Irwin Hepplewhite and the Terrifying Papoose Jockeys?

On Memorial Day, clouds and rain and cool air moved in following sweet hot pre-mosquito days of mid-May. With the coming of post-Memorial Day rains, mosquitoes have emerged from wrigglerdom to bother us mammals.

I was looking at the guest list for the Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour on Wiki the other day (don't ask) and it looks like someone seeded the list with a handful of bogus performers, but none with a better name than "Irwin Hepplewhite and the Terrifying Papoose Jockeys." ("Jericho Squeezebox" isn't bad, either.) Further research reveals that the name is mentioned on other pages that borrow material from Wiki, but Irwin and his Jockeys don't have their own page on the sprawling encyclopaedia, probably for good reason.

If such a thing as Wiki had existed at the time, I might have posted references to my own entirely fictional '80s band, Sarratt Main Desk. But I did have a SMD concert t-shirt made by a graphic artist friend of mine, and I still have it somewhere in my drawer of retired t-shirts. The shirt celebrates the band's Tooling Around the World Tour to promote their album Haecceity Control, with stops in Bangor, Maine; Horseheads, NY; East Carbon, Utah; Schaumburg, Ill. (!); Dar Es Salaam; Pflugerville, Texas; Meeteetse, Wyo.; Smyrna, Tenn.; and Pyongyang.

Speaking of tattered tees, I also have a souvenir shirt from the grand opening of the first Krispy Kreme in downtown Chicago in 2002. Got a free box of doughnuts that day, too. The shirt has a pic of a plain glazed KK doughnut with the words, "The Real Chicago Loop" or something like that. It's a memento of the early 2000s glory days of KK expansion, which is now a B-school case study about the perils of expanding a brand too much, too fast.

That comes to mind because I noticed the other day that the Hanover Park, Ill., Krispy Kreme has gone belly up. I think the economy killed that one. I'm fond enough of their product -- I remember discovering KK gleefully in Nashville nearly 30 years ago, when the chain was Southern exclusively -- but the truth was, the only time we ever bought doughnuts at the Hanover Park location was when we got a hold of coupons offering two boxes for the price of one, since a dozen normally comes at a premium to more ordinary doughnuts. Otherwise our sometime doughnut business goes to Country Donuts, a suburban chain made up of three locations.