Al Diamon
Palins, Papayas and Powdered Eggs
Todd Palin was in Maine this past week.
Sarah Palin will be here this week.
Todd, the husband of the governor of Alaska (although he prefers to be called “First Dude”), made stops in Palmyra, Hermon and Presque Isle to campaign for the Republican presidential ticket. He said Maine was a lot like Alaska, only with better foliage. He said the GOP ticket had more experience and accomplishments than the Democratic ticket. He said he and Sarah liked to hunt and snowmobile. He didn’t say anything about the special investigator’s report that charges he and his wife violated Alaska’s ethics law by trying to get his ex-brother-in-law fired from his job as a state trooper.
The veep candidate herself will be in Bangor on Thursday for a rally. Tickets to the free event are said to be scarcer than Palin press conferences.
The Dana Street diner didn’t cater to Portland’s fashionable brunch crowd. It didn’t draw politicians and celebrities pretending to visit the “real” waterfront. It rarely showed up on best-of lists. But until its closing on Oct. 13, it was where a sizable cross-section of the city started – or ended – its day with reliable omelets, home fries, muffins and coffee. The owners said they were tired of seven-day weeks.
The replacement: a franchise joint called Papaya King.
I always thought papayas had overthrown the monarchy and established a republic.
Doesn’t matter, I guess, what with the impending collapse of society and all. Once that happens, papayas will be in shorter supply than decent diners. What there will be plenty of, though, is powdered eggs.
According to a story in the Oct. 13 Lewiston Sun Journal, there’s a woman in Auburn who calls herself Sarah (I know, weird coincidence, isn’t it) who has stockpiled enough food and supplies in her basement to last for years.
Powdered eggs, smothered beef, freeze-dried ice cream sandwiches (for special occasions, like when the Palins come to visit), four cases of toilet paper, 50 bottles of laundry detergent and 10 bottles of Irish Spring shower gel. Also, guns and ammo.
“I’m not a wacko,” she told the paper. “I don’t feel anxious anymore. I feel like I’ve done all I can to survive. And that alone helps me to sleep at night.”
I dunno. Seems like she’s a little light on the TP.
Still, I can understand why she might be feeling a touch of paranoia. It’s the papaya juice. Makes you jittery. Also, the economic news can produce the same effect.
The Wausau Paper mill in Jay, which has already announced it’s shutting down one paper machine by the end of the year, is cutting production on its remaining machine from seven to five days a week.
The town of Hartland is teetering on the brink of financial disaster, unable to come up with the money it needs to pay the local school district, so the selectmen decided to fire the town manager, who’d been out on medical leave for several months. Except they did it at an unpublicized meeting that violated more laws than an Alaskan governor with a grudge against her brother-in-law.
I blame all this on excessive consumption of papayas.
Instead of eating foreign fruits, I recommend indulging in local grub, such as lobsters. Which, at the moment, happen to be insanely cheap, due to a glut on the market.
To boost demand, some stores are selling the crustaceans for as little as $3.49 a pound, and the Maine Lobster Council (the wise old lobsters who run the lobster government) are airing television commercials warning that if sales don’t increase, they will attack coastal cities. And they won’t be wearing those damn rubber bands on their claws, either.
Fortunately, there’s still time to escape inland. And you can afford the trip, because gasoline prices have declined to the point where they’re – well, actually, they’re 33 cents a gallon higher than they were a year ago. But at a statewide average of $3.16 for regular self-serve, that’s a drop of 51 cents in the last month.
In Newport, the price cutting reached $2.99 a gallon on Oct. 7, the lowest figure seen in Maine since November 2007.
Not everything was such a bargain. If you went to an Oct. 7 auction in Fairfield looking to buy an antique Colt Walker .44 revolver to store in your bunker next to the cases of powdered eggs and freeze-dried ice cream sandwiches, you’d have had to lay out a world record $800,000 plus an auctioneer’s commission of $120,000.
The gun, manufactured for U.S. marshals fighting in the Mexican-American War (“Give us your papayas!”), was owned by a 1952 graduate of the University of Maine, who now lives in Montana. The buyer wasn’t identified, but is not believed to be Todd Palin.
Still have money to burn after stocking the old bomb shelter? The 62,000-square-foot Masonic Temple on Congress Street in Portland is for sale for $5.25 million.
Features include a cafeteria with room for 360 and a 700-seat auditorium.
Too pricey? Catholic Charities Maine is selling the Gov. John F. Hill House in Augusta – you may know it as the St. Paul Center on State Street – for a mere $1.3 million.
It comes with 1.34 acres of land, 28,000 square feet of Colonial-Revival-style mansion and 101 parking places – in case there’s a shortage of on-street parking in post-apocalyptic America.
Perhaps you’re looking for a quirkier way to spend your money. Or maybe you just have all the powdered eggs and toilet paper you’re ever going to need. If so, you might consider donating to the Maine Center for Creativity’s effort to have Venezuelan artist Jaime Gili paint big squiggles and triangles on the oil tanks on the South Portland waterfront.
Gili’s design was chosen from among hundreds of submissions. For just $1 million, you could be immortalized as the person who turned those enormous white surfaces into, um … well, art, I guess.
The fine print: Your immortality is conditioned on the continuation of western civilization. The center assumes no responsibility for the collapse thereof. In the event of an outbreak of barbarism, the center is not offering to share space in its shelter. Unless you BYOP.
(Bring your own papayas?)
(Or is it Palins?)
Al Diamon can be e-mailed at aldiamon@herniahill.net.
Posted on Tuesday, October 14, 2008 in Permalink
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