(I would have used "yellow-bellied sapsuckers", myself, but "loons" works, too.)

Annoy your friends. Traumatize your loved ones. And let the spirit of the season wash over you like some terrible quicksand of obnoxiousness:

Mojo

So Mojo, fresh from the TRAUMA of seeing pictures of EVIL CLOWNS everywhere, decides to go out for Thanksgiving dinner with some Loved Ones. It's buffet style--Mojo has the salmon, since she planned on having turkey the NEXT day--and for dessert Mojo chooses a cup of chocolate mousse. Because, ummm, listen, if the words "chocolate mousse" aren't reason enough, we might as well end it now because you will never understand The Free Spirit That Is Mojo.

Anyway, I am eating chocolate mousse, and from the very first I am aware of a nasty taste I don't particularly like, but I can't quite place it. I keep eating because, well, chocolate mousse, but the taste doesn't go away and it's actually making me a hair nauseated. Which is a shame because, well, chocolate mousse.

The waitress pops by to see how things are going, and I do my best to not make a horrible face as I casually ask, "What's in the chocolate mousse?" Because this is the sort of pretentious Yuppie cuisine where the chef likes to add Weird Stuff to things, and you have to be cool about it or people might suspect Mojo is slightly less awesome than she actually is.

The waitress lights up like you wouldn't believe (she's probably in her early twenties, so she still has the energy to get all excited about foods she had no hand in preparing except to bring it to the table) and she gushes "Isn't it GREAT?"

So one Facebook page Mojo admins is a typical do-goody organization that does nice things for the area. You'd be hard put to find someone wanting to make their lives miserable, though I know such people (and bots) exist. I have been on the innertubes for a long time, and I am usually SCRUPULOUSLY CAREFUL with security and whatnot.

Part of being the admin for a FB page is, you get access to all these stats about hits and clicks and comments and whatnot. I usually stroll by that section every now and then, to keep tabs and make sure folks are behaving. They always are. So after the glut of Thanksgiving-esque posts for this organization, the notifications are invariably chock full of people who appreciate just how nice this organization is. And then I saw this:

Okay, so I have this THING about Evil Clowns. Meaning, I DON'T LIKE THEM. I do not like them, Sam-I-Am! Mojo and Evil Clowns DO NOT MIX. And the next more horrible thing besides actually MEETING an Evil Clown would be seeing a PICTURE OF ONE.

I feel the need to point out that, even though I personally thought ATLAS SHRUGGED was a terrible, terrible book--I think I’ve read it twice in the past twenty years, the second time partially because I thought to myself “It can’t POSSIBLY be as dreadful as I remember it being” (turns out I was wrong)--you could still make an okay or even a fairly decent movie out of it. I was going to point out superhero movies as an illustration of this, but I have to admit I consider BOTH superhero books and movies pretty stupid, too.

So today I was dragged out of my house deep in the sticks and made to walk around the city for a good chunk of the day. Usually for me "the city" is New York, or once in a while Boston, but today it was Springfield, Mass. I had a job that entailed wandering around downtown taking pictures of a particular group of slightly older women I sometimes assist; we will leave it at that. I also spent some time wandering around alone, because that is how Mojo often rolls.