What a country. Manufacture any kind of dopey cause, set up a Web Site and voila! You have a “grassroots movement.”
Case in Point: Some guy named J.A. Tosti from Camas, Wash., sent me a press release saying he’s the spokesman for an “organization”:http://www.leftlanedrivers.org to get slow drivers out of the left lanes of America’s highways. These souls are everywhere. I saw one today on the Bronx River Parkway, a little old man who could barely see over the steering wheel and was going about 50 mph. That was the speed limit, but as we all know, the marketplace of Type A drivers sets the real limit of about, oh 65 mph or so…that is until the cops catch you.
Tosti wants that old guy and his selfish ilk to stay in the slow lane where they belong.
“As traffic gets increasingly congested, it’s time for citizens to reclaim the left lane,” he says. “More and more these days, you find slow drivers in the left lane, causing no end of headache and frustration to those of us who have places to go and people to see. Some of these offenders are timid and tenative, some are completely oblivious to what’s going on around them…” Blah, blah, blah.
Tosti urges people to get a “Move Over” decal to put on their cars.
For a second, I thought this was a joke. I mean, here’s Tosti who is in a big hurry, but he has a lot of time on his hands to advance a ridiculous cause. Ah, but wait. I get it, now.
He’s actually selling those decals for 29 bucks! Good luck.

There’s an old myth about Sing Sing Prison that the lights in Ossining always dimmed whenever they turned the juice on for the electric chair. Myths die hard and that old chestnut still persists.
But here’s fodder for a new one. It’s Paris Hilton’s vow that she will now accept her well-deserved incarceration and devote her time in the can to “learning and growing.” Paris has decided to think in other words. The very idea of the 26-year-old bimbo attempting to squeeze a coherent thought from her pea-sized brain should certainly cause a major west coast power outage.
What’s next? Will she read a book without pictures, too? Or perhaps she will attempt to write a manifesto like Hitler and Castro did when they spent time in the slammer. This could be a very bad thing. Come to think of it, maybe society would be safer in the long run if Paris was released from jail, after all.
Instead, she should be required to perform community service like helping O.J. find the “real killer.”

I’m taking this week off to swim, run and read, which means this blog will go on a brief hiatus. If I get the urge, I may post a thing or two…but I’m not planning on it.
Or I might let my dog Amy substitute for me. She likes to converse in Internet chatrooms and, truth be told, most of the incomprehensible rants anonymously posted on the Lohud forums are really from her. My dog has a lot of time on her paws so it’s no sweat. Besides, she can type fairly well for a dog…better than me, actually.
Incredible. She won’t fetch my slippers or come when her name is called, but without hesiitation she can throw off an angry Internet riff on just about any topic—yippy-yappy toy poodles, people who walk funny, supercillious cats, rabies shots, mailmen, tics and fleas, the Discovery Channel and loud motorcycles, not to mention global warming and NAFTA.
Well, we’ll see. The bitch can do what she pleases.
All I know is that I won’t be around. It’s near summer, my time of year. And this will not be the last week I take before the season is over.
Ciao for now.

Ah, kids. Whaddya gonna do with them?
A note went out to Valhalla school parents this week, notifying them that a 10th grader “may have” spiked a school cafeteria ketchup dispenser with urine. Nice. Now you can add another ingredient to Heinz 57.

Diane Ramos-Kelly, superintendent of schools, said in the note that the condiment tampering happened Tuesday at the end of the first lunch period for the high school students. The incident is under investigation, she said,.
In the meantime, all dispensers were removed and replaced with ketchup packets.
Ramos-Kelly said that it was not know whether any student actually consumed any of the tainted sauce but officials from the Board of Health advised that “urine is a sterile fluid and one would not expect adverse health reactions.”
The reminds me of a cafeteria story from my freshman year in college. This idiot took a dare that for money he would drink an entire concoction of gunk made up of dinner scraps, table seasonings and other barely edible things we could stuff in a tall glass. The liquid ingredients included carbonated Sprite, milk, gravy, salad dressing and coffee. Then came the leftovers of potato skins, meat chunks, lima beans, etc. Salt and pepper shakers were emptied into the emulsion, too.
I forget how much money was put on the table, but the kid drank the whole thing and promptly threw up.
No doubt if urine had been added, he still would’ve downed the heinous mix. I remember he also bit off a chunk of the glass. Needless to say, he wasn’t a honors student. Few legends are.