Hmmmm

It's a wonder I have any friends at all.  Guess some people like smartasses. 

More Gilligan Trivia

The character of the Professor on Gilligan’s Island was named Roy Hinkley. The Skipper was named Jonas Grumby. Both names were used only once in the entire series, on the first episode.

Global Warming as Birth Control

So much for hot sex. A recent study purports there are fewer births nine months after a heat wave. It found that an increase of about 21.600 Fahrenheit in summer temperatures reduces births the following spring by up to 6 percent. Researchers at the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research concluded that high temperatures could reduce people’s sense of well-being, which could result in a reduction in sexual interest. Another study found lower sperm counts and higher rates of miscarriage during hot weather.

We Know!

Oh Gross!

Next suggestion?

Crushed cockroaches can be applied to a stinging wound to help relieve the pain.

And now this ... yuck!!

Cockroaches have quite a capacity for survival. If the head of one is removed carefully, so as to prevent it from bleeding to death, the cockroach can survive for several weeks. When it dies, it is from starvation.

Sorry.  At least I didn't post any pictures. 

Monkey Brain Trivia

The squirrel monkey’s brain accounts for roughly 5 percent of its body weight, the largest percentage of any animal. The human brain, by comparison, makes up about 2.3 percent of body weight.

Don't Drink the Milk!

Got paint thinner? In most TV milk commercials, a mixture of white paint with a little thinner is used instead of milk.

Trivia That Applies to Me

Poliosis (from the Greek word polios, meaning "gray" is the graying of the hair. It’s caused when pigment cells stop producing melanin.

Addiction

I have friends I wish could have found help.  I learned when I went to Al-Anon that you can't do it for them or love them into it.  I don't know what makes some people find what it takes to overcome addition, while others don't.  It's hard to do and hell for everyone involved - also heartbreaking.  

From Russell Brand's Blog  HERE.  

When you love someone who suffers from the disease of addiction you await the phone call. There will be a phone call. The sincere hope is that the call will be from the addict themselves, telling you they’ve had enough, that they’re ready to stop, ready to try something new. Of course though, you fear the other call, the sad nocturnal chime from a friend or relative telling you it’s too late, she’s gone.

Frustratingly it’s not a call you can ever make it must be received. It is impossible to intervene.

Addiction is a serious disease; it will end with jail, mental institutions or death. I was 27 years old when through the friendship and help of Chip Somers of the treatment centre, Focus12 I found recovery, through Focus I was introduced to support fellowships for alcoholics and drug addicts which are very easy to find and open to anybody with a desire to stop drinking and without which I would not be alive.

Now Amy Winehouse is dead, like many others whose unnecessary deaths have been retrospectively romanticised, at 27 years old. Whether this tragedy was preventable or not is now irrelevant. It is not preventable today. We have lost a beautiful and talented woman to this disease. Not all addicts have Amy’s incredible talent. Or Kurt’s or Jimi’s or Janis’s, some people just get the affliction. All we can do is adapt the way we view this condition, not as a crime or a romantic affectation but as a disease that will kill. We need to review the way society treats addicts, not as criminals but as sick people in need of care. We need to look at the way our government funds rehabilitation. It is cheaper to rehabilitate an addict than to send them to prison, so criminalisation doesn’t even make economic sense. Not all of us know someone with the incredible talent that Amy had but we all know drunks and junkies and they all need help and the help is out there. All they have to do is pick up the phone and make the call. Or not. Either way, there will be a phone call.

Well ...

Because of a football’s resemblance to an olive, albeit a very large one, the Chinese often call the American game of football "olive ball."

27 Club

One of Nutwood Beth's commenters on FB, pointed out a 27 Club that lists celebrities who died at 27.  I didn't realize Kurt Cobain was 27 when he died.  In addition to the ones I listed in my post about Amy Winehouse are Brian Jones and Jean-Michel Basquiat. 

List HERE. 

Amy Winehouse RIP

It finally happened just like we were afraid it would.  Amy Winehouse died at 27, the same age Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Jim Morrison were when they OD'd.  There are too many talented performers who left too soon because of excesses and abuse.  A few are John Belushi, Kurt Cobain, Heath Ledger, Michael Jackson, Chris Farley, River Phoenix, and the sad list goes on. I feel so sad for her family.  It's parents' worst nightmare to outlive their children.

This is an excerpt from an article in The Telegraph about Amy Winehouse's life and death.

Amy Winehouse: 1983-2011

Amy Winehouse, who has died aged 27, ticked all the right boxes for a self-destructive wild child of pop, having bags of “attitude”, a drink and drugs problem and a no-good man; yet underneath the ratty beehive hair-do, oversized plastic earrings, kohl-encrusted eyes and tattoo-covered arms, she was also an addictive and engaging performer with a natural deep voice who sang with a jazzy, passionate energy.

Pathetically, Amy Winehouse’s hopes for her life with Blake Fielder-Civil seemed touchingly conventional and domestic. “I’ve always been a little homemaker,” she told an interviewer. “I know I’m talented, but I wasn’t put here to sing. I was put here to be a wife and a mum and to look after my family. I love what I do, but it’s not where it begins and ends.”

In late 2007 Amy Winehouse’s father Mitch was reported to have taken the precaution of writing her obituary, fearful that the end could not be far away.

Job Security

According to the official rules of baseball, no umpire may be replaced during a game unless he is injured or becomes ill. He may also be replaced if he drops dead.

Acid Trivia

The digestive juices of crocodiles contain so much hydrochloric acid that they have actually dissolved iron spearheads and 6-inch steel hooks they have swallowed. Yet crocs don’t take Rolaids, as far as we know.

So I'm wondering ... is this an effective way to dispose of scrap metal?  Also wonder if they've analyzed the poop of crocodiles.  At any rate, we must never go near one!!!

Uh Oh

Enjoy those reruns of Gilligan’s Island? Your brain is actually more active while you are sleeping than it is while you are watching TV.

Superflea Trivia

If humans could jump like fleas, they’d be able to leap over a 100-story building in a single bound.

Olympic City Trivia

Cleveland Stadium was built for what became a failed attempt by the city to host the 1932 Olympic Games. Of the 192 countries on Earth, 3 of them, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, and Vatican City, have no National Olympic Committees.

Beatles Trivia

"Long Tall Sally" was the last song played by the Beatles during their last scheduled concert, which took place at Candlestick Park in San Francisco on August 29, 1966.

Worth Watching!

Dirt Devil-The Exorcist from MrPrice2U on Vimeo.

Hair Trivia

Natural blonds have more hairs on their heads than redheads or any shade of brunette. A blond has about 120,000 strands of hair, while a redhead has about 30 percent fewer strands about 80,000. Brunettes are somewhere in between the two.

Weirdo Trivia

Goodfellows Insurance outfit in London capitalizes on many people’s weird mental states. Among the most requested policies are the "Alien All Risks" package, which offers $1.7 million coverage for just $400 dollar a year, should someone be abducted or impregnated by something not of this Earth. To date, 40,000 people have paid for this sense of security. Back in 1999, the ingenious company sold 15,000 women, terrified that they might unwillingly be forced to give birth to the messiah, immaculate contraception protection.

Jockey Trivia

On February 22, 1989, Barbara Jo Rubin became the first female jockey to win a horse race. She rode Cohesian to victory at Charlestown Racetrack in West Virginia. The first woman to ride in the Kentucky Derby was Diane Crump on May 2, 1970.

This and a Gay Husband for Crazy Eyes!

Strabismus is the condition of a person’s eyes going in different directions.

Oh?

Hawaii is moving toward Japan 4 inches every year. 

I thought islands in the ocean were tops of mountains. No?

So That's How They Do It!

Marine mammals such as dolphins and whales manage to sleep without drowning, because only half their brain sleeps, while the other half stays awake and handles the breathing and swimming chores. The two hemispheres of their brains work totally independently. For 8 hours, the entire brain is awake. The left side then sleeps for 8 hours. When it wakes up, the right side sleeps for 8 hours. Thus, the marine mammals get 8 hours of sleep without ever having to stop physically.

Fossil Trivia

Shark fossil records date back more than twice as far as those of the dinosaurs.

We're Like Snowflakes

Men can have 8 million genetically different sperm, and women a like number of egg types. Together they can produce 64 billion children with no genetic duplicates.

Trivia

And should you find this all very amusing, be thankful that you don’t have cherophobia, which is the obsessive dread of laughing to death. Isn’t it obvious by now? Your study of human psychology has been woefully lacking, a serious condition that we intend to remedy with the following useless course study.

B&B Trivia

In October 1993, Beavis and Butt-head, MTV’s animated top-rated series, was attacked for allegedly inspiring a 5-year-old child to start a fatal fire. In response, MTV agreed to run the controversial show in a later time spot, and the writers agreed that in the future they would not use references to fires.

Knitting

Here's what I knitted for Mother for her birthday tomorrow. This is the first garment I've made, and it took a long time since I'm a social knitter and only worked on it at Yarn Frenzy.  I'd knitted scarves and hats, and finished a couple of scarves during this cardigan even though I'm usually a monogamous knitter.  This required measuring and math and fitting!  That was a first for me. 

My next project is a ruana for myself. Who besides Maddie knows what that is? I just learned it but am slow about some things.

Na-No Na-No

In the Mork and Mindy series, the capital city of Mork’s home planet, Ork, was Kork.

Free at Last!

Our last class during the summer session was Tuesday!  Tina now has the 18 hours she needs of graduate English classes to teach the dual enrollment course at the high school where she teaches, which means I have audited those graduate classes as well.  I'd wanted to do that since state universities and colleges allow people 60+ to audit classes free.  Since she was required to take them and the district paid for them (which means she owes them so many years of teaching here because of it), it seemed like a good time to do it.  She has epilepsy and has seizures when she hasn't had enough sleep and is really tired and when she gets overheated.  After teaching all day and being tired, she didn't need to drive almost an hour both ways since the classes were from 4:30 - 7:30 twice a week since we took two classes a semester.  I was her designated driver/rider.  Sometimes we went out to eat in Clarksville before we drove back to Dickson.

This summer class was from 9:40 - 11:30 EVERY DAY.  That was a big change from my retirement schedule the last six years.  First of all, I've been staying up late until 1:00 or 2:00 or later and getting up around 9:00 or 10:00.  I also got out of the habit of having to be somewhere every day and definitely not every morning.  I took a nap almost every afternoon.

Since these were graduate English classes, there was a lot of reading.  During the last year, I've bought and read about fifteen novels, three books of essays, and assignments from an anthology of American Literature.  In the creative nonfiction writing class, we wrote many essays and learned a lot about each other when we workshopped them.  There were fourteen in the class, so we made copies for all the students and the instructor the week before we discussed them.  We read those papers and wrote comments on them.  Then they were discussed in class.  Now you know why you haven't heard from me as often!

It's all been a lot of work, but I've enjoyed it.  Two of the professors I loved and would like to audit again sometime.  One not so much.  It was fun being around students of all ages (some young enough to be my grandchildren) and learning for the pleasure of it instead of having the pressure of tests, papers, and tests.  I'm thankful for the ones teaching the classes who allowed me to audit.  It's their decision.  The head of the department gave me permission as long as it was OK with them.  It was for all of them but one.  I still went there with Tina and sat out in the art gallery in the building where the English classes are taught and read, played with my phone, and knitted.  

I met some neat people I'm in touch with on Facebook now, including the professor from this summer.  She and I agree politically and about all kinds of things.  So now it's over.  I'm relieved even though I might do it again eventually since there are some more classes I would like to take - Faulkner, Southern writers, technical writing, African American Lit, postmodern lit, and some history, sociology, and cultural anthropology courses.  There are some courses in the Criminal Justice Department such as Constitutional Law, International Law, and some courses on terrorism and gangs that sound interesting, too.  We'll see.

Ironic Condom Trivia

The exalted pharaoh Ramses II fathered over 160 kids. To immortalize this achievement, the Ramses brand of condoms bears his name.

It's Own?

Within a lifetime, a crocodile can go through 2,000 to 3,000 teeth.

Ovation

Somehow I got caught up in all these shows on Ovation about Johnny Cash, Janis Joplin, Chrissie Hynde, and the Newport Folk Festival.  It reminded me of how much music reminds us of places we've been, people we knew, and experiences we had.  Certain songs trigger various memories.  Some I can mention; some I won't.  I guess it's sort of like having a sound track to part of our lives.  What song represents your life?  "Both Sides Now" is mine.  Lyrics HERE.  Joni Mitchell wrote and recorded it. This is a 1970 performance.  In more recent years, she sings it with the maturity and emotion you'd expect.  It's more jazz than folk now, too. 

NPR

Correction:  The "Wait Wait" show we saw Thursday night is on this weekend.  It was on today and will be aired again tomorrow.  Check your local times and listings!  You'll be glad you did!

They edited the funniest line, though.  "When using the Gilligan's Island comparison, Michelle Bachman is Mary Ann and Sarah Palin is Gilligan."  (They stopped there and didn't use this line which was my favorite.)  "Of course, for Sarah Palin it would be an hour and a half cruise." 

Wait Wait!

Went to see a taping of "Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me!" at TPAC last night.  It was so much fun!  I got tickets for the show and the VIP reception as a gift for my donation to our local NPR station.  The seats were perfect!  I always wondered how people got those good seats, and last night I was one of those people!  It was so neat to see Carl Kasell standing there announcing in that wonderful voice of his!  Then Peter Sagal was hilarious as usual.  So many funny things!  The panelists were Roy Blount, Jr,, Kyrie O'Conner, and Adam Felber (writer for the Bill Maher show on HBO and professional comedian).  Vince Gill played "Not My Job" and was down-to-earth and funny.

This show will be on weekend after next since this one is a holiday and will have clips from past shows.  You can also listen to podcasts free on iTunes.  So if you are not a regular listener, be sure to listen to the one we saw last night on the weekend of the 8th and 9th.  Check your local listings!

You can read about it HERE and listen to the entire show or to Bill Clinton when he was on last weekend.  That was quite entertaining! 

Here's a video of how they put the show together and a Chicago show.