Dear Dr. Babooner,

I was going through the check-out line in the grocery store when the clerk scanned my bag of clementines and said “These babies are going to cost a ton once the Federal Reserve Bank goes in for another round of quantitative easing.”

I’m not the sort of person who expects a lot from my contact with people running cash registers. I figure they have enough to keep them occupied without the added burden of sustaining a conversation with me, but I have to say this came as a surprise.

“The government is printing money like mad,” she said, “and there’s no way they can stop doing it now, not with the economic pain people are feeling and the fact that the 2012 presidential election campaign has already begun.”

She scanned my coupon for fifty cents off a can of mixed fruit.

“The pressure is intense to keep up the pretense. It’s all based on your mindless faith that everything has to work out fine, but I’m tellin’ you that the whole economy is built on a friggin’ house of cards.”

As she weighed my bananas I remembered hearing that the familiar Cavendish variety of my favorite yellow fruit would soon be extinct.

“The first thing you’ll see is unchecked inflation, wild like you wouldn’t believe. That’s what I mean about the clementines. And after that, there’ll be something like total collapse of the entire system because it’s not based on anything real. Once people figure that out, it’ll be a torching-cars-at-the-curb kind of crazy”, she said, sticking a red dot to my gallon of “No Bovine Growth Hormone” milk.

“Good thing you got the no BHG version of skim. Hope there’s not too much Japanese nuclear radiation in there.”

“I think the milk is safe,” I said, beginning to wonder if the milk was safe.

“I’m just sayin’,” she said, “that it’ll be a tough decision once you realize the only way you can re-stock on Ho-Ho’s is to throw a shopping cart through the front window and start looting, or pay for them on the black market with pure gold.”

She held up the Ho-Ho’s and shook them at me as she lectured.

“Because these babies will never go bad, and that makes them a great catastrophe food. No-spoil items will become really valuable because you might have to stay in your basement for months. Especially word gets out to the roving mobs of jobless middle managers that you might have valuables and guns in the house.”

“Or Ho-Ho’s,” I said, trying to lighten the mood.

“There are surveillance cameras at all the exits,” she observed. “Try to bury your non-perishables lower in the bag. Stockpilers will be identified and their caches re-distributed by the government. To reduce panic.”

I thought for a moment about running back to grab a few armloads of beef jerky and gallons of water.

“Winter’s hanging on,” I said, trying to return the conversation to a normal topic. “Wonder if we’ve seen our last snow.”

“Ash and airborne particulates from the fires out west will fall like snow over the entire Midwest once the Yellowstone super volcano starts erupting,” she chirped. “We won’t see the sun until 2050.”

I collected my groceries and went home, but didn’t feel like eating.

Dr. Babooner, do you think clipping grocery store coupons is worth all the time and trouble I put into it, or am I simply an unwitting dupe in a food industry marketing campaign?

Sincerely,
Unsettled By My Disaster Cashier

I told Unsettled that the key to coupon clipping is to only cut out the ones issued for things you already intended to buy. Going into the supermarket and coming out with a lot of stuff that wasn’t on your list is a quick route to the poorhouse. I’ve always thought that instead of what they usually say, cashiers should ask “Did you find anything you WEREN’T looking for?” And then, as a public service, they should set it aside and have the stock clerks return it to the shelves.

But that’s just one opinion. What do YOU think, Dr. Babooner?

Once a legitimate journalist and now a desperate attention-seeker, radio’s Bud Buck is more than willing to purposely misunderstand the details of an assignment if he thinks it leads to a more controversial story. There is almost always less to a breathless Bud Buck expose’ than meets the eye. Here’s the latest atrocity from his growing collection:

Strange Rituals Gain Foothold

In this week leading up to an annual sacred observance for a large section of the populace, I set out to find strange superstitions that represent the worrisome downside of our celebrated freedoms. In short, I was looking for weird religion – alarming rituals happening right under our noses.

I didn’t have to look too far to discover what appears to be pagan worship of a mechanical God, the extremely loud and surprisingly portable deity “Shre-Dit”. Just this past Saturday, an impromptu ceremony sprang up in a local parking lot with loyal adherents lining up for the chance to make a sacrificial offering.

Legend has it that Shre-Dit has an insatiable hunger for human secrets.

The God must be fed large amounts of confidential information on a daily basis to maintain his strength.

The ritual requires that the secrets be written on paper. During the ceremony the faithful form a line and bring their treasures to the high priest, who is literally above the masses – standing on a wheeled platform to receive offerings from the supplicants. This platform is entirely covered by a metal enclosure, which also hides the deity from direct public view.

But oh, can you hear him! A whirring, rumbling sound slowly rises as Shre-Dit prepares to accept tributes from his people. The offerings are made in boxes and bags. These sacrifices are flung into the open maw of Shre-Dit and when the secrets are accepted, a sharp, brittle buzz cuts through the air, like the sound of a million locusts leveling an acre of corn in an instant.

Joy is obvious on faces of the supplicants as their classified documents are transformed into sacred confetti.

Why do they do it? I asked some of the faithful to describe their motivation for participating in this bizarre ceremony.

“I pray that I can keep my identity intact,” said one adherent who asked that her name not be used.

“I don’t want anyone else to try to become me,” added another who insisted his photographic image be distorted to prevent loss of privacy.

“I’m here to prevent the total theft of everything that makes me who I am, or who I ever hope be,” shouted a third, who tried to wrestle my camera away from me and kicked me in the shins several times.

Apparently Shre-Dit is seen as a protector against complete loss of one’s essential self. If he is even marginally successful at this, that would make Shre-Dit a very potent God indeed.

But there’s more! After the consumption ceremony, the secrets are said to undergo another phase of transformation, eventually being re-incarnated as more pieces of paper that will someday be able to hold new secrets that may eventually be tossed once again into the open metallic jaws of the ravenous Shre-Dit!

I was deeply impressed by the faith of those who brought offerings to the parking lot shrine this past Saturday. They stood in the wind and withstood unseasonably cold temperatures to nourish their mysterious mechanical protector, and to keep their very selves from being lost – forever. But will they reap real rewards for their efforts, or is this just another Strange Superstition?

Time will tell! This is Bud Buck!

Like I say, I think Bud misinterpreted what he saw. But who wants to hear a story about an ordinary shred-a-thon for people’s ordinary financial records? Especially when it’s so easy to think outrageous, surreal things about other people!

Have you participated in, or observed, puzzling rituals?

This e-mail arrived over the weekend from perennial sophomore Bubby Spamden, who continues to struggle with the choices facing a young person as he completes yet another year of 10th grade at Wendell Wilkie High School.

Hello Mr. C.,

So last Friday Ms. Murgatroyd called in sick at the last minute and her first hour social studies class, which I’m in, had to go next door to sit with Mr. Eisenstien’s “Introduction to Conceptual Art” class while they called for a sub.

Mr. E. was real good about letting us come in. He said if we had work to do that was class-related we could take care of it quietly in the back of the room while he lectured. That was fine with me because I was kind of hoping I could catch up on some important reading assignments on the backs of my eyelids.

First hour sucks, but you know that.

Anyway, he was up there going on and on about abstract this and subversive that, and the choices people make and how artists have to find a way to be artists and still survive and blah blah blah. Not to criticize him or anything. It’s just that his lecture was making my head feel heavier and heavier – so heavy I was about to put it down on my desk and get to “work” – when suddenly he said he was going to show the class a Woody Woodpecker cartoon.

Mr. E said he had just read an article about this animator who really liked cool art and worked some of it into the assembly line drawing he was doing for a studio. He did it on the sly because high concept art wasn’t supposed to be part of his job and most people are common toads who don’t understand good stuff and wouldn’t cross the street to look at a decent painting with a strong point of view, but they’ll lap up stupid cartoons all day long.

That got me really interested, because I love cartoons. And Woody Woodpecker kicks butt, literally. Mr. E said you can see the abstract stuff in the explosions at 4:40 and 6:33 on this You Tube video.

So that got me to thinking about what I’m going to do with my life. Mr. E said a conceptual artist can be a social critic no matter what line of work he or she goes into – it’s all about the attitude you take and what you consider to be your “mission”.

Personally, my mission is to get a job where I watch cartoons all day long.
Do you think I should be a super-cool conceptual artist, or just an art teacher like Mr. E?

Your pal,
Bubby

I told Bubby to be clear about the real job of teaching. Even though Mr. E. showed his class a Woody Woodpecker cartoon, that doesn’t mean he “watches cartoons all day long”. Far from it. And in any case it’s a bad idea to disparage someone’s line of work. Being “just an art teacher” is not a step down from being “a super-cool conceptual artist”. But I am glad that something happened at school to get him thinking – and excited about the future.

What was your favorite subject in school?