November 8

Hey – if you have any moisture in your part of the world, would you send a little down here to the desert. Holy COW, but it’s dry here. “How dry is it?” you ask ala Johnny Carson. It’s so dry that we think we might be slowly morphing into lizards. This is not an attractive proposition. It’s also very itchy. All this scratching is troublesome. People look at you weird and we have enough trouble with that as it is.

We’ve started telling people it’s fleas. It may make them lose respect for us, but it also frees up a lot of personal space. Here’s some funny stuff from this week.

1. Missing sheep. If you remember last week we brought up random meadows being mowed in Austria. Now there’s sheep rustling in Wool, England. Yes. The place where sheep are being stolen is named Wool. There aren’t that many times in this world were everything comes together with such symmetry, you know? This makes us very happy and comfortable, knowing that wool comes from Wool. We also suspect that the inhabitants of Wool are itchy, too. Look – we got off topic. Someone carted off 160 sheep from Wool. The people of Wool and it’s surroundings are asked to notify authorities if anyone offers them wool “for very low prices.” We think they should extend the APB to include a truck full of Austrian Grass following around a big truck that smells of sheep.

2. More politicians behaving badly. The mayor of Toronto was caught on video smoking crack. He refuses to resign stating, “I love my job.” He finally admitted the incident occurred “probably a year ago” when he was in a “drunken stupor.” Can you believe he thinks that excuse is the Get Out of Jail Free card? We’re keeping a very close eye on this story because if that excuse works we’re going to start using it all the time. Think of the possibilities. “I may have forgotten my children at the grocery store, but I was in a drunken stupor at the time.” or “I didn’t pay the electric bill, but I was in a drunken stupor.” This is going to really work out.

3. Dona Esperanza. All of us at Bank of No Forks have become addicted to the tortillas at Dona Esperanza’s. They are possibly the best thing we’ve had in our mouths in a really long time. Buttery and thin and glorious. One of us will head over to the factory and come back with dozens of them. At least two packages will be gone by the end of the day. They are the best $2.25 we’ve ever spent. The smell is heavenly and we’ll gorge ourselves on them until we’re holding our stomachs, feeling sorry for ourselves. We’ve started rationing them out – we’ve eaten six of them just writing this blog. We’re not sure if there is a real Dona Esperanza. We feel sure that if we did meet her, we’d squeeze her very hard and never let her go.

4. More members of our tribe. We’re involved in a book festival coming soon. (More news to follow). We received an email from the committee with instructions for set up and take down that convinced us these ladies were more of our people. Like this line for example: “Please do not attempt to shove anything larger than a toy teacup Chihuahua underneath your table…” We like the specific mention of “TOY” dog. It’s like they knew we’d try to smuggle a real teacup Chihuahua into the event. Now, if there’s a couple of things you should have learned about the Sisters by now they are that we dislike being told no almost as much as we love fuzzy creatures. Now, we’re bound and determined to find ourselves a teacup Chihuahua before the 17th – which we’ll try to shove under the table, just to see what happens.

5. More weird stuff missing. We don’t know what’s going on out there, but now there seems to be 140,000 pounds of walnuts missing from Escalon, California. Last month someone took 12,000 pounds of nuts. The same people? What’s up with that? Who the hell needs 162,000 pounds of walnuts? Who? Maybe someone should check with the fudge makers in the area. The Sisters like walnuts but not that much. You hear that FBI/NSA? We like ’em but not that much. The Sisters didn’t take ’em. And the sheep want you to know that they didn’t either.