Pod People

Every day I drive to my train station for the 90 minute journey to my home. I drive past the backside of Disney's California Adventure and as backside's go, this one is quite nice. It's also fun to say that I drive past Disneyland every day.

Ahhh, California.

Yesterday, a bumpersticker struck me as odd, and it took me some time to figure out why.

The slogan read: Is that how they drive on your planet?

I finally figured out why it bothered me. Since the question is being posed to me, and presumably to all my fellow drivers around me, and since I know that my planet is this lovely marble called Earth, that can only mean that the drivers of said vehicle were aliens!

Illegal aliens!!

While George W. Bush was gallavanting about on his food-tasting mission through Mexico and South American, the problem of illegal aliens still plague us. They're so invasive that they flaunt their status in our faces, and lord over our driving skills from their high horses . . . err, pickup trucks. Just because they've mastered inter-stellar travel doesn't make them any better at lane changes and parallel parking.

And what about anal probing?

Sure, I'm all for advancing science, but how many sphincters must you review before you've seen all there is to see? How many cows must you turn inside out before you've established that neither the humans nor the cows find this humerous anymore? How many crop circles must you create before Mel Gibson gets another drunk-driving ticket?

In short, I'm against illegal aliens. Earth for Earth-men . . . and women.

Making Diamonds

It's been suggested that I am somewhat anal.

Not that I'm gay.

Nor that there's anything wrong with being gay.

I'm just not gay.

But I digress. The point here is that unlike most mortals of the male persuasion (gay or not) I tend to like everything to have a place, and all places to have their thing. I also like them reasonably well dusted and somewhat backlit to show them off at their best angle to the casual observer.

Sunday, Lil, Justice and I sat down to play a new game we'd picked up called Munchkin. Lil's sister, Isabella, brought it with her on a visit a few years back and we quite liked it. One of the aspects of the game requires for markers or counters of some kind that aren't included with the game (cheep bastards). Fortunately, this is hardly a problem for us, since I maintain a couple of bookends that were in a past life Paul Mason wine carafes. I used spare change from my pockets to fill these carafes, in one I put my silver coins and in the other the copper pennies. The finished product looks, at least to me, quite nice.

So, to play Munchkin, I grabbed my penny bookend, and poured out enough for each of us to have the requisite ten markers. I set the carafe down, then glanced at it, and something caught my eye.

There were two silver coins in with the the pennies.

I almost poured out the entire contents to remove the offending denominations. Almost.

Then I realized that was a bit too anal and tried to play off my momentary panic as a stretch. Lil apparently has wisdom beyond her years.

"I probably put them in there," she soothed. "Sorry."

"No, no," I replied. "It's ok. It's not a big deal, and it was probably my fault."

Seriously, we were discussing whose "fault" it was that two or three silver coins got into the penny carafe.

I think I need help. Some kind of twelve-step program that involves heavy doses of gin. If you find that retreat, kindly send it my way.