False!

There’s a rumor afloat that if you run into trouble at the ATM machine, you can summon police by entering your pin backward. False! According to Snopes (where I found out that Mikey didn’t die from Pop Rocks. He was murdered by an escaped lunatic with a hook for a hand) there is no truth to this urban myth at all. To make sure, I tried entering my PIN in reverse and wouldn’t you know it? “Stairway to Heaven” began to play.

Daylight craving

Tuesday, Aug. 14, 7:20 p.m. That’s when I first noticed that daylight isn’t lingering so long anymore. The sun way down near the horizon. Cars and trucks with their headlights turned on. Heading into dusk and not even 7:30. You know what happens next. Frigid mornings with dew on the grass. Leaves starting to lose their green grandeur and showing instead the colors of dying. School buses rolling through your neighborhood, long yellow avatars of summer’s end. Once the light starts to crawl away from the day, bad times move in quick. I’m not reminding you of all this simply to depress you. I only tell you because I . . . No, wait. It IS to depress you. I’ve got a mean streak in me as long as a beach towel. Which you won’t be needing much longer, now that I think of it.

I was a horrible, selfish child

How about those kids selling lemonade and using their profits to help a stricken teenager? It makes me think of my own entrepreneurial efforts as a lad. I too sold lemonade for part of one afternoon. I also painted rocks and tried to sell them as art. I sold Grit magazine (proper pronunciation: GREE-yit) and ran my own neighborhood detective agency. Fifty cents per investigation; no case too small. I made a little cash and do you know what I did with it? I bought Stretch Armstrong. When the fun of that stupid toy wore off after about 10 minutes, I used my leftover loot to buy firecrackers and transformed Armstrong into about a thousand pieces of charred, stretchy debris. Good times. Simple times.

Beach closed

In Auburn, that is. They say it’s some kind of bacteria in the water, but we all know what’s going on here. Shark! Carcharodon carcharias! If I were you, I wouldn’t even drive the municipal beach until three drunken men in a boat are able to bring this crisis to an end.

I apologize for the hysteria. It’s Shark Week on the Discovery Channel.

Balloon fest

Please don’t forget to send me your collection of 1,000 photos of hot air balloons rising serenely beyond a church steeple. I just can’t get enough of those.

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