Growing up I was expected to play as much sports as possible by my ever so athletic father. I completed one year of varsity basketball which I absolutely hated and two years of football which ended with my being unconscious on the sidelines after being drilled by a rather large and muscular defensive player. Baseball was always my main thing, and I began playing at seven years of age and played until I went off to college. Unfortunately for me the college I attended had no baseball team and that really pissed me off as well. I had many coaches throughout the years and was required to sit and listen to endless “pep talks” prior to our games and endless criticisms if and when we lost. There were only one or two coaches who actually took the time to create and deliver a pep talk that accomplished what they wanted. A few others believed in blatant terrorism and threats to help motivate us to a victory. Today’s post is a short story about some real coaches with real methods that showed real results.
⚾⚾⚾ 🏈🏈🏈
Coaches use all kinds of psychology to lift the spirits of their players. Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne once refused to sit with his team in the second half of a game. He sat up in the stands, which got the team so fired up they went out onto the field and wonthe game.
One of the most unusual pep talks was delivered by coach Dana X. Bible during the Indiana-Nebraska football game of 1936. Nebraska was losing, 9-0, at halftime. Coach Bible looked scornfully around the dressing room and berated the players unmercifully. “You don’t have the desire to win!” he thundered. “You don’t have the courage to fight back!” Then he said, “The first eleven players who go out that door will start the second half and the rest of you will sit on the bench.” Immediately, the fired-up team jumped to their feet trying to quickly reach the door. But Bible got there first and barred the way. “That’s not good enough,” he snarled. “You’re not ready to win.” A slugging match followed with teammates who really liked each other pushing and shoving, and then scrambling for the door. It became a free-for-all but finally, eleven players managed to squirm through. Bible immediately put those eleven on the field and they beat Indiana 14-9.
I have upon occasion been called a sarcastic smartass. Truth be told, I’ve been called that on many occasions by many people and I wear that mantle with pride. It probably will explain this post that concerns two of my all-time favorite people, Oscar Wilde and Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), two of the most famous smartasses in the world. History calls them humorists, rascals, and intellectuals but that’s just history being kind. They took biting humor and sarcasm to new levels and did it in such a way as to make people love and respect them. Fortunately, I don’t have to worry about that. Here’s a little personal information on Oscar with a collection of his quotes.
Oscar Fingal O’Flaherty Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900) was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s.
“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
“Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.”
“I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying.”
“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
“If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.”
“It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.”
“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”
“You can never be overdressed or overeducated.”
“Never love anyone who treats you like you’re ordinary.”
Now for a little taste of Mark Twain. He was a good old down-home boy who had the ability to make politicians shiver in their boots and the rest of us to laugh at his humorous way of seeing things.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910), best known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher, and lecturer. He was praised as the “greatest humorist the United States has produced”. Here a a few pearls of wisdom from Mark.
“The best way to cheer yourself up is to try to cheer somebody else up.”
“A person who won’t read has no advantage over one who can’t read.”
“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”
“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”
“The secret of getting ahead is getting started.”
“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.”
“Humor is mankind’s greatest blessing.”
“Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.”
Back in my college days when I thought I knew everything but really didn’t, I had a professor once ask me what person living or dead would I like to sit down and have a meaningful conversation with. I can’t remember my answer but I’m sure it was stupid and meaningless because at that time I was totally clueless. If I could communicate with him now these two gentlemen would be my first and second choices. Better yet, I’d love to have them both sitting with me in a corner of a dark quiet pub sharing a bottle of brandy or bourbon and puffing on a cigar to discuss the state of the world or anything else they’d like to tell me.
I’m a bit of a history lover but that usually involves old history like the Romans, Egyptians, and the Greeks. Today I thought I’d go into the past back to 1940. That’s well before my time and I’m pretty sure there aren’t many people left who were born in 1940. I’m also sure you’ve heard many people say it was always better back in “the good old days.”, so let’s find out.
The top three radio shows of 1940 were The Adventures of Ellery Queen, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, and Fibber McGee and Molly. I wonder if they were appreciated by their audience as much as some of the TV shows are today.
1940 was also the first and only year for the production of the Mercury 8, a new model car. Also available was the Chevrolet Special Deluxe Sport Sedan, the new Ford V-8, and the Buick Super Model 51 Four-Door Sedan.
It was the year of the World’s Fair held at Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in New York and was the largest world’s fair at that time.
Because of the war there were shortages of many things but one of the first new items to return to the stores was a new product, nylon stockings. They went on sale for the first time on May 15, 1940.
The 1940 college football season ended with the University of Minnesota Golden Gophers being named the national champions and Stanford in second place. The Heisman Trophy winner was Michigan halfback Tom Harmon. In the National Football League, the Chicago Bears defeated the Washington Redskins 73-0 in one of the most one-sided games in professional football history.
Here some facts and figures of 1940. The president of the United States was Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the vice president was John Nance Garner. The population of the United States was 132,122,000, and the average salary for a full-time employee was $1200. per year. The minimum wage per hour was $.30.
On May 15, 1940, the first McDonald’s restaurant is opened in San Bernardino, California by brothers Dick and Mac McDonald.
On January 31, 1940, Ida M. Fuller became the first American citizen to receive a Social Security check. Her first check was for $22.54.
On January 17, 1940, Eleanor Roosevelt publicly endorsed birth control in a statement that she was not against the “planning of children”.
Now let’s get down to the important stuff. Here are the average costs for many of their everyday foodstuffs and we can only wish to have these prices back again. A loaf of bread was $.08, a pound of bacon was $.27, a dozen eggs was $.33, a gallon of milk was $.26, 1 pound of coffee was $.21, gasoline was $.11 per gallon, postage stamps were .03, the average car cost was $990.00, and a single-family home averaged just $2938.00.
Here’s a collection of really stupid headlines I rediscovered recently in my files. It still amazes me how much stuff I forgot I was saving for a rainy day. The more I dig around the more I seem to find. You can thank all of our many educated and skilled editors for their fine jobs in editing these gems.
Amphibious Pitcher Makes Debut
Forecasters Call for Weather on Monday
War Dims Hope for Peace
Death Causes Loneliness, Feeling of Isolation
Kids Make Nutritious Snacks
Statistics Show Teen Pregnancy Drops Off After Age 25
“Lady Jacks” Off to Hot Start in Their Conference
Utah Poison Control Center Reminds Everyone Not to Take Poison
City Unsure Why Sewers Smell
17 Remain Dead in Morgue Shooting Spree
Safety Meeting Ends in Accident
Best Man Left Bleeding After Being Hit by Flying Dildo
Since everyone should be well rested after their Labor Day festivities, I thought I’d reintroduce a Sex Quiz from an unusual joke book published in 1984. It’s a bit difficult but I’m sure all of you will be able to deduce the correct answers (True or False). It’s funny and ridiculous but then so were the 1980’s. Here we go . . . .
🍩🍆🍩
A pubic hair is a wild rabbit.
A fallopian tube is a part inside a television.
A menstrual cycle has three wheels.
Fellatio is an Italian dagger.
Anus is a Latin word denoting a long period of time.
Cunnilingus is a person who can speak four languages.
A condom is an apartment complex.
Masturbate is something used to catch large fish.
A wet dream is dangerous if you sleep under an electric blanket.
A vulva is a Swedish automobile.
A vagina is a medical term used to describe heart trouble.
A clitoris is a type of flower.
KOTEX is a radio station in Dallas, Texas.
Testicles can be found on an octopus.
A rectum is what you are for doing this test. LOL
For those of you who were stumped by the quiz I’ll add a short joke to make you feel better about yourself. If you don’t understand the joke, call a friend.
John was a seventy-seven-year-old man and decided it was time for one last final fling. So, he went out and hired himself a buxom and luscious prostitute for a last night of pleasure. It was a spectacular and pleasurable night, and he slept like a log upon returning home. Three weeks later he felt a growing pressure and pain in his groin and immediately rushed back to the doctor’s office, insisting on an immediate consultation. The doctor examined him thoroughly, then asked a rather personal question. “Have you been with a woman anytime recently?” John smiled proudly and confessed the truth. “Well, said the doctor, you’d better go find her right away, ’cause you’re about to come!”
Everyone looks forward to eventual retirement. As I grew older, I thought I’d planned well but as always, there were problems. Here are a few paragraphs on how I made the transition from employed to retired. A distasteful divorce ruined my initial plans forcing me to start all over from scratch at age fifty. I wasn’t all that concerned because I never thought I’d live long enough to see retirement, but again I was wrong. The “best laid” plans never remain “best laid”. Once I passed the AARP senior citizen mark, I began to realize that I might just make it to retirement, so I’d better get off my ass and get busy, and I did.
I was able to untangle myself from my final job and walked away retired at sixty-two. For almost thirty-eight years my jobs required that I talk to an endless number of people. I was an interviewer, interrogator, investigator, and manager and a rough estimate would be approximately sixteen to eighteen thousand interviews and interrogations. I was sick to death of talking to anyone and promised myself to keep my social life (on-line and off) to an absolute minimum, and I did and still do.
On my first official day of retirement, I poured myself a large glass of champagne, went into my closet and began retiring most of my clothes into a pile in the living room slated for delivery to Goodwill. The first items that went into that pile were every suit I owned but one, every dress shirt I owned but two, and all of my thirty ties, twenty pairs of black socks, sport coats, all pairs of dress shoes but one, and seventeen pairs of dress pants. Anything remotely related to any employer I ever worked for were immediately discarded. My post-retirement wardrobe now currently consists of fifty assorted-t-shirts, ten pairs of jeans, eight pairs of sneakers, ten pairs of sweatpants, and assorted jackets and hoodies. I made it clear to my family that I only wanted outrageous rock group t-shirts for gifts, and they did me proud. I also had earlier upgraded my computer with an external hard drive and stashed away twenty years of information that went into storage for safe keeping. That first night I finished the remainder of the champagne, crawled into bed, performed a stretched out “X” with my body, and breathed the largest sigh of relief you could possibly imagine. I had finally reached the unreachable promised land.
You will all approach retirement differently and I wish you luck. Admittedly my way was a little over-the-top but that’s pretty much how I lived my life so why change now. My computer connects me to the world and my blogging began in 2007 and remains my preferred contact with all of the other humans on this planet.
I thought on this rainy day we should revisit some retro baseball stories. These are two of my favorites and one of the many reasons I love baseball so much. The first story is something that was called The Five-Base Hit. The second is a story about a debt owed to Albert “Chief” Bender, an old-time pitcher. I hope you enjoy them.
Strange things happen in professional baseball, but even stranger things can happen in amateur sandlot ball. Harry Hardner was involved in one of the most peculiar plays possible in baseball.
Hardner’s Walnut Street team played on a field in Milwaukee that had no fences. No matter how far the ball was hit, it was in play until the pitcher had it back in his glove. In one game Hardner got a fat pitch and drove it far over the outfielder’s head. Hardner raced around the bags happily.
Just as Hardner crossed the plate, a teammate who was coaching at first base began shouting, “Run to first! “Run to first! The teammate and the opponent’s first baseman noticed that Hardner had failed to touch first on his way around the base paths.
Tired as he was, Hardner took off for first base again just as the ball came in from the outfield. He slid hard into the bag just as the throw arrived. The umpire called him safe. He was given credit for just a single. But his teammates always called it a five-base hit.
⚾⚾⚾⚾⚾
One of baseball’s greatest pitchers was an Indian named Albert “Chief” Bender, who pitched for the Philadelphia Athletics and Phillies. Bender won 208 games in the majors, but his own favorite story concerned a game he lost as a bush-leaguer. In 1901 Bender agreed to pitch his first professional game for the Dillsburg, Pennsylvania, team. He was to be paid five dollars. Even Bender had to laugh when he saw where the game would be played. It was a hayfield, with a cabbage patch in the outfield. Bender himself hit a home run into the cabbage patch, but he lost the game in the 10th inning. Afterward the manager handed the “Chief” $3.20 and said “we don’t have enough money. I’ll give you the rest the next time I see you.” 41 years later the “Chief” was being interviewed by Ed Pollock a reporter for the Philadelphia Bulletin. Bender recited the story and surprise, surprise, a few days later a letter and small canvas bag reached the Bulletin. The letter read in part:
Dear Sir: In going over our records we have an outstanding amount due you from the summer of 1901. Not knowing your whereabouts nor having seen you for all these years, we were unable to remit. The cabbages were harvested and sold later that year, giving us a small surplus. We are enclosing the money reserved for you.
In the canvas bag was a three-cent piece with the date 1864, a two-cent piece, two dimes dated 1875, 23 nickels, and 40 Indian-head pennies. The change added up to a $1.80, the exact amount Bender was owed. But the Dillsburg team was really being generous. The coins were very rare and worth a great deal more than their face value.
Since we’re well into the middle of August already, I feel like I’m on another planet. These changes in the weather patterns are just too weird to try and explain. I’ve lived in Maine almost 24 years and I’ve never seen or experienced summer weather that would require using an electric blanket in July. It’s hard at times to celebrate a summer that we haven’t had yet but I’m sure next year will be just as effing great. With that depressing thought in mind, I feel the need to inject a little humor back into our lives. You’re welcome to come along for the ride if you like.
😁😅😂🤣
There was a man who had insomnia so bad he couldn’t even fall asleep when it was time to wake up.
It was an enormous funeral that was winding its way through the streets of the town, and, in every way, no signs of sorrow had been seen. A bystander, who had been away from the neighborhood for a while, nudged a neighbor. “Who died?” he whispered. “Big Angelo’s girlfriend, said the other.” Big Angelo’s girlfriend? But she was so young! What did she die of?” “Gonorrhea!” “Gonorrhea! But that’s impossible. No one dies of gonorrhea.” “You do when you give it to Big Angelo.”
I sat next to the Duchess at Tea.
It was just as I feared it would be.
Her rumblings abdominal
Were truly phenomenal,
And everyone thought it was me.
A man and a woman met on the beach, they fell in love with each other at first glance, and after three days, were married. The wedding night was just as successful as it could be, but when the woman awoke the following morning, she found her husband dressing. She asked, “Where are you going?” “Darling, we married so quickly I didn’t have a chance to tell you I’m addicted to golf. I’m afraid you’ll rarely see me. She nodded and said, “That’s all right, we married so quickly I forgot to tell you I’m a hooker.” The man smiled and said, “That’s nothing darling. Don’t worry about that because it’s easily corrected. You just need to hold the club like this . . . . “
Chemists are known for synthesizing some marvelous chemicals. There is the story that one synthesized an aphrodisiac for men that was so powerful it had to be swallowed very quickly to avoid getting a stiff neck.
And last but not least a short but interesting story about a visitor to the home of Pablo Picasso. The visitor remarked there were no Picasso’s on the walls. “Don’t you like Picasso paintings?” asked the visitor roguishly.” “Of course, I do,” said Picasso. “I just can’t afford them.”
I consider myself to be an avid reader, but many friends and family consider me an obsessive reader. I admit to reading a lot, but that obsessive description seems a little much. I’ve been an avid reader of just about everything starting at about age 4 and I’ve never lost my love of reading and books. I thought with the advent of the Kindle and the Nook and other electronic reading devices I’d be in heaven. What I didn’t count on was missing the feel of the books in my hands, their smell, turning the pages, and just how contented those actions made me feel. Don’t get me wrong, I love my Kindle and I read it every day but it’s just not the same. Unfortunately for me I gave away a lot of my most favorite books when I bought the Kindle initially. Now I find myself looking to replace many of those books so I can sit on a quiet deck on a summer day and spend time reading my old friends. Today’s blog will be a few historical facts about books. Enjoy.
The art of printing was born with the first printed book, the Gutenberg Bible, and considered by many as the most beautiful book ever produced. 300 copies were printed, nearly 1300 pages each, 42 lines in Latin to the page. The Gutenberg Bibles remain among the most value books in the world.
Charles Darwin believes that the proposed first printing of this book The Origin of Species would be too large: 1250 copies. But the edition was sold out the very first day of its publication.
In 1814, when George Byron’s poem The Corsair was published, 30,000 copies were sold in a single day.
Kepler’s story Somnium, published after his death in 1630, is the first piece of authentic science fiction, as opposed to fantasy, because it was the first to try to describe the lunar surface as it really was.
The first collection of Aesop’s animal fables was put together 200 years after his death and included many that originated long after the Greek slave from Africa had departed this world.
Clement Clarke Moore (1779-1863) – a biblical scholar, professor of Oriental and Greek literature, and compiler of a Greek and Hebrew lexicon – wrote the exquisitely simple and easily remembered “Visit from St. Nicholas”:Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house . . .
“The best moments in reading are when you come across something—a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things—which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.”
everyuselessthing.com 