What would you say, if I told you that

“if your friend’s friend’s friend becomes happy, that has a bigger impact on you being happy than putting an extra $5,000 in your pocket.”

That’s what a recent study says, anyway.

Happiness is contagious! You surround yourself with people that are happy, and you’ll be happy.

So, thank you for visiting my blog. It makes me so happy. Nice to have you here, why don’t you just click around a bit. Maybe this is is something you’d like? Or this one? And I know you’d be happy to find this one again, I bet you had forgotten all about it. Fun stuff, right?

Be happy.

There was an interesting story about swear words in the Atlantic Monthly. I happened to read it today on a plane to Switzerland. And the on the train, a few hours later, I saw something that looked like a huge cross up on a hillside, and I started to think about symbols.

I remember when I first saw somebody flipping the bird, or extending their middle finger at somebody else. I was in the seventh grade, and back then, my classmates told me that the proper way to reply to that one was to show the “extended index finger and pinky” combination towards the bird man.

To me, these gestures seemed weird. I remember not understanding the power of an extended middle finger, or how two other fingers would be the appropriate reply. I have a faint memory of starting a campaign of my own, by replying with just my pinky. Why would that finger be any less powerful?

As you’ve probably noticed by now, after all, it’s been a good 25 years, that one didn’t catch on. But I haven’t seen the two-finger reply salute in a long time, either. Why wasn’t that sticky? Too difficult maybe?

“Life magazine announced Tuesday that is is making more than 10 million of its archival photographs publicly available through a partnership with Google.“

So, their entire archive gets scanned and made available, searchable, through Google Image Search. Among the classics and other super shots, there’s quite a bit of hockey photos as well, from, for example, the 1940s and 1950s.

Like this George Silk 1958 photo of Jacques Plante:

More, and more, and more.

Warning: you will lose your sense of time and will thereby end up spending hours watching the LIFE magazine photos. (Like this one).

Here’s Ricky and Jessie’s girl.

And me, I’m Jessi’s guy … and I wish that I had Ricky’s style! Fabulous!

My cousins are wizards with cars, just like their father, my uncle, who shares the name with a famous Finnish rally driver. When I was out shooting pucks and throwing a ball, my cousins were in the garage, fixing their mopeds and helping their dad.

So I was surprised when the younger one of them told me, years ago, that he was going to be a chef.

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I remember this game as if it was yesterday. But it wasn’t. It was 30 years ago.

Happy New Year!