Sunday Rerun: Last Year's New Years' Eve Picture Show!

 

The next time someone tells you that Americans used to be much more dignified, show them this picture from NYE 1938 and then hit them with a custard pie.

We traditionally insert baby angels into our New Year's iconography because they represent a fresh start...but think about that one second, please...

Adding to the confusion: Down South, many people wouldn't dream of New Year's Day supper without black-eyed peas, which are not peas at all, but, rather, legumes, and a proud member of the pea family. They associate this dish with good luck in the new year, and they link collard greens with the kind of green we all want in our wallets, so that's on the menu, too. I will gladly eat greens, but no pea beans, please.

Now, in the Greek culture, they are into pomegranates, regarding this fruit as a sign of luck, prosperity and fertility, and new beginnings. Part of the tradition is the ritual smashing of a pomegranate on the front door at the stroke of midnight. The belief is that the more seeds that come flying out, the more prosperous a year it will be for the family. I do feel sorry for the person who winds up having to clean up the seedy, pulpy mess. Their year can only get better after that, though. 

Back in the day, it seemed like everyone on the East Coast tuned in to see the Rose Parade from Pasadena, CA, on the morning of January 1. It was a great way to see something in color on the brand new Zenith.

Not every culture will celebrate New Year's Eve tonight. The Chinese New Year will be on Sunday, January 22nd, and it will be a year of the Rabbit.

Here's your free wallpaper!

Remember, as much as you might like making your backyard sound like a recreation of the Battle Of The Bulge, there are many people (and their pets) who prefer a lighter version of New Year whoop-de-doo. 

Here is your homework for this week. Print it out and fill it out, and remember, neatness, spelling, and grammar count.

Happy New Year! Be safe and be happy, and think about your blessings!

The Saturday Picture Show, New Year's Eve Eve 2023

We'll start off the Saturday Picture Show with a couple of decorating ideas for your home party...

Vintage.

Lots of good times were had before the invention of color film!

Can you admit that you danced scandalously in the neighbor's clubroom?

Babies born in the upcoming year will start their lives with everyone looking for them to start a fight.

My garage is never fully decorated until I get my favorite roll-up scroll calendar from my favorite Chinese carryout. #28 with Won-Ton, please.

In 1935, America was still dealing with the Great Depression. Massive unemployment, food lines, rampant crime and despair. But in New York City, people put on their patent leather dancing pumps and partied like it was 1936.

Change the month and the date and the year, but don't change any of the things that make you great!
 

Holiday Rerun: Santa Jimi

  

In December, 1969, Jimi Hendrix continued to defy other guitarists, who to this day are unable to duplicate what he could do on an electric guitar, and spelling purists who insisted his name was "Jimmy.".  He accomplished the latter by naming his new band, which was to replace The Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Band of Gypsys.  The more conventional spelling would be Gypsies, of course, but then, Jimi never did anything the conventional way.

He had hired veteran drummer Buddy Miles to slam the skins, and Billy Cox (not to be confused with the old Dodger third baseman) to play bass. Cox and Jimi had become friends while serving in the US Army together in 1961 at Fort Campbell, KY.

Jimi and the band were booked for the holidays of '69-'70 at the Fillmore East, the legendary rock concert hall in New York.  There were new songs ready for the band - most notably "Machine Gun" - but Jimi wanted to do something special. 

While rehearsing for the shows at Baggy's Studios in Manhattan, the band wove together the melodies (melodys?) of The Little Drummer Boy, Silent Night, and Auld Lang Syne.  Someone wisely hit the "record" button, and we are left with these holiday treasures to enjoy, 43 years later.  At the concerts on New Year's Eve and New Year's Day, The Little Drummer Boy and Auld Lang Syne wound up as parts of medleys with other songs.

If you'd like to hear this tripartite medley, YouTube is standing by.  Just go here and enjoy! 

The album of the concerts was released in March of 1970, the last to come out during Hendrix's life, which ended that September.  


We don't have any way to know which direction his career might have taken, but it's good to hear his music again.

Holiday Rerun: Piece of Cake

 We saw more than one German Chocolate Cake over the holidays. Now, if you ask me, German Chocolate Cake is all that a cake needs to be. I am not a big fan of chocolate, and German Chocolate Cake uses a kind of chocolate that is marked "mild dark" and that suits me fine. And the icing! So tasty. Now, cake purists will tell you that it's actually a custard, made by low-boiling brown sugar, granulated sugar, butter, egg yolks, and evaporated milk, and adding vanilla, pecans, and coconut to make a gooey slathering for the cake.

As long as I'm sharing my thoughts, I think there is nothing that can't be made better by adding coconut to it.

Something else we need to talk about...German Chocolate Cake has nothing to do with Germany at all. You can go to Bermuda and tell them how much you love wearing Bermuda shorts in summer, and the people of Merrie Olde England are delighted to hear that you toast one of their muffins every morning, and I once told a woman in Winnipeg, Manitoba, that any bacon she ate was automatically Canadian bacon. 

But you can't walk up to Hans, the baker, in Munich and tell him how much you love his German Chocolate Cake without him calling you a dummkopf. That's because we call it "German" Chocolate Cake after one Sam German, a baker who developed that sweet baking chocolate for the Baker's Chocolate Company in 1852. 

And old Sam was long gone by 1957, for sure. That's when a woman in Dallas, identified as "Mrs George Clay" in the inane sexist terminology of the day, sent a recipe to the Dallas Morning News for its popular "Recipe Of The Day" column for what she called "German's Chocolate Cake." General Foods, the multinational conglomerate which was absorbed by Kraft Foods in 1989, owned the Baker's brand at the time, and they about broke their necks to pass the recipe on to other papers all over the country.  Within a year, sales of Baker's German's Chocolate were up by 73%, and while none of that money accrued to either Mr or Mrs Clay, we all knew they ate some tasty cakes. 

And they changed the name of the chocolate to Baker's German Chocolate, which is where the old rumor about it being German started.

Two more things I have to say before I go start working off the holiday cakes...you can't take a regular chocolate cake and cover it with coconut-pecan icing and call it German Chocolate Cake. That won't do.

And where did this thing of calling Ralph O'Hoolahan's wife "Mrs Ralph O'Hoolahan" get started? Everyone knows her name is Mitzi...Mrs Mitzi O'Hoolahan! You wouldn't call him "Mr Mitzi O'Hoolahan," would you?

And is it ok to bring a Devil's Food Cake to a church supper?

Holiday Rerun: Hello Up There

 Ok, for all of you studying at home, here's a question for both geography and physiology:

How come mountains get taller and people get shorter?

First, we turn to the words of Donovan, in his beloved song "There Is A Mountain." This was a hit song in 1967. Later, the melody from the song was turned into a jam that lasted almost 3 days, as played by the Allman Bros. 

The main point of the lyrics to the song runs like this:

First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is

First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is

Well, that makes it all clear. My problem is, I am quite a literalist. I don't get symbolism and arcane allusions or even hints. If you say there is a mountain, what happened to that mountain two minutes later that caused you to say it's gone?

I looked it up. Those "in the know" say that if you're on a hike and you see a mountain, and then you climb it, when you're at the top, you don't see a mountain anymore because you're ON the mountain. 

The problem is, these people know about mountains, but they sure don't know me, if they think I'm about to climb Mt Everest!

I'm getting shorter as I get older, but not old Everest. And hold up printing the new encyclopedia...it's getting taller up in there! 

You see, back in 1998, Wally Berg, a mountain climber from out of Copper Mountain, Colorado, scaled Mt Everest, and placed a Global Positioning System receiver up near the peak. 

Five days later, another climber got up there and picked up the GPS receiver, and found that the mountain had gotten even closer to the sky! People who study these things figured out, from checking out other GPS doodads up there, 5 1/2 miles high, that Mt Everest is growing at a rate of almost two inches per year!

It turns out that up there in the Himalayas, where the Indian continental plate pushes up against the Asian continental plate, underground action is pushing the mountain higher at the seam.

This is similar to holiday dinnertime at the family homestead, where Uncle Roger's plate, heaped with meat and fowl and gravies and sauces, pushes Aunt Edna's plate right off the TV stand they were sharing. 

The rugs needed a good going-over by the Stanley Steemer anyway.

Holiday Rerun: In a pear tree (from 2018)

  They haven't released the prices of all the 12 gifts for 2018 yet, "they" being the people over at the Consumer Price Index, where every year, people with adding machines, calculators and abacuses ("abaci"???); figure out just how much it will cost someone to send The Twelve Gifts Of Christmas to their love.  Here are the prices for last year, the last time anyone did all the math on this. Of course, if you're the sort of guy who's canoodling with two lovers at a time, better double the prices, fella. Women don't play like that, and we don't know why you would.

Of course, the price of everything goes up a bit every year, so figure on spending around $35,000 to make someone's heart light up with holiday joy. In 2017, the exact tab was $34,558.65.

And of course, with the price of gold going up every time Ariana Grande gets engaged, figure on the Five Golden Rings being a bit pricier now. Anyone who has been to the live tree section at Home Depot knows that a pear tree goes for a lot more than it used to, although the price of partridges varies with the availability of Danny Bonaduce. Just kidding. He couldn't BE more available.

Anyway, here’s the breakdown of cost for the 12 days:

A Partridge in a pear tree will cost $220 as compared to $210 last year. The partridge price remained the same as last year (talking about real birds) but it was the price of the pear tree that went up.

In other bird pricing news, two Turtle Doves are holding in price as the past few years - still $375.

Three French hens are the same price this year at $182.

Four calling birds held the line at $600.  I guess they're the calling birds without an unlimited plan.

Five Golden Rings did go up this year to $825 compared to last year's $750. The price of gold fluctuates all the time.

Six Geese-a-laying, @$60 per goose, comes to $360. You go downtown and try to get a goose for less, and you'll see.

Seven Swans-a-swimming is one of the most expensive items on the list, although, it has held steady these past few years: $13,125. And let me tell you, as peaceful as those swans look, they are some mean suckers.

Eight Maids-a-milking did not increase in 2018 and stayed at $58.

Nine Ladies dancing, another expensive item in the 12 days  - is unchanged at $7,553. You don't want union trouble, do you?  Pay the going rate and no one will bother you.

Ten Lords-a-leaping did go up this year, the only labor group that saw an increase. Expect to shell out  $5,619, up $110 from last Christmas. I guess these Lords are members of the American Olympic Broad Jump team, and so you are sponsoring ten athletes. Not bad.

Eleven Pipers, proud members of the Musicians' Union, will pipe up on their pipes for the love of your love for $2,708.

Similarly, Twelve Drummers drumming had a zero % change from last year, keeping the beat steady at $2,934.

Total cost of the Twelve Days of Christmas was $34, 559.  We'll take cash or check only, no credit cards.

Merry Christmas 2023

It won't be a white Christmas for us in Baltimore this year, but have a merry one, wherever you are!

Christmas Eve will find me where the love light gleams

 "It's fruitcake season!" 

Oh, were three lovelier words ever exclaimed on a late-December morning!? And here we are on Christmas Eve, and my gift to you is this story by Truman Capote. "A Christmas Memory" dates to 1956 and it's still worth hauling out every year at this time.

Read it here, enjoy your holidays, and we'll see you soon!

The Saturday Picture Show, December 23, 2023

So you like a nicely grilled steak for dinner, but you hate to pay those restaurant prices? Improvise and DIY!

The Christmas spirit lives on! The ducks at this park adopted a chicken who needed a home and a family...

Just don't call this cab if it's raining hard some night... 

Why do I have this fascination with old trucks? I think it's because of how great they look in photos!

This is happening all over the country, and it's a good way to "repurpose," as they say, old malls. They're becoming college student centers, senior housing, and other bright ideas. Someday, we'll tell some kids, "That used to be Hickory Farms right over there..." and they'll say, "Sure, old man...."

Feel free to cut and paste this and print out as many as you wish! It's actually from a Japanese bus.

This ad from 1952 ought to settle this dispute about how to spell "catsup" once and for all.

Another notable American mural: this one features the late civil rights leader and US Congressman John Lewis.

"What's on tonight?" was a oft-heard question back in the day, and for a mere 15¢ this little magazine would tell you. Today, all the information is right on your screen, which will tell you now that 14 years worth of reruns of "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet," featuring America's favorite family, The Nelsons, are available to watch as reruns on Comcast channel 1495

Enjoy your Christmas, however you celebrate this time of year, and thanks for another year of fun and laughs.

Going Out With A Bang

I'm going to take a few days off from writing to have a relaxing Christmas, but before I go, here's a reminder to take that handgun everywhere you go, because, well, you never know...

From Wisconsin, this news...the Food and Drug Administration reports on an incident in that state in which a woman brought her handgun into a room with an MRI machine in it. As any schoolkid knows, the "M" in "MRI" stands for "magnet," and this giant electromagnet did its thing on that gun, causing it to shoot a bullet.

The woman is 57 and may indeed live to be 58, but not if that will take` brains. Speaking of her brains, the bullet lodged itself in her buttocks.

The injury to her derrière was described as "small and superficial" and here's the good news: this stranger to the Phi Beta Kappa selection committee was described as healing well afterwards.

She had been through the screening process for an MRI exam and had been asked if she had any objects containing iron with her. I guess she thought they were asking her if she had brought her steam iron with her, and she did not wish to be pressed for details.

It's a sad day when we feel the need to bring heat to a medical procedure, but still, she does not deserve to be the butt of our jokes. 

 

 

What a drag

Regular viewers of the "Today" Show on NBC know it's getting toward the end of the week when jocose weather guy Al Roker (they call him MISTER Roker) is talking about the forecast for the weekend and all of a sudden the sound guy puts the echo on and Al says "Sunday SUNDAY!" and I wonder why.

Turns out, a little kid named Justin Gunter, Jr. is thrilled by hearing Al bellow this, so much so that his parents schlepped him to New York to meet the great man and say his catchphrase. What a time little Justin must have had!

But when "Today" put this on their Instagram, several people wondered what this "Sunday SUNDAY!" business was all about. Fortunately, I am old (very fortunately), so I can tell you that 50-60 years ago, there were drag strips all over the country.

I hasten to explain that a drag strip is not a place where people wear clothes of the opposite gender and then take them off. A drag strip was a place where people could take their hopped-up hot rods and race, two at a time, down a quarter-mile track. There were people who were just amateur shade-tree mechanics and there were people who made a living making and racing fast cars, both regular stock models and built-from-parts custom machines.

Drag strips came to life on weekend nights ("Friday night, under the lights at beautiful York US-30 Drag-O-Way!") and Sunday afternoons ("Sunday SUNDAY at Budds Creek Dragstrip!") and the way to get a crowd to come out and watch was to run radio commercials, some of which were recorded by yours truly, screaming his 20-year-old head off with echo effects in full effect and the same music every week. Da-da-da-da-DAT-dahhhhhh. Here's an out-of-town sample:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_YmA0cd3kg

I guess there are still some drag strips in operation, but I'm sure the real estate that some of the closed ones once occupied has gone to paved lots for WaWa Stores and nail salons. Still, next time you hear Mr Roker echo about Sunday, think about the golden era of Don "Big Daddy" Garlits, who was also known as "The Swamp Rat," and Shirley "Cha-Cha" Muldowney, the cream of the drag racing set. Vroooooooom!

 

Oh Tannenbaum!

I'm sure someone on this side of the Atlantic is doing this - but if not, maybe someone should!

The deal is, in London, England, one can rent a Christmas tree, one all potted up and ready to go home for the holidays with an adoptive family. Said family will water the tree and return it to the tree lot after the holidays, and then... "We just say it's 'rent, water, return'.  After Christmas, return it and we put it back into the irrigation," said Jonathan Mearns, who runs London Christmas Tree Rental.

This is sustainable Christmas decoration at its most basic (as long as the Mississippi Leg Hound doesn't guzzle all the tree's water).

 

Mearns, a counter-terrorist police officer in his younger years, started this rent-a-tree deal in 2017, and now has regular repeat customers renting trees he brings down from a tree farm in the Cotswolds.

"It started off as I think what some people would have said was a crazy idea -- but it has grown over the years and more and more people are interested in renting a Christmas tree," he says. "There's big growth, big growth in it. We're not saying we have perfect trees what we say is we have real trees," he added.

 

No one expects to find the *perfect* tree. They just want to find a tree that's perfect for them...for a while! 

Call me anything

I worked with a guy who found his own given name not colorful enough, so he started asking people to call him "Tater."

The only other person I knew by that nickname was the illustrious country singer "Little" Jimmy Dickens, so memorable for his 1949 hit "Take An Old Cold Tater And Wait," a paean to the dining arrangements at his boyhood home in Bolt, WV. Clearly, Little Jim earned the right to be called Tater, since, many a night, that's all he got for supper. But that right does not convey to just anyone who happens to be looking for the identity boost that a colorful moniker might bring.

Speaking of which - Jim Hunter, a baseball pitcher from out of Hertford, NC, did not need a snappy nickname to proclaim his greatness. He could just flat-out pitch, as they used to say. He signed with the then-Kansas City Athletics at 19, and after a couple of outings in the Florida Instructional League, he needed no further instruction, and went right to the major leagues, where we went on to play on five World Champion teams on the A's (by then calling Oakland home) and the Yankees, a professional team from New York City.

When Charles O. Finley signed Hunter to the A's, the wily owner said the young man needed to have a flashy nickname, so Finley said, "Let's call him 'Catfish,' and let's say that as a young man he wandered off and when his frantic parents finally found him, he was trailing a string of fresh-caught catfish behind him, and that's where he got the name."

All good for the publicity, but none of it had even a germ of truth, and Jim Hunter, most tragically dead at 54 from diabetic complications and Lou Gehrig's Disease, didn't need anything but his good right arm to make himself famous.

Fun fact: Jim was scouted for the A's by an old big-leaguer named Clyde Kluttz, a perfect example if there ever was of a man with a built-in nickname.

On the other hand...a man named Wilmer Mizell was a fairly successful left-handed pitcher (90 wins, 88 losses) for the Cardinals, Pirates, and Mets back in the olden days.  After he retired, he served three terms in the US Congress, representing North Carolina's 5th District. But he was much better known by the nickname he acquired while playing amateur baseball as a teen, in the town of Vinegar Bend, Alabama. 

So, my advice is, don't try to hang a nickname on yourself or anyone else. It rarely works. Like when I was four and asked my parents to start calling me "Tito." Not for Tito Puente or Tito Francona of music and baseball, respectively, but for Marshal Josip Broz Tito, President of Yugoslavia, the first national leader who was as interested in knowing what time it was as I was.

Sports names

Someone reminded us that the Baltimore Ravens played their final home game at good old Memorial Stadium in midtown Baltimore on December 14, 1997 before moving to their undomed palace downtown. Their opponent that day? The Tennessee Oilers, formerly the Houston Oilers, who had decamped from Space City just that season. They were supposed to be based in Nashville, but only two college stadiums were available in Opryville. One was too big and one was too small. But the one that was just right was in Memphis, over 200 miles away. They made that their home for two seasons.

In a bizarre twist, the Edmonton Oilers hockey team almost moved to Houston in 1998 before the city of Edmonton came up with the money to keep them home, which spared Houston the pain that people feel when they see their ex marry someone else with their name!

If you think that didn't make sense, how about them keeping the name "Oilers, " in a state whose one refinery accounts for a whopping 1% of US oil production? Later on, when a stadium was built in Nashville, they changed their name to the Titans, a nod to the titans of country music who add so much to our culture.

This was not the only example of a sports team relocating and keeping a wholly inappropriate nickname. The New Orleans Jazz basketball team moved to Utah and should have left the Jazz behind. The Minneapolis Lakers moved away from the Land Of 10,000 Lakes (actually, there are 11, 842, but who's counting?) to Los Angeles, California, a city of 22 lakes and one tar pit.

The Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team, named for the nimble way Brooklyn residents had to duck and dive to avoid being hit by trolley cars, moved in 1958 to Los Angeles, which for years had electric streetcars. These had replaced horse-drawn trolleys, and those horses really gave pedestrians something to dodge!

Sunday Rerun: Shame The Devil

 Here's a sentence you won't see too often: Pareidolia is a type of apophenia.  

Nixon Eggplant

Those terms refer to the way we fool ourselves, or allow ourselves to be fooled, by the way we perceive things.  Have you ever been in the shower and you're just SURE the phone is ringing, so you hop out of the shower, skid across the tile while leaving a watery wake like a tugboat, and, wrapping yourself in a towel, grab the phone and holler "Hello!" to a dialtone? The phone wasn't ringing at all; it hasn't rung since the day before yesterday when Aunt Mildred called to thank you for the peppermint patties you sent from Ft. Lauderdale. Certain sounds and sights can fool us. People often see the face of Jesus or Nixon on things, and you have to figure, the name of the pooch in that photo top left is "Muffin."

All of this is fun; we all enjoy seeing a cloud that looks like Bill Belichick, but you can take it too far.  And by "you," I mean Robyn Wilkins, a resident of Cordova, Tennessee with too much time and too little to do.  She is a proudly Christian mom, and worried that the occult is taking over her town.  Why, they've even got red tail lights on school buses that look like pentagrams!   And, for crying out loud, a pentagram just like those brake lights, except that it's upside down, with two points up, inside a double circle with a picture of the head of a goat inside is the logo of the Church of Satan!

And Adolf Hitler...wore a shirt!  Just like some other people do...so all men wearing shirts are evil too!

Memphis’ Action News 5 says Ms Wilkins took a picture of the tail lights, and lookie here! The lights form a five-pointed star! 

Pentagrams are a sacred in some faiths. Some people turn the five-pointed star upside down and ascribe evil powers to it, but to me, I see a sheriff's star, a symbol of law enforcement, where Ms Wilkins see whatever in Hell she's talking about.

“Anyone who fears a God, if not God and Jesus Christ, should be outraged,” the worried mother told the TV news.

My free advice for Ms Wilkins and her worried friends would be to read up on pentagrams, Pentatonix, pentameters, and pentathlons.

And for heaven's sake, don't fly over the Pentagon!

The Saturday Picture Show, December 16, 2023

 

I don't know, there was just something about this woodsy scene that made me want to look for my hiking boots and a jacket and vest and go for a December walk...

There are more than 400 varieties of holly plants, and they are all beautiful, and make perfect Holiday decorations.

I would like to know more about this neighborhood. I mean, a place where people go to the trouble of making that second sign has to be a nice place to live!

While the rest of us were busy worrying about who's "woke" or reading silly novels, this nice lady got busy and made 48 blankets for 48 people who needed a blanket. Salute!

Very sad picture from Ukraine, but the interesting thing is that the cloud covering the sun looks for all the world like a hole in the windshield.

America is in the process of muralizing every wall still standing. This one was painted in the alley off Lincoln Avenue in Chicago, near the Biograph Theater, where 1930s gangster John Dillinger met his end in a hail of FBI bullets. Dillinger, a ruthless killer who robbed banks for his own enrichment, was the first in what has become a series of really bad people somehow being lionized as heroes. A rumor sprang up that Dillinger took money from banks at gunpoint and then handed it out to desperately poor Depression-era citizens, which was baseless nonsense. Good thing that people are not easily duped today, huh? 

I came in like a Christmas ball....

This cute little Kingfisher bird sends Christmas and Holiday love to all from his home in Port Townsend, Washington.

Many men who consider themselves too short in stature seek to make up for it in various ways. Some become obnoxious bullies, pushing their will on all around them. Some brag about themselves in a curiously adenoidal whine, and some wear lifts and high-heeled boots to bring themselves up to that coveted 5' 8" mark. A very few do all three.

This rare white alligator, born last month at Gatorland, a Florida theme park and wildlife preserve, is this pale because it has leucism, a condition that results in a lack of pigmentation. In order to keep it warm this winter, Gatorland officials have ordered tiny polo shirts with pictures of tiny people on them.