For the last few years I’ve publicly marveled at the extent to which each fall pumpkin has invaded our daily lives. Please understand that I am the last person on earth who would turn down an extra slice of pumpkin pie for dessert. I have my very own self with my very own hands fashioned a pumpkin cheese cake. I will wait with rapt anticipation for the once a year release of Reese’s pumpkin shape peanut butter cups. (Yeah, I know they’re not pumpkin flavored and barely look like a pumpkin but it’s my post in my blog and I happen to like peanut butter cups, or didn’t you read “Caution, Falling Pump(kin) Ahead” last year?) But I am not ready for pumpkin soap! That’s right, soap, not soup. Soap!!!
I thought that when we saw pumpkin flavored chewing gum three years ago we saw the most extreme pumpkining we were going to see. (You didn’t miss that one too, did you? Ok, go refresh your memory at “It’s The Not So Great Pumpkin.” We’ll wait for you.) Since then, pumpkin flavoring pretty much has been kept food based. Granted there have been some expectedly unexpected choices. Pumpkin salsa to go with your pumpkin chips, and pumpkin cream cheese to top your pumpkin bread are a couple of the newer fall flavor offerings. The newest pumpkin food that I’ve seen this year is the pumpkin flavored chicken sausage. A double feature at the “What’s Wrong with this Food Film Festival” but not so wrong that I couldn’t be talked into tossing a couple on the grill and see what happens when you cross a spring chicken with a fall gourd.
But up until this week’s grocery store ad, pumpkin chewing gum was the most extreme pumpkin offering out there. So extreme it was that after that one sighting in 2014 it didn’t even show up in the case load buy outs stores. But this week we might have stepped over the edge. This week we might not be coming back from. This week, somebody, somewhere, for some reason…..is going to actually buy…..pumpkin pie liquid hand soap in a convenient pump dispenser.
Oh, for sure, it’s not the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.
(Oh, in case you’re wondering, I still haven’t seen any pumpkin tea. Have you?)
Let’s look at some of the ventriloquists I grew up with. Shari Lewis was the first ventriloquist I have any memory of. Shari hit the national stage with Captain Kangaroo in 1956 which was when I was hitting the stage for the first time also. Granted, my stage was in home movies but hey, all the world’s a stage, right? I loved Shari Lewis as a child (when I was a child, not her) (maybe I would have loved her as a child too, I dunno) (her as a child, not me) (maybe both of us as a child) (children). Shari played on stage with Lamb Chop, Hush Puppy, Charlie Horse, and Wing Ding. She and her puppets might have been more popular than even I realized because now that I think about it, I recall my own daughter playing with a Lamb Chop puppet when she was a baby 30 years after I put my puppets into cold storage. And I seem to also recall that her Lamb Chop was new.
Hand puppets, though the least techy of puppets (although exactly what Lamb Chop and friends were) had the biggest impact on me as a developing mental genius. (It’s my blog, I can call myself whatever I want.) In particular, King Friday XIII, Queen Sara Saturday, and X the Owl, the puppets of the Neighborhood of Make Believe in Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. Fred Rogers was a force in puppeteering and all things educational for children. From his earliest days with the Canadian Broadcast Company’s “Children’s Corner” he introduced children to his own childhood make believe characters. But it was in 1966 from WQED in Pittsburgh, the nation’s first public-owned broadcast company, that Mr. Rogers, his puppets, and his live neighbors swept a nation, and a generation.
If you are looking for exercise while vacationing around the autumnal equinox your choices are limited to the indoor exercise room or sprinting across the hotel parking lot to the neighboring bar and grill and back. Now, about those exercise rooms. They are almost universally labeled “Fitness Center” on their door signs and the hotel floor plans but they aren’t likely to be mistaken for your quintessential, full service YMCA. You’ll find no sauna, no juice bar, no Pilates classes. These “centers” do not boast of juice bars or healthy living cafes. And they have no indoor pools! There are, at best, travel size “fitness centers.”
From the 40s through the 60s to the 80s, everybody smoked. By the time we got to the 2000s people just stopped smoking. Movies today even have disclaimers at the end of the credits stating nobody, but nobody involved in the production of the just viewed movie got any financial, moral, or athletic support knowingly, unknowingly, or even accidentally from anybody, any corporation, or any organization supporting or even involved with the tobacco industry. Often the disclaimer is more prominent than the notice of what type of camera used to shoot the film and the union local responsible for driving the caterer from location site to location site. In the most recent Bond, James Bond volumes nobody smokes. Not in the bars, not in the casinos, not on the stakeouts. Not just the spy and the supporting spy people. No body. No where. No Smoking. They must have all gone cold turkey.
I don’t even understand how the sport got its name. Baseball employs bases. Basketballs are aimed at baskets. Ice hockey is played on ice. Soccer players sock each other. A football is a …. What? A local sports writer who is a voter in the football hall of fame selection process has often said that he would never vote for a kicker to be enshrined in that hall. Yet the football kicker is the only football player on the football team who actually uses his foot in the play of the game.
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