Today is the state sales tax holiday weekend, where things that students need are sales tax-free and often set at a significant discount.
Notebooks, pens, pencils, paper, clothes, and athletic gear are what typically comes to mind.
The price per item limit is a hundred bucks, because it’s meant to help poor families with kids in school.
What’s weird is that the sales tax break isn’t just for that stuff when it’s bought for students. Anybody can buy new clothes or shoes and get the discount.
But it doesn’t apply to vodka, which is what I needed most in college.
Category: My stories
Pluot
I like fruits and vegetables.
But when it comes to being adventurous in the produce sections of the grocery stores, I don’t go far beyond the grapes and cucumbers and onions and such.
A coworker brought in a pluot, which is some kind of blasphemous rebuke of God’s Will between a plum and an apricot.
It’s soft. It’s sweet and sour in the skin.
And it’s delicious.
I’m going to the grocery store after work.
I wonder what other marvels are waiting out there to discover, try, and…
Why am I itching?
I hope I’m not allergic to this thing.
The Needle
If you’re going to die alone in a run-down shack with a needle in your arm, it had better be a phonograph needle.
Instead, we found Joe in the alley with the Space Needle in his arm.
I took out my phone, called Seattle, and told them we’d found it.
“Can you stick it in a mailbox?” they said. “The corner of it says we’ve pre-paid the postage.”
“No can do,” I said, putting on latex gloves and sealing the Space Needle in a bag. “It’s evidence.”
It disappeared from the evidence locker last night.
I called Seattle.
No answer.
Nazi?
The leader of a Neo-Nazi group in Hungary recently discovered that he’s Jewish.
Can the reverse happen? Can someone Jewish discover that they’re a Nazi?
Angry liberal college protestors aside, I wanted to see if this were true.
Looking in my closet, I don’t see Doc Marten boots.
And my scalp isn’t just unshaven, but covered with unruly greasy curly hair.
Finally, I don’t attend any rallies or protests, nor do I go around beating the crap out of people.
Whew. Thank goodness.
I pat my teddy bear Adolf on the head, turn out the light, and go to sleep.
Ribbon
I didn’t watch any of the Olympics on TV.
Not even the women’s beach volleyball.
However, a friend of mine at NBC is scoring me a tape of all the Ribbon Gymnatics footage.
No, I’m not interested in that shit either, Those chicks wear a lot more than the volleyball chicks, and they’re usually only thirteen or fourteen.
It’s for my cats.
They love to play and jump at with twirling ribbons, so I’m going to leave the tape running while I go to work.
Forget what the Russian judge says. To the cats, every performance is a perfect ten.
Forward
Time travel?
Sure, we have that available.
But it’s a one-way trip.
You can go forward, but you can’t come back.
One-way.
Payment in cash only.
No credit.
After all, it’s one-way.
You won’t come back to pay your credit card.
And we can’t send anyone after you to break your legs.
So, we need cash up front.
We learned that the hard way.
So, how far do you want to go?
Weeks? Months? Years? Centuries?
What’s out there?
We don’t know.
It’s a one-way trip.
No way to find out.
Except to go.
So… yes? No?
Take your time.
Tennis
Oh. God. No.
Not tennis.
Aside from the Monica Seles stabbing in 1993, I don’t find tennis all that interesting.
Sure, some of the chicks grunt, but that gets repetitive.
And I appreciate a cute butt in white shorts when I see it, but Pete Sampras retired.
Golf is boring, too.
You hear about people getting struck by lightning while playing golf, but they never show that on the Golf Channel.
And the chicks don’t grunt.
Has there ever been a stabbing?
Well, there will be one if you don’t change the channel.
Oh, and get me a beer, too.
Babbage
Famous inventor Charles Babbage may never have built his Analytical Engine due to his inability to focus on manufacturing, but he did create punchcards to program it.
What the punchcards will do, we’re not completely sure.
We scanned in all his blueprints and notes, and our simulations suggest that it involves basic counting and number processing functions, but then when the museum staff built a Difference Engine from his original plans, the RING BELL function chimed out strange, plaintive messages in Morse Code…
Messages from the dead.
Visitors kept mistaking it for a fire alarm, so we disconnected the bell.
The Challenge
Do you remember The Pepsi Challenge?
There’d be a table in a supermarket with someone offering colas in a blind taste test, and the people who said they preferred Coke but chose Pepsi would be put in a commercial.
I always thought it was a fake, but just the other day I saw someone in the supermarket conducting a taste test.
A woman drank one cola, squinched her face up in disgust, and then tried the second.
She spat it out: “They’re both horrible!”
I looked behind the screen… two brands of rat poison.
“Can I be next?” I asked.
Rejection
An envelope. From a publisher.
I closed my eyes, tore it open, pulled out the letter, and looked.
I was expecting another rejection letter to join my pile of rejection letters, but instead, I received an offer.
It wasn’t for much, sure, but it was better than a rejection.
But there was a problem… a big problem.
The editor wanted me to make changes… a lot of changes.
I looked at the rejection pile… at the offer… at the changes…
Do I keep my integrity, or sell out?
The editor suggested changing that, too.
“Screw it,” I said, and signed.