The Saturday Picture Show, August 31, 2024

Only 116 days until we all get to be the Charlie Browniest we can be!

It looks like this sign has been telling people where to go for some time now.

This is the Clinton Gulch Dam Reservoir, built in Colorado in 1977 because some people looked around and said, "This would be a pretty nice place to store our drinking water."

If you have to ask that that pedal is to the left of the brake, you can't drive this '57 Chevy with a manual 3-on-the-tree transmission (but I could teach you!) What's that little button on the floor, huh?

This is the Shot Tower in Baltimore, where molten lead took a vertical trip down 215 feet to become shot for rifles. Built in 1828, this was, at the time, the tallest building in the United States. It's in downtown Baltimore on E. Fayette St, close to Little Italy.

I don't think people use sundials anymore, but if the awning here is at the right angle, you could use the shadows to tell the time.

They do not mess around in Australia. So you cut down some trees to improve your view from the sunroom? Fine. The government will impair your view with a nice sign until the vegetation returns as before. FAFO!

There's an extra kick in my step this week because "Only Murders In The Building" is back for season 4. Every time I think they couldn't keep up the quality, they always do. Selena Gomez, Steve Martin, and Martin Short, left to right. 

An interesting life, this. He was known as Cory Wells, one of three lead singers for Three Dog Night. They alternated leads among Cory, Danny Hutton, and Chuck Negron. You remember Cory's sweet soulful voice from "Try A Little Tenderness," "Eli's Coming," "Mama Told Me Not To Come," "Never Been To Spain," "Shambala," "Let Me Serenade You," and "Play Something Sweet (Brickyard Blues)." But his story as a member of one of the biggest bands of the early 70's rarely mentions that he led an abstemious life forever, never touching drugs or alcohol at all (the other members of 3DN cannot say that). While they were coming in at 4 AM from a night of carousing, Cory was getting up to go fishing! He loved fishing so much that he wrote articles about it for field and range magazines, but no one connected the writer to the singer, because he wrote them under his real name: Emil Lewandowski. He passed from blood cancer in 2015, but what a story!

I'll bet this house is in Pennsylvania, where the custom was to have two front doors on a house: one for regular in and out traffic, and one leading to the parlor, for when the preacher came a-calling. This house gives me a homey feeling.

That shirtin' feeling

So, what do you do with your old shirts?

Speaking for myself, I wear them until they vanish. I once gave a few of my old T-shirts to the kids in the neighborhood who wore them around as beach coverups, too.

But - if you are friends with someone who you feel is destined to become a baseball legend, and that person offers you his soiled, game-worn jersey, hang on to that garment. Here's why:

You've heard of Babe Ruth, the baseball player from the streets of Baltimore, right? And probably, you have heard of his "called shot" in the 1932 World Series.

Ruth's Yankees were playing the Chicago Cubs in that "fall classic," and he was receiving maybe even more than his usual hoots and catcalls from the Windy City crowd. According to the legend of Ruth, he stopped for a moment to make sure all eyes were on him during game 3, as the shrieking reached a crescendo. It was then that Babe took a step out of the batter's box, and with his Ruthian bat, which was a whale of a war club at 35 ¾ inches and weighing approximately 38 ounces, he pointed to the deep center field stands without a word.

Then, he stepped back into the box and hit the next pitch right where he had pointed. Instant legend! Another chapter in the Book of Ruth.

Ruth, an expert shirtmaker himself (a trade he learned at the St. Mary's Industrial School for Boys, having been shipped off there after a judge found him "incorrigible and vicious...beyond the control" of his parents) later gave the jersey he wore on that historic day to one of his golfing buddies, who really should have told his descendants to hang onto it!

Because...that "New York" uniform jersey sold this past weekend at auction for a sweet $24.1 million, making it the most expensive piece of sports memorabilia ever.

These Yankee fans have deep pockets! The previous record was the $12.6 million someone shelled out for a Mickey Mantle baseball card, and you can't even put that on and wear it around.

Well, you could, but there would be trouble.

 

Way Out There

Is there a cure for claustrophobia?

I mean, getting stuck in a small room is bad enough, but when that small room is also known as the International Space Station Boeing Starliner, and you've been on it since early June, and your eight-day mission is now going to run until February... Yikes!

SpaceX will bring them home. Their Boeing space machine is..."having problems," says NASA.

Above all, the return trip for astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams must be safe. 

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said this over the weekend: “Spaceflight is risky — even at its safest and even at its most routine — and a test flight, by nature, is neither safe nor routine, and so the decision to keep Butch and Suni aboard the International Space Station and bring the Boeing Starliner home uncrewed is a result of a commitment to safety,” 

This Starliner program, sending people rocketing around who-knows-where, was supposed to be a big deal for Boeing. They have been chasing Elon Musk's SpaceX company, but Starliner is more than $1.5 billion over their budget, and years behind their schedule.

But the eight-day trip is oddly reminiscent of the inane plot of TV's Gilligan's Island, where some people went off on a "three-hour tour," only to find themselves stuck on an island and having to live with Jim Backus and company. That had to be tough, even on Jim Backus!

That was make-believe, and it passed for high comedy in the 1960s, when merry mixups of that sort were considered amusing. This is real life! Wilmore and Williams will miss the baseball playoffs and World Series, college and professional football, the presidential election, Labor Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, New Year's Eve, and the fall TV season, which will undoubtedly feature shows with plots about two people stuck in a space capsule, eating freeze-dried Thanksgiving dinners and watching their shoes float in air.

Meanwhile, W&W will hitchhike home on a SpaceX launch (Crew-9) that will be delivering crew members to the Space Station. The Starliner will return to home base empty after dropping off the two stranded flyers.

I have an idea for what they can do while waiting for the X to bring them home (in time for Valentine's Day, we hope). They can get a small piece of paper and write down all the reasons one would ever have for wanting to go explore outer space when they haven't seen everything on Earth yet!

 

 

For the kids

It hasn't been that great a season for the Seattle Mariners. They seem to be stuck in second place in the American League West division, trailing the cheating Houston Astros. Ownership seems to have grown tired of their manager, Scott Servais, to the point of inviting him to watch the rest of this season's games from the comfort of his home.  They didn't even bother to call him and let him know they had tied a can to him; he heard it as a news bulletin on the radio. I hope he wasn't shaving at the time.

But it hasn't been all doom and gloom for the Mariners in 2024. Earlier in the season, outfielder Mitch Haniger gave off a positive vibe, reminding one and all what mattered after all.

Haniger came up with a great idea for something for the kids at Seattle Children’s Hospital. Instead of the kids lining up for autographed baseball cards from baseball players, Haniger showed up with a bunch of players who wanted autographs from the kids.

He called it a ‘reversed signing’ and the kids got to feel like the stars for the players. They had a nice turnout, too, from what I hear.

 

Even the Mariner Moose mascot took time out from his busy schedule to join the fun.

And the Seattle Children's Hospital posted their thanks online:

Thank you Mitch Haniger for hosting Seattle Children's patient families for a reverse card signing event. We appreciate @Topps for creating one of a kind trading cards for our kids. Shout out to @MarinerMoose, Cal Raleigh, JP Crawford, George Kirby, Dylan Moore, Luke Raley, Justin Turner and Cade Marlowe for joining in on the fun!

Haniger, at 33, is batting .211 this season, so this has not been the most successful season he's had, but what's a batting average when a man does something so far above the average?

Lock it up

When I was in high school, I was advised that I should never stop learning.

So, this spring, decades - and I mean decades later -  I found myself in the hallowed halls of dear old alma mater Towson High School, and I learned something!

I learned that students there do not use lockers anymore! 

I was really surprised, but then, the reasons my ears heard while my mouth hung agape made sense.

They don't have that many textbooks at all; learning material is on laptops and learning platforms (online books). 

They use backpacks to carry what they need, including water bottles and snacks, so they don't have bag lunches to stash.

Some schools stopped using lockers during COVID to keep bunches of kids from congregating in the hallways. 

Have you noticed this, too: back in the Pleistocene Era, we wore overcoats and heavy parks, with scarves and gloves, during wintertime. Now, no matter if the temperature is down around the teens, the teens are wearing a hoodie, maybe even shorts. 

Conclusion: kids are tougher today, more resilient in the face of cold weather, and they don't need lockers to store all that gear. 

Guess I would need another place to hide the stashes I stashed in lockers back in the day.

Time, she do march on. But I can still tell you the combination to my old Master padlock: 16-36-24!

 

Cool to be kind

 "No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted."  - Aesop

Parents, when your kids get home from school these new days of the school year, be sure to ask them about their accomplishments, who their teachers are, what they look forward to in their various classes, how their friends' summers went, all the usual.

And then, please remember to ask them this simple question: Did you make someone feel better today?

There are so many people with so many things dragging them down, and not everyone jumps out of bed looking forward to their day like we lucky people do.

But it doesn't cost a penny to look around the classroom or the cafeteria or gym and find someone who looks lonesome, and offer that person the hand of friendship.

I can't imagine what it would feel like to be the "new boy," just moved in from Keokuk or someplace. But if you can encourage your child to be cool to the new kid, to say an inspiring word to the one who seems a little lost, to show someone how to get around...your child just may be the one who unlocks a heart of gold.

And then others might follow your kid, and before you know it, it's anarchy, all over the place, kindness and goodness spreading like syrup on a waffle!

"You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one."  - John Lennon

Sunday Rerun (from 2019): The wrong right leg

 The widow of the late U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings, Maya Rockeymoore Cummings, made the decision to have a double mastectomy last week. This was called a "preventive" surgery; she did not have breast cancer, but her mother died from that disease and her sister was recently diagnosed with it, so her decision to have her breasts removed to prevent the disease is one that many women around the world are making.  I wish her the best and acknowledge what a tough personal medical decision this must have been.

HowEVER...the grammar guy in me barked when a local television anchor referred to this as "preventable" surgery. She meant to say "preventive" surgery.

And that leads us down another wormhole, because there exists a debate among people much smarter than I as to whether it's acceptable to say "preventative" instead of "preventive." I say, save a syllable, and call it preventive, but don't call it "preventable."

When I researched this, I found out something even more interesting. 

Did you know there is a topic, one which most medical people would prefer not to talk about with you, known as Wrong Site Surgery?  These mistakes involve:

• surgery performed on the wrong part of the body (e.g. left knee instead of right knee)
• wrong surgery performed on the right part of the body
• right surgery performed on the wrong patient

I've gone under the knife a total of three times, and the last two, the surgeons about to slice into me (back and knee) took marking pens to draw arrows on me pointing exactly to where the surgery was to take place.  Since I was not going to be conscious when the cuttin' was happening, this left me in a peaceful state as I dropped off with the anesthesia.

I had to trust them to do the proper surgery, and they did, and as to whether I was the proper person on whom to operate, I guess they read the stylish ID bracelet that the hospital stuck on me.

We like to think that the people we entrust with our medical care are wise and well-trained and careful, but things happen.  That's why a lot of people give up practicing medicine and become lawyers.

The Saturday Picture Show, August 24, 2024

 

In 1925, all vehicular and pedestrian traffic came to a halt in New York City for a mama cat and her little bitty baby.

Gotta be some sort of record: This sunflower reached 13 feet in height this sunny summer!

I don't know what you do for a living, but there are people whose work involves getting Mariah Carey ready to sing her Christmas song, and they are already on the job!

The Tide is rolling again! Classes (and football practice) are underway at the U of Alabama.

Ina Garten and I want to share our secret for the best bacon ever: Cook it in the oven and sprinkle brown sugar over it first!

This picture looks like it could have been taken last week, but it actually dates back to 1907! It shows a Thai woman posing in a Panung, their national costume.

Almost time for my favorite color!

Remember those "If you can draw this lumberjack, you might be on your way to big bucks as a commercial illustrator" ads? Here's how to practice by drawing Snoopy.

We have now lived in our house for 25 years, and yet, when I want to turn on a light upstairs or outside or in the foyer, I need a chart to tell me which switch switches which light. My idea of printing little labels is still under consideration.

For all of us who have an occasional lack of self-confidence, I share this little soliloquy from John Candy as Del Griffith in "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles." The message lives on: once you get to the point of liking yourself, it doesn't matter who else does.

Bad People's Court

Out there in sunny Detroit city, a young lady of 15 years was on a field trip with a nonprofit group called Greening Of Detroit, which describes itself as a "non profit environmental group... We plant trees, provide green jobs and job training for adults and youth."

It sounds like they are people trying to do good things for people, and the young lady in question was with them on a field trip designed to teach participants about the legal system, let them watch a real trial happen, and even speak to a judge.

Unfortunately, she dozed off. It happens. Trust me. Most courtrooms, especially warm ones after lunch, are maximum doze-atoriums.

Judges are fond of pontificating from the bench, and one popular theme they expound upon is "You have choices in these situations." Presiding Judge Kenneth King had several choices before him in that situation. He could have 

a) ignored it

b) discreetly sent the bailiff to gently tap her on the shoulder   - or - 

c) locked her up.

You know me well enough to know already, he chose "c." Hizzoner told her to leave the courtroom:  “You fall asleep in my courtroom one more time, I’m going to put you in the back (holding cell), understood?”  

You also should know, the attorneys were not in the courtroom yet when this petty imbroglio occurred. But when the student came back,  “She was first detained in a room facing the court from where she could hear the judge call cases,” her attorney, Gary Felty, said. 

Then, a female corrections officer handcuffed her, moved her into another room and asked her to change her clothes, where she sat for two hours, separated from her group. Oh, and all this was shown live on the judge's YouTube channel, heaping more onto the humiliation of this young lady.

Her parents (she is not being identified in news stories because she committed no crime) filed papers accusing King of malicious prosecution, unlawful arrest and incarceration, intentional infliction of emotional distress, false arrest and imprisonment, unlawful seizure and detention, and invasion of privacy.

King has been suspended from hearing cases and sent to remedial training. He was set to teach two classes at Wayne State University, and those have been reassigned to a judge with a smidgeon of common sense, one hopes.

The judge has his own attorney in this matter, a fellow named Todd Perkins, who refused comment beyond saying that King “only wants the best outcome for this young person and all young people.”

Attorney Felty said she is a good student with dreams of becoming a cardiothoracic surgeon. “Who knows how many people saw her be portrayed as a juvenile delinquent?”

Here's the awful, awful part.  While the judge was embarrassing the girl, he told her to "go home and get in your bed."

She has no home. She has no bed. Her mother says the girl was tired because the family has no permanent home, and that King belittled her daughter “in front of the whole world and her friends, to make her feel even more worse about our situation.”

Hizzoner defended himself to the local news this way: 

“I’ll do whatever needs to be done to reach these kids and make sure that they don’t end up in front of me.”

And, that he wanted all this to look real and feel real to her,  “even though there’s probably no real chance of me putting her in jail.”

That last sentence alone says a million sad things.

And they called it puppy love

Imagine being a carefree puppy (they think he was a stray street doggy) whose whole day was made, the day he thought they threw a parade for him!

Dateline:  March 2012. Pope Benedict XVI spent three days in Mexico, his first visit to Latin America, and he was all set to give mass in Guanajuato, and a photographer named Yuri Cortez was all set to take pictures of the parade that led to the procession to the mass.

"I was in Guanajuato staked out on a platform, since [the pope] was going to make his tour in the Popemobile," Yuri explained.  And while he and the crowd waited, along came a little poochy, scooting down the parade route. It was probably one of the streets he prowled daily, but this time he was greeted with waving flags and tossed confetti.

Yuri knew a moment when he was in one, so he started snapping, and one of the pictures caught the joy of a proud pup who can't be blamed for thinking all that love and applause was for him!

"I feel that dogs are present in all parts of life. A dog appears where you least expect it. Those dogs sometimes add a special touch to different situations," Yuri said.

The parade continued, the Pope conducted mass, and not one of the thousands in the throng ever dared to tell the dog that he was not the featured attraction!

   

 

 

Dreaming

Don't read anything into this, but I dreamed I died the other night.

It was one of those vivid dreams. Nothing was crazy or nonsensical. In the dream, I was living in a different world in the same house we live and love in. It's just that it had been decided that it was no longer practical for me to stay alive, and I was lying in bed waiting for the doctor to come and put me to sleep for good.

I remember hearing a car door slam out in the driveway, and I said, that's a good, solid door clunk, like a Buick or something. Must be the doctor. I figured he would stop downstairs to exchange pleasantries with the crowd in the living room and family room. I was sure I smelled a casserole baking. And I thought I should spend these last few minutes making sure I had left nothing undone.

I was mentally jotting down a few things that still needed tending to when I realized that it really didn't matter if I finished the projects I had started or the books that sit unread or the music unplayed. When the final buzzer goes off, so does the chance of worrying about stuff.

I woke up determined to be happy and enjoy every day as a blessing. As someone who was supposed to die at age 12, I'm playing with house money anyway. So, speaking to you now from this side of beyond, I wish to remind everyone that when we're gone, it will not matter if you did all your chores around the house as long you remember to do the happy chore of living gratefully and sharing your love.

Bawdry Bird

As a connoisseur of really bad jokes, I must know a dozen that involve parrots. And it would be hard to think of anything much cooler than walking around in a pirate getup with a foul-mouthed feathered friend on my shoulder.

But I just missed the chance to adopt one!

The Niagara SPCA animal shelter up in Niagara Falls, NY, recently took in a white-fronted Amazon parrot, and no sooner had he gotten a good look from his new perch than he started in on the staff and volunteers around him.

“Do you want me to kick your [expletive]?”  

No wonder a woman had brought this bird named Pepper, along with six parakeets, to the shelter for rehoming. You can't have that sort of talk in the house! What if the parson and his wife stop by for a visit?

Amy Lewis is the shelter director, and she was clear about what a prospective adopter could expect from Pepper.  She said on Facebook, “If you think Pepper’s feathers are colorful, you should hear his language.” 

(Birds of this species are known to ornithologists as conures. I even have a name all ready to go in case I get the chance to bring home a bird like him - I will call him "Jimmy Conures.")

But seriously, folks, Ms Lewis said, "Somebody get this guy a bar of soap or a humor-loving home!”

To the surprise of no one, over 400 applications to take the prattling parrot home came in from all over the country.  “It seemed like everyone wanted a cursing parrot,” Lewis said.

And after three weeks of studying on the matter, Ms Lewis and her team settled on Tiffany Turner, a special-ed teacher, and her fiancé Tim Sage.

After all, they had another cursin' person-impersonator at home, so what's one more potty-mouth parrot?

Ms Lewis did say that while such a critter might be embarrassing to have if he breaks bad in front of the bridge club, it might be a good thing if he helps make unwanted guests scoot along.

Peggy says, no bird needed; she has me to do that.

 

Hotline

Let's meet an interesting person:  Until his recent death from a stroke in Basingstoke, England, the Rev. Chad Varah, an Anglican priest. served as a guide and counselor to the needy. He often said that loneliness is the most heart-rending anguish, and he died recently in Basingstoke, England. He left this world aged 95.

His charity was called Samaritans and they existed to assist the cause of suicide prevention. If not the first, his hotline was certainly among the first, and it serves yet as a model worldwide. Samaritans has 200 branches in England and Ireland and several hundred more in some 38 countries. 

As a young (23) deacon in 1935, it fell on Father Varah to conduct the funeral service for a girl who was 13 or 14 at the time of her suicide. She ended her life, because she concluded that the onset of her first menstrual cycle meant she had a venereal disease.

Looking back in 1959, Fr. Varah said, “Here was a life that could have been saved if only there had been an intelligent person she could bring herself to talk to."

Early in his priesthood, Fr. Varah saw dozens of cases of people so distraught over sexual issues that they considered suicide. In those days, there was an average of three suicides daily in London.

So he began to envision a way for people in the throes of despair to get help, and he hit on the idea of a telephone line linking them to help.

In 1953, he became the rector of St. Stephen Walbrook in London. Oddly enough, this church had but one parishioner: the lord mayor. That's a ceremonial title that carries no responsibilities beyond a) pomp and b) circumstance. With so little to do, Father Varah had tons of time to devote himself to what he called “the parish of despair.”

Father Varah

He found an unused phone, which had survived German bombs, and set up "Mansion House 9000" as the hotline number for help.

As the service grew in popularity, the Daily Mirror newspaper gave it its name of "Samaritans," although Father Varah forbade all religious teaching and preaching in helping desperate clients. Also forbidden: telling the police anything that a client divulged in confidence. Eventually, he changed the name of the organization to Befrienders Worldwide.

I find it most interesting that Father Varah augmented his income by writing (not drawing) for comic strips.

And that, in order to help clients keep day-to-day problems in perspective, he would repeat his mantra: "It doesn't matter." He believed in reincarnation, so he did not fear death.

Well, neither do I, but, just...when the time comes, that's all. Don't rush it.

Sunday Rerun (from 2020): Born Every Minute

 There is actually something worse to worry about than the coronavirus.  And that is that good old Swindlin' Jim Bakker, the horny televangelist, is trying to tell people that the silver potion he is hawking can cure the coronavirus.

And there's something even worse than that.

People are buying it! They're sending money to that charlatan as soon as they get home from BuySumMor with 137 bottles of Purell, cases of toilet paper, and 35-packs of water.

Bakker's latest endeavor is The Jim Bakker Show, and it's among seven companies sent warning letters by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for selling unapproved products and treatments.


"The FDA considers the sale and promotion of fraudulent COVID-19 products to be a threat to the public health. We have an aggressive surveillance program that routinely monitors online sources for health fraud products, especially during a significant public health issue such as this one," FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn said in a statement.

Johns Hopkins University, where people who know what they're talking about work, reports that there are no vaccines or approved drugs to treat or prevent the coronavirus. COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus, is responsible for  at least 24 deaths in the U.S. as of Monday. More than 3,800 have died around the world.

"There already is a high level of anxiety over the potential spread of coronavirus," FTC Chairman Joe Simons said in a statement. "What we don't need in this situation are companies preying on consumers by promoting products with fraudulent prevention and treatment claims. These warning letters are just the first step. We're prepared to take enforcement actions against companies that continue to market this type of scam."

Bakker is selling nostrums that he claims contain silver, such as "Silver Sol Liquid," and he says this stuff will diagnose or cure COVID-19. He admits that his product hasn't been tested on COVID-19, but he does allow that God sent it to us.

A proud moment, when Jim swapped his expensive suits for prison jumpsuits

Some of you were not around for the Bakker heyday. Although he claims to be a minister, he is not a graduate of any college or university that offers divinity degrees. Instead, he is an evangelist, which anyone can be. He started out in the 60s with Pat Robertson's network and formed his own in the 70s. By the 80s, when cable tv brought both Ozzie and Harriet reruns and godless men of God to our living rooms, Bakker was rolling in dough with his daily "PTL Club" show. We knew people who were sending him a couple of hundred bucks a month, and "Jim and Tammy" (his then-wife was the oddly-made-up Tammy Faye Bakker) became America's new religious icons, rolling in ill-gotten gains.  They even had an air-conditioned dog house, and the now-defunct Heritage USA, a Christian themed amusement park in Fort Mill, South Carolina.

It all ended in the most 80s way possible. A bosomy church secretary, Jessica Hahn, charged that he paid her hush money (sound familiar, Donald?) to keep their affair a secret. That led him to resign from the "ministry." And then Bakker was indicted in 1988 on eight counts of mail fraud, 15 counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy, after which  Judge Robert Daniel Potter sentenced Bakker to 45 years in federal prison and imposed a $500,000 fine.  He served 5.

Tammy Faye divorced him, and after laying low for a few years, he remarried and started a new hustle called the Jim Bakker Show, from the Morningside Church in Blue Eye, Missouri.

Besides "cures" for coronavirus, he also peddles survival food in "Bakker Buckets."  His "50-day Survival Food" sampler bucket contains 154 meals. He wants $135 for it, but when the world comes to an end and the Apocalypse is nigh, you'll be sitting pretty on your Bakker Bucket with freeze-dried dinners and your silver solution.

The Saturday Picture Show, August 17, 2024

 

I look at this New Yorker cartoon and to me, what's funny is not the fish-out-of-water image of a cat in a barber's chair, and it's certainly not that it wants a head scratch. They want them every day. What cracks me up is the cat knowing the barber's first name is "Carl." It goes with David Letterman's rule that any name with a "K" sound (or hard "C") is funnier than a name without it. If the clipper's name was George, it wouldn't have been this funny. Frank would be hilarious, too.

My favorite part of paying compliments, besides the good feeling, is that it's one thing that it doesn't cost a nickel to pay.

I assemble the picture show every week by sorting through various sites and old pictures I've saved. I choose them at random on Tuesday night. Sometimes it seems like I'm working a theme, but trust me, I'm not that clever. So if it seems like a lot of cat pictures are in this assortment, it's not by design.  PS Look how happy Nancy is, surrounded by purrrfection!

I love my Orioles and all the various logos and pictures about them. Now that they are a great team again, it's fun to look back on when they were not so good, and be happy about it!

Sure, you can pay a bricklayer or stonemason a prince's ransom to build you a nice pizza oven in the yard. Or you and your buddy with a pickup can stop by Lowe's one Saturday for the bricks, go home, and start stacking! That pizza's gonna be great!

I can see the advantage for church ushers to use these long-handled baskets when it's time to take up the collection. Passing the plate can mean that some deadbeat will just pass it on without dropping in some lucre, or he can pretend not to notice the plate at all. But with this, an usher can gently tap a parsimonious parishioner on the shoulder or temple to shake a buck out of him.

This is where we get the term "busy as a bee." 

Your free wallpaper for the week is a view of our nighttime sky. We so rarely stop to look up and observe the majesty over us.

The window washer took time to leave a caricature of the feline who was watching him work!

Get ready for four years of Hollywood Olympic hype!

Fishing for fun

In Baltimore, we have the National Aquarium, a must-see stop with tanks full of fish for spectating tourists who will later head out for a seafood dinner.

In Brooklyn, New York, they have a puddle, and they're making a BFD (big fish deal) about it.

It's not a really deep puddle, just a little lagoon by a leaky fire hydrant where people keep placing goldfish who need a new home.

It seems like no matter what the cause is, you can always find someone willing to label themselves an "advocate" for it, and so there are people so invested in this tiny sidewalk lake that they have started, you guessed it, a GoFundMe campaign.

People who moan about the horrid state of the American economy will be cheered to hear that as of last week, people had dug $1100 out of their pockets to try to "help build a better habitat for the fishes to thrive and also funds for food and an outside ventilation system for them so they can survive through the seasons, so the community can continue to enjoy the beauty of nature. We appreciate all and any support we can get to help the fire hydrant goldfish."

I'll show you the "pond" in a sec, but some in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood up there in B'klyn are laughing at the effort to even call it that.

But..."We don’t have an aquarium, so it's good as we're going to get," Laura Dexter, a Bed-Stuy resident, says.

If you still have vacation time left, head on up to the corner of  Tompkins Avenue and Hancock Street, 11216, and bring your camera! Because it's become quite the local cause. Just ask local Ken Garner, who says, "Everybody takes a turn. Did you feed the fish? Did you check on the fish?"

It all started when Je-Quan Irving and his buddies invested $16 at a pet shop. That got the 100 goldfish, many of which are still bobbing around in the sidewalk spa.

But...someone turned to the expert in the situation, and that would be Julius Tepper, DVM, who runs the Long Island Fish Hospital.

They really DO have everything in New York!

Dr Tepper points out, "You’ve got issues with pollution that could be a problem. You've got issues with predatory birds."

What's more, a crew from the city's Department of Environmental Protection crews showed up last week and shut off the trickling hydrant.

And folks are showing up with red Solo Cups, scooping up guppies to take them to safer surroundings.

And as soon as the crew took off, someone opened the water flow again, vowing to keep the mini-aquarium going until the cold weather arrives.

You'll remember from the time you read The Catcher In The Rye that Holden Caulfield was all worked up about what happened to the goldfish in Manhattan in wintertime: 

"If you was a fish, Mother Nature'd take care of you, wouldn't she? Right? You don't think them fish just die when it gets to be winter, do ya?"

This is the scene of the piscine pandemonium. We'll keep you posted!

Right?

People who know these things say that interjecting the word "right" in our speech is called using a "filler word."

A lot of people do this. And it can backfire. I think they do it in the first place to seem authoritative or polished. But when they do it while speaking to someone such as I, who thinks everything through way too deeply, it slows down the conversation, because I answer them!

If you say to me, "The Orioles are a baseball team, and for many years they did not do very well, but for the past several seasons they have been near to or at the top of the standings in the American League East, right?"

I'll say, "Yes, that's right."

And you'll say, "Yeah, they're great, you know what I'm saying?"

And I will say, "I do know what you're saying, so please just say it without all the excess verbiage."

Using a rhetorical crutch like this can really distract from the message one seeks to share. This really hit home when I was watching the morning news the other day, and a child psychologist (actually a grown woman) was talking about the ways to get a child off to a good start in the new school year. And her advice was great! As someone who was inevitably the first kid in any class to be sentenced to detention, I know the difference.

But I wonder how many parents got her message, because - I am not exaggerating - she inserted "right?" in virtually every sentence. And after a while, I think that bespeaks not confidence or polish, but the exact opposite? It's as if the speaker keeps asking, "Am I right about this? Should I go on?"

Take this simple test: Here is William Shakespeare's immortal Sonnet 116 in its original form:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments; love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove.

O no, it is an ever-fixèd mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wand'ring bark

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come.

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom:

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

****************************************

And now let's muck it up with nonsense:

 Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments, right? love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds, right?

Or bends with the remover to remove.

O no, it is an ever-fixèd mark, you know what I'm saying?

That looks on tempests and is never shaken, right;

It is the star to every wand'ring bark

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken. You follow me?

Love's not time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come, right?

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom:

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved. You know?

That distant rumble you just heard was old Willie rolling over in his grave. We should use geometry in speaking, that old rule about a straight line being the shortest way to get from point A to point B. Saying more with fewer words and verbal crutches is that straight line.

And that's all I have to say.

Belief

It's the middle of August, what I call Elvis Week, and once again, our crepe myrtle in the back yard is fully ablaze in pink!

Funny tree, or shrub, or bush, whatever it is. Some people spell it Crepe Myrtle, some go with Crape Myrtle, and now and then you'll see Crepemyrtle.  However you spell or name it, its blooms appear right in the middle of hellish summer heat, long after the forsythias and azaleas have lost their luster and retreated back to stubborn green.

Ms Myrtle waits until all the other bloomers have had their turns, and then she does her thing. And with her blooms at the top of long tall branches, they wave majestically at the people piling into their SUVs to get back-to-school shopping done.

(Kids - ask your folks if they had Trapper Keepers back in the day! They drove teachers nuts, for some reason.)

We planted our CM shortly after we moved in, maybe 2001 or '02. And every year since it took a notion to bloom, it has done so in this very week. Like being able to expect people to say, "The Ravens will never win a Super Bowl with Lamar," it's as dependable as an Accutron watch. 

Except for one year, and I will tell you this with my hand on a Bible if you wish...

D.

In 2014, that sad June, my mother (who bought and brought the little plant to us) died, and in July, our dear Deanna went to be with the Lord. Deanna's funeral was in Phila on July 19 that year, and when we got home that night, we looked out back and the crepe myrtle was gloriously pink and waving greetings from above.

A month early.  And it never happened before then, or since.

I believe in signs and messages. This is one that lives with us every day.

Kevin!!!

All this talk about Paris the last couple of weeks makes me want to tell that you can now buy the great big brick house featured in the original "Home Alone" movie in 1990 for a mere $5.25 million.

The last time the manse in Winnetka, Illinois, was sold, the year was 2012, and the family that had owned it during its time of movie-set stardom still owned it. They got $1.585 million for it, a dozen years ago.

Getting down to the details, the five-bedroom house measures out at 9,126 square feet. There are six bathrooms, a wood-burning fireplace and a hot tub for your bubbling pleasure.

And there is an indoor basketball court! So there you go! You can dribble before you bubble!

Never at a loss for hyperbolic house descriptions, the real estate people describe this old (built in 1921, refurbished in 2018) pile of bricks as “one of the most iconic movie residences in American pop culture” and “a masterpiece of traditional style.” 

And in case you don't feel like buying the house and running it like Twitty City - the home of the late country singer Conway Twitty, who allowed paying guests to traipse through his house and stay behind the velvet ropes while the man who sang "You're The Reason Our Kids Are Ugly" in a duet with Loretta Lynn munched his Post Toasties and walked around looking for the remote - the sellers have installed security fences to keep the curious at bay.

 

 

Getting back to the Paris connection, it seems that a favorite conversation among fans of the Home Alone movies is adding up how much it would have cost, even in 1990, to haul an entire family (minus one) to Paris for a vacation. 

And that provides a jumping-off point for discussing what sort of job paterfamilias Peter McCallister was holding down to shell out that sort of moolah.

People really get into this in online chat groups, none of which seemed to be named "Let's Remember It's A Movie."

The Brain That Wouldn't Be Right

I don't know much about artificial intelligence. I don't even know much about real intelligence, and then along comes AI and it looks like it's saying "Al" as in Al Bundy and I'm so confused, it's not fair.

But now even the Googlers are admitting that it's more like artificial unintelligence at times. For one thing, being soulless like some people, AI can't tell a joke from a fact.  And that is dumb. 

Someone recently asked Google AI how to keep cheese from sliding off a homemade pizza.  AI said to mix some glue - I'm guessing Elmer's - into the cheese to hold that mozzarella right in place.

And years ago, I got picked on for suggesting we drop some Visine into chili so my eyes wouldn't water when I hit a really hot pepper in the mix.

Google (they have taken this one down, but still...) advised us to drink a lot of urine to help pass a kidney stone.

Asked when John F.  Kennedy was graduated from college, AI said the most Harvard-y man ever was a U of Wisconsin grad, and specified six different years, including 1993, the thirtieth anniversary of his death.

Asked for an African country that started with a K, AI said there were none, which must have really hurt the feelings of millions of people in Kenya. 

Now, to be sure, some people with nothing better to do on a lovely day like today try to trick Google AI into giving wrong answers. Later, for even more fun, they go to hospitals and loosen the bolts on the wheelchairs.

However, one palm up! We are being told that with Google's generative AI, OpenAI’s, ChatGPT,  and Microsoft’s Copilot, you should just count on them being wrong until you see proof that they're right.

Get this explanation, which is similar to a lot of people explaining what that bag o' of stolen bank money is doing in their pants pocket:  

“The vast majority of AI Overviews provide high quality information, with links to dig deeper on the web, ” Google says. And they add that they are using these and other mistakes to “develop broader improvements to our systems, some of which have already started to roll out.”

Oh, so they KNOW it was wrong and they are now out to prove it. Sorry for any student who did a term paper on JFK Sr, though.

 

Sunday Rerun (from 2020): At least we learned something

 We can't seem to escape one thing: every horrible event, such as this current pandemic, adds to our vocabulary.

It's not a new word; certainly it was known to doctors and other medical professionals, but we all know now that the technical term for "losing the sense of smell" is "anosmia."  We used to just call it "can't smell nothin' " but now we know better.  It's pronounced uhNAHZmeea, not uhNOSEmia, by the way.  I checked!

Holly Bourne is a woman from London who says anosmia is "one of the most upsetting things (she's) ever gone through. I woke up and couldn't taste or smell anything. It was the most acute thing I've ever experienced."

She did not have the cough or high fever, but when she was cooking one day with her back to the stove and failed to notice the scent of a plastic margarine tub on the stovetop until her boyfriend alerted her, she noticed she couldn't smell a thing, and called her doctor, who said he was able to diagnose her "straight off the bat" with Covid-19 over the phone.

This novel coronavirus is all new  - hence the "novel" characterization - and so there have been no studies yet on the link between coronavirus and sense of smell or taste, but the reports of it among people with the COVID-19 are so numerous as to make it seem unlikely to be coincidental.

And there's also a condition known as hyposmia, or partial loss of the sense of smell. I was planning to call it Anosmia, Jr or Anosmia Lite, but hyposmia it shall be.

But how long will it last?  That's unknown, according to Professor Steven Munger, Director of the University of Florida's Center for Smell and Taste.


"What we've known for a long time is one of the major causes of smell loss are upper respiratory tract infections due to viruses -- a common cold, influenza -- a subset of people lose their sense of smell, most of them temporarily, but a small subset lose that smell permanently," Munger told CNN.

Munger adds that there is "a real emotional component to smell, a connectedness that comes with it" and that gets into how our social connections are involved with food or drink. Even beyond the angle of safety - not noticing the smell of fire or that of spoiled food - that social aspect is important, especially as we look forward to getting together with friends and family after the pandemic is over.

There's every reason to believe that senses of taste and smell will return as soon as the malls reopen.  That's either a good or bad thing, depending.

The Saturday Picture Show, August 10, 2024

 

Olympic photographers line up the best shots during the athletic action, and then it's just a matter of luck and good timing!

This is not just any old apple tree, no sir. This is the apple tree under which Sir Isaac Newton was sitting when an apple fell off and plunked Ike on the noggin, leaving him to appreciate the gravity of the situation. The tree is still thriving at Woolsthorpe Manor in Grantham, England - it's over 350 years old!

Say hi to Babe The Blue Ox, mascot of the Kents Store (Virginia) Volunteer Fire Company! Paul Bunyan's companion is usually found in Minnesota. I couldn't find out why these volunteers use his image, but the engine looks great, am I wrong?

Some people go out of their way to prove how awful they are. First, they get one of these Musk Trucks and then they block the pedestrian walkway. Later, he'll steal coins from the poorbox.

This barn has seen better days, but there's a fortune in the old wood! People pay top dollar for weathered planks like this.

Baltimore's Senator Theater is like this, the Alabama Theater in Birmingham.  A lobby and waiting area so luxe, you would almost want to hang around waiting to see a director's cut of The Rise of Skywalker. Almost.

Your free wallpaper for the week is a walk in the park.

Someone always thinks it's cute to label lavatories "Stallions and Mares," or "Señores and Señoritas" or some such. Why not gender-appropriate pictograms?

Simone Biles is more than a story of physical excellence. Even more important, she overcame self-doubt and whipped the world this summer, and for that she deserves all the respect in the world!

Just as Florida State has their mascot Osceola ride atop Renegade, these high schoolers from Washington Irving country have a cool rider for their games. I'm sure it's a high honor to lose your head for your high school!