They say that 13 is unlucky

...(whoever "they" are) and today is the 13th anniversary of this blog. So far, knock on wood, cross your fingers (I'm joking), nothing bad has happened to me. On a historical note, five stents were inserted into my coronary arteries in 2017, but I consuder that to have been a good thing.

If my blog were a person, puberty would be right around the corner. If my blog were Jewish, it could have a Bar Mitzvah.

Speaking of 13, many tall buildings, especially hotels, do not have a 13th floor, except actually they do but it is called the 14th floor.

Denial is not a river in Egypt.

I could call this my blog's 14th anniversary all day long but the truth would be as plain as the nose on your face, especially if your name is Pinocchio: it's my blog's 13th anniversary.

Do the math: 2020 minus 2007 is not 12 and it's not 14. It's 13.

Happy 13th birthday, llttle blog.

As luck would have it, this also happens to be my 100th post of 2020.

On such a momentous occasion, cards and comments are nice, but money is even better.

If you think I'm being serious, you must be new around here.

And if the next 13 years go by as fast as the last 13, I'll be 92 very soon.

Binge watching as a tactic

Today was the first time Mrs. RWP and I have ever "binge watched" anything. For 12 straight hours, from 11 a.m. until 11 p.m., we watched Dr. Jeff, Rocky Mountain Vet on the Animal Planet channel.

Yes, we did.

And in so doing we managed to avoid Fraklin Graham's prayer walk from the Lincoln Memorial to the U.S. Capitol buulding in Washington, D.C. with 50,000 of his closest friends as well as President Trump's announcement that he was nominating Judge Amy Coney Barrett of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals to replace the recently deceased Ruth Bader Ginsburg as an associate justice on the Supreme Court.

So the day was not ompletely wasted.

Our heads are now filled with images of dogs, cats, horses, rabbits, camels, turtles, chinchillas, ferrets, and various other members of the animal kingdom. And although we did not see a single parrot, cockatoo, owl, iguana, or python on this go-round, the political season is not over yet.

There's more than one way to skin a cat.

What happened to rhymeswithplague?

I'll tell you what happened to rhymeswithplague. No one is in a better position to know. I'll tell you exactly what happened to rhymeswithplague.

Nothing, that's what.

But I have been incommunicado blogwise for the past 10 days because we get internet access through our landline telephone provider and we have had no dial tone for that period of time. We still don't, and the modem for my desktop computer is receiving no wi-fi signal through the phone jack so I am stuck.

And since my handy-dandy iPhone from the Apple Corporation depends (or so I mistakenly thought) on my home's wi-fi connection to access the internet as well, my blogging has been at a standstill.

Until my firstborn told me today to turn off the wi-fi in Settings in my iPhone and let Apple use Data mode instead.

He is brilliant.

I am not.

The Queen is not dead. Long live the Prince of Wales.

When Queen Victoria died at 81 in 1901, her eldest son, the 59-year-old Prince of Wales, became King Edward VII.

Fast forward 80 years. (It occurs to me that the phrase "fast forward" has disappeared from today's world along with "radio dial" and "telephone cord".)

In 1981, when Diana Spencer, future mother of the Duke of Cambridge and the Duke of Sussex, became engaged to Prince Charles Philip Arthur George of the House of Mountbatten-Windsor, the current Prince of Wales, she left her ancestral home in Althorpe and moved into Clarence House, I think it was, in London to prepare for her forthcoming marriage and new role as Princess of Wales.

The person who was assigned to be her mentor, to teach her how to become part of the royal family, to show her the ropes as it were, was the person who, as far as Prince Charles's bedchamber goes, was both her predecessor and her successor, none other than Camilla Parker-Bowles.

Here are a couple of true historical snippets:

1. Camilla's great grandmother, Alice Frederica Edmonstone Keppel, was a longtime mistress of Charles's great-great-great-grandfather, the aforementioned King Edward VII. You can look it up.

2. Andrew Parker-Bowles, Camilla's husband, was an equerry to the Queen. On the wedding day of Charles and Diana, he wore a bright red uniform and a golden helmet amd rode horseback alongside their wedding carriage.

Camilla bore two children to Andrew, a son, Tom Parker-Bowles, and a daughter, Laura Parker-Bowles Lopes.

Since Camilla was cut out of the same cloth as her great-grandmother, Princess Diana once remarked in a filmed interview that "There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded."

As we all know, Diana died in a horrific automobile crash in Paris in 1997. Camilla, whose marriage to Andrew Parker-Bowles ended in 1995, continued on with Charles as before. Speaking of historical snippets, there is a recording of a telephone conversation between Charles and Camilla in which he stated his wish to be her tampon. They married on April 9, 2005. Camilla did not become the Princess of Wales, however. She became the Duchess of Cornwall instead.

Charles is now 71, and is still the Prince of Wales, the oldest one ever. His mother, Queen Elizabeth II, is now 94. She may outlive her own mother, who lived to the ripe old age of 101. Here is a photograph of the blended families with all of the step-siblings on Camilla's and Charles's wedding day in 2005:

If Charles, who is getting on up there and could die at any moment (as could Joe Biden or Donald Trump or you or I), outlives his mother he will become king and the world will remember him as Charles III or Philip I or Arthur I (or perhaps II?) or George VII. If she outlives him, however, then the first child of Charles and Diana, Prince William Arthur Philip Louis, the Duke of Cambridge (or as he is more popularly known, Kate Middleton's husband) would become king.

There is precedent for what I am saying. Before Edward VIII became king he was known as Prince David, and before George VI became king he was known as Prince Albert.

If you became the next British monarch instead of Charles or William, which of your names would you use? I could choose to become either Robert I or Henry IX. I would choose Robert.

Which title is better for this blog's first-ever embedded video?

1. You Take The High Road, And I'll Take The Low Road, And I'll Be In Scotland Afore Ye
2. It's A Long Way To Tipperary
3. Something else -- tell me in the comments

P.S. -- That was 13 seconds of your life that you will never get back.

My ma gave me a nickel to buy a pickle’

I didn't buy a pickle (as the old song goes),
I bought some chewin' gum.

CHORUS: Chew, chew, chew, chew,
Chew chewin' gum,
How I love chewin' gum.
I'm crazy over chewin' gum,
I chew, chew, chew.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, even when my aunt gave me a quarter for soda water, and my pop gave me a dollar to buy a collar, and my uncle gave me money to buy some honey, I still went out and spent it all on chewin' gum.

And I'm not the only one.

Singer Kitty Kallen did the same thing (2:10).

So did Dean Martin and Ella Fitzgerald and Teresa Brewer and numerous others, but to have included them all here would be cruel and unusual punishment indeed.

Actually, I haven't chewed gum in a very long time, and I hadn't thought of the word "chiclet" for decades until this morning when I ran across this very interesting article:

"How A Mexican General's Exile In Staten Island Led To Modern Chewing Gum".

As a guy who grew up in Texas I am very familiar with General Santa Anna -- he's the one who killed Davy Crockett and 180-some others at the Alamo -- but I never knew until now about his connection to chewing gum. I'll bet you didn't either.

Live and learn.

Hi, my name is Bob and I’m a Pharisee

I hope, actually, that I'm not a Pharisee, but I needed to get your attention.

The following is from the book 12 Steps for the Recovering Pharisee (like me), written in 1970 by John Fischer. The original list was written in first person plural (we, our, us) but I decided to change it into first person singular (I, my, me) to help get what I hope is my point across more forcefully:

12 Steps for the Recovering Pharisee

1. I admit that my single most unmitigated pleasure is to judge other people.
2. I have come to believe that my means of obtaining greatness is to make everyone lower than myself in my mind.
3. I realize that I detest mercy being given to those who, unlike me, haven’t worked for it and don’t deserve it.
4. I have decided that I don’t want to get what I deserve after all, and I don’t want anyone else to either.
5. I will cease all attempts to apply teaching and rebuke to anyone but myself.
6. I am ready to have God remove all these defects of attitude and character.
7. I embrace the belief that I am, and will always be, expert at sinning.
8. I am looking closely at the lives of famous men and women of the Bible who turned out to be ordinary sinners like me.
9. I am seeking through prayer and meditation to make a conscious effort to consider others better than myself.
10. I embrace the state of astonishment as a permanent and glorious reality.
11. I choose to rid myself of any attitude that is not bathed in gratitude.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, I will try to carry this message to others who think that Christians are better than anyone else.

i have just enough active gray matter left to discern that the above is sort of a self-test. I won't ask you your score and would appreciate it if you didn't ask me mine.