Blow Hard

So, I’m watching television, and something comes on that I just can’t get my head around. Of course, that’s nothing new these days, but I wasn’t watching the news.

What I saw looked like an absurdist parody of modern life. Again, remember please that I wasn’t watching the news.

Before me, in high definition, was an advertisement for a heating pad. What, you may ask, is so difficult to comprehend about a commercial for a heating pad? Good question. This particular heating pad is weighted in order to be more comfortable and to give the user the same sense of comfort and security that weighted blankets provide.

That’s the point at which the commercial got weird, or I hallucinated.

We see a woman lying on a bed with this new heating pad laying across her torso. Into the room comes a man wearing a lab coat, and holding a leaf blower. He points the leaf blower at the woman, and yet, the heating pad doesn’t blow off.

We then see a flashback scene with a non-weighted heating pad. Again, the leaf blower guy enters, points the blower at the person, and, wouldn’t you know it: the non-weighted heating pad blows off.

A few things: First, I can’t remember the last time somebody pointed a leaf blower at me in my house. Second, were so many people having their heating pads blown off by leaf blowers that American industry got busy and designed the new heavy heating pad?

I’m not currently in the market for a heating pad, but the next time I am I may well purchase the heavy one shown in the commercial. It won’t be because I fear a leaf blower attack or a rogue wind tunnel breaking into my house. Actually, I think a heavier heating pad might feel nice.

Meanwhile, I won’t be able to use my leaf blower without thinking about heating pads. God only knows what kind of mayhem my string trimmer could unleash on my hair dryer!

Supply and Demand and Supply

In the Midwest it is expected that an upcoming blizzard will result in grocery stores running low on bread and milk. Not running out. Running low. We know that the worst storm isn’t likely to keep us home-bound for more than a couple of days, so we stock up for that amount of time.

None of us has experience with pandemics, so our response as a society was, and continues to be improvised. As a result, before the cleaning supplies disappeared or any food was in short supply, the one item that disappeared was… wait for it… toilet paper.   Not only toilet paper, but other paper products that could conceivably work as toilet paper. I’m sure plumbers have been busy dealing with paper towel clogs.

Obviously, this viral pandemic is nothing to make light of as some suffer and others pass away as a result of it. It is interesting, though, to see how the great majority of us who are left to our own devices in our homes react to the challenge.

Now, I understand that running out of toilet paper would be a bad thing. Really, I do. But, how little toilet paper did people have in their homes when this began, and how long did they think it would have to last? As I see it, people poop at about the same rate all the time. With the exception of an intestinal bug, pandemics don’t cause people to poop more. Granted, a lot of people can only poop at home now, so I guess a slight increase in home supply was needed.

I feel for the people in the paper goods industry. In the long run, the amount of toilet paper used per person per day won’t have changed. So, this spike in usage will be mirrored by a drop in demand later on. They’ll make the same amount of money overall after working their butts off trying to keep up with the pandemic demand.

Meanwhile, supplies of milk are so large that farmers are dumping some of it. Do people not drink milk at home? I know schools go through a lot of milk, but don’t those children still exist?

It will be interesting to see how this all turns out. We’re all hoping that the virus goes away, though it might take a while. When it does, it’s uncertain when people will be able to go back to work. In the mean time we’re being given thousands of our dollars back, and who knows if we’ll buy milk or toilet paper or lottery tickets with that money.

I, for one, remain hopeful that someday there will again come a time when toilet paper is available, people are again drinking milk, and we can all poop without fear.

 

Story Time

Since being retired from my weekly newspaper column, I find that I continue to note things around me or in the news as good potential column fodder. Or mudder. But, without that weekly deadline those ideas have been relegated to the “one of these days” pile.

As it turns out, writing those columns each week also provided me with some self-therapy, as I worked through thoughts and ideas. Plus, when I do dumb things or when weird things happen to me, it’s so much more satisfying to share those stories.

So, here are a few things that have happened since I last posted.

A while back I went out to work in the garden, and as I often do, I took my phone out of my pocket and put it on the back of the car. Don’t get ahead of me. As you were just imagining, I forgot it was there and took some sort of trip to town. Upon returning home, I wondered where my phone was. Lo and behold, there it was, still on the back of the car. Thanks to good fortune and a somewhat grippy phone cover, it didn’t fall off. Disaster averted!

Fast forward a few weeks. I’m off to do some errands, but first I need to run up to my office. I put the phone on the roof of the car, right above my door so I’ll be sure to see it. Once ahead, you have jumped ahead of me, but this time your prediction is correct.

After returning home I looked everywhere for my phone and couldn’t find it. I didn’t remember having put it on the car roof, but it became evident that that’s just what I had done. I checked the roadside just off our driveway and I drove slowly, re-tracing my route, but to no avail.

Being a pre-pre-pre millennial, I went on-line and found that Verizon had a service wherein if your phone was looked into Google Mail when it was lost, Google would find it for you! Oh happy day!

My on-line search told me that my phone was on the shoulder of Interstate 39/90 about four miles from our house. It seemed obvious to me that someone had picked it up and, finding that the phone had a password, tossed it out the window. I mused to myself about how I would have tried to return the phone, but, well, society these days…

We looked for it along the roadside, as cars sped by at 70+ miles per hour. A fellow with a wrecker truck stopped to see if our car was disabled, and when I told him what had happened he helped us look for a while. Hmmm. Maybe society isn’t so far gone after all…

Well, we didn’t find it. So I went back on line and discovered that I had been paying a monthly phone insurance fee and, sparing you the details, THAT EVENING I had a replacement phone. That was a good thing, because our land-line phone had once again become unusable. That repair person was expected the next day, but at least we weren’t cut off from the world until then.

Let’s fast-forward again. We’re watching some football game Sunday afternoon when the land-line rings. It’s a neighbor from a mile away. She walks miles every day, and I always wave at her (while silently cursing her for making me feel like such a slug). She found a phone. She had tried to call the “if found please call…” number the previous several days, but all she got was static. But, she tried one last time and got through.

We drove over and picked it up, thanking her profusely. My belief in the deterioration of society was again shaken. She had found it the day I lost it while walking past our house. Basically, she had already picked it up before I knew it was missing.

What have we learned from this story? First, we’ve learned that Google’s phone finder service, at least in this case, was completely wrong. Second, we’ve learned never, never, never to put our phone on the car. Never! And, we’ve learned that the selfish jerk-face that took my phone and threw it out his car window didn’t exist, but that two nice, helpful people do.

The other story I have for you is less interesting. On my way to some business meetings in California I found myself in Chattanooga (and yes, I did sing the song to myself) as Atlanta was being stormed upon. As expected, once the Atlanta airport opened up again the plane I was supposed to have transferred to took off. Three hours later we arrived in Atlanta, just missing the flight I had switched to, which would have taken me back to Wisconsin.

So, after a few hours of sleep I went back to the airport and returned to Milwaukee, sans checked suitcase. It arrived the next day.

There were a lot of upset people on our plane in Chattanooga that night, but it was one of those things. Nobody was a fault. I was a little peeved with the loud people behind me who coughed repeatedly and with such force that I was expecting to feel a piece of lung hit the back of my neck, but that didn’t happen. I’m sure I caught something, though.

Other than wasting a day, there was no permanent damage done. I was able to cancel my meetings and hotel reservation in Los Angeles, and I’m sure the next time things will work out fine. If it isn’t safe to fly, it’s best not to fly. And, if the ground crews at an airport are at risk of being hit by lightning, it’s not worth the risk to have them out there working.

So, that’s my self-therapy for now. I hope you have avoided life’s speed bumps, and – I can’t stress this enough: don’t put your phone on the roof of your car.

Real Life

There’s an old phrase: “Life imitates art.”  It can be interpreted various ways, but it is odd how sometimes things happen that seem unreal and fictional – or even fanciful.

I remember a Memorial Day weekend when we lived in Duluth.  We were planting our little garden when I noticed it was snowing.  I realized I was planting snow peas at the time.  Not an earthshaking coincidence, but still…

More recently, and far less happily, it was reported that an angry camel bit off a man’s head.  So for all those times when somebody who was being criticized said, “Don’t bite my head off,” we now know if can happen.

Back when we used to cut and bale our own hay, the expression “make hay while the sun shines” took on a literal meaning as storm clouds rolled in when we had another load to finish.  Making hay has other meetings, as does hitting the hay, or a roll in the hay.  None are enhanced by rain, though.

The expression “nothing is sure except for death and taxes” took on new meaning at the VFW fish fry in Stoughton last weekend when we noticed that the placemat had a mortuary and a tax preparation service listed.  For some reason that reminds me of the Archie’s Monuments location that used to be on Highway 26 north of Watertown which also featured miniature golf.  A very interesting combination business.  Watch out for the last hole!

Another tragic example of late: the man who attempted suicide by stripping naked and breaking in to the lions’ area at a zoo.  Throwing someone to the lions is supposed to be a metaphor.  It’s hard to imagine even the most jaded movie script including suicide by lion.

Life has imitated science fiction for many years, from rocket travel to artificial intelligence.  In fact George Orwell’s “1984” and Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” were, I guess, social-science fiction books that speak to thought control (Facebook?) and constant monitoring by the government (cameras everywhere in cities, cell phones being monitored…) 

Life imitates art in good ways too, of course.  It doesn’t often make the news, however. 

I don’t want to make too big a deal out of all this.  Rumor has it that there is a mole hill somewhere that might be made into a mountain, if we’re not careful.

               

History of Humor

One of the many ubiquitous GEICO insurance ads involves a couple on a date. When the woman says everybody knows about GEICO, the man says, “But, did you know that there IS an oldest trick in the book?”

At that point, we switch to a castle scene where a young apprentice is learning from an old teacher, who looks in his book and says: “Trick number one: Lookest over there!” The boy looks, and sees nothing. Then the old teacher says, “Ha-ha! Madest thou look! So endeth the trick.”

That got me thinking about humor through the ages, going back to early humans. So much of humor is based on the nervousness we feel when someone violates certain taboos about sex, and such, that I wondered what would be funny in a society with no taboos? I mean, if you’re already running around naked and using the woods as a bathroom, what would be funny?

“America’s Funniest Videos” may have the answer. Their formula is videos of people doing stupid things that make them crash, fall down, be terrified, or fall into the water – or a wedding cake.

Early humans may have found it funny when Zor tripped over a tree root. Or maybe it was funny when Grog threw his spear at an elk, but accidentally hit Thon in the leg.

Laughing is such a natural thing to us. Even young babies chuckle. I wonder, though, who was the first person to laugh, and what did they laugh at, and what did the other humans think about it?

Let’s say Frop and Clon are walking along, and Frop runs into a tree. Somewhere in his body, Clon feels the urge to laugh, and he does. Frop gets up from the ground, and says the primitive human version of, “What kind of weird sound is that you just made? Are you sick?” Clon can only shrug.

Maybe there became secret societies of laughers who got together deep in the woods to do pratt falls and funny faces so they could laugh in safety, beyond the suspicious eyes of the non-laughers. Perhaps those secret societies spawned the genetics that eventually gave us comedians.

As time went on, and language became more sophisticated – not to mention people wearing clothes and going to the bathroom in private – I’m sure humor naturally developed. Some possible examples: “Gee Charles, you seem to have forgotten your codpiece.” Or, “Phillip, have you seen Lady Gwendolyn, whom rumor says is faster than the many hours it would take to remove the 37 layers of over and undergarments in which she is dressed?” Not thigh slappers, but maybe funny back then.

Now it seems that many comedians rely on the shock value of vulgar language, but I prefer those who tell amusing stories or reflect on human characteristics. And yet, watching someone (as long as it isn’t me) get hit in the “swimsuit area” by a three year-old with a bat is actually very funny. I guess there’s a little bit of cave man left in me.

All Groan Up

Sometimes the news of the day is so troubling, depressing, and infuriating that I just tune-out, and busy myself with other things. I know it’s probably shirking my duty as a citizen not to grab a sign and march in the streets, but after all, it is still winter.

So, I listen to music, read escapist fiction, and seek out comedy. Television comedy can be pretty good, but most of it is not much more than suggestive humor that gets cheap laughs. Not that I’m above that, but real, quality comedy comes from a well-constructed joke.

I’m fortunate to have satellite radio and the several comedy channels it offers. A lot of the jokes are about the same topics: air travel, marriage, kids, cell phones, and other predictable themes. I don’t often actually laugh at the comedians, but many of them are pretty good.

I’ve always liked jokes. The first one I made up was: “What do you do when your foot gets stuck in the mud? Call a toe truck.” I think I was five. Jokes that have plays on words, or that make you think a little are among my favorites. For example, Demitri Martin says the worst time to have a heart attack is during a game of charades. He also points out that the phrase “I’m sorry” and “I apologize” mean the same thing, unless you’re at the receiving line at a funeral home.

Woody Allen, back in the 1960’s, talked about how he and his first wife weren’t getting along very well, and they decided that they should either go on a vacation to the Bahamas, or get a divorce. They figured that the vacation would be over in two weeks, while the divorce is something they could share forever.

A couple of my favorites: A man walks into the break room at work. His friend says, “Bob, you look really tired.” Bob explains that he’d been up most of the night playing poker with his dog. “Wow! Your dog must be really smart,” says his friend. “No, not really. Every time he has a good hand he wags his tail.”

A man leaves a bar late at night, and comes across a grasshopper on the sidewalk. “Hey,” he says, “I just had a drink named after you.” The grasshopper responds, “You had a drink named Irving?”

There are a lot of jokes about bars, like the one about the horse who walks into a tavern, and the bartender says, “Say pal, why the long face?” Or, the classic: a priest, a lawyer, and a rabbi walk into a bar, and the bartender says, “What is this, some kind of a joke?”

Most people have one or two jokes they can remember, and a hundred they wish they could. I mostly remember jokes when I’m reminded of one in conversation. So, I have the annoying habit of inserting “funny” remarks without provocation. I don’t have a lot of friends.

Reader’s Digest has always maintained that Laughter is the Best Medicine, and I think they’re right. Even if it isn’t really medicinal, if you’re going to feel bad, you might as well feel good while you’re doing it. And, you might even find out why the chicken went halfway across the road. (She wanted to lay it on the line.)

A Great Big Simile

How to Park