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I know I give myself away as being old when I reminisce about the old days when the strangest candy out there was ‘Runts’. These were fruit shapes. People eat fruit. This made an odd kind of sense.

I remember bone shaped candies. But at least mammals eat bone shaped treats . . . okay, that’s stretching it, and so is the old fabled ‘ring-pop’. At least in my mind, these aren’t as far out there, or as gross and disgusting as the candies on the market today.

It all began when my kids asked ‘How do you blow a bubble in bubble gum?’

No problem, I can blow a bubble that when it pops will require me to cut hanks of hair! I thought surely I could teach two kids to blow a bubble. But there was a problem: you can’t find bubble gum on the shelves today. Okay, there are a few out there. Extra makes a pink bubble gum in a stick. But this alone took three drug stores and a WalMart before I found it. Where is the packet of soft, chewy cubes in grape and watermelon and the occasional mint? These make the best bubbles because they were designed for it! They don’t hurt your jaw. They have a scent that you will radiate for the next three hours.

These gums are no longer at the checkout. If you want them, you’ll have to go online. Really. What you will find at the checkout lines is . . . well, it’s gross.

First, there’s the old-fashioned lolly-pop. But just in case America didn’t have enough of a problem with childhood obesity, these suckers now come with a motor that rotates the pop for you. Wouldn’t want those kids to mistakenly burn off a few extra calories swapping the sucker from side to side. Thank goodness, this problem has been solved.

Suckers are big business. There are the lipstick shaped, because that’s just so tasty. The pacifiers, because . . . well, for the life of me, I can’t figure this one out. In that same vein, there are bottle shaped (as in baby-bottle) treats that have a sucker nipple and a bottle full of little pacifier candies. *sigh*

Even worse is the tongue shaped sucker. Some of these even come with motors in the sticks. It may taste like candy, but it will traumatize you for life with nightmares that you are being attacked by Gene Simmons of KISS.

I admit I did find some other gum there at the checkout in WalMart. But I didn’t tell my kids about it. It was in a small tin with a fliptop lid and the sticks were shaped like . . . band-aids. Yes, bandage shaped gum! Excuse me while I retch.

At least, if a person puts a pacifier or even a tongue in his mouth he won’t catch horrid diseases from it. It’s stupid, but not dangerous. But bandages? It’s hard concentrate because my stomach is rolling. Even if the bandage-gum tin has a smiling bandage-gum on the front telling us the sticks come in grape, watermelon and sour apple.

It was so close to what I had been looking for. The classic flavors. I can handle that they aren’t in the standard cube shape. But I cannot get past the band-aid look.

Of course, the irony here is that if the thought of bandage gum is causing you to make a really bizarre face, then you are the adult.

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We’re all familiar with this three word phrase, but is it really good? As instructions go, it’s rather unclear. Lather what? Where? Whom? Yes, technically, it says what you do, but it still leaves much to be desired. Maybe this is why even this familiar phrase is often dumped in favor of picture panel instructions.

You’re familiar with these: the series of squares with little stick figure people depicting what you are supposed to do, because ‘lather, rinse, repeat’ has gotten beyond us. In some places, the panel series is handy. Last week, when I put a ceiling fan together, the pictures were far more helpful than the little labels and ‘bolt A, nut B’ written directions. A picture can say a thousand words and it’s worth it when the ceiling fan in question has so many parts that they gave up on standard notation and went straight for hexadecimal.

But in other cases, I’m not so sure. The Axe deodorant company is everyone’s favorite maker of cheesey ads, and I want to say that no one I know has ever touched the stuff. But . . . well, I can’t say that. It seems fitting that these purveyors of all things overdone have ditched the standard ‘lather, rinse, repeat’ is favor of the picture panel. There are only two pictures on the back of the body wash. The first depicts the outline of a man with a washcloth and a lot of lather. It appears he is rubbing the lather on himself.

This makes sense! And it even answers the earlier questions. Lather whom? He of the washcloth clearly lathers himself. Where? Well the little panel shows him with suds all over. That’s great! But why the second picture? Because the second picture goes way beyond ‘lather, rinse, repeat’. It shows the same grey outline guy (sans suds) with a curvy red outline chick hanging on each arm. Oh, yes. Axe has raised the bar to ‘lather, rinse, get laid by twins’.

This isn’t the only place for panel picture instructions. A friend of mine brought back a neat item from his visit to Poland. To be truthful, I’m still not certain it wasn’t a joke. He had a Pepsi can with a four panel display on how to open the can. Four panels. FOUR! It had to have been a dumb Pollock joke, but they were selling them in Poland. Still, I laughed until I had to cry.

I had another incident with these panels as well. You have to start with the fact that I grew up in the ‘town that built the bomb’, so you understand that what I asked my father wasn’t out of the realm of possibility. Upon arriving at my Dad’s house I said that I thought I had seen a missile truck on the road in front of me on the drive into town.

My Dad immediately asked, did the top of the truck have a barn-like roofline? Yes! I wondered if they were all like that and Dad said, yes, wasn’t that how I recognized that it was a missile truck? But I had no clue that all missiles were hauled in trucks of this telltale design.

Nope – as I passed the truck on the winding road, I saw the four panel picture instructions. (Really, I did.) Figure one showed a stick man pushing the button on the back of the truck bed. Figure two let me know that would open the barn-like roof and raise the missile. Figure three showed how to input the coordinates, and four depicted the launch.

It was a shame I didn’t have any coordinates on me, I could have set it off right there on the side of the highway. Now I get the idea that the picture panel is there to help us – to make tasks easier. But I don’t think I like the idea of everything being easier. I don’t think we need any fool who runs across one of these trucks to be able to launch the missile. I just don’t think the world is ready for the equivalent of ‘lather, rinse, aim’.

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Some of us are turtles in life. We go down the highway without a need to arrive anywhere in any great hurry. Some of us are speed demons – there is no where that can’t be gotten to faster. I personally think that being faster is an evolutionary advantage. Some of us may have mutated out of it, but most of us still act like there’s a saber-toothed cat chasing us down the freeway at seventy miles per hour.

Like most of us, I feel the need for speed but wind up falling somewhere in the middle. I admit to having days where the sky is beautiful and I am just out running errands on no real time frame . . . and I’m pissing off other drivers who do have a place to be. And other days those lollygaggers had best just get the heck out of my way.

Like most others, I am not committed to the speed limit for the sake of the law and I don’t fully understand the speed limits. That 55mph that still exists on most freeways was installed to help stem the fuel crisis of the Seventies. Hello? Seventies over. Fuel crisis no longer the same issue.

Now some claims say that it’s far better to go slow, that you can save up to 33% of your fuel bill by simply driving the speed limit. Part of that is true – if you drive 60 miles in one hour then turn around and drive back the same 60 miles in two hours you will use less gas on the return trip. But if you want to shave a full 33% off your gas charges you’d better have been going 90mph the vast majority of the time and then you need to slow it down to 30mph. Keep in mind, too, that anything you save on your fuel bill is likely to be offset by the medical bills from that heart attack you’re going to get.

Aside from the stress of being on the road twice as long (and therefore twice as likely to be in a car accident?) and the fact that everyone is zooming past at twice your speed, is the issue that you can actually get a ticket for driving too slow. Yeah, that’s embarrassing.

For the truly eco-conscious, there’s the bicycle. But one guy who pedaled his way across the country pointed out that it was really fuel-INefficient to do this. The extra food he had to eat to power his bike all those miles every day was far more expensive than gas would have been – and he was a lot slower.

In the end, I’m in favor of some speed. There are sections of freeway in the country where the posted speed limits are 85. What a glorious day it was when I first saw that. Mind you, those limits are out in the back beyond of Texas and if you make the mistake of driving those roads after dusk be prepared with some aspirin for that heart attack – the night limit is a full twenty miles per hour slower. Ouch.

Still, as good and fun as it is to be fast, and as much as I can argue that I’m on the road less time and therefore less likely to be in an accident, there is one rule to follow – Don’t be the Rabbit.

I learned this one in high school. The ‘rabbit’ is the car that everyone else follows. And it’s usually the one pulled over. But not always. The real trick is to find a rabbit and follow him, but at a slightly slower speed. This, of course, means your rabbit is going to lose you after a little while, but it also usually means that you don’t wind up getting pulled over and ticketed along with your lead dog. Let the rabbit take the ticket and the embarrassment of the shiny, flashy lights. Because if you get pulled over there isn’t much you can do at that point.

A friend of mine who recently moved here from India was enjoying her new freedoms and out tooling around in her new American car. She tucked in behind a chain of speed demons and enjoyed the wind whistling through her American made window for all of five minutes. Then the blue lights came on and the cop pulled her over. When he asked her to roll down the window the conversation went like this: “I wasn’t going as fast as they were!” “But you are the one I pulled over.” “Why? Your car doesn’t go fast enough to catch them?”

Oh, Alka. That was a bad idea. But within the first week she, too, learned to use the rabbit wisely. Let someone else have the joy of being the fastest on the road. Someone else can enjoy traffic school on a sunny Saturday. You might wind up eating their dust, but they can eat the ticket!

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I know I’m not the only one who has these feelings about emergency service vehicles. I am not alone, even though many days on the road it feels like I am the only one who seems to care if the ambulance can get to the place it’s going.

I confess, there is a mean, mean part of me that hopes the ambulance is headed to the house of that truck driver that’s refusing to move over and let the big, loud, flashing cube pass by. Unfortunately, I am forced to acknowledge that my fantasy scenario hurts some poor soul who is already suffering by having to live with that schmuck rather than really punishing the driver.

The rules are simple: when any flashing vehicle comes near, you pull to the side and stop. No, they aren’t supposed to have to go around you and no, it doesn’t matter that the other side of the road is clear. Don’t people understand that if you do anything other than come to a stop, the ambulance driver can’t tell what you’re doing? This means he has to slow down and wait for your ass. While someone is dying! Or can’t breathe, or has a kid with two broken legs . . . Really, think about where they are going and then think about the people who are waiting and bring your butt to a complete stop.

I’m sorry. I’m not really mad at you (I don’t think.) Again, I know I’m not alone in this. I once saw a woman pull into the left turn lane in front of an ambulance then she had the nerve to take the light when it changed, even though the ambulance was trying to go around her. She flipped off the ambulance driver. And then the car behind her flipped on its shiny blue lights. Everyone at the intersection opened their windows and cheered while she got ticketed. Really. That was a good day.

Don’t we all have a little more humanity than to pull into the left turn lane? There’s nowhere you have to be that’s more important than someone’s life. And when the ambulance is coming for you, you want everyone else to get out of the way, right? So make three right turns because you missed the left. Take the next exit and double back. When you arrive a few minutes late say, “I missed my turn because of an ambulance. I was so afraid it was heading here, to you!” Fake a tear if you must. No one is going to get mad.

Clearly we should all just be better people. But I have another solution to the emergency vehicle problem: Paintball!

Here’s how it works. One employee has a gunner position atop the ambulance, firetruck, whatever and he shoots paintballs at vehicles that don’t get out of the way. These contain specially formulated paint that basically says to everyone on the street “I am an ass*$@% who doesn’t get out of the way for emergency crews.” It should also require a special solvent to remove. This solvent will be sold at city hall in a convenient wipe for about $100 apiece. All proceeds go to families of emergency workers.

Okay – there’s no such paint that I’m aware of. And I see a potential problem for the gunner up top when the ambulance speeds under a low bridge. But in my fantasy there are no low bridges and the gunman is a sharp shooter out to tag everyone who doesn’t seem to understand that emergency vehicles are on their way to emergencies.

In the end, you should just pull over and stop. Why? Because you are a good person who cares about others. Or maybe you should pull over because I own a paintball gun and have a wicked little sense of vigilantism on this one!

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For many of us Spam is the bane of our existence. Ten years ago we didn’t even know of Spam as anything other than a canned meat, now a generation has come along that will be surprised to find that ‘spam’ is something you can buy at the supermarket and consume.

Blocking computer spam is a huge business unto itself and a priority in many large companies who fear lost productivity as well as law-suits from offended employees. But it seems even the best filter is no match for a tech savvy slacker with a few free hours. Because it’s so much fun to send people a message from their own email addresses. It’s better when you title it “Jason Strand you have such an ugly face!” Because the better the subject line, the more likely it is the unsuspecting fool will read it.

We all know to just delete some emails without even looking. No, I don’t want male enhancement, thank you. I don’t need a mate, I’ve had one for ten years now – so I’m not really looking, even though several websites seem to think I should be. But I have to admit, this one almost got me: “Chris died”. Ah! Brilliant! Who doesn’t know someone named Chris? I wanted to open it just as an homage to the person who thunk that up.

There’s nothing you can really do about spam. Sooner or later you will be the victim – unless, of course, you don’t use email at all. (I do particularly like that we are ‘victims’ of spam. The whole ‘victim’ thing has gone a little too far when it is referring to an email we really didn’t want to get. Oh, let me file a report with the police! I got spammed!)

As a great show of fear from a large parent corporation, my work email account has both a spam filter and a content/language filter. Unfortunately, I am just about ready to turn them both off – not that I can. The language filter has only caught me once. What it does is corral the renegade email then send you a form email stating that it took one of yours and why it got corralled. Mine was flagged for ‘racially derogatory language’. I will say that I don’t usually open my email in a flurry of excitement, but I really wanted to read this ‘racially derogatory’ email that some co-worker had sent me. What could they have possibly said? Were they going to get fired?

Instead, I found I couldn’t even open the darn thing. Even having warned me that the email ‘contained racially derogatory language’ wasn’t enough. It took the email and wouldn’t give it back. It didn’t even tell me who it was from. (It might have sullied my lily white mind to even know who had sent me such foulness!)

Crushed, I sorted through the rest of my email. But while there, I found that another co-worker had hit ‘reply all’ to the baaaad email. (This was a freelancer! And therefore not subject to a clean mind!) It turned out the renegade language was the relay of a story which basically went like this: “The only thing he knew about WWII was that there were Nazis.”

Yup, it was the word ‘nazis’ by itself that got the email detained Guantanamo
-style. And apparently, emailing the word ‘nazis’ is bad form, but forwarding it is fine. To top things off, when I emailed the Nazis who were discriminating against emails based on single words, they replied that they couldn’t read everything and had to corral anything that seemed suspicious. Dude – I got that part. While it’s stupid, I understand it. What I was actually complaining about was that they were inconsistent. No matter how many times I repeated that, the tech folks assumed they were being attacked for corralling emails and responded that I was out of line to suggest they let foul language get through. *sigh* This is why I sometimes hate people.

And these are only the woes of the language filter. There’s a whole other system that steals emails that might be spam and makes me log into another email system to get them back. Because, it seems, dealing with spam was taking up too much of my workday. Thus, developing another email system (and yet another password!) and making me dig the offending meat substance out is clearly the way to cut down on lost productivity. Brilliant!!!

Even better, only two things seem to get detained in the spam account: sale notices from Overstock.com and mass emails FROM MY COMPANY!!! Yes, they have corralled their own emails. I may die of irony here.

As soon as I had finished reclaiming the emails that I clearly needed, another email had popped up in my regular system. It wasn’t flagged by anything. It wasn’t corralled. It must be pure and good. I now know I should spend my work hours learning how to run a “pornocracy”.

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I once read that one in five Americans has at some point in life worked for McDonalds. While this made me want to barf up my Big Mac Supersize-Me-style, I managed to hold the yak at bay with some facts.

I was sitting in a dorm room at the time surrounded by other collegians and a hazy cloud of . . . well, it was hazy. After I shared that tidbit another (perhaps more alert?) friend took a poll around the room. Blowing my intel all to hell, the impromptu survey revealed that five of ten of us had worked for the clown. And there’s the added issue that these numbers were from a decade ago and don’t include anyone who might have turned to Ronald for a paycheck to lean on in recent lean times.

While two of the five of us had made it into Ronald’s management team, my record was in the other direction. I have worked for McDs for a grand total of . . . . wait for it . . . four hours. Okay, multiply minimum wage by four and subtract out that stupid little hat and a plastic name tag (yes, those came out of our first – only? – paycheck) and my one check was no longer worth the paper it was printed on.

Why such a short run? There were oh-so-many reasons. The ‘be sure to wear long sleeves in case you are on fries’ rule. Even as a cash-desperate college student I was against anything that puts me ‘on fries’. The long sleeves were because the oil splatters would scar your arms. I am also against getting permanent marks that show I work for the clown. There was the fact that the burgers clinked as they hit the big cooktop. I admit to being a bit of a food snob now, but even in college I didn’t want to eat a meat that cost less than a dollar.

Maybe the biggest reason I left was that the store I worked in boasted the “McDonalds’ Scholar”. This was the brightest McDonalds employee in the whole state and he got a free ride to the state school (as long as he continued working for McDs.) My god, what a moron. The big mayonnaise gun was a conundrum to him. Leaving off the pickles was out of his scope. Yes, four hours was about three hours past my limit.

I realize as I write this that if one in five Americans has worked for the clown, then I may have offended a handful of you. I apologize. Your McDs may be much brighter than the one I was at – mine was in East Tennessee. And if you are reading this in the first place it’s a guarantee that you’re ahead of anyone I met on the job.

While Ronald may run the uber-empire, he’s not the only clown on the block. Wendy has those freaky Pippi-style braids that defy gravity. And while I believe her burgers are better than the boys’ there’s still a hell of a lot of room in ‘better’ before you get to ‘good’. Subway, now the fourth largest chain in America (and growing!), has eschewed the cartoon representative in favor of a real guy named Jared. He would make me like the cartoons better if it weren’t for that creepy new Burger King.

Who thought the new Burger King was a good idea!? First, he has a plastic face. This makes the Botoxed elite look positively expressive. If it wasn’t enough to make him creepy looking, the good folks in advertising made sure we understood he was icky by having him peek in peoples’ windows in the early morning hours.

Where’s the ad where the King takes a deserved shotgun blast to the face? Or at least gets himself a shiner from the angry dad of a teenage daughter? No, the King offers up a tasty/calorific breakfast sandwich and all peeping tommery is forgiven. Didn’t I learn better in second grade? Stranger Danger! Shout it with me!

But apparently I’m in a tiny minority. It must be okay to check out good folks while they’re getting dressed as long as you bring along an English muffin stuffed with bacon, eggs and cheese. Oooooh, don’t forget the mayo!

Hey you! Pay attention here. The ad folks are trying to see what you’re willing to take. The American public didn’t respond to the stalker version of a much-loved symbol of bad eating habits, and the ad boys came back with “I like Square Butts.”

Check it out on YouTube. It stands out as inappropriate in an era of inappropriate-ness. The King sings a jacked-up version of the old Sir Mix-a-lot “I like Big Butts” – it’s geared toward square butts a la Sponge Bob. Yes, the ads where the King ogles the backsides of square-booty-licious females are for KIDS!

Yes, we want her to look like “she got a phone book down her pants” and we want her to shake that. Oh yeah. We’ve gone to hell and no one seemed to notice. Maybe we were made complacent by high fructose corn syrup and 45c beef patties?

Ah, it makes me miss Ronald and the splattering fry grease. Please Ronnie, kill me softly with high fat and lowered liver function.

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It’s true that whatever will be, will be – even when I don’t understand how some things continue to be.

Since long before those old ads had surprised people exclaiming “Hey, you got your peanut butter in my chocolate!” we’ve all had that innate love for two great things that go great together. The problem comes when the things don’t really go together so well.

Unless you are pregnant, I don’t think you’re going to jump up and down for pickles and chocolate. (Excuse my while I retch for a moment.) But I have to say humanity isn’t producing too many Pickles-n-chocolate stores. So why don’t others have that flash of clarity? That “Hey, maybe this isn’t such a good idea” moment?

Some things, just fall into the middle, like the suntan and movie rental stores that I’ve seen. I don’t get this. What is it about tanning that makes you want to see a rental flick that night? Or is it that when you see all those Hollywood-types on film, you suddenly see the need for a tan? I’m at a loss. Apparently though, the owner of the store isn’t – there’s a whole chain of these rental/darkening stations around.

But there are other combos that are creepier. Luckily, this one seems to be a one shot deal (although it is still in business after a number of years.) The Veterinarian/Taxidermist.

I’m sorry – I needed to take a moment there because of the shudders running up and down my spine. Uuuggggh. I have eight pets. Sometimes more. As I love my pets, dearly, you can bet you won’t find me in line here with my fuzzy friends, though I do know a number of men who think this is the best place to take their wives’ cats. Because, hey, if something goes awry, well then, you are already at the taxidermist. Still, I once sat up for three days straight with a pet rat that had pneumonia. Sadly, he didn’t make it. Even after that, I buried him rather than have him bent into some creepy life-like pose and preserved with little glass eyeballs and stiff stuffing. I do have to say that this taxidermist/vet is in the South and that may be the key to the store’s longevity.

While I may be a minority in thinking the taxidermist-vet is a bad idea, I’ve seen others that I’m sure we all have to say are a combo for the unthinking. Just two days ago I passed this one: Papers, Pipes, Tattoos. Oh this is baaaad. Let’s face it, no one but no one is really using the papers or pipes for tobacco. No sir, it’s all about weed. Is this really the store where you want to ink yourself for life? You can probably find a steadier hand on Bruno in cell block C. I’d trust his pen nib long before I’d get a tatt from anyplace that also sells everything needed to get you high. (Except the weed, of course.) Am I pessimistic? Sure, but I wouldn’t want to buy papers and pipes from someone who doesn’t know what to really do with them.

The last combo is even worse that the sky-high tattoo artists. I’d leap at the chance to get branded by a stoner long before I’d even venture into this place. Get this winning mix: Alcohol, gasoline, tobacco and fireworks.

This place, too, has been around for years. But how? As if gasoline and fireworks weren’t a bad enough combination (see the movie ‘Zoolander’if you doubt the effects) they’ve added in alcohol just to make it that much more likely that the place will blow up in the near future. In testament to the bad idea that this is, about half the employees are missing one or more digits. Still, I have not figured out quite how the tobacco fits in. Maybe it’s so you can lean back and smoke while you wait for emergency services to show up.

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