Saturday Morning PSA of The Week: The 1970s was not a hotbed of action when it came to color.

Today's public service announcements are all information and no imagination--but yesteryear's? Those were full of drama, plot lines, and cameos from B-grade celebrities, all wedged into one minute of absolute fantasticness.

Consider this a trip back in time to when PSAs were sometimes worth watching more than the Saturday morning cartoons.


Today:  TWO Red Cross PSAs for the price of one!






Random Thoughts and Questions (PSA #1):
1.)  Some tender flute music is the hallmark of a quality PSA.
2.)  Everything in the 1970s was just a varying shade of sepia.
3.)  Correction: Everything in the 1970s was just a varying shade of sepia with a dash of beige to jazz things up.
4.)  The two seconds of wannabe Saving Private Ryan was unexpected  random  lacking missing limbs.
5.)  So I take it that the wife/mom is bored out of her skull with her kid?
6.)  That three page brochure is probably chock-full of info. It might take all day to read.


Random Thoughts and Questions (PSA #2):
1.)  Ten days at this aquatic "center." Also known as the woods.
2.)  BREAKING NEWS: Every modern man today from Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia is still rocking a hairstyle popular forty years ago.
3.)  The hand gesture for diving seems redundant. Did he think the diver was going to take flight?
4.)  "...come to the aquatic skooowa..."
5.)  "Most students come [...] to learn water safety," says the teacher. And the rest show up to get a nice tan apparently.
6.)  What's with the freeloader in the middle of the canoe doing nothing? AND THEN HE FLIPS THE BOAT LIKE A TROUBLEMAKER!

The battle over where the lyrics to 'Jingle Bells' were written still rages on.

That's right--strangely the debate for once is where, not who.

James Lord Pierpont was born in Boston, the son of a Unitarian pastor and abolitionist, and worked as a songwriter. His most noted composition was "The One Horse Open Sleigh," which would later gain worldwide fame entitled "Jingle Bells"--that holiday earworm beloved by kindergarteners worldwide hopped up on candy and caffeine and sung until their parents' ears bleed.

This means largely nothing except to local boards and chambers of commerce that are looking for any angle to promote their small towns and make a buck off a hapless tourist.

Enter Medford, MA, and Savannah, GA.

Savannah dances around the actual "where" part on their plaque.

Both locales have commemorative plaques honoring Pierpont, and both are damned if they're going to claim otherwise about their histories. If you're going to hang your hat on anything, it's a generic holiday song about sled races.

Are we going to call Mrs. Otis Waterman a liar?

Kyna Hamill, a theater historian at Boston University (and volunteer at the Medford Historical Society) decided to do the grunt work to figure out where, exactly, Pierpont penned the words. Her verdict? As she told BU Today and the Boston Globe, there's no proof he wrote the song in either town.

What's fact is the Pierpont's song was published in 1857 by Oliver Diston's publishing group out of Boston. Yet, throughout the 1850s, Pierpont moved back and forth between both Medford and Savannah. He moved down south to work with his brother, also a Unitarian pastor, and perform at the church as the organist and music director. He would also marry Savannah's mayor's daughter, and later fight for the Confederacy in the Civil War.

According to Hamill, Medford's claim that Pierpont wrote the song in 1850 is probably an editing screw-up based on a 1946 Boston Globe article that said the song was written in the 1850s, and the "s" simply was misplaced.

Yet, Hamill believes the most concrete evidence is that Pierpont actually wrote the song in Boston--not Medford or Savannah at all. Hamill discovered an 1857 playbill of a show in Boston where "Jingle Bells" was performed by actors in blackface as part of a minstrel show.

This would clash with The Songwriters Hall of Fame--which inducted Pierpont in 1970 (no rush or anything, folks)--as their biography of Pierpont simply says he wrote the song for a Thanksgiving church service in Savannah in 1857, and children loved it. Sure, Savannah doesn't get much snow ever, but he was channeling his inner New Englander apparently.

I'm feeling jngly all of a sudden.

Medford's mayor, Stephanie Burke, is having none of that. As she told the Globe, "It was written here, in the tavern. We take full ownership of it. It’s got a long history, and we’re proud of it."

She also noted the city would go out caroling and that "Jingle Bells will be sung repeatedly."

So you might want to avoid Medford for the time being to protect your ears.

Ryan Seacrest is an American hero.

It's college commencement season, which means it's that delightful time of year when everyone baking in the midday sun catches heatstroke while desperately trying not to nod off during a lengthy speech about changing the world, living your dreams, yada, yada, yada. Commencement speeches are a lot like those "inspirational" quotes your annoying friend on Facebook posts, only fifteen minutes longer:

This should inspire you to try and use a comma better.

Some colleges and universities actually pay for their commencement speakers though. The idea of an honorary degree from, say, a Columbia or Yale is enough to lure most anyone to speak for free. Lesser known universities, especially state universities, can't woo big names though, not unless the wooing comes with a briefcase of cash.

Take, for instance, the University of Houston, which paid retired astronaut hero Scott Kelly $35,000 this year to speak at their commencement, according to the Associated Press. This was practically fun money for the school, which spent $166,000 last year on Matthew McConaughey to speak, plus an extra $9,500 for his airfare. To be fair, McConaughey donated the speaking fee, but the airfare cost wasn't, and the school still ponied up the fee regardless if it went to charity.

Likewise, Kean University in New Jersey reportedly spent $40,000 on its 2016 commencement speaker, Brandon Stanton. If you know who Brandon Stanton is, odds are you're his grandmother--and that's just adorable. (Hey, Grandma!) For the rest of America, Brandon Stanton is the founder of HONY--the website/social media creation better known as Humans of New York. Kean University also spent an additional $40,000 on having its own retired astronaut speak, too. Mark Kelly, the twin brother of Scott Kelly, was Kean's second speaker--proving once and for all that being the second fiddle sibling doesn't mean you get the second fiddle speaking fee.

"Our students worked very hard, and they deserve it," said Margaret McCorry, a spokeswoman for Kean University, to the Associated Press. "It makes their commencement just that much more memorable." Imagine how memorable it might be if you actually knew who the person was beforehand!

The University of Texas at Austin paid $3,300 for its alumnus, Darren Walker, to come back last year to speak. Walker is the president of the second largest philanthropic organization in America, The Ford Foundation. The $3,300 was spent on Walker's two night stay at the Four Seasons Hotel, which covered a $450 spa tab. Philanthropy apparently starts at home.

The University of Georgia paid $22,000 to charter a private plane for ABC news anchor Amy Robach to come on down. This is reasonable when you consider only 216,000 people fly in and out of Atlanta every day at the world's busiest airport, so it's not as if she could have found a Delta or United flight connecting there.

All of this brings us to Ryan Seacrest. The most ubiquitous human being in America is apparently also the most sensible about commencement matters. This past week he returned to his alma mater, the University of Georgia, free of charge to speak at their graduation.

Whereas Toni Morrison once charged Rutgers University $30,000 for her to scowl for twenty minutes, Ryan Bleepin' Seacrest flashed his polished Chiclets for free--and was probably more memorable to a bunch of twenty-somethings in the audience than Toni Morrison will ever be.

But imagine how much Ryan Seacrest could charge if he was a semi-famous retired astronaut.

A pregnant woman in labor continues taking her online college exam even while contractions were three minutes apart.

I once took a 5-minute pop quiz with a paper cut holding me back. Hurt like no one's business for a solid minute, I tell you, but I soldiered on in the name of education like a champ.

Which is really to say I'm pathetic. Tommitrise Collins was told she could only take a psychology exam on one given day. Timing being what it is, her soon-to-be newborn had other plans, so Collins marched forth, taking the exam from her hospital bed. Her sister, Shanell Brinkley-Chapman, posted this photo to Facebook showing Collins doing double-duty:

The Middle Georgia State University (which goes by the acronym MGA, throwing everyone off) student was told this would be the only chance to take the test. So a big shout-out to MGA for setting back equal rights for women by a hundred years! Good to see that those good ol' 19th century values still exist somewhere in America. Wouldn't want to advance them too quickly now!