Talk: May 22, 2022
Talk of the Town: A Tough Week for Pants by Mark LaFlamme
High jump record set at The Colisee
All I wanted to do was to storm the CMCC graduation at The Colisee in Lewiston, grab a few comments from the folks in long gowns and goofy hats and get out of there. And it would have gone that way, too, if some @$#@#! cop hadn’t parked a cruiser containing a humongous police dog inside right near the doors. The first time I walked by the car, the conniving dawg waited until I was right on top of it before unleashing a ferocious series of deafening barks, causing me to jump three feet and to screech like a scalded cat. Had to go home and change my pantaloons. The moment I got back, I went strutting by that cruiser again, the dog unloaded once more, and the whole scene repeated itself before the tittering graduates. I went through a lot of pantaloons that day. Most embarrassing of all is the fact that I’ve been doing this job for nearly three $#!#@! decades and I STILL forget that police cruisers sometimes have ferocious beasts inside them.
16 percenter
So, the Sun Journal, in one incarnation or another, has been around for 175 years. I’ve been working here going on 28 years, which means I’ve been on the job for 16 percent of the newspaper’s existence. What’s it mean? Nothing much. It just took me about three days and all of my fingers and toes to put that math together so I wanted to do SOMETHING with it.
I’m not wearing pants today
So, with all the hoopla over the potential Twitter sale, it’s been revealed that the majority of “people” you interact with on social media may actually be highly advanced bots. This is disturbing to me in a Philip K. Dick kind of way. I mean, how do I know for sure that I’M not a bot? And if I AM a bot, do I still need to get out of bed every day, brush my teeth, pay taxes, return phone calls, put on pants . . . Jeepers, now that I give it some thought, this bot thing might be liberating. Don’t come howling to me if I write something you don’t like, nags. It wasn’t me, it was a glitch in my software.
Laying it on the line
Last week we talked about those weird white traffic poles drunk people are putting up around the city for reasons not clear to those of us with smoother brains. This week I discovered that the painted crosswalk lines that accompany those poles are really, really slippery. If you’re on a motorcycle and have to put your foot down, take care that you don’t put it down on the paint because next thing you know, that foot is going to be two blocks away. Maybe they put up the poles so motorcyclists can catch themselves on the way down. Appreciate it, drunk people.
