Today! #socs

Today, we’re supposed to start with an adverb. Well, today is an adverb, at least the way I used it. I win!

Here are The Grass Roots (or, if you prefer, The Grassroots) with the title track from their 1967 album, “Let’s Live For Today.”

When I was growing up, Chicago had four daily newspapers (five, if you include the Chicago Daily Defender): the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago Daily News, and Chicago’s American. The first two papers were the morning papers, the second two were afternoon papers. Chicago’s American was a Hearst newspaper and always #4 in circulation, so eventually (in the mid-to-late ’60’s) they sold it to the Tribune, who changed its name to Chicago Today. It went from a broadsheet to a tabloid, and got rid of the sensational headlines, but it failed to attract a bigger audeience, so the Tribune started publishing an afternoon edition, took what they could from Today (including several columnists and, of course, the comics) and ceased publishing it. About ten years later, Field Enterprises, which owned the Sun-Times and Daily News, did the same thing, merging under the Sun-Times name and folding the Daily News. Which was a shame, because I liked the Daily News.

Chicago Today had a practice where, if a cartoon was included in the color comics on Sunday, it would print “Also in Sunday’s Color Comics” next to the daily strip. Eighty percent of the cartoons were so labeled, and I wondered why they didn’t just tell you which ones were not in color. One afternoon, I was looking at a copy of Today, and I took a pen and wrote “Ain’t In Color” next to the ones that didn’t have the other legend. I remember my brother got incensed with me, not for writing all over the comics page, but for using the word “ain’t.” It was, after all, drilled into our heads not to use “ain’t” by the Sisters of the Holy Child Jesus.

From 1964, The New Christy Minstrels with “Today.”

I heard that The New Christy Minstrels inspired a candy called “New Minty Crystals.”

Q: What goes “HA HA HA thump“?
A: A man laughing his head off.

Stream of Consciousness Saturday is brought to you each week by Linda Hill and this station. Now here’s Bill Cragle for Clorets, the amazing breath remedy that stops bad breath in seconds!

chlorophyll + retsyn… hey, a portmanteau! (And probably a whole lot more effective than “New Minty Crystals.”)

Stressing Over Strain #socs

Image by Kevin McIver from Pixabay. Don’t know why Pixabay chose this for “strain,” but…

I can’t think of anything to write about for “strain.” I think I’ve already talked about how I play rain sounds at night to cover up my tinnitus, and how there are some rain tracks that I need to turn way up or I’m straining to hear, then the next track comes BLASTING out of the speaker. I found a whole bunch of white noise tracks on Spotify and they all seem to be pretty easy to hear, so maybe at some point I should just use that all night.

Playing with the word strain, I can anagram it into trains, or I can discard the first letter and have train, and take another letter from that and I get rain. I have an app that allows you to make the sound of a train in the rain. Well, it’s something, anyway.

I’m thinking about sleep a lot lately because it’s been harder and harder to come by. I’ve been sitting here this afternoon (I write these on Friday, as I think I told you) doing everything but writing this, because let’s face it, I’m tired…

Stream of Consciousness Saturday is brought to you each week by Linda Hill and this station. Now a word about the Mars Almond bar. You get an almond in every bite!

#socs Addendum: “It Came Out Of The Sky”

Just thought of this: From their 1969 album Willy And The Poor Boys, Creedence Clearwater Revival, “It Came Out Of The Sky.”

The lyrics:

Oh, it came out of the sky
Landed just a little south of Moline.
Jody fell out of his tractor
Couldn’t b’lieve what he seen, oh.

Laid on the ground a-shakin’
Fearin’ for his life.
Then he ran all the way to town

Screamin’, “It came out of the sky.”

Well, a crowd gathered ’round
And a scientist said it was marsh gas.
Spiro came and made a speech

About raising the Mars tax.
The Vatican said, “Woe, the Lord has come,”
Hollywood rushed out an epic film
And Ronnie the Popular said
It was a communist plot.
Oh!
Oh, the newspapers came
And made Jody a national hero.
Walter and Eric said they’d put him
On a network T.V. show.
The White House said, “Put the thing in the Blue Room.”
The Vatican said, “No, it belongs to Rome.”
Jody said, “It’s mine
But you can have it for seventeen million.”
Oh, it came out of the sky
Landed just a little south of Moline.
Jody fell out of his tractor
Couldn’t b’lieve what he seen, oh.
Laid on the ground a-shakin’
Fearin’ for his life.
And then he ran all the way to town
Screamin’, “It came out of the sky.”
Oh!

This special edition of Stream of Consciousness Saturday is brought to you by Mars Candy Company, makers of Milky Way candy bars. Everything’s for real in bars from Mars!

I kinda doubt the same claim can be made about their more recent creations.

Raining Animals! #socs

Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

I cheated! Having no idea how to handle today’s prompt, I typed “fall from the sky” into DuckDuckGo to see what I could find. And I found a Wikipedia article that says that, occasionally, flightless animals fall out of the sky.

Yes, for some reason, fish, frogs, spiders, worms and “assorted marine life” like octopuses, starfish, and jellyfish will occasionally fall out of the sky like rain. In fact, in Yoro, Honduras, fish rain from the sky every summer, in an event known as Lluvia de Pesces, “The Rain of Fish.”

The theory is, at least for marine life, they get picked up in a waterspout, which is a tornado that happens over water, and are then deposited elsewhere, somewhere inland. Other theories include that they’re blown by strong gusts of wind and relocated that way.

I guess Sharknado isn’t as far-fetched as we once thought…

Ron White talks about hurricanes. Those tend to relocate a lot more than just fish and aquatic life…

Stream of Consciousness Saturday is brought to you each week by Linda Hill and this station. Now a word about Beech-Nut Fruit Stripe Gum. Buy Beech-Nut, by gum!

Playing with XP #socs

I bet you’re expecting me to write about Windows XP, aren’t you? Well, I hate to disappoint you, but as I told someone earlier this week, when I realized I didn’t have to deal with Windows, that was the end of my involvement with it.

I was going to explain my new technique for generating that list of bloggers that I thank at the end of my weekly “Week That Was” post, then I realized that most of you aren’t technical experts, and decided against it. You’re welcome.

This week, I’ve been preoccupied with trying to free up disk space on my computer to see if I can speed it up. Even though I supposedly have plenty of room on my internal hard drive, I moved my iTunes library to an external hard drive and exported backups of all the folders within it to iCloud before deleting the original. I have plenty more space now, but I haven’t noticed an improvement. Still, I’ve wanted to move my library for a while, anyway.

It’s Saturday afternoon, and you probably have better things to do than read about my technical exploits, so enjoy your day and, if you’re going to be out in the sun, be sure and use sunscreeen on any exposed skin, and wear a hat that shades your ears and face.

Stream of Consciousness Saturday is brought to you each week by Linda Hill andv this station. Now here’s the cast of Super Circus (including the lovely Miss Mary Hartline) for Kellogg’s Sugar Smacks. The best to you each morning!

Super Circus ran on ABC from 1949 to 1955, based in Chicago (where it ran on WENR-TV, channel 4). Mary Hartline, who was a particularly talented musician with a degree from Northwestern, was one of TV’s first “sex symbols.” ABC killed the show by moving it to New York and selecting a new cast (they invited Mary to stay with the show, but she decided she wanted to stay in Chicago). Mary remained a local celebrity until 1962, when she met and married an heir to the Woolworth fortune, leaving showbiz and thousands of adoring fans behind. She’ll be 90 this October 29, and still gets fan mail.