Say Goodbye To Montana?

Every time you lose faith in the Internet, the Internet comes through to entertain and enlighten us.
Take Montana, for example.

Montana, for the benefit of my foreign readers, is one of our 50 states, and is one of several states on our border with Canada.

Someone started a petition on change.org to sell Montana to Canada for $1 trillion dollars to "eliminate the national debt".

To everyone's surprise, some 12,245 people (as of the time I wrote this post) have signed this petition. The petition has now gone viral.

Goodbye, Montana?

I haven't been to Montana since 1979.  I only spent one night there, camping with my spouse in a deserted campground (mid September) and admiring the Big Sky Country. In case you've heard of Big Sky Country - it's real.  And I've never seen it since that day.  To me, Montana is far from useless, and I will give the petitioner credit for thinking outside the box (as the saying goes).

People from Montana pride themselves on independent thinking.  I suspect that more than a few of them might not mind joining up with Canada and becoming Canadian citizens.

Sometimes, I think I wouldn't mind becoming a Canadian.  How could I not love a people who paid tribute to the late Leonard Nimoy by "spocking" their five dollar bills?

Although, has anyone thought about how this might affect Bigfoot?

Selling off land is not a new idea.  After all, how do you think we obtained Alaska?  Or, all those states in the Louisiana Purchase? Governments sold territory to us in our younger days and I know people will point out that Russia and France sold us territories and not parts of their actual nations.  But is it possible for the United States to sell off a state?

Our national debt really is no laughing matter.  But, why not lighten things up for a moment?

Would you sign this petition?

Let's have some fun with this, because it seems there is so little to laugh about.

Sustainable Saturday - Is Sustainable Living Too Grim?

 Heard a good environmental joke lately?

Me, neither.

We all need a good laugh.  Especially after the past year.  The government shutdown that started at midnight tonight.

And so much has happened in the past year, both in the lives of people I know, and in the world in general. 

I have to remind myself that laughing is one of the things that makes life worthwhile, even in the midst of stressful times.

But, there really is such a thing as "sustainable humor".  I don't mean recycling old/tired jokes, I don't mean the "you're so hot, you started global warming" type of non-humor. No, rather, what we might call green humor.  I guess those of us who like to try to live on the Earth as lightly as possible (at least, in theory) are sometimes just a bit too grim.

Need a good laugh today?  Here are some links to "green humor", or at least, humor involving nature, and a little laughing at ourselves.

First, the famous Amazon.com "Mountain Three Wolves" T Shirt reviews.

Tuscan Whole Milk poem (based on Poe's "The Raven") well, if it had been ORGANIC whole milk maybe it would not have spilled.

Recycle your broken dreams (an Onion classic).

Got any good green jokes?


I'm almost afraid to ask but - heard a good joke lately?

Palindrome Day

Instead of a falling Friday, I thought I would blog today about a light topic to take our minds off the recent tragic news stories in the United States and Great Britain.

Are you ready for a little Friday Fun?

In the United States, we write our dates in one of a couple of types of systems:  Month, Day, Year (or m, dd, yy).  Today's date would be 6-17-16 in the way we normally write dates.

6-17-16.  Hmmm.  See anything interesting about today's date.

Today's date is a palindrome (something that reads the same frontwards and backwards).

That makes this week Palindrome Day in the United States.  (Here, you can read more about Palindrome Days).

Observe:  (this works only if you write in m-d-yy format, incidentally)
6-10-16
6-11-16
6-12-16
6-13-16
6-14-16
6-15-16
6-16-16
6-17-16
6-18-16
6-19-16

Of course, now that I hardly write out a date, it took me reading about this in Facebook to realize what was happening.

The last Palindrome Day of the 21st century will be February 29, 2092.  It will also be a leap day.

Too bad only the youngest of my blog readers may be around to see it.  But don't let that gloomy thought stop us.

Happy (in the United States) Palindrome Day!

If you don't live in the United States, what dates are palindromes for you?

Your Friday Laugh - Schrodinger's Cat Executive Decision Maker and Other Finds

When life gets a bit tough, it's time to start laughing. 

Some of my readers may not be aware that one of the best sources of humor can be found in certain Amazon product reviews.  I sometimes wonder what the merchants of these items think but you have to admit, when thousands of people stop by to add their wisdom, it means these merchants are getting attention - and traffic.

And who knows, maybe they find it funny, too.

It's become such an art form that Amazon itself even keeps track of the funniest ones.

Hence, my latest roundup of Guaranteed Belly Laughs. Take a deep breath and read. Restore your sanity.

Schrodinger's Cat Executive Decision Maker.

The  JL421 Badonkadonk Land Cruiser/Tank (only $19,999 - cheap!)

A Million Random Digits.  You'll enjoy the 100,000 normal deviates that come with it.  But, you may want to wait for the audiobook version to come out.

The all time favorite Hutzler 571 Banana Slicer

The famous book "How to Avoid Huge Ships"

My spouse's favorite shirt, the Mountain Three Wolf Moon (seriously, he loves wolf t-shirts).

Brooklyn's famous Tuscan Whole Milk - 1 gallon - 128 fl. oz

The Denon AKDL1 Dedicated Cable

And, last but not least, the Accoutrements Chicken Mask (cock a doodle doo!)

Do you enjoy Amazon product reviews?  And even better, do you write any?

Super Groundhog Bowl Sunday

(If you are looking for Civil War Sunday, it will return next Sunday).

Today is a merging of two traditions here in the United States.  Will we survive the experience?

Every February 2, we celebrate Groundhog Day.  Well, let's be real about this - we humans celebrate it.  As for the poor groundhogs who are dragged out of warm burrows by strange fur less creatures who make them look for their shadows (hence "predicting" if there will be six more weeks of winter) I'm sure they aren't celebrating anything.

The most unfortunate groundhog of them all is one Punxsutawney Phil, of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania (don't ask), who even gets on national TV.  Now, I realize this tradition of using groundhogs (or badgers) to predict the early end of winter (or not) is hundreds of years old. But, according to the records (and P. Phil, or his ancesters, have been doing this since 1887), Phil has been right only 39% of the time.  

The groundhog math, actually, is simple.

Groundhog sees shadow = six more weeks of winter.
Groundhog doesn't see shadow = early spring  six more weeks of winter.

Last year, in fact, a prosecutor in Ohio sought the death penalty for Phil because he didn't see his shadow, but we got six more weeks of winter anyway.

No Weather Channel job for Phil! Now, can we let the groundhogs sleep?

Nah.  And, in fact, P. Phil saw his shadow this morning, so we are in for six more weeks of winter, as if we didn't already know that.  With a major storm bearing down on upstate New York for Wednesday, we didn't need a groundhog to tell us.

Meanwhile, Americans are readying themselves for the Super Bowl.  This is a national sports event for most Americans - it is the championship game for professional football.  For my European and Australian blog buddies, you are probably already aware that "American Football" is not "World Football".    I will not be part of the debate on which is "better".

At any rate, what the Superbowl REALLY is about is inviting your family and friends for the following:
1.  Watching the game at home, while eating mass quantities of chips, chili, guacamole, seven layer dip, fried chicken wings covered in every kind of glop you can imagine, and foods that are required by law to have a minimum fat content of 75%.  And, I suppose, hoping none of them have groundhog as a secret ingredient.
2.  Drinking beer.
3.  Watching the commercials.  Especially, for people like me, watching the commercials.

Like this one, which already has been viewed over 25,000,000. times on You Tube.


And this one (which will be cut for the Bowl viewing).

Groundhogs, American Football, puppies and Arnold Schwarzenegger.  What more can you want on a Super Day?

The Laughy Chatty Cheesecake

It's amazing what a little cheesecake can accomplish.

This is a little strawberry cheesecake from a bakery in Tarrytown, New York.  I wish I knew the name because it was an excellent cheesecake. 

I blogged last year (I think!) that, right after my mother in law was diagnosed with cancer last December, her last living sibling fell, developed complications and died a week later - the day before my mother in law's birthday.

Yesterday, her son, "J" came to visit my mother in law, my spouse, and me.

J is a retired fireman, and had been caring for his late mother for years. Now (it's sad to say, but I think you all know what I mean)  that she's gone, he's free.  He has been absent from a lot of family gatherings and we mainly saw him at funerals.  Now, we are making plans to have him come up sometime this summer.

He's very friendly, and we talked about a lot of things.  Over cheesecake, we laughed and joked, all of us, about cell phones and Facebook, about our children, about Weight Watchers (he's on it, I'm on it, my spouse is "sort of" on it), and about my mother in law's cancer.

Why would you laugh about cancer? Because a person with cancer is just that, a person, the same person as she was the day before her diagnosis.  Cancer doesn't make her a saint, or someone who needs to be treated like a special sick person.  Everyone needs to laugh.  Laughter is truly the "best medicine".

She spoke about her oncologist, who has been so supportive.  He joked with her before she was put under for the first of her two surgeries.  He treated her like a human being, not a medical case.

She spoke about wanting some comfort foods.  Over this weekend, we had made a couple of them for her and stocked her fridge  In the coming weeks I'll blog about the two soups we made for her.  One was an Italian specialty.  The other - well, it wasn't.  And that really made me laugh.

And we spoke about the cheesecake, which was made New York City style-maybe, like this.

(And yes, J, my spouse, and I, all had small pieces.)

At the end of the visit, my mother in law was so happy that J had stopped by.

We hopefully won't be seeing my mother in law again until February.  We live 150 miles away, and will definitely keep in touch by phone.  However, I hope you don't mind if I continue to blog about her and our ongoing experiences as long distance caregivers for her and her developmentally disabled son, from time to time.

Isn't it wonderful what some good food and some good company can do?