Land Of The Lost
Hello World,
Well, whoever said "these are the times that try men's souls" wasn't just whistling Dixie, and that's putting it mildly. It's gotten to the point that you don't dare ask anyone what's new, because they'll probably go right ahead and tell you, and it won't be good, believe me. In fact, there's such a scarcity of good news these days that people have probably forgotten that there used to be two kinds of news, good and bad, and not just the frenzied hysteria that's the sum total of the media recently. It reminds me of the wag who quipped, "It's always darkest before it gets even darker," or the other pundit who noted that when you can see the light at the end of the tunnel, it's probably an oncoming train. So if misery does indeed love company, then everyone should at least be feeling very companionable, because it does seem as if we're all in the same boat, that one with all of the leaks and not looking very sea-worthy at the moment. But if laughter is our lifeboat, then it came as a relief to see this story in the newspaper about the annual Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner, a dazzling white-tie affair for the benefit of Catholic charities, that was chockfull of the powerful and celebrated. The grandson of the event's namesake, Alfred E. Smith IV, announced to the crowd, "My bank just sent me their 2009 calendar. It only goes up to February, and shows my bank president standing on a ledge." I think that's the kind of high-rise gallows humor that we can all relate to.
In other financial news, my friends at Citibank are well-known protectors of the environment (please feel free to go visit them at www.paperless.citicards.com and see for yourself) and included this discomfiting notice in with my credit card statement: "A paper trail is an identity thief's best friend. Sign up for paperless statements, and you can rest easy knowing all your account information is locked away safely online." By golly, Toto, let's make sure that all of our sensitive financial information is at some international conglomerate's web site, where nothing could ever happen to it that would compromise the security of the data, like being hacked into by a couple of 13-year-old juvenile delinquents from South America or anything. Yeah, right. Personally, I think that Citibank telling me that my account information is safer with them than the U.S. Post Office is nothing more than the pot calling the kettle black, and probably both of them should go stand on the ledge with Al Smith's bank president.
I don't mind saying that I'm no advertising executive, and I don't even play one on television, so I don't pretend to be qualified to determine what is a good subject for an advertising campaign, especially in this day and age where there are no standards, heaven knows. But one thing that I never do understand is commercials for ingredients, like the fat-substitute Olestra, which isn't even an item that you can buy, it's simply included in other products as part of the production process. Why have ads for this, or Intel processor chips, that the computer manufacturers install inside their equipment without asking you if you want those, or chips from some other company. I have never understood the concept of spending probably millions of dollars to promote something that you can't even buy on its own, except as it comes included in other things that you may or may not already be buying, but you see this kind of thing happening over and over. Just when I thought that things had gotten as absurd as they could possibly with this sort of nonsense, I bumped into a commercial that literally left me with my mouth hanging open. I'm not even kidding about this, I actually watched a commercial that was trying to sell me on the idea of high fructose corn syrup, of all things. I said to Bill, you may as well have a commercial touting the benefits of Agent Orange ("Effortlessly defoliates your yard in seconds!") as trying to put a positive spin on something with such a bad reputation. Even people living under a rock for decades know that high fructose corn syrup has been widely blamed for every imaginable ill, including rampant obesity, increased diabetes, childhood brainwashing, allergic reactions, corporate greed, governmental extortion, economic skullduggery, environmental calamity, as well as being a scourge among developing nations. the list just goes on and on. I've never heard a single person have one good thing to say about it, at least until this ad, it was just one of those things that was foisted on an unsuspecting public and you just had to live with it or lump it. But apparently the High Fructose Corn Syrup Anti-Defamation League has been hard at work trying to change our perceptions (they obviously can't change the facts, which speak for themselves) and by golly, they want all of us to love this slop as much as they do, or die trying. And once again, you can't go out and buy the stuff, it's just an ingredient that's already in or not in whatever you're buying as it is, so I can't understand why they need commercials for it. They may be bound and determined to win us over, but as for myself, I'd be voting them off that ledge with Al Smith's bank president, and no thank you so very much not.
Many of us had a good laugh when the hospital president informed us that he had received "over 7" cards to recognize employee excellence, but apparently this problem is more contagious than we realized. Last week, the local newspaper announced a new model railroad train set in honor of the 25th anniversary of the Metro-North Railroad, with a big front-page story featuring lots of pictures and interviews. So it was easy to spot someone else suffering the symptoms of this syndrome: "Tim Trewhella, owner of Treat-Station, a shop selling train sets, toys, candy and ice cream in Peekskill, said he has almost 10 people on a waiting list for the Metro-North train set ... " I don't know about you, but I have to feel sorry for that ninth-and-a-half person on the list, because that's got to be pretty uncomfortable, waiting for the other half to come along. And I sure hope that other half isn't up there on the ledge with the bank president, because that could be a long wait.
Speaking of long waits, I had been walking down to the park around the corner on weekends, and noticed on a pole in front of the municipal marina, there had been posted a flyer that said in large letters at the top MISSING, and then there was a picture of a boy, and below the picture it said Perdido, which I assumed was the boy's name. And I passed this pole and flyer many times, back and forth, on my way to the park for a few weeks in a row, and I couldn't help but think to myself that Perdido was a silly name for a person. "After all," I found this little voice in my head saying with all the logic my poor addled brain cells could muster, "I'm pretty sure that means something in Spanish, so it's not really a name, but a word, and it would be like calling someone Cable or Brook or Foster, which is just bound to cause confusion, and you would really think that the parents would give this more thought." And so I was walking along and just musing on this miscarriage of justice, where the parents gave this poor lost boy a silly name (and I'm starting to think, it's no wonder the poor kid got lost, I don't blame him) when finally enough of my semi-functioning brain cells woke up enough to get my attention by insisting: "Yes, you moron, it does mean something in Spanish, it means LOST." Oh well, as the late and lamented Emily Litella used to say on Saturday Night Live, "Never mind."
Of course, it's a well-known fact that my brain is a lost cause (I'm planning to wear a sign that says Perdido and points to my head) but I had high hopes for improving the fitness of other areas, which turned out to have mixed results for unexpected reasons. Years ago, I had amassed a motley collection of exercise tapes, that included all the big names in the fitness world, and ran the gamut from aerobics to yoga, and everything in between. (One of them was the Playgirl Workout for Couples, so you can see that when I say there was a little bit of everything, I do mean everything.) Recently, I decided to dust them off and give them another try, except for one small problem, which was that they were mostly on old VHS tapes, perhaps better known as an antiquated relic from days gone by. Even that was not the biggest problem, but I had recently let my sister borrow my combination TV-VCR, because hers was broken, and the only other VCRs we still had were in places where it would be impossible to exercise. Not to be daunted, I resolved to copy the tapes to blank DVD's instead, because I still had that equipment available to me, and that actually worked a lot better than I would have expected. The next part of my plan was to make use of my portable DVD player for this purpose, and which I could easily move to any suitable location, so that in the summer, for instance, I could be near the air conditioner, which would be very important. I was all fired up to get going with this program, but I wasn't counting on one little detail, which turned into a very big problem, or rather, an extremely tiny one. That is, I never realized before how small the screen is on the portable DVD player, which is fine if you're watching a movie up close, but if you're trying to follow a bunch of skinny instructors doing an exercise routine from three feet away, it's just about impossible to see what they're doing. Obviously, it defeats the purpose of the exercise to stop and watch them all the time, so I would just keep hopping around in a more or less aimless way, or do something like jumping jacks until I could tell what the next part of the routine was and could follow along. I admit that I wasn't expecting to break new ground with my fitness goals, but I do believe that I have invented a new indoor sport that I refer to as "Squint-erobics," and with good reason. No please don't thank me, it's enough for me to advance the cause of athletic endeavor and be on the cutting edge. Or perhaps it's the ledge that I'm thinking of instead, with the Post Office and Citibank and Al Smith's bank president, but whatever you do, please don't follow me, because everyone knows that I am Perdido.
Well, whoever said "these are the times that try men's souls" wasn't just whistling Dixie, and that's putting it mildly. It's gotten to the point that you don't dare ask anyone what's new, because they'll probably go right ahead and tell you, and it won't be good, believe me. In fact, there's such a scarcity of good news these days that people have probably forgotten that there used to be two kinds of news, good and bad, and not just the frenzied hysteria that's the sum total of the media recently. It reminds me of the wag who quipped, "It's always darkest before it gets even darker," or the other pundit who noted that when you can see the light at the end of the tunnel, it's probably an oncoming train. So if misery does indeed love company, then everyone should at least be feeling very companionable, because it does seem as if we're all in the same boat, that one with all of the leaks and not looking very sea-worthy at the moment. But if laughter is our lifeboat, then it came as a relief to see this story in the newspaper about the annual Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner, a dazzling white-tie affair for the benefit of Catholic charities, that was chockfull of the powerful and celebrated. The grandson of the event's namesake, Alfred E. Smith IV, announced to the crowd, "My bank just sent me their 2009 calendar. It only goes up to February, and shows my bank president standing on a ledge." I think that's the kind of high-rise gallows humor that we can all relate to.
In other financial news, my friends at Citibank are well-known protectors of the environment (please feel free to go visit them at www.paperless.citicards.com and see for yourself) and included this discomfiting notice in with my credit card statement: "A paper trail is an identity thief's best friend. Sign up for paperless statements, and you can rest easy knowing all your account information is locked away safely online." By golly, Toto, let's make sure that all of our sensitive financial information is at some international conglomerate's web site, where nothing could ever happen to it that would compromise the security of the data, like being hacked into by a couple of 13-year-old juvenile delinquents from South America or anything. Yeah, right. Personally, I think that Citibank telling me that my account information is safer with them than the U.S. Post Office is nothing more than the pot calling the kettle black, and probably both of them should go stand on the ledge with Al Smith's bank president.
I don't mind saying that I'm no advertising executive, and I don't even play one on television, so I don't pretend to be qualified to determine what is a good subject for an advertising campaign, especially in this day and age where there are no standards, heaven knows. But one thing that I never do understand is commercials for ingredients, like the fat-substitute Olestra, which isn't even an item that you can buy, it's simply included in other products as part of the production process. Why have ads for this, or Intel processor chips, that the computer manufacturers install inside their equipment without asking you if you want those, or chips from some other company. I have never understood the concept of spending probably millions of dollars to promote something that you can't even buy on its own, except as it comes included in other things that you may or may not already be buying, but you see this kind of thing happening over and over. Just when I thought that things had gotten as absurd as they could possibly with this sort of nonsense, I bumped into a commercial that literally left me with my mouth hanging open. I'm not even kidding about this, I actually watched a commercial that was trying to sell me on the idea of high fructose corn syrup, of all things. I said to Bill, you may as well have a commercial touting the benefits of Agent Orange ("Effortlessly defoliates your yard in seconds!") as trying to put a positive spin on something with such a bad reputation. Even people living under a rock for decades know that high fructose corn syrup has been widely blamed for every imaginable ill, including rampant obesity, increased diabetes, childhood brainwashing, allergic reactions, corporate greed, governmental extortion, economic skullduggery, environmental calamity, as well as being a scourge among developing nations. the list just goes on and on. I've never heard a single person have one good thing to say about it, at least until this ad, it was just one of those things that was foisted on an unsuspecting public and you just had to live with it or lump it. But apparently the High Fructose Corn Syrup Anti-Defamation League has been hard at work trying to change our perceptions (they obviously can't change the facts, which speak for themselves) and by golly, they want all of us to love this slop as much as they do, or die trying. And once again, you can't go out and buy the stuff, it's just an ingredient that's already in or not in whatever you're buying as it is, so I can't understand why they need commercials for it. They may be bound and determined to win us over, but as for myself, I'd be voting them off that ledge with Al Smith's bank president, and no thank you so very much not.
Many of us had a good laugh when the hospital president informed us that he had received "over 7" cards to recognize employee excellence, but apparently this problem is more contagious than we realized. Last week, the local newspaper announced a new model railroad train set in honor of the 25th anniversary of the Metro-North Railroad, with a big front-page story featuring lots of pictures and interviews. So it was easy to spot someone else suffering the symptoms of this syndrome: "Tim Trewhella, owner of Treat-Station, a shop selling train sets, toys, candy and ice cream in Peekskill, said he has almost 10 people on a waiting list for the Metro-North train set ... " I don't know about you, but I have to feel sorry for that ninth-and-a-half person on the list, because that's got to be pretty uncomfortable, waiting for the other half to come along. And I sure hope that other half isn't up there on the ledge with the bank president, because that could be a long wait.
Speaking of long waits, I had been walking down to the park around the corner on weekends, and noticed on a pole in front of the municipal marina, there had been posted a flyer that said in large letters at the top MISSING, and then there was a picture of a boy, and below the picture it said Perdido, which I assumed was the boy's name. And I passed this pole and flyer many times, back and forth, on my way to the park for a few weeks in a row, and I couldn't help but think to myself that Perdido was a silly name for a person. "After all," I found this little voice in my head saying with all the logic my poor addled brain cells could muster, "I'm pretty sure that means something in Spanish, so it's not really a name, but a word, and it would be like calling someone Cable or Brook or Foster, which is just bound to cause confusion, and you would really think that the parents would give this more thought." And so I was walking along and just musing on this miscarriage of justice, where the parents gave this poor lost boy a silly name (and I'm starting to think, it's no wonder the poor kid got lost, I don't blame him) when finally enough of my semi-functioning brain cells woke up enough to get my attention by insisting: "Yes, you moron, it does mean something in Spanish, it means LOST." Oh well, as the late and lamented Emily Litella used to say on Saturday Night Live, "Never mind."
Of course, it's a well-known fact that my brain is a lost cause (I'm planning to wear a sign that says Perdido and points to my head) but I had high hopes for improving the fitness of other areas, which turned out to have mixed results for unexpected reasons. Years ago, I had amassed a motley collection of exercise tapes, that included all the big names in the fitness world, and ran the gamut from aerobics to yoga, and everything in between. (One of them was the Playgirl Workout for Couples, so you can see that when I say there was a little bit of everything, I do mean everything.) Recently, I decided to dust them off and give them another try, except for one small problem, which was that they were mostly on old VHS tapes, perhaps better known as an antiquated relic from days gone by. Even that was not the biggest problem, but I had recently let my sister borrow my combination TV-VCR, because hers was broken, and the only other VCRs we still had were in places where it would be impossible to exercise. Not to be daunted, I resolved to copy the tapes to blank DVD's instead, because I still had that equipment available to me, and that actually worked a lot better than I would have expected. The next part of my plan was to make use of my portable DVD player for this purpose, and which I could easily move to any suitable location, so that in the summer, for instance, I could be near the air conditioner, which would be very important. I was all fired up to get going with this program, but I wasn't counting on one little detail, which turned into a very big problem, or rather, an extremely tiny one. That is, I never realized before how small the screen is on the portable DVD player, which is fine if you're watching a movie up close, but if you're trying to follow a bunch of skinny instructors doing an exercise routine from three feet away, it's just about impossible to see what they're doing. Obviously, it defeats the purpose of the exercise to stop and watch them all the time, so I would just keep hopping around in a more or less aimless way, or do something like jumping jacks until I could tell what the next part of the routine was and could follow along. I admit that I wasn't expecting to break new ground with my fitness goals, but I do believe that I have invented a new indoor sport that I refer to as "Squint-erobics," and with good reason. No please don't thank me, it's enough for me to advance the cause of athletic endeavor and be on the cutting edge. Or perhaps it's the ledge that I'm thinking of instead, with the Post Office and Citibank and Al Smith's bank president, but whatever you do, please don't follow me, because everyone knows that I am Perdido.
posted by El Tango Fandango @ 9:26 PM
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