The Devil you say!

Kids know about "Taz," a Warner Bros cartoon character, a grunting, growling carnivore based on a real animal, the Tasmanian devil, which is the largest surviving carnivorous marsupial.

Until recently, you could only find a Tasmanian devil on the island of Tasmania, off the coast of Australia, but people involved with Aussie Ark are bringing them to breed in New South Wales, on the Australian mainland. Aussie Ark calls themselves "the life raft of threatened, endangered native species to create an insurance population."

They are calling this the #DevilComeback. The Devil has not lived on Australia for some 3,000 years, but people have decided that the time is right to "rewild" Australia and bring balance to the bush.

[Those of you who love the English language will note the birth of a new word, along with the new devils being born. "Rewild" is new, and let's not send it any presents.]

These Devils might seem cute and cuddly like teddy bears, but they are incredibly temperamental and have one of the strongest bites of all mammals.

But that strong set of teeth and jaws were no match in 1000 BC, when dingoes were first brought to Australia by Asian migrants. In no time at all, there were no Devils left on the mainland and the only survivors had wound up in Tasmania.

 

So, in 2020, the good folks at Aussie Ark set free 26 Tasmanian devils into the  mainland wilderness and hoped for the best, and in 2021, seven healthy joeys were born!

Live long and prosper, joeys! Life evolves.

Dig it

If you've ever been to an ocean beach in the morning or early evening, you've seen people out there with metal detectors and long-handled sieves, going through the sand in search of treasure. The metal detector detects metal, and gives off a ping sound, and the digging begins. Soon enough, the beachcomber comes up with a treasure: either a high school class ring from Mayfield High School (with the inscription "W Cleaver '63") or a nut and bolt that came off a deck chair on the Titanic. 

Well, it's free fun (after you pay for the metal detector) and who knows? There's a lot of metal washing up on the beach.

We here on the coast tend to limit our metal searching to the seashore, but there are muddy fields and yards all over, just teeming with prizes for you, F'rinstance...

Over in Norfolk, England,  Andy Carter, 65, made quite a find a couple of years ago. He and 30 other metalhunters had spent looking for buried treasure on the muddy field of a farm, when all of a sudden, he got that magic ping as most of the others were starting to give up and head for home.

Digging through ten inches of mud,  Andy found a small coin, gold as can be!

 

“When I brushed off the soil, I saw the hind leg of a big cat,” Carter tells the Guardian newspaper’s Harriet Sherwood. “I thought, ‘It can’t be a leopard.’”

But it is! The big cat on the 23-carat coin is certainly a leopard. These coins, from the days of Edward III, were called leopard florins (a florin was an English gold coin worth about two shillings). 

Andy sold the coin for $185,000.  A private coin collector from the United Kingdom ponied up the money for the leopard coin. 

Edward III ruled England from 1327 to 1377, and he had the idea to put out these gold coins, replacing the former silver standard pocket money. France and Italy had gold coins, and Edward was goldarned if he was going to have England left out.

“[A] man with pretensions, ... seeking to unite the thrones of England and France, [he was] acutely aware of the irony of not having his own economically and politically prestigious international currency in gold,” is how the coin and the man were described in the auction listing.

He minted  £32,000 worth of gold coins in 1344, with leopards, double leopards, and helms (an old time helmet) pictured on them.

By August,1344, Edward tired of trying to get people to accept the new gold coins, and everyone in England went back to silver coins and fish-and-chip coupons are currency.

But in 1344, with one of these coins in your pocket, you could have bought a single sheep and a gallon of wine - that's about $2670 in today's money.

So Mr Carter can plan to get a bottle of wine, a pizza, and a tankful of gas!

Hole lot of shakin' going on

A popular thing for men to say when talking about how the transmission dropped out of their car, or how their favorite horse lost by a nose at Laurel, or that their mother-in-law is coming for a two-week vacation, is "Well, hell." The very expression denotes a certain weary acceptance of a sad fate, as in, "What can you do?" 

In the al-Mahra province of Yemen, there is a sinkhole  figuratively full of broken down Chevrolets, losing horses, and the vacation plans of mothers-in-law that is known as the "Well Of Hell." It's a crater 98 feet wide and 367 feet deep. It's been there for centuries, but has never been explored. The locals stay away, believing the hole to be a prison for jinn, the shape-shifting spirits from ancient Arabian folklore.

As legend has it, anyone who dares descend into the Well Of Hell might get swallowed whole, cursed with bad luck, or forced to attend an Adele concert. But recently, geology professor geology professor Mohammed al-Kindi and seven others from the Omani Caves Exploration Team rappelled down there for a looky-loo. Two others waited at the tops of the ropes.

What they found was, 30-foot high stalagmites and bright green cave pearls, waterfalls where flowed torrents of subterranean liquid from 150 feet above, and colonies of snakes, beetles, frogs, and birds that have been thriving for all these years! 

They encountered no evil spirits, at least, not as far as they know. No one knows how this sinkhole formed in the first place, but the research team came back with samples to test. 

And maybe the reports of a Hell on earth were overblown. "All we saw was pure freshwater down there,” said al-Kindi. “We even drank an entire bottle, and nothing happened to us!”

Let's check back with him in a year. Maybe his mother-in-law is moving in.

Go fish

My wife Peggy and I were talking the other night, and it occurred to us that there might be very few couples like us anywhere. We don't agree on a whole lot as far as music and books and movies go. We usually like the same TV shows and of course the local baseball and football team. 

But we both like anchovies, and how many couples can say that? I mean, swimming on top of a pizza, or nestled around some croutons atop a Caesar salad, that's where we find the anchovy, a small, common forage fish of the family Engraulidae. They are classified as oily fish, and to make it even slicker, they come in a little tin can or glass jar with more oil and salty brine to give them that extra anchoviness.

I looked it up and found their description: small, green fish with blue reflections.

And haven't we all had blue reflections!

Anchovies have a long silver stripe down them. They have tiny sharp teeth in both of their jaws, and they eat plankton and newly-hatched fish on their way to being part of our dinner.  

That's what they eat. In turn, they are eaten by just about every predatory fish around such as the halibut, rock fish, yellowtail, shark, chinook, and coho salmon. Marine mammals and birds like them as much as we do! They are an important part of the diet of California brown pelicans and elegant terns.

And I must say, this blog has certainly taken an elegant tern today.

They come to our tables, salad bars, and pizzerias having been gutted and salted in brine, and then, once cured, it's into an oily salty can or jar for them. 

The ancient Romans liked their anchovies too! They made a fish sauce of them and called it "garum."

I have a simple test I use to see if a dictionary is good. There is a word, from Latin, that refers to charitable endeavors. The word is "eleemosynary." If I see a new dictionary, I pick it up and thumb to the "e" section, and if "eleemosynary" is there, I think it's a good dictionary.

Same way, if your pizzeria offers anchovies, it's a good pizza place, and might even be great if they add them for free! That would be eleemosynary of them.

 

 

Sunday Rerun: Measuring Tape

 There was an episode of The Simpsons in which Sideshow Bob was temporarily let out of jail so he could help the Springfield Police track the fiend who was attempting to kill Homer. Living among the Simpsons, he came outside to find Homer trying to trap the would-be murderer with an effigy of himself hanging in front of 742 Evergreen Terrace. But Homer flipped out and began assaulting the hanging dummy, leading Sideshow Bob to ask the rest of the family, "And none of this seems odd to you?"

"It's Sideshow Bob!"

Those words ring in my head ever since SB spoke them. And if you're paying attention, your head is shaking too at what people are up these days.

Let's go to the videotape!

For those who haven't noticed, everything is on video these days. So people's interactions with police out in public are most likely available for review from many surveillance cameras, and, soon, from cameras on the police themselves. Time after time, we see people whose account of some melee or fracas is shown to be at wild disparity with the reality that video provides.  So, the next time a delivery driver throws some fragile package 20 feet onto a porch, he or she should figure on being recorded...along with the sneak thief who darts onto the porch to rip off the package.

I make it a habit to wave wildly and do something flamboyant at the little smoky gray camera covers on the ceilings of banks and liquor stores. Might as well leave 'em smiling!

And the other day, a once-respected rabbi pleaded guilty to 52 counts of voyeurism. He had set up surreptitious video cameras to record women using the ritual bath at his synagogue.

And the other day, the proprietor of a string of bar/concert venues in our town was arrested for ALLEGEDLY installing video cameras in the ladies' room at one of his spots.

And there was the respected gynecologist from Johns Hopkins, one of the finest hospitals in the world, who was recording his examinations of hundreds - thousands! - of the private parts of his patients via the use of a video recording pen in his pocket.  He committed suicide when confronted with his enormous evil.

Now, you can ask any prostitute, or late-night radio call-in host. There is no limit to what people are into. There are probably millions of people who get a thrill from hidden-camera videos of others taking a bath or using the commode or being examined down there.

And so I ask the Rabbi or the night club guy, "None of this seems odd to you?"

It's a problem when some people's pleasure comes from misusing others.

The Saturday Picture Show, March 26, 2022

 

Sometimes we are confronted with facts that just seem impossible to believe. Gary Oldman is younger than Gary Numan! One 18-inch pizza is more pizza than two 12-inch pizzas! The Apollo 11 astronauts were unable to purchase life insurance, so, to provide for their families, they each signed hundreds of autographed photos for their survivors to sell! Sonny Bono was once elected to the US Congress! And, most incredible of all, the Allman Brothers' "Eat A Peach" album is 50 years old.

This is the week for Cherry Blossom lovers to go to Washington DC to see them in their full flower.  With any luck, you'll see Lindsey Graham hanging around the reflecting pool.

On the other hand, yes, the flowers get all the attention, but sometimes the leaves are just as interesting, like the ones on this rose.

Those who read history know the story of the Maginot Line, a defensive wall of concrete, obstacles and weapons installations named for the French Minister of War André Maginot. It was supposed to keep Germany from invading France. It would have worked, had it not been for the ability of the clever Germans to sneak in through The Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. This ballfield is not safe!

No scaffolds or hoists for these guys! House painters in Thailand get it done!

This 1950 Oldsmobile showroom is no longer needed to sell the non-existent Olds line, but if it's still standing, it's probably a Starbucks.

This week in 1963, the last inmates were moved out of Alcatraz prison off the California coast. They don't paint those rocks white, by the way; they are covered with pelican poop. The island is rightly named Yerba Buena Island, but was earlier known as "Isla de Alcatraces" (Island of Pelicans).

It would take a real Maverick to pile into one of these homemade campers and travel the country.

It seems like it was really important for early students of geometry to dress up in foppish finery.

Many people resisted getting a home computer for a long time, because they thought there would be a setup like this in their living room.

Have a spare

Editor's note: Official Blogger statistics inform me that this entry will be my 5,000th entry in a series I began a long time ago...like 2006. I still write it five times a week, and add a Saturday picture show with 10 pictures I enjoyed, and a rerun of an old blog on Sundays. I still love it and get a lot of fun from writing it and hearing your feedback. So please keep feeding me back and I will write another 5,000 blogs! Thanks - Mark

 We moved into this current iteration of the "Lazy 'C' Ranch" in summer 1999, and my mother thought that a refrigerator for the basement would be a nice gift that Christmas.

It was a great idea and I recommend it to anyone with a little extra room. I mean, when Giant marks down the price of hams right after Christmas and Easter, I can pick up a couple of semi-boneless specials, all the while wondering how anything can be "semi" boneless. Either something is boneless, or it is not boneless, am I wrong? 

It's been good to have an extra icebox. There are some things that it's good to have in duplicate, such as eyeglasses, tea pots, and, of course, refrigerators.

The refrigerator had two jobs: keeping frozen things frozen, and cold things cold. And until recently, it did both jobs perfectly. Broccoli florets, a couple of bagels, and homemade tomato sauce kept company in the freezer with Stouffer's Entrees and ice cream, and down below there was lettuce and tomatoes and carrots and celery and milk and OJ and cheese and life was great until the night I went to get some ice cream, grabbed the carton of Breyer's, and it was...squishy. 

Funny, some things in the freezer were still rock hard, and everything in the refrigerator part was cold. But we had a repairman come out and add some freon, and by that night it was 40° in the freezer and the broccoli florets were complaining it was too hot.

A couple of days later, another repairman came out and took us aside, like a doctor in a sad movie. He said he was trying one last transfusion of freon, but we had to understand, if there was an internal freon leak, the prognosis was dim.

And sure enough, that night, it was almost warm enough inside there to toast the bagels. We removed the food, threw some out, and moved the rest upstairs to the kitchen icebox, where they got acquainted with some new neighbors and chilled right out.

NO! This is not our old refrigerator and if it were, you know I could never
post a picture of it! Rust is forbidden in our house!

It's hard to find a basic refrigerator these days, one without French doors and crushed ice coming out of the door and all that, but we found one and it will be here today, if you want to come and see it begin what should be another 22-year run.

In 22 years, I will be 93 years of age, and I won't want my ice cream to be too cold, so let's hope for the best.

 

Ring a bell?

Listen, my children, and you shall hear, of the bronze bell cast by Paul Revere!

Well, cast by his son, to tell the truth. 

We all learned about Paul in school. On the 18th of April in 1775, he got on his horse and rode from Boston to Lexington, telling the colonial militia members that the British were coming.  He had planned to light one or two lanterns in the steeple of the Boston's Old North Church to tell everyone in what form the invasion was taking place...

"One if by land, and two if by sea..." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

That made him an early American hero, and after the Revolutionary War (spoiler alert: we won!) he was credited with launching the American copper industry.  You've probably got some Paul Revere cookware in the kitchen somewhere.

Keeping the family business alive, Paul's son Joseph Warren Revere took over the foundry in 1804, and made a 1,000-pound bell in 1834 which is just now coming home, if you will.

At first, it was taken from Massachusetts to Ohio via oxcart. Can you just imagine that trip, in the days before interstate highways and rest areas?

For years, the bell pealed from the belfry of the First Presbyterian Church of Cleveland before it wound up in a church in Vermilion, Oh. The church was sold in  1984, and the real estate agent who handled the transaction, Jeannene Shanks, wound up owning the bell when the fitness center that bought the church didn't want a bell around.

They should have sold it to Taco Bell!

Mrs Shanks gave a thousand dollars to the church, and when she and her husband Robert retired in Chino Hills, California, they dragged the big bell out there with them. 

Amy Miller, a psychologist in Chino Hills, is the Shanks's daughter, and she recalls, “It became the joke of the family.  They'd open the doors to the garage and ring the bell every Fourth of July. People would look at it and say, ‘What the heck is that?’”

After the deaths of Mr and Mrs Shank, Robert Jr and Amy moved the bell into Amy's garage, where it sat for years. 

After their parents' deaths, Miller and her 69-year-old brother, retired Ford Motor Co. executive Robert L. Shanks Jr. of Miami, moved the bell to Miller's garage, where it sat since 2009. A collector from Texas offered them $50,000 for the bell, but he mentioned that he might just melt it down if he couldn't resell it, and the brother and sister decided to send it on home. 

Ms Miller checked things out online and found there is a museum that would make a better place for the bell than any other, and so...

“I don’t need a bell in my garage, and this bell has a story of its own,” she said. “It represents what our history and our country are all about. I wanted it to go beyond us — to go back to where it started. We're the keepers of our history.”

So from Massachusetts to Ohio to California and back to the Bay State, the bell is home and on display, says Kiley Nichols, a spokesperson for the Paul Revere Heritage Site in Canton, just south of Boston. 

History still draws us all in. For instance, we know that people disposed of their trash by throwing it in their outhouses, back before there were regular garbage pickups. In Baltimore, there was evidence found in the center field area of Oriole Park at Camden Yards of the childhood privy of Babe Ruth, whose chaotic upbringing took place in that part of town. And in 2017, archaeologists excavated  the site of an outhouse next door to Paul Revere's home in Boston's North End.

There's a joke there, but I won't be the one to say it.

Take time to make time

Come with me back to the American landscape of fall, 1973. Let's see. Spiro Agnew, the Shame Of Maryland, was forced out of the vice-president's office over his crooked schemes that saw him pocketing bagsful of bribe money from contractors in the very office that should have seen him getting ready to become president, because Richard Nixon's second term was coming unraveled like a pair of socks from Woolworth's.

Syria and Egypt attacked Israel on the Yom Kippur holiday, seeking to regain territory lost in the 1967 Six Day War. The fighting lasted from October 6 through the 25th. Nixon came to Israel's defense, sending military aid to the region, and ordering U.S. aircraft carriers to the Eastern Mediterranean. 

As a result, oil-producing nations in the Persian Gulf announced an embargo on oil sales to the U.S. and several other countries. As a result of that, the price of oil here went from $3 a barrel to $12, and gasoline prices doubled - when you could find it. By Christmas, shortages were showing up at gas stations, and so were gas lines, where you sat in your car for an hour waiting to get $5 worth of Gulf No-Nox.

For the first time ever, people were paying attention to something called an energy crisis, and Nixon's people took steps such as asking us not to put out Christmas lights, and keeping Daylight Savings Time in effect permanently. What a great idea, everyone said in October!

And then, in December and January, when little Lisa and Bob Jr were outside waiting for the school bus in the pitch dark, all heck broke loose, and what was supposed to be a two-year "experiment" was called off in early 1974.

So, proving once again that many of us don't learn from the past, the U.S. Senate has passed a proposed law that would mean no more changing the clocks twice a year in order to bring us a "new, permanent standard time" that would bring us brighter winter evenings. They did not say exactly who needs all that sunlight at dinnertime in December. The candle industry would not like that idea, and neither would the fire departments that remind people to change the batteries in smoke detectors in fall when they change their clocks.

"The good news is if we can get this passed, we don't have to keep doing this stupidity anymore," said Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., author of the bill to end the practice of switching twice a year.  He's also a climate-change denier, so there's that.

Dr. Beth Malow is a neurologist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center who has spoken about this topic with an interesting twist: she agrees that it's not healthy to change the clocks twice a year, so she advocates leaving them alone, at standard time permanently.

"It's called standard time because ST lines up with our natural, biological rhythms," she says. That would mean more sunny mornings and more dark evenings for those who get up early such as students and old men with cats.

Anyway, there's no telling what the House might do with this, even if they ever take it up.  And I think of the person who complained that his blanket was not long enough to cover his shoulders, so he cut some off the bottom and sewed it to the top.  

 

Meet The Beet

I'm going out on a limb to say that we have probably seen the end of the snowstorms for 2022. 

I know, watch a blizzard come to town next week. 

But we didn't have a whole lot of snow this year, which means one of two things: we are in for a really wild winter next year or two, or there is something to this global warming. 

I don't know what it is, why we don't get as much snow as we used to, but I do see that some parts of the country, instead of throwing down ten tons of salt on the road, are using something else, because salt, while effective, is harmful to property, the infrastructure, and the environment. 

"Road salt can contaminate drinking water, kill or endanger wildlife, increase soil erosion, and damage private and public property. Alternative methods are needed to mitigate these drawbacks," the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says. "Rock salt can have corrosive effects in large quantities that affect cars, trucks, bridges, and roads resulting in approximately 5 billion dollars in annual repairs in the U.S. alone. In addition, road salt can also infiltrate nearby surface and ground waters and can contaminate drinking water reservoirs and wells."

Thanks, EPA. And did you ever notice that your grass turns a brownish shade where the salt snow piles up by the mailbox?

Here is one alternative: Linda Horn, Communications Director for the Missouri Dept. of Transportation, says "We use beet juice. We've had a lot of success with it."

I have no use for beets on my dinner plate, but their juice is coming into play more and more in winter weather situations.

"It's a little tackier, and it sticks to the road," Horn explains. "In Missouri, our winters sometimes can be difficult because they'll start as rain, then it'll snow, and then back to ice. We're not as fortunate as some of the northern states that just get snow."

MoDOT uses a product that is actually a by-product of the process by which we get sugar for our coffee and tea and cereal. A fermentation process extracts the sugar crystals, and what's left behind is this juice, that, when mixed in an solution of 80% salt brine and 20% beet juice, does a bang-up job preventing cars from banging into each other on the beltway 

What's more, cutting the salt with beet juice makes the salt less corrosive, so the roads don't crumble quite so much.

Ms Horn goes on to toot Missouri's, uh, accomplishment of treating over 33,000 miles of road. "We're the seventh-largest state highway system. Missouri is certainly not the seventh-largest state, but in the state of Missouri, we maintain a lot of roads that in other states would be maintained by a county or city."

One problem with beet sugar is that it can't be stored like salt. Up in Philadelphia, Richard Montanez, deputy commissioner for the Streets Department, says they have talked about using beet products but decided against it. One reason: the city can’t store it for long periods like salt, which can be stockpiled for years in those picturesque salt domes.

“There is a balance between clearing the street with salt and [being] mindful of the environment,” Montanez said. “It is important to make sure all streets are clear of snow for safe travel.”

No matter what states and municipalities decide to do about snow and ice removal on the roads, the way I look at it, every beet that goes for snow treatment is one less beet I have to see on the dinner table, and that's a good thing! 

One Shining Moment

I'm not a basketball fan but I do know enough about the college game to know that Indiana U is a traditional power. But last Thursday night, they got their Hoosiers handed to them by the mighty Gaels of Saint Mary's College in the NCAA tournament, and I wouldn't even be talking about it, except for the fact that the two best Indiana people in uniform that night were not on your scorecard!

Indiana was ranked 12th in the nation before that loss, but by now everyone in the world with a TV has seen the heroics performed by Nathan Paris and Cassidy Cerny. You see, what happened was, the basketball got stuck between the backboard and the shot clock, some 13 feet in the air, and nothing was going to happen unless that ball was retrieved. 

They tried hollering at it, poking at it with a broom handle, and asking 6' 10"  Saint Mary's center Matthias Tass to reach up and grab that thang, and nothing worked.

Paris, a senior cheerleader from Floyds Knobs, Ind. (add that to the list of towns we have to visit someday!) offered to get on a folding chair to go for the ball, but the refs nixed that as being too risky

So Nathan said, I have an idea! I'll just lift my cheer partner Cassidy (a sophomore from Avon, Indiana) skyward, as we often do during football and basketball games, and let's see if she can reach it...

 

Nathan and Cassidy were on the tv Friday more than the My Pillow guy, and let's say hooray for them! They are a nice couple of young people, from all appearances, and I will go so far as to say if Cassidy ain't cute, grits ain't groceries! 

Too bad it was the worst game of the year for Indiana, but because of our hypermedia world, Mr Paris and Ms Cerny had 24 hours of fame that they certainly didn't expect when they put on their socks Thursday afternoon!

And they can look forward to sharing their time in the sun with their children and grandchildren in the years down the road, as part of the innumerable "Whatever Happened To...?" stories we'll see!

Sunday Rerun: Ice Ice Baby

 I postponed writing about this topic until the temperatures became a little nicer outside. No one wants to talk about ice in the middle of winter, but that used to be the time of year to make money on ice.

Nowadays, if we want ice, we just ankle into the kitchen and open the freezer door on the Kelvinator, where crystal-clear cubes drop into a white container automatically.  Very simple deal.

But imagine yourself living in India in the early 1800s...no Whirlpool refrigerator in the kitchen to make your ice...and even if there had been one, there was nowhere to plug it in!  And all across the Caribbean, Europe, and India, there were no frozen ponds to chip off a chunk of ice and cool your limeade.

Where is there plenty of free ice?  Massachusetts in winter!  So the only problem is, find a way to get that ice over the sea to places where they need it, and you'll be rolling in the long green in a minute.

The Wright Brothers weren't even twinkles in papa Wright's eyes at the time, so Frederic Tudor (1783 - 1864) knew he couldn't count on an airplane to send the ice to the Old World.

So he packed huge ("yuuuuuuge!") ice slices, cut from Walden Pond in Concord, Mass, and other waterways, packed them onto a ship and covered them with sawdust and shipped them off to places that wanted ice.

Ice King Tudor

His first effort was sending ice aboard his ship "Favorite" to Martinique with a load of frosty coolness.  It took three weeks for the ship to get there (I suppose they stopped off somewhere for beer and pizza on the way) and a lot of the ice had become watered down, and then had become water, which is hard to sell on an island surrounded by it.  Tudor sold what little ice there was to sell, and took a loss of $4500 on the deal.

That was 1806, but by 1810 he was profiting from selling ice to the tune of a cool $7400.  But there was no Forbes Magazine then to give him business advice, so Tudor had to spend some time in debtor's prison in 1812 and 1813, before springing out in the fall of 1815 with a new scheme - an icehouse in Havana, nicely insulated, and large enough to hold 150 tons of ice.

In the years to come, he brought back Cuban fruit as the boats returned to New England, and it's stunning to think how much he could have taken in by combining the fruit with the ice and some Cuban sugar and inventing the snowball. 

Tudor also missed out on making some bigtime starbucks when he invested in coffee futures in the 1830s...he couldn't envision iced coffee!

Today's modern entrepreneur knows how to diversify, spreading his income and investments across all spectra of the business world, before indictments, jail terms and disgrace get in the way.

The Saturday Picture Show, March 19, 2022

 

Here along the shores of the ocean, our terrain is hilly, so we don't get to see a view like this from our great middle America. Flat for miles and miles. The guy who took this was doing maintenance on a radio broadcasting tower. He mentioned that he had recently been on another radio tower and people were down below him, shooting at him, in the belief that he was working on a 5G tower. The dopes who live among us are easily convinced of conspiracies. They believe that 5G technology will kill us all (but nothing is wrong with 4G), that chemtrails are poisoning us, and that Hillary Clinton and others were running a child prostitution ring out of the basement of a DC pizza parlor that has no basement. While amusing on the surface, their stupid gullibility (or gullible stupidity) can have dangerous consequences.

A friend from Egypt asked me what's the best pizza in Baltimore, and I had to go with Pizza John's, nipping second-place finisher Gil's by a pepperoni slice. But do not be confused! Pizza John's is not the same as Papa John's, which tastes like catsup, and imitation "cheese" on white bread. 

I love images that interpose the serene and the mundane. This traveler was enjoying the magnificence of Sorrento, but he still had to wash out his socks.

I like my beef rare and my chicken well done. This one looks almost ready!

America still leads the world in terrycloth origami, the art of folding towels into decorations!

A novel use for that old hardhat that's hanging around the basement.

I love trucks, and those forward control chassis jobs were cool to drive. I got the chance to drive one once and it was like I had a bread route.

The humor in "After Life," Ricky Gervais's Netflix series about a man recently widowed, is biting and mordant, but anyone who has ever been in love can relate to the very idea of losing that love. Gervais plays a journalist for a paper that's like the English version of the papers they throw on our lawns, and he meets some rather odd people in that line. Trust me: you'll laugh in spite of yourself!

This is your morning view, if you are lucky enough to live in Reine, Norway. 

How ironic that a ship that sank in 1915 is still rather intact, albeit 10,000 feet below the icy Weddell Sea, off the Antarctic Peninsula...and that the name of the good ship was the Endurance! It's currently home to all sorts of marine life way down there, like these anemones. The ship was stuck in ice for ten months, and the crew had to eat whale meat and blubber.  You'd blubber too, if you had to eat whale meat for ten months.

Welcome to the Mid-Atlantic!

While my sausage and hominy sizzle in the pan, I get to watch the morning TV shows - CBS Mornings, Today, Good Morning America, and the upstart News Nation on WGN. 

All those shows have some features of their own, and they all have some things in common. If there is bad weather coming, they don't say "bad weather is coming." They give up the straight telling of the story for "Killer storm marauding across the heartland!"

Any disappearance is "bizarre," fires are "blazes" that "roar through buildings," and security is always something that needs to be "beefed up." 

No matter how unlikely it is that any of us will have a Joro spider land on us, still, you know the morning shows will tell us that the nation is "bracing" for an "invasion" of these large spiders from East Asia.

They've been spotted regularly in Georgia and other points southeast of here. But now "top scientists" will warn of a northern migration.

They will probably have an entomologist (not that they would use the real name for a "bug expert)  or two come on the shows with joros so that one or two of the anchors can hold a spider in their meaty hand and one or two others will run and flee for higher ground, hiding behind Michael Strahan.

But just like 2021's chief bug annoyance, the 17-year cicada, Joro spiders are harmless to humans, and unlike cicadas, they even do some good.

"People should try to learn to live with them," Andy Davis, a research scientist in the Odum School of Ecology and one of the authors behind a recent study, told UGA Today, a publication by the University of Georgia. He says that the joros had been hanging around the southeastern states but felt unwelcome because of Ron DeSantis, so they are moving up north to form new colonies here. And it is believed that these larger arachnids have a better chance of withstanding a brief cold snap, because they ordered down-filled pajamas from LL Bean last fall.

Interesting: they get their name from Jorōgumo, from a character in Japanese folklore that can turn itself into a beautiful woman to prey on unsuspecting men.

Also interesting: All men are unsuspecting, only in different areas.

And Davis says not to worry about them, even though they are somewhat startling in appearance. They don't eat crops and they do provide food for local birds who are tired of carryout night after night. And even though they kill for their own food and use their venom to do it, they don't bite humans or pets because their fangs are too small to pierce our skin.

So don't worry if you see them in your neighborhood. With any luck, you might get to meet Ginger Zee.

 

St Patrick's Shake (rerun for the holiday from last year)

 It's colder today in Austin, Texas than in Oslo, Norway, so of course, that means Here Comes Spring!  And to celebrate...The Shamrock Shake is back "at participating McDonald’s."

In other fast-food news, the Golden Arches people want you to know that there is a website so you can find out where to head out to get yourself a Hi-C Orange Lavaburst. Hi-C was on the McDonald's menu from the 1950s until 2017 when it was replaced by the equally repugnant Sprite TropicBerry. 

A word to the wise: if you want an orange-flavored drink, drink orange juice. Hi-C contains "orange juice concentrate, peel oil and orange essences, sugar, water, citric acid and ascorbic acid (vitamin C)" so why not just squeeze an orange and skip the added acids?

Anyway, the Shamrock Shake is back "to mark the first green of spring." And it's bringing a date to the party this year...the Oreo Shamrock McFlurry, which "first debuted" last February to salute the Shamrock Shake's 50th anniversary.

Note to McDonald's: "first debuted" is redundant. One only gets one debut, so please make sure you don't have an artificially colored green milkshake in your hand when you make yours!

"For more than 50 years, fans have eagerly awaited the annual return of the Shamrock Shake, counting on the arrival of Shamrock Shake Season to mark the unofficial start to spring," McDonald's Senior Director of Culinary Chad Schafer said in a news release.

None for me, thanks.

Every McD-ophile knows that the Shamrock Shake was whipped up in 1967 by Hal Rosen, a Connecticut McDonald's owner and operator, who created it for St. Patrick's Day. It went achieved wide distribution in 1970 and has been a seasonal nationwide favorite since 2012.  

It's made with vanilla soft-serve ice cream, artificially flavored Shamrock Shake syrup and fake whipped cream. The Shamrock McFlurry is a shake with Oreo pieces whipped in. 

Green beverages and drinks do not appeal to me. I see people with green tea and drinks from Panera that looks like swampwater.  But then again, I like parsnips and grits and anchovies, so don't go by me!

On the other hand, he hasn't had chapped lips since 2015

Petroleum jelly, the technical name for Vaseline, is good for a lot of things. 

Besides that!

Listen, it's the best for chapped lips and split finger skin. We used it to keep our price stampers flying fast at the supermarket. You can use it on your pet's paws or on a baby's butt. It's even good for split ends on your hair.

It's just not good as a replacement for muscle tissue. You know that, but Kirill Tereshin did not, and so he injected himself with PJ starting in 2016. 

He thought that pumping up his biceps the quick and easy way - much faster than lifting weights - would help him become a big deal MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) fighter. Now all that petroleum residue could lead to serious infection, resulting in amputation or death.

 

Petroleum jelly (petrolatum) is the result of oil refining. Back in the 1800s, oilfield workers working on rigs noticed that the gooey substance on the pumps was a cure-all for chapped hands and minor cuts. Chemically, it's a mixture of mineral oils and waxes, in a semisolid jelly-like substance. 

No one ever advised anyone to shoot petroleum jelly into their body, but nobody told Tereshin, who fancies himself "The Russian Popeye," that it's just for the outside. It's not good for strengthening the muscles, but injecting it carries side effects including infection, stroke, or heart attack.

This actually was weakening the muscles he did have, to tell the truth, not to mention cutting off the internal blood supply.

He has undergone two surgeries to remove the goo, which removed 25% of the "muscles," and needs another, which has been delayed due to the pandemic.

“Soon I will have a very complicated, hard third surgery,” he said. “I don’t know how it’ll end up. I bulked up my arms when I was 20 due to my own stupidity. I did not think about the consequences…God forbid something happens to this nerve and I cannot move my arm.”

You know that they say about a person attempting to be his own attorney having a fool for a client. Same goes for guys like this and other graduates of WebMD University.

What's Your Poison?

Everyone loves those Crime Lab On Wheels stories. Leave as much as one stray hair or a shirt button at the scene of an otherwise perfect crime, and Sherlock Holmes or one of the CSI gang will figure out the clue's provenance in minutes. Of course, it doesn't work like that. Not even the most skilled of forensic detectives can get a fingerprint from a puddle of water or a gust of wind, but here's something for light dinnertime talk...

In 1840, a woman named Marie Lafarge poisoned her husband with arsenic. Beside sympathy for the victim, the case is remembered chiefly for being among  the first poisoning cases in which detectives got help from a toxicological examination.

 Marie was born Marie Capelle in Paris in 1816, the daughter of a military officer. She was given a very good education, which was rarely the case for women in France at that time. She was said to be quite lovely, so I guess the person who drew this picture of her was related to the victim of her crime and therefore held a serious grudge.

At the age of 23, she met Charles Lafarge, who had already been married once, and was deeply in debt. His plan was to marry a rich woman, so he posed as a wealthy industrialist and pretended to have a high-class estate.

When Marie met Charles, it was not love at first sight; she found him "vulgar and repulsive," character traits that often lead to three bad marriages and election as president of the United States. But Marie got past her feelings when she heard about the estate. That was enough for her to assent to marrying the short-fingered vulgarian.

'Twas a short honeymoon. One look at his crummy ramshackle house surrounded by a rundown village was enough to convince Marie of the truth of William Congreve's line in "The Old Batchelour" (1693):  "Married in haste, we may repent at leisure."

What's more, the Lafarge family did not exactly roll the red carpet to welcome Marie to their crappy château, so she decided on Plan B. She played the part of a bride head over heels in love with this heel, and even wrote letters to friends and kin back home, talking about how happy she was being a Lafarge and all.

Shortly after their marriage, Lafarge talked his bride into writing him letters of recommendation and headed for Paris to use the letters to get loans. It was Christmastime, so she sent him letters expressing her undying love, and she had her mother-in-law bake some pies for him. These pastries were delivered to his room at the Univer Hotel. He helped himself to a nice slice of pie, which soon led him to him helping himself deal with convulsions, vomiting, and diarrhea. He lay abed for a day, and felt better, so he went on with his business, finally returning home on January 3, 1840, still a bit weak and ill.

Marie fixed him a dinner of game and truffles.  After dinner, he was back on the floor and remained ill until his merciful death on January 14.

There was widespread cholera in France at the time, and his passing might have been chalked up to that disease, but several of the Lafarges bore witness to seeing Marie adding white powder to his food.

And local purchases of arsenic on December 12 and January 2 were enough for the gendarmes to round her up.

This sort of detective work was certainly not common in those days, but chemical analysis of the contents of the victim's stomach showed arsenic residue. 

On this basis, on January 25, 1840, she was arrested. Toxicology, in its infancy then, was enough to convince a jury Marie was guilty of murder, and she was sentenced to "indefinite hard labor," and died ten years later of tuberculosis, having been recently released due to her terminal illness. 

I don't know about you, but I'm thinking of pitching this to Lifetime Movie Channel as a movie called "Fatal Powder: The Marie Lafarge Story," starring Courteney Cox and Ben Affleck.

Batter up

Strike three! You're out! 

We'll soon hear umpires bawling those words again because, thank Heaven, the strike is over, the lockout is lifted, and baseball is coming back!

The major leagues will begin play on April 7. Fittingly, the Orioles have that day off, and will open their season with an away series against the Tampa Bay Rays on the 8th. Baltimore's home opener will be April 11 with the Milwaukee Brewers coming to town.

The teams will all be playing their full 162 game schedules, meaning that the games that were supposed to be played starting March 31 will be made up somehow.

And here is the best news! They are going to play real baseball again! Those silly rules from the last two seasons that meant extra-inning games started with a man on second base, and all doubleheaders were 7-inning games, are gone, relics of the two sad years of pandemic baseball.

That man-on-second rule reminds me of so many backyard ballgames we played as kids, with "an imaginary man" on third base because we only had like three guys on a team. It's hard to tell what an imaginary man might do while running the bases. For all I know, my imaginary guy fell down while cantering home!

And a 7-inning game throws off the game plan. It would be the fifth inning and you'd be thinking ahead to the 7th, 8th and 9th, and then remember "they ain't no 8th or 9th tonight!" It's like saying all football games in December will be 45 minutes because "it's chilly."

Going back to the real rules will make the games longer, some say.

"Whaddya, got somewhere to be?" I say!

And what's more, the Designated Hitter will now be universal, so the National League fans will be spared the sight of their pitchers waving fecklessly at other pitchers' pitches.

And Nelson Cruz will now be able to play until he reaches Social Security age.  And even then, he'll hit well for some team, if asked.

Sunday Rerun: Call me by my name

 A quick look at my Facebook friends list shows there are seven women on there named Heather.

I love that name! It conjures soft visions of a pink flower in the Scottish Highlands, and all that goes with that...tweedy jackets, mulled cider and wines and soft music played on woodwinds as fires and candles warm and scent the room.

We get a sense from names, and that's my warm glow from the name "Heather." Much more a balm to the soul that, say, Agnes, Mildred, or Hortense, all though there are lovely people by those names as well.

I also like to see the popularity charts for names as they ebb and flow. I remember the days when little boys were John, Steven, Richard (and the occasional Mark) and girls were Carol, Susan, and Barbara. Not so much anymore.

But no name ever took such a precipitous spill in popularity as Heather.

Did you know that in 1975, there were more than 24,000 American baby girls given that name, and that it finished third in the name charts that year, after Jennifer and Amy?

Fast forward to 2017, and if you named your baby Heather, she was one of only 219 to be so called. "Heather" is now the 1,129th most popular girls' name.  "Jennifer" and "Amy" have also fallen off, but not quite so much.

Because I have plenty of time to read stuff, I read an article about a woman named Laura Wattenberg, who is said to be the top expert on US naming trends. She operates a website called Baby Name Wizard, which is a great site for baby name trivia and ideas. (As always, I humbly remind all expectant families of the wonders that could befall a little boy christened "Elvis.") 

Laura (how cool would it be if her name were Heather?) said Americans name their kids according to fad and fashion, and, "When fashion is ready for a name, even a tiny spark can make it take off. Heather climbed gradually into popularity through the 1950s and ’60s, then took its biggest leap in 1969, a year that featured a popular Disney TV movie called Guns in the Heather. A whole generation of Heathers followed, at which point Heather became a ‘mom name’ and young parents pulled away.”

"Heathers" (1988)

It makes sense that the first batch of Heathers became moms and did not want to call their offspring "Heather, Jr."  Wattenberg also says the 1988 movie "Heathers," which concerned some rather evil snotty princesses, all named that, was another factor. 

And the fact that every movie made 30 years ago has, by law, been made into a Broadway musical was the final nail in the coffin.

And get this: Wattenberg also claims that the sound of a name has to do with how popular it is. “Current style favors liquid sounds dominated by long vowels,” she says, liquid sounds being those that involve using the tip of the tongue to create air flow through the mouth. This theory explains why there are so many people being born now called Liam, Noah, Aria, Amelia and Melania.

Just kidding with that last one. 

The Saturday Picture Show, March 12, 2022

 

You really haven't lived at all until you've walked into a room and seen a woman hooked up to one of these hot-air hair dryers that make them look like a Jiffy-Pop popcorn thing about to achieve fulfillment.  What price beauty, indeed?

Out our way, we have a few Little Free Libraries - small bookshelves where people can take or leave a book for others. But this is in Georgia, something I haven't seen here in Maryland - a honor system honey stand. I'm sad to think that some people would steal honey, though.

And, continuing our retrospective on Great American Sandwiches, this is artist Noah Verrier's take on a BLT! Looks great!

It's nice, when you finish cleaning the dishes, that the suds leave you a little smile of appreciation!

If you think you are going nuts, you aren't alone. This statue is nothing but nuts!

Here on the East Coast, we have never seen almond trees. What a Joy it is to see this grove of them in California!

This is as close as you ever want to get to a frozen road surface. I would rather drive in ten inches of snow than a tenth of an inch of ice, and far too many people forget that "four-wheel drive" does not mean "four-wheel stop."

Returning American servicemen, after World War II ended, got a ride home on the Queen Elizabeth. I'm sure they were overjoyed to be going home, but how they were fed and where they slept and bathed during the cruise must have been interesting. 

The scorecard from the Orioles' first season in Baltimore, 1954. There will be baseball this year! The labor negotiations all worked out! 

There are always baby sheep this time of year in Williamsburg. These are Leicester Longwool lambs. What a beautiful sight!

It's not a puzzle to explain the continuing popularity of  American novelist and poet Jack Kerouac. His 100th birthday is being celebrated today all around the world and in his home town of Lowell, Mass.