Today is Sunday, March 27.  Happy Easter!  Today we remember the birthdays of Antonio Squarcialupi, Nathaniel Currier and Sarah Vaughan.  On this day in 1513 Juan Ponce de Leon sighted Florida, in 1790 the shoelace was invented and in 1980 Mount St Helens became active after 123 years.  In Burma it is Resistance Day, in the US it is National Spanish Paella Day and it is Easter Sunday.

Easter, celebrating the resurrection of Jesus, is a foundation of the Christian faith.  The exact origins of this religious feast day’s name are unknown.  Some sources claim the word Easter is derived from Eostre, a Teutonic goddess of spring and fertility.  Other accounts trace Easter to the Latin term hebdomada Alba, or white week, an ancient reference to Easter week and the white clothing donned by people who were baptized during that time (as discussed in the 2015 Easter edition of this blog).

Whatever!  None of this explains how we got from all of that to eating chocolate bunnies, Easter bunnies and Easter bonnets with all the frills upon it.  More interesting would be the explanation of how someone connected rabbits to eggs -  hard boiled and colored, chocolate or jellied.  I am sure retailers and making money had something to do with it and, of course, the greeting card people got in on it, too.  As with most holidays, we have managed to obscure the actual meaning of the day and turned it into something entirely different.  Don’t get me wrong.  I like eating chocolate eggs wrapped in foil as much as anyone.  I just don’t necessarily see what they have to do with Easter or why we have to wait a whole year to eat them again.

This past week the lovely Elaine had to re-enter the hospital.  As luck would have it, she got a room right near the requisite yeller.  You know who I mean.  Every time I have been to visit a family member in the hospital, there has always been one patient who is constantly yelling.  One time there was a guy yelling for Gloria and saying he had “the diarrhea”.  Another time there was a woman begging for help saying that she needed help getting up so she could leave.  The nurse pointed out, on numerous occasions, that she couldn’t get up because she had a broken leg.  I am sure you have heard someone like that at one time or another.

The one near the lovely Elaine was interesting.  At times he would just repeat the words help me over and over.  Another time he was saying, “Oh god, oh god, oh god!”  I was not sure if he was in real pain or having sex.  Another time he kept asking for help and saying he needed a knife.  Then we didn’t hear him anymore.  We don’t know if they moved him, sedated him or gave him the knife he was asking for.

Please excuse me for jumping around, but I have a couple different things to discuss and I don’t want to forget them.  My next issue is something I have noticed while ironing shirts.  I am sure that this is something that has been in existence for some time, but for some reason I only noticed it recently.  This question has two parts.  Part one is why is the last button hole on a shirt horizontal when all the others are vertical?  Part two is why is that button hole sometimes sewn with a different color thread?  I have spent a fair amount of time wondering about this and have not been able to come up with a reasonable explanation.  I will have to do some research on it and I will let you know what I come up with.
Another issue that I noticed recently is my neck.  I was looking in the mirror and noticed that when I hold my head the way I usually do, I have this, for lack of a better term, pouch where my neck used to be.  I realized that if I lifted my head up a little, the pouch went away.  I was left with that old man wattle-type thing instead.  The up side is that you can see that I have a neck.  The down side is that as I grow older and my skin continues to sag, I will have to raise my head more to get rid of the pouch.  At some point I will be walking around looking up in the air.  This will result in my walking into things because I can’t see where I am going.  If this becomes an issue and you see me, just say, “Bill, live with the pouch and watch where you are going.”  Thanks!

This week our fact tells us that about 8,000 Americans are injured by musical instruments each year.  Many of the injuries are preceded by the phrase, “If you don’t stop playing those bagpipes I am going to shove them …”  I am sure you get the picture.

Have a good week and enjoy some paella.

Today is Sunday, March 20 and there are only 280 days until Christmas.  I played some Christmas music the other day when the lovely Elaine was napping.  I don’t know if I enjoyed it more because it was Christmas music or because I played it in March.  Either way, I liked it.  Today we remember the birthdays of Balthasar Bekker, George Caleb Bingham and Carl Reiner.  On this day in 1616 Walter Raleigh was released from the Tower of London to seek gold in Guyana, in 1868 the Jesse James Gang robbed a bank in Russelville, KY of $14,000 and in 1969 John Lennon married Yoko Ono in Gibralter.  In Tunisia it is Independence Day, in the US it is National Ravioli Day and it is also Won’t You Be My Neighbor Day.

Let me start by saying that I know I had the wrong date last week.  Apparently I was so excited by DST that I jumped ahead a whole day.  I hope the mistake didn’t create any issues for anyone other than me.  It took me a day to get back in sync with the calendar.

So we have passed St. Patrick's Day and now everyone has gone back to being not Irish.  I have never quite gotten the big thing about the day.  Suddenly, one day a year, everybody wants to drink green beer, eat corned beef and cabbage and speak with a brogue.  I am not sure why. Did you hear about the Irish women’s libber?  She goes around saying Erin go braless.  Sorry, that just sort of came out.  But again why do we ignore other saints?  There are a number of other saints whose days are recognized throughout the year.  Why don’t we have parades and celebrations for them?

For example, St Fidelis of Sigmaringen.  Sigmaringen is in Germany, so we could still drink beer.  We could also eat schnitzel and bratwurst and other German delicacies.  It is written of St. Fidelis that if a poor man needed clothing Fidelis would often give the man the clothes off his back.  So on St. Fidelis Day, April 24, we could have a parade where the participants took off their clothes and threw them to the crowd.  Instead of wearing green, everyone could walk around with no clothes on.  This is starting to sound like my kind of holiday.  I think we should think about starting a movement.  Let me know your thoughts.

I want to express my concern with people’s lack of knowledge in the use and pronunciation of the English language.  As an example there have been several commercials using the word pure.  The people doing the voice overs have pronounced the word as peur instead of pyoor (like poor, but with a u).  It is almost as if these people have gone through life never having heard words pronounced correctly.  What really gets me is that no one connected with the commercial thought the proper pronunciation was important.  Either they were not aware that it was being said wrong or they just didn’t care.

Another thing I heard recently, again on several different occasions, was someone referring to a toast as doing a cheers.  One instance was a commercial for a beverage.  Several “real people, not actors” were asked their opinion of the beverage being touted.  They all, of course, expressed their amazement at how good it was.  I would love to see a commercial where they show someone who says, “I don’t really like this.  It doesn’t have a good flavor and it is kind of thick.”  I know that will never happen, but it would be interesting to see some honest reactions … but I digress.  So everyone was raving about the beverage and one girl says, “This is really good.  Do you want to do a cheers?”  A cheers?  How about drinking a toast to the beverage.

I personally do not like it when people take a word that is normally a noun and use it as a verb.  An example of that is how the word source has been used lately.  One advertiser brags about how their ingredients are sourced from local providers.  I recognize that source can be used as a verb, but why can’t they say they get or obtain their ingredients.  For that matter, how do we know that just because the provider is local, their product is good.  Just because they are local doesn’t mean they are clean or that they follow the proper guidelines … sorry, digressing some more.  It seems to me that they feel that if they source something rather than get it, it somehow makes it better.  I think we should get back to using regular words.  People have enough problems with our language as it is.

This week our fact tells us that 50% of American women say that they would marry the same man.  Another fact; however, tells us that 85% of American women are happier after their divorce or separation.  So while those women would marry the same man, they would be happier if they got divorced or separated.  Go figure.

Today is Sunday, March 14, which means there are only three days until everyone wears green clothes, eats and drinks green consumables and pukes green.  Yippee!  Today we remember the birthdays of Peter Musschenbroek, Jens Worsaae and Pedro Duque.  On this day in 1794 Eli Whiney patented the cotton gin, in 1870 the California legislature approved an act making Golden Gate park possible and in 1971 The Rolling Stones left England for France to avoid taxes.  Today is National Potato Chip Day and National Learn About Butterflies Day.

By now we have all sprung (sprang, springed?) forward.  I am not sure what the actual purpose is to daylight savings time or if there is a purpose.  The official spelling for this is Daylight Saving (no s) Time.  This is actually inaccurate because no daylight is actually saved.  The practice was originally suggested by Benjamin Franklin as a means of cutting back on candle usage.  It was instituted during the world wars as a way to save electricity by cutting the use of incandescent lighting.

It is believed that an extra hour of daylight in the evening is more usable than an hour of daylight in the morning.  Retailers are generally in favor of DST because studies show that people stay out later and spend more money.  We were always told that the time change had something to do with the farmers, but it seems that the farmers have nothing to do with it.  Some formers oppose it because grain is best harvested after dew evaporates, so when workers arrive and leave earlier in the summer their labor is less valuable.  Dairy farmers complain because their cows are sensitive to the timing of milking.  Delivering milk earlier disrupts their system.

There are groups who are in favor of DST and groups who are not.  Personally, I don’t care one way or the other.  Frankly, I think we should just pick one or the other and stay with it.  If DST is so great, why don’t we just jump ahead and stay there?  If we are ultimately going to fall back, why not just not jump ahead in the first place?

Is it me or are commercials getting more inane lately.  One of the ones that gets me is where we open with two guys in a locker room.  They talk a little and then one guy offers the other a piece of gum.  Suddenly they don’t know how to talk and use armpit farts to communicate.  We are given a translation and I spend the time trying to figure several things out.  One is what the gum has to do with what they are talking(farting) about.  Another is why the gum makes them unable to speak.  Finally I wonder why whoever created this commercial thought this was funny or why they thought it would make me want to buy their product.

Another series of commercials is the one with the settlers.  If you are trying to sell a product, why don’t you talk about how good it is instead of using these ridiculous commercials.  I cannot believe that people would actually feel like these “settlers” because they do not use the product that is being advertised.  I do not use the product and I do not feel like a settler.  Nor do I have any plan to switch to their product based on these commercials.  In fact they would make me want to avoid their product.  They do not inspire confidence.

There is also a series of insurance commercials that annoy me.  I have mentioned this in the past, but I feel that they should be mentioned during my commercial tirade.  You know the ones I am talking about.  The ones where “you named the car Brad” or where they don’t want you riding around on three wheels.  The one that gets me is where you buy a new car, crash it into a tree and have a problem with the insurance company.  Are they the ones who put the tree in your way?

I am not sure why, but insurance companies seem to have some of the most annoying commercials.  You have Flo, a gecko, settlers, etc.  None of these commercials are particularly amusing and generally people find them annoying and ignore them.  The other problem I have is that they are causing me to have weight and sugar problems.  Whenever they come on I go to the kitchen for some kind of snack like ice cream or cookies or something.  I wonder if there is an insurance company that can help me with that.  If there is, I hope they don’t have annoying commercials.

One more and then I will end this.  There is a restaurant chain that is making a big deal about the fact that their roast beef is hand carved.  What were they carving it with before?  How does the fact that it is hand carved make it better?  I would think that if they were using a machine that they would have more uniform slices.  That would seem like an efficient way to do it.  Shows how wrong I can be.  Okay, my rant on commercials is done, for now.

This week our fact tells us that in 2010, some schools in Southern California banned a dictionary for including a definition of oral sex.  First of all, did they really think kids use a dictionary anymore?  Second, did they really think that most kids needed a book to give them a definition?

Anyway, go have some chips and have a good week.

Hard drive crashed. I am doing this on my iPad. Please come back next week. I hope to have it fixed by then. Thanks. See you then.