By By Lee Weyhrich
Gas prices are on the rise, minimum wage may or may not be on the rise, Social Security is on the fall and keeping up with the weather is like rolling the dice.
It must be spring in Dixie.
Somewhere at the local news station the weather men are lined up next to a dart board tossing darts at little pictures of suns and clouds and hoping that whatever they hit might actually be the weather for tomorrow.
It's already getting hot out and its still technically winter, isn't it?
In other news gas prices are expected to break all-time records, again. Thank goodness Atmore is in the great state of Alabama where gas prices are among the lowest in the country. Those poor millionaires in Hollywood will probably be paying $5 a gallon for their gas-guzzling Hummers that get eight miles per gallon.
Gas could be as much as $54 for an 18-gallon tank in Alabama if gas goes up to $3 like experts (a group of people lined up in front of a dartboard covered in random numbers) are projecting. That means a trip from Atmore to Birmingham could cost almost as much as a person on a $20,000 a year salary makes a day.
Of course, if you need another job to help cover those expenses and you have "very strong communications skills" McDonalds may have a job for you.
McDonald's CEO Jim Skinner announced that the multi-billion-dollar burger company is looking into using remote call centers to take drive-through orders.
"If you're in L.A…. and you hear a person with a North Dakota accent taking your order, you'll know what we're up to," Skinner said at a New York conference on food and apparel.
Anyone who has ever gone north of Tennessee and tried to order sweet tea knows that would never fly.
If you walk into an Illinois McDonald's and order the Alabama drink of choice the people behind the counter look at you like horns just sprouted from your forehead.
Imagine ordering from your local drive-through and trying to explain to some guy in another state that you like tea that already has the sugar in it.
It would be even worse if Burger King or Dairy Queen tried to do that because almost every one of them has a little bit different menu.
If McDonalds thinks that ordering your dinner from someone in another state will make things easier and faster then it's no wonder their mascot is a clown.
Speaking of clowns, remember that idiotic class bully that liked giving people wedgies? He now works at the company that makes Webster's dictionary.
Wedgie is one of the 58 new words to be added to the new edition of the dictionary this year.
The definition that will go next to the word is (and this is absolutely true, look in next year's edition of the dictionary.):
wedgie: noun. a prank in which the victim's undershorts are jerked upward so as to become wedged between the buttocks.
The spell checker on the Advance's computer doesn't even list undershorts as a real word so apparently that was added recently as well.
So, to sum it all up it's hot in the middle of winter and the weather men have no idea what to tell us, a trip to Birmingham could cost you a day's pay because the government buys gas from countries it has threatened to blow up, the clowns at McDonald's are going to let a Yankee judge you because of your drink order, and they all need a serious wedgie.
Lee Weyhrich is the managing editor of the Atmore Advance. His column appears weekly.