Go on, Goon!

Calvin and Hobbes, the 1985 - 1995 comic strip that is still available online was a daily wonder to me.  I wondered how its creator and artist Bill Watterson was able to come up with so many (3,160!) dead-on satires of daily life in America, our schools, our love of TV over most everything else, and the senseless limits that we place on a child's creativity.  

The old strips might as well have been drawn yesterday.  The past few weeks, we have enjoyed seeing young Calvin and his friend Hobbes battling a battalion of Snow Goons that have taken over their neighborhood.  Funny stuff! Some of the best cartoons that Watterson ever did were about snowmen and Calvin out there playing in the snow and making his own snowpeople.

But when I think of Snow Goons, I think of:

• The person who tailgated me all the way down Stevenson Lane yesterday morning.  For the benefit of my many readers in Gila Bend, AZ, we had snow on Monday night, followed by freezing rain on Tuesday morning.  It made all the world look like a gigantic Honey-Dipt Donut, and when I left for work, it was still an even freezin' 32°, and the roads were icy in spots.  Stevenson Lane is downhill with a hard right turn at the bottom of the hill, and the speed limit there is 25, which means you go 25 in the best of conditions, which were not the conditions yesterday morning.  So, to the man or woman driving a tan SUV right on my back bumper all the way down the hill - please don't force me to go buy a set of Yosemite Sam mud flaps! 
• People who shovel the snow and slush from their driveway out into the middle of the road for the rest of us to steer around.  Please don't force me to go buy a Yosemite Sam snow shovel!
• Shopowners who rip the public off at the very thought of snow and ice, jacking up the prices of rock salt, car window scrapers, mud flaps, and snow shovels.  I know capitalism means following the laws of supply and demand, but gouging is illegal and immoral and unethical.  Don't make me come to court, represented by Yosemite Sam, Esq!

Snow Goons, you have been warned!