Happy Thursday. There are about 40 days left until college football season and less than four months until the November general election.
In the meantime, some random, rickety thoughts from your friendly neighborhood weekly newspaper hack editor.
• Yours truly, which is me, has a case of what an urgent care nurse on Monday called “nasty old COVID.”
I can attest I do not feel so hot, but am fortunate it is not worse and I have health insurance and access to Lysol. I would never make light of COVID. It isn’t funny.
I will note I am taking Paxlovid, a fairly new drug which may have some unforeseen side effects not listed on the paperwork that came with it, according to that paperwork.
To that end my wife, who also got COVID, is prepared to call my health care provider in alarm if my potato-shaped head changes overnight into a perfect cube or something like that. Say my belly button suddenly pops out like a turkey timer when the temperature’s right and goes “ping,” which I think it may already do when I’m not looking, so never mind that one.
However, and this is important, if I suddenly show up on your front doorstep wearing Crisco in my beard asking for directions to your very favorite favorite Dollar General, well, never mind my health care provider, call 911 and tell them to bring the stun guns.
• Random bullet point No. 1: In retrospect, I don’t want Paxlovid lawyers coming after me. That is unless Paxlovid turns me invisible and then let ‘em come try to find me. Hah. I’ll be invisible. The invisible editor! The man who could not be seen!
• But wait. What if Paxlovid turns me into a newt, like John Cleese on “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” only I don’t get better?
If I get turned into a newt and have to stay one I hope it isn’t Newt Gingrich. But I’d probably rather be turned into a newt than into something like an iguana. Those things give me the willies.
They’re also a sign of just how weird Florida has become. Apparently, there are so many iguanas infesting the state there are professional iguana exterminators paid to spend their days knocking the lizards off with air rifles and then chumming them up for fish bait. I saw that on an episode of Dirty Jobs with the great Mike Rowe.
I’m not sure, but I don’t think you’ve truly broadened your horizons until you’ve watched somebody chop up an iguana, put it in a sausage grinder and watch it come out the other side ground into a pink and green lump of burger that goes into a bucket and gets sold to people who, well, buy iguana chum.
• I also don’t think I want to be turned into a shrimp, especially not a “mouth watering” shrimp of the kind one gets at the Seafood Fest. Probably don’t have to worry about that. I’d probably be graded bait shrimp See you next week. Maybe.