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 You don’t know fun until you realize you’re about to be raked up and down on the radio for kicks ‘n’ grins, and realize you have two options: listen, call in and argue, or B) continue with your plans, which consist of two hours at Chuck E. Cheese’s. I went with B, since Gnat wouldn’t understand why Daddy was sitting in the car yelling into his little silver thing. (I refer to my voice recorder. I would have mailed the tape to the show and trusted them to play it. Easier than debating.)
I enjoyed Chuck E’s this time, actually. I truly did. We bonded over Skee Ball. Those things pay off in tickets big time if you learn the nuances of the game. Ah, like life itself: don’t shoot for the 100 point slots; concentrate on reliably hitting the 50 point hole. Unless of course you’re really good at hitting the 100 pointers, in which case go for it. And of course you can’t get good at it unless you practice. So screw the 50 point holes. By the end of our trip we’d racked up 200 points, which earned us one half a rat-gnawed Tootsie Roll. The points have been banked with the rest. One of these days she’ll spend them on something really cool, like a bag of lint.
The pizza wasn’t even as inedible as usual.
Got in the car; drove home; heard myself taunted in the usual genial style, so I called up as soon as I got home and we had a nice argument about it. I’m not sure how we disagree, since I respect anyone’s decision to avoid any store for any reason; it’s your buck. But one emailer to the show described how he loaded up his cart, had it totaled, then drove it to the manager to tell him how he wouldn’t be spending the money at Target. Whereupon he left.
Please. Who has to put the stuff away? Some guy who has other things he has to do. You want to make that sort of statement, go to Target, load up, pay for it, then send Target a copy of the receipt to tell them what sort of business you won’t give them. Making an employee clean up after your Symbolic Gesture is like taking a leak in the aisle to protest the fact that they’re out of Depends.
Anyway. As I may have mentioned, this was a two-column day with extra expanded Gnat care duty, since my wife is at her monthly Bunco party tonight. I have yet to start the Sunday column, and worse yet, it’s 10:30 PM. And I have no idea what I’m going to write about. NO IDEA. Anticipating that tonight would be hell, I took some pictures today with the hopes of padding out the bleat with pictures.
The view from the back door this morning. Lovely – but alas, the trees in the background are dead with dutch elm and scheduled for removal. Well, look on the bright side! More sky!
This is the juvenile justice bldg across from the Strib; it’s trapezoidal, which makes it look from some angles like one simple wall erected for no discernible reason. Inside, young hooligans are dealt with. It is a hooligan-dealing machine, this structure.
The front of the Strib, with the skyline reflected in the marble. I’ve been meaning to take this shot for years. Now I have. I can die happy.
Over at Tim Blair’s place, there’s an argument about cartoons based on yesterday’s Bleat. Someone had the gall to mention “King Leonardo” in the same discussion as Warner Brothers cartoons, and he even went so far as to mention “The Hunter.” Krep, all of it, and krep that fills me with great sadness; I had the King Leonardo 45 when I was a kid, and for some reason I connect it with lost empty mornings where the cartoons were cheap and lame and utterly devoid of laughter. The theme song says it all, I think. Yes, nothing says kid-fun like a theme song scored for six barroom harmonizers and one oboe.
Although I’ll sit through a Commander Bragg just to hear him say “quite.”
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