The Legend of Spap Oop

Sometimes I forget that people who read me aren't directly in my head, or know the people I know, and don't quite get why I might do something like name a blog "Spap-Oop."

My friend Ed, a long-time tech industry insider, who, like me, remembers and Age Before the Information Age, when newsgroups were all the rage, and there were not nifty icons to click, or wisywigs to deal with, and computer screens were monochromatic, and the Internet was *only* dial-up....tells the Legend of Spap Oop much better than myself...but he's somewhere in Ireland with his family, so I've got to be the one to recount it.

If you lived in Central New Jersey sometime in the late 20th Century, and knew where the Sunshine Biscut Company factory was (in Sayerville), you inevitably knew someone who worked in the snack-food industry....who made Cheezits and Hydrox cookies....

and another strange snack called Doo-Dads. The word doodad is a synonym for odds and ends.

Doo-Dads was a combination of odds and ends from the runs of Cheezits and Mr. Salty pretzels, of broken bits of other snacks foods manufactured by Sunshine Biscut.

And sometimes when they shipped the big, cardboard cartons full of boxes of Doo-Dads, the boxes got turned upside down...and, subsequently the wording was not just upside down but also backwards.

Ed, myself, and some others were in some super-discount-market one very late night, and there was an upside-down, backwards box of Doo-Dads...

"oh, look, " Ed said "spap-oop."

and he was right. Take Doo-Dads, turn it upside down and backwards, and you got Spap-Oop.

I laughed so hard I tunred blue couldn't breathe. It would be only one of many times Ed would make me laugh so hard I turned blue and couldn't breathe.

So when I thought of doing a little blog that would be a collection of oddball things I came across in the crazy, upside-down and sometimes backward world of the Blogosphere, I thought, of course, of Spap-Oop.

And there you go. It's just that simple.

:-)