The Cat's Away....

Ii makes me sick to think of all the men in New England who are currently being deprived of the companionship of this lovely lady. This hot babe is my buddy, Mandy (a.k.a. Whizzer), who owns this site. But I have the keys while she is spending time in New Hampshire with just one guy. One lucky guy.

My name is Ol' Hoss. I live in Oregon. Mandy lives in Connecticut. I am 75. She will always be 39. I've got a lot of no money and no plans to get any younger, so I am out of the running. Scientists will put this in the category of "too bad, Hoss."

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So instead of mooning over Mandy (song title: "Moon Over My Mandy"?), I will teach you all about Google. I am pretty famous here in Oregon, but not nearly as famous as Old Hoss Radbourn. Go ahead, Google "Old Hoss." You have to get to at least No. 36 before I get a mention. Almost every other citation is about an 1880's New England baseball player name of Charles "Old Hoss" Radbourn, who set a record in baseball that will never be broken. He and I have a lot in common, though: He drank a lot, and I am still churning away at it.

See, ol' Chuckie died up sometime back, but not before he pitched ALL of his team's final 27 games in 1884. In that season he WON 60 games and lost 13. Today's pitchers are lucky if they can win 20.

Old Hoss set this record playing for Providence, Rhode Island, a small place now owned by Connecticut. Two years later he was playing for The Boston Beaneaters. You thought all that stuff about Boston Baked Beans was hooey, didn't you? Nope, they was mighty proud to be the Beaneaters and the Fartmakers.

This, of course, is why so many Boston people died in the great molasses spill of 1919. What happened was, a 2.5-million-gallon molasses vat.... Wait a minute: The reason they had so much molasses in Boston was because they was getting sugar from the West Indies, making it into rum, and trading the rum with somebody in Africa in exchange for slaves, who went to work in the West Indies making sugar. This was called "The Bermuda Triangle."

So anyway, this huge molasses vat -- which they tapped now and then to make baked beans -- broke apart and 21 people sweetly drowned. A children's book writer, Judity Viorst, would have labeled this "A Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day."

I don't know who was pitching that afternoon.

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At my own site I always have a definition. Mandy's site gets one, too:

My favorite word today is defeat. N., hard to take. Def.: The result of your attempt to open one of those plastic packets of mustard.