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Two of the magpies were holding down a third magpie, and a fourth magpie was wearing what looked like little robes and a powered wig. I don't know where they got that from, but it was adorable. They were all squawking at each other, and pecking at the one on the ground. When this kind of thing happens, you feel like you should step in. Abandon your crude justice system, birds! Listen not to this corrupt "justice," who was probably appointed by a bird not operating in your best interests.

My hand was still. I didn't want to catch a contempt charge. The (human) justice who yelled at me for most of last week's ordeal told me that I was lucky to get away after turning his courtroom into a circus. Who knows what magpie jail was like? As a minority, I'd be isolated and attacked, picked on whenever I tried to get extra birdseed at the cafeteria or call my family by standing on the roof and squawking real loud. I decided not to interfere.

Sure enough, a fifth magpie soon appeared, wearing a little white tie. He already had the black robe, I guess. After presenting some evidence to the justice magpie, he consulted it for a bit. Soon, the justice rapped a little gavel on the bike path, and the accused was freed. I had seen the avian court system work yet again.

Once they had dispersed from the path, I continued my walk. Up in the trees, I heard the accused magpie complain to his friends.

"Can't believe I got busted for nest raiding, man. It's not my fault. It's all because the grocery store started locking up their dumpster to keep that asshole from stealing all the expired ramen."

Lots of folks around me complain bitterly that retail establishments are too quick to change their seasonal promos. I say: don't blame me. This is the fault of the ancient Gregorians, who put Halloween and Christmas too closely together when they invented the calendar. They knew exactly what they were getting into, and it is only fate that it is our age that the inevitable collapse has occurred to.

In a normal, healthy retail environment, these two holidays put too closely together wouldn't matter: families would still spend through the summer on hot girl summer, the fall in hot girl autumn, the winter in somewhat colder girl winter, and finally re-up for hot girl spring. Cash throughout the whole year pouring into your coffers, paying for deluxe mall real estate and maybe a BMW or two for the regional manager. Unfortunately, shit's fucked right now, in case you haven't noticed, and now the only two things that can get a wallet opened are spooky skeletons and big ol' trees with blinking lights on 'em.

Indeed, public transit makes a lot of sense as an investment. People need to get somewhere, and making it easier to get a bunch of people where they want to go, quickly, can only be a good thing. That is, unless you live in the soap opera universe, where getting somewhere quicker means that you are more likely to catch your significant other cheating on you with your identical evil twin. You expected me to be stuck in traffic, Sofia? Like a peasant? Efficient, frequent, and convenient mass transit has put the lie to your antiquated concept of congestion, just as it has to this marriage!

We know, of course, of the opposition to public transit. Used car dealerships wield a shocking amount of power in municipal government. They'd rather destroy civilization than be told that they can't sell you a 320,000-mile 2001 Neon for $11500 (with extra finance charges.) How dare they mess with our kids' ability to get on a maglev bullet train that takes them to work in nanoseconds.

For a lot of reasons, I don't really do that anymore. We'll talk about how I am actually a great moral leader and a wonderful human being later, but for now let's talk about golf carts. Golf carts are like a little car that you get to drive around the golf course. They're great, although I often felt that they didn't have enough in the way of oomph. No torque, no pluck. The more astute readers may already understand what is going on here.

Another important aspect of golf carts is that they are almost exclusively rear-wheel-drive. You know, like a drift car. Combine that with a relatively short wheelbase, and you can get some naughty skids out of them if you get the weight to transfer just right. In a theoretical case, which my attorney would like to impress upon you is hypothetical only, someone could do a pretty sick rip on a sparsely-populated golf course. That is, of course, if that someone's medication allowing him to be a functional member of society were to run out.

Now, as everyone knows, these robots aren't "smart." They're heinously overbuilt RC cars, to which some grad students stapled a circular saw. Your average luggage tug has more autonomy, mostly because nobody is particularly afraid that it will get hit by a 60,000-rpm spinning blade and ejected into the audience. Simple is better, and simple is a lot easier to turn off when things start getting hairy.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the sport, I think you can probably still work it out with a Swiss Chalet kids' placemat and a couple unchewed crayons. It is basically demolition derby, but with the benefit of the driver not being actively inside the car at the time it is blown to smithereens. Their (the robots, but also the owners') goal is simply to survive being sawed, flipped, burned, mulched, or folded for longer than the other guy can, and there's lots of ways to do it.

One strategy is just to be a big ol' heavy thing, like a sumo wrestler. Then you can go through life with the philosophy that walls often win, even when big pickup trucks crash into them at high speed. The other end of combat conceptualization is that you should be very tiny and fast, so as to make it very annoying for them to hit you. Then you wait, flitting around like a little asshole dragonfly, until the enemy exhausts themselves and exposes a flashing, vulnerable weak point.

When I called the woodpecker guy about all those woodpeckers trying to peck the side of my house (which is not mostly made out of wood) I got a rude surprise. Dude just laughed at me. Nobody can make woodpeckers go away, he gasped out between giggles. All we do is sell you some crazy shit to annoy them into destroying your neighbour's house instead. I hung up immediately, and resolved to solve my problem myself. It would turn out later that his uncharacteristic honesty was due to a gas leak in the neighbourhood, but that's a story for another time (RIP Woodpecker Woody.)

Rather than fight them directly, I decided the best plan was to do as the woodpecker guy wanted. Like Steven Seagal in his acclaimed action thriller Above Lethality Under Siege, I would simply redirect their attack somewhere else. What makes a bunch of agitated birds with super-long tongues wrapped around their brains chill the fuck out for five minutes? Becoming homeowners, that's what.

Now, I've been accused of many things over the years, often credibly. One of the things that any attorney will tell you never to do in court is defend yourself. Even so, if it came down to it, I would tell that stuck-up judge and that jury full of douchebags that I was capable of building a Goddamn birdhouse. No woodworker, to be sure – there's no ornate finials or even dovetails, as I wasn't sure if woodpeckers had like a "race thing" going on with the doves – but I dutifully followed the woodpecker birdhouse plan I had downloaded from alt.woodworking.birds.birds.birds on the library computers. And it looked pretty good as I nailed it to what remained of my fence.

Here's what I hadn't thought about, though. Induced demand. As soon as I put up some affordable housing for these picidaes, all of a sudden their entire social calendar wanted to move into the same neighbourhood. Parents, cousins, grand-cousins, supernephews, you name it. Each and every one of them knew the way to get a brand-new deluxe luxury condo was to start pecking on my house when I was trying to sleep. One morning I woke up and a pair of sapsuckers were flying around my bedroom, with a hole in the wall big enough to stick a pair of Weber carbs. I was spending every waking hour constructing low-density housing for the woodpeckers, and my neighbours were beginning to wonder if I was the one luring them to destroy their homes.

On the idyllic afternoon where my policies are put into action, I switch my right turn signal on a little bit too early, and in return a woman named Neci who has never seen the outside of a Soviet work prison for more than 30 minutes takes my wing mirror off with a subsonic 50-calibre warning shot from a mile away. Her dream when released is to one day visit Subway.

Up the block, a pair of teenaged child soldiers made mostly of knives who were hardwired from birth by various French ex-governmental assassination rings have disabled a Cayenne by putting $6500 of tank killer rounds through the engine block, and pull out the driver to receive her ticket.

Behind me, I hear the distinct sounds of an Uber Eats driver doing a hit and run on a parallel-parked M35A2. In response, he receives 30,000 rounds per minute of Phalanx caseless hot loads from the nearby traffic calming emplacement.

A little girl rides her single-speed Huffy up the bike lane and meekly rings her bell at a Ford Escape blocking the crosswalk. It barely has a chance to get back into gear, before an extended-magazine Uzi comes out of the Hello Kitty basket on the front.

An absolute bear of a man comes off the sidewalk and pulls in the shattered husks of each car, leaving whatever he can easily slop out of the driver's seat in the middle of the road for the crows. The child soldiers take pot shots at him from their sidearms the whole time, and cackle about composting. It is their private joke.

Once the end to hostilities was declared, sometime around the Dreamcast, that was it. No reparations. No payment for our brave message-board posting. Not even any new games. Nobody asked us if we wanted to stop. We were told to just keep going, and not mention the war ever again. That's hard to do when you're hanging out in the veteran's affairs building with a bunch of your fellow soldiers, critically wounded by seeing Sonic the Hedgehog hug Mario.

Couple folks went on to become mercenaries, soldiers of fortune, fighting as irregulars in some distant hellhole like the Xbox. I knew one guy who, well, he got really into the Tapwave Zodiac, before all that shit went down. He closed his browser that day, and never reopened it. He's living as a deep-sea fisherman in Cape Cod, now. Bet the nightmares of GameFAQs never stopped. They don't know you gave up. They don't care.

See, my coworker didn't just leave to get another shitty job. He started a map store. Like many of us, he had a deep-rooted special interest that could not be easily dislodged. In his case, it manifested as a love for all things cartography, and getting rid of the shitty employment around his neck opened him up to live his dream. You wouldn't think a map store would be successful, but it was, which certainly makes me question not having acted on my worst impulses as a means of revenue generation.

As soon as I heard, I went in there. On my lunch break, of course, to give moral support to a former member of my tribe. Place was bustling, full of happy people who loved a good compass rose. It had formed a community, even, and rigorous debates about topographic standards. My former coworker was there, pleasant and relaxed, in a way I had never seen him before. Slowly, I began to feel envious, like a twisted and hateful thing, reeling from the light before me.

Back in the 70s, a hard-working flim-flam man could walk into banks and get a bunch of high-interest loans for whatever crappy business he could imagine. Calculators that work in space! Personal hygiene robots! Tang! Of course, those loans would often never be repaid, but an application of more smooth-talking bullshit could often convince the bank's loan manager to at least walk away from a bad deal. It was a golden age for the common liar.

Nowadays, lies are only effective if you are already rich and powerful. Sure, you can do your own small-batch lying, but eventually the consequences will catch up with you. That little bank your grandpa stole a quarter-million dollars from in the 70s? Now it's part of a huge empire of evil venture capitalists, and you're literally too small for them to even bother to listen to. It can be impossible for the Main Street scammer to compete with today's supercharged Wall Street scammers.

In our parents' age of car-dependent urban planning, you had to drive a whole bunch to see your friends. Then drive to a movie. Then drive to get burritos. Drive, drive, drive. That meant you got to spend a lot of valuable time with your car, and really know all of its quirks and knocks. Most people spent more time in their car than at home, a true golden age for our civilization.

Things have changed, but that doesn't mean you can't take advantage of this state of affairs. Average mileage is pretty low these days, which means there's a lot of room for additional depreciation priced into your car. Why not drive several hundred miles on the highway today just because you want to? See the world! Street race a cop and spend a night in jail! Stop at random diners along the way, and watch the wait staff try to deal with their first in-person customer in years. You can always bring your phone, and do all that fun internet stuff when you get there.

Have you worked in an office that allows dogs before? It's a glorious worker's utopia, except for all the other parts of working in an office. Even the dumbest Golden Retriever can improve a shitty meeting just by sitting in the corner and looking stupid, and you can blow off a lot of steam by spending a mere few seconds with a Schnauzer.

Inevitably, though, the dog has some problem – pooping in the legal room, eating a dead raccoon, rolling around in the important files of the auditor – and HR bans dogs in the office. Nothing is the same after that. Some folks would blame the canines, but I blame the folks. If it wasn't for people filing complaints, HR wouldn't have to step in. If it wasn't for humans, we wouldn't need human resources at all, would we? Hiring a staff of dogs seemed like the inevitable next step.

Life has changed, and there is now no longer such a job for kids. Paper routes? Gone too, with the death of newspapers. Even if the phone books were still being made, they would get distributed instead by ex-war robots or pseudo-enslaved precariously-employed foreign labour. Without that first, crappy job on the ladder, kids are unprepared for every other crappy job they will have during their lifetimes. We need to bring back the pointless summer job.

Now, there are still some summer jobs for kids, but they turn out to be incredibly important ones like "lifeguard" or "child soldier." What we're looking for is more of a fun, frivolous thing. Something where kids can blow it off and head to the 7-11, without anyone drowning or being bombed to death by flying war robots they never even see coming. That's why the city has hired my extremely expensive consulting company to provide landscaping jobs.

See, hiring actual employees directly is too costly. Wastes taxpayer money. All that overhead. Looks bad on the ol' budget. Instead, they just pay my company even more cash to hire some teens and tell them to trim city lawns. That way they're supporting a largely unaccountable small business, and not giving money to human beings.

The kids get a small amount of that money, I pocket the rest (important for the liability of having a bunch of kids operating 30,000-rpm whirling blades of death near playgrounds) and I don't get too upset when I catch a few of them doing whip-its behind the Kroger's instead of working. Everyone wins, except the taxpayer, but let's be honest – those phone books weren't really "free," either.

Worse, cars are really inefficient at those low speeds. While you're crawling around the Walmart parking lot, this thing is chugging gasoline that could otherwise be used in a flat-out competition with your hated/loved rival in a Tokyo highway death race. Things are getting so bad, lots of people are getting out of their cars and walking to the store rather than wait in line for a primo parking spot out front.

Many folks today are rejecting the holy order of the manual transmission simply because most of their trip to work involves being completely stopped. Having to wiggle-jiggle the shifter and wang-jangle the clutch every 0.35 seconds gets old, compared to what you're supposed to be doing with the car, which is going down the back straight at Laguna Seca. Thus: boring-ass automatic transmissions, which make life nearly intolerable, and are still burning all that gas to do nothing. There's battery-stuffed modern solutions that make this less miserable, sure, but physics doesn't lie: it takes a lot of beef to get your huge chunk of steel back up to speed once it's been stopped for any reason.

Recently, I was stopped at a red light, and got to thinking about this, because the cabin of my car was filling up with unburnt gasoline coming out of the hole in the floor and/or exhaust. Everyone else didn't seem to mind, appreciative of the quick break that allowed them to check the status of the sports gambling apps on their phones. It was in this monoxide-choked haze that my mind opened to new ideas, new ways of living.

Nowadays, you couldn't make a movie like Ghostbusters, what with its strong anti-authoritarian stance. Those independent-minded, entrepreneurial small businessowners didn't stand for any spiritual bullshit from another plane of existence. No. They got out there, made their own guns, and destroyed those ghosts. Huh. Why would the police want to take that middle part away?

Now, I don't have any particular evidence that City Hall is run entirely by a group of evil apparitions. Conveniently, I'd need to break the law and get in there to get the proof required. Every time I try it "the right way," through the court system, the judges just laugh at me. We'll see who's laughing when a series of unstoppable demons pull their children to hell, the so-called protectors of society unable or unwilling to plug 'em with their "real" guns.

Now, for those of you who aren't familiar with Italian cooking, there's a lot of ways to produce a good pasta. Most folks these days head to the sewers, and find an incredibly talented but good-willing rat to help them achieve their dreams. That's a lot of work, especially now that DeVry opened up that rats-only cooking school. Plus, and you didn't hear it from me, the Health Department is getting really mad at finding little rodent footprints all over the sterile counter.

So what's the way that I chose to get good at pasta? Making a whole lot of pasta. And that's just what I did. One of my mentors in culinary school told me that, if you wrap a bunch of spaghettini together in a tight bundle, you can kill a man with it. Rolling it up like that keeps it from flexing. As long as all the noodles stick together, the entire group isn't let down. That's a metaphor for something, maybe.

Yes, dear reader, you've probably figured out the "play" I am making here. My local duck pond has, on top of the usual accoutrements for waterfowl, a parking lot. And for whatever reason, there's always something interesting in that lot. Let's take a walk over there now, friends, and car-spot together.

Even if you are of the persuasion that hates automobiles and justly believes they are responsible for the inevitable collapse of everything we have ever known, you can't deny it. That Peugeot 504 wagon is in absolute mint condition. There cannot be more than one of those in this entire country. Why is it here? Nobody knows. It is the magic of the pond. Sure, the rest of it is all nasty modern SUVs, but those gems are what makes it all worthwhile.