Honolulu Lite

by Charles Memminger

Monday, June 2, 1997

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Weird when your
fingers do the walking

THE new phone books are in and they are chock full of all kinds of nifty new innovations, the most amazing being the new type font that is so tiny a gnat would have to wear bifocals to read the listings.

Honey, they shrunk the phone books. I'm not kidding. The books themselves are smaller and fatter, keeping up with, I suppose, the general physical demographic of most phone book users. The trouble is that there are just as many people in Hawaii as last year so in order to squeeze all of their names into the new, midget phone books, they had to shrink the type size. Now, I've always had good eyesight. In fact, I used to amaze people at parties by reading the back of an aspirin bottle from several feet away. But I'm getting to the age where I have a bit harder time reading small type at the end of the day. There's a scientific name for this affliction. It's called "Becommingus An Oldus Fartus." There's nothing like receiving the new phone books with type too small to read with a microscope to remind you that you essentially are a dying hunk of organic material. Thanks, GTE.

Anyway, I took out my biggest Sherlock Holmes magnifying glass in order to perform my yearly phone book rituals: check to see if any other Memmingers have snuck onto the island in the past year (nope) and scour the page headings in the Yellow Pages for amusing combinations of words.

I know, this sounds like the activity of a guy with no life. So what's your point? The deal with the Yellow Pages is this: at the top of the page, they list the topics covered on that page, like from "Beachballs" to "Brain Donors." Meaning the first listings on that page are places where you can buy beachballs and the last listing on the page is where you can buy a new brain. (I just made up those categories for illustrative purposes. You can't buy new brains, you have to steal them.)

Usually I can squeeze an entire column from the strange or funny juxtapositions of categories.

One year, there were such page headings as Hydraulic Hypnotists, Dry Editorials, Party Pastors, Karate Kitchens and Surfing Surveyors.

This year, not only did the phone company make the books smaller and type unreadable, but it also upset that delicate balance of business listings so that there are hardly any funny page headings.

But because I have an army of readers who faithfully look forward to my annual Funny Headings in the Phone Book column, I dutifully scanned the new Yellow Pages for amusing entries. Here they are (with some suggestions of what the businesses might be about):

Computer Dehydrating (Industrial Liquor or Costco's Scotch-In-A-Drum.)

Beer Bibles (Such as New Testament Lite, All the Sins, Half the Calories.)

Dancing Data (What happens when your computer dehydrates.)

Fireproofing Fish (Amazingly, despite all the changes in the new books, this heading still exists. Now think about that. If there had been just one more escort service advertisement, or one less attorney in town, the heading might have been Fireproofing Fingernail Salons, which just doesn't have the comic power of Fireproofing Fish.)

Gypsum Hair (I'm not sure what gypsum is, but on an off year, we have to take what we can get.)

Handwriting Hardware (They use to call it a pencil.)

By the way, my favorite ad in the Yellow Pages still is D&M Hydraulic, whose motto is "Get Hosed By The Pros."

Housing Hypnotherapists (What you need in Hawaii to get you to buy a house.)

Podiatrists Polygraph (Sample question: Did this little piggie really go to market, sir?)

Produce Psychics (I predict lettuce will get ahead and tomatoes will catch up.)