WHTM-TV (Channel 27) got around to doing a story about the billboards around town touting an upcoming gun show at the York Fairgrounds. The billboards depict a blond woman holding targets.
Gives new meaning to the phrase "gun rack."
Just saying.
A colleague said, "I guess guns aren't the only thing bitter small-town people are clinging to."
The marketing person says the ad targets a specific audience for gun shows. She doesn't add that they apparently are the socially and emotionally retarded.
My Monday column recounts the battle between Alene Meckley, a 76-year-old woman, and Intown Motors, which towed her car while she was paying her taxes last week.
Guess who won?
Post your own thoughts, impressions and car-towing stories here.
Today is National Columnists' Day in honor of Ernie Pyle, one of the greatest columnists in the history of American journalism. The day was set aside by the National Society of Newspaper Columnists to help remember Ernie and call attention to columnists. (Full disclosure: I am the current president of this organization. I'm still not sure how that happened.)
Anyway, to remember Ernie, read this , perhaps Ernie's masterpiece, called "The Death of Captain Waskow."
This has craptacular written all over it. Oliver Stone, who, I read somewhere, hasn't made a decent movie since the Zapruder film, is making a bio-pic about Dubya.
The script was leaked to ABC News. It's pretty amusing and, according to ABC, contains this passage:
"(Bush) interrupts a meeting with Prince Bandar, in which he informs the Saudi ambassador about plans to invade Iraq, so that he can catch the rest of the 2002 Miami Dolphins-Baltimore Ravens playoff game. Bush is later shown choking on a pretzel and passing out during the second quarter."
It doesn't get any better than that.
Click here to read the first four pages of the script. (It's a pdf file and Adobe Acrobat is required.) Click here to read the ABC story that summarizes the script.
Josh Brolin has been cast to plat Dubya. I think Stone should have gotten Will Ferrell. Seriously. Just watch this:
Case closed.
Here is a video of a speech by a delegate of the Virginia legislature, lamenting the fact that nobody was taking his proposal to ban truck nuts seriously. The real fun begins about a minute and a half into it.
Enjoy.
Lots of people have been asking, "So how's Ed Berry doing?"
Ed's doing all right.
If you'll recall, he was badly injured in a fight a couple of years ago and was temporarily paralyzed. He still has some lingering problems from that, but he's doing OK, generally.
Anyway, I talked to him for Friday's column and as usual, when you get to talking to Ed, there was some stuff that didn't make the column. Here it is.
We were talking about bar arguments and Ed told me about the time he was almost shot in the old King George Tavern. He was in there, after his shift at Cole Steel, watching some guys play pool, when another guy came through the front door and pointed a gun at Ed.
"Hey, Tom, where's my dope and my money?" the guy demanded.
Ed said he wasn't Tom and he didn't have the guy's dope or money.
The guy insisted and everyone in the bar starting saying that Ed wasn't Tom. The guy was getting confused and Ed thought he was going to buy it right there in the King George.
He survived a couple of tours in Vietnam -- on the ground with the 82nd Airborne -- only to die on North George Street.
"I thought that would be about the worst thing that could happen to me, to be shot my mistake," Ed said. "Had I been Tom and took his dope and money, I probably deserved to be shot. But I wasn't."
The guy approached Ed and looked closely at him.
"You're not Tom," he said.
And he left.
Ed's also a master of trivia. Here's one: Who built the biggest battleship during World War II?
"Everybody says the Bismark," Ed said. "But it wasn't. It was the Japanese, the Yamato."
And another one. Ed said this question took his friends four years to figure out.
Who was the voice of Mister Ed?
Of course, this was pre-Internet and there was no easy way to look it up. For four years, they guessed and nobody got it. For a while, they thought Ed didn't know himself. The show's credit only listed "Mister Ed: Himself."
Ed only knew it from reading a book about B Westerns.
Finally, after four years somebody got it.
It was Allan "Rocky" Lane.
Lane, it seems, was embarrassed to be playing a horse and he was upset that they used wires to move the horse's mouth -- he thought it was cruel. But he needed the money and agreed to do it only if his name didn't appear in the credits.
There you have it.
This passage, from the New York Times, about says it all:
"Question to our Keystone State readers: What is it with this Pennsylvania fetish for bizarre world food combinations? In Johnstown, this New Yorker encountered the artery-clogging prospect of cheese-fries. And here in this diner in a perfectly lovely corner of this Berks County we come upon the Marvel Mess, a sandwich combining eggs, potatoes, onions, cheese, green peppers and Shiva only knows what else. (And in Philadelphia, my college son Nick tells me they serve up a sandwich called the Roethlisberger, named after the Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback, which sound so utterly and purely disgusting in its bouillabaisse combination of mystery meats and cheeses and coarse spices, as to induce a stomach-throbbing ache just hearing of it)."
Answer for our New York friends, what are you talking about? Last I heard, it was possible to get cheese fries in New York.
I suppose Pennsyltucky is a like a foreign land to our brethren in New York. Hey, we even speak English. Well, sort of.
