If you have ever shared an office workspace with women of childbearing age, you will no doubt be familiar with the office baby shower. This is not a suddenly put together affair, but one that occupies hours of planning and coordination on the part of the shower givers.
Wolfman Jack was the star attraction on XERF. The “howlin’, prowlin’” Wolfman was as mysterious as he was raucous. He played “race” records—hard core r&b, blues and the breed of rock ‘n’ roll you wouldn’t hear on the Top 40 stations. Wolfman was best listened to in bed under the covers, after your parents had gone to sleep.
There’s something ’bout the prairie as it stretches to the sky
With the tall grass swaying easy in the wind
With the clouds a-headed somewhere out beyond the great divide
On their way to distant places you’ve not been.
An estimated 3.5 billion wire hangers go into U.S. landfills every year, and they sit there for over a hundred years. That does not count the 1.25 million hangers in my closet at home. Leave it to American ingenuity to identify a problem and turn it into an advertising campaign. A New York company, EcoHanger®, is making a 100%-recyclable, biodegradable clothes hanger made of paper.
Literary Lions
Eustis McGurk was a meek little clerk who worked in a local bookstore. When the circus came round to Eustis’s town he decided his life was a bore.
In 1921 Fred R. Barnard in the advertising journal Printer’s Ink first coined the phrase “One Look is Worth A Thousand Words.” He later rephrased the ad headline to read, “One Picture is Worth Ten Thousand Words,” and credited it to an ancient Chinese proverb. The only thing ancient about the line was that he had made it up six years earlier. Regardless, I get his meaning.
I bought a book off the discount rack at a local bookstore not long ago entitled Quintessence: The Quality of Having IT. On the jacket fly, the author explained the book’s purpose. “This a book about the objects of this world that transcend their form and function, that offer more to us than we ask of them—that rise above themselves to assume iconic stature.”
As you can plainly see
I’m from off the lone prairie,
Got a ranch out there; I call it “Mornin’ Dew.”
But the cowboy life was lonely
Til I found my one and only,
A red-haired widder gal, the name a’ Pru.
Long before getting patched up was as easy as a drive to see the doc, our tough-as-nails predecessors had their own, sometimes questionable, remedies for things that still plague us. We suggest that you completely ignore the advice that follows. Read on and be thankful for walk-in clinics!
One of the benefits of being a writer is the opportunity to speak to community groups. But I clearly understand that the main mission of the meeting is not to hear me speak, but to have fellowship and eat picnic food on a weekday.