Did Sam Walton Invent the Bikini in 1938?

Pay attention.  There may be a quiz.

Thanks to my BFF Larry Google, I have learned that volleyball was first played in Rome in 240 AD.  The Romans came up with the game from watching a group of sly foxes playing with stolen melons on the hills outside the ancient city. 

Roman Legionaires took the game with them when they marched to Germany for Oktoberfest and it became Faustball.  American William Morgan turned the game into volleyball.  A beach version was created in Hawaii in 1915.

Beach volleyball became the favorite spectator sport of the male race in 1994 when the bikini became the official women's uniform.

Bonus Questions: 
1.  Who invented the bikini?
          a.  Sam Walton
          b.  An engineer 
          c.  A plumber
          d.  David Jantzen
2.  When was it invented?
          a.  1920's
          b.  1930's
          c.  1940's
          d.  1950's
3.  Why did the creator name it the 'bikini'?
          a.  He named it after a Pacific atoll, sight of nuclear weapons tests
          b.  He wanted a word to rhyme with his favorite mushroom, the 'crimini'
          c.  He thought it sounded sexy.
          d.  His mom made up the name

Thank you boys and girls.  Now I'm not the only one walking around with useless information stuck in my brain.  Want to know when the Battle of Hastings was?  I am not able to forget it.  1066.





Anwers:  b, c, a

1978, Or As The Romans Would Have Said, MCMLXXVIII Was A Great Year

* Gasoline was only 63 cents per gallon.  Even better if you drove a VW.
* Topher Grace and Ashton Kutcher were born.  And 'That 70's Show' is in perpetual reruns.
* Charlie Chaplan's coffin was stolen in Switzerland.  To use as a coffee table?
* Dick Smith towed a fake iceberg to Sydney Harbour.  For the ultimate game of Marco Polo.
* Charlie Chaplan's coffin was found 15 km from the cemetary.  Was it on wheels?

* Garfield made his debut.  And cats all over American began eating lasagna.
* Timmy Johnson blew up his sister's Barbie with a cherry bomb in the driveway.  Barbie's an easy target for boys who like to blow things up. 
* U.S. President Jimmy Carter legalized brewing beer at home.  At the request of brother Billy.  Remember him?  He peed on a Secret Service car.
* David Rorvik claimed he cloned a human.  At last!  David has a girlfriend.
* I was driving an 18-wheeler cross country.  Yikes!  What was I thinking?

All You Need is a Mouth. A Brain is Optional

I missed out on the game  'A Questions of Scruples' in the 1980's because I was in a parallel universe not playing games.

Players are supposed to give Yes, No or Depends answers to questions posed by other players. The goal is not to be truthful, but to answer differently than what is on the other players' answer cards.  Lying, bluffing and remaining emotionless are important keys to winning

Each yellow question card asks "a moral question such as we encounter every day"

Every day?  What people?  Are they drunk?  Are they high?  Have they been on 'Jerry Springer'?

• Your lover is away and you come across a diary. Do you read it? 
DUH.  Are you nuts?
• While drinking in an out-of-the-way bar, you see a friend's spouse having a romantic téte-a-téte. Do you mention it to your friend? 
Only on my cell from the table.
• Your lover has appeared as a nude centerfold. Do you leave him/her?  
What's the question? Why are you assuming I have a boyfriend 30 years younger than I am?  Gross.

I have a relatively low tolerance for stupid questions.
And for the people who ask them.
And for the people to whom the stupid questions relate.  
And for the people who appear on 'Jerry Springer'.
I do not think I could win this game. 

Barbie Invents New Sport: Nude Gymnastics

Über limber and flexible Barbie just loves to do gymnastics in the nude. 

"It's exhilarating to perform my routines when I'm buck nekkid."

She hopes it will catch on and be recognized as an Olympic sport. 

"Risqué shmisqué!", says Barbie, "Have you seen beach volleyball?"

The Heart Shaped Bathtub Capitol of the World

There are 11,000 hotel rooms in the land of honeymoons, Niagara Falls.

Guessing that half the rooms have heart shaped bathtubs, that means there are about 5500 of them.

So why would anyone buy a souvenir ashtray?  I guess if you're too cheap to spend the extra 50 bucks for the heart tub, you have to have something to show for the trip.

I would want a picture of me in the tub – in 23 bushels of bubbles.

Let's Bring Back Break-up Bling

I think a break-up should always include jewelry.

A Victorian boyfriend would arrive at the home of the girl he planned to break up with armed with a piece of jewelry in the pocket of his best suit.   He would present his card at the door and ask to see the girl. After taking tea with her and her mother, the young couple would be left alone in the parlor.

On bended knee, the boy would offer the little box and tearfully explain that he was joining the French Foreign Legion and would be leaving in the morning.

Today the tattooed and pierced cowardly knaves dump their girlfriends by email, IM, voicemail, text, Twitter, Facebook Wall, Skype or sticky note.

Curses be upon them.

Remember girls, ALWAYS drive the dump truck.

I Owe Everything to Little Chocolate Donuts

Sure. You can serve Ritz crackers in this charmingly tacky faux crystal plastic tray. No need to risk lead poisoning.

Why would you if you could have little chocolate donuts instead?

If you were alive and aware in the '70s, your brain jumps to John Belushi every time you see a little chocolate donut.

Who can forget the image of John Belushi smoking a cigarette while eating a little chocolate donut?

Little Chocolate Donuts. They taste good, and they've got the sugar I need to get me going in the morning. That's why Little Chocolate Donuts have been on my training table since I was a kid.

I think the perfect proportion of hydogenated fat to chocolate wax is the secret to their dizzying deliciousness.

(See John Belushi in action on SNL: 
http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/little-chocolate-donuts/280260)

I Know the Cause of the Financial Debacle

The soroban, or Japanese abacus, came to Japan from China via Korea in the 1600’s. It is composed of 9 – 31 rods and bicone beads. There is one heaven bead on each rod above the reckoning bar and four earth beads on each rod below the bar. Each heaven bead equals five and each earth bead equals one. The soroban is as accurate as a calculator. 

Sounds as easy as counting on your fingers and toes.

Here is a small excerpt from the instruction booklet:

‘A’ beads have each the value of ‘5’ ‘B’ beads each ‘1’. Numerical value are put into effect, when ‘A’ beads are pushed down and ‘B’ beads are pushed up, each to the crosspiece. Black points put on the crosspiece except three reeds represent unit. Suppose that some black point is the unit place of one, the next left and right points shows each 1,000 and 0.001. In case of addition and subtraction, they have important influence, but in case of multiplication and division, they are not so, vital. Why have they not so much effect on multiplication and division? You can understand later.

And so boys and girls, that is how the financial crisis happened. The Poobahs of finance were obviously trying to use sorobans and could not figure out the instructions.

All Boys Were Cross Dressers

Notice anything strange about this clown?  He is wearing a French Pierrot outfit with a Charlie Chaplin Derby, an umbrella and a depressed Emmett Kelly expression.   A weird comic cross dresser
.

Which of course reminds me of men.

Until the late 19th or early 20th Centuries both boys and girls wore dresses.  Some of the little boys were given trousers by age two, but many had to wear their dresses until they were eight years old.

Hence the expression, "You run like a girl."       

How We Got Peanut Butter

The Incas in South America began cultivating peanuts around 950 B.C.  They invented peanut butter as soon as they could. 

Peanuts travelled to Africa with early explorers and then went to Spain after the Conquistadores got tired of pillaging.  The Spaniards traded the peanuts to the Virginia colonies.  By this time, no one had ever heard of peanut butter.

George Washington Carver finally reinvented peanut butter in 1880.  He was craving a peanut butter, banana and mayo sandwich.

Genius.

Salt Shaker Trivia - in case you're ever on Jeopardy

♦ From the salt chunk to the salt grinder to the saltcellar to the salt shaker in the shape of little birds took almost two thousand years.

♦ There is a Novelty Salt & Pepper Shakers Club whose membership includes collectors from 47 states plus Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Belgium, England, Germany and The Netherlands.
http://www.saltandpepperclub.com/

♦ There is a Salt and Pepper Shaker Museum in Gatlinburg, TN. It contains 20,000 sets of Salt and Pepper Shakers from around the world and a 1500 piece Pepper Mill collection.

♦ If you are one of those people who have bags of salt and pepper packets stolen from McDonalds in your kitchen cupboard, you have no idea what I'm talking about.

Raggedy Ann and Andy Embrace Rastafari

Exhausted and bored by their 'little goody two-shoes' reputation, 90-somethings Raggedy Ann and Andy have embraced the Rastafari life.

They now prefer to be called Reggae Ann and Rasta Andy.

"We've always loved reggae," Ann gushed. "And the red dreads make me feel so free."

"It makes sense for us to reject western society, not to mention the spiritual use of cannabis," hissed Andy, exhaling a long stream of aromatic smoke.  "Deal with it."

Yah, mon.

Ugly Never Wears Out

This really retro Home Interiors plastic wall décor reminds me of a couch I rescued in 1979.

The green-rust-brown-beige busy floral fabric was an industrial strength petroleum-based woven vinylly substance that appeared to be indestructible.

The horrible thing had begun its life with a family in a Texas living room, was replaced by something attractive and moved to their basement, migrated to the porch and came to rest in my apartment on the way to the dump.

I moved it to Kansas City where it lived for seven more years until I gave it away and it headed east to St. Louis. It was still in great shape.

Ugly never wears out.

Flamenco Dogs

Polka dots were first worn by the gypsies in Southern Spain, Los Gitanos, in the early 19th Century.  This proud and persecuted people brought us Flamenco, a fusion of different musical elements - Spanish folk, Sephardic Jewish, Arabic and Indian Kathak.  Gitanos called polka dots 'lunares', meaning moons. 

A perfect word to use with dogs.

They never stop mooning us.

They never bother to wear pants.

Satanists Like Picnics Too

My former friends Sally and Steve told me they ran into some Satanists on their picnic last summer. I asked what that meant and she said they had Eastern Star pentagrams on their salt and pepper shakers.

Believe it or not, this is what Sally and Steve believe...............
  ☼ Masons and Eastern Star worship Lucifer as God.
  ☼ Their goal is world domination.
  ☼ Their secret organizations for their kids - Job’s Daughters, Rainbow Girls and
DeMolay are playpens for satanists.
  ☼ If you have ancestors who were Masons or Eastern Star, all their descendants carry the curse of demonic possession.

That explains everything … why I have bad hair and can’t sing.  Why I got divorced.  Why I had skinned knees and cavities as a child.
I always thought my grandparents were really nice people. I had no idea they cursed me with demons. I thought they were Lutherans.

Red Heads Resistant to Seduction

In ancient Egypt, it was a good thing to have red hair if you were a Pharaoh like Ramses or Cleo.  If you were a non-royal, chances are you were burnt to death or buried alive. 

Along came the enlightened Greeks who thought redheads became vampires after death.

It was obvious to the loving Christians of the Spanish inquisition that redheads had stolen the fire of hell.  What to do?  Burn them as witches. 

Now we know that redheads are probably just regular people. 

They do have fewer hairs on their heads than the other hair colors.  They also require 20% more anesthesia to be sedated than blonds or brunettes. 

So if you're planning to seduce that ginger you've had your eye on with a couple of glasses of wine on Valentine's day, you'd better plan on four.