One of the greatest sources of amusement for me is the amount of product, money and time that women spend on skin care. In an effort to maintain clear skin, I know women who spend hundreds of dollars a year on skin care products, yet I do not have a single male friend with a noticeable skin problem, and I have yet to find a single male friend who is using any product save soap and water in order to keep his skin looking good.
Someone please explain.
I recently heard Alice Waters, well known restaurateur, explain to Bill Maher that she does not use a microwave because “I don’t have a relationship with that machine.”
And Maher let that ridiculous, nonsensical statement go unchallenged.
When experts begin to speak in drivel and mumbo-jumbo, ordinary folk need to call them on it. Bill Maher missed an opportunity and an obligation to tell Waters how stupid she sounded.
I have been invited to join the International Association of Crime Writers. I received the invitation via an email from the North American branch today.
One problem: I’m not a crime writer.
Yes, my first book contains certain elements tied to crime writing, but my second book, UNEXPECTEDLY, MILO, has nothing to do with crime. Nor does my third.
It’s been interesting to see how readers, booksellers and other attempt to define me as a writer. I guess with just one book in print thus far, they don’t have much to go on.
But I’ve also been referred to as a mystery writer, a suspense writer, and a humorist, and I don’t think that either of these monikers apply. SOMETHING MISSING possesses some elements of mystery, and both books contain some humor (mostly unintentional), but I don’t think either could aptly be categorized as mystery, suspense or humor.
This all leads me to wonder how an author like John Updike was categorized after his first book. Not to imply that I am the next John Updike, but there are many, many writers like Updike and myself who just write stories. He was a novelist, but he did not write suspense, humor, mystery, historical fiction, science fiction, horror etc. He just wrote stories.
It would be interesting to research how readers, booksellers, reviewers, and others attempted to categorize writers like these based upon certain elements in their first few books. Updike’s first book was THE POORHOUSE FAIR. The plot summary from Amazon reads:
At the County Home for the Aged, the inmates, having shed their cares and responsibilities, live out their remaining years. On the day of the Poorhouse Fair the order is broken and the old people take charge. It is a day neither Conner, the poorhouse prefect, nor his charges will forget.
Sounds like it could be a Stephen King novel. Doesn’t it?
Updike as a horror writer?
I’ve ordered the book. After reading it, I’ll do some digging and see if I can find out what the public thought of the book and the writer after his first offering. Did they try to categorize him? Fit him into some convenient box? I’ll see what I can find out.
Another project. Just what I needed.
I was getting my haircut last week. and the usually bustling salon was relatively empty. Just me, the woman cutting my hair (not my regular stylist) and a customer on the other side of the salon, sitting with tinfoil in her hair.
Halfway through the haircut, the tinfoil lady, People magazine in hand, asked my stylist, “Does Angelina Jolie have a reason to be angry with Jennifer Aniston?” So began a five minute discussion about these two actresses. Their careers. Their children. Their love lives.
At one point I finally asked, “Do either one of you know these women?”
Of course, they did not. Yet their conversation continued as if they did. Back and forth, these women debated the decisions and morality of these two women, as if these actresses’ lives had any importance or meaning to their own.
And as if they could honestly rely on the gossip media for accuracy in reporting.
Let me just say it:
I find this conversation, and conversations like it, to be trashy, petty, simpleminded, and meaningless. And publications like People magazine, US magazine, and every other celebrity-obsessed website and print medium operate in a similar vein.
Don't get me wrong. I don’t begrudge the publishers for making a profit. As one of my heroes, HL Mencken once said, "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public."
But doesn’t there come a point in a person’s life when the divorce and diet plans of people who pretend to be someone else in front of a camera cease to hold any interest?
Last week I was visiting relatives when I was asked what I thought about Jesse James. Naturally, I thought they were referring to the bank robber from nineteenth century. When I explained that I had not heard about this modern-day version of Jesse James, I don’t think they believed me at first.
Yes, I know who Sandra Bullock is.
Yes, I even know she won an Oscar. I saw the movie and read the book.
Yes, I think I even heard her Oscar speech, recommended to to via Twitter from someone I follow.
But no, I don’t remember the reference to her husband in the speech, because doesn’t everyone thank their spouse after winning an Oscar?
And no, I had no idea that her husband was cheating on her.
But then again, how would I know? Not a single one of my friends brought this situation up in conversation. I do not watch any television programs that deal with celebrity gossip. And I don’t read celebrity-gossip publications like People or US.
And let’s face it: If you are a subscriber or regular reader of one of these publications, you are probably in the company of the lowest common denominator of American society.
Please note for those suddenly offended: I did not say that you are a member of the lowest common denominator. I simply stated that you are in their company. You are probably a brilliant thespian, but you’re surrounded by morons.
Are there any magazines of lesser value than those that hire photographers to stalk celebrities for a picture of their new baby? Or write incessantly about the weight problems of a twenty-something? Or elevate girls whose fathers are rich to the heights of celebrity?
And is there anything worse than wanting to see a photo of a celebrity baby when you know the mother or father were trying to keep their child out of the public eye? Or wanting to read the story about the young woman who gained thirty pounds and now can’t find work in Hollywood? Or the rich but otherwise irrelevant girl who has been caught in a sex tape scandal?
Doesn’t there come a time in a person’s like when magazine covers like this become repulsive?
May I humbly recommend magazine covers that look more like this:
If it’s so common (and it is) why is it in a zoo?
I had just as much chance as seeing one of these birds in the tree beside the caged one.
This morning I wrote the last words of CHICKEN SHACK, finishing the book in almost exactly one year. After getting up to pee and grab a cookie, I sat back down and began the revision process.
My agent, Taryn, has read the first half of the book and sent me notes to consider during revision. My books tend to need a lot more revision in the first half of the novel because I tend to wander a bit and fumble around for a plot. Once I find the story and kick it into the action, there tends to be a lot less to do in the second half, and Taryn’s notes reflect that. She had made many, many comments in the first few chapters of the book, and they become less frequent as the book moves along. By chapter 13, the last chapter that Taryn has read, it would seem that she’s hooked and pleased with where the book is going, but she admits that it was a struggle at times to get there.
So now I begin to revise, which is usually a quick and painful process for me. As I read through Taryn’s notes and consider her suggestions, along with ideas of my own, I engage in an inner dialogue with her. And while I love her dearly and value her opinion a great deal, the imaginary Taryn who speaks to me through her notes becomes someone who I despise at times. He comments become stinging barbs and tiny acts of cruelty, and I latch onto her occasional compliments like life preservers.
This time, I’ve decided to use Twitter to record some of this inner dialogue,in hopes that it will at least make this process more entertaining. If you’d like to follow the running commentary, which should persist for a week, you can follow me at twitter.com/matthewdicks or just follow the hash tag #Taryndialogue.
After an afternoon and evening of work, here is what I have tweeted so far:
Taryn comments that one of my favorite paragraphs in chapter one is "GOOD STUFF!!!" She's such a smart agent and editor.
Taryn notes that snowmen's eyes are traditionally made from coal. Not buttons. Nice catch.
My agent hates my chapter 2. She has ideas for improvement but I suspect she'd like me to delete the whole thing. Not happy.
Oh dear... Taryn might be right. I hate re-writing even more than revising.
Fine. I'll re-write chapter 2 tonight. But I'm not happy about it. As my wife would say, Taryn is now "on my list."
Scrolled back to Taryn's "GOOD STUFF!!!" comment in chapter one to remind myself that I don't completely suck.
Just spent an hour reading books to my 15-month old. girl And none of them had a chapter 2 . So jealous of Sandra Boynton.
Ironically, chapter 2 had a section that deals with handling criticism without falling apart. Damn you, irony.
Okay, Taryn. I started the chapter off in the way you advised. And it's a lot better, I think. Until you tell me it's not.
Taryn crossed out two of my favorite lines from the material I salvaged from chapter 2. I'm really not liking her right now.
I mean, I know she's usually right, but I like these lines. I know why she doesn't like them and why I shouldn't, but I do.
I know. I'll keep one but kill the other. But I like them both...
I know I'm not in fifth grade, but I wish Taryn would follow my "two compliments for every one criticism" class rule.
I hope I'm not making my agent sound rotten. She's a truly amazing person and my hero. I just kind of hate her right now.
Okay, chapter 2 officially re-written. And yes, it's much better. Still, her comments stung. I'm going to bed mad.
I learned today that the lack of applause between movements in a classical music performance is a 20th century convention, and it is the result of snobbery. In Beethoven, Mozart, or Bach’s day, applause between movements was standard and expected. But in the early 20th century, arrogant, elitist jackasses began withholding their applause in order to demonstrate their familiarity of the piece. Knowing that the piece was not finished, they would remain silent, waiting for the next movement to begin, making those who might be applauding the movement appear foolish.
Doesn’t that make you want to reverse this elitist convention? Start applauding between movements? I seriously want to stand up and cheer between movements at all future classical music concerts. Make a huge scene.
Is anyone with me?
I had three great academic moments in college. The first:
I majored in English while in college, with a concentration in creative writing. My focus was upon fiction, but during my senior year, professor Hank Lewis suggested that I take a poetry class in order to hone my use of sentence structure.
So I did. Little did I know that I was signing up for an advanced poetry class, full of students who had been reading and writing poetry for the past four years in the same way that I had focused upon fiction. They were a group of writers who knew one another well, had read and in many cases memorized thousands of poems, and had been honing their poetic skills for years. As a result, I was clearly out of my league.
Thankfully, the class was taught by the late Hugh Ogden, one of the finest teachers whom I had ever met. Hugh called me “honey” on the first day of class and patted me on the back to reassure me that I would be okay, and he was right. While my classmates were writing poems filled with complex allusions, sophisticated rhyming schemes and obscure allegorical references, I kept my work simple and personal. Though it failed to impress my classmates, Hugh seemed to like it well enough, and my grades reflected his appreciation for my work.
One evening the renowned poet Ethelbert Miller came to class to offer a critique on our work. Each of us read a poem, the class critiqued the work, and then Ethelbert weighed in on the piece. As usual, my classmates’ poems were well crafted, complex pieces of artistry, full of rousing metaphor and underscored symbolism. Most of them went on for two or three pages, and everyone at the table, myself included, was impressed. My classmates had pulled out all the stops to ensure that our visitor would be greeted with poems worthy of his stature, and he was not disappointed.
Then came my little poem, unlike any other poem read that night. It was short, simple and sounded rather amateur in comparison to the rest. As I read it, I couldn’t help but feel a little foolish, like a tiny minnow swimming in an ocean full of sharks.
Here is the poem, unchanged since that night. It deals with an incident that occurred while I was student-teaching in the Berlin, CT school system in 1998.
For Matthieu
For the want of a quiet classroom and a student who would remind me of me, I saw red instead of button nose and freckled cheeks, and in a voice that sounded criminal as it echoed off the Green Eggs and Ham bulletin board, I told him I’d be calling his mother tonight, to tell her about his disrespect for our nation’s flag, forgetting the thick, wet, grass that covered her grave. ________________________________
I read the poem with great trepidation, and though my classmates were kind, their comments indicated that the poem needed a lot of work. They felt that that the poem was too simple and lacked depth and that the imagery was mundane and obvious.
I listened without saying a word, as I always did, and then the poem was passed to Ethelbert.
I don’t remember his exact words from that evening, but he essentially told the class three things:
1. Of all the poems he had heard that night, mine would be the one that he would remember the most, because it told a story, was honest, and demonstrated great courage in my willingness to write and read it.
2. The “simplistic imagery” used of the poem was exactly what it needed given its context. The poem resides in a first grade classroom, so there is no need for anything more complex. The urge to soar to lofty heights in poetry must be tempered by context.
3. While all the poems were excellent, mine was the most accessible to the average reader and would likely find a wider audience than any of the others. A sestina written about an albatross that seeks to examine the multiple uses of the albatross across feminist English literature is a great poem for an advanced poetry class, but in terms of finding an actual audience in the real world, my poem would be most assuredly more successful.
It was a moment that I will never forget.
Am I saying that I am a gifted poet?
Of course not. I would venture to guess that every poet in that classroom that night was more skilled than me, and despite the comments by Ethelbert, my classmates continued to thumb their noses at my work for the rest of the semester, and rightfully so. In my years of writing poems, I’ve had exactly one poem published in a rather obscure publication that earned me a grand total of $100.
But in terms of memorable academic moments, this one stands tall. For one evening, the unskilled amateur soared with the greats.
According to some researchers, there is at least a twenty percent chance that we are currently living in a computer simulation. In fact, if you accept a pretty reasonable assumption of Oxford University’s Dr. Nick Bostrom’s, it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation.
“This simulation would be similar to the one in The Matrix, in which most humans don’t realize that their lives and their world are just illusions created in their brains while their bodies are suspended in vats of liquid. But in Dr. Bostrom’s notion of reality, you wouldn’t even have a body made of flesh. Your brain would exist only as a network of computer circuits.”“Dr. Bostrom assumes that technological advances could produce a computer with more processing power than all the brains in the world, and that advanced humans, or ‘posthumans,’ could run ‘ancestor simulations’ of their evolutionary history by creating virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people with fully developed virtual nervous systems. Some computer experts have projected, based on trends in processing power, that we will have such a computer by the middle of this century.”
I’ve explained this to several friends who find the information rather unnerving. But I’m not sure why.
If there is no conscious difference between the real world and a simulation, wouldn’t it be better to be part of the simulation?
Lose control of your SUV and run over a child and you’ve only destroyed a series of bits and bytes and not actual flesh and blood.
Sounds good to me.
Consequences would be considerably degraded (even if it were unconsciously so) while success and achievement, even in a simulated environment, would continue to carry the benefits and prestige that the world has assigned to it.
Not a bad deal until some advanced human civilization pulls the plug.
I saw this Botero sculpture in the Time Warner Center in New York City earlier this week.
“That’s quite a situation he has going on,” I said to my wife as we passed by.
“Eh,” she said. “I’m not impressed. I actually don’t think that’s much of a situation at all.”
I wasn’t sure if I should feel good about myself or horribly intimidated.
I was on the elliptical machine last night, watching the Red Sox-Rangers game. During my forty minute workout, the Sox look pitiful. The Rangers had already stolen nine bases on knuckleballer Tim Wakefield, who had surrendered a 6-2 lead in the fifth inning. I’m a Yankees fan, but that doesn’t mean I can’t admire certain Red Sox players, and one of those players is Tim Wakefield, who last night passed the great Cy Young for the team’s all-time lead in innings pitched.
Tim Wakefield and I go way back. Back in 1995, I was playing my second season of fantasy baseball. It was a different game in ‘95 (and perhaps a better game), when the Internet still did not contain the vast stores of information that it does today and many people did not even have access to the network. Back then, if you wanted to be a great fantasy baseball player, you had to hunt for information from every source imaginable. I would buy two or three newspapers a day, watch every iteration of SportCenter, and even catch sports on the local news in the evenings, hoping to find tidbits of information on injuries, changes in starting rotations, and blossoming rookies in the minor leagues. I would keep track of player’s statistics through box scores and spread sheets, negotiate dozens of trades with other owners over the phone, and spend hour upon hour on the game. I am a person who does nothing halfway, and when it gets competitive, I focus all of my energy and attention on the task at hand. For two years, I lived and breathed fantasy baseball, which is why I no longer play.
I simply do not have the time to play the game properly.
But 1995 was a different story.
In the midst of the ‘95 campaign, Red Sox ace Roger Clemens was injured and the team had called up the relatively unknown Tim Wakefield from the minor leagues to take his place in the rotation. Wakefield was originally an outfielder for the Pirates who had converted himself to a knuckleballer in an attempt to remain in the major leagues, and it had worked. Wakefield went on to post 16-8 record in 1995 with a 2.95 ERA.
Outstanding fantasy baseball numbers.
A couple weeks after he had joined the team, it became apparent that Wakefield was going to be a star, so I called my fantasy league commissioner, Mike Lavin, to pick the player up for my team.
“My brother, Bob, already tried,” Lavin said. “But league rules state that the player has to be in the team’s minor league system at the beginning of the year. Wakefield wasn’t.”
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“I’m a Sox fan. Of course I’m sure.”
It’s remarkable to think how Wikipedia or a website like ESPN's would one day render conversations like these mute, but at the time, I could not rely on the Internet for my answers. Not trusting Mike’s assertion, I did what every serious fantasy baseball owner would do:
I called the Pawtucket Red Sox, fought with secretaries and team spokesmen until I was finally put in contact with the assistant general manager, who confirmed that Wakefield was in the minor league system at the beginning of the year (while also confirming that I was the only fantasy baseball owner to ever call the front office). Then I convinced the assistant general manager to call Mike and confirm Wakefield’s presence on the team in April.
When Bob found out what I had done, he protested, stating that since he had put in a claim on Wakefield first, he should get the player, regardless of my efforts. Mike, however, sided with me, saying that I was the one who went the extra mile in confirming Wakefield’s place on the team and therefore I should get the player.
I think Mike was just jazzed by the fact that the assistant general manager of the Red Sox AAA squad had called him at work.
Thanks in part to Wakefield, I went on to win the league that season, and I promptly retired from all fantasy sports (I was also playing fantasy football, basketball and even hockey at the time). Being the way I am, I was unable to play the game without the intensity of a major league pitcher, and having just started college the year before, I knew that my priorities lay elsewhere.
Fifteen years later, Wakefield is still pitching for the Sox, and despite giving up the lead and allowing nine men to steal bases last night (along with two wild pitches and a balk), the Sox somehow came back to win the game 7-6.
I was happy for Wakefield. He didn’t get the win, but he kept his team in the game and gave the offense a chance to come back.
I owe him a little loyalty for all that he did in 1995.
Of course, the Sox are in 5-9 and the Yankees are in first place with a 10-3 record, so rooting for Wakefield wasn’t so hard. Had the Yankees and Red Sox been tied for first place last night, my loyalties for the knuckleballer who helped to make me a fantasy league champion might have gone right out the door in favor of my beloved New York Yankees.
I would like to propose a new man rule: Men don't comment on the state of another man's lawn.
A friend of mine came over the other day and noted that my lawn is getting rather long. I began to defend myself, explaining that I haven’t got the lawn mower out yet and it’s the beginning of the season, but then I stopped myself, realizing that only a jackass would comment negatively on another man’s lawn.
What right does any man have critique or insult another man’s yard?
Do we criticize the layout of a friend’s living room?
Do we comment on a sibling’s choice of throw pillows?
Do we mention the dust bunnies gathering in the corners of a neighbor’s kitchen?
Hell no. It’s my goddamn house, and I’ll do with it as I please.
So yes. My grass is rather long. But it’s mine, so shut up, you stupid, good-for-nothing lawn snob.
Is it wrong that I took so much pleasure in beating my former students and a bunch of teenagers in laser tag this afternoon? I mean, I crushed them. In two games of twenty players, I finished first and second.
My shining moment: After blasting three teenage boys in a row, they turned and fled and I heard the tallest one say, “Damn. That guy is good. Let’s stay away from him.”
That was six hours ago and I’m still basking in my glory.
I caught some of The Hunt for Red October yesterday. It’s a good movie and a better book, but having not seen the film in years, I had some thoughts after watching it again. 1. Just a little bit of computer-enhanced special effects in the last fifteen minutes of the film could really improve the whole damn thing. Those underwater submarine battles, and especially the torpedoes, look ridiculous. If they can add a bunch of meaningless CGI to the original Star Wars, couldn’t they fix this film up as well?
2. Does the evil Russian submarine captain have to be sweaty and arrogant and stupid? Give me a capable bad guy any day.
3. Harrison Ford makes for a much better Jack Ryan. But perhaps watching Alec Baldwin’s masterful comedic performances over the years have soured him for me when it comes to dramatic roles.
4. The way in which the director eliminates the subtitles while making the viewer believe that the Russians are still speaking in Russian is masterful and should be copied whenever possible.
New rule: Walking in a retail district or downtown area does not constitute a genuine walk.
I can’t tell you how many times I have been asked by friends and relatives to join them for a walk, only to realize after it’s too late that I have been taken shopping. Even though we have a perfectly good neighborhood in which to walk, parks in virtually every direction and a reservoir of walking trails and bike paths less than two miles away, I am routinely asked if I would like to go for a walk through the town center.
And for a long, long time, I believed these people.
But I’ve finally come to realize that I am being deliberately deceived. The glacial pace of our stride on these so-called walks, combined with the multitude of stops along the way, hardly constituted walking.
The North American continent drifts faster along its adjacent tectonic plates than these supposed walkers.
I think my heart rate actually decreases during the majority of these walks.
The most common of these walking-turned-shopping traps begin with a meal. After a delightful lunch or dinner at a local restaurant, I am asked if I’d like to go for a little walk.
Actually, I am usually paying my bill, removing the keys from my pocket when someone says, “What? You don’t want to go for a little walk first before we head home?”
Shortly thereafter, I find myself peering into shop windows, meandering between racks of clothing, and standing outside boutiques, wondering what the hell happened to our walk.
In the future, I’m just looking for a little honesty.
If we’re walk, let's walk.
If we’re going outside to stroll, window shop, say hello to friends, chat with strange old ladies, and cover a distance of less than one city block in more than an hour, just give me a heads up.
I won’t bother changing my shoes.
I drive by a billboard everyday that reads:
If you do not forgive others, God will not forgive you- Matthew 6:15
Does this strike anyone else as a gun-to-the-head kind of scenario? And is it even true? Though I am hardly an expert, I have always been under the impression that if a Christian asks God for forgiveness, it shall be granted.
No strings attached.
Apparently not, at least according to this billboard.
What I find more surprising is the thought that this billboard, with its bullying tactics, might be well received by anyone, Christian or otherwise. If I was required to spend my church’s advertising budget on enormous billboards, positioned high above fast food restaurants in some ridiculous attempt to pass on the word of God onto people driving by at 35 miles per hour, I don’t think I would’ve chosen Matthew 6:15 as my slogan.
Perhaps instead a welcoming message of encouragement or inclusion. Words of hope and love.
These exist in the Bible. Right? Certainly not in Leviticus, the bigots favorite book of the Bible, but there must be a few words somewhere in the Bible that are capable of raising a person’s spirits.
I’m being facetious. Though I am not religious, I’ve actually read the Bible from cover to cover three times. I know that those passages exist, and depending on the chapter and verse, they exist in abundance.
Which leads me back to my original question:
Who the hell thought Matthew 6:15 was the right verse to paint across a billboard? Every day that I drive by it, I become more and more angry at its finger wagging, ten-year-old playground tone.
A friend of mine was telling the following story last night to a group of our mutual friends, and I agreed to re-post the story here. The incident occurred on the day that my wife and I were moving into our new home. For the record, my wife cannot stand it when people cut in line. It’s her biggest pet peeve. I have watched her castigate little old ladies who were dragging around walkers and oxygen tanks when they cut into line.
It’s quite a sight to behold.
Years ago, we attended the wedding of a friend. During the cocktail hour, the mother of the bride accidentally cut into the hors d’oeuvre line, and Elysha could barely restrain herself.
Perhaps this is where I found the inspiration for my problem solving described below.
___________________________________________________
On Saturday morning, I was standing in line at the local U-Haul franchise, waiting to pick up my truck. One of my friends was sleeping in his car outside the apartment, waiting to begin helping me move, and several other friends were expected at any moment.
I was in a rush.
After ten minutes of waiting, my friend and I finally made it to the front of the line, where a polite gentleman began processing the paperwork necessary for my rental. Thirty seconds into the transaction, his phone rang, and he excused himself to answer it and take a reservation for another truck.
A minute later it happened again. And again.
It seems as if 9:00 AM is prime time for Last Minute Charlies to attempt to find a truck for the weekend. And each of these under-prepared morons was managing to cut me in line with their phone call, thus delaying my departure.
During the third of these interruptions, I entered the phone number of the U-Haul office into my phone, and once his call ended and the employee returned his attention to me, I placed the call, my hands and phone concealed below the counter.
A second later his phone rang again and he politely excused himself one more time.
“U-Haul Moving and Storage. Can I help you?”
I then raised my phone above the counter, placed it to my ear, and said, “Now that I have your undivided attention, can we finish processing my rental, please? I’ll wait on the line if necessary.”
The gentleman paused for a moment, appearing to take in all that had happened before deciding how to react, and then, after a few seconds, he smiled and said, “Props to you, man.”
My friend then apologized to the employee, saying that it was a jerky thing for me to do, but the man disagreed, saying he hated how often the phone interrupted his transactions with customers.
"Maybe it was jerky, but it was smart, too," the man said.
Either way, I was on my way back to my apartment in less than five minutes.
Have you ever noticed the Petco sign?
Note the tag line beneath the store name.
Supplies (dot) Fish & Grooming.
How did the geniuses who designed this sign rationalize this choice and separation of words?
Let’s start with the word Supplies. Isn’t this sort of obvious? Did the executives at Petco think that consumers might assume that the store sells animals but absolutely nothing else pertaining to the care of these pets?
Fish but no fish tanks?
Hamsters but no wheels?
Birds but no perches?
Then they chose to indicate a single pet category (fish), even though it’s one of many, and attach it to the word grooming. Two completely incongruous words unceremoniously joined by an ampersand like some shotgun wedding of advertising ineptitude.
Bizarre. Don’t you think? Fish & Grooming. How do these to ideas ever go together? I’m sitting here, trying to come up with a rationalization, any rationalization, for this sign and can come up with nothing.
As strange, far-fetched or unlikely as it might be, can anyone propose any reasoning behind this inexplicable piece of signage and advertising?
“I’m proud of you, Mom. You’re like Christopher Columbus. You discovered something millions of people knew about before you.” –Lisa Simpson
As some of you may know, I am universally acknowledged as having no neck. My head literally sits atop my shoulders. While it hasn't bothered me very much, my friend sent me this, from the Word of the Day website, which cheered me up quite a bit.
WORD
argal
MEANING:
conjunction, adverb: Therefore.
ETYMOLOGY:
By alteration of the Latin ergo (therefore). The word argal is usually used to indicate that the reasoning presented is ludicrous.
USAGE:
"Mr. Barbecue-Smith was a short and corpulent man, with a very large head and no neck. In his earlier middle age he had been distressed by this absence of neck, but was comforted by reading in Balzac's 'Louis Lambert' that all the world's great men have been marked by the same peculiarity, and for a simple and obvious reason: Greatness is nothing more nor less than the harmonious functioning of the faculties of the head and heart; the shorter the neck, the more closely these two organs approach one another; argal...It was convincing."
Aldous Huxley; Crome Yellow; 1921.
Then again, I am also reminded of a conversation between me and a coworker prior to the birth of my daughter that went like this:
Me: Yeah, Elysha and I are afraid that the baby might have a huge head and no neck, just like its dad. Poor little thing.
Coworker: Don’t be silly. You have a neck.
Me. No, I really don’t. Just this big head stuck on a pair of shoulders.
Coworker: Don’t be ridiculous. Show me your neck.
Me: Huh?
Coworker: C'mon. Show me your neck.
Me: I am showing you my neck. What do you think I am? A turtle?
Coworker: No, I mean, stretch your neck out.
Me: I am stretching my neck out. This is it. It’s all the neck I’ve got!
Coworker: Oh.