The Original Peanuts Characters, and The Peanuts Collection

 At the Millhopper Public library today I renewed Martinus Evans's running guidebook Slow AF Run Club while returning a large book listing and discussing every Beatles song ever recorded.  As we were finishing with our browsing, I noticed some compendium volumes containing very early Peanuts comic strips.  Charles Shulz created Peanuts, and as a little kid I was one of its biggest, most consistent readers. Poor underappreciated Charlie Brown was its main character..."Good Grief" may have been his motto.  For a period in the sixties I procured some of the earliest Peanuts collections and enjoyed going way back in time to the original strips that introduced the early characters.  Over the years some more were introduced, largely in the interests of promoting a DEI culture (diversity, equity, inclusion).  I will always remember the old kids like Patty, Violet and Sally...they fit the TV specials well.  Schroeder, with his toy piano featuring a stern-looking bust of his hero Beethoven, was never a primary Peanuts character but remained a valued member of the series, and he may have been phased out of some series merchandise for the sake of promoting a woke agenda.  I remember that Christmas special when Linus saved the day by quoting the Christmas story out of the Bible's book of Luke.  He was a great kid. I have some books I'm now reading, and The Complete Peanuts figures strongly in that mix.  The strips collections, which go back for decades, can be accessed almost at random, and I have no need for bookmarks here.  I don't intend to do any comprehensive book reviews, but if there is something I come across that makes a good impression on me, then i'm likely to discuss it in an upcoming article.  Looks like I shouldn't have much trouble being able to renew The Complete Peanuts...

Merry Christmas from Me with a Minimal Appetite

 Merry Christmas, everyone! Today we greeted this holiday and visited our good friends, who live on the western outskirts of Gainesville. The food was wonderful and so was the company.  I had a very small appetite and filled up quickly, wanting to take a nap on their couch.  We went back home and I rested, skipping the exercise routine I had planned.  Later on I watchd, while resting, a couple of NBA games and some Thursday Night Football on Amazon Prime channel.  Well, time to get a decent night's sleep. Happy holidays...

Latest Snowy Jigsaw Puzzle, Exercise Plans

 

Well, late yesterday I completed a cute 300-piece jigsaw puzzle of two snowmen with several sweet-looking little animals: a pony, two affectionate pigs, a cat, squirrel, horse and rabbit.  At the end it seemed I lacked a single piece.  Getting its finished photo uploaded to Google Fotos was a little challenging, but there you see it!  Now I've just finished my dinner with Melissa at Nopal...no residual hunger here.  I suffered from some level four headaches this morning, probably in major part stemming from cumulative effects of radiation treatments since Novmber 17rh.  Melissa has brought forth the idea of having my head capped with a special electronically-powered device to help fight the development and./or reproduction of glioblastoma multiforme cancer within my sensitive, sad little brain.  I forgot the name...refreshing with Google should properly inform me.  Yet for someone with such a bummer of a cancer diagnosis, I still feel pretty doggone healthy.  I'm still susceptible to tiredness from late in the day as evening and darkness approach. My plan is to exercise on our living room rug while watching Peter...back in 2022...as he struggles to cover that year's Nw York City Marathon on YouTube.  Should be interesting.  In the previous two or three days each my virtual mile totals haven't risen beyond one and a fraction...let's see if I can't beat that figure tonight. IT's now eight in the evening and I have finished my evening living room exercise session, with 5.0 total virtual miles. Merry Christmas!  By the way, if it's five til midnight and a humungous train with "POLAR EXPRESS" on its side pulls up in front of your house, then seriously consider getting on board, especially if the conductor looks and sounds like Tom Hanks...

Filling in the Blog Gaps to Cover Missing Days

For the most part, I have continued to be faithful in writing and posting daily blog articles.  Sometimes, though, a calendar day will come and go without any posted article from me.  But I have a way to get around that: backpost "yesterday's" article!  Which is exactly what I'm doing this morning.  The trick is for me to search my short-term memory for information I can write about, as if it were ongoing and not just something that happened the previous day.  "Officially", tomorrow is Christmas Eve, the 24th of December.  That's the date I'm posting this blog entry about filling in missing days with blog articles.  I looked up "back-posting" on Google and got answers related to crocheting, for all the good it did me.  Still, I fully intend to make use of this blogging ploy to fill in as many of my blogging gaps as possible.  Merry Christmas!

Blessings and Hopes for this Christmas Holiday Season

On this Christmas Eve "Eve", I wish you all a happy holiday season and that you experience peace in the present and hope for the future.  Melissa and I both are still deeply in grief over the loss of our wonderful son Will, who tragically passed away this past July.  The holiday season simply isn't the same without his loving presence in our lives...we are grateful for our dearly beloved daughter Rebecca to be living near us to celebrate Christmas.  God Bless you all...

Quote of the Week...from Scut Farkus

What, you're gonna cry now?  Come on, crybaby! Cry for me, come on! CRY!     ---Scut Farkus

Scut Farkus was the big bad bully character in Jean Shepherd's immortal 1983 movie A Christmas Story, for which he compiled a number of already published short stories and wrapped them together within a holiday theme.  It's become a TV staple, with a couple of channels running nonstop marathons at Christmas.  I already knew Jean Shepherd in the mid-1970s for his late-night humorous monologue shows on my local talk radio station in Miami Beach, WKAT/1360, shows that originated from the mighty WOR/710, (50,000-watt clear channel) in New York City.  I also had read the short story he wrote to which the above quote pertains.  Little Ralphie, around eight I guess, is all excited as Christmas approaches...he desperately wants a Red Rider toy air rifle, but his mother says no, "You'll shoot your eye out".  And now his own teacher has just written the same thing on a homework assignment he wrote about it...and Ralphie is trudging home in the snow, tears falling from his eyes.  Suddenly Scut Farkus, the school bully...accompanied by his little, stocky toady Grover Dill...jumps in Ralphie's way, confronting him and ridiculing his crying.  And then our hero does something unexpected: he charges his adversary, pushing him to the ground, proceeding to beat him up.  The scene didn't look realistic to me and, besides, I knew from Shepherd's earlier short story that it was the more manageable Dill that Ralphie fought, not impossible Farkus.  I also had a problem with the bully in this story being a social outcast among the kids...where I grew up in South Florida during the sixties and seventies, it was the bully who was the popular kid on the block or at the bus stop.  I could take the above quote of an imaginary figure in different directions, but since I always remember this jeering taunt of Scut's, I decided to turn it on its head and make something sweet about it.  You see, we have a year-old mixed breed puppy dog named Daisy, and when Melissa ("Mommy" as far as Daisy is concerned) ever goes into another room in the house with the door closed, Daisy sidles up to the door and begins to whimper just like she did when she was very young and temporarily separated from her litter.  And every now and then when she does this, I go straight into my Scut Farkus routine, repeating almost verbatim the above quote...but with some good-natured affection thrown in...                                                                            

Interesting Winter Weather Hitting Gainesville as Christmas Approaches

Looks like an unusually wet and cold upcoming week in Gainesville as Christmas on Sunday approaches.  Whenever precipitation is forecast and the temperature is below freezing, the obvious inference is that it's gonna snow...such is the case this coming Friday, two days before the big holiday.  All I know is that in the next few days we're going to get a lot of water...in whatever form...falling from the skies and plummeting temperatures as the weekend approaches.  At last glimpse The Weather Channel has Christmas day's high in my hometown here in northern Florida at 45, bracketed with lows in the 20's.  My main concern in all this...and perhaps yours as well...will be potentially icy roads: hardly anyone here, including myself, is prepared to handle driving over them.  The last time that happened in Gainesville to any substantial degree was just before Christmas in 1989 when roads iced up overnight.  I was at work in the downtown post office in the wee hours of the morning and after my shift spent several minutes trying to clear my car's windshield of the thick ice.  Then the treacherous 6-mile drive home...I managed to make it nearly into my own neighborhood before the car began briefly to skid on the frozen road.  And then it began to snow in earnest while icicles formed all around my house.  Nothing like that has happened here since...until possibly this coming Christmas weekend.  Should be interesting...