Wednesday, September 24, 2003
The Writing on the Wall
Things are intense for me these days - work is in its apogee season, bargaining is starting up again and I have to find some actuaries for “our” side, I have a head cold and my weekend will be substantially taken up with going to services for the cool holidays (I skip the other ones, but RH and YK are like a sauna for the soul). So here, to ward off my anxiety that anyone would visit the ‘hut and find nothing new under the sun of a given workday, here’s a few notes from my back-pocket notebook.
Heeding the example of my biblical namesake, I like to read the writing on the wall - any wall - and sometimes it makes no more sense to me than it did to that other Daniel. Read slowly, these have to last all day.
* Sign on the side of a worksite pickup truck: Shooter and Butts Landscape Contractors. 1) Sounds more like a plumber or maybe an outcall proctologist. Given these two principals, almost any other name would have been better. How about “Garden Party Landscape Architects?” “Brave New World?” “Open Trench?” Come on guys, if “Shooter and Butts” is the extent of your creative capacities, why would I want you deciding where to bed my lobelias?
* “Quickley Tapioca Drinks” has changed its name to “T & A Tapioca.” Now, I like tapioca as much as the next guy, if not more - I enjoy chewing my beverages, and fish eyes never tasted so good as when they’re floating in pureed watermelon and mango. But T & A is a misnomer. Everybody was fully dressed, and even the marischino cherries were covered up. I feel ripped off.
* Near T & A is one of my favorite shops, Kamei Housewares. Shopping there recently for a cherrypitter and a melonballer (yes I did), I noticed their dingy cornflower-blue refuse pail behind the register, looking tired and dirty and overfull. It’s got a crude but cute cartoon on it of two happy children on a patch of grass, big heads, big eyes, real insulin-shock stuff. Above them appears the following: In large letters, “GOOD”; and below that, in smaller printing: “I love all beauteous things. (/) I seek and adore them.” That’s a good lesson, trash can. Live the dream.
* And finally, for this morning anyway: a few days ago was “talk like a pirate” day, which I assiduously ignored, being the antisocial curmudgeon that I am. However, despite my best intentions, I couldn’t help misreading a budget proposal for “Outsourced Private Attorney Assistance” as “Outsourced Pirate Attorney Assistance.” I have so many good ideas about how to make this work that it scares me. Are these outsourced pirates, to help attorneys? Or Pirate attorneys, outsourced to provide assistance? Or maybe a plea for outsourced assistance for those overworked pirate attorneys? Even when I get the words right, I can’t help but pronounce it mentally as “Outsourced private attorney arrrsistance.” I think this project deserves a site visit. Hand me that parrot, will ya?
