Vegas Vexation

Deep in the dim (very!) recesses of my mind, I keep a mental jotto on things. One category is Reasons To Dress Up All Fancy, but unless you're getting married or shuffling off to Buffalo, I can't think of any reasons. Another is Excuses To Use When Offered Asparagus, because I am reliably informed that "it looks like something the weed wacker spit up" is not polite.

Another is the eternal question, Vegas Vacay: Yea or Nay?  Reasons FOR include the proliferation of buffets and the chance to be given a lift by Wayne Newton if I wind up hitchhiking.

Reasons AGAINST start with the heat, and Celine Dion. And having to call Elton John "Sir."  And now, add grasshoppers to the list!

There are so many grasshoppers hopping around LV these days, they are showing up on weather radar, looking for all the world like a BA rainstorm.

It's not rain, it's bugs!

It's been rainy out there in Las Vegas  - in the first half of the year, they've already received more rain than they usually get in the whole year (4.2 inches). Because of all this rain, there has been what the bug people call a massive migration of grasshoppers who are visiting Las V on their way north.. The area has seen more rain in six months than the roughly 4.2 inches it typically gets in a year.

These critters are common in the desert, and they won't hurt you, unless you break an ankle running like a maniac when 237 of them light on your jacket at once.  And in a town that thrives on attractions to lure folks in by

the busload, people are standing around taking pictures and videos of black clouds of grasshoppers clustering under lights in the evenings.

Unlike their friend the lightning bug, grasshoppers don't carry a flashlight in their tail.

If you were around here in 1970, 1987, and 2004, you remember the invasion of 17-year locusts, whose deafening chirps make conversation all but impossible on late spring evenings.

I know you just did the math! They'll back in 2021!

I'm a Rocket Man!

I've been meaning to write for a little while now about the huge amount of people who "forget" that they had a gun in their suitcases as they hop aboard a plane bound for Disneyville or other exotic ports of call that feature humanistic animal characters.

The irony is that most gun owners I have known are so in love with their shootin' irons, they don't forget them for one moment of the day. But certainly, you don't think for a moment that any of the 19 gun-toters who have been nabbed at the BWI checkpoints this year were trying to take their guns with them on vacation and just hoped those TSA people were TFD to catch them, do you?  I mean, that just could not be it.

If you're scoring at home, this puts BWI on a pace to far exceed last year's total take of 22 Smith & Wessons.  The lesson is, you can carry on Smith Bros cough drops and a small bottle of Wesson Oil, but no Smith & Wesson guns, ok?

OK.

There are five months left in the year, more than enough time for at least 4 more gun enthusiasts to pack their roscoe in with their whitey tighties and try to get it through, and then, we can play for the bonus round, where the scores are doubled and the fun never lets up.

But just to break up the tedium of all the handguns caught in the net, here's an active duty military member who thought it would be a good idea to bring a missile launcher in his checked luggage.

The man is from Texas (really!?) and was coming home from Kuwait, and apparently took a notion that a rocket launcher would make a good souvenir. Down in his hometown of Jacksonville, TX, this sort of acquisition would make him the king of the local domino parlor, so into his bag it went, as he hoped no one would notice it, I guess.

One wouldn't think this necessary to say, but Lisa Farbstein, a TSA spokeswoman, clarified that "military weapons are not permitted in checked or carry-on bags."

The man was allowed to catch his plane without being arrested. I guess if he wants to drive back up here from the Lone Star State, he can pick up his souvenir WMD and haul it on back home, maybe lob a turnip or two out of it for old time's sake on the way.

Farbstein told the Capital Gazette newspaper that a Florida man tried to get on a plane at Lehigh Valley International Airport in Pennsylvania recently while carrying a rocket propelled grenade launcher.

Used to be, we'd bring home postcards or corncob pipes as remembrances, but not anymore.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion........

Quite a lively debate here in the old hometown, the usual much ado. The Baltimore County Fire Department held their graduation the other night, and three members of the new class (below) did not salute the flag during the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance.

You can just imagine the horrified responses, from retired fire personnel and active fire personnel and members of the local populace. Disrespect! Fire them all! Outrageous! How much longer can our republic survive in the face of such sedition?

Now, hold on just a moment, please. First of all, congratulations to the men and women in the class. They have been through an arduous regimen of training in fire suppression and emergency medicine, the result of which being that they are trained to take their place in our community as active first responders.

Oh, and three of them are Jehovah's Witnesses.  Here is a statement issued by Fire Department Public Information Officer Elise Armacost:

We are aware of concerns about three recruits who stood but did not salute during the National Anthem during tonight's 113th Recruit Class graduation ceremony. These new BCoFD members are Jehovah's Witnesses, whose faith prohibits displays of national allegiance. They are successful graduates with a commitment to public service. BCoFD respects members of all faiths, as well as the Constitutional right to free speech. We congratulate our graduates on their accomplishments and look forward to their service to Baltimore County. EA

My point is this. We are a nation founded on the rock of freedom of religion. Among the tenets of the Mennonite, Amish, and Jehovah's Witness faiths is the belief that they offer allegiance only to God's Kingdom, instead of any government or nation. They do not salute flags or sing patriotic songs, because to them, such things are forms or worship antithetical to their faith. They stand, out of respect, as the men in the Fire Department class did.

It turned out, as the debate raged on, that there have been Witnesses graduated in the past from the Fire Academy, and they did not salute, and somehow, it didn't cause the furor that this did.

And how about a nice hand for the fire-stokers who whipped up this brouhaha, ensuring that these three men will now begin their careers in the fire service marked as men apart, because of their religion.

Let us be basic here for a second. Imagine that, God forbid, your house is on fire or you are having a medical emergency or you are trapped in the crushed wreckage of a car accident.  When the firefighters arrive to help, do you care what religion they follow, or whether they saluted a flag when they were graduated?

I don't think you do.

Just let people do the job they're trained to do, please.

Sunday Rerun: A tip of the slongue

The afternoon guy on our local public radio station committed a classic Spoonerism the other day, referring to our Governor Larry Hogan as "Governor Harry Logan."

This dates back to the days of Reverend William Archibald Spooner (1844–1930), the pastor of New College, Oxford, England, who would stand up in the pulpit and say "The Lord is a shoving leopard" instead of "a loving shepherd," or end a wedding with, "It is kisstomary to cuss the bride."

So linguists call that a Spoonerism, in his honor, defining it as "an error in speech or deliberate play on words in which corresponding consonants, vowels, or morphemes are switched between two words in a phrase."

From what we can read of the Rev. Spooner, he was a very intelligent man whose thoughts sometimes came to him faster than his words could be formed, such as time he found a worshipper in the wrong seat in church ("You are occupewing the wrong pie") or asked to see the Dean of his school ("Is the bean dizzy?").

Just as every statement that seems goofy but has a kernel of wisdom deep within ("If people don't want to come out to the ballpark, how are you gonna stop them?") winds up being attributed to Yogi Berra, every slip o' the tongue seems to get lumped in the dap of the good preacher.  Does it matter whether it was he who said, at the end of World War I, "When our boys come home from France, we will have the hags flung out," as long as SOMEONE did? 

The Saturday Picture Show, July 27, 2019

This is a picture of the inside of a prison in California. I share this with you in the hope that anyone considering a life of crime will look at it and remember that this could be their view of the world for 5 to 10 years. No thanks!

 

This yogurt cup was made in 1976. Sometime that year, some oaf ate the yogurt and tossed the cup away, where it found a home in the sea until it washed up on a beach and someone in the #trashtag movement finally picked it up for recycling. Plastic is forever, folks.

Someone had a persistent memory of a Salvador Dali painting when they came up with this.

I am here to tell you that cats of all sizes love to lie around like this, but only the luckiest get to have a daddy who can shade them on a sunny day.

I love these Four Seasons pictures, and especially the last three! Come on, winter!

This is the very very wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiide beach at Ocean City, Maryland. There was a time when they did not have those wooden walkways, resulting in many a scorched foot as people headed for the surf.

Show this to the twelve-year-old in your life and wait for them to ask what that thing is that's plugged into something or other...

Greene Day

I used to be an avid reader of a man named Bob Greene, who wrote a column for the Chicago newspaper for many years, and who cultivated a print version of Charles Kuralt-sort of image, a man of the people who covered the lethal adulteration of Tylenol capsules as well as writing stories of everyday people dealing with everyday gains and losses. His career ran well over 30 years, and one of the most memorable stories he wrote concerned a man who took one of Greene's columns and had it published in his army base newsletter, on the grounds that he wanted a little recognition and was not able to write with the flowing clarity that Greene brought to the page.

He went and met with the man, flattered by being copied, but puzzled over why. That was the kind of thing that he wrote about day after day.

Bob Greene was one of the early exponents of participatory journalism. For example, while it might be interesting to write about life on the road with a major rock band - in this case Alice Cooper in 1973 - the focus changes when you're actually performing with the band.  Greene didn't need a guitar to do that; the members of the band on stage with Alice didn't even play their own instruments. The music was provided by musicians offstage and the drama was supplied by Alice himself, acting out his macabre Grand Guignol-style show.

And Greene played Santa Claus in the show, the rousing finale of which featured Santa Claus being pummeled by five musicians.

Hey, it was the 70s! What can I tell you?

Greene also turned his high school diary into a sort of nonfiction novel called "Be True To Your School," he became an associate member of Jan And Dean, the 60s surf group, he wrote about his family and his daughter's birth and turning 50, and he wrote a lot about The Greatest Generation.

It seemed like he would hang around long enough to become one of the Grand Old Men of newspaper writing. Instead, horribly, he was revealed as one of the Dirty Old Men of newspaper writing.

Greene's career crashed and burned in 2002, after a young woman brought it to the attention of the newspaper publishers that he had been in the habit of luring young women who sought to interview him about his techniques into unsanctified congresses in a hotel room that he maintained for just that purpose.

Four months later, his wife, who had been ill for some time, passed away.  He has not written for newspapers or magazines since. He wrote a book about the sad slow death of newspapers, and of his days with Jan And Dean, and a book about the five living presidents, and one about catching up with his high school friends.  None of these books were anywhere near the best-seller list.

In his heyday, he would have been all over the story of a man such as he, who had it all and tossed it away in the name of debauching young women who came to him for career guidance.

He has not written a word about that. I'm sorry that I had to.

ET Phone Home

Ever have the feeling that there is a whole 'nother world right here with us?

As evidence, I offer the story that says over a million and a half people with nothing better to do have told Facebook that are "attending" an event scheduled for September 20 of this year at three o'clock in the morning.

The event is called "Storm Area 51, They Can't Stop All of Us." Area 51 is a test and training area in Nevada. Conspiracy theorists are under the impression that the United States government (led by a man who doesn't particularly believe in UFOs) has a lot of UFOs and extraterrestrials caged up in there.

Really.

You see, in 1947, in Roswell, New Mexico, before the US Air Force became a separate armed service, a US Army Air Forces balloon, sent aloft to do nuclear testing surveillance, crashed, and that's where the whole Unidentified Flying Object thing started.  For years thereafter, people were running around claiming that "little green men from Mars" had landed in America, demanding to be "taken to our leader."

I can understand why they are unwilling to do so currently.

But the US government spent 22 years and untold millions investigating the whole UFO deal. The result was, in official language, "Nada Zilch Zero Bupkis" -  none of it was real, and there was "no evidence indicating that sightings categorized as 'unidentified' were extraterrestrial vehicles," according to the Air Force.

And just to throw everyone off the track, the investigation, known as Project Blue Book, was conducted at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, not at area 51 in Nevada or at Roswell.

That'll show 'em!

So this massive meet-up is all set, per Facebook:

"We will all meet up at the Area 51 Alien Center tourist attraction and coordinate our entry," according to the Facebook page. "If we naruto run, we can move faster than their bullets. Lets [sic] see them [sic] aliens."

"Naruto run" refers to how Japanese anime character Naruto Uzumaki sprints around with his arms stretched behind him.  It is now known how running like a sandpiper is supposed to help these funseekers storm a government safeguard, but let them dream on.

Air Force spokesperson Laura McAndrews weighs in: "The United States Air Force is aware of the Facebook post. The Nevada Test and Training Range is an area where the Air Force tests and trains combat aircraft. As a matter of practice, we do not discuss specific security measures, but any attempt to illegally access military installations or military training areas is dangerous.”

This is not exactly like having everyone meet at the food court in the Galleria Mall to do one of those flash mob deals. This range covers 2.9 million acres of land and 5,000 square miles of airspace.  The airspace is restricted. Do not try to fly over it. The government doesn't want you seeing all those downed space ships from Mars and the strange visitors who rode them here, currently caged up and being fed Space Food Sticks left over from the 70s.

{Note to the editor - be SURE that last line is deleted! If that gets out, we're doomed!}

The Apollo Credence

Some of the treasures of the early days of television were lost over the years when some network technician needed a new blank tape, so he (always a 'he') erased some priceless video of a papal visit or a Pablo Casals cello solo or Soupy Sales getting hit with a pie in the face. There are countless episodes concerning lost episodes like this.

Many people believed the moon shot actually
took place, but believed this historic summit
meeting to be an elaborate Disney animation hoax.

But surely, the people at NASA, men and women smart enough to stand on earth, look up at the moon, and say, "I know how we can get a rocket ship and a crew up there to plant an American flag and play golf!" would never be so shortsighted as to get rid of video tapes recorded directly from a camera on the moon, showing the entire moon walk as seen by the Mission Control staff, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin bopping about the surface, and the famous phone call from with then-President Richard Nixon, just a year before he met with Elvis, would they?

I'll save you the suspense in this heat. They would.

A guy named Gary George was interning at NASA in that Leisure Suit Summer of 1976, and at a government auction, he bought 1,150 used reels of videotape from NASA for $217.77.

Some of them he sold, some of them he gave away, but the ones labelled "APOLLO 11 EVA | July 20, 1969 REEL 1 [--3]" and "VR2000 525 Hi Band 15 ips" - some 2 hours and 24 minutes of history - seemed to be worth hanging on to.

As the years went by, NASA came to regret dumping those tapes for pennies on the dollar, realizing that even though they have not been edited or enhanced in any way, they had to agree with the people at Sotheby's auction house that these tapes are the "earliest, sharpest, and most accurate surviving video images of man's first steps on the moon."

Cassandra Hatton, vice president and senior specialist in Sotheby's Books & Manuscripts Department said, "Fifty years ago today, we achieved the world's greatest human accomplishment, and what we universally recall about that event is best documented on these tapes. We are truly over the moon about today's outstanding result."

Yes, she actually said they were "over the moon."

Sotheby's unloaded those tapes from the original $217 bundle for $1.82 million.

This whole story gives hope to all of us dumpster divers, thrift store habitués, and auction attendees. All I have to do is find an original Soupy Sales pie plate, and I'll be in tall cotton.

Warmup act

The dangerous heat wave that took hold of most of the eastern half of the U.S. broiled millions of people, almost literally. The heat was blamed for at six least deaths.

From the midwest to the Atlantic Shore, temperatures were in the 90s. Baltimore hit 100° on both Saturday and Sunday, marking the first time that we've seen triple digits since 2016.

We had to run out to dinner on Saturday and traffic at 5 PM was more like it is at 5 AM...hardly anyone was out; most people were in pools or camped out in air conditioned rooms, icing themselves or each other down with drippy bags of ice right out of the Kelvinator.

In Montgomery County, Maryland, a woman was hiking a mountain path called the Billy Goat Trail and succumbed, apparently from the heat, on Saturday.

And on the national news, CBS showed a guy in New Jersey, all sweaty and thirsty. He was saying that he was running in the heat and said, "I thought I was having a heart attack a couple of times, but I pushed through."

Here is my message to this man.  Go right ahead and "push through," if you must.  If running and sweating in dangerous weather is that important to you, if your health and your future with the people who like you and love you and, one presumes, wish to have your continued presence in their lives means so little, and if you think that losing another gallon of water and half a lb. of gluteus maximus means more than being safe, then, by means, you just push on through.

But do us a favor. Young people might be watching, and they might see an adult on television advising people to keep running in 100° weather even if they feel that they are having a heart attack, and we don't want young people seeing that sort of thing.

Because we already have enough fools.

¡Ay, caramba!

I once scratched my cornea (never mind how!) and after three days of rubbing my eye and washing it out with gallons of eye drops, I gave up and went to the hospital walk-in clinic near where we used to live. A doctor dropped an eye drop - just one! - in there, and the pain went away at once.  Amazing.

On my way out, I asked him for the brand name of the eye drops, so I could be prepared for the next time I walked into a tree branch. (Ooops). He said it wasn't available at Pharm-A-Lot, because these eye drops contained cocaine.

Ohhhhkay.

So I can report from firsthand experience, or eyewitness testimony, as it were, that cocaine is an effective pain reliever, and, sadly, for the past fifty years or so, people have come to use and abuse it for a lot more than treating corneal abrasions.

This leads, of course, to a huge international business in the production and distribution of the stuff, sad to say. People go to great lengths to hide bags of the insidious white powder in or on themselves to sneak it past customs inspectors.

But if you know me, you know I can wring humor out of anything, so with that in mind, I present to you The Stupidest Smuggler Of All Time.

They don't even give his name, for fear of his entire family being made laughingstocks, but he looks like this:

Yes sir. I know it's funny to Google "Florida man" and roar at the resultant tide of goofiness, but how about this Colombian who cleverly secreted half a kilo of cocaine under his toupee, only to be stopped by eagle-eyed police at the Barcelona Airport?

The police said the man drew their attention because "he looked nervous," and maybe that was because he looked like he had two heads and wasn't really using either of them.

And when they took off his hat and toupee, there he stood, with $34,000 worth of the drug on his melon.

“There is no limit to the inventiveness of drug traffickers trying to mock controls,” said the police in a statement.

The report I saw stated that over 100 kilos of cocaine were seized by police at the Barcelona-El Prat airport in 2018.

Come on. It's like you criminals aren't even trying anymore!

Sunday Rerun: Up The Skaggerak

We talked about Friday the 13th superstitions the other day (Friday the 13th, I think it was), and from what I could tell, no one near me freaked out over anything, and we all lived happily ever after.

But maybe that was because I was not in Copenhagen, the capital of Denmark, where, on Friday the 13th, a 13-year old airplane (aeroplane, as the orange man says it) designated as Finnair Flight 666 took off for the ninety-minute flight to HEL.  HELsinki, Finland, to be exact.

And I couldn't tell you why people who are in Copenhagen ("Wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen," as we sang it at dear old Hampton Elementary, from the Danny Kaye movie about Hans Christian Andersen) would want to go to Helsinki, but they piled onto the plane, and against all odds...

It landed safely.  Early, as matter of fact.  

Well, there goes that superstition.  

Now, let's try to figure out why second-graders in my day sang songs with words like:

Wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen 

Friendly old girl of a town 

'Neath her tavern light 

On this merry night 

Let us clink and drink one down 

To wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen 

Salty old queen of the sea 

Once I sailed away 

But I'm home today 

Singing Copenhagen, wonderful, wonderful 

Copenhagen for me 

I sailed up the Skagerrak 

And sailed down the Kattegat 

Through the harbor and up to the quay 

And there she stands waiting for me 

With a welcome so warm and so gay 

Wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen 

Wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen 

Friendly old girl of a town 

'Neath her tavern light 

On this merry night 

Let us clink and drink one down 

To wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen 

Salty old queen of the sea 

Once I sailed away 

But I'm home today 

Singing Copenhagen, wonderful, wonderful 

Copenhagen for me 

And of course, the next year we were singing about Mammy's little baby liking shortnin' bread in minstrel accents.  Elementary school music classes got me like ??? 

The Saturday Picture Show, July 20, 2019

To welcome visitors to my hometown of Towson, Maryland, some talented people are painting this mural on the wall outside a restaurant right off the main drag, York Rd. Represented are segments of the Maryland flag, the Tigers of Towson University, the Gophers of Goucher College, Black-Eyed Susans (the state flower), a hard crab, the Blast indoor soccer team, which plays at the Towson U arena, and the legendary clock tower on Stephens Hall at the University. Not shown is anything to do with Towson High, an egregious omission if ever there was one.

Now you're really lucky - you've found a FIVE-leaf clover!

This logo for the 2020 Olympics shaped up nicely, 2020 being a round number in many ways. There are always five Olympic rings, representing the five continents competing, and the colors white, blue, yellow, black, green and red are the six colors on all the national flags of the world.

Stories they could tell: the Apollo astronauts celebrate the moon landing, 50 years later.

Someone is really thinking here. How many times have you been at the office and there's a huge cloudburst just as you leave for lunch or home? Well, now, you never have to worry about your umbrella! It's right there!

This week's free wallpaper!

The insurance company always wants a diagram of the accident scene. This must have lightened up the day for everyone over at GEICO.

Instead of training wild animals to be actors, Disney has trained humans to generate simulacrums of animals through computerization. You'll be seeing this face a lot, trust me.

Book It

I live among books. Literally! Between me and Peggy, we have stacks and stacks of books...books we've read and want to save for later reference (or an annual re-reading, such as In Cold Blood or The Catcher In The Rye), books we have yet to read (I've never gotten around to even cracking A Child's Guide To Richard Nixon, which someone gave me when Old Pinocchio-Face was vice president), and extra copies we somehow acquired and will donate (there's a Little Free Library right around the corner from my Planet Fitness), and of course there's always The Book Thing Of Baltimore, the internationally famous warehouse full of free treasures. Just imagine, a free education, yours for the taking. You really have to see this place!

Fortunately, we have enough space in the house for the stacks and shelves of books we own. I find comfort in books, and knowledge, and enjoyment. If I have a book with me, I figure I'm never alone.

And some books, even if I haven't opened them since Watergate was in the news, it just feels good to have them around. It's like an old friend that you don't necessarily have to talk to every five minutes, but you know they would be there in one minute if you need to hear from them. The collections of Robert Benchley's essays or compendia of letters from writers such as Jack Kerouac or Gore Vidal are books I can pick up, open at random, and find myself awash in the memory of the first time I read that selection.  Or the fourteenth time!

I will confess to one big change in my reading habits. Because I was raised by parents who lived through the Great Depression, I was acclimated to not wasting anything, be it food, clothing, or money.  For that reason, many times earlier in life, I continued to plow through books that I found absolutely awful.
It might have been because I spent money for the book, maybe it was because I kept thinking that no one could really write this poorly and I thought with each turn of the page, it would all get better, but it didn't (John Grisham comes to mind).

But The Corrections changed everything. This hefty turgid log was a winner of the National Book Award and was on all the best seller lists, and the critics all broke their necks to praise it. I bought it, I started it, and I was stultified from the first. I kept thinking of the line in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne ceaselessly into the past.” I really had the feeling that the books was dragging me with the current into the Sea of Bad Fiction, but did I stop reading?  I did not, but when I was finished at last, I vowed never again to stick with a book I was not enjoying. I dropped it like a bad habit! Because it was.

You can usually spot a dozen or so copies of it at the Book Thing!

The Climb

Trevor Hahn is one of the people who have climbed a dozen of Colorado's "14ers," the 14,000 + foot peaks that dot that state like cloves on a ham.

"I’m a huge outdoor enthusiast,” Hahn, a Colorado native, told a news station. “Just getting into the back country where you don’t see a soul.”

“I just love to be on top of a mountain because I can hear the expanse around me,” Hahn said.  Hearing matters to him...

He can only see light, no shapes at all. Hahn has been legally blind since birth, living with macular degeneration, iritis and glaucoma.

But he wasn't about to let visual challenges keep him on the ground.  He uses  adaptive techniques, things like hearing bells and moving in the direction of the sound, or hearing voice commands from hiking partners.

With these methods, he climbed Gokyo Ri mountain in Nepal - a 17,575-foot summit, but didn't find the experience as satisfying as he hoped it would be. "It it didn’t really give me a purpose. Like, I was just following this bell,” Hahn reports. “It would be really cool if I could have a purpose on the trail.”

And then...

Last year, Hahn and his wife Mandy met Melanie Knecht through No Barriers USA, a group that exists to help people with challenges get into adaptive sports. Melanie lives with spina bifida; she has never walked, but when she met a man who depends on hearing voices to be guided up mountains, she said, "Well, I have a voice."

They became friends and realized the possibilities of her eyes helping his and his legs working for her.  They call it “Hiking with Sight.”

They rigged up a harness that Hahn wears like a backpack; she sits in it, facing forward to see what's ahead, and she gets to leave her wheelchair behind and see places she couldn't previously reach.

“We both serve a purpose on the trail and a huge responsibility to each other,” Hahn said.  Knecht's voice commands tell Hahn about rocks, cliffs, logs, and what-all else is ahead.

For Knecht, the toughest part is remembering the task of calling out the obstacles ahead while enjoying the beautiful views.

“I want to describe what we’re seeing so Trevor has a mental picture,” Knecht said. “Then, I have to be like, 'Oh gosh, we’re turning left!'”

For Hahn, the hard part is building the strength to carry and balance a person on his back. That takes endurance. It's understandable that he needs to stop often for breaks.

“If you have a crazy idea, find another person that also agrees with that crazy idea and then it’s not crazy anymore. It’s just an idea,” Knecht said.

I saw their story on CBS News and it's amazing to see them getting up and down those hills. But it's our daily reminder that two humans can unite to conquer any challenge.

Did someone MAKE you do this?

Yesterday, we talked about the San Fermin Festival in Pamplona, Spain, where humans undertake the foolhardy task of running through cobblestone streets as bulls, unhappy in the knowledge that they are about to die in a bullfight, try to exact the same bad ending on the humans among them.

Spanish tourists can round out their summer of fun by partaking in La Tomatina on August 28.  That's the day when 20,000 people will waste food, and an afternoon they might have spent reading, by heaving 30,000 pounds of tomatoes at each other in Buñol, a little village near Valencia, Spain.

I saw the story on "60 Minutes" this Sunday past about Chef Massimo Bottura  ("The Pavarotti of pasta") who has worked out a way to take food that's about to wave goodbye to its expiration dates from grocery stores and use it to feed the unemployed and homeless.  This takes place in "refettorios" - high grade shelter food service spaces - and there are six of them: London, Paris, Rio de Janeiro and three in Italy, and more are planned.

Bottura is a man who makes paper out of seawater to wrap around his filet of sole. He gets $500 for a 12-course tasting menu supper. so maybe he would have a better use for 30,000 pounds of tomatoes than this wanton waste.

                                        Quite frankly, the worst of this is the unconscionable waste of food, and the other appalling aspect reminds me of when people started wearing Doc Marten shoes when they didn't have to orthopedically, but just wanted to be like everyone else, lugging around a pair of anvils all day for fashion's sake. I used to wonder what they would say if someone forced them to wear those shoes, or if being chased by bulls or pelted with ripe tomatoes were some sort of punishment or forced prank.


















I guess I'll never know.

Bull

Eight.  The total this year came to eight. Four Spaniards, two Australians and two Americans.

No, we're not talking about winners of the Nobel Prize or the Academy Awards or even the Teen Choice Award. This motley crew of eight fools comprises all the people who were gored this year during the weeklong funfest known as the San Fermin festival, held annually in the northern Spanish city of Pamplona.

On the final day of the gala bloodarama Sunday, a chocolate-colored bull named Rabanero let the other five he had been running with go on ahead while he, playful as ever, hung back and started a commotion all on his own. Rabanero flipped a guy over his horns, slamming him into the cobblestone street, and then clipped two other runners, forcing them into a wall like Stork did to the marching band in "Animal House."

All over Spain, admirers are filling out applications to join the Rabanero Fan Club.

Ernest Hemingway popularized all this San Fermin foolishness in his 1926 novel “The Sun Also Rises.” People travel to Spain and drink  stay up all night to be on the scene when the rooster caws the bulls to action. The, runners dressed in white outfits with a red sash run like thieves in the night as animals weighing around 2,400 lbs  - who are slightly peevish about the whole thing - chase after them like Joey Chestnut chases hot dogs.

Festival organizers fell all over themselves to share the news that there has not been a fatality in this insanity since 2009.

Mississippi Burn

“I don’t trust the perception that the world puts on people when they see things and they don’t ask the questions, they don’t look to find out the truth."

Those are the words of a man from Mississippi, current state Rep. Robert Foster (R-Hernando) who is running for governor of his state. He went on to say to CNN, "Perception is reality in this world and I don’t want to give anybody the opinion that I’m doing something that I should not be doing.”

Oh my Jumpin' Jehoshaphat! What is it that he is so afraid that people will think he's up to?

Well, it's that age-old sin of being with a woman.  And not in that carnal sense, either.  The story is that a reporter, Larrison Campbell, from the nonprofit news site Mississippi Today, asked to spend a day on the campaign trail, a ride-along with the candidate, as it were.

The problem is that Campbell is a woman! So Foster said he'd be willing to have her along, but she would have to bring a male colleague along so's the tongues down South wouldn't get to waggin'.

He wants to be governor of
a state with this flag.

(I just checked my calendar. It's still 2019 here in Maryland.)

“I’m a married man and I made a vow to my wife. And part of the agreement that we’ve also made throughout our marriage is that we would not be alone with someone of the opposite sex throughout our marriage. And that is a vow that I have with my wife” is how Foster said it to CNN, going on to say, "I didn’t want to end up in the situation where me {sic} and Ms. Campbell were alone for an extended period of time throughout that 15- to 16-hour day. And so out of precaution, I wanted to have her bring someone with her, a male colleague.

Back home in Yazoo City, Foster can't be too mad about all this, because his inane fear has brought him national attention, most of it negative, but still. It's all susPENCEfull, you know.

Foster

And when Foster told CNN that he would have acceded to the same request from a male reporter, Campbell replied, sensibly, "Why is it my responsibility to make you feel comfortable about something that, you know, that is — that, again, as your campaign director said on the phone with me, is this weird request that you have?”

Foster's reply:  "It’s my rules, my truck.”

I very much doubt that any couple ever made vows that preclude being in a room with a person of the opposite sex, but this is probably appealing to people whose sense of sanctimony is highly defined. I know that casting onself in that self-righteous "I'm so divine and so much better than you sinners" mode is a solid election strategy for those seeking the votes of the easily duped, but I have to tell you this: if a man is going to cheat on his wife, he will do so if he is chained to a gurney and on the way to the hospital with severe injuries possibly requiring amputation following an accident involving his car and a southbound freight train and one of the onlookers looks pretty that day.

And on the other hand, if a man is not inclined to cheat, he could be placed in a harem full of wanton, licentious women and nothing would happen.

Sorry to tell you that, Mr and Mrs Foster, but that's the truth, and what's funny is, deep inside, you both know it.

Sunday Rerun: Pants on Fire

Sometimes as I cast about the world wide nets to find news to share with you, I see a story that I figure must be fake news.  I mean, when you see a story about a lifelong beer lover winning a brewery in a lottery, or someone falling down while getting off the x-ray machine, thus breaking the leg that the x-ray has just shown not to be broken, or a hapless motorist driving a Ford crashing into the display room of a Chevrolet dealership, it catches the eye, am I wrong?

But how does "lawyer's pants catch fire" sound?  And add to it what he was doing at the time the tweed started blazing...

His name is Stephen Gutierrez, and he practices law in Florida. And his defense (unsuccessful) of one Claudy Charles, 49, was taking place in a Sunshine State courtroom when, suddenly, the attorney's slacks began smoldering.   

And Charles was on trial for arson! He set his own car on fire, or, at least, the guilty conviction the jury handed down said he did.  I imagine the jurors were spellbound by Gutierrez's defense of his client ("Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, pay no attention to the evidence the state showed you, and remember, the police have been out to get my client for years and years!") as he stood in the Miami-Dade county courtroom, weaving his masterful defense in an oration that led many observers to compare him to the young Clarence Darrow, or would have if they knew who Clarence was.

And then his pants caught fire.

He was trying to convince the jury that Charles's car had just *poof!* spontaneously combusted, but it was his trousers that did that. It wasn't all that spontaneous. He had several batteries for those electronic cigarettes in his pants pocket, and the cells contacting each other led to sparks and smoke and embarrassment, as Gutierrez darted out of the courtroom and into the mens' room  to scoop water out of the sink and onto his onto his britches.

Gutierrez

The word that stunned witnesses used in describing the smoky scene to the Miami Herald was "surreal."

The attorney returned to the chamber with his pants all wet and his pocket all singed.

"This was not staged," Gutierrez told the paper. "No one thinks that a battery left in their pocket is somehow going to explode. After careful research, I now know this can happen. I am not the only one this has happened to, but I am in a position to shed light on the situation."

And what's great about it is, he doesn't need a flashlight to shed light on it...he can just hold up his pants!

The Saturday Picture Show, July 13, 2019

My advice: don't bother. They don't keep well in captivity, and there are so many of them, anyway.

If you don't think women's soccer is at least as important as men's, let me ask you to name two players on the US National Men's team.

You can duck all you want, but the one on the right shows that the dog days are on the way.

I think this is a good idea for a pooch - it gives him/her a little room to call their own.

They really are so cute when they're little.

It's funny, the contrast between a pretty reflection of water droplets, how the light refracts and disperses, giving the image of a spectrum when it comes in the sky (that's a rainbow) and when it comes in an oily puddle (that's an oily puddle).

I don't see any snow, but I am told these are snow crocuses. I guess that's right. I just like the way they brighten up the field.

One year it's elephants, one year it's horses, and this year it's the unicorn's turn in the sun and in the shadow, if you can get your daughter and yourself positioned just right in the shadows.