AlphaLima

I was watching television the other night, watching the Lakers stink it up against the San Antonio Melodramatists, and as the nighttime viewing hours spooled by, I sat there in foolish oblivion, unaware of the absolute awesomeness that was being aired simultaneously on another channel.

On the Hallmark Channel, typically the purveyor of much that I view skeptically.

Only last Sunday night, they were airing a Hallmark original movie.

Shark Swarm.

Starring ex-Duke brother and erstwhile country singing legend John Schneider and former mermaid Darryl Hannah, apparently the show featured sharks, swarms of them, swarming around and devouring people. While I did not see but about five minutes of the docudrama, I can almost bet that it went like this: some wacky oceanic business causes all of the sharks to start congregating around one central resort-like location, and the good guy and his lady friend are battling some sort of human evildoers who are more than likely jeopardizing the ecological welfare of the aforementioned burg, and at some point in the greatness that is this plot, the bad guys and the good guys end up on a boat, and after coming perilously close to perishing, the good guys prevail while the bad guys get eaten by sharks, swarms of them. Pepper liberally with bad acting, stunted dialogue, and half bake. Deelish!

I also learned recently that a new Incredible Hulk movie will be released this summer. Genius on two levels–first, the latest Hulk movie was gut-wrenchingly bad. So this next one should be much, much better. Plus, instead of Eric Bana as Bruce Banner, they got Ed Norton playing the part. And, the dies are already cast for movie tie-ins. Just this last weekend I saw a flyer in the Sunday paper marketing gigantic foam Hulk Smash Hands v. 2, v. 2 only because they look to my untrained eye like slightly darker green versions of the initial Smash Hands offering. I’d imagine that those avid collectors out there are seething now since their original, brighter green Smash Hands’ value is decimated by the newest Smash Hands product: “Dang it! Nobody’s gonna pay top dollar for my minty Smash Hands in original packaging! These new ones make mine look like total crap!” Were I you, I’d stock up on Smash Hands v. 2 because their worth will surely skyrocket since the Hulk movie prospects are (hopefully) tapped out after this summer.

I have figured out that the ease with which I can find the lids to the plastic lunch containers is inverse to the amount of ill will I am feeling towards packing lunches.

The containers are stored on the bottom shelf of the cabinet by the refrigerator in a larger plastic container.  If all is rosy on the lunch-packing detail, well, right there those lids are!  Ta Da!

If things are a bit more stormy, then I am pretty much guaranteed to have to hunker down, rummage around on the bottom shelf, fight back any urges towards bloodlust, and steam until I find the stupid lids.  Not Ta Da!

Like most everybody else by now who’s in the Eastern US, we got cicadas all over the place. Well, not all over the place, but in many, many places. Ms. AlphaLima counted ninety-one husks and cicadas on a single, foot-tall spiderwort plant in the area of our yard that seems to be ground zero for this scrabbly, buzzy explosion.

At our house, we have all appreciated the event–the kids have enjoyed traipsing about the yard collecting shells and putting them in buckets, daring entomologists staggering around in the yard, little arms reaching back into shrubs, Baby Girl attired appropriately for the hunt in her pink crocs.

Ms. AlphaLima enjoys hearing the cicadas calling each to each, the sound swelling and waning off down the way. She likened it to sounding like bamboo, and it sounds like that, sort of. Run your thumb down the teeth of a comb, but make the comb out of bamboo, and then multiply the number of thumbs you have by a thousand and run each thumb down its own individual bamboo comb and stand five houses down through the trees out of sight and give three or four hundred of your thumbs a break on occasion to vary the sound output of this fabulous din and there you’ll have it! You may need to add in the sound of water running somewhere in the house to lend an air of the constancy of the song, subliminal but steady, no heartbeat quick flashes here. And if sunlight lands on you while you are thumbing the bamboo combs, you’d better get those thumbs a’moving because that’s exactly what the cicadas do. Sun out = racket up.

What I’ve marvelled at about the cicadas is that the sound seems paradoxical–you can’t really pin down the origins of the song, but it is always there to some degree when they are singing. It’s a tricky sound, too, as you’ll think it is gone because you are momentarily distracted by something else, but then, in a quiet moment, there it is again. I have noticed the sound

• over and between the recording of Linda Rondstadt singing “It’s So Easy (To Fall In Love)” that they were broadcasting over the loudspeakers at the local Sonic Saturday afternoon as I was picking up lunch for the family
• through the closed sliding glass doors as I was standing on our sun porch
• as I was driving home one afternoon with my windows down
• during commercial breaks whilst watching television.

I have gotten some mileage out of mulling over the mystery of it all. The cicadas always wait seventeen years before they emerge, have a few glorious hours in the sun, and die. The subsequent brood cannot have any possible inkling of their forbears’ tendencies, but seventeen years later, they do the exact same thing, climb the same trees and brave the same dangers. In these times, I enjoy some mystery, especially when it lends a sense of order to unsettling times.

Earlier this week I took Baby Girl to the dentist to get her teeth checked out. At daycare some visiting dental professionals thought they saw something in there during a routine screening, we blew it off since we didn’t see anything, and the dental professionals called us at home. So, we sensed some urgency there, and I took her in.

I had to fill out paperwork before the dentist would see her, and I was filled with the slightest hint of uneasiness as I checked off the big old list of maladies on the back of the sheet to attest to Baby Girl’s sterling health record. Blood pressure, heart problems, cancer, liver disease, addiction to drugs, a whole catalog of things I do not want my daughter to experience ever. But, to my thinking, since all of those maladies appeared on the checklist, there’s a possibility that Baby Girl, mortal as she is, might at some point fall ill, maybe even dangerously so. I didn’t like that realization, especially since she was being powerfully cute thumbing through a back issue of Cat Fancy and telling me about the different pictures– “That cat is angry. That cat fell asleep. That cat is eating. That cat is on the furniture.”

Let me just say that I hope that all bad fortune steers clear of my little ones.

As it turns out, there was nothing really wrong with Baby Girl’s teeth. I think now that it might be some sort of industry scam to get little kids into dentists’ offices. They probably work on commission, too. Scam artists.

One item of interest to us all, however, was lucky tooth number 21. Yep. Most folks suffer the misfortune of having even numbered sets of teeth, but young Baby Girl has an extra. Bonus! I figure that lucky tooth number 21 will allow our sweet girl to have prophetic dreams that we can then bet on and rake in untold amounts of cash. Or something similar. I don’t want anything like bestowing her with the ability to start fires using only her mind or the ability to see only dead people that would, in turn, lead me to realize that for the entire movie I have been a dead person. Bummer!

Powers that be, if you are kicking down with special abilities, use some common sense about what we want here in AlphaLimaville.

AlphaLima:

Kenn Kaufman’s Kingbird Highway: The Biggest Year in the Life of an Extreme Birder. The book recounts Kaufman’s quest to see more species of birds in North America than any other individual in one calendar year. He has to see something like 627 species to break the record, and right now he’s in the 300’s. One thing I marvel at? Kaufman hitchhikes almost exclusively to move from region to region, and he goes, say, from Brownsville TX to Key West FL to Lancaster PA in the course of a week.

Sarah Manguso’s The Captain Lands in Paradise. This book of poems so far is good though her efforts are not as accessible as Ted Kooser or Billy Collins, two other poets I’ve been reading. I am planning on posting an Unholy Triumvirate All Poets Shootout here at some point, but I need to finish this book first. It may be an apples to oranges kind of deal, but crazier things have happened, like the time Mr. Green the student teacher we had in English my sophomore year of high school taught us poetry by using Pink Floyd lyrics. My gut reaction? “Yeah, the lunatic is in your head, but that’s probably because the marijuana is in your bong.” But I digress.

Ted Kooser’s The Poetry Home Repair Manual. This is sort of a how-to guide, but I like it more as a text that helps me to consider and reconsider what goes into my writing. Kooser is sagacious, much like Yoda, but his syntax is much more straightforward.

I am also fifteen pages into Stephen King’s The Stand. I closed the book upon reading the sentence, “She burst into tears.” Sources that I trust say that it is probably one of King’s best works, so I may read on to see what all the hullabaloo is about. I read Cujo back in the day and liked it; of course, I was also fifteen or so years old. I am leery of getting into the King book as it is a thousand or so pages long.

Ms. AlphaLima: Pietra Rivoli’s The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy: An Economist Examines the Markets, Power, and Politics of World Trade. I am not too “up” on what this book is about, but a cursory glance revealed dates, percentages, and acronyms. ITIPBTA*

Sonny Boy: The Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder. That’s his nighttime book. Once a day he also reads a book for school, usually something from the Bailey School Kids series (tonight, he read Swamp Monsters Don’t Chase Wild Turkeys), a Cam Jansen book (Cam is short for Camera; apparently the kid is some sort of sleuth), a Magic Treehouse book (overripe with Wiccan and Dark Arts undertones), or one of the Boxcar Children books (DSS falling down on the job–again). He is a voracious reader.

Baby Girl went to bed tonight reading Susan Boynton’s Rhinoceros Tap book. At this point she pretty much looks at the pictures and sometimes narrates with her own tale. I think her tales are vastly superior, of course. Today she regaled us with this story. “There was me, and there was this dragon, and he bit my leg.”

So what are you reading?

*I think I’ll pass, but thanks anyways.

One of my colleagues at work is all the time harping on me about not watching more NBA games. Maybe once a week or so, he’ll ask, “Did you watch any games?” And I know exactly what kind of games he’s talking about, even if he asks during the height of March Madness. I asked him if he was watching any March Madness during this last tournament, and he said he “couldn’t really get into college ball.”

I’ll admit that I root for the Lakers, and on occasion I’ll tune in during the playoffs to watch pro hoops. Take last night, for example. Ms. AlphaLima had the extreme pleasure of going to the school prom to take pictures for the yearbook (her verdict? “All it was was bump and grind.”) I staggered out to the living room to see how the game was going, and I turned on the New Orleans Hornets/San Antonio Spurs game, the first of the series. Immediately after I tuned in, the announcer said that there was probably going to be a delay.

At the end of the first quarter, Hugo the Hornet executed his Ring of Fire dunk off of a miniature trampoline. While he successfully made the shot, the huge Ring of Fire that he had just leapt through continued to burn for an inordinate amount of time, so much to the point that the mascot pit crew had to scurry out and extinguish the aforementioned RoF with three separate fire extinguishers. Of course, this left a miniature SuperFund site right there on the court, so they had to delay the game while everybody from RoF stooges right up to guys in suits dragged out all manner of cleaning gear to clean the mess up.

When I turned off the TV they were still cleaning up and running commercials. What a magical sporting event to watch. Hooray.

Reason number two for college hoops superiority? College teams do not (as far as I know) move their teams to other, distant cities in pursuit of greater profits. You may remember, perhaps, that the Hornets used to be in Charlotte, were immensely popular to the point that my own mother wanted to go see a Charlotte Hornets game so she could watch Muggsy Bogues, and then the ownership had some sort of snippiness with the local government and headed off to the Big Easy.

I may be mistaken, but I do not think that the college game has anything comparable.