Little columns that could

I don't receive fan mail, but if I did, I imagine at least one letter would read something like, "Scott, where do your ideas for your columns come from?" I'm glad you asked, Fictional Concerned Reader. First of all, you really shouldn't end sentences with prepositions. Let's work on that, why don't we? As to your question, I can't speak for my colleagues, but in many instances I'll come up with a decent 50-word joke and spend three hours trying to tack on another 500 words to make a column. But sometimes I just can't squeeze out 500 more words from one joke. So here now are my seedling column ideas that never came to fruition.\n"Second 2nd Assistant Directors" are people, too\nMy parents sit through the entire credits after movies. Growing up, I thought this was the thing to do. So when I saw movies with friends and they got up to leave as soon the credits began to roll, I was completely flummoxed. "But … but … I haven't found out who the assistant to Mr. Sandler is, or if the characters and events are fictitious and any similarity to any persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental!"\nConfessions of an easy listener\nIf I'm in the car by myself and I'm flipping through the radio stations, every once in a while I'll land on the light rock station, and I'll just start singing along to something like Michael Bolton's "Said I Loved You" or Pat Benatar's "We Belong." Of course, if there are other people in the car, I'm all man. "Michael Bolton? What a tool! Isn't there a station playing Nelly?" But seriously, kids, isn't Dashboard Confessional just Boz Scaggs with tattoos?\nHung out to dry\nIt's not that I'm a clotheshorse, but I hate doing laundry so much I'll buy more of something instead of wash what I have. No more socks? No problem! I needed to go to Target anyway! After the ninth consecutive day of the same pair of jeans, I usually broke down and admitted it was time to do some laundry. \nAnd then I discovered the drop-off service at the Laundromat. For a mere 85 cents a pound, someone else washed, dried and folded all my mentionables and unmentionables for me. Once when I waited as long as I possibly could, I finally took in my laundry bag -- it was roughly the size of a Hyundai Elantra -- and placed it on the Laundromat's scale ... 53 pounds of dirty clothes. Let me spell that out in words to impress upon you the gravity (literally) of that number -- fifty-three. The small Russian woman who worked there rolled her eyes and sighed heavily, perhaps wondering if there was enough laundry detergent in the city to wash all those clothes. The next time I was in there washing my clothes myself, the woman saw me and smiled. "You do it yourself this time? This is better!"\nNot-so-little brown jugs\nWhy does powdered protein come in such unbelievably huge tubs? I never touch the stuff, but since two of my roommates are riding in Little 5, and the other two apparently just like the taste, my house is being overrun by pony kegs of stuff whose main ingredient appears to be sand. I can only imagine what a protein factory looks like -- towering silos of powder maintained by beefy guys wearing white lab coats with the sleeves torn off who then test it by mixing it into a glass of water, grimace horribly at the taste and say, "Perfect!" No disrespect to people whose bodies are their temples, but if I need protein, I stick my finger in the peanut butter jar and call it a day.