Sorry, but I have no interest in either the Oscars or sports. I haven't been to a movie theater in decades, but I do like to watch some of the old classics on DVD. I can't remember the last time I was interested in one of the current releases.
It's a good thing that I looked up that stuff over the weekend, or I wouldn't have anything to write about today. First, I found out why a dollar is called a "buck". It seems that money was scarce on the American frontier and they sometimes used things like salt, tobacco, or animal skins as media of exchange. Deer hides were particularly popular and, as we have previously discussed, all tanned deer hides are usually called "buck skins", regardless on the actual gender of the animal from whence they came. When money did become available, it seems that a good deer hide was worth about a dollar, so the dollar became know as the "buck". Of course, a dollar was worth a lot more in those days than it is today but, last I heard, a deer hide was still worth about a dollar. Seems like the dollar and the buck have both depreciated in value about the same amount over the years. The poker player's buck that we talked about was probably called that because a silver dollar was frequently used for that purpose.
I don't know if you've ever seen a sawbuck, but it's basically two X frames linked together by several lateral braces. The log is cradled in the X frames and you have to keep moving it as you cut pieces off the end, otherwise you might saw through one of the lateral braces. That's why a sawbuck is more trouble than it's worth if you're using a chainsaw. Anyway, at some point in history, they used Roman numerals on American money instead of regular numbers. An "X" was used on the ten dollar bill, and an "XX" on the twenty. The ten became known as a "sawbuck" because a sawbuck looks like an "X" when viewed from the end, and the twenty became known as a "double sawbuck".
I also looked up Brian Williams on Wiki. (The stuff about the bucks came from Ask.com.) When I saw his picture, I remembered seeing him on TV. He reminds me of a guy I used to know at the paper mill, back in the 1970s. We were working side by side on a boring job, so we talked to each other a lot. He was a good story teller, and had done some interesting things in his short life. (We were both in our 20s at the time.) At some point it occurred to me that he hadn't been alive long enough to have done all that stuff. I asked him about that and he said that he hadn't done any of it for very long. Well maybe, but others who had known him longer than I had said that he was as full of shit as a Christmas turkey. They said that some of the experiences he reported sounded a lot like movies or TV shows they had seen, and they suspected that he just inserted himself into the scenarios. He never made himself the central character, so it would have been hard to prove, since many movies are at least loosely based on true story events. The guy also said that he read a lot, so some of his stories might have been inspired by books. I only knew this guy for a year or two. Then he left his wife and four kids, took up with a much younger woman, quit the paper mill, and moved away. Years later, I ran into one of his sons, all grown up now and a lieutenant in the army. It was nice to see that he had made something of himself, I never though that any of those kids would ever amount to anything.
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