Happy half-birthday to me

I knew three answers on Jeopardy! tonight that none of the contestants knew:

Who is the Queen of Sheba?
What is U-2?
What is outfox?

On the first one, all buzzers remained silent. The clue was a quote a queen made about King Solomon. Easy-peasy. Obviously Old Testament. Who else could it have been?

On the second one, all three contestants buzzed in but all guessed wrong. Guessing is never a good strategy on Jeopardy! because a wrong guess costs money. Either you know the answer or you don't. The clue included the words Francis Gary Powers, Russia, and a photograph of an airplane. The first contestant said B-52. The second contestant said B-2. The third contestant said B-10.

I don't remember the wording of the third clue, but the category was something about Words With Animals. The answer seemed obvious to me.

In their defense (British, defence), all three contestants were young.

I, on the other hand, felt old.

And with good reason, I might add. Today is my 85-1/2 birthday. (Note to the general public: Very young people and very old people keep track of their ages the same way, in half-years. The people in-between never do. It's one way to tell if you are old. The very young and the very old do it for one reason and one reason only: Both groups want to be older.)

I know I do.

It's not where you start, it's where you finish

There are 50 states in these United States of America, and not a single one of them starts with the letter B, E, J, Q, X, Y, or Z. That must mean something, but darned if I know what.

Let us therefore consider where they finish.

Five states end in 'ia' - California, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia. That last one (the ult) actually was carved out of the next-to-last one (the penult) in 1863, during the Americn Civil War, because people in the western part of Virginia didn't want to secede from the Union to be part of the Confederacy. Count knowing this as your historical trivia factoid of the day.

Sixteen states end in 'a' alone (without a preceding 'i') - in no particular order, certainly not alphabetic, they are North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Indiana, Alabama, Minnesota, Iowa, Louisiana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Montana, Nevada, Arizona, and Alaska. (Actually, they are in a sort of order geographically, in four groups approximately equivalent to their time zones, excluding Alaska, which is in a class by itself.)

Four states end in 'n' - Oregon, Washington, Wisconsin, and Michigan.
Two states end in 'd' - Maryland and Rhode Island
Four states end in 'o' - Ohio, Idaho, New Mexico, and Colorado
Five states end in 's' - Texas, Kansas, Arkansas, Illinois, and Massachusetts
Two states end in 'y' - Kentucky and New Jersey
Four states end in 'e' - Tennessee, Maine, Delaware, and New Hampshire
Two stated end in 't' - Connecticut and Vermont
One state ends in 'g' - Wyoming
One state ends in 'h' - Utah
Three states end in 'i' - Hawaii, Missouri, and Mississippi
And, finally, one state ends in 'k' - New York

Put them all together, they spell mother add up to 50 states in all. There is a 51st area, the District of Columbia, which also ends in 'ia' but it is not a state. It is a district. There's a world of difference. As such, it is not included in the list.

What does this post mean, exactly?

Maybe (a) nothing, or (b) that one can waste an awful lot of time on a computer, or (c) that there's no fool quite like an old fool.

Pick one or add one of your own. If you pick (c) do not identify the fool you have in mind out of consideration for th undersigned.

I remain, as ever, yours truly, rhymeswithplague

A clarification

This short post is to clarify to my more than confused readers (you are confused, aren't you?) that when I said in the previous post that I licked hinges, I meant little cellophane hinges that were carefully applied to the backs of single used postage stamps to cause them to adhere to the pages of the stamp album my dad had kindly given to me, not big metal hinges that connect doors to door frames. My dad collected U.S. commemorative plate blocks and didn't use hinges.

Mission accomplished.

Roger, over, and out.

Either time is speeding up or I am slowing down

...because August just started and it's already over.

Three guesses which theorem is correct, and the first two don't count.

I'm doing my best to keep this blog going a while longer because its 19th anniversary will occur on September 28th and there's still a bit of life left in it if you ask me, which you didn't, of course.

I've been trying for a month to put together one of the most difficult jigsaw puzzles I've seen in a long, long time. A collage of many, many U.S. postage stamps, it was created as part of our country's semi-quincentennial (250th) anniversary celebration and sold at the post office for twenty dollars American ($20USD). I just had to have it. I couldn't resist. My dad was a philatelist (stamp collector) and in my yute I spent many hours admiring his collection of U.S. commemorative plate blocks. I even had a little stamp collection of my own. I learned how to count peforations. I licked hinges.

In early August our only granddaughter was married and a good time was had by all. At the reception I learned a new word, mocktail. The waiter offered to bring us mocktails after I said we didn't drink alcoholic beverages. When I asked him what was in a mocktail, he said, "watermelon juice and spritzer water" so Mrs. RWP (the lovely Ellie) and I both had one. They were very refreshing.

This is turning out to be a stream-of-consciousness post and, like most of my other posts, it is all over the place. I do apologize (British, apologise) but it simply can't be helped, especially at this late juncture in my life when an old dog has difficulty learning new tricks.

Speaking of old, our oldest son is helping me transition from a Windows 10 system to Windows 11 by helping to find a replacement for my trusty old Hewlett-Packard All-In-One. It was kind enough to inform me after suggesting that I run a few diagnostics that my computer is not able to be upgraded to Windows 11. Bummer.

My son also informed me that our iPhone 11s are the oldest model phones that Apple will support once ios 27 comes out. Bummer squared.

I have decided to give my fabulous 1000-piece 24"x 30" jigsaw puzzle to my granddaughter, not as a wedding present, you understand, but just because her mother told me the other day how much she enjoys doing jigsaw puzzles.

Eighty years ago today (September 2nd) my mother married my father who was not really my father, a fact I didn't know until I was well into my teens, in Seekonk, Massachusetts, a place that I'm fairly certain will live in infamy for that very fact. I was born 5-1/2 years earlier in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and my biological father had not been in the picture for, would you believe it, 5-1/2 years and one week. He joined the Army and went out of the picture forever exactly one week before I was born.

Well, that's enough minuutiae for one post.

To quote Winnie The Pooh or Tigger or somebody invented by A.A. Milne, "Ta-ta for now."