Shell Game

The stretch of I-95 that runs through our county takes travelers north and south, even if they don't mean to.

It's wild, the way they drive on that road. I mean, local Maryland drivers are fine, but you add in the Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey ticket catchers, and it's every Volvo for itself out there. 

I've never taken 95 all the way to Florida, due to a disdain for mice, but I can only imagine how crazy the traffic is, the nearer one gets to the race tracks and Happiest Place On This Here Earth.

And it's just not the cars that will drive you nuts.

Here's what happened the other day down by Daytona Beach: a 71-year-old woman was cruising 95 with her daughter when a turtle smashed through her windshield. She suffered a cut to her forehead, along with the biggest shock of her life.

The daughter was driving, and here I get to type a sentence I have never even imagined typing. Seeing the turtle smash through the glass and hit her poor mom, she pulled over and received help from a kind motorist.

While the daughter called 911 for help, the operators could hear that man saying “There is a turtle in there!” 

To which the daughter, in some shock, replies, “A turtle! An actual turtle?”

I've heard crazier questions.

The unfortunate mom bled profusely, but she was not seriously hurt. 

The police figure the turtle ignored the posted TURTLE CROSSING signs and was crossing the interstate (to get to the other side...) when it was hit by another car, sending it airborne.

“I swear to God this lady has the worst luck of anything,” the daughter told the 911 operator as they awaited police and EMS.

You'd have to say the turtle had all the luck. With just a few scratches on its shell, it was released into the woods nearby, no doubt wondering why all these people were going so fast in their crazy shells.

"Rah! Rah! Boom Dee Ay! You can't tell me what to say!"

Sometimes, life is like an apple. You see it for what it is, you enjoy it, and you move on.

Sometimes, life is like an artichoke. You don't know what it is but you know it contains different layers and textures.

And sometimes, the case of a high school girl getting jammed up over some salty language is a lot more than what it appears to be on the surface.

You know how people in a minor dispute will sometimes say, "Why make a federal case of it?" Here's a situation of a cheerleader blowing off steam on Snapchat turning into a Supreme Court case.

Brandi Levy is 18 now and attending college, but when she was 14 and finishing her freshman year at Mahanoy Area High School in Pennsylvania (near Pittsburgh) she got some bad news: she was going to stay on the junior varsity cheerleading team as a sophomore. 

In the time-honored fashion of 14-year-olds, she blew up, dropping f-bombs all over her world. “F--- school, f--- softball, f--- cheer, f--- everything,” she Snapchatted on a Saturday morning. To illustrate the nature of her ire, she and a friend posed with their middle fingers up, saying, "Love how me and [another student, whom Levy identified by name] get told we need a year of jv before we make varsity but that doesn’t matter to anyone else?” All this, punctuated with an upside-down smiley face.

For those unaware, a snap posted to a Snapchat story disappears within 24 hours, except when someone screenshots it, giving life to the truth about the internet being forever.

Someone took a screenshot and before you know it, it was in the hands of the daughter of one of the cheerleading coaches. Other cheerleaders said "Gimme an "F!" and complained, and the coaches suspended Brandi from the squad for a year.

The coaches says she had agreed to certain team rules (including showing respect, avoiding “foul language and inappropriate gestures,” and a strict policy against “any negative information regarding cheerleading, cheerleaders, or coaches placed on the Internet.”) and broke said rules.

Larry and Betty Lou Levy, Brandi’s parents, launched appeals with the athletic director, the principal, the superintendent and the school board, and rang up a "NO SALE" at every turn. So, they got with the ACLU and filed a federal suit.

Justin Driver, a Yale law professor and author of “The Schoolhouse Gate: Public Education, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for the American Mind," says, “This is the most momentous case in more than five decades involving student speech.” 

And here's why: 

Previous cases that involve a student's right to free speech concerned speech on school grounds. Notably, in 1969, the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District that "students and teachers do not shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”

In other words, it was ok that I replied "The hell should I know?" when asked for an exegesis of Edgar A. Poe's "The Bells" in junior English, but the teacher didn't know it yet.

Professor Driver says, “Much of the speech from students is off-campus and increasingly online. When I talk to school administrators, they consistently tell me that off-campus speech bedevils them, and the lower courts desperately need some guidance in this area.”

In their side of the fight, the Mahanoy Area School District said, "Wherever student speech originates, schools should be able to treat students alike when their speech is directed at the school and imposes the same disruptive harms on the school environment.”

“This may seem like a very narrow case about a minor temper tantrum on Snapchat, but it is about speech anywhere and everywhere, by students of all ages,” said Frank LoMonte, director of the Brechner Center for Freedom of Information at the University of Florida.

And these standards as delineated in this verdict will set the standards for off-school free speech for generations.

It almost makes me want to go back to high school!

At the old ball game

It seems like ancient history these days, but you can still win a bet sometimes by asking "Who won the 1994 World Series?"

I'll cut right to it. You can usually get someone to say "The Braves" or "The Blue Jays," but the fact is, no one won the 1994 World Series because they didn't HAVE one. The players went on strike and the last 1/2 of the season was cancelled, and baseball fans were steamed, I wanna tell you.

The next season, the game realized they needed to do a lot of getting back in good with the fans, and, it being the season that Cal Ripken, Jr, of the Orioles was set to break Lou Gehrig's consecutive game record, Cal went out of his way to do public relations for the sport. Night after night, he stood on the field as fans lined up past midnight for his autograph. And, signature by signature, he did yeoman's work toward getting the fans back.

A portion of my Cal museum

Of course, last year, no one could go to any ballgames, and there was just an abbreviated 60-game schedule. This year, with the exception of Texas, a state where the laws of immunology and common sense are suspended, clubs are allowing smaller crowds, and trying their best to keep interest alive.

I've always thought that a few more Ripkens would be good for the game, players who play to the crowd and actually admit to breathing the same air as Freddie and Felicia Fan. Fans enjoy a little byplay with athletic heroes, and here's a guy who seems to understand that.

His name is Cole Calhoun. (This year, 35% of major league ballplayers are named "Cole" (Cole Sulser, Cole Hamels, Gerrit Cole...it goes on and on...)

Playing right field for the Arizona Diamondbacks the other night, Calhoun snaked his way (!) over toward the stands, trying to catch a fly ball gone foul into the seats. He put up his glove, and so did a kid, and the kid, wearing a glove, snagged it like an old pro.  

It was perfectly ok for the kid to make the play; anything into the stands is fair game for everyone. And instead of storming off in a huff, Calhoun gave the kid a cool fist bump. The first base umpire, hustling down the line to make the call, gave him a bump too. 

Cole and kid

And the Braves gave him a collectible Henry Aaron bobblehead, and he was interviewed on live tv.

And - it was his first big league game! I can't promise him similar thrills the next time he shows up at the park, but the point is, there will be a next time!

To the younger generation

I wish to address the children now, so, adults, please go read Buzzfeed or check your horoscope or work the Jumble a minute, ok? I need to tell the young people something.

OK, gang, I need to tell you something, and it's about figuring things out with a discerning ear.

You may have been told that by the time you reach your 20s, 30s, whatever, you will be mature and capable and will know which end is up and will be able to handle yourself in the world.

And I am here to tell you that adults are not doing all that good a job of it right now, so don't worry about being as good as us. That's pretty much assured, you will be. Because I am certain you will not behave as these adults do:

• Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) was the only senator who voted AGAINST a bill that was written to fight the recent uptick in hate crimes against Asian-Americans. The man who encouraged the Capitol riot on January 6 with a raised fist to a roiling mob of troublemakers says "it’s dangerous to simply give the federal government open-ended authority to define a whole new class of federal hate crime incidents." So he, out of all the US Senators, doesn't mind Asian people getting smacked around on the streets, targeted for their ethnicity.
• Emergent, manufacturer of AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson COVID vaccines, mixed up the ingredients at their Baltimore plant, ruining millions of vaccine doses because, apparently, people were not paying attention to their job. Hey, it's only medicine, not something important like making Chicken McNuggets.
• Hundreds of people who received their vaccine at the US Army's Kimbrough Ambulatory Care Center (KACC) at Fort Meade, Maryland received vaccines that were allowed to sit at room temperature for 24 hours, even though everyone in the world knows that vaccines have to be maintained under strict temperature guidelines. No harm done, except for the waste, and 800 people will have to be re-vaccinated, and those in the public who are leery or disdainful of the vaccine's value have another arrow in their "See? I TOLD you it's no good!" quiver.
• A man from Baltimore County man was thrown off a Southwest Airlines flight for eating Twizzlers. He was on the plane, waiting to take off for Ft. Lauderdale, and he pulled his mask down to eat a Twizzler, only to be told that a new rule went into effect in February that says if you are on a plane and eating or drinking, that mask better be on your face even between sips and bites.
  
  
  

You see, guys, adults sometimes get so caught up in setting themselves up as a rogue candidate for political office that they don't care how many people suffer for their ambition, or they get to gabbing on the job or checking their phones instead of making sure the right chemicals go in the right bottle, or they forget to keep life-saving vaccines cold, or they become ridiculously strict about following impractical rules, and in doing so they cause harm.

Your generation will do better! I have no doubt. Go prove me right.

Eat, Sleep, Sleep

Man oh man, if there ever existed a case for saying "I TOLD you so..." here it is...

There is research that says if you get plenty of sleep now, you have less risk of dementia later on.

Sure, there are factors (age, genetics) that will make dementia inevitable for some, no matter how much sleep they are getting. There is no way we can control that. But with 50 million people around the world diagnosed with dementia, why not do what we can to avoid joining that crowd?

The journal called Nature Communications is out with a study showing that high-quality sleep in middle age is a great prevention tactic. They followed 8,000 people in the United Kingdom over 25 years, and found that getting not even six hours of shuteye in one's 50s and 60s gives a 30% higher risk of dementia as compared with those who log (get it?) 7 hours +.

Stephanie Stahl, a sleep disorder specialist with Indiana University Health, says that while this is not the first study to make this sleep connection, but it is one of the largest.

“We know that getting insufficient sleep or getting poor quality sleep increases the risk of dementia,” Stahl told the HuffPost. “This is a larger scale study, so it definitely adds value to the evidence.”

Sure, it makes sense, but no one can say exactly WHY it's true, but there are theories:

“During sleep, our brain is allowed to clear toxins and that includes beta-amyloid,” Stahl said. (Beta-amyloid is a clumping brain protein that is often associated with  Alzheimer’s disease.)

She goes on: “Also, our sleep is really important for us to consolidate our memories. Sleep disruption leads to inflammation and that can lead to clogging of the arteries, and that includes those arteries in the brain.”

Experts say that while there is no assurance that any certain amount of sleep now will have us all bright-eyed well into our 90s, just like chicken soup for a cold, it can't hurt!

  

Sunday Rerun: Medical Assurance

 Alan King used to do great routines about doctors and lawyers and house painters and such, and they were funny.

  An elderly man went to the doctor complaining of aches and pains all over his body. After a thorough examination, the doctor gives him a clean bill of health. 
“Who asked you to make me younger? Just make sure I get older!” 

“You’re in fine shape for an eighty-year-old. After all, I’m not a magician – I can’t make you any younger,” said the doctor. 

It's not as funny, for real, when a real doctor makes a real mistake. My mother, whose health is not at all good at age 88, recently underwent a series of iron infusions to try to get her past the anemia that has plagued her since childhood and is now making things ever more difficult as she battles other issues.  At 88, you need all the strength you can get, that's for sure.

So we were hopeful for good news when we went to see the doctor for the results of blood testing after the iron went to work.  We waited as the med tech took more blood for testing, and soon the doctor appeared, with notebook computer in hand. If you've ever seen the movie "The Hospital," where the bumbling doctor walks into a patient's room, takes a cursory glance at a chart and says, "Well, Drummond, you're none the worse for wear!" and the patient explodes, "I'm not Drummond, you monkey!" then you know how I felt when the doctor knit his brow and pursed his lips and said, "Your mother's iron levels are low...I'm going to recommend that she comes in for some iron infusions..."

And I did not call him a monkey, but I said, "Are you talking about the same procedure she's just had for the past month?"

Oh, how he blushed.  He got all tomato-faced, reminding me of the quote from English temperance leader Clara Lucas Balfour, defining a blush as "The ambiguous livery worn alike by modesty and shame."

But, did he say, "Wow!  Look at me, almost sending your mom to repeat something she already had done!"  He did not.  He stuttered and stammered, "Well, I had not reviewed her files before I came in... I mean...er...uh..."

Not trying to harsh out the good doctor here.  The point is, everyone is going to make mistakes, from the best to the worst of us. (The worst of us just make our mistakes on nationwide TV.) Something they might want to teach in medical schools, yea, in all schools everywhere, is how to be gracious enough to say, "Whoa! I was wrong there!  What I should have said was..."

Ladies and Gentlemen,
Victor Newman!

The Saturday Picture Show, April 24, 2021

 

Townhouses in Baltimore are called 'row houses,' and this is a perfect example of how neighborhoods cooperate, by coordinating colors!

When a guy in a tiger suit in an Asian zoo is hurt on the job, his fellow Panthera tigris lends support.

I'm sad to read in many places that people don't listen to radio that much, preferring podcasts for news and information, and their own mp3 collections for music. Back in the day, the pride of every home was the big console radio in the living room. A man happened to find this old relic in the crawl space of a house he bought, and he refurbished and repurposed it to hold knick-knacks...and a radio.

Springtime on the farm. Time to get the corn crops planted!

What's more American than a free stack of "dog stiks" (sic)? Such a fetching idea!

And how about this community pantry for canned goods and a Frigidaire for fresh meat and produce? People can give and take, according to ability and need. How nice!

A solid favorite in every diner and luncheonette: the club sandwich. I have belonged to many a club over the years, and no one ever handed me a tall three-decker.

Some emotions cut across the lines. Is there a mom out there who hasn't looked out on the world with this wistful vista?

Famous Hats In History: this is the Texas Rangers cap that José Canseco wore on May 26, 1993. It was on that day that Carlos Martínez of the Indians hit a fly ball to right field, where Canseco's steroid-riddled body was stationed, for the purpose of catching fly balls. Maladroit as ever, José allowed the ball to hit him on his head, right off the dome of this very cap, for a home run. There were two immediate results: the Harrisburg Heat soccer team offered Canseco a contract to play a game where headers are allowed and encouraged, and three days later, José talked his manager into allowing him to pitch in relief in a game long lost. José injured his arm in this effort and had to undergo Tommy John surgery, missing the rest of the season. Always a good sport, Canseco sold the dented cap to a collector and continued on his erratic life path.

If you can spend $425,000 on it, this house in Siler City, NC, can be yours. It once was owned by a television actress who lived there in a peculiar fashion, keeping 14 cats in the house and a broken-down Studebaker with 4 flat tires in the garage. She was known as warm and welcoming to some fellow Siler Citizens, and reclusive and aloof to others. But she left an annuity of $100,000 to the local police department, which they banked, and still use to distribute Christmas bonuses to officers and staffers alike, just a way to thank the cops for keeping fans away from the home of Frances Bavier, Andy Griffith's beloved Aunt Bee.

Slow the truck down

Just a year ago, Peggy and I would take a nice ride on Sunday afternoons as we kicked into full lockdown. We wouldn't go anywhere at all, since there was nowhere to go. But gas was dirt cheap since no one was driving much.

So we'd hit the road in northern Baltimore County and Harford County, just seeing the sights. You can see a lot of farms and ranchettes by staying off the main roads and driving up and down the old country lanes. Seeing another car was almost like the first days of auto travel - we almost felt like waving at the people in that Stutz Bearcat or Model T as they careered on past us.

It was a good way to see other sights beside the walls here at the Lazy 'C' Ranch bunkhouse, and then we'd go home and be back in hibernation. We always remarked on the scarcity of other vehicles, and we figured that besides us Sunday drivers (so THAT'S where the expression comes from!) everyone else was home, with the Biscayne parked for the nonce. 

So here we are, one year later, and guess what? Yes, traffic was way down last year, and traffic deaths were way up!

How's that? Well, while we were out toodling along on Milk Barn Rd, America's car fiends saw those unoccupied lanes on highways and mistook them for the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

The National Safety Council put out a report the other day, and they say 42,060 people never got to come home from the last car ride they over took in 2020. That was up 8% over 2019, and remember, there was much less traffic in 2020.

This was the first increase in four years.

Broken down on a per-million-miles-driven basis, the fatality rate jumped 24%, and that was the biggest increase since the safety council started jotting down the data in 1923 - and they should know, because, as Doug Heffernan says, they are The Department Of Driving.

And, as people will, once we get into a bad habit, we tend to keep it going. “It’s kind of terrifying what we're seeing on our roads,” said Michael Hanson, director of the Minnesota Public Safety Department’s Office of Traffic Safety. “We’re seeing a huge increase in the amount of risk-taking behavior.”

We drove a chunky 13% fewer miles last year, and yet we kept the ambulances and busy.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says speed is the top factor in our parade of foolish behaviors, and of course, tests of trauma center patients involved in traffic crashes show increased use of alcohol, marijuana and opioids.

In Minnesota, traffic volumes fell 60% when stay-home orders were issued early in the pandemic last spring. Hanson said state officials expected a corresponding drop in crashes and deaths, but while crashes declined, deaths increased.

Back to the Empty Roads As An Invitation theme: the Minnesota State Patrol ticketed just over 500 drivers for exceeding 100 mph in 2019. In 2020, that figure more than doubled, to 1068.

Masters of stating the obvious the safety council reminds us that driving over 100 mph results in far more serious crashes.

Is this the best we can do?

Getting Inside Your Head

I have time to do this stuff, and maybe you don't, so I thought I would share with everyone my research on a common medical situation to which I fell prey not long ago whilst enjoying a drink of ice water.

Medical science knows it as The Heartbreak of Sphenopalatine Ganglioneuralgia, and we lay folk call it "ice cream headache." Brain freeze. The Chilly Willie (not to be confused with The Wet Willie.)

Classic Schoolboy Wet Willie

Wet Willie, Jr.

You guzzle a Slurpee or snowball or you gobble a spoonful of Breyer's or you go all in on a Popsicle, and you get it. 

Brain freeze is also called ice cream headache, or cold  headache. It is a short-term headache typically linked to the rapid consumption of ice cream, ice pops, or very cold drinks. It happens when a lot of something really cold hits your upper palate - the roof of your mouth. It's even worse when the rest of you is really hot.

And it's more than that the momentary unpleasant you get from that Icee. Up at Harvard Medical School, the brainiacs are looking into them, with an eye toward curing migraines and pain resulting from brain injuries.

So far, we know that the cold stuff causes our blood vessels to constrict quickly, and the best cure is gulping down some warm water right on top of the Sundae.

Oh, and we also know that it doesn't have to be food or drink that causes a melon cramp. You could get one from sticking an ice cold drain pipe in your mouth, which would also result in failing out of plumbing school.

Next up: science will try to figure out a name for the time between the time a falling hammer hits you on top of the head (you would be surprised at how often this happens to me) and the pain begins. You just about have time to say, "Oh man, is this ever gonna HURT!"

 

 

What to do?

 A friend posted on social media that she faced a choice. She had promised to go out with friends, but that day, a book she had long had wanted to read came in the mail. So, should she "call out sick" and stay home and read, or give up reading the book she was dying to dive into, to keep the date?

By the way, this is not technically a dilemma. A dilemma is a choice between two unpleasant alternatives, such as, "there are only two books left on the shelf, and they're both by John Grisham..."

You can't win there if you decide to jump and plow through the turgid prose of Grisham. And my friend is young and cool and popular, so that means a feeling of social responsibility to friends and what-have-you.

Being unyoung and uncool and unpopular, I have no problem saying, "Hey, I was waiting for this new compendium of Tom Wolfe essays, so I think I'll stay home tonight and read. See you next time!"

Tom Wolfe on a bus, 1960s

The beauty of that is, you don't have to tell a little fib to get out of going, because inevitably, someone will call you back the day after you say you can't go out because you have pellagra, to ask how your pellagra rash is going. You blow the whole caper if you reply, "What pellagra rash? The hell you talkin' about?"

See, when you get to a certain age, a lot of the social constructs and fabricated rules just seem to flake off and go away. I had a friend who used to joke that the coolest thing is to live to be 80, because you can walk around 1/2 nekkid or stand on the corner singing "Mack The Knife" or have lasagna with eggs for breakfast, and what's everyone going to say?

"Well, he's 80, so...you know how they get..."

The reason you can't blow your friends off with total insouciance when you're 30 is that many many decades stretch out ahead of you. At 80 (ten years to go for me!) most of your decades are back over your left shoulder, so read your doggone book!

Long-awaited

 

I cannot think of a better way to open a podcast than with this challenge:

"Who's ready to learn some stuff?  Let's go!"

But those are the words of Tyler Mahan Coe, who is back today with Season Two of his great podcast, a scattered, non-linear history of real country music called "Cocaine and Rhinestones." He's a little miffed because accidentally, today's launch day for Season Two accidentally coincided with what he calls a "weed holiday."

The title might be a bit off, because some might think that Coe, the son of fabled country singer/songwriter David Allan Coe, is extolling drug use. He's not. He's been down that highway and avoids the on-ramps to it now.  It's not insignificant that he is estranged from his father and states publicly he hopes never to speak with the man who wrote and sang "Mona Lisa Lost Her Smile" and was the writer of Johnny Paycheck's biggest hit "Take This Job And Shove It." The elder Coe is not a fine man by any means. Look at any of his records - his millions of albums and CDs, yeah, but his jail record, his marriage record and his history of tax avoidance don't point to a well-adjusted life.

David Allan Coe

The Washington Post wrote a long long article about Coe and his podcast and his bizarre family history. When you have a father capable of writing tender songs such as his ode to eternity "Would You Lay With Me (In A Field Of Stone") and "She Used To Love Me A Lot" and then turn around and fill concert halls with vile racism and misogyny, you tend to grow up confused. Tyler spent twelve years playing guitar for his father and then ran away from the old man because of how disgusting he is, taking with him an abiding love for what we call real country music - the kind without Luke and Blake and that bunch.

Tyler Mahan Coe, at the card catalog of the Country
Music Association. He does extensive research.

Tyler does painstaking research. Lover of arcane fact that I am, I sat mesmerized as season one played out, detailing the genius of the well-known (Buck Owens) as well as those obscure to all but serious country nuts (steel guitar king Ralph Mooney) and lots of others in between. The first three episodes are devoted to the best country singer of all, George Jones.

And it doesn't matter that most of the people Coe chronicles are no longer living, because he does not do interviews to get his information. He researches painstakingly, which is why it's been several years since he put out the last installment. 

And he flatly turned down the opportunity to become a millionaire by selling the rights to the podcast to some outside party who would then have editorial and distribution control and authority over him. As he says on the website, “If I didn’t make ‘Cocaine & Rhinestones,’ it was never going to exist and I couldn’t bear the thought of it.” He wants the information out there, and he is in charge of sharing it.

He doesn't have a great voice for podcasting, but what he does have is the pedigree, and doggone if he doesn't have the facts to back himself up! The website is here, with all the info about past episodes and links to all, old and new. I'll see you there!

 

 

Shell Game

Half a million people live in Poznan, Poland, and yet it takes but eight mollusks to make sure their water is pure.

Huh? What say, Mark? Mussels are checking the water purity of a large city? Next thing, you'll tell me that computers are running the elevators and the traffic lights.

Fun fact: They do, and they do.

The Warta River supplies the water for the Poznanians. 

What you see in the picture is a zebra mussel. It turns out that they are very sensitive to pollution. Instead of going out to eat, or cooking for themselves, they feed by filtering water in the river they live in, trapping microscopic plankton.

And you know, there's nothing better than seafood! The Plankton Platter also comes with fries and slaw!

All right. As the mollusk filters the water, if there is something funky afloat, it closes the valves of its shell. The eight mollusks who work for the city in Water Purity each have a magnet attached to their shell. There is a water-sealed relay in the mussel that sends a signal to a computer to say "I just clammed up."

If more than 3 of the 8 shells close up, that's a signal to the Water Dept. that the river water is bad, and it's time to switch over to the tanks of clean water set aside for just such eventualities.

And get this! These mollusks live for between 4 and 8 years, depending on whether they smoke. BUT the retirement plan! They get pensioned off after just three months of work, and are sent to a nice clean retirement tank.

And this is kind to the animal, sure, but also, after a short period of time, these guys get used to foul water and stop noticing the low quality. 

They are replaced with younger, sharper mussels, and life goes on.

It's a lot like humans, without the nice retirement party.

 

Sunday Rerun: from the early pandemic days: It's Hard to Believe Some People

 Hello from your Pandemic News headquarters: Today's allotment is one story of hopeless foolishness and one of worthy hopefulness. The fool first:

Roseanne Barr, who claims to be funny and smart, says that the coronavirus outbreak is a bioweapon that was made to kill us baby boomers.

She talked to the great Norm Macdonald, who has a YouTube show called “Quarantined with Norm Macdonald.” The two were talking about quarantining and this whole COVID-19 experience.

Roseann said, “You know I’m crazy so I’m speaking as a crazy woman now. I think we’re being forced to evolve. You know what it is, Norm? I think they’re just trying to get rid of all my generation.”

“The boomer ladies that, you know, that inherited their, you know, are widows. They inherited the money, so they got to go wherever the money is and figure out a way to get it from people,” she continued.

So, if you follow her "logic" (and remember, she had a great chance at a comeback last year when they brought back the sitcom that made her famous, only to blow it with a series of racist comments) she is saying that a lot of widows in their 60s have all this inherited money that young people want to get their hands on, so they came up with this virus to get those women out of the picture.

Barr has been lately blessing the state of Hawaii with her regal presence. She told Norm that Hawaiians have “no toilet paper and are out of white rice.”

Contrary to reports that there have been 385 confirmed cases and five deaths on the island, Roseann said there is one case of COVID-19 there.

And she went on, telling Norm that the time in isolation has given her a chance to “research and come up with the perfect lawsuit … against Hollywood.”

“I’m devising the perfect lawsuit and I am so blessed to have that time and sit here and be able to compile my thoughts,” she said. “So I can figure out how to *^$% over everybody in the &^%# world over there.”

Really. I'm sure the Hollywood legal community is scared.

Meanwhile, the good news:

The Red Cross says they want Americans who have gotten over the COVID-19 to donate plasma. The science is, that blood can help current patients with serious or immediately life-threatening COVID-19 infections because that plasma has antibodies that will attack the virus.

They call it "convalescent plasma," and in the past, it's come in handy as a  lifesaving treatment for new diseases for which no treatments or vaccines have been developed. I think it's fascinating to think that nature gives us the cure to use on others like this, and it gives me hope that medicine will come up with a vaccine to prevent, and a cure to heal, this coronavirus.

In the same spirit, I happen to think that Norm MacDonald is one of the funniest and brightest people alive. Maybe some time with him will be good for Roseanne and make her funny and smart again.

The Saturday Picture Show, April 17, 2021

 

This is from the 1960s school of humor that thought posting "Don't pee in our pool; we don't swim in your toilet!" signs in the paneled clubroom was a riot. Charlie was the life of every party.

I know we've had a lot of rain these last few weeks. Trust me, when beauties like this, and lots of corn and whatnot come in this summer, it'll all be worth it!

I think we can date this cuneiform wall art to the Mesopotamians. Charlie and Claire Mesopotamian, that fun couple from the next street over.

And here is an extreme close up of a red pencil making a big X on my math quiz.

The fabled cobblestone streets of Philadelphia. One can only speculate as to how Amazon delivery trucks, fire engines, and other essential vehicles traverse them, but they sure look quaint.

So, a guy is tearing up the old wall-to-wall carpet in the house he bought, and it turns out that the people who just sold it to him were really into Monopoly. Think of the iron, race car, and thimble you have to tote around on it!

Miami Beach. Then, as now, largely unmasked.

It's the obstinate side of me that finds real beauty in weeds. To me, this dandelion is as pretty as an orchid, and you can make wine, if you have several hundred of them.

How great would this look, hanging on the living room wall?

It's the sign of maturity when one can accept the world as it is and make the best of it. So the only place they could find on your wall to hang the fire extinguisher is right on the main wall? Think of a creative way to deal, and look at the result!

Riders On The Storm

 Whoever coined the term "Dumb bunnies" didn't know these rabbits!

 Dateline: Dunedin, New Zealand: Three rabbits saw floodwaters rising fast, and they knew they had to take action, since they don't a) own surfboards  or  b) know how to swim.

So what they did, they jumped onto the backs of some sheep who were also seeking to avoid getting flooded out, and hitchhiked to dry land.

Ferg Horne, 64, is a farmer in New Zealand, been at it for almost 50 years, and he has never seen anything to match it.

His neighbor was off on vacation, so Ferg was caring for the sheep next door when wind and rain came ripping through the Taieri Plains on New Zealand’s South Island.

That was Friday afternoon, and Ferg was held at bay by the high water until Saturday morning, and when he got to where the sheep were standing in three inches of water, two of them had riders on their backs. 

Well, Ferg figured that the sheep were carrying some flood-borne debris or something, but, "the closer I got, I realized it was rabbits,” he said. Two on one sheep, one on the other.

But being 64, he's no technowizard, and when he went to snap a photo of the free-riders, he wound up shooting a video. But he wanted to show the world what was happening, because he didn't think people would believe him otherwise.

"It's a Samsung or a smartphone or whatever you call it. I swear at it every day," he told the news. "I'm absolutely useless with technology." In that cool New Zealand accent!

He did figure out how to forward the video to his son, and from there, it all went, well, viral, if it's ok to say that.

And, "From then on it's just gone crazy," he said.

And yes, he did take the sheep to the safety of higher ground after all this commotion. 

"They were as happy as can be, those rabbits; they were warm and dry, snuggled up," he told The Press newspaper in Christchurch, the South Island’s largest city.

And, just for the capper of it, Ferg says the rabbits "fell off by the time I got to where I was shifting the sheep to dry land, but I did look back, and they were climbing up [a] tree.”

Maybe they had had all their fun for the week.

"Cinderella story, out of nowhere, former greenskeeper, now about to become the Masters champion"

 I make it a habit to try to watch the very end of the Masters Golf Tournament every April, because it's a Festival Of Clichés every time. The donning of the Holy Green Jacket, which brings to our Sunday evening television screens a formal ceremony that is rivaled only by a papal investiture for pomp-ish circumstance, always brings me back to a couple of lines from Bob Dylan's 1965 liner notes for "Highway 61 Revisited":  "...the subject matter -- though meaningless as it is -- has something to do with the beautiful strangers . . . . the beautiful strangers, Vivaldi's green jacket & the holy slow train." 

Augusta National Golf Club is just full of beautiful strangers. The crème de la crème of the entire Southern beau monde are all there, and one can almost smell the aroma of microfiber polo shirts through the screen. The winner gets to wear his green spring jacket, and it's a shame that golf has not seen fit to create wardrobe choices for the other Three Seasons.  

And heaven knows golf matches move with the speed of a holy slow train. But with all the players trooping around with their caddies dressed in jumpsuits, playing a game as boring as an entire afternoon can be. But it was Dorothy Parker who said, "The cure for boredom is curiosity, and there is no cure for curiosity."  So I tried on Sunday to find something to be curious about, and I found it when Jim Nantz, the voice of CBS Sports, said that the winner, Hideki Matsuyama, a man from Japan, had "fans from halfway around the world watching him compete."

Well, now. Augusta is 6,945 miles from Tokyo, which is really all the way around the world. You can see the antipodes (the direct geographical opposite) of any address on https://www.antipodesmap.com/ and that site shows us that the antipode to Augusta - where you would wind up if you started drilling down at the 18th hole, all the way through Earth - is just west of Perth, Australia, south of the Indochinese Peninsula.

And by the time I figured that out, Matsuyama had his green jacket and I had a delicious pan of barbecued chicken to chow down on, so until next year, so long, Augusta!

Cheerios are not English!

I am a big breakfast fan. I prefer to fuel up with a proper eye-opener, like bacon and eggs, or fried ham and potatoes, or hominy and sausage. Fill up the tank for a big day, pause for a light lunch (apple slices with peanut butter, maybe a granola bar) for lunch, and then all hell breaks loose for dinner.

It must be my English heritage! Over there, they have what's called the Full English breakfast. And there's a Facebook page called Rate My Plate, on which a woman named Stacie E shared her morning meal.

Stacie E got the beatdown of the century, probably because she put gravy on her breakfast. Gravy!

She served up three link sausages, one fried egg, two plum tomatoes, three rashers of bacon (the English call a slice of bacon a "rasher"), a scoop of baked beans and a slice of buttered white toast.

And then she ladled on a cup or so of gravy.

She took a picture for Facebook, and captioned it "Full English with Gravy by Stacie E."

About the nicest word that anyone used to describe her morning vittles was "vile."  It seems that English breakfast lovers do not believe in slopping gravy on their meals, and also, people were pointing out that the real deal would have mushrooms and blood pudding.

Blood pudding, if you haven't heard of it, is "made from pork blood, with pork fat or beef suet, and a cereal, usually oatmeal, oat groats or barley groats." That's how Wikipedia defines it.

It's a sausage, and you remember the old adage: There are two things you don't want to see being made: Laws, and Sausages. 

Breakfast, anyone?

Across the Universe

 

If you enjoy listening to radio from all over - over in the next county or over across the seven seas - I recommend a free app that will give you hours of fun listening!

It's called Radio Garden and you access it via http.radio.garden on a mobile device or a desktop. Once you're there, you navigate a globe that appears, zoom in on the green dots you'll see spread out on a map background (each dot is a radio station) and you'll be transported miles away.

It even gives you the feel of tuning in an old radio. You hear slight static and crackle as you scan the dial, and then you'll hear small-town stations playing the same music you hear on major stations and then you'll hear major stations from New York or London playing the same song - or you'll hear songs you never heard before. If you like a station, click on the heart symbol and that station will be saved on a list you can easily click on again.

Studio Puckey is the name of the outfit that came up with this idea. They're in Amsterdam, and I tell you, if this technology had been available when I was a lad, I would have whiled away many an hour, or entire day, let's be honest. 

The 3D Google Earth interface is what shows you where are you, so to speak. Radio stations that wish to participate (and why wouldn't they?) simply have to beam up a signal converted to streaming editing. 

Moving around the globe, one can listen to music, news, talk shows (people are just as vapid elsewhere as here) live sporting events and even distant commercials!

I've heard live radio dramas from northern California, World War II speeches and plays from Britain, a talk show from Sri Lanka, a high school station from Delaware where the principal spins some of his favorite records one hour a week, and two interesting sites: a station from London that plays bird calls (and nothing but) 24 hours a day and AmbiNature Radio from Zurich, Switzerland, which gives a steady diet of nature sounds all day. That station is marvelous background for an afternoon nap.

Or so I am told.

Calling Dr Yankem

Whoa! Don't tell your favorite dentist - or any hooker - but "paid escort" is not really the oldest profession in the world, although books and advice columns always present it as such.

No, it turns out that people have been doing dentistry - although maybe not with fancy offices and Muzak and outdated Yachting magazines in the waiting room - since people first had teeth.

Scientists now have evidence of teeth being drilled in skulls that dates from 7,500 to 9,000 years ago.

Ogg and Mogg, the prehistoric couple, had holes in their teeth made by some sort of prehistoric bow-drill.

Researchers at the University of Bologna, Italy examined a 14,000-year-old skull and found that "one rotten tooth in the jaw had been deliberately scoured and scraped with a tool," says the BBC. That makes dentistry one of the oldest recorded professions and is definitely a reason to smile.

Imagine if you will, a world without toothpaste, toothbrushes, dental floss, and toothpicks. And then imagine Barney Rubble with a bow drill, saying. "Say ahhhhhhhhh, Fred!" 

Ancient bow-drill, as used by ancient Egyptians

"Look, Ma, no cavities!"

Sunday Rerun: The Bird Is The Word (from 2016)

 If you remember the meeting just after the election when the president-elect met with the current president, there were so many cameras clicking in the room as the men met the press that you could hardly hear what they said!

It must have been about that loud up at the Conowingo Dam, the hydroelectric power plant that takes the flowing water of the Susquehanna River and generates electricity to light up the little lamp by your sewing chair.

The crowd gathers

There's a park up there called Fisherman's Wharf & Park, and last week they held their fourth annual Eagle Day for avid birdwatchers and photographers. There's something about the tall, tall trees and craggy topography of the area that makes a happy home for America's feathered national symbol.  The area and the dam and plant are owned by Exelon Generation, the good people who are powering the computer I'm pounding away at right this minute.

More than 1,100 people showed up on a chilly Saturday in Northeastern Maryland, cameras and binoculars in hand, because, "It's the best place to see eagles," said Exelon spokeswoman Deena O'Brien. 

There were demonstrations and lessons from wildlife organizations to help people better appreciate the wonders of nature, and from all accounts, it was a fine time for all.  Fishermen and women have long trooped up there to have a chance to catch dinner, and while you won't go home with anything but film or digital images from Eagle Day, it must really be something to be in the right spot when one of them swoops in for breakfast on some perch or shad.

The papers said that bird enthusiasts came early, stayed late, dressed snugly and prepared with all sorts of camera bags and coolers, camp chairs, portable gazebos, lunch boxes, and supplies. I ought to get involved in this next year, because I would love to go out in that sort of clothing - the shirts, pants and vests with all sorts of pockets and carabiners and slots and zippers all over the place. That's for me.  And getting to see an eagle is a pure bonus! 

PS - if you go...the thing to do is to wait to hear a fellow birder holler "Right overhead!" and then look up!  There goes one now!

The Saturday Picture Show, April 10, 2021

 

I often wonder, while filling up the cat food, how anyone can stand to work in the cat food factory, given how bad their product smells? So here is the opposite of that - a job raising incense!

Words from a very wise principal. Remember, even Bill Gates needs brakes on his car, and Elon Musk needs someone to launder his socks. No one is alone here.

It really does exist! It's in Florida, which is why so many of the superannuated migrate there.

A wise sign in Northern Ireland. 

I'm stumped if I can think of a better place for a fox to take a snooze and avoid watching fox news.

This crocodile went to the pool and insisted on taking his inflatable.

This Wednesday the 14th will mark the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, our 16th president, at Ford's Theater in D.C. He wore this top hat that evening.

This is an Arabian silver coin, struck in 1693 in Yemen. It was recently found in the ground at a farm in Middletown, R.I. and is believed to be part of the loot stolen by 17th-Century English pirate named Henry Avery, who sailed the seas under the colorful nickname "Long Ben," apparently because that sounds so much cooler than "Long Henry."

So many of us skip our vital midday naps. Doing so leaves one at the risk of being overly tired when it's time for the afternoon nap.

Those chilly mornings are over for now, sad to say, but remember how nice it is to see your breath fogging up in front of you?