Cans! Cans! Cans!

The man on the phone, asking a moment of my time, sounded reasonable — at first.

"You might want to write about this," he said. "I think I know why people are so tense and nervous and jumpy."

Pencil poised, I waited.

"Cans!" he said.

Right there I began cringing.

"It
started with the incinerator ban," he said. "Until then all a person
had to worry about was putting out the garbage can on Mondays and
Thursdays and the bottles and cans on alternate Wednesdays, at least in
my neighborhood.

"All of a sudden," he continued, "people had to
gather their old papers and wrappings and cartons and leaves and twigs
and put them out at the curb on Tuesdays — three canfuls for me.

"A
person needs a bookkeeping system to keep up with what day is which. I
get so mixed up I catch myself putting the garbage out on combustible
rubbish day and sometimes I forget can day entirely."

"And," he scolded, "we've still got smog!"

A FUNERAL DIRECTOR out
toward San Gabriel a few days ago engaged a travel agent to arrange to
ship the remains of the recently deceased elsewhere for burial, with a
slightly macabre result.

The travel agent called an airline and
inquired about procedure. The airline man, apparently reluctant to
handle this type of business, said one way was to ship the deceased air
freight, otherwise a regular ticket would be required. The travel agent
said this might not always be satisfactory because of the time element.
"What about C.O.D.?" he pursued.

"Suppose the people at the other end refused to accept the remains?" the airline man countered.

The
travel agent, sensing he was losing ground, retorted, "I guess it's
like anything else — if they don't pay, you just keep the merchandise."

YOU KNOW all those jokes about the Fuller Brush man? Well, today we have a slight case of rebuttal.

John
Owen, who has a territory in Hollywood, knocked on a door and a lady
invited him in. He realized she had been expecting someone else who
hadn't appeared.

He went ahead displaying his brushes and
cleaners and cosmetics, but it was obvious she was not in a buying
mood. Her mind was on romance. He fled with the reputation of all
Fuller Brush men intact.

WEIRD EXCHANGE between two women overheard on the veranda of the Coronado Hotel:

"You know, my son is a normal child."

"Very normal?"

"Yes."

I THINK I have finally figured out why TV car salesmen mispronounce it "Chevalay." They think it was named for Maurice Chevrolet.

PUBLIC AT LARGE —
What this country needs, Seymour Mandel contends, is a credit card
Uncle Sam will honor for taxes … Of a lady executive he has
encountered, Paul Grimes says, "She's easy to talk to — if you can
interrupt her."

TIME OUT

Tomorrow's blinds are drawn —
And yesterday? So what!
Go scratch your back, and yawn–
Today's all that you've got.
–JOSEPH P. KRENGEL

AROUND TOWN — A young man at 5th and Hill carrying a pair of skis and ski boots drew some yoo-hoos from the sun worshipers who abound there … It isn't generally known that Edd Byrnes, the hair-combing Kookie
of "77 Sunset Strip" played a jive-talking killer in the series' pilot
film. He was so good they made him a nice guy. Now the teenage girls
adore him … Anyone else besides Blanche von Aspe notice that the new president of Family Service in Pasadena is Mrs. Willis Stork?