Simply 6 Minutes: At A Loss For Words

Christine was nice enough to invite me to participate in this blog hop a few months ago, and I’m sorry that I haven’t participated in it very well. I know she goes out of her way to come up with picture prompts to inspire us to write. Were I more of a fiction writer, I would find them challenging and fun; as not much of a fiction writer, I find them bewildering. I really find myself at a loss for words. You might say I’m nonplussed.

Today, I decided that, no matter what the prompt, I was going to write something. And the picture you see above is today’s prompt. And I have no idea what to write, so I’m going to fall back on something she puts in the directions every week:

For any participants that do NOT like restrictions, please feel free to participate in any way you would like. It is great to read the contributions!

I got to thinking about a feature we had in the Sunday comics called "Cappy Dick." (For us in Chicago it ran in the Daily News, so the "Sunday" comics came out on Saturday.) It’s hard to describe what it was, but there were little panels in it that gave you ideas for things to do that would keep you out of your parents’ hair while they were trying to cook Sunday dinner or watch football on TV. I Ducked "Cappy Dick" and found this page that goes into more detail, and there are several samples of the strip embedded you you can see what it looked like (or, if you remember seeing it, refresh your memory). There was a weekly contest which was essentially a coloring contest, although sometimes you have to unscramble a word or answer a trivia question. You’d then cut the picture out of the comics and mail it in to "Cappy Dick, c/o this newspaper," and hope to win some cheap toy that probably broke within five minutes of you getting it, after which you decided the whole thing was stupid and you weren’t going to waste anymore time on it. Then there was a national prize, a full set of The World Book Encyclopedia and something called Childcraft.

Which kind of shows you the world we lived in during the ’60’s.

I have a cousin (okay, a cousin once removed, all right?) who read the entire World Book Encyclopedia in the bathroom. Really, he’d take a volume into the bathroom when nature would call and read it….

Top Ten Tuesday: WIXO (98.5 FM, New Orleans, LA), 5/25/73

WIXO is now located in Peoria, Illinois, where it’s "105.7 The X." In New Orleans, 98.5 is now WYLD, one of the top stations in the market, broadcasting an Urban Adult Contemporary format. The old WIXO went dark in September 1974, because they didn’t have any listeners and thus no revenue coming in. Few people in the New Orleans market had FM radios at the time, apparently. Anyway, here’s their Top Ten from May 25, 1973.

  1. Sylvia, “Pillow Talk”
  2. The Spinners, “One Of A Kind (Love Affair)”
  3. The Doobie Brothers, “Long Train Runnin'”
  4. Three Dog Night, “Shambala”
  5. Barry White, “I’m Gonna Love You Just A Little Bit More Baby”
  6. Paul McCartney & Wings, “My Love”
  7. Jim Stafford, “Swamp Witch”
  8. Clint Holmes, “Playground In My Mind”
  9. Ohio Players, “Funky Worm”
  10. The Edgar Winter Group, “Frankenstein”

And that’s Top Ten Tuesday for May 24, 2022.