New Scaratings

REVE was on a junket from Zurich, his home base, to an industrial site on the outskirts of Milan. Among the party was a talented, but socially limited evangelical Lutheran, also from the Upper Midwest, who invited REVE to join him for supper at the local MacDonald's. The two of them were housed in a nondescript hotel. There was a MacDonald's on their side of the industrial strip.

No, REVE told him. We're taking a bus into town. Wherever we land, it'll be the best Italian meal you've ever eaten.

So the two of them boarded a bus, crossed the dreary industrial frontier into suburban Milan, and eventually the bus arrived in a neighborhood of just prosperity, and they disembarked.

The bistro which REVE soon chose offered only seating alla famiglia, so the two of them were placed at a table for twelve, and undertook a study of the menu.

What should I get? the Evangelist asked.

Whatever! REVE replied. It'll be the best you've ever eaten.

REVE was seated (his reluctant companion opposite) next to a personable young woman, who said, You speak English?

Yes I do! REVE replied, with characteristic enthusiasm.

I am a student of physical study, the Young Woman replied. I want to know more English. Can you teach me English?

I suppose I could, REVE replied, none too brightly. But how could I repay you?

We can trade, the Young Woman replied. I can teach you physical study, and you can teach me English.

I live in an apartment complex which is notably diverse, and when problems crop up in my end of the 45 Building, I'm often the one who makes the call. Many of my neighbors have an incomplete mastery of English, and most of the rest of them are either utterly indifferent to their surroundings or paralytically introverted. So I've acquired some feel for what I can get out of the property's management, and how to get it with appropriate urgency. And then I've also learned when to take matters into my own hands.

Last Saturday it rained all afternoon, and at 6 PM the rain turned to snow, with a total accumulation predicted of anywhere from five to twelve inches. It was coming down pretty hard, and knowing my neighbors, just because the streets were slick as snot wasn't going to keep them from going out to party on Saturday night. The exit ramp from our underground parking is steep and curved. So with a half inch of ice covered by the 2-3 inches of snow that had fallen by 9 PM, I took a shovel in hand and went out to clear the bend.

The first vehicle out of the garage, appearing just after I started, was a four-wheel drive SUV. He slid a little, but the success of his climb was never in question. A few minutes later the next vehicle, a sedan, was obviously in trouble. I got behind it and managed to provide a timely push while it was still moving forward, and that proved to be enough. So, back to shoveling.

The third vehicle, a white, late-model Sonata, came out of the garage when I was better than half-done - the hazard zone being only about 80 feet - and it was obvious, not merely that she wasn't going to make it, but also that she had no idea how to drive in such conditions. Spinning her tires, she managed to get her car turned 20 degrees out of true, facing awkwardly toward a retaining wall. I wasn't going anywhere near until she let off the gas. Then I went to the driver's window to explain how we were going to proceed. I needed to get between her left front fender and the wall. She needed to start spinning her tires. I would then push the frictionless front end onto the pavement I'd best cleared, etc.

Before I could say a word, she rolled her window down, and with a wide-eyed gaze offered up this throaty question: "Have you seen my cat?"

I was so surprised I had to ask her to repeat herself. She did. Apparently the gallant stranger would soon be in need of relaxation.

"My goodness!" exclaimed REVE, on hearing this. "The question wouldn't make any sense at all, given that she's stranded on a tilted sheet of ice - unless her cat could offer superior traction."

I once saw cats used in place of chains while driving the #7 road Oslo to Bergen in a Fiat Uno.
Winter of '75. Record snowpack.
Hmm. Think I'll have some gløgg and lutefisk.

That would make for some angry pussy indeed.

REVE was asked to go to Beijing. He'd been there a couple of times, and didn't care for the Imperial City. He could have wriggled out of it, but was well aware that to do so would have cost face with his employer. Fishing for some reason to back out, he discovered that there was a Hard Rock Cafe Beijing, and so he cast for his fate, and took the assignment. (In the interests of full disclosure, cleromancy, idealized in the I Ching, is deplored by Mohammed in the Qur'an. I hope I haven't offended anyone.)

REVE has a son who was then in his late teens or early twenties, and a collector of Hard Rock Cafe t-shirts. Until last Monday, I was not aware that such tees were much prized, but they were, and there was status to be obtained by flaunting one from an especially obscure venue.

"Hard Rock Bangkok?" I suggested, helpfully.

"He already had one of those," REVE shrugged.

"Hard Rock Cafe Beijing," he continued, "was well located, about halfway between the German embassy and the US visa office, and it was cavernous.

"The rail itself," REVE exclaimed, "was from here to the far wall," indicating half again the length of a standard bowling lane. "The place must have seated well more than five hundred. And that huge space was all the more conspicuous because there were only about five of us in there.

"I came in, in early afternoon, to buy a t-shirt. I figured I might as well stay for one. So I plopped down on a barstool, requested a CC+Soda in English, got my drink - I already had the t-shirt - and I'm just in awe of the space that I'm sitting in. At the far end of the rail are a couple of women. A guy comes in. There's a brief conversation, I don't think the guy even sat down. He leaves with one of the women, and in about five minutes she comes back, without the guy. 'That's efficient,' is what I'm thinking.

"So I'm staring into my glass, and then I'm poked in the arm. I look up. It's the other woman - you know, the one who didn't turn the trick - and this moon-faced woman, Mao's kid sister at a glance, is smiling at me, saying:

""Hi! I am Mongolian. Do you like me?""

QUESTION 10:

AT WHAT 2000 SPORTS EVENT DID THE BADGERS DEFEAT THE BRUINS?

"The Sun Bowl, maybe?" suggested JOHNL.

It was Monday afternoon, and the usual suspects had rounded ourselves up for a friendly game of Countdown. We all uttered gasps of astonishment when the Sun Bowl appeared in the five-item drop-down box. The brilliance of John's pre-call was undercut by the Sun Bowl's being the only NCAA sports event among the options, so everyone system-wide got the question right, but still...

REVE has a baccalaureate from that Distinguished Reformatory which enjoys so prominent a place in Madison's civic life. "How would you know that?" he asked.

"That's just the illustrious JOHNL," KRISPY replied, matter-of-factly.

"Well, out of that bunch," JOHNL growled, doing his best imitation of BOGEY, whose voice lies somewhere on the Joe Cocker-Janis Joplin Spectrum and doles out praise as if it were paid directly from his wallet. BOGEY wasn't there to defend himself. All the more reason to put him on trial.

A retired college instructor in the earth sciences, BOGEY is still drawing royalties from a textbook he wrote several years ago. He disputes global warming and is the only person I know who claims to have seen an alien spaceship. Or so I thought.

"Wait just a minute," REVE interjected. "I have a story I want to share."

Five minutes later we'd stumbled to the end of the quiz, whereupon REVE resumed the floor. He grew up in Green Bay, and one warm summer night in 1956 hosted one of his grade school classmates for a sleep-over in his family's screen porch. Sometime after midnight the eight-year-old REVE woke up to find a brightly colored sphere, roughly the size of a croquet ball, hovering not a foot from the porch screen, not more than three feet from where he lay. What's more the colors of the sphere, and the pattern of its illumination, kept changing. Unlike a flashlight, there was no focus to this object's illumination.

He woke up his friend. "What's that?" the friend asked.

"I dunno."

"Maybe we should wake up your Dad." So the boys raced upstairs to awaken REVE's widowed father, and then ran back downstairs. They returned just in time to see the sphere which had been scanning their sleep absorbed into a mother ship, of which they hadn't been cognizant - an obloid affair of metallic blue, slowly and silently passing beyond their view just above the treetops. REVE's Dad, slow to awaken, saw none of it. But the boys were convinced.

"What was your visceral reaction to seeing that sphere studying you?" I asked. "Were you frightened?"

"No. Dumbfounded, maybe. But the point I want to make is that I am absolutely certain that what I saw was real. Nobody will every convince me that UFO's - no, make that alien spaceships - don't exist. I know."

This isn't something one would expect to hear from a troubleshooter for Sperry/Unisys, whose success, on several continents, persisted into his early 60's. Personally, I worked for the Postal Service, which harbors more than its fair share of eccentrics, and I'm not sure I would have the courage to make such a confession.

"What do you suppose they were after?" the chatter began.

"Searching for intelligent life?"

"In Wisconsin? That seems like a stretch."

"Maybe that's why we don't hear much about UFO's anymore. Maybe they've given up on us."

Yet it's possible that alien curiosity in our human experiment may be mounting. I'd always thought the UFO craze had peaked in the 1950's. When the Air Force shut down Project Blue Book in 1969, there were only about 12,000 entries, stretching over 20 years, and only a handful of those entries hadn't been discredited. According to the National UFO Reporting Center, there were 8,619 recorded UFO sightings in the year 2014 alone. While the science of optics is far from complete, the spherical probe that REVE and his childhood friend both witnessed is hard to explain away. They weren't drunk, they weren't high, they weren't frightened, and they both claimed to see the same thing.

And why shouldn't superior intelligence wish to study us? To examine a species which has the power to destroy itself is an opportunity not to be neglected.

"REVE, my youngest! Are you accepting guests?"

"C'mon over."

"It'll take about twenty minutes." I was visiting my mom, who is domiciled in a memory care facility not that distant, in a nearby corner of the Back of Beyond.

"Whatever. I'm in the gazebo. Just let yourself in through the garden gate."

REVE occupies a split level five miles outside the I-694 beltline, on a large drumlin, surrounded by marshland, which is shared among twenty or so houses. There's no crime in the neighborhood for the simple reason that no burglar could ever find it. His split looks like it was professionally decorated, to be photographed by a domestic journal, which happens to be the case. REVE's significant Linda, with whom he's been living in companionable sin for the last twenty-five years, is a semi-retired interior decorator. We've all been trapped in that waiting room with an outdated copy of Architectural Digest, thinking, "Yeah, but what does this place look like when flawed by human inhabitance?" Now I know. The disturbed gentility of La Maison Reve is enhanced by there being nobody to pick up the place.

REVE just had his aortic valve replaced and is on a two-pound weight restriction. Four days before his scheduled surgery, Linda tripped over a tarp she'd laid down in the garage, and landed on her right elbow, chipping off a quarter-sized chunk of her ulna, which started migrating, as bone chips do, into her upper arm. The chip was extracted and surgically pinned. REVE isn't permitted to sit in the front seat of a car for the next several weeks (airbag deployment could crush his surgically broken sternum), and Linda won't be out of her cast before then.

So I closed the garden gate and began picking my way gingerly along the flagstones set among the four hundred cultivars of hosta that Linda has assembled there, each with its little aluminum name plate stuck on a foot-tall pole, identifying the cultivar, who first bred it, in what year, and what its properties might be. Good to his word, REVE was in the gazebo, with a local prog rock station somewhere off in the background.

"This is my summer retreat," REVE said, in repose, once greetings had been exchanged. "But I have to bug-proof it sometime soon. Unfortunately, the weather hasn't been cooperating."

"The elevation and screens aren't sufficient?"

"No, not at all! There's a tiny, almost microscopic red arachnid - you see this screen?"

He was pointing, randomly, to the facing of the gazebo. It was a standard sort of porch screen.

"Three hundred of them can pass through one gap in that mesh. And they'll tattoo me. You see that I'm wearing long pants and a long-sleeved shirt. Both my shirt and pants have been treated with Picaridin. But I'll be treating the screens and woodwork in here with probably three or four different kinds of repellant."

"Your little red friends are probably windblown. They might not have any choice but to land here."

REVE sighed. "I've found a ring of bites all the way around my sock tops. The strange thing is, I'm the only one who's afflicted. Linda isn't. None of our guests. And it's not just the arachnids. Bugs love me. Have you ever visited the Lost 40?

"Never heard of it."

"It's about a hundred acres of virgin forest in northern Minnesota - we were on our way to visit Joanie at Rainy Lake and it wasn't much of a detour - it's virgin forest, misidentified as a swamp on the original plats. So when the lumber barons were bidding for timber around there, nobody laid claim to it. Why would you want to buy a swamp? So it's full of these towering red and white pines." He shrugged. "We figured it was worth a stop.

"So we drive in and find the parking lot. It's deserted. We get out and before we're even into the woods I'm attacked by deer flies. There must have been a dozen of them buzzing around my head." In the interests of full disclosure, REVE does a pantomime of a dozen deer flies flying about his head which is absolutely hilarious, all the more so because he's the only one who doesn't think it's funny.

"The deer fly is aggressive," I agreed. "When I used to go jogging in Tamarack Nature Preserve, which is only about five miles east of here, they'd land on the lenses of my eyeglasses."

"And fly into your ears. And when they bite, deer flies take out chunks. Horrible, horrible things. And there they were, trying to make a meal out of me. They ignored Linda. She could see that I was having a bad time of it, and let me go back to the car. So I sat in the car with a beer and a paperback and Linda went off in the woods for an hour. She came back gushing hour gorgeous it was. Not bothered by flies at all. Meanwhile, I'd been glancing up occasionally, and there were always at least two of them on the driver's side window, and a few more buzzing around. 'Forget it, I'm not coming out,' I told them, but they didn't seem to understand."

"I suppose you can't be accused of paranoia if the threat is real."

"Well, when Linda opened the passenger door, one did get in. We swatted it and started to pull away, and the other flies followed us. I'm doing five miles an hour, and they're right with us. Ten miles an hour - do you know how fast I had to go to lose them? Thirty!"

I could lose the deer flies in the Tamarack Nature Preserve with a three-quarter stride, and so gave tongue to the following fable.

Two birds were perched side-by-side on a power line, massaging their feet, when one of them turned to the other and said, "If you could have any superpower, what would it be? To turn doorknobs? To eat with a knife and fork?"

"That sounds unnatural," replied the second Bird. "I'd be happy just to fly through glass."

"I hope the robins in my neighborhood never figure that one out," REVE replied, grasping the moral by its tale. "Or if they do, they don't teach it to the flies."

REVE and Linda are recovering handsomely, I'm happy to report. He informs me that one of his oldest friends is retiring from United Airlines. "I must have met him 38, 39 years ago."

The conversation was a bit disjointed. We were playing in the company of our chief kibbutzer Mark, whose circle of knowledge is so irregular a closed curve as to render his genius, on certain points, the near neighbor of idiocy - as Mark, a Catholic schoolboy of 68 years, would freely confess. So REVE and LI ZHU stood back-to-back, as it were, to fend off those entertainment questions which can blow up a Countdown quiz. If only the illustrious JOHNL had been there! But John, in the guise of GOPHER, was off at Ray J's, illuminating a path for the Brain Trust. The Brain Trust, late of DeMori's, took us 4 out of 5, as they usually do.

"There were two or three instances of folly in my dealings with United Airlines that beggar the imagination," REVE persisted.

"In the wake of one or another blackout - and I don't recall which - United installed a back-up generator to pump fuel into their planes at the Chicago hub. The whole business was sealed in concrete. So they installed it, tested the system - and fifteen minutes later, the fuel pump ran dry. Nobody had troubled to connect the fuel pump to the generator. How peculiar is that?"

"An oversight to be sure," I agreed. "How quickly were you able to round up a gang of inmates to break down the concrete?"

"So check this out: United wished to secure its logistics by running an impregnable mainframe out its basement to servers on the 5th floor. The basement was, in fact, impregnable - not by fire, nor flood, nor earthquake - but United deemed its home office employees too valuable to suffer their work disrupted by having holes driven through their offices, and so ran the ethernet up the outside of the building. This worked for about two weeks, until a passing thunderstorm reconfigured the wiring."

Many years earlier, Terry Joyce, a junior supervisor in the St Paul post office, had managed to cache a Volkswagen Beetle on the 5th and topmost floor, where it didn't belong. Eventually he became Postmaster.

"And here's another one. We installed a global register - flights, reservations, and the planes available - and United plugged the system into a wall socket, without back-up, without any warning messages, and without putting the plug & socket in a security cage. And a janitor came through one night, and wanting to plug in his vacuum, pulled the plug on the universal registration system, and started vacuuming. Result? A clean carpet, and a three hour delay on all outgoing flights."

"And you've known this guy for 39 years? I suppose it couldn't be much longer. After all, he survived."

"Nah, you're right, it's at least forty years. He was in charge of logistics. But back then, there weren't very many of us. And we were all young."

"In the intervening years," I mused, "there's been a lot of consolidation among the airlines. Gone are Northwest, Eastern, TWA...the list could go on. I suppose that the airlines that didn't survive suffered embarrassments even more egregious than the ones you've mentioned."

"Look at it this way," REVE explained. "That's three incidents in forty years. Yeah, there were some minor inconveniences. On the whole, that airline has a very impressive record."

"Tell that to David Dao," Mark interjected. "The doctor who was dragged off a United flight because four of its employees needed to deadhead to Louisville. A concussion, chipped teeth, a broken nose? And here's an airline with 80,000 employees, and they needed those four, specifically, in Louisville? I ain't buyin' that."

The optics, as they say, were bad. Customer complaints on UA flights skyrocketed. The CEO of United Airlines was forced into retirement. How, in an integrated system, could this have possibly happened? REVE's opinion might be worth publishing. The gate agents made a hash of it. They should have sought the advice of a superior. Or maybe they did, and the superior didn't know how to access the available resources. Maybe the gate agents thought they'd save their own skins by not being mentioned as party to a union grievance.

Nor should readers of this thread let me off the hook, with my own easy cynicism, that advanced technology is created by genius and adopted by the ignorant for the purpose of conquest.

I've probably reported this already, in some other context. But for the most part you're an indulgent bunch, and one might hope to be excused for telling the same story twice.

RUGCAT has recently moved to the outskirts of Mouse Hollow, and has been frequenting B-52, although not with the diligence we had hoped. The saloon itself is the culprit. RUGCAT is 6'8". He slouches easily to about 6'3", but it's one of those forward leaning slouches you might associate with a fire-breathing Abolitionist, or of a technical adept lecturing his business clients, which better fits the case. If RUGCAT gets on his soapbox in a rainstorm, you can adjust your position and use him as an umbrella.

Buzztime players can be notably eccentric. With Big Kitty, it's not that obvious. But he won't consume any alcoholic beverage except bottled Heineken. And when you're 6'8" and 250 pounds, and you're a regular player at a Buzztime site, that might come to a case a week. Sure enough, B-52 ran out of Heineken within three days of RUGCAT's arrival. There was conversation.

AUVA, who had a long-standing relationship with B-52 as a food distributor, insisted on taking the lead, and I acquiesced, with the proviso that he inform management that their requisition of Heineken needed to be bumped up a case. (All liquor shipments are received every Thursday, but only on Thursday.) The message apparently didn't circulate, because twice more in what has only been a month, RUGCAT has failed to score his favored brew. Today was the eye-rolling apotheosis.

"Sorry, we don't have any Heineken." So Rugcat is sitting there, nursing a water. At the end of the quiz, I go upstairs to the patio, which has its own cooler, and request a bottle of Heineken. The bartender reaches into a cooler, pulls one out, and before uncapping it, looks at me and says, "You don't usually drink this stuff."

"It's not for me."

The manager of both floors happened to be standing there. She said, "Oh, she (presumably the downstairs bartender) was just up here. She took three down."

So I cancelled my request, but not without asking how many Heinekens the patio had reserved. According to the patio bartender, there were still six in the rooftop cooler.

RUGCAT downed the three beers. And having been informed that those were the only three on the premises, he declared, with a sardonic laugh, that he would take his trade elsewhere.

REVE was led by this to recall an old friend who'd come to Saint Paul with a craving for Italian cuisine. So REVE took him to Pazzaluna, the town's premier Italian joint, where you're likely to drop $100 at a table for two, or more than that, depending on the wine.

"I'd like a Grey Goose on the rocks," REVE's guest told the server.

"I'm sorry, Sir, but we don't carry it."

"I don't understand," the guest replied. "Grey Goose is a premium vodka, and this is a premium restaurant. What gives?"

"We used to carry it, but we kept running out," the Server apologized. "To provide more consistent service, we stopped stocking it."

I don't quite recall what BUD said that put me in mind of this anecdote, but it came up, unbidden, again today.

The 11 year old REVE wanted to attend a Boy Scout camp not that distant from Green Bay. But to attend, he needed a physician's certificate. His father, a widower with a machine shop to run, let the form sit on the kitchen table for a month, two months. As the deadline approached, REVE booked himself an appointment with the family physician.

"I'm very sorry, REVE," the Family Physician told him. "You have a significant heart murmur. I can't in good conscience sign for you."

REVE got on his bicycle and rode around Green Bay until he located another shingle.

Without much delay, the 2nd Doctor saw him in, and gave him a passing grade, signing the certificate. "Why did you seek me out?" the 2nd Doctor asked.

"The doctor we usually see said I had a heart murmur, and wouldn't let me go."

"Yeah, you have a heart murmur," the 2nd Doctor agreed. "When you get to be really old, maybe 30 or 40, you'll want to keep an eye on that."

"How much do I owe?" REVE asked, too young to know that the bribe and kick-back usually go hand-in-hand.

"Usually $5, but this one is just between you and me. Enjoy your camp."

........

Sure enough, his heart murmur earned REVE a 4-F during the Viet Nam build-up...

Mark, our Kibbutzer-in-Chief, on hearing this, went ballistic. "You've gotta be putting me on! I've got flat feet, I'm so fair that my Irish skin blisters when I stand next to a micro-wave oven, I've committed numerous felonies, and my ticker is so weak that I went through a quintuple bypass, eventually. I declared my opposition to war. I declared that I was homosexual. And I spent 18 months in Viet Nam. And you got off with a what?"

(Here follows five minutes of agreeable debate regarding the capriciousness of draft boards. I recused myself. My grandfather was on one, and the original GONE D spent most of WW II at the University of Michigan, or of Minnesota, or at Harvard, and closed out the war as a payroll ensign at a naval base in Georgia.)

...And REVE's heart murmur didn't resurface as a topic of concern until he was in his 40's. Even then, at every physical, he'd be advised that yes, this is a subject of future concern.

The tipping point - as it was described by his cardiologist - occurred this past winter, when REVE was in his 70th year. He was asked to cancel his usual 6-week junket to Puerto Vallarta. His vital signs closely monitored when he might otherwise have died on a Mexican beach, he was wheeled into an operating room, where his sternum was medically fractured, and his aortic valve replaced. It turns out that REVE, like roughly 2% of the general population, had only two leaflets, instead of the typical three, controlling his aortic valve.

"I look back through the parish records," REVE declaims, from the back seat of my 2015 Woofer, while we're zipping along at 73 MPH in a 60 MPH zone, twenty miles from our destination, "and many of my ancestors were dying in their 40's and 50's, while their brothers and sisters are either dying in their infancy or living into their 80's." He was in the back seat because the deployment of an airbag might have re-broken his sternum. "I'd bet good money that my aortic valve isn't a freak accident, but a legacy."

He's a Swede, by geneology if not by citizenship, and until very recently, the census records in Sweden were kept by Lutheran parishes. I've had the opportunity to translate, or more accurately, attempt to translate the Gothic script in which REVE's family history is encoded. REVE's claim to be dyslexic, often repeated, is unpersuasive.

BLSXPN recently coined the term, SuperKennyG, a portmanteau so redolent as to cause many of us to to ask whether there isn't a detergent with which one can safely scrub one's brain.

Cindy Crawford wanted to donate her body to Science, and according to one of the Cola companies, she turned into Rodney Dangerfield.

In human inquiry there are frequent setbacks.

REVE recently flew to Phoenix, to assist his son and daughter-in-law in their move to Greensboro, North Carolina. Both kids, now in their 30's, are still saddled with student debt, and the move had to be executed within a narrow time frame, on a shoestring budget.

Somewhere in Arkansas, REVE and his son saw a highway billboard, advertising a Homeopath who claims she can cure autism. Since REVE's daughter-in-law is a child psychologist, the claim seemed worth pursuing. A Google search turned up that the Homeopath recommends, among other treatments, a Bleach Enema.

That would certainly capture a wayward boy's attention.

Personally, I might rank a little too high on the autism spectrum to benefit from a Bleach Enema, but might it help with my Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder? Where I wander off after every five questions, smoke cigarettes on the patio, engage civilians at the rail in strange conversation, and come back to my device only after half the points in Question 6 have marked down?

But that's not what draws me in. I want to undertake Homeopathic Autism Therapy, replete with a Bleach Enema, to see whether I can produce a white turd.

"I know where you Bolshevik lefties want to take this," Mark Rogan, our Kibbutzer-In-Chief replied. "Don't go there."

At the age of 16, REVE was hired as a beer vendor at Lambeau Field. This would have been in 1963, in the upswing of the Lombardi Era.

"I wanted to see the games," REVE apologized. "I couldn't afford a ticket. That was my only way in.

"Pabst was a major sponsor for the Packers, and Lambeau had a neon sign, reading, 'Pabst Makes It Perfect', and whenever the Packers scored, the 'It' would light up. So Pabst's presence was huge.

"But at 16, I was the runt of the litter among beer vendors, and had to carry an off-brand, the only brewery based in Green Bay: Rahr's."

"Seriously?" we asked. "There were breweries in every third town in Wisconsin, and Green Bay had only one?"

"Only Rahr's," REVE confirmed. "So I'm carrying this case up and down, selling one here, another one there..."

"Were you kept to one particular aisle?"

"No, you could go wherever you wanted. But the bottom line was that I wasn't selling a case. And you paid in advance. So I was swallowing some losses."

"Couldn't you take them home?"

"Nah, you had to sign in for what you were carrying, and sign out for what you didn't sell. Beers were counted. Not like guns nowadays, which are, like, whatever. And I was only sixteen. Maybe Yogi Berra took home pots of beer to his dad in the '30's.

"My breakthrough happened at half-time, in a game I can't remember. I'd actually sold out a case of Rahr's before halftime, and was passing by a Men's Room with a new case as halftime was winding down. Being familiar with the expression, 'One in, one out', I sat down outside the Men's, and sold fifteen beers in fifteen seconds. I couldn't pop 'em open fast enough.

"The next week I ordered five cases of Rahr's. The distributor was incredulous. 'How's a kid like you gonna sell that much?'

"I sat outside the Men's Room at halftime and sold off all five cases. I saw a lot of football doing that."

"

REVE sent me a link to a guy whose experience as a beer vendor was similar to his own. This link may be helpful to that sliver of New Scaratings readers who are active in the beer trade:

https://www.plzdontletbuddie.com/curren ... ers-and-me.

I've taken up polling my Monday afternoon Countdown table on topics of political interest. Among two Republicans, four Democrats, one Libertarian and one Independent (this last, a mail-in vote), there is an extraordinary diversity of opinion, and next-to-no conformity to party line. There is an apparent bias in favor of transparency, but neither is that definitive. And the sample is, obviously, miniscule.

Last week's topic: Cats

1. Do you own a Cat, or conversely, does a Cat own you?
2. Do you regard yourself more a Cat person or a Dog person?
3. On a scale of 0-5, 0 (no appeal) to 5 (love 'em all), how do you rate Cats as pets?

AUVA (a staunch Republican) replied that, on a 0-5 scale, he rates cats a minus(-)10. He likes to hunt ground-nesting game birds, and views feral cats as unlicensed competition. Plus, he grew up on a farm, and the farm cats disdained him, which apparently damaged young AUVA's esteem for the species irreparably.

REVE (a Democrat) offered a more nuanced response.

"My father kept a cat which would respond to five voice commands. Play dead, roll over, leap through this, climb on that. That cat was terrific."

"How did your father train him? What was the secret?"

"Cocktail shrimp," REVE replied. "My father kept a jar of them in the fridge, and all you had to do was utter the word, 'Shrimp', and that cat would be at your feet, begging to know what it needed to do next."

"You probably could have taken that cat for a walk around the block without a leash."

"Indeed you could."

"But you've had other, less stellar cats?"

"My wife and I were living in Montreal, a fourth-story walk-up with a fire escape outside our bedroom window. The fire escape went all the way to the ground. In the summertime, we'd leave the window open, and her cat would come or go as it pleased. He had been neutered, but one night it was followed home by a tom of, shall we say, eclectic tastes. We knew nothing about this tryst until 3 AM, when a cat fight broke out beneath our bed.

"The same apartment was equipped with one of those old, four-footed bathtubs, which didn't meet the wall, and that cat would walk around the rim of the bathtub while I bathed. I didn't think much of it, but a cat's claws can't do much with porcelain, and one day the cat fell in. And what was its first instinct? To gain a foothold, of course, and it had nothing to grab onto, except me. And once it had, it wouldn't let go. I had to pull it off me. The bathwater turned pink."

"That was the same cat that used to run down the fire escape?" I speculated. "It sounds as if that cat had boundary issues."

"Maybe so," REVE chuckled, "but not like the one that mistook my son's bed for its litterbox. That one lasted two days. One day to attempt the experiment, and one more day to confirm the result."

AUVA was within earshot. "You know you're only justifying his prejudices," I whispered.

"Not a prejudice," AUVA interjected.

It turns out that the only one in the Monday group who owns a cat is our kibbutzer-in-chief, the Libertarian. Mark recently acquired a strikingly handsome one-year-old orange cat, which he named Gonzo. I was up in Mark's condo last month, helping him assemble an electronically operated litter box, and I can attest that if finicky Morris was the Clark Gable of cats, or Grumpy Cat the W.C. Fields of the species, Gonzo would be the Errol Flynn. According to Mark, Gonzo's talent for mischief is acrobatic.

"I could suspend the garbage can from the ceiling and he'd still find a way in," Mark complains. But even more than handsome or acrobatic, Gonzo is wonderfully cheerful. In the hour I spent there, he never stopped purring.

Mark's judgement: "He owns me, and he knows it."

REVE is on his way to Puerto Vallarta for six weeks. Burglars beware! The teenage girl who lives across from him has been hired to water Linda's plants and collect their mail and she is a trap-shoot champion, eager for any excuse to demonstrate her skill with a rifle.

"JOHNL and I may well meet on St Patrick's Day," REVE confirmed, regarding conversation overheard between them some days earlier. "But Linda and I have any number of friends who'll be passing through."

Friends from all over," I conjectured.

"Well yes, but oddly enough, a guy who grew up across the street from me has invited me to meet the mayor (of Puerto Vallarta) this St Valentine's Day." To which REVE added, "My friend lives at a different socio-economic level from you or me.

"Chuck B and I have known each other from seventh grade, went to high school, college together," REVE continued. "While I got into computers, Chuck B majored in fine arts. He developed a friendship with an art history major, also named Chuck B, and eventually they fell in love. And then they were obliged to graduate. Money would be an issue.

"On a whim, this being Madison in 1970, they bought a curio cabinet at a garage sale, and two pairs of roller skates. They bought a bunch of soap, stuffed it in the glass, attached the roller skates to the bottom of the cabinet, and began wheeling this contraption between campus and downtown, selling soap from a mobile kiosk.

"This proved to be profitable. Within six months they were able to rent a storefront, in a defunct liquor store. A year later they rented another, larger space across the street. Two years after that, they bought the place. Three years later, they paid off the mortgage.

"Madison is crawling with impoverished students expected to celebrate Christmas, or Mother's Day, or any woman's birthday, with a gift. What better than a $10 bar of soap?"

REVE was oversimplifying, but you get the gist. The two Chuck B's were going upscale with their merchandise. They began with soap and a mobile art installation, which, by-the-bye, could be monetized. Now they were dealing in gift boxes.

"The six, seven hundred feet of their shop," REVE continued, "Smaller than the space we're sitting in (B-52's lounge) was absolutely crammed with soap. They called it the 'Soap Opera'."

There were a couple of breakthroughs. Here enters the internet.

"They had a contract with a French supplier of super-premium soaps. The French supplier went on-line, and made a corporate decision to cancel its exports. For one reason or another, they continued to supply the two Chuck B's. Tanned 40-somethings were showing up in mid-January, from places like Palm Springs."

"Maybe those fabulous California blondes had Wisconsin roots," I proposed.

"Check this out. One day, maybe fifteen years ago, the other Chuck B went to his basement office and found that his fax machine had gone haywire. All the paper had spilled out onto the floor.

"'Oh fuck,' the other Chuck B said. But the fax machine had not failed.

"A newspaper in Japan had published an insert, similar to Parade Magazine, advertising the 'Top 10 Mail Order Websites You Need to Discover', and put the 'Soap Opera' website on its front page.

"The Chuck B's hired a Japanese student to fulfill the demand. It was several years before that pipeline went dry.

"Eventually they sold the store, but they still live in Madison. The home they designed was so complex that they had to hire a commercial developer to built it. And the kitchen floor is upholstered with leather."

REVE suggested a couple weeks ago that the usual Monday Countdown crowd might get together, with safe distancing, for an in-person Buzztime session, but since neither he nor I wish to spend three hours in a confined space, we would be obliged to meet outdoors, at a place other than REVE's, where he complains of poor reception.

I managed to turn REVE's invitation inside-out, and cadged an invitation to his place, for the purpose of touring his significant Linda's hosta garden. The American Hosta Society had intended to make a tour stop at her garden last week. The visit has been postponed until 2022, so Linda has two more years to fret over what might constitute perfection. Instead of a tour bus, she received only a AHS photographer. And then, this past Saturday, Mouse Hollow Taxi & Limo deposited JAN M at the garden gate, where she and her Driver walked into an arcadian paradise. Of Linda's 400 distinct cultivars, 399 were thriving exuberantly. And all the off-setting plants, non-hostas strewn for variety, seemed a happy, well-integrated minority.

There is a lot to admire in REVE's backyard. After a fascinating hour JAN M and her Driver were invited to fresh-roasted coffee (REVE has his own roaster) and homemade cinnamon rolls, with a frosting that melted like butter (no doubt a significant ingredient). Linda confessed that she is an anxiety baker who, when stressed, takes it out on flour and eggs. While we were sitting on the patio, exchanging confessions, another gardening enthusiast came around, a fashionably casual blonde of a certain age, and confirmed JAN M's impression. "My God!" she exclaimed, on passing through the garden fence. "I'm in paradise! Literally," she gulped, "I've got goosebumps."

The new visitor was not wrong to feel that way. Another hosta garden on the 2020 AHS tour is directly across the street from Linda's, and is arguably more satisfying. The opposite garden is the pride of neighbor Kathy, who enjoys the distinction of having given Linda her very first hosta. Kathy would seem to have the evangelical gift: she persuaded her next-door neighbor to tear out the six feet of scrub demarcating the back of his property, and to install a garden complementary to Kathy's, so the astonished visitor to Kathy's backyard finds an unbroken and lavish 50-yard flowering vista, behind a lot only half that length.

Kathy's garden is in distinct contrast to Linda's. Kathy's is classically curated, with smaller cultivars in the foreground, larger behind, stepping stones precisely where they need to be so that each cultivar can be intimately inspected, the garden statuary tastefully discreet. Going from Kathy's garden back to Linda's is like stepping out of library into a street riot. Personally, I preferred the barely controlled chaos of Linda's garden: not of classical form, but with more excitement, more danger. Two of her hostas have leaves as large as turkey platters, and in brushing past them, one must conquer the fear of capture.

REVE displayed the damage red squirrels had done to his gazebo. Why squirrels would chew on REVE's gazebo remains a mystery. "Did you take up my suggestion to import Burmese pythons?" JAN M asked. "I understand pythons come two for one from Florida, and that the seller pays the postage."

"No, I didn't," REVE replied, apologetically. But then he brightened. "Last week one of my neighbors found a red squirrel tail on his back patio. Just the tail. The rest of the squirrel had disappeared!"

At the end of every story, someone or something is bound to go away unhappy.