Choom Choom Charlie Was An Engineer

Choom Choom Charlie Was An Engineer Bits of my life pulled out and flung on the Internet floor Choom Choom Charlie Was An Engineer

Not up to code, I think. Not the building code, Morse Code, Hammurabi's Code, my area code...

Well, it appears I'm going to have to get back at it.

My public demands I hit my Intertunnel thumb with a pixel hammer until gouts of Web blood appear amusingly on their screen. They suspect I've failed -- know it in the depth of their hearts, in the forecourt of their minds, in the alleys of their senses -- but gosh, they want to know exactly how I dropped my house on my head while trying to fix it. For the Lulz.

Of course, if I wanted to tell an audience something really interesting, I'd have made a mordant aside somewhere along the long, weary way we've traveled under my house, about how I once got a 650 pound woodburning furnace into the second floor of my house in the dead, dead, dead of winter, through a door three feet above grade with no stairs, halfway down a driveway under four feet of snow and with a pitch approaching black diamond, with no one but a teenager and his mother to help me. Now that would have been a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying, well, heat. That would be a story worth telling. But I put the audience off the scent early, and coaxed them into the basement where I keep the second-rate tales, and they're none the wiser. Of course they're none the wiser, because they're listening to me. I'm not that bright, but if I was a butcher, and a customer came in the shop and expressed an interest in an emaciated pullet with scoliosis I had hanging in the shop window, I wouldn't blurt out that I had a big roast beef in the back. I'd keep, er, selling that chicken. So forget I mentioned it.

Now that all my clothes have been washed twice since Thanksgiving, so that most of the cranberry is out of them at this point, I really should get back to it. How to jack up the back of your ramshackle Victorian and ram a foundation under it, a hundred years or so too late. We of course took the theoretical engineering course earlier in the week. Time for practical engineering.

When my dad had a flat tire -- an occurrence as common as meeting a congressmen in Hell, as dad favored "recapped" tires back in the day -- he'd make us all get out of the car while he fixed it. My father was a banker, so arithmetic wasn't his strong suit. All practical things weren't his strong suit, now that I think of it. Hell, I think we buried him in his strong suit, which was a bit shiny at the elbows and knees. He wasn't good at anything but making people love him. But how much a car weighed, and how much the jack would hold, and what additional danger would be posed by four or five relatives malingering in the car was not known to him. His calculations consisted solely of get out of the car, you lot. It had the side benefit of an eager audience to cheer him on as he cursed gently under his breath and deftly replaced the bald tire with no air in it with the bald tire that was low on air that he kept in the trunk for just such festive occasions.

Now I'm no better than my dad; indeed, I'm much worse, because I don't care for arithmetic, and I'm as lovable as a bacterium, generally. But even I know that telling my family to get out of the house just before I lifted it wasn't going to help all that much. Houses be heavy, dude.

How much does a house weigh? That's an interesting question. It was especially interesting to me, because it might end up on top of my head. I had to know whether to wear a hard hat or a baseball cap. Go ahead, ask the Intertunnel how much a house weighs.

Herein lies another lesson. If you enter the Intertunnel, and ask it a question of a practical nature, it generally sends you first, last, and every time, to someplace with HOW TO in the URL. I've noticed that no one at no site with HOW TO in its name knows how to locate their nether regions using cartography and hand-held portable illumination devices. The HOW TO neighborhood of the Interburbs isn't just stupid; it's concentrated, distilled, malignant imbecility.

(to be continued)

[Update: In one of life's great comeuppance moments, my wife called me this evening and told me she had a flat tire. Neither one of us can remember the last time we had a flat tire. It might be 25 years. I had to go to the Sherwin Williams parking lot and change her tire in the sleet and darkness. My father has gone to his reward, but he still has enough existential pull to teach me a lesson about defaming him, I see. If you're listening, Dad, I wove a tapestry of obscenities that as far as we know is still hanging in space over the Androscoggin River]

Posted by Hodie J