Quick question: How come my bank can't remember what language I speak? I put my ATM card in the machine and it says my name and asks the password and remembers the thousands of transactions I have made over the years, computing it all in an instant, and never allowing me to take out more money than I have, or give away more money than I can, but always, before we get down to doing our business, it asks the inevitable question: English or Spanish? I'm always insulted. It's like your best friend asking if you've seen Star Wars. Response: I saw it with you, dumbass! Twice!

I should calm down about it all. Yesterday I got a voicemail from my wife telling me that there was a freakish thunderstorm in the area and that I should not be working with metal high atop a ladder. This was good advice. Since I leave my cel phone in the truck so as not to be disturbed with calls from my wife when I am high atop a ladder, I didn't get the message until I was on my way home. It's funny, because that afternoon I was standing on the notastep on a six-foot ladder holding a nine-foot metal post high above my head (so I could slide it down inside a column, you see) when I heard a kraccckkk! and saw lightning strike a nearby hilltop. I'm not kidding. Then it began to hail. So I narrowly avoided becoming a statistic yesterday, I guess, but then again, sooner or later we're all statistics, aren't we?

Some more newsworthy than others, unfortunately. A local landscaper was struck by lightning near our house here in the suburbs, yesterday. He was merely standing next to the palm tree, which was hit. As described by a fourteen-year-old boy who witnessed the whole God-smiting event, the lightning hit the palm tree and traveled down the trunk of it and then leaped off to blast the landscaper right out of his boots. There was no reason to doubt the stunned kid, as the news video showed the burn scars smoldering on the tree. The kid described it as "the loudest thing I have ever heard in my whole entire life" and "it sounded like an atomic bomb going off". The worker is doing okay. Passersby administered CPR until the paramedics arrived.

Got home, bloodless and breathing, from work yesterday and the Little Ditchman begged me to watch Star Wars, so, yes, we have brainwashed her sufficiently. I always flip around between episodes because I know she likes ewoks and R2D2 but not the stormtroopers or anyone getting their heads or limbs hacked off. Yesterday she said she wanted to see an episode with Annakin and Darth Vader (or "Darf Aider" as she refers to him.) Evidently, she has yet to grasp the subtle relationships and character arcs within the epic. We'll have to work on that.

So I just had to post this. It's brilliant. It's clever. It's creative. It's totally meaningless, and I wish I'd thought of it. Some day I will do a Star Wars mash-up of my own. That will be a day when the stars align and I have free time galore. I'm looking forward to it.




(Hat tip to TDR for emailing it to me.)

~