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| I love the Amazon Hub pickup lockers. They're handy for when you don't feel like worrying about a porch pirate ripping off your order of cat food or t-shirts. Each one has a name - the one I usually use is called "Contribution." But this, naming this one "Imbalance," sounds a bit personal, you know what I mean? |
How many times did we all get caught sleeping in class? And by "we," I mean "I," and by "how many times," I mean at least a dozen.
But I could always claim to be practicing sending Morse Code mentally, or naming all the US presidents in order. Which very few of them were.
But let's go across the ocean to Lincolnshire, England, where the Seascape Cafe at the Observatory holds yoga classes on Wednesday evenings.
And last week, a well-intended passerby looked in on the class and saw the group in "final resting position" (is there really no better way to phrase that?) and so they called 999, the English version of our 911. He/she reported a "mass killing" at the yoga studio.
That final resting pose is also called "corpse pose" (not really better) or "savasana" (which is great as long as you speak Sanskrit) and it means everyone gets down on their backs, supine and ready to sink into meditative state.
Seascape's Facebook page reports that the caller “reported a mass killing in our building. Having seen several people laying on the floor. Which actually turned out to be the Yoga Class in meditation.”
It all turned out fine, everyone acted with good intent, and yoga teacher Millie Laws told the Washington Post that "seven students were lying on their backs for about 30 minutes" as she "banged on a shamanic drum in a dark room lit by just candles during Wednesday’s hour-and-half restorative yoga class."
She saw a couple outside peering in through the window, walking a dog and appearing bewildered. So...
“They reported to the police that they’d seen somebody walking around in a room lit up with candles and what looked like dead people lying all over the floor,” Laws told The Post. “The couple thought it was some sort of ritual mass killing.”
When youth soccer started becoming wildly popular in our area, 911 got a few calls reporting similar situations, but upon checking, the police invariably found that the spectators, and many of the players, had fallen asleep out of sheer boredom.
I've decided that my life has been a trivial pursuit, so I am going to delve into the questions and issues that all America ponders.
Here's one: Why do they call the 3 Musketeers candy bar the "3" Musketeers?
It goes back to World War II. 3 Musketeers came out in 1932, brought to us by the good people at M&M/Mars. And in those days, there were three pieces of candy in the package: Chocolate, Vanilla, and Strawberry, enough to split with two friends, or gobble all by yourself. I wasn't there then, so I don't know.
Yes, they did cop the name from The Three Musketeers, a novel written in 1844 by Alexandre Dumas, a book that followed the exploits of three inseparable swashbucklers named Athos, Porthos, and Aramis.
But along came the Second World War, and there were restrictions on sugar, so the candymen decided that Vanilla and Strawberry had to get the heave-ho, leaving only the chocolate part (which was the most popular part anyway!)
Milky Way bars are similar to 3 Musketeers, except that they have caramel on top of the nougat. There was never any restriction on the use of nougat in candy, as the United States is home to all of the nougat mines known to exist in the world. The photo below shows raw unrefined nougat, just unearthed in Caramel, California.
There seems to be an recurrent discussion about the last words of the Marquis de Favras. He was born Thomas de Mahy, and became the Marquis by being a supporter of the House of Bourbon during the French Revolution.
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I looked it up, and to my surprise, the House of Bourbon was not a saloon on Harford Rd. But it still might be, someday.
He was hanged in 1790 for being on the wrong side of the French Revolution, and after he read his death sentence, he shook his head ruefully and said these words which will live through the ages:
"I see you have made 3 spelling mistakes".
I would like to think that I would respond in kind if I ever find myself in his shoes, and here's why:
In doing my research for this blog, I came across this sentence, in which someone is suggesting that maybe we don't know if the Marquis said this, or why:
"Despite the flurry of interest, no-one seemed quite sure whether we were supposed to be commending the marquis's sangfroid, or his equally laudible regard for correct orthography."
And I shook my head, because this person misspelled laudable.
It's called Spell Check! Don't turn your back on it!
In his hilarious Jerry Reed song "Lord Mr. Ford," the songwriter, then known as Dick Feller, and now known as transgender woman Deena Kaye Rose, listed her grievances about the modern automobile, including the notion that "all the cars, placed end to end, would reach to the moon and back again. And there'd probably be some poor fool pull out to pass."
Along the same line, the length of your circulatory system is almost 100,000 miles - 60,000 miles if you are a child. Imagine. All our veins, arteries and capillaries, if you were to stretch them out flat. That's the length of 16 round-trip flights from London to New York.
That trip to the moon that Deena talked about would be 238, 655 miles, or roughly Two And A Half Men.
Serendipity:
ser·en·dip·i·ty
/ˌserənˈdipədē/
noun
the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way.
That's just what happened recently to Andrew F. Gulli, managing editor of "The Strand" magazine. Gulli went to the Library of Congress in Washington to look for information about James M. Cain, the Maryland author of "The Postman Always Rings Twice" among other novels, and Gulli instead walked off with a great prize: an undiscovered short story written by Truman Capote, who wrote great books, short stories, novellas, and really, anything he wrote was compelling. I'm sure his grocery lists would keep you hanging on til the very end.
And there, in the Library of Congress among Capote's papers was this story "Another Day In Paradise" hidden in plain sight in a red notebook. This is like looking through the used picture frames for sale at Goodwill and finding a Van Gogh or even a Rembrandt!
"Then in a red notebook, there was a handwritten short story from Truman Capote. Actually, I couldn't believe it, this can't be happening, because, you know, I was researching his work years ago, and I could not find it," Gulli told CNN.
The story concerns a fictional American woman, Iris Greentree, who is living in Sicily, after shooting her life savings on a beautiful Italian villa by an unfaithful lover.
Capote and I have one thing in common: our handwriting requires a team of forensic experts to decipher. Gulli assembled a squad of transcribers, including an executive from the Capote Estate, to help him put the penciled words into type. I'm sure that was quite a task!
Gulli said that it was all worth it: "...The story is satisfying, finished, complete, it has his wry sense of humor."
One theme of the story, he said, is that, "You could be living in some wonderful type of paradise, you can be living in a wonderful country, but a lot of times, if people aren't settled, the most wonderful setting on the planet can feel like a hell."
I don't think that Truman Capote ever really found happiness on this earth, but at least he shared his thoughts on paper. And left some surprises behind!
Here's a story we've seen over and over: Some rando from Virginia was arrested for crashing a car into Taylor Swift’s New York City apartment building. His goal, you see, was to get into the building and enjoy time with Ms Swift.
Morgan Mank, 31, (they do give them perfect creep names, don't they?) was arrested last week. He had driven the wrong way on the street in the Tribeca section where Swift owns a townhouse and also a couple of apartments in an adjoining building.
Although police were able to confirm that Mank was the man who drove his Jerkmobile into the lobby of the building, they could not confirm reports that he was telling the police he would not leave until he had his Taylor time that day.
The law took Mank to a hospital for an evaluation, later arresting him on charges of driving while intoxicated and driving while ability impaired.
Swift is a young woman of vast talent and popularity among all sort of people - country fans, pop fans, young, old. It's great that people love her and stream her songs and attend her concerts and buy her merchandise, but that's where being a fan should end.
But no. Swift also has homes in California and Rhode Island, and everywhere she goes, these people are trying to be near her, to such a dangerous extent that she told Elle magazine that she carries army-grade bandage dressing "for gunshot or stab wounds."
"I've had a lot of stalkers show up to the house armed. So we have to think that way," she told the magazine.
Isn't that nice, that a girl born on a Christmas tree farm in Pennsylvania is blessed with such looks and talent that people just can't leave her alone and admire her many gifts from a proper distance?
Here I am, saying that one of the many problems in this old world is that we don't know where the walls - figurative and otherwise - are. I'm sure Ms Swift appreciates the well wishes of her fans. They have provided her with the wherewithal to have all those houses and all the accouterments of fame.
But is it worth it, when you can't leave the house to run to the $1.25 Tree without packing battleground wound dressings and being accompanied by beefy security types?
Just Google "Taylor Swift stalker" and sit down for a long reading session.
And of course, she is not the only one. There was actress Rebecca Schaeffer, who was killed by crazed stalker Robert Bardo in Hollywood in 1989. He had previously stalked other young female celebrities, and stabbed Ms Schaeffer in the doorway of her home.
He returned to his hometown of Tucson where he was arrested by Police Chief Peter Ronstadt (brother of Linda) while running in and out of traffic. Brought back to Los Angeles for trial, he was prosecuted by Marcia Clark, who later served as lead prosecutor in the O. J. Simpson murder case.
She was successful in the Bardo case and he now spends his days and nights, serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole at the Avenal State Prison in Avenal, California.
People like Mr Mank should be there with him until they learn where the walls are.
You know what's really unfair? They won't let bears join the Army, and that's just not right! Bears excel at getting up early in the morning and marching around, and they deserve the chance to join the "Occupation G.I. Blues."
To indicate their interest in enlistment, two bears voluntarily went to a military base in Alaska. OK, that's all good, but they got in trouble by raiding the Krispy Kreme doughnut van that was parked outside a convenience store while making its rounds.
Being a military base, Joint Base Elmendorf should be a place where the driver of the donut wagon doesn't have to lock up the van, so last week she hopped out to drop off a couple of dozen for the soldiers at the JMM Express store.
And when she came out, there was a sow and her cub shoving donut holes and assorted pastries down their necks for about 20 minutes. The driver commenced to bang on the outside of the van, which bothered the bears about as much as a whiff of fresh salmon would have.
“I was beating on the van and they're not moving. I could hear them breaking open the packages and everything,” she said. “I was like, 'They don’t even care.'”
Next step: they called base security. They came down and cranked up their sirens to scare away the hungry beasts. Not surprisingly, they took their sweet old time and then hung around the front of the store for a while before heading back into the woods.
The people who run the store say it's not all that uncommon to see bears come out of the woods in Alaska. The driver has promised to close the doors of the van now, and the base spokesperson, Capt. Lexi Smith, says the authorities up there “are aware of this and other wildlife situations throughout the past several months. We urge the public to use caution to ensure you are protecting our wildlife and yourselves. Wildlife may be our neighbor, but they should not be attracted to our human food sources.”
There is apparently no truth to the rumor that this is the same bear who showed up at Disney World the other day, although there was a great Hulla Baloo about it.
As columnist Meredith Blake said in The Los Angeles Times put it, “Drew Barrymore spent years building her brand. Without writers, it unraveled in a week.”
Right up top, I will tell you I am a staunch union man. Don't accept the benefits and progress that unions have brought us and then say you don't want to follow the rules.
Case in point: Drew Barrymore's TV show, which has been shut down since summer because of the Writers' Guild of America strike. But last week, it seemed that Drew was turning her back on the union. She announced that her daytime, syndicated “The Drew Barrymore Show” was coming back with new episodes despite the writers’ strike. Her plan was to have the show and not have it include written material, which would have left the nation with a show in which Drew Barrymore ad-libs with her guests.
I mean, you can imagine!
A good point was that she said other workers on the show who have been idled since summer would be able to come back to work and resume collecting their salaries. That's a good point but not good enough. Those people she was looking to help are union members who would not likely cross a picket line.
As the reaction heated up, Drew put out a video in which she repeated that most difficult to prove of Hollywood hypes: “This is bigger than me. My decision to go back to the show — I didn’t want to hide behind people, so I won’t. And I won’t polish this with bells and whistles and publicists and corporate rhetoric. I’ll just stand out there and accept and be responsible.”
She added, pretending to understand: “Nothing I can do that will make this OK for those it is not OK with. I fully accept that. I fully understand that there are so many reasons why this is so complex and I just want everyone to know my intentions have never been in a place to upset or hurt anyone.”
You can see why having her talk without the aid of writers would be a disaster.
So now, this past weekend, she changed her mind: “I have listened to everyone, and I am making the decision to pause the show’s premiere until the strike is over. I have no words to express my deepest apologies to anyone I have hurt and, of course, to our incredible team who works on the show and has made it what it is today. We really tried to find our way forward. And I truly hope for a resolution for the entire industry very soon.”
The only way forward for a union member during a strike is to move forward with solidarity. Trying to sneak in through a side door is not good for anyone.
You really have to admire commitment, even if it's just to one's mullet.
And in the case of Tami Manis, here is the depth and breadth and length of her mullet commitment: she is 58 and has spent the last quarter century growing her magnificent Mississippi mudflap. At 5 feet, 8 inches, her mullet is four inches longer than she is tall, and here she affirms her commitment with a promise to take that tribute to Billy Joe Cyrus with her into the afterlife:
“At my memorial, they can take it off then, and drape it across my urn."
Guinness World Records, which began as a publication to settle bets among people drinking Guinness over just such things as "who has the longest female mullet ever?" named Ms Manis, a nurse from Knoxville, as the crowned record holder in that category.
She reflects: “Growing the longest mullet never really started out as anything other than it was the ‘80s and everybody had a rattail. And I started growing mine, and over the years, it’s just kept growing, so I’ve kept it.”
She names February 9, 1990 as her "mullet birthday." She was getting a haircut that day and while her long tresses were being shortened, she asked the stylist to leave a rattail back there to honor Aimee Mann of 'Til Tuesday, who did that song "Voices Carry" with a long McGyver down her back.
Aimee Mann is still around, performing a solo act these days, and so is Manis's mullet, kept in shape with every-other-day shampoos and a weekly application of leave-in conditioner, and a weekly braid done by a friend, which is the only way to keep that tassel off the floor.
She says it gives her patients something to focus on while she is treating them, which is good.
"Gimme a head with hair. Long, beautiful hair. Shining, gleaming, streaming, flaxen, waxen," they might say.
It's September 19, and we will remember this date as the day President James Garfield died (1881). He won the presidential election of 1880 and had only been in office for a very short time when he was shot on July 2 while waiting for a train at the Baltimore And Potomac railroad station in Washington. The assassin was a lunatic who is always known as "disappointed office seeker Charles Guiteau."* Guiteau had supported the candidacy of Ulysses S. Grant in the 1880 election, and had written essays and speeches extolling the virtues of Grant; when Garfield won the White House, Guiteau hung around there every day, hoping to get a meeting with Garfield in order to be named a consul to the French government. He showed off the essays and speeches which he had reprinted with Garfield's name substituted for Grant's. Failing to get the political appointment, he naturally deduced that God wanted him to kill Garfield, so he shot the president.
Death did not come instantly for Garfield, who lingered through pain, infections, and hallucinations through the hot DC summer as Thomas Edison raced to perfect a metal detector to locate the bullet within the 20th president. With the magnetometer ready, Edison went searching for the bullet that, once removed, would give Garfield a chance, but a) the president was on a metal bed frame, which muddled the metal detector's readings, and b) doctors were so sure the bullet was on the right side, they wouldn't allow Edison to examine the left side.
After 79 excruciating days, Garfield died, probably shaking his head at the incompetence around him.
*Not to be confused with Leon Czolgosz, who assassinated President McKinley in 1901, and is invariably referred to as "crazed anarchist Leon Czolgosz.
Got anything going on later today in Baltimore? You can go watch our beloved local treasure, filmmaker John Waters, get his star planted on the Hollywood Walk of Fame free for nothing!
The Senator Theatre and the Charles Theatre will be holding watch parties so fans can see the goin's-on on a big screen, no charge!
“The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce has granted The Senator Theatre’s and the Charles Theatre’s requests for permission to live-stream the ceremony in the theaters’ historic auditoriums,” say the owners of those two movie palaces. "Baltimore is invited, at no charge, to attend and celebrate. Seating is limited and offered on a first come, first served basis. Doors open at 2 p.m.”
Last year, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, which runs the Walk of Fame, proclaimed that Waters, having been nominated by Outfest of Los Angeles, had been selected to have a star in the motion picture category.
Waters's star will be #2,763 in the galaxy of H-town biggies.
John will speak at the ceremony, and so will actresses Ricki Lake and Mink Stole, and photographer Greg Gorman. Marc Malkin, editor of Variety, will be the Master of Ceremonies.
The Senator, at 5904 York Road, and the Charles, at 1711 North Charles Street, are big old theaters with hundreds of seats. Two of them can be for you and your plus one, today at 2!
If you can't get to Los Angeles or into Baltimore City, the chamber will live stream the ceremony at walkoffame.com.
NPR had an interesting story the other day about the despair being felt in Newfoundland. The hardy seafaring people of that eastern Canadian island like their mustard pickles, they do. I've never heard of putting up pickles like that; it turns out that it's a zesty side dish made with cucumbers and onions, pickled in mustard sauce along with turmeric and celery seed.
Newfoundlandians (Newfoundlers?) enjoy mustard pickles with lobster (that is prime lobster territory for those lucky folks!) and other dishes, and they are very fond of two brands, Habitant and Zest. (We have Zest bath soap in the USA, but it does not go well with lobster.) The good people over at Smuckers have made Habitant and Zest for years, but now they are ceasing production of mustard pickles, leading to panic in the streets. |
| Shkreli! |
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| A beautiful perfect double rainbow over New York City on 9/11. Appropriate. |
Sometimes, Plan B works best!
Here's the story of a couple of couples who couldn't have babies, but helped each other have babies.
Neva Benton has a friend named John Cardenas. Neva and John and their respective spouses were on vacation six years ago when the topic of wanting to start families came up.
Neva is married to a woman named Kelsey, so you can see that situation. And John is married to Amy, who couldn’t handle a pregnancy because her endometriosis resulted in a hysterectomy.
The plan was hatched, so to speak: “Just give us your sperm,” Neva said to John. “We’ll have a baby, and then we’ll just give you an egg. It’s not a big deal.”
At first, all four laughed, and then two years later, Neva brought the topic back around to the Cardenases and said she was totally serious.
So John donated sperm, and in 2020, Kelsey became pregnant through an insemination service. The Bentons had their in 2021 in Kansas. Then Kelsey acted as a surrogate for the Cardenases and gave birth to their child in July.
I needed a pencil and paper to figure this out, but those two kids are biological siblings, and the four parents plan to raise them all as one large family.
“We’re forever together,” Amy, 39, said in The Washington Post. “It’s really beautiful and it’s really nice, and it just feels right.”
From left, here are Neva and Kelsey Benton and Amy and John Cardenas after the birth of Ezri Cardenas in July.
If this is all it takes to make four people parents when the other roads were blocked, I say, "Pass the Pampers!"
The fact that these socks are in my favorite color is outweighed by their age. Listen, most men have socks that date back to the last century, but these socks from 250 - 420 AD.
Really! They were found during an excavation in Egypt at the end of the 19th century. Someone was wearing these very socks while the Pyramids were being built and Cleopatra was in charge and mummies were all the rage. If you want to go over there and look for more, set your destination as “the burial grounds of ancient Oxyrhynchus, a Greek colony on the Nile.”
So how come these socks are still in great shape, and that pair of tube socks you bought at K-Mart didn't last as long as K-Mart? Sock science has taught us that these socks were made by a process called “nålbindning," which, to you who know how knitting works, is single needle knitting. Dear reader who also knits, please fill us in about how one needle can knit a pair of forever socks!
The nålbindning process makes for socks (and sweaters, etc, one supposes) that really fit snugly, and that keeps people warm in cold weather, which Egypt doesn't really have, but anyway...
Just one pair of these split-toe socks, so perfect for use with sandals, will keep the feet warm all through an Egyptian winter. Match the rest of your outfit to those glory days and you can prance around like King Tut.
Two things on my mind...
The other night, some fans hadn't even settled into their La-Z-Boy recliner when Aaron Rodgers, new to the New York Jets, crumpled to the turf with an apparent Achilles injury, which may have ended his season, if not his entire career.
Sitting before his TV, Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes tweeted (or X-ed), “Hate that man… Praying for the best.”
How long did it take for someone to text Mahomes and suggest he add a comma? Soon, he came back and added the punctuation to make his sentence more clear and more pleasant:
“Hate that, man.”
“Knew i was going to need that edit button on here one of these days,” Mahomes added.
It reminded us of the old "He loves cooking his family and his pets" statement, which fairly cried out loud for commas.
And then I read that our society has finally reached a cultural pinnacle, now that Matthew McConaughey has become the last of our celebrities to write a children's book, following the leads of Reese Witherspoon, Serena Williams, and Seth Meyers.
McConaughey, best known for chirping "All right, all right, all right" in movies, titled his book "Just Because."
“Just because I let go, doesn’t mean that I stopped climbing,” goes one entry that shows a skateboarder zooming up a ramp.
And then, this Zen-timental entry above a picture of a sad girl painting a picture of a smiling sun, “Just because I mean it, doesn’t mean that I’m not lying.”
McConaughey says his book is "about the poetry of life, instead of having the pressure on us that feels like we’re told every day that we need to be absolute about every single thing.”
Now that sounds like a credo any child could understand. Their moms will buy them the book because they find the author attractive, and the young ones will fall asleep quickly at night, rather than hearing Mom read them one more page.
Among the things whose increasing popularity always surprises me...Kale, the leafy green that's so good slow-cooked with a hambone and some potatoes. I thought I was the only kale fan in town, but all the healthy people are gobbling it up. And so am I.
And...man-made diamonds are a big thing now, and whereas it used to be a scandal when a guy would pop the question with a cubic zirconium ring in his hand, now it seems that one in three couples is turning up their nose at natural diamonds and going with lab-grown stones for their engagement ring.
After all, who can tell the difference?
The wedding site The Knot says 36% engaged men pulled a lab-grown diamond out of their pockets last year, and that reflects a 100% increase since 2020.
And the sales of natural diamonds are down by 25%.
The appeal of man-made rocks, let's face it, has to be the price, but being able to ask someone to walk down Matrimony Lane with a sustainable alternative is pretty cool, too.
This being a very flashy day and age, a lot of people want to tote around a Plymouth Rock-sized rock, and those are much less money when they're manmade.
Why, fashion leaders such as Gigi Hadid, who could walk past me in the produce aisle without me knowing who she is, and Meghan Markle - I know her; she married Happy Harry - are strutting around with the fakeroos on their hands and everybody says it's fine.
For you bottom-line types, you can have a one-carat lab-grown diamond for around $1,430. A mined diamond - pure carbon from way down inside Earth- of the same size is going to run you $5,635.
A lot of people object to diamond mining. The process itself, using fuels, hydrocarbons and earth-digging machinery, is said to be part of climate change, and certainly air pollution. And the human rights violations inflicted on diamond miners are too numerous to mention, so we won't, but let's salute the people getting married without spending the equivalent of the annual defense budget of Liechtenstein on a left-hand third-finger doodad.
We actually entered a time of gearing up for war and gearing up for peace at the same time. All these years later, things are still turbulent, but if that horror was something we could overcome, there can't be many things we can't.
