Sunday Rerun: ...On the other hand...

 You know the old saying, currently popular in D.C: "the shoe's on the other foot now."  That would really be uncomfortable.  But how about if the pencil's in the other hand?

In my neverending search to find new interesting material to share, my web surfboard washed up on a site called http://hubpages.com/education/Creativity-and-the-Non-dominant-Hand

and this is some fascinating stuff right here.  


This article makes the point, or tries to, that if you are stuck in a mental logjam, or a bucket of strawberry jam, you can get your brain back in gear by...using your other (non-dominant) hand.

Read the article with either hand on the mouse, and see if you think it would work.  

Yessirree Bob! 

Have you ever, for instance, sprained your wrist reaching for a lunch check (laughter) and found yourself unable to use your right hand for mousing purposes for awhile?  I know someone who had shoulder surgery and is currently left-mousing it, and from all indications, it is not easy.  

The article says if you pick up your pen with your other hand and write with just that hand for a week or two, you will:

• soon be writing legibly with the new hand
• have all sorts of new thoughts to write about in your new handwriting
• find that hoodie that you thought you left at the pool but wasn't there when you checked the lost-and-found

And THEN, the article says, if you normally write with your right hand, use that hand to write a question, and write the answer with your newly-trained left hand.

They say it works! To quote from the story: 

 It is allowing that part of your mind, which normally 'switch-boards' through the right-hand side of your brain, access to consciousness via writing. The predominantly 'creative' right hemisphere of the brain, which channels most of our imaginative processes, our sense of rhythm, spatial awareness, our daydreaming, colour and sense of dimension, our 'picturing' and visualization, is thereby made available. The flow is through the right-brain and down through that left hand.

I will leave it to the clinical psychologists among us - and you know who you are - to determine if this is valid.

My plan, since I'm left handed, would be to take that hand and write "What the heck is this consarned reverse-hand foolishness?" and then see what the right hand writes.

It's funny how we always put on the same shoe first, or use the same hand to brush our teeth.  

It works better if you use a toothbrush, you know.

The Saturday Picture Show, July 30, 2022

 

"I know the hot dog and beer guys will be along soon...."

I was telling a friend, one of the most beautiful things to me is to see old steel getting rusty. I love those highway guardrails that are deliberately left untreated so they can rust naturally. It's just a pretty color, for me.

This is either a close-up of some multicolored pasta or an extreme close-up of one of those rubber band balls. Fun either way!

Taco Bell had a dollar-a-taco deal going on one Sunday long ago and one of the guys at 911 volunteered to take a C note over there and come back with a ton of tacos. There were no leftovers.

Oh, the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth the other day when Klondike announced they weren't going to make Choco Tacos anymore, and then everyone realized they hadn't had one since 1997, so go off...

This is tomato time and I hope everyone's crop is flourishing nicely. I love these cherry tomatoes a lot - just drop them in a salad and away you go!

There's no law against going airborne in baseball. Here's Cedric Mullins of the Orioles careering home the other night. After years of lackluster teams, we Baltimore fans have a team worth cheering for now! 

The sunflowers in Austria look great already, and soon the fields around here will wave their brown and gold and we'll all go pose for pictures!

It just wouldn't be New York to just say "No Parking Anytime."

This week's free wallpaper shows why living on a farm offers sights no citydweller can match.

Holey Hell

Here's the kind of story we all like to see: one of those little-man-fighting-the-mighty-corporation tales....

The man here (I have no idea about his size) is one Kent Slaughter. Over the course of ten years, he bought about twelve pairs of socks from Bass Pro Shops.

These were not just any old cheapo socks, you understand. These were RedHead Lifetime Guarantee All-Purpose Wool Socks and up until now, they meant it.

Which is to say, every time Slaughter's socks got threadbare, he would take them back to the  Bass Pro store in Springfield, Mo., and get a free replacement pair, no questions, no hassle.

Until the hassle came along (you knew it would)! Last year, according to the lawsuit Slaughter has filed, they refused, and offered to swap his “lifetime warranty” socks for a pair with a 60-day warranty.

By the way, these are not second-rate socks at all. They sell for $11.99 a pair.

Slaughter's suit says Bass Pro is cheating customers with a “hollow promise” that swaps a lifetime promise for a two-month promise. 

Try that at the altar one day, promising to love, honor and cherish for sixty days.

His class-action lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri asks for a trial by a jury of sock-wearing Wisconsinites...and $5 million in damages.

“This lawsuit is about one simple principle: a corporation’s obligation to tell consumers the truth. Bass Pro Shop made a promise to its customers when it offered its RedHead socks with a lifetime guarantee. Those words should mean something,” says Slaughter's California-based law firm, Singleton Schreiber.

"But it says right there...."

Bass Pro Shops has declined to comment on the allegations, but did point out that they are having a great sale on coolers, fishing rods, and down vests.

In 2018, USA Today said that many retailers have discontinued lifetime guarantees, but Bass Pro continued to trumpet the value of their socks with terms such as "THE LAST SOCK YOU’LL EVER NEED TO BUY," and “backed by our Lifetime Guarantee,” and "customers can return them for a FREE replacement” if they wear out or get holey. 

Well, of course, we're all on Slaughter's side. We need to keep things fair and square. If something says it's guaranteed for two months, so be it, but don't tell me I can get a replacement for the rest of my life and then tell me you didn't think I'd live that long!

 

Judy Judy Judy

I know the current trend when discussing something superannuated is to compare them to Keith Richards, but Keith is not even 80 yet, won't be until next year, and so he can hardly compare in birthday candles to Gorgosaurus, a relative of T. Rex who lived in Montana 76 million years ago.

Many of us know Gorgo from the 1961 film of the same name in which some explorers find a gigantic sea creature and, of course, move him to London (what else would you do with such a beast?) But the monster's mom is enraged to find that her child is being put on exhibit by Dorkin's Circus in Londontowne, so she sets out to bring him home. This Oedipal angle works out well; young Gorgo is pleased that Mommy came to bring him home. Eventually, leaving London and several naval vessels destroyed, the two monsters go home.

Speaking of finding homes...this fossil skeleton of a T. Rex (10  million years older, but who's counting?) is looking for new digs, and if you can pony up 5 to 8 million dollars, he can come home with you.  You'll need a room  to hold a critter 10 feet tall and 22 feet long, so maybe you could clear out that room with the old magazines and VCR tapes.

He's up for grabs, so to speak, at today's Sotheby natural history auction.

He was found in 2018 in the Judith River Formation, which is a place for relics of the Cretaceous Era near Havre, Montana.

All the other Gorgosaurus skeletons live in museums, so if you're interested, today is your lucky day.

I'll be spending my day wondering what people 76,000,000 years from now will think of us when they dig up our skeletons, our cell phones, and the remains of our chicken boxes. Will they know of hot sauce?

 

 

 

 

It's what's for dinner when you don't feel like dinner

In summertime, no one feels like preparing (let alone eating) a big heavy meal with gravy and potatoes and boiled carrots and all that. Toss together a nice green salad and call it dinner.

There's always the standard tossed salad with iceberg lettuce, tomatoes, carrots, radishes, beets, celery, and so forth. Very popular and easy to toss together, although not as much with the grocery store salad bars being closed down 😢😠

We like that kind of salad and we like Caesar salads too, here at the Lazy "C" chuck wagon. You only need romaine lettuce, croutons, anchovies, garlic, Parmesan cheese, and black pepper.

The story is that a restaurant owner named Caesar Cardini was swamped with diners on July 4, 1924, at his restaurant in Tijuana, Mexico. He decided to throw together whatever he could find, and do it tableside in a large wooden bowl, to add a dramatic flair to the dining experience.

I assure you, there will be 37 different versions of that story if you ask 37 different descendants of Caesar Cardini. Does it matter what happened in Mexico? You want dinner tonight. So toss the ingredients above in your large wooden bowl that you got as a gift all those years ago, and add this dressing:

 

INGREDIENTS

2 small garlic cloves, minced and mashed (make a paste by adding little salt)

1 tablespoon anchovy paste

2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice

1 tablespoon Dijon mustard

1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce

1 cup bottled mayonnaise

1/2 cup freshly grated Parmesan

black pepper

 

 

In a bowl, add the mashed and minced garlic paste. To this garlic paste, add the anchovy paste.

Mix both the pastes well together as their flavors merge.

Pour in the lemon juice and stir with a spoon to mix.

Shower on some pepper and then mix well. 

Pour in the Worcestershire sauce along with the Dijon mustard and drop in the cup of mayo. Last, mix in the cheese.

Stir with a large spoon.  The dressing should be thick! Plop some on the salad just before eating and mix it up real nicely. 

 

As Josh Hawley would say, "You can run, but you can't hide."

I wonder how a person can commit a crime in 1975 and walk around until 2022 without being arrested. How does it feel? Do you look over your left shoulder all the time? Do you panic whenever the phone rings or someone knocks at the door? 

And is it almost a relief when that knock comes from someone with handcuffs on their belt and an arrest warrant in their hand? I have to wonder.

I'm not saying this guy is guilty, y'unnerstand, but Lancaster County Police up in Pennsylvania do, so let's see how the trial comes out.  And to think, it was a coffee cup that might have sealed his fate.

Last Sunday, Lancaster County arrested David Sinopoli, 68, and charged him in the 1975 killing of Lindy Sue Biechler. Mrs Biechler was murdered - stabbed to death - at age 19 in the apartment in Lancaster she shared with her husband.

This was a cold case for years, but only because detectives had run down every lead. Never did they give up on solving it, but advanced DNA and genealogy research made Sinopoli became the prime suspect.

"This case was solved with the use of DNA and specifically DNA genealogy and quite honestly without that, I don't know that we would have ever solved it," Lancaster County District Attorney Heather Adams said at news conference.

Sinopoli and Biechler

It was December 5, 1975, when Biechler's aunt and uncle stopped by her apartment in the Spring Manor Apartments in Manor Township to exchange Christmas cookie recipes, and found what Ms Adams described as a horrific scene. The victim was stabbed 19 times. There were defensive wounds, and DNA evidence was gathered, although it would be another ten years before DNA testing became a part of crime detection.

An organization called Parabon NanoLabs solved another cold case, so investigators asked if they could use the evidence from the Biechler case.

Interestingly, that DNA led Parabon to look for people with ancestry around the Gasperina section of Italy. Parabon investigator CeCe Moore found 2,300 people with Italian ancestry in Lancaster County in late 1975.

Examining public records, old newspaper archives, and more, Moore winnowed down the list of candidates, leading her to point to Sinopoli as the lead suspect. Sinopoli had never been thought of as a possible suspect before.

Detectives went to work. They found that Sinopoli had lived in the same apartment complex at the time of the murder.

And he was still living in the area. Police needed a DNA sample to clinch their case, and got one while doing surveillance on him. They followed him to the Philadelphia airport and snagged a coffee cup that he tossed away.

As Lennie Briscoe would have said on "Law & Order," he should have switched to decaf...and taken the cup. DNA match. Bonk bonk.

"This has been a never-ending pursuit of justice for Lindy Sue Biechler that has led us to identifying and arresting David Sinopoli," Adams said. "Lindy Sue Biechler was on the minds of many throughout the years. Certainly law enforcement has never forgotten about her. And this arrest marks the first step in obtaining justice for Lindy Sue Biechler and holding her killer responsible."

Sinopoli is being held without bail on one count of criminal homicide.

 

GoFundMe again

I'm kind of surprised that this case from 2017 is still dragging its way through the court system, but here we are in Pandemia, where everything is not like it used to be, and we are all stocked up on paper towels and toilet paper, but we can't find infant formula or peanut butter.

I asked Google why the Skippy shelf is so empty these days, and the answer I got had to do with Jif peanut butter. They had to recall 47 billion jars of Jif because of potential Salmonella contamination. Now, that sparseness of Jif means people are buying other brands, including my Skippy, resulting in a shortage that's causing a ripple effect on the availability of nutter butter everywhere.

Of course, my fear is that long-time Jiffers will suddenly realize "this is what peanut butter is SUPPOSED to taste like" when they try Skippy, and the shortage will not soon abate. And with school lunches right around the corner, well, Katie bar the door! Some states might even make it illegal to travel across state lines to score goober pâté. 

And I'll be writing this blog from federal prison, serving 5-10 on a peanutter rap.

Speaking of criminals, and things for which there is no shortage ever, here's a story we talked about when it happened five years ago, and there is no shortage of evil schemes people will concoct with the simple goal of separating honest citizens from their money in the name of "charity."

Her name is Katelyn McClure. She was not the mastermind of the dirty deal (her now-ex-boyfriend, Mark D'Amico, is the brains behind the scam scheme that raked in $400,000 with a fake story about a homeless man). McClure, 32, will be a guest of the No-Holiday Inn for a year, and will have to make restitution, and serve three years' supervised release down the road. Next month she will be sentenced on state charges and could get more time behind bars.

 

In 2017, McClure and D'Amico came up with a fable about a homeless veteran named Johnny Bobbitt, Jr. (not to be confused with John Wayne Bobbitt, the victim of an involuntary penectomy). The plan was to tell everyone that McClure had run out of gas near a bridge underpass where Bobbitt was staying, and that Bobbitt had spotted her $20 to get some gas.

The real story was that the three of them had met near a Philadelphia casino to concoct their story.

They spread the word through social media and it was picked up for local and national stories.  You can just imagine how it played on the morning news shows, and it worked! First thing you knew, over 14,000 people of good intention donated to a GoFundMe account in the belief that they were helping Bobbitt.

You know the story: three can keep a secret if two of them are dead. Bobbitt soon became enraged that he wasn't getting duked in on his fair share, so he filed a suit to get a bigger slice.

According to the federal criminal complaint, McClure and D'Amico spent the whole bundle by March of 2018, one casino trips to Las Vegas and one to fabulous New Jersey, a recreational vehicle, and a BMW.

D’Amico, known as the brains of this outfit, pled out in April on federal charges and was sentenced to 27 months in prison, plus he will have to pay the money back and be sentenced on separate state charges next month.

Bobbitt got five years’ probation on state charges and will be sentenced on federal charges next month.

And again, the old lesson about cheating and stealing being wrong rings true. What makes people think they can get away with this sort of crime?

Sunday Rerun: Easy Rider

 The other day there was one of those online brouhahas that I have learned not to take part in, because it hurts my head to see people write things like "Your a moron."  The topic was whether the effete Eastern liberal types disdain people who drive around in pickup trucks.

Maybe some of those hi-falutin' wine-sippin' cheese-eatin' book lovers are that way, but I'm here to tell you, I had three pickups in my day, and I would still have one today except for the guy who drove into a Honda that hit another Honda that hit a Toyota that hit my pick-'em-up and totaled it, as I sat still waiting for a light to change.  I loved all my trucks, and when it was time to haul some top soil or a dozen bags of leaves or mulch or help a buddy move, I was right there.  I always had 4-wheel drive so I could get to work in the snow and mud and rain and ice and whatever nature threw at us.  

I can't say enough about how much I love pickups, and I would still have one, except that after the last one got wrecked, I realized I was getting a little old to haul sofas and entertainment centers around for friends who were relocating, so now I limit my participation to standing around helping to sort socks or frying pans.  Let the firm of Two Guys With A Truck handle the rest.

But that friendly argument started when someone pointed out that the top 3 selling vehicles last year in the USA were the Ford pickup, the Chevy pickup, and the Dodge pickup.

Karl Brauer of Kelley Blue Book says two words explain the appeal of pickups: "Functionality and flexibility," he says. "Everything you need in a big, roomy crew cab."

You can fill the extra seating area with kids or relatives or tools or friends or a picnic basket.  But still, a lot of those trucks being sold are the basic model with no back seat.  

I used to see people buying teeny sportscars and wonder how they hauled home a pile of 2 x 4s they took out of a construction dumpster legally purchased at a hardware store.  They usually said, "What's a 2 x 4?"  

Anyway, is your current ride on the top ten sellers?  Here they are:

1. Ford F-Series pickup  595,656

2. Chevrolet Silverado pickup 425,556

3. Ram 1500 pickup 359,226

4. Toyota Camry  297,453

5. Honda Civic 283,783

6. Toyota Corolla  275,818

7. Honda CR-V   263,493

8. Toyota RAV4   260,380

9. Honda Accord   258,619

10. Nissan Altima 242,321

Source: Autodata

The Saturday Picture Show, July 23, 2022

 

As Godawful hot as it's been in the entire world this week, let us pause and all say the magic word "Blizzard" as one.

I don't know one butterfly from another, except for this guy, the Monarch, and that's because he looks just like the Maryland state flag.

I never once patronized a Fotomat. I would get my pictures printed at KMart, which gave me an excuse for buying a ten-gallon bag of popcorn and a Slush Puppie. And I didn't want to be accused of contributing to the claustrophobia of a minor. 

I know they had to do it for the ad, but the label on this cheese shaker is on  ǝpᴉsdn uʍop.

This is a water tower on Rte. 66 in Groom, Texas, where a man named Ralph Britten operated a truck stop and diner. The deal was, he brought the tower to his location and got it to lean by pushing it with a bulldozer, so that people passing by would pull up and run into the diner in alarm, hollering that the water tower was about to topple over. Ralph would then say, "It's all right, pahdner, come on in and have you sumpin' to eat!"

Life is simply a matter of having the right tools and knowing what to use on what.

We can build lighthouses all we want. Nature can light up the night any time she takes a notion to.

Next winter's wool coats are looking great!

I think that red licorice should be kept around the house in case one needs to caulk a red wall.

I say you turn this old manual typewriter over, knock some of the dirt out of it, and put in a fresh ribbon, and you can really go to town. They don't make them like this anymore. In fact, they don't even make them anymore.

Feuding and Fighting

Call me crazy, but I love keeping up with the news, and so while I cook and eat my eggs and grits in the yawning, I watch The Today Show, CBS Mornings, and Good Morning America, with a dash of Morning In America on News Nation, dipping my spoon into each one just enough to check the temper of the nation as a new day dawns all over the place.

I might be giving up on Morning in America, which used to have Adrienne Bankert as the lone anchor. I think she is great and have followed her since her days on ABC. But now they have sent out to Central Casting and brought in a male anchor named Patrick Patrick or something else so perfectly newsy. He takes away from the show, but no one asked me. I will tell the producers of the show that he is perfectly filling the job of an anchor, because he is dragging the show to a stop.

The anchor teams on CBS (Gayle King, Tony Dokoupil, and Nate Burleson), ABC (Robin Roberts, George Stephanopoulos, and Michael Strahan) and NBC (Savanna Guthrie and Hoda Kotb) are all fine mixes of every good ingredient in the anchor stew recipe. All these teams are augmented by backbench players, strong experienced hard news reporters, lighthearted feature reporters who can find you a story to break your heart and melt it all at once, wacky meteorologists in funny eyeglasses, the whole magilla. If you look across the spectrum of all these folks, you will find someone from just about every social group and background.

So why do we look behind the anchor desk to see if there are any scraps or half-finished grudges?

This was online the other day: "TODAY show fans have noticed some awkward tension during Tuesday's live broadcast.  It comes as claims are being made about hosts Hoda Kotb and Savannah Guthrie feuding behind the scenes."

Now. First off the bat, whoever wrote this is leaning hard on the old trope (false) about women not being able to work together without it turning into a brouhaha. I mean, really. How sexist, how stereotyped.

Second, and also third, I don't care if those two women, or any other twosome on any news broadcast lace on the boxing gloves after the show and go ten rounds in the ring. I worked with enough people (948) in my day to know that not everyone in a workplace likes each other or gets along. In fact, every time I see two coworkers going on about how they are like brothers from different mamas, I want to say whoa! In fact, I have seen two people squabble over who filled out the morning crossword in ink one minute, and then work together in spectacular fashion the next to get a mission accomplished. The fight didn't matter when there was work to be done.

C, why would anyone give a millisecond of thought to this? It might be made up in someone's mind. It might be true. I don't want to know if Hoda and Savannah get along, I will never know if they do, and it does not matter to me. I must say, if they are at odds, they are doing a mighty good job of hiding it, because some people would be tempted to chortle or guffaw at a coworker if they made a mistake or something, and then come back at them with a major eyeroll and say, "What are you, drunk or something?" 

But you don't see that on the news shows.

If you did, the ratings would go sky-high, though. People would stay home from work to see Tony Dokoupil and Nate Burleson arm wrestle at 8:30 AM.

"Hello, CBS? Got an idea..."

The Obit Bit

Yogi Berra once said, "You should always go to other people's funerals, or else they won't come to yours."

The great Yankee sage might have also pointed out that it's better to be nice to your children, since they are the ones who will write your obituary. Most people know that already, but it does not appear that Lawrence Pfaff, Sr. did.

Old Pfaff lived to be 81 but it doesn't look like he did very well being a father. He passed away recently, and his son, Lawrence, Jr. was able to publish the obit he had worked on for the past year or so.

It was published in The Florida Times-Union, and says that Pfaff père was “narcissistic” and an “abusive alcoholic.” Pfaff fils wraps up by saying that the death proves that “evil does eventually die.”

From the obituary:

[Pfaff] is survived by his three children, no four. Oops, five children. Well as of 2022 we believe there is one more that we know about, but there could be more. His love was abundant when it came to himself, but for his children it was limited. From a young age, he was a ladies’ man and an abusive alcoholic, solidifying his commitment to both with the path of destruction he left behind, damaging his adult children, and leaving them broken.

Pfaff spent more than 20 years working for the New York Police Department, it goes on to say, but “because of his alcohol addiction, his Commanding Officer took away his gun and badge, replacing them with a broom until he could get his act together.”

Huffington Post asked the NYPD if the old man ever did get his act together, but received no reply.

Detailing the horror of the old man's days, the younger Pfaff Jr., 58, says his father’s “hobbies” included “abusing his first wife,” and that he “possessed no redeeming qualities for his children, including the ones he knew, and the ‘ones he knew about.’”

Pfaff, Jr. 

It's no exaggeration to say Jr. felt his old man was a first-rate bounder. He said his father walked out on the family when Jr was 9, only to repeat the trend with several other women and their abandoned kids.

It has taken DNA research for Pfaff, Jr. to connect with his brothers and sisters.

In preparation, Pfaff Jr. started writing the obit a year ago, before his father departed this mortal coil, as “a way for me to really cleanse myself and let that part of my life go.”

The Times-Union contacted a sister, Carolyn Compton, who  “grew up in the same household and confirmed Pfaff’s account of their father.”

It's not surprised that Lawrence Jr. has heard from people who appreciated his honesty about the old man.

“I got a call from somebody in St. Augustine that found me and wanted to thank me for posting that because, you know, they had a similar life, and they wanted to be able to do something similar to help heal,” he said. “They just thanked me for, you know, the honesty.”

 I'm sure this has gone a long way to helping the younger Pfaff get over his childhood, so tormented as it was. But he needn't worry about this part: wherever his "dad" is right now, the people in charge know all about this.

 

'Cause you know it don't matter anyway

You remember that song, "Rich Girl," by Hall and Oates? Well, it was not originally about a girl at all.  And Hall and Oates don't like to be called "Hall and Oates." They insist on being referred to as Daryl Hall and John Oates.

Also, Daryl Hall is not his real name. He's Daryl Hohl, so you can see why he went with the pseudonym.

Now that you've had a chance to listen to the song again, here's the scoopy-doo. 

Hall had a girlfriend back then by the name of Sara Allen. She figures prominently in two Hall and Oates classics: "Sara Smile," and "Las Vegas Turnaround," which mentions her being what they called a stewardess then (they're flight attendants now, a much more respectful title.)  Sara contributed lyrics to several H & O songs, as did her late sister Janna Allen, co-writer of "Kiss On My List" and "Private Eyes." 

Before taking up with Hall, Sara's boyfriend was a spoiled restaurant heir named Victor Walker, whose father owned Walker Bros. Original Pancake House in Chicago and a great many KFC franchises. Victor was the sort of young man to whom everything had been given. Hall wrote a song about this pampered pancaker called "Rich Boy," including the line, " "He can rely on the old man's money/he can rely on the old man's money/he's a rich guy."

"But you can't write, 'You're a rich boy' in a song, so I changed it to a girl," Hall told Rolling Stone.

The "Rich Girl" single hit the Billboard Top 40 on February 5, 1977, at number 38 and on March 26 of that year, it became the first of their six number-one singles on Billboard. It wound up as #23 overall on the list of 1977 hits.

 

Hall and Oates made a big deal of not being called Hall and Oates, but in 2015, when the Brooklyn-based Early Bird Food company came out with a snack they called "Haulin' Oats Granola," Hall and Oates sued them. The company was even offering a 25% discount for online orders that used the coupon code #sayitisntso. 

 

And even though they resemble each other enough to be mistaken for brothers, John Oates is NOT the same person as Howard Stern's producer Gary "Baba Booey" Dell'Abate.

Judge Crater

Orioles color commentator (Hall Of Famer) Jim Palmer stuck his foot in the linguistic soup the other day, asking his play-by-play partner Kevin Brown, "Did you ever take a selfie of yourself?"

"Selfie" implies "of oneself," and lately, we're not happy to do that, no sir. We need to have national parks or famous highway signs or flower gardens behind us as we pose.

But I'm here to say, it might be better if we all designate someone to be our "selfie buddy" so they can help us line up the shot, to make sure we don't walk into a bear's den or tumble into a volcano.

It was just a week ago a Baltimorean made worldwide news, and for once, their renown did not come as the result of shooting people. This globetrotter went to Italy and fell into Mount Vesuvius while trying to take a selfie, according to Italian officials.

The guy is 23, so he should be old enough to know better. There he was, hiking along the pumice with his family.  As Baltimoreans will do, they breached the rules and accessed the top of Vesuvius through a trail they were told not to use, say  Naples police. 

So there they were, at the peak of the volcano that destroyed Pompeii in the year 79.  And the man, identified by NBC News as Philip Carroll, reached for his phone to snap that one-in-a-lifetime shot, 4,000 feet up. 

At that moment, he wished he had just gone to Ocean City instead.

But his phone fell into the crater, says Paolo Cappelli, president of the Presidio Permanente Vesuvio, a base for guides at the top of Vesuvius. And when Mr Carroll reached for the cell, he lost his footing and dropped into the crater.

“This morning a tourist for reasons still to be determined … together with his family they ventured on a forbidden path, arrived on the edge of the crater and fell into the mouth of #Vesuvius,” said Gennaro Lametta, a government tourism official, on Facebook.

Cappelli said that a team of guides on the other side of the rim saw that the man “had slipped inside the crater and was in serious trouble.”

“Four volcanological guides were set in motion instantly and, arriving on-site, one of them was lowered with a rope for about 15 meters to allow them to secure the unwary tourist,” Cappelli said, adding that Carroll could have plunged 300 meters, or nearly 1,000 feet, into the crater.

Posting photos, Lametta wrote that the man was unconscious when the guides reached him. Police says the man was given medical care by an ambulance along the mountain trail but refused transport to a hospital.

In 2018, a study by the All India Institute of Medical Sciences found that more than 250 people worldwide had died while taking selfies between 2011 and 2017. Leading cause? drowning, followed by transportation accidents (oncoming train, etc) and falling from heights.

Animal attacks, firearm discharges, and electrocutions followed lower in the list of Ways To Die For A Stupid Selfie.

And here's the hot sauce on top of it all: when you get home, no one wants to see your vacation pictures anyway! Put your phone in your pocket and enjoy the view. You can tell Aunt Mabel all about it when you get home.

Whole lotta shakin' goin' on

Homemade ice cream was a cool (!) thing to do back in the day, sort of group project with the folks next door and the ice cream bucket and some ingredients. It's lucky that summertime is ice cream time; that's when so many fruits and berries are plentiful.

I'm a Breyer's man, myself; there's nothing like their vanilla ice cream, but I stumbled across a home recipe that you may want to try. Let me know how it comes out and I will come running with my spoon in hand!

This is from the delish website, and they say you don't need tubs and churns and all that. Just get a big mason jar, pour in a cup of heavy cream, 1 1/2 tablespoons of sugar, half a teaspoon of vanilla extract, and a pinch of salt.

Tighten the lid and start shaking! The jar, not yourself.

This is a good time to use up the extra energy of people around the house, because you have to shake that jar vigorously for about five minutes. You can take turns, passing the jar around. Maybe someone you know has one of those hardware store paint shakers! But shake like there's no tomorrow for your five minutes.

Once you notice that the mixture is twice the size as when you started the shake, put a wooden spoon in the jar. If it comes out with its back coated, you're good to go! Put the jar in the freezer for about three hours. Just before you do that, add your berries or peach slices and then sit around for three hours anticipating a real treat for yourself.

You earned it, with all that shaking!

Blank space

 There's no Sunday Rerun for today, on acct. of the simple fact that I never got around to posting one.

And there was a time long ago when making a mistake like that would have caused me to put on an emotional hairshirt, burdening myself with guilt and recriminations all the day long.

But here I sit early on a Sunday morning sipping a cup of tea. We have friends who have been terribly inconvenienced by not having electricity since Tuesday's storm tore half the county all up. We have friends in dire circumstances, friends facing awful medical sadness, and friends with hearts torn asunder.

And we have friends who help friends deal with their pains and sorrows, friends whose souls light up the world with love and joy.

On balance, I don't have anything to complain about, and I'm no longer willing to lock myself in a pillory for making a mistake. I've made plenty of them over the years and will continue to do so!

And what am I going to do about it? 

I'm going to smile and try again.

I love to share pictures of interesting people, places, and things. Here's one of Barron Trump interacting with normal-sized people. 

The Saturday Picture Show, July 16, 2022

 

In Alfred Noyes's "The Highwayman," "The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas..." This is just how I picture that ship in daylight.

This is the Public Market in Seattle. The water on the street makes it appear that the neon is leaking.

Today's free wallpaper is familiar to those of us who used old paper grocery bags to cover our textbooks.

"Well, my father was a mechanic. His father was a mechanic. My mother's father was a mechanic. My three brothers are mechanics. Four uncles on my father's side are mechanics." The great Marisa Tomei from "My Cousin Vinny." By the way, her father in real life is Gary Tomei...a trial lawyer.

As sunset comes to Port Huron, Michigan...(sounds like a Hallmark movie, right?)

We were just talking about this the other day...there CAN be too much of a good thing.

Beach huts are a cool way to go!

Tuesday afternoon, late, we had storms through Baltimore, Harford, and Cecil Counties.  Many neighborhoods saw people pulling together to clear the way for traffic and the electric utility people to come and help. Once again, we saw the mighty power of nature. Glad to say there were no injuries!

Interesting! This is called Blue Lake, and it's in Imotski, Croatia. Pretty water, but no parking.

I can always count on The New Yorker for interesting content and great cover art. Towel and bathing suits on the line! Perfect for July.

The Real GOATs

Sometimes, the old ways are the best ways.

When my parents moved us to what was then a very bucolic area of Baltimore County in 1955 (where they had just gotten electricity twenty years before!) the yard was completely overgrown with weeds, grasses, bermudagrass, wiregrass, curly dock, burdock, crabgrass, Canada thistle, mugwort, poison ivy, and you know all the rest. 

I think Dad was thinking about hiring a airplane to fly over and drop some benign defoliant when the farmer across the dell (I couldn't resist) came over with a long rope in hand and a goat tied to the other end. "Just tie him up to that tree," he said, indicating a mighty Juglans nigra that was to drop tasty black walnuts on the yard for years, "and I'll be back next week to round him up."

I know the legend is that goats will eat anything that comes out of the earth. True! This goat gnawed his way through that foliage in no time at all, and the next thing I know, grass replaced the weeds, and I, with a lawn mower, replaced the goat.

So I was glad to see that New York City realized that goats could help them with their problem in Riverside Park. They brought down twenty of them to the park from Green Goats Farm in Rhinebeck, NY, to bring chemical-free weed removal to the Big Green Apple.

John Herrold, interim president and chief executive of the Riverside Park Conservancy, was pointing out to a reporter the other day "the steepest river bank east of the Palisades." 

"Imagine trying to keep your balance while you're pulling out invasive plants so that you can plant native species that will better hold the soil and provide better habitat for the wildlife."

(A side note: Italy being a country full of steep rocky hills, cows do not do well grazing there, but goats thrive, which is why the original ricotta and other Italian cheeses come from goat milk).

And what's more, goats are hungry dudes! They don't discriminate a bit! "They love this stuff," Herrold says. "They eat poison ivy, they eat the porcelain berry, they eat the multiflora rose and that's what we're trying to get rid of."

To use modern office parlance, the twenty goats have been tasked with chawing their way through two acres of Riverside Park by the end of summer. I will try to get a report and let you know how they do!

 

Free advice is worth the price

I have known several people who made nice livings, or part-time money, working as strippers.

Of course, stripping is best done out of doors, since it involves chemicals. There are several products one can use for stripping at home...

Wait a minute. Did you think we were talking about removing our clothes in front of people for money or something? I was talking about taking an old desk or bureau or kitchen table, and removing the layers of paint and lacquer and starting over fresh. That's furniture stripping! You should see them go to work on an old etagere with their chemicals. Some even use Easy-Off oven cleaner. But the chemicals reduce the old layers to a goop which they wipe off and get ready to refinish. It's quite an art.

But furniture strippers work hard all day long, and don't have time to listen to financial guidance, which is why people "in the know" say the OTHER kind of strippers are better at forecasting the stock market than most people.

I wouldn't take advice on how to compose a message in English from this @botticellibimbo person, but she says we are in a depression now, and bases this on how many strip clubs are empty.

Ms Bimbo explains, “the strip club is sadly a leading indicator and i can promise ya’ll we r in a recession lmao.”

Here's a tip: don't listen too much to people who actually type "y'all." It's overdone.

Her post was written in May, and it's gotten tons of likes and retweets since.

She also says that strip clubs have been “an operative tool” for business people, not just a source of ‘sinful’ entertainment. 

 Apparently, a lot of business talk happens at "gentlemen's" clubs. 

I thought that's what golf was for.

She goes on to say that in her line of work,  “we always have to be aware of fluctuations in the market and how upper class men are behaving and spending their money...we have to be aware of how rich people are going to spend their money, stripping is betting on how the rich spend their money.”

She even gets religious for a moment, pointing out that the money really flows in these clubs around the time of year when we celebrate Christmas. How quaint!

The tweets end with her saying, with naught but anecdotal evidence, that "every single stripper I know is a better trend forecaster than any finance bro or marketing exec.”

Well, now, that cinches it for me. Next time I have a windfall to invest, I'll just head on down to Starbutts or The Bare Trap and receive worthwhile investment counseling. Then on the way home I'll stop off at Madame Bazinga's to have my palm read.

 

  

You just got nine months older

We try to keep it fairly light here at Castles In The Sand, but we view things with an even eye. Things are either one way, or they aren't. 

F'rinstance, it is thoroughly illegal to hold up a bank, and no legislature would dream of passing a law that makes it legal for people who have lost their jobs through no fault of their own to stop by at the First National and withdraw enough at gunpoint to see them through.

Zoning laws exist to keep your crazy neighbor from turning his backyard into an auto graveyard.

And there is but one speed limit on each road or highway, so even though you are piloting a really hot vintage Mustang around the Beltway, you don't get to make that trip at 130 miles per hour just because you're so cool and all.

So when they changed the laws to say that an as-yet unborn fetus is a human being, does that mean that a fetus is a human when the Eyes of Texas are upon it?

That's the question Brandy Bettone, of Plano, TX, is asking. She got a ticket for driving "alone" in the High Occupancy Vehicle lane on US 75 last week. HOV lanes mean there has to be more than just the driver in the car; it's a fillip to get people to carpool and get fewer cars on certain roads.

So there went Brandy, on the way to pick up her son, and she was pulled over at a checkpoint for being alone. 

"I was driving to pick up my son. I knew I couldn't be a minute late, so I took the HOV lane," Bettone told the news down there. "As I exited the HOV, there was a checkpoint at the end of the exit. I slammed on my brakes and I was pulled over by police."

The police asked Ms Bettone if there were more people in the car. She is soon to give birth to a daughter, is Ms Bettone, so she said her daughter was in the car  with her.

 "I pointed to my stomach and said, 'My baby girl is right here. She is a person,'" Bettone recounts, but the police wouldn't have it: "He said, 'Oh, no. It's got to be two people outside of the body.'"

She pled her case with several of the cops on the scene. One of them told her to take the citation and plead her case in court, and... 

"One kind of brushed me off when I mentioned this is a living child, according to everything that's going on with the overturning of Roe v. Wade. 'So I don't know why you're not seeing that,' I said," Bettone says. "He was like, 'I don't want to deal with this....Ma'am, it means two persons outside of the body."

She drove off with a $215 ticket. The officer who wrote it told her it would most likely be dropped if she fought it in court. The Dallas County Sheriff Department has had no official comment on the case.

In Texas, the presence of a fetal heartbeat is now the definition of "an unborn human individual," and thereby hangs her case. If we are human at the moment of conception, then a pregnant woman is accompanied by a living human at all times, and, clearly, that satisfies the HOV requirements, so Ms Bettone is innocent.

And my June 30 birthday will now be celebrated on October 30, effective immediately.