What ever happened to all of those “pet rocks” that everyone loved? How about those fine-looking mood rings that were around for a time. Fads come and go and just when you think you’ve heard and seen it all, another bit of Fad strangeness comes along to baffle and amaze us. You might think our recent Fads are cool and awesome, but we are just the tip of the weird iceberg. So, grab your hula hoop and read on. It’s time to look at the past where our love for Fads originated.
1920 – Raccoon Coats
1924 – Flagpole Sitting
1939 – Goldfish Swallowing
1950 – Poodle Skirts
1955 – Coonskin Caps
1959 – Phone Booth Stuffing
1960 – Tie-dyed T-shirts
1970 – Platform Shoes
1973 – Puka Shells
1974 – Streaking
1975 – CB Radios
1976 – Pet Rocks
1980 – Rubik’s Cube
1982 – Smurfs
1983 – Cabbage Patch Kids
1993 – The Macarena
There’s the proof we’ve been looking for. The Fad gene goes all the way back to early cavemen. Did you honestly think that we really invented the “pet rock?” What will be next now that the “Spinner and Fidgit” fads has run out of gas. I hope the next one is a little more interesting.
HOW MANY OTHERS DO YOU REMEMBER?
It’s Sunday which is supposed to be a day of rest. Short and sweet today with a few limericks written by kids and for kids.
😎😎😎
Consider the poor hippopotamus,
His life is unduly monotonous.
He lives half-asleep
At the edge of the deep,
And his face is as big as his bottom is.
🙄🙄🙄
There was an old man of Peru
Who dreamt he was eating a shoe.
He awoke in the night
With a terrible fright,
And found it was perfectly true.
🙃🙃🙃
A visitor from Outer Space
On arriving presented his case.
“Earthlings? Inferior!
My race? Superior!”
Tripped up and fell flat on his face.
🤪🤪🤪
An elephant never forgets,
Neither messages, shopping nor debts.
He can hold in his trunk
A whole cartload of junk,
And the little ones make super pets.
I can’t tell you how many times in my life that I’ve been assured by so-called experts that things were good and ten minutes later another so-called expert is screaming “doom and gloom”, it’s damn confusing. It’s amazes me how many experts or so-called experts exist especially when discussing sports. Let’s look into sports a little and listen to the real experts.
BASEBALL
- “If Jesus were on the field he’d be pitching inside and breaking up double plays. He’d be giving high fives to the other guys.” Tim Burke, Montréal Expos pitcher
- “They shouldn’t throw at me. I’m the father of five or six kids.” Tito Fuentes, National League infielder
- “I am a four-wheel-drive pickup type of guy. So is my wife.” Mike Greenwell, Boston Red Sox outfielder
FOOTBALL
- “Man, I want you just thinking of one word all season. One word and one word only: Super Bowl.” Bill Peterson, Florida State football coach
- “I don’t care what the tape says. I didn’t say it.” Ray Malavasi, St. Louis Rams coach
- “Nobody in football should be called a genius. A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein.” Joe Theismann, player/commentator
BASKETBALL
- “Left-hand, right-hand, it doesn’t matter. I’m amphibious.” Charles Shackleford, North Carolina State player
- “I have won at every level, except college and pro.” Shaquille O’Neal, former Los Angeles Laker player
- “A lot is said about defense, but at the end of the game, the team with the most points wins- the other team loses.” Isaiah Thomas
SOCCER
- “If we play like that every week, we wouldn’t be so inconsistent.” Bryan Robeson
- “I’m going to graduate on time, no matter how long it takes.” Unnamed senior, University of Pittsburgh
- “What I said to them at halftime would be unprintable on the radio.” Gerry Francis
- “He’s one of those footballers whose brains are in his head.” Derek Johnstone
YOU KNOW, I THINK I’M AN EXPERT TOO!
Being a lover of trivia has always been fun and games. There’s so much information available about so many people and the majority of that information is almost never published. The past I’ve centered a lot of my trivia on celebrities and certain politicians especially former Presidents. Today I thought I would take a look at presidents’ wives and some of the information available that you’ve probably never heard of. Some of them are actually more interesting than their husbands.
- Andrew Carnegie personally paid pensions to widows of former presidents before Congress decided that the responsibility was the country’s and not a steel magnate.
- President. Ulysses S Grant’s wife was cross-eyed and wanted to correct the problem. Grant refused to let her have the operation because he liked her that way.
- Abraham Lincoln’s wife – like Lincoln himself – was born in Kentucky. During the Civil War, she was accused of being a spy for the South, for her brothers were members of the Confederate Army.
- President Calvin Coolidge did not allow his wife to supervise any details of White House life. He did it all. Even the menus and other housekeeping plans were submitted to him and not to the First Lady. She did not even buy her own clothes without Coolidge’s approval.
- When the First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, received an alarming number of letters threatening her life, soon after her husband, Franklin D Roosevelt, took office as President during the depression, the Secret Service insisted that she carried a pistol in her purse.
- Martha Washington and was nearly 60 years of age when she became “Lady Washington,” as she was called during her husband’s Presidency. She did not enjoy the role. Privately, she wrote that she was “more like a state prisoner than anything else.”
- Mary Todd Lincoln was tried for insanity before a jury after her husband’s assassination. Her son Robert attempted to have her declared legally incompetent when she began suffering hallucinations and phobias, but the law required a trial before a person can be institutionalized. Mrs. Lincoln attempted suicide after she was judged insane by the court, and was taken to a sanitarium, where she received treatment. She improved to the point that another court reversed the insanity verdict in 1876.
- Pres. Andrew Johnson’s daughter, who ran the White House domestic affairs in place of her invalid mother, bought 2 Jersey cows, which she kept on the White House grounds, to assure her family of fresh milk and butter.
- Mrs. William Howard Taft also bought a cow which grazed on the White House lawn. Twice a day, milk from the cow was delivered to the White House kitchen.
- Mrs. Woodrow Wilson purchased a flock of sheep to help crop the White House lawn, and then auctioned their wool for the benefit of the Red Cross. She was proved a good businesswoman when the auction netted $100,000.
BEHIND EVERY MAN IS A WOMAN WITH A CATTLE PROD
I thought all of you would appreciate a few relatively harmless limericks mainly concerned with anatomical issues. The weekend is in sight and maybe these little ditties will help get you through until then.
There was a young lady of Kent,
Whose nose was most awfully bent.
One day, I suppose,
She followed her nose,
For no one knew which way she went.
🥰🥰🥰
There was an old man of Blackheath,
Who sat on his set of false teeth.
Said he, with a start,
“O Lord, bless my heart!
I’ve bitten myself underneath.
😜😜😜
There was an old man of Tarentum
Who gnashed his false teeth ’til he bent’em.
When they asked him the cost
Of what he had lost,
He replied, “I can’t say, for I rent’em.”
😏😏😏
A girl who weighed many an oz.
Used language I dared not pronoz.
For a fellow unkind
Pulled her chair out behind
Just to see (so he said) if she’d boz.
🤣🤣🤣🤣
These days when I talk about “rich” people it is considerably different than when I was in my twenties. Back then it was unbelievable that someone could become a millionaire. It was difficult to believe that amount of money could be earned by anyone except for the mega-rich. Today it’s almost unbelievable. If you own a large home in a nice neighborhood, have two cars, and good paying job, your net worth is probably more than a million. I couldn’t even imagine trying to guess how many millionaires are playing pro sports. It boggles the mind. As outrageous as that is, the uber rich remain in a separate class all their own. To them a millionaire is seen as a low rent bum. Let me show you what I mean.
- William Randolph Hearst once purchased a pair of Cellini saltshakers for the low, low price of $500,000.
- Henry Ford once stated to Hearst after he had been complaining about never seeming to have any money: “That’s a mistake,” replied Ford. “A man ought to have $500 million or so in cash for a rainy day.”
- Once when a reporter asked John Paul Getty if he was really worth over $1 billion, “Yes, I suppose it’s true, but $1 billion doesn’t go as far as it used to.”
- A young Nelson Rockefeller was sailing his toy boat in a pond when another boy asked, “Where’s your yacht? “Whaddaya think I am, “he replied,” a Vanderbilt?”
- When an elderly John D Rockefeller, Sr, learned that members of his family intended to give him an electric cart to ride around his estate, he told them in no uncertain terms, “I rather have the money.”
- Howard Hughs started out as a very presentable young playboy with the world at his feet. He ended up as a starving, paranoid recluse trapped in a room watching old movies.
- The oil billionaire H. L. Hunt wrote and published a book in which he proposed that citizens voting power be proportionate to the amount of taxes they paid.
- H. Ross Perot had a coral reef dynamited at his oceanfront home in Bermuda because it interfered with his boat slip.
- Armand Hammer once bought an important manuscript written by Leonardo da Vinci and renamed it the Codex Hammer.
- William K Vanderbilt once stated, “I am the richest man in the world. I am worth $194 million. I would not walk across the street to make $1 million.”
They live in a different world in a galaxy far, far away. They barely have the ability or the desire to stoop so low as to talk to someone considered a “blue collar” worker.
MONEY BREEDS ARROGANCE
I am constantly amazed as I do my research for this blog. So many facts exist that are different and sometimes strange. It seems that the stranger facts regularly turn out to be true. Here are ten interesting facts you might enjoy.
- The Puritans brought beer to America. According to Mourt’s Relation (1622), the Mayflower Pilgrims settled at Plymouth because supplies, especially beer, were running low. Beer was a dietary mainstay on long voyages because, having been boiled, it was purer than water.
- Despite being made famous by Dutch paintings and Spain’s Don Quixote, windmills originated in Persia before the 10th century.
- At -90°F, your breath will freeze in midair and fall to the ground.
- The word “deadline” originated in Civil War prisons, where lines were drawn that prisoners passed only at the risk of being shot.
- On March 15, 1985, Symbolic.com became the first registered Internet domain. Science-fiction writer William Gibson had coined the term “cyberspace” in his novel Neuromancer only the year before.
- The first film version of Frankenstein was a 15-minute silent film produced by Thomas Edison.
- Inventions that changed how we shop: the cash register (1884), the shopping cart (1936), and the scannable barcode (1952).
- Warren Buffett, legendary investor and self-made multibillionaire, filed his first income tax return at age 13, reporting revenue from a newspaper delivery job. He claimed a $35 deduction for his bicycle.
- Shakespeare coined thousands of new words, or “neologisms” in his plays and sonnets. Among these are: amaze, bedroom, excellent, fitful, majestic, radiance, and summit.
- Dolly the sheep – the first cloned mammal – was named after country singer Dolly Parton. Stockmen dubbed the sheep “Dolly “because she was cloned from a mammary cell.
How many of the ten were you aware of before reading this post? I’m just a little curious. I’ll just bet the real Dolly was so proud she was popping her buttons off. LOL
START NOVEMBER WITH A GIGGLE
Languages are interesting. Many books have been written about the use of words, but it seems they appeal to only a small portion of the population. I love learning new words and their odd uses, it’s fun! Let’s get started on some fun for you on this fine Monday morning.
- Check out these three sentences:
A mad boxer shot a quick, gloved jab to the jaw of his dizzy opponent.
Five or six big jet planes zoomed quickly by the tower.
Now is the time for all quick brown dogs to jump over the lazy lynx.
They each use every letter in the alphabet.
- The 1939 novel, Gadsby, doesn’t contain a single word with the letter “e”. That quite some accomplishment in a fifty-thousand-word book.
- The longest palindrome in the Oxford English Dictionary is “tattarrattat”. Coined by James Joyce in his book, Ulysses, as a knock at the door.
- The word “honorificabilitudinitatibus” at 27 letters is the longest word to appear in a work by Shakespeare from Love’s Labor Lost.
- The longest palindrome in any language is “saippuakivikakuppias”. It’s 19 letters long and means “soap seller” in Finnish.
- Poets love to rhyme words but in some cases it’s very difficult or just plain impossible. No words rhyme with orange., silver, elbow, galaxy, and rhythm. The words wasp, purple, and month are also very hard to rhyme.
- Here are a few more very cool palindromes:
A man, a plan, a cat, a ham, a yak, a yam, a hat, a canal. Panama
Madam, in Eden I’m Adam
Was it a bar or a bat I saw.
THERE’S YOUR ENGLISH LESSON FOR THE WEEK
With tax time approaching I decided to harken back to maybe not a better time, but a time when our citizenry lived within their means. There was a national debt, but it was a mere drop in the bucket compared with our current situation. It motivated me to take a look back and see how our economics have changed in the intervening years.
- In 1900, the United States treasury showed a surplus of nearly $47 million in income over expenditures. The last time the federal budget was balanced was in 1969.
- President Carter’s “lean and tight” budget of $500 billion for the fiscal year 1979 equals the spending of $690,000 a day since the birth of Christ. To dispose of this amount of money in a year, the government has to spend $951,000 a minute, $57 million an hour, or $1.37 billion a day, including holidays and Sundays.
- Andrew Carnegie, one of the richest Americans ever, practically became allergic to money as he grew richer and older. He was offended, he said, just by the sight and touch of it, and never carried any. Because he had no money with him with which to pay the fare, Carnegie was once put off of a London Tram.
- According to the 1970 US Census, only 5000 Americans had a net worth of $10 million or more.
- The longest jury trial ever in the United States federal courts began on June 20, 1977 and ended on July 10, 1978. It took the judge almost an hour to read the verdicts on 49 separate questions. During this antitrust action, by SCM Corporation against Xerox, it is estimated that both sides spent well in excess of $60 million in attorney’s fees.
- The federal government keeps billions of dollars – much of it taxes collected by the Internal Revenue Service – in bank accounts that draw no interest. Banks turnaround and invest much of these deposits in U.S. Treasury bills, on which the government frequently pays more than 9% interest. Incredibly, the government is paying the banks to borrow back its own money.
- It costs $4000 per inch to build an interstate highway project on the fringe of New York City in the late 1970s – over 215 million per mile. Just imagine what the current costs must be.
- Until there was a pay raise in 1814, US Congressmen were paid six dollars per diem when Congress was in session. I think it might be just a little higher these days.
- To finance the Civil War, a 3% income tax on all incomes over $800 was enacted by the federal government in 1864. It was the first time in income tax was enacted in the United States. The law was discontinued in 1872. The United States Supreme Court declared the law unconstitutional in 1894. Not until 1913, with the adoption of the 16th amendment, the income tax become law.
- In the 1800s, big industry began to set up trusts to monopolize production and distribution. The first big trust was Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Corporation, in 1882. The first international trust was Nobels Dynamite Trust, in 1886.
LOOKS LIKE DINNER AT JOE’S HOUSE
It’s a cold morning here in Maine. I did an early food shop this morning and the hunters appear to be out in large numbers. I’ve never been a hunter and I have no idea what hunting season actually started today. I just know I won’t be taking any long walks in the woods where some drunken, nearsighted, armed, citizen might mistake me for a deer or a turkey or whatever. I’ll be staying indoors where it’s safe.
Enough of this nonsense, let’s get into some other more interesting nonsense concerning one of my favorite subjects: Media and Celebrity Silliness. When they screw up, they put it out there for everyone to see and hear and here are some of my favorites.
- “To say this book is about me (which is the main reason I was uncomfortable – me, me, me, me . . .frightening!) is ridiculous. This book is not about me.” Kate Moss, Model, on her book, Kate: The Kate Moss Book
- The Duck and Doochess of Windsor.” Anonymous Commentator, introducing the Duke and Duchess of Windsor
- “The red squirrels . . . you don’t see many of them since they became extinct.” Michael Aspel, BBC
- “Smoking kills. If you’re killed, you’ve lost a very important part of your life.” Brook Shields – During an anti smoking campaign interview
- “Whenever I watch TV and see those poor starving kids all over the world, I can’t help but cry. I mean, I’d love to be skinny like that, but not with all those flies and death and stuff.” Mariah Carey
- “I would not live forever, because we should not live forever, because if we were supposed to live forever, then we would live forever, but we cannot live forever, which is why I would not live forever.” Miss Alabama 1994, when asked “If you could live forever, would you, and why?”
- “An end is in sight to the severe weather shortage.” Ian Macaskill, BBC Weather
- “It’s not listed in the Bible, but my spiritual gift, my specific calling from God, is to be a television talk show host.” James Baker, televangelist
- “We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out.” Decca Records Co. executive in 1962, after turning down the Beatles
- “As a prize – a beautiful riding mower with optional ass scratcher.” TV Announcer who meant to say “grass catcher”
TO ERR IS HUM AN AND THESE FOLKS ARE REALLY HUMAN
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