August! This would be the place to note that summer is just flying by, and soon the Fair will signal the end of everything green and the cold sharp scythe of Old Man Winter will scrape our necks, et cetera, boo hoo. But it’s felt like a long summer so far, no? Droughts will do that. Droughts make the summer feel like one long slide down a chute paved with sandpaper.

History-wise, It’s another month of Biblical plagues. 1857: grasshoppers devour crops in four counties, and leave without tipping! 1869: Colorado potato bugs destroy Minnesota potatoes! Minnesota potato bugs file grievance! 1870: state-wide cholera! (According to wikipedia, cholera sufferers can lose up to 36 liters of fluid from the hectic trots. You get so dehydrated you lose your memory of what swimming pools look like.) 1873: Rocky Mountain locusts arrive, having been tipped off by their relatives, the Colorado Potato Bugs! 1910: grasshoppers blight the flax crop! 1946: Polio, which is somehow vaguely connected to Communism! 1976: Disco! Also, drought and fire! It’s been copacetic since then, although we seem overdue for a grasshopper infestation. Next time they’ll hit the Old Country Buffets, and the state will suffer the worse loss of Three Bean Salad since the Garbanzo Weevil infestation of ‘05.

Do they still put out three-bean salad? When I was a waiter that was the worst thing to stock. Big prefab tubs of slimy beans. Amend that: the worst was the herring cutlets, which came in big drums bearing the brand name of ELF. The drums said ELF CUTLETS, as if we’d skipped the part where people marveled over the existence of small, magical humanoids and went straight to the part where we chopped them up for salads. You think chicken barns are loud and smelly? Try the factory-farm Elf barns. Thousands of the little things, all screaming in Gaelic.

It’s National Raspberry Cream Pie Day, supposedly. You can probably thank the National Raspberry Council for that one. It certainly goes over better than National Raspberry Colonic Month, last practiced in 1924. As for the weather: Buzzy the Anthropomorphic Weather Triangle hasn’t had much to say lately, given the unbroken string of hot clear days. But they’ve suggested rain today, and while it might ruin our planned 3 PM StarTribune sidewalk egg-bake, that’s a small price to pay. Prediction: asterisk mouth and scattered arrows.

See you soon.