The Saturday Picture Show, January 31, 2026

Some day, this will be an exhibit in a museum, and students will be told that it was a prehistoric telephone that couldn't be carried in a pocket, but could make calls to anywhere for a dime or a quarter!
 

This is just what you want to see, right after you give your hands a good scrubola. Clean this drier, please!

We have always welcomed new citizens! And this is a cool display on a building in San Diego to make that point in a simulated newspaper.

I don't think that American street artists get the acclaim they deserve. Now watch 'em pave over this masterpiece!

"No, Wilbur, it's MY turn to sit in the orange one!"

You know this is from Canada because a) Tim Horton's is a Canadian chain of coffee and donut joints and b) there's a ton of snow.

That was a very good idea, sticking the wipers out like that.

Already, we have a winner in the How Many Fire Codes Can You Break At Once? competition. I don't think we'll see anything stupider all year.

I put this in as a reminder that summer will be here shortly.

Cold? It was so cold, this Target ball spent the night in the lobby to stay warm!

Nice try

Once again, Baltimore is unwillingly thrust into the national crime spotlight, as some doofus named Mark Anderson, 35, was pinched in New York City on charges of impersonating an FBI agent.

Mangione, hero to the lonely

Anderson (I hate it when people give Marks a bad name!) showed up at the Metropolitan Detention Center in New York the other night, the current domicile of Baltimore's own Luigi Mangione, who sits in stir charged with the murder of an insurance bigshot. This took place in December, 2024, and all because young Luigi didn't like insurance companies. More perplexingly, owing to his dashing looks and dark, brooding countenance, Luigi has become sort of a folk hero to the people who really don't choose their heroes carefully.

So, when Anderson showed up at the Ironbar Hilton at 6:50 PM, which is well after the time of day when legal transactions take place, he aroused suspicion by claiming to be an FBI agent in possession of court papers " ‘signed by a judge’ authorizing the release of a specific inmate,” apparently, Mangione.

All the best people wear backward ballcaps

Guards at the MDC in NYC didn't just ride into town on a head of cabbage. I mean, among the other denizens of that lockup are Nicolás Maduro and Sean "Diddy" Combs, so they know how to handle people like Anderson. They asked him for his FBI credentials, and Anderson showed them a Minnesota driver's license, and stated that he was in possession of weapons. One supposes that was said in order to scare the pants off the guards, but all they could was laugh and keep their pants right where they were as they searched Anderson's backpack and found a barbecue fork and one of those pizza-cutting wheels.

The tools of a master criminal

Anderson said he recently came to the Big Apple for a job that somehow didn't work out when whoever hired him realized he is a lunatic and had stayed around to accept a position at a pizzeria, which he will probably lose because a) he's in the hoosegow and b) he stole a pizza cutter.

Maybe the prison can use the cutter if P Diddly or Maduro decide to treat the Big House to some 16 inchers with extra cheese, pepperoni, and sausage.

As of yesterday,  Anderson was still detained and being refused bail as a flight risk, although the riskiest thing about him might be not knowing whether to travel on the inside or the outside of an airplane.

 

Club 99

Why do we remember the longevity of Bob Hope, who lived to be 100 years and two months of age, less vividly than, say, Betty White, who fell just short of a century, passing on eighteen days before her 100th birthday? 

These people meet up in a little luncheonette in Heaven called Club 99: Betty, Bob Barker, Billy Graham, Prince Philip, Zsa Zsa Gabor, and Rose Marie Bentley.

No, not that Rose Marie from the Dick Van Dyke Show (speaking of people who saw 100 candles!) Rose Marie Bentley was a woman from New York who died at 99 in 2018 - and not until her death did anyone realize that all of her vital organs, except for her heart, were in the mirror image of where they were supposed to be. This happens to one person in 50 million. It's called situs inversus with levocardia, this condition where your whatsis is where your whosit ought to be, and vice versa. 

I'm guessing that Ms Bentley, who is said to have lived a hale and hearty life, never posed for X-rays or MRIs. Her condition was discovered by a team doing an autopsy as an assignment in medical school.

Little-known fact: It was from Rose Marie Bentley that we get the expression, "...but her heart was in the right place..."

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.