POPCORN

BY JIM SZANTOR

Rhetorical questions, questionable rhetoric and whimsical observations about the absurdities of contemporary life

• Show me a kid who prefers white milk to chocolate milk, and I'll show you a future claims adjuster!  
• What I wouldn't give for a button on the remote control (or a Menu setting) that would make those irritating and relentless "crawls" disappear from the bottom of the TV screen.  (Ditto for those intrusive pop-up promo logos, or whatever they are.)
• Speaking of TV . . .  here's a message for our sponsors:  My name isn't "America" (or "Chicago," or any other city name, for that matter), so commercials that begin with "Hey, America . . . " (or worse yet, "Listen up, America . . .") are almost guaranteed to make me mute the sound, change the channel or avoid your product.
• Why are bowlers sometimes referred to (primarily in the sports pages) as keglers?  Nobody refers to bowling as kegling--at least not in this country!  
• "Being slightly paranoid is like being slightly pregnant--it tends to get worse!--Journalist Molly Ivins
• Last fortune cookie received:  "Don't ignore minor detail; they are the key to your success."
• (You mean, minor details like subject-verb agreement?)
• "We had better create a French music--and without sauerkraut."--French composer Erik Satie to Claude Debussy as the German Romanticism of Anton Bruckner, Hugo Wolf and Richard Wagner appeared headed to a dead end. --David Dubal in the Wall St. Journal
• jimjustsaying's Weird Crime of the Week:  Officials in Hebron, Md., arrested a 60-year-old man who allegedly went into a supermarket, poked holes in packages of meat and moved chicken from refrigerated cases so they would spoil.  He was charged with five counts of malicious destruction of property.
• "There is one word in America that says it all, and that one word is, 'You never know.'"--former major-league pitcher Joaquin Andujar
• Speaking of baseball, isn't it about time to scuttle the so-called All-Star Game?   When you consider the injuries that usually result in a half dozen or so substitutes thrown into the fray, the absence of star pitchers who can't or won't participate because they worked in the previous Sunday's game and the suspicion that many of the game's elite are chemically enhanced, the game loses much of its former luster.   
• Add to that the absurd Home Run Derby  (guys going way off their game by overswinging at powder-puff pitches) and the prima-donna posturing ("If I ain't startin', I ain't departin'") plus the galling reminders that overpaid blokes like Albert Pujols are getting X million dollars as part of their "incentive clauses" for making the team . . . . If the game wants to take a four-day break, take it.  Just spare us the distorted and increasingly annoying spectacle.
• "A pessimist gets nothing but pleasant surprises."--Mystery writer Rex Stout
•  Another Product You Probably Didn't Know is Sold by Amazon.com:  Hawbakers Coyote and Wolf Gland Lure.
• jimjustsaying's  Dumb Idiom of the Week: "Miss out."  Is it possible to "miss in"? 
•  " . . . [R]estaurants have a sweet spot that sometimes lasts for only a year or two, when the chef is really invested in it.  But when that chef becomes well-known and famous and wants to scale up and open another venture and the concept becomes kind of played out and might become dumbed down, you see a decline in quality there. I think part of the problem, too, is basically in all of the arts  . . . there's always a demand in kind of a capitalist system to grow--let's grow, let's grow--and a lot of things when it comes to creativity are really hard to scale up."--Statistics expert Nate Silver 
•  Another jimjustsaying Media Word, a word you encounter only in print but never hear a normal person use in real life:  "Besmirched."
• When someone says a mass or serial killer was "kind of a loner," that doesn't reveal much of anything.   Of course, they're loners.  It's not like a Tuesday bowling night with the boys!
• Has anyone else but me grabbed someone's body wash instead of shampoo in the shower?  
• Nicest thing about my 90-pound weight loss:  My Love Handles shrunk down to Like Handles, then down to Nodding Acquaintance handles, and, finally,  down to Won't-Even-Give-You-The-Damned-Time-of-Day Handles!
• Newspaper Obituary Headline of the Week:  "Tiger."  As in Elmer "Tiger" Bruening (Green Bay Press-Gazette obituary, March 5,  2013). R.I.P., Mr. Bruening.
• Do people still put little pieces of toilet paper on their shaving cuts?
• I heard the drought is so bad in the Southwest that one bar is holding damp T-shirt contests.
• Forty-sixth Wisconsin Town I Didn't Know Existed Until I Saw It Mentioned in a Green Bay Press-Gazette Obituary:  Dunbar.  (R.I.P. James Erickson, Green-Bay Press Gazette obituary, May 17, 2013).  Previous entries: Athelstane, Walhain, Duck Creek, Breed, Anston, Sobieski, Amberg, Osseo, Angelica, Brazeau, Waukechon, Sugar Camp, Kossuth, Lessor, Kunesh, Pulcifer, Cato, Florence, Greenleaf, Eaton, Poygan, Hofa Park, Hilbert, Hollandtown, Beaufort, Glennie, Harshaw, Bessemer, Crooked Lake, Tigerton, Goodman, Readstown, Dousman, Butternut, Montpelier, Cecil, Red River, Gillet, King, Laona, Kelly Lake, Glenmore, Tonet, Stiles and Morrison.
• "The only time to eat diet food is while you're waiting for the steak to cook."--Julia Child
• Today's Latin Lesson: Mane volucris gets vermis , tamen quisnam volo vermis pro ientaculum?  ("The early bird gets the worm, but who wants worms for breakfast?")