Get Crushed

Hello World,


And so here we find ourselves, poised on the very brink of Martin Luther King Jr. Weekend, or as the online travel web sites like to keep reminding me, the first long weekend of the year. Although, generally speaking, I would think that New Year's would be the first long weekend of any year, but that's just nitpicking for nitpicking's sake, and many of us have taken the pledge to swear off that sort of thing in 2005. As far as they're concerned, those nits are just going to have to pick themselves from now on, or lump it. I feel it's only fair to say that everyone knows I have been complaining, long and loud, about being on Jury Duty and them making me sick, and just in time for Christmas besides. I have to admit that might have been just a little bit hasty, not to mention unfair, to my fellow jurors and other people caught up in the maw of the justice system in December. In reality, half of the choir in Lessons & Carols was also sick just before Christmas, and when I got back to work after finishing with Jury Duty, everyone in my office was also sick that week. Later, it seemed that everyone I spoke to on the phone, or who came into my office, said either that they were sick for the holidays, or everyone else around them was sick. It does appear as if there was an awful lot of awful stuff out there making a whole lot of people sick at the end of the year, and not just unfortunate wretches like me on Jury Duty downtown. The scary part was that even people who never get sick, like Bill, got it and got it bad. All over the hospital, we had staff coming down with bronchitis, pneumonia and pleurisy, or going in the other direction with a stomach or intestinal virus. It was horrible. And after all winter, all the news was about how people couldn't get flu shots, there wasn't enough vaccine, and so many people were going to get flu because of the flu shot shortage, and instead everyone got everything BUT flu. I've had flu, and I still remember how miserable that is, when even your eyelashes hurt, and you figure that you're too weak to even drop dead, and you'll have to get better before you can even die. But they certainly got every other darned thing, even if there wasn't a particular name to call it by. One of my co-workers downstairs in the computer department, where people never get sick but did this time, was telling everyone that she had a bad case of "cooties." Now that I'm feeling a little more kindly to my fellow jurors, who only may or may not have made me sick for the holidays, I could relate another of my favorite stories from the jury room. In the original group of 18 jurors, we had two Asian ladies, and in the very beginning, when we were trying to determine how long we might be involved in the case, we figured that it would probably go past Christmas and New Year's at least. I said I hoped it didn't go as far as MLK weekend, because we had plans to be away. One of the Asian ladies piped up that she hoped it wouldn't be later than Chinese New Year, and I said, "Bite your tongue!" because as a movable feast, Chinese New Year can be as late as the middle of February. Then I told them that at the hospital where I work, we like to wish everyone a happy new year in Chinese, but we can't remember it exactly, so we just say "Hong Kong Bok Choy" to everyone and figure that's good enough. They honestly laughed so hard, I though their coffee was going to come out of their noses. I suppose in Chinatown where they live, people don't say "Hong Kong Bok Choy" to each other. Another favorite story from the recent legal ordeal concerned a book that had been written by a rogue member of the criminal organization involved in the case. It was apparently an insider's look at the underworld, as told by an insider, and it ripped through the organization like a car bomb. One of the government's cooperating witnesses discussed the book, and said that other members of the organization had been appalled and infuriated at this unrepentant breach of secrecy, and took umbrage at the media attention it attracted. He concluded his remarks by saying, "It had a first printing of something like 50,000 copies, and we figured the FBI was going to buy all 50,000 copies, just to make sure it was a best-seller, and really stick it to us." I love that! Meanwhile, alert readers may be wondering what's going on in the wonderful world of clothing nowadays. I'm glad you asked! I discovered in one of the J.C. Penney menswear catalogues, this delightfully arcane sidebar: =========================== MEET THE BUTTON CRUSHER Before your dress shirt is subjected to the rigors of daily wear, its buttons must survive a pounding from the button crusher. Unlike ordinary buttons, our extra-durable buttons stand up to the pressure of the 1.8-pound steel rod dropped from a height of 2.625 inches. =========================== Now, I have to tell you that my feeling about this is that if your "Button Crusher" is being dropped from a height of roughly two-and-a-half inches, it's not even worth mentioning. You want to drop that steel rod from 24 inches, you can go right ahead and tell me about it. But anything under 3 inches, I think just makes them look even more ridiculous than if they hadn't said anything about it in the first place. Button crusher, indeed. Well, I can see by the ol' clock on the wall that it must be time to wrap this up, and a good thing, too. I hope that you and your loved ones have not fallen victim to the insidious germs rattling around nowadays, which I refer to as "the crud," or if you have, that you're well on your way to recovery by now. One good thing about January is that you can count on an abundance of left-over Christmas candy in the stores at great discounts for your snacking or therapeutic needs, or if you want to splurge, the Valentine's Day candy is also on the shelves already, and what a welcome sight it is. In fact, we should all go and have some right now, and I don't know about you, but that's about the best idea I've had all day!