In the wake of not a single meaningful legislative change being made in the wake of several gun massacres in 2012, it looks like the government just can’t do anything to prevent gun violence.

Fortunately, that’s where ordinary citizens step in. Virginia gun shops and their suppliers have been unable to keep ammunition on the shelves for the past five months. Since the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, customers have bought up every bullet, especially those for handguns and light rifles like the 9 mm, .38 and .22 caliber. Even shipments that once arrived in cases now come by the box because manufacturers can’t keep up with demand.

So, there you go: there’s nothing left for the criminals to buy, and what is left is more expensive than a couple of armed robberies will cover. It turns out that the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun … is a scared guy with all the bad guy’s ammo.

That’s why we’re not that surprised that a pair of brothers still have Christmas decorations up in May. We’re also not surprised that the Christmas decorations aren’t exactly of the most tasteful variety. And we’re really not surprised that their neighbors don’t exactly care for the decorations still being around and visible in the yard.

We are surprised, however, that someone actually bought a plastic Santa Claus standee that’s wearing a cone on its head. We thought that Spencer’s had gone out of business by now.

A married couple wanted to fly from Los Angeles to Dakar, Senegal after a friend invited them to visit. Somehow, Turkish Airlines decided that Senegal was not the place they wanted to go. Instead, they should enjoy a relaxing vacation in Dhaka, Bangladesh, which is not even on the same continent.

Since then, the couple has spent months trying to get an answer as to why they ended up in Southeast Asia, but no answer has come and no reimbursement, either. Most likely, the request for an investigation was sent to the wrong office, never to be seen again.

Now, Mad Men is starting to redeem itself, Game of Thrones is too good of writing and acting to suck for an entire season, but the Knicks? They just got my hopes up for no reason and showed yet again why rooting for them has been the most frustrating thing in my life since 2000 other than women.

They started off the season on a tear, went through some weird mid-season lull, tore apart everyone down the stretch, then fizzled out against an Indiana squad they were badly overmatched by. The reason? Carmelo Anthony.

Now don’t get me wrong, I was as excited as anyone to see Melo come to the rescue in the Spring of 2011. After suffering through the Stephon Marbury and Isaiah Thomas years, seeing Anthony come to town revitalized the hope of a shattered and pissed off fan base. Now what do we have to show for it two and a half very expensive seasons into this mess? Two first round losses and a second round loss as a number two seed because the team that lost for. So many years because of stat driven, me-first guards, have the most expensive, stat driven, me-first guard driving a team that is just good enough to lose early in the playoffs.

The Knicks had a great formula in place pre-trading half the team for Anthony, now all that’s left is a team not fit to compete for anything and two contracts that can’t be amnestied. Man it’s great to be a basketball fan!

There may be two popes in the Vatican these days (OK, technically one’s Pope Emeritus), but only one of them just performed an exorcism in broad daylight. The real surprise is that it wasn’t the showy one.

After a recent mass, Pope Francis laid his hands on a man in a wheelchair and prayed over him. The man then convulsed in his wheelchair and slumped over. A television station that covers the Italian Bishops’ conference consulted exorcism experts (because European pundits are better than ours), and they all agree: Pope Francis cast the devil out of that man.

We hate to diminish Frank’s work while he’s contending with a squatter in the guest room, but one exorcism on camera? Please. If that’s an exorcism, then the Beatles are saints.

A recent study found that one out of five purses has more bacteria on it than a toilet seat. Apparently, women are just carrying around petri dishes all day long. The germiest stuff were the face and hand creams, followed by the makeup and lipstick.

So if you want to stay bacteria free this summer, tell your lady to keep her hands to herself, and don’t get anywhere near her face. For once, you know exactly where it’s been.

Netflix has certainly proven it is capable of creating, fostering, producing, pimping and delivering a solid television series–certainly more so than in 2011, when the deal was announced. The company has launched several shows, but the only one worth any serious mention is House of Cards, which demonstrated that a streaming media service can match the storytelling style of HBO, if only for a few fleeting weeks. But Arrested Development is nowhere near as tough of an assignment. All they have to do is let their people work, and it appears they have.

Unfortunately, it’s still going to be disappointing.

I’ve said before that I don’t think the show can ever please its fans the way they are hoping it will. But then, I’m also one to call for my favorite franchises to end before they get further trampled. I wish fanboys agreed with me, but they will always demand more of what they once loved, hoping it will be all like it was before.

It’s the Pet Sematary paradox of the entertainment world. The things we love get killed. Sometimes we don’t realize how much we loved them before they go, and sometimes we don’t even know much about them until news of their passing has reached us. So we go back, remembering their legacies, and our desire to be with them again swells up. We know it’s wrong, but we’re driven by our love to let our favorite things rest in peace. When they are revived, they’re not what we’ve built up in our minds, and sometimes they don’t come back in a form we like very much. Our passions have led us to destroy the things we hold so dear. Fred Gwynne tried to warn us.

But the Arrested Development people seem to be hitting the right notes. The original cast is back, there is a movie plan, and there are nod-and-wink references to the first three seasons in promotional material. The new season is still doomed, though.

Part of why the show has such wide appeal is that there’s no consistency of tone or focus from one season to the next. The first season laid the solid foundation for the show, and was easily the most consistently pleasing from one episode to the next. For the second season, the writers seemed to choose to play up the whackier elements of the show, which is saying something for a show that was already pretty whacky. This took the series a bit farther away from reality and made it more insular. In the third season, the writers at first attempted to continue this theme, then forced themselves to tack back closer to reality when they realized the show was in FOX’s sights. Then, of course, came the scramble in the closing of the third season to tie up plot lines, clearly designed to last into the next year and beyond, as cancellation came down.

Everyone loves Arrested Development, but they don’t love it for all the same reasons. Some people don’t like the crazier parts of the second season. While others see the first season as too tame compared to the follow-up. There are probably also people out there who like the third season because of where it was going. The freedom to imagine where it would have taken us can be intoxicating. There’s no way the show can please all of these fans in a single season, even if their hopes weren’t higher than they should ever be to begin with.

I’m excited about the return of Arrested Development, but cautiously so. I look forward to seeing old friends come back, but I can’t shake knowing that not everything that comes back is the same.

The kids at Cosby High School should’ve used the word. One teenager decided that the smart thing to do would be to fly his remote control helicopter in a classroom. Normally, this might be a most whimsical thing, except … it hit a fire sprinkler. Which proceeded to empty its contents into the room.

And the school.
During test time.
And the contents had been stuck in the pipes for years.
And some of the students taking exams may have to retake them.

So, uh … that jumped up a notch.

In Washington state, one rancher is experimenting with how to make pork taste even better by feeding pigs marijuana. It works exactly like you’d think. While pigs can’t really get high, they can get the munchies. Making the pigs even hungrier will make them eat even more, and butchers hope, give the meat a little more a little tastier. Who knows, maybe you will even get a contact high from your morning bacon.

Still, there’s no reason we should be using the legalization of marijuana to benefit our animal foes. It’s the gateway drug, and no one wants to eat heroin-addled pork.