Synonames

Do you ever meet people who have names that sound a lot like someone famous, and when you jokingly bring that to their attention, they don’t know what you’re talking about? I used to know this woman whose name was Sandra Gay something. I don’t remember her last name but that’s not important to this story. I of course called her Sandra Gay O’Connor once, after our famous former Supreme Court Justice, Sandra Day O’Connor. Well, you’d have thought that I was from another planet. She had no idea what I was talking about. No one had ever linked Sandra Gay with Sandra Day for her before. Are you kidding me? How can you go through your life with the name Sandra Gay and not once have someone call you Sandra Day? And Sandra Day O’Connor was a Supreme Court Justice for a long time, man.  And she was the first female justice, I think. Pretty, pretty famous person.

I know, I know. I shouldn’t judge people. That’s why we have people like Sandra Gay, I mean, Sandra Day O’Connor.

Alcoholics Unanonymous

Remember the early days of recycling when you had to put your stuff in those red tubs with no lids?  You’d smash the two liter bottles and the milk cartons into it along with your glass and take it to the curb and then hope the wind wouldn’t blow ‘cause if it blew you’d be chasing plastic containers throughout the neighborhood like some adult Easter egg hunt. I always hated having to pick up someone else’s milk cartons in my yard. And it seemed like we always lived downwind from that family with all the kids…

The contents of your tub told a lot about your life, like where you shopped, what you ate, etc. If you drank a lot of liquor, people knew it, ‘cause on Wednesday night, your bottles were right there in your open tub for the world to see. Since the modern recyclable containers have lids, people don’t have to leave their empties out in the open. We think that this may not necessarily lead to a higher use of liquor, but, since the bottles are now hidden, this may lead to a higher consumption of cheap liquor…

Growing up, we used to let Alcoholics Anonymous use a room at our church for their meetings. Apparently everyone smoked at those meetings ‘cause smoke would roll out of that room. I always wondered if everyone drank heavily at Smokers’ Anonymous Meetings…  

Standing, Oh...

We attended a wonderful ballet recently. I really enjoyed it but I did not see any Ballet Parking (see post dated December 6, 2015. That’s where the understudy dancers park your car for you.) Regardless, it was a great performance, although, unlike the previous performance we had attended, there was no standing ovation. My first thought was, “Well, this must not have been quite as good of a performance as that one.” On second thought though, I had the following observation:  How often is a standing ovation just one or two guys trying to get out of the auditorium early to get their cars and beat the rush? So, yeah, they stand up during the curtain call, and their whole row has to stand up to let them out. You get one or two other guys doing this in different parts of the auditorium and next thing you know the whole crowd is on their feet. ‘Cause once you get some percentage of people on their feet, say 35%, everybody’s gotta stand.

Who’s gonna tell the performers?

Fifteen Seconds of Fame

I was listening to a baseball game on the radio today when a fan ran onto the field. The announcers always downplay that type of thing because they don’t want to encourage it, but c’mon, it can be entertaining seeing someone get arrested, especially if the game is not close. Everybody likes a good chase scene where the bad guy gets what's coming to him. That got me to thinking: Does the guy running onto the field think he’s not going to get caught? It’s a walled stadium, right? Where’s he gonna go? How does he hope to escape? He’s got about as much chance of getting out as my childhood overweight hamster had of escaping his metal cage. His only chance of not getting caught is to have a couple hundred others join him on the field and that never happens. Secondly, the guy always runs on the field during a stoppage in play. C’mon! If you’re gonna run out on the field and get arrested and all, at least try to make a play. Run out there and catch a pop-up or something.  

There’s gotta be that one case though, when the guy ran out on the field, and a scout saw how fast he was, and the guy ended up getting a tryout. I bet that's happened and they’re not telling us.

Duck Duck, Couscous

What’s with these names with repeating identical syllables? Are we to take these folks seriously?

•          Bishop Tutu – A name I would love to get in Charades
•          Honey BooBoo  – I never took her seriously
•          Boutros Boutros-Ghali – Was once introduced as Boutros Boutros Boutros-Ghali
•          BooBoo Bear – Totally overshadowed by Yogi
•          JohnJohn Kennedy –JohnJohn dropped the second (or was it the first?) John as he got older. This can also be done with the name Joe, but do NOT do this duplication thing if your son’s name is Barry.

This brings us to couscous. This is a North African dish that has found its way to North America. Now, before my Moroccan and Egyptian readers write to us, I want to assure you that I find couscous to be delicious. But, can we drop the second “cous” already? I mean, is there some meaning in the second “cous” that is not conveyed in the first?  

Hospital John

I used to work for this guy named John who could be very funny at times. One day John visited our mutual friend in the hospital. The friend was a former boxer and he looked it. Picture De Niro as Raging Bull. John found the guy’s room. There was no one in the room but he noticed that the bathroom door was closed so he figured the patient was in there. As he was waiting for the patient to come out of the bathroom, dinner was served. The nurse placed it on that adjustable table thing that pulls over the bed. Well, John saw the opportunity and jumped at it. He climbed into the guy’s bed and pretended to be eating the dinner to surprise the patient when he came out of the bathroom. Well, the patient was surprised all right. He had no idea who John was. Sure enough, John was in the wrong room. 

The good news here was that this patient did not resemble De Niro in Raging Bull (or Sitting Bull for that matter). There was no fight. And he did not have a heart attack. And John did not have a heart attack. John put his clothes back on and quietly left the room.

OK, OK. I made the clothes part up. But the rest is true.