Something bizarre plus a quiz from the days of auld lang syne

Below, verbatim, are the words of a commercial currently being run on American television. The speaker is a man about 50 years old sporting a big moustache, dressed in cowboy garb topped off with a big, black, 10-gallon Stetson hat:

"Hi, I'm John Rich, and if you love God, America, and family as much as I do, then mammoth nation dot com is the place to do all of your online shopping, and while you're on mammoth nation, don't forget to order Redneck Riviera whiskey, 100% made right here in the United States of America, and supporting Folds Of Honor. God bless you and God bless America." The commercial ends with a voice-over by a group of females singing "Everybody said, 'Save a horse, ride a cowboy'."

There is only one word to describe the commercial and that word is:

Bizarre.

Since 2024 will soon be history, I thought it would be fun to have a quiz of advertising slogans and jingles from days gone by.

1. ________. Ask the man who owns one.

2. ________, the beer that made Milwaukee famous.

3. ________ means fine tobacco.

4. You can trust your car to the man who wears the star, the big red ________ star.

5. M-m-m good, m-m-m good, that's what ________ are, m-m-m good

6. ________, from the land of sky-blue waters.

7. I'd walk a mile for a ________.

8. ________, a little dab'll do ya, ________, you'll look so debonair; ________, the gals'll all pursue ya, they'll love to run their fingers through your hair.

9. You'll wonder where the yellow went when you btush your teeth with ________.

10. See the USA in your ________, America is asking you to call; see the USA in your ________, America's the greatest land of all.

11. ________. Outstanding, and they are mild

12. ________ hits the spot, twelve full ounces, that's a lot: twice as much for a nickel too, ________ is the drink for you.

The correct answers can be found in the first comment. Tell us how well or poorly you did.

If you got 0-4 correct, you are definitely either a millennial or a member of Gen Z. If you got 5-8 correct, you may have watched too much television as a child. If you got 9-12 correct, you are older than dirt.

Remembrance of things past (show-biz edition) and a few petty gripes

Some performing groups came in twos (the Everly Brothers, the Smothers Brothers, Les Paul & Mary Ford, Steve Lawrence and Edyie Gormé, Peaches & Herb, Ike and Tina Turner, Simon and Garfunkel, Martin & Lewis, Martin & Rossi), some in threes (the McGuire Sisters, the Andrews Sisters, the Ritz Brothers, the Supremes, the Three Stooges), some in fours (the Pointer Sisters, the Ames Brothers, the Four Lads, the Four Tops, the Chordettes, Little Anthony and the Imperials, the Drifters, the Coasters, the Platters), and some were even larger (the Osmonds, the Marx Brothers, the King Family, the Von Trapp Family Singers, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir). I'm kidding on that last one, but only sort of.

All of the foregoing are from the part of ancient history known as the mid-twentieth century. I stopped listening to pop music when my children were small (translation: five decade ago). We have blogger Tasker Dunham of Yorkshire,England, to thank for stirring up my brain cells in this area. At least you know that if, as Scottish people say at this time of year, auld acquaintance should be forgot, you will always have this blog to fall back on.

Enough of that.

There are words that describe various kinds of animals, words like canine (dog), feline (cat), asinine (donkey), bovine (cow), .ovine (sheep), equine (horse), porcine (pig), lupine (wolf), volpine (fox), caprine (goat), leonine (lion). If there is no such word as orcine to describe whales, there should be. All of these words describe mammals. Words also exist that describe birds (avian), bees (apian), and fish (aquatic) but they do not end with "-ine". Neither do "marsupial", "reptilian", or "ungulate". If you know words ending with "-ine" that describe particular species (ducks? geese? chickens? hippos? rhinos? giraffes? ostriches? opossums? beavers? mongooses? platypuses? kangaroos? alligators?) please share them with us in a comment. Inquiring minds want to know.

Enough of that, too.

Mispronunciations irk me, especially by untrained singers at Christmas time. It isn't "Comfert and joy", people, and it isn't "O night deevine", and most importantly it isn't "Silunt night" or "Sleep in heavunly peace".

In regular, unsung speech all year long, "mis-cheevy-us" drives me crazy. If you try to remember that mischievous has three syllables, not four, you won't make it rhyme with devious. Say "mis-chiv-us" to keep my blood pressure in the normal range and I will thank you.

In the perfect world according to me, the first syllable of "applicable" is stressed, not the second syllable. The second syllable is stressed in "incomparable" and "irrevocable", not the third syllable. Perhaps these are problems for Americans only.

Enough of that, too.

I promised you petty gripes and I always deliver on my promises. And if you have spent a few minutes thinking about something besides Joe Biden or Donald Trump, it has all been worthwhile.

Money, money, money makes the world go around

So sang Sally Bowles in the Kit Kat Klub, a cabaret in Berlin back in the 1930s, and once again the world has come around to the month of December.

December is chock full of things for bloggers to blog about. There's St. Nicholas Day (tomorrow), Pearl Harbor Day, St.Lucy's Day, Beethoven's birthday, winter solstice, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Hanukkah, Boxing Day, Kwanzaa, New Year's Eve. I think I've written about them all in years gone by.

This year nothing floats my boat. Not even President Biden's pardoning of his son Hunter for anything he might have done since Jan 1, 2014. Especially not President Biden's pardoning of his son Hunter for anything he might have done since Jan. 1, 2014.

Speaking of money (see what I did there?), the price of a single share of the cryptocurrency known as Bitcoin reached an all-time high today of $103,595.75USD. If, on a lark, you had bought one dollar's worth of Bitcoin back in 2009, this afternoon it would briefly have been worth $103,595,750USD before it settled back to a mere $97 million or so in round figures. If you actually did that back in 2009, I congratulate you. Unfortunately for me and my heirs, I didn't.

Several years ago, a friend gifted us with some Vietnamese paper currency totalling 200,000 Vietnamese Dong (VD) and assured us it would be worth a lot of money once Vietnam's economy recovered as expected. At the time, 200,000 dong was worth $8.40 in U.S. dollars. After hearing about Bitcoin today, I checked and my 200,000 Vietnamese Dong is now worth $7.80 in U.S. dollars.

When it comes to financial matters, I'm a a regular Wrong-Way Corrigan.

Some of my earliest memories include...

• Seeing my mother wash the outside of the windows in our third-floor apartment at 61 Larch St. in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, by sitting in the window sills. It scared me to death (not literally, of course, but almost)
• Travelling to Revere Beach in Boston, Massachusetts, which was very stony as I recall, not sandy at all
• Going to see Plymouth Rock where the pilgrims disembarked from the good ship Lollipop Mayflower in 1620
• Getting on an ocean-going vessel (possibly a ferry) and going on a blustery day from Point Judith to Block Island with my parents and my dad's friend Jock or maybe it was Jacques
• Attending Pawtucket Day Nursery between the ages of three and five where my teachers were Miss Irma Chisholm and Mrs. Yvonne Schack.
• Sitting in Mrs. Mullins's kindergarten class at Hancock Street Elementary School in Pawtucket for all of four days before being moved to the first grade class of Miss Edith Wildgoose

It occurs to me that I have tried to do something like this before, so I searched the blog archives and found a post from October 2013 entitled "Remembrance of things past (part the first)". The rest of this post is that post. Everything in it is still true except that I am now 83 instead of 72.

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Remembrance of things past (part the first)

It occurs to me that I keep showing you odd bits of stuff like that film of San Francisco in 1906 but never tell you much about myself.

Today I will tell you a whole lot a little about myself.

Of average height and average weight, I am a 72-year-old man who spent the last week in September in a hospital where a great deal of poking and prodding and sticking with needles and photographing of my innards and receiving a couple of pints of blood and a few other things too horrible to think about took place. And that was just at the admissions desk.

I was born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, (it’s the smallest state in the union, and it’s in New England) because I wanted to be near my mother, and she happened to be there at the time.

We lived in a third-floor apartment of a house at 61 Larch Street and my pediatrician was a Dr. Kachichian. I attended the Pawtucket Day Nursery while my mother, who had received a teaching certificate from West Chester State College in Pennsylvania, worked at the Coats & Clark Thread Factory. My teachers were Miss Irma Chisholm and Mrs. Yvonne Schack. A Portuguese woman in the neighborhood would sometimes take care of me as well and give me apple pie and pastrami for breakfast.

One day at recess, while two children were playing on a seesaw, one jumped off and the other, a black boy named Peter, fell and hurt himself. His arm was bleeding, and I noticed that his blood was red just like mine. I decided on the spot that people are alike on the inside and it is only on the outside that we are different.

When I was about four or five, a man wearing a white sailor uniform began visiting my mother occasionally. My mother called him “Ted” and so did I. Eventually he moved in permanently and my mother told me to call him “Daddy” from then on.

I went to Hancock Street Elementary School to Mrs. Mullins’s kindergarten class, but after four days she took me to first grade. Apparently Pawtucket Day Nursery had done its job well, because I was answering all the questions and telling all the other children the answers. My teacher in first grade was Miss Edith Wildegoose.

(Here I am in the spring of 1947 as a student in Miss Edith Wildegoose’s first grade class. I was six.)







In August 1947 we moved from Rhode Island to Fort Worth, Texas, on a train. It took three days. We arrived on one of the hottest days in the history of Fort Worth, Texas, and walked several blocks from the Texas & Pacific Railroad Station to the Majestic Hotel, which was inaptly named, carrying our luggage. One day, while leaving the hotel to get something to eat, I saw a hotel employee whose skin was so black it was almost blue, who had the whitest teeth and the whitest jacket I had ever seen, sweeping little black things off the sidewalk into little piles in the gutter and setting them on fire. The little black things turned out to be live crickets, and the smell was beyond awful. I was scarred for life in that instant.

A few days later we moved to a boarding house in the Arlington Heights section of Fort Worth. Mrs. Cash, who owned the boarding house, spent her days telling everyone who would listen that her close relative, actress Faye Emerson, was married to Elliott Roosevelt, the son of the President. The phrase “six degrees of separation” had not yet been invented, and actor Kevin Bacon was not born until 1958, but Mrs. Cash was eager for all to know that she was associated with the rich and famous.

My parents eventually rented a small post-war bungalow on a horseshoe-shaped street (2332 Chandler Drive East, on the other end of the horseshoe from Chandler Drive West) and I was enrolled into Mrs. Wolfe’s second-grade class at Oakhurst Elementary School.

I was not to experience urban life for long. In the spring of 1948, we moved again to a three-acre plot two miles from a little town that boasted a one-block-long business district with a traffic signal at both ends. I was to live there for the next ten years.

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(End of archived post)

I would just like to reiterate that there is nothing on earth quite like the smell of crickets dying. Driving past a turkey farm with fields full of turkey poop is a close second.

If you are very good I will show you "Remembrance of things past (part the second)" next.

How soon we forget

Today is the 61st anniversary of an event that changed forever the course of American history and the world as we knew it. As far as I know, no mention of it has been made on the news network we watch at our house. I'm talking about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas by Lee Harvey Oswald on November 22, 1963.

George Santayana (1863-1952) wrote that those who don't remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Winston Churchill (1874-1965) said something similar in a 1948 speech in the House of Commons, that those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Unfortunately, it is all too true.

On July 13 earlier this year at an outdoor rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, presidential candidate (now president-elect) Donald J. Trump survived an assassination attempt by a 20-year-old named Thomas Matthew Crooks, who was himself killed by a Secret Service sniper.

On June 28, 1914, what turned out to be World War I began when Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie were assassinated by a Serbian sniper in Sarajevo, Bosnia. Today, people are beginning to say that World War III is not far away.

The more things change, the more they remain the same. Somebody said that, too, in French as I recall.

It was reported recently that when someone googled "what happened on July 13, 2024?" the AI-generated response contained no mention of the incident in Butler, Pennsylvania.

If history is being ignored or (even worse) erased by the programmers of the algorithms behind AI (artificial intelligence), no one at all will remember history and we will be in (no pun intended) a world of hurt.

Österreich (Austria) played a part in the start of World War I. I sincerely hope that Ostrich-like thinking (uninformed citizens with our heads buried in the sand) does not play a part in the start of World War III.

Why, yes, I am definitely slowing down

It happens to the best of us. Slowly but surely, although it seems like suddenly, we grow older. A stranger peers out at us unexpectedly from the mirror. It is a shocking thing, the aging process. It shouldn't have caught us unawares, but most of us are very good at denying the inevitable.

For years the children and their spouses came to visit us during the holidays. Gradually we began to welcome grandchildren as well, and eventually six grandchildren and their spouses or significant others graced us with their presence. This year one of the children will be hosting and there will be three great-grandchildren added into the mix. Time marches on and ever older strangers peer out at us from our mirrors.

So yes, I am publishing fewer posts these days. Back in the early years of this blog (it began in September 2007) there were several times when my posts exceeded 200 per year. This year the number may not reach 70, but I intend to keep going for a while yet, and I am very grateful to you, the few who continue to read and comment here from time to time.

The bigger question of course, even bigger than how often I might produce a post, is whether I will prove to be smart and/or clever enough to find interesting topics to write about and present them to you in such a way that you will keep coming here.

This is not to say I haven't tried. I have lost count of the number of posts I have discarded that never saw the light of day. Trust me, you wouldn't have liked them.

Maybe my muse is slowing down too.

I hope not.

Post-election thoughts

Here are some mangled aphorisms I have stumbled upon over the years:

1. If you can keep your head when all anout you are losing theirs, you obviously don't understand the problem.

2. To err is human, to forgive practically impossible.

3. If your nose runs and your feet smell, you're built upside down.

The last one is not so much an aphorism as a scientific observation. Rudyard Kipling and Alexander Pope are undoubtedly turning over in their graves at this point. I don't know who authored the third one. It sounds a great deal like the sort of thing comedian Steven Wright or comedian Rita Rudner might say, and neither of them has a grave yet.

Two days have now elapsed since the American electorate chose Donald J. Trump to serve a second albeit non-consecutive term as President of the United States. As far as I can tell, our country is still intact. It is my fervent hope that it will remain so for a very long time to come.

In 1972, after being sworn in to succeed the resigned U.S. president Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford said, "My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over." Today a great many Americans think his statement applies once again, that our long national nightmare is over. A great many others think it is just beginning.

Stay tuned. Keep your eyes and ears open. Don't be swayed by partisan voices on either side in the media. Think for yourself. Make up your own mind. Time will eventually tell whose views were right.