Sorry, Wrong Address

I went to breakfast with Carter, Stephanie and Bink this morning. I was staring at my favorite breakfast sandwich when Stephanie asked the waitress for hot sauce.

"Yes, Ma'am."

After the waitress left, I asked Stephanie, "What do you think of Ma'am?"

"Ma'am?"

"Most men," I said, "don't mind Sir, and some even like it, but I don't know any woman that likes Ma'am."

"Ma'am used to bother me when I was a little younger," said Stephanie, "but it doesn't bother me too much now."

"What would you use instead?" said Carter: "Madam?"

"Same thing," said Bink, rudely, "unless you're at a cat house."

Bink believed that if the people around him weren't offended, he wasn't properly speaking his mind. I wondered which one of us invited him.

"How about just, Woman?" I asked.

Bink snickered and Stephanie politely shook her head.

"Some people use Honey, or Sweetie," said Stephanie. "It works depending on who's saying it."

"Yeah?" said Bink. "If it only works for some people, it doesn't solve the problem, does it?"

"Ms was big forty years ago," I said, "but it didn't seem to stay."

"Too political," said Bink.

"Or southern," said Stephanie.

"Yeah," said Bink. "You mix the libbies of the sixties and seventies with the Daughters of the Confederacy and you end up with something everyone's going to hate."

I focused on finishing the last of my BLT, an under-rated breakfast food that's done superbly at Mary's Gourmet Diner.

 I wondered if it would taste better without Bink beside me. "You'd think we'd be able to find a word that women like."

"How about Madame?" asked Carter, pronouncing it like the French do?

"I don't know," said Bink. "Americans trying to sound French are like dogs walking on their hind legs. They can do it for a few steps, but they can't do it all the time, and they're just asking people to laugh at them."

"I don't know," said Carter, who seemed to be as annoyed with Bink as I was.

"Yeah," I said. "How about concierge and rendezvous?"

"There's no English word for concierge or rendezvous," said Bink, "and no Frenchman would say we pronounce them properly."

"Alright, Mister Wise Guy," I said. "Why don't you come up with a word to replace Ma'am that women would like?"

"That's easy," said Bink.

"Easy!?!"

"Yeah, Goddess."

Stephanie nodded her head. "Goddess."

I gotta stop having breakfast with Bink.

Speaking of breakfast, this song has been in my head all week.  Make it stop!

Astonishing Flatware

It’s all Tim Tunes fault. I can’t say the words, “plastic silverware,” anymore. I have a hard enough time writing it.

Prior to going to work for Jordan Marsh, Tim’s greatest accomplishments were in the fields of tormenting kittens, and alphabet belching. (Tim could belch the alphabet through M on one swig of store brand soda. Unfortunately FLAB – the Federated League of Alphabet Belchers only accepted entries from name-brand soda belching. We were both too cheap to find out if he could make the big time.)

Jordan Marsh (which being a New England-based upscale retailer should properly be pronounced without saying either “r,”) changed all that. Tim handed in an application to avoid losing unemployment benefits. Though he was in jeans and Velcro fastened sneakers, he wore a mostly clean tie and a collared (though untucked) shirt to the interview.

They put him in the fine china and silver department.

Tim’s supervisor, Mercedez de la Roi, Comptessa de Madrid, did her best to transform Tim Tune into a classy guy. I have to admit – she was a diminutive well-coiffed miracle worker. Within a week, Tim was swigging his no-name soda from a tea cup and belching the alphabet in French. He was also correcting my crudities.

“Hey Tim, did the delivery guy give us any silverware? All of mine has too much mold to tell the forks from the spoons.”

“Any what?”

“Any silverware.”

“Why would he give us silverware? A single fork would cost more than the whole order.”

At this point, Tim resumed his belching from P /pe/ pé  to Z /zɛd/ zède .

“I don’t mean silver, silverware. I mean plastic silverware.”

Tim, his pinky extended from his tea cup, tilted his head back so he could look down his nose at me. “There is no such thing as plastic silverware,” he said.

“Then I live in a mythological world,” I replied, “because last time I ate meat-flavored fried rice, I used such a non-existent object.”

“What you used,” Tim belched in a French accent, “was flatware.”

“Plastic forks aren’t flat.”

“Neither are they silver,” said Tim, primly using his shirt to wipe belch expectorant from his saucer.

Then I saw the bottle. Tim was drinking Pepsi – real Pepsi, not Value Shop brand Poopsi-Cola, but the genuine carmel-colored article. At that moment I realized that my good friend had left the fraternity of slob-hood and moved on to that strata of personages I had only been exposed to on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.

“So did he give us any flatware?” I asked.

Tim handed me a slightly soiled white plastic fork while he unwrapped another that was sealed in a bag with Chinese characters on it.

I took the soiled fork and didn’t say a thing.

It’s hard to argue with class.

Warning!  This video might be too classy for some people.  

Birthdays

I’ve just entered birthday season. Starting March 5, and into the middle of May, a huge % of the significant people in my life have their birthdays. I wrote this tribute to one of them 12 years ago.

Happy Birthday

by Headley Hauser

An old friend of mine is having a birthday. I haven’t seen her for twenty years and it’s unlikely I will in the near future, but I still want to wish her a happy birthday. When I survey our culture’s offerings of birthday greetings, I find we really have only one: the birthday song. You know the one that wants to charge people a royalty every time they sing it: the song that has no other lyric than Happy Birthday to you and a dear so and so in the third line? (Actually, I think the dear so in so is a later edition. I believe the original lyric is nothing more than Happy Birthday to you repeated four times.) Now I could be accused of foisting drivel on society, but I think if I wrote a lyric that consisted of happy birthday to you four times, I might not be so quick to claim royalty credit.

Then again, these people are getting rich off the song.

I would like to announce (in a very legally binding way)

the following lyrics.

1. Happy Christmas day to you (repeat four times)
2. Happy Saint Patrick’s day to you (repeat four times)
3. Happy Arbor Day to you (repeat 3 times, insert an instrumental bridge from Iron Butterfly and close with Happy Arbor Day to you)
4. And, just to be safe: Happy (insert any and all holidays declared or recognized by the greeting card industry – except birthday) to you (repeat four times).
   

There are volumes of Christmas carols, Thanksgiving hymns, and even New Years songs out there. Why are we stuck with only one birthday song – and a crappy one at that?

Why does our single birthday song rhyme you with itself three times? Is “you” so hard to find rhymes for? I eschew the snafu that to imbue a rhyme for you would ensue in a switcheroo of hue to a taboo milieu. I knew that to pursue such a true bugaboo that I need not construe with the IQ of a guru. So I subdue and spew that mildew residue goo. (Did you view the debut of a tattoo I drew anew of a bamboo horseshoe I threw from Honshu?)

(All right, enough of that pooh.)

There are sufficient rhymes for “you” and sufficient diversity of people out there, that we should have myriad birthday songs specialized to various interest groups.

For cheese lovers:

Happy Birthday to you

May your mold all be blue

May all of your troubles

First be dipped in fondue

To mystery fans:

Happy Birthday to you

To our favorite gumshoe

When you’re missing your car keys

May you soon get a clue

To Shirley McLaine fans:

Happy Birthdays to you

As past lives you review

With the latest book from Shirley

That’s just like the last two

Or even to Francophiles (if there still are any):

Happy Birthday a vous

Now we must say adieu

You’ll look a year older

When we next rendezvous

The point is to strive for diversity, creativity and royalty avoidance. To make birthdays, once again, something of which, to be proud.

Now if I can just get this stupid tune out of my head.

This video is from the greatest episode of the old Mary Tyler Moore Show. Granted, it’s missing something without the context.

You want the context? Okay, here’s the whole ep.