Shorts

"It's not the way you think--it isn't that way, at all. Nobody wants it this way; nobody would ever let it be this way if it was humanly possible to change it."

-- Tom Godwin, "The Cold Equations"

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It's a big day. Shorts day. It's the first day of the year when I wear shorts outside. I'm wearing a sherbet-orange polo shirt, too. I look like the drumline douchebags who played tennis in high school and tried to steal girls from nerds. Never throw away a tie.

My cell phone withstood a full wash cycle this morning. Now it can't pick up my voice, and there is fog in the LED screen.

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There are some historians who read The Wizard of Oz as an allegory of the Populist movement. Of the part where Dorothy falls asleep in a field of deadly poppies, these historians have written, "the poppies represent the issue of anti-imperialism," citing the British Opium Wars in China. (The Historian's Wizard of Oz, edited by Ranjit S. Dighe)

They also interpret the Stork that saves the Scarecrow from drowning as the woman suffrage movement.