This week I would like to introduce a new feature I am calling, “Scratching My Head in St. Augustine.” I’ll run it every once in a while — whenever I think, see or read something that makes me scratch my head and say, “If we can clone sheep and make salmon pinker, why can’t we figure out how to stop breeding stupid people?”
So off we go on our first trip down what I affectionately call “What the Heck Lane”:
• I don’t mean to make light of something as serious as murder, but this Reuters story definitely had me scratching my head: “A customer banned from a Tokyo ear-cleaning salon was arrested in Tokyo Monday on suspicion of stabbing a young woman working at the salon and killing her grandmother, Japanese media reported.”
Obviously murder is tragic, but let’s back up for a moment so someone can — please! — explain to me what in the name of wasabi an “ear-cleaning salon” is? How dirty are their ears? The story explained the salons this way: “Japan has many salons where workers, often women, clean customers’ ears with ear picks, sometimes as the customers lie on the workers’ laps.”
OK, it just gets creepier and creepier. I’ve never had a manicure, I barely remember to get my haircut — usually only when people start asking why I’m wearing an azalea bush on my head — and I wouldn’t have my eyebrows tweezed if they were paying me for the service. So unless I’m duct-taped to a chair and under anesthesia, no one is going in my ear canal.
• I nearly scratched a bald patch on this one: The Chicago Tribune reports that a company called LifeGem is going to produce diamonds from, get this, a lock of Michael Jackson’s hair. Let me just repeat that … a company is planning to make tiny little diamonds from the King of Pop’s … wait a minute, what?!? I had to read this five times and I still can’t believe it. I mean where, except for a late night out at the bar, do you even come up with such an idea. “Dude, I say we either go throw up off a hotel balcony again or make diamonds out of Michael Jackson’s hair. Who’s up for it?”
• Why is it dictators don’t have better fashion sense? Take for instance Kim Jong-il, the leader of North Korea who apparently only has two sets of clothes — a tan zip-up jump suit he’s always photographed in or a pair of black silk pajamas that he likes to wear out. Apparently nobody on his staff has the courage to mention to him, “Uh, Supreme Leader. You’re still in your PJs and it’s 30 degrees outside. Why don’t you wear those Jordache Jeans we just bought you on eBay?”
I don’t mean to trivialize the part about North Korea’s nuclear weapon ambitions or oppression, but I just can’t understand why he won’t wear something different for a change — a Mickey Mouse shirt. A tuxedo. A Polo with some non-iron Dockers for casual “starve-the-peasants” day. But not Kim Jong. He loves his khaki.
Which brings me to my point: If you ever get the chance to brutally rule a nation, your first act should be to get a tailor on staff. Any self-respecting madman owes it to himself.
• Why is my wife hooked on “Jon & Kate Plus 8”? I’m stumped. The other night Kate and her kids set up a tent in the backyard. A tent! That was it. And they have a television show! Come on. Give me a television show. I fall off roofs. I say things that make people wonder what time I’m supposed to take my next medication. My mother puts most conspiracy theorists to shame. My brother just broke clean through both bones in his leg while riding a vintage bike on some ass-stupid hills outside of Ocala. We’d make an awesome TV show. People would point and say things like, “Hey, look the family with only three brain cells is back on the funny box with colors in it! Now pass me the moonshine.”
So, enough head scratching for now. Until next time …