9 minute read
Broke Girls ’
My Christmas wish list for Santa
Tony Wade
Daily Republic coRResponDent
Idon’t usually wait this long before sending santa my wish list, but with the modern forms of communication we have at our disposal, i’m not that worried about him receiving it in time. i actually had planned to go all old school this year and break out some lined paper, a no. 2 pencil and write a list out in – wait for it –cursive. i was concerned at first because writing stuff longhand was not something i had done for a long time. cursive went from being something i mastered in third grade and used frequently to just another font among hundreds of others. anyway, with a mere five days left i am having this printed in the newspaper, posted online and i’m going to send a private message on the santa claus Facebook page that is run by his elves, er, working little people. Holographic virtual reality live concert portal so i have now been going to live concerts for 40 years. My first was Def leppard in november 1981 and my last was christmastime rockers trans-siberian orchestra on Dec. 3. actually, i had decided that a Joe bonamassa show i saw in san Francisco in 2019 was gonna be my last, but i wanted to make sure, plus i love tso. after the show i am definitely done.
Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t a bad show, quite the opposite. it’s just that at this age, any enjoyment that i receive from a live concert has to be weighed against how much of a hassle it is. i mean, we got to sacramento and then there was the hassle of traffic. then the hassle of having to park. then the hassle of having to wait in line to get in, the hassle of being searched, the hassle of finding your seats and on and on. now i had never been to the Golden 1 center before and its peculiarities helped me make up my mind. our seats were in that layer of the sky right before you go into outer space. now, that was fine, i chose them. My wife beth and i have seen tso twice before so we didn’t need to see the performers’ facial expressions, they put on an enormous entertaining spectacle so there really isn’t a bad seat.
Well, until we saw that the stairs going up to ours were at a near 90-degree angle. Me and beth have lost significant weight so it wasn’t a struggle with gravity getting there, it was just freakin’ terrifying to attempt to scale a steep indoor mountain without a harness or parachute or something. invariably there were the weed smokers too. i ain’t mad at people who use weed, but there’s no smoking and i have asthma. tso was great as always, but on the whole the hassle outweighed the enjoyment. now, to be sure, i will continue to attend the awesome Frazier trager shows at Fairfield’s Downtown theatre where i can be home in 10 minutes, but the big shows i have to drive the better part of an hour to get to? uh, no. so i want santa and his worker little people to whip me up a holographic virtual reality live concert portal so i can enjoy a live show in the comfort of my own crib. it would be just like being there without having to scale the Matterhorn, park or suck in secondhand smoke. plus you could pause it to go to the li’l boy’s room. Men in Black Flashy Thing/Matrix blue pill i need either one of those handheld Men in black Flashy things that you hold in front of your eyes and when it flashes it wipes out your memory or a blue pill from “the Matrix” that would make me blissfully unaware of
certain things. i would need them to be able to be dialed into certain memories, not a blanket erasure of all my cranial recordings. in this case i want to delete the memory of watching the 2021 netflix documentony Wade tary about tV painter bob The last laugh Ross called “Happy accidents, betrayal & Greed.” i am a huge bob Ross fan and it messed me up hearing about how allegedly he was and continues to be exploited by a family that gained legal access to his likeness and legacy. it made me look at the bob Ross calendar, bob Ross Happy accidents bandages and bob Ross t-shirt i have with something resembling shame for being duped.
Self-balancing roller skates
i had a love/hate relationship with roller skating back in the day. i mean, on the one hand roller rinks blasted music i liked and there were girls there. on the other, i never learned how to skate. you know how you’re taught to get your balance on a bike? i never received that instruction or mastered it for roller skates. Flailing wildly then falling and dragging anyone else near to me to the hardwood floor? i’m all over that. skating? no. i want some self-balancing roller skates that will not allow you to fall and do the work for you so i can finally truly enjoy the classic 1979 tune by Vaughan Mason & crew, “bounce, Rock, skate, Roll.”
Blues Brothers car speaker
Remember in the movie “the blues brothers” when Jake and elwood drove around chicago with that ginormous speaker on top of their car to let people know about the show they were doing that night? i want one of those, but not for promotional purposes. i just want to be able to say at an intersection when someone is too hesitant:
“you HaVe tHe RiGHt oF Way! DiD you Get youR license FRoM a Happy Meal?” or when i see those kids who travel in packs pulling wheelies, riding in the middle of the street and causing problems:
“is it tHe biKe tHat MaKes you a MoRon? oR youR lacK oF HoMe tRaininG?” or when i pass a pedestrian wearing a boss Ross t-shirt:
“WatcH ‘Happy acciDents, betRayal & GReeD’ – tHen taKe tHe blue pill!”
Womanspeak translator
i saw a commercial for a smartphone that can translate different languages back and forth in real time. i want one of those that speaks woman. that way if my wife says, “i’m fine,” the little artificially intelligent voice would translate it as, “i am definitely not fine. i’m upset and angry and annoyed and you have to figure out why.” or if she said, “sorry, what?” the little voice would say, “i heard exactly what you said and you have seven seconds to change it.”
Fairfield freelance humor columnist and accidental local historian Tony Wade writes two weekly columns, “The Last Laugh” on Mondays and “Back in the Day” on Fridays. Wade is also the author of The History Press book “Growing Up In Fairfield, California.”
Bee relocation expert removes 7-foot-tall beehive from Florida couple’s bathroom wall
st. peteRsbuRG, Fla. — a Florida couple had a massive beehive containing some 80,000 bees behind their bathroom wall, where the insects had been living, likely for years, and had produced roughly 100 pounds of honey, a bee removal expert said. the 7-foot-tall hive was hidden behind a shower in shore acres, a neighborhood in st. petersburg, Fla. beekeeper and bee relocation expert elisha bixler broke bathroom tiles to expose the huge swarm. bixler, who has her own bee relocation service called How’s your Day Honey, said the homeowners called her in october, explaining that they had known there was a hive in the wall for some time but were not too concerned until recently, when the bees slowly started to escape into their bathroom. the husband was stung at least once, bixler said. the couple wanted to have the bees relocated rather than exterminated, bixler said. bixler said she used a thermal gun to find the precise location of the bees, then started removing tiles. “as i was breaking the tiles, the beehive just didn’t stop – it went floor to ceiling. i ended up pulling all the tiles out down to the studs and all that was left was that ginormous 7-foot beehive,” she said.
it took bixler more than five hours to scoop up all the bees and collect all their honey, which she was hauling away in buckets and trash bags, she said.
“there was honey everywhere – walls, doorknobs, my shoes,” she explained. “it was a sticky mess.” bixler said the hive was one of the largest she has seen – and the first one that she has removed from a shower. she said she transported the bees to her personal property, where she is rehabilitating them before relocating them to a working aviary where they can once again make honey. as for how the bees got into the bathroom, bixler said the homeowners told her that they had their roof redone several years ago and believe that a small hole may have been left behind that allowed the bees to enter. bixler said this was not the first time that these homeowners found a hive in their bathroom. but the first one was small and the husband removed it on his own, she was told. in Florida, discoveries such as this one are not that uncommon this time of year, bixler said. she explained that from March to november, when the weather is warmer, bees are the most active, so homeowners are more likely to see them.
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