Wild Pitch

We have friends who still get the newspaper delivered to their house every day. The guy who delivers it throws it to their front step from the sidewalk and about once a month he misses the front step and fires it into their hedge. He never retrieves it from the hedge. And our friends who live there don’t retrieve it.  It just sits there in the hedge, maybe for weeks. The delivery guy is old, so his aim is probably never going to get better. And it’s not like he’s throwing it from his bike. He’s walking.     

I blame the publisher. When they hire these guys, do they assess their athletic ability? Questions like, do they play horse shoes, Jarts or cornball? Were they ever a pitcher? If yes, could they throw strikes? Was their best pitch a fastball, or did they rely on curves and sliders? Does they need a full windup or can they pitch from the stretch?

If they had a military background, did they throw grenades?  

Happy Easter! 

Peeps for Pups

One of our readers recently found Peeps dog food of some sort in the liquidation aisle at one of the big box stores and was kind enough to tell us about it. I have no problem with dogs enjoying peeps (better them than me). The main problem I had was that the Peeps were in the liquidation aisle BEFORE Easter. Nobody discounts candy before Easter. So this meant that:

•                They were leftover from last year, or
•          The store didn’t know when Easter is this year. (Easter does move around a lot.)

I wonder how much different these Peeps are from the human Peeps. I wish some brave person would try one and let us know. My guess is that they are about the same and that Peeps Inc is tired of slow sales in the human market and is test marketing their product on dogs.

I bet that’s how a lot of dog food gets started.  

The Plots Thicken

Is a couple that buys adjoining cemetery plots more likely to stick together until death? I don’t know that answer but I bet the answer is “Yes!” I would assume that, yes, people who lay out the money for these plots, these people who know they will someday be laid side by side, have a better than average chance of staying together. If I was a marketing director for a cemetery, I would really push the “buying plots together can strengthen your marriage” angle. It doesn’t take someone who took a marketing course in college to see this...

This subject reminds me of the song “Love Will Keep Us Togther” by the musical duo Captain and Tennille. Their marriage lasted 39 years. Wikipedia doesn’t say if they had adjoining cemetery plots or not…

The Plot Thickens

As we get older, we need to think about funeral arrangements for ourselves. Purchasing cemetery plots is a nice couples activity. You and your spouse shop around, find what you like, pick it out, buy it, and it’s yours. Maybe there are arguments as to who gets the left plot and who gets the right one, but I’m guessing people just go with which side of the bed they sleep on, right? Or maybe the couple  selects the right or left plot based on which side of the car they sat in. (“Well, Herb always drove. Always.”)  

The separate plots remind me of the twin beds on the old Dick Van Dyke show. It would have been really funny if Dick and Mary Tyler Moore would have switched beds from episode to episode (“Hey, last week she was in the bed on the left”) but I don’t think that happened…

Mario

Tuesday was Mario day (MAR10, get it?). This was a new one to me. It’s a Nintendo-endorsed holiday featuring sales on Nintendo games and stuff. But why should Nintendo “own” this day? What about all the restaurants named Mario around our communities? Shouldn’t they be allowed to participate? We had a carryout-only pizza place near our house growing up called Mario’s.  There were only two women who ever worked there (it was small). We thought they were sisters and maybe they lived upstairs above the restaurant. They probably didn’t need a furnace what with that pizza oven running well into the night. And they got to eat all the pizzas that people never picked up. Pretty sweet gig…

Every day was Mario Day for them I bet. I was often tempted to order a pizza and not pick it up so they’d have more to eat but I never did it.  

Big Ride

I saw a headline today that read: “Governor Wants Tighter Seat Belt Law”.  Really? Those self-tightening seat belts are tight enough now, I thought. They’re tight enough that, when I go through a fast food drive through and order a double cheeseburger, large fry and a 56 oz Mr. Pibb, I can’t take my wallet out of my hip pocket without unlatching my seat belt. (Is that even legal?) Then you eat the burger, fries and guzzle the Pibb and that belt gets even tighter!

I gave a business associate a ride to BW3 once. I didn’t know him that well. My car started beeping – I told him his seat belt needed to be on. He replied, “I know” and proceeded to do nothing. He knew he was too big for the seat belt. I gotta tell you, that was one awkward ride. What does one do in that situation?

•                Turn up the radio?
•          Talk about the weather?
•          Turn back?
•          Ask him to move to the back seat?
•          Take off your seat belt to sympathize?

I think I said something like, “So, like hey, what’re you gonna order at BW3?” Yeah.

Photo Op

Sorry I haven’t updated in a while. We’ve been on a moderately needed vacation. Plus we lost an hour this morning. But yeah, nobody ever talks about a “not needed vacation”, or” kinda needed” vacation, do they? It’s always “much needed”.  Regardless, it was a great vacation; I’m rested and ready to go. As my high school history teacher used to say, “Let’s have at it!”

While on vacation, five of us ate at a restaurant, and we emptied the napkin dispenser that was on our table. We told our waitress about it. She checked the dispenser (?) and agreed that we were out, and proceeded to not fill the dispenser or give us more napkins, or give us our check for that matter. We don’t know what we did, if anything, to offend her. We eventually got the check from another employee.

It’s not like we asked her to take a picture of us and then later asked another employee to take another picture of us.  No. You don’t want to do that. But you’ll want to limit the number of pictures to 3, maybe 4. She’s got work to do. Somebody probably needs napkins.  

Stupid Pet Trick

Have you ever taken your dog to the vet to get spayed and instead the dog gets sprayed for fleas (they do that, right?)? I mean, this type of thing has to happen, right? Maybe not all the time, but I bet it happens. That’s why human doctors (well, vets are human too but you know what I mean), before doing a procedure, asks the patient what they’re having done today. The vet can’t do that with dogs. Sure, they can ask the dog in their dog voice what they’re having done today, but the dog can’t answer. No.

When you get the vet's bill, you can’t believe how low it is. And the dog recovers really fast. And you give the vet a really good online review.   

So yeah, there’s a lesson here: If your vet gets really good online reviews, make sure you ask about this little trick.

Some Bunny to Blame

I missed the Super Bowl halftime show this year. I had suggested that Taylor Swift marry Travis Kelce this year during halftime but that did not happen. No idea why. An explanation would be nice. So someone named Bad Bunny performed. Like I said, I didn’t see the show. But a lot of people saw it and the people I was with tonight definitely did not enjoy it.

The fact that people are still trashing this Bunny guy a month after the Super Bowl is concerning, especially considering we’ve been bombarded with the Olympics the past two weeks and then witnessed the huge US win in hockey yesterday. The concern now is what affect this Bunny will have on Easter candy sales. This may not be a good time to be buying Peeps Inc stock.

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.