The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Odds are you were like me, just get past the elections, get to the Inauguration, let the fetid dismal fog clear and maybe, just maybe, we could get back to some semblance of sanity in this country. The emperor without clothes would slither back to his golf course and his reign of terror would end. Okay, it’s been less than two weeks and from my vantage point down here at the bottom of the food chain, not much has changed. Oh sure, we got a new leader and yeah, the Senate flipped, signs of optimism if you’re not a Qanon Kool-Aid addict who thinks the inauguration was photoshopped and Trump is still president and will be recrowned king very very soon. Course, some of those Qanon addicts are now in the Congress.

The enemy is within. And Trump has decamped to his Mar-a-Lago golf compound to receive kisses and condolences from his old pal Minority Leader McCarthy who hopes to mend fences and keep the masses restive without going full berserk. Obviously the little incident in the Capitol Building a few weeks back has receded to nothing more than an amusing anecdote for the Republicans, children acting out, no need to worry. That Hang Pence talk was just good sport. Nothing to do with the stolen election that D.J. Trump won by huge margins ….

Yesterday I was surprised to learn that the forest fires in California were actually started by Jews firing lasers from outer space. Although later I heard that no, they weren’t started by the Jews, they were actually started by Elon Musk. It’s hard to get accurate information, apparently, in this brave new world of technological marvels. Rep. Greene from upstate Georgia has suggested the best way to deal with Nancy Pelosi is to put a bullet in her head. If you thought Congress might sanction this dangerous assassination talk, you’ve been asleep the past decade or three. The days of dealing with Richard Nixons are long gone. Say hello to government by the Three Stooges. Poke em in the eye, smack em with a hammer, put a bullet in her head, it’s all good fun. The barbarians are at the gate, the lasers are aimed at Smokey the Bear, the truth is out there somewhere but I guarantee you most folks won’t find it.

I love a good holiday as much as the next yahoo … but c’mon, this Groundhog’s Day business, let’s be honest, the Chamber of Commerce out there in Pullmyleg, Pennsylvania has pulled a fast one on those of us who take meteorologic prediction seriously. Down here on the convergence zoned South End, No Way is a groundhog going to see his shadow on Feb. 2nd. Even if we had groundhogs! This thing just gives Science a bad name. And lately, the last thing it needs in these superstitious, fake news, impeachment trial, end-of-the-world times is a black eye over some mammalian hairball on the East Coast seeing its hairball shadow (or not) and then extrapolating that to El Nino or asteroid strikes on Wall Street or global warming.

Which is precisely why some of the more empirically minded boyz down at the Mabana Body Shop have been searching, in a deductive sort of methodology, an alternative Predictor of winter longevity. Hellfire, if this Covid lockdown makes every day the same as the last one and the one coming tomorrow, we figure there’s no point in fighting endless monotonous inevitability. We’ll just pull the covers up, collect unemployment and wait patiently for our vaccinations. This is how civilizations thrive: they figure out tides and seasons for planting schedules and harvest times and earlier happy hours.

The model the boyz constructed over the past decade or so is a local paradigm that utilizes a 5 gallon polyethylene bucket of fresh caught Dungeness crabs —- I KNOW you’re going to point out they’re illegal this time of season, but listen, we’re putting em back when the data is collected. Spirit of the Law, if not the Letter and that, in a clamshell is the very essence of the South End Way. —- So you got a pail of clacking claws and now you bring out a dog, any dog, any breed, random sampling, see? And you let the pooch check out the crustaceans. No shadows, no hibernating drowsy marmots. And if the crab gets a lock on Snoopy’s snout, voila, studies have shown that is a true omen of an early spring. The dog schnozz slips the noose, 6 more weeks of sleeping in. Or six more months of a spiking pandemic. Probably both.

Simple. Like Einstein says, the more elegant the theory, the higher the probability it’s correct. And the boyz down at the body shop will tell you, the accuracy here is in the 90 percentile range, statistically astounding. We’re not claiming, like those unabashed self -promoters in Pennsylvania, that this will predict spring or the end of Covid for the entire country, but for all us Left Coasters, rest assured, Feb 2nd now has science as its bedrock foundation. We’ll leave it to the South End Chamber of Commerce how they want to capitalize on it. Crab Dog Day. Nice profitable ring to it, don’t you think, kind of like a cash register. If we can keep PETA at bay….