Hello, Barney.

This is Barney. I have a pine tree in my house, Martin, that I think would be good friends with Barney. They're both Daoists, by my estimate at least. I say this because they have a tendency to 'go with the flow.' I was watching Barney the other day and there was a breeze. You know what Barney did? Some of his branches swayed in the direction of the breeze. Daoist.

Anyway, a little story about myself: way back in the 1990s when I was at a relatively young age, my brother and I had watched a National Geographic episode about rappelling, or climbing, something of the sort. Naturally, inspiration followed--we wanted to rappel from trees. We gathered plenty of rope and climbed up a tree in our backyard, fastened the rope to the tree and prepared ourselves to descend the trunk.

However, there was an important component of rappelling that we did not pay close attention to: when preparing to rappel, you do not fasten the rope around your neck. What a wonderful call my mother received from the neighbor as we were about to jump (definitely not proper rappelling etiquete). She must have been so proud of us.