I remember when "toilet-papering" was not a first-degree felony. It used to be a minor inconvenience or sometimes a godsend. Maybe we have come full circle with the toilet-paper thing.
Lots of things have gotten out of society’s collective closet in the past several years. My personal closet door still remains closed mostly, and I don’t intend to discuss what’s in there, but one thing I will talk about: those rolls of white stuff.
A generation ago, we sometimes carried a roll of toilet paper in the car’s jockey box, flattened under the owner’s manual, the registration, the extra fan belt, the Reader’s Digest and the eight-track tapes. Clear at the bottom, out of sight.
We carried it there just in case we got too far from home and what we politely called the little girls’ room, which is also one of those things that has come out of the closet. (Do I know what I am talking about?)
But it came out from the bottom of the glove box, and for a while there, kids carried a four-pack in the back seat of their cars just in case, while driving around, they found a likely house to toilet-paper.
"Toilet-paper" used to be a noun (well it still is, thank goodness), but somewhere along the line it became a verb meaning, according the Butterbean’s New World Dictionary, "the quaint practice of spreading toilet paper around someone else’s front yard, paying special attention to tree branches, mailboxes, basketball standards and other tall structures." Butterbean’s spells it with a hyphen since "head-hunting" was the first roughly comparable word that I came across in Webster’s while trying to decide whether it should have one.
This activity, I’m sure, contributed to the nation’s rising costs of toilet paper. In fact I’m surprised there weren’t real shortages. Wait a minute, there were—like in my house at ten o’clock on Friday nights. The grocery stores probably experienced a run on it every Saturday morning if not the night before.
On one Saturday night a few years back, I got caught without a square of it in the house. I could have sworn there was some in the closet. I couldn’t beg or bribe a soul to go to the store, so we went to bed hoping that we could survive without one of the necessities of life for just one night.
You might say that our prayers were answered. Come morning we had toilet paper growing on our trees. You just had to go out and pick some. By the end of the day we had cleaned up all of the manna and were wondering whether we had faith enough to skip the store run for one more day.
I think in the early days of the rise of the art of toilet-papering, being toilet-papered was supposed to be some sort of insult. But as time went on, it became a means of conveying all sorts of messages like: congratulations, good luck, I like you, you are a good old Joe who wouldn’t mind, or yours was the only house on the block whose light were out.
When I heard that people were toilet-papered, I advised them not to get excited, just to mellow out and settle for the "good old Joe" connotation or to not look a gift-horse in the mouth.
Whatever the intended message, or whichever way you used toilet paper, you had to be prepared to hide in the bushes so you wouldn’t get caught. If you got caught, it didn’t count.
And that was that. How something that harmless became a criminal offense, I don’t know. But it did. Toilet paper, or it’s unintended use, became the scourge of society, something the likes of which must be crushed and reconsigned to the closet, to sit there by its lonely self.
Saturday, February 23, 2008
Saturday, February 16, 2008
Dating—then and now
There is only one thing that dating in the "olden days" has in common with dating in the—what is this decade called anyway, the Thousands?—and one thing that is the phone. By "olden days" I mean back when I was in high school, and those days are admittedly pretty olden.
That decade was the 60s and was dubbed the "Swinging Sixties." That was the decade when words like "cool" and "rad" and "hip" were coined, and we were—or are. Just ask us.
Back then, when a boy wanted to ask out a girl, his first step was to use his friends to find out her name, and if possible, her father’s name. Then he consulted an obsolete publication called the phone book. After some study and some deductive reasoning, he could usually figure out which of the possibilities was the correct phone number for his prospective date.
He might call her number a couple of times, listen to the voice at the other end, and hang up, "just so he could be sure he had the right number." Actually it took a couple of calls just to find the nerve to actually talk to this girl. But eventually, he would call and ask to speak to her and when he did, he knew for sure that he was actually talking to a girl who was actually getting his message. If she wasn’t too standoffish, he would make conversation for a few minutes and then ask if he could call her later. By the way, the telephone was in the main room of the house, and the whole family would likely be listening to her side of the conversation.
Then after a few more calls he might really ask her out. Asking her out meant asking her to do something specific on a specific day and at a specific time, which was the time he would actually pick her up at her house. Being late was frowned upon by the girl, her parents, her siblings, and her entire extended family.
Most of the time they actually did what they told everyone they would, with only a couple of drags up and down Main for the sake of conformity.
Well, even now, the phone is the facilitator in the social life of—well, not quite daters—more like hanger-outers. In fact, if a boy wants to get to know a girl better, he needs only one thing: her phone number—that would be her personal cell phone number. If he has that, he has a foot in the door, presuming he wants to put down his phone and actually show up at her door.
So he texts her a message that on her screen looks like this: "WSUP TOY JW WTDSS? " which interpreted is, "What’s up? I was thinking of you. Just wondering, would you like to do something sometime?" This, by the way, is an enormous commitment for a guy cyber-dater. He usually waits for the girl to do the texting.
By texting, our guy doesn’t need to put too much out there on the line. If she doesn’t reply, he can think that she didn’t get the message, that she was indisposed, or that she didn’t get it until later because her cell phone battery needed charging. (Why is there not an acronym for that?) By the way, cyber-and wireless-daters are spared all kinds of anguish because they are never present to witness the actual response of the textee.
Providing her reaction was positive, she texts back, "OK SLAP" which means, "Okay, that sounds like a plan," which is a massive overstatement. "L8R" "See you later." She’s not much good at commitment either.
So whenever later is (I don’t know how anyone knows) boy calls, not texts, girl and says, "I’ll be over this afternoon; I’ll call you when I leave." He does…her number is in speed dial by now. "Okay, I’m leaving. I’ll be there in a bit. I’ll call you when I’m almost there."
If he gets caught in traffic, no one will mind; and guess what, he is never late. What they will do next is still a mystery to everyone, which goes to show that they seem to have mastered the art, or science, of virtual dating.
That decade was the 60s and was dubbed the "Swinging Sixties." That was the decade when words like "cool" and "rad" and "hip" were coined, and we were—or are. Just ask us.
Back then, when a boy wanted to ask out a girl, his first step was to use his friends to find out her name, and if possible, her father’s name. Then he consulted an obsolete publication called the phone book. After some study and some deductive reasoning, he could usually figure out which of the possibilities was the correct phone number for his prospective date.
He might call her number a couple of times, listen to the voice at the other end, and hang up, "just so he could be sure he had the right number." Actually it took a couple of calls just to find the nerve to actually talk to this girl. But eventually, he would call and ask to speak to her and when he did, he knew for sure that he was actually talking to a girl who was actually getting his message. If she wasn’t too standoffish, he would make conversation for a few minutes and then ask if he could call her later. By the way, the telephone was in the main room of the house, and the whole family would likely be listening to her side of the conversation.
Then after a few more calls he might really ask her out. Asking her out meant asking her to do something specific on a specific day and at a specific time, which was the time he would actually pick her up at her house. Being late was frowned upon by the girl, her parents, her siblings, and her entire extended family.
Most of the time they actually did what they told everyone they would, with only a couple of drags up and down Main for the sake of conformity.
Well, even now, the phone is the facilitator in the social life of—well, not quite daters—more like hanger-outers. In fact, if a boy wants to get to know a girl better, he needs only one thing: her phone number—that would be her personal cell phone number. If he has that, he has a foot in the door, presuming he wants to put down his phone and actually show up at her door.
So he texts her a message that on her screen looks like this: "WSUP TOY JW WTDSS? " which interpreted is, "What’s up? I was thinking of you. Just wondering, would you like to do something sometime?" This, by the way, is an enormous commitment for a guy cyber-dater. He usually waits for the girl to do the texting.
By texting, our guy doesn’t need to put too much out there on the line. If she doesn’t reply, he can think that she didn’t get the message, that she was indisposed, or that she didn’t get it until later because her cell phone battery needed charging. (Why is there not an acronym for that?) By the way, cyber-and wireless-daters are spared all kinds of anguish because they are never present to witness the actual response of the textee.
Providing her reaction was positive, she texts back, "OK SLAP" which means, "Okay, that sounds like a plan," which is a massive overstatement. "L8R" "See you later." She’s not much good at commitment either.
So whenever later is (I don’t know how anyone knows) boy calls, not texts, girl and says, "I’ll be over this afternoon; I’ll call you when I leave." He does…her number is in speed dial by now. "Okay, I’m leaving. I’ll be there in a bit. I’ll call you when I’m almost there."
If he gets caught in traffic, no one will mind; and guess what, he is never late. What they will do next is still a mystery to everyone, which goes to show that they seem to have mastered the art, or science, of virtual dating.
Monday, February 11, 2008
Butterbeanisms shed some light on life
A few years back, publishing books or articles on the various forms and usages of the English language was a definite trend. People gathered and disseminated collections of malapropisms, oxymorons, sniglets, typos, and palindromes, to name a few. All of them were up for grabs, and if you could collect enough of them for a book or an article, you were on your way. You could get rich just by fiddling around with English.
I also remember publications about various laws and axioms such as Murphy’s and Duffy’s, Some of them were hilarious.
As you can guess, Bertha has collected a few "isms" of her own. Well, barely enough for a column. A good share of them relate to children who never follow the rules and make up their own rules as they go along anyway. Here is the original unabridged assortment of Butterbeanisms:
• Little kids put their shoes on the wrong feet one hundred percent of the time. Forget The Law of Probabilities.
• Mine is always the car that is out of gas.
• If you can retain possession of both the right and left of a pair of socks for a month, you will have to keep them for the rest of your life.
• Kids always get sick on the doctor’s day off.
• If there are five things to do in one week, they will all need to be done in one day.
The probability of a kid losing his coat is directly proportional to the value of the coat. (They never lose hand-me-downs.)
• Picking up a flyswatter renders flying insects invisible.
• At any given time and in any one place, one or all of the following is missing: the scissors, the cellophane tape, the remote.
• Fruitcake happens. (Maybe this a just another way of stating Murphy’s Law.)
• The main drawback of a day planner is that first you have to remember where you put it.
• Never take a kid to town to buy candy; he either wets his pants or gets lost.
And just so you know, the ten-second rule was not coined by us but has been thoroughly tested in the Butterbean household, and in the process we have proved the validity of the "bread, when dropped, will always come to rest butter side down" axiom.
My compendium of wisdom is sure to push a little on the frontiers of human reason and scientific knowledge. Might even budge them a bit. What this planet needs is order and reason. I hope life makes a little more sense to you now.
By the way, feel free to throw the "if you saw it in print, it must be true" adage out the window if you haven’t already.
I also remember publications about various laws and axioms such as Murphy’s and Duffy’s, Some of them were hilarious.
As you can guess, Bertha has collected a few "isms" of her own. Well, barely enough for a column. A good share of them relate to children who never follow the rules and make up their own rules as they go along anyway. Here is the original unabridged assortment of Butterbeanisms:
• Little kids put their shoes on the wrong feet one hundred percent of the time. Forget The Law of Probabilities.
• Mine is always the car that is out of gas.
• If you can retain possession of both the right and left of a pair of socks for a month, you will have to keep them for the rest of your life.
• Kids always get sick on the doctor’s day off.
• If there are five things to do in one week, they will all need to be done in one day.
The probability of a kid losing his coat is directly proportional to the value of the coat. (They never lose hand-me-downs.)
• Picking up a flyswatter renders flying insects invisible.
• At any given time and in any one place, one or all of the following is missing: the scissors, the cellophane tape, the remote.
• Fruitcake happens. (Maybe this a just another way of stating Murphy’s Law.)
• The main drawback of a day planner is that first you have to remember where you put it.
• Never take a kid to town to buy candy; he either wets his pants or gets lost.
And just so you know, the ten-second rule was not coined by us but has been thoroughly tested in the Butterbean household, and in the process we have proved the validity of the "bread, when dropped, will always come to rest butter side down" axiom.
My compendium of wisdom is sure to push a little on the frontiers of human reason and scientific knowledge. Might even budge them a bit. What this planet needs is order and reason. I hope life makes a little more sense to you now.
By the way, feel free to throw the "if you saw it in print, it must be true" adage out the window if you haven’t already.
Sunday, February 3, 2008
The portable power problem
Well, my kids gave me an iPod for Christmas. (I have downloaded 61 songs, two podcasts, one audio book, three tv shows, and some text files.) With my cell phone, my iPod and my digital camera, I could possibly be described as a techno minimalist. Since there is a whole array of portable electronic devices such as laptops, notebooks, Bluetooths (or is plural Blueteeth?) Blackberrys (Blackberries?), and Iphones, that I don’t own, or even know precisely what they do, I am not anything like a junkie. It’s a good thing.
Do you know how many connectors it takes to run the few that I have? I would hate to try keeping any more little black wires than I have now untangled and together with their devices. And don’t try to kid me; "wireless" does not mean that a device comes without any.
But worse than that, since all of these devices are portable, they all have batteries that have to be charged using one or more of those little black wires. But putting the connectors aside, if I couldn’t spell, I would think that "battery" is a four-letter word. It seems to me that batteries are the weak link in the universe.
Think of it—my iPod could conceivably hold enough music to play non-stop for more than a week, which seems over the top considering I would have to charge it’s battery several times for it to play every piece. Suddenly, the thing is not so portable after all. You can’t get too far away from its home computer or its cradle.
My daughter’s laptop does amazing things, but it needs to charge for two hours so she can use it for one. That seems upside down to me.
And cell phones are more dysfunctional than that. Well actually they are incredible, but their batteries are weak (pun). They discharge even when you don’t use them. Did cell phone engineers say to each other, "I know how we can make a portable phone, and if we try really hard, maybe we can make a battery that will stay charged for a whole day."? If I were one of those engineers, I would be pushing for a month, minimum.
And if you think that digital cameras are going to be carefree, you are wrong. You have to worry about their batteries. Don’t expect to pick up your camera after a week and find that it will make pictures. It might not even turn on. What good is a pocket-sized camera on vacation if you have to bring along a backpack full of batteries to run it?
Electronics engineers try to get around the battery problem by installing bells, beeps, lights and bars to warn you that your batteries are about to die, but before you can hook up the respirator, they’re dead.
Father Butterbean has a fairly new battery-powered drill with a lifetime warranty. Well actually he is like most guys which means he has three of them. All of that is true except for one thing. He does have three drills and they all have at least one battery, and they all have warranties, but do any of them actually have power? Not enough to wind your watch.
They need new batteries. He has called every tool supplier in the Mountain West, checked E-bay and been to the Battery Store. (Yes, there is actually a store called the Battery Store. What does that tell you?) It seems that the battery for the drill with the lifetime warranty is out of print, so to speak. They don’t make it anymore. Granted, they wouldn’t need to make a new one if the old one did the job. But does anyone tell you this on your first foray into the world of portable power? The industry is probably afraid that you will figure out that batteries are really just a very poor solution to the power problem.
Does anyone besides me want to step on the Energizer Bunny? If someone ever finds a solution for the weak link of the universe and invents a battery with some real lasting power, I hope I am related to him/her. Can you imagine? Move over Bill Gates.
Tonight I called my daughter and said, "I’m writing about batteries this week. Do you have any good battery stories?" She started to tell me one, but her phone died.
Do you know how many connectors it takes to run the few that I have? I would hate to try keeping any more little black wires than I have now untangled and together with their devices. And don’t try to kid me; "wireless" does not mean that a device comes without any.
But worse than that, since all of these devices are portable, they all have batteries that have to be charged using one or more of those little black wires. But putting the connectors aside, if I couldn’t spell, I would think that "battery" is a four-letter word. It seems to me that batteries are the weak link in the universe.
Think of it—my iPod could conceivably hold enough music to play non-stop for more than a week, which seems over the top considering I would have to charge it’s battery several times for it to play every piece. Suddenly, the thing is not so portable after all. You can’t get too far away from its home computer or its cradle.
My daughter’s laptop does amazing things, but it needs to charge for two hours so she can use it for one. That seems upside down to me.
And cell phones are more dysfunctional than that. Well actually they are incredible, but their batteries are weak (pun). They discharge even when you don’t use them. Did cell phone engineers say to each other, "I know how we can make a portable phone, and if we try really hard, maybe we can make a battery that will stay charged for a whole day."? If I were one of those engineers, I would be pushing for a month, minimum.
And if you think that digital cameras are going to be carefree, you are wrong. You have to worry about their batteries. Don’t expect to pick up your camera after a week and find that it will make pictures. It might not even turn on. What good is a pocket-sized camera on vacation if you have to bring along a backpack full of batteries to run it?
Electronics engineers try to get around the battery problem by installing bells, beeps, lights and bars to warn you that your batteries are about to die, but before you can hook up the respirator, they’re dead.
Father Butterbean has a fairly new battery-powered drill with a lifetime warranty. Well actually he is like most guys which means he has three of them. All of that is true except for one thing. He does have three drills and they all have at least one battery, and they all have warranties, but do any of them actually have power? Not enough to wind your watch.
They need new batteries. He has called every tool supplier in the Mountain West, checked E-bay and been to the Battery Store. (Yes, there is actually a store called the Battery Store. What does that tell you?) It seems that the battery for the drill with the lifetime warranty is out of print, so to speak. They don’t make it anymore. Granted, they wouldn’t need to make a new one if the old one did the job. But does anyone tell you this on your first foray into the world of portable power? The industry is probably afraid that you will figure out that batteries are really just a very poor solution to the power problem.
Does anyone besides me want to step on the Energizer Bunny? If someone ever finds a solution for the weak link of the universe and invents a battery with some real lasting power, I hope I am related to him/her. Can you imagine? Move over Bill Gates.
Tonight I called my daughter and said, "I’m writing about batteries this week. Do you have any good battery stories?" She started to tell me one, but her phone died.
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