Do They Make One With a Rotary Dial?

Maybe I’m nuts...but…I just don’t get the unbridled excitement over the release of the newest cell phone which seems to occur every 3 months or so. “Tech Junkies” actually start to vibrate at the mere MENTION of an updated device.

The last time I went to the cell phone store had NOTHING to do with a “new and improved” model. I HAD to get a new phone because the battery on my OLD phone wouldn’t charge anymore and those far sighted nerds who MAKE such things as batteries had decided NOT to.

The 12 year old salesgirl (She may have been older than that but as I KNOW I’m not getting older, the only other option is that tech salespeople are getting younger) came at me as though I had “dead battery that’s no longer in production” written all over my face. She asked what phone I was currently using. I told her I wasn’t currently using ANY cell phone and explained why. I handed her my 18 month old antique and the little snot (with great disdain) informed me that it was obsolete.

Didn’t she have something better to do with her time (like selling cookies) than being annoying to ME?

   Maybe I'm nuts...but...After seeing this clip of Barak Obama, describing how his father (who would have been 5 years old at the time) served in WWII, I felt obliged to share with you a brief summary of my rather mundane story.

   Ahhh…I remember well the year of my birth, 1960, as I was 13 at the time. It seems like yesterday.

   Little did I know (5 years later) when I voted for Nixon what would transpire in the world of politics just a few years earlier. It didn’t seem that long ago that I was on the front lines in Korea wondering why I had ever voted for Taft in the first place. Nixon (of course) was forced to resign over an affair that was caught on tape in a hotel. We would have known nothing of it were it not for Julian Assange.

   I recall to this day how my father, a WWI veteran, watched as HIS father (who went down on the Titanic) ventured off to Vietnam to fight the Germans in WWII. It made ME wonder if I would someday have to take up arms and fight in the war of 1812. Thankfully, President Kennedy put a stop to that before he was shot and killed by John Wilkes Booth.

Fireworks Schmireworks

   Maybe I’m nuts but…I’m a bit concerned about this whole birds-dropping-out-of-the-sky phenomenon we’ve been hearing about lately. Not that it’s keeping me awake at night but…it IS keeping me from napping during the day.

   It all started on New Year’s Eve, 2010, in Arkansas. That’s when more than 3000 red winged blackbirds just…fell from the sky pelting down upon cars, roads, rooftops and anything which may have been handy like feathered beanbags on the town of  Bebee. But…WHY?

   Government officials (I refer to these officials as government because all officials seem to be somehow connected to government) said it could have been high altitude hail…or…lightning…but it was most probably…fireworks. REALLY? Not that they were hit by flak but that fireworks just…scared them to death. I have several problems with this theory not the least of which would be…why don’t we see red winged blackbirds doing the dirt-dive on the 4^th of July? Or…why JUST red winged blackbirds? Do they have such a fragile constitution that the report of your average bottle rocket is enough to cause mass apoplexy? And, weren’t “government” officials involved in trying to convince the general (not a military general…just a general…general) public that it was a weather balloon that caused a UFO to dirt-dive in Roswell?

   Maybe I’m Nuts but..I think our court system could use a little tweaking…especially when it comes to picking juries. It seems to me that the process for picking 12 people to listen to and decide upon the merits of a case has gotten a little lax over the last several years.

   As one who has been tapped for but never actually had to report to jury duty, I can’t help but wonder about the process. The accused has the right to a trial by a jury of his or her peers…right? So…how do they decide what constitutes a pier? I can tell you this much…if Hannibal Lecter had peers I certainly wouldn’t want 12 of them in one room!

   In Boston, some cat named Sal Esposito recently got called for jury duty. Sal Esposito is an actual cat (You thought I was just being hip) and his owner tried to convince the court that Sal was ineligible to serve…to no avail. Cats make lousy jurors, I think, because they spend a lot of time sleeping during the presentation of evidence and (Though it’s generally frowned upon) they always want to sit in the attorney’s brief cases. If I were a judge, I’d probably cite a juror like Sal with contempt for harfing up a hairball during closing arguments.