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A side dish of wit to go with dinner

By JON WILSON (With a lot of help from his friends)
Published November 22, 2006

Floating, wrinkled laundry bags?

No, they're not pretty, but it's impossible to sight manatees and not smile. This time of year, they come to Coffee Pot Bayou and other relatively warm water. Manatees are nice guys. They won't clamp down on one of your legs, for example. Enjoy them.

Sleek, glistening water rockets

Oh, yeah, and don't forget the bottle-nosed dolphins providing graceful counterpoint to the lumbering sirenians mentioned above. Plus you get to hear a tourist yell, "Gladys! Gladys! Look at the sha-ahh-k!"

Could we get hot sauce with that bestseller?

You can get books to go at the drive-through window at the public library's Mirror Lake Branch. So far, you can't borrow french fries. And we're thankful for that, too.

We want money and we want caffeine. NOW!

Speaking of drive-throughs, there's a zoom-and-go ATM in the Shoppes at Park Place and a Starbucks window in the same Pinellas Park mall. We're not sure if it's a genuine blessing or suggestive of the need these days to make a withdrawal to buy an upscale cuppa Joe ... oops, we mean a LAHHH-tay.

Who's your daddy?

St. Pete Beach voters took control of what gets built where in the Nov. 7 election. The brouhaha is over. Gosh, now the city won't have to spend public money telling the public how to vote. Anyone can be thankful for that.

No offense to the tub

We don't want to plug any particular fish house, but at this certain place on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Street N, there's seafood gumbo that makes the New Orleans stuff taste like Mrs. Murphy's wash water. Sorry, you'll have to go find it. We post no free ads here (though we will do so on our foreheads).

Distant thunder of former baby feet

It must be the baby boomers beginning to retire. They will probably come to St. Petersburg. They will buy zoot suits with drape shapes. They will do the Lindy hop. They will spread the lettuce around. Any you mugs got a beef with that? Maybe you need a real Broderick. (Sorry, we got stuck in the 1940s for a minute there.)

Yeah, but don't burn your plywood supply

We know the season is not officially over, and that you're not supposed to talk about no-hitters in progress, whether it's baseball or hurricanes. But nobody we know has missed dodging bullets from the tropics during the past few months.

Condos and condos

It is nice they are here. It is nice there aren't any more. And as the old-time newspaper gang used to say: period, paragraph, 30.

Times staff writers Anne Lindberg, Mary Jane Park and Paul Swider contributed to this meal.

[Last modified November 21, 2006, 20:21:41]