Oh, the indignity of it all

Frum Helen Back (aka D.J. Nall), the blogmistress of Hauser Thoughts, is convinced that the Kootenai County Sheriff’s Department discriminates. Last week, she made a pilgrimage to renew her license after almost eight years with the current one. She gave herself time to get the job done, after being warned by fellow sufferers about long delays at the vehicle licensing office. She made it through the maze only to suffer her first indignity when the county worker bee asked if she still weighed the same. She was saddened to learn that she weighs much more now than she did in Y2K. “Too bad she didn’t ask me if I still smoke cigarettes,” FHB noted in her blog. Then, the next indignity. The county employee wanted to know if she was as tall now as then. She wasn’t. By an inch. “I’m beginning to feel like I’m a star in ‘The Incredible Shrinking Woman,’ ” FHB mused. At that point FHB figured she’d pay her $24.50 and pick up her eight-year license before things got worse. She figured wrong. She was told by a “nice deputy” that she was too old for an eight-year license. She’d have to settle for a four-year one. “Of course,” FHB posted, “that made me wonder what he knows about the next eight years that I don’t know.” She felt like telling the deputy that KCSD should be ashamed of itself for age discrimination. But she let it go. Quoth FHB: “This guy had a real badge on his real uniform and I didn’t want to go to jail since I hadn’t had my lunch yet.”

‘Idaho’?

If Broadway can produce a successful play about paying to pee (“Urinetown”), it isn’t that hard to imagine that an “Oklahoma” parody set in a corn field, called “Idaho,” has a shot, too. At Boise’s KTVB, newscaster Alyson Outen points out that Buddy Sheffield’s bawdy version of “Idaho” has “plenty of potato jokes” but suffers from the fact that the playwright has never visited the Gem State. “In the play,” Outen writes for KTVB online, “the Gem State is referred to as the prairie and the imagery depicts cornfields and farmers hugging pigs and talking with a Southern drawl. In fact ‘Idaho’ – looks more like Iowa.” There must be a cornfield and a pig or two in the Magic Valley, right? Sheffield offered Outen an excuse re: the geographic inaccuracy of his own personal “Idaho.” Quoth: “We know it’s not accurate about Idaho. It’s kind of the New York impression of anyplace other than New York.” The play opened Off Broadway last Thursday. Sheffield, again: “I hope the musical runs for five years on Broadway and everybody in Idaho gets to come and see it and feel proud about it.” I’ll wait for the Coeur d’Alene Summer Theatre production of it – in 25 years or so.

Huckleberries

Poet’s Corner: Smaller than a peppercorn,/a mustard seed, a dot;/tiny as the little one/a Congressman has got – The Bard of Sherman Avenue (“How Small Is A Bird Brain?”) … You might have heard that loopy PETAphiles have asked Ben & Jerry to use mother’s milk, instead of cow’s, in their world-famous ice cream. But you didn’t read the response from Berry Picker Jen: “I can barely make enough milk for my 4-month-old. I don’t have any left for a pint of Chunky Monkey” … At the Idaho Statesman, Opinion Editor Kevin Richert has proposed a simile in honor of the political season and recent events on the UI Vandal football sidelines: “(Insert candidate’s name here) has a political resume as skimpy as those University of Idaho cheerleaders’ uniforms” … At the Kootenai MPO blog, Jeff Selle was browsing the Web recently when he learned that a pizza delivery person in the CdA area earned a lousy $11,000 per year, not including the price of gas. He was bored so he deducted another $1,800 (@ $3.60 per gallon for an average driver who uses 500 gallons) to drop the final earnings down to around $9,000. Quips Jeff: “Yikes, hope they’re getting free pizza so they can at least eat.”

Parting shot

You’ve probably heard that a hand and part of an arm washed up on shore from Newman Lake. And that it’s generally believed that the lost limb belongs to a 27-year-old woman who survived a boating accident four months ago. But did you know that some curious bystanders took photos with the decomposing limb after they got over the grossness? Hey, a wag told Huckleberries, they had to do something while waiting hours for response crews.