Cranky Large Medium reading, 18 February

Go away.

When will you go? Yesterday isn't soon enough. Please, if you have an ounce of decency, you will leave.... Apparently, you have no decency. Otherwise, why would you still be standing there? Oh, you came here for something. A reading. How nice. And I suppose you expect it to come from me. How nice. As if you couldn't have sent me a postcard, instead of taking up space in my retreat. Well, if it will make you leave any sooner, let me give you what I have:

You are a plodder, not allowing anything to get in your slow, steady path to what you view as success. You're like the tortoise in Aesop's fable, except that you haven't a clue that you're in a race, or where the finish line might be. Under those circumstances, the rabbit will always win. You miser, you could pinch a penny until locomotives became jealous of how thin you got it. It's amazing that you haven't been abandoned by embarrassed family and friends.

Are you happy, now? Of course not. That would require something you lack: swiftness of uptake. Well, try to look on the bright side -- at least you've still got your life, which is more than we can say for these people, all of whom, on this date in history, got caught in the intake of afterlife: Tarasius, Kublai Khan, Thabit ibn Qurra, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, John Whitehurst, Carl Gustav Jakob Jacobi, Henry Norris Russell, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Angilbert, Pope Gregory V, Martin Luther, Antonio Francesco Grazzini, Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac, Albert Payson Terhune, Dame Ngaio Marsh, Guido di Pietro aka Fra Angelico, Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, Nicolaes Pieterszoon Berchem, Charles Lewis Tiffany, Gustave Charpentier, Bob Stinson, Robert Rossen, Andy Devine, Noam Pitlik, Maggie McNamara, Jacqueline Hill, James J. Corbett, Harry Caray, Dale Earnhardt, Eddie Mathews, Richard Bright, Anna Maria Luisa de' Medici, John Chapman aka Johnny Appleseed, John Batterson Stetson (with a tip of the hat to him), David King Udall, Joseph-Armand Bombardier, John Knudsen Northrop,

and Johnny Paycheck,

You're not the only hell YOUR mama ever raised, but don't ask your daddy about it.
Happy birthday, anyway.