Random junk, May 2007

A few brief items too slim to work into a full blog post.

• At the gas station near where I live (it's the one on 517 and California), I spotted a yellow posterboard sales display behind the counter. It was a simple sheet of posterboard, onto which were glued several boxes of condoms. A simple sales display, set up for easy retrieval and selection. The heading of the display shows a mediocre drawing of a woman and the name Family Condom Center. Uh...huh.
• Another gas station sign, this one a homemade computer-printed announcement at the Shell station on I-45 near work: YOU MUST MAKE A PURCHASE FOR GHANGE. Yeah, too many people just coming in for ghange must have driven them crazy.
• For the last several days, I've noticed the in-store radio at Job Number Two playing Bon Jovi. And not old Bon Jovi, which would be just as repellent but a little understandable and, perhaps, excusable. No, the icky new Bon Jovi greeted me as I attempted to take telephone orders. This horrified me, obviously. Then I realized that they were playing Bon Jovi at the same time every day. And I could correctly guess what the song following it would be. Obviously, they just used the same playlist for all those days (it might be on a CD or DVD or something), but for a minute, it felt very Dead Zone.
• I downloaded a bunch of music from a torrent of Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. (If you care, the list is here. With the downloads, I now own 75 of them. I don't know if this is impressive or not.) One of the albums, #67, is Billy Joel's The Stranger, which I had never heard before. I picked it to download without looking at the track listing, so I got something of a surprise when I listened to it this morning: I had heard most it before, it turns out, because of the album's nine tracks, six are in his Greatest Hits collection. Talk about hitting your prime.
• Though it should come as no surprise, I'm pretty sure the entire Beatles catalog is on that list.
• Back to Billy Joel for a second: this is probably the most terrifying album cover I've ever seen:
  
• Spotted on a church marquee: PINE DRIVE CHRISTAIN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, SIGN UP EARLY NOW. Oh yeah, sign me up.
  
• The electronic marquee at the Helen Hall Library in League City is advertising a hurricane evacuation education seminar. It's apparently titled "Run from the Rain, Hide from the Wind." Well, that's pretty much all you need to know, isn't it?
• Run from the Rain, Hide from the Wind sounds like a Bob Dylan album title.
• When a customer is unhappy at Job Number Two, I like to play a game called "What Would Happen If This Happened at Job Number One?" Case in point: a few days ago, a woman ordered a salad, and remarked that last time she ordered the same salad, the amount of chicken was insufficient. She said she'd complained to a manager, who'd promised to mail her a gift card but never did. My manager simply gave her the salad for free. What would happen if this happened at Job Number One? "That's the way we make it. You want more than that, it's another two dollars. If you don't like it, go away." I told this way to Airfon -- my boss at Job Number One -- and he concurred. "Hell yeah."
  
• In searching for something else, I came across a ticket stub for The Watcher, which I saw at Cinemark during its theatrical release seven years ago. Why I still have it, I have no idea, but it's interesting to note that I've moved four times since then, and it's still here.
• I didn't throw it away this time, either.