 Sponge Bob |  Fry Bob |
We are saving the Earth this week where I live, which for me means I have to bring my own bags to the grocery store. The girl, who is always much more concerned about the Earth than I am, has ordered me to break my lifetime habit of letting the supermarket give me my groceries bagged. And I mean lifetime—I am old enough to remember when stores only offered paper bags. The transition to plastic happened in my youth, and people were not happy with it then, often insisting on paper when it was really obvious the store was pushing plastic. But we got used to it. Now I can only remember two things that paper bags are unquestionably superior to plastic for—shaking chicken pieces in flour and spices before frying them, and putting them on your neighbor's stoop after you have filled them with excrement, lighting them on fire, ringing the doorbell and running away. And really, you can do the chicken thing with plastic. You just have to be aware of the cloud of flour that will puff out of the hole in the bottom of the bag.
If you are planning on pranking your neighbors, you simply must remember to say "Paper, please," at the checkstand, because plastic will not work with that kind of payload.
The best thing about plastic bags is that you can carry more of them at once. It was difficult to hold on to more than two or three paper bags while fumbling for your keys in the dark, and somehow it was always the bag with the eggs in it that you dropped. With plastic, you can hook a bag on every finger, enabling you to carry in five at a time and still have a hand free to unlock the door and ward off the dog, although moderate to intense finger pain can result from this practice if you have been shopping for heavier items, like melons or ammunition.
However, these days will soon, or may soon, pass in the Golden State. Our legislature has ordered us all to bring in our own re-usable shopping bags to the store starting July 1st. Plastic bags are bad for the environment, by their very nature, and they are especially dangerous to marine life. I am dangerous to marine life myself, and certainly I don't want ocean creatures choking to death on plastic bags when I could kill them with a hook and line instead. I realize the law will benefit me on this account, but not so much that I was planning to start obeying it before I had to.
Not so my special lady. She has announced that we will start pre-obeying this ordinance. To this end, she has bought me a re-usable shopping bag. She got it at Fry's, a giant electronics store. The bag is black except for a small yellow squarish figure printed on its lower half. The figure strongly resembles Sponge Bob Square Pants, the cartoon character of children's lore, except it can't be, because Fry's and the gigantic corporation that owns Sponge Bob have surely used their battalions of lawyers to settle any copyright infringement questions by now. So I call my reusable bag Fry Bob.
Fry Bob sits in the back seat of my car, ready at all times to save the Earth by carrying my food and beverage items greenly home. He has yet to do so, though, because my mind is usually too preoccupied with its usual chores, thinking of jokes and calculating how much money I can spend on food and still have the necessary amount left over for beer that I can't remember to use him. I only recall him when I am loading my plastic bags into the back seat next to him. "Oh, feces, " I say, or something similar, when I spot his unused form, because I know I am in big trouble when I get home.
To be continued...click here
If you are planning on pranking your neighbors, you simply must remember to say "Paper, please," at the checkstand, because plastic will not work with that kind of payload.
The best thing about plastic bags is that you can carry more of them at once. It was difficult to hold on to more than two or three paper bags while fumbling for your keys in the dark, and somehow it was always the bag with the eggs in it that you dropped. With plastic, you can hook a bag on every finger, enabling you to carry in five at a time and still have a hand free to unlock the door and ward off the dog, although moderate to intense finger pain can result from this practice if you have been shopping for heavier items, like melons or ammunition.
However, these days will soon, or may soon, pass in the Golden State. Our legislature has ordered us all to bring in our own re-usable shopping bags to the store starting July 1st. Plastic bags are bad for the environment, by their very nature, and they are especially dangerous to marine life. I am dangerous to marine life myself, and certainly I don't want ocean creatures choking to death on plastic bags when I could kill them with a hook and line instead. I realize the law will benefit me on this account, but not so much that I was planning to start obeying it before I had to.
Not so my special lady. She has announced that we will start pre-obeying this ordinance. To this end, she has bought me a re-usable shopping bag. She got it at Fry's, a giant electronics store. The bag is black except for a small yellow squarish figure printed on its lower half. The figure strongly resembles Sponge Bob Square Pants, the cartoon character of children's lore, except it can't be, because Fry's and the gigantic corporation that owns Sponge Bob have surely used their battalions of lawyers to settle any copyright infringement questions by now. So I call my reusable bag Fry Bob.
Fry Bob sits in the back seat of my car, ready at all times to save the Earth by carrying my food and beverage items greenly home. He has yet to do so, though, because my mind is usually too preoccupied with its usual chores, thinking of jokes and calculating how much money I can spend on food and still have the necessary amount left over for beer that I can't remember to use him. I only recall him when I am loading my plastic bags into the back seat next to him. "Oh, feces, " I say, or something similar, when I spot his unused form, because I know I am in big trouble when I get home.
To be continued...click here
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