by Pa Rock
Minimal Mentalist
Sometimes I think my kids are amazed at the amount of trivia that I carry around in my head - but I guess that a head requiring a size eight hat should be good for something. I remember once when Tim was in junior high or high school and we were on the road going somewhere when one of those small trucks with the oblong tank passed us. I explained to Tim that it was a truck used in the cleaning of septic tanks. He looked kind of bewildered before asking, "How in the world do you know that?"
I just do, that's how. If that particular information had any monetary value at all, I wouldn't possess it. My speciality is knowledge of the totally useless variety.
Once many years ago some of my kids' relatives came in from Chicago for a weekend and brought a new board game with them. It was called Trivial Pursuit. We played until somewhere past the middle of the night, and I massacred the competition. I also kill at Jeopardy, causing my father and at least one of my children to suggest on multiple occasions that I should try to get on the program. Somehow I suspect that my living room skills would diminish considerably if I were to enter the Jeopardy studio.
Today Tim and I and Baby Olive drove over to Kansas City's Research Medical Center to pick up Olive's mother who was working a shift there as a traveling speech therapist. Research is an older hospital that is really beginning to show its age. As we pulled up I told Tim that I believed that was where Harry Truman had died. As we sat in the car waiting on Erin, he pulled up Wikipedia on his phone and confirmed that his old man had just nailed U.S. Presidents for five hundred - thank you very much, Alex!
Give 'Em Hell Harry died forty-one years ago this month at Kansas City's Research Hospital. I was on Okinawa when it happened. Lyndon Johnson died within the following thirty days - while the nation's flags were still at half-mast for Truman. Richard Nixon was living in the White House at the time. He survived for more than twenty additional years.
Don't ask me how I know that - I just do, that's how.
Minimal Mentalist
Sometimes I think my kids are amazed at the amount of trivia that I carry around in my head - but I guess that a head requiring a size eight hat should be good for something. I remember once when Tim was in junior high or high school and we were on the road going somewhere when one of those small trucks with the oblong tank passed us. I explained to Tim that it was a truck used in the cleaning of septic tanks. He looked kind of bewildered before asking, "How in the world do you know that?"
I just do, that's how. If that particular information had any monetary value at all, I wouldn't possess it. My speciality is knowledge of the totally useless variety.
Once many years ago some of my kids' relatives came in from Chicago for a weekend and brought a new board game with them. It was called Trivial Pursuit. We played until somewhere past the middle of the night, and I massacred the competition. I also kill at Jeopardy, causing my father and at least one of my children to suggest on multiple occasions that I should try to get on the program. Somehow I suspect that my living room skills would diminish considerably if I were to enter the Jeopardy studio.
Today Tim and I and Baby Olive drove over to Kansas City's Research Medical Center to pick up Olive's mother who was working a shift there as a traveling speech therapist. Research is an older hospital that is really beginning to show its age. As we pulled up I told Tim that I believed that was where Harry Truman had died. As we sat in the car waiting on Erin, he pulled up Wikipedia on his phone and confirmed that his old man had just nailed U.S. Presidents for five hundred - thank you very much, Alex!
Give 'Em Hell Harry died forty-one years ago this month at Kansas City's Research Hospital. I was on Okinawa when it happened. Lyndon Johnson died within the following thirty days - while the nation's flags were still at half-mast for Truman. Richard Nixon was living in the White House at the time. He survived for more than twenty additional years.
Don't ask me how I know that - I just do, that's how.
1 comment:
Around here we call that truck the honey pot.
My high school's student body lined the streets around 1600 The Paseo Boulevard as LBJ headed south to see Give 'em Hell Harry at Research, which was a new building at the time.
The old Research Hospital was up on Hospital Hill, where Truman Medical Center is now. That's a building that really showed some age!
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