No, “rock candy” isn’t a euphemism for anything as far as I know. It could be now though. That would too cool, me inventing a euphemism. (An euphemism? No, just “a” since “euphemism” starts with the consonant sound of “y” even though there’s no “y” anywhere near the word. Weird, just plain weird.)
So Swampy doesn’t feel snubbed…
The 'Possum Who Sold Stuff
Once upon a time there was a Possum named Willy. He sold stuff door to door. He was really good at it too. He could sell just about anything to just about anyone. He was really good at selling stuff.
One day Willy got to a new town to sell stuff. He saw a sign that said “All Solicitors Must Register At City Hall”.
“My, what a forward-thinking town,” thought Willy. “Letting hookers work in peace as long as they sign up first. Seems like a real friendly town.” So Willy got to work selling stuff. Today he was selling brushes. All kinds of brushes. Hair brushes and shoe brushes and toilet brushes. Willy was real careful not to get his brushes mixed up. That could be gross. (Like that one time he was selling thermometers.)
After Willy was selling his brushes for a while, a police car pulled up next to him and explained the sign at the city limits to Willy. Willy was a little embarassed, but the police were nice enough to drive Willy to City Hall, so no harm was done.
While at City Hall, Willy met a couple of other salesmen also registering. There was Bob the Squirrel and Jim the Armadillo (he was from down South). They got to talking and all decided they were the best salesman and decided to have a friendly competition. Whoever could make the next sale would be the winner.
The three new friends saw a house across the street. Ah-hah! This would be the perfect test of their salesmanship. So they started across the street…
and got hit by a truck.
Possums, Squirrels and Armadillos should really just stay away from roads.
-U.R., s.g.
Lighten up Ex. I was just kidding.
I knew you were just kidding, Rue, but I do feel a little bad about nagging you while you were sick.
Chipmunks and rabbits should stay away from roads too. Boy, could I tell a story about chipmunks, rabbits and roads. I have a slightly boring story about a bear and a major highway, too. That’s not what this thread is for, though. I don’t tell stories very well, either.
I still think Chief Dan George had the last word on hard rock candy.
He was a real Indian, I don’t know from what tribe, who was in some movies in the 60’s and 70’s. (Huh. A real Indian playing an Indian in a Hollywood movie. What a radical idea! ;)) I believe the one Ex is quoting is Clint Eastwood’s The Outlaw Josey Wales, although I may be confusing it with another one. The character, whose name escapes me, had what he called a piece of rock candy, although it was red and not crystalline, that inspired the quote. It was actually a good character, even if the quote sounds pretty lame out of context. Actually, the whole movie is better than it’s generally given credit for.
I refuse to believe that that you did not understand the reference, nor recognize the actor.
Every true red-blooded American is required to watch The Outlaw Josey Wales at least once in his or her lifetime, and no exceptions are allowed. Chief Dan George is one of the most succesful Native American actors in Hollywood history.
“It ain’t right, you sneakin’ up on me like this. A white man ain’t supposed to be able to sneak up on an Indian.”
“White men have been sneaking up on me for years.”
And*:
“You think we aughta’ bury them fellers, Josey?”
“To hell with them fellers. Buzzards gotta’ eat, same as worms.”
It’s a very common popular culture reference, for crying out loud.
Sheesh.
And stop hijacking Rue’s story thread.
*[sub]This bit of dialouge didn’t involve Chief Dan George, but it’s still really cool.[/sub]
We rented that video once - it was a bad copy and it jammed, so I’ve never seen that movie.
So sue me.
And Rue loves to have his threads hijacked. No really - he told me so. See, we have this special relationship, what with me being his #1 Special Friend and all, and he tells me secret stuff that he doesn’t tell anyone else on the boards. And don’t try to trick me into telling, because I’m a very loyal #1 Special Friend and I’m not ratting him out.
Unless you have cash…
:eek:
Crap, Davebear beat me in here with the Josey Wales reference. Not fair, Dave.
For the record, the Chief was talking about hard rock candy. That’s that solid, monolithic single-crystal stuff that you have to chip a piece off of to suck for two hours. It wasn’t the jumble-of-little-crystals that you bite of a piece and chew for a couple of minutes.
Sorry for continuing the hijack. Instead, let’s all stand up, applaud Unca’ Rue, and wait for his next story. We may have to wait until he gets over his sick, though.
Actually I do like for my threads to get hijacked, just like Snickers said. I figure if people just hijack my threads:
A. They get more interesting.
&
2) That saves the ‘jackin’ in other threads (except Trek threads- they need the ‘jackin’) keeping them more coherent.
What’s the story of the bear and the highway Ex? I’d really like to know.
Graham Greene is a real Indian that plays Indians. And he’s Canadian too. Not that that has anything to do with anything, I just thought I’d throw that out there.
Once upon a time, I was driving home from work. This is actually one of the most exciting parts of this story, so you should know what you’re in for here. Grab a pillow.
To be honest, I had already left the highway at the point when the bear should properly enter the narrative. I was on the Exit 8 offramp from I-90, which is still two to three lanes wide in both directions and a couple of miles long. It’s a heck of an offramp. You can also still smell Albany from there.
Anyhow, there we all were, just driving along minding our own businesses, when this juvenile bear lumbered out of the woods, down the embankment, and onto the roadway. Of course, traffic was forced to stop because hitting a bear with a car isn’t good for either bear or car.
We just sat there for a few minutes, watching the bear watch us, until one of my fellow commuters had a brainstorm and honked his horn. The horn honking seemed to startle the bear a little bit, and it turned around, lumbered off the roadway, up the embankment, and back into the woods.
Told you it was boring.
Ya know, Exgineer, you coulda spiced it up a bit - like having the bear flip you off or something. Not that seeing a bear on an off ramp isn’t super neato keeno and all that.
All I ever see on off ramps are guys begging, and that’s another story entirely.
Come to think of it, it would also have been much cooler if the bear turned out to be a fugitive Confederate guerilla fighter who refused to surrender.
I need to work on my storytelling.
Yeah me too but let me see if I can do this justice.
Speaking of suicidal animals and thoroughfares . . .
My uncle was bebopping along one night in his wife’s little car. It was dark and he lived out in the sticks. Well he came around a corner and his headlights illuminated a horse standing in the road. There was literally no time to stop or swerve just enough time to yell an expletive. The same for the horse.
The horse reared and tried to turn at the last second. It ended up on its side with its two front legs through the windshield and pushed a hole through the passenger side seat. The horses head came through the windshield as well and its front teeth made quite a gash on my uncle’s forehead. He had to go to the hospital (my uncle, not the horse) and explain that. The horse went to horsey heaven.
The end.
How’d I do? Not as good as Unca Rue, I know. In fact how do you learn to tell stories really well. It takes more than practice I’m sure or I would be great at it.
Wow. Your uncle hit a horse? Dang. The most exotic thing I’ve ever hit is a deer, and that happens all the time around here. Some people go so far as to put those deer-whistle thingys on their front bumpers. I never bothered because I’m not sure they do squat.
“I know they work, because I have 'em and I’ve never hit a deer.”
“Oh yeah? I stick a carrot down my pants so I won’t be attacked by alligators. I know it works, because I’ve never been attacked by an alligator.”
Half the reason the bear story is so boring is because it’s so pedestrian. A couple of years ago, we had a bear wandering around downtown Albany. That actually aroused some interest. A couple of years before that, we had a similar problem with a moose. The town of Round Lake had beavers in it’s water system. The critters are taking over.
The moose situation was bizarre. We can’t find them in the Adirondacks at all, but one showed up in Troy grazing in the flowerbeds. Then it swam the river and took a walking tour of Albany.
I agree that Rue is a master storyteller. He could probably take my crap story and turn it into a literary masterpiece, but he’s probably already thought of something better.
I’m just mystified that he wrote an entire story about a cheerleader and rock candy without using the word “bendy” even once.
I think you’re underestimating yourself a bit, though, Copper_moon:
That’s funny.
Thanks - that made my day.
It doesn’t take much.
Oh yeah, my husband decided to buy those sonic bug stay away thingies to put all through thru our house. (My brain isn’t working well enough this morning to come up with the precise words.) Anyway I was dubious about it and finally came across a site (snopes.com) that debunked the whole thing saying that there actually is a false advertising law suit against the makers because they don’t work at all. In the lab or in the real world. I bet the deer-stay-away-thingies don’t work either.
BTW, now that I think about it, it was the horse uncle that recommended the sonic things saying he never sees bugs at his house. But then what can you expect from someone who got bit in the forehead by a horse at 30 miles an hour?
Ex ol’ buddy I’m so glad you didn’t hit the bear. We bears are notorious for wandering out in front of stuff. Could be all the marshmallow fluff and beer we keep swiping from picnic baskets. The only boring animal story I have is that I occasionally have cows in my front yard early in the morning. They escape from the dairy farm down the road from time to time. I know the man who has the dairy farm and now have his number on my speed dial so I can call him up and say I got one of your cows in my yard so he can come and get the cow. When I see a cow in my front yard I usually tell it it needs to go home but they don’t listen. They just stand around til the dairy farmer brings his cow trailer up to get em. They don’t mind walking a half mile up the road to my front yard but they sure as heck won’t walk the half mile down the road to go back home. They wait for a ride everytime. Them cows is weird I tell ya.
Rue thanks for the story. Ya know, use to be we had dead possums lying all over the place on the roads around here but lately they’ve been replaced by mostly dead armadillos lying all over the place on the roads. Try slipping a little vitamin b into Katcha’s “fruit smoothie.” I hear that helps with the morning after surlies.
My brother worked for the Forest Service doing something, I forget what. But then he got to go fight forest fires one time, so there was that. It’s even better, because when he went to fight the foesrt fire, the REAL forest fire-fighters had already gotten it out, but when he was “mobilized” to put the fire out that by the time he got there was already out anyway, it was still going. So he left to fight a fire which got him hazard pay for not having to actually do anything.
So? You ask. Well, actually nothing. But he said that those deer whistle thingies you can put on your car to keep the deer away work. Sorta. They will scare the deer when you zoom by in your car, only first the deer wander down to the road to find out what the hell all the danged whistling is all about. They they get all scared and run away. Only a scared deer doesn’t quite know which way it wants to run, so once in a while (like all the time) they’ll panic and then run into the road to be hit.
So while the whistles do scare deer, first they draw them to the road where they can be scared in unpredictable ways. End result: deer whistles are a bad idea. For you. You want everyone else to have them so THEY draw the deer down and then smack 'em with their cars so you stay safe.
It’s like Darwinism for both the curious deer and the deer whistle people.
Now, since this thread is still perking along nicely, and it’s Monday, should I:
Just throw my Monday Morning Post (since it’s the Monday Morning Post and not the Monday Morning Thread) in here.
OR
Start a brand new thread and see how long they fight amongst themselves before one goes away and sulks.
We’ll see, yes, we’ll see…
-Rue.
I had to read all the way to the end just to see if it was already the Monday Morning Post. And I scarcely have any coffee left now. But I still vote that you start another thread, just to keep the amateurs and the lazy involved.
Oh, and nice story Copper Moon. I’d never heard of anyone getting bit by a horse while driving.
OK, Shibb. For you, anything.
You know what’s going to happen now, don’t you?
I’m going to think up some kind of halfway clever comment and post it in the wrong thread.
That’s what’s going to happen now.