Things to go "WTF?!" about

So, among the list of things to do on my errandey day yesterday was acquiring a rubber stamp of graphic merit appropriate to the task of marking all the delicious guests who pay their $5 cover when coming visit Mark Morford et al. at this swinging party tonight (you get $5 off the price of the book in compensation!). I was hoping for a "666" or at least a deviant-looking monkey.

But alas, I was repeatedly dunked into the realm of craftie chotchkies, and everything was all about "you're the cream in my coffee" and cute hearts and rubber duckies. It didn't take long for me to starting thinking, "oh dear, this is not going to end well."

Thanks to the sharp eye of Michelle (The Other Michelle), we made it work, but a moment that sticks out rather vividly in my memory was this one stamp I found that said - in sweet, curley writing - Sorry I've been cranky.

It wasn't even very big, so I'm not sure what got me to stop and read it, but I did. I picked it up and held it in my hand. Had a mental image of someone who would use it, holding it all inked up and ready to apply to...what? a card envelope? a letter? a present? a card the person constructed from homemade paper all hand-caligraphied? I turned to The Other Michelle and asked her, "can you think of >any< reason that you would buy a stamp like this?" She read it and got this charmingly confused look on her face, and was, like, "uhhhhh....no."

I put it back on the shelf thinking, "that is pretty weird." Then, not 2 steps later, I came across a place where there were 4 or 5 more, just like it.

And that got me to thinking about the practical purpose of having a stamp. Well, maybe there is more than one practical purpose, but the one that settled in my brain is that a stamp is an efficient way of putting something down that spares you from writing it over, and over, and over again. So, in my imagination at least, the person buying the "Sorry I've been cranky" stamp is someone for whom this need to apologize is not infrequent. How many times does he or she (probably, she) have to use it? Every day? Every week? Every month? To how many people does she need to apologize?

So there I was, surrounded by all that cuteness, and imagining the chronically crabby person finding sanctuary because here, among all the rubber duckies and flowers, is a stamp designed specifically for her ill-tempered heart. It was a peculiar combination of images; it was all wrong, somehow, but there it was. And they didn't even have a single deviant monkey. Where's the justice?

In other news, G alerted me this morning to this item in the Chronicle whose headline took a few seconds to sink in but then had me laughing for several minutes straight: "Couple tried to sell baby outside Walmart" - for $25.

Just think about that for a second. Where does your imagination go?