Make me an offer!

On the front lawn of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, lines of Sherman tanks on each side ($120,000,000.99 or best offer), the tables have been laid out. Dolly Madison's silverware ($35,000, slightly used), Eleanor Roosevelt's collection of erotic hat pins (Never before seen! Make me an offer!), and the famous Big Stick of Theodore Roosevelt ($18.75, genuine replica) are all on display.

When I was a boy in the Iowa cornfields (actually we lived in a house), the making of fried chicken happened with blissful regularity. My sister and I would be whisked from kitchen to kitchen to consume fried chicken. I have a distinct recollection of telling Lula that her chicken tasted better than the Colonel's.

Immortality achieved.

With this as a background, I must admit that since those bucolic days of yesteryear until only very recently, I had not paid a single visit on Colonel Sanders (now a license rather than a name) or Kentucky Fried Chicken (as we once knew it, now a mere abbreviation, KFC). During these more than 30 intervening years, this purveyor of extra crispy and coleslaw was off my Fast Food Radar (which, by the way makes, the Hubble Space Telescope look like a Kinder egg sneak-a-scope).

And then the Colonel came to Serbia.

In order for me to have taken this photo - which I recently did at a Belgrade toy emporium which will remain Nameless for Legal Reasons - several Stupid Things had to happen.

First the manufacturer had to come up with an idea for a game. He proceeded then to "invent" tic-tac-toe. Realizing, as he must have, that even in the People's Republic of Some Country which will Remain Nameless for Legal Reasons people played this game for centuries already, he had give it a marketing spin. "Let's make it a LEARNING game, Mr. Chang." Mr. Chang (not his Real Name) then thought about it for awhile and came up with this:

Today, Mr. Caesar would be surrounded by a coterie of armed guards in dark glasses. He would probably not be walking around the forum unprotected and in a bed-sheet all by himself. He might not even talk to Messrs. Brutus, Casca, and Tillius directly, but rather have his people set up discussions (especially as the pretext was a petition which Tillius Cimber wanted to conference about on his exiled brother).

[Moment of silent contemplation]

A scientist, chosen by the same gang that strong-armed Galileo into backsies, that poo-pooed Copernicus, and that burned Giordano Bruno for heresy in the middle of Campo dei Fiori. As a class, these are people who do not get along very well with scientists. But now...

HABEMUS SCIENTIFICUS!

And it is all out of our control. Earthquakes quake. Weather squalls. Clouds cumulate. What can anyone do to combat this? Human fallibility on the other hand creates a whole new set of wrong-angle situations - trains derail, airplanes get lost over Malaysia, fanatics get elected to positions of power, armies roll in, and someone wears a red shirt with yellow striped pants.

True story. I have seen that guy.

The effect is meant to demonstrate the machine's power by generating enough noise to drown out any other urban man-made sound within 10 kilometers of the blower.

It also

There are people who are born with an innate sense of orientation. These people always know which way is True North, how to get from here to there without circumnavigating the globe and discovering the West Indies, and do not refer to "right" as the "other left."

What is True North anyway? Is there a Fake North?

Chances are that the world will have ended by the time I finish this sentence. No? Ok, I can probably get a few more paragraphs in before the cataclysm and what St. Matthew calls the time of "great tribulation" (clearly a biblical Star Trek reference, indicating how well he could see the future).

The big question must be HOW the world is going to be ended.