Casual boom boom

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				THE
Column Archive				VIRGINIA GAZETTE
				WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA
Casual boom boom				June 11, 2005

Rita McGhee wants my body. Make that desperately wants my body. I know this because her amorous appeal slid down the spam sluice into my delete file last week. I usually automatically pass over all the ads for Viagra, Cialis and low interest mortgage loans, but I must confess that the message from Rita rather intrigued me. She told me how horribly lonely she was and that she just knew I was the man she was looking for.

I suppose I would have replied to Rita had not another eye-catching beam from beyond come cascading down the cyber chute from some character named Complete Dardan. I have no idea what species something called Complete Dardan is, but it was hot to tell me that there are literally millions of people profiles in my area who are “looking for fun.” And didn’t I want to hook up with one of them for some “ casual boom boom”?

I must admit that I’m clueless as to what casual boom boom is, but it certainly sounds like a lot of fun, especially if it’s casual. I hate dressing up for anything, and if I can engage in some boom boom in jeans and a T-shirt, so much the better. But what’s even more exciting is that there are evidently millions of people in the Williamsburg area who are into casual boom boom, and they want me to join them.

On the other hand, you have to be wary of such offers. When something sounds too good to be true, it’s probably not true. Casual boom boom might just be one of those things. My first inclination was that casual boom boom referred to fireworks, and they’re certainly fun. But then it occurred to me that it might also be an al Qaeda-type ruse to recruit people into some shabbily-dressed suicide bomb corps. You never know.

As the bumper sticker says, “It’s as bad as you think, and they are out to get you.”

The fact is that there are more than a few nasty people out there who live to tinker with your brain. They lure you with a false sense of security or appeal to your besieged basic instincts and then lower the boom boom.

For instance, you may have noticed a rash of fresh signs posted on various roads in the county warning motorists that they are entering a “Seat Belt Enforcement Area.” What is especially troubling is that black residential areas seem to be the targets for such zones. Motorists on Chickahominy Road have been subjected to speed traps and road blocks for the past three weeks. Another enforcement area includes the black enclave on Route 60 West, where it intersects with Route 199.

But it is the logic of this that escapes me. If there are now specific areas set aside for the enforcement of seat belt laws, does this mean that we can chuck the buckle everywhere else? If we can’t, why set up isolated seat belt enforcement areas? What’s the hidden agenda here? Is Complete Dardan working for the county boom boom police?

Another donkey-minded idea making the rounds is that we can appease the anti-growth crowd in James City with developments consisting of cluster homes surrounded by oodles of green space. This will certainly maintain the rural nature of what little open acreage there is left in the county and show the world that we’re truly worshiping the goddess of green.

The only problem is that, for all the green space, there will still be the same number of homes with the same number of people using the same number of water-wasting sprinklers and sending the same number of kids to already overcrowded schools. Who’s kidding whom? Boom boom!

Or did you see that the developers of the new mega-complex on Centerville Road are going to lure homebuyers with the notion that they’ll be living amongst “rolling hills”? While the topography might be steep in places, we’re not talking Appalachia here.

Yet, in them thar hills, there’s plenty of room for a new bride and groom. Boom boom!

Perhaps the greatest mental tricksters of all are those Homeric sirens who lure you to their products with jived-up nutritional information. For example, on a box of Orville Redenbacher’s buttery popcorn, we’re told that two tablespoons of unpopped corn contain 160 calories.

Who on earth but an oozy-brained, starving chicken is eating unpopped popcorn? But it gets better. Orville informs us that those two tablespoons of unpopped corn cough up a serving size of four cups of popped corn. But in the nutrition table, the serving size is suddenly reduced to one cup when it comes to counting the calories, of which there are 35.

Again I ask, Who eats only one cup of popcorn? Especially when the bag that you fry in the microwave produces, it says in small print, 12 cups of popped corn. Caloric doom. Boom boom!

To the millions of you in the Williamsburg area who have been seduced into the whirl of casual boom boom, I have one word of warning: Beware! The world is full of canoodling weasels like Rita McGhee and Complete Dardan. Never forget that behind all their exotic enticements lies a deadly Trojan virus just waiting to smash your Windows to smithereens.