Have you noticed how often our United States is less than the fifty we actually have? I caught a TV spot last night for somebody's restaurant (obviously not Alice's) boasting about always using 'fresh, never frozen' beef, or meat or employees (I was distracted, cut me a break!). While the announcer is talking and we're seeing cascading lettuce, tomatoes and onions or something that could be an onion, there's little, tiny words, barely visible on the screen, about how that statement only applies to the '48 contiguous' states', which is grown-up-speak for 'on your bikes, Alaska and Hawaii.'
Contiguous ranks right up there with disambiguation, which sounds like a made up word (okay, actually all words are made up, of course, but I meant by a prankster or someone learning English by correspondence course during a postal strike) which, has nothing to do with either Alaska or Hawaii, but seems like showing off by using a lot of letters for possibly nefarious purposes.
There's a different commercial for another restaurant chain where the pitch is 'buy this plate of now dead, cooked fish for only this much money, it's yummy' and the little words pop up in the corner of the screen to tell me the price is higher in Alaska and Hawaii (and in Puerto Rico; perhaps because of their continuing disambiguation?) though I would hope the fish are both as dead and as yummy as elsewhere.
'When you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there', to quote Christopher Columbus' mother (just one more thing- she looked nothing like Peter Falk), though I was somewhat surprised to learn he'd gotten lost just getting to the piers. Learn something new every day. I can't help but feel sorry for Alaska and Hawaii--the last two states to get their silk jackets and be allowed into the union and we still string them along.
Sure, we say to Alaska, you can be the biggest state (Texas doesn't mind, much) but we're gonna put this hunk of Canada between you and the State of Washington. As for Hawaii, it's like the kid always picked last for baseball (he's not very good, but he lets us use his bat), 'okay you're gonna play deep center field. Keep going back....no, more than that...a little more...just a bit more.' Until he disappears. If he's lucky, we remember to call him in when the game is over and he wonders what happened to his at-bats.
It just needs to stop. How can we have a family of nations when we cannot even unite the states? How would the rest of us feel if Hawaii and Alaska just blew us off. You fly into Juneau and the TSA guard asks for your passport. And you cry out 'but Alaska is a state! I don't need a passport to go from one state to the next!' And the TSA guard gets a tight little smile when he says, 'isn't that nice? Help yourself to one of those frozen meat hamburgers and take a seat, foreigner.'
Or you hit the Big Island to soak up the rays and your hotel clerk says, 'so you're from Norwich, Connecticut, are you? Your English is quite good-I can barely hear the accent! No, little man, I don't think you'll be enjoying Tiny Bubbles anytime soon. She has a headache from trying to read the small print on her TV.'
And we're left to watch Dan-O struggling to To Build a Fire and wonder what went wrong.
-bill kenny
No comments:
Post a Comment