Doing The First Amendment

A Little Info from Rod-Boy

2010-05-09T19:26:00.000-07:00

Last week in this very space, I updated you on recent developments in my medical condition. Since then, a lot of folks have contacted me to let me know I’m on their prayer lists, for which I am truly grateful.

Back in August of 2008, when I first underwent surgery to remove a malignant brain tumor, I promised to keep you posted of my progress, much as my friend Jerry Fowler had done during his illness a couple of years earlier. He shared his personal battle with cancer each week, and helped a lot of people along the way.

In my column, I mentioned that I had not undergone any of the standard cancer therapies, such as chemotherapy, but instead had chosen the treatment route of “clinical trials”… still-experimental treatments which have not yet been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Several readers contacted me this week asking for more information about clinical trials, so I thought I would share my thoughts about this concept of dealing with cancer.

First, let me say emphatically that these are my ideas, not necessarily endorsed by the entire medical community. I want to share what I’ve learned in the last two years, because I hope someone else might be helped with this information, but I also want to make sure you know that the decision to pursue trials instead of the generally-accepted standard of care is simply one man’s opinion.

The fact is that only 2% of all cancer patients currently participate in clinical trials of experimental treatments. And many of those who do participate do so only as a last resort, only after standard treatments have proven unsuccessful.

To a great extent, cancer patients simply don’t know that these trials are available. Doctors can’t prescribe them, because they have not yet been approved by the FDA. In some instances, however, doctors will mention the availability of trials, usually leaving it up to the patient to follow through.

In my case, my good friend (and lifesaver), Dr. Oscar Lovelace, suggested that I contact Duke University to check into the availability of trials. My doctors as MUSC, knowing that certain standard treatments would not be suitable for me, also suggested checking on trials.

My decision to pursue this course was based on pure-common sense, as I perceive it. Most of these trials are funded by drug companies who are always pursing new and better treatments. I reasoned that it would be unlikely for a drug company to invest millions in a potential treatment which would be less effective than currently approved treatments.

In fact, many of these trials have shown high levels of success… double or triple the success rates of approved standard treatments, and often without many of the undesirable side effects.

None, of course, are sure things. But seeking treatments with higher percentages of success seems like pure common sense to me.

You should always consult with your doctor about these trials, but you can’t always depend on him to know about all the trials. No one does. There are so many different new trials starting each month at so many different locations that it’s simply impossible to keep track with all of them.

But, here’s the good news. There’s a great website which is designed to help people like you and me locate trials which may be suitable. The website is:

http://www.cancer.gov/clinicaltrials/search

If for any reason you have trouble accessing the website, just send me an email, and I’ll be happy to send it back to you as a “link” that you can click on.

In all, the website lists over 8,000 clinical trials that are currently accepting participants.

Amazingly, this very useful website comes to us from the federal government: The National Institutes of Health. (It’s good that they do something helpful for cancer patients, to make up for the FDA being more of an impediment to them for so many decades. But that’s a story for another time.)

As I write this column, I am currently located in Knoxville, TN, where I will be for a few days to begin my second trial. By the time you read this, hopefully, I will be receiving the treatment, pending final results of a battery of tests tomorrow.
I hope this information may be helpful to someone within my readership audience. If it helps only one person live just one day of a fuller life, then I’m thankful to have had the opportunity to share it.

With cancer, no one knows exactly what works, or exactly how or why it works, or exactly which patients will respond to which treatments. Those answers are determined by a Higher Power.

Which gets me back to the prayer lists.

It’s the only thing I know of that DOES work 100% of the time, although not always in the way we want it to. But, regardless, it always works.

And to anyone who may be facing the challenges of cancer, as I am, I ask that you let me know about it, so I can add you to MY prayer list.

Because, believe me, I’m talking to Jesus many, many times every day.

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You’re always welcome to let me know you agree, disagree, can’t make sense of, or simply don’t care about anything I’ve written here… or about any other topic that happens to be on your mind. You can email me directly at: RodShealy@aol.com.

And, if reading it once just wasn’t enough for you, read it again online – along with previous columns -- at my modern-technology Electronic Internet blog: www.doingthefirst.blogspot.com

It’s Me Again, Jesus!

2010-04-29T04:06:00.000-07:00

Last week, careful readers will have noticed, Yours Truly skipped his weekly assignment of penning this little column, which is something I try to accomplish each Monday morning. (Careless readers may not have noticed, because the usual space was filled in with a “re-run” from months gone by… just like the TV networks do!)

It was the first time I missed my deadline in over three years. I do not have a good excuse.

I guess, if I was a “dream-up-excuses” sort of guy, I could come up one. I was, after all, strapped down to an operating table, undergoing a bit of brain surgery.
But that’s really no excuse. I’ve undergone similar surgeries two other times in the last couple of years, and I managed to meet the deadline for my column both of those times!

So no excuses. I’ll try to do better in the future, although there admittedly may be some new challenges ahead.

Back in August of 2008, when I first underwent surgery to remove a malignant brain tumor, I promised to keep you posted of my progress, much as my friend Jerry Fowler had done during his illness a couple of years earlier. He shared his personal battle with cancer each week, and helped a lot of people along the way.

I guess I’m just not as disciplined as Jerry was, because, try as I might, I can’t seem to work my health picture into my column but once or twice a year. There have, however, been some recent developments, and I thought I’d share them with you.

I won’t try to give you all the background on the melanoma that I was first diagnosed with in 1983, or the recurrence in the summer of 2008 that briefly impacted my communication skills. I will instead refer you to this column, which is now posted online as a blog at www.rodshealy.com. (Just go back to August, 2008, and you can read all about it.)

When we last updated my condition here (last November), I mentioned that I had chosen the treatment route of “clinical trials”… still-experimental treatments which have not yet been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Although the my first round of trials -- an experimental vaccine designed to boost my immune system -- officially showed no response, there is some evidence that a partial response was achieved. In other words, some success, perhaps.

While searching for the next clinical trial, however, I was delayed by what appears to be multiple new recurrences of the melanoma in various areas: several spots in the lungs, where we already knew there was at least one large tumor; nine lesions in the brain, which were treated by gamma-knife last Monday at MUSC; and a number of brand new melanoma tumors in areas which do not appear to threaten any organs.
A biopsy of the large tumor in the lung, however, which had tested positive for cancer last June, suddenly came back negative, just a couple weeks ago. Hence, the possible partial success, perhaps.

As of now, I am scheduled to begin a new round of clinical trials next week. I’ll try to keep you posted better than I have been doing.

In the meantime, I am blessed to have no real side effects or disabilities, and am able to continue to work my normal schedule… with the obvious exception of last Monday, when I missed my deadline.

It’s also a good time for me to reflect a bit.

Given my several brushes with cancer, my odds of still being here are not good. In 1983, I was given a 35% chance of surviving five years. In 2008, my odds of making it through were described as maybe one in a thousand. And the couple of recurrences since then have been…well, let’s just say alarming to the technicians reading my scans. (You can always see it in their eyes!)

Still, here I am, starting on my next streak of writing a column every week for three years without missing a single one. I hope.

There are a few things I’ve learned through these experiences of the last two years.

First, none of the medical professionals and researchers can tell us what makes these cures and treatments work sometimes and not work other times. They’re striving to find out, but they just don’t know.

Secondly, a lot of really smart people – doctors, scientists, researchers – seem to think the “power of prayer” has a lot to do with it. I’m glad, because I think it has everything to do with it. When word of my diagnosis was revealed two years ago,

I was humbled by the number of prayer groups who helped me – friends and acquaintances, and total strangers alike. They prayed for me, and I assume that’s why I’m still here.

Although I’ve personally never stopped talking to Jesus about it, I do notice that our chats become a little more fervent and frequent each time I get a diagnosis with a new set of challenges. I’m praying as hard as I can, but I sure do appreciate those extra prayer-words from others (because yours might be the one that works!)

Thirdly, whatever my future holds is okay with me. It’s a great life, and I love this life, but I’ve certainly had my fair share of it -- probably more than my share -- so when my time comes, it comes. In my prayers, incidentally, I always address that exact point: I simply ask Jesus to use me as is His will. If that means going to Heaven sooner rather than later, then that’s what I’m ready for. After all, it’s not this life that really counts… it’s the next one. I believe. I am saved. And I am ready.

If I’m sounding a little more prayerful than usual in my column this week, I hope you’ll understand. Skipping my column last week gave me extra time to reflect on this week’s message… and I decided to talk to a larger audience this week.

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You’re always welcome to let me know you agree, disagree, can’t make sense of, or simply don’t care about anything I’ve written here… or about any other topic that happens to be on your mind. You can email me directly at: RodShealy@aol.com.

And, if reading it once just wasn’t enough for you, read it again online – along with previous columns -- at my modern-technology Electronic Internet blog: www.doingthefirst.blogspot.com

Sing-along with Rod-Boy

2010-04-28T05:00:00.001-07:00

Never let it be said that this little newspaper is a slave to tradition. Nay, far from it.

This little-ol’ community newspaper pushes the envelope on a regular basis. This little newspaper – specifically, yours truly, in this weekly column, the very one you are reading right now – is perfectly willing to take you places you have never been…. to seek out new worlds and new journalistic adventures… to boldly go where no man has gone before!

So buckle up. This week, I’m taking you on one of those newspaper joyrides, as we embark on the history-making, World’s-First-Ever, newspaper Sing-along!

Most of my closest of my friends recognize that I’m a big fan of sing-alongs. I’m inclined, on a moments notice, to whip out my trusty guitar any place, any time, and commence to crooning. Sometimes a modest crowd gathers around and joins in. Other times, they scatter like flies, and I’m left with my sing-along of one: my sing-along becomes a sing-alone!

So this is a big moment: We’re having a sing-along right here in the newspaper. First time ever. A history-making event. I think it can be done.

If this were radio, or television, or even the Internet, it wouldn’t be quite so ground-breaking of an undertaking. Heck, Mitch Miller did it every week when I was a kid. But not inside the pages of a newspaper.

Okay, here’s how it’s gonna work…

I’ll name the song, and you’ll be able to hear the tune in you mind. (We’re going to use very familiar songs that I’m sure you’ll recognize. From many years of actual, live and in person sing-alongs, I happen to know which songs most people know the best.) All you’ve got to do participate is nod your head back and forth in rhythm as you’re reading the lyrics to the song. (Finger wagging or foot tapping will also work.)

Or, if you want, you can move your lips. If you’re ready for the next step, go ahead and hum. And if you’re really out there, just let yourself go and belt it out… LOUD, so the other people in the office, waiting room, or restaurant can join in!

Now, put on your Happy Faces, and Sing-Along With Rod-Boy!

We’ll start with an old favorite that I’m sure you know, because everybody does:

“You Are My Sunshine!”
key of E for you folks with perfect pitch

“You are my sunshine, my only sunshine,
You make me happy, when skies are gray.
You’ll never know dear, how much I love you,
Please don’t take my sunshine away!”

Okay, we’ll stop with just one chorus. We don’t want to create any disruptions in the workplace. How did you do? Did anyone join in with you?

Okay, next, let’s move to a song actually from the most recent half-century. A little ditty by the Beatles:

“I Saw Her Standing There”
key of E

“Well, she was just 17, if you know what I mean,
And the way she looked was way beyond compare,
Well, how could I dance with another….. WOOOOOO…
When I saw her standing there?”

Tell the truth, did you shake your head when you got to the “WOOOOO”?

From the hit movie “Shrek”…. (and a few decades before that, from the “Monkees”)…. here’s a little ditty called:

“I’m a Believer”
key of E
(This time we’ll try the verse and the chorus!)

“I thought love was only true in fairy tales,
And for someone else but not for me,
Love was out to get me, that’s the way it seemed,
Disappointment haunted all my dreams…
Then I saw her face…. Now I’m a believer,
Not a trace…. Of doubt in my mind,
I’m in love… oooooooooh, I’m a believer,
And I couldn’t leave her if I tried.

If that one didn’t get your toes tapping, I’m pretty sure this next one will. It’s from the 1960’s, and if you were there, you’ll definitely remember it:

“The Ballad of Jed Clampett”
(also known as the theme to the “Beverly Hillbillies”)
key of E

“Come and listen to my story ‘bout a man named Jed,
A poor mountaineer, barely kept his family fed,
And then one day he was shooting at some food,
When up through the ground came a bubbling crude…
(Oil, that is. Black Gold. Texas Tea.)

Now tell the truth. Even if you didn’t participate in any of the other songs, you had to at least say that last line to yourself, didn’t you? (Oil, that is…)

I could go on all day long with songs you would chime in to, but you really need to be getting back to work, instead of spending your whole day nodding, tapping, and moving your lips. But it was fun, wasn’t it? Maybe some other time we’ll sing a few more.

By the way, if you simply could not move yourself to tune in to a newspaper sing-along, you can perhaps visit my Electronic Internet blog (RodShealy.com) where, with luck, you can actually sing along with me. I’ll be the one with the guitar, playing in the key of E… which, you may have noticed, is the only key I know!

And I you don’t sing-along, it will be a sing-alone.

Springtime in the Good Old Days

2010-04-10T12:05:00.000-07:00

Since it was Easter Sunday, I went to church, as I always TRY to do… but especially on Easter.

Another thing I TRY to do when I go to church is NOT let my mind wander, which is pretty hard for me because: (a) my mind wanders pretty much all the time, and (b) I’m a Lutheran, which means our church service includes lots of chants and so forth, which provide extra opportunities for my mind to wander, no matter how hard I try to stay focused on the content of those chants.

This past Sunday, my mind did wander a bit, but at least it stayed on Easter stuff. For some reason, I found myself thinking about Dogwood trees, and the legend I remember from my childhood that the flower of the dogwood represents the Crucifixion. (If you look at a dogwood flower, you can see a cross, as well as four rusty indentions, which symbolize the nails.)

After church, my mind kept wandering. First, I recalled how as a young kid, in my tree-climbing years, dogwoods were my favorite, because they were easy, being low to the ground, and also have trunks that were twisted just exactly right for climbing upon by a six or seven year old.

Then, my mind drifted over to the other iconic flower of springtime in the South, the azalea bush, which seemed to grow everywhere when I was a kid. Next thing I knew, I was absorbed in full-fledged mind-wandering, daydreaming about Springtime in the Good Old Days.

From azaleas, I somehow jumped to the Sunday afternoons I knew as a kid. On the ride home from church, one of the three kids would always have the foresight to “call” the comics: “I got the funnies!” Somehow, it was as if calling for that section of the Sunday newspaper had the force of law. The caller, would, indeed, always be granted the right to choose from among the two sections of the comics that existed back then.

While we glanced at various sections of the newspaper, Mom would be in the kitchen getting Sunday dinner ready. It wasn’t until I was older that I ever realized other people called the noontime meal “lunch”, and “dinner” was the meal served in the evening, which I called “supper”.

Looking back, I realize that regular Sunday dinner at our house was an extravaganza: usually roast beef or chicken or cubed steak or pork chops, with more sides than you can imagine, including either mashed potatoes or rice with gravy, macaroni, rolls, iced tea, and usually three or four different vegetables.

I was never a big fan of the vegetables.

On one memorable occasion – possibly the most storied Sunday dinner in Shealy family history – Mom and Dad decided to exert their parental authority and insist that I not leave the table until I had consumed a portion of – YUCK – English Peas.

Hours after the rest of the family had left the dinner table, I was still sitting their, stubbornly refusing to budge.

Finally, after it occurred to me that my daylight/outside playtime was slipping away, I ate the dreaded peas: one at a time, swallowed like a pill, with a giant gulp of iced tea to wash it down. It took another half hour or so. I ate them all. But I didn’t taste them.

After daydreaming about Sunday dinners of years gone by, my mind somehow jumped to “catching fireflies”, which we did in the early evenings of the spring.

From there, my thoughts raced willy-nilly from image to image, recalling bits and pieces of springtime memories from circa-1965 – 1967, which would be approximately ages 12 to 14 for me. Here are a few of those glimpses I recall:

-- Counting down the days til summertime! School was bearable because the end was within sight: SUMMERTIME!!! So I sat in school during those springtime countdown days with my mind wandering… not unlike present day.

-- Walking to the drive-in movie. I was too young to drive. But on Wednesday nights, there were free coupons, and they didn’t care if you had a car or not.

-- Atlanta Braves baseball. In the mid-to-late 60’s, I was a big fan. I could recite batting orders and recount scores of games, and I kept up with how many games out of first place the Braves were. I knew the names like they were family: Hank Aaron, Clete Boyer, Joe Torre, Felipe Alou, Rico Carty, Phil Neikro… I knew ‘em all, and listened to every game on my transistor radio.

-- Walking to the corner store for a soda. In the springtime, as it started to get warm, investing 10-cents in a cold drink seemed like a good idea. Back then, the drinks were in bottles, in a cooler with a lift up lid and a bottle opener. Coke came up with the idea to put a contest under the bottle caps. Under each cap was a letter, printed either in red or black. If you collected enough caps to spell out “things go better” in red letters, you won $1,000. I remember digging through a lot of used bottle caps.

-- The Attic Fan! Air conditioning existed back then… but not at our house! However, we had a giant attic fan, which kept the whole house cool during the spring a summer nights. (Well, maybe by August it wasn’t quite getting it done anymore.) The good thing about the Spring was that the gnats and flies weren’t out in full force yet.

-- I think it was also along the same time – the mid-to-late sixties, in the Springtime – that I first discovered “girls”. Actually, I knew girls before, but previously, had viewed them mostly as just nuisances while us guys were trying to build a fort, ride our bikes, or play a game of baseball. Suddenly, however, I seem to have discovered girls in a whole new light. (Unfortunately, I simultaneously discovered that I was apparently the shyest boy in about five states.)

So, I spent part of my Easter afternoon daydreaming about Springtime in the Good Old Days. I hope you had a good Easter, too.

Bauer’s Bold Solution

2010-03-30T20:10:00.000-07:00

Regular readers of this weekly epistle know that I try to steer it away from all thing political, preferring instead to ramble on about topics as varied and mundane as the bi-weekly 25-cent crew-cuts I grew up with as a kid, to “Fashion Trends of the Aging and Overweight”… and lots of other topics in between. (After all, there seems to be enough politics floating out there without me weighing in.)

Readers also know that one of my long-time friends and allies is our Lt. Governor, Andre Bauer, for whom I have labored in each of his campaigns over the last sixteen years, and am supporting in his current race for Governor -- albeit in an unofficial, advisory-only role -- facts which I publicly disclaim on those occasions that I happen to venture over into the political realm. This is one of those occasions.

Andre has always been bold with his ideas. The very first bill he proposed – the day after first being elected in November, 1996 – was the law which now allows all senior citizens and working people to vote early by absentee ballot.

Eight years ago, he proposed the common-sense ideas -- such as Saturday hours and less frequent renewals -- which ultimately led to shorter lines at the Department of Motor Vehicles. (Incidentally, it really worked. I went to the DMV two weeks ago to get a replacement license, and was amazed at the quick, efficient service. I was in and out in less than five minutes!)

And he regularly comes up with out-of-the-box, but commonsense, ideas to save tax dollars. Why not build ONE rest area in the middle of interstate highways, instead of two… one on either side of the road? Why not build all elementary schools from a single set of plans? Why not, instead of naming interchanges after politicians, let corporate sponsors purchase naming-rights, with the money going to help reduce taxes?

Ten years ago, when he proposed the idea of letting corporate sponsors kick in funds for various sponsorships, the news media scoffed. Last month, one of the state’s largest newspapers advocated that exact thing -- paid sponsorship ads on school buses -- as a way of plugging the holes in the state’s budget.

Andre Bauer is not afraid to offer bold, new solutions to problems facing our state.

Last week, however, he proposed the boldest solution of his life… a proposal that has already gained national attention, and could affect the future of every American.

Like many, many citizens across the land, Bauer was frustrated by the action of Congress last week in forcing government-run health care on the public, when, clearly, the vast majority of Americans opposed it. In researching the issue, he was advised that efforts to block the new law would not likely succeed. Lawsuits were likely to fail. Efforts to repeal the law would be vetoed by the President.

But Bauer, who is responsible for a provision asking that all high school students spend a brief period studying the U.S. Constitution each Veterans Day, was aware of an Article in the Constitution allowing the people to reign in Congress if it ever got out of control.

The framers of the constitution, in their wisdom, did not bestow ultimate authority in the Congress or the President. They bestowed ultimate authority in the PEOPLE. They foresaw that someday Congress could perhaps get out of control, as it now has, so they gave the people the right -- through their state legislatures -- to reign in Congress and undo whatever damage they’ve done.

Article Five of the Constitution gives the PEOPLE the right -- through the state legislatures-- to call for a Constitutional Convention of the people to propose an amendment to the Constitution, which then must be ratified by 38 states.

Last week, Bauer became the first official in America to call publicly for such a convention, for the limited purpose of prohibiting government-run health care and socialized medicine. He arranged to have a resolution calling for convention introduced into the SC House and Senate, and then contacted other state legislatures to begin the process of having the required 2/3 of the states do the same.

Writing to members of state legislatures across the land, Bauer said, “I believe this action, left unchallenged, is the beginning of the end of the America we know and love. The freedoms we have enjoyed in our lifetimes are being steadily eroded, and future generations will suffer the consequences. The time has come for bold action.”

A few detractors immediately criticized Bauer, worrying that a Constitutional Convention could “open the floodgates” to unwanted changes in our federal government. Bauer responded that those floodgates had already been opened by Congress, which is steadily eroding the basic freedoms that Americans have long enjoyed, and shows no signs of stopping.

“We need a Constitutional Convention to CLOSE the floodgates, and keep Congress from taking away every shred of freedom we enjoy” Bauer said. “Congress is out of control. The government is broken. The question is, who do we trust to fix it: the congress or the people? I trust the people!”

Legislators in other states have now joined Bauer’s call for a Constitutional Convention. To happen, two-thirds of the states (34) would have to officially call for it. Congress would then set the time and place. The people of the individual states would choose their own delegates. After an Amendment prohibiting mandatory socialized health care was passed by the convention, it would only take effect if it were ratified by ¾ of the states (38).

A Constitutional Convention is a bold solution. We’ve only had one before. At that one, which was in 1787, the participants were Ben Franklin, James Madison, George Washington, George Mason, Alexander Hamilton and a lot of other names you would recognize.

They were very smart men, and in the Fifth Article of the Constitution they crafted, they saw fit to include this provision giving the people the right to over-rule an out-of-control Congress should it ever become necessary.

I think that time has come.

Counting on You!

2010-03-28T10:30:00.000-07:00

I wonder if it’s just a coincidence that the Census Bureau has designated April 1st – April Fools Day – as Census Day 2010.

Could it be that the joke’s on us?!!!

“No, Ma’am, we’re not going to share your personal information with anyone.”

“No, Sir, the White House will never have access to the data you give to the census-taker.”

“We absolutely guarantee that there is no politics whatsoever involved in the Census Bureau.”

“APRIL FOOLS!!!!!”

I don’t recall there ever having been as much consternation with the census as there is this year for the 2010 census. (Of, course, I’ve only really been around for a few of them. For all I know, there could have been widespread misgivings when T. Jefferson, that wily son-of-a- gun, set out to conduct that first one in 1790.)

But I do know there seems to be some angst about this one. I figure it’s a combination of things.

Frankly, lots of folks, myself included, took note when one of the first actions of the Obama White House was to grab oversight of the Census Bureau. Call me a cynic, but that smelled a little fishy to me. And, taken along with the FedGov takeover of the banks, the health care system, and a piece of the auto industry, it sends up a red flag. (Of course, that’s probably only because I’m an actual American.)

Politics aside, there’s also a fairly healthy general skepticism anymore about giving out any personal information, period. This whole Internets fad that Al Gore invented has opened up a giant new can of worms regarding identity theft and abuse of personal information.

I’m encouraging folks to be cooperative with the census folks, and provide the answers to the seven basic questions being asked. Here in South Carolina, there’s a lot at stake.

For instance, if our actual population matches up to the population estimates which have been predicted, The Pimento State could gain a whole new congressman… giving us seven instead of six… which, arguably, could be a good thing.

Just think… if we get an extra Congressman, next time Joe Wilson blurts out “You lie”, the new guy could chime in, “And how!”

More importantly, the new South Carolina vote in congress could be the one vote needed to repeal the government-run heath care bill that, unless repealed, probably spells the end of American freedom as we know it.

If you DON’T cooperate, here’s what will happen: Nothing, most likely, to you personally. But the census taker will get the information about you and your household the best way he can, mainly by snooping around to your neighbors, and asking them a bunch of questions about you.

So, skepticism, cynicism, and just plain ornery stubbornness aside, I’d like to offer the following information as a public service. (“As a public service” is unusual territory for me. Normally, I just blather on about whatever nonsense happens to be on my mind. So, “as a public service”, I have turned to the Better Business Bureau, and the actual United States Bureau of the Census, for the following helpful information.)

From the BBB:

During the U.S. Census, households will be contacted by mail, telephone or visited by a U.S. Census worker who will inquire about the number of people living in the house. Unfortunately, people may also be contacted by scammers who are impersonating Census workers in order to gain access to sensitive financial information such as Social Security, bank account or credit card numbers. Law enforcement in several states have issued warnings that scammers are already posing as Census Bureau employees and knocking on doors asking for donations and Social Security numbers.

The big question is - how do you tell the difference between a U.S. Census worker and a con artist? BBB offers the following advice:

• If a U.S. Census worker knocks on your door, they will have a badge, a handheld device, a Census Bureau canvas bag and a confidentiality notice. Ask to see their identification and their badge before answering their questions. However, you should never invite anyone you don’t know into your home.

• Census workers are currently only knocking on doors to verify address information. Do not give your Social Security number, credit card or banking information to anyone, even if they claim they need it for the U.S. Census. While the Census Bureau might ask for basic financial information, such as a salary range, it will not ask for Social Security, bank account or credit card numbers nor will employees solicit donations.

• Eventually, Census workers may contact you by telephone, mail or in person at home. However, they will not contact you by e-mail, so be on the look out for e-mail scams impersonating the Census. Never click on a link or open any attachments in an e-mail that are supposedly from the U.S. Census Bureau.

From the Census Bureau:

More than 140,000 U.S. Census workers will count every person in the United States and will gather information about every person living at each address including name, gender, race, relationship, date of birth, and whether the respondent owns or rents his or her home.

Census information, such as household size, must be accurate as of April 1. Census forms have actually been mailed out to 90% of the homes during March.

By law, the Census Bureau may not release or share information that identifies individual respondents or their household for 72 years. That’s the year 2082.

Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution requires the decennial headcount we call the census. You could look it up.

The normal census form is six pages long, and requires two pages to be completed and returned. Some homes, however, may have received a longer form: the American Community Survey, which the Census Bureau also collects. It's mailed to 2 million households, and asks dozens of questions about topics such as education, commuting, ancestry, citizenship, disability, military service and housing costs and conditions. None of these topics is included in the 2010 Census form. The Census Bureau asks you to complete and return the 2010 Census form AND the 2010 ACS form if you get both.

The 2010 Census asks just seven questions about each person. The standard form — mailed to 90% of households — comes on a folded sheet of paper equivalent to six standard pages. For households of up to three people, your answers will fit on just two pages.

From Rod-Boy:

In the first census (1790) they counted 3.9 million inhabitants of the nation. The most recent census (2002) recorded a population in excess of 281 million. I’m guessing 308 million this time. (Some of the experts have predicted 310 million… but I’m guessing a couple million illegal immigrants have now headed back home, figuring the economy there has got to be better than it is here.)

Here are some other good numbers for you: There are an estimated 6,810,094,425 people in the world. The universe is believed to be 13.7 billion years old. There are an estimated 200 billion, billion stars in the solar system. There are 41 calories in a medium-sized grapefruit. And there now are 1,217 words in this column – that’s 5,904 letters – which is 417 too many! Time for me to say, “See you next week!”

I’m waiting

2010-03-22T04:58:00.001-07:00

Among the many totally unimportant, genuinely insignificant subjects upon which I consider myself to have some level of expertise is the subject of “waiting rooms”.

I’m not saying I’ve spent more time in waiting rooms than anyone else. I probably haven’t. I’m just an average Joe when it comes to my actual, personal waiting room experiences.

But I’m pretty sure I’ve spent more time actually studying on waiting rooms than most folks.

For instance, have you ever made a list of different types of waiting rooms? I have.

Before you go off saying, “Wow! Rod-Boy’s really gone over the edge this time!” let me try to explain.

As publisher of this little newspaper – and a few others – I noticed many years ago that a lot of folks seemed to report on items they had read while in such-and-such a waiting room. There was an abundance of newspaper-reading going on in waiting rooms, I realized. Indeed, it occurred to me that waiting rooms provide a unique block of time for many people to read… somewhat of a rarity in our modern-day, never-enough-time, busy, busy lifestyles.

Consequently, our little community newspaper made it a mission to make sure all local waiting rooms were stocked with a few copies each week, for the reading pleasure of the waitees. (It also didn’t hurt any that waiting-room newspaper readers very frequently seemed to come across advertisements of interest, to which they often responded, pleasing the local business-owner who had purchased the advertisement, and revving up the entire economic cycle which fuels the newspaper industry.)

Hence, I have become somewhat of a “waiting room” authority, even to the point of maintaining not one, but several different lists of waiting rooms: doctors offices, dentist offices, barber shops, beauty shops, karate lessons, dance lessons, oil change, car wash… about 30 frequent varieties of waiting rooms in all! And we try to keep them all stocked with your favorite little weekly community newspaper.

Along the way, I’ve made a few observations about waiting rooms. Some of these observations have come from careful study and analysis. And some of them have come from being stuck in waiting rooms for hours at a time.

-- As I age, I find myself spending a lot more time in waiting rooms of a medical variety, and a lot less time in hair cutting establishments. Go figure.

-- Here’s another thing I’ve noticed: When you see one of those signs that says “Ring Bell for Service”, don’t believe it. It’s been my experience that the lady behind the window usually gets a little irritated whenever anyone rings that bell.

-- While this week’s newspaper is generally the very best reading material you can hope to find in any waiting room, there are usually some other excellent reading choices as well: a collection of sports magazines from several years ago; a variety of promotional brochures; and a children’s puzzle book, usually with a number of missing pages.

-- I think sitting in a waiting room is a lot like standing in line at a ride in Disney World… except that, when you’re standing in line at Disney, you can easily tell how close you’re getting to your turn, because the line keeps moving and they post signs telling you how many minutes left in line… but in a waiting room, you don’t move closer, you just keep sitting in the same place, so if you want to find out how much longer, you have to go ask the lady behind the window “how much longer?” again, to which, ironically, she reacts exactly the same as if someone had rung the bell. Also, at the end of your wait, you get a blood sample or a haircut, instead of a ride on “Space Mountain.”

-- I have estimated that, at any given point in time, there is approximately
0.3156 % of the population currently in a waiting room. This has to be a drain on the economy, sapping 0.3156% of the Gross National Product each year. Given that there’s a captive audience/market in waiting rooms everyday, couldn’t we devise some sort of industry to take advantage of this untapped workforce? Maybe knitting sweaters? Cell phone telemarketing? Earn money addressing envelopes?

-- Various types of waiting rooms dictate different levels of socialization. Medical waiting rooms, for instance, are generally very private: not much interaction among the waitees… very little chatting, no hand-shaking at all, due to that whole “communicable disease” thing… and who wants to hear about somebody else’s aches and pains when you have your own? Karate class waitees, on the other hand, are very social… chatting away about their cute little karate kids. And hair cutteries… wow. The chatter never stops!

-- I think “waiting rooms” is a nice name for them. It sounds better than calling them “holding areas” or “containment zones”.

-- Fancy restaurants have the best waiting areas. They call them “bars”.

-- I miss the EZ listening that they used to always pipe into waiting rooms in the old days. Nowadays, if anything, there’s a TV on in the corner. And there is such a thing as too much Oprah.

-- I have more I could tell you about waiting rooms – lots more – but I gotta go now. They just called my name.

Sports Column

2010-03-08T19:08:00.000-08:00

Regular readers recognize that I rarely write about sports.

I like sports, but I just don’t often write about it. I figure there’s plenty of sports writers out there -- approximately eleventy gazillion of them, by my tally – which is plenty enough to cover the sports scene.

I’m much more likely to write about obscure notions from the recesses of my mind. Like alliterations, for instance.

If this were one of my typical columns, I would have already pointed out that the first sentence contained quite the alliteration: regular, readers, recognize, rarely, write. How often do you see an alliteration like that?!!!

But this is not my typical column. This is my rare, almost never seen Sports Column. (Unless you count the Winter Olympics that I recently wrote about three weeks in a row… but I don’t count that because, you know, it’s the Winter Olympics, with curling, ice dancing and so forth).

This sports column is about real sports, American sports, the sports we all know and love – football, baseball, basketball, golf, and NASCAR – where they don’t have to repeat everything in French after they say it the first time… and where the opening and closing ceremonies are held in parking lots with tailgates open, like they should be.

Let’s start with football. Now there’s a real, American sport! I know its over for the year…ended about a month ago with the Super Bowl… but we never got a chance to discuss the most important parts of the game: the halftime show and the Super Bowl ads.

Here’s a quick quiz: two questions about the game, and two questions about the halftime show and the ads. Think fast, and see how quickly you can answer the questions…

First two questions: Who won the Super Bowl, and who was the MVP?

Second two questions: Who performed at halftime, and what was your favorite ad?

I’m guessing the answers came a lot quicker for the questions about the show and the ads than they did about the game.

For the record, “Who” did perform at halftime… and MY favorite ad was the Betty White spot.

Now on to baseball, our national pastime. It’s early March, so Opening Day is just weeks away. You can always tell when it’s getting close, because you start seeing reruns of all the baseball movies: Field of Dreams, Bull Durham, The Natural, The Bad News Bears, Angels in the Outfield, A League of Their Own, and, if you’re lucky, some of the real classics from back in a time when all the games were day games, a time before steroids, when the only way you saw a game was to go to the ball park. This week, I saw Bull Durham on, so it can’t be long. I love baseball. I’m a red-blooded American.

Basketball. It’s time for March Madness. Basketball is the sport which is actually culminating its season along now… except for the pro teams, which I don’t count, because it seems to me they play for about 16 months of the year anyway. But the countdown to the Final Four during March…. Now, there’s some exciting sports action. And, basketball, let us remember is a bonafide, American invention.

NASCAR. This is arguably not a “sport” at all in the sense that there’s no running, jumping, kicking, throwing, catching, tossing, hurling, diving, blocking, tackling, shooting, dribbling, boxing, wrestling, hitting, pushing, shoving, or tug-of-war – plus, they seem to be letting the girls compete with the guys these days – but we’re still counting it because, not only is it an American invention, but its also a Southern concoction, with its roots right here in the Carolinas. And, it don’t get much more exciting than watching the finish of a good, close race at Darlington. We’re a few weeks into the season, and, try as they may to turn it into a just another corporate-sponsor promotion marathon, it’s still a pretty good way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

Which bring us to golf. Another televised sport to watch, and another way to spend a Sunday afternoon…. IF you need a good, long peaceful nap!

For the life of me, I can’t figure out why millions of people sit in front of the TV and watch a round of golf. Could it get more boring?

Granted, I am personally the world’s fourth worst golfer, runner up only to one guy who’s missing several required body parts, another guy who plays with the aid of a seeing-eye dog, and a five year old girl who is actually still in kindergarten. I don’t even try any more… and the last time I did try, it was extremely dangerous for everyone standing anywhere near me.

Still, people watching golf on TV is one of civilization’s most bizarre and unexplainable phenomena, right up there with alien visitation, crop circles and the mysteries of the tomb of King Tut.

If people will sit in front of the tube for hours watching golf, then I think I have an idea for a great new sport that will thrill them: “The Ten-Feet in Ten-Years Slow-Motion Walk”. I don’t have the details worked out yet, but I’m envisioning another sport with the exact same action-packed adventure and thrill-a-minute excitement of golf.

Okay… that’s my sports column. I’ll probably go back now to writing about things I know more about, like “vegetable colors”, “dangling participles”, and “Fashion Tips for Octogenarians”… and leave the sports columns to the professionals.

And the world will be a better place.

Sloppy Handwriting

2010-03-03T19:36:00.000-08:00

If you are one of those readers who believe me to be without fault, you are wrong. (Also, you are in the tiniest possible minority of people... probably a minority of one.)

I hate to burst the fantasyland bubble you apparently have never left for your entire life, but I must shatter your illusion: I do have a fault. One very serious fault: Sloppy Handwriting!

I actually know when it started. In first and second grade, I actually received kudos for my handwriting. Of course, back then, the writing was all in “block” letters: printing, it was called.

But then, along about the third or fourth grade, we were introduced to a concept called “cursive” writing…. and it was all downhill from there.

I really didn’t mind having bad cursive penmanship, because neat, flowing cursive writing always seemed a little girly to me. So I went to the other extreme. And now, all these years later, I find myself with handwriting so bad that even I cannot decipher it.

Normally, I would not bother you by telling you about my clumsy, fat-fingered handwriting. But in this case, my awful penmanship has a direct impact on your life. Here’s how….

Nearly every day, I have new, exciting, creative ideas for my weekly column. Unfortunately, even though I may be long on creativity and excitement, I’m a little short on memory. So quickly I forget those ideas… UNLESS I write them down.

So I DO write them down. Every time I have an idea for my column, I jot a note on a scrap of paper… usually on a Waffle House napkin, on the back of a business card, or on an old envelope which once contained my chance at millions in the Publishers Clearinghouse Sweepstakes.

I then stuff those scraps of paper into one of my nine pockets (four pants, two jacket outside, two jacket inside, and one shirt), where it stays for a week or two… until its time for laundry. It is then that I unfold those various and assorted gems of wit only to discover, to my utter disappointment, that I cannot read whatever it is that I have written.

When that happens, the scraps usually go into a box or a drawer or a file folder, where they languish forgotten for months, even years, until I come across them and try once more to decipher them.

Sometimes, I miss badly, and end up writing Totally Unintended Columns.

Once, I meant to write a column on “Why I’m a Republican”, and instead published 800 words entitled “Warts on a Rutabaga”.

Another time, my intended topic, I believe, was “I Remember First-Grade Friendships”… but, instead, I accidentally wrote on the topic “I Resemble Fred Flintstone”

It’s all because of Sloppy Handwriting.

This week, I’ve unfurled a few more of those scraps of paper to see if I can guess what I was trying to write. It’s really hard to tell sometimes, because, in addition to Sloppy Handwriting, I also suffer from Fuzzy Headthinking… meaning I could have jotted down just about anything!

This is what I think some of my old notes say:

-- “I miss Saturday morning cartoons”. I’m guessing I got that one right, because I really do miss them. I’ve missed them for about the last forty years. (If you do the math on that, it means that I watched Saturday morning cartoons until I was sixteen!)

-- “How will we know when the recession is over?” Will there be a buzzer? A bell like when school lets out for the day? Maybe a final gun, like at a ball game? Or a checkered flag, like NASCAR!!!

This wasn’t on the crumpled napkin, but I also think it would have been helpful if there had been an alarm of some sort to let us know the recession was coming, like they do for a storm, or a tsunami, or when the river rises.

-- “One dozen eggs, a gallon of milk, loaf of bread, cheerios, scope, toilet tissue (not single ply).” Upon closer inspection, this crumpled scrap of paper probably was not one of my column ideas.

-- “Only 298 more shopping days ‘til my birthday.” Gift idea: pocket tape recorder for making notes, because I can’t read my own handwriting. Scratch that. I also can’t understand most of the things I mumble into a tape recorder.

--“Pick up dry cleaning. Get haircut. Return movies.” Again, the wrong scrap of paper. I hope I remembered to return the movies, because this appears to be a really old scrap of paper.

-- “Belly-button lint.” One of life’s mysteries, to me, is where belly button lint comes from. In fact, I think I could devote an entire column to the wonders of the belly button, and the marvels of the lint therein.

-- “Wearing your pants tucked into your socks”. I remember, as a very small child, being thoroughly confused each morning as I tried to dress myself. Ditto, shirttails. Tucked in, or hanging out? I think I recall confusing the two: tucking the pants into the socks, but letting the shirt hang out.

-- “Muffle lightsocket banana smushy Einstein”. Or at least that’s what it looks like to me.

-- “That’s all, folks!” I wonder if I should start using this slogan to sign off of my column each week, like Porky Pig. Also, I wonder if there’s a way a newspaper column could have a theme song. If so, I would like that Looney Tunes song.

I miss Saturday morning cartoons. And I think it’s starting to affect my work. That, and the sloppy handwriting

Isolated Thoughts and Random Observations

2010-02-23T19:39:00.000-08:00

There are a few things which have been on my mind lately that I need to get off my chest.

Which, of course, makes no sense… if they’re on my mind, why do I need to get them off my chest?

I wonder how that expression came into existence: getting something “off your chest”.

Okay. Let me start over. I have a few random observations and isolated thoughts to share this week. And perhaps some questions which have been perplexing me.

First is this: What’s the difference between “hot chocolate” and “cocoa”? I don’t know. To me, they’ve always been interchangeable. Is there a difference?

Next thought: The massive Toyota recall.

I heard an interesting conspiracy theory the other day. The suggestion was that “the government” was putting the squeeze on Toyota to help sales of GM products, which are now owned by “the government”. What silly, nonsensical idea will the conspirator-theorists come up with next? That the FDA is withholding approval of some drugs because they’re in the pockets of the drug companies? That the SEC had been tipped-off about Bernie Madoff’s ponzi scheme years before it blew up, but had failed to take action? That the government has a giant, off-limits, top-secret military installation in the Western United States where it researches extraterrestrial life? Where do these guys come up with this stuff?

Back to Toyota: I saw a TV ad for the company over the weekend, where they appear to be trying to put the public-relations damage from this recall behind them. The slogan of their new ad campaign is “Toyota: Moving Forward.”

Now, I don’t claim to be an marketing genius… but wasn’t that the problem that caused the recall? The accelerator would stick, and you couldn’t stop moving forward? Is “Moving Forward” the only slogan they could come up with?

Text messaging: I’m usually not one to trounce on the few remaining individual liberties we still enjoy, but I make an exception with “text messaging while driving”. I’m happy the state legislature is getting ready to make it illegal, because it’s not safe, and the victims tend to be young kids – teenagers and so forth – who simply don’t know any better. They’re the ones who do most of the text messaging, and they’re the most inexperienced drivers.

I saw a bumper sticker that said: “Honk if you love Jesus. Text while driving if you’d like to meet him.”

New thought: Lately I’ve been cleaning out some old boxes in storage. I like it. It gives me a chance to revisit decades gone by. Most of my old boxes contain records, documents, notebooks, and other assorted paperwork. My favorite boxes, though, are the ones that contain “stuff”… not just paper. The non-paper objects are always in a box by themselves, and it’s usually a VERY random assortment of stuff: badges from a trade show; sunglasses; scotch tape; old cassettes; ketchup packets; a harmonica; an envelope full of glossy pictures, from back in the days when we had to send film in to be processed; lots of ink pens and batteries; a Nixon button; birthday cake candles; Magic Markers, usually dried out; potholders; a flashlight; an assortment of knobs; and a pocket calendar from 1989, just to name a few items I found.

The contents of the “stuff” boxes in storage closely resembles the contents of the “stuff” drawers in the kitchen, the den, and the basement, except from a decade or two earlier!

I would be remiss if I didn’t say a few words about the Winter Olympics. I wrote about the games last week, but I feel I should at least say a few words this week.

Luge. Curling. Skeleton.

There! I’ve done my duty. I’ve said a few words about the Winter Olympics… although I can’t begin to tell you what those words mean.

Now, “football” and “NASCAR”…. Those are a couple of sports words I DO understand… because they’re AMERICAN words… so it’s a pretty safe bet they’ll never be used in conjunction with any Olympics.

No matter… we’re winning the medal count anyway!

Last topic: Spread the word to any young brides to be you may know. Elsewhere in this newspaper, you will see a promotion for a Free Wedding Giveaway. Times are tight, and weddings can be a little pricey…so a local wedding venue – The Mitchell House – has come up with the idea to give away a complete wedding to a deserving soon-to-be wed couple! Their rules say the contest is open to anyone who serves the public in their job: the military, law enforcement, teacher, EMS, fire department, etc., in appreciation for their service. So see the details inside this newspaper, and spread the word to any young couples you may know.

Okay, that’s it for this week. Thanks for letting me get these things off my chest, off my mind, and off my plate for another week.

Winter Olympics, eh?!

2010-02-22T10:24:00.000-08:00

I know Canada, our neighbor to the north, is our best buddy and all… and I’m rootin’ for our best allies and pals to do well in the competitions… but, I gotta tell you: their Winter Olympics show is a snoozer.

I know they tried hard in their opening ceremony…. but they’re just not known for their pageantry, like the ancient Chinese were back in the Summer of Naught Eight.

The Chinese had their flowing, multi-colored robes, their exotic dragons, and about a gazillion people, because lots of people is their number one product. And fireworks. They invented fireworks.

The Canadians, on the other hand, had clogging, bad poetry, and totem pole imitations.

While the Chinese had an endless supply of highly-disciplined young Madam Butterfly Dancers, the Canadians had to rely on a few old lumberjacks.

Still, the opening ceremony was the best part! The Vancouver games went downhill from there. (Get it? Downhill.)

Maybe I’m just a Southerner through-and-through, and thus reject all things Northern, like snow and ice.

But I gotta tell you… most of these Winter Olympic events are foreign to me.

Curling, for instance. What’s that all about?

And how do snow-skiing and shooting rifles fit together into one sport?

A lot of these sports seem to be very similar: just riding some sort of sled downhill! I don’t think you find these kind of gravity-enhanced events in the Summer Olympics.

I’ve always said that the Olympics, in general, seem to be a bit biased against America. The selection of sports -- summer or winter -- has never really favored the USA.

Baseball, for instance, gets one Gold Medal, while judo accounts for 14 Golds and fencing accounts for 10. Shouldn’t baseball have separate events -- and separate Gold Medals -- for pitching, batting, fielding, home runs, bunting, and base stealing. (For that matter, separate Golds for right-handers and left-handers, the same way the judo events are broken down by weight categories?)

Basketball, too, should have different Gold Medals for shooting, dribbling, blocking, passing, three-pointers, free throws, and jump balls. Also, I think there should be a separate event for “horse”.

And, frankly, basketball should be in the Winter Games, because it’s a winter sport. It was invented so kids could come inside out of the cold during the wintertime. The Head Honchos of the Winter Olympics -- the guys who make the rules -- seem to have conveniently overlooked all the winter sports that do not rely on snow, ice, or gravity.

Bowling, for instance. There’s a winter sport that Americans would fare right well at, I’ll bet. And billiards. And Guitar Hero.

Just because we Americans have sense enough to come in out of the snow and ice, don’t hold that against us. (Well, at least Southern Americans have enough sense to come in out of the cold!)

If they insist on including only the outdoor sports, they ought to at least broaden their horizons a bit.

Snowball fights. That would add some pizzazz to the Winter Olympics. And I’ll bet we could bring home the Gold every four years.

And spice up the figure skating a bit. Let all the teams get out on the ice at the same time, and turn it into a bit of a Demolition Derby. Last team standing wins!

First of all, the wipe outs are already the most exciting part. This way, there would just be more spills, and thusly, more excitement.

Secondly, it would solve the judging dilemma that seems to dominate figure-skating. As it is now, the judges seem to play politics with their scoring. Changing to a “last man standing” event solves that problem.

Here’s my last suggestion to help improve the Winter Olympics:

Football!

Can anyone explain to me why there’s not football in the Olympics, winter or summer? Does that seem fair to us?

The Super Bowl was just one week earlier, so adding a little football to the Olympics seems like a natural.

And if for some reason football doesn’t work…. NASCAR!

Either one will be fine, and either one would help add a little balance to an occasion which is currently a little too….. how do we kindly say? …. European! (That seems nicer than calling it “French”!)

Here’s an amazing statistic about the Winter Olympics: NBC reportedly paid $2.2 billion for the rights to broadcast the 2010 Vancouver Games!!!

That seems like a lot to me.

But I’m glad they did. Because, for a couple of weeks, anytime I want to catch a nap, all I’ve got to do is switch it on!

The Big Four

2010-02-21T10:07:00.000-08:00

This week marks the final installment of everyman’s Occasions Which Best Not Be Overlooked. I thought I should dust off some advice I first offered three years ago, because, by now, there are a whole new crop of innocent young males entering a world ruled by females who can benefit from this advice.

It’s Valentines Day. Neglect/overlook/forget it at your own risk

Valentines Day is the fourth of what I refer to of The Big Four: Christmas, Anniversary, Her Birthday, and Valentines Day. Those are the four times a year when – if you are an attached male – that’s married, engaged, dating, “going steady”, or anything even resembling an attached male – you are obliged to offer your wife/girlfriend/steady date a gift or some other carefully selected token of your affection.

Let me repeat.

Obliged!

It is not optional; it is mandatory. It is required by the unwritten rules of the universe that gifts shall be provided on each of these days, lest unspeakable forms of punishment rain down upon he who does not follow the rule.

After more than three decades of on-again/off-again experience, I feel qualified to offer a few tips on the observance of Valentines Day to the less experienced. Hopefully, someone reading this will benefit from my past experiences, and perhaps, avoid the pitfalls of being a male on a day that is all about females.

Here are my helpful tips about Valentines Day:

1. Do not forget Valentines Day.

2. When I say “do not forget”, I mean “do not forget to buy a gift”.

3. A card is not a gift. (In grade school, I specifically remember the whole thing being about exchanging little Valentine Cards… but somewhere along the line, that was changed by the females.)

4. Cash is not a gift. Or a check.

5. A pizza cut in the shape of a Valentine is not a gift.

6. Do not forget Valentines Day.

7. “It’s the thought that counts” does not apply to Valentine’s Day, or for that matter to any other of The Big Four. It’s actually the monetary value that counts. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

8. When purchasing a gift to be engraved; a) you must order well in advance, and; b) do not accidentally engrave the wrong name.

9. Ditto tattoos.

10. A tattoo is not a gift. (If a tattoo IS a sufficient gift in your world, ignore everything I’ve written so far, and keep doing it your way. You’ve got things figured out a lot better than I do.)

11. If, at the last moment, you realize that the gift you have acquired is not big enough (based on monetary value), you may be able to disguise that by stopping into the local supermarket and purchasing a very large box of candy, arrangement of flowers, and huge oversized card to go along with your chintzy gift.

12. One of those cute little stuffed animals might also help if the gift was really chintzy.

13. Do not forget Valentine’s Day.

14. If you DO forget Valentine’s Day, check yourself into some sort of clinic. (It will NOT be an acceptable excuse for forgetting, but you’ll be in a clinic for awhile, and you won’t have to hear the non-stop verbal abuse you’re going to be getting for the next six weeks.)

15. Jumper cables are a gift, just not a very good one for Valentines Day.

16. Things that sparkle and shine ARE gifts, almost always. We males don’t understand WHY they are gifts, because they really serve no useful function, but for some reason, they’re gifts.

17. Valentines Day is all about the female. Remember these words forever.

18. Do not forget Valentines Day.

Again, I’m happy to have shared just a bit of my wisdom of the years with you. And maybe some young buck WILL benefit from my experiences, and avoid the pitfalls of being a male on a decidedly female day. And the world will be a happier place!

A Guest Column from Cuzzin Bubba-Boy

2010-02-20T19:12:00.000-08:00

Cuzzin Rod-Boy wuz a mite bizzy lass week, so he ast me to rite hiz noospaper collum fer him, wich, naccherally, I'z mor than delited to oblije with.

He sed i cud rite abowt ennytheng I wonted to.

So i thowt i'd jest rite abowt regalur, ole everday, dull stuff, like he duz

Yue no, plane old dull stuff like, watt he had to eet fer brekfass… ar like thangs he useter do wen he wuz a yungun…. ar like stuff he rememburs frum wenn he wuz in skool.

Reel dull stuff, like dat

Uf corse, I culdnt rite much abowt skoolin, sense I ditten do enny acktual skoolin… butt thin, Cuzzin Rod Boy ditten do a hole hekkuva lot uv it, neether.

I reckon I cud rite abowt rasslin gotes, wich iz sumthin I’me pretty gud at… but dat wud be way to xsiten to be in Cuzzin Rod-Boy’s noospaper.

Naw, I probly auwt to jus keep it az dull az possibul, lke he duz.

I cud rite abowt Grown Hogg Day, sense its rat’cheer in Febrewerry. Trubble iz, I dawnt no verry much abowt Grown Hoggz. Da onliest Grown Hogg I no ennytheng abowt at awl iz sawsige. But I dawnt no nuthin abowt no uther kine uv Grown Hogg.

Uf corse, dat mite be okae, to, cawse I’m pretty sur Cuzzin Rob-Boy dawnt no a thang abowt mose uv da stuff he rites abowt.

An anuther thang: Hav yew evur notised how he jess goze on an on an on abowt thangs, jumpin arouwn frum paje to paje. Sumtime, I need to take a lil nap bfour I can finnish reedin his hole collum. He rites like dere aint no tomorror. Like I aint got nutthin bedder to do dan reed a hole dangd buk evree dangd weke.

He nedes to larn wenn itz time to kwit.

Mebbe I can teech him sumthin by settin a gud xsample.

So, dis iz Cuzzin Bubba-Boy sayin, “By, yawl!”

The happiest day of the year

2010-02-19T04:31:00.000-08:00

Last Monday was the happiest day of the year for me. At least the happiest day so far.

Maybe Tuesday was happier, but I can’t know for sure until it happens.

Although you’re probably reading this column on a Thursday, Friday, or Saturday, it was actually written on Monday. In the world of weekly newspapers, we observe “deadlines” a few days before the newspaper is actually printed and put on the street.

And I use the word “deadlines” very loosely.

In the world of weekly newspapers, deadlines are actually just guidelines. We hope to have everything in place by the deadline, but if a big story occurs afterwards, or an advertiser really needs to get an extra ad in this week’s newspaper, the deadline goes out the window.

And I use the words “big story” very loosely.

In the world of weekly newspapers, a “big story” usually isn’t that big: the garden club holds a bake sale; the school crossing guard writes somebody a ticket; or Old Lady Griswold’s cat gets rescued out of a tree by Deputy Fife.

I digress.

The point is, this column is being written on a Monday, as is my custom, for the newspaper that you’re reading now, which was published for a Thursday.

Earlier this morning, we gathered at the local Lizard’s Thicket for our regular Monday newspaper staff meeting, and Annette, our veteran Account Executive observed that Monday, January 25th, had been designated as the most depressing day of the year!

We talked about it.

We decided that experts who make such distinctions probably took a number of factors into consideration:

First, it’s January, and it’s cold and dreary.

Next, the bills are all due now from Christmas, which was exactly a month earlier.

Also, it’s the last week of the month, which means everybody is running out of money.

And on top of that, it’s a Monday.

So, it was easy to see why the experts – psychologists, psychiatrics, sociologists, and the like – had figured that Monday, January 25, 2010, was likely to be the most depressing day of the year.

Except for one thing: None of us felt the least bit depressed!

I asked around the table, and nobody was depressed. We were all in pretty good spirits, except for one case of the sniffles.

So I got to thinking: If the rest of the world is depressed today, but we’re all happy, then we really have a big advantage over the rest of the world. We should be, not just happy, but SUPER-happy!

So, we decided that the Most Depressing Day of the Year for everybody else should be the Happiest Day of the Year for us!

This incidentally, is not unlike the Rainy Day rule that we’ve adhered to for years.

Long ago, I observed that rain actually doesn’t hurt. It may dampen you for a bit, but it doesn’t hurt you. So, back in the days when I was a door-to-door salesman, of sorts, I kept my appointed rounds on rainy days in spite of the drizzle. And I realized that I did real well selling on those days because: a) lotsa folks were impressed that I was dedicated enough to be slogging through the rain; and b) nobody else was, so I didn’t have any competition on rainy days.

Upon that realization, I came to view rainy days as special gifts: days when I would have a competitive advantage because I understood that you don’t actually melt if you get rained on. Other people may have woken up to rainy days in a dreary mood; but rainy days always made me happy!

So, for years, our entire staff has subscribed to the theory that rainy days are GREAT! (Although occasionally, when it’s coming down in buckets, I do hear them quietly whispering that perhaps Rod-Boy has gone off the optimistic deep-end.)

And now – YIPPEE -- we’ve discovered we have the final Monday of January each year to add to our collection of special happy days.

That’s why it’s Monday, January 25th, 2010, and I’m having my happiest day of the year.

At least until Tuesday.

Main Streets, Dirt Roads, and U.S. 1

2010-01-20T18:23:00.000-08:00

During yet another of my recent wistfully nostalgic moments – a more and more frequent occurrence as I get older and older, thus accumulating additional years of memories to be wistfully nostalgic about – I was pondering the main streets and dirt roads of yesteryear.

We still have plenty of main streets and dirt roads, or course, but not like we used to.

I can still recall the Main Street of my hometown – Lexington, SC – from when I was a young’un. (It was a lot like the Main Street we all know from TV’s Mayberry.) Folks wandered from store to store, stopping along the way to visit acquaintances they bumped into. Shopkeepers occasionally spent the afternoons sitting on benches or stools out in front of their shops, usually with friends hanging around just to chat and pass the time. (This was before air-conditioning, so sitting in the shade outside was usually preferable to the fan-cooled inside. And, they had usually rolled out their canvas awnings in the morning to provide the shade.)

Once a week or so, at age nine or ten, I’d hop on my bike and pedal the mile or so from my home to the stores on Main Street (which in early ‘60s Lexington lingo was referred to as “going up the street”.) Sometimes I’d have a dime or so to spend, which worked out nicely, since I usually landed at Dodd’s Dime store. Sometimes I was penniless, which was also okay, cause it was fun just to look around.

After my weekly afternoon Cub Scout meetings, held a block away, I had another opportunity to just wander over to Main Street and hang around until Mom or Dad came to pick me up. There weren’t any cell phones back then, so you’d think that locating me would have been a problem. But it wasn’t. They would just come park somewhere on Main Street – which was really just a block or two – and somehow, we’d find each other pretty quickly.

There are still Main Streets in lots of towns. But I don’t think kids today have these kinds of Main Street experiences.

I doubt if many parents would consent to their nine-year-olds hopping on their bikes and pedaling “up the street” for a couple of hours.

I also think a lot of kids today probably aren’t familiar with dirt roads.

Not that dirt roads are anything special… but it seems a shame that you have to drive a good ways out of town to even see one any more. When I was a kid, half the people I knew lived on dirt roads.

Since the population is now centered in cities and towns, I’ll bet the majority of young kids have never even seen a dirt road, much less ridden their bikes or walked barefoot on one.

At a young age, we learned to keep your bike toward the middle of a dirt road. If you ventured over toward the edge, you would invariably bog down in the soft piles of sand that accumulated on the shoulders of most dirt roads. Also, there would be a little mound of soft dirt right in the middle. But, if you kept it in one of the two paths where the tires continually ran over it and kept the dirt packed and hard, you could do some good bike riding!

Walking barefoot was another matter. In that case, you might be perfectly willing to trod along the soft dirt on along the edge, because it felt a lot softer on your feet.

Back in the hot summertimes of the early 60s, kids quickly learned to walk in the light-colored sand instead of the hard, packed, dark-colored dirt. Hot! Hot! Hot!

I grew up living on a highway: US 1.

I assumed that, because it was numbered “1”, it was the best highway in America. Or the longest. Or the first.

I was never quite sure why it was named Highway One, but I figured there was some superlative significance to it.

Today, US 1 has changed drastically from what it used to be, just like Main Streets and dirt roads have changed. Once upon a time, it was a proud highway, a major artery stretching from the Maine to Key West, and people travelling from the big cities of the North to destinations in Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia or Florida often found themselves on U.S. Route 1. And the Mom and Pop restaurants, gas stations, motor lodges, fruit stands and truck stops along it thrived.

But no more. Now the mighty Interstates have taken over.

And the U.S. Route 1 I knew as a child is a thing of the past… just like Main Streets and dirt roads.

The kids of today are missing out.

You and what army?!!!

2010-01-15T08:41:00.000-08:00

Since we’re a couple weeks after New Years Day, and lotsa folks are probably currently struggling to keep what’s left of their New Years Resolutions, I thought I’d talk a little about “willpower”. Hopefully, I can motivate you to try, try again!!!!

It’s willpower, after all, which separates the successful resolutions from the substantially more prevalent “better luck next years”.

I feel qualified to write about the topic of “willpower”, because, quite frankly, I have it. Lots of it.

Three years ago, for instance, I made a New Year’s Resolution to write a newspaper column each and every week, which, in over 17 years of publishing newspapers, I had simply neglected to do. Now, however, after applying a modest amount of willpower to my 2007 New Year’s Resolution, I am at this moment writing a column for the 156th consecutive week… three full years… all because I have the willpower of a block of granite.

Most of my friends and acquaintances do not acknowledge my willpower.

They recognize this personal characteristic of which I speak, but consistently mislabel it as a “character flaw”, referring to me with somewhat unflattering terms such as stubborn, mulish, pig-headed, opinionated, obstinate, obdurate, obstructionist, inflexible, headstrong, immovable, and a thick-headed, lame-brained, good-for-nothing, backwards jackass.

What it really is, of course, is a collection of the highly sought after traits of Persistence and Tenacity, and Unwavering Willpower: doggedly determined, and relentless in my pursuits.

In fact, it is thanks to these much sought after “never give up” qualities that I have never once in my entire life lost an argument! (Friends and acquaintances, out of sheer jealousy, I suppose, claim it’s because I simply keep arguing until eventually the other side goes away, or slips into a coma from boredom.)

My willpower also manifests itself in other, less obvious, ways. Fashion trends, for instance.

It’s not that I’m trying to make a statement by wearing the latest styles of the 60’s and 70’s. It’s just that… “don’t fix what’s not broken!” Eventually, the rest of the world will probably come back to lime green leisure suits, eight-inch wide neckties, and flare bottom jeans. In the meantime, I ain’t changing!!!

If I had been alive in the 1920’s or 1930’s, I probably would have been good at those dance marathon contests I’ve read about. Also, pole-sitting.

Had I grown up in the frigid climates of the north, I’m pretty sure I would have been that kid in the movie who got his tongue stuck to the flagpole… that is, IF I had been Double-Dog-Dared! (Of course, I would never have whined about it, or let the fire department come rescue me. I would have insisted that having my tongue stuck to a pole was my plan all along, and possibly would have just stayed there until the spring thaw.)

Back in 1996, some readers will recall, I actually DID water ski 162 miles from Columbia to Charleston partly as the result of a Double-Dog Dare (and partly as the result of a Coors Lite-inspired boast, as was my occasional custom in my lost younger years.)

I suspect I come by my obstin…. oops… willpower quite naturally. When my Dad was a member of the SC House of Representatives in the early 1960’s, he once set a record for filibustering, standing at the podium and speaking non-stop for over 24 hours to kill a piece of legislation to which he was opposed. Thirty years later, as a member of the Senate, he filibustered again, talking all night long just a week after getting his new pacemaker. Blast the doctors’ orders!!!

Truth be known, this kind of stubb… I mean… willpower is a part of our South Carolina culture. After all, it wasn’t too long ago that our state voted to secede from the Union and declare war on the most powerful nation on earth… without an army, navy, air force, or military of any kind.

Don’t let my easy-going, laid-back style fool you. I may look like I’m chilled out, but when I need to be, I can be as pig….. er…. determined as they come.

So, my advice to anyone who is struggling with those New Years Resolutions is this:

“Hang in there, baby! Don’t let ’em talk you down off that flag pole.”

Remember the examples of George Washington Carver, Ghandi, and General Stonewall Jackson. (And for that matter, General McArthur and General Patton, too. But try not to think of General Custer.)

To paraphrase FDR and Churchill:

“Nothing can make you cave in but caving in itself!”

and

“Never, never, never, never, never give up your favorite pair of shoes, no matter how many decades old they may be.”

Top 10 Tips for Dealing with Cold Weather

2010-01-14T05:03:00.000-08:00

Possibly you’ve noticed that your thermometers have dipped a bit in the last week or so. It’s cold outside.

Because the majority of my reading audience, like myself, are Southerners, we are not really equipped to deal with cold weather. It’s unnatural to us, sorta like hockey and grilling hamburgers and calling it “barbecue”.

I, however, being somewhat of an urbanite, a “Man of the World”, and having travelled to exotic places in the colder extremes north of here, like Raleigh, Knoxville, and Huntington, West Virginia, have experienced some freezography and chillometry in my lifetime.

In the lingering spirit of the recently-celebrated holiday season, and the bright promise of the coming new decade, I would like to share with you a few of my personal tips on dealing with the cold weather which is being heaped upon us.

Here, then, are Rod-Boys Personal Experience Tips for Dealing With the Freezin’ Cold Weather:

10. Dress like you’re a character from a Norman Rockwell picture. Many of his covers for the Saturday Evening Post featured people who appeared to be from Up North where it’s cold. Consequently, they were dressed differently that we dress in the South, wearing articles of clothing we’ve never even heard of, let alone worn. Earmuffs. Snow pants. Mittens. Scarves. Leg-Warmers. Stocking Caps.

9. Blubber. Typically, a large, thick, jiggly layer of fat surrounding your entire body is thought to be a bad thing. But not on days when the high temperature has a minus sign in front of it. On those days, blubber makes you the object of the affection of lots of cold, skinny people who would like to squeeze up against you to absorb a few of your raging BTUs.

8 Layers. This is the most basic of all staying-warm advice: dress in layers. For instance, you should wear an undershirt, a regular shirt, a sweatshirt, a sweater, an over-sweater, a jacket, a coat, a parka, and an overcoat. Add a couple of layers of Hefty Bags over that, and you’re gonna stay warm in Antartica.

7 If you drive a convertible, make sure it actually has a top on it. This particular tip comes from experience. When I was a high school senior, I drove an old beat up convertible that did NOT have a top on it. During the winter months, I wrapped up in a blanket each morning before I drove to school. (Actually, I don’t know why I still called it a convertible. The only thing it converted was my breath into steam.) On rainy days, I drove fast so I could lean up under the windshield and the cold rain would only hit my back.

6. Run for Congress. It only helps if you win. But if you do, you’ll get to move to the “hot air” capital of the universe!

5. College. Go to college, earn a degree, and go to work at a desk job, inside instead of outside. Then you can look out the window and watch all your drop-out friends freezing their tushies off while they wash cars and hawk tax services.

4. Duct Tape. I haven’t actually used this one before, but as we all know, duct tape will fix anything, including, I suppose, cold weather. If, for some reason it doesn’t fix the cold weather, then just add some WD40. It definitely fixes anything.

3. It’s not really cold… it’s just your imagination. Haven’t you been keeping up with Al Gore and his global warming stuff? After all, they gave him a Nobel Prize, so it has to be right.

2. Soup! Eating hot soup is the best answer of all to the cold weather, because not only does it warm you up, but it also fills your belly. Coffee and cocoa are also good at warming you up, but they don’t do quite as good of a job at filling your belly.

And the number one tip for dealing with cold weather is…..

1. Tickets! Buy tickets to somewhere warm, like Cancun, Jamaica, or the Caribbean. Because, in my lifetime of personal experiences which has included dealing with freezin’ cold weather, I have learned that the VERY BEST way of handling the cold…. is being somewhere else.

So here’s hoping YOU find a way to stay warm in the cold days ahead.

Hope you have a GREAT New Year, and a Super-Fantastic Decade!!!!

2009, as I barely recall it!

2009-12-29T18:11:00.000-08:00

As I noted a few weeks ago – we’ve reached not only the end of another year, but the conclusion of the entire first decade of the new millennium. (Wow, time flies when you’re living vicariously via a series of online websites!)

This week, nearly every newspaper columnist in America is writing a column along essentially the same themes: either the year in review, or the decade in review. I chose the year in review because it would require too much mental energy for me to go back and try to recall the entire decade. I’m too old for that level of remembering.

Frankly, I’m actually too old to remember a whole year, so I’m just including the highlights that I DO happen to recall at this exact moment, which is almost certainly a different set of highlights than the ones I will recall a couple hours from now.

Here are the highlights, as I hazily recall them:

Global Warming -- There was a major meeting of all the world’s leaders in Copenhagen, to determine how to handle this looming crisis. US leaders committed $100 billion of our money, although they admitted having no idea where it would come from, or what it would be used for. Then, they returned to the nation’s capital to face the coldest, snowiest winter blizzard in history.

Swine Flu was given a new name: H1N1 – The Surgeon General told us to cough into our sleeves to prevent the spread of the virus, resulting in millions of neck injuries when old people like me expelled ferocious sneezes while our necks were craned sideways trying to reach our shoulder sleeves. The Surgeon General also advised us to forego traditional handshakes in favor of the germ-free “fist bump”. The fist bump, it turns out, only looks cool when young, urban street toughs do it. When the rest of us try it, we look sorta dorky.

The Recession -- The nation has been mired in a deep recession for the entire year. As for me, I started the year with basically no money, and ended with basically no money. When you didn’t really have any money to start with, you hardly notice a recession.

Tiger Woods -- Somebody asked me a few weeks ago if I had been keeping up with Tiger Woods. I told him, no, at my age, it wasn’t really possible… but if I was his age and had his money, I’m pretty sure I could have kept up with him.

South Carolina On The Map -- Wow! Mark Sanford’s “Appalachian Trail” and Joe Wilson’s “You lie” have brought us to the Big Time. Those who believe we have merely been subjected to ridicule by their actions are unaware of the modern axiom of marketing: “Celebrity is the coin of the realm”! Trust me: Mark Sanford and Joe Wilson are both marketable commodities: They are ‘brands” in the current-terms of media-speak.

Nobel Peace Prize -- Get one free with every oil change!

Health Care Debate -- The Health Care Debate obviously consumed much of the attention of the nation for the entire year. Only thing is, it wasn’t really a health care debate: It was a government debate, dealing primarily with how much individual freedom and liberty the American people are willing to surrender in exchange for more government control and intervention. And it was a money debate, like many other government debates, trying to control how the money-pie gets sliced up. If it had actually been a health care debate, we would have heard discussions of words like “electrocardiogram”, “macular degeneration”, “paracentric chromosome inversion”, and “deoxyhemoglobin”… or at least words like “biopsy”, “osteoporosis” and “white blood count”. But instead, the words and phrases we heard during the health care debate, according a glossary from Reuters News Service, were “public option”, “Cadillac health plans”, “exchanges”, “single payer”, “trigger”, “opt-out”, “opt-in”, “bending the cost curve”, and “age rating.”

My Weight -- For the umpteenth year in a row, I’m ending the year on a high note: I’m a Big, Fat, Giant, Hippo-Pig-Whale!!! My weight has finally exceeded even my massive ego!!! But, here’s good news: It’s time for out annual Kick-Off-The-New-Year-With-A-Weight-Loss-Contest competition. (If you’d like to join our pound-shedding adventure, email me at RodShealy@aol.com. By the way, in recognition of The Recession, I’m pretty sure our buy in will be $25 per person, instead of our traditional $100.)

Baby Boomers -- This was the year that baby boomers started reaching retirement age en masse, a trend which will continue for over a decade. Retirement will never be the same.

What I Got for Christmas – For me, December 25th, 2009, marked exactly the 500th day since I underwent brain surgery back on Aug. 11, 2008. At that time, I was diagnosed with a cancerous brain tumor, and initially given a dire prognosis. The tumor was a recurrence of the same cancer – melanoma – from 25 years earlier. My odds of still being here for Christmas, 2009, were slim. (Being here was a great Christmas Gift! Knowing that I’ve made it 500 days is a Blessing Beyond Belief!!!)

As I reported at Thanksgiving, I was fortunate to be accepted into an innovative cancer research program at the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida, for a long-term trial in which I am currently participating. It’s a field of cancer research -- finding better ways to boost the body’s natural abilities to fight cancer -- which appears very promising for the future.

From time to time, as I promised back in August, 2008, I have updated readers on my progress. (See http://doingthefirst.blogspot.com/2009/11/much-to-be-thankful-for.html)
Within the next few weeks, I should have new scans, and a new update for you.

In the meantime, I continue to be thankful for my family and friends whose strong support has kept me positive and optimistic; and for the many, many people who said a prayer for me… and caused the miracle that allowed me to be here for Christmas, 2009.

Happy New Year! I’ll see you in 2010… and a whole new decade!

Has it been that long already?

2009-12-27T12:20:00.000-08:00

Ten years. It’s hard to believe it’s been that long already! But it has.

We survived the first decade of the new millennium!

As I was beginning to think about my annual Christmas gift-giving a few days ago, the thought occurred to me that we have, indeed, made it to the end of the first decade of the 2000’s! Well, almost. Another few days.

The new millennium was a big deal, you probably recall. It was the Mother of all New Years celebrations.

Do you remember where you were? I remember where I was. (I also remember where I was supposed to be.)

Some of you are probably wondering how thinking about my annual Christmas gift-giving caused me to think about the end of the decade. You’ve probably jumped to the conclusion that it’s been 10 years since I purchased a decent gift for anyone. Wrong. It’s been much longer.

Actually, I was contemplating, as I do most years, simply ordering custom-made T-shirts for my close friends and family members. For some reason, however, I always demure, usually over the same nonsensical notion: “What if they, for some unknown reason, don’t WANT a T-Shirt with my picture on it?” Silly me. What a foolish notion. Of course they would adore their own Rod-Boy T-Shirt!

But, again this year, I passed on the original concept, and started thinking instead about a T-Shirt with a Meaningful Slogan on it. The slogan that kept running through my mind, given the state of the economy and all, was “I Survived 2009”… which I thought would make a pretty swell T-Shirt.

And then it hit me: We’ve not only survived 2009! We’ve all survived this entire decade: January 1st, 2000 – December 31st, 2009. Ten whole years of the new millennium have slipped right by.

Do you remember computer geeks throughout the world preparing all of us for Y2K, the computer calamity that could have crippled the world if we had not been ready for it?

There was also an ongoing controversy over exactly when the new millennium actually began: Jan 1st,2000, or Jan. 1st 2001. While the 2001 advocates were technically, mathematically correct, it really didn’t matter, because the rest of the world was set to celebrate the onset of 2000.

I remember wondering in this newspaper column what name we would give to the decade. How would we refer to it? All the other decades were easy to say: The 90’s. The 80’s. The 70’s, 60’s and 50’s. Would we call it the 00’s, I wondered. Here it is ten years later, and I still don’t know what we call the decade we’re about to complete.

I can tell its been a long time, because 10 years ago, I actually had learned how to spell the word “millennium”, since it was used frequently during the big build up to Y2K. Now, however, I find myself needing to look up the correct spelling to write this column!

A lot can happen in 10 years. We went from Clinton, to Bush, to Obama during the period. Technology happened so fast that no one can really keep track of it anymore. We went from a booming economy to a recession. And speaking of “booming”, we baby-boomers all slid quietly into middle age. Okay, upper-middle age, maybe.

In the history books, I suppose, the period will be defined largely by the events of that day 20 months and 11 days into the decade: 9/11/2001. That day changed history. That day changed lives. And that day suddenly brought a sudden end to the excited euphoria and wondrous innocence that had ushered in The New Millennium. Just that quickly, the New Millennium came of age.

All in all, it’s been a heckuva decade. And it’s almost over… if you’re using the Jan. 1, 2000 calendar.

For the rest of the family, I’ve decided once again against the T-Shirts for Christmas.

But I think I will order one for myself:

Jan. 1, 2000 – Dec. 31, 2009: I Survived the First Decade of the New Millennium!

Overlooked traditions and under-appreciated icons

2009-12-26T07:36:00.000-08:00

There must be hundreds of traditions of Christmas. Many of these customs have become so popular that merely mentioning the word conjures up vivid holiday images:

Reindeer. Holly. Mistletoe. Wreaths. Stockings. Elves. Sleigh bells. Jingle Bells. Silver Bells. Snowmen. Candy Canes. Fruit Cake. Caroling. Egg Nog. Candles. Icicles. Sugar Plums. Figgy Pudding. Poinsettas. Ornaments.

I think there are other perfectly-good traditions which have sadly been overlooked. They’re just as much a part of the Holiday Season, but for some reason, they’ve never made it to the big time.

This week, I’d like to correct that oversight. I want to mention a few of the other traditions of the holidays.

Here they are: Rod-Boy’s list of Overlooked and Under-Appreciated Traditions, Customs, and Icons of The Christmas Season:

The Attic. Twice-a-year, I visit the attic: Once to bring down the Christmas stuff, and once to take it back up for another ten-and-a-half months. Basically, these are the only two times of the year I ever see the inside of my attic. So why isn’t the attic a symbol of Christmas, just like the tinsel that’s scattered about all over the attic floor?

Hearing relatives snore. This, too, seems to happen at only one time of the year: the holiday season! Maybe its Thanksgiving afternoon, maybe Christmas, or maybe even New Years Day… but at my house, it’s a pretty good bet that at some point during the holidays, I’m going to get to hear at least one relative snore. (And it’s a REAL safe bet that my relatives are gonna get to!!!)

Lbs. – Gaining weight! Happens every year…because of all the goodies! But we focus on the yummy instead of the tummy. Truth in advertising: Wouldn’t it be better just to go ahead and anoint “blubber rolls” as an official custom of The Season. (And, by the way, can anyone tell me how “lbs” is an abbreviation for “pounds”?)

Batteries and extension cords. Tis the season of bright lights, musical toys, and dancing Santa bears. They all require batteries or extension cords to supply their kilowatt needs. I cannot recall a single holiday season in which I purchased neither batteries nor extension cords.

Those hideous holiday sweaters. (I personally also have holiday suspenders, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.) Starting with the color combination – bright green and bright red -- holiday sweaters are, by design, unflattering. In my case, however, it tends to be an improvement over my normal attire. Every year, friends and family alike encourage me to keep wearing my Christmas sweaters for an additional few months. As a bonus, they do tend to distract attention away from the holiday blubber roll… so you’ll understand when you see me wearing a Holiday Sweater in August.

Musically-gifted animals: Barking dogs and singing chipmunks on the radio. At Christmastime, apparently anything goes on the AM/FM airwaves. When the animals aren’t chirping their versions of the songs, we’re often singing about them, like the songs about an airplane-flying dog and, of course, the antlered Rangifer tarandus with a glowing nose.

Assembly instruction sheets. These don’t really affect my holidays anymore: it’s been a couple of decades since I had kids in the toy-assembly age range. And since I don’t, I can smile fondly at the memories… especially the ones at 3am on Christmas Eve… and the ones where they left two bolts and a hex-nut out of the package… and, I’ll tell you what tickles me most… the fact that, nowadays, I’m pretty sure all the toys are made in China, so the assembly instruction sheets are now written in a close imitation of the English language. Ho, ho, ho!!! That’s gotta be fun through those bleary 3am eyes!!! Assembly instruction sheets are a jolly good Christmas tradition… when you’re not the one doing the assembly!!!

Re-gifting. I think re-gifting has been given a bad rap. I see it as a noble tradition. Suppose you get a gift, put it on the shelf for 50 years, and then give it away. You would be parting with a precious heirloom. When I re-gift, I think of it the same way: parting with a precious heirloom, except this is better, because it’s still in like-new condition!!!!

Scotch Tape and scissors. I think this under-appreciated tradition is pretty much self-explanatory. (We’d all have a pretty hard time ripping the gift wrap to shreds it there was no such thing as Scotch Tape, wouldn’t we.)

Wondering if we’re going to have a White Christmas this year. A wonderful tradition, not to be confused with actually HAVING a White Christmas. I’ve never experienced the actual White Christmas…. because I’ve lived my entire life in Lexington County, South Carolina, where we can usually wear shorts or flip-flops on Christmas Eve. But that doesn’t seem to stop every person I know from wondering aloud, each and every year, if we’re going to have a White Christmas. GET A CLUE. It’s South Carolina!!!! Still, what a warm and wonderful holiday tradition, just to wonder aloud, so that all your friends can “ooooh” and “ahhhhh” and “I hope so!” like they’ve never even heard of the Weather Channel.

That’s my list. Now back to the attic for the clogging reindeers. (I just hope I haven’t misplaced those precious heirlooms.)

The Christmas Story that really happened

2009-12-23T21:48:00.000-08:00

I think it’s hard for most of us to wrap our minds around The Christmas Story.

I’m not talking about the “Christmas Story” that we watch on TV every year… the one with Ralphie, who wants a Red Ryder BB Gun for Christmas, but keeps being told “you’ll shoot your eye out”. You know the one… he learns cusswords from his Dad, so his Mom washes his mouth out with soap; the gang dares a kid to touch his tongue to a frozen lamppost; the neighbor’s dogs eat the turkey; and Ralphie’s Dad wins a fragile, Major Award. It’s a cute movie.

I think most of us CAN relate to that Christmas Story.

It’s the other Christmas Story we have a hard time really relating to: The original one, with Baby Jesus wrapped in swaddling clothes, laid in a manger.

We all know the story. We cherish the story. And the faith many of us carry with us for our entire life is based on that story.

Still, we have a hard time letting the reality of it sink in. It was so long ago, so far way.

I have developed my own theory about how the human mind treats fantastic, amazing, or incredible events from long ago or far away.

I had to develop my own theory, because I never really studied psychology. Okay. There was the one class in high school when I was a senior, but I mostly slept through it because I had gotten up early every morning to drive a school bus. And there was one course in college, but I dropped it because… well, the professor was too weird. It was the 70’s.

Consequently, I have no real formal schooling in psychology, nor have I read much about the topic on my own… so I’m left to develop my own theories, which, frankly, may have already been theorized by others. Or totally disproven as nonsense. I don’t know. I guess I should have stuck around and listened to my hippie professor.
My theory, however, holds that the human mind has a way of storing topics which humans can’t really grasp or deal with. The mind simply treats it the same as it treats story-book material, I believe. I gave it a name: “sub-fictionalization”.
Dinosaurs and cavemen, for instance. They were very real, of course, but I believe our mind often treats these topics like fiction. We think of them the way we think of a good movie or Disneyworld.

Similarly, we’re incapable of truly grasping other galaxies which are millions of years older than ours. So our brain simply files it in the “story book” folder as a way of coping with it.

Terrible disasters and wars and unspeakable atrocities perhaps fit into the same categories. If we weren’t there, and didn’t see it with our own eyes, or live it in person, the events just get filed away along with the “fiction”. It’s a good story, sorta like a Dickens novel. The Crusades happened. So did the Napoleanic Wars. And the Black Plague and the Holocaust. But since we weren’t there, we’ve only heard the stories.

The entire Bible, despite being the most authoritative historical account ever produced, is processed by the brain as simply a collection of stories. The ark and the flood, the lions den, the belly of the whale, are stored like fairy tales. Angels, along with cavemen and dinosaurs, are “sub-fictionalized”. (Remember, that’s my made-up word to go along with my made-up theory.)

After a while, we have a hard time separating miracles from monsters: miracles that really happened form the monsters that are the invention of a writer.

And, because it was so long ago and far away, the original Christmas Story, I fear, falls right into same category. We hear it. We learn it. We recite it. We make it the central focus of our annual calendar and the rituals of our lives.

But our brain still may have it filed along side Snow White and Pinnochio.

To make The Christmas Story even more difficult for us to grasp as truth, not fiction, we’ve built an entire holiday culture around it which WAS invented by the human mind: flying reindeer, elves that make toys, Frosty the Snowman, and, of course, Santa, up on the roof top.

All of which makes the wonder of that original Christmas Story fade back into our storybook file, along with The Night Before Christmas, Ebenezer Scrooge, and Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer.

Except, there’s a really important difference: that Original Christmas Story really did happen. Sure, it was long ago, and far away… but it’s still just as real as if it had happened last week in Myrtle Beach.

A Baby named Jesus really was born of a virgin. He really was the Only Son of the Creator of our entire world. He really was born in a manger.

Angels really did appear to shepherds watching their flocks of sheep. A star really appeared, guiding visitors from distant lands to visit the Christ Child.

He really turned water into wine. He really fed a multitude of people with two fish and five loaves.

He really healed the sick, the lame, and the blind, simply by willing it. He really brought the dead back to life.

He really walked on water.

And then, He really did let Himself be nailed to a cross to die, and didn’t try to save Himself as he had others. He really died. And He really rose from the dead.

And He really did it all for us.

It’s a wondrous, incredible, miraculous story. So wondrous, so incredible, so miraculous, that many of us simply file it away in the storybook file, along with the other things we just can’t understand.

But at least once a year, we ought to stop and try to think about that very real story.

The Original Christmas Story.

The one that really happened.

Check Your Calendar

2009-12-12T15:20:00.000-08:00

One of the overlooked traditions of the holiday season is the annual arrival of a batch of new calendars for the next year.

I’m always intrigued by the new calendars. Most people, I think, just look at the pictures or advertising messages contained on the calendar, but I like to peruse the actual dates to see if there are any surprises in store.

It occurred to me this week in a moment of melancholy that calendars as we know them are on probably the way to becoming extinct, just like newspapers, phone books, paper money, and a whole host of other products. Thanks to technology, many items which are now printed will someday likely be only transmitted.

Calendar users are already a dying breed, I suspect. I myself keep a calendar book -- called a Daytimer -- in my back pocket to keep track of my upcoming appointments, but few of my peers still do. They all seem to use those berry-named devices. I must admit that the “alarm” function of these gadgets is appealing from time to time. While I am skilled, after decades of practice, at writing appointments on my pocket calendar, I find myself more and more frequently forgetting to actually check it to see if I have any appointments.

Because of my background as a printer -- a trait I share with Benjamin Franklin, along with a big, odd-shaped, balding head -- I probably pay more attention to calendars than most folks -- I’ve probably produced a few million of them in my time -- and therefore can claim a level of expertise on the subject. For instance, I know that there are always 365 days on a calendar, except for leap years, when there are…. I forget how many… I’ll have to check a calendar.

But I do know there are all sorts of calendars, ranging from the aforementioned pocket sized calendar books and wallet sized cards (and refrigerator magnets), to desk calendars, to stand-up calendars, to thick calendars where you turn the page every day, to large colorful decorative wall calendars, with a different picture on every page: -- red barns, snowscapes, covered bridges, sunsets, wheat fields and mountain ranges -- all corresponding to the month on the facing page. For instance, you show me a picture of leaves changing colors, and I can almost guarantee that you’re looking at September or October.

For decades, banks and insurance companies have given out free calendars to their customers. It was better than a card. It was an actual GIFT!

My favorite calendars of all time were the community birthday calendars sold by the Jaycees in my hometown of Lexington when I was a kid. Back then, Lexington was a small town, and everybody sorta knew everybody, so it was interesting to see a lot of their names listed on their birthdays.

Nowadays, you can buy calendars adorned with just about any topic you want: dogs, cats, classic cars, rock stars, sports teams, gourmet foods, and, of course, swimsuit models. Or, you can go to Kinko’s and get your own face -- or your relatives -- plastered onto a custom made calendar.

I don’t know who invented calendars, or when, but I’m pretty sure it was some really smart guy a lot of centuries ago. The Chinese seem to have an entirely different calendar, which doesn’t surprise me, since they have a WAY different style of writing, with little pictures instead of letters.

I think the Caesars had something to do with the invention of our current calendar, since Julius, Augustus, and Octavius all have months named after them. For years, I have been lobbying to have the name of the month of August -- named after Augustus Caesar, of little relevance to any currently living human being -- changed to the month of Elvis.

But, the problem is, I don’t know who exactly would be in charge of changing the name of a month. Congress, I don’t think, has ever weighed in on the topic. We just took the months, days, and dates invented by these ancient smart people, and stuck with ‘em, year after year, decade after decade, century after century, and… apparently, millennium after millennium.

I guess NOT tinkering with it is the best plan, because if we start, who know what we’ll end up with. If we change “August” to “Elvis”, what’s to stop us from changing “October” to “Obama”? Could changing “February” to “Favre-uary” be far behind?

Where would it end? “April” to “Oprah”? “May” to “Miley”? “December” to “DonaldTrumptember”?

Not that it matters, because I’m pretty sure technology will soon prevail, and the calendars of the past will go the way of rotary dial phones, analog TV, and 45 RPM records.

We’ll still be able to find calendars hanging on walls… but mostly as nostalgic decorations, the way you might now see an old wooden crank phone hanging in someone’s den.

The times, they are a changing. And you don’t need a calendar to know it.

Much to be thankful for

2009-11-24T18:50:00.000-08:00

Excuse me for the grammatical error in this week’s headline: I ended with a preposition! I tried the correct version – “Much for which to be thankful” – but it just didn’t feel right. Nor did the error seem very important, when considered in the context of the “big picture” scheme of things.

And the big picture is what I am writing about this week as Americans pause to celebrate Thanksgiving. Because, in the big picture, we do indeed have much for which to be thankful.

True, times are tough. We are mired in a serious recession, and many feel great uncertainty about the future of our nation.

Despite these challenges, however, we still enjoy a standard of living and quality of life unparalleled in the history of mankind. Living at this particular place, at this particular time, is a privilege for which 99% of the people who have ever inhabited the Earth would gladly trade places.

We are thankful for living in the land of opportunity, where our free enterprise system allows each of us to raise ourselves up through our own individual efforts, to benefit from our own hard work, creativity, and perseverance

We are thankful that we have the freedom to speak out and try to change the policies with which we do no agree, and even to elect new leaders. We are each free to become as involved as we choose to be, and to make as much of a difference as we wish to.

We are thankful for the freedom to worship as we choose, to put our faith and our futures in the hands of our Maker as we choose, without interference.

And we are thankful that these freedoms are protected. We may profit from our efforts, speak out to make a difference, and practice our faith without oppression or threat of retribution.

There are billions of people in other lands who are also suffering from the global recession, but do NOT have the freedoms to do anything about it… so, in the big picture, all Americans have much to be thankful for.

In addition to these blessings of liberty shared by all Americans, I personally also have many, many other blessings for which I am thankful.

For example, I’m still here… and healthy… which I can only count as a miracle.

In Summer of 2008, many readers will recall I was diagnosed a cancerous brain tumor, and initially given a dire prognosis. The tumor was a recurrence of the same cancer – melanoma – from 25 years earlier. My odds of still being here for Thanksgiving, 2009, were slim. My odds of still being here and being healthy were even slimmer.

At that time, I wrote in detail about my condition, and promised to keep readers posted of developments. Thanksgiving seems to be a good time for an update.

For the better part of a year after my brain surgery, I remained free of any recurrence. In late June, 2009, however, scans detected growth of tumors on one of my lungs, which biopsies revealed to be melanoma.

A month later, a regularly scheduled MRI revealed new, very small tumors on the brain.

Since my 2008 surgery, at the advice my doctors I have undergone scans every couple of months in order to catch new tumors as early as possible. It worked! Within weeks of the new discovery, I was able to undergo stereotactic surgery at MUSC to eradicate the two small brain tumors.

Similarly, catching the tumors on the lung early has allowed me a variety of treatment options, including participation in experimental clinical trials, which is the route I chose to take. Ultimately, I was fortunate to be accepted into an innovative cancer research program at the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida, for a long-term trial in which I am currently participating. It’s a field of cancer research -- finding better ways to boost the body’s natural abilities to fight cancer -- which is VERY exciting to me, and appears very promising for the future.

My most recent scans indicated that the tumors on my lung appear to have stabilized.

So, as promised, this is an update of my medical condition. If you’re keeping score, I’ve now had four separate occurrences of cancer -- starting with one in 1983 that I shouldn’t have survived, according to the doctors -- and overall, the odds have been something like 1,000 to 1 against me. But, to date, I have no symptoms, no side effects, and no impairments whatsoever. I’m not just alive… I’m healthy! (I could add that I’m “completely normal”… but, frankly, I’ve NEVER been exactly what anyone would refer to as “normal”.)

Am I thankful this Thanksgiving? You betcha!

I’m thankful to be here. I’m thankful for the doctors and nurses and other medical professionals who have found ways to keep me healthy -- from MUSC in Charleston, to Moffitt in Tampa, to Lovelace Family Medicine in Prosperity, SC… and lots of places in between. I’m thankful for my family and friends whose strong support has kept me positive and optimistic. And mostly, I’m thankful for the many, many people -- including entire groups of people I didn’t even know -- who said a prayer for me… and caused a miracle.

In the big picture, I have much to be thankful for.

Tis the Season

2009-11-21T15:34:00.000-08:00

Over the years, I’ve worked with several hundred candidates running for various offices… I can’t say for sure how many, because I lost count a good while back (around the same time I started forgetting their names).

A lot of new candidates, I’ve noticed, start thinking about running for office -- or decide to run for office -- during the holiday season... between Thanksgiving and New Years Day.

It makes sense. There are the family get-togethers and Christmas parties where the topic of conversation can easily turn to politics. And there’s always planning for the New Year, including resolutions, where items which have been lingering at the bottom of the Things To Do list (like “run for office”) get pushed to the top.

As a result of these combined factors, during the next few weeks, a lot of new candidates will decide to toss their hats into the ring of politics.

It’s a good thing. I’m ready for a whole new crop of ‘em.

Don’t get me wrong. The elected officials we have now are not bad people. I like many of them. Some are friends of mine.

But I think of my elected officials sorta like I think of my underwear. No matter how comfortable it may feel, I still want to change it every once in a while.

Now more than ever, we need new blood in government… at ALL levels. Americans like to vent their frustration on Congress, but the fact is that each local elected official – school trustees, county councilmen, legislators – can have a far more direct impact on your life than your Congressman.

Due to the tough economic times we are currently facing, all governments are facing more serious challenges than normal. Some of the folks occupying those offices seemed incapable of solving the old problems, much less new problems that now need to be solved with less money.

My solution to meeting the challenges facing our local, state, and federal governments is a simple one: Elect old people.

After nearly four decades of helping elect candidates – hundreds and hundred of ‘em -- to almost every kind of political office, I have arrived at one very firm conclusion: Old people make the best elected officials. (Note: I am referring to those who are already Old People when they are first elected, not to those who get elected when they are young, but hang around in office until they become old. Those Old People are better known as “Career Politicians”.)

There are some obvious reasons Old People make the best elected officials.

1. They’re retired, therefore they have no conflicts of interest with their careers. (Most elected officials are still in the middle of their careers… and, when confronted with a decision, they always come down on the side of their own personal interest. If they didn’t they probably wouldn’t have their jobs the next day.)

2. They have experience: a whole lifetime of it. Sure, those young politicians often have that eager-beaver energy and enthusiasm… but nothing beats experience. (Don’t believe it? Think about leading an army in wartime. Who would you choose as the best leader? A young, energetic hot-shot Lieutenant right out of officer’s school? Or an old grizzled General with decades of military action?)

3. They have time to devote to the job. Listening to constituents is important for elected officials. Old people love conversation.

4. They’re not as likely to be swayed by political gamesmanship. Unlike most politicians, they’re more interested in the next generation than the next election.

5. They’re automatically term-limited. Term limits, a concept which is immensely popular with the public as a way to eliminate career politicians, will never be voted into law… by the career politicians. But, with Old People, the problem tends to solve itself. How long can they really stay in office?

I offer these benefits of electing Old People to office for a reason. As we head into this holiday season, you may very well find yourself conversing with someone who is thinking about running for office. If it’s an Old Person, by all means, encourage them. (Or maybe, you yourself are an Old Person thinking about moving “run for office” higher up your Things To Do list.)

Let me quickly add a disclaimer: There are no absolutes. There are plenty of young or middle-aged people who do a great job in office. Similarly, there are some Old People who, once they get in office, give Old People a bad name. ( I would also note that, while the Old-People-are-better theory applies well to politics, it does NOT apply to many other fields: pro athletes, stock car racers, rock musicians, etc.)

I hope you’ll join this new political movement: New Blood, Old People in 2010.

A touch of fever.

2009-11-09T22:26:00.000-08:00

Some years back -- actually starting before I embarked on a career in the community newspaper business -- I published an occasional tabloid called “Gamecock Fever”… a jovial little journal which was distributed to tailgaters before each USC home football game. (Extraneous Publisher’s Note: I used the word “career” very loosely in the preceding sentence.)

Gamecock Fever was mostly light-hearted and nonsensical, featuring good-natured ribbing at each week’s opponent, as well as opposing school’s coaches, mascot, home state, and the entire population thereof.

Actually, we simply took some standard Arkansas jokes, and rewrote them each week to apply to whatever school we were playing: old standards like, “How do you get an Arkansas graduate off your porch? You pay him for the pizza!”; and, “How do we know the toothbrush was invented in Arkansas? If it was invented anywhere else, it would be called a ‘teethbrush’!”

Anytime we played a school from West Virginia, however, they always seemed to get a little sensitive about these jokes… especially the ones about marrying their cousins.

Each edition of “Fever” also contained a healthy helping of “Clempson” jokes, which I felt was my patriotic duty as an American. Plus, being a lifelong, born and bred resident of the Pimento State, swapping Carolina and Clempson jokes back and forth is a tradition… a way of life! So how could I not poke a little fun at “Moo U.”?

We occasionally even took a good-natured poke at ourselves, and our coaches and athletic directors, because, after all, we were the long-suffering Gamecocks, and it helps to have a good sense of humor when you’re a Gamecock Fan. (Or, as we occasionally, put it, a “Lamecock” Fan!)

Through the years of Coaches Joe, Sparky, Brad, Lou, and that other guy, we were there in the parking lots, keeping them on their toes, and giving the opposing coaches locker room fodder. Except to us, they were Coaches “MoJo Morrison”, “Sparky Wouldn’t”, “Brad FSNot”, and “Loose Boltz”. Along with Athletic Directors “Don King Dixon” and “Mike McGee McGoo”. They were public figures, and it was all in good fun.

But, unfortunately (or fortunately in the opinions of 97.3% of the people who are not me), Gamecock Fever went away a few years ago. The Gamecock Tailgating Tradition Since 1985 (except for one year we forgot) has now slipped our minds for over half a decade!

So ever since the Old Ball Coach showed up at USC, he hasn’t had our little Tailgating Toilet Tissue to bolster his team. The last time Spurrier showed up in Gamecock Fever, he was the head coach of the Gators – the very same Gators who are currently ranked Number One in the Nation, and who are coming into Columbia this weekend to take on the Gamecocks. At that time, we honored him with this limerick:

There once was a ball coach named Spurrier,
Who wanted his team to go hurrier,
So he yelled, whined, and screamed,
Like a girl at his team,
Now his win-loss record is blurrier!

Of course, that was back in the days when he still tossed his visor and won national championships. And he was the enemy. Now he’s on our team. We love the guy. But he’s mellow.

And maybe because Spurrier has mellowed out a little, we, the Gamecocks, seem to be suffering from that old Mid-Season Chicken Curse again -- the cursed roost-ah… just like we used tah. We start off strong, but finish a little weak. And with Numero One FLA on their way to town, things don’t look good.

Probably, it’s a Spurrier thing… but we can’t help wondering: “What if the Gamecocks are sliding back into mediocrity just because we stopped publishing “Gamecock Fever” each week? Could it be our fault?

We can’t take that chance.

So, while I can’t magically produce an entire issue of Gamecock Fever in time for this weekend’s game against the Florida Gators, I can use the remaining space here for a little taste of Fever… and toss a few NCAA College Football insults in their direction before they come clobber our brains out.

It’s Cocks versus Crocs at Williams-Brice… and here is OUR welcome to the visitors:

Q: What do you call a Florida graduate who lives in a $400,000 house?
A: A butler.

Q: What do you call a gorgeous woman on the arm of a Florida fan?
A: A tattoo.

Q: Why do Florida graduates stick their diplomas on their car bumper?
A: So they can park in the handicapped zone.

Q: Did you hear about the Florida student who was a poor speller? He paid $50 to spend the night in a warehouse.

Q: Why do Florida fans spend so much time staring at containers of orange juice?
A: Because the label says “concentrate”.

Q: How many Florida fans does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Four. One to change the bulb, and three to stand around talking about how great the old bulb was “back when Spurrier was here!”

Okay, I’ve done my part. Now its up to the players. Go Cocks! Gig the Gators!

Nothin’ could be finer!

2009-11-04T19:18:00.000-08:00

If you believe the national pundits, it’s been a rough year to be a South Carolinians. (I don’t believe them… mainly because I’m not even sure who or what a “pundit” is.)

Ever since our Governor captured international headlines on the first full day of summer with his make-believe hiking trip on the Appalachian Trail, we seem to have endured a steady stream of punch-lines. Late night comics could just utter the name of the state – “South Carolina” – and their studio audiences would break into giggles.

But, you know the old saying: “He who laughs last…”

And last week, we may have gotten the last laugh, when the aircraft manufacturer for the world, Boeing, chose our state for its newest manufacturing facility… a move which will likely put food on the table for over 4,000 South Carolina families -- and probably not just food, but prime rib and lobster -- at a time when the rest of the nation is scrambling for table scraps.

(Gratuitous publisher’s note: I’m understandably proud that two gentlemen I worked to help elect were key players in putting the Boeing deal together: Berkeley County State Senator Paul Campbell, former boss at Alumax, and the Senator with the strongest background in manufacturing, was the key inside leader of the final negotiations; and North Charleston State Representative Tim Scott, the only black Republican in the SC House or Senate and now a candidate for Lt. Governor, originally got the Boeing ball rolling several years ago when he was Chairman of Charleston County Council.)

There were lots of reasons Boeing chose South Carolina, but one really big one: our people.

For all the abuse we may take for our shortcomings, Boeing decided, as many others have, that South Carolinians are good, solid, hard-working people... the kind of people they could depend on to build good, solid, dependable aircraft for the world.

We’ve known it all long.

South Carolinians are some of the best people you can find anywhere in the world. Hardworking. Friendly. Patriotic. Faithful. Compassionate. (And I’m not just making idle chit-chat here. I can back these claims up with near facts.)

Compassionate, for instance. A couple months ago, USA Today published a chart of which states were the most charitable, based on giving their time and money. South Carolinians, for all our reported income deficiencies, showed up among the top 10 most giving populations.

Patriotic. For years, South Carolina has been ranked as one of the very highest percentages of military veterans. Our people have historically offered themselves to defend our nation at a greater rate than most any other state.

Faithful. We are the buckle of the Bible Belt.

Friendly. Southern Hospitality was born here in South Carolina. We are consistently ranked among the friendliest people in America. We’re not afraid to walk up to stranger and say, “Hey, y’all.”

Hard-working. South Carolinians have always hungered for the opportunity to earn a good decent living. Given that opportunity, we work. We work hard. We’re dedicated. We’re proud of our work ethic. Consequently, Boeing decided that the folks in the Lowcountry – some of whom had worked on our Naval Ships for generations – were the right people to now build the next generation of aircraft.

So, South Carolina landed a giant industrial development, one that will jumpstart our economy, and have untold spinoff impacts. A lot of our leaders worked together to make it happen, and they all deserve some credit for making it happen.

But the real credit should go to the hard working men and women of South Carolina who have made our state the only place I would ever even think about living.

Y’all can keep laughing if you want to… but we’re laughing best.

Sleep is King: An extra hour!!!

2009-10-30T21:10:00.000-07:00

Regular readers of this column know of my long-standing love/hate relationship with that ingenious innovation of modern man called Daylight Savings Time.

This weekend, we will once again conclude the annual practical joke we play on ourselves. DST is a harmless hoax, because we’re all in it together.

For my part, I hate it in the spring, but I love it in the fall...or at least I love or hate the specific nights when it starts and ends each year. That’s because, in the world of Rod-Boy, sleep is king. (Naps are nifty. Snoozing is super-duper. Dozing is dandy. And the Sandman is simply swell.)

I lost an hour of precious sleep in the Springtime… but this weekend, I’ll get it back. A whole extra hour of sleep. I’ve been looking forward to it for weeks.

Up until a few years ago, DST was always an April to October occurrence. But the good folks in the United States Congress, realizing they had legislated the only thing in history which actually seemed to work, and was okay with most folks, put their heads together and said, “It ain’t broke… let’s fix it!” “If nearly seven months of DST is working for us,” they wondered, “then wouldn’t nearly eight months work better?”

So we now have our extra hour each day starting in March instead of April, and ending in November instead of October.

Turns out, the end of Savings Time will be right smack dab in the middle of the World Series this year. (The extra hour of sleep will come in very handy for those folks who don’t get enough sleep watching our National Pastime’s most exciting games of the year.)

I was watching Jay Leno a few nights ago, and I saw a comic who apparently shares my fascination with Daylight Savings Time. He did an entire bit on the subject, which puts him in my league, if only in distant second place. (For the record, this past spring, I wrote three different weekly columns on the topic of Daylight Savings Time.)

I didn’t catch the comic’s name, because Leno comes on at 10pm, so, naturally, I was drifting off to sleep. (The mere fact that I was watching Leno makes me old… and old people can go to sleep at 10pm if they want to.) The comic, however, had done some research on the topic, and had determined that, from the beginning of Daylight Savings Time many years ago, if you total all the hours we have saved, we have now saved over 16 years. We ought to start spending some of it, he said. I like the way he thinks.

(It just occurred to me that Jay Leno could be the big winner with the end of Daylight Savings Time, since his new early time slot will all of a sudden be late again!)

As much as I will enjoy the extra hour of sleep, I’m still usually disoriented for a few days each Spring and Fall when the time changes, as I suppose most people are. Consequently, after the November 1st time change, we’re likely to have a nation full of disoriented people two days later… which is ELECTION DAY. Thousands of state and local governments will hold elections on November 3rd. It can’t really be a good idea to disorient the entire population while they’re trying to decide who they want as their leaders. On the other hand, it could explain a lot.

My biggest personal challenge with Daylight Savings Time is being forced to change the time on all the clocks twice a year. Once upon a time, it was much simpler. You just went to each of the three or four clocks in the house, and wound it backward or forward an hour. (When the big hand went around one time, the time was changed by an hour.)

But clocks don’t “wind” anymore. They click. Or blink. Or flash. Or glow. Or reset themselves. But they don’t wind.

And these days, clocks are everywhere. Radio. TV. Computer. Phone. Car. VCR. DVD Player. Microwave. Ink Pens. Alarm System. (And a whole host of newfangled gadgets I see kids with but I’m not sure what they are… but they mostly seem to be called fruit names, like apples and berries.)

Clocks are everywhere, and none of ‘em work the same as the others. You have to figure out how to reset the time on each and every one.

It was hard enough resetting all the clocks when we sprang forward in March and got an extra hour of daylight.

But now I gotta figure out how to set all those clocks in the dark!

Mismatched Perspectives

2009-10-21T17:37:00.000-07:00

It got a little nippy earlier this week, so I did something I hadn’t done since way back in March: I wore socks.

Well, that’s not entirely true. I haven’t worn socks in my regular daily routine since March, but I have worn ‘em for “dress-up-in-a-suit occasions”… like church or weddings (although, I must admit I don’t wear socks every Sunday like I should.)

Most days, I’ve been wearing flip-flops. That’s one of the advantages of living in the South. And not having a real job.

When the temperature dipped a few weeks ago, I traded in my flops for docksiders and Adidas… but still I didn’t feel the need for socks.

But then finally, this week, my feet were feeling a little frigid… so it was time to visit my sock drawer. Which caused me to start contemplating socks.

It’s not the first time I’ve sat around contemplating socks. I think about socks a lot. (Probably more than most people.)

As I wrote one Thanksgiving, I believe the “sock drawer” is an indicator of how much average Americans have to be thankful for, inasmuch as many people in the world don’t have access to a single pair of shoes, let alone a pair of socks to wear inside the shoes… and certainly not a whole drawer full of socks that average Americans take for granted.

Anytime I find myself nostalging back to the good ole days, invariably my mind lands back in the Sock Hops of the 50’s. Those were great socks. Bobby socks!

Mostly, though, I spend time contemplating socks because I’m frequently looking for one of them to match the other one. It’s not unusual for the sock segment of my morning getting-dressed ritual to take longer than all the other segments combined, including brushing my teeth and combing my hair!!

Ultimately, the socks always win. More often than not, I give up, and end up wearing mismatched socks, which is actually okay with me, because I don’t spend much time looking down at my feet, so within a minute or two of donning the uncoordinated socks, I’ve totally forgotten it.

I figure, what’s the big deal. After all, if I’m wearing socks, it’s a safe bet that I’m also wearing long pants, so the socks are only visible for about a half-an-inch underneath the cuff… sometimes, not at all.

Long ago, I figured out a really simple way to make people completely overlook my mismatched socks: Wear mismatched shoes!

Anyway, while I was contemplating socks this week, a few mismatched thoughts crossed my mind:

-- Socks are the only item of clothing that have a Major League Baseball team named after them. And actually, there are TWO teams, although they both abbreviate their names as “sox”… probably because it got a little embarrassing to them once they realized they were competing with such ferocious mascots as Tigers, Braves, Giants, and Cardinals. (Well, not Cardinals so much.)

-- Socks is one of the most popular names for cats. And, once again, you rarely hear of a kitty named “Pants”, “Shirt”, “Hat”, or “Cumberbund”.

-- When you go to the beach, you can easily spot the Northerners because of the socks. Black socks with Bermuda shorts is NOT a Southern thing.

-- The late Michael Jackson, The King of Pop, single-handedly revived the fad of white socks with black shoes. He made it look cool. Unfortunately, most of his millions of imitators simply look dorky.

-- If you Google the phrase “smelly socks” (on the Electronic Internet which Al Gore invented) you will find over 60,000 websites which mention that phrase. Don’t ask me why I know this.

-- The only one of those 60,000 websites which appears even remotely useful is the one which suggests vinegar, borax, or sudsy ammonia as possible remedies for smelly socks. Don’t ask me why I know this, either.

-- Here’s good news. Although holes occasionally occur in socks, the part with the hole is ALWAYS covered up by the shoes… so it’s always your little secret. (Note to self: Remember not to eat at those Japanese restaurants where they make you to remove your shoes.)

-- In 55 years, I have NEVER thrown away a pair of socks. I have, however, reassigned some single socks to other duties.

-- White tube socks are the best. Although they are frequently mismatched – short, long, stripes at the top, no stripes – nobody ever knows it, because all they can see under the cuff of the pants is white!

As much as I may disdain wearing socks in the summertime – and I do, because I have been told they do not go well with my flip flops – I love ‘em on cold winter nights AFTER I kick my shoes off. Walking around the house in sock feet is one of life’s little pleasures.

At least it’s a pleasure for me. Everybody else in the house keeps offering me vinegar and Borax.

More FREE advice… (and well worth it!!!)

2009-10-16T15:53:00.000-07:00

I’m always stunned when I’m invited to speak to local groups or organizations. It happened twice last week. (I usually just assume they have some sort of betting pool: Will he wear socks? Will they match? Will he remember to comb his hair? Will he forget his name?)

I’m even more amazed when people ask for my advice. Of course, usually these people are only pretending to ask for advice, as an entre to asking for money. But, sometimes, even after they realize that I’m broker than they are, they still ask for advice!

Any time I’m asked for advice, I dish it out, fairly comfortable that no one’s gonna actually listen to my opinion anyway. Why would they? I’m old, tired, broke, worn-out, over-weight, crippled, hard-of-hearing and rapidly deteriorating: losing my hair, my teeth, and my memory. I dress shabbily, eat like a five year old, and have the social skills of a gnat. What is it about this picture that would compel anyone to say: “Here’s a good idea! I’ll ask HIM for advice!”????

Still, I sometimes get asked, so I feel compelled to comply. (Keep that card and letter coming in.)

There’s already some pretty good advice floating around out there in the cosmos, if you just know where to look for it. I recommend starting with really famous dead people, like Ben Franklin and Abraham Lincoln.

Franklin, it seems, did little more than sit around all day making up advice to give to people: “Early to bed, early to rise… blah, blah, blah.” It’s sound advice. Boring, but sound.. He wrote entire books of sound advice, much of which, I suspect, was borne of his own personal mistakes. “Never fly a kite when it’s lightning.” Experience is the best teacher.

Lincoln’s advice was plain and simple. He offered gems like: “Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.” Good advice. Plain and simple.

Bill Cosby’s not dead, but he offered good advice… about giving advice. He said: “A word to the wise ain't necessary - it's the stupid ones that need the advice.” Cosby’s smart. Of course, most dentists are smart.

While these famous people, both dead and alive, offer pretty swell advice, it sometimes seems a little over-reaching. Healthy, wealthy and wise are lofty goals… but most people I know need more practical day-to-day advice, like how to make the gas pump come on… or what’s the best color of shoes to wear with your lime-green leisure suit.

So, to help the masses along the way, I am today unveiling:

Rod-Boy’s 21 Axioms for Life
(Free advice, and well worth it!)

1. Time is NOT money. Time is time. But a lot of people TRADE their time for money. Ergo, the old (but incorrect) adage: “Time is money”. Of the two, time is actually worth a lot more than money.

2. Don’t sweat the small stuff. And there ain’t really much big stuff.

3. Wear happy shirts.

4. Always remember you're unique, just like everyone else.

5. Remember half the people you know are below average.

6. The sooner you fall behind the more time you'll have to catch up.

7. There are 3 kinds of people: those who can count & those who can't. (That’s not actually advice. It’s just an observation.)

8. Be nice to your kids. They get to choose your nursing home

9. It may be lonely at the top, but you probably eat better.

10. Wear happy shirts.

11. The first step to getting the things you want out of life is this: Decide what you want.

12. If you ever need to make a list of anything, try to make it end up at exactly 21 items… because I think 21 is a lucky number. (Even if you have to include some of the same items more than once!)

13. Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes.

14. The severity of the itch is inversely proportional to the ability to reach it.

15. Whenever possible, use words like “axiom”, “inversely” and “ergo”

16. A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.

17. Hard work pays off for your future. Laziness pays off now.

18. It's always darkest before dawn. So if you're going to steal the neighbor's newspaper, that's the time to do it.

19. Never miss a good chance to shut up.

20. Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.

21. Wear happy shirts.

That’s it for this week. I’m done. (See Axiom 19.)

We don’t need no educashun

2009-10-13T06:33:00.000-07:00

Next month, we’ll be celebrating American Education Week, and, of course, I’ll be all “Rah, Rah!! Hooray for schools! Yeah, teachers! Go, team!!!” like the vast majority of the rest of the public. But first, I have a few things I want to get off my chest.

I distinctly remember questions being raised back during my school days about our curriculum. Specifically, the questions posed, about once a week, were: “Why do we need to know this? What good is this going to do me? How will I use this knowledge in the future?”

While plodding through the poetry of Byron, Shelley, and Keats for instance, we tried to figure out a point to it all. Most of us just couldn’t see these ditties -- classics that they might have been -- factoring into our future earning potential.

How to figure the hypotenuse of a triangle, as another example, seemed like fairly useless information.

And diagramming sentences never made a lick of sense to any of us from day one.

The question of “why do we need to know this?” was generally posed mostly rhetorically, since school-aged kids back then understood very well that they had no say-so in anything. Consequently, the usual answer to these musings – “Because I said so!” – was generally sufficient.

Occasionally, however, some of our more passionate teachers would attempt to explain that, although we couldn’t understand it now, we would, in the future, realize the reason for it and be thankful we had learned these things. (And, once, a teacher told us we need to study all these things in case we were ever selected to appear on a game show like Jeopardy.) But mostly, our mentors just allowed as to how “in our future” we would find this knowledge useful and meaningful.

So, now I’m old -- 55 years old, to be exact -- and I’m still waiting.

I’ve had about a half-dozen different jobs, operated three different businesses, published five newspapers, and done a whole bunch of other things… but I still haven’t figured out when Beowulf is going to come in handy.

Sine and cosine. Tangent and cotangent. Secant and cosecant. Even back then I understood that these things would probably be useful if we were gonna be rocket scientists. But, as it turns out, not a single member of the Lexington High School Class of ’72 actually DID become a rocket scientist.

Not that I’m not thankful for the education I received. I am. And, while the Palmetto State may have ranked near the bottom of the nation all those years ago just as we do now, we all came through it pretty well.

But, as a point of advice to prepare today’s youth for the jobs of tomorrow, I might offer the education professionals a bit of guidance:

Instead of trying to teach all of them the formula for rotating a parabola on its axis, you might want to train some of them to smile when they say, “Would you like fries with that?”

Now, just in case you too spent countless hours studying random topics which you have yet to put to good use, let’s have a little game show of our own: a contest!!!

Read back through this column, and see how many of each of the following you can find:
1. Dangling participles
2. Split infinitives
3. Misplaced modifiers

Send your answers to me by email (rodshealy@aol.com).

First response with the most correct answers wins a trip to Rhodesia (a country I studied in the seventh grade which, apparently, doesn’t exist any more!)

I’m a Gamblin’ Man

2009-10-10T14:13:00.000-07:00

I’m undeniably a gambling man. Like most other people who decide to go into business for themselves, I do a little high-stakes gambling every week… you know, like gambling that there will be money left at the end of the week so I can get a paycheck. Most weeks, I lose.

I also gamble on a variety of other things.

Politics, for instance. I spend a lot of time grooming candidates for public office, in hopes that, on election day, they’ll get at least one vote more than their opponents.

And driving. I’m a really bad driver, mainly because, due to my increasing age and the accompanying absent-mindedness that seems to go along with it, my attention is rarely on the road where it should be. Instead, I’m usually somewhere else entirely. Anytime I drive, it’s a gamble.

And cooking. Mostly, the cooking I do involves tossing a slab of meat on the grill. It’s a major gamble whether or not I’ll remember the meat before its burned into charcoal. (See “increasing age and accompanying absent-mindedness” above.)

I do NOT, however, gamble on sports.

It’s football season, and sports gambling is in full swing. But not for me. Believe it or not, I’ve never bet on a sporting event.

We’ll, that’s not entirely true, because in grammar school, we always bet each other five dollars on the outcome of the USC vs. Clemson game. Only, we never paid off the bet, nor were we expected to, because none of us had ever even owned a five dollar bill, much less squandered one away in a bet. To us, “betcha five dollars” was simply a figure of speech… certainly not intended as a promissory instrument of any kind.

I don’t oppose wagering on ballgames. I think it should be legal, if that’s what you want to do. When I’m on a cruise or at some faraway destination, I have been known to light up a casino or two. (I should point out that I’m not a high-roller. I usually start small… and end up smaller.)

But sports betting lost me when I discovered what they called “the spread”. To me, “covering the spread” had always meant what I did with the strawberry jelly on top of a layer of peanut butter and a slice of bread. But now, it suddenly meant a “point spread”: my team not only had to WIN… it had to win by a certain number of points.

“So let me get this straight,” I remember asking myself, “If the Gamecocks win by 3 points, but the spread was 4 points, even though they won, I would lose my bet?”

Then I said to myself, “Self! You don’t want no part of that!”

It got worse.

As I investigated further, I discovered that lot’s of times, the “point spread” was not just a number, but it was a number and a half. For instance, they would say, “The Cowboys are a 5 ½ point favorite” or “The Falcons are a 4 ½ point underdog”.

I’ve watched a whole lot of football games in my 55 years, but I have never seen a team score half-a-point.

But then a light went off, and I figured out exactly what was going on here: It’s a money-making scheme!!! That half-point, I’m guessing, is sorta like everybody betting on those red or black spaces on the casino’s roulette wheel, when all of a sudden – KERPLUNK – the little ball lands in the green slot, and everybody who bet on red or black loses! I think it’s the same principle.

The point of betting on the game, I’m told, is to make it more interesting. I always thought that’s what the cheerleaders were for. Just sit closer to them, if you want it to be more interesting!

At my age, I probably don’t need ballgames to be too much more interesting. It couldn’t possibly be good for the heart.

Imagine the strain the following football game scenario could place on my cardiovascular system:

WHAM! My team intercepted a pass with 11 seconds left and runs it back 87 yards for the winning touchdown! BLAM! But they didn’t cover the spread, so I just lost the thousand bucks I bet! SLAM! The cheerleaders don’t know the games over… they’re still out there shaking their all-overs to the rhythm of “Beat It.”

Instant heart attack, except for….

SHAZZAM! Due to my increasing age and the accompanying absent-mindedness that seems to go along with it, my mind has wandered to a recent documentary I watched on The History Channel, and I’ve completely missed all three of the preceeding events, avoiding the heart attack and likely saving my life.

Now I wonder if I can persuade my bookie that “betcha a thousand dollars” was just a figure of speech.

People Watching

2009-09-26T06:23:00.000-07:00

Can you remember when we all lived in the land of “Leave It To Beaver” and Mayberry?

If you can remember those simpler times – as depicted in TV Land – you’ll recall that many a lazy afternoon was spent sitting on the bench in front of Floyd’s barber shop… just watching the people of Mayberry amble about.

Those days are pretty much gone, mainly because Main Streets don’t seem to exist any more, at least not the kind of Main Street where people walked from store to store down the sidewalk. Main Street has been replaced by Wal-Mart and the mall. If you enjoy people-watching, as I do, nowadays you probably do it at the mall.

The first time I can really remember people-watching was in church when I was just a tot. At St. Peters Lutheran Church in Lexington, on the first Sunday of each month, the service included Communion, which involved every adult member of the church lining up, and easing their way to the altar in groups of a dozen or so. Since I was about five years old, I didn’t yet quite grasp the whole “forgiveness of sins” thing, so I focused on watching the people walk up to the front of the church… the same people, month after month, year after year. By the time I was seven, I could recognize everybody in the congregation.

And by the time I got to college, I had developed somewhat of a hobby out of people-watching. As I recall, I spent most of my entire sophomore year sitting on a bench in front of USC’s Russell House people-watching, instead of attending class.

Nowadays, as a sometimes-political consultant, it’s actually my job to watch people, and study their habits… except we call the people “voters”. Still, it’s people-watching, and I enjoy it.

Politicians, of course, need to do more than watch people. They need to walk up to them, introduce themselves, and shake their hands. Believe it or not, that talent doesn’t always come naturally for politicians. I often need to show them how to do it.

The problem, I think, is that we, as a society, don’t interface with each other as much as we used to. We may watch people, but we rarely talk to strangers.

Just as technology has evolved, so have our relationships with our neighbors. The coming of the automobile nearly a century ago made us more transient, and less likely to know our neighbors. A half-century ago, the innovation of back yards took us away from our front porches where we could see people walking by. And then, TV forced us indoors instead of outdoors, and air-conditioning made that move permanent. Now, for some people, the Internet is taking away any reason to EVER leave the house.

Consequently, many people find themselves more isolated than ever from actual human contact. And that’s a shame. It diminishes our quality of life.

One of the joys of being the publisher of community newspapers is the endless opportunity it gives me to meet new people. From my earliest forays into this business, back when I spent my days selling advertising, I considered it my job each day to go out and meet new friends. And I did!

In my freshman year of college – the year I actually attended classes – my sociology professor told of an informal experiment whereby you would show up early at the movie theatre, when only one couple had already taken seats, and proceed to take the seat immediately next to the seated couple… instead of any of the dozens of other rows which were empty. The reaction, of course, would always be awkward and uncomfortable. Sometimes the original couple would move to different seats.

It’s a strange reaction, because, as animals, we are by nature drawn together, into tribes, much like herds of elephants, packs of wolves, flocks of geese, or schools of dolphins. But somewhere along the way, we seem to have erected some sort of artificial walls around ourselves.

While you might not be inclined to go out and just introduce yourself to new people willy-nilly, I would nonetheless encourage you to at least engage in healthy people-watching, which I figure is the next best thing: the mall, the zoo, at a ballgame, the beach or lake, on a cruise, tailgating, at a concert, the post office, at a flea market, or in a restaurant.

Or, if you can find one, on a bench in front of a barber shop on Main Street.

Fun With Last Week’s Headlines!

2009-09-15T20:11:00.000-07:00

Set a spell... take your shoes off. Let’s pause to have some fun with a few of the nation’s biggest headlines from the last week or so.

Headline: “Sanford says he won’t resign.” Over and over and over he’s said it. It’s actually getting boring, reading that same headline again and again. Of course he won’t resign himself. The state legislature is going to have to resign him. (Or make him an offer he can’t refuse… in whatever language they speak on his planet.)

Headline: “Williams outburst shocks nation.” Serena Williams, the professional tennis standout, shouted out inappropriately, stunning the viewing audience.

Headline: “Wilson outburst shocks nation.” Joe Wilson, our own Congressman from South Carolina, shouted out inappropriately, stunning the viewing audience.

I’m envisioning a new reality TV show, where Wilson and Williams travel around the country, bursting unannounced into solemn occasions and stately events. The point, each week, would be to guess which outburst we’ll see: Wilson’s “You Lie!”, or William’s “Guess Where I’m Gonna Put This Tennis Ball.”

When I first met Joe Wilson, he was the college advisor to the Teen Age Republicans, of which I was a member. We were both destined for politics, but at the time, the level of our involvement was selling donuts to delegates at the State Convention. As I recall, Joe taught us the phrase that pays: “Would you like to buy a box of donuts, please?” (Only now have I realized that our donut sales would have been vastly improved if I had refused to take rejection, but instead countered every polite “No, Thank You” with an explosive, in-your-face “You LIE!!!” Spontaneously, of course.)

Headline: “Leno’s new show premieres.” While it’s certain to be a hit, Jay still doesn’t have the edgy comedy of Letterman, who last week gave us: “Top Ten Joe Wilson Excuses.”

Headline: “Lack of vitamin D increases your risk of death.” That was the actual headline. But I don’t believe it. It may alter the time-table, but it doesn’t increase your risk of dying.

Headline: “Cash for Clunkers” etc., etc. Okay, so the program which required older cars to be traded in and junked probably jump-started the economies of the big automakers. But it really couldn’t have been very good for the 50,000+ small businesses devoted to automotive parts, maintenance, service and repair… and the employees who make their livings working on…. OLDER CARS!!!.

Headline: “Disneyworld to expand.” The Magic Kingdom, etc., etc., is doubling its size. I can’t wait to go back: That’s twice as many lines to stand in!!!

Headline: “Sharks invade Cape Cod.” This headline caught my attention, and when I saw the true-life “Jaws-like” TV news account, I was really shocked. What I saw was hard for me to believe: Those Yankee swimmers actually think that’s a real BEACH! (Don’t ever show them pictures of our Grand Strand.)

Headline: “All You Can Eat Buffet”. This was not a news headline…. It was a headline in an advertisement. But it caught my eye, as it does every time I see it. It’s as if I’m drawn to that particular phrase. I seem to take it as a personal challenge. I’m always like… “Oh, yeahhhh???? Well, we’ll just see about that!!!” Chomp, chomp, chomp. And 6 to 8 pounds later, the buffet always wins…. But at least it knows it was in a fight!!!

Headline: “Fun With Last Week’s Headlines.” Whoa!!! That’s weird... sorta freaky… like déjà vu all over again….like the twilight zone… a different time and place… a parallel dimension… a whole other world, a different galaxy.

And look! There’s the Governor!!!

Wee all make misteaks!

2009-09-09T18:11:00.000-07:00

It’s true. Wee all make misteaks! (Some of us, with more regularity than others.)

I learned a long time ago to admit my mistakes. I’m very good at it. I’ve had a lot of practice.

The last time I accidentally made a GOOD decision was in the ninth grade, when I accidentally signed up for typing class, instead of taking Latin, as had been recommended by my counselor. Oops. (But since I’ve pretty much spent the last 40 years typing words for a living, that mistake turned out okay.)
.
The earliest mistake I can remember is when I fell out of the car at four years old. I opened the door while the car was zooming down the highway. Oops!

The next few years were chock full of mistakes (and when I say “the next few” I actually mean “the next 51”.) A few stand out:
--The brushed suede tuxedo I wore to the prom in high school. Oops!
--Completely forgetting to go to any classes for an entire semester and flunking out of college my sophomore year. Oops!
--Forgetting to put anti-freeze in the 1954 Chevy. Oops!
--At 18 years old, casting half of my first-ever vote for Agnew. Oops!
--Selling my old Mustang convertible for $200. Oops!
--Forgetting to keep oil in the 1966 Ford Falcon. Oops!
--Forgetting where I left the used station wagon I had bought a month earlier, and never seeing it again. Oops!
--Leaving my little sister at a rest-stop on the Interstate Highway in Florida, and not missing her until about 60 miles later. Oops!
--Every time I have ever tried to cut my own hair or trim my own beard. Oops!

In my defense, during the same half-century I was making these mistakes, there were lots of other mistakes happening that I had absolutely nothing to do with. For instance,
--Leisure suits, Oops!
--Milli Vanilli. Oops!
--Pet Rocks. Oops!
--Pleather. Oops!
--Disco. Oops!
--Windows Vista. Oops!
--“Yummy, Yummy, Yummy”. Oops!
--Giving the Nobel Prize to Al Gore. Oops!

You will notice a lot of my mistakes have involved cars. Automotive mistakes are certainly among my top categories of mistakes. That’s because I know very little about cars. This is unfortunate, because a speeding automobile is one of the worst places to make a mistake. Recognizing my tendency to make mistakes, and my total lack of understanding of all things mechanical, I have taken steps to drastically reduce my car-related mistakes. I now drive 35 MPH everywhere I go, and my mistakes cause less damage.

To try to curb my other mistakes, I’ve categorized them into groups, and come to a major realization: I make more mistakes doing the things I do more often, and fewer doing the things I do less often. For instance, I make fewer mistakes during gardening, home repairs, aerobics, cooking, etc., because I don’t do ‘em much. (Actually, I do cook occasionally, which usually results in multiple mistakes… but I don’t even count mistakes with food. I figure that’s what ketchup is for!)

My most frequent mistake categories include

a) dressing myself, because I do it every day, which provides a lot of opportunities for errors. Oops!

b) listening and/or remembering: major goof-ups, multiple times per day. Oops!

c) Nigerian princes I met on the Internet! They are SO convincing. Oops!

d) song lyric mistakes, which occur every time I try to sing. (I have actually developed a method of hiding those mistakes, using a combination of humming and mumbling. It’s like ketchup for lyrics. Note: Yodeling does NOT work; it tends instead to accentuate the mistake. Oops!)

e) social graces; CRIPES!!!

f) Business and finance; you know, stuff like banking, investing, paying taxes, saving money, making profit. Oops! Oops! Oops! Uh Oh! Oops!

To top it off, I’m in the newspaper business. Each and every week, I publish pages and pages of words -- somewhere between an estimated 150,000 to 250,000 words each week… which means 150,000 to 250,000 chances for typographical errors each week. Oops!!!!

As I said earlier, I learned a long time ago to admit my mistakes. Last week was one of those mistakes, as it happens.

An advertisement contained a very minor error: There was nobody selling BBQ Porn for Labor Day.

Oops!

What it was was benchwarming!

2009-08-31T20:14:00.000-07:00

High school football is a tradition throughout most of the South.

There was nothing more exciting to me, when I was a young kid, than the Friday night ritual of going to watch the Lexington High School Wildcats play, in a stadium that used to be next to what was once Hites Restaurant, behind the former location of the town water tower. By the time I was eight years old, I was playing football every day in my front yard, imagining myself one day playing for those Fighting Wildcats.

Preparing myself to one day join that varsity team, I diligently practiced running, passing, punting, kicking, blocking and tackling any time I could gather up a few friends. Turns out, I should have saved my energy and just practiced sitting… because the position I mostly ended up playing was “benchwarmer.”

Officially, I played guard and tackle in high school. But in my case, that meant “guard the water bucket, and tackle anybody who came near it!” I had all the athletic ability of an over-stuffed sofa.

Even back then, however, I was the eternal optimist. Whatever I undertook, I undertook with passion. Even benchwarming. Hence, the birth in 1970 of what we called “LBU”: the Lexington Benchwarmers Union.

During our junior year, it became apparent to a handful of us that we were destined to ride the bench for the entire year, so we embraced it with pride. We developed the proper techniques for sitting, kneeling and standing on the sidelines, so that we could pass on our expertise to future benchwarmers. We learned the best tactics for staying warm when the weather turned chilly… a common benchwarmer hazard, since you never work up a sweat. We took turns watching the game and taking naps on the bench. And we learned how to rub grass and dirt into our uniforms during the pre-game warmups to make it appear that we had actually played in the game.

We were the finest group of benchwarmers LHS had ever seen.

While I can’t reveal the full identities of my fellow LBU members – after all, they may at this very moment be regaling their grandkids with tales of their high school athletic heroics – I will say that they had very common last names like: Shealy, Sharpe, Sox, Satcher, Smith. (For the longest time, I thought the coach had somehow obliterated the “S” section of the team roster, presumably by dripping tobacco juice on it, and never called us into the games because he couldn’t read our names. I discounted that notion, however, as Sharpe, Sox, Smith, and Satcher’s names were all eventually called into action, leaving me as the lone undisputed captain of the benchwarming unit.)

Looking back, I think my problem was simply that the coaches had me pegged for the wrong position on the team. Defensive tackle is probably the wrong place for a writer/humorist. As a matter of fact, I don’t think the Defensive Coordinator, Coach Hogwartz, was really looking for the “creative type” at all.

(On a side note, in addition to being a member of the team, I was also the sports editor of the high school newspaper… and the sports page of the fall, 1970, edition coincidentally featured the benchwarmers instead of the team!!!)

By my senior year, things changed. But only slightly.

In addition to having the athletic ability of an over-stuffed sofa, there had also been a bit of a communication problem, I discovered.

For years I had heard my coaches saying things like “put some leather on him”…. “crack some leather”… “I want to hear some leather pop”. I had no idea what they were talking about until I finally discovered that apparently, 50 years earlier, helmets and other football pads had in fact been made of leather. How could I have known? This was typical of what seemed to be a general disconnect between the coaches and me.

Then one afternoon at practice, the head coach accidentally said something without a wad of tobacco in his mouth, and I understood him for the first time in three years. He said, “Shealy, why didn’t you hit that guy?”, which I had always misinterpreted as “Sweetpea, waddle donkey Hitchcock fly?” (… which always started my mind wandering, staring off blankly into space wondering what he meant, while the other players were running willy-nilly all around me.)

Now that I understood what he was saying, I did it. I smacked the other guy. And, for the first time, it occurred to me that just running toward the other team with my arms flailing wildly, as I had been doing since fourth grade, did no good whatsoever. And seemed to exasperate my coaches.

Running into that guy, like the coach had asked, changed my football career. The coaches shifted me from defense to offense, and made me a blocking lineman, which largely consisted of me “getting in the way” of the other team. My job was to make sure the opposing players ran into me instead of running into any of my teammates who were authorized to touch the football. (I was sternly instructed never to touch, or even come within five yards, of the football.)

Getting in the way of the other team was easy. I had been getting in the way my whole life. I was actually quite good at it. Probably one of the phrases I was most familiar with was “you’re in the way”.

Unfortunately, in the third game of my senior year, I got in the way of two guys at the same time. Actually, my knee got in the way of the two guys – two BIG guys, coming from two different directions – and ended up lying on the ground beside me facing a totally different direction than the rest of my body.

After a brief hospital stay to put my knee back together, they let me out and gave me a pair of crutches.

I rejoined the team, and hobbled back over to the sidelines -- back to the bench -- where I felt a home… and concluded my football career proudly watching Sox, Smith, Satcher, Sharpe and the rest of my benchwarming buddies from the previous year compete for the conference championship!!!

This is really, really funny

2009-08-28T05:17:00.000-07:00

Oftentimes when I write my column, I try to be funny. I mention this because a lot of my regular readers have suggested recently that I should occasionally add humor to my column.

Let me re-phrase that: “a lot of my regular reader”, I should have said.

And instead of “suggested recently that I occasionally add humor”, I should have said “asked me if I’m still writing a column occasionally, because I quit reading it years ago, because your jokes are so lame.”

Come to think of it, her exact words were: “The 1950’s called. They want their jokes back!”

Other times, however, I succeed in being very funny, even hilarious… but it’s usually when I’m not trying to, but instead, just telling true stories from my life. (The true stories which seem to get the biggest chuckles, incidentally, are: [a] my attire; [b] my finances; and [c] my automotive and mechanical skills.

(Oh, and I forgot [d] my age, weight, looks, and personality.)

So, I decided to do better. For the last few weeks, I’ve started paying particular attention to the most humorous shows on TV to try to determine what makes them funny. As it turns out, they’re not that much different than my column: the late-nite comedy shows are sorta lame… but the nightly news is a hoot (thanks mostly to our own Governor.)

Consequently, I have given up on the vast wasteland of television, and gone directly to the newest, greatest source of humor in the world: The Electric Internet!!!
Several times a day, one of my many friends will “forward” me an email which makes me LOL (which is an Electric Internet abbreviation for “Laugh Out Loud”).

Let me re-phrase that: “Several times a day”. That part is okay. But when I said “one of my many friends”, I should have said, “Mom”; and when I said “forward me an email”, I should have said, “accidentally hits the ‘reply all’ button” so that I see a list of several thousand people who have already forwarded the joke, complete with date/time stamps, dating back almost to the 1950’s, from whence came the joke!!!

But there are also some REALLY FUNNY jokes on the Electric Internets, if you just know where to look.

To find the funniest ones, I always go to this website: www.jokesrejectedbylatenightTVhumorwriters.com

Let me give you and example of the jokes I have found on the Electric Internets. Here’s one:

Three old guys are out walking. First one says, 'Windy, isn't it?' Second one says, 'No, it's Thursday!' Third one says, 'So am I. Let's go get a beer.'

Now let me give you a sample of Rod-Boy’s Homemade Jokes and Humor:

Question: How did the Scottish man meet his demise?

Answer: Kilt.

Okay, now that you’ve heard both kinds, which did you like best?!!! Which was funniest?!!! Which one really cracked you up and made you roll on the floor?!!!

Oh.

Okay, if that’s the way you feel, I’ll just give you a few more jokes from the Electric Internet, and be done with it:

Did you hear about the blonde who returned a scarf to the store because it was too tight?

-----------------------

A Sunday school teacher was telling her class the story of the Good Samaritan. She asked the class, 'If you saw a person lying on the roadside, wounded and bleeding, what would you do?'

One little girl gave an honest answer: 'I think I'd throw up.'

------------------------

Bumper sticker of the year: 'If you can read this, thank a teacher -and, since it's in English, thank a soldier!'

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Life is like a roll of toilet paper. The closer it gets to the end, the faster it goes.

------------------------

A man was telling his neighbor, 'I just bought a new hearing aid. It cost me four thousand dollars, but it's state of the art. It's perfect.'

'Really,' answered the neighbor. 'What kind is it?'

'Twelve thirty.'

------------------------

Emily Sue broke her ankle and Bubba called 911. The 911 operator told Bubba that she would send someone out right away.

"Where do you live?" asked the operator.

Bubba replied, "At the end of Eucalyptus Drive."

The operator asked, "Can you spell that for me?

There was a long pause and finally Bubba said, "How 'bout if I drag her over to Oak Street and you pick her up there?"

------------------------

Did you hear about the $3,000,000 Alabama State Lottery? The winner gets $3 a year for a million years.

------------------------

Morris, an 82 year-old man, went to the doctor to get a physical. A few days later, the doctor saw Morris walking down the street with a gorgeous young woman on his arm.

A couple of days later, the doctor spoke to Morris and said, 'You're really doing great, aren't you?'

Morris replied, 'Just doing what you said, Doc: 'Get a hot mamma and be cheerful.''

The doctor said, 'I didn't say that. I said, 'You've got a heart murmur; be careful.'

-------------------------

There you have it: a few of the funniest jokes in the world, Fresh Daily from the Electric Internet. But don’t expect me to make a habit of including Actual Humor each week.

Okay, gotta run now: The 1970’s called… they want their clothes back.

Meet My Facebook Friends

2009-08-19T19:06:00.000-07:00

Last week, I gave you a brief lesson on the Internet fad called Facebook, primarily for the benefit of my fellow Old People, who, like me, grew up in the age before computers, and frankly, are having a difficult time adjusting to the World in which we currently find ourselves.

Now that we all basically understand how Facebook works (like an old telephone “party line” that everybody in the world can listen in on, except with words and pictures instead of talking), I will follow through on my promise to introduce you this week to a few of my Facebook Friends. (Facebook Friends are what we call those acquaintance with whom we’ve mutually agreed that its okay to listen in on each others “party line” conversations.)

My Facebook Friends can be divided into a very few categories:

First -- and my favorites -- are my old classmates from the Lexington High School Class of 1972, give or take a few years. I’ve reconnected with a number of these old school chums who I haven’t seen since… well, since 1972!!! Every time I am “friended” my another member of the LHS Class of ‘72, I swell up with a sense of inner-pride, knowing that yet another one of us actually learned to read and write, despite numerous predictions to the contrary.

The next group – and probably the largest – is my relatives. They don’t get much choice. They HAVE to be your friends. And since I had a grandmother with eleven brothers and sisters, and a grandpa with fourteen, I’ve got relatives falling out of trees. When I started signing up my relatives as Facebook Friends, the Facebook Overload Alarm sounded.

Then there are the people I work with, or formerly worked with, along with business clients, customers and vendors. These are the contacts which could actually be useful from a profit standpoint. I only have about two of these.

Social friends are another big category. In reality, I have about a kazillion social friends… except for the part about actually remembering their names. Since you need to know someone’s name to become their Facebook Friend, I only have about two of these, too.

Next category: Real Estate acquaintances. I seem to know a lot of people who sell real estate, and they all seem eager to be my friends. I think they’re expecting me to be homeless any day now.

Jim Smiths. I have a couple of actual friends named Jim Smith – which it turns out is the most common name in America, therefore I have about 50 Facebook Friends named Jim Smith, none of whom are the ones I actually know.

And the last major category: People I don’t really know… but I do now, because they’re my Facebook Friends. I have loads of these… even some from foreign countries, which should not be a surprise, because I also seem to know a few members of the Liberian royal family, and they all want to give me money via email.

So that’s a rundown of my Facebook Friends (which I will now start abbreviating as FBFs.) Now, what do I do with ‘em, you may be wondering. That’s where it gets interesting. Every so often – maybe once an hour, maybe once a month – you write a “status update”, telling your friends what you’re doing right now, or just got finished doing, or maybe are fixin’ to do.

Frankly, this has always seemed like a bad idea to me. I might not want the entire free world to know what I’m doing right now. So, instead, I fill in that blank with whatever nonsense happens to pop into my mind: “I fear gerbils”, or “You ain’t nuthin’ but a hound-dog, crying all the time”, or “Time for Tootsie Rolls”, or “Where does bellybutton lint come from?”

Most of my “status updates” leave my FBFs wondering.

Others, however, take their “status updates” very seriously.
Here are some actual “status updates” from my actual FBFs over the past few days. (The names have been changed to protect the indecent.)

Very often, a FBF will list as his or her status that he/she is “about to go for a jog.” Many times, this report comes early in the morning… even before 7am. Whenever I see that, I immediately delete those people as FBFs. We don’t belong in the same club.

Similarly, other FBFs feel the need to broadcast it every time they mow the lawn, paint the house, organize the garage, clean the gutters, haul off the garbage, or change the oil. Delete, delete, delete, delete, delete! It’s people like that who give people like me a bad name.

A recent update informed my that an old classmate of mine, Elmer Snodgrass is “going to the Piggly Wiggly.” If I were going to list that as the main event of my day, I would instead say “Rod-Boy has no life.”

A former co-worker posted that Peggy Sue Overstreet “is stuck in traffic on I-26”. I thought to myself, there’s probably a traffic tie-up due to a wreck caused by somebody trying to play with their Facebook while they’re driving.

Shannon Marie Blonderhair “is heading to Atlanta for the weekend”, another report said. Good luck on having any stuff left at your house when you get back, since you just broadcast to the world that there’s no one at your house on Saturday night!!!

Johnny Ray Rednickerson “can’t wait for State Fair”.

Bubba Lewie Loudmoutherson “is getting ready to watch America’s Got Talent. I hope the magician wins.”

Henry Clay Withersmith “just had pork chops, macaroni and cheese, and collards for lunch.”

Emma Lou Goodness “is listening to the rain.”

Gary Lee Hankerchiefton “is studying for a test I have to take for work”.

Sarah Lee Bakerpie “wants her kids to learn to clean up their rooms”.

On and on and on it goes…. Intimate glimpses into the day-to-day lives of my friends, acquaintances, relatives and some people I don’t know who actually might live on other planets. It’s Facebook. It’s all the rage these days.

As for me, I think I’ll not bore my friends (or embarrass my relatives) with the details of my day. I’ll probably just continue to report on my daily life as it exists in my mind.

Rod-Boy “is trying to finish his weekly column so he’ll have time to mow the lawn, paint the house, organize the garage, clean the gutters, haul off the garbage, and change the oil before the rain comes.”

Facebook Friends

2009-08-12T19:03:00.000-07:00

By now, you’ve probably heard of the Internet phenomenon called Facebook, even if you are “Old People” like Yours Truly.

To most of the Young Folks, keeping up with the latest Internet fad is easy. It’s second nature. They grew up with the Internet. They understand how to use the Internet. They get it.

But to us Old People, it doesn’t come so easily. It pretty much has to be drilled into us before we even come close to catching on. There’s too much, and it moves too fast. We can’t keep up. And if we TRY to keep up, it makes us dizzy, and we end up having to take an extra dose of our medication….or an extra afternoon nap.

Most of us Old People first learn about these new Internet innovations after they’ve caused some trouble, forcing the National News Media writes about them. Many times, they’re a factor in some sort of violent crime, even murder.

I never knew there were websites that taught people how to make bombs until some wacko used a bomb made from Internet instructions to blow somebody up! But then, I read about it in the National News Media.

After a website is connected to a murder or two, the whole world hears about it. And, if you believe everything you read, these websites are killin’ people: MySpace seems to have killed some people; Craigslist is reported to have killed some people; and now, Facebook is said to have killed some people. (It should be noted, however, that GUNS do not kill people… criminals do!)

Anyway, because of all their notoriety, lots of new Old People have now heard of these Internet websites. But, for the most part, the Old People still don’t have a clue what they really are.

So I thought I would offer you a bit of explanation about Facebook, in which I happen to be a participant, so therefore I am qualified to explain it – one Old Person to another. (If you are reading this column in a your local community newspaper, incidentally, the odds are very strong that your are an Old Person. Remember this fact: Young Folks read the Internet; Old People read newspapers. It’s true.)

So, pay attention, Old People – and elbow the Old Person sitting beside you to wake ‘em up – while I explain the Facebook Friends phenomenon:

1. It’s a computer thing. (If I’ve lost you already, stop reading, and go back to reading your newspaper.)

2. It’s on the Electronic Internet, also known at the World Wide Web. While the Internet is still a mystery to most Old People, I have invented a way of explaining it that most Old People can understand: Think back to the old days of the Telephone, and remember what was know as a “Party Line”. Now just imagine that everyone in the whole world is on the same party line… except instead of talking, we’re sending each other words and pictures. That’s the Internet…the World Wide Web.

3. Now, to understand Facebook, think of a Telephone Answering Machine. When somebody calls you, if you don’t answer, they get a recorded message from you, and then they leave a message. Facebook is just like that on the Internet, ‘cept, once again, instead of TALKING, it’s just written words and pictures… and when a friend tries to contact you on the Internet, instead of leaving a voice message, they leave their message in words and pictures.

4. If it’s a Party Line with everybody in the world on it, other people would get to see all your messages, right? Wrong! That’s where your Facebook Friends come in handy. Facebook allows you to choose the people you will allow to read your messages and see your pictures. Those people are your Facebook Friends. You can ask anyone whose email address you happen to know to become your Facebook Friend… and if they accept, you will now be listed on each others Facebook page as Friends… and you’ll be able to keep up with each other by checking in from time to time.

Now that you know what all the hubbub is about, I’ll invite you to become my personal Facebook Friend, with all the rights and privileges accorded thereto, herewith, whereas, hither, thither and yon.

And, now that you understand the essence of this Internet fad, next week I plan to introduce you to a few of my Facebook Friends, and tell you what they’ve been up to lately. They’re characters, they are. A hoot.

That’s all for this week. It’s 2:00pm already… time for a nap before I eat supper at 3:30 pm…. like Old People do.

Isolated Thoughts for August

2009-08-09T05:53:00.000-07:00

Well, here we are right smack dab in the middle of Dog Days… nothing happening ‘cept anticipation.

Every year, when the calendar turns to August, you can be sure there’s still another couple weeks of “nuthin’ much hap’nin”…but right around the corner is all that Back To School, Football Season Kickoff madness. (Until then, the onliest thing interesting enough for journalists to write about is how old Elvis would have been. Mark my words, you’ll be reading that exact theme within the next 10 days.)

That’s why I’ve decided to break the Dog Days monotony with another installment of “Isolated Thoughts”… basically, just whatever’s on my mind, plus a few things that weren’t really ON my mind, they just happened to flicker through my mind for just a brief second or two.

So here we go…

--Strawberries are much bigger than they used to be, I think.

I’ve been eating a lot of strawberries recently, because that’s a good way to lose weight, and I, once again, find myself in the position of being a Big-Fat-Giant-Hippo-Pig-Whale. So I’m eating strawberries. But I’ve noticed that the berries are a lot larger than I remember them as a kid. A LOT larger!!! They’re huge!!!

So I’m wondering why. What happened to make the strawberries five times as big as they used to be?

-- Since its August, I will renew my campaign to have the month renamed to “Elvis”. You may know that I have long pushed for this change… as of yet, to no avail. But it’s a cause I believe in, so I will continue to fight on. (If I’m ever successful, my Mom’s birthday would then be “Elvis, the 16th”. I think it has a ring to it.)

-- Some mornings, my Rice Crispies talk to me and tell me things. Other days, I see wee people inside the O’s of my Cheerios.

-- Each week, as a kid, our first, second, and third grade classes were visited by the music teacher for an hour or so of public school music. I couldn’t believe that it counted as a school class! All we did was listen to music, and occasionally slap blocks together in rhythm! What a breeze.

I do recall, however, being frightened by one song we sang: “Buffalo Gals won’t you come out tonight”. Being a second grader, and therefore totally unfamiliar with the geography of New York State, the words to the song had an entirely different meaning to me. I think I laid awake some nights worried that THIS might be the night that the buffalo girls would appear from nowhere. (I had no idea what “buffalo girls” were, but whatever they were, I’m pretty sure I didn’t want them to come out tonight.)

-- I think “rhythm” is an odd word. It has all those letters, but only half a vowel.

-- I’ve recently come up with two pre-inventions. First, is the pocket patch: a special patch designed for the hole in the bottom of your pocket. Second, is the windshield wiper lights-on switch: so whenever you turn your windshield wipers on, the lights automatically come on. Maybe we already have these two devices, and I’m just not aware of them because I basically live in a cave. But if not, they’re darn good ideas. That’s why I pre-invented them.

-- I also made up a new word: “pre-invent”. It means to come up with the idea for an invention, but not to actually figure out how to make it work. It’s a good word. A useful word. I’ll add it to the list of other words I’ve created – “ar”, “teafill”, you can find a list of them in my previous columns if you visit my blog online at www.doingthefirst.blogspot.com -- none of which have yet found their way into Websters.

-- Here’s a preview of yet another new word I’m currently developing. The word is “whump-whump”. It’s used to describe the sound your vehicle makes after you drive over the curb one time too many.

Okay, that’s it for this week. I need to stop now, so I can get back to sitting beside the phone, waiting for the people from Pulitzer to call.

Help Wanted:

2009-08-06T13:17:00.000-07:00

Quite frequently these days, I hear the same types of questions from friends and acquaintances during our ongoing discussions of the current economic conditions:

How does a small community newspaper survive during a recession which is killing-off some of the giants of the publishing industry? How does a small local newspaper survive the onslaught of the Internet and other technological advances which have virtually wiped out entire industries… and has long been predicted to be the cause the end of the newspaper industry?

To be honest, I sometimes hear these questions in my own mind!!!

These are challenging times for all businesses, but particularly so for the newspaper industry, which is facing the twin threat of a slow economy AND shrinking relevance due to the Internet.

(How’s that for a straight-up, honest, no-spin assessment?!!!)

Fortunately, it’s not as glum as it would seem for this little weekly journal, or the thousands of other local weeklies scattered across the continent. While daily newspapers have in fact been suffering for more than a decade due to pressure from the Internet, smaller community newspapers have actually seen growth… presumably because the localized news featured in community newspapers is not as readily available online.

Still, the slow economy has hampered all of us! Virtually all of the funds which have historically allowed this newspaper to publish each week have come from advertising revenues, primarily from small, local businesses which use the newspaper as a vehicle to attract new customers. As the slower economy has forced many smaller businesses to cut back or close, some of those ad revenues have dried up.

Consequently, we, like nearly every other business in America, are making changes to survive the recession. (One of those small changes involves Yours Truly working an extra 10 hours each week on nights and weekends to help reduce overhead costs!!! Believe me… I’m ready for this recession to be OVER!!!)

Another lucky change for us is that more and more larger business are suddenly turning to community weeklies for THEIR advertising, because they, too, are trying to cut costs, and realize that smaller newspapers are more affordable than their larger counterparts. And every little bit helps.

But the biggest single factor that helps this newspaper survive -- especially during tough times -- is the support we have from the community... not just businesses, but contributors, readers, and many, many local groups and organizations.

Each week, dozens of local schools, churches, sports teams, and organizations take the time to email us their news, so we can spread the word to the entire community. We are also fortunate to have a good number of local writers and photographers who take it upon themselves to collect local news and pass it on. These contributors are the backbone of our small news-gathering organization. Thanks to their volunteer efforts, our community is able to have a newspaper… and, as has been said many times before… a newspaper is the glue that holds a community together.

Each year, at about this time, when folks are returning from vacation, and thoughts are turning to the coming school year, the new sports season, or the new organizational calendar, we invite local residents to join us in this ongoing adventure. We encourage YOU to contribute items of interest to us, so that we can share them with the rest of the community.

Whether your talent lies in reporting news, photographing events, writing a community column, or just passing on local items of interest you happen to come across, we want your help. If you’re a participant or member of any local church, school group, neighborhood association, youth sports team, or civic organization, please volunteer your efforts to make sure YOUR group’s news is not being overlooked. If you send it to us, we’ll pass it on to the rest of the community… (or at least to our estimated 20,000 weekly readers!!!)

And we’re also ALWAYS looking for your ideas, suggestions, or comments to help make your newspaper better. Anything at all… just send an email directly to me: RodShealy@aol.com

We want you to become a part of our team. It will help this newspaper survive the recession, and help make the community a better, stronger place to live, work and grow.

And, as always, we thank you for your support!

Moon Walk

2009-08-05T19:47:00.000-07:00

You’re probably disappointed that I haven’t written anything about the passing of Michael Jackson. And, right now, based on the title of this column, you probably think I’m going to!

But you’re wrong. I’m not writing about THAT kind of moon walk.

Still, I will pause and pay tribute to the King of Pop before I get to today’s agenda. He was, after all, omnipresent throughout much of my life… starting, if I’m not mistaken, with “ABC, easy as 1-2-3”, because I obviously somehow completely missed their first single: “I Want You Back.”

Growing up as a bit of a nerdly geekazoid misfit, I only made it to two concerts during my entire time in high school (…including my freshman year of college, which I failed to realize was not my fifth year of high school until it was way too late.) One of those two concerts was The Jackson Five, with cute little Michael stealing the show. In the mid-80’s, for some reason, I also decided to take the kids to see the Jackson Victory Tour in Knoxville, Tennessee. So I actually saw MJ in concert twice.

But, mostly, I was influenced by his dancing – especially the Moon Walk – after which I patterned my own unique dancing style (commonly referred to by others as “The Wounded Walrus”, although I’m pretty sure they’re just jealous!)

Anyway, The Jackson Five were getting ready to hit it big in 1969 – the year of their first hit -- which coincidentally was the exact year that “other” moon walk took place… 40 years ago this week, to be exact.

That moon walk was an actual moon walk. I remember it, because the whole family watched it on TV, as did most other Americans.

The Shealy family, at the time, had only recently acquired its first color TV, but the pictures transmitted from the moon were in vivid Black and White.

Have you ever seen the movie “Pleasantville”? It’s a movie about changing times. In the movie, the earlier, innocent times are in black and white, while the emerging modern times – complete with new and different ideas and values – were presented in living color.

That’s sort of how I remember 1969. It was a crazy, mixed-up time. Of course, I was a 15-year old adolescent who had just gotten a driver license and finished a year of high school. At that age, you could have put me in the middle of the Sixth Century and I probably would have thought the world was crazy and mixed up.

Without question, landing a man on the moon was the achievement of the year, and probably the decade. Nearly 10 years earlier, JFK had laid down the challenge to put a man on the moon, and we had done it… before the Russians!!!

But the moon landing was far from the only event of the year. There was Woodstock. And Hurricane Camille. And the average household income was a whopping $8,500, which was a gracious plenty, since technology had not yet provided us with a whole laundry list of new and costly necessities: cable TV, Internet, cell phones, etc.

And there was Chappaquiddick, the tragic accident which came to define Ted Kennedy, which, ironically, happened exactly two days before we landed on the moon.

The movies in 1969 were different than the ones I had been accustomed to. Instead of Tarzan, Elvis, and Disney, the movies were more complicated, like Easy Rider, Midnight Cowboy, The Wild Bunch, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. (At 15, I was not old enough to see any of these… but I was TOO old to go see the only movie of the year I could have related to: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang!)

The music was also changing. True, the Jackson Five were getting ready to make their move, but there were all these other musical groups with names I didn’t understand – like Led Zepplin – and song titles which made even less sense – “Bad Moon Rising” and “Suite Judy Blue Eyes”. The Jackson Five sounded like the name of a musical group; I thought “Led Zepplin” was some kind of weighted fishing tackle!

My only safe haven at age 15 was the friendly land of television. The Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction, Gomer Pyle, Gilligans Island, Bonanza and The Brady Bunch were still my friends.

But then, right there on the friendly safe-haven of our recently acquired color TV in the middle of our comfy den comes this moon walk, and starts complicating things even on TV. (Norman Lear and Rowan and Martin and 60 Minutes were right around the corner.)

It’s interesting that we went to the moon a half dozen times from 1969 until 1972, and we haven’t been back since… a fact which I only realized earlier this week. That probably means we really didn’t need to go in the first place. We only went to prove we could.

And, I suppose, to add one more complicating factor to the previously black and white world of a nerdly geeazoid misfit 15 year old.

I scream, you scream.

2009-07-21T19:58:00.000-07:00

We all scream for Ice Cream! Especially in the middle of July, in sunny South Carolina!

Have you ever watched one of those Info-mericals on TV where it seems like a regular program, but then you realize it’s really just an advertisement, and they’re trying to sell you something?

Well, this column is sorta like that!

Except, this time, when we get to the end, I won’t be trying to sell you something… I’ll be giving it away to you for FREE!!!

This little info-mercial is about Gatsbees Worlds Fair Soda Fountain, a pet project I began a couple of years ago. Let me tell you how it happened….

I started Gatsbees because I realized the old style Soda Fountains had become a thing of the past, and, frankly, it was a little piece of Americana that I wanted to hang on to!

It was way back in 2006 that the inspiration first came to me: What if there WAS such a place… like the good-old-days… old-timey and nostalgic? I remembered the Soda Fountains that were once the central gathering place for EVERY small town in America. Soda Fountains were where families gathered, neighbors met neighbors, and things were a lot simpler.

After looking around, I discovered that TRUE soda fountains… where beverages were mixed any way you wanted while you watched…. were totally a thing of the past in America. The leisurely, neighborly soda fountains which were once the fabric of our nation have long since been replaced by fast food chain restaurants. A great part of life was missing.

Frankly, I became fascinated with the concept of bringing back soda fountains to a new generation of Americans…. and, ever since then, have been working in my “spare time” to develop the concept.

Along the way, we discovered that -- now as then -- our soda fountain is really about a lot more than the drinks, treats, and ice cream. It’s about having a family-friendly place to spend time, relax, and get to know your neighbors again… like the old days, before cell phones and shopping malls, before computer games and the Internet.

So, for a couple of years now, Gatsbees Worlds Fair Soda Fountain has been working to bring back this “old style” gathering place and finding ways to re-invent the soda fountain.

Nowadays, to most people, “soda fountain” means “ice cream shop”. While it’s true that we serve all kinds of ice cream -- from sundaes and banana splits, to milkshakes, malts and floats -- the original soda fountains were based on the beverages: carbonated “soda” water, mixed with hundreds of various flavors.

Consequently, Gatsbees Worlds Fair Soda Fountain -- right here in the Midlands -- is currently the only establishment in the entire South where you watch your sodas being custom-flavored by soda jerks – the old fashioned way, any combination of flavors you want!!!! (Actually, we’re told there is only one other business in all of America that still makes sodas the old-fashioned way!) While its true we’ve got a long way to go before Gatsbees becomes a household word, we’re nonetheless proud of the progress we HAVE made – and the hundreds of friends we’ve gained – in trying to bring an all-new “old” concept to the market!

So, I want to personally invite each of my readers to drop by, check us out, give us your ideas and suggestions… and enjoy a soda, ice cream, hot dog or sandwich while you’re there. We’re open daily from 11:30 am until 8:00pm (and later on weekends), located at 7585 St. Andrews Road in Irmo (behind the Lizard’s Thicket and beside Carolina Wings.) I might also add that Gatsbees has quickly become a favorite place for parties and celebrations. For more information, you can call 803-233-4133 visit our website: www.Gatsbees.com.

And… here comes the FREE part… if you walk into Gatsbees waving this newspaper in one hand, and tell the soda jerk: “Rod-Boy said you would let me try out a new soda flavor for FREE”… they’ll let you try out a new soda flavor for FREE!

Just pick any flavor -- or combination of flavors -- you’ve never tried before, and we’re gonna let you try it out… OUR TREAT! (If you pick a combination of flavors our soda jerks have never made before, we’ll probably name it for you!!!!) It’s a small token of appreciation for you reading all the way to the end of my column AGAIN!

Frankly, just dropping in and seeing the place will help to make this small dream a success. And maybe the flavor of soda you invent will become your new favorite, and you’ll come back again… or tell your friends, and they’ll drop by.

After all, it’s an ice-cold soda… and this is the middle of July in sunny South Carolina!!!

And maybe, with your help, we can give a happy little taste of the Good-Ole-Days to a new generation.

As always, I thank you for your support.

Tough times ahead

2009-07-07T19:52:00.000-07:00

Most readers know I have a self-imposed policy of separating my role as publisher of several community newspapers from my other role as a political consultant, or at the very least, clearly disclaiming my dual roles on those infrequent occasions when the two roles overlap.

Well this is one of those times.

When I wrote my column last week, I said I was not gonna beat up on Mark Sanford, because he was being beaten up enough.

That was before he “kept talking”, and sealed his fate with a second press conference. But I’m still not gonna beat him up.

It is well-known by readers of this column that I am not a political ally of Sanford, having directed the campaign of his 2006 GOP opponent, Dr. Oscar Lovelace.

Moreover, I am a long-time friend and advisor to the Lt. Governor, Andre Bauer, having run each of his previous campaigns. Still, I refrain from using this column to promote the Lt. Governor. This week, however, I will…

In the fallout from what has now become known as the Sanford Scandal, much attention has been given to the order of succession into the Governor’s office. With the increased likelihood that Lt. Governor Bauer might be thrust into the position of Governor, his political competitors have launched an aggressive, behind-the-scenes PR battle to make Bauer appear to be an unattractive alternative.

The detractors have written negative letters-to-the editor of the state’s major newspapers, and have subtly lobbied editors to write editorials slanted against Bauer.

The reason his competitors have begun these behind-the-scene attacks, of course, is to stop Bauer from becoming Governor… because they themselves have aspirations to become the next Governor!!! They recognize that if Bauer becomes Governor for 18 months, he will likely be very successful, as he has been with the Office on Aging, and virtually every other pursuit he has undertaken during his years of public service. They know his hard work and determination is virtually unstoppable, and believe that he will be markedly successful… thus probably quashing their own desires to become Governor. But nowhere in their opposition to Bauer do they have the best interests of our state in mind.

I, for one, happen to believe allowing Andre Bauer to ascend to Governor is a logical step for our state. Those who have watched him grow and mature into a solid public servant know that Bauer is exactly the person we need to pull the state out of this latest crisis.

Who could better help solve South Carolina’s problems during a recession? Andre Bauer has a well-documented history of overcoming major obstacles and plowing ahead to solve problems that would stop most others. What other potential candidate for Governor can match his energy, enthusiasm, and work ethic… the elements needed to lead our state through its roughest period ever? No one else even comes close.

Consider these factors:

1. We’re in the midst of a major recession, and we’re still facing the same challenges we’ve struggled with for decades: near the bottom in education, health care, crime, personal income, etc. But now, we will be trying to solve these problems during the weakest global economy in history.

South Carolina’s next governor MUST be someone who has the energy, the drive and determination and the perseverance to overcome whatever obstacles we may face. No one can overcome tough obstacles better than Andre Bauer!

2. With the 12.5% unemployment – third highest in the nation – the most critical immediate challenge we face is recruiting new industry so we can provide jobs for our people.

Our next governor must be tireless in pursuing industrial prospects. We need a proven hard-worker who will put in the time it takes to attract new jobs to our state. We need a natural-born salesman. We need an enthusiastic advocate for the state. Andre Bauer is already hard at work selling our state to potential prospects.

3. Most of all, South Carolina needs a return to the communication, cooperation, and common sense which has been missing from state government in recent years. We can’t afford to have the legislative and executive branches battling each other. Now more than ever, we need a government that works.

More than any other prospective candidate for Governor, Andre Bauer has a record of open communication, get-it-done cooperation, and good, solid common sense. He understands how to stand up for his principles, but also use his common sense to promote the greater good of our state.

In short, Andre Bauer has the qualities we need to pull South Carolina out of this current crisis, to recruit new industries, and to solve problems during the tough times we are facing.

This is not an endorsement of Andre Bauer’s election. It’s simply the other side of the coin -- which most media outlets aren’t explaining, because they’ve become pawns in the political maneuvering which has taken over our state in the wake of the Sanford Scandal.

Should Sanford be forced to resign or impeached? That’s a question I will leave to the will of the people. But it’s a decision which should be made on its own merit, not based on who might take over.

This I CAN tell you: The Lt. Governor South Carolina elected not once, but twice, to be ready just in case of a vacancy is absolutely ready and able to put our state back on track. We should let him do what we elected him to do.

A call for action:

2009-07-07T08:11:00.000-07:00

The Ideals of America, 2009

2009-06-30T13:43:00.000-07:00

Lots of friends and acquaintances have been asking this week what I would be writing about the Mark Sanford affair. They know, as most of my readers do, that I have been a Sanford critic for a number of years, and, in fact, ran the 2006 campaign of Sanford’s Republican primary challenger, Oscar Lovelace. (That’s possibly the reason Sanford called me “creepy” at a press conference last year.) Regular readers of this column are also aware of my unofficial advisory role to Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer, as well as having served as campaign manager for Senator Jake Knotts, another key figure in the ongoing Sanford saga.

Suffice it to say that, yes, I could write an interesting and informative column about the Mark Sanford affair. But I’m not going to, because there are approximately 10,000 other newspapers taking care of that business.

Frankly, I’m more interested in this week’s celebration of America’s birthday… Independence Day… the day the Declaration of Independence was signed, which led to a Constitution giving all these newspapers the right to freely comment on the Sanford affair, and all Americans the right to express their individual opinions on the matter.

So, instead of piling on, I’ve decided to reprint my column from July 4th, two years ago, to commemorate the set of ideals – freedom, liberty, and equal justice -- which are obviously still alive and well in America:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

“When in the course of Human Events…”

So begins the Declaration of Independence, to document which declared the creation of the United States of America, the signing of which on July 4th, 1776, is the date we celebrate as our national holiday of patriotism.

It’s no accident, I think, that our national day of celebration commemorates a document, rather than the end or beginning of any battle or war, or any military victory, or any national incident. To be sure, there are many other dates which will, indeed, live in infamy or be cause for perpetual celebration. But the single day we have chosen to celebrate Americanism is the day the ideas on which our nation was created were signed into effect with a single declaration.

We celebrate words -- not battles, not royal bloodlines, not military might -- because words convey ideas... and America is a nation founded on a set of ideas: freedom, liberty, justice, equality, and opportunity. These ideas, represented by written words, created the foundation on which our way of life has been built.

Because our American Way of Life is built on a set of ideas/ideals, and because I’m pretty sure we ALL take these ideals pretty much for granted on a daily basis – and it would probably be a good thing if we reminded ourselves of them from time to time -- I thought I would commemorate this July 4th by offering a bit of a quiz on some of the Words of Patriotism we have come to cherish.

Below, I’ve listed twelve patriotic phrases. Your job is to identify where each phrase comes from. These correct answers are at the end.

Here we go…

Patriotic Phrase #1: “We the people of the United States….”

Patriotic Phrase #2: “The land of the free, and the home of the brave”.

Patriotic Phrase #3: “WE hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are
created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness”

Patriotic Phrase #4: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free….”

Patriotic Phrase #5: “One nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all”.

Patriotic Phrase #6: “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.”

Patriotic Phrase #7: “Crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea”.

Patriotic Phrase #8: “ … no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances”.

Patriotic Phrase #9: “Stand beside her and guide her through the night with the light from above.”

Patriotic Phrase #10: “We mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor”.

Patriotic Phrase #11: “A new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”.

Patriotic Phrase #12: “Secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity”.

How did you do? Here are the answers: 1. Preamble of the Constitution; 2. The National Anthem (The Star Spangled Banner); 3. The Declaration of Independence; 4. Inscription of the Statue of Liberty; 5. The Pledge of Allegiance; 6. Inscription of the Liberty Bell (we would also accept Leviticus 25:10); 7. America, the Beautiful; 8. The First Amendment (or The Bill of Rights); 9. God Bless America; 10. The Declaration of Independence, again! 11. Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address; 12. Preamble of the Constitution, again.

Hope you have a safe and happy Independence Day. And as we all celebrate freedom, let’s please keep our fighting men and women in our thoughts and prayers. God Bless America.

I’m an expert at eating food

2009-06-25T05:09:00.000-07:00

With BBQ season in full swing – and the biggest barbecue day of the year just ahead – it’s only fitting that we should have a little chat about food in general. And Bar-B-Q in specific. (I especially want to spare you transplanted Yankees of the inevitable bar-b-cue embarrassment you are likely to experience if you try act like you know anything at all about B-B-Que around Good Ole Boys who grew up on Bar-b-cue.)

Barbeque is, of course, the best food ever invented in the whole, entire history of mankind. (It’s also ranks high among “foods which can be spelled a lot of different ways”, which you may have noticed in the preceding paragraphs.)

So here’s what you need to know before diggin’ in on July 4th:

1. There are many different kinds of BBQ.

2. Grilling hamburgers or hotdogs ain’t one of ‘em.

That’s the common mistake made by Yankees. They confuse grilling with barbecuing. I don’t know where they got that notion. Probably from growing up with a lack of actual barbecue, so they’re just trying to make do.

Actual variety in BBQ comes from the various sauces: mustard-based, ketchup-based, vinegar-based, and a whole lot of other bases in exotic, faraway places like Texas.

How do I know these things? Because I am a food expert. I have eaten it almost my entire life, and I try to exercise my skills every day, usually several times a day to keep in practice. I learned about food at an early age, and have been carefully observing it ever since. Hence, I am an expert.

I remember food before there was fast food.

Back then, “eating out” was rarity… a special treat reserved for the occasional Sunday after church.

Soft drinks with meals were also a bit of a treat. Pepsi, Coca-Cola, RC Cola, Nehi, Seven Up came in bottles, not cans, in a cardboard six pack with a handle. But… they were not on the regular shopping list, because, once again, they were for special occasions. (For some reason, small cokes – half the size for the same price – were considered a special delicacy.)

WE opened those bottles, incidentally, with the bottle opener located at the other end of a “church key”. At our house, we could never find the bottle opener… which was okay, because the handles of our kitchen drawers doubled nicely as bottle openers.

With meals at my house, we drank a lot of (a) water, because it was free; (b) iced tea, because we were Southerners; and (c) milk, because it was delivered to our back door several mornings each week by the Golden Glow Dairy.

The meals themselves were a variety pack: some days were practically gourmet home-cooked feasts… and some days were the same cereal we had for breakfast for lunch and supper… if I could get away with it. (I was a kid! What could be better than Fruit Loops three times a day?!)

My other most memorable kid’s meal was the daily lunchtime “mannaze sammich”. I was in high school before I discovered that the Miracle Whip which comprised the entire inside of my sandwich was not mayonnaise at all, but salad dressing.

As I got older -- maybe eight or nine -- the mayo was replace with a Vienna sausage and mustard. Now THAT was good eating!

Here’s some other foods which were mealtime favorites at the Shealy household, circa 1962:

Spam. We liked it. We made sandwiches out of it, or we fried it and ate it like steak!

Hot Dogs. We simply wrapped a slice of white bread around it like a bun, because actual buns were unheard of, except at restaurants.

Collards, turnip greens, and mustard greens. There was a special way we ate them – with ketchup on top – which, to this day, I can’t find anyone else who has ever heard of this gourmet offering.

Salmon. Once upon a time, canned pink salmon was apparently very, very cheap, because we ate it a LOT. There was salmon gravy, salmon stew, salmon and eggs, and salmon patties (which were called croquettes when you saw them on the menu in restaurants.)

Gravy. On everything, the way it was intended. Gravy on grits. Gravy on potatoes. Gravy on rice. Gravy on biscuits. (If for some reason gravy was unavailable, then a big slab of butter was a decent substitute on any of the forgoing dishes… although it wasn’t really butter at our house… it was margarine, but we didn’t know the difference.)

And, of course, being from the South, there were certain automatic items of cuisine at our house: boil’t peanuts, mater sammiches, and wallermelon slices.

I could go on and on.

I could also make a rather lengthy list of foods I had hardly heard of, let alone tasted, until high school or college: pizza; burrito or any other Mexican food; Chinese food, such as Wong Tong Ching Chang Wow; any seafood other than fish. Shrimp, scallops, lobster and such didn’t even exist in my world.

But they do now…. Because I am a food expert. I try to eat every day.

And on July 4th, the food I plan to be eating is BBQ!

Along with an RC Cola, if I can find one.

Nostalgia was better in the old days.

2009-06-21T19:03:00.000-07:00

This week, I’m writing yet another in my long line of columns about “nostalgia”... the good ole days!

It’s one of my favorite things to write about because the good ole days were…
well, they were the good ole days!!!!

For instance… Do you remember the old days of analog TV. I certainly hope you can remember, because it was LAST WEEK!

The Big Switch to digital occurred last week, and yet another piece of the old ways fell by the wayside. No more big metal antennas decorating the roof of your house. No more rabbit ears on top of your set.

I remember when you needed two separate antennas: one for picking up VHF (which I knew only as Channel 10); and one for picking up UHF, which were the other two channels – 19 and 25 – that contained the TV shows that some of the other kids in my class talked about, but I had never seen because we only had one antenna.

I guess things just change... and the Big Switch to digital is just one of the latest examples.

Consider for a moment how much changed in the last week:

A week ago, there was analog TV… and there were amusement parks known as Six Flags.

A week ago, millions of kids were high school graduates… and now, a week later, they’re just unemployed.

A month ago, there were Pontiacs, but apparently no more.

A year ago, there was Circuit City and Sharper Image, and banks actually loaned money. A year ago, most people had never heard of Rod Blagojevich or Bernie Madoff. (We thought a Ponzi Scheme was something dreamed up by one of the characters on Happy Days.) And, a year ago, there were still Republicans!

A decade ago, there wasn’t anything called Reality TV. Watching TV was an escape from reality… although I’m not sure why we were escaping, because reality back then, in retrospect, was pretty good.

A decade ago, there were two really tall, side-by-side skyscrapers that defined the skyline of New York City. Like the lyricist said, “Wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then.”

A decade ago, this little newspaper chain was turning 10 years old… because it was two decades ago this summer that Yours Truly decided to launch our first newspaper – The Lake Murray News – motivated largely by the fact that a close friend who had been the newspaper business told him “it couldn’t be done”.

Now, 20 years later, the current economic climate suggests that he might have been right!

But, as we embark on the celebration of our 20th year in business – which you will most certainly read more about in coming weeks, right here in this little column – we are entrenched in a mission, which is not about profit as much as it is about providing the community a forum to exercise the “freedom of the press” which our forefathers felt strongly enough about to include in the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

Twenty years ago, four of the five newspapers we publish each week didn’t exist.
While those WERE the good ole days, we didn’t have any good way to share the details of those days with the rest of the community.

Just as TV has changed from analog to digital, from three channels to 300 channels, from rabbit ears to cable, and from an escape from reality to Reality TV, so will this newspaper change in the years ahead. We’re not sure exactly how, but we’re sure it will change…. because things just change!

But in one form or another, it will continue to be a part of the community, since having a forum for the exchange of information within the community is too important to let melt away.

And, in the next few weeks, as we pass the milestone of having published weekly newspapers for the 1,040th week in a row, we’re gonna keep plugging away -- recession or no -- and try to remember that THESE are the good ole days we’ll be writing about 20 years from now in the Summer of 2029.

June is busting out all over!

2009-06-14T19:21:00.000-07:00

I was all set to write a column this week about our 20th anniversary in the newspaper business, which we will be commemorating this summer, when a press release caught my eye and changed my mind:

The SC Department of Health and Environmental Control (DHEC) issued a press release noting that our Governor has proclaimed the month of June as “Obesity Awareness Month”.

When I read that, I thought to myself, “Huh! He finally got something right!”

Because June is definitely Obesity Awareness Month. That’s because it’s the month when we all put on swimsuits and head to the water. Which definitely makes you aware of obesity. (I took my first swim of the year this weekend, and I became painfully aware of my obesity! Along with the obesity of lots of friends who also should not have been wearing swimsuits.)

But now we have the month officially proclaimed. Thank you, Governor.

I decided to check my files and reference materials to see what else the month of June might have in store for us.

The Big One is the beginning of Hurricane Season, which started on June First. (This season, it should be noted, marks the 20th anniversary of a little storm we might recall as Hurricane Hugo!)

June is also the time for an annual Palmetto State rite of passage known as “First Week at Beach”… which is happening right now along our coast. There are thousands of youngsters who aren’t really even old enough to pick out their own underwear spending their first week of freedom from school with bunches of their equally unprepared friends. Lots of the things school didn’t teach ’em during the last 180 days… they’re learning now during seven days.

I hope they stay safe and have a good time… especially those who just graduated. They need to have a blast before they come back home and find out we’re in a recession and they can’t find a job!

June is National Dairy Month, too. Drink your milk!

Turns out, there are a lot of other food celebrations during the month. June 5th is Donut Day AND National Applesauce Cake Day. June 6th is National Gingerbread Day. And June 12th is World Egg Day. (I’m not sure who makes the proclamation to designate a “World” day.) June 17th is Eat Your Vegetables Day. (But I’m not sure if it’s a World, National, or State day.) After eating your vegetables, if you want dessert, June also has National Fudge Day and Chocolate Pudding Day.

June is a very good month for kids’ characters. No fewer than five were born or invented during the month: Oscar the Grouch on June 1st; Donald Duck on June 9th; Garfield on June 19th; Captain Kangaroo on June 27th (He, incidentally, was actually born, not invented.) And, the biggest of them all: Superman, was born on June 30th!

Kids might also like to know that June 15th is officially designated as “Fly a Kite Day”… so designated to honor Ben Franklin’s famous kite experiment.

And, interestingly, a couple of favorite summertime pastimes were invented in June: The drive-in movie was invented on June 6th; and our national pastime, baseball, was invented on June 12th.

My reference material doesn’t say when the biggest summertime pastime of all – swimming -- was invented. But I’m going out on a limb and guessing it was invented many, many centuries ago in the month of June.

Along with Obesity Awareness!

Sum, sum, summertime!

2009-06-03T10:57:00.000-07:00

It’s summertime! Vacation time! Everybody’s favorite time of the year! (Except, of course, for Christmas time, which is everybody’s OTHER favorite time of the year!)

Most all of my best memories from my youth seem to have occurred in the summertime. Smatterofact, I think I’ve repressed most of the other months of my youth -- the school months – because getting up early each morning and being forced to sit still and quiet through the drudgery of classes all day long was not my idea of a good time when I was nine.

But I definitely remember summertime.

Right now, this week, millions of schoolkids are finishing up for the year, and getting ready to spend the next dozen weeks creating their own summertime memories.

It’s sad to say, but there’s not a chance that their computer games and online adventures will match up to our sandlot baseball games, bicycle rides, and afternoon swims in the lake.

Since its summertime, and I’m on vacation, I shouldn’t have any homework… such as writing this column! So instead, I’m just going to sit here and remember some random stuff from the summertimes of years gone by:

-- On Sunday afternoons, we churned ice cream. It was hand-cranked in the early years! I remember making peach, banana, strawberry, vanilla and lemon. The bag of ice required a special trip to the ice-plant – where they would crush a big block of ice for you -- because there wasn’t bagged ice for sale at every corner convenience store. (Come to think of it, there weren’t even any convenience stores.)

-- We didn’t have air conditioning… but we had an attic fan, and it cooled us pretty good at night time. We also had screen doors which let the breeze in. The screen door always had a coiled, metal spring, which made it SLAP closed. You could hear anybody coming into the house. We didn’t lock it, we “latched” it. (Growing up on Main Street in Lexington, SC, I don’t recall the doors to our house or car EVER being locked!)

-- The screen in the screen door was for keeping flies and gnats out… but invariably, a few would slip in. So the fly swatter was always handy. The fly swatter also occasionally doubled as a disciplinary device.

-- I spent a lot of outdoor time at “the spicket”. Many times a day, I would turn it on and cup my hands under it for a quick slurp of water. Or, better yet, I would attach it to the garden hose, and connect the sprinkler to the other end. It’s possible the sprinkler at our house was used for watering the lawn or garden… but if it was, I didn’t know about it. I used it for pure recreation. Turn it on, and spend an hour running through the streams of water shooting into the air.

-- If I was indoors and I needed a drink, there were two choices for kids: tap water, and for special occasions, Kool-aid! The beverages were most often served in jelly jar glasses – not the ones with screw on lids (we weren’t hillbillies!!!), but the kind with the snap off lids that doubled as drinking glasses when the jelly was all gone. Those jelly glasses were the fine china at our house. To chill our drinks, there were ice cubes, made in aluminum ice trays in the freezer. Each tray made a couple dozen cubes, and the rule of the house required that you refill the tray with tap water after you used it, so the next batch of ice cubes would have time to freeze.

-- Other than the sprinkler, the major form of recreation was apparently “swinging”. Back yards in the 50’s and 60’s seemed to automatically include a swing set (some even had a sliding board)… but those couldn’t compare to the tire swings hanging down from sturdy tree branches… or, occasionally, a Tarzan swing. The best swing of all was the rope swing that swung out over the lake, so you could let go and splash in.

-- Evening recreation and entertainment consisted mainly of chasing fireflies. Except on Wednesday nights, when it was free movie night as the U.S. 1 Drive In movies… and I lived practically across the street… within walking distance!

Ah, summertime: A neighborhood sandlot baseball game every morning. Swimming in the lake every afternoon. And bicycle riding in between… anywhere I wanted to go.

I hope the kids today have a summer half as good as the ones I remember.

Freedom!!!!

2009-05-25T21:02:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week, Americans celebrated Memorial Day, one of a string of patriotic holidays we observe each year along now.

Starting the third Saturday of May with Armed Forces Day – a salute to our men and women in uniform -- we, in rapid succession, pay our respects to those who have given their lives in the service of our nation on the last Monday in May; then commemorate the Stars and Stripes on June 14th; culminating with Independence Day on July 4th, celebrating the birth of our nation.

Armed Forces Day, Memorial Day, Flag Day, and Independence Day, all squashed together in a period of six or seven weeks, give us each ample occasion to ponder the freedoms we enjoy as Americans.

But there are two other occurrences during the same time frame that I believe also help us define the concept of freedom.

First is the end of the school year… and the end of the school year, to millions of kids across the land, is the very essence of “freedom”.

When I flash back to my own childhood, I can almost taste the joy and excitement I felt on that final day of school each year. I had endured the authoritarian drudgery of 180 days of being told exactly what to do and exactly when to do it… under penalty of severe punishment, such as sitting in the corner, or a trip to the principal’s office. Could living under a Communist regime possibly have been any worse?!!

But now, I was FREE for three whole, entire months. Free to do as I please without classes, without bells controlling my schedule, without homework!!! I was free to wear cutoffs and old T-shirts, free to go barefoot during the day, free to get on my bicycle first thing in the morning and ride it all day long, pretty much anywhere I wanted to go.

Throughout the USA, the next generation of Americans is getting this annual treat of “freedom”, a concept many of them will decide later in life is worth standing up for, even fighting for!

The other occurrence we here in The Palmetto State witness each year along now is the end of the state’s legislative session. By law, the House and Senate must adjourn “Sine Die” no later than the first Thursday in June. (“Sine Die” is Latin, meaning “we ain’t coming back”.) This year, to save money during the recession, they adjourned a couple of weeks earlier than required.

The adjournment of ANY legislative body – House or Senate, State or Congress, or even local bodies such as city and county councils – is a great day for the cause of FREEDOM.

Because… when they’re not in session, they can’t make any more laws taking our freedom away!!!

While the daily news media has been critical of the recent legislative session, I have a very different view. This year’s state legislative session, in my humble opinion, was the most successful in my memory. They passed virtually no new laws this year… and to freedom-loving citizens, that’s a good thing.

To put it in the proper perspective, you should always remember this little axiom of government, which I learned many years ago:

“Every time a new law is passed, somebody loses a little more of their freedom”.

Laws, you know, are generally designed to tell us what we cannot do, not what we can do. We have a constitution which guarantees us certain freedoms, and we are presumed to be free to pursue any dream we may have…unless our dream has been restricted by the passage of some federal, state, or local law.

Since convening in January, the state legislature was successful in passing one major law – the annual state budget, which is needed, despite the fact that it takes away the freedom of the citizens to spend their some of their own money as they see fit.

Others may chide the General Assembly for their lack of action. I applaud them for it. Our freedoms are safe for another year.

And now, just like the schoolkids across the land, I plan to go out this summer and enjoy as much freedom as I can!

The Name Game – part two

2009-05-25T10:39:00.000-07:00

Last week, when I wrote a column entitled “The Name Game”, a lot of people told me they were expecting to see: “Hannah, Hannah, bo-bannah; banana-banna fo fannah; me, my, mo-mannah… Hannah!”

No such luck.

Instead of the words to that iconic Silly Song of the Sixties, I wrote instead about the Social Security Administration’s annual list of baby names for 2008… a list headed by “Emma” and “Jacob” as the most popular names for newborn girls and boys, respectively.

(“Respectively”, incidentally, means “in precisely the order given; sequentially”, according to my Internet dictionary. If you’re like me, you’ve read or used that word for years, but never knew exactly what it meant. Today, however, I decided to look it up to make sure of what I was writing… possible through the miracle of the Internet dictionary, right here on my same laptop computer, meaning I didn’t even have to walk across the room to the bookshelf to pick up an actual dictionary. If I had been required to get up from my Lazyboy and walk across the room, I wouldn’t have bothered: I would just have used the word anyway, and crossed my fingers in hopes that I guessed right.)

While I was conducting “research” for my column about names last week, I came across several other interesting lists of names: names of racehorses, pet dog and cat names, and names of boats, to mention a few.

Pet names, it turns out, have morphed primarily into people names in recent decades, or so it seems.

The most popular name for dogs and cats is “Max”, we are told. That can’t be good. It sounds like a plot to force dogs and cats to get along in peace and harmony, which is against nature’s plan, I’m pretty sure.

The next nine most frequent names for dogs are Bailey, Bella, Molly, Lucy, Buddy, Maggie, Daisy, Sophie, and Chloe. Virtually all of them are people names. There are no Fidos, Rovers, Ruffs, or Spots. Not even a Toto or Astro. No dog-names at all… just people names.

Cats are almost as lame. The next nine most common names after “Max” are Chloe, Tigger, Tiger, Lucy, Smokey, Oliver, Bella, Shadow, and Charlie. But still no Puff, Boots, or Felix.

My favorite bit of name research, though, was not cats, dogs, horses, or people. It was boats. And seeing as how we’re now moving into the boating season, I thought I would share some of the names of boats you’re likely to see out on the water this year.

The Top Ten boat names of 2008, according to the folks at Boat U.S. magazine are: Seas the Day, Summer Daze, Second Chance, Aqua-holic, Wind Seeker, Dream Weaver, Black Pearl, Hydrotherapy, The Salt Shaker, and Sea Quest.

While those are the most popular names, the Boat U.S. folks go on to mention their 10 FAVORITE boat names… which are my favorites, too:

1. What College Fund?
2. Stocks-N-Blonds
3. Anchor Management
4. Sweet Em-Ocean
5. Knotty Buoy
6. Reel-e-Fish-ent
7. A-Frayed Knot
8. O-Sea-D
9. A-Loan-Again
10. Really Big Car

Boat-owners, it turns out, still have a little personality when it comes to choosing names… like dog and cat owners used to have. What ever happened to Scooby-Doo?

That’s it for my weeks of “research” into the most popular names for babies, horses, dogs, cats, and boats. Next week, we’ll return to my usual style of column… with no research at all!!!

See you next week… but before I leave…. Let’s do Bella!

Bella, bella, bo-bella; banana-banna fo-fella; me, my, mo-mella… Bella!

The Name Game

2009-05-12T20:51:00.000-07:00

Most every year in May, I miss the Kentucky Derby.

Some years I miss it altogether, but I usually hear about it on the news after it happens.

Some years I’m aware of it in advance, but am too busy doing other things to watch.
And some years, I actually plan to watch it…. but I’m driving to the Piggly Wiggly to pick up more BBQ sauce when the four-minute race actually happens. Or flipping to the weather channel to see how fast the green blob is moving toward us. Or putting in a load of laundry. (Don’t laugh. I did laundry once.)

With most sports, if you tune in a few minutes late, its no big deal. If it’s NASCAR, you’ll pick ‘em up on lap three. If it’s football, you’re still in the opening possession. If it’s our national pastime, baseball, you’re still in the top of the first inning, and some of the fans in the stand are still awake.

But if you miss the first few minutes of the Derby, it’s over.

Turns out, it really doesn’t matter much, because the only thing I know about horses anyway is their names. Which, I suspect, is the same for many spectators, including some who probably make wagers based solely on that piece of information.

I like the names they come up with for their racehorses. This year, the winner’s name was “Mine That Bird”… not to be confused with “Summer Bird”, who placed sixth. The rest of the field included names like “Chocolate Candy”, “Join the Dance”, “Atomic Rain”, “West Side Bernie”, and “Mr. Hot Stuff”.

I feel bad for the horses. How would you like to go through your whole life knowing the people who feed you also decided to name you “Nowhere To Hide” or “Desert Party”?
Human names are much easier to figure. Apparently, parents-to-be travel in packs, and subscribe to the herd mentality when choosing names for their bundles-of -joy.
Last week, the Social Security Administration released the list of the top names of newborn babies for last year. This list was topped by “Emma”, which replaced “Emily” as the most common name for girls; and “Jacob” as the top name for boys. (“Emily”, by the way, had been the top girls name for the last 12 years; “Jacob” has now been in the top spot for 10 straight years!)

The runner-up names – positions two through nine – were Isabella, Emily, Madison, Ava, Olivia, Sophia, Abigail, Elizabeth, and Chloe for girls; and Michael, Ethan, Joshua, Daniel, Alexander, Anthony, William, Christopher, and Matthew for boys.
The folks at Social Security also let us know which names are on the move, and which ones are falling like a rock. On their website – www.socialsecurity.gov – they share their full list of the 1,000 most common names for the year, along with other juicy tidbits:

This year’s winner for the biggest jump is Khloe, attributed to the popularity of Khloe Kardashian from the show “Keeping Up with the Kardashians.” Khloe with a K increased 469 spots to number 196 in 2008, up from 665 in 2007 and 960 in 2006 (her first year on the list). Also, Chloe with a C is in the Top 10 for the first time ever.

Another fast riser is Miley, moving up 152 spots to number 127 for 2008, a rather impressive increase given this is only her second year on the list. On the downside for fans of Miley Cyrus’ fictional character, the name Hannah fell out of the Top 10 and landed down at number 17.

Jacoby had the biggest increase for the boys, moving up 200 spots to number 423, attributed to the appeal of last year’s star rookie Red Sox centerfielder, Jacoby Ellsbury.

Barack, they tell us, did not make this year’s top 1,000 boy’s list, but it did set what is believed to be a record by skyrocketing more than 10,000 spots in rising from number 12,535 in 2007 to 2,409 in 2008.

And Elvis, they report, is still shakin’ at number 713, but fell on the charts from 673 in 2007.

And, although the Social Security name-watchers did not include this in their annual press release, and as hard as it is to believe, for the umptieth year in a row, the name “Rod-Boy” failed to make the list at all. Apparently, out of the four millions kids born last year, nobody in America had the ingenious foresight to give their newborn that brilliant name: “Rod-Boy”!

(And probably only a handful of horse owners!!!)

Tune in next week, when we’ll take a look to see what Americans are naming their cats, dogs, boats and hurricanes these days.

Happy Mom's Day

2009-05-10T10:56:00.000-07:00

There is a famous quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln… something along the lines of: "All that I am, I owe to my Mother".

I could say that, too… but right here before Mother's Day, do I really want to put all the blame on her?

There’s a whole bunch of great stories I could recount for you in this column, to note the occasion of Mom’s Day. Some of them are even true!

Like the one year, when I was a pre-teen, and as one of my chores, was supposed to have taken down the bright multi-colored Christmas lights, which had been strung along the top of the house, which happened to be on Main Street. To be sure, I had unplugged the electricity… but January had passed, along with February and March… and I still hadn’t gotten around to actually taking them down. And then, along about Easter, Mom came home from work late one evening – well after dark – and was horrified to discover that somehow, that bright strand of holiday lights had gotten plugged in… and we were the only house in town accidentally displaying bright Easter lights all night long!!!!

Like my five years of piano lessons that she paid for… which turned out to be a huge waste money… just like that day I practiced my piano lesson similarly turned out to be a bit of a waste of time. (Fortunately, the five years of tap dancing lessons were a very wise investment. Have you SEEN me on the dance floor?!!!)

I think back to the late afternoons she would come pick me up after some sort of ball practice or other activity – whenever I called to say it was time. Mind you, this was before the days of cell phones, so she would have already gotten home from a full day’s work. (Did you ever “click” a pay phone? Usually, I didn’t have a dime on me, but had learned that you could dial the number, and just “click” the phone, which was the signal to come pick me up!!!)

I was a picky eater as a child. Still am, in fact. (A picky eater… not a child!) So.. for about 15 years, Mom cooked all of our meals without using onions, tomatoes, and a host of other vegetables that are really very useful in cooking. Once, after Sunday dinner, she and Dad insisted that I eat the English peas that had been prepared, and said I could not leave the table until I did. About three hours later, I left the table, after consuming approximately 50 of the nasty little beans one at a time… popping them like pills, and swallowing half a glass of tea after each one.

Sunday dinner, by the way, is what we called the meal eaten shortly after noon on Sunday, which we ate together every week, after returning from Sunday School and church, which we attended together every week. If it was summertime, incidentally, we sometimes ate that dinner at the lake, and if we didn’t eat there, we generally headed there for the rest of the afternoon.

Sundays weren’t the only family rituals. There were others. Wednesday nights, for instance, were TV nights in the Shealy family den: Green Acres, followed by The Beverly Hillbillies!!!

Needless to say, I had a great childhood, thanks to my Mom and Dad. There were the ordinary scrapes and bruises that all kids get, which needed the appropriate tending-to by Mom… but I also had my share of extra-ordinary “scrapes and bruises”, we will call them symbolically – many of them self-inflicted… and Mom was always there.

Obviously, it’s not easy being my mom… ranging from the anxious tension she undoubtedly feels each time she opens the morning newspaper, to the stressful concern she most assuredly feels each week when she starts to read this column!!!

But she never complains. In fact, she never complains at all… about anything. For that matter, she never says anything bad at all about anybody. For the 55 years I’ve been on this earth, I’ve never heard her say anything bad about anybody… even me!!!

So Mom, I hope you have a Happy Mother’s Day…. cause if anybody deserves one, its you!

And I know the best thing I can do for you on this occasion is to stop writing now… so you can breathe a sigh of relief… at least for another week.

Happy Mothers Day!

Rod-Boy’s Fashion Tips for Summertime

2009-04-30T13:46:00.000-07:00

As we head into the final stretch toward sho’nuff summertime in sunny South Carolina, many of you are wondering what the fashion trends of the season will be.

And, naturally, that means my email box is full of inquiring minds asking me for the inside scoop, seeing as how I have earned somewhat of a reputation as a perennial fashion trendsetter. (Many people depend on my advice to avoid making fashion faux-pas.)

Take clam-diggers, for instance. I’m confident that my all-time favorite summertime article of clothing attire is going to make a comeback. Nevermind the fact that I haven’t actually seen a pair of clam-diggers since I was six years old. This summer, I plan to find a pair somewhere and don them… and I’m pretty sure the trend will spread like wildfire. (I always liked the rope belt, which, when I was six years old, also came in pretty handy for tying up siblings.)

Here are the rest of clothing trends I’ll be setting in the coming months:

Shirts -- There are two basic shirt choices in the summertime: printed tee-shirts or alohas (aka Hawaiian). Which you wear depends largely on your belly size. (Get it? Depends “largely” on your belly size!) If you’re occasionally a big, fat, giant, hippo-pig-whale, as I am, you’ll want to stick with the loose fitting alohas, instead of the sometimes snug-fitting tee-shirts. I personally am a big fan of the alohas… mainly because I’m a BIG fan of the alohas! Printed teeshirts, on the other hand, do offer the extra advantage of advertising your favorite rock band, NASCAR driver, or allergy medication.

Color choices of shirts – and all summerwear, for that matter – depends largely on your choice of BBQ sauce, since BBQ is the meal most likely to be eaten in the summertime. If I’m planning on eating ketchup-based BBQ sauce, I’ll probably go with a red-toned shirt; if it’s mustard-based sauce, then I’ll trend toward a yellow or mustard color. Bottom line: If you go ahead and plan in advance to blend your shirt with your sauce, you’ll save yourself a lot of heartache from the almost-certain “drip and stain” eventuality. (By the way, I have found that a good, flowery, multi-color aloha shirt will hide virtually ANY summertime BBQ drippage you might encounter!)

Footwear -- Two words: Flip Flop! It’s the next best thing to going barefoot, which is really my favorite, but I know a lot of big city folks who read this column – from places like Pelion, Prosperity, Elgin and Huger – will reject my notion of going barefoot. If you can’t go barefoot, flip-flops are the next best thing, followed by sandals and old, worn-out sneakers. Socks, on the other hand, should definitely NOT be worn in the summertime. I mean, what’s the point? (If you feel you must wear socks, I recommend black socks, worn with sandals, so you will blend in with the tourists visiting from Up North.)

Pants -- While you’re waiting for clam-diggers to once again become all the rage (just because I said so), there are a few other acceptable styles of pants you can wear: Cut off jeans are a safe choice. Swimtrunks always work. And I seem to generate a lot of real nice comments, compliments, and approving smiles from total strangers every time I wear my plaid Bermuda shorts that my aunt gave me back in 1973.

Neckwear – This is the area of clothing which represents the greatest difference between summertime and the other seasons. The recommended neckwear(s) in the summertime generally fall into three categories: 1) Straps, such as sunglasses, guitars, or beverage holders; 2) Hawaiian leis, to match the highly-recommended aloha shirts; and 3) Bibs… very helpful when slurping up the BBQ which should be consumed at least five days a week during the summer months.

Neckwear which is NOT recommended during summertime is: 1) necktie (ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha… as if I even OWN one!); and, 2) jewelry, like gold chains, etc. This ain’t Jersey, you know.

Accessories – The Stylish Southern Male’s wardrobe can be completed with a few well-thought-out accessories: straw hat, sunglasses, and a white stripe where your wristwatch once was. It’s summertime! Who needs to know what time it is?

To select the appropriate straw hat, you’ll want to factor in the angle you expect your head to lay on your hammock, which is, after all, the most important pastime of a good summer day.

Your shades, on the other hand, say much about your personality… about “who you are” as person. (Mine, for instance, reveal that I am a confirmed cheapo who likes to shop at dollar stores and consignment shops.)

Well, that should cover the fashion basics, and allow you to head out into the summer sunshine stylin’ and profilin’!!!

There is, of course, much, much more I could tell you about fashion, but it will just have to wait until next week, when our fashion topics will be: “Tattoos for Great-Grandparents”; “Piercings After 50”; and “Elastic Waistbands: Not Just for Formal Wear Anymore!”

I’m in the white car

2009-04-29T11:32:00.000-07:00

If you happen to see me walking around a parking lot this week, seemingly meandering from vehicle to vehicle, don’t worry. It will just be me looking for my car.

This week, it turns out, I’m in a rental vehicle. Last week, a delivery truck smushed the door of my car. (“Smush”, incidentally, is NOT a technical automotive industry term – and actually doesn’t even show up in most English language dictionaries – but it’s the only word which can adequately describe precisely what happened to the door of my car.)

The rental vehicle is white. It has a name – probably something like Ford, Chevy, Dodge, or TamishiakiYomasukiSushhama – but car makes and models go in one ear and out the other with me. All I know is it’s white.

You may know this about me: I am not a car person. I can’t tell them apart. They’re all about the same to me. I can’t tell you what’s under the hood of my car. Actually, I HAVE owned cars that I’m not really sure which end WAS the hood.

What I know about a car is this: I go out in the morning and put the key in the ignition and turn the key and either it starts or it doesn’t. If it starts, I drive it. If it doesn’t, oh well, I guess I just have to find a different car.

As a result of a total lack of knowledge, understanding, and concern about all things automotive, I have amassed a pretty long list of car tales in my lifetime… far too many to recount in this space in a single week. It would take several weeks… and I just might do that.

But these honest-to-goodness, absolutely-true tidbits will give you a clue how I am with cars: I once owned a car which broke down so often, it had a trailer hitch installed on the front bumper for ease in towing! I once lost a car. And I once painted a car myself… with a paintbrush.

Obviously, I am not mechanically inclined. The only tool I have ever found even remotely useful in repairing a car is a hammer.

And now, as automotively-challenged as I am, I face the additional problem of driving a car that looks exactly like half the other cars on the road. It’s a little white car… and that’s really all I know about it.
And, to make things worse, I’m just a tad absent-minded. Sometimes, right in the middle of doing something, I completely forget to

So, when I go into the grocery store, absent-mindedly bumbling along the aisles in search of grocery items I can’t remember at locations I can’t recall, I’m also very likely to forget exactly where I parked my little white rental car.

A few years ago, when I was travelling from Columbia to Charleston in a similarly nondescript borrowed car, I stopped at the rest area near Orangeburg. When I came out of the restroom, to my dismay, I had no clue which of the 50 cars in the rest area I had been driving. Through the miracle of Electronic Cell-phones, however, I was able to contact the owner of the car and establish the color, size and tag number. And, 49 cars later, I found it!!!

Normally, it’s not a big problem for me. Sure, I forget where I parked, but it rarely takes me more than a half-hour to find my car, because it’s usually the only one of it’s kind in the lot. Like my rental, it’s white… BUT it’s old and big and rectangular… with a blue top. My car is usually easy to find, because it’s roughly the size of a WWII battleship, and shaped a lot like a Ramada Hotel. And, just in case there are two, mine is the one with the assortment of brightly-colored bumper stickers plastered on it, ranging back to the “I Like Ike” era.

This week, I’m trying to avoid going to the grocery store, to avoid the embarrassment of losing my car. But one can only go so long without nourishment.

If you see me in the parking lot, peering into the window of every single white car, don’t fret. It’s just me trying to find the one with a hammer on the front seat.

The return of the Big, Fat, Giant Hippo-Pig-Whale!!!

2009-04-26T09:15:00.000-07:00

It’s baaaaaaa-ck!

The big, fat, giant hippo-pig-whale that believes itself to be my alter-ego is trying desperately to take over my body again.

Actually, the BFGHPW was only gone for a week or so.

Regular readers of this column will recall that, back during the frosty winter days of January, I forthrightly proclaimed on these pages: “I am a Big, Fat, Giant Hippo-Pig-Whale”. My girth had begun to exceed my net-worth. My waistline has become a wasteland. I was regularly cheating on my over-eating. (I was an huge-enormous poet that didn’t know it.)

So, given my gargantuosity (a word I have just made up to describe the condition), I did what I always do to shed a few pounds: I challenged the whole world to a weight-loss competition. And… the whole world sent eleven of its stoutest members to accept my challenge.

For eight weeks, a dozen of us were slaves to our chosen diets in a battle of willpower to see which of us would claim the $100 per person prize (which converts to $1200 American dollars, for the numerically-challenged).

That weight-loss contest came to a conclusion last week, on April 6th, which, it turns out, was the Monday before a major holiday: Easter!!!

Here’s an interesting fact which I never fully realized until last week: As it turns out, Easter is one of the Major Food Holidays, along with Thanksgiving and Christmas. The main event of the holiday, other than going to church, is eating a big Easter meal. Let me repeat: A BIG Easter meal.

I have probably sorta taken those meals for granted in previous years. But not this time. I had just come off of an eight-week self-imposed hunger strike – during which I had officially lost 32.7 pounds – and I apparently unknowingly set about trying to see if I could gain it all back at one sitting!!!! I almost succeeded! Hence, about a half-dozen pounds of the Big, Fat, Giant Hippo-Pig-Whale has returned!!!!

But it was great being down 32.7 pounds while it lasted… which was about an hour and a half.

As it turns out, my 32.7 pounds lost was good enough to put me in second place for the competition… just ahead of three other former weight-loss champs. The reigning weight-loss champ Don Gawrys lost 32 even. Three-time champ Kirk Luther lost 26. And the original contest champ Norman Agnew lost 22.

Turns out most of the other contenders – Bruce Holland, Jimmy Carroll, Denis Vaucher, Doug Adam, Shirley Towne, Jim Miles, and Terry Campbell – were merely window dressing whose only role was making the prize money bigger. They averaged losing about 10 pounds.

But the big winner – and new Almost Annual Fifteen Fat Guys Weight Loss Competition Champion – was Tom Boetger, General Manager of Carrabba’s in Harbison. Tom bested the field with a total weight lost of 46.8 pounds, dropping from 267.8 to 221 in eight weeks.

At the big final weigh-in, Tom let us in on his secret: He went on a diet, and stuck to it!!! Brilliant! No… Genius! What a plan!!! Diabolically clever.

So, our congrats to Tom, the new King of the Formerly Fat Guys.

And I hope Tom enjoyed HIS Easter as much as I enjoyed mine: Six pounds!!!

Rod-Boy’s Tax Tips

2009-04-10T08:14:00.000-07:00

This week, I want to offer some free advice… and as with ALL the free advice I give out, it’s worth TWICE as much.

However, if I were you, I would think twice about following my advice this week, because this week, I’m leaving my typical areas of expertise – fashion, art, cuisine, physical fitness, home décor and design, Scrabble, and Undercover CIA Operations – and delving into an entirely new field: Rod-Boy’s IRS Tax Deduction Advice.

Now, already, I know the question prolly at the tip of your tongue: “Hey, Rod-Boy! Since you’re giving away all this valuable advice for free, like a donation, will you be able to claim it as a tax deduction?”

The answer is a resounding “NO”. Claiming Free Advice as a tax deduction is a bad idea, a lesson I learned during the IRS Audits of 1982 and 1983.

The next question you’re likely thinking to yourself now is, “Hey, Rod-Boy! If I applied my Schedule C Accrued Depreciation Allowance to the Earned Income Credit or my Adjusted Minimum Tax because of my Net Operating loss from Credit Default Swaps, can I apply the carry-forward to a SEP or HAS?”

My answer to that question is a resounding “Can you say that again slower.. and maybe use some littler words?”

My point is: I do not know everything about Income Taxes. But I do know some stuff. And, today, I want to share some of the stuff I know, or else have just invented out of thin air, one or the other.

With times being what they are – a slow economy, a recession, tight-money, and Reality TV Shows almost every night – things seem pretty bleak. And with tax filing day coming up next week, most Americans will be looking for ways to hold on to every penny possible, which sometimes leads to “playing a little fast and loose” with the ol’ tax deductions.

Here’s my advice: Don’t do it!

I really can’t tell you what deductions you SHOULD claim, but I have compiled a handy little list of deductions you should NOT take. (Feel free to clip this list and pass it around the office to your co-workers.)

Here it is -- Rob-Boy’s List of Bad Tax Deductions. DO NOT try to claim these tax deductions:

-- One of the most common deductions being tried unsuccessfully this year is the Interest on your Mortgage Deduction for the cardboard boxes many Americans are currently living in.

-- Some taxpayers are trying to claim Education Credits & Deductions for going back to school because watching Hulu.com – an evil plot to take over the world – has turned their brains into mush.

-- The IRS has denied a claim for Depreciation Allowance on a ShamWow when it began to lose its absorbency after only 23,257 uses.

-- Several Illinois taxpayers unsuccessfully claimed Charitable Donations to the Governor of Illinois in their attempts to be appointed to the United States Senate.

-- In addition to the Hybrid Vehicle Credit, some are listing a Hybrid TV Credit, arguing that their TV has not yet switched from digital to analog as promised.

-- The Bernie Madoff Medical Expenses Deduction, which allows Bernie Madoff to take large deductions years in advance, because if he ever gets out of prison, he’s probably going to need lots of medical attention.

-- The IRS is also not likely to allow the “Serving Fish to Tourist in T-Shirts” Deduction because you’re broke and have no money so what could it possibly hurt.

-- And this year’s catch-all deduction is the “So Easy A Caveman Could Do It” Deduction Suite, a collection of large, random, miscellaneous deductions, none of which are valid, but if the IRS questions you, you just say: “Oops! Sorry. I had a caveman do my taxes for me.”

That’s my list. None of these deductions will work, so I’m afraid you’re just going to have to suck it up and pay your taxes.

However, while none of these deductions will work, I am exploring another plan to deal with taxes in these dismal times. At the grocery store last week, the lady ahead of me in the checkout line had an envelope full of coupons she had clipped, and she saved about a hundred dollars on her grocery bill.

So do you think the IRS will accept grocery coupons?

Spring Forward This Week

2009-04-01T04:54:00.000-07:00

Don’t forget to set your clocks ahead one hour

This week, for the second time in less than a month, many Americans will once again set their clocks ahead one hour, thanks to a new Economic Stimulus program passed this month by Congress.

Called “Economic Stimulus Daylight Savings Time” (ESDST), the new program is totally voluntary for Americans wishing to dedicate an extra hour each day to reviving the economy.

With many citizens already planning to use their initial extra hour of Daylight Savings Time to earn extra income, thus stimulating the economy, Congress hopes a second, additional extra hour will stimulate the economy even more. The original proposal, which would have mandated the second hour of Daylight Savings Time for all states, stalled in the Senate after passing the House, forcing the Obama administration to offer a compromise which made the extra hour totally voluntary.

If the ESDST voluntary extra hour succeeds, sources say Obama will use that success to bolster his health care proposal, which is designed to work on the same principal.

To increase participation, the plan offers citizens additional incentives:

-- Participants will also be able to Spring Forward on their income taxes, with the traditional April 15th deadline moved forward one month to May 15th for those who sign up for the extra hour;
-- As an additional economic stimulus, participants will be allowed to roll-back the odometer on their primary vehicle by up to 10,000 miles;
-- The long-awaited “analog to digital” TV conversion will be delayed by up to one year for ESDST participants; and
-- All participants will be allowed to reset their home bathroom scales by up to 10 pounds, allowing instant weight loss for participants.

While traditional DST always begins at the hour of 2:00 am on a Saturday night/Sunday morning, ESDST will begin midweek, during the night of Tuesday, March 31st, with participants re-setting their clocks at 2:00 am Wednesday morning (4/1/2009).

Not all officials are happy with the Economic Development Daylight Savings Time plan.

South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford rejected the extra hour outright, writing in a Wall Street Journal editorial that he will veto any future Daylight Savings Time legislation. Sanford, a strong proponent of the global economy, said he believes that the time-of-day should always be exactly the same in all time zones around the world. Known for his Libertarian leanings, Sanford said he also believes that each individual should have the right to choose their own time-of-day.

Sanford’s staunch Libertarian ally, Wall Street mogul Howard Rich, agreed with the Governor, and announced plans to fund new “Time-Choice” political organizations in a dozen states, appropriately named: “Iowans Against Gun Control”, “South Carolinians for Gooder Government”, “North Carolinians for Government Gooder than South Carolina’s”, “Texans United for Boots (TUB)”, “Utah Citizens for Wife”, “North Dakotans for Warmer Weather”, “Save The Seals”, “Rescue The Whales”, “Help the Hippos”, “Serving Fish to Tourists in Tee Shirts”, and “I Hate the New Facebook”.

It was unclear whether those groups have any connection to another recently formed organization, “Gullible Transplanted Northerners Who Always Fall for Rod-Boy’s Annual April Fools Columns”.

Victoria’s got a Secret, and Mark Sanford does, too.

2009-03-31T09:27:00.000-07:00

Just what we need: one more hack commenting on the economy. Never-mind, I’m doing it anyway, because that seems to be what’s on everybody’s mind these days.
I’ve actually written here about the economy a few times before, but mainly to urge folks to protect our LOCAL economy by shopping local. When the first round of stimulus checks started flowing nearly a year ago, I reminded readers that the Big Giant Corporations and their investors would profit handsomely, before sending on a share of our economic stimulus funds to the manufacturers of their products in China and beyond.

Way back last spring, I predicted that Wall Street and foreign companies would benefit nicely from this infusion of our cash… and that was before any of us had heard the term “bailout”.

The way things have actually unfolded in the last year makes me seem smart.

Actually, I’m not very smart at finances at all. Most of what I know about bank failures is what I’ve learned by watching George Bailey and Mr. Potter in “It’s a Wonderful Life” every year.

But I do occasionally have a dose of common sense, which, to me, seems to be missing these days. So here are a few of the common-sense observations I’ve made about the economy... or at least some questions that have arisen in my mind:

1. Last year, we bailed out the banks because they were taking a beating because people who had borrowed to buy a home couldn’t pay their mortgages. This year, we bailed out the insurance giant AIG, which had insured the banks in case people couldn’t pay their mortgages. So, doesn’t that mean we’re bailing out the same mortgages twice?

2. I keep hearing that this is the worst recession since the early 1980’s. Frankly, I was around in the early 1980’s, and I don’t remember any recession that seemed as bad as the current one. So what’s different? I think it’s because we now have 24-hour news, and far more pervasive news media than at any time in the past. The national media, you know, loves to report bad news… so they’re having a field day with this recession. The actual statistics say this recession is no worse than the recession of ’81-’82… but the media sure is making it seem worse.

3. We don’t produce things anymore. By “we”, I mean the US of A. I noticed it ten year ago, and I heard President Obama mention it on TV last week. Our economy is “artificial”. He said that 40% of our total economic growth had been in the finance sector. That means we’re just trading money back and forth, and adding a little value to it every time we make a deal. But all that money-swapping isn’t producing anything, except artificial wealth. Our manufacturing industries have left our shores, and a lot of agricultural products are now coming from elsewhere. That leaves Americans to trade money and information, and sell services to each other.

4. The new “global economy” is a bad idea for us. There is a reason our jobs have gone overseas. It’s because we don’t compete on a level playing field. We offer our citizens basic human rights. They don’t. As long as other nations are using what amounts to slave labor, we’ll never be able to produce goods as cheaply as they can. We also protect our citizens by insisting on standards for our products. They don’t. That’s why we’re seeing crisis after crisis of products manufactured in China causing problems here.

5. Everybody is dealing with the recession in their own way. The Girl Scouts made their cookies smaller this year.

6. At my house, we’re examining our bills a little closer than usual before just automatically paying them. That’s how my wife happened to notice an unfamiliar charge on her Victoria’s Secret bill: a charge for $109 for an item called “VS Escapes” that she was sure she hadn’t authorized, because she hadn’t shopped there in months. After calling a toll-free number, and spending an hour researching the charges online, we determined that she had fallen victim to something I would categorize as a “scam” of major proportions. Apparently, at some point during the online purchase or credit-card process, Victoria’s Secret customers unknowingly agree to this annual $109 charge to join a program from an unaffiliated travel company. I visited the Consumer Reports website and discovered this practice has been victimizing VS customers for years, many of them never taking the time to check their monthly statements, and forking over $109 a year for a service they didn’t ask for. While I may be a fan of Victoria’s Secret’s products, I’m not a fan of this scam… especially during tough economic times. So… I’m blowing the whistle on them… to help protect others.

7. Here’s an even bigger scam: Our governor is playing politics with our state’s future. You have probably heard that Mark Sanford rejected $700 million of economic stimulus money for our state. Now I’m going to tell you WHY he rejected it. He rejected it just so he would look good to arch-conservative voters across the nation during his upcoming campaign for President. While I admittedly don’t know much about high-finance, I do know a little about political campaigns. Make no mistake: Mark Sanford is selling out our state’s future for his own personal political gain. He’s all politics, all the time… even while pretending to be “above” politics.

So, next time you hear of a friend or neighbor losing a job, see a local business close its doors, or have to tell the kids you can’t really afford a vacation this year…. Thank your Governor!

There you have it: My common-sense observations about the economy. We now return you to your regularly-scheduled, 24-hours a day, national media news cycle already in progress.

Humor Writing….. NOT!

2009-03-30T09:44:00.000-07:00

For the last five weeks, I’ve been sorta hungry… mainly, ‘cause me and a handful of buddies have been engaged in a High Stakes Weight Loss Contest, with $1200 American Dollars on the line… and what with the recession and all, the whole bunch of us have been trying pretty hard to win the contest! (Bad grammar alert: I know I should have said “a handful of buddies and I”, but the lack of nutrition from my current diet has made me too weak to go back and fix my error.)

I’ve been doing this roughly annually for the last half-decade or so. Competition is the only sure-fire way I have of losing weight. Of course, its evident that I’m not REALLY losing weight, at least not for the long term. If I was REALLY losing weight, long term, then I wouldn’t need to do it every year, now would I.

Anyway, a few weeks ago, I announced that I was once again a Big-Fat-Giant Hippo-Pig-Whale, and, therefore, it was time to kick off our Annual Fifteen Fat Guys Weight Loss Contest.

We kicked it off back on Feburary 9th, and I’ve been hungry ever since. However, instead of 15, we had 12, one of which is not a guy at all, but a gal. Here is how we weighed in at the start:

Reigning Champion Don Gawrys, Manager of Michaels -- 374.2; Okra Strut Chairman and three-time champion Kirk Luther -- 247.0; Bruce Holland, Attorney -- 229.6; Tom Beottger -- 267.8; Terry Campbell of nationwide Insurance -- 235.4; Norman Agnew of Agnew Lake Service-- 285.2; Jim Miles, former Secreatry of State -- 241.0; Doug Adam, The Indesign Firm -- 277.2; Denis Vaucher, International Man of Mystery -- 228.2; Jimmy Carroll, Isle of Palms Man of Mystery -- 228.2; and, yours truly, Rod-Boy Shealy -- a massive, whopping, huge-enormous, earth-orbit-altering 248.6 lbs.

We’ve now completed five weeks of an eight week contest, and the contestants are getting… well, we’re getting a little ornery.

Plus, all the rest of them are real secretive about their current weights. It’s because they’re trying to use strategery in the contest!!! It’s also because they believe I will make Big Jokes about them in this column if they tell me how much weight they’ve lost. And they’re right! So they won’t tell me.

Every time we have one of these contests, I write pretty much whatever I want to about my Blubbery Buddies who have joined me in the competition. I refer to it as “humor”, and sometimes, my readers actually giggle or guffaw… and not just at my picture.

Well, apparently my fellow contestants have had enough. For the last few weeks, they’ve lighted up the Internet with their Blubbery Barbs aimed back at Yours-Truly!!!

They’re taking Porky-Pig Pokes!!! Tank-sized Teasing!!!

So, I thought I’d give you a sample of the Jumbo Jibes -- and feeble attempts at humor -- these Big-Bellied Bubbas been shooting my way.

From Young Mr. Agnew:

“As a member of Rod’s infamous weight loss contest (as a side note it really shouldn’t be called Rod’s as he has never won) I’d like to get a few things off of my chest other than about 60 pounds. With regards to our “Captain of Cream” and by cream I of course mean Ice Cream, not the popular band of the 70’s, it is probable that he once again will not win this contest. I am hopeful that I will walk away (walk, not jog or run) victorious this year, a feat that I haven’t been able to match since the “original” weight loss contest. This little-known contest didn’t get the publicity like the present day one. It probably didn’t get the publicity because it was yet another contest Mr. Shealy failed to win. This year, we have one of the larger contests on our hands, and that sparks even more incentive to win, something I doubt our esteemed publisher will be doing yet again this year. If you have noticed a developing theme in my letter, it is for good reason. Although I would like to win the contest this year, as long as one of my deserving colleagues wins, and they are not the publisher of a paper, I will be happy. I wish the best of luck to all participants… with the exception of Rod!”

From Jimmy Carroll:

“Weight loss, how about we change the game to memory loss. No huh, well as for your beach bum contestant, he is still holding give or take 6lbs lost. Darn, I am still walking every night, I gave up my life blood, sweet tea, I mean, real sweet tea and darn it, only 6 lbs!!!!! O-well, maybe I am becoming all muscle and my body is creating 6 pack abs, but the mirror doesn't agree. So unless there is some miracle here on the good ole Isle of Palms, I may be out another $100 bucks.”

From Kirk Luther:

“I realized that my wait loss has not decreased but has increased substantially since the beginning of this contest. I've calculated what my 'wait deficiency' is currently and want to share it with all of you: Wait for coffee pot to brew each morning: 3.2 x 30 days since start of contest = 96; Wait at the doctors office: 58; Wait at DMV: 43.5; Wait at dentist: 16.4; Wait for stimulus check: 63 days since Obama took office (90,720); Wait for this stupid contest to end as of today: 30 days or 43200; TOTAL WAIT (in minutes): 134,133.9. So there you have it... I have lost 2235..565 hours or 93.148 days trying to win $1200. If I had spent that time actually working for minimum wage at the current SC rate of $6.55 per hour I would have earned $14,642.95. We either have to up the ante for this contest or reconsider our priorities.”

So, as you can see from the three samples above, extreme weight-loss diets apparently not only make you hungry and ornery, but also seem to completely drain one’s humor writing talents. (I wish them luck at winning the money in the weigh-loss competition… cause they’re not gonna make it on the comedy circuit.)

And to my readers…. I’m sorry you had to witness this. I promise to never again include anything submitted from any of the other contestants in our weight-loss contest.

And I promise I’ll be back next week with my own rip-roaring, side-splitting, half-witted brand of fun, frolic, and frivolity. Or else something else.

How to use your extra hour

2009-03-29T21:14:00.000-07:00

So, how are you enjoying your extra hour so far? If you’re like me, you’re still sleepy from the hour we missed Saturday night!!!

Last week, I arrived at a conservative valuation for the combined “extra hours” all Americans would have this year, thanks to Daylight Savings Time, of approximately $720 billion. (I now know that figure was a little high, because I have learned that two states – Arizona and Hawaii – do not participate in this hoax. Arizona I can definitely understand. If their legislature tried to sell an extra hour of 115 degree desert afternoon heat every day to those Old Retired Arizona Geezers, they’d be chased out of office faster than you can say, “Help, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” So, I’ve adjusted my Economic Impact estimate down to and even $700 billion!)

I also noted that most people, even though they’re hurting financially due to “The Recession”, don’t have the foggiest notion, not even a clue, how to use their extra useable hour to help make ends meet.

So, as promised, I’m pleased to present Rod-Boy’s List of Some Good Old Fashioned Common-Sense Ways to Make A Few Extra Bucks to Survive the Recession. (Incidentally, if this recession isn’t making things a little tight and uncomfortable for you, then you’re one of the fortunate ones, and the rest of this column isn’t for you. But, as someone who has had to scrape together loose change to buy enough gas to get to work more times -- and more recently -- than I care to admit, I’m offering this advice for the rest of us.) So, here it is… my absolutely FREE advice -- and worth two or three times that much:

1. Work more! If are self-employed or in sales, this is easy. If not, then offer to work overtime or assume additional responsibilities, or volunteer to do work at your office that would normally be handed off to temps.

2. Get a second-job utilizing your career skills. If there’s no extra work available where you work, find another company which needs your skills and do a little moonlighting.

3. Get a part-time job in another field. While few businesses hire part-timers for one-hours shifts, many restaurants, retailers, telemarketing firms, etc., are looking for extra help during certain times of the week, like Friday night, Sunday afternoon, or Saturdays. So use your extra hours each day to spend extra quality time with the kids, then take your Friday night for a part-time job.

4. Take on odd jobs, such as yard work, painting, housecleaning, car wash, dog sit, spring cleaning, haul-off, gutter cleaning, etc. Simply put the word out to your friends that you’re available, and keep putting it out until your phone rings.

5. Sit. Baby sit, dog sit, house sit, and so on. Again, put the word out to friends that you’re available to keep kids in your home or theirs. Since there are plenty of moms who are taking on extra part-time jobs themselves, there are plenty of people looking for extra child care services.

6. Be an errand driver one day a week, or one evening. Plenty of seniors or shut-ins who need someone to run errands for them, or to be driven so they can do their own shopping or errands.

7. Offer services. You probably have some skills or talents which you’ve overlooked: tax preparation, computer repair, home/appliance repair, oil change and auto mechanic, cooking/catering, or designing. Again, put the word out to your friends, and ask them to tell their friends. There are people who need the skill you possess.

8. Work at home on-line. In this new world of technology, there are many online opportunities: data-entry, billing, design, writing, computer skills. Of course, there are also plenty of online scams, so make sure the money (and information) is coming TO you, not FROM you.

9. Sell your stuff. Sell items you do not need at the flea market, in the want ads, or online on Ebay or Craigslist. Then, if you seem to have a knack for it, perhaps you can use your receipts to continue to buy and sell items at a profit. Just make sure you’re actually making a profit.

10. Sign up with a temp agency. If you can’t seem to make the items above work for you, then go to a temp agency, and let ‘em know when you’re available. Since the economy is bad, some businesses are relying on temps to do work formerly done by employees.

11. Teach lessons or tutor. Somewhere out there are people who want to learn how to do something you already know how to do. Show them… for a small fee.

12. Become a salesman. This is my personal favorite, because it comes natural to me… but it also comes natural to most people. Take a sales job, and spend your spare time meeting new friends and asking them if they want to buy whatever you’re selling. You can join some sort of sales company, such as a multi-level marketing outfit (because those things actually do work for lots of people), or you can simply approach local businesses and ask them to let you sell for them. Most businesses would like an extra part-time salesman that could be paid based on sales made.

There you have it. A dozen ways you can use your extra hour each day to help you survive during these tough times. Maybe you have some other suggestions you can send for me to pass along. Send me one of those Electronic Emails at RodShealy@aol.com.

That my FREE advice… and prolly worth two or three times that much! While the Economic Experts are telling you how to survive the recession by CUTTING costs – which incidentally HURTS our economy – I decided to go a different direction and suggest ways to MAKE MORE money.

Or, again, you can just sit in front of the TV for an extra hour each day and watch the news about how bad the recession is.

An extra hour!

2009-03-07T06:13:00.000-08:00

This weekend, we will once again embark on the annual hoax we refer to as
Daylight Savings Time.

It’s a harmless hoax, because we’re all in it together. We’re collectively playing a giant practical joke on ourselves: fooling ourselves into believing we’ve created an extra hour!!!

After our bodies get over the shock of losing an hour of sleep on Saturday night – which, in my case, will probably take about a month of daily half-hour naps – we will be rewarded with an extra hour of daylight every afternoon until November. An extra hour!

In reality, it’s not an extra hour, because you cannot create time – not even Congress, which authored the current DST hoax – but it does SEEM to be an extra hour!

What it is, in reality, is an extra USEABLE hour each day… useable because it’s tacked on to the end of the workday.

So, for all practical purposes, we all get an extra hour per day to use as we see fit.

Hold that thought for a moment while we explore a different concept…

Time is money.

We’ve all heard that adage, and we inherently know it’s true. Time is money. If you work an hour, you get paid for an hour. If you work eight hours, you get paid for eight hours.

Now, hold THAT though for a moment while we move on to yet at THIRD concept: We are in a recession. Our economy is suffering. We don’t have enough money. Businesses are collapsing. Everywhere, people are worried about how they’re going to pay their bills… about how they’re going to survive.

Okay… now, let’s take those three concepts and try to connect the dots:

First, we’re in a recession, and everybody needs more money.

Second, time is money.

Third, starting next week, we’re all going to have an extra useable hour of time each week.

Are you seeing where I’m going with this? Doesn’t it seem like the extra hour – which is time, which is money – ought to put a dent in the recession?

Let’s do the math. If each person gets an extra hour per day, that means they have 30 extra hours per month. There are roughly 300 million people in America. That comes to 9 billion extra useable hours per month in America. Eight months of DST… now we have 72 billion extra useable hours this year. Let’s put a conservative average value on an hour of $10… meaning the extra useable hours THIS YEAR alone should be worth $720 billion…. nearly as much as the bailout!!!

So, it turns out, we didn’t really need a bailout at all… we just each need to use our extra hour per day to do something useful for our own economy!!!

That’s the good news. Now here’s the bad news. It will not work that way because – despite the fact that they all KNOW time is money – very few Americans understand how to apply that concept anymore. Once upon a time, we all knew. A century or two ago, when we were still an agricultural society, with an occasional craftsman thrown in, virtually all Americans understood that to make more money, you could simply work more hours. By working more hours, farmers could plant and harvest more acres. By working more hours, craftsmen could produce more goods to sell.

But then came the industrial revolution, and eventually mass-production, the assembly line, and factories, and suddenly most Americans simply worked whatever hours the boss told them to work. Sure, they got paid for their hours, but gradually they lost their entrepreneurial instincts.

And, today, confronted with an uncertain financial future, but a sudden boon of seven extra hours each week to use, most Americans – I would guess 9 out of 10 – have absolutely no idea how to connect those dots to create extra income for themselves.

So, just because I like to help out as I can, I’m going to give you some common-sense suggestions on how to use your extra hours for extra income.

Next week.

In the meantime, why don’t you see if you can figure it out for yourself? If you come up with really good ideas, send them to me and I will share them with the rest of the class. Email to me at RodShealy@aol.com

And next week, I’ll offer at least a dozen ideas on how you can use your extra hour to beat the recession.

Or, if you prefer, you can just watch TV… especially the news, to find out how bad this economy is.

A few good words

2009-02-27T11:41:00.000-08:00

You may know that I have “invented” a few words in the past. They are good words. I am hopeful that my words eventually become part of the lexicon… and possibly even find their way into Webster’s and Thorndike-Barnhart.

Inventing new words is not something to be taken lightly. You really don’t want to be running around willy-nilly coming up with new words. The English language is cluttered enough as it is.

But, occasionally, there is a need for a new word, because there’s something new that you need to say. “Website”, “software”, and “Internet” are all words which we didn’t need 30 years ago, but now we do!

Recognizing the need, I invented my first two words some years back. The words were: “ar” and “teafill”.

“Ar” means the same as “and/or”. You see that phrase a lot, so I thought there ought to be a word which means “and/or”. I chose the word “ar”. It has not yet been included in Webster’s Dictionary, but I’m holding out hope.

“Teafill” is my word which means “tea refill”, a phrase that I seem to use a lot. It’s a good word. Webster’s should definitely pick up on this one.

I should point out that neither of these words have yet been widely accepted, but I am confident that, someday, they will. (And I intend to keep mentioning them at least once a year in this column until they catch on.)

If I had to choose one of my words to be included in Webster’s, I’d pick “ar”, because it would be a very helpful word when playing Scrabble

Last year, I invented my third word. The word is “crookwards”. I invented it while hanging some framed documents on the wall. I know what it means, but I still haven’t written an exact definition.

Today, I want to introduce four brand new words I have invented, again because I see the need:

The first word is “yappity”. It’s an adjective, and it’s literal definition, I have decided is “talking in a non-stop manner, similar to a puppy barking”. Believe it or not, this word was inspired by a female.

The next new word is “rainshine”. It’s the reflection of lights against the wet pavement. I thought of that word while I was driving, if you can believe it!

The third word is “flurb”. It’s a much needed word here in the South where we have heat and humidity. “Flurbing” is the condition of two rubbery or fleshlike items “grabbing” when they rub together. For instance, if you’re wearing Bermuda shorts in the summertime and your bare leg seems to stick to a vinyl restaurant booth or car seat. Then, my friend, you have “flurbed”.

My final new word is a word we don’t technically need yet, but I’m pretty sure we’re GOING to need it if our Governor, Mark Sanford, continues running for President. The word is “laster”, and the news media is going to need it when they try to explain to the nation exactly what kind of a governor Sanford has been:

“As Governor, Mark Sanford succeeded in taking a state which was last in almost everything and making it laster!”

As you can see, these are some really good words. They should all become part of our language.

Okay, gotta go now. I hear a yappity visitor outside my office, but I’m flurbed to my chair.

February: The Little Month That Could!!

2009-02-26T19:44:00.000-08:00

I’m a big fan of February.

Not that I play favorites with the months. I don’t. I like ‘em all. And I would probably be considered a little “odd” or “unusual” or “a total whack-job” if it was ever discovered that I had the names of all twelve months typed neatly into a password-protected excel spreadsheet on my laptop computer, each one ranked in order based on various criteria, including number of days, average temperature, special occasions, and derivation of name.

I do not have such a list, probably because (a) I strive for total conformity and acceptance; (b) I never thought of it until now; and (c) I can’t password-protect anything, because, invariably, if I try, I forget the password.

But back to February… which I like to think of as “The Little Month That Could”.

Last weekend, halfway through the month, I thought to myself: “Whew! I need to stop and get some rest!!!”

How much can they pack into one short, little month?

It started with probably the biggest event of the year, other than Christmas, an American Institution: Super Bowl!!!

By the time we fully recover from Super Bowl weekend -- probably haven’t yet even memorized all of the new Million Dollar super Bowl Ads -- it’s Valentine’s Day, which this year was part of the Presidents Day three-day weekend!

And while we’re still packing away our bright red Valentine’s Day belt and socks, along comes Mardi Gras and Ash Wednesday. You don’t have to be in New Orleans to hand out beads, y’know!

Right in the middle of all that fun and frivolity come the Grammys and the Oscars… the only two awards show that matter even a little bit.

And, of course, during the entire month, the flow of tax refund checks has started, so lotsa folks start having a little jing-a-ling in their pockets. Shopping!!!
From Shopping to Sports, from Partying to Presidents… February’s got it all!
You like sports? How’s this: Start with the biggest sporting event of the year, the Super Bowl. Kick off NASCAR with the Daytona 500. College hoops in full swing. And even start the training camps for Major League Baseball. Now THAT’s a busy month for a sports fan…. and all in 28 short days!!!

For the superstitious, we had a Ground Hog Day AND a Friday the 13th!

So many great Presidents were born in February (2) that we were forced to roll them into ONE holiday. Otherwise, we’d be celebrating one every other week!!!

Did I mention “Random Acts of Kindness” Week?

And, just for extra thrills, not once, not twice, but three times during the month so far, the weatherman has officially mentioned “a chance of snow”.

And as if that’s not enough, this year, we had the BIGGEST EVENT of them all – possibly the biggest event since Y2K: February 17th, the switch from analog to digital that we’ve been hearing about for two years!!!! Woooo, woooo!!! Let’s party!!!!

I hope YOU enjoy February as much as I do. I think it’s a great way to get over that month-long Holiday Hangover we refer to as “January”.

-------------------------------------------------

Moving on, you may recall from last week that I’m a Big-Fat-Giant Hippo-Pig-Whale, and it was time to kick off our Annual Fifteen Fat Guys Weight Loss Contest.

Well, we kicked it off last week, except that instead of 15, we had 12, one of which is not a guy at all, but a gal. Just in case you’re hankering to keep score – and to put adequate public pressure on all of us – here are the initial weigh-in scores for each of us, taken directly from a non-password-protected excel spreadsheet on my laptop computer listing various criteria, ranked in order based on first listed to last listed:

Reigning Champion Don Gawrys -- 374.2; Three-time champion Kirk Luther -- 247.0; Bruce Holland -- 229.6; Tom Beottger -- 267.8; Terry Campbell -- 235.4; Norman Agnew -- 285.2; Jim Miles -- 241.0; Doug Adam -- 277.2; Denis Vaucher -- 228.2; Jimmy Carroll -- 228.2; and, yours truly, Rod-Boy Shealy -- a massive, whopping, huge-enormous, earth-orbit-altering 248.6 lbs.

I’ll keep you posted with our weigh loss progress in the weeks ahead between now and the final weigh-in in April.

In the meantime, my advice to you is this: If you run into any of these people on the street, stay as far away from them a possible. They’re hungry. They’re grouchy. And they may try to take a bite out of your arm.

A healthy appetite

2009-02-11T19:07:00.000-08:00

This week, I’m both happy and sad to report that I have a healthy appetite. That’s because I’m marking two separate occasions this week.

First, on Monday, we kicked off our annual “I’m a Big, Fat, Giant Hippo-Pig-Whale Again” Weight Loss Contest… which makes it a little unfortunate that I have a very healthy Hippo-Pig-Whale appetite, because it means by the time you read this, I’m probably going to be really, really hungry.

But, more important is the other occasion I’m observing this week, which makes me very HAPPY to have a healthy appetite: Wednesday, Feb. 11th, marks exactly six-months since I underwent surgery for cancer. And as my many other friends and acquaintances who are also cancer survivors can tell you, it’s a GREAT feeling to reach that benchmark.

If you are a regular reader of this column, you know I promised back in August to give periodic updates of my medical condition. Fortunately, there haven’t been many updates, because my medical condition has been GREAT, and hasn’t changed much at all.
You may recall that I was diagnosed with a cancerous brain tumor, likely a recurrence of a melanoma from 25 years earlier, by my friend, Dr. Oscar Lovelace. On August 11th, I underwent brain surgery at MUSC in Charleston to remove the malignant tumor, which had begun to affect my communication skills, including this column, which, back in July, was beginning to occasionally include blocks of total gibberish.

Miraculously, with the prayers of many, many friends, I recovered from that surgery quickly and fully, and was actually back on my laptop computer and cell-phone within two-days of the surgery!!! Rather than chemo or radiation therapy, my doctors advised regular monitoring to detect and treat any recurrence early. Consequently, I’ve undergone MRI’s or scans every month since August, with no evidence of cancer whatsoever. I’m clean. I’m happy. I’m healthy.

There are, of course, still blocks of total gibberish in many of my columns… but that’s usually just me attempting to be profound!

Along with my clean bill of health, it turns out, has come a healthy appetite… and I sho’nuff have one!

Suffice it to say that I’ve had no trouble convincing folks of my complete recovery from cancer once they see how big I’ve gotten! If I get any larger, they’ll give me my own zip code! (Br-r-r-rump!)

So, once again, I find myself well into the New Year, a Big, Fat, Giant Hippo-Pig-Whale, with my annual New Years Resolution to lose a few pounds merely a distant, shattered memory. And, once again, I find a dozen or so of my friends in the same boat.

So once again, we’re each throwing $100 American dollars in the pot, and laying down the mutual winners-take-all challenge. And talking smack to each other like NFL linebackers!

The difference is, when I talk smack, I put it into my newspaper column and onto my blog for the WHOLE WORLD to see. (Entering our weight loss contest is NOT for the timid. We WILL publish your name, your weight, and, if we can get our hands on it, your SAT scores, annual salary, credit report, and any unclaimed off-spring you may have sired.) The ladies who participate, however, we go easier on. Call me a chauvinist.

Anyway, as of press-time, we had not yet conducted our official beginning weigh-in – scheduled for Monday, Feb 9th at 5:30 pm -- so I can’t really be sure who is participating in the contest.

Expected participants, however, included Don Gawrys, Manager of Michaels (and reigning Champ); Terry Campbell, Nationwide Insurance; Jim Miles, former Secretary of State; Doug Adam, The Indesign Firm; Kirk Luther, Chairman of the Okra Strut (and former three-time champ); Norman Agnew, Agnew Lake Service; Shirley Towne, ADT Security; Dennis Vaucher, our first Euro-American contestant; Jimmy Carroll, Isle of Palms Realtor Extraordinaire; Tom Boettger of Carrabba’s; Bruce Holland, Attorney and Official Money-Changer; and yours truly, Rod-Boy, currently a big, fat, giant hippo-pig-whale.

And possibly a few others who were still trying to decide if they’re really as fat as the mirror indicates!

The contest period is exactly EIGHT WEEKS, beginning Monday, Feb. 9th and ending Monday, April 6th, with a final weigh-in. Then, the two winners split the pot: most pounds lost, and biggest percentage lost.

(Although it hasn’t started yet as I write this, I’m already getting hungry. I’ll bet I’m gonna be REALLY starving by April. Hey, I just thought of a good April Fools Joke I can play on myself!!!)

We'll have optional weekly weigh-ins, and hopefully get regular "unofficial" reports via email, so I will keep you posted and let you know just how big of LOSERS we really are.

The other rules of the contest are… There ARE no other rules!!! Cheating is okay... anything goes, such as having a dozen Krispy Kreme donuts delivered to each of the other contestants!!!! (Or offering them free ice cream at Gatsbees!!!) You want to get Lipo so you can win? Go for it. Cut off a limb? Perfectly legal. Anything goes.

So, by the time you read this, I will be on a strict diet, yearning for a morsel of most anything… but resisting the temptation, because I need to lose a lot of weight. I’ve had a very healthy appetite, and it’s made me WAYYYY overweight!

And, this year, I’m very thankful for that!

--------------------------

You’re always welcome to let me know you agree, disagree, can’t make sense of, or simply don’t care about anything I’ve written here… or about any other topic that happens to be on your mind. You can email me directly at: RodShealy@aol.com. (Or, you can post your outrageous opinions on my FaceBook page!!! That’s right: I’m very hip, because I’m on FaceBook!!!)

And, if reading it once just wasn’t enough for you, read it again online – along with previous columns -- at my modern-technology Electronic Internet blog: www.doingthefirst.blogspot.com.

Meet The Beatles!!!

2009-02-02T18:51:00.000-08:00

Next week, on February 9th, most of the world will overlook an anniversary, as perhaps they should. (After all, every day is the anniversary of something… and sooner or later we have to stop living in the past, right?)

But I feel the urge to mark this particular occasion here… probably just because I’m OLD, and frankly, I LIKE living in the past!

Here’s the anniversary: It was 45 years ago this month – February 9th, 1964, to be exact – that The Ed Sullivan Show gave America its first glimpse of a four-man musical combo which called itself “The Beatles”.

I was watching.

And if you’re currently 50-or-60 something, you probably were, too. I read recently that The Beatles initial performance on Ed Sullivan’s show is still the highest-rated non-sporting event in TV history. (I know its true, because I read it on The Internet!!!)

That event may not have started the cultural revolution we now refer to as “The Sixties”, but it was certainly a major catalyst. Just eleven weeks earlier, Kennedy had been assassinated, and the nation was still in shock. We needed something to change the conversation. And we got it.

The Lads from Liverpool burst onto the American scene like nothing we had ever witnessed before. And suddenly, the world began to change. (Bear in mind that my perspective might be a little off. I had just turned 10 years old, so my world was getting ready to change, with or without The Beatles.)

For three consecutive weeks, The Beatles headlined Sullivan’s Sunday night variety show -- always accompanied by a theatre full of wildly screaming young girls -- and quickly became THE topic of conversation in America. Period.

Everybody was singing along, because the lyrics were easy to remember: “Yeah, yeah, yeah!” Even I could remember those words.

“I want to hold you hand!”

“She was just seventeen, if you know what I mean!”

“Shake it up, baby. Twist and Shout!”

“All my lovin’ I will send to you.”

And of course, “She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah!!!!”

Their music was actually quite good, with intricate harmonies and memorable, inventive melodies delivered in an exciting, upbeat tempo. But most of us didn’t realize it at the time. We mostly never got beyond their “gimmick”: the mop-tops.

Perhaps, somewhere in the world, maybe even in our own nation, males had worn their hair “long” before The Beatles showed up. But I had never seen ‘em. This was new and exciting. And a little weird at first -- a curiosity -- until everybody started doing it.

Within a year of that first appearance, my barber shop had a third offering on the price placard above his chair: “Haircut. Crewcut. Beatle Haircut.”

Then, for those of us who couldn’t quite get there (at the time) with the long hair, there were Beatle Wigs. I owned one. It looked very authentic when I wore it to my fourth grade classes.

Not only did The Beatles cause me to purchase the first record I ever even thought about owning, but I also invested in their “Beatles trading cards”.

As big of a Beatle’s fan as I became, I still couldn’t bring myself to completely abandon Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color, which was being televised on a different network directly opposite Sullivan. Somehow, to this day, forty-five years later, I still recall that Disney featured a three-part movie, “Scarecrow of Romney Marsh”, up against Sullivan. And it worked, because I remember turning the dial back and forth between the two channels so I could watch the movie without missing any of The Beatles.

A few years later, of course, John, Paul, George and Richard Starkey (Ringo’s real name) abandoned the mop-tops for regular-old scruffy-looking long hair, just like a couple million other hippies. In my young, innocent mind, I actually always gave The Beatles the credit (or blame) for the entire Sixties thing. Their music got druggy and psychedelic, they started hanging out with gurus and yogis and maharashis (and Yoko Ono), and, to be perfectly honest, they kinda just lost me.

They got away from me somewhere between Sgt. Pepper and Yellow Submarine. Abbey Road, for instance, was just way over my head. And White Album or Magical Mystery Tour… Cripes! They completely lost me.

But for a few Sunday nights in February, 1964, they captivated us, changed our conversation, and changed our world. And if you were there, you remember it, too.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

Okay, enough living in the past. Back to the present. Reality.

And the reality is this: We’re well into the new year, and I’m a big, fat, giant hippo-pig-whale!!!

So, as I mentioned last week, I’m kicking off another $100 per person, winners-take-all Weight Loss Challenge. We’ve got about a dozen entries so far, but I’m hoping for more (so I can make more money when I win it all!!!)

If you think you might qualify to enter this contest…. Then let me break the suspense for you: You DO!!!

We start this coming Monday, February 9th, with a group weigh-in… which, by the way, is the 45 year anniversary of The Beatles first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. (Unlike the 1964 event, there will NOT be a theatre full of wildly screaming young fans for our weigh-in.) Email me if you want more details: RodShealy@aol.com

I want to win your money!

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!!!

A very, thin line!

2009-01-28T14:19:00.000-08:00

Since this is our Fifth Issue of the Month of January – and right on the verge of being February -- I’m going to give you a few random thoughts in today’s column.

First of all, I’m wondering why newspaper columns came to be known as “columns”, and their authors came to be as columnists. I suppose it’s because, in the days before computers, all newspapers were designed column-by-column and writers of little literary gems like this were regulated to a single column… but I’m not sure.

I really should know, having been in this business for nearly 20 years… but I DON’T know. Regardless, journalistic masterpieces such as this are no longer designed in a strict column format. Now, they’re designed more as “blurbs”. I should probably consider myself a “blurbist”, not a columnist.

Okay, back to this weeks blurb.

Ground Hog Day is coming up next week, February 2nd. Let me repeat my annual advice: Be sure to dress comfortably in case this happens to be the year that the movie comes true!!!

Speaking of movies, television and entertainment…

The Super Bowl is this Sunday. It’s time for an all new slew of Big-Time High-Priced TV advertising. The economy may be in a downward slide, but I’m betting you won’t be able to tell it from the television commercials during the Super Bowl.

Normally, I would be rooting for Pittsburgh I’ve been somewhat partial to the Steelers ever since the days of Mean Joe Green, who I liked, mainly because of his TV ads for Coke.

But this year, I find myself leaning toward the Arizona Cardinals, mainly because I’m a big fan of their standout receiver, Rod Tidwell.

In my world, there’s a very thin line between make-believe and real life.
Segue to “Is it real, or is it make believe?”

Sharp-eyed viewers who watched last weeks Presidential Inauguration on CNN caught a glimpse of a UFO sliding through the sky behind the Washington Monument. You can go online and see a clip of it for yourself.

Is it real, or is it make believe? Decide for yourself. I personally don’t think this was a real UFO – even though I AM a believer in them – because it did not appear to have the same shape and movement characteristics as the UFO’s in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

A very thin line, I tell you.

Now let’s switch gears to a very, very real – and stark – reality.

I’m Fat Again.

Way fat!!! A big, fat, giant hippo-pig-whale!!!

It came to my attention this weekend when I attended a formal gala and tried to fit into my tux… and couldn’t.

(Okay, as soon as you stop rolling on the floor laughing at the dual absurdities of Rod-Boy a) in a tuxedo, and b) having been invited to a formal gala… we’ll continue with this week’s blurb.)

Anywho, it didn’t fit, because I am HUGE! Gargantuan! Ginormous! BIG, with a capital B-I-G!!! We’re talking Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Balloon big! I could have my own zip code! I’m beside myself… literally!!!

Regular readers will recall what happens when I find myself in this condition each year soon after the holidays: I organize my almost-annual Fifteen Fat Guys Weight Loss Contest! And that’s what I’m going to do.

This is my open invitation for any and all takers to join us. We’ll start the contest on Monday, February 9th, and end on Monday, April 6th… exactly eight weeks later. Each participant will put $100 in the pot. We’ll weigh in at the beginning and the end, and the biggest losers split the pot (half to the most pounds lost, and half to the biggest percentage loser.) If you want in this years contest, send me an email: RodShealy@aol.com, and we’ll give you the details.

Some of the same folks who have been in the contest in the past will be in it again because – guess what – they’re fat again, too!!!! But we always welcome newcomers. (There’s something particularly satisfying about taking their money.)

Two words of warning to those who dare join us: First, I WILL be writing about you in future editions of my weekly blurb. And, second, when it’s all over, I plan to have YOUR money!!!

Okay, on to other business…

Last week, I wrote here about Australia Day, January 26th. But I failed to mention that Jan. 26 is also Indian Independence Day, which was pointed out to me by my new friend Desiia. Thanks for letting me know. Happy Indo-Inde Day! (A few days late.)

Hey! How about that big snow last week?!!!! I’m still digging myself out!!!

As promised in my New Years resolution, I am trying to include bigger and better words in my blurb each week. This week’s Big Word: Obfuscate.

Advice to Young Guys from an Old Guy: Start planning now for Valentine’s Day. (To us, it’s just a day in the middle of February. But to them, it’s a Special Occasion you’d better not forget!!!)

Nostalgic Mention of the Week: I picked up the Sunday Daily Paper (The State) this weekend, and for the first time in many, many years, happened to glance at the comics (or the “funnies”, as I called them in my youth). There were mostly strips I had never heard of before, but fortunately still a few that I remembered: Peanuts, Blondie, Beetle Bailey, Dennis The Menace. So I started wondering who else might remember the comics I remember from a half-century ago: Li’l Abner, Dick Tracy, Pogo, Mutt & Jeff, Dondi, The Phantom, Steve Crane, Mary Worth, Mandrake The Magician. I’d be interesting in hearing the comics YOU remember from the Good Ole Days.

Okay, that’s it for this week. We will now return to a regular schedule of only four editions per month…until the fifth week of April!!!

Australia Day! G’day, mate!

2009-01-27T18:13:00.000-08:00

I want to be the first to wish you a Happy Australia Day! (It’s coming up this week, you know.)

I think Australia Day is one of our most overlooked holidays here in the Good Ole USA… which is a shame, because we Americans universally like Australia.

Most years, we just simply forget to celebrate the day. We always remember St. Patty’s Day, a tribute to Ireland. We remember Cinco de Mayo, the holiday celebrated by our neighbors to the south. And we usually note the occurrence of Chinese New Year.

So why not Australia Day?

Many of us, if we were forced to relocate to any other country to live, would choose Australia. After all, they speak the same language as us, albeit with a bit of an accent. They practice Democracy, albeit spiced-up, with a little more name-calling than we’re accustomed to. And the country was first colonized by the cast-offs from other places…. just like us!

The native animals there are the stuff kids books are made of: kangaroo, koala, duckbill platypus. And they seem to be very likeable folks, the ones we know: Olivia Newton John, Russell Crowe, Mel Gibson, Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman, Elle Macpherson… these are all people I’d like to hang out with. (Not to mention Crocodile Dundee!)

And, to top it off, they have their own continent! The whole thing!!! Crikey!!!

Probably the reason I’m remembering the Australian holiday THIS year is because our little newspaper organization – the over-worked and under-paid people who provide you with the newspaper you’re reading each week – gained a new Australian-born General Sales Manager LAST year… and none of us have been able to get Australia our of our minds ever since!!!

Our GSM’s name is Jacqueline Kleynenberg, and she joined us one year ago this month. She came to us from Down Under, via Michigan, where she picked up hubby Michael, along with his last name. We have come to think of it as our own little cultural exchange program.

Anyway, now realizing the error of our ways in not celebrating this important holiday each year – after all, the Aussies are and have always been great allies of the USA, even during those times when some of our allies (we won’t mention any names, but “parlez vous Francais?”) seem to get amnesia about who their friends are – we’ve decided to commence our own Australia Day celebration. But before we start wolfing down Bloomin’ Onions and singing “Tie Me Kangaroo Down”, we thought a little edu-ma-cation might be in order.

So we asked our Jacqueline’s Pop, who is still down under, to give us a crash course on what this Australia Day is really all about. So, this week, as a part of my weekly word-offering to you, I’m proud to present, live and direct from the Land Down Under: Jacqueline’s Dad, The Most Honourable Eddie Edstein, retired from the Australian Military and Diplomatic Service. G’day, mate!

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Austalia Day – January 26th
By Eddie Edstein
Australia Day is the National Anniversary of the founding of Australia by Captain Arthur Phillip in 1788. It is a Public holiday and is generally celebrated with major fireworks displays in major cities, small town parades or just lazing on the beach or a friendly BBQ at home with the neighbors. Usually organizers have a major tennis or cricket event at this time. It is celebrated on the day it falls but if on a week-end the following Monday is given as a public holiday.
Australia had been visited by many nations before the arrival of Captain James Cook in the Barque ‘Endeavour’ in 1770 when he claimed it for England. The Chinese had visited here back in 1421 and made some long forays into the hinterland after becoming shipwrecked. There is some evidence that DNA shows some aboriginals have Chinese blood. Many other countries, particularly the Dutch, had landed and even chartered the coastline from what is now Western Australia right around Southern Australia and up to the top of Queensland on the East Coast in the 15/16 centuries. They, had even named the land mass as ‘New Holland’ but somehow never got around to making the necessary claim.
Captain Arthur Phillip arrived with the First fleet but passed the magnificent Port Jackson (Sydney Harbour) sailing some 20 miles further South to Botany Bay where he landed at Kurnell and raised the Flag of and for England and there began the first white settlement of Australia. Re-enactments of this event takes place every year on 26 January.
It was also the beginning of an unfortunate conflict with the Aboriginal people who inhabited this area resulting in many fatal outcomes. On 26 January each year, the Aboriginal people make their peaceful protest at the re-enactment site.
The first fleet arrived with a military contingent, supplies, and animals and fowl for the beginning of their new country. Also, there were many convicts accompanying the fleet.
The settlement moved back to Port Jackson (Sydney Harbour) where the settlement grew quickly with the arrival of more convict ships. Australia was now a penal colony. Convicts were sent to Sydney, Melbourne and Tasmania (Port Arthur). They were sent to many other places too.
Australia, like America has been built largely on its immigrants from all parts of the world. Initially most came from England and after the WWII many came from Europe. Many Italians, Greeks and folk from the Baltics, and Eastern Europe arrived in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s. Now we have immigrants from China, Vietnam and the Middle East and many other countries.
We welcome them all and we now have some magnificent restaurants of many different cuisines. We also benefit from the cultures they bring with them. We only ask that they leave their prejudices behind.
Now we all share in the benefits of living in a free country made by many who have laid down their lives to make it so.
We ask only that they respect the country they have chosen, its Flag and the values it stands for.
Although we still are part of the British Commonwealth and share some of the British traditions, we are fiercely independent, especially in our sporting achievements but we always try to abide by the sporting code. We are well known for our egalitarian attitude of the “Fair Go” for all and generally dislike people who flaunt their wealth or position.
We take our share of the load in world conflicts and usually pay more heavily per capita for doing so. And we do it entirely at our own expense!
We are presently 21 million strong but have room for a few more. Why not come down and have a look? Or stay even?
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About the author: Eddie Edstein retired as an Officer in the Australian Military with 23 years service, then served in the Australian Government’s Foreign Diplomatic Service for 12 years. He is a husband (with 48 years service) and the father of three daughters, with eight grandchildren. He currently resides on Bribie Island, Qld., which is in Northeastern Australia.

Black Like Me

2009-01-14T09:31:00.000-08:00

Next week, America will witness back-to-back celebrations. On Monday, we’ll pause to honor a pioneer of the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King. And then, on Tuesday, we’ll witness the inauguration of Barack Obama, our first African-American president... if not the culmination of the struggle for equality for all Americans, certainly a major benchmark.

Reflecting on the importance of the coming week, I couldn’t help but think back over the last half century – my lifetime – and the issue which largely defined that time period: race relations in America.

It was, in fact, a half century ago in 1959 that a journalist, John Howard Griffin, embarked on his six-week journey to help white Americans better understand black Americans. As research for his book, “Black Like Me” (which later became a James Whitmore movie by the same name), author Griffin, who was white, had a medical doctor inject him with a drug which changed the pigmentation of his skin to make him appear to be an African-American. He then spent six weeks traveling through Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia in an attempt to better understand what it really meant to be a black American. His 1961 book, along with the movie in 1964, helped white Americans gain a slightly better understanding of black Americans at a time when racial tensions were at an all-time high.

Now, far be it from me -- or any other white American -- to claim to actually understand the plight of African-Americans. We don’t and we can’t… anymore than we can truly understand poverty, hunger, cancer, depression, space travel, mountain climbing, skydiving, love, drug-addiction, prison, death, or childbirth… until we’ve actually done it.

But that does not stop us from sharing in the excitement, enthusiasm, and euphoria next week during this momentous occasion.

I, for one, have always believed that our nation is truly the land of opportunity in which all things are possible, and any person can achieve anything he can believe.

I’m guessing the inauguration of Obama will help many more people share that belief in the greatness of the American opportunity. And that is a good thing. I’m guessing that, a year or two ago, there were millions of young Americans who did NOT believe they had an equal opportunity to achieve greatness… but that will change next week.

To be sure, there has been a struggle to reach this point… and the struggle is certainly not over. MLK was just one of many, many individuals who fought to overcome the great obstacles which the black race faced since coming to this land as slaves.

In this modern day and age, none of us condone or understand many of the practices of our forefathers, whether it be building a slave nation, or burning innocent women as witches, or beheading the ousted rulers of the nations from which we came. Nor, in this modern age, do we understand the recent regime which would attempt to exterminate an entire race, or the current culture which celebrates the flying of jet airliners into sky-scrapers to kill as many innocent people as possible. We wonder how human nature can invent such atrocities.

But the obstacles to African-Americans -- which began with the slavery we don’t understand or condone -- have continued far beyond that practice. Just five generations ago, it was illegal in many states to teach a black person to read! Just two generations ago, most black youngsters were relegated to sub-standard educational facilities. And in this generation, that same human nature -- which allowed for practices we now find reprehensible -- is still erecting barriers every day through both attitudes and actions.

But next week, the entire world will receive the clearest signal ever that Americans, working together, are now overcoming those obstacles. We will prove to the world that we are “one Nation, under God, with Liberty and Justice for All.”

Over the last few weeks, as many of us enjoyed the college football bowl games which always accompany the holiday season, we often found ourselves watching games in which we had no real favorite. And since we had no favorite, we did what Americans do: we rooted for the underdog!

Last November, I did not vote for Obama, because his positions on most issues did not parallel my personal positions. Still, there was a part of me throughout the electoral process which was rooting for the underdog. And now that the nation has made its choice, I will embrace his Presidency. He is our Commander-In-Chief, and I will support his leadership as we all do under our system of democracy.

But next week’s celebration is about far more than issues, or partisan politics, or the change in administration. It is about opening the doors of opportunity to EVERY single American, and taking a giant step forward on the issue of race relations.

All black Americans will be enthusiastically celebrating two important days next week.

So will I.

NY Resolutions: Version 2.009

2009-01-11T13:59:00.000-08:00

Now that the New Year is getting a little age on it – we’re ONE WEEK into it already – I’m ready to discuss my New Years Resolutions.

I long ago gave up on the standard practice of trying to begin a healthy new habit on the day after New Year’s Eve. On paper, turning over a new leaf with the New Year is a great idea. But, to make it work for me, I usually just postpone starting until I’m really in the mood to improve myself (as opposed to the day after New Year’s Eve, when I’m generally only in the mood for a nap!)

Most New Years Resolutions deal with self-improvement. With the year now roughly 2% expired, I’ve had sufficient time to carefully examine myself to determine which areas of my life need improving.

This year, instead of devoting my resolution to improving MYSELF -- which, after all, seems like sort of a selfish and self-centered thing to do -- I’ve decided to devote myself to improving THIS WEEKLY COLUMN.

Turns out, after contemplating it for a whole, entire week, I can’t think of a single thing about myself than needs improving!!!! (Unless, of course, you include trite and unimportant things, like my weight. Or my physical condition. Or my financial condition. Or my perpetual laziness, carelessness, inattentiveness, forgetfulness, irresponsibility, unreliability and immaturity. Or my looks. Or my personality. Or my driving. Or my fashion-sense.)

Okay, maybe I CAN think of a few things about myself I could change. But none of ‘em really jumped up, slapped me in the face, and shouted “fix me, fix me… I’m broken”!!!

So, instead, for 2009, I’m resolving to present Rod-Boy’s New & Improved Weekly Newspaper Column. And I’ve already made a list of the improvements I’m planning:

--- A more EXCITING column!!!!! I seriously doubt if the content of the articles will actually be any more exciting… but the writing style WILL BE!!!!!!!! I plan accomplish this by including more EXCLAMATION POINTS than EVER!!!!!!!!!! Also, a STRONG dose of underlined words, ALL CAPS, italicized words and even bolded words… sometimes ENTIRE PHRASES or sentences!!!!!!! And sometimes, I’ll use more than one of these ultra-exciting writing devices, combining several to increase YOUR column-reading enjoyment!!!!!!!!-- A shorter column!!!! Again, this improvement is for YOU!!!! Time is money, and in these tough economic times, none of us can afford to be wasting either. So if I can reduce your reading time by, say 25%, those are precious extra minutes you can use on more profitable pursuits!!!! (This also argues for skipping this column altogether, which, frankly, I couldn’t argue with if you did.)

-- Better words!!!!! This is an area where I hope you will see a MAJOR improvement. In looking back over previous columns, I realized that there are a number of perfectly good words which I rarely, if ever, use in my column!!!!
Words like
“balderdash”.
“Jabberwocky”.
“Paraphernalia”.
“Unequivocally”.
“Persnicketty.”
“Willy-nilly”.
And “Minnesota.”

(I realize Minnesota is not a word… it’s the name of a state. But if they let that Saturday Night Live guy be their U.S. Senator, I suspect it will also soon take on a dual-meaning and become a word used by residents of the other 49 states!!!!!)

And not just better words...BIGGER words, too!!!! Just like the New York Times!!!

-- Prufereeding!!!! Beginnning immeediatlee, wee will prufereed this columm vary carfully eech weak befour allouwing it to bee printed!!!!!

-- Clearly identifying the humor as humor. I’m a bit chagrinned (Note: Big Word) to recognize that some readers apparently fail to see the humor in some of my humor. Case in point: A couple of weeks ago, I just casually made reference to the number of Northerners who had migrated to the Pimento State, observing that the Midwesterners (Ohio, Michigan, et al) seem to blend in better than the True Yankees (New York, Massachusetts, etc.) Turns out, the Yankees also don’t recognize tongue-in-cheek satire or hilarious, slapstick frivolity when they read it. I received not one, not two, but THREE angry emails from transplanted-New Yorkers after that column. Apparently, they didn’t recognize it as attempted humor. (You would think they might have picked up on it later in the column when I claimed to have been the original author of “Jingle Bells”, “Joy to the World”, “The Night Before Christmas”, and “Feliz Navidad”.)

-- A point!!! This year, I’m planning on having an actual “point” to each of my columns…. something that has been sadly lacking for the last two years, I’ve been told!!!! Most of the time, it’s just “a column about nothing”… just the non-sensical
weekly ramblings of a mildly disturbed, middle-aged but immature jokester curmudgeon. (Another new word!!!)

Since I don’t want to fall into that Seinfeld trap of “a column about nothing”, I’ve decided that each and every column I write during 2009 will contain a clearly discernable reason for having written it… an actual POINT!!!

Beginning NEXT WEEK!!!!!!!

An optimistic look back at 2008

2009-01-05T05:14:00.000-08:00

Looking back at 2008, I’m gushing with enthusiasm that it was such a wonderful year… and I’m confident 2009 is going to be even better!!!
Of course, I’m an optimist.

And not just the starry-eyed, dreamer kind of optimist. I’m an actual member of the club: It’s official.

(Before I was recruited to become a Charter Member of the Chapin Optimist Club back in 1993, I had always thought Optimist Clubs were organizations for eye doctors… but then I read closer and realized that the clubs were just groups of local folks who all had positive outlooks on life, and got together to do good things for their communities.)

Turns out, I’m the unofficial “glass-half-full” kind of optimist, too… which has probably helped me make it this far. (If I were not an optimist, I might get depressed when I looked in the mirror every morning; but, as it is, I catch a glimpse of myself getting out of the shower and think, “Great news! I’m not going hungry!!!”)

The beginning of each New Year is a time of great optimism for many people, as they resolve to improve themselves in various ways.

The end of the Old Year, however, is too often dominated by less-than-positive reflections of the year just past. A lot of the blame for that goes to the news media, I think. Invariably, the news media ends the year with their own compilations of the “biggest news stories” of the year… and, of course, if it was a “big” news story to start with, it probably had a negative slant. After all, the major media doesn’t make its money from writing positive news. (“If it bleeds, it leads”, as the old newspaper saying goes.)

So, optimist that I am, I decided to take my own look back at the year just ended -- 2008 -- and what I discovered was a wonderfully, fantastic year!!!

There are those who would take issue with my optimistic assessment. They would point to the national economy which required an historic “bailout”. They would remind me that my choice for President lost. They would remind me that I personally underwent brain surgery for cancer, and ended the year by turning 55, making me officially old. In short, they see the glass half-empty.

But that’s not the way I see it.

I see an economy which is correcting itself to match the numerous changes in last few decades – especially technology – which have altered the world as we know it. While many of us saw short-term losses in our long-term investments, virtually no one went hungry this year as a result, and the “new” market which emerges will be stronger and more stable, with greater earning potential for the future.
When I see unemployment at 7%, that means an astounding 93% of the people have jobs… and the entire notion of “jobs” is changing as more and more people are using new technologies to create their own livelihoods.

While my preferred candidate didn’t win the Presidency, many good results will come from the election of Barak Obama, most notably the easing of race problems which have long plagued our nation.

Would I have preferred a Republican president? Sure. But the really good news is this: Our nation changed governments without riots or unrest or bloodshed, something which is rare in the annals of history. And we did so because the largest voter participation in history occurred this November. And because we changed government in an orderly way proscribed by our Constitution, we will have the opportunity to change back again if four years if we choose! A guaranteed opportunity!

Then there were the Olympics, where China managed to take 15 more Gold Medals than we did, while also showing off its new super-superpower status to the world. (We, of course, won more medals overall… a small consolation.)

But the far bigger story than which superpower prevailed in the medal count was that more than one hundred nations again came together is a peaceful display of global harmony and brotherhood. Are there still trouble-spots in the world? Of course there are. But there is also a prevailing goodwill among nations that has been more of the exception than the rule through recorded history. The greater openness which technology has only recently afforded is already bearing the fruit of global progress and acceptance.

As for me personally during 2008, yes, I did face a health challenge when I was diagnosed with brain cancer and had a tumor removed in August. But, to me, this incident represents the best news of all… because I’m still here!!! There’s probably nobody on earth who has ever been happier to turn 55, as I did last week. Somewhere between the neuro-surgeons at MUSC and the prayers of many hundreds of friends and supporters, it worked out well… and has increased my optimism to an all new level!!

So, I guess you can see why I’m gushing with enthusiasm about 2008!

And if you’re still not convinced that 2008 was a banner year…
Clemson and South Carolina are BOTH playing on New Year’s Day Bowl Games… and how often does THAT happen?

Hope your 2008 was as great as mine was, and your New Year is better than ever!!!

Things I forgot to write this year

2008-12-23T07:44:00.000-08:00

As I was preparing to write this, my final column of 2008, I pulled out my notes from the year and realized there were a few things I had intended to write about, but simply forgot.

Actually, I didn’t totally forget, because I’m thinking of them now. Let’s just say I didn’t forget… I simply ran out of weeks. There are only 52 weeks in a year, and if I have more than 52 topics, I’m out of luck. (Probably even fewer, because I use about half of the weeks dribbling about some nonsense that just happened to cross my mind, or reminiscing about the way things were when I was a kid.)

Anyway, I thought – this being the Christmas season and all, as my special Christmas gift to you – I would quickly run through some of the points I intended to write about, but didn’t get around to.

-- Absent-mindedness is not such a bad thing, I have learned. True, you occasionally forget something important… but you also forget a LOT of stuff that you’re better off not remembering!

-- Don’t you hate it when you call customer service, and you get a recording telling you that you’ll be on “hold” for five minutes until the next representative is available? Know what I do? After they answer, I always make a point to put THEM on hold a few times… you know, maybe to go warm up my coffee, or just to stretch my legs which have gotten stiff from sitting there waiting for them to answer!!!

-- There are an awful lot of people originally from Up North who have moved to the Pimento State. I think my favorite transplants are the ones from places like Michigan and Ohio in the Mid-West. They seem to blend in rather nicely. But, you can’t really say that about the ones from New York and Massachusetts. Seems like they’re always trying to change things to “the way we did it Up North.” (They can complain about us all they want to, but you don’t hear about anybody retiring and moving North!)

-- At my house, I have three different kinds of exercise machines in various rooms. I have found that no matter what part of the house they’re in, they all make excellent clothes racks.

-- The older I become, the more I forget the names of people… but the less embarrassed I am about it. When acquaintances challenge me on forgetting their names, I have a great comeback:
“I’m old!”

-- I have recently learned that there’s nothing less romantic than flossing in bed.

-- Paying for TV and buying water. These are concepts which I scoffed at when I first heard them predicted many years ago. Now I freely fork over hard-earned cash for both. What has happened to me?

-- And speaking of TV, the conversion from analog to digital is now only weeks away. I haven’t given it much thought until recently. I’m not an engineer or computer expert, so I really don’t fully understand the technological reasons for the required changeover. However, a couple of questions have arisen in my mind, which I’m hopeful have already been raised and answered before Congress mandated the change-over.

Here’s the most concerning question: If all of our TV communications are now digital – and analog no longer exists – wouldn’t our entire nationwide communications network be at risk of being “hacked”? Couldn’t technology-savvy enemies of our nation easily disrupt, or even hijack, our broadcasts via the Internet, which they cannot do with analog signals? Probably not. Probably I’m just wondering out loud, and the great minds in Washington have figured that problem out a long time ago. Anyway, I hope so.

-- Did I ever tell you that I keep one contact lens in, and one out, so I can see far away or close up? Of course, near or far, everything’s a little fuzzy this way. So, if you see me on the street, and I seem not to recognize you… you’ll know why!!!

“I’m old!”

-- Technology is taking over my life. There was a time when – if I had a question – I would look it up in the encyclopedia or almanac. Nowadays, I usually just google it. I’m now officially a Facebook user. (For the un-enlightened, that’s a “social network” website on the Internet.) And I currently have over 500 emails waiting to be read. (Actually, most of them have already been glanced at, but I’m waiting on some “spare time” to go back and read them thoroughly.)

-- Do you realize that – when the clock strikes midnight on New Years Eve – we will officially be in the 10th year of the New Century and the New Millennium? Could it have been that long already? (I guess time flies when you’re fighting terrorism and heading into a global recession.)

I can tell it’s been a long time since we heralded in Y2K on January 1, 2000, because back then, I had learned how to spell “millennium”, and today, as I’m writing this column… I had to look it up!

On Dictionary.com, of course.

Suddenly, its coming back to me. I didn’t FORGET to write about these things… I skipped them on purpose! Oh well, too late now.

I am, however, currently forgetting to write my special 2008 Christmas Week Holiday Greetings column!

So let me just quickly leave you with a few of my original Christmas thoughts:

“Have a holly, jolly Christmas. May all your Christmases be bright. Santa Claus is coming to town. Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow. We wish you a merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Although it’s been said many times, many ways, Merry Christmas to you. Jump in bed and cover your head ‘cause Santa Claus comes tonight. Have yourself a Merry Little Christmas. Feliz Navidad. Fa la la la la, la la la la!”

--------------------------

You’re always welcome to let me know you agree, disagree, can’t make sense of, or simply don’t care about anything I’ve written here… or about any other topic that happens to be on your mind. You can email me directly at: RodShealy@aol.com.

And, if reading it once just wasn’t enough for you, read it again online – along with previous columns -- at my modern-technology Electronic Internet blog: www.doingthefirst.blogspot.com (And, if you’d like to look at me while you’re reading… you can look me up on Facebook!)

The Gifts of Christmas Past

2008-12-16T10:37:00.000-08:00

Every time I hear the opening line of Silver Bells – “City sidewalks, busy sidewalks” – my mind goes back to a time when there actually were busy sidewalks at Christmastime… back to The Time Before Malls!

I have vivid memories of family shopping excursions on the streets of Downtown Columbia during the holiday season. Looking back, it’s likely that they were not “family shopping excursions” at all… just the kids tagging along because the adults didn’t have anywhere else to park the kids.

Main Street in Columbia was dressed in holiday style every December. There were decorations strung across the streets, the giant State House tree shimmering at the end of the street, and, of course, the window displays in the stores. My favorite was always Belk. They had massive Christmas displays that still linger in my mind… like the manger scene up on the catwalk… or the actual working model trains in the window displays.

These days, it doesn’t seem possible that a 9 year-old kid could be left alone on Main Street of a major city, darting back and forth from store to store and block to block, with only the instructions to “meet at the Eckerd’s lunch counter in two hours”. If, after nearly 50 years, my memory is correct, there was Belk, Eckerd, J.C. Penny, Tapps, Berry on Main, Woolworth, Kresse, McCory, J.B. White, and about a hundred other shops and stores. (The official names were “Belk”, “J.C. Penny”, “J. B. White”, and “Eckerd”… but we for some reason always pluralized the names to “Belks, Pennys, Whites and Eckards”.)

Off we’d go, in various directions, into a sea of Christmas shoppers from throughout the Midlands who had all converged on the same six-block hub.

Of course, I usually wasn’t actually doing any SHOPPING on Main Street in Columbia. Mainly, I was just looking and wishing and dreaming. It was wonderful!

My personal holiday gift shopping would come later on Main Street in Lexington, my hometown, just 13 miles away from Columbia. Lexington’s Main Street was also quite a festive place, with Session’s and Harman’s Drugs and Taylors Hardware and the Western Auto all on the same block!!! Most of my actual purchases came from what I considered to be the epicenter of the Lexington shopping district: Dodd’s Dime Store! (And, usually, at a more appropriate time for Christmas shopping: Christmas Eve -- or maybe the day before -- a fine holiday tradition I continue to this day!!!)

I still recall what was likely the first time I went shopping at Dodd’s by myself with my own money. (It was bicycling distance from my home, only about a mile further down Main Street.)

At the age of probably eight years old, with my own money earned from chores during the Christmas vacation, I located what I was certain to be the perfect Christmas gift for my Mom: a 25-cent arrangement of plastic flowers which I was absolutely certain she would adore!

And, sure enough, I was right! When she opened my gift on Christmas morning, she couldn’t stop oohing and ahhing! She was thrilled with my gift! Completely overwhelmed, based on her reaction!

My gift-giving prowess continued through the years. By the time my kid brother Shawn came along, Mom and Dad were in the habit of showering us with goodies on Christmas. And since he was about a dozen years younger than the three older kids, he really racked up on the Santa loot. At about age three, he got a ton of gifts: Hot Wheels, Big Wheels, a drum-set, games and toys galore.

From his older brother, his gift was a roll of Scotch tape… which he proceeded to play with for the rest of the day while virtually ignoring all of his big Santa Claus gifts!!!

I recall that, when I was age 11 or 12, my older sister Sherry -- who was already old enough to have a real, part-time job -- gave my sister Cric and me each a transistor radio! Now THAT was a major gift! As far as I was concerned, it might as well have been a car or a yacht or a house. They all cost the same amount to me: LOTS! It was at that moment when I first began to really understand the value of having a job, and to develop the work ethic that would stick with me until… well, I guess last weekend!

Of course, the most unusual gift any of us received came on Christmas, 1967, when each of us three older kids received a note in the toe of our stockings announcing the Shealy family would soon be adding a fifth and final child: Lorri, the youngest, who sure enough came along a few months later! (I also recall getting new shoelaces in the stocking, which I badly needed. And, every year since I can recall, everybody’s stocking had a flashlight. At our house, Santa had a very practical side!)

At the Shealy home, Christmas was a happy time. We were blessed, and we knew it.
That’s why Dad, every Christmas, took it upon himself to try to make Christmas a little brighter for some other family. Long before there were Toy Drives or Adopt-a-Family programs, he would quietly find a family each year that was not financially able to provide gifts, and deliver a couple of packages for each of the kids. He did it without fanfare or acknowledgement. He never really even told us kids what he was doing. He was simply trying to share our blessings.

One year, though, on Christmas morning, he invited me to go along with him to deliver those gifts… and I suppose that is when I learned what Christmas is truly about. It’s one Christmas memory that I’ll never forget… and a gift that will stay with me forever.

Great parents and caring families, it turns out, are the very best gifts of all!

Here’s hoping your Christmas is filled with wonderful gifts for you and yours.

Christmas in a simpler time

2008-12-14T18:13:00.000-08:00

Invariably during the holiday season, my mind skitters back to Christmas celebrations from a much simpler time. (Everything seemed simpler when we were kids!)

Even before children are old enough to understand the hoopla, I suspect they are drawn to Christmas by the excitement in the air. I don’t really remember any Christmases from my pre-school years, although I THINK I remember them because of the home movies I saw over and over again.

My early school years are when the memories actually kick in. Back then, I liked Christmas mainly because there was no school for two whole weeks. They could have parked Ground Hog Day in the middle of two weeks vacation from school, and it would have been a big hit with me. I would have gladly decorated a tree and sung Ground Hog Carols if it resulted 14 in consecutive days with no school in the middle of winter.

Of course, getting TOYS was pretty cool, too.

As a lad of four, five, six, seven, or eight, during the late 50’s or early 60’s, my Christmas wants were pretty simple: anything in cowboy. A cap gun. A holster. A cowboy hat. Cowboy boots. Or a hobby horse, which, as you may recall, was a stick with an imitation horse-head on the end.

It’s not that we were so easy to please back then… It’s just that we didn’t know much else except Cowboys and Indians! There were no Transformers or action figures. There were no Ataris or X-Boxes. Just a back yard, and enough vivid imagination keep us occupied for hours playing Cowboys and Indians, sometimes all alone!

During the 60’s, the advertising industry teamed up with the Saturday Morning Cartoon industry to start TELLING kids what toys they wanted for Christmas: Mr. Potato Head, GI Joe, Easy Bake Oven, Rock’em Sock’em Robot, Etch-A-Sketch… they all looked better than simple plastics on TV. It never occurred to us that Super-ball, Twister, and Slinky were nothing more than a hard rubber ball, a printed piece of plastic, and a coil of wire.

And the games!!!! Candyland. Chutes and Ladders. Operation. Parchesi. Sorry. Mystery Date Game. And that old standard… Monopoly.

Another thing different about Christmas these days are the Holiday movies. Back then, there were only three: Rudolf, Frosty, and Charlie Brown, as I recall. That’s because we didn’t have cable TV, nor the multitude of channel selections that we have today. There was no such thing as a “movie channel”. So each of those movies was aired ONCE ONLY during the holiday season, along with the annual Bing Crosby show and a handful of other specials.

For some reason, the smells of the holidays during my childhood seem to linger in my memory banks. There was something special about coming in out of the cool, crisp winter air into a toasty den, with the smells of a cedar Christmas tree and firewood crackling blending with freshly baked cookies and pies. The grand finale for the olfactory senses was the Christmas dinner… all kinds of good things to eat at Grandmama’s house.

Here’s an interesting tidbit: At my house, we never once left milk and cookies for Santa, as tradition called for us to do. Even while maintaining the existence of Santa, Mom and Dad told us that the “cookies and milk” bit was a myth. (In truth, they were far too frugal in those days to let perfectly good milk and cookies sit out half the night and go to waste!)

The Shealy Family Christmas Tree was always something to behold. Shiny, shimmering ornaments that showed up year after year. Never-mind that they were mostly just painted plastic…. to us they were valuable antique heirlooms! (One I specifically remember was stuffed with Angel Hair!) Strands of garland. Silver and gold tinsel hanging from every branch. And string after string of colored lights.

There were only two kinds of Christmas lights to choose from: indoor and outdoor. Both consisted bright, multi-colored bulbs, but the outdoor variety was larger to withstand the elements.

I don’t recall ever going to a “Christmas tree lot” as a child. Why bother when there were acres and acres of woods all around? We simply walked into the woods and found a little cedar tree. (Sometimes they even grew in the highway right-of-ways!)

And if the tree was a little skimpy to start with, you would never know it after the decorating process was complete, with 4 strands of garland, 59 ornaments, 144 multi-colored lights, 2,918 individual pieces of tinsel… and one star splendidly adorning the top of the tree! By the time the Big Day arrived, the tree would be finished off with a mountain of colorfully wrapped gifts underneath – about a gazillion in all.

Then came the mid 60’s, and the carefully-decorated cedar tree was replaced by a silver, aluminum “tree”, with a spotlight and color-wheel which revolved to give the appearance of a different color tree every few seconds!

Some of my childhood Christmas memories are actual memories, but others have been propped up by the photographs which captured those moments. I’m sure I don’t remember Christmas morning when I was two years old… but I know about it because there were a few pictures. Not a lot of pictures, mind you. Back then, we were very selective about our picture-taking because film cost a lot of money, and developing the film cost even more.

Nowadays, with digital cameras and VCR recorders, we can capture image after image… but in those days, picture-taking was reserved for special occasions like Christmas, family-vacations, and the occasional dance or piano recital.

Of course, the most vivid of the Christmas almost-memories were the ones captured on home movies… 8mm filmstrips.

The lighting was bad, and the movies were usually just a collage of 15-second clips… the average length of time of a movie scene, due to the afore-mentioned costs of film and developing. But it only takes a few seconds of these old home movies to capture the simpler times of Christmases past. The freckle-faced two-year old with a blonde crewcut -- and the other people in those movies -- are long gone…. But the memories come back year after year during the holiday season.

Here’s hoping you create your own armload of happy memories this Christmas.

White Christmas

2008-12-12T08:36:00.000-08:00

Let me say from the outset that I am not a Scrooge, or a Grinch. I like Christmas. At my office, in fact, I start playing Christmas music earlier than anyone else I know… usually September, occasionally even August.

But there is one traditional Holiday wish with which I disagree. (Try saying that three times real fast: “wish with which, wish with which, wish with which”!)

While the entire rest of the universe appears to be hoping in unison for a “White Christmas”… my preference is, as it always has been, a balmy, sunshiny, warm Palmetto State December day in the 70’s.

This was all brought painfully to my attention last weekend – Thanksgiving weekend to be exact – when we had a couple of days of cold, dreary, rainy almost winter weather… probably made drearier by my favorite team’s drubbing at the hands of arch-rival Clemson (which I am spelling correctly today out of respect for their victory).

Anywho, the cold wet weather during the first serious weekend of the Christmas shopping season made we stop and wonder what to expect weatherwise for the rest of the season, and I got to guessing whether we’ll have a White Christmas this year.

I guesses “No”… and I hope I’m right.

I’ve never actually seen a White Christmas, and probably never will. It’s one of those things like a total eclipse or Haley’s Comet. They only happen every so often, and even then, you have to be at the right place at the right time to see it.

Maybe in parts of Canada, Alaska, and Wisconsin it’s a regular occurrence. But I’ve never been any of those places on Christmas Day, and don’t expect I ever will be.

Growing up in the sunny south, I’m used to a different regular occurrence in December: wearing Bermuda shorts and flip-flops! And if it’s a truly special Christmas, I might even need to add sunglasses to keep the bright sun out of my eyes!!!

I know this puts me at odds with the rest of the world, but I’d rather have a Bright Christmas than a White Christmas!!!

Stop and think for a minute. Ask yourself this question: It’s the busiest travel day of the year, so what can we do to improve the holiday travelling experience? I know!!! Let’s cover all the roads and airports with a foot of snow!!! That’s a great idea!

Even as a kid, I was never in favor of a White Christmas. We didn’t get many snow days, and I didn’t want to use one up on a day when we were already out of school.

As a kid, a snow day was that rarest of special occasions when I could skip school without pretending to be sick! AND… unlike those “fake sick” days, it was perfectly okay to go out and play all day long!

Of course, snow days in the South were a lot different than snow days in the North. First of all, most of the time, it wasn’t really snow, but instead, was snow’s evil twin – “ice”.

And either way, we weren’t equipped for it. We didn’t have the right mittens and boots. Instead, I wore socks on my hands, which kept them warm for about three minutes, and sopping, soaking cold and wet for the rest of the hour until I went back in the house to change “mittens”.

In the South, we also never had the primary piece of snow-recreation equipment: a sled! So we improvised. My favorite improvisation was an old automobile hood turned upside down… which allowed about eleven kids to take a ride down a nice steep hill.

I also tried cross-country skiing once with a pair of waterskis instead of snowskis and a pair of old crutches instead of ski poles.

Yes, snow days are designed for interrupting the education of our children, not for disrupting my favorite holiday.

So let me go on record: I’m NOT dreaming of a White Christmas.

I like the song (although I sing it without the deep, heartfelt meaning that others give it.) I even tolerate the movie. (Though clearly, it’s a second tier holiday movie, not on the same level as Miracle on 34th Street or It’s a Wonderful Life… or even, in my opinion, Christmas Vacation, Elf, or Scrooged.)

But let’s save the actual snowfall for a more convenient time when there’s not so much going on. For no particular reason, I’m voting for January 15th.