
I believe it was Danny DeVito who once observed You always get screwed at the drive-through. We all have. Insufficient packets of condiments, cheeseburgers missing cheese, one napkin to service the drippings from twelve tacos. Finally, a Taco Bell customer in Athens, Georgia, had enough. He fire-bombed the local Bell when they refused to rectify his perceived problem of not having enough meat on his chalupa.
Some people might consider not having a meaty enough chalupa a personal problem, but they are not aware of the nature of a chalupa. It is one of the Bell's Mexicanish food items that has no actual opposite number in real Mexican cookery, like the enchirito. Order one in Tijuana and you'll get something entirely different. But they are supposed to have meat, or what at Taco Bell passes for meat, and when an American does not get enough food, he gets angry. In this case, angry enough to follow in the footsteps of Jeremy Coombs, of Missouri, who was arrested last month for pulling a shotgun on a Taco Bell employee who did not give him enough hot sauce. Taco Bell, beware. Can you say Second Amendment solution?
Americans, in these tough times, are clearly getting hungrier. Potato salad is community food. It's usually served in huge bowls at picnics. You can take a spoonful or a plate of it, or merely stick a toothpick in a starchy morsel and raise it to your lips. No wonder Karen Henry grew angry at her 80 year-old dad for refusing to share his. It's only a shade short of being disinherited, being cut off from the family's bowl of russet and mayonnaisey goodness. Although news reports failed to say whether the salad in question was standard or German potato fare, Karen's anger at being excommunicated from it could not be expressed in mere words. Her resulting assault upon the aged spud-miser landed her in jail.
Likewise jailed overnight were pregnant Nicole Leczcyzynski and her husband, while their three year old daughter Zophia, was placed in protective custody for eighteen hours, when Nicole forgot to pay for a sandwich in Honolulu. The couple, having recently moved to Hawaii, got lost on the way to the supermarket. I moved to Hawaii myself at one point, and while it is ordinarily the happiest of occasions, rookie residents do get lost. There are only thirteen letters in the Hawaiian alphabet, but all five vowels are included, leaving only eight exhausted consonants working overtime to form Hawaiian words. Street signs tend to look similar, and street names look similarly unpronounceable.
Having wandered looking for food for hours for themselves and their three-year-old, the family, upon finally finding a Safeway, opened a couple of those nasty, plastic-wrapped sandwiches that all supermarkets sell before they resumed shopping, intending to pay for the tasteless but filling hunks of baloney and bread upon checking out, but forgot to do so while paying for their $50 worth of groceries at the check stand.
Their story is suspicious here…fifty bucks worth of groceries in Honolulu consists of maybe a gallon of milk, a couple mangoes and a box of sanitary napkins, but even if the Leczcyznskis had entered with sandwich larceny in their hearts, they surely would not have carried out the deed if they had been aware of the Safeway chain's policy regarding shoplifting, i.e., YOU TAKE OUR SANDWICHES—WE TAKE YOUR KID.
Finally, Crockett Keller, a gun safety instructor in Texas has announced that he will not conduct courses for Muslim-Americans or anyone who voted for Obama, stating that Muslims "cannot be real Americans" and saying of Democrats "You have already proven that you cannot make a knowledgeable and prudent decision as required under the law."
A picture of Keller is included with the news item, in which he states that many of his neighbors support him. From the picture, I infer that he means they support him by letting him attend their barbecues. I may have voted for Obama, but I've at least made the knowledgeable and prudent decision to lay off the chili dogs and peach cobbler before I weighed as much as a sofa bed. Everybody makes mistakes, Crockett, so I'm begging you to forgive my lapse in 2008 and teach me how to use a gun. I've got a bag full of chalupas and a gigantic bowl of potato salad, and I've vowed that no one's getting any food from me until they pry it from my cold, dead, mayo-stained fingers.