Mhall46184@aol.com
The Rodent vs. the Reptile
No, no, I’m not talking about the latest squabble at an office meeting.
Recently a couple of those roadside chain giganto gas ‘n’ gulp ‘n’ gorge places got into a legal tiff about one’s reptile logo looking too much like the other’s rodent logo.
Since neither establishment serves rodents or reptiles as takeout, what’s the point?
As Al said on the radio, if a driver can’t tell the difference between a giant rodent and a giant reptile, maybe he shouldn’t be driving at all.
Indeed, if the health department were to find rodents or reptiles in the food service spaces, a Godzilla of citations would be released into the wilds of the sandwich kiosks.
Another point of contention is that the rodent people accused the reptile people of copying the rodent people by bragging about their clean restrooms. That makes no sense. One can’t imagine any establishment advertising with, “Come on in; our restrooms are vile and disgusting!”
Of course no one’s restrooms would be vile and disgusting if The People, bless them, didn’t trash them constantly with populist incontinence.
The rodent people and the reptile people – those sound like new categories for a reality show. The competitions could be parking-lot drag races, the highest-decibel screaming children, and map-and-compass navigation of the souvenir area. The losing team would be voted to spend a night, without either weapons or anti-witch powder, in the truck stop restroom across the street, the one with the cologne dispenser because there’s nothing that says lot lizard magnet like cologne from a truck stop restroom.
According to Wookiepedia (or something like that), one of the rodent locations features “120 fueling positions, 83 toilets, 31 cash registers, 4 Icee machines, and 80 fountain dispensers.” All that is mildly interesting, but a cafeteria offering of 83 toilets hardly makes the place a vacation destination.
Texas has put a lot of miles (or maybe those godless Napoleonic kilometres) on the tires from the Ye Olden Days gas station along the two-lane, with a couple of pumps, a screen door, fizzy drinks in a tank of ice water, ceiling fans stirring the flypaper strips in the desert heat, and a couple of old geezers sitting on a wooden bench out front, whittling and watching the decades pass. Now we have sanitized giant rodent and giant reptile gargantua plazas with air-conditioning and 80 toilets and lawsuits.
Progress, I guess.
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