I love eating at Panera’s, as I have made abundantly clear in this very space previously, in no small part because of all the potential wackiness that can happen when they have to call your name.  I went there with my dad the other week though, and the first thing that the girl at the counter said was, “Whoa! You guys look exactly alike!”  Which is kinda true, cause we do, but then I got to thinking, maybe it’s not that I look a lot like my dad after all, maybe she’s just crazy and that’s what Panera Girl says to everyone.  If that’s true, I would imagine she gets punched a lot.  I mean, being told I look just like my dad is one thing, but what if I had chosen instead to share an over-roasted beef hamwich with say, an orangutan, or President Gerald Ford?  Then I might not have taken it so well.  Also, it would be completely hilarious if when you ordered your sandwich there, you said your name was Spartacus, then, when they called you, a bunch of other guys who had also used the same name came up and they were like, “Which of you is Spartacus?”  And then everyone would be all like, “I am Spartacus!” “No, I am Spartacus!”  “Nay, pity ye these fools, for I am Spartacus!”  You’d probably never get your sandwich, but it would be fun.

            I was in Harrisonburg last week, and since I went to JMU (‘Jo Momma University) it was all nostalgic and stuff, except since I was there, they’ve changed all this stuff, and the town is all different.  Like, they used to just have a regular dentist office in town, but now they’ve built a new bigger one.  The thing is, on the sign there’s this big picture of a Swirling Vortex of Doom witch doctor hand with a big eye in the middle.  Now, if this was a sign for the hand, eye, and Swirling Vortex of Doom specialist, that would all be cool, but unless he’s a voodoo dentist or something, I suspect that the sign-making guy just gave him one he had lying around the shop.  Also, now there’s an entire Heavenly Ham emporium in the mall.  Back when I was a student there, all we had was a Ham of the Damned store, but now it’s gone too, victim to the merciless progression of Harrisonburg trying to get all classy.

            Why is it that people in public restroom always have to go and write dirty limericks and stuff on the walls?  I mean, if you’ve already decided to carry a magic marker with you at all times, I’m clearly not going to talk you out of using it, but why not try to change it up a little bit and be different.  Like instead of writing a clever haiku implying that whoever reads it is gay, try putting up an Emily Dickenson poem.  Or instead of just recording that you were there, why not throw out a few lines from Charles Dickens’ masterpiece, Great Expectations?  Trust me, you’ll weird out so many more people that way.

            You know how they’re always putting out those little books of funny and/or dumb things that the President said?  I’ll bet those are a relatively new phenomenon.  Like, imagine being in medieval Mongolia and hanging out the Barnes & Noble yurt, you’d have to have a book of like, humorous Genghis Khanisms, and there’d be a big picture of him on the front holding a chicken of falling out of a helicopter or something, and it’d be full of verbal slip-ups, where he had been doing an on air spelling bee or something with his horde, and had accidentally spelt yak with an extra E at the end.  That would have been funny.

            Last night I was in Waffle House enjoying a delicious nocturnal foodstuff, and there was this guy there whistling a merry little tune.  But after a minute, I realized that it was in fact the theme song from Wrath of Khan.  And so I was all freakin out, cause he was this trucker hanging out at Waffle House, whistling the Wrath of Khan song.  I wanted to say something, but I knew that if I was wrong, I would surely bring shame upon my family for ten generations, so I didn’t say anything.  I was gonna do some really subtle thing that would let any other Khanheads around know I picked up on it, like go trap myself in an asteroid and kill Leonard Nimoy, but by the time I’d figured out my plan of action, he’d already left.  I suspect that someone’s just come out with like, a Wrath of Khan remix, like Willy Nelson or someone, so now all the truckers know it; which, when you think about it, is actually far more weird than just the idea that a lone trucker might just happen to be a fan.

            If you’re one of those people who goes to the International House of Pancakes just because it’s all cosmopolitan and international, I’m afraid I’m about to disappoint you horribly.  You see, it turns out that there’s really just like, one up in Canada and that’s it.  So don’t be sitting there thinking that people in Papua New Guinea are, at that exact same moment, eating an international pancake too, unless you “eating an international pancake,” you mean, “sitting in the jungle eating tigers,”  which you probably didn’t mean unless you’re crazy.