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Tuesday, June 3, 2014

A car by any other name is still a lemon


Humorist Jean Shepherd once related a personal story to author/cartoonist Shel Silverstein about how he was constantly teased as a kid because of his very feminine sounding name.
Silverstein wrote music about a boy with a girl’s name and performed it at the home of a friend who took the song to California, performed it before a captive (literally) audience at a prison and thus in the early 1970’s “A Boy Named Sue” was born.  It became a huge hit for Johnny Cash who performed it live at San Quentin.


In the book of Genesis in the Bible, the story goes that Adam was given the task of naming all the animals. As a kid I understood that as not naming a giraffe by its species, rather, I thought Adam’s task was daunting as he had to give this giraffe the name “Fred” that giraffe “Ethel” and so on.
He could get woozy and pass out if he found a mound of ants.
When would he ever find time to “share that apple” with Eve?
No wonder they lived so long in the Old Testament.

I have a whole flock of females in my family whose names are so unique that I could never find an imprinted coffee mug at a mall kiosk to give to any of them as a gift.  Seriously my wife, daughter, daughter-in-law and all 5 granddaughters have “normal” sounding names but not common enough for the mass market.
Recently I did see an imprinted keychain with the name Keshandra. It was the last one on the rack
. 
There were others? Who could have thunk it?

I bring up the naming of things because I was curious as to a car commercial I saw about a Volkswagen product called the “Tiguan”.
I found that the crossover vehicle, Tiguan, is a name combining the “crossing-over” of two species, the Tiger and the Iguana.
Having been an owner of two models of “superior” German engineering, I will expect to see the Tiguan perform with the same reliability as my former vehicles. 
I would have to park them at the top of a steep hill so I could push-start those lemons in order be able to drive to my auto mechanic.



The microbus was once towed 11 times in 2 months.  My insurance agent warned me that I was about to become the 1st person in the history of Nationwide Insurance to have his towing privileges revoked.

With my luck with the folks at volks, if I were to purchase a Tiguan I would have to change the name.
How about “money-pit”?