Chill Pill

This time of year is not nice to me. I hate the cold. I could really do without it. But if you talk to someone who lives where it's cold, they swear by it.

"You can always put on more clothes"

But that's the beauty of hot weather. People take off their clothes. There's an entire calendar industry based on that ideal. You wouldn't want to be flipping thru a calendar, going..

"Whoa come check out Miss April. All she's wearing is a ... parka, a scarf, mittens, wool socks, a ski mask, galoshes, a turtleneck, and earmuffs. You can almost see her eyebrows! It looks so hot!"

I'm from Texas. The South. We're proud of our hot temperatures. The hole in the ozone layer doesn't scare us.

"Global warming? Down here we call that July."

I visited India a few years ago and it was 120 degrees there. The heat didn't bother me so I used the free time to explore the country side. I saw a guy with one of those pedal-generated grindstones to sharpen knives. He was outside a restaurant just pedaling/sharpening away. No goggles. His idea of safety involved turning his face away to avoid the flying sparks. One normal brown eye. One googly over-sized green eye. Green as in Go Find Another Job. He looked like how I'd imagine a pirate to look like, if he removed his eye patch.

There's something about watching someone sharpen a knife that always come across as creepy. Especially someone who spends more than 2 seconds sharpening it. Are we cutting cucumbers or ankles?

You always see infomercials on tv advertising a set of knives. They have every size blade imaginable from tiny pearing knives to the ones you can cut a slab of meat with. But never do they have a sword.

"Even after slicing through human bone, it never loses its sharpness. Our patented Ronco Miracle Blade Excalibur will not only sever the limbs of any late-night intruder, it also glides through this tomato"