Seams Like Old Pants

I’ve got a pair of pants with a bad leg. The hem is coming undone. Since I don’t sew, and my wife is very busy, I went to the dry cleaner today where they have a very friendly seamstress. She’s helped me with numerous clothing issues in the past. I like a full service dry cleaner. The guy who runs the place is great, other than being a smoker (see "Blowing Smoke" March 1, 2016), and can often be seen in the lobby offering fashion tips to some of his women customers. One time I went there with a tear in my britches and they fixed it on the spot. I just had to wait behind this kinda flimsy curtain, but they got ‘em fixed. So, today I went there to get the hem fixed. The seamstress asked what needed to be done to the pants. I said “A hem.” She looked at me funny and asked again what was needed to be done. “A hem”, I repeated. This went on for a bit, and I think she thought I was beset with allergies or had phlegm issues or something, but then she finally realized my pants needed a hem. She said that nobody had ever hit her with that routine before, and she used to be a seamstress in Sonoma California where some pretty clever people lived.

Who says all the cool stuff starts on the coasts?

Death and Taxis

I used to work with this woman whose husband was a taxidermist. He stuffed animals in his basement, and I don’t mean the kind that you win at the carnival. The phone number for the business was their house number. People would bring over dead deer, bears, elk, some pretty big carcasses (carci?), and carry them into the basement of their modest home. Well, this lady must have watched a lot of those Jurassic Park movies, ‘cause she would tell us about her nightmares of the animals coming to life and coming out of the basement.  It got to the point where she was afraid to go downstairs and do laundry. 

To make matters worse, inebriated people would call their house late on Friday and Saturday nights looking for a taxi. This woman wasn’t a real good communicator, so it apparently took her a while to convince the drunks that they were calling a taxidermist, not a taxi dispatcher. 

To make matters even worse, she would get calls at home in early April from people (not sure if they were drunk) who wanted their taxes done.

So this whole thing could make a cool movie I think. Maybe she and her husband like go crazy from all the phone calls and pick up one of the drunks and bring him back to the house to scare him with the animals. And they open the door to the basement and the animals ARE coming out of the basement. I’m not sure how the tax part fits in but maybe you have the story take place in early April.

Leeked Post

I was at a nice restaurant last week.  The first item on the menu was a salad. And the salad featured something called candied ramps. None of us at our table knew what a ramp was. So I, in an effort to constantly improve my food knowledge, asked the waitress what a ramp was. She politely explained to me that a ramp was an onion. (None of us ordered that item unfortunately, so I cannot comment as to the taste or presentation of the ramps.)

My not knowing this vegetable troubled me, because, as many of you readers know, I have a background in produce, plus my mother grew up on a farm. So I know a bit about vegetables. I looked up “ramp” in the dictionary. Sure enough, no sign of any onion. Well, my dictionary is 40 years old, so I thought this might be a new breed or something. So I did a search for “ramp” on google and, sure enough, some pictures of some small onions came up.

OK, I thought, new stuff gets invented. There are always new flower varieties being developed. And we have mini corn dogs now. And the peanut butter Snicker – that’s kinda new. But if I was inventing new vegetables, I don’t think I would name it “ramp”. I mean, that name is already taken, and it’s not a very pretty word anyway. It has an unpleasant vowel sound and it ends abruptly. It’s an ugly word, even if it’s candied.

  

I don’t really like the word “leek” either. What’s with these onion words?

Interview with Uncle Tommy

As we approach our one year anniversary here at Uncle Tommy, it’s a time for reflecting on what’s taken place and also for looking forward. We’ve received a number of questions from our readers that we’d like to try to answer:

Q: What’s been your biggest disappointment in the first year of your blog? 

UT: Not reaching the African readers. We have readers from all of the continents except Africa.  We may try some sort of leaflet drop/flyover, but it’s a large continent. You may see us take on a few more African themes over the next few months. Themes like water quality, diseases spread by flying insects and election fraud. Oh, wait, those are American problems...

  

Q: When you write, do you exaggerate a bit?

UT: I give the readers what I think they can handle. I give them what they need. So, often the story is under told. The blog is targeted for family viewing so we find ourselves leaving out some of the blood and guts stuff.

Q: What’s your biggest challenge?

UT: While we try to come up with ideas that are fresh, too often we find that our “fresh” idea is already used by someone else, i.e. the fitted sheet toga. Other ideas that we thought were ours were already taken by someone else. For instance, the combination yardstick / walking cane is already used. So is the telescope cane (if you’ve gotta carry a cane around, let’s give it multiple uses…). So we gotta think of something else we can do with a cane. On a positive note, we are still the dominant player in the knitting kneedles chopsticks market.

Q: Won’t you eventually run out of material?

UT: As long as the world keeps changing, I’ll have material. If the world stops changing, maybe I’ll do some reruns, but I’ll change maybe one word in it when I do the re-post, and you’ll have to find the difference. Kind of a “Where’s Uncle Tommy” sort of thing.

Q:  What can we look forward to in coming months?

UT:  Well, this is a political year and I may try to quote some of the politicians. I loved it when Reagan said he was going to campaign in all 13 states and when Bob Dole said he had but one wife to give to his country. And when the wall goes up between the US and New Mexico we’ll be there to cover the story.

Thanks for reading. Please continue to send us your questions.

“Holy Mackerel, When’d You Get Out?”

There are many words or combinations of words that one does not enjoy hearing.  Words you never want to hear. I was at our local Speedway the other day getting a coffee when I heard a guy say excitedly to another guy, “Hey, when’d you get out?”.  “Holy mackerel!”, I thought to myself. Am I in the midst of some former prisoners of some sort? Were they released or did they escape? Pardoned, maybe? And are they getting fired up on coffee? At least none of them were buying liquor, although one had a bottle of Sprite which can be sometimes mixed with liquor. I got my coffee using my Speedy Rewards Discount Card and got the heck out of there. I mean, I’m pretty tough and all, but not nearly as tough as I look.

Speaking of the expression “Holy Mackerel”, my writing doesn't leave me much time for hobbies, but one of my hobbies is phrase etymologies. I typically ignore most research on the origin of the meanings and rely on good old common sense. “Holy mackerel” undoubtedly originated with Jesus and the feeding of the 5000. C’mon. What else could it have been?

Tattoo You

My friend had this tiny growth removed from his arm. It left a mark which was a perfect red circle. To hide the mark, he is contemplating getting an “M”’ tattooed on either side of it. So, it would read “mom” from one side, and “wow” from the other. He’d be getting a nice two for one from the tattoo parlor and they maybe wouldn’t even know it. (Are there other words you can flip upside down like that and turn them into other words? “ON” and “NO” come to mind. Of course, who in the world would have “ON” tattooed on their arm? We need to come up with a name for these words that can be flipped upside down and become other words.  Flipnyms, perhaps?) This guy probably should have done this before Mother’s day to truly honor his mother.  How much of a gift is it though to tattoo something on yourself as a gift for someone you care about? Do you receive a thank you note for that? 

That got me thinking. How many people with tattoos are just getting the tattoos to disguise scars? I need to rethink my level of sensitivity to this people group.