I’m mesmerized by TV shows uncovering lost cities, solving age-old mysteries, looking into abandoned properties and generally giving me one more excuse to lounge on the couch instead of writing this column.
It’s all big stuff: How the universe works. Why ancient civilizations disappeared. Whether rich people in the olden days had gold toilets like they do today.
But I want something that solves the mysteries of the common man and the everyday Joe. You know, the around-the-house stuff and the matter-of-fact mysteries that we all deal with. These may not be great and complex, but they are just as confounding and worth solving. I would like to see a show that looks at:
• Why are stickers impossible to remove? Have you noticed this? How awful they’ve become? I bought a hanging plastic basket to put a porch fern in and spent more time trying to get the sticker off the outside than actually planting the fern. The irony was the sticker proclaimed that this was a “decorative basket,” which would have been true if not for the huge, un-decorative gob of glue and torn paper left in plain view. It now plainly reads “… rat bask … ,” which sounds like a heavy metal band or something I shouldn’t be allowed to print in a family newspaper.
• Why when you find a pair of running shoes that make you feel like you are running on little marshmallow puffs, caressing your feet in a way that is illegal in 17 states, the “rat bask” manufacturer decides it’s time to change it up and discontinue the line? Is this because I did something rotten in another life? It’s like an ice cream maker coming up with the perfect flavor and then the next month declaring, “Nope, not anymore. Now we sell only rum raisin!” Who eats rum raisin?!? (Another unsolved mystery.) The only ones left for sale anywhere on the Internet are a size that wouldn’t fit a kitten, or some color that looks like a drunk designer created it while mixing mustard with grape jelly.
• Why hasn’t anyone told me that the best way to weed is by using a propane-powered flame thrower? Because, I kid you not, this is both the best, and most enjoyable way to weed! My wife found this torch thing online. You hook it up to a little propane cannister, fire it up and stroll about your yard setting fire to pretty much everything in your path – weeds, pine needles, the polyester tarp above the chicken run, the picnic table, one of the tires on the car. I don’t know that the weeds are actually dying, but this is possibly the most satisfying weekend I’ve had since the time I tried to get rid of a tree stump by setting it on fire with diesel fuel.
• Why does my car make some kind of rattle whenever I drive around, but the minute I stop to listen to where it’s coming from, it magically disappears? Get back in the car, it starts right up. Step out … it stops. And I can’t take it in to the shop yet. Not until I know where it is. Because I hate the embarrassment of explaining some mysterious sound that can’t be explained, can’t be pinpointed and won’t reproduce itself for a mechanic under any situation. But the minute I pick it up and drive away, the rattle comes back! Are you kidding me, rat bask car!?! Why?