JackTales

Windcaps, or windscreens as they’re sometimes known, are small cap-like devices for your pipe. They fit right over the bowl. They serve two primary purposes. If it’s windy, it keeps the embers from blowing out of your bowl and it slows down the airflow to the bowl, so your smoke doesn’t become very hot and burn fast.

There’s four kinds of windscreens, but you’ll probably only want to know about two of them. The most common type of windcap looks like the image to the right. A round spring holds two clips to the interior of the pipe.

 This is another type of windcap. To be honest, I’ve never actually seen one of these in person, but it looks pretty similar. I’d guess that there is a spring that holds the two buttons tight against the interior of the bowl. It would provide the same function as the windcap above.

 Butz-Choquin has a Rallye series of capped pipes. To be honest, I know nothing about this pipe other than it’s capped.

 Finally, some meerschaums come with decorative caps.  I don’t have a picture of one here, but the caps are usually attached to the pipe itself with a small chain.

Here in the Pacific Northwest, it rains enough to put out the tobacco in your pipe, so a regular pipe with a windcap like the first two I discussed here, is handy to keep the water out of your pipe if you smoke in the rain.

This is my windcap story: My wife and I walk the dogs along the beach at Dumas Bay in Washington state. Because it’s so breezy, I usually have to have a windcap or risk embers blown into my face. This is not a good thing. So I have one of those pipe windcaps with the round spring, like the first windcap described here. We go for a walk in January, and when I get home and fish my pipe and lighter out of my pocket, I realize I’ve lost the windcap.

Now, I’ll grant you I’m frugal. Okay, I’m tighter than paint on a wall, but I was upset I lost the windcap. It wasn’t much of a financial loss, about $3-$4, but still I don’t like losing things. With multiple head traumas in the past, I’m worried I’m going senile when I can’t find something. Digging through my pockets and tracking my steps through the driveway and house, I still couldn’t find it.

For the next week, every day I went for a walk on the beach, I’d look for it. It was ridiculous of course. The tides coming in and out would either bury or wash away anything that light. So I gave up on it, and went out and bought a new one.

 One day my wife walked the dogs on the beach without me. It was late March, two months after I had lost the windcap. She said, “Guess what I found?” No way, the windcap had washed back onto shore, and as she was walking along, she saw a glint in the sand. She walked over and saw the edge of the windcap and pulled it out.

It was rusty from the saltwater, but it was my windcap alright. I was so amazed, I put away my replacement windcap, and took a sander to take off as much of the rust as I could. I’ve become ridiculously fond of the miracle windcap that I won’t part with it willingly.

Of course, I could always lose it again.

A truck driver had just finished offloading on our dock this morning, and one of our guys yelled to him, “Would you like to use the little girls’ room?”

He yelled back, “No, I’d like the little boys’.” We all did a double-take, and the truck driver groaned and turned beet red. “Not what I meant! Not what I meant!”

It was hard to hear him over all the laughing.

Okay, here’s my weird moment of the day. We had a woman standing in line at the counter the other day. I noticed she had a “tramp stamp” (a tattoo just above the butt). It was blobby looking and about the size of a basebball, with more attached to it, running down to her fanny. Whatever it was, it wasn’t anything I had seen before.

She bent over a couple of more times, and I still couldn’t get a good look at it. Finally, she was in front of me with her back facing me, and she bent over again.

Holy cow! It was Yoda! It had to be 15″ long in total and as wide as a baseball.

Now I’ve noted a lot of other tramp stamps; some were pretty, some were just symbols, some were interesting…but Yoda?!!

I mean, can you imagine being 40 with Yoda stamped on your butt? How would you explain it to your grandkids some day in the far off future? Heck, if Star Wars was long forgotten, explaining Yoda would be pretty weird in the first place.

Okay, I think I’m scarred for life.

I stumbled across ”What are Jack Tales?“ before, and enjoyed the read, for obvious reasons. I reworked all of the articles into a .pdf file that’s a lot easier to read. Check out Jack and His Place in the Folktale Tradition. I feel a lot of empathy about a character who stumbles into strange situations. Can’t imagine why…

Some of the absurdity of this morning just sort of sank in. This morning, long before we opened, we heard a loud bang, which seemed like it was far away, but then our power went out just a few moments afterwards. Probably two seconds after this, our fire alarms went off. A clerk shrieked and I evacuated the building, and called 911. As I went by the electrical room, I couldve sworn I smelled something electrical burning. I did manage to save my coffee and pipe. Hey, Ive got my priorities.

I had the employees move their cars as far away from the building as possible. I’d have had them gather outside, outside of their cars, but it was too cold and we didnt know how long it would take for the fire department to show up.

The fire department eventually shows up, and they pull around to the wrong side of the building. We waited and they finally come to the back of the building. They ask me what happened. I said, “loud boom, lights out, fire alarm.” Could be our electrical room, could be a bunch of places in the building where something mightve blown.

Then they want me to let them in and walk them through the building.

Lets think about this for a moment, shall we? The building may be burning, smoking, god knows what, and theyd like me to step into that ol’ building with them. I mean, can’t I just give them the key and tell them to have at it? But no, I get to traipse through a building with two firemen with no equipment, through a building where every alarm we have is going off. Ooh, they want to see this side of the building, would I show them how to get there. Gosh, maybe this other side of the building, please show them through.

I used to work somewhere else, long before I came to the postal service, where we pretty much ignored the fire alarms, we had so many false ones. Then one day, it went off, but sounded funny. We walked through the building, and then into this giant oven, tall enough for trucks to pass through. Temperature about 312 degrees. We see a gas main fire, shut down the gas to that main, and walk out. Our phone is going nuts. I pick up the phone and the guy on the other side wants to know why I picked up the phone. Duh. I asked why the heck he would ask something like that?

“Didn’t your alarm sound different than normal?”

“Yeah, so?”

“Didnt they tell you guys what that meant?”

“No.”

“It means a gas main fire is out of control, and the building could go up in any second, and the alarm meant that everyone had to immediately not only get out of the building, but get as clear of it as possible, running for your lives.”

As scary as this was, I kind of wondered why he’d be dumb enough to call not expecting any answer. “Hi, I’m dead. Can I help you?” For chrissakes, send the fire department, the police, any other number you might think of. Don’t call and see if I’m still alive to have my ass chewed out.

So I take alarms kind of seriously anymore.

Next time, I’m handing my keys to the firemen. I’m evacuating to Cleveland. Call me when its over.