Necessity is the Mother of Invention

NECESSITY is the mother of Invention. Invention's father is a guy named Bob. Bob told me he wanted to name his daughter Mary, but Necessity wouldn't hear of it. She had her mind set on "Invention."

Bob tried to reason with her:

•None of the other kids in school will be named 'Invention.'

 •Boys attempting to write her Valentine poems will be forced to use words like intention, declension or detention.

"I'd spend two hours in detention,

If I could be with you, Invention."

•Or her friends will call her Venti, and she'll be humiliated when a middle school boy discovers that at Starbucks, Venti means "very large."

But Bob's arguments were unpersuasive. Necessity was determined.

After giving the matter the thirty seconds of thought that such matters demand ("That's pretty much your thought limit, isn't it Rusty?--PB)  I realized that surely Necessity must have been teased about her OWN name. Kids at school would have called her "Nessie," which not only rhymes with "messy," but is the chosen name of the Loch Ness monster.

SUICIDE-ATTACK DEER

Last Friday night we were attacked by a suicide-attack deer as we were driving the Prius, our car from the future. It was after 9PM, when most respectable deer are home from work, bouncing their fawning offspring on their numerous knees. The one who attacked us was evidently crouching behind a bush, awaiting our approach on a dark country road in Maryland.  It certainly seemed that he knew we were coming, which makes me suspect that he was tipped off by someone like Tommy (Pretty Boy) Humphrey.  Since I don’t know anyone like Pretty Boy, it was probably him.

He leaped in front of us at the last possible second (the deer, not Pretty Boy), and although I immediately hit the brakes, we collided. The good news is that if the deer was wearing a suicide-vest, it didn't detonate. I suspect this was because he hadn't anticipated my cat-like reflexes, so he was struck in the hindquarters rather than the chest as he evidently intended. The point of impact was the very front of the car, where there is (or was) an oval shaped Toyota emblem.

I don't think I'll ever forget the hatred I saw in his eye just before impact.  (The hatred was in his left eye, in case you were wondering.) My first thought was that the attack might be ISIS-related, through its radicalized deer army, DASH (Deer/Angry/Suicidal/Hostile).  But as you know, those attacks are usually planned for places where large numbers congregate. This deer seemed to be waiting for us specifically.

At Risk to Die of BB's

After some routine blood work involving a small vial of My Precious being extracted from my left arm, I had a follow up appointment with my new Asian doctor.  Although I should point out that he is far more fluent in my native language than I am in his, issues remain.

"Blood levels not good. Too high. You at risk to die of BBs."

This came as a complete shock, first because I assumed my risk of dying of BBs dropped dramatically after my brothers stopped shooting me; and second, because even with all the trumpeted advancements in medicine, I couldn’t see how a simple blood test could reveal the risk of a future BB shot. 

“The patient’s blood looks normal, with that red color we’ve come to expect, but his BB titers are elevated.  The short term risk of a lethal BB shot is quite high.”

Then it occurred to me that maybe what the doctor meant was that the test revealed BBs already present in the blood, BBs that have presumably been there for decades. 

If so, the BBs would have company.  I remember one day when I dropped my pencil while sitting on a stool in a Lyman High drafting class in Longwood, Florida, north of Orlando.  I had the presence of mind and the catlike reflexes to clap my legs together and catch it, thus saving me the trouble of stepping off the stool to retrieve it, as some of my slower classmates had to do when they dropped their pencils.  Had my recently sharpened pencil been falling vertically, this clapping together of the legs might have been a good plan.  It was not.  If you are ever assigned the task of identifying my body, let me make it easy for you.  Look for a 1/8 inch black foreign object below the skin on my right thigh about six inches above the knee.