First, to my fellow Americans, a Happy Independence Day! And to everyone else, a Happy 4th of July!
Today is a day for picnics and lawn games, like bean bag toss, or as we call it in the South, cornhole. (I’m fully aware that “cornhole” has another, less polite meaning. We won’t discuss that.) Far from being just a dumb lawn game you play on picnics, there are some people who are really into it on an almost professional level. There’s even a governing body. In fact, there are twogoverning bodies, evidently. Not to mention instructional videos, like this one:
There are a lot of games that involve tossing something, such as bocce and pétanque, horseshoes, Frisbee, and my personal favorite, lawn darts, sometimes called Jarts. These, unfortunately, are no longer sold, because some parents thought they were dangerous and someone could lose an eye, or worse. Kind of like this…
(There is, by the way, a remake, if you’re interested.)
I think we can all learn from this: some toys are fine, provided they’re used under adult supervision, which, as any tween boy will tell you, takes all the fun out of it. Kind of like our fireworks video at the beginning of this post.
Stream of Consciousness Saturday is brought to you each week by Linda Hill and this station. And now a word from Wham-o, makers of the Slip ‘N Slide and the Water Wiggle, at toy, drug and department stores!
About the only pickup line I knew when I was single (which wasn’t very long) was “hey, baby, do fries come with that shake?” when a girl passed. I got one of two reactions: either she’d start walking faster or she’d give me the finger. Sometimes both. I’m glad I got married early, because otherwise I’d still be single.
Coffee, Tea, Or Me? seems to be a particularly popular book title, particularly those of the “cheap, trashy romance” genre. The original book was a memoir written by two stewardesses (as they were called in days of old) named Trudy Baker and Rachel Jones. I never read it, nor did I see the 1973 movie of the same name that starred the lovely Karen Valentine as a stewardess who had husbands in New York and London and had nothing to do with the book. The movie was a remake of The Captain’s Paradise from 1953 that starred Alec Guinness. One of the special guest women was none other than Yvonne DeCarlo. Imagine that: Obi-Wan Kenobi and Lily Munster in the same movie.
Nowadays, we call stewardesses flight attendants, which gives them more of an air of professionalism, more in line with what they’re prepared for with all the training they go through. I flew a lot in my days, and there are three in particular I remember. One was a Delta flight attendant who flew back to Atlanta with me from New York who, it turns out, lived near me, and we had a nice conversation before she had to get back to work. Then there was one on Air France going from Singapore to Paris that was very efficient and professional, but otherwise charming and solicitous with all her passengers. Flight attendants on international flights are generally the more experienced ones, having earned the privilege after years of milk runs between places like Monroe, Louisiana and Sioux City, Iowa (whose airport code is, no kidding, SUX).
The third I remember was a flight attendant on TWA, whose years as an international carrier were practically behind them and they were mostly doing milk runs around the midsection of the country. I was in an aisle seat close to the front of the coach section, and at the appropriate time they began “beverage service” (“here’s your peanuts, here’s your drink, now shut up”). One of the flight attendants, who was working quickly as this was a short flight, grabbed a couple of plastic cups and one managed to sail out of her hand and hit me on the back of the head. She apologized, and I just waved her off. It was no big deal. Had it been Waterford crystal, we’d have something to talk about, but plastic cups?
Anyway, the next day I was on the return flight, sitting in the same seat, and the same two flight attendants were working the flight. They come out with the beverage cart, and the same flight attendant comes to me and asked if I’d like anything to drink. “Why don’t you just throw a cup at me like you did yesterday?” The two of us had a good laugh, and I got extra peanuts…
Stream of Consciousness Saturday is brought to you each week by Linda Hill and this station. Now a word about Phillips’ Milk of Magnesia. You’ll feel better with Phillips’!
I have an aunt and uncle named Raymond and Maureen.
I don’t know what it is about jazz that I like so much. Maybe it’s the snob appeal, but if that were the case, I wouldn’t enjoy listening to it when I was alone, and I do. Snob appeal would imply that I’d only enjoy it when I could be a snob about it, i.e. around non-jazz fans. It would be like “ha ha, I listen to better music than you do!” There was a time when, if I wasn’t listening to the kind of music I liked, I couldn’t have a good time. I realized that was stupid. Now, if I’m not listening to music I like, I tune it out and use it as background noise, kind of like the stuff I listen to at night.
Speaking of noise (and I’m not talking about traffic accidents or cats fighting), did you know there were “colors” of noise? You’ve heard of white noise, I’m sure, but there’s pink noise, brown noise, blue noise, gray noise, violet noise, even green noise. Each is associated with a specific mathematical function, and beyond that I don’t know how it works. I should pick up a book on acoustics, or whatever it is that would explain how it works.
All right, I’ve been meandering long enough…
Stream of Consciousness Saturday is brought to you each week by Linda Hill and this station. Now here’s a word about Funny Face drink mix from Pillsbury. Pre-sweetened without sugar, and fun to drink!
Abraham Maslow once said “To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” It might have been someone else, and those might not have been his exact words, but you get the idea. It’s saying that there are some people who take the same approach to fixing a problem, whether or not it makes sense to do so.
Or maybe he’s saying that some people just like to hit stuff. I dunno. We call that “percussive maintenance.”
Classical guitarists and some fingerstyle players insist on playing with the nails on their right hand, and have all kinds of ways to deal with their nails. Kent Nishimura, for example, files his nails down to a point. Here’s his cover of Tears For Fears’ “Everybody Wants To Rule The World” (a particularly good one, I think).
Chet Atkins played with a thumbpick and his nails, and if a nail broke he cut a new nail tip from a ping-pong ball and Super Glued it to the end of the real nail. Jerry Reed played this way, too.
I could never get the hang of playing with my nails. I always ended up playing with the pads of my fingers. Turns out Tommy Emmanuel does the same.
I never used a thumbpick, either. It was all bare fingers. I wasn’t that good, so maybe I should have…
Stream of Consciousness Saturday is brought to you each week by Linda Hill and this station. Now here’s Jan Miner as Madge the manicurist for Palmolive dishwashing liquid. Softens hands while you do the dishes!
An effective nighttime noisemaker. Image by StockSnap from Pixabay
By now everyone knows that I sleep with white noise going on all night. Up until the other night, I had been using sounds of rain and thunderstorms, but I decided to change things up this week and went with the sounds of different fans, and enjoy those almost as well. At some point, maybe I should just put a fan in the bedroom, but I need the noise more than the air circulation. I have a ceiling fan for the latter.
When I was younger, in the days before we had air conditioning (it was available, we just didn’t have it), we had a big, noisy fan that we’d put in the window during the summer. Mom always set it to blow out rather than in, thinking that blowing the heat of the house out was better than blowing the heat from the outside in. Theoretically, it was a good idea. In practice, not so much. When we moved to an apartment with an air conditioner, Mom put the fan in the window on the back porch with us and closed the doors while she sat in air-conditioned comfort. When we’d get hot enough, we’d open the doors and walk out, and we’d be freezing. Sometimes we were on the back porch and set it to blow into the room, and Mom would come in and change it back. Mothers are like that (yeah, they are).
There’s a fan in just about every computer, even the real thin ones, to keep the components cool. They get dusty after a while, and when things start going haywire, one of the things they tell you to do is to clean the fan. I just got my desktop computer back after a week, and I assume they did that.
A few years ago, we had some improvements made to both bathrooms, which included replacing both exhaust fans, which frankly weren’t doing a whole lot. The guy who replaced them discovered one possible reason why they weren’t: the previous owners had put insulation in the attic and covered both of them…
Stream of Consciousness Saturday is brought to you each week by Linda Hill and this station. Now a word about Handi Wrap, when you’re wrapping for keeps!
