Wings of love

This and that:

Congratulations to the nation of Colombia, which joined the BYE League of Nations yesterday. Now that you're here, I want to apologize to you on behalf of myself and every other American who repeatedly misspells the name of your country as Columbia.

Yesterday's blog post about keys inspired several comments and others have passed on your key-related stories to me off-line. Quincy's comment reminded me of the time that I cleaned out our junk drawer after a decade or so of neglect.

Do you have a junk drawer at your home where you place potentially useful items that serve no immediate or obvious purpose? I think most of us do.

We stuff things like rubber bands, incomplete decks of playing cards, sample bottles of suntan lotion, pens that aren't quite working and odd types of batteries into our junk drawer so that we'll have them "when we need them." "When we need them" turns out to be a time in the indefinite future that never quite arrives. When the time comes to put that extra Energizer size 2016 battery into the calculator, I've forgotten about the one waiting in the drawer, and I head off to Walgreen's to buy another pack of two--one of which will also join its long-forgotten mate in the junk drawer.

Our junk drawer had gotten to the point where I couldn't open the darn thing, much less add or subtract anything from it. So, on an afternoon when I had absolutely nothing better to do, I grabbed a trash bag and cleaned it out. This purging is a part of the junk drawer cycle of life.

After cleaning the drawer I was left with at least a half a dozen keys with no matching lock. Since I didn't know what they were for, but since they had all been sitting in the drawer for years, it was logical to conclude that whatever they may have once unlocked couldn't be that important.

I had the strangest feeling throwing away perfectly good, but perfectly useless keys. It felt wrong somehow. What if I needed them later? What if the garbage men found them and used them to rob us? I know these thoughts were ridiculous, but there you go.

We turned the TV on for an hour or so last night towards the end of prime time. Since we were too lazy to make an actual choice and the TV was already tuned to the Birmingham ABC affiliate, we watched that station by default. It was a "reality" show called The Bachelor, On the Wings of Love. Appropriately enough, the show was about a bachelor pilot named Jake who starts out with dozens of pretty girls at his disposal and kicks several off the show each week until only his "one true love" remains at the end of his "journey".

Is there one true love for any of us? I wonder, but it's a subject to explore another day--a day when only men are reading this blog.

Last night we tuned in midway through the two hour grand finale. The impossibly handsome Jake was torn between the good girl and the bad girl. The last two girls looked exactly alike to me, so Teri, using her girl radar, had to keep telling me which was the good one and which was the bad one.

Moments after we turned on the TV, Jake asked the bad girl to marry him, and I spent most of the next hour attempting to amuse Teri by inventing new promotional commercials for the show. "The Bachelor, it's tramp-o-licious. The Bachelor, it's trollop time! This season on The Bachelor we'll trumpet our new line of strumpets." I could go on, and I did--annoying Teri no end as she tried to pretend she wasn't caught up in the cheesy romance of it all.

Where was I going with this? Oh yeah, the thing at the bottom of the screen.

You know how the networks and TV stations put extra stuff on the corners of your screen to tell you what station you're watching or to promote upcoming programs? Well last night our local ABC affiliate put up a tease for their big story on that night's late local news. This major headline popped up every few minutes while we watched The Bachelor.

And the earth-shattering story they were promoting so heavily? A looming shortage of chicken wings.

I'm not kidding. We had to watch the first few minutes of the news last night to see what this was about. In a stunning bit of investigative reporting, the correspondent discovered that "the chicken only has two wings." Apparently demand for chicken wings is up somewhat and prices have gone slightly higher. That was pretty much the whole story, but here's a link to it if you want to watch it for yourself.

I'm not sure why this non-story was the one the station chose to promote. Was it the "wings of love" subtitle of the lead-in show? Was it that the producer is obsessed with the offerings at Buffalo Wild Wings? Did nothing else happen in Birmingham yesterday?

In other news, the weather guy breathlessly forecast the slim chance of a flake or two of snow for today. He went on to explain that the any snow that happened to fall wouldn't stick and would pose no hazard to travel because our temperatures will remain above freezing. Several area school systems dutifully announced they would open several hours late today anyway because of the looming disaster. Really.

I love living in Alabama--especially on a slow news day.

I've mentioned booking cruises to escape the winter blues a couple of times in this space recently. One of those trips, a five night cruise out of New Orleans in December, is rapidly turning into a group cruise. After I told a couple of friends that we booked a cabin for just $289 per person for this five nighter, they signed on too. Now another couple is also threatening to join us. Hey, the more the merrier. If you read this blog, you're my kind of people, so I'm sure you'd be good company. If you're interested, I can give you the details. If you do go, at least one of you needs to book a big suite so we'll have a place for our group parties.