Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

I really should read my own blog.

I like you, you’re my kind of trouble.

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

All your base are belong to Tunch.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

Not all heroes wear capes.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

Conservatism: there are some people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

Prediction: the GOP will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

Today’s GOP: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

Good lord, these people are nuts.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

The next time the wall street journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.

Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

We still have time to mess this up!

Nothing worth doing is easy.

You are here: Home / Politics / Domestic Politics / Lump of Cole

Lump of Cole

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I had a very Cole day yesterday. I was rushing around to wrap up a few DIY projects before we’re overrun with holiday guests. One of my projects involved a quart-size can of white enamel paint, which I located on the only shelf in the house that’s a challenge for me to reach (I’m tallish).

The shelves in the laundry room are those hideous wire bracket things; I could just touch the bottom of the can through the shelf if I reached up on tippy-toes, so instead of dragging a stepladder out, I used my fingertips to scoot the can toward the edge. I totally had a workable plan for catching it so it wouldn’t drop on my head.

What I didn’t account for was the small can of varnish that was on top of the paint can, because I didn’t know it was there. When the paint can tilted, the varnish can slid off:

paintcan

Usually, my ninja-quick reflexes would allow me to block such an assault, but both hands were at that moment occupied with keeping the larger paint can from falling on my head. Consequently, the varnish can dropped about two feet and bounced off the bridge of my nose.

So now I have Liam Neeson’s nose for the holidays. I’m making the best of it, telling anyone who says, “My GOD, what happened to your NOSE?” that I got into a fistfight over the last Furby at Target.

That’s not all. While grouting some tile later that morning, I leaned onto an overloaded trowel and momentarily encased my boobs in concrete. (Sorry, no illustration.) I was wearing a raggedy-ass tee shirt at the time, so no harm done.

But because this type of mishap isn’t so unusual in my life, I forgot all about it seconds later, and when I ran out to the grocery store shortly thereafter, I just threw a ratty old flannel shirt on over the tee shirt and didn’t notice until I was in a store chock-full of my fellow residents of this very small town that I was, in effect, sporting a concrete bra for all the world to see.

Come to think of it, that last thing probably wouldn’t happen to Cole. Even if he has the requisite cup size, he also has the good sense to outsource tiling projects.

Reader Interactions

78Comments

  2. 2.

    NotMax

    Painting with enamel hint:

    If not going to finish the job in one go, wrap the brush tightly and well in plastic wrap and toss it into the freezer.

    Doesn’t take long to defrost when taken out, and ready to go for the rest of the job later, rather than using a new brush.

  5. 5.

    p.a.

    <blockquoteThat’s not all. While grouting some tile later that morning, I leaned onto an overloaded trowel and momentarily encased my boobs in concrete. (Sorry, no illustration.) I was wearing a raggedy-ass tee shirt at the time, so no harm done.

    To T-shirt or boobs? Grout Brassiere would be a great name for a grrl band.

  6. 6.

    Matt McIrvin

    The commenters on James Nicoll’s LiveJournal refer to these as “Nicoll Incidents”.

    (Nicoll was at one time astonishingly accident-prone; eventually he realized that he had an undiagnosed sleep disorder, and his accident rate went way down after he went on a CPAP, increasing his general level of alertness during waking hours.)

  7. 7.

    scav

    “fistfight over the last Furby at Target.” riiiiiiiight You had a drag-out knock-down with Bouncer et al at the Reindeer Tailgate party over a drink at closing and Rudolph got the last punch.

  8. 8.

    Steeplejack

    @Betty:

    [. . .] I got into a fistfight over the last Furby at Target.

    “As I rained blows upon him, I realized there had to be another way.”

  9. 9.

    Suffern ACE

    My nephew somehow managed to break his nose playing touch football yesterday. If you need an excuse, you can always say that you were trying to strip the ball from some lad.

  10. 10.

    geg6

    Don’t feel badly, Betty. The Koda-induced eye injury I’m sporting looks like someone punched me. John is embarrassed to take me out today. Thankfully, it’s day 3 and I can finally put some makeup on over the scratches so they won’t look so bad.

  11. 11.

    Ultraviolet Thunder

    @p.a.:

    To T-shirt or boobs? Grout Brassiere would be a great name for a grrl band.

    They can provide accompaniment for the Spackle Motion dance troupe.

  13. 13.

    Ultraviolet Thunder

    Since you asked, I have no idea what’s going on today. Both parents without power (separately) 60 miles away. Siblings driving to town and staying with us because their formerly planned lodgings are without power. It’s all up in the air. Fine with me. I’ll keep the beds made and the coffee on for whoever whenever.]

    We’ll recall this as the Blackout Christmas.

  16. 16.

    handsmile

    Betty Cracker:

    If as you say, “this type of mishap isn’t so unusual in my life,” the fellow residents likely just shrugged at the holiday lingerie. And evidently, your getting into fistfights raises no eyebrows either. “That’s just like Betty,” they snicker, reaching for another carton of Southern Comfort Eggnog.

    But unlike John Cole, you’ll have mustard for your holiday guests, your car(s) is in the driveway, the chickens roam the yard, and god just might be in his heaven after all. Merry Holidays to you and your kin!

    @Ultraviolet Thunder:

    In case you’d not seen it, an appreciative reply to you re the Proulx recommendations at the unspooled end of last night’s “Festivus” thread.

    Brimming bowls of wassail and heaping plates of figgy pudding to all the Thunders this holiday season!

  18. 18.

    OzarkHillbilly

    Anybody else see the video of Pajama Boy beating the p!ss out of one of Wayne LaPierre’s fanboy BGwG’s? I wonder what PJ B would do to Jonah Goldberg?

  20. 20.

    rikyrah

    Positive Black Male News: Detroit mailman saves family’s burning home, continues on delivery route
    By Randy Wimbley, Fox 2 News

    He won’t admit it but one Detroit neighborhood mailman is a hero now. “I wouldn’t say a hero,” Darrian Crutcher says, hoping to set the record straight. But others see it differently.

    Tuesday morning Detroit firefighters responded to a house fire on Stansbury Street. When they arrived they found Crutcher upstairs putting the fire out with the home’s garden hose.

    The homeowner, Carolyn Patterson, lit incense and that’s believed to have started the fire.

    “It was a blessing for me to be at that spot at that particular time,” Crutcher says. His quick thinking saved Patterson’s home and, possibly, her life.

    “It really was burning,” Patterson tells Fox 2′s Randy Wimbley.

    Crutcher tells us he got the hose from the side of the house, took it inside and hooked it up there and began to fight the fire.

    “He was spraying [the fire] down and everything and knocked [the fire] down quite a bit,” Patterson says. “I think this room probably would’ve burned up. I really do,” she continues.

    Firefighters applaud Crutcher’s job. “He did great! I asked him after it was over, I said, ‘Hey man, you should come join us! We’re hiring right now!’” David Weems of the Detroit Fire Department tells us.

    Crutcher stayed on the job until firefighters arrived. When they did he just went back about his business, not even pausing to take a break or get a drink of water.

    “I said, ‘Ok, they there. The real firemen is here now so I can go ahead and do my job,’” Crutcher says.

    “It’s great just to see citizens just stopping to do the good – the good of man,” Weems says.

    Wimbley asked Crutcher if, at any point, he thought, ‘Why am I doing this? This isn’t my job.’

    Crutcher responded: “No I didn’t think that. I just seen a lady in the house and a young kid outside. I just go in and do it. I know if I … if somebody seen me like that I wish they would do me like that, too.”

    http://theblackmancan.org/2013/11/06/positive-black-male-news-detroit-mailman-saves-familys-burning-home-continues-on-delivery-route/

  21. 21.

    MomSense

    I am in big trouble.

    Conversation overheard last night.

    10 year old: I don’t believe in Santa anymore but don’t tell mom. I think I get better presents if I still believe.

    Older brother: Think that will work for me?

    Both: laughter

  22. 22.

    MomSense

    Androgynous, ethnically neutral, yet still manages to elicit feelings of great loathing and repugnance

    Yes! Just noticed it is in rotation at the top of the page!!

  24. 24.

    Ultraviolet Thunder

    @handsmile:

    Thanks, I did see that. Good to know we share musical tastes. I was on a Proulx kick for a while and read all of her stuff. There’s a deep current of depression and hopelessness that pervades all of her stories. I find the shorter works easier to take. Postcards is just unrelentingly grim. It shares with Accordion Crimes the theme of a tragic mistake ruining lives. No salvation in the last chapter from her.

    Regarding music, I’m working on a new project; an interface for digitizing record albums on a computer. Plenty of off the shelf solutions exist but this will be DIY with all Radio Shack components. The publisher wants it by 1/1 but that probably won’t happen.

  25. 25.

    Steeplejack

    I have pretty much avoided hectic holiday shopping, but I need to make a run to Total Wine today to pick up a case of champagne* for the leisurely day of cooking, socializing and big dinner at the bro’ man’s house tomorrow. I’ll try to knock that out as soon as the place opens—oops, I just checked and see that they’ve been open for an hour already!—well, I’ll try to knock that out as soon as I can get my ass moving. Then I may nip into Target on the way home to get a few gift cards. I would sort of like to go to Crate & Barrel to get one specific thing, but I fear getting anywhere near the big mall.

    * Okay, méthode champenoise. My current economic pick for big crowds is Conde de Caralt Brut, a Spanish cava—$10 a bottle and quite good.

  27. 27.

    Culture of Truth

    The first time I read this I thought it was written by Cole himself. Now I can’t get the image of bruised concrete-bra wearing Cole out of my head.

  30. 30.

    doug r

    @Suffern ACE: Friend of mine in high school got a black eye trying to catch a fly ball. With a glove. He’s a physicist now, runs a neutrino detection lab.

  32. 32.

    watergirl

    Merry Christmas, Steeplejack!

    I couldn’t quite make out what you were trying to say about my gym yesterday – are you a fan of no capitalization, or just not the G?

    Edit: I had been away from BJ for so many months after the tree fell on my house that I couldn’t even remember how I had capitalized my name. So I played with it after your post yesterday, and I think I prefer no caps at all.

  33. 33.

    The Dangerman

    Shit, I was hoping we found the mustard.

    ETA; SHIT, I assumed disaster happened to Cole; an honest mistake, obviously.

  34. 34.

    PsiFighter37

    Starting to think in earnest about potential honeymoon locations next year (will be in late September)…anyone have suggestions? Our current thoughts have revolved around Bora Bora or a safari in Tanzania, but those are more generic ideas than anything set firmly in stone.

  37. 37.

    handsmile

    @Ultraviolet Thunder:

    Ah, so that’s the project you had recently mentioned. With that desired deadline, perhaps not so much wassail for you then. Will be asking for publication details once you’ve submitted the article. Skoal!

    Now off to do my small part (last-minute shopping is one of my holiday traditions) to bolster the national economy!

  40. 40.

    GregB

    I remember Mr. Vital showing us a film in shop class about Primitive Pete who used screw drivers to hammer in nails and other misuses of tools that always led to injury or maiming.

    Don’t be a Primitive Pete.

    Not shit. I found the reel    , it was produced by Disney and in opening narrative it casually cites that humankind began 70,000 years ago. Not controversial then, yet very controversial now.

  41. 41.

    TaMara (BHF)

    Love this story Betty.

    I have to work this morning, hosting a Christmas Eve party tonight and a quiet day tomorrow (pjs and holiday movies).

    Wishing everyone a very Merry Christmas (fuck you Sarah Palin) and I hope you’re warm, safe and happy. Don’t know what I’d do without the Balloon-Juice crew every day.

  42. 42.

    dmsilev

    @Ultraviolet Thunder: I assume you’re planing on using the computer’s line-in input to handle the digitizing and recording, and the DIY part is all of the analog circuitry needed to go from phono to line-level?

    I don’t know if it would fit within the Radio Shack constraint, but some of the hobbyist-grade microcontroller boards have analog inputs that are good enough to handle audio at decent resolution (e.g. the Arduino Due has a 12 bit 20+ kHz ADC).

  44. 44.

    PsiFighter37

    @OzarkHillbilly: Open to just about anything. Only real requirement is that it’s international (we have to go to China first to say hello to her side of the family first).

  46. 46.

    Roger Moore

    @PsiFighter37:

    Starting to think in earnest about potential honeymoon locations next year (will be in late September)…anyone have suggestions?

    If you haven’t done it before, think about doing the Grand Circle on the Colorado Plateau. You can start in Vegas and then go either way around the circle, winding up back in Vegas before heading home.

  47. 47.

    danielx

    Betty, I begin to think you have a career alternative as an illustrator of….something. Although the quote in the picture should have been AIEEEE!

  49. 49.

    donnah

    Betty, you’ve snatched the gold Klutz medal from the hands of my sister, who fell and broke her leg two weeks ago. She’ll have to be content with the silver, since she didn’t follow up with a public display of her klutzery. Points for public humiliation!

    Anyhoo, thanks for sharing your insights, humor, and smarts here in Balloon Land. You are a treasure!

  51. 51.

    Citizen_X

    @GregB: Nice find.

    I always wanted to make a safety film where primitive workman Ogg injures himself, and Ugg tells him, “Well, that’s what happens when you try to use a knife rock as a hammer rock!”

  52. 52.

    Ultraviolet Thunder

    @dmsilev:

    Radio Shack sells an off-the-shelf USB audio interface from Diamond that does 16 bit 44.1 khz ADC. I’m just designing the analog amp/EQ part. The problem is the Diamond unit has such high gain and sensitivity that the level is too high and tough to control. I’ll have to do a lot of arithmetical heavy lifting to figure out how to squeeze the EQ curve (+20 db, -20db) into less gain.
    I built the prototype phono preamp with the cheapest off the shelf parts and amazingly it sounds very very good and has low noise. I was quite surprised.

  53. 53.

    Mnemosyne (iPhone)

    Here I was getting all freaked out about my mom spending Christmas Day moping around the house alone, and she signed up to help serve Christmas dinner at the local homeless shelter.  That’s what I get for worrying. ;-)

    Also, my boss was walking around with a good shiner a few months ago — she has twin 4-year-olds and one of them managed to elbow her in the eye while they were asleep. Even more fun, it happened a couple of days before her mother’s funeral, so she got to spend the whole day explaining what had happened.

  54. 54.

    Mnemosyne (iPhone)

    @Roger Moore:

    Walt Disney was as conservative as they come, but today he would be a commie pinko who loves commies because of his environmental and science films.

    Fun fact: one of the very first feature-length animated films was an educational film about evolution done by the Fleischer Studio. It was silent and (IIRC) is now a lost film like so many silents.

  58. 58.

    BethanyAnne

    Mom fell and had a black eye a few years back. Idjit boyfriend asked if her coworkers thought he beat her. She said, “Oh, no. You’re alive!”

  60. 60.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Mnemosyne (iPhone):

    Back in the early/mid-50s, Disney teamed up with one of the big sanitary napkin brands (Kotex? Modess?) and made a tasteful, yet graphic, animated short about the totally normal joys of ovulation and menstruation. We 7th-grade girls were shown it in gym class after our parents signed permission slips saying it was okay with them for their 12-year-old daughters to learn the basics of how their bodies worked. Such was sex education in the public schools back in the day.

    FSM only knows what Disney came up with for the boys to see, or who the corporate partner would have been (Trojans? Probably not. It was 1954.)

  63. 63.

    Cervantes

    @Fuzzy:

    Anywhere in the South Pacific is much better than anywhere in Africa. Gotta have that beautiful clear water.

    Try the Seychelles.

  64. 64.

    Mnemosyne

    @Steeplejack:

    Sorry, two co-equal bosses (which makes things SO FUN sometimes when they don’t agree). Older boss is 60-ish and retiring in February; younger boss is a couple of years older than me, so late 40s. On the iPhone, I get lazy about typing “older boss” and “younger boss.”

  65. 65.

    CAL

    Did you ever notice things that you do by accident you could not repeat for all the money in the world? Is anyone familiar with a music genre called ‘Americana’. My husband heard something the other day it was kinda like the ‘Soggy Bottom Boys’ with a bit of a latin influence. Anybody know a group like that? I’m having no luck searching the Americana Charts.

  67. 67.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Cervantes:

    My gosh, I didn’t think I’d ever see that again! But that’s the one I remember. Thanks for finding it.

    There was no credit line for the narrator, but her voice is very familiar. I’m thinking maybe Eve Arden?

  72. 72.

    Sir Laffs-a-lot

    A Merry Christmas or Fabulous Festivus to all (and esp Betty!) and may you all find concrete underthings under the tree with your name on it!

  73. 73.

    Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)

    Betty, you need to take that Gators’ helmet off the shelf above the tv and put it to good use. Well, the next time you’re doing chores, anyway.

  75. 75.

    Older

    @rikyrah: My son (a fireman) once tried to convince me (a mail carrier) that I should get a job with the fire department. He told me it would be safer!

    I pointed out that I grew up in a town with a Firemen’s Memorial to all the firemen that have died in the course of their work. There is no Mail Carriers’ Memorial that I know of.

    But he thought it was more dangerous for me to drive on roads frequented by log trucks than for him to run into burning buildings. “It’s perfectly safe if you do it right.” He said.

    Not to say mail carriers can’t be heroes. We had regular stand-ups on how to look out for the well-being of our patrons. I don’t know if it’s still that way, but a certain degree of responsibility for the welfare of others was considered to be part of our job back then.

    And isn’t that the Golden Rule? “if somebody seen me like that I wish they would do me like that, too.” More honored in the breach. Hurrah for Darrian Crutcher! And all decent folk like him.

  76. 76.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    @PsiFighter37: We’ve never been to Bora Bora but we’ve been to Tahiti and Moorea. We loved Moorea, lots to do if you want to and veg if you don’t want to do anything. Highly recommended.

    The kid’s sister went to Bora Bora for her honeymoon, seemed to enjoy it.

  77. 77.

    Death Panel Truck

    @GregB:

    Not controversial then, yet very controversial now.

    It’s not “controversial” among educated people. It’s only a problem with the young Earth fanatics, Evangelicals, the religiously home-schooled and the Fox News propagandists.

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