Two Years and Counting

I don’t how many of you realize this but we are celebrating an anniversary. I hope the time has gone by pleasantly and this will be looked upon as passing a milestone and not like passing a kidney stone. I am referring to the fact that my stint as a community columnist for the venerable Hutchinson News has now made it to its second birthday. My first column was published in June, 2007 and some 40,000 words later (I’m sure I used some of them more than once) our relationship is still stronger than Jon and Kate’s or Governor Sanford’s (at least with his wife) or the relationship between Amy Winehouse and reality.

I was not sure how to celebrate this occasion. I thought about asking for gifts, but realized that would be tacky. Maybe I could throw a party for my biggest fan, but my mother doesn’t really like parties. Then I remembered how Johnny Carson celebrated an anniversary on the Tonight Show. He would display vignettes from previous shows which were particularly entertaining.

I went through all my old columns and couldn’t find anything as interesting as Ed Ames performing a tomahawk vasectomy on a plywood cowboy or having a marmoset nest in my hair. Asking Joan Rivers to do a guest column was not an option worth considering and Jay Leno only works at ten, nine central, from now on so that wouldn’t work either. So, rather than recycle old material I thought I’d just throw out some material which I was not able to work into any of the previous columns but might be diverting none the less.

A couple of months ago there was a headline on the CNN website which read (I am not making this up, as soon as I saw it I wrote it down) “Beauty Queen Stumped by Confucius.” There’s a stop the presses newsflash if I ever saw one. A contestant in a beauty pageant has to confess she doesn’t understand the deep thoughts of an Asian philosopher from five hundred years before Christ. Truthfully, it would have been more of a paradigm shift if there had been an article describing how Miss Virgin Islands published her doctoral thesis on Cartesian dualism and how it is definitively shown in the collected works of obscure Japanese author Yukio Yamaha-Kawasaki.

At the risk of sounding like Andy Rooney, did you ever notice how some words just aren’t used except in particular phrases. “Disgruntled” is a perfectly good word to describe someone who is irritated but you never see it except in conjunction with a former employee who decides the severance package wasn’t good enough and returns to his cubicle with a Rambo-esque outfit including a headband using fabric ripped from the interior of his boss’s Lexus to get an extended COBRA plan. This reminds me that the word “spree” is only used with killing or shopping. You never hear of anyone going on an eating one’s vegetables spree or a working for the release of political prisoners spree or a preserving the ozone layer spree.

Not long ago I learned there is version of Supernanny on German television. This is how I imagine a commercial for this show would sound (except it would be in German). On this week’s episode of Der Uber Nanny we see Frau Bestrafen put little Heinrich and his sister Brunhilda in the naughty corner for trying, yet again, to invade Poland without permission.

A couple of years ago I was driving across town on the first truly cold day of the winter. I was stopped at a red light when a pick-up truck drove in front of me on the cross street. In the bed of the truck, standing upright, was large refrigerator. The freezer door was open and waving in the breeze as the truck headed down the road. It truly looked like this guy was out distributing the cold with his freezer-on-the-go like those trucks the city uses in the summer to drive around spraying for mosquitoes. I have no joke. I just really like that image.

Finally, I may have found my new favorite TV commercial. There is firm offering to pay you for your old jewelry. Do they simply offer top dollar or describe how this is a good way to get easy money during an economic downturn? Nope. This business is called Outofyourlife.com. They are serving the gold-digger with cash flow problems demographic. “You broke up with him. It’s time to break up with his jewelry, too.”