Contraband

I heard a story the other day that I thought was pretty funny--though probably not for the people who lived it. Nevertheless, I am prepared to laugh at their expense. This concerns a group of guys who do an annual fishing trip to Canada--rent a cabin, stay a few days, drink a lot of beer and commune with nature. At the border crossing, they were asked if they had any produce. Well, knowing full well there would be no problem (and probably to divert attention from the amount of alcohol they were bringing along) they declared the potatoes destined for the steak dinner on the first night at the cabin.

Oops.

The potatoes were enough of a red flag that the Canadians ran checks on all of them for prior vegetable smuggling convictions. It turned out they were first-timers with the vegetables, but one of the guys had a prior DUI--an automatic felony in Canada. And this from a country that shares a border with Wisconsin--they must be more foreign then they seem. Anyway, they would not admit the poor sap into the country and in a three musketeers gesture, his companions refused to proceed without him.

So they turned back, only to find that their nongrata status in Canada had all the alarms ringing on the US side of the border. In short, the US border patrol couldn't say exactly why, but they really didn't want them back. Not if Canada didn't want them. Caught in no-man's land with a sniper pacing the roof between the two borders, they spent an additional few miserable hours trying to smuggle their potatoes back into the land of their births.

And as I listened to this story, I couldn't help thinking about how times have changed. I remembered the time we crossed from Canada into the US with a car full of chaotic and muddy camping gear and the guy asked us if we had any guns. We invited him to check for himself, and though he didn't laugh as much as we thought he might, he didn't arrest us either.

And the sniffer dog who went into high alert over my carry-on bag which contained a large sheep's cheese from Italy--well I lied to the dog as well as his handler and they looked at me and my two young nervous cheese-smuggling children and let us all walk.

Would that happen now? I am not so sure. A kilo of declared Italian dried herbs (and yes, a kilo of dried herbs does connote a certain something, as well as being a really impressive amount of herbage) did walk through Chicago customs a few years ago, but the reindeer jerky from Norway did not. Apparently there is a ruminant virus in Scandinavia and we don't want to catch it. No, we would rather hold the fort at chronic wasting disease, a prion disorder that I prefer to call mad deer disease. I explained that I had no intention of eating the reindeer jerky or feeding it to other deer, but only wanted it to stuff the Christmas stockings of my (adult) children and claim it came from Rudolph. Maybe I got what I deserved...or maybe the customs guy thought that was an excellent idea and confiscated my jerky to distribute himself.

Either way, the fun is certainly going out of crossing international borders with food, one of my favorite souvenirs. And don't even think of taking anything with dirt on it into New Zealand. Kiwis may seem very happy-go-lucky, but those customs people can be quite severe. Trust me, I know.

I think it is only a matter of time before we are dumping not only our shoes, but all of clothes, into those little gray bins. Then naked through the showers before seeing the sidewalks of any other country. Mark my words.

Compulsion

No, not that depressing French movie--I am referring to behavior that began last Friday when I discovered Bejeweled Blitz, one of the applications on Facebook. Henceforth, I will refer to it as the Devil B, so as not to add to the allure.

Not since Tetris was new have I wasted so much time. My friend Mary warned me, but I see she is posting a score of over 59,000 points in the current tournament, so clearly she is not taking her own advice.

I have been playing Lexulous for a few weeks now and it is fairly sedate. Much like Scrabble, the game it imitates, there is a board, there are letters, and everyone takes turns. Sometimes several days go by between turns, unless you have three players on three computers in the same house. Then it gets raucous with much yelling and thundering up and down the stairs and the neighbors might complain. In short, everyone's idea of good family fun.

The Devil B is a totally different animal. This is the kind of game that causes eye strain, weight loss (or gain) and repetitive stress syndrome in the mouse hand. And all since last Friday. It has all of the ingredients of a good game: it takes less than a minute to learn, but I am still working out the strategy. My scores keep going up, but it feeds me just enough stratospheric success that I want more. The shapes, colors, and sound effects provide enough multisensory cues that I know when I am doing well, and I always want to do better. I thrive on the sound of jewels glissading into patterns of 3, 4, and 5, exploding into thousands of points.

I was talking to some friends recently about keeping the brain active--the goal, apparently, is to keep laying down neural pathways. I am sure I have, but all of my new pathways are causing me to see pink triangles and discs that look like Werther's Original Toffees whenever I close my eyes. I am not at all sure this will protect me from dementia. In fact, could this be causing dementia. At the very least, I am short on sleep.

It has also occurred to me (as I am sure it has to you) that this may be one of the alien plots to subjugate the human race. The first step, after making everyone play this game compulsively, is to withdraw the game. I am getting an error message as we speak. Although my friend Mary is merrily ramping up her scores, I CAN'T GET IN!!!!

I think may need a Devil B exorcist. Either that, or a flight to New Zealand where the jewels cascade, free of error messages.