· At any given time today and tomorrow, at least 12 percent of all upper-management people in the city and county will be at the golf tournament, doing what they can to look after our best interests. If any council members or supervisors are out there, they'd better follow different golfers around, lest they violate some open-meeting law.
· At least one idiot (and possibly many more) in the Arizona Legislature will bring up the shootings at Northern Illinois University in an effort to get that ridiculous bill passed that calls for teachers to be armed on high school and college campuses.
I've got a kid at the UA, and I don't want him attending a school where the teachers are armed. Moreover, I don't really want to live in a society where people think the answer to gun violence is more guns.
I have some semi-reasonable friends who own guns, and their conduct has shown me that law-abiding citizens can own guns and not be a menace to society. I'll never understand their fascination with guns, and I'll never own one myself, but different strokes. I just refuse to go through life scared. (I'll also never accept their argument that the Constitution guarantees unrestricted gun ownership without any ties to a militia, but that's for greater minds--like, say, gun nut Antonin Scalia--to determine.)
If that scary-ass bill actually makes it through the Legislature, Gov. Janet Napolitano had better not sign it into law. If she does, I'm going to insist on home-schooling my college student at state expense, and I'll never show up to watch her fake-coach another women's basketball game, ever!
· Tucson Mayor Bob Walkup will ride in the Rodeo Parade. After seeing how he can wave to the crowd with either hand (and sometimes with both, at the same time), it will become clear why the Democratic Party didn't field a candidate to run against Walkup in a Democratic-controlled city! That hand-waving has to be the reason; what other explanation could there be for the Dems to run and hide from this guy?
· There will be wailing and gnashing of teeth among town leaders (such as they are) in Marana every time the TV announcers talk about the "Accenture World Match-Play Championship from lovely Dove Mountain in Tucson, Arizona."
A Marana official will finally corner one of the announcers at dinner that night and mutter something about Waste Management. The next day, the announcer will mention Marana on the air. And mispronounce it.
· The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals dorks will show up to protest at the rodeo, as they do every year. That last sentence represents more media coverage than they deserve.
Did you happen to see that they're protesting a monument to Kentucky Fried Chicken, in Kentucky?! Why not just spit on the American flag?
Why don't you PETA people do something constructive? Instead of protesting the fact that bulls get the opportunity to stop the livin' piss out of crazy-ass cowboys, why not go to a school, and help a kid learn how to read? Or go to a hospice and talk to some poor dying soul? Or buy some homeless guy a veggie sandwich at Subway?
Nobody I know supports cruelty to animals, but then again, I don't know anybody whose definition of cruelty is so broad as to include looking sideways at an armadillo or telling jokes about manatees.
Do y'all understand that if we left all of the animals alone, they would just eat each other? That's what animals (including humans) do. If we were all to resist the urge to deep-fry and consume them, would the other animals learn from our example? Would the lion stop eating the antelope? Would whales swear off krill and switch over to soy?
And if we left chickens alone for 10,000 generations of reproduction, guess what? They'd still be chickens. They wouldn't be smarter chickens. They wouldn't be paint-the-Sistine Chapel chickens. They'd be chickens. And you guys would still be wasting everybody's time.
· No Country for Old Men will win the Oscar for Best Picture. It damned well better. There Will Be Blood and Michael Clayton are real good, but Country is positively haunting.
If Atonement wins, we should declare war on England and the Academy. No, wait, the Bush administration is too gutless to try for a declaration of war. If that were to happen, then all of their Blackwater and Halliburton buddies might be held accountable for all the thievery and lawlessness that's going on.
In all honesty, I haven't actually seen Atonement, because I was afraid Keira Knightley might smile that ghastly smile of hers in it and send me running, screaming, from the theater. The only British movies worth seeing are the Harry Potter movies and anything with Hugh Grant in it. Now, if they could get Hugh Grant to appear in The Deathly Hallows ... oh joy!
I did read that the Academy is going to give Keira Knightley a special Oscar for Best Performance By an Actress Who Doesn't Cast a Shadow.
