A Legend in
his Own Mind
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A Legend in
his Own Mind |
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Carlo's Table
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Green or Blue? Which are you? The debate over which chalk to use has raged for quite some time. Blue chalk or Green chalk. GREEN! BLUE! GREEN! BLUE! Fistfights are commonplace. Divorces, too. If you answered Red, Lavender, Burgundy, or Mauve you are reading the wrong website. Please put down the mouse, turn around, and exit the building immediately before you give pool a bad name. Err. Well. Before you give it a name more closely aligned with fruit than with wood, steel, slate, ivory and competition. Now I’m a Green chalk fan. I was a Blue chalk fan for more than a half dozen years. It seemed to stay on my tip better. Later I came to realize that it was the Blue dye that was staying, not the chalk. The Green will show you where the chalk is missing, but the Blue will dye the tip after a while and will deceive you into thinking that you are covered. I deceive myself often enough at this game, and my opponents gleefully add their own deceptions so actually continuing to self-inflict additional deception upon myself is not in my game plan. No thanks. But what are the origins of pool chalk? We know where the wood for pool cues and tables originated. (TREES, if that one stumped you.) The steel for joints is dug from the ground in various forms, cooked with some secret European recipe stolen by Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan and “Ta-Dah!,” we have steel. Ivory comes from Ivory Fairies that steal it a little bit at a time from drunk elephants. Ferules come from Ferule Fairies. Pool cloth is woven from the wool of green sheep. More expensive cloth uses Virgin Wool which comes from really ugly sheep. (Thanks to an ex-Chicago player, John A, now from WA, for that one!) Slate is carved from the ground with noisy saws by hostile Italians and even more hostile Brazilians. They’re hostile from headaches from listening to those screaming slate saws. Cantcha just hear it? The Brazilians buy the dull blades from the Italians, hence their additional attitude. Chalk, namely pool chalk, is yet another great mystery of the planet Earth, our Mother Earth, and a completely different story. I’ll bet not one of you know where the chalk comes from… The Chalk Fairies, perchance? Well, maybe the Mauve stuff. The only two sources of chalk come from two mines. One is in Texas and the other is in Texas. Blue Chalk is mined in modest quantities in the same part of the country as Blue Bell Ice Cream. They have kept the location of the entrance to the Blue Chalk mine a closely guarded secret. The Blue Chalk mine is a deep, deep mine requiring being lowered deep into the earth in wire basket-like elevators. In fact, local rumor is that the Blue Bell Farms are the front operation for the Blue Chalk mining operation. Not counting worker decompression fatalities, two additional deaths have occurred in the area. It is suspected that the Sicilian mob or Mueller Billiards is trying to muscle in on Blue Chalk production. The Blue Bell moo cows reportedly act as watch-cows, and simultaneously, as a live, renewable source of leather tips. The harvesting of the leather tips keeps the watch-cows mean-as-hell which is a good quality for watch-cows. A watch-cow will run you down, and punch a few oversized cue tips out of you letting YOU know how THEY feel during tip harvests but they will eventually let you go. Fortunately they are not carnivores. The Green Chalk mines are an open pit operation having been in operation for 40 years longer than Blue. I had the privilege of touring their facilities earlier this year, before the bloody worker uprising (quickly crushed by mercenaries from the BCA, PCA, PBT, WPBA, and some fire breathing gal named Susan) that delayed Green Chalk shipments mid-year. As I said, it is mined from open pits. It is quite the spectacle seeing those trucks with 10-foot tires hauling Green Chalk to the factory where indentured illegal aliens try to work off their debt by wrapping little papers around the chalk they just whittled into a cube. To save money they are not supplied glue for the paper so they have to lick the chalk then rapidly apply the paper. Lick! Slap! A Green tongue is a badge of honor, a sign of chalk maker status, first class. A green tongue is good for picking up chicks! Well, at least in that town. Every generation has its own unique form of status symbols, I guess. Today you put rivets in your lips and pecker and the tattoo of a gargoyle or a rock band on your ass. In my day, it was having a hot car or a lot of money. The ingestion of Green chalk, unfortunately, results in gastronomic illness and discomfort. If you do not believe me, munch a cube or two of green chalk. During the early part of this century, watch-face makers used their lips to straighten the bristle of the brush that was used to apply radium paint to the numbers, and became ill with radiation poisoning. It was quite the social outrage and OSHA was formed, Ford Motor unionized and Earl Strickland even punched out a blind tourist because of the unionization. Ask your Grandfather if he remembers hearing about the Boxer Rebellion? Even though historians warped the story for political purposes it was actually the first of several violent incidents surrounding pool chalk. This rebellion centered around the workers that put the chalk into the little boxes, hence the Boxer Rebellion. Prior to some maniac-in-marketing’s decision, a simple paper bag was sufficient. Mister Joe-Smooth-Marketing-VP wanted each set put into an itty-bitty box of a dozen cubes of chalk. Four died and many were wounded. The rebellion failed and that is why we now get chalk a dozen to a box. This is useful information, I’m sure. Similarly, the Green Chalk dust the workers ingest causes extreme constipation and terminal flatulence, so workers, just like this diatribe, smell badly and are full of green “It.” Thanks, and I hope that clears matters up for you. Any thing else on your mind? Carlo |
Nobody paid me any money to put these links here, I just thought they deserved it. Tell them Carlo sent you, maybe they'll buy me a beer.
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