Rock, Paper, Scissors

Hello World,

Happy Groundhog Day! I hope that you observed the holiday in an appropriate manner, perhaps wearing the customary marmot garb of a furry woodland creature, having the family over to feast on the usual woodchuck delicacies, or traversing the local area to regale your neighbors with your favorite groundhog carols. Ah, some of these timeless traditions just never go out of style, do they? Of course, there's nothing all of us hide-bound traditionalists love more than an old-fashioned holiday cloaked in all of the storied trappings of yesteryear, so let's all get out there and enjoy this one to the fullest. Don't forget to save me some ground-nog!

The recent and much maligned cold snap in the local region has continued to generate a media frenzy, to the extent that if space aliens happened to land here from another solar system, they would assume that there was no other news to report. Our friends at The Onion web site took this one step further, showing a picture of a man with two kids on a sled, dragging them across a patch of green grass with a little snow at the fringes, along with this frosty headline --

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Northeast Stunned By Freak January Snowfall
SYRACUSE, NY—"I've seen some freak weather, but this definitely tops them all," said area resident Mary Baloh, whose garden was slightly set back by the 1.5-inch snowfall.
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Now, that's the kind of news story that we can all rally around, I'm sure. Speaking of news, earlier in the week, I happened to run across just the opposite, when I grabbed a paper to use as a place-mat under a cat dish, and was startled by this arresting headline:

Pirates' Late Win Delays Mets' Celebration Again

Since the Mets haven't played the Pirates in at least six months, I'm thinking this newspaper is a lot older than I expect it to be. I mean, even in our recycling, I would figure the papers to be somewhat more recent than September, but apparently not. In other news, and this of a more contemporary vintage, I couldn't help but notice this front page story in Monday's paper, which announced in large type:

Motorist Found Shot In SUV Dies
Mt. Vernon cops say driver hit pole,
call death 'suspicious'

I tell you, you have to get up pretty early in the morning to put anything over on the police around here. The story states that police responded to an accident of a vehicle hitting a pole, and instead found that the driver had been shot in the chest. The police commissioner said, "We are treating this as a very suspicious death, but it's too early to make a determination as to the cause of death." I realize that the police commissioner doesn't want to go out on a limb or anything, but I believe I could save everybody a lot of time and bother, because even from this distance, I have a pretty darned good idea of the cause of death in this case. Of course, we can't rule out the possibility that the driver suffered from an allergy to bullets.

Anyone can tell you that allergies are nothing to sneeze at, and there's certainly nothing funny about them. Or is there? We get the following from Bill, who knows first-hand about allergies, and also has a nose for sniffing out the inadvertent humor all around us --

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In the CVS last Friday, I found a (plastic) jar of CVS-brand ("CVS Gold Premium", no less!) dry roasted unsalted peanuts. I like their cashews, so I thought I'd give the peanuts a try and they are, in fact, much better than the last package of dry-roasted nuts I had (which was probably 30 years ago), but that's irrelevant to this situation. What I thought was funny was the ingredient label -- no, not the Nutrition Facts for once.

My jar of CVS Gold Premium Dry Roasted Peanuts says: "INGREDIENTS: Dry Roasted Peanuts." So far, I'm kinda catching their drift. But then the label goes on to say:

"ALLERGEN STATEMENT: CONTAINS PEANUTS. MAY CONTAIN CASHEWS, ALMONDS, BRAZIL NUTS, FILBERTS, PECANS, PISTACHIOS, MACADAMIA NUTS, WALNUTS, SOY (SOYBEANS), MILK, WHEAT."

Well, I admit I started fishing around in the jar to see if there were any pistachios sitting at the bottom. I didn't find any, and I feel kinda gypped -- where are the Brazil Nuts? They're a lot more expensive than peanuts and I could go for one every now and then.
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While we're taking pot-shots at people who should know better, I have my own to toss around. Last week after church, the pastor complained to me that no one seemed to appreciate or comment about how he had cut his sermon so drastically short, in order to save time for the meeting to follow. Everyone knows that I'm much too polite to laugh, especially at the pastor and right in church besides, but I felt that people could be forgiven for not recognizing this sacrifice on his part, since I actually read another 60 pages in my Escort owners manual during this supposedly pared-down sermon. I find it impossible to climb on board with the idea that a "60-pager" could be considered "short" in any way, and it occurred to me that it's lucky we don't have to pay him by the word, or we'd be out of business. I still like my idea of the "pastor cut-off switch," which I'm suggesting as a safety feature, although an even better idea would be where you pull a string to make them talk, and when the string runs out, they stop. I call it "Pastor Chatty-Not."

Mind you, I'm not complaining, because it's given me the opportunity to learn a lot of things about the Escort that were hitherto a mystery to me. It's true that one day entirely on my own, I happened to discover the "trap door" that covers a hidden storage area in the back deck, and which I supposed was for those more valuable items that people might not want to leave out in plain sight, where anyone could see them through the hatchback window. However, I was disabused of this notion by the owners manual, which explained that the "trap door" was supposed to stay attached to the hatchback with cords, so it would lift up to expose the storage area whenever the hatchback was opened. Apparently, the ever wary engineers at Ford (there's a picture of them wearing belts AND suspenders) considered it the height of prudent design to provide a nice large, flat and handy cargo area in the back (behind the rear seats, which also have the useful feature of folding down flat to make an even larger space for carrying paraphernalia) and then they further supposed that it would be perfectly logical to tell people not to put anything back there. As Dave Barry always says, "I'm not making this up," and it's right there in black and white on page 136 of the owners manual. They refer to the "trap door" as a Cargo Area Cover, which they describe thusly: "This removable cover hides cargo in the luggage compartment. The cover lifts automatically when you open the hatchback." For wanton daredevils like me, they follow this up with a blaring warning that screams: "Do not place any items on the cargo area cover. They may make it difficult to see out the window, or they could be dangerous if they strike any occupants of the car in the case of a sudden stop or collision." I said to Bill that it must take a special kind of advanced engineering education to design a car with a substantial cargo area and then expect people not to put any cargo in it. A rational person might think that would pretty much defeat the whole purpose of having a "cargo" area in the first place. I've been calling it mine a "carno-no" area instead, although I admit that the ideas that it suggests, apart from cargo, are of a prurient nature that a respectable person would shun. After all, they don't call it an Escort for nothing!