Alien Nation.

Lately our country has been positively inundated with foreigners. Have you noticed? For example, this January as I flew through Chicago, I met a group of French men and woman who were on their way to Vail to do some skiing. "Long way to come just to ski," I remarked. "It IS," said one in their cadre, "but it's so much cheaper to fly over here, stay in a nice hotel and ski in Vail than it would be to take the train to ski in Gstaad."

Uh-huh.

Seems everywhere I fly I'm encountering Europeans that are finding the same values in our country that we associate with Tijuana. Okay, so perhaps it's not that bad. After all, in most U.S. towns you're not apt to find homes constructed out of cardboard. And seldom will you find entertainment such as "The Donkey Lady". That, and you can pretty much drink the tap water in any U.S. town if forced to do so. But I digress.

This weekend Amie and I took the boys for to Monterey. Our eldest son, Jack, was celebrating his ninth birthday (holy crap...NINE!), and he really wanted to check out the Monterey Bay Aquarium. So it was that we stayed at a very nice resort. It was located right on a beautiful golf course, within a 10-minute drive of the Aquarium, and it allowed dogs. As an aside, our Bulldog, "VIVI" became somewhat of a celebrity during the weekend, with people literally lining up to pet her. But I digress.

As today was "Aquarium Day", we spent most of yesterday around the pool. The kids had a blast. Amie and I did, too. But I couldn't help but notice that more than a few poolside loungers were wearing dark socks with shoes, and were sporting skin whiter than mine*. Fine by me. I for one am all for bilking the Eurotrash out of their last Euro. But, shortly after we settled in for a nice afternoon at the pool, this couple - pictured left - showed up.


Judging by their clothes, their complexion and their size (in a word: ZAFTIG), I guessed post-Iron Curtain in origin. Not a problem...'this pool's big enough for the both of us', I thought. It was in this spirit of bonhomie that I decided to order a margarita and chill.

But it was when Mrs. Zaftig decided that poolside was the perfect place to try to clean her toenails that I had enough.

For over ten minutes, our Little Miss (and, to be clear, she was by no means little: you could land an F-18 on her ass) dug and picked at her toenails. Now, certainly I would have liked to have looked away; unfortunately, the pool at the resort was small. At least it was when compared to her ass. But I digress.

12 minutes into it, I thought she has had enough. I certainly had had. But, apparently her fingers could find no purchase on the crap embedded in her toes. Unwilling to demur, she decided that the ideal implement with which to unearth her trash was her room key:

Of course, I could not sit idly by and watch Fraü Bigaß mine the treasure betwixt her cuticles...I had to photograph this spectacle. It's yet another example of the pains to which I will go to to provide you with senseless blog fodder to read.

But I digress.


* "How white?", you may ask? White enough to have been called 'ultra-Caucasian'. But I digress.

When you're finished picking at your bodily extremities, go check out humor-blogs.com.