The richer I get

 And now there was nothing in all the land to hinder the people from prospering continually, except they should fall into transgression.

3 Nephi 6:5

The richer I get the more lazy

I become -- isn't that crazy?

Until I transgress

and have to confess

that my motivation is hazy . . . 

En Strengen av Perler: Foam Rubber Mania

Barnaby Bumpershoot started it all, back in the 1971 Blue Unit of Ringling Brother's clown alley.

We called him Barney for short. He had to make a seven foot tall foam rubber dragon for the walk-around that season. He wanted to show off his artsy-craftsy skills. Because he wanted to compete with our very own Michelangelo of the foam rubber, Mark Anthony. Mark was a happy tramp clown who sculpted foam rubber into amazing shapes. He created a full-sized elephant from foam rubber, and painted it to look like the real deal. It was used in a disappearing elephant act by the show for years. His most recent creation was a bedraggled vulture that sat on his shoulder, seeming to stare hungrily about for some roadkill.

Barney had gone to some kind of art school back in Nebraska, and considered himself the equal of Mark when it came to carving out wildlife from expanded rubber. So he went to work on a green dragon and had it done by the time we reached Madison Square Garden. It was a smash hit with the audience as it walked along, waving a claw and wagging its tail.

Mark, who had nary a mean bone in his body, congratulated Barney on his comic coup de foudre. Then immediately began sculpting a foam rubber anteater, using an electric carving knife -- the instrument of choice by all serious foam rubber artistes.

When completed, Mark's anteater stuck out a long thin red tongue, and could also squirt a jet of water through its elongated proboscis, thanks to the rubber syringe Mark had hidden inside it.

For close up work with the audience, it proved to be just as much a crowd pleaser as Barney's green dragon.

And then Charlie Baumann, the fearsome Performance Director, stirred things up by announcing one afternoon before the matinee at the Garden: "Okay funnymen, Mr. Feld likes der floppy animal tings you make. He vants more -- schnell, schnell! Make it schnappy!"

Old man Feld had bought the show from the last of the Ringling brothers a few years back, and was now the head honcho. His word was law. If he wanted lots of foam rubber clown props, he was going to get them!

The hum of electric carving knifes slicing through foam rubber night and day made clown alley sound like a boutique sawmill. Tigers, kangaroos, zebras, parrots, and even an aardvark, were soon carved and slapped together with a crude coat of spray paint. But in the hands of rank amateurs the props looked lumpy and grotesque, not cute and eccentric, and they fell apart like the shoddy handiwork they were. It was not unusual to see various animal parts strewn around the arena after each walk around, with Smiley, one of the roustabouts, using a push broom to gather them all up to return to clown alley.

Bear and I decided we would ask Mark to tutor us before touching a single piece of foam rubber.

"Well, what kind of an animal do you want?" he asked us.

Good question, that. We hadn't really thought it through. Bear, practical as ever, asked in return:

"Well, what kind of animal is easiest to carve and paint?"

"Chicken. It'll take you an hour to make one to walk around in."

So Mark showed us how to make a giant foam rubber chicken. He then suggested we carve out a large egg from a block of Styrofoam he just happened to have lying around, attach it to a long piece of elastic rope, attach the other end to the giant chicken's butt, and then have one of us inside the chicken walk around the track, occasionally dropping the Styrofoam egg. The other one would be dressed like a farmer, pick up the egg, hold it until the elastic rope was stretched good and tight, and then let go. The egg would then shoot back to the giant chicken's butt -- and another classic clown gag was born.

It was a brilliant sight gag, and garnered Bear and I some huge belly laughs. The only problem was that Bear thought I was made for the part of the chicken, which hid me completely from the audience.

"Why don't you get inside the darn thing, and I'll be the farmer getting the laughs?" I asked after the first few times.

"Tork, you've got such skinny legs they already look like chicken legs. Mine are way too chubby -- it wouldn't be funny anymore."

That didn't sound very convincing to me. Besides, the Styrofoam egg kept ricocheting off my legs when it snapped back, and it stung. I finally gave Bear an ultimatum; either he could get inside the chicken for a week or he could find another stooge to do it. Bear gave in, not very gracefully, and the next matinee I capered about with the Styrofoam egg like a madman before letting it snap back into the giant chicken.

I could hear Bear's muffled cries as the egg slapped into his calves. Ha! I thought to myself; now the egg is on the other foot.

That evening clown alley was tipped off that old man Feld was to watch the show to check up on a number of things, including the new foam rubber clown props. This would be my big chance to show off in front of him!  Bear, needless to say, was a mite peeved that he had to be incognito inside the giant chicken. But I reminded him that a bargain was a bargain. He'd get his chance to shine some other time . . .

The band struck up Lazarus Trombones by Fillmore, which was our cue to take our clown gags around the track for the walk-around. First went Mark with his anteater, then Barney in his green dragon, then Prince Paul smoking a huge foam rubber cigar fully five feet long, then Swede Johnson riding a chariot that appeared to be pulled by ducks, and then me and Bear started around the track.

Just as we got in front of old man Feld to begin the routine the elastic rope broke.

Bear kept waiting for the egg to snap back; I just stood there with my mouth open like a dead carp. Finally I sidled up to Bear, informed him of the disaster, and we both ran off in horrid embarrassment.

After the show that night Baumann came back to clown alley to tell Bear and I that the chicken gag was out -- Mr. Feld hated it.

So Bear and I retired the giant chicken to one of the prop boxes and went with 'Bigger and Bigger'. All it took was a balloon and a long needle. Not cutting edge, but at least we no longer quarreled about who was going to crawl into the chicken anymore.

Restaurant Review: Good Thyme Cafe. Provo, Utah

The feeling of having dined well is a rare and cherished experience for me. So often I have to settle for warmed over mediocrity or stale overly processed calories. Today I'm happy to announce that Good Thyme Cafe, on Center Street in downtown Provo, provides the kind of good, well-cooked food a man of distinction (or even a slob like myself) can savor and appreciate. Everything is locally produced and minimally processed; at long last I have found a safe haven where I and all my children, no matter what kind of diet they are on, can feast together in full felicity.

 This locavore paradise features numerous fresh salad combinations, along with soups that will put hair on your chest and heavy duty trencherman stuff like loaded mashed potatoes, grilled brussel sprouts, and spare ribs that are not at all spare.

I went ala carte, which was a little pricey, but I had to sample as much as I could. Pork posole. Shrimp and pine nut pasta. Beets in vinaigrette. Tomatoes and mint.Tender and succulent chicken breasts luxuriating in a red chili sauce that was impudent but not overpowering. They have their own bakery, with plenteous samples set out to entrap the unwary sweet tooth, so I topped things off with a large puckery lemon bar that had candied lavender sprinkled on top. A pear basil lemonade washed it all down -- with free refills. It set me back $25.57, but my money has never been better spent.

 I spent an additional one hundred bucks to get gift cards for my kids. I was going to Scrooge my way through Christmas this year -- but this place is just too good to deny my beamish boys and girls.
This place is awarded an unprecedented Five Burps. And I may just retire after my meal there. I don't believe there is another restaurant anywhere that can satisfy me like Good Thyme did today. So why bother to keep searching?

Several World War II warships mysteriously disappear from watery grave at the site of Battle of Java Sea

When warships go down in the sea
they ought to be stationary;
not cut up in chunks
by plundering punks
and sold off for scrap potpourri.

I like to carry grudges

"Fervent charity, meaning “wholehearted,” is demonstrated by forgetting the mistakes and stumblings of another rather than harboring grudges or reminding ourselves and others of imperfections in the past."   Jean B. Bingham.  


I like to carry grudges; they're good exercise for me.
They build up great resentment that I use most constantly.
To huff and puff in anger is great sport for man or clone;
and if you do it well enough you'll soon be left alone.
Take it from an expert, when you've got an axe to grind
your life will shrivel and grow bitter like a rancid rind.
Living in the past develops sour attitude;
you can waste a lot of time if all you do is brood! 

En Strengen av Perler: Learning English the Hollywood Way

I thought I had all my Christmas shopping done after I placed my orders on Amazon for the grand kids. But one of the items never showed up; a disappearing magic wand for my grand son Noah, who likes to put on magic shows at his grade school (to which, I may add with a soupcon of bile, I am never invited.)

When I called Amazon customer service I was connected with a comedy accent from Saturday Night Live. Here's how the conversation went:

Accent:  Hi. My name is Bzzrhoin. May I have your gloink please?

Me: Huh? What do you want, my what?

Accent:  Bpoin, please. I need your gloink for seguro pickles please. 

Me:  I can't understand you. You want my name maybe?

Accent:  M;lknpo. That would be fretful yet. 

Me:  Uh, okay. It's Tim Torkildson. T.I.M. T.O.R.K.I.L.D.S.O.N.  Got it?

Accent:  Umvmvdp. Thank you. How can you help me Mister Forkerslum? 

Me:  That's not my . . . oh never mind. I didn't get an order; it never came.

Accent:  Rouotnnt. Sorry and bother to you. I will winklenot the pruck, shall you do that?

Me:  Lady, I can't understand a word you're saying! (I THINK it was a woman . . . )

Accent: (Strange noises, like an electrical discharge from a cat petted the wrong way). Nkriikk. Please hold me.

The line went dead and I hung up with a curse so sincere that seven blue devils appeared on my living room carpet to dance a Killarney jig before disappearing in a cloud of cotton candy. They left behind the smell of polyester yarn.

After a cup of chamomile tea and shot of epinephrine I was able to calmly survey the situation. Obviously, Amazon has outsourced their customer service overseas to some place like Lower Slobovia and engaged operators whose English skills are abysmal.

I could only shake my head. Why hadn't Amazon called on me to teach those poor souls English? After all, I have a TESOL certificate, and five years experience teaching the King's English in Thailand.  In fact, I had invented a revolutionary pedagogy that left educators breathless and my students flummoxed. This happened during my early days in Thailand, before I met my girlchum Joom.

I called it Hollywood English. I based it on the fact that everybody the world over, including Thailand, thinks that the United States has made the best and most beloved movies of all time. So I would show my students some of the finest cinema old Uncle Sam has to offer, and we would dissect and discuss the dialogue until my pupils could speak English as well as Arthur Q. Bryon or Zasu Pitts.

I couldn't quit my day job at Sukhothai Thammathirat School, of course, to pursue this inspiration, so I offered Hollywood English in the evenings in my landlord's ground floor lobby, which I rented from him for ten dollars a month. It was full of potted bamboo and featured the hard teak wood benches that Thais consider the height of elegance and farangs can't sit on for more than ten minutes without losing all circulation in their legs. The landlord had a large screen TV and a connected VCR he kindly let me use.

I put flyers up on the concrete telephone poles that lined the soi (street) were I lived advertising my new approach to English, and the result was five twenty-somethings who showed up at the announced time and place, to promptly cross my sweaty palm with a hundred baht deposit each.

My first film was a little seven minute gem by Tex Avery, the maestro of outlandish cartoons, called "Symphony in Slang". It details the plight of a young man prematurely sent to the Pearly Gates to explain his early demise to Saint Peter. The cartoon interprets slang phrases literally, so that the viewer sees people actually 'chewing the rag' and 'bouncing a check'. My pupils could not make heads or tails of it at first, but we viewed it several times together and gradually they came to understand what it meant to 'be in a pickle' or 'play the piano by ear'.

In a few weeks time, after viewing "The Roaring Twenties" with Jimmy Cagney and Humphrey Bogart, "Red River" with John Wayne and Montgomery Clift, and "Singing in the Rain" with Gene Kelly and Donald O'Connor, my proteges were greeting each other with a hearty "Howdy Tex!" and tap dancing across the lobby to proclaim "Moses supposes his toeses are roses" in mellifluous and arch tones.

Nonessential items such as grammar were swept away in the joy of being able to repeat verbatim Abbott and Costello's deathless duologue "Who's on First".

Such was their enthusiasm for this new method of language training that when I asked for my second one hundred baht installment all five students insisted I accept their promise of no less than two hundred baht each the very next week.

Strangely, I never saw them again after that. My supposition is that all five decided simultaneously to enter the Buddhist monkhood for a season. And before I could rustle up another crew of eager beavers I had to make a visa run to the Cambodian border, which resulted in a slight case of dengue fever that laid me up for a month. When I finally slid out of bed I found I had been replaced by another farang English teacher at the school; but the principal had kindly found me another position in Klong Tooey, a noisome Bangkok slum, where I was to teach dacoits basic Business English. My new position kept me extremely busy, not only lecturing but keeping my back to the wall to avoid stray daggers being thrust into it. I had to put my Hollywood English idea on the back burner, where it has remained to this day.

Still and all, I can't help thinking that today throughout the length and breadth of Thailand tourists are being told to 'keep your shirt on, bub' or asked 'cat got your tongue?' due to the influence of my brief tutoring efforts.

And if the highfalutin Amazon.com ever wishes to improve their customer retention agent's proficiency in English, they have only to ring my doorbell, hat in hand, and beg piteously while holding out large canvas sacks of greenbacks, for me to graciously lend them a helping hand.

That's all, folks!

Restaurant Review: La Dolce Vita Ristorante. Provo, Utah.

They are located at 61 North  100 East. Their food is excellent. And what I really loved about the place was that they give you a BIG linen napkin, about the size of a tablecloth. This is a welcome bonus for a slob like me who manages to spill more spaghetti sauce on my shirt than I have on my pasta:

I ordered the combination gnocchi and penne plate for $8.99. It comes with minnestrone soup, which is chockfull of fresh green beans.

I loved the color scheme and the taste dichotomy of my combo plate. When I was done with it I felt like I could eat it all over again without having to deal with a dyspeptic rivoluzione. I give this place Four Burps.

Paul Horner

Paul Horner gropes truth for a thrill.

He peddles a low grade of swill.

I doubt very much

that he has the touch

to put Donald Trump on the Hill.

A tyrant is my schedule

"May you be vigilant in tending the flock of God in ways consistent with your circumstances . . . "    Jeffrey R. Holland. 


A tyrant is my schedule; it doesn't let me sleep.
I follow it most slavishly like any mindless sheep.
It sends me off to work and dictates when I eat my meals;
it disallows daydreaming and keeps turning little wheels.
But finally I break the chains, and for a little while
I visit with my neighbor and pause just to give a smile.
God knows I'm not a hero who can move a mountain peak;
I must return to bondage that I label my 'workweek'.
But I'll escape again real soon to wander carefully,
looking for the good that I can do for you and me.  

En Strengen av Perler: God Throws Money Out the Window

"God throws money out the window" my mother always said. What she meant by that was unclear to me as a boy, and remains something of an enigma today as I totter towards the grave. But she was convinced it was a true saying, and that it covered a lot of ground when it came to economics.

I first heard her say it when my dad won a pink Cadillac convertible with a raffle ticket purchased from one of the priests at Saint Lawrence in Southeast Minneapolis. The raffle was to raise money for renovating the grade school. Someone with very pious bad taste had donated the vehicle, and when my dad drew the winning ticket he immediately loaned the car to his crony Skeets to drive up to Northern Wisconsin for the smelt run. Inordinately fond of smelt fried in lard, with the heads still on, my dad licked his chops in anticipation of Skeets returning with brimming tubs of Osmeridae -- but when several weeks passed without Skeets or the Caddy returning dad became restive.

"Damn that Bohunk!" he griped to my mother. "You can never trust a Pollack to do anything right!" Dad liked to mix his racial epithets the same way he liked to mix whiskey and 7 Up. Skeets eventually showed up, sheepishly explaining that the car was now part of a fish hatchery in Lake Superior for reasons that remained rather hazy and indistinct, but involved a case of Leinenkuegel's and the daughter of a resort owner whose hair was not platinum after all.  

"There goes our trip to the Corn Palace!" dad said, rather cryptically. "And I just paid fifty bucks to have that thing repainted black."

"God throws money out the window" said mom, just as cryptically.

As I grew older but no sharper I wondered about money -- how to get it, how to spend it, but mostly how to get it. I held several menial positions while in high school, scraping together a pittance that would not have fed Mahatma Gandhi. I hated to work after school; it took me away from the mellow and soothing influence of the flickering television screen. I had the ambition of a garden slug.

And then I answered an ad in LIFE magazine and found myself a pupil at Clown College in Venice, Florida. Ringling Brothers decided I would fit a large number of their already-made show costumes, so I was hired at the staggering salary, to me, of ninety dollars a week.

Suddenly in the chips, one of my first extravagances was to buy all the White Castle hamburgers I could hold. I thought they were the most delicious and elegant comestibles on earth when my dad brought them home on a hot summer evening as a way to keep mom from getting heat stroke in the kitchen. But I was only allowed two of them. Now that I was earning my own money, I ordered a dozen of 'em when the show played Indianapolis, and ate every blessed one. Then went to the ER to have my stomach pumped -- which cost a heck of a lot more than the the twelve sliders did.

So I was out the cost of a dozen White Castle burgers and the ER fee, which I recall was about fifty bucks.

After that I limited my splurging to books. I haunted used book stores like a ghoul in a graveyard, pawing over Asimov paperbacks and crumbling Book of the Month Club hardcovers like Osa Johnson's I Married Adventure. My roomette on the train quickly filled with so many books that I was hard put to pull down the Murphy bed and latch it to the opposite wall so it wouldn't bounce back up in the middle of the night, with me in it.

While ninety dollars a week seemed a princely sum to me, it did not impress my co-workers in clown alley. The other First of Mays found ways and means to expand their income. Bear worked cherry pie, helping to set up and tear down in each town, for which he earned an additional twenty-five dollars each week. Chico loaned money to the improvident roustabouts, demanding and getting an astounding vigorish. Others formed liaisons with gullible showgirls and lived off of them.

Still, at the end of that first season I had managed to put away a tidy sum in the bank. I moved back in with my parents with free room and board and smugly awaited events.

I pass over many of those events to the year 1986, when the cry rang out through my own little family of one wife and six kids, "We've got to cut back on spending!" This hallowed trope from many a TV sitcom and B movie was inspired by the escalating cost of providing for a growing bribe that insisted on eating three times a day and wearing clothes that fit. Such unreasonable demands never seemed to stop.

 I'd spent many a season on the road as a clown; some of them had proved profitable, and some had not. Now it seemed the unprofitable seasons were outnumbering the profitable ones to a distressing degree. I had to map out a plan of action to keep the wolf from licking the rosemaling off our door.

First on my list was a call to my parents, asking for a temporary loan to help pay for some unexpected car repair bills and a swingeing great doctor's fee stemming from two of my boys believing they could coast safely to the ground from the roof of the house with the use of cardboard wings. Their fuselages had needed major patching up.

My dad said "No" and hung up. This I had expected. But mom had a soft spot for her grand kids, so I called again when dad was at work. Her response was sympathetic but also negative. It seemed that dad was soon to be retired from Aarone's Bar and Grill, where he had worked and drank for some forty years. So, mom ended sadly, there wasn't anything she could do because . . . "God throws money out the window."

So I took a second job selling educational video cassette tapes in the evening over the phone. It was just as exciting and profitable as it sounds. As this was the winter off season, I was working days as Santa Claus at the Rosedale Mall.

Just as we began to pull ahead financially the one and only upstairs bathtub popped a rivet; the resulting leak left a sinister brown boil on the dining room ceiling. The plumber's inspection revealed pipes so rotten with age and rust that the repair bill would surpass the annual state budget for Guinea-Bissau.

We worked out a payment plan with the plumber, a Mr. Dix whose little white van featured a grinning man in blue overalls with a balloon over his head reading "When you're in a fix, call Dix!"

It certainly was a fix; there would be no Christmas tree that year and no trip to Grandma and Grandpa's up in North Dakota. Presents would be of the Dollar Store variety. But at least we'd have a bathtub again. In the meantime, a jury-rigged system of buckets and tubes in the basement provided an interesting demonstration of hydraulics as applied to the principals of bathing.

I cursed myself as a fool for buying a home; I should have invested in a trailer, and then we could all have traveled together when I hit the road as a clown! In the winters we could snuggle down at a trailer park in the Florida Keys. Now we had nothing but bills to look forward to until the sun rose in the west.

Christmas came and went, and it was not as cheerless as I had dreaded. The kids played outside in the snow while Amy and I shredded Past Due notices into doilies for the dinner table -- which featured a steaming pot of mac and cheese, with canned peaches for dessert.

When the large check arrived from an old clown alley pal, in repayment, he said, for several gag ideas I'd given him when he went to work for Chuck Jones at Warner Brothers, I could only shake my head and repeat "God throws money out the window."