Of novelties and fantasies: Nevada Legislature borrows from a fairy tale

We now have proof positive that the Nevada Legislature is a fairy tale land run by a cadre of royalists obsessed with fighting the imaginary witches and dragons to protect their feeble-minded minions ever in peril from peas under mattresses, poison apples and hazardous spindles.

Perhaps you've heard the story of Sleeping Beauty. Seems the king and queen decided to celebrate the birth of their beautiful baby girl by inviting over for dinner some of the local witches so they could bestow on the child the gifts of virtue, beauty, riches and the usual fairy godmotherly stuff. But one old gal was not invited. So she crashed the party and proceeded to curse the child by saying that in her 15th year she would prick her finger on a spindle and fall down dead. Well, one of the witches hadn't done her thing yet, but she could not undo the spell, only soften it to a 100-year sleep.

So, the loving king did what any doting father with unlimited magisterial power would do. In a senseless and futile gesture, he had every spindle in the kingdom burned. You know the rest of this story.

But have you heard the fairy tale out of the place for nodding off in the far, far away land of shaking leaves, falling snow and benighted assemblypersonage?

Yes, slayer of fires (with or without dragons) John "The Protector" Ocequera, right, overlord of the chamber of fools persuaded his fellow makers of laws and decrees to declare that all novelty cigarette lighters — ones that look like golf clubs, guns, footballs and assorted toys — must be forever banned from kingdom lest some curious tot one day grasp one of these nefarious devices and ignite a conflagration.

We call this fairy tale Assembly Bill 266. It is coming today to the Nevada Revised Statutes, as law of the land.

And we live happily everafter, safe from the scourge of novelty lighters. Happy New Year, I hope you did not set off your illegal fireworks this morning with an illegal novelty lighter.