Hooray for High Gas Prices--No More Ice Cream Trucks

In my Los Angeles neighborhood the ice cream trucks, despite the lenghtening days, the completion of many school schedules, and the building heat, are absent--what a relief!

I'm sure the hill toppers must think me an awful grouch, celebrating the demise of the Good Humor Man, of American tradition, and summer staple. But when you live in the basin, in "the grid", on a residential street with slower-moving traffic--the ice cream colporteurs are constant. Push carts with bells, converted econolines and vanagons, blanketed in product stickers, or backyard stenciling, streaming sirenous ditties from make-shift audio systems like "Pop Goes the Weasel", or "B-I-N-G-O", luring children to the dairy moonshine of Chocotacos or banana-less splits. For shame.

During peak summer hours, two or three trucks, can sometimes be seen idling up and down the long blocks of the St. Vincent College tract, their big grey frames like so many Walrus on a mating-crazed beach, trolling for packs of complicit, caramel-crazed youth. "Go forth and pressure your conflict averse parents", the icy ayatollahs encourage.

The food pyramid inverted, its tomb raided, the family dinner highjacked, undermined, undone by the pharoahs of fat and the frozen feast. But, no longer! They've been driven from their den like a pack of hunted wolves--by soaring petrol prices, and, and....and....

Maybe the Republicans really are for family values.