Auntie Mame said (paraphrasing): "Life is a banquet, and yet some poor chumps are starving to death!"
This seems especially true to me when I observe the election activity this year. Negativity seems to be a new way of life, and I don't like it at all. We have always had some negative ads, but this is ridiculous. Elaine and I took advantage of early voting and have done our duty, but we still have two weeks to be subjected to mail, telephone, email and tv messages telling us how bad each of the opposite candidates is. (I know that no amount of bad-mouthing will influence my vote and I hope it doesn't influence yours.) So, I would say to these negative people: "Relax! Begin to enjoy this wonderful banquet of a life. Look around you at all the beauty. It's there. When all you do and say is negative, you miss out on so much."
01. Cold feet? The Greenland marathon was run yesterday and won by a lady from Stockholm. I believe the temperature was a balmy 19 degrees, I could be wrong. I heard that one year the race was run in minus ten degree weather. The runners have to be very careful to avoid hidden cracks and crevices and some wear spiked running shoes so they don't slip on the ice.
02. Country Living. We live in a rural county in Maryland where there are many old churches that provide Saturday food fests. For instance, a couple of weeks ago we got carry-out crab cakes from one church. I'm not an expert on crab cakes, but Elaine said they were some of the best she had ever had.
Yesterday, we got carry-out fried oysters from another old country church. They were wonderful.
Soon, bazaar season will be upon us and we will be able to do the rounds of the churches and sample all the goodies here is the "land of pleasant living."
As a person involved with several senior citizen organizations, I get to attend lots of funerals. I make it a point to eulogize many of these persons if I feel that they are not being served well in that regard by clergy or relatives. After these services, there usually is a luncheon put on by the "church ladies". The food is always yummy, and helps to keep sweet memories of the deceased stay with us.
03. Commandments. Recently, I finished listening to a book on tape that I highly recommend. The Year of Living Biblically by A.J. Jacobs. AJ is an editor at Esquire magazine and is the author of several books, including The Know-It-All, where he recounts his "humble quest to become the smartest person in the world" by reading the Encyclopedia Britanica from A to Z.
I will not try to give a review of AJ's book on tape. My son, Chris, is an author and does much better than I could ever do at book reviews. Suffice it to say, I enjoyed the book on tape so much that I ordered a print copy of the book from Amazon so that I could get the full effect of AJ's scholarship.
Just imagine, finding all of the commandments and suggestions in both the new and old testaments of the Bible and trying to observe them for a whole year. Try the read.. you'll like it.
04. Goats? A book that I recently read was The Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson and a helper that doesn't get mentioned in the copy of the book that I have. After some delay, the movie based on the book has finally been released. (Did it first have to get US Government approval?)
Since I was in a small way connected with Air Force people who acted similarly to those (real persons) mentioned in the book, I got completely absorbed in the book. Once again, I will not try to give a review of the book. I will tell you that I was able to use one of the techniques mentioned in the book to save my life when surrounded by drunken Army tank drivers in Nuremberg, Germany fifty years ago. Read my book about that one.
05. Happy seniors. Speaking of banquets.. last week, it was my privilege to help set up the induction ceremony for the 2010 members of the Maryland Senior Citizens Hall of Fame. Fifty seniors were honored for doing years of volunteer service to their communities. These inductees had been involved in all kinds of activity that helped their fellow citizens of all ages. It was indeed a happy occasion. No negativity there.
I want to mention one of the inductees and I don't think he would mind. His last name is Vaughn (without the "a"). He brought a group of cheering supporters with him.. 6 tables of them.. 59 ladies! Since we have (almost) the same last name, I asked him to take some of whatever he has that makes him so attractive to women and bottle it for me. (Only kidding, Elaine...)
06. Amazing. Simon Cowell's "Got Talent" franchise now broadcasts in over 30 countries, including China. In Shanghai, the winner was a 23 year old man who plays the piano with his toes! Liiu Wei lives in Beijing and lost his legs at age 10. Parents.. tell this to your reluctant piano playing kids.
07. Parlez-vous? The Associated Press reports that a woman in England speaks English with a French accent even though she has never been in France or studied French. She has a condition known as Foreign Accent Syndrome. There are only a few cases of this around the world. Supposedly, the syndrome appeared suddenly after she had a severe migraine attack.
08. Old friends. Recently, coming back from three weeks at the ocean, I tried to catch up on three weeks of newspapers... including some online from my Massachusetts hometown. Of course, the first thing I checked was the obituaries.
Baltimore Sun: I saw a memorial to the lady who was my secretary for several years at the Social Security Administration in Woodlawn, Maryland.
Letha Alston: a marvelous secretary and good friend who made a big impact on my life. She passed at the age of 66 in 2006..
Letha once gave me a birthday card that said: "You remind me of Chinese Food: Egg Foo Old!"
Letha also was a great supplier of jokes for my stand-up comedy routines: the one I remember best has the punchline: "that's nacho cheese!"
I miss Letha.
New Bedford Standard Times:
David Burr, who died on his 78th birthday.. September 30th, 2010. Dave was a friend at Rodman School in New Bedford, Massachusetts. He was a comedian type kid who always had a joke or a funny tale to tell. He was another influence on my life. RIP
09. Resurrection? Last week in Baltimore, an 89 year old lady was found on the floor of her bathroom. The policemen assumed that she was dead and contacted her son, who made arrangements to donate her body to science.
When the college worker came to get the body, he noticed that the body's arm moved. He checked her pulse, and sure-enough, she was alive.
Baltimore police will get a refresher course in what to check for when an apparently dead body is found. (read Edgar Allen Poe)
10. Another resurrection? A Michigan dog was "put down" by its owner because of a painful spinal condition. The owner put the corpse in the garage to be buried later. The next morning, he found the dog standing up and giving him a dirty look.
11. Stink bugs. Well, the invasion has finally come to Maryland. We have always had some stink bugs, but this is ridiculous. Open the door, they fly in. Squash them, they give off a pungent odor. Some people like the odor. Most don't. SuZee won't eat them. Elaine wants them thrown down the toilet. I usually just pick them up on a paper and throw them out.
The local orchard folks are very upset. These bugs destroy the looks of apples and nobody will buy them, including canners. Farmers can't use the chemicals that could kill them because of environmental hazards. Some want to import Japanese stink-bug predators, but that may become a problem ecologically also. Its a problem that needs to be addressed before next year's crop season.
12. Humor. Those who have XM radio have a great resource for humor. There is a "clean joke" channel. As I've mentioned before.. a true humorist does not have to resort to dirty jokes or cuss words to get a laugh. I am developing a blog for clean jokes that I have accumulated for almost fifty years... visit: http://joevaughansjokes.blogspot.com/
((I apologize, George Carlin!))
Enjoy the banquet!
..........................................................................................................
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Thursday, October 14, 2010
The Mad 1960's
With all the excitement about the series MAD MEN and the 1960's decade, I have decided to record some of the items in a scrapbook I created in May 1963. Perhaps it might give you even more insight into that wonderful time to be alive, a half-century ago!
http://www.amctv.com/originals/madmen/about/
01. Murphy's Laws. Although probably listed first in the Scientific American magazine for 4/56, they were talked about extensively in the 1960's..
I. If something can go wrong, it will.
II. When left to themselves, things always go from bad to worse.
III. Nature always sides with the hidden flaw.
02. Figures: An "electronic computer" was used in Atlanta to come up with the following statistic: The average female figure measures 35-25-35. However, ladies on the West Coast are a wee bit larger.
03. Chewing Gum: An historian found out that chewing gum was being used by the Aztecs when the Spanish landed in the Yucatan. However, it didn't catch on with European types until 350 years later. General Santa Anna of Mexico was a fan and tried to get an example of it taken seriously by the Americans while he was exiled in Staten Island. Discouraged, he left the material when he returned to Mexico. But an enterprizing American named Thomas Adams used it to found a U. S. chewing gum industry.. his product: Adams Chiclets. Shortly thereafter, a guy named William Wrigley, Jr. gave the big push to make chewing gum an important American pastime.
The Germans call chewing gum Kaugummi. I suspect that is because people who chew gum kind of look like cows chewing their cud. Recently, in Ocean City, we were served by a medical doctor at an emergency center who was chewing gum. Somehow, this did not seem professional to me.
04. IBM. The computer giant was really "big" in the early '60's. Times were good for them, especially with Government contracts. Jobs were rather prevalent, in fact, around 1963, headhunters offered me three jobs with IBM. One of which was at their Poughkeepsie "Think Tank" where the employees (gasp!) were allowed to dress for work without a black suit or tie!
In my scrapbook, I have a cartoon by a cartoonist named Richard Taylor who had a distinctive manner of drawing which I tried to copy for years. The cartoon showed an older manager introducing a new employee to the existing black-suited staff of five men. The new recruit looks and is dressed exactly like the current staff. (This is a direct reference to IBM's cookie-cutter created staff.)
http://www.pbase.com/csw62/r_taylor
05. Ben sez: Quote from Ben Franklin: "Keep thy eyes wide open before marriage, and half-shut aft erwards."
06. Flower Mart: The Flower Mart in Mount Vernon Square, Baltimore, Maryland, was big in 1963. That is the first year that I attended. It took place in a circle around Baltimore's Washington Monument, and consisted of craft vendors, food vendors, flower vendors and generally crazy people. Crab cakes were a big hit and were a lot cheaper than they are today. But, the biggest hit of the Mart was the famous "peppermint sticks".. everybody bought them. These are candy peppermint sticks, stuck into lemons.. they are surprizingly refreshing.
http://www.baltimore-maryland.org/flower-mart-photos.html
One thing I noticed about the Flower Mart was that there were very few black people in attendance. Since half of the population of Baltimore at the time was of African-American descent, this seemed strange to me. Apparently there was some racial problem because a few years later, black protests shut the mart down for a few years. I haven't been down to check it out these days, but I haven't heard of any problems with it lately, so I guess everything worked out o.k.
07. Names: Those of you who have read Mencken's American Language, know a bit about American last names. If you haven't read it, you really should; it is a classic.
While I worked at the Social Security Administration, I kept a file of strange names (at least to me). I guess, since I have been retired for a while, it would be o.k. for me to list some of these names that intrigued me while I worked there. I hope noone takes offense.
Rose Pyles
Lucy Kluck
Fanny Paper
Park Bench
Work Bench
Only Teasdale
Ozelia Fontenont
Bunnie Blue
Wrestling Keith
Bonita Purkypile
Dink Pike
Joe Ooom
Parafine Puff
Feather Schwartz
Bren Gunn and Tommy Gunn (father was Pop Gunn)
Freeman A. Mason
When Elaine worked at SSA, she found the name: Pink Valentine.
08. More Ben sez: "A single man resembles the odd half of a pair of scissors."
09. City life: A 1963 study found that 400 snakes of three species were found living in peaceful anonymity on three acres within Chicago's city limits.
10. Car terms: A weekly magazine in 1963 listed some once common automobile terms that were no longer recognized:
SPRAG: A pointed iron rod beneath a car. It's pointed end could be released to dig into the road to prevent cars with poor brakes from rolling backwards down a hill.
TREMBLER: A buzzer-like device attached to the dashboard, which made the ignition sparks.
PILOT: A little gasoline-fed flame which ignited the fire under the boiler of a Stanley Steamer.
http://www.stanleymotorcarriage.com
BANDAGE: Something that you buckled over a punctured tire to allow you to continue.
TILLER: What some people called the wagon-related steering device on early autos...which was thankfully replaced by the steering wheel.
11. Pre-Mensa Poetry:
Pyschologist, with Freudian craft,
Divide the dullards from the daft,
Say who's rigid, who's resilient,
Who's safe and who risks being brilliant.
The thing to be is well-adjusted
(Your reflex actions must be trusted)
That way you'll never be suspected
Of thinking something unexpected.
By Leonard Sharpe
(I'm not sure of the poet's name. Perhaps my brother Joe, who has a gift for solving mysteries, can find out who the poet is.)
12. Final Ben sez:
"There's a time to wink as well as to see."
.................................................................................
http://www.amctv.com/originals/madmen/about/
01. Murphy's Laws. Although probably listed first in the Scientific American magazine for 4/56, they were talked about extensively in the 1960's..
I. If something can go wrong, it will.
II. When left to themselves, things always go from bad to worse.
III. Nature always sides with the hidden flaw.
02. Figures: An "electronic computer" was used in Atlanta to come up with the following statistic: The average female figure measures 35-25-35. However, ladies on the West Coast are a wee bit larger.
03. Chewing Gum: An historian found out that chewing gum was being used by the Aztecs when the Spanish landed in the Yucatan. However, it didn't catch on with European types until 350 years later. General Santa Anna of Mexico was a fan and tried to get an example of it taken seriously by the Americans while he was exiled in Staten Island. Discouraged, he left the material when he returned to Mexico. But an enterprizing American named Thomas Adams used it to found a U. S. chewing gum industry.. his product: Adams Chiclets. Shortly thereafter, a guy named William Wrigley, Jr. gave the big push to make chewing gum an important American pastime.
The Germans call chewing gum Kaugummi. I suspect that is because people who chew gum kind of look like cows chewing their cud. Recently, in Ocean City, we were served by a medical doctor at an emergency center who was chewing gum. Somehow, this did not seem professional to me.
04. IBM. The computer giant was really "big" in the early '60's. Times were good for them, especially with Government contracts. Jobs were rather prevalent, in fact, around 1963, headhunters offered me three jobs with IBM. One of which was at their Poughkeepsie "Think Tank" where the employees (gasp!) were allowed to dress for work without a black suit or tie!
In my scrapbook, I have a cartoon by a cartoonist named Richard Taylor who had a distinctive manner of drawing which I tried to copy for years. The cartoon showed an older manager introducing a new employee to the existing black-suited staff of five men. The new recruit looks and is dressed exactly like the current staff. (This is a direct reference to IBM's cookie-cutter created staff.)
http://www.pbase.com/csw62/r_taylor
05. Ben sez: Quote from Ben Franklin: "Keep thy eyes wide open before marriage, and half-shut aft erwards."
06. Flower Mart: The Flower Mart in Mount Vernon Square, Baltimore, Maryland, was big in 1963. That is the first year that I attended. It took place in a circle around Baltimore's Washington Monument, and consisted of craft vendors, food vendors, flower vendors and generally crazy people. Crab cakes were a big hit and were a lot cheaper than they are today. But, the biggest hit of the Mart was the famous "peppermint sticks".. everybody bought them. These are candy peppermint sticks, stuck into lemons.. they are surprizingly refreshing.
http://www.baltimore-maryland.org/flower-mart-photos.html
One thing I noticed about the Flower Mart was that there were very few black people in attendance. Since half of the population of Baltimore at the time was of African-American descent, this seemed strange to me. Apparently there was some racial problem because a few years later, black protests shut the mart down for a few years. I haven't been down to check it out these days, but I haven't heard of any problems with it lately, so I guess everything worked out o.k.
07. Names: Those of you who have read Mencken's American Language, know a bit about American last names. If you haven't read it, you really should; it is a classic.
While I worked at the Social Security Administration, I kept a file of strange names (at least to me). I guess, since I have been retired for a while, it would be o.k. for me to list some of these names that intrigued me while I worked there. I hope noone takes offense.
Rose Pyles
Lucy Kluck
Fanny Paper
Park Bench
Work Bench
Only Teasdale
Ozelia Fontenont
Bunnie Blue
Wrestling Keith
Bonita Purkypile
Dink Pike
Joe Ooom
Parafine Puff
Feather Schwartz
Bren Gunn and Tommy Gunn (father was Pop Gunn)
Freeman A. Mason
When Elaine worked at SSA, she found the name: Pink Valentine.
08. More Ben sez: "A single man resembles the odd half of a pair of scissors."
09. City life: A 1963 study found that 400 snakes of three species were found living in peaceful anonymity on three acres within Chicago's city limits.
10. Car terms: A weekly magazine in 1963 listed some once common automobile terms that were no longer recognized:
SPRAG: A pointed iron rod beneath a car. It's pointed end could be released to dig into the road to prevent cars with poor brakes from rolling backwards down a hill.
TREMBLER: A buzzer-like device attached to the dashboard, which made the ignition sparks.
PILOT: A little gasoline-fed flame which ignited the fire under the boiler of a Stanley Steamer.
http://www.stanleymotorcarriage.com
BANDAGE: Something that you buckled over a punctured tire to allow you to continue.
TILLER: What some people called the wagon-related steering device on early autos...which was thankfully replaced by the steering wheel.
11. Pre-Mensa Poetry:
Pyschologist, with Freudian craft,
Divide the dullards from the daft,
Say who's rigid, who's resilient,
Who's safe and who risks being brilliant.
The thing to be is well-adjusted
(Your reflex actions must be trusted)
That way you'll never be suspected
Of thinking something unexpected.
By Leonard Sharpe
(I'm not sure of the poet's name. Perhaps my brother Joe, who has a gift for solving mysteries, can find out who the poet is.)
12. Final Ben sez:
"There's a time to wink as well as to see."
.................................................................................
Thursday, October 07, 2010
Geezers at the Beach
I thought that I might talk a bit about a recent trip that we took, because it might give you some insights about vacation matters. I'll just ramble on and cover topics as I think of them.
Who? Elaine and I.
What? Spent 3 weeks in an ocean-front condo on the beach.
Where? Ocean City, Maryland.
When? Just after Labor Day.
Preparation: As you probably know already, women pack differently than men. Elaine filled 19 containers of various sizes. I filled 3. I do have to admit that Elaine's fills were mainly things that were needed for the condo: such as sheets, pillow cases, and non-perishable food. And she did also pack necessary clothes items.
My stuff (that I didn't forget) consisted of a few shirts, socks, and underwear, as well as my laptop, books, magazines and binoculars for watching the gulls.... girls?
Over the years, I have developed a check-list for myself, to make sure that I don't forget anything. (Elaine doesn't use one and thinks that my list is "just something a man would do.")
Unfortunately, the only thing about a checklist is that you must remember to find it and use it. (Remember the key point of every memory course... whatever you are looking for, is under something.. so pick it up!) I'll bet that my checklist is right underneath my missing hearing aid.
Moving in: The condo is on the third floor and can be reached by a little elevator. To get our 22 containers into the elevator, I had to make 14 trips, pushing a wheeled holder up a long ramp to get to the elevator. This was done at 11 pm in gale winds. Once in, after a lot of heavy breathing and gasping.. a warm beer helped calm me down a bit.
Since Elaine is in a wheelchair right now, beds and furniture had to be moved to accomodate and in so doing, a heavy picture popped off the wall right over my bed. It's a good thing that it happened then, because if I had had a nightmare and bumped the wall, that damned picture could have injured me. How would I have explained that to the doctor: "A picture flew off the wall and landed on my head." It was a picture of the Titanic..
Provender: Of course, what we brought with us in the way of food was minimal. We would buy the bulk of our food at the local supermarkets where prices are a bit higher than at home; for instance, on the main drag, a dozen medium eggs cost $2.59! Later, I found eggs at $1.59 a dozen at a supermarket on a road going out of town.
Happy Hair: Elaine discovered a store she was not familiar with: HarrisTeeter. They had a clearance table that had Elaine's favorite shampoo at $.99 a bottle. That was a fraction of its price in Baltimore. Elaine bought up all they had.
Broooom!! Our arrival was during "Bike Week" when 100,000 Harley Davidson riders descend upon Ocean City. This made driving our mini SUV a challenge and sleeping kind of trying.
Most of the bikers have been coming to OC for years and a lot of them look like me: chubby, bearded and old. While they cavorted with their fellow bikesters, their wives and girlfriends made the Beach Scene and helped give OC a new name: Cellulite City.
Buzzzzzzz! Since it wasn't safe to be on the road with the bikers, we did not go out to eat this week. Instead, we cooked a lot of good food right in the condo. However, since I do the cooking, smoke detectors feel that they have to harrass me. Just as it was in our Weller Way home, the detector is right near the stove, it has a tendency to go off to let me know that our food is ready.
Yummy stuff: When we did get to go out to restaurants, we went to some favorites:
Outback: Coconut shrimp!
Panda Buffet: Raw oysters and crab legs!
Crackerbarrel: Down home food!
Red Lobster: Unending shrimp!
We brought in a lot of food too:
Waterman's: A couple of dozen crabs!
Market: Big bag of steamed blue crab claws!
Greek Colonels: Creamed chipped beef!
FunFest: One week was FunFest Week in OC. This is when they put up monstrous tents containing lots and lots of crafty stuff for Elaine to buy. She bought some gifts, including some nice things for SuZee, our cat. She also bought a fancy (eternally sharp) knife for a bunch of money. Since I bad-mouthed the deal, she probably won't let me use it. The knife has a 50 year warranty.. neither she nor I will live that long. When I mentioned that to the 20 year old sales lady, she said that we could just pass it on to our heirs.
The only bad thing about FunFest, in my opinion, is that because noone can smoke in any of the tents, they congregate at the entrances... hundreds of them.. and blow smoke.
Entertainment?: Next to these tents are amusement areas. A ferris wheel, shooting galleries, Dodg-em Cars, Merry Go Rounds, and a weird and very scary piece of equipment that shoots people in little gondolas way up in the sky as though they are being shot by a massive rubber band.
The Hubcaps: Our favorite group, Carroll County's own Hubcaps was there inside the big tent one night. Tickets were $5 and $10. (Blood, Sweat and Tears was in the big tent another night, but they charged $20 and $49.) Elaine didn't want to get a ticket; instead, she sat near the back entrance and could see and hear them very well. She said that they did not do their usual schtick. That is probably because they would have to pay royalties.. and maybe they can get away with not paying them in Carroll County.
Delish: The food tent held many delicacies. One night, Elaine had a crab fluff and I had little fries and fish. Another night, we both had crab soup in bread bowls. Yingling beer was $3 for 10 ounces; light beer was $3 for 16 ounces. (At one time, Yingling was garbage beer and unsellable outside of Pottsville, PA.. now they advertise Nationwide and charge a lot more for a six-pack.) I think that IPA (India Pale Ale) is far and away the best beer made today. Much better than the versions made by the Brits years ago.
WalMart? What's a trip to OC without a visit to their WalMart store? This year, instead of counting the number of people with massive tatoos, I decided to count only those who did not have them. I only counted 5.. but they probably had theirs covered by their shirts.
What other WalMart can you go to where everybody is yelling at the top of their lungs? Strange people down there.
Home away from Home: We rent the condo from a good friend of ours, and we have to care for it as though it were our own home. So, when I fell asleep at the table, tipped it over and saw the glass of tomato juice sail through the air and onto the carpet, I became a little excited. Immediate action allowed us to get the spill completely cleaned up and undetectable.
Pills: As an old dude, I take a lot of medication. One of my pills is minute. A little yellow pill that blends in perfectly with the weaves of the carpet. (Yes, I spilled my pills.) I never did find 3 of them and hope that the vacuum cleaner got them before our host steps on the little squishy things.
Anger: Early one Sunday morning, we heard a knock on our door. It was a maintenance man who said that the guy in the condo under us was getting water into his bathroom. The maintenance man found that the spigot and faucets in the bathtub were loose, perhaps allowing some water to get in and spread down to his appartment. He said that he would caulk the area.
Meanwhile, a man with a very angry red face barged in and started yelling about his ceiling and put his face right up against mine. The last time an angry face got that close to me, it became dented in a few places and it almost happened again this time. However, I restrained myself. After caulking, the guy was getting more water, so it probably wasn't from this apartment at all.
Anyway, after this, I was hoping that we wouldn't have any other problems that would upset this guy.. guess what.. on the last day, while we were packing to leave, the toilet overflowed. Elaine and I spent a long time with a lot of towels getting the water off the floor.. and then we spent hours trying to unclog the drain. I didn't see the guy's red face again so I guess he stayed dry.
Oil Spill? When I went down to the beach to get some shells for Elaine, as I do each year, there were none. Where were the shells? The sand was flecked with black, just as I remember from when I was a kid during WWII. Tankers were sunk in the Atlantic by German submarines and spilled oil created tar in action with the sand.. and it spread out lightly over all after a while. This was like that.. and where were the shells? What is going on?
When we first got to OC, the surf was monstrous. Could it have squashed the shells?
Weather: Later, while remnants of hurricanes were storming up the Atlantic in the form of torrential rains, the weather channel kept showing Doppler Radar pictures of all this wetness coming up the coast. At one time, we had a Flash Flood Alert, a Heavy Rain Alert, a Tornado Watch and something else I can't remember. Over and over we were alerted about and shown pictures of the 12 inches of rain that we definitely would get. It never showed up. Not a drop until the last day that we were in OC.
The Last Day: As we battled with a rogue toilet, torrential rains buffeted OC. I made the 16 trips (remember, we made purchases) down the elevator and out into the storm and into the car. Everything got soaked, especially me. (I'm paying for it now with a very painful back and wheezing lungs.)
But, all in all, as usual, we had a great time. We were especially glad that my beautiful granddaughter, Bridget, was able to look after our cat, SuZee for the time that we were gone. SuZee told us that Bridget treated her very well.
.......................................................................................................................
Who? Elaine and I.
What? Spent 3 weeks in an ocean-front condo on the beach.
Where? Ocean City, Maryland.
When? Just after Labor Day.
Preparation: As you probably know already, women pack differently than men. Elaine filled 19 containers of various sizes. I filled 3. I do have to admit that Elaine's fills were mainly things that were needed for the condo: such as sheets, pillow cases, and non-perishable food. And she did also pack necessary clothes items.
My stuff (that I didn't forget) consisted of a few shirts, socks, and underwear, as well as my laptop, books, magazines and binoculars for watching the gulls.... girls?
Over the years, I have developed a check-list for myself, to make sure that I don't forget anything. (Elaine doesn't use one and thinks that my list is "just something a man would do.")
Unfortunately, the only thing about a checklist is that you must remember to find it and use it. (Remember the key point of every memory course... whatever you are looking for, is under something.. so pick it up!) I'll bet that my checklist is right underneath my missing hearing aid.
Moving in: The condo is on the third floor and can be reached by a little elevator. To get our 22 containers into the elevator, I had to make 14 trips, pushing a wheeled holder up a long ramp to get to the elevator. This was done at 11 pm in gale winds. Once in, after a lot of heavy breathing and gasping.. a warm beer helped calm me down a bit.
Since Elaine is in a wheelchair right now, beds and furniture had to be moved to accomodate and in so doing, a heavy picture popped off the wall right over my bed. It's a good thing that it happened then, because if I had had a nightmare and bumped the wall, that damned picture could have injured me. How would I have explained that to the doctor: "A picture flew off the wall and landed on my head." It was a picture of the Titanic..
Provender: Of course, what we brought with us in the way of food was minimal. We would buy the bulk of our food at the local supermarkets where prices are a bit higher than at home; for instance, on the main drag, a dozen medium eggs cost $2.59! Later, I found eggs at $1.59 a dozen at a supermarket on a road going out of town.
Happy Hair: Elaine discovered a store she was not familiar with: HarrisTeeter. They had a clearance table that had Elaine's favorite shampoo at $.99 a bottle. That was a fraction of its price in Baltimore. Elaine bought up all they had.
Broooom!! Our arrival was during "Bike Week" when 100,000 Harley Davidson riders descend upon Ocean City. This made driving our mini SUV a challenge and sleeping kind of trying.
Most of the bikers have been coming to OC for years and a lot of them look like me: chubby, bearded and old. While they cavorted with their fellow bikesters, their wives and girlfriends made the Beach Scene and helped give OC a new name: Cellulite City.
Buzzzzzzz! Since it wasn't safe to be on the road with the bikers, we did not go out to eat this week. Instead, we cooked a lot of good food right in the condo. However, since I do the cooking, smoke detectors feel that they have to harrass me. Just as it was in our Weller Way home, the detector is right near the stove, it has a tendency to go off to let me know that our food is ready.
Yummy stuff: When we did get to go out to restaurants, we went to some favorites:
Outback: Coconut shrimp!
Panda Buffet: Raw oysters and crab legs!
Crackerbarrel: Down home food!
Red Lobster: Unending shrimp!
We brought in a lot of food too:
Waterman's: A couple of dozen crabs!
Market: Big bag of steamed blue crab claws!
Greek Colonels: Creamed chipped beef!
FunFest: One week was FunFest Week in OC. This is when they put up monstrous tents containing lots and lots of crafty stuff for Elaine to buy. She bought some gifts, including some nice things for SuZee, our cat. She also bought a fancy (eternally sharp) knife for a bunch of money. Since I bad-mouthed the deal, she probably won't let me use it. The knife has a 50 year warranty.. neither she nor I will live that long. When I mentioned that to the 20 year old sales lady, she said that we could just pass it on to our heirs.
The only bad thing about FunFest, in my opinion, is that because noone can smoke in any of the tents, they congregate at the entrances... hundreds of them.. and blow smoke.
Entertainment?: Next to these tents are amusement areas. A ferris wheel, shooting galleries, Dodg-em Cars, Merry Go Rounds, and a weird and very scary piece of equipment that shoots people in little gondolas way up in the sky as though they are being shot by a massive rubber band.
The Hubcaps: Our favorite group, Carroll County's own Hubcaps was there inside the big tent one night. Tickets were $5 and $10. (Blood, Sweat and Tears was in the big tent another night, but they charged $20 and $49.) Elaine didn't want to get a ticket; instead, she sat near the back entrance and could see and hear them very well. She said that they did not do their usual schtick. That is probably because they would have to pay royalties.. and maybe they can get away with not paying them in Carroll County.
Delish: The food tent held many delicacies. One night, Elaine had a crab fluff and I had little fries and fish. Another night, we both had crab soup in bread bowls. Yingling beer was $3 for 10 ounces; light beer was $3 for 16 ounces. (At one time, Yingling was garbage beer and unsellable outside of Pottsville, PA.. now they advertise Nationwide and charge a lot more for a six-pack.) I think that IPA (India Pale Ale) is far and away the best beer made today. Much better than the versions made by the Brits years ago.
WalMart? What's a trip to OC without a visit to their WalMart store? This year, instead of counting the number of people with massive tatoos, I decided to count only those who did not have them. I only counted 5.. but they probably had theirs covered by their shirts.
What other WalMart can you go to where everybody is yelling at the top of their lungs? Strange people down there.
Home away from Home: We rent the condo from a good friend of ours, and we have to care for it as though it were our own home. So, when I fell asleep at the table, tipped it over and saw the glass of tomato juice sail through the air and onto the carpet, I became a little excited. Immediate action allowed us to get the spill completely cleaned up and undetectable.
Pills: As an old dude, I take a lot of medication. One of my pills is minute. A little yellow pill that blends in perfectly with the weaves of the carpet. (Yes, I spilled my pills.) I never did find 3 of them and hope that the vacuum cleaner got them before our host steps on the little squishy things.
Anger: Early one Sunday morning, we heard a knock on our door. It was a maintenance man who said that the guy in the condo under us was getting water into his bathroom. The maintenance man found that the spigot and faucets in the bathtub were loose, perhaps allowing some water to get in and spread down to his appartment. He said that he would caulk the area.
Meanwhile, a man with a very angry red face barged in and started yelling about his ceiling and put his face right up against mine. The last time an angry face got that close to me, it became dented in a few places and it almost happened again this time. However, I restrained myself. After caulking, the guy was getting more water, so it probably wasn't from this apartment at all.
Anyway, after this, I was hoping that we wouldn't have any other problems that would upset this guy.. guess what.. on the last day, while we were packing to leave, the toilet overflowed. Elaine and I spent a long time with a lot of towels getting the water off the floor.. and then we spent hours trying to unclog the drain. I didn't see the guy's red face again so I guess he stayed dry.
Oil Spill? When I went down to the beach to get some shells for Elaine, as I do each year, there were none. Where were the shells? The sand was flecked with black, just as I remember from when I was a kid during WWII. Tankers were sunk in the Atlantic by German submarines and spilled oil created tar in action with the sand.. and it spread out lightly over all after a while. This was like that.. and where were the shells? What is going on?
When we first got to OC, the surf was monstrous. Could it have squashed the shells?
Weather: Later, while remnants of hurricanes were storming up the Atlantic in the form of torrential rains, the weather channel kept showing Doppler Radar pictures of all this wetness coming up the coast. At one time, we had a Flash Flood Alert, a Heavy Rain Alert, a Tornado Watch and something else I can't remember. Over and over we were alerted about and shown pictures of the 12 inches of rain that we definitely would get. It never showed up. Not a drop until the last day that we were in OC.
The Last Day: As we battled with a rogue toilet, torrential rains buffeted OC. I made the 16 trips (remember, we made purchases) down the elevator and out into the storm and into the car. Everything got soaked, especially me. (I'm paying for it now with a very painful back and wheezing lungs.)
But, all in all, as usual, we had a great time. We were especially glad that my beautiful granddaughter, Bridget, was able to look after our cat, SuZee for the time that we were gone. SuZee told us that Bridget treated her very well.
.......................................................................................................................
Monday, September 06, 2010
Bieber Fever, etc.
01. Bieber Fever: Mr. Bieber came to the Maryland State Fair yesterday and you would have though they were giving out free fifty dollar bills. This 16 year old guy has all the eleven year old girls yelling and screaming like the Bobby Soxers did for Frank Sinatra in the 1940's (yes, I was alive then!)
One interviewer asked a Bieber fan how she liked his singing. She said: "He's cute!"
Frank Sinatra's voice lasted almost to the day he died at age around 80, I think. Let's see what Bieber's voice does in the next few years. He seems like a nice clean-cut kid, and his popularity will probably just grow..
I hope everyone also gets a chance to listen to the 10 year old female finalist on America's Got Talent. This is a kid with a Diva's voice range. She should be a spectacular super star someday.
http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/38667257
02. Car stuff: I'm typing some of this while waiting for Toyota mechanics to do the 10,000 mile maintenance on my Rav4. I love that car. I bought the 100 year maintenance offering, so I should not get charged anything for my 5,000 visits until the year 2109.... at least that what the fine print on my contract says.. maybe.. I guess I need to buy a magnifying glass to make sure.
03. Tolerance: In my last blog entry, I wrote about a Florida pastor scheduling a Koran burning session. I just read in Time magazine that this will take place on 9/11. The pastor argues that Jesus would burn the Koran because "it's not holy." Now, everybody in Afghanistan is cursing the US and Obama.. why do they think that our President is condoning the burning?
04. Jokes: As some of you know, I started a new blog that will contain jokes and puns and humorous items that I have been collecting for many many years. I've already had some comments on my first issuance. "Cheesy.", "Fun to read.", "Childish", "Funny." ,"Go for it."
So, I guess I will continue it. If interested and a glutton for punishment, visit
http://joevaughansjokes.blogspot.com/
05. Species: Today, my SNAPPLE diet tea cap had the following message:
"Manhattan Island was once home to as many different species as Yellowstone National Park."
I showed the message to Elaine, and she had the very same response as I had, namely:
"It still is."
06. New Jersey Perps: Did I mention the one-legged thief who broke into a New Jersey shoe store and left some boxes on the floor with just right shoes? He was easy to catch.
Or the bicycle-riding crook who wore a Nixon mask? Another easy catch for Trenton cops.
07. Birther: By now, you must have heard of that "bright light" Army Officer who refused deployment to Afghanistan because he said that President Obama is not legally his Commanding Officer, because he wasn't born in the United States. He says he wants to see the "real" birth certificate. (A judge threw out his defence as idiotic.) I wonder how he got to be an officer?
08. Ugh! Disgusting sign seen in a men's rest room:
"Please do not drop paper towels in the urinals. They turn yellow when we dry them out, and some people do not like to use them."
09. Savage breast? An English headmaster punishes his students in detention by forcing them to listen to classical music!
Today, a radio announcer mentioned that there are people who die every day who have never heard the beautiful music of Beethoven. Or Mozart!!!!! I wonder if they teach classical music in school these days. My 7th grade teacher taught us how to read music and how to enjoy classical music. My mother had already instilled in me a love for the light classics, but listening to the masterworks opened my mind to a wonderful new world. So, I learned to like Bach and Beethoven. And then, later in life.. Mozart and Mahler!
10. Toot! We missed it! July was National Baked Beans Month.
11. SuZee TV: Did I mention that our cat watches TV with us. The other night, we watched two Netflix movies and she didn't move from her perch on a table between us and the TV. She watches TV very intently. She likes a lot of action and conversation. The news bores her and she doesn't like some of the cop shows that Elaine likes (even though they have lots of action).
12. Spice: Some of my Toastmasters friends sent me lists of things to do to make life more interesting. I thought that you might like to learn some of them.
Put your garbage can on your desk and label it "IN".
Everytime anybody asks you do do something, ask if they want fries with that.
In the memo field of all your checks, write "for sexual favors."
Instead of walking, skip.
Married men, everytime you see a broom, yell: "Honey, your mother is here."
..............................................................................................................................
10.
One interviewer asked a Bieber fan how she liked his singing. She said: "He's cute!"
Frank Sinatra's voice lasted almost to the day he died at age around 80, I think. Let's see what Bieber's voice does in the next few years. He seems like a nice clean-cut kid, and his popularity will probably just grow..
I hope everyone also gets a chance to listen to the 10 year old female finalist on America's Got Talent. This is a kid with a Diva's voice range. She should be a spectacular super star someday.
http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/38667257
02. Car stuff: I'm typing some of this while waiting for Toyota mechanics to do the 10,000 mile maintenance on my Rav4. I love that car. I bought the 100 year maintenance offering, so I should not get charged anything for my 5,000 visits until the year 2109.... at least that what the fine print on my contract says.. maybe.. I guess I need to buy a magnifying glass to make sure.
03. Tolerance: In my last blog entry, I wrote about a Florida pastor scheduling a Koran burning session. I just read in Time magazine that this will take place on 9/11. The pastor argues that Jesus would burn the Koran because "it's not holy." Now, everybody in Afghanistan is cursing the US and Obama.. why do they think that our President is condoning the burning?
04. Jokes: As some of you know, I started a new blog that will contain jokes and puns and humorous items that I have been collecting for many many years. I've already had some comments on my first issuance. "Cheesy.", "Fun to read.", "Childish", "Funny." ,"Go for it."
So, I guess I will continue it. If interested and a glutton for punishment, visit
http://joevaughansjokes.blogspot.com/
05. Species: Today, my SNAPPLE diet tea cap had the following message:
"Manhattan Island was once home to as many different species as Yellowstone National Park."
I showed the message to Elaine, and she had the very same response as I had, namely:
"It still is."
06. New Jersey Perps: Did I mention the one-legged thief who broke into a New Jersey shoe store and left some boxes on the floor with just right shoes? He was easy to catch.
Or the bicycle-riding crook who wore a Nixon mask? Another easy catch for Trenton cops.
07. Birther: By now, you must have heard of that "bright light" Army Officer who refused deployment to Afghanistan because he said that President Obama is not legally his Commanding Officer, because he wasn't born in the United States. He says he wants to see the "real" birth certificate. (A judge threw out his defence as idiotic.) I wonder how he got to be an officer?
08. Ugh! Disgusting sign seen in a men's rest room:
"Please do not drop paper towels in the urinals. They turn yellow when we dry them out, and some people do not like to use them."
09. Savage breast? An English headmaster punishes his students in detention by forcing them to listen to classical music!
Today, a radio announcer mentioned that there are people who die every day who have never heard the beautiful music of Beethoven. Or Mozart!!!!! I wonder if they teach classical music in school these days. My 7th grade teacher taught us how to read music and how to enjoy classical music. My mother had already instilled in me a love for the light classics, but listening to the masterworks opened my mind to a wonderful new world. So, I learned to like Bach and Beethoven. And then, later in life.. Mozart and Mahler!
10. Toot! We missed it! July was National Baked Beans Month.
11. SuZee TV: Did I mention that our cat watches TV with us. The other night, we watched two Netflix movies and she didn't move from her perch on a table between us and the TV. She watches TV very intently. She likes a lot of action and conversation. The news bores her and she doesn't like some of the cop shows that Elaine likes (even though they have lots of action).
12. Spice: Some of my Toastmasters friends sent me lists of things to do to make life more interesting. I thought that you might like to learn some of them.
Put your garbage can on your desk and label it "IN".
Everytime anybody asks you do do something, ask if they want fries with that.
In the memo field of all your checks, write "for sexual favors."
Instead of walking, skip.
Married men, everytime you see a broom, yell: "Honey, your mother is here."
..............................................................................................................................
10.
Sunday, August 29, 2010
Some new stuff.. at least to me.
I learned a lot of fantastic information this week. Some of which I will outline here.
01. What's in a name? I apologize to this beautiful person for picking on her name, but somehow it makes me giggle, I don't know why, but I believe that there once was a stripper on the Baltimore infamous "Block" with the same name.
The AARP Sex and Relationship Expert is named Pepper Schwartz.
http://uwnews.org/uweek/article.aspx?id=52956
02. It had to happen: A heavy-set woman was charged extra in one of those fingernail salons for being too fat and endangering their chairs that are tested for only 200 pounds.
Many years ago, fellow Mensan, Marvin Grosswirth established an organization called Fat Pride. based on a book he wrote with the same name. Other such organizations were established over the years, but I think his was the first. Marvin wrote lots of interesting books and unfortunately, died of cancer at the age of 53. A man of great intellect, as well as great girth... which rhymes with his last name.. which means a "great innkeeper".. at least in the German dialect I know.
Anyway, Marvin felt that one should not be ashamed of being overeweight. Why on earth would one want to be a skinny-bones? (However, personally, I would like to be a little bit thinner.)
(Marvin also was in favor of beards.. at least on men. He felt that if one wore a beard, one should wear a real man's beard, not one of those "sissy beards" worn by some rock stars.)
http://openlibrary.org/authors/OL1346088A/Marvin_Grosswirth
03. Caution! Kevin Dayhoff, former mayor of Westminster, Maryland, in one of his interesting newspaper articles, mentions that in the 1960's, some traffic lights did not flash yellow, only red and green. I was around then, but I don't remember such lights in the places I lived. This probably confused children who thought that the traffic lights were Christmas decorations.
Among lots of other things, Kevin Dayhoff writes a journal called the New Bedford Herald. (It's not about New Bedford, Massachusetts, where I was born and brought up.)
http://kbetrue.livejournal.com/
04. Deep fat! Vendors at the upcoming Maryland State Fair will be selling lots of deep fat fried items, including Oreo cookies, Snicker Bars, Twinkies, Buckeyes (peanut butter and chocolate mixed), and even ice cream bars... but they will have to go a lot further in their plans to clog up Marylanders' arteries to top the Canadians. At an exhibition in Toronto, vendors are selling deep fat fried butter!
http://www.deepfatfryerspro.com/
01. What's in a name? I apologize to this beautiful person for picking on her name, but somehow it makes me giggle, I don't know why, but I believe that there once was a stripper on the Baltimore infamous "Block" with the same name.
The AARP Sex and Relationship Expert is named Pepper Schwartz.
http://uwnews.org/uweek/article.aspx?id=52956
02. It had to happen: A heavy-set woman was charged extra in one of those fingernail salons for being too fat and endangering their chairs that are tested for only 200 pounds.
Many years ago, fellow Mensan, Marvin Grosswirth established an organization called Fat Pride. based on a book he wrote with the same name. Other such organizations were established over the years, but I think his was the first. Marvin wrote lots of interesting books and unfortunately, died of cancer at the age of 53. A man of great intellect, as well as great girth... which rhymes with his last name.. which means a "great innkeeper".. at least in the German dialect I know.
Anyway, Marvin felt that one should not be ashamed of being overeweight. Why on earth would one want to be a skinny-bones? (However, personally, I would like to be a little bit thinner.)
(Marvin also was in favor of beards.. at least on men. He felt that if one wore a beard, one should wear a real man's beard, not one of those "sissy beards" worn by some rock stars.)
http://openlibrary.org/authors/OL1346088A/Marvin_Grosswirth
03. Caution! Kevin Dayhoff, former mayor of Westminster, Maryland, in one of his interesting newspaper articles, mentions that in the 1960's, some traffic lights did not flash yellow, only red and green. I was around then, but I don't remember such lights in the places I lived. This probably confused children who thought that the traffic lights were Christmas decorations.
Among lots of other things, Kevin Dayhoff writes a journal called the New Bedford Herald. (It's not about New Bedford, Massachusetts, where I was born and brought up.)
http://kbetrue.livejournal.com/
04. Deep fat! Vendors at the upcoming Maryland State Fair will be selling lots of deep fat fried items, including Oreo cookies, Snicker Bars, Twinkies, Buckeyes (peanut butter and chocolate mixed), and even ice cream bars... but they will have to go a lot further in their plans to clog up Marylanders' arteries to top the Canadians. At an exhibition in Toronto, vendors are selling deep fat fried butter!
http://www.deepfatfryerspro.com/
05. It's a digital world all right. A street musician now has a card reader by his side. If you like his guitar music, you can give him a tip (donation) by swiping your credit card and keying in the amount you want to give him. (I wonder if he takes American Express.)
06. Mis-attribution. One of the few poems I ever learned was the one about a pelican:
A curious bird is the pelican,
His beak holds more than his belly can.
He can store in his beak,
Enough food for a week,
And I don't know how the devil he does it.
I have always attributed it to Ogden Nash.. it's the kind of stuff he wrote.
Well, I learned this week that I was wrong. The poem was written by newspaper humorist, Dixon Lanier Merritt, and goes like this:
A wonderful bird is the pelican,
His bill can hold more than his bellican.
He can hold in his beak,
Food enough for a week,
But I'm damned if I see how the hellican.
(Which one do you like?)
http://search.intelius.com/dixon-lanier-merritt
07. Ugh! A nutritionist who was interviewed on NPR said that shrimp imported from Thailand is "grown in dirty ponds." Think about that the next time you order scampi at your favorite restaurant.
08. Banana Bread: I love to bake banana bread! Sometimes I make it plain.. just bananas.. sometimes I add blueberries; sometimes I add walnuts; sometimes I add chocolate chips; sometimes I add butterscotch chips; sometimes I mix them all together.
A well-known local Carroll County humorist, with another interesting name, Cathy Drinkwater Better, writes a funny column in the Carroll Eagle. This week, she mentioned what goes on in her house when her husband finds real old bananas in the fridge. Of course, as anyone knows, you have to have real old bananas to make good banana bread. I'm probably one of the few men in the world who knows that the secret to delicious banana bread is old, black, mushy, gnat-infested bananas.
Elaine and I always laugh long and hard when we read her Sunday articles. She is a gifted story teller, and as I also learned this week, a well-known author, with a lot of books to her credit.
http://www.cathydrinkwaterbetter.com/
09. New word. The big-name dictionaries are adding a new word in their latest editions: bromance .. friendship between two men. I have a brother Joe, that I sometimes call BRO and a friend from early childhood named Bob, and we both often refer to each other as BRO. But of course, there is no "romance" there. There are lots of BRO- words, such as bromide, brocade, Bromo Seltzer, .... Broken = what Barbie's brother now calls Ken.. NBC's Tom Brokaw... etc etc
10. A Dog's Best Friend: I've mentioned this before, but some one of you may still never have heard of this great invention. It was dreamed up by the brother of Tony Shalhoub (you know... Mr. Monk!)
Yes, I'm talking a bout the Shapoopy.. better than a pooper-scooper.. it catches your dog's poop before it even hits the ground! Wow!
Have you heard the jingle?
www.televisiontunes.com/Family_Guy_-_Shapoopy.html
11. What would Johnie Cash do? I learned today that those automatic faucets that are now ubiquitous, will not work if you are wearing black. Imagine that.
12. An amazing author! Over the years, Tom Robbins has written a lot of thoughtful (weird) books. His latest is a children's book called B is for Beer.
Tom says that he ate so much mayonaise as a kid that his parents threatened to send him to the Mayo Clinic. ! He is the inventor of the Gin-Greasy.. which is a combination of gin and mayonaise. I don't think I'm going to try it.
Quote from Tom: "I believe in nothing, everything is sacred. I believe in everything, nothing is sacred." Whatever that means... I think I will put it into my email messages.
http://www.randomhouse.com/author/results.pperl?authorid=25708
.............................................................................................................
Sunday, August 22, 2010
I went to my doctor last Thursday, and he said that I looked so good that I probably would live to be 70. I told him: "I'm already there." He replied: "See, I told you so."
Sorry, I made that up, but this was my skin doctor and he told me I didn't need to come back to see him for a whole year. Good news.
I had asked him about the white things growing on my arms and hands. They look like barnacles. (Remember the old song: "I'm Barnacle Bill, the sailor"?) He assured me that I was not turning into a humpback whale. He said that eventually everybody gets them, usually around the age of 60. See what you have to look forward to.
Enough about me, let's go on to more interesting things, I hope.
01. Mr. Mind? SHAZAM!: This week, Elaine and I came face to face with the dreaded tomato horn-worm. (Actually five of them.) These are large green caterpillars with thin white stripes and horns. They are very hard to see because they are the same color as the foliage they love to eat. They are voracious eaters. You can tell where they are by looking for devastated areas on your plants. If you don't get rid of them, they will completely devour your tomato plants.
We couldn't figure out how these worms could get to our plants, which are 15 feet off the ground on our deck. We later learned that they are propagated by a generous moth that lands on your plants and lays eggs which later turn into the worms.
The worms grow big and strong very quickly and sometimes get to be 6 inches long and very plump. At some point, they feel that their tummies are full enough for them to quit being a worm and weave themselves into cocoons and go to sleep until they wake as giant colorful moths, some as big as humming birds. Then the cycle continues.
To break the cycle, you must rid yourself of these worms when you find them. I threw some down a toilet and it got clogged up, so I don't recommend that. I put some through the disposal. That worked ok, but I then felt like a murderer. Finally, I followed some advice and cut them in half with a knife... yes, I didn't like doing it, but what was the alternative?
There is one humane way to handle them. A certain type of wasp climbs on the backs of these worms and deposits hundreds of eggs which become larvae that feeds on the worm. After a short time, these parasites kill the worm. So, if your tomato horm worm shows white things on its back, it will be going to worm heaven shortly and you can leave it alone.
http://organicgardensite.com/bugs-harmful/tomato-horn-worms/
02. The ultimate solution? I heard on the radio yesterday that a Southern Christian church is scheduling a "Koran Burning Day." Will they soon be recommending the rounding up of all Moslems for concentration camps?
03. Carat juice: Years ago, aristocrats liked to drink liquid gold; they thought that it was helpful. It probably killed them. Recently, gold residue has been found in dug-up ancient remains. You rich folks, don't try it.
Recently, one of my organizations that publishes a book with a gold-lettered title on the cover, received a bill for hundreds of dollars, just for the gold-lettering. When we opted for a silver-lettered title, the price went down considerably.
04. HUH? The Baltimore Sun reports that 15% of teens are going deaf because of the music coming through their ear buds. Music? I'm sorry, but the sounds that appeal to some of our teen-agers would make my poor old ears cry "Uncle!" But then, I am an old dude who would rather listen to Mozart... once in a while I like to hear works by Gustav Mahler which could be considered by some classical musical buffs to be a little loud at times. (By the way, give yourself a treat, teen-agers, plug into Mahler's Lied von der Erde.. both the music and the lyrics/poems.. I think you would like it.)
http://www.mahlerarchives.net/DLvDE/DLvDE.htm
05. Writer's idea: Walk through a cemetery and find an interesting tombstone. Do some research on that person.. who they were.. who their ancestors were. Then, armed with those facts, build a story around them, perhaps change their names and write the story for publication.
I have always wanted to do this. In Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, near my family's gravesites, there are tombstones for the Snow family. The family intrigues me. There is a Captain Snow, with a carving of his ship on the stone. There are lots of other Snow's nearby, including one person named Ivory Snow. These were all people who lived in the 18th and 19th centuries and probably many of them were whalers out of New Bedford. I'll bet there are interesting stories there ...and I would like to get them down on paper someday when I have time. (Space here for an emoticon representing someone laughing their head off.)
I wonder if Captain Snow is the same guy whose house is now an inn on Cape Cod?
http://www.stonelioncapecod.com/inn.html
06. Even the rich have to: I just learned that Hetty Green, New Bedford born richest woman in the world at one time, was not quite the mean person she was made out to be. I'll talk more about her and a biography of her life in a later blog entry. For now, I want to mention something I think I heard on Wait Wait Don't Tell Me: her son, called Colonel Green, owned a diamond-encrusted chamber pot. Speaking of things scatalogic, his mother had an automobile that contained a working toilet. The car is now on display at an automobile museum in Princeton, Massachusetts.
07. Up, Up and Away: The Baltimore Sun mentions a theater in Lansdowne, Pennsylvania, that shows old ugly movies. The audience is encouraged to boo, hiss and heckle. Sounds like a lot of fun. One of the old movies being shown is Gamera.. about a kind of ugly monster that flies through the air by farting fire.
http://godzilla.wikia.com/wiki/Gamera
08. Another writer's idea: Take a deceased person and develop a facebook style story with them and others of the same time frame. In other words, for instance, set up Thomas Jefferson on a dummy Facebook, with "friends" like John Adams, George Washington, etc. Plug in entries.. about events in their lives.. with pictures of oil paintings as "photo" spots.. but not like Twitter entries, although that might be worked out.
09. Girls night out: I read somewhere that people in Bogota, Colombia observed a "night without men".. and reported that crime for that night was down by 25%.
10. Exciting stuff: Folks can now canoe or kayak over the 18 foot high Ohiopyle Falls on Pennsylvania's Youghiogheny River. When I worked at the Social Security Administration in Baltimore, trips down the Youghiogheny River were fairly common. However, I can't imagine how any of these folks, in their reportedly drunken condition, could have made it over a waterfall without leaving this world.
http://www.fay-west.com/ohiopyle/
11. Fish in disguise? Inside my facial cheeks, I have what seem to be vestigial gills. Nobody else I know has them. They never have helped me get oxygen through my cheeks and "what can be the use of them is more than I can see".. they do get kind of chewed up sometimes... haven't you ever bit the inside of your cheek? Can anybody out there.. and believe it or not, there are a few people out there .. help me in this regard? But please don't get me embroiled in the anti-evolution argument.
12. A Teenage Hero: In item 07 above, I mention that there is a theater where lousy movies are shown. One of those mentioned is Hercules, starring Steve Reeves. The movie came out in 1958, just after Steve had achieved a body-building status unmatched until "Big Arnie" appeared on the scene.
I was heavy into weight-lifting and body-building in the 1950's, 1960's and 1970's, and Steve was one of my "heroes". This was a guy that I could never look like.. he was about 7 feet tall, with massive, but well-formed muscles from his little toe to the top of his hairdo. He was "a man's man" who did not use steroids and liked women... who went crazy over him.
Unfortunately, he was not a very good actor. I believe he did a lot of Italian movies where his voice was dubbed in a perfect Roman accent.
At one time, I had a 5 minute movie of Steve flexing his muscles. I had that movie mixed in with other 8 mm movie film of family events. One of my co-workers combined all of these films into a long reel.. however, Steve's movie didn't get edited out.. so, as you looked at the family at Christmas in 1966, this was immediately followed by Steve flexing, followed immediately by the family in Easter 1967. Interesting.
http://www.stevereeves.com/
.............................................................................................................
Sorry, I made that up, but this was my skin doctor and he told me I didn't need to come back to see him for a whole year. Good news.
I had asked him about the white things growing on my arms and hands. They look like barnacles. (Remember the old song: "I'm Barnacle Bill, the sailor"?) He assured me that I was not turning into a humpback whale. He said that eventually everybody gets them, usually around the age of 60. See what you have to look forward to.
Enough about me, let's go on to more interesting things, I hope.
01. Mr. Mind? SHAZAM!: This week, Elaine and I came face to face with the dreaded tomato horn-worm. (Actually five of them.) These are large green caterpillars with thin white stripes and horns. They are very hard to see because they are the same color as the foliage they love to eat. They are voracious eaters. You can tell where they are by looking for devastated areas on your plants. If you don't get rid of them, they will completely devour your tomato plants.
We couldn't figure out how these worms could get to our plants, which are 15 feet off the ground on our deck. We later learned that they are propagated by a generous moth that lands on your plants and lays eggs which later turn into the worms.
The worms grow big and strong very quickly and sometimes get to be 6 inches long and very plump. At some point, they feel that their tummies are full enough for them to quit being a worm and weave themselves into cocoons and go to sleep until they wake as giant colorful moths, some as big as humming birds. Then the cycle continues.
To break the cycle, you must rid yourself of these worms when you find them. I threw some down a toilet and it got clogged up, so I don't recommend that. I put some through the disposal. That worked ok, but I then felt like a murderer. Finally, I followed some advice and cut them in half with a knife... yes, I didn't like doing it, but what was the alternative?
There is one humane way to handle them. A certain type of wasp climbs on the backs of these worms and deposits hundreds of eggs which become larvae that feeds on the worm. After a short time, these parasites kill the worm. So, if your tomato horm worm shows white things on its back, it will be going to worm heaven shortly and you can leave it alone.
http://organicgardensite.com/bugs-harmful/tomato-horn-worms/
02. The ultimate solution? I heard on the radio yesterday that a Southern Christian church is scheduling a "Koran Burning Day." Will they soon be recommending the rounding up of all Moslems for concentration camps?
03. Carat juice: Years ago, aristocrats liked to drink liquid gold; they thought that it was helpful. It probably killed them. Recently, gold residue has been found in dug-up ancient remains. You rich folks, don't try it.
Recently, one of my organizations that publishes a book with a gold-lettered title on the cover, received a bill for hundreds of dollars, just for the gold-lettering. When we opted for a silver-lettered title, the price went down considerably.
04. HUH? The Baltimore Sun reports that 15% of teens are going deaf because of the music coming through their ear buds. Music? I'm sorry, but the sounds that appeal to some of our teen-agers would make my poor old ears cry "Uncle!" But then, I am an old dude who would rather listen to Mozart... once in a while I like to hear works by Gustav Mahler which could be considered by some classical musical buffs to be a little loud at times. (By the way, give yourself a treat, teen-agers, plug into Mahler's Lied von der Erde.. both the music and the lyrics/poems.. I think you would like it.)
http://www.mahlerarchives.net/DLvDE/DLvDE.htm
05. Writer's idea: Walk through a cemetery and find an interesting tombstone. Do some research on that person.. who they were.. who their ancestors were. Then, armed with those facts, build a story around them, perhaps change their names and write the story for publication.
I have always wanted to do this. In Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, near my family's gravesites, there are tombstones for the Snow family. The family intrigues me. There is a Captain Snow, with a carving of his ship on the stone. There are lots of other Snow's nearby, including one person named Ivory Snow. These were all people who lived in the 18th and 19th centuries and probably many of them were whalers out of New Bedford. I'll bet there are interesting stories there ...and I would like to get them down on paper someday when I have time. (Space here for an emoticon representing someone laughing their head off.)
I wonder if Captain Snow is the same guy whose house is now an inn on Cape Cod?
http://www.stonelioncapecod.com/inn.html
06. Even the rich have to: I just learned that Hetty Green, New Bedford born richest woman in the world at one time, was not quite the mean person she was made out to be. I'll talk more about her and a biography of her life in a later blog entry. For now, I want to mention something I think I heard on Wait Wait Don't Tell Me: her son, called Colonel Green, owned a diamond-encrusted chamber pot. Speaking of things scatalogic, his mother had an automobile that contained a working toilet. The car is now on display at an automobile museum in Princeton, Massachusetts.
07. Up, Up and Away: The Baltimore Sun mentions a theater in Lansdowne, Pennsylvania, that shows old ugly movies. The audience is encouraged to boo, hiss and heckle. Sounds like a lot of fun. One of the old movies being shown is Gamera.. about a kind of ugly monster that flies through the air by farting fire.
http://godzilla.wikia.com/wiki/Gamera
08. Another writer's idea: Take a deceased person and develop a facebook style story with them and others of the same time frame. In other words, for instance, set up Thomas Jefferson on a dummy Facebook, with "friends" like John Adams, George Washington, etc. Plug in entries.. about events in their lives.. with pictures of oil paintings as "photo" spots.. but not like Twitter entries, although that might be worked out.
09. Girls night out: I read somewhere that people in Bogota, Colombia observed a "night without men".. and reported that crime for that night was down by 25%.
10. Exciting stuff: Folks can now canoe or kayak over the 18 foot high Ohiopyle Falls on Pennsylvania's Youghiogheny River. When I worked at the Social Security Administration in Baltimore, trips down the Youghiogheny River were fairly common. However, I can't imagine how any of these folks, in their reportedly drunken condition, could have made it over a waterfall without leaving this world.
http://www.fay-west.com/ohiopyle/
11. Fish in disguise? Inside my facial cheeks, I have what seem to be vestigial gills. Nobody else I know has them. They never have helped me get oxygen through my cheeks and "what can be the use of them is more than I can see".. they do get kind of chewed up sometimes... haven't you ever bit the inside of your cheek? Can anybody out there.. and believe it or not, there are a few people out there .. help me in this regard? But please don't get me embroiled in the anti-evolution argument.
12. A Teenage Hero: In item 07 above, I mention that there is a theater where lousy movies are shown. One of those mentioned is Hercules, starring Steve Reeves. The movie came out in 1958, just after Steve had achieved a body-building status unmatched until "Big Arnie" appeared on the scene.
I was heavy into weight-lifting and body-building in the 1950's, 1960's and 1970's, and Steve was one of my "heroes". This was a guy that I could never look like.. he was about 7 feet tall, with massive, but well-formed muscles from his little toe to the top of his hairdo. He was "a man's man" who did not use steroids and liked women... who went crazy over him.
Unfortunately, he was not a very good actor. I believe he did a lot of Italian movies where his voice was dubbed in a perfect Roman accent.
At one time, I had a 5 minute movie of Steve flexing his muscles. I had that movie mixed in with other 8 mm movie film of family events. One of my co-workers combined all of these films into a long reel.. however, Steve's movie didn't get edited out.. so, as you looked at the family at Christmas in 1966, this was immediately followed by Steve flexing, followed immediately by the family in Easter 1967. Interesting.
http://www.stevereeves.com/
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Saturday, August 14, 2010
Another Hot Week
Even though this was another hot and muggy week, with violent thunder storms, it was a "cool" week for the Social Security Alumni Association in Maryland.
A nice group met at Bullock's Rt 32 for the Carroll County Social Security Alumni Chapter on Monday.
A larger than usual group met at the Windsor Inn for the Baltimore Chapter on Tuesday.
On Thursday, I represented the Social Security Alumni Association as its President for the opening of the Social Security Museum and the festivities for the 75th Anniversary of the Social Security Act. I'll be writing about this in my SSAA Blog.
Meanwhile, let me mention a few "interesting" things that I heard or read about recently.
01. By the book: Efficient New York City traffic workers would not allow a King Tut's tomb artifact, namely, an ancient vehicle, to enter the city.. because.. it did not have a "vehicle identification number."
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyid=128973450
02. A lot to learn: Researchers say that we have 250,000 known species and another 1,000,000 unknown species in the world's oceans. (Not counting the one billion unknown bacteria species.) The richest areas to look for these unknown non-bacteria species are thought to be around Australia and Japan, and many species probably live in mud or on reefs.
A recently found "unknown" is called a "Dragon Fish" which has teeth on it's tongue.
03. That little squirt! A 28 year old Maryland resident has finally been caught after squirting sperm on several persons in Gaithersburg grocery stores and malls. Maybe he thinks he's an unknown species of fish.
04. Methuselah? A global warming expert stated this week: "...a rate of (animal) extinction that we haven't seen for millions and millions of years." Does he have a Hubble-type telescope with very close resolution?
05. Another opportunity for short people. The French Gendarmerie (police) have started to hire people under 5'3". Was this a change because they wanted to hire more females.. although in the US, females seem to be usually taller than that these days. Or, maybe it is another boon to short people that has been pushed by Sarkozy?
I've mentioned before.. researchers have determined that Napoleon might have been 5'6"... the same height of Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini.
By the way, new documents have been found in Scotland that indicate in 1919 a Scotsman saved a young Hitler from being stomped to death by a mob. !
06. Sarah quote: I hadn't heard about this one until I read it this week. "When are they going to ramp up drilling?" Did she really say that? Was it before the BP spill?
07. Mad man? The advertising guy who gave us "Don't squeeze the Charmin" is now pushing for "Meatless Mondays". He feels that it will be a healthful move for our obese society. I believe he has already gotten Johns Hopkins University interested in the concept, and some Baltimore schools are removing meat from their menus for Mondays.
http://www.meatlessmonday.com/
08. Brains. Someone showed me an article from 2008 that mentioned that two pygmy sperm whales got caught up in a low water pool in New Zealand and couldn't figure out how to get out of it... before they could become beached, a local bottlenose dolphin, named Moko, found a deep water part of the pool and guided the whales through it and out into deep water.
09. Scandinavian criminals? JAMA, the journal of the American Medical Association has an article about common sense sunbathing that tries to show that blonds and people from northern countries with minimal sun may develop criminal tendencies when they move to high sun areas. Since I am not an MD, I may have misread the article.
10. Self-mutilation: Some of you may have seen a picture of Elaine Davidson who is reputed to be "the most pierced woman in Scotland"... and from the looks of it, probably the world. Check it out.
http://www.elainedavidson.co.uk/
11. Seinfeld? A piece of the Peterman Glacier broke off this week. It is four times the size of Manhattan. Doesn't that add any credence to the Global Warming theory? How many ice cubes would that make? Perhaps one of the Arab leaders could get it towed to their land.. wasn't that done once before? Or did I read that in a story by Mark Twain?
http://open.salon.com/blog/rick_spilman/2010/08/07/huge_ice_island_calves_from_greenlands_peterman_glacier
12. Not Here! The Museum of Tolerance has stated that they do not want the Ground Zero mosque to be built.
...............................................................................................................................
A nice group met at Bullock's Rt 32 for the Carroll County Social Security Alumni Chapter on Monday.
A larger than usual group met at the Windsor Inn for the Baltimore Chapter on Tuesday.
On Thursday, I represented the Social Security Alumni Association as its President for the opening of the Social Security Museum and the festivities for the 75th Anniversary of the Social Security Act. I'll be writing about this in my SSAA Blog.
Meanwhile, let me mention a few "interesting" things that I heard or read about recently.
01. By the book: Efficient New York City traffic workers would not allow a King Tut's tomb artifact, namely, an ancient vehicle, to enter the city.. because.. it did not have a "vehicle identification number."
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyid=128973450
02. A lot to learn: Researchers say that we have 250,000 known species and another 1,000,000 unknown species in the world's oceans. (Not counting the one billion unknown bacteria species.) The richest areas to look for these unknown non-bacteria species are thought to be around Australia and Japan, and many species probably live in mud or on reefs.
A recently found "unknown" is called a "Dragon Fish" which has teeth on it's tongue.
03. That little squirt! A 28 year old Maryland resident has finally been caught after squirting sperm on several persons in Gaithersburg grocery stores and malls. Maybe he thinks he's an unknown species of fish.
04. Methuselah? A global warming expert stated this week: "...a rate of (animal) extinction that we haven't seen for millions and millions of years." Does he have a Hubble-type telescope with very close resolution?
05. Another opportunity for short people. The French Gendarmerie (police) have started to hire people under 5'3". Was this a change because they wanted to hire more females.. although in the US, females seem to be usually taller than that these days. Or, maybe it is another boon to short people that has been pushed by Sarkozy?
I've mentioned before.. researchers have determined that Napoleon might have been 5'6"... the same height of Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini.
By the way, new documents have been found in Scotland that indicate in 1919 a Scotsman saved a young Hitler from being stomped to death by a mob. !
06. Sarah quote: I hadn't heard about this one until I read it this week. "When are they going to ramp up drilling?" Did she really say that? Was it before the BP spill?
07. Mad man? The advertising guy who gave us "Don't squeeze the Charmin" is now pushing for "Meatless Mondays". He feels that it will be a healthful move for our obese society. I believe he has already gotten Johns Hopkins University interested in the concept, and some Baltimore schools are removing meat from their menus for Mondays.
http://www.meatlessmonday.com/
08. Brains. Someone showed me an article from 2008 that mentioned that two pygmy sperm whales got caught up in a low water pool in New Zealand and couldn't figure out how to get out of it... before they could become beached, a local bottlenose dolphin, named Moko, found a deep water part of the pool and guided the whales through it and out into deep water.
09. Scandinavian criminals? JAMA, the journal of the American Medical Association has an article about common sense sunbathing that tries to show that blonds and people from northern countries with minimal sun may develop criminal tendencies when they move to high sun areas. Since I am not an MD, I may have misread the article.
10. Self-mutilation: Some of you may have seen a picture of Elaine Davidson who is reputed to be "the most pierced woman in Scotland"... and from the looks of it, probably the world. Check it out.
http://www.elainedavidson.co.uk/
11. Seinfeld? A piece of the Peterman Glacier broke off this week. It is four times the size of Manhattan. Doesn't that add any credence to the Global Warming theory? How many ice cubes would that make? Perhaps one of the Arab leaders could get it towed to their land.. wasn't that done once before? Or did I read that in a story by Mark Twain?
http://open.salon.com/blog/rick_spilman/2010/08/07/huge_ice_island_calves_from_greenlands_peterman_glacier
12. Not Here! The Museum of Tolerance has stated that they do not want the Ground Zero mosque to be built.
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Saturday, August 07, 2010
From billionaires to shopping bags.
Here are some more things that you may or may not be thinking about.
01. Brain alarms: Many years ago, I realized that I could set my own brain alarm clock. If I told myself at bed time that I needed to get up at 6 am, I woke up at 6 am. If I told myself that I needed to get up at 8:55 am, that was when I would wake up. I did not need an alarm clock. I still can do that even at this advanced age; however, I don't trust myself like I did, and I do use an alarm clock.
Thinking about that, long ago I decided to find out if I could set a mental alarm for the future, not just for the next morning. So, as an experiment, on vacations, as I drove, I would set my mental alarm for 5, 10, 20, or more years in the future.. at which time I wanted me to see what I was seeing through the car window at the time I was setting my alarm. I did that a lot, and lived to regret it.
For years, as I was engaged in some activity, I would suddenly get a flash picture in my brain of a place we were driving through.. years ago. At first, I didn't realize what was happening.. when I did.. it amazed me, and I've always wondered if other people had the same experience. So far, nobody has owned up to it and I guess I am the only weird person around.
02. Watch out, bag people! Now we learn that reusable shopping bags may have bad bacteria. It makes sense, but who would have thought it? I have a wonderful bag that I bought in South Carolina. It is excellently made to handle the heaviest load that I can handle, reinforced in a southern textile mill with strong threads. It probably will never wear out. However, now I have to think about all the things that I have carried in it over the years... milk jugs, vegetables, meat, sloppy soup, fruit, candy, etc. The bacteria must have been there through many generations. I really hate to wash it out and weaken it, but I guess I will have to.
03. Is this real? Another Chinese man has gone into a Kindergarten class and slashed the children. This is the 7th time this has happened since last March. What is going on in that country?I thought that we had the monopoly on nut cases, apparently not.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/7925666/three-children-killed-in-attack-on-chinese-kindergarten.html
04. Fight fire with fire? In Holland, alcoholics are being treated with beer. A half litre every little while keeps the patients happy with a slight buzz so that they can get the attention that they need.. instead of being bombed out of their minds all the time and therefore, basket cases. Damn clever, these Dutch.
http://hello.news352.lu/edito-59772-dutch-clinic-cures-alcoholics-with-beer.html
05. Mine's bigger than yours! France's Nicolas Sarkozy is getting a new plane. And.. it has a wingspan 2 feet longer than Air Force One! (Air-Sarko-One) Yah yah yah yah yah yah!
http://luxist.com/2010/08/01/nicolas-sarkozys-new-presidential-plane-gets-a-test-flight
06. What a nerve! A Florida burgler who had broken into a van, was caught and sat on by the owner and two friends while they waited for the police. Now, that burgler is suing the owner of the van for damages, because he sustained a permanent disability when those guys sat on him.
07. The U.S. crack case. A New York judge dismissed a case against a young guy for wearing his baggy pants low enough to show his underwear. ( I had mixed this case up with one in the U.K.) All Americans have the right to dress the way they want to dress.. right?
08. Watchit! If you get an email saying that you are suffering under a virus and need to purchase special anti-virus protection, be careful. That message may be "scareware"... and if you buy some phony anti-virus software, you may be getting "scamware." (Once, there was only "hardware" and "software."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-19518_3-10466253-238.html
09. Respect. At an Allentown, PA church carnival, a target on one of the games was what appeared to be a figure of President Obama. Although the owner said: "It wasn't meant to be him".. the figure wore a belt buckle with the Presidential seal and held a scroll labeled "Health Bill." How long will this country allow people to be disrespectable to the President of the United States? Regardless of how you feel about what he is doing in office, he is the President of the United States. Why would anyone want him to fail at what he is doing? And why should he be the object of ridicule by sub-cretans?
http://wvgazette.com/rssfeeds//201008040699
10. Freedom of Speech? Somewhat similar to #09 above, the Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration offices have been visited by persons who block the entrances and display tables with pictures of the President shown as Hitler. (!) always wonder why people like this waste their time and bother honest people in a cause that can never be fulfilled. At the Westminster MVA, the demonstrators took time to call people "Jerks".. surely that should have gotten them evicted.
If I had the time, and the inclination, I would have taken pictures of these guys at the Westminster MVA and had the pictures blown up to place on a table across from them. I would have had dunce caps shown on their heads. Would I have been able to do that?
http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news/traffic/2009/08/obama_as_hitler_at_mva_its_leg.html
11. Money. A lot of billionaires have pledged to give away half of their wealth to charity. They have been encouraged in this respect by fellow billionaires, Warren Buffet and Bill Gates. Great idea!
(Tevya asked God to make him a rich man.. what do most people think is "rich"? Being worth a million dollars? .. I am rich.. but not necessarily with money.. but with the love of family and friends. Although, like Tevya, would it hurt if I had a little bit of money?)
http://www.thegivingpledge.org/
12. The other "bread". Good news. Whole grain bread is selling better than plain white refined bread. In the past twenty years or so, it has amazed me to see people buy tasteless white bread, when they could have nice healthful tasty whole wheat or whole grain bread at close to the same price. I'm glad that the message about healthful bread is finally getting through to folks.
............................................................................................
01. Brain alarms: Many years ago, I realized that I could set my own brain alarm clock. If I told myself at bed time that I needed to get up at 6 am, I woke up at 6 am. If I told myself that I needed to get up at 8:55 am, that was when I would wake up. I did not need an alarm clock. I still can do that even at this advanced age; however, I don't trust myself like I did, and I do use an alarm clock.
Thinking about that, long ago I decided to find out if I could set a mental alarm for the future, not just for the next morning. So, as an experiment, on vacations, as I drove, I would set my mental alarm for 5, 10, 20, or more years in the future.. at which time I wanted me to see what I was seeing through the car window at the time I was setting my alarm. I did that a lot, and lived to regret it.
For years, as I was engaged in some activity, I would suddenly get a flash picture in my brain of a place we were driving through.. years ago. At first, I didn't realize what was happening.. when I did.. it amazed me, and I've always wondered if other people had the same experience. So far, nobody has owned up to it and I guess I am the only weird person around.
02. Watch out, bag people! Now we learn that reusable shopping bags may have bad bacteria. It makes sense, but who would have thought it? I have a wonderful bag that I bought in South Carolina. It is excellently made to handle the heaviest load that I can handle, reinforced in a southern textile mill with strong threads. It probably will never wear out. However, now I have to think about all the things that I have carried in it over the years... milk jugs, vegetables, meat, sloppy soup, fruit, candy, etc. The bacteria must have been there through many generations. I really hate to wash it out and weaken it, but I guess I will have to.
03. Is this real? Another Chinese man has gone into a Kindergarten class and slashed the children. This is the 7th time this has happened since last March. What is going on in that country?I thought that we had the monopoly on nut cases, apparently not.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/7925666/three-children-killed-in-attack-on-chinese-kindergarten.html
04. Fight fire with fire? In Holland, alcoholics are being treated with beer. A half litre every little while keeps the patients happy with a slight buzz so that they can get the attention that they need.. instead of being bombed out of their minds all the time and therefore, basket cases. Damn clever, these Dutch.
http://hello.news352.lu/edito-59772-dutch-clinic-cures-alcoholics-with-beer.html
05. Mine's bigger than yours! France's Nicolas Sarkozy is getting a new plane. And.. it has a wingspan 2 feet longer than Air Force One! (Air-Sarko-One) Yah yah yah yah yah yah!
http://luxist.com/2010/08/01/nicolas-sarkozys-new-presidential-plane-gets-a-test-flight
06. What a nerve! A Florida burgler who had broken into a van, was caught and sat on by the owner and two friends while they waited for the police. Now, that burgler is suing the owner of the van for damages, because he sustained a permanent disability when those guys sat on him.
07. The U.S. crack case. A New York judge dismissed a case against a young guy for wearing his baggy pants low enough to show his underwear. ( I had mixed this case up with one in the U.K.) All Americans have the right to dress the way they want to dress.. right?
08. Watchit! If you get an email saying that you are suffering under a virus and need to purchase special anti-virus protection, be careful. That message may be "scareware"... and if you buy some phony anti-virus software, you may be getting "scamware." (Once, there was only "hardware" and "software."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-19518_3-10466253-238.html
09. Respect. At an Allentown, PA church carnival, a target on one of the games was what appeared to be a figure of President Obama. Although the owner said: "It wasn't meant to be him".. the figure wore a belt buckle with the Presidential seal and held a scroll labeled "Health Bill." How long will this country allow people to be disrespectable to the President of the United States? Regardless of how you feel about what he is doing in office, he is the President of the United States. Why would anyone want him to fail at what he is doing? And why should he be the object of ridicule by sub-cretans?
http://wvgazette.com/rssfeeds//201008040699
10. Freedom of Speech? Somewhat similar to #09 above, the Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration offices have been visited by persons who block the entrances and display tables with pictures of the President shown as Hitler. (!) always wonder why people like this waste their time and bother honest people in a cause that can never be fulfilled. At the Westminster MVA, the demonstrators took time to call people "Jerks".. surely that should have gotten them evicted.
If I had the time, and the inclination, I would have taken pictures of these guys at the Westminster MVA and had the pictures blown up to place on a table across from them. I would have had dunce caps shown on their heads. Would I have been able to do that?
http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news/traffic/2009/08/obama_as_hitler_at_mva_its_leg.html
11. Money. A lot of billionaires have pledged to give away half of their wealth to charity. They have been encouraged in this respect by fellow billionaires, Warren Buffet and Bill Gates. Great idea!
(Tevya asked God to make him a rich man.. what do most people think is "rich"? Being worth a million dollars? .. I am rich.. but not necessarily with money.. but with the love of family and friends. Although, like Tevya, would it hurt if I had a little bit of money?)
http://www.thegivingpledge.org/
12. The other "bread". Good news. Whole grain bread is selling better than plain white refined bread. In the past twenty years or so, it has amazed me to see people buy tasteless white bread, when they could have nice healthful tasty whole wheat or whole grain bread at close to the same price. I'm glad that the message about healthful bread is finally getting through to folks.
............................................................................................
Saturday, July 31, 2010
Amazing Dozen
Since I won't be attending Chelsea Clinton's wedding, I should have time to write my weekly blog entry. I was disappointed that President Obama was not invited, so I decided not to go, even though I had looked forward to seeing those $15,000 Port-A-Potties.
http://refinery29.com/chelsea-clinton-wedding-budget.php
01. Who are you looking at! I went on a tour of NASA's Goddard Space Center with my Men's Club on Friday. Amazing place. I was mainly interested in the Hubble space telescope and it's remarkable pictures which were posted over all the walls.
I probably should have known this, but I didn't. The Hubble will be replaced around 2014 by the JWST (James Webb Space Telescope).
http://www.jwst.nasa.gov/about.html
Hubble takes picture of the universe as it was over 13 billion years ago and is an orbit 350 miles above the earth. JWST will be in orbit one million miles above the earth (4 times as far as the moon) and will take pictures older than Hubble's, if that's possible. . Some of the comments of my fellow men's club members:
"Will they be looking over the edge of the universe.. like Columbus?"
"Suppose they take a picture of a big eye?"
"This whole thing doesn't make sense. Don't they read the Bible?"
I just hope that I can make it to 2014.. for the launch, and then through however long it takes to transmit pictures back to earth from a million miles up.
My great grandson, Cameron, should see a lot of interesting space pictures during his lifetime, if crazy people don't blow us up soon and make us just another burned out rock on the screen of some alien's space telescope.
02. This cracks me up. A Court ruling says that a man lowering his pants and showing underwear is protected by the first amendment and can't be prohibited .. huh? This comes under "freedom of speech?"
(It may be that I have mixed this up with an English ruling a few months ago. I thought it was an American case. Instead of "first amendment".. such a prohibition would instead violate "young {British} men's human rights.")
03. Gives new meaning to "giving one the finger." The petrified middle finger of Galileo is on display in Florence, near the Uffizi Gallery, at the Museo Galileo: Instituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza.
http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/galileo/finger.html
04. No money-pit? The Carroll County Times (Maryland) reports that Baltimore has recommended no-cost spaying and neutering programs for "Pit Bills".
(Reminds me of President Harding. Some have said that the President rented a row-house in DC, where a deep pit was built so that people wanting favors from his Administration could toss their contributions without fear of disclosure.)
http://www.infoplease.com/biography/var/warrenharding.html
05. Round-up? Some 99 cents stores in the U.S. have changed their prices to $ 0.9999 cents, which I'm told causes the register to record it as $1.00. This, of course, allows them to make one penny on each sale.. and this equates to lots of profit on millions of sales.
(At one point, the Government decided to "round down" the amounts in Social Security checks.. imagine how much money that has made for the Government. I hope it went into the Social Security Trust Fund......)
06. The Great Bell, California uprising of 2010. As I reported in my last entry, city officials in Bell, California were making astronomical wages. Well, as soon as the people in that city learned about these wages (no, not from my blog), they erupted in anger and the officials involved have had to resign. The question is: how did it get to this point? Doesn't the city have open meetings where things like officials' salaries are discussed? Guess not.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100723/ap_on_re_us/us_bell_salaries
07. Birth control? Scientists have discovered that there is a gene found in all creatures in the line from fish to man that controls the generation of sperm. This is called the Boule Gene. Would controling that gene be an acceptable method of birth control? Probably not.
http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/article/3356
08. Hot lawyers? Once, when Abraham Lincoln was staying at a tavern on a very cold night, he noticed that there were a lot of other attorneys hugging the pot-bellied stove. As Lincoln neared the fire, the host addressed him: "Pretty cold tonight."
Lincoln replied: "Colder than hell."
One of the lawyers turned to Abe and said: "You've been there too, have you, Mr. Lincoln?"
Lincoln replied: "Yes, and the funny thing is that it's much like it is here.. all lawyers are nearest the fire."
http://www.rickwalton.com/lincoln/linc001.htm
009. Star track? I read where Bill Shatner is about to debut an interview show.. where he will interview "notorious personages".. Will our Captain Kirk make this into a "slightly naughty" show like Boston Legal? The first interviewee is slated to be the "Subway Vigilante." Should be interesting.
http://movieactors.com/actors/williamshatner.htm
010. Prison for dummies. An Argentine prison was low on money, so they posted a dummy in a guard tower. Some prisoners were not the dummies that the warden thought they were and escaped.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-10706626
011. Here's your sign. The inhabitants of Shitterton, England, not wanting to change their town's name and tired of constantly replacing their town sign.. chipped in to buy a boulder with the name carved into it. "Let's see those 'low-lifes' steal this one!" (I'm sure that people smart enough to fool the public about crop-circles for years, will have no problem in removing this big stone, at night, by the light of a full moon.)
012. Use your napkin and sit up straight, Fido! Hammacher Schlemmer is selling a "Pet High Chair".. which they say "promotes more refined behavior." (As reported by Consumers Reports.)
......................................................................................................................
http://refinery29.com/chelsea-clinton-wedding-budget.php
01. Who are you looking at! I went on a tour of NASA's Goddard Space Center with my Men's Club on Friday. Amazing place. I was mainly interested in the Hubble space telescope and it's remarkable pictures which were posted over all the walls.
I probably should have known this, but I didn't. The Hubble will be replaced around 2014 by the JWST (James Webb Space Telescope).
http://www.jwst.nasa.gov/about.html
Hubble takes picture of the universe as it was over 13 billion years ago and is an orbit 350 miles above the earth. JWST will be in orbit one million miles above the earth (4 times as far as the moon) and will take pictures older than Hubble's, if that's possible. . Some of the comments of my fellow men's club members:
"Will they be looking over the edge of the universe.. like Columbus?"
"Suppose they take a picture of a big eye?"
"This whole thing doesn't make sense. Don't they read the Bible?"
I just hope that I can make it to 2014.. for the launch, and then through however long it takes to transmit pictures back to earth from a million miles up.
My great grandson, Cameron, should see a lot of interesting space pictures during his lifetime, if crazy people don't blow us up soon and make us just another burned out rock on the screen of some alien's space telescope.
02. This cracks me up. A Court ruling says that a man lowering his pants and showing underwear is protected by the first amendment and can't be prohibited .. huh? This comes under "freedom of speech?"
(It may be that I have mixed this up with an English ruling a few months ago. I thought it was an American case. Instead of "first amendment".. such a prohibition would instead violate "young {British} men's human rights.")
03. Gives new meaning to "giving one the finger." The petrified middle finger of Galileo is on display in Florence, near the Uffizi Gallery, at the Museo Galileo: Instituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza.
http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/galileo/finger.html
04. No money-pit? The Carroll County Times (Maryland) reports that Baltimore has recommended no-cost spaying and neutering programs for "Pit Bills".
(Reminds me of President Harding. Some have said that the President rented a row-house in DC, where a deep pit was built so that people wanting favors from his Administration could toss their contributions without fear of disclosure.)
http://www.infoplease.com/biography/var/warrenharding.html
05. Round-up? Some 99 cents stores in the U.S. have changed their prices to $ 0.9999 cents, which I'm told causes the register to record it as $1.00. This, of course, allows them to make one penny on each sale.. and this equates to lots of profit on millions of sales.
(At one point, the Government decided to "round down" the amounts in Social Security checks.. imagine how much money that has made for the Government. I hope it went into the Social Security Trust Fund......)
06. The Great Bell, California uprising of 2010. As I reported in my last entry, city officials in Bell, California were making astronomical wages. Well, as soon as the people in that city learned about these wages (no, not from my blog), they erupted in anger and the officials involved have had to resign. The question is: how did it get to this point? Doesn't the city have open meetings where things like officials' salaries are discussed? Guess not.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100723/ap_on_re_us/us_bell_salaries
07. Birth control? Scientists have discovered that there is a gene found in all creatures in the line from fish to man that controls the generation of sperm. This is called the Boule Gene. Would controling that gene be an acceptable method of birth control? Probably not.
http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/article/3356
08. Hot lawyers? Once, when Abraham Lincoln was staying at a tavern on a very cold night, he noticed that there were a lot of other attorneys hugging the pot-bellied stove. As Lincoln neared the fire, the host addressed him: "Pretty cold tonight."
Lincoln replied: "Colder than hell."
One of the lawyers turned to Abe and said: "You've been there too, have you, Mr. Lincoln?"
Lincoln replied: "Yes, and the funny thing is that it's much like it is here.. all lawyers are nearest the fire."
http://www.rickwalton.com/lincoln/linc001.htm
009. Star track? I read where Bill Shatner is about to debut an interview show.. where he will interview "notorious personages".. Will our Captain Kirk make this into a "slightly naughty" show like Boston Legal? The first interviewee is slated to be the "Subway Vigilante." Should be interesting.
http://movieactors.com/actors/williamshatner.htm
010. Prison for dummies. An Argentine prison was low on money, so they posted a dummy in a guard tower. Some prisoners were not the dummies that the warden thought they were and escaped.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-10706626
011. Here's your sign. The inhabitants of Shitterton, England, not wanting to change their town's name and tired of constantly replacing their town sign.. chipped in to buy a boulder with the name carved into it. "Let's see those 'low-lifes' steal this one!" (I'm sure that people smart enough to fool the public about crop-circles for years, will have no problem in removing this big stone, at night, by the light of a full moon.)
012. Use your napkin and sit up straight, Fido! Hammacher Schlemmer is selling a "Pet High Chair".. which they say "promotes more refined behavior." (As reported by Consumers Reports.)
......................................................................................................................
Sunday, July 25, 2010
Conversation
One of my favorite movies: The Wrong Box has an elderly character who likes to share facts with anyone who is nearby. At one point in the movie, he gets a chance to ride on a horse-drawn wagon for an hour, seated next to the driver.
As they enter the town, he breaks off his monologue and tells the driver that he would now be able to disembark. The driver, clearly battered and worn from his rider's incessant chatter, says: "Oh, would you?" (with an implied PLEASE!)
So it is with blogs. The good thing though, is that one can avoid visiting the site or one can block the writer's entries, at least on Facebook.
With that bit of off-hand advice, I will continue with my blog entry.
01. Death of another Icon: Dan Shorr passed away at 93 on Friday. I didn't always agree with his actions, but usually I agreed with his commentary. Besides, anyone on Nixon's Enemies List has to be someone I admire.
02. Hate Groups. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) says that they are now tracking 23 organized extremist groups in Maryland. They also state that there are 1,753 active extremist groups in the U.S. Anti-immigrant groups have grown astronomically recently.
Let me ask one question related to immigration: If suddenly all illegal aliens were kicked out, who would pick our fruit and vegetables, clean the toilets in our fast food joints, or watch the children of our elected officials?
03. Gun control: Comic, Chris Rock says he has the solution to the "bearing arms" issue. "Bullets should cost $3,000 each." That way, only serious hunters would have them..and children and crooks might be deterred. What do you think?
04. Bliss. Jeremy Quinn, Mensan, says: "The beautiful thing about marriage is that you can wear your old, discolored shirt in front of her when it would embarass you no end should anyone else witness it."
05. Harvard grads? Massachusetts put out a list of the top 1,000 State tourist attractions.. but the list only showed 996 places, and some of them don't exist. (I'll have to look for New Bedford entries. A few years ago, I compiled my own list of about 100 places to go and things to do in the geater NB area. I would be glad to share it.)
06. Nature's Bounty. Last year, we discovered the Earthbox and grew lots of vegetables on our back deck. This year, we bought three more and are enjoying lots of delicious home-grown veggies, such as giant zuchini, giant cucumbers, tomatoes of all kinds, patti-pan squash, .. and even corn!
(Google Earthbox)
07. Toastmasters take note: Shakespeare wrote 31,959 speeches! (Could Bacon have done that?)
08. Mushrooms: The Crystal Falls, Michigan Humungus Fungus Fest will be held in August. I believe that they make a 10' x 10' mushroom pizza. (Is it true that there is a mushroom growing on 37 acres underground..that is 1,500 years old?)
http://www.humungusfungusfest.com/
09. Sarah sez: New word.. refudiate. Is this related to Elmer Fudd's dislike of Bugs?
10. The Bard: Sarah said that Shakespeare made up new words all the time..when he wasn't writing thousands of speeches. Mensa has a Special Interest Group (SIG) for Shakespeare lovers.. it's called Bardolatry and can be found on Facebook.
11. Jobs: Maybe we should move to Bell, California. Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me reports that the Bell City Manager is paid $787,000 and it's Police Chief is paid $457,000. I wonder what the salaries are for L.A., which probably has a rather larger population?
12. Burning Question: Is this the year twenty ten, two thousand ten, or two thousand and ten? (Answer, from Mensan Richard Lederer.. "twenty ten ... saves five letters, one syllable, and one word." I know, you are wondering why us guys with genius IQ's are spending time on this subject. I wonder too.)
..................................................................................................................................
As they enter the town, he breaks off his monologue and tells the driver that he would now be able to disembark. The driver, clearly battered and worn from his rider's incessant chatter, says: "Oh, would you?" (with an implied PLEASE!)
So it is with blogs. The good thing though, is that one can avoid visiting the site or one can block the writer's entries, at least on Facebook.
With that bit of off-hand advice, I will continue with my blog entry.
01. Death of another Icon: Dan Shorr passed away at 93 on Friday. I didn't always agree with his actions, but usually I agreed with his commentary. Besides, anyone on Nixon's Enemies List has to be someone I admire.
02. Hate Groups. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) says that they are now tracking 23 organized extremist groups in Maryland. They also state that there are 1,753 active extremist groups in the U.S. Anti-immigrant groups have grown astronomically recently.
Let me ask one question related to immigration: If suddenly all illegal aliens were kicked out, who would pick our fruit and vegetables, clean the toilets in our fast food joints, or watch the children of our elected officials?
03. Gun control: Comic, Chris Rock says he has the solution to the "bearing arms" issue. "Bullets should cost $3,000 each." That way, only serious hunters would have them..and children and crooks might be deterred. What do you think?
04. Bliss. Jeremy Quinn, Mensan, says: "The beautiful thing about marriage is that you can wear your old, discolored shirt in front of her when it would embarass you no end should anyone else witness it."
05. Harvard grads? Massachusetts put out a list of the top 1,000 State tourist attractions.. but the list only showed 996 places, and some of them don't exist. (I'll have to look for New Bedford entries. A few years ago, I compiled my own list of about 100 places to go and things to do in the geater NB area. I would be glad to share it.)
06. Nature's Bounty. Last year, we discovered the Earthbox and grew lots of vegetables on our back deck. This year, we bought three more and are enjoying lots of delicious home-grown veggies, such as giant zuchini, giant cucumbers, tomatoes of all kinds, patti-pan squash, .. and even corn!
(Google Earthbox)
07. Toastmasters take note: Shakespeare wrote 31,959 speeches! (Could Bacon have done that?)
08. Mushrooms: The Crystal Falls, Michigan Humungus Fungus Fest will be held in August. I believe that they make a 10' x 10' mushroom pizza. (Is it true that there is a mushroom growing on 37 acres underground..that is 1,500 years old?)
http://www.humungusfungusfest.com/
09. Sarah sez: New word.. refudiate. Is this related to Elmer Fudd's dislike of Bugs?
10. The Bard: Sarah said that Shakespeare made up new words all the time..when he wasn't writing thousands of speeches. Mensa has a Special Interest Group (SIG) for Shakespeare lovers.. it's called Bardolatry and can be found on Facebook.
11. Jobs: Maybe we should move to Bell, California. Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me reports that the Bell City Manager is paid $787,000 and it's Police Chief is paid $457,000. I wonder what the salaries are for L.A., which probably has a rather larger population?
12. Burning Question: Is this the year twenty ten, two thousand ten, or two thousand and ten? (Answer, from Mensan Richard Lederer.. "twenty ten ... saves five letters, one syllable, and one word." I know, you are wondering why us guys with genius IQ's are spending time on this subject. I wonder too.)
..................................................................................................................................
Sunday, July 18, 2010
More Foolishness
01. Insight: I know that some people do read blogs like mine.. especially in Japan where some entries are used to facilitate English lessons, or at least that is what I have been told through some emails I have received and from the large number of Japanese comments posted to one of my blogs.This reminds me of a "life lesson" from when I was in the eighth grade:
I had been working hard to build my muscles through weight lifting for a couple of years, but I had overheard some girls saying that guys with large muscles looked ugly. That bothered me for some time, until I visited one of my friends' girl friend's home.. on her bedroom wall, she had posted large pictures of weightlifters and bodybuilders flexing their massive muscles. She and her two girlfriends were "oohing" and "aahing" over the pictures. That is when I gained my insight:
As the song goes: "Some girls don't like boys like me...... ahhh! but some girls do!"
02. Bad taste: Doctors have reported that Pine Nut Syndrome is with us again. This occurs to certain people who eat too many pine nuts. Somehow, their tastebuds are screwed up and they have a tinny taste in their mouths for up to six months. I love to eat pine nuts but have not yet experienced bad taste.. at least not in my mouth.
03. Immigration: Harpers reports that almost 400,000 immigrants have been deported from the US during President Obama's first year in office. (Did you read that, Lou Dobbs?)
04. Super tool: I received an ad for a "pocket saw" that supposedly can cut through any substance known to man. It folds up like a jack knife and can be put into one's pocket, and apparently remain undetected until needed for tasks like decapitation.
05. Itching to know? I read about a site where you can find out about possible infestation in your New York City hotel. http://www.bedbugregistry.com/
06. Cut it out, Imam! In a move that will cause the hairs to rise on the back of your neck, Iran has banned the Mullet haircut. At last Iran has done something I can agree with. http://hubpages.com/hub/Mullet-Haircuts
07. Finally! British researchers have determined that the chicken came before the egg, based on scientific examination of egg shell material! (Now, where the devil did the chicken come from?)
08. Funny phrase: Yesterday I heard a lady tell her friend: "Where have you been? I haven't seen you in a month of Sundays." (Does anyone know where that phrase comes from? I'll bet my brother Joe does.)
09. Wino test: NPR reports that Harrisburg, Pennsylvania is testing a wine buying set up for supermarkets. One accesses a video hookup in a kiosk and a person remotely checks the personal information that you supply (name and date of birth at least) and then, if you are who you say you are, and over 21, you are asked to breathe into a tube and undergo a check to make sure you are not already drunk. Once you pass all these tests, you can open the door and extract wine that is priced from $6 to $22. (Apparently, they are selling 80 bottles a day through the kiosk.)
Just think of the possibilities for the police from this set up. But probably not for homeland security folks, because terrorists may not drink alcohol.
10. Cat burgler. A family has reported that their cat has come home with stolen underwear every night for a while. So far, the feline felon has copped 79 pair of undies.
11. Watchit! Along that line.. I received an ad for "grab and go" underwear. I would be afraid to wear such things. (I guess maybe the above mentioned cat got her thievery idea from this ad.)
12. Button up! Another British study has determined that people with high belly buttons are better at sports because they have a higher center of gravity. (I wonder whose bellies they examined. Did they check out belly-dancers? Pot bellies? Innies or outies? Beer bellies? Pregnant bellies?)
Saturday, July 10, 2010
Madamina, il catalogo e questo...
A couple of very interesting catalogs appeared in the mail the other day, and I thought that I might mention a few of the things that you might want to order. If you are tempted, let me know and I'll tell you the names of these great catalogs.
Stuff for the home.
01. Hair cutting umbrella: This is kind of a cape/bucket that fits around your neck and catches all of the hair, eyebrows, and earlobes that get lopped off as your spouse gives you a haircut. Clever idea.
02. Laundry sign: A magnetic cover for the front of your washing machine that lets people know that they are in the "laundry." (Here's your sign!)
03. Egg cracker: A machine for those persons unable to crack their eggs on the side of a bowl. The two sides of each cracked egg come out evenly and aesthetically correct.
04. Bed bug repeller: Plug it in, turn it to "high" and watch those little rascals scoot to escape the ultrahigh inaudible sound waves. (Especially recommended for people living in New York City.)
05. Lock for your safe: Keeps people from stealing the important papers in your 10 pound safe, unless the crook decides to pick it up, carry it off and open it later with a crowbar.
Tasteful items:
01. Toilet seat clock: Chimes every hour with a flushing sound.
02. Toilet mug: Have your dark brown morning brew in a realistically rendered coffee mug shaped like your bathroom toilet.
03. Booty Bop: I haven't a clue about this product.. the catalog doesn't explain it. It probably is related to the old poem: "what God has forgotten, we stuff up with cotton."
04. Burping bank: Stick a coin in the piggy bank's slot and it burps and snorts just like the depositor.
05. Butt bank: Stick a coin in the plumber's butt crack and hear a realistic fart. (Voted "Baltimore's Best" by Miss Allen's 6th grade class.)
Stuff for your pet.
01. Doggie litter turf: This little bit of greenery is designed to allow your pooch to do his business indoors in bad weather.
02. Diet bowl: Prongs stick up from the bowl bottom, so your dog or cat will learn to eat slower and more carefully. (Might work also for human dieters.)
For your yard.
01. Frogs have fun. Forget about the Mexican on a burro or the "Baltimore Hon" flamingo, this is a set of two waving green frogs on a sliding board. (Years ago, our friend, Miss Marie, made me a ceramic "Frog in Pink Hot Pants. My daughter now has this heirloom next to her backyard fish pond,)
02. HOOT! Hang this realistic owl from a tree trunk and every time something comes near, a sensor triggers a very loud "Hoot! Hoot!" to scare the trespasser away. (I wonder what this sounds like at 3 am when some bats decide to investigate?)
Remember these catalogs take credit cards.
....................................................
Stuff for the home.
01. Hair cutting umbrella: This is kind of a cape/bucket that fits around your neck and catches all of the hair, eyebrows, and earlobes that get lopped off as your spouse gives you a haircut. Clever idea.
02. Laundry sign: A magnetic cover for the front of your washing machine that lets people know that they are in the "laundry." (Here's your sign!)
03. Egg cracker: A machine for those persons unable to crack their eggs on the side of a bowl. The two sides of each cracked egg come out evenly and aesthetically correct.
04. Bed bug repeller: Plug it in, turn it to "high" and watch those little rascals scoot to escape the ultrahigh inaudible sound waves. (Especially recommended for people living in New York City.)
05. Lock for your safe: Keeps people from stealing the important papers in your 10 pound safe, unless the crook decides to pick it up, carry it off and open it later with a crowbar.
Tasteful items:
01. Toilet seat clock: Chimes every hour with a flushing sound.
02. Toilet mug: Have your dark brown morning brew in a realistically rendered coffee mug shaped like your bathroom toilet.
03. Booty Bop: I haven't a clue about this product.. the catalog doesn't explain it. It probably is related to the old poem: "what God has forgotten, we stuff up with cotton."
04. Burping bank: Stick a coin in the piggy bank's slot and it burps and snorts just like the depositor.
05. Butt bank: Stick a coin in the plumber's butt crack and hear a realistic fart. (Voted "Baltimore's Best" by Miss Allen's 6th grade class.)
Stuff for your pet.
01. Doggie litter turf: This little bit of greenery is designed to allow your pooch to do his business indoors in bad weather.
02. Diet bowl: Prongs stick up from the bowl bottom, so your dog or cat will learn to eat slower and more carefully. (Might work also for human dieters.)
For your yard.
01. Frogs have fun. Forget about the Mexican on a burro or the "Baltimore Hon" flamingo, this is a set of two waving green frogs on a sliding board. (Years ago, our friend, Miss Marie, made me a ceramic "Frog in Pink Hot Pants. My daughter now has this heirloom next to her backyard fish pond,)
02. HOOT! Hang this realistic owl from a tree trunk and every time something comes near, a sensor triggers a very loud "Hoot! Hoot!" to scare the trespasser away. (I wonder what this sounds like at 3 am when some bats decide to investigate?)
Remember these catalogs take credit cards.
....................................................
Saturday, July 03, 2010
Another dozen
01. Red Hat Club Ancest0r: In 1969, I established the Red Tie Club at the Social Security Administration. At our peak, we had 29 members who vowed that they would wear a red tie on Fridays. If not, they had to buy coffee and doughnuts for all of the other members. (Several guys would forget each week, but it wasn't very hard on the pocketbook because you could get a coffee and a sticky bun for 15 cents in those days.)
Remember.. this was 40 years ago and office workers had to wear neckties. This was a bad time for lungs because smoking was allowed everywhere. It always stunk to high heaven and one had to work in a haze of smog. However, we were used to it and didn't worry about it too much.
Once in the 1970's I decided that it was too stinky in my branch, so I shipped one of my smokiest sections into what I thought was a vacant storage room. That way, those guys could puff away to their heart's content without bothering anybody else. Or so I thought.
As soon as my guys were settled and began to light up, they noticed a rustling that seemed to be coming from what we thought were empty cartons piled up in the far corner of the room. It turned out to be the location of a programmer who hated smoking and who had made himself an office out of empty boxes. We had no idea he lived there. But, overwhelmed with the new smokiness, he soon moved out for parts unknown.
(Incidentally, this gentleman turned out to be the world's foremost expert on Esperanto, the international language. I've talked about this in other blogs.)
02. Big Bite! Scientists have found evidence of a giant Sperm Whale in the Australian desert. I have to check this out. The teeth are purported to be 4' long.. in a 50' body. Supposedly, this leviathan was not Mr. Niceguy. I believe that part of the discovery's name will honor Herman Melville (my hero.)
03. Watch out! The National Federation of the Blind and Virginia Tech are working on a project to allow blind people to drive. There already are some assistive devices related to that:
DriveGrip.. vibrating gloves that signal when and where to turn.
AirPix.. Paper with holes through which compressed air is sent to inform a driver as to what is around the vehicle.
04. Directions: One true thing about the village I live in, there is only one road out. Ordinarily this doesn't pose a problem, but the other day a jogger hailed me and asked if he were going in the right direction to get out of the village. I said "no" and explained the layout to him. He said "thanks" and went off in the wrong direction. I accosted him and told him he was going in the wrong direction. He said "OK" and continued in the same wrong direction. I gave up. Elaine says "that is just like a man."
05. Spies? I wonder if any of my neighbors are Russian spies. If they have operatives planted in the US.. we must have some as well. Spygate? I guess it is just another source of income for American citizens. I wonder what secret documents they xeroxed or photographed from their time in the PTA or the local Baptist Church.
06. Abdication: Larry King is retiring after 25 years in the media. Will Jeraldo take his place? Maybe now he can become a Russian spy like his neighbors.
07. Damn Alkie Wino: I am under my cardiologist's orders to have two alcoholic beverages per day. It's supposed to help my heart. So, in a week, if I drink only beer.. there will be 14 bottles in my recycling bin. If wine, maybe 3 or 4 bottles of wine. Anyway, last week the recycling pickup didn't show up for a few days.. so the booze evidence increased until it looked like all we drink is alcoholic beverages. So what.. who cares what the neighbors think. Besides Lutherans like to drink beer.
Once, on vacation in Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, I was out blogging on recycling pickup day and I noticed that every bin was filled with empty wine bottles of a certain fairly expensive red wine type. At first I thought that the liquor store must have had a fantastic sale. Then I thought that this many people can't all drink the same kind of wine. Then I realized that this was probably all from the same wino. His bin was full, so he decided to fill up his neighbors' bins. .. ok.. like I said before.. who cares?
08. Great idea: Someone is marketing Bridal Diapers. Who needs them? I guess it depends on how strong a Bride's bladder is.
09. Style: An upbeat 69 year old Wonder Woman will now dress in stretch pants. About time.
10. Baltimorese: John Goodspeed of the Baltimore Sun published a dictionary of the dialect spoken in Baltimore, Maryland. Look at a few of the entries:
Clays: clothes
Everythink: everything
Flares: flowers
Koor: car
Nayo: no
Urshter: oyster
Zinc: sink
11. Job openings: Britain is advertising for Bikini mud wrestlers.
12. Hairy lip? A German study has found that female fish like male fish best if they have a kind of mustache. Clark Gablefish.
...............................................................................................
Remember.. this was 40 years ago and office workers had to wear neckties. This was a bad time for lungs because smoking was allowed everywhere. It always stunk to high heaven and one had to work in a haze of smog. However, we were used to it and didn't worry about it too much.
Once in the 1970's I decided that it was too stinky in my branch, so I shipped one of my smokiest sections into what I thought was a vacant storage room. That way, those guys could puff away to their heart's content without bothering anybody else. Or so I thought.
As soon as my guys were settled and began to light up, they noticed a rustling that seemed to be coming from what we thought were empty cartons piled up in the far corner of the room. It turned out to be the location of a programmer who hated smoking and who had made himself an office out of empty boxes. We had no idea he lived there. But, overwhelmed with the new smokiness, he soon moved out for parts unknown.
(Incidentally, this gentleman turned out to be the world's foremost expert on Esperanto, the international language. I've talked about this in other blogs.)
02. Big Bite! Scientists have found evidence of a giant Sperm Whale in the Australian desert. I have to check this out. The teeth are purported to be 4' long.. in a 50' body. Supposedly, this leviathan was not Mr. Niceguy. I believe that part of the discovery's name will honor Herman Melville (my hero.)
03. Watch out! The National Federation of the Blind and Virginia Tech are working on a project to allow blind people to drive. There already are some assistive devices related to that:
DriveGrip.. vibrating gloves that signal when and where to turn.
AirPix.. Paper with holes through which compressed air is sent to inform a driver as to what is around the vehicle.
04. Directions: One true thing about the village I live in, there is only one road out. Ordinarily this doesn't pose a problem, but the other day a jogger hailed me and asked if he were going in the right direction to get out of the village. I said "no" and explained the layout to him. He said "thanks" and went off in the wrong direction. I accosted him and told him he was going in the wrong direction. He said "OK" and continued in the same wrong direction. I gave up. Elaine says "that is just like a man."
05. Spies? I wonder if any of my neighbors are Russian spies. If they have operatives planted in the US.. we must have some as well. Spygate? I guess it is just another source of income for American citizens. I wonder what secret documents they xeroxed or photographed from their time in the PTA or the local Baptist Church.
06. Abdication: Larry King is retiring after 25 years in the media. Will Jeraldo take his place? Maybe now he can become a Russian spy like his neighbors.
07. Damn Alkie Wino: I am under my cardiologist's orders to have two alcoholic beverages per day. It's supposed to help my heart. So, in a week, if I drink only beer.. there will be 14 bottles in my recycling bin. If wine, maybe 3 or 4 bottles of wine. Anyway, last week the recycling pickup didn't show up for a few days.. so the booze evidence increased until it looked like all we drink is alcoholic beverages. So what.. who cares what the neighbors think. Besides Lutherans like to drink beer.
Once, on vacation in Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, I was out blogging on recycling pickup day and I noticed that every bin was filled with empty wine bottles of a certain fairly expensive red wine type. At first I thought that the liquor store must have had a fantastic sale. Then I thought that this many people can't all drink the same kind of wine. Then I realized that this was probably all from the same wino. His bin was full, so he decided to fill up his neighbors' bins. .. ok.. like I said before.. who cares?
08. Great idea: Someone is marketing Bridal Diapers. Who needs them? I guess it depends on how strong a Bride's bladder is.
09. Style: An upbeat 69 year old Wonder Woman will now dress in stretch pants. About time.
10. Baltimorese: John Goodspeed of the Baltimore Sun published a dictionary of the dialect spoken in Baltimore, Maryland. Look at a few of the entries:
Clays: clothes
Everythink: everything
Flares: flowers
Koor: car
Nayo: no
Urshter: oyster
Zinc: sink
11. Job openings: Britain is advertising for Bikini mud wrestlers.
12. Hairy lip? A German study has found that female fish like male fish best if they have a kind of mustache. Clark Gablefish.
...............................................................................................
Saturday, June 26, 2010
Summer 2010 is here and we're still crazy.
Another dozen:
01. Communication. One young man sitting near me said to his friend: "I was like, well, I mean, you know." His friend nodded, so I guess he knew.
02. Another fatwa: An Iranian Ayatollah has condemned the keeping of dogs as pets, because they are not clean and cause some people to love them more than people in their family. (What about cats, gerbils or hermit crabs?)
03. Eat your veggies! The garden on our deck has now produced:
6 bags of lettuce
lots of dill
2 5" zukes
2 8" zukes
4 red tomatoes
Hey! We're farmers!
04. Another young terrorist. A 7-year old was kicked out of a Rhode Island second grade class for having toy soldiers with guns glued to his hat! (When will those gangsters learn to stop breaking the law!)
05. Das Vaterland. I heard on the radio that Homeland Security was named as a joke that stuck, even though Americans don't refer to the U.S. as their "homeland."
06. Appropriate name: A lady calling a radio talk-show was named Patience Waite.
07. Carry on luggage? Airport workers in Arkansas found a bunch of human heads when they inspected a package. Police reported that they were just being sent to a medical company and that was ok. (Was Bin Laden's head one of them?)
08. Got trolls? I heard that a movie is about to be filmed about those little trolls from the '70's, so if you haven't thrown them out, you might want to keep them as an investment. (What about "my little ponies?")
09. Important information: The fruit (or vegetable) with the most fiber is the avocado. (I didn't know that!) And the name comes from the Aztec word for testicle, "ahuacatl."
10. Can't women let men have anything of their own? Fibanserin is a drug that is being called "the female viagra." (I wonder how the FDA is testing it.)
11. Hayabusa recall. The Japanese have successfully retrieved a geological sample from the Itokawa asteroid! (Think about that for a while!)
12. A new terrorist ploy? Bedbugs have invaded Goldman Sachs offices in Jersey City. (Serves them right!)
....................................................
01. Communication. One young man sitting near me said to his friend: "I was like, well, I mean, you know." His friend nodded, so I guess he knew.
02. Another fatwa: An Iranian Ayatollah has condemned the keeping of dogs as pets, because they are not clean and cause some people to love them more than people in their family. (What about cats, gerbils or hermit crabs?)
03. Eat your veggies! The garden on our deck has now produced:
6 bags of lettuce
lots of dill
2 5" zukes
2 8" zukes
4 red tomatoes
Hey! We're farmers!
04. Another young terrorist. A 7-year old was kicked out of a Rhode Island second grade class for having toy soldiers with guns glued to his hat! (When will those gangsters learn to stop breaking the law!)
05. Das Vaterland. I heard on the radio that Homeland Security was named as a joke that stuck, even though Americans don't refer to the U.S. as their "homeland."
06. Appropriate name: A lady calling a radio talk-show was named Patience Waite.
07. Carry on luggage? Airport workers in Arkansas found a bunch of human heads when they inspected a package. Police reported that they were just being sent to a medical company and that was ok. (Was Bin Laden's head one of them?)
08. Got trolls? I heard that a movie is about to be filmed about those little trolls from the '70's, so if you haven't thrown them out, you might want to keep them as an investment. (What about "my little ponies?")
09. Important information: The fruit (or vegetable) with the most fiber is the avocado. (I didn't know that!) And the name comes from the Aztec word for testicle, "ahuacatl."
10. Can't women let men have anything of their own? Fibanserin is a drug that is being called "the female viagra." (I wonder how the FDA is testing it.)
11. Hayabusa recall. The Japanese have successfully retrieved a geological sample from the Itokawa asteroid! (Think about that for a while!)
12. A new terrorist ploy? Bedbugs have invaded Goldman Sachs offices in Jersey City. (Serves them right!)
....................................................
Sunday, June 20, 2010
Old and New, Borrowed and Blue (maybe)
Here's another dozen:
01. Prophetic. I'm trying to solve a crossword puzzle from 1943 and one of the clues states: "Chirping note." The answer, of course, is TWEET. (How did they know?)
02. Self-mutilation. Last year, at a WalMart store near Ocean City, I noticed that almost everyone, old and young, male and female, had tattoos. Last week, at a WalMart store in Westminster, Maryland, I noticed that almost everyone, old and young, male and female, had tattoos. I predict that the most lucrative profession in the year 2030 will be Tattoo Remover.
03. Methuselah? Former Illinois Governor, Rod Blagojevich, faces a total of 415 years in jail.
Do you remember those great lyrics:
Methuselah lived 900 years,
Old Methuselah lived 900 years,
But what use is livin'
When no woman will give in
To no man what's 900 years?
04. Retired? Who said this?
Somebody asked me: "What did you do today?
I said: "Nothing."
"But isn't that what you did yesterday?"
"Yes, but I wasn't finished."
05. Cholesterol: Would you go to the Australian restaurant where you are required to eat everything on your plate or be banished? Chef Ichikawa says he is serious about this.
Is that bad? "I say: Nay Nay!"
06. Somebody is watching you! I just read that General James Clapper (!) has been nominated to become coordinator of the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies. I hope that Jimmie will be able to get them coordinated enough to find Ben Ladin. (Maybe they already know where he is. If so, why don't they help the guys with hand grenades and samurai swords get to him. )
Question: how did that guy get on a US plane with his sword if I get stopped when my metal collar button sets off the metal detector?
07. Aging: I like this poem by Suzan L. Wiener, that was in Mature Living magazine.
You know you're getting older,
And this is true I guess,
When your life in the fast lane
Is now just the supermarket express.
08. Samuel Clemens: Mark Twain was known all over the West for the Celebrated Jumping Frog story, but when the New York Times published it so the East would know about him, they mis-named him Mark Swain.
09. Beam me up! I'm told that William Shattner auctioned off his kidney stone. I wonder how much he got for it.
10. Church stuff: Elaine likes to see the burrowing animals that inhabit the sloping lawns around the local Catholic church. She calls them: Holy Gophers.
Somebody told me that there is a Catholic church somewhere that is called "Lovely Bones".. I haven't checked it out yet.
Church names are interesting: When I went to a Quaker "church".. it was called the Friends Meeting House. What a nice name.. although it was misleading because if any of us young boys started to nod off waiting for the spirit to move someone to speak, we were subjected to a hearty crack on the head by a long pole-wielding unfriendly old-timer.
Later in my childhood, I went to the "First Baptist Church." I don't recall there being a "Second Baptist Church".. I'm sure there was somewhere. I'm also sure there was never a "Last Baptist Church." I could be wrong.
Some folks know that I was ordained in the Church of Modern Apostles in the 1970's. I still can legally perform weddings in the State of Florida. Actually, anybody can perform marriages in most states as long as the parties to the marriage get appropriate licenses.
11. Computers! (Watch it.. this is boring.. so just skip over it.) I have a lot of computers, partly because I never throw anything away. Let me give you an inventory:
A. One of the first laptops.. it weighs about twenty-five pounds. (Carry-on luggage?)
B. A laptop that I backed over in Massachusetts. It still works, except for the screen.
C. A replacement laptop, that has half of its screen messed up.. yes, I dropped it.
D. A desktop that is driving me crazy. I'm ready to throw it out the window. Its main function is as a network base. At least it actually does that ok.
E. A new laptop with VISTA. Every day it has a problem that takes me a long time to fix. But it has a very user-friendly keyboard, and I like it when it is working. Every once in a while it becomes unfixable and I have to restore it to its pristine condition and lose a lot of information.
F. A mini-laptop which was very cheap to buy and is easy to carry around and store. However, my fingers are a little too fat for the keyboard.. and pictures don't show up very well on the small screen.
G. A DROID. I like it, but it also has small keys.. my daughter-in-law gave me some tips about it and that has helped me learn to use it. The battery gets used up fast so I have to charge it up every evening. It takes nice pictures.
H. Three CPU's from earlier computers.. a technician says he can take all of the data from them and put it on a CD that I can then download/upload to one of my newer computers and see what I thought had been lost when I upgraded.
12. Celebration. Please be advised that July is National Baked Bean Month. (I'm sure that Larry the Cable Guy will have something to say.. or do.. about that.)
...................................................................................................................
01. Prophetic. I'm trying to solve a crossword puzzle from 1943 and one of the clues states: "Chirping note." The answer, of course, is TWEET. (How did they know?)
02. Self-mutilation. Last year, at a WalMart store near Ocean City, I noticed that almost everyone, old and young, male and female, had tattoos. Last week, at a WalMart store in Westminster, Maryland, I noticed that almost everyone, old and young, male and female, had tattoos. I predict that the most lucrative profession in the year 2030 will be Tattoo Remover.
03. Methuselah? Former Illinois Governor, Rod Blagojevich, faces a total of 415 years in jail.
Do you remember those great lyrics:
Methuselah lived 900 years,
Old Methuselah lived 900 years,
But what use is livin'
When no woman will give in
To no man what's 900 years?
04. Retired? Who said this?
Somebody asked me: "What did you do today?
I said: "Nothing."
"But isn't that what you did yesterday?"
"Yes, but I wasn't finished."
05. Cholesterol: Would you go to the Australian restaurant where you are required to eat everything on your plate or be banished? Chef Ichikawa says he is serious about this.
Is that bad? "I say: Nay Nay!"
06. Somebody is watching you! I just read that General James Clapper (!) has been nominated to become coordinator of the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies. I hope that Jimmie will be able to get them coordinated enough to find Ben Ladin. (Maybe they already know where he is. If so, why don't they help the guys with hand grenades and samurai swords get to him. )
Question: how did that guy get on a US plane with his sword if I get stopped when my metal collar button sets off the metal detector?
07. Aging: I like this poem by Suzan L. Wiener, that was in Mature Living magazine.
You know you're getting older,
And this is true I guess,
When your life in the fast lane
Is now just the supermarket express.
08. Samuel Clemens: Mark Twain was known all over the West for the Celebrated Jumping Frog story, but when the New York Times published it so the East would know about him, they mis-named him Mark Swain.
09. Beam me up! I'm told that William Shattner auctioned off his kidney stone. I wonder how much he got for it.
10. Church stuff: Elaine likes to see the burrowing animals that inhabit the sloping lawns around the local Catholic church. She calls them: Holy Gophers.
Somebody told me that there is a Catholic church somewhere that is called "Lovely Bones".. I haven't checked it out yet.
Church names are interesting: When I went to a Quaker "church".. it was called the Friends Meeting House. What a nice name.. although it was misleading because if any of us young boys started to nod off waiting for the spirit to move someone to speak, we were subjected to a hearty crack on the head by a long pole-wielding unfriendly old-timer.
Later in my childhood, I went to the "First Baptist Church." I don't recall there being a "Second Baptist Church".. I'm sure there was somewhere. I'm also sure there was never a "Last Baptist Church." I could be wrong.
Some folks know that I was ordained in the Church of Modern Apostles in the 1970's. I still can legally perform weddings in the State of Florida. Actually, anybody can perform marriages in most states as long as the parties to the marriage get appropriate licenses.
11. Computers! (Watch it.. this is boring.. so just skip over it.) I have a lot of computers, partly because I never throw anything away. Let me give you an inventory:
A. One of the first laptops.. it weighs about twenty-five pounds. (Carry-on luggage?)
B. A laptop that I backed over in Massachusetts. It still works, except for the screen.
C. A replacement laptop, that has half of its screen messed up.. yes, I dropped it.
D. A desktop that is driving me crazy. I'm ready to throw it out the window. Its main function is as a network base. At least it actually does that ok.
E. A new laptop with VISTA. Every day it has a problem that takes me a long time to fix. But it has a very user-friendly keyboard, and I like it when it is working. Every once in a while it becomes unfixable and I have to restore it to its pristine condition and lose a lot of information.
F. A mini-laptop which was very cheap to buy and is easy to carry around and store. However, my fingers are a little too fat for the keyboard.. and pictures don't show up very well on the small screen.
G. A DROID. I like it, but it also has small keys.. my daughter-in-law gave me some tips about it and that has helped me learn to use it. The battery gets used up fast so I have to charge it up every evening. It takes nice pictures.
H. Three CPU's from earlier computers.. a technician says he can take all of the data from them and put it on a CD that I can then download/upload to one of my newer computers and see what I thought had been lost when I upgraded.
12. Celebration. Please be advised that July is National Baked Bean Month. (I'm sure that Larry the Cable Guy will have something to say.. or do.. about that.)
...................................................................................................................
Sunday, June 13, 2010
Breakthroughs and Insights
It's amazing what one can learn in just one week's time. From pants to crocs, from Rush to Ozzie, and from Futball to cockroaches.
01. Hope for men everywhere: Ladies, have you noticed that your husband has started to carry a basketball around his waist? Some men (present company excluded of course) develop a little (?) paunch when they reach a certain age. This presents a big problem, because if a man used to have a 30 inch waist, but now, because of good living, measures 46 inches around that same waist, pants no longer fit him and he must either buy suspenders, or give up wearing pants altogether.
Now, there is good news for such men.. as shown in the June 2010 issue of Funny Times magazine, famed cartoonist Mark Parisi has let us see "slant-top pants". What a great idea! The back top of the pants are at what used to be the waist, and the belt area slants down to below the belly area, allowing a "melon carrier" to be fashionable and comfortable once more.
02. Short People again: On Wait Wait Don't Tell Me this week, it was reported that France's Sarkozy has now ordered that all of his bodyguards be shorter than his 5'5" stature. When will this end?
They also mentioned that Napoleon was taller than Monsieur Sarkozy at 5'6" or 5'7". That is a surprize to me.. and probably to all the other people who believed that Nappy was around 5' nothing. Hitler was 5'6". Mussilini was 5'6". Stalin was 5'6". Randy Newman might have been right. (But Charles DeGaulle was 6'5" as was our greatest President: Abraham Lincoln.)
03. The Privileged Class: Prior to Princess Diana's death, she and Fergie were observed poking people in the butt with their umbrellas at the Ascot races. (There is the beginning of a poem there, Brother Joe.)
04. American Pie?: GM recently put out a memo requesting that all employees refrain from calling the Chevrolet "Chevy"... too undignified? There were "Chevy" jars set up.. and whenever anyone said the dreaded word, they had to put a quarter in the jar.
My GM stock is now worth about 3 pennies total. I wonder if it will ever go back up again.
05. Beach buoys? Experts have now concluded that crocodiles surf.
In a related story, reptiles have now been banned from public streets, the beach, the boardwalk, alleys and sidewalks in Ocean City, Maryland.
06. Wedding daze: Rush Limbaugh has hired Elton John to perform at his upcoming wedding. He will be paying him one million dollars.
In a related story, it has been determined that orangutangs in the zoo get a bigger kick out of watching humans than humans get watching them.
07. Spelling: A young lady has won the National Spelling Bee. The word that won her the prize was "stromuhr"... my German analysis says this relates to "stream clock".. now what the hell is that? I guess if you are in the medical profession you would know that a "stromuhr" is "a rheometer designed to measure the amount and speed of blood flow through an artery."
OK, now what is a "rheometer"?
Speaking of "spelling", fortune tellers can now legally deceive their customers in Annapolis, Maryland.
08. Doctor, Doctor: The London Sunday Times has announced that Ozzie Osbourne will now be health advisor for their paper.
When Willie Nelson heard about it, he cut off his pigtails.
09. Where is Pele when we need him? I hear that the North Korean fussball team doesn't want to use the new type ball because it is "cursed".
Speaking of "cursed", I also hear that futball referees have been attending the "World Cup Cursing Class for Referees" so that they will know when to be offended and when to throw the "offenders" out of the game. (Or "East Enders?"
10. Heart Healthy: Somewhere I read that there is a new wine from the Netherlands called "Choco Vine". You can guess what that tastes like. I think that you could make your own recipe.. just take that half-eaten Valentines Day heart, melt it in a pan, and mix it with some cheap Burgundy wine, stick it in a wine glass, and drink it to get all the goodness of red wine combined with chocolate.
11. New Terrorist Tactic: It has been reported that terrorists are about to change their tactics.. since they are probably running out of idiots who want to self-destruct. The new tactic will be to leave empty boxes here and there... to annoy us.
12. Tim Conway story: Famous funny man, Tim Conway, told this story on NPR the other day. At a party, when he went into the rest room, he decided to wrap himself in toilet paper. After amusing the guests with "mummy" schtick, someone took a polaroid picture of him and pasted it onto his drivers license.
Tim stayed in his toilet paper suit to drive home.. he tried to drive a little fast so that he would be stopped. Sure enough, a State Trooper stopped him and asked for his license. Tim showed him the license with the picture pasted on. The trooper looked at the picture and then at Tim and said: "Ok, you can go, but try to drive a little slower."
This story is a lot like my Social Security monkeys story.. elsewhere within my blogs.
.... See ya!
01. Hope for men everywhere: Ladies, have you noticed that your husband has started to carry a basketball around his waist? Some men (present company excluded of course) develop a little (?) paunch when they reach a certain age. This presents a big problem, because if a man used to have a 30 inch waist, but now, because of good living, measures 46 inches around that same waist, pants no longer fit him and he must either buy suspenders, or give up wearing pants altogether.
Now, there is good news for such men.. as shown in the June 2010 issue of Funny Times magazine, famed cartoonist Mark Parisi has let us see "slant-top pants". What a great idea! The back top of the pants are at what used to be the waist, and the belt area slants down to below the belly area, allowing a "melon carrier" to be fashionable and comfortable once more.
02. Short People again: On Wait Wait Don't Tell Me this week, it was reported that France's Sarkozy has now ordered that all of his bodyguards be shorter than his 5'5" stature. When will this end?
They also mentioned that Napoleon was taller than Monsieur Sarkozy at 5'6" or 5'7". That is a surprize to me.. and probably to all the other people who believed that Nappy was around 5' nothing. Hitler was 5'6". Mussilini was 5'6". Stalin was 5'6". Randy Newman might have been right. (But Charles DeGaulle was 6'5" as was our greatest President: Abraham Lincoln.)
03. The Privileged Class: Prior to Princess Diana's death, she and Fergie were observed poking people in the butt with their umbrellas at the Ascot races. (There is the beginning of a poem there, Brother Joe.)
04. American Pie?: GM recently put out a memo requesting that all employees refrain from calling the Chevrolet "Chevy"... too undignified? There were "Chevy" jars set up.. and whenever anyone said the dreaded word, they had to put a quarter in the jar.
My GM stock is now worth about 3 pennies total. I wonder if it will ever go back up again.
05. Beach buoys? Experts have now concluded that crocodiles surf.
In a related story, reptiles have now been banned from public streets, the beach, the boardwalk, alleys and sidewalks in Ocean City, Maryland.
06. Wedding daze: Rush Limbaugh has hired Elton John to perform at his upcoming wedding. He will be paying him one million dollars.
In a related story, it has been determined that orangutangs in the zoo get a bigger kick out of watching humans than humans get watching them.
07. Spelling: A young lady has won the National Spelling Bee. The word that won her the prize was "stromuhr"... my German analysis says this relates to "stream clock".. now what the hell is that? I guess if you are in the medical profession you would know that a "stromuhr" is "a rheometer designed to measure the amount and speed of blood flow through an artery."
OK, now what is a "rheometer"?
Speaking of "spelling", fortune tellers can now legally deceive their customers in Annapolis, Maryland.
08. Doctor, Doctor: The London Sunday Times has announced that Ozzie Osbourne will now be health advisor for their paper.
When Willie Nelson heard about it, he cut off his pigtails.
09. Where is Pele when we need him? I hear that the North Korean fussball team doesn't want to use the new type ball because it is "cursed".
Speaking of "cursed", I also hear that futball referees have been attending the "World Cup Cursing Class for Referees" so that they will know when to be offended and when to throw the "offenders" out of the game. (Or "East Enders?"
10. Heart Healthy: Somewhere I read that there is a new wine from the Netherlands called "Choco Vine". You can guess what that tastes like. I think that you could make your own recipe.. just take that half-eaten Valentines Day heart, melt it in a pan, and mix it with some cheap Burgundy wine, stick it in a wine glass, and drink it to get all the goodness of red wine combined with chocolate.
11. New Terrorist Tactic: It has been reported that terrorists are about to change their tactics.. since they are probably running out of idiots who want to self-destruct. The new tactic will be to leave empty boxes here and there... to annoy us.
12. Tim Conway story: Famous funny man, Tim Conway, told this story on NPR the other day. At a party, when he went into the rest room, he decided to wrap himself in toilet paper. After amusing the guests with "mummy" schtick, someone took a polaroid picture of him and pasted it onto his drivers license.
Tim stayed in his toilet paper suit to drive home.. he tried to drive a little fast so that he would be stopped. Sure enough, a State Trooper stopped him and asked for his license. Tim showed him the license with the picture pasted on. The trooper looked at the picture and then at Tim and said: "Ok, you can go, but try to drive a little slower."
This story is a lot like my Social Security monkeys story.. elsewhere within my blogs.
.... See ya!
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