When I talked to Frylock yesterday I mentioned that shopping at Wal-Mart isn't as much fun as it used to be. Sometime between corporate going all multi-culti and marketing going all suburban-trendy the place lost its tragic character.

But I went in there today anyway. And I was rewarded. By being annoyed.

It was in the new grocery section: recently redone to be stylish, kind-a like a blue Target. Anwyay, I was looking at the rolls of aluminum foil while a mother stared intently at the opposite shelves. Her children giggled and made merry, and as I walked up I had to step across a package of paper plates that that young girl had taken down and rolled on its side down the aisle.

This disgusted me: Cookie and Mojo have gotten smacked upside their coconut-heads for lesser breaches of the peace. But the mother was unperturbed: she just kept looking at the cut-rate merchandise. The girl rolled another package of plates and announced: "Mommy says we're very talented."

And the mother replied: "Of course you are."

As much as I tried not to do it, I turned to look. The mother was beaming sweetly at her reprobate children: the little girl happily hurling plates, her brother on the other side doing likewise and, I noted, sporting a faded orange stripe that had been dyed down the center of his crew cut.

And I thought to myself, this is where it starts... In a few short years that kid will be staggering around a stadium parking lot sloshing beer onto people's hibachi-grilled bratwursts while other fans remove their shirts and paint their man-boobs orange, whooping it up until gametime when things get really obnoxious.

Yeah, football season is pretty messed up around here. Frylock bemoans the sorry state of the culture -- and he's just talking about the aspects portrayed on television! With the news-biz being what it is these days, I regularly find the truth to be much stranger than non-fiction.