Author / phsiii

by phsiii

Practice!

This really isn’t a CIDU, of course, but it’s a callback to the old joke, “How do I get to Carnegie Hall?” “Practice!”

Long, long ago–probably 1990 or earlier–I was at a gas station in Stewart, NY, filling a rental car before returning it. A civilian Jeep with two young, buff dudes pulled up and the one guy yelled, “Hey, buddy, do you know how to get to West Point?”

I briefly considered telling him, “Join the Army!” but then realized that there were decent odds that that would result in someone finding my body behind the building, so just told him “I’m afraid not, I’m not a local.”

Would have been funny, though!

by phsiii

What’s the skinny?

BillR writes, “Don’t know what “shinny” is”:

Having grown up in southern Ontario, I knew it was a game sorta like hockey, so this is just a cheap pun. Wikipedia adds more detail, of course: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinny

…which is interesting, because I played a lot of street hockey and never once heard it called “shinny”. Nor was raising the ball (never a puck!) forbidden, nor were teams chosen by throwing sticks into a pile. May be a regional thing. Body checking was indeed not part of the game, though of course it happened occasionally.

We’d get out there of a winter’s Saturday morning–the churchyard behind my parents’ house was ideal, except for all those cars on Sundays–and play until it got dark around 4, skipping lunch. Nothing quite like taking a frozen tennis ball to the ear after you’ve been outside in subzero temperatures for several hours: first you feel nothing, then it starts to itch, then burn.

Good times!