Beloved and I had just enjoyed a south-of-the-border repast, paid our bill, and were caught up short when attempting to actually...you know...LEAVE the establishment.
Being unsure whether to trust American Express or Pepsi, this post has been uploaded from a small Mexican restaurant in Lakeville, Minnesota.
The television series Castle, though firmly set in New York City, was filmed in Los Angeles.
The Archies (a cartoon musical group created for a television show) had a huge hit with the song "Sugar Sugar," which was originally offered to The Monkees (a human musical group created for a television show).
From my GPS while driving in Las Vegas: "At the light, turn right on Mel Torme Way and then turn left onto Sammy Davis Junior Avenue."
Somehow, the word horrified ought to have something to do with prostitutes.
The hashtag symbol (#) is called an octothorpe.
The King of Hearts is the only king in the deck without a mustache.
A single strand of spaghetti is called a spaghetto.
Crows hold funerals and gather together to mourn the passing of dead crows. Kind of ironic, considering that a group of crows is called a murder.
Reindeer eyes turn blue in winter for better low-light vision.
Clarence Odbody, the angel who saves George Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life, appears on screen for only 15 minutes.
It irritates me when people on medical shows say things like “You have to save my child! Please save my child!” As if the medical staff wasn’t going to do anything until the parent told them to.
The voice of Betty Rubble, Bea Benaderet, was also Kate Bradley, the owner of The Shady Rest, on Petticoat Junction.
Two spoons of Swiss Miss plus one spoon of Tang makes for a tasty, orangey mug of hot chocolate.
Ice is not slippery. The tiny bit of water (i.e., melted ice) between your boot and the ice is what's slippery.
The Twilight Zone's Rod Serling was only 5'4" tall...if tall is the right word to use in this instance.
The founder of Hormel Foods, maker of Spam® and other fine delicacies, was George A. Hormel, who pronounced his name HORmel, not HorMEL.
It's not the lavender flower that smells so good; it's the leaf.
Mary Tyler Moore was only 24 when she started playing Laura Petrie, wife of the 35‑year‑old Dick Van Dyke, on The Dick Van Dyke Show.
♫♪ Hey Pink Panther
We love Pink Panther Flakes
They’re pink and sweet and they’re new
We love your 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 different vitamins
Just as much as we love you
From Post!
Somebody, somewhere, needs to splice together every instance of Laura Petrie saying "Oh, Rob" into one big, beautiful supercut.
Only about a third of Gilligan’s Island episodes are about trying to get off the island.
Billy Joel wrote "We Didn't Start the Fire" as a response to a friend of Sean Lennon having said that Joel's life had been easy because he grew up in the 50s and everybody knows that nothing happened in the 50s.
The actor who was Alfalfa in the original Little Rascals/Spanky and Our Gang comedies, Carl Switzer, turned the key that opened the gym floor in It's a Wonderful Life and was the Haynes sisters' brother, "freckle-faced Haynes, the dog-faced boy," in White Christmas.
Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, on a sesame seed bun
Ray Charles shilling for Diet Pepsi:
I know it shouldn't bother me, but it does: My high school and college-aged co-workers at FastStop do not know who John Wayne is.
The square root of 6,561 is 81.
During the year that Tom Hanks was losing weight to film the 2nd half of Cast Away, Robert Zemeckis and the whole crew filmed the jeepy-creepy What Lies Beneath.
The term "gaslighting" (a form of psychological manipulation where someone makes another person doubt their own reality, memories, or sanity) sprang from the 1944 film, Gaslight, though that film was based on a 1938 play of the same name.
The orange powder left on your hands after eating Cheetos is called "cheetle".
The two main male characters of The Big Bang Theory, Sheldon and Leonard, were named in honor of the actor who played Nick the Bartender in It's a Wonderful Life.
According to a producer I know, Miley Cyrus can't carry a tune...at all.
The stories that say Karen Carpenter was on a popcorn-only diet are unsubstantiated rumors.
James Taylor's first single, "Carolina in My Mind," was released on The Beatles' Apple Records.
♫♪ Dewey Dewey Bo-Bewey, Banana Fanna Fo-Fooey, Fee Fi Mo-Mooey...Dewey! ♪♫
Before he was Gilligan, Bob Denver co-starred as a beatnik on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis.
On Sesame Street, Caroll Spinney was both Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch.
When extended, a frog's tongue is about a third as long as the frog - as if our own tongues reached our belly buttons!
Chihuahua's are the world's smallest breed of dog...even though they look like rats.
Beloved and I received a wedding invitation that has thrown us for a loop.
The earliness of the invitation in relation to the date of the event is fine.
The expected level of attire and decorum is well within the boundaries of reason.
However...
The menu options...oh my...
As a grandparent, I have been known to say "You're so sweet, I could just gobble you up," but I never expected to be taken seriously.
Here in the final throes of winter (which, in Minnesota, could go on for another two months), it is important to find joy in even the simplest things in life.
Take grocery shopping.
Please.
I am blessed that Beloved deems herself to be totally capable of shopping for groceries by herself. (I try to tell myself it has nothing to do with a lack of faith in MY ability to do it.) Even so, there are times when I tag along to push the cart and reach things on the top shelf.
It was during just such an excursion recently that I observed the following absurdity:
A profound question indeed.
Makes me ponder:
* Baby Needs Hygiene Paper
(Well duh)
* Cereal Bug Killer
(Call Criminal Minds!)
* Soda Chips Artichoke
(So, the chips are to choke)
I've been known to crack wise about signs in restaurants' restrooms forcing me to wait for an employee to show up and wash my hands for me. You know..."Employees must wash hands before returning to work."
That's based on reading the signs in a very strict manner, but I can find absolutely NO way to read the following sign that would result in me being willing to have McDonalds put ice in my drink.
Yee...and may I say...IKES!
You know how the character Raj on The Big Bang Theory couldn't talk in the presence of women and how fake that seemed? That's a real condition called selective mutism and was based on a former co-worker of one of the creators/executive producers of the show.
The author of The Giving Tree, Shel Silverstein, wrote a lot of songs, several of which became radio hits for other artists, e.g., Boy Named Sue (Johnny Cash), Cover of the Rolling Stone (Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show), One's on the Way (Loretta Lynn), and The Unicorn (Irish Rovers).
Maybe I should write a book titled Crying at Sunrise: Mourning All Morning.
A crocodile cannot stick out its tongue.
In the movie Jaws, Sherriff Brody's classic line after seeing the shark for the first time, "You're gonna need a bigger boat," was an ad lib by the actor, Roy Scheider.
Paul Lynde was once pulled over for driving on the sidewalk. The traffic cop flipped open his pad to write the ticket and Lynde said, “I’ll take a cheeseburger, hold the fries.” (And the cop chuckled and said, “Get outta here”!)
I have a cough that's so rough it ought to have brought the tree's bough through a dollop of dough.
Saw this sign at the library and thought, "Now THERE'S a fairly specific genre!"
How many titles could there possibly be on that shelf?
It doesn't take much to send my mind on a swirling adventure. It can happen when I see something as simple as an instructional sign:
I read that and I wonder:
A-way back in the middle of last month, Beloved and I took 10 days to drive to, around, and back from the 44th state of the union, Wyoming.
In spite of the fact that Wyoming was the first state to take the progressive step of giving women the right to vote, it is mostly an old-fashioned, hard-core center of GetOffMyProperty individualism.
But that did not keep us from observing some decidedly absurd things during our visit.
Take, for instance, the following storefront sign that refuses entrance to any humans:
Or this confusing bit of mislabeling:
* * * * * * *
There was one sight that, while being absurd, was certainly not humorous.
We toured the Heart Mountain WWII Memorial Japanese Relocation Center near Powell, Wyoming. It shed light on a shameful, but mostly forgotten, chapter in the history of the United States...when thousands of Americans of Japanese descent - most of whom were U.S. citizens - were taken from their homes, stripped of any possessions that wouldn't fit in a single piece of baggage, and imprisoned in thrown-together towns of wood-and-tar-paper barracks surrounded by barbed wire and equipped with armed guards.
One of the most surprising sights at the site was this editorial cartoon, depicting Japanese Americans as potential saboteurs. What was so surprising about it, you ask? The fact that it was drawn by Dr. Seuss!
Green Eggs and Propaganda?
There's no doubt in my mind that policing is a difficult job. Trying to keep our roadways and neighborhoods safe and free from crime is a noble calling.
Every so often, our highly-trained professional law enforcement officers need a little help, and there is no shame in realizing one's limitations and asking for it.
Sometimes that help comes from a concerned citizen. Sometimes, the police are hoping it comes from an ignorant perp.
For instance . . .
The following is a direct quote from a Lakeville, Minnesota police report:
Officers were dispatched to a found property call. Upon arrival, officers were handed a phone. Tucked in the back of the phone was a small baggie with cocaine inside. The phone was damaged, so officers were unable to identify an owner. If you know of anyone who lost their phone recently with a small baggie of cocaine in the phone case, please let them know we have it.
My current employment situation allows me the wonderful opportunity to work from home almost completely. The only time we have to come into the office is when someone higher on the food chain is visiting from England...the land wherein resides the company that bought our company.
On those few occasions when we are enjoying each other's company on company premises, we often have lunch together as a team at a local eatery.
At a recent lunch gathering, the restaurant of choice featured Thai food and a snooty wine list.
It was the wine list that hit me squarely on the funny bone...to the point that I could barely control myself to be able to order.
This is an actual picture of the actual wine menu:
The amazing pain-killer Excedrine is just aspirin with caffeine.
I can't listen to Cat Stevens' "Wild World" anymore without being distracted by the clicking sound of the guitar pick.
Silver sliver. Silver sliver. Silver sliver.
The first VHS movie I ever purchased was Honey I Shrunk the Kids, and the purchase was made before we even had a tape player.
The first DVD movie I ever purchased was the box set for all three parts of Back to the Future, and the purchase was made before we even had a DVD player.
New Jersey is the only state that has no rural areas.
If you let a mixture of lemonade and Dr Pepper sit, they will separate, with the lemonade on the bottom.
Two-thirds of Canadians live south of Seattle.
Yes...I realize this ad, photographed in a mode of public transportation, is really TWO ads that, through the rules of happenstance, have been partially destroyed to the point of them blending into each other...
...and creating an amazing mental image of tater designers building a poultry-powered vehicle that can be driven under the influence of hallucinogens.
I have a hard enough time deciding on what to eat at a new restaurant. Imagine my dismay when met with the choices available at the home of this sign:
Ron Howard has included the place of conception in the names of his children (e.g., Bryce Dallas Howard)
The producers of Golden Girls wanted Betty White to take the role of senior citizen sex kitten, Blanche, but she refused, giving life to the dim-witted Rose instead. White said that Blanche would have been too much like her previous TV role, Sue Anne Nivens, on Mary Tyler Moore.
At the end of every episode of Glenn Campbell's television variety show, he said, "Keep the latch string out and the dog tied up, 'cause I'm coming home!"
Jerry Garcia (from the Grateful Dead) played the pedal steel guitar for Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young's "Teach Your Children".
Disney should make A Frozen Christmas Carol. Here's the tagline for it: With Elsa as the Ghost of Christmas Future, the phrase "cold as hell" becomes literally accurate.
The Chinese word for "crisis" is comprised of the symbols for "dangerous" and "opportunity".
Debrief = The opposite of a wedgie
♪♫ Spider-Man! Spider-Man! Does whatever a spider can. Spins a web any size. Catches thieves just like flies. Look out! Here comes the Spider-Man. Is he strong? Listen, bud, he's got radioactive blood. Can he swing from a thread? Take a look overhead. Hey there! There goes the Spider-Man! In the chill of night at the scene of a crime, like a streak of light, he arrives just in time. Spider-Man! Spider-Man! Friendly neighborhood Spider-Man! Welcomed, then he's ignored. Action is his reward. To him, life is a great big hang-up. Wherever there's a bang-up, you'll find the Spider-Man!♫♪
Gag Reel:
I used Bing's AI creative chat feature to create the above graphic of Elsa and Scrooge McDuck, but here's its first attempt:
And then I asked it to make Elsa look more threatening and Holy Farnsworth!
In the 1950s, the laundry detergent brand Cheer advertised the enviable fact that it included a "blue-magic whitener". This led Allan "Camp Granada" Sherman to musically ask, "What does that blue magic whitener do? Does it make blue things white, or make white things blue?"
I was reminded of that moment in advertising and pop music history when I saw the following sign on the freezer door at my local FastStop convenience store/gas station/tobacco emporium:
Is this butter-flavored ice cream or ice-cream-flavored butter?
And the second item in the What's Wrong With This Picture category is the apparent pair of options I get to choose from concerning the price of this dairy delight.
Dear FastStop:
Perhaps you should consider hiring me as a proofreader instead of a cashier.
Dewey "IB4E" Roth
Apparently, my electric toothbrush is feeling kind of "meh" about my oral hygiene.
