With just a few hours left before summer officially begins, I decided it was time for my first (and probably last) annual spring cleaning column, which will basically demonstrate that I really can throw out an awful lot of bad column ideas and still have enough…
***
For the longest time I kept thinking that Mel Brooks and Mel Gibson were the same person, which would explain why I had such a hard time reconciling ?The Passion? against ?The Producers.?
***
This has always bothered me: How is it that an animal?whose body is completely covered in a thick coat of fur?can wake up after a full night?s sleep looking perfectly presentable, but a human?whose only patch of thick hair sits perched atop his or her head?that takes an half hour nap will wake up with each follicle pointing a completely different direction?
How does that make sense?
***
It wasn?t until recently that I realized Malibu was a real place, and not a fictitious address made up by the Mattel company.
***
Just over a year ago wife Hanna and I were searching for a new place to rent. With the availability of the ?right? kind of rental not making itself apparent, I was starting to get worried we might end up in my parents? basement.
But then in a classic Dave Barry-esque epiphany I realized that the letters in ?For Rent? can be rearranged to spell ?Nor Fret.?
Despite the eccentric syntax, I took it as a good sign.
***
I wonder if George Orwell would be pleased or horrified if he knew the setting for his novel was only three decades off.
***
A few weeks back Hillsboro?s economic developer extraordinaire Clint Seibel wrote a letter to the editor asking, ?What if everyone in Marion County made a commitment to buy all of our toilet paper locally??
An excellent question.
According to controlnroll.com, which got its data from blogger Josh Madison, who apparently has even more spare time than I do, the average person uses 49 rolls of TP per year.
This equates to about 49,000 squares of TP personally used annually, or 2.8 miles or 5,644.8 square feet of tissue, although those facts have absolutely nothing to do with the question at hand.
I figure that if you don?t purchase the Cadillac brand of toilet paper, you can probably get it for around 50 cents per roll. So multiply half a dollar by 49 annual rolls by Marion County?s population (12,300), and that?s $301,350 in TP sales, plus roughly $26,500 in sales tax.
Now you know.
***
Recently the media has been talking a lot about the outbreak of the Middle East respiratory syndrome, which has been lovingly nicknamed ?MERS.? This has got me wondering how many five-year-old Sunday school students are asking their teachers why one of the wise men brought Jesus a respiratory virus.
***
I suppose the solution to preventing bed head would simply be to never go to sleep. It?s possible, as Hawkeye once said, but you?ve got to keep dancing.
