Oh Lillian!

Everyone in the "99" Club welcomed Lillian Gish as a new member in February, 1993. Being born in October, 1893 meant that the lovely actress, whose career spanned stage roles, silent pictures, movies, and television, roamed this earth for 99 years without making it to triple digits.

I saw her not long ago playing a cool-for-her-age biology teacher on "Mr Novak," and I learned some cool things about her at the same time. She was credited as being the first true movie star. Her acting was highly regarded at a time when others became famous for being in the movies but couldn't act for beans (much like Nicolas Cage of this era.)

In the mid-20s, movie producer Charles H. Duell claimed that Gish had an ironclad contract forbidding her from making movies for any company but his. He took the case to Federal Court. He should have kept all this to himself, because the outcome of the suit was that Gish was vindicated and Duell was found guilty of perjury, and disbarred. Oooops.

During the trial, her fans came to learn that Lillian Gish was a vegetarian, and there were not many of them around at the time. She had the habit of eating raw carrots during times of stress or for a snack. This picture <<< of her chomping on a carrot during the trial was so widespread that gnawing on raw carrots became an American obsession for a time.

Gish later dropped vegetarianism for a healthy carnivorous diet of boiled eggs, fruit, meat and veggies. As a former smoker, I can say I have never had a serious urge to fire up another KOOL, but I would walk away from kale salad and go for bacon cheeseburgers very quickly if I fell into the hands of vegetarians, and still plan to live to be 99.

In fact, I think I'll throw a patty in the pan right now in honor of Ms Gish, and grind on a raw carrot while it sizzles.

 

 

Look-alikes

 So we're having a nice pre-snowstorm dinner the other night, and Peggy comes out with this, a sentence that I am fairly certain has never been spoken in English before (I can guarantee that in Russian):

"Rachmaninoff looked like Barney Fife."

Well, there they are, folks, Sergei Vasilyevich Rachmaninoff, the great Russian composer, and Bernard Milton (possibly Oliver, possibly "P" Fife, depending on which "Andy of Mayberry" rerun you watch) on the right. I see a certain resemblance around the eyes.

Rachmaninoff (whose friends called him "Rocky") was sort of an American pop music composer, accidentally. Eric Carmen lifted the main melody for the second movement of of his Piano Concerto No. 2 for his hit record "All By Myself," and from his Symphony No. 2, the former Raspberry ripped off the third movement for his song "Never Gonna Fall In Love Again."   

At the time he was "borrowing" the Russian's music, he thought those melodies were in the public domain. He thought wrong. And he had to pay the Rachmaninoff estate to make up for his misappropriation. 

Barney Fife, whose friends called him "Barney," would not have countenanced the theft of intellectual property had he been on the Mayberry Crime Watch at the time.  Eric Carmen may well have wound up in State Prison with the Hubacher Brothers if Barney had anything to do about it.

 

They sent a very nice Christmas card, didn't they?

Not no more

 A friend from far, far away (so far that it's the middle of summer right now where she lives) wrote to ask me if I was planning to shovel out our driveway after this current snow mess. 

Dear friends from near and far, my shoveling days are all over (and I really used to shovel it!) Same with mulching the shrubs, mowing the lawn, raking the leaves, powerwashing the house. All that is done by the great Curley Brothers lawn care firm these days. Mention my name when you call!

As the recipient of two mechanical knees and a spinal surgery that featured cadaver bone to stand me up straight, it would be a daggone shame to perform backbreaking manual labor and risk the stability of those vital body parts, so I don't.

I visited my snowbusting equipment the other day when I found myself hanging around the garage. Do you know what's the nicest thing you can see on a snow shovel?

Dust!

Sunday rerun: "Money is not everything in life"

 So you find a million dollar lottery ticket. But you know it's not yours. What do you do? What DO you DO?

If you're Abhi Shah, from the family that owns a convenience store in Southwick, Massachusetts, you do the right thing.  Abhi, 30, was going through a pile of discarded scratchers recently, when he found a Diamond Millions that wasn't completely scratched off. He found it was a million dollar winner.

Just like any of us, his first thought was "I'm rich!" He thought of buying a house...a Tesla...another convenience store. But he talked it over with his parents and they even called a grandmother in India, who told them they were right to be honest and give the ticket back.

The article in The Washington POST doesn't really make it clear, but somehow the family knew who had bought the ticket and carelessly put it in the reject stack.   

“We had mixed emotions,” Shah told The Post. “We didn’t sleep for two nights, but I don’t know what happened. My inner soul told me, ‘That’s not right. You know who that person is. You should give that ticket back to them.' And that’s exactly what I did.”

"That person" is Lea Rose Fiega, who is a regular at the store. She works nearby for an insurance company, and pops in a couple of times a week on lunch to buy scratchers. It's her habit to give the clerk the losing tickets; they stack them up behind the register.  She bought this $30 ticket from Aruna, Shah's mom, and handed it back, without fully scratching it off. “I was in a hurry, on lunch break, and just scratched it real quick, and looked at it, and it didn’t look like a winner, so I handed it over to them to throw away,” she told the Associated Press.

                                                           The winner!

It was ten days later that Shah saw the ticket and scratched the remaining square.

Even though Fiega would never have known what happened, the family insisted on her having the ticket. Shah even drove down to her office when she didn't come in the store for several days. Fiega thought maybe she was in trouble for having forgotten to pay for something, but Shah reassured her: “No, you’re good. It’s something that’s going to change your life.”

Back to the store they went, and when the family handed her the $1,000,000 ticket, she began crying, her body shaking.

Wouldn't you do the same?

“It was a really great moment,” Shah told The POST. “Seeing her happy, I got so happy. I knew I did the right thing. I shouldn’t keep anybody’s money. Money is not everything in life.”

Fiega told the AP she duked the family in on some of her winnings, and of course the family gets $10,000 for selling the ticket, so everybody is bucks up. 

It's never the wrong time to do the right thing!

 

The Shah family (Abhi, Maunish, Varija, Aruna and Anjani). 

The Saturday Picture Show, January 24, 2026

 

Your yard will look like this soon! Or at least your computer will, if you steal this to use as a wallpaper!

It was Theodore Roosevelt whose foreign policy was guided by the adage, "Speak softly and carry a big stick." This dog has the second part, but he's no meek speaker!

Annual reminder: we can do better.

Today, before the snow/sleet/ice hits, practice your duckwalk. It will come in handy very soon!

It guess he learned: No parking in the cart corral!

This is how they make stick incense in Viet Nam.

      Why are we never there when the money truck overturns?

This is one of those tiny hotel rooms in Japan. I guess it would be ok for an overnight trip, if you don't have claustrophobia.

I bet I know what happened here: the cat told the dog, "Here's the cool way to sit on a fence."

I didn't know they brought back Space Invaders!

Safe at home

She said, "“To this day, I don’t know how he got out.” That's Patricia Orozco, from Sacramento, who was torn to pieces for five years after her rescue dog Choco got out one day. Anyone who ever shared a love with a furry (or feathered, or finny, or whatever) friend would know how that felt.

“I still talked about him all the time,” she said. “I wondered what he’s doing; I wondered how he is … When you have a pet disappear, everything races through your mind. … Is he alive? Is he okay? Is he being treated well?”

It was unbearable, I know. One of our cats went missing for a few hours one day and we about went crazy. And when she turned up, we felt a joy like few others. We won't say what happened to Eddie that day, but we are now very sure about keeping the kitchen cabinets closed.

 But back to our story...along came a text from a microchip company, telling Ms Orozco that Choco had turned up... 2,300 miles away in Lincoln, Michigan.

The wirehaired-Dachshund mix was found tied to a fence at the Lincoln Park Animal Shelter in late November. A few phone calls and, and Orozco was able to go get her pooch! 

This is a perfect demonstration of the value of microchipping a pet. You put air tags on the luggage; this is the same thing!

Except for this - Ms Orozco was thinking that the call came from a shelter in Lincoln, California, 30 miles from home. No. 

The story gets complicated from here, but let me just tell you, Orozco went on Facebook and asked for help, and the next thing you know, a member of the Helping Paws and Claws nonprofit in Loomis, California saw her post, and she knew someone who was willing to coordinate the trip. Community members paid for the person's airfare, and quick as a wink, Choco was home, thanks to some kind, loving, lovely people.

There are such things! You just have to look for them.

Home again!

 

Apples of my eye

 Pardon me if I get excited about apples. But I do, the way some people get jazzed about a new song by A$AP Rocky or a movie with Timothée Chalamet or a book by James Patterson. You go ahead and listen or watch or read; I'll be over here chomping on a fine Fuji.

It was 2019 when I read about and wrote about a new apple that our fathers had brought forth upon this continent, and that was the now-ubiquitous Cosmic Crisp, which I have gobbled by the dozen ever since. 

Now, apple science (not Apple science!) has come up with a new one that I have to try. It's called the Opal apple (it's even fun to say!) which is described as "juicy and delightfully tart" but with "the unusual tropical undertones of banana, pineapple, and coconut, as well as pear."

And catch this - Opals are naturally resistant to turning brown. I've always combatted this rusty look with a squirt of lemon juice, but now it seems I won't have to.

And now that I care about this sort of thing, but Opals are certified organic and Non-GMO Project certified.  

I can't wait to find them at BuySumMor. I will let you know as soon as I take a half dozen out for a road test!  

They still keep the doctor away

Pasta For All!

You can't even get people to agree on how many forms of pasta there are in the world. Some say 27, some say 30.

You have your bucatini, angel hair (cappellini), Cascatelli, Cavatappi, Elbow Macaroni, Farfalle (Bow Ties), Fettuccine, Linguine, Penne, Ravioli, Rigatoni, and, of course, Fusilli.

And how about this? Recent estimates say that Italians ate over 60 pounds of pasta per person, per year, easily beating Americans, who gobbled about 20 pounds per person.

But, beside the fact that you can tell the young person in your family planning on their future career that there is a job out there estimating how much pasta people in all different countries consume annually, there is this fact: Spaghetti is the most-loved pasta shape in the United States, according to Barilla.

And even there, you have choices:  Angel hair? Linguine? Fettuccini? 

So many choices on what to cook or order, but you can figure it out if you use your noodle.

A long way

How does it come that I can remember the word for when you can't think of a word or something's/someone's name...that's lethologica...but the other night I tried to remember the name of the instrument Bon Scott "plays" in the "It's A Long Way To The Top" video, and all I could come up with was "airbag"?

Take a minute to enjoy the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-qkY2yj4_A

I guess I had been thinking about Bon since reading that his ex-wife Irene Thornton passed away in November, and now she has the enviable task of trying to get the pint-sized wild man to settle down up there. Such a shame that we have lost so many great entertainers and personalities.

So many funerals, so many bagpipes playing.

Bagpipes! That was the word!

Bon and Irene, 1977

For Dr King

    “With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.” - Dr Martin Luther King, Jr

Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. was a preacher in from Atlanta, serving as minister of a Baptist church in Montgomery, Ala. It's hard to believe, but this occurred in America sixty-some years ago: Black citizens were required to ride in the back of the municipal buses (they did pay the same fare as all others), and were not allowed to shop in certain stores, dine at some restaurants, or even use public toilets or water fountains. Or Vote. 

Inspired by the resistance of a hard-working seamstress named Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her bus seat to a white man and move to the back of the bus, Dr King led a boycott of those buses.  It took almost two years, but in the end, the buses in Montgomery were desegregated, open to all.  

Today, we pause from the day-to-day to honor a man who had the courage to lead the nation away from the awful practices of legal racial prejudice and discrimination.

 He went on to lead the fight to allow all citizens to vote.  Again, I am writing this for the benefit of the young, who might find it hard to believe there was a time and place in this country when a man or woman of legal voting age could be denied the right to vote because of the color of their skin.

Of course, even the young can see that a political platform that damns an entire race or religious group or seeks to keep them from coming to the Land Of The Free is based on "hair-brained" foolishness.

There was an interesting article in the Washington POST the other day about the Dr King Memorial in Washington.  National Park Service guide John W. McCaskill, stationed there, encounters all sorts of visitors to the monument.  Some are just learning about the fight for civil rights in the US, and some are people who were there on the front lines of the fight - literally.

One day, he met Rev. C.T. Vivian.  In 1965, Rev. Vivian was on the steps of the Birmingham municipal building, trying to register new voters. And a violent sheriff, one Jim Clark, stood in their way and said they could not register.  

Vivian stood firm for the right to vote. Clark hit Vivian so hard that he broke his hand. As blood poured from his nose and mouth, Rev Vivian had the courage to say this to the news cameras recording this horror:  

   "We are willing to be beaten for democracy."

And that courage flowed from the heart of the man whom we honor today. 

Please remember that, the next time that voting seems an inconvenience, or kindness to persons of a different faith or background seems to be too much trouble. 

Sunday Rerun: Hats On

 The question was put to me the other day by the Mrs, "Why do men like to wear a hat?"

I think she had been listening to That 80s Station and heard Men Without Hats doing the Safety Dance, I don't know.

But it is true, I don't like to leave the premises without a hat on, and it's usually a baseball cap that's atop my melon.

Even as a wee lad...

I could think of five reasons right away:

1 - A hat with a brim will keep the sun out of your eyes. Frenchmen sporting berets and anyone wearing a beanie know how tough this can be,

2 - I am way past the age of wanting to fool with my hair. No sprays or mousses or gels or macassars for me, please. When I wear a cap, for all anyone knows, it's all perfectly coiffed under there.

3 -  A hat lets you show your affiliation with a certain team or cause. (This is why I banished all my red hats, no matter what symbol they bore.) Try this simple test someday when you feel lonely: wear an Alabama Crimson Tide hat and see how many friendly folks give you a strong "Roll TIDE!" It will warm your heart, doggone ya.

4 - Combined with the bandana that you should always have, a cap become an emergency tote sack.

5 - Hats offer protection from spiderwebs getting on your bean. Every spring, the trees around here are goalposts between which spiders construct elaborate webbery.

I'm sure there are other reasons, but 6 -  I'm keeping the rest under my hat.

The Saturday Picture Show, January 17, 2025

This is the Feline Gene Simmons, welcoming you to this week's Picture Show!

Maybe next week, what do you think?...

A pair of thin waffles sandwiching some syrup is the Dutch treat known as "Stroopwafel."

This is a wildflower spring in Texas. Sing it: "You've got a smile like an acre of sunflowers, and your eyes are a Bluebonnet blue...Shake hands, it's grand you're from Texas, 'cause I'm from Texas too!" (But I'm not.)

For such a beautiful area in which to live, nature is not going to just send any old swaybacked hoss! Look at all this beauty!

Sorry for you vegetarians and vegans and avocado fanciers. This is the ne plus ultra of the carnivore experience. Pass the Worcestershire sauce, please!

You've heard of the sardonic expression "rearranging the deck chairs on the 'Titanic' ", meaning to try to straighten up a hellacious mess before the whole thing sinks in the North Atlantic. Well, this is an actual deck chair from the 'Titanic," and it's arranged nicely!

This shrimp is all alone. I usually see them fried up with eleven of their friends, aswim in cocktail sauce.

The good folks at Waffle House have set up break areas for employees to enjoy a few minutes of peaceful solitude, away from the din and clatter of the bacon and batter.

This does not look a bit like the plastic stork they always have at baby showers. I was part of that unenlightened generation whose parents handed out nonsense about the stork bringing babies and metal desks saving us from radioactive fallout and working hard for giant corporations bringing security and happiness. 
 

Infamy

Wednesday, January 14, 2026, will long be remembered as the day when the cell phones stopped working for half the day, and oh my heavens! The weeping and wailing!

It was just after noon when I looked at my phone and saw "Emergency Calls Only" where it usually says "Verizon." I tried to figure if I had fatfingered something wrong, but then Peggy said her phone said the same thing, so I figured it was some network outage. 

Within minutes, two great teams went to work on the problem. First, the network engineers, who, some 12 hours later, figured someone unplugged something or the whole network needed to be rebooted or whatever, and then the public relations all-stars went to work, putting out soothing messages about how "we know this is an inconvenience to your day" and "our people are working to restore service as soon as possible." My guess in these techie things is that someone had to call home and ask their 17-year-old kid what to do. As always, one of them knew, and then went back to watching his K-Pop.

This is not a picture of someone with the measles. It's a chart of the Verizon snafu.

This morning, we awoke to news that Comcast was going to give us all 20 bucks for the inconvenience, but the last I saw, we had to go online and submit a request for the double sawbucks. They know exactly who was out and who should get the 20 simoleons, but they're going to make us work for it.

I should ask that bigshot's kid how to get my twenty.

And oh yes, it was fun to be back in 1991 again - no phone, no text, nada. My landline still worked, though, and this is why I told Peggy I will never ever again ask if we can get rid of it. You can call us to hear how we feel about that landline! It's either 1-800-DONTNEED IT  or 1-800-GLADWEHAVEIT.

NYPD True

Yesterday we talked about the goof who was caught porch-pirating from the Police Commissioner of Baltimore City.

So let's talk today about Willie King, the New Yorker who mugged a 94-year-old lady in 1996, getting away (but not far) with her wallet with family pictures and $90 inside.

The little old lady was out for a walk with her son, Louis Gigante, as in the Rev. Louis Gigante, a priest.

Father Gigante did mention this to his brother, the lady's other son, Vincent "The Chin" Gigante, who was, at the time, the city's most feared Mafia don. Although Vince, or "Vinnie," as he liked to be called, was at one time an amateur boxer, he didn't come by his nickname for taking punches on his chin. Seems that as a boy, he was called "Chenzo," a short form of Vincenzo. 

Vince, 1957.

In much the same way, pugnacious Yankee manager Billy Martin, born Alfred Manuel Pesano, was such an adorable child (!) that his grandmother called him "Bello,"  meaning "beautiful" in Italian. Other people in the area, refusing to see Alfred as handsome, guessed she was trying to say "Billy," and it stuck.

Anyhow - naturally Willie was a little scared when he found out whose mom he knocked down while stealing her purse. But not to worry: Father Louis told him "the Chin" was a forgiving sort:  “This is stupidity,” he told the press. “I know you like to talk about my brother. I just want to be left alone. My brother is sick enough to be what he is. He’s home with mama.

During his arraignment later, King, 37, was all loose and smiley, and his defense attorney, Steven Wershaw, saw no reason to ask for protective custody for King.

“He does not seem to have any fear,” Wershaw said. “Mrs. Gigante was not injured in any way, and other than the alleged reputation of the family, I don’t think he has anything to be worried about.

Other than that, Mrs Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?

The Chin had his own legal problems. The government was trying to try him on murder and racketeering charges, so Gigante took to wearing a bathrobe and walking around the streets in a bid to mount an insanity defense.

A heck of a town, New York is.

His other brother Darryl

This is the kind of dumb thing they read at the end of the news, to send you off to sleep on the lighter side.  Here you go: Be glad you are not Darryl Nichols.

Darryl Nichols, master criminal, knows how to pick 'em when he sets out to rip someone off. In November, he cunningly stole a stainless steel bowl (valued at $20) from the front porch of a house in North Baltimore.

He was seen on the Ring doorbell camera and probably wishes his high school graduation photos came out that well. Police spotted him making his well-planned getaway on a bicycle.  As he pedaled along, he had a bag slung over his shoulder, a bag containing packages he had helped himself to from another porch.

When he was taken into custody, the police took those packages and returned them to their rightful owner; it was a dress and a pair of children's pants, total value, $35.

The bowl was not recovered. 

Nichols is 60, and Judge Ana D. Hernandez, in Eastside District Court, arranged for him to be a guest of the city for the next two months this past Monday.  In view of his lengthy criminal record (theft, malicious destruction of property and burglary) Nichols will be able to spend time with friends on the Inside for those 60 days.

His parting remarks to the court? “I just want to apologize,” Nichols said. “I’m sorry for what I did.”

All rooms have unobstructed ocean views.

He's also sorry that he stole the bowl from Police Commissioner Richard Worley, but he didn't mention that. The commissioner's wife appeared in court to send him off with the police department's best wishes.

 

Meal time

Some people love a new car, a new restaurant, a new mixed drink. I love a new word, or, at least, a word new to me. 

Peggy read to me from a magazine article and the quote contained the word "inchmeal." I figured it meant "a little at a time, progressing inch by inch" because of the "meal" suffix, as in piecemeal.

Having nothing better to do, I looked up "meal," and not the five-piece fried chicken meal at Popeyes. No, this sort of "meal" comes to us from Old English and Middle English, and means a way to "denote a fixed number, measure, or amount at a time."  There's also "wordmeal," which is how we read certain people's public writings - one word at a time. 

It would have been good to know "inchmeal" back in the days when the Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration offices were bottlenecks that kept us hostage on hard tubular steel seats as you waited to be waited upon. You'd be there for hours, making inchmeal progress! But some smart cookie decided to run the place on an appointment basis now. We had business in there last week, and we were in and out in no time at all. 

We had time to pick up a  chicken dinner on the way home! We ate it piecemeal.

All alone

I challenged myself the other day! Nothing too precarious, you understand. I was waiting for a doctor and sat in the exam room with nothing between me and rank immodesty but a thin, cotton-poly exam gown the color of pea soup. The self-competition was to see how long I can sit in a room by myself without reading something.

There was a time I would rifled through the drawers in search of free alcohol wipes and tongue depressors, but why? I buy rubbing alcohol at The Tree, and it is not possible to depress my tongue, which is always busy saying something salacious or provocative, and never sad about it.

The big asterisk here * is that I did not need to be without something to read; my phone is a little Kindle and I have dozens of books on there just a couple of buttons away. My phone was in my pants pocket, at rest on a chair. But I decided it was going to be me against time. Nothing to read.

I started balancing my cane on the tip of my index finger. That was fun for 45-60 seconds, but I worried that they had some sort of monitor at the front desk and would see me raising cane with my malacca, so I quit it.

Then I figured, if they have a camera in here, where is it? So I looked high and low for a spycam and found nothing, unless the dispenser tip of the alcohol bottle is a cleverly disguised lens. 

Then I realized that spying on patients would be a huge impropriety for any doctor, and so I figured that nothing of the sort was going on. This notion was reinforced when I realized that I have never walked out of the exam room anywhere to hear the staff giggling and guffawing, so I know no one saw nothing they shouldn't have.

That means he never even told the receptionist that I said he ought to take me out for dinner and drinks before he checks me for a hernia. So I'm good.

My reverie ended when the doctor politely knocked before entering my exam room. And no, I could not resist going falsetto and asking, "Who is it?" 

You get me alone long enough and I can always crack myself up.

Sunday Rerun: Out of the bag

 When I was a kid, I didn't wish for things like go-karts and trips to a theme park based on a rodent, although Capybara Country would seem like a fun place right about now.

I used to wish to live in an abandoned school, where I would have plenty of room to collect rocks and snakeskins and display them, a gymnasium so I could play indoors on rainy days (or sunny days), a full industrial kitchen so I could roast and bake and deep-fry, an auditorium with a stage where I could declaim to my heart's content, a fully-equipped health suite to care for my sniffles and sprains, and a fully-stocked library.  What's not to like?

Now, if I were a cat, naturally I would choose to move into a fish market...or maybe a nice home improvement megastore, where I could find all manner of things to climb, cozy corners to sleep in, bag after bag of kibble and the occasional mouse for dinner, and a lot of people in and out, to scrinch my cheeks and the top of my head. Yes! Feline paradise!

There's a cat down in Richmond by the name of Francine. She's been living in a Lowe's on West Broad St for some eight years now and is the official unofficial mascot for the local branch of the hardware giant.

Recently, she was missing, and the employee family was worried that she got a better deal at a Long John Silver's or had been spirited away by a cat-worshipping group of Egyptians.

Francine was listed as missing in mid-September, and somehow, her co-workers deduced that she had gotten onto a delivery truck that took her away 85 miles to the chain's distribution center in Garysburg, N.C, a town that lives in my memory as being the home of a barbecue restaurant that once served me a plate of meat that was more than I could eat for dinner. Hard to believe, but true. 

Maybe that's why Francine wanted to go to Garysburg.

Anyhow, the workers in a giant warehouse looked all over for her, and even put thermal cat-seeking drones to aid in the search, and nothing. But you cat lovers will understand, Francine came out of hiding when she was damn well ready to, and not a moment before. 

They saw her on a security camera on October 4, rounded her up, and the manager, Wayne Schneider, and another guy from the store drove down to pick her up.

"She looked at us," Schneider said, "and gave this big meow like, 'What took you so long?'"

She's back at home base in Richmond now, and store staff are asking well-wishers to give her a couple of days of r&r to get over her vacation, after which she will be available for paw shakes and belly rubs.

The Saturday Picture Show, January 10, 2026

 

This is the Capital Gate in Abu Dhabi. It's the world’s farthest leaning man-made building, with an incline of 18°. Guess what? I'm not inclined to be up in there!

Wisconsin looks like a jigsaw puzzle in wintertime. 

Look closely! This is not a full-size ramshackle barn, but a tiny model of one! Would look very realistic in a train garden. 

I'm going to guess that in some Northern village somewhere, at one time, someone started a new age band and said, languorously, "Hey man, let's call the band "Aurora Borealis"!  Duuuuude!

Fake Christmas tree stored in original box, with a couple of yards of tape every year!

Broken hearted broken ceramic whatnot.

Interesting thing about this photo is, it's in full color! 

Toast came out looking like a rabbit!

We all know the feeling! This giraffe is getting up on his feet and it ain't easy.

Someone checked into their hotel in Madrid and reported that the TV monitor was a little on the small side...

Now ask yourself: is this a couple worn out by traipsing through a museum all day, or an exhibit in a museum? You decide!