JIM REEVES - FOUR WALLS...

Here's JIM REEVES singing FOUR WALLS -

live - no lip-syncing.  Now this is how to sing!

KLASSIC KOMIC KOVERS: SUPERMAN #100...

Image copyright DC COMICS

Another collectors' item classic cover for all you cavortin' Criv-ites - SUPERMAN's 100th issue!  It's taken a couple of liberties with the small repro of the 1st ish (namely, adding 'First Issue' and updating the masthead to a more accomplished one), but I very much doubt that many readers in 1955 had ever seen an actual copy of #1, so it didn't much matter.

However, you've no doubt seen it on this very blog, and now you've also seen #100, so aren't you glad you dropped by?

THE BEAR FACTS - WISH I'D HAD ONE OF THESE...

Back around 1963 when I was a kid, I had a shaped, cardboard YOGI BEAR Hallowe'en mask (bought from WOOLWORTH's), and in 1965 or '66, I bought another one (again, from Woolies).  Here's an outfit I probably would have killed for though.  Ain't it neat?  (Update: Managed to re-acquire another Yogi mask the same as the one[s] I had when I was a lad.)

BABE Of The DAY - IMOGEN HASSALL...

What a way to be welcomed in the morning,

eh?  A fresh glass of orange juice and a beautiful,

bikini-clad Babe in the shape of stunning IMOGEN

HASSALL, and the world seems like such a great

place to be, don't you think?  I know I do!

STAPLES IN THE SANDS OF TIME...

I decorated my back room recently.  I say 'recently', but it actually took me about 29 years to start it, and then it was months of hanging a couple of strips of wallpaper every few weeks 'til it was finished.  Because of a medical condition, I tire easily, and I just didn't have the stamina to apply myself to the task with any energy or enthusiasm.  Therefore, it was a bit here and there when I could.  And I was absolutely knackered at the end of it, let me tell you.

The room used to be my brother's, mainly, when we stayed here the first time around.  I say 'mainly' because we shared it for quite a few months when my room suffered from damp during the winter months, and there was a period when we swapped for a while, so the room was 'officially' mine as well.  As regular readers will know (and lost the will to live at my continual re-telling), we flitted to another house after eleven years, then moved back (sans brother) four-plus years later.  Along with my old room, I also commandeered my sibling's former sleeping quarters.

Yeah, big deal, you say, get to the point.  Well, while I was in the long, slow, arduous process of trying to hang a few strips of wallpaper, I found staples embedded in various spots in the walls, where my brother had affixed all his heavy metal posters back in the '70s.  I decided to leave them there (after flattening them into the wall with a hammer), as, having been there for more than 40 years, I didn't have the heart to remove them.  Long after I'm less than a memory, these old staples will likely still be there, a permanent testament to the fact of my family's presence in this house down through the decades.

I've touched on this subject before, but it amazes me to think that we always leave our mark on wherever we've lived, even if we don't realise it at the time.  When I revisited a former dwelling sixteen years after having moved out, I was surprised by just how many 'markers' of our time there yet remained.  Wallpaper, tiles, lowered ceilings, marks where circular fluorescent lights had been, etc., it was all comfortably familiar to me, as if we'd never been away.  And when we returned to the house in which I now reside, our departed doggie's scratches in the back door were there to welcome us and remind us of our prior occupation.

We all leave some kind of mark behind us, however trivial, and regardless of whether we intend to or not.  What feature of any of your former homes will attest to you once having lived there long after you're gone?