Random Observations and Trivial Events

WHAT'S YOUR PEN NAME?

Looking for interesting blogs dealing with writing, I came across a website that features something called a Pen Name Generator. You type in your name, indicate what gender you are, and after you submit the information it somehow generates a pen name for you. According to this gizmo, my pen name should be Jon Stall, which sounds to me like slang for a stopped-up toilet.

GIVE US A BREAK

Advertisers have figured out that they can no longer get away with advertising some products like they did in 1958. Remember all those old-time ads that featured women who apparently did nothing but sit at home and worry about whether their husband's collars were white enough, or if their floors had any waxy buildup? Those commercials made it appear that all women cared about was (1) housework and (2) pleasing hubby, and advertisers have figured out that nowadays that approach won't get them anywhere, because women -- if they ever were really that way, which I doubt -- aren't like that anymore. They have lots of interests besides housework.

So, if we can change an advertising stereotype concerning women, why can't we change the one which portrays all men as sports-obsessed TV junkies? I swear, every other commercial I see, especially in the fall, is about how guys will do anything -- lie to their wives, neglect their kids, spend more money than they should -- for the ability to park their butts in a chair, eat snacks and drink beer with "the guys," and watch televised sports from early Saturday morning to late Sunday night. I even heard a new AT&T cell phone ad on radio today, featuring a guy whose cruel wife was forcing him to quit watching TV sports to spend time in the park with her and the kids. But, alas!, his new AT&T phone connected with the Internet, so (whew!) he was able to spend all that time in the park checking on scores while he pretended to play with the kids.

Stop it. Just stop it. Yes, there are no doubt some absolutely maniacal, sports-crazed doofuses out there, like there are crazed doofuses of many different stripes, but I don't know any guys who worship sports above all else, do you? I do know guys -- myself included -- who will watch a game or two that interests them, but they have a lot more going on in their lives besides sports. If you can quit with the ads showing women falling in love with their vacuum cleaners, please quit with the sports addict ads.

DOGS CALL IT P-MAIL

At least three or four nights a week, Mrs. Muley and I try to take our two sheltie dogs for a walk. Our smallest one loves to hike his leg and leave his calling card on the curb about every 50 feet, while our larger dog waits to do his duty in a little patch of grass by a fence. Before he does, however, he must sniff vigorously like a bloodhound along the length of the patch, lingering longer on some smells than others.

It finally hit me the other night -- my dogs are just as connected to their world as I am to mine. When they're out on a walk, what they're basically doing is communicating with other dogs -- both sending and receiving messages. What I think of as doing a lot of time-consuming sniffing is really the same thing I do when I get to work each morning and fire up the computer. My dogs are checking their e-mail from the day before. And they never get spammed.

ANY TAKERS?

Visiting my local big box bookstore the other day, I couldn't help but notice a large table near the entrance filled with books relating to the upcoming Presidential election. There were books by Obama and McCain, books about Obama and McCain, books about how either the Democrats or Republicans are idiots, and books about how the country should vote one way or the other or risk bringing terrible destruction down on everyone.

My thought was -- I know publishers are always trying to make a buck, but is anybody buying these things? I mean, I've got to think that in this particular campaign, there are very few truly "undecided" voters who might need the information in one of these books to help them know which lever to pull in November. Most people, I'm betting, have known for quite some time which candidate they're voting for, and would rather spend their book budget on something else, like a good mystery or graphic novel, or maybe one of those hundreds of books with cute photos of puppies and kittens.

How to Hula While You Make Moolah

I think it was that eminent philosopher Fonzie who said, "Sit on it and spin!" That might be a good slogan for something called "The Hawaii Chair," which I discovered on a blog somewhere. Check out this YouTube video of what has to be one of the goofiest products ever invented. If you want the sensation of working at your desk during an 8.4 earthquake, then I guess this is for you.



And just what, pray tell, is a "2800 RPM Hula Motor?"

Thingmaker: Make Toys or Grilled Cheese Sandwiches!

This is the third in a series of trips down memory lane featuring Muley's favorite childhood Christmas toys.

This toy was a big favorite with me and my brothers. The foundation of the toy was Thingmaker, basically a heated metal plate that would take metal molds filled with liquid plastic and cook the plastic until the resulting shapes became hard and rubbery. But the product is commonly referred to as "Creepy Crawlers," which was the name given to the products of one of the most popular series of themed molds you could buy to work with Thingmaker.



If you go into a toy store nowadays, I believe they sell something under the Creepy Crawlers name. The idea is the same, but from what I have seen it is a pale imitation of the original Thingmaker system. The new one looks like a modified Easy Bake oven, with plastic parts and using the equivalent of a light bulb to bake the plastic. The original Thingmaker, by contrast, was like a little metal foundry in your home. The molds were made of thick metal, and the Thingmaker was able to heat that metal up so hot that you would burn the dickens out of your tiny, tender hands if you didn't remove the molds just right.

I would guess that Creepy Crawlers were probably the most popular things you could make with Thingmaker, but as you can see from the clipped advertisement here, you could also make other stuff like scary makeup items. I also remember that at our house we had molds that allowed us to create toy soldiers. One mold would make the front part of the soldier's body, a second mold would make the back half, and I guess you were supposed to fit the two halves together while the thing was still warm and sticky so that they'd dry into one figure. A third mold let you make rifles and grenades and such. The idea was that you could eventually create enough of the little guys to form your own army. But, unlike G.I. Joes, Thingmaker soldiers were as rubbery as the fake snakes and vampire teeth it also cooked up. It's as though some alien from space swooped down and removed all of the bones from a U.S. Army battalion.

Besides providing me hours of enjoyment being my own Dr. Frankenstein, I loved the sheer utilitarianism of the names Mattel gave to this toy and its components. The thing you made stuff in was called...the thing maker. The liquid goop you poured into the molds was called...goop.

When it comes to summing up Thingmaker, I believe radarmagazine does it best: "Nothing says safety like an open hot plate. And nothing says fun like using that open hot plate to create molten, rubbery insects you can throw at your sister while narrowly avoiding setting the house ablaze."

Major Matt Mason: Muy Molded Machismo!

In Part Two of what I guess is now a series of looks back at my favorite toys from childhood 1960s Christmases, I want to introduce you to Major Matt Mason (surprisingly, not a product of the 3M Corporation).



I think it was a bit unusual, even back in the groovy Sixties, to have television ad copy read in rhyme. I believe this poem, titled "The Misbegotten Moon of Major Matt Mason," was actually one of the lesser-known works of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Robert Penn Warren, based on a short story by Chekhov.

My little brother and I spent many hours of pleasure taking Major Matt and Sergeant Storm (as an enlisted man, he didn't rate a first name) on adventures across the floor in our dad's study. We would have been green with envy, though, if we'd seen the swanky fantasy play area the boys in the TV commercial have their space station set up in. Not many parents would let their children bring in beach sand and move boulders into the living room, even if they did look like those cardboard imitation boulders used on the original Star Trek episodes.

I don't remember the Captain Laser character at all. Being a battery operated giant, he probably had a giant price tag, which might explain why my parents never saw fit to bring him home to join our crew. Besides, being raised on Mars and all, could you really trust him? Would Major Matt wake up one day in the space station to find one of his rubberized legs chewed off up to his hips, with Captain Laser just licking his lips, his red eyes pulsing rapidly?

It Wasn't Called "Vrroom!" for Nothing

If you were a red-blooded American boy in the 1960s, not old enough to drive and forced to settle for riding a bicycle or tricycle, this was something you wanted from Santa. I finally got one as a Christmas gift, and I can still remember our neighborhood in the days following, with me and other boys riding their bikes down the street, sounding like an invading army of locusts ready for a motocross race.



You just knew this was the coolest because you had your own special key to start the engine. It weren't no toy, you understand.

I love the commercial! Am I wrong, or can no kid have that many huge freckles on his nose? Do you think they painted them on with some sort of dye? And why do all little boys in 1960s commercials look as though their fathers cut their hair with a pair of pruning shears while drunk? Probably because, in many cases, they did.

Random Observations and Trivial Events

I LOVE YOU, CHOP, CHOP

I passed by a display in my local grocery store the other day which I assume was meant to suggest possible Christmas gift ideas. On a table there were all sorts of objects that had been "personalized" with a photograph. A photo of an attractive woman was used in each example, her smiling face wrapped around coffee mugs and pencil holders and placed atop calendars and mouse pads. The idea, I guess, is that anyone can take a picture of a loved one and get that picture put on the object of their choice.

This is not anything new, of course, but I was a bit taken aback when I saw what one of the items available for personalization was. At first I thought it might be a super-sized mouse pad, but on closer inspection I discovered that the woman's face was now smiling from the surface of a cutting board. You know, like the ones you cut meat or chop carrots on.

I still have not been able to figure this one out. Why in the world would someone want to personalize a cutting board? And if they do, what kind of message is that sending? I love my kids and would never want to see them hurt, but if I send their grandmothers cutting boards with their cute little faces on them, am I not, in effect, asking them to stab and hack their darling little sweeties every time they chop celery for the soup? Could someone do this in good conscience?

And, if I send someone a cutting board with their own photo on it, am I not asking them to regularly simulate hari-kiri? Will they they get the idea that I want them to commit suicide?

I guess that if you had a bad breakup, you could order one of these adorned with the photo of your ex-spouse or ex-partner (chop, chop, HACK, HACK), but is there a huge market for that? Maybe so.

IT'S STILL A LONG WAY TO THE CAFETERIA

Content alert: the following paragraphs will be discussing toilets and their functions. You have been warned.

I have not done the scientific testing on this (and I never will), but I have come up with a theory involving toilets and their relative flushing power, based on elevation above sea level. This comes as a result of many years of personal experience in the field.

Can you relate to this? If I am in an office building of multiple stories, and if I go to a restroom on an upper floor and ask a toilet to do just what it is designed to do, more often than not, it fails. A toilet needs a certain, shall we say, hydraulic power to carry away what it is designed to carry away, but when I'm in a fifth floor restroom and flush a toilet, it disappoints. A toilet on a high floor seems to think it is a washing machine, content to just swirl water around the bowl a bit in an effort to clean its contents instead of carrying them far away.

By contrast, if I go down to the ground floor of that very same building and flush a toilet in a restroom there, I am met with a sound like that made by a 1962 model TWA jet. The toilet water will circle around and around with the ferocity of a whirlpool at the bottom of Niagra Falls, and if I make the mistake of covering every square inch of surface around the seat with my posterior, creating a seal of sorts, I will be in danger of getting sucked down into the churning bowl like a bird sucked into a jet engine. When the titanic suction ends, I will then be lodged somewhere down into the pipes until a janitor hears my frantic cries for help and rescues me.

Why does this happen? Can physics account for the difference? I will leave this for future scientific researchers to figure out.

May I Borrow a Battery? My Book is Dead

I went on Amazon.com one day recently to check out something or other, and the opening page, instead of giving me the usual recommendations by categories, was almost completely given over to introducing me to a new product called the Amazon.com "Kindle." It's basically the company's version of an electronic book reader, which they say they've been working on for three years to perfect.

Explaining the genesis of his company's new product, Amazon.com CEO and founder Jeff Bezos said, "The booklover in me often has asked the nerd in me, 'Is there a way to get the emotions and experiences I love from books, but combined with the possibilities of advanced technology? Can something as evolved as the book be improved?"

Now, maybe I'm just hopelessly mired in the technological mud, but when I sit down in a nice chair with a good book (the pulpy-paged type), one thing I surely never think about is how to transform the book in my hands into another electronic gizmo, which I must pamper and recharge and repair when it gets broken. I'm quite happy, thank you, to just let The Brothers Karamazov be The Brothers Karamazov, and not lament the fact that any book I flip the pages of can't also get me stock quotes, show YouTube videos or allow me to spend more money with Amazon.com. This ability may represent an "improvement" to Mr. Bezos, but I beg to differ.

I'm glad that books have not really "evolved" since their invention, despite Mr. Bezos's claim. Yes, they're a bit smaller and made of different materials than they were in Gutenberg's day, and we no longer have to fashion them entirely by hand or crank them out one at a time on a crude press, but the essence of a book is still the same -- pages of text between two covers, pages turned one at a time and enjoyed at the leisure and pace of the reader.

I don't know how many times I've seen people come out with these "electronic book" gizmos, announcing (or implying) that the printed book is on its long-overdue deathbed, only to have the gizmo, and not books, soon bite the dust.

Then again, maybe an electronic book is inevitable. Maybe there's so many people these days whose attention spans have been worn down to the nub by a steady dose of TV and DVDs and video games that they won't -- or can't -- read a book without some sort of electronic diversion handy. But then again, I don't think those people are the ones truly longing for a good book to savor. Let's face it, the target audience for any new electronic book is not likely to go out and download Dostoevsky or Dickens or Joyce to read on it.

I am content to get drenched as I leave my finger in the dike. Invent what you will, and while I applaud your technical genius and even let out a "hey, cool!" every now and then, I'm happy to keep my books just as they've always been.

Bite Into These Beans

The Harry Potter phenomenon has given birth to any number of products spun off from the original novels by J.K. Rowling, including movies, calendars, mugs, bed linens, pajamas, board games and too many others to list here.

One of the most popular products to come on the market as a Harry Potter tie-in is Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans, which of course are one of the treats enjoyed by Harry and his friends in the books. One of the unique things about Bott’s Beans is their unusual flavor palette. When you bite into one of these jellybeans, you might be welcomed by a traditional sweet flavor, such as cherry or licorice, but you also might find (to your horror or pleasure, depending on your bent) that you have bitten into a jellybean featuring flavors such as pickle, sausage, booger, vomit, rotten egg, earwax or dirt.

From what I hear, kids love the “nasty” flavors, even if they say they are disgusted by them. I’m sure that the shock value of biting into earwax and vomit has probably subsided a bit by now, since so many kids have experienced that, so I am proposing some new “gross” flavors that the manufacturers might want to consider.

Proposed New Flavors of Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans:

Theater seat gum
Chinese toy factory
Liquid paper
Grout
Bile
Ship channel spume
Lutefisk
Witch hazel
Dog breath
Mohair
Taxi seat
Mucilage
Pustule
Nursing bra
Scabies
Charismatic preacher sweat
Styrofoam
Baby burp
Grandpa’s mustache

Escapist Dating

If you turn on your radio these days for longer than 15 minutes at a stretch, or watch at least one TV commercial break -- any hour, any channel -- then you've no doubt heard the ads for a dating service that supposedly makes you answer a 2,675-question "personality" test before you dip your toe in the rippling pool of romance. This incredibly thorough test, we are told, is why this certain company's matchups are so well-made.

Well, I can't argue with the company's success, but a little birdie told me something the other day. That big, fancy questionnaire is just a marketing gimmick. I don't know this as fact, but from what I hear, the real survey that potential customers are asked to fill out is much shorter, and is supposedly based on the lyrics of a popular 1970s love song.

In a plain brown envelope left under my doormat, I was provided with a purloined copy of these alternate questions. And even though I'm already married and not in the market for a date, I'll answer the questions as if I were, just to give you an idea of how this thing works.

Ready?

1. Do you like Pina Coladas? Haven't had one in 20 years, but I'd have to say...yes.

2. Do you like getting caught in the rain? First of all, please note that I have never dated waterfowl and don't intend to start now. Having said that, since "getting caught" implies being unprepared, I'd have to reply that it's all a question of logistics. Am I late for a meeting? Is it cold outside? Am I without a raincoat or umbrella? Is it during really bad weather, such as a lightning storm or hurricane? Am I buck naked? If the answer to any of those is "yes," then my answer is "no." Otherwise, sure, I'm game.

3. Are you not into yoga? Shouldn't that be, "Are you into yoga?" Awkward sentence structure. But, my answer is, yes and no. I think yoga's probably good for you, but the two or three yoga DVDs on my shelf remain unwatched.

4. Do you have half a brain? Whoa, the standards are high at this place. Half, as in 50 percent? I can answer without hesitation: I believe so.

5. Do you like making love at midnight? Time of day has never been a hindrance for me, unless I'm actually asleep at the time. ...in the dunes of the cape? Well now, this changes things a bit. You mean, like in the sand in the pitch dark, out in public? Hmmm. Let me think about this. Sand in places sand shouldn't be. Pieces of broken shells poking my skin. Hungry crabs eyeing me like a dead fish. Globs of beach tar. Elderly couples out late at night with a flashlight and a metal detector, discovering us and then clutching at their wildly beeping pacemakers. I think my answer is...heck no. Now, leave the time and general location the same, but move us inside to a nice master suite overlooking the ocean, and you're on.

6. Are you not much into health food? Who taught these guys grammar? Again, I need more details. Are we talking wheat bread, yogurt and granola? Well, sure. Or are we talking dried sea slime, pine cones and otter cheese for breakfast? Then, no.

7. Are you into champagne? Apparently, the guys who wrote this really like to knock back the hooch. Maybe it helps them numb their gluteus maximi after all those crab bites. My answer is a conditional yes. If I'm at a New Year's Eve party, and free champagne is available, and doesn't come out of a can, I will sip a glass to help ring in the new. Otherwise, it's not my favorite beverage.

So, there it is, folks. If you're looking for one of those boring, traditional dates where you go eat dinner and see a movie, then this place probably isn't for you. But, if you're looking for half-witted members of the opposite sex who pig out on junk food and wander drunk around the beach naked until they spot a flabby but willing partner flailing around in a downpour, then give them a buzz.

Quotes of the Day:

Love is an exploding cigar we willingly smoke.

--Lynda Barry

I'm dating a woman now who, evidently, is unaware of it.

--Gary Shandling