I certainly don’t want to knock anybody trying to make a career for themselves, trying to catch hold of that which, at one time, made them great and fantastic and (doubtlessly) wealthy.
But really. Who thought this was necessary? I mean, aren’t we a litle past the point where we can call the New Kids On The Block either “new” or “kids”? Shouldn’t this be more like the Alter Kockers On The Porch?
Hey, I kinds of like that.
Here’s to the A.K.O.T.P.
My plans have been thwarted!
All of my daughter’s–my five year old daughter’s–friends are all boys. And I was just about ready to pick one and off they would go to get married!
Okay, not really, but as I’m reading through the news of the weird, I stumble upon this on AOL. To summarize, apparently Arkansas lawmakers have closed a loophole they had inadvertedly created several months ago when they re-wrote the law governing the legal age for marriage. Instead of setting the legal limit for marriage, they eliminated it all together. Thus, my five year old daughter could have easily married her four and a half year old friend. All they needed was both sets of parents’ permission and a lengthy drive to Arkansas.
How does something this silly happen? I mean, honestly. Doesn’t anybody read this stuff before they vote and sign on it? Don’t they have some kind of special legislative proofreader whose sole task is to keep goofy crap like this from happening?
Apparently not…
My wife just coined, as a phrase, the category title this little anecdote falls under. Look for more of these as I, or people I know, do things that make you go “huh?”.
I decided to cook some chicken that has been sitting in my fridge since Saturday. It’s now Thursday and I have zero desire to wait until is goes bad, starts to smell, and have to throw it out .
Since it’s later in the evening, about eight o’clock or so, and I have no fresh charcoal, I’m going to have to do this the old-fashioned way: the oven.
I break out the Shake N Bake. Makes chicken taste great, it’s REALLY hard to screw up, and it’s quick. So I turn on the oven and let it preheat. I open up the chicken and wash it. I pour the Shake into the little plastic baggy that comes in the box. I shake the chicken.
I lay the chicken out on our shiny new IKEA cookie sheets. The sheets are nice and big and accomodate six legs and six thighs. Cookin’ it all in one batch. Score.
I put it in the oven and set the timer for forty-five minutes.
About ten minutes from the end, the smell coming out of the oven changes. It morphs from a pleasant aroma of chicken cooking slowly for my convivial pleasure to one of…what the hell is that, anyway?
I open up the oven door. Is that…smoke?
Sure is.
Uh-oh.
I turn on the range fan and open every window in the house. It’s forty-five degrees outside. I disable all the smoke detectors because now they’re going off and the kids are in bed. I return to the oven and open it again. How? How is this thing smoking like this?
Then it hits me.
Grease.
The grease from the chicken is running off the cookie sheet and onto the bottom of the oven, where the fire below (did I mention this is a gas oven?) has heated it to a temperature Milton would be proud of.
Apparently, in my infinite wisdom, I decided to use the new cookie sheets THAT ARE FLAT AND HAVE NO LIPS.
Welcome to my new category, “Check The Dosage.”
