Monday, June 15, 2009

Naming the family cars just got a little harder

What’s in a name? I assume that the naming of people, animals, boats, etc. became necessary when there came to be more than one of the same kind in a person’s domain.

If there were two girls in the family, something more specific than Girl was required if you were going to want to refer to just one of them. If a man had two horses, he had to name them if he were going to talk about them or to them.
There came a time in the history of the world, also, when it became expedient for man to name his cars. In the old days you said, “ I am going for a ride in the car,” as opposed to the bicycle, the scooter or the washing machine. There was only one car.

But when households accumulated more than one vehicle, it became necessary to differentiate between them. You could say you were going for a ride in the Ford unless you had two of them. Or you could say you were going for a ride in the white car unless you were partial to white vehicles. Or you could even be more specific and say you were going for a ride in the sports car.

But it is just more personal, creative and practical to give your vehicle an appropriate name. Then you are able to announce precisely, and to no one’s confusion, just exactly in which car you are going to ride.

It prevents annoying problems like running off in the car that someone else wants to use, or running off with someone else’s wallet, planner, lunch or lunch money that have been left in “the car.” (In the Butterbean family, car-hopping has nothing to do with Dairy Queens.)

The best names are clever, descriptive and concise. You can probably pass the naming duties along to the teen-agers in your family if you have been remiss or aren’t quite up to the task. They are clever. Just ask them.

If you are lacking in imagination, I am herewith passing on a list of witty car names along with a basic description so you get the idea. You should be able to take inspiration from this collection:

The Iguana is long and green with scales. The Pickle is also long and green, but with bumps. (Old, long and green is particularly stimulating to teenagers.)

The Gadget Mobile is equipped with every available option. The Rammer is one long, low muscle car. The Green Goose is a nearly-extinct Datsun hatchback. The Gray Ghost is back from the land of the dead.

The Rice Rocket is small and white and made in Japan. Orange Crush is a long-bed, heavy-haul pickup truck which is the perfect color for deer-hunting. The Dumpster has a dump-bed and is usually full of trash. The Twinkie is a yellow VW bus. The Marijuana Mobile is a van that is used to deliver flowers.

The Banana Boat is a yellow maxivan, and The Batmobile is the scariest car in town. The 8-1 refers to the truck with an 8.1 liter engine. You can see the advantage in not having to announce that you are going to drive “the truck with the 8.1 liter engine.”

You should be duly supplied with some inspiration now. Get naming while you have the chance. The spectrum of cars available for naming is rapidly getting narrower. There will be fewer kinds, fewer sizes, and fewer colors. What do you expect from government-issue?

You can forget names like Big Red, Black Beauty and Fast Eddy or anything else reminiscent of power, speed, or a dependence on gasoline.

But wait a minute, there would be greater challenge in naming cars when they are all carbon copies. Actually, I am getting into it already. What about The Sun Chip, or The Two-seater or Bioshock, or Bellybutton…no, I was not thinking of The Green Machine and neither were you.

My socks are one of a kind

Being as I wrote about shoes last week, I thought that I would move on up and report on the subject of socks. You may remember my fairly recent story about battling with the washing machine as well.

Although my washing machine didn’t quite eat one of my children, it does manage to regularly eat my socks. Fortunately, in recent years, it has not had to compete with a whole family of sock destructionists, which means that hanging on to socks is easier than it used to be.

You probably thought that socks were to be worn under shoes to keep feet warm and comfortable, didn’t you? My kids were quite inventive and devised a great number of alternative uses for socks which partly accounted for their disappearance, although they usually blamed the washer.

Socks can be used for grenades, footballs, baseballs, slippers, floor polishers, galoshes, skis, accessories for the backyard, sleeping bags for GI Joes, chewing materials for the dog, flyswatters, shoe trees, truce flags, kite tails and marble bags.

Fortunately some of those uses don’t necessarily require a complete pair of socks. However, when a kid needs a sock for a science experiment, he is not likely to look in the unmated sock basket. He is going to look in his sock drawer, and if he needs one sock, so be it.

Of course socks will come to sad ends that have nothing to do with being worn out under shoes when they are subjected to nuclear testing. And then the ones that aren’t blown up, chewed up, or dissolved, are just simply lost.
Lost! I am conducting my own personal investigation, and what I want to know is whether anyone has ever lost both socks of a pair. If you have I want to know about it.

Whose washer eats socks by the pair? My washer likes to consume one of this and one of that. The Butterbean demolition society operates that way as well. I never did see two GI Joes lying side by side in matching sleeping bags. It was rare that I saw real mates worn side by side on one kid’s two feet. Usually they wore the kind that “no one will notice they don’t match.”

Sometimes they wore the kind you would have to be colorblind not to notice they were mismatched. I used to select my kid’s school teachers based on their inability to distinguish colors. If there was one who was color blind, that was the one I wanted.

One of the dilemmas of life is deciding whether to throw away the remaining sock after the first one is lost, The alternative is to keep it, hoping the other one will turn up when the snow melts. But should you throw it out, its mate will turn up within the week.

By the same token, both socks of a pair do not wear out together. One day you will put your foot in one end and out the other of a sock. Close inspection of its mate, providing you can find it, will reveal a sock without a single blemish or a broken thread.

I fail to see how the “use it up or wear it out” adage applies here since it is kind of hard to use one sock of a pair at all in spite of what my grade schoolers used to do. So I tend to follow my own adage which is “throw it out and buy a new one (or two).” It took me a few years of squirreling away unmated socks to come around to that attitude though. I finally found that by the time I found the lost one I couldn’t find the found one.

One of my kids used to leave a pair of socks in his snow boots every time he took them off. I guess they just slid off more easily that way. One day he wondered why he couldn’t get his foot back in. That was when he pulled five socks out of one boot and four out of the other. He should try that with rabbits sometime.
So you see why there were never neat little rows of mated socks in their drawers—the washer did it.

If there ever were pairs in their drawers, those were the ones they wore outside in the rain or used to polish their shoes, which partly explained their range of color. My kids got to wear white socks once for each new pair. After that they could be any color.

Thursday, June 11, 2009

Need a simple character reference?

My kids think that they can tell all about a person by the shoes he/she wears. I think that someone once said that you have to walk a few miles in some of those shoes in order to understand that much, but I will allow that they are on the right track. Track.

They fully understand the importance of the right shoe to one’s social standing and relative well-being. I know because I have been shopping with them. Well, at the very least, shoes are indicative of one’s taste and style, not to mention one’s preferences in sports and exercise.

The shoe industry has certainly kept pace (pun) with every other segment of the fashion industry in terms of what it has to offer and to whom.

When I was a kid, we had two pair of shoes, one for church and one for everything else. If you had school shoes, they were just borrowed from one of those two categories and renamed.

Not anymore. Name a sport, and they make a shoe for it; which is good, I guess, if you have big closets and wallets. In fact, I challenge you to think of any activity for which they don’t make some kind of footgear. You might have to resort to catalogs or the internet to get them, but they are out there in abundance.

The name of your game is just one factor in choosing a shoe, however. You also have your image to consider. Say you need court shoes so you can sit around and watch TV.

Just what image do you want to adopt for TV watching? Something Kobe Bryant-ish; or maybe something a little more Tiger Woods, off the course that is, because golf shoes really wouldn’t be appropriate for taking in an “American Idol” segment.

Or say you need a pair for walking around in the mall. A comfortable pair of skater hightops would be just the thing. After all, you wouldn’t want to be sending out confusing messages. How my kids think they can tell so much about a person by his shoes is a mystery to me. Of course, I am rather uninformed and image-challenged.

At an outdoor theatrical production a few years ago, my daughters staked out positions right next to the flow of foot traffic so they could play their shoe game.

They lay on blankets on their front sides, and kicked off their own shoes. With their chins in their hands, they watched the feet go by. The object of the game was to see whether they can guess what kind of people have their feet in the shoes on review. Their whispered conversation went something like this:
“Oh look, this guy must be really cool. I saw his shoes in “GQ” (I don’t know why they read “GQ”), and they are so awesome. I wonder where he got them. Not around here for sure.” They all surreptitiously check out the wearer of the shoes.

“See, I told you he was cool.”

“And check these out. This guy must play basketball for U-state. They have their shoes specially-made, and no one has them just like that.” (I don’t know where she read that, maybe in “UQ.”) By craning their necks hard, they are able to take the guy in, clear up to his Adam’s apple.

“Whoa! I have to be right; he has to play for someone.”

“Hey look, this person is pretty cool. She has shoes just like mine” There was a tinge of disappointment registered in that announcement.

“Wait! They are mine!”

In stead of looking up to see who was wearing the shoes in question, she whipped her head around to see whether her own new sandals were still in the pile. They weren’t.
My daughter’s adult chaperone had quietly sneaked around behind the girls, put on her shoes, even though they fit like heck, and got in the line of traffic. All she had to do was keep on walking until she passed the gamers. (By then she was feeling really cool herself.)

My daughter was convinced that she was the first and only one in the Intermountain West to have sandals just like the ones she saw parading in front of her. For one bleak second she thought that someone else had found them too.

But that was only for a second. After she was satisfied that the wearer of the coolest sandals ever was not a usurper or the Intermountain Shoe Burglar in person, she steadied her breathing and was able to resume her position as “the coolest of all,” with her dignity and image mostly intact.