Posted on 03/31/2012 4:44:10 PM PDT by SamAdams76
Does anybody read magazines anymore? I was just thinking about all the magazines that used to come to my house back in the 1970s and 1980s. Family Circle, Reader’s Digest, National Lampoon, Mad Magazine, National Geographic, Popular Science, Rolling Stone, even “news” magazines like Time and Newsweek because other than the daily newspaper and the evening news on TV, there were no other sources for news.
I figure at one point, I was subscribed to about 25 different magazines - some weekly, some monthly and some bi-weekly. I would pretty much find at least one magazine in my mailbox every night when I got home. These days, I only get two magazines (Wired and MacWorld) and l think it’s only because my wife accidentally renewed them when doing the bills a year or two ago. I think I’m about done reading magazines.
Seems to me that if the economy is so bad, why does it take so long to get a table at the Rainforest Cafe, the Bahama Breeze or even the Olive Garden? In fact, the American landscape is chockfull of these “casual eating” chains. Outback, Applebees, Chilis, Longhorns, Red Lobster, Margaritaville, Bertuccis, just to name a few more. There are dozens up dozens of casual eating chains with hundreds and hundreds of locations all across this great country of ours.
Now maybe I’m just an old codger, but when I was growing up, there was no such thing as casual eating restaurant chains. Going out to eat in those days was a special event - maybe two or three times a year - and you had to be wearing your Sunday best to go. And if you didn’t scrub yourself church-clean, you got a whack upside the head by your mother and you got dragged into the bathroom where you got scrubbed down with a piece of steel wool. But I digress.
Now going out to eat is a routine event and you get to go there dressed any old way you want. Flip-flops, shorts, t-shirts, pretty much anything goes in a casual eating joint. All you have to do is show up with some kind of shoes and a shirt and they hand you a pager and tell you it’s a 30-45 minute wait. Which doesn’t faze anybody these days. You grab a drink at the bar and spend the next half hour standing in the waiting area (because the seating area is always full) waiting for your pager to light up like a Christmas tree and buzz. Then you get taken to your table where a harried waitress (these places are perpetually under-staffed) scribbles down your order and drops a massive basket of bread and butter that could be a meal all by itself.
One thing I can say about these casual dining joints is that the portions are absolutely enormous belly-busters. For example, the “Blooming Onion” appetizer at the Outback is this ungodly heap of fried onions that is probably about 5,000 calories all by itself. I always come walking out of these places swearing off food for at least the next two days. But somehow, I’m always hungry again the next day.
Buying shirts and ties for work sure isn’t simple like it used to be. I went into the men’s clothing store recently thinking I’m going grab a few shirts off the rack, a couple of $10 ties and get the hell out of there when I get set upon by some young woman trailed by an effeminate guy named Leif who is carrying a tape measure and while the woman is interrogating me, this Leif is walking around me taking all sorts of measurements.
Before I even know what is happening, shirts and ties of various colors are being laid out on a long table and none of them are cheap. I’m talking $80 shirts and $40 ties. Then I get pushed into a changing room with various trousers and sports jackets to try on. Each time I come out, some short Italian guy with a heavy accent makes me spin around and starts making chalk marks on everything I’m trying on. I guess I own these suits now.
By the time I get back to the long table, belts, shoes, socks and cuff links have been introduced into the mix. For every item I reject, two or three more items quickly replace it while the woman prattles on about how to properly coordinate neckties with shirts and jackets and how I need to get shoe trees for my shoes and wooden hangers for my suits that have to be sanded and wiped down every so keep the moths out of my suits. I guess I’m a sucker for young women who want to pick out clothes for me to wear.
By the time I get out of there, my American Express card had taken a hit well into four figures and I had a lot of explaining to do when I got home to the wife. On the bright side, I won’t need to be buying business suits or shirts and ties anytime soon.
Speaking of formal clothing for men, I had to go to one of those “black tie” events recently. Now it has been about 20 years since I had to put on a tuxedo but I still remembered the basics of how to dress for black tie. So out of mothballs came the bowtie and the glassy shiny shoes and the funny looking shirt with the studs for buttons and all the other tuxedo trappings. But when I showed up, I was sort of out of place. About 90% of the other men were all wearing long ties with their tuxedos and only a few of us older folks bothered with the bowties. Nobody under the age of 40 had a tuxedo with a bowtie. Now 20 years ago, you would not dare attend a black-tie event with a long tie but times have changed.
While at this event, which was one of those $$$ a plate charity things (my company sponsored a table), all the women at our table would get up and go to the bathroom together. They did this about 3-4 times during the night leaving us men were left to discuss just what the hell women do when they all go to the bathroom together.
Now men would never go to the bathroom together as that is considered to be “kind of queer” in men circles. In fact, the whole male experience of going to the restroom bears mentioning for benefit of the ladies reading this article. For with men, relieving yourself in the men’s room is absolutely not a social event like it is with the womenfolk. For men, urinating is strictly a solemn, solitary event. When you stand at the urinal, the protocol is to look straight ahead at the wall in front of you, do your business quickly and efficiently and get the hell out of there without making eye contact with anybody else. And when you are at the urinal, you do not want to be fumbling about with your zipper or letting out a weak, dribbling stream. You want to urinate with confidence and eject it like a fire hose so you can get out of there and make room for the next guy. That’s why there is never a line for the men’s room. Guys do their thing and get the hell out of the way. It would be a serious breach of etiquette to socialize in there or do any of the other time-consuming things that women tend to do when in the bathroom.
Now there is a very masculine way for a man to use the restroom and during this black tie event, I happened to have one of the most manly restroom breaks of my life. Now I had been sitting at the table for a couple of hours and I had already pounded down some martinis and a glass of red wine so my bladder was starting to burst. But I felt good, I felt real good. So I excused myself from the table and strode purposely towards the men’s room.
Once there, I pushed through the door, grabbed a paper towel off the dispenser without breaking stride and in a single fluid motion, had my zipper down just as I pulled up to the urinal. As I stood at the urinal with my left hand casually in my pocket, I let loose a thundering torrent as I coolly pondered the wall space in front of me. Within 30 seconds I was finished and with a casual flip (to get that last drop out) I headed to the sink while zippering up. At the sink, I washed briskly with soap and water and walked towards the door while drying my hands with the paper towel I grabbed on the way in. Doing a pirouette as I reached the door, I tossed the used paper towel towards the wastebasket and watched it swish right in as I finished my perfect spin and walked right out the door, leaving everything else in the room slack-jawed in awe at my manly, no-nonsense men’s room style. And that ladies, is what transpires in a men’s room. Damn, I wish I had gotten that on video so I could YouTube it. I felt like James Bond.
For some reason, I really like that Ebay commercial where the guy named Pete shows up in the boardroom with pen and paper while everybody around him have trendy tablets. They all make fun of Pete not having an iPad while Pete frantically whips out his iPhone to order up a tablet - meanwhile, the ink from his pen has spilled all down the front of his shirt. The woman who pretends to be a caveman, pounding her chest and saying “Me Pete...Me have pen” is sort of a jerk but the blonde sitting next to her is pretty hot - especially when she’s laughing at Pete.
I sometimes sit and wonder whatever happened to KC and the Sunshine Band. They had a string of hits back in the 1970s and then after around 1980 (when “Please Don’t Go” hit number 1) dropped off the face of the earth. Recently, I finally got around to doing a Google search and found out that Henry Wayne Casey (KC) is still alive and well and doing 200 concerts a year playing the old disco hits of the 1970s. Now KC as a solo artist did have a hit in 1984, a bouncy uptempo song called “Give It Up” which vaguely resides in my memory banks but “Please Don’t Go” was for all practical purposes KC’s last hurrah on the national stage and probably my favorite song by them because their “disco” songs are annoying at get-out - especially that “That’s The Way I Like It” song.
Ticks...their only purpose in life is to sit on a blade of grass for days on end, waiting for some furry animal to wander by so that they can latch on. One aboard, the disgusting parasites embed themselves into the animals skin in which they gorge on blood until their bodies swell up into a giant zit. Of all the things God put on this earth, things like lakes, mountains, puppy dogs, beer (or at least the hops, barley, yeast and water required to make beer), snowflakes, and palm trees, why did he have to go ahead and create ticks?
Nasty things those ticks and my dog is always getting them. No matter how religiously I apply the Frontline treatment each month, I still feel the occasional bump on my dog and off to the bathroom we go where I have to get out the tweezers, feel around for the tick, extract the disgusting parasite that is engorged with my dog’s blood and flush it down the toilet. Now they say that you should not flush ticks down the toilet but put them in a glass of alcohol but I find it much more satisfying to flush them down the toilet, knowing that they will have a long, miserable journey to the killing fields of the water treatment plant.
I was thinking lately about maybe growing out my sideburns like Elvis Presley. I’m talking 1973-era Elvis, when he was a rather mean looking dude who was taking karate lessons and shooting out his television sets whenever a commercial came on. For me, the early 1970s was Elvis’ coolest period, just before he got really fat and sweaty and started wearing those stupid jump suits.
In fact, a fantasy of mine is to get myself looking exactly like Elvis Presley and getting my wife to look exactly like Marilyn Monroe and then go to Las Vegas where we can walk through Caesar's Palace or maybe Bellagio’s and just watch the people around us go absolutely nuts. That would be awesome. If I could sing like Elvis too, I’d get up on stage and do “A Mess Of Blues” or “Blue Moon of Kentucky”. None of those crappy movie songs Tom Parker used to make him do. I’d rock out and bring the house down. And then I’d walk off the stage and go home with Marilyn Monroe (who is actually my wife in disguise).
LMAO!
Good ‘un, Sam.
Except that little bit about ticks. Off-topic. Other than that, excellent.
Yes, the tick part does seem out of place but I write this stuff stream-of-consciousness - so as I pulled yet another tick off my dog this morning, it kind of ended up in the mix!
Man i HATE ticks.
I pulled one out of my inner thigh three weeks ago and theres still an itchy red bump there.
Nasty bloodsucking parasites....
Outstanding post of the day, sir!!!!
And, I understand about the ticks. Here in Georgia, they range in size fromt the size of a poppyseed to the size of of an orange seed. Ick. (The extra small ones are the ones that carry Lyme disease- double ick!) They have already made their presence known here- with no hard freeze to speak of this year, they have had time to contemplate their strategies and have already made claim to our home a couple of months early. They especially like to drop from limbs onto unsuspecting females who have a very loud, high pitched scream.
Good one, but on Elvis’ coolest period (if there ever was one) we disagree.
Good one, but on Elvis’ coolest period (if there ever was one) we disagree.
“Seems to me that if the economy is so bad, why does it take so long to get a table at the Rainforest Cafe, the Bahama Breeze or even the Olive Garden?”
A long time ago one of my instructors told us that there were three businesses in the Great Depression that did well in relative terms. The list surprised me. 1) Dining, 2) Jewelry and 3) Entertainment. I am not sure he was right, but it is an interesting list of small luxuries that are affordable, offer a small sense of escape, and provide a bit of social reassurance. The man passed away years ago, but this odd bit of instruction has stuck with me over the years.
I quite enjoyed this stream of consciousness romp. TANKS!
Well done, Sam!
What a nice break from the usual bad news.
Ticks, yeah we had an easy winter here in Wisconsin...I applied Frontline to our dogs last week. Earliest I’ve ever done that.
Husband mowed our lawn last week too. It needs it again!
It was 80 degrees here for a week recently.
Now it’s back to freezing at night and 40-50ish in the daytime.
The lilacs are leafed out and the buds are bursting open.
In your story, I started laughing at this point...”an effeminate guy named Leif...”.
Great stuff!
I have enjoyed our previous postings as well.
You should have a ping list so we don’t miss any of your stuff.
Put me on it, if you decide to make a ping list, please.
Cheers!
I noticed sideburns are coming back with the younger crowd.
A little bit of everything.
A co-worker of my father's from a large manufacturing company back in the late 60's had just returned from a lengthy vacation. Part way through the morning he went to make a quick pit-stop in the men's room. His last step was approaching the urinal but instead 3 women were shocked to see him from their "desks" as he flew in. Everyone forgot to tell him the men's room and been razed and converted into office space.
Pretty much spot on, except James Bond woulda kicked it, not shook it.
Your “about” page is a great read, also.
So anybody who wants on the "SamAdams76 Ramblings" PingList, please reply accordingly and I'll add you to my intermittent ramblings.
Ping Please Sam.
G
Add me to the pinglist!
I grew up in the 70s and we almost never ate out. And never to a fancy restaurant. Usually Frisch's Big Boy.
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