Someone's full of Bologna

Did I mention it’s hot? Today is forecast to be the hottest day in over 22 years.

The heat is apparently getting to lots of people, including criminals.

Earlier this week, a 19 year old woman returned to her car at the mall where she found that ten pieces of bologna had been left on it.

My first thought was that someone was simply trying to have a bar-b-que, grilled bologna being a southern delicacy that is frequently overlooked.

Maybe a case of taking some old wive’s tale – like “hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk” – a step further.

“Hot enough to grill Bologna on a Toyota.”

I don’t think it’ll catch on, though. It just doesn’t roll off the tongue smoothly.

The police report said that the car was covered in scratches and gouges that looked like, “. . . . a fork-wielding vandal had made them,” further supporting my cookout theory.

Who hasn’t gone on a picnic, forgotten some essential item like cups or plates or flatware and had to make due with whatever was available?

That little silver bag that keeps the wine in the cardboard box from spilling out works great as a cupless dispenser if you don’t mind a little sidesplash.

The dipstick out of the car can work to make a weenie roaster, if you can ignore a little 10W40 aftertaste.

The picnic people even wrote a note for the car’s owner – “Opps” – presumably a misspelling of “Oops” -- was scratched into the hood. They also etched “toilet paper” into the rear bumper, probably as a reminder of another essential item that shouldn’t be forgotten in the future.

The police speculated, based upon information on the internet that bologna may take the paint off a car and the act wasn’t an attempt to cook using solar energy gone awry but rather an act of vandalism directed at the car’s owner.

They newspaper reporting the matter noted that the US Department of Energy’s website says that slapping bologna on a car is not going to do much damage to the finish.

I don’t find it especially bothersome that the question of bologna removing paint is a topic people discuss on the internet. It’s probably got as much or more merit as a lot of other things that are discussed there.

I do find it bothersome, though, that the US Department of Energy has purportedly chosen to both study the issue and found it important enough to put up on their website.

Was bologna contact with automobile finishes sufficiently prevalent to warrant that diversion of resources? We have a gazillion gallons of oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico and are clueless as to what to do about it, and someone decided we needed to pull a couple of folks off of the project to go study bologna on cars?

My hope is that the study happened during the prior administration, encouraged by either the bologna or car paint lobby.

It’s interesting to note that I can’t find the topic anywhere on the DOE website, either. You’d think that the site would be indexed better than that – after all, who knows when there is going to be a bologna – paint removal emergency for which citizens need to be able to immediately access information.

Besides, it’s probably about as useful as some of the other government pamphlets that are out there.