Mr. Write's Page

Sometimes, you just have to relax and enjoy the humor in things.

A couple of months ago, I bought a jet ski trailer. Not the jet ski, just the trailer. I purchased it to haul my kayak.

This is the trailer when I brought it home.

This is the trailer modified to carry the kayak. Piece of cake.

All well and good. But, as you can see, the trailer is a tiny thing. When I was on the road, I couldn’t see it in the rear-view mirror. Nor could I see it while backing up. It was a problem that demanded a solution.

No worries. I bought a fiberglass pole with a safety flag and mounted it on the back corner of the trailer. The pole sticks up about three feet so you can see what’s back there.

But still, there was a problem. The orange flag was dreadfully tacky, and it was noisy in the wind. I simply couldn’t abide it. I decided to ditch the flag and replace it with an antenna topper.

Hmmm, what kind of antenna topper should I get? Smiley face? Grinning skull? Flaming eyeball? Daffy Duck?

In the end, I settled on a Styrofoam eight ball, like this one:

I found it on Amazon.com. The price was about $3.00 plus a couple of bucks for shipping. Fair enough.

A week or so later, an oversized envelope arrived in the mail from the 温 馨 公 司
company (not their real name) in Hong Kong. The packaging didn’t seem appropriate for a Styrofoam eight ball, but I wasn’t expecting anything else at the time. I opened the envelope.

What it contained was a 3’x5′ nylon replica of the Confederate battle flag.

The paperwork in the envelope stated that it was an eight ball antenna topper, but I’m here to tell ya, it wasn’t.

My first inclination was to return it. In truth, the flag is worth a good bit more than a Styrofoam antenna topper, but I have no use for a flag.

(Where I live, flying it would be perfectly acceptable, but it’s too big for the little fiberglass pole on the trailer.)

Anyway, I figured it was silly to return a five-dollar order, and antenna toppers are easy to find. I decided to keep the flag and chalk it up to experience.

A few days later, back on Amazon.com, I ordered another antenna topper — this one:

I bought it from a company in, of all places, Hong Kong. This time, the order was fulfilled satisfactorily.

I find it quite amusing to make eye contact in the rearview mirror with the incomparable Larry Fine.

When I told my kids about the saga of the eight ball and the flag, my son Dustin pointed out the obvious.

Somewhere, there is a dude who ordered a Confederate battle flag and is trying to decide what to do with an eight ball antenna topper.