The Royce Files

This title sounds like a band from the 70s. However, Google has a great interactive doodle today in honor of Art Clokey , creator of green guy Gumby. Clokey would have been 90 today, but he passed away last year. But did you know that the Gumby came from my hometown of Hastings, MN! Indeed I thought this odd too when I saw this fact on a map of Hastings that has hung in the family home for years. Clokey was Californian and seemed to have no connections wtih the North Star State, so I thought this incredulous. I did a little digging and then found my answer in an article in the Star Tribune from October 20th, 2003.  Dick Parker and Heron Marquez Estrada did a the hard work and re-discovered that Echo Plastics of Hastings manufactured millions of Gumby and Pokey toys up to about 1971. So I guess Minnesota can claim the green guy and his red pony after all. Perhaps the state quarter would have been more collectible if it had Gumby an...

I began to to think that there would be no snow cover before the end of the year. On Thursday evening I ran and it was clear but overnight flurries developed. They stopped but eventually another spat of flurry arrived on Saturday morning and later turned to wet sticky snow. Conditions apparently worsened elsewhere and on the tele stations scrolled church closings. I found it quite funny that it mostly Lutheran churches closed. I guess Lutherans are not as rugged as Garrison Keillor makes them out. This is certainly not blizzard weather. This type of storm only slows people down because of the perceived (possibly real) slipperiness. I saw no cars in the ditch today although I noticed one with a blown out tire. I saw more cars on the side of the road returning home from Christmas and then no snow existed. The weather did not prevent me from going out to do something I wanted to do for weeks. In fact I had a craving and using some self control contained it until today: Chinese food calls...