Old but Good Stuff
I had a crossword puzzle from The Week Magazine for May, 2011 that I had not completed. I found it the other day and completed it. On the same page were a couple of contests that interested me:
1. This Week's Question: Since it has been determined that whales sing tunes that can be heard and mimicked by other whales for up to 4,000 miles, what could possibly be the #1 hit tune on the cetacean hit parade?
Elaine wrote: "I am so Blue." I thought this was a great response and sent it in to be considered. No luck. I don't recall the winning entry.. but it obviously could not compare to Elaine's entry.
2. Last Week's Contest: Translate a famous phrase from the Bible into current lingo.
The Winner: "My God, my God! Why have you unfriended me?"
Third Place: "And on the seventh day, He chilled.
(Waiting for the lightning to strike.)
Phony News
NPR tracked down the guy who was responsible for creating phony news during the election campaign. He is a Democrat who would have liked for Hillary to win. So, why did he create garbage stories that the Republicans used to fire up their supporters?
He said that he did it to mess up the Alt Right people. The false news story would go out and the Alt Right would grab onto it and make sure that it was widely distributed through their sites. Then, supposedly, the story would be tagged as false and withdrawn, shaming the Alt Right folks. (I don't thing that it worked that way though.)
P.U.
Elaine and I are making sauerkraut for tomorrow's Thanksgiving dinner. Us New Englanders never realized that some folks (namely, Germans in Maryland) liked to have sauerkraut with their turkey. Elaine's recipe calls for lots of turkey meat, apples, and unions blended with the kraut and cooked in a crock pot for a long time. I never liked sauerkraut, but I do like Elaine's. And the smell of it cooking is really not that bad. One gets used to it quickly. But it does kind of smell like someone has run over a skunk nearby.
You Turkey!
NPR reports that the Pilgrims brought some turkeys to the New World and they mated with native birds to create a delicious tasting turkey called a Narragansett Turkey (New England area name). However, after a while these turkeys dwindled until there were only ten of them some years ago. Far seeing farmers worked on restoring them and now there are supposedly thousands on farms near and far. One farmer reported selling out with hundreds of them this week... the going price was $6 or $7 a pound, but the flavor is reported to be much better than other type turkeys.
Lum and Abner
I hope that you have been able to listen to a rebroadcast of the Lum and Abner radio show from November 1942. The "boys" just can't chop poor "handsome Clarence's" head off and cook him for dinner. Instead, they call up the local café and arrange a cooked one to be delivered. It's a very funny and thought-provoking session. It gets played every year on WAMU-FM's Old Time Radio Show (Sunday Nights at 7:00 pm at 88.5).
Cheerfulness
I'm almost done with listening to the Great Course on Emotions. I've mentioned before that the professor does not believe that emotions are spontaneous. He believes that they are deliberately thought out before coming to the fore. This may take only milliseconds and directly relates to how we were brought up and what our culture expects.
The final emotion that he is covering is cheerfulness. He agrees with Europeans that Americans are too cheerful. That we seem like idiots, grinning all the time while life is not that pleasant.
Well.. I disagree. Americans live in a place where there is freedom to become whatever we want to be, if we have the talent and "push" to motivate ourselves to find opportunities, and that can contribute to cheerfulness, in my opinion. (If it is so bad to be cheerful, why do those dour Europeans change to cheerful Americans in a short period of time, living in the United States?)
Living where we live, everybody who has lived here any length of time will say "Hi!", wave, or pass the time with others they meet on the campus. You can tell the new folks; they will try to avoid eye contact for a while until they relax. Cheerfulness probably contributes to the lifestyle that has resulted in the large number of 100 year old people who live here.
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Adieu, mon Ami!
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