Sticks Of One, A Half-Dozen Of The Other

• An expression I used to hear all the time: "It ain’t a sharp stick in the eye." It was meant to make you feel better about not getting exactly what you wanted, but it would suffice. Not long after you agreed to a deal like that, you were wishing for the sharp stick.

• Teddy Roosevelt, my favorite President you may recall, had a saying, "Walk softly and carry a big stick." "Big Stick," oddly enough, is the model name of a baseball bat made by Adirondack (I think). At Washington Nationals games (where I’m pretty sure some of the players use "Big Sticks") they used to (and maybe they still do) have a between-innings foot race between the four Presidents whose images are carved into Mount Rushmore (George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Teddy). (Rest assured the race was between four people dressed like the Presidents, wearing large cariacature "heads" made of styrofoam or papier-maché; they did not dig up the corpses of the four august gentlemen and reanimate them a la Frankenstein’s monster.) Invariably, Teddy would lose, often coming in dead last. I heard they added a fifth President a couple of years later: the fans elected to have that be William Howard Taft, who got screwed big time by Teddy in his re-election bid in 1912 (Teddy ran as a third-party candidate, representing the "Bull Moose" party, and drew sufficient support away from Taft to get Woodrow Wilson elected). I’m sure "Teddy" sped up to avoid being tackled and perhaps sat upon by the corpulent 27th President.

UPDATE: Teddy actually won one!

• When he was younger and would play cowboy, my brother Jim used to walk up to people, draw his six-shooters, and holler "stick out your brains!" I think he was abbreviating "stick ’em up, or I’ll blow your brains out."

• I’m done. How about a stick of Doublemint gum? Made by the William Wrigley Company, now owned by M&M/Mars, of Chicago…

Linda is your host for Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Now a word from Camel cigarettes. You’ll walk a mile for a Camel!