A.G.E's Joint

 Many people have said it. Once in a while, a bonehead will come up with it. Years ago, my niece gave me a book titled "The Trenton Pickle Ordinance and Other Bonehead Legislation" (Dick Hyman, The Stephen Greene Press, (c)1976) with 115 pages of laws, that might have made sense at the time of enactment, but are silly today.  The titular entry reads: "It is unlawful to throw tainted pickles into the streets" It doesn't say when the law went into effect, but I assume it was before most were paved and horses could literally be in a pickle. Tainted pickles do stink of rotted cucumbers, so there is that.  If you are living in the Northeast, you might be interested in this law from Brawley, California: "It is forbidden to snow within the city limits." Then you have ones that seem Prohibition Influenced: "In the state of South Carolina, it is unlawful to sell pants with hip pockets." This was done to dissuade people from carrying flasks. My moth...

My name is Another Government Employee and I’m a politics addict. Not really, but I spent 25 years of my life in bureaucratic drudgery keeping various social services running. As part of my job and a survival technique, I paid close attention to the circus that is the State Legislature as they convened every year. A motley crew of moral trapeze artists and clowns they are, too. My co-workers and I would hold contests for the most asinine bills and made book on whether they would pass. Most of them wouldn’t, but spring wouldn’t be complete if there wasn’t a pitch for the Official State Turtle or Squirrel. Of course, there would also be tracking of bills directly affecting my employer and our budget. Anything thing that smacked of entitlement was fought over like a ham bone in a dog kennel. If something really nasty got proposed, I would be tasked with doing the worst case scenario projections and hope the bill would die in Committee (more than half the time, it did.) ...