CarlHoliday

I've always seen malleable in the figurative sense, "capable of being adapted by outside influences," which comes from the 1610s. As in the inveterate huckster, the presidential candidate, who is able to gather more than enough support from a weary, malleable electorate believing change will truly occur if they cast their vote for the person who tells them what they want to hear.

I think there has to be some form of disconnect in my mind that prevents me from experiencing grief. Probably it has something to do with my form of mental illness.

Fury was a Saturday morning American TV series running from 1955 to 1960, starring Peter Graves, Bobby Diamond, and a saddlebred stallion named Highland Dale, or "Beaut" from his starring role in Black Beauty (1946).

Around the beginning of the 18th century, missionaries in Brazil began to use the passion flower of the purple passion fruit (P. edulis) as an instructional tool for the indigenous people depicting the final hours of Jesus Christ. The corona represents the crown of thorns, the styles represent the nails used in the Crucifixion, the stamens represent the five wounds, and the five sepals and five petals represent 10 of the Apostles--all but Judas, who betrayed Jesus, and Peter, who denied Jesus three times on the night of his trial. Passion Fruit is one of the flavors of Jarritos Mexican soda.

Luckily, my jitters, caused by a medical condition called essential tremor, are only a problem with use. You probably wouldn't notice it, unless you asked me to take a full cup of coffee across the room. In all likelihood, the cup would be less than half-full or empty at the end of the mission. It's mostly the fine movements that are affected the most. Like screwing a bottle cap back on or pausing in typing and hitting a key anyway. Getting the two parts of a zipper together is a challenge, as is grooming facial hair. And why essential? It's idiopathic. Now, there's a word for Word of the Day.

And the Three Stooges standing in as firemen at the airport.

From Jimmy Durante kicking the can to Ethel Merman slipping on the banana peel, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World is my favorite madcap movie of all time.

There's a line in Tom Petty's song "Free Fallin'": It's a long day livin' in Reseda. This town in the San Fernando Region of Los Angeles, California, was named after the plant Reseda odorata, known by many common names including Mignonette, Garden Mignonette, Common Mignonette, Egyptian Mignonette. It probably originated in the Mediterranean Basin, but it can be found growing wild or as an introduced species in many parts of the world.

Being a sissy, I grew up the victim of numerous pranks perpetrated by family (especially the adults), "friends", and five of the nastiest cousins you would ever have the misfortune to grow up with (there's six of us a year apart: boy, girl, girl, boy, girl, and me).

The ultimate enigma is the human relationship with the unknown and the human gullibility to permit a select few to come up with somewhat credible answers and dubious rules and requirements (temples, monuments, sacrifices, etc.) in exchange for a free ride through life.

The much-studied McMurdo Dry Valleys in Victoria Land, west of McMurdo Sound, are one of the dryest places on Earth. There are some estimates this region hasn't seen rain in two million years. Cold, dense katabatic winds from higher altitudes (wind speeds up to 200 mph) evaporate water, ice, and snow.

OK, I'm thinking about pediments. First thing that comes to mind is Geology 101 at Eastern Washington State College (now Eastern Washington University) where pediments were being discussed. Quick look up pediments in the geological sense. The Italian word pedamento entered English meaning "foundation, basework, footing." Along the front of steep mountains in the Western United States, the Andes of South America, and surrounding monadnocks or inselbergs in South Africa there is gently sloping bedrock covered with a thin layer of gravels. These should not be confused with merged alluvial fans which are made up of material eroded from canyons of the escarpments.

In the summer after my freshman year of college, I was working in a welding shop doing odd jobs. One day the foreman told me and the other flunky to move a bundle of copper-nickel rods from one place to another. We had to use the overhead crane. Being flunkies, neither of us knew what we were doing. In the process of getting the straps onto the rods, one of them broke from the extreme weight and the rods fell a few inches onto my right foot. I should've gone to the doctor, but this was pre-OSHA and a lot of industrial accidents were ignored at that time. Instead of being given time off to recuperate, I was simply fired. A month or so after the accident I received my pitiful grades from spring quarter and was put on academic probation. The college advised they would notify the draft board of that fact. I was still limping and still hadn't gone to the doctor. If I had played my cards right, I might've received a 4-F rating at the induction physical if I was drafted. So, being young, stupid and not wanting to go to Vietnam with the Army, I went to the Air Force recruiting office and joined up. Plus, during the physical at the Armed Forces Induction Center, I forgot to mention that many pounds of copper-nickel rods had recently fallen on my foot and that was why I had a slight limp.

OK, since no one else has stepped up to the task, Star Trek: Voyager, Season 2, Episode 7, Parturition. Directed by Star Trek: Next Generation cast member Jonathan Frakes (William Riker). Neelix (Ethan Phillips) and Lt. Tom Paris (Robert Duncan McNeill) are sent on a mission to a nearby planet because Voyager has detected proteins on its surface. To escape a poisonous trigemic vapor on the planet's surface, they seek shelter in a cave where they discover a nest of eggs, one of which hatches. The hatchling is named Kes. Lots of other things happen, and, well, there's a happy ending, too.

The community of Horsefly (estab. 1859) lies on the shore of the Horsefly River in the Cariboo Country of Central British Columbia, Canada. The Horsefly River does not directly drain the waters of Horsefly Lake where you can do outdoorsy activities at Horsefly Lake Provincial Park. The Horsefly River drains into Quesnel (don't pronounce the "s") Lake at Horsefly Bay. Oh, and between Horsefly Lake and the upper course of Horsefly River there is Horsefly Mountain. To get to all those Horseflies, leave the Trans-Canada Highway in Cache Creek on BC Highway 97. In 150 Mile House, leave Highway 97 on Likely Road, and then Horsefly Road. If you're planning on visiting all those Horseflies, I recommend packing OFF! Insect Repellant in your luggage.

Every time I see lumbago, my mind goes to various dishes I enjoyed when I was stationed in Thailand during the Vietnam fiasco. Lumbago was never on the menu, but if it was there would be slices of various tropical fruits and vegetables along with bits of some unrecognizable cooked meat swimming in a sauce that was hot enough to blister your teeth. In reality, one of the symptoms of bladder cancer is lower back pain. I didn't have lower back pain. Actually, I didn't have most of the other symptoms. Just blood in urine, lots of visible blood. I've had recurring bouts of that since 2013, but every time I went in for a cystoscopy exam (think colonoscopy up your dick), nothing showed up until the one last September. This time there was a big ugly papillary tumor sticking out of the lining of the bladder. That got me a Transurethral Resection of Bladder Tumor (TURBT) on September 21, which was followed by second TURBT on October 27. Final diagnosis was Carcinoma In Situ, that's a tumor restricted to the epithelial lining of the bladder. Last Monday, I had my first of six Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG) installations in my bladder. Basically, 50 ml of BCG fluid is delivered into your empty bladder via a small catheter. The body's immune system recognizes the bacteria as foreign matter that must be destroyed, and in their frenzy to rid the bladder of bacteria, they attack the cancer cells in the epithelium. It's a proven first course of treatment that has been shown to delay the inevitable total resection of the bladder, which leads to two options for stomas to drain urine from the kidneys (urine only beside the navel or urine and intestinal fluid from lower right abdomen), or a neo bladder fashioned out of a length of small intestine that goes out the old way. Considering I receive my medical care at a teaching hospital (VA), I've decided that if my cancer leads either of the two stomas, I'll opt out of having to collect waste fluids in baggies from holes in my body that tend to get severely infected at the most inopportune times. I'm 74 and have arthritic knees and feet bad enough I need a cane and probably could use a walker if I didn't have to pick up dog shit when my son is at work. I should be on a beach somewhere watching the boys play volleyball instead of having to babysit two female German Shepherd dogs (you have to say dogs or people associated with the AKC will suppose you're speaking of real Germans who take care of sheep in your back forty) and a Pit Bull-Australian Shepherd-Jack Russell Terrier (imagine a skinny dog on long legs with a brown merl coat) youngster that thinks he's boss dog.

It has been reported that roughly 40 to 50 percent of soapstone in quarries contains some asbestos. Since soapstone is a metamorphic mineral, it can have different minerals around it. You can be assured that soapstone in commercial products has been thoroughly tested. When I was a kid, we went camping with friends at Lake Wenatchee State Park. My mother was against the idea because of the prevalence of rattlesnakes in the area, but friends being friends we went to stay being friends. There was an active soapstone quarry in the vicinity and one of the fathers suggested we go see if we could get some soapstone. It being Saturday, who's going to notice. As it turned out, they were working that day. One of the fathers went to the foreman and did a bit of negotiating, so that us kids could sift through a pile of waste. I came away with a small cobble. (Hey, I was little when I was a kid.) It became my frustration fighter. I was in a one kid family and there was no one to blame when I screwed up. I had a pocketknife and I would attack that rock when shit came my way. I can't remember what became of that rock. Probably got too small to worry over.

My grandparents, on my mother's side, had a farm (apple orchard) in Eastern Washington. Me and my three girl cousins got to spend six weeks every summer there. Grandma prepared three huge meals a day, breakfast, dinner, and supper. They had a huge garden full of practically every kind of fresh vegetables. One of these vegetables were rutabagas, which were served cold in slices with turnips, radishes, carrots, and tomatoes. The thing that I remember most about the rutabagas was that they weren't grown every year. The other four, yes, but rutabagas only showed up now and then, usually with boiled parsnips. Rutabagas and parsnips were the exotic vegetables.

Soiree, soirée, or swarry. Yes, swarry is, or rather was, a word. It is spelled to match the English pronunciation. Dickens used it in 1837 (in what work there is no record I could find, but he was publishing monthly installments of The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist at the time), so it must be okay, except it’s fallen out of usage. That happens to words. I say that, if we have to use fruition, outlier, and, God forgive me for putting it in this comment, nowadays, we should be able to use swarry. It just needs more usage. There’s a challenge for you GA authors. If you look up soiree in Etymonline.com, the Etymology Online Dictionary, you will find that soiree is related to the Lithuanian word sietwa, “deep place in a river.” Why the Lithuanians have their evening parties at deep places in rivers is anybody’s guess. Maybe, it has to do with clandestine night-time fishing parties so popular in Eastern European locales. For you Benjamin Britten fans, and don’t try to deny your involvement in Britten events because there are people who pay attention to people like you, I’m sure you remember Soirée musicales, (Musical Evenings), Op. 9, that suite in five movements derived from work by Gioachino Rossini. If you're looking for inspiration from Italian composers, Rossini is probably your best source.

What to do, what to do with cowlick? Well, there is the Hairy Ball Theorem. Seriously, there are some mathematicians out there studying hairy balls. There are probably some mathematicians out there who are doing more than just studying hairy balls. Seriously, it all has to do with algebraic topology, that wonderful field of mathematics dealing with shapes. The theorem states that there is no nonvanishing continuous tangent vector field on even-dimensional n-spheres. Wikipedia goes more in depth, but we’ll stop here because unless you’re a mathematician, you’d probably get as confused as I did, and I know enough math to do the fun stuff. The theorem was first proved by Henri Poincaré for the 2-sphere in 1885, and extended to higher even dimensions in 1912 by Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer. The theorem has been expressed colloquially as “you can’t comb a hairy ball flat without creating a cowlick” or “you can’t comb the hair on a coconut”.

Looking for something to contribute to today's Word of the Day, the only thing I found that definitively applies is Outburst Queer Arts Festival of Belfast that has been celebrating in your face queer art since 2007.

The 1973 comedy Western film The Brothers O'Toole takes place in the fictional Colorado mining town of Molybdenum, Colorado. The citizens of town mispronounce the name of the town as "Molly B'Damn" because all of their stock certificates in the failed mine are worth less than the paper they're printed on. The movie stars John Astin as Michael O'Toole a gambler and con man, and the outlaw "Desperate" Ambrose Littleberry; Pat Carroll as the spinster Callie Burdyne; and Lee Meriwether as Desperate's violent girlfriend. Michael O'Toole's younger brother is played by Wikipedia unknown Steve Carlson (see IMDb.com for information).

Winter doldrums getting you down? Good at palavering? Have a few vacation days? Have done Cancun so much you exchange Christmas cards with that cute gay waiter at your favorite resort. Then you need to go to Palaver Point on Two Hummock Island, Palmer Archipelago, Antartica.

Since ancient times, humans have sought out hot springs to ease the aches and pains of being human. To the uninitiated, the sulfurous reek of a hot spring is somehow healthy. The summer I turned thirteen my family (plus my best friend Randy) took a two-week vacation down US-101 from its junction with Washington State highway 104 to Crescent City, California. One of our many stops was the old Olympic Hot Springs Resort (closed in 1966) because they had a large swimming pool. Randy and I were permitted a one-hour swim, but my parents weren't having anything to do with water that reeked of rotten eggs.

Sadly, there is a misconception that the Pacific Northwest is so pluvial that school children are issued umbrellas at the beginning of each school year, and that most residents are not plagued with Athletes Foot but have moss actively growing between their toes. That is only half true. This region has two distinct climates created by the Cascade Mountains. The west side is predominantly wet with average annual precipitation in Forks, Washington being 119 inches, Seattle, Washington 39 inches, and Portland, Oregon 36 inches. On the eastern side, the climate is much dryer with precipitation in Wenatchee, Washington at 9 inches, Spokane, Washington 16 inches, and Bend, Oregon 10 inches. The drier side of the mountains is a touristy region filled with soggy Westsiders seeking fun in the sun. Golfers enjoy fairways not clogged with toadstools. Water sport enthusiasts enjoy sun filled days waterskiing, fishing, swimming, or simply sunbathing on a lakeside beach. Motorhome, trailer, or tent campers can be assured of weekends or vacation weeks in campgrounds free of those knee-deep mud puddles common on the wet side of the mountains. Of course, anywhere people congregate for pleasure you can be assured vampires and werewolves are lurking in the shadows. A particular demon that is bound to unnerve even the most unbelieving tourist to the dry side of the mountains are the things that go bump in the night which are widespread in the region, probably due to the lack of moisture that those beasties find chafing.