WordPress Reader is Acting Strangely

Do you follow my blog in the WordPress Reader? If you do, then you might be wondering why I am reposting old stuff. The short answer is, I’m not. The WordPress Reader is doing it for me – a totally unsolicitated behaviour.

The Reader is also not advertising most of my new posts. Catch 22 – right! If I try to tell WordPress Readers about this issue in a new post, will the Reader publish the new post?

Or will the Reader pick another old post like this one – How to Replace iTunes with CopyTrans Manager, which was first published in 2009. It appeared in the WordPress Reader a day ago.

This has been going on for a few months now, but I wasn’t paying attention (Christmas, New Years, travel to AZ, etc). Then I contacted a few of my regular readers. Thanks go to to Al and Faye for confirming my suspicions that the WordPress Reader had developed a mind of its own! I alerted the WordPress Happiness Engineers who say that the ‘Reader team’ has being contacted and the issue is being ‘escalated’ with them.

Even more puzzling, some of my readers are being sent to links that are a revision of one of my old posts. Since only I can see revisions, WordPress simply tells people

I’ve alerted the WordPress Happiness Engineers about that too. Perhaps they have some bugs to work out in their world of big data. Or maybe, somehow, I’ve broken my blog…

Facebook Is Not Your Friend Quotations

And then alcohol said ‘Put that on Facebook, it’s hilarious.” But alcohol was wrong. So very wrong.
– Author Unknown –

All I know is that I carried you for nine months. I fed you, I clothed you, I paid for your college education. Friending me on Facebook seems like a small thing to ask in return.
– Jodi Picoult, Sing You Home –

Dear Facebook: Adding an ‘Unfriend until Election Day” option would save me a lot of time.
– someecards –

Facebook is kind of like prison. You spend all day staring at walls and getting poked by people you don’t know.
– Authors Unknown –

Facebook is like a fridge. Even though you know nothing new is going on, you still go and aimlessly check every 10 minutes.
– Author Unknown –

Facebook is not your friend, it is a surveillance engine.
– Richard Stallman –

Facebook is the perfect platform for constructive political discourse… said no one, ever.
– Megan Bailey –

Facebook should have a limit on how many times you can update your relationship status. After 3, it should default to ‘Unstable’.
– Author Unknown –

If anything, social media has driven us further apart. On top of the filter bubbles that push us toward more extreme and entrenched beliefs, social media has become an environment fueled by outrage.
Outrage is viral, outrage is easy, and with anonymity — or at least distance — screaming your outrage on social media or even launching personal attacks carries no consequences.
As outrage has come to be the dominant culture of social media, what started as a way to connect people has largely become a way to attack people or simply express anger.
– Francisco Dao – Fueled by Outrage –

If you can’t stop thinking about someone’s update, that’s called “status cling.”
– Jessica Park, Flat-Out Love

If you get a friend request from someone named Jeremiah, it’s okay to accept it. He’s a bullfrog. He’s a good friend of mine. You won’t understand a single word he says, but he has some mighty fine wine…
– Internet –

It’s a highly deceptive world, one that constantly asks you to comment but doesn’t really care what you have to say.
– David Levithan, Two Boys Kissing –

It’s going to be interesting to watch presidential elections in around 2040, when voters can dig up candidates’ teenage angst pics and posts from old social media and discussion forum archives.
– Mikko Hypponen –

Leaving Facebook is the adult version of running away from home. You are only doing it for attention, and everyone knows you’ll be back.
– Author Unknown –

Never before has a generation so diligently recorded themselves accomplishing so little.
– Author Unknown –

One day Youtube, Twitter and Facebook will join together and be called… Youtwitface.
– Author Unknown –

One of the reasons I use Facebook is to laugh, have fun and converse with my friends and family. I don’t use it to get worked up or stressed out over something I see that I disagree with. There’s enough political coverage in the mainstream media. More than enough.
– Scott Dickson –

Political commentary and social cause posts on Facebook – makes me long for the good old days of Farmville requests and pictures of cats.
– Author Unknown –

Recently thought of deleting my Facebook account and start using Twitter, but realized it’s not easy. Facebook has become like the boyfriend I no longer like but scared to dump because I’ve invested so much time in the relationship.
– Manasa Rao Saarloos, author –

Roses are red, Facebook is blue, no mutual friends, who the hell are you?
– Author Unknown –

Santa saw your Facebook posts. This year you’re getting a dictionary.
– Author Unknown –

That one little phrase, Your real friends—so quaint, so charmingly mothering—perfectly encapsulates the anxieties that social media have produced: the fears that Facebook is interfering with our real friendships, distancing us from each other, making us lonelier; and that social networking might be spreading the very isolation it seemed designed to conquer.
– The Atlantic – Is Facebook Making Us Lonely? –

There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson –

We post content that isn’t ours, for likes that aren’t real, to impress people we don’t know.
– Author Unknown –

You may have friends on Facebook, but Facebook is not your friend. It wants your money. It wants your information. It wants your time.
– Tom Searcy, CBS Moneywatch –

Details Quotations

I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does.
– Jorge Luis Borges –

My boyfriend, like a lot of men, takes great pride in his car. Honey, his car is detailed, waxed, and vacuumed weekly. On the other hand, my car looks like a really big purse.
– Diane Nichols –

Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.
– Jean-Paul Sartre –

Our life is frittered away by detail…. Simplify, simplify.
– Henry David Thoreau –

Someone asked someone who was about my age: “How are you?” The answer was, “Fine. If you don’t ask for details.”
– Katharine Hepburn –

The English light is so very subtle, so very soft and misty, that the architecture responded with great delicacy of detail.
– Stephen Gardiner –

The essence of success is that it is never necessary to think of a new idea oneself. It is far better to wait until somebody else does it, and then to copy him in every detail, except his mistakes.
– Aubrey Menen –

The knives of jealousy are honed on details.
– Ruth Rendell –

“Well, we were always going to fail that one,” said Ron gloomily as they ascended the marble staircase. He had just made Harry feel rather better by telling him how he told the examiner in detail about the ugly man with a wart on his nose in the crystal ball, only to look up and realize he had been describing the examiner’s reflection.
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix –

While you are destroying your mind watching the worthless, brain-rotting drivel on TV, we on the Internet are exchanging, freely and openly, the most uninhibited, intimate and, yes, shocking details about our config.sys settings.
– Dave Barry –

Why can we remember the tiniest detail that has happened to us, and not remember how many times we have told it to the same person.
– Francois de La Rochefoucauld-

Canada’s Health Care is Anything but Free

Canada has a universal health-care system that is governed by the Canada Health Act. Some people believe it is ‘free’ health care, but it is paid for by everyone who pays taxes: Federal taxes, Provincial taxes, and in some Provinces, an additional health insurance premium. Canadians don’t, however, have any idea how much the services they consume cost, since the CHA prohibits providers from showing patients a bill.

The 10% of Canadian families with the lowest incomes will pay an average of about $496 for public health care insurance in 2018. The 10% of Canadian families who earn an average income of $66,196 will pay an average of $6,311 for public health care insurance, and the families among the top 10% of income earners in Canada will pay $38,903.
– The Price of Public Health Care Insurance, 2018 Fraser Institute –

The Federal money flows to the provinces or territories if they meet these requirements:
– Administration of provincial health insurance must be carried out by a public authority on a non-profit basis.
– All necessary health services, including hospitals, physicians and surgical dentists, must be insured. In addition, all physicians, hospitals, etc, must be provided reasonable compensation for the services they provide.
– All Canadian citizens or permanent residents are entitled to the same level of health care, after they have applied for the insurance in the Province or Territory they live in.

Many people also purchase Private Health Insurance to cover services that are not covered by their Provincial plan. These include things like dental services, optometrists, physiotherapy, ambulance and prescription medications.

In addition to public health care providers, private clinics are becoming more prevalent. They offer specialized services, and in some cases, quicker access to services that are also offered in the public system.

Private clinics are a subject of controversy with those who believe it favors those with higher incomes. Others see these clinics as a good option, since Canada’s public health system is increasingly being criticized for long wait times for diagnostic, treatment and emergency room services. Additionally, inadequate numbers of first line clinics and family physicians create a situation where patients use emergency rooms for services that could be performed by a Doctor in their community, if they had access to one.

Another alternative to Canada’s Public system and Private Clinics are a large number of treatment options available in the United States or other countries. The Fraser Institute, Canada’s public-policy think tank, estimated that more than 52,000 Canadians received medical treatment outside of Canada in 2014.

 

Books, Writing and Reading Quotations

A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking about what to write.
– Author Unknown-

Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.
– P.J. O’Rourke –

A new word is like a fresh seed sown on the ground of the discussion.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein –

And then Satan said, “Put the alphabet in math.”
-getfunny.net –

‘Bookworms’ are now almost exclusively known in the secondary and derivative meaning of the word as porers over dry books; but there was a time when the real worms were as ubiquitous as our cockroaches. They would start at the first or last page and tunnel circular holes through the volume, and were cursed by librarians…. They were dignified, like other disagreeable things, with fine Latin names….
The most audacious beast of our days is the cutter-out of plates…. Towards him we feel a ferocity that is merciless. We should like to extract a tooth without anæsthetics for every plate he has purloined.
– “The Sufferings and Death of Books,” Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, 1890 August 30th –

Educational television should be absolutely forbidden. It can only lead to unreasonable disappointment when your child discovers that the letters of the alphabet do not leap up out of books and dance around with royal-blue chickens.
– Fran Lebowitz –

Every writer faces a moment in her career when she realizes that a good part of success has nothing to do with skill or planning, and everything to do with pure, dumb luck. For me, that moment arrived at a party at the Romance Writers of America conference in St. Louis in 1993, when a colleague came to me and asked, “Did you know the heroine on the cover of your newest release has three arms?”
– Christina Dodd – On the Other Hand –

For myself, I favored the abstract. I collected not just obsolete terms and words, but ideas.
― Jasper Fforde, Shades of Grey –

Grandma told me Mama was once caught by the Principal for writing in the front of her book, “In Case of Fire, Throw This in First.” I have never had so much respect for Mama as the day I heard this.
– Erma Bombeck (At Wit’s End) –

Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.
– John LeCarre –

Here’s a brain twister. Can you use the word ‘capitulated’ in a sentence where it doesn’t mean ‘Your hat’s on backwards’?
– Joe Martin –

If people say they just love the smell of books, I always want to pull them aside and ask, “To be clear, do you know how reading works”?
– @bridger_w 
(Bridger Winegar) –

I’m a bookaholic on the road to recovery. Ha, not really. I’m on the road to the bookstore.
– Author unknown –

I’m writing a book. I’ve got the page numbers done.
– Steven Wright –

I’m writing my book in fifth person, so every sentence starts out with: “I heard from this guy who told somebody …”
– Demetri Martin –

I love walking into a bookstore. It’s like all my friends are sitting on shelves, waving their pages at me.
– Tahereh Mafi –

…I struggled through the alphabet as if it had been a bramble-bush; getting considerably worried and scratched by every letter. After that, I fell among those thieves, the nine figures, who seemed every evening to do something new to disguise themselves and baffle recognition.
– Charles Dickens –

It is clear that the books owned the shop rather than the other way about. Everywhere they had run wild and taken possession of their habitat, breeding and multiplying, and clearly lacking any strong hand to keep them down.
– Agatha Christie, The Clocks –

It is a damned poor mind that can’t think of at least two ways of spelling any word.
– Andrew Jackson –

I try to leave out the parts that people skip.
– Elmore Leonard –

I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.
– Anna Quindlen, “Enough Bookshelves,” New York Times, 7 August 1991 –

Many people, other than the authors, contribute to the making of a book, from the first person who had the bright idea of alphabetic writing through the inventor of movable type to the lumberjacks who felled the trees that were pulped for its printing. It is not customary to acknowledge the trees themselves, though their commitment is total.
– Forsyth and Rada, Machine Learning –

May God forgive me, but the letters of the alphabet frighten me terribly. They are sly, shameless demons – and dangerous! You open the inkwell, release them; they run off – and how will you ever get control of them again!
– Nikos Kazantzakis –

Old or new, the only sign I always try to rid my books of (usually with little success) is the price-sticker that malignant booksellers attach to the backs. These evil white scabs rip off with difficulty, leaving leprous wounds and traces of slime to which adhere the dust and fluff of ages, making me wish for a special gummy hell to which the inventor of these stickers would be condemned.
– Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night –

One of the advantages of reading books is that you get to play with someone else’s imaginary friends, at all hours of the night.
– Dr. SunWolf –

Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.
– Attributed to Groucho Marx –

Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book.
– Ronald Reagan –

The covers of this book are too far apart.
– Ambrose Bierce –

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.
– Mark Twain –

The length of this document defends it well against the risk of its being read.
– Winston Churchill –

There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader’s hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text.
– George Santayana, “Imagination” –

There’s nothing to match curling up with a good book when there’s a repair job to be done around the house.
– Joe Ryan –

There is a temperate zone in the mind, between luxurious indolence and exacting work; and it is to this region, just between laziness and labor, that summer reading belongs.
– Henry Ward Beecher –

Think about these words: cease, coin, chic, indict, and discrepancy. In this string of terms, C sounds like S, K, Sh, and in one case it’s silent. Even within one word this letter doesn’t always maintain the same sound.
The fickle nature of this letter did not please everyone. As American English grew in the 1700s, Benjamin Franklin campaigned to remove C from the alphabet altogether, though his efforts did not gain much traction.
– From The Curious Chronicle of the Letter C –

Why is the alphabet in that order? Is it because of that song?
– Stephen Wright –

Why pay a dollar for a bookmark? Why not use the dollar for a bookmark?
– Fred Stoller –

Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.
– Mark Twain –

Writing became such a process of discovery that I couldn’t wait to get to work in the morning: I wanted to know what I was going to say.
– Sharon O’Brien –

Punctuation

And all those exclamation marks, you notice? Five? A sure sign of someone who wears his underpants on his head.
– Terry Pratchett –

Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald –

In the family of punctuation where the full stop is daddy and the comma is mummy, and the semicolon quietly practises the piano with crossed hands, the exclamation mark is the big attention-deficit brother who gets over-excited and breaks things and laughs too loudly.
– Lynn Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, pages 137-138 –

…it sometimes seems hurtful to suppress the exclamation mark when – after all – it doesn’t mean any harm to anyone, and is so desperately keen.
– Lynn Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, p 139 –

The punctuation marks you use (and where you put them) can completely change the meaning of what you write. “Twenty-odd ducks” is an estimate of how many are waddling by, but “twenty odd ducks” would not only be a big group, they’d be very strange looking.
– From Twenty-Odd Ducks, by Lynne Truss –

Time Quotations

6:15 in the morning! I’m not usually this upset until 10:00 A.M
– M.A.S.H –

A baby first laughs at the age of four weeks. By that time his eyes focus well enough to see you clearly.
– Unknown –

A good holiday is one spent among people whose notions of time are vaguer than yours.
– John B. Priestly –

Am writing an essay on the life-history of insects and have abandoned the idea of writing on “How Cats Spend their time.
– W.N.P. Barbellion –

And when asked, I can say, “Well, no, I don’t know what time it is, but if you’re lost, I can help you. Because I’m not.
– Robert Fulghum –

Cancer is part of my life. But it’s only my body that has cancer all the time. It’s okay for my spirit to be free from it once in a while.
– John Robert McFarland, Now That I Have Cancer I am Whole –

Childhood is a place as well as a time.
– May Sarton –

During a coffee break: “There must be something to reincarnation. It’s hard to believe that I could get this far behind in one lifetime.
– Robert Orben, Orben’s Current Comedy –

For disappearing acts, it’s hard to beat what happens to the eight hours supposedly left after eight of sleep and eight of work.
– Doug Larson –

Howard not only knew the story of Ferryland during his own family’s time, but he knew it, or felt it, as far back as history can go. That was a long way back since Ferryland is one of the places in Newfoundland where the patina of human occupation is thick enough to really soften the bony face of the old rock.
– Farley Mowat –

How did it get so late so soon?
― Dr. Seuss –

I see no advantage in these new clocks. They run no faster than the ones made 100 years ago.
– Henry Ford –

I try to take one day at a time, but sometimes several days attack me at once.
– Ashleigh Brilliant –

I write poetry not for publication but merely to kill time. Air planes are a good place to write poetry and then firmly throw it away. My collected works are mostly on the vomit bags of Pan American and TWA.
– Charles McCabe –

It’s no good running a pig farm badly for thirty years while saying, “Really I was meant to be a ballet dancer.” By that time, pigs will be your style.
– Quentin Crisp –

It’s a strange thing, but when you are dreading something, and would give anything to slow down time, it has a disobliging habit of speeding up.
– J.K. Rowling, “The Hungarian Horntail,” Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, 2000 –

It was always my belief that farmers developed strange theories of cause and effect because they spent too much time alone. A combination of incomplete information and a lack of critical review led to some odd conclusions. In the early days of farming, a reinforcing factor in all this was that horses seemed willing to accept almost any theory if it was accompanied by oats. It was a closed circle.
– Leonard G. Lee, Lee Valley Tools –

Life is easier if you dread only one day at a time.
– Charles M. Schulz –

Let not the sands of time get in your lunch.
– Tony Hendra –

Marrying a man is like buying something you’ve been admiring for a long time in a shop window. You may love it when you get it home, but it doesn’t always go with everything else in the house.
– Jean Kerr –

Middle age is that time of life when you can feel bad in the morning without having had fun the night before.
– Unknown –

More than anytime in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction. Let us pray that we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
– Woody Allen –

Strangely enough, this is the past that somebody in the future is longing to go back to.
– Ashley Brilliant –

Thank-you for our life together and for all the times in the past when you’ve understood when I forgot to say it… thank-you.
– Author Unknown –

The critical period in matrimony is breakfast time.
– A.P. Herbert, Uncommon Law, 1935 –

Three o’clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.
– Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980), Nausea –

Time, obviously, is relative. Two weeks on a vacation is not the same as two weeks on a diet.
– Author Unknown –

Time is what prevents everything from happening at once.
– John Archibald Wheeler –

Time is a figure eight, at its center the city of Déjà vu.
– Robert Brault –

Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.
― Anthony G. Oettinger –

Warning: retiree – knows it all and has plenty of time to tell you about it.
– Unknown –

Winter is that discouraging time of the year when the house uses more fuel than the car.
– Doug Larson –

When a man retires and time is no longer a matter of urgent importance, his colleagues generally present him with a watch.
– R.C. Sheriff –

When you are REAL, you don’t mind being hurt. It doesn’t happen all at once. You become, it takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are REAL, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are REAL you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.
– Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit –

When told the reason for Daylight Saving time the old Indian said, “Only a white man would believe that you could cut a foot off the top of a blanket and sew it to the bottom of a blanket and have a longer blanket.”
– Unknown –

Why won’t they let a year die without bringing in a new one on the instant, can’t they use birth control on time?
– John Dos Passos, 1917 –

Woman to psychiatrist: “If my life were a movie, this is about the time I’d go to the snack bar.”
– Carrie Snow –

Drinking Straw Ban – Facts and Fiction

The movement to ban drinking straws and other single-use plastics is growing around the world. The ban prohibits restaurants, bars, and other food service businesses from handing out plastic straws to their customers. Some cities impose fines. Other cities are considering the possibility of jail time for repeat offenders.

The humorists have had a field day. (See more Memes at the end of this post.)

In 2017 there were about 63 billion straws used in the United States – about 170-175 million straws per day. (Data from Technomic – a consulting and research firm).

The Be Straw Free Campaign, however, claims that Americans use 500 million plastic straws every day. That’s an average of 1.6 straws per person per day which supposedly is enough to fill over 125 school buses. The 500 million number apparently came from a 9 year old boy who did a telephone survey of some straw manufacturers in 2011. No one bothered to check the validity of that number.

The City of Vancouver recently claimed that Canadians use 57 million straws a year — a number they extrapolated purely by adjusting the 500 million figure for Canada’s population.
– National Post, July, 2018 –

Strawless Ocean takes that exaggerated number (500 million) even further by saying:

Plastic straws are really bad for the ocean. We use over 500 million every day in America, and most of those end up in our oceans, polluting the water and killing marine life.

Most of those straws, however, don’t end up in the oceans:

A 2015 study in the journal Science ranked countries by their rate of “mismanaged” waste. Ocean pollution heavyweights such as Bangladesh were mismanaging up to 89 per cent of their garbage. In the United States that rate was only two percent — a number made all the more notable given that the average American generates up to five times more trash than a Bangladeshi.
– National Post, July, 2018 –

500 million straws is just one example of estimates gone wild. How many straws do you suppose are discarded on the entire world’s coastlines? To find that number, two Australian scientists used the amount of trash collected on U.S. coastlines during cleanups over five years. They came up with a figure between 437 million and 8.3 billion plastic straws.

In other words, no one really knows to any degree of accuracy how many plastic straws are used, nor how many end up on beaches. They also have no clear idea how many are washed into the ocean, but it is estimated that if all the straws that might be on beaches all washed into the ocean, they’d account for about .03 percent of the plastics estimated to enter the oceans in a given year. Maybe.

What really kicked off the Straw Ban Campaign, though, was a viral video of a sea turtle with a plastic straw in it’s nose. The turtle was the trump card, if you’ll pardon the pun.

The drinking straw ban – a feel good thing that let’s people feel virtuous without actually having to do much.

Climate Change: Scientists Vs Politicians and Media

Climate change is an urgent topic of discussion among politicians, journalists and celebrities… but what do scientists say about climate change? Does the data validate those who say humans are causing the earth to catastrophically warm? Richard Lindzen, an MIT atmospheric physicist and one of the world’s leading climatologists, summarizes the science behind climate change.
– Prager U –

Cars, Trucks, Garage and Licenses Quotations

A commuter tie-up consists of you — and people who for some reason won’t use public transit.
– Robert Brault –

After you’ve heard two different eyewitness accounts of the same automobile accident, you begin to wonder about the validity of history. How do we know, for sure, what ever happened anywhere?
– Bits & Pieces Vol D #5 –

And I, I took the road less traveled by. I was using a GPS system.
– Robert Brault –

An object at rest tends to stay at rest, especially if you’re behind it when the light turns green.
– Robert Brault –

A pedestrian is someone who thought there were a couple of gallons left in the tank.
– Author Unknown –

A suburban mother’s role is to deliver children obstetrically once, and by car forever after.
– Peter De Vries –

A truly happy person is one who can enjoy the scenery on a detour.
– Author Unknown –

Cheap, fast and reliable. Pick two.
– Author Unknown –

Direction is more important than speed. We are so busy looking at our speedometers that we forget the milestone.
– Author Unknown –

Drive-in banks were established so most of the cars today could see their real owners.
– Joseph E. Cossman –

Each year it seems to take less time to fly across the ocean and longer to drive to work.
– Author Unknown –

Every year my family would pile into the car for our vacation and drive 80 trillion miles just to prove we couldn’t get along in any setting.
– Janeane Garofalo –

Guys, you can date whomever you want, but marry a girl who can back up a trailer.
– Michael Martin Murphy –

I drive way too fast to worry about cholesterol.
– Steven Wright –

If all the cars in the United States were placed end to end, it would probably be Labor Day Weekend.
– Doug Larson –

I feel like I am parked diagonally in a parallel universe.
― Author Unknown –

If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.
– Henry Ford –

If you can’t Dodge it, Ram it.
– Author Unknown –

If you think nobody cares if you’re alive, try missing a couple of car payments.
– Earl Wilson –

I’m trying very hard to understand this generation. They have adjusted the timetable for childbearing so that menopause and teaching a sixteen-year-old how to drive a car will occur in the same week.
– Erma Bombeck –

It finally happened. I got the GPS lady so confused, she said, “In one-quarter mile, make a legal stop and ask directions.”
– Robert Brault –

It is said that if you line up all the cars in the world end to end, someone would be stupid enough to try and pass them.
– Author Unknown –

My license plate says PMS. Nobody cuts me off.
– Wendy Liebman –

Meanwhile, those battling against the ever-increasing tide of Japanese cars to European community nations got an unexpected bonus recently when two ships collided in the Straits of Gibralter. A total of 3600 Mazdas and Toyotas wound up in Davy Jones locker at the bottom of the Mediterranean.
– Author Unknown –

Never lend your car to anyone to whom you have given birth.
– Erma Bombeck –

No, no, no. There’s no such thing as cheap and cheerful. It’s cheap and nasty; expensive and cheerful.
– Jeremy Clarkson –

On the other hand, the Bible contains much that is relevant today, like Noah taking 40 days to find a place to park.
– Curtis McDougall –

People can have the Model T in any color – so long as it’s black.
– Henry Ford –

Prudence was waiting for us when we arrived, and I saw her visibly wince as I pulled the Fiesta into the parking space beside her Lexus, like an automotive version of Lady and the Tramp.
― M.L. Brennan, Iron Night –

Teach a child to be polite and courteous in the home and, when he grows up, he’ll never be able to merge his car onto a freeway.
– Author Unknown –

The elderly don’t drive that badly; they’re just the only ones with time to do the speed limit.
– Jason Love –

The fact that people and trees and elephants and cars all have trunks just proves that there are more things than there are words.
– Scot Morris –

The key to motivating a young man to work hard… generally fits the ignition of his father’s car.
– Lynn Johnston –

The marvels of modern technology include the development of a soda can which, when discarded, will last forever – and a $7000 car which, when properly cared for, will rust out in two or three years.
– Paul Harwitz –

[T]hey both knew that the basis of her invariable reluctance about new cars was not thrift but sentiment. She simply could not endure the moment when the old one was driven away.
As for cars, they were in a class apart, somewhere between furniture and dogs. It wasn’t, with her, a question of the pathetic fallacy. She did not pretend to herself that cars had souls or even minds (though anybody, seeing the difference that can exist between one mass-produced car and another, might be excused for believing that they have at least some embryonic form of temperament). No, it was simply a matter of mise en scène. A car, nowadays, was such an integral part of one’s life, provided the aural and visual accompaniment to so many of one’s thoughts, feelings, conversations, decisions, that it had acquired at least the status of a room in one’s house. To part from it, whatever its faults, was to lose a familiar piece of background.
– Jan Struther, Mrs. Miniver –

They’d given me a minivan. They could have picked any car and they picked a minivan. A minivan. O God of the Vehicular Justice, why dost thou mock me? Minivan, you albatross around my neck! You mark of Cain! You wretched beast of high ceilings and few horsepower!”
― John Green, Paper Towns –

Two wrongs don’t make a right, but three lefts do.
– Jason Love –

… we live on the edge of the abstract all the time. Look at something solid in the known world: an automobile. Separate the fender, the hood, the roof, lie them on the garage floor, walk around them. Let go of the urge to reassemble the car or to pronounce fender, hood, roof. Look at them as curve, line, form.
– Natalie Goldberg, Living Color: Painting, Writing, and the Bones of Seeing –

When buying a used car, punch the buttons on the radio. If all the stations are rock and roll, there’s a good chance the transmission is shot.
– Larry Lujack –

You know, somebody actually complimented me on my driving today. They left a little note on the windscreen, it said ‘Parking Fine.’
– Tommy Cooper –

Garage

I can’t fix stupid, but I can charge for it.
– Unknown Mechanic –

I couldn’t repair your brakes, so I made your horn louder.
– Steven Wright –

I’ve been trying to start a garage band for over a decade now, but father won’t move his car.
– Author Unknown –

Only in America – do we leave cars worth thousands of dollars in the driveway and put our useless junk in the garage.
– Author Unknown –

Some moms take a bubble bath with a glass of wine. I hide in the garage and smoke a joint.
– Someecards –

The doctor must have put my pacemaker in wrong. Every time my husband kisses me, the garage door goes up.
– Minnie Pearl –

Walking isn’t a lost art — one must, by some means, get to the garage.
– Evan Esar –

Warning! Need to borrow a tool? The last guy that touched this box is in the bottom drawer.
– Snap-On –

What happens in the garage stays in the garage.
– Author Unknown –

Bumper Stickers

Cover Me, I’m Changing Lanes.
Horn Broken… Watch For Finger.
He who hesitates is not only lost, but is miles from the next exit.
Honk if you love peace and quiet.
How Many Roads Must A Man Travel Down Before He Admits He is Lost?
If You Can Read This, I’ve Lost My Trailer.
If You Can Read This, Please Flip Me Back Over… (Seen Upside Down On A Jeep)
Pardon my driving, I’m reloading.

Vanity Plates

Professions:

Cardiologist: LUB DUB
Doctor: YRUILL
Dentist: 2THDR
Lawyer: ISUE4U
Detective: CLUESO
Judge: ALLRIZE
Many options: OLOGIST
Surgeon: LUV2CUT
Radiologist: C THRU
Urologist: CME2P and NOPCME

Vehicle:

VW Rabbit: HOP2IT
On a big motorhome: GLBL WMR
On a gas guzzler: 1 MPG
Disgruntled Fiat driver: FIASCO
Corvette: 02 BE ME

Interests:

Cat lover: MEEOOWW
The golfer: IN2GOLF
Star Wars: JEDI IAM

Vegetables Quotations

Advice from a Pumpkin: Be well-rounded. Get plenty of sunshine. Give thanks for life’s bounty. Have a thick skin. Keep growing. Be outstanding in your field. Think big!
– Ilan Shamir –

After all the trouble you go to, you get about as much actual “food” out of eating an artichoke as you would from licking 30 or 40 postage stamps.
-Miss Piggy –

Any dish that has either a taste or an appearance that can be improved by parsley is ipso facto a dish unfit for human consumption.
– Ogden Nash –

An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
– Henry L. Mencken –

Butternut squash is a real letdown. No butter, no nuts, just squash.
– Author Unknown –

Calories are little units that measure how good a particular food tastes. Fudge, for example, has a great many calories, whereas celery, which is not really a food but a member of the plywood family provided by mother nature so that we would have a way to get onion dip into our mouths, has none.
– Dave Barry –

Carrots are a great thing to eat when you are hungry and want to stay that way.
– Author Unknown –

Do you hunt your own truffles or do you hire a pig?
– Jean McClatchy –

During a bull session about human nature, a friend made this observation: “When we make sandwiches, we begin with square bread, round meat, rectangular pickles, slices of tomatoes, chopped onion and flat lettuce. We then cut the sandwich diagonally – and get angry when pieces of it fall on the floor.”
– Edward K. Ulery –

End world hunger. Grow Zucchini.
– Author Unknown –

Even today, well-brought up English girls are taught by their mothers to boil all vegetables for at least a month and a half, just in case one of the dinner guests turns up without his teeth.
– Calvin Trillin –

Facts must be faced. Vegetables simply don’t taste as good as most other things do.
– Peg Bracken, The Compleat I Hate to Cook Book –

First off, let’s clear this up—fries are not a side dish and you can’t count those as a vegetable. Sorry.
– Tez Brooks, The Single Dad Detour: Directions for Fathering After Divorce –

Four year old Bob was so anti-spinach that when he was served asparagus for the first time, he moaned, “Oh, no! Not spinach legs!”
– Mildred Sherrer –

Give Peas a Chance.
– Pun – Author Unknown –

How to eat spinach like a child – Divide into little piles – rearrange again into new piles – repeat. After five or six maneuvers, sit back and say you are full.
– Delia Ephron –

I didn’t fight my way to the top of the food chain to be a vegetarian.
– Author Unknown –

I don’t want any vegetables, thank you. I paid for the cow to eat them for me.
– Douglas Coupland –

If you stir coconut oil into your kale while you cook it, it makes it easier to scrape it into the trash.
– Author Unknown –

It’s possible to feel full when it comes to more vegetables, but not full when it comes to a piece of cake.
– Cynthia Copeland Lewis –

I used to be into ‘forbidden fruit’, but I’ve moved on to ‘verboten vegetables’.
– Josh Stern, And That’s Why I’m Single: What Good Is Having A Lucky Horseshoe Up Your Butt When The Horse Is Still Attached? –

I’ve tried that Japanese decluttering trend where you hold each thing you own and throw it out if it doesn’t give you joy. So far I’ve thrown out all the vegetables and the electric bill.
– Author Unknown –

I was a vegetarian until I started leaning toward the sunlight.
– Rita Rudner –

Jonah’s adaptive niche in the family ecosystem was to be the perfect grandchild, eager to scramble up on laps, unafraid of bitter vegetables, underexcited by television and computer games, and skilled at cheerfully answering questions like “Are you loving school?”
– Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections –

Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit, not a vegetable. Wisdom is knowing not to include it in a fruit salad.
– Brian Gerald O’Driscoll –

Large, naked, raw carrots are acceptable as food only to those who live in hutches eagerly awaiting Easter.
– Fran Lebowitz, Metropolitan Life, 1978 –

Last night we had three small zucchini for dinner that were grown within fifty feet of our back door. I estimate they cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $371.49 each.
– Andy Rooney –

Life expectancy would grow by leaps and bounds if green vegetables smelled as good as bacon.
– Doug Larson –

Life is too short for self-hatred and celery sticks.
– Marilyn Wann –

Life itself is like an onion: it has a bewildering number of layers; you peel them off, one by one, and sometimes you cry.
– Carl Sandburg –

Mother to child at the dinner table: “It seems like yesterday we practically had to hit you over the head to get you to eat your vegetables. Now all of a sudden you’re a vegetarian.
– Joe E. Buresch –

…nobody really likes capers no matter what you do with them. Some people pretend to like capers, but the truth is that any dish that tastes good with capers in it, tastes even better with capers not in it.
– Nora Ephron, Heartburn –

Overheard on a bus: “My worry about genetically altered vegetables is that my daughter seems to be dating one”.
– Bill Tammeus –

People have been cooking and eating for thousands of years, so if you are the very first to have thought of adding lime juice to scalloped potatoes try to understand there must be a reason for this.
– Fran Lebowitz, The Fran Lebowitz Reader –

Someone keeps putting vegetables in the beer crisper.
– someecards.com –

Some people cry when cutting onions. The trick is not to form an emotional bond with the vegetable.
– constantly_varied_gear –

The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent, not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.
– Tom Robbins, ‘A Cook’s book of Quotations’ –

The connecting link between the animal and vegetable (plant) kindgom is stew.
– E.C. McKenzie –

The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don’t want, drink what you don’t like, and do what you’d rather not.
– Mark Twain –

The trouble is, you cannot grow just one zucchini. Minutes after you plant a single seed, hundreds of zucchini will barge out of the ground and sprawl around the garden, menacing the other vegetables. At night, you will be able to hear the ground quake as more and more zucchinis erupt.
– Dave Barry –

Then the zucchini started to arrive; first those lovely little delicacies, then the hefty meal-in-a-zucchini – the ones that can be stacked like cordwood or shipped off to the Guiness Book of World Records. At this point the neighbors finally realized that things were getting out of control. They had planted a 25 foot row.
– Harrowsmith #14 –

The question of common sense is always what is it good for? — a question which would abolish the rose and be answered triumphantly by the cabbage.
– James Russell Lowell –

To my favorite honeydew, do you carrot all for me?
My heart beets for you, with your turnip nose, and radish face.
You are a peach. If we cantaloupe, lettuce marry.
Weed make a swell pear.
– Author Unknown –

Vegetables are a must on a diet. I suggest carrot cake, zucchini bread, and pumpkin pie.
– Jim Davis –

Vegetables are interesting but lack a sense of purpose when unaccompanied by a good cut of meat.
– Fran Lebowitz, ‘Metropolitan Life’ –

Vegetarian is an old Indian word meaning ‘I don’t hunt so good.’
– Reg Hunter, The Red Green Show –

What do you get if you divide the circumference of a pumpkin by its diameter?
Pumpkin pi.
– Author Unknown –

Why do potatoes make good detectives?
Because they keep their eyes peeled.
– Author Unknown –

Zucchinis terrific!
Like bunnies, prolific!
– Author Unknown –