The triumphant return

So we went to San Jose to see the sister, brother in law, and niece (and go to Great America) over the Memorial Day weekend. While the tale of our trip there is full of misadventures and hilarity involving forgetting to take cash, running into broken fare machines, missing MAX trains, dodged fare inspectors, and arriving at the airport late is pretty funny, I am going to have to plead the 5th since, even though we did pay the fare, the way we did may not have been legal...I actually don't know. Since I try really hard to be legal (which contributed to missing one of the trains...scratch that, which is THE ENTIRE REASON we missed the smurfing train...) I would rather not inadvertently convict myself....

I also considered writing about a variety of other things; the trip itself, a belated Memorial Day essay, etc.

But in the end there are so many better topics, to wit:

- The grocers who believe the best way to compete is to concoct a plot to steal their competitors grapes using cabs. because, you know, renting trucks would be too likely to get them caught...this will not go down in history as a grape idea. (ooh, that pun was so bad I should prune it from my vocabulary...

- the government incompetence that led them to spend a million bucks protecting something that did not exist...

But really, how could I talk about any of these things when I can combine a discussion of flying frisbees, Elvis, and decapitations?

Actually, as great as that quote is, the one that caught my attention came from Harriet Harman: "Tony Banks described the English fans arrested in Marseilles as brain-dead louts - that goes for me as well."

This reminds me of an amusing bit of family lore. My Dad and his brother Ben were both quite the cut-ups. They were constantly dropping one-liners and telling stories that rivaled Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls (2008) for believability.

One time the three of them went on a drive together. Mom was seated in the center of the pick-up with Dad driving and Ben riding "shotgun". As the drive got longer and longer the stories and jokes got wilder and sillier. After one particularly outlandish story that they team-told...one completing lines the other started, the other riffing a few one-liners off the first to unleash a few vaguely related jokes...Mom had enough.

"Hubert, Benjamin...you two don't have a brain between you."

They just turned to look at her seated in the middle and burst out laughing.

The moral of this story is simple; if you ever have to suffer my presence and I am in one of my moods where everything is striking me funny and I am cracking wise about any and everything, if you should think of showing me the error of my ways...well, you don't want to be a Paralee or Harriet Harman, so just let it go. I will run out of breath eventually.