Page 4

Finger Lickin' Bad

Please don't lick your finger to remove a too-tight ring and then hand it to me. Joseph's has sanitary lubricants on hand for this purpose.

Please don't lick your thumb to count money. If the new bills you just printed stick together, give them to me and I will lick my thumb to count them. However, I will excuse this unsanitary practice for counting hundred dollar bills. Thank you for your attention.

Exclusive Gourmet Discount Hand-Crafted Designer Products For All

I opened the refrigerator to get milk to put in my coffee and there it was: Land O Lakes Gourmet Half-and-Half*. "Gourmet" was done up in fancy script, too. The carton contained no information that would save the name from being an oxymoron, i.e., "from hand-milked cows" or "extra-virgin cream".

A lot of words like "gourmet" and "designer" are bandied about today. I suppose everything is designed by someone, but prefixing a product with "designer" should mean it was designed by someone you've heard of.

Hand-crafted is also abused. I was once in a fast-food chicken joint and, knowing the mashed potatoes were of the instant ilk, I declined them. Well, the girl behind the counter was offended and she proudly told me that she had personally hand-mixed the potato powder. A lot of that "hand-crafted" Indian jewelry you see was just soldered together from cast-from-a-mold components. The FTC regulates such claims: hand-made jewelry is supposed to be made from scratch with hand tools.

Then there's "discount." Discount from what? Other than for watches, there's no list price on jewelry to discount from. Actually, "discount" is a code word for cheap stuff cheap. Good stuff cheap is hard to find, since the minute a store starts pushing "discount", it attracts people who only want to hear price, not quality, which forces the store to adjust its products accordingly.

"Exclusive" and "imported" are a few other words to make you think you're not just getting a mass-produced product. I like the beer ad jingle that claims the stuff "never tasted so imported." What does imported taste like?

I used the milk.

* Since renamed “Traditional Half-and-Half”, no doubt from the original pilgrims’ recipe.

The Only Law Never Broken

It is ordained and established that none from henceforth shall use to multiply gold or silver nor use the craft of multiplication and if any the same do and be thereof attaint, that he shall incur the pain of felony.*

This Act Against Multipliers was passed in England in 1404, during the reign of Henry IV (1399-1413). To multiply gold and silver referred to alchemists transmuting base metal into gold or silver. It wouldn't do for someone to be richer than the king.

The act was repealed in 1689 after lobbying by Robert Boyle, one of the founders of modern chemistry (Boyle's Law). Boyle, along with his contemporary, Isaac Newton, was an alchemist, seeking to change base metal into gold. He wanted the act repealed because he thought he had found the secret.

Actually, minute amounts of gold have been made from mercury and platinum in nuclear reactors at great cost.

* They didn't fool around in the 15th century. "Pain of felony" meant the death penalty, no doubt painful.

Sunday School

Benjamin Franklin relates a story told to him by Indian interpreter Conrad Weiser in Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America (1784).

Weiser tells of an Indian friend who, offering to sell his beaver pelts on a Sunday, was told by a trader that he couldn’t conduct business on the Sabbath because this was the day they meet to learn good things.

The Indian tagged along with the trader to church services. He perceived that the angry man in black who spoke was angry at him being there so he left.

After the service he accosted the merchant again and asked if he would give more than four shillings a pound for his beaver. No, the trader said. Three and sixpence.

The Indian then asked other traders and they all told him three and sixpence. “This made clear to me that my Suspicion was right; and whatever they pretended of meeting to learn Good Things, the real purpose was to consult how to cheat Indians on the Price of Beaver.”

Intelligence Agent

A woman came in to the store and asked if any intellectuals patronized the store. I never was asked that before. I told her that all walks of life come in. She looked dubious. I was sore tempted to ask her how one could spot an intellectual, but she was looking at something and I wanted to segue to close the sale.

She bought a chain and wanted me to shorten it. I told her she could pick it up the next day and gave her a newsletter.

She came in to pick up the chain, wearing her phi beta kappa key, and gave me back the newsletter with a few corrections highlighted in yellow.

So how could one spot an intellectual? A subtle air of superiority? Gratuitous displays of erudition? An arrest for sherry binge-drinking? Wait! Of course! The head comes to a point. And in advanced cases there is a propeller on top.

Bubble Trouble

Bubble wrap was invented in 1957 by the founders of Sealed Air. While useful for protecting fragile things for shipping, its primary function is the thrill of popping those air-filled bubbles.

Sealed Air’s bubble wrap business has declined even though the rise in e-commerce has increased demand. This is because the material is so bulky it’s too expensive to ship it more than 150 miles from one of its factories, losing business to local imitations. (The patent expired in 1981.)

The company was considering getting out of the business before it invented iBubble Wrap which can be shipped flat and inflated on site. This new bubble wrap takes up one fiftieth the space, but requires a special pump that users have to buy for $5500, although that is expected to go down to $1000 by 2017.

Unfortunately, the bubbles in the new stuff can’t be popped. The bubbles aren’t individually sealed but are in columns. Pushing on a bubble just pushes the air into neighboring bubbles in the column. This may spell the end of pop culture!

So just how satisfying is popping those bubbles? There is a Facebook group called Popping Bubble Wrap with 500,000 members. There is a National Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day the last Monday in January, started by a radio station in Bloomington, Indiana in 2001 when microphones that came packed with bubble wrap inadvertently broadcast the the bubble popping of the unwrappers.

The radio station kicked off the first holiday with a bubblympiad featuring a popping contest and bubble wrap fashions and sculptures.

And, of course, there is a Guinness record for simultaneous bubble popping. Oral Roberts University broke the record on Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day in 2015 with its “Pop ‘Til You Drop Bubble Wrap Challenge”. 1011 poppers broke the old record of 942 set by a Minnesota elementary school in 2014.