YOU NEVER KNOW

There once was a time when a broadcast or print news item stuck pretty much to the topic under which it was titled or labeled.

That was then.
Now is now – and you never know.

Two examples:

The other day Sophie and I emerged from the bathroom wherein I had just completed giving her her doctor-ordered once-a-week bath.
We have a two-person Jacuzzi type tub and I put her in, climbed in as well, and proceeded to do the duty.

I stand up and bend over. She is only a foot or so high. She doesn't even have to sit down.

We had a grand time – well, not really. She hates the bath but she loves the drying out part which comes later.

The shampoo has to stay on her for five minutes before rinse off, so I left the door open, set the clock, and turned up the radio to help me pass the time while we waited for the minutes to go by.

I set the station to NPR. I do that sometimes.
I am open-minded.


A producer of plays or a director or some such person was being interviewed by one of the senior folks at NPR.
They were discussing an updated version of one of Shakespeare’s plays which he was hoping would eventually be used as a teaching instrument in schools for some kind of civil rights lesson.

Well, it was interesting and I stood listening and getting cold feet in the tub with Sophie and I was thinking ok, so maybe this is a good idea and maybe it is ok that they are using Shakespeare to teach stuff.
Who better than Shakespeare?

And then it happened.

The guy being interviewed, the producer or whatever he was, started to say that it was easy to understand the message, that it was in plain English and so on, AND THAT IT WAS NOT IN BUSH TALK.

At first, I thought that he was referring to some sort of rural, mountain vernacular type of language.

And then it hit me.
This is NPR.

There he was, doing a good job talking about his play, and he had to interject the President Bush Thing, another case of BUSH SYNDROME.

And then along came the ad/review for a new Cadillac model, a 2010 edition.

The article was in the Detroit Free Press and it was a swell review. The reviewer went on about the good points of the car and so on and how he and his wife drove it to a wedding in Michigan and how nice it would be for the newly married couple to have such a car to take on their honeymoon.

And then it happened.

The reviewer ended the review by lamenting that it was too bad that the gay newlyweds had to go to Massachusetts to get their marriage legalized since the benighted state of Michigan did not allow such marriages to be performed.

IN A CAR REVIEW???????

Gramma used to say that you cannot tell a book by its cover.

But car reviews and educational plays too????