Tuesday, July 5, 2016

Nanny, Nanny

  • At the checkout counter in the grocery store yesterday, the clerk told the customer in front of me that she could no longer sell the customer the bottle of wine in her cart because her child had touched it.  
    • "Really?  Why not?" 
    • "It's the law."
  • A list of business articles from LinkedIn found its way into my email inbox.  One had the headline "Natural Resource Management: The Great Public Land Heist Has Begun."  I was shocked to see an article that could possibly be warning people that the government was about to take more private property and so I clicked.  And of course the article wailed and gnashed its teeth about the exact opposite: that a proposal through congress would begin selling off "our" lands to private interests.  Cue the Woodie Guthrie.
  • Two of the younger Toadrollers are attending a Catholic youth conference this week.  A letter from the busybody diocesan organizer stated that all prescription medicines and medicine schedules would be turned in to a medical practitioner on check-in, to be disbursed at need.  Apparently, there was an issue last year with two kids sneaking off and smoking pot, so naturally confiscation of medical prescriptions was in order.
  • In polite conversation with a colleague I'd recently met, it came up that he lived near Cleveland.  
    • "Really?  Whereabouts?  I was born in Cleveland."  
    • "Oh, in Solon.  It has a really good school system.  That's the most important thing, isn't it?"
  • Independence Day is one helluva marketing campaign, isn't it?  I love the American Idea, but loathe propagandized nationalism.  Every country has its independence day these days.  It's the latest thing.