Surprise

As my faithful few will recall, the main purpose of this blog is to catch Dave Barry’s attention and ultimately take his place when he retires. He’s still writing but I was stunned to find out yesterday that he’s pretty much ALREADY retired!!

Guess I should’ve done a bit more research on that one, huh?

So there’s already a void that needs to be filled! What joyous news!

Ok, well, I should restate the offer I made in my first posting. $50 to the person who can arrange a lunch meeting for me with Dave Barry. And the offer is of course limited to the humor columnist legend Dave Barry, not some Dave Barry in northern Iowa whose primary life achievement was creating a corn maze to roughly mimic the shape of a duck-billed platypus.

Keep spreading the word if you enjoy reading these posts!

Now, on to funnier things.

I also stopped by a local Redbox yesterday and noticed something a bit surprising. Did you know that you can pay Redbox $1.04 (if I recall correctly from the last time I rented there) to rent an EMPTY DVD CASE?

I’ve seen it there every time I go and wondered if there were some catch. Is this a special prize that only the really gutsy people get? You know, they go ahead and rent the Empty Case and it comes out full of money or with coupons for free gerbils or something. Or perhaps this is the Redbox version of gambling. By choosing “Empty Case” you receive a DVD at random, like the least-rented one, or the one with the most vowels in the title.

Or maybe Redbox is so popular that some people just rent the Empty Case as a status thing. You know, they don’t have the time to sit down and watch a movie, but they know that the cool thing to do is rent something from Redbox after waiting behind four people for half an hour because none of those four people had the first clue what they wanted to watch, if anything.

Apparently it’s none of the above. “Empty Case” is an option because some people lose their DVD cases and they need to buy one from Redbox directly. Fine, www dot redbox dot com slash Help slash FAQ dot aspx, give a viable answer. I still want my free gerbils.

And to return briefly to “Today In History”, in 1862 American Confederate troops evacuated their fort along the Mississippi River which paved the way for Union troops to take Memphis, Tennessee. You may think that’s a fairly mundane thing to bring up in a “Today In History” post. However, if you do think so, you clearly don’t know the name of the abandoned fort…Fort Pillow.

Who names a military base Fort Pillow? In everything I read, there was no mention anywhere of why it was named Fort Pillow. It’s not a common last name. I can only imagine that it was named after some nearby city, although why a city was named Pillow is also beyond me.

Sure, we all built pillow forts as kids, but to grow up and name a REAL fort after pillows sends the message that "We're just playing war until our Moms tell us to come in for supper."

Ok, so it was a terrible name. Or was it? Why not add a little humor into war? We have all these scary war names like Python missile and Black Hawk helicopter. We even have some things that just sound butch, even if they’re not particularly intimidating, like Fort Knox and Longbow helicopter.

But what if we started naming missiles, forts, aircraft, etc. after goofy, soft, plush things? What if we had an aircraft carrier that was named the USS Teletubby? Or a Camp Pendleton? Or a Tacit Rainbow missile? Wouldn’t that just make war a little more…plush?

Well, yuck it up now, Buttercup, because two of those three suggestions I just made are true. I guess Pendleton has a certain ring to it. But so does the USS Teletubby, although that is clearly not an existing aircraft carrier (to the best of my knowledge). Which is really too bad in my opinion. War could use a better reputation. It’s always so harsh and full of dead people. Sure would be nice to soften it up a bit.

Pictures:
Corn Maze
Baby Gerbils
Aircraft Carrier
Teletubby