Sunday Rerun: Being a baby about it

I know they are doing marvelous things in the field of human procreation these days, just as I know that many marvelous humans do their procreation in a field.  You want to get a room back there?

Again, I know that science has made great strides, but the fact remains that every single person on the face of Earth has, or had, a mother. So did all the married people.

You can't deny it, whoever and wherever you are; you had sets of atoms from two humans who might or might not have even known each other, getting together and getting all fertilized and so forth.

So if it follows that every person walking around today was borne by a pregnant woman, why do some people get so bent out of shape over the shape of a pregnant woman?

Latest example comes to us from sunny Augusta, Georgia, where Laura Warren anchors the news on WRDW-TV.  She's expecting a baby, but she didn't expect a nasty voicemail from some random viewer slamming her appearance. 

"Please go to Target and buy some decent maternity clothes so you don't walk around looking like you got a watermelon strapped under your too tight outfits. Target's got a great line of maternity clothes in case you've never heard of such a thing. You're getting to where you're being disgusting on the TV."

Laura's first reaction was shock and hurt feelings, to be slagged by another female in this way.

"Did she just call a pregnant person disgusting? What kind of...I am only at week 20 of this? Am I going to have to deal with this crap another 20 weeks? Should I have my consultant or my boss call her and tell her tailored, form fitting clothes look way better on air than baggy ones, especially when pregnant? Is that a WOMAN who called me?!? Is she a MOTHER?!?!? The freaking nerve," she writes in a blog post titled "Week 20: Sticks and stones.

I recall the same thing happening to a wonderful meteorologist in Philadelphia when she had the audacity to be pregnant with twins. The criticism and clamor for her to do her forecasts from inside a tent or something like it got so insane that she finally spoke out before going off to deliver two sweet bundles of joy.

Ms Warren says that since she shared this blasting voicemail, she has received plenty of encouraging messages from others in her town.

But it makes one wonder about who would say, "Where's the phone? I feel the need to call that woman on the TV and tell her she no longer pleases my finely-honed aesthetic senses and pass along some fashion advice from a woman who thinks TV anchors shop at Target."

I know, it was a woman who made this critical call, and that's horrible. I'm sure people in the public eye get this sort of deranged commentary from both genders.  

I'm just not sure why.

The Saturday Picture Show, June 29, 2019

This really looks like a real front page from the New York Daily News tabloid paper. This mockup was printed for the first Godfather movie, to be displayed on a newsstand so Michael and Kay would find out about the hit carried out on his father, while they were Christmas shopping.

 At our local police precinct, they've saved the car door from the unit operated by slain Officer Amy Caprio, and the other police sent benedictions on it to be displayed as part of her memorial.

This is a zorse - the result of breeding a horse with a zebra. This brings up the question, did we need this animal? I feel like such a fool now for putting $20 on the nose of a horse named Zorse in the 5th at Pimlico the other day.

From here on, I am going to read all the labels and tags on the products I buy. It turns out, some of them are funny!

Everyone talks about the small towns where they "roll up the sidewalk after dark."  Here's a place where they haul the sun away before it goes down!

Firefighters responded to a house for a man in cardiac distress suffered while he was cutting the grass. While the medic crew took him to the hospital, the people on the engine stayed behind to finish cutting the grass for him. That's public service.

Here in Maryland, our ocean beach at Ocean City is a mighty great place to be!

Let's close out Pride Month with one more rainbow, this one over Grand Teton National Park. Perhaps there will come a year when the LGBTQ community will be free to be proud 365 days a year, but until then, let's give each other the respect and love we want for ourselves.

Salad Daze

Can someone explain the thing about getting kids to eat salad? I mean, sure, asparagus looks like something the weedwacker dragged in, and beets are purple death balls, and lima beans, brussel sprouts and cauliflower are best bought in frozen plastic bags to be applied to sprained wrists, but you pile up some lettuce, tomato, shredded carrot and green cabbage, some olives and croutons and bacon bits in a bowl and that's what you call your basic salad and that's tasty.

Maybe it was easier for me; I love salads and always have, although you have to add some meat or seafood if you're going to think of it as anything other than an appetizer.

Just as with books - some kids will take to reading and do so avidly for the rest of their lives - with salads, choosy moms know, you have to find a way to get some green stuff into the kids, so Kraft Foods (makers of fine wholesome nutritious products such as Cool Whip imitation whipped cream, Country Time imitation lemonade, Jello-O, the sweetened processed flavored collagen-based dessert, Kool-Aid imitation Country Time drink mix, Kraft Singles pasteurized prepared cheese product, Lunchables mystery meat and cheese in a box for busy moms and kids, Miracle Whip imitation mayonnaise, Tang imitation Kool-Aid, and Velveeta, the Pasteurized Prepared Cheese Product) now introduces their latest contribution to American haute cuisine: Salad frosting.

I said Salad Frosting.

This is not really an advancement in food preparation, but, rather, an adventure in misnaming something that is as laden with chicanery as fake apple pie made with Ritz crackers or Krusty Brand Imitation Gruel.

Kraft has brought out "Salad Frosting," and it's just a tube of ranch dressing!

The goal is to make kids think they're putting sweet frosting on their salad as if it were a cake, but it's just dressing.


And they're not even trying to make it sound like it's even remotely healthy for Junior or Sis to put the stuff they think they want on the salad they know they don't. Their press kit accompanying the product says, "Kids will eat anything with frosting, right? It's a match made for dinnertime bliss."

Not to drag science into it, but there are 110 calories,11 grams of fat, and 290 milligrams of sodium in 2 Tablespoons of ranch dressing.

The same amount of vanilla frosting has 140 calories, but only 5 grams of fat and and just 70 mg of sodium.

So, in some cases, you'd be better off by spreading cake frosting on a tomato and telling your kid it's a salad.

Then for dessert? A nice slab of baloney pie!

A contest we don't need

Here's a news story: 

Scamp the Tramp will never win a beauty competition. But he has won an ugly competition.

Scamp’s eyes stick out like balls on the top of his face. His fur is very disorderly – pointing out in all directions from his little dog body.

But that look won Scamp top prize at the 31st yearly World’s Ugliest Dog Contest. The competition was held at the Sonoma-Marin Fair in Petaluma, California.

Scamp’s owner is Yvonne Morones of Santa Rosa, California. She won an appearance with her dog on the television news program “Today.” She also received $1,500 for herself and another $1,500 to donate to an animal shelter.

She told a local newspaper, “He’s Scamp the Champ, no longer Scamp the Tramp.” She added, “I think the audience saw his beautiful spirit and everything he’s given back to the community.”


We see this story every year, right about this time of year, before the Hot Dog Eating Contest on the Fourth of July and after Father's Day.

And maybe it's because I am never going to be on anyone's list of Best Looking People, and maybe it's because we share our home with two sweet lovely little critters, but I don't like this World's Ugliest Dog contest.

And it's ok with me if you do, but for me, I've come to realize that dogs and cats and pets in general do so much for us, often in the face of abuse and mistreatment, and I don't like seeing them picked on.

We're living in a world where some teacher in some backwater town chose to award to a child, who lives with autism, under his/her tutelage as the Most Obnoxious Student. 

There are all sorts of prizes being handed out and I'm sorry for those who find mirth in hurting others, even if the others are pets, who offer unconditional love even to people who hold them up for public ridicule.

I always enjoyed The Angriest Dog In The World, the comic strip (1983 - 1992) by movie director David Lynch, a sort of dada minimalist cartoon that showed a growling cur in the back yard of a house every week. Now I know why he was so angry.

Sorry for getting all Kumbaya on you today, but then again, no I'm not.

She made a name for herself

Let's all say hi to Dr. Marijuana Pepsi Vandyck.

That is her real name, and who would have given her a name like that?  I mean, "Vandyck"?  Sounds vaguely Dutch, or like Dick Van Dyke.

But seriously, don't try to tell Marijuana Pepsi Vandyck that an odd name will hold anyone back. In fact, she just earned her PhD last month; her dissertation topic “Black names in white classrooms: Teacher behaviors and student perceptions,” looked at how black students with non-mainstream names are treated by the people who run predominantly white schools.

She was the perfect person to look into that matter, for the love of Pete. She was named Marijuana Pepsi Jackson at her birth in 1972.  Her aunt verifies that lots of weed was being consumed in that Watergate Summer so long ago, and Pepsi was popular for cooling a throat that had just torched a mean doob.

Dr Vandyck said her mom had an idea about the name. “She said that she knew when I was born that you could take this name and go around the world with it. At the time as a child, I’m thinking yeah, right. You named my older sister Kimberly. You named my younger sister Robin.”

Her Aunt Mayetta Jackson said, "I thought it was crazy, but they were such fun-loving people that it suited them.”

The fun didn't last; her parents broke up and her home life was rough. She left home at 15, with what few possessions she could round up going with her in a pillowcase, and when she was taken in by friends, her grades and attendance in school went way up and she was on the path to success, odd name or no.

She was graduated from high school in 1990 as "Most Improved Student," and headed to the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater on a scholarship. And she became a teacher, went on to earn a master's degree, and became a real estate broker.  Her FOR SALE signs identified the seller as "MP" because the early versions that carried her full name were often stolen by fans of either marijuana or Pepsi.

She tells a local Wisconsin newspaper that she is married to a welder; they have children, and live on a small farm with pigs and chickens. She's the director of a program at Beloit College for students who are from low-income backgrounds, are first-generation college students, or have disabilities.

She has never tried marijuana.

Her plan is to endow a scholarship at her alma mater for people who are the first in their families to attend college. She wishes to call it The Marijuana Pepsi Scholarship, and I have every reason to believe it will all come true for a woman who was born with a name that stands out, and now has accomplishments to match.

“I’ve grown into my name because I am a strong woman,” Dr Vandyck says. “I’ve had to be.”

Stinky

Summertime, and the living is sleazy.

I don't have a really good sense of smell; I'm not one of those people who can sniff out a barbecue from three yards away or differentiate between Axe Body Spray or Drakkar Noir (they both smell awful) or choose a candle. Just don't make it anything with vanilla, or I'll expect cake.

But one thing we can all recognize is good old-fashioned body odor. B.O. The great stankeroo. There are three ways a person can smell:

• No smell
• Pleasant smell (soap, cologne, powder)
• Awful (infrequent bathing or cheap cologne)

The first, that neutral smell, is fine, and no one minds sitting next to person who exudes a slight air of something nice.

But nothing empties a room or car like a human stinkbomb, and that's why I have a hard time reading that a new poll says people aren't using deodorant anymore. The poll reveals that about 40% of people 18-24 don't use deodorant at all and haven't in the last month.

The next age bracket doesn't smell much better. 31% of people between 25-34 nix the Ban too.

What's even more puzzling is that the young people polled aren't saying that they worry about putting chemicals on their armpits, and it's not like they forget to roll on the Old Spice.  To a certain Degree, they feel they don't *need* deodorant.

I just walked past one of you.  You do. If Gillette me ask a favor, be a Dove and be Sure to be on your Right Guard.

Cut it out

I like that ME-TV channel, the place to see Andy Griffith, My Three Sons, Leave It To Beaver, Gunsmoke, M*A*S*H, Gomer Pyle, and dozens of other shows you already saw 16 times.

A lot of those old shows are so old, they don't even try to make important points about socioeconomic inequality and the other ills so pervasive to our world today.  There never was a "Very Special 'Green Acres'," depicting Eb's lonely battle against root beer addiction.

But the other morning, the "My Three Sons" rerun was a 1966 classic called "Whatever Happened to Baby Chip?" The topic was Chip's hair, and the length and color of it.

As I watched the plot unfold (middle son Chip has let his hair grow to almost shoulder-length in order to fit in with the cool guys in junior high, and then he dyes it platinum, which sends his father off to the company psychologist at work for advice, and then Chip suddenly "comes to his senses" and gets a good old-fashioned haircut and everyone has a nice laugh and a steaming bowl of Uncle Charley's oatmeal) I couldn't help but wonder how it must feel to watch a show where the whole world is flipping out over how long a boy's hair is.  For those of you who weren't around 53 years ago, long hair on boys was a sure sign of the decay of society, and parents and school principals wasted many a night and day worrying about Junior's locks, instead of worrying about how to educate Junior (and Sis, for that matter).

A group called The Barbarians achieved a #55 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 with their song "Are You A Boy Or Are You A Girl?," an arrhythmic tune that seemed unclear as to which side of the controversy the band took. Parents decorated their Buick Estate Wagons with bumper stickers saying " Beautify America - Get a Haircut!" and news programs showed barbers sitting around empty barber shops, reading the Police Gazette  and blaming their economic slowdown on four musicians from Liverpool, England.




Of course, things change all the time in society.  By the time the early 70s arrived, construction guys were growing their hair, and many a carpenter or ironworker even yet today can be seen with a long long braided ponytail in back of a rapidly decreasing hairline. Attorneys and stockbrokers dared to have hair touching their ears, sideburns made every man an Elvis, and the first guys who had that Beatle hairdid were going with the Kojak look.

They say that being a parent is a lot like being a general. It's important to choose your battles. The length of a boy's hair never was worth more than half a second of anyone's attention, nor will it ever be.

Sunday Rerun: The Kids Are Alright

The story was in the Washington POST the other day, about how some students in the journalism class at Pittsburg High School in Kansas looked into the background of a woman who had been hired as the school's new principal.  They found some of her academic credentials to be, in a word, bogus. And in two words, made up. And in three, a lotta baloney.

Amy Robertson was hired to run the school on the strength of having a bachelor's degree from the University of Tulsa, but she was not able to produce a transcript from that institution. 

What's more, Robertson claimed to have earned a master's and a doctorate from something called Corllins University. It turns out that this school is regarded as a diploma mill, and the students who work on the "Booster Redux," the school newspaper at Pittsburg High, couldn't even get the Corllins website to come up. There's no evidence that it's an accredited university, and on the scale of 1-10 in rating colleges, where "10" would be Harvard or Hopkins, Corllins rates a zero, equal to "Trump U." The school has no address for even so much as a building, and it is not approved by the US Dept of Education.  

There is no indication that they have a football team, either.

The student journalists also found it interesting that Robertson had been living in Dubai for the last 20 years, working as the boss of an education consulting firm called Atticus I S Consultants there.

Clearly, her three ponied-up degrees and two decades of working 7,586 miles away in Dubai qualify her to run a high school in Southeastern Kansas.

Even the student advisor to the newspaper staff, Emily Smith, had been among the educational "experts" who vetted the credentials of Robertson, so when the kids started digging a little deeper into her, Smith had to step aside and allow Eric Thomas, executive director of the Kansas Scholastic Press Association, and other proficient journalists to lend a hand. 

On April 4, 28 days after she was hired, Robertson resigned, after telling the Kansas City STAR that all three of her degrees "have been authenticated by the U.S. government," and refused to talk about the facts the students unearthed "because their concerns are not based on facts."

Some of the high school journalists worked through their spring break to bring out the facts about the charlatan would-be principal. 

The future is in good hands

And that makes me wonder how hard the adults who were supposed to hire the best person to run the school for these and the other students worked to find about Robertson's credentials.

If they worked at all. 

People used to trot out the expression "youth must be served," and I have no idea what that means. If it means that young people should be catered to and patronized, no need! They're all right on their own. This is the perfect example. The adults in the town of Pittsburg should be bowing their collective heads in shame.

The Saturday Picture Show, June 22, 2019

Bobbi and Nick Ercoline are still together, 50 years later. Their first date was Woodstock, and they were on the album cover. Love never dies!

Also still together: Cuff and Link, the turtles that Rocky had bought from Adrian at the pet shop in the first (best) "Rocky" movie. Sylvester Stallone still has them. Yo.

Come spend the weekend at our beach house. Please bring a shovel.

The only kind of fox news I want to watch!

Sometimes, we're the kitten, and sometimes, we're the duck. When it's your turn to be the kitten, please be as good as this one.

Fans of the Howard Stern show know his producer, Gary Dell'Abate by the nickname Baba Booey. Gary collects original cel prints from old cartoons, and one day years ago, he came in loudly trumpeting that he had bought an original print of "Baba Booey," totally misstating the name of Baba Looey, the cartoon burro who served as Quickdraw McGraw's deputy. Once the error was pointedly pointed out to him, he said that no one would remember the gaffe. That was July 26, 1990, and no one has forgotten it yet. For the record, here is the real Baba Looey.

There is a pizza company in Canada known as "Boston Pizza," (go figure) and they have decided that the little table that comes in the pizza box to stop the lid from crashing down needed chairs to make a set. Next thing, the pizza will come to you with little tiny people sitting in the patio set.

Here's a busy bee who's had a good day at work, gathering pollen, Honey.

The run for his life

It's just a shame when The Running Man has to run for his life, but it happened again.

Keith Boissiere is the name of a man who hails from Trinidad and Tobago and has settled in Baltimore, seeking the best life.  Some say he has found it. He runs on the average 20 miles a day through the streets of Baltimore - he has 15 different routes - and he does this to ward off physical infirmity and find mental peace.

He reads voraciously, and he believes in not only taking care of his mind, but his body as well.

''Fitness of the body, fitness of the mind, and understanding and learning what the whole world is about,'' is his mantra.

So. He lives alone, needs very little except some new sneakers every few months, and hassles no one as he scoots around downtown. He waves to people as he goes along. He has neither a phone nor a computer, but he does have Stage 4 Chronic Kidney Disease and is on the list for a kidney donor.

Hence the running. Doctors told him that physical exercise would be salubrious and he followed that advice.

So, for no good reason other than to do the devil's bidding, someone decided to attack Boissiere last week, leaving the 66-year-old bruised and beaten.

“He didn’t have a stick at first, but he punched me and knocked me down, and then he went and picked up a stick somewhere on the side of the road and started beating me with it,” Boissiere said according to WJZ.

Two valiant women came along in a car to interrupt the attack, and give The Running Man a car ride to safety.

“Two girls in a car stopped and told me real quick to jump in, and so I jumped in their car and that’s what saved me because he was going to finish me off,” Boissiere said.

He has been attacked before while running, but he won't let that slow him down. The “Running Man” Facebook page had this to say: “This doesn’t make any sense, Baltimore. Attacked again and just for being liked and loved by so many.”

“I was upset because he doesn’t bother anybody, and for some guy to jump on the guy just running down the street at his age is just bad,” an area resident said.

Keith Boissiere has a great attitude about his running, making the run its own goal: "When you’re competing you’re trying to impress people, I have nobody to impress but myself."

He impresses everyone by trying to impress no one.  More should learn from him!

I wouldn't steer you wrong

Back in 2013, Jeral Pope Sr, down in Goodwater, Alabama, asked a local veterinarian to help him find a pet longhorn.  He had been out West and seen longhorns, and, well, he just had to have one to call his own.

Mr Pope found one, all right, a six-month old longhorn, and the steer, named Poncho Via (an apparent play on the name of the Mexican bandito Pancho Villa) has grown and grown and grown to the point where you wouldn't want to find him a scarf.  Poncho has set the Guinness World Record for possessing the longest set of horns on any other Texas longhorn ever.

Last month the steer's horns were measured from tip to tip at 10 feet, 7.4 inches. For the sake of comparison, a basketball rim is 10 feet off the ground, so...

Jeral's son Dennis acquired a longhorn named Moo shortly before Poncho showed up, and at first, Moo's horns were longer, but "Poncho's kept going out straight and it kept growing and growing," Dennis said to NPR.

Once Poncho left Moo in the dust, so to speak, his horns just inched on.  Previous world record holders didn't even reach maximum hornage (!) until the age of 12  - 15 years, and Ponch has a way to go to reach that point.

So the biggest horns on any Texas Longhorn belong to a steer in Alabama, Virginia Baked Ham comes from Wisconsin, and Manhattan Clam Chowder is from New Jersey.  Nothing makes sense, unless you want it to.

Dum De Dum Dum

Last Saturday night, a man from Virginia, wearing body armor and some sort of ersatz police uniform (and a real gun and body armor) was charged with  five offenses by Maryland State Police. What happened was, a real state trooper caught him impersonating a police officer.

This man pulled a car over on I-695 - the Baltimore Beltway, on the outer loop near Greenspring Avenue. Fortunately for the motorist who had been pulled over by a non-police, the real trooper saw this fakey police car  - a black and white 2012 Chevy Impala with blue and white flashing lights - and correctly deduced something was wrong.

The man arrested is Timothy Ervin Trivett, 54, of Yorktown, Virginia, and he is facing charges on these five offenses:

• Impersonating a police officer
• Loaded handgun in vehicle
• Loaded handgun on person
• Handgun on person
• Handgun in vehicle

Fake cop, real mugshot

For reasons that he might as well discuss in his upcoming trial, Trivett had been trying to stop a gray Honda Accord on the Beltway. That driver was allowed to leave the scene by the real trooper, and probably went home with a "You're not gonna BELIEVE this one!" story...

Trivett posted a $10,000 bond and was released from the Baltimore County Detention Center. He'll be driving back up from historic Yorktown for his trial on Aug. 21 in the fashionable Baltimore County District Court.

I have these questions:

• How many times has he done this?
• Does he issue fake traffic tickets? Or worse, has he committed crimes against citizens he has pulled over?
• When he approached the car, was the plan to say, "Fake Police. License and registration, please"?
• Why? What is lacking in this man's world that drove him to acquiring this car and uniform and gun and police regalia and pulling over random vehicles on the interstate? Did he want to be important or in charge or have power over people?
• Wouldn't it be great to send him to fake prison with fake prison guards for a real long time?
  
  
  
  
  
  

Hand me that bull

Quick! Get your Chinese menu and see if this is The Year Of The Bull.

And if so, was 2014 also the YOTB?

I'll tell you why I ask.  It was June 13, 2014 that a steer got away from an abattoir in West Baltimore, leaped the barbed-wire fence that was supposed to keep him confined, and went for a joywalk of some two miles before Baltimore Police, in fear of damage to lives and property, ended his life in a slightly different manner than the butchers had intended.

Customers of nearby steakhouses and burger joints complained for days that their beef "tasted of lead."

AND THEN on June 13, 2019 - five years since the great Midtown Belvedere Rodeo - two steers decided to make their run for it.

Here's what I have to say about my beloved Baltimore, before I tell you how this roundup wound up.  Other cities have lower crime rates, certainly fewer murders. San Diego is just one American city where the weather is indisputably superior to our hot 'n' hazy summers and frozen-stiff winters.

Other cities have tourist attractions that dwarf ours. Other towns have better baseball teams, yea, all of them do, except Kansas City.  Only Baltimore has had a succession of mayors and public officials led away in handcuffs, and I defy any town anywhere to top the misadventures of Catherine Pugh, the mayor who wrote a series of children's books and became a millionaire overnight.

So there is a lot about Baltimore that is up for approval, and good people are at work on solutions. 

But say what you will, there is not another city anywhere where the bulls come to town and learn to leap barbed-wire fences! We could have the Beef Steeplechase right here any time. Saddle up old Ferdinand, slip into the jockey getup, and leap!

Our cattle can jump high fences. Don't come at us.

So last week, Bullroast and Beefsteak got as far as a lawn with a fence at the  Penn Square apartment building, right across from the stockyard.  City police trained in the cowboy ways loaded them into a truck and took them back.

“This should never have happened,” said Medina Gaither, who just moved to the neighborhood this past December and might now have known she was now in Dodge City East.. “You’re jeopardizing a community of people. Why couldn’t you detain this animal? They need to shut that slaughterhouse down … or relocate it and be more secure. They need to move this out of the city and further in the county.”

Hey! They don't to be here, either.  This is pit-beef stand country!

It's news to me

Last Tuesday evening, a crew was working on the infrastructure on York Rd in Baltimore County. Something went wrong and they broke a 24" water main, causing a hole about the size of Delaware to form in the road, a flood to ensue, and a natural gas line to rupture.

Since York Rd is the main road in the central portion of the County (it runs from Baltimore City, where all of a sudden right where my old dentist's office used to be it changes its name to Greenmount Avenue to York, Pennsylvania, which was the first capital of the United States way back when - you could look it up!) so you can imagine this caused quite a disruption in traffic. It was the lead story on the morning newscasts on radio and tv.

So why was I surprised to see the news later on that day showing people being interviewed by reporters, and saying that they had no idea about York Rd being closed to traffic?

I've heard this from a lot of people, people saying they don't watch the news or listen to news on the radio or read the newspaper.  After I finish shuddering, I always ask why they feel that not knowing what's happening in the world is a good thing.

And I'm not talking about news that causes opinions to break out. Knowing that your route to work or home will be radically different, or that a thunderstorm is coming, or a blizzard, or a severe heat wave, or that certain foods have been recalled...these are not "fake news" stories or reasons to be dubious. There's no spin on traffic information.

It scares me to see these stories in which people are interviewed and asked simple questions about simple facts of history or current events. We laugh when high school graduates are perplexed about when World War II took place ("18 hundred something?") or when people are unaware of how society works (the local government will haul away your trash and recyclables, but will not mow the grass in your back yard) but it's really not all that funny.

I googled the reasons why people might be inclined to skip knowing the news. One of the reasons seems to be that the news is an "infinite source of negativity" that "keeps me up at night worrying" and besides, "I try to stay positive."  

My stance is, and I hate to drag out everyone's favorite tautology, but the news is what the news is. A war is not good news, neither are floods and murders, but history is just yesterday's news. There are good and bad parts of every day. Knowing about both is worth the time!

I'd be interested to hear what anyone thinks about the trend of not wanting to be up on the news! 

Sunday Rerun: I guess that's why they call it the blues

I have one thing to say about this trend of young people today dying their hair blue:

I don't care.

I see kids all the time, going around with multicolored melons, sometimes variegated like a parrot, sometimes all one color. There are as many shades of blue as there are teenagers.  With colors like Air Force blue, Azure, Baby blue, Blue-gray,  Carolina blue, Cerulean, Indigo, Iris, Navy blue, Periwinkle, Royal blue, Sapphire Sky blue and all the way on down to Viridian, there are plenty of choices for the modern person who wants their hair to be some color other than what genetics put there.

When I was a barefoot boy with cheek of tan, my hair was so blonde, it almost looked white. So I didn't have to resort to the custom of dark-haired guys of my day: they would empty the contents of a bottle of hydrogen peroxide on the front of their hair to have their bangs all blond. Why they didn't just tint ALL their hair was never quite clear to me, although it did save a lot of guys from walking around looking like Guy Fieri, which would not have been a good thing even then.

But a little peroxide for guys and some frosting for girls and the occasional all-the-way to Clairol Light Golden Blonde or Pure Diamond for some girls, and that was the extent of hair chemistry in my day, and meanwhile I saw my own hair turn from that blonde to a ratty brown, and now nature has seen fit to continue using my head as a kaleidoscope, and it's gray.  Not that Mike Pence White, and not the George Clooney cool kind of gray. And not that salt-and-pepper look from the Grecian Formula ads, the ones that promise aging hipsters a chance to come back to work after vacation leaving coworkers stunned...STUNNED!...that anyone would think they wouldn't know the secret.

One of the immutable laws of nature is that no man can ever tell when a woman has dyed her hair, and no man can dye his hair at all without everyone from five-hour-old babies to soundly sleeping nonagenarians spotting it at fifty paces.  I mean, really.  Guys who dye their hair might as well wear a tiara with diamonds spelling out "DYE JOB", because it's that obvious.

But here's the point I was hoping to make.  A woman I know has a daughter in high school, a young lady of considerable accomplishment, with good grades, plenty of participation in the right activities, just one of those good kids that you know is headed for academic and personal success.  You know the kind of person I mean.  Not the sort that I, a total stranger to the honor roll review committee, was, but anyway...

Someone - some "adult" stranger - chose to cluck-cluck and shake her head and mumble some pejorative words when this sterling young woman took a notion to dye her hair blue before the start of the school year.

She did not get a swastika tattoo across her forehead. She did not get a pistol and rob a 7-11, or commit massive cheating on college boards, or steal a car and get all shahfahzed and run over a passel of orphans waiting for a ride to a fresh-air camp.  

She dyed her hair, which will grow out and flourish.

I hope we can say the same for the crabby, grumpy woman with enough time to criticize the free spirit of a fine young lady.




             

The Saturday Picture Show, June 15, 2019

People with hi-class cameras seem to know how to get the very best pictures! Here's a photo of trees as magnified by a drop of water on the end of a branch.

Would anyone care to guess how many weary travelers, how many families on the way to Wally World, and how many unsanctified congresses and illicit liaisons took place over the years within these walls?

Every club has a special patriotic hat for the 4th of July. This is the Orioles version for 2019; the "B" logo is based on the one on the 1964 uniform hat, worn for that one season alone.

In this old picture of a gas station in Virginia, you see a guy wearing bib overalls. They are great for doing chores and general work around; not having a belt and worrying about droopy draws is such a pleasure. Maybe I should get another pair. Hello Amazon?

Even nature supports Pride Month.

The people who took this picture promises that it's not fake. The water splashing off the elephant's head took the shape of...an elephant's head.

As kids, my sister and I always got some sort of food gift. She got nice sweet chocolates to match her personality, and I got these. They really were all they were cracked up to be!

Australia just took a big jump ahead in the worldwide car decorating contest!

Alarming

On the rare occasion that Peggy and I forgo sleeping in the car and actually take a hotel room, I always make sure to be nice to the maid. For one thing, it's the better thing to do, and when you take time to talk to them, you will hear harrowing stories of the nastiness they get from our fellow humans.

On the more practical level, it will help you be sure to get plenty of coffee for the room and extra towels or shampoo, but that's a distant second to just being nice to people doing a largely thankless job.

People tend to mistreat service personnel, but it's even scarier when you're in a hotel room with some perv from Pennsyltucky who has seen too many pornos set in skeevy motels and he thinks this is his big chance, or when you open the door for room service and happen upon a crime in progress, or a medical emergency, or any of a hundred reasons to wish you were anywhere else right then.

New Jersey, my second favorite state, has become the first state to require that hotels with over a hundred rooms issue emergency buttons to employees. That's great!

“It means a whole lot,” said Iris Sanchez, 40, a housekeeper at Caesars Atlantic City, as Governor Phil Murphy signed the new law this week.  “I know I’m going to be able to go home at the end of the day.”

According to The Press of Atlantic City,  Murphy says hotel staff will now have  “greater security” that will let them be able to “immediately call for help, should they need it on the job.”

And this is good for all of us, not just the staffers. Assemblyman John Armato, D-Atlantic, says housekeepers are often the first people to discover an emergency situation, like a fire or a medical emergency situation.

“It’s not just for their safety, it’s for the safety of the whole hotel itself,” he said.

This law came to fruition because of the work of Unite Here Local 54, the casino workers union representing nearly 2,000 hotel housekeepers in Atlantic City alone.

And they take these things seriously in The Garden State: Hotels that do not get these buttons as required will pay a fine of $5,000 the first time and $10,000 for subsequent violations.

Nationally, large chains such as Marriott, Hilton, Hyatt, IHG and Wyndham are promising employees to get alarms for staffers who deal one on one with guests.

Good news! Now if people will just behave, at home and away.

Blame it on the moon

In the early days of our marriage, Peggy and I really had to get to know each other.  Our engagement was so brief that we still had to go on voyages of discovery to find out how we liked our burgers cooked (rare for me, medium for her), whether she liked hominy made from scratch ("What is hominy?") and how cold was cold, how hot was hot.

We settled most of those matters. Peggy still won't touch hominy, or grits, for that matter. After lengthy negotiations, we finally figured out what thermostat settings (summer and winter) are good compromises, and most of the time, I can fix a satisfactory burger.

But there was one question I asked Peggy about that got me a look of utter stupefaction and an adamant "How could you even ASK that?"

It's the kind of thing that can be enjoyed in mixed company among consenting adults, or in homogeneity. It doesn't matter. It's pleasurable, no one gets hurt, and it gives fresh air to a body part that is all too often covered in denim.

We're talking about mooning here, and it was quite the popular sport in my youth.  Get a passenger with a sense of humor and pull up next to a car being driven by a Fred Rutherford type, have him drop trou, and hang a moon right on out the window.

1880's western style

Not that I ever was involved in such degradation, you understand, having devoted my teen years to quiet contemplation in dim salons and libraries and the "glass aisle" at the A&P (condiments, jams, jellies...) In junior high, we were fortunate enough to have a guy in our class whose brother was in high school, and from him we learned, like young seminarians from a bishop, that in wintertime when it was too cold to open the window, mooning was referred to as "pressed ham."

I heard about what was going on and I still find it hilarious, which explains why I still hold the record at the Regal Theatre in Bel Air as the only person ever to request a Senior Matinee Ticket for a "Jackass" movie.

I think that today's teens are too busy playing those video games and listening to Seven Seconds Of Summer or Z Money or whoever to ride in cars with their patooties on display, and that represents a dropoff in our culture from which we may never recover.

Tip Top

I love old jokes. Once I hear a gag that cracks me up, I don't forget it (or stop repeating it). I still like the one I got from Bazooka Joe on a bubblegum wrapper:

"Every time I'm down in the dumps, I get a new outfit!"
"Oh, so THAT'S where you get them!"

I am here to tell you that going to the dump can yield some great finds! With that wonderful precision of language, the British call what we call "the county dump" a "rubbish tip."  And a man named David Rose has found a top hat and cigar once owned by Sir Winston Churchill in one of those tips. The stogie and the topper were found with a cigar case and letters that gave up a lot of details of the former prime minister's daily life, have been valued at £10,000.  And that's 12,678.65 American semolians.

David Rose (not the bandleader who topped the Top 40 in 1962 with "The Stripper,") found this Churchilliana at work. He works in a dump and he was glad to show his loot off on the BBC show Antiques Roadshow.


The items were gifts from Sir Winston for the cook, and included a signed photo of the politician himself. The letters (200 of them!) were written by the cook to her son, and gave us a look inside Britain in Churchill's days. "She used to write to her son every day about the daily goings of Winston Churchill, what he was getting up to, how he was feeling and just interesting stuff about him," said Mr Rose.

The sad news is that Mr Rose is not giving up the location of this goldmine in a dump. He's worked there for 15 years and is squirreling away his cool haul for the future.

With any luck, he'll find a cache of Benny Hill's old getups.

To protect and serve

We make certain assumptions in life, and most of them are valid. It's not outlandish to plan on getting hot water when you turn on the tap, and when you put the trash out at night, you can count on the county coming along in the morning to take it to the dump.  And certainly, when there's a police, fire, or medical emergency, you can be sure that the right people will respond to your 911 call.

But what about when an armed maniac is prowling through a high school gunning down students and teachers, and there is an armed School Resource Officer on the premises?  We expect that person to display the gallantry for which police everywhere justifiably pride themselves, and enter the fray to take out the killer, come what may.

Yeah, we thought that would happen, and then came the crisis at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Valentine's Day 2018, when Scot Peterson, the armed officer who should have responded to the 1200 Building on campus, did not do so. He stood outside the building while unspeakable carnage went on, for 48 minutes.

After a year and a half of investigation, the state of Florida has charged Peterson with eleven counts to condemn his actions, or lack thereof. One of the charges is for perjury, and it is clear that Peterson lied about how many shots he heard and what he was doing while Nikolas Cruz ALLEGEDLY carried out his murders.

All of this is obviously weighing heavily on Peterson, seen here at his arrest (left)
 and while still an active deputy sheriff (right).

Some experts see a little cloud over the other charges — seven counts for felony neglect of a child and three for culpable negligence.  There is a fine point, say some experts, between the responsibility of a "caregiver" (a parent, adult household member, or other person responsible for a child’s welfare), who has a legal duty to protect children in, say, a school, and that of a police officer. Indeed, Peterson’s attorney, Joseph DiRuzzo says his client was not a caretaker, legally speaking.

Things have changed since the 1999 mass shooting at Columbine High School. In those days, police were trained to wait for backup and exercise a high degree of caution before acting. But now, best practices for police departments hold that they should enter an active-shooter situation as soon as possible.

Down in Florida, they call Peterson "The Coward Of The County," which is wryly wrong, because in that Kenny Rogers song by that name, the "coward" actually rights the wrongs done to him by the evil Gatlin boys, standing up for what was right.

Perhaps a more apt Kenny Rogers song would be "The Gambler," because Peterson gambled that by cowering outside the scene of the slaughter, he would be safe and no one would ever know what a poltroon he actually is.

Humans have dealt with this "fight or flight" reflex since the first time a caveman came upon a sabre-toothed tiger way back in the day. We've come a long way since Og's day, and it says here that I can't think of a cop I know who would have turned tail like Peterson did.  We can't know how any of us would respond in his shoes, but we can expect more valor.

What the shell?

I've made some classic mistakes in my life, but I wish I had been smart enough to write down all the things (or even half the things) I heard while working at 911.

From real estate agents looking for the location of the great house they were trying to sell, to a woman who wondered if "going off with men" in return for household appliances constituted prostitution, to the kids wondering if school was open in the morning or who was James Buchanan's vice president (John C. Breckinridge).

Also, "who was James Buchanan?" and "how much is 9 times 8?" were samples of questions on the Homework Hotline, a/k/a 911.  Which is not to mention all the people who thought we were an offshoot of 411 ("Can you give me the number for ..."?) and the ones in the very early days of 911 service who called just to see if this new-fangled thing worked.

And of course, calls came in often about how the police BETTER get out here right away or someone was "gonna get smacked upside the haid" (that's Baltimorese for a violent blow to the temporal lobe). Or the old standby about someone parking in "my" parking spot on a public street, with or without snow in the way.

But I have to admit, this is a new one on me, from the bayou country down in Slidell, LA, where the local constabulary reports that a citizen called to report that a local Taco Bell had run out of both hard and soft taco shells. The department posted about the call on their Facebook page, calling it a “‘we can’t make this stuff up’ story.”

“Somebody called in to complain that the Taco Bell on Gause Boulevard ran out of both hard and soft taco shells,” the department wrote.

Sadly, the police weren’t able to help.

This is the Taco Bell in question. In case you find yourself in Slidell,
 you might want to bring your own shells.

“While this is truly a travesty, the police can’t do anything about this. Hopefully, they are replenished in time for Taco Tuesday!” the post concluded, hopefully.

The problem here, and I guess it's the same in Slidell, is that there is no other 1/2 decent taco carryout around. Chicken, burgers, pizza, there are plenty of other options.

And that is because the federal Department of Hamberder Choices makes sure of it.