I hate parasites. Blood sucking parasites. Hate’em.
If you’re tromping through the outback enough, you’ll eventually get bitten by a tick.
They are a blood sucking parasite.
Growing up on a farm, I was bitten. Our dogs were bitten. It wasn’t a common thing, but it happened. If you had blood … they were looking for you. And ticks were ugly, ugly, ugly things after they’d been sucking your blood for a while. And come to find out, I had no idea what to do.
The first thing to do, is to avoid getting bitten. Here’s how you do that:
Apply insect repellant with DEET to your clothing, shoes, socks and skin.
Walk in the center of trails. Avoid overhanging brush and long grasses as much as possible.
Wear tightly woven clothing, long sleeves, and light colors when walking through woods and overgrowth. They will make the ticks easier to spot, and expose less of your skin.
Keep your shirt tucked in.
Check your clothes and skin after you’ve been in an area that might be tick-infested. Wash everything as quickly as possible to make sure ticks are gone.
Ticks like folds in the skin (like behind your ears) or under your waistband.
Check your kids! Check your pets!
If you are bitten, you’ll need to remove them. Once they’re hooked into your skin, they are an extremely difficult thing to remove.
Luckily, there was no Lyme disease when I was a kid. That particular malady wasn’t discovered until 1975, when an outbreak in Lyme, CT was found to be infecting kids that lived near tick-infested woods. When I was a kid, though, ticks were just bad. They were annoying. But they were nothing more than a temporary problem. Now, if you are bitten by a disease-carrying Deer Tick, you might catch life-long health problems. And a Deer Tick Nymph is only the size of a “.” Even fully engorged, it’s only the size of a “o”. Good news: most ticks do not carry Lyme disease. In every case, though, you want to get the tick out of your skin as soon as possible.
Vaseline
One theory you may have heard is that you coat a tick that’s bitten you with Vaseline – totally cover them in petroleum jelly. Eventually, they’ll unhook from your skin rather than suffocate. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work.
Burnt Matches
Another old theory was that you light a match, blow it out, and then touch the tick with the hot match head to convince it to leave for a cooler place. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work.
The Tick Key
What does work is removing the tick with tick removal tweezers, or a tick key. If you’re going on hikes, you need one of those in your first aid kit. Tick Keys are on sale at the Placerita Nature Center here in Santa Clarita. See how they work in the video on their website; the link is below.
The band was called The Cyrkle. That was the name given them by John Lennon … well sources are a bit conflicted, actually. It appears that the name came from Nathan Weiss, who managed them … and he was the partner of Brian Epstein, who managed The Beatles. Weiss had signed the band when they were working the club circuit as The Rhondells. Weiss decided their new name would be The Circle, and it was John Lennon, apparently, who came up with the idea to change from The Circle into the infinitely more interesting name, The Cyrkle.
The Players
Don Danneman, guitar & vocals
Tom Dawes, bass guitar & vocals
Earl Pickens, keyboards
Marty Fried, drums
Chronology
September 6, 1965, discovered playing in Atlantic City on Labor Day
1966, opening act on 14 dates of The Beatles tour, including the August 28 date at Dodger Stadium
1968, the band broke up
The Hits … not quite a one hit wonder
1966, “Red Rubber Ball,” # 2 Billboard … written by Paul Simon and Bruce Woodley (of The Seekers)
1966, “Turn Down Day,” # 16 Billboard
The Albums
1966, Red Rubber Ball
1967, Neon
1969, The Minx (movie soundtrack)
After The Music Stopped
Well, it really didn’t stop. Dawes and Danneman both wrote advertising jingles.
Dawes wrote one of the most famous jingles of all time: Alka-Seltzer’s “Plop plop fizz fizz.”
This one, as you know, is the personal blog that I share with MrsMowry. We write about family, photography, food, education, Presidents and other topics that we’re passionate about. Thanks for reading, truly!
My other blog is on Smarts Broadcast Systems’ website … I’m interviewing successful broadcasters as a part of my company’s 30th anniversary celebration. These blogs are published both on our site, and in a weekly radio industry email publication, Small Market Radio Newsletter.
This isn’t the right illustration for the Green Onion chips … but this is the iconic Guy’s bag from the 60s.
It was heaven.
Friday nights, dad would get paid and often did the grocery shopping on the way home. And I knew what I was having for dinner.
A minced ham sandwich with longhorn cheese
A 16 oz bottle of Coca-Cola
Guy’s Green Onion Potato Chips
This was comfort food: the processed kind that we loved in the 60s. Loved me some Guy’s Green Onion Potato Chips.
Today, of course, those are all gone. I heard the minced ham recipe was lost. Longhorn cheese isn’t available in California. Coca-Cola is still around, of course … but I ditched the sugar long ago.
And then there are those chips. Not only are Guy’s not available in my grocery stores, but the green onion flavor is not available!
Oh, the inhumanity!
But welcome to the new reality of The Long Tail, my friends. Here’s how this phenomenon is explained by Wikipedia:
In statistics, the long tail is the large number of occurrences far from the “head” or central part of a distribution of popularities, probabilities or such. A probability distribution is said to have a long tail, if a larger share of population rests within its tail than would under a normal distribution. A long-tail distribution will arise with the inclusion of many values unusually far from the mean, which increase the magnitude of the skewness of the distribution
The internet has made this important to you … by making broad distribution of niche products economically possible. It doesn’t matter what you might want, you can probably buy it online.
Twenty years ago, you would have trouble buying polka CDs if you lived in … well, anywhere. But today you can buy CDs or electronic downloads for any genre of music online. Good thing, too, as you won’t find much music in your local record store any more. Because you won’t find your local record store anymore, either … it was a victim of the long tail. Record stores couldn’t keep a diverse enough inventory to satisfy today’s eclectic consumer while simultaneously paying the mortgage on their brick & mortar store. Online retailing became our overwhelming choice to buy music, because of the long tail.
Similarly, you can buy all manner of odd desires, from the ingredients to make your own hand lotion (Velda’s latest case of OCD) to … Guy’s Green Onion Potato Chips.
That’s right, my friends, all I had to do was a search for them by name, and I can now order My Favorite Chips from their manufacturer, Guy’s Snack Corporation in Overland Park, Kansas. You can, too; the link is below.
I’m on a little road trip, attending a 90,000-person convention in Las Vegas. It’s put on by the National Association of Broadcasters, and this is the 25th anniversary of my first NAB convention in Las Vegas.
Which is kind of cool.
But I’m disgusted by something I’ve seen. And, yes, I’m in Vegas, but, no, it’s probably not what you think.
Case # 1. Driving through Barstow, I stopped for lunch at a restaurant. It could have been a Friday’s but it wasn’t. It could have been a Chevy’s, but it wasn’t. It was a Chili’s.
They were turning away business on a Sunday afternoon, because there was a 40 minute wait. However, they were holding an empty section in the restaurant, which could have dealt with their line easily. I don’t know why they felt it better to refuse business than seat paying customers, but I suspect it had something to do with cutting costs (salaries) instead of making money (more sales).
Case # 2. I am staying at the Paris, which routinely keeps large section of their buffet seating closed while keeping people in line for 20-30 minutes and more. I have no idea what they’re thinking, but they’re wrong.
Case # 3. I went to Le Burger Brasserie at Paris Las Vegas for dinner tonight, but I was told there was a 20 minute wait … but I could sit at the bar (party of one). No seats at the bar.
While walking back to the hostess station, I noted 2 empty tables in the restaurant as I walked out (I surveyed perhaps a third of the restaurant). I told the two (2) hostesses that the bar was full, but they had 2 tables open … they told me they couldn’t seat anyone there because it wasn’t those station’s turn to get new seatings. They showed me the waiting list of people waiting for when they COULD seat them … but they couldn’t fill the empty tables until some of the people left that the hostesses were waiting on.
I left.
Three cases, three restaurants. In each case, the operators felt it more important to restrict their business than to maximize sales. This may well be because they are “optimizing” their staff, and when they don’t properly anticipate the amount of business coming their way, then they just say no when the extra people ask to give them some money. Or maybe the operational staff doesn’t want to work harder than they were told to, and don’t have the initiative to solve the problem in the favor of the guest.
Don’t know, don’t care. But when a business turns away business for any reason … they don’t deserve it.
In this job market, the mere suspicion that this is a job-related cost-saving measure frustrates me.
As a wise man once said to me, these restaurant operators are starving, while sitting on a ham sandwich. And until they hire staff to cover the business they receive, may then continue to starve.
I learned a new word this week: Promposal. I may not have known how to do an over-the-top invitation in 1974, but I certainly did have a sense of style. A bad sense, but a sense, nonetheless.
Who among us did not suffer in school? It’s part of our right of passage. Several school stories came to me this week, and I thought they were worth a look.
Avoid The Bouncing Ball
Dodgeball has been banned in a New Hampshire school district, as that game was found to be inappropriate. No longer will students be subject to “human targeting” in this “physically aggressive” activity. And yes, yes it was.
Wasn’t it great, though?
The High School Barber
There’s a Jesuit school in Kansas City that will begin drug testing this fall. It seems they have a barber on their teaching staff, and they will take snips of hair from randomly selected students. That hair will then be tested to see if they are engaging in any activities from binge drinking to smoking PCP. The test examines consumption over the last 90 days, apparently.
Go to school, get a hair cut … get counseling if you’re on the wrong path.
Fascinating what people do to high school students, isn’t it?
WATCH THIS VIDEO
Seriously, this is a fabulously great video done by the student choir at Highland Senior High School in Pocatello, Idaho.
Love this video. I hope the kids – who did this video in one long 8-minute shot – had as much fun as it looked like they had! Watch them scramble from scene to scene as the camera keeps moving.
Green energy continues to befuddle and annoy us. I’ve been approached by one too many solar energy sales people at Home Depot … so I wanted to re-examine where we were as a society with solar and renewable energy.
This photo just makes me laugh.
Making green energy has become even more controversial as investment in green technology has increased. We now have green lobbies arguing against wind farms and solar energy installations (links below) because some wildlife will be harmed in the making of the supposedly green energy. I’m sure that’s true … so which would you prefer, using oil and coal, and harming the environment, or using solar and wind, and harming the environment?
I believe in the creation of energy that I can use. And if a few birds die in the process, that’s unfortunate. I like birds. But I like using energy, too.
But I digress.
Here’s a great set of tips on how to lower your energy bill without installing expensive solar panels. And you might be surprised to see what’s most important! According to the Minnesota Power utility, buying solar panels for your home is the LAST thing you should do! Here’s a priority list they developed to help their customers, which you can see here.
A wonderful post from my friend, thepracticalhistorian. When you both showcase British humor and cast aspersions at the French, you’re on the right path!
I hate parasites. Blood sucking parasites. Hate’em.
