And here's to you, Mrs Such-and-such

With the laundry done, I settled back in my chair to perform two concurrent tasks, one sort of painful, one more like hopeful: I grabbed this week's accumulated bills and logged onto the bank site to pay them, and I popped open this week's newest musical acquisitions to play them.

Tucked inside the envelope with the phone bill was a pitch for the telco's own online-payment service, illustrated with an overhead shot of a woman at a notebook presumably using said service. Now Net-based services are no less likely to fall back on Sex Sells than any other commercial endeavor, but the telco's bill-paying model isn't the usual barely-legal refugee from a Skechers ad; you can't see her face, but her slightly-streaked, vaguely-unkempt coif, the slight thickness around her upper arms, the prominent striations on the backs of her hands as she types — all these things indicate that we're looking at, not some twentysomething babe, but her fortyish (fiftyish?) mother. And that's a good thing: not all of us are youngsters anymore, and when we were, we didn't particularly want to be reminded of things like phone bills. Besides, I was pleased to note, Mom had a nice pair of gams.

And precisely at that moment, Fountains of Wayne launched into "Stacy's Mom", a song about a guy who doesn't mind hanging with a classmate, but:

I pulled the booklet from the CD case to verify that yep, that's what I heard.

This probably isn't the sort of synchronicity that would have impressed Carl Jung, or even Sting, but it shook me up for a couple of minutes.