Time switch a cue for purging of file

This is the weekend when the talking heads on television remind us to turn back our clocks one hour because of the end of daylight-saving time.

Should a miracle occur and some of them actually refer to DST correctly as “daylight-saving time” rather than the popularly erroneous “daylight savings time,” the drinks are on me. If this crowd’s track record in the matter is any indicator, my bar bill won’t exactly break the bank.

But that’s an old horse that I long ago flogged to death, with no appreciable benefit to mankind, so I won’t go there again today. Let the language police worry about the sorry situation from here on out. And rotsa ruck to them.

The time change means it is also time for the semi-annual purging of the dawg-eared file folder containing faded newspaper clippings, barely decipherable notes to myself in journalese shorthand, old fortune cookie maxims and the like that once seemed like great jump-starts for columns but got upstaged by more pressing current events.

There’s this note on the Rep. Gary Condit (remember him?) dustup: “Condit. Shud hv bought just pants, sted entire suit. Never wears damn jckt. Always slung over shldr…” An attachment notes that NBC’s claim to have an “exclusive” interview with the parents of Chandra Levy, Condit’s young intern friend, gives new meaning to the word “exclusive,” seeing as how, at the time, you wouldn’t have wanted to have been standing between the elder Levys and the nearest television camera or microphone. An “exclusive” interview with Ma Levy in those days was about as exclusive as a cold day in the Allagash in the middle of January.

Great bumper stickers I have encountered during the past six months are duly recorded in my overstressed folder. “Horn Broken. Watch For Finger” is a favorite. As is “Time Is What Keeps Everything From Happening At Once.” And “I Brake For No Apparent Reason.” But the one which would look best chiseled in stone over the entrance to one of our institutions of higher learning, is “Artificial Intelligence Is No Match For Natural Stupidity.”

There is a news clipping out of Bath, Pa., about the landlord who had placed several old porcelain toilets, including one in flaming pink, in front of his rental properties for use as tulip planters. Flushed with civic pride, he suggested that townspeople – rather than grousing about his bout of inspiration – should be thankful that he’s serving as a one-man Chamber of Commerce in their behalf. “When you think of Bath you think of

bathrooms,” the man said.

“But bathtubs were too big, so I used toilets…”

Another clipping reported that Montana had approved emergency restrictions on “water skipping,” an increasingly popular summer sport in which participants gun a snowmobile down a bank or boat ramp into the water at full speed and hydroplane across the water until they reach shore or sink to the bottom, whichever comes first. Skippers now must wear a life jacket, be at least 16 years old, and stay away from no-wake zones within 200 feet of shore. The restrictions came after one non-swimmer Montana dude drowned in a reservoir when his snowmobile lost momentum and sank. Skipping appears to be strictly a Montana trick. No Maine snowmobiler would be numb enough to try such a stunt. Especially since he didn’t think of it first.

After watching hell-raising young Palestinians heave rocks at police on cue from CNN television cameras this past summer I deposited this note in the folder: “Rioters. Where get rocks??” Damned if I can figure that one out, especially when all about them the streets are paved seemingly better than in most any Maine town you’d care to name. Are there local Rocks R Us franchises that supply the stones? Do they recycle them for use in the next riot, or truck them in fresh from the outback for each performance? Are there different size rocks for different age groups and skill levels? It looks like there are some pretty good arms there. Suppose one of these wild-eyed bozos could be cross-trained to become the badly needed fourth starting pitcher for my beloved Cleveland Indians?

The freshest clipping in my collection, gleaned from Thursday’s paper, provided a spark for a column that would practically write itself, so high is its Bull Quotient. The Associated Press story reported that O.J. Simpson had been acquitted of charges stemming from a Florida road-rage incident. When the prosecutor asked Simpson on the stand whether he ever would lie under oath, Simpson replied, “I’ve never been put in that position, to have to lie with my life on the line…”

NEWS columnist Kent Ward lives in Winterport. His e-mail address is olddawg@bangordailynews.net.