Poor Choice of Topic

Outta Leftfield: Rule book for home paper product usage may be necessary
Published: Tuesday, November 02, 2010
By Mike Morsch
Executive Editor

A few days ago, Morsch posted this on Twitter: Anybody misuse household paper products? Like wiping up spills with tissues or blowing one's nose with a paper towel? I knew we were in for it.

A Facebook friend wrote the other day that she had a question she had been meaning to ask me for some time. My first thought was, "Oh, this sounds serious."

Uh-oh, it's a woman writing! Surely whatever she has to say will baffle Morsch, as well as any red-blooded male reader.

"Ask The Blonde Accountant about the correct usage of home paper products. I have a pet peeve about using them for what they were made for. My husband laughs at me. Yesterday he wiped up a spill with a Kleenex. Kleenexes are for noses, paper towels are for spills. And toilet paper should never be used for blowing one's nose," wrote Cheryl.

Shades of the "I can't organize my closet" column. This is not even a funny premise.

Just as I thought, a serious question. And naturally, it's not a question being asked directly to me, but to the wise one in our household.

The wise one! Because women are always the wisest, right?

Rest assured that I do not consider it a slight at all. I am used to being Vice President in Charge of Very Little Other Than Lightbulbs and Trash at my house.

Wahoooo! What man can't relate to that?

Scientific research (I asked a few other Facebook friends) reveals that it may be another one of those "Guy Things."

Can we get a new topic please?

For example, I am quite content attending to my nose with a paper towel. When that happens, The Blonde Accountant always flags me for Improper Use of Paper Towels. Not only am I scolded, but I must move an additional 15 yards away from her the next time I do it. But it is my nose, and I'm pretty sure she would agree that it's my paper towel once I have used it in that manner.

Woah woah, is that an unnecessary FOOTBALL reference? Now we really know the baseball season is over. I don't know if I've ever blown my nose with a paper towel... it strikes me as wasteful.

Household paper products - tissues, paper towels, napkins, toilet paper and baby wipes - seem to me to be mostly interchangeable. I'm a paper towel guy for just about everything because it seems to be the sturdiest of the household paper products.

This is laughable, and not in the way he intends.

Kleenexes are OK for minor work about the face - dabbing and wiping and such. But I cannot use one for any serious nose maintenance. As my Facebook friend Frank points out, one good big ole guy honk into a tissue and the dadgummed thing virtually disintegrates.

Frank is a frequent Facebook offender. And I've never disintegrated a tissue by blowing my nose, but I love the suggestion that every guy has a nose like a Howitzer.

Why, it's like blowing one's nose directly into one's hands. We men may be heathens and Neanderthals but we usually know enough not to blow our noses right into our hands.

"Heathens"? Are heathens notorious for their poor hygiene?

A Twitter friend - whom I won't identify based on The Blonde Accountant's reaction when I told her this story - offered that he once found himself out of baby wipes and immediately reached for the Armor All wipes, which resulted at him getting yelled at by his wife.

I'm really running out of things to say here. And there's a lot of fascinating paper discussion to go.

My initial reaction was, "Why would she yell at him for that?" Trying to find evidence to support the "Armor All is OK to use on a baby" approach, I looked on the Armor All website to see if baby bottoms popped up on its list of acceptable use surfaces.

We're sure to be treated to some fascinating material recycled from a website in the coming paragraph.

According to information on its site, "Armor All Cleaning Wipes have been specifically developed and tested for use on automobile surfaces." It says nothing about baby butts, so I guess it's safe to assume that the Armor All wipes are designed to be used on tires and auto interiors and not baby behinds.

Wow, I'm glad that we covered this. The Armor All website is fertile ground for comedy, and Morsch has gathered quite a crop, hasn't he?

Still, we shouldn't try to raise wimpy kids these days and a baby who has been tidied up with Armor All wipes is likely to be one tough baby. That baby could grow up to have one of those "I walked to school four miles uphill both ways in the snow" kind of stories to tell his kids and grandkids.

Or he could become one of those people who repeats cliches that were old when Harding was president!

"You think you kids got it bad, things were so tough in my neighborhood that when I was a baby my dad cleaned me off with an Armor All wipe ... and then went out and used my butt to wipe off the entire car!"

All this talk of babies and wipes and butts is starting to strike me as very foul.

In general though, the consensus among the guys is that short of using Armor All wipes on everything, paper towels can be used in any situation. Once again, in an attempt to support that theory, I typed in "good uses for paper towels other than cleaning up spills" into Google and found several other uses for paper towels.

I really hate this. How can someone think this is funny? Does he review his own work and think it's amusing? Does he think that the limitless Internet public will think so?

Among them are: as insulation; for stuffing one's bra (apparently not all women are anti-paper towel when it comes to its multiple uses; they appear, however, to draw the line at stuffing their bras with Armor All wipes);

Semi-colons are funny, I guess.

blowing your nose (I knew it); the entire roll makes a decent lumbar pillow (wouldn't have thought of that); as packing material for mailing fragile items; as table napkins (that one is a no brainer for me); and as potholders (one towel folded in half three times.)

Lists are funny.

As Facebook friend Tim pointed out, there really is no rule book for home paper products. But as we can see, maybe someone should develop one.

It looks like it would certainly be worth the paper it's printed on.

I can't think of anything to say. This was a horrible topic, first of all. I doubt even a funny person could write a column about using paper towels to blow his nose. But this one is all over the place. There's no cohesion. It reads like the diary of a goldfish.