BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

So, my kid is brilliant.

I know I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating. In fact, I’ll repeat it again right now for good measure. My kid is freakin’ brilliant. She’s in the gifted & talented program at her school, she has a reading comprehension level umpteen jillion grades ahead of her own, and a vocabulary that will sometimes astound you. Not always on top of the slang, as evidenced by an earlier blog entry, but hey, I’d rather she not be.

So, why am I telling you this? Believe it or not, it actually has something to do with the story.

You see, being brilliant – I did mention that, right? Anyhow, being a brilliant child, the O-spring is also enrolled in the College For Kids program at a local community college campus. If you haven’t heard of it before, it’s kind of a neat deal. Gifted kids from all over get to come and take classes in all sorts of things – from oil painting to biology to robotics to chess to geo caching, and a ton of stuff in between. They have two sessions – winter and summer. Winter happens on Saturdays for 5 weeks. Summer happens for one straight week in August.

See where I’m heading?

Yeah… See there, you’re brilliant too… Anyway, the O-spring managed to pull the three classes she wanted this session, (like the real deal, it doesn’t always work out that way), which means we have to head out the the college right around morning rush hour.

Being a bit anal retentive about punctuality, we tend to leave a little early, just in case something happens to slow us down, and then we spend 15 minutes sitting in the lecture hall doing that Dad – Daughter bonding. This means she talks to me about Pokee-Man cards and I listen. Sometimes we even talk about things that old dad actually knows something about, such as writing. She has it in her head that she wants to be a writer. I have yet to find a suitable way to discourage her from that folly. Who knows? Maybe she will actually be successful at it, unlike her pops. Time will tell… But, I digress as usual.

On the day in question we were heading up the main drag, only a couple of miles from home, and we ended up stuck behind some guy in a four door sedan who either had no idea where he was heading, or simply wasn’t awake. From what I could see, the only thing of real interest to him was his cigarette. Well, that’s not entirely true. He was also deeply involved in some sort of driving game which entailed speeding up, slowing down, and going from 40 to 0 in nothing flat for no apparent reason. Another apparent part of the game’s strategy was to make sudden swerves to the right, then jump back into the lane.

This went on for a good mile or better, with me unable to get around him due to other traffic. Eventually I began to mutter all manner of expletives, some of which I had been using for years, others of which I had learned from Luets (my multi-lingual buddy). I even made up a few names for the guy and issued detailed instructions – upon deaf ears, of course – about what he needed to do with his car if he wasn’t going to take the time to learn how to drive it.

The O-spring watched and listened in silence. She’s heard ol’ pops rant before, so this was no big deal. She just watched the idiot in front of us, and waited to see what would happen.

Finally, cigarette man screeched to a halt, turned on his blinker, and made a painfully languid turn into the parking lot of the McDonalds. Thankful that I was now going to escape the rolling roadblock and still have plenty of time to arrive at the college for the first class, I sped up and pushed us along on our way.

My 10 year old daughter, still quiet, swiveled her head to watch the lurching car putter around the McDonalds parking lot as we drove past. Before the arches had even made it into my rear view mirror, she clucked her tongue and in a matter-of-fact tone announced, “Well… Apparently somebody hasn’t had his Frappe yet this morning.”

Told ya’ she was brilliant. How could she not be? With a sarcastic mouth like that, she’s obviously got my DNA…

More to come…

Murv

“The what?” I asked.

I wasn’t trying to be difficult, and even though my hearing is really and truly shot, I thought I’d heard him okay. Unfortunately, I couldn’t be sure because what John had just said didn’t make any sense whatsoever.

“You know,” he replied. “The rankstankle.”

“What the hell is a rankstankle?” I asked.

“You know.”

Obviously – well, to me at least – I didn’t. John, however, was absolutely certain that I knew just what a “rankstankle” happened to be. Everyone should. After all, it had been on TV.

I suppose I should back up just a second…

You see, John was a guy a worked with. In fact, this was back in the days of T & W Typewriter and Computer Repair… And just as I have explained before, NO, the T didn’t stand for Typewriter and we didn’t spell computer with a W. Those were the owner’s initials. But, I digress… My point here is that this was eons ago, back when I worked in the computer – printer repair field. This is the company where Chris worked (see Whoa! Was That A Sasquatch?). Mike too. And Bill. In fact, the owner used to call us the “bearded wonders,” because we could fix just about anything and we all had beards. Except Mike and Bill that is. But, they were the new kids on the block, relatively speaking.

Anyhow, there we were, in the shop, working on stuff and chatting about all manner of inane crap. It’s how we would pass the time while waiting for the three or four pieces of equipment we had on the bench to finish testing, or formatting, or whatever. And that’s when John mentioned the “rankstankle.”

You see, we were talking about stuff from our childhoods. Television shows, games, and all sorts of other crap. Like I said, just passing the time. The thing that really made this all surreal is that “rankstankle” wasn’t the first thing he’d said that had us all scratching our heads. It had actually started out with one of his favorite shows when he was a kid, that being, “The Sea Hag”…

We’d never heard of it. Of course, that didn’t mean much. They’d never heard of “Cousin Fred” either. He was the host of a morning kids show back home in Kentucky. I suspect nobody outside Paducah and surrounding area had any clue about “Cousin Fred.”

However, John claimed that “The Sea Hag” was one of those big time national shows on a major network. And then, he came up with “rankstankle.” It seems that the “rankstankle” was an integral part of a board game he’d played as a kid. So integral, in fact, that it was prominently mentioned during the commercial for the game.

After pondering all of this for a while, I asked, “What game was this again?”

“You know…” he said. “The one with the fat guy and the tweezers.”

“Fat guy and tweezers?” I asked. Obviously, there were all sorts of places my warped mind could take this, but since we were talking about a childrens board game I knew they wouldn’t fit.

“Yeah,” he said. “And his nose would light up.”

Pieces fell into place – figuratively, that is – and I put two and two together to come up with seventeen. “You mean, Operation?”

“Yeah, that’s it!” he replied. “You had to take out his rankstankle.”

I kept putting two and two together with the seventeen, trying to remember the commercial. Finally, after running through all 206 bones in my head, it dawned on me.

“Do you by any chance mean, wrenched ankle?” I asked.

“Oh,” John said. “I always thought it was rankstankle. Guess that’s why it was shaped like a wrench, huh?”

And, “The Sea Hag”? Well… Turns out that was “Sigmund and the Sea Monsters.”

More to come…

Murv