POPCORN

BY JIM SZANTOR 

Rhetorical questions, questionable rhetoric and whimsical observations about the absurdities of contemporary life:

• I'm strongly against the death penalty--with one exception: Defaulters on student loans.
• We've just had a remarkable run of balmy October weather in Northeast Wisconsin, our glorious Indian Summer.  (Oops; I mean our glorious Native-American Summer.)
• Consumer Imponderable No. 538: Toothbrushes keep getting bigger and bigger . . . and plastic toothbrush travel holders keep staying the same size!  Who will be the first to act on this discrepancy?
• Why is the badger the Wisconsin state animal?  No one I know has ever seen one; 90-year-old hunters and game wardens have never seen one. These beasts could be extinct for all we know! (Wisconsin--the Extinct Animal State.)
• Why do we  keep naming sports team after the same animals--lions, tigers, rattlers, eagles, bears . . . .? Show me a team that calls itself the Rhesus Monkeys, and theyve got themselves a season ticketholder for life!
• The military can’t find Osama bin Laden, nor can the CIA or anybody else.  Well, enough--it’s time to send in the psychics. You know, those fat housewives from New Jersey who are always being quoted in the supermarket tabloids, the ones who claim to have predicted JFK’s assassination, even though it happened when they were about 2 years old.  Give them a shot.  What have we got to lose?
• Crazy idea?  Well, as they say in those corny old movies (usually with chin being stroked), “It’s just so crazy, it just . . . might . . . work.”)
• Redundancy patrol:  "VIN number," "free of charge," "added bonus."
• Door County Crime of the Week (tie):  A guy from Troisdorf, Germany, fined $200.50 for "possessing firewood on Dept. of Natural Resources land that originated from more than 25 miles away"; and a woman from Waukegan, Ill., fined $162.70 for "too many people on campsite."
• Most ridiculous baseball sight of the year (again!):  Players getting pummeled with high fives in the dugout after hitting an RBI grounder in a one-sided game.  You'd think they'd just hit the Shot Heard 'Round the World to win all the marbles.
• First move I'd make if I were NFL commissioner:  Any touchdown would be automatically nullified if the player scoring it didn't hand the ball to the referee (instead of "spiking" it and dancing around like a deranged buffoon with itching powder in his pants).  Better yet:  Add 6 points to the other team's total!
• "Football combines the worst features of American life--frantic violence punctuated by committee meetings."--Syndicated columnist George Will.
• Back to baseball:  A faithful reader from south of the Mason-Dixon Line suggests "Maybe ESPN has a dress code" in response to my item about the three bozos broadcasting a baseball game in three-piece suits.  A good point--up to a point.  But if there is a code (a) not every ESPNcaster is following it (see Sutcliffe, Rick . . . among others) and (b) it is the network that should then lighten up, the whole point being the incongruity of it all, regardless of who made the wardrobe decision.  Doing baseball in three-piece suits is like going to a beach party in a tuxedo.  When in Rome . . . .
• Zadra's Law of Biomechanics:  The severity of the itch is inversely proportional to the location.
• Overheard: "The IQ of a woman is inversely proportional to the amount of jewelry she wears.  The IQ of a man is inversely proportional to the wattage of his auto stereo system."
• Bumper sticker for a hyrid:  "0 to 60 in 5 miles."
• The six phases of an actor's career:  Teen idol, leading man, supporting roles, character parts, obscurity, infomercials.
• Did you know that the Coke bottle, that most American of symbols, was designed by a Swede who was new to these shores?
• Political blather commonly heard:  "Obama is not American enough!"  (Translation:  "Obama is not white enough.")  Well, racism aside, given how the last "real American" messed things up, maybe the more "foreign" the leader, the better!
• My suggestion on decreasing hate crimes:  No more protective custody!  Would a white supremacist skinhead attack a black man if he knew that he'd be thrown into a general population cellbock with 300 of "them"?
• If you've seen one nuclear war, you've seen them all."--College dorm graffito.
• "I'm sorry my karma ran over your dogma."--Pizza parlor graffito, Berkeley, Cal.
• Ninth entry in the Wisconsin Town I Didn't Know Existed Until I Saw It Mentioned in an Obituary sweepstakes: Angelica, Wis. (r.i.p. Debra J. "Debbs" Fischer, Green Bay Press-Gazette, Sept. 21, 2010). Previous entries: Athelstane, Walhain, Duck Creek, Breed, Anston, Sobieski, Amberg and Osseo.
• Book Title of the Week: "The Idiot's Guide to the Mafia"  (444 pages!)
• Today's Latin lesson:  Operor illa pardus planto meus tergum terminus vultus pinguis?  ("Do these pants make my rear end look fat?")