Today is Sunday, October 19.  There are only 39 days until the start of the Christmas Music Season.  Today we remember the birthdays of John McLoughlin, Gunnar Nordahl and Jennifer Holiday.  On this day in 615 St. Deusdedrit I began his reign as Catholic Pope, in 1849 Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman in the US to receive a medical degree and in 1988 the Senate passed a bill curbing ads during children’s TV shows.  It is Independence Day in Mauritania, Yorktown Day in Virginia and tomorrow is Alaska Day in Alaska (as if you hadn’t already worked that out).

I thought the bit about curbing ads on children’s TV was interesting.  Because of my grandsons, I have watched a fair amount of children’s TV and never noticed much of a curb on ads.  I decided to look into this and see what the story was.

The bill would have limited advertising during children's programming to 10.5 minutes an hour on weekends, and 12 minutes an hour on weekdays.  Such limitations had existed under longstanding Federal Communications Commission rules until 1984, when the commission removed them.  The House of Representatives passed the measure, 328 to 78, on June 8, and the Senate gave its approval Oct. 19 by unrecorded voice vote that could have been blocked if only one Senator had opposed it.

President Reagan, who exercised a pocket veto late Saturday, said he disapproved of the bill because it was an unconstitutional infringement on freedom of expression. Supporters of the measure called the veto a disservice to children and said the legislation would be reintroduced the following year.

''This bill simply cannot be reconciled with the freedom of expression secured by our Constitution,'' the president said in announcing that he had used the pocket veto to kill the legislation.

Peggy Charren, president of Action for Children's Television, said that the assertion that the bill was unconstitutional was ''a double-speak excuse.'' The legislation, she said, simply furthered the mandate of the Communications Act that every station serve the public interest. Current children's television, she said, does not do that.

There is a lot more information available and if you are interested you can Google “1988 Bill Improving Children’s TV.”  I will not go into my feelings on this except to say that based on some of what I have seen disguised as children’s TV, I would rather watch the commercials.

I would like to take another swipe at a group of people I have talked about before – pedestrians.  I really think that something needs to be done about these people.  You know the ones I’m talking about, the people who are walking along the sidewalk and decide that they want to cross the street.  Rather than walk the extra 10 feet to the traffic light and crosswalk, they just come out between two cars and start to cross.  They don’t even look to see if cars are coming, they just go.  Why?  Because they believe that they have the right of way and can cross whenever and wherever they wish.

Another type of idiot, I mean pedestrian, is the one who is walking down the street and decides to cross, but instead of going straight across the street, takes a diagonal path, putting him or her in the street, and in your way, even longer.  I know I have said this before, but I am going to repeat it.  You may have the right of way because you are a pedestrian, but when you are lying in the hospital with broken bones and damaged organs, the right of way is not going to make you better.  Of course, I always feel that these people have the word lawsuit floating around in the back of their mind, just in case the right of way doesn’t work for them.

The worst ones are the people who walk in parking lots.  These people are in a space filled with cars.  They have just driven through the lot to find a place to park.  What makes them suddenly think that it is okay to walk along four abreast?  Doesn’t it occur to them that other people are driving around doing the same thing they just did?  Are people really that oblivious?  Yes, they are!  OMG!  Yes they are!!

Recently, the lovely Elaine and I were at a mall.  We had completed the tasks we had set for ourselves and were preparing to leave.  I was backing out of the parking space, when all of a sudden, the alarm that lets me know something is behind me when I am backing up, starts to beep.  I look and two people have decided that they could not wait the 10 to 15 seconds it would have taken for me to back out of the space, so they decided to walk around me.  Of course they might not have seen me.  I was only driving a black SUV, it was light out, my back-up lights were lit and my car was moving (insert your own annoying buzzer sound here).  Wrong!  They saw me, but they were in a hurry and they had the right of way, after all.  Having just come out of the mall, I could not think of a store that was running a sale so spectacular that it was worth risking being run over to get to.

I watch this kind of behavior all the time and I am constantly amazed at how dumb people can be.  One more quick discussion about people in parking lots.  I watch them make five or six attempts at backing into a parking space.  When I pull into a lot I go in head first.  When I leave, I back out, usually in one move and leave.  I once asked a person why he backed into the space and he said it was because he didn’t like backing up.  This way he could just pull out.  I just looked at him. It didn’t even occur to him that backing up was how he got in the space in the first place.  I could not come up with a response.  This guy and the others all suffer from an affliction I call “anal-cranial inversion” (think about it).

This week our fact tells us that conception occurs most in the month of December.  Guys, it would be easier and cheaper, in the long run, to just get her a pair of earrings or a bracelet for Christmas.