Wednesday, September 2, 2026

Road trips and other quandries...

I know this may be a bit Florida-specific, but I'm sure, if you think about it, you could come up with a similar memory from your yonger days . Before rest stops had vending machines and fast food chains, a road trip through Florida meant pulling over at a giant orange-shaped stand for a glass of fresh-squeezed juice straight from the grove.  These roadside stands became an iconic symbol of the classic Florida vacation drive.
Families making the long trip down U.S. Highway 1 relied on these stands not just for refreshment, but as a genuine taste of the citrus groves stretching endlessly along the roadside. Many of these novelty-shaped stands became beloved local landmarks, drawing tourists as much for their whimsical architecture as for the juice itself, a perfect blend of roadside kitsch and genuine Florida agriculture.
There's something so charming about a simple glass of orange juice becoming its own tourist attraction. Do you remember stopping at a roadside citrus stand like this one? If you have a special childhood memory of a unique roadside attraction, drop a comment. Our readers may enjoy hearing about it...
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Tim McGraw helped give more than 100 veterans and military families mortgage-free homes. Starting in 2012, the country music star partnered with Operation Homefront and Chase to surprise military families during stops on his tours.
At many concerts, a local veteran would be brought onstage or surprised backstage. Then came the announcement. They were getting a home. Mortgage-free.
The homes were provided through the partnership, while McGraw helped present them, raise awareness and turn the moment into something unforgettable for the families receiving them.
For veterans who had spent years serving their country, the gift meant more than just a set of keys. It meant security.
Stability. And a place to finally call home.
If you're interested in finding out more about the organisation, here's their website: https://operationhomefront.org/
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Yeah - they even translated it and redubbed. Go figure...
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Ovutek Smart Scale for Body Weight
Professional Digital Scale with BMI, 
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Disney may be taking a small step back toward the traditional, family-friendly language many longtime fans remember. The classic phrase “ladies and gentlemen” has reportedly returned to at least one Walt Disney World monorail announcement after Disney spent recent years replacing some traditional greetings with gender-neutral wording.
The change has drawn attention because Disney never publicly announced a companywide policy reversal. That means it is not yet clear whether the phrase is returning across all parks, attractions, and announcements — or whether this is only a limited change. Still, for families tired of corporate language games, hearing a simple traditional greeting again is a welcome sign.
The shift comes under Disney’s new CEO, Josh D’Amaro, who took over in March. Disney is also restructuring parts of the company and has said it could eliminate up to 1,000 jobs, mainly in marketing and corporate operations. Those job cuts appear to be a business decision, not a confirmed part of any cultural change.
Disney built its reputation by creating fun, wholesome entertainment that families could enjoy together. One announcement will not fix every concern longtime fans have with the company, but it may show Disney is finally paying attention. The real question is whether the company will keep moving back toward the timeless stories, common sense, and family values that made Disney special in the first place.
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Last Friday night we went out to dinner with friends in Belfast, and we sat outside and had a couple of cocktails before going in. While we doing our ritual pre-dinner embibing, I couldn't help but notice this young-ish couple sitting at the picnic table across from us. We were out there for about 30 minutes, and these two chuckleheads never spoke to each other damn near the whole time. As we were going in, I not-so-casually commented to the woman "What did we do before we had phones smarter than us", trying to be funny, and she replied "Seriously. We jusy ordered our dinners and we're waiting for them to tell  us our table is ready."
Just shoot me now and get it over with.
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Click on the picture for more information on these oh-so-cute earrings.
They're all simple yet elegant - and come to you with free shipping!
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1975 Decor Popcorn Machine catalog ad - Wrapped in wood paneling to fit the era, this coin-operated hot fresh popcorn dispenser was created to serve our needs by convenience. They were commonly installed in bowling alleys, roller rinks, department store corridors & rest stops just to name a few.
Obviously, marketing was a bit different back in the day. The ad exec for the company had been trying to bang his secretary for onths, to no avail. "Fuck", he said to himself, "I'll put her in an ad and make her famous. Yeah  - that'll work. I'll put her in somew hot pants and just have her lean against the machine for the shoot. If that doesn't work, fuck it - I give up."
He gave up...
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Click here for more information.
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We were different in so many ways...

 
We didn't have helicopter parents or electronic gadgets to keep us occupied - we were, for the most part, on our own to keep ourselves busy. No TV or radio? NO problem - we made our own fun. 
If we were going to the park to play ball with the guys, our mothers would bag a PBJ sandwich and hand it to us with an admonition to 'be home before your father gets home for dinner' and push us out the door. We had good imaginations and great friends. Fifty cents could last us all week. Nobody cared what you wore, because we pretty much all wore hand-me-downs from our older brothers. 
We were different. In so many ways. And thank God we were...

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Tuesday, September 1, 2026

Texas roaches bug fuckin' the rats? Jeez...



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Just used it on our Ireland trip. It's great...
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His kinda woman...

 

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This blog is supported by the meager commissions I get when you buy stuff 
on Amazon going through a link you see here. It doesn't matter if you buy what
 is promoted, or something else - it's all still credited to the blog. 
Long and short of it? If you're ever going to Amazon, do me a favor - come to
 the blog first and use one of my links. 
Your help is greatly appreciated. Seriously - thank you...
                                                                                                                         
                                                                      
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How dare he rename Lakes and Seas, right?

 
For my friends on the left who might be critical of renaming Lake Ontario to Lake America, you're being hypocritical. Acting like this is some unprecedented outrage after a decade of the left renaming sports teams, schools, highways, food brands, and half the dictionary.
A quick reminder, in case anyone forgot:
 
• Washington Redskins → Commanders
• Cleveland Indians → Guardians
• Stanford Indians → Cardinal
• Edmonton Eskimos → Elks
• Loudoun County Raiders → Captains
Places and holidays
• Columbus Day → Indigenous Peoples’ Day
• Robert E. Lee High School → John Lewis High
• Jefferson Davis Highway → Richmond Highway
• Mount McKinley → Denali (later reversed)
• Fort Bragg → Fort Liberty (later reversed)
• Fort Hood → Fort Cavazos
Brands and institutions
• Boy Scouts of America → Scouting America
• Aunt Jemima → Pearl Milling Company
• Uncle Ben’s → Ben’s Original
• Eskimo Pie → Edy’s Pie
• Land O’Lakes → kept the land, dropped the Indian
Language
• Illegal alien → undocumented immigrant
• Hispanic → Latinx (a term Hispanics never asked for and don’t use)
• Mother → birthing person
• Breastfeeding → chestfeeding
• Inmate / prisoner / convict → justice-involved person
• Ex-con → returning citizen
• Fat → plus-sized
• Master bedroom → primary bedroom
• Anchor baby → child of noncitizens
 
And so on... You can think the lake rename is dumb. Fine. Just don’t pretend renaming things is some brand-new crime that only started last week!



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Does New Jersey Have The Meanest Drivers In America?

I know it appears that I rag on my home state often, but there's a good reason. 
A: There's a lot to bitch about - especially since I'm looking in my rear view mirror, and 
B: Between taxes, congestion and, oh, I don't know - maybe three or four hundred other reasons, yeah - I got the fuck out of there as soon as I could.
If you thought New Jersey drivers were among the meanest drivers in America, a recent study might be proving me right. If you've ever driven in the Garden State, you may not think you need a study to answer that question. New Jersey has some pretty mean drivers.
There are angry, aggressive drivers every where you go.  The question is, are they meaner drivers than anyone else in the country? According to Maison Law, which questioned about 2000 drivers on that topic, the answer is no. Thank goodness for a place called New York - who really, really suck at the most basic of driving skills...
 For example, New Jersey drivers are more likely to beep than any other drivers in the country. I know how shocking that must be for you, but the truth is, we (I'm speaking as a native) use the horn a lot. More than just about anybody else. Still standing still when the light turns green? Horn. No turn signal? Horn. Too slow in the left lane? Horn and finger. Stopped in te middle of the street bullshitting with someone? A lot of horn - and then the finger as I go past. Tailgating me? Slow down to a crawl, and when you pass on my right horn and finger. You get the idea. There's a reason that horn is there. Use it. 
Drive safely my friends, that guy behind you might be from Bayonne - and that guy passing you on your right? Absolutetly from Hackensack. Juss' sayin'...
 
Thanks to NJ101.5 for the inspiration.


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Hats off to this fine blonde HillBetty...



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Be careful what you wish for, guys...

Six guys took part in the British reality dating show There’s Something About Miriam, competing for the attention of 21-year-old Mexican model Miriam Rivera without being told that the program’s finale would reveal she was transgender.
Filmed in Ibiza, Spain, and broadcast on Sky1, the six-episode series offered a £10,000 prize (worth about $18,324 then) and a yacht trip with Rivera.
Contestant Tom Rooke, a lifeguard and former ski instructor, was ultimately chosen as the winner. After learning about the show’s concealed premise, however, he rejected the prize money and joined the other contestants in taking legal action against production company Endemol. Their claims included conspiracy to commit sexual assault, defamation, breach of contract and psychological and emotional injury.
The legal dispute delayed the program’s release for several months. After the contestants reached an undisclosed settlement with the production company, the series premiered on February 22, 2004, with the finale airing on March 24. It was subsequently broadcast in several other countries, including Australia, Lithuania, Poland and Argentina, before reaching the United States in 2007.
Rivera largely stepped away from public attention following the controversy surrounding the show. 
In 2019, he/she was found dead at her mother’s apartment at the age of 38. 
His/her death was reported as an apparent suicide.

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  Your A/C has been cranking all summer.
It's a good idea to change you HVAC filters.
Find the size you need here ...
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Tigers don't sneeze!!!


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Is someone you know a Mother 
who needs to be celebrated?
 
Click on the picture for more information on this lovely bracelet
It's only $ 28.00 - and it comes to you with free shipping!
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Well guys, another piece of our childhood is heading to the great mailbox in the sky.

 
Columbia House - yes, THE Columbia House - is finally shutting down for good on September 15th. And if you're over 40, you already know exactly what I'm talking about.
Twelvealbums, 8-tracks, cassettes or CDs for a penny. Or a dollar. Or however they framed it that month. You'd tape a literal penny to the order form, mail it off, and wait like it was Christmas morning.
Here's the part they don't tell the kids today: it was a beautifully sneaky business. You got your stack of albums up front, then the "selection of the month" just kept showing up whether you asked for it or not. Forget to mail back the little card? Congratulations, you now own a Michael Jackson album you never wanted.
They had a name for it - "negative option billing." We had a name for it too. It rhymed with "trap." And it was so aggressive that it was actually outlawed in places like Ontario, Canada.
But here's what I keep coming back to.
At its peak, this thing was a MONSTER. We're talking roughly $1.5 billion in annual revenue and something like 15% of all CD sales in America running through a mail-order catalog. A catalog! No app, no algorithm, no streaming - just glossy paper, a stamp, and the patience of a saint.
And the ritual was universal. Get your first player - record, cassette, boom box, Walkman, then CD - and Columbia House was how you actually filled it up. It was the on-ramp to owning music before owning music meant anything.
So we all ran the same play. Sign up. Grab the twelve. Cancel. Wait a few months. Sign up again under your dog's name. Grab twelve more. My "collection" was built on this hustle, and I'd bet money yours was too.
The wild part isn't that it's closing. It's that it was somehow STILL OPEN in 2026. In a world of Spotify and instant downloads, there was a company out there still stuffing discs into padded envelopes. That's not a business model - that's a fossil that forgot to go extinct.
The dinosaur finally lay down. And honestly? It had a good run - 71 years is longer than most marriages- or lifetimes. Farewell, Columbia House. You hooked us, you billed us, and you gave a whole generation the thrill of "free" music before free music was even a thing.
 
Thanks to Mark C. Arnold for reminding us...

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That's only 34 cents per cup and it's GOOD coffee!
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We pretty much just got here if ya think about it...

Earth is roughly 4.5 billion years old, a number so large it's nearly impossible to grasp on any human scale. Scientists and writers have long used a simple trick to make it more understandable: compress the planet's entire history into a single 24-hour day. 
On that scale, each hour represents about 187 million years, each minute about 3 million years, and each second roughly 52,000 years. The clock starts at midnight with Earth's formation. Life doesn't even begin until around 4 AM, and for the next sixteen hours, the planet has nothing to show but simple single-celled microbes. It isn't until nearly 8:30 PM that the first sea plants appear, followed by jellyfish, trilobites, and eventually the first creatures crawling onto land around 10 PM. Dinosaurs don't arrive until 11 PM, holding dominance for less than 40 minutes before a catastrophic asteroid impact wipes them out at 11:39 PM, clearing the way for mammals to take over. 
And humans, the species responsible for cities, technology, art, and everything else we consider "history," don't show up until just one minute and seventeen seconds before midnight. Everything we typically think of as human history, ancient Egypt, the Roman Empire, both World Wars, the internet, all of it, would be compressed into the final few seconds of that final minute. 
Looking at it this way reframes something easy to forget: we are an extraordinarily recent addition to a planet that spent nearly the entirety of its existence getting along just fine without us.

Thanks to Mind Blowing Facts for the inspiration.






I've never heard anyone blame the knife - have you?

 
The "suspect" - they say that because calling her 'the stabber' would be disrespectful of the 'stabees', I guess -  identified as 49-year-old Pamela Cisneros of Queens, wielded two knives as she approached a 68-year-old man at Times Square and stabbed him in the abdomen, according to Tisch. Moments later, she stabbed a woman in the stomach. Soon after, police confronted Cisneros and tried to stop her. They spoke with her for approximately 4 min, authorities said, but did not convince her to drop her knives.
Multiple officers tried to subdue Cisneros with stun guns, but she continued to move toward them with the knives. Then two officers fired their service weapons at Cisneros. The shooting was captured on body cameras, according to Tisch. All three people – Cisneros and the two stabbing victims – were taken to Bellevue hospital, where Cisneros and the female victim were pronounced dead. The man is alive and in stable condition.
Both Tisch and Zohran Mamdani, the New York City mayor, defended the officers’s lethal use of force, though it will be investigated, which is standard for officer-involved shootings in New York. “I want to thank the NYPD officers who stepped in and prevented a horrific attack from becoming even worse,” Mamdani said.
Had she shot two people instead of 'just' stabbing them, all of these people would be pissing and moaning about the gun the women might have used, blaming the gun, and not the whackjob who killed someone and wounded another. There is only one reason they didn't - banning knives is not yet on their agenda - although it might be sooner or later. Do you see the folly in this? I certainly do. If it doesn't fit their agenda, it doesn't happen, plain and simple.

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American Airlines announced it will match the federal government’s $1,000 Trump Accounts contribution with another $1,000 for eligible employees’ children. The move adds the airline to a growing list of major companies backing the Trump administration’s child savings initiative.
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Trenton, NJ Mayor Reed Gusciora is speaking out after a weekend block party erupted in gunfire, leaving two people dead and eight others wounded in the city’s Wilbur section.
Gusciora’s message blamed the instrument instead of the people behind the killing, in which the shooters used an illegal gun. Legal gun ownership at this time, is not the issue, yet the mayor, like many other New Jersey Democrats used the mass shooting as evidence against legal gun ownership, ignoring the root causes of inner city violence in Democrat controlled cities across the state.
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Anyone you know in that picture? Madness...
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There is most certainly a timelessness on what I think is beautiful - 
or just plain isn't. Tastes may change for others, but not for me...

And not a single stupid friggin' tat between 'em. It fascinates me how styles - and lifestyles - change over the years. How we, as a society, define what is 'beautiful' and what isn't gets skewed by whatever the current vogue is, but I'd say unashamefully that there are certain things - certain looks - that are timeless, and these three women from the early eighties are a perfect example of what I mean.
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These are seriously 
comfortable pants. 
 

At under 25 bucks each, a good deal, too. 
See for yourself - click on the picture or this link:
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Florida is putting the brakes on automated license plate readers across the State Highway System. The Florida Department of Transportation has revoked all permits allowing law enforcement agencies to operate license plate reader systems, including Flock cameras, on state highway rights-of-way. Agencies have been given 30 days to remove the cameras.
FDOT says state law allows it to temporarily permit local law enforcement to install the technology, but officials say the “recent exponential increase” in cameras required intervention to protect Floridians’ sovereignty and quality of life. Automated license plate readers, commonly called ALPRs or LPRs, photograph passing vehicles and record information such as license plates, locations and times. That information can then be searched by law enforcement during investigations.
Gov. Ron DeSantis isn’t denying that the cameras can help police catch criminals. He says the bigger issue is what happens when technology capable of tracking vehicles across Florida is misused against innocent citizens. DeSantis has called the rapid expansion of Flock cameras and similar surveillance technology “out of control” and wants lawmakers to establish stronger protections for Floridians.
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Any of the jewelry pieces my wife creates make great gifts.
Click the picture to see what she has available today.
 
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In 1982, Knickerbocker Toy Co. released one of the strangest pieces of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial merchandise ever made. The E.T. Finger Light was designed for children ages 4 and up and allowed them to imitate the alien’s famous glowing fingertip from the movie.
Sold under model number 4111, the toy consisted of a flesh-colored rubber finger extension with a small light inside. When the child pressed the finger against a surface, the built-in battery activated the bulb at the tip, making it glow.
The problem was the toy’s appearance. Its elongated shape and textured rubber design led parents and the public to point out an unintended resemblance to an adult novelty item. Complaints and mockery followed, and retailers soon began removing the toy from their shelves.
The product disappeared after only a short period on the market, becoming an unusual example of how a successful movie franchise could still produce a merchandise failure. Knickerbocker Toy Co. itself also went out of business in 1982.
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Road trips and other quandries...

I know this may be a bit Florida-specific, but I'm sure, if you think about it, you could come up with a similar memory from your yonger...