Is there something about Bend that generates weirdness? The air, the water, the altitude? We’ve had the Pregnant Man, the Lawn Chair Balloonist, the Clothesline Lady – and now, the Mad Poop Bomber.
Melinda Hoffman, a Bend entrepreneur whose company, The Bomb Squad, is in the business of removing doggie doodoo from people’s yards, got mad at a customer who owed her $150 and retaliated by dumping 30 gallons of canine excrement in front of the customer’s house.
“Actually, once I started doing it, I kind of lost all rational thought … and I just got into this mode of emptying bags,” Hoffman told KTVZ. “And as I was flinging the poo all over her yard - it felt really good, and I just kept doing it.”
Hoffman, who was charged with criminal mischief, criminal trespassing and offensive littering and led away from the scene in handcuffs, said she didn’t regret the poop assault. She might change her mind when the judge hands down the sentence.
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An unfortunate new adjective has entered the vocabulary, and I hope to hell it goes away. Soon.
The adjective, “Eyjafjallajokullian,” is derived from Eyjafjallajokull, the name of the Icelandic volcano that knocked out air travel in Europe by spewing a vast cloud of ash into the atmosphere. “Eyjafjallajokullian” is used to describe something totally awesomely huge, such as “the Eyjafjallajokullian mouth of Rush Limbaugh.”
There’s no need for this new tongue-twister; there are dozens of perfectly serviceable adjectives meaning more or less the same thing – enormous, gigantic, stupendous, tremendous, gargantuan, etc. Or if you insist on something a bit more esoteric, there’s that old standby, Brobdingnagian.
If “Eyjafjallajokullian” sticks around, bloggers all over the world are going to get carpal tunnel syndrome trying to type it and news anchors are going to dislocate their jaws trying to
pronounce it. Let’s ditch it ASAP – please.
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KTVZ ran an on-line poll asking the following question: “Do you support [the] new Arizona law to crack down on illegal immigrants [and] require police to question people they suspect are here illegally?” The responses: 79% yes, 18% no, 3% not sure.
That says something either about the type of people who take part in on-line polls or the type of people who live in Bend. Either way, it’s not good.
