The Junk Drawer

Today I’m giving a hearty shout-out to one of my favorite blogs, The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks. The blog’s brainchild, Bethany Keeley, documents the needless double quote marks that wind up transforming an everyday phrase into a seemingly disingenuous one. One example shows an East India Tea & Coffee LTD bag labeled Old Fashioned Sassafras Herbal "Tea." It may be tea, or it may not be tea. Inquiring minds want to know.

It took about a month, but I was able to find a sign with unnecessary quotes, take a snapshot and send it in. It’s from a catering business near the Allentown (Pa.) Fairgrounds. She posted it on Saturday.

If you want to see more like it, check out her blog. It’s a really "enjoyable" read. Wink wink.

Recently I wrote about what I perceive to be a shopping club card scam. My local grocery store suddenly pulled a switcheroo on what kind of rewards they were giving to customers who use their club cards.

In the past, it was always a monetary discount, up to 20% off your total bill, depending on your point accumulation. The last time they ran the points redemption period, they gave my husband, Dave and me useless bakeware instead. I gave all three pieces to my sisters, by the way.

Today we got revenge.

Dave ran over to the store for some dinner items: hamburger, ice cream, and macaroni and cheese from the deli counter. When he got home, he announced "That lady at the deli must have the hots for me. She did it again."

What’s "it," you ask?

"It" is undercharging for a pound of macaroni and cheese. "Again" means it’s the second time the same lady did this to him. The first time it happened, we got a good chuckle out of it. Now we just think she’s smitten with him.

Dave didn’t realize this had happened again until he got to the register and self-scanned his items. When the macaroni and cheese rang up, the polite-sounding lady who lives inside the machine said in her best monotone voice, "Five cents."

Yeah, a nickel for a whole pound. See for yourself. Note: I’m blocking out the store name because Dave is actually afraid someone from the store might read my blog (????) and then fire the woman who is repeatedly weighing his stuff in this way.

I asked him what he did when the machine lady reported the surprising discount — loudly, I might add. Everybody in the store knows the cost of everything you’re buying because the audio is jacked up so high. Frankly, I can’t understand how the store employees can listen to the scanner voices all day without wanting to commit hara-kiri.

He said he looked around figuring some store employee would look up and say "Nothing costs a nickel! The machines are malfunctioning! Tech support in Aisle 2! Stat!"

But no one blinked and he wasn’t about to return it to the deli, as half his items had already merrily rolled down the conveyor belt. We’ve decided this makes us even for the club card scam. Karma works like that.

In case you’re thinking it’s immoral for him to not have corrected their mistake, he was punished, in a way.

When Dave started frying up the burgers, he realized he forgot to buy mayonnaise, a staple in his diet and an absolute requirement for cheeseburgers. He had a very unhappy meal tonight. Karma works like that.

If you’ve ever made the mistake of leaving the house wearing two different shoes, you don’t want to run into me. I will mock you mercilessly. I did just that to a co-worker once, in the form of this PowerPoint tutorial, titled "Shoe Lessons." Once there, click View Published Presentation in a New Window. Page through the slides at the bottom of the screen.

My victim took it well when I sent it to her originally. And she’s been matching her shoes properly ever since.

The slideshow had the added benefit of making my mother laugh for the one and only time during her excruciatingly painful bout with shingles. And, by the way, I would rather have two broken legs, an intestinal parasite and a flaming case of poison ivy — all at once — than suffer through shingles. I managed to get my mother skin patch narcotics you slap right on the pain points and even that wasn’t enough. It’s a truly horrible condition.

Last month I wrote about my new, awesome Sony Bravia HDTV. Dave and I have been enjoying the Sunrise Earth program on the Discovery HD Theater channel a couple times a week. Stunning is the only way to describe it.

Evidently cats can enjoy it too! It’s been reported that cats have some trouble distinguishing between real objects and those projected on an HDTV set. Here is Shadow enjoying penguins from a recent episode of Sunrise Earth. Her head moved back and forth, following them as they waddled across the screen.

She sat like this for almost ten minutes. If you have cats, you’ll know they can barely sit still for any length of time unless they’re sleeping. Easily distracted, they’ll respond to the slightest movement. I was able to go upstairs, prep the camera, and take a few shots without her budging from this spot. She sat there for another five minutes afterwards, enthralled by the penguins.

I was going to suggest she’s in this trance-like state because she has a little brain. But that’s pretty much how I look when I’m watching Sunrise Earth. So let’s just say I must have the smartest cat in the world, shall we?

You read that right. I have been accused of plagiarism, but not as a blogger. I have plenty of juice left. In fact, I’m just getting started. I have no interest in copying others, mostly because there’s no fun in that. And, oh yeah. It’s illegal.

But since I do wonder if anyone is plagiarizing me, I use a site called Copyscape, where you submit your blog URL and it crawls the web for places where your work has been duplicated. Stolen, actually. I did find one site that took my entire The Day I Didn’t Die post and translated it into German. It’s a junk site plastered with ads. Evidently, they lift posts to drive you to their site and try to get you to buy garbage when you get there.

After discovering Copyscape, I was reminded of the one time in my life that I was officially accused of plagiarism. I was a sophomore in high school and in danger of failing music class. I don’t understand music theory, I can’t read sheet music since the symbols look cartoony to me, and of course, I can’t carry a tune to save my life. I was failing on all cylinders.

My teacher offered me an opportunity for extra credit so I could pull myself up to a passing grade. I gladly took her up on it. She gave me a few options and I chose to listen to a piece of classical music, then write a story about what I thought the music was trying to say.

I can’t remember what piece I wrote about, but I do know I listened to it over and over in the living room one weekend and knocked out not a story, but a poem, about what it meant.

The piece began with a very peaceful melody, then gradually progressed into a cacophony of what sounded like every instrument in the orchestra, later relaxing and making a soothing exit. I thought it sounded like a storm rolling into a valley, shaking things up, and then rolling out. That’s what my poem was about and I was pretty happy with what I’d written.

And then I turned it in.

While we were taking our final exam, I noticed her reading it at her desk. When the class was over, she called me up and asked me point blank "Did you write this?"

I told her "Yes, this weekend."

"It doesn’t sound like you wrote it. It sounds like you copied it," she protested.

"But I did write it. I listened to the piece all weekend and that’s what I thought it said to me."

"Did anyone see you write it?"

"Yes, my parents did. You can ask them."

"I will."

Now, you might think I should have been insulted and horrified to be accused of plagiarizing someone else’s work. But I wasn’t. It was the most flattering thing I’d ever heard since my English teacher suggested I go to a creative arts camp the summer before. It was the first time in my life that I thought I might have a talent for writing. I left the class on Cloud 9, when other students might have left in tears.

My teacher did get confirmation from my parents that I wrote the poem myself. She might have felt bad afterwards for accusing me of stealing, but she was only doing her job. The accusation left a marked impression on me. If she thought my work was so good it couldn’t have been my own, maybe — just maybe — someday I could call myself a writer.

Someday is today.