What Starts With Mish and Ends With Mash?
A Geezer’s Notebook, By Jim Foster
I fear this a bit of mishmash since it goes all over the place with no rhyme or reason, not like the well-organised columns I usual write.
Has anyone noticed that ever since the medical community began pushing this sneezing or coughing into your elbow business supposedly to protect each other from Bubonic plague and other air-borne illnesses, we see more and more people wandering around with only half an arm? The whole scam had nothing to do with health at all but a hell of a lot more to do with promoting orthopaedic surgery and its ally, the prosthetic body parts business. You cough Black Death germs into your elbow what do expect?
The above is BS, as you have no doubt surmised, but it was one way of telling you about a friend of mine from long ago. He had a hook where one of his hands was supposed to be, right or left hook, I can’t remember. (Isn’t that odd I saw the guy all the time and can’t remember which hand he lost? It certainly says something about my powers of observation. I must take a close look at Mary and see if any of her parts are missing.)
He had slipped uptown at noon hour one day to buy a pair of gloves. In the store was a bin containing all kinds of different styles. One brand had little clips to keep the pairs together. He separated them and clipped two lefts together thereby getting two pairs for the price of one. (Or he might have clipped two rights together I don’t know which hand was missing but I’m sure he did since his powers of observation were much better than mine.)
I suppose technically what he did is stealing. On the other hand (I don’t know whether that particular hand is right or left) the next customer could also have had a hook so he was helping out another guy so no harm done – unless of course they both lost the same hand.
So much for that.
I am not exactly a Luddite, although I have to admit I haven’t kept up with the current practice of substituting two or three letters for a phrase now popular with my friends when texting when they should be watching where they are going. BYOB I understand since they do it all the time, although it may have more to do with the cheap rotgut whisky I have on hand and less on their willingness to help defray the entertainment costs at our house.
I always say, ‘why pay a lot of money for a jug when you can get it much cheaper?’ Granted you have to snap your head back to get it down but after two or three they all taste the same. (When you are cheap you say that to convince yourself)
LOL confuses me, the ‘left on’ part I get but I have no idea what day starts with an ‘L’. They also add little picture thingies, emojis I think they call them, or was that the comedienne on the Sid Caesar Show. I don’t understand them either. Sometimes my friend, Cecile, adds what I hope means thumbs up but it could just as easy be the finger. I even got one from my friend Gary which really leaves me out of the loop or OOTL since I thought he was as dumb as I am.
I guess now that I am approaching middle age I should learn these things, but I have another problem you have to get them on line and need a computer. Oh we have one but it just sits there. It needs a password to get into it and because of the privacy rules set down by some geeks to protect us from other geeks the man at the store can’t tell me what it is. Every morning we turn it on and then stare at it for a while. Maybe someday I can con one of my great-grandkids into figuring it out, but if they do under the privacy rules they won’t be able to tell me what it is anyway.
Back in December (see I told you this column was going to go all over the place) there an article on wine with suggestions of which one to buy as Christmas gifts (one bottle was from Argentina and cost $39.95, I wouldn’t pay that much for a case and I am a wine connoisseur – actually I am not, but I keep hoping if I write connoisseur often enough I will learn to spell it without spellcheck correcting me. So far, not so good ) but it wasn’t the wines that interested me, it was a couple of other suggestions to brighten the lives of your friends at Christmas.
A pair of wine glasses at 85 bucks a stem are highly recommended but, and this is important, they are universal and can be used for either white or red so that makes them quite a bargain. Really? I don`t know what happens at your house, but wine glasses at the Fosters last about twenty minutes if we are careful. The only way they could possible survive a week, or even a couple of days, would be if they were made from the window glass on a space shuttle.
The other suggestion was a hand-held device that extracts wine from a bottle without uncorking it. After six months the wine will taste exactly the same. Like a bottle of wine is going to last six months at our house.
