Today is Sunday, October 6 and there are only 80 days until Christmas.  If you listen closely, you can almost hear the people swearing in the parking lots as they fight for a space … never mind, that happens all the time.  Today is the birthday of Richard Dedekind, Sir Basil Zaharoff and Helen Moody.  On this day in 1683, 13 German families arrived in present day Philadelphia, in 1884 the Naval War College was established in Newport, RI and in 1967 Haight-Ashbury hippies threw a funeral to mark the end of hippies.  In Massachusetts it is Grandparents Day. Tomorrow it will be Missouri Day in Missouri (thank you Captain Obvious) and world-wide it will be Child Health Day and Universal Children’s Day.  One time I asked my mother why there was a Mother’s Day and a Father’s Day, but no children’s day.  She said that every day was children’s day.

Is it me or have we become a civilization that beats everything to death and then some.  We take something and just use it until it becomes tiresome.  Take for example vampires.  Some years ago, 1992 to be precise, the movie “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” was released.  It was an erotic tale about Dracula based on the novel written in 1897.  It made a fortune, was received positively by critics and revived, for a time, the vampire image.

That image simmered for a number of years, out there, but not quite mainstream until 2011 when the first of the “Twilight Saga” series came out.  Over the next couple years we had three more movies in that series and a number of other TV shows and movies involving vampires.  What I hope is the death knell for vampires is the TV commercial where vampires are selling breakfast bars and saying how much they like the morning now.  I think that stupid commercial has taken that subject farther than it needed to go.  Please let vampires rest!

Another subject that has reached ridiculous proportions is zombies.  There have always been zombies and zombie movies.  There was the movie “Bowery At Midnight” in 1942, “Castle of the Living Dead” in 1964, “Prince of Darkness” in 1987 and “The Crypt” in 2009 just to name a few.  There were many, many more.  I think the one thing that made zombies mainstream was the Michael Jackson music video “Thriller” released in 1983.  That was when zombies came into their own.  Since then we have had a plethora of zombie movies, a video game was developed  – Plants Vs Zombies – and we had a big time movie starring Brad Pitt about World War Z.  I do think; however, that the zombie issue will be coming to a close soon.  Zombies are now selling cell phones.  When zombies start making “amusing” commercials, they are on the downhill run to being passé, one can only hope.

This idea that if something is good let’s use it all the time for everything, is not unusual.  Look at the fashion industry.  A long time ago, the big clothing fad was the Nehru jacket. This jacket was popular in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s.  Its popularity was spurred when the Monkees and the Beatles wore them, along with several villains in the James Bond series.  All the big names in show business wore them.  You saw them on famous people all the time.  Then, they became available to the masses.  People everywhere began wearing them.   I bought one after getting out of the service and got to wear it one time before the jacket fell out of favor.

Another big fashion hit of the ‘60’s and ‘70’s that got overdone was the leisure suit.  This was a popular outfit and was a hit with young men all over.  This polyester pants and jacket ensemble was big during the disco era.  The outfit became the thing to wear for some time, but ultimately became a cause for ridicule when 70 year old men began to wear them with white belts and shiny white shoes.  At one point some restaurants and businesses banned them from their establishments.  Here is another time when I got out of the service just in time to be on the tail end of a fad. 

Maybe it’s me.  Maybe people are enjoying a clothing fad and then someone notices that I have started wearing the style.  “Well, that does it for that outfit.  Bill’s wearing it now.  I guess I can send mine to Vietnam Veterans.”  Or not.

I managed to miss a lot of great things while in the Air Force.  I completely missed the sexual revolution, getting out just in time for a few minor skirmishes before a complete cease fire was declared.  By the time I was out to witness the phenomenon, women had gone back to wearing bras.  I got to enjoy the mini-skirt thing but only for a short while before women started wearing pants.  But I digress …

We saw Cavaricci pants and parachute pants in the 1980’s.  All the young people were wearing them.  Add to that look the mullet haircut and you have a look that  … well, let’s just say that it was a look that lasted too long and then mercifully went away, at least for the most part.  I have seen guys who still sport a sort of modified mullet, they still roll up the short sleeves on their shirts and wear high top sneakers untied.  Oh well, some fashion things never completely die.  Now if we could just get more women back into that braless thing … (big sigh here).

This week’s fact tells us that 62 degrees F is the minimum temperature required for a grasshopper to hop.  I guess if its colder, the grasshopper will just work on his karate.  Wax on, wax off.