August 9

Today winds down the Mardi Gras celebration of Amylynn’s birthday. We’ll go out with a bang. We’re going out to dinner with our long-suffering husbands to a very nice restaurant sans children. Amylynn has already made it clear that there had better not be anyone kicking anyone else under the table during dinner because she’s had quite enough of that, thank you very much. And the children wonder why we don’t like to go to dinner with them.

1. Non-John. The Boy-Who-Lives-at-Ava’s-House came up with the brilliant nickname Non-John for the interim host of The Daily Show. When Jon Stewert took a leave of absence, we’ll be honest, we panicked a little. We have serious crushes on Mr. Stewert. He’s the only crush we have at this time who isn’t extraordinarily white-trash. We love our intellectuals – especially when they’re witty. Then along came John Oliver to hold down the fort. Amylynn adored him from the get-go, but Ava had to warm up to him. We have come to the agreement that he’s hit his stride. He’s damn funny. And English. If we love funny then we REALLY love funny Brits.

2. New Careers. We’re always looking for a way out of Bank of No Forks. We saw an article in the Picayune where the city has come up with $40,000 to hire an outside contractor to collect abandoned shopping carts and then hold them ransom for a fine payable by the retail owner of said cart. First, let us just say that we’d rather they use that $40,000 to fill some Volkswagen sized potholes in our city streets. We don’t care if they just withdraw 40,000 one-dollar bills from our bank and shove them in one of the holes. Whatever it takes, ya know? Anyway, we thought we’d be excellent Cart Pirates. We’d use cut out magazines and newspapers to send ransom notes and everything. Hey City Council are you listening?

3. Manolo Blahnik. It’s no secret that we love shoes as much as cake. We’d love to open a cake/shoe/book store. We’d call it All The Good Stuff. We’d definitely sell Manolo’s. There’s an adorable quickie interview with him in Vanity Fair this month. Apparently he lives in adjoining Georgian houses in England that’s full of shoes to the tune of 25,000 to 30,000. He’s lost count. He calls it a shoe mausoleum. Sounds like heaven to us. We wonder, if we show up with cake, would he take us for a tour?

4. Super criminals. This was the headline that caught our attention, Police Seeking Man Who Ran Over Himself. What an auspicious beginning to a fabulous saga of a master criminal, that’s what you’re thinking, right? How the hell did this happen? you wonder. We wondered, too, so we read on to this section: Still determined to avoid the traffic stop, the man climbed out the passenger window of his moving vehicle, but “his foot caught in the window and he was pulled under the car and the back tire ran over him.” And yet he still managed to evade our crack police force even after the car ran over his torso. Not just his foot, his entire torso. Then the unmanned car ran into the dumpster at a Burger King. The last the police saw of our victim (?) he was running across a busy street. Yes, the police had a motorcycle to give chase and still managed to lose him. We presume he was at least limping. Wouldn’t you think? They’re describing him as 18 or 19 years, 5 feet 8 inches, wearing a black shirt and sweat pants. We also assume he would be identifiable with the tire marks across his chest.

5. Complaining for profit. Ava has decided her new side job is going to be professional complainer. The other day she successfully negotiated for $525.00 in compensation for multiple transactions that had been unsatisfactory. That’s a pretty good day’s work we say. Besides, you get to be surly and mildly crazy. Do you have a complaint which has fallen on deaf ears? Do you want a professional to take a crack at it?