Happy Halloween!

 Charles Addams's New Yorker Magazine cover, October 30, 1989...

Sunday Rerun: Sweet Deal

 

At the first location of the Lazy "C" Ranch, we used to get a veritable army of trick-or-treaters every year on Halloween (and some for other holidays as well.) There were so many that we took to sitting on the tailgate of my old pick-'em-up truck, having a pizza for dinner and passing out the Butterfingers and Mounds and I don't know what-all else.

In fact, I can tell you for sure that it rained like a monsoon around here on Halloween 1993, because that was the year I had a whole winter full of Butterfingers, Mounds, and I still don't know what-all else.  Spring of 1994 meant lots of long walks and exercise, I know that, too.

But now, we live up a hill on a court without youngsters at all. Some people come from around the corner, but we hardly get any wandering hobgoblins at all. I'll get a few treats ready, and if we're faced with an unforeseen onslaught, I guess I can always hand out canned goods from the pantry.

According to an article I read while I should have been doing other stuff, our candy-makin' sweeties figure that Americans will spend $2.7 billion just on Halloween candy this year.  That's $2,700,000 on Hershey bars, "Reesie's" Peanut Butter Cups (that's how we say it in Baltimore, hon) and candy corn. I wonder how much of that goes for fake wax lips and those marshmallow "Circus peanuts" made of pastel marshmallow.

They break it down state by state, and it seems that in Maryland, Milky Way bars are the #1 Halloween candy, followed by "Reesie's" and Blow Pops. Blow Pops, for crying out loud, are two! two! candies in one.  Like Certs used to be both a breath mint and a candy, Blow Pops are a lollipop candy that encases bubble gum, and they replaced Skittles as the third-place candy in our state this year.

Mary Janes, Bonomo's Turkish Taffy and Sugar Daddy, all the stuff that I am currently paying a dentist to repair, are nowhere on the list anymore.  But neither are those dumb wax lips.

And by the way, I really like this new trend. Houses that will have non-food treats (stickers, stamps, snap bracelets, glo-stick toys) for kids with food allergies are self-designating by putting out a teal-colored pumpkin. Fun for all! 

The Saturday Picture Show, October 29, 2022

 

Free wallpaper for today could also be a placemat for Halloween dinner!

Up north, here, we are used to seeing hay and straw rolled in big bales like these, but this is cotton from those old cotton fields back home. And you know, when those cotton balls get rotten, you can't pick very much cotton!

This is Autumn in New York City, and it just dawned on me that the average denizen of The City That Never Sleeps does not have a leaf rake. Hmmm. I guess they just let them all get blown over to New Jersey.

You know, if I wanted to, I could fill this space every week with hilarious spelling boo-boos, but prudence forbids. I couldn't resist showing you this one that spell check totally approved! Whoever fills this job will have to have a great recipe for Indian pudding.

I think we all got a few of these in our trick or treat bags, a wax harmonica to drive your parents with for a few days, and then you got to chew on it to drive your dentist crazy.

The disgraced, twice-defeated former politician was slightly embarrassed at the low turnout for his rally, but still, he bloviated for several hours.

A cool thing about living near an ocean shore is that you get to see things that wash ashore, having been dilapidated by being tossed by waves and bumping into whatever is down there in Davey Jones's locker. If this brick could talk...

A well-used pair of ice skates is always a fun winter decoration. 

Here's someone who just had to take his support rabbit with him for a walk in the sun.

Who was the coolest guy in 7-C that year?

Tell the teacher we're surfing

I always thought that no day at work should go by without at least one laugh. And I used to love leaving gag messages for other people in other offices, such as "Just tell her I have arrived in Venice to find the streets flooded. What to do?"  

I only steal from the best. That one was from Robert Benchley. 

Now, about the real things going on in Venice: the mayor over there got up a search to for two unidentified miscreants who were using motorized surfboards to zip around the canals over there. These two jokers turned out to be Australian tourists who left a lot of commotion in their wake. And now the mayor wants them to be assessed big fines.

Mayor Luigi Brugnaro called them "imbeciles"  and said they were making a mockery of Venice.

Hizzoner had a great way to round up these surfin' dudes: he offered a free Italian dinner to anyone who could help bring the pair to justice.

"Venice is NOT Disneyland," the mayor wrote on a post showing video of the No Beach Boys hanging ten under an arched bridge in the city's serenely beautiful Grand Canal.

It didn't take long for the two to be arrested, their boards seized, and trials looming.

According to the local newspaper, La Nuova di Venezia e Mestre, the two Popeyes received fines of 1,500 euros (about $1,509), and still the mayor wants them tried for the crime of harming Venice's image.

Four years ago, Venice passed a new law forbidding personal watercraft such as paddleboards and kayaks from its municipal waterways. The gondolas and vaporetti (water buses) could hardly make their way around for all the tiny crafts afloat.

In our country, any time there is flooding or high tides due to hurricanes and whatnot, a large contingent of people with kayaks, surfboards, rafts, and canoes just about break their necks to get out on that extra water. 

Why they do this, we may never know. 

  

Son Of An Itch

Joni Mitchell had an album in 1975 with the title song "The Hissing Of Summer Lawns," and for years, I have kept the secret to myself. 

But now it can be revealed. The hissing comes from the mosquitoes, the dreadful little bloodsuckers that buzz all summer long, drinking human blood and leaving an itch behind.  

And at long last, science has found the time to prove that some of us are "mosquito magnets" as we have long surmised. We all know guys and gals who can stand around outside every August eve and come back inside with nothing but a belly full of beer and burgers, while some of us can come under attack just by hauling the recycling out to the curb.

I'm in the second group.

And science says it all comes back to how I smell. Researches say those of us to whom the bugs are really attracted have certain chemicals on our skin.  AND! your "attractiveness" does not fade away over the years.

“If you have high levels of this stuff on your skin, you’re going to be the one at the picnic getting all the bites,” said Leslie Vosshall, who's a neurobiologist at Rockefeller University in New York, and an author of this report.

The science journal "Cell" released the findings last week of a test that matched people's scents against each other in terms of how much 'skeeters like to munch on them.

Study author Maria Elena De Obaldia rounded up 64 volunteers and had them put nylon stockings on their forearms to trap their individual smells. The stockings were then put in separate traps in a long tube, and mosquitoes were let loose to go after the smells they love the most.

“They would basically swarm to the most attractive subjects,” De Obaldia said. “It became very obvious right away.”

Scientists, always looking for a fun game, set up a tournament of sorts, and found that the "winning" smell was 100 times more attractive to bugs than the least popular.

And then they tested the same people again and again over the years and got the same results, so there you have it. You can take a bath and you can powder yourself all up, and these consarned critters will make a beeline for you just the same. 

“Mosquito magnets seem to remain mosquito magnets,” DeGennaro said.

It seems that it's the greasy molecules that serve to moisturize our skin that attract the stingers.  And Ms Vosshall says you can’t get rid of these acid molecules without damaging your skin health.

So, you can't win if you're among the ones that the bugs go for. Stay inside with me and watch the ball game, be my advice. 

 

Anglers' angles

Cheating takes place all the time in sports, even more than we think. The Houston Astros stole a page from the cheater's manual when they tipped their batters off to what sort of pitch was coming in the 2017 and 2018 seasons. This was done in much the same fashion by the 1951 New York Giants: someone would watch to see the catcher's signals and then relay the purloined information to the hitter.

In football, Tom Brady can tell you, the best way to cheat is to have someone deflate the other team's footballs. 

Let's face it: as long as there are humans involved in any gainful activity, someone will look for a corner to cut. But surely no one involved in the time-honored sport of fishing, the classic Huckleberry Finn activity where a kid and his dad bond over a bamboo pole, some string, and a bent pin, would do anything so dastardly as to cheat in a fishing tournament, right?

Hold the presses. Officials in Ohio are saying that  Jake Runyan and Chase Cominsky won a pro fishing tournament with a $30,000 purse by stuffing their fish, not with crabmeat, but with weights. They have been indicted; each of them faces three felony charges.

 

The charges are for cheating, attempted grand theft, and possession of criminal tools. The Cuyahoga County prosecutor has filed fifth-degree felony charges that could land these jokers in the Walled-Off Astoria for a year, with $2500 in fines to boot.

 Prosecutor Michael C. O'Malley said,  "I take all crime very seriously, and I believe what these two individuals attempted to do was not only dishonorable but also criminal."

The prosecutor really took a deep dive into the charges he could lodge, adding on top a misdemeanor count of unlawful ownership of wild animals, because they allegedly had raw fish filets on their boat. Their fishing licenses could be suspended indefinitely if they are guilty on the filet rap

It all happened at the Lake Erie Walleye Trail tournament in Cleveland. A routine inspection of the fish they submitted showed lead weights and fish filets shoved down the gullets. Before their stupid scheme was detected, they were set to win the competition and be named Team Of The Year and split a sway of $28, 760.

The scales (!) of justice started turning when someone noticed that the fish they claimed to have caught seemed to weigh a lot more than others of that size. Judges cut the walleyes open, and out came the hardware while the other fishermen howled and carped, their hopes of winning floundering.

"We got weights in fish!" declared Jason Fischer, director of the Lake Erie Walleye Trail fishing tournament.

Some of us who have no interest in fish that don't come from a supermarket seafood counter packed in ice might find it hard to believe that something is fishy with these tournaments, but these contests are a big deal to a lot of people. Runyan and Cominsky claimed to have won more than $300,000 last year - but that was when one of them failed a tournament's polygraph test and had to return some of his ill-gained loot.

I have the same question I have all the time in these matters: how do these people go home and face their friends and families in the wake of such perfidy?

I could do that!

You've seen the memes that say, "The perfect sandwich (or mate, or car, or cell phone, whatever) doesn't exis....." and then they show you a picture of perfection in sandwich form...

Well, as a happy retiree, I am not looking for another job, but if I were....I would do like Shoji Morimoto is doing.

Shoji, 38, lives and "works" in Tokyo, getting paid pretty well to do pretty much nothing. To be specific, he charges 10,000 yen ($71) for bookings to go places with clients and just be a boon companion.

"Basically, I rent myself out. My job is to be wherever my clients want me to be and to do nothing in particular," is how Morimoto says it. He points out that ove the last four years, he has been a companion 4,000 times.  That's $284,000 all told, or $71,000 a year - righteous bucks for no real work at all.

I know Jared Kushner makes more than that for doing nothing, but it's all in whom you know.

Morimoto gets most of his clients from Twitter, where he almost has a quarter of a million followers. Some of his business is from repeat customers. One person has hired him 70 times.

One time, he went to a park to totter back and forth on a see-saw with someone who needed someone on the other end. One time, he went to a train station to give a send-off to a stranger who wanted a proper goodbye.

And there are limits to doing nothing, including moving a refrigerator (good idea! I messed up my back for four months doing that!) and going to Cambodia. Also, he strictly nixes any work of a sexual nature.

We do-nothings are nothing without our standards!

Recently, the job involved sitting with Aruna Chida, who is a data analyst. She wanted to wear her traditional Indian sari out in public but was afraid her friends would be embarrassed, so for $71, she had tea and cake with Morimoto. 

"With my friends I feel I have to entertain them, but with the rental-guy (Morimoto) I don't feel the need to be chatty," she said.

In Morimito's job history is a job where he worked at a publishing company and kept getting hollered at for doing nothing, so..."I started wondering what would happen if I provided my ability to 'do nothing' as a service to clients," he says.

Morimoto supports a wife and child with this job and averages one or two clients a day, down from three or four pre-pandemic, but so is everything else.

"People tend to think that my 'doing nothing' is valuable because it is useful (for others) ... But it's fine to really not do anything. People do not have to be useful in any specific way." - Shoji Morimoto

 

 

 

 

Teacher, teacher

 I'm certain that no teacher who ever endured my Punchinello classroom antics would have done this, but out in California, a teenaged male who disappeared in 2020 has been found living with a teacher.  

A California public school teacher has been arrested after she concealed the disappearance of a teenage boy for two years, the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office said Friday. She's under arrest, so at least her students will have the experience of having a substitute for the near future.

The kid was 15, according to his guardian Katte Smith, when he left home in Rancho Cordova following a fight with others in the family.  “He felt like the grass was greener on the other side,” Smith said. 

That was May, 2020, and he did not turn up until this past March, although the family with whom he lives and the local police tried to locate him.  He showed up at the house and asked to move back in, is what happened.

Last week, the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office charged Holga Castillo Olivares, 61, with keeping the boy hidden.  Olivares is a second-grade teacher at the Alice Birney Waldorf-Inspired K-8 School. According to the boy, whose identity is not given in news reports, Olivares is the mother of one of his friends. 

Charges for Olivares include detention of a minor with intent to conceal from a parent (a felony), and contributing to the delinquency of a minor, (a misdemeanor). She spent this past weekend in the Sacramento County Main Jail, ineligible for bail, and will be in court this afternoon.

The hoosegow the teacher called home this weekend

Olivares is on leave, according to the Sacramento City Unified School District, while their investigation continues.

“We felt so robbed of all this time with him. You can’t just hide someone’s kid and think that’s OK,” Ms Smith told station KCRA.

I mean, you have to wonder what kind of teacher, let alone what kind of woman, this Olivares is, to think she can harbor a troubled teen as if he were a runaway Labrador Retriever. I am certain the topic of how wrong that would be came up during one or more of her education classes at whatever college she attended.

 

Sunday Rerun: National Velvet

 Somehow I will have to make sure that Peggy does not pick up the book I am reading these days and start reading it.  

Just the right thickness for a wobbly chair leg

It's the autobiography of the noted actor, raconteur, Hollywood swinger and tanmaster George Hamilton.  "Don't Mind If I Do" tells the tale of the life of a man chiefly famous for being famous...sort of the male version of the Gabor sisters, without all that acting talent.  I picked this book up at Barnes & Noble on their reduced rack for $5.98, because I was interested in reading about just how it is that he became an actor, and also because the book looked so lonesome, sitting there atop a gigantic stack of other copies of itself. 


And I'm not even that far into it, to tell you the truth. I've read up the part where his mother, having left his father, supports herself by striking up friendships with Hollywood notables such as Hoagy Carmichael.  

I am telling you, there is a world out there in which people do such things.  Then again, there is a world out there in which people used to be able to spend their vacation at Twitty City, the Hendersonville TN home of country music legend Conway

Conway Twitty (1933 - 1993)

Twitty.  And after paying the admission charge, fans were able to roam the grounds and visit the mansion wherein dwelt the man born Harold Lloyd Jenkins.  Fans could even enter his house and walk around in there.  Sure, there were velvet ropes set up to keep people from entering the bathroom while the great man loofahed his back, but they say that one could actually stand right outside the dining area and watch Conway spooning Shredded Wheat down his neck in the morning.  

And people planned their vacations to be in Twitty City for this.

George Hamilton IV

You ask how in the world does Conway Twitty have anything to do with George Hamilton, and you might think I am confusing Hamilton with George
Hamilton IV, the country singer from North Carolina who had such a big hit with "A Rose and a Baby Ruth" in 1956.  But no.  Here's the angle:


Hamilton had an older brother Bill who was interested in decorating and had a real flair for design.  His mother let Bill decorate their apartment in New York, and Bill got the idea to put one of those velvet ropes in front of the door to a rarely-used closet.  People walking by were to get the impression that the door led to another whole area of the apartment, but it was currently closed for renovation: hence the velvet rope.

I'm not kidding you.  There are people who actually think like that, deceiving people into thinking there is more to   them than the eye can see at first glance. And the velvet rope is all that stands between them and reality. Then there are people who will cluster on the east side of a velvet rope while Conway Twitty goes about his life on the west side.  

I just don't think that Conway would have fronted in any way.  He seemed like a what-you-see-is-what-you-get kind of guy.  Hamilton comes from that there-must-be-more-to-see-than-just-this school of thought.  

I think I prefer the Conway.

The Saturday Picture Show, October 22, 2022

 

I like to remind everyone every so often that the first monument to George Washington was built here in Baltimore's Mount Vernon neighborhood, and opened in 1815. I think there's one in Washington, D.C. as well.

If you're a really great poet, you will find out exactly what words are worth.

I'm always shocked when I hear of people who say they don't like coconut! Myself, I love it!

The Dublin, Ohio, Fire Department numbers among its members one or more creative types who can make a hose really seem to come to life!

I never had one of these, but they were the coolest thing before tapes and mp3 players...a record player for the car that played 45s. I wonder if anyone ever slammed into the back of the Rambler in front of them while sliding out a Paul Revere And The Raiders record to insert Jan & Dean.

It hasn't happened here yet, and it sure doesn't look like it will this weekend, but here's how cool it looks when it snows on top of changing leaves!

In our country, we look at this and it doesn't even register, how much courage it takes for an Iranian woman to walk past a mullah on the street while not wearing the approved headscarf. The tragedy in that nation is what happens when religion replaces civil government.

It happens to us all.

Well, now, I guess if you have a really expensive purse, you want to keep it covered so it doesn't get worn-looking. So, put it in an acrylic case. But what about if the acrylic case gets smudgy? Put it all in a bigger case? This could go on forever. 

This is a homemade scarf knitted by Emily Ann Meyer of New Windsor, MD to salute the Baltimore Orioles on their great 2022 season. She knitted three lines after each game - all 162 of them - with Orange yarn for a home win, Black for a road win, and White and Grey representing home and road losses, respectively. What a great scarf! Let's hope she makes another one for 2023 and let's hope it's full of orange and black yarn!

Oh-oh, and you're Mary Tyler Moore

"Ooh-wee-hoo, I look just like Buddy Holly"

You hear those words, and you think of Weezer, the great band led by Rivers Cuomo, and named so because Cuomo's father thought that young Rivers reminded him of Bobby "Wheezer" Hutchins from The Little Rascals. 

Contrary to popular belief, Cuomo did not have asthma as a child.  In those films, Wheezer Hutchins was always running after the older kids, all out of breath, so that's where he got the nickname. Apparently Rivers's dad thought his son was that way, too. 

For all their great songs ("Buddy Holly", "Island In The Sun", "Hash Pipe", "Beverly Hills" and dozens more) Weezer has attracted a ton of great fans. And their fans express their devotion in unique ways...

Way out west in the Salt Lake City suburb of Murray, Utah, a man named Cory Winn, CEO and founder of the Lucca International t-shirt company, spent his own excess money to rent the billboard at 5800 S. State Street.

And on that billboard, he had emblazoned just one word:  "WEEZER" in Comic Sans font, all caps.

Those of us who obsess unendingly about fonts take a dim view of Comic Sans unless it's used in an ironic sense such as this.

Anyway, he put up the billboard in June, and here, four months later, the band replied, with a message on another billboard.

Winn told KSTU-TV that he and his business buddy Creed Stump came up with the idea to salute Weezer in the "worst font ever."

One of the t-shirts Lucca sells shows a cartoon image of the members of Weezer with the words "I Love One Direction" below the picture.   

The billboard has now received a response from the band itself, with a new billboard being erected about a mile away with the message: "Thanks to whoever bought the billboard down the road. -Weezer."

 

Winn said, "Never in my wildest dreams did I think that just putting 'Weezer' on a billboard would warrant a response from the band themselves. It wasn't even a call out to them."

And the joke will go on. Winn is planning a new message to replace the original greeting on the billboard he rented. 

"[We'll] likely exchange the panel we already have there, but I'd like to keep this little text message thing going with them, see how far we can take it," he said. "We have a message prepared, ready to go right now, and it'll get up ASAP."

What I love about the USA is that we always find time to be polite.

Cat Scan

Two things you never want to say to a cat parent:

a) Wouldn't you really rather have a dog?

b) Do you have any pictures of your cat handy that you can show me?

This whole smart phone thing (I think it's here to stay) makes it all the easier, of course. When Tabby or Felix is doing something unbearably cute (which happens every 15 minutes) you don't need to go running to the drawer where you keep the Kodak camera. Your phone will do just fine, so snap to it!

And now, there's another reason to! We ailurophiles will be helping our beloved companions by using a app called Tably, which was developed by an animal health technology company, Sylvester.ai,  of Calgary, Alberta, Canada.  The Tably app uses the phone's camera to tell whether a feline is feeling pain.

What it does, it checks out Katy Purry's ear and head position, eye-narrowing, muzzle tension, and how whiskers change. The app will detect any distress. The journal Scientific Reports reported in 2019 that there is a thing called the FGS - the Feline Grimace Scale - which is "a valid and reliable tool for acute pain assessment in cats."

So is "whether or not the cat in question is currently gnawing on your thumb."

Miche Priest is Sylvester.ai's leader on this venture, and she says, "It helps human cat owners know if their cat is in pain or not," said. "We were able to train a machine using machine learning and a series of images."

Meantime,  Alice Potter from British animal charity the RSPCA, says we should be checking out Skimbleshanks's entire body, including the tail, for clues as to their well-being.

"Cats that are worried or scared will hold that tail really tight and tense to them. And then aside from that, there's also just thinking about their behavior in terms of are they eating, drinking, toileting, sleeping like they usually do?"

And another sure sign: if Sushi Sioux is using her tail rhythmically to beat out a tom-tom drum pattern on your chest, she is not happy.

He called on the saxophone

In 1841,  Adolphe Sax, an inventor living in Belgium, came up with a great idea: putting maple syrup on a Belgian waffle.

And he also figured out that if he put a reed, from a woodwind instrument, into a brass horn, the resultant device would make music that sounded like a saxophone. Which is why he named it after himself.

Sax and his sax moved to France, where he had all sorts of trouble. The musical instrument business did not like his horn.  Some enemy burned down his factory, someone tried to kill him, and he filed for bankruptcy twice.

At least he had the right instrument to play a mournful wailing solo for his bad luck.

It got worse after he died, even. In Nazi days, German authorities called the sax "entartete kunst" (degenerate art) and sent SS soldiers to clobber anyone caught wailing away on one. 

In the 1930s, Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union banned the use of saxes in bands, on the grounds that the instrument was the embodiment of Jazz, which was "the embodiment of bourgeois American imperialist culture." 

And you'll notice that no action was ever taken against the inventor of the recorder, which has been used by schoolchildren to torture their parents with agonizing renditions of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" since Stalin was in junior high.

And now comes news from Italy, where doctors performed delicate brain surgery while the patient stayed awake...while playing his saxophone.

Officials at Paideia International Hospital in Rome reported that 35-year-old patient "G.Z." stayed awake and played a medley of saxophone favorites that lasted all through the 9-hour tumorectomy.

Besides allowing the operating room staff to turn off whatever background music they usually play, G.Z's music let the surgeons "map" different brain functions as they worked.

"Awake surgery makes it possible to map with extreme precision during surgery the neuronal networks that underlie the various brain functions such as playing, speaking, moving, remembering, counting," said lead surgeon Dr. Christian Brogna.

Dr. Brogna said the surgery was a success, even though most hospitals recommend that doctors refrain from having sax while on duty.

Hey Hey We Were The Monkees

There is only one Monkee left. It's Micky Dolenz, the madcap drummer of the Prefab Four, and he wants to see the files the FBI has on the band.

Say what, now?

For context, some people who saw The Beatles in the movie "A Hard Day's Night" had an idea to get four musical types together, have a great writing and production team make great music for them (two great singles and 10 half-fast filler songs per album) and then put the four guys - Dolenz, Michael Nesmith, Peter Tork and Davy Jones - in a knockabout tv show with physical comedy, sight gags, and people doing silly things.

It worked great for two years, but the inmates wanted to run the asylum, by which I mean the band decided that the people who were putting their music and their videos together didn't know what they were doing, and insisted on playing their own instruments and writing their own songs. In 1967, they had four #1 albums, a feat unmatched before or since.

In 1968, they were unemployed, and the show sank like a stone in six months.

 

Dolenz now says that their first hit, "Last Train To Clarksville," was a subtle anti-Vietnam War protest. And the FBI, at the time under the direction of the totally sane J. Edgar Hoover, opened a file on these revolutionaries, and now Dolenz is suing the Federal Bureau of Investigation so he can see any records with his name in the fed files.

Actually, some of the file came out in 2011. Through the heavily blackened-out pages, we can see than an FBI fink went to a Monkees concert in 1967, and told the steadfast agency that there was a backscreen to the rear of the stage "that depicted “subliminal messages … which, in the opinion of [redacted], constituted ‘left wing innovations of a political nature.’”

And...“These messages and pictures were flashes of riots in Berkeley, anti-U.S. messages on the war in Vietnam, racial riots in Selma, Alabama, and similar messages which had unfavorable response from the audience.”

The FBI website mentions another document on The Monkees that is "redacted entirely."

Micky filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request this summer, to get a look at those files. With no reply in hand, he's pursuing legal action “to obtain any records the FBI created and/or possesses on the Monkees as well as its individual members.” 

I don't know if this is in the files, but when The Monkees tour played Baltimore in '67, the opening act was a certain Jimi Hendrix, who was booed off the stage by kids screaming for The Monkees. He ran for the hills after playing seven shows as their opener, because If Six Was Nine, he couldn't have taken two more shows.

I'm gonna sit write down and write myself

My handwriting is horrible.  My father was quite a proficient amateur calligrapher, and my mother won prizes in high school for her Palmer Method handwriting, and anything I write tends to look like I was trying to make an old BIC pen write a few more words. 

It doesn't help that I am lefthanded, and my fellow lefties know the agony of "math hand." That's where you've done a whole page of arithmetic with pencil on paper and the heel of your hand looks like a graphite pit with all the pencil smudges over it. 

However, I'm certain that lots of lefthanded writers put out page after page of perfectly legible work, whereas I...don't.

But there is an effort afoot (or at hand) to mark National Handwriting Day every year on January 23, which just happens to be the birthday of John Hancock, first  signer of our Declaration of Independence.  And, according to legend, he signed it in very large letters so “the fat old King could read it without his spectacles."

Pretty impressive, especially when you remember Hancock was using a quill pen made from some poor goose's feather, and not a BIC.

We didn't even know there is such a group, but The Writing Instrument Manufacturers Association is there to promote good penmanship by talking about the history and the influence of it. They feel the pressure of so many of us pounding out notes on a QWERTY keyboard, but then again, lousy typing is still better than lousy penmanship. They started Handwriting Day in 1977 to put a fine point on it, if you will.

And if they really want to promote good handwriting, should they not be sending all of us a handwritten letter, or at least a postcard?

And while I will admit that a nice handwritten-in-cursive letter or thank-you note makes a fine appearance, so many of us would be sending letters and notes that the recipients couldn't read.  What could be more embarrassing that getting a phone call to ask, "What does it say in this letter? That you 'love me forever' or you're 'moving to Rochester'?" 

Sunday Rerun: Leave Me Alone

 According to the National Rake Foundation - and they ought to know - the last autumn leaf to fall off a tree comes down off the Bradford Pear tree in the front yard of the splendid home I share with the wonderful Mrs C.  Every other tree in North America seems to wrap up its Fall Color Show by the time I get to put the rakes and blower back in the shed.

Hey, the county even stopped collecting leaf bags two or three weeks ago. All through October and November we ride around the suburbs, marveling at the lovely colors as the other trees in town see their leaves change color. The oaks turn red, brown and russet. Hickories go all golden bronze; dogwoods become purplish-red. There are birches, all bright yellow, and maples that run the color gamut from orangey red to scarlet.

The rest of the trees on our little slice o'heaven are ash trees, whose leaves have the kindness to turn a kind of paper-bag color and drop off while the lawn is still being cut, so there's not much to rake. 

Oh, but this Bradford Pear ("Bradford" being a word meaning "little inedible pellets that stain the driveway and sidewalks") is stubborn. While every other tree turns colors and their owners rake up the detritus and then put the rakes away for another year, we are stuck waiting for the change to occur.

And we wait.  And wait.

As happened this week, it usually works out that a windy rainstorm finishes denuding the tree, and then after things dry out a bit, I get out there with the annoying leaf blower and round up the crunchy foliage, hiding it in bags otherwise full of household debris.

But all the while as I bag 'em up, I talk to the tree and ask it if it would mind sharing the yard with a nice apple tree.  

Sure, it's rude of me, but this time next year, I could be baking a free pie!