Neanderpundit

Well, when i first started working at Inland Steel, all those years ago, I noticed something peculiar about the way the boys celebrated their birthdays.

They would usually catch a guy in the shower, and beat him with a piece of radiator hose for the number of years he is old.

About once a week, this would happen, there were nearly two hundred guys in the shop and rarely a week went by when someone hadn’t a birthday to celebrate. About once a month, someone would go to the hospital, bleeding from the back or legs, often as not a bruised testicle, sometimes a torn scrotum. These were the guys friends. Whoever was the victim of this celebration would gleefully reciprocate when it was his turn. I witnessed this in my first couple weeks of employment, so my birthday became a closely guarded secret. I never participated in this foolishness, and I never desired to.

One day I couldn’t conceal was my hire date; they were less nasty about that, but the only time I ever got caught on my service anniversary was in my second year of employment there; three big guys caught me in the shower while a fourth with a paintbrush coated my wedding tackle liberally with Cop graf, an anti seize compound that was a mixture of grease, graphite, and copper. The gooey, slimy stuff was the consistency of toothpaste and had a high concentration of finely divided copper bits; they called it “The Bronze pecker” and it took forever to get off; literally months later I’d be in the shower and see a tiny fleck of copper where no tiny fleck of copper should be.

At least I didn’t get beat too.

I’m still a bit standoffish about telling people my birthday.

that she has difficulties finding properly fitting footwear. I can sympathise. Big feet run in the family, in fact I have a nephew who has feet so big he has to put his pants on over his head. So for all of us who are too big, too small, too different, too wrongs not making a right, here’s Fats, singing my favorite version of the song:

And just because I’m in a Fats mood, here’s perhaps my favorite Fats song, ‘Two sleepy people”

Neither video is even remotely interesting they’re just the versions of the songs I like best.

Who sees a giant box of angelfarts and thinks, damn, I wish I had a leafblower.

Mayhem. I lurves it.