(Photo by Geometric Photography via Unsplash)
• I knew that the ostrich was nothing for anyone to mess around with, but a magpie?! I should have known about magpies from watching the antics of Heckle and Jeckle as a kid but, alas, I thought they were mere Negro tricksters, to use a phrase, not actual deadly birds.
• I think doughnut is preferred by Republicans, the traditionists who throw themselves athwart the tracks to stop the speeding train of history because they do not like its direction and get run over, while donut is preferred by Democrats, the change agents who ride the speeding train of history no matter its direction, even as it is going off the rails and they get thrown off.
• All this ranking proves is that baby boomers watched a lot of television. They wish to claim now that all they did was read books, while Gen-Xers and -Zers play with their Smartphones.
• The first Black person to play something that is now classified as Major League Baseball was a Black person who passed for White. Well, does that not lead to a lot of problems? How can this person be Black if he did not self-identify as Black and did not want to be considered Black? Is it not racist to apply the one-drop race rule which was invented by racist White people? Heck, why are we bothering with racial “firsts” anyway? That sounds very twentieth-century to me. It is funny that the first Black person (allegedly) to play Major League Baseball was named White and he only played one game. It all sounds like something for Ripley’s Believe It or Not, not the Baseball Hall of Fame Museum.
• The Filipino weapon of death, the yo-yo. I could have sworn Bruce Lee used it in one of his kung-fu movies, a sign that the yo-yo moved across the colored world in impressive fashion. But Lee did not use it and the Filipinos never killed either Spanish or American soldiers with it. It has always been a toy. I loved Duncan yo-yos as a kid. I still have one. In times of stress, it is better than a glass of wine.
