Talk of the Town Ernie Anderson

The Midas touch
So, less than a week after writing a column to brag about how I used to repair things like broken mufflers all the time on my various junk cars, the tailpipe fell off my #!@!!#! truck. Karma? Kismet? Anyway, now I’ve got to crawl under that big ol’ beast and see if I can fix the thing with a coat hanger and a cut-up can of Miller Lite beer. Or possibly Stroh’s, I don’t remember the procedure exactly.

I shall salt them with my tears
I know how much you people look forward to my grocery store rants week after week so here comes the next one: salted pistachios. That’s right, some unrepentant pistachio hoarder is buying up all the salted nuts and leaving that unsalted crap behind. Does any heartbreak compare to the anguish of finding a full shelf of pistachios before discovering they are all unsalted? I don’t think so, bub.

50 grand!
So, I’m not sure if you know this, but I have a dual sport motorcycle named El Mechon. The highlight of last week for me was the moment when El Mechon and I rolled the odometer over to 50,000 miles. Glorious miles they were, too, every one of them. So when the big moment came, I was on a trail in Lisbon and I had to creep the bike forward inch by inch so I could get a photo of the odometer displaying all those beautiful zeroes. It was a stressful affair, yo. Explosive experts defusing bombs move with less care than I did out there in the wilds of Lisbon. I was concentrating so hard on the slow ticking of the odometer that I almost rolled straight into the river and a crafty chipmunk stole my wallet. Believe you me, when 100 K rolls around, I’ll be more prepared.

Light up the night
Saw my first firefly of the summer the other night, which is always a glorious moment. Unfortunately, this was near downtown Lewiston and five seconds after I spotted it, the poor critter was killed by gunfire.

And speaking of gunfire in Lewiston…
With the Fourth upon us, the annual game of “Fireworks or Gunshots?” this year should be extremely rousing.

Trashed
So on Wednesday, one of the news alert services put out a notice that rubbish was on fire somewhere in Lewiston. Not trash, not garbage, but rubbish, which to me always sounds like a lofty term for stuff a rich man has thrown away. I like to think that what I haul to the curb every week is rubbish, but when there’s green, stinky liquid oozing from the bottom of your bag, what you’ve got is plain old garbage.