So… it’s the day after Thanksgiving, and I’m wandering a grocery store with my best friend on the last leg of our shopping adventure. Our goal was to find a pepper mill, but that’s not important to the story.
Moments after we find the mill, she turns to me and says “I heard the strangest… well I guess you’d call it a song, yesterday.”
'Yeah?"
“Yeah. It was about this guy and he was visiting his friend’s restaurant, and then he ended up getting arrested-”
“You can get anything you want…” I warbled with a grin.
“Yeah, that’s it. What’s that song called?”
“The song’s called Alice’s Restaurant .” I promptly replied. “By Arlo Guthrie.”
Then she pulls me out of my thoughts about what a funny name Arlo is by saying, “Oh, is that what it was called? I never heard it before.”
For a moment I blink in shock. “You must have! They play it on Thanksgiving day every single year, since before we were born.”
“Nope. I’ve never heard it before.” She said, sounding quite convinced. “It’s pretty funny, though.”
This friend will be 27 in a few days. How can you go almost 27 years without ever having heard this song until now?!
Please share your tales of the mind-blowing yet completely insignificant.
Yesterday, we were walking out to our car in parking lot, talking with friends about the time we sailed the British Virgin Islands, eight years ago. We haven’t talked about the trip in years, mind you.
The first car we come to in the parking lot, just a random stranger’s car, has a vanity license plate:
Every morning, I take my little dog along when I go get the paper. She’s always happy to go sniffing and peeing. Yesterday, though, she and our cat were newly awake and having a grand time tussling. I offered the leash and said, “Layla, you wanna go out?” She took a step toward me, then stood there swiveling her head between Freckles and me; go out, hassle the cat, go out, hassle the cat, go out, hassle the cat. OK, let’s go out.
For the record, I was 18 when I first heard “Alice’s Restaurant.” And even thenit was just because my GF was shocked thatI had never heard it, so she played it for me. So it wasn’t even on Thanksgiving! And, five years later, I stuill have NEVER heardf it on the radio on Thanksgiving. Probably because I don’t listen to the radio on Thanksgiving, because I’m always inside eating and whatnot.
I don’t know how insignificant this is, but discovering my Mom is likely bipolar has made me re-examine my childhood with her, as well as her behavior these last 10 years. Sooooooo much makes sense now.
I’m almost as old, and I can remember hearing the song, but I can’t remember anything except the chorus (“You can get anything that you want at Alice’s Restaurant”). I certainly don’t remember any lyrics about someone getting arrested.
Regarding “Alice’s Restaurant,” there’s a connection between that song and Watergate.
I had my mind blown yesterday. You know, you can live with a person all your life, you can learn everything you know from them, have them help you through all your troubles, and yet they’ll still surprise you.
Yesterday I learned my father makes an awesome zombie. My sister, in high school, and her classmate and friend are making a movie about the stress of applying to college. And my father played a zombie.
Saturday night a guy called the ER wanting suggestions for how to get a ring off his girlfriend’s finger – she’d injured her hand, and the finger was so swollen that the ring was biting into her flesh.
Let’s see. My little brother will be applying for university by the end of the month, my little sister has started high school and as of November, I’m no longer a teenager. When did these things happen and why wasn’t I consulted about them first?
Way back, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, and it was 1985 or so, Motley Crue (I think) did a cover of Brownsville Station’s Smoking in the Boy’s Room.
I was in a record shop at the time, perusing the merchendise, when the original version came on the store’s PA. Two teens were nearby, and one turned to the other, “Oh man… they ripped that one off already!”
Not excessively mindblowing but yesterday I found out my kid who works part time for a criminal defense attorney got the same bonus that I had just received as my special 15th year bonus. :dubious: :rolleyes:
Well, this happened a couple weeks ago, and it’s more of a “WTF?” than a true mind-blow, but…
Ever since I moved in with my then-fiancee now-wife, we’ve watched “Wheel of Fortune” in the evenings. It just came on the TV, and she never changed the channel, so I assumed she liked the show. Thus, we slipped into this nightly habit.
And just a few weeks ago, I remarked that I never really liked the show, I just watched it because she liked it. She looked at me funny and said, “I don’t like this show! I just watch it because you do! I never watched this before you moved in!” So, apparently, we’ve been watching “Wheel of Fortune” for like three years now because each of us thought the other one liked the show, even though neither of us actually does.
The past few months I have been selling some odds and ends on eBay, mostly to have money to spend on eBay. While digging through a box of my dearly departed mother in laws stuff, I found a thank you card from Grover Asmus, Donna Reed’s last husband. He was thanking my MIL for the kind words following the death of Ms. Reed. When I asked my wife about it, she said her mom and Ms. Reed wrote and talked to each other on the phone all the time, both were into geneology and were tracking a few related family members.
On a whim, I listed the card on eBay with an opening bid of $2.00 thinking someone might pay that for it. It sold for $102.50. That was a definite surprise to me that someone would pay that much for it.
