Snow swagger

That’s a manner of locomotion employed by the many, many, many people who take to walking in the middle of downtown Lewiston streets once the snow banks get high. They don’t just walk in the roadway, they occupy it, and practically dare a harried motorist to say something about it. I swear some of these guys wait all year long for winter’s really big storms so that they can swagger right down the middle of Walnut Street while traffic piles up behind them.

A storm of savings

So, for the past few years, we’ve been naming every winter storm that comes our way as if that’s the most normal thing in the world. Why, just last week we all got to know Winter Storm Fortis pretty well, didn’t we? I wish that guy would come back because there are a few things I’d like to say to him. If you get my drift. But Fortis aside, I think that this new trend is quietly leading us to the point where one greedy group or another begins selling the naming rights to every new storm to come down the pike. In the near future, we may find ourselves shoveling out after Winter Storm Kmart, for instance, or Blizzard Berta’s Live Bait and Catering. Think that could never happen? The baseball stadium formerly known as Comiskey Park would tend to disagree with you.

Mariah Carey

The poor woman. Hacked by the Russians on New Year’s Eve. The singer is known for hitting some pretty high notes, but even if she sat on a thumb tack, I don’t believe she could ever achieve the level of screeching that followed her aborted performance in Times Square. To hear the reaction, you’d think Mariah had walked onto the stage and body slammed a kitten.

Funny papers

In our New Year’s Day paper, the fuzzy characters of Slylock Fox asked readers to identify two of five cartoon images that matched one another. As it turns out, none of them did. There were differences in each image, a fact which drove a handful of readers back to the bottles they had sworn off just a few hours earlier.

Monday, Monday

So, Christmas falls on a Sunday so the world takes Monday as a holiday. A week later, it’s the same thing, with Jan. 2 treated as a holiday because the first fell on a Sunday. Somebody tell me, has this always been a thing? Because to the best of my recollection, when a major holiday happened to fall on a Sunday, when Monday came around, we went back to work and groused about how we’d been screwed out of a day off.

Ghost

So, I’ve had a long string of people not returning my calls lately and it occurred to me – suddenly, at 3 in the morning – that perhaps no one is calling me back because I’m actually dead and just don’t know it yet. Tell me, is there some kind of test one can perform to prove that he is, in fact, still alive? You better respond quickly because if it turns out I AM a ghost, you’re going to get haunted sooooo bad.

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