I was at the Price Club this week, and they were selling these videos called Baby Einstein, but you don’t want your kid to be like baby Einstein, because he didn’t start talking until he was like, five years old and all his teachers thought he was retarded.  Which of course mean that either the people making these videos already knew this and chose to lie to you and your children, or they thought that Einstein was some kind of a wonderbaby, in which case they clearly don’t know their history and you don’t want them to be teaching your baby stuff.  Unless, of course, it was actually some kind of a horrible prequel to Young Einstein, in which case you probably should just run screaming away from the store altogether, because if there’s one thing that’ll make your kid dumb, it’s too many prequels.

            I was out driving and I saw this billboard, but it was partially obscured by a gas station that had apparently grown there overnight.  So on the left side of the board, it said “Tired of This...” and showed a woman recoiling in horror from something on the other side of the billboard.  But because there was a gas station there, I had no idea what it was I ought to be tired of.  Was it international Communism?  Weasels?  Poorly laid bathtub grout?  I had no idea.  Unless of course, it was actually just asking if I was tired of billboards being obscured by stuff in front of them.  That would be absolutely genius on so many levels.

            I read an article in the paper about a girl who had her prosthetic leg stolen.  First, you’d have to be pretty crazy to steal a leg, but secondly, when exactly could you take it?  I mean, if the guy broke into her house during the day, she’d have been out wearing it.  And I’m sure that at night she probably kept it right near her bed.  So what happened?  Did she just forget to put in on one morning as she left for school, and then not remember until second period calculus?  “Dag, I seem to be falling over with unwonted frequency today,” she may have thought, “Aw monkeys, I left my leg on the nightstand again.  Narf!” 

            You know Family Circus?  Where every day there’s another charming little domestic vignette about Billy not being able to find his way home without wandering around in the desert for 40 years, or possibly PJ getting lectured by Dolly for setting up a meth lab in his crib (“Who’s been selling ecstasy to all the other toddlers?” “Not Me!”).  I’ll bet that the guy who does that has to go through so much to come up with ideas for it.  Like, I’m sure all his kids are like, fifty years old now, but every week they still have to come home and reenact stupid childhood moments so their dad can continue to provide us with saccharine, wholesome family entertainment.  “Billy, now I want you to climb over that tractor, through the drainpipe, and around that tree!” “But Dad, I’m a CEO of a major corporation!” “Shut up, boy, your old man needs to buy his medicine!”  Also, what kind of a name is Family Circus anyway?  There’s no circus whatsoever involved.  Maybe if Billy had to fight a lion, a lion that was on fire and driving a monster truck, then it would be a circus, but only then.

            I was eating a box of Tic Tacs the other days, and I saw that their website is at tictacusa.com, which I could understand if there was some other company that already took www.tictac.com first, forcing Tic Tacs to go with a second string address.  But I checked, and there’s not even a tictac.com in the first place.  This is kind of like if CNN made their website www.ilovelearningaboutthenewsatcnn.com.  Yeah, it works, but why not take the much shorter option that everybody is already going to assume is your address (and I do, by the way, realize the potential hypocrisy involved in championing short, easily typed URLs).  But then I thought, hey, maybe they just have a different website for each nation in which Tic Tacs are available.  But alas, it is not so.  www.tictaccanada.com, www.tictaczimbabwe.com, and www.tictacdjibouti.com all lead to nothing but heartbreak and lameness.  So yeah, why can’t you be more like altoids and the Klan, and just go with the obvious name instead of getting all creative on your customers.

            In a side note, why would you go to the website for Tic Tacs anyway?  Did you just have your first one ever and want to know how they work?  Are you looking to get a job at the Tictacary?  Seriously, even though this is the 21^st century and all that, maybe not everybody needs a website.  Leave some bandwidth for the rest of us.