Getting In on the Bully Market

You may have missed this juicy little tidbit due to the incessant news coverage on what the Tsarnaev brothers’ aunt’s cousin’s wife’s step-daughter’s librarian’s nephew has to say, but the legislature here in Minnesota has been quietly introducing a bill that has people here realizing just how silly the word ‘tidbit’ really is.   The bill is about banning bullying in school and while I am not a fan of bullies mainly because I don’t have any rotating blades, a cursory perusal proves that this bill is almost as silly as the word ‘tidbit,’ but not quite.

Back in my day bullying was a simple form of economic exchange: I would hand over my lunch money and in return, said individual would refrain from lifting my whities over my head. Continue reading →

A Citizen and His Money Are Soon Parted

Ah, spring—the time of year known for its unbounded desire: desire for beauty, desire for romance, and desire for the IRS to insert their schedule B firmly into their line 43a.  Yep.  Tax time.  And unless you are clever enough to file for your automatic extension, you have just spent the last several weeks collecting receipts, scouring instructions, removing your hair in large clumps, and asking yourself age-old, soul-searching questions like, “If a tax man and a politician were both drowning and I could only save one, would I go get some coffee or check Facebook?”

Personally, I don’t mind this time of year so much because it reminds me that I am solidly entrenched in the middle class in that I am in the upper half of the population that actually pays taxes yet not so rich that I have to feel guilty about avoiding them entirely.  Yea for me. Continue reading →

Suspended Over a Pop-Tart? One Cannoli Hope

What with my big family vacation and then coming home to take down all my Cesar Chavez Easter decorations—not to mention getting geared up for National Grilled Cheese Sandwich Month this month—I totally missed the story out of Maryland a while back in which a 7-year old boy was suspended from school after eating his Pop-Tart into a shape kind of maybe resembling a sort of handgun and then, in a fit of imagination imitating media inundation, going “bang bang.”

Supposedly, the second-grader’s intent was to shape the pastry into a mountain; kind of a three-dimensional monochrome post-impressionist landscape piece.  But a slight, rather amateurish design miscalculation resulted in the boy mistakenly creating a fearsome profile resembling a treacherous terroristic armament capable of dropping sprinkles all over the cafeteria floor at up to 9.8 meters per second per second. Continue reading →

Sprig Thyme in Pairs (Thank you, Autocorrect)

It’s been a long-standing tradition in our family going back almost two weeks now that the member who happens to be a senior in high-school gets to choose the destination for her final family vacation before she has to face reality.  Being an art spaz and a student of spending as much of her parent’s money as possible, Thing 1 chose spring break in Paris, which we accomplished last week and which I will now attempt to summarize in 800 summative words or less.

Other than single-handedly upholding the local crêpe-stand industry, our time in The City of Lights was spent rushing in and out of the more irritatingly crowded Parisian tourist traps in just five days, including Continue reading →

Holy Week, Batman! It’s Easter!

Hello and here we are in the midst of the most holy week of the Christian calendar, not to be confused with the Christian colander which is also holey but for an entirely different reason.  Holy week is the time of year when believers in the resurrection of Christ become especially reverent and often take time  to personally and  solemnly reflect on why TV commercials can say ‘Easter’ but can’t say ‘Christmas.’

It’s also the time of year when people who normally wouldn’t go to church if their soul depended on it suddenly find themselves going two or three times in a span of a few days “just in case” or to maybe give their busted bracket a supernatural boost. Continue reading →