SOMBRERO.
I saw the mail truck stop at our box and instead of Mo putting something in and driving on down the block, she got out, walked around to the back, opened it, and rummaged around for a while. I watched her with fascination—I've set up my office in the front of the house, what used to be the living room before they built the addition on the back (I've walled it off with bookcases back to back sticking out from the interior wall towards the front wall, but I've got half the books sitting on the floor until I can get around to putting a couple of screwjacks in the cellar to hold up the office floor, which was never built to take that kind of concentrated load), so I see everything that goes on in the street. After a while she walked down the driveway and over to the front door, carrying a catalog and a large package. When she handed it over to me, I realized it was amazingly light and wondered what on earth it could be. I got the boxcutter, opened it up, and found a gorgeous, pristine white hat, something like this but with the crown slanted down sharply towards the front and deeply indented. It was made in Mexico and bore the label D'Avila Hats on one side of the band and "La Providencia" and a phone number on the other. It fit perfectly.
It turned out to be from my old buddy the Growling Wolf, who'd found a good deal on eBay and gotten one for each of us; in an e-mail responding to my thank-you, he said "the guy told me these hats were made in only certain parts of Mexico--and they are made from a special grass and they are made by women who go into caves and weave these hats so the straw doesn't dry out--they have to keep it soft and evidently the air in these caves is perfect for this... You can smell the straw in these babies." My wife calls me Don Magnifico when I wear it.
As it happens, the Growler is in the midst of a long saga called One Spring Morning Off Spring Street, that starts with being rudely awakened on "a spring morning when I lived on Greenwich Street in a 2nd-floor loft in a building that had been, and I loved the fact, a butter and egg wholesale house" and continues via many a commodious vicus of recirculation to an epic attempt to use a weekend pass to get from Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, to East Lansing, Michigan, and back before Monday morning formation at 6 o'clock. If you had no problem with my mildly discursive first paragraph, you might try riding the bucking bronco of the Growler's wild-eyed, intoxicatory prose style; the saga starts at 1 (with a history of the Ear Inn) and continues with 2 ("being awakened by an earthquake that turned out to be Bobby Fuller's 'I Fought the Law and the Law Won' being played by such a wild uneven unthoughtout racous almost jackhammer-bothersome in its incessant bad drumming whingding POW on the 2 and 4"), 3 (mafficking at the Ear Inn—warning, Not Safe For Work or delicate sensibilities), 4 (the formation of a great blues band, with more raunch), 5 (writing, lusting after Tuesday Weld, getting beat out by Joyce Carol Oates), 6 (the epic journey begins: "The first time I was in Detroit...OK, I start swimming back into some murkier waters of my past times, those times when I was in the U.S. Army and stationed at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, outside the town of Rollo, Missouri..."), 7 ("So the Chicagoans and Big Bad John and I got on the military bus to the post main gate and there we caught the Trailways into Saint Louis, where we were gonna book on the Rock Island or the Burlington or the Illinois Central, one of those railroads and then head up to Chicago a couple'a hundred miles north and then after that--whatever, we had a horrible schedule to beat..."), and 8 (stewardesses and Lake Michigan, plus a joyous yawp about the Yankees—the Growler is a serious Yankee fan). If you like it, there's more to come.
WOW What a Complimentary Piece!
You can read the whole schmeer at www.languagehat.com
And would you believe after such a great post about him, thegrowlingwolf again didn't show up for work leaving us hanging by our necks on a lightpole just off Spring Street--but now, after such a glowing post, he'd better break out of his writer's bloc and get his wolfish ass in gear. We love that line above reading: "...continues via many commodius [ed: we emphasize the "commode" aspect of the word] viscus of recirculation...."
Episode #9 is being composed as we throw this flyer in your face.
thestafffor The Daily Growler
Becal, Mexico, Palm Straw Hats Made in Backyard Caves
Since Becal is located in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, the weather is extremely hot and dry. These two conditions cause the palm fibers to become brittle and impossible to weave. To overcome this problem, the Mayan people (the majority of the people in Becal are Mayan) weave the hats in natural and man-made underground caves usually in the back yard of houses. The caves provide a cool and humid enough place to allow the panama straw fibers to be malleable enough to be woven into hats. This also allows weavers to pull the straws tighter during the weaving process without the worry of tearing or cracking of the straws. This usually helps yield tighter panama hats. During the panama hat production peak in Becal, there were said to be over two thousand occupied weaving caves. (From a Google Search--can't remember the site.)
The Blog of Death Has Great September 11th Tribute Up Now
We just checked the Blog of Death because we heard it had gone under--but, no, not at all; in fact, the Blog of Death creator has outdone himself. Did you ever want to know just who died in the World Trade Center strange happenings on 9/11? Well, here they are, those who the cop heroes and fire department heroes and politician heroes couldn't bring back to life--some of these dear folks are actually the unsung heroes of 9/11, to us here at The Daily Growler the true heroes of 9/11 are the people who escaped with their lives--those who SAVED THEMSELVES and were not rescued by the cop heroes and fire department heroes and politician heroes who are now going about the country trumpeting how heroic they were on 9/11 and I have a feeling some of these cops and firemen trooping about the country were never near 9/11--and I'm not being anticop or antifireman, I'm just saying like I say the troops in Iraq aren't heroes neither are cops and firemen just because they're cops and firemen. During 9/11 the NYPD and the NYFD weren't heroes they were unprepared dupes who had no idea what they were walking into--besides there weren't that many cops killed, 40 some odd--a hell of a lot of firemen, though, nearly 300, and what a shame that was--ill-equipped firemen going into those doomed towers--who was to blame for the firemen being ill-equipped? Why Rudi "Mussolini" Guiliani, America's Mayor and America, You Can Have Him, that's who; he cut both cops and firemen, closed fire houses, and never his whole administration gave either group a contract--what an out-and-out crooked, lying, deceiving, and perverted man Rudi Guiliani is--not quite as perverted as Mitt "I Want 6 Wives But No Men Wives" Romney. Anyway, here's the URL to the Blog of Death if you want to go through those names looking for familiar ones.
http://www.blogofdeath.com/
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