The Latest Hollywood Squares

From time to time I do like TV game shows. I like the current incarnation of Hollywood Squares with Drew Barrymore as the center square (as well as being one of the producers). For those who don't know Hollywood Squares is basically Tic-Tac-Toe fitted into a game show format. Two contestants compete against each other for a small sum of cash by playing tic-tac-toe with 9  Hollywood celebrities who are sitting at desks on a three level set. There is a host, in this incarnation Nate Burleson (most notably an ex NFL player?) who asks the celebrities questions. The celebrities usually give a joke answer to lighten the mood and then give their real answer to the question, the contestant then either agrees or disagrees with the celeb's answer if they are correct then their shape (X or O) gets the square. They usually have two rounds (games) and the contestant with the most accumulated cash wins and goes to a bonus round. In the bonus round the host makes a statement about each celeb to which the contestant either agrees that the statement is true or false, they have 60 seconds to answer this round robin of "fact" questions. Each celeb has an envelope with a card inside it, 8 of the celebs have a blank card and just 1 had a card that has $25,000 written on it. For each celeb the contestant matches with (gets the fact question correct) the celeb opens the envelope to reveal their card. If the celeb has the card with $25,000 on it the contestant wins the $25,000.

As a kid I enjoyed the original version that had Paul Lynde as the center square. I don't think any other version over the years has really compared to the charm of the original. A few years back (1990s? early 2000s?) there was an incarnation with Whoopi Goldberg as the center square that wasn't as good or as witty. At least this new incarnation has some of the old wit of the original somewhat.

As to Drew I have always liked her since she appeared in ET. As a child actor she was a cutie, then she became a troubled teen, a bit precocious and almost ruined her life with the alcohol and drugs. Still she has been a celebrity crush of mine for ages and still is.

Happy 20th Blogiversary To Me!

 

WOW 20 YEARS? Since I started this dang thing? The amount of content I actually have here is less than half that time. Anyway. I thought I would look to see what my very first post was and it was called The Beginning or The End?  I mentioned that I had been "blogging" for a little while on my personal website that I had back then. I simulated a blog there by writing a diary type page on the site. It was a pain in the butt maintaining it. 

As I mentioned in that first post, I would do CD and DVD reviews, mention new purchases of that media, track updates I made to the website, and probably a few other things. Sadly my old website is long gone. Maintaining the registration for a website was the biggest reason I let it go. I still barely have some of the files from that site on whatever floppy discs survived my late 2023 apartment inspection purge. Among the various things I decluttered was about 90% - 95% of all the computer floppy discs I had.  The biggest thing I got rid of during that purge for my apartment inspection was the very large dinning room table that was too big for my apartment's dinning room and 6 chairs with it.

State O' The Blog: 2025 Recap

STATE O' THE BLOG

2025 Edition

2025 was a year of very very low blog activity. Practically none at all. 

Here are the monthlies from 2025:

January: 1
February: 0
March: 0
April: 0
May: 0
June: 0
July: 0
August: 0
September: 0
October: 0
November: 1
December: 1

TOTAL: 3
Monthly Average: 0.25

Now lets look at how the 2025 blogging matches up with past years:

2006 - 32
2007 - 43
2008 - 36
2009 - 34
2010 - 18
2011 - 20
2012 - 38
2013 - 93
2014 - 57
2015 - 24
2016 - 29
2017 - 16
2018 - 18
2019 - 12

2020 - 17

2021 - 33

2022 - 14

2023 - 14

2024 - 8

2025 - 3
Yearly Average: 28.25

Another RED year yippie.

So yeah very little blogging this past year just the bare bones. I think this is the last year that I will do the average totals. I might do a "State O' The Blog" at the end of 2026 but I don't think I'll do the average posts totals as that ties in with the keeping up with my quota counting.

Happy New Year: Hello 2026 Goodbye 2025

GOODBYE 2025 HELLO 2026

2025 was an OK year. New car back in January. Nothing too spectacular that I can recall.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

I'm NOT Dead Yet!

Yeah, Yeah, Yeah. It's been ages many months since I have blogged here, or even on either of my two card blogs. Mostly because the desire to blog isn't as demanding as it was a few years ago. I don't feel that I "have" to meet the one post a month quota that I used to implement upon myself. I also have never had a huge following so most of the time I am basically just writing for myself.  The task of coming up with something to write about can be a little stressful when you are "forcing" yourself to do it.

One of the things I do want to do is get back into album reviewing and maybe some book reviewing. Right now I'm trying to locate a notepad that I had begun composing one of my CD reviews on a year or two ago. I recall that I had started the general overall reaction I had to that particular album, but I was going to go into detail with the tracks. Some of the tracks remind me of other artists and one of the tracks is a cover of a very popular song from 17 years previous. I have a few partial draft posts for some other album reviews, most are just the bare bones information about the album that is being reviewed - the title, artist, picture of album cover and that is pretty much it, if anything.

I also have a partial post from several years back that closes out a section I used to have on this blog. I will leave that a mystery in case I don't ever get around to it. Just as for my Curly W Cards blog I have a post that reviews the Nationals 2019 World Series that I never got around to finishing. I wonder if I'll ever get around to finishing either of those posts. I want to it is just that for some reason I have procrastinated on them. For both there are some specific details that I want to include that I haven't gotten around to putting into the draft post.

So yeah I still WANT to blog I just don't force myself to go through the motions of blogging and the routines that you go through and the practice that you do.

State O' The Blog: 2024 Recap

STATE O' THE BLOG

2024 Edition

2024 was a year of very low blog activity which the numbers reflect and at the bottom I will mention the major causes.

Here are the monthlies from 2024:

January: 2
February: 2
March: 0
April: 0
May: 1
June: 0
July: 0
August: 0
September: 0
October: 2
November: 0
December: 1

TOTAL: 8
Monthly Average: 0.67

Now lets look at how the 2024 blogging matches up with past years:

2006 - 32
2007 - 43
2008 - 36
2009 - 34
2010 - 18
2011 - 20
2012 - 38
2013 - 93
2014 - 57
2015 - 24
2016 - 29
2017 - 16
2018 - 18
2019 - 12

2020 - 17

2021 - 33

2022 - 14

2023 - 14

2024 - 8
Yearly Average: 29.26

Another RED year yippie.

This year had some lows. The kind of lows I don't like to talk about when they are happening and I don't want those "Sorry to hear that" pity replies from everybody while I'm experiencing them. Stuff happens and you roll with it. Some stuff you accept other stuff you try to fight but in the end stuff happens.

Late March I had some excruciating back pain, so much that I went to the hospital to get my back checked out. I do have Scoliosis (curvature of the spine). I think it was being irritated by adjusting to a months old toe wound on my right big toe that thanks to my diabetes was not healing. The toe wound was infected down to the bone and the first tendon of the big toe. So bye bye right big toe. Hospital stay was 2 weeks then I went on to rehab for what would be a total of 6 months at two separate facilities, a regular retirement home and then an assisted living center before getting to go home. It is at a time like that where being single without a live-in partner to be a health care provider sucks. Family is either too far away or in the case of family that was close by they were in the process of getting ready for a move, which oddly wouldn't get done until closer to end of this year.

The other bad setback for this year was early December I got into a car accident, fortunately I wasn't injured but my car was totaled. I am in process of getting a newused car estimated arrival 02 January. When I had gotten out of rehab I had to have my car in the shop because it hadn't been running for 6 months, the battery was drained and some rats had gotten into some of the engine wiring. So yeah didn't have much time with the car this year.

As for my Ebay I only sold 1 item early Dec a sports card. I thought I had sold a couple of other things, but those were sold near the end of last year. Meanwhile over at COMC (Check Out My Cards) I had a record number of yearly sales there. I will put the details for those on my card blog sometime soon hopefully.

Happy New Year: Hello 2025 Goodbye 2024

GOODBYE 2024 HELLO 2025

2024 was a so-so year, there were a few bad things that I will mention in my State of The Blog post in January. Had record year for trading card sales over at COMC most sales in one year for me there. Also for 2025 I'm getting a newused car.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

When To Blog Or Post

 From time to time on social media and in various internet forums, and those rare occasions in real life, I sometimes find myself saying (typing, writing) something that is taken in a way I didn't expect or is challenged and I feel uncomfortable with what I originally said. This is why I try to stay away from talking politics. Sometimes this misspeaking leads to very awkward backtracking that I usually have to just eventually give up on. Often it makes me want to not interact on any social media anymore, especially on whatever platform I made the gaffe on. If it was on a forum I will sometimes just avoid that forum for an extended period of time, if I can. 

Upon later examination, if I do take the time to do that, I often find part of the problem or what I think is a problem, came from being emotional about my reaction and quickly reacting without taking enough time to process what was said. This coupled with the replier taking things at face value or trying to read something else into what I said that isn't in whatever it is that I said.

It is also caused by me having reached an age where for many things I just don't care about them anymore. Other possibilities could be that I stink at being social and am becoming a horrible unsocial person.

Getting Back into the Swing of Things

 ...And I am back to the Blogiverse from my mostly medical absence. Few if any may have noticed but they don't care, I don't care either I just blog for the fun of it now days, if others see it they see it. Long story short I had some health issues, a toe/foot operation that was diabetes related with back issues that had me in the hospital for 2 weeks then 2 months in rehab with PT (Physical Therapy) and OT (Occupational Therapy) until my insurance quit and I had to relocate for 4 more months of rehab at an assisted living complex out-of-pocket. The back pain was what kept me down for so long. 6 months away from your home is a very long time. Being single, living alone and not in a relationship sucks in this situation, that is why I was in rehab for so damn long. No live-in caregiver. Your life gets disoriented and super off track. It is difficult to keep track of finances and lots of other everyday life things that you don't notice until you don't have access to them anymore. There was a period of almost a week when I was in the first rehab center (a regular retirement home) where my old cell phone gave out (it was very old and I kept dropping the damn thing) and even though I had my work computer, another story but I won't tell that one too long and complicated, with recent updates to the network and my lack of being on the network resulted in me being off the grid for 4 or 5 days? No internet and no phone, another long story I don't want to tell the details of (I sort of blogged about it here). Fortunately my sister (who is normally in CA but had come east to help me out some and see if I was getting good care) was able to get my Chromebook from my apartment so I could get back online and was able to get me a new Android cellphone that upgraded me in that department. So I was able to manage most of my finances OK. Work was another story and I did get back eventually.

Without going into detail there are a few permanent life changes. I'd rather not discuss the medical stuff.

I slowly got caught up with some of the TV that I had missed. I had access to TV but in the 2nd rehab the TVs were in common areas so I didn't always have control of what was being shown. A few of my shows I had watched and missed some episodes of I will have to get the DVDs of their last season(s) to checkout what my Xfinity Cable is now charging for On-Demand. Yeah I was away from some of those shows for that long.

I also now have access to my CDs so I can listen to stuff the way I prefer to listen to them and on my own schedule and not just watch some obscure fan made video on YouTube for the song.

NOT Connected

I have recently been offline from the internet for a few days. Plus my cellphone seems to have died. So I can't text people about the outage. I managed to get internet access, but anything with my cellphone is not accessible. I have said many times in many places to many people that modern Technology is GREAT when it is working properly, but when you lose access to all of your devices that either link to the internet or has a texting network it SUCKS big time.

Random Ramblings Maybe Even A Rant

 

MMMKAY I got to thinking of things I could blog about and one of my thoughts was about recent changes to my life due to decluttering and several months of a change in how I approach the various things that I collect. When someone collects stuff they do it for many reasons. When it gets out of hand it turns into hoarding or the maintenance of a hoard if the accumulation has stopped. Rarely does the accumlation stop.

Many people get attached emotionally to the collection or some of the idividual items which makes it that much harder to declutter the mess. That was me yep. Also emotions of how the stuff was acquired can contribute. For me it has been a lot of emotional attachment combined with a lifetime of collecting the stuff. Sometimes with the intent of "sometime selling it because it is worth a lot". The problem is you never give up on the stuff and keep it anyway. You procrastinate on finding a selling venue, or place too high a value on it. 

I saw the collections more as "libraries" for whatever media they were. I still see my music collection and videos in that way a library. There is so much I could never listen to, watch or read each and every item in the collection, thus the library label. You have a bunch of stuff you like and would like to experience sometime, even if you never end up experienceing most of it. It is there for you whenever you want. Many people have switched to streaming services and the cloud to store stuff, but the streaming services periodically get rid of stuff or make upgrades to the latest version of something so you can't access the original or in some cases what you want at all becuase they dumped it.

During my decluttering, which I am still in process, I don't think I will ever be totally clutter free, one of the emotional attachment things I cut loose was 90% of my comicbook collection. It went along with a large dinning room table that was much too large for my apartment, 4 chairs, lots of electronic equipment, and a small entertainment center on wheels, boxes and boxes of VHS tapes mostly home recorded off the air tapes, but some pre-recorded commerical product tapes, boxes of magazines, a pole lamp that was shorting out a couple of verticle cubbie organizers storage units, a very nice footlocker the size of a small steamer trunk. No room for the stuff. I used one of those junk hauling companies that will attempt to donate or recycle stuff before they go to the dump. So I feel a little relief about that. I hated having to "dump" a lot of stuff, and still did a lot of dumping before the junk hauling company came. I was in a panic mode to prep for an inspection that if I had failed they could have kicked me to the curb (due to the clutter). I wasn't sure if I could get the "junk" hauled away before the inspection, but I was able to. My cluttering was never any nasty moldy food, or animal feces (or human), just lots of clutter in boxes with very little organization at all. There were "areas" of stuff where I knew mostly what was there but not much specifically.

My attitude of "stuff" in the last couple of years has been "It is 'just' stuff". No reason to be attached to it. It doesn't make it much easier though there is still the emoitional attachment thing, and the logic games of why to keep stuff. You can't take it with you. Mortality is also a factor for all of this. I'm single no kids. The youngest of 4 siblings (1 deceased) . I do have 2 nephews now in their 30s, one by blood the other by marriage. Neither one seems to be interested in the stuff I have been into, so they would probably just trash the stuff anyway. Right now though I don't have a will so living in Maryland all my stuff would be in the hands of the state and they usually dump stuff anyway.

 

Happy Blogivversay To ME!

 

HAPPY BLOGIVERSARY!

Today is the 18th Blogiversary for this here blog "Kirk's Knook".I don't remember what my first few goals for this blog were, but I'm sure I steered away from those early on, or abandoned them for being too lofty. 

Now a days my only goal is to post at least one post per month. I have said a few times before about my yearly self appointed goals for my blogs. Sometimes I wish I was more enthusiastic about blogging and more prolific in my post writing, but it is what it is and I yam what I yam.

As is my tradition I am timing this post to be published at the same time of day that my very first post on this blog was.

Mondegreen Fun: In The GoldenTwilight Zone Earring

 Time for another round of "Mondegreen Fun" AKA "Misheard Lyrics". This one is from a song that was released in 1982 by the band Golden Earring, they are most notably known for their song "Radar Love". The song I had misheard the lyrics from is "Twilight Zone" from their album "Cut". 

The real lyrics are: 

"Soon, you will come to know

When the bullet hits the bone."

However, for many many years I heard the last line as "When the bullet hits the phone." Occasionally I would think that it was "Foam".

State O' The Blog: 2023 Recap

STATE O' THE BLOG

2023 Edition

This year my "State O' The Blog" year in review post is pretty much on time. It was a typical bare bones posting year... sort of.

Here are the monthlies from 2023:

January: 2
February: 1
March: 1
April: 1
May: 1
June: 1
July: 1
August: 1
September: 1
October: 1
November: 1
December: 2

TOTAL: 14
Monthly Average: 1.17

Now lets look at how the 2023 blogging matches up with past years:

2006 - 32
2007 - 43
2008 - 36
2009 - 34
2010 - 18
2011 - 20
2012 - 38
2013 - 93
2014 - 57
2015 - 24
2016 - 29
2017 - 16
2018 - 18
2019 - 12

2020 - 17

2021 - 33

2022 - 14

2023 - 14
Yearly Average: 30.44 

Another RED year yippie.

As for my trading card blogs CaptKirk42's Trading Card Blog and Curly W Cards I missed posting in November for them. In years past I would have been very upset with myself for missing a month, but now I really don't care. If I stopped blogging completely I just wouldn't care any more.

Happy New Year: Hello 2024 Goodbye 2023

GOODBYE 2023 HELLO 2024

2023 was a year... well a year that WAS. It is time for a new year and in 2024 we in the United States of America have the "honor" of voting for a "new" POTUS. Fun fun fun.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Life Interupts Blogging.

 So yeah. I had somethings to do from around Thanksgiving until forever. It didn't leave me with time to work on my blogs. Basically my personal montly quota of 1 post per month suffered a huge set back. In the past I have thought about hanging things up completely. I don't think I'll do that, but my not so frequent blogging will continue to be not so frequent. It might have long periods of non-activity from now on. Blogging definitely doesn't mean as much to me as it once did and hasn't for many months maybe even a few years. As with many other facits of life things that meant a whole heck of a lot to me just a few years or even in some cases a few months ago, now I can shrug my shoulders at and say "Ehh Whatever".

EEK soon it will be time for my yearly "year in review" and such.

November Update.

November, November, November let me count the ways. UM NO. So looking back on this month from the end of the month point of view was there anything majorly significant this month? No, not in the grand scheme of things whatever that is. I did sell a DVD - Season 5 of the Television Show "Castle" on Ebay.  Unfortunately I lost out on shipping the package was over 1 pound. I charged $5.00 shipping and real shipping was $8.55. It was my 3rd sold item on Ebay for this year. Right now there are 68 items listed. "And there was Much Rejoicing"

Not sure if I'll add anything to this or not. Got some things on my plate.

Blogging Rant And Work Moves Around

 Of my 3 blogs this one is sometimes the most difficult to come up with posts for as it is the most personal and I don't want some stuff made public. The draft posts that I do have in the draft queue for this blog still require more effort than I am willing to do, or rather take more time to complete than I usually allow myself. A good portion of them are reviews that I still need to actually start the writing of the review. Several of them will require re-watching, or rereading, or re-listening to whatever it was I wanted to review. Sometimes I wonder why I bother even writing a rant about my inaction. Well in some ways it gives me something that I can post about. So there is that.

Meanwhile at work our office is in the process of vacating one of the floors of the building we are in. We are currently on 3 floors, 2 of which we occupy the entire floor and 1 (the one I am on) our offices are maybe 1/4 of the floor. One of the full floors we are exiting from with most of the people moved. We have til the end of the year to exit completely when the lease runs. After that we will be only on 2 floors one the full floor and the other one at about the 1/4.

Name Game: Didn't Even Try

I've made many of these posts on variations of my name and the misspellings I have seen. We all have had our name misspelled at the very least once. If you haven't then you are extremely lucky. Anyway a month or so ago (almost 2) on one of my visits to Chick-Fil-A and their standard asking you for your name for your order. I thought things were sort of normal. The cashier asked my name I gave it to him and he even asked to spell it. Then I saw what was on the receipt and it was not my name spelled correctly. It was a note to the order preps to give the cashier the order for him to give it to me.

Chick-Fil-A receipt

That is right instead of my name which I spelled out for him "K-I-R-K" he put in "G-I-V-E-2-J-E-F-R-Y". Hmm I wonder if he spelled his name right? Does he use one "F" or two?

Chick-Fil-A order sticker for bag

As you can see on the sticker for the order's bag they even have a line to identify the customer by a brief description of what they are wearing, under the line that tells them if the order is dine-in, take out, or a delivery service like DoorDash or Uber Eats. I could have been wearing a green long sleeved t-shirt, or green long sleeved sweater, but I wasn't.

We Didn't Start The Fire Updated

This post is not about the tragic fires in Maui, Hawaii it is about the update cover of a popular song from the late 1980s. One of Billy Joel's popular chart toppers "We Didn't Start the Fire" was released in 1989. The song is just a well-organized and mostly chronological list of newsworthy events and pop culture from Joel's first 40 years of life 1949-1989 set to a catchy rhythm. He was 40 when he wrote it. The song became a popular teaching tool for history classes. Well now in 2023 some 34 years later an updated cover version has been recorded by the band Fall Out Boy. I heard part of the new version on the radio and thought it was OK. Not great but I can accept it a bit. I have since watched a YouTube video of it. The update picks up from 1989 to 2023, however the events listed are just randomly placed not in chronological order. The band has made a statement that they intentionally listed things out of order because of the way the world is currently in a state of chaos. It also concentrates more on pop culture than just historic events.

Unlike some recent amateur "updates" this official recording does not have a liberal bias against a certain Ex-President that the amateur versions have. Those seem to be intentionally biased and tend to be recorded by Never Trump Activists for the sole reason of spewing their hate for Trump. There was one version that just covers events from 2020. The only reference to Trump that I could hear/see in the Fall Out Boy cover is the lyric "Trump gets impeached twice". Many of their pop culture references you seem to have to be of a certain age to get or be a part of the later video game generations.

I really like Joel's original version and when it plays on the radio, I will listen to it all the way through even if I found it in the last few seconds of the song. The update slash cover I am unsure about. I think it is cool that there is finally a semi-decent update, even if it is a few years too early for a full 40 year chunk of history. Due to its randomness and the fact that I am not a huge Fall Out Boy fan I wouldn't say I fully like it. I like it some, but I would not go out of my way to listen to it over and over. I might listen to it if I hear it start and then I might not.

Here is a YouTube video of The Fall Out Boy version with some images of what they are singing. There doesn't seem to be an official video at this time if there will ever be one.