"Today will soon enough become tomorrow, and spent wisely, will then become a yesterday to remember." How will yours be remembered?
Tuesday, January 11, 2011 began pretty much as any other day of an otherwise nondescript weekday for me. Oh, there was (and still is) snow on the ground here in McKinney Texas; 4"+ of the white stuff. Temperatures were in the teens with a wind chill of 11F. Hmmmm, there's an interesting number.
And so it began, the phenomenon of 1/11/11 (US) 11/1/11 (UK). Now I'm not a numerologist by any stretch of the imagination, but numbers have always fascinated me. You can do some pretty strange things playing around with numbers. I'll not drag you through a list of them here, so just relax.
I was napping today, as I usually do after lunch, when I was awakened by the telephone ringing. "Damned telemarketers!" I thought as I reached for the handset to check the caller ID. There it was. A perfect subject for today's blog, though it didn't dawn on me at that moment. The call came in at 1:11pm. The caller ID read "Alzheimers" 951-281-3716. Seriously. My wife asked me who it was and when I told her, she said "maybe they forgot who they were calling?". Folks, you can't make this stuff up.
In an earlier blog, I mentioned the idea of eating a frog first thing every day (http://www.eatthatfrogmovie.com). Do that, and everything else will seem pretty easy the rest of the day. So, I ate the frog a little late today, but it's down and I'm blogging. Look, I'm a newbie at this blogging stuff and I've been putting it off for way too long, so cut me some slack here.
One of the things I have become accustomed to doing every day is "tweeting". It took me a while to get into it and understand the power of using Twitter to reach a multitude of people around the globe. There is a huge amount of information being shared out here in the cloud of the Internet and a lot (if not most) of it is on Twitter. It runs the gambit from the informative to the sublime to the ridiculous. If you're not using Twitter, you're missing a good bet to learn something, be amused and if you're not careful, to be abused as well.
Therein, lies this next little piece for today.
For some folks, being ignored on Twitter is taken as a personal affront, a rejection by those from whom we seek attention and a tweeter with an exaggerated sense of entitlement can be thrown into a rage of revengeful recriminations. Today, I ran across this comical YouTube video, done I believe by one of our British cousins. It's a real hoot (that's Texas talk for a laugh).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJr8uAqQCBM&feature=player_embedded Trust me on this one.
In my 6 January 2011 "Water, Water Everywhere" blog, I made mention of a US-based company, WaterPure International and its newest distributor, Acqua Pura LLC (http://myacquapura.com), in conjunction with an article about the purity of the world's water supply. The CEO of Acqua Pura wrote to me, asking for permission to include a link from their web site to my blog. I was flattered, to say the least. Okay, so now you're thinking, "here we go, OldMrBill has sold out and his blog is going to go commercial". Not so. I'm just doing a bit of bragging here, okay?
And while I'm at it, this isn't really a brag, but rather a mention......My 90 year old Dad, a retired US Forester, actually read my last blog and dropped me a note saying he was proud of me. He went on to say, and I quote "You are doing mighty well with the English language". Now before you get the idea that perhaps English is a second language to me, it's not. I am American born and bred, of British heritage, and the offspring of a mother (may she rest in peace) and father who have always been sticklers for correctness in speech and writing. Dad was always meticulous in his own avocation as a writer, so a small pat on the back from him was warmly received.
Let me wind up today's blog with a few Random Thoughts:
- The verb "cleave" is the only English word with two synonyms which are antonyms of each other: adhere and separate.
- The only 15 letter English word that can be spelled without repeating a letter is uncopyrightable.
- The longest one-syllable word in the English language is "screeched."
- Maine is the only state whose name is just one syllable.
- In England, in the 1880's, "Pants" was considered a dirty word.
- Einstein couldn't speak fluently when he was nine. His parents thought he might be retarded.
- Aztec emperor Montezuma had a nephew, Cuitlahac, whose name meant "plenty of excrement. Montezuma's Revenge come to mind.
- An average person laughs about 15 times a day.
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