Me Head

Thursday, June 19, 2003
4:42 PM by Michael Mason link

An Incomplete List of Written Notices Which Annoy Me
by Hilatron

1. In the produce aisle at the grocery store, the sign that reads "Bananas - Yellow and Green - 69 cents/lb." Do they really believe that green and yellow bananas are entirely different fruits, not just varying stages of ripeness. Are they trying to fool us, or themselves?

2. The yellow safety signs which read "Caution: Automatic Door." Just to be contrary, my persnickety and unforgiving internal editor chose to embrace the old yellow circles, which put the "Caution" in a black banner in the middle for emphasis:

Automatic
CAUTION!
Door

Now they've changed the word order so that it reads as an actual phrase, and I miss the old hysterical screechy nonsensical signs.

3. As you finish your transaction at my bank's ATM, you're instructed to "Please take your card, cash, and record." But these items emerge in the following order: cash, record, card. Why not list them in the real-world order, so that your eager fingers might hover before the correct slot? Is alphabetizing that important to them?

4. All notices painted on asphalt which are written backwards so that,theoretically, you see the words in order as you drive toward them.

LANE
FIRE
CAUTION

is how I read these, because they are always close enough together to see them all at once. This is not charming like "Automatic CAUTION! Door." It's just irritatingly patronizing, as though the road planners were concerned that we would say "Words, coming at us! I can only handle each one in turn as it hurtles under my wheels!"

5. The menu for a certain restaurant in Boston says, in big letters at the top, "Breakfast All Day!!!" At the bottom, it reads "Hours 7:30am - 2:00pm Monday through Saturday." It is my opinion that one should not claim to have breakfast all day unless one is actually open all day; redefining "day" to one's own specifications is just cheating. Somedays, I show up there at 5pm, drunk, banging on the door, demanding pancakes.

Tuesday, June 17, 2003
10:13 AM by J.R. Gast link

The drummer last night was a bulldozer, straight ahead, no stopping. He was bald and smoked. The waitress was Hungarian, we guessed Dutch. She had that kind of haircut.



Monday, June 16, 2003
1:07 AM by Brian McCloskey link

The Inner

Ten Ways To Celebrate Bloomsday:

• Prove by algebra that Shakespeare’s ghost is Hamlet’s grandfather

• Eat with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls

• Go to a funeral in a horse-drawn cab

• Accidentally tip the winning horse in a race

• Help a blind piano tuner across the street

• Stay away from your house so that your wife can have sex with her concert promoter

• Get chased from a pub by an anti-Semitic dog

• Masturbate during a fireworks display

• Discuss the philosophy of medicine with some drunken students at a maternity hospital

• Get into a fight with a couple of English squaddies



Sunday, June 15, 2003
8:03 AM by Michael Mason link

The Making of a Dad

So she walks up to me, all three and a half feet of her, with her hands cupped like nine year olds cup their hands, and she's happy. She tells me Happy Father's Day, and I smile and ask her what she's got, and she holds out her hand and I hold out mine, and she puts a ten dollar bill in my palm.

"It's for you," she says, all smiles.

"Ten dollars?" I say, a little confused, and wondering what I must've been teaching my child, that she gives me ten dollars instead of a coffee mug or a bad tie.

And then it hits me. This is all the money she has in the world, the first ten dollars she ever made from an official allowance. She knows what ten dollars means, and she let go of it, just like that, for her dad. For me.