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.