Say, that's some swell calendar, Harry!

I was looking for calendars in an office supply catalogue yesterday. Please don't ask why I'm shopping for calendars in June. It's really not important. The point of the story is I saw this intriguing line of ad copy: "With a 28 pager for extra months or art work to a standard 24 pager, these calendars assure you enjoy each month of the year."

Wow. That's a pretty big promise for a calendar to make, don't you think? How exactly does it intend to accomplish this? A calendar's function is to keep track of days, weeks, months and years, not fill them with joy. A calendar can tell you when Christmas is but it is not capable of giving you a gift. Even if all 24 pages (that's 28 pages for you jet setters) are decorated with the very best pictures of baby animals, leggy pin-up girls (that's shirtless firefighters for you gals...or dudes. Hey, I don't care. This blog is what you make it.) or popular cartoons you've already seen hundreds of times, I just don't think that's an assurance that any calendar can keep. And what do you think is going to happen if I have a shitty month and I want my money back? "Hey, February sucked. Sure, I always knew what day it was, I was never late for an appointment and I learned something new and interesting about black history every single day. But that doesn't mean I enjoyed it." They're not going to give me a nickel. They'll probably tell me the guy who writes blurbs for the catalogue had peaked creatively with the catalogue they put out six years ago, which wasn't even as good as the one they did nine years ago, and he's been coasting ever since. So this year he didn't even try at all and just recycled some of the same tired, old nonsense that he's gotten by on before. Sort of (exactly) like what Mike Myers did with "The Love Guru".

Or maybe they'll say there was a typo and they actually meant CALENDER, a machine in which cloth, paper, or the like, is smoothed, glazed, etc., by pressing between rotating cylinders, in which case a guarantee of year-round enjoyment makes complete sense.

Well, either way, I'll tell them that somebody needs to tighten up the operation down at the ol' office supply catalogue. If they're going to make bold statements about assuring people's happiness, they better damn well be ready to back them up.