2001-09-09 - 11:00 p.m.

Not Improved By Repetition

My brother Harry has a birthday coming up in a week's time, so I went to the local mega-drug store to get a birthday card for him. I bought him a little birthday present, too. We usually don't get birthday presents for each other, but it's his 40th birthday and I figured that he could use a little cheering up.

The local mega-drug store has a pretty wide selection of cards, but I couldn't help but notice that the card selection seemed to be heavily slanted toward the female consumer. There were very few adult "birthday card for brother" cards. There were tons for sisters and mothers though.

All the cards about turning 40 seemed to be somewhat mean-spirited observations about bodies not working properly. Again, not the sort of thing I'd like to send Harry right now.

At length I found a rather expensive card that had a sparkly rainbow "Happy Birthday" on the front, and was blank on the inside. So I wrote inside it: "Ooooh...pretty...sparkly..."

While I was poking around, looking at various cards I found something peculiar, that actually fits in very well with the "greeting cards are for women only" idea.

There were three different cards in three different parts of the greeting card isles, and they all told the same, rather unfunny, joke. Here it is:

Front of card: How many men does it take to screw in a light bulb?

Inside of card: Four. One to screw in the light bulb, and three to hear him brag about the "screwing" part.

Yuk, yuk.

It wasn't funny the first time, and it definitely wasn't improved by repetition. Guess it shows how quickly jokes make the rounds in the greeting card industry.

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