Yesterday, I watched a 1950 episode of What’s My Line? — “television’s gayest game!” — which my TiVo had picked up on Sunday morning. One of the guests, whose profession the panelists were supposed to guess, was a seltzer manufacturer. Now, seltzer was not a word I heard much growing up, outside of an occasional reference to the seltzer bottles used by vaudevillian comedians. Although I come from a region that falls decidedly on the “pop” side of of the great linguistic soft drink schism, I always knew the stuff as “soda water,” or just “carbonated water” — not seltzer.
So whenever I hear someone use the word, I think of the Seinfeld episode where George and Jerry briefly discuss how “salsa” and “seltzer” sound pretty similar when spoken with a Spanish accent, soon before George reaches his epiphany that their NBC sitcom proposal should be a show about nothing. So, as the What’s My Line? panel tried guessing the seltzer guy’s occupation, Jerry Seinfeld was riffing in the back of my mind: “Don’t you know the difference between seltzer and salsa? You have the seltzer after the salsa.”
Later last night, while working, I started playing an episode of Seinfeld that the TiVo had picked up on Monday night. The episode? You guessed it: “The Pitch,” which features the very conversation I had remembered earlier that day.
Which reminds me — last October, Justin and I were buying drinks (i.e., pop) at the neighborhood QuikTrip, which has one of the biggest selections of drinks (e.g., pop) I’ve ever seen in any convenience store. As I glanced at some of the many slushy/squishee/smoothie options featured there, I noticed they had horchata. I’d only tried this flavor at one location — a 24-hour Mexican restaurant in Boise — although I’d had it there several times. It tasted like liquid rice pudding, I thought, which triggered pleasant sense memories of the Christmases of childhood past. Anyway, I convinced Justin he should try it. “Have you ever had horchata?” “What’s horchata?” And so forth. He tried it, and hated it. Oh well. I keep thinking I should try the QuikTrip version to see whether it stacks up to the ghetto version I had in Bosie, but have yet to do so.
Later that night, the TiVo plucked an episode of Beavis and Butt-head from the digital cable aether (specifically, MTV2), which at one point features our protagonists watching a Tori Amos video. Beavis notices a background character in the video: “Hey, Butt-head — that’s the guy that works at Maxi-Mart!” Butt-head: “Oh yeah. He’s cleaning out the Slurpee machine.” Beavis: “Yeah. ‘Get me a large horchata. Horchata! And a Blue Wackadoo.'”
Are there big coincidences and small coincidences, or just coincidences?
