They named a high school for him

With the Fourth of July right around the corner, let's take one second to look back on July, 1776, to the days when the Continental Congress was debating the issue of proclaiming independence from Britain.

When all the shouting and tumult was over, the delegates of the Second Continental Congress would declare that the Thirteen Colonies were breaking away from the rule of Britain's King George III. The Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, but it took one man to break a tie and make it happen.

Every signer of the Declaration put his life on the line; splitting from Mother England was an act of treason. But delegate 
Caesar Rodney of Delaware was twice endangered. He missed the trial (preliminary) vote on July 1 because he was suffering from late-stage cancer. When the votes were tallied, with only two of the Delaware delegates present, they split their votes on July 1, one for and one against proclaiming independence. With a final vote set for July 2, Thomas McKean, the pro-independence Delaware delegate, sent a message by rider to the ailing Rodney urging him to get to Philadelphia from his home in Dover ASAP!

In those days, there was no AMTRAK, no buses, no I-95. There was a horse to ride and a violent thunderstorm to ride through. All afternoon, all night, and into the morning Rodney rode to Phila and delivered the decisive vote.

It's said that Rodney was mud from head to toe when he got to the vote. In his modesty, all he said was, “I arrived in Congress, though detained by thunder and rain, in time enough to give my voice in the matter of independence.”

And all these years later, we can be thankful.

The Awful Contest

What's on my mind today is the winner of the recent "World's Ugliest Dog" contest. I'm not going to show you the picture of the winner. I know the poor canine went on the rounds of the morning news shows as the Hodas and the Gayles and the Georges and I don't know who-all else clucked over him/her and made bad jokes and people laughed. 

But it's not funny, I don't think.

What possesses otherwise good-hearted people to hold such a contest and hold an animal up to ridicule? The "winner" is probably a family pet somewhere and I will go so far as to wager he/she has been a good pooch, greeting family members with tail wagging when they come home, barking goodbye when they leave for school, coming in tight for hugs and nuzzles, and after all that, the family holds up their family member for scorn and humiliation, just for the chance to be on the TODAY Show, for crying out loud? 

Every living thing deserves love, not derision.

And somewhere, for every pet that people call ugly, there is a child wishing for a doggie to have and hold and love.

I hope they find each other.

Don't go bacon my heart

Not until after my father died did I learn that HIS father was born in Macon, Georgia.  As I always say, that says a lot about how quiet my father was about everything, and also about explaining my tendency to like Macon things (grits, peaches, the Allman Brothers) while resisting the politics down there. Here's an example.

Macon is home to the Macon Bacon, a collegiate summer baseball team. Good, clean, all-American summer fun with wooden bats, and now comes a group of doctors who are all up on plant-based eating and animal rights. They're sizzling mad about the name of the ballclub.

The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine has sent a letter urging the team to change its name, says WMAZ-TV.  The PCRM has put up a billboard urging Maconians to “keep bacon off your plate.”

“Macon Bacon’s glorification of bacon, a processed meat that raises the risk of colorectal cancer and other diseases, sends the wrong message to fans,” Anna Herby, the group's nutrition education program manager, preached to the team's president.

The team has only been around since 2018. The local fans chose their name, and also the name of their mascot, Kevin.

Get it?

Yes, that's the real Kevin Bacon wearing a Macon Bacon hat!

At the Bacon games, hungry fans can treat themselves to bacon-wrapped bacon, steak-cut bacon, bacon-loaded cheese fries and bacon chips.

In her letter, Ms Herby (whose official title bears the letters "DHSc, RD, CDE/CDCES" but not "BLT") says she thinks the team ought to change their name to the “Macon Facon Bacon.” That's a plant-based bacon substitute.  

Team President Brandon Raphael, who knows there is no substitute for bacon, says the team name and image "have been embraced by fans for their lighthearted and playful nature.” And he points out there is a plant-based option at the concession stands.

“The Macon Bacon do not view ourselves as a glorification of an unhealthy lifestyle,” Raphael's statement continued. “Rather, we pride ourselves on being a fun-natured organization focused on bringing families and communities together of Middle Georgia and beyond.”

So, lighten up there, Ms Herby.

Remember walking in the sand?

Those of us who are regular sons of beaches enjoy walking down the beach a way, seeing the sights.

We should all take a stroll with Jennifer Schuh. She was on a California beach and found something just a liiiiiiiiiiiiiiittle odd: a tooth from an ancient mastodon, sticking out of the sand.

I looked it up: Mastodons paraded around California 5 millions to 10,000 years ago, so they even predate Kevin Costner.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. I said Jennifer SAW the tooth protruding from the beach at the mouth of Aptos Creek on Rio Del Mar State Beach. That is near  Monterey Bay in Santa Cruz County on California's central coast.

She knew it was more than just an old chicken bone tossed away, but she wasn't sure what it was. So she took photos of the tooth and posted them on Facebook, asking for help.

Help came from Wayne Thompson, palaeontology collections advisor for the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History.

Tooth expert Thompson identified the object as a worn molar from an adult Pacific mastodon, an extinct elephant-like species.

He and Ms Schuh hustled down to the beach, and what do you think? It was gone!

They spent a weekend looking for that tooth, after which Mr Thompson took to social media to ask for helping finding that missing molar. 

Boom. Next thing you know, Jim Smith (if that was really his name) calls in and says he saw the tooth while jogging.

Uh huh.

Smith did donate the tooth to the local museum, and Ms Schuh went right to Amazon and purchased a replica mastodon tooth necklace, as people do.

Science now has determined that baby mastodons were not allowed to go swimming for a half hour after eating.

 

They cling to their guns

Here's a brilliant gunclinger for you, name of Phoebe Copas.  Pheebs is from Tompkinsville, Kentucky, she is 48, and she recently found herself "out in the West Texas town of El Paso," as that old song said it.

She hopped into an Uber to meet her boyfriend in El Paso.  As any geography student knows, El Paso is right on the Mexican border across from Juarez. 

So it was kind of natural that she would see signs reading “Juarez, Mexico,” am I wrong? I mean, if the signs had said DETROIT 15 MILES or BUFFALO NEXT RIGHT, that would have been cause for concern.  

But Phoebe figured that seeing a sign pointing the way to Juarez was proof positive that the Uber driver had kidnapped her and was taking her to Mexico.

Now, you know how we Americans are lately. Faced with the (incorrect) notion that she was being Shanghaied to Mexico, did she: 

a) ask the driver to stop and let her out?

b) phone 911 from her cell phone and say that she feared for her life?

c) pull a gun out of her purse and shoot the driver in his head?

 If you chose "c," well, winner winner, prison dinner! 

Now Phoebe sits jailed in El Paso, charged with murder in the death of 52-year-old Daniel Piedra García .

Mr. Piedra-García 

According to charging documents, the area where all this took place was “not in close proximity of a bridge, port of entry or other area with immediate access to travel into Mexico.” 

“The investigation does not support that a kidnapping took place or that Piedra was veering from Copas’ destination,” police added.They also said that before she even called 911 after the shooting, Copas took a photo of Piedra and texted it to her boyfriend.

Piedra clung to life for several days before doctors told his family he would not recover.

“I wish she would’ve spoken up, asked questions, not acted on impulse and make a reckless decision, because not only did she ruin our lives, but she ruined her life, too,” Piedra’s niece, Didi Lopez said. “We just want justice for him. That’s all we’re asking.”

Is this the country we want for ourselves, one where people shoot at hurricanes and drivers and people who dare step foot on our property? 

I need to know.

Sunday Rerun: Try it

 I've seen some things in my day, food wise. I've seen the main attraction at a pig roast brought in royally on a cot, ready for the feasting, and someone thought it was a cake.

I've seen (but never tasted) a mock apple pie made of Ritz crackers, instead of apples.

I've been to MOM's Organic Market and seen people buy crickets, apparently to use instead of croutons. (I'm not kidding. This is from their website: "Since 2016, MOM’s has been selling cricket and mealworm products as part of our sustainable protein initiative."

I've heard my wonderful wife tell me of her high school days, where they ate big soft pretzels with ice cream. I say that combining salt and sweet is like putting syrup on a pizza, but multitudes side with Peggy in this debate, so I bow out. But I will admit to a habit that dates back to the early days of Colonel Sanders's campaign: I will put hot sauce on fried chicken and then douse the whole thing with honey. Can't beat it.

My dad used to like apple pie the old fashioned way, with a slice of cheddar cheese. I've never been able to try it, but then again, when I put apple butter on cottage cheese, I get the hairy eyeball a lot, so it's a to-each-his-own thing.

This one comes up every year at Thanksgiving: putting marshmallows on sweet potatoes. Marshmallows are candy, but try putting a Butterfinger bar on your yams...

Pineapple on pizza? Couldn't give you a bigger no.

Oh yeah, I've seen a guy eat a pepperoni pizza and wash it down with milk. I've seen people turn a simple cup of coffee into a pumpkin spice-gingerbread latte thing, and I think about whether the Colombian coffee farmer even dreams of such aberrations.

But I can let everything else go, now that I have seen what I saw yesterday morning on Facebook, where someone showed a picture of crabcakes desecrated with mustard on them.

No mustard, no catsup

Friends and neighbors, a crabcake is not a hot dog or a hamburger. It says here, the only suitable condiment for it is Worcestershire sauce, usually known as "worsdaedaestershay" sauce in Baltimore.

The very idea!

The Saturday Picture Show, June 24, 2023

 

The Baltimore Floatilla (great pun!) is an annual convocation of paddlers held in Baltimore's Inner Harbor. At the end of the day, everyone sings "Paddlin' Madelin Home" and they all paddle home.

Look at this for a second and then look at your own keyboard. Sumthin's different!

One of the great men in our past was a caveman named Tong who figured out a way to stop burning his fingers all the time.

Future Applesauce coming in strong!

And you wondered where your pizza shop gets its pepperoni! Well, wonder no more...it's the rarest of all tropical fruits, the exquisite Bananaroni!

She always wanted a little houseboat...

Those little cymbals on the tambourine have a real name! They are called zills, Turkish for cymbals, and they are related to finger cymbals.

All it takes is one slob to finish his Coke and just toss the can on the ground. Oh, make me a judge for a day and put me in Littering Court.

Little by little, this little peep is about to peck her way into our lives very soon.

Hoover, as Delta President, was honored to have good enough grades to receive his degree and go on to law school before winding up in one of the busiest court systems in the nation. His classmate, Daniel Simpson Day (whereabouts unknown) had no grade point average. All courses incomplete.

It's free

Supreme Court Associate Justice "Slammin'" Sammy Alito, seen below demonstrating that the Court is not supposed to support any political party or candidate, once took a trip to a resort, being flown on a private plane while the costs of the visit to the Alaskan fishing resort were paid by a Republican bigshot.

The man who paid for the ride then had business decisions in front of the Supreme Court at least 10 times in the ensuing years.

Alito forgot to mention this generosity when he filed his financial disclosures, nor did he step away from any of the decisions involving his buddy boy, one Paul Singer. He said he had "no obligation to recuse in any of the cases" because he and the guy did not discuss "business activities or any cases before the court" because (get this!) he had no idea any of the cases in which he ruled had anything to do with the man who treated him to luxury vacays.

That's a lot of tuna sandwiches, boys.

Ask any divorce attorney if "I swear, I thought that was my wife" is a credible defense.  You know it isn't, but ask. Lawyers need laughter too.

But here is my favorite part:  Alito claims his flight was "not consequential" because that seat upon which he plopped his Yale-educated posterior "would have otherwise been vacant" and therefore his friend didn't really spend a penny on him.

Good to know!

Because the whole thing with the Supremes is that they depend on "precedents:" earlier decisions that provide guidelines for present cases.

So, the next time you want to, say, jet over to France for the Cannes Film Festival, just hang around the airport and peep out empty seats, and just before takeoff, plop your non-Yale-educated rump into whatever is unoccupied and say, "Sam sent me." 

Hungry? Head on down to Chris's Ruth Steakhouse and wait for a nice tenderloin that they were going to throw away anyway. That's your supper! Pass the A-1.

And of course, a night at the hotel of your choice is on the house too, if you wait until everyone else who is going to has checked in. Any unused room is all yours, thanks to the Alito Doctrine.

Don't forget to leave a nice tip.

Duck Duck .....

Doesn't it always seem that we try all sorts of technical remedies before realizing that it just might be the easy solution that works best? 

Any auto parts store or Val-U-Mart will sell you window cleaners in exotic shades of blue, and after you give up on them, you go back to what works best and cheapest - grocery store ammonia in water, and newspaper. 

Some time ago, they came out with another miracle pain killer - Aleve. Never did a blessed bit of good for me, but aspirin, made from tree roots, always does.

So when the people running the goldfish pond in Lynn, Massachusetts, found the pond overrun by geese (and their byproducts, goslings and goose poop) they tried chemical deterrents, fishing line, holographic ribbons, any number of things.

And..."People love to feed the geese. The more they feed them, the more they want to come," said Howie Stowe with the Goldfish Pond Association. "When they lay eggs, they will come after you. All of the birds get along good, but the geese fight each other."

(Imagine hearing that being said with that Massachusetts accent!)

Well, Mr Stowe and his crew (the Stoweaways?) found the one simple answer - Tube Dudes!

Dancing inflatable humanoids on timers, so that they activate every hour!

"If these were up all of the time, the geese would be up around it. They would love it," explained Stowe, "When they come back on, they fly away, so it's that on and off they don't like. They can get used to it, so we have to be smart enough to come up with something else."

And what a great schedule the tube dudes have! They come on by timer, work for ten minutes an hour, and then go back to Deflateville, waiting for their next turn.

The pond association reports all good news, and they are waiting to see if they will need to hire more blowup men as the goose season carries on.

Our correspondents will keep us posted, I promise.

 

Fifty

Sometimes, when I'm looking to get a handle on what I want to write (and many people have suggested that I just put it all in a bushel basket with no handle) I lose myself in music. Songs from the past bring back thoughts better than a diary could.

Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the day Peggy and I met and fell in love and went on a blind date that is still going on.  And as older couples will do, we have fallen into a happy routine, part of which involves me riding the exercycle until it's time to come upstairs for a cup of tea with Peggy as we work the Wordle. (Two heads are better than one.) 

And then! before dinner, we watch a rerun of Ozzie and Harriet, which connects us to our golden youth. Inevitably, at the end of the show, the "impossibly handsome" Ricky, to quote John Waters, sings a song, and he's backed up by the great James Burton on guitar. James is shown here over Ricky's left shoulder, putting his Rickenbacker through its paces on "Believe What You Say." 

You know about James, even if you think you don't. The pride of Dubberly, Louisiana, just played an all-star concert in London three weeks ago at the age of 83. But you know him as Elvis's lead guitarist for the last eight years of the King's life...and for the way E would holler, "Play it, James!" when it came time for the guitar solo. Elvis told James that he used to watch him on Ozzie and Harriet, playing for Ricky, and that's how he got that job.

So I'm on the way to the doctor the other day and up pops song # 2251 out of the 2648 tunes I have on one of my favorite thumb drives. It's Elvis doing "The Wonder Of You," (and calling out to James) and that is the song that makes me think of Peggy and how lucky I was to meet her fifty years ago, look into her root-beer colored eyes, and fall in love with the wonder of her.

"I guess I'll never know the reason why" she loves me. We can't explain love; we just live it for 50 years, if we're this lucky.

 

Progress sideways

In the early 1800s, the trend was getting away from everything in factories being done by hand. Machines were taking over! Yikes! And just as people were told in the 1950s that "you could be replaced by a computer," many Englishmen and women feared that the automatic sheep-shearing machine or the waterwheel of knitting would replace the work they had been doing in humble homes and dim factories.

The anti-machine movement grew out of fear (as most anti- movements do) and the best way to spread the fear was to make up a personage to idolize. (Sound familiar?) They came up with the legend of Ned Ludd, who was supposed to have smashed a sock-making machine in his frenzy to forestall the Industrial Revolution.

Next thing you know, no machine had a chance against the self-styled "Luddites," who roamed from factory to farmyard breaking machines and raising the devil about them. 

Spoiler alert: machines were here to stay.

Cut back now to the first time someone told you they were taking a picture by using the telephone they had in their pocket. It seems hard to imagine, how things took us by surprise, as digital technology snaked across the world, engirdling us with microbytes and URLs and websites galore.

It seems inevitable that some are saying, "Whoa! Pump the brakes a second," and rethinking over-digitalization. And according to the Washington POST, these are six activities which might be a good idea to keep around in their traditional analog fashion:

• Film cameras 
• Sending letters and postcards
• Print books and magazines
• Vinyl records
• Pens and stationery
• Collecting

Most all of us have an old film camera somewhere! Look in the drawer where the old batteries and calculators have sat since 1998. There might even be a roll of film in there, ready to drop off at Fotomat.

Or not.

I personally love letters and postcards, so if you go away on vacation this summer, let me know and I will give you my official USPS mailing address. Heck, I can even give you some stamps; I'm sure we have some in that drawer mentioned above.

Print books and magazines! Some of us love the feel of a real book in our trembling hands. If I really want a book to keep forever, I will buy it. For a one-time reading, I will borrow it from the library. 

I have a billion vinyl records so don't even.

I attend every hometown carnival I can find, to load up on refrigerator magnets, nail files, erasers, tote bags, and ballpoint pens. Arthritis has made it hard for me to write anything more compelling than a grocery list with a pen, so I think I have enough to last forever.

My bizarre collection of old LIFE Magazines occupies an area in the basement the approximate size of Rhode Island. Feel free to stop by and read about an era when people had real concerns about body odors, bad breath, and whether their boss would be suitably impressed by their china and silverware.

 

Rising to the challenge

This picture appeared on Facebook the other day, a photo from an accident near the 14th St Bridge in Washington, DC. It occurred on as lovely a June day as you're ever going to see around here - moderate temps, low humidity, just perfect.

January 13, 1982 was just the opposite kind of day. Here in Baltimore and down in DC as well, it was a biting cold day, with snow falling. The DC Airport closed for traffic in the morning but reopened at noon, and at 4 PM, an Air Florida Boeing 737 took off for Florida. The flight lasted just seconds. Unaccustomed to de-icing a plane, the pilots went ahead with takeoff, only to crash into the 14th Street Bridge below, which carries traffic on busy I-395.

The plane was half in the water, half out, and sinking. Several cars on the bridge were struck, and traffic going nowhere meant a lot of people got out to see what was happening.

A man named Lenny Skutnik, who worked running errands and handling mail for the Congressional Budget Office, was one such person, but unlike most of the eddying mob, Lenny did something.   

A National Park Service helicopter hovered above as people on the bank of the river tried to reach out for survivors from the plane. Lenny saw a woman who was too weakened to reach out for the rescue ring lifesaver lowered down from  the chopper.

So Lenny became the lifesaver. He was 28, had never so much as taken a life-saving course, and dove into the freezing water and swam to her, bringing her back to the riverbank. Her name was Priscilla Tirado; she was one of five people who survived aboard that plane bound for the sunny climes of Florida.

78 people on the plane died.

  

                               Mrs Linda Skutnik, Lenny, and Nancy Reagan

Lenny found himself on the shore shirtless and freezing, having given away his parka to a man. He was making $14,000 a year at the time, supporting a wife and two sons, and when he was told he needed to go to a hospital to be checked out, his first thought was whether it was going to cost him anything.

No way. He got an hour's dunk in a hot tub, and thirteen days later, was invited to appear in the gallery of the U.S. House of Representatives for President Ronald Reagan's State of the Union address. The somnambulant president, who often spoke of the heroic actions of others while not mentioning that he spent World War II making movies for the Army Air Force, heaped well-earned praise on Lenny, saying he "represented the spirit of American heroism at its finest.” The nation cheered, and Congress rose as a man and woman to give a true hero a true hero's welcome.

Lenny retired in 2010 from the CBO, but to this day, the mention of his name brings out pride and admiration. 

And to this day, every State of the Union address features stories of people deserving recognition and applause. They sit in the gallery with the First Lady and are saluted warmly.

And to this day, these people are known as "this year's Lenny Skutnik." 

 

Sunday Rerun: (It's not really Black Friday)

 Black Friday is here! It's the day celebrated by merchants across America as their chance to put their profit statements in the black, which is their term for making money, which is why they're in business, no matter what impression they try to give you.

It's interesting to look back on a day when The Day After Thanksgiving was regarded as a day to stay home, watch football, eat leftover sandwiches (putting stuffing on a sandwich is almost as cool as using pizza as a pizza topping >>>>>) and wait for the plumber, since Thanksgiving Day is the #1 clogged-drain day of the year.

The term "Black Friday" originated in Philadelphia, among police and bus and cab drivers and anyone else trying to deal with the shopping  and traffic frenzy that happened in the early 1960s. Beside all the shopping, there was the Army-Navy football game, which used to take place on the Saturday after Gobble Day at Franklin Field.

The City Fathers up there in the City of Brotherly Love were alarmed at the negativity being connected to the merry sound of cash registers registering cash by the truckload, so they tried to float the names "Big Friday" and "Big Weekend" as substitutes.  But those names did not, in fact, float.

The original, first, and most famous Black Friday occurred on September 24, 1869, when two financial wizards, Jay Gould and his partner James Fisk attempted to corner the market on the New York Gold Exchange. It turned out that Gould and Fisk had gained the confidence of President Ulysses S. Grant, who had about as much business being president as the man in the moon did. The economy of the United States, still recovering from the Civil War, went into a tailspin for years after this scandal.

The next historic Black Friday was so horrible that it was held on a Tuesday so as not to wreck anyone's weekend. We're speaking of October 29, 1929, when a decade of insane financial practices following World War I led to the first stock market crash, which led to the Great Depression. So many people had bought stock "on margin"  - meaning without money they actually had - that when the bills came due, everyone looked at everyone else to pay, just like when everyone goes to Applebee's for a big lunch. 

It's hard to think of Black Friday as a boon to business with that history behind the term, but for those of you heading to the malls today - and to the REAL malls of today, your keyboards - here's a reminder that tomorrow is Small Business Saturday.  Why not spend a little money at that local craft store or yarn shop or ma-and-pa photo developing place instead of helping Wally World crush the competition?

The Saturday Picture Show, June 17, 2023

 

Everything about this says "1985": her vinyl records, her stereo component system (to which she would add a cassette deck soon, for sure), her CRT TV with rabbit ears, no cable. No cell, no wifi, but a Golden Maize wall-to-wall carpet. 1985.

Anne Francis had been Glenn Ford's wife in "The Blackboard Jungle," and was still a few years away from starring as "Honey West" when she was in 1958's "Forbidden Planet," co-starring Robbie The Robot. We spent that entire decade expecting robots to take over our lives, and are still waiting.

Here is why they call it "Kingsford" brand charcoal: When Henry Ford set up operations to build his Model-T Ford cars, he needed a lot of wood, because the frame, dashboard, steering wheel and the wheels themselves for those cars were all made of wood. Old Henry had a cousin who was married to a man named Kingsford, who was in the real estate business. Kingsford found a large forest in Michigan to supply the lumber, and the extra wood (sawed-off segments, branches, etc) was going to waste until he found a use for it, and that was the charcoal briquet that Dad pours so much lighter fluid on even today. The briquet is the scrap wood and sawdust, bound by cornstarch. The factory that Ford set up for this enterprise was designed by Thomas A. Edison and it was so efficient that it turned out 610 pounds of briquets for every 2000 pounds of waste wood. 

As soon as the burgers are done, these rolls will be ready for them! Cheese, mayo, pickle, and fried onions for me, please!

Now that the kids are out of school for the summer, give them that box that the water heater came in, and some Elmer's Glue, and let them make their Halloween getup early!

In India, they make footbridges from living vines.

It would never dawn on me to rip off items from a hotel room, and I would love to see someone nonchalantly saunter through the lobby with the ironing board under his jacket. But this hotel found a way to let potential thieves expect a bill.

I have a fascination with old brickwork. Imagine the work that went into this hallway!

I'm not sure how important it was in 1912 for an eighth-grader in Bullitt County, Kentucky, to know how to spell "rhinoceros." But I do think the Board of Education should have known how to spell "endeavor" and "Raleigh." 

This picture probably came from a calendar. Kids fishing with bamboo poles in Peoria, Illinois.

The first of its kind

 I have to admit, we are a little late watching the MAX miniseries "White House Plumbers," about the bumbling ineptitude of G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt as they carry out their sworn mission to make sure that R. Milhous Nixon would win the 1972 presidential election.

Justin Theroux (l) and Woody Harrelson as Liddy and Hunt.

It just dawned on me when I sat down to write to you about the show that maybe the entire concept of a "miniseries" came about when television bigwigs saw this drama unfold night after night on the Evening News. It was 51 years ago tomorrow that the first crack in the damn dam appeared, when Hunt and Liddy sent a "crack" team of burglars to the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate complex in Washington to get information that might harm the chances for George McGovern to defeat Nixon.

McGovern did not have a chance in hell of winning that election. Even with all the trouble Nixon got into before the election, he still won 60.7% of the vote, but because he had a deeply suspicious nature, he was certain that "THEY" were out to get him.

That seems to be a recurrent theme in presidential politics.

But again, Nixon sent people on all sorts of nefarious missions to sew up the election for himself, and he really should not have bothered. Because the doofuses (doofi?) Hunt and Liddy sent to break into the DNC offices were caught taping the doorlatch open, and a poorly-paid security guard named Frank Wills saved the nation by catching the dunderheads in the act.

Wills called the police, and as it happened, three members of DC's finest happened to be in the area in plainclothes, looking for drug deals and street crimes. They responded to the call and arrested the burglars, who had a lookout named Alfred Baldwin stationed in the Howard Johnson's hotel across the street. Baldwin would have seen the police entering the building and could have notified his compadres, but he was watching a movie called "Attack Of The Puppet People" on TV and, well, he let his guard down.

Starting with those arrests, and the investigation that led up the ladder past Hunt and Liddy all the way to the Big Man In Charge - Nixon - the nation was transfixed night after night as crimes were revealed and Congress took action to investigate and punish the wrongdoers. Spoiler alert: they did.

But maybe that is where someone got the idea to have limited-run series of dramatic events, because this stuff is endlessly fascinating.

And just to show you that 51 years later, things have not really changed all that much, Nixon held a press conference on November 17, 1973, as the investigation began squeezing out the truth. That was the night he said, "People need to know whether their president is a crook. Well, I am not a crook."

And people laughed. It was fun and entertaining. Of course it was - it took place in Walt Disney's Contemporary Resort in Florida.

Then as now, it all comes back to the mouse.

Just a little to the left

If you're an athlete, it's good to be tall and lean.

If you're a high-rise apartment building, it's good to be tall, but you don't want to lean.

In San Francisco, the Millennium Tower is leaning to the west - more than ever before - even though outside engineering consultant experts have been working on the problem.

Many of you will remember Charley Eckman, the verbose local sportscaster here in Baltimore. He defined "expert" as "a guy from out of town with a briefcase."

People have known that the building is both sinking and tilting since 2016. To my astonishment, people keep living there. I hope the day never comes that their surviving family members have to say things like, "He believed to the end that that tilting, sinking building was safe to live in." 

The current lean is more than 29 inches. 

Seen here are engineers, photographed earlier this year, inserting piles at the base of the massive building to try to stabilize it. NBC Bay Area says that while there was some initial improvement of the situation, the leaning has continued.

Ron Hamburger, one of the engineers on the case, says not to get too upset because the data that NBC Bay Area saw is prone to fluctuations, because it was taken from the rooftop. Hamburger says we should be measuring the tilt at the foundation of the building instead, and states that the added tilt is “negligible.”

“We are fully confident that following transfer of the remaining design load to the piles,’’ Hamburger said to NBC Bay Area. “There will be no further …. movement of the roof to the west.”

Uh huh.

Nutty dance

Here in the US, it's pretty much the plan that at all wedding receptions, retirement parties, rec center dances, and supermarket openings, we'll be doing the Chicken Dance. I ask my far-off friends in Hong Kong, Balochistan, and Nome if there are reports of Chicken Dancing in their town, and the answer is usually "no."

Sometimes, it's "What???," but usually, just "no."

Meanwhile in Australia, they're mad for The Nutbush, a dance they made up to dance to the Ike & Tina Turner Classic "Nutbush City Limits." It goes like this right here... 

As you can see, they draw a whale of a crowd when the DJ drops "Nutbush"...

So popular is this step, which, remember, is set to a tune recorded in 1973, that some of the schools in Australia have put it in their physical education curricula.

And of course, they're all over it down under, doing TikTok videos to Tina's song.  

A good thing about the record Ike produced way back then is that it has a long and recognizable intro, giving seated people the chance to take one last pull on their drink before getting up to join the fray on the dance floor.

You can Google the steps if you want to learn the dance, or watch the dozens of videos available. Just from looking at them, I'd rate it as harder to learn than The Twist and easier than The Hand Jive.

And do you know a person who never learned it?? Tina Turner had her own dance for the song, and she never did this step. 

But don't try to copy the late, great Ms Tina. You might fracture your clavicle.

 

 

 

Bear Down

When I was a kid, and Disney was just a benign producer of TV shows such as "Davy Crockett," we all sang the theme song:  

Born on a mountain top in Tennessee

Greenest state in the land of the free

Raised in the woods, so he knew ev'ry tree

Kilt him a b'ar when he was only three

Davy, Davy Crockett, king of the wild frontier

We all knew what we would do if we came face to face with a "b'ar," otherwise known as the brown bear, or grizzly bear (Ursus arctos horribilis). Why, we'd kill it, with bare hands if necessary, or by boring him to death with our bravado.

We could do that, because in those days, a bear roaming around Baltimore County was as common a sight as an unindicted politician.  But things have changed, and they are everywhere now!

(Not our local bear)

The news showed a bear in video taken from a Ring camera just a hoot and a holler away from our house here in Carney. The homeowner told the station:

"After he saw there was no birdseed he went to a different tree and yanked my hummingbird feeder down from the branch. Then he just walked away. My dog never even noticed that he was there! Aside from straightening the shepherd's hook that the birdfeeder was on, he didn’t do any damage."  

And the video shows the ursine strutting around the yard, and reaching up from its hind legs to scoop out a nice treat from the bird seeder.

And also last week, folks saw bears in Hyattsville and Columbia.

What's more, DC police said that a Baltimore County bear was found roaming in Northeast DC before being given a lift back home. They were able to figure out where he lived because he was wearing a "Straight Outta Baltimore County" t-shirt and eating Berger's Cookies when apprehended.

If the bear that was stalking around Carney shows up in my driveway, let's hope he has the courtesy not to interrupt my nap by ringing the doorbell, in which case I will think he's selling siding or windows or FIOS. He can stand there until hell freezes over, like the other annoying salespeople.

 

As the years go by

Set your Wayback Machine to April 2005, and imagine  Mary Majcunich-Beasley, an air traffic controller at the Savannah, Georgia, airport. It's 10:20 PM on April 15 as Mary finishes her shift and gets into the elevator on the 12th floor, pressing the button for the first floor.

Mary had just worked her eight-hour shift and was seven months pregnant at the time and more than ready to go home and unwind, but the elevator had other plans, grinding to a halt on the way down.

“I didn’t want anything bad to happen,” Majcunich-Beasley told The Washington Post, “because emotions, especially when you’re pregnant, can get the best of you.”

It took an hour, which must have seemed like a dozen hours, for the airport fire department crew to pry open the doors so Majcunich-Beasley could crawl out. After the paramedics checked her out, she was on her way home.

Majcunich-Beasley's daughter Malia Beasley came along that June, and Mary came to believe that the girl's life was saved by the rescue.

So here we are, 18 years later, and Malia is being graduated from high school. And as Ms Majcunich-Beasley was planning the grad party, she took the notion to invite the brave firefighter she credits with getting her off that lift in 2005. At the time of the rescue, he was Sergeant Raymond Sikes, and is now Deputy Chief Raymond Sikes, and he remembered rescuing Majcunich-Beasley from the broken elevator.

Mom, 53 now,  and daughter recently went to the Savannah/Hilton Head International Airport to meet up with DC Sikes and thank him again.

“It’s always been on the back of my mind; I wanted to get my daughter and him together,” says Majcunich-Beasley.  “We get so busy in life that we don’t go back and acknowledge that person.”

“We’re there in some of the worst times in people’s lives during emergencies, and I don’t think everybody wants to remember some of those events,” Sikes recalled. “That’s one of the first times that anybody’s ever reached out from an event like that and invited me to something. To me, it was a big deal.”

So they threw a party to celebrate Malia's graduation and the reunion with Sikes, and amid the pasta, peanut butter cookies, and cake, she told the chief she is heading to Montreat College in North Carolina this fall to study criminal justice.

“I guess I’ll see you at college graduation next,” Sikes told mom and daughter.

“Expect that invite!" Majcunich-Beasley responded.

 

Sunday Rerun: Have a drink

 When your doctor or fitness coach or spouse tells you to drink more water, it's not that they own a huge chunk of Poland Spring stock. The fact is, the water that comes right out of the tap, or garden hose, will do, but the trick is you have to DRINK it!  A lot of people lug home 35-packs of bottled water, or fancy glass bottles of mountain-fresh water just down from the majestic Lake Sopchocky Falls.

Just owning water is not good enough. You actually have to drink it.

And there is more and more evidence that being even a bit dehydrated can scramble your mood -  or your noodle.

Mindy Millard-Stafford, director of the Exercise Physiology Laboratory at Georgia Institute of Technology, reports finding that, "When people are mildly dehydrated they really don't do as well on tasks that require complex processing or on tasks that require a lot of their attention."  She's done 33 studies on this, and published her analysis of the evidence this month, right after she drank a whole lot of water.

And this time of the year, with people inexplicably taking to the great outdoors to get that 20-mile run in, is even harder to deal with, because with summer heat and humidity, it does not take long at all to become even mildly dehydrated.

"If I were hiking at moderate intensity for one hour, I could reach about 1.5 percent to 2 percent dehydration," reports Doug Casa, a professor of kinesiology at the University of Connecticut, and CEO of the Korey Stringer Institute.

2 percent dehydration means you've perspired about a liter of water.

"Most people don't realize how high their sweat rate is in the heat," Casa adds, pointing out that it only might take a half an hour to soak out that much water.

And the problem there is, just as you might keep eating before your "appestat" tells you "that's enough chow!" you might be reaching dehydration before you even feel thirsty.

But you can tell the effects on your mental performance almost right away.

Nina Stachenfeld, of the Yale School of Medicine and the John B. Pierce Laboratory, led research into this, testing a group of young healthy women who took cognitive tests, and cut their fluid intake to 6 ounces a day. That was a 1% dehyrdration, and even that small amount showed a measurable effect on their mental flexibility.

The test was a card game that required the women to deal with rule and situation changes, and sure enough, when they weren't getting enough water, they make lots more mistakes.

And then, given all the water they cared to guzzle, they went back to doing well in the game.

The tests showed that even coffee or tea - drinks made with water - had the same salubrious effect, so from Starbucks to Lipton to Aquafina, whatever it is, drink up!

The next part of the test - locating public restrooms - is still being analyzed.

The Saturday Picture Show, June 10, 2023

 

"The Louvre? Ah, madame, the Louvre is two blocks east of here. This, bon amie, is the LOUVERS!"

There are memory triggers that never let me down. Just seeing a pile of steamed crabs, and I can smell the Old Bay, the smell of a cheap cigar takes me back to humid summer nights watching baseball at the old Stadium, and a grassy lawn mower fills my feeble brain with that incomparable fresh-cut grass aroma.

Great art was created (or at least planned) here: This was Vincent Van Gogh’s bedroom in the psychiatric hospital at St. Remy de Provence, France

It was so much simpler in 1973 to explain political scandals. Here's Nixon's secretary Rose Mary Woods demonstrating how easy it is to hold one button down on the telephone while pressing the "record" button on the Dictaphone for 18 and a half minutes. 

We've all seen bozos and crapulous fools interrupt reporters doing live shots on TV - but Samantha Rivera of CBS Miami wasn't having it when a man who didn't belong on TV tried to get in the shot. She pushed him away with one arm and didn't even skip a beat!

Native Americans regard the birth of a white buffalo as a sign of good times and happiness ahead. This newborn out in Wyoming is here to bring that to you! Just don't tell Ted Nugent; you know how he gets all worked up.

Someone named Krusty must be driving that big rig!

This is the special Muppet storage area at the Smithsonian.

I am one of those who gets excited when I come into possession of a really nice box, with firm cardboard, a reinforced underside and a tight lid. I then plan on a dozen different things that will be just right to store in the great box, and wind up filling it with what else? Books.

It's a baby seagull! Never seen one at the beach, so I guess they hang around the house until they grow big enough to come up seaside and start chowing down on french fries.