A recent bill for garbage, water, sewer and recycling services contained an insert entitled “Your Utilities. Your Partner. City of Sacramento.”
This irks me on a number of levels. None are especially deep, you’ll be relieved and probably not surprised to learn. But still.
Had he been able to call the shots a few weeks ago, I suspect that Howard J. Rubenstein would have sent out a news release that said he was going on “an extended, indefinite sabbatical” instead of admitting he died. Yet he did that very thing, at the age of 88.
Many years, homes, pounds and non-elective surgical procedures ago, I overheard two four-year-old boys arguing in the driveway I shared with my neighbor.
One called the other a “poo-poo-head,” which was unimaginative but had a ring of clarity. The other hesitated, probably looked around and then said, “Oh yeah? Well you’re a piece of…of SIDEWALK!” This made the other explode in tears¬—and I imagine later kept him from pursuing a degree in civil engineering.
While it’s very late in the game to tell everyone that a member of my consulting team at The Goldman State HQ discovered the key to mind-controlling Donald Trump, I have to share this with you.
Had he lived a blessedly long life, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., would have celebrated his 92nd birthday—not today, which is the annual holiday in his honor, but three days ago, on the actual date the spiritual father of Black Lives Matter came into the world.
To keep you momentarily distracted from yesterday’s many elections—and from the fear that if Trump loses and deigns to make a concession speech it’ll include his revealing the nuclear codes—I thought I’d discuss an issue of monumental importance if you happen to think soda is a monumentally important issue.
Please pardon today’s detour from The Golden State and join me for a cyber junket to my birthplace, whose nickname is The Empire State. And while I usually dispatch these columns from my home in Sacramento, The Big Tomato, today we’re going to zoom in on New York City, The Big Apple.
As the election nears—it’s only four weeks and two days away, in case you hadn’t heard; also, Christmas Eve comes out on December 24th this year—I’ve gotten a kick out of reading the testimonials on behalf of, and tirades against the survival of, the U.S. Post Office.
When I was four, I learned there was no Santa Claus. The Easter Bunny told me. (This is one of my favorite Dad Jokes). Not long thereafter, when I was about five or six, my mom let me know that everyone dies, sooner or later—she was getting ready to attend a funeral for Sid Kass, a boy a few years my senior who’d been killed in a freak accident at school.
I’ve decided that 24/7 newscasts on cable TV aren’t much different from the following assessment of Major League Baseball: “There are only 18 minutes of total action in an average baseball game,” according to a Snapple bottle cap, a usually reliable source.
The comment could have gone on to say that those 18 minutes of action get crammed into more than three hours—but how much verbiage can one squeeze into the average bottle cap, which has a diameter of only 1.17 inches? (And in case you’re wondering, the cap’s info came from PolitiFact, an actually reliable source.)
