Has anybody noticed…

…a greater abundance of  tarantulas lately?

Mike has come across four of them within the last week including one crawling on his kitchen floor.  It was let back into the wild and even though they’re pretty benign, they look scary. :(

Oh yeah, he’ll be practicing with emoticons from now on because social networking messages don’t seem to be conveying just the right mood. :-/

Today is:  Today is Permanent Press Day, a day proudly to wear polyester and keep the iron unplugged.

Today is Hug Your Sweetheart Day.

Whoops, wrong picture.  How about this one?

The 101 number one song of the day was the ninth try for a group of girls signed by Motown. Their 8 previous attempts all failed on the charts and the other artists on the label had started making fun of their inability to produce a hit.  Today’s featured song was written for the Marvellettes but lead singer Gladys Horton said, “no way am I gonna sing any junk like!” The song was passed around down the line until it was offered to the group you’re about to hear and because they were low down on the totem pole, they couldn’t turn it down. After the song was recorded, they were booked for a tour on Dick Clark’s Caravan of Stars along with Gene Pitney and the Shirelles but these girls didn’t even get billing when they first hit the road. They were simply listed under “and others.” Until, that is, the song started climbing the charts. By August 23, 1964 it was number one – from then on, their name would be up in lights – Big Time! The Supremes – “Where Did Our Love Go”

Other stuff:

It’s back to school and so we are determined to provide you with the latest information that is being disseminated from our halls of academe. 

Stunning new research from Cornell University…found customers left larger tips to waitresses that tended to be slender…blonde…and had larger than average breasts.

They say the study is important in helping potential waitresses gauge their prospects in the industry.  Nice to know that Cornell students can fall back on this study when they graduate and head out into the work world.

Here’s the story behind the 101 Gold Nugget of Knowledge: It took a while to get started, but 101-year-old Mimi Rosenthal now has her third tattoo, courtesy of a Florida tattoo artist. Mimi’s first tattoo came at age 99, a dime-sized butterfly on her ankle. At 100 she had a small flower tattooed on her other leg. This time she picked a sunflower on her left arm. “Her skin is so fragile, it’s like uncharted territory,” said Spring Hill, Florida, tattoo artist Michelle Gallo-Kohlas, who is responsible for all of Rosenthal’s inkings. The work took longer than expected, but Rosenthal liked the results. Mimi jokes that her next tattoo is going on her “butt.” Rosenthal lives in Surfside Beach, South Carolina, with her daughter. She spends her time reading the New York Times online, communicating on Facebook and participating in a couple of book groups.

The owner of the New York house made famous in the 1979 film “The Amityville Horror” has unloaded some of his stuff. The five-bedroom Dutch Colonial on Long Island has been on the market since May for $1.15 million and is under contract. Owner Brian Wilson held a moving sale Saturday. Items included furniture and exercise equipment, not loot from the house’s infamous past. The costliest item was a baby grand piano priced at $15,000.

Officials say a bedbug infestation in New York has even reached the city’s most iconic building ater bedbugs were found in an area of the Empire State Building. The pests were found in an employee changing room, prompting building officials to call in exterminators. An Empire State Building official said the bedbugs probably hitched a ride into the building on an employee’s clothes. The building is just the latest in the city to report an assault by the pests. Among other locations reporting recent infestations were an AMC movie theater in Times Square, the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, a Victoria’s Secret store and the Time Warner Center.

The Los Angeles Unified School District is set to unveil the nation’s costliest school project ever built – the $578 million Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools. Starting next month, the K-12 complex will house 4,200 students on the site of the former Ambassador Hotel where the Democratic presidential nominee was assassinated in 1968. The campus is LA’s third high-priced school in as many years following a national trend of so-called Taj Mahal schools, $100 million-plus campuses that boast both elegant architecture and deluxe amenities.  The pricey schools have come during a sensitive period when the nation’s second-largest school system is struggling to close a $640 million budget deficit.