Newsletter #45

Super Bowl Sunday

In some circles, this is probably the second most important religious holiday on the calendar, after the opening day of deer season. Nine months from today, the birth rate in Texas will drop to near zero and no one in his right mind would schedule a Pro Wrestling match or Tractor Pull for this date. People have been buying up beer and ordering barbecue in preparation for this day since before they completed their Christmas shopping. There will be enough potato chips consumed today that if all the potatoes came from Ireland, they would have another potato famine.

The Super Bowl used to be held in January, but the mental anguish caused by thousands of Texans having to choose between a day hunting and a day guzzling beer in front of the boob tube was hurting oil production, so now it's held in February after all the hunting seasons close.

Now, I realize that what I am about to write could get me disinherited, deported, and labeled a Nancy-Boy back home, but the truth is that the last time I watched a football game was back in the days when The Southern Command News used to broadcast taped games with the commercials and timeouts removed, so it only took a bit more than an hour to watch. That was in the late 70s. I'm not sure what happened. Maybe it was the Chagres River water, which they say has magical properties. Maybe it was a late-blooming genetic defect. Whatever the reason, one day I realized that I could do other, more fun things while drinking beer, so I just stopped watching. Over the years, when my channel surfing would happen to land me on a football game, I'd watch a few minutes and think, 'Hey, I've seen that before' and move on to something more exciting, like 'The Nude Cooking Show'.

Now that I'm a big-time Newsletter writer with a couple of hundred subscribed readers who aren't even family, I thought it was my duty to watch the XL Super Bowl game and report on it, just in case some of you were trapped in a cave or shipwrecked somewhere on Super Bowl Sunday. Unfortunately, I fell asleep before the game started and missed the best part, the half-time show, but having seen no breaking news flashes on any of the news channels, I assume that no bare breasts made an appearance this year. I'm sorry to have to report that I found this football game to be just as boring as every other football game I've seen in the last 25 years, so as soon as it became clear to me that the team in the yellow pants was going to win, I rushed to my computer to type up this report.

So, that's my football report for this season, and for all you fans out there, who won't have anything to do until the next season starts in late February, may I suggest you check out 'The Nude Cooking Show'.

Mail Service, Ordering Parts

I have recently assumed the part time job of Secretary for my Masonic Lodge and one of the tasks the secretary does is prepare and mail several hundred meeting notices every month. I send a very few through the APO, but most of the local and US members go through the Panama Post Office. First I sent the local and APO notices, then went to the Los Pueblos post office and asked for 300 $.35 stamps. Silly me! After rummaging around and checking the safe and storage closet, the clerk came up with 113 stamps. I should have known. Several years ago when I held this office, I frequently encountered the same problem. Obviously, my memory is deficient. So, a simple matter of buying 300 stamps turns into a half-day long pain-in-the-backside trek from one post office to the other to get enough stamps to mail the notices. Another major pain is that even though the local notices can be mailed for $.10, no post office ever has $.10 stamps, so I have to pay $.20 to mail them. Fortunately there aren't all that many, not enough to justify driving to Balboa where the only franking machine in Panama is located. I used to go there, but the machine was broken as often as it worked and when it did work, it would mangle about 10% of the notices.

Although this has nothing to do with the Panama Post Office, it does have to do with mail ordering stuff. I ordered the U-joints I need for my Jeep from CarParts.com, a JC Whitney partner, and they were sent to Miami and from there to Panama via Al White's PTY600 freight service. PTY600 charges either by weight or volume, because that's how the shipper charges them, so my two U-joints, which weighed less than 3 pounds but were packed in a box big enough to hold about 50 of them, cost $7.00 instead of $3.00 had they been packed in a box just big enough. That box, by the way, was filled mostly with air and about 10 pages from a newspaper.

The Website

My prediction of 2000 visits for January was slightly exceeded. I'm still finding an occasional error in a link, so if you notice anything out of whack with the site, please let me know. Later this week, a new section called 'Files' will appear on the website. Most of the files there will be in Portable Document Format (pdf) and will deal with such matters as selecting an attorney, getting a visa, buying property, and getting a Panama driver's license.