The Indian Army claims that fresh footprints of the abominable snowman have been found in the mountains of Nepal. This, they say, proves that he is real and not just a legend. He must be a rather large fellow because his footprint measures 32 inches by 15 inches.

No wonder he’s barefoot. Who’d be in the business of making shoes just for the abominable snowman? If he had a big family I can see where Nike might make a product line to accommodate the abominables. Add a deplorable line of sneakers and they could capture the anti-Hillary voters. But, nobody seems to know if he’s married with a family so he continues to go barefoot.

There’s one thing about this creature that one can say should be corrected. He’s called abominable and yet nobody really knows what kind of a character he really is. Abominable means despicable, obnoxious, loathsome, and detestable. As far as I know, this creature just hangs out high up in Himalayan Mountains. So what has he done that is so abominable? Does he throw snowballs at Nepalese 20,000 feet below him? That would be sort of playful in my opinion, not detestable.

I imagine he seldom gets to bathe, if at all, so body odor could be pretty abominable. But that’s more of a problem for other abominables, not humans. I assume he’s naked so that could be pretty abominable catching a glimpse of his abominables. On the other hand, I can imagine a naked Harvey Weinstein excelling in the abominable category that no snowman could even approach.

¯ I recently flew from Buffalo to Chicago. While my wife and I were waiting at the gate to board our flight, the two pilots joined us at our gate and sat waiting to board the flight along with the other passengers.

I found that a bit unnerving. Why is that, you might say? Well, I thought that the pilots would have a special set-apart area from the passengers where they would be doing pilot things. If you go to a baseball game, the players aren’t in the stands checking their phones or iPads like these two guys were. They’re warming up, stretching, throwing, hitting, you know they’re doing baseball things. I would think that pilots should be warming up, too, you know like at least practice steering for crying out loud. How about making flying sounds, making flying motions, using pilot jargon like, “135 degrees to the port side-check.” I would think they would say check a lot.

Shouldn’t they be going over the operation manual to see if there’s anything that might have slipped by since their last trip? Shouldn’t they be reviewing pictures of all those dials and levers? I would think they would be quizzing one another about wings, tails, air pressures, you know airplane things. Jeeesh, come on airline people, get these guys a warm up lounge, at least away from me.

¯ You may know that a lot of high school students take the SAT test. They do this to attend colleges of their choice. If they get a high score, they might get into an elite school. If they don’t, they get to attend Laona Tech, as we used to say in caveman times when a Fredonia High School student was a Hilltopper.

Now the SAT people are adding a new twist to the scores. There is now going to be an “adversity factor” incorporated into the score that a kid gets based upon the difficulties that he or she had to deal with during their formative childhood and school experience.

Of course, you might ask, what’s adversity? If I would’ve gotten more credit for adversity in my young life, Oxford and Harvard would’ve been at my door competing for my presence. The number one adversity that I experienced was atomic powered nerdness. Just imagine if you had to live with this daily trauma that I experienced. I would go to bed, hoping to become a handsome godlike adonis that girls would swoon over. Then, just as the day before, the new morning revealed that there in the mirror was still Alfred E, Neumann’s twin brother staring back at me. There was a nerd still living in my skin that survived another night, with pimples to boot.

Adversity 1. My adversities began in the womb. Many kids were serenaded in the womb by the sweet sounds of Mozart. The theory is that all that high- falutin music would lead to the child being born with more IQ points in his preschool bag of goodies. Lucky them. My Italian-American IQ points got a big dosage of Louis Prima’s boogie woogie and the occasional Dick Contino’s accordion version of Lady of Spain.

Adversity 2. Most kids are born crying. I was born exhausted because my mom was too busy canning tomatoes in the basement. She needed to reserve her energy so it was up to me to assist her labor pains. I had to work my way out where my Aunt Rose caught me.

Adversity 3. Aunt Rose was the midwife. Living up to her title, she did a half-assed job of catching me and dropped me on my head.

Adversity 4. Mom was too busy to feed me so that assignment went to Aunt Jennie. She fed me a cannoli.

Adversity 5. Mom eventually did breastfeed me but she didn’t until they shaved my mustache.

Adversity 6. Like any kid, teething was an annoying time of life. Most kids got a rubber binky to soothe their sore gums. Here’s where my adversity quotient gets a boost. I got a brascciole from Cshungunnoonies to suck on.

Adversity 7. Gerber’s baby food was not a typical presence in our house. Oh no. I got linguine and clam sauce along with sausage and peppers. I was like all the other babies in Fredonia’s Little Italy neighborhood who were chucking Tums to alleviate heartburn.

Adversity 8. I was the only kid in my kindergarten with hair on my chest and facial nicks from shaving. Try to live with those additions to obstacles

Adversity 9. Every May in high school would be hellish prom time. Like the Swallows Returning to Capistrano, that was matched by the Fredonia Girls Sprinting To Parts Unknown.

When you know that girls are leaving the area for weeks trying to avoid that dreaded phone call from A. E. Neuman’s twin brother, it does not lead to self-esteem.

On second thought, with the new SAT adversity factor in effect back in the ’50s, Harvard and Oxford, forget about it. I could have owned my own college.

¯ Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez has no limit to interesting things to share with her inferior non-progressive thinkers. Her latest expression of wonderment deals with vegetables. She claims that community gardens that allow the growing of cauliflower is falling into the embrace of colonialism and of course, racism. She suggests that yucca should replace cauliflower. What she didn’t explain was what part of the yucca to eat.

My bride and I tried some yucca the other night. We said that ” AOC ain’t going to place no racist label on us.” And to show our solidarity with all the people of the world, we ate the spikes instead of the items that we should’ve eaten: the root and the flowers. Now I know where the name comes from. Yucca is the sound you make trying to cough up the spikes.

Nin Privitera is a Fredonia resident. His column appears the second Sunday of each month. Send comments to editorial@observertoday.com