Diversion

The Birthday Calculator.

Your date of conception was on or about 6 November 1956 which was a Tuesday.

You were born on a Tuesday
under the astrological sign Leo.
Your Life path number is 5.

Life Path Compatibility:
You are most compatible with those with the Life Path numbers 1, 5 & 7.
You should get along well with those with the Life Path numbers 3 & 9.
You may or may not get along well with those with the Life Path number 8.
You are least compatible with those with the Life Path numbers 2, 4, 6, 11 & 22.

The Julian calendar date of your birth is 2436049.5.
The golden number for 1957 is 1.
The epact number for 1957 is -1.
The year 1957 was not a leap year.

Your birthday falls into the Chinese year beginning 1/31/1957 and ending 2/17/1958.
You were born in the Chinese year of the Rooster.

Your Native American Zodiac sign is Salmon; your plant is Raspberry.

You were born in the Egyptian month of Paopy, the second month of the season of Poret (Emergence - Fertile soil).

The date of Easter on your birth year was Sunday, 21 April 1957.
The date of Orthodox Easter on your birth year was Sunday, 21 April 1957.
The date of Ash Wednesday (the first day of Lent) on your birth year was Wednesday 6 March 1957.
The date of Whitsun (Pentecost Sunday) in the year of your birth was Sunday 9 June 1957.
The date of Whisuntide in the year of your birth was Sunday 16 June 1957.
The date of Rosh Hashanah in the year of your birth was Tuesday, 24 September 1957.
The date of Passover in the year of your birth was Sunday, 14 April 1957.
The date of Mardi Gras on your birth year was Tuesday 5 March 1957.

As of 6/27/2006 1:30:18 PM EDT
You are 48 years old.
You are 587 months old.
You are 2,552 weeks old.
You are 17,864 days old.
You are 428,749 hours old.
You are 25,724,970 minutes old.
You are 1,543,498,218 seconds old.

Your age is the equivalent of a dog that is 6.99178082191781 years old. (You're still chasing cats!)

There are 33 days till your next birthday
on which your cake will have 49 candles.

Those 49 candles produce 49 BTUs,
or 12,348 calories of heat (that's only 12.3480 food Calories!) .
You can boil 5.60 US ounces of water with that many candles.

In 1957 there were approximately 4.0 million births in the US.
In 1957 the US population was approximately 150,697,361 people, 50.7 persons per square mile.
In 1957 in the US there were approximately 1,667,231 marriages (11.1%) and 385,144 divorces (2.6%)
In 1957 in the US there were approximately 1,452,000 deaths (9.6 per 1000)
In the US a new person is born approximately every 8 seconds.
In the US one person dies approximately every 12 seconds.


Your birthstone is Ruby
The Mystical properties of Ruby

Ruby is said to open one's heart to love.

Some lists consider these stones to be your birthstone. (Birthstone lists come from Jewelers, Tibet, Ayurvedic Indian medicine, and other sources)

Carnelian


Your birth tree is

Cypress, the Faithfulness

Strong, muscular, adaptable, takes what life has to give, happy,content,optimistic, needs enough money and acknowledgment, hates loneliness, passionate lover which cannot be satisfied, faithful, quick-tempered,unruly, pedantic and careless.


There are 181 days till Christmas 2006!
There are 194 days till Orthodox Christmas!

The moon's phase on the day you were
born was waxing crescent.

Aaron's Broadcasting Network (ABC)

That was the running gag around Hollywood during the Seventies because Aaron Spelling, who passed away on Friday, had so many shows on ABC. The only ones I ever took to were Fantasy Island and The Rookies. That is tv series only. There were countless tv movies that he produced that I thought were great. Yes, great. Oh boo hoo! Everyone says that it was mostly mindless drivel, but honestly all it was supposed to do was entertain, and it did.
On a more personal note, he was a great dad. Absolutely no one on the planet believes Tori can act...except her dad.

An alarming trend of late is the folks who I saw on tv all the
time during my wonder years, are dropping like flies. A quick list:
Dennis Weaver
Don Knotts
Darren McGavin
Tony Franciosa
Al Lewis (Grandpa on the Munsters)
Maureen Stapleton
Paul Gleason (Clarence Beeks in Trading Places)


Not fair.

Went to the movies...

Couldn't find the gift card for the movies that we had been given. Been searching the house for months. Did come across the AAA (as in the motorclub) discount tickets, so we were good to go.
We piled into the minivan and went to see X-Men: The Last Stand. So while I was pounding down a bag of pop-pable (sp?) little round snicker balls, I enjoyed some good previews and a thoroughly excellent movie.
it is actually tough to review the movie with spoiling some part of the storyline. Suffice to say that, the good, solid story outweighed every other aspect of the movie, but everything aside from the story was top notch. Very well thought out special effects.
I vote a must see in a movie theater.

Why Blog at all?

...really.

OK

maybe short bursts are the answer...

hmmmm, not depressed. more like temporarily lost. I think I know the way, but it is different from the past. Scary.

tragic consequences, if proven wrong.

Hey kids! What time is it?

A really, really long time ago, that phrase was the queue for every little kid in the 50's to yell at their precious Zenith black and white console tv (along with the studio audience of little kids), "It's Howdy Doody Time!".

It was also a time when television shows varied in length. A show could be 20-23 minutes long or even as little as 15 minutes. Things evolved. Half an hour or an hour became standard. Daytime television was one or two talk shows in the morning, the soaps during midday/midafternoon and then one or two afternoon talk shows (Mike Douglas and Merv Griffin come to mind). This was followed by the 5 and 6 o'clock news and then Prime Time would kick in from 8-11pm. And it would be wrong not to mention Johnny at 11:30 after all the years he put in.

There were other facets to this model that went on for decades. Weekends were Saturday morning cartoons and afternoons on both days were sports (Wide World of...etc.) and Sunday nights were family time (Wonderful World of Disney, Wild Kingdom).

One of the most important components to all of this scheduling were Repeats. Or as we used to refer to them, Reruns.

For many years the flag that signaled the end of the television season was the TV Guide announcing that next week's show was a rerun. There were no big season finales. Actually, it was very rare to have a series finale. Nine times out of ten, the show just never came back in the Fall.

Oh, and about the Fall. Yes, it was cooler weather, school starting, but most importantly...there were the Fall Previews. The shows that were new to the lineup, hitting the ground running and hopeful that they would still be there in the spring. It used to be that they had thirteen weeks to pull it off or wind up as an obscure question in Trivial Pursuit, the Platinum Edition.

Well, that was then. Somewhere around the turn of the century the landscape changed in such a way that, even though it always seemed like a free for all, it really became a free for all. You could make an argument that cable was the culprit, been around since the late seventies, with it's multitude of channels, numbering in the hundreds. But realistically, it's Tivo. With Tivo there is no restriction to when you watch something. That is a really big deal. Routines are no longer based on when you can see something you want to see. That means that if you are a tv show now, your audience is dispersed. It is no longer a matter of the next day, hanging at the watercooler and chatting about 'Lost' from last night. Which means momentum for any show is almost impossible to create because 'Must See TV' is no longer 'Must See Now TV'.

Hey kids! What time is it? ... It doesn't matter anymore.