BLATANT SPEED RIPOFF COMING YOUR WAY: It is a slow day here in our happy little burg. The sun is shining, the leaves are turning, and the kids, happy to be free of school for at least a couple of days, are busy beating the crap out of one of their confreres in the middle of Main Street. I don’t really have anything to say at the moment, except that my brother went for a nuclear stress test the other day. This is a test of the cardiovascular system, or so I am told, and involves the doctors pumping the test subject full of some sort of radioactive goop and then making the subject walk on a treadmill while x-raying them, or maybe I’ve gotten that part of it wrong. I know an x-ray is involved in some way in this whole thing and so are treadmills, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the subject had to do a good impression of Charo as well. In any case, this test hardly seems very stressful to me, and my brother, who has always been the very picture of health and robustness, thought the test was not stressful at all. If the doctors really want to stress someone with atomic energy, I would suggest that they stop farting around with this sort of mealy-mouthed piddling with radioactive goop and just wire a two megaton warhead to the treadmill and tell the test subject that the thing will go off if they stop running. To my mind, this test will jack your stress level up faster than almost anything else you can think of, with the possible exception of finding out the IRS is auditing you for back taxes.