Discussing Uganda

Dear Friends,

Where there is Yin, there is always Yang. I learned that from someone who hadn't really mastered English yet, but I think he meant that life is a balance of opposing forces. Where there is earnestness, there must also be silliness. Last month's Hard Taco song was all Yin... it was uncharacteristically earnest. And so, to maintain equilibrium, the song for May, "Sightings," has a more Yang then I know what to do with.

Speaking of more Yang than I know what to do with, my parents have a giant cobblestone phallus in their yard.

My high school friend Jeremy named it Uganda. He had read that in the 1970s, "Discussing Uganda" had been a euphemism for sex. We found this phrase delightfully anachronistic. This was the 1990s, after all, and the English language had at least five other euphemisms for sex by then, all of which were variations of  "___-ing the horizontal ___."

We agreed to call it Uganda as sort of a retro homage to a time when people were less creative with their euphemisms.

May 1, 1993. Getting ready for senior prom. Back row: Jay, Uganda, Paula, Nicole. Front row: Zach.

The actual origin and purpose of this structure has been lost to time. My parents' house is over 100 years old, and as far as we can tell, Uganda was there since the beginning. Most neighborhood historians agree that it was built by the early settlers of suburban Milwaukee as a part of World War I era fertility ritual. It even has a hole on top, about three inches in diameter. My parents' hypothesize that this hole held a flagpole.

That's a nice theory. But you and I know that if Sigmund Freud could come back from the dead, he would flick cigar ashes at my parents and tell them to stop being so naive. This was never a flagpole, and the original homeowners weren't patriots.

This was Bonehenge.

Sitting in someone's lawn for 100 years can take its toll on even the heartiest of ceremonial phallic symbols. The cement holding Uganda together has started to wear down, and some of the stones have chipped.

A few months ago, my dad hired a trusted stonemason to give us an estimate for repairs. The news was not good. There was water damage that ran deep. He estimated that it would probably be cheaper to replace the whole thing than to repair it.

I really wish I could have been there for this conversation. He was volunteering to replace it. Replace it with what, exactly? How do you go about building something from scratch when neither you nor the customer knows what it is?

Okay, let's say we ask him to replicate the original as much as possible, and we don't spring for any upgrades (although I can imagine some great ones!) Even if we rebuild it stone for stone and change nothing, we are going to run into all kinds of trouble with zoning restrictions and safety ordinances. Quite simply, Uganda is fine, but a new giant lawncock would have to built to code, and approved by the neighborhood association.

So we've got some things to think about. In the meantime, it's May Day people, so get out there, and dance around your own Maypole!


With warmest regards,
Zach

The Six Greatest Maritime Mysteries of All Maritime

Dear Friends,

The Hard Taco song for May is called, "Mary Celeste." The Mary Celeste was a ghost ship that was found adrift in the Atlantic Ocean in 1872. There was plenty of food and the cargo was untouched, but the crew was missing, prompting the ship's discovery to be dubbed the greatest maritime mystery of all time. Here are the other maritime mysteries that round out the top six.


# 6 The Bermuda Triangle

I'm not sure whether it's due to magnetic anomalies, rogue waves, or aliens, but most of us are able to accept that the lines connecting Miami, San Juan, and Bermuda form a three-sided figure. 

The concept of the Bermuda Triangle was conceived by a bored guy with a newspaper subscription, a map, and some pushpins. I don't know who this guy was, but I'm sure Scotland Yard could have tapped into his unique skill set to track and capture serial killers. 

Gentleman, if you look at my map and pushpins, you will see that all of Jack the Ripper's victims lived in this England-shaped island just off the coast of Europe. But why? Detectives who are used to doing things the way they have always been done may now go home to your families, but I'm going to stare at these pins deep into the night until I see the connection.

#5 The Loch Ness Monster

Like a prehistoric Keyser Söze, the greatest trick this camera-shy plesiosaurus every played was convincing the world she didn't exist. Even with a brain the size and texture of a golf ball, Nessie has enough gumption to sustain herself at the bottom of a lake for thousands of years, and enough savvy to evade every five letter acronym we've thrown her way... SONAR, RADAR, LASER, and even SCUBA. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that we won't have better luck finding her with TASER, SEALs, NAFTA, NSAIDS, or BiPAP.


#4 Atlantis 

I've heard that the History Channel has dedicated hundreds of hours to exploring the mysteries of this ancient sunken island-city, but I remain unconvinced of its existence. Anyone who understands the basics of plate tectonics knows that there is no scientific justification to support the presence of such a thing as the History Channel on basic cable.


#3 The Edmund Fitzgerald

As a child, I loved sitting in the bathtub and trying to guess the relative buoyancy of different objects. I experimented with whatever I had at my disposal... Paperclips. Crayons. Apples. Aluminum foil. Urine. Larger humans than myself have applied this experimental method to other hypotheses: Witches float. Floats sink. Sinks also sink.  Steel sinks, but ships made out of steel float, a puzzling fact that engineers are often challenged to explain at job interviews. All we know is that when a ship goes down, our fundamental assumptions about flotation are rocked to their very cores. (Exception: When Gordon Lightfoot sings about those assumptions, they are merely folked to their very cores.)

The E-Fitz, as we serious buoyancy-enthusiasts call it, sank in a storm in 1975, somewhere in L-Supe. The usual culprits have been blamed... rogue waves, icebergs, sea quakes, aliens, ice sculptures, fresh-water pirates. Gordon Lightfoot biographers agree that one of these was probably not much of a factor, but which one?


#2: The Laugh Track on The Love Boat

Here's the thing: there was no laugh track on The Love Boat. According to legend, dozens of studio audience members died during the filming of the pilot when they were trapped in the soundstage during a grease fire. Throughout the nine year run of the show, the victims of that fire haunted the post-production suite, their ghostly laughter mysteriously appearing after every punch line. There were even peals of corpselike chuckling following topical jokes that shouldn't have made sense to people who died in 1977. How did they even get those jokes if they were too dead to follow the news?

If we knew the answer, it wouldn't be the second greatest maritime mystery of all time.

With warmest regards, 

Zach

A Piggyback Ride from Batman

Dear Friends,

I. Your Hair Looks Great Today
It's true. And you know what would make this day even better? (You: Did you say something about a piggyback ride from Batman?)

No, even better. The new Hard Taco album, "Who Dares Disturb My Slumber?" It's available here, here, and here. To the stark naked eye, it looks just like any other compact disc, but if you gaze through the polycarbonate layer and reflect your laser vision back into your opto-electronic sensing organs, you will perceive combinations of zeroes and ones that will blow your tiny mind. (e.g. 1011 ker-pfff!)

And look, here comes the Dark Knight, crouching down for you to climb on his back, so you're getting both of the things you wanted!

II.  It's Called Picornavirus
Usually I try to say something positive about the monthly Hard Taco song to persuade you to listen to it, such as, It's very danceable or This song will soothe your hoof and mouth disease.

This month, I make no such claims. The December Hard Taco song, "Fancy," will speak for itself, and if your hooves are really that painful, I'm sorry, but you just need to suck it up and go into quarantine with the other infected cattle.

III. Back Off: I've Got an Iron-On
When I lived in the U.P., we had a family friend who owned a T-shirt store. One my earliest memories is flipping through a giant catalog of images to pick an iron-on for my size 3T powder blue T-shirt.  From thousands of choices, the image I selected was the Loch Ness Monster upsetting a rowboat. There was a man in the rowboat, futilely trying to fend the ferocious creature with a broken oar. It was the coolest thing I had ever seen.

I felt invincible when I wore that shirt and I was convinced that other kids were struck dumb with fear and awe.

"Here comes that preschooler with the sea monster capsizing the rowboat," they probably whispered to each other, "We'd better stand back. He's just so... macho."

After wearing it for 100 consecutive days, the transfer peeled off, but by then I had moved on. In the coming years my badass ideal would evolve from  being plesiosaurus-based to being sunglasses-based. Soon, I only wanted T-shirts of characters wearing enormous black shades, like Chester Cheetah or that one California Raisin. This was cathartic for me, you see. I've never really been able to wear sunglasses myself because my ears are affixed to my head at different heights. (It's a common problem. Like 10% of people have it.)  At best, sunglasses look foolishly askew on my face, like someone trying to do a parallel bar routine on the uneven bars. But I was at peace with that, because I could wear a T-shirt with a close-up of a surprised Marty McFly lifting his Ray-bans, and that was the next best thing.

IV. Today's Toddler T's.
My son only wears hand-me-downs from his cousins, so as much as I'd like to, I can't take credit for how badass most of  his clothes are. These are all real T-shirts I've seen on him or his contemporaries, and each one is more awesome than the last.

Image                                                           Caption:
Two helicopters                                            Tactical Team!
A tractor                                                       Total Quad Traction!
Buzz Lightyear                                             Target is on Approach!
A motorcycle at a 45 degree angle                Extreme Dirt Bike Zone!
A motorcycle, not at an angle                       Supreme Maximum Velocity!
Different kinds of balls                                 Playing Sports Every Day is Not Enough!
A giant number 80                                       Dinosaurs: 80 MILLION years ago!

None of the children who wear these shirts are old enough to read, so I assume that the captions are directed at older kids. "I'd better not pick on that toddler," a would-be bully might say, "His desire to play sports is insatiable!"

With warmest regards,
Zach