Greetings!

I saw 3 people over the weekend who I thought I knew. In each case, when I greeted them, they did not know who I was. Now these types of things happen, but three times in two days? You really start to question yourself. Questions like:

1. Am I not making any impression on people?
2. Is my appearance rapidly changing?
3. Is my appearance rapidly changing for the worse?
4. What kind of people am I hanging around with?

If this ever happens to you, here are a couple of tips:

1. Don’t give up on these people. Greet them again next time you run across them. Give them another chance.
2. Realize that people can and do have identical twins

If they don’t remember you on the next greeting, it would then be appropriate to ask them if they have an identical twin.

My wife tells me to quit saying I know people when they don’t know me. Good point. Know means know!

Gimme Animal Shelter

We bought a puppy from a shelter in ’02 when our kids were little. She was a great dog. She was labeled a “mixed” breed but she was part Petite Bassett Griffin Vendeen and part something else. Seeing as how Petite Bassett Griffin Vendeen was apparently already a combination of four breeds, I guess the shelter didn’t want to add a fifth word to her breed and simply labeled her “mixed”.   

I think that’s pretty inconsiderate.  If a breed can be four words, I don’t think a five word breed is out of the question. Then the dog can have the dignity of knowing that she is a member of a breed.

When we moved to a better neighborhood in ’08 the dog was uneasy to go because she thought the dogs in the new neighborhood were all pure breeds. She eventually adjusted but if the shelter had had the decency to call her mix a breed this stress could have been eliminated.  

When you get a dog license, can you invent the breed? Maybe that’s the answer. Has anyone tried that?

Fast Food for Thought

I had some lab work done recently and I had to fast for 12 hours prior to the appointment. For those appointments you walk into the waiting room and see all these sad, fasting/starving faces staring at you. There aren’t many smiles in that waiting room. After the appointment you can go next door to Bob Evans or Cracker Barrel and see a lot of the same people, only now they’re smiling. So yeah, ideally you want to do the Bob Evans piece of the process to enjoy the full experience...

When you go to Bob Evans you break the fast. That, of course, is where the term “breakfast” comes from. A lot of you knew that. What you (and I) don’t know is how the term “Fast food” fits in here. Is this food that you eat during the fast? If so, is it still a fast? Or is this food that you are tempted to eat during a fast? Like, maybe other people eat it and tempt you while you’re fasting? Or is it a minute portion of food that you’re allowed to eat during a fast? “Here’s some fast food to carry you over ‘til we get to Bob Evans.”

When the lab tech asks you if you’re fasting and you reply “Yes, except for some fast food” they’re probably going to give you what’s known as the “fast exit”.

 

A Fine Print Mess

 

We walked by a shop a while back that was conducting a retirement sale. Having recently retired (from my day job – not from UTST’s!), I strolled in. To my surprise there were young people and middle aged people in there. Wait. What? I thought this was a sale for retired people. There must have been fine print in the sign out front. Always read the fine print, I told myself. The problem is retired people can’t read the fine print.

My doctor used to have copies of large print Guideposts in the lobby. If large print Guideposts had fine print (which I don’t know why they would), would the fine print be the size of their regular print?

And hey! Why doesn’t my eye doctor have large print periodicals in his waiting room? That would make too much sense. You know that eye doctors monitor how you read when you’re in their waiting room, right? Like, how far you hold the magazine from your eyes, whether you read the magazine right-side up, that type of thing. It’s part of your exam and it’s all in your file. It’s in there. But it’s in fine print.

Senior Discount

 I bought some good barbecue takeout a while back. I was behind a local former news anchor. She had retired a couple of years ago.  She is pretty famous.

When it was time for me to pay they gave me a senior discount. This was a nice surprise and it saved me some money. For me, the pleasure derived from the money saved outweighed the disappointment of being labeled a senior. I mean, yeah, I am a senior, but I’ve kinda been hoping that it wasn’t that obvious….

After getting the discount, I kinda wanted to know if the famous anchor woman got the discount. I wanted to know if they made the same age assumption with her that they made with me. It’s only natural to be curious about that kind of stuff. So, like, is it proper for me to ask the cashier if she got the discount? If yes, is it proper for the cashier to give out that information?

Now I kinda want to go work there and see if this issue is addressed in the employee handbook.

The Big Whopper

 

I read recently where Burger King is doing really well due to its Whopper sales. Sturdier buns, new mayonnaise recipe and serving it in a box instead of just a wrapper have helped to spur sales. They are also now offering the “Whopper Guaranty”. They will “remake” your Whopper if you are not satisfied with yours. I’m curious as to how this guaranty works:

•                     How many bites into the Whopper can you be and still get the replacement one?
•          What’s the definition of “remake”? Can this be just them moving the tomato around? (“See, now it’s in the middle of the bun!”)
•          If you leave half a whopper in your car over the weekend, can you take it back and demand a new one on Monday?
•          If you’re driving on the expressway eating a whopper and you don’t like it, can you get a “remade” one at the BK at the next exit? Is the guaranty valid over state lines?

Remember the old “It takes two hands to handle a whopper” slogan? How many highway deaths did that cause? Maybe they’ll bring that slogan back once we all get them self-driving cars.

Tropical Storm Dolphin

Tropical Storm Dolphin made landfall (what’s up with that expression?) in China last Sunday, causing at least 760,000 people to have to relocate. 760,000! Granted, China has a huge population, but that’s a lot of people. Terrible.

While trying not to make light of a tragic situation, can we take a step back and take a look at the name of this tropical storm? If you just read the headlines (“Dolphin Destroys City!”), it sounds like a large dolphin made landfall (there’s that expression again) and wreaked havoc on a city and its people. It reminds me of one of those old Japanese movies where Godzilla destroys Tokyo or wherever.

Everybody’s got 20/20 hindsight, but in the future naming of tropical storms, meteorologists may want to stay away from names like Dolphin, Gator, Godzilla, Shark, Pickerel, and Smog Monster. I’m okay naming a storm Flipper.

Meaty Issue

Have you heard about the woman who was running for governor in Wisconsin? She wants to eliminate Thanksgiving, or at least she did until recently. Now she says she’s OK with Thanksgiving. Personally, I think it would be hard to reverse one's opinion on something like that. Possible reasons for her reversal:

•          She finally had some good turkey
•          She wanted the United States to be more like Canada but then she found out Canada has Thanksgiving too, just on a different date
•           One of her kids is in marching band and got to be in the Thanksgiving Day parade
•       She found out Thanksgiving has nothing to do with the country Turkey

I bet she also wanted to eliminate the ice cream vendor trucks that play “Turkey in the Straw”. Actually, that maybe could've gotten her elected.

Knives Out!

We went to a breakfast-lunch restaurant on vacation a while back. It was an independent place. The door to the kitchen was open; you could kind of watch the cooks prepare the meals. (Maybe there could be a new concept – instead of having the cook come to your table and prepare your meal on a hibachi or whatever, maybe they could let you eat in the kitchen and you watch the cooks there.) At any rate, at this place you could see right into this kitchen and, for a breakfast-lunch only place, they had some of the largest knives I’ve ever seen hanging on the wall. These were weapons. There was no wild game on the menu, just bacon, sausage, eggs. I think the lunch menu was mainly salads. The knives seemed like overkill.

With those knives out in the open, there was no way this place was ever going to get robbed. There are large knives, there are king sized knives. These were Stephen King sized knives!

The Bunker

A business associate of mine is going to the luxurious Greenbrier resort in West Virginia to play golf. Greenbrier offers skiing and golf as well as a huge underground bunker which was built in the 1950’s to house congress in the event of nuclear war. Numerous presidents stayed at the resort over the years. It was decommissioned as a US bunker in 1992 but the underground bunker still exists.

My associate and I discussed the history of the resort and the underground bunker. He knew the history. I asked him if he was at all concerned that his golf ball might somehow land in the underground bunker, ‘cause, like, there are bunkers in golf, right? I asked him if there would be like a 3 stroke penalty if his errant ball somehow landed in the underground bunker.

 He didn’t seem to get it.   Too bad, ‘cause he coulda been the talk of the resort with material like that.

Sometimes Y

 Today we’d like to take a look at women’s names that begin with the letter Y. These would include the names Yvette and Yvonne. Often these are pronounced with the “Ya” sound, as in “Yavette” and “Yavonne.  Now, you can pronounce your name however you want, but in the cases of Yvonne and Yvette, the Y is the sole letter in the first syllable of the name. Being the only letter, it has to be a vowel and thus would not have the “Yaw” sound. The Y would need to be followed by a vowel to have the “Ya” sound. By itself the Y would typically have an “eh” sound.

The people who say “Yavonne” or “Yavette” are asking too much of the Y here. They are asking the Y to be the vowel and the consonant.  That’s not allowed. Huh-uh. Certainly, Y is sometimes a vowel, but it’s never a consonant and a vowel in an individual word.

But hey, you can do whatever you want with a name. But what are we teaching our kids when we pronounce names like that? The only time pronouncing names like that is remotely OK is maybe if you’re from Ypsilanti.  

Goolagong Show

I ran across a hyphenated name recently where the name after the hyphen was the woman’s maiden name. That struck me as odd. Isn’t the maiden name always before the hyphen? Whatever…When Australian tennis star Evonne Goolagong got married in the 1970’s her name became Evonne Goolagong-Cawley. As a worldwide star in a sport that was extremely popular at the time, this kind of set the standard for the hyphen. Women around the world thought, “If Evonne Goolagong can keep the name “Goolagong”, I can certainly keep my maiden name”.

Baseball star Pete Crow-Armstrong has his name on the back of his jersey. In order to fit all the letters in, his name is arched like Mt McKinley-Denali. It starts down by his belt, goes up to his neck and then back down to his belt again. I’m thinking that Evonne Goolagong-Cawley is the reason tennis players don’t have their names on their backs.   

Dog Tales

I spoke to a friend last week who claims his dog was born in 1998. That would make the dog 28 years old, or 196 in dog years. I did an internet search for oldest dog and found a dog in the early 20^th century who lived close to 40 years. But really, can’t anybody make that claim? It’s not like there’s a dog census out there. With the difference between dog years and human years, it can get pretty confusing.

Hey, you can make your dog be any age you want. More power to ya. But, if you’re gonna say your dog is 40 years old, it sure better be able to do some tricks. Some serious tricks.

Wedding Dress(ing)

 

Readership has really picked up lately here at Uncle Tommy’s. We’ve tried to speculate as to the reason(s) for the increase. It could be any or some combination of the following:

•             Excitement associated with the World Cup
•   Excitement about Taylor Swift’s historic marriage

I suppose it’s possible that this blog, like the ranch dressing and free soda refills enjoyed by international soccer fans, has great appeal to the soccer fans AND to fans of Taylor Swift.

To attempt to make sense out of all this, I’m doing research for a post digging into whether or not there were free refills on ranch dressing at Taylor and Travis’s historic wedding.

Spice Girls

 

Looking for something to do after the exciting holiday? Maybe it’s time to take a look at your spice rack. The average American kitchen has 27 different spices in their spice cabinet. It’s hard to keep track of such a wide inventory of spices. And it’s even harder to keep track of their expiration dates. Many of these spices are rarely used – when’s the last time you actually used clove? Or Rosemary leaves (the only spice name sentence that I’m aware of)? One needs an excel spreadsheet to track these items and who has time for that?

So, should we be purging items from our spice cabinet? I say, no! Don’t do it! Does ginger really go bad? How about garlic powder?

In a worst case scenario, the expired spices can be used as a deodorant. I assume that’s how the brand “Old Spice” got its name. Running this blog and all, I don’t have time to research that but if somebody could look into it that’d be great.

(I’m guessing you might have to find a different use for that expired garlic powder…)   

The Audible Letter

More U.S. history: Why do some American’s put the “r” in Washington? “Warshington”, they say. Linguists say it’s a Midwestern accent thing.  They say the tongue slides through the r to get to the s. Apparently the tongue knows the alphabet…

What we have here is the opposite of the silent letter. This is a letter that’s not in the word, but it gets pronounced as opposed to the silent letter which is there but it’s not pronounced. This is not taught in our schools but maybe it should be. And we need to name this phenomenon. It’s been around long enough (250 years in the case of Warshington). Some possible names:

“Extrar” – Do we need to go any further?

“Englirsh” - This could be it

This could cause problems for Wheerl of Forturne. We're gonna have to work through that.

What Exactly Are We Celebrating?

 

Well yeah, there it was. I hope you enjoyed celebrating America’s 250^th birthday, ‘cause the 300^th won’t be celebrated nearly as much. Why, you ask? Because that date will be overshadowed by the celebration of Taylor Swift and Kelsey Grammer’s 50^th anniversary. People will say, “Oh yeah. I guess it is also the 300^th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence”.  Yeah. You watch…

Yeah. Do these celebrities think about these types of things? Like, the effect that’ll have on fireworks sales? And yeah, forget about their 50^th anniversary, what about even next year? Will the fourth of July ever be the same?

What’s my wife gonna do with these leftover red white and blue paper plates?