Snazziness

This is my first real column for the school newspaper. so here goes.

                                                          Snazziness

 

            Ties are an amazing piece of clothing. They make you look snazzy. They have so many possibilities of styles, and that is unseen in almost every other type of clothing. They can hide that nasty chili stain on the front of you shirt. They… can save your life (at least in the movies).

            Ok. Girls, lets take a vote. There are two candidates, so choose wisely. First candidate: middle-aged man, manager of a bank. Last name is Banks, carries a briefcase, and has millions stored away. Wears a black pinstriped suit (tailored to fit him perfectly), wears shoes that are shined once a day, everyday. He generally wears dark colored shirts, with no tie. Second candidate: middle-aged man, manager of the local grocery store, last name is Johnson, wears a black suit (that he got at the thrift store down the street), wears shoes that are dull and faded. Wears a white button-up shirt, and always wears a tie.

             Yeah, yeah I know the choice is a difficult one. But I know exactly what you’re thinking. “Pssha! Of course I would pick the second candidate! Hands down! A tie every day?!” If you voted for Mr. “million dollar” Banks who doesn’t ever wear a tie, I think you should stop by the psychiatrist on your way home.

            But come on; look at the people who wear ties. The President of the United States, Director of the CIA, James Bond, and every other person in the world with even a little bit of power. Plus some who don’t have power, but like to look snazzy.            

            One thing I love about ties is that there is such a wide variety of styles: stripes, polka dot, textured, wavy, solid, seasonal, I mean the list goes on. Then there are the ties that support different things, football teams, basketball teams, artists, or religions. Once again the list goes on. With a list like that, you will never run out of possibilities. I like that kind of guarantee. I don’t like wearing the same things over and over again (unless its cargo pants), and I’m sure you don’t either. With ties, you don’t have to worry about that. If you don’t believe me go look in you grandpa’s closet.

            Ties are the bomb, the cat’s pajamas, the bee’s knees! Endless possibilities, Girls “dig” them, and they make you look like James Bond. Most importantly… they make you look… snazzy.  And from what I’ve seen lately, we all need to look a little more snazzy.    

           

 

 

JB Engler

Man's Best Friend

Im sorry that it has been so long since my last post. But here you go. 

Man’s Best Friend

 

 

            One of the most common titles for a dog is “mans best friend”. Kind of weird, huh? But if you have a dog, you know what that proverb states.

            Yesterday, my neighbor’s dog was running (messing) around in our yard, and I thought back to a couple years ago, just a year or two after we got Hermione. Hermione has a notorious record for breaking her cable. Whenever this occurs we just wait an hour or two, and she’ll come wandering back into the yard. Well one Friday, yet another occurrence took place… she didn’t come back. We waited for hours. After calling around to the neighbors we hopped into our car and went to go looking for her. We looked everywhere. Parks, the canal, houses that we knew had cats, hence cat food (Hermione’s favorite), and every other place we could think of and some we couldn’t think of. After searching we called the pound, no answer. Either something happened to Hermione, or we stumbled upon her newfound skill at “hide-and-go-seek”.

            Have you ever cried so hard and so long that you felt like you were going to throw up? Well I have and it was at the moment that I realized that I might never see her again. I cried all day and all night, I tried so hard to think about something else, nothing was a cure.

            So Hermione died.  Or so I believed. When Monday came around my dad put in one last call to the pound, what he thought to be a futile effort. And after the 17millionth time, they finally answered. When my dad gave them Hermione’s description, he said “Yeah we have her you can come and pick her up.” I was elated! Beyond that! I had never been so happy. I had gotten my Hermione back!

            So as it turns out, after Hermione broke off her cable, she meandered up to the park where she cam across some kids playing baseball. As most of us know that dogs and baseballs, well balls in general, get along well together. So after a few feeble attempts to get the baseball back, Hermione had yet to learn the concept of “fetch”, they called it in.

The dogcatcher. He came, He saw, He conquered. And since Friday is the last day the pound is open, it was already closed when we called, and was closed for the entire weekend, hence nobody answering.            

            I believe that proverb, mans best friend. I love my dog and have never cried harder. Hey, we all need a best friend anyway.     

            

Candy Catching

So this post is what i think to be my first column in the school newspaper. im not 100% sure if i made it, but i sure hope so.

                                   Candy Catching

           

            Every year we celebrate a whole heap of holidays, one of my favorite is Halloween, the holiday of “candy catching.” Trick-or-treating is only one of the many activities of Halloween, and by far my favorite. In truth I don’t ever remember missing a trick-or-treating excursion since I was born.            

            There are a lot of people my age that would rather go to a party or go do something else besides trick-or-treating. But I always have to ask myself why. Why wouldn’t you want to go walk around in the dark wearing a wicked-awesome costume, and ask random people for candy? I mean that’s awesome! I always love coming up with a costume. I mean sure you can go and buy one of those dinky, manufactured costumes from K-Mart. But where is the fun in that?

Its always entertaining to come up with a costume based on a favorite media character, occupational figure, mythical being. Once you’ve figured out what you are going to be, you try like heck to make it perfect. After this, you’re ready for the next step: picking the “candy catcher”. Some choose the conventional plastic jack-o-lantern. Personally I dive for the pillowcase, the atomic bomb of “candy catchers!”

 Once this is done you wait impatiently for that glorious night of “candy catching.” Once it arrives you can not help it. No matter your age you’re as giddy as a teenage girl who’s just gotten a pair of shoes. You then make all the arrangements of where to meet your friends. And then… it begins. You go as fast as possible spending no more than 17 seconds at each house, running door to door, not wasting any time to talk, except for to use the two phrases used in trick-or-treating: “Trick-or-treat” and “ Thank you”. After hours of this you decide that you have enough candy. The only night that ever happens.  

You walk through the front door with a bag so full of candy it was almost impossible to lug down the street. As you begin to take off your costume one thought is constantly passing through your mischievous mind: chocolate binge!

Warm Fuzzies

Hey sorry guys that I haven't posted in a while, things just got busy. This post was used for my application for the school newspaper. hope I get the job, and hope you enjoy.             

                         Warm Fuzzies 

 

 

 

 

            Ever get one of those “warm fuzzy” moments? You know like the ones where you’re just filled to capacity with warmth? I love those feelings. I wish, probably along with a lot of people as well, that they could just last forever. If you want to have these “warm fuzzies” as much as possible then you need to figure out the easiest way possible to create these feelings. Some people go for doing what they like to do best in the whole wide world and some go for love. Both of which are somewhat difficult to come by. I personally go for a warm chocolate-chip cookie and some cold milk.

         The easiest way to get those extraordinary feelings, called “warm fuzzies”, is to have the extraordinary taste of chocolate-chip cookies engulf you completely, at least for me. Let me ask three simple questions. Have you ever had a chocolate-chip cookie? If you have had one, then did you like it? How much? You have most likely had a chocolate-chip cookie, and its up for you to decide the other two.  If I were to answer the questions my self, then the answers would be first, yes. Second, I adored it. Third, indescribably so.

         On the back of one my favorite books, Everything I Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten, by Robert Fulghum, is a list of some of the things that apply to the title. One of them is “ Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you”. Funny thing is, is that that is what we all learned in kindergarten. I still believe it now. Can you imagine a better feeling than that? A big, fat, chocolate-chip cookie, so warm that it falls apart in you hand and melts away into your mouth and you can feel the warmth run down your throat, and then slowly spread to your entire body. You then look at your hand and you have warm chocolate all over you, and say “What the heck” and start licking away. Then the simple but profound thought, milk. You slowly get up and walk towards the fridge, grab the carton of milk, a tall glass and combine the two and walk slowly back to the counter stool and sit and look at the glass of milk as if it were some odd thing, and then pick it up slowly and… GULP. And then… the “Ahhhh.”

         This is the “warm fuzzie” feeling that I speak of.  No better feeling. Not difficult, not complicated, just goodieness. How do you get your “warm fuzzies”?     

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                                                                                                                                                

Dogs and their Supersenses

Have you ever heard of a dog having an unusual sense? Yes, all dogs do have that great sense of smell and sense of hearing , well I guess that I shouldn't say all  dogs, but when I say unusual I mean like being able to do something that you don't really hear about much, hence "unusual". 

I recently read a column by one Craig Wilson who writes a weekly column, every Tuesday, for USA Today. His column titled "Dogs turn tail and hide from thunderstorms" is about his dog being able to "hear thunder a 1000 miles away". As I hear stories about peoples' dogs and their remarkable senses, being able to sense thunder is always a popular one. Although I have heard of dogs being able to sense things like pregnancy, seizures, spirits, among other things. I like to call these "supersenses."

I have a dog. Her name is Hermione. Now my dog, her supersense is that she has an acute sense of time. Now I'm not sure if you've heard of that, but I haven't, but thats just me. Its really quite odd. She can tell, no she knows when its Sunday. See every Sunday my family goes on a "Sunday walk". I don't know what it is about the "Sunday walk" because we take her on other walks throughout the week, but on Sunday she will not shut up. No matter what we do to try to make her shut up, she will not submit to our shouts of frustration. If you don't believe me you can ask my neighbors and they'll confirm that statement. 

Hermione has yet to let me down. And although she doesn't have a problem with thunderstorms, she has her own unique problems. Or should I say "supersenses"?