That Darn Cat

Hello World,

Happy Autumn! Believe it or not, we find ourselves poised precariously at the final weekend in September already, and don't look now, but next Friday will actually be the first day of October. They tell me that the autumnal equinox was on Wednesday, so we've officially entered the fall season, although why our old nemesis Comrade Mischka picked this week to blast us with days in the high 80's, I'm sure I'll never know. Of course, that wasn't the least of it, not by a long shot, as we have our Russkie pals and their infernal weather machine to thank for some of the wildest conditions that have befallen us all year, and that's saying something. Although the hurricanes skirted us, the area was hit with bands of dangerous thunderstorms, some of which included tornadoes that touched down in Queens and Nassau, and about as welcome there as your average Russian spy at the Pentagon, which is to say, not much. Meanwhile, another band of storms with violent winds knocked down a swath of trees that landed on the Long Island Railroad tracks, and literally stopped the train service out of Penn Station, in its tracks as it were (get it?!) and stranding thousands of commuters on the spot. It got to the point that the terminal was so over-crowded with people who couldn't leave the city, that the MTA closed the station so that no one was allowed in from the outside. I'm thinking there's a reason that they don't still use that dusty old slogan from the heyday of yesteryear: "Traffic a pain? Relax on the train!"

On the home front, for reasons known only to themselves and their diabolical little minds, three of our cats have taken to perching on the edge of an old and wobbly 3-legged table in the living room, and regularly tipping it over, and it goes without saying, thank you so very much not. Luckily it has nothing on top of it except stacks of empty paper plates, so nothing gets damaged when it falls over, but it's true that the plates go flying in every direction, and it becomes someone's job to pick them all up again, as well as the table, and apparently the cats take no responsibility for the cleanup, because I've yet to see them do it. For the first time since before I went on vacation, I have reason to thank the furry varmints who chewed into my camping supplies, because now that the stuff is all still piled in the corner of the living room, instead of being packed away in the attic like it should be, it truly was a useful thing to have bungee cords so fortuitously close at hand when I needed them. I didn't have to run up two flights of stairs after them like I normally would, I just grabbed a bunch of them right in the living room, and secured the wobbly table to the piano leg behind it, and solved that problem in one fell swoop. Now my concern is that after being thwarted their disorderly schemes, our feline delinquents will bring in reinforcements from outside, and find a way to tip over the wobbly table as well as the piano behind it, and then we'll really have a catastrophic mess on our hands, sort of like Penn Station last week, except with a lot more little wooden hammers all over the floor.

We get this from an alert reader (thanks, Arlene!) after hearing the story about the unfortunate refrigerator hose calamity -

===================
Call me crazy but I can't help but wonder
why you keep all those cats on the payroll
if at the very least you can't get them to keep
the vermin at bay. Perhaps a cut in pay or rations
would get them a bit motivated.
Please, explain to those cats what their job is!
===================

Now, our cats don't need me to spring to their defense, heaven knows, and they would no doubt strenuously object, even if I did. But the truth is that over the last couple of years, the alarming rate of attrition has taken its toll around here, and what used to be a menagerie of "all those cats" has now dwindled down to a precious few, such as this house hasn't seen since we've been married. Of the tattered remnant, two of the cats only stay upstairs, and perhaps it is their very presence that deters the furry varmints from that floor, although I would tend to doubt it, since it's pretty much all they can do to catch their own Fancy Feast on their own plates, and that doesn't have much in the way of moves, believe me. The other cats patrol the living room and den downstairs, and here again, there's not a varmint anywhere in sight, either because of their diligence, or more likely, because the varmints know better and keep out of their way. We don't let the cats in the attic or the basement, which is where the varmints did their damage, thanks not, so we don't want to cast aspersions on our cats' deterrent capabilities or motivations. Although now could certainly be the time to rethink that policy, especially if it means protecting my collection of macaroni necklaces from their ravages. I said to Bill that the funny part is that we used to hide our treasured belongings away from some of our more rambunctious kitties in the past, by putting the items in rooms where the cats weren't allowed, so they wouldn't get knocked over, broken or worse - and now we're doing exactly the opposite, and moving our things into areas where the cats are, to keep them away from the varmints instead. It's like the animal version of a foreign-language espionage movie, where it's hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys. Hey, put down that macaroni necklace!

And speaking of having animals on the brain, that's the only explanation I have for this next story from work. Yesterday I had contacted one of our vendors, and was trying to straighten out a problem with an order where the wrong items had been received, compared to what we had originally ordered. I had to read a catalogue number over the phone, and I actually heard myself saying, "That's 'S' like Sam, 'K' for cat ... " There was more than one item with the same sort of part number, and I went ahead and said the same thing both times, and it took a while for the realization to sink in, when I suddenly burst out laughing, and pointed out that I had used that description as if "cat" was spelled with a "k" instead of a "c," or was so new to the language that I didn't know the difference. The lady on the phone was very empathetic, and said she understood what I meant anyway, and wrote down "k" in spite of me saying "cat," like I was some sort of illiterate moron who couldn't even spell the simplest word that any pre-schooler would know better than that. I said it was easy to see what kind of day I was having at work, when I was so alphabet-challenged that I couldn't even come up with a word that starts with "k" when I needed to, and it's just a wonder that I didn't come up with "knight" instead.

While we're on the subject of things that make no sense, we have Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys fame, who decided to release a new album called "Brian Wilson Reimagines Gershwin," and here again, for reasons known only to himself, one supposes. It begins with an a cappella rendering of the opening to the Rhapsody in Blue that is very interesting, and touches on many of the composer's classics, like "Someone to Watch Over Me," "I Got Rhythm," and "Our Love is Here to Stay." I'm not exactly sure that the world was clamoring for the Brian Wilson version of "I Loves You Porgy" or "It Ain't Necessarily So," but they're done in an earnest way that is respectful and charming in its own awkward style. I said to Bill that my absolute favorite from the album was "They Can't Take That Away From Me," in which I'm sure the late and great Ira Gershwin never would have expected to hear the words “boogedy-boogedy-boogedy-boogedy-shoop” or “wop-bop-bop-wop-bop-ba-dada-dada” anywhere near his impeccable lyrics, even this long after he was dead, and that's not just a lot of ramma-lamma-ding-dong, believe me. And poor George Gershwin, even more so, who didn't live to see the Boogie Woogie Bugle Boys, much less the Beach Boys, heaven knows. Personally, I give it a "K" for "Celebrated."

Elle

On The Blink

Hello World,

Just when you think that September can't possibly have anything more to throw at us - after all, we're already past Labor Day and Grandparents Day, the 9/11 observances have come and gone, along with the end of Ramadan, and even the Jewish holidays have packed up their tents and spirited away in the night - here comes Mexican Independence Day, for our amigos y amigas south of the border, and don't spare the tequila. I'm sure the day is fraught with historical significance and cultural gravitas, but personally, I can't seem to get the Mexican Hat Dance out of my head, so it's a little hard to be serious about anything, with the clattering of castanets reverberating through my poor addled brain cells (both of them) who I have renamed Pancho and Ricardo in honor of the occasion. The month is barely half over, and we've already had a welter of red-letter days, and at this rate, we're bound to run out of confetti long before the festivities wind down. Pancho and Ricardo recommend tossing arroz con pollo instead, but even I don't need more than two brain cells to recognize that as a bad idea, by golly.

In sports news, the football season has finally gotten underway, and not a moment too soon for its desperate legions of clamoring fans all over the country and beyond. On the local scene, the Giants won their home opener at the brand new stadium at the Meadowlands, to the delight of the hometown faithful, by beating the Carolina Panthers, a team that had victimized them in the past, by ruining their playoff chances or the last home game at their old stadium. The next day, the highly touted Jets lost their home opener at the very same new stadium to the Baltimore Ravens, without even scoring a touchdown, which was certainly not the start that they hoped for. Even the poor stadium has yet to hit its stride, as it still has no name, and while every other team is battling it out at the likes of Minute Maid Park or Corel Centre or U.S. Cellular Field, everyone around here basically still calls this place "the new stadium at the Meadowlands," which is certainly not going to win any awards for originality, much less street cred in the cut-throat world of sports stadiums, that's for sure. Meanwhile in baseball, the Yankees and Tampa Bay Rays are neck-and-neck in the race for the pennant, with their season records so close that they're a mere half-game apart in the standings after 140 games. Of course, tight pennant races can be highly entertaining to people who don't care who wins, but extremely nerve-wracking to the fans who live and die with every pitch. My advice would be to move the Tampa Bay franchise out of the American League East altogether, to a different division where they could make their own way without the Yankees dogging their heels at every turn. Pancho and Ricardo tell me that Guadalajara is very nice this time of year.

There seems to be no end to the hijinks at the local newspaper, and here again, these leaped right out at me, as they were one on top of the other, so there was no avoiding them. The first one painted this intriguing picture -

==================
Lesbian Air Force
nurse trial to begin
==================

Now, for anyone who didn't already know anything about this particular story, like me, I'm thinking that you just really wouldn't know where to start with this. It certainly packs a wallop in 7 small words, and seems to be going in a lot of different directions all at once. We have not just your average garden-variety lesbian, which might not be very newsworthy, but a military lesbian, and one in the Air Force on top of that. And not just any old flying military lesbian, but also a nurse, so there's already a lot going on in this story. But it doesn't even stop there, my friends, because our very special flying military lesbian nurse is apparently on trial as well, which would seem to violate some rule of too many objects trying to occupy the same space at the same time, and the Quantum Physics Police would have stepped in long before now. I suppose it's only a good thing that she's not also handicapped or a woman of color, or we'd have to call out the headline stretchers to make enough room for all the modifiers and adjectives they'd need to describe the situation. Pancho and Ricardo want to point out that at least she's not also blonde, but I'm not sure that's not just the tequila talking.

It was the one right under that which really got my attention -

=====================
Burning elevator
called suspicious
=====================

Believe it or not, that story was reported right here in the Queen City on the Sound, New Rochelle, so it hit pretty close to home. I have to admit that I feel truly fortunate to live in a place where burning elevators are considered suspicious, instead of some hotbed of post-apocalyptic wasteland, where a burning elevator would be so routine as to excite no comment, much less appear in the newspaper. I know that everyone will be relieved to hear that the article ends by saying that the Police are "continuing to investigate," so the elevator burners should be on notice that their actions will not be tolerated obliviously by the authorities, as if this were some sort of far-flung frontier outpost where anything goes. Frankly, my money is on the lesbian Air Force nurse.

And what may be new and exciting in the wonderful wide world of politics, you may be wondering, and well may you wonder. Last week, the Westchester County Board of Elections rolled out their brand new Optical Scan Voting Machines, with the plan to use them in the primaries for the first time. Now, I had nothing against the old mechanical voting machines with the levers, but they certainly had been using them ever since I started to vote in 1972, and probably for decades before that as well. With society developing ever more high-tech gadgets everywhere you turn, and at a dizzying pace, it seemed only logical for the democratic process to jump right on board that futuristic bandwagon too, and leap into the forefront of the digital revolution, leaving behind the trappings of auld lang syne. I would have expected something along the lines of an ATM, with a touch screen showing the various candidates or propositions that you could vote on, which would also incorporate some sort of identification device that would make sure that the voters were legally eligible to vote, and only voted once. So the ImageCast arrived at long last, and with plenty of fanfare, as they kept sending out mailings to the yearning electorate letting us know what we had to look forward to. Finally they sent out an elaborate brochure on how to use the new equipment, and it was certainly an eye-opening tutorial, although probably not in the way they would have expected. First of all, you still have to stand on line to go register at the district table, just like always, and then - believe this or don't - they actually hand you a paper ballot, which you have to mark like an SAT exam, by filling in the little circles. At that point, you feed it into the ImageScan, and it displays an image on the screen of what you voted for, and then you press the Enter button for your ballot to be accepted. I know people may complain about their tax dollars at work here, but I think it's good to know that Westchester County has joined the ranks of modern civilizations dating to at least the time of the ancient Phoenicians, who I believe invented the process of putting pigment on parchment, and taken a giant leap into the era of paper ballots, that would seem archaic even by medieval standards. Even Pancho and Ricardo would regard this process as laughably quaint, and don't forget, they invented the idea of arroz con pollo tossing, so they ought to know.

Speaking of airborne elements, at an intersection near the hospital, there has historically been a blinking yellow traffic light, on the road that leads to the Emergency Room, presumably to clear the way for emergency vehicles racing to our doors on their life-saving missions of mercy, although I personally have to say that I have never seen anyone pay the slightest bit of attention to it in all the years that it has been there, blinking happily away in its unsung safety efforts nonetheless. I have always found this light to be very helpful, not necessarily from a traffic standpoint, but in terms of giving directions to visitors trying to find the hospital, which you would think would be pretty easy for a sprawling campus of 10 buildings that has been on the same spot for over a hundred years, but you'd be surprised. The biggest obstacle to the potential first-time guest, obviously, is that the hospital's official address is on an imaginary street that doesn't exist, and perhaps never has existed except in the hypothetical realms of bygone city planners, and even if it did, there are certainly no street signs for it. A determined search through the archives of fusty old city maps of yesteryear might identify which street it should be, however, even that would not solve the problem for the searcher, since that is now the back of the hospital where the Receiving dock is located, and not the front entrance, and you literally have to walk around two other buildings to find your way to the front. Now, it's true that the front of the hospital is actually located on a real street, which even has a street sign, but in their continuing efforts to repel the public, the hospital designers have very cleverly hidden the entrance at the end of a courtyard between a tall building and the backyard of a house with an unsightly large and overgrown fence, so that countless hordes of people go past it on a daily basis and have no idea that it's even there. At least the blinking light was a landmark that could be used to orient someone in their quest to find the hospital, or leave the hospital and get back to the highway, and I found it extremely useful for this purpose. In fact, I was still doing that recently, when Jean, our irrepressible bookkeeper - with unassailable proof of just how true it is that no one pays any attention to that light - pointed out to me that there is no longer any blinking light in that intersection, and in fact, there hasn't been one for over a year. I always say that they didn't invent the Federal Witness Protection Program to protect anyone from me, since I never notice what's right in front of my face, but even I found that a little hard to swallow, until I went back outside and verified for myself that not only is there no blinking light there anymore, but there aren't even any poles or wires to hang one on, even if they wanted to. Normally, I would find this type of mental lapse rather embarrassing, but frankly, Pancho and Ricardo have been drinking an awful lot of tequila lately, and I'm finding it increasingly hard to get their attention over the incessant din of castanets.

Elle

Penny Arcade

Hello World,

Happy Jewish New Year! Thursday was the time for you to wish "L'Shana Tovah" to all of your friends, as our Jewish brothers and sisters welcomed in the Year 5771, on what they describe as the first day of Tishrei, the seventh month of the Hebrew calendar. This year it began at sunset on September 8 and runs until nightfall on September 10, and like a lot of movable feasts, is based on some arcane formula that sets it 163 days after the first day of Passover. As a result of that formula, it can never be earlier than
September 5, as it was in 1899 and will be in 2013, or later than October 5, as it was in 1967 and will be in 2043, God willing. We have our friends at wikipedia.org for these Rosh Hashanah tidbits, and there's plenty more where those came from, believe me, so you're welcome to visit their web site and check it out for yourself. The article begins by translating the words and providing the correct pronunciation, explaining its religious significance and Biblical references, and describing its connection with Yom Kippur later in the month. The paragraph concludes with this arresting statement: "On this holiday there is no traffic on the roads." I suppose that might be true in one place or another, but I'm thinking it would come as a big surprise to the rest of the world, especially say, Vatican City or Mecca, for instance. Not that a world-wide traffic-free holiday would be such a bad idea after all, and might actually be an occasion that both the environmentalists and liquor companies could all agree on.

Speaking of occasions, Monday was Labor Day, and many people were able to enjoy a very nice three-day weekend, in fact, all three days were perfectly delightful, which is extremely unusual for holiday weekends around here. Even more so, since the dire reports of Hurricane Earl were splashed all over the media for two weeks, leading everyone to fear the worst, batten down the hatches, head for the hills, or just lay in a supply of Zachys famous Back-to-School wine specials and drink themselves into a stupor. The fact is that nowadays, everyone exaggerates the severity of the weather forecasts, for the sole purpose of selling more newspapers or garnering higher ratings for their TV or radio broadcasts, so you really can't trust them anymore when they tell you how bad it's going to be. On that score, Earl turned out to be a complete bust, at least in this area, which I'm sure came as a welcome relief to everyone except the meteorologists and advertisers. On the home front, the flag brigade once again did an admirable job flying the colors upstairs and downstairs, and even remembered to bring them back indoors later, which as we all know, is a big challenge to the poor addled brain cells (both of them) of the flag brigade at this point. If this process ever develops a third stage beyond OUT and IN, it's obvious that the current flag brigade will never be able to keep pace with the higher expectations, and that's not just a lot of Hurricane Punch, by golly.

And while we're on the subject of things we might not be expecting, there was apparently another hurly-burly at the U.S. Mint, where after years worth of redesigns of the paper currency, dollar coins, quarters, and even nickels, they finally got around to the lowly pennies, and certainly without any fanfare. In fact, you probably have some in your wallet or pocket right this minute, and you'd hardly even notice them, they look so much like the old pennies in many ways. On the front, they might have updated or tidied up the rendering of Lincoln, although you really wouldn't be able to tell, while on the back, there is now a shield with the legend E Pluribus Unum in the place of the famed Lincoln Memorial - which had been on the back since time immemorial it seems, or at least since the "wheat" pennies of yore. It's amazing to me that they could have gone ahead and redesigned the penny, of all things, especially now when they're not even worth anything and they cost more to produce than their face value, and they keep saying they're going to do away with them altogether. And even more so, that they did it without letting anyone know, and then just slipped them into the currency mainstream unannounced, and they scarcely even look any different, so people don't even notice them, because Lincoln looks the same on the front, and you really have to look close to spot the new shield on the back. Or as late night television's Craig Ferguson famously quipped, "Oh sure, NOW they give me a shield!"

And speaking of television, I do hate to complain about the TV Section of our local newspaper, because I do sincerely sympathize with their problems of trying to cram a lot of information into small spaces, and I know how challenging that can be. I'm more than willing to overlook the occasional lapse, the errant typo, the single slip-up along the way, and give them credit for good intentions. But when they come in bunches, I have to wonder if anyone is watching the store, or whether they've put the illiterate foxes in charge of the proof-reading hen house, so to speak, and then I just have to draw the line. In Friday's Best Bets, they offered this description for a TLC program called "Say Yes to the Dress:"

=================
A woman is excited to finally a bride
after being a bridesmaid 15 different times
=================

Now, I realize that the spell-checker is not going to help if you're going to leave out a whole word, but I had to complain about this when they apparently liked it so much on Friday that they had it in their Best Bets TWICE, and each with the same word left out both times. I can see having it in there twice if you're going to fix the second one, but if you're just going to make the same mistake all over again, that's taking a bad joke a little too far in my book. The other listing actually had no grammatical errors at all, and was for House Hunters International on HGTV, concerning a couple of young surfers -

==================
... who have chosen to spend their early
retirement near the Nicaraguan Riviera
==================

I'm sorry, but however much I would prefer not to cast aspersions in the direction of our southern neighbors, out of respect for the English language, I can't help but object to having the words "Nicaragua" and "Riviera" in the same sentence, and that's all there is to it. Some things just don't go together, like nitro and glycerin or Rosh Hashanah and traffic, and this is another perfect example of disparate elements that should be forcibly separated, by legal means if necessary.

Meanwhile on the local scene, it was probably the same furry varmints who chewed into my camping supplies that recently decided that their next bit of mischief would be nibbling through the water hose for the refrigerator ice maker, so now the refrigerator won't make its own ice anymore, and I don't mind saying, thanks so very much not. I realize that on the global scale of tragedies and disasters, this ranks about on a par with a sluggish side-view mirror wiper on your Lexus, so you're welcome to go right ahead and break out the world's tiniest violin at this point. But it's a big deal in this house where we use a lot of ice on a daily basis, and this unexpected mechanical setback has really put a crimp in our refreshment prospects, on a titanic scale that is the reverse of the famous liner's iceberg collision, where their problem was too much of the stuff, while ours is just the opposite. Nowadays, the poor over-worked household staff, who shall remain nameless but look a lot like Bill, has been reduced to painstakingly making our own ice cubes with plastic ice cube trays in the freezer, which is an ongoing nuisance from days gone by that quickly loses whatever fond memories it used to have, and that is to say, not much. It's easy to forget how much trouble that is, which is why they invented ice makers in the first place, and believe me, even more appreciated when you suddenly don't have one anymore. One lucky thing has been the discovery that we can dump the ice cubes into the ice compartment in the freezer and get them to come out the door as usual, because the dispenser part of the apparatus still works fine. This is what we call being grateful for small favors, and I can tell you that we don't take these ice cubes for granted, that's for sure. So last week when I was getting myself some ice for a cold drink, and one of the ice cubes bounced out of the glass and onto the floor, you can be sure that I chased after it, rinsed it off and used it anyway. I won't say that we've gone as far as naming them, but they are precious to us, so I wouldn't rule out that possibility either. I'm thinking that "Nanook" has a nice ring to it. On the other hand, the ice maker, which is busted, is obviously "Earl," while the ice-free refrigerator must be the Anti-Titanic. Say, who is that playing "Nearer My God to Thee" on the world's tiniest violin?

Elle

Editorial Desk

Hello World,

Happy Labor Day weekend! Monday is a holiday for many people, and that will be the time for the working stiffs to rest from their labors, although nowadays with all the stores open early and late with sales, it seems that only some of the working stiffs actually get the holiday off. If you're one of the lucky few, I hope that you will enjoy a nice long weekend full of rest and relaxation that would do justice to the spirit of the late and lamented Samuel L. Gompers, and long may he wave. Normally in these parts, it's right after the Labor Day weekend that schools re-open and welcome students back from their summer vacations, and that is still the case in most districts. In a few other places, they're taking the rest of next week off as well, and waiting to start school up the following week after that. And in another handful of areas, the unfortunate students are already back in classes now, as the schools opened up earlier this week, before Labor Day even got here, which I think is a kind of a dirty trick, and a dastardly way to end a perfect summer vacation, without even a holiday to take the sting out of it. I'm betting that none of those would be the Samuel L. Gompers High School, that's for sure.

While we're on the subject of back-to-school, I couldn't help but notice in a recent newspaper, there was a full-page ad from our friends at the Zachys Wine Gazette, where they were featuring what they referred to as their ZACHYS BACK-TO-SCHOOL SPECIALS WITH THE $120 CASE SALE AND SOME SENSATIONAL TASTINGS! I have to say that I never considered wine to be a back-to-school essential up to now, but it certainly beats pencil cases and notebooks, by golly. And here I'm thinking that back-to-school has certainly changed over the years since the dinosaurs and I left off roaming the vast unformed land masses, and took our slates and charcoal back to the henge to learn all about dirt and fire. Ah, those were the days indeed. History was my best subject, although we called it Current Events then.

Speaking of news, of course, it's much too easy to pick on the local newspaper, heaven knows, where there are no standards nowadays, if in fact there ever were, and so reading it becomes an exercise in absurdity that alternates between pain, pity, amazement, hilarity and outright horror, sometimes all in the same paragraph. In fact, I wasn't even going to complain about this miscue in the Sports section, except that there were two of them right on top of each other, and it just got to be too much, even for a person trying their best to practice forbearance. The first one said:

====================
The football camp stops continue
on the Varsity Insider blog
====================

I admit that I had to read that several times over to even begin to get in the same ballpark with what they were talking about. The football camp? The camp stops? The stops continue? Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot, as the young geek-sters say nowadays. How can stops continue? And if the stops continue, doesn't that mean that they have stopped being stops, and have instead turned into continuations, or something? A series of stops that continue is just too much of an oxymoron for my poor addled brain cells (both of them) anymore, I'm afraid. Then the one right under that was about the pennant race in the American League East, and asked the musical question:

==========================
How do the Yankees stack up down the stretch?
==========================

Well, after the "stops continue" in the first one, this thing with the "stack up down" was just too much to take, and I simply had to throw in the proverbial towel and say enough is too much already. Oh, for those halcyon days of yore, when the wise old Editoriosaurs roamed the vast unformed land masses with their trusty red pencils, before they were all wiped out after the giant asteroid impact, so that nowadays, you can't pick up a newspaper without wanting to weep, not to mention, the wailing and gnashing of teeth that follows newsprint like a bad smell. Up down, indeed.

Now to be fair, it's not just the newspaper that is prone to these sorts of usage mishaps, not by any means. I recently noticed in the office supply catalog that the hospital uses (and please feel free to go right ahead and visit their web site at http://www.preferredbusinessforms.com/ and see for yourself) they had an entire section devoted to assorted modular products that you could assemble together in different ways to create office cubicles, reception areas, training centers, conference rooms and more. Well, anyway, at least I think that's what they were offering, because what they actually called this whole category was PANEL SYSTEMS AND DESKING SOLUTIONS. Inasmuch as "desking" isn't a word on any planet that I know of, and in fact, wouldn't mean anything in this language even if it was a word, I'm not exactly sure what they were trying to convey, but I do know that making up a word that doesn't exist, would in no way encourage me to spend hundreds of dollars on the thing, whatever it is, and that's not just a lot of chairing and bookcasing, believe me.

That reminds me of our friends at Glidden paint, and I recently saw one of their commercials on television, only to discover that their slogan is apparently, "Glidden Gets You Going." I admit that I have no idea what that means, or what concept they're trying to get across to me with that phrase, at least in terms of paint. I can see the point of U-Haul rental trucks having a slogan like that, or even as Bill suggested, Fleet enemas, you should pardon the pun. I could even understand if they came up with something like, "Glidden Gets You Started," in the sense that painting first might be the beginning of a larger transformation in a home renovation project, or perhaps, "Glidden Gets You There," in the sense of accomplishing your redecorating goals. But this "Glidden Gets You Going" idea simply doesn't suggest anything to me at all, of which paint could possibly be the answer, and in fact, about the last thing I would want from my paint would be for it to be going anywhere, heaven knows. Around here, we blame things like that on what we refer to as the "Horoscope Computer," where it uses actual English words, but arranges them together in a random order that means absolutely nothing. In fact, I'm surprised that it didn't come up with "Glidden Gets You Desking" instead.

Also having paint that's going somewhere, I know I'm not the only person in the world with a computer keyboard that the letters have worn off, so you can't read them anymore, and typing becomes even more of an adventure than usual. This seems to be less of a problem with the black keyboards that have white letters, although it might just be because those are newer, and haven't had as much use. But I find that on the old tan keyboards with the gray letters, it doesn't take long at all for the gray to become so faint and faded that unless you remember the keys from memory, you'd be hard-pressed to tell what is supposed to be where, so that even proficient typists find it more of a hit-or-miss proposition than it should be. It had gotten so bad on one of my computers that Santa took pity on me, and brought me some Glowing Keyboard Stickers from our friends at Funky Rico, who promise that their fluorescent keyboard stickers will renew worn out keyboards and reduce eye fatigue, especially in dim and semi-dark environments. I was glad to get them, and quickly applied them to what used to be the E - S - D - C - I - L - M - N keys, but which now were all blank instead. At the time, I was disappointed that the package only included one set of letters, so that I couldn't also use them on my other old keyboard, where basically the exact same letters had also worn off and were completely blank. But I was prepared to be content that at least one of my keyboards was once again legible, and had a full complement of keys that were actually identified, and could be read for the letters that they represented for a change. Unfortunately, it didn't take long - in fact, it was only July, so that's just a little bit more than six months after Christmas - before I noticed that, yes, the letters on the replacement stickers had also flaked off. so there was a solid white dot where the S and M should have been, with the C, D and N not far behind. So I guess that's an idea that needs to go back to the drawing board, or perhaps "ba_k to th_ _raw__g boar_" would be more like it, since the solution to the blank letters certainly didn't stand the test of time in any substantial way. Speaking of time, I wish I could stay here and blather, but I just read my horoscope, and it said that it said that this was a perfect day for me to go out desking.

Elle