April is playing games with us

It's pretending to be July.

This Week in Experimental Eating

Ever wonder what you get when all you have in the fridge is fruit,
cheese and salad mix? You get a toasted camembert and strawberry
sandwich on raisin bread with a strawberry and mixed green salad with
poppyseed dressing. Delicious!

This week in disturbing food products

Now I've seem some truly stupid and/or disgusting consumer food
products in my time, but this one might just take the top prize.
Whatever meglomaniacal food conglomorate that is behind this crime
against nature has termed it a "Grape-l", but what it appears to be is
an apple soaked in artificial grape flavor for such sufficient time
that it ceases to taste like an apple, nut rather tastes like fake-
grape. Apparently, some MBA marketing exec ran a survey that concluded
that children like apples, but would like them even more if they
tasted like, well, grapes. Sigh. And I thought we'd hit rock-bottom
with the Jimmy Dean chocolate-chip-pancake-wrapped sausage link on a
stick ("With real maple flavor!").

Scenes From Traffic School

As we go through the group discussing things that bother us on the road (like, say, people who merge onto the freeway at 45 mph, or people who keep in the right turn lane, zip past all the people waiting in line, and then try to cut in front), an Asian girl says "Asian drivers" is the big thing that bother her in the road. Queue awkward silence.

People comiserate like inmates in prison - "What are you in for?" - and swap stories of injustices perpetrate by cops. One nutjob in particular has a whole conspiracy theory about why there are photo-enforcement cameras in Santa Ana, and not in Newport Beach - Orange County is out to get the "little people"!

The instructor reminds me of a Jungle Cruise skipper - quick-wited and sly. He likes picking on the USC student who decided to drive through
a red light. She didn't run it, she just thought it had turned green and started off into the intersection, only to get T-boned by a pickup truck.

Amusing annecdote by the instructor, a former cop in Laguna Beach. Driving down Laguna Canyon one day, he hits a wall of traffic. He radios in to see if there's been an accident reported, but no such thing. Then, up in front of him, he sees an '83 Buick cresting the hill going about 12 mph, with a line of 25 cars behind it, trailing like irate ducklings. He slaps on the siren, zooms to the front, and pulls over the Buick. As he whips out his citation pad to give the elderly male driver a ticket for going to slow, the drivers of the formerly imprisoned cars wave to him, blow him kisses, and give him high-fives as they drive by. He says that he's caught rapists and murderers and larcenists and arsonists, but the greatest gratitude he's ever gotten on the job was the day he gave a ticket to the slow driver.

The Lupines Have Landed!

Once again, the hills are covered with a carpet of purple flowers.
The lupines are one of my favorite parts of spring, and I'm always sad
to see them go at the end of the season.

Do they make kitty Midol?

This is the cat. She has gone into heat, and is now meowing
incessantly, especially at 4:00 am. It is supposed to go on like this
for another 4 to 6 days. Someone please shoot me now.

How Starbucks is like a condo developer

Now, I may not be as sophisticated as the authors of "Freakinomics,"
and have, say, statistics to back up my theories, but I think I'm on
to something here. As the housing market slips slowly downhill,
housing developers are reluctant to lower their prices because they
don't want the people who already bought into their development to
feel like chimps. So, instead of lowering prices, they keep offering
more upgrades for the same price. Granite? You got it. Hardwood?
It's yours.

Which brings me to Starbucks. Espresso drinks are luxury items, and
one of the first things that people start cutting from the budget when
things get tight. Starbucks doesn't want to lower their prices,
because that would a) make them look weak, and b) cut into their
profit margin. So the solution? Start offering free upgrades, just
like the developers. After all, the unit cost of that free extra shot
of espresso is pretty small, and it makes the customer feel like
they're getting more value for their $3.50. Which, Starbucks hopes,
will keep them coming back for their caffine fix each morning.
Sneaky, ain't they?