Summertime is clean-up time. I’ve been going through files and pieces of paper and old notebooks and have come up with quite a selection of trivia.
See Spot, See Spot Run
It was announced in People on July 27 that A. Sterl Artley died at 91 in Overland Park, Kansas. His works live on in the memory of many who went to school in the ’50s and beyond. According to the magazine, Artley was “the last of the three authors who contributed to the books chronicling Dick and Jane, the running, skipping, jumping protagonists in four decades of grade-school primers.” Don’t forget Puff and Spot.
Read Also
Growth plates are instrumental in shaping a horse’s life
Young horse training plans and workloads must match their skeletal development. Failing to plan around growth plates can create lifelong physical problems.
A meal for all seasons
A favorite of children and a staple of university students’ larders, Kraft Dinner came to Canada in 1937. Sixty-one years later, Kraft Dinner, a name coined by Canadians, is eaten by 246,000 Canadians every day, making it, in the words of a Kraft spin-doctor, a “Canadian icon.”
Dates to note
September is National Gum Care Month. It’s also Library Card Sign-Up Month and National Piano Month. If that doesn’t give you reason enough to celebrate, Sept. 7-13 is National Vegetarian Awareness Week, Sept. 10 marks Swap Ideas Day, Video Games Day is on Sept. 12 and we mark National School Internet Safety Week Sept. 14-18.
For those who like to plan ahead, October is National Cookie Month, National Dessert Month, National Pasta Month, National Pizza Month, National Pork Month and National Seafood Month.
It has World Farm Animals Day on the second, Ten-four Day on the fourth, Dictionary Day on the 16th and Mule Day on the 26th.
Popeye the Sailor Man
Remember the cartoon character who got his strength from a can of spinach? He’d enjoy it in Lenexa, Kansas, where, The Old Farmer’s Almanac says, they hold an annual spinach festival for which the townfolk make the world’s largest spinach salad using a pitchfork, a digging spade, a kid’s wading pool and 300 pounds of fresh, washed spinach, 600 sliced mushrooms, 100 sliced garlic cloves, 12 two-quart jars of bacon bits, 75 cups of red wine vinegar, 50 cups of salad oil, 30 teaspoons of salt and 10 teaspoons of pepper; 300 hard-cooked eggs are optional.
The townsfolk divide the salad into 700 portions which they sell for $2 each, the money going to the local history society.
