Rex Hamilton lives

We're at work in the 19 Minutes World Media Headquarters in downtown Milwaukee, Wisconsin, today. There are apparently few other people at work in downtown Milwaukee, because our bus ride in from the 19 Minutes Suburban Satellite Office took only about 15 minutes over city streets.

The trip in to work also included a stop at Dunkin' Donuts, which brought to mind the following two ruminations:

1. The apostrophe at the end of the word "Dunkin'" is kind of an anachronism in today's chain-store environment. A welcome anachronism for grammar enthusiasts, but an anachronism regardless. It's as though the store was originally called "Dunking Donuts", but someone decided, "Whoa, we better make this sound more conversational!" Of course, it also makes one wonder why the name of the store isn't "Dunkin' Do'nuts", given that "donuts" is a variation of "doughnuts".
2. The clientele at our Dunking Doughnuts of choice this morning was, shall we say, a little offbeat. Some might have paused to consider whether there was a hobo convention going on at the nearby Midwest Airlines Center. Others may have considered it the best sighting of Rex Hamilton as Abraham Lincoln since a 1988 spotting we remember from the men's room at a service area on I-95 in Maryland. More remarkable, perhaps, was the fact that there were three or four people at the restaurant this morning who could have been shooting for the Lincoln look, and - as far as we could tell - these people were not connected in any way except a mutual interest in doughy treats. Anyway, it got us to wondering whether there are normally that many odd ducks at the donut shop, but today, they represented a much higher proportion of the clientele at large (say, 95 percent) than on a typical weekday morning.

I'm thinking of stopping by tomorrow, just in case Gerald Ford is there.