Heard any crickets lately? I heard some last night, and it reminded me how seldom I hear the twilight chorus these days. It’s been years since the night has featured the contrapuntal belching of frogs, for that matter. Skeeter-whines, yes. The occasional chitter of a bat. Now and then, the tortured yowls of coupling alley cats. But summer’s not summer without the metrical perfection of a choir of crickets, counting out the temperature like a cashier balancing the drawer at day’s end. Nice to hear them. Watch out for the bats, boys.
Speaking of bats: HARRY POTTER! HARRY POTTER! There: just boosted traffic 900%. I was considering starting out with a fake spoiler, since the internets are abuzz with rumors about the last chapter. But I don’t want to pretend to spoil it. I hate spoilers and the cruel snickering dorkmongers who love to ruin everyone else’s enjoyment of movies or books, I woudn’t think of telling you the ending.
I don’t know what compels people to give away the ending. I’m one of a select group of people: I learned about Luke Skywalker’s father on the opening night of “The Empire Strikes Back.” Let me tell you: no one saw that coming. The last time I’d felt anything like that was in 1963, when the planes at the local Air National Guard Base celebrated National Sonic Boom Week. We all left the theater with smug expressions, passing the people queued for the next show: I know something you don’t. No one shouted out the secret.
Even now I hesitate to write the particulars. I’d like my child to experience it first-hand, but that’s probably a lost cause. Dad, someone at school said Rosebud was Darth Vader’s sled when he was a Cylon. Is that true? More or less, yeah.
Today in history: Harriet Bishop arrives in Minnesota. She’s remembered as Minnesota’s first school teacher, but there were others who’d filled in unofficially. The kids were probably set to studying McGuffey’s Readers, the "Dick and Jane" books of their day. If an alien civilization compared the rigorous sober McGuffey’s to the flat moronic monosyllabic Dick and Janes, they might conclude that the median IQ had dropped like a Qwqids tossed down a borgin hole. (Well, they’re aliens; they have their own analogies.) The old days: “Abernathy Swithin doth spend a half-part of his grain against the chance the price of bacon would fall by a third. If Abernathy Swithin had six hectares planted before the solstice fell, and bacon futures fell forty percent on news that the Sow Trust had cornered the gristle market, what did Farmer Swithin spend? Express your answer in Latin, using drachmas as the currency.”
The Dick and Jane books: “See Spot Scoot. Scoot, Spot, Scoot. See Jane chase snowflakes. No, Jane, No! That’s fallout.”
It’s National Caviar Day. No thanks. Given what W. C. Fields said about water, you wonder what he would have said about caviar. But never mind that. Let’s head back 21 years to the ACTION CENTER of THE TWIN CITIES! It’s the opening of the news for July 18, 1986.
Why all formality was tossed out the window, we may never know.
Paul Magers
Hey! That there Paul Magers is here in LA on CBS 2. Still tossing formality out the window. Well, except now he wears pinstriped suits.