Happiness is lions, and tigers, and bears! Oh my!

 

Happiness is clean gutters and downspouts, thanks to a Werner 24' aluminum extension ladder

Werner 24 ft. Aluminum Extension Ladder with 225 lb. Load Capacity Type II Duty Rating

This fella has just enough of the length I needed to reach the second story gutters in the rear comfortably, but only from the first floor patio deck in back, which is itself already elevated almost 6' off the ground.

It also reaches comfortably over the big shrubs and other plantings in front to get to the first level gutters.

I don't think the 20-footer would have worked as well.

The ladder is less than 35 lbs, but the gutter cleaning was still a two-man job.

 

 

Happiness is a cat who catches vermin

Grimalkin, to domestic vermin sworn

An everlasting foe, with watchful eye

Lies nightly brooding o'er a chinky gap,

Protending her fell claws, to thoughtless mice

Sure ruin.

 

-- John Philips (1676-1709)

Happiness is a silvan scene

Betwixt two rows of rocks, a silvan scene

Appears above, and groves for ever green.

-- John Dryden

Happiness is RMS Queen Mary: My dad came home on her in 1945

After decades of rocky seas in Long Beach, Queen Mary in danger of sinking. Can it be saved?:

'After the start of World War II, it was painted gray and converted into a troopship that ferried Allied soldiers, earning the nickname the “Grey Ghost” for its speed and camouflaged color.'

Arriving in New York Harbor, 20 June 1945, with thousands of US soldiers – there is a prominent degaussing coil running around the outer hull.

 

Happiness is the color of June

 June is drawn in a mantle of dark green.

 

-- Henry Peacham (1578-c.1644)

Happiness is escaping the enemies of the homestead

The nightly wolf is baneful to the fold,

Storms to the wheat, to buds the bitter cold.

-- John Dryden

Happiness is contentment

'Tis better to be lowly born,

And range with humble livers in content,

Than to be perk'd up in a glist'ring grief,

And wear a golden sorrow.

 

-- William Shakespeare, Henry VIII

Happiness is watching Gordon Ramsay make mayo in less than two minutes

 

The secret is 100ml of neutral oil per egg yolk, added ever so slowly at the start. A three egg yolk recipe seems about right for a standard food processor as in the video. I got away with just two. For small batches of mayo, a smaller food processor is ideal.

The beauty of the Cuisinart that I own is that it comes with a lid with an oil reservoir on top which dispenses the oil through a pinhole at the ideal rate.

I add capers at the end for the Tuesday night beer-battered cod fry tartar sauce. In the absence of the juice of a lemon, substitute white vinegar.

Happiness is a Deltec home, designed to withstand Category 5 hurricanes

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Designed for disaster: These homes can withstand a Category 5 hurricane

'Matt Oblinsky, Deltec’s director of engineering, spearheads an effort to constantly find better building materials to further strengthen its designs.

'“After each and every hurricane … we reach out to each and every homeowner in the path of a storm to ask how they are,” Linton said. “99.9 percent of the time we’re seeing ‘we lost a couple shingles’ or ‘we lost a piece of trim, but our neighbor’s home was demolished.’ Our homes have been field-tested for a number of years.”'

Happiness is the nonsense verse chant Flea Fly Flow from Boy Scout camp in the 1960s

The chant is a "repeat after me" or "echo" song. The leader at the campfire chants a line, the boys gathered round are to echo it exactly in reply.

There are many, many versions.

The idea was to make the nonsense lines a little longer each time and to vary the elements in order to make them more tricky to remember, which is great fun but is probably why no one can remember the thing exactly the same way now. 

In this case, the nonsense probably goes all the way back at least to Shakespeare's King Lear of 1605 ("Child Roland to the dark tower came, His word was still, Fie, foh, and fum, I smell the blood of a British man") and was immortalized in the English fable Jack the Giant Killer of 1711 ("Fee-fi-fo-fum").

"Fie!" is an old word which you use when you smell something really bad, i.e. a stench, a subject of some fascination for young boys.

By beginning with an allusion to the form of these then well known lines, the expectation was set for something familiar to come, but is immediately turned into a tongue twister to set the audience of young boys off their balance and arrest their attention and engage them. It needs to be remembered that boys were then relatively better educated than they are these days, and that it was fun to play loose as it were with the otherwise more or less serious subjects of their school days.

Add some strategically placed stick-banging and tub-thumping and it gets to be quite the scene around the bonfire!

The form is a playground for improv, but most if not all of the versions people now remember have regularized the opening tongue twister by incorporating an "L" in each line and element, as in Flea! Flea fly! Flea fly flow! 

This is how I remember it:

Fie!

Fie fly!

Fie fly foh!

Kooma-lotta kooma-lotta kooma-lotta Feast Day!

Oh, no, no, no not the Veesday!

Eeny meany deci-meany Ooo walla walla meeny, Eeny meany, hexa-meany, Ooo walla walla!

Beat belly oaten boaten Bobo benoten botten, Bobo benoten botten, Bobo benoten botten, shhhhh!

Happiness is the fabulous Linda Ronstadt with her 1975 cover of When Will I Be Loved

 

Happiness is Ed Norton from The Honeymooners

 

"Did somebody say I'm trending on Twitter? Well I'm HERE for it!"

Happiness is Do You Know What I Mean? Lee Michaels 1971

She's a dandy, yes indeed, but now she's free.

This is the Rock 'n' Roll you first heard fifty years ago and suddenly you wake up one morning with it playing on continuous loop in your head for some reason.

Happiness is sort-of-Italian opera

 

Happiness is the patriotism of our Irish

 

Happiness is being content with one's share in the blessings common to all

 

Every creature has a share in the common blessings of providence; And every creature should rest well satisfied with its proportion in them.

-- Roger L'Estrange

Happiness is the tree that made America great: The Eastern White Pine

 It's almost an hour long, but it's the fabulous but true story you probably never heard and must see.

Happiness is Not Chick'n Bouillon Cubes

I use this stuff to rev-up my chicken stock/soup, which I do make from the carcass of the leftover chicken. It also works great mixed with extra virgin olive oil made into a paste for rubbing the inside and outside of the roasting chicken before placing in the oven.

Happiness is having a vigorous interior life

(Scarecrow)

I could wile away the hours

Conferrin' with the flowers

Consultin' with the rain

And my head I'd be scratchin'

While my thoughts were busy hatchin'

If I only had a brain

I'd unravel any riddle

For any individ'le

In trouble or in pain

(Dorothy)

With the thoughts you'd be thinkin'

You could be another Lincoln

If you only had a brain

(Scarecrow)

Oh, I would tell you why

The ocean's near the shore

I could think of things I never thunk before

And then I'd sit and think some more

I would not be just a nuffin'

My head all full of stuffin'

My heart all full of pain

I would dance and be merry

Life would be a ding-a-derry

If I only had a brain