Too much

My fondness for red hot sauce is clear to see. I always reach for it in restaurants swanky and low-class. I've had most of the brands you see in the stores, but my favorite is Texas Pete. 

I too have pondered many a night weak and weary about people who are willing to have fried chicken or pork chops without dousing them in Texas Pete. It's just a must and it works to add a little heat and a little spice to any dish.

Notice, though, I said a little.

Which is my long-winded way of saying there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. There's a new version of Texas Pete, called Texas Pete Hotter Sauce. and a friend let me splash some on my dinner the other night and I was not thrilled with it. And it's not that it was too hot, per se, but the heat lingered even onto the next bite.  Too much. Still tasty, but overdoing it.

Oreos are perfect cookies, don't you think? Two wafers with a "creme" filling make the best sandwich. Double Stuff Oreos throw off the balance and make the cookie too "creme-y, " and now along comes this: the MOST stuf. That's too much stuf.

And it's not just making things bigger that messes them up. Tiny versions of candy like Snicker, and wee crackers like Mini-Ritz, do not work for me.

Everyone knows the famous plaid made by Burberry. The combination of khaki, black, red, and white in a glen plaid is known the world over as a base for scarves and
belts and the occasional cap. But they make entire suits and raincoats out of it, and what should be an accessory side dish becomes the overdone main course.

Look at how many athletes have played one season too many, how many TV series should have gone off a year ago (looking at you, Seinfeld) and how many authors decide throw some water in the soup pot and get one more meal out of it. 

But don't get your hopes up! I will keep pounding out this blog 7 days a week until the Tuesday past my last. 

Keep it!

When the pandemic hit two years ago, we got a sense that things would be changing in our lifestyles, our schools, houses of worship, and workplaces, but it seems like every day, there is news of something we never dreamed we'd live long enough to see.

So here's the latest: Some of the big stores are thinking about just paying you not to bring back unwanted items!

You read that right. They call it "unwanted inventory levels," and that means that stores and their warehouses are packed to the gills with last year's t-shirts, unwanted Bill O'Reilly books*, luggage, NASCAR window decals, mens' lined slippers, mens' unlined slippers, shoes with heels that light up, springform cake pans, ventriloquist dummies, knee pads, shoulder pads, scratch pads, blank cassette tapes, and I don't know what-all else. 

And you know what? They don't have room for it if you return it! 

So, mix in the price of fuel to deliver all this stuff, and the supply chain problems, and some major retailers are about to say, it's costing us a ton of money to store this unwanted flotsam and jetsam, so just keep your doggone reversible down vest with a thermometer hanging from the zipper!

It times like these, I like to turn to people like Burt Flickinger, who's a retail expert and managing director of retail consultancy Strategic Resource Group, as you all know. Burt says, "It would be a smart strategic initiative. Retailers are stuck with excess inventory of unprecedented levels. They can't afford to take back even more of it."

Returned merchandise is handled in a variety of ways. If it's in good condition, the store will likely slap a new price sticker on it and put it back on the shelf.

If it's damaged or not working, they can refurbish them and sell them at a reduced price or dump them through foreign liquidators for sale in sale in Europe, Canada or Mexico.

But - "Given the situation at the ports and the container shortages, sending product overseas isn't really an option," Flickinger points out. 

The last option is to sell all their returned items to third party firms who get rid of everything for them.

No matter which option a company goes with, it brings on additional costs for the retailers.

Flickinger again: "For every dollar in sales, a retailer's net profit is between a cent to five cents. With returns, for every dollar in returned merchandise, it costs a retailer between 15 cents to 30 cents to handle it."

There is a company called goTRG, whose business it is to process returned items for WalMart, Amazon, and Lowes. Their chief operating officer is Steve Rop, and he is the one promoting the option for retailers to address returns while avoiding more product bloat by considering 'returnless return.'

Rop's company handles over 100 million returned items a year, so he knows a little about the crowded back room.

For now, he says that stores are cutting prices way back on a lot of items to get the warehouses emptied, but adds that there is an odd effect to this:

"They're already discounting in stores to clear out products but, when there's heavy discounting, buyer's remorse goes up. People are tempted to buy a lot, only to return it later," he said.

This keep-it policy actually began several years ago with Amazon. I can tell you this: I bought a hose reel from them and used it exactly twice before it broke into several large pieces of plastic and showered me thoroughly with Baltimore's finest tap water.  As soon as I toweled off a bit, I called Amazon, and they told me to keep the reel and they would credit me.

I wonder to this day how they knew that my hose reel did, in fact, fall to pieces. I guess I sound very trustworthy when I'm damp.

*ALL O'Reilly books are unwanted.

"I Got a '34 Wagon and we call it a Woodie"

Something caught my eye the other day and it took me back to the 1980s, and here in 2022 I realized that 40 years ago, everything had fake wood grain on it!

I guar-ahn-tee you, you had a clock radio just like this before you counted on your cell to wake you up in the morning. That GE or whatever brand AM-FM clock radio looked real nice on the nightstand, all fake wood and everything, and exactly at 6 in the yawning the Morning Zoo radio show would come on and gently awaken you to "Bang On The Drum All Day" by Todd Rundgren as the Zoo Crew howled their slightly sexist jokes.

Oh, you hit the snooze button, and six minutes later, here would come "Lady" by Styx, and you knew it was time to face another day.

Down in the kitchen, you put your English Muffin in the wood grain toaster oven, put on your fake wood grain glasses, and your fake wood bow tie (male) or your fake wood leggings (female) and it was off to work in your Chrysler Le Baron with the fake wood dashboard, and a day in your office with fake wood desk accessories and file cabinets.

The theory about why wood grain was so popular in the 70s and 80s is that it replaced the Mid-Century modern look of the 50s and 60s. We were caught up in the space age, racing the Russians to the moon (and look what that got us!) so we decorated everything in a Space Age Motif with a side salute to the atomic age and all the wonders that we expected from splitting the atom.

And then, in 1969, we put men on the moon, and it was as if the thrill was over. The next time people were on the moon, they showed it on TV, but people called and yelped that they wanted to see "All In The Family" instead. Decorations changed. People didn't want fake wood grain anymore; they went to the beach and found chunks of driftwood the size of the front door, stuck legs on it, and there was the new coffee table we enjoyed while doing macramé and making our own yogurt and drinking wine in a wineskin.

That lasted until cell phones and email took our attention away from what was in our living rooms and focused on what was in our hands.

 

Noodling around

We got our first microwave oven in 1978. It was one of the freestanding models, as opposed to the built-in we have today, it was about the size of a Buick, and was almost that heavy. 

And it wasn't nearly as powerful as today's micronukers, so that's why our worldwide home appliance makers keep right on getting better. 

Speaking of which...I resisted trying this for a long time, but it turns out that if you want noodles for dinner, you don't have to heat a steaming cauldron of water and moisten up the kitchen. I've been microwaving spaghetti and other pastas for a while, and once you learn how much water and how long to nuke it, you'll be pleased, I promise you.

So! That makes me wonder why we would buy boxes of macaroni and cheese. That orangish powdery "cheese" is sort of, well, cheesy, and I'm here to promise you, you can have a really nice side dish by putting water on pasta in a bowl in the microwave, zapping it for 4-8 minutes depending, and then turning it out in a strainer. Dump it back in the bowl from the strainer, add a little salt and olive oil and whatever kind of REAL cheese you like, toss it, and there ya go.

I bring all this up to mention that the good folks at Kraft aren't sure people are up to writing the whole "macaroni" word on the grocery list, so they are about to change the name of America's favorite side dish.

After 85 years, Kraft Macaroni and Cheese will now be known as Kraft Mac & Cheese. It's meant to "reflect the way fans organically talk about the brand," the company announced last week. Look for the new packages in August.

 

The new box will have the new name featured alongside a tuned-up logo and a new blue color scheme that "amplifies the brand's most recognizable asset — the noodle smile."

Kraft is making these changes to emphasize that their noodle dish is "comfort food." Other noodle and cheese boxes are right next to Kraft on the shelves, all bragging about how much healthier they are.

Kraft has also raised the prices on their mac and "cheese," but then again the prices of everything are going up, so....the company notes "the upward trend in packaging, transportation, ingredients and labor costs persists, reaching levels not seen in decades."

Save money, buy store-brand noodles and mac it yourself!

By the way, since nobody asked, we're getting ready to sing that "Yankee Doodle Dandy" song again, and that "stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni" does not mean that early Americans thought their hats were pasta. Upperclass young Englishmen of the day took trips to Europe to become worldly, and would return to Britain with a taste for fancy wigs, skinny Italian pants, and pasta for dinner. England soon lumped the food and the clothing styles together, calling such young men "Macaroni." Think of Harry Styles, but without wi-fi. 

The English who came here to suppress our glorious revolution sneered at Americans who thought that a fancy feather in one's cap would make one Styles-ish. "So you think you're macaroni, eh?" was a challenge no one could resist.

The rest of the war didn't go well for the British, either.

 

Sunday Rerun: Heaven on earth with an onion slice

 There we were at a cookout the other day (this is the time of year I love cookouts best, when hanging near the grill actually feels good, and you need a hoodie and long pants outside) and a guy was flipping burgers off that Weber, and they were goooooood!

I'm not gonna lie to you. From a frozen patty on a whitebread bun, to fresh-ground top round on a ciabatta roll, I love a hamburger sammy. I can even skip the cheese, and I can live without the fried onion and relish and lettuce and tomato if need be. If the other goodies aren't available, just a squirt each of catsup and mustard will do me fine.

Cook it on the grill, broil it in the oven, fry it in the cast-iron pan, it's all good.  Even if the patty is ground turkey or chicken, I'm fine. The amazing pizzaburger sub is great, too: toss some pizza sauce and cheese onto an opened-up sub roll and toast it, while meanwhile cooking up a couple of thin patties, which you then toss into the roll and dress up with shaker cheese and oregano. Swiss cheese! Provolone (from the Italian, meaning "in favor of volone")! Port wine cheese spread!  Even good old American cheese. I'm just a "cheeseburger in paradise," as the old Jimmy Buffett tune had it. Buffett said, "I like mine with lettuce and tomato, Heinz 57 and French fried potatoes, Big kosher pickle and a cold draft beer..."

I had to talk about all this because, as you probably heard, the World Health Organization now issued their monthly reminder that red meat likely is bad for you, and you might as well smoke ten Lucky Strike cigarettes while you chow down on bacon, sausage and other processed meats.  

They have studies about how bad it is to eat red meat, like beef, lamb and liver. Well, I have said all along that liver is not good! So I have that going for me. And hot dogs have been part of the American diet for over a century. So what are we going to do, stop going to ballgames?

And sure, eat more fish, the scientists say. I wish I had time to do more fishing for dinner! Right out near us is a lake owned by the Paul family, where the wily stickfish swim. Rectangular fish born without heads, these tasty treats come already breaded and ready for the pan, right out of Mrs Paul's lake.


I am sorry, vegans and vegetarians and malt-dextrose gobblers. I know you will be alive to see the year 2100, and I won't be. I can only hope that the presidents of the end of the 21st Century (Carson III, Trump IV, and Pee Wee Herman) will treat you kindly. 

The Saturday Picture Show, June 25, 2022

 

This is a statue that for years has stood in the school where they teach baseball managers and coaches how to greet players at first base or the pitcher's mound.

Somewhere there is an auto graveyard just for dead hearses, and you have to love the irony there. This relic is a 1939 Studebaker, and for sure it made a lot of sad trips in its day.

A knot little known to all but the very saltiest sailors, this is the pretzel knot, used for rounding up snacks.

I don't use a lot of salt, but you can have all the pepper you want. This variegated pack of peppers is certainly nothing to sneeze at.

It's curious how we stop and all pose nicely for the photographer at the scene of all non-fatal car accidents.

Fall will be here soon! This is my weekly reminder that the best season of the year has the prettiest decorations. This is flint corn, what used to be called Indian corn, and it's edible for humans and livestock. They make hominy out of it for us.

I think it was second grade when the teacher asked us if anyone knew a poem they cared to recite. I was first with my hand up! "Don't worry if your job is small, and your rewards are few...remember that the mighty oak was once a nut like you." Next week, I was all ready with "There once was a man from China..." and that's as far as I got. 

This Gaetano Cherici painting is called "Feeding Baby." Actually, two babies. Very nice.

As bad as these chairs look right now, a couple of cans of Krylon and some cushions, and you'll be on the porch gabbing away in no time!

Warning sign painting is one field of art in which a painter can really feel free to indulge in self-expression. This lurid scene is enough to make me avoid utility poles for the rest of my life!

Business Opportunity!

Missouri seems to confuse a lot of people. For instance, the 45th "president" of the United States got all worked up when the Kansas City Chiefs won the Super Bowl, and splashed all over social media telling the people of Kansas they should be super proud of their team. Apparently his knowledge of geography did not include learning that Kansas City, where the Chiefs and the Royals play, is in Missouri. There is a Kansas City, Kansas, but there is no there there.

Also, playwright Thomas Lanier Williams, who was born in Mississippi and grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, moved to New Orleans at age 28 and changed his name to "Tennessee" Williams for reasons that neither you nor I will ever understand. First, we have to figure out why the New Orleans Jazz basketball team moved to Utah and kept the team name, since Jazz has as much to do with Utah as Tennessee Williams had to do with Tennessee.

Other notables from the "Show Me" State include Yogi Berra, Charles "Pretty Boy" Floyd, Dick Gregory, Porter Wagoner, Chuck Berry, Bob Barker, Harry Caray, and Emmett Kelly. And if you'd like to join that throng as an honorary Missourian...

Here's a unique way to go.

There is a property up for sale there. It used to be a tourist attraction, the "attraction" being that it was a chance to walk around a town from the 1800s. Included in your prize package, if the price is right, are two cabins, a grist mill, a schoolhouse, a general store, a tavern, a blacksmith's shop and a jail.

Marion Shipman's family started building all this in the town of Warsaw in the 1960s. They opened up for tourism in 1979.

They only charged three bucks to get in and roam the acres, and I don't know if there was an extra fee charged for getting your Cousin Leon to pose behind the bars in the jail for a funny Christmas card picture.

It's never easy to get Leon away from the bars.

Mr Shipman said he and his family used to keep the park interesting by tearing down a building over the winter and re-purposing the materials to build something new, Shipman told KTVI-TV. "So, every year, we had this little circle of locals that would come at the beginning of every season to see what new thing we had built."

The place went under in 1995, but Shipman and his family moved into the house that was built for the park superintendent, and if you have never lived in a theme park, you've missed out on a lot!

Warsaw is just 120 miles from Branson, MO, so one possible sales pitch would be to try to attract people heading for Big Foot Fun World and Xtreme Racing Branson to do a side trip.

Now, Mr Shipman wants to move on and find someone who will buy the park and restore its luster. He tried to sell it in 1989, so now seems like the time to try again.  

"We listed it and never had a single person to come and look at it, not a single one," he said.

They're asking $295,000 but I am sure you could talk them down to 289, easy.

 

Soul Finger! Soul Fingerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

Got a minute for a little pop/soul music history?

I'm glad you do. More and more I find my mind drifting away from the current times anyway. How about 1967?  

In April of that year, along came a hit record, an instrumental, by a new group called The Bar-Kays.  They were on Volt Records, part of the Stax/Volt company out of Memphis, and this was their first single release, called "Soul Finger."

The band had been noodling in the studio, rehearsing to "But It's Alright," the song by J.J. Jackson.  As instrumentals often do, the band started with a melody (this time, it was the eight notes of "Mary Had A Little Lamb") and built the tune from there.

And in the studio that afternoon so long ago was none other than Isaac Hayes, about whom I could write three blogs, about his careers as a musician, producer, and actor. Isaac was an idea man, and he came up with a beauty for this record. First, he said, let's call the song "Soul Finger" (which must have been a tribute to James Bond, the double-naught spy from "Goldfinger").

And then, Isaac said, let's get some kids to help us out here by having them holler the title! David Porter, Hayes's production partner, knew whom to ask, when he saw kids out in the street in front of the Stax studios in Memphis, playing hopscotch, tag, chasing each other around on bikes...the usual kid stuff.

Porter went out and asked the group of kids if they wanted to help make a record...and he sweetened the deal by offering Coca-Cola for everyone! In came the kids, down went the soda, and the next thing you know, the kids are screeching "Soul Finger!" right on cue!

And the record was an instant hit, reaching # 3 on the U.S. Billboard R&B singles chart and # 17 on the Billboard Hot 100, with the B-side "Knucklehead" also getting some airplay.

As joyous as the sound of this record is, 1967 ended horribly for the Bar-Kays. Chosen by Otis Redding to go tour as his backup band, four of the band - guitarist Jimmie King, organist Ronnie Caldwell, saxophonist Phalon Jones, and the great drummer Carl Cunningham - died along with Redding and one other man when the star's airplane crashed into Lake Monona, near Madison, Wisconsin.

Other musicians continued playing as the Bar-Kays, notably on Isaac Hayes's "Hot Buttered Soul" album, but "Soul Finger" remains their essential legacy, and it's all due to some kids in Memphis, all sugar-rushed on Coca-Cola and hollering their hearts out! 

IAM Union to the core

I was always a proud union worker, if for no other reason than I never saw any sense to the trickle-down notion that if we work hard, the business we work for will succeed, and then they will share their abundant profits with the workers out of the goodness of their hearts. I mean, that sounds great in theory, but while you're pushing that broom, the fat cats are buying diamond tips for their shoelaces.

I pushed a broom and freight trucks galore and even the cash register now and then, starting when I was 17 and still in high school. I worked at the Great Atlantic And Pacific Tea Company, what most people called the A&P, and there I was, a barefoot boy with cheek of tan making union wages - about 5 times what my friends who worked at Gino's and McDonald's made. I was a member of the Retail Clerks International Union, Local 692. I paid monthly dues and got to go strike meetings and hear stirring pro-labor speeches. And I met with our shop steward, a really cool guy from the produce department whose reply, every time you voiced some sort of concern, was always, "Don't worry about it. I'll take care of it."  And he did.

I moved on to other jobs, and was happy to wind up for the last three decades of my working days as a member of the Baltimore County Federation of Public Employees, whose contract gave us honest wages and terrific benefits.

Now, the A&P where I worked surrounded by a lovely vista of Oreo cookies, Dad's Root Beer, and Esskay Chipped Beef was in the Dulaney Plaza in beautiful Towson, MD. The store is gone now; it's now one of those hippie stores with subdued lights and huge tubs of dried mung beans and loaves of bread so replete with nuts and seeds that we are considering sending planeloads of them to Ukraine to be lobbed at the Russian invaders, so heavy are they. 

Across the street from Dulaney Plaza stands Towsontown Centre, formerly Towson Plaza, formerly a farm field. You will note that malls do not like to be called "malls" so much, so they go by "The Shoppes at O'Hoolahan's Crossing" or whatever. But Towsontown Center is a BA mall, four stories packed with this, that, and the next thing, including Apple products!

And I am proud to announce that the Apple Store in that mall has officially formed a union!  Last Saturday, workers at the nearby Apple Towson Town Center voted to organize into the Coalition of Organized Retail Employees (CORE). 

Get it?  Apple. Core!

The incipient union will join the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM). "I applaud the courage displayed by CORE members at the Apple store in Towson for achieving this historic victory," says IAM international president Robert Martinez Jr. in a statement. "They made a huge sacrifice for thousands of Apple employees across the nation who had all eyes on this election."

This past April, the Starbucks at 1209 North Charles Street in Baltimore became the first in Maryland to unionize. Unions are coming back, one reason being that labor has seen greater power over corporations since the pandemic.

Both of these events were big news on national TV. Solidarity forever!

Lifesaving lifeline

Jot down this date: July 16, 2022. 

In just under a month, the new nationwide easy access number for the Suicide Prevention Hotline will change, and will be convenient for anyone in need. The number is 988.

Just those numbers will connect people in distress with trained counselors and they help people need.

According to the people at the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, the 988 service will:

• Connect a person in a mental health crisis to a trained counselor who can address their immediate needs and help connect them to ongoing care
• Reduce health care spending with more cost-effective early intervention
• Reduce use of law enforcement, public health, and other safety resources
• Meet the growing need for crisis intervention at scale
• Help end stigma toward those seeking or accessing mental healthcare

The mental health community has been working for this for many years. The current number, 1-800-273-TALK (8255), is fairly easy to remember and dial, but nothing beats a three-digit number in an emergency. Just ask 911. 

So, the National Suicide Hotline Designation Act has been the law of our land since 2020 and it requires all telephone providers to connect people dialing 988 to the Lifeline as of July 16.

There's no need to mention that suicide is a major problem. Worldwide, over  700,000 people take their own lives every year.

And for every one of those sad cases, there are many more who attempt it.  A prior attempt is viewed as the single most important risk factor for another attempt.

Suicide is the fourth leading cause of death among 15-19 year-olds.

I greatly dislike sharing this sort of information, but then again I am proud to be able to. It makes me sad that is has to be done, and I'm sure tomorrow I will write about a guy who made a lifesized likeness of Mike Pence out of some discarded library paste, but I am asking that you share this number with your teenaged loved ones, and with all people. 

You never know. Spread the word, please.

 

Juneteenth

Today is the first time that Juneteenth is recognized as a federal holiday. President Biden signed the bill last June after the Senate unanimously passed the bill designated the day as such. 14 House Republicans from states that were part of the Confederacy voted against it.

Henceforth, June 19 (or an alternate date set in years when the 19th falls on a weekend) will be celebrated as Juneteenth, but why? What happened on this day?

It goes back to 1865 in Galveston, Texas. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves in 1863, but until the Civil War ended in 1865, it was not enforced in many places. Slaveholders went on as if the law had not been passed, since they did not consider themselves citizens of the USA. 

“The Emancipation Proclamation was freeing slaves in another country. The Confederacy was a country that had their own flag, their own money. Their headquarters were in Virginia. Jefferson Davis was the president,” says Adonnica Toller, a historian who runs the Eartha M.M. White Historical Museum.

Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant in Virginia in April, 1865, ending the War Between The States, but not until Union Major General Gordon Granger and his troops arrived at Galveston on June 19 of that year did the enslaved learn of their freedom.

To recognize the struggle, the word Juneteenth has been coined, a blend of "June" and "nineteenth." 

I believe that it's good to take time today to reflect on the past and honor our unique history.  As Para LaNell Agboga, museum site coordinator at the George Washington Carver Museum, Cultural and Genealogy Center in Austin, Texas, says, “Our freedoms are fragile, and it doesn’t take much for things to go backward.”

Indeed. 

Sunday Rerun: Put A Stamp On It

 They say that life follows nature, or nature follows life, like a cat follows a fish truck. 

Our estimable Congressman Ruppersberger is demanding an audit of some local post offices that are not delivering mail. And we're not talking about "they missed our delivery last Wednesday" or "my birthday card from Aunt Eliza was a day late." There are neighborhoods in and around Baltimore where people just don't get mail for weeks on end, and they finally go to the post office to pick up their letters and magazines and prescriptions and what-have-you, only to be told "it's out for delivery." And they go home and nothing is delivered. It's infuriating that the efforts of a twice-impeached loser trying to thwart mail-in voting has dismantled a postal system that used to be the best in the world, but there you have it. 

What you don't have is your mail. But intelligent people are going to get it back to normal again.

The only thing slower than getting your birthday card from Aunt Eliza is sending a message in a bottle. This story fascinates me. Natalia Kunowska is a Polish woman who was a student at Krakow's AGH University of Science and Technology in 2011. During a trip to Russia that year, she wrote out a message, put it in a bottle, and tossed it into the Gulf of Finland.

Natalia was part of an international student exchange at the time, and as she put it on Facebook, "I was with my friend at the beach and we came up with the idea to write a letter and throw it into the water." She put a 10-ruble note in the bottle as well, but don't get all excited...10 Russian rubles in 2011 had a value of 17 American cents.

And look here! In just ten short years, she got a reply! 

She said she finally heard last week from a man named Maksim who reported he had found the bottle near where it had been launched a decade earlier.

So, it didn't travel far, but what do you want for 17¢?

"I just got a message with a picture of a bottle and a question asking if I recognized it. I was really shocked," Kunowska said.

It turns out, Maksim is an ecologist, but he said he didn't mind Natalia littering.

I hope they get to be friends or something. I sense a Russian Hallmark movie in this!

The Saturday Picture Show, June 18, 2022

 

As youngsters, we always seemed to have colored pencils to go along with our crayons. My goal was always to learn to draw an acceptable picture of Fred Flintstone. I never reached it.

This week we had a June Strawberry Supermoon up in the sky, and if you're thinking of starting a 1960s tribute band, you could find a worse name than "Strawberry Supermoon."

I love a practical animal, and this fella is a California Scrub Jay, and he carries his lunch around with him!

Homemade Kermit for the yard? Please!

So who can tell me what this picture has to do with country music? Well, it's a scene from the silent movie "Safety Last," and the comedian you see here is Harold Lloyd, one of the great stars of the silent film era. He was so popular back then that in 1933, a couple down in Helena,  Arkansas, named their son Harold Lloyd Jenkins in tribute.  And that son decided to choose a name for himself later on when he became a singer. He picked the name of a town in Arkansas and one in Texas and called himself Conway Twitty. Musical theatre lovers will recall the show and movie "Bye Bye Birdie" whose story revolved around an Elvis-ish singer getting drafted. They called that singer "Conrad Birdie." 

Wherever I went to school or worked, I loved having a locker to keep my stuff (I need a lot of stuff, from pencils to tooth care equipment to Alka Seltzer). But it would set off my OCD to be assigned the one yellow locker in a sea of orange ones.

Nature will find a way to deal with things. This mama made a home for her family out of a tire that once supported a Buick! We evolve.

You know what, 26 years ago, they said the paint would last 25 years...

These "circus peanuts" are only to be called candy if you would also call an opera "entertainment" and falling off a roof "transportation."

In some southern states, faced with a dire shortage of utility linespersons, they have developed a forest where new phone and electric workers literally grow on trees. These guys will be ready to hook up your telco line by mid-July.

My Mourning Jacket

I'm a charter member of the "If It Ain't Yours, Leave It Alone" club, and I wish to extend membership in our ranks to an unidentified 72-year-old woman in Paris.

She went to the Picasso Museum (you get a lot of side-eye there) in Paris, and while enjoying the “Picasso à l’image” exhibition, which is all about showing photos of old Pablo, she came upon a denim jacket hanging on the wall next to a picture of Picasso on the wall.

So she figured someone had left it behind, and instead of leaving it there to be sought by its rightful owner, don't you know she ripped that jacket off!? Took it on home and even had a tailor alter it so it fit her just ever so.

But the jacket was not left behind by any Pierre, Paul ou Jacques...no no no! It was part of artist Oriol Vilanova’s “Old Masters” series. The jacket's pockets were full of photos taken by Vilanova of postcards and examples of Picasso's works around Europe. It was supposed to be "interactive" "art," because museumgoers were supposed to take a picture from the stack of pictures of Picasso's art in a jacket hanging on the wall of a museum showing pictures of Picasso's face.

In the art world, that is the ne plus ultra - the grand slam of arty artfulness. The artist intended it as a statement on mass production.

In third grade, I made an alligator out of clay, painted it, and gleefully gave it to my mother after the teacher fired it in a kiln, so as to make a statement about tiny alligators being displayed on the breasts of polo shirts. I was way ahead of my time in terms of artistic statements.

 

“When the museum told me the work had been stolen, I was surprised, but it was impossible to envisage the story that followed,” Vilanova told the museum staff.

Immediately, trained French art crimebusters swung into action, reviewing the surveillance videos, and seeing clear images of the woman stuffing le jacket into her sac. 

Their years of training and honing deductive skills paid off when the woman came walking back into the museum again in a couple of days. With almost machinelike precision, they said, "There she is!" and she was questioned about it. 

If she had any sense of humor, she would have said she came back looking for the pants to go with her new jacket. But no. The police searched her home, finding the jacket with its sleeves now each a foot shorter.

She says she had no idea the jacket was not up for grabs. Vilanova, who has been showing the jacket in a traveling exhibit since 2017, said he never would have brought it to that museum if he thought he'd be the victim of a crime. 

And the police let the woman go with a warning. She told them she was passionate about art, and also mentioned that she had previously been placed under guardianship.

Just as the jacket should have been!

French toast, anyone?

Water water everywhere sometimes

Even though droughts and climate change are bad for farmers and grocers and people who like to eat, there is always someone who does OK in a crisis situation.

For example: in Europe right now, there are severe weather changes that are ruining crops and costing everyone. But it's to the benefit of archeologists, because loss of water in lakes is giving them access to relics previously unseen.

Case in point: In Spain, there is a megalithic monument called the Dolmen de Guadalperal. It's 7,000 years old, an arrangement of some 144 stones piled up as high as six feet, all in a circular open space.  It's in the province of Cáceres.  And now, blame the drought for crop failures, but this monument that was underwater and out of our view is completely exposed. 

Some call it the “Spanish Stonehenge.” It's sort of a mini-version of the English original, and now it's possible to see it without swimming up to it for the first time in 50 years.

Angel Castaño, president of the local cultural association,  says, “I had seen parts of it peeking out from the water before, but this is the first time I’ve seen it in full. It’s spectacular because you can appreciate the entire complex for the first time in decades.”

Castaños lives in the village of Peraleda de la Mata, and he has known and appreciated this dolmen (that's a megalithic tomb with one large flat stone laid on upright ones, found mainly in Britain and France, according to my Merriam-Webster) all of his days, and the drought has allowed him to get a closer look.  

This particular dolmen wasn't always under the water. It was a German archaeologist by the name of Hugo Obermaier who first excavated it in the mid-1920s. It was left in all its glory until 1963, when some brilliant Spaniards decided to flood it out to build a reservoir and dam on the spot.

Today, people would be able to say, Hold on a minute! and stop people from covering up history in the name of progress.

“You couldn’t believe how many authentic archaeological and historic gems are submerged under Spain’s man-made lakes,” says Bueno Ramirez, a specialist in prehistory at the University of Alcalá.

Something similar was done here in Baltimore County, where the entire town of Warren was flooded out to make room for the Loch Raven Reservoir.  Warren did not have age-old monuments, but there were houses and a mill where people worked.  All that was moved out in 1922 to make room for 23 billion gallons of Gunpowder River water, which is what I am about to drink from right now. See ya tomorrow.

 

Taking It To The Streets

Just in case you thought there was no purpose in painting murals in the middle of street intersections, it's a lot more than just a decorative touch!

Spartanburg, SC

And how about this...they can save lives!

People in Richmond's historically Black Jackson Ward section have noticed that a certain intersection is now safer for both pedestrians and drivers alike since a street mural was added to a crosswalk. The mural salutes the Jackson Ward traditions of Black culture and progress. Episodes of cars slamming on the brakes and other near-accidents are down by 56%!

That's just one example.  A study of cities nationwide is showing far fewer crashes at art intersections now all over the nation.

Visions and his work

Chris Visions is the artist behind the murals in Richmond, and he says "the mural has encouraged pedestrians and motorists to slow down and take safety into consideration,” said Visions, 37.

Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Asphalt Art Initiative is the charity behind all this colorful activity.  There are three crosswalk art projects going on in Richmond, with the work being done by a group of art students from a local arts nonprofit. This Bloomberg group has ponied up the money, $25,000 at a time, to 41 cities since 2019.

And so while they were at it, Bloomberg Philanthropies huddled up with Sam Schwartz Engineering, a traffic consulting firm, to see if the street art was having any effect on safety. The resultant study showed that collisions were far fewer in areas with street art on the street itself.

There is even video evidence showing a 27 percent rise in the rate of motorists letting pedestrians have their right of way, and a 38 percent decline in pedestrians challenging the walk signal.

Janette Sadik-Khan, a principal for Bloomberg Associates and the former commissioner of the New York City Department of Transportation, says the crosswalk art “can improve behavior behind the wheel and it can protect the most vulnerable people on the road.” 

At first, some thought that it might be that brightly painted streets and intersections would cause drivers to be distracted, and in fact, it turns out that the paint increases the visibility of crosswalks and that makes drivers more cautious and alert.

“Not only will these projects do no harm, they can actually prevent harm from happening in the first place,” Sadik-Khan confirmed, pointing out that studies on the topic are few and far between. “This data shows that safer, sustainable streets don’t need to cost millions of dollars.”

She hopes all this information will inspire other towns and cities to consider paints their streets with designs other than post-crime markings. Bloomberg Philanthropies has put out a free Asphalt Art Guide, a how-to book for cities with a yen to beautify the corner of Elm and Main.

Rock and Roll

We were driving along our county's colorful east side when I drove over some debris in the road a couple of years ago, and before long I realized we were taking some of the debris along with us.

We pulled over, looked under the car, and there was a branch wedged up under there, stuck under the fraddistand, near the automatic bungelater. Peggy was able to reach it, so we tossed it into the roadside where, I hope, a family of rabbits is using it as the roof of their new hutch.

You never know what you'll pick up on the road. Why, the Perseverance rover is up there on Mars, and somehow a rock found its way into the rover's left front wheel four months ago, and it's not about to leave! It likes the free ride.

This whole thing makes me think of Howard Wolowitz from the Big Bang, because NASA put a "left hazard avoidance camera" on this vehicle, and you know that's the sort of thing Howard always did on the show.  That camera is sending back pictures of the big Mars rock for us to enjoy.

In the months the rock has been in the wheel, it has traveled 5.3 miles over the bumpy land on Mars as Perseverance explores an ancient lake and river delta that NASA brainiacs call Jezero Crater.

 I don't know what your spring and summer plans are, but the Perseverance is busy drilling into the core of Mars to look at the sedimentary rocks around the delta.  That makes our little garden projects seem sort of small in comparison, when you think those rocks up there were created billions and billions of years ago, when there used to be water on Mars. Martians stopped paying their water bills, and now look! Dry as a box of popcorn.

 

 

The Latest from Giraffic Park

Medical science marches on, or in some cases, prances.  All of us "of a certain age" who have had knee replacements installed do well to recall that 50, 60 years ago, when your knee went bad, it was "tough luck, Charlie." They had no way to give anyone a metal knee or repair the old one, so the patient got to limp around and that was it. And braces were only the answer for some cases.

But, speaking of, there's a fellow named Ara Mirzaian who is the best around at making braces that keep an arm or leg together. He has made braces for Paralympians and for kids unfortunately dealing with scoliosis. Challenges all, but a baby giraffe?

The giraffe calf was born February 1 outside of San Diego at Escondido's Zoo Safari Park.  The poor little critter came into the world with one front leg bending the wrong way. With her mobility hampered, the park staff knew she might die if unable to nurse or walk about her habitat.

Animals of less imposing size had been fitted for braces, but this baby was born 5 feet, 10 inches tall, much like Nicole Kidman. Expert care was called for, so they called for Mr. Mirzaian, who is a prosthetics & orthotics specialist in Encinitas, CA, and he took on his first animal patient.

He told the Associated Press, "It was pretty surreal when I first heard about it. Of course, all I did was go online and study giraffes for like 24/7 until we got out here.” And there he was, fixing Msituni, and I'll get right to the good part: she's walking the walk and talking the talk, as it were, just like the rest of the tower.

(That's the really appropriate name for a bunch of giraffes!)

I don't know why it took so long for medical professionals and veterinarians to collaborate, but they are working out all sorts of prosthetics and 

Zoos increasingly are turning to medical professionals who treat people to find solutions for ailing animals. The collaboration has been especially helpful in the field of prosthetics (artificial body parts) and orthotics (splints and braces).  Down in Tampa, FLA, the zoo met with such professionals and made a 3-D printed beak for a great hornbill bird who had lost his due to cancer.

It happens to be my belief that a kindness to animals is always repaid, so these guys have that going for them!

Sunday Rerun: The Sock Market

 I have to chortle when I see people crying that they refuse to get vaccinated against the dreaded COVID-19 on the grounds that "they" put something in the juice to "track" you, because their cell phones, social media outbursts, and credit card usage don't do enough of that already.

So while you're worried about Bill Gates needing a few extra bucks, so he slips a tracking chip into your vaccine like you're a housecat or something, maybe spend a little time worrying about your socks.

Because, down in Silver Spring, Montgomery County, cops have arrested a man they say was part of a three-man gang that threatened, assaulted, and bound a family with duct tape 18 years ago.

And they nabbed him because he wore socks as gloves during the whole awful crime. And in so doing, he left DNA behind on the socks.

I'm not going to go into the gory details of the crime. I can point you to this article on the Patch if you really want to read all about it.

But just remember this - while you're worried about Bill Gates and Dr Fauci and all the other people who are trying to help this nation and the world get out of this mess, don't try committing a crime while wearing sockgloves (or is the term glovesocks?) because you will get caught and they will send you to a place where the socks are thin and made of polyester.

But on the other hand, if you take the vaccine, you'll still be alive to wear them!

The Saturday Picture Show, June 11, 2022

 

Well, here it is, June, and my first chance to say Autumn will arrive in 102 days, but who's counting? I am.

I'm prowling the local Goodwills looking for a ladderback chair like this for my bathroom. And Eddie wants that little rocking chair, too.

Just so you don't get one confused with the O'Hoolahans' German Shepherd from down the street, this is what a coyote looks like.

You know the building, but not from this angle: it's a low look up to the Empire State Building.

They have bike paths along the waterways where the windmills are in the Netherlands.

It's tea for me, but I know a lot of people feel this way about the java.

These were everywhere a few years ago and now, nowhere. Wonderful Waterfuls!

Jocks and gym teachers (I know we're supposed to call them phys ed teachers) always loved Converse and they still do, but so do the Emo kids. Take a lap, son.

Buddy Holly's glasses were lost in the plane crash that killed him in 1959, and then found that spring when the snow melted in Iowa, then put in a file cabinet until 1980, at which point someone said, "Hey, would anyone be interested in seeing these?" Almost as much as the music, they defined the skinny rocker from Lubbock.

If you like those 50's movie with people running out of the house all dramatically, and combat flashbacks, and chance meetups between two guys who fought the war together, and a dyspeptic judge, this is the movie for you. It's a movie that asks a lot of questions and doesn't hang around to hear the answer.