The uploaded, you voted, they won! Check out the results of our photo contest on Facebook! Congratulations to Runners Up Paula and Brady and Grand-Prize Winner Bryan!

Ally Rosenberg makes sculptures…out of gum! From the Prestfield and Whitefield Guide.

Ally’s top grade in art owed much to an off-beat project last September, when he challenged 50 friends to chew 1,000 bits of gum in two weeks.

He then created a gum sculpture of an elderly woman he had met on a street in Manchester a few weeks earlier.

Ally said: “She was a charismatic old woman who had long ginger hair. She also had no teeth, so it was fitting that I should make the artwork out of gum.”

Ally with his sculpture

We are interrupting out regular gummy program to bring you a guest post from the author of Mrs. Lieutenant, Phyllis Zimbler Miller!

When my novel Mrs. Lieutenant was published in April 2008, I was focused on sharing the fictionalized account of my experiences as a new Mrs. Lieutenant in the spring of 1970 right after the Kent State shootings.

My goal at that moment was to present the point-of-view of new officers’ wives during the Vietnam War-era.  Yet only a few months later I had become actively involved in volunteer activities to support our military personnel and their families today.

In November of 2008 Nancy Brown of YourMilitary.com asked me to be her co-host on the new BlogTalkRadio show YourMilitaryLife.com.  I said yes, and Nancy and I were off and running. [More...]

Our show has given us the opportunity to interview an incredible range of people supporting our troops and their families.  And Nancy and I have been most impressed by the efforts of everyday Americans to step up to the plate to provide for needs that aren’t met by the government.

You can read blog posts about some of these amazing people at the Mrs. Lieutenant blog and you can listen to audio replays of show interviews at YourMilitaryLife.com.

Plus check out my two websites OperationSupportJewsintheMilitary.com and InSupportofOurTroops.com. I’m planning to add to this latter website the stories in their own words of some of these everyday Americans.

Phyllis Zimbler Miller

And in an effort to both educate the general American public about troops serving now as well as about troops serving in the Vietnam War, I’ve just launched History Through the Arts to encourage high school language arts, U.S. history and social studies teachers to use my novel Mrs. Lieutenant as an adjunct to classroom textbooks. You can read more about this project at here and here.

FYI – Nancy and I have done several BlogTalkRadio interviews to get out information about help for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). There’s a free report at InSupportofOurTroops.com that everyone should read in order to recognize the signs of PTSD.

I am truly thankful that my novel Mrs. Lieutenant has led me to “meet” so many wonderful Americans. And, as Nancy ends each of our BlogTalkRadio shows, God bless our troops!

Meetings at Jolt HQ usually involve such topics as, “How do we fill the marshmallow with peanut butter?” and “Wait, can we then COVER the marshmallow with CHOCOLATE?” Not a bad gig, I’ve got to say. But I know, not everyone’s as lucky.

File this one under “journalism of obvious”: “Employees Say Caffeine, Texting Key to Making Meetings Bearable”

I say, forget coffee, grab a pack of Jolt Gum before you sit down with Bob from Accounting or Diane from HR. Because you don’t want to be the “coffee breath” guy, ya know?

Nobody wants to sit next to coffee breath guy.

Check out Jolt Gum’s new duds! For every Support Our Troops pack of Jolt Gum sold, we’re donating to organizations that support wounded members of the military and their families.

We here at Jolt Gum HQ believe everyone should understand and appreciate the sacrifices made by the individuals of the armed forces and their families. Over the years we’ve gotten a lot of emails and real-life letters from servicemen and women and their families. Obviously, the letters are usually about gum — to tell us how Jolt Energy Gum helped them or how much they enjoy it.
With every letter, it humbles us to realize what they achieve and endure in support of our nation. As a small thank you, we’re donating seven percent of all sales from Support our Troops Jolt Gum packs to charities that assist wounded or fallen members of the military or their families, including the Wounded Warrior Project, The Intrepid Fund for Fallen Heroes and The Fisher House.

As we say around here: Chew more, do more…and who does more for our country than the members of the armed forces.