The Season of No Reason

One of our local "lite" rock stations ("your home for rock so lite it'll tranquilize an elephant and make you want to wrap your lips around your car's exhaust pipe") went to an all-Christmas programming format the day after Halloween.

Let me repeat that: the day after Halloween.

K-Mart was putting up Christmas decorations before they took down the Halloween stuff. Our local Meijer (a Target clone, for those outside the upper midwest) already has their inflatable Jack Frost in front of the store.

ENOUGH ALREADY.

I'm going to run for president. My platform is going to be simple and -- I hope -- a sure-fire winner:

• NO Christmas decorations or Christmas music OF ANY KIND until the day after Thanksgiving (this includes those obnoxious "Christmas in July" sales at furniture and electronics stores).
• All gas pumps, self-scan registers and ATM's must have the same card readers - all cards go in the same way, instead of having different manufacturers set up readers any way they choose.
• All automobiles must have the wiper and headlight switches in separate but standardized locations. My Explorer has the lights on the dash, the wipers on the turn signal stalk; my wife's Honda has the lights on the turn signal, the wipers on the right of the column. God only knows how many times I've turned off the lights trying to turn on the wipers.
• Tweety, Timmeh, the entire News Corp staff, and anyone showing a "W" sticker and/or yellow ribbon magnet will be immediately extraordinarily-renditioned to a heavily-fortified area in the Nevada desert, where they will be forced to listen to the Chipmunk's "Christmas Song" 24-7-365.

I was going to add a fifth plank concerning "No Child Left Behind" but thought better of it. That did, however, remind me of something I saw at Meijer's last week: a set of pet stairs (to help your senior-citizen Cocker spaniel-American climb onto the bed)... with "No Pet Left Behind" in great big letters on the box.

Between that and dubya's "I'm the decider" comment being imortalized in an Equal commercial, it's obvious that dubya and his quaint commentary will be with us foreveh.