I discovered over the years that the older you get the more reminiscing you do and I’m still not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. I’ve always been a believer of worrying about the future not the past and that hasn’t changed a whole lot. I’ll be turning 78 years old in August of this year and I’m amazed. I never thought I’d live this long because of my rough and tumble attitude towards living. As I was reminiscing about my long and somewhat interesting life I wondered, what some of the other people that I read about deal with their aging after the age of 70. I always jokingly told anyone who’d listen that after 70 I would retire, sit on my porch with a drink, and smoke as much weed as I could get my hands on until I passed on. Little did I know that I’d be buying my cannabis at a convenience store in gummy form. One of life’s many miracles. I thought a little reflection on my current lifestyle should be matched against some of our more famous or infamous celebrities.
Age 70
Socrates is condemned to die for corrupting the minds of Athenian youth.
Me: I made dozens of bottles of wine, and then spent a few months drinking them.
Age 71
Nelson Mandela was released from a South African prison, after 20 years of incarceration.
Me: Completed a few graphic paintings of scantily clad buxom young women. Then I drank some more wine and sat and looked at them. And yes, I still do.
Age 72
The Marquis de Sade takes a new, 15-year-old lover.
Me: I looked for a 15-year-old lover but forgot why.
Page 73
Walt Stack completes the Ironman Triathlon in 26 hours, 20 minutes.
Me: I did 1000 steps in one day, and my faithful Fit Bit was so amazed it exploded.
Age 74
Albert Einstein announces his unified field theory (but it didn’t hold up).
Me: Drank more wine, contemplated some of my erotic paintings, and worked hard trying to remember the names of the models.
Age 75
Fanny Garrison Villard founds the Women’s Peace Society.
Me: I founded and celebrated the Maine chapter of the Jack Daniels Fan Club. I also considered making a Hag to their distillery in Tennessee.
Age 76
Charles Foster Kane, of Citizen Kane, whispers his immortal, confounding clue, “Rosebud”.
Me: I decided after rereading Citizen Kane that I needed a lot more Jack Daniels. It’s the only way to defend myself against the boredom of Orson Welles and his writings. Little did he know I once had a fat little gerbil named Orson who never really bored me at all.
Age 77
Grandma Moses takes up painting in a serious manner.
Me: After 16 years of my so-called retirement, I bought a lot more weed and a case of a really good Chardonnay in preparation for the start of our three grandson’s 2024 Little League debuts.
Do you own a cowboy hat or other articles of western clothing. The American Old West has fans around the globe as reflected in thousands of Japanese cowboys who live for the fantasy. I was a big fan at an early age when I received my first two-gun cap pistol rig. When the novelty of that wore off, I was pretty much finished with my desire to be a cowboy, so I moved on to wanting to be a professional baseball player and later still a first-class skirt chaser. I’m not wearing a cowboy hat, boots, or assless chaps but I still can offer a few limericks from the Old West.
After my raucous celebration of Earth Day, I thought a little humor would improve my morning. It’s only right that if I’m having a good morning, I should pass along some of that goodness to you. Here’s a short joke to start things off.
Q. What are the three words men hate to hear during sex? “Are you done?”
Q. What are the three words women hate to hear during sex? “Honey, I’m home.”
I thoroughly enjoyed this joke which made me laugh out loud when I read it. Who doesn’t love sheep?
🐏🐏🐏
A new farmer buys several sheep hoping to breed them. After several weeks he notices that none of the sheep are getting pregnant and calls a local vet for some help. The vet tells him that he should try artificial insemination. The farmer doesn’t have the slightest idea what that means but, not wanting to display his ignorance, only asks the vet how he will know when the sheep are pregnant. The vet tells him that they will stop standing around and will lay down and wallow in the grass when they are pregnant. The farmer hangs up and gives it some thought. He comes to the conclusion that artificial insemination means he has to impregnate the sheep. So, he loads the sheep into the back of his truck, drives them out into the woods, screws them all, brings them back and goes to bed.
In the morning, he wakes up and looks out at the sheep. Seeing as they are all still standing around, he deduces that the first try didn’t take and again loads them into the truck. He drives them out to the woods, screws each sheep twice for good measure, brings them back home and goes to bed.
The next morning, he wakes to find the sheep still standing around. Out of frustration he again proceeds to load them up and drive them out to the woods. He spends all day sheep screwing, and upon returning home falls totally exhausted into bed.
Morning arrives and he can’t even raise himself from the bed to look at the sheep. He asks his wife to look out and tell him if any of the sheep are lying in the grass.
“No”, she says, “they’re all in the truck and one of them is beeping the horn.”
Well yesterday was when the ever-so-lame Earth Day was celebrated. I’ve never celebrated this day the same way I don’t recognize or celebrate Kwanza. All of you so-called “Greenies” out there can get as excited as you’d like but not me. My concern for the environment is ongoing every day and not just on one day. Many people are truly “Green” but they’re in the minority. The majority of citizens when polled all love Earth Day but ask them again a week later. They aren’t quite that serious about it as they’d like everyone to believe. It’s become a social stigma not to beat the environmental drum.
This is a partial repost from April of 2013 to show that my opinions remain unchanged. Here are a few facts about how Earth Day was started and by the POS who was responsible. Read and learn you “Green” fools about one of your demi-gods who cared more for the planet than the life of an innocent women.
I’ve been around since the inception of Earth Day by Ira Einhorn and his half-assed hippy movement and while some of the initial ideas were valid concerning abuses of the environment it has now evolved into a semi-religious movement with goals and political aims that go way too far and are harming the country. Everything green becomes more important than life itself. The movement has no respect about another person’s property rights, their jobs, or the devastating effect many of the stupid EPA laws have had on unsuspecting citizens and businesses.
As in any political movement you must look at the leader for his ideas and credibility. Einhorn to me is just a stone-cold killer who thinks the laws of society don’t apply to him.
Ira Samuel Einhorn, a.k.a. “The Unicorn Killer” (born May 15, 1940), is a convicted murderer, and American activist of the 1960s and 1970s. He is now serving a life sentence for the 1977 murder of Holly Maddux.
How many Earth Days has “Holly Maddux” missed since she was beaten to death by Einhorn, stuffed into a trunk, and stuck in a closet. It took more than twenty years to find, arrest, return him to this country, and convict him.
To quote the murderer: “Underlying the themes of Earth Day is a call for mankind to align itself with nature, and against itself, enlisting human beings to take part in a battle that seeks to place humanity under the control of an enlightened elite, one that values the interests of nature above that of people.
If you’re interested and want more information about Einhorn and Earth Day, just click here to learn more about the case:
I decided today to prove once and for all that this blog is fair in the things that it posts. I’m a sports fan when it comes to baseball (Pittsburg Pirates), and I’ve been accused on a couple of occasions that I’m biased towards the teams I like and not so much against the teams I dislike. I know that’s a shock for all of you since none of you would ever do things like that, but I do. Today I’m going to push back a little by telling you a story about one of the Pittsburgh Pirate’s more infamous players and how he earned that reputation. This post is all about Dock Ellis and his famous or infamous no-hitter.
Ellis was, as major league pitchers go, a bit of an odd duck. He wore hair curlers during pregame warm-ups, and according to the baseball records he only stopped when the commissioner of baseball demanded that he do so. In 1974, while pitching against the Cincinnati Reds he hoped to motivate his team by taking aim at the other team’s players – literally. In the first inning alone, he beaned three players (including Pete Rose) before throwing a pitch behind the Hall of Fame catcher Johnny Bench’s head, after which he was promptly removed from the game.
On July 12, 1970, the Pirates had just finished a two-game series in San Francisco and were enroute to San Diego. Since it wasn’t Ellise’s turn to pitch, he spent the day in Los Angeles with some friends, relaxing and dropping acid (LSD). Due to scheduling changes the Pirates had an unscheduled doubleheader in San Diego that afternoon when an extra game was added. Ellis was expected to take the mound and he rushed to catch a shuttle and make it to the ballpark just in time for his game. Through the nine innings he pitched, he struck out six batters, walked eight, but gave up no hits and won 2-0 (a rare and unusual no-hitter). The following quote was later offered up by Ellis in a book where celebrities tell their real-life stories of addiction and recovery. Here’s the quote.
“I can only remember bits and pieces of the game, I was psyched, I had a feeling of euphoria. I was zeroed in on the catcher’s glove, but I didn’t hit the glove too much. I remember hitting a couple of batters, and the bases were loaded two or three times. The ball was small sometimes, the ball was large sometimes, sometimes I saw the catcher, sometimes I didn’t. Sometimes, I tried to stare the batters down and throw while I was looking at them. I started having a crazy idea in the fourth inning that Richard Nixon was the home plate umpire, and once I thought I was pitching a baseball to Jimi Hendrix, who to me was holding a guitar and swinging it over the plate. They say I had about 3 or 4 fielding chances. I remember diving out of the way of the ball I thought was a line drive. I jumped, but the ball wasn’t hit hard and never reached me.”
Dock retired from Major league baseball after the 1979 season and turned over a new leaf. He became a drug addiction counselor and passed away in December of 2008 at the age of 63.
I’ve made it clear over the years that I’m a huge fan of Isaac Asimov. I’ve tried to read as many of his writings as I could find, and his limericks are outstandingly bawdy. He also has another talent which I really appreciate and that was his ability to collect odd facts. It never ceases to amaze me how diverse his level of knowledge became over the years, and it still fascinates me. It was one of my motivations for starting this blog because there are just so many interesting odd and weird facts available and most of them never see the light of day. This blog is my way of bringing as many of those facts as possible to light so you all can enjoy them. Today’s topic of discussion will be the world of entertainment. Where else could you find the appropriate amount of weirdness that Asimov so religiously documented. Here we go.
Not until 1959 was a play by a black woman produced on Broadway. 29-year-old Lorraine Hansberry’s starred in, A Raisin in the Sun, which concerned the problems (comic and serious) of a black family in modern day America. It was highly successful and eventually made into a motion picture.
The great French actress Sarah Bernhardt was obsessed with death. As a teenager, she made frequent visits to the Paris morgue to look at corpses of derelicts dragged up from the Seine, and she begged her mother to buy her a pretty rosewood coffin with white satin lining. The coffin became part of the Bernhardt legend. Occasionally, she slept in it, and eventually she was buried in it when she died at the age of 79.
A U.S. television network’s dramatic representation of the trial of Nazi judges was sponsored by the natural gas industry. The word “gas” was excised from the script, but a few “gases” slipped by the censors; those had to be blipped before the program was aired.
During the pre-Broadway tour of the 1936 musical Red, Hot and Blue, Cole Porter had to do a lot of rewriting. Rather than hire a professional stenographer to take his dictations and transcribe the changes, he used the services of one of the stars of the show, Ethel Merman. Before she went into show business, Ms. Merman had been a secretary. Porter described her as “among the best stenographers I’ve ever had.”
A tambourinelike instrument used in old time minstrel shows was made from the jawbone of a horse or ass, from which the instrument got its name, “Bones.” When the bone was thoroughly dried, the teeth were so loose they rattled and produced sounds as loud as a castanet. Every minstrel troupe had a “Mr. Bones.”
Rin Tin Tin, for years the most famous dog in the world, was born to a war-dog mother in a German trench in France during World War I. Deserted when the Germans retreated, the German-shepherd puppy was found by an American officer who just happened to be a police dog-trainer from California. He trained Rin Tin Tin when they returned home. The dog was so intelligent he came to the notice of Warner Brothers Studios, which signed him up for what turned out to be a long career as one of the biggest box office draws of the silent screen era.
I just love these hidden stories and facts and envy Azimov’s ability to research and publish all of them. I’m happy to share them with you and I hope you enjoyed them.
To all of the baseball lovers out there, here’s a little trivia that goes back seventy-two years. It’s nice to know that the tradition of the game remains as frustrating and fascinating as ever.
In baseball there is no clock. A pro basketball game lasts 48 minutes while hockey and football games last 60 minutes. But as the old saying goes, a baseball game (or the inning) isn’t over until the final out. A game on May 21, 1952, between the Cincinnati Reds and the Brooklyn Dodgers proved the old saying true.
The first half-inning had lasted one hour. Twenty-one batters had gotten hits and seven walks, and two batters had been hit by a pitched ball. Fifteen runs had scored, and three men were left on base. The following day the New York Times printed some of the records the Brooklyn team had broken in that that first-half inning:
Most runs scored in one inning (15)
Most runs scored in the first inning (15)
Most runs scored with two outs (12)
Most batters to bat in one inning (21)
Most batters to reach base safely in a row (19)
This last record may be the most amazing of all. Only the first batter and the last had not gotten on base safely. The 19 batters in between had all made it – even the man who was put out on the basepaths for the second out. The Times confessed it couldn’t be sure that 19 batters in a row was a record, but if any major league team ever did better, no one remembers the occasion.
When I started this blog many years ago it took me a while to come up with a proper name. Once the decision was made to call it “every useless thing” I was hooked into providing as many weird and unusual facts as I could find. I’ve created a rather large library of totally useless information and it’s my pride and joy. If I’ve calculated properly, I have enough facts and trivia to continue this blog for 10 more years and never repeat the same item twice. I get to find them and post them, and unfortunately you get to read them. Here we go . . .
Reese Witherspoon has two pet donkeys.
Keanu Reeves was born in Lebanon.
The iconic mask used in the 1978 horror film Halloween was a plastic Captain Kirk mask from Star Trek, spray-painted white and with its eyeholes enlarged.
The S. S. Minnow of Gilligan’s Island fame was named after former chairman of the FCC, Newton Minnow, who considered television to be a “vast wasteland.
The maiden name of Betty rubble from the Flintstones show was Betty Jean McBricker.
To complete the pair, the maiden name of Wilma Flintstone was Wilma Slaghoopel.
In the United States, the last year that somebody officially died of “old age” was 1951 That’s the last year “old age” was listed on death certificates. It’s now referred to as death by “natural causes.”
Robert Williams is the first known person to be killed by a robot. He worked at a Ford automobile factory and was struck in the head by a robot in 1979.
Amalie Auguste Melitta Benz was the un-famous inventor of the coffee filter.
The first mechanically sliced loaf of bread was sold under the famous Wonder Bread brand in 1930.
I’m feeling the need for some limericks today. I recently came across a book that I picked up at an on-line thrift bookstore and it was a former Boise Public Library book with a date of 2015. It’s a book of limericks written by children for children and some of them are priceless. With that in mind here are four that I particularly liked. I hope you will too.
I’ve had a relationship for more than fifty years with the criminal justice system in this country. Starting as a cop, then a private investigator, a corporate Loss Prevention specialist, and eventually working for the State of Maine in the Judicial Branch. I’m fascinated with all aspects of the profession which includes collecting odd bits of trivia which I’ll share with you today.
The world’s first police detective was Eugene Françoise Vidocq. The Frenchman founded the plainclothes civil police unit, the Brigade de la se Surete, in 1812.
C. Auguste Dupin was the world’s first fictional police detective. Edgar Allen Poe used Eugene François Vidocq as a model for his character C. Auguste Dupin in the 1841 short story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” which is considered to be the world’s first detective story.
The act of hanging, drawing, and quartering was not abolished in England until 1870.
Sheraton Hope and Ormond Sacker were the original names of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous crime-fighting duo, Sherlock Homes and Dr. John Watson. They first appeared in a novel called “A Tangled Skein.” Doyle ultimately changed the novel’s title to “A Study in Scarlet” when it was officially published in 1887.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has sold more books than J.K. Rowling and J.R.R. Tolkien combined.
One in four convicts ultimately exonerated by DNA evidence confessed or pled guilty to crimes they did not commit.
Until 1998 it was a valid defense against rape or sexual battery in Mississippi to claim that the female victim was not chaste in character.
From the 11th to the 18th centuries criminals were executed in southeast Asia by being crushed by an elephant.
A real-life member of Scotland Yard, Inspector Charles Frederick Field, was friends with author Charles Dickens and introduced Dickens to many of London’s criminal haunts. Dickens later featured the inspector in his 1851 short story “On Duty with Inspector Field.”
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