Random Thoughts 9

• On a recent road trip to rural Mississippi, I found myself in need of a restroom break. We stopped the car and I went into the men’s room of a non-descript gas station. The inside of the door was adorned with graffiti which, as anyone who has ever urinated in a gas station restroom knows, is not unique. What was unusual is that someone utilized a bright-green paint marker to write the following:

“What is life to you beyond the almighty $$?”

As I read the question, I thought to myself how reassuring it was to discover a thought-       provoking philosophical musing rather than a racial slur or crude drawing of a phallus. Sadly, in the way of an answer, someone had subsequently taken a black permanent marker, drawn an arrow from the question mark, and written......“Dees Nuts”

• I certainly understand that from a marketing perspective phrases like commercial strength or contractor series are excellent selling points. It allows the consumer feel as if they have become privy to something exclusive. After all, why would any use anything less than NATO-grade Velcro to hang a picture? That being said, I believe that we have jumped the shark with Professional Series toilet paper. What does that even mean? What qualifies someone as a professional connoisseur of bathroom tissue? Dysentery?

• The War on Christmas is exhausting. I am having difficulty remembering exactly which corporations hate Jesus. As far as I am concerned, the War on Christmas was over the moment someone lost their life attempting to get a Black Friday discount on a waffle maker.

• I am upset by the latest batch of emojicons. The only visual representation of feces is smiling, and while I feel that the evacuation of one’s bowels can be a happy event, I should at least be offered a frowning alternative to convey gastrointestinal distress. On a side note, the British technology firm SwiftKey published a report that found Canadian residents are twice as likely to utilize the smiling poop emoji as the rest of the world. It may be time to close the border.

• While there is legitimate debate to be had over the recent protests at the University of Missouri, it should remind us all that wherever you stand on an issue, it had best be on the same side as the football program.

• Several weeks ago, a SPAM message made its way in to my GMAIL inbox. This was unusual as these sort of messages rarely circumvent Google’s anti-spam algorithms. The message was a formulaic phishing scam presenting itself it as an unsolicited carnal encounter (I saw your profile on “the social internet site” and would like to have a meaningless sexual relationship etc..) and included three photos. Two of them were exactly what you would expect. The third, appeared to be a scanned picture of lower quality that could have been captioned “Elderly Ukrainian Woman Washes Dishes” I am still unsure if this was an honest mistake where the originator of the scheme had accidentally attached a personal photo or, having been disappointed by the scheme’s response thus far, decided to cast a wider net. I can just imagine some guy getting this message and saying to himself, “The bikini model is tempting, but I am having a devil of a time getting my Brioche Pan clean after that progressive dinner!”