Frog juice

A nice lady wrote to tell me that she enjoyed my Wednesday column, but that her joy was diminished somewhat by a distracting story about blended frogs on a nearby page. We’re talking frog juice here, an amphibian liquid that can reportedly make a person feel sexier in just one gulp. In fact, just writing those lines, I feel a little bit randy, myself. Ribbit. If you get my drift.

Look me up

This week I received two – count them, TWO – phone books in my mailbox. Remember the day when getting the latest phone book was an exciting thing? You’d look up your own listing to see if they got it right and then you’d find the perfect spot for the listings somewhere in the vicinity of your phone. You’d mark key businesses in the Yellow Pages and make a strategic fold so you could quickly find the listing for your favorite pizza joint or cab company. It was keen. These days, the phone book is really only good for incapacitating frogs before you put them in a blender.

Important note

I would never intentionally strike a frog with a phone book, or any other large object. I love frogs. Wouldn’t even call them mean names if they gave me dirty looks, which they totally do sometimes. What’s your problem, frog?

Beautifying the canals

People keep talking about how the canals of Lewiston will be transformed into a joyous place of skating and cocoa and all around good cheer. Why, it’s going to be Whooville all up in here. And I have to admit, there’s something alluring about the idea of skating on the frozen canal above all those mangled shopping carts, cannibalized bicycles, smashed computer monitors, old boots without mates, rusted guns from forgotten crimes, mangled bird cages, tire rims, unloved tinker toys and that old VCR with a copy of “Red Dawn” stuck in it that I totally didn’t throw in there.

Chicken Little

Lancaster, N.Y., recorded five feet of snow, while six miles away, the Buffalo airport got less than four inches. What do you want to bet it was the long-suffering late-beat reporter at a newspaper near the airport who got tasked with writing a weather story in advance of the storm? There’s nothing worse for a reporter than pounding out 16 riveting inches about a snowstorm that doesn’t actually arrive. Ask me how I know.

Pew! Pew!

In Massachusetts, a 10-year-old boy was suspended from school for pointing his finger at a classmate and making laser sounds. Which, if you remember correctly, is “pew! pew!” and not “boweep! boweep!” The latter would be the proper sound effect for a Star Trek phaser. I suppose this means the age of the spitball is officially over. If they’ll suspend a lad for erecting a finger, I imagine they’d hang him for something so incendiary as a flying wet wad of paper that’s breath-propelled through a drinking straw.