I Just Can't Stop Dancing

This picture is not historically accurate,
but it's still funny. Toga!

Where modern-day France meets modern-day Germany, we find the city of Strasbourg, where even though the official language is French, the locals also speak the Alsatian language, a combination French-German. That confusion might help us to understand what happened there in July, 1518, when Strasbourg was part of the Holy Roman Empire, and people just started dancing and dancing and could not stop dancing. 

The twisting and shouting began when a woman named Frau Troffea went in the street and began to throw down. Oh, how she twisted and shook and hopped and boogalooed! And she danced for almost a week!

Before you knew it, more than three dozen others were pirouetting and gyrating like mad. And by August, Dance Fever had claimed as many as 400 total victims.

Well, there was no Dr Oz in those days, no tv shows to help explain it all. The town's doctors consulted with each other and decided to blame it all on "hot blood." Their prescription was to dance it away. The town built a stage, hired a band, brought in professional dancers to lead the line dancing in a 16th Century Boot Scootin' Boogie. 

Inevitably, the fun ended when some of the dancers started dropping on the spot from exhaustion, fever, you name it. Several died of heart attacks and strokes. And as sickness overtook the lighthearted fun, town officials decided to take the remaining strutters away to a mountaintop shrine where they could pray the sway away. 

As History looks back on those dancing days, it's been noted that Strasbourg wasn't the only place where a whole lotta shakin' was goin' on. Switzerland, Germany, and Holland all saw regional outbreaks of the mania, although none of the others were as widespread, or deadly, as the original. 

 

Causes? John Waller is a historian, so let's ask him. He says look at St. Vitus. Vitus was a Catholic saint in those days. Europeans believed he had the power to lay a curse on people and make the dance dance dance.

There is a physical disorder known as Sydenham's chorea. It used to be called St Vitus's dance. I remember it being an item on a checklist of conditions that the junior high school nurse had to check us for, a list that began with "B.O." and "cooties." Sydenham's is a disorder "characterized by rapid, uncoordinated jerking movements primarily affecting the face, hands and feet," according to the medical journals.

Perhaps it was more a syndrome than a curse from a rogue saint. Disease and famine were everywhere in Europe in those days. Waller suggests that perhaps the illness was in people and the superstition about the curse accentuated the symptoms.

And it's also possible that people had inadvertently ingested ergot, which is a mold that grows on rye and causes hallucinations and bodily spasms.

Great. LSD in sandwich form. There's always something going on, and always has been.

With this ring

Down at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, they like their hot dogs hot, according to one football fan. Local Raleighian (?) Will Yadusky was pregaming in the tailgate area the other Saturday when he lost his wedding ring. And he got help from  Wolfpack basketball coach Kevin Keatts!

Yadusky has been married for 16 years, but he still must have boney fingers, because, "I picked up a molten hot dog," Yadusky told WTVT-TV. "The point that I realized that, I just flicked my hands like crazy and hear this sort of pinball ding-dong-dong and realized, 'Oh, that was my wedding ring.'"

What did I say? The hot dogs down South are so hot, they're molten!

There he stood on the huge parking lot outside Carter-Finley Stadium. Some fans started helping him, and then he heard a familiar voice.

"Somebody goes, 'Coach Keatts?' And I look up and there's the man himself," Yadusky said. "And he's like, 'What are we looking for?'"

Coach Keatts, on his way to the game, stopped to join the search.

"He was like, 'You know, I don't know if we can let you go home without finding that,'" Yadusky said. "I was like, 'Well, I appreciate your concern, I do.'"

(Once again, I will beg for people to stop using "He's like" in place of "He said." I know it will fall on deaf ears, but I'm like, please).

Coach Keatts on the prowl

And it was Keatts who had the best idea to plot the ring's course. After all, he's used to basketballs bouncing all around. The coach said, "Don't think of it as a linear search -- it probably didn't go straight."

And the ring turned up a few feet from his hand. Yadusky said he was grateful to Keatts for his help.

"The fact that he took five, 10 minutes out his day on game day, that was the part that was really meaningful to me," Yadusky said. "I'm excited to know that he is in real life as good as a guy as he seems on TV."

Yadusky tweeted his thanks, and the coach tweeted right back, saying he "was really worried about you going home without your ring."

Now, about these "molten" hot dogs...

Scat Cats

I'll try to be delicate about this, if I can, but maybe you'd rather wait and read this later, if right now you are spooning Wheat Chex or pork sausage down your neck. I don't often delve into topics like this, but I thought I would give you the poop on cougars.

And that is: they are terrific at gardening. I mean, really, maybe you think you do a lot of planting and seeding and fertilizing and weeding, but do you plant 94,000 seeds a year?

Ecologists have figured out that apex predators such as cougars  (apex predators are the big guys and women at the top of a local food chain, with no natural predators) do two things very well, besides issuing blood-curdling howls.  They kill and eat plant-eaters, which allows the plant population to flourish.

AND scientists now say that they are the type of meateaters that do something else to keep the world green. Let's see:

• they eat smaller animals who have eaten seed-bearing fruits and veggies
• those seeds wind up inside the cougar
• being regular, the cougar also expels the seeds via what top zoologists and third-graders call their "poop"
• those seeds grow!

Even though they are encouraged to visit the salad bar, cougars are actually "hypercarnivores.” They have such a need for protein that their diets tend to be mostly meat. So whatever plants they chow down on are plants that were eaten by someone else first.

José Hernán Sarasola is a biologist who, with his team, spent months collecting and analyzing cougar meadow muffins in Argentina’s Parque Luro Natural Reserve, where the cats get a lot of eared doves for breakfast, lunch and dinner.  The team (we hope that they all wore gloves) picked their way through 123 cougar pies and found 32,000 seeds that had been breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the doves. They planted these seeds, and they sprouted nicely, proving that a trip through the alimentary canal of a cougar doesn't hurt their viability.

So as the cougars dash and dine and drop deuces all over, seeds colonize new areas, and those previously lacking in plant growth.  And that's good for everyone who eats outdoors and has fur.

That covers a lot of area. Cougars live from British Columbia down to  southernmost Chile, which makes them the most widespread mammal in the Western Hemisphere. And all over the world, seed-eating birds are on the menu  in most ecosystems, and big felines are, in turn, having them for dinner, shall we say, so big cats are keeping the entire planet green!

Go ahead and have your granola now.

Slither

I've seen people just crazy go nuts over a simple garter snake ("garden snake," in Baltimorese) and that is anxiety that should be reserved for when we meet a snake who might really do some harm, such as a rattlesnake (not too many of them around here, although the Timber Rattlesnake slithers through a habitat that includes western Maryland, and they can easily hop a Uber to get to Baltimore County) and copperheads, who are right at home around here.

However, the rattlesnake is courteous enough to give an audible signal that he is nearby, while the copperhead gives off no sound at all, especially if he's wearing earbuds.

And herpetologists, the people who study snakes and other reptiles and amphibians, tell us now that even though rattlesnakes are ones responsible for the  majority of bites inflicted on people, they don't even play fair with that rattling sound warning system.

Here's what they do: as a person gets closer to them, their tail-shaking noise gets louder, and then it switches to a much higher frequency all of a sudden.

And that sudden frequency change is what makes humans think the snake is closer that it really is. 

According to research, this is a system the snakes invented to signal that, yes, "we are here, so please don't step on us or anything. Also, I might just bite you."

That hissy rattly sound of the tail reminds you of every sweaty Western movie. Just like castanets, the sound is made by shaking hard objects - in this case, keratin - at the tip of the tail 90 times a second. Keratin is a protein and we use it to have fingernails and hair, not blood-chilling maraca noises, for crying out loud.

All this leads science to deduce that rattlesnakes are smart enough to know somehow that human ears lead us to believe that something that's getting louder is also moving faster and getting closer. So just like when you hear the neighborhood loudmouth getting louder, it gives you a chance to duck into the garage or a close-by saloon to avoid hearing about the shortcomings of the improvement association.

"Evolution is a random process, and what we might interpret from today's perspective as elegant design is in fact the outcome of thousands of trials of snakes encountering large mammals," says a herpetologist.

Such as the neighborhood loudspeaker!

Sunday Rerun: Bleed and Blend

 When I was a kid, we were doing some sort of school project about Clothes From Other Lands, and my father's uncle up in Philadelphia, a shirtmaker by trade, sent me a box of fabrics From Other Lands.

And in that box, among the denims (French fabric named for the city of Nîmes where it was produced, called “sergé de Nîmes”), cottons, and corduroys, I found a swatch of madras, from India.

Greatuncle Charles explained in a note that Madras was named for the city in India from whence it came. That city is now known as Chennai.

But the fascinating thing about madras back then was that it was a sort of rough, but lightweight, cotton material, and it was dyed with vegetable dye and sesame oil.

And here's the irony  - it was regarded in India as the clothing of the lower classes, people who couldn't afford the finer clothiers. It was regarded as work wear for the working class.  But in America, preppy guys 'n' gals who had been to Bermuda came home with pants and shorts and shirts and sports jackets and I don't know what-all else, and madras was huge here in the early 60s. People were mad about plaid. It all went well with the advent of what we call "go to hell pants" - loud plaids, madras, and vibrant reds - crimson, rusty, scarlet, vermilion,  greens - teal, pine, mint, and yellows  - canary, goldenrod, lemon chiffon - sometimes with tiny nautical symbols, or crabs, or lacrosse sticks - and we wear them proudly, and those who don't care for them can just go to h-e-double toothpicks.

And here's another angle on the madras story. Brooks Brothers was among the first to sell the clothing here, but for reasons best known to the Brooks Brothers, their early customers were not told about the "bleeding" part of bleeding madras.  Back in those days, those inexpensive dyes would run and fade all other the place when washed in hot water. Brooks Bros were supposed to tell people to use cold water only, but they didn't, and they faced a lot of angry customers...

until a wise ad man named David Ogilvy entered the picture. He was smart enough to know that, rather than deal with complaints about all the blurry runny shirts, it would be better to tell customers that that was what was SUPPOSED to happen with madras. He made "guaranteed to bleed" a household expression, at least in the laundry room. And that turned a defect into an advantage!

He wrote this for the catalog:

Authentic Indian Madras is completely handwoven from yarns dyed with native vegetable colorings. Home-spun by native weavers, no two plaids are exactly the same. When washed with mild soap in warm water, they are guaranteed to bleed and blend together into distinctively muted and subdued colorings.

So just like a comfortable a pair of khakis or that old "US Olympic Bongo Team" sweatshirt from the beach in the early 60s, madras gets to be soft and faded and eternally comfy.

Or, it used to. They use colorfast dyes now.  But still.

The Saturday Picture Show, September 25, 2021

He's got kind of a shy grin, does he not? Ladies and gentlemen, say hi to the Red Forest Ant!

Let's say you're in some Florida swamp and find yourself being chased by these two beasts. Get to know who's who, before they eat you! That's an alligator on the left and a crocodile on the right.

And from way up north, the polar bear "borrowed" someone's camera to watch you being chased around by the alligator and the crocodile. 

Peggy loves that languid "Harvest Moon" song, so this picture is for her. I don't like languid music very much. But I love this moon picture!

Levi's must have sold 10 billion trucker jackets over the years. I had several: unlined denim, lined denim, 3/4 length unlined among them. I'm glad to see young men and women still buying them. They're just the right thing, with cooler weather coming up.

There are only so many face shapes and types and only three dozen or so scenarios for cartoons. "A bear was in a hammock" could be the starter for lots of great funny drawings.

Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson had this to say about flipping his way into the end zone with the winning touchdown the other night: "I'm kind of sore. I didn't want to tell coach because coach would've probably said something to me about flipping next time. I don't know. I'd probably do it again, though. It was pretty cool." Ah, how sweet the song of youth!

If I have a favorite butterfly, it would be the monarch, what with the Orioles color scheme and all. But if you want to see the world's largest kaleidoscope (that's the name for a group of butterflies!) of monarchs, then a trip to Pismo Beach CA is in order!

Old time postcards are all the rage for decorating. I used to love getting colorful picture postcards when friends went on vacation, but you don't see them anymore except for in antique shops, and they all say, "Arrived at the beach, enjoy the peppermint patties. Days hot, nights not, home Sunday.  Edna."

 I'm crazy about photorealistic painting. The skill, the effort, the time it must have taken for "L. Foster" to create this art! Just wonderful. 

Jimmy Crack Corn

Years ago, there was a Mexican restaurant in San Francisco called Casa Sanchez. One of the owners came up with an interesting idea: if you show up with their logo tattooed where it can be seen on your body, you can have free food for life.

I will tell you this right now: if the Double T Diner in Perry Hall offers a deal like this, I will be at the tattoo parlor tomorrow right after my nap!

The owner of Casa Sanchez was told by his sister (also his business partner) that she figured this might wind up costing them somewhere in the neighborhood of $5.8 million.  And that's a neighborhood in which I would feel comfortable, and so did the boss, because he went with the deal anyway.

Greg Tietz had only been in San Fran for a couple of years in 1998, when the deal was put forth, and he liked the neighborhood where the restaurant was. He lived in the neighborhood and wanted to stay, so he figured that investing in a tattoo would sink his roots into the local soil, so to speak.

"I was just a happy-go-lucky bartender at Bottom of the Hill," Tietz, a video logger for ESPN, told SFGATE. "And I was trying to explore areas of the Mission I hadn't been to, and found myself walking past Casa Sanchez."

The Sanchez tattoo was to be his first inking, and he had some moments of indecision ("Like, boy this really needs to be special, really needs to mean something. I'm nervous about it.") before telling the man with the needle to go right ahead.

"I caught a co-worker friend of mine who had probably a dozen or more tattoos, saying, 'You should come check this place out with me and see what you think of the offer,' and helped me find a good tattoo artist," recalls Tietz. 

Fortunately for Tietz, he is happy that the tattoo is there. The logo for the restaurant, by the way, is called "Jimmy the Cornman." It depicts a youngster riding a corncob rocket while wearing a sombrero.

And when he flashed it at the restaurant for the first time, he remembers ordering his first dinner: a "deluxe" carne asada burrito with all of the fixings.

And then that friend, one Guido Brenner, went and got the tattoo himself and joined the free chow club. Tietz and Brenner were actually second and third, though: it turned out that another taco fan was a woman who got the logo tattoo even before the promotion was announced. In fact, the restaurant might have gotten the idea from her after she ate there.

“She loved it so much that she came back with the logo tattooed and said, ‘Hey, what do you think?’ and [they] said, ‘Oh, you get free lunch for life,’” Brenner said.

And so, the race was on. Others went to the same tat parlor, and the story hit the national news on The Associated Press, CNN, and NPR's "All Things Considered."  

"I was just like the guy that they kept teasing," Tietz said of his experience on the talk show, "like, 'This guy gets free food for life and wait till you hear what he had to do.'"

Tietz lived in the neighborhood for quite some time and continued to avail himself of the gratis guacamole, but took pride in always leaving a nice tip. ("You don't want to take undue advantage of something like this. It's karma.")

He said that over the years, because so many news organizations called the tattooed tacolovers together for stories, they bonded into a sort of family.

"It was a little community, of those of us that got the tattoo and also, between us and the Sanchez family,” Tietz said.

Alas, as often happens in the restaurant business, the Sanchez family moved on, but the people who took over the place opened it as a pupusa shop called D’Maize, included in their lease agreement the stipulation that anyone with the Jimmy tattoo gets a free pupusa. 

Tietz and Brenner dropped by a time or two, but found the atmosphere lacking from the days before. I guess you can't have everything, but you can still have a free dinner.

 

Toyota Tomato

I got all confused in third grade when Ms Van Breemen talked about "truck farms." Even though I had my own corn and tomato patch in the back yard, and a huge farm behind us, her description of the truck farms in her native Southern Maryland made it sound like huge trucks drove around with dirt in the beds, and crops were planted right in there, so as to drive the fruits and veggies to the market without the trouble of being planted in the ground. 

I have always been too much the literalist. But then, look at what's going on in Thailand, where taxi cabs are sporting rooftop gardens!

These are not cabs that are going anywhere, though, sadly, due to the COVID.  They are parked for now. The two big taxi cooperatives, Ratchapruk and Bovorn, only have 500 cars left carrying people around Bangkok, with 2,500 cabs idle at various parking lots around town.

So, some workers made bamboo frames and stretched black plastic trash bags across them.  Adding soil to the tops, they then planted tomatoes, cucumbers and string beans.

It turns out, the main point, beyond growing salad stuff, is to draw attention to the sad state of taxi drivers and operators so badly affected by coronavirus lockdown measures.

There just aren't enough fares available, with people not going many places, and even though the cab companies cut the daily rental fee on the cars in half, drivers weren't making their daily nut, so they parked and walked.

“Some left their cars at places like gas stations and called us to pick the cars up,”  recalled a taxi company official.

Recently, Thailand has been seeing almost 15,000 new infections per day, after a peak of 23,400 in mid-August.  All told, the country has confirmed 1.4 million cases and over 14,000 deaths.

The taxi companies are in debt $60.8 million for the purchase of these vehicles, and so far, their government has offered no financial assistance.

These makeshift gardens are certainly not going to bring in $60.8 million. Staffers, with nothing better to do, are tending the crops. 

“The vegetable garden is both an act of protest and a way to feed my staff during this tough time,” says a cab company official. “Thailand went through political turmoil for many years, and a great flood in 2011, but business was never this terrible.”

We can only hope that this produce will help to feed some of the affected people.

Feliz Navidad

I know a lot of people who will relate to this. Meditation, calming down exercises, soothing ethereal music, chai lattes, and on-duty stress counselors can only go so far. Some people just have an unquenchable need to slug someone.

In Peru, they have Takanakuy. It sounds like fun, but what it is, is a fighting festival in the small town of Santo Tomas.  

It takes place on Christmas every year.

People of all ages, including children, have the chance to settle grudges, close out on old differences, and basically clean each other's clocks before getting on with the holiday hi-jinx.

Takanakuy means "to hit each other," so there's no effort made to pretty this thing up. It's an old-fashioned slugfest for all!

Before the festival, there is lots of drinking and dancing in traditional Andean horse-riding costumes.  That's just the warmup.  On Christmas morning, everybody who's been mad at anybody since last Christmas parades on down to the local bullfighting ring and starts the smacking. 

According to tradition, most people are inebriated, not to mention drunk. Custom means they hug warmly and then start punching their opponents in the face. There is a referee, who walks around with a whip, lashing out when a fight becomes one-sided. This also serves as a deterrent, lest spectators decide to leave the seating area and join the melee.

They say that this brutality helps to steel the residents for their struggles, living in extreme conditions.  

For one thing, they live above 8000 feet altitude, and that can induce a lot of sickness. Santo Tomas is actually way up there at 12,000 feet. The local diet consists of potatoes and whatever animals wander onto the jagged slope of their town.  Santo Tomas is the capital of Chumbivilcas, one of the poorest states in Peru. They are all but cut off from civilization and government services, With only three officers on the entire Chumbivilcas police force, and the nearest courthouse 12 hours away by car, it's easy to see why Law & Order is carried out on a more personal level. Someone steals your goat, don't call the cops, smack him around on Christmas Day!

With no formal legal system in place, these people have allowed hand-to-hand pugilism to replace police, and the fighting allows for the settlement of wrongs.

"The average villager in this region has basically no access to lawyers or courts, and even if they travel to a place where they do, odds are the ultimate judgment will not be in their favor," according to a law student from Lima who came to observe the goings-on.  "Using violence as a means of solving disputes may seem barbaric to people in the cities, but as you can see, the fighting here is all carefully controlled and the people involved get an immediate and cathartic result."

And when the fights are over, they all have a drink and go on their merry way.

Don't laugh too quickly. Ask any police about how many family gatherings around the holidays here start to look like the final scene of "Rocky" after the egg nog runs out.

In the City Of Brotherly Love

Philadelphia sports fans may never live down the time they bombarded Santa Claus with snowballs, but things like this might help their reputation!

Last Wednesday night, the Phillies were playing at home, and a foul ball zipped into the stands down the third base line. As they will, kids of all ages dove for the free souvenir. 

Kids who really are kids have the advantage of being able to worm in between and under seats to grab baseballs before their elders can even get to their feet. In this case, a 10-year-old boy came away with the prized Rawlings ball. He said, “I’m following the ball and I see it hit the ground, so I went to go grab it and it was just exciting.” 

(I have to stop for a minute to tell you, this kid is born to nobility. His name is Aaron Pressley. I do not know whether his parents intentionally named him for Elvis Aron Presley, undisputed king of Rock 'n' Roll, but either way, young Aaron was born under a good sign, and here is why:)

After bathing in the glow of happiness for a second, young Pressley looked around and, "I look over and I see the girl, she’s crying,” he said.

She was Emma Brady, 7 years of age.

“A guy, he catched the ball and I tried to get it, but he was too quick,” Emma told the local Phila news. “I cried because I fell on my leg.”

And then!

“He came up to me and gave it to me,” Emma said.

Aaron gave his prize to little Emma.

“I was like it just didn’t feel right having the ball and knowing that somebody is crying so I had to just give it to her,” Aaron said.

 “She was just so polite, and she said thank you and we had to just take a picture together,” Aaron said.

Emma's parents gave him a Phillies gift card AND the Phillies gave him another baseball of his very own.  

And Aaron told the local news, “Be nice to people, because not a lot of people in this world are nice."

Somebody keep a check on this kid. I tell you, he's gonna be someone great.

GF-BF-WTF

21-year-old Annie Wright, out of Atlanta, GA, took up with a guy she met, and after two weeks they were bf-gf. And just to make sure they stayed in each other's hearts, she wrote up 17-page relationship contract.

You know, just like Sheldon Cooper on The Big Bang Theory, except this is real  life for Annie, who laid out the four main objectives she is looking for in a relationship that has already survived two long weeks: honesty, communication, awareness of partner’s needs and clarity and alignment in their intentions.

The boyfriend, identified as Michael Head, is fortunate. She could have gone all Boy Scout and demanded that he be Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind, Obedient, Cheerful, Thrifty, Brave, Clean, and Reverent.

She says she was just joking at first (“I made the idea as a joke, then he said, ‘No, seriously. We can do that and talk about it.’ ”) but I'm thinking she is not the funniest lady in Atlanta, so maybe she was serious, huh?

She had been in a lousy relationship before, and when Tinder gave her Head, she said she was going to make this one work.

He is a law student. I'm sure they still study Contracts, don't they?

She told a news source, “At the time, I had braces in college, and I was very embarrassed,” said Wright. “It was also pandemic time. But I got to the point where I was like ‘screw it — I’m going on dates with guys and don’t care anymore.’ I matched with almost anybody on Tinder and would tell my matches, ‘I’m going on a walk with my dog at 2 p.m. today — are you free?’ It was a fluke that I met him. I was going on three Tinder dates a week to go out there and meet people.”

Does anyone else sense a bit of desperation here? 

So, they meet, they click, and she's ready to lock things down. “He was like, ‘I want us to be boyfriend and girlfriend.’ ” Wright said. “In order to be ready for that, we had to lay some serious ground rules.”

Included in the 17-page Magna Carta Junior: he is forbidden to give her the silent treatment, he will pay for all dates, and he cannot isolate her from her loved ones. He has to come up with a romantic gesture every two weeks, and he has to work out at least five times a week.

So this is love...sign here in triplicate.

Printouts in hand, she flew to the side of her new inamorato, and said things like,  “I felt like the biggest issue I had in my last relationship was it felt like boundaries of mine were crossed that I never established. I was like, ‘This time I’ll write them out and no one can cross my boundaries.’ Michael’s also pre-law so he was pretty keen on the idea of making a contract.”

"Boundaries of mine were crossed that I never established." Isn't that a line from a Hallmark movie? Or at least the title of one?

Miss Wright (!) says she can't believe other couples don't have relationship contracts (“We treat our relationship almost like a business interaction”) and she allows that he might want to toss in an addendum or two, such as requiring her to take off her shoes in his apartment. She "always forgets."

I'm just an old-timer coming up on 50 years of marriage, so what do I know? We never had any sort of contract except that we fell in love and promised to stay that way, and it has been no problem doing so. Nothing is notarized, no lawyers were involved. 

And who knows? Maybe these two crazy kids will make it. I promise you this, if they are still together 50 years from now, it will be because they found a way to love each other more than they love themselves. 

Sunday Rerun: We Need More Kids Like Him

 I was the sort of kid who was fascinated by comedians. Anyone who could get up in front of a crowd and make people laugh and smile was a hero to me, so

I started ripping off their jokes to tell at Sunday dinner with my grandparents.  I still remember two good ones I "borrowed" from Jan Murray, a comic and game show host of the day:

* I just got back from a pleasure trip. I took my mother-in-law to the airport.

* I've been in love with the same woman for 49 years! If my wife ever finds out, she'll kill me!

You have to admit, those are two typical 1950s jokes. And I found out later that Jan (born Murray Janofsky, October 4, 1916 – July 2, 2006) always regretted having to drop out of high school at 13 when the Depression hit. He had to help his family eat and pay rent.  BUT he arranged to finish his classes later and was a proud high school graduate - in 1962!

And that allowed him to say, as he approached his 50s, "I can't be getting old! I just graduated from high school!"

Jan developed his comic styles early. His mother was ill throughout his youth, and he would go to vaudeville shows and come home to his mom and act out the skits and jokes he had seen to entertain her, and even though his first job after dropping out was putting heads on dolls in a factory, he knew where his talents lay, and followed that.

That was then. This is now:  Meet Callaghan McLaughlin, 6, of British Columbia. Callaghan has been working on his one-liners around the house, and now he moved to the big time...a joke booth at the end of his driveway, where he regales passersby with surefire material such as...


“What does a rain cloud wear under its coat?
Thunderwear!”

“What kind of bug is bad at football? A fumblebee!"

“What does a duck snack on? Cheese and quackers!"

Last fall, his mom gave him a joke book called “Laugh out Loud Jokes for Kids.” He memorized 16 of the knee-slappers and told them all, and told them again, and again, and again.

He's been on local TV and on the Canadian Broadcast Corp., and now the pint-sized punchliner is putting his town, the District of Saanich on Vancouver Island, on the map.

Callaghan's mom, Kelsea McLaughlin, says that in the year 2020, with all that's going in the world, people are happy to be entertained.

“He knows there is a pandemic and that people are getting sick and are scared,” she said. “He knows that many people don’t have jobs right now and he knows that means they don’t have money to spend on extras.”

Callaghan was considering setting up a lemonade stand with his extra time while school is closed, but he figured, “Even when you are scared or sad, a good joke makes you feel a little bit better.”

His mom said that he found it fun to tell his jokes to the family, and adds, "He can talk the hind legs off a donkey. He is outgoing and chatty, so this is his wheelhouse.”

I need to tell him what we call a cow with no legs at all.

Ground beef!

The Saturday Picture Show, September 18, 2021

 

Have you ever felt like this seal, one among a crowd of many others? Who hasn't?

You've heard of the tiny house - now say hello to the skinny house! You have to say, you'll get plenty of fresh air any time you need to go upstairs or down.

Someone used this clear phone in 1990 to call their friends and tell them that MTV was about to play Poison's great new "Unskinny Bop" video.

I like the idea of this guy changing the look of his hair as the seasons change.

We give two hearty thumbs up to Hulu's "Only Murders In The Building." It's a comedy drama thriller suspense whodunit and it stars Selena Gomez, Steve Martin, and Martin Short. That's enough to get me in the door!

Even old reliable stuff like Stonehenge over in the old country needs a little maintenance every 50 or 60 years or so. Workers are doing some touch-up to the prehistoric monument in Wiltshire, England's Salisbury Plain.

That's a lot of Jeep for exploring the frozen tundra, the steppes of Russia, the deepest jungle, or the parking lot at Lowe's. I mean.

Given the chance, who wouldn't shake hands with a kangaroo baby?

In Baltimore, when we want to let someone know we still love them, we find unique ways.

These giant cranes are not the whooping variety! They're the ship-unloading variety and they just arrived at Baltimore Harbor after a trip from China. They got under the Chesapeake Bay Bridge by four feet!

A summer trip ends

"They're headed home!" No, not the Baltimore Orioles, but a group that moves at about the same glacial pace. It's that herd of elephants that roamed around Southwest China, a largely urban area, for over a year. They had a good time during everyone else's COVID stay-home experience, wandering about and plundering farms and a retirement home for their food.

Chinese officials sent trucks and people and drones to keep an eye on the ponderous pachyderms. They would clear out roads that the pack seemed likely to tread, and they kept them away from populated areas by leaving tons of food along the roads as a lure. They stalked through several villages, and got close to the Yunnan provincial capital of Kunming, but they mostly shunned big towns, which was good, and no humans were hurt, which was really good!

The leader of the herd led all 14 of them across the Yuanjiang river in Yunnan on Sunday night in the picture above, and the next stop on the itinerary will be a return to the nature reserve where they lived in the Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture.

No one knows why they went on this journey, and who was going to stop them? They were 300 miles away, up in Kunming, when they decided to head back down south.

Along the way, one of the males wandered off from the group. He was tranquilized and give a ride back to the reserve.

China is very serious about protecting their 300 remaining Asian elephants. Just like in the US and other "modern" countries, farming and urban growth have reduced their habitat. At long last, people are thinking more about the elephants than the factories.

I understand why it was necessary to protect animals from cruelty and exploitation, but it's still a shame that Baltimore-area rose gardens lack a lot in color and vitality as a result of the circus no longer coming to town. The annual parade of pickup trucks and station wagons going to the Civic Center to pick up free "fertilizer" was always something to see!

Dunk 'em

From NPR, I read about a man on a noble mission: His name is Alex Schwartz, and he has set a goal to "taste and review every fresh apple cider doughnut" he can find.

He's on Instagram with pictures and locations where these delicacies can be found. He calls himself the "Cider Donuteur." 

And he has a map that shows where to take your cider donut craving, but it doesn't include local Baltimore places. Here in the 410, we go to Weber's Farm in Cub Hill, and Richardson's Farm in Middle River/Cowenton. I've had Weber's, and nothing says autumn like a visit there to stock up on donuts and apples.

If you're wondering, here's why apple cider donuts are so good: they contain apple cider. That sounds simple, but stop and consider how people get so happy about "Pumpkin Spice" everything, none of which contains pumpkin. I've said it a million times: if you want your coffee to taste like pumpkin spice, get a can of pie-ready pumpkin and stir a teaspoonful of it into your java.  I say this, and people act as if I recommended stirring some cyanide in with your Chase & Sanborn. But apple cider makes a plain donut so tasty, I might even add some to my tea one day!

Of course, as with any commodity, there are cider donuts, and there are cider donuts. When Schwartz talks about one of the 32,945 donuts he has had, he judges them by freshness, crumb texture, sugar level and, of course, taste.

You have to hand it to Mr Schwartz, because his goal of tasting one from every farm stand is lofty. He once ate six apple cider doughnuts from six different places in a single day. "My stomach was not super jazzed about that," Schwartz said. "But, you know, I was doing it for the cause."

He goes on to say you should try to get them hot and fresh (uh, yeah!) and look for sweetness, airiness, moistness, crispy fry-ness, and sponginess.

Just don't look for Eliot Ness.

Seriously, it's the best part of the year, and cider donuts are the best part of the best part of the year. Eat them slowly or gobble them, chase them with milk, tea, coffee, whatever. 

Better hurry, though. The next thing you know, all the stores will be full of heavily-iced Thanksgiving cookies in the shape of a turkey, and then Christmas cookies, in the shape of Santa Claus.

And you'll wish you had stocked up on cider donuts and frozen some!

“It’s the greatest gig in the world, being alive. You get to eat at Denny’s, wear a hat, whatever you wanna do.” - Norm MacDonald

I am terribly saddened by the death of Norm MacDonald, the comedian who was best described as "relentlessly funny." He died yesterday morning, and it turned out that he had cancer for nine years before finally losing his fight to live.

I know that Norm was not as well-known as others in the comedy field, so I looked for a clip to illustrate how great he was, and found something else to talk about.

Take a few minutes (your boss isn't watching you!) and watch him perform on the final David Letterman show in 2015. 

No one else but Norm ever mixed comedy with real emotion like that. And another thing about Norm, something he played down but he really couldn't hide it always: the man was brilliant, and well-versed in English.

Did you notice what he said toward the end of his stand-up?  “Mr. Letterman is not for the mawkish, and he has no truck for the sentimental. If something is true, it is not sentimental. And I say in truth, I love you.”

I tend to say I have no truck with things from time to time, and I get a lot of sidelong looks, like what does a Ford F-150 have to do with anything? 

Not that kind of truck! It's a perfectly cromulent expression, as Ms Krabappel would say,

To have no truck with something is to reject it or have nothing to do with it.

We get the term from the word "troque" in early French. "Troque" meant to trade, to exchange or barter, and it snuck across the English Channel into our lexicon as "truke."  

In the 1600s, the use of the word "truke" was extended to cover association or communication, and "to have truck with" came to mean the same as "to commune with."

I guess it's like nonchalant; you never hear of anyone being chalant, as George Carlin put it. You don't hear "have truck with" used in the positive sense. I've yet to hear anyone say he would really like to have truck with that new chicken sandwich everyone is cackling about. It's almost always in the negative sense: "I'll have no truck with a fake meat sandwich when I can always go to Popeyes and get something great!"

Norm did a great job playing Sen. Bob Dole in the 1996 SNL presidential campaign season. Senator Dole tweeted this: "Norm MacDonald was a great talent, and I loved laughing with him on SNL. *Bob Dole* will miss Norm Macdonald.”

You can say your life has gone well if you can make people laugh while teaching the finer points of their language. I just wish that Norm's life had gone on longer.

I don't love Lucy

There ought to be a reality TV show called "I Can't Believe How Dumb People Can Be!"

I've already imagining what the blurb will look like in the TV listings:

8:00 tonight on "ICBHDPCB!" host Kim Kardashian introduces us to crisis deniers Max and Katrina O'Toole, who claim they have natural immunity from all disease in perpetuity because they suffered with catarrh several years ago, a man who has collected pieces of  toast with what seems to be pictures of saints burned in their surface, and people who ignore zoo barriers because they wish "to be one with the animals." 

Speaking of which...

Texas people and Florida people are still running neck and neck for Looniest Americans, and Texas just took a temporary lead. One of their fine citizens has found herself in a pickle because she jumped over a wall in a zoo, into an enclosed primate area, to feed Hot Cheetos to the monkeys.

Don't call your eye doctor; you saw that right! Lucy Rae was at the El Paso Zoo. And she found the spider monkeys so enchanting that, naturally, she just HAD to join them.

Over the fence she went, and then she paraded on down a hill and even waded through an artificial lagoon, but doggone it, she got there!

Lucy might be the last American to realize this, but everything we do in public nowadays is recorded on hi-quality video, and it wasn't long at all before half the country had seen her simian silliness.

Spider monkeys are an endangered species - all monkeys are - and they do very well in the forests of South and Central America, swinging from branch to branch like, well, like monkeys!  It's not until they go all the way to El Paso TX that they run into human problems.

You see, zookeepers naturally keep animals in their care on regulated diets, trying to have them eating what they would be eating in the wild. As far as any veterinary nutritionists are aware, there are no 7-11s in the forests where spider monks live, so they have no access to Hot Cheetos, until some nincompoop brings them in.

What's more, humans invading animal domains is traumatic for the animals and quite risky for the humans. If a monkey feels threatened, they will attack, and spider monkeys are very very strong little critters, so just don't.

The people at El Paso Zoo say Rae was “stupid and lucky.”

And then the next day, her luck ran out, when the Lovett Law Firm, where she had been working, decided they could get along without her services very well, both now and forever more. They called her actions “irresponsible and reckless.”

Lawyers said that!

Not only that, but the Zoo, per director Joe Montisano, says now they want to pursue criminal charges against her.

And how does Montisano know how the fool was? He reported that many people dropped a dime to identify Rae once they saw her video. “Your friends will rat you out,” Montisano warns.

Let that be a lesson to any would-be Lucys!

108

I love to tell this story, and, today being my late father's 108th birthday, please let me share it.

My dad taught himself to do everything. He had to quit high school when the Depression came along, but he was better educated than most people I've met. He could fix or repair or build from scratch just about anything, and toward the end of his years he began going to the woodworking shop at Baltimore County's BYKOTA (Be Ye Kind One To Another) Center, where he participated in projects with the others just to have something better to do than sitting around watching television.

BYKOTA is located in the building that used be to Towson Elementary School, and Towson High School before that. The Office of Aging has its headquarters on the third floor, and I told Dad that one day while he was sawing and sanding, he should go up to the third floor and say hey to my good friend Lisa who worked up there. Lisa and I were co-treasurers for the county's United Way campaign, so you know already she is a very patient and kind woman.

Anyway, one day Lisa called to tell me that a "smallish, mild-mannered gentleman" had presented himself in her office, gently knocking on the door, asking if she were Lisa, and, having received a positive reply, he went on to say, "I'm Mark's father..."

Lisa was stunned! As she tells it, she said, "Your son comes barging through that door like he's leading a brass band in here!"

Which I have heard before.  Another friend went to a rodeo and saw a prize Brahma bull named "Big Sid" come charging out of his pen to do what bulls do at a rodeo. That friend said that the way I enter a room reminded him of Big Sid.

But Lisa still speaks fondly of Dad, his newsboy cap in his hand, being such a gentleman. 

So while I am a believer in science and medicine, maybe there's something about genetics we don't understand just yet. I didn't get that mild-mannered gene, and certainly not the "smallish" gene. I am enough of a gentleman, though. I will not pull a chair out from under someone or throw food around in public.

Like most men of his generation, when the time came to fight in World War II, he went and fought, and when he came home he spoke no more of war. Prying information out of him was like getting the combination to the vault out of the bank president. He went back to the job he had with the Baltimore Gas and Electric and found his niche there, quietly supervising the room of "load dispatchers," the people who made sure that just the proper amount of electricity was being sent out to homes and businesses - not too much, not too little.

And you know, that was the key to Dad's life, in a nutshell. He did wonderful things in the most shy manner.  When a lady up the street lost her husband, Dad did repairs around her house for a long time. When he took up carving duck decoys, he whittled and painted wonderful Mergansers. 

He taught me to know and accept my limitations, which is why I don't try to carve ducks out of wood or rewire the basement electricity. But one time when he saw me emcee a concert, he said he couldn't imagine getting up in front of people and talking.  And he pointed out that I couldn't imagine NOT getting up in front of people and talking.

It was Dad, a regular at the Baltimore Symphony, who was to introduce me to country music when I was in elementary school. He gave me an album called "Hank Williams Lives Again" and said, "You might like this." That started something right there!

I like to picture Dad at 108, up in heaven reading his Robert Frost and Woodworker magazine, having his lunch (a piece of cheese, a couple of ginger snaps, and a Goldenberg's Peanut Chew) and looking forward to his dinner martini. 

I still hear from him, especially when I'm doing something that might result in my electrocution, disfigurement, or election to local office, all things he urged me to avoid. He would be embarrassed at my writing this encomium, but when did that ever stop me? 

Happy birthday, Pop! 

Sunday rerun: We'll Never Run Out

 Over the years, we Americans have faced shortages with bravery and strength and kindness and resolution.  During World War II, food and metal and gasoline were needed for the war effort, so those items were rationed to make sure that everyone got no more than what they needed.

In the 1970s, owing to global politics, we faced a gasoline shortage in '74 and '79 that we dealt with by paying through the nose for gas after lining up to get it.  And suddenly, the oil companies felt no need to hand us a coffee mug or stuffed animal or deck of cards to get us to fill up at their station.   

I even remember Exxon running an ad justifying the huge price increase for gasoline by pointing out that catsup was much more expensive by the gallon than their gasoline, as if we needed to purchase catsup by the gallon anymore since the Exxon station down on the corner no longer hands out hot dogs with every tankful.

Now they are saying that this year's pumpkin crop will be a little short, and once the demand (?) for pumpkin pie filling is met, don't look for any can can can of Libby's Libby's Libby's pumpkin until next year.  This will mean more blueberry, cherry and lemon pies for me, so this is a plus.

One thing that we as proud Americans can count on forever is that we will not have a shortage of horse's patooties among us. You saw one the other day, driving a car with a shot suspension and a bumper sticker reading "My kid can beat up your honor student."  They are everywhere at the supermarket, elbowing their way into the express line with 47 items bulging out of their cart, and running their cart into your ankle just because they are in such a hurry.

And they attend ball games.  And they jump out of the stands and run onto the field, like this bozo the other night during the Sunday Night Football game with the Giants and the 49ers.  He was wearing a red jersey in 49ers colors, and as he made his way around the field, half a dozen New Jersey state troopers rounded him up like a stray calf and herded him to the exit.

It happens everywhere

But, since only a true horse's patootie can take this sort of foolishness to the next level, he decided that his next best move would be to headbutt a cop.  So he did that, and it led to him being toted away with one officer on each arm and each leg and schlepping him off the field and into a nice cozy cell.

I was at the Colts game in 1971 when a bozo ran onto the field and grabbed the football, only to have his timbers shivered by the forearm of linebacker Mike Curtis.

It's hard to believe that anyone would undertake this sort of behavior while totally sober. But whatever fuels it, don't worry.  There's plenty more of it.  

The Saturday Picture Show, Special 9/11 Edition, 2021

 

It was on this day twenty years ago that the world was changed forever. 

Welles Crowther was 24. He had just begun working as an equity trader in the World Trade Center that day. He was also a volunteer firefighter in his hometown and made it a habit to carry a red bandana at all times, even in a business suit. He used this as a makeshift mask that morning to help others escape the South Tower before the collapse took him.

Shanksville, Pennsylvania, population 273, is now known worldwide as the resting place of hijacked United Airlines Flight 93, bound for San Francisco. 40 passengers and 4 hijackers died as it crashed, but of the four planes hijacked that day, this is the one that did not reach its goal. A revolt among the passengers caused the crash, which likely saved the Capitol or the White House from the fates of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

We tend to forget that the fallen towers were at the very tip of Manhattan, making it difficult for those who made it out of the buildings and the ones adjacent to leave the area. A huge flotilla of boats of all types assembled itself and ferried 500,000 people away to safety.

Firefighter gear left behind is on display at the 9/11 Memorial Museum. 2,977 people died that day: 343 FDNY firefighters (including a chaplain and two paramedics), 37 police officers of the Port Authority PD,  23 police officers of the NYPD, 8 EMTs and paramedics from private EMS, and one patrolman from the New York Fire Patrol. 

Amid the awful chaos, Lady Liberty stood tall in the harbor.

At Summit Academy North Elementary School in Michigan, every year around this time, students place a heart on a bulletin board for every good deed they do, with the goal being to have 911 hearts (they always exceed that quota!).

My old fire company, Providence Volunteers, proudly displays a piece of WTC steel as a remembrance.

The town of Gander, Newfoundland, took in 6,700 rerouted and stranded airplane travelers that day and treated them all like family.

Every year at this time, I remember the first months after the attack. People were  more kind, more thoughtful, more sharing. I wish we could get that feeling again.