Guns 'n' Poses

I've been oddly drawn to reading the Family Circus for years now. I think it's because they had a dog named ''Barfy.'' But here's Billy making a good point, one that Calvin made a dozen years ago: verbing weirds nouns!

I had a hard time not laughing at this picture in the paper yesterday:



This young woman with her crudely-lettered sign amused me. Not that it's even worth trying to argue with the Supreme Court definition of a ''well-regulated militia,'' now that the court has been packed with right-wing crackpots. Your Supreme Court just told you that your neighbors have the right to pack a piece and strut around waiting for someone to look at them crossly, and then watch the lead fly!


And the poorly-laid-out perspective of her home-style calligraphy (notice how "My gun permit" leans to the right, eerily reminiscent of Antonin Scalia) is a cause for concern as well. But the fact that she used ALL CAPS to spell out THE SECOND AMENDMENT when the font she copied clearly calls for lower case letters except for the first is bothersome. The least of the sins committed at Neverland Ranch was the use of ALL CAPS in the entryway to that Stygian hellhole:

And you know what? If people could only learn to be more careful with their capitalization, more precise with their spelling and more selective in their choice of artists, why, that would be awesome! Or awsome. Or something, I dunno...




I also read someplace about a survey that indicated that people who have been the victims of lightning strikes tend to have higher levels of irritability in later years. Well, for crying out loud, why shouldn't they? You get zapped with a little thunderbolt from above, you're entitled to be a touch cranky about it, I feel. And the bigger question, to me, is: why is it necessary to find out how petulant or cantankerous some poor Joe became after that July afternoon when he was crossing the street when BOOM! lightning hit him, and it came down in ALL CAPS! like that.

Riding up Harford Road the other evening, I saw a sign in someone's front yard that really gave me the willies:


I can't stand the thought. We're coming to the end of eight years of imprudent leadership by a vacuous, supercilious, obtuse party boy. It's time to think a little, folks. Remember the lesson they learned in Minnesota when a few voters thought they'd send a message to the big guys by voting for a wrestler for governor? So it was that a few too many votes were cast in this half-baked protest, and then the entire state had to suffer with having oafish grappler Jesse "The Body" Ventura as governor for four years. And the time on "Barney Miller" when Wojo brought one of those bolo ties for Barney when he came back from a trip out West, only Barney didn't know it was a gag and he wore the corny tie! Jimmy Buffett is the musical equivalent of a bolo tie, and we don't need another millstone around our necks after these past eight years, do we?