Come Unto Me

And ye see that I have commanded that none of you should go away, but rather have commanded that ye should come unto me . . . 
Third Nephi. Chapter Eighteen. Verse 25.

Open and accessible, the Savior welcomes each
to test his loving kindness and find it's within their reach.
His invitation lingers in the hardest heart, indeed;
and no reproach is ever heard for those who lack much speed.
So come and sample happiness while at the Lord's bright feet;
I testify there's nothing there but what is pure and sweet! 

The British Butterfly Ballot -- Russian Rerun -- Pangolins Face Extinction Because of Quackery

The survey began in 2010, and last year, a record 60,000 people turned in 62,500 counts of butterflies and day-flying moths from across the United Kingdom, according to Butterfly Conservation, which describes the effort as the largest butterfly count in the world.

NYT

The butterfly census remains

one of humanity's gains.

A labor so charmed

that no one is harmed;

we need more such peaceful campaigns. 

MOSCOW—The Russian government signaled Friday its openness to a possible second summit between President Vladimir Putin and his U.S. counterpart Donald Trump, even as some officials in Moscow remain taken aback by the firestorm that has surrounded the meeting between the two leaders earlier this week.

WSJ

When leaders of global import

meet more than once to cavort,

I think it's a sign

that they still do pine

each other to fully extort.

The air of mystery attaching to the reclusive pangolin has been its downfall, sparking an unjustified belief that its scales have magical medicinal properties. In hospitals and pharmacies across China and Vietnam, powder made from pangolin scales is prescribed for an impossibly wide range of ailments, including rheumatism, wound infections, skin disorders, coronary heart disease and even cancer.

Washington Post

The pangolin is awful rare;

it carries armor and not hair.

It noshes on the eggs of ants

and is a medical romance.

So if you're sick and your heart fails,

just swallow some of its smooth scales.

Crushed pangolin is just the thing

to give you back that good old zing.

But nobody has thought to quiz

the pangolin about this biz.

I think if pangolins could drawl

they'd say "Go get some Tylenol!" 

Brother Billy Cleans House

I once started an email to a friend with "Well, I decided to clean house today -- so I flushed the toilet."

And that's not such a great exaggeration, either. Dust and cobwebs hold no terror for me, and dirty dishes feel at home in my kitchen sink and often overstay their welcome. Vacuuming is a concept I am only vaguely committed to.

As I look back on the major influences of my childhood, this slovenly trait is certainly an anomaly -- for my mother was a dedicated foe of dirt, grime, dust and tarnish of any kind. She drilled it into me that cleanliness was not only next to godliness but one of the Ten Commandments if you read between the lines, as she did.

She kept an arsenal of chemical cleaners underneath the kitchen sink to help her eradicate the merest suggestion of a smudge. There was always a large canister of Bon Ami powder, with its absurd logo of a baby chick emerging from the shell; I thought maybe you were supposed to sprinkle the powder on eggs to make them hatch. I tried it once, to no effect. 

Mom went through a bottle of Mr. Clean every other week. And as a television addict with a vast retentive memory of every commercial I ever saw I would break out into the refrain "Mr. Clean . . . Mr. Clean . . . Mr. Clean . . . " whenever I smelled that pungent aroma. 

There was Clorox bleach; Pledge furniture polish; Weiman silver polish; Brillo pads; Palmolive dish washing liquid; Arm&Hammer baking soda; Windex; Johnson floor wax; Lysol spray; Glade air freshener spray; a packet of chamois strips for delicate jobs; and of course a pair of sturdy yellow rubber gloves. 

 Strange to say, my older brother Billy, ten years my senior, who was on the high school football team and kept a set of weights in the basement to stay buff, was also a clean freak. He seconded my mother's continuous commando actions against dirt. 

Thus it came to pass one summer day when I was six that my mother had to leave unexpectedly on some urgent errand, with the housework incomplete, so she prevailed upon brother Billy to not only look after my sisters and me, but to finish up cleaning the house. Billy was only too glad to do so. He parked us kids in front of the television set just in time for the Mel Jass Matinee Movie on Channel 11, then began tidying things up.

But the Mel Jass movie that day was a dud -- "Henry Aldrich Gets Glamour" or some such dreck -- so I swiftly grew bored and wandered away from the boob tube, looking for a little action.

I found it in the dining room, where Billy had unwisely left the Electrolux vacuum in a vulnerable and wide open position while he took the vacuum bag out to the trash. In a flash I saw the possibilities of stuffing the innards of the Electrolux with a dozen or so small plastic cowboys and indians I kept handy in a bag under the living room couch. That done, I wandered into the kitchen to open the refrigerator door for ten minutes, staring blankly at the milk, eggs, and the remains of last night's fish sticks. Meanwhile Billy began swearing softly to himself as he attempted to inject a new bag into the vacuum. Repeatedly foiled, he finally gave up, pushed the vacuum to the side, and began industriously polishing the dining room table. Closing the fridge door I walked up behind him to demand a Popsicle. The magical word "Popsicle" brought my sisters running, screaming that they wanted one too.

"You kids go back to the TV and leave me alone -- Mom said you can't have any cuz you didn't finish your lunch!" he said. But Billy was not mom, and could be hectored unmercifully until he caved in. So we yelled and blubbered and wheedled until he caved, as we knew he would, and got us each an orange Popsicle from the freezer and told us to go eat them outside. 

We promptly took them back to the TV in the living room instead, where they melted all over our clothes and dribbled onto the carpet. When Billy discovered this he got the Mr. Clean to rub out the evidence of his dereliction of duty from the carpet and had us strip down to our skivvies so he could put our dirty sticky clothes in the laundry hamper and hunt us up something clean to wear. Then the doorbell rang.

"Don't answer that!" Billy hollered from our bedrooms upstairs.

I answered it. It was a tall lugubrious gentleman selling life insurance door to door. They used to do that back in the 1950's.

He was somewhat startled to find himself confronting a little boy in only his underwear.

"Is your mother home, son?" he asked.

"Nope. But Billy's upstairs. You wanna talk to him?"

Door to door salesmen would talk to anyone they thought might buy their wares, so he stepped in and said sure, go get him.

I ran upstairs to tell Billy there was a tall man with a briefcase wanted him to come down. Billy was big for his age, so the life insurance salesman actually went into his spiel the minute he saw Billy -- but Billy would have none of it and politely steered the man back out the front door.

Then he gave us clean clothes to put on. Then, with a disturbing gleam in his eye and a tremor in his voice, he asked if we'd like to play a game. 

"What kind of game?" I asked suspiciously. Billy was not known for his love of childish frolic. He mostly went out with girls or pumped iron in the basement. 

"Come on over to the fireplace and I'll show you" he said sweetly.

Now our house had a very fine brick fireplace in the living room, but the builders had never built a chimney to go with it. It was strictly ornamental. Mom had all the accessories for a real fireplace around it -- andirons, bellows, black cast iron tools, and even a heavy chain fire screen. Billy told us to go into the fireplace and he would hide us with the fire screen until mom came home. Then we could jump out to frighten her. Did we like the idea? We liked; so he stowed us away behind the fire screen in the fireplace, telling us not to make a peep until we heard the front door open. 

Then he went back to cleaning the house. We could hear him whistling happily as he dusted and swept. My sisters and I gradually fell into a semi-stupor behind the firescreen. When mom returned we hadn't the energy to pop out and cry "Boo!" She exclaimed over the fine job that Billy had done. Then, noticing the quiet, she asked where Timmy and the others were.

"I put them in the fireplace" said Billy matter-of-factly. 

Mom moved the fire screen to reveal the three of us squatting contentedly. It didn't seem odd to any of us that we three had spent the better part of an afternoon cooped up in the hearth. 

"Hi mom" I said. "Can I have a Popsicle?" 
  

The Old Cracked Sidewalk

When I was six years old I ran along the old cracked sidewalk in front of my home, playing tag, tripped, and banged my head on the crumbling cement with enough force to open a ragged wound on my forehead. The blood flow was massive, but harmless, and I gloried in the immediate and intense uproar it caused my friends and parents. A towel was wrapped around my crimson forehead as I was rushed to the family pediatrician's office over by Loring Park. My mother considered it unseemly to go to a hospital emergency room, full of shot-up gangsters and drug fiends going cold turkey -- and back in those relaxed days of the late 1950's it was still possible to waltz right into a doctor's office and get stitched up; the doctor gave me two stitches and put me in a narcotic haze that lasted well into the next day.

And then, six weeks later, during another frenzied game of tag, I tripped again -- reopening the scab on my forehead. Another two stitches were required, and after that I began telling all my friends that if I ever banged my forehead again I would instantly die. I told that fib so often that I came to believe it myself. But that didn't stop me or my pals from playing on those old cracked sidewalks on 19th Avenue Southeast. 

You really couldn't roller skate on those old sidewalks, although we tried with a stubborn persistence that led to dozens of scrapped and bloody knees. The elm roots got under the cement to push entire blocks of sidewalk up like a plateau, or crack them in half. Some blocks settled an inch or more into the earth, acting like a catchment area whenever it rained. Even my little sister Linda's steadfast tricycle upset on those unreliable cement paths -- hurling her into elm trunks and prickly shrubbery. 

At some point in the early 50's city workers had ineffectively poured asphalt into the largest cracks and chasms -- the temperature extremes of the upper Midwest caused the black stuff to work its way out, adding another barrier to our already bumpy sidewalk progress; although the hardened asphalt didn't taste half bad when chewed long enough. Sort of like bubble gum mixed with turpentine. 

Then there was The Hole. On a plate of cement right in front of old Mrs. Henderson's house, next door to my house, a small hole developed. And no boy has yet been born who can leave a hole alone. I dug at it with twigs at first. Then swiped a soup spoon from my mother's kitchen drawer to widen it out and see how deep I could make it. The earth was loose and sandy. Hydraulic operations were called for. With the help of Wayne Matsuura and Butchy Hogley I unwound our garden hose to flush out The Hole's intriguing depths. We got about five feet down, with a geyser of sand and gravel spurting back up at us, before my mother got wind of our illicit mining technique and yelled out the window to Stop That Foolishness Right This Instant. That evening Mr. Matsuura lugged a bag of Quikrete over to The Hole and emptied the entire contents down into it. But The Hole proved insatiable, so he got a bag of sand out of his garage and poured that down The Hole too. Then he issued strict orders to us bystanders to Leave The Damn Thing Alone. We did, but I can't help thinking that beneath The Hole there lurked, there may STILL lurk, some kind of cavern crawling with nameless H.P. Lovecraft horrors.

In the year of Our Lord 1961 the city of Minneapolis finally decided to replace that crummy old sidewalk with a brand new pour. We kids thought that was great. Our parents, however, felt quite differently. Each household on the block would be dunned two-hundred smackers for the work. Dire predictions of our imminent departure for the Poor Farm increased exponentially.

But we kids had a glorious time watching the men with jackhammers come destroy the old cement, tamp down the sandy earth underneath with heavy stone mallets, build little wooden sidewalls the entire length of our block, and then start pouring the grey slurry from the big cement truck. Then a man pushed a machine along the drying cement to slice it up into sections, like a pizza. 

Having seen the "I Love Lucy" episode where she steals John Wayne's footprints in cement from Grauman's Chinese Theater a dozen times, I was determined that my footprints and name would be immortalized in the drying cement in front of my house. But the workers, wise to the ways of little boys, kept waving me away with mighty blue collar oaths and brandished trowels. I had to wait until after dark one evening to slip out of the house, wearing my Sunday shoes, to do the deed. The cement clinging to my shoes ruined them entirely. And the next morning I discovered that in my haste and nervousness I had signed myself as 'Tim Troklindson.' 

My allowance was stopped for a month to help pay for a new pair of Sunday shoes, and my misspelled name remained in front of the house on 19th Avenue Southeast even after I had left the neighborhood to join the circus. A collector of big top memorabilia, were he or she so inclined, could probably still find my misspelled name there and crowbar the whole shebang out for display at Circus World Museum in Baraboo. Just a suggestion . . . 

  

When Congress is Meeting -- Food for Thought -- The New Kiddie Tax

When Congress is in their big meeting,

you'd better hold on to your seating.

The laws that they pass

would suit a jackass,

while Reason just goes on retreating.

Over the course of the past few months, I crisscrossed the country to eat in six of its highest-grossing independent restaurants, curious to see what made the diverse collection of subjects special enough to pull in combined sales of about $194 million in 2017.   Washington Post.

I used to travel quite a lot, and ate out all the time.

I noshed at polished bistros and real dumps chock full of grime.

I've run the gamut of wait staffs, from surly to insane,

and sampled ev'ry kind of dish -- from pickled to whole grain.

And this much I can tell you -- that no matter where you eat,

the food always tastes better when it's someone else's treat. 

The Kiddie Tax is a special levy on a child’s “unearned” income above $2,100. It typically falls on investment income such as dividends, interest and capital gains, and it doesn’t apply to a youngster’s earned income from mowing lawns or designing websites.   WSJ

Teach your children to invest;

Uncle Sam thinks that is best.

Then when profits multiply,

Sammy gets a piece of pie.

He don't have to work a bit;

your kids' earnings he will split.

Rob 'em while they're still too young

to know that they have been stung.

One Flesh Above Another

Behold, it is not expedient that we should have a king; for thus saith the Lord: Ye shall not esteem one flesh above another, or one man shall not think himself above another . . .
Mosiah. Chapter Twenty-Three. Verse 7.

I'm only better than myself each day I strive to be
more useful to my fellow man and full of charity.
And when I fail to follow through on bettering myself,
my conscience says "Look out, old boy -- they'll put you on the shelf!"
To be above another is to float on clouds of pride;
you're headed for perdition, and it's such a bumpy ride!
One flesh is like another, prone to virus and decay;
there is no exaltation till we come to Judgement Day.

Infants Abandoned in Dirty Courtrooms -- New Tariffs Threaten Jobs in the Car Industry -- No Hijabs Need Apply

The Trump administration has reportedly ordered at least 70 children under the age of 1 to appear before immigration judges since last October, with some appearing without any legal representation. 

Newsweek

A judge had a baby appear

so its legal status was clear.

The infant, upset,

did its diaper wet --

the bailiff put it in jail drear. 

On Thursday, the Commerce Department is holding a hearing in Washington on whether imported cars and car parts harm national security, the premise of an administration plan to impose hefty duties. If imposed, the tariffs would most likely have deeper and wider-reaching repercussions for the economy than levies on fish or steel. Cars don’t come together in one plant, with one work force — they’re the final result of hundreds of companies working together, in a supply chain that can snake through small American towns and cross oceans.

NYT

If we must tax something that's hot,

then why not tax stupor of thought?

It's such a big trend

that it may not end,

but stay in the White House and squat.

Pool officials spoke of the dangerous weight of wet cotton and said the girls’ religiously required clothing [including hijabs] could put a strain on the pool’s filtration system. They cited a vaguely worded, unposted policy.

Washington Post

The pool is a wonderful place,

if you're of the right creed and race.

But if you are not,

no matter how hot,

the lifeguards will make you lose face.

A spokeswoman said Zack Snyder wouldn’t discuss a director’s cut. Mr. Snyder never watched the version of “Justice League” released in theaters, she said.  WSJ

Aren't the movies long enough, without Director's Cut?
They add another hour and it seems to be all glut.
It takes a lot of popcorn to sit through three hours straight,
even if you're with the world's most fascinating date.
I think that movie editors should chop 'em down to size;
forty minutes is enough for any old franchise.
Show the villain; show the girl; then blow up something huge;
the hero then can run a race and shoot the villain's stooge.
It all ends with Godzilla or a spaceship on the moon.
Unless it's Mama Mia -- then the actors simply swoon. 
Don't hand me longer movies; the director can go hang --
I want a movie that won't turn into a dull harangue! 

The Pit

. . .  yea, that great pit which hath been digged for the destruction of men shall be filled by those who digged it . . . 
First Nephi. Chapter Fourteen. Verse 3.

I fell into a pit one time
and struggled midst the mud and slime;
but I got out with help from God,
so on the firm path I could trod.
But those who dug that pit of shame
were caught up in their own foul game.
Inside their chasm they remain,
and struggle to get out in vain.
It is their tomb, unless enticed
to take the helping hand of Christ.