From 2017, a Stream of Consciousness Saturday post, for Flashback Friday…

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Thanks to Linda, this song is now running through my head.

Psssssst! didn’t actually clean your hair, from what I gather: it was talcum powder mixed with alcohol and put in an aerosol can. I guess when you sprayed it on and fluffed your hair, the talcum dried up the oil, and brushing your hair got rid of the oily talcum powder, leaving your hair less oily and smelling better. I think Mom bought it once. I tried it, and was underwhelmed by the results. But I bet some of you have used it…

I realize that has nothing to do with “psst! or any other attention-getting noise or word.” I just thought it was appropriate, plus I had the damn song stuck in my head.

I used to get phone calls from people selling auto insurance all the time. I already have auto insurance, but I get the calls anyway. Evidently someone likes to go around the Internet plugging my name and phone number into things. For a while, they were ordering pizzas from Pizza Hut and Papa John’s, then they figured out I had contacted my local restaurants and told them that if they get an order from me, it might not actually be me. So whoever it is (I have a very good idea who’s screwing around with me, so if any of you live in or around Brownsville, Texas, I’d like you to run an errand for me…) started instead giving my name and phone number to auto insurance agents. Now, if I don’t recognize a number, I won’t answer. If they want, they can leave me a message, and if it’s a robocaller, I report them on Truecaller as a spammer.

Anyway, I got a call from one person selling insurance who launched into her spiel, which I wasn’t interested in, so I tried to get her attention. I started with a polite “excuse me,” then a louder “EXCUSE ME,” then “HEY!”, then “HEY!” and finally “HEY!” She said, “That’s very rude, you know,” and hung up. I didn’t care. She had it coming.

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Stream of Consciousness Saturday is brought to you each week by Linda Hill and this station. Now, a word about Jell-O Instant Pudding.

Looks like butterscotch… mmmmm…

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There is no reason to be mad about the Starbucks red cups except that IT’S NOT EVEN THANKSGIVING YET.

— Jenny Jaffe (@jennyjaffe) November 8, 2015

I guess, as a Christian, I’m supposed to be upset that Starbucks (in whom I own stock and which I patronize regularly) brought out this year’s Christmas cups and didn’t put anything on them that would indicate that they were, in fact, Christmas cups. But then, I’m a Catholic, and while I consider myself a Christian, there are those who don’t. Maybe that’s why I’m wondering what this current kerfluffle is all about. Either that, or maybe I’m just one of those people who considers what’s in my coffee cup far more important than what’s on it.

Can you imagine the uproar if they came out with a rainbow-colored cup? Yeesh…

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One-Liner Wednesday is sponsored by Linda Hill.

Think I’ll jump in the pool on Fandango’s Flashback Friday here, where the idea is to “reach back into your own archives and highlight a post that you wrote on this very date in a previous year.” This is from 2017, on Stream of Consciousness Saturday, when the prompt was “shortcut.”

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I’m sitting here trying to remember the shortcuts I used to take in my old neighborhood, and the only one I can remember taking was on the way to school. If I was running late, I would cut across the church parking lot and through the alley that emptied out onto Loyola Avenue. The nuns didn’t like us cutting through alleys to get to school, but they were busy in the classroom by that point and never caught me. I talked a little about alleys a while back and how they were to us what streets were to the rest of the world, but none of them were shortcuts as much as alternate routes or bypasses.

Now, there were times we’d try to take shortcuts through people’s yards and gangways, but that was frowned upon, as you can imagine. Occasionally you’d go into someone’s back yard only to discover they had a dog in there. So it wasn’t one of those things we did all that frequently.

I wasn’t much for taking shortcuts, anyway. I used to go out of my way to take a more circuitous route home from school, especially when I got into eighth grade. I tended to roam a lot through the neighborhood, with nothing but my thoughts to keep me company. I was kind of weird that way. Antisocial, maybe.

Nowadays, when people talk about shortcuts, they typically mean on the computer, where you put an icon on the desktop that invokes a program when you click it. It’s more common with Windows users than Mac users, mostly because icons on the Mac desktop have a habit of slowing things down at startup time, for reasons known only to Apple. It’s okay, because we have the Dock in MacOS. It’s a bar at the bottom of the screen (that can be moved to either side or the top) that holds the icons for whatever programs you use on a regular basis. Normally there’s also an icon for the Applications folder, so you can get at all the programs you have installed. They added something called Launchpad a couple of releases of the operating system ago, which lays out all the programs as if you’re looking at an iPad or iPhone. Evidently this was the most exciting thing Apple had done with MacOS, based on discussions of it I see on help boards, but I never use it.

Well, I think I’ll cut this short…

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Stream of Consciousness Saturday is brought to you each week by Linda Hill and this station. Now this word about Scotties tissue.