Body Impressive, Brain Optional

Because of last week's post about Bimbo Bakeries supplying baked goods to the local high school, I felt the need to do a little research. (Whenever I do research, it's always as little as possible.)

First, about the word bimbo itself, this comes to us from DictionaryCentral.com:

a silly, empty-headed or frivolous woman. This is the sense of the word in vogue since the late 1980s. The origin is almost certainly a variant of bambino, Italian for baby. In the early 1900s a bimbo, in American colloquial use, was a man, especially a big, unintelligent and aggressive man or a clumsy dupe. By the 1920s bimbo was being applied to women, especially by popular crime-fiction writers, and it is this use that was revived in the 1980s with the return to fashion of glamorous but not over-cerebral celebrities.

Not Over-Cerebral: Politically correct terminology for "as intellectually agile as a small soap dish."

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Okay, this all makes sense...except for why in the name of all that is right and good would a bakery give itself this name?!!?

And so, with a few more clicks of the mouse, the World Wide Wackfest informed me about how Bimbo Bakeries is actually the largest baking company in the USA:

Although many of its brands can trace their histories back to the late 1800s or early 1900s, Bimbo Bakeries USA’s story begins in 1994, when Grupo Bimbo – Mexico’s largest baking company with operations in 19 countries – purchased La Hacienda, a California-based tortilla company.

A series of subsequent purchases is what turned Bimbo into the baking powerhouse it is today, with brands including Thomas' English Muffins, Entenmann's, and Boboli.

But why BIMBO???

Well, the word on the street (i.e., Wikipedia) is that bimbo (pronounced BEEMbo) is a nonsense word (in Spanish, it has no definition) formed by mixing the words bingo and Bambi.  (Kinda fits for the American meaning, eh?) But still, because the word DOES have a meaning, and a negative one, at that, in the U.S.A., their choice to retain that company name when entering the U.S. market would be like opening Chi-Chis franchises in Mexico. (Considering that, in Spanish, chi chis is a slightly vulgar slang term for the part of the female anatomy found in the top of a bikini.)

Wait, Dewey...you mean like...Hooters?

Observed Absurdities™ 14 - Baking Bimbos

I have reason to believe there are wild women heating things up for high school students.

So...I'm backstage at the local high school...actually, sitting in the dressing room. There's no high school production going on, just us Giant Step Theatre losers.

I can only assume that's what the high school's Powers That Be (PTB) must think of us, because, even though I need a certain amount of space to transform myself into Queen Ebola Hemlock for our production of Snow White and the 7 or 8 Dwarfs, the PTB have transformed the dressing room into a temporary storage closet for the athletic department's concession stand. 

I am surrounded by cases of Milk Duds and popcorn boxes and a stack of pallets that, I'm guessing, arrived full of hot dog buns.

It is this stack of bun pallets that particularly arrest my attention and cause this post to be another entry in the Observed Absurdities™ canon.

WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?!!?

Same Difference

Beloved and I recently spent a week back home again in Indiana, staying in the lush resort known as My Folks' Place.

It's always an interesting experience hanging out with SweaterGal and FlatulenceKing. They're both well into their eighties, with FK about to move on to the next decade. The television is almost always on, almost always twice as loud as is comfortable, and almost always tuned to either a Cubs game or RFD-TV, home of Hee Haw reruns, country music showcases, and farm reports from every state in the union.

One particular show was full of reports from Texas and was creatively titled, The Texas Report. I'm not sure what kind of screening/audition process it takes to become a correspondent on The Texas Report, but I'm thinking it can't be very rigorous.

Case in point: my proofreader's blood nearly boiled and my editing sense of justice actually snapped when I heard an explanatory sentence begin with these words:

"I equivalate it to..."

"I equate it to" or "It is the equivalent of"...one or the other...but not both, okay? This is the verbal equivalation of coming to a fork in the road, not knowing which path to take, and running into the tree in the middle instead.

I would have made a smart-alecky complaint call to the station if I hadn't been so busy laughing derisively.

...and then SweaterGal told me to warsh my hands before supper.

Problematic Blessing

There's a guy at my church who has been working in Iowa, while his wife and kids still lived in Minnesota, for six years. It's been a long haul, with only a couple weekends a month of being together.

He recently got a new job closer to home — 2.5 miles from his house, to be exact!

As you can imagine, everybody that had been praying for him through it all was pretty excited...but as part of our thanksgiving during a mid-week prayer group, we also asked God to help the family readjust to him being home; it was going to be a new kind of normal after such a long time.

When I told the man and his wife about how we had prayed about that readjustment, the guy said, "That's great! I haven't really thought about that."

To which his wife energetically responded, "Oh believe me, I'VE thought about it!"

Sometimes, blessings bring their own set of problems. Methinks we ought not to take them off our prayer list too quickly, eh?

Don't Tell ME What To Do!

For some time now, I've been thinking that advertisers-in-general don't hold the American population's level of intelligence in very high regard. (And if that comes as a shock to you, congratulations on finding this blog from your thatched-roof hut in the Amazonian jungle.)

But now they've gone too far.

Now they apparently think I can be trained like some sort of attention-starved canine.

What's next? Play dead for a 20% discount?!!?