Ban all the things!

I got a little taste of what it would be like to be Rip Van Winkle, Buck Rogers, or some other person who wakes up to find things have changed in strange and unexpected ways. 

It happened at a group down at the church, which had been meeting again in person following the Chinese Death Virus Lockdowns. The meetings had resumed for some time, but someone (not me) said, "Hey, instead of everyone bringing his own coffee, why don't we make coffee again like we used to?" It was decided to do a trial balloon by getting a Box o' Joe from Dunkin' (nee Dunkin' Donuts) and some bagels. 

I had nothing to do with any of this except that I had a big wholesale-club carton of Styrofoam coffee cups at home, a remnant of the pre-COVID era, so I figured I'd bring some to the meeting in case we needed some extras. 

That's how I found out I was a strange visitor from the past.

"You must have had these hidden in your basement or something," a friend of mine said.

"Well... yeah, why?"

"Because they're illegal now."

Yes, although New York State has been busy chasing its grotesque governors around, inviting illegal aliens to move in, and watching its wealthy people and businesses flee, it still had time to ban Styrofoam last year. They slipped it in last year when we were all celebrating Christmas, and now I know why I can't find the really good 16-oz. Dart travel cups anymore. Like the plastic bag ban of a few years earlier, this is another way to make life less convenient, less hygienic, more expensive, and more annoying, all in the name of the environment. And now we're using paper and cardboard, which means cutting down more trees. 

I'm a rebel and I'll never
ever be any good

You can't recycle Styrofoam, it's true, but guess what? All our other legally mandated recycling goes in the landfill as well, because nobody wants our garbage. 

But if you've been a reader of this blog, you knew that. 

As an experiment I put some Styrofoam cups in my Amazon basket, because of course you can buy polystyrene cups on Amazon, and got no red flags saying they cannot ship to New York. I'm going to try to smuggle in some of those Dart cups. I think this could be the next great smuggling opportunity in this state, after cigarettes and plastic bags. 

I'll also keep an eye out for the next big ban. The more they make illegal, the more we all become criminals anyway.