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Bard Loving 'Shroom Picker....

Tuesday, 24 January 2012 02:30

Going Off Course - Have you ever hiked gaspingly to the top of what you thought was a pointy-top mountain and discovered that it didn't really have a pointy top? Talk about disappointment!

When Twin Citizen triathlete Tiffany Storms (photo L) arrived at the top of Mount Normandale, the least-publicized member of Colorado's 14,000+ foot Collegiate Peaks (the others are Mt. Harvard, Mt. Oxford, Mt. Stanford, Mt. Columbia and Mt. Yale), she found that there was enough room up there to park a couple of rock star tour buses. She had hoped to be able to balance on the point for a full minute, sorta like the guy in the photo (R), which she later learned wasn't real. (The guy was Photoshopped into the pic. If you enlarge the shot you'll be able to see a rock star tour bus parked alongside the heel of his left foot.)

A few years have passed and Tiffany, who is very, very pretty and looks great in an Ironman beanie, can finally laugh about her dispiriting mountain adventure....

An only child, Tiffany used to have an imaginary sister named either Sandy or Dusty, with whom she used to pick morel mushrooms, read Shakespeare and pet a cat that's been in her family since 1968.

It's not the age of her cat, or the fact that she had an imaginary 'shroom-picking sibling that disturbs us. It's the fact that she read Shakespeare. Nobody really reads Shakespeare, Americans especially.

Worse yet, Tiffany claims to have actually enjoyed his plays and poetry. How could she? The Bard didn't write anything that was intelligible. (And what-the-heck is a "bard" anyway?) And how can you enjoy something you can't understand?

Check out this stanza from a"A Lover's Complaint":

A thousand favours from a maund she drew

Of amber, crystal, and of beaded jet,

Which one by one she in a river threw,

Upon whose weeping margent she was set;

Like usury, applying wet to wet,

Or monarch's hands that let not bounty fall

Where want cries some, but where excess begs all.

What does this stuff mean? And why did Bill make up a bunch of weird concepts, like favor-granting maunds and weeping margents? Geez!

And The Shakester's plays were even more incomprehensible than his poems. Check this conversation betwixt a couple of witches in "MacBeth":

First Witch

A sailor's wife had chestnuts in her lap,

And munch'd, and munch'd, and munch'd:--

'Give me,' quoth I:

'Aroint thee, witch!' the rump-fed ronyon cries.

Her husband's to Aleppo gone, master o' the Tiger:

But in a sieve I'll thither sail,

And, like a rat without a tail,

I'll do, I'll do, and I'll do.

Second Witch

I'll give thee a wind.

Come on! We read this two nights ago before bed and later had nightmares about rump-fed ronyons and tailless rats. The next day we asked Tiffany what the conversation between the witches was about.

Amazingly, she knew. So I guess we're wrong about Shakespeare's stuff being incomprehensible and un-enjoyable. Apparently, it's only incomprehensible and un-enjoyable to the MTN guys.

Tiffany Storms is a beautiful and wonderful person, despite having been kicked repeatedly by farm animals in her youth. The fact that she loves Matt Damon movies and adores macadamia-encrusted halibut further enhances her wonderfulness. She claims to be painfully shy but, for some reason, is reluctant to tell us where it hurts.

We thank Tiffany for allowing us to embellish stuff about her, and we encourage you to read her fascinating mini-bio.

Personal stuff:

Hometown? Muscoda, WI a small farming community in Southwest WI along the WI river. There are approximately 1,400 people who call it home and is the