Folks,

A good afternoon Dux:

Too bad about that crab meat. I agree it can be smelly. Our grandson once lost his pet hermit crab in the car during a beach holiday. We searched and searched to no avail. Twas a beastly hot day. The poor thing was much easier to track down the next morning. The defunct crab was instantly removed and buried in a plastic bag after what must still rank as the shortest funeral for shellfish ever held in this state. To our dismay, it took days and days of riding about with the windows open to get the stink out of that car.

Consider another beverage. That sounds too steep. It may be that your alcohol is just worth more than ours, eh? Or perhaps the taxation is a wee bit too high on alcohol over there Pal? At the present rate of exchange (1 GBP = 2.02401 USD) that is enough to put one permanently on the wagon. Mercifully there are apparently still just enough alcoholics in our legislatures to prevent such wanton exploitation of brewed and distilled spirits over here. There is plenty of tax on alcohol but it would seem not as much as on yours. Our greedy pork barrel addicted lawmakers reserve that excess for the tariff placed on cigarettes and other fiery things some people stick in their mouths. Fortunately, although I am a North Carolinian, I neither smoke tobacco nor do I grow any tobacco.