Unaccustomed as I am...

Today is my birthday, so instead of sharing a story about a guy who grew a turnip that looks just like Mark Zuckerberg, or a new way of frying an egg by using the dish heater setting on the dishwasher, or railing about the complete disregard for pronunciation and grammar displayed by news anchors, baseball announcers, and the people who answer the phone for multinational corporations, or trying to inveigle my dear readers into watching one of my beloved offbeat quirky movies (The Big Hit, They All Laughed, Ghost World), I am going to tell you, in my standard logorrheic style, how happy I am to be here as I reach three score and ten.

For one thing, I am happy to be alive! A lot of people my age are not, and that includes many a guy or girl I went to school with. A lot of my friends are gone. Some died very young, and some have just recently stepped off the stage, but I miss them all. It's almost laughable how, at 17, I thought I was going to live forever, and very soon came to learn that was not the case. The words of Mickey Mantle ring true now: "If I had known I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself." 

Sorry to say this, Yankee fans, but Mantle was a reprobate, a pixillated playboy in pinstripes. We who grew up in Baltimore were lucky to see the example of guys like Brooks Robinson, Frank Robinson, Johnny Unitas, Cal Ripken Sr. and Jr.  And Art Donovan, whose jersey number takes on a certain significance today!

They were guys who got to be great because they worked for it day after day. To this day, I wonder how Cal Jr can keep from laughing when he hears about some 24-year-old needing "a day off" after playing baseball for several nights in a row. Cal played 2,632 games in a row and did not need "a day off."

That was the good thing about growing up in Baltimore, Towson, to be specific. We always felt we had the best of everything, but we did not strut around saying we were the best of everything. I wouldn't trade my growing up for any other. My Towson was sort of like Mayberry, as I look back - a small town with quirks and heart. The schools were great, and I never drive past Hampton Elementary or Towson High without having the urge to go in and walk those halls one more time. My junior high, Towsontown, is but a memory now, torn down to build Carver Center, where young people can learn everything from culinary arts to cosmetology to acting, singing, and writing. Great schools, all of them. 

And their purpose was to prepare us for life and work. Before I was even employed, I was a proud volunteer firefighter and that remains a huge part of my being. From the days when I was a clerk at the A&P Supermarket - a union man at 17! - to my days in radio, teaching radio, time in police and fire communications for the County and as facilities manager and, later, a public information specialist for the Health Department, I put in time enough to pension out at 60 and here I am, enjoying life as a retiree, cranking out my blog, posting pictures and quotes, and fooling around reading, listening to music, playing with the cats, staying in touch with the people I love all over the world.

Speaking of people I love...I begin my septuagenarian status together for 48 of those years with the most wonderful woman on earth. Peggy and I went on a blind date that has lasted since June 21, 1973, because we simply and frankly fell in love at first sight, and even though we both still wear glasses, that sight has never dimmed. If you've met me, you know that life with me will mean a lot of commotion and a lot of laughing and a ton of talking...and not one time have we ever had to "talk about working on our relationship" or taken a course in effective marital communications. We say what we want, and since what we want is what's best for each other, no problem.

I can say I've been lucky. I never won a Dodge or anything, but I won a set of car ramps at Pep Boys on Joppa Rd once, and a few dollars came my way from football pools. I have been lucky enough to have two legs and two arms and two ears and two eyes and one half-decent brain. I have always had the jobs I wanted, seen the things I wanted to see, read the books I wanted to, heard my music. People have been very good to me and I have tried to reciprocate in kind. 

Some say, "You've missed out by never visiting Europe or owning a mountain resort or tasting the great food and wines of France." Cape May and Ocean City suit us fine. I don't need a house in the hills; I love this house so much. It has all my stuff in it! And with so many great places to eat here (including our own kitchen!) and I am happy with iced tea, seltzer and cold beer.

That's really all I set out to say. 70 years of happiness as of today, and I thank you for being the best part of it!

And one more quote from Yogi: "If the world were perfect, it wouldn’t be."

I think it's as close to perfect as it's ever going to be!

Doggone

I don't know much about dogs, being a cat man myself, but if canines are like felines, they go with what their genes tell them.

Your standard house cat has been bred for centuries to follow the lead of his leonine forebears and sleep twenty hours a day attack the slightest morsel of food sitting around the house to feed the rest of the pride back home.

Here's a case of a dog living up to his name. Out in Spokane, a doggy dogg was ejected from his family's car when it was involved in an accident.

For two long agonizing days, her family walked the floors, wondering where she had bolted. Linda Oswald, her family, and Tilly The Dog were cruising along Idaho State Highway 41 the Sunday before last when their car collided with another.  And the rear window blew out, and that launched Tilly out of the car and onto the world.

Tilly was totally unhurt, but she took off on foot (paw), and what do you know? At least six complete strangers pulled over along the highway to help the Oswalds look for her.  But no luck.

All told, the searchers were out on the hunt for 10 hours that Sunday.

“People just kept going out,” Oswald said. “We were sore and exhausted.”

Then, the family took the 21st Century approach and put the whole deal on a Facebook post that included a picture of Tilly, a 2-year-old border collie and red heeler mix. That post was shared by more than 3,000 people. And three of the people who saw it were Tyler, Travis and Zane Potter.  They had seen the dog in the wanted poster hanging around on their family farm near Rathdrum, Idaho, on Tuesday.

The Oswalds and the Potters figure that the dog was attracted to their farm because they have sheep.

“I think that dog was trying to herd,” Travis Potter said.

So Tilly is home, the Oswalds are happy about it, and shepherd dogs will do what shepherd dogs will do!

Good thing she's not a boxer. They might have found her in a gym sparring with a middleweight.

Louie, Louie

I've said a thousand times that I must have missed the day in school when they explained the Solar System, or maybe I was in the vice-principal's office for some routine questioning. Whatever the reason, while the rest of you know all about the sun and moon and stars and planets, I only know two things for sure when it comes to astronomy:

a) It's different from astrology (as if I know anything about that either)

2) I know more about it that Louie Gohmert.

 Louis Buller (Louie) Gohmert Jr. is a United States Congressman from the first district of the state of Texas. Last summer, when he tested positive for COVID-19, he blamed it on wearing a mask, which he was not wearing when he called his entire staff into a room to tell them he had the virus.

He once said that people who "are a little bit crazy are the people that always do the best on foreign policy.”

He once got into an argument with the Attorney General of the United States, claiming that the United States government could have done more to prevent the Boston Marathon bombings. Goehmert ended the byplay by hollering (he does that a lot), “The attorney general will not cast aspersions on my asparagus!”

So, he's clearly not on the Top Ten list of Washington Brains. But his latest hard-to-explain statement is, well, hard to explain.

In a House subcommittee hearing the other day, Louie said, "I was informed by the immediate past director of NASA that they have found that the moon's orbit is changing slightly and so is the Earth's orbit around the sun."

"We know there's been significant solar flare activity. And so, is there anything that the National Forest Service or BLM (Bureau of Land Management) can do to change the course of the moon's orbit or the Earth's orbit around the sun? Obviously, that would have profound effects on our climate."

 His point is that there is a connection between the moon and Earth's orbit and solar flares and climate change. He was questioning US Forest Service Associate Deputy Chief Jennifer Eberlien, and he asked if the National Forest Service or Bureau of Land Management could change the orbits of the moon and Earth.

Read that again if you need to. Even I know that only Superman can move the planets. And the National Forest Service is too busy sweeping the forests, anyway.

Ms Eberlien's response was that she "would have to follow up with you on that one, Mr. Gohmert."

But how can she?

Sunday Rerun (from 2019): What Else Is On

 It was former FCC Commissioner Newton Minow who described television as a "vast wasteland" in a 1961 speech, and Newt, it ain't gotten much better since.

What brings this to mind is the sad, sad news that hundreds of Americans will soon be parking it in the big old recliner in front of the 48" Sony to watch Season 2 of Celebrity Big Brother.  Get ready for this list of luminaries about to light up living rooms from San Diego to Schenectady:

• Tamar Braxton, whose sister is famous.
• Anthony Scaramucci, who was Trump's mouthpiece for a week.
• Dina Lohan, whose daughter is famous.
• Ryan Lochte, the most obnoxious thing in a pool since that Baby Ruth bar in "Caddyshack"
• Kato Kaelin, who once mooched off O.J. Simpson
• Joey Lawrence, famous for saying, "Whoa!" on "Blossom."
• Ricky Williams, who chose marijuana over continuing to play pro football (so he's famous for saying "Whoa!" on blossoms.)
• Lolo Jones, who's one of the few people ever to compete in both the Winter and Summer Olympics (so maybe she'll be on the regular "Big Brother" too)
• Tom Green, whose movie "Freddy Got Fingered" set new frontiers for lovers of humor that makes you want to throw yourself off the roof

Kato Kaelin, who lived in O.J. Simpson's pool house, is seen here at the
former football legend's trial, trying to remember meeting O.J. Simpson

Julie Chen Moonves, who added her husband Les Moonves's surname to her own right after they hauled his cheating lecherous leering self out of CBS last fall, will join this merry band as master of ceremonies.

Public libraries, bookstores, parks and petting zoos are still open, by the way.

The Saturday Picture Show, June 26, 2021

 

Be honest with you, I'm not a fan of the taste or texture of strawberries, but I guess if you pile some atop shortbread and cover it all up with a mountain of whipped cream, I can stand them.

I've seen people asking why there aren't any fireflies hanging around in our yards this summer, and I'm guessing that maybe they don't go out to look for them because they're afraid of being dive-bombed by cicadas.

It's ok to preen a little when you know you're looking good!

This is A) a greatly magnified view of the surface of a vinyl phonograph record OR B) it's a picture of the sand dunes trapped in a crater on Mars.  

Go with "B"!

Here we find an ant who learned the hard way not to take a shortcut through the paint tray.

And here we see a baby giraffe using its own hindquarters as a pillow.

If you ever take an anatomy class, save this picture and show it around when the topic turns to "blood vessels of the human hand." 

What a lovely picture of a seaside home, as the waves break ever so gently on a summer morn. OR this is a picture of a mountain home in landlocked West Virginia. Again, go with "B."

I inherited a king's ransom worth of tools from my father, many of which I use all the time, and many of which sit in the toolbox he left me because I have no idea what to call them or do with them. I make up names like "Manual Stultifier" or "Left-Handed Knob Cracker," but that doesn't help. If you need one, I have one.

I'm quite certain no police force in this area ever used these Nash Metropolitans for their fleet, which saved many a cop the embarrassment of being called "Officer Beep-Beep."

My handshake brings everyone to the yard

Handshakes, and their distant cousin, hugs, used to be so commonplace that you hardly even noticed when you gave someone the old Grip 'n' Grin, or the Belgian Back Pat.  Handshaking actually began in ancient times as a way to show strangers you encountered that you weren't carrying a blunderbuss or a cat o' nine tails or some other weapon. Until recently, no one even thought twice about sticking their grubby paw in yours and squeezing like a blood pressure cuff, or wrapping their arms around you so tight that their hands met at your iliac crest.

And then came the pandemic, and we all feared cooties as man has feared nothing since the Black Plague (1346 to 1353). Masked up, and occasionally gloved, we stayed 6 feet apart at all times, which distancing rendered handshakes impossible.

And now that we are returning to "normalcy," it feels a bit awkward to even see someone's mouth, let alone take their hand in yours.

Perhaps this can help. You don't have anything to worry about IF you’ve been vaccinated for COVID-19. That's the word from pulmonologist Akhil Bindra, MD. He says if you've had the needle(s), you have “little to no risk” of getting the virus through the casual contact of a handshake.

Dr. Bindra says that society will have to learn to deal with changes in social ways, given the pandemic and the vaccines, which offer us protection against the virus while slowing the spread of the disease.

The CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) have released guidelines that say fully vaccinated people can resume activities without wearing a mask or practicing social distancing, except under certain circumstances. And they define "fully vaccinated" as having received a single-dose coronavirus vaccine (Johnson & Johnson) or the second dose of a two-dose vaccine series (Pfizer and Moderna).

Dr. Bindra points out that recent data show vaccinated people having "less of a chance of contracting COVID-19 than they would of picking up a flu bug in a normal year."

“The key here is being vaccinated,” he says. “That is where the path begins on the return to normal. It’s how you can get back to living life the way you remember and feeling safe while doing it.”

And he points out that the simple act of shaking hands with confidence is part of our return to "feeling human after a year of living in fear."

So, the doctors say, if you're vaxxed, go ahead and shake, unless you see the other person coughing into their hand or something else gross, in which case you can just pretend you NEED to keep your hands in your pockets.

 Feel better now? Let's shake on it.

Max Appreciation

It must be awful to be attractive. Not that I would know, but good-looking people have trouble all the time with creepazoids bothering them, seeking their attention and favor.

It's like this in society: a woman goes to a restaurant or a bar, with or without others along, and some gozzlehead starts in with the sleazy lines ("I hope you know CPR, because you just took my breath away!") and in his dreams, the woman runs into his arms like always happens in shampoo commercials. 

I wonder what it is with these bothersome boors. Only the most delusionary person would think that a woman they are eyeballing in a bistro will return his ardor with like feelings, so that can't be it.

Maybe they know what sort of losers they are, and they take out their resentment over it by annoying people right and left. "If I can't have you, then I shall discomfort you as often as I can."

All that said, at least there are some helpers out there. Let's have a hand for Max Gutierrez, a bartender in St Petersburg, Fla. He was working the shaker one evening not long ago when he saw excessive pestering in progress in his saloon. Max stepped up and saved the day!

He wrote a note and passed it to the two women being tortured by the loser. One of the women is Trinity Allie, and she showed a picture of the note online: 

“If this guy is bothering you, put your ponytail on your other shoulder, and I will have him removed. He’s giving me the creeps.”

Trinity wrote: “This man was harrassssing (sic) me and my friend and the bartender passed this note to me acting like it was my receipt ! Legit the type of bartender everyone needs.”

Later, she wrote that Max hollered this at the would-be Lothario:  “You need to get the f—k away from these girls who clearly are not interested,” and then he gave him the gate. 

 “Not all heroes wear capes. Some wear Hawaiian shirts,” wrote an admiring observer.

The capper is: the loathsome loverboy came back into the bar to try to order another drink and was promptly given the bum's rush.

Ladies and Gentlemen, a hand for Max Gutierrez, please!

 

Hmmm, that's odd...

The stories always go around, saying that the word "tips" - the cash we leave for servers, cabbies, and blackjack dealers - derives from the acronym for "to insure prompt service." No, it doesn't, but people will continue to aver that it does. 

Same with the person who pops up and says, "You know where they get the word 'news,' doncha? It's because the news comes from North, East, West, and South. So they call it the 'news'!"

Wrong again, Kemo Sabe, but closer. The letters in the word "news," when spelled backwards, do form an old word that's fallen into disuse in modern times. That word is "swen," meaning "a person who will believe anything they read."

English scholars call it a "back construction" when a word exists, and then people come along claiming that it meant something different all along. The reply from  linguists and professors to that claim is universally "Nuh-uh."

You know the word "odd," meaning "out of the normal, unconventional, a bit bizarre." It turns out that the world of psychology, without a shred of irony, uses the acronym ODD to categorize a style of bad childhood behavior.

ODD, or Oppositional defiant disorder, is defined as "a behavior disorder in which a child displays a pattern of an angry or cranky mood, defiant or combative behavior, and vindictiveness toward people in authority. The child's behavior often disrupts their daily routine, including activities within the family and at school."

If left untreated, ODD will always result in egregious adult misbehavior, especially when a child of any age is influenced by crazy-haired goons.

The textbooks tell us that there are phases in the life of every child - particularly at the ages of 2, or 13, that are marked by defiance of authority, be it parental, educational, or civil. Such defiance is marked by arguing minute points ad infinitum, abject disobedience of rules, laws, and social conventions, and refusing to accept the results of a free and fair election. Even a child aged 75 years can be said to have ODD when the behavior last for more than six months.

Not that many kids have it - estimates say between 2% - 16% of children (more boys than girls) have it.

Unfortunately, many of the children dealing with ODD also manifest other behavioral problems, such as ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) and DJT (Disappointing Judicial Tricks - the reliance on incompetent legal advice to push an illegal quest, or the complete inability to face truth and deal with it like an adult).

We also know that some children with ODD later on develop a more troublesome behavior pattern known as "conduct disorder," which is Antisocial behavior such as physically pushing other world leaders around, holding up borrowed religious tracts, or failing to observe basic health and safety pandemic procedures during a disease outbreak.

Take this simple test to see if the you or someone you love is dealing with ODD behavior:

Symptoms of ODD may include:

• Throwing repeated temper tantrums
• Excessively arguing with adults, especially those with authority
• Actively refusing to comply with requests and rules
• Trying to annoy or upset others, or being easily annoyed by others
• Blaming others for your mistakes
• Having frequent outbursts of anger and resentment
• Being spiteful and seeking revenge
• Swearing or using obscene language
• Saying mean and hateful things when upset

Again, remember: we're talking about children of all ages.

Norman

Personally, when I hear the name "Norman," I think at once of the greatest Norman in the history of Normania...the amazing wit, Norm Macdonald. You might have seen Norm on his dozens of appearances on the David Letterman show, and his walk-on music was usually "Norman," the old Sue Thompson hit with the cool trombones.

And then there are those who think of Norman Bates, the guy in the "Psycho" movie with all the mom issues. Not for me, although I did enjoy Anthony Perkins, the star of "Psycho," in his sensitive portrayal of Jimmy Piersall, the guy who lost his mind while playing for the Red Sox in "Fear Strikes Out." That had a more believable plot, because it was a true story!

But the smart guys at MIT - the Massachusetts Institute of Technology - have been working with "AI"- artificial intelligence - for quite some time. As a person of very little intelligence, artificial or otherwise, I can't begin to figure how this works. Somehow the brainiacs are imbuing machines with human-style intelligence, much like Ted Cruz, only smart. 

Last year,  they developed AI-Powered Empathy, showing artificial images of disasters from all over to see if looking at that sadness could help the robots gnerate sympathy for those in pain and suffering.

Remember, this all started years ago with robots that could play chess, and now they have upgraded to an AI with a psychopathic personality, like we need more of them running around loose. They fed the artificial noggin stories of death and dismemberment, and presto - instant psycho!

MIT's Norman

And they named it Norman, after Norman Bates. 

And in case you wonder how they filled a fake brain with horrible thoughts and notions, it was simple: they exposed "Norman" to the captions - not the actual photos and videos - of death and mayhem and havoc on the Reddit internet page. They found a subreddit (discussion group) so grisly that the researchers won't even say what it was, and then, after "he" read all this gore, they flashed Rorschach ink blot tests at "him," and sure enough, "he" had a bizarre outlook.

F'instance, there's an ink blot that you and I would look at and say, "It looks like a bunch of birds on a tree branch." But after reading those macabre captions, Norman thought that same image looked like a man being electrocuted.

For the blot that we would call "a person holding an umbrella in the air," Norman "looks" at that and sees "a man shot dead in front of his screaming wife."

This proves that an Artificial Intelligence being shows a bias, depending on what material it is shown. Show it agony and death, and it "sees" things that way.

Show it raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, and it breaks into a medley of Broadway show-stoppers.

They were going to let Norman watch Fox News for a week, but there are limits to how much even a robot should suffer.

Fan Club

I'm no fan of wine; I'd rather have my grape juice non-fermented, if you please. But lots of people love it, and wish to be as close to it as they can. As with anything, you can take it too far.

Out in Santa Rose, California, there is a vineyard where someone reported a "suspicious vehicle" parked nearby.

(I can tell you this: during my years in the police dispatching business, I argued unsuccessfully a hundred times that a vehicle itself cannot be said to be "suspicious." Attributing human characteristics to a Buick never works out. The car you see parked outside suspects nothing. The circumstances surrounding the vehicle being there may be well suspicious, but whatever...)

So the police show up and they find a hat on a piece of farm equipment. Again, not right. Farm equipment does not need hats. 

The Sonoma County Sheriff's Department found a man stuck inside the shaft of a giant vineyard fan. I didn't know this either, but they need huge fans out in the grape growing lots to keep air moving around the grapes so they won't freeze.

The "suspicious" vehicle in question

The Fire Department had to respond the get the man out of the fan, and I can assure you, that is the first time in my long life that I have ever typed those very words all in a row.

“The man indicated he liked to take pictures of the engines of old farm equipment,” the Sheriff said. “After a thorough investigation, which revealed the farm equipment wasn’t antique and the man had far more methamphetamine than camera equipment, the motivation to climb into the fan shaft remains a total mystery.”

They took this picture of him because he deserved a souvenir.

Free advice to all would-be criminals: always make sure you have more camera equipment than methamphetamine on you. In fact, zero meth should be your goal, as should not committing crimes.

The man is 38 years old now, and as Casey Stengel would say, in ten years he has a good chance to be 48. He needed medical attention but should make a a full recovery, so that's nice, so he can be in good health to deal with trespassing, drug possession, and violations of probation case.

I've spent a good amount of time wondering about the trouble people get themselves into, and now I have to wonder about the fans people get themselves into. 

It keeps me busy.

Sunday Rerun (from 2013) And the Beat Goes on

 If my father were still alive, he'd be about to turn 100 y.o.a. this September.  Long lives are not a long suit of my family, owing to the risky undertakings of some departed distant relatives such as "Wrong Way" Clark, who kept driving his Studebaker the wrong way into tunnels and over bridges, "Shocky" Clark, who demonstrated that inserting the tines of a fork into an electric outlet was bad for the fork (and its holder), and "Sinker" Clark, who was the first to prove that you really shouldn't go in swimming for half an hour after eating.

But Dad wasn't from that side of the family.  A prudent, cautious gentleman, he lived to be 84, and to zoom past the three-score-and-ten mark, outlined in the Bible, by 14 years is a pretty good life.

I stumbled across this link on Stumble Upon.  I find it interesting and I hope you do.  Dad surely would.  If I could talk to him about the world he was born into and the world of a little fellow born today, he would be fascinated.  Just the other day, Peggy and I discussed whether Dad would have a smart phone, and I don't know that he would have.  He might have gone with a plain cell phone.  It would not have been his way to be driving to Home Depot while texting someone about meeting him later that morning and seeing how many board feet of lumber he would need to repair the back steps.  He would be appalled to see the way most people today drive and act and write.

We talked earlier this year about a little baby born to a splendid couple of Baltimore journalists.  His mom pointed out that he could very well live to see the year 2100 rung in.  I was thinking that my Dad's family, at his birth in 1913, would scarcely have dared to wonder if he would still be around in 2000.

He didn't miss by much, but he did live long enough to see Sonny Bono get elected to the US Congress.  And maybe that was more than his family could have ever dreamed.

The Saturday Picture Show, June 19, 2021

 

Ah, the age-old riddle: Why did the chicken go to the carryout?

Show your colors!

It was just about a year ago we would get calls or messages to look on the front porch for a nice hot loaf of freshly-baked sourdough. People learned to bake and work puzzles and read and a lot of other new hobbies.

Since the temperatures are hanging around near 90°, here's a shot of what last winter looked like! Another sweet memory.

Jennifer Rocha is a woman from Coachella, California who just finished earning her degree from the University of California San Diego. For her graduation pictures, she posed with her parents in the farm fields where she worked since her young days with her parents to pay for that education. You may be assured this young woman knows the value of a dollar, and an education.

This is not one of those southern water towers with a peach painted thereupon. It's the same moon we all sleep under, settling in for the night in a radar dish.

Bruce McCall actually painted cars for ads years ago before he turned to satirical artwork of cars, such as these '58 Bulgemobiles for the National Lampoon in 1973.

There must be a family with the surname Stick somewhere. Let's hope they are really thin and willing to pose for the rear window of cars.

This is "Office At Night" (1940) by Edward Hopper. You know him from "Nighthawks," the painting set in a diner which has been re-done a hundred times. This image came to Hopper's mind from the many times he rode a subway in New York and caught fleeting glimpses of people in offices. For over 70 years, people in the art world have discussed this, how the woman is so voluptuous, and the man is so intent on his work that he fails to notice she dropped a piece of paper. To me, he's focused on his work, and she's wondering why she's still on the job, because it's dark out.  

This may not be Brick Hell, but maybe it's Brick Heck. Who can tell?

Let's Make a Deal

We've all heard a hundred jokes that begin with "Florida man..."

They're not always jokes; sometimes, they are real news stories. So this one begins with: Small town in Florida sells its water tower in a bungled real estate deal.

Look at this map! I've never even heard of Brooksville, FL, but here it seems to be a bigger deal than Tallahassee, Jacksonville, Tampa, Orlando, and Miami!

Anyhow, in April, a local business wheeler dealer bought the city-owned building under Brooksville's water tower. He gave the city $55,000 for the building, which used to be used as a storage site for various city agencies; the plan was to turn it into a gym (one where people would constantly look up to the sky in fear of the tower collapsing, but anyway...)

Bobby Read is the businessman here. As the City Council was closing the deal on May 5, he told city officials he thought the legal description of the property went far beyond what he thought he was buying. But officials, relying on the description they had, said no, we're cool, go ahead with the deal.

When Read went to the Hernando County Property Appraiser’s office to get the official address for the site of his new gym venture, the appraiser told him the parcel he bought included the entire water tower site.

Fortunately for many, on May 14, Read signed a warranty deed, transferring the water tower back to the red-faced city (population 8,500).

“I don’t know where the blame falls here,” said Blake Bell, a city council member. “We’re council members and we rely on the city manager. We assume that he has done his due diligence."

City Manager Mark Kutney said a "bad legal description" was to blame for the snafu. No lawyers have resigned yet, but the city's redevelopment agency director quit his job.

“We’re human,” Kutney said. “Sometimes we make a mistake.”

I can assure you, dear reader, that just WHO made the mistake and WHO should have caught it are topics of intense conversation around the town offices these days, make no mistake about that.

 

Ferrous's Day Off

Perhaps it's just that they have been living in the worst times imaginable since early 2020, but there seems to be some sort of confusion running amuck in the medical profession.

Jennifer Bridges works at Houston Methodist Hospital, and she and 116 of her colleagues do not wish to receive COVID vaccine for reasons best understood by themselves, working, as they do, in a health care setting. Bridges et al represent  less than 0.5% of the staff at the hospital, where 24,947 staffers have already been vaccinated.

US District Court Judge Lynn Hughes ruled against Bridges and the other malcontents after they sued to block the sensible requirement that people involved in providing medical services be vaccinated so they don't make them sick. Bridges claimed the Covid-19 vaccines used in the US were "experimental and dangerous," which might be contradicted by the 300,000,000 doses already administered in the US.

Next up will come the cry that their rights are being violated, to which the hospital need only ask who is forcing them to work there against their will.

She seems reasonable.

Leaving Texas for Ohio, let's talk about a nurse in the Buckeye State who says -  without laughing  - that COVID-19 vaccines contain “magnetic vaccine crystals.” Last week, she tried to demonstrate her novel theory, but there was plenty of laughter from the people who saw Registered Nurse Joanna Overholt sticking a  key on her chest and then on her neck...several times.

Ferrous metals will stick to magnetic sources, but Joanna Overholt is not magnetic.

But they were having a hearing for whatever reason, and then along came a Doctor -  one Sheri Tenpenny, M.D. - to delineate her notions that:

• Vaccines cause autism
• Vaccines magnetize people
• Vaccines connect us with cellphone towers ("There’s been people who have long suspected that there’s been some sort of an interface, yet-to-be-defined interface, between what’s being injected in these shots and all of the 5G towers.")

The CDC told the Ohio legislators that “All COVID-19 vaccines are free from metals such as iron, nickel, cobalt, lithium, and rare earth alloys, as well as any manufactured products such as microelectronics, electrodes, carbon nanotubes, and nanowire semiconductors." 

And, “In addition, the typical dose for a COVID-19 vaccine is less than a milliliter, which is not enough to allow magnets to be attracted to your vaccination site even if the vaccine was filled with a magnetic metal.”

And of course, the vexed non-vaxxers will tell you that their best friend's sister's boyfriend's brother's girlfriend heard from this guy who knows this kid who's going with a girl who saw a guy making a cell call on his bare hand because of the 5G towers and the chemtrails. 

I guess it's pretty serious. 

Not THAT Nixon!

The other day, as my wonderful Peggy read one of her mindfulness journals and I was Googling pictures of famous politicians wearing their pants backwards, she said, "There's an article in here just for you!"

And she spoke to me of Niksen. Wikipedia says "Niksen is a Dutch verb which means "doing nothing," which can be roughly translated as 'nixing'. It has been explored as a method to combat work-related health problems such as stress and burnout."

Now, you don't hear people saying that word "Nix" any more. It's been replaced by the current "No way" or the more vibrant "NFW." It just means no.  It's from the German word "nichts," meaning "nothing."

"You should come over and watch Kung Fu tonight"

It was as if years ago, I had come up with the idea of putting a fried meat patty in a roll with cheese and calling it a cheeseburger. Niksen describes my low-energy lifestyle perfectly! Even as a kid, my heroes were guys like Ozzie Nelson, Uncle Joe from "Petticoat Junction," and, later, Peter Gibbons >>> of "Office Space": Guys who, while making sure their hearts were still beating, never got their heart rate up to the dangerous category.

This show, The Adventures Of Ozzie and Harriet, is ultimate niksen. They don't mention that Ozzie had been a successful bandleader, that Harriet was his female singer and wife, and that their younger son, the "irrepressible Ricky," was among the first rock 'n' roll idols. Or that Ozzie had put himself through law school and was shrewd enough to negotiate all the family deals with the ABC TV people, and a long-term record contract for Rick.

No, they just showed him not working, hanging around all day in nice pants and a cardigan, getting involved in merry mixups and generally niksening it up from sunup til sundown, when he had a dish of ice cream and hit the sack. 

I decided on my official slogan: Do your work, but don't let it show. 

I would have translated it into Latin for the family crest, but no. 

Carolien Janssen wrote a book about it! It's called Niksen: The Dutch Art Of Doing Nothing, and in the book, she says niksen is "similar to mindfulness, yet you don't need anything special to do nothing." Music to my ears! She says the way to achieve Niksenian nirvana is to "slow down and celebrate the moment of not achieving."

Oh, I did my work in my day, and now it's time, as I rapidly approach the November of my years, to look back over those halcyon days and smile wistfully. Toward the end of his time, Dwight D. Eisenhower, a man of towering achievements, wrote an autobiography called "The Summing Up," and so that's my plan.

Like Ike did, I look back and I enjoy the memories. It would be too much effort to write an entire book, though, so I'll just niksen it up and not write a book.

Dance Dance Dance!

So you think you can get out there at Cousin Kekiokolanee's wedding and really cut a mean rug, dancing up a storm like no one's seen since "Shake Down" was on TV. You can throw a Nae Nae til people holler No No and you can show the squares how the Triangle goes.

Well, all right. Stop by the cheese table on your way back to your seat, because it turns out that humans aren't the only ones who can dance to La Musique. Other species can dance. 

Here's the deal: Only species that can make or mimic sounds can groove to a beat. It's not just humans. But that does imply an evolutionary link between man and bird, for example.

A study led by Adena Schachner, (Harvard), Marc Hauser (Harvard), Irene Pepperberg (guess where!) and Timothy Brady, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (just to mix it up a little) studied the life and dance moves of Alex, a well-known African grey parrot, and Snowball, a sulphur-crested cockatoo whose dance moves made it famous on You Tube and every morning news show looking for a little relief from stories of mass shootings, kidnapped children, and politicians caught running out of motels with their pants in their hands.

Technically speaking, "Our analyses showed that these birds' movements were more lined up with the musical beat than we'd expect by chance," Schachner reported. "We found strong evidence that they were synchronizing with the beat, something that has not been seen before in other species."

"It had recently been theorized that vocal mimicry might be related to the ability to move to a beat," says Schachner. "The particular theory was that natural selection for vocal mimicry resulted in a brain mechanism that was also needed for moving to a beat. This theory made a really specific prediction: Only animals that can mimic sound should be able to keep a beat."

So, there's that. Before you can dance to the music, you have got to be in tune with the music. For instance, I can't dance, but that might be because I can't sing!

But Schachner, being a scientist and all, went and got data from a large variety of animals.  Guess where she went to get pictures of birds grooving to tuneage?

YouTube, of course!

Schachner, being seriously scientific, systematically searched the site for videos where animals were keeping time - animals such as parrots, and dogs and cats, even though they don't mimic humans.  

At least, not that we can see. They probably mock us endlessly when our backs are turned.

Real-life Hagars!

What's new? More to the point, what's old? They have found skeletons of two guys who were kinfolk, men from the Viking era, and they are going to be put on exhibition in Copenhagen. One of the men died in central Denmark, and the other one was killed in England as part of a massacre that a king ordered.

University of Copenhagen geneticist Eske Willerslev ran some DNA tests on the bones, and he says they show that the men "are either half brothers or nephew and uncle.” Beside the DNA tests, archeologists found each man to be in possession of  Vikings season tickets, and a pair of gigantic purple and yellow foam fingers indicating they are "#1."

One of the guys was from Funen, a town in Central Denmark that sounds like a fun place to live. They figure he was in his 50s, and worked as a farmer, as anyone could see from the farmer's tan his remains are sporting.  He stood just under 6 feet tall, and had arthritis in most of his bones and vestiges of inflammations inside his ribs, a possible hint that he had tuberculosis.

The scientists also figure that the man probably was involved in the Viking raids because he has a violent lesion on his left pelvis, which might mean he was stabbed with a sword. In fact, this wound may have been fatal.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the North Sea in Oxford, England, they found the earthly bones of a younger guy in a mass grave with 35 other men. This man "died of massive injuries from several types of weapons,” according to Lasse Soerensen, who's the head of research at the National Museum of Denmark. His skull shows at least nine boo-boos caused by a sword or other sharp object, and the skeleton also revealed signs he was speared several times in the back. 

The skeletons will soon be on display (as of June 26) in an exhibit at the National Museum of Denmark titled “Togtet” - Danish for ”The Raid.”

Danish people started settling in England to be farmers as early as 850 AD. That was great, Danes. But 

From the year 850 A.D, people from Denmark settled in England as farmers. But beginning in 1002, King Aethelred II had them massacred as part of his "Make England Great Again" program.

Recently discovered population rolls indicate that one town had one more Viking than they had counted; it turns out that the town officials must have taken Lief off their census.

Sunday Rerun: Whine and Dine

 I have always enjoyed the way people talk and write about wine, as if it were more than squished up grapes and the product of the resultant fermentation.  Just listen to the wine review shows on the radio or read one of the 87 oenophile magazines in the wooden racks at Barnes & Noble, and you start to wonder what the deal is, why people are so moved to rapturous language when discussing something that the people at Welch's make a billion bottles of every year, only they sell it fresh.  

I mean, here's one at random, literally the first wine review I Googled up:

Seven Hills Winery, Walla Walla Valley (Washington) “Pentad” 2006 ($50)
 To make this wine, the winery vinifies six different grapes and chooses the best five wines (hence “Pentad”), which means that the blend of grapes changes from year to year.  It’s always based on Cabernet Sauvignon, and in 2006 that grape represents 65% of the final blend.  Unusually in 2006, however, the wine contains no Merlot, and does have 7% Cabernet Franc (along with 7% each of Carmenère and Malbec and 14% Petit Verdot).  It’s a wonderfully graceful, finessed wine with fairly delicate aromas and flavors of dark fruits, cedar, mint and eucalyptus. Harmony is the name of the game here more than power.  Food-friendliness goes with the territory.

Wouldn't this taste good..right now?

Well now. I think I dropped a sawbuck on a horse named Pentad once.  Now they want 50 smackers for a bottle of wine with the same name.  And   "Vinifies" ? It sounds like they didn't have enough grapes to make a lot of wine, so they dumped whatever they had into a Mulligatawny Stew of wine.  And who gets to decide which five of the six grapes make the cut? But I like "vinify" as a word, if it exists.  And the phrase " a wonderfully graceful, finessed wine with fairly delicate aromas and flavors of dark fruits, cedar, mint and eucalyptus."  How many times did Joe, Steve, Mike and I say that as we sat on the banks of the reservoir as teens, passing bottles of Boone's Farm back and forth?  Even then we knew that food-friendliness went with the territory, so we would each wolf down a whole pizzaburger

sub from Maria's of Taylor and Oakleigh.  (They would put pizza sauce and cheese on an opened-up sub roll and stick that in the oven while they fried three hamburger patties, which, when cooked, were graciously piled into the roll.  The whole thing was then wrapped in virgin aluminum foil, or "wrapified." I remember Steve pointing out that the hamburger patties had "fairly delicate aromas and flavors of cow.")

I'm only harshing the wine critics because their lingo is spreading.  Just the other day, the SUN paper had a review of some pizza palazzo in SoWeBa (Southwest Baltimore, about a hundred miles from our NoEaBa) and the review said the pizza was "unpretentious."  Here's how Google defines "pretentious," and while reading this, make sure that the next pizza you get has none of this going on:

• making claim to or creating an appearance of (often undeserved) importance or distinction; "a pretentious country house"; "a pretentious fraud"; "a pretentious scholarly edition"
• ostentatious: intended to attract notice and impress others; "an ostentatious sable coat"
• ostentatious: (of a display) tawdry or vulgar

Man oh Manischewitz, I cannot stand it when they slide a pizza down in front of me and it seems tawdry. Or vulgar. Or intends to attract notice or create an appearance of often undeserved importance or distinction.  Bill Clinton was right to agree with Freud that sometimes, a pizza is just a pizza.  

Unless it becomes...pretentious. 

The Saturday Picture Show, June 12, 2021

 

"Baltimore" magazine is still an enjoyable monthly, and is the oldest city Chamber of Commerce organ in the nation. This cover from 1965 shows the days when 75,000 Volkswagens per year came through the port of Baltimore on their way to the highways and byways of America.

Just stay out.

For more than half a century, ZZ Top has brought their infectious boogie from Texas to us, with the same three members. Billy Gibbons plays guitar, Dusty Hill is on bass, and Frank Beard plays drums while being the only guy in the band without a Beard.

The feet and hands of Mario David García Mansilla are shown here making a pizza in an unusual way. He's a chef in Guatemala, and he bakes his pizza pies on the lava of the Pacaya volcano, where the temperature on the melted rocks reaches a nice 1,472°. I wonder if he delivers up here...

Here's a cartoon that shows the graphic version of the directions I found for reheating pizza in your frying pan. Clip 'n' save for ready reference, because this is the BEST!

Here are the two versions of the 1965 St Louis Cardinals team photo. The second one had to be taken after a closer look at the first one showed recently deceased Hall of Famer Bob Gibson holding hands with Bob Uecker, the third-string catcher best known for playing Mr Belvedere on TV.  Just like mischievous third-graders, the two were separated for the retake: Ueck 2nd from left on the back row, Gibby 4th from left in the middle row. Men will be boys.

14-game losing streak? What 14-game losing streak? The Orioles are my team to ride or die, and even their mascot is great, and masked up.

This picture represents a hundred times more radishes than I ever ate. I remember kids with a radish in their lunch at school, with a little bit of salt folded up in wax paper. I mean, really.

With the price of wood going through the wooden roof, if you can find some old pallets lying about, you can save 40 thousand dollars on your next set of kitchen shelves.