Whatever happened to Bertha Gifford?

Bertha Gifford was ahead of her time. She might have been one of the all time great women serial killers. She used arsenic. Oddly, she was also considered an outstanding cook.

One of my mother's older brothers was Bertha's hired hand in his teens. He lived on her farm and ate with her family. He was not poisoned.

You can read about Bertha HERE on Wikipedia.

You can read more HERE, including what happened to her. Be sure to read to the last sentence!

Nothing more to say...

Man on motorized barstool charged with DUI

Someone will be going to Summer School!

Followed a Driver's Ed car through town, at 17MPH. It left me behind when the driver rolled right through a red light! Oops!

Is it Coke or Pepsi?

Most people cannot tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi in a blindfold taste test. (Blindfold yourself and try it before you tell me you're the exception. The key word if blindfold.)

I have always felt the same way about cooked carrots and cooked sweet potatoes. They look the same and they taste the same -- and if you melt marshmallows on cooked carrots they're exactly the same.

Ditto for chicken salad and tuna salad.

Speaking of snow, what time is it in Antarctica?

As the map above shows, it's many different times!
If you click on the map, you can see the current time in each time zone from WorldTimeZone.

At the South Poll itself, the U.S. Base (Amundsen-Scott Station) uses New Zealand Daylight Saving Time. Think about that for a second! Remember grade school geography? How long does the son shine this time of year at the South Poll? For time and temperature at the South Poll CLICK HERE.

This is way beyond strange!

The guy above is Spanish football star Andrea Vasa. Do you see anything in his living room that you would like? Well, oddly enough you can buy anything you want! Nope, he's not selling things out of his home, except to the extent that his home is a department store. The guy is living in a department store!

In the photo below, you can see the folks looking into his living room from the street. You can also watch him from inside the store. There are also a couple more photos below. Only the shower (and I assume commode) is private. Otherwise he lives, dresses, sleeps, whatever, in public.

Stopped for school bus.

Kid got off bus so fat his parents should be arrested.

Traffic in both directions had to wait while he stopped to open a can of nondiet soda when he got off the bus.

Did I mention that his parents should be arrested?

I've been re-gifted!

There are five autographed copies of my book, that I sent out for free, for sale on amazon.

Made me laugh!

"Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of the dog, it's too dark to read."

Groucho Marx

Is it just me...

Except for Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, you can take the first half of any John Cusack movie -- and tack it onto the second half of any John Cusack movie -- and not have any obvious change in the plot.

Found on the WWW - ways to annoy others:

Declare your apartment an independent nation, and sue your neighbors upstairs for "violating your airspace".

Honk and wave to strangers.

At the laundromat, use one dryer for each of your socks.

Deliberately hum songs that will remain lodged in co-workers brains, such as "Feliz Navidad", the Archies "Sugar" or the Mr. Rogers theme song.

Sit in your front yard pointing a hair dryer at passing cars to see if they slow down.

Absolutely random thought

According to the Hebrew Bible, Wednesday is the day when the Sun and Moon were created.

Our Wednesday, however, is named for the Roman god Mercury (via Woden, the Germanic equivalent of Mercury -- Wēdnes dæg).

The early church converted the temples and statutes of Mercury to shrines to St. Michael the Archangel. The odd consequence is that, unlike most saints, St. Michael is usually depicted as nude or nearly nude. His feast day, September 28th, was a major church holy day until the Middle Ages when he was downgraded. Probably because of all that nudity.

St. Patrick Day Afterthoughts

St. Patrick's Day was not really celebrated much in Ireland until the 1970's -- and only then because the American tourists expected it. (Until 1995, the pubs in Dublin were closed on St. Patrick's Day.)

St. Patrick was not Irish by birth. He was the son of an English aristocrat who was kidnapped and sold in Ireland as a slave. He escaped back to England, but then went back to Ireland after being made a priest.

St. Patrick may have invented the custom that women could propose to men in a Leap Year. (Al Capp created Li'l Abner.)

The Irish area of St. Louis is called Dogtown either because during the 1904 World's Fair dogs were kept there to feed natives brought from Pacific Islands or because the early Irish settlers had guard dogs. Your pick.

St. Patrick was never canonized by a Pope, but he is on the Catholic Church's List of Saints.

St. Patrick did not drive the snakes from Ireland. There never were any.

His favorite color was blue.

Double Dah!

Not much has come of the Supreme Court overturning the District of Columbia's strict gun laws. There have been lots of cases but the existing gun control statutes have stood (for example, no guns near school or in Post Offices).

This is my favorite case:

Harvey C. Jackson argued in federal court that he had a constitutional right to carry a gun while selling drugs in a dangerous neighborhood in East St. Louis, Ill. That's right, he claimed a constitutional right to bear arms while committing a felony.

The uproarious laughter you hear in the background is the federal appeals court in Chicago.

updates

Rooty is doing great. This week's blood test was perfect and his lymph nodes have shrank to nothing.

Ozzie had to have a tooth pulled so he also has pills to take.

I do not know how the book is doing. I will receive a quarterly report in April.

Momma goose is back. This will be her third year of nesting on top of the seawall. I will post pictures. A pair of ducks have also been hanging around so maybe they will nest too. (Ozzie and Rooty do not chase the geese and ducks, it would be way to far from their food bowls.)

My sister is going to work for the Kansas City Royals. She loves baseball so she is very excited.

The plot was thin, but I'm a better person...

Some copies of my book contain the insides of another book -- a self-help book of some type. Imagine the surprise of the people who ordered that book if they found my grisly story inside!

Barbie is 50 this month!

So, spend Monday dressing Barbie.
Or, you can dress Ken HERE.

"Oh my God but you have a warped brain."

The quote in the headline is Sleep's reaction to my book. [Comment to previous post HERE.]

My sister read the galley and asked "How do you know so many ways to kill people?" In the copy that I sent to her, I wrote: "To Judy, who over the years has given me many reasons to consider different ways to commit murder." We're not a very sentimental family!

It's trash night!

Why can't all things be biodegradable so we could just throw the trash in the yard?

Speaking of silly!

State Farm has increased the premium on my volcano insurance!