Burn Unit

I attended a luncheon yesterday where the guest speaker spoke about “avoiding burnout”. She suggested actions like eating properly, getting enough sleep, and not requiring people in other time zones to return your emails at non-business hours. She recommended that we try not to be jealous of our pets. Yeah, you read that right. Apparently some people are jealous that their pets don’t have to work and that causes people to get burned out. I’d be more worried about some pets getting burned out. Jack Russell terriers and hamsters on the wheel come to mind. I think that worrying about my pet burning out could lead me to burn out. But I was not asked to speak...

A fresher approach would be the topic of “avoiding burnouts”.  “Just say no” to drug users. Something like that. Maybe I'll be asked to speak on that topic. Yeah.

Wilt

Basketball legend Wilt Chamberlain claims he drove from New York to Los Angeles, a trip of 2964 miles, in 36 hours and 10 minutes. That would require an average driving speed of about 82 mph assuming no stops. Well obviously there were stops for fuel, etc. If we adjust for, say, one hour of stops, that takes the average speed up to 85 mph. So yeah, not undo-able. Of course, driving west he got to turn his clock back three times for time changes, but I don’t think he was including those extra 3 hours in his time. (Readers, do not attempt to change your car clocks when you’re driving, especially when you’re driving 85 mph!) I tend to believe Wilt based on the exactness of his numbers.

Charles Lindbergh took 33.5 hours to cover 3610 miles on his transatlantic flight. But he didn’t have to make any stops, pay any tolls or deal with traffic, and he had a tailwind. Lindbergh had it easy.

Lindbergh’s plane is on display in the Smithsonian. Can we get Wilt’s car in there please?  

On Thin Ice

Anybody watching the Winter Olympics yet? I haven’t turned it on yet. But I heard that one of our male figure skaters is a soldier in the US Army. Yeah. That’s your tax money at work, folks. You’re sending the government your hard earned income and they’re paying some guy to skate around to ABBA songs or something.. At first thought, that doesn’t seem right, does it?

Well, sometimes it doesn’t take a genius to figure this stuff out and I think this is one of those times. I think this is the United States Army showing Greenland and Denmark and others that, hey, we can come to Greenland and yeah, we got skaters and we can handle the ice and snow and so you’d better cooperate.

No pressure to win the gold, pal. No pressure at all.

Signs of the Times

We have traveled quite a bit already this year. Some states are filled with billboards advertising cannabis. I pretty much keep my eyes on the road, but yeah, I glance at the signs. The people who sell space on these billboards have the easiest jobs in the world, ‘cause these signs are everywhere. I’ve seen so many of these that I expect every billboard to be an ad for cannabis.

Yesterday I was driving and saw a sign for a cabinet company. The letters on the sign read “CABINETS”. I of course thought it was an ad for cannabis and gave it only a brief glance before realizing it was an ad for cabinets.  You don’t have to have taken a Marketing course in college to realize that the cabinet company is not getting full value out of that billboard. People think it’s cannabis.

This, no doubt, is why you don’t see many billboards advertising marinara.

Afrin

I came home from vacation with a head cold. Sneezin’, weezin’, tearin’ up, that kind of cold. Fortunately we have Afrin. The nasal spray. It has nothing to do with Africa; they might have it there, but it doesn’t come from there. So it’s not affected by the tariffs.

As a reminder, don’t have just one Afrin in the house. As Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell used to sing, “It Takes Two”. Keep one bottle in your left pocket for your left nostril and one in your right pocket for your right nostril. You don’t want to spread the cold from one nostril to the other. Think of this as the nostril firewall. 

We had a guy in high school who thought that the human body had two independent respiratory systems and that each nostril took in air solely for its side of the respiratory system. 

I’m gonna ask him at the reunion if he carries two Afrins.  

Reenactment Revisited

Why don’t we see war reenactments in cold weather? C’mon. It’s not like every battle took place in warm weather. Let’s step up guys…

Reenactors, rather than pretending to fight at a park, could fill some valuable roles in society. Let’s say someone is building a new Dollar Tree and they need a couple of old farm houses demolished. Rather than hiring a contractor to do that, why wouldn’t they bring in reenactors who could demolish the structures while reenacting a key battle? Obviously, modern warfare would be the preferred era for this type of project with the use of tanks and napalm providing the most efficient tools.

Reenacting could be so much more than what it is. For instance, why not have militia from different eras fighting each other? For instance, what if the Confederate army had been there to storm the Bay of Pigs? What if Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Rider had been Viet Cong? How would history have been changed? These reenactments could maybe supply some of these answers.

The best part of the demolition idea is the developers wouldn’t have to pay the reenactors. This is weekend recreation for the reenactors and they would likely pay the developers. While this would be a win-win for the developers, one of the militia groups would unfortunately lose the skirmish. One possible solution here would be to have participation ribbons for the losing militia…  

Eight Legs is Enough

It’s playoff time in the NFL. I heard some new phrases this year on broadcasts. One of these was the expression “Completing the Octopus”.  An announcer used this phrase after a receiver caught a touchdown pass and followed it up with catching another pass for the two point conversion. 6 points + 2 points = 8 points. 8 = octopus, I guess. I googled “completing the octopus”. It is nowhere to be found. It hasn’t caught on. I bet this announcer got a call from management on Monday telling him he can’t just make up phrases…

Let’s chalk this up as what President Obama would call a teachable moment. It’s pretty safe to say that a phrase shouldn’t be used (certainly not used on a national television broadcast) until it has appeared on an Uncle Tommy’s New Words and Phrases list. I’m sure President Obama would agree.  I can’t remember if “teachable moment” was ever on one of my lists, but I bet it was.  

Hallmark Moment

Today we’re going to cover greeting cards signings and in particular the cards that get circulated around your office or your church or wherever where everybody writes a short message and signs their name. These are typically get well, birthday or sympathy cards. Rule number one is make sure you know what kind of card it is. I’ve actually seen people write “many happy returns” on a sympathy card. You don’t want to be that guy…

The challenge on these cards is coming up with an original message to write in the card. If you’re the 17^th person to sign, and it’s a sympathy card, all the good phrases are already used. I agonized through that process on a card last week. Then, it occurred to me: I can use the same expression somebody else used because the recipient won’t know who wrote it first! Yeah. This eliminates the agony of trying to craft an original phrase.

One last piece of advice: I’d avoid the rhyming sympathy cards. That’s no time for a rhyme.

Text Books

Remember when you were in college (you older readers) and you would buy used textbooks at the book stores that sometimes contained highlighted passages?  A lazy student could focus mainly on the highlighted passages and avoid the non-highlighted parts. But there was huge risk to that practice. You didn’t know how good of a student the prior owner was; you did not know if they passed or even finished the course. The prior owner may have highlighted the wrong passages.

In hindsight, the book stores could have helped us out, and helped themselves out. They could have required the person trading in a textbook to show what grade they got in the course.  And the better their grade, the more $$ they’d get for their textbook. Then the book store could sell that copy at a premium. Students would be incentivized to get better grades, knowing they would eventually get more money for their textbooks. Everybody wins here: the former student gets more for their book, the book store gets a cut on the higher sale price of the book, and the buyer gets the benefits of the highlighting having been done by a top student.  

I know at least one of you readers is going to ask if my college Marketing textbook is for sale. Sorry. Sold it.  

Tenor Eleven

During the holidays, all the tenor groups were on tour, trying to get to every town before Christmas. They were all out there. The Three Tenors. The Texas Tenors. The Ten Tenors. The Celtic Tenors.

Did you know that The Canadian Tenors changed their name to just The Tenors? Pretty bold, huh, considering all the other tenor groups out there. Are these Canadians suddenly not proud of their heritage? Will we see other Canadian entities drop Canada from their names?

·         Canada Dry – “Bartender, Gimme a Rye and a Dry!”
·         Canadian Club – “Bartender, Club me!”
·         Canadian side of Niagara Falls – The American Falls and The Falls. Yeah.
·         Canada Goose – I’m sure Canada would love to disassociate itself from this hideous creature.   

I’m drawing the line at Canadian Thanksgiving. If they’re just gonna call it Thanksgiving, they gotta have it on the same day as us. No more of this second Monday in October stuff. No.  

 

Uncle Tommy Cruise

 In our travels over the holidays, we ran across the traveling Titanic exhibit where apparently you actually go on the ship in some manner. The comments on their advertising say “it feels like the real thing!” Really? Do I want to pay to go on a ship that sinks? Do I want to pay money to be reminded of death, of the massive drownings? Or is 100+ years enough time to get over our fears, our anguish, our misery over the sinking of The Titanic? I’m guessing that’s what the marketing research indicated…

When the Titanic movie came out, friends told us they were going to see it. I said something like, “Hey, you know it sinks at the end, right?” The woman thanked me for spoiling the ending for her. She didn’t know. I felt kinda bad, but not really, ‘cause people should know that stuff. I think I likely better prepared her for the sad ending.

Come to think of it, Hollywood never make a movie or show about a ship unless it sinks: The Titanic, Sink the Bismarck, The Minnow (Gilligan’s Island). Didn’t the Love Boat sink in final episode? Maybe it just sank in the Nielson ratings…

Playing in the Key of M

I had the pleasure of ordering food at a kiosk over vacation. . The first step at this kiosk was to enter your name. This is where the trouble started. The “m” did not work on the keyboard, so my name was shortened to “To”.  When my order was ready, the clerk yelled out “Tony!”  I, being a perceptive consumer, realized that could be my order, and, sure enough, it was. I tried to tell him that the “m” didn’t work but he interrupted me with a loud “Thanks To!”, loud enough for the whole restaurant to hear.

I assured the other diners that the “m” didn’t work in the kiosk, and that yes, I had always been a good speller, even before spell check. Thank goodness I hadn’t just won a spelling bee and had my picture in the paper. That could have been awkward.