True poop
A man with a fistful of postcards and wearing an oversized red, foam cowboy hat tastefully decorated with a giant white USA on the side strides past the bus stop and toward the blue box on a curbside pole.
He's a man on a mission.
Coming from the other direction is a woman in a Canadian-red down parka, dog on a leash and a paper bag in her hand.
She's a woman on a mission.
He gets there first.
And stops. And looks. And looks again for the flap that reveals the slot into which he will put his slabs of cardboard.
He looks under the box. And behind the box. Then steps back.
The woman with the dog and the bag takes his place.
She reaches for the underside of the blue box and yanks.
Out comes a black plastic bag. In it goes the paper bag, then over to a trash barrel.
The man watches, laughs and tucks the postcards in his jacket.
Turning to the bus stop, he asks no one in particular: "Does anyone know where there's a mailbox? I thought I did. But I guess I don't."
There’s nothing like the Olympics, at once an amazing pageant of supreme athletic sacrifice and accomplishment and bureaucratic pettiness and paranoia. Like Certs, the candy mint and breath mint, the Olympics is a sprint and marathon. Breathtaking speed on the field of play and molasses-in-January mechanics behind the curtain. Baltimore Sun reporter Candus Thomson is at her fifth Olympics, four of them of the winter variety. From the Christmas-like anticipation of the lighting of the cauldron on Feb. 12 to the abrupt conclusion on Feb. 28, when the flame is extinguished, she’ll be watching it all from inside the beast. 