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.

Modifier placement is so important

I just saw a television commercial for a vitamin supplement or rejuvenating product of some sort in which a man said, "I'm 63 and I can still almost hit a golf ball three hundred yards."

He didn't mean to say that he could still almost hit a golf ball, he meant to say that he could still hit a golf ball almost three hundred yards. Do you see the difference?

Even when the modifier was in the right place, comedian Milton Berle could find a joke. He told an audience he was 83 and he and his wife had sex almost every day of the week, adding that they had sec almost on Monday, sex almost on Tuesday, sec almost on Wednesday....

I hope you're not offended; I thought it was funny.

My own personal faux pas involving a misplaced modifier occurred in Macy's department store several years back. I said to the salesperson that I wanted to buy a black man's umbrella, when what I should have said was that I wanted to buy a man's black umbrella.

On another note, my email inbox is full to overflowing constantly of late, most of it unwanted. Yesterday I received 307 new messages, of which 178 were political. I for one can't wait until (and will be so glad when) this election cycle is over.

Whether life will return to what passes for normal is another issue entirely.

Time will tell.

First do no harm (Hippocrates, c.460 - c.370 BCE)

In the previous post, I told you that Mrs. RWP (the lovely Ellie) had suffered several episodes of the rigors (shivering, teeth chattering, etc.) and that having her gall bladder removed had not stopped them. Rachel remarked in a comment that gall bladder removal and teeth chattering and shivering sounded like a strange combination to her. I said I would explain in my next post.

Here we are at my next post and I will give it the old college try. Please keep in mind, though, that I am not a doctor, I am not an expert, and mainly I don't know what I'm talking about. I just read a lot and that is always dangerous.

During one of Ellie's hospitalizations, one of the doctors mentioned "rigors" -- no one else had used that term -- and I looked it up. It did describe what she had experienced (shivering, trembling, teeth chattering) and that a likely or possible cause (I don't remember the exact wording) was the portion of the brain called the hypothalamus, which is the body's thermostat. Sometimes, for reasons not clear, the hypothalamus decides to change the body's 'set-point' temperature, and it can (and often does) result in rigors as the body attempts to adapt to the change, This is my very unscientific summary of what the article said.

It rang a bell with me because ever since I met Ellie 63 years ago she has told me and nurses and doctors that her normal temperature is 97.6°F instead of 98.6°F (37°C). In the last couple of years it seems to have dropped even lower, the thermometer often reading 96.5 (35.8) and even 96.0 (35.5) on occasion. I have concealed my alarm by teasing that she must be part reptile; she gets my point but remains unconcerned. In July, the episodes of rigors began occurring about once every three weeks, the latest and most severe being this past Monday night. We do know for sure that her gall bladder is not the reason because she hasn't had one since mid-September. Perhaps I should say "not the only reason" as the surgeon remarked that the gall bladder he removed was "very angry".

Our PCP did give a referral to an endocrinologist for further testing but we are currently on hold with that as this particular endicrinologist only treats patients with thyroid problems or diabetes, neither of which has been indicated.

Another possibile cause (or aggravator) for Ellie's rigors is dietary choices. We are learning the hard way that without a gall bladder a person should prefer low-fat foods almost exclusively and scrupulouy avoid egg yolks, mayonnaise, seafood salad, and the like.

I hope this post is helpful and does not lead people to reach erroneous conclusions. You should always check with your physician about any questions or personal issues you may have about your health.

Your trivia factoid for today is that the words "do no harm" do not appear in the Hippocratic oath. Hippocrates did include them, however, in another of his works entitled Of The Epidemics.

Continuity is highly overrated

Thursday morning marked the first frost of this season at our house and I'm just getting around to telling you about it on Saturday night. Time flies when you're having fun, and sometimes even when you're not.

Mrs. RWP (the lovely Ellie) and I received our flu vaccinations and COVID vaccinations this afternoon.

We have had an unsettling horrendous interesting last three months. Mrs. RWP (the lovely Ellie) experienced three episodes of prolonged shivering and teeth chattering that led to two ambulance rides and three hospitalizations, culminating in a surgery called a colocystectomy, the medical term for having one's gall bladder removed. The very odd thing is that she had two more episodes of the rigors (shivering, teeth chattering, etc.) after the surgery, which caused a great deal of confusion in the local medical community. Tests were performed that eliminated the possibility of the pancreas being a part of the problem. The rigors have now ended and Mrs. RWP's recuperation is proceeding apace. Our PCP (primary care physician, current name for what used to be called a family doctor) believes she was having what he called "a stunted immune system response." Who knew?

The two most recent Jeopardy! answers that I knew and the contestants didn't were "What is buckaroo?" and "What is ballyhoo?"

The University of Alabama footbal team, ranked #1 in the nation, has been defeated by two teams from the neighboring state of Tennessee this season, first by Nashville's Vanderbilt University two weeks ago and then by Knoxville's University of Tennessee today. Tuscaloosa is not a happy place right now.

A roundabout is being built at the entrance to our subdivision (British, neighbourhood), so it is not a happy place right now either.

Let the commenting begin.

Great poem, Prufrock

One of my dad's favorite riddles was this one:

As I was going to St. Ives, I met a man with seven wives. Each wife had seven cats. Each cat had seven kits. How many were going to St. Ives?

I was determined to get the answer and did the math: 1 man + 7 wives + 49 cats + 343 kits = 400 going to St. Ives, oh and don't forget the one who asked the question, 1 more person, so 401 is the answer, there were 401 in all going to St. Ives.

"Wrong!" chortled my dad, happy to have tricked me. "There was only 1. As I was going to St. Ives! All the rest were returning from St. Ives!"

It taught me to listen more closely to what is being said, and when my friend at school said, "How many of each kind of animal did Moses take with him on the ark?" I said, "None. It was Noah on the ark, not Moses."

My dad also liked tongue twisters such as these:

-- She sells seashells by the seashore.
-- Rubber baby buggy bumpers.
-- How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
-- Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers; if Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, how many pickled peppers did Peter Piper pick?

These are trite now, but they were real knee-slappers back in the day.

I am a bit more cerebral than my dad, who also liked to say "Pull my finger."

I am more the type to wonder aloud whether, if T.S. Eliot had lived in Rochester,New York, J. Alfred Prufrock would have said, "In the room the women come and go / Talking of Lake Ontario." Stuff like that.

The commonality is that we both have (or in his case, had) weird aspects to our personalities, so much so that my mother often said to each of us, "Everybody's crazy except me and thee, and even thee is a little bit crazy."

I grow old ... I grow old (83 on my last birthday) ...

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Shall I part my hair (what's left of it) behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers and walk upon the beach.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me....

Great poem, Prufrock. Every old person should reread it, even if it never made any sense to you when you were younger.

This is quite a disjointed post, n'est-ce pas? And yet I will send it on its way, out into the world, to do what it will, what it was meant to do from before its creation. If you can figure out what that is exactly, please enlighten me in the comments section.

A few more proverbs

You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.
You can't get blood out of a turnip.
Great oaks from little acorns grow.
You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink.
A miss is as good as a mile.
An apple a day keeps the doctor away.

My dad would always add that an onion a day keeps everybody away. Sometimes he could be infuriating, but sometimes he made a lot of sense.

What are some of your favorite (British, favourite) proverbs that haven't been mentioned in these last two posts?

October ruminations on no particular subject

There are proverbs and then there are proverbs. Here are a few:

A stitch in time saves nine.
Marry in haste, repent at leisure.
A new broom sweeps clean.
You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.
Once burned, twice shy.
A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
Absence makes the heart grow fonder
Out of sight, out of mind.
Waste not, want not.
When in Rome, do as the Romans do.

Writer Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964) of Milledgeville, Georgia, said, "When in Rome, do as you done in Milledgeville ."

Just as two of the proverbs in the above list say opposite things (absence making the heart grow fonder versus being out of mind when out of sight), in the book called Proverbs in the Bible there are adjacent verses in the 26th chaper that convey opposite messages:

"Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him." (Proverbs 26:4)

"Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit." (Proverbs 26:5)

which only goes to prove that these cannot be commands from God (since it is imposdible to do both, only one or the other) but merely a collection of things people say.

It is also possible that these verses advocate choosing to do whatever is best in the moment, which requires discernment.

Finally, and for no particular reason, here is a list of things that come in twelve:

Things That Come In Twelve

Eggs
Doughnuts
Labours of Hercules
Apostles of Jesus Christ
Parts of the Boy Scout Law
Days of Christmas
Months of the Year
Signs of the Zodiac
Sons of Jacob
Tribes of Israel
Pence in an old-style Shilling
Tones in a chromatic Scale
Faces on a Pair of Dice
Hours ante meridian (a.m)
Hours post meridian (p.m.)
Jurors on a jury
Baskets of food left over after Jesus fed the 5,000 using only five loaves and two fishes

A Boy Scout, just so you know, is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent.

Oh, and it follows as the night the day, exhausted. Don't forget exhausted.

Rosh Hashanah, Jewish New Year, ends at sundown today. Remember to start writing 5785 on all of your checks (British, cheques).

I'm kidding.

Closed captioning still needs some work, people

Closed captioning (CC) based on voice recognition software (VRS) has certainly improved a great deal since it was first introduced -- I remember seeing lots of errors in days gone by -- but it ain't quite perfect yet, folks.

Case in point:

Earlier today I saw a report on an all-news channel about today's grand jury indictment of the current mayor of New York City, Eric Adams. As part of the report, the station showed an older video clip of the mayor saying "Make no mistake, when I was elected I promised to lead this city, and I will lead this city." Across tbe bottom of the screen the closed caption said "Make no mistake, when I was elected I promised to leave this city, and I will leave this city."

This is the stuff of which conspiracy theories are made, in my opinion. The people who depend on closed captioning to get their information received, in this case, a message completely opposite from the one the rest of the population heard.

Either voice recognition software needs more work or artificial intelligence (AI) isn't what it is cracked up to be, or perhaps both statements are true.

Am I right or am I wrong? Feel free to agree or disagree in a comment.

The US presidential election process explained

I hope to explain how a US president is chosen without becoming hopelessly bogged down in minutiae (or, if you prefer, becoming bogged down in hopeless minutiae). So fasten your seat belts, take a deep breath, and try to stick with me all the way to the end, at which time you will have either ascended to a higher level of enlightenment or descended to a lower circle of hell (a shout-out here to Dante Alighieri and his Inferno).

Here we go.

Until 1960, only US citizens who resided in one of the many states (currently there are 50) could vote in presidential elections. Since 1960, US citizens who reside in the District of Columbia (the nation's capital, Washington, DC) can also vote in presidential elections because of an amendment to the US Constitution. US citizens who reside in the US-owned territories of Puerto Rico, Guam, the Solomon Islands, and the Virgin Islands cannot vote in presidential elections. Non-citizens of the US are not permitted to vote in a presidential election no matter where they live, although some communities do allow non-citizens to vote in local elections. (The fact that in many states a person obtaining a driver's license is automatically registered to vote is a cause for much concern, nay, alarm to those who don't like that the current administration has allowed illegal border crossings into this country to surge.)

If you think the US president is determined by which candidate gets the most votes in a national election, you would be wrong. We do not have a national election for president, which makes so-called 'national polls' meaningless. No, friends, we have 51 elections held on the same day, one in every state plus the one in the District of Columbia. The US presidential election is decided by an 'electoral college' consisting of 538 electors. The candidate who wins a majority (that is, 270) electoral votes wins the presidential election. More on this in a minute. If no candidate receives 270 electoral votes, the US House of Representatives, where each state gets only one vote for this special circumstance, decides who will become president. (This actually occurred in 1800, 1824, and 1876. Another special circumstance occurred in 2000, when the US Supreme Court effectively decided who would be president by stopping Florida's prolonged recounting of votes because of disputed ballots with infamous 'hanging chads'.)

Why 538 electors? It's a little complicated and I'll try to make it as simple as I possibly can. There are 435 voting members of the nation's House of Representatives. The size of the US House grew as the nation grew until the number of seats was frozen in 1929. After each national census, which occurs every ten years, the number of people represented by each House seat changes, and the legislature in each state draw up a new congressional district map to accommodate the changes. This process is called reapportionment. Since the last census in 2020, some states gained seats (for example, Texas gained 2, Florida gained 1) and some states lost seats (for example, California, New York, and Pennsylvania each lost a seat). In the US Senate, the other house of our bicameral (that is, two-house) legislature, each state gets two senators regardless of its physical size or population, and because the US has 50 states, the Senate has 100 members (note that if the District of Columbia and/or the territory of Puerto Rico becomes a state the number of seats in the US Senate will increase).

If you add 435 and 100, you get 535, which is close to 538 (the number of electors in the Electoral College). The remaining three electors are allotted to the District of Columbia, which is not a state but whose residents can vote in presidential elections as I mentioned earlier, one for its population and two for senators. Each state's allotment, then, is based on its population; that is, the number of congressional districts it has (for example, California has 52, New York has 26, Wyoming has 1, and Georgia where I live has 14) plus each state gets 2 more electoral votes for having two senators.

Each political party with a candidate on the ballot puts together a slate of electors in each state (plus DC) who are pledged to vote for that party's candidate when the Electoral College meets on the same day in each state capitol. Sometimes an elector will break his or her pledge and become a 'faithless elector' who votes for someone else.

The 435 House seats are allotted to the 50 states according to their population. Each state is divided into congressional districts based on population and a representative from each district is elected to serve for two years in the nation's House of Representatives in Washington. The size of the H of R grew over the years as the nation grew and more states were added to the union. According to the most recent official census, the population of the 50 states and the District of Columbia was 331,449,281 in 2020. Because the size of the House of Representatives has been frozen at 435 since 1929 and the census of 2020 counted about 332,000,000 each congressional district during this decade should contain around 750,000 people but some districts are smaller and some are larger. As Joe E. Brown said to Jack Lemmon at the end of Some Like It Hot, nobody's perfect.

This year, Georgia is one of seven states referred to as 'battleground states' or 'swing states' in the presidential election (the others are Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin). The remaining 43 states are considered fairly predictable as to which party they will choose based on their past selections. That is, some states are more liberal, some are more conservative, and some are toss-ups. Accordingly, Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump are both concentrating their presence and their campaign money contributions in the seven states I mentioned. Lucky us (I'm being sarcastic).

A month after the election, the slates of electors meet in the 50 state capitals plus the District of Columbia and officially cast their ballots. which are certified and transported to Washington. Sometimes, as I mentioned, there are 'faithless electors' who go rogue and cast their ballots for someone other than the candidate to whom they were pledged. In Washington, each state's certified results are opened and announced in a joint session of Congress led by the sitting Vice-President. Last time around it occurred on January 6, 2021. Maybe that date rings a bell. We won't pursue it further at this time.

Already in this campaign season, with seven weeks left until Election Day, there have been two assassination attempts on one of the major party candidates. There is trouble right here in River City, and that starts with T and that rhymes with P and that doesn't stand for pool.

There now, wasn't that simple? (I'm being sarcastic again.) Seriously, I hope this post has helped you to understand how a US president is chosen. If not, I suppose it would only muddy the waters further by telling you that there actually are not 51 elections but 3,242 county or county-equivalent (Louisiana has parishes, Alaska has boroughs) elections including, of course, the District of Columbia.

The 650 members of the House of Commons in the UK represent 68,000,000 people, give or take, while the 435 members of the US House of Representatives represent 335,000,000 million people currently, give or take. We are neither a monarchy nor a paiamentary system, but which government sounds more democratic to you?

How much is that doggie in the window?

Dogs I had before I met Mrs. RWP:

--Tippy, a male Border Collie
--Sandy, a male shepherd-collie mix
--Frisky, a male shepherd-collie mix.

Dogs Mrs. RWP had before she met me:

--First Nellie, a black female cocker spaniel
--Second Nellie, a black female cocker spaniel
--Tangie (short for Tangerine), a brown female dachshund-chihuahua mix

Dogs Mrs. RWP and I have had together:

--Koko, a tan female Manchester
--Spot, a male beagle
--Gigi, a black female miniature poodle
--Tasha (short for Natasha), a brown female Irish setter-Afghan mix
--Cricket, a gray female toy poodle
--P.J. (short for Pierre Jean-Jacques DuBois), a white male miniature poodle
--Jethro, a cream-colored male Havanese
--Rudy (short for Rudolph Valentino), a brown male dachshund
--Abby (short for Abigail), a white and fawn female chihuahua-Jack Russell terrier mix (I think)

In summary, I had three, Mrs. RWP had three, and together we have had nine. Fifteen in all.

I feel as old as Tolkien's Gandalf the Grey who became Gandalf the White, who knew many generations of hobbits. I wish our dogs could have lived longer, but if they had we probably wouldn't have known all of them.

Each of them was memorable in his or her own way.

Why I love hexadecimal

I love hexadecimal, a big word that means 16, because it makes me feel so young. Let me explain.

In our familiar decimal (base 10) system there are 10 units, and we use the symbols 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 to represent them. After reaching 9, we add a 1 in the next column to the left (the "tens" position) followed by the same unit symbols and get 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 all the way to 19, and then we add 1 to the tens position and repeat the units (20, 21, 22, and so forth). Eventually we get to 97, 98,99, and repeat the process of adding 1 in the next column to the left and reach 100 (1 hundred, no tens, and no units).

We should have learned all of this in grammar school. In the world of computers, however, one will soon eccounter (at least people used to) the word hexadecimal because computers are not based on the decimal system. Computers are based on binary (base 2) arithmetic, and hexadecimal (base 16) is a shorthand method of avoiding having to read long strings of zeroes and ones in binary. Hexadecimal notation uses the same 0 to 9 as decimal but adds six more symbols (A, B, C, D, E, and F) that correspond to the decimal numbers 11, 12, 13, 14, and 15 before we can reach hexadecimal 10, which is equivalent to 16 in the decimal system.

If you don't understand the previous paragraph, keep reading it over and over and do not proceed further until you do. If the light never dawns, however, you will be caught in what computer programmers call an endless loop.

So if hex 10 is the same as decimal 16, and it is, can you hazard a guess as to what hex 20 and hex 30 are equivalent to? If you said 32 and 48, go to the head of the class.

The reason I love hexadecimal is that I can sort of fool my aging self into pretending I am not as old as I really am. When I turned 50, the folks in our office gave me a cake that said "Happy X'32' Birthday"!

And now that the two adults in our home are 83 and 89 in decimal, we manage to think of ourselves as quite a bit younger by thinking of our ages in hexadecimal, 53 and 59, respectively.

If I should happen to live three months longer than my grandfather did and reach my 96th birthday, I will be a mere 60 in hexadecimal (16 × 6). The only drawback to carrying on our pretense is the difficulty in trying to explain such ages as 5A, 5B, 5C, 5D, 5E, and 5F (90 through 95 in decimal) to ordinary mortals (i.e., non-computer geeks).

I may have written a post similar to this one before, but I'm not sure. Maybe my brain isn't as young as I try to fool myself into thinking.

It’s too hot to write a long post

The average person (me, for example) has no (okay, little) grasp of just how large or small a number really is. Case in point, I read the other day that one in every 10,000 persons in the US lives to be 95 years old. Is that a large number or a small number? It sounds significant to outlive 9,999 other people but it depends on how you look at it and what you compare it to. I hope to be one of those persons myself one day (actually less than 12 years hence, in my case) as was my maternal grandfather, Nathan Sulberman of Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, who died on December 20, 1970, having lived 95 years, 8 months, 29 days after having been born on March 21, 1875. But I digress.

Think about it. With 335,000,000 people in the US currently, one in 10,000 works out to 33,500 people who are 95 years old. And in a world of nearly 8.4 billion people (a number that boggles the mind), the rate works out to 840,000 people worldwide who have been alive for 95 years. Gathered into one locality, that group would form a city the size of Liverpool, or one a tad smaller than Indianapolis, or one a tad larger than San Francisco. Any way you slice it (probably not the best metaphor choice), that is a lot of very old people. The rate, however (one in 10,000), is actually a very tiny number, 0.0001 per cent, proving once again (a) figures never lie but liars often figure, (b) whatever it is, it's all in how you look at it, or (c) something else you are invited to expound on in the comments section.

I am not my own grandpa

...but strange things do happen sometimes.

I know a father and son who married sisters. A couple of years after Lee Watson married Lois, his widowed father Gordon married Lois's older sister Lula. So Lee's stepmother was also his sister-in-law, and Lee was both Gordon's son and Gordon's nephew. Put another way, Gordon was both Lee's father and Lee's uncle. Lee and Lois had two sons, Billy and Gordon, whose aunt and uncle on their mother's side were their grandma and grandpa on their father's side. I would have found that very confusing.

Two of my stepmother's brothers, Russ Williams and Billy Williams, married women who were related to each other as aunt and niece. Dorothy Bridges Williams (Russ's wife) had a sister, Jewel Bridges Chumeley, whose daughter became Lawanda Chumeley Williams (Billy's wife). So Russ and Dorothy's daughter Carol was first cousin to Lawanda through her mother Dorothy, and she was also first cousin to Billy and Lewanda's children Barry, Connie, and Cindy through her father Russ. Otherwise they would have been her first cousins once removed, not her second cousins, which is something else entirely. Carol's children and Lawanda's children are second cousins. I hope I have made everything crystal clear.

My stepmother's two youngest siblings, Fred Williams and Sue Williams, had children who were what is called double first cousins because Fred married Martha Perry, and Sue married Jack Perry, Martha's brother. Normally, first cousins have three sets of grandparents between them with only one set in common. Double first cousins are different in that they have only two sets of grandparents between them, and they have both sets in common. I hope that makes sense.

Here's a bit of trivia. The television evangelist Jimmy Swaggart and the bad-boy rock star Jerry Lee Lewis (his hits included "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" and "Great Balls Of Fire"; he was married seven times including once to his 13-year-old first cousin, once removed) were double first cousins, which fact only serves to prove that every person's journey is unique and independent of supposed family influence.

Another bit of trivia: The younger Gordon Watson (that is, Lee's son, not Lee's father) whom you met in this post's opening paragraph was Vanna White's significant other for several years before she moved to California and began turning letters on Wheel Of Fortune. You won't learn this kind of stuff on anybody else's blog.

If you find information about unusual inter-personal relationships as fascinating as I do, I hope you will enjoy hearing Lonzo and Oscar singing "I'm My Own Grandpa" way back in 1947 (3:05).

If three things were different (that is, if Lee Watson had married Lula instead of Lois; if Lee's father had married Lois instead of Lula; and if Lula had been Lois's mother instead of her older sister, as she was certainly old enough to have been), my friend Lee Watson could have given Lonzo and Oscar a run for their money.

T.T.F.N.

Thank you, Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II

I read yesterday that the oldest person in the world, a man in Spain, has died. He was 117 years old. Several hours later, the following song kept running through my head:

Ol' man river, that ol' man river,
He don't say nothin'
But must know somethin',
He just keeps rollin', he keeps on rollin' along.

He don't plant taters, he don't plant cotton,
An' them that plants 'em are soon forgotten
But ol' man river, he just keeps rollin' along.

You and me, we sweat and strain,
Bodies all achin' and wracked withh pain.
Tote that barge! Lift that bale!
You get a little drunk an' you land in jail.

I get weary and sick of tryin',
I'm tired of livin' and scared of dyin,
But ol' man river, he just keeps rollin' along.

(end of song)

It seemeed an odd song to appear so suddenly, full-grown like Athena from the forehead of Zeus, with all lyrics intact, playing on my mental radio station. I put two and two together and decided that it must have been having learned of the death of the world's oldest man that set the wheels turning in my sub-conscious and thrust the song into my consciousness.

No one knows how long one's lifespan will be. Some people die quite young, and some live to a ripe old age. Me, I'm 83 now and my wife just turned 89. She has survived to be the longest-livedp person in her family line, her father and an aunt both having lived to be 88 years, 6 months old. In my own case, I will have to outlast both an aunit who lived to be 88 years, 8 months old and a grandfather who lived to be 95 years, 9 months old to be able to claim "longest-lived member of the family" status. Do I intend to try? You betcha. Do I hope I make it? As Gabby Hayes may or may not have said to various heroes in western movies of the 1940s, "yer durn tootin'." But do I aspire to live long enough to dethrone our recently departed Spanish friend? I'm not so sure. I'll have to think more on that one. I'll get back to you.

In the meantime, as I look back over my life so far, I reflect on the fact that I have never toted a barge, lifted a bale, got a little drunk, or landed in jail (one of those claims is not true), and I will continue to revel in the fact that though I sometimes do get weary, I am not yet sick of tryin', tired of livin', or, since I am a Christian, scared of dyin'. Until the end comes, I will pull myself up by my bootstraps each morning and, like Ol' Man River, just keep rollin' along.

Avastin, Lucentis, Eyelea, Beovu, and Vabysmo

There have been plenty of successful business partnerships, mergers, and joint ventures one could name. Sears & Roebuck. Neiman-Marcus in Dallas. Mercedes-Benz. Daimler-Chrysler. Titche-Goettinger in Dallas. Carson Pirie Scott in Chicago. Goldman Sachs. Merrill, Lynch, Pierce, Fenner, and Beane which morphed into Merrill, Lynch, Pierce, Fenner. and Smith which eventually became just Merrill Lynch. Hewlett-Packard in Palo Alto, California.

There are also many individuals whose businesses became household names without benefit of partners. Henry Ford. J.C. Penney. R.H. Macy. Gimbels. John Wanamaker in Philadelphia. Charles Schwab. F.W. Woolworth. Harris Teeter. S.S. Kresge. Dare I say it, Donald Trump.

Some are still around, but many have passed off the scene and are only a memory.

Avastin, Lucentis, Eyelea, Beovu, and Vabysmo are not partners in a law firm. They are not a brokerage house or an automobile conglomerate or a giant department store or a chain of supermarkets. They are not breeds of goats (shout-out here to hilltophomesteader in Washington state). They are not the names of quintuplets in Venezuela.

No, friends, what they are are five different medications that were developed to treat macular degeneraton. Over the course of the past seven years, I have received all of them. Unfortunately, they are not available in pill form. Instead, they are injected into the whites of one's eyes via a sharp-pointed needle, the term for which procedure is intravitreously (as opposed to the possibly more familiar term, intravenously).

You probably could have lived your entire life without knowimng this information, but now you do. I predict that you will not forget it any time soon.

This has been another public service announcement from your roving correspondent, RhymesWithPlague of Canton, Georgia, USA.

You're welcome.

What a tangled web we weave

He was born in 1906 in a place called Tomah, Wisconsin, and moved twice with his parents and four older brothers, first to LaCrosse, Wisconsin, and then to Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He left school after the tenth grade. He worked at Quaker Oats there as a young man but later found his life's calling working with metals at the Dearborn Brass Works. He drifted around the midwest some in the early years of the Great Depression, living the hobo life and hitching rides on freight trains. Eventually he married a woman named Hildred Putman from Leavenworth, Kansas, and returned to Cedar Rapids with her. He was 35 and working at Dearborn Brass Works when Pearl Harbor was attacked. He enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1942 at the age of 36 when he realized he probably was not going to to be drafted. He wanted to be in the submarine service but was told that he was too old. After completing training at Great Lakes Naval Station in Chicago, the farthesr east he had ever been up to that point in his life, he was assigned to the PCE-869, a Patrol Craft Escort vessel of the "submarine chaser" class, as a Machinist's Mate. He was twice the age of many of his young shipmates, and they called him "Pop". He was even older than the ship's captain, who was 32.

During the war his ship sailed through the Panama Canal in both directions, going up the Pacific coast as far as Portland, Oregon, and up the Atlantic coast as far as Greenland. He never served in either the European or Pacific theaters of operation, but his ship escorted many ships containing people who did. He remembered in his later years that his ship would drop depth charges when German submarines were in the vicinity; he had nightmares of seeing dead bodies rise to the surface of the ocean and woke up screaming a few times. At some point during the war he received notice that his wife Hildred back in Iowa had divorced him. He remembered various shore leaves in San Diego, California; Fort Lauderdale, Florida; and New York City with fondness. His ship's last home port before his honorable discharge from the Navy after the war ended was Quonset Point Naval Station in Rhode Island.

He met my mother in Rhode Island sometime in 1945. I was about four. I thought he was my father returning fron the war. He wore a sailor's white uniform and I called him "Ted" like my mother did until I was encouraged to call him "Daddy." They were married in Seekonk, Massachusetts, on September 2, 1946, but this bit of information was not known to me for many years. I thought he was my biological father and that they had married on September 2, 1939, probably because it meshed nicely with my being born in March 1941. That is what they told me and everybody else, but it was not true. My mother died when I was 16 without ever having told me the truth. I pieced it together after many years and through much research and remembering fragments of conversations that were not meant to be overheard. I remember hearing my mother say to my dad during an argument, "He never asked to be born." I remember hearing my dad say to my mother during another, "I gave him a name." I remember hearing my mother tell someone that she had fallen in love with a sailor suit and found out only later that she didn't care too much for the sailor.

After I completed first grade, our family moved away from Rhode Island for two reasons. First of all, I had developed a pre-asthmatic condition -- I remember my mother using an atomizer to spray something medicinal up my nose each night at bedtime -- and the doctor said a drier climate would be beneficial. Second, the new man of the house thought job prospects would be better for his particular set of skills in the new aerospace industry. After he had considered both Ohio and southern California, we moved by train in August 1947 to Fort Worth, Texas, where he found work at Consolidated Vultee Aircraft (later called Convair and then General Dynamics) as a turret lathe and milling machine operator. He stayed there for nearly 20 years, dying of pancreatic cancer in March 1967 at age 60, just six months before he would have been eligible to retire with a pension. My mother, Ruth Silberman Brague, had died in 1957 of metastatic breast cancer at the age of 47. He had been married for nearly nine years to Mildred Louise Williams Houston Brague, his third wife and my stepmother, at the time of his death. With no visible means of support, neither pension mor Social Security payment, she married again to a man naned John Fuller in 1969 and stayed married to him for 33 years. He died in 2003 and she died in 2004 at the age of 89.

I was born at home. My first bed, I've been told, was a pillow placed in a drawer that had been removed from a chest of drawers and set on a table. I believe that. What I don't believe, what I know in fact cannot be true, is that the only birth certificate I have ever had, which was not issued until I was about to enter public school, indicates that the man in the sailor suit fathered me. And as far as I know, I was not adopted by him. It is simply false information, whatever good intentions they may have had.

Just because a document that is considered official says something doesn't make it so.

If a body meet a body comin' through the rye

I don't know whether you have noticed, but I am a sucker for an avid consumer of demographic information. I don't know why. I just am.

Here are some figures you may find startling. Perhaps you were already aware of them. The table below shows the population of the world by continent in 2024 as well as each continent's population density per square kilometer and per square mile:

Population By Continent 2024

			Density	Density
Rank	Continent	Population	/km2	/mi2
1	Asia	4,927,748,740	100	259
2	Africa	1,494,988,668	49	127
3	Europe	...741,252,853	32	83
4	North America	...608,132,768	25	65
5	South America	...442,860,821	25	65
6	Australia/Oceania	.....46,109,212	5	13
	TOTAL:	8,261,093,062

These figures are, of course, an estimate, a snapshot at a moment in time (who knows when?) based on birth rates, death rates, immigration data, emigration data, and (as Andy Griffith might say) I don't know what all. But using them I can tell you that Asia is home to 61.056% of the people in the world, Africa is home to 18.68%, Europe is home to 9.26%, North America is home to 7.6%, South America is home to 5.5%, and Australia/Oceania is home to 0.58% of the people in the world. Or were at the time these figures were, er, figured.

I don't have a clue as to what it all means or what it all bodes, but I do remember a mid-20th-century saying that has been attributed variously to General Bernard Montgomery (UK), General Dwight Eisenhower (USA), and General Douglas MacArthur (USA): "Never fight a land war in Asia."

Based on the table above, I would call that very good advice indeed, or even a word to the wise, which, as we all know, is sufficient.

P.S. - Today is the 79th anniversary of the dropping of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945 that killed an estimated 160,000 human beings. Three days later a second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, killing 80,000 more human beings. World War II ended a few days later.

People say things

...unless they are deaf-mutes who communicate through writing, drawing, or sign language. Talking is one of the first things people learn to do. Most of the time they don't stop doing it until they are dead.

I do not mean to be crass or insensitive, just factual. How people talk is our subject today.

I don't mean how different sounds are formed with the mouth, nose, lips, and tongue (there's a whole branch of science that deals with that) or the different ways people pronounce the same word in various English-speaking countries (ZEE-bra vs. ZEH-bra; DEB-ree vs. duh-BREE; uh-LOO-mih-num vs. al-yew-MIN-ee-um; good day, mate vs. g'digh, might; and so forth) because, friends, that way madness lies. Instead, we will confine ourselves to a couple of things I have heard with my own ears. One of them is charming and one of them is infuriating.

I know a woman in Cumming, Georgia, who says Sayrah instead of Sarah and Mayry instead of Mary. I find it charming, something I thought only a few older women in Georgia said. But a young man from Sylacauga, Alabama, called my son Cayry (his name is Cary, which rhymes with carry, marry, tarry, Harry, Larry). So it must be at least a Georgia-Alabama thing and it might even be a remnant of speech in the Old South, which you thought had gone with the wind. It hasn't.

What I find infuriating is hearing people on radio and television say Fentanol, rhyming it with "alcohol". The drug's name is Fentanyl, not Fentanol, and its final syllable should be unaccented, what peope in phonetics call the "schwa E" sound. The word ends with the same spelling and the same sound as "vinyl". People don't say vinol and they shouldn't say Fentanol either. It's about to drive me crazy.

Tell the truth now. You thought I was already there, didn't you?

P.S. - August has started off with a bang, blogging-wise. I have published three posts in four days. I don't want to be Debbie Downer, but I doubt that I will be able to keep up the pace. Time will tell. As the man who jumped off the top of the Empire State Building was heard to say as he passed the 50th floor, "So far, so good."

Figures never lie, but liars often figure (Olympic edition )

The Ancient Olympic Games began officially in Greece in 776 BC or BCE (choose one) although it is generally agreed that earlier games did occur even though no on seems to know how many there were or how often they were held. Beginning in 776 BC/BCE the games were held every four years (which period is called an Olympiad) until, it is believed, 393 AD or CE (choose one). If you do the math (776 + 393) you cannot help but see that the Ancient Olympics lasted for a period of 1,169 years. That number is obviously (obviously, I tell you) not divisible by 4, but since the year in which the games are played is the first year of a four-year Olympiad, using 396 (that is, adding three years to 393 AD/CE) we find that the Ancient Olympics lasted 1,172 years, or 293 Olympiads (that is, 1,172 divided by 4 equals 293).

Olympic Games were then not held for 1500 years until the Modern Olympic Games began in 1896 (proof: 1896 minus 396 equals 1500). The Olympiad count started over fresh and the Athens Olympics kicked off Modern Olympiad I (aren't Roman numerals just precious?). The current Paris Olympics mark the first year of Olympiad XXXII (that is, 32). That works out nicely because the year 2024 minus the year 1896 is a period of 128 years and, as we all know, 128 divided by 4 equals 32.

It should be noted here in the interest of accuracy that the 1916 Olympic Games during Olympiad VI were not held because of World War I, and the 1940 and 1944 Olympic Games during Olympiads XII and XIII, respectively, were not held because of World War II.

It should be further noted that if we count Olympiads from the very first one in 776 BC/BCE -- and I think we should, based on the fact that the four-year Olympiads in modern times continue even when the games are not held, as noted in the preceding paragraph -- then the current Olympics in Paris, which are occurring exactly 2,800 years since the Ancient Games began (2024 AD/CE years plus 776 BC/BCE years equals 2800 years altogether), are actually occurring during the 700th Olympiad (proof: 2800 divided by 4 equals 700).

No matter how you slice it, that is a lot of Olympiads.

I enjoy coming up with posts like this one. I hope your head is not spinning, but if it is, it simply cannot be helped, It goes with the territory.

Perhaps I should add a warning in the blog's header. Should it say:

a. PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK
b. ABANDON ALL HOPE, YE WHO ENTER HERE
c. FASTEN YOUR SEAT BELTS, IT'S GOING TO BE A BUMPY NIGHT

or something else that you tell me in a comment?

A new lease on life

I know there are a lot of things going on in the world right now. The Olympics in Paris. Twelve schoolchildren killed in northern Israel by Hezbollah. Retaliatory bombing of Beirut, Lebanon, by Israel. Leaders of Hamas assassinated in Tehran and Damascus. Joe Biden replaced by Kamala Harris in an apparent bloodless coup in the upper echelons of the Democratic Party without a single vote having beien cast for her in any primary election. Three little girls stabbed to death near Liverpool, England, while dancing to Taylor Swift's music.

However, please bear with me for one more post about myself and then I will blog about other things.

I am elated. I am ecstatic. I am still somewhat giddy at the wonder of it all.

i'm referring to the recent surgeries to remove cataracts from both of my eyes..

The great thing about having had surgery to remove cataracts from my eyes is, as you might expect, that I can see so much better, but I had no idea how much better it would be. It is hard to describe. It is rather like Dorothy leaving Kansas and arriving in Oz. I don't mean Australia (but here's a shout-out to kylie, Sue, and Helsie, anyway). I don't try mean that I now live in a place where scarecrows can talk, lions are cowardly, monkeys can fly, or witches melt. I mean it has been rather like going from a black and white world, an increasingly dark, drab, dim world, to a bright, beautiful Technicolor world. I didn't realize fully how poorly I was seeing. I could no longer read a newspaper. To use my smart phone or my desktop computer required me to put my nose about an inch from the screen, and the print kept fading into ever lighter shades of gray.

I feared that my worsening eyesight was due to the macular degeneration I've written about in other posts. It was not. It was due to the cataracts.

There is one small downside to having vastly improved vision. I can now see in the mirror clearly every wrinkle on my face, neck, and brow, and I don't need the mirror to see my wrinkly hands. They are not a pretty sight.

I feel sorry for Mrs. RWP having to look at me every day, although she says she is nor complaining.

I will tell you just what sort of person Mrs. RWP is. Yesterday I was wearing a pair of tan shorts that I hadn't worn since losing quite a bit of weight. They fit quite loosely in the waist and I had to keep hoisting them up. After about half an hour of hoisting I said, "My pants are about to fall off." Did she say, "Change into a different pair, then" or "Put on a belt"? No, she did not.

She said, "Don't stand in front of a window".

Travel Hint No. 17,643

If you are ever staying in a hotel in Stockholm and need to take a taxicab from Strandvägen to Lidingö and you purchased a Swedish-English traveler's phrasebook but you left it in your room and you can't recall how to say "to the right" and "to the left" to the taxi driver who doesn't speak English because he is an older man whose education ended before English was taught in Sweden's schools, just think of Shirley Jones.

Remember her?

Shirley Jones was an American singer-actress who in the movies played Laurie in Oklahoma! and Julie in Carousel and Marian the librarian in The Music Man and on television played Shirley Partridge, mother of her real-life stepson David Cassidy, in The Partridge Family. After she and David's father, Jack Cassidy, were divorced she married comedian Marty Ingels who starred in another television series called I'm Dickens, He's Fenster. You will suddenly remember that the Swedish phrases meanng "to the right" and "to the left" are till höger and till vänster, respectively, and because the ö in höger sounds like the short oo in book or look or hook or crook, and the ä in vänster sounds like the short e in bed or fed or red or wed, suddenly thinking of Shirley Jones's second husband's television series I'm Dickens, He's Fenster will trigger you to recall the similar-sounding near-rhyme till höger, till vänster and you will eventually reach your destination.

However, if you think of Florence Henderson instead of Shirley Jones, you will never make it to Lidingö.

All of this came to me in a flash in the middle of the night when orher insomniacs would be counting sheep.

As you may have concluded, I am not like other insomniacs.

The lesson of this post, which stemmed from a real-life experience of mine back in February 1969, is simply this: When mnemonics are scarce, invent your own.

Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da, Life Goes On

Indeed it does. Accordingly, here are more answers to Jeopardy! clues no one knew during my absence from Blogland:

What is lurk? What is scribble? What is New Jersey? What is hymnology? What is the Casbah? What is the Delaware River? What is Dien Bien Phu? (or, more accurately, Điện Biên Phu.)

It never stops.

For those who care, 48 years have gone by since the USA celebrated its bicentennial (200th) anniversary. In two more years, therefore, its 250th anniversary will occur. Do you know the word for that? Also, in what country is Mount Kilimanjaro? Keep reading.

The word for 250th anniversary is semiquincentennial (literally, half of 500) and Mt. Kilimanjaro is in Tanzania. When one of my grandsons spent a whole summer in southern Kenya several years ago he could see Mt. Kilimanjaro every day from his front yard.

it suddenly occurs to me how well-traveled some of my family members are. They have been to Hungary, the fjords of Norway, the Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China, Guatemala, Japan, Hawaii, England, Mumbai, Dubai, Kenya, Uganda, Honduras, France, Switzerland. The list goes on and on.

I have been to Alabama several times.

I'm joking, sort of. I have set foot in 38 of our 50 states, I think, plus the District of Columbia (as in Washington, D.C.), as well as Canada (just barely), Mexico (just barely), England, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Bermuda, and the Bahamas. I remember that enroute from New York City to Copenhagen, the plane flew high over a very snow-covered Scotland, but i have never had the pleasure of stepping foot thereon.

In the lull between my recuperating from having had a cataract removed from my right eye on July 8th and the excited anticipation of having a cataract removed from my left eye on July 29th, Mrs. RWP kept life exciting for us by being hospitalized/hospitalised for three days days and theee nights because of a gallstone. She came home just in time to celebrate her 89th birthday.

I'm back in Blogland for the moment, but I'm going away again. When I return, my left eye will be able to see what my right eye is already seeing. Unfortunately, I will not be flying over Scotland this time, snow-covered or otherwise.

In closing, I think I have managed to kill a hydrangea.

Not just another Saturday

Mrs. RWP and I were binge-watching a few old episodes of Rescue 911, a series from the 1980s and 1990s hosted by William Shatner of Star Trek fame, but we decided to switch over to Fox News to see if anything interesting might have happened on a sleepy summer afternoon.

Former President Donald J. Trump had just been shot in an assassination attempt at a political rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

We were glued to our set for the next six hours.

I am going to make one statement, after which I will not say anything else of a political nature. It infuriates me that even though statements condemning the act were made by former Vice President Mike Pence; U.S. Congressman Steve Scalise (survivor of a shooting/attempted assassination); former President George W. Bush; current third-party Presidential candidate Robert F.Kennedy Jr. (whose own father was assassinated during the 1968 Presidential campaign); and former President Barack Obama, all of them were released before current President Joe Biden got around to saying anything. He also told a reporter that he didn't have enough information to say that it was an assassination attempt.

A final note: Earlier this year he supported ending Secret Service protection for former Presidents, and he prevented RFK Jr. from being provided with any.

Will wonders never cease?

Recent Jeopardy! stumpers include:

What is fondant?
What is Bewitched?
What is Bonanza?
What are the New York Mets?
What is the Atomic Energy Commission?

I'm baaaack (much sooner than I expected to be)!

One of my eyes has been successfully repaired, and it makes a world of difference. I see bright colors now instead of drab shades of grey. Most importantly, I can read text on the computer screen easily again after fearing it was going to fade away altogether. It's like being reborn. The difference is amazing.

My second eye is scheduled to be repaired on July 29th, but until then I can cope. I can do just fine. I just can't drive.

I do not have a third eye.

Not that I'm aware of.

Can you tell I'm downright giddy? You would be too if you had experienced the sudden improvement in vision that I just did on Monday and Tuesday of this week.

I will still have to be fitted for glasses for distance vision. Of the two types of lenses that could have been inserted, I chose to be able to read books, music, newspapers, hymnbooks, etc., without glasses instead of being able to see afar off. I have worn glasses since I was seven years old (except for the 40 years I wore contact lenses between 18 and 58, when I got corneal abrasions and had to stop wearing contact lenses) and it won't be a big deal to still wear glasses when I need to drive a car. I'm driving less and less these days, but I intend to be reading and doing computer work and playing music for some time yet.

This whole transitional period will take two or three months (surgically remove cataract from right eye, post-op exams, surgically remove cataract from left eye, post-op exams, being examined for new prescription for eyeglasses, waiting for new eyeglasses to be made) but I'm ecstatic.

All systems (well, some of them) are GO, and I thank you for your interest!

My dad used to say, "I see," said the blind man, as he picked up his hammer and saw.

I know how that blind man felt.

A probable hiatus looms

Before I get to that, last night's triple-threat stumpers from Jeopardy! were "What is the Organization of American States?" (another mid-twentieth-century one) and "What is cloistered?"

Moving right along....

I wanted to let my vast reading audience (Hi, Emma! Hi, Janice!) know that I will probably not be posting anything on the blog for about six weeks. Removal of a cataract from my right eye (Oculus dexter) and insertion of a new lens is scheduled for Monday, July 8th. It will be blurry vision and dark glasses time for a while, and then just about the time I might be getting back to normal, the removal of a cataract from my left eye (Oculus sinister) and insertion of another new lens is scheduled for Monday, July 29th. But one never knows how one's body will respond. My getting back to normal (or whatever the new normal will be) is anybody's guess.

So I will see you when I see you, and with the new lenses and all, I really will see you.

In the meantime, keep your powder dry, praise the Lord and pass the ammunition, don't take any wooden nickels, and other inappropriate expressions. What I'm really tryiing to say is:

T.T.F.N.

P.S. - A happy Fourth of July (American Independence Day) to all of you.

Some games involve thrones, real or imagined

If only I had been a contestant, some recent dead-air segments on Jeopardy! would have been filled with the correct responses of "Who is William Randolph Hearst?" and "What is a Hudson Hornet?" and "Who is Cab Calloway?" and "Who is Bob Hope?" but as some grammar-challenged wag once opined, "Them's the breaks".

The sharp-eyed among you may have noticed two things. First, all of the answers the real contestants couldn't supply are decidedly mid-twentieth-century (an era with which, having lived through, I am personally acquainted). Second, I ended the first paragraph using U.K.-style punctuation, not U.S.-style puntuation (that is, the period is placed outside, not inside, the quotation mark (known as inverted commas in the U.K.).

Tonight is the long-awaited and much-anticipated debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, a first in American history, although, speaking of the mid-twentieth-century, 1968 saw a debate between Vice-President Hubert Humphrey and former Vice-President Richard Nixon. A major difference is that the 1968 participants were the nominees of their parties but the 2024 participants are only the presumed nominees, their respective parties having not yet held their nominating conventions.

Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to find out whether William, Prince of Wales, is King Charles III's heir-presumptive or heir-apparent, or both, and report your findings in a comment. Be sure to cite your sources, because some sources give you extra points and others cause points to be deducted. Your correspondent will decide which are which.

Parlez-vous français?

Ma petite-fille voyage en France cette semaine. Elle a vingt-quatre ans et voyage avec une amie d'école. Je ne sais pas si l'aime parle français mais ma petite-fille ne le fait pas.

How am I doing?

I took one year (two semesters) of French during my second year at university way back in 1959-60 when I was 18 and 19 (in other words, a long time ago).

So it was with a bit of fear and trembling that I took pen in hand put fingers to keyboard and wrote typed the first paragraph above, which says:

My granddaughter is traveling in France this week. She is 24 years old and traveling with a friend (female) from school. I don't know if the friend can speak French but my granddaughter does not.

Thanks to a rich and varied life I can tell my granddaughter how to say "Thank you" in Portuguese (Obrigado) or "Where could I find the men's toilet?" in Swedish (Var finnst der herrtoaletten?), but if she needs much more besides "How far is it to the train station?" in French (à quelle distance se trouve la gare?) I wouldn't be very much help.

The two friends' European trip is a gift to thenselves for having recently obtained their Master's Degrees. It will include side trips to Suisse (Switzerland) and Pays Bas (The Netherlands, literally The Low Country) before it ends in early July. I hope they have a wonderful time. I pray daily for their protection, safe travels, and safe return.

My granddaughter is 24, not 9, and she has a head on her shoulders. She may not be a little girl any more, but she will always be my petite-fille.

I see the moon, the moon sees me

Do you know how many phases of the moon there are?

Before you say "I don't know and I don't care" or embarrass yourself by guessing some wildly inaccurate number, let me tell you the answer.

There are eight.

Some of you may be thinking "No way. Impossible. Cannot be true," to which I respond, "Way. Possible. Can be and is."

I will now tell you the eight phases of the moon while you silently marvel, "Is there no end to his knowledge?":

1. New Moon (Illumination: 0%)
2. Waxing Crescent Moon (Illumination: 0.1% to 49.9%)
3. First Quarter Moon (Illumination: 50%)
4. Waxing Gibbous Moon (Illumination: 50.1 to 99.9%)
5. Full Moon (Illumination: 100%)
6. Waning Gibbous Moon (Illumination: 99.9% to 50.1%)
7. Third Quarter Moon (Illumination: 50%)
8. Waning Crescent Moon (Illumination: 49.9% to 0.1%)

You know, of course, that wherever each human being stands on the surface of Ye Olde Planet Earth, his or her feet are pointing down, perpendicularly as it were, toward the center of our planet. Only gravity keeps us all from flying off into space. Depending on where we happen to be standing causes a curious effect on how the moon looks to us. This phenomenon is known as the moon's orientation. I said all that to say this:

In the Northern Hemisphere, the moon's orientation is from right to left, but in the Southern Hemisphere the moon's orientation is from left to right. Stated another way, in the Northern Hemisphere the First Quarter Moon resembles a capital D. In the Southern Hemisphere it is the Third Quarter Moon that resembles a capital D.

It is absolutely true, though you may find it hard to believe. Coincidentally, I have never seen an illustration of the moon's phases from the Southern Hemisphere's point of view.

In a previous life I think I may have been a middle school science teacher.

Last gasp?

I have the terrible feeling that my blogging career may be about to come to an end. I don't want it to. I hope I am wrong. But I haven't posted anything here since May 30th. After nearly 17 years, perhaps I have run out of things to say. It hasn't been for lack of trying; I started several posts and discarded them all.

In the meantime, the world keeps turning and June keeps busting out all over. Our friend Donna D. came over the other day and planted a blue hydrangea under our dining room window. The gardenia bush next to our patio has outdone itself this year, exploding with dozens and dozens of blooms that flood the patio with their unmistakeable fragrance.

Today is Flag Day in the United States. On June 14, 1777, eleven months after the Declaration of Independence was signed by 56 men meeting in Philadelphia, upholsterer Betsy Ross of that city presented the first American flag to General George Washington. Because the new nation had been formed by 13 British colonies uniting, the flag had 13 stripes of red and white and 13 white stars arranged in a circle on a field of Navy blue.

Sunday is Father's Day in the United States and it is also our dog Abby's eighth birthday. It is growing late and the arms of Morpheus are calling. I don't have time to tell you more right now, so I'll save it for later.

Perhaps this is not a last gasp after all. Here's hoping it is a second wind.

More you know what from you know where

What is a lob?
What is a Victrola?
What is acetylene?
What is truncate?
What is Romania?

If this is your first foray into The Wonderful World Of Rhymeswithplague, you do not know what all the regular readers know, that the "you know what" mentioned in this post's title are answers phrased in the form of questions to clues that no contestant could answer (but I could) and that the "you know where" is the American television quiz program Jeopardy! which may or may not be somewhat similar to a British programme (see what I did there?) called Pointless.

My own personal opinion (and what other kind would a person have?) after reading what the thoroughly unsubstantiated online encyclopedia Wikipedia says is that Pointless sounds more like a combination of College Bowl and Family Feud with a few more quirky rules thrown in for good measure.

Be that as it may, let us move forward with the post, progress being in the eye of the beholder.

Mrs. RWP (the lovely Ellie) and I didn't do anything special for Memorial Day. We considered driving out to the National Cemetery to see all the grave headstones decorated with American flags, but decided against it because of the likelihood of crowds. We try to avoid crowds. Our daughter and her husband just returned to northern Alabama from a short getaway to Santa Rosa Beach in the Florida panhandle, also referred to in some quarters (not ours) as rhe Redneck Riviera. Our older son and his wife will be heading to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, this weekend. Our younger son and his wife are both working hard at their respecective places of employment, keeping the wolf from the door, so to soeak, although coyotes are more prevalent than wolves hereabouts. We continue to sit at home, avoiding crowds. Occasionally we go to the grocery store or a doctor's appointment or a barber or a church service or a Burger King, but mostly we avoid crowds. Old age has turned into a humdrum existence.

In the first week of June, I am scheduled to receive the bi-monthly injections in both eyeballs (the big word is intravitreous) of a medication called Vabysmo for the treatment and hopefully stabilization of macular degeneration. In the first week of July, I am scheduled to have surgery to remove cataracts from my right eye, and a similar surgery a couple of weeks after that to remove cataracts from my left eye. It's going to be a busy summer.

I hope there won't be crowds,

I’m baaack

...and normalcy (shout-out to President Warren G. Harding, 1921-1923) has returned, more or less, to the blog. I fervently hope that life has slowed down to a dull roar for a while.

Last night I knew four answers on Jeopardy! that none of the contestants clicked in on. (Note. Although people often frown when someone ends a sentence with a preposition, your editor recommends that you smile when someone ends a sentence with two prepositions.)

The four answers, in the form of a question as the rules of Jeopardy! require, are:

1. What is Hawaii? The clue included the words 'sandwich' and 'islands'. Read your history books.

2. Who is Horatio Alger?

3. Who is Ignatius of Loyola? The clue said this man founded the Society of Jesus (the members of which, you may remember, are known as Jesuits, although that was not part of the clue).

4. I forget the fourth one.

Hey, I'm 83 and my memory isn't what it used to be.

I have no trouble remembering my name, age, address, date of birth, social security number, cell phone number, and so on, but I often can't remember what I had for dinner yesterday or other non-eartrh-shattering information.

Did I tell you that this past Sunday was our 61st wedding anniversary? Yup, on Sunday, May 19, 1963, at 3 p.m. in Orlando, Florida, Ellie and I said "I do" and she became Mrs. RHB. She didn't become Mrs. RWP until I started this blog in 2007.

I don't want to bore you further so I will close for now and hope to see you again when next I put fingers to keyboard.

I haven’t posted a thing for two weeks

...and it feels like forever. May has been a very busy month this year in our family, with birthdays (2), anniversaries (2), graduations (3 at two different universities), moves (3), holidays (2, although one won't occur for another week or so), visitors from out of state (2), new jobs starting (5 among the grandchildren and their spouses), family dinners (2 so far), doctor appointments (2), medical emergencies (2), and so forth. 'Round and 'round she goes, and where she stops nobody knows.

I'm not complaining, mind you. I love family outings and get-togethers, but it has been a whirlwind of activity lately. We saw our oldest great-grandson this past week and that was a joy. He is 10 months old and a happy, contented child. Another great-grandson is three months old now and still another one is arriving (different family) in August. Today we're going to a restaurant to celebrate, one day early, the 61st anniversary of our wedding. Life is good and time marches on.

Outside the family, the world seems to be falling apart and rapidly going to hell in a handbasket. I suppose it has been ever thus and people in every generation say it, but this time around it seems more possible than ever. Despite usurpers on every hand, the family really is the basic unit of society. Not the school, not the community, not the church, and certainly not the state, much as each would like to be. Please don't try to disabuse me of my notion. Them's my thoughts and I'm sticking to them.

Another post, admittedly short, is in the books. Maybe June will be less hectic than May and I'll have time to think instead of rushing around, but I am not encouraged at the prospects. After all, June has a reputation for busting out all over.

Couples in show biz (part 2)

Reader Emma Springfield in Iowa thought of two more couples in show biz:

60. Paul Hogan & Linda Kozlowski (his co-star in Crocodile Dundee)
61. Paul Simon & Carrie Fisher

so Australia has made it into the list (a shout-out here to Kylie Tai in the suburbs of Sydney).

Emma said in her comment that this list is contagious, and so it is. I thought of a few more couples in show biz, some of whom go back decades:

62. Bing Crosby & Dixie Lee
63. Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Joan Crawford
64. Franchot Tone & Joan Crawford
65. Howard Duff & Ida Lupino
66. Jim & Marion Jordan (Fibber McGee & Molly on the radio)
67. Harrison Ford & Calista Flockhart
68. Dick Powell & Joan Blondell
69. Mike Todd & Joan Blondell
70. Gary Merrill & Bette Davis

and hare are two that I probably should have thought of first but they never occurred to me until just now:

71. Ronald Reagan & Jane Wyman
72. Ronald Reagan & Nancy Davis

In case you were wondering, it is perfectly normal to make lists of things. I say that with confidence because in the encyclopedia of Brague, normal is whatever I do and abnormal is what other people do.

I shall not pass this way again, but I may drop in and add a P.S. if one is warranted.

--------------------------------------------------------

P.S. - The list continues in the comments and is up to #81 at this writing (3:40pm EDT, May 6, 2024)

Couples in show biz

...are more common than you might think. Here are some that come to mind:

1. Douglas Fairbanks Sr. & Mary Pickford
2. Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. & Billie Burke
3. George Burns & Gracie Allen
4. Clark Gable & Carole Lombard
5. Jack Benny & Mary Livingston
6. Phil Harris & Alice Faye
7. Humphrey Bogart & Lauren Bacall
8. Spencer Tracy & Katharine Hepburn
9. Joe DiMaggio & Marilyn Monroe
10. Arthur Miller & Marilyn Monroe
11. Michael Wilding & Elizabeth Taylor
12. Mike Todd & Elizabeth Taylor
13. Eddie Fisher & Debbie Reynolds
14. Eddie Fisher & Elizabeth Taylor
15. Richard Burton & Elizabeth Taylor
16. Martin Landau & Barbara Bain
17. Mel Brooks & Anne Bancroft
18. Willam Holden & Stefanie Powers
19. Tom Hanks & Rita Wilson
20. Kurt Russell & Goldie Hawn
21. Gene Wilder & Gilda Radner
22. Roy Rogers & Dale Evans
23. Danny DeVito & Rhea Perlman
24. Ted Danson & Mary Steenburgen
25. Danny Kaye & Sylvia Fine
26. Allen Ludden & Betty White
27. Jack Klugman & Brett Somers
28. Brad Pitt & Jennifer Aniston
29. Brad Pitt & Angelina Jolie
30. Bruce Boxleitner & Melissa Gilbert
31. Timothy Busfield & Melissa Gilbert
32. John Astin & Patty Duke
33. Moss Hart & Kitty Carlisle
34. Alfred Lunt & Lynn Fontaine
35. Tim McGraw & Faith Hill
36. Mickey Rooney & Ava Gardner
37. Artie Shaw & Ava Gardner
38. Frank Sinatra & Ava Gardner
39. Frank Sinatra & Mia Farrow
40. André Previn & Mia Farrow
41. Woody Allen & Mia Farrow
42. Vincent Minelli & Judy Garland
43. Sidney Luft & Judy Garland
44. Roberto Rosselni & Ingrid Bergman
45. Fred MacMurray & June Haver
46. Desi Arnaz & Lucille Ball
47. Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé
48. Robert Wagner & Natalie Wood
49. Paul Newman & Joanne Woodward
50. Les Paul & Mary Ford
51. John Lennon & Yoko Ono
52. Dick Powell & June Allyson
53. Harry James & Betty Grable
54. Orson Welles & Rita Hayworth
55. Dick Haymes & Rita Hayworth
56. Burt Reynolds & Judy Carne
57. Burt Reynolds & Dinah Shore
58. Burt Reynolds & Sally Field
59. Burt Reynolds & Loni Anderson

It occurs to me that most of the people in my list are Americans and I do apologize to my UK and Australian readers. Maybe you will be inspired to draw up your own list. Then again, maybe not.

I compiled the list in pretty short order, in just a few minutes actually. I probably left many people out. Most of the couples are (were) husband and wife but a few (numbers 8, 18, 20, 41, 57, and 58) were in long-term relationships without benefit of clergy, the currently popular term for which is "partners".

One couple, number 31, is (are?) unique in that although each person had a successful individual career in show business, each had left the industry before meeting and marrying one another. Timothy Busfield was in the television series thirtysomething and The West Wing as well as the motion picture Field Of Dreams. Melissa Gilbert portrayed the young Laura Ingalls for several years in Little House On The Prairie. For several years they lived on a farm in rural Michigan, as opposed to living on a farm in urban Michigan, I suppose.

One must be very careful and attentive to detail when writing a blogpost to keep from saying something dumb. Sometimes I am and sometimes, obviously, I am not.

In conclusion, happy Cinco de Mayo.

It’s Star Wars Day!

May the fourth be with you!

I know it's corny but I couldn't resist. Incidentally, Mrs. RWP (the lovely Ellie) and I recently discovered the Rescue 911 channel on Pluro TV and have been binge-watching episodes of it for hours every day. Well, I suppose that is the very definition of binge-watching, isn't it, to watch for hours and hours every day? Of course it is. The stories are riveting, and seeing and hearing Willam Shatner narrate them in the years after Star Trek and before Boston Legal is semi-interesting too. I can't remember whether Rescue 911 was before or after his T.J. Hooker series. I'm guessing after, based on nothing more than his age.

A little trip down television memory lane today, and I'll say it one more time just because I can:

May the fourth be with you!

Hold the fort! It just occurred to me that Willam Shatner was Captain James Kirk in the Star Trek television series and had nothing whatever to do with the Star Wars films. Dumb me.

Star Wars was Obi-wan Kenobi and Darth Vader and Luke Skywalkee and Princess Leia and Han Solo and all thise guys, not Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock and Uhura and Bones and Scotty and all those other guys. I repeat, dumb me.

I guess I boldly went where no man has gone before.

Beam me up, Scotty.

.

How’s that again?

Tonight on Wheel Of Fortune when host Pat Sajak was eliciting introductory remarks from each contestant at the beginning of the program, one woman said, and I'm not kidding, "Pat, I'm engaged to my wonderful fiancé [here she said his name]. We have a beautiful blended family of seven children, three boys and three girls."

Either the jury is still out on the seventh child or Mom should refrain from helping the children with their math homework.

I may be showing my age. There probably isn't such a thing as math homework any more.

That's all there is, there isn't any more.

Do you know who said that?

Words mean something

I love a joke Red Skelton told about a spaceship that landed on Earth. Two aliens got out. The first thing they saw was a parking meter. They walked up to it and looked at it admiringly. Then one alien turned to the other and said, "Do you have change for a hern?"

The sheer absurdity of that joke is what strikes me as so funny.

Speaking of absurdity, perhaps the most jaw-dropping moment in a very long time on Jeopardy! occurred on tonght's episode when the clue "A statute mile consists of this many feet" elicited only one guess (What is suxteen hundred?) and blank stares from the other contestants. Even though the reigning three-day champion was an emergency room physician, nobody else buzzed in. The correct answer, which I had assumed every schoolboy knew, is "What is 5,280?" Now that is absurd.

I compiled a list of words that begin with the letters 'para' and in short order I came up with the following:

parabola
parabolic
parachute
parade
paradox
paradoxical
paradigm
paradigmatic
paraffin
paragliding
paralegal
parallel
parallelogram
paramedic
parameter
paranormal
paraplegic
parasailing

The language of my wife's parents, Albanian, includes the word para (it sort of rhymes with our 'huzzah!'). It means money. Often when Mrs. RWP and I are out shopping and encounter a particularly expensive item for our budget, one of us will say to the other, "Shumë para!" to convey a message [Too much money!] without informing the sales clerk. Knowing a second language can come in very handy at times.

If you are wondering about my compiling that list, I must be in my Robert F. Kennedy phase. He famously said, 'Some people see things as they are and ask "Why?". I dream of things that never were and ask, "Why not?" '.

At the end of the day, absurdity is in the eye of the beholder.

You heard it here first.