"You pettifogger, you!"

Some people love numbers; I love words. I love to learn new ones and old ones and enjoy seeing people make them up.

And I love it when people dredge up an old, old word and use it all over the place.

Of course, I'm talking about Chief Justice John Roberts, who blasted both the  Democrats and Republicans during the impeachment trial.  Because senators on both sides were being so vociferously contumacious and disputatious, he dressed them down with a fine old rare word -- pettifogging -- to settle them down.

Roberts, who ordinarily spends his days in the company of well-reasoned individuals who behave like grownups, and Brett Kavanaugh, sat through the barbs and insults, and said that sort of talk was inappropriate, citing history to remind a roomful of lawyers why they need to act like big boys and girls.

"In the 1905 Swayne trial, a senator objected when one of the managers used the word 'pettifogging' and the presiding officer said the word ought not to have been used," Roberts said. "I don't think we need to aspire to that high of a standard, but I do think those addressing the Senate should remember where they are."

Roberts did not make it clear just what the objection was. Possibly, the solon lodging the gripe did not know what it means ("worrying too much about details that are minor or not important," according to Merriam-Webster) but I suppose he was saying that in 1905, senators found it objectionable to nit-pick, and in 2020, they're openly calling others dishonest.

The Chief Justice continued, "I think it is appropriate for me to admonish both the House managers and the President's counsel in equal terms to remember that they are addressing the world's greatest deliberative body. One reason it has earned that title is because its members avoid speaking in a manner and using language that is not conducive to civil discourse."

Or not. Perhaps he figures that saying so makes it so.

At any rate, his job here is largely ceremonial.  He presides over the trial by  keeping the clock, reading aloud the rules, and announcing the vote tallies.
The Senate majority could overrule any decisions he were to lay down, so it's better than he serve us to use rare words that we can learn and use.

I would suggest that Roberts turn to merriam-webster.com, a site I visit like kids go to YouTube. They feature a Word of the Day, and recently, that page has featured some fine ones: "parvenu," "sublimate," "lackluster," "euphoria," "outlandish" and "nurture" among them.

All but the last of these could reasonably be expected to be seen in any article about Congress. Nurturing is not a thing they do.

Insensitive

We speak of, and bemoan, the divisiveness in our country, and we wonder what we can do about it.

And then we see people who should be the very people who work to bring us together being the people who create the divisions.

Take this soldier:

This John Evans is a big deal in the Army, I guess. I mean, a Major General! Wow! Is that better than a General General?  Anyhow, on Sunday, when the news came along of the deaths of Kobe Bryant and his daughter and seven other American citizens that Beetle Bailey Evans here is supposed to be serving, Evans chose to send that text marginalizing those nine deaths.

By the way, you and I are paying him a salary of $15,381 per month, plus housing and benefits and free camouflage clothing.

"Lots of people mourning a basketball player this morning."  As if that's a bad thing. Soldier Guy goes on to say HE will use his time to remember SPC Moore and his Family (sic).

Where did people get this habit of Capitalizing initial letters to stress the importance of nouns?

No doubt about it, SPC Antonio Moore, who was a 22-year-old Army Reserve combat engineer who came from Wilmington, N.C. deserves our mourning, and his family, our sympathy. He died in Syria on January 24 in a vehicle rollover accident. Regrettable, and sad.

But  - earth to Evans - it is possible to mourn this brave soldier, and to mourn "a basketball player" and his daughter and the seven others aboard the helicopter, and to feel sorrow for their survivors.

The United Nations World Population Prospects analysis says that an average of 7,452 people die every day in the US. That's one every 12 seconds.

Every one of those 7,452 had two parents, and every one of them had people who knew and loved them, no matter how glorious or lachrymose their individual lives turned out to be.

And guess what else, Major Doofus? It is entirely possible to grieve for more than one of them at a time!

You would know that if you were a fully-realized person, but your "you're in the Army or else you don't matter" myopic tunnel vision is keeping you from joining the rest of who have feelings for all that matters.

And, most of the time when people say, "I meant no disrespect"...they did.

Youth will serve

One great idea that schools have of late is this concept of a senior project, where, before being handed a diploma, a student has to accomplish something meaningful.

Here in Baltimore County, MD, a student must complete (1) Seventy-five hours of student service that includes preparation, action, and reflection components and that, at the discretion of the local school system, may begin during the middle grades; or (2) A locally-designed program in student service that has been approved by the State Superintendent of Schools.

(Hint to anyone seeking hours: join a volunteer fire company.)

I'm sure students and teachers alike understand that doing this sort of thing is much more valuable than writing an essay on the causes of the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC).

For example, how about this young man named Hunter Wart? (With a name like that, he should go into radio. He'd be a natural!)

But here's what he did for his senior project:

Hunter Wart

Hunter spent more than a year fundraising - cutting grass and hauling in scrap metal  - and he came up with $10,000, with which he bought a Safe Haven Baby Box for the Seymour, Indiana, Fire Department. These boxes are meant to provide a place for babies of parents in distress to shelter the child. When the door is opened to provide access to the little haven, an alarm notifies firefighters.

"It was a lot of hard work," his mom Julia Kwasniewski said on CNN. "A lot of blood, sweat and tears."

The hard work paid off last June, when he proudly oversaw the installation of the box at the fire department. Such boxes are meant to prevent abandonment of newborns.

Then, last week, the alarm went off, firefighters checked it, and found a healthy baby girl inside - only an hour old, says Fire Chief Brad Lucas.

"We are ecstatic that the system was used," Lucas told CNN. "It worked perfect, exactly how it was designed to work."

Lucas's people provided care and took her to a hospital by ambulance. Once the baby is released, she will in the custody of state child services workers, and, at Hunter's request, she will be called "Baby Mia."

A Safe Haven Baby Box

Safe Haven Baby Boxes has now installed 24 of their units in several states. They are a nonprofit organization founded by Monica Kelsey, who was herself abandoned as an infant.

Kelsey said that around two to three abandoned babies died annually in Indiana before she started her lifesaving crusade, and not one has perished since.

As for young Mr Wart, he says, "I'm hopeful that one day she will see the story of how she was safely surrendered in the Safe Haven Baby Box I raised the money for...and search online for me."

And now, he is starting a new campaign to buy another box for his city.

Stupid games

There's an anger in this world that you can almost feel in the air when you read stories like this one.

I'm sure that Mr and Mrs Og, the first cave dwellers who put a door on their antre, were bothered when the troglodyte kids from down the street knocked on that door and ran off to invent fire or something.  The Ogs went to the door, found out they had been pranked, and were angry for a second, and then went back to painting pictures of mammoths on the cave walls.

Something is wrong when such a prank, stupid as it is, turns out fatal, but it happened the other day in Southern California, where a man chased after a carload of kids who had played ding-dong-ditch on him and rammed their vehicle.  Three of the six boys in the car were killed.

The six buddies had been on a sleepover when one of them came up with the idea of jumping into someone's pool or ringing someone's doorbell and hightailing it out of there. Dumb ideas, but they should have been harmless as well.

Sergio Campusano, 18, was the oldest of the crowd, and he was driving them around in a Prius. He survived, as did two other guys. Drake Ruiz, Daniel Hawkins, and Jacob Ivascu were all killed when a car driven by Anurag Chandra, 42, a resident of Corona CA, about 60 miles southeast of Los Angeles.

The carload of guys apparently picked a house at random and one of them rang Chandra's bell.  I'm sure they did not expect an enraged man to barrel out of the house and chase them down in his own car.

“He got really close and I was like, What is this guy doing?” Campusano told NBC4. “And I felt like a nudge forward like he hit me from the back and I was like, There’s no way he just did that… like, this guy is insane.”

Campusano said that when the man rammed their car from the side, he thought, "If anything happens, I love these guys.”

“He just got next to me and I was confused. What is he going to do?” Campusano said. “I just saw him ram his car into my back. And I whipped into my window and I blacked out and then I remember I woke up on the floor. I don’t remember how I got there. I was shaking."

The teens' car had collided with a tree, killing the three 16-year-olds. Chandra fled the scene, but witnesses followed him to a nearby house, where he was arrested, and charged by the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office on three counts of murder and three counts of attempted murder. The DA’s office also filed a “special circumstance allegation of multiple murders” against him.

The three victims

Our lives are filled with minutes, and inside all of those minutes are crossroads and choices.  Some choices are obvious; when we're cutting a sandwich in half, we understand that we could do serious damage to ourselves if we deliberately use the knife on our fingers or arms. 

But you can be sure that if any of the seven people involved in this horror had their choices to make over again, things would be far different for all of them now.  That's why it's important to stay in the moment and choose wisely, to avoid a lifetime of sorrow.

Roll Over, Rover

If you're like me, you think that "Jezero Crater" is one of the men vying for the honor of playing second base for the Orioles this year, and that means neither of us know much about Mars.

Mars is a planet, and we are interested in seeing what goes on there, so we have rovers roving around the place, including the Curiosity rover, the InSight stationary lander, and several Mars orbiters flying overhead.

And NASA is about to send a new rover up there this year, so they have a contest going on to pick the name for the machine. Students in grades K-12 submitted 28,000 potential names. 4,700 volunteer judges cut down the list to 155 semifinalists, and now that list is down to 9.

It's like the Wimbledon brackets, only without the annoying tennisness.


Students across the US, ranging from kindergarten to high school, submitted more than 28,000 potential names for NASA's Mars 2020 rover. A panel of 4,700 volunteer judges whittled that list down to 155 semifinalists.

Here they are, and we have to choose before liftoff this summer:

• Endurance, (Kindergarten to 4th grade, by Oliver Jacobs of Virginia)
• Tenacity, (Kindergarten to 4th grade, by Eamon Reilly of Pennsylvania)
• Promise, (Kindergarten to 4th grade, by Amira Shanshiry of Massachusetts)
• Perseverance, (5th to 8th grade, by Alexander Mather of Virginia)
• Vision, (5th to 8th grade, by Hadley Green of Mississippi)
• Clarity, (5th to 8th grade, by Nora Benitez of California)
• Ingenuity, (9th to 12th grade, by Vaneeza Rupani of Alabama)
• Fortitude, (9th to 12th grade, by Anthony Yoon of Oklahoma)
• Courage, (9th to 12th grade, by Tori Gray of Louisiana)

I note with dismay that the following names were overlooked:

• Elvis
• Leon
• Beep Beep Yr'Ass
• Lynyrd
• Skynyrd

Lori Glaze, director of NASA's Planetary Science Division, says, "Thousands of students have shared their ideas for a name that will do our rover and the team proud. Thousands more volunteered time to be part of the judging process. Now it is the public's opportunity to become involved and express their excitement for their favorites of the final nine."

My Rover would have decals
like this and Yosemite Sam
mud flaps

Once the poll closes, each contestant will speak to a panel that includes Glaze; NASA rover driver Nick Wiltsie; NASA astronaut Jessica Watkins; and Clara Ma, who named the Curiosity rover when she was a sixth-grade student in 2009. 

At first glance, I thought it said that Nick Wiltsie was a NASCAR driver, and that would have been funnier.

After all this, the decision will be made, just in time to have someone letter the name on the expensive Marsmobile.

The winning name  will be announced on March 15. The student will also get to go to Florida in July, which is as close as one can come to Hell on Earth, to see  the launch from Cape Canaveral.

It turns out that Jezero Crater is the site of a lake that existed 3.5 billion years ago. Mitch McConnell and his first wife honeymooned there when it was new.

Sunday Rerun (May 2018): "Love Is A Hurting Thing" (Lou Rawls)

I'm happily married for 45 years as of soon, so it's been a long time since I was diving into the dating pool, and I guess the rules have changed.

Back in the day, the dating ritual involved meeting a girl, taking her out once, and then driving past her house 129 times a day, just hoping she was coming out to dump the trash.

Now, in the electronic age, no one takes out the trash; they "hit the delete button." And that's what a man in Phoenix ALLEGEDLY had to do 65,000 times recently, just because he had one date with a woman by the name of Jacqueline Ades.

It turns out, there is a dating site for verified millionaires, a site known as Luxy. Ms Ades, 31, met her inamorato there, and they went out once.

Once was plenty for the man, unnamed in charging documents.  But, “I felt like I met my soul mate and I thought we would just do what everybody else did and we would get married and everything would be fine,” Ades said, instead of saying, "He didn't like me, so that's that."

The eyes. Look at the eyes.

No, what she did was, she sent him 65,000 text messages, which is even more than I get from those Nigerian princes-in-exile.

Apparently, the first 64,999 messages did not get her in trouble, but when she hit "send" for the 65,000th time, she was arrested and charged with threatening, stalking, harassment and failure to appear in court, according to The Washington Post.



Ms Ades told the local news in AZ that she sent her date all those texts  because “loving him selflessly brought me his information.”

A lot of the "selfless" texts included anti-Semitic insults and threats to kill the man, which moves this case from the realm of the peculiar right into psychoville.

She was getting those messages out at a 500-per-day clip, but she must have grown fearful when she got no replies, so she upped her game, breaking into his house and taking a bath.

I know that sounds nutty, but she did use the bathtub. Taking a bath in his kitchen sink, now that would be odd.

Police say she also showed up at his work pretending to be his wife.

Never lacking for nerve, Ades admitted sending 65K texts and said she thought she had sent more than that, intoning these immortal words:

 “Love is an excessive thing.” 

Her trial is pending.

The Saturday Picture Show, January 25, 2020

I feel sorry for people who never made a call in a phone booth. They were actually like little rooms where you could have a private phone conversation without everyone within 100 yards having to hear all about how your boss and your spouse and your entire immediate family and workgroup don't understand you. There was little room to pace in that little room, but still, you could feel privacy.

This is a basketball game made from a Pizza Pizza box. I guarantee you, it would take longer to assemble this mess than it would interest you to play with it.

If you live to be a centenarian - or turn 100 years of age - in Barbados, they put you on a postage stamp, which is even cooler than a Smucker's jar. I'm more than 2/3 of the way there!

And they wonder why I think I would love to live in Canada!

A little bit of plywood, some tools and stain, and here's the coolest cat toy around!

We live in a global society. The Koreans now have their own version of the Cat Lady memes.

You can't hold nature back. Even as they are cleaning up in Australia, scorched trees are budding with new growth.

The folklore has it that when you see a cardinal, it means a departed relative is thinking of you. OR, that a cardinal lives near you. You make the call.

Sword of weird

Love and marriage. People fall in love, and the lure of marriage overcomes many of them, and things are great for weeks on end, and the next thing you know, there's a nasty divorce and the guy winds up in a crappy one-bedroom apartment with a bullfight poster and a Keurig machine.

But even at that, some people just have to carry everything to extremes.

This brings us to David Ostrom, 40, from Paola, Kansas.  Long removed from the rice-and-shoes-at-the-reception days, things did not go well when he and Bridgette tried the marriage thing.  So now, he's asking a judge in Iowa to grant him a trial by combat.  He wants to take on his ex and her lawyer in a sword fight.

(Check your calendar. This is the year 2020 and you are still in the United States.)

Ostrom says Bridgette, now of Harlan, Iowa, and her attorney, Matthew Hudson, have "destroyed him legally," according to papers he dropped in court out there.

Accordingly, he's asked the Iowa District Court to let him have 3 months to find katana and wakizashi swords for his battle.

He seems normal.

In court records, Ostrom is arguing that, "To this day, trial by combat has never been explicitly banned or restricted as a right in these United States," and that it was used "as recently as 1818 in British Court."

You won't find it surprising that the Ostroms are bickering over custody rights, visitation rights, and "who's gonna pay those property taxes?" -  common themes in divorces, they tell me.

Mr Ostrom said that part of all this stems from frustration with attorney Hudson, whose legal training allowed him to deduce that since a duel could mean a death or two, “such ramifications likely outweigh those of property tax and custody issues.”

"It should be noted that just because the U.S. and Iowa constitutions do not specifically prohibit battling another person with a deadly katana sword, it does prohibit a court sitting in equity from ordering same," Hudson wrote.

Hudson asked the court to suspend Mr Ostrom's visitation rights and get him to have a court-ordered psychological evaluation.

Judge Craig Dreismeier, said in a court filing, not to look for his decision anytime soon. I guess not. He has to finish laughing first.

Hot stuff

Woody Allen once said that it isn't the venom of a rattlesnake that will kill you - it's his bad breath!

Well, here's news about a red hot chili pepper that actually can kill you.

From England comes the Dragon's Breath pepper, developed by Mike Smith at the University of Nottingham.  Don't try to eat it, though; it might be the last thing you ever have.

 You see, there is a thing called the Scoville Scale, which measures how much capsaicin a pepper has.

And as you know from watching commercials and Dr Oz, Capsaicin is a neuropeptide releasing agent selective for primary sensory peripheral neurons... an agent to control peripheral nerve pain.

The Scoville Scale says that Dragon's Breath rings up 2.48 million heat units, which completely blows the current record holder, the Carolina Reaper, out of the ballpark.  U.S. military pepper spray hits about 2 million on the scale.

It's almost as if one could make one's own personal pepper spray for self defense by loading some Texas Pete hot sauce into a water pistol, but you didn't hear that from me.

There is even a website for devotees of hot peppers. My favorite is a sauce someone bought me from T.J. Maxx, of all things. It was called Smokin' Tonsils, and they did!

But they look so tasty!

But from that website we learn that bell peppers, mainstays in the produce aisle at Try 'N' Save, have a recessive gene that blocks production of capsaicin,  habanero pepper is way down the scale (350,000 Scoville units) and the jalapeño pepper, which people think is a hot number, only registers 8,000 heat units.

Chances are, you won't find Dragon's Breath by the bagful at your grocery, but in no case should it be regarded as a food or condiment. Just ingesting it can put you in anaphylactic shock, so just stick to Texas Pete for your fried chicken, please. The real purpose of Dragon's Breath is as a topical numbing anesthetic for people who are allergic to regular anesthetic.

I love the intersection where food meets medicine.

Stool Sample

I found a dollar bill that someone had been using as a bookmark in a library book I took out once.

For days, every time a car drove up our street, I thought it was the racket squad, come to knock down the front door with a battering ram as a guy in a trench coat stood on the front lawn, barking, "Awright, we know you're in dere, come on out with your hands up and bring dat dollar bill!"

I about broke my neck to take the book and the ill-gotten gain back to the library, where the librarian looked at me askance as I turned in the loot.

SO imagine how it feels to be Howard Kirby, of Owosso Township, Michigan.

After Christmas, he dropped $70 at a Habitat For Humanity store and took home some furniture, including a footstool which "didn't feel right" once he got it home.

His daughter-in-law unzipped the cushion on the stool and found $43,170 stashed within.

What Kirby did was, he went back to the shop and found out who donated the lot of furniture he had bought.

“I do what I can to be as much like Christ as I can, and this is the moral thing to do,” Kirby, 54, said. "This is going to help them. I’m so happy for them.”

It turns out, the footstool was part of a living room set donated to Habitat For Humanity by Kim Fauth-Newberry and her husband. The couple inherited the  furniture from her grandfather, Phillip Fauth, who died in July.

Ms Fauth-Newberry said Grandpa Fauth was one of those old-timers who paid his way in cash all along, and he had stashed this loot in the footstool, telling no one about it.

“This is crazy,” Fauth-Newberry told the news last week, staring at stacks of hundred dollar bills.

Mr Kirby (l) and Mrs Fauth-Newberry

Odds are, I will buy the farm one day, and if you come and pick through what I leave behind, take care to find a hollowed-out book titled "See? I Told You I Was Right About Everything!" by R. Limbaugh.  Look inside that book, very carefully, and you will find the words cut out of every page, leaving enough space to hide almost $50,000.

You won't find any money, just a place to put some, if you have any.

The Yanks are coming

In a pinch, I once went to a dentist for a wisdom tooth extraction. I guess the first hint would have been that he was open for business on a Saturday afternoon, and said, "Sure, I'm here! Come on up!"

So I did, and he offered me the laughing gas, and served up a shot of hooch in one of those Tony The Tiger mugs that Exxon stations used to hand out with a fillup.

"Drink this, and we'll get started," he chortled. I was young and dumb then, so we plowed ahead with this ill-advised surgery. I am no longer young and dumb. I'm old now.

I bring this up by way of introducing you to Seth Lookhart, until recently a professional toothyanker up in Anchorage, Alaska.  He will soon have a new address featuring iron bars, following his conviction on dozens of charges, after he was filmed pulling a patient's tooth as he stood on a hoverboard, according to the Alaska Department of Law.

A total of 46 felony and misdemeanor counts were dropped on Lockhart in Anchorage Superior Court. The judge, Michael Wolverton, called the evidence presented by the state during a five-week bench trial "overwhelming." the Department of Law said in a news release.

The state of Alaska charged Lookhart with "unlawful dental acts," making the outrageous claim that performing a dental extraction procedure on a sedated patient while riding a hoverboard "did not meet professional standards."

Add caption

And it's not like turning his operatory into a clown show was where he drew the line. They also got him for medical assistance fraud.  He was billing Medicaid for procedures that were either unnecessary or not properly justified. They convicted him of theft of $25,000 or more because he diverted funds from Alaska Dental Arts, among dozens of others.

Wolverton said it looked like Lookhart "believed that he could get away with his fraud indefinitely, and that he believed his scheme was foolproof."

And he said the evidence of what this joker was up to "was often supported, and often in excruciating detail, by Lookhart's own texts, photos and videos."

Veronica Wilhelm was just one of his victims, and she testified she did not consent to being filmed while sedated nor to having her tooth taken out while Lookhart was on the hoverboard.

You know how these trials go. They had to ask.

Ms Wilhelm didn't even know about the video until she was contacted by investigators, she said. "I would've said 'hell no!' No, that's unprofessional," she testified. "It's crazy."

And of course, according to the local news up in the 49th state, Wilhelm looked at  Lookhart and told him she thought he "could've made better choices."

The thing that I'm taking away from all this is that Lookhart went through 12 years of education, then college, then dental school, and that somewhere along the line he figured that performing Jackass-style stunts while conducting a tooth extraction would be all right.

What?

“The time is always right to do what is right.” - Dr. Martin Luther King Day 2020

Sunday Rerun: Noises On

"I'm officially at the age where I hate loud and unnecessary noises."

That was a tweet from someone that was re-posted by a friend of ours, a young woman we like a lot. And it got me thinking.

I really dislike noise when others are playing their music loudly on stadium-sized speakers, disturbing others for miles around. That's a sign of inconsideration.  And frankly, the music that others play is rarely the music that I want to hear. So no, just spare me from the latest by Marshmello and Bastille. Or the Captain and Tennille, either way.

On the other hand, guys like noises, and since every man of every age is just a larger version of what he was in 5th grade, we like noises all the time. My wonderful perfect wife often stares at me in wonderment as I amuse myself with gargling noises, cracked knuckles, and the amazing air-driven noises I can make just by squeezing my palms together.

Not to gender-generalize, but let's just say I don't know a lot of women who laugh at noises men make...

But any man will tell you, a crashing, breaking tray, dropped in a diner, accompanied by a crescendo of tinkling china and clattering silverware, delights us like few other things. We look around the room and wait for the chortling to begin.

Popping popcorn, sizzling bacon, a baseball being hit by a wooden bat and being sent on a trip of 450 feet, popping bubble wrap, wind in autumn that makes the drying leaves on a tree rattle and sigh, thunder, rain on a metallic roof...these are a few of my favorite things!

Ironically, when a comedian launches a joke that falls with a thud and no one is laughing, it's said that all that's heard in the room is the sound of crickets.  And even that is worse than silence!

The Saturday Picture Show, January 18, 2020

 Conceptual art at its finest. Here's a door with a mirror in the sand. What is the artist saying to us in this piece? And why?

We are astonished when we see animals making use of rudimentary tools. Here's a tiny frog police officer, on the beat with his nightstick.

Taco Bell had that dog saying, "Yo quiero Taco Bell," and it was popular. They could dress up a cat in similar garb, but the problem would be that the cat will never say what he or she wants.

This man likes to thank the hotel staff wherever he stays, so on his last night, he takes newspaper, torn paper towels, and makes some sort of animal tribute for them. It's all very nice, but maybe the chambermaid would rather have a few more dollars and less paper to clean up. I don't know.

I would be glad to walk down this path at night, as long as I had a police escort, air cover, and several types of body armor. I don't know where this is, but it's Creepsville to me.

I guess you saw that woman on the Canadian version of Family Feud, all happy to answer the question "What is Popeye's favorite food?" Here's the right answer: he loved his spinach! But the woman in Canada got $10,000 worth of free eats from the chicken chain.

So you're a crocodile, and what's a great place to hide?  Right: the mud!

We went deep into the animal kingdom this week, didn't we? Now here's this tiger, and he and I have something in common.  We both have a gold tooth, although mine is far less prominent. Have a happy week!

Christmas on the beach

Just like the swallows returning to Capistrano every year, we can count on seeing trucks filled with sad old used Christmas trees prowling the neighborhoods every year.  Ah, those trees, so resplendent in December and so lugubrious in January, piled up down by the mailbox and the electric pole, waiting for the county truck to haul them off.

I don't know what our county does with old discarded Christmas trees, but here's a good use for them along the New Jersey shore: the beach town of Brigantine uses them to replenish their sand dunes. It's a useful alternative to having the US Army Corps of Engineers move sand around to rebuild the sandhills.

There are a few towns in Jersey where this is done. I haven't heard of it happening here in Maryland, but as John W. Doring, superintendent of public works for Brigantine, says, "We help create our dunes, but they’re created by nature.”

The plan is, the town wrangles 2,000 to 3,000 old Christmas trees, and public works employees lay them down parallel to the ocean, single file, tip to trunk at the base of the dune.

“It helps catch the sand the way a beach fence does,” Doring said. “The sand blows up, it covers the trees and then the dune starts. Once it’s buried, the tree breaks down and it feeds the dune grass.”

By the numbers: they pile them up 10-15' high, three dunes per block, 60-70 trees per dune.

There's just one hitch: you have to remove all the lights and tinsel and ornaments like the one that says Baby's First Christmas.

Last year, they replenished about eight blocks worth of dunes. They will eventually need to be replaced, but there is no foreseeable shortage of Christmas trees ahead, so this should help the beach stay beachy!

Fruit Of The Boom

Deuteronomy 22:11 teaches us:

You shall not wear cloth of wool and linen mixed together.

And this was written long before some fool came up with the idea of dacron and orlon and polyester.

My taste in clothing is simple, and you can bet that most of it is cotton. I do not like the feel of polyester fabric; it feels like I'm wearing a shirt or pants made of Saran Wrap (and no one needs to see that!)  So I don't wear it. It's my choice.

But if I worked for a corporation that forced me to wear a uniform, I would have to, and now it seems that besides feeling clammy all day, those uniforms might be insalubrious.  Not to mention unhealthful and noxious.

It's bad for you, ok?  And now people are going to take action.

Some Delta Air Lines employees are suing Lands' End. They have been forced to wear unis made by that firm since 2018, and people are sick about it, they say.

This horrible clothing even makes people stand funny

The lawsuit was filed in Wisconsin, home of Lands' End, and it joins another suit filed by two Delta flight attendants in New York in May.

In the Wisconsin suit, the employees seek class-action status for 64,000 Delta employees - including flight attendants, airport customer service employees, ticket and gate agents, and SkyClub workers.

The claim is that the uniforms caused skin rashes, headaches, fatigue and other problems. The workers ask that Lands' End should take back the uniforms and start a health monitoring program for those affected.

Delta, which is not named as a defendant, said they invested in "a rigorous toxicology study" of the uniforms.

"The results of the study confirm our uniforms meet the highest textile standards," the company said, "with the exception of the optional flight attendant apron, which we removed from the collection."

The lawsuit says Lands' End added chemicals to the clothes to make them stretchier, wrinkle- and stain-resistant, waterproof, anti-static and deodorizing.

Nice idea, but to do that, they added amounts of chromium, mercury and formaldehyde, and other lovely chemicals, in excess of industry standards.

I see a lot of advertising for clothing, and then I don't buy any, but I don't recall seeing an ad for Lands' End (or any couture, haute or otherwise) that proclaims, "Now with even more chromium, mercury and formaldehyde!" 

Chromium is for car bumpers, mercury is for thermometers, and formaldehyde is for embalming dead people. I don't wish to be any of these three things, so I'll be over here in my jeans and T-shirts, if you won't mind.

A national disgrace

Just days after the football season ceased to mean anything to me, news from the world of baseball popped up, and this is a big deal. Houston Astros general manager Jeff Luhnow and manager AJ Hinch were both suspended by Major League Baseball and then fired by owner Jim Crane after MLB announced results of their investigation of a sign-stealing scandal.

It turns out that the Astros cheated their way to a World Series title in 2017. They used a camera to zoom in on the finger signals opposing catchers used to tell their pitchers what to throw next (fastball, curve, off-speed pitch, or a fit) and then relayed this information to a player sitting in the dugout next to a big Rubbermaid trash bin.

The player would then thump beats in a code on the trashcan to tell the player at the bat to stop scratching his goobers and be ready for whatever sort of pitch was next.

MLB determined that this was wrong and worthy of punishment...but, curiously, decided that there was nothing to be gained by stripping the cheaters out of their ill-gotten title and awarding to the Los Angeles Dodgers, who were rooked out of it.

Crane told the press that he did not think the Astros' World Series title in 2017 was "tainted."

In other news, he does not think the sun is hot or that there's an egg in an omelet.

I think their title is tainted, and I think they should not be allowed to fly the pennant at their stupid ballpark which is named for orange juice, and I think they should be forced to alter their uniforms to reflect the new team name "Cheatin' Astros."

That's what I think.

Hinch and Luhnow: out on their astros

By the way, this is not new. We talked before about the 1951 New York Giants baseball team, and now they had a coach with a super spyglass out in the distance reading the signs and relaying them through an electric buzzer, and that team won the National League pennant, although they lost the World Series to the Yankees, four games to two.

My Orioles are currently in a rebuild, being engineered by a guy who used to work for the Astros (!) and unless there is some divine machination going on this summer, the O's will probably finish in last place again this year.

But they'll do it honestly! I remember in eighth grade Spanish class when Mrs Moore found a guy named Charles with a list of verb conjugations in his lap while we took a test on verb conjugations. Snatching the paper away from startled Charles, she cried, "Anyone can pass when they cheat!" 

The Astros should remember that.

They're damn mad

We all know people like this, poor souls who wake up every morning, and the first thing they reach for is something to get all worked up about.

All right, maybe the second thing, but still, the definition of society as "several hundred million people in search of something to be mad about" is valid.

Speaking of numbers, an organization called One Million Moms is currently all a-churn over a hamburger commercial.

And if you think there are really are a million moms out there with enough free time to get mad about a Burger King commercial, please stop asking the ones with maids and chauffeurs.

The Twitter acct. for "1MilMom" has a current following count of 4,658, leaving them 995,342 moms short of a million.

But here's what has their knickers in a twist:

They claim that Burger King "crossed the line" in running an Impossible Whopper commercial that uses the "D" word.

“Burger King is airing a commercial that uses profanity to advertise its Impossible Whopper -- a burger made from plants instead of beef,” whinges their website. “The language in the commercial is offensive, and it’s sad that this once family restaurant has made yet another deliberate decision to produce a controversial advertisement instead of a wholesome one.”

In the commercial, people are shown eating the meatless burger with considerable euphoria. One man responds to his mouthful of soy leghemoglobin, or "heme," by ejaculating, "Damn, that's good."

“One Million Moms finds this highly inappropriate. When responding to the taste test, he didn’t have to curse,” the group complained. “Or if, in fact, it was a real and unscripted interview in which the man was not an actor, then Burger King could have simply chosen to edit the profanity out of the commercial.”

“It is extremely destructive and damaging to impressionable children viewing the commercial. We all know children repeat what they hear,” they droned on.

I will step in long enough to say that I have yet to eat a fakeburger, but I can promise that if that ever happens, I will be able to contain my enthusiasm just short of screaming about it.

One Million Moms wants us to contact Burger King to entreat them to cancel the commercial, “or at the very least, edit out the cuss word immediately.”

One can only hope that OMM never hears about the words of a certain high government official. This orange man grumbled about “goddamn windmills” in a speech right here in Baltimore!  This same bleached blond bloviater told people in North Carolina that ISIS "will be hit so goddamn hard,” and he also told a businessman, “If you don’t support me, you’re going to be so goddamn poor.”

One can only assume that the staff at One Million Billion Mommies never heard of that politician, who shall remain nameless because it would be a damn shame not to.

What's orange and sounds like a parrot? A carrot

Many years ago, while working in the county courthouse, I made it a point to gobble a sandwich at lunchtime and then head out on the streets for a post-prandial stroll.

There was a bar on York Rd called The Crease Bar and Grill, and out front, they brought a caged parrot every day when the weather was favorable.

This bird was very intelligent and educated - he must have gone to PollyTechnic - but it seemed that he was half shark.

He'd talk your ears off.

I made a sport of teaching him to say a then-popular expression  ("Reagan lied!") and would enjoy bantering with him as I stopped to chat.

I always wondered what happened to that bird and I think he might have landed in Florida.

Police in Lake Worth Beach responded to a call for "someone screaming for help" inside a house recently, and when they got there, the homeowner was out in the driveway working on his car.

That is exactly how I picture 90% of Florida to be, by the way. Guys in white a-shirts with wrenches in their hand, laboring under the hoods of old Fords.

But he told the officers he could handle the matter by stepping inside, and he did so, returning with a shrieking Psittaciform on his finger.

And he was still screaming for help!

One last parrot story that country singer Mel Tillis told on himself, and he swore it was true.  Mel was in the Air Force, way over in Japan, and wanted to send his mother something nice for Christmas. So he picked out a nice parrot and sent him in his cage back stateside to Mama Tillis.

After Christmas, he had a chance to call his mother, and asked her if she had gotten her gift.  "Yes, Melvin, I got him, and he was delicious!"

"Mama, you weren't supposed to roast that bird! He wasn't a chicken, he was a parrot, and he could talk!"

And Mrs Tillis replied, "Then he should have said something!"

Sunday Rerun: Book 'em!

I am an avid reader. Magazines, newspapers, pamphlets, papal bulls, cereal boxes, stuff on the internet. I love reading. I even downloaded a couple of books onto my phone so that if I'm ever trapped in some stygian place of boredom, I can read some of the collected works of Ring Lardner while I whine wait.

I've been collecting books since childhood. I would have had to build a new wing onto the house if I had kept them all, so I winnow the library by repurposing used books at the Book Thing or the Goodwill or the late, deeply missed Smith College Club of Baltimore Book Sale. 

The first place I check in Dollar Tree is the book section! Believe me, they have sold off some remaindered books there that I have enjoyed for a buck. And Goodwill and yard sales are always good places to get more, too.

I tend to feel a bit...uneasy...if I am in a home or office with no books. Of course, I am already uneasy in most homes and offices to begin with.

And there is, of course, the wonderful Baltimore County Public Library, home of thousands of free-for-the-loaning volumes. When I tell friends in other countries of the magnificent building where one can read or get on a public computer or take part in a reading club or borrow music or movies for free, they are flabbergasted, and often gobsmacked on top of it all.

But lately I was witness to a serious crime involving the library. One might even put it in the felony classification. I have a call in to the State's Attorney's Office about it.  Here's what happened:  I signed out a copy of "Food And The City," in which writer Ina Yalof does Studs Terkel-style interviews with people in New York involved in distributing, purchasing, preparing, cooking and serving food - from those tony places where they gouge $32 out of you for a hamburger to those pizza places run by guys named Tony where $32 will get you the world on two pies. I love books about this sort of thing, especially when they remind me that kitchen personnel work 12-14 hour shifts on their feet in cramped, unbearably hot conditions and rarely even get to see their families (if any). That reminds why of why I am glad I didn't go into that line of work.

But when I started to read the book, I found that one of the previous library patrons who had read it had dogeared pages as he or she went along, marking their places because they are too bloody lazy to get up and find a bookmark or a used envelope or just the postcard from the dentist, John Wilkes Tooth, with a reminder that it's been a few years now, and time for the old onceover. 

This person dogeared the pages of a book that did not belong to them. Dogeared pages.

Now, if it's your book, feel free to gnaw off the corners if you want or write notes and remarks in the margins or highlight it with neon pink or do whatever else you wish to do.  It's your book.  

A library book belongs to everyone, and dogeared corners mean that corner might just drop off, and then you've got anarchy! 

Here's a line of work I might get into. If the county library wishes to hire me to track down these brutal book abusers, I hereby volunteer to find out who they are and where they live, and serve them with legal papers printed on crisp, unbent paper.  

The Saturday Picture Show, January 11, 2020

It looks like a pizza, but you don't want to see Domino's showing up at your door with this - it's molten lava.

I look at this dining room (from a house-for-sale listing) and I think maybe the owner ought to be on the Dr Phil show, seeking stability. And he is. This is the dining room in the house of Dr Phil.

Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November. In Khartoum, all bets are off.

You wonder about the clean up crews that have to get Times Square swept up on New Year's morning? Here are some of them...what a job!

 "And we call this one 'Baby Turtle and Sea Foam'."

I don't know whether these things are done intentionally, but face it, plumbing fixtures can look sort of human...

I was really impressed by the cover art of this week's New Yorker. The artist is Pascal Campion, and the title of this picture is "Twilight Evening." I don't know much about art, but I like this a lot!

Back in the day, they sold products with little humanoid characters. Who remembers this little guy, "Speedy Alka Seltzer"?

Need a dog name?

Judging from all the barking going on out back, someone in our neighborhood got a doggie dogg for Christmas. This pooch mainly bays at the moon (and sun) so I suggest, if they haven't named it already, that the happy family consider the names "Moaner," "Keener," "Plaintiff", or "Wailin' Jennings," but I don't know how dog names are chosen.

Our cats have names that are entirely personal with us; Deanna is for our dear departed friend, and Edwina is the female version of Peggy's father's name, Edwin. If we had dogs, I would have to go with "Leon," "Jerry Lee," or "Mr Peanut."  Those first two are names of musicians that I would gladly swap for my given monicker, and the third, of course, is for a cultural hero who wears a monocle.

But - for those of you who are getting a canine, just got one, or are thinking of bringing four or more paws into the family circle, here are the top 50 dog names by gender:  Pick any you like!

Top 50 Female Dog Names

1. Bella
2. Daisy
3. Luna
4. Willow
5. Roxy
6. Bailey
7. Lola
8. Harper
9. Rosie
10. Nala
11. Abby (Abigail)
12. Coco (Cocoa)
13. A.J.
14. Bambi
15. Addie
16. Sadie
17. Ava
18. Bell (Belle)
19. Gracie
20. Addison
21. Piper
22. Dixie
23. Biscuit
24. Hazel
25. Angel
26. Zoe (Zoey)
27. Cookie
28. Honey
29. Ellie
30. Winnie
31. Lucy
32. Blue (Blu)
33. Millie
34. Oreo
35. Maisie (Maisy)
36. Poppy
37. Cleo
38. Buttercup
39. Alice
40. Kiki
41. Lady
42. Olive
43. Penny
44. Mia
45. Amber
46. Pixie
47. Pippa
48. Lily (Lilly)
49. Violet
50. Paris

Top Male Dog Names

1. Bear
2. Milo
3. Charlie
4. Archie
5. Oreo
6. Bailey
7. Blue
8. Tiger
9. Duke
10. Teddy
11. Axel
12. Biscuit
13. Buddy
14. A.J.
15. Alfie
16. Coco (Cocoa)
17. Diesel
18. Benji
19. Caesar (Ceasar)
20. Chewie
21. Bacon
22. Bandit
23. Barkley
24. Archer
25. Atlas
26. Arlo
27. Max
28. Scout
29. Bruno
30. Barney
31. Rocky
32. Finn
33. Pluto
34. Bingo
35. Blaze
36. Banjo
37. Boomer
38. Thor
39. Toto
40. Brownie
41. Waffles
42. Ace
43. Augie (Augie Doggy)
44. Jasper
45. Copper
46. Gizmo
47. Yoshi
48. Tank
49. Argos
50. Ziggy

For more information and some interesting graphics, try this site: https://www.mydogsname.com/

It's a sin

I'm going to keep this post very short on details, for two reasons.  A, I am trying to keep the blog apolitical, and 2, the actions of the person are not the point. His attempts at explanation are the point.

A certain congressman from Arizona, a man whose siblings once paid for an advertisement to warn their fellow Arizonans (Arizonites?) against voting for their perfidious arrogant brother, recently tweeted out a photo that appeared to show a former president of the US happily doing the grip-and-grin handshake with the president of Iran, with the caption reading “The world is a better place without these guys in power.” If you wish, you can find the whole story here.

The POTUS depicted is out of office, but the Iranian is in office to this day.
These two men never met.
The picture was photoshopped from when the EXPOTUS shook hands with the former prime minister of India.

And the result was predictable.

Many people believed it to be true and expressed their high dudgeon in colorful, if ungrammatical, terms.

In about fifteen minutes, people remarked that the photo was a put-up job, and some of the dudgeonaires mumbled their regrets. Some.

And the representative who attempted to foist off this chicanery as fact said:

“No one said this wasn’t photoshopped.”

This, of course, from a person who travels from the desert (and there ends the comparison to Moses) to write laws for you and your family.

And it could lead to all sorts of things.

You could go out to dinner and order clams, and be served cut-up rubber bands, and complain to the restaurant, only to be told, "No one told you wouldn't be served rubber bands!"

Your defense in any court proceeding...let's say you get caught speeding at 105 mph in a residential neighborhood, and get hauled into court.  Just tell the judge, "When did I ever say I wouldn't drive 105 on Maple Avenue?"

And as it happens, this representative is a dentist back home in cactus-ridden Arizona. One supposes he tells his patients, "When I said this would be a painless procedure, I meant I wouldn't feel a thing!"

I am really in a spin over this, a person serving in our congress and mansplaining his lies by asking if anyone ever heard him promising not to lie.

We keep saying we expect men and women serving as lawmakers and law enforcers and so on to be honest and true, and these things keep happening, and we just keep shrugging.

 Honestly.

A special birthday

I'm sure that lots of people born this date, January 8, in 1935, are still with us. I wish them well; they're turning 85 years of age today.

And one such person born that day, who left this mortal coil in August of 1977, is still with us in spirit, for his name is Elvis Aron Presley, and he brought coolness to music like no one had before.

The life of the King began in this shotgun shack in Tupelo, MS, and it ended in the  mansion below in Memphis.

The great paradox of Elvis is that his greatest strength was that he never really changed from the unsophisticated country boy he was from birth, and his greatest weakness was that he never changed from the unsophisticated country boy he was from birth.

To the end he called his seniors "Ma'am" and "Sir." He accepted his draft notice and went into the army for two years at the very height of his fame and earning power. 

But he accepted bad advice, trusting a crooked manager, "Colonel" Tom Parker, who cheated him and held him back from true artistic accomplishment, instead miring him in two dozen of the stupidest movies you ever saw. And like so many people caught in a vortex that takes them from everyday life to a whirlwind, he fell in with "doctors" who gave him very, very poor medical advice - advice that ended his time with us at 42.

But what he left behind is the spirit that gives a man the confidence to dress like this without regret:

 Happy birthday, Elvis. We're still enjoying what you brought us.