Who doesn’t use cliches? You probably use one or two every day and don’t even realize it. I once wrote a four-minute speech using nothing but dozens of cliches strung together. I loved the challenge but the thirty people I read it to weren’t the least bit impressed. I really dislike people who can’t take a joke. Anyway, one other thing I love to do is to trace back into history to discover who originally came up with the cliche. Here are a couple just for you.
“By the skin of one’s teeth.”
“By the skin of one’s teeth” specifically is a (slightly misquoted) biblical phrase that means to have suffered “a close shave”.
My bone cleaveth to my skin, and to my flesh, and I am escaped with the skin of my teeth. Job 19:20
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“A chip on one shoulder.”
There is an ancient proverb, “Hew not too high less chips fall in thine eye.” By the late 16th century, this health and safety warning had become something of a challenge, a dare to a fearless woodcutter to look high up without regard to any falling chips of wood.
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“The hair of the dog that bit you.”
The phrase likely originated in the 16th century. Back then, if one was bitten by a mad dog (which was likely to be suffering from rabies), It was accepted medical practice to dress the wound with a burnt hair of the dog, as an antidote. Amazingly, this cure was recommended for dog bites for about 200 years before its efficacy was finally brought into question.
I’ve spent most of my life obeying and enforcing the laws of the land. First, as a cop, and then as a private cop for companies throughout the country. I’ve always believed in what I did and felt proud as I dedicated my time and energy to something bigger than myself. That was ‘yesterday’ and unfortunately ‘today’ it’s become something less noble. I can’t praise our law enforcement officers enough because the job has become almost impossible to do. Between the bleeding-heart liberal judges and the thousands of attorneys doing their level best every day to muddy the waters of what’s right and what’s wrong, it’s no wonder the society is suffering.
Everyone seems to complain that the system is broken but no one knows or even tries to fix it. It’s much easier to just send cops out into the streets knowing that if they make one solitary move or say one solitary thing to a citizen, they’ll be ridiculed or worse within minutes. There are times when it’s justified but all cops don’t deserve that kind of ridicule. Our forefathers are a joke to many people these days, but they saw this coming over three hundred years ago. Read on.
Alexander Hamilton (1757-1804) & James Madison (1751-1836)
“The Federalist Papers”
“It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood, if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is today, can guess what it will be tomorrow.”
Today is the start of a better day than yesterday. Today I’m assured of at least another year before the cancer might return. A good doctor’s report makes for better days ahead. I can stop obsessing over this whole cancer deal until October when I’m due to be scanned again. So, what better way to pass the time than throwing some bad poetry your way. I wrote this many years ago during what I used to call the I-don’t-give-a-shit days. And believe me, I had plenty of them.
❤❤ It’s near in the mist. ❤❤ It watches and waits, as its urges flicker to life. A stroke of the hand, a kiss in the dark, and a seed is spilled near your wife. Some call it desire, others haven’t a clue, I see it near you!
I’m a lover of history, and I’m absolutely crazy about obscure historical trivia facts. I’ve collected quite a few over the years and I’m going to begin today with what I hope will be a number of postings with more of these little tidbits. Enjoy!
“Take this script,” Rudyard Kipling said to the nurse who cared for his firstborn child, “and someday if you are in need of money, you may be able to sell it at a handsome price.” Years later, when the nurse was actually in want, she sold the manuscript of the first Jungle Book and lived in comfort for the rest of her life.
After writing the runaway bestseller Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe was bombarded with hate mail. Out of one package that she received fell the ear of a slave.
The author of the best-known document in the United States, and perhaps in the world, published only one book. Thomas Jefferson’s answers to a set of 23 questions about the American continent, circulated in 1780 by the French emissary François Marbois, appeared as Notes on the State of Virginia.
Walt Whitman was dismissed from his clerical post in the Indian Bureau of the Department of the Interior when the Secretary of the Interior, James Harlan, read a portion of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and deemed it “pernicious poetry”.
Heavyweight boxing champion Gene Tunney lectured on Shakespeare at Yale University.
The electric automobile self-starter, which was perfected in 1911 by Charles F Kettering, made it possible for women to drive without the companion previously needed for cranking the engine.
In the early 1860s, a New York firm offered a prize of $10,000 for a satisfactory substitute for ivory in the manufacture of billiard balls. The prize was won by an American inventor, John Wesley Hyatt, who devised for the purpose what came to be known as celluloid. It was the first synthetic plastic.
Somewhere out there in space, amid all of the junk, is the Hasselblad camera dropped during a spacewalk by the United States astronaut Michael Collins. It will orbit the earth indefinitely.
A manned rocket reaches the moon in less time than it took a stagecoach to travel the length of England.
In 1930, Ellen Church recruited seven other young nurses to work 5000 feet above the Earth. They were the first airline stewardesses, flying on Boeing’s San Francisco to Chicago route, a trip that, in good weather, took 20 hours and made 13 stops.
Ralph Kiner, Pittsburgh Pirates Hall of Fame slugger, was the broadcast voice of the Mets in the 60’s. For all of you baseball fans out there, here are a few of his gems.
“Today is Father’s Day, so to all of you fathers out there, we’d just like to say, Happy Birthday!”
“Solo homers usually come with no one on base.”
“Tony Gwynn was named player of the year for April”
If Casey Stengel were alive today, he’d be spinning in his grave.”
I’ve been trying to keep up with the news out of the Ukraine and Russia but as with any conflict news reports change depending on who’s doing the reporting. The bottom line for me is that Putin has been using many of the tools used against the Russian people by Germany in World War II. Everyone recalls Hitler’s move into Poland by flooding the airwaves with propaganda claiming the Poles were acting against the German people’s best interests. Now I hear that Putin has been beating the old Nazi drum, claiming the Ukraine is a Nazi regime and must be stopped. As I’ve said in previous posts, I think Putin is living in a World War II fantasy land. If he’s a student of Russian history like I assume he is, has he forgotten what happened to Germany when they attacked Russian in World War II. All the games of Hitler’s regime accomplished only one thing, they all ended up dead. An intelligent man should learn from the past, not repeat the past. Here are a few quotes from the World War II era to explain it better.
“A modern dictator with the resources of science at his disposal can easily lead the public on from day to day, destroying all persistency of thought and aim, so that memory is blurred by the multiplicity of daily news and judgment baffled by its perversion.” Winston Churchill
“Propaganda has only one object: to conquer the masses. Every means that furthers the same is good, every means that hinders it is bad,” Joseph Goebbels
“By the skillful and sustained use of propaganda, one can make a people see even heaven as hell or an extremely wretched life as paradise.” Adolf Hitler
“The propagandist operates chiefly by means of the printed word; the agitator operates with the living (spoken) word.” Lenin
“In view of the primitive simplicity of their minds, the masses more easily fall a victim to a big lie than to a little one.” Adolf Hitler
THOSE WHO FAIL TO LEARN FROM HISTORY ARE DOOMED TO REPEAT IT?
Since today is April Fools’ Day . . . HAPPY FOOLS DAY. I know Just how much all of you love celebrities and movies, so I thought some movie trivia might be interesting. Nothing too spectacular, just a few interesting factoids to get your week started.
In The Wizard of Oz, Toto was paid $125.00 a week in salary.
The injuries on Luke Skywalker’s face when he is attacked by the snow monster in The Empire Strikes Back were real.
India’s Bollywood movie industry produces more movies each year that Hollywood.
The 2006 James Bond movie, Casino Royale, was the first Bond movie permitted in China by their censors.
The first interracial kiss in television history happened on Star Trek.
Actor Jim Caviezel was struck by lightning while portraying Jesus in The Passion of the Christ.
Bryan Adams’ famous song “Summer of 69” is named after the sex position, not the year.
Nicolas Cage is named after comic book hero Luke Cage.
The group ZZ Top performed in the movie Back to the Future 3.
Kevin Smith’s iconic movie Clerks was filmed on a budget of less than $28,000.
Sean Connery turned down the role of Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings because he didn’t understand the script.
In the post-apocalyptic classic, The Road Warrior, Mel Gibson’s (Mad Max) had just 16 lines of dialogue.
In the Star Wars Trilogy, George Lucas’s original name for Yoda was Buffy.
The mask that Michael Myers wears in Halloween was actually a white Captain Kirk mask.
Yoda from Star Wars, the cookie monster from Sesame Street, and Miss Piggy from The Muppet Show were all voiced by the same person.
Now that I’ve finished my first two cups of coffee and I’m reasonably awake and alert, I’m trying to decide exactly what I’ll be posting about today. I have many categories to choose from, but I’ve come up with a few things that I found very interesting concerning one of my and your favorite topics – ‘Celebrities’.
The amount of unbelievable interest in celebrities has always boggled my mind. So many people in this country seem to think that because they’re celebrities their lives are totally different from ours. They certainly have more money than most of us, but they also lose their “right to privacy”. So, they have some good things we don’t have and a few things we’d probably never want. Here are a few facts that may help make them seem a little more human than we ever thought.
Superstore Madonna is reportedly deathly afraid of cockroaches. She once confessed:” Whenever I saw them, I screamed and ran away.”
Hollywood actress and producer Drew Barrymore, suffers from claustrophobia, a fear of confined spaces.
Hollywood star Johnny Depp suffers from clourophobia, a fear of clowns. He sees darkness and evil in those painted faces.
English actor Orlando Bloom once broke his back falling from a third story roof terrace, but he isn’t afraid of heights – he’s terrified of pigs.
American singer and actor, Justin Timberlake, suffers from galeophobia, ophidiophobia, and arachnophobia – that’s fear of sharks, snakes, and spiders.
Oprah Winfrey fears chewing gum.
Actress Nicole Kidman is afraid of butterflies.
Christina Ricci suffers from a form of botanophobia – she is frightened by indoor plants.
The English actor, the late Roger Moore, was licensed to kill as James Bond but he had a fear of guns.
The legendary British suspense director Alfred Hitchcock was afraid of eggs. He thought they were absolutely disgusting.
And there you have it folks, just a few facts about celebrities that show they’re no different than the rest of us. They suffer from the same stupid phobias and issues just like everyone else. Now as I’m finishing this posting I must throw one more fact out there. It concerns a celebrity I’ve never been particularly fond of, Roseanne Barr. It appears that she is deathly afraid of anything – people or objects – touching her toes. For some reason I find that hilarious, but that’s just me.
everyuselessthing.com 