I’ve never heard of a state fair having a roller coaster worth riding, for an adult. I mean, they have kiddie coasters that you ride with your seven-year-old, that go twelve miles an hour and have twenty-foot-tall, thirty-degree hills…
The words “and unusual” are there because otherwise the courts would have long since outlawed all punishments including sternly worded letters of reprimand. (Anything seems cruel when it’s the worst thing you ever do to a criminal.)
Actually, I’m pretty sure the sound track in hell is a thirty-second loop of polka music, and every couple of weeks they make a single one-note change to it.
We always put the tree up the day after Thanksgiving, and we never take it down until after school starts up again in January.
This is not a problem, because we have the good kind of tree — the kind that does NOT dry out and drop needles everywhere, and we can store it in the attic and re-use it year after year after year.
We used a “live” (which is to say, cut off from its roots, i.e., dead) tree one year on my dad’s whim, when I was in junior high, and lo, it was the most horrible holiday-related notion we have ever had. The needles that actively attacked anything that got within six yards of the tree, the trunk that didn’t really fit in the stand properly, which was aggravated by the fact that the whole thing wasn’t properly symmetrical, the needles that constantly fell off the branches and got into absolutely everything so that two years later we were STILL finding them here and there, the water reservoir that we could never quite keep from going empty, no matter how many times a day we refilled it, the needles, did I mention the needles? The whole lousy experience… every single member of the family swore in unison never to have anything to do with THAT nonsense ever again.
Forget lobsters. Real men bob for french fries.