NYE 2021

 

This 1620 painting by Jan Brueghel The Elder was called "Bacchanalia." I show this to you now because tomorrow morning at this time, should you not heed the warnings to be moderate in your consumption this evening, you will know how many of these people felt the next morning, too.

Have a safe, sensible, Happy New Year's Eve.

Longtime Mystery Solved!

I've been a fan of "A Christmas Carol" since I was a tiny little tim myself (and that's been a while). But I have always wondered about something...something at the very end of the story, where now-giddy Scrooge is running around his bedroom and hollers out at a little boy passing by in the snow.

He asks the boy if he knows the poulterer's shop around the corner with the big prize turkey hanging in the window, and when the lad says he should hope he did, Scrooge tells him to go buy it.

In the original story:

“It’s hanging there now,” replied the boy.

“Is it?” said Scrooge. “Go and buy it.”

“Walk-ER!” exclaimed the boy. 

I've wondered ever since what "Walk-ER!" meant. I used the closed captioning on the tv when I watch the 1951 version of the story, and that says the kid says "What cor?" and on my second-favorite version, "Mr Magoo's Christmas Carol," the closed captioner typed "Wha cur?" and none of that makes sense. The dictionary says a cur is a poorly-behaved mongrel, and up until that Christmas morning, Scrooge was too cheap to keep a pet around, so that wasn't it.

The little turkey-fetcher, from the movie

Recently, though, someone invented Google, and it finally dawned on me to look it up! And the Oxford English Dictionary, a walloping hearty meatloaf of a book if ever there was such a thing, defines it for us:

"WALKER" "More fully, Hookey Walker.  An exclamation expressive of incredulity,  as in 'That is all Walker.'

and then Eric Partridge, in his book "A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949) p 403, says "Hooky Walker! A phrase signifying that something either is not true or will not occur."

Digging into the matter more deeply (what else do I have to do all day?) it turns out that "John Walker" was the name of an untrustworthy spy in literature of the 1830s, a bad guy with a hooked nose. So, saying "Hooky Walker!" became a way to damn something as untrue, and that was shortened to just using "Walker!"

Now, with that mystery out of the way, I can spend some time figuring out why people will spend money for coffee at BigBucks when they can make it at home better, for less.

See here!

Like millions of Americans, I began wearing eyeglasses in elementary school so I could see what was being written on the chalkboard, way up front in the classroom. I also thought it would be handy to be able to see baseballs flying at my face, movies, and the giant dog that knocked me off my bicycle one Saturday afternoon. 

One thing I was able to see that day was stars.

As the years went by, I needed bifocals, and then trifocals, and then cataract surgery, which replaced the lens in my peepers so that I can see almost perfectly at a distance.

So where's that big dog now?

I do need help with small print, and now there is help for those of us in the "over 40" boat.  And above.

Help is on the way! There's an eye drop coming out to solve the problem of age-related blurred near vision.

It's called Vuity. It was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in October, and it might be just what the eye doctor ordered for some of the 128 million Americans who have trouble seeing close-up.  Just instill one drop in each eye, wait 15 minutes, and you'll have eagle eyes for six to 10 hours, according to the company that makes it.

750 people tested the drug in clinical trials, and Toni Wright was one of them. She liked what she saw (get it?)

Was at time, Ms Wright had to keep cheaters everywhere - in her office, bathroom, kitchen and car - if she was going to read. 

"I was in denial because to me that was a sign of growing older, you know, needing to wear glasses," she said. 

A couple of years ago, her doctor pitched her on this new eye drop. She tried them and liked the result right off.

"I would not need my readers as much, especially on the computer, where I would always need to have them on," she said.

Age-related blurry near vision is known to medicine as presbyopia. This is the first drug to treat the situation by utilizing the eye's natural ability to reduce its pupil size, said Dr. George Waring, the principal investigator for the trial.

"Reducing the pupil size expands the depth of field or the depth of focus, and that allows you to focus at different ranges naturally," he said. And I'm sure we can all agree.

It ain't cheap, as they used to say. For a month's supply of Vuity, you'll shell out 80 clams. And it won't be covered by insurance because it's not "medically necessary."

Side effects among test participants included headaches, red eyes, and wondering where they left their reading glasses.

The manufacturer points out that they don't want you using Vuity when driving at night or "performing activities" in "low-light conditions."

Ahem.

 

Piece of cake

We saw more than one German Chocolate Cake over the holidays. Now, if you ask me, German Chocolate Cake is all that a cake needs to be. I am not a big fan of chocolate, and German Chocolate Cake uses a kind of chocolate that is marked "mild dark" and that suits me fine. And the icing! So tasty. Now, cake purists will tell you that it's actually a custard, made by low-boiling brown sugar, granulated sugar, butter, egg yolks, and evaporated milk, and adding vanilla, pecans, and coconut to make a gooey slathering for the cake.

As long as I'm sharing my thoughts, I think there is nothing that can't be made better by adding coconut to it.

Something else we need to talk about...German Chocolate Cake has nothing to do with Germany at all. You can go to Bermuda and tell them how much you love wearing Bermuda shorts in summer, and the people of Merrie Olde England are delighted to hear that you toast one of their muffins every morning, and I once told a woman in Winnipeg, Manitoba, that any bacon she ate was automatically Canadian bacon. 

But you can't walk up to Hans, the baker, in Munich and tell him how much you love his German Chocolate Cake without him calling you a dummkopf. That's because we call it "German" Chocolate Cake after one Sam German, a baker who developed that sweet baking chocolate for the Baker's Chocolate Company in 1852. 

And old Sam was long gone by 1957, for sure. That's when a woman in Dallas, identified as "Mrs George Clay" in the inane sexist terminology of the day, sent a recipe to the Dallas Morning News for its popular "Recipe Of The Day" column for what she called "German's Chocolate Cake." General Foods, the multinational conglomerate which was absorbed by Kraft Foods in 1989, owned the Baker's brand at the time, and they about broke their necks to pass the recipe on to other papers all over the country.  Within a year, sales of Baker's German's Chocolate were up by 73%, and while none of that money accrued to either Mr or Mrs Clay, we all knew they ate some tasty cakes. 

And they changed the name of the chocolate to Baker's German Chocolate, which is where the old rumor about it being German started.

Two more things I have to say before I go start working off the holiday cakes...you can't take a regular chocolate cake and cover it with coconut-pecan icing and call it German Chocolate Cake. That won't do.

And where did this thing of calling Ralph O'Hoolahan's wife "Mrs Ralph O'Hoolahan" get started? Everyone knows her name is Mitzi...Mrs Mitzi O'Hoolahan! You wouldn't call him "Mr Mitzi O'Hoolahan," would you?

And is it ok to bring a Devil's Food Cake to a church supper?

I love history

One day, people will look back on how civilization acted during the COVID-19 pandemic, and they will probably shudder in disbelief.

But that's what history gives us: the chance to look back on lunatic behavior with a shake of the head and a hearty disapproval.

I don't think enough people study history enough, a belief borne out recently when the National Football League acted surprised when groups of 75+ men working together started up with outbreaks of the virus. Several head coaches were unable to take their field with their squads the weekend before Christmas, leading the local Baltimore sporting media to ask Ravens head coach John Harbaugh who would take charge of the team should he be sidelined with the disease some still call a Chinese hoax.

Here is the reply, directly from the official transcript of Harbaugh utterances:

"Oh my gosh, you already have me buried! (laughter) You're throwing dirt on me – come on." (laughter) (Reporter: "But do you have any plans?")"I will cross that bridge when we get there, how about that? I do have a plan, yes. There is a plan in place. … It's not Alexander Haig, I can tell you that. It wasn't Alexander Haig then, either. Some of you guys appreciate that reference, right? …(points to a reporter)You don't even know. You don't even know the Alexander Haig reference. Wow. You're a history guy?"(Reporter: "Yes, but I don't know it.")"Ronald Reagan, Alexander Haig. … Do you want me to go through it? When Ronald Reagan … Remember when he got shot?"(Reporters: "Yes.")"Right, and he was in the hospital. There was a succession order, and something happened with the vice president, I'm not sure. Maybe he was … Who was the vice president? [Walter] Mondale?"(Reporter: "No, no. It was … It was [George H.W.] Bush.")"[George H.W.] Bush, he wasn't there for some reason. I think it would've been the 'pro tem' [pro tempore] of the House, I'm pretty sure. Check me on that. But Alexander Haig, the Secretary of State, came storming in and did a press conference and said, 'I'm in charge,' which he wasn't, but he thought he was. So, that's the Alexander Haig reference."

What this tells us is to stick with the historians on the topic of presidents, not football coaches who say that lifelong Democrat Walter Mondale would have been part of the ill-fated Reagan administration.

But, to keep with the sports analogies, in baseball, the "neighborhood play" is a recognized part of the game. That's there the shortstop or second baseman takes a throw as part of a double play. Said player is supposed to touch second base to make an out, but umpires will usually call an out if the infielder is somewhere in the neighborhood of second base, rather than actually being there and getting stampeded by 282 pounds of Aaron Judge.

Taking away that Mondale foolishness, Coach Harbaugh gets partial credit for the allusion to Haig, a former Army general who worked his way into the White House time and again, chiefly because he said things like, "The warning message we sent the Russians was a calculated ambiguity that would be clearly understood" and people thought him to be profound. He was Chief of Staff under Nixon and Ford, and became Secretary of State for Reagan.

Two months after Reagan was sworn in, he was shot by a guy who was trying to impress Jodie Foster. Really! And in the confusion of the White House that afternoon, as Reagan was being taken into surgery and reporters were asking where Vice President George H.W. Bush was (he was making a speech in Austin, Texas), Haig stepped up before the microphones and cameras and shouldered everyone else aside to say "I am in control here."

Actually, he wasn't, under any understanding of the law and US Constitution.  As  Secretary of State, to be in line to be acting HMFIC, Haig was behind Vice President Bush, Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill, President pro tempore of the Senate Strom Thurmond, and Billy Martin, who was managing the Oakland Athletics that season. 

But it was fun to remember the bantam rooster that Haig always seemed to be, trying to wrest power that he didn't have in a vainglorious attempt to seem important. In 1988, he ran for president, garnering an impressive 1% of the primary vote after calling eventual winner G.W. Bush a "wimp."

The 80s. You really had to be there.

The Sunday Rerun from 2015: 10 Things About Month 12

Note: this was written 5 years ago! We currently have Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu. No Disney +, though. There are limits, yes. 

December is such a great month! It gets dark so early, there might be snow, and there are major holidays...and, for those who think this year can't end soon enough, New Year's Eve with all its promises and hopes.

I found a list online of the best things about December.  Holidays are great, and they had them at #1, but look at what else we enjoy in the 12th month:

2. Hot Drinks - I drink hot tea all year long, and even in the hottest dog days of August, I sip the Lipton.  Coffee, not so much, but I like hot tea.

3. Smell - as fall fades away, with the aroma of fallen leaves and crisp air, we get to smell cinnamon and pine and all those winter aromas. Even fake pine air freshener smells better than gardenia air freshener!

4. Winter Clothes - I don't have to modify my wardrobe greatly; it's not a huge deal to switch from cargo shorts to cargo longs. Add a long-sleeve tee under my short-sleeve tee, and you have the complete Brick Heck look that I favor. Timberland boots, Carhartt jacket, a woolen stocking cap and scarf and gloves and I'm ready to go.   

5. Cozy, Cozy, Cozy - Snuggle time is much better than "you're so sticky" time! Pile on the blankets and afghans and turn down the heat!

6. Netflix  We don't Netflix or Hulu or Amazon here.  We do Hallmark Christmas movies with Lacey Chabert and we love 'em! I have installed a Kevin Spacey filter on the cable box.

7. Vay-cay   We are retired.  What would we vacate?

8. Fluffy Snow - yay yay yay!  Let's hear it for those December Snows, which are just practice, rehearsals for those January blizzards.  Any snow that can be swept away with a broom makes the house and yard pretty without straining the back.


9. ABC Family - Again, Marky no watchy, except when "Step By Step" reruns are on. But have you seen "A Family For Christmas" starring Lacey Chabert?  It's on Hallmark, where everything turns out happy in the end and there are no lessons or ponderous morals or symbolism.  In a Hallmark movie, a tree is just a tree, eggnog is eggnog, and nothing is confusing.

10 - A Time for Reflection - In summer we are too busy swabbing sweat off our fevered brows to think about habits to change and new plans to make and resolutions to give up gluten.  December is the perfect time to make those plans.  I hope all of yours work our perfectly.

Please pass the eggnog!

The Christmas Picture Show, December 25, 2021

Merry Christmas from our hearth to yours! 

Freshly roasted on a open fire...tell Jack Frost to come on in and nip at my nose!

How the library improvised a tree!

If you don't have a tree handy, just easel your way on down the Christmas road...

Christmas tins once held cookies! Tasty treats you can't forget...But don't reach in for a snickerdoodle, and come away with Mabel's sewing set!

More than just a pickup, this is a parade float!

If your inlaws and outlaws are dragging you, claiming that your house just ain't posh enough, feel free to send them this picture and ask them if they think you might have overdone it this year...

To a cat, a Christmas tree is more than just a beautiful decoration: it's a challenge!

This apartment combines the best of classic old days and new.

Baltimore's Washington Monument predates the obelisk in Washington. And it gets decorated every year!

 

All about that song!

Rerun Week saunters on...this one is from 2009...

 It's Guest Editor day - because I got this information about one of my favorite carols from a friend online, so I thought I'd pass it along...while you read what Pat sent to me, click on this link and you can see/hear the 12 Days of Christmas on YouTube!

There is one Christmas Carol that has always baffled me.

What in the world do leaping lords, French hens,

swimming swans, and especially the partridge who won't come out of the pear tree have to do with Christmas?

This week, I found out.

From 1558 until 1829, Roman Catholics in England were

not permitted to practice their faith openly. Someone

during that era wrote this carol as a catechism song for young Catholics.

It has two levels of meaning: the surface meaning

plus a hidden meaning known only to members of their church. Each element in the carol has a code word for a religious reality which the children could remember.

-The partridge in a pear tree was Jesus Christ.

-Two turtle doves were the Old and New Testaments.

-Three French hens stood for faith, hope and love.

-The four calling birds were the four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke & John.

-The five golden rings recalled the Torah or Law, the first five books of the Old Testament.

-The six geese a-laying stood for the six days of creation.

-Seven swans a-swimming represented the sevenfold gifts of the Holy Spirit--Prophesy, Serving, Teaching, Exhortation, Contribution, Leadership, and Mercy.

-The eight maids a-milking were the eight beatitudes.

-Nine ladies dancing were the nine fruits of the Holy Spirit--Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, Kindness, Goodness, Faithfulness, Gentleness, and Self Control.

-The ten lords a-leaping were the ten commandments.

-The eleven pipers piping stood for the eleven faithful disciples.

-The twelve drummers drumming symbolized the twelve points of belief in the Apostles' Creed.

Again, this is all new to me - hope you liked it!

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

 

I saw this picture on the interwovenweb the other morning, and it is a perfect example of the old maxim about a picture being worth a thousand words.

But since when have you known me to just show a picture and save my thousand words?

Here are 328:   I celebrate Christmas along with several other billion Christians around the world.  I wish people a merry Christmas and have been wished one in return a million times in my day.  I have also wished, and been wished, a happy Hanukkah, a joyous Kwanzaa, a sweet Yom Kippur, and Eid Mubarak, the congratulatory greeting on the day of Muslim festival and celebration.
It means  'MAY YOUR DAY OF EID BE A BLESSED ONE!'
And what's wrong with any of that?  I was born and raised in the Christian faith, but when a Jewish friend died, I was honored to attend the services.  A friend put a yarmulke on my head and told me what was about to happen, and it turned out to be one of the most meaningful services I've ever attended.

And when I was a young kid, maybe 10, I got out of school early one day to join the family on a trip to Washington, D.C. to attend the wedding of a relative who was marrying a Muslim fellow.  We were welcomed in the mosque on Embassy Row with kindness and warmth.

I've made friends with all sorts of people with all sort of religions, and some who have no religion.  It's not my job to tell people how they ought to worship, but it is my job to stand up for people who get knocked down because they are of the wrong faith or skin color or denomination.

So, wish me whatever holiday wish you want to wish me, or don't, as you see fit.  I am sorry for so many people who want to feel so persecuted because not everyone in the world wants to walk through the world like they do.

Wasn't it the good folks over at Walt Disney who urged us to "let it go!"?  Sorry, folks, but the holidays aren't just for Christians. The moose out front shoulda told you.

Christmas rerun: Crime Never Takes A Holiday. It never even dresses for the holidays.

 The United States of America is a vast, huge nation.  Last time I checked (2014), 318.9 million people live here within our 3.797 million square miles. 4,745 of them live in Dardanelle, a city in Yell County, Arkansas. 

And this is the story of one of those people, which left 4,744 people in Dardanelle shaking their heads. 

On a recent Sunday morning down there, says Dardanelle Police Chief Montie Sims, his police arrested an unidentified female following two incidents at Burger King and McDonald's. The female in question entered Burger King, stating she was there to "check on the status of her application." She then, according to witnesses, stole a Santa hat and some garland from the restaurant and made good her getaway, heading for the McDonald's next door, attempting to enter a vehicle on the McParking Lot. That's where she was arrested, to be booked on two counts of disorderly conduct and transported to the Yell County Detention Center.

Grainy surveillance photo

I almost forgot to mention that she was McNaked as she was checking on her job application and as she attempted to take a seat in a car in the parking lot. 

Officials at Burger King say they will not let her have it her way, too.

I mean, no shoes, no shirt, no underwear, no socks, no pants...no job!

The reruns continue with this one from 2016

 

Today, another look back at some of the favorite pictures we enjoyed this year here at Saturday Picture Show Headquarters. 

We're all in that dash mode today.  Filling in the spaces between the day we are born and the day we shuffle off to Buffalo is a matter of high importance. Fill in the dash with what means a lot to you!

A lot of people mentioned that it's one thing to have your big toe nibbled by a crab while swimming in the ocean...

When the real estate agent shows you a house that "just needs a little work and TLC" and all you see is a giant Jenga game...

After the big storm Matthew passed, these lovely shells were left on Fernandina Beach.

When two seasons meet and marry, they can take the name Autumn Winters.

I love the volunteer tree that sort of grew up between the bricks here.

Maybe it's the eyebrows, but this guy looks mad.

And now, as the holiday season comes to an end for another year, how about one more round of "The Twelve Days of Christmas" with me?  Anyone? 

Rerun from 2014: Do You Like Good Music?

Editor's Note: I decided to give myself a week off, so here we go with some reruns! Happy Holidays!

I'm talking about a man who dropped out of high school (and later was graduated at age 21), a man who became a songwriter, performer, arranger, singer, actor, voiceover actor and radio host, and then left far too soon.

I'm talking about Isaac Lee Hayes, Jr.  As a songwriter, he and his partner David Porter came up with great stuff for Sam and Dave, such as "Hold On, I'm Comin'", "When Something is Wrong with My Baby", "Soul Man" and  "I Thank You". He first came to the attention of pop fans with the theme song from the movie "Shaft" in 1971. But back up a couple of years to 1969, when his album "Hot Buttered Soul" came out, with a long version of "Walk On By," the Burt Bacharach / Hal David song on which Dionne Warwick had the first hit.  I can't hear this without remembering WWIN playing it on their overnight show as I labored at the A&P, stocking shelves with peanut butter, macaroni and floor wax.   And if you liked Dionne's version of "I Just Don't Know What To Do (With Myself)," check out his take on it and see if it doesn't move you a little bit more!

And I don't know what you had planned for the next 18 minutes and 40 seconds, but you could do a lot worse than to spend it listening to Isaac make you forget that Glen Campbell also recorded "By The Time I Get To Phoenix." Then you can also compare his "Close To You" to the Carpenters'.

Isaac's Baltimore connection was that he was one of the owners of the Memphis Sounds basketball team which was moved to Baltimore in 1975, but folded before their season even began.  He did better with other things.

Other things such as...acting.  He was the newspaper photographer Angel Dupree in "It Could Happen To You," the 1994 movie with Nicolas Cage and Bridget Fonda.  He played an Isaac Hayes impersonator in an episode of "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" and was Chef for many years on "South Park."

And, he was a DJ/radio host on WRKS in New York in the late 90's.

If you ever find yourself in Tennessee, where Isaac was born in 1942, look for a section of Interstate 40 known as the "Isaac Hayes Memorial Highway".   His songs have generated more than 12 million plays on the radio, and when you watch "The Blues Brothers" or listen to any disco, hip hop or rap music, you hear Isaac Hayes all over the place.  He passed away in 2008, the victim of recurrent strokes, but while he was on the earth, he made the most of his talents, and that's about as much as we can all hope to do.

Sunday Rerun: Voldemort is not a large city in Maryland

 It's just me talking, but I am not a Harry Potter fan.  I don't think that all the inconveniences in life can be solved by casting spells, and speaking of spell, I wish that people would learn to! Muggles and mugworts and people named Petunia do not exist in the real world, and even as a kid, I was all about learning facts, not imagining how great it would be to be at Gryffindor.  

But hey!  If you're into it, it's fine.  When we started reading in elementary school, I went right for books about history and the wars and the presidents.  Other kids were reading novels and short stories, and today's kids still do, which has made Joanne "J.K." Rowling, author of all those Harry Potter books, a very very rich woman over in England.

But it was charity that made her a rich woman, no longer very very rich.  Sure, she made a pretty bundle, but high British taxes and her penchant for making charitable donations ($160 million and counting) pulled her off the Forbes magazine billionaire list.

I know we live in a world where one of Warren Buffett's deal snags him $8 per second, and a senator's daughter makes $18 million a year for denying lifesaving medicine to people.  

But giving $160,000,000 to people in need is the better way to go. Not saying that Warren Buffett isn't similarly generous, but the point is, I think that life gives us gifts and opportunities. It's what we do with them that counts. For example, Ms Rowling has the ability to come up with these story ideas and weave her tales into books that people want to read and movies that people want to go see.  

But she's not about to sit in some castle, counting golden coins and hiring someone to walk ahead of her strewing rose petals in her path (that was Mick Jagger) or feeding her dogs Kobe beef sauteed in truffle butter. You know how they ask for a dollar at the supermarket checkout to fight childhood diseases now and then?

Imagine shelling out a dollar 160 million times!

Good for her.  And Ms Rowling, don't feel too bad.  I'm not on the billionaire list either.

The Saturday Picture Show, December 18, 2021

 

I don't know if you're ready for transatlantic travel, but I see that Stonehenge is now open again. It took a couple of weeks to reset the stones to allow for the return to standard time, but they're good to go when you're ready!

Here is the latest in our series entitled "Why Women Live Longer." I mean, really.

Sadly ironic that the tornado in Mayfield, KY, tore the wall off an assembly room and left the stark outside view as if it were a movie...

Sometimes I wonder how far some guys get down the road before they decide to give in and turn around to go to DQ, after all that begging and hollering.

In The Netherlands, they saw no reason to bisect a woods with a highway, so they added a footbridge.

I don't think they have Lunch Lady Doris over there, but this is a school lunch in Beijing. I'll take two to go, please, plus egg rolls.

I'm just saying, some of the roads around here with the worst litter problems are roads with that sign saying the street has been "adopted" by So and So. Some roads are always clean, sure, and that only proves my guess that the "adoption" is a lot easier than the "going out and picking up trash" like this guy did.

Sure, we've all wanted to bang our heads against a wall, but when you realize that it only hurts you and dents the wall, so try a punching bag instead! And wear a helmet!

Marilyn Monroe was a beautiful woman, talented and appealing, and certainly nice to be around. Everyone loved her, except for the publicist who insisted that she pose for publicity photos reading "Ulysses" (note that they posed her as if she were at the very end of the book). It was a cruel stunt back then, that actresses were supposed to be everything to everyone, and so let's have her be thought of as both pretty and brainy. The same kind of people spread the rumor that Jayne Mansfield had an astronomically high IQ, and of course, we had to hear that college dropout M. Trump was a genius multilingual architect. People can stand on their merits as they are without this silly inflation. I'm reminded of the words of baseball immortal Mickey Rivers upon hearing Reggie Jackson claim to have an IQ of 160: "Out of what? A thousand?"

I said stop playing with your food! Eat that broccoli!

“Every time you do a good deed you shine the light a little farther into the dark."

There used to be a country music comedian, popular on the Grand Ole Opry and on stages all over the south, who was born Benjamin Ford, but was known as Whitey Ford (not to be confused with the Yankee pitcher of the same name).

Ford billed himself as The Duke Of Paducah, which is a city in McCracken County, Kentucky where he never lived (he was born in Missouri and died in Tennessee). I mentioned this fact in 7th grade, but the teacher (Mrs Goldstein) just looked at me with a look I've seen time after time when I go off on tangents.

Now, in 2021, I suggest a new person to be given the title of The Duke Of Paducah, and it's the man named Jim Finch, whom we all saw this week on the news.

Jim Finch was born in Paducah, lives elsewhere in KY, and like everyone else, he woke up on Saturday morning and saw the devastation wrought by the tornado late last Friday.

But most people saw the news, shook their heads and made vague promises to themselves to donate to Red Cross or other organizations arranging help for the people of Mayfield and other areas in the five-state swath of natural destruction.

Jim Finch

Jim Finch grabbed his grill and as much food as he could pick up in his pickup and drove half an hour to Mayfield, where he parked in the middle of what used to be the town, fired up the grill, and fixed people up with food for the body and soul.

“I know they don’t have electricity. No restaurants. No running water. I just figured I would do what I could do. So I showed up with some food and some water," is how he put it. 

He said it as simply and plainly as possible:

“We trying to feed the people. We got hamburgers, chicken, I got sausage, egg.”

A welcome sight!

“What a blessing he is. He is warming hearts and bellies with his act of kindness,”   wrote a Twitter tweeter.

“Such a kind human being. I am humbled by his generosity of spirit!” said another.

 Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear said that when the big local business, a candle factory, collapsed in the mighty wind, more than 100 people were inside, working.

“That will be, we believe, the largest site, the largest place of loss,” the governor told the Weekend TODAY show.

There is despair and there is hope, thanks to people like Jim Finch, who chose to act and help.

By the way,  Whitey Ford was known for ending his shows with this gag:  "I'm goin' back to the wagon, boys, these shoes are killin' me."

Let's hope that when his time and work in Mayfield are over, the new Duke will be known worldwide for his kindness and service to others. 

A walk through history

We see the word "paleo" bandied about a lot these days; it's used in the sense of The Paleo Diet, which means you can eat all you want as long as your diet consists of anything a caveman or cavewoman could have eaten, is popular, and allows a certain latitude for including Haagen-Dazs Vanilla Chocolate Brownie Nut Chunk, on the grounds that Gnetzut Flintstone could have conceivable milked a mammal, made ice cream, and found cocoa beans and walnuts somewhere.

Paleontologists are always digging the past, and in 1976, they found two sets of footprints dating back 3.7 million years. Right next to them was a well-worn pair of Skechers Foamie slippers, but when Ogg and Nog set their feet down to leave prints for 20th Century people to study, they left what now seems to be the oldest known evidence of upright walking among early humans.

That footprint proves to the scientists that two bipedal humans roamed the earth at the same time, and were known as the Jonas Brothers.

“These footprints demonstrate that the evolution of upright walking was more complicated and more interesting than we previously thought,” says Jeremy DeSilva, an anthropology professor at Dartmouth College. 

“There were at least two hominins (precursors of modern man who looked like Johnny Damon), walking in different ways, on differently shaped feet, at this time in our evolutionary history, showing that the acquisition of human-like walking was less linear than many imagine.”

Up til now, it was thought that only one species of human lived at the time — Australopithecus afarensis (known as "Ozzy"), who roamed ancient Africa 3.9 to 2.9 million years ago.  

Lucy the skeleton is the most famous example of Australopithecus afarensis.

But the second pair of footprints seem to belong to a different kind of human, with a peculiar way of walking. Instead of walking in a straight line, the footprints suggest they swung their foot forward and landed it in front of the other.

So that's how we used to get around - putting one foot in front of the other all day. No wonder it took forever to get to Cleveland then. Later we developed the sashay and never looked back.

And do you remember the 1963 hit recording of "Walk Right In" by the Rooftop Singers? It had that great line, "Everybody's talkin' about a new way of walkin', do you want to lose your mind?"

History wants us to remember the original version of the song, by Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers, from 1929. Gus lived until 1979 but never had another hit record.

But he never lost his mind!

Roses are red and violets are purple and sugar's sweet and so is maple surple - Roger Miller

Faced with a shortage of vital fluid, the great nation has decided that the only course of action would be to uncork some of the precious reserves it has laid up for just such a rainy day as this.

No, we're not talking about the US tapping into our strategic oil reserves. That's old news, and we don't deal in that. We're talking about Canada, the great nation to our north, and they have a shortage of their own. This is serious: they are short on maple syrup.

The Quebec Maple Syrup Producers has opened the stopper to allow 50 million pounds of their strategic syrup reserves. That's about half of their emergency stash.

70% of the world's maple syrup comes from Quebec. The US, where we know that there ain't no substitute for the real sweet thang, is Canada's biggest customer, but this year, as more people stayed home eating waffles, worldwide demand for real maple syrup jumped by 21%.

People are often surprised to hear that the goo sitting atop their pancakes is made from the sap of the maple tree. The sap is harvested by tapping a metal tap (so that's where they got that term) right into the tree's trunk. 

In Grandpa's era, a bucket was hung from the tap to catch those precious drips, but now, a network of plastic tubes and vacuums collects the drips and transports the product to a syrup refinery.

The trees will only yield sap under very specific weather conditions. This year's short and warm Spring resulted a very low flow, according to industry spokesperson Mrs Butterworth.

That was a fake! I hope you caught it.

But Helene Normandin is a real person. She is the Quebec Maple Syrup Producers' communications director, and she says, "That's why the reserve is made, to never miss maple syrup. And we won't miss maple syrup!" 

She sounds quite resolute about this winter's breakfasts, and she also is when discussing plans to avoid another shortage next year. 

"What we can figure at this moment is maybe the season here in Quebec will start a bit earlier in February, instead of March, and end earlier also," she said.

The Quebec Maple Syrup Producers will be sticking their taps into some 7 million more trees soon to refill the reserve tanks.

Syrup costs money, and money does not grow on trees. It does grow IN trees, however.