Basura: Blennies, college football and GHW Bush

Essential Oils that I recognize:  Motor.  Hashish.  Olive. — (attributed to me)

. . . I was dreaming about snorkeling.  There are so many interesting fish and other forms of marine life.  I’ve been very fortunate to have seen so much.

I’ve seen mega fauna (whale sharks, mantas, manatees, tarpon, Goliath groupers).  I also greatly appreciate seeing things like red lipped blennies.  They are about four inches long. They’re tiny little things, but they like it rough.  If you want to see one, be in the right place, like the Caribbean Sea perhaps, and find where the waves are hitting the rocks of the shore.

The red lipped blennies will not be swimming around like most fish (though they can), but rather clinging to the surface of a rock/coral/structure, and moving about using their pectoral fins to propel them in what appears to me as sort of crawling movement.  Their bodies are a beautiful shade of brownish red I think of as mahogany.

But they come by their name naturally.  They have garishly bright red lips.  Those lips are fire engine red, like the brightest shade of the cheapest red lipstick.  Like the brightest flaming shade of a red pepper.  And that’s it for the bright red coloration on these fish.  They are completely mahogany brownish-red colored -except for those lips.  There is a kite board company that has taken the image of the fish as their logo, and it amuses me to see it depicted on a big sail, sometimes “getting air,” with the kiteboard and the kiteboard sailor pulled 20 feet up into the air and sailing 100′ or so.

The almost fanatical devotion to college football

Looks like fun.  For a young man. . .  (excerpted from my daily email to my brother)

It looks, from afar, that for some, college football has replaced religion as a primary focus.  Given my particular biases, that doesn’t seem to be a bad thing.  They don’t proselytize, which I appreciate.  Except for extolling the virtues of one set of “student athletes” over another.

It should be noted that some student athletes are actual students.  I know people who get so wrapped up in the goings on of the kids they are in-conversant on most other topics. Ihear, during this time of the year about the wonderfulness of Michigan State and Michigan, Ohio State, Notre Dame, Alabama, and Iowa – depending on with whom I’m conversing, which team they favor, and how awful those others have proven themselves to be.

My cousin married a guy that has devoted a room of their home into a shrine celebrating the football endeavors of a university, with posters, special footballs, bobblehead dolls, signed jerseys, and other memorabilia that is very important to him.  He has spent money on this, and I suspect he wouldn’t really want to expose the depth of what his passion costs him.

Just in the interest of full disclosure, this guy did not attend the university for which he holds such deep loyalty.  To my surprise, I learned that fellows (and they are, by far, mostly fellows) have developed a seemingly obsessive devotion to a particular team.  They didn’t play football at that school.  Often, they didn’t attend that school.  One guy’s daughter went to grad school there.  One guy thinks he would have liked to have gone there.

Let me be clear: this rabid fanship is not in any way I know a bad thing.  It just seems a little odd.  I notice linguistic characteristics that strike me as peculiar.  First person plural forms, as in “we really need this win,” as opposed to “this is an important game for the team.”  Not calling it the team.  Using “we” or “us”, as in “it would help us if the rain would hold off; we do better on a dry field.”

I’m told tickets to big games are expensive if you buy them directly, and insanely expensive if you buy from a scalper.  People I know flew to the west coast for a big game.  Wow.  For the record, the game was televised.

Once I was riding a bus with my son in Boston, where he attended college.  Two young women got on the bus, and sat next to us.  They were near graduation at Harvard, where they attended.  I had to think they were a little naïve.  They were considering a Michigan university for Medical School, and one told the other that a visit to Ann Arbor was so wonderful, because it seemed the whole city was wearing apparel with a big M on it.  The University of Michigan has a fine medical school.  But I’m guessing all those M shirts were not for the med school.  That’s fine.  I just find it amusing the girls seem unaware.

George H.W. Bush had a sense of humor

Sea of Thunder, by Evan Thomas, is a fine history of naval warfare in Pacific during WWII.  In it is a small segment on one experience of George H.W. Bush.  As a teen aged pilot for the US Navy, he and his two crewmen were shot down over water.  The other two guys perished.  George was saved, to the great surprise of Japanese observers, by the dispatch of a Navy submarine.  The sub came to where he was, surfaced, and picked him up.  “Welcome aboard, sir,” he was greeted.  “I’m glad to be here,” he replied.

I worked in a large office, and took coffee break regularly with 8 or so co-workers.  One Monday talk developed about the SNL skit featuring Dana Carvey as the 41st President, George H. W. Bush.  People at coffee break were laughing as the recalled the portrayal, which suggested Bush was a wimp.  I spoke up, saying the man was not a wimp, and we could look to his war record rather than his speech inflections to draw that conclusion.  My colleagues were surprised.  I was then, as now, and outspoken Democrat and a liberal.  For the record, Bush seemed be amused by Carvey.  Bush once had Carvey attend a function, with Carvey as Bush, with, and with the real Barbara Bush, and doing a scene with Carvey.   George H.W. Bush was known to have a sense of humor.