"Honey, I told you to get Scotch tape."

"What did I get instead?"

"Two rolls of Irish tape."

"How can you tell?"

"They're all uselessly tangled up together, impossible to separate."

"DOH!"
 

- Another moment in time extracted from "Fun at Dan & Amy's"
 
 

     So I'm watching the CBS Evening News last night and it's just about over when Dan basically says, "Oh, by the way - in a cross between a Godzilla flick and Hitchcock's The Birds, 21,000 crows have launched a reign of terror in Tokyo."
     And lo, it was so.  
     There was footage.  
     There was reportage.  
     And it was bad - very bad.  Crows dropping down out of the sky onto the heads of wee innocent folk.  Crows stealing cloths hangers to build their nests with.  Crows that had completely lost their fear of Raised Fist Man!
     Where will the madness end??
 

     So I get my newspaper this morning (after a very restless night despite the fatigue induced by boarding up all my windows) and I'm reading along and I come to this:
     "Ohio State University has selected the first professor for the Wayne Hayes faculty post.  John Mueller will start in the fall as a professor of national security issues and dance."
     Excuse me??
     Wasn't Wayne Hayes a football coach?
     And was the Cuban Missile Crisis really nothing more than a conflict between worshipers of the Bolshoi Ballet and those addicted to The Twist and the Funky Chicken??
     The mind reels while the feet refuse to move, just like in all those dreams I have in which I'm trying to flee old NFL highlights films but the floor of my Health Class is covered with molasses....
 

     So I read further on in my paper in a frantic attempt to regain a sense of sane reality.
     HA!
     "Japanese and Western historians have said that in the aftermath of World War II, U.S. troops raped thousands of Okinawan women without reprisals.  The historians said that while hundreds of rape cases have been documented, most went unreported for fear of retaliation and shame."
     Tom Brokaw, please call your office.  The "Greatest Generation" has just peed all over your rose-colored windows....
 

     In desperation, I went to the Vatican's official site.  I needed help.  I was looking for a bit of infallible guidance.
     Thanks to the nifty little search engine they now have at their site, I found out instead that while the Vatican has denounced the use of contraceptives in Oceania, it apparently has never once denounced the Mafia in Italy, Sicily, or environs.
     WTF...?
 

     I have a friend.
     Oh, YES - I DO!
     His initials are D.R. and he lives in the South and he's been having a little problem wiring his doorbell.  
     Which is fine.  Which is cool.  Could happen to anybody, and I wish him the best of luck.
     But his telling his problems to me sparked flashbacks in my head of the time I tried wiring my own front door's knocker.
     NOT a good idea, as it turns out.
     And not just because it's against the law to electrocute trick-or-treaters old enough and tall enough to reach your knocker.  No no no!  The important thing to remember is this:  Sometimes I have to use that knocker myself when I accidentally forget to take my keys with me when I go out to pick up my morning newspaper from my front steps.
     And I really have to grip that sucker to knock it hard enough so that my wife can hear it all the way in Columbus when she's there, like she was this very morning.
     
     Thank goodness she managed to drive home and let me back into the house before word of my vulnerability reached those dastardly Tokyo crows!

     Now if I could only get this damn Irish tape out of my mind...