The Saturday Picture Show, September 30, 2017

Isn't it fun to take a walk in the woods? Think of how lovely places like this will be in just a few weeks! And think of how much work it took to make these great steps! That's a lot of lumber and garden spikes all up in there!

On this date...September 30, 1955, actor James Dean died in a car crash in California, becoming the first celebrity to become more famous dead than alive. He was a mumbly actor whose acting style was then followed by hundreds of other surly, mumbly actors. He made three big movies: "Rebel Without A Cause," "East of Eden," and "Giant." Dean was 24 and speeding like a fool on a public highway when he crashed his Porsche into a Ford driven by a student named Donald Turnupseed.

Here's the receipt from when "Jimmy" Hendrix bought a guitar, an amp, and assorted gear just two months after the pinnacle of his renown at Woodstock. Within a year, he too would be gone.

Caption from the site where I saw this: "This is my brother Frank eating a frankfurter at the Frankfurt station in Frankfurt."

I have to figure that someone in the Hallmark store put this in the wrong slot.

I happen to know a lot of people who either live here, or should.

I remember the first Ranchero I ever saw (Chevy had a 1/2 car, 1/2 pickup called the El Camino.) I thought it was the coolest thing on the road, and it just still might be.

You can think you're cool, but Joe Namath (shown here with Alabama coach Bear Bryant) wrote the book on cool. Roll Tide!

Using their Bean

It's probably never going to happen, but I have it all planned: if I'm ever at one of those awards shows where I have to walk in on a red carpet, and one or more members of the Ozzy Osbourne family stop me to ask "Who are you wearing?" I will first say, "OK. You mean 'whom am I wearing?'..." and then report that my attire comes to me courtesy of Eddie Bauer, L.L. Bean and Fruit Of The Loom.

Those three firms suit me just fine, and one of the reasons is that they always come up with new ways to present something old. I mean, cargo pants, cotton sweaters, duck shoes and wool sox have all been invented, so who needs new designs? 

But - the L.L. Bean folks have come up with a new way to advertise in the newspaper.

Readers of the New York Times were recently surprised to find a large nearly blank insert sheet in one of the sections of the daily paper. It was white paper, with a green border.  Only these words were legible to the reader: "Just bring this outside...No, seriously. Take this outside.''

So, you take the paper outside, and the words become visible by sunlight.  "Welcome to the outside,''it says,"where there are no strangers, only friends we haven't met yet.''

I won't reprint the rest of it; you didn't come here to read someone's advertisements, but this represented some deep thought on the part of the Beanies.

"We wanted to do something unique, creative and a call to action,'' says L.L. Bean spokeswoman Carolyn Beem. "It's an absolute celebration of the outdoors.''

It reminds me of the old Boy Scout trick of filling the chamber of a fountain pen with lemon juice and writing "secret" "spy" messages with that as ink, and passing the paper along to other members of your spy cabal, who only had to hold up the paper to a warm lamp to see the words magically appear.  

But today, who has a fountain pen, for crying out loud? And the lamps are full of LED bulbs which put out no heat. Today's Scouts will just have to settle for sending secret messages via text.

And that's just not the same.

Double Whopper

Pictured here is the Burger King restaurant in Denville, New Jersey, where they really take that "Have It Your Way" slogan to heart - day after day.

According to WABC TV, on a recent Friday night, Denville police responded to the Home Of The Whopper for a report of a woman in labor, birth imminent. The parents had been going to the hospital via private auto, but ran into heavy traffic, and, lacking red lights and a siren, drove into the drive-in. Traffic jams in New Jersey are usually the result of shenanigans involving the popular governor of the state, Chris ("Chris") Christie, but we don't know about this one.


At any rate, "It happened so fast," Denville police Detective Scott Tobin told the TV station. That is exactly what the turtle said when he reported being assaulted by a snail, you know.

"We had to take action, and thank God everything worked out great," Det. Tobin also said.

"This baby did not want to wait, though, so we got there and she was actively in labor," firefighter/EMT Shannon Covert said. "Ready to push, and within minutes, the baby came out."

So between the police and the fire department and the father, who probably just ran laps around the parking lot all the while, a healthy son named Ryan became the newest, shiniest New Jerseyite.

"It was a little surreal," Covert said. "I had to actually sit down and think, like, wow that just happened. Because it doesn't happen every day here. It's something that a lot of people in this department have never experienced."

And then...

Everyone in town was still talking about little Ryan the next evening when ANOTHER woman enroute to the hospital pulled into BK because she was PG and her BP was sky-hi and she was ready to deliver.

And the same police got the call to respond! It must have felt like that "Groundhog Day" movie. But there they were, following Friday's labors (!) with a Saturday delivery, right in the parents' vehicle.

This time, the expectant mom was going through severe contractions, with the cord wrapped around the neck and the body, so, "We had to take a little more action to make sure everything was OK," Tobin said. "Thank God everything worked out great."

And the Saturday night special at that Burger King was a little guy name of Braydon.

"This is something that we don't get called to do too often," Denville police Chief Christopher Wagner says. "But they did a banner job on it and were truly heroic in the birth of two healthy baby boys."

That Sunday evening, you can be sure that people kept an eye on that BK parking lot...but nothing. 

Bashing the people who keep us safe

Now that a tenth person has died after the Rehabilitation Center at Hollywood Hills, a Florida nursing home that lost electrical power, and then, of course, air conditioning, following Hurricane Irma, can we just say one thing to those who think governmental regulations are just horrid?

And that one thing would be, please think again. 

Think of the explosion in the fertilizer factory in the town of West, Texas, which just about destroyed the town a few years ago. Texans, in their anti-government zeal, decided to trust the people who operate businesses of this sort to police themselves, making sure that the factory wouldn't blow up, and look how that turned out.

Following the devastation wrought by Hurricane Andrew in 1992, Florida noticed that recovery efforts were significantly hampered by the inability of gas stations to pump gas to fuel vehicles and generators. They had gas in the tanks below the stations, but with electricity out, no power to pump it out. Laws were passed to make sure that gas stations had generators from then on.

Wouldn't you think that someone would have required hospitals and nursing homes to be similarly equipped?

Let's hope that no one really counted on the pennypackers who make a fortune in the health care business to spend some of their profits on generators. That didn't happen, and now the governor of Florida (a man who does not allow the use of the term "climate change" to be used by state employees) is breaking his neck to right this wrong and make it a law.

I'm not without bias, or experience, in this debate. Having worked for three decades for local government, I can tell you lots of stories about just why we have laws and regulations and inspections.

Ask me about the people who have 45 cats inside their house, and more in the detached garage out back. Better yet, ask me about how their neighbors liked living in proximity to such conditions. Where would they be if there were no regulating of such repugnant conditions?

Ask me about the people who will give you verse and chapter on why government is no doggone good, and then call the government to find out when the government mosquito sprayers will be in their neighborhood.

Ask anyone whose neighbor all of a sudden decides to turn his front yard into Honest Charlie's Used Cars, right in the middle of a residential area.

Ask anyone who still has their life because of laws that make them use helmets on motorcycles or seatbelts in cars.

Ask the people whose house is still standing because the Fire Inspector made them have the house safer.  Or the people who saved a life because they learned CPR at the local firehouse. 

Or ask anyone who is still alive because they finally got the point about speeding around on the highways being, you know, sort of unsafe.

I'll step off the soapbox now with deep sorrow for the ten aged people in Florida who might still be with us, had the operators of their nursing home been required to foresee the chance of a power outage in a very hot state where they see a lot of storms.

HOA! HOA! HOA!

Young me (artist's conception)

I hope I don't bore you with tales of my bucolic upbringing, and how I could dart off, clad in Jack Purcells tennis shoes, cut off jeans and a Howdy Doody T-shirt and play for hours on end in the streets and streams and woods and abandoned tenant farmer houses that dotted our area back in the day. Every kid's mom had a dinner bell, and when we heard our special clangs, it was time to drop whatever we were involved in, be it frog-catchin', dam-buildin' or girl-tormentin'.  We'd race home, wash off a layer or two of good land dirt, and chow down, only to race back out until the fireflies came out.

I know, it almost sounds like Huckleberry Finn without the raft, but the point was to be outside.  Which is why it's so odd to see this story from Granite Bay, California, where the residents of the exclusive Hidden Lakes Estates community have received a letter from the Homeowners' Association asking that the kids in the development be discouraged from playing outside on the lawns or streets.

First off, you'd think these people would be busy enough finding the hidden lakes so people could go swimming or something, but no. The HOAs have decided to take one hand off their walkers so they can shake it wildly and shout, "All right, you doggone kids! Get off that street! And get off that lawn!"

What are they supposed to do, vaporize in thin air?

Jed Peters and his family moved in three months ago, and before they even figured out where to hang all those Thomas Kinkade prints, they were getting notes from Big Neighbor about those pesky kids, out there playin' 'n' all.

"Honestly we were a little put out, real upset to the fact we didn’t feel welcome in our neighborhood," Peters told CBS13 as he watched his three-year old riding his bike across the street. I looked this town up on the map, and it's near Bob's Quality Tires and Harris Industrial Gases, so there's that. I think that a child on a bike should not rankle the neighborhood all that much.

"We also got a handwritten note from our association manager that states, perhaps we should have the children play in the backyard or at the park," Mr Peters continued. 

And then you read more about it and you see that the Homeowners' Ass. considers children playing outside to be a violation. And when people put out rubber traffic cones to warn motorists of kids riding bikes, the Ass. threw the penalty flag on that as well.

Suzanne Peters, wife to Ben, says, "I think this neighborhood is wonderful, I think there’s maybe one bad apple that got a little cranky and didn’t want to see the kids out.”

A board member who wishes to remain unidentified said that the letter sent out was not worded properly. So, in an effort to help the matter wind up in the US Supreme Court, I offer this suggested revision:

1. Kids are supposed to play outside.
2. Let them.

What's news?

It all started where everything starts lately - the hallowed halls of Facebook.

The subject was a local celebrity, former cheerleader, the ex-wife of a very rich man who was HMFIC* of a big utility company, a woman who was charged and convicted of having carnal knowledge of a schoolmate of her son and was sentenced a couple of years ago to a number of weekends in jail for her crimes.

And now, having served a significant amount of her bid, she has been released for good behavior.

And it was on the news when she was freed.

And people broke their necks to get on Facebook, hollering, "Why is this news? Why do we need to hear about this?"

And I don't like rhetorical questions.  I see a question, I answer a question.

When an adult has sex with a child, it is a crime. We don't like crime or the criminals who commit them, and we keep tabs on them so we know when they are rounded up, tried, convicted, and sent to the Big House.  And we like to know when they are freed from the Big House so we can avoid being surprised to see them at the Fall Frolic or the mall or in the stands at the football game.


That's why it's news when a child molester is put in, or released from, incarceration.

The other disappointing aspect of the brouhaha was men crowing about how wonderful it was for this minor to be initiated into the wonderful world of sex in cars in parking garages. Left unsaid was how they would feel if their daughters of the same age were taken by men of the same age as the poor twisted soul we began talking about above. 

Listen, Big Daddy: sex between adults and children is against the law. Matters of broken laws and the lawbreakers who break them are news. 

This is all an offshoot of the effort some people make to make people disbelieve anything they read or see or hear. It's like when you were 13 and the neighbor lady saw you throwing rocks at someone's window, and you ran home to tell your parents what a liar that woman is.  

The news is what's new. Whether or not we like what's new is another matter. Wishing that earthquakes and hurricanes weren't happening doesn't change the fact that they do.


*Head Man For Inspection Complaints

Sunday Rerun: Wooden You Just Know It

If you read the novella "The Shawshank Redemption" by Stephen King, you remember the part where Red Redding (Morgan Freeman in the movie) follows clues to the location of a certain tree, which was described to him by his old prison sidekick Andy DuFresne (Tim Robbins).  Andy had told Red that the tree was where he had proposed to his wife (and we know how she ended up!) Red finds the tree, digs up a letter and bus money to get to Mexico and things turn out nicely for everyone but the warden.

In the original story, the tree was located in Buxton, Maine, but when they made the movie, they found a tree in Mansfield, Ohio, and I can't tell Maine from Ohio anyway.  It's only 810 miles away! So the tree you see in the movie was in Ohio, and that's the only place you'll see that white oak anymore, beside your imagination, because it's down. Five years ago, a lightning strike weakened it, and last week, high winds finished it off.


Jodie Snavely with the Mansfield & Richland County Convention and Visitors Bureau (a branch office, I suppose...) says, "It's a sad day for Shawshank fans." I was surprised to read that the tree and the field where it sat became an international tourist destination.

People even Tweeted their Twitter (and you should try that soon!) to hope that something good will be made of the wood.
My suggestion would be to go out on a limb and make a life-size statue of Rita Hayworth.

"I have had a chance to see the tree and if it's a stump left, I'm sure people will still come see it because hope is a good thing, and a good thing never dies," Snavely says.

In Maryland, the venerable old white oak tree called the Wye Oak down in Talbot County was really down in Talbot County after a thunderstorm in 2002. It was the largest such tree in America and was 460 years old.  I'm not saying it was old, but Dick Van Dyke was there when they planted it!

Now it's a desk in the governor's office in Annapolis, where politicians never know when to leave, and can't cedar forest for the trees. I don't have any more tree puns, so I guess I willow you one.

The Saturday Picture Show, September 23, 2017

Francia Raisa, in an amazing gift of love, donated a kidney to her lifelong friend Selena Gomez, on the right. Selena has done a lot of good for her fellow Lupus sufferers by bringing attention to the malady. I would hope that we'd all have a friend this good.

My admiration for Cheap Trick continues unbounded, as it has for almost 40 years. This is an "odds and sods" compilation of early recordings, with a booklet containing thoughts on all the songs from their drummer/archivist Bun E. Carlos. It contains about the 27th version of "Surrender" that I've heard, with the original lyrics about whom the WACS recruited.  Let me play it for you sometime.

This 102-year-old ship outlived its nautical purposes and now serves as a home for a grove of trees.  Nature will do what she will.

The caption I saw for this picture said "I saw Sideshow Bob's truck!" If you love the Simpsons, you know why it's so funny!

A classic old VW Beetle fitted with a tiny camper!  Pretty cool, as long as you and your traveling companion are pretty small.

I love interesting New Yorker covers and this appliquéd quilt edition from 1944 is one of the best ever.

Vade mecum is Latin for "go with me" (it comes from the Latin verb vadere, meaning "to go.") The term is used to apply to the stuff we carry in pocket or purse every day, and this is what Abraham Lincoln took to the theater with him that fatal night. Two pairs of eyeglasses, lens cleaner, watch fob, pocketknife, an oversize white Irish linen handkerchief with "A. Lincoln" embroidered in red cross-stitch; a sleeve button with a gold initial "L" on dark blue enamel; and a brown leather wallet, including a pencil, lined in purple silk with compartments for notes, U.S. currency, and railroad tickets. That's a Confederate 5 dollar bill he had just gotten in Richmond as the Confederacy surrendered, because they lost the Civil War. Lincoln went to the theater that night in 1865 believing that the war was over. How wrong he was.

This old dental ad shows a cartoon of a young man whom some say was the model for Alfred E. Neuman of MAD magazine glory.

Take me out of the ball park

There are lots of "classic" TV shows of which I have not seen so much as a nanosecond...anything to do with any "Star Trek" iteration, "St Elsewhere," "Doctor Who," and "Magnum, P.I." among them.

"Magnum" starred Tom Selleck. Oddly enough, while I never watched his first show, I don't think I've missed an episode of his current one, "Blue Bloods."

I do know that in the "Magnum" show, Selleck played a private eye in Hawaii who wore OP shorts and Hawaiian shirts and a Detroit Tigers baseball cap, the home version with the Olde English "D" in white.

Another cultural pleasure of which I remain blissfully out of the loop is this thing called "cosplay," the portmanteau that means you put on a COStume and PLAY at being some famous character.

In Michigan there exits a cadre of men who are into the "Cosplay as Magnum" thing, so 45 of them dressed up as the character and went to Comerica Park for a Tigers game/bachelor party for a guy named Joe Tuccini.

If you count the cardboard cutout of Selleck in his Magnum finery, there were 46 of them, and some of them might have gotten as stiff as the cutout, and started carrying on and catcalling in the ballpark, and at least one of them was smoking a cigar. They tell me that Magnum smoked cigars on the show, as did his manservant Higgins, who was known for saying "Oh, my God" long before every teenaged girl in America started saying it.

So you have 45 men, stag, dressed as a Hawaiian bon vivant character, maybe sipping on some suds and puffing Cheroots, a-hootin' and a-hollerin', and they were thrown out of the ballpark for their behavior.

Let's hear it for the ushers and security force at Detroit's baseball stadium!

Be Prepared

The New Yorker  would use this in their occasional "Constabulary Notes From All Over" column.

The setting is LaPorte, Indiana.  Out there in John Cougar Mellencamp Country, people help each other out. The police out there recently helped a stranded motorist who had run out of gas, and gave him a ride to town.

You know who else helps people out? Obstetricians!

But the man pictured here is Sean Harris, a 33-year-old resident of the Hoosier State, and a stranger to medical colleges all over (but not to neck tattoo parlors).

Harris was allegedly in an intoxicated state when he ran out of gas while driving his automobile on Indiana State Rd 8 the other day. It's odd that he ran out of gas, because he had just visited a BP station in Lacrosse, IN, and left with some food and beverage items, and cigarettes, before leaving the station on US 421.

He took 421 to Rd 8 before running out of gas.  Oh, you know what else he took? He took the food, drinks, and smokes without paying, which is why a State Trooper took 421 to 8 and found Harris in his stalled machine.

LaPorte County Sheriff's deputies assisted in the arrest, which resulted in DWI charges being filed on Harris, in addition to the theft charges.

There will soon be a meme appearing on Facebook bearing the face of Mr Harris and the advice for all would-be thieves to make sure to gas up the Firebird before pulling capers.

Blame it on the moon

I still haven't figured out who was kidding whom down in Florida as Irma the Hurricane approached.


A guy started a Facebook page exhorting locals in the path of the behemoth storm to "Shoot at Hurricane Irma."
Having just recently read about how one Billy Ray Taylor and some others in Kelly, Kentucky, shot their weapons at what they perceived to be "Little Green Men" invading from Mars in 1955 (it turned out to be a parliament of owls), I was on the hunt for another story in which men (it's always men) shoot guns at some otherworldly force.

Well, sir, the Pasco County Sheriff's office took this seriously, posting a tweet as the storm drew near. "To clarify, DO NOT shoot weapons at Irma," read the tweet in an earnest, albeit poorly worded, bit of advice.  "You won't make it turn around & it will have very dangerous side effects."

Such as shooting the people next door, or your car.

46,000 souls clicked "like" on the page started by Ryon Edwards. Edwards was later to write that he was "amazed that anyone could see it as anything else than a joke." He told the news down there that the idea for the page came to him out of "stress and boredom."

Sometimes I just shake my old head and hear the thoughts (or something) rattling around in there, and one of the thoughts is that a joke ought to be funny.

Just to give you an example, here is a joke that is funny, as told by comedy master Norm MacDonald:

"A guy said, 'I want you to buy this pit bull. This will protect your valuables.' I don't own anything very valuable. If I buy the pit bull, that would be the most valuable thing I own. I'd have to buy something to protect it then."

And this one, which I have heard from comics like Buddy Hackett and Mel Tillis:


A guy goes into a pet shop and tells the owner that he needs a pet for his mother. The guy says that Mom lives alone and could really use some company. Pet shop guy says, "I have just what she needs. A parrot that can speak in five languages. She'll have a lot of fun with that bird." The guy says he'll take the parrot and makes arrangement to have the bird delivered to his Mom. A few days pass and the man calls his mother. "Well Mom, how did you like that bird I sent?" She says, "Oh son, he was delicious!" Aghast, the guys says, "Mom, you ate that bird? Why, he could speak five languages!" 

And the Mom says, "Well, he shoulda said something!"

All in good fun, and no bullets flying.

Rock and role

Not long ago, the thing to do was to do random acts of kindness. Remember them? Paying the toll for the guy behind you on the interstate, or buying coffee for the entire crowd at S'Bux, or icing down a case of bottled water and passing out chilly Dasanis at the Fourth of July parade...

If I ever go back on the radio, I will use the air name "Chilly Dasani."

I'm sure that still goes on, the random act thing, but now the thing to do is to emblazon messages of love, admiration or encouragement on rocks and leave them where people in need of love, admiration or encouragement will find them.

They're called Kindness Rocks, and here is a link to a site that tells you how to make your own.

According to the Kindness Rocks Project, you can leave a message rock where the intended recipient will stumble over it (not literally) or you can create an entire Inspiration Garden.




Rocks go through this, this spate of popularity, every few years.  They are plentiful, so you don't have to spend a nickel to find some, and they are easily cleaned and painted. Pet Rocks made a fortune in the 1970s for the guy who figured out that people would spend $5 (that's like $4 in 2017 money!) to get a little rock that looked like a potato in a cardboard box with ventilation holes to put on their desk to hold their paperweights down.

And any family with a simple home smelting operation can mine their back yard and produce their own zinc, lead, copper, aluminum and aquarium gravel.  OR you can paint inspirational slogans on them and leave them on the neighbor's porch or your child's lunchbox or the reception area down at the loan office where you go to make payments on your smelter.



I think the choice is clear. 

Sugar and Spice

Maybe we misjudged Sean Spicer.

He got off to a bad start, coming out the day after the recent poorly-attended inauguration to declaim to a skeptical press corps that the ceremonies drew, in fact, a gathering of humanity seventeen times the size of Woodstock, with the New Year's crowd from Times Square thrown in. He was put in a tough spot, forced to repeat spurious information to balm the ego of the new guy.

In so doing that day, Spicer came off like a substitute shop teacher who was brought in after the tough guys in Metal Shop soldered Mr Pipgrass's pants to his BVDs and was told to crack down right away.  He got off to the worst start of any presidential press secretary in our history, and never really got his footing behind the podium.  And it didn't help that as the press hurled scorn and invective at him, his sardonic boss was sprinkling disdain all over him as well. Within days, Melissa McCarthy was lining up to knock him every Saturday Night Live and the country roared as "Spicey" came to life as a Barney Fife-like caricature.

It seemed that things really hit their nadir when the traveling White House road show played the Vatican. I'm not Catholic, but I understand that meeting the pope is, without question, the top goal for anyone of that faith.  And it must have crushed Spicer when his boss cruelly did not allow him to meet the pontiff as much as it would have hurt me had I not been allowed a private audience with Ernest Tubb at the Civic Center in 1967. 

I think that's when the public tide turned and people started to feel sorry for Sean, and it wasn't that much longer that he was replaced by someone's hard-to-employ daughter out of Arkansas.

And then - this happened! Spicer appeared on the Jimmy Kimmel show and played along with the jibes, and then here he was on last night's Emmy awards telecast to the surprise of all. He rolled out behind a podium, just as Melissa did, and he mocked himself with, "This will be the largest audience to witness an Emmy’s, period, both in-person and around the world." 

And the audience in the theater and at home laughed, this time with him, and not at him.

A lot of times we start out in a new venture tripping all over ourselves and landing right on our asterisks.*  If someone is keeping score, I'm sure they could tell you that I am a world leader in making an ass-embly of myself, and one thing I have learned is, if they're laughing, don't get mad, laugh with them!

Spicer seems to have learned that, and now we might as well all go to Amazon to pre-order the book he will certainly have up for sale in time for Christmas. 

Sunday Rerun: Space Doubt

In the days before microwave ovens made it possible for us to nuculate Hot Pockets and Jimmy Dean Breakfast Sandwiches at work for lunch, lunch choices were limited to whatever one could stuff in a brown bag.

And it was even worse for astronauts! Floating around in space in a multi-million dollar space capsule, those brave men couldn't very well pack cheese and crackers for lunch. There were very delicate electronic parts aboard, and crumbs hanging in the air in a weightless environment could very well get in the works and jam things up.


If you remember Space Food Sticks, that was Pillsbury's idea, bringing to American pockets, lunch pails and vending machines the tubular Astronaut food with the consistency of a Tootsie Roll and the taste of tree bark and sawdust. But food for grinding on in a space ship had to be crumb-free and molded into blocks or tubes. All other food was strictly not A-OK, in NASA parlance.

John Young was the pilot of the Apollo III mission in March, 1965. Later, he became the ninth man to walk on the moon (1972) but first, he became the first man to smuggle a corned beef sandwich aboard a NASA mission. As Apollo III hurtled spaceward, he reached into the pocket of his spacesuit and pulled out a corned-beef-on-rye-with-mustard and began to chomp away.

 It turned out that another astronaut with a penchant for practical gaggery, Wally Schirra, had slipped off to a deli in Cocoa Beach FL, brought the sammy to Young, and sat back to enjoy the hijinx.

We can say that this was not the worst thing that ever happened in the state of Florida or in the province of American space travel. No beef or rye molecules ruined any onboard equipment, although the next guy to take that spaceship for a ride did complain that there was mustard all over the steering wheel.

And the bigshots at NASA had to do some fancy scrambling when, at the next Senate Appropriations Committee hearing to determine how much more of our tax money would be wasted spent on flying around like William Shatner, Sen. George E. Shipley blasted NASA: “My thought is that after you spend a great deal of money and time, to have one of the astronauts slip a sandwich aboard this vehicle, frankly, is just a little disgusting.”

To end the suspense, they got their money anyway and Americans landed on the moon in July 1969.  


Or so you think.

The Saturday Picture Show, September 16, 2017

There was a time that children were told that "the stork" brought babies. I was really upset when I found out the truth about them being found under huge cabbage leaves in the garden. 

Someone with a curious mind put out two rolls - one under, one over - to see which was the preferred setup. You can see for yourself, the clear winner is "over."

There is nothing I enjoy seeing more than a sight like this, soon to be seen on roadways all over our town. It's almost October, and we could be snowed upon as early as next month!

And here is another good idea for fall, a time of year when everyone wants pumpkin spice errthang. Your car will thank you and let you know it's time to bundle up by needing a new muffler.

The New Orleans Pelicans were a minor-league baseball team for many years. During the time (1940 - 1942) that they were affiliated with the St Louis Cardinals, they wore jerseys sort of like what the Cards wore, but with pelicans balanced on a bat instead of cardinals. That is a cool-looking bird. 

We were happy to make a picture of a rectangular-looking giraffe back in the early days of Etch-a-Sketching, and now people are doing all sort of complicated designs on there. That little red frame on a silver screen has been around since 1960!

The hands, and "Trigger," the guitar, of Willie Nelson. 

With cats in the house, our plans to do jigsaw puzzles have waned, but they still provide lots of fun for old and young.