Signing off.

Well, that should about do it for me, as I head into a week of radio silence. I plan to resume posting next Sunday, although I may delay my return to Monday if family plans arise that warrant such a shift. As always, it would be cool if the regulars would load the page a couple times in the interim, just to keep traffic from dropping to nil (aside from goofy search engine hits, like this one). And as always, good reading can be found in the various sections of the blogroll.

And for your amusement, here are a couple of ruminations on supermarket shopping, by George Carlin. I've excerpted this from his book Napalm and Silly Putty. The scary thing is, thanks to work I can now relate to this stuff on multiple levels.

"Shopping hungry is great; you just keep loading things into your cart. But then, after several aisles, you realize you may have overdone it: You find yourself pushing a motorcade of three carts, all tied together with long loops of string cheese. Once again, you've lost control.

"And so, as you realize you don't have enough money to pay for everything, you begin to put back some of the more expensive items. Like meat.

"'Meat? Twenty-seven dollars? Bullshit! I'll put back these steaks and grab a few more pound cakes. The kids shouldn't be eating meat anyway.'

"The nicest thing about putting things back in the supermarket is that you can put them anywhere you want. No one cares. You can leave the Robitussin next to the ham hocks and stick the marshmallows in with the Bacon Bits. They don't care. They have people who come around at midnight to straighten that stuff out, and in the morning everything is back where it belongs.

"By the way, next time you shop at a supermarket in a neighborhood that has a higher than average marijuana use, take a look at the cookie section. Combat zone. Half the packages have been opened, and all the really good cookies are gone.

"'Where the hell are the Mallomars?'

"'Oh, we can't get Mallomars into the store. Folks line up at the loading dock for Mallomars.'

"There are always plenty of crappy cookies. You ever notice that? Shitty, low-priced local cookies? Like 'Jim's Home-Style Cookies. Twenty-six varieties.' I say, 'Damn, Jim, if you can't make cookies in twenty-five tries, leave me out.'"

OK, that's all for that. See you next Sunday!