By JEFF VRABEL • 843-706-8140

If there is anything in this world that drives me nuts, it is a grumpy Jedi.

They are like this more than you think, always with the “These burlap robes are so itchy,” and the “I’m supposed to lift that whole ship out of that swamp but I’m starving” and the “Since he figured out post-death communication, Obi-Wan’s Force Spirit keeps dropping in during Me Time, if you catch my Jedi drift.”

But on the whole, Jedis are supposed to be wise, enlightened and even-tempered, which is why it was peculiar this week to read of one of them getting all snippy with a British supermarket.

By JEFF VRABEL • 843-706-8140

Attention friends, colleagues, family, people who hang out by the printer on Monday mornings, I’ll make you a deal. I’ll stop talking about all the adorable things my son does if you stop issuing updates regarding your fantasy football team(s), because when you talk about your fictitious owning of fictitious Tom Brady I am doing what I imagine you do when I tell you about Jake’s considerable reading abilities: dreaming about ways to kill myself with whatever office supply is within reach (if it’s a letter opener, I’m in good shape; if it’s a stapler, I have to get a little more inventive).

Evidently while I was on vacation, someone installed a bright orange placard on my desk that reads PLEASE COME OVER HERE AND EXULT ABOUT YOUR STABLE OF WIDE RECEIVERS. Because in this opening week for fantasy football nerds, it is Katie bar the door over here for people whose otherwise healthy fantasy worlds have expanded to include Peyton Manning.

So let’s just get this out of the way: I’m really happy for you, but as these players exist primarily in your Firefox, I will have great difficulty generating the enthusiasm you’re fishing for when you say, “My first draft of the season. No. 1 pick. Who do I take?”

By JEFF VRABEL • 843-706-8140

Having seen nearly a half-dozen movies in the past year (with a 5-year-old at home, this figure is astonishing), it’s not like I’m naive about what’s required to bring familiar franchises to movie screens, be they reanimated comic books, defrosted video games or long-dormant toy franchises marketed entirely to Twitter-addicted white-and-nerdy thirtysomethings, not that I’m naming any names, “G.I. Joe.”

Such films tend to require the same little toybox of ingredients: explosions, fire, fiery explosions, Megan Fox caressing truck engines, an editing philosophy that suggests the entire thing was cut by 30 glue-sniffing rhesus monkeys, the computer-generated destruction of one of the 7 Wonders of the World and, if there’s time, a talking Rasta frog, or maybe like an anthropomorphic hip-hop guinea pig.

Sure, many of these are simply basic prereqs for making money with your silly movie. I’d rather be fully submerged in an Olympic-sized pool filled with ranch dressing than see the new “Transformers,” but I understand that it fills people’s needs to watch action flicks, as well as 28-year-old women pretending to be high-schoolers fleeing things sweatily in their underwear to blankly angry-sounding music performed by cupcakes such as Linkin Park. But doing it with Sherlock Holmes seems, to use a word I first learned from my English professors, redonkulous.

By JEFF VRABEL • 843-706-8140

Here’s what I did at work last Friday: Held an alligator. With my hands. Both of them. That is an essential strategy, because holding an alligator with one hand is a terrible idea, because no matter how you do it the gator is going to be hanging in some fashion, and that is highly unsafe, especially if the hanging portion contains the mouth. So I used both, which was good news for the alligator, because when you’re being held by someone who is quivering uncontrollably, the effect is probably that of a pleasant massage.

I was holding an alligator because it was brought to the office by gator wrangler/guy who could snap my spine in half like a pretzel stick Joe Maffo of Critter Management, a company that specializes in the removal of alligators from things, such as pools, ponds, baby seats and refrigerators. If there’s an alligator that needs to be relocated — often, it seems, because of tourists trying to impress someone by playing a minivan version of “Man Vs. Wild” or attempting to snap a cool picture for the breakroom bulletin board — it is his job to do so, which is the mathematical opposite of my job, which involves trying to tap-tappity funnies at 2 a.m. for one of these “newspapers” that my grandkids will be asking me about in the way that I ask about, say, stegosauruses, like: “Wait, they really had those?”