My Trip Over into Wisconsin

So I stopped off to buy lunch at that convenience store, Kwik Trip or Kwik Star or whatever, in Necedah. Got a sub sandwich and a bottle of milk. And the gal at the cash register was like, "And would you like a cookie or some chips with that?"

And I'm like thinking to myself, hey, if I'd wanted a cookie or some chips, don't you think I coulda figured that out on my own?! What is this evil meme that got started some years back with McDonald's and "Would you like some fries with that?" when nothing was further from your mind? For those of us who have thoroughly immunized ourselves against them, such unsolicited proffers are nothing more than a minor mental form of environmental pollution.

On further into Wisconsin, driving due east on Highway 21, and I got this station on the radio. It was playing Queen, Boston, Kraftwerk, Queen, Pink Floyd, Van Halen, Steely Dan, the Moody Blues, and of course plenty of Led Zeppelin. Now I know what the forty-somethings in central Wisconsin listen to. Talk about a station that took me back to a time in my life, back to my college days!

Noticed that one of last fall's windswept leaves had somehow wrapped itself around my radio antenna. Obsessive compulsive that I am, I wanted to reach right out through the windshield and snatch it away. Then it occurred to me that since I've got a power antenna, I could turn the radio off, wait till the antenna retracted and the leaf blew away, then turn the radio on again. But on second thought this seemed too flamboyant a solution.

Drove past some insurance outfit on the highway:

Glavinsured
Insurance "Since 1953"

This bugged me. When they say Insurance "Since 1953," with the scare quotes, does that mean that they only call it "Insurance Since 1953," and that it's really Insurance Since 1962, or Insurance Since 1949??? Then I got to thinking, what if their sign had read:

"Glavinsured"
Insurance "Since 1953"

Would that mean that the name of their insurance outfit was called Glavinsured, but that actually the name of their outfit was "the Anderson Insurance Agency"? And that it was said that they'd been selling insurance "Since 1953," but that really they'd been selling insurance since 1962? I mean, shades of Lewis Carroll!

And you can tell what a week I've had, when all this happened to me on a trip over into Wisconsin Monday, and I don't even get around to writing about it until Saturday.