Where? Who knows.

I'm going through a stack of a couple hundred postcards I just found in a box downstairs.  They were originally purchased on eBay for the purpose of decorating my awesome vintage travel-flavored wedding.  I'm doing what I wanted to when I first bought them, but didn't have the time -- read through all the messages on the ones that were actually sent.  Here's a gem:

On the front: Photo of Radio City Music Hall, NY NY
Postmark: Not readable, but internet stamp dorks tell me that the FDR $0.06 stamp was issued in 1966.
Message:

Hi Mary, we got to N.Y. this morning about 8:30.  We went to the top of the Empire State Bldg. this afternoon. Stood in line about 1 1/2 hrs. Tonite we are going out -- Where? Who knows.
Love Mom & Dad

Can't you just hear the giddiness?

Update:  Mary appears to be on Facebook.  I think I may have just found a new obsession.  Let me finish sorting these, and I'll let both of my readers know whether I'm going to be Facebook Creeper Postcard Santa.

There's something in my brain

...that's (nearly) not on the Internet!  Does this constitute an emergency? Is there someone I can call? Am I under some sort of obligation to begin a Wikipedia stub article? This has never happened to me before!  I mean, if a fact isn't found on the internet, does it really exist?  I reckon I'll blog about it, and at least then it will be crawled and cached by Google's friendly little bots*.

I am the proud conservator and curator of thousands, maybe even hundreds, of nearly-useless facts.  Were I to categorize these facts into broad areas, I might go with "the natural world," "cultural oddities," and "crap that will somehow never come in handy in a pub trivia quiz, but will bubble up in an irritating know-it-all fashion when talking with friends."  For example:

• The correct way to eat asparagus stalks at a fancy dinner is to pick them up with your fingers.
• The Masai people of Kenya get a good portion of their protein by bleeding their cows and mixing said blood with milk. 
• The Wrigley Load

Now, I bet you were nodding your head while reading the first two things.  Sure, the asparagus thing makes sense, and anyone who took Honors Geography at Fullerton High School knows more about the Masai than about their own family.  But the Wrigley Load? Oh no.  Not on the internet at all, save for one mention in what appears to be a fiction novel.

I was yammering at Chris the other day about something, and I brought up the Wrigley Load.  He had heard me mention it before, but finally called me out.  "I believe you, but I'm going to need some internet backup on this alleged Load," he said.  Always glad to be proven right, off I went to the computer.  And... nothing.  Just the aforementioned book mention, in Turn of the Century by Kurt Andersen.  Based on his description of the Load, which is crap, I'd recommend against the book as a whole. You've seen the Load all your life on TV ads -- it's how marketing people decided gum should be introduced to a mouth.  To Load properly, one grasps an unwrapped piece of gum at one end, opens one's mouth just wide enough to receive gum, touches the free end of gum to one's lower teeth, then continues to apply inward pressure with the gum-holding hand until it bends double and disappears inside the mouth.  One is then contractually obligated to make big TV eyes and smile irrepressibly.

Anyway, I've known this move to be called the Wrigley Load for years now.  I have no idea where I learned this fact, but I will remember it long after I've forgotten my child's name (I will just refer to him as "Danger") and the year the Cubs won the World Series (2035, with H. Arehart on shortstop).  I now present this Juicy Fruit commercial, which was ubiquitous in the 1980s.  It generously features the Load at :08, :17, and :22.  You will be humming this stupid song for the rest of the day.  You're welcome.


Juicy Fruit.  Available where you buy groceries.

*Who, in my mind, look like the Nanites from MST3K.

"La la la!"

WHYYYYYYY????

My child started napping sometime earlier this morning.  Based on previous nap experience, I expected him to awaken shortly after I finished folding a bunch of laundry.  But he didn't.  Figuring he'd still probably wake shortly, I sat down at the computer to participate in the internet for a while.  Still nothing.  Then, it dawned on me -- ZOMG I COULD STUFF LUNCH IN MY FACE.  GO GO GO

Normally, I would be using this space to complain about how a completed ham sandwich, sitting on a plate, is what activates a napping child.  And then I'd be all, WHYYYYYYYYYY?  But in this case, I stuffed said sandwich in my face and he's still asleep.  I'm certainly not complaining, and I don't think I'm gloating either.  It's more like I don't know what to do with myself right now.

This must be what it feels like to work in an emergency room on a day when nobody comes in.

A long way from home

You know you're not in LA any more when you turn on the local evening news on a holiday weekend Friday and see a perky reporter doing a live standup from the side of the packed freeway.

That's right, they sent out a news team and satellite truck to do a report on traffic.

You'll be surprised how this post ends with obsessing about corn syrup.

Sometimes, there will be a little marketing catchphrase that gets my attention in such a way that once I've heard it, I'm incapable of focusing on the product at hand.  These little phrases have clearly been focus-grouped to within an inch of their lives, and with the assistance of millions of dollars to boot.  Obviously they're effective, else they wouldn't be used so damn often.  Once I tell you which one I'm thinking of, start listening for it in commercials and in print ads -- I bet you'll hear or see it at least three times in the next week.

"Powdermilk Biscuits, made from whole wheat raised in the rich bottomlands of the Lake Wobegon river valley by Norwegian bachelor farmers, so you know they're not only good for you, but also pure, mostly.  Look for them in the big blue box with the picture of a biscuit on the front of it.  Available where you buy groceries."

First of all, my apologies to Garrison Keillor for implying that the noble Powdermilk Biscuit company would stoop to using such vacant ad copy as this.

Second of all, how on earth did "they" decide that "where you buy groceries" was the best way to encourage people to look for and purchase the item in question?  It's the sort of non-specific framing that might accompany a general-audience mention of religion.  "Your place of worship."  That makes perfect sense, since just about everyone's got one, but they're called lots of different things.  But "where you buy groceries"?  I don't know about you, but I buy groceries at the store.  The grocery store.  Sure, you might call it "the grocery," "the market," "the food market," or even, improbably, the "grocery food market store," but I'm sure nobody would be too confused with any of these interchangeable terms.

Now, if they'd prefer to go with the also-popular "available in the _______ section," I'm with them.  How much of your life have you wasted wandering through the aisles at the place where you buy groceries, looking for one thing that you've never bought before and have no idea where it lives?  The manufacturer of the product is really helping out in this case.

Pop quiz --  where in the place where you buy groceries do they keep the corn syrup?

Corn syrup quiz answer:  Next to all the pancake syrup.  I know that's wrong because nobody should be putting corn syrup on their pancakes.  This is not 1950, everybody.  Please move the corn syrup to its rightful location with the rest of the baking ingredients.  I recommend just beneath the shredded coconut. Yeah, bottom shelf is fine.  Great.  Now take this pricing gun and go mark up all the junk food sky-high, and make healthy stuff dirt cheap.  Now run, because Big Corn's a-coming for us!!!

Funny story -- I went looking for an old corn syrup ad, one that shows a scrappy young boy pouring clear gooey corn syrup all over his hotcakes, and found this instead.  It turns out that in 1910, 101 years ago, we still had to be told where to buy things.  But you'll notice they just go with the most common sense approach.