Quite a few of you have written to inform me of the origin of Pancake Day. This e-mail from Brent McKee seems to provide a good summary…
Pancake Day is actually Shrove or Fat Tuesday, the last Tuesday before the commencement of Lent. It's the last day for eating an assortment of tasty treats. In England — from which Canada and most of the United States derives its traditions — this meant pancakes. In Newfoundland, the tradition is to put trinkets like coins and rings into the pancake. The person who finds a particular trinket has good luck in a particular area — the one who finds the coin will get rich, the one who finds the ring will get married in the next year, and so on. In some areas of the United States, the tradition varies. In Detroit, for example, you never hear of "Pancake Day", it's "Paczki Day" (pronounced "punchky") where they eat "paczkis" which are sort of a Polish fruit pastry which seems to resemble a jelly donut. In New Orleans, the tradition is (besides getting women to show off their breasts for beads) to eat "King Cake." As in the Newfoundland tradition, a trinket of some sort is found in the cake, with the person who finds it becoming "king" of the party.
Yeah, but what do you get in the free pancakes at IHOP? Or don't I want to know? I don't want to know.
I've also received a number of e-mails from folks telling me their horror tales of shopping at Radio Shack…and from two different folks, their unhappy experiences working in those establishments. Almost everyone mentioned the policy Radio Shack once had (I remember this, too) of demanding your address and phone number any time you made a purchase, no matter how tiny. I once bought a 10-cent battery there and had to give them that info, despite the fact that I was already receiving six or seven copies of every Radio Shack catalog. It took me a while to figure out, as I'm sure others realized, that the thing to do was to give them a bogus address and phone number.
Two people within the confines of KNBC wrote to me, separately, that they know their hi-def signal is occasionally out of synch and that they can't understand either why no one there is concerned about it. I'm not so much concerned about it as amazed. At every station, there's a department called something like Master Control that is responsible for monitoring the outgoing broadcast 24/7 and making sure it's as close to perfect as possible. The folks in those divisions are usually fiercely diligent…although once, I was in the NBC network Master Control in New York and the guys in there were watching The Price is Right on CBS because they'd been tipped off that there were major bikinis in the Showcases at the end. And once, I was in Master Control at ABC and the guys there were watching porn, which struck me as just plain dangerous. They were one wrong button-push away from replacing Grace Under Fire with Grace Under Fred. But that kind of behavior is not typical. Usually, they catch transmission problems and do everything necessary to correct them, long before any viewers phone in.
Lastly, many have written to tell me of other "Who's on First?" variations that have been done in recent years besides the one by the Credibility Gap. This Wikipedia page lists a lot of them, including one I wrote. I still think it's an incredibly stupid routine that works in spite of itself.