This week, a particularly good, and funny friend, sent me a picture of what looked like a gun shop loaded with walls of firearms. Like the wall in Academy. Below where the guns hung, there was a bakery counter stocked full of fresh donuts, eclairs, puff pastry, cinnamon rolls and more… right next to a rolling cart stacked high with pastries that they hadn’t yet put out. Her note attached said, “My political views are whatever this is!” I can see where she’s coming from.
Elon Musk, a frequent Twitter critic, is now joining the platform on their Board of Directors. Hmmm. This announcement came one day after he acquired a 9.2% stake in the company, making him by far the largest shareholder. Musk has also been known to tweet misinformation, along with less than complimentary statements about journalists and other individuals; like comparing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to Hitler, which was quickly deleted. Twitter’s stock jumped 27% Monday. Elon Musk’s net worth is about $300 billion, $100 billion over Jeff Bezos.
Tiger Woods announced that he will play in the Masters Tournament and believes he can win. He’s just worried about all the necessary walking. A number of Republicans have criticized Mitt Romney because he is backing Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson for the Supreme Court. GM and Honda are teaming up to build a $30,000 electric car. JetBlue has now offered to buy Spirit Airlines for $3.6 billion. Wait, hadn’t Frontier Airlines agreed to buy Spirit for $2.9 billion? Hmmm. Someone is having a bidding war. A West Virginia angler landed a 51-pound Muskie (white filleted flesh compared to lobster when prepared with butter), setting a state record for the species. He called friends for assistance in taking photos and keeping the fish alive until it could be released back into the lake. Flowering plants in Antarctica are growing at an unprecedented speed, a rare spectacle showing a tipping point of the climate crisis. Yep, we now have flowers where it used to be too cold.
On April 13th in NY, the Bonhams Space History will auction lunar dust collected by American astronaut Neil Armstrong from the Apollo 11 mission in 1969. Just think… man’s first steps on the Moon. The sale of this specimen marks the first time a part of the Apollo 11 contingency sample, which has been evaluated and verified, can be sold at auction. Still in the case from NASA, it is estimated to bring between $800,000 to $1,200,000.
A man named Simon who lives in Oklahoma, found a green tree frog in his boxed lettuce from Whole Foods. Because society seems to be looking for everything, and everybody that seems to ‘wrong them’ in the world, I was sure this story would end up with the guy throwing a fit and suing. No. This is an incredibly happy story. Simon said it was too cold outside on the night he found the little guy in his lettuce, so he put him back in the lettuce box, made him a bathtub with water in a Mason jar lid, and named him Tony. The next day Simon bought Tony worms to eat and upgraded him to a little orange habitat that stayed in the bathroom. Tony was happy. Simon was happy. Tony escaped a few times but was always found. At Christmas, he even had his own stocking. All along, Simon just wanted the best for Tony… release him or keep him? Then Simon got Tony a terrarium mansion, and knew the frog was going to stay with him. Oh, now I need to tell you the best part of the story. When Simon was 10, he was given a 50% chance of surviving leukemia. While he was sick in the hospital, his favorite companion in his hospital bed was a stuffed green tree frog. I saw the pictures. I am blubbering right now.
RECENT BIRTHDAYS: Singer Peggy Lennon of the Lennon Sisters is 80. I remember watching them on the Lawrence Welk Show at my Granny and Pawpaw’s house. Guitarist Steve Howe of Yes and Asia is 74. Bassist Mel Schacher of Grand Funk Railroad is 70. Singer-actor John Schneider of The Dukes of Hazzard is 61. Singer Julian Lennon is 58. Actor Robin Wright is 55. Actor Patricia Arquette is 53.
Actor Michael Learned of The Waltons is 82. Country singer Margo Smith is 79. Actor Dennis Quaid is 67. Actor Cynthia Nixon of Sex and the City is 55. Actor Keshia Knight Pulliam of The Cosby Show is 42. Actor Kristen Stewart of Twilight is 31. Actor Elle Fanning of Because of Winn-Dixie is 23. Musician Lil Nas X is 22. Singer Jackie Evancho is 21. Actor Steven Seagal is 69.
Estelle Harris, 93, the actor known for playing George Costanza’s mother on Seinfeld, died at 93. Bobby Rydell, American singer, actor, and teen idol, died at 79. His songs included Wild One and Volare, and he appeared in Bye Bye Birdie in 1963.
The Dairy Bar Celebration, in recognition of its 70 years of doing business in LJ, was postponed in September due to Hurricane Nicholas. Well, Let’s try again. SATURDAY, APRIL 9 from 11:00-2:00 p.m. on the grounds of the LJ Historical Museum. Food, Music, and 1950’s Fun. Mary Harnden, daughter of long-time owners Dorothy and Slim Harnden, will present an oral history in the museum rotunda at 1:15. Period clothing encouraged. So, grab your bobby socks, poodle skirts, penny loafers and more, head over there to say thank-you, and help them celebrate. If you have never had a Dairy Bar Cheeseburger, then you are probably the only person in town that hasn’t. Good memories.
Sometimes I talk to myself, then we both laugh and laugh.
I have shared this with you before, but it spoke to me again, so here it is. Sometimes you get what you want. Other times, you get a lesson in patience, timing, alignment, empathy, compassion, faith, perseverance, resilience, humility, trust, meaning, awareness, resistance, purpose, clarity, grief, beauty, and life. Either way, you win.
Jon Batiste walked into the 2022 Grammy Awards with the most nominations (11) then walked away with the most wins, picking up five prizes. Yes, five, including Album of the Year, Best Music Video for his song Freedom; Best American Roots Performance and Best American Roots Song for Cry; and Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media for the animated film Soul which was a fabulous movie. Following him was Silk Sonic with four awards. I LOVE Jon Batiste, and I love Silk Sonic. It was a good night for music.
In California, a man found a 7-foot Vietnamese blue beauty rat snake coiled up back behind his couch cushion… in his home. Not his garage, shop, or back porch. The snake removal man says that this breed of snake is a rare find, adding, “You’d be luckier (likely) to find a Rolex sitting on the ground than a snake like this.” Hmmm. No one knows where it came from. Thank you, but I’ll take the Rolex.
We’ve been given a warning by science and a wake-up call by nature; it is up to us now to heed them.”
– Bill McKibben
A 59-year-old Florida man was driving down a road in the middle of the night and hit an 11-foot alligator, which caused him to veer off the road, crash, and overturn into a ditch, where he was pronounced dead at the scene. An A380 superjumbo jet just completed a flight powered by sustainable aviation fuel or SAF, made mostly of used cooking oil and waste fats, and operating with a single Rolls-Royce Trent 900 engine Ken Burns has a new two-part, four-hour PBS documentary about Benjamin Franklin.
There are now only five remaining rhino species worldwide, and all are threatened. Some sub-species have already vanished like the western black rhino of western Africa, which was declared extinct in 2013, due to poaching. The last male northern white rhino died in 2020. They were poached for their horns, which are coveted ingredients in traditional Asian medicine. An extremely rare Sumatran rhino, the world’s smallest rhino, was born at a sanctuary in Indonesia recently. I saw her picture and she is definitely so ugly, she is cute.
“We are being governed by a bunch of children,” says Illinois Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger. “By a bunch of people that are not serious about running the United States of America and truly don’t understand the threat that’s out there from Vladimir Putin, from China and from some of these actors in the world that want to destroy our place here.” He continued, “The world order is being challenged for the first time since World War II and they’re sitting around thinking today about how we can win our next election, what the newest outrage is, what’s the next thing we can do to get people angry and upset and get their money from them for our re-election.” I wonder if anyone is listening.
Reese Witherspoon’s production company has adapted the bestselling novel, “Where the Crawdads Sing” for the big screen due to be released July 15, 2022 and will feature a brand-new song by Taylor Swift. It was Amazon’s most sold fiction book for all of 2019.
Will you miss switching your clocks forward and backwards? In a surprise move, the Senate unanimously passed (wow, they agreed on something) legislation making daylight saving time, which began last month, permanent for the entire U.S. starting in 2023, after input from airlines and broadcasters. It is called the Sunshine Protection Act. The National Association of Convenience Stores opposes the change, telling Congress “We should not have kids going to school in the dark.” I can’t find whether the decision has been made whether to support daylight or standard time as the permanent choice. We will wait to see if Biden signs it.
“The war doesn’t let us choose who survives and who stays in eternal silence.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky
The war still rages in Ukraine, but now we are actually seeing and hearing the horrors that are so extremely hard for us to unsee. Civilians being blindfolded, hands bound, and shot in the head. Women raped in front of their children. Mass graves, children killed, all while Putin continues with lies and deception to his own country. Please keep them in your prayers.
May your week be filled with good thoughts, kind people and happy moments. Don’t forget… Art Car Parade April 9th. That always makes me happy.
LISA
