Since I have no particular place to start today, I’ll post this Retail and tell a related story to point out why timing is everything in comedy.
I was out running errands and getting hungry and happened to be passing the only place in town with decent pizza, so decided that, instead of a burger, I’d grab a couple of slices. And there were only two people ahead of me when I walked in, so that was good.
Only the old guy (okay, probably my age) at the head of the line had paid with cash, and he and the pizza worker (high 20s/low 30s) were trying to figure out the change. They weren’t arguing; they were just going back and forth on the calculations.
Midway through, pizza worker pulled a couple of slices from the oven and called out the orders. Then he told the people who came up that he’d burnt the pepperoni ones but they could take the others and he’d put in fresh pepperoni slices.
Then he went back to the math problem and the woman who was the other person in front of me offered to use the calculator on her phone to resolve the issue, which might have moved things along except then one of the people who had picked up an order came back to complain that he’d given her the wrong thing.
So I left and went to the burger place down the street.
And hadn’t laughed about it until now.
It could have been worse, as this Andertoons suggests.
I might have gone stark raving mad and ordered pizza with pineapple.
“Hawaiian Pizza” belongs at county fairs, along with deep-fried Oreos and Krispy Kreme Triple Cheeseburgers and all that other made-up county fair junk food.
I say that as someone who used to sit a booth through a week-long county fair and quickly learned to pack a lunch until the last day, because if you start eating all that weird greasy stuff the first day, you’ll be sitting the Port-O-Sans most of the week instead of your booth.
Juxtaposition of the Housing Market
I’ve never had to deal with a home owners association, but a couple of my dog park friends do, and their stories are both horrifying and hilarious, like being ordered to replace patio doors with some specific sliders.
Then the sliders weren’t quite the right color and they had to buy new ones, which puzzled me because the HOA had specified the first doors but wasn’t picking up the tab for having ordered the wrong ones.
And has now banned barbecue grills for some sort of safety reasons related to insurance.
Thing is, I’ve had lousy landlords, but when the lease is up, you go find someone else to rent from who won’t make your life hell. Selling your townhouse is a whole lot more complicated.
Bottom line: I’ll never understand buying property but not owning it.
But that’s only mildly puzzling. When I see those TV shows about well-heeled Yuppies buying dream homes, I’m ready to set up the guillotines.
One of those reality-realty shows filmed in my old home town, which surprised me because it specialized in waterfront property and I couldn’t imagine there would be four or five homes on that tiny lake up for sale at the same time.
To fill the half hour, they skipped all around the county without admitting it, and my Facebook friends from home were snickering because they knew the couple had bought property before the show began taping, so the entire “walking through and reacting” was staged, and the place they bought was several miles away from the place named in the show anyway.
Believe half of what you see and none of what you hear.
Which reminds me that Gladys Knight turned 75 on Tuesday and still looks better than anybody else over 40.
That was a segue to this Arlo & Janis, in which Janis obsesses over getting older, and it’s funny that they’ve been married long enough to have a son grown and gone and yet Arlo is still puzzled that his point of view in this area is irrelevant.
That could trigger a whole discussion but it would be far too serious for a Friday Funnies post. If you want to hear a woman talk about getting older, check out Wanda Sykes’ new standup show on Netflix, in which she covers that topic and also gets all political.
Wanda doesn’t worry too much about pleasing the man in her life but she does obsess over her wife’s reactions to her aging body, which leaves the overriding topic unresolved but makes her insecurities kind of unisex.
She also points out that the Republicans went batshit when Michelle went sleeveless “but you can google Melania’s titties.”
Never mind. It’s Friday.
Also on the topic of growing older, when I saw this Mother Goose and Grimm, my response was “Does TV Guide magazine even exist anymore? Isn’t it just a website?”
Back at the end of the last century, I had the job of assembling the weekly television insert for our paper. Even then, we had to pick and choose what channels to include, and the forest hasn’t become any less dense in the 20 years that followed.
But, by yompin’ yiminy, TV Guide is still around at the bargain price of $20 a year, though the fact that they haven’t updated the cover on their website in nearly a month makes me wonder how well they do on listings.
Y’know, when I’m not wondering why Mark Harmon is #1 and who else is on that list.
I think the gluten-free name was the gag in this Moderately Confused, but I laft over the overall concept, given that Bread was pre-assembled from studio backup vocalists and so was already kind of a cover band, though one that did original material.
Which adds depth to the gluten-free joke: Fake Bread would be grim stuff indeed.
BTW, back-up vocalists are not to be confused with studio musicians. Different animals entirely.
TV Guide’s webmaster must have left for a job with more of a future, and didn’t leave behind a note with the web page’s password.
“Does anybody remember the name of Brad’s cat? How ’bout his birthday? Did you try spelling ‘TV Guide’ with an exclamation mark instead of the ‘i’?”
“Sit the booth”- I never heard that that phrasing before (down here it’s “sit at the booth” on “sit in the booth” or even “tend the booth”). Is it an upstate NY term?
I may have adapted it from real estate, where people “sit a model,” but I think I heard it as we talked assignments — people volunteers to sit the booth. Nothing regional — Realtors in Colorado sit models and also convention booths. But if only Realtors said it there, it translated when I was back East working at newspapers.
Watched The Goodbye Girl a couple days ago for the first time. (Didn’t get to many movies during the college years – discretionary income mostly dedicated to beer.) I was surprised to hear David Gates (sans Bread) singing the closing song. (Thanks for music links!)
Back around 1979–80, a friend treated us to pizza at a local place in Fort Collins. There were four of us, chatting away. When time came to pay, we all went and chatted away at the counter, waiting for someone to come take the money. We sometimes saw a shadow move, as if someone was alive way in the back. It seemed to go on forever, but we finally found ourselves on the sidewalk heading away. Our host, in a confiding tone, said “I never paid for that pizza,” and we all walked a little faster. I figure if you wait for ten minutes and can’t even get someone to look at you, you’ve earned the pizza.
***
How about “Wonder Bread”?
Reminds me of a brief period in the late 60s when credit card companies began sending unsolicited cards to college students, with the understanding that, if you wanted it, you’d just use it and then pay them back.
Well, that was what the credit card companies understood. What the students understood was that the credit card company had no idea what their signatures looked like and that trading cards with someone else was all it took to make expenditures deniable.
After a few tons of pizza and god knows how much gasoline, the credit card companies dropped the concept.
(Bearing in mind, BTW, that in those days the way a merchant spotted a bad card was to go through a booklet of numbers they were sent each month. If you kept your purchases down to a pizza and a few beers or a tankful of gas, the merchant was unlikely to bother checking against the book.)