The Halloween Saturday Picture Show, October 31, 2020

 

Sad to say, this the most perfect Halloween symbol for 2020. Next year will be better!

This kid lives in a generous neighborhood and came away with a sweet bag of loot! I have never had Kit-Kat, Twix, or Starburst, but I'll fight you for those Snickers!

Never take a dinosaur to lunch. They'll say they're reaching for the check, but then they'll say they couldn't reach that far.

More and more, you see people decorating outside for Halloween. Then they have to rush to get the Thanksgiving decorations up in time for Christmas.

It's Lifesize Work-From-Home Barbie!

What a great mask! Too bad we need to wear them, but isn't it nice that they can be fun!

This is the cover of The Country Gentleman magazine (sister publication to the Saturday Evening Post), painted by Norman Rockwell for the October 22, 1921 edition.

Happy Halloween from all of us grinning jack-o-lanterns to you and yours!

Take two and call me in the morning

If you knew this, you're one up on me: "Aspirin" is a trademark owned by the Bayer company, a German pharmaceutical firm. So technically, they aren't fooling around when they say "All aspirin are not alike," in that only Bayer aspirin is real aspirin.

Now, you are certainly free to go ahead and buy a bottle of 50 Bayer aspirin for around 5 bucks at your big name drug store if buying the name brand makes you feel better! That's the aspirin's job, anyway, making you feel better. Plus, you'll feel richer if you do like I do and go to the Dollar Tree with your fiver. That's where you get 5 bottles of 24 tablets each, a total of 120 little white pain relievers for that 5 dollars.

The kicker is, no matter what you spend on it, aspirin tablets are acetylsalicylic acid, no matter the brand name. And now these little tiny miracle pills, which I use for everyday pain relief, have a use we didn't suspect until a new study at the University of Maryland School of Medicine dug it up.

They found that  COVID-19 patients taking one daily low-dose aspirin (many people pop one a day to protect against cardiovascular disease) are also significantly lowering the chance of death and complications from coronavirus.

For real, while the world chases after expensive cures and palliatives and vaccines, it turns out that an aspirin makes a Coronavirus patient 50% less likely to pass away in the hospital, and much less likely to wind up on a ventilator in the ICU.

Research says that the COVID tends to cause blood clots, and aspirin is excellent for that!

Dr. Jonathan Chow,  Assistant Professor of Anesthesiology at the U of M Med School, says, “When you have a disease like COVID that leads to increased formation of blood clots, and then you have a medication like aspirin which thins your blood and prevents those blood clots from forming, it makes clinical sense that it would work.” 

He studied the records of 400 patients this spring and summer.

But! although this would mean that aspirin would be the first over-the-counter drug to reduce mortality in COVID patients, Dr Chow says don't go running out and starting a self-prescribed aspirin regimen.

“That is not what we are suggesting,” Dr. Chow said. “We advise that patients go to their primary care doctor because they are the ones that are qualified to determine the risks and benefits of this drug.”

Doctors are optimistic, but they still need to do a "randomized control trial" to get final approval.

But as my personal physician, Dr Pepper, said on more than one occasion, "It can't hurt."

Up the creek with a paddle

If we were all thinking ahead when the 'rona first came to our shores, we would have figured that the best way to avoid it would be to go offshore...far offshore.

A Latvian adventurer, Karlis Bardelis, just finished rowing across the seas. It took him 140 days of solo rowing, and now he has advice for anyone coping with lockdowns.

His trip had nothing to do with the coronavirus anyway; he left Peru in July 2018, got to French Polynesia in five months, and wound up in Malaysia this past June.

His adventures at sea included having his boat rammed by sharks off Papua New Guinea, losing an anchor (replaced with an old battery) and several near misses with other watercraft.

Let's start calling near misses "near hits."

At one point, he was asea for five months without seeing another living being that didn't have fins, and I hear some of you already hollering, "Where do I sign up?"

Back in his native Latvia, the 35-year-old Bardelis spent two weeks in quarantine, and then said, "If we can't change the circumstances, we can change our attitudes towards them." 

"A lot of people asked me if I didn't lose my mind or become insane. No, I just enjoy it, because that's what I choose to do," he told the homefolks.

All told, he rowed 16,155 miles.  You can catch up with him on his Bored of Borders Facebook page.

Remember, he had no engine and no sails! He rowed that 23-foot boat for as many as 13 hours a day from South America to Asia.

Reaching two metres at its widest point, the row boat is equipped only with a small cabin for sleeping and storing supplies and equipment.

"I'm 200 percent certain that I made the first solo rowboat trip from South America to Southeast Asia," Bardelis says.

Along the way, he talked to people in Tuvalu, French Polynesia, the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea and Indonesia. His long blond hair and big hairy beard made him quite the object of curiosity among the folks he met, and he reports that everyone was invariably welcoming, which is nice. Indonesians helped him drag his boat ashore to scrape the hull for barnacles and shells.

And, Bardelis says that after all this time alone, he never felt lonely.

"The ocean is full of life: I wasn't alone, but rather together with birds, fish, whales," he said, adding that podcasts and audiobooks, downloaded while at port, also helped.

He wasn't doing this for the first time, either. Four years ago, he and a buddy rowed the Atlantic from Namibia (known by the current US president as "Nambia") to Brazil.

And why row, when other ways would be easier?

"It would be easy to pull up a sail, but I love rowing, and using sails would feel like cheating, even if only to myself," he said.

You have to figure he won't need to work out until the year 2046, after all that!

Don Q very much

Peggy and I are friends with a woman who said some wise things in her day. One of them, and I'll paraphrase, was that "if there is more of you than there is bathing suit, go up a size."  This was in reference to those who had a lot spilling over the dam, as it were.

And another time she said words that I have quoted a thousand times, and I will do so verbatim here:

"Some people, if they don't have enough drama in their lives, go out and make more drama for themselves"

The latest case involves this fellow up in Harford County, one Daniel Swain, from Fallston. He was arrested after refusing to wear a mask to vote at the Jarrettsville Volunteer Fire Company the other day. 

It was the first day of early voting, and the place was packed, as all the early voting locations have been. Swain, 53, showed up to vote with his 22-year-old son, and would not cover his face as required by the governor's mandate for all people over the age of 5 to wear a face covering indoors in public places.

Deputies were sent to the Jarrettsville fire house at 2:46 p.m. on Monday after election officials reported two people were refusing to cover their mugs. 

Recognizing that some people would throw up objections to wearing a mask to protect others while voting, the state put alternate plans in place. So, officials gave Swain, who retired this year as a captain at the Baltimore County Detention Center, a chance to step outside to an outdoor booth to vote.

By this time, three officers had been taken away from important patrol duties to deal with this insanity. There is no record of Swain being either an attorney or a law enforcement officer, but nevertheless, he persisted. He told three officers that the request that he follow the governor's lawful order was “unconstitutional," claiming that Maryland law allowed people to vote indoors without face masks, according to the police report.

The debate raged for another half an hour, with Swain refusing exhortations from the police and the election officials to don a mask. At length, the two men were asked to leave the firehouse. Swain’s son complied. Swain did not. 

He was charged with trespassing on private property and failure to comply with a health emergency, per court records.

"Deputies worked to resolve the situation for nearly 30 minutes. At that time, one man complied and left the premises," the Harford County Sheriff's Office said in a statement. "However, Mr. Swain made the choice to continue to refuse to comply directives given by the Election Judge. When it was clear there were no other options, Mr. Swain was placed under arrest."

Released on his own recognizance, Swain faces trial on December 4 in Harford County District Court.

The Sheriff's Office added, "It is worth noting, Mr. Swain was not banned from the location, and is still able to cast his ballot." 

"Since the coronavirus pandemic began, Sheriff Jeffrey Gahler has been very clear that deputies would handle reported mask violations through education and would not be making arrests or issuing criminal citations solely for refusing to follow the Governors' order on wearing masks," the sheriff's office reported. "However; if a private property owner, store manager, or in this case, Election Official needed assistance in having a person vacate a premise, we would enforce a trespassing violation. That is exactly what occurred in the following incident. While the polls are open to the public, they are subject to compliance with the rules and regulations set forth by the Board of Elections and the Governor of Maryland."

I don't know this man, although we both get our pension checks from the same munificent source. But I do know that my sixth-favorite Don (after Cheadle, Geronimo, Knotts, Stark, and Everly) is Quixote, who said, “Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them.”

And his buddy Sancho replied, "Take care, sir," cried Sancho. "Those over there are not giants but windmills."

The lesson is clear. Pick a fight that's worth fighting and don't go chasing windmills. Or waterfalls. Just do the right thing and get along.

Planting an idea

There's a town called Sisters in Oregon, and the people out there are lucky enough to have a newspaper called the Nugget, and therein I found a nugget I wanted to share! I thought it might plant a seed.

A woman named Katie Diez lost her father, and she waited ten years to unbox his belongings that had been stored away. She thought it would be cool to take his old shirts and make a quilt, and so she did, and then...

She was going through the shirts, cutting them up, and found a tomato seed stuck to one of them. Without even thinking about it, she flicked the seed away and continued to work, but soon came to wish she hadn't been so hasty, because an idea was sprouting.

She continued working with the aged fabric and came across another seed, a sign from above if there ever was one. She jumped at the second chance. In her journal, she wrote:

"I find that I feel guilty when I don't use every scrap of fabric. Almost as if I'm wasting the animal I just shot," she wrote. "Planning the cuts feels like I'm field-dressing a deer, which is ironic - Dad was a hunter. I found another tomato seed. I had discarded the first one and regretted not trying to sprout it. I feel like I won the lottery finding ONE MORE seed! I'm soaking it and will try to plant it."

As it happened, her father was not only a hunter, but a gardener, as well as an avid consumer of tomatoes. The seed found purchase in soil.

"I've been nurturing it for the past two months and it's now four feet tall and growing tomatoes," she said. "And it was in a box stuck to a shirt for 10 years."

Through the fall and winter, she kept that sprout sprouting and had her family help her keep a Gro-Lite beamed on the plant.

And the tomatoes came along and the quilt will be here forever, and who knows how many more fertile seeds the fruits of it will bear?

Who knows what other surprises nature has for us, if we just open our eyes and hearts?

Patience Pays

Jesse Katayama is from Osaka, Japan. At 26, he set a goal of going to Machu Picchu, the 15th-Century Incan settlement in Peru.

Jesse is a savvy traveler. He made his plans and booked his reservations and tickets.

Good plans, bad luck. He arrived in Aguas Calientes, Peru, on March 14 of this year.  That was when Peru shut down due to COVID-19.

Stranded in his room, Jesse, with the versatility and flexibility that a lot of young people have, made his way by teaching boxing to local kids, enjoying yoga classes, and studying for his exams awaiting him back home.

There were still things to do in Peru. Katayama took in sights like the Putucusi Mountain and the Calientes Waterfalls.  

But every morning, he went out for a run and he could see Machu Picchu looming in the distance. He told CNN, “I thought I would never make it to Machu Picchu as I was expecting it [wouldn’t] open within this year.”

But here's a case of patience paying off. Sure, he had to hang around for seven months, but eventually the Peruvian government allowed Jesse to have the Machu Picchu experience! And he had it all to himself, just about.

Alejandro Neyra, Peru's minister of culture, said it was decided that Jesse should get to see what he came to see, and so, his patience was rewarded. 

“He had come to Peru with the dream of being able to enter [the park],” Neyra said, as quoted by the Times. “The Japanese citizen has entered together with our head of the park so that he can do this before returning to his country.”

Of course, Katayama shared his happiness with the world in Instagram, posed with a park representative.

“After the lockdown, the first man to visit Machu Picchu is meeeeeee,” was his caption.

Machu Picchu, way up high at 8,000 feet in the Andes Mountains, above the Urubamba River valley, normally draws as many as 2,240 visitors per day, all drawn to see the 15th-Century terraces, temples and fountains there.

“I thought I [would] never make it [to Machu Picchu] but everyone asked the government and the town and they [gave] me super special permission,” Katayama added on Instagram post.

Super special! Even better than double secret!

He added, “Peruvians are soooo kind. Thank you soooo much!”

Sunday Rerun: Sweets for the sweet

 If it's October, it's time to get the candy for the kids who may or may not show up at your door for Halloween!

It's a shame that we can't bake cookies or brownies or make homemade treats of any sort for the kids, but tampering incidents in the past have made people too wary of anything unless it's manufactured and sealed in a factory far away. A real shame, it is.

So you give out candy or you sit inside watching "Law and Order: SVU" in the dark, hoping that no one will knock on the door. If you choose to go the candy route, again, there are two choices:

• Get the candy you like, the good stuff, that kids will like. This way, if you have leftovers, you have candy all winter, so when you come in from shoveling the driveway, you can grab a Snickers and munch away.
• Get the candy you don't like, so that when you have leftovers, you can take it to work and leave it on the desk in the reception area. The bonus here is that you get to see that person from Accounting - the one suspected of pilfering lunches in the break room - gobbling an Everlasting Gobstopper outside his cubicle.

I like to find and share this list every year about this time. CandyStore.com, a bulk candy delivering service, runs data from all the states and figures out the three most popular Halloween candies in each. They get the figures from candy manufacturers and distributors. 

Once again here in Maryland, the #1 candy is Milky Way. You'll find Reese's Cups in second place, and Hershey Kisses in third. Those first two spots are the same as last year, but in 2017, Blow Pops came in third.

I mean, really. Who wouldn't rather have a Hershey Kiss?

For the record, our favorite, Milky Ways, aren't even in the top 10 nationally.  They roll out this way:

Skittles
M&M's
Snickers
Reese's Cups
Starburst
Candy Corn
Hot Tamales
Hershey's
Tootsie Pops
Jolly Ranchers

And once again, the horrible candy corn ("neither candy, nor corn" - Lewis Black) sneaks into the top 10. I cannot explain some things.

The Saturday Picture Show, October 24, 2020

 

I'd like to see what the Smucker Brothers could do with this - great looking Rainbow Grapes for tasty jams and jellies!

The guy who shared this said it was his view as he walked down the lane to get his mail, and he allowed as how many others might be jealous of where he gets to live! Heck, I'm jealous that he gets his mail in the daytime! Most days, ours comes later than the 6:30 News!

There's no crying in baseball, and none at all at Halloween if you and the kids dress like the cast of "A League Of Their Own."

The great thing about Nicolas Cage is how natural he is. Like in this picture. You can't really tell if he is scratching his foot as part of a movie role or if he is scratching his foot in real life! The great ones, and their toupees, make it look easy.

If you worked at the A&P or some other grocery store back in the day when each can of peas, each package of Fig Newtons, and every bottle of ReaLemon had its price stamped on it in purple ink, then you recognize the tool of my trade: the official Garvey Repeating Price Stamper. It made a satisfying ker-CHUNK sound as it did its job, as did I.

This week's free wallpaper is from dusk on a fall day!

If you wonder why pumpkin-pickin' looks like from the sky, wonder no more. This is Wyoming.

Everything here screams 70s - the hairdids, the Wrangler corduroy bellbottoms, the Nerf ball....

Let's go mooning

I'm sure I've told you this story before, but when did that ever stop me from being redundant and saying the same thing over and over?

There was a time when my sister called me, cell phone to cell phone, from Paris, which is a leading city in France, land of fromage et vin. The connection from Europe all the way over to here in Carney, land of crabs and beer, was as clear as the proverbial bell. The only way I could have heard her more clearly would have been had she in the car with me.

Then I had to call Peggy at her office in Timonium, land of state fairs and horse racing, and I could hardly hear her on the cell. I'm going "Hello? Hello? Hoy hoy!" and she's hearing nothing.

Now it turns out, we should have made the phone call from the moon, for, you see, NASA is putting a 4G network on the moon.

By 2028, NASA wants to build a base on the moon and set up a "human presence" up there (I have prepared a list of people I would suggest as the first inhabitatants of Lunatic Acres) by the year 2028.

And here it is, 2020 already.

While you're back here on earth fretting about how much Chris Davis is being paid, NASA has shelled out 370 million US dollars to companies developing technology on the moon. They'll need to work on generating electric power (since no currently-available extension cord will reach that far), cryogenic freezing (don't ask why), robotics, safe landing procedures, and a 4G system so that moon dwellers can order green cheese pizzas for dinner and phone home.

Anticipating a large crowd of hungry travelers, NASA has installed the first
Weber grill on the moon.

I don't know how many Gs are in place on the moon right now, but NASA says 4G will give them better long-distance service on the moon, plus TikTok, which will soon be abolished here because they made fun of the ruler. And don't worry, the plan is to give them 5 Gs as soon as possible.

Remember the old Nokia flip phone you loved so much, how it fit so nicely with your acid-washed jeans and Crocs? How about this? Nokia's Bell Labs got $14.1 million to make this happen. They'll be working with a company called Intuitive Machines.

I knew they were in on it. I just had a feeling.

Bell Labs says that lunar explorers will use wireless technology for sending data and grocery lists back home, controlling lunar robot cars, a sort of Google Maps system for the moon, and streaming video.

The good news is that no one will have to build enormous cell towers on the moon. The trade off is that Bell Labs came up with small cell tech instead...it's limited in range, but it's easier to set up.

And getting a building permit to erect cell towers on the moon would be an arduous task. We have no idea how local governments are set up out there, but they probably use different application forms for all this stuff.

Cruising for many bruisings

I see on CNBC that General Motors, best known for building a Chevy Traverse that had the annoying habit of shutting down in traffic while being driven by a friend of ours, is branching out beyond the old unreliable gasoline engines and looking to get into the business of making selling unmanned autonomous vehicles by the end of this year in San Francisco.

Remember, "unmanned" means no one is driving, and autonomous means "no one is driving." 

They call it the Cruise because owning one will cause you to jump up and down on Oprah's sofa.

The Cruise people say they have received permission from the California Department of Motor Vehicles to do away with the human backup drivers from its self-driving cars.

Remember, "human backup drivers" means "the only person controlling the vehicle's acceleration and braking except for some robot who never took driver's ed."

“Before the end of the year, we’ll be sending cars out onto the streets of SF (San Francisco) — without gasoline and without anyone at the wheel,” Cruise CEO Dan Ammann says. “Because safely removing the driver is the true benchmark of a self-driving car, and because burning fossil fuels is no way to build the future of transportation.”

This will make Cruise cars the first privately operated fleet on the road without drivers, which CNBC says is the goal of the company.

They had hoped to get these autocars on the road for testing by 2019, but said they needed "further testing."

If you're the kind of person who would allow a blindfolded person to shoot a gun in your direction, if you would let someone who knows nothing a brain surgeon trepan your noggin, and if you would walk a tightrope that looks a little frayed across Niagara Falls, please report to the nearest Cruise dealer the minute they open.

They have a deal just right for you!

...there's a way

One of my favorite standup comedians was Alan King, who used to appear agitated at all times about everything, f'rinstance:

• "The supermarket sign said Ample Parking. That means there's only one spot left on the lot, and it's reserved for the manager, Irving Ample."
• "There was a kid sleeping in the grocery cart. My kids knew him. He always sleeps in shopping carts. The other kids call him 'Waffle Face'."
• "You only live once, except for Shirley MacLaine."
• "My brother-in-law is a lawyer. He says to me, 'Alan, don't you understand, if you die without a will, you could die intestate.' I looked up the word intestate. It means 'without a will'." 
  


What brings all this up? The news came last week that Chadwick Boseman, the great actor from “Black Panther” and “42,” died without a will. Now his widow, Taylor Simone Ledward, has filed documents in probate court, which is what our survivors have to do in such cases.

He died of cancer two months ago, leaving an estate of around $938,000 for his wife and his parents to settle. I saw friends of my parents go through this mess when one passed on and the other was left to deal with the Registrar of Wills, the MVA, this and that lawyer. It's a mess and it's easily avoided...just by filing a will.

Prince died without a will, which led to any number of lawsuits and actions being filed. Jimi Hendrix left no will either, but these two musicians were not being treated for a deadly disease, as Boseman was for the past four years. 

Aretha Franklin is said to have left three different wills, with some of them outdated, or with illegible handwriting, written out on legal pads. Stan Lee, who created the Marvel Universe that Boseman acted in, left what is called a "messy legal plan" which will take years to untangle, you may be sure.

But the surprise is that these celebrities are not alone! In this crazy year we call "2020," only about a third of us have wills on file. That is way down from 2017, when about half of us did. Surveys are finding that older and middle-aged "adults" are less likely to have their final wishes spelled out. Reasons given include

• "I haven't gotten around to it"
• "I don't have enough to leave anyway"
• "It costs too much"
• "I don't know how to do it"

Here's free legal advice from me, a non-lawyer. Go get a will. Even if you don't have a ton of loot, you have vehicle(s), personal possessions, semi-valuable tools in the shed, all sorts of stuff. Spare your family the mishigas of dealing with people who have a whole carousel of rubber stamps on their counter in the courthouse.

And if saving your loved ones all that hassle doesn't persuade you to do it, just the thought of seeing the cousin you can't stand, driving away in your car, ought to.

You deny Dino Flintstone?

Is it the heat in Arizona that makes people do goofy things? The latest is, some people are trying to make a McDonald's get rid of a fiberglass dinosaur statue because.....you won't believe why.

Well, there is a group called Christians Against Dinosaurs. 'Twas they who denounced a fun statue of T.Rex. On their Facebook page they rallied their followers to bunch up and do something about getting rid of that statue because

a) dinosaurs were known to be racist

b) dinosaurs often drove drunk past kindergartens while tossing fireworks out of their car window and firing revolvers

c) dinosaurs never picked up a dinner check after a night out with friends, claiming that their short little arms couldn't reach any further

d) 23,000 people think they never existed.

At least, that's how many people have "liked" the Facebook page Christians Against Dinosaurs, which states that its purpose is to let us all see the "truth" about the "dinosaur lie." They say that dinosaurs never roamed the earth, but were a scam that scientists cooked up in order to "thwart religion."

[Take ten seconds right now and say the word "thwart" three times slowly. Like the word "ointment," it gets sillier every time you say it.]

Their cry for help was printed in the Arizona Daily Star. "Please help! This McDonald's has this dinosaur and refuse (sic) to remove it! This is in Tucson, Arizona. Call the manager and demand the removal of this blasphemy!"

And then they give the name of the local franchisee so their nuts  adherents could hassle whoever answered the phone there.

Meanwhile, this T. Rex has been hanging around the McD's on Grant Road and Tanque Verde Road since 1994, bothering no one, amusing millions.

Some people think these people are just kidding, but then again, some think that of the Flat Earth believers, and where did that get us? The guy who spoke to the Daily Star said this ain't no joke, no sir:

"Yes, the dinosaur should go unless they're willing to compromise with a plaque of some kind stating that it's a fictional character," Josh Brown told the outlet.

Not this T Rex!

The Patch news site contacted CAD and were told that it's not a joke to deny T. Rex. "We're fed up with everybody acting like the people of Tucson are imbeciles and we want to help," a spokesperson for the dino-deniers told the Patch. "Having a big dinosaur outside a cultural hub like McDonald's makes Tucsonians look like they're mentally deficient and that isn't right."

The group also told Patch that they are not science deniers; they merely deny the science of dinosaurs.

The group also took issue with claims that its page is satirical, saying that they are not science-deniers. They just don't believe in dinosaurs. "We simply recognize that dinosaurs are not supported by anything scientific," the group wrote. "They're a parlor game that got out of hand."

No. Uno is a parlor game that got out of hand. Paleontology is for real.

It is funny, though, that the members of this group keep driving past McD's to fret about the T. Rex, forgetting that without the real T. Rex and other dinosaurs, there would be no oil to power their Buicks.

It's a gamble

I've been telling you for years and years, persistence pays off!  

And once again, someone who is not you nor I took at that advice to the $50,000 payoff window.

If you've been around here for a while, you remember when the Maryland Lottery used the slogan "You Gotta Play To Win." Meaning, you have to take some money out of your wallet to ever have the chance to win some to stuff back into it.

Someone took that advice, and right now, his Buxton is bulging with the loot that you and/or I could have had, but WE didn't play, so WE didn't win.

The man is unidentified, but he lives down in Churchton, Anne Arundel County, and for many years he has used the same batch of numbers to play the Bonus Match 5 game, and now he has won a $50,000 jackpot.

In the past, he has won smaller prizes, as much as $840 one time, but this is the big enchilada.

He buys his lotteries from a store that is likely the most Maryland thing you ever heard of  -  Parks Drive-in Liquors in Deale.

The lucky winner told the lottery commission, "I looked at it, saw a few matching numbers and figured I had won $15. When I saw the rest of the numbers, I knew it had happened."

His plans include paying off his wife's car, buying himself a better fishing boat and a nice truck to haul it around.

There's a nice Mexican restaurant near us - El Trovador - that sells steak, chicken, or cheese enchiladas for $12.50 a plate. For those of you homeschooling, how many $12.50 enchiladas can one buy for $50,000?

Sunday Rerun: Meet the Measles

On February 9th, 1964, I was among the 4 billion, give or take, who watched The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show and felt the earth shifting. Bobby Vinton, Ricky Nelson, Andy Williams, and yes, Elvis Presley were going to have to step aside for at least a while.

I was 12, about to turn 13 that summer, and a world that had seemed so bleak just months before, with the assassination of John F Kennedy, was about to start seeming hopeful again. It's been said a thousand ways better than I can, but The Beatles were just what we needed at that time. It's difficult to explain to those not yet alive just how it felt when John, Ringo, George and Paul threw the switch to light up our lives again.

Two weeks and a day later, I put a smile on, along with a button-down Oxford shirt, khakis, and Jack Purcells and prepared to leave for another day of 7th grade, only to be met by mother at the door. She wanted to know what I had done to my face in the time between finishing my sausage and hominy breakfast and brushing many of the same teeth I still use to eat sausage and hominy.

There were red spots all over my face that had just popped up. The golden ticket - the measles! I ran to change back into pjs and begin getting sick. These things must be handled just ever so. I probably had more hominy for lunch and maybe some rhubarb. The measles were gone in a few days.

Then, two weeks later, I was glad for any hope, because on that Sunday, March 1, 1964, I woke up up unable to move my arms and legs. I had spiked a fever the night before and woke up all sweaty and having spasms. Not good. An ambulance took me to Church Home and Hospital down on Broadway (no hospitals in Towson then) and things began looking dire as doctor after doctor came in and presented their diagnoses. Polio, encephalitis and epilepsy were leading the pack for most of the day as I lay in bed, my only company being the transistor radio that I took along on the ambulance ride downtown. I heard a lot of Beatles songs that day.

My parents were conferring with doctors most of the day, and so, were not around when a kindly old priest came in with oils and other impedimenta. He talked to me in a very soothing manner about how there is a brighter world awaiting the righteous and how sometimes God calls us home before we would want to leave what we're doing here and how heaven is said to be a land with no illness, no pain, no suffering and somehow in the middle of this, it dawned on me that he was telling that the odds on me being around to watch "The Andy Griffith Show" at 9 the next night were not all that great.

"So, I've come to administer to you the last rites..."

I have relived this a million times in my mind and I always see myself as much pluckier than I really was when I said, "Father, I'm...I'm not Catholic."

And he put aside his oils and sacramental gear before I even had a chance to say penance for breaking my sister's baton ten years before (a transgression that still is discussed at family gatherings.) And he said, "Son, it can't hurt."

I know it sounds like something out of a Dead End Kids movie, but it happened. As many of you know, I lived, and find myself now fifty years older and still penitent.

As all of you know, The Beatles went on to have a long and prosperous career.

The doctors never found out what was wrong with me. That May 3rd, I wound up in Mercy Hospital with the same symptoms. My radio came along again and I listened to the Orioles lose to the Indians, 3-0. There was still still no determination of the problem after another week in the hospital. But ever since, people have wondered just what is it about me.

But all those early Beatles songs bring me back to places I remember...

There are places I remember

All my life though some have changed

Some forever not for better

Some have gone and some remain

All these places have their moments

With lovers and friends I still can recall

Some are dead and some are living

In my life I've loved them all.

The Saturday Picture Show, October 17, 2020

 

A lot of people ask about the photos and where they come from for the weekly picture show, if 2 anonymous messages and a slightly pithy text constitute "a lot." But I will tell you, since you didn't ask, I just clip and save pictures that I've found over the week as I surf the net looking for photos of Spiro Agnew wearing a propellor beanie, hamburger coupons, and new methods for getting egg nog stains out of a priceless heirloom table runner. I really don't go looking for pictures that fit a theme or pattern, but more often than not, it seems like I did. This week, we feature colors from all shades and stripes. Let's get the unpleasant one out of the way first. This fellow citizen of ours has taken it upon herself to be the volunteer ICE lady for her neighborhood. Notice that she has taken her homemade sign, asking for something that is absolutely none of her business, and placed it in one of those plastic sheet protectors so she can harass people at a moment's notice on her way home from bingo or bowling or wherever she was instead of doing something nice. 

Now to some nice memories and colorful things! Tie dyeing is back! Everyone say, "Farrrrrr out, maannnnn!" How Woodstock!

I should write a book about the third grade at Hampton Elementary School. We had a teacher named Ms Van Breemen, who would cross paths again later on with us, but she had some interesting notions, one of which is that we should sing every day, sometimes completely inappropriate tunes like "Short'nin' Bread" (in the old minstrel dialect), and sometimes it was "Kookaburra Sits In The Old Gum Tree," the Australian song that made me wish for my own kookaburra, or at least a photograph of one.

This is "Autumn Leaves," (1856) by the English painter John Everett Millais. It's always a wonder to me that people back then would get all dressed up in their finery to go out and rake up the leaves, but formality meant a lot.

There was a time when show business folk dressed up special! And no finer example exists than the original Jackson 5ive lineup. Tito, Jermaine, Michael, Marlon, and Jackie show what the rainbow wishes it looked like.

At the height of the Depression in the 1930s, American commerce did something good for itself and for the cash-strapped public. Realizing that women were taking old flour and feed sacks to make dresses and curtains and whatever else around the house, manufacturers of those goods started putting them in cloth sacks that could be used for sewing. Whatever labeling had to go on the bag was printed with a vegetable dye that would wash off, leaving perfectly good yard goods for the handy seamstress at home. You can be sure these young ladies were proud of their dresses and their brother like the sweater that mom knitted for him!

Who wouldn't like a view like this for the fall?

And yes, he's not colorful like a parrot or anything, but this little panda cub is still cute as all-get-out. I guess it's time for me to get out.

Alaska 4-9

Do you like those Hallmark movies where the whole town pulls together to work a miracle? Sure, we all do. They make us happy, and somehow they harken back to a sweeter time in this country, when people really did things like this...

You probably can infer from the town's name that Igiugig, Alaska, is a very remote part of the world. But when the life of a child is hanging in the balance, it doesn't matter if you're in London, New York, Keokuk, or Igiugig. Something has to be done, and it take a village...even a remote village.

Here's the story. One Friday evening in September, a child from Igiugig (population 70) needed a medevac flight to Anchorage. LifeMed, the company that does these flights, sent a plane to the little town airport, right at the mouth of the Kvichak River on the south end of Iliamna Lake. It's a 30-minute flight usually, no problem.

But this year, the village’s state-owned airport has had some problems with the runway lights. It all started when a snow removal contractor knocked something offline with a plow.  Whatever the reason, the lights weren't on when they needed to be, and the plane kept buzzing around, unable to land.

Local resident Ida Nelson heard the plane circling and knew that something was wrong. “When they first flew over, I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, that sounds like a weird vehicle. I’ve never heard that truck before,'” she said. “And it wasn’t a truck, it was an airplane. Anytime there’s any type of planes flying after dark, you always assume it’s going to be something urgent and an emergency,” she said. 

Nelson can see the airport from her house (no word on whether she can see Russia) and so she could tell the runway lights were off. This being a community airport, any citizen can go throw a switch and light up the airfield, but no go this time.

A lot of people would have shrugged and said, "Huh. How about that?"

But Ida Nelson is not a lot of people. She got on her four-wheeler and raced to the runway, taking a neighbor along. 

“She started calling other people and waking them up. Like, ‘Get up, get out of bed, come line up the runway,’” Ida said. 

Ida's neighbor called 32 households. That's pretty much everyone in the village, and what do you think?

Pretty much everyone in the village drove on down to the airport and used their headlights to illuminate the landing zone. A pilot got on the radio of one of the planes parked there and communicated with the LifeMed pilot.

The child and family boarded the plane, and once it taxied and took off, everyone went home, having been part of a good community effort.

Next day, the LifeMed people posted a picture on Facebook - a dark area with some lights off in the distance.

The company wrote: “What appears to be a blurry, dark photo is actually a view of what an amazing community can do with a lot of determination.” 

Nelson is happy that people were willing to come running when the need was there, and she's thankful for the patience of the pilot who was willing to wait.

“I’m just truly happy and proud to be from here,” she said. 

  

Wrap it up

You do know why the kids love fast food, right? Just talking about the food here, not the toys or the playrooms or the cartoon characters. There's a little something in the food...

And they don't take these things lightly in Ireland. The Supreme Court over there in the Emerald Isle made an important ruling the other day.

No, it wasn't about abortion rights or health insurance or states' rights or anything like that. The Irish Supremes ruled that the bread on Subway subs has more in common with a Dunkin' Donut.

In a judgment published on Tuesday, the court ruled that the bread served at Subway, the sandwich chain that started here in the US and has now snaked its way around the world, could not in fact be defined as "bread" because of its high sugar content.

"I'll have a Deluxe BMT on Angelfood, please."

I love these.

I have no idea if the bread in foreign subs is of the same recipe as we get here. This whole thing started when Bookfinders Ltd, the people who hold the Subway franchise in Ireland, appealed a ruling, asking that their food be considered a staple.

"And for dessert, children, how about a Footlong Chicken & Bacon Ranch Melt?"

Over in Britain, they have something called a VAT - Value Added Tax - which draws a clear line between staples such as bread, tea, coffee, cocoa, milk and “preparations or extracts of meat or eggs” – and what they call “more discretionary indulgences”  -  ice-cream, chocolate, pastries, snack chips, popcorn and roasted nuts.

And the fine print of the law says the amount of sugar in bread “shall not exceed 2% of the weight of flour included in the dough”.

The Supreme Court ordered up a bunch of subs, one supposes, and analyzed the roll on the average Sweet Onion Chicken Teriyaki or Meatball Marinara. Those rolls had 5 times the permissible amount of sugar, or, as the court put it, “In this case, there is no dispute that the bread supplied by Subway in its heated sandwiches has a sugar content of 10% of the weight of the flour included in the dough.”

I tell you, my sandwich-loving friends, only a Supreme Court can get this serious about a Footlong Italian BMT:

“The argument depends on the acceptance of the prior contention that the Subway heated sandwich contains ‘bread’ as defined, and therefore can be said to be food for the purposes of the second schedule rather than confectionery,” Justice O'Donnell ruled. “Since that argument has been rejected, this subsidiary argument must fail.”

Subway replied to a query from the Guardian newspaper with this terse statement: “Subway’s bread is, of course, bread.”

You might also recall the commotion raised when some sharpie with a ruler found out that the footlong subs are 11" at most, or the 2014 imbroglio when Subway responded to a petition drive by removing a flour whitener known as azodicarbonamide from its baked goods. People didn't seem to worry about getting their adult minimum daily requirement of azodicarbonamide until they found out it was also used in yoga mats and carpet underlays.

So. Where do you wanna go for lunch?

Hang it up

Last week, the board of trustees at the Baltimore Museum of Art voted to let the Sotheby Auction people sell three of their famous pieces of art. The idea is a good one; they will take the loot and "expand diversity initiatives," which is the swanky way of saying they will get some paintings etc by people who are not all the same type. Some art from people who are of different races, ethnicities, backgrounds, persuasions, and lunch choices will make for a more inclusive collection.  After all, who wants to look at the same art by the same people all the time? Mix it up a little.

The pieces to hit the auction block are Andy Warhol’s “The Last Supper”, "3" by Brice Marden, and “1957-G” by Clyfford Still, an artist who lived in Westminster, Carroll County, for a number of years.

Christopher Bedford, the director of the museum, figures that these three pieces will rake in more than 65 million simoleons.

The plan is to set up an endowment to arrange for permanent future care of the museum's collection, and the interest from the $54.5 million fun will make for raises for staffers, free admissions for special exhibits, and open the place up in the evening so that people who have to work all day can come around and enjoy the art.  All commendable plans!

Bedford told the Baltimore SUN, "A light bulb went off inside my head during the lockdown. I realized that it’s impossible to stand behind a diversity, justice and inclusion agenda as an art museum unless you’re living those ideals within your own walls. We can’t say we’re an equitable institution just because we buy a painting by Kerry James Marshall and hang it on a wall," he said.

Kerry James Marshall is an African American multimedia artist.

“What’s more important is to create and model the world of inclusion he depicts in his paintings," Bedford continued.

In the world you and I live in, this practice is called "having a yard sale to raise mortgage and grocery money," but in the world of cake-eaters, they use the term "Deaccessioning." The BMA did it before. In 2018, they auctioned off a lot including Warhol's "Hearts" and brought in $16.2 million, and the world continued to go on and on.

As a patron of the arts - I'm a regular at gallery openings and salons all across my neighborhood - I would like to suggest the sale of several works from my personal collection to raise a buck or two for my personal charities.

The works of Thomas Kinkade illuminate homes from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon.

Many of us feel that art is not art if it doesn't look like it was raining.

This is the ne plus ultra - the pinnacle - of the art category known as Aesthetique Du Schlock. Dogs playing cards make a statement that none can deny making.

 

My favorite Tyler, besides Steven and Aisha

Today, let's tie up a couple of loose ends from stories we shared previously. In June, we talked about the death of the last person in America still receiving a Civil War pension. 

Now comes news that John Tyler's grandson has left us as well.

John Tyler! You know, the 10th POTUS, known as "His Accidency," a loving nickname he won by being the first VicePOTUS to ascend to the top job when the top guy kicked off.

William Henry Harrison was president #9. Shortly after his inauguration in 1841, he was caught in a sudden rainstorm and died of pneumonia three weeks later, which then became a lesson handed down by every single mother in history about not "catching your death of pneumonia." Enter John Tyler, who conducted the affairs of state in a lackluster manner for the rest of the term. He did not run for a second; the Whig Party to which he belonged folded because they had a silly name.

But John Tyler was the Big Daddy of American presidents, marrying twice and fathering fifteen children, none of whom had to walk around being named "Barron." 

One of his progeny, Lyon Gardiner Tyler, was born in 1853 when John was 63 and clearly old enough to know better. But the president passed along the idea of late-life fatherhood to Lyon, who, in his 70s became father to bouncing babies Lyon Gardiner Jr. and Harrison Ruffin.

Lyon Tyler had a distinguished life before dying on September 26 at age 95. He was a naval officer in the Pacific during World War II, returning home to serve with the Naval Intelligence Reserves, after which he had a law practice, was Charles City County’s commonwealth’s attorney, and taught at the Virginia Military Institute. 

Now he is gone, and how many people who pass away this year can say that their grandfather died in 1862? 

Not only that, but Lyon's kid brother Harrison Ruffin Tyler—born in 1928—is still living.

The whole thing just fascinates me, and to think that we wouldn't even have HAD a President Tyler if President Wm. Henry Harrison had a decent overcoat.

New Celebration

 

Indigenous Peoples' Day is a holiday celebrating and honoring Native American peoples by commemorating their histories and cultures. After all, they were here first! It's time to recognize and pay them respect; this is a holiday in Baltimore City and all across the nation this second Monday in October. It is an official city and state holiday in various localities.