Tag: humor

State of the Reunion

Reunion is just another way of acknowledging that you’ve reached another milestone in your life where it is time to revisit what was. This past summer, some people from my high school class decided to put together a forty year reunion (how can than be if I’m only 39?) but in another country. There were only forty-eight of us back in 1970 when we graduated. And even with such a small number we had cliques. Having the so-called celebration overseas was another way to maintain the clique facade after so many years. So you can imagine that less than half our class showed up showed up.

A friend got a hold of the pictures from the weekend and passed them along to me. I was surprised to see a certain fellow who had a mound of hair when he was seventeen turn out to now look like Kojack. There was one female classmate I did not recognize at all while another looked old enough to be my grandmother.
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Shoplifting For Dummies

Calling someone a shoplifter is a polite way of calling him or her a thief. A robber usually breaks into a place to steal goods or money. Or he or she may have a weapon that they threaten to use. But a shoplifter doesn’t enter a place illegally, doesn’t use a weapon or threaten anyone. So, he or she cannot be such a bad person after all, right? Maybe they are desperate for something and don’t have money or they have a compulsion to want to get caught. That’s often the case because they do it out in the open.

Of course, there are professional shoplifters who are not desperate or have a compulsion or want to get caught. They just want to take without paying for it. Sometimes they take from other shoppers such as when my niece put her purse down for two minutes in a dressing room at a store to go to the entrance of the area and look at the three-sided mirror. When she returned her purse was gone. By the time her mother called forty-five minutes later to report stolen credit cards, the thief had already gone to another store that was a twenty minute drive away and used it to make purchases.
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Who Said Youth Must Be Served?

Go type into a search engine box “who said ‘youth must be served’?” You won’t get the answer you’d expect. Instead of showing you several links to the story behind the origin of this saying, you get various news articles about giving in to the young generation. It seems no one wants to take credit for such a remark.

Is there a court of law where you certify famous quotations and the objectivity to which they hold? If so, I’d like to object and offer my competing truth.
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Overtures

Funny how words in the English language take on a different purpose from generation to generation. Take, for instance, the word “overture”. It is used quite often as an expression to start the ball rolling in negotiations. Everyone seems to be chasing rainbows and looking to cut a deal. “Let’s make an overture” usually means “let’s indicate interest to the other party so that we can make an offer that they will not refuse.”

There was a time when “overture” served an entirely different purpose. It was mostly used to describe the beginning portion of a musical performance. It was intended to provide a nurturing effect in getting everyone to their seats, relaxed and prepared to watch a movie or concert. In the 1950’s and 60’s, when movie musicals were still very popular, a film would contain several songs that would be familiar to the audience before they even went to the theater. If you went to see a blockbuster film such as “Oklahoma”, “Carousel”, “South Pacific”, “West Side Story”, “The Music Man” or even a drama with a moving score such as “Exodus”, you’d expect to be entertained with short segments from many of the popular musical numbers.
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American Idol Worship

Years ago watching The Ten Commandments movie, I learned that an idol is something that people worship that gives off a false promise and/or sense of security. The believer is sure that the idol is something better than it really is but eventually he sees that it does not deliver on what it promises. He also gets discouraged when he discovers other false idols are just as powerless.

american idolTen years ago American Idol burst forth on the television scene as a talent show for singers looking for overnight fame and fortune. Each contestant had a dream that they would become admired by millions all over the world. Other than last year, the setup was for three show business personalities to judge the ever-shrinking talent pool each week.
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Chinese President Hu is On First

Chinese leader President Hu Jintao made a historic trip to the United States this week to meet with President Obama and members of Congress. On Wednesday, Obama and Hu held a joint press conference that developed unintentionally into an Abbott and Costello routine. For whatever reason translators were not made available who could provide almost simultaneous translations of both presidents statements as well as answers to reporters questions. One would think that if the United Nations could do it, so could the White House. Instead, President Obama was surprised when after giving an opening statement for what seemed like ten minutes, a Chinese translator gave an equally long harangue to the straight-faced Hu. A couple of minutes into the translator’s talk, Obama cut in and apologized to the newsmen present that he had no idea that this was going to be the protocol.

When Hu spoke, Obama looked askance and tapped his ear, making a motion that he was clueless as to what was being said but to his credit showed patience to wait as did the rest of the audience to finally find out its meaning. And when a reported asked Hu why he seemed to be evading answering a specific question, Hu replied that he didn’t even know it was being asked of him.

I can imagine a reporter in the back of the room turning to another and asking, “Who’s speaking?” and the other fellow replying, “exactly”. Which reminds me of the time I first came face to face with a live Asian when I was a teenager in the mid 1960’s. Until then, the only ones I had noticed were Charley Chan and his number one son in the old movies shown on television as well as Fuji, the cook and erstwhile captive on McHale’s Navy.
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Welcome To The Hotel Florida

So, which is it- California , Florida or Arizona? When a person gets to that point in life where he is thinking of spending less time in cold climes, he looks into where to buy that winter condo. Lots of serious thinking goes into that decision-making.

Come December, most Chicagoans would rather be anywhere else that has a temperature above 50 degrees, no evidence of snow and regular sunshine. As for me, I still have fifteen years left on the mortgage payoff so I guess I can deal with the winter blahs.

Then again, the only time I visited Florida, I was not so impressed. Back in 1975, in my early twenties, a buddy and I drove there. Actually, he did all the driving because it was his father’s car and he did not want me to touch the steering wheel. We went in late August as the motel prices were supposedly cheapest then. We found out why. It was unbearably hot.

Chicago can be hot and sticky during July and August as well, but Florida has a sneaky type of heat because you don’t feel the humidity. And you get that Caribbean blast. Not only that but staying on the beach-front in Miami, it can be quite sunny and dangerous to the skin and the next thing you know a rain shower comes down without any warning. No dark, ominous clouds. Then after a few minutes of getting drenched, it stops just as suddenly. You also have to worry about coconuts falling out of palm trees as you stroll down Collins Avenue. Who needs this?

I am told that during the winter it gets down into the high thirties at night and up to the mid sixties during the day. That’s nice but not enough to get me to pack my bags. I hear that they don’t know from heaters so the natives wear their clothes to bed at night.

What’s the big winter attraction in Florida- DisneyWorld in Orlando? My buddy and I went there just a couple of years after it opened so the Disney folk had not yet bought up a lot of the land near the theme park. We were able find a cheap efficiency apartment a mile or so from the amusement center and took in the place. In order to see an exhibit that took no more than ten minutes to view, we stood in line for an average of forty minutes. Try doing that six or seven times in one afternoon. Who needs this?

Not only that, but we were tortured with continuous playing on the sound system of that diminutive classic- “It’s a small, small world, after all”. That’s what they should have used on the prisoners of war at Guantanamo Bay to make them talk.

And another thing. Hurricane season in Florida is anytime it feels like it. A unit owner in my condo building up north also has a winter condo in Florida. He told me a couple of years ago that the condo association down there assessed each unit owner an extra twenty thousand dollars as their share in bringing the building up to hurricane-resistance code. Who needs this?

I’m done with my Florida bashing. I can’t speak much about Arizona other than the half hour I waited one winter day in the Phoenix airport while I changed planes. It did look sunny outside and I’m confident that there were no hela monsters or lizards crawling about the airport terminal. As for California, what’s an earthquake between friends?

Impatience Management

Your honor, I admit I’m an impatient person and don’t tell me I have to control my anger. Just please listen to the facts. It’s about the frustration of dealing with idiots who don’t know how to use a self-service checkout at a supermarket. They stand there staring at the device trying to figure out how to pay. Or how to weigh the produce or input the correct quantity of apples purchased. Or how to find the proper description of the item if there is no scan-worthy bar code. They stand there scratching their head instead of asking for assistance. Like the one attendant for six self-service machines is going to volunteer to
walk over and accomodate them- yah right? Even the five other people in line with me applaud when I make a comment.
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This Drives Me Angry

Psst… as long as my editor is not looking over my shoulder, I’d like to discuss a real pet peeve. He wants me to stick to topics that draw interest mostly from people who have angst about getting older. Heck, I think we all do. The guy who is twenty thinks about how mature he is going to have to act when he turns thirty-five. The gal who is forty with kids contemplates whether her future grandchildren should call her grandma, some other derivative or by her first name. She is also planning revenge on her own kids by spoiling the follow-up generation. Those in their late fifties and early sixties wonder if it makes sense to buy the burial plot now while it is cheaper or let the surviving relatives worry about it.

Back to my peeve. It’s about the jerks who drive their car while holding one hand on the steering wheel and the other on their cell phone attached to their ear. And they are doing this while going thirty miles an hour in a forty mile an hour zone- in the left lane. I want to yell at them, “stay the _____ home.” Or “hang up the _____ phone.” Or “pull over, _______.” You can fill in the missing blanks. My dander is up because these morons don’t give a ______ about being fair and decent to anyone else. It’s all about them. Their excuse, of course, is that it is not illegal in certain areas. But, that still doesn’t make it right.

In the City of Chicago, it is illegal to drive with the phone in your hand pushed against your ear. Trust me, it is probably the most ignored law by both the motorists and the cops. Fines range from $100 to $500. But, that does not seem to scare drivers from doing it. Some suburbs also do not permit driving and talking at the same time but unfortunately most have not enacted such a law. Even in the suburbs where distracted driving is not illegal, it is still a crime to do so while driving through a school or construction zone that has temporary speed reduction.

I’m not even bringing up a worse crime- texting while driving. The State Of Illinois issued over 7800 citations for distracted driving in 2010. From the number of violators I’ve observed this past year, this seems low- an average of a little more than 20 a day. Maybe some cops are too distracted themselves stopping off at doughnut shops.

It got me to thinking if there is a generation gap going on with this issue because I rarely see a senior citizen committing such a heinous crime. Some will say that’s because most of them cannot figure out how to even use the buttons on their cellphone to make a call. The seniors I know- ahem- mostly just take incoming calls. Less of a hassle. My mother accidentally discovers missed calls days after they were displayed on her cellphone desktop. Or she will call me and mention that she is returning a voice mail message I left. I tell her that I did not leave her a message. She then tells me that I indeed did. I then have to tell her in a nice way (yah, sure) that I left the message the previous week.

Forget about her creating or adding to the address book. She has me append any new entries for her. I still think she types the entire number in when she wants to make a call regardless.

This is the same lady who brags that she has an email address and once sent one out just for fun to prove it. What she forgets to mention is that:

a. she doesn’t have a clue as to what her email address is or where it is
stored or how to retrieve any possible waiting for her because-

b. she hasn’t checked her email account since the day she created it on her granddaughter’s computer.

Gotta go- my editor is coming around the corner.

The Three Stooges

Living down the block from school as a kid in the late 1950’s and early 60’s enabled me to come home early enough to catch some quality afternoon tv for children. This was before the era of do-gooders trying to offer diversity-based educational stuff like The Electric Company or Sesame Street. We did have early education staples such as Ding Dong School with Miss Frances and Romper Room (“I see Jimmy and Mary and Bobby”) but a lot of it was electronic babysitting.
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