I was about 5 years old and it was getting late and I was falling asleep in the back seat of the car. The news came on the radio and the last thing I heard was about dozens of people getting sick and 6 or 7 dying. Salmonella poisoning.

I heard Sam and Ella poisoning. These two were clearly evil like Boris and Natasha. For a long while I was on the lookout for the evil duo.

The day JFK was assassinated was the day my family moved into our new house in the San Fernando Valley suburbs of L.A. and while my parents and the movers were hard at work, I was sent off to my first day at a new school for 3rd grade. Then an announcement came over the school's public address system that the President had been shot. I had been tunnel-visioning about things happening at the new school (and my father had been complaining about everything wrong with L.A.'s Public Schools ever since I started my education) so my first thought was that the victim had been the school's Student Body President and "wow, this is a tough school" and was afraid to discuss it with any of my new acquaintances/not-yet-friends. By the time they sent us all home, I had the real story, but for a while...

When I was a kid bread came in two kinds - white (unsliced) or a 'wheatgerm' bread called Hovis, which was made by 'posh' bakeries and was baked in a tin which made the word 'Hovis' appear on the side of the loaf. We only ever had white bread at home, and so when I first tasted Hovis at a schoolfriend's house, it was, to my uneducated palate, like eating sawdust.

So I assumed that, when my parents wouldn't answer the knock at the door, they were saying "it's only The Hovis Witnesses", whose job, I thought, was to force children to eat this horrible bread.

Of course, now I'm all grown up, Hovis has grown up with me and is available now in all kinds of delicious incarnations. The Seven Seeds Sensation loaf is my favourite bread these days.

But I still think of Jehovah's Witnesses as The Hovis Witnesses.

I saw the movie "Jaws" in a theatre whn I was eight; and I still have a phobia about being eaten by some giant fish whenever I am swimming in water I 1) Can't see the bottom of. 2) Might be big enough to hold a really big fish in; like a farm pond (stop laughing; there might be a 20 foot fish on the bottom of the 30 foot wide five foot deep farm pond just waiting to EAT adult me), or 3) that might be murky enough for a really big fish to hide in.

I think these are all wrong ideas about being eaten by a giant fish.

Ok. So I am now building a Sherlock Holmes mind palace of childhood life from all this and it's weird and scary but really kinda fun.

Oh and I was planing to do something for my 1000th post and fuck me I missed it. This was post 1011. So here is a link to the Lockheed L-ten-eleven. Not as cool as the McDonnell Douglas DC-10 but it does have 1011 in it.

buzzman, I don't like swimming in open water for exactly the same reasons. If I can see the bottom of the sea/lake, it's fine. But I only have to have a bit of seaweed touch my leg and I'm sure I'm about to be dragged to my death by a giant octopus.

Here you go, buzzman and Senyar. :-D

Ha!

I totally assumed that in the Southern Hemisphere, maps had South as UP, because, why wouldn't you think your hemisphere is on the top?

Well; that dog frantically trying to find shore kinda sums it up. And now I have to worry about freshwater octopus attacks too.