Expletive Not Deleted

By Michael Brooks

Staff Writer

I wanted to write several columns talking about various things this week, but for the sake of confusion, I am going to combine them into one. Has it been a good couple of weeks or a bad couple of weeks? I guess it depends on how you look at it.

Here are some things that I have had to put up with over the last few weeks. Hopefully you will be able to keep up. If not, Attention Deficit Disorder medication may help. Just don’t get it confused with a Tide pod.

My car battery went out. It actually makes sense. I know that with my income tax return, I will be buying a new tire, so I needed something else to go wrong to help me get rid of the extra money instead of saving it. But hey, it’s just a car battery, a really easy, 15-minute job. Except this car was obviously designed by Helen Keller. My battery was not located in the front of the car and easily accessible. Nor was it easily accessible in the trunk. Nope. The battery was located under my front wind shield. So, a 15-minute job turned into an hour-long job. 

Remove the windshield wiper arms. Not just the blade, but the entire wiper. Then remove the cowl (the hard plastic piece that sits between the back of the hood and the bottom of the windshield.) 

Then open the battery box and you have finally gained access to the battery. Then, grumble an expletive, because the negative post on the battery, the post that you are completely unable to see until you remove everything else, is completely covered in corrosion. This means that the battery may not actually be bad, but maybe just isn’t making a good connection. 

Then reason to yourself that the battery is four years old and that the average lifespan of a battery is three to five years, so you decide to go ahead and clean the connections and place the new battery. Spend another half hour removing the corrosion. Replace everything in reverse order. 

Since it is raining on the day you had to do this (because OF COURSE IT IS), use your windshield wipers right away – only to discover that one of them wasn’t put back in the same location, so spend another 30 minutes correcting that. While you are doing that, angrily yell a creative new combination of expletives. Finally finish and take your frustration out on your battery by throwing it at a tree. Repeatedly. 

While getting your core refund, explain to the guy that the case of the battery was already damaged when you removed it from your car. Say exotic new expletive when your refund is refused.

Not everything was bad though. Some things were terrible! But some football can make the day better, right?

Ahhhh, the Super Bowl. Like most football fans, I couldn’t care less for either team playing and was just hoping for a competitive game with some funny commercials. Both things happened, so I was happy. Although I don’t like either the Patriots or the Eagles, I was very glad Tom Brady lost. 

I really have nothing against Brady as a football player. I do think he is one of the greatest of all times. But I have a problem with Brady the man. Each person should only be able to achieve a certain amount of happiness in their lifetime. It can be argued that he reached that level years before, but he absolutely reached it when he married Gisele.

For those of you who didn’t care about the game, there were the commercials. I hadn’t seen a Super Bowl commercial that I really liked since the Budweiser “Puppy Love” commercial but this year really wow’ed me. From a hilariously bizarre  Rap Battle between Morgan Freeman and Peter Dinklage, to a great NFL Dirty Dancing parody, to my favorite, the Alexa Loses Her Voice ad, they really delivered this year.

And speaking of commercials, a few weeks ago KFC revealed their new mascot. I can see the ad campaign pitch playing out in my head.

A few years ago:

KFC President "Okay, our numbers are down. We need to do something radical to make people want to come to KFC."

Ad Pitchman "I've got it! Let's start an ad campaign featuring an extremely creepy Colonel Sanders. We will run it for a while, even though nobody likes it. Then we hire Reba as Sanders to make it even more creepy. Hopefully the real Colonel Sanders will be rolling in his grave."

KFC P "Why would we want to hire a creepy–and Reba? Reba McEntire? You want to hire a female country singer to play Colonel Sanders in our ad campaign?"

AP "Absolutely. But don't forget the awful one we have playing him first."

KFC P "How is this going to help up sell more chicken?"

AP "Oh. The goal is to sell more chicken? I thought we wanted to freak out our customers and drive them away."

KFC P "Why would we want to do that? This ad campaign sounds ridicu..."

AP "Too late, we're already doing it."

This whole ad campaign is an expletive that can expletive an expletive-ing couch expletive-expletive sandwich expletive baseball bat.

I said when I turned 40 that I became a grouchy old man. I guess this proves it.