Power Outage Gremlin

Yesterday I was working on the computer when the power went out. Luckily, it was still daylight and not very cold outside. I cursed the electric company under my breath as I always do, remembering an article in the local paper a few years ago about the inordinate amount of power outages this particular power company has every year. Well over 30,000 and, apparently, all but a dozen or so occur in my hometown. But then I got to thinking about the real cause of the power outages and my face flushed red with embarrassment.

Every time there's a power outage here that's long enough to knock out the VRC programs and the kitchen clock, what do I do? I spend the next couple days or so re-programing all the VCRs and the TVs that don’t have a built-in battery backup. And I reset all the electric clocks that don’t have battery backup or the ones where their backup systems simply don’t work. And both answering machines and two clock-radios and all the rest. And then what invariably happens after all the electric and electronic hardware in this house is reset and reprogrammed? We have another power failure.

So, the real reason for all the power outages in this town is not really because of the power company at all but because of me and all my crazy resetting and reprogramming and I’d simply forgotten that. I hope no one around here finds out that I’m the real reason the power goes out so regularly in this town and punches my lights out, or worse. But then, again, they’re probably too busy resetting and reprogramming to even think about that.

Just Say “No” to Slugs

I've often believed that people who search the Internet for free blogs to read while ignoring all other published material are often federal agents, aliens, terrorists and Illuminati spies, all of whom are looking for skeletons, weak spots, toe-holds and soup-starter for big boiling pots of legal gumbo.

But some blog readers are just lazy slugs who are also too cheap to pay for the really good stuff. They believe that being addicted to reading blogs is actually a disease and not a lifestyle choice and that makes me laugh.

The image shown here is a composite of all those kinds of blog readers. This particular figment of my paranoid imagination is a legal clerk for a crooked lawyer in Philadelphia. It’s his job to read blogs all day long and catch people saying really stupid things or revealing way too much about themselves in their blogs. Then he and his boss move in like vultures and sue the pants off bloggers they can’t easily blackmail.

If you see this guy snooping around your private affairs, just wave a book at him, any book, and he’ll go away and never bother you again.