Seriously? This is all I have to work with? Bummer.
So. After staring at the screen for about 10 minutes now, I’m just going to wing it. Scarecrows. Michael Jackson. The Wiz. “Come on and ease on down, ease on down the road.” Poor Michael. I think he was semi-normal when he did that movie. I remember watching it at my step-mom’s house when I’d go to visit my biological father (who I usually referred to as Uncle Dan). They had cable at their house. He couldn’t afford to pay child support but they had cable. Priorities. I’d stay up for hours on end watching bad movies just for the sake of enjoying cable. Hey, I deserved to get the most out of what was replacing my child support payments. My step-mom and I would watch the craziest movies. Mostly horror films. I like a good scary movie, and “The Wiz” was one of them.
Scarecrows. Living in Kirkersville, Ohio for most of my life, which used to be a very small town surrounded by farms, one would think that I’d seen my share of scarecrows. I just can’t recall ever coming across one. Many people had lawn ornaments, but no scarecrows. During my high school years my best friend was Jill. She had her driver’s license (a novelty to me since I had killed that kitten and refused to get my own license). We would go to a couple of the houses that were the “big daddies” in the lawn ornament world. Deep in the dark of night, we would sneak into these worlds of landscaping horrors: mini towns of dwarves, families of deer, angels, lawn jockeys, and that big rear-ended lady bending over. We would carefully rearrange them so they’d be looking into the homeowners’ windows. And then we’d steal away, laughing at our mischievousness. (Spell check says this is a word.) Ridiculous? Yes. A pain in the butt to the homeowner having to rearrange their lawn? Yes. Funny? Are you kidding me? It’s hysterical. And harmless. We could have done any number of ridiculous things but this is what we chose. It could have been worse.
I’ll tell you who needs a few scarecrows. The Grand Canyon. They’ve got crows bigger than Texas. While Matt and I had exactly one day to marvel at one of the modern world’s greatest wonders, we saw a tremendous amount of crows. They would lurk close to the visitors because – despite all the signs clearly pointing out that you shouldn’t feed the wildlife – there were a gazillion idiots flinging food at these birds saying “Hey! Is that an Eagle?!” I guess we’d technically need a scarecrow for the idiots flinging food, not for the crows. This is where Michael Jackson would come in handy.
Actually, Michael Jackson died while we were on this trip to the Grand Canyon. Cellular service was spotty at best so – as I was reading Facebook updates on my BlackBerry instead of marveling at one of the greatest natural wonders of the world – I saw hints that suggested he had died. My friend, Wal, had posted “I think Michael Jackson’s been dead since 1987.” I thought that was an odd post, so I scrolled down. Someone else had written “Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett AND MJ all in one week. Sad.” What? I’d gone to the Grand Canyon and all these people had died? I was furiously trying to get information on my BlackBerry as the scenery of this beautiful area whizzed by me. They don’t call ’em CrackBerries for nothing.
Hey! Is that an eagle?
As I’m writing this I keep singing a song called “Let’s Build A Snowman” from the movie “Cannibal, the Musical“. This movie, by Trey Parker and Matt Stone (yes, the “South Park” guys), is a musical based on the life of Alfred Packer. He’s the man who attempted to lead a mining party from Provo, Utah to Breckenridge, Colorado but was stranded in the Rockies during a winter storm and eventually resorted to cannibalism. I know. It’s a gruesome story. However, their musical is loosely based on facts and has quite a snappy repertoire of tunes. While I found the movie to be wonderfully funny, I cannot recommend it to anyone. You might lose all respect for me. However, I can recommend you listen to the following link and replace the word “snowman” with “scarecrow”.
Now wasn’t that a peppy tune? My bet is that you’ll be singing it for the rest of the day.
Enjoy your Sunday, everyone. More tomorrow. 🙂
Stronger Than I Look 
Great post. I was particularly impressed by that person holding the bag of food with the label clearly stating “don’t feed the animals” and asking us “can i feed these too the animals?”
The grand canyon was grand and thanks so much for being there with me. I’ll always remember our short walk through the cemetary. to the rim… It’s a shame we couldn’t leave a few people buried there.
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