Patrick Says

As I mentioned earlier this week, I’m taking your questions. So, what’s our second question? This one comes from regular reader, Chris: ‘the daughter would like to know where the whole “tooth fairy” thing came from?’

Ah, the tooth fairy. It’s not a very detailed story. Unfortunately, most of the records about the tooth fairy predate man’s ability to write complete sentences, things like ‘online life insurance quotes can be found here‘ or other completely unrelated phrases.

But as the legend goes, the tooth fairy was a maniacal creature in a time before the United States was formed, roughly 1923. In this time, people were shorter than they are now. The average man stood three feet tall and most women never got over two and a half feet tall. People lived in huts usually made from a combination of giraffe dung and iron ore.

Anyway, the local people lived pretty much in fear from the tooth fairy. A massively-hairy creature, standing over seventeen tall, with gnarly teeth and severe halitosis, she was quite the monster. Eventually, through the loss of small children, the people determined the tooth fairy was attracted to freshly-removed teeth. So, in an effort to hide the teeth, children would place them under the pillow to mask the scent.

It worked, because these days, the tooth fairy is just a fairy tale. Now, if you’re curious where the money aspect came into it, that was the idea of the Republicans in the 80s.

As the legend goes anyways.

So, as I mentioned in a previous post, I will take three questions from my readers and answer them. Nothing is out-of-bounds. So, what kind of scintillating questions do you have for me?

Becca asked, ‘So, why don’t they have a DAR for your car?’

Okay, not what I expected, but why not?

Here’s the short answer: they do. Kind of. I have an mp3 player and it has an FM radio built into it. If I’m in the car and digging some NPR, I can switch over to the mp3 player and hit ‘record’ and bam, I’m recording it.

I suppose you mean some kind of built-in unit, but wouldn’t that drain your battery while its recording radio and the car is off? Get an mp3 player from a wholesale electronics dealer, I guess.

Alright, so I’m a little dry on content lately. I’m sure it will turn around soon, but I thought I’d take this opportunity to make you an offer.

The first person to email a question will get that question answered here. ANY question. NOTHING is out of bounds. It could be serious or it could be ridiculous. Totally up to you. In fact, I’ll take the first three questions and give each its own post. How’s that for cajones?

So, email me your question. My email is on my contact page. If you post the question in a comment here, I will ridicule you mercilessly, so email it. Keeps the suspense that way. If this goes well, I may do it again every couple months, unless it’s wildly popular in which case I will do it every other day.

I’m a big fan of GMail. I’ve been using it for years. It’s awesome. But it’s not without some flaws. One of these flaws is that any person you’ve emailed is in your address book. So, literally, I have 716 contacts in GMail.

That’s kind of ridiculous.

Now sure, I could go through the immense list and delete people I don’t know that well or just emailed once or something, but who has that kind of time? But that’s not really the problem I want to talk about today.

No, the problem is that if you have the chat box up in GMail, you can see who’s ‘active’ right now for chat. And I have some semi-celebrities I’ve contacted. We’re hardly friends, but there they are.

Two are notable. Megan Morrone and Mary Alice from ‘Ace of Cakes’.

So, when I see that little green ‘available’ dot over there for either one of them, I’m all, hey, maybe I should say something. But then I realize they have no idea who I am and would be calling their attorneys faster than a supermodel eats a safe diet pill. So, there it sits…just teasing me.

Curse you, you little green dot of future restraining orders.

Can you imagine how those conversations would go?

Me: Hey, Mary Alice, remember me? I had that blog contest where you finished second to Amy Lee of Evanescence even though you actually emailed me and stuff? Sooooo, what chaaaaa doing?

Mary Alice: . . . [blocked]

The conversation with Megan goes pretty much the same way except for the stuff about the patron sainthood.

The other day, I was on the Facebook. I saw that one of my friends had joined a group that had a created a petition to have another group removed from Facebook. The group the other group was trying to remove was an organization that apparently doesn’t like soldiers. And is very vocal about it.

I dug a little deeper.

The site was really, just downright offensive, in my opinion. Having served in the military, I feel that our men and women who chose to enlist really are doing a true service to their country.

But, sorry, that first group with the petition is, well, wrong.

One of the founding principles of this country, grounded in the First Amendment to the Constitution, is freedom of speech.

Even speech that is downright hateful. It’s all protected. Why do you think the Ku Klux Klan still exists and can have public marches and pick up led light bulbs and trash off the highways?

Our servicemen and women didn’t take an oath to defend just the stuff they liked? They took an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.

We have to take the good with the bad.