Ideas Anyone?

September 2005 - Sorry about last month's column. How lame is it when the best topic I can come up with is a GOOGLE search of my own name?!?

I just don't seem to have any good ideas these days, at least not any ideas good enough to make a full column. So, I'm just going to share a bunch of little ideas. Shallow thoughts, if you will. I've been mulling them over lately, so let me purge them from my system now and, hopefully, make room for some slightly less shallow thoughts in the future. Here we go.

I opened a fortune cookie the other day. The paper inside read something like, "If you chase two rabbits, you will lose both of them." That’s an adage, not a fortune. Confucius say, there's a difference.

I don't know if this is an adage, but it's certainly a warning: Watch what you do because there's a good chance someone is watching you! In early August, our 6:00 p.m. newscast aired surveillance video taken at a produce stand in Snyder County. A farmer runs the stand on the honor system - take fruit and veggies, leave some cash. When the farmer suspected that some of his customers weren't being very honorable, he installed a surveillance camera. He also put up a big sign to let people know the camera was there. What happened? It wasn't long before the camera caught two women taking fruit and veggies. It also caught them swiping the cash that honest customers had left! The farmer turned the tape over to state police, who turned it over to Newswatch 16. Within 30 minutes of the video being shown on the news, at least 50 people had called state police to ID the crooks as a mother and daughter. What did we prove? We proved that these two women are well-known but not well-liked. We may also have proved that these two dumb crooks can't read!

Speaking of reading, I have quite a dilemma these days. I have one mystery novel that I started reading back in June. For some reason, the reading is going very slowly. I’m only about 100 pages into a 300-page book. The problem is that I have two other mystery novels that I really want to read just waiting on the shelf. If I started to read them, I'm pretty sure I could get through both of them pretty quickly. But, it just doesn’t seem right to start one book and then, possibly, another before I've finished the first one. On the other hand, is it right to put off reading two books I might enjoy for the sake of finishing one book that I'm really not liking very much?

What should I do? Maybe I'll come up with some ideas and write a column about it.