Jack of all trades

One of my favorite writers was Jack Kerouac, who is always linked to the Beat writers of the 1950s and 60s, although he did not like being called a Beatnik.

Would you?

Kerouac (1922-1969) was unsettled all of his life, roaming from his hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts, and taking on more jobs than the usual amount for one man. He was a sportswriter for the Lowell Sun (a great high school and college athlete, he often found himself sidelined by injury and wrote about the games in which he would have played), he was in and out of the United States Merchant Marine  and the United States Navy (enlistment photo at left), and he worked other odd jobs along the way. He wrote a novel called "The Town And The City" in 1950 and was considered a likely success as a writer. But the book was not a success, and he wound up hitchhiking across the nation, finding himself working as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak, Wyoming, in the summer of 1956.

He hoped that the isolation of being alone in a tall lookout tower in Mount Baker National Forest would provide him a chance to get away from alcohol, drugs, and his boisterous friends, so he could concentrate on his work. He reported for duty, received a week's worth of firefighting training, and packed $45 worth of groceries, but soon found that withdrawing from the world into an endless vista of forest was not the answer to his writer's block. That entire summer, he wrote exactly one letter to his mother, several haikus, and some journal entries. 

When his duty ended in September '56, he got back on the road, and not long after that his world changed from the total solitude of a 30' x 60' tower cab to a situation where he could not find a moment to be alone with his thoughts - which had been his only companion a year before.  

On September 5, 1957, New York Times book critic Gilbert Millstein gave a hearty review to “On the Road,” the book Jack wrote about cross-country travels and adventures. Fame came suddenly. “Jack went to bed obscure,” Kerouac’s girlfriend told a reporter, “and woke up famous.”

He had already written "On The Road" before he took the lookout job, and in just one year found himself on the cover of magazines and the talk of the publishing world. "On The Road" was his peak of both creativity and fame, and although he continued to write until his death in 1969, we can only wonder how that summer changed him. 

Being alone with one's thoughts is beneficial. The constant crush of humanity around us is not. 

Nuts

If you live long enough (so far, so good for me and you!) you will have seen everything old become new again. Styles in hairdids, clothing, manners of speech, and all sorts of things come and go and then come back if you wait around.

So now I see someone saying that "the latest food trend is now surfacing and we can’t help but scratch our heads in thought..." Food trend websites, always the first to report what was hot six months ago, are saying that putting peanuts in your Coca-Cola is a southern delicacy that you need to try.

It works best with a bottle, I think, but the deal is, grab a handful of goobers and let your hand funnel them down the bottle's neck, where they can marinate for a while. You have to use salted peanuts so that the salt can intertwine with the sugary soda, and then after you finish your sweet and savory pop, you get to tilt the bottle back and have a nutty snack! 

 

Or use a glass. It's all good.

And for those who remember classic country music, this was mentioned in Barbara Mandrell's 1981 hit "I Was Country When Country Wasn't Cool." However, I do not recall a time when country wasn't cool.

I didn't know there was even such a thing as The National Peanut Federation, but they say this practice dates back to the 1920s, when workers with dirty hands didn't want to handle their snack, so they just dumped nuts into their Coca-Cola, and away they went to snack heaven.

Two things about all this: the Peanut Federation says this was a Southern deal, but I first came across it at a birthday party for a second-grade classmate name Peter "Twig" Terwilliger, and he was no southerner, no sir.

And sorry, Diet Coke just doesn't get it. Myself, I haven't had a soda pop since 2005, can't stand the sugar, but I drop 'em in my grapefruit seltzer and I go right to town. 

 

Two adults and a large popcorn

For baseball fans, the Baltimore Orioles have a deal where one can get a monthly general admission pass to see the games at Oriole Park at Camden Yards downtown for a set fee. You don't get to sit with the swells down in the box seats, or the corporate people who don't even watch the games from their perches on the Club Level, but that's all right. You'll be out there in the bleachers or the standing area beyond center field and you'll be catching home run balls - and this year, it will be the Orioles hitting them!

And for moviegoers, if you remember the MoviePass deal, well, it went bankrupt in 2020, but it's coming back, with a "tiered price system and credits to use toward movies each month."

Their original sales slant was "Any movie, any theater, anytime you want, for 10 bucks a month" and that sort of tipped the company into the red, with all the movie buffs sitting through "Paul Blart, International Spy" 007 times a day.

Now, MoviePass CEO and co-founder Stacy Spikes says it's going to be better this time. The monthly fee will be $10, $20, or $30, depending on location (obviously seats are higher-priced in New York City than in York, PA), and the credit system...we'll let Spikes explain that...

..."And so, if I want to go only on Friday night of opening weekend, I'm probably going to use the maximum number of credits, if you think of peak and off-peak pricing. But let's say I don't have a problem going to see that movie a few days later on a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday night. I can use far fewer credits because the theaters are more open to allowing a lower price."

Makes sense. And who wants to be packed in on opening night for "Ratatouille, Jr" when we can just as easily go on Monday night?

Spikes goes on to say that MoviePass has changed their business model, too.

Used to be, they paid full price for the tickets they were selling to subscribers, but now, they are cutting deals with theater chains for lower prices.

"Even prior to launch, we've negotiated partnerships with more than 25% of all the theaters. If you take out AMC, Regal and Cinemark, we've got 40% market share outside of the big three," says Mr Spikes.

Now, I'm just a simple man. I don't understand where anyone gets the money to live the way they do in most cases. I see people online hollering that they can't afford to fill their gas tank or their belly, and yet they have cigarette money, tattoo money, trip-to-the-beach money...

So even though movie business went kablooie during the pandemic, people who make the latest movies starring Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, Chris Pine, and Chris Pratt figure we'll have MoviePass money left over too. 

"People like to escape. It's still the least expensive form of out-of-home entertainment there is," Spikes says. "Going to a sporting event or to a Broadway play or to the opera is still going to be a $100-plus ticket. So we think it's a wonderful time to get started again."

My favorite entertainment is still going down to the Try 'N' Save and watching them unload the freight trucks. They'll let you do that for free. And if a case of Hawaiian Punch breaks open, they might even let you have a bottle or two.

The MoviePass website will let you get on the waiting list until tonight at 11:59 PM. After that, they'll start selling passes on or about September 5.

See you in the balcony! I'll bring the Hawaiian Punch!

Sunday Rerun: Your Dogs have collar ID

 On those rare occasions when my beloved and I are both out of the house during the day, we leave the radio on, tuned to WBJC-FM 91.5, where the finest music presenters in town keep the cats happy with vivid, tender classical music. It doesn't take much to please a cat - two meals, some kibble to gnaw on, water, a litter box and some hugs and nuzzles.

It seems that the canine population is the finicky pet! So now Spotify, the music streaming service, has come out with playlists and a special podcast to be played when the hoomans are not home.

Spotify's research showed that 74% of pet owners played music for the pooches when they left the house, and the other 26% let them listen to Rush Limbaugh, although animal rights activists have thrown a penalty flag, charging that is cruelly unusual and unusually cruel.

The podcast will feature soothing music, and - dig this - “dog-directed praise” and "messages of affirmation and reassurance narrated by actors to alleviate stress for dogs who are home alone."

They also said that 25% of dog owners claim to have seen Rover dancing to music.

So, I looked through my playlist for you, and offer you these ideas to start your own Dog Show:

"Snoopy Vs. the Red Baron" - Royal Guardsmen
"Bird Dog" - The Everly Brothers
"Hot Dog" - Led Zeppelin
"Black Dog" - Led Zeppelin
"Can Your Monkey Do the Dog" - Rufus Thomas
"Dog and Butterfly" - Heart
"Who Let The Dogs Out" Baha Men "Get Down" - Gilbert O'Sullivan
"Hey Bulldog" - The Beatles
"Hot Diggity (Dog Ziggity Boom)" - Perry Como
"Hound Dog" - Elvis Presley
"I'll Be Doggone" - Marvin Gaye
"Mr. Bojangles" - Nitty Gritty Dirt Band
"Me And You And a Dog Named Boo" - Lobo
"Puppy Love" - Donny Osmond
"The Return of the Red Baron" - The Royal Guardsmen
"Walkin' My Cat Named Dog" - Norma Tanega
"Hound Dog Man" - Fabian
"Walking the Dog" - Rufus Thomas
"Your Bulldog Drinks Champagne" - Jim Stafford

You should be able to download most of these doggone songs, but if not, try buying the records at a...flea market.

The Saturday Picture Show, August 27, 2022

 

Hey! Don't blame ME! Some city thought this was a nice statue to put up. I don't know.

Robert Frost said, "Good fences make good neighbors," but I wonder if that's true when you can't even SEE your neighbors.

I wonder what Chef Duck is whipping up for breakfast!

Here's this week's free wallpaper in case you have to log on somewhere....

You can really get a good price on these at a chain store.

It fills a little tiny pool for dogs to get a drink. Yesterday was National Dog Day and I hope they all enjoyed it!

Orioles fans are being treated to some really great baseball this summer, and those of us who watch the games on MASN get to enjoy the play-by-play of Kevin Brown and former pitcher Ben McDonald (foreground), as well as their hilarious byplay. It's sure a lot more fun to watch the team when they're winning!

They're riding the New York subway. She's embroidering a new hat for her man, and he's holding the skein of yarn for his woman. Love is love is love.

As an avid reader since Eisenhower was president, I kind of miss the old days when the school librarian signed out our books. The entire concept of libraries thrills me to no end. Imagine, a building full of facts, free for the taking!

Any library will have a few dictionaries on hand where people can learn what an oxymoron is. A good example of one would be "American Spaghetti." And, although it may seem cute to hear the kids call it "basketti," they will be embarrassed when they still call it that at age 29.

Open REALLY wide

We've all known people who just won't go to the dentist...even when they're in pain and chewing aspirin and using baby-teething medicine to stanch the pain...even when they can't even chew pudding without howling in pain...even when their mouth looks like a handful of Corn Nuts (below), they will put it off until it's almost as painful as sitting through a Breaking Bad marathon, and then they go.

So imagine how Madhubala felt, and she WANTED to go, but couldn't get there. I guess you should know that Madhubala is an elephant, a 16-year-old elephant in Pakistan. She had the misery for years, with a dental infection and pain from a broken tusk. Last week, relief at last! She got the treatment she needed - and get this - she was under standing sedation.

Maybe my dentist should try that with me!

Madhubala is one of four African elephants who are being treated in Karachi, Pakistan by eight members from a global animal welfare group called Four Paws. You might have heard of their good work before. In 2020 they moved "the loneliest elephant in the world" - Kaavan - to Cambodia from Islamabad.

It took an order by the Sindh High Court last year in Karachi to allow Four Paws to come in and see about the health needs of the animals. Local animal rights activists had gone to court with concerns about the welfare of the big critters.

 

Madhubala was named after a famous Indian actress. The doctors at the Karachi Zoo had to tape her eyes shut and tie her legs to metal side supports to keep her supported during treatment and recovery.

 

With drills and heavy surgical tools, the veterinarians extracted her broken tusk in bits and pieces.

"Due to long-term inflammation the tissue is so fragile and thin it's not possible to take it out at once; it is breakable," said Dr Marina Ivanova.

Before they started to work, the surgeons did an endoscopy, showing the inside part of the bad tusk to be just over 12 inches in length.

"It's now important for us to focus on postsurgical treatment. The removal of the tusk would open a big wound, so this wound needs daily cleaning," added Dr Ivanova.

The sedation went well, which was good. No one wants to deal with an elephant resisting dental work during a six-hour procedure, and stomping out of the operatory.

"Today we are happy to start the first unique procedure at the Zoo in standing position, not in sleeping or complete anesthesia, as it could be risky for the elephant and could be fatal, which we don't want," team leader Dr Aamir Khalil said.

No word on whether the dentists gave Madhubala a lollipop for being a good patient.

Name It and Claim It

Every high school had them. Back in the day, they were easy to spot: they had slide rules sticking out of their binders. Some even had tiny slide rule tie clasps.

They were the Bill Nyes of all ages, the Science Guys, often found hanging around the chemistry lab or the AV room. They were smart and they knew stuff, and now they run NASA and other agencies that are probing space and all the galaxies, while the rest of us are sitting around trying to figure out new ways of lacing our sneakers.

AND NOW...they are turning to us for help, and I think it's little enough to ask that we give them a hand naming the 20 exoplanetary systems that this Webb telescope has found. 

To get us started, I looked up "exoplanetary," because that word is not a part of my standard lexicon.  An exoplanet is a planet beyond our solar system. So this big telescope is peeping on exoplanetary systems, which are outside planets and their host stars (like Jimmy Fallon or Jimmy Kimmel).  And all of these new discoveries have to be named.

Accordingly, the International Astronomical Union, the fun people who name celestial objects, started the NameExoWorlds 2022 Competition so that you and I and the people who just moved in around the corner have a chance to christen these new exoplanetary systems seen by the telescope.

The IAU (it would be funnier if the acronym were IOU, but these are serious people) wants you to set up a team to work together. We have to create teams of teachers, students, astronomy enthusiasts, or professional or amateur astronomers.

And then, after a team chooses names for one exoplanet and its host star, they have to hold a community outreach event to teach the public about exoplanets. And THEN the team gets to submit a written and video proposal detailing the chosen name and reasons why it should be chosen.

These being busy people, they are not about to sit around watching feature-film length videos or reading long essays. The video has to be three minutes or less, and the essay can't be more than 300 words. They also want a report (<300 words) on the public outreach event, with photos or videos.

The names submitted should have "long-standing cultural, geographic or historical significance." You can submit an indigenous name, but only if your team leader is a member of an Indigenous community.

Better get going, rounding up your squad: names are due by November 11. The winner will be introduced at a huge event hosted by Tony Orlando next March.

Due to an almost total lack of interest on my part, I will not be participating in this contest, so you can have my star name ideas if you wish to enter:

• Ringo Star
• X. O. Planet
• Star Bores
• Mars Bar
• Little Earth
• Houston Astros
• McPlanet
• The Carson Daly Planet
• You Bet Your Astronomy

 

 

 

Raspberry Deluxe

Some people liked The Raspberries, the power-chord pop band from Cleveland from the 1970s. I did! "Go All the Way", "I Wanna Be with You", "Let's Pretend" and "Overnight Sensation (Hit Record)" just say so much about that era. Their leader, Eric Carmen, followed up the success of the group with solo numbers such as "All By Myself", "Never Gonna Fall in Love Again", "Sunrise", "She Did It", and "I Wanna Hear It from Your Lips" that all sound like a Saturday night in the 1980s if you play them today.

Raspberries in the 1970s. Eric Carmen, far left. My father, no lover of their music, once called me because he saw them on the Mike Douglas Show. Dad was awestruck by the incredible bouffant pompadour that Eric's hair squad had sprayed atop his head.

And I enjoy adding some fresh raspberries and blackberries along with the grapefruit wedge that floats in my seltzer, so yessireee, Bob, I do love raspberries. And coming soon....

The Girl Scouts of the USA have announced that a new rookie cookie will be joining their lineup in 2023. They call it the the Raspberry Rally cookie!

What we know about this fundraising cookie is that it will be thin and crispy...sort of a “sister” cookie to everyone's favorite Thin Mints, but instead of mintiness, it will be infused with raspberryness and dipped in the same delicious "chocolaty" coating.

(I guess that means it's not real chocolate, the same that they have to say that Velveeta is not cheese, but "cheese food.")

It's a tad bit early for Girl Scout Cookie season; it's January through April, but you can always go to www.girlscoutcookies.org to leave your name so you can be contacted as soon as your local troop starts trooping this cookie your way.

I like to see this program in action.  As they say. "Girl Scouts learn leadership, problem-solving, and community building through the Girl Scout Cookie Program."

I think that every young person should have a job at some point that involves people handing over their money for something. That's where you really learn some lessons about people - how magnanimous they can, and how stingy.

I've never discussed this with anyone, but I have to feel that a lot of women learned a lot about people by sitting in front of the Try 'n' Save Market at a card table with other Scouts and a mom or two, selling cookies. I've seen people treat them rudely and have heard about people ripping off their money or their merchandise. Maybe we adults could offer a little kindness and support.

 

 

 

There's a big dance Friday night at St Vitus Hall

So, how do you feel about premarital splooting?

Experts are torn.  While many "enlightened" teachers, clergy, parents, and counselors find a little splooting-curiosity to be a perfectly normal part of adolescence, just about the same as learning salacious dances, and flirting with strangers who just happen to be in police custody, more and more authorities are pointing to the rise in Sydenham chorea, also known as St. Vitus dance, and calling it the unwanted fruit of the sploot tree.

Many schools and penal institutions are keeping a closer eye on the 13-17-year-olds who seem to be the most likely to be drawn to seeing what's behind the homeroom buzz about splooting, hoping to stem splootomania before it rips the very fabric of the nation, which is only being held together by some very loosely basted stitches and some surgical staples.

Perhaps it's time now, before school starts back up, to talk to YOUR child, to warn them of the dangers of indiscriminate splooting. Remind them that what seems so innocent beneath the football bleachers on a moonlit night can turn deadly serious when that "All-American" boy suddenly becomes "All hands."

All right, I was only joking, because things get so dumb, it's all I can do. It turns out that some of us, not satisfied with looking into the lives of other humans, are now sitting around fretting about squirrels do in hot weather, which is splooting.

For real. Splooting.

When it gets unholy hot, as it did this summer, you will see squirrels sprawled out on the bellies, propped on their tiny elbows, hugging the earth for all it's worth.

And humans, apparently driven somewhat off their beams by this sight, are posting 40,000+ Instagram images of splooting squirrels, dogs and even cats in the prone position. But we shouldn't worry about it: turns out, this activity is quite healthy for animals, actually, and it's one of the ways they have of cooling down in extreme heat (the other is getting a part-time job in the frozen food aisle at SavSumMor.)

The bellies of many mammals are less furry than the rest of them, making the frontal region a handy way to get some heat burned off, as it were. And we get that solid from to Dan Blumstein, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The New York City Parks Department actually found it necessary to go on Twitter to let anxious New Yorkers know it was time to go back to worrying about the Yankees and leave the animals to do what comes naturally. "If you see a squirrel lying down like this, don't worry it's just fine. On hot days, squirrels keep cool by splooting," tweeted the department.

What WILL we worry about next?

Any way you slice it

In my days, I have spent time with all manner of people, including some very, very intelligent scientific types...people who discuss string theory and evolution and the neuropsychiatric spectrum and how yeast rises to make bread for us, and there is one thing that such people tend to have in common - they are usually dead serious about their science, and never joke about it. At all.

So, it was to my pleasure to read that a French scientist tweeted a photo of a slice of chorizo sausage, claiming it was a picture of a faraway star as taken by the James Webb Space Telescope.

Double humor points for me, because James Webb was the name of my 7th-grade phys ed teacher at the now-dismantled Towsontown Junior High School. Mr. Webb was a man given to looking up at the sky and saying, "No rain today, boys. Let's run out there!"

The Frenchman involved here is one Étienne Klein. He's a well-known physicist and director at France's Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, and something of a zany wit. He is now apologizing for sharing the photo of spicy Spanish sausage on Twitter.  At the time, he went out of his way to praise "the level of detail" it claimed it showed.

"Picture of Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the Sun, located 4.2 light years away from us. It was taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. This level of detail... A new world is unveiled everyday*" is what he said on Twitter to his 91,000 twitterers.

Naturally, everyone in the science community broke their necks to retweet and share the picture, so that everyone could see a good picture of the notably camera-shy Proxima Centauri.

But before they could even finish slicing up the sausage, Klein had to admit that it was all a fausse photo ("fake photo" in French) (I did pay a little attention at Towsontown) of tubular meat.

 "Well, when it's cocktail hour, cognitive bias seem to find plenty to enjoy... Beware of it. According to contemporary cosmology, no object related to Spanish charcuterie exists anywhere else other than on Earth" was his first comment, and  "In view of certain comments, I feel obliged to specify that this tweet showing an alleged picture of Proxima Centauri was a joke. Let's learn to be wary of the arguments from positions of authority as much as the spontaneous eloquence of certain images" was his second.

And then, his third followup said that his intention was "to urge caution regarding images that seem to speak for themselves."

Next, he showed the Cartwheel galaxy, vowing over and over that it was legitimate. 

The question of whether the scientific community will now shun Klein has yet to be answered, and the chances are, we will never know, or even care.

********************************************************************************

*As any Towsontown graduate knows, the biggest problem was that he used the adjective "everyday" in the adverbial sense, where "every day" would be correct.

 

Sunday Rerun: Jan, Jan, Jan!

 Any discussion of "The Brady Bunch" that I get into must contain my firm declaration that I am a Jan Man from day one.  I found Marcia Marcia Marcia annoying annoying annoying, and Cindy was just too young, but I dug Jan for wearing glasses (which she hated) and having freckles (ditto) and for worrying so much about not having a boyfriend that she invented a beau named George Glass. And when she figured she couldn't beat Marcia in the blonde hair department, she went out and put on a marvelous black wig that made her look like a tiny lounge singer.

So, I went for Jan, and Alice, too (although I know I could never come between her and Sam The Butcher) and that's the deal.

Speaking of deals, did you see that Eve Plumb, the actress who played Jan, bought a house with that TV money when she was 11 years old?  A little place on Escondido Beach in Los Angeles, and she plunked down $55,300 for it in 1969, and sold it this summer for $3,900,000...a tidy profit of $3,844,700.  

It's a flat-roofed beachfront bungalow, 850 square feet, and the new owners are planning to install a moon roof and other amenities for beach parties to which they really ought to invite Ms Plumb.

In other news about investment opportunities we all passed by, just imagine if you had spent $2,368 for a brand new Mustang in 1964, and kept that Ford on ice...you'd be drinking the best beer and buying the thickest steaks tonight.  

A dime for the first Superman comic...$956,000.

Where were we when all the great ideas were hatched?

The Saturday Picture Show, August 20, 2022

 

We're starting off this week with two (2!) architectural nightmares. These things happen, yes, but you would think that at some point, the builder would call the architect and say, "Hey, Frank...about this second floor landing..."

"And while I have you, Frank, how about this hideaway tub?" This one sends my claustrophobia through the roof and out of the attic.

Wegman's "carrots, corn, peas, green beans & lima beans," eh? I see two carrot chunks, one lima bean, and zero peas and green beans. They should relabel this "corn surprise"!

And yes, here is another in our popular series "Why women live longer." 

This accidental pumpkin farmer wants you to know he did NOT plant pumpkin seeds, but he did throw a couple of them in the compost pile last Autumn, and nature took over.

For those of you who don't know the term "speakeasy" - during Prohibition in the 1920s when alcohol sales were forbidden due to American hyper -abstemiousness, one could still be served in secret bars called speakeasies, so named because one was asked not to blab about them all over town. The procedure was, knock on the door, someone would open it a bit, and the prospective customer would say, "Joe sent me." This is the same thing...call in your order, knock on the back door, and someone will hand you a x-large with xtra cheese and pepperoni, no questions asked.

This beautiful flutterby was spotted bathing in a puddle in New Jersey.

"Don't go chasing waterfalls, please stick to the rivers and the lakes that you're used to."

I go back to the days when the local fire house was a community asset - a meeting place for groups, a polling place, a place to go in troubled times. I have to think that some firefighter had an extra bike and wanted to share with a kid who needs one.

My hebdomadal reminder that fall is coming, with all its beauty and cool crisp air and apple donuts and hoodies and flurries.

I don't miss work at all

In my dotage, when people just embarking on careers ask me for advice about work, I always recommend being so versatile as to be irreplaceable. In any sort of work situation, be the guy or woman who knows where the key to the paper towel dispenser is hidden, where the files are (and where they should be!), how to order supplies, and so on. 

I heard the story about a radio station engineer who made such a complicated bowl of spaghetti out of the wiring for the transmitter that the top brass said, "We can't let him go! He's the only one who knows how to fix it if we break down."

Job security. It's a wonderful thing.

Now comes this story from Newton, Mass, where a former city employee just doesn't seem to give a fig about the police website.

Fig. Newton. Follow?

Newton is a suburb of Boston. The mayor, Ruthanne Fuller, said they used to have an employee working as the police department information technology director. He threw a monkey wrench into the works and took down the PD website sometime this summer.  The website was set up so that when you clicked on it, you got a message saying to "call Mayor Fuller and ask her to restore it!"

What to do? The employee has total access to the website and refuses to release it to the city, forcing the town to set up a new PD website and shut down the old one. 

The mayor told the Boston Globe that the employee shut down “a vital resource for the residents of the city of Newton.” The unnamed worker told the city that he was leaving the job back in March, but lodged a complaint over being denied $137,000 worth of compensatory time. 

The city refused to pay him back, so he took the website with him when he ankled out the door. Initially, he had said that he was “disheartened by the city’s representation of the facts in this matter” but would work with the city to resolve the problem.

That didn't work out so well.  Add to the advice above: never leave a job without security!

"If It Was Good Enough For Your Grandfather, It's Good Enough For You!"

I have been a fan of leftovers for years! I think there are certain foods that, once cooked and stored overnight in the coolerator, taste even better when microwaved the next day. Pasta dishes and soups, especially, seem to take after the old song, "Love is lovelier, the second time around..."

But here is the grand champion of leftovers! A restaurant called Wattana Pinich, in Bangkok, Thailand, has a big old pot of beef stew always simmering.

Accent on the big, and accent on the old!

It's called neua tune, this beef stew they love in the Thai capital, and it's been bubbling since the owner, Nattapong Kaweenuntawong, was a kid, and that was over 45 years ago. His father taught him the ways of balancing the flavors of a good "hunter's stew." 

It can also be called Perpetual Stew, and the trick is to use some of the yesterday's leftover broth as the base of today's stew. 

“We keep tasting. There is no recipe,” Kaweenuntawong told Channel News Asia.

Into the giant vat go a a secret blend of spices and herbs, stewed beef, raw beef slices, meatballs, tripe, and other edible organs. 

Next time your travels take you to Thailand, head for Wattana Pinich, in the  restaurant and condominium district, and get in line for your new old stew. Tell them I'll be there someday.

 336 338 Ekkemai Rd

Bangkok

Thailand

coordinates: 13.7342, 100.5876 

She's out!

Here's news for those of us who watched the recent Hulu series, “The Girl from Plainville”...

Michelle Carter's probation is over.

Carter, also known as The Scariest-Looking Teenaged Girl In The Whole Wide World, was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in 2017 for encouraging 18-year-old Conrad Roy, her occasional boyfriend, to commit suicide.

Coria Holland, Massachusetts Probation Service communications director, reports  that Carter’s probation ended on Aug. 1.

Carter was under special conditions of probation, and they have ended as well, meaning that she will now be able to profit directly or indirectly from her story, should she choose to.

Other conditions of her 15-month probation included having no contact with the family of Conrad Roy or witnesses, and following the recommendations of a mental health professional, following an ordered evaluation.

It was 2014 when Carter, of Plainfield, Massachusetts, 17 at the time, encouraged young Roy to get back in his truck, filled with carbon monoxide, to complete his threatened suicide. She was tried as a youthful offender.

In 2017, the judge in a bench trial found her guilty, holding that she caused Roy's  death. These communications between the two were done by text messages. The judge noted that she did not use the phone in her hand to notify Roy's family or the police that he was intent on suicide. She did, however, text a friend and say she told Roy to get back in the truck.

Carter was given a 15-month sentence in the Bristol County House of Correction in 2019, and released on good behavior in January 2020 after serving about a year.

In spite of her attorneys pleading that her texts to Roy were constitutionally protected free speech, the Mass. Supreme Judicial Court upheld her conviction, and the the U.S. Supreme Court declined to take up the appeal in 2020.

The case created lanes of discussion all over, with some saying that her encouragement of the young man to prove his devotion to her by ending his life was reckless, illegal, and immoral, and countless television producers coming up with new ways to dramatize the events.

Will it surprise you if Michelle Carter winds up having a show on one of those cable stations most of us don't even know about? 

 

"Talitha, cumi" is in the Bible, Mark 5:41. Jesus spoke this when He raised Jairus’s daughter from the dead.

Note: I post this poem by John Updike every year on the date of Elvis's passing. When I read it in The New Yorker in December, 1999, we were getting ready for the Y2K nonsense, fearing that our computers and water pipes and elevators and clocks were all going to stop at midnight on New Year's Eve. Even so, the words and imagery moved me, then as now.

January 1, 2000 came in as scheduled. We simple believers got up and went to work, still believing in The King. I still do.

From The New Yorker, December 6, 1999

JESUS AND ELVIS



Twenty years after the death, St. Paul

was sending the first of his epistles,

and bits of myth or faithful memory -

multitudes fed on scraps, the dead small girl

told "Talitha, cumi" - were self-assembling

as proto-Gospels.  Twenty years since pills

and chiliburgers did another in,

they gather at Graceland, the simple believers,

the turnpike pilgrims from the sere Midwest,

mother and daughter bleached to look alike,

Marys and Lazaruses, you and me,

brains riddled with song, with hand-tinted visions

of a lovely young man, reckless and cool

as a lily.  He lives. We live. He lives.



                                           John Updike

You Have To Earn It

Baltimore Orioles fans hoping for their team to win two of three games against the Tampa Bay Rays were disappointed yesterday. The Orioles, who find themselves, against all preseason predictions, in the midst of the fight for a postseason playoff spot, lost as Rays pitcher Drew Rasmussen allowed no baserunners at all through eight innings, and then gave up a leaf-off double to Jorge Mateo in the ninth.

Mateo got to third and eventually scored on a wild pitch, so Rasmussen lost his perfect game, his no-hitter and his shutout in a matter of minutes, but the Rays won the game 4-1.

And this baseball game in August of 2022 reminded me of a football game in 2002.

What, you ask? 

It takes 27 consecutive outs to make a perfect game. As the Orioles came to bat in the ninth they were behind 4-0, and winning seemed a totally remote possibility.

But instead of taking three weak swings and folding their tent, the Orioles went at it hard all down the line, and did their best.

The football game that came to mind was between the Green Bay Packers and the New York Giants in January, 2002. Giant defensive end Michael Strahan, now seen daily as an affable host on Good Morning America, was chasing after the individual record for sacks (tackles of the quarterback). 

The opposing quarterback was Brett Favre. The game was almost over with the Packers ahead by nine points, and "for some reason," Favre deviated from the planned play, and staggered around for a moment with no blockers around, because they were playing the play that was supposed to be happening.

Like a house of playing cards, Favre fell to the ground, allowing Strahan to pile on top of him for the "record-setting" sack # 22.5. Packers tight end Bubba Franks, pulling out to block for a running play, could only watch with dismay as his quarterback was tackled with no opposition.

 At the time, Strahan celebrated his accomplishment, but later, he came to see things in a different light. In a 2013 version of "A Football Life," a 2013 documentary produced by the NFL Network, he said, "I caught so much flak over it... It's not worth it, because everyone looks as if one sack that they question is the defining moment of my career," Strahan said.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel columnist Dale Hoffman, put it exactly right, to my mind, in his column after the game:

"Not that Michael Strahan did anything wrong Sunday. He just didn't do enough right to be where he is."

Had Strahan gotten the sack during the time when the game was still competitive, all the glory of the record would have been his. He can't feel good about a sullied title, just as pitcher Rasmussen of the Rays would feel cheated if the Orioles had all taken desultory swings to give him his perfect game.

Everyone should do their best at all times in any job, or accomplishments are devalued. 

 

Sunday Rerun: I've never seen a turkey wrestle, but I've seen a chicken box

 I often reminisce about the time I was a kid visiting a friend's farm up in the country, and met a mad rooster, who was apparently provoked by my wardrobe of cutoff jeans, a striped short and and a beanie with the slogan "Don't Go Away Mad, Just Go Away" on it.

Yes, I was an early member of Mötley Crüe.  And an avid viewer of Tommy Lee Goes To College, for that matter.

I'll be doggoned if that rooster didn't peck me right on the knee! Yow! And I told him as he strutted away that I would take it to the streets, and exact my revenge at every KFC and Popeyes and Wendy's and every other chicken joint in the continental US.

Then I ran to the farmhouse to put some Texas Pete on the abrasion. I was one tough kid, I wanna tell ya.

And I wanna tell you that raising chickens is now a very big deal! We have a wonderful friend who has quite a flock of hens and roosters, and she loves it! Lots of people do, and according to last week's New Yorker, it's the coolest thing out in Silicon Valley to have chickens, although they sort of do things up a lot fancier out there.

These are the people who designed the very screens you are reading this on, and the software to make the pixels spell out these words, and Johan Land is an example of that. He's the lead project manager at Google's Waymo division - that's the self driving car that will be banging up your fender any day now. It would be sooner than that, but Land is wise enough, according to the Washington Post, to work less and enjoy life more.

“It’s a fascinating thing to sit and watch the animals because instead of looking at a screen, you’re looking at the life cycle,” Land told the paper. “It’s very different from the abstract work that I do.”


Yes, because computer screens don't leave manure all over the place! Not literally, anyway.

And Land isn't into this as deeply as some of his techie colleagues, who spend up to $20,000 for a chicken coop and hire personal chefs for old Foghorn Leghorn out there. Land has 13 chickens and three sheep.

So as part of my ongoing effort to share my moneymaking schemes with you, here is today's Big Business Idea: Move to Silicon Valley and sell:

•  live chickens. They shell out (!) $350 for a laying hen that fetches $15 in the real world.
• chicken feed. These people are putting a diet of organic salmon, watermelon and steak out for the chickens, and I bet it's been weeks since I had the salmon/steak/watermelon combo platter.
• veterinary services. You can just imagine if Rhode Island Reds coughs one morning. These people will have you out there looking down his throat in five minutes.
• coops. They are into redwood coops that match their own houses, or chicken "shacks" made of reclaimed materials. They also go for solar panels, automatic doors, electric lights, and video cameras so they can check in on the brood at the office.  Their office, that is. And you can bet those coops have Wi-Fi so the birds can follow their favorite teams...The Eagles, The Cardinals, even the Orioles.

We all do what we can, as we can. If people out there in California have this kind of money to spend to avoid going to KFC, more power to them. And just don't go out there and try to rustle other people's chickens...they don't like a Chicken Pot Pirate.

The Saturday Picture Show, August 13, 2022

With a knife, a marker, and a couple of berries, you can always have company for dinner.

I can see it now in the real estate ads: "Handyman special, sunny and breezy cottage, well-ventilated, on spacious lot"

When you're finished playing checkers, your salad will be ready!

Stick around...the pie crust will be ready soon!

Another sure sign of fall coming up. I don't know if this is a pumpkin, a squash, or a gourd, but I love the colors!

Rodolfo Castro of the Pittsburgh Pirates has to slide on his belly...no need to slide on his butt and break that nice new iPhone...

Owls were popular decorations back in the day. We think they are wise. How do we know that?

Salt is bad for you and adds nothing but salt, but some nice mixed pepper will really add zest!

Have you ever felt like you were surrounded by a bunch of nuts?

Go ahead and pick on Snoopy....listening to records is a great way to spend your time!