Blogabillies

Dirt-Cheap Calendars - Like Expired Milk?

by T-Bone

Okay, explain this situation to me so that I can understand it. Office Max sells big calendars—you know, the kind you hang up on the wall so you can tell what day it is. You can even write appointments in the big squares.

It's the last week of December 2006; I buy a calendar at the big office store. I find it right there at the display with all the other calendars. I don't care what brand it is. Calendars are calendars, right? Not so much.

Office Max has all of their calendars mixed up in a month-humping wad, Novembers rubbing up against Decembers in all sizes and configurations. Not knowing you can buy an old calendar, I just grab one and go.

Now, I can't claim total ignorance since the year is plainly stamped in big numbers at the top of each calendar. But that's not the point here. The point is, they are selling calendars at a huge discount, and I assumed the heavily stocked shelves all held the 2007 model. Wrong.

I ask you, can I buy an old newspaper for a discount? Do they toss in week-old Big Macs with the ones they just piled under the heat lamp? We're not talking used cars here, we're talking calendars. Old ones are worthless. Yet I buy a calendar for a buck-forty and don't notice until I get home that I have just bought a 2006 calendar.

I start thinking, why would they be selling 2006 calendars the last week in December anyway? Who wants to look at a calendar with less than a week left on it? That's like buying milk after the expiration date. Would Kroger even sell me a gallon of seriously expired milk? Now I'm starting to worry about my groceries.

Basically, I need a current calendar, so I go back up to Office Max with my expired model and ask to exchange it.

The sales person says, “Oh, you bought a 2006 calendar.”

“Yes, apparently,” I say. “I don't exactly need last year's calendar since I already know what happened in 2006. I need a 2007 calendar—you know, the future and all. So I can plan.”

I figure I'd better explain the concept of calendars because Office Max had obviously skipped that training session for their employees.

“That's why it was only $1.40,” says the salesperson. “It was a 2006 calendar. The 2007 calendars are $23.49. You got this one in the old calendar section.”

Say what? There's an old calendar section? I look at the clerk as if she once had a brain.

“I got this calendar back there where all of your calendars are,” I say.

The salesperson shakes her head in a “no” motion. I shake mine in a “yes” motion. After a little shaking on both sides, we walk back to the new calendar section. Sure enough, a bunch of 2006 calendars are mixed in with the 2007s. It's a calendaristic time warp.

“Maybe I can get a 2005 for a nickel,” I say sarcastically.

“Hmmm,” offers the distraught sales person. “Look at that. Somebody put the old calendars with the new ones.”

“Maybe it's just me,” I say. “But why are there old calendars to begin with? Who in their right mind would buy a huge, out-of-date 2006 wall calendar?”

“You bought one,” she says.

Slim Whitman Returns After 10 Years!

by Belle

In an earlier post I described our Christmas tradition of regifting Slim Whitman recordings and memorabilia and promised to update y'all on where I found Slim under the tree this year. Well, Christmas has come and gone, and while a number of SW items were opened and enjoyed, none of the techniques used to disguise Slim were particularly memorable.

All that changed when the mail came yesterday. I got a small package from a friend I hadn't heard from in a while, and tucked inside some tissue paper was a Slim Whitman cassette with a Post-it note attached - in my handwriting - dated 1996!

The card my friend included said, "This has been in my Christmas box for many years now. I remember the custom was to pass it on, so I thought you might enjoy having it back ..."

Yes! That totally unexpected little pleasure was what we had not been able to capture in our Christmas giving this year; the ritual had become somewhat tired and predictable. But opening that padded envelope and discovering a Slim Whitman cassette I'd given away ten years ago - now, that was fun.

Thanks, Suzann. You absolutely made my day!

Different Shades Of Redneck

We write a lot on this site about Southerners and rednecks and Bubbas, and it has occurred to us that we should clarify those monikers. We Southerners are a diverse bunch. There are geniuses and peckerwoods, smartasses and dumbasses. When we talk about unique Southern characters, we mean all shades of redneck.

We don't use the word redneck in a negative sense (okay, maybe now and then, but not always). And rednecks are a lot more intelligent and varied than the stereotypes portrayed in the movies and on TV.

Aunt Faustine's Toothpick Tree & the Wrestling Santa

Each year it grew larger and larger on the table, a pyramidic protrusion reaching for the ten-foot ceilings like a fat Saturn rocket. Hundreds of Styrofoam balls, each poked full of toothpicks, stacked six feet high and sprayed with fake snow. People came all the way from Florida to see this evolving, massive toothpick-tannenbaum that my Aunt Faustine had created. She was famous for this thing, the strangest Christmas tree I have ever seen.

I've tried to sketch it out, but I can't do it justice; it was ridiculously impressive. A million styrofoam Sputniks spiked with wooden picks and festooned with tiny dangling ornaments.

We Made the Z List

If Blogabillies makes you grin, chuckle or even laugh out loud, please surf on over to Squidoo and vote for us on Seth Godin's Z List of blogs worth checking out. And while you're there, discover some other writers whose musings will educate or entertain you. We're gonna be clicking links for days and adding to our Google Reader list.

Thanks, y'all!

Southerners Outwit DMV

Right here in the tradition-laden capital of the old South, Richmond,
Virginia, things are not as staid and conservative as they once were. I
won't go so far as to say these two gentlemen are rednecks. But I hope so.
The Virginia DMV is not amused.  I was going to write a post about it; instead,
I'll just let you, dear Blogabillies surfer, see for yourself.

 

Newsflash: Painting with Your Butt

by T-Bone

Maybe you've heard this important news story already. A high school art teacher from the Richmond, VA area has been suspended from his job because he paints pictures with his butt (not to be confused with an artist who paints on his butt; a much more common occurrence).

School officials say he is setting a bad example. He says he is "proud of the ass painting" that depicts abstract floral images; he calls them "anthropometric monotypes" and says he learned the technique in college (if painting with your butt can be called a technique).

Don't Pay It Forward, Regift it Backward

by T-Bone

Office Christmas party. I hate these things and look at my watch for the 347th time.

9:00 p.m. Time to give my clumsily wrapped present to the name I'd drawn out of the hat – Sheila, from account services.

She hands me her beautifully wrapped gift with the custom bow. I stare at it sheepishly. Dang, she spent more time wrapping this thing than I did even thinking about the gift I have just handed her.

She smiles. I don’t.

Hey, I’ve been busy; I have excuses. It's just the office party. Nobody cares.

Sheila looks at the wooden salt and pepper shakers in the box she'd just opened, the box I had just given her as a Christmas gift. She is not amused.

"I gave you these for your birthday earlier this month," she says.

Cell Phone Songulation

by T-Bone

I have discovered that the best way to learn to hate your favorite song is to make it the ringer on your cell phone. I had no idea this kind of Pavlovian thing could happen. I used to love the music theme from Braveheart, then I made it my ringer. With each call I began to feel like William Wallace when Longshanks’ executioner was boiling his intestines: “Freeeeeeeeeeeedom!” I had to lose the song.

I searched around for another song I was positive I’d never tire of and found it. “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” by the Temptations. Anyone who knows me knows this is my absolute favorite song of all time. I slugged that ditty into my cell and enjoyed the first fifty or so calls. Hundreds of calls later, Papa feels like he has a kidney stone. I am distraught.

Clearly, I suffer from cell phone songulation. I am not about to put another favorite song into the darned thing because it is the best way to make my tunes feel like a cheese grater raking across my butt. I am thinking of just going back to the basic bell. I cannot subject my music to such torturous execution.

If you have this problem, write us about it. Tell us your favorite song and how you learned to hate it.

Down, Dasher! Down, Donder! Watch out over Yonder!

by T-Bone

Christmas break. Two weeks off from junior high (this was before middle schools).

Dark of night. Three of us stumble out of a ditch in a neighborhood near downtown Andalusia, Alabama, and into the yard of our English teacher, Miss Butcher. It's not a nickname; it's her real name, and she does everything in her power to live up to that moniker.

The plan is for me, Brim and Loomis to "roll" her yard by tossing toilet paper into the trees and around her holiday yard ornaments. We unfurl about four good-sized rolls, stolen from the First Baptist Church (God forgive us), and are putting the finishing touches on Mary and Joseph (forgive us again) when we hear the front door unlatch.