JUST A THOUGHT: There’s no long piece attached, just an observation here. I ate my lunch about half an hour ago down the street in my favorite deli, a nice place that offers quality sandwiches, air conditioning, and, even more important, distance from the egregious mold pit wherein I labor for my daily bread, enough distance so that the importuning masses who plague my existence during working hours will not follow me hither and yon demanding that I solve their problems for them, as opposed to solving them themselves and leaving me alone. I know that that’s too much to hope for, I know, and I suppose if these people could solve their problems themselves they would, which would put me out of a job, but it’s still annoying, no matter how you look at it. So there I was, consuming my chicken cutlet sandwich and looking out the window at the traffic, vehicular and pedestrian, passing down our happy little burg’s main thoroughfare, when I saw a man parking his car on the other side of the street. He was careful not to park in the handicapped spot, something that clearly marked him as an out of towner, since no one who actually lives here pays the slightest bit of attention to those handicapped zone signs, a basic lack of respect that flows inevitably from the ease with which you can get a handicapped sticker for your car in this neck of the woods. I think at this point damn near everyone in town has a handicapped sticker somewhere either on or in their automobile; even I have one and there’s not a damn thing wrong with me that kicking a small child in the shins and then lying about it with a straight face wouldn’t cure in a New York minute. So our careful parker makes sure that he is in his carefully allotted slot and then rolls his windows up, which brings me, at last, to the point of this screed. I am not sure I fully understand the logic behind driving a convertible with the top down, parking said vehicle, and then rolling up the windows without putting the top up. Rolling up the windows in such a vehicle will stop a potential car thief for less time than it takes a Democratic politician to propose a tax increase and thus has little or no deterrent effect on the criminal classes. Nor will rolling up the windows and keeping the top down prevent sun, rain, wind, or the occasional incontinent bird from soiling your nice new leather seats. There must be a point to performing such an action, but clearly I am not grasping the Aristotelian depths of the logic involved and no one wants to explain it to me. I also find it impossible to detect the difference between minutes in New York and minutes in any other state, but I usually ascribe my ignorance to my limited knowledge of Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which can, no doubt, explain all the mysteries of the universe, except, probably, why a man in a convertible would roll his windows up while leaving his top down. Some things are just beyond the wisdom of men and this is one of them.