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?

TNT

More American history: We saw some great fireworks over the weekend. But no fireworks can compare to what took place in New York City over the weekend: Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift tied the knot. What a way to begin the next 50 years of American history. The couple will get to celebrate their 50th anniversary at America’s 300^th anniversary. I look forward to that. Apparently all kinds of celebrities attended the wedding. Adam Sandler officiated at the ceremony. (Adam Sandler?) Was the pope not available? C’mon, we’re talking Taylor Swift here…

My only regret was that her mother Loretta Swift (from M*A*S*H) passed away last year and was unable to attend.  

Axe to Grind

More US history: Some guy in the 1800’s wrote that our founding father George Washington chopped down a cherry tree when he was young. The legend has grown to the point that a good percentage of Americans believe it.  We don’t know how old George was (10?, 17?) and we don’t know the size of the tree. We don’t know if it was their only tree or if they had an orchard. We only know that George owned up to chopping down the tree. He could not tell a lie. OK, but apparently he couldn’t be trusted around cherry trees. When asked about the new stump in his yard, George’s father probably said, “Oh George did that. But he told us about it. We’re proud of him.”

Chopping down a cherry tree is kinda wimpy. This writer needed to enhance his story and make the tree a council oak or a redwood. C'mon, this is George Washington we're talking about here...

Lastly, isn't it crazy that America's best apples come from the state of, you guessed it, Washington? Oops, looks like I'm mixing apples and cherries. 

Happy 250th, America! 

 

Fun Time

More US History: We used to have a roller skating rink in town called Fun Spot. And guess what? I always had fun there. Always. Fun is a word that shows up a lot in advertising. I had a Fun Size package of M&M’s last week. It had 11 M&M’s in it. I thought that was an unusual number, so I opened another package. That package had 10 M’s (Do I really need to add the “&M”’s in this context?) in it. Regardless, I don’t consider 10 or 11 M’s “fun”, do you? You may not even get all the colors. And some say all the colors taste the same, but I’m not so sure. Shouldn’t “fun size” be the larger size?

Should we describe clothes sizes the same way? Petite = fun size. Should Big and Tall be “More Fun”?

The Dawn of American History

I know I promised to write about aspects of US history leading up to the 250^th anniversary of the United States next month. I'm trying. (See below.) I was in a record store over the weekend and the owner was playing a Tony Orlando and Dawn LP on a shabby little record player. I asked him pleasantly, “Hey, what’s up with the Tony Orlando record?” He said that his good stuff sells OK so he tries to promote his stuff that doesn’t sell. (Dude probably took a marketing course in college, I bet.) I did not question his strategy – hey, it’s a free country (for 250 years!). But I didn’t buy any Tony. Or Dawn.

Interestingly enough, (and here’s some interesting US history), Dawn was not a person. No. Dawn was a group, a pair of women, neither of whom was named Dawn. I couldn’t find any info on the choice of the name, like if they often woke up before sunrise, or whatever…

It dawned on me as I was writing this that there must be hundreds of guys in Orlando named Tony who go by Tony Orlando. I bet at least one of them is married to a woman named Dawn. I’m pretty busy running this blog but if somebody could look into that, that’d be great.

Getting Past the Gatekeeper

I called a business yesterday. When I asked to be connected to a certain individual, the receptionist responded with the line, “Will she know why you’re calling?” Yeah. When a receptionist asks this, it’s your job to take control of the conversation. You at this point need to flip the conversation to make it appear she is questioning her boss. I responded, “I don’t know if she’ll know why I’m calling. I don’t know her capacity for remembering stuff. I really don’t know her that well. Do you think she remembers things particularly well? You know her better than I do.”

This seemed to work. There were no more questions. She put me through to the person’s office. Bingo. This typically works. Try it!

1000th Post

We’d like to take the occasion of the 1000^th post here at UT to take a look back at the 250 year history of our country. We will continue looking at aspects of US history leading up the July 4^th celebration. Today we’re taking a look at the “George Washington slept here” signs you see in the northeast US. Some of these signs need some clarification:

• Was it just him? Didn’t Martha travel with him sometimes?
• How many nights did he stay there? Put that on the sign.
• Did he leave a review?
• Did he get the AAA discount?
• Do they sneak the name “Carver” in small letters after “Washington” on the sign?
• How do you define the word “slept”. Can they put the sign up if it was just a nap?

You’ll be walking on peanut shells awaiting these and other answers.

Overjoyed

Have you ever thought about the word “overjoyed”? Typically, that prefix “over” indicates too much of something. “He overate.” “She overcooked the pot roast.” “He overate the overcooked pot roast.” This word overjoyed reminds me of my friend in sixth grade who spent too much time in the sun at the beach and got sick. He overdid it. He enjoyed himself too much and thus overjoyed. (Yeah, this was the same guy whose mom gave him the Conway Twitty 8-Track tape. We may have over-listened to some of those songs. We overplayed that tape.)

So yeah, be careful with the word “overjoyed”. If someone tells you they’re overjoyed to see you, you’d be best to tilt your head slightly and ask them, “Have you ever taken a hard look at that word?”

A second, less used meaning for overjoyed, is when you're doing dishes and you use too much dish soap  and the bubbles are more than 12 inches above the water. If you're more than like 11 and you find yourself doing this it may be time to take a turn drying.  

300 Feet

Have you seen the 300 feet “no fireworks” signs? They’re in front of all major retailers around here lately. I saw the signs today at Kroger and Lowe’s. They state that you cannot set off fireworks within 300 feet of the door of the store. I’m not sure I understand the concept ‘cause most of these stores don’t even sell fireworks. Have parking lots become a popular spot to shoot off fireworks? What am I missing? Why not just ban the use of fireworks on their property? Can we at least change it to 250 feet as we celebrate that anniversary this year? Is that asking too much?

I bought some lighter fluid at Kroger yesterday. There’s no 300 foot rule on lighter fluid. Apparently I can grill in their parking lot. But I got carded. 

Do they really look at the ID if you look old? I think it’s a fake look at the ID if you look over 30. But maybe they make a game out of it and try to guess your age and then, if they’re really good at it over time, I bet they apply for a job at the age guessing booth at the carnival. Yeah.