Hurrah for free high speed internet
Although, strictly speaking, I guess that "free" is overstating the case. I have, after all, just paid an extra half day for this hotel room with a wonderful scenic view of Miami International Airport. But the room is air-conditioned, has the aforementioned internet connection for my laptop to talk to, and is therefore an altogether more enticing prospect on a day when I have nothing very much to do other than wait for a flight late this evening. Most of my friends departed at dawn; the last of them flies out early this afternoon. So I guess that I'm going to spend my last day in Florida doing some hit and miss catching up on what the internet-world has been doing in my absence from it this past week. And maybe having a nap. I hate flying, I'm flying steerage as usual, and I never can sleep on overnight flights no matter how much the cabin crew probably wish I would.
At some point I may (or may not) organise my thoughts and my photographs into order and write down something about my trip to the Florida Keys, but for now I'm feeling a bit too scatterbrained for it. So instead I'll just treat you to an amusing sight I encountered at a gas station on the drive back from Key West yesterday.
Probably not at Marathon, but I couldn't swear to it.
North Americans may not understand why the sight of a Snickers Marathon bar made me snigger at all, but I'm willing to bet that the British people on my friends list will. You see, once, long long ago, there was a chocolate bar called Marathon. A concoction of caramel and nougat and peanuts wrapped in chocolate, they were a familiar treat of my childhood.
And then their owners decided that because they called the same bar Snickers elsewhere in the world, it was time to effect a name change. So the Marathon bar became the Snickers bar, and the whole of the UK went "Huh? What? Just what kind of a silly name is 'Snickers' anyway and why would you want to change to it?" To us 'Marathon' evoked thoughts of consuming your chocolate bar, stripping down to your t-shirt and shorts, doing a 26 mile run and due to the marvellous energy-giving results of the magic chocolate still feeling fresh as a daisy and twice as bouncy as Tigger at the end of it.*
But anyway, Mars very helpfully labelled the bars with both names for a couple of years so that we wouldn't get excessively confused by all this name swapping, and then Marathon was no more, subsumed into the greater Snickers empire. Until, apparently, it was decided to launch an "energy bar" under the Snickers name in 2004, at which point they looked around... and found the Marathon name again.
Gosh... could it be that it wasn't so crumby a name for a chocolate bar after all? ;-)
As far as I can see, this new bar is a US-only phenomenon, at least for now, so we're stuck with the silly-sounding Snickers name at home still. But internet research has its benefits. A little googling on the subject this morning has led me to the information that on this side of the Atlantic the chocolate bar in question was named after a horse.. which at least suggests some of the requisite fleetness of foot of its (to us) original name. Alas, that meaning is kind of lost to us since nobody ever bothered to explain what the new name they were slapping on the wrapper was all about.
Mind you, at this far remove from the bar's conception I'd guess that the origins of its naming are lost on US consumers too.
Anyway, quick update time. Pale tan, no sunburn, well rested, happy after a nice lazy holiday, beginning the stomach-turning-to-knots anticipation of a transatlantic flight, mostly doing okay. In other words, I've had a good holiday, though it'd be nice to fast forward to tomorrow morning when I can get home and dump all my bags and start waging war with jetlag. There comes a certain point towards the tail end of every holiday when you're about ready for it to be over, and the point at which you get to waiting around for the flight home is where it kicks in for me.
* I never did attempt the 26-mile run after eating myself, but I suspect that indigestion is a whole lot more likely.
At some point I may (or may not) organise my thoughts and my photographs into order and write down something about my trip to the Florida Keys, but for now I'm feeling a bit too scatterbrained for it. So instead I'll just treat you to an amusing sight I encountered at a gas station on the drive back from Key West yesterday.
Probably not at Marathon, but I couldn't swear to it.
North Americans may not understand why the sight of a Snickers Marathon bar made me snigger at all, but I'm willing to bet that the British people on my friends list will. You see, once, long long ago, there was a chocolate bar called Marathon. A concoction of caramel and nougat and peanuts wrapped in chocolate, they were a familiar treat of my childhood.
And then their owners decided that because they called the same bar Snickers elsewhere in the world, it was time to effect a name change. So the Marathon bar became the Snickers bar, and the whole of the UK went "Huh? What? Just what kind of a silly name is 'Snickers' anyway and why would you want to change to it?" To us 'Marathon' evoked thoughts of consuming your chocolate bar, stripping down to your t-shirt and shorts, doing a 26 mile run and due to the marvellous energy-giving results of the magic chocolate still feeling fresh as a daisy and twice as bouncy as Tigger at the end of it.*
But anyway, Mars very helpfully labelled the bars with both names for a couple of years so that we wouldn't get excessively confused by all this name swapping, and then Marathon was no more, subsumed into the greater Snickers empire. Until, apparently, it was decided to launch an "energy bar" under the Snickers name in 2004, at which point they looked around... and found the Marathon name again.
Gosh... could it be that it wasn't so crumby a name for a chocolate bar after all? ;-)
As far as I can see, this new bar is a US-only phenomenon, at least for now, so we're stuck with the silly-sounding Snickers name at home still. But internet research has its benefits. A little googling on the subject this morning has led me to the information that on this side of the Atlantic the chocolate bar in question was named after a horse.. which at least suggests some of the requisite fleetness of foot of its (to us) original name. Alas, that meaning is kind of lost to us since nobody ever bothered to explain what the new name they were slapping on the wrapper was all about.
Mind you, at this far remove from the bar's conception I'd guess that the origins of its naming are lost on US consumers too.
Anyway, quick update time. Pale tan, no sunburn, well rested, happy after a nice lazy holiday, beginning the stomach-turning-to-knots anticipation of a transatlantic flight, mostly doing okay. In other words, I've had a good holiday, though it'd be nice to fast forward to tomorrow morning when I can get home and dump all my bags and start waging war with jetlag. There comes a certain point towards the tail end of every holiday when you're about ready for it to be over, and the point at which you get to waiting around for the flight home is where it kicks in for me.
* I never did attempt the 26-mile run after eating myself, but I suspect that indigestion is a whole lot more likely.