Foot's Forecast

We always read that the greatest thing about America is that it's the land of the free and home of the brave.  And nothing could be more true, because under a dictatorship, the government would step in and forbid people to go walking on hot coals, thus preventing dozens of injuries, but crimping the rights of people to attend a Tony Robbins event in California where they burned the hell out of their feet.

Cheaply-toupeed motivational speaker Robbins got 6,000 souls to lay down good money and show up at his shindig, the big finale of which is The Firewalk Experience, where people parade across coals glowing at a balmy 1200° - 2000° in order to have a transformational experience.

They certainly do!  They change from people who walked in on their own two feet to people who need help getting home, what with their feet all blistered.  Some of them were soaking their paws in fountains for relief.


No one can convince me that there is any value to singeing your soles on coals, but there is one side benefit not often discussed.  The birth rate among festival goers will be down for the foreseeable future, since this procedure made all the men limp.

Getting your goat

From where I sit, it's only about 165 miles to the Atlantic Coast, which is comforting, as it seems that the farther west one goes, the less this one can figure things out.  Witness this story from northern Utah, where a man has chosen to dress in a goat suit and run around with a herd of wild goats.

There he is!

All right. I know it's Monday, so I'll repeat that verbatim.  A man has chosen to dress in a goat suit and run around with a herd of wild goats.

This story tells the story.  Phil Douglass, with the Wildlife Resource people out there, points out that it's legal to hunt goats out there, although he does not say why anyone would want to. I always thought that man hunted for food.  But sometimes, that's not enough, as Woody Allen said: there must also be a beverage.  For the record, I am not interested in a McGoat sandwich.

Mountain Goat

And beside the possibility of being shot by Ted Nugent, there must be several unpleasant aspects about living among goats.  One would be the smell, two, the braying, and number three, the dietary restrictions.  According to Wikipedia, "mountain goats are herbivores and spend most of their time grazing. Their diet includes grasses, herbs, sedges, ferns, moss, lichen, twigs and leaves from the low-growing shrubs and conifers of their high-altitude habitat."

The flamboyant Mr Nugent

Great.  So when Saturday night rolls around, and this guy wants to cut loose a little and order in some General Tso Chicken or a Triple Cheese Steak pizza, what happens? He gets outvoted, because the rest of the herd wants lichens. Again.

And, while people are calling the wildlife folks, saying, "Leave Goat Man alone," the wildlife folks are worrying that the goats will turn against the interloper and headbutt him back into the last century.


And that's the latest news from northern Utah.

Sunday rerun: I see dead peepholes

This is a rerun from September 2010.  I do know that Osama bin Laden has moved on to his reward, as it were.  But I didn't know when it would happen when I wrote this:

I am not claiming any psychic or metaphysical powers here, and I know it might seem a little spooky to be going where I'm going here.  But here I go.

This has happened far too often to be anything less than weird.  It just seems that many times when I think of someone I haven't thought of for a while, they wind up on the no-longer-in-existence list.  The most recent example is baseball player Bobby

"The Giants Win The Pennant!"

Thomson.  His career, though long and fairly productive, is chiefly recalled for one single swing of the Louisville lumber - a three-run homer in the bottom of the ninth inning that gave the 1951 New York Giants the pennant over the Brooklyn Dodgers.  The Dodgers had been 13 games ahead in the pennant race and then the Giants overtook them at the end with Thomson's epic homer.  It had all the elements of baseball that appeal to me - a grey October day in an old long-gone ballpark, a homer hit by a man in baggy flannels and no batting helmet.  And the Brooklyn pitcher threw the pitch that Thomson hit was Ralph Branca, who is now remembered for lugubriously chanting, "Why me?  Why me? Why did it have to be me?" after the game.  


The Scottish-born Thomson played 15 years in the major leagues, ending his career going hitless in six at bats for the Orioles in 1960.  But, like being Britney Spears's first husband, nothing he ever did after that brought on quite so much adulation.  He retired and, in the manner of athletes of the days before they earned 274 million dollars the day they signed their first contract, thereby obviating any contact with the work world forever, went to work as a paper salesman, and was also available to hire out as an autograph show tandem attraction along with Branca, who, one imagines, was somehow able to pick up the shattered pieces of his career and write his name on baseballs along Thomson's.  

So avid was my interest in Thomson's moment in the sun and the cast of characters in the game that day that I have made it a point to read as many books, articles and bubble gum cards on the topic as I could find.  A fine author named Joshua Prager wrote a book about it called "The Echoing Green," which details allegations of cheating and sign-stealing by the Giants (Thomson denied repeatedly having any idea what kind of pitch Branca was about to throw on 0-1). That's something I love about sports - one pitch, one swing, one play, can reverberate for decades.  I was 4 months and 4 days old when this happened, so of course I knew nothing of it at the time.  But with this interest, I found it curious that on vacation a couple of weeks ago, I saw a book about the argument some people are having over who has the actual baseball that Bobby sent on a line over the disappointed head of Dodger left fielder Andy Pafko.  I thumbed through the book, but decided not to buy it for now.  And I stood in the bookstore and wondered how Bobby Thomson was doing - hadn't heard his name mentioned lately.


So the next morning, I picked up the papers, and there was the headline in the New York TIMES, announcing that Thomson was now on the big baseball team up in the sky.  

I feel sometimes like I have one of those goggle-eyed peepholes that lets me look out and see things...but I don't know what I'm seeing at the time. I know this happens too much, and it does dawn on me that many people scamper across my consciousness and live for decades thereafter, but it feels so eerie to be Mr Predicto.   

Hey! I wonder how Osama Bin Laden is doing these days!

Saturday rerun: Shake my head

The mileage between my part of Baltimore and the DC suburb in Maryland known as Bethesda is only 40 miles as the crow flies, but the average crow would rather stay here, judging from how many I see peckin' around on my way home.

And I can't blame them.  I often mention that there might as well be a giant brick wall on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, as far as many of us around here are concerned.  I realize that in, say, Idaho, two huge cities 40 miles apart would more or less be twin metropolises.  And I know that meteorologists on The Weather Channel like to point their doodads in our direction and blithely refer to "the Baltimore-Washington area," but take this simple test.  Have you ever been watching a show or listening to people talk, and when one asks the other where he/she is from, heard, "Oh, I come from the Baltimore-Washington area, Jay!"?

Baltimore is the biggest small town in the world, where we all relate to each other by the answer to "Wheredja go to high school?"  When you go to the doctor, you'll invariably find that the medical assistant's mother's cousin was the steady girlfriend of your uncle by just asking a few simple questions in conversation.  We sold our first house to a guy and his wife who ran a sub shop that we liked, and they in turn sold it to a guy who was in my class in high school, who sold his old house to the significant other of a good friend of mine. You get the point.  We are Mayberry, writ large.  


DC, as we call Washington, is a city that no one really calls home.  The cast changes all the time as new presidential administrations come and go.  Whereas I went to all twelve grades with the same core group of outstanding young scholars, and myself, kids in DC finish high school having attended a dozen or so schools previously.  

Baltimore is renowned for its cuisine, and the only signature food item I can really think of as being "pure DC" is the half smoke, which is kind of like a chubby hot dog.  We don't see them up here.  

Speaking of smokes, DC is the temporary home of John Boehner, who smokes in his office, in violation of law, common sense, and hospitality.  But he will be Ohio's problem to deal with soon, one can hope.

But I think this is the difference that really sums it up for me.  I was, like everyone else, disgusted, when a woman named Jayna Murray, working in a store called Lululemon in Bethesda, was killed this past March 11 by her coworker, one Brittany Norwood.  322 wounds to the body was the mechanism of death in that case, we found last week as the Norwood trial began.  


And that's not even the most shocking part for me.  Sure, the murder was beyond comprehension, but so was this fact:


The Lululemon store was next door to an Apple store, whose employees heard the commotion of the 322 wounds being administered to Ms Murray and heard a female voice calling for help.  Here's part of the story as reported on Channel 9 in DC:

According to the state,  an employee at the Apple Store next door to the Lululemon store told stated that she heard the sound of "furniture moving" and two women yelling. Then, the employee heard a voice say: "Oh God, please help me." The employee got her assistant manager, who pounded on the wall, but didn't follow up.

I know, I know.  The 20-year-olds who worked at the Apple Store can sell you a little box the size of an Etch-A-Sketch that makes pictures come out of the air, brings you email and music, functions as a camera and I don't know what-all else. 

But these are people so disconnected to humanity that their response to agonized cries for help is to bang on the wall.  Shut up over there!  We're trying to play a video game!  You need help, grab your iPhone and call 911. I'm not helping you.

And something that cold would never happen in Baltimore.  

Do not go gently into that Dark Knight

Do you remember "Batman"?  A 60's tv show based on a comic book, laden with colorful POW! and ZAP! words exploding off the screen while Adam West, before he became the mayor of Quahog RI, leapt around in tights? 

 

Batman fan all dressed up to go!

It certainly was an action-packed comic and tv show and series of movies. They're still making movies about it.  A whole comic book world, right there in Gotham City, with all the characters - the Joker, the Penguin, the Riddler, the Mother In Law. And people line up to see the movies. The new one comes out this weekend, the one we talked about because El Rushbo got his knickers in a twist about the villain.  The movie is called The Dark Knight Rises, and the reviews are in, and they're not all that kind.

So here's the quiz:  When the negative reviews came in - and only 14% of the critics knocked the film - did the Batfanatics...

a) take a neutral stance, planning to see the movie and judge for themselves

or

b) reply with so many profane and threatening comments - threats to commit murder and rape upon the dissenting critics - that the RottenTomatoes.com movie review site had to suspend user comments. Marshall Fine, a movie reviewer, received emails from people with nothing going on whatsoever in their lives or their minds, messages saying, "You should die in a fire" and another from a person who said he/she (probably he!) would like to beat him “with a thick rubber hose into a comma [sic].”

 

Let us bray.

No wonder this country can't have a presidential election without rancor and vitriol and thinly veiled threats from gentlemen such as the one pictured (left).  I mean, choosing the leader of the Free World is one thing, but don't you dare try to get in the way of a Batman movie!

Please don't threaten to beat me into an ampersand.

Rush to misjudgement

Never one to let facts stand in the way of his dopey (!) bloviations, radio babbler Rush Limbaugh now claims that the people who made the new Batman movie The Dark Knight Rises made some sort of slam at Willard M. Rmoney, the Republican candidate for president of the United States and the Cayman Islands.

This was one of those days when Rush started pounding on his console and biting off every word.  He tends to be one of those who overpronounce every word, as if each of them were a pellet of golden truth manna.

Bane

Rush, probably acting on a tip from one of his well-informed listeners, went off on one of his rants the other day, claiming that the Dark Knight movie has a villain named Bane.

And this is a direct slap at Rmoney, because Mitts used to work for an outfit called Bain, although he's not sure when he left them or anything.

The creators of the Batman comic book introduced Bane as a character in 1993.  That's almost 20 years ago, Rushbo!

Curiously, Bart Simpson likes movies starring McBain - a character loosely based on the loose-moraled former governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger.   Do you think that Bart was in on the deal all along?

Do you see any reason why people would continue to listen to Rush Limbaugh?

Neither do I!

A dime extra for cheese, too

Every Wednesday of my Mayberry-esque childhood, a GMC Step-Van would pull into the driveway, and Mr Foehrkolb would holler out his nickname and his business in just two words:

"FISH MAN!"

And the neighborhood ladies would go get fresh live crabs, soft crabs, rockfish, shad and shad roe and whatever else he had brought up from the shore.

Now these food trucks are all over downtown Baltimore and in the suburbs as well, but I still feel a little odd eating chow handed down to me from inside a truck.  You can't call me a food snob, as much as I love diner food and the buffets.  Here's why I think the food trucks are a trifle odd:

Click right here and read details about a hamburger for sale out of a food truck in New York City.  We think of New Yorkers as being shrewd with their money and their safety; after all, living in a town where one needs to dodge bullets and rats just to get from the subway to a fire-free zone teaches one to be wary. 

But Gothamites are up there shelling out $666 for a devil of a burger. This banquet on a bun serves up lobster, caviar, truffles, and a beef patty...wrapped in six sheets of gold leaf!  It's ok to eat that much gold leaf.  That much beef, the jury is still out.

And to spend $666 on lunch, enough to feed dozens of others, is conspicuous consumption of the highest order, to my burger-lovin' eyes.  If you have that much to spend on lunch, call me and you can come over any day!  Be here 12:30 the latest; that's when my story comes on.

Can it

Among the foods that I could  -were I so disposed - consume in massive quantities in some sort of eating contest are Chex Mix and Pringles potato chips.  To be accurate, they are not potato chips: the snack association, the people who make potato chips out of thinly sliced potatoes fried up in oil and then heavily salted, fought to have Pringles known as potato snacks.  At first, they even tried calling them "newfangled potato chips," but the snack people were adamant, and no thinking person calls them potato chips to this day.

I love Pringles potato chips. And do you know who else did?  One Fredric John Baur, who was born in 1918 and hung around until 2008.  Fred developed the tubular packaging for Pringles in 1970, probably right after playing tennis.  He loved his Pringles all right, so much so that when he shuffled off four years ago, his family honored his request to package some of  his cremated remains in a Pringles can. 

I don't know.  I think about being cremated when the time comes, but the whole idea just burns me up.

Shave every day and you'll always look keen

So it's happened twice now this season, that the hero of an Orioles game on a Saturday evening is given the salute of the shaving-cream pie in the face by team leader Adam Jones - and then the recipient lets fly a vulgarity on TV!

The first time, it was since-departed outfielder Bill Hall, who beat the Tampa Bay Rays with a home run on May 12 .  Fairly dripping with Noxzema Medicated Comfort Shave, he sputtered "Oh $hit!" on MASN, which was conducting the post-game interview with him.

Then on Saturday night, backup catcher Taylor Teagarden (left<), playing his first game of the year after being injured in spring training, hit a two-run homer in the bottom of the 13th inning to beat the Tigers for the O's. This game was televised nationally on FOX, and as Taylor spoke with announcers Bill Ripken and Kenny Albert, Jones and friends smacked him a good one with a payload of Gillette Foamy, leaving Teagarden sputtering the same expletive that Hall had used.

There was a time that these events would have caused a huge crisis across the length and breadth of our land, and civic leaders would have decried the increasingly profane nature of society and boycotts would have been threatened and I don't know what-all else.  But I do know that today, no one even has time to worry about a ballplayer's spicy vocabulary, since everyone is headed out to see "Ted" again. 

The old Nae Mair, she ain't what she used to be

We don't know what they were trying to do at Stonehenge between 3000 BC and 2000 BC, arranging giant rocks to line up with the break of the sun on days of solstice and equinox and so forth.  Best guess is that they were planning for a Rolling Stones concert to be held in several weeks.

And certainly, the people who laid out the streets of New York, NY, in 1811 had no idea that on certain days of the year, the sunset would be perfectly framed by the canyons of Manhattan.  Calendars being what they were in 1811, they  were lucky if they didn't miss Saint Swithin's Day, which is today! Good thing you didn't miss it, because you're supposed to check the weather today, and what we have today will be what we have until Saint Tom Cruise Day, when the days get real short. 

I guess there's not a man or woman alive who doesn't remember chanting this as a child:

'St. Swithin's day if thou dost rain
For forty days it will remain
St. Swithin's day if thou be fair
For forty days 'twill rain nae mair.'

dost = does
thou = you
nae mair = no more
forty = ounces in a bottle of malt liquor

Manhattanhenge was celebrated this year with many bottles of malt liquor.  Dost thou desire to travel to Manhattan next July 12 to see sunsets like this?  Because until next July, 'twon't set like this nae mair.

Saturday rerun: Hugh must be kidding

When most people see an 85-year-old man chasing after a 25-year-old beautiful woman, the first reaction is usually a chuckle, followed by a guffaw, a chortle, all-out giggling and then uncontrollable paroxysms of laughter.

Unless, of course, the golden-ager is ageless wolf Hugh Hefner, who is 85, for crying out loud.  Same age as my sainted Mom, and she has always had more sense than most people. Or, at least, more than Hugh Hefner.

The happy couple, in happier times

Hef, and his pajamas and his Pepsi, are about to be left at the altar, his plans suddenly altered because Crystal Harris, his sixty-years-younger bride-to-be changed her position on all this and now is to be regarded as his bride that ain't gonna be.  She is even featured on the cover of the July issue of "Playboy," billed as "Mrs Crystal Hefner" (hey - if she already got monogrammed towels, no problem!) in a move that was bound to move that tired old monthly past "Surf Kansas" and "Modern Spelunking" magazines in circulation.

Now it's turning out that there was a TV deal for all this commotion.  Someone was planning a reality show, but with a twist: old Crystal was planning to dump really old Hef at the altar, all on tape, but then no one ponied up any money for her, so she quit the whole deal.  But she did put out a new song on iTunes just hours before she packed up and ankled out on Hugh.



You hate to see someone who just doesn't know when to bow out gracefully.  At 85, it might be better to have some tapioca pudding and wait for the news or "Matlock," and then get to the Early Bird seating down at the Thai Tanic restaurant (where everything is prepared in sinks - get it?  Sinks!) The whole Playboy thing - the nudie magazine, the key clubs, the Jazz Hall of Fame - now seem as dated as anything else from the 50's.  A wiser Hefner would have stayed home and not planned a wedding with someone so young.  I mean, what would they have talked about on their honeymoon, once they got to Viagra Falls?

"Try and explain: scab of a nation, driven insane" (Zappa)

There's no sense flogging this topic til the end of time, but the report by Judge Freeh and his commission into the sickening Penn State situation points fingers directly at Coach Paterno (am I the only one to notice the irony of that name?) and his minions.  You can download the entire report at this link.

Nice shoes, Joe.

One would hope that the beloved (for whatever reason) old coach would have said,"Hmmm. This is inappropriate,  to receive reports that my assistant coach is sexually abusing young boys in the football building shower.  Perhaps I should look into this, and if I find any scintilla of evidence that Sandusky is a predator, I should both fire him and report him to the police."

But no, that didn't happen.  How wonderful that Paterno's family is now claiming that the old fool didn't realize that the man reported to be molesting children was a child molester!  "We wish he'd have been more aggressive in following up," his son Scott Paterno now says. "But clearly he thought it had been handled."

Hypothetical situation:  You're the branch manager of a bank.  Someone reports to you that one of your top staffers has been seen stuffing huge piles of money into his pockets and walking out the door.  You mention it to the brass, but months later you still see this dude hanging around the bank, laughing and carrying on.  You have to wonder why he is still around, so you...

a) call someone and say, "Why is he still around?"

or

b) shut up and keep coaching  managing the bank.

Paterno is the man who for years claimed that PSU's uniforms had to be plain, blue and white, no adornments of any size.  This was all in keeping with his allegedly plain and simple lifestyle, which saw him amass millions of dollars to donate to the school library on a coach's salary.  He would have no logo, nothing on the team's uniforms...until the people at Nike cut him a deal, and suddenly, the Nike swoosh stripe appeared on PSUniforms.  Even the black football shoes he wore with his white socks and rolled up khaki pants- all part of his 'aw shucks' persona - were Nikes, and sported the swoosh.

He also made a big deal of being technologically ignorant, so he said, "I don't do email or twitter or any of that stuff."  Perhaps he should have learned a little more about how things are today.  People have now come to realize that one little boy being anally raped is actually more important than a college football team. 

Joe Pa never got that.  Which is why, after 1998, when he claimed that he thought the whole Sandusky matter had been settled, he was able to go on and set the record for most (hollow) victories by a football coach.  409.

7.  That's how many more young men were assaulted by Sandusky after 1998.

And 7 is greater than 409.

Win, Lose or Tie

Josh Elliott on ABC News wears his necktie to do the Good Morning America show, but by 2 pm when he's on Good Afternoon America, he doffs the tie and goes open-neck.

Tony Pann was doing the weekend weather last weekend when it was about 106° (but it FELT LIKE 166°!) so he did away with the tie, too.

Ray Romano had some hilarious jokes on Letterman the other night.  No tie, but a suit jacket, just like Josh and Tony.

I am usually the last to pick up on sartorial trends, having only recently disposed of my Nehru jacket and love beads, baby. So was I out of the room the day the words came down from Fashion Central that said neckties are optional for guys - but you still need the daggone sports jacket or suitcoat?

It really doesn't help one to cool down, leaving the jacket on.  So maybe that's not the point.  Would you feel better hearing the news being read by a guy in a tie? Does wrapping 75 dollars worth of silk around the old windpipe add credibility?

Once again, I was born too soon, because when I accepted a high-level position (grocery clerk p/t) with the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company in high school, we had to wear a white shirt every day and a tie and dress slacks. White shirt, although you could get away with wearing a t-shirt with a Rat Fink iron-on ironed on to it, underneath the white shirt.  And for years, I wore the same tie almost every time: a club tie with tiny insignia of a little boy taking a whiz all over it.  I mean, pictures of a little boy were all over the tie, and the little boy pictured was actively making water at the time. He wasn't tinkling on the tie. He was some sort of prince from Belgium and he got lost in the woods and his father, the King, said that he would commission a statue of his darling son, showing him doing whatever he was doing when he was found. 

At least, that's what the guy at Jos. A Bank told me when he sold me the tie!  Do you think that's why Josh, Tony and Ray left their necks open and dry?

It's a hot mess

My dad was in the Navy during WWII, serving on a repair ship that went alongside the big boats and served as fix-it guys for everything from electric motors to cannons.  Like most of the men I have known who served in that war, he did not talk about it very much. 

Now and then he would pull out some sort of souvenir from a big trunk he kept upstairs.  I wound up with a Japanese knife - a scabbard - and what I always called a Japanese mess kit.  Dad said that his ship came upon a Japanese ship that was still floating but had no survivors aboard, and so he and his shipmates jumped aboard and made off with all sorts of stuff.  That's where this stuff came from, and probably some stuff that he chose not to bring home. Guys on Dad's ship, the USS Delta, used to drink Aqua-Velva in their coffee to get alcohol, and they also made some sort of homebrew by fermenting raisins in large crocks.  Dad did not partake in these exotic libations, but he used Skin Bracer exclusively for the rest of his life.

Japanese Bento

I did not know until this very day that the mess kit - an aluminum box with little dividers that separated rice from fish and I don't know what-all else they served in the Japanese Navy - is and was called a Bento Box.  They are still popular in Japan, and from what I read, people go to great lengths to fill the spots within with all sorts of tasty food.  And they try to arrange it in a colorful, pleasing fashion.  And they don't make them of aluminum any more, the better to allow microwaving.

In America, not to be outdone, we send the young-un's off to school with our US version of the Bento Box:

American Yucko

Koda clones

We tend to forget that there has always been color in the world, because we see black and white movies and still photographs from our parents' day, and it's like color didn't exist until they perfected color tv.

Actually, they perfected color.  TV, not yet. 

But lookie here at these old color pictures from the 1940's.  It's fascinating to look back on the good old days in color.

Here's an example from that array that is timeless, because there's no way to tell a horse from the 1940s from one of today's hosses.  And guys who work on farms still tend to wear overalls and ball caps, so what's the diff?

Here's one that sort of cheers up the grammar nut in me, as it shows that the "you're/your" problem existed long before I born. "We cut pipes while your waiting," indeed!

And here's one that is dated, because you can see how old the cars are...but wouldn't it be fun to take a picnic to the Maryland State Fair and sit there behind the sideshows chomping down on sandwiches and chocolate cake that you brought from home?  While wearing a fedora? 

Archery Bunker

I was in 9th grade when our English teacher decided it was time for us to stop diagramming sentences and read a short story.  Apparently, she chose one by picking a slip out of a hat, and we wound up reading "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson.

Shirley was to write four more stories for The New Yorker; today, this quintet of tales is known as the Jackson 5.

I would have made that joke in 9th grade, but the timing would have been off.

If you've never read it, it's a good one and I can recommend it to you and can even hook you up with a link right to the June 26, 1948  New Yorker where you can read it right off the original pages!  Just click here and away you go!

But I thought that people had forgotten "The Lottery" until last evening, when I heard a radio dramatization of it on The Big Broadcast on WAMU 88.5 FM from long ago, and it reminded me that just a few short weeks ago, every teenager in America was lined up to see the movie version of "The Hunger Games."  No, I haven't read that book, nor did I see the movie, but enough people who have experienced the book, the movie and the Lottery tale have said what I suspected: the setups for both stories are very similar, although the endings are quite different.

If you're a school kid and have finished your summer reading, I urge to you to read "The Lottery" and compare it to the "Hunger" book.  Of course, if you're a school kid, I urge you to subscribe to The New Yorker and read every single issue from 1925 on.  All those back editions are yours free to read online as a subscriber, and you will learn so much about everything that your grades will improve exponentially, your allowance will treble, and your newly-expanded vocabulary will help you vault to the top of the SAT standings.  

And, that person you've had your romantic eye on since 8th grade will fall helplessly, hopelessly under your captivating spell.  And, my friends, that's what's called winning the Lottery the right way!

Sunday rerun: High-end Low

Here's a perfect example of that New York mentality that we down here find so quaint. A story appeared in the New York Times the other day, and here is the gist of it: a guy was having dinner in a "high-end" restaurant on a Saturday night, when the chef came out of the kitchen to holler at one of the waiters. So disturbing and annoying was the chef's scolding that the guy (who happens to be a writer for the Times) got up, went into the kitchen, and told the chef that he found the outburst to be disturbing and annoying. And then he went back to his seat.

And then the chef came out and told him he thought it was time for the man and his wife and the other couple with whom they were dining to hit the bricks. Vamoose. Scram.

And then the guy called the chef the following Monday and told him he was going to write about it all in the New York Times, and what did the chef have to say for himself? Here it is, right from the Times:

(He) said that I had scolded him like a child on Saturday night. “First and foremost, you came into my kitchen and spoke to me very disrespectfully in front of my cooks,” he said. “The kitchen is a sacred space.” He told me that my reply to his attempts to explain why he was yelling, while I was in the kitchen was, “We’re not interested.” That sounds about right, since we hadn’t come to the restaurant to listen to him yell repeatedly at his staff about whatever it was that he thought they were doing wrong.

That wasn’t what got us kicked out though. He claimed that he didn’t decide to ask us to leave until he explained to us tableside that his yelling was all in the interest of making everything perfect. “Well you aren’t,” he remembers me saying. “And then,” he continued, “you waved a hand in my direction as if I was an annoying bug. Someone who acts like that in my restaurant, I would never serve.”

Now, then. Let's look this thing over before the fists start flying. The kitchen is a "sacred space"? It's a place where the profane, the impure, the fallen dare not tread? Perhaps that's why the chef chose to berate the waiter out on the dining room floor, so as not to sully someone's omelet or curdle a souffle with his rancor. And, while I'll admit that my taste in restaurants runs more to the diner than to places named for the chef himself, I have been served plenty of eats in my day that had nothing sacred about their origin, I'll tell you that right now.

But not even the grave offense of telling the chef to cool it in front of his prep chefs, as they busily filleted parsley for a chiffonade, was enough to get the boot. No, that came because he made a dismissive hand gesture to the chef. Can you just picture it? The fully extended arm, hand up, and then the fingers quickly point down...that same gesture that Billy Crystal used to describe how his grandfather would tell customers at his clothing store, "We're closed, gawdammit! Get outta heah, you stupid baaaaaaaastid!"

Oh, New York. They say that if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. But here's this guy who won't even make dinner for you if you tell him to knock off the pre-meal hollering! And here's this writer who runs into the kitchen to make that knock-it-off complaint!

I don't want to be a part of it, New York, New York. It's up to you.

Saturday Rerun: Pirate walks into a bar with a parrot on his shoulder

"Ed"

Well, it's spring, and time for the cruise ships to be sailing away and coming back with a ship-pot full of people sick from some mystery illness. Everyone has a great time sailing the high seas aboard the SS Edward Teach, don't they?

Blackbeard's Flag seems corny today

It appeals to my mordant sense of humor to name a ship after Teach, who is better known today for his nickname, "Blackbeard the Pirate."  Long before Keith Richards was born, Blackbeard knew of the advantages that came with cultivating a fearsome appearance.   Another pirate had this to say about his look: "...such a figure that imagination cannot form an idea of a fury from hell to look more frightful."  He wore his hair long and wove colorful ribbons into the braids of his beard.  This sort of appearance today is called "Being An Oakland Raiders Fan."  He had a thick black beard. Remember, this was before there was before the days of Just For Men or Clairol Natural Instincts for Men, but then again, most accounts of his life say that it ended at the age of 38, the age that most American men of this era are just beginning to spread out a little, shall we say.

 
When I read about the dude, I was fascinated with the names of the other people who figured in his short yet colorful life.  His pirate apprenticeship was served under a pirate named Benjamin Hornigold.  Teach and Hornigold met a pirate named Stede Bonnet, who invented the hat that even today is worn by pirate girlfriends and bunnies at Eastertime. Or not.  But Mr Bonnet was an incompetent pirate!  I know! We don't often think of pirates as being incompetent, but he had deficiencies in sailing a ship and ordering a crew around, and those two skills have to be at the top of any pirate's list of talents to master.  So Blackbeard took over the Bonnet crew and sailed with his merry men around the Southern Atlantic and then wound up off the coast of South Carolina, where they blocked access to the port of Charleston (then called Charles Town). 

Timbers being shivered

His career plundering the high seas was short but, as you might imagine, colorful.  The colonial governor of Virginia, one Alexander Spotswood, sent a fleet of rickety ships, commanded by Lt. Robert "Bob" Maynard, after Blackbeard.  There was a short period of unpleasantness between the two men, which ended with Blackbeard's head being removed from his body against his wishes and being displayed on the bowsprit of Maynard's vessel.  

This is why, to this day, to ask a boat's intended course of travel, we ask, "Where are you headed?"

At this very moment, 13 million Americans are having sex (and you're reading this!)

Who do you think said this?

“Girls who base how much they’re worth on the sexual favors they can do for somebody, that makes me really sad. Because sex is actually really beautiful."

“It’s the only way that we create and it’s the only way that the world keep going. It’s ignorant to not talk to your kids about it or make it seem like it’s not as cool or magical as it actually is. If [kids] have a TV, they know what sex is. Everyone knows, so educate them.”

“Let them know that they wouldn’t be here without it, and it is a beautiful thing, and it is magic, and it is when you connect with somebody and it isn’t how much you're worth. Your worth isn’t based on that. Your worth is based on how you feel about yourself.”

They sound like wise words, so which wise soul said them? Oprah Winfrey? Dr Laura, either Schlessinger or Berman?  Dr Phil (pause for laughter)? Dr Ruth Westheimer?  Any of the panelists on "The View" or "The Talk"?

Nope. These thoughts come to us courtesy of the young (not 20 yet) actress/singer/personality born Destiny Hope Cyrus, but known to millions worldwide as Miley Cyrus.  And I point out that she said them because she is one of those people whose fame so encircles them that she is hardly able to hop in the car and ride down to the Try 'N' Save for some fig newtons without attracting a swarm of camera bugs.  And people tend to think, well, she was Nebraska Alaska or Hannah Montana or some such role, so she couldn't know much except how to sing, dance, act and accrue a fortune estimated at $54 million, which is known as "The Willard 'Mitt' Romney Starter Set" among the monied.

And I don't know much about the young lady myself. I have enjoyed hearing her sing on Christmas shows and here and there, but I don't know if she is familiar to the Phi Beta Kappa selection board.  That's my point (and thanks for waiting for it!)  She has enough common sense to realize that sex is pretty much here to stay, people of all ages and genders will get together, and there's not much point in pretending that if we just keep young people in the dark about it, they won't be interested in being in the dark one night with some person they find attractive.

They will be, and it's better that they know the pitfalls before they fall into any pits.  Thank you, Miley!

Name's the same

Here in Baltimore, we are fortunate to enjoy the work of Gerry Sandusky, who is a radio play-by-play announcer for the Ravens, the evening sports guy on Channel 11, and the son of John Sandusky, who spent 43 years in the NFL as a coach and player.  Gerry "With a 'G' " is a good man from all accounts; I remember seeing him at a yard sale once and he seemed friendly.  He knows a lot about football.

A lot of people who don't know a lot about football think that somehow he is either the same person as, or somehow related to, the heinous hell-bound Jerry Sandusky, the vile creep who coached at Penn State and soon will find himself in less commodious accommodations than his big house in State College PA.  See, he'll be going to the Big House, ya know?

Gerry.  Good Guy.

CNN did a story about how people continue to send hateful messages to Gerry with a G, confusing him with Jerry with 45 convictions.  People can be confused easily; see the election returns from 1972, 1980, 1984, 1988, 2000 and 2004.  But in the CNN story, the ironically-named Christian H from Connecticut says, "At first glance I thought it was him (sic). In my mind Sandusky is a sick animal and shouldn't be here," said the 21-year-old who did not want his last name used because he feels bad about what he wrote on Twitter. "I definitely feel for the guy. I respect his work in sports, but he needs to change his name because people are going to keep messing with him."

It's my opinion that Christian H should change his name to something like Judgmental H.  He really thinks that respected sportscaster Gerry Sandusky ought to change his name just to avoid confusing gozzleheads who don't know Gerry from Jerry? He doesn't have to change his name, Christian, but you should think about changing your level of information.

Jerry. Human Filth.

And while I'm on the Penn State story, I have to say I am sorry for the many people I know and like a whole lot whose school has been so sullied by this. But I also have to point out that while Jerry Sandusky was the evil caitiff in all that ineffable abuse, there now come to our attention emails sent among the college brass, the topic of which was how best to cover all of it up.  It seems that there was a plan to report Jerry's heinous deeds, a plan derailed once beloved, folksy, lovable, simple man-of-the-people Joe "Joe Pa" Paterno stuck his nose into it.  Man of the people, he was.  Man of the children being buggered by his assistant, not so much.


And for those who always holler about government spending and waste of tax money: Penn State is a state school.  It's in the name and everything. Those people sitting in plush offices tapping out emails about how to prevent Jerry's sick little predilection from being made public were doing so on taxpayer computers on taxpayer time in a tax-paid building.

What goes up

Happy Wednesday, the 4th of July! This is a holiday that can't be moved to Monday, forcing hundreds of millions of Americans to take the entire week off.  Of course, many people here in our town are stuck at home, living like frontier people all over again, electricity being a thing of the future just like in 1848. That is a pity and a shame, and I feel for them.

Some of them, and some of those who have power, will go downtown to Baltimore's Inner Harbor tonight for the fireworks show.  Police and other city officials are hoping to avoid a rerun of last year's unpleasantness, in which random fights broke out, a visitor from Alabama was fatally stabbed after an altercation, and a four-year-old child was shot in the knee.

Fights will break out any time you have more than one person in an area.  Sometimes, one is all you need, to tell you the truth.  And, sad to say, there are always going to be people who settle their petty differences by breaking off a bottle and cutting someone's jugular vein.  The goal would be to get people inclined to such violence under arrest and then give them new addresses and numbers, along with some fashionable orange jumpsuits.

But the long-standing Baltimore tradition of firing pistols in the air to celebrate the Fourth of July, New Year's Eve, and new episodes of "The Wire" needs to come to a proverbial abrupt halt.  This has been going on around here as long as we have been putting crab cakes on crackers, but for less good reason. Bullets fired into the air serve no good purpose, and since they eventually have to come back down, sometimes they land in the knee of a four-year-old.  Or worse.

I know I am treading on dangerous hallowed ground here, but I just checked the Constitution, and it didn't mention firing your Saturday Night Special for celebratory purposes.  Those who planned to fire off their phallic substitutes might consider just going outside and hollering at the moon as an alternative.

Making Plans

We are still dealing with the detritus strewn about the town and the aftermath of last Friday night's "derecho," another weather term that we only hear about AFTER one occurs.  The big derecho we got on Friday was a B.A. thunderstorm with such violent winds that it did more damage than any storm since Hurricane Isabel in 2003.  Hurricanes are forecast as much as a week in advance, giving power companies, Emergency Operations Centers, and Panera Bread outlets time enough to stock up on needed supplies and ship in personnel and foam cups.

I'm writing this on Monday night, and all over town, people have been without electric power since Friday night just before midnight, in thousands of cases. With the temperatures flirting with the 100° mark (and totally getting over on it a couple of times) and humidity that sets off the Gank-o-Meter, it's just been horrible. Malls are packed with people seeking a cool place to charge their cells and laptops, electric crews from as far away as Canada have been here helping to restring the power lines, and people are responding as they tend to do.  Many are taking this in stride, philosophizing that it could have been much worse.  Many others are taking to the airwaves of talk radio, complaining that the Baltimore Gas and Electric people are just not working hard enough to get things back online.  Yes, they've only been working nonstop since Saturday morning to repair an unprecedented amount of damage caused by giant trees toppling power lines.  Why, they ought to be able to fix everything in ten minutes, say the people who know all about the restoration of electricity across a very large city while not actually working for an electric supplier.

I heard two things on the radio that disturbed me (which is way below the normal amount of disturbing things I hear on radio). One of them was a talk show host urging his listeners to call the electric company again and again and again to let them know that service has not been put back in place on Cherry Blossom Lane.  This is not needed at all! Once they have your complaint, they do not need to log it in again, and the notion that if you just call 27 times, they will move you to the head of the line is not accurate.  As hard as it must be to hear for people who have lost the contents of their Kelvinators and been horribly hot and sticky for four days, there is a process by which the utility brings back the power, and no amount of extra calling serves a useful purpose. (I read that you can call BGE at 877.778.2222, enter your phone number and get a restoration update...but I can't say that for sure. Might want to check it out, if you are among the affected.

Emergency kit time!

I do have to say that I was shocked to hear people saying that they ran to Home Depot or Walgreens or Cheap Charlie's to get battery operated radios, flashlights and bottled water, only to return home with no battery operated radios, flashlights or bottled water.  I'll admit, I am overly prepared for emergencies, but I can't imagine being so underprepared as not to have a flashlight on hand.  Here is a link to a list that Baltimore County compiled. If you pack away the various items over the next 7 weeks, you'll be ready when hurricanes and blizzards knock power out again.  And you can come on over for a nice bottled water by flashlight!

What's the rush

I had a great birthday weekend...actually, more like a week of pageant-like activity.  Went to Red Robin with a friend, had the family get together at Jason's Deli, and went to Friendly Farm with Peggy on a "just-us" date on Saturday.  It's always good to go there, dine like kings and queens, and see our friend April.

It was an interesting birthday weekend in that it's been hotter than the hinges on Hades around here; that's usually the case at the end of June, but we had one helluva storm late on Friday night.  The weather people had been calling for a storm all day, but I don't think any of them expected what we got, which was a million Marylanders without power early on Saturday morning, and even late Sunday, there were about a half that many still in the dark without air conditioning or refrigerators or hot water. Just awful.  They call this sort of storm a "derecho," which is Spanish for "straight," and that's what this mess was.  It came straight from the Midwest all day, leaving trees scattered like toothpicks from Indiana to Maryland.  And the fact that, unlike the aftermath of a hurricane, when the weather oddly turns pleasant in many cases, it is still hotter than the dashboard of a '64 Plymouth that's been sitting in the sun at a broken-down strip mall.  Temperatures over 100° and high humidity do not make for happy days, and my heart goes out to all who have been suffering.

On the way to Friendly Farm on Saturday, we were stopped at the light at Manor Rd and Sweet Air Rd. The light was red.  Peggy was looking at the Weather Channel on her phone, because it looked like another storm was coming along.  The light changed and I, engaged in conversation with my wonderful wife, failed to tromp on the gas pedal within one nanosecond of that change, to the disappointment of the man driving a Volvo behind me.

Citizen's arrest!

So he blew his Swedish horn at me, and as I started off driving, I looked in the rvm* to see a tfa**, his face contorted in rage as he piloted his sedan along Manor Rd, down the hill toward the pike.   I thought it best to be observant of any and all traffic regulations as I made my way along, so I made sure to keep my speed at exactly the posted 35 mph.  I caught the occasional glance at him behind me as we paddled our gondolas along the macadam path to happiness.  He was hollering at someone on his hand-held cell phone, which is against the law in Maryland (the use of the hand-held, not the hollering) but I thought it best not to try to effect a citizen's arrest.

He turned right (naturally) while I went straight at the light at the Pike, and I was sorry that we had to part company.  I'm sure that wherever he zoomed off to in his Volvo was an important destination, and his presence there surely lit up the afternoon for many.  We went up to the Farm and saw our friend and had a wonderful dinner and lots of fun and love. If Mr Volvo had come up and dined with us, perhaps he wouldn't be in such a doggone hurry and he could learn to enjoy himself a little.

*   rear view mirror
** you know what it means

Sunday rerun: Where'd the get the expression "Devil-may-care"?

They're big in the Hispanic communities. They call them telenovelas; we call them soap operas. Interesting - they're on in the evenings, 5 nights a week, on the Spanish-language stations, while US networks run theirs during the day, although a huge chunk of the viewers watch them later, time-shifting with digital video recorders and the occasional VCR.

But on a story called “Más Sabe el Diablo,” (“The Devil Knows Best,”) the US Census people are getting involved, supplying props and writing assistance to help weave into the story line a reassuring strand about how important it is for the Latino population to be sure to be counted in the 2010 Census. There's been a tradition of ducking the censustaker for fear that information given will then be used in less-than-pleasant means. The government wishes to get an accurate decennial snapshot of the population of the nation, and the people who run the Telemundo network - part of the GE/NBC megapower - can claim they are doing this to help that effort, but it also stands to reason that the ability to show a larger potential audience for their niche programming will mean more money rolling in for them. Which suits me fine, because they can always use it to give Keith Olbermann all the money he can wheel to the bank, if he'll only keep appearing on TV to lay out truths both witty and wise.

But Peggy and I had one of those philosophical discussions tonight, ranging from Who Created God so that He could create the world, and how it must have felt to be the Virgin Mary. I don't like to postulate about things we can't know on this plane; I believe in the teachings I was given as a child and I don't question them. What could be less definite than people on earth discussing what they know about the afterlife? We have faithful hope, but I bet it's gonna be way different than what a lot of people think.

Don't look for me to be invited to deliver the commencement address at any divinity schools this year. I consider myself religious, and I love being that way, but I don't know a whole lot. Just like plumbing and electricity. I count on them being there for me all the time, so why question beyond that?

And I do know that I'd like to avoid going to hell. Any place that's hot as hell would not be for me.

Saturday rerun: On the phone

Well, wasn't everyone all worked up the other day when they glanced at the calendar and saw that the date was 8/9/10?  Haven't seen that much calendar-based excitement since 7/8/09!

But, I got to thinking about something else when I was watching a King of Queens rerun, one of 14 episodes in which Carrie refuses any more of Doug's amorous advances unless he starts doing something or stops doing something; I can't remember which.  I loved that show the most when Arthur, the wacky father of Carrie, would emerge from the basement where he had just had his four-hour nap, and get into one of his loony adventures.  I plan to be a lot like him someday.

On one of the outside scenes in the show, there was a sign for a store where they sold phone cards.  Remember all that?  Around 1990, suddenly everyone in this nation was consumed with an urge to call friends and kin in far-flung outposts, and so we turned to phone cards.  Phone cards were the size of credit cards, and had imprinted on them a simple 127-digit code number.  When you got the urge to call your buddy Pat McButoks in North Dakota, you went to a pay phone, picked up the handset that contained no fewer than 127 bacteria, flu germs and cold-causing contaminants, entered that code number, and then heard a beeping tone telling you that you had entered an invalid code.


You didn't get to make your call, but you did catch a case of whooping cough.

Pay phones?  Remember them?  Now you walk through hotel lobbies, mall food courts and detention center waiting areas and see nothing but phone jacks, still on the wall, but without anything plugged into them.  Go to court or some other gathering, and when someone comes out and reminds everyone to make sure their cells are on vibrate, every man, woman and child reaches for the Samsung and kills the noise.  Except for one dozing individual, who is shortly to become the center of barely-suppressed tittering when his phone rings and his ringtone is that "I Like Big Butts And I Will Not Lie" song.  But later, no one needs a pay phone except for that guy (the bailiff confiscated his) to call their friends and tell about what happened in court.   

Eva Savealot

And the 8/9/10 part reminded me of those deals where you called 1-800-10-10-10-10 or something and got long distance at really cheap rates.  What happened to all the people - Alyssa Milano among them - who worked for these companies?  Now that all cells have free long distance and you can call your friends Bill Loney or Ty Malone, what are we doing with the money we used to spend on long distance calls?

Because, I got to tell you, everyone is on the phone with someone all the time.  Grocery shopping, driving, walking along, those Blueteeth are biting into important conversations. Now, the woman in front of me in line at the Buy 'N' Pay the other day was apparently tired of the conversation she was having.


The only thing she kept saying was "Shut up!"  "Shut UP!"  "SHUT! UP!"  But still her friend went on talking.  I headed home for my four-hour nap.