It’s been so long since one of my columns of wisdom ran in the paper that I was sure they’d put me out to pasture. But I guess they decided to keep me because low and behold the publisher took to complaining that I was late with my column. Guess doing less bellyaching and griping wasn’t one of his New Year resolutions.
1 – Seen a piece in one of the American online papers about a fellow that backed his vehicle into a gas station to break into the store. The only thing the crook took when he got in was a single banana, and he ate that right there in the store. A guy’s really gotta have a craving for a banana or some potassium to break the law like that. Thankfully those kinds of crimes don’t have a lot of appeal here. Or maybe that should be a lot of “a peel” here.
2 – Speaking of cravings. Seen a story in the same publication about a 120-pound woman from Nebraska what ate a 72-ounce steak in just three minutes. Unlike banana boy, this gal didn’t break a gas station; she broke a world record. The previous record for chowing down on that much Grade A beef was almost seven minutes.
3 – After 134 years the government has now banned the little round light bulb Thomas Edison invented all them years ago. Well, not all of them. The 60- and 40-watt bulbs will get phased out next year. They tell me the new curly ones last longer but I don’t think they are as bright as the ones we’ve been using all along. Mind you, the new ones are a darned sight brighter than the ones that made us get rid of the old ones.
4 – Speaking of stuff that’s soon going to be gone. I was thinking about our “on-its-last-legs” arena the other day and was reminded about that old barrel of hot water the rink rats used to push around between periods to clean the ice. There was no end to kids wanting to do that job, and some of them cashed in pop bottles at the store to raise the money to get into the game so they could get the work. Now a Town employee rides around on a Zamboni to clean the ice. Of course with child labour laws being what they are, they’d never let you have a kid to push around a barrel of boiling water for an hour for a measly quarter. Lot of good memories in that old building … the hockey games and fights, not the child labour stuff.
5 – Read that Norwegians are all worth a million apiece because of their oil revenues going into a big fund that’s making money. Maybe this lefty that writes the column to the left of me is right.
