Maybe I should start going to an impersonal chain drugstore

A conversation between two middle-aged women that I couldn't help overhearing, earlier today at a local independent pharmacy where I was waiting for a prescription to be filled:

Clerk: What kind of battery are you looking for?
Customer: For my husband's penile implant.
(Quick look over to me, to see if I'm paying attention; I pretend to be very interested in a display of pocket-sized Kleenex pouches)
Customer: No, for this little timer I have.

Singular or plural?

As I was using my TiVo to watch the New Jersey Devils defeat the Tampa Bay Lightning tonight, I kept fast-forwarding through a car commercial that asked the question, in graphic form, "What does every X-Men need?"

I assume there was some kind of trademark-related reason for screwing up the singular/plural issue like that. Or maybe the ad agency was just a bunch of idiots.

So, Mr. Apartment Maintenance Guy, what was making my apartment vibrate?

"You're right below the main heater. A pigeon got stuck in the fan. He died."

Lord Stanley's cup

The Tampa Bay Lightning's 2003 playoff record: 4-2
Their 2003 playoff record in games I watched on TV: 3-0

I'm not sure how I can be affecting things, since I'm watching the games delayed by up to an hour via TiVo, but clearly, I must be doing something.

Deja vu

This morning, I tried out for "Jeopardy!" for the second time, and passed the test for the second time. This is because my brain is filled with nothing but trivia. Read the whole sordid story.

On second glance...

Today, I saw a billboard for a Showtime original movie that I thought was called "Romancing Mrs. Stone." I thought, "Hmm, that's kind of clever, being a play on words of a previous movie title like that. I wonder if they had to get Robert Zemeckis's permission."

Then I looked again and realized it was actually called, "The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone." Not quite so clever. And now that I've looked it up on IMDB, it turns out it's even less clever, since it's a remake of a 40-year-old movie.

I've gone completely out of my mind

I just got a CD called "Napoleon Complex," which contains the 1960s novelty hit "They're Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!", and a couple of follow-ups by the same artist (Jerry Samuels, recording under the name Napoleon XIV), plus some cover versions of the song, plus some foreign language cover versions of the song (including German, Latin, and two in Dutch), and plus some "answer songs," including a couple by female performers, one using the name Josephine XIII and one using the name Josephine XV.

It may be the most annoying CD ever.

Baseball, baseball

There was an article in today's L.A. Times about how the 500-home run club has become less and less exclusive. An excerpt:

When Mickey Mantle is 10th, Stan Musial 22nd and Joe DiMaggio 56th on the all-time home-run list, have the numbers gotten out of whack? How can you compare those players with today's big boppers?

You can't, any more than you could compare Ruth to Connor (Roger Connor, who held the career home run record before Babe Ruth shattered it), the modern era to the dead-ball era. We have, says television analyst Bob Costas, entered yet another era.

"In my mind," said Costas, "you had the era prior to 1900, or 1903 when the World Series started, then an era stretching from then until 1947, when a new phase began with the arrival of Jackie Robinson and the integration of baseball. Then, around 1994, yet another era started when some very strange things began to happen."

In the mind of Steve Hirdt, a vice president of the Elias Sports Bureau, this newest era dawned at a very specific moment.

"It was April 4, 1994," he said, "opening day between the Chicago Cubs and the New York Mets. Tuffy Rhodes of the Cubs, who would wind up with 13 home runs in 590 career at-bats, hit three home runs that day against Doc Gooden. That's what I'm calling the moment that ended the modern dead-ball era. You know, a dead-ball era is in the eye of the beholder."

I was at that game, and it's nice to know that I saw history in the making. Tuffy didn't just hit three home runs, he hit three consecutive home runs, in his first three at-bats. If I recall correctly, he only got a double in his fourth at-bat, and it was a major disappointment at the time.

Of course, the wind was blowing out at Wrigley Field that day, so it was really more of a fluke than anything else, evidenced by the fact Tuffy only got 10 more home runs in his major league career...and by the way, despite his offensive output, the Cubs lost the game, but it all turned moot when the players' strike happened later that season.

(Yes, I feel that I'm on a first-name basis with Tuffy. All of us who were at the park that day do.)