And now for something vaguely different

I was never really part of the drug scene at any of the colleges I attended. This was largely because I never actually used any drugs. But I had friends in college that experimented with a variety of controlled substances (including one who used his occasional marijuana use as an excuse to his parents for his poor grades, despite the fact that the real reason was that he was spending too much time with his girlfriend. But I digress.), and they often liked to have me around as they were going through whatever they were going through. That's because I had, and continue to have bizarre thoughts like these:

It's time for Chinese restaurants to freshen up their placemats with some new zodiacal years. I'm tired of having been born in the "Year of the Rooster", though it was nice of them to swap out the word "cock" and thus eliminate 90 percent of the fun junior high school students have at Chinese restaurants. But if they can make that change, there's no reason they couldn't do something more radical. And that's why I'm proposing the following new Chinese years over the next decade:

2006: Year of the Anvil.
2007: Year of Top Soil.
2008: Year that Won't Stick to Most Dental Work
2009: Year of the Bug that's Flying Around in My Floor Lamp
2010: Year of Excedrin
2011: Year of Mucilage
2012: Year of Hogan's Heroes reruns
2013: Year of the Al Stewart hit, Year of the Cat
2014: Year of farfel
2015: Year of Pueblo, Colorado

We'll wait a little while before we propose the drawings that'll appear on the placemats.

Bizarre Thought #2: Imagine you're from a country with no tradition of cable TV. Say, Burkina Faso. Now, pretend you've traveled to the United States and are looking for educational programming on television. And now, imagine that you get confused and believe QVC is actually a university, and not a shopping channel. Think of all the wackiness that ensues when you write to pitchman Bob Bowersox and suggest he ask for a sabbatical.

(And just a reminder that rum and Cokes were the strongest thing to enter my system in college...)

and finally, Bizarre Thought #3: Wouldn't it be just incredible if Kenneth Lay died mysteriously before he could be sentenced for his role in the Enron debacle? I think that would be terrific, because it would give people something to talk about with the Vincent Foster conspiracy buffs.

But that one's way too far-fetched.