Sunday Rerun: "Forever starts today"

You probably heard that a rising baseball star, José Fernández, pitcher for the Miami Marlins, was killed early Sunday in a boating accident. The boat he owned crashed into a rock jetty early that morning, and he was killed, along with two friends.


It's known that Fernández was at a dockside bar at 2:20 that morning, and the Coast Guard found the wreckage and the three victims at 3:30, so sometime in that 70-minute span, something awful happened.

Fernández

At first, I thought of writing about the sad loss of three lives, especially that of Fernández, whose harrowing attempts at defecting from his native Cuba are part of his interesting story.  It took four tries.  The first three times he tried, he was arrested and put in jail for "Being a traitor to Fidel Castro." On his fourth try, he was finally successful, but only after diving into the Gulf of Mexico to save someone who had fallen off the boat he and others were on.  

It was not until he had rescued that person that he found out that the person was his own mother.

So that makes it doubly - infinitely  - tragic that he lost his life in the water.  

Make what you will of this: on Monday, the day after he died, a bag of baseballs Fernández had autographed, seemingly as a gift to one or both of his friends Emilio Macias, 27, and Eduardo Rivero, 25, washed ashore in Miami Beach.

Meanwhile, the Marlins team all dressed in jerseys with José's name and #16 for their game on Monday night, and there was quite a moving ceremony on the field.  The team has retired that jersey number, and there are plans to make permanent the memory of a young man who had lived through so much, and still had so much ahead.

"It's our job to make his life matter, so we're going to do that forever, and forever starts today," Marlins president David Samson said Monday.

The Saturday Picture Show, May 30, 2020

Many of us are said to "wear our hearts on our sleeves." This is sort of like that.

This is the Buffalo Bills' fifth-round draft pick in the recent NFL draft. He's a quarterback from the U of Georgia, and if he doesn't get an endorsement deal from a large insurance company, somebody there fumbled the ball, because, you see, his name is Jake Fromm, State Farm.

I know, I promised no more Irate Lady and Smudge The Cat pictures, but this one was found on the back of bus seats. In Kenya.

As June 1 approaches, here is my annual tribute to the most admired man in my summer lifetime. Ladies and Gentlemen: he invented air conditioning. He's Mr Willis Carrier.

Two gentlemen of Verona were over there digging, and lookie here - they unearthed an almost entirely intact Roman mosaic villa floor!

These Homeowners' Associations really can go too far. Here's a lady forced to dress in the colors of her house in order to go out and whack the weeds.

Thirty years from now, when they teach entire courses about the year 2020, people will still be surprised at two neighbors whose social gathering hinged on their fences.

To welcome a new fox who's been darting around our court, here's a fox kid from another town. We can't get ours to pose.

Ask away

A young friend was asking me (for a quiz on Reddit):
Well, let's be quite honest. I am 40+++++++ and I am happy with my life, and to you young 'uns in your 20s, this is what I say...

a) don't worry so much
b) you're as good as anyone!
c) ain't no use a-worrying.

The great sage Mickey Rivers taught us many things in his day, one of which was, "It was so cold today that I saw a dog chasing a cat, and the dog was walking."

And the other one was, “Ain't no sense worryin' about the things you got control over, 'cause if you got control over 'em, ain't no sense worryin'. And ain't no sense worryin' about the things you don't got control over, 'cause if you don't got control over 'em, ain't no sense worryin'.”

Of such wisdom, great religions have been constructed and have flourished.

Real talk, when you're in your twenties, you have all the time in the world to sit around fretting about your job and your love life and that funny noise the car was making, because you aren't in your sixties and worried about that funny noise your left ear is making.  But you know what you're going to find out?

Things work out according to plan.  A few years ago a friend of mine, who thought he was set with a dream job for years to come, was startled to find the job eliminated in one of those corporate wipeouts, and there he stood in the lobby with his discharge in his hand. I called him with words of consolation, but he said, "No problem, Mark. This is life, playing out as nature intends.  And all I have to do is show up every day and play my part."

It's really much easier when you leave the worry out. And, as I have said a million times, never exaggerate!  No, as I say, you can't name a time when worrying about things did a bit of good. So let it go and let it flow.

Something else you learn when you get a few more summers is that while you think everyone else around you really has it all figured out, they don't. You think that people aged 40 or 50 have learned all the lessons and apply that knowledge in their daily activities, and then you find out that one of your friends just invested his life savings in some stupid pyramid scheme and it looks like he'll be in the hole until he's literally in a hole.

Dr Ben Carson, formerly the pride of Baltimore, may have been the greatest neurosurgeon around, but that didn't stop from pronouncing "Hamas" like "hummus" in public, and saying out loud that Muslims cannot be president of the US and being gay is a choice and people go to prison to make that choice.

Sometimes, the smartest guy is the one who shuts his piehole in time.

SO yeah, I'm here to tell you that most people are not quite as smart or pretty or funny or tall or naturally blonde as they appear to me. There's nothing wrong with you! Always remember that.

And one more quote from an oft-quoted New Yank Yorkee:

If you ask me anything I don't know, I'm not going to answer. 
 - -Yogi Berra

Life to go!

We talked yesterday about mondegreens - words that sound alike, so much so that people confused them.

Today let's talk about a gangster and a gangster rapper who both chose to go by the same name, and why this is so funny.

The gangster was "Machine Gun Kelly," born George Kelly Barnes. He was really nothing more than a fairly mild-mannered bootlegger (liquor smuggler) during the Roaring Twenties - the 1920s, that is. The current Roaring Twenties are off to a less-than-sensational start, eh?

He ran into trouble with the local cops in Memphis and headed west to Tulsa; so as not to besmirch the Barnes family name, he started going by Kelly. Convicted of smuggling liquor onto an Indian Reservation, he was sentenced to  three years at Leavenworth Penitentiary, Kansas, in 1928.  He was regarded as a model prisoner and all-around nice guy by the staff and fellow inmates.

Released early for good behavior, Kelly started acting up, because he had a thorn in his side. Her name was Kathryn Thorne, and she was a real piece of work, experienced in crime, gunplay, and quite a handy homemaker to boot.

Not so much the homemaker, but she was adept at spreading the lore of Kelly. She bought him a Thompson submachine gun and spent hours teaching him to use it. In those days of famous mobsters like "Pretty Boy" Floyd, Alvin "Creepy" Karpis, Kate "Ma" Barker, John "Public Enemy No. 1" Dillinger, and Lester Joseph "Baby Face Nelson" Gillis, a crook had to have a snappy name to go along with a snappy fedora, and a gimmick or catch phrase, such as "Hand over all your cash" or "Make America Great Again." Kelly learned to sign his name by shooting bullets that spelled out MACHINE GUN KELLY on billboards as he fled the scenes of bank robberies, gas station heists, and jaywalking.

Not much about his legend stands up. A bank teller in Tupelo said that Kelly "really didn't look like a guy who held up banks."  Thorne was the driving force behind him, and her plan to have them kidnap oil tycoon and businessman Charles F. Urschel in 1933, collecting a $200,000 ransom, led to the both of them being arrested within weeks and sent to prison for life.

I used to use an old joke "I'm not saying my mother-in-law is old, but her Social Security number is 14!" to mixed reviews, but Kelly, as one of the first prisoners at the new Alcatraz Home For The Federally Convicted, was prisoner # 114 there! Pretty cool, to have a low number like that.

And actually, MGK started his life term at dear old Leavenworth, where he bunked until Alcatraz was finished, so I'm sure there were many tearful reunions with guards and crooks he knew from his first term.

Sometimes, crooks and ne'er-do-wells don't get a second term, but Kelly did, becoming known as "Pop Gun" to his fellow Alcatrazians, right up until he died there in 1958. Gun moll Thorne did 35 years in a women's hoosegow, and was paroled in 1958 to Tulsa, which is another form of prison, as hot as it gets down there.

The other Machine Gun Kelly was born  Richard Colson Baker in 1990.

He's out of Cleveland, and took the Machine Gun handle owing to his rapid-fire delivery on rap songs such as "Death In My Pocket," "Rap Devil," "Bullets With Names," and the lovely, haunting "Hollywood Whores."  

Actress Megan Fox just left her husband for the warm comfort of young Kelly's tattooed arms. I wish those crazy kids six good months together, at least.

I have notified our local police and state's attorney that if I am ever charged with any sort of flagrant crime, I am to be referred to in all official court documents as Mark "Pretty Boy" Clark. 

At Christmas time, we sing of Round John Virgin

I heard a DJ talking about mondegreens the other day. He didn't pronounce the word correctly (it's MOND-a-green, not Mondgreen) but it's one of those things that we all know and don't always know, like the term for the little holes where the shoelaces go (grommets) or the punching bag thing at the top of your throat (uvula).

A lot of mondegreens are in the lyrics of songs. Here's the perfect example: Jimi Hendrix did not sing, "Excuse me while I kiss this guy" when he sang, "Excuse me while I kiss the sky," but so many people think the first. Bob Dylan sang, "the answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind." He didn't say, "the ants are my friend" any more than The Turtles sang, "You and me and Leslie, grooving" on a Sunday afternoon.

Excuse me.

But when we mishear or misunderstand words or a series of words, and instead believe we heard something else, that's a Mondegreen, and has been since 1954, when a writer named Sylvia Wright wrote in "Harper's" magazine that she really misunderstood something she heard as a child.


Her mom (Sylvia's mother!) would read to her from a book called "Reliques of Ancient English Poetry", a dusty old volume from 1765, and young Sylvia thought she was reading, "Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands / Oh, where hae ye been? / They hae slain the Earl Amurray, / And Lady Mondegreen.”

But it was all in the way she heard it. In the poem, one person and only one died. The actual line is "They hae slain the Earl Amurray, and laid him on the green."

Poor Earl. It was bad enough that he died, but now a simple misunderstanding made it worse.  And then in The Beatles' "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds," "the girl with kaleidoscope eyes" becomes "the girl with colitis goes by."

"There's a bad moon on the rise" in Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Bad Moon Rising sounds like "There's a bathroom on the right" for millions of people.

Even disco songs were not immune: "Take your pants down, and make it happen" is the mondegreen for "Take your passion and make it happen" as Irene Cara sang in "Flashdance."

Pity the doctor who tells a patient they will need a bone marrow transplant, only to have them think he/she said, "You need a bow and arrow transplant."

And then there are the ones that double back on themselves.  The English make a fine meal called Welsh Rarebit. It's a delightful combination of cheddar cheese, Worcestershire Sauce, Dijon mustard and beer served on rye bread that was originally called Welsh Rabbit. Somewhere along the line, possibly in response to people who felt shortchanged because there was no rabbit on their plate, they switched to calling it Rarebit.

And who among us has not seen someone on Facebook describe someone's overreaction as an "ovary action"?

Color me Happy

The child in me rejoices when we sit down at a fine restaurant and, instead of tacky linen and ringspun cotton napkins and tablecloths, I find a place mat with a connect-the dots game, a Spot The Differences quiz, and a place to doodle with crayons. After ordering my epicurean feast, I turn to the business at hand. It's best to finish before the soup comes, so having quality crayons is important.
(At least, that's how I remember it, when restaurants were open).

I hate to say it, but most restaurants that hand out free coloring mats and crayons are not handing out the real thing, the ne plus ultra of the crayon business: the real Crayola crayons. The second-rate wax sticks would be better off if used at the Used Appliance Store down Belair Rd, to write "AS IS / MECH PERF on an aging Whirlpool icebox.

In the whole crayon world, there are the real and only Binney & Smith Crayola Crayons, and everything else that pretends to be crayons. Crayola is actually part of Hallmark (I did not know that!) and it's still a big business, even though there are other ways to make colored markings now!

A company doesn't stay on top of the world without changing and adding to the product line. Many of us in the age range where no asks for verification to give a senior discount on some denture adhesive, which sells a lot better to our gang than does pimple cream.  Crayola came up with the idea of the 64-pack of crayons with a sharpener built in a long time ago, and since then, they've come up with neon colors and the 96-pack Big Box (featuring colors named by kids!) and washable markers.

I fully expect them to come up with plaid crayons any day now.  But speaking of colors, it was 1962 when Crayola looked around and saw that not everyone's skin was the same color! Huh! Up until then, they had a color called "flesh" which was the perfect color for the Hiltons and the Kennedys. They might as well have called that flesh color "upper crust," but they did wise up and call it "peach."

But here we are in 2020, and Crayola is catching up, releasing 24 new "Colors of the World" to represent the dozens of skin tones people really come in all over the world!

There is a bid deal called "UN World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development" and the multicultural crayons are coming out in conjunction with that glorious day of growth for all of us (except for Bob Ehrlich, former one-term governor of Maryland, a lout who once brayed, "Multiculturalism is bunk.")

Multiculturalism reflects the way the world is. We come in many colors, and vive le difference! "With the world growing more diverse than ever before, Crayola hopes our new Colors of the World crayons will increase representation and foster a greater sense of belonging and acceptance," said Crayola CEO Rich Wuerthele. "We want the new Colors of the World crayons to advance inclusion within creativity and impact how kids express themselves."

You can find the new in packs of 24 and 32.  The jumbo 32-pack also has four crayons each for hair and eye colors. And each crayon will have their color name in English, Spanish, and French.

My skin tone can best be described as "mottled," so it might be hard to match me up. But this is a major step for all the kids who felt left out when the time came to draw a self-portrait. And that's a step for self pride.

It's Memorial Day, the day we honor those who gave their lives in service to the nation

Sunday Rerun: What's Your Name?

There was a time that a woman would marry a man (often against the best advice of her friends and his parents) and quit her job and change her name to his and become a full-fledged housewife and that was that.

All good, and it's still done, but there are options. If a woman wants to get married at all, she may change her last name to that of her partner, or not.  Or she may hyphenate the two ("Mrs Cecilia McDonald-Berger").

There used to be this weird thing in which married women were known by their husband's full name, as in "Mrs Drew P. Weiner," which made no sense to me.  "Mrs Otis Campbell"?  A woman named Otis?

I have seen married couples in which a man will take his wife's surname, and same-ex couples who exchange last names.  All cool with me.

I bring all this up to say that there is still mumbling going on about the woman formerly known as Amal Alamuddin, a 38-year-old British-Lebanese woman who is a lawyer, activist, and author, universally respected as a force for good and an expert in several fields.

She also happens to be a married woman, who married an American actor named George Clooney.

And people are losing their grips because she wishes to be known as Amal Clooney. That's how she is listed on the website for Doughty Street Chambers, the London-based law firm by which she is employed. 

"But she's a femininist!" came the cry, and I say that being a feminist is more about allowing women to choose to do what's best for them than following some vague list of rules and regulations.

Amal and Geo. were married in Venice, and own a 17th-century manor on the River Thames in the British countryside, so it's safe to say they know their ways around the world and did not just ride into Tulsa on a turnip truck.

George Clooney is most famous for his starring roles in "Ocean's 12", "Ocean's 13", and "Ocean's 127" (coming to theaters near you in 2028). No, seriously, he is a fine actor, with lots of good movies and even more worthwhile statements on the world as we know it.

Read the list of Amal Clooney's educational and professional accomplishments, her awards, honors and appointments here. By any measure, she is a woman of great stature in the world.

And here is the list of all the people in the world who should have any say in the matter of what Amal Clooney's name should be:

1. Amal Clooney

The Saturday Picture Show, May 23, 2020

This is the first of two sunset pictures today. I think that people are taking more sunset pictures now, because normally we're running out to ballgames and shopping and driver ed and returning library books and picking up Moo Shu and so we miss cool things like sunsets.

It sure doesn't feel like Memorial Weekend, I know, but at least it can look like it.

No matter the size of a cat, when they want their dinner, they WANT THEIR DINNER right NOW!

Wouldn't you think that Madam Zara could have seen this coming?

People are making good use of their time, and good use of colored paper to make a picture of The Golden Girls!

He's never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down, but Rick Astley is 54 now, so don't hold him to that.

Sunset # 2 - this is when the lake your lake house fronts on is Lake Erie.

This is a colorized photo from the 1917 pandemic, showing a streetcar conductor denying admission to a guy without a mask. It being 1917, the hapless man did not have a placard proclaiming himself to be a free man with no responsibility to follow either lawful government orders or common sense, or a crowd of like-minded rabble rousers. . I hope he's still walking home.

Take it from him

Let's take a little trip to Palm Beach, FLA, where a fella by the name of Brian Lee Hitchens is in the hospital, one of tens of thousands in this world recovering from the coronavirus.  From his bed at the Palm Beach Gardens Medical Center, he's telling reporters that he used to be a big skeptic on the topic of the disease that laid him low.

He can't figure out how people can't understand that the virus is a real danger to people's health, even though he used to be one of those non-believers.

“To these protestors I say, how did I go to the ER and test positive? How can I make that up?” he asks.

“I didn’t test myself. This isn’t a made-up thing.”

You might have met Hitchens if you've been to Palm Beach; he's a driver for Lyft and Uber. Right now, he's not driving anywhere except for wheeling down to the occupational therapy room in the hospital. He's coming along, getting better, but he'll still be down for a while.

Worse yet, his wife is in critical condition in the same hospital, on a ventilator, with the coronavirus.

He told the newspaper down there that he thought at first that the virus was no problem. He says this happened because he "heard so many different things that it was unclear what was real and what wasn’t.”

On April 2, he posted on his Facebook that "I’m honoring what our government says to do during this epidemic, but I do not fear this virus because I know that my God is bigger than this Virus will ever be.”

So he figured, why wear a mask and take certain precautions?

So it came to pass that a week into the shutdown, it dawned on him that he and his wife should wear masks when they went out.

But that was too late, it would seem.

He and his wife started with the symptoms at the same time ("I started to feel out of breath, like I ran a 10-mile marathon or something. My energy was zapped. I was so tired and lethargic") and his wife couldn't keep food down. Hitchens thought it was a cold or flu, but he knew worse was happening soon.

His April 18 Facebook: “Been home sick for over a week. Both my wife and I home sick. I’ve got no energy and all I want to do is sleep.”

He's still in the hospital waiting for a second negative test before they will send him home. He has only seen his wife once, when he was being wheeled from room to room and passed hers.

It's sad that it took such a dangerous few weeks to bring Hitchens to this revelation.  But he has this to share with non-believers and "Re-Open" agitators:

"I want to encourage people to comply, because this is a plague and we have to be careful."

His words.

Martin!

Let's walk down Memory Lane and remember the good old days when Martin Shkreli was smugly smirking his way onto the list of America's Top Jerks.

He's 37 now and dwells in a federal ironbar hotel in Allenwood, PA.  He founded some hedge funds and now he has a job trimming hedges in prison! For real, he made a ton of moolah as co-founder of Elea Capital, MSMB Capital Management, and MSMB Healthcare. He was also co-founder and CEO of a biotechnology firm called Retrophin, and founder and former CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals.

Lotta money, and he was in with those guys who make a billion dollars a day trading money for money.  But the ship hit the sand for him in 2015, when he bought the license to manufacture a drug called Daraprim, which is used to treat pneumonia in HIV/AIDS cases. It's an important lifesaving drug.

Knowing this, Shkreli raised the price per pill from $13.50 to $750.  That's called raising the price by a factor of 56.  For this act of benevolence, Shkreli came to be known as "Pharma Bro" and "The most hated man in America."

For his part, he said, "Everybody's doing it. In capitalism, you try to get the highest price you can for a product."

Here's the secret to this sort of operation: if someone brings your villainy to light, quickly have pictures taken where you're delivering hams to the needy or paying to have old bicycles fixed up to give to children. Don't sit there and brag about bleeding others for every nickel you can squeeze out of them.

But by being a flagrant reprobate, he became the target of federal prosecution. He was charged and convicted on two counts of securities fraud and one count of conspiring to commit securities fraud.  The Feds SAID it had nothing to do with the whole Daraprim thing, but you know...

SO off he goes to Club Fed for 7 years, and will pay $7.4 million in fines.

AND SO this past weekend, a judge looked over his request to leave prison. He applied for early dismissal, claiming that he wanted to research a treatment for the novel coronavirus.

Officials said this was the sort of “delusional self-aggrandizing behavior” that got him sent up in the first place.

Smirking at a Congressional hearing.

Shkreli posted a request to get out, because the pharma industry's attempts to create Rona-No-More pills or vaccines are "inadequate.” He points out, with no support, that he is “one of the few executives experienced in ALL aspects of drug development.”

After all, Martin says the cure “so far eluded the best medical and scientific minds in the world working around the clock.”

U.S. District Judge Kiyo Matsumoto said, don't start packing, Sunny Jim. After all, she said, that Shkreli was “healthy,” with no “recent history of preexisting medical conditions that place him at higher risk” and there was no report of any cases at the virus at Allenwood.

But the judge noted that the “Defendant requests to be released into, among other places, an apartment in New York City, the epicenter of the covid-19 pandemic.”

Shkreli’s attorney, Ben Brafman, says he and Shkreli were “disappointed” by the decision but that it was “not unexpected."

I expect that Martin's going to do every minute of his term. I hope I'm right!

The best sort of gift

Out in Troy, Kansas, lives a man named Dennis Ruhnke.  He's a farmer by trade, and he had grain bins on his farm.  This is not something we think about when we gobble granola, but storing grain involves a lot of dust.

So farmers wear masks, and the smart thing to wear is one of those N95 respirators, so named because they filter at least 95% of airborne particles.
Dennis is in his 70s now, so is his wife, and she suffers from severe health problems that would make it very risky for her to come down with an infection such as COVID-19.  He found five of the masks while digging through his stuff in the barn.

Dennis and his wife Sharon figured that each of them could make do with two masks, and that left one up for grabs at a time (March of this year) when those things were scarcer than hen's teeth (sticking with the farm angle).

The Ruhnkes saw the daily press briefings on TV and were familiar with the shortage of masks that New York's Governor Andrew M. Cuomo described, so they mailed him their extra mask, with a note asking that he pass it along to a healthcare worker.

“Please keep doing what you do so well,” Dennis wrote, “which is to lead.”

Gov. Cuomo was touched by this kindness, so much so that he almost cried as he read the letter during a televised news conference last month. He praised the farm family for their generosity.

And, as so often happens, something good came of it.

You see, Ruhnke had to drop out of Kansas State University in 1971, two credits shy of his diploma. He needed to leave school and run the farm after his father died suddenly, but not getting that degree always nagged at him.

And then, last week, Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly presented him with his diploma in a ceremony at the statehouse. And she made sure to point out that the degree she awarded him was not some honorary title, but quite official, in respect for his years of work in the business of running a farm.

“He provided a dose of inspirational strength to America just as soon as we felt ourselves beginning to buckle under the crushing, prolonged weight of this crisis,” she said. “He has proved to us that he has mastered all the most important lessons that a university has to offer.”

As the years went by, Ruhnke had asked KState about finishing his degree somehow, but was told that too much time had passed, and he would have to start the paper chase from the beginning. But university President Richard Myers said the practical experience was enough to earn the degree.

At the ceremony, he said he had heard from a lot of people who were inspired by his example.  They wanted to know how they, too, could help.

“Just pay it forward as much as you can afford to do so to honor all of those who lost their lives to the C-19 virus,” he said. “And also to honor the first responders, who in some cases also lost their own lives in the line of duty — the ultimate sacrifice.”

For his part, Cuomo called the gift a “snapshot of humanity.”

“It’s that love, that courage, that generosity of spirit that makes this country so beautiful,” Cuomo said. “And it’s that generosity for me makes up for all the ugliness that you see. Take one mask, I’ll keep four.”

"Tis a gift to be simple, 'tis a gift to be fair, 'Tis a gift to wake and breathe the morning air," in the words of an old Shaker song.

Embrace the gift!

Bananaramarama

So you say you haven't been to the office since the shutdown?

Did you...leave something behind as you scurried out hurriedly...or did you leave work the Friday before all that happened, fully expecting to be back on regular hours?

Are you wishing you had taken that favorite jacket with you...or turned off your monitor...or not left a banana in your desk?

You might want to get in touch with Mhairi-Louise Brennan over in Glasgow, Scotland.  She was home for nine weeks, and besides all the anxiety that the pandemic brought to us all, she also had to worry about what was going on with the banana she left in her desk drawer at work.

"Knowin there is a banana in my desk drawer in work, which has been there since a week before lockdown is makin me feel anxious," she Tweeted.

People replied, as they always will...

"Anxious, it must be driving you bananas," one user joked.

"If it’s any consolation, it’ll no longer be a banana in any sort of recognizable form," another wrote.

9 weeks into the shutdown, Brennan decided to hie herself o'er to the office and see how Chiquita was doing. That's enough time for any science fair project, don't you think?  And she had all her Tweeters wantin' to know how the banana was faring.

"The unknown was killing me so I've drove to work to see wit the damage was. I present...a 9 week old banana," Brennan wrote. "Safe to say its deed [sic]."

It sure seems to be.

"I came here from the viral tweet hoping for a resolution. Thanks for following through," a fan wrote to her, as he or she ran down the hall in a hurry.

"It looks how I feel during this lockdown," someone said.

Another simply replied: "RIP that banana."

It reminds me of a time when I was working shift work, and one Saturday evening we decided to do Salad Bar Night. We all brought in various items in Tupperware and laid out a nice selection, and then promptly put the leftovers in the dispatch center refrigerator.

Three weeks later, we decided to do Salad Bar Night again, and when someone opened the tub o' raw cauliflower that had been a-moulderin' for 21 days, well...I'm not gonna say it was lethal (although I led a delegation to take the tub and its foul contents out to the dumpster in the Judges' Garage) but the United Nations came that Monday to investigate rumors of chemical warfare taking place in the Baltimore County Courthouse.

I myth you

There are many differences between humans and animals. Humans are the only inhabitants of earth who willingly eat chickpeas, find an evening watching "The Phantom Of The Opera" an enchanting way to pass the time, and read bodice-ripping romance novels on the beach.  Most squirrels know nothing of Nora Roberts or Nicholas Sparks, and look how happy they are!

Animals accept nature, since they are part of it. We fight back at every turn, since we want to be large and in charge of everything. Animals hear thunder or big winds, and they just figure it's time to curl up and nap for a while, and then go find some berries or something later.

Humans jump up from their chairs, run to the porch, cry, "What the deuce was that?" and get all worked up.  And then they ask each other what it was, and call the guy down the street who always watches The Weather Channel.

We demand explanations, and more often than not, we want explanations of the inexplicable.

Let's say you were an ancient Greek. We'll call you "Stephanopoulos."  One day, you were sitting around the house when an enormous peal of thunder rocked all of Athens.  You went over to ask your neighbor Savalas what happened in the sky.  Neither of you were versed in modern meteorology, but in order to satisfy the need you have to understand what was going on, you and Savalas concoct a story - the Greek word for story is "mythos" - that involves three brothers. In your story, Poseidon was in charge of the seas, Hades ran the underworld, and Zeus ruled the sky.

The way you and Savalas told it, old Zeus could throw lightning bolts around when he was mad, and that's how we get thunder and lightning.

These ancient myths were how people could sleep at night without being tormented by not knowing all the mysteries of life, how natural phenomena occur, and why Coke always tasted better in those little bottles.

When the Romans came along, they reinterpreted the Greek myths to suit their own ideas. They took the Greek God of love, a fellow named Eros, and called him "Cupid," based on the Latin word for desire.  Cupid was pictured as having wings (because love is like a butterfly) and being boyish, because love makes no sense and neither do boys.

And don't forget the Mayans, down Mexico way. They came up with a god of wind and storm named Huracan, and he had charge of the natural elements.  We still use his name every year from June 1 through November 1: it's Hurricane Season.

Ancient people thought of earthquakes as the result of some god or other being mad at earth, so he or she shook the world to get us to calm down up there!

Today, with our superior wisdom, we know that pandemic viruses are part of nature, and we will conquer them as we always have, and we are sure that the guy who co-founded Microsoft did not cook up the virus in his diabolic quest to make everyone run out and get a new iPhone.

At least, most of us are.

Sunday Rerun: Tell me about it

Collectors of 911 lore always enjoy hearing my story from just after 9/11/01, when the nation was in the grip of anxiety from people mailing anthrax to others.

And then some joker started sending emails to others, with the message that by opening the email, the addressee had been exposed to anthrax.

And some of those people called 911 to report their exposure.

So you understand the level of concern that unknown powdery substances can bring about in Americans, and justifiably so. Biochemical warfare is a scary thing, and who knows where the next attack might take place?

And that's why the person involved in this story needs to go sit in a corner (of a jail cell) and think about his foolish actions.

A man whose opera mentor recently passed away brought a vial of his cremains to the Metropolitan Opera in New York. And then, during the second intermission to the afternoon performance of Rossini's "Guillaume Tell" ("William Tell"), he sprinkled those ashes into the orchestra pit, forcing Met officials to cancel the rest of the show as well as an evening performance of a second opera.

The New York Police Department said they know who the man is, that he is from out of town, and John Miller, the NYPD deputy commissioner in charge of intelligence and counterterrorism, said the disposal of ashes at an opera house may violate city codes but, "I don't believe at this point that we see any criminal intent here."

One person attending the show requested medical attention, and the general manager of the opera, Peter Gelb, said, "We appreciate opera lovers coming to the Met. We hope that they will not bring their ashes with them."

The investigation meant that the Met had to cancel that evening's performance of another Rossina opera, "L'Italiana in Algeri," ("Algebra is Even Harder in Italian"), another Rossini opera, because of the investigation.

So the well-dressed audience filed in from the intermission, and so did well-equipped NYPD tactical officers.  Shortly thereafter, an announcement was made that there was a delay caused by technical problems, and then, the announcement came that the audience could leave without having to sit there for the fourth act. And people in the seats who were all ready to shout "Bravo!" at the end started hollering that they wanted their money back. 

Just like when a ballgame is rained out, disappointed ticketholders will be allowed to come back another time.

Maybe the Met will hand out William Tell bobbleheads to being the crowd back. 

They had not performed that opera for more than 80 years until this season, which means that while the hit song became known to all as the theme from the "Lone Ranger" tv show.

All cultural references aside, what sort of unthinking goof thinks that spreading the cremated remains of a human being in a public place is a good idea?

The Saturday Picture Show, May 16, 2020

We don't get to see our friend Gail so much anymore. Matter of fact, we don't get to see anyone anymore, except each other and the mail lady and the grocery/pharmacy cashiers. But Gail sent me this picture because she loves the Picture Show and we miss her! Holy Mackerel!

This is the family band that moved to California from Oklahoma and were sleeping in a culvert until they got the chance to make music and light up the world with it and with their outfits. I wish I could go back in time.

Paint the house, pose the kid.

This is the day that firefighters train for, the day they get the chance to rescue police. Or not. This was in Kansas City.

Rusty tools and hardware at an antique store? Nope. It's chocolate!

Real estate people, take it away...it's a handyman special!

For the day when weddings and parties happen again...a peacock-cupcake party.

In the days of black-and-white TV, there was a really funny show called "Car 54, Where Are You?" It's on Amazon if you want to laugh. But it was filmed on the streets of New York City, so they painted the fake car red - as opposed to the dark green of real squad cars - so as not to make people think that Officers Toody and Muldoon were real cops.

Everybody Must Get In Rolling Stone

I have to tell you, there was a day and time when the news that a new Bob Dylan album was coming out was even more exciting to me than when someone calls to say they are bringing me a raspberry pie. As America's Greatest Living Poet has faded into mumbled obscurities, my interest has waned, but seeing that his new "Rough And Rowdy Ways" album is coming out on June 19 still gives me at least one goosebump.

I can't even say that the people on the album cover even look either rough or rowdy, but that's not up to me. It is interesting, though, that this picture is 56 years old.

The photographer is an English guy, Ian Berry, 86 now, from Salisbury, England. He told Rolling Stone magazine that he's more a visual guy than a musical one, but adds, "I have, though, spent quite a lot of time with people like Miriam Makeba, but most of the profiles I’ve done on musicians have been more classical, people like [David] Ashkenazi.”

He was happy to be asked if Dylan could use the photo on his new album: “I was delighted,” he says. “A record cover for Dylan is a great compliment.” Oh! By the way, Dylan has not put his own mug on one his albums of new music since 2001’s "Love and Theft."

Rolling Stone says the image, taken in 1964 at a club on Cable Street in Whitechapel, London, "crackles with intrigue and romance." Well, now. The one guy is checking the selections on a jukebox, and that was always a lot of fun when you had a fistful of dimes, and the couple seem to care about each other. That's romantic. They're doing the kind of dancing where holding hands is part of the fun!

Berry says he had not asked for permission to shoot photographs in the club, and after 20 minutes or so, the pub's habitues were indicating that they wished for him to leave. They did this by throwing empty beer bottles at him, which is the universal signal that it's time to haul ass.

He's not one of those sensitive artists, clearly. This was originally a black-and-white photo and he had no problem when Dylan's people asked for permission to tint it. "I didn't mind at all," he said. Being 86 will do that to a person, make them a little more practical and less artistically stringent.

Berry even admits that he's not a huge Dylan fan. "I like the sort of singers where I can actually hear the words, people like Joan Armatrading or Joan Baez.”

He shouldn't think twice. It's all right.

Show me

We got to talking the other day, as we so often do during these times when looking backwards is a lot less scary than looking forward, about the times in elementary school when Show And Tell was the order of the day.

Some kids were not so willing to get up in front of the class and show and tell about their model cars or Howdy Doody marionette or war surplus scabbard that their father brought home from the war. Big surprise, I was not one of

those kids. Week after week, I showed up with discarded police memorabilia, bashed firefighter helmets, flip books, out-of-town milk bottles, polliwogs, an Indian blanket my mother bought from a real Navajo, a deck of marked cards, and what my grandfather promised me were real wooden shoes from Holland.

My grandfather was such an avid collector of junk that he was unable to park his car in his garage, which bulged at the seams with car parts, tools, wood, extra sinks and toilets, and literally anything one could imagine. One day my father needed an angled pipe of a certain diameter, threaded at one end, and my granddad had just what he needed. So I come by my ways honestly.

I don't even know if kids do Show And Tell anymore in school. If they ever have school again. I think it would be a good idea, even though with current equipment being what it is, the kid could just bring in a video of his home atom splitter, which is not as cool as bringing the atom splitter in for the rest of the class to use.

BUT - are Facebook and Instagram and Snapchat and Whoozit and Whatsit and all those social media platforms just the modern form of Show And Tell? "We got a new car!" "Hildegarde chose her prom dress!" "Tonight's dinner: French Dip Halibut with Axolotl Pudding!" "Our dream vacation to the Gilligan Islands!" And on and on.

Same concepts, bigger audience. Although, I am proud as punch to be on Facebook with lots of people from Show And Tell days!

Every word of this is true; it just doesn't seem like it.

If you thought the craziness with pop star names reached its apogee when Amethyst Amelia Kelly from Australia changed her name to Iggy Azalea, sorry.

There is this Elon Musk guy, not a pop star in the strict sense but a member of the pop glitterati (his net worth is estimated at 39.4 billion semolians) and the founder of Space X and the Tesla Motor Co, which I guess is an electric car that drives itself while you sit there eating Goetze's Caramel Creams and listening to Grimes.

Grimes is a singer of sorts, composer of electronic tone music from Canada. Her real name is Claire Elise Boucher, but she changed it to Grimes because she calls her music "grime" music, which indicates to me that it sure doesn't sound like anything I've ever heard.

She hooked up with Musk a couple of years ago, and lo and behold, these two marvelous people have procreated, and on May 4 she gave birth (he's probably working on a way to bear their second spawn himself) to a live human male baby.

Quiz time:  Did they name this child:
A) Gerald
B)  Rudy
C) X Æ A-12

You know doggone well they named him X Æ A-12, but really, they might as well have named him C. Tell you why in a minute, but for now, let's focus on the fact that they can't settle on how to pronounce little Junior's name.

Grimes says that Æ is how elves spell AI, which is what the brainiacs call articial intelligence.

Someone with a lot of time on their hands asked her on Instagram how you pronounce the kid's name, and she wrote back, "It's just X, like the letter X. Then A.I. Like how you said the letter A then I."

That seems clear enough, but then proud papa Elon told a podcast that Grimes is the one who named the child, but doesn't pronounce it correctly:

"I mean it's just X, the letter X. And then, the Æ is, like, pronounced 'Ash'... and then, A-12, A-12 is my contribution."

These two interesting people currently inhabit the state of California, where somewhere along the line it became necessary to set a rule that says a child can be named only with words that use the 26 letters in the English language.

That means you could move to Los Angeles and name your child "Los Angeles."

And if you're curious, here's her breakdown of what the name means:
She says "X" stood for "the unknown variable," and Æ -- AI -- means artificial intelligence and that means "love" in several languages.

Grimes, or "Grimey" as she likes to be called, adds that part of the boy's name refers to the couple's favorite aircraft.  Get this:

"A-12 = precursor to SR-17 (our favorite aircraft). No weapons, no defenses, just speed. Great in battle, but non-violent," she added.

And then Musk came along and she said was, in fact, talking about the "SR-71."

As Little Richard would have said, "Aw Rootie!"

Remember when I said they may as well have called the baby "C"?  Grimes, the woman born Claire Elise Boucher, now says she wants to be known as "c" because that's the symbol for the speed of light.

Yeah, she's that quick.

Honoring a man of honor

Here's some good news. A Go Fund Me campaign for something worthwhile has reached its goal of raising $30,000. It's sad, but it was set up to cover the funeral expenses of Greg Zanis, the man from Aurora, Illinois, who was often seen on the news setting up crosses, Stars of David, and crescent moons where mass shootings and other horrors had taken place.

He was 69. Late last year, he came down with bladder cancer, and the Friday before last, his daughter arranged one of those uniquely CovidAmerican events, with people driving by to wave to her dad as he stood greeting them all from the porch.

Zanis started his Crosses For Losses in 1996, after the murder of his father-in-law. By the time he retired his campaign in December, the total was 26,680. About 21,000 of them were for mass shooting victims. He told CNN that each cross took an hour to make, paint, and letter.

He was probably best known for bringing 58 crosses and Stars of David to Las Vegas after 58 people were gunned down at the Route 91 Harvest Festival country music show. The city of Las Vegas honored him with a key to the city and a Greg Zanis Day commemoration.

He also showed up with mementos at natural disasters, bus wrecks and boating accidents - and Martha's Vineyard, where John F. Kennedy, Jr. and family died in a plane crash.

Aurora Mayor Richard C. Irvin said:

“Mr. Greg Zanis was a giant among men. He was a man of action who simply wanted to honor the lives of others. In return, his life was one of honor and one that was celebrated throughout our nation and world. Heeding to the scripture ‘pick up your cross and follow me,’ Mr. Greg Zanis did just that. He picked up the crosses he made and followed his mission in the noblest of ways. His legacy shall forever be remembered in his hometown of Aurora and around the globe.”

Here's a way we can continue to honor the work and spirit of Greg Zanis. How's about we stop shooting each other 58 at a time?

The hands-off policy

You've probably seen that commercial for Liberty Mutual Insurance that shows an emu running around as the mascot. Actually, there are three stars in the ad: Limu The Emu, a dude named Doug, and a painted-up 1970-72 Plymouth Duster.

These are the commercials they show to try to lure me away from the Geico gecko, and that won't happen. But like the gecko spot, the one with the emu uses anthropomorphism - the ascribing of human qualities to animals - to try to sell car insurance.

Now, I know this has been going on forever. Even when I was a young cub (!) the Kellogg's people used Tony The Tiger to sell Frosted Flakes, and we all knew better than to try to reach into a tiger's cage.  But now, I can't say that wisdom is pervasive.

ITEM:

A woman who was killed in an alligator attack last week in South Carolina was visiting a client for an in-home nail appointment when she was drawn to a nearby pond and yanked into the water by the animal, according to NBC News. 

The story goes on to say that the woman named Cynthia Covert, and she was 58.  An alligator grabbed her leg and pulled her underwater several times, and she drowned.

Covert was a nail tech, and of course nail salons are closed under state orders due to the coronavirus, so she was doing home visits in her field, and went to the Kiawah Island home of a client to give a manicure to a client who told the police later that " (Covert) was acting strange and speaking more than she does at the nail salon where she works. She saw the alligator in the pond and was fascinated.

After completing the manicure, Covert stood on the porch of the client's home and took pictures of the creature. OK, but then she went down to the water's edge...

“(The client) stated that she was cleaning up the porch when she noticed Covert down by the water,” Detective Keith Herriott of the Charleston County Sheriff’s Office wrote in a report.

And Herriott also wrote that when the client yelled to Covert that the alligator had grabbed a deer the other day, Covert replied, "I don’t look like a deer," then moved to touch the alligator.

That, as they say in novels, was her last mistake. She fell into the water, and came up long enough to catch a rope that neighbors flung into the water to save her, only to have the alligator grab her and drag her down.

Police and firefighters were called, and they arrived to find the water calm and nothing apparent, when suddenly the alligator broke the surface, his maw still clamped onto the woman's leg. In a desperate attempt to save the woman, an officer shot the alligator. It let go, but the woman was dead.

This is the third fatal alligator attack in The Palmetto State in the past four years.

On Saturday, with an exquisite but sad irony, an emu escaped from a sanctuary on the west side of our county, and although caught by wranglers after it roamed in traffic on LIBERTY Rd, it was not a MUTUAL pleasure to find later that the emu died of exhaustion and stress - probably because it was chased around the street by locals unaccustomed to seeing the world's second-tallest bird species walking by the seafood carryouts and 7-11s that dot their landscape.

Even worse in South Carolina (where the state motto is Dum spiro spero  - Latin for 'While I breathe, I hope'): a human being and an animal are dead because humans cannot seem to leave animals the hell alone. While I breathe, I hope we can learn to do better.

Sunday Rerun: What to do

One thing I like about REALLY old people is that they become REALLY honest!

Take Tony Bennett, if you will. The longtime saloon singer, born Anthony Dominick Benedetto 90 years ago, was a guest on NPR's "Fresh Air" not long ago, and the host, Terry Gross, asked him what could be the reason for the longevity of his career.

"Talent" was his one-word answer.  

Yes, it takes talent to stay popular in show business for over 65 years; Bennett's first hits came in 1950 - 51. That's a while.  And you know what?  There are plenty of singers just as good as Tony Bennett.  I'll daresay there are many, but he knows something that has kept him around a long long time.

He went on, in the radio interview, to tell Ms Gross that Jack Benny and Bob Hope (who advised him to change his name) gave him lots of advice in the early stages of his career. In fact, he said the best advice was telling him that it would take him a few years of knowing what to do before he learned the more important lessons - knowing what NOT to do.

I've told a million people, seven of whom actually wanted to hear it, that a great lesson I learned as a supervisor was that if you did a favor for one person, the others would not say, "Wowie! What a great guy he is!"  Nope.  What they said was, where is my slice of that pie, please.  And who can blame them?

One of the first things I learned in my lifetime of driving everything from cars to trucks to fire engines is that you can see an car approaching with its turn signal flashing and the driver's arm out of the car giving a back up signal.  I don't care if the driver hollers out the window "I'm turning here! Go ahead and pull out!" I'm not going anywhere until he/she clears the intersection...not that I mistrust my fellow drivers.  I just don't trust them, you see. I remember the sage words of my father, who taught me to assume that every other car on the road was being driven by a drunken sociopath, out to kill me.  

Half the time, he has been proven right.

Knowing what NOT to do pays off.  Frying an egg? Adding three more minutes of pan time is something to avoid. Speaking before a crowd? Don't keep speaking any longer, once you've seen two people stick out their wrists to check the time. Washing your brand new white polo shirt and your brand new blue jeans? Unless you want a periwinkle colored shirt, better make that two trips around the Maytag.


Take it from Steve Harvey <<< or Tony Bennett and me: two old men who will tell you, it doesn't matter if you're repairing a Singer sewing machine or trying to be a professional singer, knowing what NOT to do is something to do.

The Saturday Picture Show, May 9, 2020

The land where our house is located is probably the least arable soil I've ever seen. I think that there used to be a gravel pit in the area, which is why the dirt is a rich parfait of stones, ginger ale bottles, and old car parts. So I envy anyone who gets things to grow anywhere, like a sunken rusted old hull.

These toy giraffes were made from abandoned flip-flops that washed up on the shore of Kenya. Some had quite a voyage all the way from Ocean City, I'm sure.

The ne plus ultra of suits used to be a suit with jacket, vest, and two pairs of pants. Now the cool thing is to add a tailored mask.

The ultimate recycle motorcycle is one of these, using a Volkswagen fender!

If there's any question about how cool Amish people are...here's how they move a barn.

This sure looks like the increasingly empty White Marsh Mall near here, but it's somewhere else, and it's not the Highland Mall any more; it's part of Austin Community College down Texas way.

"So, I promised Fred I'd help him spread mulch, and I've got the wheelbarrow, but Junior took the pickup to town after supplies. I'm on the way anyway."

She was glad she invited Aunt Steve to go shopping, because Steve wound up carrying all the bags out to the car. She really has What It Takes.