It is Sunday, March 19 and there are only 71 days until Memorial Day, the unofficial start of summer.  Get that sun block out and get the grill ready.  Today we remember the birthdays of William Bradford, Wyatt Earp and Nakagawa Soen.  On this day in 721 BC the first lunar eclipse was recorded, in 1628 the Massachusetts colony was founded and in 1951 Herman Wouk’s “Caine Mutiny” was published.  In Australia it is Canberra Day, in Italy and Spain it is St Joseph Day and in the US it is National Chocolate Caramel Day and National Let’s Laugh Day.

I am off on one of my rants on commercials again.  I apologize, but there are certain things that just cannot be ignored.  One of the ads that always gets me is the one for wrinkle cream.  They talk about how great it is and how well it works and then they show a woman who can’t be more than 25 years old and we are supposed to believe that she needed wrinkle cream.  She probably doesn’t even know what a wrinkle is.  You want to show how well it works, use it on some 60 plus woman who spends her entire summer sitting on the beach and let me see a before and after comparison.

Another thing that gets me is clothing ads.  Not just TV commercials, but print ads as well.  They show all these slender men and women wearing the clothing.  The people are always smiling and having fun, even though in the commercials it is so fake looking and they do not seem to be … but I digress.  You want to sell clothing, show people of various ages, sizes and shapes wearing the outfits.  Let us see how they look after having worked all day or dealt with a two year old for an afternoon, not what some guy with a fake smile looks like throwing a beach ball while wearing a suit.

Another commercial I saw recently was for a car company trying to sell its mini-van using the convenience of being able to open the door by waving your foot under a sensor.  They show a guy loaded down with athletic equipment waving his foot.  The door opens and he puts everything in the car.  Then they show a guy, also loaded down with athletic equipment.  Unfortunately, he does not have one of those magic sensors and as he tries to open the door manually, he drops all the equipment.  This is where I have the issue.  The announcer claims that the game was lost because he did not get there in time.  But if you notice, when the equipment is dropped, it is baseball and soccer equipment.  Perhaps the game was lost because the guy had no idea where he was actually supposed to be going.

One other issue regarding this sensor and how wonderful it is to be able to actually open the door with your foot.  Here are my questions – how do you open the door without unlocking the car?  Can anyone come by and wave their foot and open your car?  If you need some kind of fob, what do you do if your hands are full and you cannot get to it?  If you just need to have the fob in the vicinity, what do you do if you leave the fob in the house?  Just wondering.

I have, on several occasions, made fun of the medication that uses two claw foot bathtubs as the closing advertising gimmick for their product.  I have always said that if you are going to sit in separate bathtubs, you don’t need their pill.  I was recently excited to see that I am not the only person who finds the two tubs incongruous.  In a recent cartoon in my daily paper, it shows a doctor talking to his patient.  He says, “I think it is important to note that the medication I’m about to prescribe only works if you get out of the one bathtub on the hill and climb into the other one.”  How weird is it to have a cartoon agree with your thinking?  There are those who would say that in my case it is completely appropriate.

I would also like to revisit an issue that I mentioned some time ago.  At the risk of sounding paranoid, or just crazy, I am still convinced that inanimate objects are out to get us (me).  I am sure if you think about it, you will remember times when such an object did something that it really could not have done.  As an example, I recently starting going through files and purging papers that I no longer needed.  When it came time to take out the garbage, I took my bag to the can with all those papers to get rid of them.  I got the bag open and ready for the garbage.  I picked up the trash can and positioned it for the dump.  I paused to make sure that everything was ready and then began to dump the trash. 

Simple right?  Pick up the can and dump it in the bag.  Except no.  just as I started to dump the trash, one side of the bag folded over and instead of the papers all going neatly into the bag, they spilled all over the floor.  So a simple task that should have taken 10 seconds ended up taking over a minute and required a fair amount of profanity.  Crazy?  Maybe.  But consider things that have happened to you that you know should not normally have happened.  Just be careful.  The inanimate object gremlins are everywhere.

This week our fact tells us that the Harthahorne City Ordinance, Section 363, states that it shall be unlawful to put any hypnotized person in a display window.  I really do not have anything I can add to this.  I would; however, love to know the circumstances that led to the need for this ordinance.

Now go have a chocolate caramel and a good laugh.