Suzanne Olsen's Humor Blog - I don't offend some of the people most of the time

Month: December 2009 Page 2 of 4

Party Hugs

We had a gathering at our house tonight to celebrate Christmas and our birthdays. We invited a couple of new friends who had never been to our house. I introduced one man to my brother, and he said, “Which one of you two is the oldest?”

This is a very slippery slope to start down. One of us is obviously older. If it’s the female, then she’ll take it as a compliment and you’re in the clear. But you only have a 50-50 chance of it being the female. If you’re wrong, then you’d better duck and cover, because as they say, hell hath no fury like a woman you’ve just insulted about her age.

This is an easy mistake not to make. Just don’t ask such a stupid question. Ask, “Where did you grow up?” or “What do you do for a living?”

But enough about this, I need to talk about my cake. You know that hideous cake I made yesterday – the coconut one. Oh my sweet goodness was it tasty. It was so moist and just perfectly doused with coconut. Not one pinch too much or too little. I decorated it with turquoise icing and wrote, “Happy Birthday to Me and Scott.” My husband and I have very close birthdays.

Even with a ring of turquoise icing and writing on top, the caked remained ugly as a wall-eyed kangaroo, but it had a massive trustworthiness about it that invited you to partake of a little nibble out of pure curiosity. Once sampled, people were taking big old slices. I’m very happy it turned out tasty.

One fun thing about parties is that people drink a lot and loosen up and get silly. I didn’t drink too much because every time I poured a glass of wine I’d set it down and it would disappear. I probably went through two bottles of wine and didn’t get a buzz. I didn’t get much food for the same reason.

But some of my girlfriends were drinking enough for me. The things that come out of their mouths! They talk about other women’s boobs – about them sagging, or being perky, or showing too much cleavage, or having no cleavage to show. Boobs really are a good conversation piece for women at parties. I wonder if men talk about any part of their anatomy at parties. “Hey, John, how’s it hangin’?” “Well, it was hangin’ to the left but lately it’s a little more center, ha ha.” “Did you see that guy in the black pants? He looks like he’s got a dishtowel in there. What’s up with that?” “It’s not real.” “How can you tell?” “I just know these things. Trust me, it’s not real.”

Somehow I don’t think guys do that, but who knows.

Well, I’m pretty worn out. Parties, even small gatherings, are a lot of work. All that cleaning and vacuuming so people can grind crackers and grapes into your carpet, spill red wine on your kitchen floor, and shatter your favorite glass into a radius a half a mile wide so everyone has to stand still while you get the broom and spend the rest of the night sweeping up all the tiny slivers. In fact, sometimes I wonder why I love having parties, but I know I had this one because of that Christmas song that goes something like, “We need a little Christmas, right this very minute…” In this stagnant, downturned economy when everyone is just hunkering down and riding out the storm, I wanted the people I love and make me happy around me. I got a good dose of seasonal kindness and a whole bunch of hugs because people decide they’re leaving and give you a hug, and then they get distracted and a half-hour later they’re still there trying to go home so you get another hug. Hugs are good for the soul, and I’m happy as an otter in the water I’m going to bed now and dream of sugarplums.

Baking My Own Birthday Cake

It’s my birthday in a couple of days so I just finished making myself a coconut cake. When I was a kid, there was a little corner grocery store down the street that would get boxed coconut cakes in at Christmas time, and they had this hard icing Santa in the middle. My parents would always buy one of those cakes for me and stick some candles on it and that would be my birthday cake every year. Part of me didn’t like the Santa thing in the middle – nobody else had a Santa on their cake – they had balloons or confetti and flowers. On the other hand, that was pretty darn good cake and the only one I wanted.

This thing I made tonight is an atrocity. It is 16 inches across and about 6 inches tall because some friends are coming over to help me celebrate and I thought everyone would want a piece. I put coconut in the mix, and put coconut in the frosting: a total of two and a half bags, with each bag being 14 ounces. That’s over two pounds of coconut. Lord have mercy – the thing is lethal!

The frosting was too thick to spread, so I watered it down but got carried away. Why is it that you can add a few drops of water to thin something and it’s almost perfect, then you put one drop more and it gets runny? This happens to me a lot.

When icing is too soft, the top layer won’t stay put. It wants to glide sideways. I know this from experience. My cake isn’t doing that, though, and I think it’s because all that coconut is giving it some traction. I used two boxes of powdered sugar and two sticks of butter, and one whole bag of coconut, and there still wasn’t enough frosting to cover it. Brown cake is poking through. I think I put too much in the middle, but I needed some extra because the bottom layer looks like a dome and I was trying to fill in. I don’t know how you make a cake be flat. That’s why this cake is so tall.

Anyway, I saved a little of the frosting to decorate it, and maybe I’ll take a picture of it. My plan is to position the decorating to cover all the bare spots. Some of the icing on the top was easing down the dome and cracks were starting to form like mini San Andreas faults all over the top when I last checked it. I’m hoping sitting overnight will harden it up some.

Sorry for rambling on about this behemoth of a cake. If it tastes okay, and people eat it tomorrow night and get heart attacks from all the oils and other bad things, can I get sued? I’m going to ask my guests to sign a release before they can have a piece.

Writing Christmas Letters Is for the Dogs

I talked a little yesterday about how hard it is to write Christmas letters. But not as hard as it is to read some of them. I can’t understand why people write them in the 3rd person. You know the person who is writing them is someone in the family. They didn’t hire someone else to do a one-page history of the last year.

For example, if there are four people in the family, the writer will say, “Joe decided to get chickens, Lucy is in 9th grade, Jamie broke her leg, and Rebecca has been busy with her new company.” So who’s writing the fricking letter? If it’s some third party, there should be a by-line somewhere, like:  “2009 Christmas Letter About the Jones Family” by Bob Smith.

Some of these letters go off the deep end. Pam, who must be the writer of one letter because she’s a single mom and you know good and well the 3 year old didn’t write it, says, “Pam has been busy with her job and a toddler. She is hoping to get a promotion so that she can work fewer hours and be able to afford to stay home more. Pam gets very tired sometimes, but she wants to be a good mom and do a great job so she just keeps plugging along. Pam would like to win the lottery or at least find a rich husband, ha ha.”

If you’re writing the Christmas letter for your family, please just say, “I have been busy.” It’s so much easier to plow through.

Here’s something else, but I know if I write it I’ll make some big stupid typo here, but it can’t be helped. Why won’t people read their own letters? They must just pump them out and stuff them in the envelope without a second glance. When I read through their letters I feel like taking a red pen and circling all the errors.

This doesn’t really bother me that much; I’m just struggling to find something to write about. I could mention a TV show I saw yesterday called, “The Science of Dogs.” It really was interesting. Assuming that dogs come from wolves, you’d think they’d have similar behavior, but they’re different in one important way. Dogs use humans to get what they want. When I saw this, I realized just how smart my dog is.

They had a dog and a wolf, and the wolf was raised as a pet so it had always lived with people and wasn’t wild. They tied a piece of meat on a string and put it in a cage, and both the dog and the wolf figured out how to pull the meat out of the cage by tugging on the string. Then they tied the meat down inside the cage but still put the string on it so it looked just like before. The wolf went straight to the string and started tugging, and when the meat didn’t come, it kept tugging, dragging the cage around and getting frustrated. Then they brought the dog in. It tugged on the string exactly twice, then backed off and looked up at the human with this perfect dog face and these eyes that said, “I can’t do it, please help me oh kind sir, and do it quick.”

I have seen that look on my dog so many times it made me laugh out loud. My dog likes to throw balls in the air and chase them around. She thinks she’s going to entice me to play with her by doing this, and sometimes it works. If I’m too busy to play right then, she’ll manage to roll the ball under the couch where she can’t reach it, and she gives me that look. If I’m not looking at her, she’ll bark a particular bark and sit and look toward the couch until I come in the room and ask what’s the matter. She just looks at me, then looks at the couch with that exact TV dog look until I lay down on my stomach and fish that ball out from under the couch.

That dog uses me for all kinds of stuff. She wants out, I get up and let her out. She wants in, I get up and let her in, then she wants out again – all in the space of three minutes. That dog has me wrapped around her finger and I’m on demand to do her bidding anytime day and night.

What that has to do with Christmas letters is this. Maybe it’s not a 3rd party writing those letters; maybe it’s the family dog. I think I’m going to train my dog to type. She’d probably have some pretty good tales to tell. “Yeah, I got Suzanne on her belly six different times today. She’s such a sucker. You’d think she’d learn and just quit doing it. I laugh so hard I puke, which she promptly cleans up and starts talking to me in that stupid baby talk she thinks I like, then asks me if I have a bellyache and slices me some cheese to settle my stomach. Ahhh, a dog’s life is the only life for me. ”

Spinning Christmas Letters

I finally got my Christmas letter done for out of town family and friends. These used to be a lot easier to write when the kids were little and doing funny antics. You could ramble on and on about the baby’s first steps and it sounded so cute. Now it’s a struggle trying to spin your teenagers’ behavior into something that won’t embarrass you.

Take my son, for instance. He has spent two and a half years at the University of Oregon trying to attend every known party on campus. There’s not a lot of learning that goes on during these occasions, unless it’s studying ways to beat your opponent at beer pong. I believe in my heart that he would move heaven and earth to get to a party on time and be one of the last to leave.

Ah, but that he could muster that same tenacity and dedication when it comes to his classes. Those, apparently, are functions to avoid at all costs. Perhaps he thinks that would be bad for his reputation to be seen in a classroom, much less taking notes or answering a question.

I am poking jests because to do otherwise is to collapse into a heap of tears at what a failure I am as a parent. We just received the official letter from U of O saying that they are disinclined to have him come back to school at this time. He may take a year and attempt to improve his grades anywhere on the planet but there, at which time he can reapply.

I don’t know if I should be writing about this. He’ll kill me if he ever reads my blog, which could happen if Hell freezes over. I guess I was trying to make the point that it’s harder to write these Christmas letters as you get older.

I’ve received a couple of letters with reports about how many people have passed away since last Christmas. This is not happy holiday reading, but I guess people feel compelled to share things that are important to them.

Oh my gosh, speaking of sharing. I was at a neighbor’s Christmas party last night and had worked pretty much the whole room except for one girl in her mid-twenties wearing a black and white mini dress and socks with some kind of clunky sandals. Woo-whee! I started talking to her at the buffet table where we discovered we both ate soy burgers. “But they make me fart,” she confessed. “I ate a whole package of soy burgers and then went on a date to a movie with a guy, and I couldn’t stop farting. I farted all through the movie.” Her eyes were getting big and her voice more animated. She obviously enjoyed this topic. “It was weird, though, he never said anything.” I was thinking that he was probably being slowly asphyxiated. “He never asked me out again.”

Well, du-uh. I hate people who pass gas in close places where you can’t escape.

Anyway, she starts in on another really gassy experience she had with baked beans, and I was…aghast. I never fart in public, though I may not be quite so kind with my family. Still, I am discreet, and I sure don’t talk about it to strangers at parties. But that’s just me.

As I was saying, I agonized over my Christmas letter this year, trying to spin it a little so that one child didn’t come across as an under-achiever, and the other as an over achiever. At least neither of my children farts and talk about it at parties. Maybe that’s what I should have said. There is always a silver lining, as they say. They also say, Beans, beans good for your heart, the more you eat the more you…toot. The girl at the party also confessed that she was a dog walker, which is the perfect profession because she can fart out in the open air all day. Just imagine! She gave me her business card, but I’m probably not going to call – my dog is averse to gas. She’ll jump off your lap and literally leave the room if you let one slip, which is pretty amazing for a beast that spends half the day with her head between her own back legs. Quite frankly, I find it a little insulting.

Well, I think I’ve said about all I can say on the subject of Christmas letters.

YouTube Homework

I was at the high school tutoring today, and I’m nursing a headache from all the noise in the library. I sat at a table situated behind a bank of computers and helped my favorite student with his economics assignment. He left for a few minutes to key in the changes I suggested on one of the computers.

As I waited, I could see ten computer screens, and most of the kids were surfing the net. One kid was looking at different cell phones on Verizon. The rest were watching YouTube videos. Kids started gathering around one of the screens to watch a video game. They started getting pretty animated, and I saw the librarian get up from her desk and head toward their direction. Just when she was almost close enough to see what was on the screen, up popped a writing assignment. She looked at the screen and made a very educated guess that they were probably not getting all that excited about a Word document. She shooed everyone away, and kicked the kid off the computer. He gave her a bunch of lip but got up and left.

We didn’t have computers in my library, but we did our share of goofing off. We entertained ourselves with looking at naked people in anatomy and medical books, passing notes, or doodling—anything to avoid homework. These kids have a different medium for wasting time, but it’s still the same typical high school behavior.

As soon as the librarian walked away, YouTube magically appeared on the kids’ screens. One guy had a game on. The game made it appear that you, the game player, were walking along looking down the barrel of a machine gun hunting for people to shoot at. You were wearing an army camouflage shirt. Someone popped out from a doorway and fire flashed from the end of your gun while you repeatedly blasted them. A bunch of boys gathered around the screen, mesmerized. They weren’t actually playing the game; they were watching a demo video of it.

I was waiting for my student to get back, so I got up and went over and stood with the crowd. “What on earth are you watching?” I asked. None of them looked up, but they all answered, “a video game.” How they knew I wasn’t the librarian, I don’t know. I guess they could still see her out of their peripheral vision. “Are you actually playing the game?” I asked. “Naw, it’s just a demo.”

There was a pretty good crowd forming. You, the video soldier, continued to blast people. Although it was definitely animation, it had a fairly realistic look to it. One time the blasted guy was pretty close to the “camera” and the screen got splattered in fake blood. “Oooo that’s gross,” I said, but they were murmuring, “Cool!”

“Doesn’t this make you want to go out and kill people?” I asked. “Naw, it’s just a game.” I persisted. “Don’t you feel anything watching this?” And they responded like zombies, “Naw.”

“We used to play Pac Man where you blasted little alien things,” I said. “This is Pac Man 2” one of them quipped. I went back to my table after a couple of minutes, bored and scared the librarian would come over.

I’ve decided that it isn’t much different than when kids pretended they were in the old west and made their fingers into guns so they could blast each other. This was the high school version of that. I don’t approve of it, per se, because it’s violent and I don’t like violence. On the other hand, I remember reading that book, “All Quiet on the Western Front” when I was in high school and I could visualize those war scenes as if they were real. I can still see them in my head. At least you knew this was a game.

The librarian came back over and the kids scattered like a bag of marbles dropped on a concrete floor. Up came the Word documents just in the nick of time. She walked over to me and shook her head. “They watch a lot of YouTube,” I said. She glanced at the screens, “I’m going to get some monitoring equipment so I can see what they have on their computers,” she said.

She’s going to get an eyeful.

Holiday Cards and Christmas Spending

I ran a bunch of errands today and had my Christmas cards printed – got a great deal at Macadam Documart and they did a really nice job – just a plug because I almost feel guilty because they treated me so well.

But I’m not here to be nice or friendly, I’m here to make fun of the world, or at least report the funny things I see, and one of them was the checkout line at Fred Meyer today. I bought some stamps, but the cashier was short one book so I had to wait at the end of the checkout counter until someone went to Siberia to fetch it.

While I whiled away the hours, I noticed people checking out. They glance at the cash register to see if the checker is catching all the sales items, looking at their checkbook on the little stand and back up at the subtotal, as if the checkbook is talking to them and saying, “We can’t afford that, don’t you know there’s not enough money in here?”  Older women pay in cash and wait until the cashier gives their total before they fish their change purse out of their deep, dark handbags. Men play pocket pool and rattle change as if to say, “I got your money right here, baby, and there’s plenty of it.”

Except for one really tall guy who had a lot of anxiety about the whole ringing up process. He literally had his hand over his face and was looking through the fingers like you do at a scary movie. He kept peeking out, watching as item after item made its way down the conveyor belt and across the scanner. I can only imagine what he was thinking. “If I don’t look, maybe it won’t go over $100. Holy crap, it’s at $106! I can’t look!  I have to look. WHAT? $114? How can that be???”

I can sympathize. I’ve asked cashiers to double check prices because I’m astounded at how only a few items, barely enough to cover the bottom of a grocery cart, can add up to seventy-nine bucks. Did someone throw a diamond ring in there when I wasn’t looking?

I read something interesting the other day about spending during the holidays that made me fighting mad. Yes, I was spitting and clawing. If there had been curtains anywhere in my house, I would have scratched them down. You know that lady in the Sunday Supplement (in The Oregonian it’s called “Parade”) who has an IQ so high it makes Einstein look like a Teletubby? Here name is Marilyn Vos Savant (no relation to director Gus Van Sant), and someone wrote in last Sunday asking what percent does holiday spending in December represent of the total US economy. Mz. Vos Savant says that it’s only ¾ of 1 percent. A mere blip on the economy barely visible with a high-powered electron microscope. If that’s the case, why do they hound us to buy buy buy earlier and earlier and earlier?

I won’t ramble on about this topic because I’ve done it before at length, and you’re lucky I remembered I did it before because I’d be launching off into a tirade like a rocket to Saturn. This is a pet peeve, and I have lots of peeves but this is one of very few I call pet.

So I finally got my stamps – which, at 44 cents a pop are about 70% of my gross December income once I buy enough to send out all the cards I had printed up. I got such a good deal I guess I over-ordered. I’ve never met you, but you will probably get a Christmas card from me this year. In case you don’t, I’ll tell you the clever poem I wrote. If you read yesterday’s blog, you’ll know that I took a picture of my mini-gingerbread houses for the front of the card. On the inside here’s what I wrote:

We downsized our gingerbread houses

Because of the economy

But we hope you’re enjoying this season

With high spirits and good company!

Merry Christmas and a Prosperous New Year!

Well, at least it rhymes (this line isn’t in the card, but maybe it should have been).

Buyer Beware: Gingerbread Houses

On Sunday we decorated gingerbread houses. It’s a longstanding family tradition even though 50% of my children refuse to engage in it anymore. They loved it when they were little because they could eat all the candy they wanted while we decorated. They invited their friends over and it was a big gorge-fest. They also took pride in the actual decorating, because there was a little bit of competition to see who could make the most appealing house. Some years I baked the gingerbread from scratch. This was when Martha was preaching to us that we could duplicate our own house so easily with gingerbread, and I, like a lot of other suckers, fell for it.

When you’re a hyper stay-home mom, you do these things. My friends and I, at one time or another, baked bread, make cakes from scratch, canned fresh produce, and took our kids to parks and parades and “outings” constantly. None of us have anything to show for it because our teenagers are as surly and ungrateful as the working moms’ teenagers, but I’m getting off the subject, which is gingerbread houses.

I came to my senses and started buying those packaged kits; we assemble them now with a hot glue gun rather than the icing, which took forever to dry. No one eats the things – they rank side by side with fruitcakes as inedible holiday fare. Although one of our friends came over and started plucking candy off the roof of the gingerbread house one year. I had to slap his hand. Twice.

Last year I was really thrifty and bought some g-bread houses on sale at half price to use this year. They weren’t the normal Wilton brand that I’ve used many years, they were a brand that stands for candy and has two names that both start with W and had a movie with the same names starring Gene Wilder first and then a remake starring Johnny Depp. I do not want to say the actual name because I’m afraid I’m going to get sued.

This particular brand of g-bread house came in a very large box with lots of candies on the front. We opened the boxes and found them full of….(suspense!) green plastic molding that sequestered the candies into little compartments and had one small section for a baby g-bread house. Now maybe the makers thought this was a full size house, but that would be like saying a Barbie doll’s house was like a real house.

Furthermore, some of the g-bread was cracked into pieces. That could have been from taking it out of the grocery cart and putting it into my storage area where it sat and did nothing for a year until it was removed from it’s safe place and opened.

We got out the hot glue guns and went to work patching the sides so that we could assemble the houses. Once that was all done, they fell apart. There is some magical coating on these houses that makes them impervious to glue. By the time we got the houses to be freestanding, we were too tired to decorate.

But we pressed on for the sake of tradition, and opened the bags of icing that came with the kit. My daughter squirted a little on her finger to have a taste, and it had a revolting brownish tinge. Luckily we had some leftover frosting from another kit and used that. The brownish color could have been because the icing was old, but I’m not so sure, I wouldn’t put anything past these guys.

Anyway, we had pretty much lost interest in the whole affair by now, but we at least put nice roofs on the houses. She used Necco wafers like shingles, and I sprinkled some of the colorful bits of hard candy that came with the kit on my roof. The rest of it we slapped together willy-nilly just to get them covered with candy and say we were done.

One bunch of candies included in the kit were little yellow banana shaped things – now there’s a Christmassy color. Instead of nice greens and reds, everything was pastels or bright oranges. Luckily we always buy tons of red and green M & M’s and other seasonal candy to sprinkle around the houses to make them more festive. Plus the loose candy keeps most normal humans away from the candy on the house (except the one exception mentioned above).

So that’s my tale of woe about this year’s gingerbread houses. I took a picture of them to put on my Christmas card, which for some stupid reason I think I have to make from scratch even though it takes hours and hours. I really need to see a psychiatrist. That will have to be one of my New Year’s resolutions. Along with not buying big suspicious boxes covered in candy just to save a couple of bucks.

Gingerbread Houses 2009

I Photoshopped the crap out of this to liven it up.

Post-operative Ramblings

I had oral surgery today and so I have been sleeping all day from painkillers. But I have to write something for today so I don’t miss, so I’m going to ramble about nothing. What do you mean all my posts are rambling about nothing? I have subjects and topics. Why would you insult me while I’m down? What is this world coming to?

For your information, I have been laying (or lying) on the couch all day suffering with a bag of frozen peas on my face. Do you think that’s fun? Well, do you????

Just because I’m a very positive person on occasion, and this is one of them because I want you to feel guilty, I will share that I’ve also been watching reruns of lots of very funny movies like The Blues Brothers and Hot Shots, Part Deux. I think Hot Shots is one of the best movies ever made because there’s some new dumb thing on the screen every twenty seconds. Like when Topper Harley says to Ranada (or Renada), “You must be joking,” she says back, “If I were joking I would say: ‘A horse walks into a bar and the bartender says, ‘Hey, why the long face?’’”

I had to put all those extra quotation marks because that’s a quote within a quote within a quote, just so you don’t start pointing fingers and saying I’m making typos, which I can do all on my own without your help, thank you very much.

The Blues Brothers is good because of all the music. Like the scene where Aretha Franklin tells her husband he can’t go off with the Blues Brothers and starts singing, “You better think (think) think what you’re trying to do to me (think!) Think (think think)” and so forth. Now these aren’t typos either. That’s pretty much the lyrics as best as I can remember them, and I hope I don’t have to get permission to use them because I feel like I’m going to throw up. Excuse me while I grab my barf bucket.

That’s better. So while Aretha is singing, some girls get off their bar stools and start dancing in being backup singers. Other people in the diner join in, and even the Blues Brothers. It’s one of my favorite scenes in a movie. And I think I misspelled scenes somewhere above but I again feel the need to barf. Must be the oxycodone, or the laying around or… I gotta run.

Awful Gadgets

This is a short article that was published in the technical section of The Oregonian newspaper. They had asked people to write in with complaints about any gadgets, and just the word “complaint” made me rush to the computer. A photographer came out and took my picture, which was just awful because I was wearing braces on my teeth for a bite problem and couldn’t smile. The photographer coaxed me into smiling anyway and took the most hideous picture ever seen by mankind – and for some odd reason that’s the one the paper published.

Here’s the short story about my awful gadget:

A few years ago I bought a Sony IC recorder and a Dragon Naturally Speaking voice recognition program to dictate my book.  I thought I could put on the headset while I was doing mundane tasks around the house and dictate the conversations that my characters were always having in my head – Nobel Prize stuff that I never could remember when I got back to my computer.

The quality of the recorder was great, but because it was so compact, Sony had to use small, multi-function buttons and toggle switches with descriptions I could barely see.  I’d have to consult the manual regularly, which was frustrating and stifled my creativity.

Also, I found that those fantastic conversations my characters were having didn’t translate well to dictation.  If I didn’t focus completely on the dictating, my recording sounded like this:  “and, ah, then uh, Sarah said, uh, uh.” I couldn’t make a bed and talk at the same time, apparently.

In addition, the old Dragon Naturally Speaking program had a hard time with my accent.  I was raised in the south, where simple words like “milk” or “bread” are spoken as two syllables:  “Mee-ulk” and “bra-yud.”  Dragon Naturally Speaking translated many perfectly coherent sentences like this: “The end we win end to the store or…” (Then we went to the store.)  They’ve improved the program substantially since then, but not before I gave up.  I typed the book, which took considerably less time and irritation.

I still have the recorder and bring it out occasionally to see if my accent sounds more Oregonian.

TV Worth Watching

Talking about weather people in my blog yesterday made me recall one weatherman I really liked in Fort Myers Beach, Florida. I spent a summer there during college, and there was a weatherman who was named Dave (or Bob), who gave his weather report like any other person would do, drawing circles around hurricanes with some kind of TV chalk and telling about the temperature. At the end he’d take the piece of chalk and toss it high in the air, and it would hover up there forever. Meantime, he’d open the pocket on his shirt and catch the chalk in it. He was keeping a record of his successes and was on day 350 or something. We tuned in, not to watch the weather, which was pretty much the same – hot and humid with showers between 2 and 2:15 – to see if this guy broke his record or missed.

That’s television worth watching. Another guy I used to love to watch was a used car salesman somewhere around Knoxville, Tennessee. I spent a lot of time there with friends, and this guy’s commercials would come on and we’d drop everything to watch him. He was some fusty dealer from the outlying area – some town you’d never go on purpose. I can’t remember his name, but he’d stand out in his used car lot and talk really fast so he could showcase a few cars in 60 seconds. He’d stand to the side of some souped-up car, and the words spilled out of his mouth like marbles from a bag: “I got this 1972 GTO, possy traction, four in the floor. $1995.” Then he’d kick the car’s back wheel and say, “Get that som bitch outta here.” The driver screeched out laying rubber and another car zoomed into its place, breaking with another screech and practically throwing the driving into the windshield. “Now, here’s a nice family car,” he’d say, “a 1969 Vet.”

We laughed our asses off, and it was because he was so funny, and not for any other reason college-aged students might have found things that weren’t particularly funny extremely hilarious. I don’t think he ever actually said, “Som bitch” because that was before trash talk, but he mumbled it in just the right way that it’s what we all heard.

None of us bought a car from this dealer. We were driving beat-up Volkswagens. But if we had been in the market for a vehicle past its prime that was loaded with worthless options, he would have been our man.

I’m going to have to Google used car dealers in Knoxville and see if he’s still around. Probably not. Some marketing genius, or one of his college educated kids, most likely convinced him that he needed to change his image and become more upscale. But it just goes to show that we get opportunities all the time in life to enjoy what’s going on around us if we open ourselves up to what’s there. In spite of a bleak world, there’s always something going on that can raise the corners of you mouth – one corner anyway.

If I can think of any other TV personalities, I’ll write about them later. But for now, I’m looking out the window and seeing ordinary rain has returned to Portland – not freezing rain as highly touted all day and night on every forecast within the Portland viewing area and beyond. Who would have figured the weather people would get yet another impending storm wrong?

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Copyright © 2021 by Suzanne Olsen