Hotel Echo Lima Lima Oscar #JusJoJan

Today’s prompt is brought to us by Lady Lee Manila from the blog of the same name. Her prompt for today is echo.

Echo is the NATO phonetic alphabet‘s word for the letter “e.” When you spell something out for another person, especially when it’s over the phone or Skype or the radio, it’s usually useful to use a word for each letter. On the phone, if I spell my name “aych oh ell tee oh en,” the “tee” could sound like “dee” and the “en” could sound like “em,” and my name would show up as Holdom. On the other hand, if I spell it “hotel oscar lima tango oscar november,” there’s no mistake, unless the person doesn’t know the NATO spelling alphabet, in which case it’s better to say “h as in hotel, o as in oscar, l as in lima, t as in tango, o as in oscar, n as in november.” Technical folk like me would read addresses and values off of hexadecimal listings (better known as “dumps,” which I think I called “computer vomit” yesterday) that way, e.g. “what’s the value at 1-alpha-6-9-bravo-foxtrot?” for the value at machine location 1A69BF.

The NATO phonetic alphabet is officially called the International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet, and is also called the ICAO phonetic alphabet. It was the basis for my first A to Z Challenge in April 2012. This year is the tenth year of the Challenge, which most of you probably already know. I’ve been a co-host for the Challenge for a few years now (I think this is my 4th year) and it’s the highlight of my blogging year. A lot of you take part in this abecedarian challenge every April, and I encourage all of you to join us.

And now here’s Dick Van Dyke with a word about the Kodak Handle camera.

An idea ~~stolen~~ borrowed from Polaroid…

Serendipity-Do #JusJoJan

Just about three years ago (January 29, 2016), the prompt for Just Jot It January was “serendipity.” I’m happy to say that Jill, better knoqwn as J-Dub from J-Dub’s Grin and bear it (hi, Jill!) has chosen it again.

Back then, I wrote about The Serendipity Singers, a folk singing group from the Denver area who was popular in the ’60’s, as was folk music and the singers that sing it. I figured to just post a link to it (which I have, just above) and be done with it, but in looking at that post, it appears that Google is throwing a 500 – Internal error and the playlist that used to be there has been replaced by a string of computer vomit that I’m supposed to pass on to their highly-trained monkeys. While I’m off doing that, here are the first two songs from that playlist, “Don’t Let The Rain Come Down (Crooked Little Man)” and “Beans In My Ears.”

And now a word from Dippity-Do styling gel.

I have naturally very curly hair with a huge cowlick in front, which is hell to maintain and an embarrassment when I was in high school. A friend of mine, who had a similar predicament, said the way he handled it was to put lots of Dippity-Do in his hair and comb it straight back before bed, then comb it out the next day. Idiotic as it sounds, it actually works. Temporarily, anyway. A few years later I learned that I could just brush it straight back, which fixed the cowlick and a lot of the curl. Of course, when it got too long I looked a little like Albert Einstein…

(I would have included a picture of Einstein here, but the rules for posting the one I had considered are so convoluted that I decided just to link to the Wikipedia article with the picture.)

TV Or Not TV #socs #JusJoJan

I write about television (which I’ll abbreviate to TV because I can) a lot on this blog, including many times for Stream of Consciousness Saturday. I write about it even when I’m not writing explicitly about it. It somehow appears in a lot of my posts. Don’t believe me? Search my blog for television in there and see all the blog posts that come up. Then, search for TV in and you’ll see a whole lot more. I mean, it comes up a lot here.

Back in the ’60’s child psychologists were alarmed at the amount of TV children were consuming on a daily basis. “My God, kids are averaging three hours a day watching TV!” Now remember, that’s an average, which means there were some kids that hardly watched any TV at all and others (like the Holton boys) that watched five or six hours a day. Yet, we all got good grades in school, always did our homework, and were in bed by 10:00 PM. (I’d have the radio on, of course, especially if the White Sox were playing on the West Coast, which they did a lot at one time.)

At this point, I’d be repeating myself, so feel free to browse some of the other TV posts I’ve done. Click the links in the first paragraph.

Stream of Consciousness Saturday is brought to you each week by Linda Hill and this station. (See? TV lingo.) Because it’s January, it’s also a part of Just Jot It January.

Now here are Tommy Rettig and June Lockhart from the cast of Lassie for Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup. Have you had your soup today?

Bread With Friends #JusJoJan

The word companion comes from a couple of Latin words, cum (with) + panis (bread). In other words, a companion is a person you have bread with. For that, I took Latin in high school. When Mom told me I’d be taking Latin, she said it was to help me with English. “You mean, the language I’ve been speaking for 14 years?” I asked. She didn’t think that was funny. I had wanted to take French. Recently I learned that taking both Latin and French together helped with both languages. Wish I had known that sooner.

My constant companion, and usually the only person I have bread (and everything else) with, is Mary. Mary’s a good companion, and she thinks I am, too. Which is a good thing, because we spend a lot of time together.

Di over at pensivity101 (hi, Di!) provided today’s prompt in Linda Hill’s Just Jot It January. Now here’s George Reeves for Kellogg’s Sugar Frosted Flakes.

Give ’em 2.54 cm, They’ll Take 1.609344 km #JusJoJan

Don’t have to link to anyone today, because I came up with today’s prompt, which is “inch.”

We Americans take a lot of crap for not using the metric system in everyday life. Food is sold in pounds and ounces (or gallons, quarts, pints and cups), distance is measured in miles, length in feet, yards and inches, temperatures are reported in Fahrenheit, etc. We “should be” using grams, meters, liters and degrees centigrade/Celsius. So, why don’t we?

You got me. I’ve been hearing for years (more than Jim Gaffigan) that we had to learn the metric system, that the United States was going metric, we’d better get used to seeing milk sold in 4-liter bottles and buying meat by the kilogram, not to mention that our speed limit would soon be 88 km/hr rather than 55 mph and we’d be buying gas by the liter rather than the gallon, and the distance from Chicago to Milwaukee (or Atlanta to Chattanooga) would now be 144 kilometers instead of 90 miles, blah blah blah…

Then, nothing. A bag of pretzels would (and still does) tell us that it was 1 lb. (454 g), a can of Coke would tell us it was 12 oz (355 ml), and the temperature would be reported as 37° (3°C), and some distances, like the length of the left-field line at Comiskey Park, would be shown as 355 ft (108 m), but given the choice between feet and meters, ounces or milliliters, and Fahrenheit or Celsius/centigrade, we went with the former, because we did have a choice.

See, officially the United States uses the metric system, but it’s not mandatory. Companies have learned that there are advantages to using the metric system, and that it’s a whole lot easier to do business internationally using it. The scientific community has used it for years. My guess is, if the US Customary units of measure were to disappear from cereal boxes and gas pumps, we’d manage. There’d be a lot of grousing about it, naturally…

Personally, I don’t care. Given my choice, I’d probably use metric, if for no other reason than I had to learn it in grammar school. Converting between the two is a bitch, though.

And now a word from Pepsi-Cola. Pepsi-Cola Hits The Spot!

“Pepsi-Cola hits the spot,
355 milliliters, that’s a lot!”

Nah, doesn’t work…