#251 Thumb Liquor

So I’m looking at the opinion page in the newspaper the other day. I was lucky because this was the day the editor was giving thumbs up and thumbs down to people. Now first let me say the whole thumbs up thumbs down thing has a checkered history. We most recently remember it from when Siskel and Ebert decided that’s the way to condemn or condone a movie. “Two thumbs up” meant you had at least two positive opinions of a movie to risk that $7.50 on. “Two thumbs down” watch out. There’d be some funky Ishtar going down in the city. Before that, in the early sixties, there was a movie by, I believe, a guy named William Castle. It may have been as early as the fifties, I’m not sure, all those blobs and things and giant grasshoppers and 60-foot men are kind of jumbled in my brain. What I do remember was the movie was called Mr. Sardonicus. Mr. Sardonicus was kind of a phantom of the opera sort of guy. He wore a mask to cover his facial disfigurement but he was really cruel. At the end of the movie the audience was asked to vote on which ending they preferred, his death or his redemption. This was in the days of 3-D glasses by the way. There was a giveaway for this movie too. When you paid for your ticket you were given a little card with a thumb on it. The thumb was coated with that radioactive glow in the dark stuff. If you wanted Mr. Sardonicus to live you held the thumb upright, if you wanted him to die you held the thumb down. For some reason the audience always voted thumbs down. Maybe it was for the lame movie itself. Maybe we are just a cruel and heartless populace, maybes little Gene Siskel was in the audience cheering them on. Before that, thumbs played a big part in the Roman gladiator kill the Christians era. The rabid audience would implore Caesar to kill or free the gladiatorial loser. Death by public acclaim. Talk about feeling unloved. So anyhow. I’m not at all sure the newspaper ought to be using such a barbaric gesture of death, murder, and condemnation but what the hell. Gotta do something to balance their liberal image. One of the entries was funny though. The editor was condemning businesses that served alcohol to minors. It then listed them with their names in capital letters. Oh the shame. Oh the humiliation. Then I read the last name on the list. At first, I missed it because it wasn’t capitalized. Funny, cause this is the state capital. And the offender who was caught in a sting operation selling liquor to minors? The state liquor store. Oh boy, If I was one of those business owners I’d be saying hey, if even your highly trained lifetime liquor sellers screw up, how am I supposed to do better with my barely over twenty-one nighttime help? I betcha they had a different idea about where to stick their thumbs.
America, ya gotta love it.