If you write "LEFT HAND" on anything, I may buy it. If you write "LEFT HAND" on beer, I'm bound to buy and drink the beer with my left hand. Laura, Amy, Shakti, and I tried the beer garden at Arlington's Westover Market yesterday afternoon, and we had a good but confused time.

We had lunch, had a round and left with many questions. For instance, was there a keg somewhere? Some people had plastic cups. T. Table seemed to indicate as much. But, after wandering, looking for signage and trying to determine who worked there and who did not, we were referred to a wall of single bottles in the grocery store, at the opposite end from the beer garden. We then bought the bottles at the registers and then took them outside. Shakti had her bottle opener, fortunately.

The beers were tasty, but the process felt like a lot of work. Maybe, in our process-related jobs, we were biased toward confusion. Or maybe the garden was staffed differently at night when bigger crowds came.

Don't get me wrong. I'd go back for more. I'd never visited the market before, but it was friendly, bigger than I expected and had a good mix of the ordinary and the unexpected. The food we got the deli counter was tasty, and the butcher was a nice guy. While the garden itself was just off Washington Boulevard, adjoined a post office and backed up to a parking lot, the space worked. Some trees, some tents, some fans that were inactive in yesterday's beautiful weather, some comfortable chairs. I love sitting down in a chair that looks metal and finding it has strong plastic with some give and sway to it. Just a chair, yes, but still.

Previous beer garden visits:
-August 2009. Pix: America wants to see Salzburg rap.
-August 2009. Pix: Prague, part three places for no respectable man.

For my leaving, good friend Matt gave me an action figure of Alan Scott, the likely left-hander among numerous, later Green Lanterns and, I'm honored to remember, the superhero identity Matt gave me. Wikipedia explains, "Each Green Lantern possesses a power ring that gives the user great control over the physical world as long as the wielder has sufficient willpower and strength to wield it." The page then notes how Alan Scott's ring was magic while other Green Lanterns had technology powering theirs. So, the question is, what's the deal with the magic?

Well…

Friend Desair put together the largest-ever gathering of the random a.m. e-mail group (for lack of any formal organization or name). There have been many amazing, previous incarnations of this collective but none as random or as a.m. as this one. Thank you, Matt, Desair, Brett, Monica, Emily, Jayme, Rebecca, and Megan, who was with us in spirit.

Via friend Glenna, my favorite read today is the Chicago Tribune's "10 things you might not know about April Fools' Day." Two particular items rise to the top of the Trib list for me. The first involves spaghetti.

2 Ranked by the Museum of Hoaxes as the best April Fools' prank ever was a 1957 BBC report about Switzerland experiencing an early spaghetti harvest. The television show included video of peasants pulling spaghetti from trees and explained that a uniform length for the spaghetti had been achieved through expert cultivation. The BBC got hundreds of phone calls, with most callers asking serious questions, such as where could they buy spaghetti trees.

The fantastic BBC video is here. (Sorry for no embed, but those copies are all of lesser quality.) From the voiceover: "The last two weeks of March are an anxious time for the spaghetti farmer. There is always the chance of a late frost which, while not entirely ruining the crop, generally impairs the flavour and makes it difficult for him to obtain top prices in world markets. But now these dangers are over and the spaghetti harvest goes forward." Here's full text and other detail.

And the second item I like involves left-handedness.

9 On April 1, 1998, Burger King took out a full-page ad in USA Today to announce a fast-food breakthrough: the Left-handed Whopper. It featured the same ingredients as the regular Whopper, except the condiments were rotated 180 degrees. According to Burger King, thousands of customers requested the new burger, and others asked for a right-handed version.

Left-handed people! Left-handed people! Sing with me.

I can't find a picture of the USAT ad, but here's the press release from the gag. In part: "It is estimated that more than 1.4 million left-handed customers visit U.S. Burger King(R) restaurants each day." This fake AP story also made rounds online. Museum of Hoaxes actually maintains a left-handed category in its April Fools' Day Database. (Yes, Museum of Hoaxes actually maintains an April Fools' Day Database, a great read.)

Glad to see beloved WXRT and mischievous newies make the list as well. Tagline: "Mark Jacob is the Tribune's editor in charge of putting in commas. Stephan Benzkofer takes out commas for the Tribune."

… you and society just give us no choice. From the Post story on left-handers sent to me by my brother and blogged critically by Crumbler, the numbers dubiously point to evil (chart), but I like the point about how we're not looking for trouble: "This does not mean that lefties are more violent. It means that in violent societies, lefties may fare better. 'When it is important in a society to be a winner of a fight, then left-handers have an advantage,' Faurie said." We just don't like losing.

Interesting thing here. CNET gives high marks to a new left-handed mouse. The Logitech MX610 scores 8.4 out of 10, winning the reviewer over with comfortable ergonomics, all sorts of buttons, wireless digital tracking, and one feature I didn't expect.

"We appreciate that the mouse's right button, where a left-hander's pointer finger naturally rests, is preprogrammed as the primary button, eliminating any need to switch the mouse settings within the Windows Control Panel," the reviewer says. "This is also handy if you share your computer with a right-hander, whose mouse will continue to function normally even if it's plugged in at the same time as the left-handed MX610."

As a left-hander who always bumps into things, regularly knocks things over and has a chainsaw accident on record, it boggles my mind actual companies go so far as to buy mice (plural!) for different-handed people on the same machine. But even more odd to me is the idea of reversing the mouse buttons. My people really do that?

I'm no expert in this niche. Despite a fierce hatred of erasible pens and can openers, and only grudging acceptance of spiralbound notebooks and my family moving the doorbell to the right side of their front door (after 23 years in the house), I've always use the mouse on the right-hand side. A left-side mouse never seemed to be a possibility. At least the dream of left-handed scissors existed, if scarce enough to be ambi-encouraging.

So I got used to the right side, and the left became strange. Why would I put my mouse on the left side when I could hold a pen or drink there? (Currently hot chocolate.) And if my left hand was on the mouse, what would my right hand do? Cut paper? That's about the only thing it's good for. Now that I think about it, what do right-handed computer people do with their left hands all day? Nothing?

But my main point here is the whole button thing. When the reviewer writes, "the mouse's right button, where a left-hander's pointer finger naturally rests, is preprogrammed as the primary button," she's saying click is right-click and right-click is click. It confuses me just to think about it. I'm not chalking that up to language. While the user messaging around clicking must be awful to rethink every time, it's not like the rest of the world's messaging is any clearer. It's the focus that bothers me. The method seems more pure than mine, but the unused right hand feels like such a waste.

Is such a feeling adaptive treason? A southpaw's Stockholm Syndrome? I don't know. The situation makes one think of ye old days of left-handers forced to write right-handed. There's plenty of creative-stunting allegations attached to the issue, but the bios of the greatest lefties (which grade-school lefties devour) show an amazing number of ambidextrous reactions. "He writes with his right hand, but does insert great skill here with his left," goes the standard line. Always on this list is President Garfield, writing Greek with one hand while writing Latin with the other.

Unless Garfield had some wacky and historically unexplored synpases, a good guess is his parlor trick was more pushing the pens than near parallel thought. But even in that capacity, even with only occasional practice, wouldn't the mental exercise have been good for him? In the mouse situation, translating messenging is a kind of exercise, but you have to wonder if the purity offers enough.

A column in today's Chicago Sun-Times tells me that this week is National Handwriting Week. I don't celebrate that holiday. You get the erasible pen industry to honor Left-Handers Day and its people, and then we'll talk.

A dinner roll faux pax leads Miss Manners to thrash a letter writer's marriage and driving abilities. I also didn't know you were supposed to go to your left. How did this etiquette originate? Left-handers have never won anything at the table. Is it only because the glasses load down the right side of the setting? The bread and salad seem to leave the left side soon enough in that scenario.

More scenarios: The Butter Battle Book.