Looks Can Be Deceiving. 04/24/26

Forget fake news for a second. Let’s talk fake pictures. One of my granddaughters just turned 5. Thanks to Yellow Submarine, turns out she loves the Beatles. So grandpa (yours truly) sees this really cool Beatles baseball cap online, It looks like a weathered blue denim cap and on the crown is a sewn-on picture of the Fab Four walking across Abbey Road. Cool, right? Thankfully I didn’t say anything early on to her because the hat took almost two months to finally arrive at my house. I eagerly unwrapped it to find an overly large, shiny, polyester blue cap with an unimpressive sketch of the guys crossing Abbey Road. I was bummed, I was going to return it with a pissy email (which always seems to do so much good) but my wife and I took it over to our granddaughter’s house, where her eyes lit up and she promptly, happily put in on her head. Hey, she’s 5. But it’s still a fake picture, the hat in that picture was so much nicer than the actual object. Sort of like the photo of a McDonalds quarter pounder with cheese. It looks like a fat, juicy burger, the cheese melting over the side of the burger. Of course the one you actually get at McDonalds, the real one, is a flat, round piece of meat, grey throughout, no thicker than a coaster. And that cheese? Well it would be melting over the side if the damn burger were remotely hot, but nooooooo!!!

Okay, I got a little carried away there, but John had a similar experience buying a hoppng bunny for his granddaughter. It hopped okay. It just looked nothing as impressive as the picture of it looked. So what is a pissed off consumer to do? Get in touch with the manufacturer? Hah! The name is written entirely in Japanese. If that’s even Japanese. Anyway, it’s a lot of fancy, curlicued letters that don’t resemble a language John of I could come close to understanding.

I think that’s why they don’t have a customer service number that connects to a human, non-precorded voice. An actual human. Because this way they never hear your complaint so they never have to respond to it. This is all the fault of the NY Times. Let me explain. The Times used to have a fantastic sports section, but they shuttered it down and now use an online source, the Athletic, to act as their sports section. I’m not a fan of it, so I subscribed to the NY Post which has a great sports section. But boy do they bombard you with ads in the middle of whatever column or story I’m reading. That’s how I found the Beatles hat. That’s how come I spend 45 minutes looking up an article before I even get to the article. I get hit with various come-ons for easy walking shoes for seniors with poor balance, the only nail clipper you’ll ever need, you’ll never believe what this former child star looks like now (But she’s never part of the list, is she?), and my all-time favorite: get a rock-ha…never mind. But all these cheap, untrue come-ons gave us the idea for the miracle cures. What a carnival barker used to look like and what they look like now.

The point is, please be careful about buying something without seeing it first. And if you buy it online, good luck trying to find someone to speak to. Oooh, I think I hear the doorbell. It must be that Ginsu knife I bought where they throw a tomato up and the knife slices it mid-air. Here honey, please toss me the tomato..

Have a great weekend,

Andy and John