Category Humor

Join the Club

Michael Leave a comment

Last week was special for me. I got mail, real USPS delivered mail that wasn’t addressed to “occupant,” wasn’t a bill, and didn’t include a detailed accounting of all medical procedures from the previous month. Oh, and it wasn’t a Christmas card either although we’re getting to that time when all the businesses I deal with send their cards out. After those come the cards from real people. But I digress. But that’s not unusual.

So, back to my tale, the mail came and therein was an envelope and within was a check. Not a bill. A check! Somebody was giving me money! It wasn’t a lot but it was mine. Coming to me. Income, not outlay. I felt so special. I practically beamed!

Now to be perfectly honest, this wasn’t anything unheard of. It happened before. In fact, it usually happens about once a year. The check in question was a disbursement from my insurance company. (Home and auto, not health or life. Those guys never give anything back. Well, technically life insurance does, but it’s usually too late to be much use.) Usually around this time each year I get a little check from the insurance company that reflects something they saved because they had fewer claims than they expected or some such thing. I don’t understand. I just spend. It’s like a Christmas Club.

ChristmasBankAh ha! Now we get to the heart of this post. Christmas Clubs. Do they even still exist. Those of you under 40 may have to find an even older adult to explain Christmas Clubs, right along with Broken Records. To be fair to the financial institutions of America, most credit unions still offer Christmas Clubs although Vacation Clubs are by far more popular. But neither have the favor they did before the credit card explosion of the early 1970s.

So when I opened the mail that day last week and pulled out that little check, my first thought was, “Wow, just like a Christmas Club.” My second thought was, “Wow, just like a Christmas Club.” My third thought was, “Okay, now you’re sounding like a broken record.”

And then I went out and spent.

 

 

Day In and Day Out

Michael 3 Comments

Yesterday was a glorious day in my neck of the woods. Sunny and warm, with temperatures in the mid 60s. Very April-like which was a relief from the February-ish November we just escaped. If you didn’t know better (unless you live in south Florida) you’d not know there were only 23 days until Christmas.

SantaWhen I was a kid we always knew how long till Christmas. That goes with childhood. You could have asked any random 9 year old on May 6 how long till Christmas and without hesitation would have gotten “only 233 days!” in reply. Parents got a little extra help. Beginning the day after Thanksgiving the morning paper posted a happy Santa holding his nice or naughty list proclaiming “20 Shopping Days Until Christmas!” That’s what yesterday’s paper would have printed. Yes, back then there was a difference between days until Christmas and shopping days ‘til Christmas.

This isn’t a post about how great things were in those good old days. I just want to point out that back then the stores weren’t open on Sunday and on Christmas Eve it wasn’t unusual for many to close before dinner time so the employees could be home with their families. Not every day was a shopping day. Of course today the stores can be closed and still shopping gets done through the magic of on-line retailers and electronic charging or cash transfers. Still those places with real doors will be opening them every day until Christmas.

Except …

Not everything is open on Sunday. And I don’t mean the post office. You can receive and they do deliver mail on Sunday. No, I mean banks. Banks, those financial institutions that try very hard in their ads to convince us that they are just ordinary people like the rest of us mere mortals working to make our money work hard for us. Uh huh.

Over the years they’ve made it handy enough for us to do most banking without their input. Automated teller machines have been around for years along with on line money transfers and automated recurring payments. Just like you would expect in the 21st century. Then why in a day when a merchant can determine whether you have enough in your checking account to cover that new OLED TV with your debit card even if it is 2:00 on a Sunday afternoon, and manage to reduce your balance by the price of that TV (plus tax and extended warranty) they still make you wait three days with you make a deposit “for the check to clear.” And why do they never tell you what they are doing with that money in the interim. It seems like they don’t have to long for the good old days. They never left them.

Back to shopping though. With now just 22 days till Christmas (and if I recall last year some retailers were actually guaranteeing same day delivery of select items ordered by noon on Christmas day making it now 23 shopping days till Christmas) I better get myself in gear. I have a lot of preparations to make. No, not a lot of shopping to do. I don’t do much shopping for Christmas. I’ll still put together a small stocking for my daughter (after 29 years the Santa fantasy is now more mine than hers), but otherwise the gifts to and from the rest of the family are our love and company.

The preparations I have to make are keeping my recycle bin empty for the daily onslaught of printed “gift guides” and my “Delete Finger” limber for elimination of the electronic version of those same and similar guides from my email inbox. Has anybody noticed those gift guides all seem to bear recommendations for anybody on your Christmas list with gifts from the same store? Who would have thought your 96 year old aunt and your 7 month old great nephew can be satisfied in a single trip to the same hunting and camping emporium. And no I am not receiving that email because I requested it. I never heard of you before and where is the “click here to unsubscribe” line?

One thing I don’t have to prepare for is an unusually warm Christmas. In fact we get back to December weather later today with falling temperatures and snow by morning. For those of you living in south Florida that’s the white stuff Frosty is made of.

All Washed Up

Michael 1 Comment

I have an absolutely, completely, positively, almost surgically clean apartment. Vacuuming, dusting, mopping, disinfecting, and laundering (yuck) are all done at the same time. Actually these were done all at the same time yesterday. Today I went to the hospital to have that pesky fistula declared kaput and a new one fashioned in my “other” arm. But wait! This is NOT a depressing “oh I’m so sick” post. If you want to read about my latest medical escapades, go read the kidney transplant journey posts. This post is about lint.

Right. Lint. I’m sorry, I’m starting in the middle again. Let me back up a few steps. You see, because I have an embarrassment of available time I spread housework out over the whole week. Typically each day has its own domestic torture. Oh I will wash, dry, iron, and put away the laundry all in one day, but usually it’s one day, one job. But because of this morning’s procedure I can’t lift or carry anything heavier than say, oh, a toilet brush. But I can’t really reach or swing with either arm so even if I wanted to pick up that toilet brush, the most I could do with it is gesture with it. So this place is so spotless today because for the next week the most strenuous activity I can pull off (like that word choice?) is manipulating the lever that raises the footrest on the recliner. So if I didn’t want to live in progressively slovenly environs, I did the next week’s work all in one day.

I know for many, because of work and family obligations every week’s household chores get done in one day but I’m old and feeble not to mention lazy by nature and as I said, with a lot of time in my hands. Being faced with a week’s worth of cleaning in just a few hours significantly challenged my efficiency. A big loser to my running around with my head threatening to be cut off was the dryer lint trap. Thus, today’s post about lint.

Right. Lint. (Sorry for repeating myself but the post really cried out for a couple extra and those fit the bill nicely.) (Speaking of words, I was thinking of you Angela when I worked “fistula” into a post about lint. Not bad, huh?)

You see, I have this love/hate relationship with fall/winter laundry. I hate how cold weather increases the volume of dirty clothes but I hate doing laundry in general. Hmm. I guess you could say I have a hate/hate relationship with fall/winter laundry. (Go back and check out “Visions of Fall” for more on that.) Regardless if I hate it or hate it, I had a lot of laundry to do. In a typical week laundry actually gets two days so yesterday I not only doubled my laundry activities, I did that on the day I was doing everything else.

So in order to get all the laundry plus everything else done I spent the day multitasking. I’m not a fan of multitasking. To me, multitasking is akin to compromise which to me is just another way of saying “nobody wins.” (If you are wondering, even though I don’t care much for compromise, I am a huge fan of collaboration. Someday I’ll do a post on that. Stay tuned.) (If you don’t understand “stay tuned,” find an old person to explain it along with “broken record” and “let’s go to the tape.”)

Well, to make a long story short (but then if I ever really did that all my posts would be just shy of 10 words), early in the laundry portion of our domestic extravaganza, I missed a tissue in a pocket. Ugh.

Launderers know the significance of that. If you don’t, go ask your mom!

LintTrap

Disbelievable!

Michael 2 Comments

The suspension of disbelief, so Aristotle says, is that theatrical principle which allows the audience to accept fiction as reality and fully experience the moments. I’ve always thought it should be the suspension of belief because what’s so hard about not not believing. Fiction by definition is that which is not real (though not necessarily unreal, at least as of the mid-1960s), or as Lawrence Block so well put it, “telling lies for fun and profit.” But I guess if you’re willing to shell out the money to have someone lie to you, whether at a play or through a novel, you’ve already surrendered at least some of your beliefs. To give up disbelief is the willingness not to stand up in the middle of Act III shouting “Oh come on now!”

Of course the author has some responsibility to make it not absurdly unbelievable except perhaps in a good farce. I thought of this while watching television the other night. It was a new age television drama that is supposed to reflect life itself. But I’ve seen this particular problem is lesser dramas, comedies, and even movies of the theatrical release type. That is the vibrating cell phone.

I am willing to disbelieve when our hero shoots it out with 5 or 6 bad guys all outfitter with automatic weapons against his pistol compact enough to slip into his tuxedo breast pocket. I can disbelieve with the best of them that someday man will fly faster than the speed of light. It even doesn’t stretch my discredibility that a fresh faced girl from Kansas can move to New York and beat out the actresses who have trained since they were 4 for the lead in the new Broadway musical winning a recording contract, and a Tony, in the process.

CellPhoneBuzzingBut I cannot disbelieve close to enough that everybody on TV and in the movies can hear their phones on vibrate from 2 rooms away. Seriously.

Seriously, is it only the programs I watch and the movies I go to that even the actors take the notice when we are instructed to mute our pagers, phones, and other electronic devices?

Maybe in the movies I can see the director being paranoid that if he or she were to call for a real ringtone too many audience members would reach for their phones and miss whatever nuance is playing out in the screen as we watch the character carefully traverse the rooms to the buzzing handset. I guess on the television shows a ringing phone would distract us to the point of missing the next commercial. Although I might be tempted to go looking for my phone thinking a) nobody in the show has a phone on them and b) holy crap, where did my phone get to?!

So I’m willing to not disbelieve in ghosts that run roughshod over New York, to take on non-unfaith that mild mannered bartenders double as CIA operatives, and to really buy that a computer can inhabit the body and soul of a foreign exchange student. But…

If anybody out there is working on a screenplay, please keep in mind that the suspension of disbelief goes only so far. And it stops at the end of my cell phone.

Bzzzzz bzzzzz

 

 

 

Memorably Forgettable

Michael Leave a comment

Enquiring minds want to know. You know that’s the actual what – quote, slogan, motto? Slogan. I think most people would say “Inquiring minds want to know” and it really doesn’t matter much what those minds want because both mean essentially the same thing. Typically people inquire on this side of the Atlantic and enquire on that, assuming you’re on the same side as I am and you’re not prone to paving your speech with Anglicisms. I’m not sure exactly what they do in Canada even though they would be with me on this side.

fingersI’ve used the inquiring minds line quite often over the years although I couldn’t tell you where it came from. My first thought was E. F. Hutton but at the same time I knew that wasn’t right. If wasn’t E. F. Hutton or the recently resurrected EF Hutton. That was “When E. F. Hutton talks, people listen.” They came up with that slogan about a year before they were forced to admit to an elaborated check chaining scheme (the corporate version of passing bad checks ) right before being bought up and disappearing into the investment miasma and setting the stage for an eventual rebirth without the periods.

But I digress. That shouldn’t surprise anyone. Enquiring minds was the brainchild of the National Enquirer, the American tabloid with the British name. I suppose regular readers of the Enquirer know that but they probably don’t know that tabloid was originally a trademarked layered tablet developed by the Burroughs Welcome drug company who sued for copyright infringement but lost for a reason I was never able to discover.

Often copyrighted names get sucked into the public domain because of a lack of attention to protecting them by their respective owners. Kleenex and Tylenol are two biggies that rarely get seen with their (r) or (c) or whatever it’s supposed to be to project the fact that there are particular brands of facial tissue and acetaminophen. Dumpster, aspirin, and thermos are just three of many that have already lost their letters. Maybe that’s what happened to tabloid although I don’t see the relationship between a gossip rag and a drug delivery system. I guess some things aren’t supposed to be understood.

Like who can understand how or why certain numbers are so memorable. Some things make sense in context – four horsemen, seven seas, twelve days of Christmas. But what about 8003253535. Let me put that another way.
8-0-0    3-2-5    3-5-3-5
Add a catchy little tune and you have the first toll free 800 phone number ever featured in an advertising campaign. And it still gets you the Sheraton reservation system fifty years later even though Sheraton is now part of a more diverse corporate family.

747100While Sheraton was revealing a new way to reserve a hotel room, Boeing was introducing a new way to get there. It might not have a catchy slogan or memorable phone number (at least I don’t know that it does) but what Boeing revealed that fall in 1968 has a memorable number of its own and quite an unmistakable profile, the 747.

So thanks to Boeing more people can get from here to there without walking. For generations, people have let their fingers do the walking. That famous symbol on the cover of so many yellow pages was never trademarked, nor was the term “yellow pages” so I can print them here with impunity. As far as I’m concerned, yellow pages have it all over enquiring minds even if you don’t need them look up the number to reserve a room at the Sheraton. I wonder why nobody ever got around to protecting it.

I guess they forgot.

Point Blank

Michael 3 Comments

Monday I picked up my daughter at the airport and I thought to myself, “Self,” I thought, “I miss traveling.” Well, really who doesn’t like exploring new places and different cultures, food from around the world, or a chance to wade out into an ocean? Travelling is right up there with food and drink on the list of necessities. And I miss those things too. But I also miss the actual work of getting from place to place. Travelling.

I know, everybody else is like, “Oh, I love to travel and if I just didn’t have to deal with the rigamarole of flying I’d love it even more.” True, most people wouldn’t say rigamarole. Or “It is so great to be able to see the country but can’t somebody else do the driving?” Cars, trains, and busses can’t escape the ardent traveler’s “what can we do to improve the experience” list. Even cruise ships can be bettered with more dinner seating or inclusive alcohol or faster port transfers. Every good time story has a “but..”

But I never minded getting from Point A to Point B even while complaining I would prefer not having to stop at Point A1 to do it. Although when I flew somewhere that required a stopover I was usually selective in choosing a way point not known for being the world’s largest airport knowing it probably did not double as the world’s greatest airport.

While other people were napping at the gates after getting there two hours before boarding, or seeing how many airport bars they can get to before said boarding, I would sit and enjoy the local accents in the bars. I would sit at the edge of the gate area and marvel at the anticipation in the faces of the youngest travelers making their way to what might be their first flight and compare that the disgust on the faces of the “professional” traveler because all the charging stations were full. While others rushed from gate to gate I watched the show from my front row seat. And when I got onto the plane if I ended up being in a last row seat, that was okay too.

BeamMeUpI recall one of the regional directors for the company I worked for saying how much he liked his job and getting to see the different cities and experiencing the local foods and sights. He really enjoyed travelling, if only he didn’t have to spend so much time travelling to get there. Duh. It wouldn’t be that exciting going from Point A to Point A. Until Samsung or Apple perfects the Star Trek transporter going places, aka travelling, is going to involve getting from place to place – aka travelling.

Even with the long security lines, unreasonable baggage fees, and really bad in flight magazines, I miss travelling. It’s really more of an adventure like that anyway. I mean, what’s more fun, trying to pack a week’s worth of clothes in a carry on and fighting for the last overhead compartment space or standing perfectly still and saying “Beam me up, Scotty?” At least now when I stop at Point A1 all of my molecules get there at the same time.

Usually.

 

 

A Clear Failure

Michael Leave a comment

I have to buy a new car. I don’t want to. Well, that’s not really true. I always want to buy a new car. Actually I always want to buy something. I get great comfort from buying things. Fortunately I have a dollar store within walking distance so I can satisfy the buying urge fairly economically but this particular buying urge isn’t just a plain, old fashioned, garden variety shopping binge. This urge, the “I want to buy a new car urge,” is strictly due to windshield streaks. I tried to clean the inside of my windshield yesterday. That was when I decided it would be easier to just buy a new car than to de-streak (un-streak?) the inside of the car windshield.

I don’t understand it. I have the patience, skill, or both to clean almost anything else from the car side windows to the refrigerator door shelves. If it’s dirty I’ll clean it. I know it’s not the most fun activity, it’s not the first thing I think of when I’m deciding what to do for a day, but cleaning is a necessary evil and is a chore I generally manage to accomplish successfully and with a minimum of drama. Except for that miserable, no good, filthy, — um, except for the inside of the car windshield. As a result, it becomes a chore I usually put off for months. Not days. Not weeks. Months.

TheSneezeI don’t understand how it gets so dirty anyway. It’s not like I walk across it. I don’t sneeze my latte foam on it like in that commercial for allergy medicine. Where does windshield grime come from? No, that’s not the question. Dirt just happens. Ask Charlie Brown’s friend Pig-Pen. The real question is what do they put on windshields that prevent the grime from being wiped off.

I’ve tried everything. I’ve used ammonia based window cleaner, vinegar based window cleaner, plain vinegar, diluted vinegar, plain water, soapy water, foamy window cleaner, even pre-soaked cleaning towelettes. I’ve wiped with cotton rags, paper towels, rubber squeegees, microfiber towels, old newspaper, blank newsprint paper, even tissue paper. Nothing works. Everything works on ever other window in the car, just not on the windshield. But why would you want that window clean anyway. It’s much more challenging to drive through bright sun or oncoming lights while looking through streaks and blotches of yuck.

Sigh. I need a new car.

Worth The Squeeze?

Michael 4 Comments

Last week had me scratching my head a bit and not due to dandruff or tiny livestock. Maybe you can help explain this.

Full pulp, some pulp, no pulp. Typically I drink Florida orange juice, not from concentrate, because I like the taste. I really mean Florida orange juice or at least juices labeled as a product of the USA and hopefully that doesn’t include California. (But that’s a different post.)

Many orange juice products also include juice from Mexico and Argentina and although I like am not anti-immigrant, I prefer those immigrants not show up in my breakfast juice glass. Really, I can pick up a difference in taste. It might not be the juice. It could other things added to it because we all know that anything that says it’s 100% of something really means “all of it give or take a little.” Anyway, my go to OJ is with the Florida labeled variety with added calcium because I can use all the help I can get and no pulp because … why. Well, what I grabbed was a carton of juice with added calcium and some pulp. Oops!

OJ.pngWhat’s the deal with pulp? Is it to make you believe you are actually sitting on a patio in Florida under the orange trees with the juicer nearby on the table still wet from a fresh squeezing? And why the different levels of pulp in the juice. Full? Some? Extra? How much is some? How much more is full? Is extra more than full? What about just “with pulp” not further specified? Is full really full if it still pours? Can I get a carton of just pulp and eat my juice in the morning? Or would that involve a trip to the produce section? Help!!!

Only orange juice puts the consumer through this selection process. Apple juice is apple juice and there’s a lot more pulp involved with those little orbs. Cranberry juice bottlers don’t ask if you want it skin or skinless. Pineapple juicers don’t give you the option of with or without core. Grapefruits are pretty much like big, tart oranges and that juice is offered as just grapefruit juice options not available.

Maybe orange juice has something to hide behind those strands of what I guess are supposed to be the stuff left over from the pressing. I’d think if there is a ounce of pulp to every glass of juice then my glass just shrunk to 7 ounces. Not cool.  How about the bottlers of my favorite breakfast juice just stick to putting juice in those bottles before I start to question whether that juice is worth that squeeze.

Thank you reading. I needed to get that off my chest. And my back teeth, too. Yuck!

 

 

Who Said So?

Michael 2 Comments

This Saturday is National Coffee Day. It might have been the brain child of somebody at Maxwell House but since it seems to have been celebrated only since 2005 or so, chances are better it was the work of those Starbucks people.  Or maybe not.

Did you know you can find a food to celebrate every day of the year? Some days two or three! Did you ever wonder where they all come from? Cynically, I used to think they are all promotional activities of a company that produces the particular celebrant. But I recently discovered that’s not always the case. In fact it seems to be not often the case.

CuppaThe key that this might be true is is the description of those many heralded food stuffs’ celebratory dates. Quite often they read “probably first observed in…” or “not much is known about the origins of…”. Really? We can pinpoint the day and time Dunkin’ Donuts becomes Dunkin’ (Start of Business, Jan. 1, 2019; parent company will continue to be known as Dunkin’ Brands (in case you really needed to know)) but not when Coffee Day became a day when all those chains that push coffee will push free coffee (probably with an additional purchase) that day. But if it was one of those, would they (it?) not have registered or trademarked or whatevered “Coffee Day” so all caffeine addicts would have to beat paths to their doors and thus take full and sole (or sole and full, even) advantage of those additional purchases?

Maybe they didn’t. Um, they being them, those companies, or associations or user groups or other sort of official folk. Maybe it was John-Bryan Hopkins, founder of the Foodimentary website. In a 2004 interview with Money, he said he created hundreds of such “holidays.” When Foodimentary.com went live in 2006, “there were already around 175 food-related holidays. ‘I filled in the rest,’ he said, to ensure there was at least one food holiday for every day of the year.”

So do we thank Mr. Hopkins for Coffee Day, or International Tea Day (December 15) for non-coffee-drinkers (coffee non-drinkers?)? I don’t know, but thanks to him, if it wasn’t before it is now possible to wake up any day of the year and say to yourself “Self, what makes today unlike any other day, food wise that is?” and have an answer.

By the way, if you can’t wait for Saturday to guzzle a mug full of your favorite stimulant, Friday is Drink a Beer Day.🍺

Fall Fetched Ideas

Michael 5 Comments

Fall arrived two days ago. Up here, north of the Equator fall arrived. In the Southern Hemisphere you’re just getting to spring so you might want to bookmark this and come back to it in 6 months. Yeah, there are a few brave souls south of zero degrees that read this. I was amazed also but thank you my Southern friends.

Anyway, fall rolled in here a little after 9:30 pm (2130 hours to those with 24 hour clocks) (just in case) and that should have been the end of it. “It” could be summer but in this case “it” is the question, “When does fall begin?” Apparently it’s not at the end of summer. Who knew?

This morning I read an article about the upcoming harvest moon, that being the full moon closest to the Autumnal Equinox, which you recall from 3 sentences ago was Saturday evening. Or night depending on your interpretation of a day’s divisions. The full moon closest to that day and time happens tonight, which according to the article signals the start of fall. Hmm.

Three weeks ago Americans celebrated Labor Day which not only commemorates violent confrontation between labor and management but also rocking hot, year-end deals on leftover 2018 model cars and trucks. And…the “unofficial end of summer” and darned if not then by extrapolation, the “unofficial start of fall.” That’s three down.

Starbucks, AKA If We Say So It Must Be So, Inc., released their Pumpkin Spice Latte (PSL to those under 35), which according to Business Insider, “has become an iconic marker of the beginning of autumn.” That’s four.

FloridaFallTo meteorologists, also known as weather guys (or weather people to the more inclusive (which is the more inclusive term for politically correct)), “Meteorological Fall” begins September 1. To football fans (American Football naturally) fall begins with the first high school, college or NFL game of the year, to horse racing enthusiasts the summer ends after the Breeders Cup and by that same extrapolation used above, fall will start the day after (November 4 this year), and to residents of South Florida, fall never comes. We’re up to 5 through 8 if you’re still counting.

And then there are those who mark the change of season with the changing of time as Daylight Saving Time morphs into regular, old, ordinary Time, which itself keeps moving around. The last time I checked, and when I’m planning on changing my clocks, that is the first Sunday of November which is November 4 in 2018. Hey, that’s the same day as the beginning of the Fall of the Horse People. Should it count twice? My post, my rules, I say yes. Number 9.

Personally for me, fall begins the last Sunday of October (this October that’s the 28th) when I pull the battery on the Miata and consign it to the garage until spring (my spring, but that’s a different post).

Ten ways to figure out when fall starts. And in a few months, nobody will think twice about winter other than to question will it never end. Well, give me six months and I’ll see if I can figure out when the first day of spring arrives for 2019. Except for the Southern Hemisphere.

Sorry, you’re still on your own down there, but thanks for reading!