Lee Duigon

Some woman in Arizona, possibly with visions of lucrative lawsuits dancing through her head, tweeted that she was plunged into a spasm of vomiting–not to mention acute psychological distress–when she discovered a chicken foot in the package of chicken breasts she bought at a Safeway supermarket.

She put a picture of it on her Twitter page, and now it’s all over the Internet. Just search “woman finds chicken foot” and you’ll find it. OK, in the photo that she took, the chicken foot looks vaguely like a hand reaching out from under the chicken breasts. But 99% of the comments show no sympathy and lots of contempt for this woman who is so freaked out by an ordinary thing like a chicken foot–especially in the context of a pack of chicken.

I’ve got that beat, though. At my local neighborhood produce stand, a woman came in ranting one day because her child saw a worm in a corncob that she bought there–“and I gotta get him into counseling!”

Counseling? Because the kid saw a worm in an ear of corn? Actually, I think the mother probably needed some counseling, too–or maybe just a swift kick in the kiester.

Honestly, where do people think food comes from? It all used to be alive, you know. As bland and tasteless as they are, especially with the skin stripped off, chicken breasts come from live chickens. And your corn on the cob came from seeds that were planted in the ground and grew into living things.

Makes you wonder about the future of this country, doesn’t it?

My aunt, the last living member of her generation in my family, recently had to go to the hospital. During the course of a routine, scheduled procedure–not an emergency!–they managed to knock out her two front teeth. The doctor’s reaction was, “Oh, well, at her age she didn’t really need them, did she?”

We’re trying to get this put right. Just because you’re 85 years old, and had a stroke which made you bed-bound and unable to chew or swallow food, doesn’t mean they get to knock your teeth out and not have to make it up to you.

I had to go see my aunt’s long-time dentist today, to show him my official power of attorney and to demand her dental records. His name is Dr. Oliver, and this is what he said:

“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about this case. You see, I’ve known your aunt (and her sisters) for so long, and I know the hospital is going to give you a hard time over this. So I want to do the work, fix your aunt’s teeth–and I’ll send my bill to the hospital. Believe me, I am familiar with her situation, and I think this is what has to be done. I can’t just let her stay like that.”

You could’ve knocked me over with a feather. I rarely encounter that kind of magnanimity in real life. It brought tears to my eyes. (I seem to be turning into the most awful kind of softy–not good for my alpha male image, but I can’t help it.) Those of you who are given to prayer, ask for a blessing on Dr. Oliver.

I wonder if there’s any way I can get this morning bronzed and mounted.

Mark Levin has been floating the idea of amending the Constitution to roll back the perpetual expansion and power-grabbing of the federal government. Of course, he recognizes that there is no way Congress would ever propose such a thing as, for example, term limits. But, he points out, Constitutional amendments don’t have to originate with Congress.

Article V of the Constitution says the legislatures of two-thirds of the states–that would be 33 of the 50 states–can call a convention for proposing amendments; and such amendments, if ratified by three-quarters of the states (38 of 50), would become the law of the land.

Our founders recognized that the government established by the War for Independence, and then the Constitution, might itself become tyrannical, and block any efforts to curb its power. So they provided this remedy in Article V, an end-run around Congress, the White House, and the Supreme Court. It is a way for the American people to exercise their political sovereignty through the states, against the central government.

So let’s say 38 states–hey, let’s say all 50–decide that you can’t stay in Congress for more than 12 years, and that therefore a whole bunch of Senators and Congressmen have got to get out. The Constitution, as amended, now says so.

What if they refuse to get out?

What if the Supreme Court, by a 5-4 vote, says the states misinterpreted Article V and their amendments to the Constitution are invalid? (California courts are always ruling that the actions of the voters are invalid, so this requires no stretch of the imagination.)

And what if the “president” says he won’t enforce those amendments, he doesn’t recognize them as legitimate, and nobody in Washington is going anywhere?

Then what?

Just asking, boss. No harm in asking…

As a writer, I naturally want to know more about the top bestselling author of all time. So I’ve been re-reading Agatha Christie‘s An Autobiography, published in 1977, a year after her death. You can get a copy from your library or order it from amazon.com.

As fascinating as her life story is, I can’t get past poor Agatha’s underprivileged childhood. She was born in 1890–and would you believe it? They didn’t have car seats! Who ever heard of a baby not strapped into a car seat? How is Daddy going to enjoy his football game when Mommy goes off to work, if the baby is not safely confined to a car seat?

Agatha was never enrolled in day care. Imagine being raised by your mother and father! Mr. and Mrs. Miller (her parents) were lucky there was no Child Protective Services back then, or they’d have been in hot water.

Worst of all, when Agatha reached school age, she was not sent to public school. She was kept home with her family. (By then she had already learned how to read and write, but that was cheating: the teachers’ union shouldn’t have allowed it.) No public school! No gender-coaching! The poor child was socialized by adults who loved her, instead of by her age-group peers. As a result, she missed out on the biggest lesson public schooling has to offer–conformity.

No wonder Agatha Christie turned out to be such a miserable failure in life. Never on food stamps. Never arrested. No out-of-wedlock births. Not a single abortion. Makes you want to weep, doesn’t it? I mean, the poor kid never played a video game, never killed a zombie….

Sorry, but I  can’t go on. It’s just too sad.

If I were to write about, or even just list, everything we did when we were kids ‘way back, this would be a thick book, not a blog post. So I’m just going to write about one thing I did a lot of, between the ages of five and ten–and that was to “play animals.”

Little toy animals, of every conceivable kind, were my pride and joy in those days. My mother and father, aunts and uncles, and grandparents used to shower me with them. Later I added dinosaurs to my collection–lots of them. That collection, in a big red box my father made for me, today rests under my bed, to be trotted out on rare occasions.

So how do you “play animals”? You move them around and make up stories about them, providing dialogue as needed. You make them have adventures. For instance, the blue rhino and the red gorilla are trying to ditch the brown skunk who keeps following them around, but they can’t do it because the yellow monkeys keep telling the skunk which way they went. (Why the funky colors? Well, they’re little plastic animals and that’s what color they are.) A story like this might go on for hours, and wind up involving cowboys and knights on horseback, a castle built from my grandpa’s old sandstone building blocks, clumps of grass, a hole dug with a trowel, or a cave made out of books from my mother’s bookcase.

There were a few of my friends who sometimes played animals with me–especially that summer when the Miller Company came out with space aliens molded in wax. My brother and his friends played with toy cars and trucks, but I could never see the point of that. After all, cars were all around us; but lions and tigers and anteaters ignited the imagination.

Aside from the animals themselves, everything about the game had to come out of our own imaginations. Nothing was put in. We had to come up with the stories, and act them out.

I don’t know what it’s like to play video games all day. But I wouldn’t trade “playing animals” for it.