T'is yet but another simple case of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf."

Example: NOAA and NWS predict coastal storm forming and dumping on us (up to 5") in Tidewater. Snow to begin prior to midnite (12/29/00) and continuing through the day 12/30/00. Media gets all excited and pulls out every "evergreen" in their arsenal (including 2-year old color photos of 30' tall salt-licks being loaded into dump-trucks and blades at the ready)! Public gets all excited and runs out to their nearest Food Lion and buys them out of all the bread and milk on the shelves! Kids jump up and down and start waxing the blades on their "Flexible Flyers" ("Flexible Flyers"?).

Now, I ask you, if, as they say, "Great minds think alike", who's to say that the other 80% don't (including those falling 2 standard deviations below the mean = morons!)?

Woke this morning to sunny skies, light breeze and nary a drop of precip.

Sound familiar?

I rest my case.

• Correlary A: The amount and size of squat increases with the amount and size of the denial of the [local] tackle shop.

You can catch just as much squat with a fully blowed-up cast of 50'+ (Don't believe me? Just ask Mo'!) as you can with a methane-driven launch of 700'+.

• Correlary A: Where the cast winds up has little bearing on squat productivity. Why,I've even witnessed squat victims with sting-silvers buried and dangling from their nekid shoulder blades. Of course, in all fairness and courtesy, it would be better if the cast successfully linked the terminal tackle to the appropriate H2O target. (Submitted by an anonymous reader calling him/herself "SQUATETTE!"

• Correlary B: Power casting in a field produces maximum SQUATIDGE when H2O is available. (Submitted by Squatette).

This can be clearly seen today in the organizational behavior of some of America's most powerful companies when and idea goes south. Rather than backing away from the smell entirely (as any rational human-being should), they throw multiple vice-presidents at the problem in a futile attempt to sew a silk purse from a sow's ear!

I've told the following story before, but under current circumstances,I think it bears repeating again (yes, I cleared that with the Dept. of Redundancy Dept.):

This happened several years ago. I was fishing False Point one May evening on a high-falling tide. There was a beautiful slough running through with excellent structure on the other side. Nice SW-12-15 to top it off and make it purrrfect. And I was catching squat!

Howard Cater (another true squat-man) rolled up, got out, came over to talk. He'd just come down from the Pelican's Roost, "'J'ya hear 'bout the guy caught two 24"ers on a rented rod at the turnout above the motels?" "Yeah! I had suggested it to him this morning and then saw him and his girlfriend walking down the beach, towing this mesh sack behind. He asked if I knew what they were?!!?" "You know, Carl, the problem with you and me is that we know too much! We think we know what we're doing!"

And Howard was right!

My father once asked me, "Son, do you know what education is?" Knowing he was going to tell me, whether I wanted to know or not, and also figuring there was likely a punchline coming, I played along, "What?" "It's the process of learning more and more, about less and less until you know absolutely all there is to know about absolutely nothing."

I was stunned by the deep-depth and obviousness of this profundity (or was it the profundity and obviousness of this deep-depth? Or was it the deep-depth and profundity of this obviousness? ... Never mind.).

And the two combined led directly to Squat Principle #4 - The more you you think you know, the less you really know. The less you think you know, the more you really know! And you can take that to the bank!

It has become clear to me that I have been spending a lifetime, honing my squat skills while thinking otherwise.