into a real book. But the books of centuries past were not exactly like books on our shelves either. So, "books" have changed through the ages from clay tablets, stiff course sheets of papyri or parchment made from dried skins of animals that were rolled into scrolls and stored in clay jars. It is still safe to quote that old passage: "...of making many books there is no end..." Books, and "print" have just taken on a new form and look.

A few years ago when I built a bookcase that is in back of the computer I am working on right now, I thought it would be a novel thing to plaster a piece of a newspaper "Classified Ads" onto one side of the case with the hope that someday someone would read about the prices of houses in the days I built that bookcase. Let's face it, those secure copper boxes that fill the ubiquitous corner stones in buildings all around town contain newspapers and copies of books! And books, my friend, are being printed every day - but one thing for sure, they are being written, published and printed in ways never before dreamed of.

"Type" too is nearly an anachronism. The Chinese may well have been the first humans to "make type" or pieces of clay or some rigid material that could be locked up in some kind of chase, letter by letter, word by word, and line by line to express thoughts or ideas. Then that "type" would be impressed onto a piece of paper and passed around for people to learn something they may not have known before. Then, of course, to type (before computer days) you used a typewriter! Try and find one of those today - you might start with Yard Sales.

WHAT is said is important but what really matters is WHO said something. The ridiculous warnings printed on practically everything from toasters to hedge trimmers are a perfect example. Who in the world would do some of the stupid things that are written as warnings on a bread toaster? But alas, it is only because of our litigious society that these warnings are included. There is a CYR policy or procedure. Ask any nurse what this cryptic expression or note might mean. Notes on a hospital chart are written for the primary purpose of protecting someone's reputation and reliability. The WHO is still the most important when I consider anything printed.

What I am trying to say is WHO is the most important when it comes to what is written (that which has been set in type, composed by word processors, or written with a ball-point pen). The one who writes "I love you" is demonstrating conversation, not just preparing a message. And WHO says that message is more important than the words! Napoleon used what and who words accurately when he said, "It is the cause and not the death, that makes the martyr." And Pythagoras knew words are vehicles -- "A thought is an idea in transit."

Don't give up on the printed word. What you are reading truly is not a book, nor is it printed on paper (at least not unless you "select PRINT") but it is as close to being printed in a book as you can get, at least in our world of computerized copy. And our world of copy machines (printers included) has made it possible to print thousands of copies of whatever we want to say without holding a pencil or ball-point pen in our hands - we just select a few keys and "let our fingers" do all the work.

What good is what you are thinking unless you put it into words? I suppose something can be thought of that might contradict what I just wrote but the principle behind these words is WORDS ARE COMMUNICATION. Talk to people. Tell people what they need to know. Without words from the special person, YOU, no one will be able to fulfill your needs or be aware of your wants..

I am about ready to agree with Dante's thoughts, "Come, follow me, and leave the world to its babbling." NO MORE BOOKS? Balderdash!

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Posted by Bill Venrick at 10:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)