Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller for November 11, 2021

i’ll admit, i snoozed even before i finished reading that sentence.

The kid may not go to sleep but dad won’t be doing bed time story duty any more

Our son just couldn’t go to sleep. I would sing to him our engineering song, all four verses that I knew, over and over. One day at day care inspectors came around. The kids were all asked to recite something. Our son burst into song with a rendition that was longer than what any of the other kids did. Everyone had a good laugh.

Maybe it was the bathroom extension that wasn’t approved so now the pigs will have to use the outhouse.

You really need to keep reality out of fairytales.

That will only work on adults. It will probably wake kids up with all the questions they will be asking.

“Daddy, use better voices! … um… please?”

That is one tiny pony there

I told my kids the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, except I substituted dinosaurs, elephants, kangaroos, … .I forgot who/what I used for Goldilocks.

Reading Faulkner can put anyone to sleep! I would suggest it to Dad but it might not be good for him to fall asleep in the kid’s bedroom.

Can’t find the picture any more, but I once snapped a photo of a restaurant sign and wrote a summary of the Big Bad Wolf story, emphasizing how the Three Little Pigs built the “House of Straw”, “House of Sticks” and “House of Bricks”.

I then added that there was a fourth Little Pig the story never got around to because the Wolf was put paid to by the third one. And how he too had his own idiosyncratic choice of preferred building materials. And then I’d post the picture I’d taken of the sign.

“House of Enchiladas”.

Last time I went into the County Recorder’s office I was busted going through the security station. My keychain Swiss Army knife with 1 to 1 1/2 inch blade was considered too dangerous for me to enter with it. Had to take it back to my car and go through security again.

Wiley must have strange nightmares at night.

I always wanted to know where the third pig got the money to pay for the bricks and mortar. Did he hold up a bank? There’s a dark side to those three pigs they leave out of children’s stories.

So the wolf could blow their houses down figuratively – instead of literally. Isn’t that nice?

That explains everything. That’s why the wolf could blow down the first two houses. The houses weren’t built to code. The pigs wised up on the brick house. They took out a permit.

Filing permits, the main purpose is to trigger the tax accessor to increase your property tax.

I never straw that coming.

When a child is too restless to sleep, whatever works will do.

Well that works a charm. I started nodding off as soon as he said “County Recorder”. If he would have had an “and ate” or something cool like that after it I would have made it to the end, but noOOoo.

At Home Depot you can buy bricks that are huff and puff resistant

Is it weird that I kind of like this verzion?

Reality IS boring and will put you to sleep, that’s why there are “stories” and movies.

In my late teens I was a counselor at a summer church camp with a dozen 8 & 9 year old girls [and another counselor] in our cabin. They wanted a bedtime story read to them but the only thing I had with me was a book of Sherlock Holmes short stories. The reading outloud of adult sentences/phrases did put them to sleep. So maybe just the eventone of reading was what they needed. [This was about 1960] I got to continue my reading and the girls got their bedtime story. A fond memory.

How to keep little pigs awake nights.

If it’s Chicago, no one gets a building permit for most residential repairs & even some additions. The law actually requires you to file for a permit to replace a light switch.

Prayers for the fallen, the wounded, their caretakers, and their families, and those who continue to serve.

This is the type of Wiley joke I love.

… so he dialed, and he filed, and he had the little pig’s house zoned away!

Chapter 6—“Quantization of Angular Momentum” from Brehm and Mullin’s Introduction to the Structure of Matter works quite nicely…

Two dulcimas raised to the degree of forty halfdulcimas, divided into equal parts by the third of a cackle of grouse geese, put over the result of ten finemackels (albeit small finemackels), stretched over the total of 53 and an eighth bottles of wildebeast lard….yields a gilded minnow of precise measurements; 269 centidrils by three million twenty-three punds (NOT punts, as might be expected). This is not to say, however any sense, whatsoever, that deviations in mean temperature of five or six dregs or so…indicate a fabrication or derivation sufficiently broad enough to exacerbate the conclusions uncovered, in due course, with regards to dimensions, consistency, mass or thickness inherent in the menial suckling grouse.

Best lullaby ever: George Hamilton IV https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfY6bxPQ2W4

Imagine the Big Bad Wolf is in fact a Werewolf.

So they sent the bulldozers around?

Kid you are missing the countryside living for sure.