We all know what a paradox is: two physicians. Thank you! I’ll be here all week! Don’t forget to tip your servers!

Seriously, a paradox is a statement or set of statements that result in the complete opposite being true. An example would be “this statement is false.” In other words, if the statement is true, then it’s false, and vice versa. Or to put it another way,

Statement 1: The next sentence is true.
Statement 2: The previous statement is false.

This puts us in a vicious circle.

😡

And there’s the ever-popular

“Can’t” is not a word in my vocabulary.

Well, if it’s not in your vocabulary, why did you use it?

The Irish comedian Hal Roach once claimed that, when he and a bunch of his friends were standing around somewhere, a police officer came up and said “If you’re gonna stand here, you’ll be be moving along.”

Wikipedia, which as everyone knows is The Blogger’s Best Friend™, has a whole list of paradoxes. You can see that this is one of those discussions that could go on for a while.

Here’s something you never see any more. In fact, some readers might not have ever seen one.

For those of you who haven’t seen one, this is a telephone booth. In the days before cellphones, if you were out somewhere and needed to call someone, you found one of these and made your call. When I was a kid, you had to put a dime or two nickels into the phone to make a local call. To make a toll call, which was a call outside the city or the towns immediately outside it, how much you paid depended on where you were calling and how long you talked. You had to put money into the phone before you even got a dial tone, then you could touch the number buttons for the person you were calling, if it was a Touch-Tone™ phone; otherwise you had to dial the number.

Sometimes, instead of being in a booth, the payphone was attached to a post, or hanging on a wall, inside or outside. It worked the same way regardless.

The rule was, when you were out, you had to have a dime to call home, in case you got stuck somewhere and needed to let your parents know where you were, or to call a tow truck to come get your car which had died on the highway. Frank Sinatra always insisted that his kids do that. When he died, they put a roll of dimes in his pocket, remembering what he had told them.

Even before cellphones were everywhere, they started removing payphones. They’d often be destroyed by someone trying to get in and take the money, or destroyed by someone who liked destroying things. In some neighborhoods, they were being used by drug dealers or gang leaders as their “office phone.” After a while, the phone companies got tired of replacing damaged equipment and just removed the phone, or the police would ask them to take the phone away so it couldn’t be used for illegal purposes. The first trip I made out of town after Mom died, I didn’t have a cellphone, and I drove around for almost an hour looking for a phone to call them on. You can bet the first thing I did when I got home was to get one.

All right, so I admit it: occasionally my theme stumped me. Those are times when you have to use two words, abbreviations, or proper names to get it to work. And here is one of those cases.

PDQ (pronounced “pee dee cue”) is an abbreviation for “pretty damn quick” or “pretty darn quick,” depending on your attitude toward mild profanity. You see it used a lot in company names, such as PDQ Printing, that did offset printing pretty damn quick. (Remember offset printing? There used to be a lot of places that did it, until Adobe Acrobat and laser/inkjet printers got cheap. Great for big jobs, though.)

PDQ was also the name of a drink mix made by your friends at Ovaltine.

An ad for PDQ drink mix, which was running a promotion with Mattel that promised an entire fleet of Hot Wheels cars and trucks for $1 plus the inner lining of a jar of PDQ. Ran in newspapers March 12, 1972 (source: eBay)

PDQ was like Ovaltine in that it came in chocolate crystals, but unlike Ovaltine didn’t have malt or egg in it and actually tasted good. Plus, PDQ came in strawberry and egg nog flavors. You could stir it into milk or sprinkle it on ice cream. It was popular during the Sixties and Seventies, then faded from view.

PDQ was the sponsor of a syndicated game show called, of all things, PDQ, with Dennis James as the host. Here is the pilot episode, if you have thirty minutes to spare.

For those of you who like their classical music mixed with a little humor, PDQ is the last, and certainly least, son of Johann Sebastian Bach.

PDQ Bach. Source: Stanton Music

PDQ Bach is the creation of composer, music educator, and parodist Peter Schickele, who often add the honorarium “Professor” to his name. He has recorded numerous albums of music he claims to have been written by PDQ. Here is the “Pervertimento for Bagpipes, Bicycle, and Balloons,” S. 66.

Questions: Are you an Ovaltine fan? Ever had PDQ? Like game shows? What did you think of PDQ Bach?