What Does Your Phone Number Spell?

            In my ceaseless effort to avoid numbers, I have often taken a look at my phone number and tried to see what it could spell.  Finally we began requesting specific numbers whenever we moved.  All you have to do is ask your local phone company for the prefixes assigned to your area, come up with some possibilities, see if they’re already taken, and request the one you like.  

If you want, you can include the area code (if you’re lucky), or just use the 7-digits afterwards.  It’s a fun way to make your number easy for friends to remember.  Of course, there are no letters that correspond with zero or one, so if you have those in your number, you have to settle for shorter words, such as friends of ours who’ve had the numbers Tuxedo 8 and 2 Be Sure.

            One time our phone number spelled F-i-n-l-a-n-d.  When someone would ask for my number, I could say, “Just call Finland.”  No need to write it down; you can transcribe it later.  

 At our next home we got “Do it now.”  A good, industrious message, right?

            Well, there are a few problems with this idea.  First of all, people remember the general concept, but not necessarily the exact word.  With Finland, people knew it was a European country with seven letters, but then couldn’t recall if it was Denmark, Ireland, Germany, Holland, Belgium, Hungary, Austria, England, or Albania. That’s a lot of dialing.

            And with our strong work ethic number, Do It Now, a neighbor said, “I’ll never forget your phone number—it spells Go For It.”  Another problem is that not all word combinations are clever or amusing ones.  If your number will only spell Owl Poop or No Brain, you might want to reconsider.

You also have the annoyance factor we all share, when a company tells you to call “1-800-HomeCare” or “1-800-NestEgg” and you have to painstakingly find the number for each letter. 

  

            If your number simply won’t spell a word, see if it plays a tune.  Then, at least when friends call, you can tell them to listen for the William Tell Overture, Phantom of the Opera, or Claire de Lune.   

And, in case you’d just like to play some tunes with your phone, here are some fun ones to try:

            Old MacDonald Had a Farm: 6667887

            Mary Had a Little Lamb: 3212333

            Way Down Upon the Swanee River: 321321045

            Shave and a Haircut, Two Bits: 9442166

            Mr. Sandman: 42626626

            If you do this at work, I make no promises about how impressed your boss will be with the way you spend your time.  And my sincerest apologies to the people who actually have those phone numbers.

            And now I have occupied you for half an hour, as you jot down your number to see what it spells.  Or, as you dial yourself and see what tune it plays.  You’re welcome.  Just one more service I offer here at Joniopolis.

Ever Flunk Obedience School?

I am not a good dog owner.  Let me take that back.  I am not a good dog trainer.  If I were a dog, I would dearly love to get adopted by me, because I would have a gloriously pampered life of ice cream, head pats, belly scratchings, and baby talk assurances that I am the most bootiful baby in the world, yes I am, yes I am.

            I would not, however, be the most obedient, disciplined dog on the block.  Or on many surrounding blocks.  Possibly on all the blocks of the world. 

            Here is a book that some friends gave us a few years ago, when we had a dog named Bentley.  Rather, here it is after we left it on the coffee table that same night:

            I’m framing it.  The irony is just too irresistible.  Bentley was a chewer, and one Christmas when a friend of ours from Switzerland gave us a box of European truffles, we put it under the tree (not knowing it contained edibles) and came home later to find mint chocolate puddles that our dog had thrown up in every single room in the house.  He did not miss a trick.  Oh—did I mention that we had just installed carpeting that we’d had custom dyed in pale, periwinkle blue?  They say that chocolate kills dog,s but Bentley, Boomer, Molly, Donut, Bon-Bon, Quat, Belle, and Mickey are eight who gulped it down and live to tell the tale.  Okay, bark the tale.

            Quat was a crotcher.  He greeted people the same way he greeted his fellow canines, and all the dog training tricks I tried could not get him to resist this primal urge. 

Maybe he was mad that our teenager sons named him Quat.  I was campaigning for Freckles or Baxter, but Quat won out because those three hooligans thought it would be funny to say, “Come, Quat.”  Like kumquats.

And it is.  Once.  But, just as I predicted, they would grow up and leave home, and I’d be the fool standing in the street yelling about fruit.  Quat also flunked out of Canine College not once, but twice.  The owner even asked me if I wanted to keep such an untrainable dog (see?  It isn’t just me).  Well, of course, I told him—you don’t sell your child just because he flunks chemistry, do you?  We love our dumb children as much as the smart ones.

And this is the problem—not loving them, but seeing dogs as children.  All I really want to do is play with them and watch them enjoy life, and believe that they are wondrous beyond belief.  When I picked Quat up after his training week, the trainer walked me through the leash training and various commands Quat had learned.  “I hate this,” I whispered to her.  She turned to me.  “That’s exactly what he’s counting on,” she said.   And he got exactly what he hoped for.

Belle is the Great Dane who ate who-knows-what (not chocolate, thank you) and threw up an entire map of the world, including the boot of Italy and the Aleutian islands, on the carpet in our loft. 

 It could have been the 8^th Wonder of the World, and we should have gotten her on Jay Leno.  It was easily as accurate as many a Boy Scout Eagle Project I’ve seen painted on school playgrounds.  I even mentioned it in my book, Funeral Potatoes—the Novel.  And here’s the other problem with dog training:  You cannot teach a dog not to throw up, nor can you teach one not to shed, nor to clean mud off its feet.  These things simply happen, and I’ll betcha they happen to the Dog Whisperer, and to any other amazing animal trainer you can find.

Still, I’m a little bit in awe of those animal trainers you see on TV, whose dogs dance with them and jump through hoops, and walk on their hind feet.  I wonder if they could take our current dog, Mickey, and teach her a thing or two.  Granted, she has a brain the size of a grape, but is she really incorrigible? 

I’ll tell you one thing you will never see:  A housecat act.  Here’s where the playing field is leveled and I am as good as the next cat owner.  Nobody ever wins a talent contest with a group of cats they have convinced to do a dang thing—not for a treat, not for a clicker, not for a live mouse. 

 If a cat has to jump through a hoop for you, he will quickly wander down the street and find a new owner, someone who will understand that he is to be fed and rewarded for doing exactly as he pleases. Someone who treats him the way I treat all my pets.  Like they own the place.

You, too, can be pampered and spoiled in Joniopolis, because that’s how I roll.  Just subscribe to this blog and you will be entertained multiple times a week.  Tell your friends!

Liar, Liar, Pants May or May Not be on Fire

            A new study just came out that says people who text slowly are more likely to be liars.  Whaat?  How can they be onto me, already?  I just started texting with my new Smart Phone last week!  You can read about this dreadful, I mean this wonderful surprise birthday gift here:

            Researchers (and let me just derail for a moment to say these are, shall we say, an interesting group of people, themselves) have found that when people lie in texts, they take longer to respond, make more edits, and write shorter responses than usual. 

            Folks, if that isn’t a description of me, trying to text, I don’t know what is.  Ergo I am the biggest liar out there.  You can see the article on this breakthrough announcement at Meridian, the very online magazine where I write a weekly column here.  And yet, despite my being the most suspiciously deceptive individual with a cell phone, they still permit me to write for them.

            Apparently we humans are lousy at detecting untruths. We can only spot lies about half of the time, and we’re even less accurate when someone lies digitally, because we can’t see or hear them.  And those tell-tale pauses, the editing… it all points to Pinocchio, I tell you.

            But I want to go one further.  I think St. Bob, when he swipes the word manana, trying to sound as if he speaks Spanish, and it comes out banana, well—we all know this could point to his having psychotic, perhaps even serial killer, tendencies.  The very screen he’s working on has him pegged—he’s bananas!  

And when he writes Joni, and it comes out Homi, well, you can’t get more racist than that.  Sometimes it comes out Hobo, a disparaging and not politically correct label that makes us all shake our heads and wonder what is wrong with that man.

            There’s another clue, here.  When I text, the punctuation I so dearly love, goes out the window.  Gone.  Desapareció  (See?  I actually do speak Spanish).  It’s like the time I put an apostrophe in the wrong place, and my daughter stared at me and said, “This is the first sign that you need to go into assisted living.”  Well, now that I’m texting without any punctuation at all, it has to be a cry for help that I need to be put down.  Or at least sent on a cruise.  Something to ease the pain.

Hurry and text your friends to subscribe to this blog.  But for heaven’s sake, don’t pause when you do it, or they’ll never believe you.