Doctor on TV recently (Norman Swan on ABC) telling us that we needed children to play in the dirt with their dogs and cats and be  allowed to build up some immunity!  Well bugger me!  Who would have thought?

Gosh, those were the days. 

Mum used to cut chicken, chop eggs, and spread butter on bread on the same cutting board with the same knife and no bleach.  For some strange reason we  didn’t seem to get food poisoning.  Our school sandwiches were wrapped in wax paper in a brown paper bag and not in ice pack cooler.  For the life of me I can’t ever remember getting E.coli. 

Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the creek, the lake or at the beach.  Pristine chlorinated pools were at the YMCA. 

We had no idea of beach closures in those days. 

Everyone all took Physical Education.  We risked permanent injury with a pair of regular running shoes.  Cross-training athletic shoes had not been invented. 

I can’t recall any injuries, but they must have happened because they tell us how much safer we are now. 

We got the strap for doing something wrong at school.  They used to call it discipline, yet we all grew up to accept the rules and to honour and respect those older than us. 

We had at least 40 kids in our class and somehow, we all learned to read and write, do maths and spell almost all the words needed to write a grammatically correct letter.  FUNNY EH! 

We all said prayers in school irrespective of our religion and sang the national anthem.  No one got upset.  Staying in detention after school netted us all sorts of negative attention, we wish we hadn’t got. 

And we all knew we had to accomplish something before we were allowed to be proud of ourselves.  Sometimes we played on losing teams.  We learned about winning and losing. 

I just can’t recall being bored.  We were without computers, Play Station, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital TV cable stations.  We used to swim naked in the creek and dive into the water by climbing trees. 

Oh yeah … And where were the antibiotics and sterilisation kit when I got that bee sting?  Gawd, I could have been killed! 

We played “King of the Castle” on piles of gravel left on vacant building sites and when we got hurt, mum pulled out the trusty bottle of iodine and then we got our backside spanked.  Today it’s a trip to the emergency room, followed by a 10-day dose of antibiotics and then mum calls the lawyer to sue the contractor for leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where it was such a threat. 

To top it off, not a single person I knew had ever been told that they were from a dysfunctional family.  How could we possibly have known that? 

We never needed to get into group therapy and/or anger management classes.  We were obviously so duped by so many societal ills, that we didn’t even notice that the entire country wasn’t taking Prozac! 

How did we ever survive? 

HERE IS TO ALL OF US WHO SHARED THIS ERA, AND TO ALL WHO DIDN’T.  I’M SORRY FOR WHAT YOU MISSED.  I WOULD NOT TRADE MY GROWING UP YEARS FOR ANYTHING!

 

A little boy in Perham,Mn  , wanted $100.00 for something very special. He prayed for weeks, but nothing happened . Then he decided to write God a letter requesting the $100.00. When the postal authorities received the letter to God they decided to send it to Pres Obama. Pres Obama was so amused that he instructed his secretary to send the little boy a $5.00 bill. Obama thought this would appear to be a lot of money to a little boy in Minnesota. The little boy was delighted with the $5.00 bill and sat down to write a thank-you note to God, which read: Dear God: Thank you very much for sending the money. However, I noticed that for some reason you sent it through Washington DC., and those assholes took $95.00 in taxes.

Earlier this week I posted the Mensa word play item. Below is a look at redefining words. The Washington Post has published the winning submissions to its yearly contest, in which readers are asked to supply alternate meanings for common words.  And the winners are:

• Coffee, n. The person upon whom one coughs.
• Flabbergasted, adj. Appalled by discovering how much weight one has gained.
• Abdicate, v. To give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.
• Esplanade, v. To attempt an explanation while drunk.
• Willy-nilly, adj. Impotent.
• Negligent, adj. Absent-mindedly answering the door when wearing only a nightgown.
• Lymph, v. To walk with a lisp.
• Gargoyle, n. Olive-flavored mouthwash.
• Flatulence, n. Emergency vehicle that picks up someone who has been run over by a steamroller.
• Balderdash, n. A rapidly receding hairline.
• Testicle, n. A humorous question on an exam.
• Rectitude, n. The formal, dignified bearing adopted by proctologists.
• Pokemon, n. A Rastafarian proctologist.
• Oyster, n. A person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddishisms.
• Frisbeetarianism, n. The belief that, after death, the soul flies up onto the roof and gets stuck there.
• Circumvent, n .An opening in the front of boxer shorts worn by Jewish men.

The Washington Post’s Mensa Invitational invited readers to take any word from the  dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and  supply a new definition.

Here are the  winners: 

1. Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house,  which renders the subject financially impotent for an  indefinite  period of time.
2. Ignoranus: A person who’s  both stupid and an asshole.
3. Intaxicaton: Euphoria at  getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to  start with.
4. Reintarnation: Coming back  to life as a hillbilly.
5. Bozone (n.): The substance  surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The  bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the  near future.
6. Foreploy: Any misrepresentation about  yourself for the purpose of getting laid.
7. Giraffiti: Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.
8. Sarchasm: The  gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn’t get  it.
9. Inoculatte: To take coffee intravenously when you are  running late.
10. Osteopornosis: A degenerate  disease.  – (This one got extra credit.)
11. Karmageddon: It’s like, when everybody is sending off all these really  bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it’s like, a  serious bummer.
12. Decafalon (n): The grueling event of  getting through the day consuming only things that are good for  you.
13. All talk and no action.
14. Dopeler Effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they  come at you rapidly.
15. Arachnoleptic Fit (n.): The  frantic dance performed just after you’ve accidentally walked through a  spider web.
16. Beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a  mosquito, that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and  cannot be cast out.
17. Caterpallor (n.): The color you  turn after finding half a worm in the fruit you’re eating.