#326 Kask Master

Along the lines of the renaming for no apparent purpose phenomena that we talked about yesterday is the naming incorrectly because you didn’t think it through phenomena. The organization that comes instantly to mind is the Hands On Children’s Museum. A great place, a great thing to take your kids to. A name that conjures up issues. Not the least of which that they could never have Michael Jackson as a guest entertainer. I saw a similar thing the other day as it drove by. It was a bus, apparently a bus that went from place to place and entertained children with some physical activities, possibly gymnastic. This I figured out upon reflection long after the bus had passed. The first impression I got was different and due to the first reaction to the name provoked by my own checkered past. When we were in high school our field biology instructor would take us out to the desert in these old cheyv carryalls. They were the precursors of the panel trucks we see today. Each of them could hold about 9 students. There were three. The instructor drove the one in the lead and an older student drove each of the two following vans. My brother drove the third one. He was older. He was 16. My instructor missed his planned turn and whipped his van around suddenly. The van behind him stopped dead in the road. My brother swerved around him and went off the road. The carryalls had a high center of gravity, my brother’s van tipped and then rolled completely over twice before coming to a stop upright at the bottom of the embankment. I remember seeing my classmates faces distorted with panic as they rolled around inside the van. There were no seatbelts. This was, like, 1967. Everyone survived. Shaken, stirred, and a few of them puking from the freefall. My instructor was white as a sheet. He survived too. He continued to teach, the carryalls continued to go out on science expeditions, students, including my brother and myself, continued to drive. At no point was a lawsuit filed. So you can imagine the trip down memory lane my mind took when I saw the sign on the side of the gaily-colored bus. It said “Kids in Motion Tumbling Bus. Yes, my still traumatized mind said, when that bus tumbles there’s gonna be kids in motion all right.
And who was the brilliant wordsmith that came up with the name “wine cask” to refer to wine boxes? Granted the idea of wine in a box conjures up notions of Ripple. Somehow a waxed cardboard container does not scream premium vintage. And how do you sniff the cork? But calling it a cask? I’m sorry, a cask is something large, like a barrel, and made out of wood. Cardboard does not qualify. And telling a friend at a party to go pick up an extra cask of wine ain’t gonna fly. Sounds way too much like cask-et. Not an image that’ll keep a party rolling. America, ya gotta love it.