Quick hits

This year is starting off slowly, and I guess that's a good thing. It means I have fewer complaints three days in.

A buddy and colleague griped today for the nth time in umpteen days that something - I think it was a vending machine soft drink today - tasted like cat pee, which made me wonder how he knew.

We all say stuff like that. I've complained that some dish tasted like a$$. I've heard other people say other things taste like: crap, vomit, garbage, and dirt.

I can see the vomit, 'cause in theory as its on its way out you're tasting it again, like it or not. And I can see the dirt - in the form of sand, if you were the skinny kid who got it kicked in his face by the buff guy on the beach, or in the form of mud pies, if you had older siblings who had dreams of being pastry chefs as children.

The other stuff? As Homer Simpson would say, you need Jebus if you've tasted any of it.

My neighborhood has fewer rif-raf. Last year, weeks after Jan. 1 some folks were still shooting off so many fireworks it sounded like a firing range. Freaked my dog out something fierce. This year I wasn't home on NYE, but I hear the random fireworks stopped shortly after midnight. Since then I've heard only the occasional pop. Besides if it ain't Dec. 31st or July 4th and you're setting off fireworks - and you're grown - you're a loser.

I am a firm believer in the notion that the truth is stranger than fiction. "Just say no" may not have worked. But if you wanna keep your kids off of drugs just show them the letter from a "reader" I saw posted on a wall in the wire room (mail, supplies, fax machine, etc.) at the newspaper Tuesday afternoon. The writer apologized for a previous correspondence to the Herald in which he'd apparently claimed to have recorded (I think video) proof of alien existence. He said he was high on LSD at the time...lots of it, as I recall. He said a lot more. But I was laughing too hard to read the rest clearly.

Anywho, I'm going to sleep. It's 1:46 a.m. right now. This'll be the earliest I've gone to bed in a while - another NY resolution, to limit the number of late nights to three per week.

If you're an insomniac and you're bored here are links to my last two stories. The first is a profile of a cop. The second is my weekly Q&A column. This week's column subject is a Miami-area woman who was recently knighted in Rome: The Cop , The Dame.