New Modern Deity: Carteron

Carteron is the deity of previous era's horses and buggies, now god over shopping carts, go carts and bumper cars.

Carteron is particularly concerned with the regulation of shopping cart use. While Carteron may act as the patron deity of the homeless, allowing them to guard their valuables in shopping carts, he has no patience for those who misuse carts within their department or grocery stores. Misuse includes allowing carts to drift into the paths of others or into large displays of items, especially when distracted by chatting with others met incidentally at the market, leaving carts out in the middle of the parking lot, and shoving carts together in inappropriate ways without fixing them.

Rowdy children, who tend to fall under the jurisdiction of the deity Kindermal, may be encouraged by Carteron (thanks in part to the long-standing feud between Carteron and Kindermal) to misuse carts, including in ways associated with the legitimate use of go carts and bumper cars. Thus, children often escape punishment for misuse -- in fact, they may be used by Carteron as agents of punishment for adults who should know better.

Divine retribution for shopping cart misuse may include giving the misuser a cart with wobbly or squeaky wheels on the next shopping trip, allowing a cart to crash into either one's own vehicle on a subsequent trip, or into the vehicle of a high-priced attorney with a Lexus and a tendency to sue individuals "for the principle of the thing," or the subsequent inability to extricate two carts from each other, or from the cart corral, on the next trip.

Libations and sacrifices may be made to Carteron in the form of shopping cart wheel grease and courtesy in not blocking aisles and returning carts to proper places at the end of a shopping trip. As Carteron also functions as god of bumper cars and go carts -- and is thus something of a mischief-maker -- prayers for retribution involving getting hit by another cart are often efficacious.