#670 Yer Moniker

What’s in a name?
Apparently a lot. I read an article a while ago about “what to name your baby” books being among the most popular bestsellers out there.
There are even baby naming consulting services available. Special name-ologists, armed with reams of data, purport to guarantee their selection for your child’s name will lead him or her to success or fortune, or maybe just help them avoid being teased on the playground.
Now if they only add the numerological equivalents of the letters, throw in a little horoscope, and check the bumps on the baby’s head, every contingency should be covered.
Sadly, I’m pretty sure the person makes the name and not vice versa. Aloysius of Gonzaga got the Saint nod not because of his sure-to-be-picked-on-in-the-locker-room name. He made the name worthy of affixing to a big church by what he did.
But names do seem to fall into certain patterns. The other day we were separating a bunch of mail-in coupons and three names popped up in succession.
I wonder if you can figure out which the oldest person of the threesome was—Brandi, Tiffany or Phyllis.
That’s right, Phyllis it is.
Do you know anyone under 50 named Phyllis? It ought to have worked its way around to cool again. It starts with a P-H- and all, like the fat that’s not fat, phat.
So here’s a conundrum for you—or should I say co-name-drum? Why is no one nicknamed Steef? Spelled like and sounded like beef.
You should spell it S-t-e-p-h. Because it would be short for Stephen. Except when you spell it that way, most people think its short for Stephanie and pronounce it Steff.
But no, we always shorten Stephen, spelled S-t-e-p-h-e-n-, to Steve, spelled S-t-e-v-e-. From whence cometh the V-? It’s not short for stevedore. It’s short for Stephen.
And even though we pronounce Stephen with a V, unless we’re French or German and pronounce it correctly with a F, it still ain’t there in the word.
So it should be Steef. A perfectly good word for a name but never, ever, used.
Nicknames are funny that way. Maybe we should just call everybody the universal nickname.
Chip.
America, ya gotta love it

#669 Yucky Shaver

The other day I was pretty upset.
I found out something that I didn’t expect to find out.
I got this fortune cookie and the fortune said, “Your luck has been completely changed today.”
It really worried me, because my luck’s pretty good.
I mean, I have so much to be thankful for, a great job, great friends and acquaintances, lots of positive projects and organizations to be involved in. And now my luck is going to change?
Stupid fortune cookie.
I thought they were only supposed to give out good, upbeat fortunes. I don’t go to a Asian restaurant to have my paranoia about an approaching cataclysm of providence inflamed. “Your luck has been completely changed today” indeed.
Well there’s one thing I know I won’t have to be worry about being lucky enough to ever get.
A $250 electric razor.
As a bearded fellow, my entire shaving experience is reserved for a small portion of my neck, but if I did get one as a gift, I’d take it back for the cash. $250 is way beyond my acceptable price point for a shaving device.
It’s just not that important for me to be smooth.
I can live with a little bristly stubble if the alternative is me or someone else shelling out 250 bucks. I don’t care if it is a “Braun Pulsonic.”
Yep, it appears to be made by the same people as the kitchen appliance Braun.
That’s why when I first saw the ad for this I thought it was a new coffee maker. Maybe injects pulses of super-heated water through a special filtration system to deliver the perfect acid-free brew.
$250 might be an acceptable expenditure for a good cup of coffee.
But even though Braun promises in their ad that “...pulsonic technology provides over 10,000 micro-vibrations per minute to help expose and shave more hair with every stroke” my penny-pinching neck still finds 250 bucks hard to swallow.
I do wonder a bit about the possibly defrocked scientists laboring through the night in some top-secret lab developing “pulsonic technology” in time for the Christmas season...
I mean, think of the implications of micro-vibration enhanced shaving to the establishment of peace on earth.
Talk about a change of luck.
America, ya gotta love it

#668 Yammer

Time to yammer and meander along the track of my mind again.
I’ve learned a few pearls of wisdom in my life, whether or not I ended up throwing them before swine, and one is that you should never, ever, bid on the grow lights at the police confiscation auction.
There are some things that are just plain dumb.
A possible corollary to this is, don’t drive around with the inside of your old Subaru wagon filled with smoke, a bumper sticker that says “Buy Hemp Products,” and not bother to notice you have a tail light as burnt out as you appear to be.
Of course, people like this are probably not going to follow such advice, they’ve already gone so far down that road of obliviousness the rest of us wonder if we share the same species designation.
Except insofar as, by and large, just being human means we are capable of an astonishing amount of self-delusion.
Take belief. It requires no grounding in reality or facts, although when the two occasionally coincide, facts and belief that is, the coincidence, while doing nothing to change the fact, makes the belief twice as strong.
At least so it appears from my own personal state of ignorance and self-delusion. I admit I have quite a few dim bulbs in the indoor farming operation of my brain.
Other people see lots of things I don’t. I’ve never been able to discern the fine line between a cult and a religion for instance.
Once you make the leap of faith how do you stop? Leaping is, by its very nature, an experience of leaving the ground. The control of if or when you come back down has been surrendered.
How do you suddenly say, okay, that’s too much faith—that’s just plain crazy? A goddess with six arms who’s in charge of both creation and destruction? Fire and brimstone blazing and a seven-headed beast destroying the world? Eight tiny reindeer?
Like I say, I’m not sure where the line is.
Then again, back in my track days, I never did well at the broad jump. I was always more of a runner than a leaper.
Cast out pearls are easier to find when you’re closer to the ground.
America, ya gotta love it