I'm happy to report that the Johns Hopkins University Press will be publishing my book Reading Herodotus: A Guided Tour through the Wild Boars, Dancing Suitors, and Crazy Tyrants of The History. It should be out in the fall of 2012.
I just heard a Kohl's ad on the radio. I'm sure I've heard it a hundred times before, but this time it wormed its way into my consciousness enough that I was irritated by it. They have one of the stupidest slogans ever devised:
"The more you know, the more you Kohl's."
Idiots.
So I was thinking that I would toss off a mention of how awful it is, but before I did I Googled the phrase and lo! I am not alone in my disgust. There are Facebookgroups devoted to hating the slogan. And discussions of its ineffectiveness. It's garnered an unflattering reference in the Urban Dictionary. It's nice to know that such an offense against aesthetics doesn't go unnoticed in the interwebs.
Remarkably, though, Newegg sued Kohl's over the slogan on the grounds that it violated their trademarked slogan, "Once you know, you Newegg." Which is not quite as stupid as Kohl's slogan, but also isn't a winner. It's like suing a neighbor over who gets to keep the dog feces deposited on the border of your properties.
One can also hate Kohl's because of its perpetual sales. One never knows what the price of any item is going to be, because everything is always "on sale." The prices shown on the signs are never accurate. All you know is that the item will be less expensive than that by some percentage. You have to look at the small print to figure out how much less. It's irritating. And after a newbie's first excitement (such as it is) of shopping at a sale, you realize soon enough that it's not really a sale, it's just a means of complicating the pricing and keeping customers guessing about what they're actually spending.
I'm finding myself still annoyed today over the fact that people knocked on the door last night. It was a youngish pair, one male, one female, and the guy did the talking. He was smooth. He was trying to be friendly, and he claimed that they were doing work on a house down the street--siding or windows or whatever. I was, probably, a little rude in getting rid of them, because I was on the phone and he wasn't getting to the point (which was, of course, that he'd want to sell me something eventually, despite his denials) and because, most importantly, it was already dark out.
In short, don't knock on people's doors at night! How successful can this strategy possibly be? Hey, let's go up to that stranger's house even though it's late and knock on their door and try to sell them something! These visits are even more intrusive than telemarketers, and Lord knows I've had my fill of them.
I'm not any happier with the Jehova's Witnesses, mind you, even though they come during the day and they're usually nicely dressed old people. Selling God is at least as annoying as selling aluminum siding.
I suppose an alternative is to just not answer the door, and I admit that more than once in my life I've pretended not to be home. Still, the onus there is on the homeowner, when there should be no onus at all. And the fact that there's a knock makes you curious....
You know the parking garage episode of Seinfeld? The one where Jerry, Elaine, George, and Kramer are stuck in a garage and can't find their car? They spend hours walking around trying to find it, and frustrating things keep happening to delay them further, and when they all finally get together and find the car they get in it and...it doesn't start. It's brilliant.
That's kind of how my afternoon went.
So, Rebecca had a swim meet at 4:00 in Milford. I got directions to the place by following a link on her swim team's web site. It's about a half hour drive, but easy to get to. Mel and I leave at about 3:30 and we make it there without any problem. Well, the only problem is that I have, unprecedentedly, forgotten to bring my wallet, but unless we're in a car accident or something that's unlikely to be an issue. Anyway, half an hour later we park and go into the school and there's a guy inside and we ask him where the pool is.
There is no pool, he says. The school doesn't have a pool. Apparently the team always swims at another high school, but that's on the other side of town, back the way we came a bit. He gives me lengthy directions I know I'll never remember, and Mel and I go back to the car.
Resourceful as I am, I get my Kindle 2 out in the car and turn on the 3G and go to Google and try to find a street address for this new school. It takes too long, and the page loads are really slow, but finally I find it. I enter the address into my GPS and we're off to the other school. This is about a 13-minute drive, say. So we're late but we're not so late that we'll miss the race she's going to be in. I'm hopeful.
We get to the school. It's a big sprawling building and it's not obvious where we're supposed to go, but we find a door open and go in. After looking around a bit we find someone and ask him where the pool is. Turns out we need to drive further around the building, to a red door "near steps going up."
Back in the car, we drive around the building some to where there's a red door with steps going up. We park, we go up the steps, the door is locked.
Back in the car, we drive around the building some more to where there's another red door with steps going up. We go up and lo! The door's open and there's actually a sign inside pointing the way to the pool, so we're good.
This process of finding our way into the building has taken some time. Mel even wanted to give up at this point, but we were too close. "She's in the building!" I said. We just had to find our way in. And now we were inside and the sign was pointing us in the right direction. And though it was quite late there was still a chance that we might be there in time to see Rebecca swim.
We walk briskly down the hallway toward the pool. We can hear the shouts now. There's a race on. The pool is up ahead on the left and the doors are open and we're just about there and there's a man sitting in front of it at a desk and he is -- and this too is unprecedented in our experience -- selling tickets.
"You need tickets to get in," he says.
"I don't have my wallet," I say.
And I don't engage in small talk or look at him because I'm thinking how petty it is for them to require people to pay to watch a high school swim meet when the other schools haven't. But I'm also thinking that this is the perfect conclusion to the story.
For a few minutes Mel and I stand in the hallway looking through the glass, trying to spy Rebecca amongst the black-suited swimmers below. And finally she's there, poolside, wrapped in a towel, and she might be looking our way though it's hard to tell at a distance. I wave and she doesn't wave back, and we walk back down the hallway and out to the car.
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