Be Kind. Rewind.

Remember the VHS boxes lined up at Blockbuster during the golden age of crappy action pictures and the image always included 1) a gun, 2) a square-jawed hero, 3) an explosion in the background, and 4) a scantily-clad starlet? Not a big fan of movies like that, but I have some leftover names if they ever need to make some more: Proximal Cause. Convection. The Dog Walker. Metric Conversion. Arbor Day. Ambient Temperature. Permanent Marker. Also, why back when they were shot on film did we call them movies but now that they’re mostly shot digitally we call them films?

fit to print

The New York Times had an article about what was the best peanut butter. There are a lot of reasons why a person might want to read the New York Times and while those reasons undoubtedly vary from reader to reader I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that the percentage of New York Times readers who turn first to the old grey lady when seeking guidance in choosing their peanut butter is a very small number. A number, I would wager, approaching zero. This too: Breakfast pastry used to be cheaper. Nowadays, dollars to donuts is pretty much even money.

The late Dave Maleckar

Well, okay, the reason I’m late is I had some errands this morning and I had no prewritten verbiage to post and I’ve not yet sunk to the level of serving up “best-of” rants from the previous decades although as a legacy blog I would certainly be entitled to do so like Family Circus or Hi and Lois which to call them comics is to completely disregard the root meaning of the word and actually why were they ever included in the funny pages although so was Rex Morgan MD, which admittedly was at least as funny as Beetle Bailey.

Not my circus

How much fun a barrel of monkeys would actually be would depend on how tightly they were packed and how long they’d been in there. Would this barrel be jam packed? Chock full? How much fun would it be to open a barrel of angry ravenous monkeys? No fun. I don’t even want to think about it. Also, under what system of measurement is the barrel anybody’s standard unit for a quantity of monkeys? Because I happen to know that crabs are measured by the bushel and while they too are eukaryotic bilaterally symmetrical critters, they’re nobody’s simile for hilarity.