JUST IN TIME FOR... THE EASTER BUNNY?

Okay, I think it's time to revisit the friendly Bizarro S------y down the street. Besides, I just saw the Easter Bunny there.

Yes, I know it's almost Halloween, but remember -- if it wasn't, it wouldn't be Bizarro S-----y now, wouldn't it?

But I digress. The other day, we had to pop in to get one quick thing on the way out of town, so I pulled into the parking lot. My daughter starts getting really excited in the back seat. "Bunny!" she giggles, pointing to something I can't see. I look over at the front of the store and see nothing.

"Did you see a rabbit?" I asked.

"Yeah!"

"Where did it go?"

"Inside!"

At this point, I chalked it up to a toddler's overactive imagination and walked inside. I'm studying something intently on one of the shelves when I hear what could only be described as a commotion behind me.

"I got a visitor for you," a regular patron I fondly refer to as Geriatric Bicycle Man is telling the people behind the glass in the pharmacy. They're busy filling prescriptions (or, more accurately, filling out little slips telling people they only have 2 tablets of their prescription in stock and will owe them the remaining 98, but that's another story for another day), so he has to repeat it a couple of times. And he does: "I said I GOT A VISITOR FOR YOU!"

And then it hits me: Geriatric Bicycle Man (tm) actually is wheeling the aforementioned bicycle through the store. And sure enough, in a milkcrate affixed to the back axle was sitting the most ratty stuffed rabbit I've ever seen, along with a lot of other stuff I'd rather not associate with stuffed rabbits, or Easter, or anything else wholesome or childlike.

That's when I stepped away from GBM and made a quick run for the registers. And to quote one Right-Thinking American, that’s all I got to say about that.

SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED

So my daughter just turned three, and boy, was I in for a rude awakening. Not because she's, you know, three or anything, but because I thought I still had a few years left before I had to tackle something like this:

The horror... the horror.

Guess who waited to put this sucker together until 10:30 the night before the big birthday party? At that time of night, I especially appreciated the high-contrast smudged brown ink on dark green newsprint. After staring at my 18-inch Radiation King(tm) monitor at work all day, it was just what I needed to push myself over the threshold of legal blindness.

Yep, this says that this little gadget has 31 screws. "Screwed" pretty much summed it up, too.