Here and there

I went down to the little snack shop on the bottom floor of my building had no regular Cheez-its today, only the “hot and spicy” and “white cheddar” varieties. What the hell? Why would they even make such things? Cheez-its are the absolute perfect snack food, designed by God. Why would someone alter or mess with such a thing? It’s like painting a moustache on the Mona Lisa, or making Salma Hayek wear sweatpants. It’s not necessary.

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Springsteen tickets went on sale, and for the first time in a few years, I did not buy any. I’m a little put out with him right now – the Super Bowl show with that stupid “referee” running out, the Wal-Mart deal, and it’s hard to drop a couple hundred bucks on a concert with the way things are going. But he’s still my hero and I’ll probably be on Craigslist just before the show trying to find a ticket.

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I read a story today where Cher said that 8 years of Republican rule “almost” killed her. Great – yet another failure by W.

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I see a lot of people are going to get money from the government if this “stimulus package” is passed. Well, here’s a group that’s being left out that needs a few billion dollars – parents of teen-agers. The public school system is sucking money out of me like a Shop-Vac.

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It looks like another winter with no snow here in Georgia. I remember as a kid, the few times it snowed, being so excited to run outside and play in it. But we weren’t equipped with the proper clothing, so it got old in about 15 minutes. Putting loaf-bread wrappers around your shoes was no substitute for galoshes, and those little thin wool gloves were worthless.

Sometimes in the winter, my mother would look up at the sky on a cloudy day and say, “Those are snow clouds.” She was born in Hawkinsville, Ga., and grew up in Cochran, Ga., and never lived north of Griffin, Ga. a day in her life. How would she know what “snow clouds” looked like? But I never disputed her. She wasn’t a big fan of being disputed.

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I like that Tennessee’s new pretty-boy football coach called Florida’s Urban Meyer a cheater. Even though what Meyer did – calling a recruit while the kid was on his visit to Tennessee – wasn’t cheating, it was the sort of classless thing you would expect from a humorless jackass who writes about himself in the third person. But I didn’t like Lane Kiffin’s lame apology – “If I offended anyone, I’m sorry, that wasn’t my intent.” Of course it was his intent.

But this is a man who moved to Knoxville and named his child “Knox,” so I don’t expect him to be super-smart. It’s hard to take sides when Tennessee and Florida are fighting, anyway. It’s kind of like the Iran-Iraq war. I want them both to lose.