Every now and then, it occurs to me that for every category of manufactured items, there must be a sales catalog somewhere. I started thinking about this when I found, in the middle of a fairly ordinary catalog for school supplies, a selection of sex education supplies including plastic feti, models of the male and female reproductive tracts (“It’s . . . a vagina.”).
So, somewhere out there is a catalog for bumpy lane dividers, a catalog for boat anchors, and a catalog for hospital ID bracelets. I find this idea both strangely consoling and utterly amusing.
The blackbirds in my garden dunk the dog food pellets in the dogs water bowl. The dog carries a mouthful of kibble onto the sofa, drops them out and eats them one by one.
Imagine what happens when they put all seven letters down at once!
[sub]They get fifty points extra, like everyone else.[/sub]
I have long held that there must be factories in China turning out reproduction rustic agricultural brick-a-brack to stick to the walls of roadhouse-style restaurants.
^ You do know the catalogs come out first? They know they’re not going to sell every item, so when a customer asks for so-and-so, “Sorry, out of stock.” Eventually they’ll sell enough of the twelve items they actually have to cover the cost of the printing.
I used to work for this company from 1988-1992. I worked at the main factory, but they had a distribution center that is also quite impressive. Not as impressive now as it used to be, though.
Back in the phone book days, I was traveling cross country and often rested an hour or two at the library of whatever town or city I was passing through. At one of them I noticed they had phone books of about 30 major cities. So I grabbed Houston and there I was. My name, address and phone number sitting in Phoenix, AZ.
I also used to wonder about vacation photos, specifically all the ones taken by strangers where I was in the background. My image is “residing” in their homes all over the country. Conversely there are a passel of strangers in my box of old photos, trapped there forever.
I think the above qualifies as pure random silliness.
Where do all the random shoes come from? I’ve seen them on highways all over America, sitting in lonely silence. Is there some group that travels the roads with garbage bags full of shoes, randomly tossing one out the window from time to time? Or have these items escaped through some sort of magical animation, now condemned to spend their existence searching for their sole mates?
My folks were travelling through Alabama several years ago, when my Dad noticed dead crows just off the side of the road; not a bunch at one time–someone was driving down the road and dropping a dead crow every mile (on the dot) for 60 to 70 miles.
I’m picturing a large trash bag of dead crows in the back of a pickup truck; “Clem, toss another.” ::shudder::
