The great storm bluff

What’s with all the thunderstorm fake-outs lately, anyway? It drives me mad. The skies grow dark with fat, black clouds. A cool wind begins to stir, riling the trees, making trash dance across the streets and promising that the world is about to be introduced to the great destructive force of nature. Thunder rumbles far away. A few raindrops fall on our hot, sun-baked flesh. Men and women young and old scurry for cover, mumbling about how a storm is coming and boy, it’s going to be a big one. And then . . . Oh, and then . . . Nothing. Nothing at all. The black clouds roll away and the deep blue resumes its place in the sky. The wind quiets, the rain stops and the heat pours back in like molten gold into a cauldron. Storm? What storm? Around here, the weather is all hat, no cattle. All sizzle, no steak. All fingers, no fist. This was nothing but another big, fat storm bluff, and by gum, I’m tired of being disappointed. I intend to write a sternly worded letter about all this fakery. I’ve just got to figure out to whom I should send it. Peter Geiger over at Geiger, maybe. His Farmers’ Almanac surely has something to do with this.

Why is it always elephants?

An alert reader reports that while she was having dinner at a restaurant on lower Lisbon Street over the weekend, she spotted a shirtless dude carrying a big stuffed elephant along the sidewalk, clutching it like a protective papa. Now, this lady’s information is almost always good, but I have it on good authority that the particular restaurant she was eating at makes a very fine Long Island Iced Tea and, well . . . I’m thinking it might be intervention time.

That’ll learn me

A local man is so tired of me going on and on about the beauty of summer that he fired off a beautifully written seven-page letter about why winter — and Christmas in particular — is better than hot summer days any ol’ time. Winter better than summer? Clearly the fellow has been at the Long Island Iced Tea as well. OK, then. Intervention for two.

Half baked

Boy, I sure missed the police beat while I was away on vacation. (I was away on vacation, you know.) Come the work week, I switched on the police scanner and there they were: all the boinks, beeps and squawks of the fire calls, police BOLOs and LifeFlight runs. Minutia, just about all of it. A fender-bender here, burned food there, and some fool having a barbecue on his porch a little farther downtown. While I was in St. Agatha (I went there on vacation, you know) there was no squawking scanner, there was just the sound of wind, birds and the sweet, sweet song of the potato. That’s right, the potatoes sang to me while I was there. And just like that, I just talked myself into a place at the intervention table.

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