Here’s what happened in 1980:

Mount St. Helens erupted, causing $3 billion in damages.

Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back was released.

Gas cost $1.19 a gallon.

Pac-Man, the best selling arcade game of all time, was introduced.

Vigdis Finnbogadottir was elected president of Iceland.

CNN was officially launched.

Ronald Reagan was elected president.

The Polish government recognized solidarity.

My band played a gig at the Black Angus.

And we recorded it! I found an old cassette tape we made and thought it would be fun to share a bit of it.  Here, for your listening entertainment, is a short “Jenny Jones & Company” compilation. You’ll see what songs were popular in 1980, and you’ll see why we never got a Grammy. 🙂  Click here

Look what I almost stepped on just outside my back door! This is not the Easter weekend I wanted to have. It was a nice day so I headed outside to check my tomato plants.  If I hadn’t been looking down, I would have stepped right on this snake. It didn’t look like a rattlesnake but I wasn’t sure. To make things worse, he went into a planter right by the patio door so I was afraid to go outside any more. But I still managed to enjoy Easter.  I started off with an Easter egg hunt where I hid some beautiful Polish painted Easter eggs around the house for Denis to find.

He didn’t seem too excited about the search, saying he was a little too old for this, but he did find them all. In exchange, he made me promise never to hide eggs again. He gave me a chocolate bunny for Easter and I made him an apple pie. He says I make the best apple pie in the world so it was my Easter present for him.

Oh, and we went to a Greek Easter Festival in Pasadena. We ate some Greek food, listened to bouzouki music (Opa!) and came home for pie. Then we watched The Ten Commandments. Except for the snake, it was a good Easter.

Stefano is gone so I’m 1 for 7. (Didn’t he sing his best ever tonight?) In my last blog, I indicated that Stefano and Lauren would be the next two to go.  If the entire voting goes as I predicted, I am going to give myself a $100 Visa gift card and buy something. Hey, maybe I’ll only spend $99 – then I can buy the Jenny Jones T-shirt on eBay! 😉

The girls need to go! I believe the winner will be a boy. I watched all the performances tonight and as a musician myself, I think the best talent is Casey Abrams. Here’s how I would vote: I imagine each of the current finalists having a concert – who would I pay money to go and see? I would buy a ticket to see Casey. Jacob Lusk can sing for sure but sometimes I feel like he’s yelling at me. I do like country music and Scotty has a great voice except his songs all sound the same… and I wish he’d stop leaning. Haley Reinhart has a great contemporary style, I might go to her concert (if parking wasn’t a problem). James Durbin rocks the stage but either he’s too young or I’m too old. When he was singing, I could swear I heard somebody say, “Turn down that racket!” Oh wait – it was me. Stefano is sooo cute  but I don’t think he’s ready – but cuter than a fat-cheeked baby holding a box of kittens. So here is my prediction for who will win, with runners-up, just like Miss America.

5th runner up: Scotty McCreery

4th runner up: Jacob Lusk

3rd runner up: Haley Reinhart

2nd runner up: James Durbin

Winner: Casey Abrams

Correct me if I’m wrong…..

*ADDED APRIL 21st: I just read that Haley & Casey are hooking up! Is it just me or is this a really bad idea?

Just when we think some animal species are disappearing, they find a new one. The tube-nosed fruit bat was discovered in the remote mountains of Papua New Guinea. This is not movie special effects – it’s real!

Let me just say that if this thing ever came flying at me, I would immediately check myself in to the nearest neuropsychiatric institute to see if they could hook me up to some electrodes that would permanently remove this hideous bat face from my memory. If that didn’t succeed, I would never recover and just live at the asylum, with my nightmares, for the rest of my life. Can you imagine?

Did you recognize her right away? It was October 1991 when Martha Stewart appeared on “Jenny Jones.” It was my first year on television and that was twenty years ago! Make sure to check out the audience members because about five years later, it was their grandchildren who were coming to my show! Martha and I made potpourri and she took questions from the audience. It’s great fun to see how we all looked back in the day. Martha looks great and I’m in this severe burgundy satin blouse with…..wait a minute…..are those shoulder pads?!? Those can’t be my real shoulders! Either that or my head was a lot smaller then. Click here to watch the video

I just snapped this in the back yard – I’m looking for a good caption.  Any ideas?

🙂 Best So Far: “Can you smell me now?” by Josh 🙂

One regret I have about no longer hosting my talk show is that I am not able to interview certain people in the news. There are a few dumb people I’d like to talk to just once, if their stupidity didn’t leave me speechless, and I’d call this episode “The reason everyone stammers – is you’re dumb as a box of hammers.”

Here’s my guest list:

1)  The woman who called 9-1-1 to report that someone stole her snowman. Just one question: Why didn’t you bring it inside for safekeeping?

2)  The two men trying to smuggle the corpse of a 91-year-old relative onto an airplane. They claimed the body in the wheelchair wearing sunglasses was just sleeping. Once arrested, they said she was alive when they checked in…nice try. If they make a movie about these guys, they should call it Mistakes on a Plane.

3)  The man who showed up in court for his DUI hearing 1 ½ hours late…and drunk. He stumbled into the courthouse carrying an open can of beer with four more in a bag. He tried to trash the beer.  Yeah, if he hid the beer, I’m pretty sure nobody would have noticed he was drunk.

4)  The bank robber, whose DNA matched the gold teeth he left at the scene of the crime. It seems he robbed the bank and as he was fleeing, he stuffed the gun in his waistband and accidently fired into his pants.  The bullet missed but then he was hit by a van, managed to stumble into a getaway car, leaving his gun and two gold teeth behind. He was arrested a few days later. If I were going to rob a bank, I would do a practice run first (with the gun), and remove anything from my body loose enough to fall off.

5)  The Arizona bride who was arrested at her wedding reception. I guess the bride was gettin’ down & dirty on the dance floor with some uninvited guests and this didn’t sit well with the groom. So he started a fight that turned into a rumble. When the police arrived, they found the bride (easy to spot in her flouncy white dress & cowboy boots) fighting with a pregnant woman. Not exactly a traditional wedding, you say? Not if you look deep enough: Something old (probably the boots, maybe the bride), something new (a criminal record), something borrowed (bail money), something blue (parts of her face!).