Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner

I hereby declare the end of my contest, with Shelly as the winner (and only participant).

It might have been easy to beat Shelly. You didn't actually have to be mad about whatever your topic -- getting The Advocate to publish a bogus rant would have been twice as much fun. So you could have come up with anything.

"But it had to be something printable," you whiny little bastards are saying. But no, it seems like our humble paper deems itself not worthy to print what's bugging us. And by "us" I mean Shelly, and me pretending to be my boss.

No, the paper printed complaints about mundane things. Traffic, for example was the most common topic. One lady was bothered by oversized loads on the interstate. Get over it, sweetheart. The interstates are there to facilitate commerce -- not to get you to work on time.

Anyway, here's Shelly's unprinted "What's bugging you" column. I actually do think it's quite good, made even more so by the fact that Shelly is capable of producing at least one rant like this every week.

Yankees who can't handle a few inches of water but have the nerve to criticize New Orleaneans for living in a bowl.A few inches of rain fell and the entire mass transit system in New York and New Jersey shut down. Flooded subway lines; water over the rail tracks and NO EXTRA BUSES made available to transport people to work. What? No Buses? Are you freaking kidding me? How many articles have I read about LA's failure to have buses available to evacuate its citizens? And another thing, HOLD THE #@%#^&$ elevator door when you see someone running towards it!! Are you SOOOO important that the few extra seconds it would take for me to enter the elevator would cause your entire business operations to come to a crashing halt? I think not. Shelly Williams 36 East Orange, New Jersey