Putting My Scanner to Use

I admit. Sometimes I think I’m very funny. Probably a lot more often than anyone else does, but that’s okay. One such instance occurred just the other night, after Melanie and I had taken a grocery shopping trip to Wal-Mart. With it being late in the afternoon, we decided to buy something quick and easy for dinner, and so we purchased a couple of frozen pizzas that were on sale. One pizza (that I chose, unfortunately) was a Buffalo Chicken pizza. Now, I’ve always had the problem of thinking of Buffalo Chicken, Buffalo Wings, and other Buffalo treats as being barbecue based. I’ve thought this even though I’ve learned on more than one occasion that this is not true. Buffalo sauce is some kind of hot sauce based concoction, rather on the spicy side. And so, that’s what our pizza had all over it. This concerned us once we started eating because Melanie is breastfeeding Creegan and we didn’t want her to eat something that would ultimately upset our baby boy.

Now, I am anything but an artist, but I decided to draw a warning label that can be applied to all spicy foods to serve as a warning to breastfeeding mothers that the food in question is potentially dangerous to their young ones. I grabbed a napkin and a ballpoint pen and came up with this:



Of course, on the products, the picture will have to have a “jet” through it, like so:



For the record, Edison coined the phrase “jet” to refer to the familiar red circle with a line through it, indicating a warning. I don’t know why he started calling it a jet, but it’s stuck with us and now it seems like a good word for the thing.

Because I was using my scanner to take a picture of my napkin art, I thought I’d also scan the cover a book that Edison (or perhaps Peter) recently picked out from our local library. It’s a children’s book, but the cover is a bit unsettling. Even the title of the book seems all too easily to hint at something very perverse. I’m just glad there aren’t only two civil servants standing in the background, one Caucasian and one African-American, or I’d start thinking Mr. Levine and Ms. Lewin really are trying to corrupt our youth.



Thanks, and good night!