Yellow Press

Remember the Yellow Pages? I guess they’re still around somewhere on the internet. But back in the day the Yellow Pages was this huge yellow book of business phone numbers and ads that got dropped off on your porch once a year. You never saw the delivery guy. It just showed up. Their advertising theme was, “Let your fingers do the walking in the Yellow Pages”. That was one catchy jingle. It insinuated that you would use the yellow pages instead of walking around town looking for stuff. This got me to thinking: Did people really walk around looking for places before there were the Yellow Pages? I suppose it’s possible, especially if you were on vacation in a new place.  “I’m hungry for Chinese food.” “OK, let’s start walking. Maybe we’ll find a place.”

At least you’d be hungry when you finally found the place.

Uncle Manners

I saw it again. I was at a nice restaurant, and a woman sneezed into her cloth napkin not once, but 4 times. I tried not to stare, and maybe I missed the first sneeze, but I unfortunately saw the last 3. That behavior is not acceptable. There was no attempt to use the elbow. So yeah, she got the memo about not sneezing into one’s hand, but she missed the one about the cloth napkin. C’mon. Somebody’s gotta pick up that napkin when they clear the table…

In situations like this it is perfectly acceptable to not say a “God bless you” or “Bless you” after the sneeze. No “Gesundheit”. How else are they going to get the idea not to do that?

By the way, “Gesundheit” is only German phrase I know. When I’m around Germans I always hope one of them sneezes so I can use it. I'm trying to find out if there's a separate German phrase to use after one sneezes into one's cloth napkin? 

Teachable Moment

 

We lost electricity for 3 hours one evening recently. We had dinner by candlelight and shuffled around in the dark with our flashlights. Some bi-products of an electrical outage

• We have no idea what we ate.
  
• I’m not even sure that was my wife.
• I changed into casual clothes during the outage. When the lights came back on none of my clothes matched.

Regarding the third point, this is, as President Obama used to like to tell us, a teachable moment. If you see someone out on the town and their clothes don’t match or don’t quite match, don’t automatically think that they’re a dolt. They might have suffered through an electrical outage.

A great commercial for generators would be to have a guy standing in front of the camera in unmatched clothes saying, “Do you suffer from electrical outages and have to get dressed in the dark?” 

Did I mention I took a marketing course in college?

New Words and Phrases for 2024

 Since it's now the fourth quarter, here are some new words and phrases for 2024:

• Two upped – When you get one-upped twice
• Seven Upped – When you drink too much soda
• Seven Up for Seven Brothers - A new musical I'm working on built around soft drink jingles
  
• Nagavate – Giving directions a bit too aggressively
• Halfie Birthday – Song sung on one’s half birthday (half of a cake is optional)
• Oh! K. – When you’re pleasantly surprised and OK with what’s being proposed.
• Zebrum – One Zebra
• Hank Sr Moment – A beyond senior moment. (Named after Hank Williams Sr.)
• Sighmultaneous – when two people sigh at the same time

Feel free to use these and let's get 'em out there!

Black and White Issue

 

We went to the zoo recently. It caused me to hearken back to when I was little and we didn’t have a color television.  You’d watch animal shows like Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom or a Saturday morning Tarzan movie in black and white and imagine what the animals looked like in color. Orange lions. Green frogs. Pink panthers. Eventually we all got color TV’s. What a disappointment when we saw the zebras; they were still black and white.

So yeah, it’s my theory that the zebra was far more popular with animal lovers prior to the advent of color TV’s. People have lost interest in them. Disney’s never made a movie about a zebra. And that song about a horse in striped pajamas? Nope. You never hear it anymore. There’s no zebra book. And sometimes football referees are called zebras and nobody likes those guys.

I bet the zebras are the “throw ins” on zoo trades. “You want the panda? Okay, you can have him but you’re gonna have to take 4 zebras off my hands.”

Marco. Polo.

Remember Marco Polo? No, not the guy who discovered Asia, or whatever he did. (Didn’t he invent the shirt?) No, I’m talking about the game of Marco Polo, the game of tag played in the pool where one kid had to close his eyes and try to tag the other kids. Oh, it was a blast – not! I don’t know anyone who has good memories of Marco Polo. I mean, have you ever heard a conversation start up with the words, “Hey Bruce, remember that time we played Marco Polo in Roy’s pool?” No, you’ve not heard that. Having said all that, it was probably the best game named after an explorer…   

Amazingly, Marco Polo traveled to the continent of Asia without taking a ship. Wait. What? Oh yeah, that’s because there’s no body of water between Europe and Asia. Yet they’re separate continents somehow. Really? C’mon. It’s been long enough. It’s time to take down the barriers between east and west. We’ve been blind – like that kid in the pool. It’s time we open our eyes and realize that we’re not going to unite the east and west until we get rid of the 2 continent thing. Call it Eurasia. Asiope? I don’t care. Let’s do it.   

Date Madness

I got invited to an Oktoberfest Celebration next week. It sounds like fun, but it’s a bit confusing seeing as how next week is still September. Good luck explaining that to your spouse. “Of course I know it’s still September next week Marge, but they’re calling it an Oktoberfest.” What’s wrong with calling it Septemberfest?

Last winter I got invited to a March Madness basketball gathering in, you guessed it, February. (I would have called it February Madness.) Is no tradition sacred?

OK. Let’s just move all the holidays. We’ll move the Fourth of July to June but still call it the fourth of July. We’ll move June Teenth to May. We’ll move May Day to April 1^st but still call it May Day. And April Fool’s Day to March 1^st (but no one would really know if the day moved or if it was a trick). And on and on. People will say “Well, Easter moves around.” And, “The Canadians moved Thanksgiving.” That’s lame.

And then people will start just moving their birthdays around. Yeah. You know it’s coming...