The Joplin Globe, Joplin, MO

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August 1, 2008

Anne Kettenbrink: Are you too stupid to live?

The mother of one of my friends has a saying. I don’t know how often she uses it, but she used it at least once in my presence, and it kind of stuck.

I can’t remember who she was talking about or what they had done, but I remembered her saying that person was “too stupid to live.”

Now, I don’t think she meant it literally, as in, “I want to go get myself a gun and remove this person from the face of the planet.” I’m pretty sure she meant it more like, “I really could do without dealing with this person, and his existence is infuriating to me.”

I’m almost positive that the person who was too stupid to live was a man, but that’s probably a whole other column.

Anyway, I found myself using that phrase the other day about a minor thing, and that made me think. There are a lot of people around who are “too stupid to live.”

There’s the guy in the really big truck who thought he could just merge into the lane where I was driving, just because I have a little car that is, apparently, invisible.

Well, mister, my invisible car has a horn, and it gets 27 mpg. So swerve back into your own lane. Too stupid to live!

Then there is the infamous Cheese Thief. The Cheese Thief has not apologized, nor has he replaced my cheese. This is patently offensive.

I know food is expensive. In fact, I know from experience, because I actually paid for mine. That’s why I bought the store brand.

And now, not only has the Cheese Thief stolen my cheese, he’s also stolen someone’s V-8 and someone else’s packaged dinner.

So now I guess we’ll have to refer to him as the Fridge Thief.

It’s really too bad that the Fridge Thief only cleans out good food and is never the one to clean out the nasty leftovers that live in the back of the fridge for two years. I would be more tempted to forgive him if he were also performing somewhat of a public service.

I am tempted to bait him with Ex-Lax brownies, but that seems a waste of good brownies. Instead, I will just taunt him: Too stupid to live!

There are also the noisy birds that perch on the trees outside the Globe’s building. Thankfully, the city is using the scary bird-noise machine that it used last year, and I think someone was throwing firecrackers at the birds, too.

In any event, the birds appear to have migrated away from such annoying and scary surroundings, and no longer reside in the trees in Spiva Park or across from the Globe. In fact, after it rained, the sidewalk remained relatively clean. Yippee.

The thing is, though, they aren’t gone. Apparently, firecrackers and whatever is on the noise machine thing isn’t scary enough for the birds to actually fly the coop.

They’ve only moved the coop. Their new roost is the trees near the police department.

At least police officers are licensed to carry and use a gun, in case they agree with me that the birds are too stupid to live.



Address correspondence to Anne Kettenbrink, c/o The Joplin Globe, P.O. Box 7, Joplin, MO 64802, or via e-mail, akettenbrink@joplinglobe.com.

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