The Sunday memo was short. Shorter than the attention span of those slumped at the picnic table for the dog-end of a summer week-end Production Meeting. Saturday had been fun, from what some claimed. There was a level of uncertainty not uncommon on these mornings.

DeMille was stern. “The Convention starts tomorrow.” He claimed the reaction of the people holding it will be important to those who watch it remotely, and thus may spark some drama from the people in the middle between the two edges. That had been a factor when they held the actual convention on a Zoom call a couple weeks ago to produce a nominee unique in American electoral history. They told us not to mention what exactly that is but we assume that will be part of the fun to come.

The memo only had the four words, excluding the address lines and handling instructions, so we obviously needed to improvise a little. DeMille is our section lead, and he assigned Rocket and Scooter to briefly (and amusingly) describe the American food distribution system with attention to the weak points and complexity of production, packaging. Transportation, display and sale of a myriad of healthy things

They shrugged and demonstrated how a system that feeds (mostly) some three hundred million people reliably operates at a 2-3% profit margin in a variety of locations spread across thousands of miles served by trucks rolling on manicured concrete. And how the occupants of cubicles in several office buildings over across the River are going to make things better with a few more controls on how things work, like cattle flatulence.

You can imagine the reaction at the picnic table to that one. But it is still a few hours to lunch so we deferred judgment on the topic and without mimicry. We did the price controls thing already in our somewhat superannuated experience and it didn’t work out well for a period of about a decade. We had mortgages one time that hovered around 14% and have not fully trusted anyone who had a bold, unprecedented scheme to fix everything all at once if we just give them a chance.

Which brought up The Playmates. Their only hit record was in 1958. It was a fun tune that didn’t make a lot of sense. Sort of like this endless campaign season about “strong central control” to fix all the problems created by strong, if occasionally somewhat confused, central control. Here is how The Playmates put it, only a half century ago:

[Very Slow]
While riding in my Cadillac
What to my surprise
A little Nash Rambler was following me –
About one third my size
The guy must’ve wanted to pass me up
As he kept on tooting his horn. Beep! Beep!
I’ll show him that a Cadillac
Is not a car to scorn
Beep beep. Beep! Beep! Beep beep. Beep! Beep!

The tune rises in tempo and volume, just like the campaign, and the instruction bar on the lyrics tells us to go faster. And Faster.

The horn on the little car went “beep beep beep. Beep! Beep!”

We don’t want to spoil the surprise ending, but what the heck. It turns out the little Rambler was actually stuck in second-gear, and roared past the Cadillac when the driver pounding on the little chrome ring of the horn actuator remembered where the clutch pedal was, to the left of the accelerator.

There was some minor confusion at the diagram, since Splash only recalls three pedals, not five, unless you count the ‘parking brake,’ which would be four in the configuration that now serves as an effective theft deterrent against modern thieves who have problems with just the two offered now.

Then he was able to whiz right by and everything was fine. It is Sunday, so we are taking the same view. The food we are going to consume with gusto (beep!) is already purchased, the store it came from is not yet in a desert, and the spiritual services normally leave is with a certain tranquility until the football season starts.

Which is does, shortly. Some places, that might be as soon as tomorrow.

The Playmates increased speed in their three minutes of fame. They summed it up this way:

[Fastest]
Now we’re doing a hundred and twenty –
As fast as I could go
The Rambler pulled along side of me
As if we were going slow
The fellow rolled down his window
And yelled for me to hear

“Hey Buddy, how do I get this car

Out of second gear?”
Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep!

DeMille asked Splash to get a nice icon of the shift patterns for three-on-the-tree and four-on-the-floor we can use to attempt to explain tomorrow. Have fun with summer as it drives off in any gear it chooses! Beep!

Copyright 2024 Vic Socotra