Maybe you’ve seen this ad, maybe you haven’t. As someone who’s been on the buying end of advertising and the end that writes advertising copy, aka the butt end, I look at all advertising. It doesn’t matter if it’s on TV, on line, or in print, I look at it all. Some ads leave no doubt as to what they’re selling and the benefits thereof. Others are obtuse, leaving you wondering just what the heck the product is. Some ads are genius; just watch the Super Bowl. Others are pure garbage but you usually have to stay up past midnight or watch obscure cable channels to see them.
This one shows up on Yahoo and intrigues the hell out of me.
One weird trick to stay asleep? Judging from the picture what could it be? Maybe you’d have to be a large-breasted woman. Then you gotta wonder how she’d get any rest at all with those things bouncing around all night. No matter how she tries to sleep, they have to get in the way.
If you’re a guy, maybe it means you have to find a large-breasted woman to sleep with you. Yeah, good luck with that. I can guarantee that if something like her was next to me in bed, nobody would be getting any sleep. But there’d be more than one weird trick going on.
Christmas 2011 is over. All the wife’s decorations, crammed into more than a score of 32-gallon plastic storage boxes full of every possible item associated with the holiday, are back on their shelves in the garage. Bigger items such as the artificial green plastic tree and decorations too large for the boxes reside on their own shelves awaiting the first week of December 2012 when they’ll be deployed again.
But is it really over? Not until the last vestige of the season is put away and the final remnant cleaned up. Therein lies the reason for the never-ending season.
Lurking somewhere in our living room carpet are rogue needles from the tree. Yes, we’ve vacuumed scrupulously with both a standup machine and a shop vac. Still they lurk, invisible to the naked eye unless you happen upon them in just the right light, at just the right angle. There it is! Pick it up now before the light changes or you move a millimeter in one direction or the other. That has to be the last one. Hah! They scoff at our feeble attempts to get them all.
Every year we vacuum what seems to be thousands of needles after we get everything set up and again when everything comes down. After all these years of shedding, our tree should be just a metal rod with bare, twisted wires hanging from it, more Festivus pole than Christmas tree. Yet, it still looks full. It must somehow regrow a new crop of needles as it spends the summer in its cocoon-like storage bag.
We have a lot of grandchildren and we vacuum a lot. Crumbs of every sort, torn candy wrappers, and other reminders of their visits are sucked up on a regular basis. Still, we find at least one needle with every cleaning. Invariably, one will survive the entire year although every square inch of the living room has been vacuumed more than once.
Our pastor suggests to us each Yuletide that we should leave something from Christmas on display to remind us of the warmth and good cheer the season provides. Consider it done, Father. I have opted for my leg lamp, ala “A Christmas Story.” But even if we put that away there will always be a green needle popping up as the seasons change to call to mind the good times with family and friends–and that we should be more diligent in our cleaning.
According to the calendar, winter’s been here since December 21 but you’d never know it by the weather. Today is January 11 and the thermometer got up to 53 degrees. That’s more like March or April around here.
The news this morning was all about dire warnings of the winter storm to come: three to six inches of snow over twenty-four hours. Oh my God Better get to the grocery store and clear the shelves. It’s gonna be a long winter siege. Schools will close, businesses will be shuttered, and we’ll never see the light of day again.
Now, just hold on a minute If you live in Florida or Tennessee, six inches of snow in twenty-four hours is a lot. Down there, six inches in a month is huge. This is Chicago. Six inches in that time period is only a quarter inch per hour. You could go out there with a broom every hour and sweep away a snowfall like that if a few minutes. Remember the big snow last February? Good. That means you survived that one and you’ll survive this.
Still the taking heads yammer on. “It’s coming. We’re all gonna die,” they maintain.
You wanna know who’s gonna die? In addition to those people who insist on going out to shovel when they know they shouldn’t, it’s SUV drivers.
This is not a blanket indictment of anyone who owns an SUV, just those ego-inflated mopes who buy Hummers, Escalades, and Durangos, etc. with the wrong-headed notion that their vehicles bestow a cloak of invincibility upon them. Sure, their high ground clearance and four-wheel drive transports can get through snowdrifts that mere cars can’t even attempt. But there’s one fatal flaw. They have the same weakness that every four-wheeled vehicle has: tires. Every car, pickup truck, and SUV has only two square feet of rubber that keeps it in contact with the asphalt, gravel, snow, or ice under it.
We mortals who dare to take to the highway in our puny cars realize the limitations winter driving sets for us and drive accordingly. Some SUV drivers think their vehicles grant them some dispensation from the laws of physics as they apply to highway traction. They drive in the snow like it’s summer outside.
They’re the ones who will die in this winter storm, their vehicles wrapped around trees or rolled over in ditches. If they don’t take any of us with them, it will do the gene pool some good.
This is just a short note to welcome the first intelligent, discerning, good-looking lover of great prose to do me the honor of following my blog. I write this, of course, under the peril of this person leaving due to the public embarrassment of this becoming public knowledge. Therefore, I will not name names and will use the genderless, and grammatically incorrect, plural when referring to them.
I apologize to all my high school English teachers who pounded, literally, good grammar into my head, but sometimes the rules must be broken to protect the innocent.
Since starting this project last year I have tried to be positive by stating that my blog had "almost one" follower instead of the less than positive "none". Henceforth, I will use that verbal ruse no longer. I will say it proudly, "I have a follower." Until they get fed up and leave, that is.
To prevent that I vow to pen thought-provoking and awe-inspiring posts that tickle the imagination and make you yearn for more.
Or I could just write about the daily crap that pisses me off. That seems to work, too.
What’s up with shoelaces these days? The last couple of pairs of shoes I’ve bought had laces that were way too long, almost to the point of being unsafe.
The laces on my running shoes were 48 inches per shoe. No amount of knotting, double-, or even triple-knotting would keep the loops from dragging on the ground. If I made the loops smaller, the aglets dragged. (That’s what those things on the ends of shoelaces are called. Look it up.) For full disclosure, I am not a runner; this particular pair of shoes was on sale–my top priority. That they looked and felt good was just icing on the cake. I replaced the 48-inch laces with 33-inchers and could have gone with 30-inchers. Just what was I supposed to do with the extra 15 inches of lace anyway? Don’t answer that.
You would think in this tough economy that shoe manufacturers would look for ways to cut back wherever they can. A million pairs of shoes with an extra thirty inches of lace per pair adds up to almost 475 miles of unnecessary material. That’s a sizable dent in the old bottom line.
I’ll wait while you get out your calculator and check my math. Satisfied? Let’s move on.
I wear work boots on the job. This is not because I labor in some manly trade where heavy-duty footwear is a necessity. My ankles are shot from years of standing on concrete floors and they need the support. The laces on my last pair were dangerously long even when wrapped around the back of the boot, twice. I think they measured 72 inches. After nine years with shorter laces, my trusty boots have finally given up the ghost. They still look great on the outside but the inside support and padding is shot and they’re painful to wear.
Today I was in Target picking up something for the missus and took a look at replacement boots. I found some that were being discontinued and were half price. Bingo! I tried on a pair and walked around like a prisoner in leg irons with the elastic string that keeps them together still attached.That was in case I didn’t like them. I loved them. They look good, fit right, and they make my feet feel like I have slippers on. Did I mention they were on sale?
If you think you’ve guessed the problem, you’re wrong. These laces are too short. Doesn’t anybody measure these things? They’re fine if I don’t lace them up to the top hook but suppose I wanted to. Not only that, they weren’t even laced equally. There were at least six inches more on one side than the other. Whatever happened to quality control?
That’s it! In the future all my footwear will be slip-ons or have Velcro fasteners.
