Joe's Place

This morning during one of those rare moments of fond reflection, I enjoyed a memory from my adolescence and thought it would be worth sharing.

Back in the day before cell phones, computers and gaming systems were in every household, safe and cheap diversions for boys were limited to mostly playing outside. In 1972 and in a beautiful stroke of marketing genius, Sunoco (Sun Oil Company) came up with a campaign that satisfied the football-craving urges of young men (and women too I suppose) while at the same time causing (maybe forcing) thousands of parents to purchase gasoline from their retail stations across the country. NFL Action ’72 was born.

Sunoco Football Saver Stamps

Anyone remember these things? For the time (and the price — free) they were a big hit in the Midwest where we lived. When you filled up with a tank of gas at Sunoco, the attendant would give you a pack of trading stamps that featured the NFL players of the time. They had stamps of most all the players on the 24 teams that comprised the league. Like trading cards, you’d collect them and if you didn’t have ones you wanted, you’d trade with your friends. They even had a small blue vinyl wallet that you could put them into to bring to carry around. I can’t imagine how many of those things teachers and nuns in schools across the fruited plain confiscated from those of us that got caught looking at them during class.

To heighten the whole collecting experience, Sunoco published a sturdy collecting album that you could purchase too. The album was broken down by NFL team and you’d glue your stamps into the album.

Sunoco Football Saver Album & Stamps

Now I really don’t know if this idea paid off for Sunoco or not, but since it only lasted for a year I imagine it didn’t get them the results they were looking for. But I know this, I remember the name of the brand of the station that I visited a few hundred times to get these stamps! Ahhh, the good old days.

I’ve been waiting for one of the big national TV news organizations to take on the subject of manufacturing in the U.S. for quite some time. Well the topic has finally been broached by ABC in a week long series on “World News with Diane Sawyer” and I’m excited to suggest it for your reading/watching consumption. Here’s a link to their “Made in America” web page with lots of resources and video broadcasts.

The “Made in America” topic certainly isn’t new and why our national media hasn’t given it lots of coverage like ABC finally decided to do isn’t clear to me. U.S. manufacturing jobs have been a critical source of income to people in this country and with the jobless rate is so high right now it makes sense I guess to feature this important topic. Personally, I have a selfish interest in the success of U.S. manufacturing as my career has and does depend on it. So I guess I should be cheering that it has been given some national attention. Let’s call it way overdue but very welcome.

One of those resources at the ABC World News site is a page on the “Made in America” pledge. Now I don’t know how effective “pledge” type campaigns are in our culture today, but I certainly agree and encourage people to make a conscious decision to consider the companies, corporations and countries that they ultimately are supporting when purchasing. If the pledge or one of these stories is what gets that ball rolling in your family and causes purchasing changes, then way to go ABC.

The U.S. economy, manufacturing and jobs are pretty complex subjects and you can be sure there will be plenty more discussion to come about them all.

Time and distance may separate families when it comes to reunions and gatherings, but one thing that seems to be able to unite the male family members is a friendly game of golf.

And so it was on Monday afternoon that a few of my uncles and cousins got together at Meadowbrook Country Club in Ballwin to see one another and find out just how much damage we can afflict to an otherwise lovely course. Things were a bit wet due to recent rains, but we managed to get in a round under overcast and cool-ish conditions.

Our gracious host and resident family golf pro, Mike Carron, laid out a lovely time for us to renew relationships and rivalries mixed in with the distraction of advancing a little white ball around in as few a strokes as possible. A good time was enjoyed by all, and it was great to see my elders actually putting the “hurt” on the ball a number of times.

Yes, we may look like a motley crew, but there’s a lot of love in this group. I can’t wait to get together again sometime real soon.

Theres photos from the day in a gallery on my Photos page so you can see them. Click the thumbnail, click the “Photo” page link at the top or here’s a link that takes you right to it.

No, this post isn’t about Aerosmith or Gene Autry, but about me and one of my good diversions.

After a six-month hiatus, I’m back serving at church, one weekend a month, in the video department. Perhaps the term “serving” is a bit strong because it’s actually lots of fun, is quite different than what I normally do and is something I enjoy.

God is good that way. He doesn’t just call us to do things that are drudgery. (Although we’ve been taught that by mainstream religion.) The Bible says in Matthew 11:30, “For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” Let that sink in a little.

Serving doesn’t have to be hard, it can be easy and is always very rewarding. I hope that is encouragement to you to get into “the game.” Don’t let those gifts and talents stay bottled up. He gave them to you for a reason.

I currently serve in the position of technical director in the video area, or “TD” for short. As you can see below it is quite dark in there with lots of switchers, equipment, computers, video monitors and electronic gear. It can be quite hectic at times. My spot is the furthermost upper left in the photo. (Unoccupied of course since I am the one taking the picture.)

 

Video booth at Grace Church St. Louis

Do you believe this? Yes it is officially Spring here in these parts of Missouri, even if it doesn’t look like it. It was 80°F just three days ago.

Enough of this already, we’re supposed to be playing golf by now.

Does your day start like this? My lovely wife had forwarded me an email with this headline and image. It had to do with coffee so I was instantly curious.

“FIND THE MAN IN THE COFFEE BEANS”

The email states at the beginning that it is the “Brain Exercise for the Day.” I like brain teasers, so this is worth doing.

The email challenges you to look at the image and find the man somewhere in the image. Seems simple enough. So I look and look and look and about ten seconds later I spot the guy. Sweet, found him. So far so good. Below the image the email stated the following:

OK, that’s cool, my right brain is normal, I think to myself. Thanks Honey for the interersting little brain teaser and ego booster to start the day. That should have been the end of it, I should have taken it for what is was meant to be and moved on to the next email. But you know what happened. I couldn’t just leave it at that. Curiosity and skepticism got to me.

I checked snopes.com and truthorfiction.com to see if this scientific claim was true. Snopes had nothing on it and TruthorFiction stated that it was unproven. Ah ha I say, I had good reason to be skeptical of it. Did I stop there though? No, I was still curious.

I went to Google. Put this exact phrase, “man in the coffee beans” into the search box and boom, 511,000 hits. Amazing! And even more surprising there were 9,490 hits on images with that exact phrase. And in blogs, Google reported “about 9,990 results.” Are you kidding me? (So much for thinking that my blog had original content.)

No wonder I can’t ever get through my email.

The other day my lovely wife (who by the way IS the loveliest woman on the planet) asked me about an email that she received as to whether it was one of those internet hoaxes, frauds or rumors or was it in fact real. (My lovely wife has in fact annointed me as the world’s top cynic and that I should know these things)

The truth be known (pun intended) I am indeed extremely cynical, but I don’t know everything and require assistance occasionally. So I have compiled some internet sources with which I can usually perform quick research with a reasonable degree of certainty. And for all of you professional news writers and journalists out there who will point out that internet sources are largely unreliable, I will agree with you, particularly as it pertains to the pure journalistic method. But we’re talking here about email and people and entertainment and speedy answers etc.

So it’s in that vain that I thought I’d share with you a few of my trusty, bookmarked sites that I use to check on these kinds of things.

• Snopes.com
• Truthorfiction.com
• Scambusters.org
• Urban Legends Page at About.com

I’m sure that there’s plenty more, but these usually get the job done for me. Some of these are more straightforward as to how to perform the actual research, but they at least all have a search function to let you dig into their information database.

And as an extra bonus to you, I am also providing this link to a great post on another blog detailing some of the most entertaining internet and email hoaxes of the past few years. Good stuff here. We are amazingly gullible!

So I hope this information will be useful to you the next time that you’re tempted to click the “forward” button to something that sounds a little too bizarre or believable. Cynics Unite!

OK, I know I’m a little weird, but I’m hoping this same thing happens to you too. Do you ever get up in the morning and some obscure song from your distant past comes to mind and you just can’t get it out of there? Such was the case this morning and it was driving me nuts.

Way back in my early teens, like in the early seventies, I remember this crazy little song about pollution. It wasn’t performed by anyone mainstream, it was a political satire to increase people’s awareness of the purported mess that we were making of the environment. (Most of you know that I’m not an environmentalist whack-o, so please don’t misinterpret my motive here.)

Until I googled it a little earlier, I couldn’t remember who sang it, but it had very catchy lyrics, obviously, since they have stayed with me to this day.  Isn’t it freaky how things you try to remember escape you and other things come to mind that you’re not trying to remember? Anyway, once I sorted through the different Google search results to get the artist’s name, I then looked him up on YouTube and sure enough, a number of people have uploaded videos of the song being performed on TV somewhere.

The artist, Tom Lehrer, was a pretty accomplished composer and had written many parodies of society in the 1960′s and 1970′s. Strangely he was a professor of mathematics at the same time and eventually returned to full-time teaching after he retired from performing.

He performs the song wearing the classic black suit, white shirt with a skinny black tie that beckons memories of the Beatles, and other musicians from that era. And after watching the video I was reminded at how those times seemed so complicated to me back then. It’s amazing how your perspective of the world and events changes.

So anyway now that I’ve got you all juiced up for this thing, I present it here only for nostalgia and entertainment value. I don’t necessarily agree with the message.

Pollution Song

Do any of you remember it?

I was born and lived my first twelve years of life in North St. Louis County and then returned here with my own  family many years later and have lived the last twenty-three years here. So while I haven’t lived here my whole life, I have certainly spent a major portion of my life here. I say that to say that in the span of all that time, winters here are typically very tolerable and in most cases just a tiny speed bump between fall and spring. But ever since the beginning of December, the winter season has really made its presence felt.

I’m no expert in meterology but in my very unofficial opinion, seems like we’re on the way to having an unusually cold and snowy winter in the great gateway to the west. Part of my theory for this (which admittedly is loosely based in science) is a simple observation. Take for example the following photograph:

This is a view of our back deck after a nice 9″ snow a little before sunrise on January 20, 2011. Yeah a 9″ snow is a bit unusual for this area, I think the last one that we had like that was in March or April 2009. So that in itself is nothing out of the ordinary but what I find to be a little unusual, and the basis for my theory, is evidenced in the next photo:

This is our back deck again photographed about 50 hours later. Anyone that has ever lived in this area will know that it is very unusual to still have the majority of  that snow still here. We can get some crazy snow and ice in the St. Louis area, but if you give the elements a chance to adjust like they usually do, conditions improve.

OK, so this isn’t exactly a huge revelation or even newsworthy, but it’s all that came to mind this morning as I sat here with my lovely cup of freshly-brewed Starbucks Sumatra, while watching the forecast for tomorrow — another 3″-5″ of snow predicted! I just love it.

When waking up to snow on Christmas morning, the world just seems at peace. Having family spend the morning with you is priceless. From the Renaud household we wish you and yours a blessed Christmas. May the real reason for our celebration — Jesus– resonate with you today and every day.