What's in a Name, Sparky

The 1920s comic strip, Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, strip gave us the nickname "Sparky," from the name of Barney's horse, Sparkplug.

Billy DeBeck wrote the strip about a community of backwoods hillbillies and moonshiners. In a 1923 strip Barney tells someone to, "Get that stupid look offa your pan. You gimme the heeby jeebys!" It meant, 'a feeling of discomfort'.

Other phrases coined by DeBeck: 'horsefeathers', 'hotsie-totsie', and 'googly-eyed' after Barney Google, who had huge, bulbous eyes.

Peanuts creator Charles Schulz was nicknamed Sparky - and that ain't no horsefeathers.

Uses for Lemons

The following are a few uses for lemons that you may not have thought of. 

Polish chrome -
Rub with a lemon rind, rinse, and dry with a paper towel.

Clean tarnished brass, bronze, copper, and stainless steel -
Make a paste of lemon juice and baking soda and apply to the tarnished area. Let soak for 5 to 10 minutes and wash in soapy water.

Get rid of stain on marble -
For stubborn stain on marble, cut a lemon in half. Pour some salt on top of the stain and gently rub with the cut lemon and quickly rinse so the acid in the lemon does not cause other damage.

Get rid of moths and smells -
Hang some dry lemon rinds in the closet to get rid of moths and to get rid of mothball smells, and wash drawers and closet with lemon juice in water.

Air freshener -
Put a mixture of lemon juice and water into a spray bottle for a natural and inexpensive air freshener. You can also put slices of lemon in a dish or a dish of lemon juice and baking soda mixture to help absorb bad odor and freshen a room. (A dish of cinnamon in water also makes your kitchen smell great.)

Get rid of ants, roaches and fleas -
Squirt some lemon juice into holes and cracks where the ants are coming in. Place small pieces of lemon rinds or peels around the house and wash your floor with the juice from about four lemons and half gallon of water.

All purpose cleaning solution
Add lemon juice, vinegar, and water in a spray bottle for a natural, all-purpose cleaning solution. I know, way more information than you ever wanted to know.

Wife Carrying

This is a sport in which male competitors race while each carrying a female teammate. The objective is for the male to carry the female through a special obstacle track in the fastest time. The sport was first introduced at Sonkajärvi, Finland.

Several types of carry may be practiced: piggyback, fireman's carry (over the shoulder), or Estonian-style (the wife hangs upside-down with her legs around the husband's shoulders, holding onto his waist).

Major wife-carrying competitions are held in Sonkajärvi, Finland (where the prize depends on the wife's weight in beer); Monona and Minocqua, Wisconsin; and Marquette, Michigan.

The North American Wife Carrying Championships take place every year on Columbus Day Weekend at Sunday River Ski Resort in Newry, Maine. The 10th Annual event will take place this year. Many North American Champions go on to compete in the Finnish World Championship. I am sure they hold it on Columbus Day so it does not interfere with the Super Bowl.

Hunky Dory

The term meaning, everything is OK, was coined from a street named "Honki-Dori" in Yokohama, Japan. Since the inhabitants of this street catered to the pleasures of sailors, it is easy to understand why the street's name became synonymous for anything that is enjoyable, or at least satisfactory.

Captain Kangaroo

It was the longest-running children’s program in the history of commercial network television. It ran from 1955 to 1992, first on CBS, then PBS.

Bob Keeshan, better known as Captain Kangaroo, died at 76 in 2004. He started his career as Clarabelle the Clown on the Howdy Doody show. He then created the low-keyed children's host that shows television need not be a wasteland. It was entertaining and educational, and ran for over 30 years.

Keeshan taught his young viewers two "magic phrases": please and thank you. Captain Kangaroo provided a safe place for children to start their day in a warm television Treasure House where bears danced, clocks read poems, and rabbits apologized for stealing carrots.

From the day the Captain made his debut on CBS in 1955, Keeshan took a different approach. There was no audience of screaming kids clamoring for prizes, no attempt to produce a kiddie version of vaudeville. Instead, there was just Keeshan, made up to look like everyone's ideal grandfather, interacting with a few TV friends: Mr. Green Jeans (the late Hugh Brannum), Grandfather Clock, Bunny Rabbit, and Mr. Moose.

The format changed over the years, but simplicity was always the watchword. The Captain would introduce a Tom Terrific cartoon or read a story. Mr. Moose would tell a joke as Ping-Pong balls dropped from the ceiling. Mr. Green Jeans would bring in a baby animal.

Rather than feed off children's nervous energy, as shows do today, Keeshan calmed his audience. He asked kids to slow down, sit for a moment and listen to a story. The effort earned him many awards and many more fans, even though he made no attempt to appeal to adults or older children.


The Captain was even mentioned in a song by the Statler Brothers a few years ago, "Counting Flowers on the Wall."

CBS dumped Kangaroo in 1984 to make more room for a morning news show that could compete with NBC's Today. Captain Kangaroo moved to PBS for a while and then disappeared.


Don't forget to say please and thank you, because I share all this stuff with you.

The World

Here is an interesting twist to making maps. It has a series of maps of countries, showing elevations based on population, rather than land mass. Below is the US. For a larger view and more, click on this link. The two that stand out the most are the UAE and Russia.

Toilet Paper Facts

I am not so sure you have noticed, so I thought you should be informed that toilet paper is getting smaller. The standard size for years had been 4.5 by 4.5 inches, but now most manufacturers have gone to 4.5 by 4 or 4.5 by 4.3 inches.

The British pay twice as much as Germans or French, and nearly three times as much as the Americans for a standard four-pack roll.

Studies show that the average user of toilet paper uses about the same number of sheets whether it is three ply, two ply, or one ply. So, when using the loo, one ply will do - and it's cheaper.

BAN ALL CAPS

TRUE - An Auckland accountant was fired for sending confrontational emails with words in red, in bold and in capital letters.

Vicki Walker, who was a financial controller with ProCare Health, has been awarded $17,000 NZ for unfair dismissal, and plans to lodge an appeal for further compensation. The Employment Relations Authority ruled that Walker was not fairly terminated from her position after sending the emails to co-workers.

ProCare told the authority, Walker, who was fired after two years of employment - had caused disharmony in the workplace by using block capitals, bold typeface and red text in her emails.

The email, which advises her team how to fill out staff claim forms, specifies a time and date highlighted in bold red, and a sentence written in capitals and highlighted in bold blue. It reads: "To ensure your staff claim is processed and paid, please do follow the below checklist."

Dinner Jacket

The tailless dinner jacket was invented in Tuxedo Park, New York. Thus it is called the "tuxedo dinner jacket" and is named after the town.

Interesting Bike

This is a very interesting looking bike that is sure to turn heads. It actually works and is turned by the second fork, which connects up to the handle bar.

The rider builds and sells them. He has a number of styles based on the same concept.

Interesting Bike

This is a very interesting looking bike that is sure to turn heads. It actually works and is turned by the second fork, which connects up to the handle bar. The rider builds and sells them. He has a number of styles based on the same concept.

Did You Know

Aegilops (goat grass) is the longest word with its letters arranged in alphabetical order. 

Spoonfed is the longest word with its letters arranged in reverse alphabetical order.

Ginger Day

We just passed the ginger festival, where 3,000 redheads came together for a recent gathering and it became a bonding experience.

The celebrations for the annual Redhead Day, which has spilled across a weekend to mark all things ginger id paid for by the local government in Breda, a city in the south east Netherlands. It has been celebrated for five years and has grown into a huge festival of ginger self-affirmation, overtaking the city center for one weekend every September.

The initiative is all for the redheads and there is much common ground for the members of one of the most genetically distinctive, yet disparate groups in the world. Men and women sporting a spectrum of ginger, from strawberry blonde to rich ochre, swap stories of being picked on in the playground and discrimination in the wider world. Here they just enjoy the fun and camaraderie.

Chocolate

There is a theory that chocolate slows down the aging process. It may not be true, but should you dare take the chance?

Speaking of Chicken

Did you ever wonder what chicken poop is good for? A study last month Aug, 2008 shows that shooting ranges in Japan have extremely high levels of lead in the soil. To get rid of this, they developed a method of remediating the contamination by mixing the soil with chicken poop to reduce the bad environmental impacts from the lead.

The study  (published in the Journal of Environmental Quality this past month, and last year at the Soil Science Society of America) demonstrated that the amendment reduced the toxicity characteristic leaching by 90%. It also showed that levels were reduced even further when plants were grown in the amended soil.

Smell This

The male gypsy moth can 'smell' the virgin female gypsy moth from 1.8 miles away.

Bad Ad

Wow, this recession really has taken its toll. Now these Benjamin Franklins are only worth 001 dollars each.

Look close.

Scuttlebutt

The origin of the word scuttlebutt, which is nautical parlance for a rumor, comes from a combination of 'scuttle' - to make a hole in the ship's hull and thereby causing her to sink - and 'butt' - a cask used in the days of wooden ships to hold drinking water (or wine). The cask from which the ship's crew took their drinking water, like a water fountain, was the "scuttlebutt".

Even in today's Navy a drinking fountain is referred to as such. Since the crew used to congregate around the scuttlebutt, that is where the rumors about the ship or voyage would begin. Thus, rumors are 'talk from the scuttlebutt' or just 'scuttlebutt'. That reminds me. Did I tell you what Tom said. . .

Photoshop Gaffe

This guy is so tough, he can hold hands with himself. Check his left hand.

Three Little Pigs

This one is just plain fun. No redeeming features. A guy builds an air gun to see if he can blow down the houses of straw, wood, and bricks. Here is the link.