I love irony – be it verbal or situational, dramatic or even Socratic. It can come from anywhere, but when it does, the rub is like sandpaper on your blessed @$$urance.

Such as:

• Break a date with your girl so you can go the game with the guys. During an intermission, you get up for a beverage and there chowing on a hot dog is none other than your girlfriend with a friend of yours who “couldn’t make it” to the game.
• A recent discovery that sun screen could actually cause skin cancer.
• Some uber-vocal, Hollywood quack supporter of PETA rockin’ the latest in leather-bound Versace dining on some nubile Veal Parmesan at the latest red carpet event.
• A no-smoking sign on your cigarette break… at the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco corporate offices in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
• The members of one political party investigating ethics of the other political party.

Here’s another righteous example in this story fresh from the sacrosanct lips of Pope Benedict XVI and the down-under shores recently visited.

“In so many of our societies, side by side with material prosperity, a spiritual desert is spreading: an interior emptiness, an unnamed fear, a quiet sense of despair,” the pontiff said.

True, and you know, that would have been a resounding hit to the locals if he wouldn’t have befuddled the masses by raising his golden and diamond-encrusted scepter, allowing people to kiss that multi-carat bling on his finger, walking with his silk-robed entourage and flying off in private Bombardier jet.

Ah, there’s that rub again. Scratch, scratch, scratch.