I just love reading and listening to news and current events, not for their overwhelming truthfulness but for their misleading and sometimes stupid inaccuracies. Once upon a time the news was reported by actual journalists who dug up the information and submitted it to highly capable editors to keep things as accurate as possible. Unfortunately, these days we have a huge selection of news readers and talking heads with nice hair, big boobs, all handsome and beautiful, who all get their stories as reported to them by the general use wire services. They’re lucky if they can pronounce some of the words properly. Here are a few of my favorite headlines that are both ridiculous and ludicrous.
LARGER KANGAROOS LEAP FURTHER, RESEARCHERS FIND
ALCOHOL ADS PROMOTE DRINKING
CHILDS DEATH RUINS COUPLE’S HOLIDAY
QUEEN MARY HAVING BOTTOM SCRAPED
ILLITERATE? WRITE TODAY FOR FREE HELP
SURVEY FINDS DIRTIER SUBWAYS FTER CLEANING JOBS WERE CUT
SCIENTISTS SEE QUAKES IN L. A. FUTURE
MAN SHOOTS NEIGHBOR WITH MACHETE
I think these headlines have helped make my point. Pay close attention to all of those alleged reporters as you watch their multitude of news programs and opinion pieces!
I’ve been trying for days to post something but these damn storms are screwing up almost everything. Our power and internet returned today after 24 hours of silence and I wanted to post before the next catastrophe arrives.
*****
It feels good to be back to some semblance of normalcy. My first post-op inspection revealed my poor fractured ankle is on the mend. The doctor assures me that only five more weeks of a walker and wheelchair and I should be good to go. That news eases the pressure a little and makes getting back to this blog a little easier. I’ll be happy to provide a few limericks today to make you smile as little.
I’ve had more time to contemplate things and myself over the last few years than I ever thought I would have. Many years as a workaholic kept me running at an insane pace leaving very little time for self-evaluation and concerns of conforming to meet the expectations of others. As busy and crazy as my life was at the time, I always looked for a way to separate myself from the crowd. It was done without a lot of thought, and I paid a price for all of my more stupid decisions. I always felt that I had to be different and regardless of the consequences I pursued that end. Overall, it was worth doing because I learned a lot about myself and about many of my closest family and friends, they gave me a steady drumbeat for most of my life of “your being weird” or “get with the program”. One of the phrases I hated the most was “That’s the way we’ve always done it.” That was like “fingernails on a blackboard” for me. For you youngsters, check with your parents if you want to know what a blackboard is. I’ve spent the last few weeks, bedridden with a fractured ankle with plenty of time to reflect on things. I must be doing and saying something right because my ever-present bodyguard, my cat Lucy, has been agreeing with me on everything. I thought in fairness I would search out a second opinion and who better to ask than my favorite smartass, Samuel Clemens aka Mark Twain.
Mark Twain (1835-1910)
“Your conscience is a nuisance. A conscience is like a child. If you pet it and play with it and let it have everything that it wants, it becomes spoiled and intrudes on all of your amusements and griefs. Treat your conscience as you would anything else. When it is rebellious, spank it – be severe with it, argue with it, prevent it from coming to play with you at all hours, and you will secure a good conscience; that is to say, a properly trained one. A spoiled one simply destroys all the pleasure in life. I think I have reduced mine to order. At least, I haven’t heard from it for some time. Perhaps I have killed it from over severity,”
Being stuck in this house and this bed is driving me crazier than usual. Now that the Cov-19 has come and gone I still have a twenty-pound cast on my leg. I’m still limited by some door sizes which are too small for this freaking wheelchair to get through. Let me apologize, I immediately start to whine and feel sorry for myself when things aren’t going my way. It’s just human nature I suppose. I decided I would find a few items of trivia to help breakup your day. These are a mish-mosh of items collected totally at random. I hope you enjoy them.
An Egyptian papyrus, dated at approximately 1850 B.C., gives us the earliest record of a method to prevent pregnancies. It required putting into the vagina a concoction of honey, soda, crocodile excrement, and some sort of gummy substance.
Between the mid-1860’s and 1883, the bison population in North America was reduced from an estimated 13 million to a few hundred.
Not a single bank existed anywhere in the thirteen colonies before the American Revolution. Anyone needing money had to borrow from an individual.
After twenty years as a faithful unpaid servant of the Duke of Windsor, Walter Monckton was rewarded with a cigarette case on which his name was engraved – and misspelled.
In the seventeenth century, and principally during the period of the Thirty Years War, approximately sixty million people in Europe died from smallpox.
A conventional sign of virginity in Tudor England was a high exposed bosom and a sleeve full to the wrists.
If all of the water vapor in the Earth’s atmosphere were condensed at the same time, there would be enough water to cover the United States (including Alaska and Hawaii) with twenty-five feet of water.
The British erected in London’s Trafalgar Square a statue of U.S President George Washington, whose armies overthrew British rule in the colonies.
When John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, it was not a federal felony to kill a President of the United States.
For fear he might conceal a joke in it was one reason why Benjamin Franklin was not entrusted by his peers with the assignment of writing the Declaration of Independence.
I haven’t been posting much in recent weeks due in part to my broken ankle and my inability to walk. I won’t drag this out because other people’s medical problems are truly uninteresting to most everyone else. Here is my short version of events.
Ankle Surgery – 2 days in hospital
Returned home to discover my better-half diagnosed with Covid-19
2d day I was also found to be positive for Covid-19
A total of 12 days of isolation for us both accompanied by all of the fun Covid symptoms.
Now that Covid-19 has been dealt with we can once again try to get back to some kind of normal.
Thats the extent of my whining, bitching, and complaining about this run of bad luck. I’m still not very mobile but on the bright side, in four or five more weeks I should be back to what I once thought was normal. Hopefully my blogging will increase as well.
Since I decided to reduce my posting to three days a week thing have gotten even more screwed up. I just spent two glorious days in the Southern Maine Medical Center for surgery on my ankle. I was walking around my home, minding my own business, when I took a step from a carpeted room to the hardwood floor of the living room. Tip #1: Never wear thick cotton socks on hardwood floors. I went down hard after sliding on the floor and absolutely crushed my ankle. The surgery lasted a couple of hours and now I’m screwed for the next 6-8 weeks.
The two days in the hospital were exactly as you’d suspect; they were the worst. Uncomfortable beds, questionable food, and not just a few condescending staff members. I was my fun-loving self except for a few profane outbursts that frightened a few of the more sensitive caregivers. One exceptional nurse stood out from the others. She was everything you could hope for, and I wish there were many more like her. A big thanks to Heather for her handling of a big hard-to-get-along-with ape like me under really crappy circumstances. She did herself proud.
Needless to say, my blogging will be sporadic at best until the wheelchair arrives.
Now that the Superbowl has come and gone we can all start living our normal lives again. Congrats to the Chiefs for pulling out a lucky win which I really didn’t care about anyway. A special thanks to Rhianna who is so hot I think I burned myself adjusting the volume knob. It’s nice to see a superstar showcasing her music instead of her body. It was a pleasant surprise. It’s the first Super Bowl half-time show I’ve ever watched from start to finish. She did herself proud and “Oh Yeah” . . . she’s also worth over a billion dollars. OMFG
Today I’ll be staying with a Sports theme, which will help to wean me off sports until baseball season gets started. I like baseball better than football, but their games are utterly boring to watch. I’ll just check the updated scores on Google and then watch the recaps on Facebook. No nasty comments please, I realize I’m a lazy fan but once again I.D.C. (I don’t care).
Did you know that the sport of dodgeball has been banned by public schools in six U.S. states?
The first recorded game of handball was played in the year 1427. That’s the first written mention of a game involving a ball being hit by hand against a wall.
Did you know that the smallest NBA player ever was Tyrone Bogues. He stood 5 feet, 3 inches tall and played for 10 years with the Charlotte Hornets.
After soccer, volleyball is the world’s second most played sport. An estimated 46 million Americans, and more than 800 million people worldwide, play volleyball at least weekly.
The year 688 B.C. was when boxing first became an Olympic sport. It has been part of the modern Olympics since 1904 with women boxers competing for the first time at the 2012 Olympics in London.
The square boxing platform is called a “ring” because in the ancient Greek and Roman Olympics the combatants met in a circular ring. They’ve been known as “rings” ever since.
Did you know that the world record for longest time aloft of a successfully caught boomerang was 3 minute and 49 seconds.
Early forms of baseball allowed throwing the ball at a runner for an out and pitching underhanded. Balls caught on one bounce were considered outs.
President Theodore Roosevelt is credited with instituting the forward pass rule in football. He demanded a change to the rules in 1905, after 18 players were killed and 159 injured that year. The forward pass was intended to open up the game and minimize the chaotic dog piles associated with lateral passes. The rule was officially adopted in 1906.
The Nerf football was invented by Fred Cox, a kicker for the Minnesota Vikings. He came up with the idea of a soft foam football while playing in the NFL. He still earns royalties on every Nerf football sold.
Today’s history lesson contains a few unusual occurrences as recorded by European media during the last 100 years. They are quirky and strange but nonetheless true. After reading some of these you can understand how we Americans are at times a bit bizarre as well. We get it honestly from many previous generations from the Continent.
On April 14, 1930, the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky shot himself. In his suicide note he said, “I do not recommend it for others.”
In 1931 the Spanish tennis player Lily de Alvarez Shop the tennis world when she appeared at Wimbledon wearing a divided skirt (culottes), the forerunner of shorts.
On October 23, 1933, a temperature inversion trapped fog and smog over London, obliterating the sun and causing total darkness at midday.
On December 24, 1935, the death of the avant-garde Austrian composer Alban Berg from an insect bite was reported.
In 1936 King Edward VIII once avoided what he thought might be an awkward interview with his private secretary by jumping out of a window of Buckingham palace and running away to hide in the garden.
On July 21, 1937, at six o’clock in the evening, all BBC transmitters and post office wireless telegraph and wireless telephone stations in the British Isles closedown for 2 minutes, to coincide with the funeral of Guglielmo Marconi the inventor of the radio.
On June 1, 1938, the Hungarian playwright Odon von Horvath, who had lived in fear of being struck by lightning all of his life, was killed in Paris when a branch fell on his head during a thunderstorm.
In 1939 a patent application was lodged for the “Wind Bag”, designed for receiving and storing gas formed by the digestion of foods. A tube linked the rectum led to a collection chamber, while the device was held in place under one’s clothes by a belt.
In 1940 during the height of the German spy scare, a vicar’s daughter in Winchester reported the British officer billeted with them to the authorities on the grounds of his suspiciously foreign behavior. The man had failed to flush the toilet.
On July 23, 1943, Eric Brown, blew up his paralyzed father by attaching a landmine to his wheelchair. He later explained to the court that he had not liked his father’s attitude. Brown was eventually declared insane.
I’ve posted about many odd and strange things that have taken place in the United States, and I think it’s only fair that these postings today give our European forefathers credit for some of their weirdness.
It’s time for me to try and convince you non-limerick lovers that they can be something other than lewd and bawdy. They’re fun to create and even more fun to read when written by members of the younger generations. Here are a few written by and for children. Enjoy!
There once was a young chap from Eugene.
Who grew so abnormally lean,
And flat and compressed
That his back met his chest,
And, viewed sideways, he couldn’t be seen!
😗😗😗
A sea serpent saw a big tanker.
Bit a hole in its side and then sank her.
He swallowed the crew
In a minute or two,
And then picked his teeth with the anchor.
😊😊😊
There was a young bather from Bewes,
Who reclined on the banks of the Ouse.
His radio blared,
And passers-by stared,
For all he had on was the news!
🙃🙃🙃
There are men in the village of Erith
Whom nobody seeth or heareth.
They spend hours afloat
In a flat-bottomed boat,
Which nobody roweth or steereth.
🤩🤩🤩
And here’s one final extra limerick for a nurse I once knew.
Believe me, this limerick is understating her illness. LOL
People love coming up with odd names or nicknames for just about everything. Even if a real name already exists, someone will attempt to create a nickname for it. I remember one from my childhood that was used to replace the term “bad breath” and it was “doggie breath”. We were stupid kids but never passed up an opportunity to create what would be considered a wise-ass replacement name. “Tubby’ was the skinny kid, “Slim” was the fat kid, and “brainiac” was the dumb ass. Why we felt the need to change the names of things that don’t need to be changed, who knows. Here are a few examples from history to further make my point without answering the big question, “Why do we do it?”.
The U.S. nickname “Uncle Sam” was derived from Uncle Sam Wilson, a meat inspector in Troy New York. During the war of 1812, Wilson’s “U.S.” stamped on meat barrels prepared for the U.S. Army was interpreted by some workmen to stand for their boss, “Uncle Sam” and the legend grew. (In newspaper cartoons during the Civil War, the figure of Uncle Sam took on the appearance of President Lincoln.)
During his career, Vladimir Ilyich Ulanov employed at least 150 pseudonyms. The best-known was Lenin. (1870-1924).
The most common name in the world is neither Ching nor John. It’s Muhammad.
The original name for the United Nations was “Associated Powers”. Prime Minister Winston Churchill affected the change to “United Nations” by quoting Lord Byron to President Roosevelt.
Millions of pounds recorded the, and anew.
Their children’s lips shall echo them, and say –
Here, where the sword united nations drew,
Our countrymen were worrying on that day!
And this is much, and all which will not pass away.”
Natives of Papua, New Guinea, who deposit their money in the bank at Port Moresby don’t get numbered accounts. Instead, they are identified by the names of fish and birds and other natural objects. One bank customer is called “sawfish” and another “hornbill”. Each depositor keeps his symbol secret.
The male Mayan Indian would change his name twice as he was growing up. His original name was linked with the date he was born. He would get a new name, describing a personal feature, when he was initiated into manhood. On marrying, he would take on his formal name.
A book of maps is called an atlas because the innovative 16th-century Flemish geographer Gerard S. Mercator’s books of maps detailing various portions of Europe sported on its cover a picture of the Greek titan Atlas holding the world on his shoulders – and thus this book became known as an atlas.
When Adolf Hitler was in charge in Germany, policemen and farmers were not allowed to call their horses by the name “Adolf”.
In 1935, “Iran” became the new name for what had been Persia, which was the new name for what had earlier been Iran.
There are an estimated 2.4 million people in the US named Smith, and over 1.8 million named Johnson, and over 1.6 million named Williams or Williamson, and over 1.4 million named Brown, and over 1.3 million named Jones. Keeping up with the Joneses would appear to be easier than keeping up with the Smiths.
As a kid, my given name was John. You can’t get much more boring than just John but that didn’t keep my friends from calling me just that, “Just John”. I had another nickname, “Crazy Legs” but the explanation for that one will remain a deep and dark secret that I’ll take to my grave. LOL
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