School Report

Here in the States it's Memorial Day, 2008.

Hey, that's a staged patriotic photo that you may never have seen before.

What is unique about this photo is that it is made up entirely of people. Soldiers from Camp Dodge, in Iowa, during the summer of 1918.

Photographers Arthur Mole and John Thomas actually created many photos of this nature, all with only people forming the shapes, from 1915 to 1920. You can find a much larger gallery here.

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Our 13-year old daughter, Melanie, had to write a report for school about World War II, specifically about D-Day and the invasion of Normandy.

Not thrilled at the prospect of reading a lot of material, she moaned, "Isn't there a movie about this?"

I told her there were probably several, but I couldn't think of any of their names.

Then her face brightened and she exclaimed, "Oh! I remember one of them! Wasn't it called 'Finding Private Nemo'?"

[Top Greetings via Wit and Wisdom, with edits by Mark Raymond]

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WORD for YOUR WEEK: So my wife wanted to know where the phrase, "let's blow this popsicle stand" originated. Let's start with that word, "popsicle." The sweet, icy treat was invented in San Francisco in 1924 and the word is believed to be a combination of lollipop and icicle. The word "blow" in the sense of "to leave an undesirable location" is much more vague and hard to pinpoint, with some references dating back to sailor's use of language in the late 1500s. There is some evidence to the phrase being used by teenagers at soda shops (they were heard to exclaim, "let's blow this pop stand") and the phrase may have been adopted after the soda shops began selling popsicles. But, in the end, I'm sorry, honey, I'm not exactly sure.

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