How many truly memorable advertising slogans can you recall? I have one that's stuck around for nigh onto fifty years. It was broadcast on local radio and TV stations until the fishing resort was sold and converted into an RV park in the '70's, but the words had already become part of the landscape.

"Norm's got worms," it said. Simple and to the point. It could have begun as a hand-painted sign, perhaps even when Norm was a young lad and budding entrepreneur. Perhaps it wasn't even Norm's idea, and had its origin among his young pals who on a sunny Saturday, exchanged the following conversation.

Billy: "Let's go fishing!"
Tom: "We ain't got no bait."
Jack: "Norm's got worms, let's get Norm to go with us."

Lucky thing Berkeley wasn't around then, because "Norm's got Power Bait" just doesn't have the same ring.

I never fished at Norm's. It was in another county, and in those days, there was no reason to travel far afield to fish. In a way, I feel left out, having never used Norm's product from Norm's dock and in Norm's home water. The door of an era closed behind me long after I'd left the building.

I wonder if worms today could ever be as good?

I'm coming to the end of marble-gathering. As of log-out time today, there were 2605 tucked away in a virtual safe deposit box. The goal is 3000, which will take another two days' hard shopping to accrue.

It's been snowing most of the day and melting as quickly as it touches ground. I could use one more good spell of the white stuff before spring, and I mean the kind that piles up a bit and hangs around for a few days. Barring emergencies, there's no particular reason to leave home, making it the perfect opportunity to tell Clyde to give the driveway a miss if he's thinking about plowing. Boys and their toys! I think he just likes to play with the plow. He got it stuck in a drift during the last interlude.

Having no snow to plow, he might resort to dragging molehills. Marvelous drag harrow he has! It's an old bedspring, twin size, and hitches to the back of the "quad" by means of a chain. Makes short work of molehills, but by morning, you can bet Mr. Mole will have reasserted his right of prior domain with a few dozen more.

We neighbors each have our own preferred method for mole removal. Clyde and I prefer a gentle approach. He drags, I rake. In either case, the point is to let light into the hole. The result is that the mole moves on to an area that is dark, namely, Dennis' yard.

Dennis is less "green" about the process. I suspect him of having some city upbringing, and this surmise is bolstered by the fact that he uses poisons, gas, traps, fusees and other less ecologically sound methods. These ways work no better than the kinder types, and only succeed in transferring moles back to tunnels under Clyde's or my yard. We have an impromptu mole exchange going on, and it's been that way for years.

Enter the new kid on the block, Giraffe. Giraffe is a sculptor of recycled metal, and a bit of a loose cannon, as it were. He has a means to eliminate moles that is almost 100% foolproof. It is also cumbersome, unwieldy, ugly and violent.

Picture if you will half of a metal tank once used for storing heating fuel below ground at a residence. It is rusty, about three feet high, oval in shape with the longer dimension being approximately four feet. It weighs a ton, and no child would possibly have the strength to tip it over, were there any children within a two-mile radius (there are not). When put into position, it conceals a hair-trigger sawed-off shotgun loaded with buckshot, aimed at the hill most recently constructed by that pesky mole. One hopes the mole is not done with its work, because when it returns and disturbs the soil...Ka-blooey! No more mole.

Giraffe installs and services his marvelous invention for free at any and all of our residences. He checks it daily when in use and even disposes of the moles. The only real drawback is if it happens to go off in the middle of the night. A shotgun blast inside a large metal enclosure is guaranteed to wake even the soundest sleeper, even when the apparatus is twenty yards away.

But let's don't quibble. It works. Nevertheless, it's a large country here, and vacancies will soon be filled by more moles. An endless exchange, this...like dipping the ocean dry with a teaspoon, as the saying goes.

Today I am painfully aware of just how far removed from the science of mathematics I've become. I need a simple formula...a very simple formula...and can't figure out how to derive it.

Let us say that one makes an initial outlay of $200 to open a shop which will hold five items. To enlarge the shop to hold ten items requires an additional $200, i.e. $400. You may only enlarge in five-item increments, and in fact, MUST enlarge in five-item increments, no larger, increment by increment. To enlarge to hold 15 items requires the amount paid to enlarge to a ten-item shop ($400) plus $200 more. Each time you enlarge the shop, you pay the amount of the previous fee plus an additional $200. I want to know what you're going to have paid out by the time you've enlarged your shop to hold 100 items. This is a formula that's going to have a couple of x's in it, some nice round numbers and a few plus signs...elementary algebra...and I cannot seem to wrap my head around it. Ping! Where did I leave my brain?

Maybe it'll come to me in the night, now that the waters have receded. Musta had the dream interpretation right after all.

They say that human beings think more clearly and creatively when they're prone. I know I do. I'm not sure about supine, but it seems to me I've had a few good ideas while I was lying on my tum. I always keep paper and pen readily accessible, as well as a flashlight, lest my midnight brainstorms disturb the slumberer beside me. I've tried to write in the dark, and let me tell you something, my penmanship is impossible to read at the best of times. I've scratched down ideas for stories that may never come to fruition, solely because I can't decode the hieroglyphs.

Ah well. As I once told a friend who suggested that I need an attitude adjustment: "Yeah, I'm vertical and I really need to be horizontal." It's that hour of the night, and I'm off to find the elusive formula, x's amid a welter of zzzzzzzzzzzzz's...

Why am I dreaming about dangerous waters?

I thought I had the answer after the first dream. It seemed so obvious: the river had risen since the last time I'd been there, and there was no way I was going to get across it, not knowing how to swim. I'm dealing with a difficult situation in my life (caring for an aging parent in my home), and it seemed logical to dream of an obstacle and my inadequacy. Simple dream, simple conclusion...and apparently wrong, because they say that once you have correctly interpreted a dream, you won't dream along the same lines again.

Last night, I was on the beach of a large lake (I could easily have mistaken it for a seaside beach, except that was not the sense of it within the dream). There were small shops along the roadside parallel to the shore, and a finger jetty dividing the main water from a small, placid bay. Someone I knew was in a boat on the lake, frantically signalling to me the size of the fish he had just caught. For some reason, I headed in the opposite direction (going to get another boat to go out to meet him, perhaps?) and began walking out on the sand surrounding the bay. Suddenly, an abnormal incoming tide rose around me and I was being lifted off my feet by the water...my impression was that a hurricane was driving the water, and I woke before I was engulfed.

I'd say (looking this over) that my original interpretation still applies, although I can't quite figure the fish. Maybe it's just normal for me to dream of fish, especially after a dreadful dry spell in the fishing department. Maybe I have to dream these dreams until I find a real-life solution. Truly, the tide is already up to my chin and the winds are far from calm.

I'm thinking about having another go at Spanish. Didn't do too well last time because I got bogged down in how to talk to your taxicab driver, how to be sure your flight was going to be on time, how to find a newsstand...all things which have absolutely no relevance in my life whatsosmeggingeverlutely. No, this time, I'm going to go at it with a total-immersion program designed for kids.

It's full of functional things like, "This is a dog," "My socks are blue," "My friend is happy." Aren't those the kinds of things that real people talk about, or have I missed the boat?

Okay, I'd like to be able to say, "I'd like a non-fat, decaf, triple-tall cappuchino, very dry," but that can come later. I'm sure I can get by with a simple, "Coffee, please," for now, especially since I'll drink the stuff in almost any state and at any temperature, and prefer it black and strong. After all, I'm only going to be talking to the Mexican kid who waits table at the local taco emporium, and they don't have an espresso bar yet.

Who'd believe that something purported to be safe for human consumption could have that effect a person? I seem to be 85% recovered, ergo, it was those dratted instant mashed potatoes, a reputable brand, even. I thought I was knocking on Death's door...Death's outhouse door, that is. Think I'll stick to rice henceforth.

The gardening urge is upon me. A dozen or so tempting little gold packets are spread out on the kitchen table, waiting to be opened. It took a few years for the point to soak in, but I finally realized that I was not a vegetable gardener by any stretch of the imagination. Have you ever heard of a person who could fail to grow peas? Inspire radish tops without a single bulb? Flunk zucchini, for God's sake? You've met one now.

But I grow flowers, beautiful flowers, although never in any organized sense. I made a nominal attempt to stick with red, orange and yellow hues, but in the end, the garden last year was a riot of color: clumps of rudbeckias were interspersed with white, lavender, maroon, pink and blue cornflowers and tall pink paper daisies. Red peonies flourished beside wild lilac, black tulips popped up beside a crimson miniature rose, a handful of orange and gold nasturtiums and one errant purple anemone. This year's plan is basically blue, never mind the line of hybrid sunflowers that promise to be anything from cream to chocolate. I couldn't pass that up. Besides, the birds will like them.

The enforced wait before planting is nerve-wracking. I want to plant. I want to break out the light, set it up over the washer and dryer, and be thoroughly inconvenienced for the next three months when I have to remove it all every time I want to do a load of laundry. The seed packets are explicit about over-anxiety: "sow seed indoors 6-8 weeks before last expected frost," or some such nonsense. Last frost here can be as late as mid-June! Be reasonable!

I've given in to the urge a few times in years gone by, and I know it's the wrong course of action. No plant is going to thrive if, in its infancy, its little roots reach out for nourishment and find nothing but air and light at the outside of a peat pellet. No, I must resist for the greater good. It's not about me, instant gratification or my compulsion to germinate; it's about new life which, when given proper care, will return a full season of beauty in its maturity.

Sick. Don't know if it was the instant mashed potatoes (special request from the invalid mother, and something I ordinarily wouldn't eat on a million-buck bet) or if maybe I've genuinely got the flu.

Haven't been sick with a disease for quite a while, and I'd kinda forgotten how absolutely miserable it makes a person. Spent most of the day in bed, and for me, that's just one step away from calling the undertaker. Have made brief forays into the living room to check my email, but that's been the extent of my physical activity for the day.

Except, perhaps, for playing with Skunk. She seems to know that I'm not quite right, and after spending half an hour doing anything she could (i.e., digging a "hole" in the pillow, violently chasing her tail in circles on the bed, leaping and bounding across me), she gave it up for a lost cause and laid down. One little hand reached out and just barely came to rest on my leg, I think to reassure herself that I was still there.

Kittens are so full of play, they don't have time to be affectionate. Maybe this was a sign of maturity. A friend who has two kitties just a month older than Skunk is experiencing similar signs of growth in them. Who knows? Maybe by the next time I come down with something painfully abdominal, the cat will be ready to pretend she's a hot water bottle. That'd be nice.

Neopets withdrawal! I am in agony. The site is uncharacteristically FUBAR, and I'm all dressed up with noplace to go.

So why don't I tell you about Spin-the-Kitty? Might as well, can't dance.

I'm not sure how this process got started, exactly. We have a sturdy metal glider rocker/revolving chair in the living room, just arm's reach from the computer chair. When Skunk got big enough to get up on furniture, she claimed the chair for her own. (Never mind that it was my chair originally!) Consequently, I put a folded up afghan on the seat as a cushion for the Princess and it's where you'll find her most of the time unless she is a) on the pillow on the bed or b) latched on with all teeth to the back of your leg.

It might have been one day when I was at the computer and the cat was awake in the chair when the fit of wickedness just came over me. Not mean-wicked, just fun-wicked. I recall leaning over to give the chair a little spin and expecting her to jump out, but she didn't. I nudged the chair again, got it going a little faster. Kitty tipped her head back and watched the ceiling going round and round. I didn't push the issue, and let the chair spin to a stop.

A few days later, I tried it again. Wacky cat actually seemed to be enjoying it! I got her going a little faster this time. When the chair stopped spinning, she got down. Again, what I was expecting didn't happen. She wasn't the least bit unsteady and was perfectly capable of walking straight to the kitchen. As days went by, we engaged in the game fairly often and she learned what I meant when I said, "I s'pose you want me to play Spin the Kitty."

Eventually, I had to try it myself. Now I'm a good many years older than I was the last time I sat on a piano stool and spun until it came unscrewed, and since this chair is on ball-bearings, there's no danger of dumping one's self onto the floor. I went 'round a few dozen times, but not near as many as Skunk normally enjoyed. When I stopped, I learned the error of my ways. Suffice to say that I was significantly nauseated and disoriented for most of the rest of the day.

Leaving this occupation to my cat, then, we play Spin the Kitty daily. She has discovered that tagging my hand as she whirls by is also fun, as is taking a bite out of me, but she's also developed a few refinements of her own. One is leaning over backwards with half the cat hanging over the chair arm. Dangerous, this, because there's an end table nearby on which a cat head can get audibly knocked. I've seen her quick reflexes in action when she feels it first start to bend an ear, and she'll double up on herself until she's clear of it and then lie back in full extension for the next pass. And man, we go fast!

If the kitty wants to spin and I'm not paying appropriate attention, she'll start at the kitchen door, run full tilt across the room and dive into the chair, back feet on the seat and front feet over the back to get it started, and then flop in the seat and wait for me to respond. If that's not sufficient, she'll roll and stretch and hang off the arm, all the while trying to engage my eyes with her huge yellow-green ones. Sooner or later, I'll spin the kitty, if for no other reasons than to have a moment's peace and escape the stare.

Last night, I was occupied with Neopets when the mood seized her. Failing to attract my attention, she directed her request to grandma. Grandma wasn't having any of it. It's not that she doesn't approve. I think she's a little afraid that once the kitty realizes that grandmas do know how to play, the play will gravitate toward leg-biting and wrasslin'. But Skunkycat was desperate. She wanted a spin before bed. Finally, she stood up on her back legs and reached up the back of the chair and hopped up and down like a cat on a trampoline.

You can't say no to a polite request like that. I put the Neopets to bed and spun the kitty.

Chased around town today, an exhausting venture and relatively pointless, except for visiting Sande and getting my new fishing license.

Okay, the new license isn't required for a couple of months, but I like to be ahead of the game. I mean, I'd hate to miss a fish because I had to renew my license at the last minute, and the fish will be lining up to be caught by the time April rolls around.

Plainly put, I guess I'm a Trout Bum. I prefer to think of myself as a hunter-gatherer who takes advantage of technology simply because it's there and it makes the job easier. I like my graphite rods, thank you, and I like circle hooks and Power Bait and quick-and-dirty sweatshop flies from WalMart. I don't particularly covet a Loomis stick or hand-tied Hendricksons, although I have been known to envy the guy standing next to me because he has Safeway shrimp and he's catching fish, whereas mine came from Associated Grocers and I'm not. Works the other way oftener than not, too.

I tie some of my own flies: patterns that I know work and that I have a hard time finding in the shops. I'm pretty fussy about whose brand of line I use and what color it is because I can see definite advantages through long years of experience. On the other hand, I've fished with bamboo and learned that it doesn't really affect the bite on local streams and lakes, and likewise, expensive flies get mangled by trout teeth just as quickly as the cheapies. Bing! You're either out 75 cents or five bucks. The choice is yours. The brookie/cuttie/rainbow is in your creel one way or the other if you know your business.

Tell ya what...there's another link over there on the right to a place called "High Country." If you doubt what I'm saying, have a look. I'll show ya who knows how to catch fish around here.

So why am I collecting Wooden Marbles in Neopets?

I think it has to do with the real-life jar of marbles in the back bedroom...2907, to be exact...and that dates back to a childhood passion.

I had something like 300 when I was a kid (none of which survived to be housed in the back room jar), and I stored them in a pale green metal tin that once held a fruitcake, quite possibly from my grandmother's era. There were a couple of moon-cratered pottery ones that had been my grandfather's, a few glassies that had escaped some game, cat's eyes (including one or two white cat's eyes which my peers would have coveted had they known I owned them), but most of the collection were your good old regulation white with a colored swirl. And they were a lovely white, too, not the bluish-grey recycled-glass shade they are today.

Among the lot, there were a few that were very small by comparison, say half the diameter of a normal marble or slightly smaller. There were three plain, opaque yellow ones and a white one, and one clear, intensely deep blue one. The blue one wasn't quite round, either, and had a groove from pole to pole on one side. It was my very favorite marble, far and away, and it alone was named -appropriately!- as Cobalt.

I didn't play marbles. Heaven forbid that you ever do anything to damage one of them, like flick it into another marble! I had solitary games to play with them, and none involved exposing them to hazard.

All children have something that drives a parent to distraction, and my mother is less hard to drive than most. I took great glee in assembling a line of marbles in the fruitcake tin's lid (the tiny yellow and white ones and Cobalt at the tail of the line) and spinning them 'round and 'round and 'round. You might imagine that a child's badly nearsighted vision (then uncorrected) might have been delighting in the revolving colors, but you'd only be half right. I was equally entranced by the sound -whirr! whirr! whirr!- of glass on metal.

I use the word "entranced" deliberately. I am today a practicing shaman, and use various sounds to aid me in reaching an altered state of consciousness. Indeed, the sound of the marbles on their voyage carried my young fancy into other worlds. But at some point, my reverie would be interrupted by my mother's shrill, "Stop DOING that!!!" and the game/meditation would come to an abrupt end.

So why am I collecting virtual marbles? Nostalgia, maybe. Or not. Maybe just because marbles are a good thing to collect.

Earthquakes in the Loyalty Islands. Now there's some real news and it's being systematically ignored by the media in favor of stoopid politics. Why don't they pay attention to the things that really matter, eh?

Since Christmas, there's been a whole lot of shakin' goin' on off the northeast corner of Oz (Australia to you, mate), and we're talking some serious seismicity, here. There have been two temblors at 7.+ and a scad in the 5.2 to 5.8 range. The pattern doesn't seem to be one of foreshock/quake/aftershock, either, and the buggers are mostly a uniform 10.0 miles deep. Either there's a new volcano thinking about sticking its head up as an afterthought to the Loyalties, or there's some major subduction going on. One way or the other, it's keeping me awake nights. Go on, click the link on the right. It'll take you to the National Earthquake Information Center, a service of the USGS. Once you've verified my little report here, I suggest going lightly on the caffeine.

Ay, caramba! That's what I get for not taking a newspaper or having TV, and never turning on the radio. To me, the Hawking attacks were new news. It began -hold on a minute!- four years ago. Four years!? (Loop? What loop? I don't see a loop, so how can I possibly be out of it? Looks like a perfectly straight line to me, folks. Why, yes, I have been travelling on it for quite some time.)

Tell me why knowing this wasn't today's headline makes me feel better?

The image created by my perception of events has changed. It's old now, monochrome, like a faded sepiatone. In my mind's eye, this heroic man was lying in a hospital bed, recently battered and bloodied by hooligans. Now I discover that although he is in fact in hospital, it's for an "unrelated case of pneumonia." The mind readjusts, removes the bandages, erases the bruises, heals the wounds. Marvelous thing, the mind.

I feel like a Grade A shitheel for feeling better, but I do. Stephen Hawking doesn't. Of that I'm almost certain. But I do. It's history, and history, if one accepts certain of Hawking's principles, is nothing but the event's light cone spreading backward through time.

Fish? One for Sande, one for me. His was the first fish of the year. It was much-deserved. He had a bit of a hospital stay late last fall, too, and so merits his moment of glory.

Stephen Hawking has been attacked and beaten. I feel like I did when I came home from several days off-trail in the backcountry to discover that the World Trade Centers were lying in rubble: disoriented, out-of-body. Colors slap the eye and sunlight looks somehow alien. Nothing tastes right. Hell, nothing tastes at all.

Why? Okay, I disagree with no-boundaries on the principle that mathematics is inherently wrong in the same way that music hasn't been the same since ol' Bach tempered the scale, but that doesn't mean I'd resort to violent means to put forth my point. What could possibly motivate someone to attack a person like Hawking? My mind says it had to have been teenagers. Britain is notorious for its violent children. "Too many rats in the box," I always say, referring to the psychology experiment which involves adding rodents into a confined area. Despite the fact that the observer believes there is plenty of room for more rats, the rats don't see it quite the same way and begin killing each other. Yep, too many rats in the box labelled "England." Too many rats in the box labelled "Earth," for that matter.

I'm out. There won't be ANY rats around the pond today except me and Sande. There aren't too many fools who like to fish in January. Wish me a fish!

Tomorrow I am bloody well going fishing. It'll be the first time in almost two months, due to various home crises. I don't give a flying fig if I catch a fish. It'll be enough to be sitting on the bank with my line in the water, and in the company of a good friend. No art in this, not hardly. Fly-fishing will come later in the year when I want to get down to brass tacks.

I'm asking myself a question here: what is the purpose of a blog? It's not like a Chat Room (which, incidentally, I despise) 'cuz you don't get input back about what you write unless you're fool enough to post an email address and invite the weirdos into your system. In fact, you don't even know for sure that anybody is reading the dratted thing. You could just as well keep a physical journal, a pen-and-paper god-why-did-I-ever-write-this-drivel book. Been there, done that. Hated myself in the metaphorical morning some years later when I re-read it. I was full of self-pity in those days, although I was truthfully living a nightmarish life.

If somebody does happen to read this...like, say for example, it goes up on the Most Recent Posts lists as it undoubtedly will...I have an apology to tender. I am a writer. Normally, my writing is grammatically correct to a frightening degree and my spelling is immaculate. It ain't gonna be like that here, folks! Not on your tintype! This bit contains the ramblings of a bored gourd, and the only reason I'm writing it is because I'm not quite wicked enough to go wake the cat up and say, "C'mon, cat! Let's PLAY!"

No, I'm writing a blog because a friend has a blog, and like a good monkey, I feel inclined to imitate. Chances are, the novelty will wear off in a day or so and I'll abandon the stupid thing. If it persists in cyberspace ad infinitum, ad nauseam, more power to it. As far as I've been able to determine, there is no ecological reason to abstain from creating cybergarbage.

As for those physical journals of years long gone, they are no more. I gleefully burned them, and with them, a chapter of my life that deserved deletion. Ah, what a cleansing that was! A veritable zephyr of the soul! ("Warning! Warning, Will Robinson! Hideous purple prose!" Oh well, I wasn't intending this for Random House. Besides, they'd probably mistake it for a new art form at this point in time.)

All right, I've wasted enough time on this TOTALLY pointless venture. Come to think of it, picking on the cat might have been a better way to spend the evening...

If this isn't a journey in and of itself, I don't know what qualifies. It's strange, talking to oneself on the internet. Bespeaks my state of mind, I suppose. All right, then...I guess I can always say the King of the Potato People told me to do it. Blog on!