S Words

I got home very, very late last night from a road trip to south Florida with some co-workers to watch the Lightning play (and let me state for the record that baseball is the only sport you can watch your team get it's ass kicked and still have a good time).

We got down there early enough to do some shopping at the Sawgrass Mills Outlet Mall, which is reportedly the largest outlet mall in the world. Visiting the world's largest anything is certainly an experience but what I was most impressed with was this: there was a store selling samurai swords for $12!

Now, I'm sure these probably weren't exactly Hattori Hanzo quality swords (katanas to be exact) but still. How can you possibly beat a $12 sword? (No, not with a gun, smartass). The price is certainly right and there's apparently no three day waiting period if you want to walk right in and buy one, regardless of how angry you might be. Three of us considered buying them, decided not to, and spent the rest of the night regretting it.

In the relatively short period between the mall visit, the game and the ride home, we thought of literally hundreds of occasions where the swords would have been useful. They would have paid for themselves at the game alone.

One of the many brilliant ideas we had was to become a team of sword guys for hire, kind of like an A-Team that was actually bad ass (the original A-Team was like G.I. Joe; forever firing off clip after clip of ammo and blowing up all kinds of stuff but never actually hurting anybody). We couldn't agree on a team name (I liked Sword Guys, somebody else said Sword Dudes, I think somebody else suggested Sworders, which is just dumb....I don't think they were taking us seriously at this point, which would not have been the case if we'd actually bought the damn things) but I was already visualizing our ads on the sides of HARTline buses all over Tampa: "1-800 ASK-WHOEVER, my a$$! You got problems? You need somebody to do something about them? Call the three guys with the $12 swords!".

Oh, and we would also wear top hats. Damn, we would have been so bad ass.