The hand that rocks

You won't believe this (or at least you won't want to believe it) but there is a preacher, to wit, a Bishop, named Edir Macedo who says that "daughters should not be allowed to seek out higher education because if they do they will be smarter than their husbands."

Oh yes he did!

Bishop Macedo is with the very well-known Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, and he unwisely continued to speak, explaining that it's his belief that he didn't want his daughters to attend college because he believes that "an educated woman cannot have a happy marriage."

I'm sure that by this time, someone much wiser than he was begging him to call it a day or a night or a career, but he droned on, saying that higher education is not for women because they supposed to “serve God” and not themselves:

"When they (his daughters) went out, I said they would just go to high school and they wouldn’t go to college. My wife supported me, but the relatives found it absurd. Why don’t you go to college? Because if you graduate from a particular profession, you will serve yourself, you will work for yourself. But I don’t want that, you came to serve God."

And there's more:

"Because if … she was a doctor and had a high degree of knowledge and found a boy who had a low degree of knowledge, he would not be the head, she would be the head. And if it were the head, it would not serve God’s will."

"I want my daughters to marry a male. A man who has to be head. They have to be head. Because if they are not head their marriage is doomed to failure."

SO, The Bish says that only by submitting to man can a woman find happiness.

AND he's not alone in this.

There is a "Christian" radio host Jesse Lee Peterson who says that you won't find good wives and/or mothers among the educated.

He sayeth:

"Women, God has given you the gift of being the assistant of the man, to watch over his children, to make sure things are well at home, to be there when the kids come home, to cook, clean, provide in that way. There is no greater job for a woman than that. And I don’t know why these men would marry these women if they don’t have that mindset. It’s like being married to another man. It’s selfishness, it’s not love."

"Men, you need to come back to your proper state of being so God can give you the right kind of woman to marry. I wouldn’t recommend you marry these educated women with these degrees; they don’t make for good wives and mothers."

Ever see a woman do this? No. And you won't.

Owing to a rare outburst of common sense, I have chosen to let these men speak for themselves here. They feel that uneducated women make the best spouses, and urge men seeking female mates to look for one unschooled.

They don't want men to get involved with women smarter than themselves.

But if they listen to this mindless blather, they aren't going to find anyone as foolish as they are.

Most men have all they can do to be as smart as they were yesterday, and most women are smarter than tomorrow already.

Sunday Rerun: The itch to scratch

The Maryland Lottery used to have a commercial jingle that said, "You gotta play to win."

I mean, for all I know, that's still their jingle. I tune it out because the whole lottery thing just never worked for me. I have bought tickets from time to time, and I wanna tell you, if there were a prize for having the FEWEST matching numbers, I'd be a millionaire.

I'm so lottery-unlucky, sometimes my ticket has letters, instead of numbers.

And they spell out SORRY PAL.

So don't take me to the Farm Store when you're getting in line for your lottos or scratchers.  Instead, find this guy.  Somewhere in Maryland there is a 75-year-old man who just pulled in $20,000 on a scratch-off ticket.

And seven years ago, he won $30,000 the same way.

The man told the lottery officials that he bought three "$250,000 Rich" scratch-offs at Downtown Tobacco in Lexington Market, and all of them were duds.

So he dug a little deeper and bought a fourth ticket, and Bingo!

Or Scratcho!, more accurately.

20 Gs.

"I just really like scratch-offs," the man said. "I try to get a few every time I'm out."

The man (the news story I saw did not mention his name) plans to share his loot with his family, and save the rest.

Now, a lot of people would tell him to save that money! At 75, he should plan to live to be 95, and set something aside for rainy days.

And I would tell him he can plan to win three or four more times in the next twenty years, so live a little!

The Saturday Picture Show, August 29, 2020

I guess you didn't know that Bill Murray was one of the founding fathers. He really has been everywhere.

The perfect gift for the guitarist in your life - a string-and-fretboard ring!

I mean, why not? It could be legit, the way things are going. "Mel's Covid-19 Testing, open late every night."

A great year for sunflowers! That big 'un is 13 feet!

What's going on in California is so sad, and as a nation, we need to work on things together, because I'm fairly certain that sweeping the forest floors is not going to be the answer.

A nice sweet old lady with a nice sweet little lady puppet to feed squirrels in the park.

I recently subscribed to the Saturday Evening POST. I mean, for 15 bucks a year, I get to read all their back issues online, from the golden days of American culture. Better enjoy it now. Macaulay Culkin just turned 40.

I'm stunned at the brilliance of this idea. It answers the old question of "Where's my charger for the phone and tablet?" with the new question of "Where are my phone and tablet?"

It should hurt to be this daft

It's interesting when they bring back things you thought were long gone. Like "Original recipe" canned Chef-Boy-Ar-Dee noodles, or Mountain Dew made with real sugar, or lunacy.

What's that? You thought lunacy was gone for good? Well, I guess you haven't heard about Abby Johnson, who spoke the other night at a gathering of people who support the candidacy of a bankrupt real estate King of Queens.

Abby is all in favor of "household voting," which sounds innocuous enough. Sure, everyone of legal age who has no felonies on their record should vote, right? But to her mind, that means being for a head-of-household voting system.

"OK Dad, you vote and that will count for all of us!" said no one ever.

Household voting means that women and people of color can just not even think about casting ballots.

“I would support bringing back household voting,” Johnson tweeted in May.  “How anti-feminist of me.”

This month, we non-lunatics celebrate the 100th anniversary of the adoption of the 19th Amendment, which gave voting rights to women.

Of course, to our shame, only certain women, I know. But before the 19th Amendment, and the 15th, which stopped states from denying U.S. citizens the right to vote based on race, it was only, for the most part, white men who were allowed to vote.  White men who owned property and were of the right religion, in some cases, I should add. 

There were states that gave the vote to Black men, and to white guys who did not own property, but it was not universal.

Johnson's bizarre head-of-household voting scheme would give the right to vote only to the head of a household.  And you can bet your sweet bippy she doesn't see females ever filling that role. She wants the male to be the de facto decision maker.

Someone asked her on Twitter, "But what happens when the husband is a Republican and the wife is a Democrat or vice versa?”

“Then they would have to decide on one vote. In a Godly household, the husband would get the final say,” she replied.

Abby Johnson

Looking into Ms Johnson's history, we see that she worked at Planned Parenthood for eight years, and then quit that job to become an anti-abortion activist. She is the founder of And Then There Were None, an organization that "supports the career transitions of individuals working in facilities that perform abortions."

Everyone has an opinion about abortion, and I don't even want to discuss it here, but I didn't dream until this week that a movement to limit voting to the men who "are in charge of their households" was even a thing. I would say that most of the men I know who are married to women are married to women smarter than themselves. Also, it would be hard to find other people dumber than most men, so there's that.

They made a movie about Abby Johnson last year, but, apparently, we don't get that channel.

Two years ago, a woman in Utah wrote on Facebook: “The more I study history the more I think giving voting rights to others not head of household has been a grave mistake!”

If I could have a moment with that woman, I would like her to know that I feel she might want to go back and study history a little bit more. I'm sure that would be all right with her husband.

Change is good

Because I have time, in between naps and bidding on Chevy Sparks on "The Price Is Right" to devote to pondering matters of the public weal, I have figured out how to solve one of the pressing matters confronting us.

The Coin Shortage has stores asking us to round up purchases or paying by VISA or taking two dimes for a quarter and yet...there is hard money left behind, up for grabs!

Airline passengers walked away from about a million bucks in loose change at the airports across America last year!

There are three airports serving Marylanders who feel the urge to fly away to distant locals, Ronald Reagan Airport, Baltimore Washington International Thurgood Marshall, and John Foster Dulles, and Dulles led the three in unclaimed moolah.

Someone has the job of putting out a report entitled "Unclaimed Money at Airports" for the reading enjoyment of members of Congress. Here is what we learned from that:

Last year, the Federal Aviation Transportation Armed Security Service (FATASS), known also as the TSA, rounded up $926,030 in unclaimed money, including $18,899 in foreign currency.

Francly, a lot of it was French money, although a lot of Mexican pesos were in the hopper too. Mexican money is called that because they have to peso much for things down there.

The airplane security people are going to use that 926 thousand simoleons for   "aviation security programs." The last time I was on an airplane, Wilbur Wright was there too, so I don't know what that entails anymore, besides taking off everyone's shoes.

When the security people are patting you down, you have to empty your pockets and put everything in them into bins. The TSA says there are advertisements in the bottom of those bins, and reading them seems to distract people.

Advertisements are everywhere! I have no doubt that when they close the lid on that one-man bungalow with silver handles down at the Stiff Bros. Funeral Home, an ad is the literal last thing we see.

But, to get back to the point, the TSA should spend those coins and get them back in circulation.

Tomorrow, let's figure out how to open the schools in time for Christmas break.

"It's...Good"

Since the pandemic began, we're so focused on our hands...and everyone else's. Wash them! Sanitize them! Put gloves on them! Don't touch your face with them! Hand someone at KFC a double sawbucks and bring home dinner with them!

Truth to tell, I'm not nuts about KFC, and prefer Popeye's hands down, as it were. Also ahead of The Colonel on my Chicken Dance are Weis Markets, Royal Farms (even though I insist on calling it RoFa instead of RoFo), and of course, Friendly Farm, the ne plus ultra of fried everything. Even Wendy's, when they had fried chicken, was pretty good, and I must say Chick-fil-A is the worst. Greasy slabs on spongy hamburger rolls? No thanks.

But, if you are in the habit of saying that KFC is "finger-lickin' good," you can just stop that right here and now. The chain says that slogan is not the thing for a hand-conscious nation, so they are pushing that motto off to the side for a while.

You kinda get the impression that the catchphrase will be back, because instead of replacing their signs and coming up with an entire new logo, they blurred and pixelated out the now-unused words.

The message still rings true: "It's good!"

I don't remember spending a lot of time licking my fingers while eating fried chicken. But maybe I should have, because I am famous around here for dousing a thigh or wing with Texas Pete hot sauce, eating right on down to the bone, and then scratching my itchy, weepy eye.

Catherine Tan-Gillespie, global chief marketing officer for the chicken giant, says, “We find ourselves in a unique situation – having an iconic slogan that doesn’t quite fit in the current environment. While we are pausing the use of ‘It’s Finger Lickin’ Good’, rest assured the food craved by so many people around the world isn’t changing one bit.”

Rest assured, we are resting assured, Ms Tan-Gillespie.

By the way - "It's finger lickin' good" dates back to the early days of Colonel Sanders founding the chain. He was no more a colonel than he was a kernel, but but anyway, after his death, they stopped using that slogan in the late 1990s and brought it out of mothballs in 2008.

So it will be back!

Crime Notes from All Over

On Sundays, we go for a ride in the country to change our view a little and see something different, and now and again we will see a woods that looks like no one has been in there since Native Americans lived here. I always wonder about what goes on down there in a land where snakes and mice and birds and groundhogs and deer and all sorts of flora and fauna live together, but I don't wonder enough to go down there and investigate.

If I did, I might stumble upon stories like this...

There was a Lithuanian guy whom the British police were looking for in connection with a murder some five years ago. He disappeared and was presumed to be dead.

His name was Ricardas Puisys and he was not seen hanging around anywhere since Sept. 15, 2015 when he was working his job at a food company in Chatteris, England.  The article I read does not give details about the murder in question, but they do say that Puisys took it on the lam since 2015 until the Cambridgeshire Constabulary found him in a deep woods 17 miles away in the town of Wisbech on July 1.

(Attention, Maryland housing developers who use British names for the roads in your developments: "Wisbech Ct" and "Chatteris Way" would be much nicer than "Happy Hollow Avenue" or "Morning Dew Lane," just saying.)

They do things differently over there. US Police, having nabbed a suspect, put him or her in handcuffs and have them do the "perp walk" into the court commissioner's office for their arraignment, for display on the 6 O'Clock News.
British police say that, in order “to protect him and put safeguarding measures in place,’’ they waited a while to reveal his whereabouts.

While Puisys was living in that dense undergrowth, he was “very well concealed” after “having not spoken with anyone for some time,” say the police.

“For almost five years Ricardas’ disappearance has been a complete mystery. That was until we received information at the end of June which led us to finding him,” Detective Chief Inspector Rob Hall of the Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire Major Crime Unit said in a statement.

“He is safe and we are working very closely with him to ensure he remains safe, but also to ensure he gets the support he needs after having lived through extremely difficult circumstances during the last five or more years.”

If the kind way they treat criminals in England becomes common knowledge over here, maybe more of our crooks will ship out for Worcestershire and pull their capers!

A Titanic discovery

They say if you want good French dressing, go to France. For Italian food, you can't beat Italy.

And so it goes that if you want the best Scotch whisky, you need to get to Scotland. Go ahead. You take the high road and I'll take the low road.

I'm sure there are liquor stores all over Scotland, land of plaid and bagpipes, but here's a chance to spend a small fortune on a bottle of hooch you aren't even supposed to drink (but wouldn't it make a cool display piece on your mantel?

Dateline: Eriskay, in the Outer Hebrides, February, 1941. The British cargo ship known as the SS Politician runs aground, taking everything from biscuits to cotton goods for customers in Jamaica and New Orleans.

Oh, and whisky. 264,000 bottles of whisky.  And if one of those bottles should happen to fall, 263,999 bottles of whisky on the wall.

Fun fact: They take this stuff seriously! Whisky is booze from Scotland, Canada, or Japan. Whiskey refers to distilled grain spirits from Ireland and the United States.

One result of this was that suddenly, a large percentage of the populations of the Outer Hebrides took up an interest in deep-sea diving.

After giving everyone plenty of time to scavenge what they could, the locals blew up the hull of the foundering Politician (no comment) to sink the ship, and still, now and then, a bottle of sauce would bob to the surface.

One of those bottles of hoochy-koo was salvaged by pro diver George Currie and is up for auction this month at Scotland’s Grand Whisky Auction. Last reported bid was $8,000, and while the bad news is that the firewater is "not suitable for human consumption," the winning bidder will also get a diver's helmet and a couple of bricks from the ship.


There was so much whisky on board that—following an initial rush among locals to rescue what they could from the foundering ship—freeloaders would still be recovering bottles nearly half a century later, even after the ship’s hull was blown up and sunk to discourage more salvage (that is, looting). Some washed up on local beaches, and others were brought up by divers. One of the latter, found by professional diver George Currie in 1987, is now up for sale at  where bidding will close on August 10, 2020. At press time, the bottle was already going for nearly $8,000. Though the auction house warns unequivocally that the “bottle is not suitable for human consumption,” the winning bidder will also be treated to a diving helmet and bricks from the ship itself.

Hey, wait a minute. The ship was carrying bricks? No wonder it sank!

Also packed aboard the ill-fated Politician: 290,000 10-shilling Jamaica bills, In 1958, the government announced that 211,267 of them had been accounted for, leaving 78,733 of them, well, unaccounted for.

I wouldn't know anything about them, guv'nor.

Sunday Rerun: A night at the theater

You know how stuff you hear from childhood sticks with you all your life? Like the first time you hear that pickles are shrivelly cucumbers and raisins used to be grapes, and the startling realization that your parents know, and once used, the same off-color words you think someone just made up...

I was ten when the Civil War Centennial started. You Dixie-fried readers know that struggle as the War Of Northern Aggression. But just after it ended, a disappointed Confederate sympathizer shot Abraham Lincoln to death while the 16th president enjoyed an evening at Ford's Theater.

Well, at least he enjoyed it up until John Wilkes Booth cunningly slipped past a missing drunken guard to enter the presidential loge and fire his Derringer.


The play that evening at Ford's starred Laura Keene (an English actress whose real name was Mary Frances Moss) in "Our American Cousin," a comedy about uncouth Americans. As an actor himself, Booth had seen the play, and knew exactly what the big laugh-getting line was.

I heard about this as a kid and it's one of the factoids that lodged itself in my noggin, along with Chuck Estrada's pitching record for 1960 (18-11, with a 3.58 ERA) and the formula for water (two atoms of hydrogen in a molecule of water).
The laugh-getter was when Asa Trenchard says this to Mrs. Mountchessington:

Don't know the manners of good society, eh? Well, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal — you sockdologizing old man-trap.

I suppose I had other things to do, but it took a few years before I found time to find out what "sockdologizing" means. (I knew what a man-trap was, having seen plenty of Katharine Hepburn movies.)

"Sockdolager" was a word that came to our language in the early 1800s, combining "sock" for a knockout blow and a mangled form of "doxology," which is the word for the final part of a hymn. "Sockdolager," meaning an exceptionally crushing punch effect, was then boiled down a little more by Tom Taylor, the playwright behind "Our American Cousin," to mean that the character toward whom the word was lobbed was an overwhelming force. That's what linguists call a nonce word, a word made up for just one occasion.

If that was the funniest line in the play, the whole audience must have been out cold when it was said, and Booth's plan was to fire his pistol while the audience convulsed over it. Then, in true theatrical fashion, he jumped off the balcony, shouting  “Sic semper tyrannis!” (“Thus ever to tyrants!”– then, as now, the Virginia state motto).

But, in non-theatrical fashion, Booth caught his spur on the American flag bunting draped over the president's box, and landed so awkwardly on the stage that he broke his leg and limped off to ride away on his horse.

154 years later, America still mixes show business with politics, and still with disastrous effect. But at least we know a sockdolager when we see one now!

The Saturday Picture Show, August 22, 2020

A dash of marigolds add some color and zest to a summer garden.

William Blake said, "To see a World in a Grain of Sand. And a Heaven in a Wild Flower. Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand. And Eternity in an hour." You can see a lot of the world in a dew drop, too.

YOU say it's a glasswing butterfly. I say it's a mosquito dressed in a butterfly skeleton.  You're probably right.

Welcome to Nothing, Arizona. I don't think there's a visitor center or Welcome Wagon.

After seeing the sunbleached, parched Arizona desert, I needed this.

This, my friends, is known as Italian Lamb Transport. All satisfied riders!

As we celebrate the 100th anniversary of women getting to vote (and the 244th of when they should have gotten it to begin with) it's interesting to note that men and women alike founded this organization to try to prevent that fundamental fairness. Brewers and distillers also opposed it, fearing that women getting the vote would lead to prohibition. Another brilliant idea.

While we argue about mail delivery and removal of drop boxes, this is happening. If you don't have stamps, nothing will happen anyway. But I'm sure this is just some sort of distribution snafu, and nothing malign is afoot. Uh huh.

No hits, one error

By now, you have heard that Cincinnati Reds play-by-play announcer Thom Brennaman is out on his asterisk for having uttered a vile slur when he THOUGHT he was off the air the other night.

Yesterday was National Radio Day and all of us who were ever lucky enough to squeeze out sparks on an AM or FM transmitter looked back on the days when we were, in all cases, younger, in most cases, slimmer and hairier, and in many cases much less wise than we are today. 

I'll be honest. You will have to look and look to find someone who ever worked in broadcasting and did not have a blooper moment or even an open mic boo-boo. It happens to everyone. There are thousands of hours of blooper tapes available to listen to.

But here's the difference with Brennaman. He did not know the mic was hot when he said some town was one of the "(slur deleted) capitals of the world" and that was his fault. The first lesson you learn around any mic is to assume that it is always on.  If he had just said, "That town is a dump" he would only have to apologize to the Chamber of Commerce of the calumniated city.  If he had said, "That town is a goddamn dump," he would have had to apologize to the city and to whatever faith he belongs to.

But saying that some city is a (slur) capital of the world is just stupid. There are no such capitals, just as there are no jobs anymore for Thom Brennaman, who is suspended from his job with the Reds and fired from his job doing the NFL for FOX.

It always seem to come as a surprise to some people, Thom, but it's perfectly okay to be gay and your narrow view of the world doesn't change how wide it is, with room for everyone.

It's so 1950 to put people down for their lives.

And another thing - enough with the fulsome apology and the "This is not who I am" remarks. If you say stuff like that, that IS who you are. Maybe we don't like it, and maybe you don't either, but it's like you eat a hamburger and say, "A guy who eats a hamburger is not who I am."

America has come a long way in many fields, but we are way behind the civilized world in the field of apologies. Say you know how you were wrong, acknowledge who was hurt and how, and outline your plans to be better in the future.  That's all it takes. No need to tell us what kind of person you are when your words have already done that.

Down on the corner

We moved into our house in 1999, and since it was a new development, the builder was obliged to include a stormwater management facility at the lowest point of the land. Most people refer to this colloquially as the "sediment pond," and it does work, because when we have those midsummer earschplitten loudenboomers, as the Germans call a thunderstorm, the rain rolls right through our back yards and into this area, where it forms a temporary swimming pool for squirrels, raccoons, and the occasional bandicoot.

I don't there are any bandicoots here, they being native to Australia and New Guinea, but it's just a word I like to say. Any time the talk turns to matters financial, I will pipe up with "fiduciary" as often as possible, and I think you know why.

But, being part of nature, the little lot down on the corner is not immune to growth, and without regular visits from the maintenance crew (the land is deeded to the county) it tends to become overgrown. Let's just say I wish the local corn crops grew as reliably as the ailanthus trees down in the ditch grow, but they don't.

Hubert H. Humphrey, one-time presidential candidate, was often cited as the source of the quotation "Politics is the art of the possible," but in fact, the originator of the statement was the German Prince Otto von Bismarck, who said, in full, "Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable...the art of the next best," before becoming the inventor of the Bismarck donut.

In other words, everyone would like a fire station around the corner, a police car down the street when needed, the soccer field lined and manicured perfectly, the schools open and efficient, the restaurants and saloons inspected, and the million and one other things that government handles done well and without prompting. But there are far more stormwater management facilities in this county than could be handled by a dozen more crews than the county has, and without raising taxes too high, the best way is to do the attainable and shoot for the best possible.

The neighbor whose property adjoins the pond does a lot to help out, cutting the grass around the sidewalk, but when it grows wild, the pond area takes on a great resemblance to the dark forest undergrowth last seen in Danum Valley,  Borneo, and that's why we can call on our nonpareil County Councilman, the amazingly energetic civic-minded David Marks, and he makes the possible happen!

Our thanks to Mr Marks, the only Republican I have ever voted for, for his unstinting efforts to keep our town so nice!

Sting operation

You might remember when (1998) some people in Minnesota thought it would be a hilarious prank to vote for a professional wrassler to be their governor. "This oughta show them politicians!" was their battle cry as they chortled while voting for Jesse "The Body" Ventura (born James George Janos) as their state's chief executive.

The whole plan went awry when no one thought to limit the amount of people who were in on the joke, and as a result, the great state of Minn. was a joke for the next four years.  "PPPPP" should be the mantra of all those who propagate practical jokes - Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance.

Now we turn to Mississippi, where the state has finally decided to get a new official flag to replace the old one that had the Confederate flag smack dab in the middle of it. They invited one and all to submit their designs, and The Mississippi Department of Archives and History (MDAH) is winnowing out the choices.

But...

Someone submitted this one for consideration.

Funny stuff!  Thomas Rosete, who is a deckhand on the Yazoo River and is therefore very much in touch with the mosquito population, told the Clarion Ledger newspaper that he works with a guy who didn't want a new flag, so he came up with this salute to the bug whose name comes from the Spanish term for "little fly."  Little fly, big annoyance, and probably more so than anywhere on the river. So Rosete turned in his flag design and probably figured the joke ended there.

The MDAH went through over 1,000 ideas, and you have to figure there were good ones and bad ones in the stack, but some people really took to the mosquito design. “Personally, I love the Mosquito Flag. ... the cheekyness (sic) of it is on brand,” one Mississippi resident tweeted.

And so mosquito fans were excited when the Rosete design wound up among the finalists, but the excitement, like a mosquito itself, turned out to be short-lived.

“The mosquito flag advanced to Round Two due to a typo in a list of flag numbers submitted by one commissioner,” the MDAH said in a statement. “That commissioner has requested that the flag be removed from the Round Two gallery, and MDAH staff has complied."

It makes me wonder. A typo is when you type "yellwo" instead of "yellow." Typing "your" when the word called for is "you're" is not a typo. Perhaps the commissioner who submitted that bug flag was being cheeky.

I hate to see that sort of humor being slapped down.

Anyhow, the commission will have a final vote among the top five flag on September 2. Watch this space for news about the new Mississippi vexillum!

What's that sound?

Well, the results are in, and I guess that I can share that I am currently dealing with an apparently incurable medical condition. I don't think they will have a telethon for this disorder; if they did, no one could hear what the host was talking about.

We're talking about auditory pareidolia, and the chances are you or someone you love may have it as well. The online dictionary at the University of Facebook Medical College defines AP as “Audio pareidolia is hearing words/music that are not actually in the sounds you are hearing. This can occur by misinterpreting words that are being said, or by hearing words in random noise."

Here is where it strikes, deep in the heart of man. First of all, we live in a two story house.  Peggy has her story, I have mine...old joke. But, our house should be turned upside down.  The basement is the coolest part of the castle in the summer and the warmest in winter.  The main floor is comfortable, but the upstairs, although nice and snug in winter, is positively Hadean in summer, as the merciless sun beats on the attic above. Even at night, after the infernal ball of fire in the sky has loitered at about 10 feet above our roof all day, it's still hot up herrrre, Nelly.

You know how many fans Harry Styles and Ariana Grande have, combined? That's how many fans we have going around up here all summer long, and that's there the pareidolia comes from.

For years I thought my sanity was ebbing away and that the final little bit of cheese had finally fallen off my cracker, but I as I lie awake in bed at night, waiting for sleep to overtake me, I hear music or voices in the room. And it's not like, "Oh, that's the Beatles with "Yes It Is" from 1965" or "This is Norm MacDonald talking about Carrot Top" or maybe an old speech by Nixon.

And then, as I fret about whether I sent out thank you notes to the staff at the colonoscopy clinic last time (I'm a handful while sedated) I toss and turn thinking I am the only person in the world who hears music while no radio is on and voices while no one is speaking and I figure it's because I am stark raving mad.

But now I read all about it "Ask Marilyn" in the Parade Magazine and I am free to find something else to be sure I have!

Now they'll REALLY have everything at the mall

If this deal - it's still in the exploratory stages- works out, it will be the first case in a long time of the business world acting like a classic country song.  Wynn Stewart had a hit a few decades ago called "I Bought The Shoes That Just Walked Out On Me," and until I heard what Amazon is cooking up, that's the last time I heard of a deal like this. It's also a lot like Jackie Vernon's old comedy bit about driving along in his car, stopping to pick up a hitchhiker, and then being knocked out and thrown out of the car as the hitchhiker zooms off in it. The story concludes with Jackie forced to hitchhike to the next town, only to get a lift from the hitchhiker in his own car.

What I'm talking about is Simon Property Group, owners of most of the malls in America (but not The Mall of America!), angling with Amazon to turn old Sears and JC Penney stores into Amazon Distribution Centers, now that Amazon has chiseled away at the customer base of the perennial mall favorites and left them in sad sad shape.

This was in the Wall Street Journal but it was also in reputable news sources as well. The beauty part of it all is that it gives Amazon the chance to warehouse the hairdryers, screwdriver sets, fringes croptop tee shirts and Lysol Wipes that we buy from them now, and stash them closer to the customers to whom they will deliver all that "By tomorrow at 9 PM."

It gives the Simon Group the chance to sell or lease vast square footage of brick and mortar buildings for which they don't have a line of stores clamoring to move in.  And it gives the few remaining stores in the mall - All Sales Vinyl, The Book Depository, Jittery Joe's Java Hut - the chance to do business with the people who drove those anchor stores away!

As I say, this is all in the very early stages, and not a "done deal" by any estimation, but Simon Property is sitting on (or in) 63 Penney and 11 Sears stores, and from what I see, they ain't gonna turn them into libraries, so let's see what happens.

Who knows? Maybe someday they will work it out so you can just go the mall and pick up the stuff you want to buy! It could happen!

Sunday Rerun: He got canned

The topic of Chef Boy-Ar-Dee came up the other morning on the Howard Stern show, so I had to research the old chef to find out what his story was.

And as with anything covered with tomato sauce, it's fascinating!

First off, Howard said that he was an avid consumer of the Chef's canned meatball and pasta products. He said his mother would be in the kitchen making wonderful meatballs, sauce, and pasta, and old Howard would go into the kitchen, open a can of C B-A-D noodles, and heat it up, gobbling it in front of his mom as a form of teenage rebellion.

Can you just imagine? I ate canned pasta once in my life and had a pre-teenage rebellion.  I think I stood up and hollered, "I ain't eating this slop!" while tossing my plate like I had seen George Raft do in the movies.

All right, I didn't throw my plate, but I definitely balked at consuming canned pasta. As I recall, it tasted like rubber bands floating in catsup. Not good. But for all I know, it's a whole lot tastier now, yessir. Si, signore.

As Howard's sidekick (and former student of mine) Robin Quivers pointed out, the chef must have been a pretty good cook in his day. Turns out the man born Ettore (Hector) Boiardi in Piacenza, Italy in 1897 came to America in 1914 and worked in the kitchen in the Plaza Hotel in New York, rising to the position of head chef. In short order he moved to Cleveland to open his own restaurant, Il Giardino d'Italia (The Garden of Italy.)

Sometimes, the combination of timing, luck and talent results in huge success. By the time the Depression hit, Hector's restaurant was doing very well, and people just loved his tomato sauce. Loved it. So much so that they asked him for sauce to take home, and he began using washed-out milk bottles and filling them with his sauce as favors to customers.

That was the talent, making that red gravy. Luck and timing came in because the early 1930s saw a lot of people losing their jobs and savings due to foolish national economic policy during the 20s. So, pasta became an affordable meal for many, and Chef Boiardi started making sauce for sale.

The only problem then was, no one could figure out how the hell to pronounce "Boiardi," and the chef said, "Let's go phonetic," and rechristened his brand "Chef Boy-Ar-Dee."

What's more, his company made a lot of canned food for GIs during World War II, and many of those soldiers and sailors came home and brought their Army can opener (left) with them, thereby staving off starvation until they got married. They purchased canned chow by the truckload.


Chef Boy-Ar-Dee appeared in television ads for many years, and at his death in 1985, his pasta and sauce cans were selling to the tune of $500 million per year.

So there you have it, and if you like his food, it's still available. If you'd like some real homemade pasta sauce, come on over one night and I'll share Vic Damone's recipe with you, and even cook you up some.

Tomorrow, let's talk about a man who changed the world for sufferers of indigestion. As luck would have it, his name was Al Kaseltzer.

The Saturday Picture Show, August 15, 2020

We all feel like this sometimes. Ask your doctor if forward-straddling a tree is right for you.

No Maryland State Fair this year, but people will still find a way to make themselves feel like they just got off the Tilt-A-Whirl...

There is only one person in this picture.

When you come to the end of the day, ask yourself, what did you do to make someone's life better?

Ah yes, Back To School in America at Dollar Tree. Our Tree is currently closed due to a fire, and I hope they reopen by Christmas!

As Andy Griffith would say, they ain't nothing better than homemade raspberry jam. I hear that so many people are doing Pandemic Home Canning this year, they're having a hard time finding Mason jars! Ask your friend Mr Smucker.

Ah yes. Back to school in America, everyone masked up and ready to go. Huh? Sorry. This is Germany. America is where kids don't see the need to flatten the curve.

Elvis died on August 16, 1977. This is his "American Eagle" jumpsuit from 1973.

Memory Lane

These things happened in 1992:

Hurricane Andrew caused unbelievable damage in Florida in August. With winds of 165 miles per hour and gusts over 200 mile per hour, it caused between $27 and $35 billion in damage and desroyed not dozens, not hundreds, but TENS of THOUSANDS of houses and killed as many as 65 people.

The Mall of America opened in that same month. There are over 500 stores built on 78 acres where Metropolitan Stadium once stood as home to the Minnesota Twins and Vikings.

McDonalds opened its first hamburger stand in Beijing, China.

Miley Cyrus was born.

The Winter Olympic Games are held in Albertville, France, and Bill Clinton was elected president of the US.

And, two guys from Menomonie, Wisconsin, made a promise that if either of them ever hit the big bucks on a Wisconsin Powerball Lottery ticket, they would split the swag 50-50.  Their names were Thomas Cook and Joe Feeney. They had nothing but a handshake agreement to go on.

And that was pretty much the year that was 1992.

And then in 2020, Cook bought a ticket for the June 10 drawing. And whaddya think?

You got it - he hit the big time, to the tune of $22 million. 

I can name that tune!

But what do you think he did?

a) feign amnesia
b) split the proceeds
c) say, "Joe Feeney? Who's Joe Feeney?"


Feeney is a big fisherman, so here is what he said when Cook called to tell him he could afford the really best worms from here on:  "He called me and I said, 'are you jerking my bobber?'"

For non-fishermen and -women, here is what he meant.

Nothing was being jerked, although the odds of hitting the Powerball are 1 in 292,201,338, according to the lottery. But the odds are good that Feeney is glad that the best friend he ever had on this earth remembered the promise of 1992.
Feeney is a retired firefighter; Cook was still working until about five minutes after he heard he hit the numbers. He gave his two weeks notice and says now he and his family can "pursue what we feel comfortable with."

The Cooks, the Feeneys, and an unidentified Lottery official (left).

"I can't think of a better way to retire," Cook stated for all of mankind.

The two guys and their wives have always traveled and vacationed together, and now Mr and Mrs Cook and Mr and Mrs Feeney "plan to upgrade" their travel accommodations.

I should say so.

I'm glad they remembered the handshake!

Tall Story

My Eddie The Cat likes to do this thing in which I'm sitting on my stool in the kitchen and she jumps up on me and climbs on my shoulder and demands to be taken for a walk around the house, thus staking her claim as The Tallest Cat In The World.

When I stand up straight, that puts Eddie up at around 6' 5" (that's about 196 cm for our metric friends) so the chances are, she is rightfully entitled to her claim.  (And who's going to tell her she isn't, anyway?)

But even Eddie, and I, and Shaquille O'Neal, my fellow member of the Rhyming Name Club, must bow before the amazing tall Forrest The Giraffe! It takes more than three six-foot measuring tapes to record his height.  He's 18 feet, 8 inches tall! 

Read about him in the  Guinness Book of World Records.


Giraffes don't usually go much more than 18 feet, but Forrest, a happy resident of the Australia Zoo, goes beyond that.
And the article says he has fathered 12 calves. That reminded me of Screamin' Jay Hawkins, the eccentric singer of "I Put A Spell On You," who is said, depending on whose account you go with, to have fathered between 33 and 75 children, .
As someone once said, that would account for the screaming.

The Most Baltimore Thing

The Most Baltimore Thing In The World is not the unrest and contumacious behavior we see in the streets and on the news sometimes.

The Most Baltimore Thing In The World showed up the other day when a gas explosion blew up three houses on Labyrinth Avenue in the city's northwest corridor.

It happened just before 10 in the morning, and the news stations had live coverage all day and into the night.  By the time the noon news came on, they were showing people showing up with needed supplies.  It was fortunate, at least, that the scene of the explosion was a few steps away from the Reisterstown Road Plaza, which afforded the helpers plenty of room to set up.

Meanwhile, at the scene, people living nearby had run out of their homes - often without socks or shoes - to start the rescue effort. Seven people were injured, and two lost their lives. Families and friends came together as people emerged from the detritus, with their possessions scattered to the four winds, but, with those exceptions above, their bodies and souls still among the quick.

Baltimore City police were there along with the Fire Departments from the city and Baltimore and Howard Counties. The Jewish community group known as the Chesed Fund was passing out water to neighbors and the many fire, police, utilities and other agencies on site.  The temperature was 90°, with oppressive humidity, so water was a must.  And because of the uncertainty of the source of the gas leak, power had to be shut off in the neighborhood for safety, leaving more people in need of a cool drink and shade.

One of the people rescued was barefoot, according to the article in the Baltimore SUN. Na-Shaé Carter, 20, went to her house and came back with a pair of her mother's pink socks for the lady.

“I got 10,000 socks,” said her mother. “One pair ain’t gonna hurt. To give it to somebody in their time of need, I don’t even care. I was out here giving out water. … I wasn’t worried about me. I was worried about my neighbors.”

Meanwhile, the American Red Cross was on the job to find temporary housing for those left without a home, and they were supplying water and food on the lot near the Applebee’s. 

But here is the most Baltimore thing on an awful Baltimore day: a man was on the news, no bigshot he, just a working class salt of the earth guy. He said, "I had $500. I took $300 and bought 30 pizzas at Papa John's, and $200 worth of water at Giant's*."

And he delivered all that to people he didn't know, just people he wanted to help. That's Baltimore.
___________________________________________________________
*Something else that's pure Baltimore - we make the names of all grocery stores and hardware outlets possesive. I can meet you at Safeway's or Home Depot's if you want to hear more.

It doesn't mean "Bidirectional Forwarding Detection," either

I guess I was a teen by the time I first heard the expression "BFD," and, with my background of hanging around more firehouses than schoolhouses, I thought it referred to the Baltimore Fire Department.

Nope.

Then I had one of those 'ah-ha' moments Oprah is always advertising as one of her favorite things, and it dawned on me what they were talking about every time someone said "BFD!"  It IS a big deal, because there is nothing better than BFD  - as in Breakfast For Dinner.

You see, my dad worked all three shifts when I was a kid (not all at once, you understand, but a week of dayshift, then a week of 4-12, and then the dreaded 12-8. A nice eye-opener with sausage, eggs, and toast, and he was ready to go to work.

And I don't know if you've ever worked on the midnight shift (old line: big boss asks supervisor how many people work on the midnight shift. Comes the reply: "About half of them.")  Some people adjust well right away, some never get used to it, but no matter how well you adjust, the chances are, if you work all night and sleep during the day, when you wake up, you won't feel like having a T-bone steak and baked patootie and broccoli with "Highlandtown" sauce, so you go to the breakfast menu and ask for waffles or toast and bacon or sausage or both and then eggs - scrambled, sunny side up, over easy, and some grits.  Nice way to get the system activated.

As a retiree, I am currently shiftless, but even when I worked the straight day trick, I still liked BFD and I recommend it to those who are looking for that something special to delight Mom and Dad and Billy and Sis.