Archive for the ‘Looking Back’ Category
I thought today might be a good time to address the “gouging” that’s been going on with food prices. I thought the oil industry was the champion gouger of all times but once again I was mistaken. I should have known that once it started with gas prices it would eventually spread to damn near everything else. Blame it on inflation or President Biden or on the many business men who seized on an opportunity to put it to the American public once again.
Yesterday I had the misfortune of doing the food shopping for the week. It will be a cold day in hell when I pay $5.50 for a dozen medium sized chicken eggs. I won’t list all of the things that pissed me off but trust me, there were dozens. With that thought in mind I’d like to time travel back to the “good old days” to do some comparison shopping. Welcome to the late 1940’s.
The average salary for a full time employee was $2900.00 and the minimum wage was a whopping $.40 an hour. I’m sure we’d all like to see prices like this again.
Bread (lb) $.14
Bacon (lb) $.77
Butter (lb) $.87
Eggs (1 dozen) $.72
Milk (gal) $.44
Potatoes (10 lb) $.57
Coffee (1 lb) $.51
Sugar (5 lbs) $.47
Gasoline (gal) $.26
Movie Tickets $.36
Postage Stamps $.03
Car $1250.00
Single Family Home $7700.00
Who is to blame? It’s a long list heavily populated by hundreds of politicians and thousands of loyal American businesses and corporations. As always, the regular guy gets stuck paying for their errors in judgement and sheer stupidity. Hooray for love of country and patriotism (sarcasm off).
U.S.A. ! – U.S.A. ! – U.S.A.!
Since I’m a bit of a “foodie” I thought I’d do a little research about food. I started my day watching an oldie-but-goodie, an episode of the original Iron Chef program from Japan. I now know everything I need to know about the preparation and consumption of pork belly. Let’s get on with this . . .
- Did you know that the cereal Post Toasties was originally named Elijah’s Manna. The name was changed in 1904 after objections were received from the clergy.
- The country of Norway consumes more spicy Mexican food than any other European nation.
- The literal meaning of the Italian word linguine is “Little tongues”.
- Margarine was originally called “Butterine” when first marketed in England.
- The top two selling spices in the world are pepper (top seller) and mustard.
- Peter Cooper, best know for inventing the locomotive “Tom Thumb”, also patented in 1845 a gelatin treat later marketed as “Jello”.
- There are 12 flowers embossed on an Oreo cookie, four petals on each.
- The standard pretzel shape was created by French monks in 610 a.d. and made to resemble a little child’s arms in prayer.
- Canned herring are called sardines. The process for canning originated in Sardinia where herring were first canned.
- When the Birdseye company first introduced frozen food in 1930, it was called “Frosted Food”. The name was changed shortly thereafter to “Frozen”.
Now you know. I also strongly recommend taking some time to visit the Roku Channel and the Iron Chef program. I loved it way back in the day and it still remains an all time favorite.
EAT, DRINK, AND DO MARY
🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡
It seems that this cold snap and the end of Summer is having a bad effect on almost everyone. So, for all you grumpy and pissed off people let me amuse you with a few really stupid newspaper headlines. They might just force some of you to smile.
ASTRONAUT TAKES BLAME FOR GAS IN SPACE
CHILD’S STOOL GREAT FOR GARDEN USE
COLD WAVE LINKED TO TEMPERATURES
BLIND WOMEN GETS NEW KIDNEY FROM DAD SHE HASN’T SEEN IN YEARS
MAN, SHOOTS NEIGHBOR WITH MACHETE
😮😮😮
COURT RULES BOXER SHORTS ARE INDEED UNDERWEAR
BITING NALS CAN BE A SIGN OF TENSENESS IN A PERSON
CHILDS DEATH RUINS COUPLE’S HOLIDAY
IF STRIKE ISN’T SETTLED QUICKLY, IT MAY LAST A WHILE
FARMER BILL DIES IN HOUSE
🫤🫤🫤
Cheer up people. Things could be much worse.
There’s only 81 shopping days left to Christmas.
Living in Maine has given me a great appreciation for monitoring the weather. Our winter here starts in late October and extends itself to the end of April, a full six months of snow, sleet, and cold. If you’re not a lover of miserable weather, I recommend you never move here. Today’s posting contains random weather tidbits you haven’t likely heard before. Enjoy!
- Lightning strikes the earth of hundred times every second, from the 1800 thunderstorms in progress at any given moment.
- Rain contains vitamin B-12.
- Observations of increased rain after US Civil War battles led to abortive experiments with weather control. Cannon volleys were fired into the clouds in order to induce rain.
- Nearly 100 pollution-filled, weather-beaten years in New York have done more damage to Cleopatra’s Needle – a granite obelisk covered with hieroglyphics – than did 3500 arid years in Egypt.
- 17 1/2 inches in circumference and 1.67 pounds in weight: that’s the size of the largest hailstone known to have fallen in the United States. It struck during a severe storm at Coffeyville, Kansas, in September of 1970.
- In 1816, there was no summer in many areas of the world. In parts of New England, snow stayed on the ground all year. Crops there and in Europe were ruined. Volcanic dust from the corruption of Tomboro in Indonesia that blocked the rays of the sun has been blamed.
- In living memory, it was not until February 18, 1979, that snow fell on the Sahara Desert. A half-hour storm in southern Algeria stopped traffic but within a few hours all of the snow had melted away.
- Residents in a small village in Scotland schedule their television viewing according to the tides. At low tide, the nearby mudflats absorbed the broadcast “waves”. Thank God for cable.
- On June 10, 1958, a tornado was crashing through El Dorado, Kansas. The storm pulled a woman out of her house and carried her 60 feet away. She landed, relatively unharmed, next to a phonograph record titled “Stormy Weather”.
- Due to friction with the surface of the planet, the wind retards or accelerates the spin of the Earth very slightly. A peak in the seasonal slowing of the planet is most evident during the northern winter.
C’MON WINTER
I’m not a huge sports fan but many people are. I’m strictly a baseball fan and have an interest in only one or two football games a season. Surprisingly many of our most famous celebrities played sports of one kind or another in their younger days. Check these sports fans out.
- Matthew Perry – Ranked teenage tennis star at age 13 in Ottawa.
- Kurt Russell – Left acting for Minor League baseball in 1971.
- Queen Latifah – Power forward on two state championship basketball teams.
- Richard Gere – Won a gymnastic scholarship to the University of Massachusetts.
- Tommy Lee Jones – Was a champion polo player.
- Keanu Reeves – Voted MVP on his high school hockey team.
- Billy Crystal – Attended college on a baseball scholarship.
- Jack Palance – Was once a professional boxer.
- Sarah Michelle Gellar – Was a highly placed competitive figure skater.
- Chevy Chase – Once worked as a tennis professional.
A guess there were a few surprises on that list but it’s nice to know that under all of that Hollywood nonsense lives a bunch of regular sports loving folks.
FALL SPORTS ARE HERE
Always wishing to keep this blog interesting I decided that a short review of the “toilet” needs to be told. It’s an important part of our everyday lives but very few people care to hear anything about it. I’ll do the best I can with the information I’ve been able to find.
- Before the invention of toilet paper, people use shells or stones, bunches of herbs or, at best, a bit of sponge attached to a stick, which they rinsed with cold water.
- A Victorian plumber, Thomas Crapper, perfected the system we all use today. The siphon flush which by drawing water uphill through a sealed cistern is both effective and hygienic.
- In Victorian times, toilet seats were always made of wood. The well-to-do set on mahogany or walnut, while the poor put up with untreated white pine.
- The idea of separate cubicles for toilets is a relatively modern invention. The Romans, for example, sat down together in large groups.
- The first toilet air freshener was a pomegranate stuffed with cloves.
- American civil servants’ paychecks are recycled to make toilet rolls.
- The most impossible item to flush is a ping-pong ball.
- The movie Psycho was the first Hollywood film that showed a toilet flushing – thereby generating many complaints.
- Julia Roberts was once asked for an autograph while she was on the john. She said, ” I’m the tiniest bit busy.”
- Actor Jack Nicholson has a dead rattlesnake embedded in the clear plastic seat of his toilet.
And one last quote from a member of British royalty. “The biggest waste of water in the country by far. You spend half a pint and flush 2 gallons.”(Prince Philip in a 1965 speech)
NEVER FORGET THE COURTESY FLUSH
With September already over and cold temperatures beginning, it’s time to have some fun before the snow starts flying. With the holidays approaching I thought I’d publish a revised version of the Worker’s Prayer. This is posted for all of those people (my better-half included) that are stuck in thankless retail jobs across the country.
The Worker’s Prayer
“Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I cannot accept and the wisdom to hide the bodies of those people I had to kill today because they pissed me off, and also help me to be careful of the toes I step on today, as they may be connected to the ass I may have to kiss tomorrow.”
And just for the hell of it I decided to author a haiku as requested by a friend. Here it is.
❤️
The sky is so blue
A dot of sunshine yellow.
Forget me never.
T.G.I.F.
While I’m not much of a sports fan these days, I did play a lot of sports over the years. I loved playing sports but watching them now is as much fun as watching paint dry. I’m still a lover of trivia too so it’s about time I matched them up. Here are a few sports trivia facts you may not have been aware of.
- Wilt Chamberlain averaged 48.5 minutes per game in 1961–62. That means he played every minute of every game and every minute of every overtime.
- Pittsburgh is the only city where every one of its professional sports teams wears the same colors.
- Major league baseball uses approximately 900,000 balls every season.
- Prior to the 1930s in the NBA a jump ball used to follow every made basket.
- One of the greatest pitchers in MLB history was known to run off the field during games to chase firetrucks. Rube Waddell was fascinated with firetrucks and managers had a difficult time keeping him on the mound if one drove by. It didn’t stop him from being one of the greatest strikeout pitchers in the history of the game.
- Wilt Chamberlain once averaged over 50 points per game for an entire season.
- Before Babe Ruth, MLB’s career home run record was just 138. When the babe retired, the new record was 714.
- Jackie Mitchell, one of the first (and only) female player in the major league baseball system, once struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in consecutive at-bats. The strikeouts occurred during a minor league exhibition game against the Yankees.
- For 43 years, the NFL record for the longest made field goal was held by a man (Tom Dempsey) with no toes on his kicking foot.
- Jackie Robinson was not the first black player in major league baseball. William Edward White, a former slave, served as a one-game replacement player in 1879. Moses Fleetwood Walker lasted slightly longer, playing nearly a full season in 1884, 63 years before Jackie Robinson made his historic debut.
PLAY BALL ! !
Are you a follower of all things “Royal”? With the passing of Elizabeth, I thought it was only right and respectful to wait a period of time before I decided to jump into the vast emptiness that all of the Brits are probably suffering from. I’ve never understood the need for “Royals” but nevertheless here are a number of items of trivia you might find interesting about them.
- Elizabeth was born on Wednesday or “hump day” if you prefer.
- The Queen always wrote with a fountain pen that belonged to her father, King George VI.
- Her husband Prince Philip once crashed his car within minutes of having delivered a speech on road safety in 1957.
- Prince Charles first Shetland pony was named Fum.
- Prince Andrew refused to wear shorts under his kilt as a child to be like Prince Philip. “Papa doesn’t wear anything and neither shall I!” he would cry.
- Princess Diana was the first royal bride not to use the word obey in her marriage vows.
- Prince Philip kept a collection of press cartoons of himself on the walls of his lavatory in Sandringham.
- The Queen was an excellent mimic and sometimes entertained the family by aping the prime ministers she’d known in the last half-century.
- Princess Margaret was afraid of the dark.
- All royal babies are baptized with water brought from the river Jordan.
There you have it, some totally useless trivial facts about the royal family. I’ve always wondered if many of their activities were as normal as some of the things that we do. I won’t get into the details of what I sometimes think because it would be a little disrespectful and absolutely hilarious. A friend of mine after a recent discussion about the Royals put some strange thoughts into my head (off-color to be sure) which I won’t get into today. Here’s one last quote to help keep things in their proper “Royal” perspective.
The Queens description of Niagara Falls was “It looks very damp.”
R.I.P. LIZZIE
The truth is sometimes strange and at other times ridiculous. These factoids are a little of both. They’re good for making a few bucks at bar bets on trivia night.
- The term ” soap opera” comes from the fact that shows used to work advertisements for soap powder into the plot lines.
- A champagne cork flying out of a bottle can travel as fast as 100 miles per hour.
- People who fear the number 666 suffer from hexakaosioihexekontahexaphobia.
- On November 21, 1980, 83 million Americans tuned in to watch the finale of the Dallas cliffhanger “Who Shot J.R.?” A few weeks earlier, 85.1 million Americans voted in the Reagan-Carter presidential election.
- During a 60-year life span, an average tree will produce nearly 2 tons of leaves to be raked.
- Dancing the tango was considered a sin in Paris during the early 1900s.
- Those roped off areas where boxing matches take place actually used to be round, hence the term “boxing ring”.
- Pope John XXI (1276-01277) had been in office less than a year before the ceiling on a new wing of his palace collapsed on him while he slept. He died six days later.
- Nearly 4% of American women claim that they never wear underwear.
- The Pentagon goes through more than 600 rolls of toilet paper every day.
TOO WEIRD TO BELIEVE? . . . WELL, BELIVE IT ANYWAY
Quote of the Day
“I have as much authority as the Pope. I just
don’t have as many people who believe it.”
George Carlin
everyuselessthing.com 