"Holidays and salad days, and days of moldy mayonnaise..." - Zappa

How fondly I remember the salad days! (It's clear that I do; I sure talk about them enough!)

The first time I saw the phrase "salad days" was when I was reading "The Godfather," seeking career guidance. There was a reference to a button man in the Corleone mob who looked back on his early days as a legbreaker. Of course, faced with a new term I didn't know, I looked it up and found that "salad days" dates back to Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra" (1606). There's a scene in which old Cleopatra says, "...My salad days, When I was green in judgment, cold in blood..."

The brilliance of W. Shakespeare is that he mixes the metaphors of being green (inexperienced) with the colors of a salad. And in modern use, the term also refers to people just starting out having to scrimp on food, so they just go with the salad bar. I'm picturing Shakespeare reaching in for some more lettuce and tomatoes and piling bacon bits and bleu cheese dressing on top.

Another fun part of being young and living on your own for the first time is coming up with rent money or salad money or gas money. I remember friends throwing "apartment parties" where we BYOBed and also brought our own Fritos and were offered stuff to buy by the rent-starved hosts: records albums, books, framed posters of Frank Zappa sitting on a toilet ("Phi Zappa Crappa").

And when we were really hard up for burger money, there was always the option of rooting through the sofa cushions for loose change.  Ha ha, you say?  Well, read on...

The Transportation Security Administration plans to use loose change left in trays at airports to partly fund the $232 million that its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, has requested to help pay for border operations if Congress doesn’t agree to its $1.1 billion funding request.

That's a real news story up there. Your federal government is so short on your tax money that they are going into the business of scooping up loose change from airport scanner trays to pay for their security operations. The story goes on to say that there are almost a two dozen agencies within the DHS, and they are all being asked to chip in to pay for border operations because, bleak as things are in this country, things in other countries are even worse, leading people to seek asylum here.

The TSA is just one of almost two dozen agencies under the DHS umbrella, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency, that could be forced to dole out millions of dollars from their budgets to pay for the ramped-up operations along the United States’ southern border.


“The Department is considering all options to address the humanitarian and security crisis at our southern border,” a DHS spokesperson said. “We will continue to work with our workforce to find dynamic solutions and funding to address this very serious problem.”

The things we can look forward to! DHS bake sales at airports! The Army having Used Tank Sales on abandoned corner lots across America! The long-rumored "email stamp" coming to life so it will cost you 55 cents to email a picture of Grumpy Cat to your feline-fancier friends!

A special Ben Carson cookie that, when purchased, comes with a free abandoned house!