Happy Father's Day from Charles Dodgson, Sr.

In honor of Father's Day, I here reproduce a letter written to an 8-year old Lewis Carroll (aka Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) from his father Charles Dodgson III.

My dearest Charles,
I am very sorry that I had not time to answer your nice little note before. You cannot think how pleased I was to receive something in your handwriting, and you may depend upon it I will not forget your commission. As soon as I get to Leeds I shall scream out in the middle of the street, Ironmongers, Ironmongers. Six hundred men will rush out of their shops in a moment -- fly, fly in all directions -- ring the bells, call the constables, set the Town on fire. I WILL have a file and a screw driver, and a ring, and if they are not brought directly, in forty seconds, I will leave nothing but one small cat alive in the whole Town of Leeds, and I shall only leave that, because I am afraid I shall not have time to kill it. Then what a bawling and a tearing of hair there will be! Pigs and babies, camels and butterflies, rolling in the gutter together -- old women rushing up the chimneys and cows after them -- ducks hiding themselves in coffee-cups, and fat geese trying to squeeze themselves into pencil cases. At last the Mayor of Leeds will be found in a soup plate covered up with custard, and stuck full of almonds to make him look like a sponge cake that he may escape the dreadful destruction of the town. Oh! where is his wife? She is safe in her own pincushion with a bit of sticking plaster on the top to hide the hump in her back, and all her dear little children, seventy-eight poor little helpless infants crammed into her mouth, and hiding themselves behind her double teeth. Then comes a man hid in a teapot crying and roaring, "Oh, I have dropped my donkey. I put it up my nostril, and it has fallen out of the spout of the teapot into an old woman's thimble and she will squeeze it to death when she puts her thimble on."

At last they bring the things which I ordered, and then I spare the Town, and send off in fifty waggons, and under the protection of ten thousand soldiers, a file and a screw driver and a ring as a present to Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, from

his affectionate Papa

May all our fathers profit by such a concatenation of generosity, ferocity, and an understanding of spatial relations.

This morning.

You want to know what it's like to be Jonathan Charles Wright?

It's like this:

You wake up and look for a pair of jeans to put on, but they are all dirty. You consider doing a load of laundry, but then just settle for some dirty jeans. In the middle of working from your apartment, while listening to your favorite band, on a gloomy North Idahoan summer day, a pair of brand spanking new jeans are literally delivered to your front door. You proceed with what you were doing, stopping only to blog about what it's like to be yourself by relating the aforementioned events.

Two wary enemies

I hope that the hornet in my dining room and I will be able to cohabitate like gentle-creatures, bearing towards one another due bodily respect. The arrangement is roughly this: the hornet does not sting my body, and I do not squash it into oblivion. Furthermore, penalty for the hornet's failing to uphold his end of the bargain extends to all of hornet-kind. Should the hornet fail to uphold its end of the arrangement, I shall swear vengeance on all of its hornet-kin and shall wreak insecticidal havoc throughout the hornet ranks.