My wife procured one of those fancy thermostats for the home furnace and air a few weeks ago. You know the kind, all works from your phone, energy company touts them as the greatest thing. The whole thing made me sad for future generations.
My stepdad had a very solid, “don’t touch the damn thermostat” rule and it was one of my greatest pleasures in life to cheat that rule.
He and my mom would go out of town in the summer, and I’d yank that thing down to 68 degrees from his desired 76. It was glorious as I flirted with danger. The secret was to return it to normal before he got home and you had to have a balmy day so you could warm the house back up, or in severe cases, you just turned the heat portion on. It was darn near nuclear science to sixteen-year-old me.
Those days are gone. Dads are sitting around resort hotels and checking their phones to see what the temp is set at back home and the real-world education of our children has been compromised. Sad.
Those were also the days when you had to check the fake plants around the house for beer tabs and cigarette butts after the parents were gone for a few days. A random beer tab could totally ruin an otherwise great coverup.
Maybe you had real plants. My folks were frugal and straight up practical. They knew how to squeeze a nickel. We were a solid, middle class, plastic plant family. Ain’t no need to waste a bunch of water on inside plants and I doubt the plants could have survived the secondhand smoke that us kids did.
Kind of questioning that “frugal” opinion, when I remember they were ripping menthol cigs most of my childhood. Maybe they were just being selfish.
This column got me going down memory lane. My mother was allergic to alcohol. I’m not kidding. Literally allergic to alcoholic beverages. That’s not a joke. I’m allergic to a twelve pack, just like most of you, but she would start coughing, eyes would swell up and she’d look like she had the mother of all colds after just a few sips of anything alcoholic.
I’m not sure you could get a worse draw on allergies.
If the government ends up banning menthol cigarettes, I wonder how much a bootleg pack of Kool Filter Kings would cost on the back-channel market. Or maybe you believe that if the government outlaws something, it will eliminate it from society. I thought Fairy Tales were true once too.
Anyway, I decided to look it up. You can order three cartons of Kool Filter Kings for $153.00 if the urge hits you. If you’ve got a big weekend planned, you can get twelve cartons for $576.00. You do you, no judgement from this column.
Rest easy. This column has been a complete nothing burger so far. I’ve got this bit of news you can use. The government is still out here working for you. Gas is high, we’re back to fighting a war Europe, your 401Ks have tanked, Supreme Court decisions are being leaked, Americans are begging for baby formula from other countries and North Korea and Iran have beefed up their nuclear capabilities.
No worries. Your government has got this. The solution is to move the January 6th committee meetings to prime time, so they can be televised to the maximum audience.
Yes, we have problems stacked on top of our problems and one of the priorities in Washington is to televise these hearings so that the committee can get maximum exposure to rip on Donald Trump and show off their investigative prowess over the events of that day. An event that involved a total of 2,000 – 2,500 people, many of whom did nothing wrong; yet here we are.
I say punish the law breakers and move on. Instead, the American people get representation that prioritizes maximum political gain above all else.
(Guy Speckman cannot be reached. He’s watching January 6th hearings and stockpiling baby formula)