You want Blue Laws? I got Blue Laws!

A couple weeks back, when I was in South Carolina visiting my father, we made a trip one Sunday morning to the local Wal-Mart (I know, Wal-Mart, but that's where we went) so he could get some groceries and I could buy a few things that we'd forgotten on our trip -- kids' shampoo, a couple of pillows for the boys, and a pair of sandals for Arie.  Fairly controversial items, I know, but we really needed them.

So we went to separate lanes to buy our respective items.  As we waited in line, Arie picked out a pack of gum to add to our purchases. When the cashier got to our items she looked at them and then at me.

"I'm sorry.  I can't sell these to you.  We have Blue Laws."

I looked at her confused.

"It's Sunday," she explained.  "We can't sell anything that can't be consumed before 1:30 on Sunday."

She was very nice about it and almost seemed embarrassed to explain the situation.

"They're right there," Arie said.  "You just have to ring them up."

I told him we'd have to come back later for those things, bought the gum because it was something which could be put into your mouth and, technically, ingested (though the same could be said about the other items as well), and left with Arie still unclear as to why we couldn't just buy the things we came for. In the car, on the way back to my dad's house, I explained to him how some people in the county of Aiken believed that selling things on Sunday was an insult to God and Jesus.

"That's stupid!" said Arie.

Amen.

(Here's the kicker:  Though the purchase of a pair of pillows for my two sons to sleep on, a bottle of shampoo to wash their hair with, and a pair of sandals to protect their feet was considered a profane act which desecrated the very idea of Jesus, I discovered later in the day that, should I have cared to, I could have legally purchased as much booze as was humanly possible to carry from the store and gotten good and liquored up on the Lord's Sabbath since hooch can be imbibed.  Go figure.)

A man who surely must value fashion sense over comfort

(Seen on the way to Targhetto, on Lake Street in Minneapolis)

A man in his mid twenties:

1) riding a bicycle about 8x too small for him so that as he pedaled, his knees would come up and hit him in the chest;

2) wearing his pants cinched at about mid thigh, underwear flapping in the breeze in order to ensure that his pant legs would bunch up at his shins and ankles and make it that much more difficult to pedal the toddler bike, all the while threatening to tangle up and topple him from said bike;

and

3) "wearing" a jacket in high 80's heat where by "wearing" I mean draping it gently over his shoulders like an untied cape so that it continually fell from his shoulders forcing him to repeatedly pull it back onto his shoulders while fighting the bunched denim at his feet that still threatened to topple him from the bike and attempting to peddle the toddler bike while continuing to hit himself in the chest with his own knees.

It sure looked uncomfortable but man, did he look cool doing it.