As the above headline so boldly proclaims, this week’s topic is, indeed, EARTHQUAKE SAFETY.

People who concern themselves primarily with weather (called “meteorologists,” or, sometimes, “dorks”) have informed those of us who are either interested or who have to write a column on the subject because they have been receiving threatening phone calls from their editors telling them to quit messing around because The Readers are getting sick of picking up the paper faithfully each and every week expecting to see earthquake safety but instead seeing some lunatic subject like “Presidents’ Day,” and — Oh, shoot. I seem to have gotten off track. I’ll have to start that one over.

All right, let’s try it again. Meteorologists have informed us that unlike other natural disasters (fires, hurricanes, Jimmy Carter, etc.), which are usually found during one particular time of the year, earthquakes are permitted in their contracts to strike wherever and whenever they please, thus earning them the distinction of being Nature’s Most Obnoxious Disaster.

It’s a good idea, then, to be prepared for “The Big One,” which, according to “seismologists” (Greek, meaning “people who study seismos”) will absolutely, positively occur sometime between now and a zillion years from next Thursday. With a major catastrophe looming in the near future like that, you should make sure you have plenty of food, or anything else relatively edible, in your house. This will be important if, after an earthquake, the Domino’s Pizza cars can’t get through.

Also, be sure to have a video camera on hand. What good is a natural disaster unless you can get some good shots of people falling down and/or being hit in personal areas by steel girders from nearby collapsing buildings? Who knows — maybe you’ll even get to meet Bob Saget!

Okay. Now that you’re fully prepared, we may as well have an earthquake. When one hits, you MUST:

1. Run around and scream as though your vital organs were being violently removed. This is important, as it makes the news footage look good.

2. Drive your car into what’s left of the lake. Nothing is more boring than an earthquake where no one is hurt and no damage is done. I take that back. “Charles in Charge” is more boring.

If you get the urge to protect yourself, try holding household pets over your head. Almost anything will do, but large dogs work the best. Yappy little dogs with names such as “Fifi” and “Boofy” are pretty much worthless, but I guess that goes without saying.

When the shaking stops, you are required BY LAW to say, “Wow. Was that an earthquake?” Everyone must then pretend that you are not an idiot for asking such a stupid question and reply, “I think so.” Of course, it will be obvious that an earthquake has occurred because any old people who may be present will be laying on the floor, mumbling incoherently to their dead spouses. But you must ask the question anyway.

The next step, once you’ve established that everything at your house is okay, is to turn on the TV to make sure that some damage WAS done somewhere, because, as I mentioned earlier, an earthquake without damages is like a rap concert without stabbing victims.

If the quake was a major one, perhaps you’ll be fortunate enough to see some “expert” opinions on television. I remember how after the San Francisco earthquake, before official results became available, the reporters spent a good half hour asking World Series fans — the same World Series fans who had compensated for the “One-Beer-at-a-Time” rule by getting good and drunk before they got to the stadium — how big THEY thought the quake was on the Sphinctor Scale.

I’m sorry. Richter Scale.

Anyway, so there were all these intoxicated baseball fans attempting to sound like they knew what they were talking about (or, at the very least, to sound coherent). One man placed the quake at five, another at eight, and yet another at 12. This last man was most drunk, and, I think, most amusing.

One interesting fact about earthquakes is that animals can predict them.

No, wait. That’s not interesting. Come to think of it, NONE of this is interesting. I don’t even know why I wrote it.

There are a couple of things that I’ve been wondering about lately. First, what should one do in case of an earthquake? Second, why is Valentine’s Day in the winter instead of the spring? I’ll cover both topics today.

I think Valentine’s Day should be in the spring because spring is, after all, the time of year when “a young man’s fancy turns to love,” while winter is when “a young man’s legs turn to ice because, in the interest of preserving his tan, he refuses to wear long pants.”

So Valentine’s Day should definitely be in April or May sometime. I would suggest April, since there aren’t any holidays there already, except for that Religious Holiday Whose Name You Can’t Mention in Public Schools Because It Implies Religious Preference, So We Just Call It “Spring Break.” I think everyone should write a letter to their friendly neighborhood congressperson and tell them that if Valentine’s Day doesn’t get moved immediately, they will begin finding dead animals in their mailboxes.

Now, some advice for all you misguided teenage boys who need some help on Valentine’s Day. This is, after all, the best time to try to acquire a girlfriend, because it is when girls are feeling the most romantic, agreeable, and, most importantly, desperate. The nearest male emotion to this Valentine’s Day sentimentalism is when a male can emit a belch of such a velocity that his car windows fog up.

It is a strange thing, though. Girls have some kind of gland — I believe it is the same gland that enables them to dance — that gives them the foolish notion that just because it’s Valentine’s Day, they should have someone (preferably a guy, though some women, such as Madonna, are less discriminating) to be lovey-dovey with. Fellas, this is the perfect time for you to move in. Now that I have ended two consecutive sentences with prepositions, I shall move on. Make that three sentences.

“But how do I go about asking a girl out?” I hear you cry, making it four sentences. Well, I happen to be an expert on the subject, having asked a girl to “go with me” when I was in the fifth grade. Actually, I guess I had someone ask for me, but that turned out to be good, because she said “no,” and if I had been right there, I probably would have killed her.

The point (I think) is, you should just ask her. Just walk up to her, put your arm around her, and say, “Hey, baby –” (girls love being called “baby”) “–you’re a babe, I’m a stud, we’re both alone…need I say more?” She will undoubtedly be so overwhelmed that she will lunge into your arms, shrieking, “Oh, yes!” Or maybe she will laugh viciously in your face. I can’t be sure.

Anyway, if she says “yes,” that is a legally binding contract that allows you to walk around with your hands and various other parts of your anatomy firmly clenched to various parts of hers, and also to proclaim in a loud, yet respectful voice to your semi-nude friends in the locker room that you do, in fact, have a girlfriend, and they don’t, so NYAH, NYAH, NYAH.

Oh, yeah. Beginning tomorrow and going through Saturday, the Elsinore High School drama department will be performing scenes from “Romeo and Juliet,” “Macbeth,” and “Taming of the Shrew,” along with a fifteen-minute version of “Hamlet” (which has to be seen to be believed). The shows will begin at 7:30 p.m., and tickets are $5 at the door. The dialogue in all four plays will remain the way Shakespeare wrote it, but the sets and costumes have been altered, so if you are an English teacher, I would strongly advise getting drunk before watching it.

The reason I mention all this is that I, Eric D. Snider, will be playing the part of Benvolio in “Romeo and Juliet,” and the part of Hamlet in “Fifteen-Minute Hamlet.” We’ve all been working hard, and the cast is simply wonderful, so please come out to Elsinore High and watch us make fools of ourselves. And after it’s over, feel free to come backstage and meet the performers. We’ll be happy to sign autographs, take pictures, accept cash donations, and sell copies of “The Unedited Eric, Volume I” (which is NOW available) for only $8. See you there!

Next week: Earthquake safety. Probably. But don’t count on it.

It is at times like this (that is, 25 minutes before our deadline) that we philosophers stop to think about the important things in life, particularly when we are in need of something to write about.

Let’s see. Important things in life. Family, friends, wisdom, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, earthquake safety… Ah ha! Earthquake safety!

But before I get to that, let me mention the other topic — Washington and Lincoln. Their birthdays are coming up this month, and they were two very remarkable men, although they would be even more remarkable if they were alive today, as they would be a couple hundred years old each and could probably get real low airline fares.

Nonetheless, they are both dead, and we are celebrating their birthdays. But how much do we really know about our two greatest presidents? Not much, we’re hoping, because if you do know a lot, then you will probably notice that we have made up most of the facts in this extremely informative column, which is actually about earthquake safety.

George Washington was born February 22, 1732 in Westmoreland County, Virginia. For reasons not mentioned in the encyclopedia in which we found our information, at age 11, George went to Mount Vernon to live with his half-brother, Lawrence Olivier. (We are not sure of Lawrence’s last name; we thought “Olivier” looked good. We are journalists, so we can do that.)

In 1753, Virginia governor Robert Dinwiddie (we are sure of that last name, although we kind of wish, for Robert’s sake, that we had made it up) sent a 21-year-old George to the Ohio Valley to warn the French that they were encroaching on British territory. The French, of course, knew good and well they were encroaching on British territory; in fact, they were encroaching all over the place, and enjoying it, but they still told George (in French) “Your mama.” On his way back, George had to walk most of the way, an Indian shot at him, and he almost drowned in the Allegheny River. We’re not sure what he was doing, swimming in the Allegheny River in the middle of winter, but he sure was.

In the 1770’s, Great Britain began enforcing the “Intolerable Acts,” so called because they were intolerable. George wrote, in a letter to someone, “Shall we supinely sit and see one province after another fall prey to despotism?” Loosely translated, this means, “Are we gonna sit on our butts and let England push us around?”

The colonists’ answer was resounding. “Probably not!” they resounded. The rest, of course, is history. George led the colonies to victory in the Revolutionary War, and if he hadn’t, we would all be speaking English now.Then he was president for a while and died.

Abraham Lincoln was born February 12, 1809 in a log condo in Kentucky. As a boy, he loved to read and greatly desired an education. Unfortunately, he lived in Kentucky, where it is illegal to be educated. Not that he didn’t try. He would sometimes walk 20 miles through the snow just to get to school. People would say, “Abe, why do you walk 20 miles through the snow to go to school? Why don’t you go to the one downtown?” Then Abe would get this thoughtful look on his face and start babbling something about “Four score and seven years ago.” His family thought he was nuts.

In 1842, he married Mary Todd, who, in keeping with the current trends in ugliness among women, looked like Moe, of “The Three Stooges.” She and Abe had four sons, three of which died shortly after looking at their mother, whose face alone ended the Civil War by frightening General Lee into surrender.

Abe was elected president in 1860. Before he knew it, the Southern states were seceding right and left. There was only solution to the rebellion — grow a beard. This caused the Civil War.

In 1863, Abe issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which only freed the Southern slaves. The Northern slaves, who had been pretty smug about living in a part of the country where the government hated slavery, were pretty ticked about this, and in response sent Abe two tickets to see a play at Ford’s Theater. While Abe was enjoying “Cats” with his wife, a weird Confederate actor named John Hinckley, Jr. snuck up behind him and shot him in the head. If he had snuck up in front of the couple, where he could see them both clearly, he probably would have shot Abe’s wife, and the evening wouldn’t have been spoiled. As it was, she couldn’t even get a refund on Abe’s ticket.

Next week: Earthquake safety. I promise.

Today’s topic, as promised last week, is earthquake safety. Before I get to that, though, there is something I think you should know about snow-skiing: it makes you stupid.

I have scientific research to back up this claim, but quite frankly, you probably wouldn’t understand it, since I made it up. So instead, I’ll give you the non-scientific evidence.

I went skiing for the first time last winter for two reasons:

1) I was invited. I will do almost anything if I am invited.

2) It looked like so much fun. On those commercials for ski places, they always show action shots of large, rugged men falling off cliffs and skidding along the snow on their bellies like some kind of deranged otter, and I thought that sliding around on packed ice with eight-foot long skis and sharp-ended poles with which to poke out the eyes of innocent bystanders would be an enjoyable experience. “Hey!” I could be heard telling people. “I’m going to go up in the mountains and try to lose the use of my major appendages!”

So I went, and I didn’t have an ounce of fun. It was too cold, I fell down a lot, and I really didn’t know how to ski, having refused to take the free lessons on the grounds that I was “Too Macho.” After about three hours, I quit for the day on the grounds that I was “Too Wet.”

Now, if I had any common sense, I would have never ever ever in a million years agreed to go skiing again. But that one time — those three short hours — affected my intelligence to such a degree that I soon found myself planning another ski trip with the very same people I had gone with the last time.

So I went again with the exact same people, except that my father tagged along, too. He had never skied in his life, but he was smart enough to take the lessons before he tried it. Unfortunately, the one thing they don’t teach you in skiing school is how to keep yourself from breaking the sound barrier as you go down the hill. So here was my father, who had never been on skis before, rocketing down the mountain, jumping off the “moguls” in his “fast” clothes, “spearing” little kids like “shish-ke-bobs” with his “poles” to get them out of his way.

The thing was — he wasn’t falling. My friends and I didn’t like this, so we called his name as he sped past us, disrupting his concentration and causing him to plunge headlong toward the bottom of the mountain. That was almost all the fun we had that day, making my father fall down.

I eventually got tired and went down to the lodge to rest for a while. From the deck, I had a clear view of the ski slopes, and it was at this point that I made my discovery. I was just sitting there, drinking my $1 can of soda and eating my $2.75 slice of pizza, when I decided that I would observe the skiers at the very top of the mountain.

The very top of the mountain is called the Insane Person’s Slope because 1) there are moguls all over the place, 2) it is very very steep, and 3) that is where the snow-making machines are, and if the wind blows just right, you’ll get caught in a snow flurry and you won’t be able to see that there are moguls all over the place and that the hill is very very steep. Despite all these adverse conditions, however, there were still quite a few people up there, most of them clinging to the lift machine and sobbing about how they didn’t want to go down after all.

But I began watching the ones who were brave and/or stupid enough to actually attempt to ski down the hill. What I noticed was that when they finally landed at the bottom of the mountain, the ones whose leg bones were not protruding from their flesh would get up and go do it again! I could not understand this.

After about an hour of observing, I made my startling discovery: The snow from the snow machines was going inside people’s ears, crystalizing in their heads, and preventing their brain cells from functioning properly. This is why, even though they had all ready nearly killed themselves, the skiers would go and try it again. The fake snow was killing their brain cells!

Then I realized — I was one of those people! I had gone skiing once before, hated it, and GONE AGAIN ANYWAY!! The fake snow had infected my brain, just as it was infecting these poor, unaware people’s brains! It was like being in that movie “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” and suddenly discovering that you were one of the pod people! It was horrible.

So I’m going again this month.

Next week: earthquake safety.

This column is about earthquake safety. But before I get to that, let me tell you what it’s like being a columnist.

There are several things that we columnists have to do frequently. The first thing is, we have to write columns. This is sometimes a big pain in the rear, particularly when we’d rather be out on a date with an attractive girl who thinks we’re funny, but NO! We have to sit in this cramped little newspaper office and attempt to type and keep some semblance of a train of thought despite that fact that whoever owns the portable radio has it permanently tuned to an oldies station that only plays Elvis Presley and whoever did “Duke of Earl” and it is driving us nuts and we are just about ready to stomp out the door in search of gainful employment without even storing our work on the computer first. That is how angry we are.

The second thing we have to do is suffer through conversations with people who don’t think that writing is an actual profession, which it’s not, but who are they to say so? I had to deal with one of these people a couple years ago, when I planned out my class schedule for my sophomore year. My regular counselor was busy, presumably with more important students, so my parents and I instead met with a woman whose name I won’t mention because 1) she has access to my transcript and 2) I don’t know how to spell it.

In the course of this meeting, she asked me what I planned to do when I graduated from college. I told her, just as I would tell anyone who cared enough to ask, that it was none of her dang business, and where was my real counselor. But I eventually told her I want to be a writer.

When I said that, though, she chuckled in the patronizing manner you might use if a relative came up and told you that he or she was going to fly off the roof of the barn. “A writer,” she said to my parents. “Yeah, my son always wanted to be a writer…”

My mother, offended by this obvious lack of faith in teenagers, attempted to choke the counselor to death with the strap of her purse and had to be restrained by my father. I found the whole thing pretty amusing.

The third, and perhaps most important thing we have to do is get paid. If it weren’t for the money, we columnists would probably chuck it all and get a real job. “Chuck it!” we would say. “I’m going to go get a real job.”

The only problem with the getting paid part is when you’re a “free-lancer” (or, in layman’s terms, “large pile of worthless gravy skin”), which means that you are not on the actual staff; you just write for the paper in your free time. The problem with this in regards to getting paid is that for a free-lancer to get any money, he has to write out a list of what he’s written and figure out himself how much he is owed by the large, faceless, company and then mail it off to the Payroll Department and wait for the Payroll Persons to send him a check, which sometimes takes several weeks, and the poor writer keeps putting off his Christmas shopping because he doesn’t have any money yet, and he FINALLY gets the check THE DAY BEFORE CHRISTMAS and has to rush out and buy things at the last minute for his friends and loved ones, who have been telling him since he got this creepy job last May that he should find a slightly more stable occupation, such as time bomb deactivating, but did he listen? NO!! He’d rather rush around like a crazy person on Christmas Eve!

The fourth thing we columnists have to do sometimes is write columns in advance, which is what I’m doing now. I knew I would be busy about this time with finals at school, as well as my involvement with the school play, so back during Christmas vacation, I wrote a few spare columns, including this one, which is about earthquake safety. I tried to pick a topic that would be appropriate at any given moment, but then I got to thinking: What if, just the day before this column appears, a major earthquake strikes Southern California, one so large that vice-president Quayle flies out in a helicopter and frowns at what’s left of the area and makes an official statement such as “Golly!” or, perhaps, “Wow!”? Won’t I appear insensitive, making fun of earthquakes just the day after a big one hits?

Then I remembered the last thing we columnists must do sometimes, the thing that makes the world realize that we are, in fact, caring, responsible journalists with rational human emotions.

Sometimes, we have to say, “So what?!?” and do it anyway.

Next week: Earthquake safety. No matter what.

Last Tuesday was a very eventful day for me, because I witnessed something that pertains to the First Amendment and Freedom of Expression, and so forth, something that could rock the Constitution at its very foundation. But even more importantly, I saw a Bob’s Big Boy statue plummet to the earth from an airplane.

This was apparently in honor of Elvis Presley’s 56th birthday. Mark Thompson and Brian Phelps, from KLOS’ popular “Mark and Brian Show,” were at Skylark Airport to drop a Big Boy statue dressed as The King out of a plane. He had a parachute, of course.

I found out that this was going on the day before, and I really wanted to go, but there was one minor problem. School.

The obvious solution, of course, was to ditch. Everyone else ditches all the time, but I never had, and plus, I really needed to go to my first two classes. Besides, I didn’t know HOW to ditch.

Or so I thought. As it turns out, all I had to do was follow this simple one-step process:

1. Walk out the gate.

For some reason, I thought it would be much harder than this. I just naturally assumed that ditching school would involve deception and sneaking around and wearing dark clothing and, perhaps, gunfire, but it didn’t. I just walked out.

(Before you get upset over my juvenile delinquency — I know a lot of you look up to me — I think I should tell you that they want us to ditch. The fewer kids they have to take care of, the more they can concentrate on organizing faculty luncheons.)

Anyway, I drove to the airport and saw, by my count, A MILLION other people who should have been in school. I guess ditching isn’t really that hard after all.

Just after I got there and pushed my way to the front, pretending to be a journalist, Lucky Butt came out, much to the surprise and enjoyment of the crowd. Lucky Butt is a man whose rear end has some kind of magical charm, so he displays it for everyone to see whenever something big is about to happen, such as building a shopping center or dropping a statue out of an airplane, but I guess you knew that, since you were there. EVERYONE was there. Don’t try to tell me you weren’t there, because you were. You probably had some young children who kept running across the runway, and you probably had a camera so you could take detailed pictures of a bunch of people crowding around what may well have been Mark and Brian, and you were probably smoking right in my face. Admit it. You were there. Your high school-aged kids were probably there, too.

So they dropped Elvis-Bob out, and everything was fine, and I got back to school just as lunch was starting. I went to the snack bar to buy what passes for food, and that’s where I saw the aforementioned First Amendment violation. There was this sophomore standing there whose T-shirt read “Kick Some Butt.” I’m not even editing that for you sensitive-eyed readers. That’s exactly what it said.

One of the campus aide persons, whose name I think is Bubba, or at least it should be, didn’t think this slogan was appropriate, however, so he made the poor sophomore take it off and put it back on inside-out so that no one could read it. I guess I don’t really care about the First Amendment thing (I just put that in the first paragraph so you’d keep reading), but there are two things about this T-shirt incident that I find silly.

1. The guy had to take it off and put it back on inside-out RIGHT THERE in the snack bar line. I wonder which is more “obscene” — the word “butt,” or a shirtless young man standing in the middle of a high school quad. (I checked, by the way, and being without a shirt on campus is against the rules, unless you’re in a locker room, which this guy was not. If Bubba had made him walk over to the locker room, though, there was a chance that some more students’ minds may have been polluted by the shirt on the way there, and they might have grown up to become mass murders or high school vice-principals or politicians or something horrid like that. So I guess Bubba did what was in everyone’s best interest. Way to go, Bubba!)

2. It’s rather ironic that less than two miles away, half the school was watching a man called Lucky Butt moon a crowd of Mark and Brian fans and no one seemed to care, nor will any of those students be punished for ditching school, but back at good ol’ Elsinore High, a student was being harassed for having a shirt that said “butt.” Maybe he should have ditched, like the rest of us. It’s not very hard, and no one ever gets in trouble for it.

EDITOR’S NOTE: On this special occasion — that of Eric’s 25th column — we thought it might be nice to have a question/answer session with the award-winning columnist.

Q: You never won any award.

A: Shut up.

Q: How did you start writing “On the Light Side?”

A: I wrote a really funny letter to the editor-in-chief, with whom I have since become very close — I think his name is Bob, or something like that — telling him that if he didn’t hire me as a columnist, he would never see his children alive again. After I threatened to scratch the paint on his car, too, he gave in and hired me. This is more or less that way people get themselves elected to public office. They tell you that if you don’t vote for them, all these terrible things will happen to the Economy and the Government in General, when everyone knows that the only consequence of them not getting elected would be that they would have to go out and find real jobs, which might be difficult, since many of them have the brains of a phone book.

Q: Have YOU ever been elected to public office?

A: No, but I’m considering running for Student Body President in May, just to see if anyone really votes for me.

Q: What if you win?

A: Heck will have frozen over, so I don’t think anyone will care who Elsinore’s A.S.B. president is.

Q: Why did you say “heck” instead of “hell?”

A: After my October 24 column, in which I said “hell” twice, my father told me to say “heck” from now on.

Q: What else did he tell you?

A: To clean my room.

Q: Did you?

A: No.

Q: When you started writing this column, what previous writing experience did you have?

A: When I was in the fifth grade, I wrote about the happenings at Elsinore Elementary for one of the other local papers whose name I won’t mention, but it involves the name of a very hot heavenly body, and then the word “Tribune.”

Q: You wrote for the “Julia Roberts-Tribune?”

A: What are you, a moron?

Q: I’ll ask the questions around here. What am I, a moron?

A: Yes.

Q: Did anything else interesting happen when you were in fifth grade?

A: Yep. I asked this girl I liked if she would “go with me,” the primary result of which would have been that I would have been able to honestly say that I was going with someone, and do you know what she said?”

Q: What?

A: She said, “Go find a stray dog.”

Q: Oh, my. What did you do?

A: My lawyer told me not to answer if you asked me that.

Q: Has anyone ever become really upset over something in your column, I mean so upset that they wanted to burst through your bedroom window one night and set fire to your pajamas and feed your carcass to wild forest animals?

A: Oh, my, yes. Back in October, I talked about how football was going to be the destruction of western civilization, as well as my social life, because all the girls I ask out can’t go because they’re either a football player’s girlfriend or else because they’d rather spend their Friday evenings watching a bunch of athletic guys in tight pants run around and sweat, I have no idea why. I also subtly suggested that all football players and football fans are drooling idiots with IQ’s somewhere between “artichoke” and “Geraldo.”

After I wrote this, I was surprised to learn that not only had a lot of football players read it (and I won’t make any “football player/literacy” jokes here), but that most of them liked it! There was, though, one guy (whose name I won’t mention in the interest of me not having to flee to Mexico) who DIDN’T like it. What he said was, “It’s funny and all, but, you know…don’t do that kind of thing.” I believe he belched once or twice, too. I didn’t know it was blasphemy to make fun of football.

Q: It is.

A: Oh. The next time I really annoyed someone was just two weeks later, on Halloween. I made a comment about a certain group of girls at school called “Death Rockers” who apply their make-up with paint sprayers, and, naturally, they didn’t take it too well. I got a few death threats, but I knew that if they ever came near me, all I’d have to do is throw water on them and they’d melt. They never tried anything.

Q: Are you afraid of them?

A: No. I am afraid of that football player, though. Hey, guy! Don’t take all that football stuff seriously! I love football the way I love my editor, Jim!

Q: Which of your columns do you like the best?

A: Why do you keep asking me all these questions?

Q: It’s my job.

A: Oh. I think the one from July where I talked about the school administration and how I thought they’d made some ridiculous decisions is my favorite one. It was very funny (if I do say so myself, and I do), but it had a message, too, although for the life of me I can’t remember what it was.

Q: Which of your columns do you like the least?

A: I’m beginning to not like this one, if you get my drift.

Q: I’ll ignore that. What is the toughest part of writing “On the Light Side?”

A: Probably dealing with all the people who, anytime something remotely amusing happens, quickly turn to me and say, “You should write a column about that!”, apparently thinking that even though I am very funny in writing, I have no idea when things in real life are humorous and that they should take it upon themselves to tell me.

Q: What does the “D” in your name stand for?

A: I don’t know.

Q: Liar.

A: Your mama.

Q: Why, you–

A: Bring it on, pal.

EDITOR’S NOTE: At this point, Eric and the interviewer began trying to poke one another’s eyes out. After the fight was broken up, the interview resumed…

Q: Is it true that you have a book out?

A: Why, yes. Funny you should mention that. It’s a collection of all my columns so far, including this one.

Q: Why should people buy this book?

A: So I can make money.

Q: But what is the major attraction of the book?

A: Well, from time to time (like every week), something gets cut out of my column either because of space limitations (very often) or because of taste limitations (not so often). But in this book, all of the columns have been restored to their original, pure forms.

Q: If someone got really rich or really stupid or really drunk and actually wanted to buy this book, how would they go about it?

A: It will be on sale at Bits, Bytes, and Books, a new bookstore near Builder’s Emporium in Lake Elsinore, for $8 later on this month. The title is “The Unedited Eric, Volume I.” Ask for it by name.

If you’d rather, you may send $8, plus $2 for shipping and mishandling, to Eric D. Snider, “The Unedited Eric, Volume I”, [my home address followed, but I’m not putting it here on the Internet, or else you’ll all just send harassing letters to my parents]. Please don’t call or write this newspaper about it. The receptionists have enough to worry about.

Q: Are you serious about all this?

A: Very.

Q: Well, thank you for the interview.

A: You’re welcome. Now who are you?

Ihad to serve a detention recently because I had three tardies to chemistry class and public floggings are no longer permitted in school. This was only the second time that I’d been given that punishment (the detention, not the flogging); the other time was last year, after Ed Farrell and I accidentally walked out of Algebra II class fifteen minutes early.

That was an honest mistake though. Everyone else was sneaking out, and Ed and I naturally assumed that twelve wrongs make a right, so we left too. Mr. Hamilton began to suspect that something was up, though, when he poked his head out of his grade book and discovered that he was alone in the room. So we all got in trouble.

Anyway, I got this chemistry detention because of my inability to walk the 17.4 km from English to chemistry in the allotted time (8 minutes). I apparently failed to run the race on three separate occasions, because one day I walked into class and my teacher said, “Okay, class. Before we do some lunatic thing with a bunch of possibly explosive chemicals, Eric needs to go to the B.I.C.!”

Oh, didn’t I mention that? B.I.C. (Behavior Intervention Center) is the room where detentions are served. Last year we had a room called the “Penalty Box,” also for detentions. The B.I.C., however, is entirely different from the Penalty Box in that in the Penalty Box, all of the words on the signs were spelled correctly. Some semi-literate person whose salary is paid by your tax dollars did the signs this year, and it makes me question the school’s intent to really educate us when the people in charge don’t know the difference between “your” and “you’re.”

Anyway, I was handed this little white slip ordering me to goose-step on over to the B.I.C. and schedule my detention. I guess I can understand being punished for three tardies because if you add them up, I was probably an entire MINUTE late, and goodness knows that in that minute, my teacher could have TAKEN ROLL!!!!

What annoys me is that I didn’t even know I had two tardies! I don’t keep track of them; I happen to think that there are better uses for what brain cells I have than remembering how many times I’ve come into a class a few seconds late. I need a few of them, for instance, to remember where I parked my car in the student parking lot, which, by the way, often resembles the Indy Speedway, except that on the Indy Speedway, no one ever tries to cram more than seventeen people into the back of one pickup truck.

So I went to the B.I.C. and said to the woman at the desk, “Hello, I’d like a detention, please.” Rather than chuckle at my witticism, she looked at me as though I had just blown my nose on her blouse, and quite frankly, I had half a mind to do just that.

We scheduled my hour-long sentence for the next Tuesday, and she filled out the Official B.I.C. Detention Slip, which had the words “Penalty Box” crossed out and “B.I.C.” written over them in pen. She gave me a copy of the slip, presumably so that if I came in on Tuesday and for some reason they didn’t have my name down, I could produce my receipt and prove that I was, in fact, supposed to be there. I can see how a lot of people might sneak into the B.I.C. and try to serve detentions that they weren’t supposed to serve.

When I showed up to serve the detention, I was handed a sheet of paper that said (and I quote): “We are the best, we know it and we show it.” The large, burly B.I.C. lackey told me that once I’d written that a hundred times, I could leave.

Now, really! Not only is that a run-on sentence (I mean, where did these people go to school? Elsinore?), but making us write it a hundred times is propaganda if ever I saw it! I mean, I realize there’s a problem with school spirit, but is this how they intend to increase it? By beating it into our minds until we become weak, submissive jellyfish? If someone were to tell George Orwell (1984) about this, it would kill him, were it not for the fact that he’s all ready dead.

What’s more, I was told by the aforementioned Miss Congeniality that if I wanted to engage in some constructive, non-brain cell destroying activity such as, oh, say, doing my homework, I couldn’t. I HAD to do this.

But I guess it all makes sense, really. High school is supposed to prepare us for real life, and with the detention policies, it’s doing just that. There must be just THOUSANDS of jobs where the boss orders you to waste time and not do anything productive. And as for being late — I can’t tell you how many people I know have been fired for being ten seconds late! It’s a jungle out there, and the school is preparing us for it by enforcing rules that make us feel like we have the brains of retarded soup spoons.

I could go into more detail about the situation of universally-enforced rules that sometimes don’t make sense, but I can’t right now. The bell’s about to ring, and if you get FOUR tardies, they drag you out in the street and shoot you.

I get a lot of letters. Most of them begin, “Dear Mr. Snyder: We would like to send you several large piles of money, Mr. Snyder, because we are absolute loons. So, Mr. Snyder, just peel off the little tiny stickers that you have probably accidentally thrown away because you, Mr. Snyder, are a complete moron, and mail them to us, and we will will send you, Mr. Snyder, ten million billion hillion jillion Milli Vanillion dollars right to your home in Lake Elsinor, California.”

I assume this is because I did something to get my name on a mailing list, such as joining a record club, or being born. It was probably the record club, because I am almost certain that my name was spelled correctly on my birth certificate.

But the point of this column is not to talk about mail. No, wait. Yes it is. But not junk mail. Good mail. Like the letter I got recently…

“Dear Eric,” it began, “I have been reading your work since the dawning of time, and I trust you, both as a journalist and as a human being. So here is my question: Where did Zsa Zsa get all her money? I mean, it’s not like she has a job or anything.

“No, wait. That is not my question. My question is: Is there a Santa Claus?

“Your fan, Virginia, age 9.”

I was deeply touched by the frankness and openness of this obviously intelligent young person, and, since I had nothing else to write about this week, I thought I would answer her letter here in the column.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. Only he’s not an actual person that you can see or touch or make obscene gestures at when he cuts you off on the freeway. He is more like a symbol — a representation of the Christmas spirit.

Remember when you were a small child and your mother would drag you to see Santa at the local mall (“local” meaning “in Riverside County somewhere”), even though you hated him because he looked like a big, fat candy cane and always smelled of stale beer? And remember how you would always cry and wet your pants when she sat you on his lap? Do you think that if Santa Claus were a real person, he would have time to go to the mall and have little brats urinate on him, particularly during the Christmas season, when he would undoubtedly be at his busiest? Of course not. Don’t be an idiot. That obviously was not the real Santa Claus because Santa Claus, as I said, is just an image.

You know how, starting December 1, every television station in the country shows “It’s A Wonderful Life” fifty times, and how every station advertises the heck out of it, as though they had the exclusive broadcasting rights to it and as if it were possible to turn on the TV at any time of the day or night and not see “It’s A Wonderful Life” somewhere? And you know how your mother always feels compelled to watch it every single time it is on? All that is Santa Claus.

You know how your mother always takes you Christmas shopping to Kmart, or a place of equivalent class, and how you drive around the parking lot for hours and hours searching for a parking space closer than the McDonald’s four blocks down the street, since you know that you’ll be buying approximately four thousand dollars worth of stuff and if you tried to carry it that far, your mother would probably lapse into a coma and you would probably just regress to the fetal stage, and you finally give up and sneak into a handicapped zone? That is Santa Claus.

You know how your brothers and sisters always get up on Christmas morning at an hour that is only technically considered morning and tear into their loot and get into fights over who gets to play with what because of course no one wants to play with his own stuff, and how everything gets broken even before your parents have even gotten out of bed? That is Santa Claus, too.

So you see, Virginia, there really is a Santa Claus. Everything associated with Christmas — Christmas cards, family get-togethers, large mobs of Christmas carolers singing ridiculous songs, each person in a different key — all of these things are Santa Claus.

I would not be surprised, therefore, if you no longer want to leave out a plate of milk and cookies for him. He probably would not eat them unless they were cholesterol-free anyway.

Merry Christmas.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This column is written in the present tense, but we don’t know why. We suspect that Eric wasn’t paying attention when he wrote it. We’re not sure.

It is Thursday, November 15, around noon. I am standing on a volleyball court in the gym at Elsinore High School, hoping against hope that no one hits the ball to me. My team, which I agreed to manage during this tournament under the firm assurance that I would never actually have to play, has strict orders to form a human wall around me to prevent the possibility of me actually having to come in contact with the ball.

The game has not begun yet, so I have a moment to fill you in on the rather loony turn of events that led up to all this.

It seems that one of the team members, Chris, went home earlier today day because 1) he had a chemistry assignment to finish, and 2) his father is a teacher, so he could get away with it. He was supposed to have been back in time for the game, but he wasn’t. And since I was technically the alternate, I had to play.

“Eric, you’ll have to play,” said Jeff, one of my teammates.

“What, are you nuts?” I asked politely, adding that I wasn’t even wearing the requisite baggy, tacky-looking shorts that all true volleyball players wear, nor had I a tank-top, since I am prohibited by law to wear tank-tops in public because of the condition of my upper arms.

But here I am anyway. I’m looking to the sideline, where several of my supportive friends have gathered to make fun of me. Chris still isn’t here.”Everyone hit it to Eric Snider,” says one of our opponents, Mitch, to his teammates. Mitch is legally a football player, but he is disguised as a volleyball player today, undoubtedly because there is no way I would ever get close enough to football for him to humiliate me there.

The game has started. Everything is going well. I am standing in one corner of the court, technically playing, but not really. The ball is coming at me! “Aaaaaaaaahhhhhhh!” I say in a perfectly calm manner that elicits several giggles from my friends on the sidelines. “Get it, David!”

David gets it. Good. I almost had to hit it myself, which might not have been so bad, since it probably would have veered to the left and hit one of my friends on the sidelines. But we would have lost possession.

Now they’re telling me I have to “rotate.” Thinking this to be a vulgar statement, I tell them they can rotate, too. They explain to me that in volleyball, “rotate” means to move to a new position.

“Why?” I ask. “I’m happy here.”

“Those are the rules,” David says.

“What a stupid game,” I mutter as I look toward the position they want me to move to. It’s the back right corner. The serving area!

“Wait a minute,” I say, looking nervously for Chris. “You want me to serve?!?” I laugh hysterically, hoping to get everyone laughing so that I can escape out the side door. It doesn’t work.

“Yes, it’s your turn to serve,” says David. I hate David.

So now I’m standing in the serving area, holding what appears to be the volleyball. I’ve never held one before. It’s nice and soft.

I hold it in my left hand and swing my right arm back. I hit it. It’s going up in the air! It’s going over the net! It went over the net! I can’t believe it!

Unfortunately, I’m being told, it didn’t go over our net. It went over the net on the next court. They insist that doesn’t count. I insist they are wrong, informing them that I am a team manager and that I know what I’m talking about. They tell me to shut up. I spit at them.

Chris showed up just in time to see my serve and laugh at me with all the rest of my friends. We are trading places now. My friends are telling me, once I am safely off the court, that I did well. I spit at them, too.

As I leave, I reflect on what just happened. I played a game of volleyball! Not very well, but I played, nonetheless. And all my life, I’ve hated sports! All these years I’ve been avoiding sports, the way you avoid enormous aunts who want to kiss you and pinch your cheeks and who you always want to strike with a heavy, blunt object, such as a car. But I actually had a little fun today! Maybe I’m broadening my horizons. Maybe I’m making myself into a well-rounded person. Maybe I will become one of those people that everyone envies who can play sports and is smart, too.

Or maybe I’m just trying to stretch something that only took five minutes to happen into 750 words so I can get paid.

Yeah. That’s probably it.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This column is written in the present tense, but we don’t know why. We suspect that Eric may be doing it for effect, or something like that, but we’re really not sure. He never tells us anything.

It is November 16. The Elsinore Tigers are playing the San Bernardino Cardinals in CIF Division 5 Bonus Round Final Jeopardy Playoffs. I am sitting in the announcer’s booth with my friend Ron Chadwick. I decided I should sit with Ron because he knows a lot about football whereas I, when it comes to football, couldn’t write my way out of a paper bag.

This is the second game I have covered. My first game was two weeks ago, in Corona, or someplace, I don’t recall exactly where. It was real cold, though. And I had a cold. My head cavities (of which I have several) were literally bulging with various mucous-related semi-fluids. But there I was, furiously writing notes, taking time every few minutes to expel a major gob.

I didn’t go to last week’s game because it was the same night as the 200th episode of “Cheers,” and if I have to look at a bunch of dumb guys, I’d rather see some that aren’t grunting and sweating and patting one another’s bottoms affectionately (something Norm and Cliff rarely do).

Anyway, here I am now, sitting in the booth with Ron, pretending to understand this football game. It seems to involve the attempted murder of anyone not wearing red and white, because all I can see are these enormous high school students, some of them so large that they require license plates, falling on top of whoever has the ball at the moment and then helping him up and patting his bottom affectionately. There is a lot of bottom-patting in football. More than in fencing, for example.

It is several hours later. We have won the game in Sudden Death Terminal Illness Bite Your Nails Right Off Overtime. Everyone seems real happy.I’m now hurrying through the extremely large and slow-moving crowd to find coach Carrozzo. The crowd is particularly slow-moving tonight because they are High on Victory, although many of them, I suspect, managed to achieve that feeling several hours ago through the use of certain controlled substances, namely the green-ish sauce that is used to festoon the taquitos sold in the snack bar.

I have made it. There’s Mr. Carrozzo. “Mr. Carrozzo!” I say, summoning all of the quick-thinking skills that I must utilize as a journalist. “How do you feel right now?” He talks in to my tape recorder and I nod my head and say, “Uh-huh” as I scan the passing crowd for a date to the victory party, which will be held at one of 9,814 pizza places in Lake Elsinore.

After a few minutes, I discover that Mr. Carrozzo has finished talking to my tape recorder and has begun walking toward the team room. I decide to follow him in the hopes of finding out what he just said, because as it turns out, I pushed PLAY instead of RECORD, and we’ve been listening to Mr. Brouwer explain how Andrew Jackson was a drunken womanizer. Or maybe it was Mr. Olpin. The drunken womanizer, I mean.

I have reached the team room. There is a mass of girls outside, waiting for their triumphant boyfriends to emerge so they can engage in some major spit-swapping. I push through the girls.

I am inside the team room. Everyone is laughing and happy and patting each other’s bottoms affectionately. The atmosphere can best be described as: sweaty. It’s almost like a mist, the sweat. My glasses are fogging up. My notepad is wilting. My tape recorder, which is still playing Mr. Brouwer, is beginning to short circuit.

I’d better get out of here. The semi-nude players, several of whom, I notice, have more upper body hair than all the men in France put together, are looking at me funny anyway. Particularly my cousin, Stephen Kaas, who always gets mad because I never mention him in my football stories. I can’t mention him, though, because all the players look alike, especially when they’re on top of each other, so I never know when he’s done something.

I suppose I could follow my grandmother’s advice, which is to just say “Stephen Kaas” whenever I’m not sure who it really was…

“The Tigers capped off an 8-play drive, led by Stephen Kaas, when Stephen Kaas caught Stephen Kaas’ pass five yards from the goal line and then ran for the touchdown, breaking through several tackles, many of which involved people named Stephen Kaas.”

But that would be silly.

In case you’re wondering why vast numbers of alleged relatives whose last names you are not sure of mysteriously showed up at your house last week, the reason is simple: it was Thanksgiving and they all expected to be fed. For many of you, the thing you were most thankful for was that only the relatives whose faces you recognize came for dinner.

I have nothing against relatives, mind you. I simply adore relatives. I wouldn’t be where I am today if it weren’t for my relatives, and I certainly wouldn’t have a reasonable topic for this week’s column, which would mean I’d have to resort to my back-up topic, which pertains to phlegm. So I certainly appreciate relatives.

The thing is, when you get a group of people together whose only thing in common is a set of parents, you’re bound to have a few “hassles,” that is, if by “hassles” we mean “gunshot victims.”

With your permission (just try and stop me!), I’d like to relate to you a virtually factless account of what happened at my aunt’s house last Thursday. And you can be thankful when it’s over.

Things started out well enough. Six hundred and forty seven relatives and I were sitting comfortably in my aunt’s living room, some of us sitting comfortably on top of three or four other people, just quietly watching the “Twilight Zone” Marathon on channel 5. And everything was nice and peaceful. If we could have stayed like that forever, life would have been truly joyous and fulfilling, except of course that we all would have starved to death, so I’m glad we didn’t try it.

The day started downhill when my mother came out of the kitchen, followed closely by several aunts and grandmothers and other assorted cooking-related female relatives, all of them announcing in harmonious unison that dinner was ready.

So we all eventually made it to the 300-hundred foot long table that had been set up in the dining room, and everyone had their plates full almost before you could recite “Desiderata” backwards with your head severed from your body and in another room.

For most of my relatives, conversation flowed quickly and freely, just like a babbling brook, and it is not without irony that I use the word “babbling,” if you get my drift. My family can be very amusing when they get together because their main topic of conversation always seems to involve debating who among them is the sickest. This little “quirk” is perhaps most endearing at the dinner table.

“So the doctor told me I had Inflammation of the Really Gross Internal Waste-Related Organ, and he said he’d have to take it out.”

“That’s nice. Pass the potatoes, please.”

“Yeah, but have you ever had a tapeworm? I just got over one. They just clamp onto your intestine and start sucking and sucking and sucking and sucking until Eric decides this sentence is long enough without saying ‘and sucking’ anymore. Then they die.”

“Oh, really? Pass the potatoes!”

“That’s nothing. Back in ‘Nam, I was run over by a tank. That’s where I got this scar on my arm, here…” (Displays his scar to anyone still listening.) “Cool, eh?”

“Great. Now pass the potatoes, darn it!”

And so on and so on. Nothing particularly unusual happened. I continued my sixteen-year streak of never attempting to eat cranberry sauce for the simple reason that it doesn’t look much like sauce to me. It looks more like cranberry lump, or cranberry loaf, or cranberry brick. But not cranberry sauce.

After dinner, someone decided that the best thing for a bunch of turkey-engorged, indigested persons to do would be to go outside and play tackle football in the sandy area that was supposed to be a volleyball court only it didn’t have poles or a net, so it was really just a big sandy area. We did it, but we didn’t like it.

I love Thanksgiving.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Some of you expressed confusion last week when my headline read, “Kristy Grasso is Miss Lake Elsinore, Erin Perez is Homecoming Queen — but can they jump?” After reading the story, you noticed that that headline makes absolutely no sense. The reason is that it was supposed to say “but can they burp?”, which does pertain to the story. There is apparently some federal law against having the word “burp” in a headline, and in protest, I’m trying it again this week. Quickly look up to the headline of this column and see if the word “burp” appears. If it doesn’t, well, then write your congressman. I’m being censored.

Two major beauty-related events recently took place in Lake Elsinore, and guess what. I’m going to tell you about them.

The first one (not chronologically, but in order of appearance in this column) was the Miss Lake Elsinore Pageant. It was probably very exciting. I don’t know; I wasn’t there. The only reason I bring it up is that the winner, Kristy Grasso, is the girlfriend of a friend of mine, Jeff Sprague, and I just wonder if someday 10 years from now someone will pick up the newspaper and turn to the wedding announcements section and see the heading “Sprague-Grasso” and burst out laughing, thinking that a disease and the Spanish word for “lawn” are getting married.

I also understand that the competitors were not required (as are the Miss America candidates) to perform some kind of talent, such as mime or singing or skeet-shooting. It’s good to know that this beauty pageant was a meat show, plain and simple, and didn’t even attempt to appear otherwise.Oh, and by way of explanation to those who were there, my little brother was operating the lights. That is why, during the dance production, the spotlight was usually focused somewhere other than the girls’ faces, if you get my drift.

The other recent beauty thing was the Elsinore Homecoming Deal. The major difference between this and the Miss Lake Elsinore Pageant is that the Homecoming Court members were all required to perform a talent: they all had to burp.

Perhaps, just this once, I should explain myself. It is a tradition at Elsinore High that once the Homecoming Court has been chosen, the Activities Persons make them do stupid things every day during lunch for a week. There is, I assume, a reason for this, but no one knows what it is. We all just kind of accept it, the way we accept hall passes, when everyone knows that Elsinore High doesn’t even have halls.

Anyway, as an example, one of last year’s events was to make the girls all take turns kissing a goat, which had been rescued from the cafeteria just in the nick of time and which may have had scads and scads of venereal goat diseases, for all we know.

This year, however, the Activities Persons decided to inject a bit of class into the festivities by holding a contest to see which Court member could belch the best.

Normally, of course, I would have no objection to this. Burping is a nice, healthy outlet for people’s frustrations, as well as a few liters of unwanted gas. But I think it was rather insensitive to make these poor girls try to burp when everyone knows that several of them have what’s known as Belch Deficiency, a disease that infects the belchal chords and prevents the victim from burping, no matter how much root beer you cram down her throat. (I say “her” because no male has ever been a Belch Deficient.)

One girl in particular named Jodi Anderson had a lot of trouble getting a belch out. She insists that she is not a Belch Deficient, but I’ll have to believe that when I see…uh, hear it.

Said Jodi, of the whole affair, “I liked kissing a goat better.” I at first assumed this to be a rather cruel joke at the expense of her former boyfriend, whose name is Ramon, or Raoul, or something like that, but she quickly reminded me of last year’s event, which of course involved kissing Ramon. I mean, a goat.

And while we’re relatively close to being on the subject, wasn’t it clever of the Activities Persons to have the Homecoming Court belch AFTER they’d been elected? Personally, I think it should have been stated on the ballot which girls could burp and which couldn’t so we would have known which ones not to vote for and thus protect ourselves from having a Belch Deficient Homecoming Court.

Imagine the embarrassment Mr. Price, the principal, must feel when he goes to Principal Conventions and the other principals ask him how well his school’s Homecoming Court can belch and he has to say something like, “Not very well, but they’re all very pretty and they represent the school quite nicely,” and the other principals laugh out loud and maybe spit in his eye.

As a matter of fact, I think the announcement of the Homecoming Queen should have gone like this:

ANNOUNCER: And the 1990 Homecoming Queen is . . . ERIN PEREZ!!!
ERIN PEREZ: BUUUUUURRRRRRRRPPPPPPPP.

But who cares what I think?

Remember when you were in high school? (If it was during the ’60s, you may not, but for the sake of argument, pretend you do.) Remember how report cards used to come out just twice a year, four times at the most? Well, those days are gone for us. We get report cards every six weeks — SIX TIMES A YEAR. My most recent one contained mostly reasonable grades, but My Father, in his Infinite Wisdom, declared that I Could Do Better, and that if I didn’t Do Better, he would Beat Me to Death.

Ha, ha! I’m only kidding! He didn’t use any capital letters.

The most obvious reason for my mediocrity, I guess, is that I am an incredibly busy young guy. Between school and my Other Job and this writing job and the school newspaper and my extremely active social life (that part is really funny if you know me), I have very little time left over for homework. In order to accommodate my many activities, I may have to give something up. Like school.

I guess I don’t have that “Oh-Boy-Let’s-Go-to-School!” attitude that some people have, particularly one boy I know whose name I won’t mention for several complex, journalistic reasons, the main one being that I can’t remember how to spell it. It starts with an “R” though.

R does very well in school, and his grade point average is always higher than that of anyone who has ever lived. With the advent of “Advanced Placement” classes (of which he has approximately 12), it has become possible to earn a GPA higher than the traditional 4.0, and R routinely gets GPAs in the neighborhood of 87.

There must be a lot of complicated reasons for R’s success, but I think the major one is — and you’ll have to pay close attention here — HE ACTUALLY WORKS HARD. Hardly a millisecond goes by that R isn’t READING some TEXTBOOK or GOING OVER HIS NOTES on some DULL, MEANINGLESS SUBJECT or doing ANY NUMBER OF THINGS in LARGE, STUDIOUS, CAPITAL LETTERS that invariably WRECK the GRADE CURVE and cause us to CONSPIRE to BEAT HIM TO DEATH with STICKS.

Take, for example, his book reports. Practically everyone else follows this simple 4-step process for writing book reports:

1. Check the book out of the library the day it is assigned.
2. Put off reading it until the day before it is due.
3. Begin reading it but become bored when the second paragraph is as long as this newspaper and when the only dialogue in the entire first chapter is the main character talking either to himself or to some person who is, technically, not even there.
4. This is a two-parter. You can either

“Hot dang!” I can hear you yelling. “It’s time for the second part of the volleyball story!” I’ll get to that in a minute, but first let me address those of you who are saying, “What volleyball story?” It’s the one I began two weeks ago where four of my friends were in a tournament and they jokingly asked me to be their manager, but I, not recognizing humor unless it comes from my own mouth, took them seriously and signed up under the firm assurance that I would never actually have to play. And I suggest that you pay closer attention in the future, and take a few notes, as there will be a short quiz in a few weeks.

Now then. The tournament, which was held at lunch each day, began Oct. 10. My friends (Jeff, Chris, Stephen and David) and I were there a few minutes early to allow them to practice their “bumps” and “serves” and “spikes” and “screams” and “grunts” and “obscenities.” I, in the meantime, flirted with some girl who thought my fluorescent pink “MANAGER” hat was amusing. My friends, I must say, did better than I did.

Before the game began, I took my team aside, and, in a gentle loving voice, reminded them that if any of them got hurt, I would have to play. This frightened them nearly to the point of tears.

Our game strategy consisted of this admonition: “Jump up and down a lot.” As manager, I can proudly say that they really and truly ignored me, except for David, who jumped a lot, but only, I suspect, to show off the fact that his calves are superior to Jeff’s (who thinks his are really hot stuff just because when he flexes them, they hit other people in the shin and create bruises).

The first game went rather well. They cooperated with each other, their hits were accurate, and they looked, according to the observing girls, really neat in their volleyball shorts, which all matched, except for the fact that they were different colors. They won, but the opposing team consisted of four elderly, decrepit teachers who had difficulty hitting the ball without breaking a wrist, so victory only seemed logical.

By the time the second game rolled around the following week, the team had acquired matching volleyball shorts. (Volleyball shorts, by the way, differ from regular shorts in that they are much looser and baggier so that nearly any “action” photograph taken of the game would be considered indecent exposure.) The matching uniforms made them look more professional; however, Chris, I believe, negated that when he hit the ball with his forehead and said, “That’s using my head!”

We won that game, too, no doubt because of the phenomenal managerial support. (I stood on the side, and said, “Go!” a lot.)

We were to play again the following Wednesday, but what happened the day before that was by far more interesting than any volleyball game, which are all pretty much the same, unless a major bone is broken to relieve the monotony.

What happened was David said he was going to ditch school the next day and go to Disneyland (“The Happiest Place on Earth, If You Don’t Mind Waiting an Hour for a Three-Minute Ride, Oh, and It Helps If You’re Rich, Too”). The only problem was that we had a game the next day, and if David wasn’t going to be there, I was going to have to take over. This would have resulted in some big-time, earth-shatteringly dire consequences, the primary one being that I would have looked like an idiot.

Fortunately, David changed his mind, and we won the game. That’s about all I remember, that and how the referee blew her whistle so much that she made me think of Don Ash. I’ll bet YOU haven’t thought about Don Ash for awhile.

The next week’s game has also been blocked out of my memory (but, then, so has my middle name), but I do remember one thing. It was played on Halloween, and one of the opposing players was dressed as a cheerleader. We instinctively kept trying to look up his skirt when he jumped, which distracted us into losing the first game of the match. Jeff got a date with him, though ….

I suppose it would be anti-climatic to say that I never had to play, but that’s the truth, and I, being a professional journalist, would never lie, unless I thought I could get away with it. The tournament will not be completely over for at least seven or eight eons, but I have run out of space, so I

Have you ever done anything really stupid that you couldn’t get out of because it was so incredibly stupid that your brain, upon realizing what you had done, ceased functioning? I think we all have, although some people tend to do it more often than others, TV evangelists being Exhibit A.

The reason I bring it up is that, believe it or not, I have done something ludicrously stupid that I can’t get out of. “What,” you are now asking yourselves, “could he have done that was so stupid?” Well, my friends, you are reading it.

I have had, up until this point, virtually no difficulty in writing this column, occasionally even writing it while I was legally asleep. The ideas have always just come to me, presumably from some Other Dimension where being obnoxious is considered funny. But then I made the mistake of tying myself down to a certain topic for a certain week, which I had never done before because I had never thought that anyone cared what I wrote about, including me. All of a sudden, though, I had people telling me that they couldn’t wait to see my Halloween column.

“Halloween?!?” I shrieked to myself. “Is Halloween coming up already? Didn’t we just start school last week? Or yesterday? Halloween can’t be coming up!”

But indeed, it was. Halloween was nearing at speeds upwards of 500 miles per hour, and I felt obligated to write a column about it. So I informed everyone that I would do just that. I even decided to interrupt a two-part story about volleyball.

When I sat down to write, though, I realized I had no idea what to say. I still don’t. That’s why I’m dragging this out. I mean, what can I say about a holiday that advocates begging and looking silly? And while we’re on the subject, shouldn’t we leave begging and looking silly to the professionals? Like congressmen?

Hey! That was funny! Maybe I’m on to something …

Personally, I never considered Halloween to be a real holiday. I simply cannot respect an event that condones the wearing of orange and black together on the same body. There are, however, certain make-up smothered girls at Elsinore High School known as Death Rockers who dress like that every day, and it’s nice to see that for one day of the year, they don’t look like mutants from the Planet Mary Kay.

Have you seen these girls? They’re hard to miss. They apply their Sears Weather-Beater Make-up with butter knives and then cover it with Thompson’s Water Seal to guarantee that at no point during the day will they actually resemble human beings. Passersby frequently have difficulty keeping themselves from taking a spatula and scraping the three-year’s accumulation of make-up off the girls’ faces and constructing a scale model of the Statue of Liberty with it.

But I’m getting away from the subject. I’ve forgotten what the subject is. Oh, yeah. Halloween.

Let’s see … Oh I know. I’ll look up the history of Halloween in an encyclopedia. Maybe that will be interesting…

Or maybe not. It says that Halloween began as a way of keeping evil spirits away. Now, of course, we just don’t vote for them again; but the Halloween tradition has still endured for several hundred years, nearly as long, according to some scientists, as Dick Clark.

One major change that has occurred in the field of Halloween since the Druid Dudes began it approximately a long time ago (maybe even longer) is that kids no longer dress in unique costumes. Mark my words — tonight, everyone will be dressed either as a ghost (a sheet with two eye holes that are useless because they are located in the upper forehead vicinity) or as a Teenaged Mutant Kung Fu Rabid Pit Bull Who Barks When Anyone Walks Past Ninja Turtle (highly-flammable yet very expensive, ridiculous-looking plastic designed to smother small children).

Oh, hey! My grandmother, who, just last Wednesday, celebrated the 30th year in a row that she has turned 29, just gave me something to write about for the Halloween column. “Why is it,” she said, “that we say ‘Boo!” to scare people?”

Of all the provocative and interesting questions I have ever been asked, that would probably have to be the least provocative and interesting. However, in the interest of not leaving an inch of blank space at the end of this column, I’ll answer it:

Saying “Boo!” is much easier than saying, “President Quayle!”

And there you have it, ladies and gentlemen. The big Halloween Column.

You asked for it.

You’ll no doubt recall that last week, I left you hanging when I said that this week’s column would be “a bizarre tale involving me, four other guys, a volleyball and a fluorescent pink hat.” This has not changed; however, there’s some business I need to attend to first.

Mrs. Linda Westfall, who is the ASB advisor at good ol’ Elsinore High, has the dubious honor of reading the announcements each morning. Most of the time, no one pays attention because, quite frankly, no one cares. But on October 3, Mrs. Westfall caught everyone’s attention when she made a statement regarding one of the wrestling coaches. “Mr. Larson,” she said, “gets the award for TIGHTEST BUNS OF THE WEEK.”

I did not make that up. She really said it. Out loud. To 2,300 people.Desiring to know just why this Larson fellow won instead of me, I talked to Mrs. Westfall. She explained that as she was reading the announcements, Mr. Larson was sitting there, tickling her, trying to make her mess up, and she wanted to get him back. She apparently figured the best way to do this would be to utterly humiliate herself, hence her buttocks-related statement, and, boy, I’ll bet her being embarrassed really upset Mr. Larson.

Actually, I’m grateful to Mrs. Westfall, because as long as people go on making statements of that caliber, I don’t have to work — I can just print their quotes and I’ll earn my living as a humorist.

Now — our story.

Lately, a bunch of guys at Elsinore High have been pushing to get a boys’ volleyball team started. Because of the miles and miles and miles and miles and miles of red tape, however, they have been, so far, unsuccessful in their attempts. The school’s compromise was to hold a four-man-team tournament, hoping to pacify the volleyball enthusiasts. It didn’t, and yours truly became involved in the tournament.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “They let this goofball play on a team?” This person who is a real “guy” only because he sometimes flexes his biceps in front of a mirror and who works in a Greyhound bus station was actually permitted to play?!?” Well, of course not. Don’t be silly. I was the MANAGER of a team.

This travesty came about when four of my friends (named, in order of importance, Dave, Stephen, Chris and Jeff) decided they wanted to be a team. Unfortunately, the Official Tournament Rules state that each four-man team must have, logically, five members, in case one of them cannot play. My friends thought this rule was stupid, so, in protest, they asked the person who would be least likely to join a volleyball team or do anything more athletic than kicking a freshman to be their alternate. That person was me. They put my name on the form with the word,”MANAGER,” next to it after reassuring me that, come heck or high water, I would not actually have to play.

Remember that everyone involved was taking a risk here. They were at risk because they knew that if heck and high water BOTH came and I did have to play, they would almost certainly be humiliatingly defeated. I was at risk because I knew that if I did play and we were humiliating defeated, they would almost certainly gang up on me and remove my digestive organs with sticks. So we all just hoped and hoped that no one would get sick.

Being the responsible leader-type that I am, I spent literally minutes learning such important volleyball terminology as, “Hey!” and “Get up!” and “I don’t care if your knee is shattered! Get out there and play!” I felt certain as a manager, I would need to stand on the sidelines and scream this complex vocabulary at an ear-splitting volume.

Another thing I did in preparation for the tournament was to go and pay $8.52 (about a week’s pay for a writer) to have the word “MANAGER” painted on a fluorescent pink hat so there would be no doubt as to who exactly had the least amount of taste in the entire gym. I also found a clipboard and necktie so I would look official (that is, if by “official” we mean “really stupid”).

Now would be the time when I would tell about the actual games, but I can’t because I seem to have wasted several hundred words on the preliminary, irrelevant details. So I’ll have to continue November 7, next week being Halloween, which will, of course, require an especially amusing piece from yours truly.

Whew! If I’m aiming for “especially amusing,” I’d better start now!

Igenerally try not to get involved with sports, having realized a long time ago that they and I don’t get along well, and we usually wind up hurting each other. Recently, however, I was involuntarily thrust into the slobbering realm of sports, and it seems to have taken custody of my life.

The first case of thrustage came about when a girl we’ll call “Bob” informed me of a new rule regarding one of the oldest traditions at Elsinore High School (aside from the Freshman Sacrifice each Thursday at lunch). The tradition in question is the one where, on the days of the football games, the players’ girlfriends wear their extra jerseys. This is mainly so the couple can proclaim to all the world that they are, in fact, still together and that neither of them has been caught behind the bleachers with anyone else yet.

Anyway, the Powers That Be decided that the girls should not be allowed to wear jerseys. The reason for this, we assumed, was that the swim team was angry because their girlfriends aren’t allowed to wear their swimsuits on the days of the big meets. We were told no, that wasn’t it. We then suspected that just maybe the school says it wants to increase school spirit, but inwardly, they don’t give a flying goat head how much people like the school. No, they told us angrily, that wasn’t it either.

Finally, according to “Bob,” (whose real name is Krista, but we don’t want to embarrass her), a few of the girlfriends got mad and started a petition, which garnered approximately 12.9 million signatures. That was apparently enough, because James Gwyn (one of 836 vice principals) called them into a Special Meeting. Present at this Special Meeting were the aforementioned “Bob,” along with “Hector,” Mike,” and “Marv” (whose real names are Heather, Angella and Jennifer, but again, we don’t want to embarass them). The four were representing their football player boyfriends, named (and these are their real names), Garret, Mitch, Raoul and Ray. (I mention their names so that the eight of them can see themselves in the paper, find me at school one day and graciously kick me in the head.)

Anyway, in the course of this Special Meeting, Mr. Gwyn announced that the real reasons for the rule were:

1. Girls have been known to lose their boyfriends’ jerseys.

2. Boys have been known to promise their jerseys to two girls, and the two girls have been know to attack each other with X-Acto knives.

3. The jerseys are made of very sheer, net-like material that looks like a large swarm of geometric moths attacked it. The girls, though, have been known to wear them with only (as they say at Harvard) a brassiere on underneath.

(I would say, though, that if they want to boost interest in high school football, having a couple dozen girls with see-through tops standing on the sidelines is the way to do it. But that’s just one chauvinist’s opinion.)The rule was eventually repealed, but only for the Varsity team girlfriends — Junior Varsity and Freshman team girlfriends still cannot wear the jerseys because, as Mr. Gwyn put it, “they haven’t yet earned the right.” This will undoubtedly create a stir among the underclasswomen, but, hey, who cares?

Personally, I think football should be banned because I feel that it is going to be the downfall of my social life, if not all of Western Civilization. At the risk of receiving a truckload of drool-stained, crayon-written letters from football fans, I’ll continue.

Nearly every girl I’ve asked out has informed me that they can’t go out with me because they don’t want to upset their large, burly, football-playing boyfriends. One girl actually asked her boyfriend, and he grunted, “No,” which made me wonder: Where and when did this guy purchase this girl, and how much did she cost? Did he order her through the mail? Was she a gift? Does he have to make payments? If he can’t pay one month, does she get repossessed?

My point — you knew I’d find it eventually — is this: if it weren’t for football, these guys wouldn’t be large OR burly, and I (having the charm of 10 men) would easily be able to capture their girlfriends’ hearts and take them to any of the dozens of exciting places in Lake Elsinore (“Want to go see a pile of rotting fish this Friday?”).

Next week: A bizarre tale involving me, four other guys, a volleyball and a flourescent pink hat. Intrigued? Well, read it anyway.

For those of you have been following this column since its conception (an elite group that includes my mother, my grandmother, a girl named Dolores, and maybe my editor), glancing at this week’s attempt at humor may shock you — it’s longer than usual. This seemingly irrational decision on the part of my editor (a lovely man whose name is also Eric) is the result of several bio-chemical experiments performed on the Common Sense and Good taste portion of his brain without his knowledge, and it will be interesting to see if I have to waste 100 words like this every week in order to wind up with 850 total. We’ll see.

With your permission (like you can stop me!), I would like to relate a more or less true exchange that occurred just after school started involving me and some guy.

SOME GUY: Hey, Eric! You know that column you wrote a few weeks ago criticizing the school administration?

ME: Who are you?

SOME GUY: Just some guy. Anyway, about that column…

ME: Shouldn’t I identify you?

SOME SLIGHTLY ANNOYED GUY: No! Now, in that column, you only talked about bad things. Why not talk about the good things the administration does?

ME: I write a column?

SOME VERY ANNOYED GUY: (Moans, emits vulgar epithet directed primarily toward my parents, walks away.)

But all kidding aside (yeah, right). The reasons I don’t mention the good things the administration does are 1) There aren’t that many, and 2) The ones that do happen aren’t funny. So how about some more criticism?

It seems that as far as Elsinore High School is concerned, the district (or whoever is in charge) has taken a very relaxed attitude, so relaxed, in fact, that if Elsinore High were a person, it would either be dead or Jack Nicholson. Upon the commencement of my junior year a few weeks ago, I noted that the school, in general, looked as though, in the middle of August, someone had said, “Hey! Let’s throw together a high school!” and Elsinore was the result. You want examples? I got examples.

The most obvious one was the school’s decision to 1) level out the large area of grass in the center of the school, 2) install sod instead of regular grass, and 3) do it all a week before school starts so that no one can walk on it for two weeks and everyone will be crammed into the quad.

Now, levelling out the ground was important enough. I currently have a 3.83 GPA, but if the ground had been level for the past two years, I COULD HAVE A 4.0!!! It’s about time they eliminated that education-hindering slope!

But doing it the week before school began was a little silly, and Dennis Price, who swears up and down that he’s the principal, didn’t know why it happened that way. And if he can’t tell me, I don’t know who can. The result of this mysterious action was that for the first two weeks, most of the 2300+ students were jammed into the quad during lunch. This resulted in squished bodies, ill tempers, and several accidental pregnancies.

(The funny part about the whole thing is — a lot of the grass is dying, most likely because of loneliness. It just didn’t feel needed.)

Another example of the school’s unpreparedness is the book situation. Quite a large number of students (I’d say between a few dozen and a whole lot) didn’t get all of their textbooks until the third or fourth week of school, and some of them (like, say, me) still don’t have them all.

The reason for this, so we’re told, is that there were far more new students than the school had predicted, thus, there weren’t enough books to go around. What I want to know is — did they really think they could precisely predict the number of students? Shouldn’t they have ordered some extra books anyway, just to be sure? I can just picture the school board holding a seance at their board meeting, trying to find out from the God of Elsinore Growth how many new kids there would be this year.

I was recently talking with Jodi Anderson, who is about as omnipresent at school as Vick Knight is everywhere else. She’s a varsity cheerleader, a representative in student government, and a junior, which makes her all the more noticeable because the junior class is by far the most obnoxious. Anyway, we were talking about the condition of the school in general, and she said that it looks a lot better now than it has in the past. Having already written most of this column, I was afraid it would once again be steeped in ignorance, so I asked her exactly what she meant. She mentioned how the doors had been repainted, the outer part of the school black-topped, the new sod — all external things. But what about the things that really matter to the education system? Sure, in some respects, the school is greatly improved. But in many other areas, it leaves a lot to be desired.

The purpose of this column isn’t to put down the school. I don’t know what the purpose is, but that isn’t it. And I certainly don’t mean to put down Jodi, even if she did refuse to go out with me one night under the guise that she had to baby-sit and I still have not recovered from the emotional trauma of having the first girl I ever asked out say “no.” But when you’re an aspiring journalist, you tend to notice things that maybe normal people don’t notice, like how the 400’s, which have been at Elsinore for 10 years, still don’t have an intercom system, which means you can’t hear the bells when you’re out there, or the announcements for that matter, which some people are kind of grateful for.

At any rate, maybe Jodi’s right — maybe the external, superficial things are more important. It doesn’t matter. My 850 words are up.

Those of you who have recently driven from one end of Main Street to the other may have noticed that you can’t drive from one end of Main Street to the other because of the rampant renovation going on between Peck and Graham Streets.

This has apparently been happening for a few months, but I never paid much attention to it until my editor told me to get off my lazy behind and go investigate. So when the next commercial came on, I did just that.

A lot of people (or maybe it was just me) thought that downtown business had been falling off lately, and that this renovation project had been thrown together to attract customers. I learned, however, that you’d have to search far and wide, perhaps even as far as “The National Enquirer,” to find something further from the truth. Downtown business, in general, has been doing just swell and this project is expected to boost sales, if anything.

I was informed of this in no uncertain terms by one of about 400 receptionists lurking in city hall. “This is a re-vi-tal-i-za-tion project,” she said over the telephone, enunciating so that I could perhaps look up “revitalization” before she was actually through saying it. That word is apparently the Official Adjective for the project, because three different people said it, though none of them quite as clearly as that secretary.

So if it’s not being done to resuscitate business, why is it being done? According to Gary Washburn, alleged mayor of Lake Elsinore and Phone Book Critic, it’s “being done [for] the image and the character of the city.” Attracting customers will be a side-benefit, he said.

(By the way — if you’re 16 years old, and you walk into city hall declaring that you have an appointment with the mayor, they will not believe you.)I have heard a couple of people say that no matter how nice things look on Main Street, the image of downtown will still be one of vagrants, transients, and undesirables, or whatever you want to call them. So I asked several prominent downtown persons what they thought.

Mayor Washburn said that by improving the appearance of Main Street, more people will shop downtown, thus raising the economic level, and “those people” will have to leave in search of some place more affordable, perhaps to Temecula, which, according to GTE, is the hub of the universe. (His Honor didn’t actually mention that last part in the interview; I mentioned it in a flagrant attempt to start trouble.)

Fred Dominguez, city councilman and owner of Elsinore Barber Shop and Beauty Supply, which is on the re-vi-tal-ized block, said that the “vagrants” probably will not hamper the “new image.” Dolores Mayhall, owner of Mayhall Print Shop, was of basically the same opinion, though she seemed rather bitter toward what she described as “the trash that walks the street.” “There is a definite problem with that,” she said. “People…resent being approached by panhandlers and prostitutes. But [the customers] are not going to stop coming downtown.”

On the other hand, John Merrifield, owner of John’s Service Center and, technically, my grandfather, was less than optimistic about the whole affair, although he may just have been annoyed because his grandson had just stuck a tape recorder in his face. “I think the [vagrants] are going to keep the image from being the…image that we want. The buildings may look better, but the ‘downtown people’ are still going to be here. I’m optimistic enough to say we can attract business, but it’s going to be a rough road. Rough, rough, rough.” (Grandpa tends to repeat himself.)

The only person who didn’t acknowledge any problem with the aforementioned “downtown people” was Donna Barlass, president of the Downtown Business Association and owner of Hodge-Podge. When I asked her if she had had any problems with the people, she said, “What people are we talking about?” I gave some examples and she replied, “Well, I’m here seven days a week, ten hours a day….We haven’t had any problems….I am totally unaware of [them].”

Just as a point of information, John’s Service Center is just north of the block being re-vi-tal-ized, on the west side of the street. Mayhall Printing is three doors south, in the infected block, on the east side. Hodge-Podge is three doors south of that, and Elsinore Barber Shop is across from Hodge-Podge. Only Merrifield, Dominguez, and Mayhall have noticed any so-called “vagrants,” however.

I can just hear you saying to yourselves, “Well, this is all well and good, and Eric D. Snider is obviously a talented columnist/journalist, and I was just about to write a letter to The News saying so, but what will be the end product of the re-vi-tal-i-za-tion?”

Well, I’m glad you asked. According to Russ Tourville, General Contractor and Official Big Guy Who Rides around on a Tractor, big trucks will be re-routed away from the new Main Street, and traffic will generally be slower, since the lanes will be narrower. This will make it easier for pedestrians to pedestriate across the street without being permanently injured by people driving at a maniacal speed while searching for K-FROG on the radio.The amount of parking will not be changed, said Tourville.

So maybe downtown Lake Elsinore will have a new, cleaner image. And maybe everyone will feel perfectly safe and comfortable as they walk along Main Street. And maybe more customers will be attracted to the area than ever before.

And maybe Elsie will come out of the lake and run for city council.You never know.

The Constitution of the United States of America, Inc. (where we live) states that approximately every time you turn around, the 147 major motion picture companies can and will put out three or four horror movies each, and you will feel compelled to watch several of them to prove that you are an adult and can be reasonably frightened without wetting your pants.

More “thrillers” have been made than any other kind of movie, including unfunny comedies starring “Saturday Night Live” alumni. Watching one, then, is always convenient, unless you live in Lake Elsinore, in which case you must drive to Temecula (or, as it is sometimes called, Trafficula). But otherwise, horror movies are always available to fill the need you may feel to impress someone by watching a film featuring several million man-eating things that don’t normally eat men, without throwing up or breaking down and crying.

Of course, horror movie-watching is more convenient when they are broadcast directly to our homes on television, although it would be even more convenient if they could be broadcast directly to our brains so we wouldn’t have to watch them. This is what my family and I did on a recent Friday night just for fun. We took time from our busy Family Schedule (which, this night, consisted of sitting around, belching, and naming said belches after celebrities), and watched a movie on some cable channel. The movie was called “Slugs.”

“Slugs” was filmed in Spain, but it wasn’t a Spanish film: it was shot with American actors on location in Spain. You’d think, then, that the actors’ lips would match the words, but the sound was approximately 1/8 inch second after the picture, and the whole thing reminded me of the “Flintstones.”The basic plot (and I use that term loosely) was that all these slugs had gotten a hold of some nuclear waste, nuclear waste being fairly common in Spain, because that’s what they use to get rid of all the bulls after the annual Running of the Bulls (what else are they going to do with them?). The nuclear waste made these slugs behave irrationally and not at all slug-like; that is, they went around eating people the way you might eat a chicken if you hadn’t been fed in a month or two.

There was, of course, one guy who knew exactly what was going on, as well as your standard sheriff who wouldn’t believe him. (“A pile of human bones with only a few shreds of flesh left and little trails of slime all over the place? Sounds like heart failure to me.”) The man eventually convinced a few of his city official friends to help him get rid of these mutant slugs, and they did so by going down to the sewers (where all mutant animals hang out) and pouring salt all over them. This caused such an adverse reaction that the sewer system exploded and people couldn’t take showers without little slug parts coming out of the shower head. This was rather awkward in Spain, because the closest translation they have for “slug” is “Geraldo.”

This is just one example of the horror “genre” (French, meaning “genre”). There are many others, the most recent being “Arachnophobia.” I have not seen this movie yet because I have a not-so-rare fear of going to Rancho called “Temechnophobia.” I’m in therapy, but I guess you could have figured that by now.

This summer has been a struggle for me, as I have been trying to watch as much daytime television as is humanly possible, and I’m pleased to announce that I have succeeded.

I can hear you thinking to yourselves (as opposed to thinking to someone else), “Why would this muttonhead want to sit around and watch television all day?” Well, can you think of anything else to do in Lake Elsinore, aside from spraypainting EYC on the walls? Then don’t ask silly questions.

The first show I’d see in the morning was “The Price is Right,” which is by far the most ridiculous waste of a viewer’s time since Illiterate Week on “Wheel of Fortune.” My mother tells me that I used to love the show when I was a small child of little intelligence, and that my first phrase was, and she quotes, “Bob Barker.” But I don’t believe her.

The thing about that show that bugs me the most, aside from the rampant overuse of enormous price tags, is that the aforementioned host gets a standing ovation each day. It’s a sad commentary on the state of this country when a game show host gets a better reception than the president.I can hear you thinking again. “Why does this cretin watch the show every day if he hates it so much?” Would you rather I steal your car and drive it into (or perhaps onto) the lake? Then leave me alone.

After “The Price is Right,” I’d flip through the channels, occasionally landing on the Spanish Channel, which only broadcasts goony soap operas, or “novelas” (Spanish for “goony soap operas”). Two of the titles are “Simplemente Maria” (“Simply Maria”), “¿Que hora es?” (“What time is it?”), and “Nadie Sabe lo que Estamos Hablando, pero Miran no Obstante” (“Nobody Knows What We’re Talking about, but They’re Watching Anyway”). If you listen closely to these programs (and I can’t imagine why you would), you’ll hear such common Soap Opera Statements as “¿Que si tu esposa vuelve a casa?” (“What if your wife comes home?”), “No Emmy para Susan Lucci este año” (“Susan Lucci loses again”), and “Tu madre es una llanta punchada” (“Your mother is a flat tire”).

The best part of daytime television is the commercials. There are the ambulance-chasing lawyers (“Larry Parker got me 2.1 million, so I can afford to talk like a moron”), the motorcycle lawyers (“John Reilly and Associates got me $175,000, even though it was totally my fault because I was drunk driving backwards down a one-way street without my corrective lenses, a valid driver’s license, or a brake pedal”), and the truck driving schools (“At Dootsen Trucking Academy, we’ll teach you foul words you never knew existed!”).

And then there’s everyone’s favorite: the Life-Alert commercials featuring Mrs. Fletcher. Life-Alert is a handy device for the elderly and/or accident prone that you wear on your wrist. If something terrible happens where you need immediate assistance, you simply push a button on it (assuming your emergency isn’t that you’ve accidentally sawed off the arm with the Life-Alert on it) and talk into it, and the people at the other end make jokes to one another about what the old duffer on Elm Street has done to himself this time. Eventually, they send the paramedics.

What’s so funny about this commercial is that the woman in question, Mrs. Fletcher, is perhaps the worst actress in the world, with the possible exception of Baby Michelle on “Full House,” but even she has her moments. If the commercial were realistic — if she were laying on the ground in a pool of some kind of fluid with tears of helplessness streaming down her cheeks and making the pool even larger — why, then it would be cruel to make fun of her (which doesn’t necessarily mean I wouldn’t). But as it is, she is lying in a pool of groceries and saying, “I’ve fallen…and I can’t get up!” in a manner that would only elicit sympathy from persons possessing I.Q.’s equal to bricks.

Fortunately, school has started, so I don’t have to watch this idiocy anymore. Just in time, too. I was about to hang my pants low on my hips, put my hat on sideways, and join a gang, which would have been more boring than Bob Barker, to be sure.

The story so far: Our hero and four of his friends have been kidnapped by his father and a man they call “Brett,” and taken to the Kern River near Bakersfield. Upon arrival, they have met the infamous Ferguson family, two malicious guides and two guys who are just hanging around, shirtless. The kidnap victims have been told not to lose their paddles in the water because the paddles are more important that life itself.

Once in the water, we learned from someone who seemed to know what he was talking about that the river was running at 486 cubic feet per second that day, which is the approximate equivalent of being a small animal in the gutter when someone is washing their car, and floating down the street in the available water.

Because of the drought, the river is much lower than it’s supposed to be, which means there were more rocks to worry about being dashed against. Much of our time was spent standing on small boulders in the middle of the river looking helplessly at our boat, which was stuck on a great big rock that was sticking too far out of the water for us to go over it. We were told, in a highly professional manner by our fluorescent-blond guide, Eric, to “kick that sucker back in the water!” And kick that sucker we did, having learned from the start that if we disobeyed our guide, he would push us in the water and run over our heads with the boat.

The high points of the river trip were, of course, the rapids, which had such ominous names as Royal Flush, Hari Kari, Surprise, Pinball and When Was the Last Time You Went to Confession? Our guide had an interesting strategy whereby he made us paddle our brains out during the calm parts so that when we got to the rapids we’d be too tired to do anything right which gave him the opportunity to yell about how various inanimate objects, including the wind and the river itself, were kicking our collective heinie.

After a few hours, we reached the point commonly referred to as “the lunch place.” The lunch place was located under a bridge, and the wife of the owner of the rafting company was there with the food, waiting for us. (She didn’t go with her husband down the river because she has a completely irrational fear of drowning.)

Lunch consisted of sandwiches, sodas, cookies and a mixture affectionately known as Gorp. Gorp is M&M candy, raisins and nuts all jumbled together, but today, an extra ingredient — river water — was inadvertently added, and the name was changed to Wet Gorp.

During lunchtime, while the adults were sitting around chatting casually about the day’s events to that point (“Everyone fell out and almost drowned! Ha ha ha!”), we were given the privilege of walking up the river bank to the rapid that comes just before the lunch place, and floating down in our life jackets. My only comment on this experience is: on the highway near the river, there is a large sign heralding the fact that 148 people have died in the Kern River since 1968. As I rode this rapid (rather, let it ride me), I kept thinking to myself, “Number 149, Number 149, Number 149 … .”

We eventually completed the 12-mile trek and were taken back to camp. So it was fun. I’m glad I went. Really.

One last note. I have known almost everyone I’ve talked about in these two columns for most of my life. No insult is intended to any of them personally, or to the river rafting company itself. They all know this, but I don’t want anyone else to think I’m an ungrateful, obnoxious little twerp. I’m not at all little.

People often come up to me and say, “Hey, Eric!” Being the quick-witted, fast-thinking humorist that I am, I deftly respond, “What?” Then they say, “Eric, what have you been doing with your summer?” I tell them to read my column and they’ll find out, which usually confuses them, since most people don’t think I can even read, let alone write. Anyway, here’s what I’ve been doing: being eaten alive by bugs, bumping into rocks, and drowning.

It seems that on July 5, four of my friends and I were kidnapped by my father and a man they call “Brett” and taken up to the Kern River, which is located between the cities of Kernville, Lake Isabella, and Wofford Heights, all three of which are the only places I know of that actually have negative populations. While there, we endured all kinds of cruel punishment and torture, and I feel it is my duty to recount our experiences to you, the uncaring public. That is precisely what I will do in this special two-part report. And away we go.

At about 6:30 a.m., we arrived at the campground, where we met a man named Brent Ferguson, who supposedly owns the river rafting company that would be taking us and attempting to kill us. Brent’s wife and their four sons and daughters were there, too, because he is afraid that they will run off to Rio if he leaves them home alone.

(It was Brent’s second oldest daughter, by the way, who ordered me to expose the whole affair. She is to receive every ounce of blame for all this.)

Also at the campground were two guides named Steve, whose sole responsibility appeared to be eating, and Eric, whose legs were the approximate size of steroid-injected redwoods.

The Ferguson girls’ boyfriends, Brian and Jon, neither of whom seems to own a shirt, were also hanging around. They had been up there with a group a few days before and had conveniently missed their rides home, so they had no choice but to spend a few days in the wilderness with their girlfriends. Tough break.

Upon our arrival, we were fed a type of burrito-esque breakfast consisting of tortillas, eggs, and the remains of some small woodland creature. Our first thought was, and I quote, “Ewwwwwwwww!”, but it was actually quite good. The guides, I noticed, ate Frosted Flakes.

After breakfast, we bathed in Sunblock #412, which actually makes you more pale than you were before, and headed for the river. The Kern River, I’m told, comes from glaciers, which is strange, since I didn’t see any on the way there.Before we could do anything, we had to put on our lifejackets. We were told that if we were to fall out of the boat without a lifejacket, we would almost assuredly be dragged downstream by the powerful current and eventually be dashed against some rocks and drown, whereas, if we fell out with the lifejacket, we would be dashed against rocks, but we wouldn’t drown.

We were also given paddles, not to be confused with oars. Whenever someone called it an “oar” (as in, “Hey! You just put my eye out with your ‘oar’!”), Eric the Guide from Hell would call them names and push them out of the boat.They told us to never let go of the paddles, even if we fall out, because, simply put, the paddles are far more important and useful than we are. If we did lose our paddles, they said they would cut off our lifejackets and watch us drown, screaming with laughter all the while.

Ha ha ha! I’m only kidding! They said nothing of the kind! Not once did they say they would laugh! Ha ha ha!

We did eventually get on the river, but I seem to be out of room, so you’ll have to wait till next week to read about it.

I know. You’ll count the minutes.

Iwent to the dentist recently, or rather, I should say, I went to a dentist, since there is obviously more than one dentist in the world because two out of three of them prefer chewing Trident over chewing on your own tongue.

I went a few months ago for a check-up for the reason I do most things — my mother made me. They X-rayed my teeth (“Perfectly safe,” said the nurse as she left the room) and then they put me in a chair so the dentist could come and look for something in my teeth that he could say was a cavity. I had eaten an Oreo that day, so he used that as an excuse to make me come back at the end of June.

So I went back and was led down the hall to the Dental Torture Chamber. It was then that I noticed that the operating rooms were separated by very thin walls, so the screams of the damned could be heard by all.

After I’d been sitting in the Chair of Dental Pain for a while, the somewhat enormous doctor waddled in with his nurse, who was equally large, but she was pregnant, so that was okay. He told her that they had to install fillings in teeth 3 and 18, and then, talking as if I wasn’t there, he informed her that he would do number 18 without anesthesia.

“What?” I said, noting that he wore a mask, making it impossible to identify him in a lineup.

“Oh, it’s a small job,” he said nonchalantly. “We don’t need anesthesia. If we use it, you’ll be numb and won’t be able to eat for three hours.

I guess as far as he was concerned, excruciating pain is better than not being able to eat. I didn’t happen to agree, but I always respect the opinions of those with sharp, electric objects.

Number 18 was a small job; I left only a few tooth marks in his hands, which is pretty good, considering he had seven or eight hands, all of them crammed in my mouth. Then he moved to number 3, which was a bigger job. It was so big, in fact, that before he began drilling and filling, he put a clamp around the tooth, presumably so it wouldn’t run away in fright.

But all my fears, all my stereotypical jibes about the dental profession were put to rest when, as he was working on number 3, the nurse handed him a tool, and he said — this is a quote — “What is this?”

It turned out that he was LOOKING AT THE WRONG END. Whew. That’s better.But everything worked out in the end, and I’ve gotten over my fear of dentists, because, after all — dentists are people, too.

Technically, anyway.

Every summer about this time, the department stores begin having their “Back-to-School” sales, causing panicked students all over the country to run to their calendars and discover that they don’t know if school will be starting soon because they don’t know what the current date is because they haven’t had to write it in the upper right-hand corner of their paper for several weeks. While I hate to be like a department store and annoy the students around here with talk of school, there are a few things I wish to say about the school district and the people in charge therein.

Throughout my sophomore year, which ended in June, I found myself wondering if just maybe the administration had been sniffing model airplane glue at their little school board meetings, because some of the decisions they made were a bit strange. And guess what. I have examples.

For instance, in September, all of the rooms in the nether regions of Elsinore High School known as “The 400s,” were re-carpeted, apparently because no one could think of anything better to spend a few thousand dollars on. Well, they didn’t ask me. How about new books to replace the decrepit ones currently being used? Only the seniors (and juniors who can afford good bribes) have lockers — how about buying some more? No, I guess it’s more important to have NEW CARPETING, the scent of which disintegrated the tissue inside my nose that separates my nostrils, than to make things convenient for the students.

An interesting bit of what my English teacher would pompously call “dramatic irony” took place toward the end of the school year. Twelve students were caught with acid, and not the kind that comes from car batteries, either. One of the students was expelled. The other eleven received five-day suspensions and were back in school the next week. Isn’t it heartening to know that the school board believes in educating everyone — even druggies?!? They may wind up in prison some day, but by golly, they’ll know how to conjugate “to be” in eight tenses!

But wait, there’s more. During the last weeks of school, notices were displayed advising us that anyone involved in water balloon or water pistol fights would be suspended for five days — the same punishment the LSD Eleven had received. Are we to assume that throwing water balloons is just as bad as the possession of controlled substances (other than the cafeteria’s burritos) on campus?

The Powers That Be seem to hold the suspension punishment near and dear to the places where their hearts should be. It seems to be their generic solution to any problem. A friend of mine was suspended last year for ditching school. That makes sense, doesn’t it? A student doesn’t want to go to school one day, so to punish him, he is told he can’t go for ANOTHER FIVE! If we follow this line of thinking to its logical conclusion, then if someone is caught spray-painting “EYC” (which stands for Elsinore Young Car-thieves) on the school walls, they should punish him by making him do it on all the walls. If a student goes scooters and wipes out the French Club with an Uzi, he should have to do it to the Thespians, too, right?

Perhaps the reason for all this is the over-crowding: maybe the administration simply has too many kids to worry about. Perhaps if the new school is ever built (that is, if the kangaroo rats voluntarily get up and move to Los Angeles to become, say, lawyers) such seemingly irrational decisions won’t be made anymore.

I say “seemingly irrational” because maybe everything I’ve mentioned has a logical explanation. If anyone can supply the reasoning behind all this, please get in touch with me. I’d really like to know.

In my last column, as I’m sure you’ll recall, I talked about jobs. The response was so underwhelming that I thought (and I quote), “Hey! Maybe I’d better beat this job thing into their heads some more!” Well, let the beating begin.

We are told from the time we’re fetuses that we can be whatever we want to be in life. But sometimes I think people decide on their jobs according to their names. Like in the recent local elections, there was a man running for County Assessor named Orso — as in, “I assess this property to be worth $94,782…OR SO.” No wonder he won. His name implies such exactness in his work. It’s like having a judge named Hangum.

Being in the government is probably the best way to get money without actually earning it, but you have to avoid the Psychotic Paper Throwers, one of whom recently made an attack on our fearless vice-president, J. Danforth Quayle.

(What do you want to bet he made up that “Danforth” part during the election so people would take him seriously?)

Perhaps you recall this story from last month. Or perhaps you don’t. It doesn’t matter. I’m going to tell it anyway. Quayle was just coming out of a video arcade, or maybe it was a 7-eleven, when some guy got his attention (“Hey! Kid!”) and hurled a bunch of papers at him, bonking him right in what doctors refer to as “the noggin.” The man was taken into custody and charged with Assaulting the Vice-President, a felony punishable by a fine of up to $50, or up to an hour and a half in prison.

Kind of puts things in perspective, doesn’t it? People try to kill presidents; they try to give vice-presidents paper cuts.

Another easy-looking job is weatherology (not to be confused with meteorology, which, of course, is the study of meteors). It must be easy if you can get away with making quotes like this one, which came from a Finnish weatherologist on the subject of a mysterious cloud hovering over Soviet territory:

“It could have been caused by some sort of disaster or accident. But it could also be just an ordinary large cloud.”

As long as you’re sure…

I suppose if I actually wanted to work for my money (hysterical laugh, cry of “Fat chance!”), I could always be a doctor and have the supreme pleasure of removing tumors the size of upright pianos, just like some doctor in Florida recently did. It seems a woman went to the hospital complaining of chest pains and wound up having a SIXTY-FIVE POUND tumor removed. It was so large, they had to call in a meteorologist, who thought that perhaps the woman had stood outside with her mouth open the last time Halley’s Comet went by. Upon close examination, however, it was discovered that the tumor was actually the woman’s seven-year-old son, whom she had accidentally swallowed during a feeding frenzy on All-You-Can-Eat Shrimp Night at Sizzler.

Some of you may have suspected that writing for this newspaper was my only occupation, and, perhaps, that it was the only semi-useful thing I’ve ever done. Those of you who thought that are so wrong that I could just laugh out loud, and I think maybe I will when I get a chance, as a matter of fact. I have a JOB.

Jobs are very important to teenagers because they give them responsibility, self-confidence, and, if they’re really lucky, paper hats. My job mainly provides me with a change to get away from my family for a few hours a day.”What a horrible thing to say!” I hear you cry. “Family is so wonderful!” Well, my family, in all its wonderfulness, would greatly benefit from a stay in the Hoo-Hoo Hotel, if you know what I mean.

A recent family incident: my little brother, who answers to the name Bonehead, was on the roof foraging for food or something, and my mother was out in the yard. My brother said, “Mom, can I do a nose-dive off the roof?” My mother responded, “No, but thank you for asking.” I went to work shortly thereafter.

Ironically, I work for a family member — my grandfather, whose name is Grandpa. He’s not as cerebrally damaged as the rest of the family, which is strange, considering he’s lived in Lake Elsinore for 63 years, and I’ve only lived here for 15, and I’m going crazy. But I digress.

Grandpa owns the local Greyhound bus station, which proved to be lots of fun a few months ago when all the drivers were on strike and the only thing we had to do was answer the phone so people could say, “I know there are no drivers, but can I still ride a Greyhound to Riverside?”, and we would answer, “Yes, but you’ll have to drive it yourself,” and they would laugh politely and call us filthy names and hang up. Imagine getting paid for having that much fun!

Now that the strike is over, my job involves answering telephones, selling tickets, and giving the illusion of listening when people tell me exactly why they’re going back to Tinkle Flats, N.C., and whom they are going to visit when they get there.

The best part of the job is when passengers tell us that their boxes and bags have to be in a certain position or else things will break. That’s when I get to climb inside the baggage compartment and tell the Baggage Gnomes not to mess around with the passenger’s stuff or else they will be fired and will have to go back to work for Keebler.

So that’s my job. It’s not much, but it puts pizza on the table, and it’s a lot better than some jobs in the area — the ones where you actually have to work.

One of my friends is unfortunate enough to have one of those jobs. He works for a car repair place in the Metropolitan Wonderland known as Temecula (or is it Rancho this week?). His main responsibility is to clean off pistons — not the basketball players (which is what I thought), but little tiny car innards that live deep down inside the car’s engine, where no one can see if they’re clean anyway. Nonetheless, he just scrubs and scrubs those pistons until they’re so clean you could eat off them, if they weren’t so darn near microscopic.

I assume that this isn’t his whole job, but every time I ask him about it, he lapses in Autonese, and says he’s also supposed to disjartle the fundershloppings, zintz them, and rejartle them. So I give up.

I have another friend who doesn’t have one of those “working” jobs. He works at an auto parts store located across the street from a bar. His job is to handle the drunk people who stagger in and want to buy turn signal fluid. He usually sells them a fungershlopping or two, and that makes them happy.

The point of all this is that there are a lot of things you can do for a living, but that only a select few occupations offer money without making you really work for it. And that’s what teenagers really want out of a job — free money.

Want to hear about my ancestry? Too bad. Here goes.

I was named after my grandfather, whose name is John. His ancestors (this is my mother’s side we’re taking about here) lived in China until the 1500s, when they decided that England would be a better place for people named Merrifield. In the 1600s, they were bought as slaves for the Mayflower, and they wound up in America, where they’ve been ever since, despite constant efforts to make them leave.

My father’s ancestors came from Germany. They were exiled to France about seven generations ago when they couldn’t get the hang of speaking German without hocking loogies. They had a lucrative business just prior to the French Revolution, selling cake to the peasants under the direction of Marie Antoinette. Eventually, they migrated to a place where they had to learn another foreign language — Arkansas.

The reason I know all this is that my father received a genealogy computer program for Christmas, and shortly thereafter, went scooters over his dead relatives. Just mention anything having to do with forefathers, or ancestors, or family, or carburetors, or garbage disposals, or thermonuclear weapons or ANYTHING, and he’ll tell you that he has great-great-great aunts and uncles named Arkansas and Tennessee, and that his great-great-great-grandfather, twice-removed, over four columns and down nine, had 19 children by two wives. And you, recalling what Miss Manners has said on this very subject, would politely fall asleep.

Since the actual subject matter of this week’s column is supposed to be names (I get sidetracked sometimes), let me give you future parents some pointers on naming your children.

• Avoid giving them verbs for names, such as Skip and Neal. Someone I heard about had a dog (and dogs are a lot like children, but with more common sense) that was named Stay. This person would say, “Come here, Stay! Come here, Stay!” and the dog would become very confused. Don’t do this to your children.
  
• Naming your children after Jesus’ apostles is fine, as long as you avoid Judas.
  
• The only vowel that is an acceptable first letter for a name is A. E, I, O and U are all out, except for one obvious magnificent boy’s name beginning with E.
  
• Don’t name all of your kids with the same first initial. This is Yuppie-esque, and, in some states, illegal. To avoid this temptation, don’t marry anyone whose name starts with the same letter as yours.

After my aunt’s first son, Stephen, was born, she decided that she was going to have each of her additional boys’ names start with S and end with N. “Sean” would have been okay, and “Sebastian” would be livable, but the only one I can think of after that is “Satan,” which probably wouldn’t have looked very good on his resumé. Imagine the family reunions …

“Hello, this is Cousin Satan. Satan, I’d like you to meet my 14th cousin, 7.4 times removed, Arkansas, her husband, Bob, and their children — Edwina, Egbert, Edward, and Simon Peter.”

Some of you sharper Elsinorians may have noticed that the Carnival/Rodeo made its rotatannual (literally, “every time you turn around”) appearance this past Memorial Day weekend. The carnival has a very deep emotional significance for me, as it was on one of its Demonic Rides from Hell that I laughed until I almost puked.

I was a tiny child of about six, maybe ten, when I went to the carnival for the first time with my unsuspecting parents. I must admit, I was frightened at the prospect of going out into a public place, where people might learn that I actually lived with both of my parents. But I went anyway, and the first ride my brother and I went on was a huge, diabolical device called “The Eggbeater,” though it was commonly known as “The Vomitmobile.”

Allow me to explain this hideous object. In the center is a large metal pole. Protruding from said pole are at least several thousand other poles, all of which have a hinge in the middle, so their extreme ends turn in 370-degree rotations. At the ends of said extremities, there are two “cars,” which also rotate. Suffice it to say that you spin around real fast, in several different directions, and if you’re lucky, you throw up before your head explodes.

Anyway, my brother and I found ourselves being ushered into a metallic box by a tattooed, bearded man whose name tag read, (and I quote), “Bob.” As we were strapped in, I suddenly realized that my life was in this man’s hands. This man, who had mistakenly put on a pair of pants with various and sundry holes in it, displaying his backside, as he had also mistakenly not put on any underwear that week, now controlled my destiny with a panel of levers, each with a name like “Stop” and “Go” and “Go real fast until the ride propels itself into outer space.”

The ride began with an obnoxious “creak,” causing me to wonder if all the screws had been put in place when the ride was assembled that morning, and we were on our way.

It was then that we saw a couple in the car across from us just a-smoochin’ up a storm. In fact, we could see his tongue coming out her ear. So I casually commented to my brother that if one of them were to throw up, we’d never know, because it would go directly into the other’s mouth. To two small boys, this was even funnier than belching in church, so we laughed, which is what we usually do when something is funny.

And that’s why the mere mention of the carnival moistens my eyes, puts a lump in my throat, and makes me queasy. But, then, so did “Joannie Loves Chachi.”

This past Memorial Day, I had made plans with several of my friends to go to the carnival together, feeling that group regurgitation would help with male bonding. Unfortunately, whoever is in charge of the weather forgot what day it was and sent rain, thus discouraging my pathetic pals from our planned puke-fest, so I went with my neighbor and his kids.

We were on the bumper cars (which, but the way, were patterned after the Elsinore High School student parking lot) when I ran into one of my many and varied friends of the female persuasion — literally. I’m almost sure I gave her whiplash.

Anyway, we wambled off the bumper cars and over to the spot where her parents were waiting. She introduced me to her large, burly father, who maliciously shook my poor, trembling hand, fracturing several of those little tiny bones. He was, to say the least, intimidating, and I was relieved to learn from his daughter that he throws up on the Merry-Go-Round.

I convinced this girl (who shall remain nameless because I don’t want Krista to be embarra– whoops!) to go on the mechanical stomach-churner known as “The Zipper,” so named because when you get off, that’s the only direction you can see — down toward your zipper. I assured her that she could “trust me.”After three or four 490-degree turns on this sucker, she was declaring her trust for me with such impassioned statements as, “I hate you, Eric!” and “I’m gonna barf!” In the interest of saving my clothes from a barf-soak, I called to the operator to leave the poor woman with whom he was flirting alone and let us off. He knew his responsibility to the public and complied with my request only a few minutes later.

By the way — that girl hasn’t talked to me since then. But I guess that’s none of your concern.

This is the first of what will hopefully be a regular column in which I — an obnoxious teenager who wants to be a writer if and when he grows up — tell you — the sophisticated populace of the Lake Elsinore Valley — my opinions and so-called thoughts on what’s going on in the world (under the presumption that you give a hoot what I think).

Let’s get down to business. This country is going to heck in a handcart, or, quite possibly, a VW Microbus, if someone doesn’t start monitoring what is shown to our children through the Hideous Beast known as television! It’s just horrifying — nay bone-chilling — to see what awful things are being shown. Take, for instance, the article I read in a recent Press-Enterprise about a little boy who was afraid of being eaten alive by his toilet.

It seems this kid saw a commercial on television — yes the same medium that brought us such wholesome entertainment as “Charlie’s Angels” — in which a toilet turned into a monster. The article stated that the boy was “scared into constipation,” a phrase previously used only in explaining how the prison guards in Miami felt after strip-searching Manuel Noriega. It (the article, not Noriega) went on to say that the boy “feared it ‘would get him,'” especially when the commode on the commercial made “a chomping movement.”

At the risk of sounding really old, what is this world coming to?!? Why, I can remember when young people’s eyes and bowels were safe from such frightening images. I grew up in a time when the scariest thing on TV was the fact that Chuck Barris, the host of the “The Gong Show,” was allowed to drive, drink and vote, although I can’t say I ever became irregular over it. Actually, I’m surprised the boy’s parents aren’t suing the toilet cleanser company that made the commercial, since recent studies show that the less you are at fault, the more likely you are to be sued by someone with stupid kids, which reminds me of something else I read in the paper.

A 14-year-old girl apparently came home from school and saw what she must have thought was a glass of Kool-Aid on the table. Feeling thirsty, she proceeded to guzzle the supposed Kool-Aid, only to find that it was actually Clorox. When she learned Clorox has six times as much sugar and costs twice as much as Kool-Aid, the girl panicked and did what any normal human being would have done — she yelled, “Mom, call a lawyer! My pathetic lack of deductive reasoning skills is finally going to pay off.”

In the meantime, the girl induced vomiting by reading a teen magazine and watching “Diff’rent Strokes.”

Lawsuits have been filed against Clorox for not having a label reading, “WARNING: Keep this product away from small children and big children with small brains,” and against Kool-Aid for making their blueberry flavor look just like bleach, and for conditioning impressionable youngsters to think that anything blue must be delicious.

The girl and her mother probably will not win the last one, as the Smurfs filed a similar lawsuit against Kool-Aid last year and lost. I’ll keep you posted as further details become available.

And by the way — doesn’t “Kool-Aid” sound like the name of a rap singer?

Ihave worked on Main Street for three-and-a-half years, and I’ve lived in the general area all my life, so I know what I’m talking about when I say that Main Street is beginning to resemble a ghetto, except that no comical television programs have ever been made about people living on Main Street.

From time to time, I look up from my extremely complex work (which usually pertains to answering the phone and putting people on hold) and look out at Main Street through the window. From that vantage point, I see anything from a tightly-clad hooker, to a stumbling drug addict, to any one of a large assortment of people whose pianos are missing a few octaves, if you know what I mean. It’s no wonder downtown business is falling off.

The City Council has noticed the lack of customers on Main Street, and It’s decided that It should alleviate the problem NOT, as one might suppose, by eliminating the two-legged scum, but by dressing up the storefronts. This is akin to telling a man with severely violent mental disorder that he can get a girlfriend by wearing nice clothes.

So They spent approximately one and a half hillion jillion dollars making the stores look old, ignoring the foolish people who insisted they were old, all in the hopes of attracting customers to Main Street who aren’t afraid to get out of their cars and actually brave the sidewalks.

Once the storefronts had been redone, the City moved on to the next step in the “Lake Elsinore — Hot Dang!” program. This step involved putting round-looking sidewalk protrusions on one block, which reduces the amount of parking in that area. This means that people will supposedly be attracted to downtown businesses, but they won’t be able to shop at them because there won’t be anyplace to park, which probably won’t matter, since it’s unwise to leave your car unattended on Main Street anyway. What we need are some good drive-thru businesses.

So what is the solution? Funny you should ask. I think the city councilors need to get their collective heads out of their collective armpits and acknowledge the fact that Main Street attracts transients the way the Lotto attracts people on welfare and that THAT is why downtown business is waning. Once they’ve acknowledged that, they need to take all of the — for want of a better word — people who can’t prove that they are currently employed in some legal, non-chemically-related occupational field and give them one-way Greyhound tickets to Vancouver. I don’t wish to sound cold and heartless, but I’m growing weary of calling the police every other day because the “residents” are doing something obnoxious, like spreading roofing tacks all over the place, or harassing some poor fool who thought a nice after-dark stroll along Main Street would be a pleasant change of pace. (Change of FACE is more like it.)

But maybe that system won’t work. To quote my grandfather, who owns a downtown business: “I can just see the ACLU coming down and saying, ‘You can’t do that! You can’t violate these people’s right to break my windows and urinate in my parking area!'”

Gramps doesn’t care much for the ACLU, and he’s somewhat bitter about his problems with the locals. Maybe he should be grateful he still has a parking area.

Ever since the Gulf War began, people have been asking me when I was going to write a humorous column about it, and I have begun to feel like a Pompeii resident asked to think of something funny to say about lava.

Now, if my editor would let me, I could probably write enough Persian Gulf material to fill this entire newspaper. As it is, I have been limited to 20 inches. I suggest you write an angry, obscenity-ridden letter to my editor (his name is Eric Grimm) and complain about this injustice.

At any rate, the War topic I have chosen is: ANTI-WAR DEMONSTRATORS. These people began sprouting up like weeds almost before the missiles hit the ground, chanting such catchy slogans as “No Blood for Oil!” and “Peace Now!” and “Ice Ice Baby!” They would stand in the streets, yelling and marching for peace, starting riots and getting in fights, and doing everything that good, peace-loving citizens would do, if they had a few beers in them.

Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against war protestors, and I would probably be on their side, were it not for the fact that I think they are completely wrong and should be DRAGGED OUT IN THE STREET AND SHOT LIKE RABID SQUIRRELS!

Pardon me. I sometimes become irrational when I’m talking about the war, particularly when it comes to those IGNORANT MORONS WITH PICKET SIGNS AND LOUD VOICES WHO GO AROUND PROTESTING LIKE A BUNCH OF COMMUNIST WEASELS!!

Again, you’ll have to excuse my behavior.

The reason I am not an anti-war-related person is that I don’t think the war is really such a bad idea. To quote George Bush, I think it was the “butt-kickin'” thing to do. (Or perhaps it was Dan Quayle who said that. It doesn’t matter.)But the people who are against it are against it, for the most part, because they don’t want to trade blood for oil. “No blood for oil!” is their motto, and I think that sums it up quite nicely.

Now here, I can see their point. They think the only reason we are in this war is for low gas prices. If they are right — if we are fighting for oil — then I say to that: “So what?”

I mean, if we were fighting for dirt, or fighting for Ginsu knives, or fighting for sole broadcast rights to “Charles in Charge,” well, then, yes, I would be against it. But oil is a pretty darn important part of the American way of life. If we didn’t have oil, we wouldn’t have gas. And if we didn’t have gas, we wouldn’t have smog. And if we didn’t have smog, then all those government-appointed, tax-fed Smog Reduction Committee Persons would be out of work, which would raise the unemployment rate, which would cause President Bush to go on TV one night and frown and say words like “prudent” and “juncture,” and I think the last thing this country needs is a frowning president, particularly during times of crisis like these. So oil is pretty important.

But all of this is beside the point, because oil isn’t the only reason we’re there. We are also there because Saddam Hussein did a naughty thing, and the United States, having been named by the United Nations to be the Pushy Over-Bearing Mother to the World, had to go and beat the snot out of him.

Now I can hear you anti-war persons saying, in a gravelly, hoarse voice that sounds like it has been yelling a lot recently, “If that’s why we’re fighting, then why don’t we go force China out of Tibet, Russia out of Lithuania, and Japan out of America?”

The reason is that those countries aren’t run by crazy people who would take over the whole world if given half a chance (well, I guess Japan is). Hussein, though, isn’t likely to stop at Kuwait. I know I wouldn’t. “This is it?” I would say, in Arabic. “All it is is a bunch of sand! I’d better go invade another country, too!” And I imagine that’s what Hussein would do, too, if we let him.

I think the main reason that people are protesting is that it’s the trendy thing to do. A lot of them have parents who protested the Vietnam War, so it just seems like the natural thing to do for this one. Many of the protesters, I think, aren’t even aware of most of the circumstances surrounding the conflict, and if they were, I think a lot of them would change their minds. It’s like Dan Quayle. People make fun of him because he’s relatively young and has made a few slips of the tongue. But I’m sure that if we investigated, we would learn that he’s also an idiot who drools on himself.

So maybe that was a bad example.

Last week, as you’ll recall, I promised to continue the account of the East Coast trip that my school chums and I recently took, feeling that if I had to live through it, so should you. So here are some amusing anecdotes.

AMUSING ANECDOTE #1: We spent much of the first day in the colonial town of Williamsburg, which has been preserved to look just the way it did in the 1700’s, except that it was probably interesting to the people who lived there, most of whom are dead now.

My four pals (Aaron, Gabe, Scott, and Tyler) and I amused ourselves by attempting to determine exactly which things on the block were Authentic Colonial Things and which had had to be Reconstructed. We didn’t actually care, of course, but we really, really wanted to bug Katherine, the stone-faced, humorless tour guide. So we’d ask her things like, “Is that an Authentic Colonial Tree?” and “Is that an Authentic Colonial Dog?” and “Is that Authentic Colonial Dirt?” and so on.

AMUSING ANECDOTE #2, WHICH IS SOMEWHAT RELATED TO AMUSING ANECDOTE #1: One of the buildings at Williamsburg is the old printing press. Or perhaps it was the clothes store. One of them is relevant to this anecdote, but I don’t remember which. At any rate, the person at whichever one it was told us that in the 1700’s, that place hired mainly women because, as he told us, “they work for less.”

When he said that, we could see Katherine bristle because she was an Authentic Colonial Women’s Libber. At the moment, this detail is irrelevant, as is the whole anecdote, probably, but it will seem important in a few paragraphs.

Also, we happened to notice that there was a major Authentic Colonial Horse Pile in the road, left by an Authentic Colonial Horse. This will also seem relevant in a few paragraphs.

After approximately four eternities, Katherine told us that the tour was over and that we had an hour or so to kill by ourselves before Elvis, the bus driver, was going to show up and take us to the Authentic Colonial McDonald’s for lunch. Before going off on her merry way, though, she asked if there was anything else she could do for us. I, being the Authentic Colonial Humorist that I am, said in a very joking, smiling manner, “Why don’t you go clean up that horse pile?” Mind you, I didn’t mean anything by this; she asked what she could do, and I told her. Jokingly.

She didn’t take it that way, though. She said, in a voice you might use if someone had just shot a dart at your neck, “Now, why would you ask me to do that?”

Before I had a chance to answer, however, Aaron showed just why he is my best friend: He came to my rescue and said something even stupider than what I had said. He said, and I quote, “Because you’re a woman, and you work for less.”

Needless to state, this did not set well with Katherine, who proceeded to call Aaron every Authentic Colonial Name in the book. The whole group burst out laughing, and we all went to lunch.

And she never did clean up that horse pile.

Some of you may have read about the recent controversy surrounding the April Fool’s issue of The Tiger Times, which is the student newspaper at Elsinore High School, a school that used to be a lot of fun but isn’t anymore for the simple fact that we can’t get away with anything anymore. We have to start learning.

I happen to be the copy editor for that fine publication, so for this particular column, I know what I’m talking about. Things were up in the air for a while as to whether we would be allowed to put out another issue, or if they were going to solve the problem by just expelling us all and firing the adviser and trashing the computers and setting fire to the publishers’ office. They finally found a new adviser and told all of us, “Naughty, naughty” and we were then free to put out a couple more issues, but only under the following restrictions: