Amish......So much for that "Witness" movie.....

We weren't supposed to notice that you were shopping for wireless phones,(which do require electricity, you know), at the Walmart store yesterday?

You'll have to dress differently, if you want to blend in.

How about those Mesquite BBQ Pringles and that pack of Pampers in your shopping cart there, 20-something Amish dude?

Pringles,(especially the Mesquite BBQ ones), and Pampers aren't particularly plain, now, are they?

Are those.....AMISH Pampers decorating the parking lots of rural America?????

Putting a sheet-metal housing around the "cockpit" of your tractor, adding a back seat, and using that tractor to drive the family into town to dine at the Bob Evans is NOT tilling the fields..... what you've done is convert the tractor into a CAR, and I'm pretty sure that driving cars is an activity that is not in strict accordance with the Pennsylvania and Ohio Amish Association bylaws.

Even if that car only goes 25 miles an hour.

Now I don't give a ratsass if the Amish have electricity or cars....but they're getting assistance, (y'know, food stamps, vouchers, WIC...), based on the claim that their lifestyle is impoverished

enough to qualifye them for aid in order to feed themselves and their kids.

So how is it they're shopping for PHONES?

It's the fact that they're cashing in on their POSE, their image, that I resent.......

Did you know that a lot of these guys are breeding and selling draft horses that pull HUGE amounts of cash at the annual draft horse auctions?

Last year I watched Amish guys selling their horses, matched Belgians and Percheron pairs going for more than $100,000 per pair.

That's more than I make in a year.

And I bet they didn't pay taxes on it.

They buy up HUGE spreads of land, with all the cash they haul in from horseflesh and expensive "HandBuilt Amish Furniture"... it's hard to find public record of the property ownership and hard to know how much property tax they actually pay.

They are big in high-profit-low-overhead puppy mills, hidden away in the deep rural back on these spreads.

Nobody knows they're there, until a bag or two of dead puppies turns up in a ditch at the end of a road between corn-fields.

Eventually, this 6-figure plus un-taxed illegal operation will get busted down by county deputy sheriffs,($22,500), and Humane Association volunteers,(free, and they donate money and time too), there will be a slap on the wrist penalty, and then Amish dude will re-start his operation way back on yet another one of these huge spreads of Amish family land.*

Bet he knows how to use a cell phone as well as I do, too.

*I'm not kidding about this. I've been in on these busts, two of which were the SAME GUY, a year apart, on two different locations in two separate counties. The conditions were beyond what can successfully be described in a blog. It's impossible to put the smell alone into a blog, and the screaming horror of the dogs has to be felt to be understood.

HANG UP THE PHONE,YOU DIMNITZ SOW!!!

Or are you TOTALLY uninvested in the little girl you've got riding in the backseat???

Perhaps you are a kidnapper, and, having already absconded with the $122,000.89 in unmarked bills, you are entirely blithe about the survival of the fluffy little blonde tyke in a pinky-lavendar barney toofer suit,(with matching drool bib).

Perhaps she's the offspring of your 65 year-old Dad's autumn-spring marriage with a 22 year-old Acapulco cabana girl,(6 months younger than yourself), that occurred only 15 minutes after he surprised your Mother,(who thought they were on vacation), with a Mexican shot-gun divorce, and you have finally discovered that the Barney-ette in your backseat stands to inherit EVERYTHING. So you don't really WANT her to make it back from the BigSister BabySits angryshoeshopping trip to the mall.

Maybe you really WANT her to be ejected through the glass at 92 mph when your distracted careen comes to a suddenly clumsy completion against the driver-side bumper of the Peterbuilt that you failed entirely to notice because you were squinting into the sun-glared "contacts" screen of your Backbleery* 2110XZ TextoSupreme.

But.

What if she's YOURS, you BEET????

Why don't you care MORE, for your little girl?

Do you even KNOW that you are driving like a Baghdad suicide-bomber who has suddenly realized that he forgot to put his bomb in the car, and must now exact his jihad with the limited resources he has at hand..... namely speed and a chaotic drive-path through roadways that are densely occupied by other high-speed careening maniacs?

You are so So SOOOOO preoccupied and self involved.

Really.

They should be working on some sort of sensing device in these cars that picks up when a cell phone gets turned on and immediately locks the top road-speed down to 67 mph.

Or perhaps cell phones should come with sensors that refuse to allow the phone to communicate if the vehicle's speed is anywhere above......say.......ZERO mph.

Listen up, Barbee.

GET YOUR DAMN HEAD OUT OF THE MICROWAVES.

Your cell phone has clearly damaged your brain.

*Name changed to protect me from any corporate bullshit lawsuits, as she was clearly using that device and they should be ashamed of enabling her behaviour.