The Saturday Picture Show, November 30, 2019

If you've always wondered what to feed a porcupine, it looks like cookies are a good choice.

This helpful website insists that a mixture of vinegar and oil will restore old timeworn wooden furniture. They say the vinegar removes old dirt and wax and the oil then puts a shine on things. Maybe. I don't know, but how many other home solutions also double as a nice salad dressing?

Curb painting extraordinaire.

Everything still looked good for the unbreakable Tesla truck window, until a second later.

Continuing our series spotlight on English breakfasts, this one sure has it all! Eggs, chips, beans, bacon, mushrooms..no English muffin?

I have no respect for people who push service people around just because they can.

You know this cat! He's Smudge, star of a million and one memes with that shrill-faced pointing lady!

This is the greatest clapback ever, and it's just for those of us who can't help but spot spelling and grammar errors. It's a Moroccan soccer crowd telling their opponents the correct conjugation of "to appear."

"When Black Friday falls you know it's got to be... Don't let it fall on me" - Steely Dan

Black Friday is here! It's the day celebrated by merchants across America as their chance to put their profit statements in the black, which is their term for making money, which is why they're in business, no matter what impression they try to give you.

It's interesting to look back on a day when The Day After Thanksgiving was regarded as a day to stay home, watch football, eat leftover sandwiches (putting stuffing on a sandwich is almost as cool as using pizza as a pizza topping >>>>>) and wait for the plumber, since Thanksgiving Day is the #1 clogged-drain day of the year.

The term "Black Friday" originated in Philadelphia, among police and bus and cab drivers and anyone else trying to deal with the shopping  and traffic frenzy that happened in the early 1960s. Beside all the shopping, there was the Army-Navy football game, which used to take place on the Saturday after Gobble Day at Franklin Field.

The City Fathers up there in the City of Brotherly Love were alarmed at the negativity being connected to the merry sound of cash registers registering cash by the truckload, so they tried to float the names "Big Friday" and "Big Weekend" as substitutes.  But those names did not, in fact, float.

The original, first, and most famous Black Friday occurred on September 24, 1869, when two financial wizards, Jay Gould and his partner James Fisk attempted to corner the market on the New York Gold Exchange. It turned out that Gould and Fisk had gained the confidence of President Ulysses S. Grant, who had about as much business being president as the man in the moon did. The economy of the United States, still recovering from the Civil War, went into a tailspin for years after this scandal.

The next historic Black Friday was so horrible that it was held on a Tuesday so as not to wreck anyone's weekend. We're speaking of October 29, 1929, when a decade of insane financial practices following World War I led to the first stock market crash, which led to the Great Depression. So many people had bought stock "on margin"  - meaning without money they actually had - that when the bills came due, everyone looked at everyone else to pay, just like when everyone goes to Applebee's for a big lunch. 

It's hard to think of Black Friday as a boon to business with that history behind the term, but for those of you heading to the malls today - and to the REAL malls of today, your keyboards - here's a reminder that tomorrow is Small Business Saturday.  Why not spend a little money at that local craft store or yarn shop or ma-and-pa photo developing place instead of helping Wally World crush the competition?

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving 2019!

You don't have to call me mister, mister!

I read the great "Ask Amy" column every day in the SUN paper, because I am that kind of guy who needs help handling the vicissitudes of life.

One thing I have learned is that it's best to handle your own vicissitudes, but in private.

Anyway, the other day, a 77-year old lady wrote to ask Amy about how to deal with the cringe she gets from being called "young lady."  She is active, still working, so it's not like she's obviously worn down by life. So why do people - she cites "waiters, tour guides and all kinds of public servants" - and mentions that it's ALWAYS a man - marginalize her this way?

I submit, not by any kind of excuse because there is no excuse for such condescending behavior, but the problem is that most men don't know how to appreciate women.  This situation is emblematic of that. There is no reason to use this smarmy attempt at reverse flattery.  How about realizing that a 77-year-old woman is not a "young lady" or an "old lady," but, rather, a "woman"? Age has nothing to do with it. Lots of people of lots of genders are youthful well into their 80s, and plenty of us decided to seem superannuated at 25. Go figure.

And while I was mulling this over, I heard from an online friend who said she did not like being referred to as "honey" by a female customer service rep on the phone. I think it best to save "honey" for people we really know and are sweet on (and they, on us).  BUT there is one exception.

In Baltimore, one of the remaining vestiges of our onetime Southernness is a simple rule that any customer of any retail establishment is often called "hon." Sometimes, it's "honey," but usually, it's "hon," as in, "Did you want the white American cheese, or the yellow, hon?"

And "ma'am" and "sir" are still in vogue here. In my case, I dealt with citizens for most of my working life as a public servant, and referring to them by those honorifics is second nature to me. And noted Southerner Elvis A. Presley addressed everyone that way right up to his sad end.

So will I stop saying that? No ma'am, no sir. And I'll take the yellow cheese, hon.

Seeing Double

As a person who bears the name of several famous people (a Black Panther leader, a big league baseball pitcher, and a World War II general) I am always on the lookout for when it happens to other people.

I mean, there are only so many names, ya know?  Yes, there are thousands of people whose parents named them Dick Johnson or Peter Little or Rod Long out of some offputting sense of humor. There are so many Jim Smiths in the world that there is the Jim Smith Society for them to get together at what must be the most confusing convention in the world.

I'm fairly certain there is only one Reince Preibus, unless there's a Reince, Jr, running around.

The U.S. Census Bureau, which probably employs a lot of people named John Jones, says there are more than 150,000 last names and at least 5,100 first names in common use in America.

I'll tell you how I got to thinking about this. The other day I heard that middling 1969 instrumental hit "Groovy Grubworm" by Harlow Wilcox and turned to my well-worn Wikipedia to see if guitarist Harlow was any kin to radio announcer Harlow Wilcox, who was famous on the "Fibber McGee And Melania" show in the 1940s.

I mean, "Fibber McGee and Molly." Sorry. It was a typo. I have the greatest typos.

Even though "Harlow" and "Wilcox" are not really common names, it's a bit unusual that the musician and the narrator were not related at all and yet had the same name.

How about the two Albert Einsteins?  Sure, there's the theoretical physicist genius, and the one we know as Albert Brooks!

Two Roger Taylors? Both are drummers! One for Queen, and one for Duran Duran, the band that also had a guy named Andy Taylor, who was NOT the sheriff of Mayberry!

There was Randy Jackson, former bassist who was best known for claiming singers were "pitchy" on "American Idol," and there was Randy Jackson, second youngest of the Jackson 5ive!

Actor Michael Keaton was born Michael Douglas, but he changed it so we wouldn't confuse him with Michael Douglas, the actor with the prognathous jaw who was also not Mike Douglas the TV host who was born Michael Dowd.

Spike Jones was an American bandleader who did crazy parodies of popular songs and was also regarded as something of a jackass. Spike Jonze (the pride of Rockville MD, born Adam Spiegel) was the co-creator of the beloved "Jackass" TV and movie franchise.

But please remember, no matter what your name, there can be only one YOU! I checked!

Toy Story

Every year around this time, two things start happening:

1. Toy companies start advertising like crazy on TV and on any other platform where they can reach their target audience (people who play with toys)
2. Parents start going crazy about how many toy commercials their kids are seeing, with subsequent demands for a WowWee Pinkfong Baby Shark Official Song Puppet, a Barbie Dreamplane Playset, a Monopoly: Fortnite Edition game, or a Nintendo Switch. 

Toys can be simple! Anyone want to guess what was the first toy advertised on television?  It only cost 98 cents that year (1952) and it was the first Mr Potato Head set!

And for those of you younger than the Boomer generation, hold onto your potatoes: in those early days, we had to supply OUR OWN POTATO to stick the little plastic nose and glasses and ears and I don't know what-all else into.

It's true! We would ask our mothers or go down to the root cellar and rip off a spud to play with Mr Potato Head.  He was invented in the wartime 40s by a man named George Lerner, up in Brooklyn, New York.  Lerner had seen his nephew taking potatoes out of the family Victory Garden and use grapes for eyes and carrots for eye to make his own toys.

So Uncle George, on the lookout for his first million, ran with the idea, but since there was a war on, people in charge of selling toys thought it might not be too great an idea to be "wasting" food like that.

Any kid could have told George Lerner that he could have used beets to make Mr Beet Head. No one would care if they never saw another stupid beet on their plate, but no. George waited for the war to end and put Mr PH in production on his own in 1949, before he sold the whole deal to Hasbro Toys in 1952.

That was the year we saw 'Tater on TV and put down our Slinkies for five minutes to run around the house sticking body parts on a russet potato.

It wasn't until 1964 that Hasbro received enough complaints about rotten potatoes moldering away in American toy chests from Portland ME to Portland OR, leading them to come up with the plastic Potato Head we still see on shelves today.

One last mashed potato fact, just for gravy. In both the real and plastic incarnations, PH smoked a pipe, and did until 1987, when he lost the pipe and became the official 'spokespud' of the American Cancer Society's Great American Smokeout.

I don't think we can ask much more from a vegetable toy!






Mr. Potato Head is an American toy consisting of a plastic model of a potato which can be decorated with a variety of plastic parts that can attach to the main body. These parts usually include ears, eyes, shoes, a hat, a nose, and a mouth. The toy was invented and developed by George Lerner in 1949, and first manufactured and distributed by Hasbro in 1952.[1] Mr. Potato Head was the first toy advertised on television[2][3] and has remained in production since its debut. The toy was originally produced as separate plastic parts with pushpins that could be stuck into a real potato or other vegetable. However, due to complaints regarding rotting vegetables and new government safety regulations, Hasbro began including a plastic potato body within the toy set in 1964.[4]

Over the years, the original toy was joined by Mrs. Potato Head and supplemented with accessories such as a car and a boat trailer. Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head may be best known for their appearances in the Toy Story franchise, voiced by Don Rickles and Estelle Harris, respectively. Additionally, in 1998 The Mr. Potato Head Show aired but was short-lived, with only one season being produced.[5] As one of the prominent marks of Hasbro, a Mr. Potato Head balloon has also joined others in the annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.[6] Today, Mr. Potato Head can still be seen adorning hats, shirts, and ties. Toy Story Midway Mania!, in Disney California Adventure at the Disneyland Resort, also features a large talking Mr. Potato Head.[7]


Contents
1 History
2 Versions
3 In popular culture
3.1 Toy Story series
4 Games
5 See also
6 References
7 External links
History
In the early 1940s, Brooklyn-born toy inventor George Lerner came up with the idea of inserting small, pronged body and face parts into fruits and vegetables to create a "funny face man". Some speculate he got the idea from his wife's nephew Aaron Bradley, who was seen placing sticks inside of potatoes in the family garden.[2] Lerner would often take potatoes from his mother's garden and, using various other fruits and vegetables as facial features, he would make dolls with which his younger sisters could play. The grape-eyed, carrot-nosed, potato-headed dolls became the principal idea behind the plastic toy which would later be manufactured.

In the beginning, Lerner's toy proved controversial. With World War II and food rationing a recent memory for most Americans, the use of fruits and vegetables to make toys was considered irresponsible and wasteful. Toy companies rejected Lerner's creation.[2] After several years of trying to sell the toy, Lerner finally convinced a food company to distribute the plastic parts as premiums in breakfast cereal boxes. He sold the idea for $5,000. But in 1951, Lerner showed the idea to Henry and Merrill Hassenfeld, who conducted a small school supply and toy business called Hassenfeld Brothers (later changed to Hasbro). Realizing the toy was quite unlike anything in their line, they paid the cereal company $2,000 to stop production and bought the rights for $5,000. Lerner was offered an advance of $500 and a 5% royalty on every kit sold. The toy was dubbed Mr. Potato Head and went into production.[2]

Mr. Potato Head was "born" on May 1, 1952. The original toy cost $0.98, and contained hands, feet, ears, two mouths, two pairs of eyes, four noses, three hats, eyeglasses, a pipe, and eight felt pieces resembling facial hair. The original Mr. Potato Head kit did not come with a potato "body", so parents had to provide their own potato into which children could stick the various pieces. Shortly after the toy's initial release, an order form for 50 additional pieces was enclosed in every kit.[2]

On April 30, 1952, Mr. Potato Head became the first toy advertised on television. The campaign was also the first to be aimed directly at children; before this, commercials were only targeted at adults, so toy adverts had always been pitched to parents.[8] This commercial revolutionized marketing, and caused an industrial boom. Over one million kits were sold in the first year.[2] In 1953, Mrs. Potato Head was added, and soon after, Brother Spud and Sister Yam completed the Potato Head family with accessories reflecting the affluence of the fifties that included a car, a boat trailer,[9] a kitchen set, a stroller, and pets called Spud-ettes. Although originally produced as separate plastic parts to be stuck into a real potato or other vegetable, a plastic potato was added to the kit in 1964.[1]

In the 1960s, government regulations forced the Potato Head parts to be less sharp, leaving them unable to puncture vegetables easily. By 1964, the company was therefore forced to include a plastic potato "body" in its kit. Small children were also choking on the small pieces and cutting themselves with the sharp pieces.[10] About this time, Hasbro introduced Oscar the Orange and Pete the Pepper, a plastic orange and green pepper with attachable face parts similar to Mr. Potato Head's. Each came with Mr. Potato Head in a separate kit. Female characters Katie the Carrot and Cooky the Cucumber also made an appearance. Hasbro also made a fast food based line called Mr. Potato Head's Picnic Pals. Some characters were Mr. Soda Pop Head and Frankie Frank. The friends and pals were later discontinued, but Funko revived Oscar and Pete as bobbleheads (along with a Mr. Potato Head bobblehead) in 2002.

In 1975, the main potato part of the toy doubled in size and the dimensions of its accessories were similarly increased. This was done mainly because of new toy child safety regulations that were introduced by the U.S. government. This change in size also increased the market to younger children, enabling them to play and attach the facial pieces easily. Hasbro also replaced the holes with flat slats, which made it impossible for users to put the face pieces and other body parts the wrong way around. In the 1980s, Hasbro reduced the range of accessories for Mr. Potato Head to one set of parts. The company did, however, reintroduce round holes in the main potato body, and once again parts were able to go onto the toy in the wrong locations.

In 1985, Mr. Potato Head received four postal votes in the run for mayor of Boise, Idaho in the "most votes for Mr. Potato Head in a political campaign" as verified by Guinness World Records.[citation needed]

In 1987, Mr. Potato Head became "Spokespud" for the annual Great American Smokeout and surrendered his pipe to Surgeon General C. Everett Koop in Washington, D.C.[1]

In 1995, Mr. Potato Head made his debut in Hollywood with a leading role in the Disney/Pixar animated feature Toy Story,[1] with the voice provided by comedian Don Rickles.

In 2000, Mr. Potato Head was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame at The Strong in Rochester, NY.

In 2006, Hasbro also began selling sets of pieces without bodies for customers to add to their collections. Some of these themed sets included Chef, Construction Worker, Firefighter, Halloween, King, Mermaid, Police Officer, Pirate, Princess, Rockstar, and Santa Claus. In the same year, Hasbro introduced a line called "Sports Spuds"[11] with a generic plastic potato (smaller than the standard size) customized to a wide variety of professional and collegiate teams.

Versions

Sunday Rerun: It pays to live longer

I need to get to Missoula, Montana and have dinner at the Montana Club, where they have a special deal when it's your birthday: they give you your age off the bill, expressed as a percentage.  So let's say you turn 40 ("you turn 40"), and now let's say you tie on the feedbag at the club. Your salad, baked patootie and steak will be served with a savings of 40%!

So the older you get, the more you save at the Montana Club! A geezer such as I can really clean up, sure, but how about Helen Self?

She was 100 when she went for a birthday ride on a Harley.

At 108, she made the exclusive list of "the two oldest people in Montana."

So now, she's 109, and off she went to the Montana Club. She had the breaded shrimp platter for $14.99, which came with a salad, a loaded baked potato and coleslaw.

Nick Alonzo is the owner of the Club, and true to his word, he gave her a dollar and change and charged her nothing!

In return she gave him a kiss on the cheek.

On her way out, Self was heard to say, “I’ll come back next year,”  according to her daughter Shirley Gunter, 86. “Don’t tell his wife I kissed him.”

You gonna bet against her being there?

The Saturday Picture Show, November 23, 2019

Beatles Socks! To be worn while listening to "The Foot On The Hill."

I love old brick buildings but I would not enjoy sitting on this balcony.

And I changed my mind about wanting Santa to bring me a drone. I think I'd rather have an eagle.

From the air, this is what Baltimore's Key Bridge looks like. It's near where the Sparrows Point steel plant used to be.

We are being warned not to plug our phones into these public charging USB jacks. Hackers have taken them over and have them set up to steal your identity info and the pictures from last summer by the time you unplug. So take your portable charger and plug it into the electric outlet; that's safe.

Up in his attic, Rod Stewart has this giant play city set up with a real model train and all sorts of toy cars and buildings.

Rock painting was big news a couple of years ago and I wonder if anyone is still doing it.

Everything about this ad points to its vintage - November 1971 - from the stilted ad copy to the Big Mac that looks like no Big Mac you've ever, ever seen.

Tray cool

We've been on the topic of accidental discoveries lately. I'm sure that it was just an accident, the first time someone dropped a Mento mint into a diet Coke. I mean, no one intentionally would do that, although when I was a youth, dropped salted peanuts into a bottle of Coke was quite the thing to do.

If you'e a kid reading this at home, please ask someone older if it's ok to drop a Mento into a bottle of diet Coke. And then get ready to help them mop it up.

I remember reading that someone came up with the idea of Velcro when walking through a field and finding that burrs stuck to anything loop-shaped. That was the idea behind Velcro!

So today, let's talk about a B.A. mistake. The year is 1953, and it's coming up on Thanksgiving season, and a buyer for the Swanson Frozen Food people has made a slight miscalculation.

(For all I know, this was a group snafu, but every time I hear this story, I always picture one guy at his desk with an adding machine with two yards of tape spilling over his desk, right next to the full ashtray and rotary phone.)

That slight snafu was the purchase of too much turkey for the upcoming holidays. 260 tons too much.

That's 520,000 pounds of turkey, sitting frozen in 10 railroad cars, and the boss is getting frantic.  What to do with all this excess!?

Along came a man named Gerry Thomas, a Swanson salesman who flew all the time. Salesmen can fly, but turkeys cannot.

But Thomas had an idea that soon took wing. He said, "OK, we have a shipload of turkey. Let's go buy a mountain of cornbread stuffing, a river of gravy, enough peas and sweet potatoes to sink the Titanic again, and several million pats of butter to adorn the peas 'n' yams, and 5,000 aluminum trays, sectioned off. Then we'll hire women to work on an assembly line with a spatula in one hand and an ice cream scoop in the other to assemble these components into individual meals.

And we shall call them Frozen TV Dinners!"

And they shall be sold for the reasonable price of 98 cents each.

That was 1953. In 1954, Swanson sold 10 million TV dinners.

Here in 2019, Swanson's share of the $1.2 BILLION frozen dinner business in America is only 10 percent. They were pushed aside by Stouffers, Marie Callender, and others.

I looked it up, and what 98 cents would buy you in 1954 would be worth $9.34 today. Meanwhile, TV dinners hardly cost more than $2 now if you get them on sale, which is how I work it.

Come on over and let's nuke a couple!

The wrong right leg

The widow of the late U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings, Maya Rockeymoore Cummings, made the decision to have a double mastectomy last week. This was called a "preventive" surgery; she did not have breast cancer, but her mother died from that disease and her sister was recently diagnosed with it, so her decision to have her breasts removed to prevent the disease is one that many women around the world are making.  I wish her the best and acknowledge what a tough personal medical decision this must have been.

HowEVER...the grammar guy in me barked when a local television anchor referred to this as "preventable" surgery. She meant to say "preventive" surgery.

And that leads us down another wormhole, because there exists a debate among people much smarter than I as to whether it's acceptable to say "preventative" instead of "preventive." I say, save a syllable, and call it preventive, but don't call it "preventable."

When I researched this, I found out something even more interesting. 

Did you know there is a topic, one which most medical people would prefer not to talk about with you, known as Wrong Site Surgery?  These mistakes involve:

• surgery performed on the wrong part of the body (e.g. left knee instead of right knee)
• wrong surgery performed on the right part of the body
• right surgery performed on the wrong patient

I've gone under the knife a total of three times, and the last two, the surgeons about to slice into me (back and knee) took marking pens to draw arrows on me pointing exactly to where the surgery was to take place.  Since I was not going to be conscious when the cuttin' was happening, this left me in a peaceful state as I dropped off with the anesthesia.

I had to trust them to do the proper surgery, and they did, and as to whether I was the proper person on whom to operate, I guess they read the stylish ID bracelet that the hospital stuck on me.

We like to think that the people we entrust with our medical care are wise and well-trained and careful, but things happen.  That's why a lot of people give up practicing medicine and become lawyers.

How about the "Lazy Gertrude"?

Names (we were talking about them yesterday) can be so cruel. For instance, there are thousands of men born long before 1987 who now walk around with the name "Bart Simpson."  Their parents had no way of knowing!

People named "John" are not too fond of others saying they have to go to the, uhhh...John.

But how about poor Susan? A lot of people named Susan must be spinning around because of that ubiquitous kitchen appliance, the Lazy Susan.

It's a tray that rotates.  We have salt, pepper, napkins, and spices on ours.  You see the big ones in Chinese restaurants so that everyone can pass around the sliced duck in garlic sauce, the crispy seaweed with chopped scallops, the pork dumplings, the won ton soup, and the dim sum.

"Dim sum" is a name given to me by a Cantonese algebra teacher to describe how dismal I was at adding numbers.

The Chinese are kinder about it than we are! They don't call them Lazy Susans at all; they say 餐桌转盘 (p cānzhuō zhuànpán), which means "dinner-table turntables."  Of course, Susan is not a real Chinese name, any more than Chop Susie.

The term "Lazy Susan" is intermingled with the term "dumbwaiter."  Today, a dumbwaiter is a counterbalanced small elevator that is commonly used to send meals or supplies from one floor of a building to another. It's not for people to ride in, no matter what that wiseguy in the kitchen told you.

But in the 19th Century, apparently, we were obsessed with having meals without putting up with loquacious waiters who yakked and yammered all through dinner, preventing diners from talking about the horseless carriage and the newfangled typewriter and telephone. So people wanted a way to have food sent up from the kitchen without a lot of yakety yak, and invented a hoist to bring up the venison and wild okra.

If you think about it, we are a demanding lot, Americans. We want food without any social interaction and we want to send the egg rolls around to Aunt Fritzi without actually having to reach up and pass them to her.

Baby Names here! Come get your baby names!

Let's say you're pregnant.

"You're pregnant."

OK, now let's say you're stuck for a name for the forthcoming child.

I cannot help with the delivery of the baby. Your ob/gyn is really good at helping people out.

But I can help with the delivery of some name suggestions. I hold in my hand the list of Top 10 names for the 2020 crop o' tots.

Before we get started, stop and think about how Reese Witherspoon's parents and Billie Eilish's parents saw into the future when they named their daughters. "Reese" and "Billie" are names that will be called out in the first grade six years from now.

This list comes from the Nameberry  website, where they log all the names mentioned among their 11 million page views this year. The list might not square up exactly with the Social Security Administration's list, but I'm not about to agitate those good people who send me a check every month.

Nameberry co-creator and CEO Pamela Redmond Satran said this in a press release:

"The names here offer baby namers a heads up on trends and specific names destined to get more popular in 2020 and beyond."

Top 10 Girl Names

1.  Adah

Nameberry spots a trend of girl names starting with "Ad...," such as Adeline and Adele.  How about "Adventure"?  Most kids are!

2. Reese

Actress Reese Witherspoon seems to be all over the place lately. Name your little girl that way, and she will be all over the house!

3. Mika

"Morning Joe" cohost, Mika Brzezinski, whose sad fate it is to be married to her cohost, Joe Scarborough, has a name that people are taking for their babies.

4. Paisley

Social Security pegs this name at #52, but the name Paisley, originally Scottish, and generally applied to a swirly fabric pattern, was a favorite of the late Prince, the entertainer who stopped using his name in favor of using a logo.

5.  Amina

She was the mother of the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him.

6. Teagan

This name is Irish and Welsh and it's one of those unisex monikers that will cause confusion forevermore.

7.  Nova

A nova is a celestial explosion on the surface of a white-dwarf star. A dwarf star is the small remnant of a star that burned out (e.g, Nicolas Cage). What a nova does is have gaseous explosions after getting close to a companion star.  Kids supply their own gas, you know.

8. Aura

That's the distinctive atmosphere around people.  See # 7.

9.  Pearl

Pearl is one of those old-timey names that are making a comeback, like Heloise, Murgatroyd, and Blanche.  A woman named Pearl attempted to teach me to play the piano for a time. She stopped coming around.

10.  Billie
When Baltimore-born Billie Holiday (born Eleanora Fagan, but anyway...) was popular, so was her adopted first name. Current music hotshot Billie Eilish gets credit for bringing it back. Eilish's real name? Eleanora Fagan! No, I'm kidding. It's Billie Eilish Pirate Baird O'Connell.

I'm all for people naming a kid of either gender "Pirate."  Middle initial must be "Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrr."


Top 10 Boy Names

1.  Austin

Austin, Texas, is described as a cool city surrounded by Texas. Look for lots of little Austins.

2.  Alva

Ms Satran claims that every kid in school knows whose middle name was Alva. The lightbulb over your head will go off when you remember it was Thomas Edison, but I haven't gotten word of any form of Edisonmania sweeping the land...

3.  Acacius

Names ending in an "S" are cool now, which might explain why people think my name is Marcus. But it isn't. Acacius is old Greek and Latin name meaning  "thorny, or innocent, not evil."  That doesn't sound like me either.

4. Tate

It's a Norse name meaning Cheerful, but a good way to prove someone is from Baltimore is to say that name and wait for them to sing the car dealer commercial "Nobody has what Tate has, no sir!"

5. Diego

I think this is a character from one of those cartoons, right?

6. Easton

There's an Easton on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.

7.  Lucius

It's the old Roman word meaning light. Some people might not be wild about it for a name, but as it happens, I love Lucius.

8.  Cash

Name your son Cash, and be prepared to explain forever whether is was for Cassius, a leader of the plot to kill Caesar, or for Johnny Cash, who was never photographed killing a Caesar salad. That might be too much to explain.

9. Ash

There was an Asher in the Bible and there are ash trees from which baseball bats are made. Wooden you rather choose something else?

Luca Brasi

10.  Luca 

Name your son this if you wish, but if the boy grows up to emulate Luca Brasi, don't blame me. A nice suggestion for a middle name would be Garrot.


Nameberry also lists these as trending unisex names: Piper, Indigo, Octavia, Harlow, Elio, Finn, Kit, Kieran, Phoenix, Remy and Rowan.

Great Goo-ga-mooga

Rod Wax.  That sounds like a great DJ name to me, but then again, every name in the world except for "Donald Rumsfeld" sounds like a terrific DJ name in my ears.

Well, you can't hear Rod on the radio, but you might find you have a handful of him. 

I should explain that.  You might not think of Titusville, Pennsylvania, as oil country, as you would Dallas and Bakersfield. However, in the 1850s, they were pumping lots of black gold out of the ground around Titusville, and the men who worked on the oil rigs were known far and wide as tough hands with tender hands. 

And why, you ask?  Because of our friend Rod Wax.

Oil rig pumps produce a gooey residuey substance around the rod that work like pistons up and down, and the oil rig hands soon found out that rubbing that goo on their hands made them softer than a baby's asterisk*, cured cuts, and had an overall salubrious effect on their skin.

And that rod wax, once purified and canned or jarred, is white petrolatum, sold in stores as Vaseline, and handy for a hundred and one jams and cuts and burns.

I inherited this ancient jar among the
ancient tools in my father's ancient
tool shed. It's great for keeping
parts of equipment moving.

A man named Robert Chesebrough was the guy who happened to be in the oil fields in 1859 and saw what nice hands the hands had, so he shouldered the burden of inventing the purification process and elbowed his way to the top of American commerce, gaining a foothold that had him arm in arm with others in the cosmetic business, until the Vaseline line was sold (handed off) to Unilever in 1987.

So there you have it, where we got yet another product that was accidentally discovered and has a marvelous accidental use!

Next week, let's talk about the first guy who thought to put a slice of cheese on a hamburger!


* I'm out of Vaseline jokes now

Sunday Rerun: Not the Tom Selleck Bluebloods

Hey! What's blue and costs $15,000 a liter?

It's not that stuff you always run out of for the windshield washer, that's for sure.  And it's not the new Blueberry flavor of Sunny D drinks. And it's sure not Aqua-Velva aftershave.

No, it's horseshoe crab blood.

That's nice to know, right? And now you wonder why people are willing to pay 15 Gs for a bottle of blue blood. Well, here's the deal...

The blood of the horseshoe crab has remarkable antibacterial properties, and they don't even use Purell! But 450 million years of evolution has given them great ability to fight infection.

I mean, as many times as you've been to the beach, have you ever seen a horseshoe crab with a cold?

$15,000 worth of crab blood being harvested,
 and then they'll go right back to what they were doing (most of them)

As evolution has worked it out for these cute little critters, they have this bright blue blood, which your science teacher could tell you is because their oxygen is transported by hemocyanin (which is copper-based) whereas we vertebrates think we're the big deal because we use iron-based hemoglobin.

Crabs and other invertebrates (creatures without backbone, e.g. Mitch McConnell) fight infection by the use of amebocytes, while the rest of us use white blood cells. The Atlantic Horseshoe Crab, (Latin name: Limulus polyphemus) has highly-evolved blood to fight infection, so highly refined as to be of great value to the medical community.

I also contribute to the medical community by bringing my doctor all the New Yorker cartoons I can find involving patients sitting around in their underwear in the exam room of a doctor's office hearing lab test results, but I guess that's not the same.

Technical Explanation Dep't: If you drop one part in a trillion of bacterial contamination into this blue blood, it will coagulate for lab testing in under an hour; whereas the same test on mammal blood takes two days, plus postage. Coagulan is the name of  the chemical that makes this possible, And science uses it for testing medical equipment and vaccines prior to use, making sure all is right.

A quarter of a million crabs are harvested every year for this purpose. Each crab donates 30% of his or her blood, and is sent back to the ocean with the thanks of all mankind and an Amazon gift card. Without their contribution, many people would die from infections.

Perhaps 10-30% of the volunteer crabs do not survive, and I'm sure the  people at PETA are steamed about it, but in the grand scheme, I think saving lives counts for a lot. And what's more, the horseshoe crab's cousins, the blue crabs, wind up getting steamed too!

The Saturday Picture Show, November 16, 2019

It's time to say Goodbye to BeiBei, the panda who has been here on loan from China for four years. He's going home on the 19th, and will probably take this Big Bambu with him.

Soon all these fall scenes we love so much will be all snowy and white. I'll still love them!

You have the six pack and the case of 24 and the box of 30, and now here comes the Family's Coming Over case of 3240 cans. Supply and demand.

We sang about him but in that pre-internet era, no one had a firm eye on what a kookaburra looked life. Here he is, Merry Merry King of the Bush, forlornly eying the devastation caused by Australian woods fires.

As we continue our series of eye-catching architecture, let's visit this Upside Down House in Poland.

Like rats and mice, beavers are rodents, and all of them have to chew and gnaw all the time because their teeth never stop growing, so they will become so big that the poor animal can't chew or even close his mouth. This beaver finished knocking down this birch tree and even left his dessert for later.

Because some people just have to have Coke in their coffee, or coffee in their Coke, the Coca-Cola company is bring you Coke Plus Coffee. They might be jittery about how well it will be received: it has 14 mg of caffeine per 100ml, h is more than regular Coca-Cola (9 mg) but actually less than a cappuccino (43 mg).

It's mid-November and experienced shoppers know, it's time for Christmas bazaars! They're the best place for homemade doodads and cookies and I don't know what-all else.

Courting trouble

Avid Simpsons viewers remember Lionel Hutz, the low-grade lawyer voiced by Phil Hartman, as saying,

"If there's one thing America needs, it's more lawyers. Can you imagine a world without lawyers?"

Lionel's character, sadly, went away when Hartman was murdered in real life, but Selma Bouvier-Terwilliger-Hutz-McClure, one of Marge's twin sisters, is still around, working for the DMV, and, presumably, will be enjoying her hobby of filing nuisance lawsuits with the assistance of new counsel.

Also in real life exists a man named Daniel Balsam. No friend of spam, he. But instead of doing what the rest of us do - deleting it while cursing - he sues the people who send it to him.

After receiving just one too many unwanted message, Balsam quit his job in marketing, enrolled in law school, and started making some sweet coin - he's taken in over a million dollars in court judgments and lawsuit settlements with companies he accused of spamming him.

He also set up a website called danhatesspam.com to help you join the bonanza, if you wish to.

"I feel like I'm doing a little bit of good cleaning up the Internet," Balsam said.

Cisco Systems Inc. figures that 200 billion spam messages clog the WWW every day - and that's 90 percent of all email.

Other attorneys claim that Balsam is using the legal maneuver of suing out-of-state firms that would rather shell out a settlement than have their ambulance chasers actually have to leave the office and go to a courtroom.

"He really seems to be trying to twist things for a buck," said Bennet Kelley, who is a defense attorney.

I'll pause for a second to let that one sink in.

"There is nothing wrong per se with being an anti-spam crusader," said Kelley, but Dan abuses the processes by using small claims court. A lot of people will settle with him to avoid the hassle."

I will state for the record that I know many upstanding attorneys, all fine men and women.

But there are others...

To be specific, California law prohibits companies from sending junkmail that leads the recipient to think it's not coming from a commercial venture, or tries to make you think you're getting something for nothing.

Pro tip: You ain't.

Another peg for Balsam to hang suits on is the requirement that any such email gives the recipient the chance to opt out of getting anything more from, for example, letsgetnaked.com.

From porn pushers to the California Asparagus Festival, Balsam takes them all on and usually walks away with a check in his mailbox (the real kind).

I don't like pornography, especially in the wrong hands, as it were, and I dislike asparagus only slightly less.

But I'm not going to court over it!

"I feel comfortable doing what I'm doing," Balsam says. So let's not send him any spam.

You be the judge

There used to be a column in the Saturday Evening POST called "You Be The Judge."

The magazine would provide evidence as proffered in real trials in courtrooms all over. Both the prosecution's side and the defense were stated without prejudice, and then the reader either read it all and decided how the case
should have been decided, or gave up and read the "Hazel" cartoon on the next page.

In case anyone read the whole thing, they would always print the actual verdict.


Which brings us to the Case of Benjamin Schreiber.  Not-so-Gentle-Ben was convicted in 1997 of beating a man to death, and he really looks like the type, am I wrong? ⇉⇉⇉

He was sentenced to life in prison.

In 2015, his heart stopped five times during a procedure at a hospital which treated him. He was a resident of the Iowa State Penitentiary in Fort Madison. Doctors gave him IV fluids and were operating on him to fix damage done by kidney stones when his ticker stopped ticking.

So now he says that since his heart stopped, he was technically dead, so now he should be released because he was sentenced to life, "not to life plus one day".

The court is denying his request to be released, stating, with no small amount of logic, that if he can make such a plea, then he must still be alive.

The Iowa Appeals Court has now ruled that "Schreiber is either alive, in which case he must remain in prison, or he is dead, in which case this appeal is moot."

How do you feel? He seems like such a pleasant fellow that I'm sure the other inmates would want him to stick around for the sunshiny ways he must bring to the morning roll call, lunch mob, and work details.

I say keep him locked up, and make him watch Dr Phil and whatever show Jerry Springer is putting out now all day long.

You?

The Terrorism of Toms River

Meanwhile, in New Jersey:

Former NY Met and NY Yankee ballplayer Todd Frazier checks in to report that he is the victim of terrorism.

I guess you'd have to call it domestic terrorism, because the perpetrators are a rafter of wild turkeys, estimated to number 40-60, parading around the town of Toms River, where he lives, waiting by the phone to see if he'll be hired by another team for next season.

(We call male turkeys, be they wild or Perdue, "toms" the same way we call male cats "tomcats." This deal with calling male animals "toms" dates back to Benjamin Franklin, which makes one wonder why he didn't propose calling them "bens." This has nothing to do with this story taking place in Toms River. We guess.)

Toms River has a section called Holiday City, which is where these gobblers are strutting around (they can run at 20 mph), blocking driveways, chasing people around, even making prank phone calls and ordering pizzas under phony names.

Frazier went on Twitter to say, "They have come close to harming my family and friends, ruined my cars, trashed my yard and much more." And he complained about "Toms River and the Toms River wildlife" not being empowered to force the birds to leave the area, and, in the manner of rich, well-known people everywhere, demanded that the governor get involved, because that's what being a state governor is all about.

"Animal control needs to step up and move these animals ASAP. State wildlife control needs to figure it out," Frazier tweeted.

Mr Frazier might be surprised to hear that humans share the land with all sorts of flora and fauna. Meanwhile, someone who does understand how things work is Larry Hajna, spokesperson for the Dept. of Environmental Protection.

Hajna said the Fish & Wildlife people are working with Holiday Citizen and the local homeowner’s association, but...

"The Division of Fish and Wildlife has offered to trap the birds but so far has not been granted access to a large enough open area to set traps," Hajna said on Friday.

So.  "Come fix this problem but stay off my land to do it."

We had one wild turkey on our deck years ago. Quite an impressive beast. I wasn't fast enough with my snare to be able to have him for dinner.

After all, tomorrow is another day!

If you liked the movie "Gone With The Wind," you might remember Tara.

If you never sat through the movie, well, Tara is not a person, but, rather, a mansion, a plantation, a big ole Southern house where some of the most overwrought acting ever took place.

They built the mansion to make the movie in 1939 at the Selznick International Studios production lot in Culver City, California, and there it stood for 20 years until it was torn down by...wait for it...Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, whose Desilu Productions company bought the Selznick lot.

At first, someone planned to reconstruct the mansion in Northern Georgia, but that fell through, and the pieces of the mansion have been in storage for decades.

Now, the Marietta Gone with the Wind Museum has paid $35,000 for shutters and window frames filmed in the movie.

Visitors to the museum, located at historic Brumby Hall, a pre-Civil War home built in 1851 in Marietta GA, will see shutters and window frames from the front of the house and its left wing. This will include gigantic tall windows and shutters to the right of the front door where Scarlett is first seen at Tara conversing with the Tarleton twins.

Oh, those Tarleton twins. The guy who played Stuart Tarleton was George Reeves, who went on to play Superman on TV and then committed suicide by handgun, which confused the devil out of 8-year-old me.

And if you remember the scene where Scarlett O'Hara yanks (poor choice of words for a Southern scene) down some the drapes to make herself a fine dress dress, well sir, that window frame is also included.

The American Civil War ran from 1861 - 1865. "Gone With The Wind" ran 3 hours and 58 minutes, but it seemed longer than the war itself.

Today is Veterans Day, a day set aside to honor all who have served in our armed forces. We often conflate Memorial Day, a day when we salute those lost in combat, and Veterans Day, along with Armed Forces Day, when we acknowledge those currently serving. Three separate days, each equally important.

When World War I came to an end on November 11, 1918, the day was known as "Armistice Day" until 1954, when the name was changed to Veterans Day, in honor of all who served at any time.

Incidentally, for my fellow grammar enthusiasts, the proper name for the day is Veterans Day, not Veterans' Day.  The US Department of Veterans Affairs website says the attributive case (no apostrophe), rather than the possessive case, is correct "because it is not a day that 'belongs' to veterans, it is a day for honoring all veterans."

And honor them we shall!

Sunday Rerun (from 2016): The times really are a changin'

We heard not long ago that Bobby Vee (born Robert Velline, 1943) was battling Alzheimer's Disease, and the end came yesterday for the man who took up the hiccup-y sound of Buddy Holly and brought it to the top 40 charts many times in the early 60s. He was, indeed, a teen idol, with hits such as "Devil or Angel", "Rubber Ball", "Take Good Care of My Baby", "Please Don't Ask About Barbara", "The Night Has a Thousand Eyes" and "Come Back When You Grow Up" between 1960 and 1966.

But how odd that his passing came just a couple of weeks after Bob Dylan (born Robert Zimmerman, 1941) was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.  Here's the connection. One of Dylan's first music jobs was playing the piano (under the nom de keys "Elston Gunnn") (with three Ns) in The Shadows, Vee's backup band.

Vee was born in Fargo and it was there that he decided to add a pianist to his group. Along came Dylan, who was from Hibbing, Minnesota, and said that he had just finished a job backing Conway Twitty on the road, but failed to point out that he could only play piano in the key of C. Even at $15 a night, it didn't work out, and Dylan put music aside to enroll at the University of Minnesota. Later, he moved to New York and you know the rest of that story (although you never heard it from Paul Harvey.)

Fast forward a couple of years, and Vee finds himself on tour, a rather important pop star playing New York City. He passes by a record shop in Greenwich Village and sees a familiar face on an album cover:

"I was walking down the street. There was a record store there, and there was an album in the front window. And it said, ‘Bob Dylan.’ And I thought to myself, ‘Looks a lot like Elston Gunnn,'" Vee recalled.

And they didn't see each other again for years. In his autobiography "Chronicles," Dylan indicated that he wished Vee had stuck with the rockabilly sound he started out with.

"He’d become a crowd pleaser in the pop world. As for myself, I had nothing against pop songs, but the definition of pop was changing."

However great the differences between the singer of "The Night Has a Thousand Eyes" and "Like A Rolling Stone," Dylan and Vee respected each other's music.  

"I wouldn’t see Bobby Vee again for another thirty years, and though things would be a lot different, I’d always thought of his as a brother,” Dylan wrote in his "Chronicles." "Every time I’d see his name somewhere, it was like he was in the room."

Vee told a Dylan website (there are dozens!) that even though Dylan's music was so wildly different from his, he liked it a lot too.  
"I probably plugged into him on the second or third album, and the stuff was really unusual. It was so far removed from what I was doing. Not long after that, I started listening to his stuff and really became a big fan," Vee said.

So, how nice it was in 2013, two years after Vee had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's, he was at a Dylan concert in St. Paul MN - and Dylan did a version of Vee's first hit, "Suzie Baby."

And Dylan said that of all the people with whom he had ever performed, Vee was "the most meaningful person." And Bob led the audience in applauding as the legendary Bobby entered his final sad twilight. That must have felt good all around.