1-800-555-FEMA

I got a call from a friend of mine today. We hadn't talked in months, and we had a lot of catching up to do. She is a firefighter in a relatively dangerous city. She generally kicks ass. I want to be like her when I grow up.

Anyway, my friend told me that she had been out of town for a great deal of the fall season. She was dispatched by her fire department to New Orleans almost immediately after the hurricane. She wanted to help rescue people. She is a rescue worker. It is what she is trained to do.

I asked her what it was like. Did she help rescue people from flooded buildings? Nope. FEMA assigned her (and every other rescue worker she knew) to hand out brochures with FEMA's contact number on it. That's what she did all day. Kind of like those annoying "flyer guys" on Manhattan street corners who won't let you walk past without taking a piece of paper.

No rescues.

At night, she would go home to her hotel room, turn on the TV, and watch Sean Penn rescue people from flooded buildings.

FEMA sucks.

Someone sure does have a lot of time on their hands...

What would you do if you bought a bag of nuts at Wal-mart, brought them home, started eating them, cracked open a nut and a condom popped out? Yes, that is what I said: a condom.

A Colorado couple had this experience recently when they bought a bag of filbert nuts (aka hazelnuts) . How did this happen? According to today's Associated Press story, the mystery was solved when the police looked it up on the internet.

"The couple took the nut — and its contents — back to Wal-Mart, where an assistant manager photographed it before the Geists took it to the police. Whether someone thought it was a joke, we take it very seriously," said Wal-Mart spokeswoman Karen Burk. "This is a food-tampering issue."

Apparently, someone had drilled a hole in the nut, emptied the shell and then plugged the hole with wood putty after the condom was inserted.

Someone sure does have a lot of time on their hands.

Turns out, though, that someone else thought of it first. You can actually buy a condom in a nut. The nuts are walnuts, though. The genius who punked the couple in Colorado broke from tradition to choose the hazelnut.

It turns out the "surprise a stranger with a condom in a nut" prank is nothing new. Oslofoodie, a blogger in Norway had the same thing happen to her on Christmas back in 2004. You can read about it in her blog (complete with pictures of the culprit walnut and its contents) here.

Unlike the couple in today's story who went to the police with the offensive nut, Oslofoodie just laughed and admired the prankster's "patch-work." What a refreshing attitude. I think I'll add Norway to my list of places to visit.

I'm famous!

Ok...not famous. But my ego was certainly inflated a bit recently when Scott Brodeur requested an interview with me. Scott was the founding editor-in-chief of www.masslive.com, the online arm of The Republican. Although I will admit I'm not a Republican subscriber (sorry, Scott), I check out masslive.com often, and as some of you know from my blog entries, one of my insomniatic habits is to check out the campuscam featured on the site. He is now the managing editor for website development at Advance.net and also writes two blogs, Blog Beat, and the Blog Beat Northampton, which are hosted on masslive.com. I'm a fan of his blogs, so I was very flattered that he even knew about mine. If you haven't read his stuff, you should check it out. I love following some of the links he discovers. If it weren't for him, I never would have read about the grandma who did a three story beer bong before a college football game this fall.

And now is as good a time as any to check out Blog Beat, because he published his interview with me yesterday (January 3).

I feel like a celebrity. Well, a little bit anyway...

Where is the snow?

According to www.masslive.com, we are in for some nasty weather. Winter storm warnings are snaking across the bottom of my TV screen, and The UMASS campus is closed. The white stuff is supposed to be coming down fast and furious. Right now. So where is it?



It snowed a little this morning. But it isn't snowing anymore. Just look at the most recent campuscam photo from downtown Amherst, and you will know what I mean. We are in the middle of a "no'easter [that] could drop up to 18 inches," but it's not snowing!!

I've always wondered if local television news stations look forward to bad weather the way that CNN looks forward to wars. Ratings boosts, you know. Sometimes, I feel like my local weatherman embellishes a little to keep me glued to the screen.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not disappointed. Shoveling snow is not my idea of a great time. But, still...