My ma gave me a nickel to buy a pickle’

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

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

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

And I'm not the only one.

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

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

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

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

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

Live and learn.

Double your pleasure, double your fun

A Feedjit day is different from an ordinary day. An ordinary day begins at 12:00:01 a.m. and doesn’t end until the little hand makes two complete revolutions and the final seconds tick off: 11:59:58 p.m., 11:59:59 p.m., 12:00 midnight [Note to youngsters. Revolutions and hands are words that used to be identified with clocks before digital clocks were invented way back before you were even born. --RWP].
A Feedjit day starts around 8 or 9 p.m. where I live and lasts 24 hours until the same time tomorrow night. This strange way of doing things explains why Feedjit’s little charts of page views always appear to be a day off.

Anyway, you can imagine my excitement when I discovered that my blog’s page views per day skyrocketed took a quantum leap forward suddenly doubled on the Feedjit day that began shortly after I published the post about Laura Ingalls Wilder on the evening of September 1st and was called September 1st even though it lasted until the evening of September 2nd. Here’s the chart:

And although the page views declined a bit on September 2nd (which ended just a little while ago on the evening of September 3rd), they were still well above what their levels were before I mentioned Laura Ingalls Wilder:

I’m mighty pleased with this turn of events, and it’s all due to you wonderful people out there in the dark my readers. I mean, it’s completely beyond my control, of course. Or maybe not. Perhaps I should write more posts about a certain G-rated, family-friendly television program of yesteryear that featured child actors Melissa Gilbert and Melissa Sue Anderson, who played you-know-who and you-know-who’s sister Mary, respectively.

In fact, I’m so happy I feel like chewing a stick of gum.