It is Sunday, April 14.  Are your taxes done yet?  Today is the birthday of Sir John Gielgud, Loretta Lynn and Ty Grimes.  In the year 193, Lucius Septimus Severus was crowned emperor of Rome; in 1859 Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities” was published and in 1960 “Bye Bye Birdie” opened at the Martin Beck Theater in New York City.  It is Water Festival in Burma, New Years Day in Laos and Varusha Pirappu in Mauritius.

I have to be honest, I don’t have much this week.  It has been a weird week, to say the least, 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 a few weeks ago 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  The law was repealed in 1995, but many states left the 55 limit in effect.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, 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?  The other evening, 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, the lovely Elaine 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.  Thanks for stopping by.  I’ll see you next week.