Plus, you gotta admire CVS’s self-sustaining marketing practices. Supply and demand is for amateurs — these guys are rockin’ some cause and effect. Check it out:

Darn it. If I’d been paying attention I could have saved $5 when bought¹ $20 or more of Halloween candy.

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¹ Yes, that’s right: $5, and one pronoun. Look at the flyer again.

For years now, the NFL has tinkered with the look of its on-field product by having teams don “throwback” uniforms, i.e., ones designed to replicate the look of the team’s uniforms from an earlier era. This costuming of the players for a game or two had proven popular in Major League Baseball, and the same has generally applied in football. If nothing else, the fact that they continue to do it is evidence that it has been a shot in the arm for the league’s merchandising revenue.

Then the Broncos took the field in Denver on Sunday, October 11, 2009 in what the team’s website called an “American Football League legacy game against the Boston Patriots… to commemorate 50 seasons of Broncos football,” and proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that some history is best forgotten.

The derision for their “legacy” outfits was swift and terrible (not unlike the ghastly uniforms themselves). D.J. Gallo at ESPN.com’s Page 2:

…I heard the announcer say they were throwbacks to the franchise’s original uniform in 1960. I seriously doubt this. Why would the original design of the team’s uniform be based on the colors seen at the bottom of a bronco’s stall? That’s disgusting.

Yes. Yes, it is. We all thought it, but Mr. Gallo wrote it. I had decided to go with something a little more restrained, like “the messy result of a fight between a jar of mustard and a bottle of Hershey’s syrup,” but there’s no rewind button once the image of bodily waste has been invoked.

Then came the Broncos’ above-mentioned defeat of the Chargers in San Diego this past Monday night. The two teams have long been bitter rivals, and a bit of a tussle erupted between opposing players during the pre-game warmups. I can’t help but suspect that Denver’s vintage duds, even in their slightly less horrifying visiting-team variation, provided an irresistible target for mockery which then escalated into the ensuing scrum. As if things weren’t bad enough for San Diego, the ignominy of their 34-23 loss was compounded by having come at the hands of a team in garish jockey-stockings while they had sported their sharp powder blue vintage Chargers gear. Verily, the fashion police were nowhere to be found.

In a post-game interview, ESPN football analysts asked Denver’s Eddie Royal (pictured above finishing one of the two long kick-return touchdowns he scored during the game) how he and his teammates were feeling about their, uh, distinctive throwback uniforms. Royal’s response was (to paraphrase), “Hey, I’m good with the uniforms. They’ve worked! We’re 2-0 in the throwback uniforms!”

Yeah Eddie, but guess what: you’re 4-0 without the throwback uniforms, numbnuts! And unlike the last two weeks, no spectators’ eyes were damaged by watching you guys in those first four wins!

For the good of the nation, the Denver Broncos’ throwback uniforms must be seized and destroyed.

Maybe only map nerds like me get excited about the rollout of this kind of feature. Frankly, I’m not even sure what utility it has for a normal Google Maps user. The nearest thing I can think of at the moment is perhaps for increased specificity in giving directions, as in, “It’s the fifth house on the right.” Or something like this…

“Hey guys, when I was looking for a place a little while ago, there was a really nice room at this lovingly restored craftsman house on McCadden…”

That’s a true story, by the way. Blew your mind, didn’t it? …Yeah, you’re right — not really.

OK, then how about a little vocabulary: googling around to find out if anyone else was taking note of Google Maps’ audacious deployment of property lines, I found a few web forums of other cartographic geeks that were. On one of them, the pedant-in-residence (every web forum has one) imparted that maps showing property lines are properly called cadastral maps.

Cadastral. Did you already know that one? Yeah, me neither. So you’re welcome, dear readers. Surely you’ll have no shortage of opportunities to sprinkle that one into conversation. Go forth and impress the hell out of the sophisticates on the cocktail party circuit, and remember your web-based wingman the next time you’re online.

The urge to bring out the scorn cudgel is almost overwhelming… but it feels too easy. If I can’t say something nice, yadda yadda yadda…

You know what? Very nice handwriting.

I want to keep the health insurance I have—which is no health insurance. I was dropped when I had a heart attack. My insurance company called it a preexisting condition, and they were right. Heart attacks have been around a very long time. The important thing is that I treasure my insurance company’s free market right to maximize profits at all moral and ethical costs. I would willingly die defending that right. And now, finally, I may get that chance.

…Like Sarah Palin, I am against Obama’s death panels. I prefer Liberty Mutual’s death panels, because at least they’re American. I am not impressed with claims of socialized medicine working in countries like Britain, France, and Canada. …Single-payer systems, as we know, just aren’t fair. Why should one person have to pay for everyone else? What if that person runs out of money?

…Bleeding heart liberal commie pinko anti-American leftist homosexual traitors contend there are 47 million uninsured people in this country. But the truth is, 46,999,996 of them are illegal immigrants and the other four are my family.

…I am dead set against government sponsored preventive care. Preventive care not only weakens our natural defenses against disease but also casts our government in the role of parent. My own parents had a different approach to medical concerns. When my right foot hurt, Dad would stomp on my left foot, and vice-versa. Mom said he picked this up while watching old episodes of The Three Stooges, proving once again that we can certainly learn a lot from our forefathers.

I’m pasting more of it than I should, but still, those bits above ain’t the half of it. Get thee over to S&R and read the whole thing. Then, remember that drinking water out of the far edge of the glass is a sure-fire cure for hiccups.