Today is Sunday, January 27 and there are only 158 days until July 4^th. Time to start planning your barbecues and buying the fireworks. Today we remember the birthdays of Abbas I, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Mikhail Baryshnikov. On this day in 1671 pirate Henry Morgan landed at Panama City, in 1880 Thomas Edison patented the electric incandescent lamp and in 1961 “Sing Along With Mitch” premiered on NBC TV. In Mauritius it is Cavadee, in Vietnam it is Peace Day and in the US it is National Chocolate Cake Day.

I have to be honest, I don’t have much this week. It was a stay-at-home kind of week and there really isn’t too much to talk about.  I could comment about a number of things, but it would just be repetitious. I will admit that I may have been misleading recently when I talked about speeding.  I said that I do the speed limit. I do not when the limit is 55. I always thought that it was silly to change the limit from 60 to 55, especially since no one paid any attention to it. I go 60 and people still fly by me. If they really wanted people to go 55, they should have lowered the speed to 40. That would have gotten everyone up to 50 or 55 and would have accomplished the goal.

I would be willing to bet that most people do not even know why the limit was lowered to 55 in the first place. The limit was lowered by Congress as part of the Emergency Highway Energy Conservation Act which was passed to try and cut the gasoline consumption levels in response to the 1973 oil crisis. It was also felt that there would be a decrease in accidents and auto fatalities. The law was repealed in 1995, but many states left the 55 limit in effect. Why? Who knows. Maybe it was easier than having to change all the signs back to the original limit.

Another thing I suppose I could go into would be older people who try to make themselves look younger than they are, unsuccessfully. I saw a woman the other day who had to be in her 70’s. She was wearing very tight slacks (that did nothing for her), high-heeled boots, a low cut V-neck sweater and her hair was styled short and spiky. The problems – she was having a hard time walking in the boots, the neckline showed wrinkles that you could hide children in and her hair was black, unnaturally black. I wanted to buy her a can of spray paint in case she needed to do a touchup. There is no way anyone looking at her thought she was younger than 70, except maybe herself.

I also saw a man who had a comb-over that started just above his right ear. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much to comb over so he had these long strands of thin hair that still did not cover most of his head. I wanted to tell him that everyone knew he was bald. Cut the hair and deal with it. Another guy I saw had a wig that reminded me of that old line, “It’s not fake anything.  It’s real dynel!” What made it worse was that it was not fitted to his head well and he had about a ½ inch border of gray showing on his neck. I do not see how any of these people look in a mirror and say, “Yeah, that looks great.”

Understand, I do not think that I am some manly stud who makes women swoon. I am what I am and look how I look. My goal is to look as good as I can with what I have and try not to look ridiculous when I go out. I keep my hair short so that my bald spot is not as obvious. I told my grandson that it was not a bald spot, it was a solar panel to help give me energy. He got it and kids me about it sometimes. The bottom line is that I am comfortable with how I look. If someone doesn’t like it, they can look the other way. I figure that as long as I am clean, shaved, neatly dressed and not bathed in cologne that you can smell two minutes before I get there and ten minutes after I am gone, then I am good.

Here is another question. Have you ever been out in public and had an itch that could not be ignored, but was in an area that you really did not want to scratch while the world watched? Recently, we were out for dinner and I had an itch on my upper thigh, in the back. There is no way, when sitting, to surreptitiously scratch that itch. It would have looked even odder if I stood up to do it. Of course I knew that when I scratched it, Barbara would say, “What are you doing?” This would have immediately drawn even more attention to me. But sometimes you don’t have a choice so I took care of it, she responded as anticipated and fortunately no one stared directly at me. But they knew, they knew.

I have just looked over what I have written and all I can say is imagine how much there would be if I had something to say. This week our fact is one that I find amazing. Justin Timberlake’s half-eaten French toast sold for over $3000 on eBay. Several questions come to mind with this. The first question is – WHY? The next question is how does the person who made the purchase know that it is, in fact, Justin Timberlake’s? What, exactly, does the person plan to do with it? In ten years who will even care, or for that matter believe, it was Justin’s? Frankly, if you have nothing better to do with your money then buy half-eaten food, send it to me and I will give you a whole French toast breakfast and use the rest of the funds to help other people eat a good breakfast.