Today is our Chemo Date Day. While Joni and I spend our day at the Slow Drip Spa I am posting a gently read post from the past. Today’s flashback talks about a study on grumpiness. I don’t mean to scare you but apparently the grumpy contagion spreads quickly from person to person. But there is hope for a cure…   Keep only cheerful friends. The grouches pull you down… Who knew that salty comedian George Carlin was on the cutting edge of scientific research when he made that observation about ways to stay young. A recent story by Knight Ridder writer Eric Adler in the Kansas City Star reports that a growing body of psychological research is bearing out the power one individual’s mood can have on others. That’s right, my friends. Grumpy people are contagious! “It is one of the most robust phenomena I have ever seen,” said University of New Hampshire researcher Richard Saavedra. “And it’s all unconscious.” Adler reported
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I am willing to confess that my life does not always demonstrate intellectual depth. Before a recent baseball telecast my fellow production crew mates and I engaged in a spirited debate over how many vegetables should be included in the vegetable medley for it to truly be a medley. The consensus was that at least four veggies could qualify but that was borderline. The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary was not all that helpful as they defined medley as a “diverse assortment or mixture”. Perhaps they had a heated debate as well around the old lunchroom before deciding on their elusive and safe definition of medley. So as I proceed into today’s musing medley I only promise a diverse mixture. I hope there are no blog versions of lima beans in this mix for you. Dallas becomes butt of national jokes by trying to cover butts The Dallas Morning News has been covering what appears to be a serious debate over banning men from wearing their
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Life is what happens to you when you are making other plans. That quote came to us from John Lennon. Tragically he learned that death also happens to you when you are making other plans. One mad gun man ended the life of the gifted musician. Today I learned of the death of a colleaque and friend in the television business. The truth of James is rocking my world today. “You do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away.” (NASB) May I challenge you today to consider those words? Jay Stinnett was a very talented camera operator. We have shared many laughs and covered a lot of bad baseball together over the years. He lived in Milwaukee and he often worked games with me at Comiskey Park in Chicago and County Stadium in Milwaukee. Both of those stadiums are gone and now my friend Jay is
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I have heard the phrase dog days of summer all of my life. But I never to stopped to research the exact calendar slotting of those days. According to factmonster.com, dog days is the name for the most sultry period of summer, from about July 3 to Aug. 11. Named in early times by observers in countries bordering the Mediterranean, the period was reckoned as extending from 20 days before to 20 days after the conjunction of Sirius (the dog star) and the sun. So dog days are officially over. However, since it is still over 100 degrees here in Texas, I am declaring at this site that dog days have been extended until further notice. I thought about dog days as I watched Miss Hannah stretch out lazily on the tile floor.                                               This is our lab/something else mix Hannah and this is not a posed photo. At any given time around our household Hannah will come waltzing up with the three
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Today is our Chemo Date Day. While Joni and I spend our day at the Slow Drip Spa I am posting a gently read post from the past. Christmas apparently is almost here based on the number of holiday catalogs arriving daily. It is an interesting phenomenon to burn your fingers on a mailbox superheated by 100 plus degree Texas days and pull out a catalog with models frolicking in the snow. With the Christmas shopping season looming it seemed appropriate to revisit the topic of regifting. I suppose that most writers perceive themselves as wordsmiths. But most of us merely arrange previously coined words. What a thrill it must be to actually create a word and see it become a part of the lexicon. The Seinfeld television show was known for inventing new words and phrases that are now in common usage. I was reminded of that this week when I read a survey about the phenomenon of regifting. Regift is a verb and means “to give an
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So I am sitting in my home this morning minding my own business, reading the Dallas Morning News, and I get clotheslined by a small note in the GuideLive section. There it is at the top of page 5G…Birthdays….Barbara Eden, 72. Are you kidding me? Jeannie is 72? How old do I feel today! I was twelve when I Dream of Jeannie appeared in stunning black and white on our Sylvania TV. I don’t like to brag but our television featured the “halo light” innovation. The halo light was a fluorescent light which surrounded the picture tube in order to provide, well, I have no idea why it was there but we had one and no one else on our block did! A little research time did reveal the answer to the mystery of the halo light. The website tvlamps.net  gave me my answer. TV lamps originated from a perceived need to diffuse the contrast between the brightness of the television screen and the comparative darkness of
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There is a brake company in the Dallas area that runs radio commercials featuring a very concerned and extraordinarily helpful employee explaining why a female caller needs to get her car in right away to save money and to be sure she is safe. They are even willing to stay later to make sure her car is safe. Impressed, she asks the question, “why do you do it?” And then the jingle singers let us know why. Because they really do care. That ad is for Just Brakes and I have no reason to doubt that they really do care. Someone asked me the other day a similar question about my almost daily blogs. “Why do you write a blog everyday?” The tone was incredulous. Why do you do it? Since I don’t have jingle singers I will have to write out my answer to a question that proved more complex than it seemed at first blush. I describe blogging as ego journaling. There
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