Of Mice and Men

We always heard that an infinite number of monkeys typing away on typewriters for infinite amounts of time would inevitably reproduce "Hamlet." In fact, although most people claim that Shakespeare wrote the line "To sleep, perchance to dream," those words were actually spoken first by me when shaken out of a deep slumber in English 12. 

It was right after lunch, that's my story. 

But even now, we are finding that the animal kingdom is pretty darn smart. We are now in a position to grow mini brains from human and mouse neurons and teach those tiny brains to play Pong.

These are actual humans playing pong for illustrative purposes. The pong-playing mini brains wear red hats for easy identification. 

I know this is all being done in the holy name of Science, but researchers have formed a synthetic network of neurons and integrated the brain cells into an electrode array controlled by a computer program.

It's like, I get up in the morning and go feed the cat, because I have taught myself this simple skill by arranging what few brains cells I still own and operate. Same way, people in lab coats are hooking up these laboratory-made mini brains to a bunch of electrical conductors in such a way that they can learn simple tasks, just as I learned not to put too much kibble in the bowl and not to give Eddie more wet food than she needs. This means we know now that it's not just whole brains inside intact skulls that can learn stuff. 

Inside a little tiny box they call DishBrain, researchers placed row after row of imported electrodes, plus a caramel center. Once hooked up to computer software, this new noggin received electrical signals that spoke to certain parts of the neurons.  The first lesson taught DishBrain to play Pong, the first computer game from 1972 - the one where you move a paddle up and down to bat a "ball" back and forth right there on the screen. Then the computer sent information back to the neurons, telling them whether or not they had hit the imaginary ball.   

In less than five minutes, the neurons learned to alter the way the moved that paddle up and down so as to hit the ball more often. Science regards this as the first time a man-made biological neural network learned to complete a goal-oriented task all on its own. It was even written up in the journal "Neuron" last month. This is a big step forward for science and unemployed neurons, of which the world currently has a huge surplus.

That was a truly great day for science, although the afternoon was ruined for the crew in the laboratory. After lunch, they taught DishBrain how to play "Grand Theft Auto," and when 5 o'clock rolled around and the group knocked off for the day, they found all their cars were missing from the parking lot.

 

 

No No No It Ain't Me, Babe

I've been following Bob Dylan since forever, and if there's one thing that always stands out about the folky balladeer, it's that he is consistently inconsistent. This goes way back to when he was a pure acoustic performer, before he plugged in a band at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. It's the hallmark of a good performer, and a good way to become legendary like Bob - always keep the audience wondering what's next. 

Show business is part show and all business. Just ask anyone who is shelling out $700 for one ticket to see "The Music Man" on Broadway. You get the experience of seeing a true legend as Hugh Jackman struts across the stage as Professor Harold Hill. If that's what you want to do with $700, fine. We all saw on "CBS Sunday Morning" that there are people willing to pony up $250,000 to get in a mini submarine and drop in on the wreckage of the Titanic. Those who go will see the unmistakable bow of the great ship at rest on the Atlantic floor and know it's for real, and not some old sunken garbage scow.

We can't take it away from Bob Dylan that he has written and performed hundreds of great songs, too many even to think of listing here. But I'm throwing a penalty flag and walking off five yards against the wire-haired boy from Hibbing, not that he would even care what I think, but because he recently tried to cheat his fans, only to be caught and turn red.

Through his book publisher, Simon & Schuster, Dylan hawked 900 "personally hand-signed" copies of his new book, “The Philosophy of Modern Song.” Each copy set the purchaser back $599, but again, for a true believer, that's not too much to exchange for a true totem - the actual autograph of the author on a book he wrote.

The books sold out and were shipped a week or so ago, and it took two days of people proudly Instragramming pictures of their treasures before people started saying, "These signatures all look alike...."

It took two more days before Simon & Schuster acknowledged that complaints about the autographs actually being mechanical duplicates were true and legitimate.

The book's cover shows Little Richard, Alis Lesley (one of the several hundred "female Elvises"), and Eddie Cochran.

“To those who purchased the ‘Philosophy of Modern Song’ limited edition, we want to apologize,” said a tweet from Simon & Schuster.  “As it turns out, the limited edition books do contain Bob’s original signature, but in a penned replica form. We are addressing this information by providing each purchaser with an immediate refund.”

Such double-speak! Yes, it's Bob's autograph, but it isn't. The books were all signed by an autopen, a machine used by people who have to sign their names many times. (In high school, I looked into getting one for my father so he wouldn't get writer's cramp from signing so many letters from the school, but anyway...)

The people at Simon & Schuster have not learned much about crisis management, it would seem; their first response was to stonewall the criticism, saying, “We certainly understand any concerns you may have, however – Each individual copy of the limited signed edition of Bob Dylan’s THE PHILOSOPHY OF MODERN SONG was personally signed by the author and is accompanied by a letter of authenticity from the publisher of Simon & Schuster.”

Each book had been mailed with a letter signed (?) by Jonathan Karp, president and CEO of the publishing house, saying, “You hold in your hands something very special, one of just 900 copies available in the U.S.  This letter is confirmation that the copy of the book you hold in your hand has been hand-signed by Bob Dylan.”

Within two days, the company buckled, with Karp emailing each purchaser to say, "We apologize for the mistake that was made and are offering a full refund of your purchase. Please keep your copy of ‘The Philosophy of Modern Song’ at no cost. We hope you will enjoy reading it.”

We who try to understand Dylan understand that confounding us is the basis of his game, as when he refused to accept a Nobel Prize or attend the ceremony involved, only to say later he was sorry about all that. But explaining is something he doesn't do...until now. From his Facebook:

“I’ve been made aware that there’s some controversy about signatures on some of my recent artwork prints and on a limited-edition of Philosophy Of Modern Song. I’ve hand-signed each and every art print over the years, and there’s never been a problem. However, in 2019 I had a bad case of vertigo and it continued into the pandemic years. It takes a crew of five working in close quarters with me to help enable these signing sessions, and we could not find a safe and workable way to complete what I needed to do while the virus was raging. So, during the pandemic, it was impossible to sign anything and the vertigo didn’t help. With contractual deadlines looming, the idea of using an auto-pen was suggested to me, along with the assurance that this kind of thing is done ‘all the time’ in the art and literary worlds.

“Using a machine was an error in judgment and I want to rectify it immediately. I’m working with Simon & Schuster and my gallery partners to do just that,” he concluded.

It does not take a "crew of five" to get books signed. Just deliver 900 books, and a handful of Sharpies to his house, and tell him you'll be back to pick them up when he's finished scrawling his signature on the inside cover. 

It's disappointing to me that he did not write and record his 1/2-assed apology in the form of a song and release it as a special edition Holiday Gift To You on vinyl, cassette, CD or MP3, but I guess he can't think of every scam.

 

Stiiiiiiiiingy

We're told by our elders that virtue is its own reward, that we should do good things just for the sake of doing them, and that is all true, but then again, what's fair is fair.

Here's what I'm talking about: a guy in Germany found a lost check fluttering along the ground as he was on his way home after visiting his mother. It was a check for $4.8 million, made out to Haribo, the people who gum up your teeth with those little gummy bears.

 It was what they call a crossed check - a check that is preprinted with FOR DEPOSIT ONLY - and when the man, whose name is Anouar G,  called Haribo, they told him to destroy the check and send them a picture to show what he did.

The check was in payment of the account of German supermarket chain Rewe, and any way you look at it, that's a lot of hay. In Euros, it comes to €4,631,538.80, which sounds like even more, somehow.

 

Not long after, the mailman brought his reward - a thank you gift box containing candies.  Anouar thought that was a "a bit cheap." Six packs of Haribo candy in exchange for his honesty and for saving the company millions of dollars worth of massive PITA...I dunno.

Not that he could have done anything with the check, and not that he would have wanted to anyway, but gee whiz, right before the holidays is no time to be closefisted and mingy. 

At the very least, they could have donated a sleighful of candy and goodies to disadvantaged kids, you know what I mean?

Maybe sets of ice skates or rollerblades to kids in group homes, to show the company is not really a bunch of cheapskates!

 

Sunday Rerun: Huge old birds

 This might be a total fake news story, for all I know. I checked, and the dateline said "June 14," not "April 1," so maybe it's legit.

Here it is: According to this story, turkeys that were like the size of kangaroos once ran around Australia.  This took place about 2 million years ago, which is going to confound the segment of the population that believes life began 6,000 years ago with the birth of Betty White.

The whole thing came up in conversation among scientists at Flinders University in Western Australia, after someone found fossils in the Thylacoleo Caves on the Nullarbor Plain.

At first, everyone said, "That's cool," and went to lunch, but this all must have taken place on a Wednesday, because they decided to look further into the matter after lunch.  Had the fossils turned up on a Monday or a Friday, the proximity to the weekend would have meant letting it all go, but they dug deeper and took a look at modern brush turkeys and their ancestors. 


"Taxonomic review of the late Cenozoic megapodes (Galliformes: Megapodiidae) of Australia" was published several weeks ago by the Royal Society. I'm not going to pretend I know what they're talking about here (and you wouldn't believe me if I tried) but the point of the paper was that they figure that giant 3.2 foot-tall turkeys were running all over Australia, even before the arrival of Angus Young.  This was one big bird, and if all you know about turkey flight is that "WKRP In Cincinnati" rerun where the Big Guy says of a failed Thanksgiving promotion, "As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly!" these big huggers could fly!  A study of the bones reveals that the giant turkey not only flew, but also roosted in trees, because who was going to stop it?

This immense Butterball has a scientific name - Progura gallinacea - and wishes to be addressed by same. Paleontologists - people who make a living studying Sarah Paleon - are all over Australia looking into what they nicknamed "chunky birds." They figure these guys weighed 6.6 pounds to 17 pounds, but with a coupon and your Giant Food loyalty card, there was usually a buy-one, get-one deal.

Incidentally - one early spring afternoon, we looked out on the deck to see a wild turkey hanging around by the grill. He did fly away, but none too gracefully.  And the very next afternoon, a little red fox came up on the deck, but that's as much fox news as I can tolerate.

The Saturday Picture Show, November 26, 2022

 

Let's start off this week by looking at one of the worst architectural nightmares since the house I saw in which, if one wanted to go from the first floor to the second floor, one was obligated to go outside and use the stairs there. This door seems to open up to a closet, my best guess, but be careful when you leave, if you wander in there to look for that sweatshirt you can't find. 

Imagine telling someone very young that, back in the day, we got these special green stamps with every grocery purchase, and the youngest member of the family (raises hand) had to paste the stamps in a special book. Once the family had a drawerful of filled books, they went to a special store and turned the books in for a toaster or a set of hedge clippers. True story.

Yes sir, it is what you think, an AM-FM radio hat. If you are wearing this and the skies turn cloudy and the DJ plays Lou Christie's "Lightnin' Strikes," you better run!

This is the car in which Bonnie and Clyde, unattractive bank robbers from the 1930s, met their untimely end. Clyde loved his Ford V-8 so much, he wrote to Henry Ford, extolling its speed and handling qualities. He should have installed some armor plate, but oh well.

Rod Stewart, the singer, model railroader, and soccer fan, made a habit of kicking soccer balls into the audience during his concerts. Someone who caught one way back in the day has saved it and kept it inflated all these years. It even looks like someone played soccer with it.

A bird's-eye view of the baseball stadium at Appalachian State College down in Boone, North Carolina. Just over the next hill is Boone's Farm!

I love the can-do attitude of the people of Buffalo this week. Sure, give me 77" of snow, and I'll put on my shorts and deal with it!

Please! No cloves in my ham, but an orange studded with them makes a swell holiday pomander.

Our mail comes so late these days, it's always after dark. I'm thinking of installing a night light on the mailbox. But this old milk can is a pretty good idea too!

I'm on a good roll for finding pictures of cool old sheds lately. This one is custom-fitted with a hornet's nest and a spider web already installed. But I promise you, if you have so many gate hooks that you need an old mayonnaise jar to hold them, well, sir, you have a lifetime supply of gate hooks!

Making a list and checking it twice

I noticed it earlier this week, when the television meteorologists were giving the long range forecast for "the week's end and the weekend," and all they said about Friday was that it will be 50° with occasional rain showers.

Friday, as in the Day After Thanksgiving.  

My, how things have changed. From the late 1980s until just recently, the Day After Thanksgiving was known as Black Friday, as in, that's when retailers will suddenly get back in the black.  (The first law of owning any sort of store or mercantile establishment is to claim you lose money every day.  The greatest example is those stores at the beach that sell you towels, t-shirts, hats, sunblock, and inflatable sea serpents at unbelievably jacked prices. Every year, as they fold up their tents after Labor Day, with straight faces they tell the news reporters that "this summer was a disaster, we hardly broke even, I don't know how we can survive in this economy," and they, next Memorial Day, guess who's back out there, hawking their wares?)

OK, so you can believe it if you wish, that none of these merchants make a nickel until holiday shopping begins. The thing is, Black Friday got to be so crazy for a while, they started holding it on Thursday instead! All the big stores would allow their employees time enough to have their Thanksgiving with their families and even a quick slice of pie before opening the big box at 5 or 6 and allowing the shopping frenzy to begin. 

And on Friday itself, the tv news helicopters would hover over the mall, reporting on available parking spots ("Attttttt White Marsh Mall, by the Sears entrance, a blue Mercedes is backing out of a spot...and two spots are about to vacated down by J.C. Penney on the upper level..."). It was mayhem. Some of you who to this day cling to your chubby-cheeked little dolls from Christmas, 1984, may have heard your parents describe their valiant service in the Cabbage Patch Kids War. This took place just two short years after the Falkland Islands War, and was fought in every toy store and department store in the land, as moms and dads fought to outflank their neighbors in order to purchase a coveted doll that sort of looked like Telly Savalas. 

And then came Amazon.

And what used to be called Black Friday is now Black November, as American commerce adjusts to the new way of shopping - not just for the holidays, but for everyday needs. I can't tell you how many times this year I have needed something - broad-tip felt markers, kitty litter, bagel chips, all vital items for life around this house -  and found nothing except for in the warm embrace of Amazon, which has everything!

And brick-and-mortar retailers - that's the term for "people with stores" -  have figured out how to fight back, and that's by starting their Christmas sales as soon as the last of the Labor Day empty beer cans are hauled out.  

The National Retail Federation (NRF) and Prosper Insights & Analytics (whoever they are) say that they estimate 166.3 million people will shop between yesterday and this Monday, the 28th, Cyber Monday. 

Cyber Monday is the biggest online shopping day of the year. The name derives from the long-ago days when very few people had computers at home, but they did at work, so the Monday after Black Friday, they would rush to work and go on "Shoes. Com" or "Blazers4Less.com" and finish off their shopping lists. There were all sorts of charts showing that office productivity was was down on that day.

So, what started as, "let's look on the computer and see if we can find just the right rifle for Uncle Leroy" has become, "Hey! Just for something different, let's go to a store and look for Leroy's present!"

Or at least, that's the hope.

Thanksgiving 2022

 Remember, please, to stop and give thanks for all we have, whatever we have. So many people around the world suffer in great need. We tend to go along with our days and years, and we might not stop to ponder how very blessed we are. Would that the Spirit remind us of that, and allow us to show gratitude in thanksgiving and returned acts of kindness.

 

I always thought it tasted like cough syrup, anyway

I used to listen to Paul Harvey's "The Rest Of The Story" because I can always spare a quick five minutes to learn something new.

Such as...the story of the young pharmacist who was working in a drugstore and fell head over heels for the boss's daughter. This was in Virginia, 1880s. It looked like the romance would blossom until the day the mean old man sent the young one packing, saying that he wanted his daughter to marry a doctor or lawyer, not some humble pharmacist.

The old man did not know that the younger had whipped up a concoction of flavors to be served as a phosphate at the soda fountain. It was go time, and the young man packed up his broken heart and his recipe and moved to Texas, where he eventually owned his own drug store and found that the locals down there liked his soda, which he named after the old fool who threw him out of  Virginia.

He named that drink Dr Pepper.

But you still have more of the story to hear because Dr Pepper is part of a huge conglomerate these days. It's in the Keurig Dr Pepper company, which has a market cap of some $54 billion. Keurig and coffee pod giant Green Mountain formed the company after acquiring Dr Pepper Snapple Group in 2018.

Now, here is trouble for the company that even that young pharmacist could not have imagined. Keurig Dr Pepper CEO Ozan Dokmecioglu was shown the door from his job last week "due to unspecified violations related to his personal conduct," the company announced.

Dokmecioglu only got the job three months ago. The brass did not give any further explanation, except to say, “Keurig Dr Pepper’s Code of Conduct is built on a foundation of ethics, integrity and personal responsibility.  Every employee, without exception, is accountable for knowing and following the Code.” 

I'm shocked - SHOCKED, I tell you - that a big business mogul fell short in the area of ethics, integrity, and personal responsibility.

But I'm reasonably sure that Dokmecioglu will not have to take a job driving a Pepsi truck to put soda on his family table. The bigshots take care of one another.

I wonder what he did?

 

Bob Gamgort, the company’s current executive chairman and former CEO, will resume his old role following Dokmecioglu’s abrupt exit.

“KDP has a deep and talented executive team,” said Gamgort. “I look forward to continuing to work with the leadership team and the Board in the role I held less than four months ago.” 

Dokmecioglu took over as CEO in July as part of a management succession plan that was announced months earlier. He had previously served as the company’s CFO.

11/22/rerun: Looking back

 It happened one day 20-some years ago in a supermarket now closed. I was talking to a high-school-aged cashier about how little use she would ever have for algebra for the rest of her life unless she became an algebra teacher, and she said that even more than math, she hated history.

"You know, boring old presidents, like Kennedy."

And I was transported back to that day in 1963, seventh grade at the now-demolished Towsontown Junior High School.  It was report card day, and we were being sent back to homeroom to get the cards, and before that could happen, the principal, Maynard B. Henry, came on the public address system and told us that the president had been shot in Dallas, and then he put the radio on so that we could hear the news unfolding.

John F. Kennedy, 1917 - 1963

We couldn't know in the instant moment that the events of that day/weekend would come to be known as the end of the 1950's, the end of our innocence, the end of Camelot.  We only knew that we didn't know much about Lyndon Baines Johnson, who suddenly was our president.  Over the next three days, we saw the slain president come back to Washington in a casket, his personal effects removed from the White House, and the arrest and assassination of his killer. On Monday, we saw a funeral live on TV, and we prepared to enter an unknown future.

Johnson, master politician, leveraged the mourning into passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which knocked down legal barriers at the state and local levels preventing African Americans from exercising their right to vote under the 15th Amendment (1870) to the Constitution.  There is doubt among historians as to whether Kennedy could have gotten passage of these parts of his New Frontier program for the nation, but Johnson did it, and won re-election to his own term in '64, only to bow out of the race in 1968 - one of the most tumultuous years in our history. The Viet Nam War proved to be Johnson's undoing, but his early days in office gave us progress long overdue and still worthy of respect.

All this, we could never have predicted that gray Friday, 11/22/63, but looking back on it, one could never call those days "boring," unless one was not paying attention in History class.  I told the cashier that I was certain her teacher knew some ways to bring the 1960s alive for the Class of '96.  And I hope she asked.

If you are looking for some words to help bring those days in perspective, I can think of few better examples than those of columnist Jimmy Breslin. He knew that every other reporter would interview Johnson, DeGaulle, the other Kennedys, and other people of note. Breslin interviewed the man who dug Kennedy's grave, and wrote about it as only he can.  I urge all interested in looking back with me today to read his piece here.

Once A Year, I Promise

I like to mention Fox "News" about once a year; watching or talking or thinking about them makes me choleric, and I don't want to be choleric.

Everyone knows the new senator-elect from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania - the state that gave us the cheese steak, the Bristol Stomp, and the Liberty Bell - is a man who is outsized in every way. Long tall John Fetterman won a hard-fought campaign against the Wizard of Oz for the seat, and will be sworn in in January. For now, he's just being sworn at, and so is his wife, the lovely Gisele Barretto Fetterman, because jealousy is like that.

Fetterman is 6' 8" tall. I myself topped out at 6' 5" before the ravages of time and diminished bone density lowered my altitude, but still, I know the horror that Mrs Fetterman's husband knows any time someone aims a camera in his direction. We tall people know there's a good chance when the picture comes out, not all of our head will be shown. People get the normal-sized people in the frame just fine, but those whose heads are up in the clouds don't get to see their whole head.

Or - the other thing - we wind up bending in half at the waist or doing a knee bend in order to try to match the heights of the other photo participants. You'd think this would be the answer, but no, because these bend-over shots tend to make us look like Gorgo leaning over to grab a section of a railroad bridge to use as a toothpick.

But those amiable FOXers have been messing with photos of the Fettermans as they prepare to move to DC. They don't realize that Mrs F has been intentionally taking headless Norseman pictures of Mr F for fifteen years now, but they crop the photos to make it seem like she wishes to marginalize the big man and shine all the brighter herself.

As it happens, Mrs Fetterman opened a Free Store in the town where they live in order to help people in their community find food and needed supplies. Read the story and then decide for yourself if her star doesn't shine brightly enough on its own without trying to detract from her spouse's good work to add attention to herself.

That "news" channel is great at fomenting displeasure and suspicion. Perhaps they could step up and help people as Mrs Fetterman does, or at least not demean her for doing so.

Sunday Rerun: "Remember, it's a holiday, not a holi-week!"

 For years, the greatest part of Thanksgiving dinner was always when Uncle Tonoose, full of Natty Boh and holiday happiness, took a nose dive into the mashed potatoes. 

Oh, the hew and cry from everyone as they pulled him out of the creamed spuds, and his tie out of the gravy tureen, and gently placed him face-down over the ottoman. Not that the concern was all about Tonoose's welfare (he'd be fine in the morning, back at the lumberyard) but for the mashed potatoes themselves, because one of the best parts of the whole weekend was the subsequent meals after the big dinner on Thursday.

Don't throw away those mashed patooties! In the morning, stir them (2 cups) up with an egg, and a cup of flour, some diced onion, salt and pepper, and then make patties to fry with your b'fast. Ain't that just like living! Potato Cakes!

Baltimore has always been big on leftover sandwiches, too, and if you're skillful you can make a great one on rye bread with turkey, cranberry sauce, stuffing, and a tad of sauerkraut (dried by pressing down a paper towel, or one of the shirts Tonoose left behind, to soak up excess kraut juice).

And I credit Baltimore with the invention of what I am calling "Stwaffles," which are waffles made of stuffing on the waffle iron. How could anything be better?

I do have to share this from Wisconsin, speaking of Thanksgiving chow. There is a restaurant there called the Dreamland Supper Club, and their year-round specialty is french-fried turkey breast.

This is not like chicken-fried steak, in which a thin steak is dipped in the flour and seasonings and breading that is used for fried chicken, and cooked that same way. No sir, this is a hunk of turkey breast dipped in sweet batter and deep-fried, and served with melted butter and a baked potato.

The sweet batter would suggest some powdered sugar and syrup, but no. This is a very big deal in Wisconsin. According to some reviews I read, this Dreamland is a popular place for holiday celebrations.

Wisconsin, thank you for your beer and cheese, but I'm going to pass on this Turkey Twinkie. 

The Saturday Picture Show, November 19, 2022

 

This little hummingbird would be upset to be called a "birdbrain," and he/she would be right. Lots of "smarter" animals aren't smart enough to set up housekeeping on a branch that affords solar protection for free!

This is just the perfect vehicle for a crew to take to the annual Firefighters' Convention.

"Nothing going on here. You didn't see a thing. Move on out now..."

Here's a can that shows that someone really follows directions! Same as with that yellow "wet floor" sign in the men's room. I do it every time.

It's still a month away, but I think we're ready this year!

I feel sorry for those of you who live in areas where you get no snow. Besides bringing a delightful chill to the world, it covers everything in what Simon & Garfunkel called a "freshly fallen silent shroud." You could leave a dented rusty soup can on the back porch and when snow lays its shawl over it, it looks like an object of art!

A door hook and a talented artist, making hardware fun again!

I think it would be the funniest thing in the world to buy one of these tins full of cookies, only to find it full of needles and thread and scissors and stray buttons when you get it home. Everyone has their sewing kit where the Danish Butter Cookies used to reside.

I found another example of a press agent's artistry at work. You can almost hear him on the phone, around 1954, "I got this kid Dean...uh, James Dean. Brooding, strong silent type. Wanna get a couple publicity pics of him reading a book. And say, the kid's from Indiana...real midwestern boy...let's have him reading that James Whitcomb Riley, the Hoosier poet who wrote about the frost on the pumpkin. OK? Solid!"

I'm here to tell you, there is not a morning so bleak or drab that it can't become perfect just by whipping up some blueberry muffins.

They're so cute when they're little

We are wrong when we say people "laugh like a hyena." Hyenas emit harsh howls and yelps when they are on the prowl, which happens a lot, because they are some tough little critters, and they are plenty scary to other animals, although they usually leave humans alone out of fear that we will attempt to make them listen to Yanni music. In some cultures, people think that hyenas are in league with the demons who seek to influence our spirits, or steal children, or rob graves.

I worked in radio with a guy named Rob Graves. You don't think he....no.

But, since the young versions of most species are so doggone cute, here's a baby spotted hyena who was spotted at the Hattiesburg Zoo in Mississippi. The baby's mom is Pili, and those who know of such things say Pili's baby is the only surviving hyena cub born in North America so far this year.

Kristen Moore is the animal curator at the Zoo down there in Hattiesburg, and she says they are "thrilled with the birth of this cub.  We feel good that Pili is doing well and is being a great mom to her first-born cub.”

The youngster was born on October 17 and is not out there on display just yet. For now, the walkway in front of the hyena habitat is closed so that zoo officials can keep their eyes on mama and cub. 

“We ask our guests to be patient while our animal care team closely monitors the cub and mother in these important early stages as they acclimate to their habitat and spend time together,” said Rick Taylor, executive director of the Hattiesburg Convention Commission, which manages the zoo.

Too much information department: it is difficult for hyenas to give birth, because their birth canals are about an inch in diameter. Zoologists report that the fathers tend to be very apologetic before, during, and after the birth process.  

“Pili is nursing her baby who is suckling well, but we have hurdles yet to cross so we are cautiously optimistic at this point,” Moore said.

What's more, no one will know the gender of the newborn for another month or so, until a blood sample can be taken.  No one working at any zoo anywhere has the temerity to walk up to a hyena and look down there.

I'll let you know if they have a "Name The Baby Hyena" contest!

Vintage

The headline said:  Two vintage World War Two-era planes have collided and crashed at an air show in the US state of Texas, killing six people.

Of course, as with anything that happens anywhere, there is video available, showing the planes colliding at low altitude. One of the planes breaks in half, causing a fireball that plunges to earth.

These planes were involved in an air show near Dallas over the past weekend. One of them was a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress. The B-17 bombers were a huge part in our defeat of Germany in World War II.

Six people on board the planes died; there were no injuries to the people watching.

Two former American Airlines pilots - Terry Barker and Len Root - were among the dead, so it's not as it these were unskilled pilots up there. Something went wrong; we don't know just what.

 

These airshows draw big crowds on weekends all across America. The crowd in Dallas was estimated at between 4,000 and 6,000.  Chris Kratovil was an eyewitness, and he told a BBC reporter he had "never seen a crowd grow more quiet or more still in just a blink of an eye".

"It went from being a fairly excited, energetic crowd... to complete silence and stillness, and a lot of people, including myself, turned their children towards them and away from the airfield because there was burning wreckage in the middle of the airfield."

I asked someone who posted pictures of this on Instagram whether it was wise for people to take aging airplanes up for exhibition purposes. 

One responder said that "they died doing what they loved."

Another said, "no one was forced to be up there. It's not necessary to drive cars, but I bet you still do."

A third person said, "History needs to preserved (sic) no matter the costs. These history buffs and reenactors knew that there's always a risk. They died keeping history alive."

Sometimes, just when I think I'm starting to understand people, I get told that it's ok to die just so some people can see an old airplane fly over them.

I have no wish to die, but there are things to die for. History is not one of them.

 

 

You can't catch me

As the man says in the beginning of "Law & Order":  "In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: The police, who investigate crime, and the district attorneys, who prosecute the offenders. These are their stories."

Specifically, this is one of their stories, from New Jersey, where the cops didn't have to conduct a widespread search for a wanted fugitive, because she applied for a job to work with them.

You read it right. 

We're talking about Ms Zyeama Johnson, who was wanted in Monroe County, PA, on fraud charges. Jersey City, NJ, also had papers on her for traffic charges - some ten bench warrants, all told.

But they didn't have to employ any sort of fancy sleuthery at all to bring her in. With these two active warrants in her name, Johnson filled out an application for an opening as a security guard with the Hudson County Sheriff's Office.

Hudson County is the county where the traffic charges were filed on her.

Given an easy opportunity to clean up the local blotter, police invited her in for a follow-up interview.  That's where she was taken into custody, and during a search, was found to be in possession of two stolen credit cards.

She was arrested on a charge of “being a fugitive from justice.” 

“While conducting a routine inventory of Johnson’s property following her arrest, sheriff’s officers discovered that she was in possession of two credit cards believed to be stolen, and she was subsequently charged with credit card theft,” according to Hudson County. It also turned out that she once worked for the the U.S. Postal Service, which has opened their own investigation after being tipped off by the sheriff's office.

American criminals long enjoyed a worldwide reputation for evading arrest by moving far away, surgically altering their appearance, and other measures meant to trip up the gendarmes. Now they make it so easy. What a shame.

On the wing

Up the road in Philadelphia, things have been up and down. On the up side, the commonwealth of Pennsylvania elected a great new US Senator, and the Eagles are doing great, in first place in the NFC East Division with an 8-1 record. The down side meant that the Phillies lost the World Serious and the soccer Union team lost whatever they call their championship.

But amidst the clamoring chaos, one man stood tall and unified The City of Brotherly Love in peace and harmony.

He was born 31 years ago and given the name Alexander Tominsky. He's been working as a server at Barclay Prime in Center City.

But that's in the past, that name, because now he is known far and wide as the "Philadelphia Chicken Man."

Even though he seemingly forgot that "everyday" is an adjective, he was proud to point out that he took a video of himself for 40 days in row, and every video every day showed him eating a rotisserie chicken, which is not an everyday feat.

In fact, his original goal was a 30-day chicken spree, but you know how it goes. After your 24th roasted bird, you get your second wind, and you plow on right ahead. So, to include the whole town in the fun, he posted an invitation on social media, with a misspelled printed version posted here and there: 

"Come watch me eat an entire rotisserie chicken. November 6th will be the 40th consecutive day that I have eaten an entire rotisserie chicken. 12 o'clock noon. The chicken will be consumed on the abandoned pier near Walmart. This is not a party."

 

And then, hundreds of people attended the non-party, where Chicken Man set up a red carpet and police caution tape to hold back the hordes.

As he licked his greasy fingers for the 40th time, he was surrounded by blissful fans, cheering and celebrating.

Mr Tominsky spoke these profound words to Action News, by way of explaining his reasons behind his Herculean feat:

"I just felt like it seemed right."

Adepti sumus magnitudine! (Latin for "we have achieved greatness!")

I declare!

With so many of us wanting to travel to distant cities for family holiday gatherings, many of us will be boarding airplanes to save the time of driving all the way to Kankakee.

And, judging from anecdotal evidence I garner from these pages, most people find it wise to show up to family gatherings with a big iron on their hips, and I'm not talking about a Black & Decker or Rowenta steamer.

However, although it might seem like a great idea to pack your shootin' iron inside the poultry you are packing to present to Aunt Pauline, security officers in South Florida caught some joker who had stuffed a chicken, not with bread cubes, but a loaded pistol.

It was like that Turducken on which John Madden traditionally feasted on Thanksgiving: a chicken inside a duck inside a turkey. This was a gun inside a chicken inside a suitcase.

The people at the Transportation Security Administration, wits all, showed photos of the chicken gun with a punny caption on their Instagram.

 “We hate to beak it to you here, but stuffing a firearm in your holiday bird for travel is just a baste of time,” the post said in part.

So you can be prepared for your fun trip, the TSA reminds us all that fresh meat, seafood and other non-liquid food items are permitted in both carry-on and checked bags, but they have to be packed in ice. You can carry an unloaded firearm in a checked bag, but you have to declare it and pack it in a locked hard-sided container.

One of your cousins will give you bullets when you get there. 

Sunday Rerun: Pudding things to good use

Before we proceed, we need to define some terms. For instance, "head cheese" is not cheese at all, but an undesirable delicatessen selection. The Hundred Year War was over by the second weekend, a foot-long sandwich measures 11 inches, the Civil War was quite uncivil, Chinese Checkers are neither Chinese nor checkers, koala bears are not bears at all, and Poor Richard's Almanac was not written by anyone named Richard, but by Ben Franklin, and he was plenty rich, having been the only president of the United States who was never president of the United States!

So don't be fooled if an English person offers you pudding. Don't think of vanilla, chocolate or pistachio.  Over there, pudding is blood sausage, which is hardly a dessert item with some Cool Whip on top.

But while English pudding is no way to end a meal, it did save the life of a British butcher.  Chris McCabe was locked in a freezer and the lock froze after a gust of wind blew the door closed. (Well, things are supposed to freeze in there, right?

Chris's butcher shop is in Totnes, southwest England, and he did all he could by kicking at the door to no avail, so he got the idea to pick up a frozen blood sausage weighing 3.3 lbs and using it as a battering ram.

What blood sausage looks like, in case you wish to have some

He whomped on that thang a few times and finally the button came unstuck and off he dashed, to have a cup of tea, one supposes, with a nice slab of blood pudding, which, if you really want to know, consists of pork fat or beef suet, pork blood and a ton of oatmeal, and your choice of groats: oat or barley. 

Maybe he needed something stronger than tea. You know, to take the chill off.

The Saturday Picture Show, November 12, 2022

 

This little guy is just bursting out of his shell to let us know he's a baby tortoise, not a turtle.

I guess we've all used these pay binoculars before. It's hard to look across the bay at the pretty boats and birds or at the spectacular scenery of Lookout Point while the clock is ticking on your 50 cents worth of binocular time.

I found a really nice place to get your nails done.

I do love a well-worn set of old tools. You can always tell when they are used by someone who knows what to do with them. Bonus points for the monkey fist bolo.

It was 1964 when I went to the New York World's Fair with my parents. We stayed in the Hotel New Yorker, which, I can assure you, was not, in 1964, an "iconic" midtown Manhattan hotel. It was clean and nice, not too deluxe, and I kept asking for Maurice, the elevator guy, but he was off that weekend.

Today's free wallpaper: Calvin and Hobbes in their lunar explorer.

Back in the 80s, the late Dinka dunker Manute Bol, at 7' 7", and 5' 3" Muggsy Bogues, the shortest NBA player ever, formed part of the Washington Bullets, now the Wizards.  A friend of mine once was sitting next to Muggsy on an airplane and said, "I feel like I know you from somewhere," to which Bogues said, "I play basketball," and my pal said, "No, really, what do you do?"

I say, let them battle it out.

I just finished a great biography of Charles Addams, the great cartoonist and creator of the Addams Family drawings, which led to the TV show, movies, and Broadway musical. There is nothing more satisfying than learning.

I'll be in the basement while everything gets sorted out with these elections and all. That's where my records are, and as they used to say on KLAC radio, "This is KLAC Country, and that's country country!"