Lady Bird Gaga

I don’t know much about this Lady Gaga person but I heard she performed during the Super Bowl halftime show so she must be popular. I hear she sings and she dances around while she sings.  So, like, what’s with that name? If Lady Gaga married Donald Trump would she be First Lady Lady Gaga?

Actually, we already had a First Lady “Lady”. That was Lady Bird Johnson. Was she known as First Lady Lady Bird Johnson? Or was it First Lady Bird? What was with that name? (And we wonder why children rebelled in the 60’s.) Her husband was known as LBJ. Why wasn’t she LBJ? And at what point does a “Lady Bird” become a hen?

Who woulda won a fight between Lady Bird and Sherryl Crow?

Tax Refund

Remember when people bragged every spring about how much of tax refund they were getting?. You don’t hear that kind of bragging so much anymore ‘cause people understand that getting a refund means that the government has gotten to use your money all year. For free. But there’s a few of those braggarts still out there. I know a guy who still does that. This same guy also has the unique practice of going a while without brushing his teeth prior to a dental appointment. “If they’re gonna clean my teeth anyway, why should I clean them before I go? You don’t wash your car before going to the car wash, right?” I suppose he had some kind of a point, but…

I know another guy who complained that his elderly mother let her dog lick off her plate. A lot of people do that, I said. He said it was really gross though when she put the plate back into her mouth…   

Tax Tip

I know. I know. You're saying Uncle Tommy is a bit late with his tax tips. April 15th has come and gone. No. This isn't about that. Calm down readers! This is about sales tax. Do you ever read those suggested tip amounts at the bottom of your bill in restaurants? Check the math on those things. The suggested tip calculations are all over the place. Some are based on pre-tax totals. Others want you to tip on the after tax total. It varies. Those restaurants who suggest that you don’t tip on the tax want you to figure your tip based a higher percentage of the pretax amount. So, they might want you to tip on 20 or 22% of the pretax amount vs tipping on 15% or 18% of the after tax amount. Confused yet?

I guess my real question is this: If you tip on the tax, shouldn’t the government get that part of the tip?   

Synonames

Do you ever meet people who have names that sound a lot like someone famous, and when you jokingly bring that to their attention, they don’t know what you’re talking about? I used to know this woman whose name was Sandra Gay something. I don’t remember her last name but that’s not important to this story. I of course called her Sandra Gay O’Connor once, after our famous former Supreme Court Justice, Sandra Day O’Connor. Well, you’d have thought that I was from another planet. She had no idea what I was talking about. No one had ever linked Sandra Gay with Sandra Day for her before. Are you kidding me? How can you go through your life with the name Sandra Gay and not once have someone call you Sandra Day? And Sandra Day O’Connor was a Supreme Court Justice for a long time, man.  And she was the first female justice, I think. Pretty, pretty famous person.

I know, I know. I shouldn’t judge people. That’s why we have people like Sandra Gay, I mean, Sandra Day O’Connor.

Alcoholics Unanonymous

Remember the early days of recycling when you had to put your stuff in those red tubs with no lids?  You’d smash the two liter bottles and the milk cartons into it along with your glass and take it to the curb and then hope the wind wouldn’t blow ‘cause if it blew you’d be chasing plastic containers throughout the neighborhood like some adult Easter egg hunt. I always hated having to pick up someone else’s milk cartons in my yard. And it seemed like we always lived downwind from that family with all the kids…

The contents of your tub told a lot about your life, like where you shopped, what you ate, etc. If you drank a lot of liquor, people knew it, ‘cause on Wednesday night, your bottles were right there in your open tub for the world to see. Since the modern recyclable containers have lids, people don’t have to leave their empties out in the open. We think that this may not necessarily lead to a higher use of liquor, but, since the bottles are now hidden, this may lead to a higher consumption of cheap liquor…

Growing up, we used to let Alcoholics Anonymous use a room at our church for their meetings. Apparently everyone smoked at those meetings ‘cause smoke would roll out of that room. I always wondered if everyone drank heavily at Smokers’ Anonymous Meetings…  

Standing, Oh...

We attended a wonderful ballet recently. I really enjoyed it but I did not see any Ballet Parking (see post dated December 6, 2015. That’s where the understudy dancers park your car for you.) Regardless, it was a great performance, although, unlike the previous performance we had attended, there was no standing ovation. My first thought was, “Well, this must not have been quite as good of a performance as that one.” On second thought though, I had the following observation:  How often is a standing ovation just one or two guys trying to get out of the auditorium early to get their cars and beat the rush? So, yeah, they stand up during the curtain call, and their whole row has to stand up to let them out. You get one or two other guys doing this in different parts of the auditorium and next thing you know the whole crowd is on their feet. ‘Cause once you get some percentage of people on their feet, say 35%, everybody’s gotta stand.

Who’s gonna tell the performers?