High school is over. Your child has now grown wings and is headed off to college. This is a sad, necessary step in life.

Letting your metaphorical butterfly go free is never easy. It is even less easy because said butterfly will need stuff. Lots of stuff.

Don’t forget to send all of the following:

Bike
Towels & linens
Chairs
Table
TV
Gaming system
Games
Clothes
Weather-related clothes
School-related clothes (go team!)
Food (especially pizza and, for variety, pizza rolls)
Basketball
Tennis racket
Frisbee
Printer paper (loads)
Ironic t-shirts
Laundry basket
Lifetime supply of ramen noodles
Ipod
Gator Aid (really?)
Car (not)
Books?

Cleaning supplies (don’t worry, these will be returned at end of the year – unused)

And finally, the things that go with them, whether you like it or not…..

Childhood
Youthful optimism
Innocence

Good luck parent. This will be harder for you than for your child…

Time for a trip.

We don’t have ‘fly’ money, but we do have ‘drive’ money, so our trips are almost always driving trips. Since our vacations are usually two weeks long, we have time to get just about anywhere in the continental United States.

This time our major destination is Vancouver which, it turns out, is not IN the continental United States.

Imagine my surprise. I thought Coronado, or Cortez, or Fred de Cordova surrendered Vancouver to us when we won the Spanish-American war. Right?

The thing about driving, rather than flying, is that you get to see a bunch of stuff on the ground. Rocks and rivers, mountains and trees…. All that stuff tends to stay earth-bound. Driving is almost the best way to see them…

Why Vancouver? Why not? I heard somewhere that it is really cool, an urban center surrounded by tons of crazy-beautiful scenery. Works for me!

This contrasts somewhat with Las Vegas, which is essentially sand with a trillion watts of electricity coursing through it.

Vegas people, please don’t attack me. I have been to your burg, and spent my money there, on several occasions. And I DO recommend people go there, at least once in their lives, to see the crazy architecture. Gambling is no longer the draw, because you can do that anywhere, but Vegas buildings are wild.

Lovers of sand/desert people, I don’t want to hear your complaints either. I get it: The desert is its own ecosystem, beautiful in its own way. It too, teems with life, just types of life that are different from prairies/oceans/forests. I get it.

Las Vegas isn’t desert, it is an artificial edifice placed in the desert. If anything, Vegas ugly’s-up the desert. If I want ‘glitz’ I will go back to New York.

But back to Vancouver. Due to the length of the drive we will only be able to spend about three days there. This is where you come in.

What are the best things to do in and around Vancouver if you only have three days? Victoria Island? Whale watching? Garibaldi Provincial Park?

Let us know, but make the pitch fast. The limo is warming up…
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P.S. While waiting for us to come back, you can check out pythonline.com.

May 21 came and went. The world didn’t end. If anyone was ‘raptured’ up to heaven, I didn’t notice. (See the May 19 Winkest Link, “Our Final Farewell”)

That I did not get ‘raptured’ did not shock me. I try to be good, but I don’t expect to be on the ‘A’ train when the rapture happens. I am sure those seats are reserved for the genuinely deserving, and I don’t place myself in that category.

Since I will be stuck here on Earth, what can I do to occupy my time? I guess I could just make a crapload of money, but how do I go about it?

The “end-of-the-world” business model may be my best bet. The Oakland radio preacher who predicted this disaster raked in $80 million in the years leading up to this.

Let us repeat: Eighty (eight-zero) million dollars.

Granted, some of this money was spent on billboards and, since the preacher is 89, maybe some was spent on Metamucil. Even so, that would leave a lot left over for… for… I don’t know what… frills?

If the world was ending you certainly wouldn’t need to put money into a more powerful radio signal. You can just talk to God when you get there.

I am sure God talks to this preacher all the time, but God did not rain down the $80 million.

That money came from believers. People followed his apocalyptic message, and many probably still do. We all need something to believe in, even if that belief is “I am going to heaven and all those standing around me will burn in a fiery hell.”

Now that May 21 has come and gone, our preacher has a new point to make: Every day from here forward is May 21. We can’t be really sure WHICH May 21 will be the final day so be ready every day!

God’s vision is so much bigger than ours, so OUR definition of “May 21, 2011” is bound to be more limiting than Gods version of “May 21, 2011.” How can you NOT see this?

Predictions now get a lot easier. On May 21, 2011 …

• The Cubs will win the World Series
• Dick Cheney will admit that invading Iraq was arbitrary and an insane waste of American lives and dollars.
• Pigs will fly

Prove me wrong.

Some followers may now begin to question the credibility of the Oakland preacher, and some may continue to follow him, but they all have one thing in common: They are not getting their $80 million back.

God must need that…

On May 21, a nearby symphony orchestra is performing “Live and Let Die: The Music of Paul McCartney”.

Live and Let Die? It can’t be any more appropriate.

May 21, 2011 is the end of the earth.

The orchestra could have chosen music from ‘Titanic,’ but maybe that would have been too subtle. Nope, “Live and Let Die” it is….

By now you know that an 89-year-old preacher from Oakland has declared May 21 as the beginning of the end. This same preacher predicted the end in 1994. He whiffed on that one, but maybe his internal end-of-the-world clock is better now than when he was only 72….

This type of prediction happens every couple of years, but a lot of people seem to have bought into this one.

Billboards are everywhere. People are traveling in caravans, warning of the end. A number of these people (seriously) have quit their jobs and given away all their worldly possessions. Yikes….

If these caravans have reached my little corner of the world (and they have), then there are A LOT of people out there expecting the worst…

When whack-jobs make dire predictions, people WILL listen. (How else do you think Glenn Beck stays a rich, rich man?)

I thought about rearranging my schedule, but things are sort of working out. We are celebrating my sisters birthday that day, but the get-together is at noon (six hours before the 6 PM cataclysm).

I am supposed to be throwing a big graduation party about a week later, but I guess I can ignore that now….

And I am sure sorry now that I paid to update the license plates for my car. There is no worry about getting tickets after Saturday.

My favorite advice came from CNN: “Skip the Green Bananas”

An exciting new story popped up in my local newspaper the other day. The Chicago Cubs may have thrown the World Series.

Not LAST year’s World Series. They weren’t in that one. Nor the one before that. Or the one before that. Or the one before that.

Okay, I couldn’t remember when the Cubs were last in the World Series, so I looked it up. Wiki tells me it was 1945. And they lost that.

Did the Chicago Cubs throw the 1945 World Series? Who knows? The story I read was not about the 1945 World Series. It was about the 1918 World Series.

Yeah, you read that right.

And no, I am not confusing this with the famous “Black Sox Scandal.” That effected the 1919 World Series, and was not about the Cubs, but rather their cross-town ‘brothers,’ the Chicago White Sox.

Nope. The year is 1918. The team is the Cubs.

Where did this ‘breaking news’ come from? It is actually part of the 1920 “Black Sox Scandal” court disposition. And somebody decided to report on it now, only 91 years later.

So in other words this was news, in 1920.

It seems to me the better time to have investigated this would have been in 1920, when any of the participants were still alive.

The White Sox players from 1919 were thrown out of baseball forever, and many died destitute.

Whatever happened to the Cub players from 1918?

Nothing. Since there was no investigation nobody was punished and they all played out their careers.

Unless you are Indiana Jones, it would be a little hard to ‘get to the bottom of this’ now….

Maybe their century-long chase for another World Series championship is just the God’s way of making the Cubs pay for the 1918 ‘non-scandal.’

Go Giants!

Apparently, Rep. Michele Bachmann made a misstatement about early American history.  She claimed that of New Hampshire, “You’re the state where the shot was heard around the world at Lexington and Concord.” We all know that happened in Texas with T. Boone Crockett exclaiming “Remember the Armadillo.” I don’t remember why the Armadillo was so important, but I guess Mexico wanted it or something.

I only heard of this mistake, when she said that the reporting of her mistake shows and obvious bias in the media. It must be news to her that I, a self-proclaimed follower of the news, had not heard of her mistake, until she used it to claim the bias.

Thankfully, she provided an example. She mentioned that during the 2008 campaign Barrack Obama, had claimed “Over the last 15 months, we’ve traveled to every corner of the United States. I’ve now been in 57 states? I think one left to go.” Again, we all know there are 52 States, excluding Canada (that’s a Province). She claimed this wasn’t reported in the media. First of all, how did she hear about it if it wasn’t reported? Second of all, I heard it many times when it happened. Yet, I didn’t hear her statement.

Where is the bias now?

To be forgiving to Bachmann, I know when it is you that make a mistake it feels if the whole world is closing in and making notice of the error, but the bias here doesn’t lie in the media’s hands, the bias is you perceiving yourself as more important than you really are.

The rest of the world could care less about that quip, there are many more telling quotes.

AOL has just completed its purchase of the online news hub, the Huffington Post.

The price? $315 million.

Our sincerest congratulations to Arianna Huffington for her newfound, additional wealth.

The press release says the combined site will attract about 117 million U.S. visitors each month, and an estimated 253 million worldwide.

We here at the Winkest Link are not the least bit jealous.

We have literally hundreds of loyal readers. Well, we don’t know how many ‘loyal’ readers we have, but we do have hundreds of ‘readers.’

And, based on current projections, we expect that level to grow by dozens before the end of the year. (Note to editors: Shouldn’t we say ‘fiscal year?’ It would make us seem more advertiser-friendly, and the projections are all imaginary anyway.)

So take note, AOL, if you want to get in on the ground floor of the surging blog that is ‘Winkest Link,’ now might be the time to act.

Donald Trump has shown great interest in us….and he is nobody’s fool.

True life conversation…..

Colleague #1:  “Right now, there is snow on the ground in 49 states. Amazing”

Me:    “I heard that and, more amazingly, the only state WITHOUT snow on the ground is Alaska!”  ***

Colleague #2:    “Really?  Wow, that IS interesting!”

And to think you were worried about our education system.

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***To clarify, for the humor-impaired…. The ‘Alaska’ comment was meant to be a joke. An exceptionally obvious joke.

Hakeem has a razor. Hakeem doesn’t shave.

The question for you (and for Hakeem) is…. Is the razor sharp, or is it not?

Discuss…

Several W-L editors play a game called “Sims 3.”

I don’t.

One of the character roles being played is a movie producer, or some-such. This producer is required, not to make a movie, but to come up with the idea and/or title of a movie.

I hereby present a few ideas of these producer-geniuses…

“Gin-ception” in which an alcoholic is able to invade the dreams of others…

“Catman Begins” which has no specific plot line, except it is a new super-hero movie, and allows for the natural sequel…

“Catman Deux”.

We at Winkest Link do NOT apologize for this awful pun. We relish this and encourage you, especially if you are playing a movie producer in Sims 3, to come up with something better.

As Bob Seger would say….. “Goodnight everybody!”

Happy Holidays…