The fall of Norman Light, followed by winter of his discontent? How is this still favourable for his managers? WILLIAMSON’S WAY reveals all.
Show Excerpts: The New Norm L
I only have brief memories of radio sound, the way it shattered bouncing off my father’s head when my mother threw it at him. I have clearer memories of watching TV. Watching my father struggling to lift it to throw it at my mother. It was such a big early model that upon lifting it Dad won a cup for weightlifting and forgot all about his intent to throw it at my mother. He instead gave the cup to mother as a peace offering and she kept it and drank from it. But later she found out this was not a cup you could wash. At least not in the dishwasher because the cup was so big the dishwasher door fell off. So, she hit my dad with it. Of course, hitting a grown man with a dishwasher is never easy. It depends on the dishwasher that you use. Selecting a dishwasher with a good strong apron is one option, you can strangle your husband with it. Then again, if, in the heat of the moment, a mechanical rather than human dishwasher with a detached door is all you have, then by all means use it as a club.
***
I used to have a job watching doors in a magic shop. I watched a guy take it off its hinges and drive off with it, saw the whole thing. “You call yourself a security guard?” asked my boss. “Well no I don’t call myself a security guard,” I said, “I can look after myself”. The boss then said, “You’re done here. Make me a help wanted sign.” “Someone else can do that”, I said, so I made a help wanted sign and put it in his window. I figured someone else can come in and make him his help wanted sign.
***
“People always say a dog is man’s best friend, but I was encouraged by my folks to think big. ‘Go make friends with an elephant,’ they’d say, having realized the line they used to use, ‘Go play in traffic’ didn’t work since no one would come near us for miles, and therefore there was no traffic to play in.
“And so, I set off to befriend an elephant. I’d heard the story of a thorn being removed from a lion’s paw, which caused the lion and the man to become friends. I found an elephant with what appeared to be a thorn in its paw and attempted to remove it. No sooner was the one removed than I was ‘shot at’ with another hundred thorns. It seems what I had really done was remove a quill from a porcupine, who proceeded to shoot me with his remaining quills. I realized I’d forgotten to ask what an elephant looked like. So now I looked like a porcupine and the porcupine a naked, rodent-like boy. We agreed to trade places and while I became bored with the porcupine cage at the zoo, my grades went up at school with the porcupine pretending to be me. This ruse lasted all of two weeks before the school insisted I trade places with the porcupine. So, it was back to school, and I hadn’t even gotten any back-to-school supplies. ‘You’ll need a Jumbo Eraser,’ said the teacher, so I came to school with my grandpa’s elephant gun.
“During detention I was of course asked why grandpa had an elephant gun. I explained it was because he said he saw pink elephants when he drank, and wasn’t tolerant of that, being a self-described pachyderm-homophobe, meaning an intolerance of gay elephants, what with them wearing all that pink.
“I was then asked where grandpa got the gun. ‘From a white elephant sale,’ I explained. So, grandpa was clearly more than just a pachyderm-homophobe, but a white-elephant-supremacist-pachyderm-homophobe, racist about elephants as well as sexist. I was told white elephant meant something useless. I rebutted with grandpa’s claim that he supported white elephants, as they clearly suffered from scurvy and never got to the beach to tan and be pink…so he could kill them.
“So, finally, my teachers and principal said ‘Norman, we need to address the elephant in the room.’ ‘What does that mean? I asked.
‘It means something big and important that no one can see clearly.’
‘Like a ghost?’ I asked.
‘Something like that,’ they replied.
‘Well ghosts are white. And the biggest, most important thing in the world than no one can see all that clearly, is God. So are you suggesting God is a white elephant?’
“And from that time on I was home schooled. So now you know my secret. The moral? Elephants never forget. This would make them good flight attendants on airplanes, except
for the obvious problem. They'd eat all the peanuts.
***
Alexander Graham Bell did the first phone calling. He was even the first one to call it a smartphone, because if it hit you hard enough it did indeed smart. So whenever we say someone has “the smarts” about something, it’s because they’ve already had some bruises in life. Then of course there’s “Smarties”, the candy that originally came from “smart ties” as in coloured bits of cloth for men to tie around their necks. How it went from smart ties to Smarties is a matter of simplicity and economy for men. Because men like to eat, and because candy-covered chocolate provides an undeniable buzz, for a while it was the fashion of men’s style to wear big pieces of chocolate candy on a string around their neck. This necessitated having to look down a lot, meaning that all men of fashion would butt heads all time. Worse, a really short man might hit his head on another man’s butt. And so candy ties failed to catch on. But failure doesn’t necessarily mean having to stop. It’s important to remember Alexander Graham Bell’s struggles with the telephone, for our tendency is to only think about and judge people by their achievements, or lack thereof, to think that they only tried things once and they were either success or failure on that first try. You’ve heard about the first phone being two cans with string? That was misheard, it was really toucans, that is, toucans the exotic birds, supporting the inventor Alexander Graham Light on a string over Bell’s head. Admittedly those were high walls in Mr. Bell’s house, and he appeared not to mind the fearsome strength of these toucans, what with being able to support a grown man on a string as they flapped angrily around the house. They were angry due to colliding with other toucans carrying men on strings eating candy covered chocolate. Bell appeared not to notice all this aerial traffic and commotion with birds and men and pieces of chocolate, all going on over his head, as is often the case with great inventors. Indeed the phrase “going over your head” originally referred not to the escalation of complaints but it was the sport of grown men fighting over candy while hanging in the air from strings wielded by toucans. The logical outcome of this was both the candy-flavoured cereal, Kellog’s Froot Loops (*A cereal that remains popular with all ages, today, which is not true of the spin-off of Fruit Loops, called Froot Lapse, which of course was intended as a healthy alternative, meaning it was just an empty box) featuring their mascot, Toucan Sam, as well as the first draft of Carlo Collodi’s famous children’s story “Pinocchio” where the boy-puppet’s woodcutter father was really a bird with a multi-coloured beak. Legend has it that Carlo Collodi first consulted Alexander Graham Bell about whether Geppetto should be a toucan or not, and invented the telephone only to quit Carlo Collodi from yelling at him in the street. Elvis Presley nearly sang a song about all this, until he questioned its historical accuracy, thus the song became “In The Ghetto” rather than “It’s Geppetto”. Was there ever a meeting of the minds, that is, of Alexander Graham Bell, Carlo Collodi, and Will Keith Kellog? In fact, yes, not so much a meeting of the minds as a three-way head-butting, prompting Bell, Collodi, and Kellog to be taken to court by the Three Stooges for stealing their act. As it happened the case was thrown out of court after Bell, Collodi, and Kellog threw them a dinner. At least it was meant to be a dinner but due to the lateness of the hour they threw the Three Stooges a dessert instead, custard pie to be exact, again a misunderstanding as the caterers were short staffed, about a half a dozen dwarves who only threw the pies because it was faster than serving them the traditional way (There were to be seven dwarves but of course Dopey got the day wrong and failed to show). But Bell did learn something from the encounter, Doc told him the greeting on the telephone should be “Hi Ho” but Bell told him that would only work if you were calling a brothel. Carlo Collodi revealed that the Cricket in his novel was actually killed by Pinocchio, which convinced Kellog to go with the name Froot Loops rather than Kellog’s Crickets (a later cereal manufacturer from Lubbock, Texas attempted this but no-one would buy Buddy Holly’s Crickets and so he got out of the food business and into rock ‘n roll instead).
Featuring: “Storytelling – The New Norm L, Part 10”.
