Drugstores at Halloween

            I like Halloween.  I really do.  I like telling vampire stories with extremely graphic descriptions of blood while lighting your face from beneath under a scratchy wool blanket.  (See, Halloween can be fun!)

            However, come October, I have to avoid drugstores until January 15^th.  I’d better stock up on gummy bears now.  Why?

Perfect Halloween decor.  All it requires is a couple of people and some toilet paper.

            Drugstores like to scare their patrons.  Really.  C’mon, CVS, do you think that we want to go in there and watch the little rubber-faced man with the vest take his head off and put it on a silver platter?  Do you think it’s our idea of fun to walk up to the cherished gummy bear rack only to have the grey fine tulle-clad grim reaper stick out his sickle at us?  Do I really want to walk towards the stationary if I just KNOW the bloody-faced woman is going to jump out of her coffin at me as I go between the nail polish and the magazines?  No!  No, I’m going to avoid your entire store for the next five months.

            I’m serious.  (During Christmas I don’t hate you AS much, you just play crappy Christmas music and light cinnamon bonfires by the door.  Glade is not as good a sales tool as you think it is.)

            Michael’s is just as guilty if not more.  I can’t go in past October tenth.  They like to scare us too, with scarecrows and zombie tombstones.  WHY DO THEY MAKE THIS SHIT?

            It’s not even the concept that is that scary.  I could live with the concept.  I could live with the gory description and the distinct odor of rotting hemes.  It’s the ANIMATRONICS that creep me out.  These things are scary.  It’s like they’re going to come out and bite you.

            They’re going to come out and bite you, but not in the way they did in the 1200’s, where they said you were possessed by the devil and then burned you at the stake in the market for being a witch.  We know these things aren’t being possessed by the devil.  Of course they’re not.  They were programmed by regular people sitting at home watching Power Rangers and Ghostbusters.  NORMAL PEOPLE.   They could be out there, among us now, taking their inspiration from anything and then submitting us to a barrage of creepy programmed straw and latex each tenth month of the year!

            It’s unavoidable, too.  They submit sick people to this stuff.  Unlike those of us addicted to gummy bears, who can stock up indefinitely, those who need prescription drugs have to bear this WITHOUT FAIL.  It’s not like you can just forget about your heart arithmia medicine.  You need it, so you go to the drugstore and get scared by the five or so plastic creatures they have set up there. 

            I propose we ban drugstores from having animatronics.  It could be like they do in gated communities or those suburban neighborhoods where they don’t let you have faded plastic flamingos in the yard because they don’t like the twisted wire legs.  There are a number of reasons to support the ban: children getting scared and being scarred for life, grown-ups going in and being scarred for life, people dying from malnutrition due to lack of gummy-bear availability, people going broke due to price of gummy bears places besides CVS.  Come  on, gummy bear eaters!  Rally!

Image credit:Marco Torresin/Freedigitalphotos.net

Progress on the fashion post

Remember Simplicity 2914?   It's finished,  a little big.  I have "finishing touches" to go on it.  I'm working on 2346 (Lisette Traveler dress) view A, and hope to finish it in a couple of weeks.  What's next?  Who knows?  I sure don't.  I'm thinking a dotted swiss trench or a convertible LBD.  That's all I'll say for now...

Ambiguity of a Phrase

Sound good when you get up in front of one of these: take diction.
Source: Salvadore Vuono/freedigitalphotos.net

I always hate the phrase "yourear."  You can never tell if people are saying "your ear" or "your rear."  This great ambiguity of phrasing makes it very difficult to tell what someone is saying.  I wonder how many bets have been lost by yourear.

This is why I think everyone should take diction for one year in eighth or tenth grade.  It could be a once-a-week lesson of thirty minutes, which would still equal fifteen or twenty hours of tutoring.  I certainly think it would be worth the nesesary pulling out of class.  In fact, I think it would enhance in-class performance, as well as college performance and interpersonal skills.  I'm not suggesting that we try to get rid of our own genuine national or regional dialect or try to rid ourselves of accents.  Accents can be incredibly beautiful; I love accents.  What I don't like is mumbling.  We have to get rid of the mumbling.

Or else our writing will have to morph to something along the lines of gdeouhdfkhvldfh to help estimate the pronunciation of our real life speech.