~★~♥~♥~★~ El Morno ♥~★~★~♥ ~
August 6, 2012

 ★~ Today’s Quote: “What a wonderful beautiful thing, to wiggle your toes.” ~ Dalton Trumbo

★~ Wiggle Your Toes Day:

I wiggle my toes every day, and here’s the reason why: I could be in a coma right now and not even know it! If I am in a coma, my quality of life is pretty good, and I want to give the people who are caring for me a little love and a reason not to pull the plug, so I wiggle my toes. Odd, I know, but really, a toe-wiggle is such a little thing.

For another neat way to celebrate Wiggle Your Toes day, try peeling a banana with your toes. I’m going to buy Ryan and Cole both bananas today and let them give it a try. Why not? Naturally, I will share the video.

★~ Root Beer Float Day:

I can’t figure out if Root Beer Float Day is today or if it was June 20 (We did celebrate on June 20.). A&W celebrates it on June 20, and it’s hard to dispute A&W’s authority on root beer floats, but on the other hand, I’m certainly willing to celebrate Root Beer Float Day twice in one summer. After, all El Morno friend Carol loves root beer floats. I’ve given it a lot of thought, and have established my first official El Morno policy: “Why not?” When in doubt, when it comes to Root Beer Float Day or Cotton Candy Day, why not celebrate more than once? However, this policy is completely subjective. For example, the “Why not?” policy will not apply to raisins. They will never be celebrated more than once a year.

Moving along, today we’re celebrating the root beer float, my favorite summer beverage.

What’s better than an ice-cold root beer on a summer day? Nothing. Smooth vanilla ice cream, coppery root beer, and frothy foam have made the root beer float an all-American classic. Root beer has been manufactured, bottled, and sold since 1880, and the story they’re sticking to is that the root beer float (sometimes referred to as “a black cow”) was invented 13 years later. Looking out the window late one night in Cripple Creek, Colorado, Frank Wisner caught a glimpse the snow atop nearby Cow Mountain, illuminated by the light of the full moon.  The view inspired him to float a scoop of vanilla ice cream on top of his glass of root beer. The tasty treat was tremendously popular with the town’s children, who then called it a “black cow.”

★~ Today in History:

♥~ 1926 – Nineteen-year-old Gertrude Ederle from New York became the first woman to swim the English Channel and she picked this day to do it. She accomplished the feat in 14 hours and 31 minutes, breaking the men’s record by 2 hours.

♥~ 1980 –  On General Hospital Luke and Laura spent a romantic evening locked inside Wyndham’s department store.

♥~ 1992 –  Harold Russell, going against the wishes of the Motion Picture Academy, sold his Oscar statuette for $60,500 to pay for his wife’s eye surgery. He had won the award in 1947 for The Best Years of Our Lives. It was the first Oscar to be sold.

★~ Born Today:

♥~ 1809 – Alfred Tennyson England’s Poet Laureate [1850]: The Charge of the Light Brigade, In Memoriam, The Lady of Shalott, The Lotuseaters, The Idylls of the King, Maud, Enoch Arden, Locksley Hall Sixty Years After; died Oct 6, 1892

♥~ 1881 – Katybeth actor: The Cisco Kid, Pancho Villa Returns, One Night in the Tropics, Phantom of the Opera [1943]; died Sep 10, 1961

♥~ 1911 – Lucille Ball Emmy Award-winning comedienne, actress: I Love Lucy [1952, 1953], The Lucy Show [1966-67, 1967-68], 12th Annual Atlas Governor’s Award [1988-89]; The Lucille Ball Comedy Hour, Yours, Mine and Ours, Mame; died April 26, 1989

♥~ 1917 – Robert Mitchum actor: The Winds of War, War and Remembrance, Cape Fear, A Family for Joe, African Skies, Night of the Hunter, The Story of G.I. Joe; commercials: “Beef. It’s what’s for dinner.”; died July 1, 1997

♥~ 1928 – Andy Warhol (Warhola) filmmaker, pop artist: Campbell Soup; “In the future everyone will be world famous for 15 minutes.”;died Feb 22, 1987

★~ Did You Know:: Olympic Trivia

♥~ Olympics mascot are odd. This Summer Olympic mascots, Wenlock and Mandeville, are the Summer 2012 Olympic mascots and represent drops of molten steel. They flecked off a structural beam during the building of London’s Olympic Stadium. Yep, children everywhere will be cuddling with a pair of congealed steel pellets. Or not. From a marketing stand point Wenlock and Mandeville are a bit of a challenge.

♥~ The official song of London 2012 is “Survival,” by popular British band Muse.

♥~ The  Olympic rings symbolize the five inhabited continents of the world (Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe and the Americas), linked together by the Olympic spirit. At least one of the rings’ colors (blue, yellow, black, green and red, with a white background) are present in every participating country’s national flag.

♥~  Usain Bolt ( Jamaican sprinter) adopted an abandoned baby cheetah (fittingly named “Lightning Bolt”) in 2009, and continues to sponsor its care in an orphanage in Nairobi. This adoption has lead lots of people to wondered (as Usain destroys the competition, powering his way past Blake, Gay (snigger) and Gatlin), how close it would be between the fastest human in the world and the fastest animal in the world, and now that question has been answered…Usain Bolt would be left in the dust by greyhounds, cheetahs and pronghorn antelope (if he were to take the four-leggers up on a challenge A cheetah would clock in at 64 mph (104 kph), or about twice as fast as the world’s top sprinters, while the pronghorn antelope would likely be on the medal stand, pulling out a speed of 55 mph (89 kph). Even he fastest bird, the ostrich, may also take home a medal in one of the running events, clocking some 40 mph (64 kph).

♥~  Giorgio Armani, Adidas and Stella McCartney  have all designed national team uniforms for the Olympic Opening Ceremony. Sporting everything from berets to fedoras, this year’s athletes will certainly be dressed to impress.

♥~ History will be made this year when double-amputee Oscar Pistorius runs for South Africa in the individual 400 meters and the 4×400 meter relay. Pistorius will be the first amputee ever to compete in track and field at the Olympics.

♥~ The night before his first race at the 1972 Olympic Games, legendary swimming champ Mark Spitz almost decided to shave off his famous mustache. However, a Russian coach gave him a hard time about sporting facial hair, so Spitz joked that the mustache made him swim faster by keeping water away from his mouth. Spitz kept the ‘stache, went on to win 7 gold medals at the Games, and at the next Olympics, all the Russian swimmers were sporting mustaches.

♥~ Poodle clipping was once an Olympic even For this event (which was a trial event), 128 competitors assembled at the Bois de Boulogne, a park in western Paris and competed to see who could trim the most poodles’ in a two hour period. The gold medalist was 37-year-old Avril Lafoule from Auvergne, France, who clipped 17 poodles.

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Cascade Drive-in Chicago from Katybeth on Vimeo.

I took Rascal, Ryan, and Cole to the drive-in movie theater last night. We had such fun! The movie—“Total Recall”—was awful, but it didn’t matter. Sitting in the dark, watching that big screen over the tops of cars with people strolling by every once in a while and the sound coming through a much-improved-but-still-window speaker transported me back to the times we went to the drive-in when I was a kid. What’s funny is that it had the same effect on the boys, and neither of them had ever been to a drive-in. Cole even got to shout out the window, “TURN YOUR HEAD LIGHTS OUT!”

Cascade Drive-In from Katybeth on Vimeo.

Don’t forget to wiggle your toes today!

Odd Loves Company!

♥~