Let's Be Real

I retired at 60. We were fortunate to be able to do so financially, and let's face it, I was never one of those people for whom work was the very essence of my being. I know there are those who feel that way, but I had things I wanted to read and write and experience that did not involve continuing my work. I loved my job and I really loved the people I worked with, but enough is enough. I'm happy I left, and every month I get a nice pension deposit that keeps the happiness afloat.

The other night, I saw the excruciating sight of a man aged 81 years trying to say a few sentences to the press, and freezing in midsentence before being led away by a colleague who happens to be a medical doctor.

I have never before been in favor of mandatory age limits for anyone in any job. But for crying out loud, that man, Senator McConnell, took a fall earlier this year, suffered a rib injury and a concussion, was out of work for six weeks, and has returned to a very important job, and if you can't tell that he's not up to it, you're not looking at it fairly.

And this is not any partisan thing for me. I happen to think that the current president is too old to continue serving in that role. 

There are younger men and women who are ready to serve in these highest roles in government, and maybe we are missing out on what they have to offer by insisting they stick around just because they've always been there.

I don't think we can make a law saying "70 and out," or whatever, but I would like to think that people should recognize they are not quite as strong as they were at 40, and maybe step aside voluntarily. We can't force people to go, but they should want to leave it up to someone else now.

I'll catch hell from the Gray Panthers on this, but since I am superannuated myself, let them bring it. 

It says here, a person who really loves his or her country or government or county or city or whatever should be willing to step away from the spotlight and let it shine on someone else.

And I think that people my age should be retested annually by the Motor Vehicle Administration to verify that they are still capable of operating a motor vehicle.  

Here we go...

Sunday Rerun: Don Q Very Much

 Peggy and I are friends with a woman who said some wise things in her day. One of them, and I'll paraphrase, was that "if there is more of you than there is bathing suit, go up a size."  This was in reference to those who had a lot spilling over the dam, as it were.

And another time she said words that I have quoted a thousand times, and I will do so verbatim here:

"Some people, if they don't have enough drama in their lives, go out and make more drama for themselves"

The latest case involves this fellow up in Harford County, one Daniel Swain, from Fallston. He was arrested after refusing to wear a mask to vote at the Jarrettsville Volunteer Fire Company the other day. 

It was the first day of early voting, and the place was packed, as all the early voting locations have been. Swain, 53, showed up to vote with his 22-year-old son, and would not cover his face as required by the governor's mandate for all people over the age of 5 to wear a face covering indoors in public places.

Deputies were sent to the Jarrettsville fire house at 2:46 p.m. on Monday after election officials reported two people were refusing to cover their mugs. 

Recognizing that some people would throw up objections to wearing a mask to protect others while voting, the state put alternate plans in place. So, officials gave Swain, who retired this year as a captain at the Baltimore County Detention Center, a chance to step outside to an outdoor booth to vote.

By this time, three officers had been taken away from important patrol duties to deal with this insanity. There is no record of Swain being either an attorney or a law enforcement officer, but nevertheless, he persisted. He told three officers that the request that he follow the governor's lawful order was “unconstitutional," claiming that Maryland law allowed people to vote indoors without face masks, according to the police report.

The debate raged for another half an hour, with Swain refusing exhortations from the police and the election officials to don a mask. At length, the two men were asked to leave the firehouse. Swain’s son complied. Swain did not. 

He was charged with trespassing on private property and failure to comply with a health emergency, per court records.

"Deputies worked to resolve the situation for nearly 30 minutes. At that time, one man complied and left the premises," the Harford County Sheriff's Office said in a statement. "However, Mr. Swain made the choice to continue to refuse to comply directives given by the Election Judge. When it was clear there were no other options, Mr. Swain was placed under arrest."

Released on his own recognizance, Swain faces trial on December 4 in Harford County District Court.

The Sheriff's Office added, "It is worth noting, Mr. Swain was not banned from the location, and is still able to cast his ballot." 

"Since the coronavirus pandemic began, Sheriff Jeffrey Gahler has been very clear that deputies would handle reported mask violations through education and would not be making arrests or issuing criminal citations solely for refusing to follow the Governors' order on wearing masks," the sheriff's office reported. "However; if a private property owner, store manager, or in this case, Election Official needed assistance in having a person vacate a premise, we would enforce a trespassing violation. That is exactly what occurred in the following incident. While the polls are open to the public, they are subject to compliance with the rules and regulations set forth by the Board of Elections and the Governor of Maryland."

I don't know this man, although we both get our pension checks from the same munificent source. But I do know that my sixth-favorite Don (after Cheadle, Geronimo, Knotts, Stark, and Everly) is Quixote, who said, “Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them.”

And his buddy Sancho replied, "Take care, sir," cried Sancho. "Those over there are not giants but windmills."

The lesson is clear. Pick a fight that's worth fighting and don't go chasing windmills. Or waterfalls. Just do the right thing and get along.

The Saturday Picture Show, July 29, 2023

 

What an inviting space for young readers! This is at the Brentwood, Tennessee, public library.

The Zamboni hockey rink cleaning device is in good hands, being driven by a D.A.R.E. graduate....

We've seen these for years. I wonder about them, specifically, how do these two young Danes find out how far their picture gets? 

Now that I have finally perfected my pasta sauce recipe, I see tomatoes in light of how much spaghetti I can get under them. These chubby fruits look just right!

The very definition of a "foreboding sky."

I don't care if you have never been within a hundred miles of a steamed crab. Wherever you are, throw a little Old Bay seasoning on your sweet corn this summer. You'll be glad you did!

I think of that Alan Jackson song "Tall Tall Trees" when I see pictures like this. George Jones and Roger Miller wrote that one..."I'll buy you tall tall trees and all the waters in the seas...I'm a fool fool fool for you!"

Nature is beautiful, is it not?

Wherever you are in the world, when you stir sugar into your coffee or whatever, you're enjoying a little bit of Baltimore. This is our Domino Sugar plant, down in the harbor. The sugarcane gets here on ships.

People were asking what the upright pipes were used for in townhouse neighborhoods...it's simple! People used to hang clothes on a clothesline to dry in the sun, and a rope on pulleys was the answer.  You could stay right on the porch and bring the dry sheets and shirts to you!

Not Taylor Swift

Zac Taylor is the coach of the Cincinnati Bengals football team. I'm sure I'm not the only football fan who wonders if he were named for the 12th president of the United States, and if the coach avoids cold milk and cherries.

What, now? President Zachary Taylor (1784 - 1850) spent his final Fourth of July on the land in Washington DC where the Washington Monument was to be built. He had only served 16 months at the time. Remember, sanitation and hygiene were primitive in those days, and maybe it would have been better if he had not gobbled a lot of cherries and cold milk on that scorching hot day.

Cholera, the killer disease borne by bacteria, was not uncommon at all in the 19th century, especially in hot weather in areas of poor sewage systems. What it was that caused the president to become ill is still in doubt. Perhaps it was cholera, perhaps gastroenteritis from all those acidic cherries mixed with milk. It might even have been food poisoning or typhoid fever that felled Taylor, a Mexican War hero, but his last four days were full of sickness (cramping, diarrhea, nausea and dehydration) and an agonizing death that his doctors attributed to cholera morbus, a bacterial infection of the small intestine.

Zachary Taylor

Millard Fillmore succeeded Taylor as president, and we can assume that he avoided dangerous foods. He was unable to secure his Whig party's nomination to run for president in 1852. His wife caught a cold at the 1853 inauguration of Franklin Pierce, who won that election, and died of pneumonia soon thereafter...and his only daughter died of cholera in 1854.

I'll have a happier story for you on Monday. Until then, watch what you eat! 

 

 

On Further Review...

Do they even still sell Baby Ruth candy bars? I know they sold a ton of them when I was a bicycle riding, Coke swigging, candy bar munching ball of energy. I was not for the Baby Ruths at all. I liked the Snickers and the Mars bars so much, I invested some stray dollars in a nougat mine out West, but it didn't pay off. The miners didn't take the right kind of drill with them.

But the name of the Baby Ruth candy bar was always questioned. Most people just assumed that the candy company ripped off the name of the Baltimore-born Yankee slugger Babe Ruth, whose popularity zoomed in the early 1920s.

At that same time, the Curtiss Candy Company in Chicago had a treat called the Kandy Kake that wasn't selling so well, so they changed the recipe to a chocolate-covered peanut-caramel-nougat bar and changed the name to Baby Ruth. 

And within five years, Curtiss was selling a million dollars worth a month, a nickel a throw. The money was coming in so fast that the company hired airplane pilots to fly around dropping thousands of Baby Ruth bars from their planes, with little parachutes to guide them to earth and the waiting hands of hoi polloi.

Back in New York, Babe Ruth noticed all this commerce and decided he wanted a slice of the candy, so he put out a bar called "Ruth's Home Run Candy." The Curtiss people said hold on a second here: our lawyers can spot copyright infringement a thousand miles away, and anyway, our candy bar is not named for you, but for President Grover Cleveland's oldest daughter, Ruth.

And that would have been much more believable had not Baby Ruth Cleveland been born in 1891, thirty years before the candy bar. Not only that: Baby Ruth was not even alive anymore; she died of diphtheria in 1904.

So it would seem that claiming they named the candy bar after a baby born three decades before was stretching the truth a little. Stretching is ok... if you're a Bonomo's Turkish Taffy. 

And that taffy has nothing to with the nation of Turkey whatsoever.

Maybe I'll switch to Clark Bars and claim to have invented them!  

 

Bah Bah Bahhhhhhhhhhh

We love you, Barbara Jean Fassert, wherever you are.

Barbara Jean had a brother by the name of Fred, a member of The Regents, a doo-wop group from New York City. In 1961 he wrote a song using her name that went to #3 on the Top 100 chart.

Four years later, Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys was working on his soon-to-be-legendary "Pet Sounds" album, but with Christmas season coming up, his record company was all over him to come up with an album and a single for gift giving time. Geniuses such as Brian don't do well with time constraints, and he was not about to rush songs like "Good Vibrations" and "God Only Knows" until he had perfected them.

But he had another idea. How about, he said, "if we go in the studio with some musicians and friends and pretend to have a party, record the whole thing, and put that out?" That's how the "Beach Boys Party" album came to be. Santa brought me a copy that December and I still have it.

It's not a classic, it broke no new musical ground, but it was fun to listen to, and the single was a new version of "Barbara Ann." By The Beach Boys, not The Regents. 

Well, sort of. 

The Beach Boys and Jan And Dean were close friends, and Brian asked his record company if it would be OK to have them as guests at the "Party."

Nothing doing, came the answer, unless you can get a guarantee from THEIR record company that The Beach Boys can be guests on a Jan And Dean record. And that was never going to fly.

So it was that by pure coincidence (!) J & D were recording across the hall the same day the "Party" was going on, and during a 15 minute break, Dean Torrence, the falsetto voice on so many great records, slipped over to say hi, and the first thing you know, Brian invited him to sing incognito.

(But he would rather sing falsetto, ha ha.)

Dean offered to take the lead on "Barbara Ann," the song was completed in two takes, and he hustled back across the hall, swearing up and down that he did not lend his voice in song.

Listen at the very end here. You can hear Brian Wilson say, "Thank you, Dean!"

Oh well. Some secrets can't stay secret for long!

Dig It

There are treasures at the bottom of the sea - just think about all those pirate ships at the bottom of the oceans and seas, filled with treasure chests and Spanish doubloons.  Almost makes me want to get some scuba gear and go for it!

But here's a fortune that a guy found while staying completely dry, unless it was raining in Kentucky one certain day.  A Civil War coin hoard turned up down there, proving that there is something even more theft proof than banks...the ground. 

In an old cornfield in KY, earlier this year, a man who is staying anonymous (and keeping this location the same!) found more than 700 gold coins. They're calling it the Great Kentucky Hoard. All these coins are from 1840 and 1863. Included in the loot: $10 gold "Lady Liberty" coins, rare 1863 $20 gold Liberty double eagles, and $1 coins known as Indian princess dollars.

This guy didn't just roll into town on a head of cabbage. He hired the Numismatic Guaranty Company to remove surface gunk and prepares the coins for long-term preservation. They also examined all the coins and identified some rare "error coins."

When the Civil War started (1861) Kentucky was a Southern state where slavery was legal, and many of its citizens decided to remain loyal to the United States, so they officially declared themselves neutral. 

With so much in doubt, including obviously the national banking system, many people buried their stashes of gold as an insurance policy of sorts. Four years later when the War was over (spoiler alert: the North won!) perhaps the owner of all this was dead or otherwise unable to dig up his coins.

And, these coins were genuine US federal currency, not Confederate money, which is as worthless as a sundial in a snowstorm.

And get your shovels and backpacks ready:  A Kentuckian named William Pettit buried $80,000 worth of gold coins on his farm in Lexington, but died before he got around to digging it up.

So, next time you're heading to Kentucky to look after your racehorse, fried chicken, and bourbon interests, dig in!

 

 

Make the most of time

He was one of those guys who really loved people and whom people really loved having around.

He was born James Franklin Oldham, but, as was the fashion of the day, he took a sharper name to use as a radio DJ, and as Jim O'Brien, he worked at radio stations in his native Texas, New York, and Los Angeles before finding his forever home in Philadelphia.

He landed there in 1970 as the midday DJ on WFIL and soon was heard on the all-important morning show after "Dr" Don Rose left that slot for a job in Los Angeles.

Somehow, O'Brien (who was the father of actress Peri Gilpin - the radio producer on "Frasier") found the energy to work as many as 18 hours a day. Channel 6 in Philly was located in the same building, making an easy commute for O'Brien to become the midday weatherman (back before stations really cared if their weather reporter was a meteorologist or not). He would also do the sports and anchor the news reports throughout the day, as well as hosting the local version of "Dialing For Dollars" and the weekend "Primetime" magazine show.

His daughter, Peri Gilpin.

Eventually, he gave up his radio duties, but only because there are but so many hours in a day. He loved broadcasting, and also had hobbies of flying a small plane, riding his motorcycle "The Chrome Pony" and skydiving.

And that's how he met his fate in September of 1983, when his parachute became entangled with that of another skydiver and he fell to earth, forever 44.

You could say he packed a lot of living into the time he had on earth, though. 

The final record he played on the radio was prophetic. "Funny How Time Slips Away, " by Jimmy Elledge.  

Sunday Rerun: Ivy League for every drop of rain that falls, a flower grows....

 In the middle of the sprawling campus of Towson University just outside Baltimore there lies a twelve-acre glen called "The Glen" by literal-minded students.  Within the glen are 94 of the 120 tree species native to Maryland.

These are everywhere!

You know that one of those tree types thriving in Towson would be the Ailanthus altissima, the tree originally from China that some people call the "Tree of Heaven" and some call the "stink tree." Ailanthus would grow in a paved schoolyard or a crack in a sidewalk. Or in a sidewalk without a crack, I don't know.  They're everywhere around here.

And so is English ivy (Hedera helix) which has been threatening to take over The Glen.  This rampant green invader can show up out of nowhere and, in no time at all, take over everything in sight, like your uncle from Cincinnati who showed up that time and just stayed and stayed, and ate all the scrapple and almond bark that Nora gave you for Christmas. 

English Ivy sounds very nice, like a nice tower at a college where people wear tweed suits and read Wordsworth and sip Darjeeling, or the other way around.  But once it takes over a garden or glen, it's curtains for the other flora...it will take over and choke everything in a curtain of green.  Even the ailanthus!

Getting your goat

So, bring in some fauna, figured the University brass, and they did, in the form of a herd of 18 goats from Harford County, who arrived by truck, entered the woods and commenced to chowing down on the ivy and I don't know what-all else...leaves, tree bark, probably some empty beer cans. This is a trial, but if the goats eliminate the ivy from this part of the campus, they will get to dine on all the overgrown sections.

It's more earth-friendly than herbicides and cheaper than hiring people.  And there is one other benefit...people get stung by bees and suffer reactions to poison ivy.  In my Opie-like childhood, when my parents moved to our long-time home outside Towson, the front yard had been allowed to run riot, and was full of poison ivy.  A friendly neighbor brought over his goat, who made a brunch of the problem, no problem.

The Saturday Picture Show, July 22, 2023

When I became a baseball fan long ago, players made $15,000 a year if they were stars, and they worked selling used cars or aluminum siding in the off season. Today, they make movie star money, and take their mom and sister to the All-Star Game dressed to the nines. Baltimore's star catcher Adley Rutschman is shown here with his mom and sister, all dressed like royalty from the days of French dynastic families. 

Tell me you just read this in Donald's voice!

It's the little things. In Japan, they decorate the manhole covers beautifully. We let ours rust.

If your address happens to #563 on whatever lane or road, you can print this and make a nice sign that your neighbors at #561 will surely envy.  That loudmouth at #565 won't care.

Someone mentioned these guys the other day. This was their first album, from 1969. Grand Funk Railroad specialized in industrial strength, non-artistic, loud rock and roll. It was not particularly cool to like them. It was better to be a fan of  Led Zeppelin or Rush or Pink Floyd and such, but Grand Funk seemed to be having fun and making music and money. The money was swallowed up in arguments with the IRS and their own management, and in 1976 they made the brave decision to disband rather than go disco. I guess they're out playing the state fair circuit these days. I wouldn't mind hearing "Closer To Home" right now.

I always enjoy seeing the way that nature arranges perfect housing for its creatures. 

Grilled cheese and bacon, and you could add a nice thin tomato slice, too.

This is an old product, Pear's Soap, but I still use it and swear by it for my glowing dewy complexion. Also, they sell it at Dollar Tree, so...

I agree with the late Thin White Duke here, and if I may, I would add that when you age and do it happily, you find out what matters - and what doesn't. Little things that seemed so important years ago now don't amount to doodly squat.

As an example of what I was just saying: you will not see people over 30 running with the bulls in Pamplona. Just sayin'.

Generals And Majors Uh Huh

People who have served in the military will usually tell you that it's hard to get the attention of the top brass, especially when you have a problem to report. 

Probably, the problem is that they don't want to hear about problems.

But someone should have told them ten years ago that millions of US military emails have been erroneously sent to Mali, which is a country in West Africa.  A country which has allied itself with Russia.

Why are our corporals and admirals and grand Pooh-Bahs sending emails that contain medical records, personnel ID info, staff lists from military bases, secret photos of military bases, naval inspection reports, Navy vessel crew lists, personal tax records, and so on to Mali?

It's because of a typo that has been typoed hundreds of thousands of times.

You see, military people, instead of addressing their emails to, say, "CampSwampy.mil," people are addressing things to "CampSwampy.ml". "MIL" is the proper suffix for military addresses, while "ML" is the suffix for Mali.

Mali's domain is managed by Johannes Zuurbier, who is a Dutch entrepreneur. When he started seeing these misdirected emails, he tried to warn the US military, but got no answer. He then set up a sieve on the computer to catch these mistakes, but there were so many, according to the Financial Times, that the boo-boo catcher  “was rapidly overwhelmed and stopped collecting messages.”

Just this year along, Mr Zuurbier says he has collected 117,000 wrongly addressed emails, and he says some of them contain sensitive military information.

And...he has had a contract with the Mali government to run their email. The contract runs out on Monday, after which local authorities will have access to all these wrong emails.

Did I mention that Mali is allied with Russia? Russia and Mali are connected through the Wagner Group, that state-backed Russian paramilitary group that's been in the news lately for trying to overthrow Vladimir Putin.

But don't worry. The military is on top of it.

“The Department of Defense (DoD) is aware of this issue and takes all unauthorized disclosures of Controlled National Security Information or Controlled Unclassified Information seriously,” says Tim Gorman, a spokesperson for the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

I know I feel better now!  

Ooopsie

We really need to make sure to watch out for every little detail in life. Like making sure the gas tank is full or close to it before embarking on a long car trip. Or taking an umbrella along on a day when they're calling for rain. Or making sure you have chives to toss on your omelet before the omelet is finished omeletting in the pan. 

Omelet that joke alone, ok? 

Here for your sadness is the story about how the best-laid plans can go awry...

K.V. Lakshmi is a professor and the director of Rensselaer Polytechnic’s Center for Biochemical Solar Energy Research. For 20 years, she worked day and night on what was regarded as potential groundbreaking research, only to have all her work wrecked by a custodian flipping a switch.

The university is suing Daigle Cleaning Systems in Albany, N.Y., for a million dollars, claiming breach of contract and failure to train properly a janitor who turned off a circuit breaker at the laboratory. That cut the power to the freezer and destroyed all its contents.

The janitor's name is Joseph Herrington. In his deposition, he said he was worried because “annoying alarms” were sounding on the freezer, and he thought that “important breakers” had been turned off. But, according to the lawsuit, Herrington turned them off.

The suit says that Dr. Lakshimi was running “high level research” inside the Cogswell Laboratory building. She had a freezer that was designed to house cell cultures and samples that had to be kept at minus 112°.

An alarm was set to holler if the freezer temp increased to 78° below or decreased to 82° below. On the day in question, the alarm sounded, and Dr Lakshmi and her staff worked to protect their research cells, and placed a security lock on the freezer outlet. She added a note saying that the freezer should be left as is, no cleaning was required, and gave instructions on muting the alarm if it sounded again.

Along came Mr Herrington to clean the lab, and he reported that the alarms were sounding off all evening. He thought the breaker switch to the freezer was turned off, so he flipped it the other way, believing that would turn it on.

“He did not believe he had done anything wrong but was just trying to help,” according to the lawsuit.

An honest mistake, for sure, but “a majority of specimens were compromised, destroyed, and rendered unsalvageable, demolishing more than 20 years of research” according to the suit.

I don't think a million dollars will make up for it. 

Added Attraction

I pose this question around the first of September every year, as thousands - tens of thousands! - flock to S'bucks and Drunkin' to get their pumpkin spice coffee.

I say, if you want your coffee to taste like coffee with pumpkin in it, why not get a can of pumpkin from the supermarket (canned fruit aisle) and stir a spoonful of orange gourdiness and some pumpkin pie spice (spice aisle) into your mocha java? You would then have pumpkin spice covfefe, without all the chemicals that the fake PS coffee has.

I always get the same answer...variations of "that wouldn't work" or "Ewwww." And then I say, have you tried it? 

"No."

I'm also astonished at the people who are all excited by Old Bay Goldfish, or potato chips, or whatever snack gets dusted with our beloved local crab-and-seafood seasoning.

I've been adding Old Bay to unsalted potato chips and Goldfish since forever. I never thought to ask for permission.

I have to say, the only cereals I like are plain oatmeal and plain granola. I know there are "instant" oatmeals with added maple flavor and about 27 flavors of granola. Not needed! Just sell the plain stuff and let people garnish their cereal with whatever they wish.

Life is simple, but the big corporations keep complicating it.

PB4WEGO

I watch with puzzlement as state after state, each facing their own serious problems ranging from not enough water to way too much water to unfair gerrymandering to crime on the rampage, worry themselves over the all-important issue of "offensive" vanity license tag messages.

ITEM: 👉 In Nevada, where it's been too hot to even walk around and count Wayne Newton's facelifts, they are trying to revoke some guy's tag because it was "meant to drive away Californians."

Nevada tag  GOBK2CA (“Go back to California”) was recalled by the state's Department of Motor Vehicles in May because they got a complaint about it. One complaint. 

Oh, how offensive.

Now the owner of the tag has appealed the recall and wants his day in DMV court. The state will cite of the Nevada Administrative Code, which prohibits defamatory references to a person or group.

“In this case, the defamed group is Californians,” DMV spokesperson Eli Rohl says, adding that his department “regularly” turns down license plates that tell Californians to hit the return key.

Every Monday, a duly-appointed Special License Committee meets to determine the face of reported license plates, because there is clearly nothing more important out there.

F'instance, they recently turned down U IDIOT as being too rude to idiots, GGGGGGG for who knows why, and a lot of subtle profanities that, if anything, might give someone a laugh as they bake alive in their cars out there.

Every Maryland motorist who has even just about been blown off the face of the earth on I-95 knows for sure that it was either a Delaware or New Jersey driver at the wheel. We don't use license tags to share our feelings with them, though. Just a simple hand gesture will do.

I got the Blues

We talked before about my fascination with Bluetooth technology. In the days before they put the phone connection right on the dashboard of the car, you could put your Bluetooth ear device on and sail on down the road, chatting away without holding the phone in your hand, thereby avoiding the $70 fine, plus court costs, plus a point on your license.

All over the house I have little bluetooth speakers that wirelessly connect the phone or the iPod or the tablet, filling the room with beautiful music or soothing sounds of nature for nap time or Keith Olbermann's daily rant session. I dunno. Perhaps I'm just a starry-eyed kid at heart. I can't believe they found a way to take the music off a device and play it with terrific fidelity on a tiny speaker way across the room - or upstairs! 

This, to me, is as amazing as having a printer/copier right here on my desk. No longer do I need to find a Xerox machine when I find some salacious cartoon that just needs to be shared, or when copying tax forms or whatever. Maybe some take these things for granted, but I still marvel. 

Microwave ovens, sticky notes, LED bulbs that (knock on wood) seem to last forever in lanterns, saving me countless times of climbing a ladder to change a bulb, all these things answered needs that sometimes we didn't even know existed. And life is better for them all.

I would like to thank the people responsible, starting with "The Bluetooth lady." That's the name I gave to the person who says, "Powering ON" and "Powering OFF" when the button is pressed. She sounds nice, but quite serious.

Sunday Rerun: Fan Club

I'm no fan of wine; I'd rather have my grape juice non-fermented, if you please. But lots of people love it, and wish to be as close to it as they can. As with anything, you can take it too far.

Out in Santa Rose, California, there is a vineyard where someone reported a "suspicious vehicle" parked nearby.

(I can tell you this: during my years in the police dispatching business, I argued unsuccessfully a hundred times that a vehicle itself cannot be said to be "suspicious." Attributing human characteristics to a Buick never works out. The car you see parked outside suspects nothing. The circumstances surrounding the vehicle being there may be well suspicious, but whatever...)

So the police show up and they find a hat on a piece of farm equipment. Again, not right. Farm equipment does not need hats. 

The Sonoma County Sheriff's Department found a man stuck inside the shaft of a giant vineyard fan. I didn't know this either, but they need huge fans out in the grape growing lots to keep air moving around the grapes so they won't freeze.

The "suspicious" vehicle in question

The Fire Department had to respond the get the man out of the fan, and I can assure you, that is the first time in my long life that I have ever typed those very words all in a row.

“The man indicated he liked to take pictures of the engines of old farm equipment,” the Sheriff said. “After a thorough investigation, which revealed the farm equipment wasn’t antique and the man had far more methamphetamine than camera equipment, the motivation to climb into the fan shaft remains a total mystery.”

They took this picture of him because he deserved a souvenir.

Free advice to all would-be criminals: always make sure you have more camera equipment than methamphetamine on you. In fact, zero meth should be your goal, as should not committing crimes.

The man is 38 years old now, and as Casey Stengel would say, in ten years he has a good chance to be 48. He needed medical attention but should make a a full recovery, so that's nice, so he can be in good health to deal with trespassing, drug possession, and violations of probation case.

I've spent a good amount of time wondering about the trouble people get themselves into, and now I have to wonder about the fans people get themselves into. 

It keeps me busy.

The Saturday Picture Show, July 15, 2023

 

This was an very popular radio from the 1930s through the 1950s. It was sort of a forerunner to "Seinfeld," in that it was a show about nothing. McGee was a fulltime bloviator, and his long-suffering wife Molly knew what a bullshipper he was, but she went along with his nutty schemes and dreams. Every 30-minute show had a performance by a big band and a vocal harmony song by The Kings Men, and all that nothingness helped America get through one depression and one world war. Today, of course, McGee would run for president.

The Datsun Auto Hammock was a great idea, and it must have been ahead of its time. Or way behind it, who knows?

Here's what Calvin & Hobbes had to say on the 4th of July, 1986. I agree.

Uh, I think I'll just wait for the elevator....

The people who make Dr Pepper must have had a lot left over, so they called the bean factory down the street and said, "Hey, got an idea..." It says here, if you want your beans to taste like Dr Pepper, open a can and pour some in, and let Uncle Nuttsy finish it. He loves the stuff.

Test your sense memory! Look at this picture and tell me you can smell the freshly mown grass.

Somehow I get the feeling that the chow is really good here, and the service is impeccable and friendly. I might be wrong, but a lot of the time a fancy, shiny veneer hides a multitude of messes.

Who's for buckwheat pancakes this morning? Just me, huh? Oh well, I love 'em.

Same as I enjoy seeing dilapidated cars in junkyards and speculating on their happier days of yore, it's hard to look at what once must have been quite the magnificent mansion, now reduced to tatters and rotten rust.

Let's assume this is a typo on the part of the bridge repair crew. One again, fellas: Spell Check is not your friend. Let's hope the wedding went off in spectacular fashion.