Pizza! Pizza?

From today's Philadelphia Inquirer:

A pizza deliveryman stopped by Lower Southampton Township police told officers that he was delivering pizzas in the same station wagon he used to ferry bodies for a mortuary transport service.

William Bethel Jr., 24, was stopped last Friday while driving a station wagon with an expired inspection certificate, police said. While checking the vehicle, police noticed a stretcher in the rear and asked what purpose it served.

Bethel told them that although he was delivering pizzas for a major pizza chain, he also "transports deceased bodies in the same vehicle," police said. The car was impounded, and Bethel was cited for driving with a suspended or revoked license and without a certificate of inspection, the Bucks County Courier Times reported.

Bethel said Tuesday that it was the first time he had used the wagon for both purposes, and that he didn't deliver pizzas and bodies simultaneously. He said he had been called to fill in at the restaurant, and because his car was in the shop, he had taken the wagon.

Bethel said he didn't tell the vehicle owner, Carl Delia of Bensalem, that he was going to deliver pizzas, and he didn't tell the restaurant that the wagon was also used to transport corpses. Delia, who runs the mortuary transport service, said he fired Bethel immediately, and the restaurant manager said Bethel had resigned.

County and state health officials say there is no law against delivering bodies and food in the same vehicle.

Chris Ryder, a spokesman for the state Department of Agriculture, said there would be no food safety concern as long as the pizzas and bodies are in "separate containers" - the pizza in a box and the corpse in a body bag or hermetically sealed box.

What's the punchline here?

"It's Not Delivery - It's DeCorpse-O!"

"30 Minutes - Stone Cold Or Free!"

"Who ordered the half-pepperoni, half-stiff?"

Any other suggestions? In the meantime, let's hope the pizza box and the hermetically sealed box don't get mixed up...

Shattered

And now, the most recent sign that The Apocalypse Is Upon Us:

From the New York Times: Mick Jagger has signed on to star in an ABC sitcom modeled after the serial structure of "Lost" and Fox's "24" called "Let's Rob Mick Jagger."

This town's full of money grabbers, go ahead, bite the Big Apple. Don't mind the maggots!

Move Over, Sliced Bread

There's a new King Of Inventions in town.

I speak, of course, of the new OXO Mango Splitter.

A mango splitter, you say? OK, so maybe I should be excited more over red convertibles or trophy wives ("but Mrs. Po IS my trophy wife," I respond) at this point in my life, but I do have a perverse fascination with really cool kitchen gadgets. So when I read of this wonderful tool in the food section of the local paper, I thought of the many hours, seeming like days, of trying to manually clean mangoes and rushed out to the local kitchen store to buy one.

It's amazing. Absolutely freaking amazing. Slide the splitter down over the mango, and you have two ready-to-be-easily-scored halves and only a little bit of trimming around the seed, should you want to maximize your mango dollar. About a minute of work and you're off to your own personal Mango Episode...and the time saved could be added on to your half-hour with Elaine Benes.

(Mr. Po received no compensation from OXO for this testimonial, but he would welcome a little of your mango, if you're willing to share. The mention of 11% off is not an offer to sell the Mango Splitter at a discount, but simply my laziness in grabbing the first photo I could find on the Web.)

OK, I'm off for a mango, and then off in the car for a day of meetings...from which I'm sure I'll be back with a wealth of new ideas. Blog ideas from driving, that is. I think my best thinking takes place in the car and in the shower.

Thinking is one of two things I can think of that can be done in the car and the shower... :)

No President Left Behind

It gives me great national pride to hear President Bush comment on yesterday's terrorist (pronounced "turrist") bombing in Egypt as "a heinous (pronouncing it "hayn-ee-ous") act." Try NPR or any of the other major news sites for the sound bite.

(Implying, of course, that a unilateral, unjustified war that kills thousands of civilians, creates new generations of turrists, and spawns sectarian civil war, is NOT a heinous act.)

Perhaps if he had been subjected to years of mindless, creativity-stifling, curriculum-dominating standardized testing to identify failing schools, he would understand that the word is, and always has been, pronounced "hayn-ous." Rhymes with "anus," as in the sentence "President Bush is a horse's anus." (Note to PETA: this is merely an instructional example and not meant to denigrate animals.)

(Blog That) You Love Camden In The Springtime

While blogging doesn't tend to have many traditional benefits, such as (let me put on my Rex Morgan, MD phrasing hat here) HEALTH INSURANCE or, in my case, readership, I was alerted via print media to this valuable free offer:

Blogger alert. On the third weekend in May, a notebook, a URL, and a good pitch could get you into Camden's waterfront attractions for a little viral-marketing experiment.
About 200 bloggers will be given weekend passes to the Riversharks baseball games, the "Big Guns" exhibition at the Battleship New Jersey, and the "Shark Realm" at the Adventure Aquarium. The only requirement is that they blog about their experiences.
Real bloggers - this means you need to have actually blogged before - should make their case by May 12 to aquarium p.r. guy Bill Larson, blarson@AdventureAquarium.com.

Yes, folks, an active blog and the willingness To Write For Free Entertainment can win you a free weekend of attractions in Camden, New Jersey. (No truth to the rumor that those not selected for this program win TWO free weekends of attractions.) But seriously, folks, while I've never been to the Battleship New Jersey, I hear it's an interesting tour, and the Aquarium has been recently updated and is fun as well. My personal favorite, given my baseball bent, would be the Riversharks tix -- they play in the independent Atlantic League, so you can be guaranteed that no one is on the field for any reason other than they love the game and are looking for a shot to latch on with a big-league organization. You see a lot of young players who may have been undrafted and/or cut from the minor leagues, trying to catch the eye of a major league team, as well as veterans hanging on for a summer call-up -- luminaries such as Rickey Henderson and Jose Canseco were in the league in recent years. If nothing else, you can't beat the price, from tickets down to concessions and parking; there are lots of contest drawings and on-field entertainment to keep everyone's interest; and the location of the stadium is absolutely fabulous, at the base of the Ben Franklin Bridge with a view across the Delaware River of the Philly skyline:

This all being said, I don't know that I will be participating in the festivities; we have weekend guests that weekend, plus tickets to see the Red Sox vs. the Phillies, and frankly, if one can believe SiteMeter (and I have no reason not to), I would be hard-pressed to demonstrate that I'm a real blogger. But I'll be keeping an eye out for other Mid-Atlantic bloggers...

Now for something(s) completely different...

Why yes, it has been a while since last post. But eventually, the Blog Cache in my brain becomes so full that it needs to spit out two completely unrelated thoughts, just to make room.

While in the car yesterday, I spotted the following bumpersticker:

I LOVE My

Cancer-Free HUSBAND

What exactly is up with that? Did the driver not love her husband when he had cancer? Or does she have multiple husbands and loves only the cancer-free one (in which case, where is she doing her marital prospecting? Sloan-Kettering?). And what's with the peculiar juxtaposition of the lower-case and upper-case (or, as my oldest daughter said back in kindergarten, "cupper-ase") letters? I don't get it.

Speaking of bumperstickers, I am reminded of one that I saw a while ago, and finally found for my wife, the elementary school teacher:

4 Out of 3 People

Have Trouble With Fractions

Now for the unrelated thought: once in a while, you hear a quote that just makes you stop what you're doing and run for a pencil and paper to record it. After the death of Rev. William Sloane Coffin last week, I heard a rebroadcast of a Terry Gross interview with Coffin, in which the following quote stopped me in my tracks -- simply because these few words so intensely and succintly say, in this era of misdirected right-wing ideologues, what it means to live a life of faith:

"The integrity of love is much more important than the purity of dogma."

Just re-listened to the whole interview - regardless of your affiliation or interpretation, it is worth taking a few minutes. Great thoughts.

City of Brother(hood)ly Ineptitude

Once again, Philadelphia is in the news not for great social breakthroughts, or great events that raise civic pride, but for urinals. Yes, URINALS. Seems that the Comcast Corporation (motto: "We supply all your communication services, so we demand whatever the f**k we want"), who is erecting a large office tower in Center City (after bending our city management over a barrel and asking them to supply not only tax concessions but also a ramekin of K-Y Jelly), wanted to have this building be the tallest Green-certified building in the United States. As part of this noble goal, they wanted to install flushless urinals in all the men's rooms, which would save gajillions of gallons of water each year. Who could possibly think this is a bad idea? Well, the local Plumbers' Union, of course, who protested that these urinals would not require the same level of installation services as traditional urinals. A furor ensues! City politicians and local State government officials are pressed for their opinions on the burning urinal issue. Finally, a resolution is negotiated: Union plumbers will go ahead and install standard water lines, even though these are not required by the new urinal technology, so that they get their precious work, regardless of the environmental benefits. Sure, we'll still save all the water, but money that could have gone elsewhere (say, to reduce our cable bills. Yes, call me Pollyanna.) will now line the pockets of the local plumbers' union. Pardon me, but haven't other people been affected by advances in technology and suffered work or financial loss? Explain to the customer service person who has had his/her job outsourced to India, simply because the technology is now available to make the customer service transaction cheaper and transparent to the user, that they can't continue to get paid for a make-work project while the plumbers' union can. Don't get me wrong -- at their inception, unions served a noble purpose that ensured a safe workplace and a decent standard of living -- but incidents such as Urinalgate have exposed the ridiculous excess to which the basic concept has been taken. (Yes, I expect the Democratic National Committee will repossess my membership card presently.) And Philly wonders why it has the reputation as a provincial backwater on the Northeast Corridor?

BUT WAIT...there's more. Philly seems to be on the verge of again not being able to pass a non-smoking ordinance in restaurants, bars, etc., due to pressure from restaurant/bar owners. Most forward-thinking cities have done so, over the objections of restuarant/bar owners, out of a novel concern for the public good. (Again, I'll risk my DNC card here, but perhaps a better approach would be to incent*, via tax benefits/credits, etc., those who implement non-smoking status, or disincent* those who don't.) Studies have shown that the implementation of non-smoking ordinances have not decreased business at these establishments. But we can't do that here, of course. The plumbers need to have a place to kick back and light up after a hard day of installing useless piping.

* Yes, incent or disincent, not "incentivize." The linguistically-lazy choose to take the noun arising from the verb, add "-ize" or "-ate", and think it's correct. To wit:

• "incent" becomes the noun "incentive." "To provide incentive" is NOT "incentivize."
• "orient" becomes the noun "orientation". To orient is NOT "orientate."

Sorry for the rant on one of my linguistic pet peeves. I'll depart now to visit my traditional, flushing urinal.