Sunday Rerun: Playing the Stock Market

From the Associated Press:

CLEVELAND — A woman caught on camera driving on a sidewalk to avoid a school bus that was unloading children will have to stand at an intersection wearing a sign warning about idiots.

A Cleveland Municipal Court judge on Monday ordered 32-year-old Shena Hardin to stand at an intersection for two days next week. She will have to wear a sign saying: "Only an idiot drives on the sidewalk to avoid a school bus."

The judge ordered her to wear the sign from 7:45 a.m. to 8:45 a.m. both days.

Hardin's license was suspended for 30 days and she was ordered to pay $250 in court costs.

This kid looks happy

If your sixth-grade class took a trip to Colonial Williamsburg, the you'll recall the stocks** that were used to punish wrongdoers back in the early days of American crime.  They were the wooden devices into which various parts of one's body were inserted for the purpose of punishment, so that your friends and neighbors, on their way home from the apothecary or the King's Arms Tavern could stop by and goof on you, although the goofing was done in that Early American style:

"Verily I say unto you, look at young Jeremiah yonder; loath will he be to violate the peace and quiet of the town square again."

Itchy and scratchy

This form of punishment is similar to the use of the hairshirt.  Ever notice that some words just kind of say what they are?  Like "ham sandwich" is the perfect way to describe a nice slice of pork butt on a roll, while "hamburger" is not an apt description of a fried ground beef sammy.  But a hairshirt is what it claims to be, a shirt with animal hair, to be worn against the skin for "mortification of the flesh," a form of penance once endured by California Governor Jerry Brown during his days in a seminary.  They really make you put this itchy garment on and sit around itchin' and twitchin' like a chicken, and the plan is that you achieve absolution by this form of self-punishment.

So, feel better about the form of punishment the judge gave you, Shena.  At least it won't itch, or give you splinters.


And please?  Stay off the sidewalks!!

A laughing stock.

**They are stocks, although many call them stockades.  The word stockade, properly, refers to a building used to hold prisoners.  We use the term laughing stock to describe objects of extreme ridicule, and that form of "stock" comes from the alternate meaning of the word: "something solid to which things can be affixed."  It's only a coincidence that the laughing stock of many a Colonial town was held in the local stock.

The Saturday Picture Show, February 7, 2015

One would hope that there were plans to encircle this property with a fence. Otherwise, it's a grand example of the Honor System at work.  This picture was shared by longtime Picture Show aficionado John David Gross!

Sometimes a book is just so good that you can't tear yourself away from it.

"I got the pizza T-shirt, pizza leggings, pizza Chucks...so I'm ready to go out and get looked at."  No matter how you slice it...

I don't know what they're building atop this mountain and I don't really need to know.  But they need a big truck to do it...

This is a sign graveyard for old signs of defunct businesses. Sad to see.

There's an Australian folk song..."Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree, merry merry king of the bush is he..."  Well, here he is now!

I'm pretty sure I saw this sign in the library when I was a kid, but I didn't need encouragement from an owl to read!

I was listening to an old Jean Shepherd radio show in which the radio raconteur discussed John Dillinger folklore at length.  His point was that even though Dillinger was a cold-blooded killer, and robber, and all-around bad guy, he carefully built up a public image that made him seem a hero of sorts.  Odd.  And Shep also said that Dillinger was jailed as a youth for a relatively minor offense, and sent to a low-security penal camp.  But when he proved to be a great baseball player at the camp, prison officials wanted him for the prison team, so he moved up to hard time in the big house, thereby cementing his anti-social attitude.

"And if the cops show up, we'll just say YOU were driving! It can't go wrong!"

Lance Armstrong, sitting atop a pile of money he took from good-hearted people who thought they were supporting an honest man who never ever took any drugs or anything to help him be a better bicyclist, must look around at all the newfound sports villains with a sneer.

"Belichick is just a nasty man, deeply introverted but basically just driven to succeed through whatever quasi-legal means are at hand. Marshawn Lynch doesn't want to talk to the press, well, neither does Harper Lee; she never has and it only contributes to her legacy. Tonya Harding didn't have the nerve to do her foul deed and hired a legbreaker.  Robert Irsay? Just a capitalist whose own mother called him the devil, but he was only out for the money. Mike Tyson said he wanted to eat another boxer's children, but settled for a bite of Evander Holyfield's ear, a mere hors d'oeuvre."

Of course, my supposition of the thoughts of Armstrong is just a guess.  I doubt that he ever read "To Kill A Mockingbird," and if he did, he probably picked it up thinking it was a poultry cookbook.

Armstrong's latest stunt, after his long string of lies and deceit and walking out on woman after woman and child after child after child, took place in December.  All the money he took in from those yellow rubber bands that he peddled (pedaled?) has landed him in Aspen, Colorado, with his latest squeeze, one Anna Hansen.  The two lovebirds attended a party in late December, and clean-living, All-American boy Lance got a little schnockered, it would seem, before he got the behind the wheel of an SUV, which he promptly ran into two parked vehicles.

And then he let Hansen take the blame, until a police who had been on the force for probably 20 minutes saw through the story. The valet parking guy at the hotel where the party was held said Lancey-boy was driving when the couple left, and now Hansen admits she lied in order to protect her boyfriend and avoid national attention.

Not that there's anything funny about this, but Lance now finds himself living with a woman who said that she did not know that the law requires her to stop after plowing her car into other people's property, or other people.  And here is her rationale: "And, um, you know we’ve had our family name smeared over every paper in the world in the last couple of years and honestly, I’ve got teenagers, I just wanted to protect my family because I thought, ‘Gosh, Anna Hansen hit some cars, it’s not going to show up in the papers, but Lance Armstrong hit some cars, it’s going to be a national story.’”

She's got teenagers, so she feels it's important to show them the proper example, such as fleeing the scene of a crime and being involved in a coverup.

All we need now is for Lance to go on The Oprah Winfrey Network and admit to it all, while wearing a yellow rubber band and that Alfred E. Neuman smile of his.

This will give you a crooked smile

There was a crooked man, and he walked a crooked mile.

He found a crooked sixpence against a crooked stile.

He bought a crooked cat, which caught a crooked mouse,

And they all lived together in a little crooked house.

Ever wonder who that crooked man was, or where he came from? Well, I am from Baltimore County, Maryland, home of a crooked man who became county executive, governor of Maryland and vice-president of the United States under Richard M. Nixon.  This was a man we knew as Spiro T. Agnew, so heinously dishonest that he continued his practice of taking canvas sacks full of bribe money even when he occupied an office in the White House. He was a true scoundrel, and yet that old nursery rhyme had nothing to do with him at all. 

The rhyme goes back to the 1840s, and it's about the Leaning Houses of Lavenham, Suffolk, England.   That town is about 70 miles from London, but like so much of England, its buildings go back quite a few years.  

In the 15th and 16th centuries, Lavenham was so prosperous, due to its production of top-quality wool for making broadcloth, that it was able to construct the highest village church tower in all of Britain (141 feet).  

So just as anywhere that finds people making lots of money, the population soon swelled as plenty of others moved to Lavenham to cash in on the bonanza.  Sheep were getting shorn, wool was being spun, and people were moving into houses built in a hurry by carpenters so eager to nail down a slice of the fortune that they used green timber for framing out the houses.

All those purchasers of new houses joined the local sheep in getting fleeced.  New-cut lumber is not so good for building. You know the steps on your neighbor's deck, with the third step that buckled and had to be replaced?  The wood wasn't aged long enough to dry.  But two bad things happened at once in dear old Lavenham: Dutch immigrants built up a rival wool trade in the town of Colchester, and soon eclipsed Lavenham's business, eventually taking all the English wool trade and leaving Lavenham a town without a lot of jobs.

And then the green timbers twisted in the warmth of the sun and the afternoons' drying of the mornings' rains.  That almost sounds poetic, but I doubt that many of the people who suddenly found themselves living in houses that looked like Salvador Dali was the architect were moved to poetry over finding their houses looked like this all of a sudden:

And there was nothing to be done; no one could afford to have their house re-built.

All these years later, the houses are still there, bent but unbowed!

There is another Lavenham poem that you know by heart.  On the village's Shilling Street, at the end of the 1700s, lived a poet named Jane Taylor. Jane wrote a poem called "The Star," and from that poem came the nursery rhyme "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star."

Truth: My Ringtone is the "Price Is Right" theme song

I used to drive my father to fits of apoplexy by reminding him that I thought that being a game show host was "pretty much the highest calling known to mankind."

If Dad were still with us, and if he had a Facebook account, he would not "like" Bob Barker, Tom Kennedy, Jack Narz (brothers, those two), Bill Cullen, Art Fleming and Wink Martindale.  He did not like lowbrow TV fodder such as game shows, talk shows and situation comedies, so you can see, we had a lot of fun not watching television together.  

I happen to love game shows, still catch The Price Is Right whenever I can, and often insist that answers be given in the form of a question.  

But, if I were playing "Jeopardy," and the answer given were "This unctuous Canadian has been hosting this show since, like, forever," I would be quick to reply with "Alex Trebek!"  I just don't like his approach, his pedantic way of crooning, "Nooooooo...we were looking for "a pierced thorax," not "a boo-boo"!  He seems to forget we all know he has the answers right there in front of him, rather than having to recall something someone mentioned in a Biology lab twenty years ago.  And so I agree with those who just think he's a little too...too much.

Right, but wrong

But.  When an eighth-grader had the right information but the wrong spelling on a Kids Week show, posing the question "What is the Emanciptation Proclamation?" to the answer "Abraham Lincoln called this document, which took effect in 1863, ‘A fit and necessary war measure,' " the judges called it a wrong answer. Another young man got it right ("What is the Emancipation Proclamation?" while the third contestant, a young woman, wrote,"What is the Second Amendment?"  - an answer that made me wonder how she got to the eighth grade thinking that) and won the game.  Thomas Hurley, he of the bad spelling, went home to Connecticut and told the Danbury News-Times newspaper he felt he’d been “cheated” by the show.  

He gets no sympathy here, if he's going to be that way about it. People today should be used to having to spell things correctly, but they aren't, so when they want to say they are "definitely" going to church on Sunday and they enter d-e-f-i and their phone pops up with "defiantly," they go with it, which is brutal. Spelling counts, math counts, there is right and wrong in this, and I hope that Thomas's parents have taken the time to sit down and teach him so. 

How is it that people who are so quick to sue their doctor for making a medical error, and break their necks to get to the courthouse to sue the grocery store when they break their neck on a grape on the floor of the produce department, are so quick to shrug off spelling a simple word incorrectly?

Hands-me-downs

Most of us are torn when we see people, especially younger people, expressing themselves artistically, when that expression comes in the form of slogans or pictures or completely confusing acronyms, permanently spray-painted or otherwise etched onto property not belonging to the artist.  The preferred property  is the back wall of a library, or a highway retaining wall.

How come no one ever buys his or her own house and then sprays stuff all over it?


We like to see people's talents come to full flower, and we also understand that everyone, most especially young people, wants to be sure that the world will take notice of their passage through this world. Back in Grandpa's day, some waggish youth would produce a #2 pencil and draw a schnozz posing overtop a wall, and that was daring stuff (left <<<).

Now, people arm themselves with 127 cans of Krylon spray and decorate the world in psychedelic fashion.  This unfortunate Cyclops-with-a-spray-can is seen beautifying some unfortunate wall (above).

I just want everyone to know this is not new.  It's been happening since prehistoric times (before someone said, "Wow!  We gotta start writing this stuff down!") and here is one example.  In a cave in Patagonia, Argentina, you can see where young men stenciled the outlines of their hands on the walls, and did some other redecorating (mainly with paint, although there is some evidence of a rudimentary form of wallpaper, and a rough attempt at vinyl siding on the outside.)  No, but they did do some paintings that show the life of the hunters who passed by the "Cueva de los Manos" (The Cave of Hands.) 

It has been estimated by scientists, and verified by Abe Vigoda, who was there, that these paintings were done between 13,000 and 9,500 years ago.   

So it's really too late to say anything about it now.

Aw, nuts.

The Huffington Post had an interesting article the other day, amid all its political coverage:  Whatever happened to red pistachio nuts?

Time was, the only way you got pistachios was red.  And not a red from nature, because they are sort of beige in color to begin with. Most of the pistachios we gobbled used to come from Iran, where the harvesting and roasting process left the nuts with splotches and blotches. And once the Iranian hostage crisis came along, our government put an embargo on importing pistachios from that troubled nation, forcing the American Nut Industry, a mighty collective of snack purveyors, to plant pistachio trees in California.

In a nutshell, that has worked out pretty well.

Today the United States is the world's second largest producer of pistachios -- after Iran -- and around 98 percent of pistachios grown in the United States come from California. The rest of the country's commercial pistachio production occurs in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.

But America - the nation that first put a man on the moon, the country that invented the iPod, the iPad and the iPhone (but not the I Ching), the people who figured out how to get over 600 little tiny time pills in a Contac cold capsule, well, American technology rolled up its sleeves over this red nut problem, and figured out a way to dry and hull the nuts without leaving a stained nut, which is why they used to dye them red, so you wouldn't see the stains.

Baltimore's own Babe Ruth stayed fit by
regularly consuming 18 hot dogs at a time

And then American technology, having figured that problem out, turned to an even stickier hand-stand situation:  that little wax paper napkin that sidewalk hot dog vendors wrapped your lunch in.  As Lenny Bruce said, those napkins just smeared the mustard all over your hands, "sort of like flavored Man-Tan."

Sunday Rerun: The Laugh of Brian

You know who I think is one of the greatest men we have in our country?  I mean, this guy is right there with Kid Rock, Cal Ripken, Jr, Jimmy Carter and Johnny Knoxville in my pantheon of heroes.  Brian Williams!  The guy from NBC Nightly News! To name just one reason: he wears the kind of shirts and ties that are the only kinds of shirts and ties that men ought to wear: the standard kind, with stripes or club figures on the ties and regular collars on the shirts, not those awful shirts that look like they have batwing collars from old monster movies or ties that look like dropcloths from when a brothel was repainted.

But his clothing is hardly why he is heroic.  In case you haven't noticed, this blog is not exactly GQ.  Brian Williams is a great guy because he is one of us!  He's from a normal state - New Jersey - and his first job, not like those richkid jobs where the sons of the privileged collate memos in a richdaddy office for $10,000 a week, was bussing tables in a Perkins Steak 'n' Pancake restaurant.  And he was a volunteer firefighter in his home town of Middletown, NJ!  

If you can find a town name better than Middletown, let me know.

So naturally, we watch NBC Nightly News with a devotion that would rival the most dedicated viewers of soap operas, reality shows and Keno broadcasts.  BW is conversant on all topics, tells the top stories of the day and even features cultural landmarks such as discussing the early days of the Bruce Springsteen band when saxman Clarence Clemons passed away.

But the other night on Letterman, Brian topped every comedian and raconteur ever! Click ^^on the link to see what I'm talking about.  In his marvelous self-depreciating way, he tells of being honored as Broadcaster of the Year for a group of New York state TV types, and how he and Regis Philbin (!) had to wedge themselves into a private jet to be flown to the ceremonies in Lake George, NY.  I tell you, this man has talent, because there's nothing that says a news anchor can't be perfectly serious about the debt ceiling at 6:30 and side-splitting about sharing a bag of Cheez-Its at 11:30.  

It's all in knowing what to do when, and how!

The Saturday Picture Show, January 31, 2015

Just to be safe, I try to have at least two Leatherman tools on me at any given time. Here's their new device - a Leatherman bracelet, filled with screwdrivers and hex wrenches.

I don't fly, haven't been on a plane for years, but I would have guessed that they dim the lights so you don't get too good a look at the person behind you who just snored the whole way home from Ho-Ho-Kus.

This, of course, is Noctiluca scintillans, bioluminescent plankton on a stretch of coastline near Hong Kong.  The picture was taken by photographer Kin Cheung.  I don't like to see the water lighted up like that, but at least it's a non-parasitic dinoflaggelate.  Right?

This is a frozen soap bubble.  Some people have all the time in the world!

These are the people on the observation decks at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York, home of NBC and all that.

With most of the air being let out of the football season already, and the last gasp of Patriot-ism coming tomorrow, I say, let's get ready for Oriole baseball!

Not sure exactly where this picture was taken, but that's the point...this is happening in several cities this cold winter.  People are knitting scarves for people in need, and donating them by leaving them in public parks.

Here's the inside of a former New York subway car, which, along with 713 others just like it, 86 retired tanks and armored personnel carriers, eight tugboats and barges, and 3,000 tons of ballasted truck tires were sunk in 2001 just 16 miles off Slaughter Beach, Delaware to form an artificial reef for the Maryland Reef Initiative.  This was all done to bolster the marine ecology and provide a haven for fish like the one you see here.

What's in a name?

Inveterate coupon-clipper that I am, I go through the cents-off pages in the Sunday paper like a squirrel in an oak forest.  And I notice a lot of things about the way big companies try to sell us stuff.

Here's a way of selling some hair stuff - shampoo or conditioner, I guess.  Say that it's "infused" with "buriti oil."  First of all, "infused" is now the word we see any time something is added to something else.  You take a poor old skinless chicken breast and inject some cajun flavoring in it prior to tossing it onto a hot grill, and presto! you just INFUSED that chicken with authentic Louisiana taste.

Now, for all I know, you'd be just as well off to add cajun sauce to your hair as you would be for adding buriti oil.  Or, add some lime to some coconut and call me in the mo-o-o-o-orning!

And I have nothing against buriti oil, which I found out comes from a palm fruit.  Why, no less an authoritative source than FOXX News reports that buriti oil is "An Amazonian beauty secret!"  So take that for what it's worth. And the woman in the ad certainly has lovely hair, so it must work!

My point is that there is a certain tactic in advertising and product promotion that involves confusing us with terms that we don't know. "Certs must combat bad breath, because they contain retsyn," we figure, as if retsyn were some magical substance that grows naturally on gauzy shrubbery in a fairyland garden.  But according to the Certs people, it is actually “a combination of partially hydrogenated cottonseed oil, copper gluconate and flavoring.”  MMMM.  Just the thing we all want to ingest.

Colgate toothpaste with Gardol?  Gardol is sodium lauroyl sarcosinate, just the thing you feel like brushing the old choppers with, huh?

Advertisers and manufacturers know that putting the best face on things is what sells things to us.  Even if it helps them to make us feel confused or out of the loop, just hearing that finally, our lackluster tresses will be chic and lustrous as soon as we add some buriti oil atop the melon is enough to send us running to the Try 'N' Save for a jug of this magic elixir, with our coupon in hand.

Squid (bait)

I want to open a combination bait shop and seafood carryout stand.  "Cap'n Mark's" will have squid for sale on one side and then offer calamari on the other.  And it's the same thing!

Calamari (appetizer)

Who's in YOUR wallet?

To our many global readers, and it must be hard to read this on a globe...there are some very honest people out there, all over! Especially Helsinki, Finland, where 11 of 12 "lost" wallets were returned in an experiment performed by Reader's Digest magazine.

What they did was, they dropped 192 wallets in 19 cities around the world.  In each wallet, they left a name, cellphone number, family photo, coupons, and business cards, and $50 worth of the local currency.  

19 cities, 12 wallets each.  They "lost" the billfolds close to parks, shopping areas and city sidewalks, and waited to get them back.

And here's how that worked out:

1. Helsinki, Finland (Wallets returned: 11 out of 12)

2. Mumbai, India (Wallets returned: 9 out of 12)

3. (TIE) Budapest, Hungary (Wallets returned: 8 out of 12)

3. (TIE) New York City, U.S.A. (Wallets returned: 8 out of 12)

4. (TIE) Moscow, Russia (Wallets returned: 7 out of 12)

4. (TIE) Amsterdam, the Netherlands (Wallets returned: 7 out of 12)

5. (TIE) Berlin, Germany (Wallets returned: 6 out of 12)

5. (TIE) Ljubljana, Slovenia (Wallets returned: 6 out of 12)

6. (TIE) London, England (Wallets returned: 5 out of 12)

6. (TIE) Warsaw, Poland (Wallets returned: 5 out of 12)

7. (TIE) Bucharest, Romania (Wallets returned: 4 out of 12)

7. (TIE) Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (Wallets returned: 4 out of 12)

7. (TIE) Zurich, Switzerland (Wallets returned: 4 out of 12)

8. Prague, Czech Republic (Wallets returned: 3 out of 12)

9. Madrid, Spain (Wallets returned: 2 out of 12)

10. Lisbon, Portugal (Wallets returned:1 out of 12)


So out of 192 wallets, 90 were returned. Humankind has a batting average of .470 in the World Series of Honesty.

Now, that's kind of low, even if you figure that one or two wallets

It's just Goofy to act like you live on Pluto

Some facts to mull over:

 - - Measles was once thought to be an eradicated disease in the United States, but now it's back, and kids are being diagnosed with it all over the nation.

 - - Disneyland and Disney World are places that people like to see, mainly with children.

 - - For reasons that seem to have to do with people believing they know more than people who have been to medical school, many people are not having their children receive the measles vaccine anymore.

  - - Of late, there have been 68 cases of measles in California, home of Disneyland. 48 of them are connected to having been in Disneyland, and there are, at last count, 17 more cases as far away as Nebraska.

We've talked before here about this anti-vax movement, and it's a concern.  We find ourselves getting lessons on physics from Bill Belichick, and medical advice from Jenny McCarthy, and no one even questions the wisdom of either.  Why should we?  They're on television, aren't they?

The two-step vaccination process used in America involves immunization at one year and then again between the ages of 4 and 5, which gives just about 100% immunity from measles, with life-threatening adverse reactions occurring in less than one per million vaccinations (<0.0001%).  That's what doctors say, and common folklore and gossip cannot negate these facts.

Child with measles

Seek her wisdom

If your children are adequately protected from those not so, you can feel safe to visit theme parks and the like.  The shame is that people unable to be vaccinated (younger than 12 months, having compromised immune systems, pregnant women) come in contact with unvaccinated people from communities in which the current trend is to avoid having the kids immunized, based on false reports put out by a discredited English doctor and Donnie Wahlberg's current wife.

Everybody knows more than everybody else, or so they think.

Bill me? Sue you!

I didn't think that people in England, where manners and grace are much more kindly observed than over here in a country where oafs like Donald Trump set the pace, would be this way, but here you are reading about Derek Nash, from Torpoint, Cornwall, on the banks of the river Tamar, and how he got a bill for £15.95, which is almost a zillion in American bucks.

Derek is five years of age, so you have to figure, he didn't run up a bill for that much at the fish-and-chips shop or any other English attraction.  No, what happened was, his parents accepted an invitation for him to the Plymouth Ski Slope and Snowboard Centre last month for another little kid's birthday. But then, in one of those merry mixups that happen in every family since the Flintstones, the Nashes remembered that they had already planned to spend that day with their children's grandparents.

Details get murky here; the Nashes say they had no contact information to contact the family holding the party and that family says they did. So when Derek was not at the party, the others wrote out an invoice for the money they're out, and had a teacher put the bill in the boy's schoolbag. Derek's father thought the whole thing was a joke at first, but then when the other family started talking about dragging him into small claims court, he stopped laughing.

The other family has had no comment.

But of course, I have one. And it's this: I am sorry to see that what probably began as an American idiocy seems to be going global, this business of dragging the courts into petty matters once solved by neighbors talking things over down by the mailbox. It's a shame that we've become like that.

If you really have time and inclination to bill the parents of your kid's school chums for a party a kid missed, you are a true tightwad, and a rather shoddy person. And if you wish to dispute this in court, call my attorney, as soon as he's finished getting Bernie Madoff into work release.

What did the weather person say?

Do you see where the bottom edge of the area where 5-8" of snow are expected today and tomorrow meets that dark turquoise 3-5" area? That line runs right about through our house, so I hope the deeper snow is in the back yard and not out front.

Because of something called bombogenesis, which sounds like the name of a rookie second baseman for the Minnesota Twins, this snowstorm that's coming the way of the American Northeast might just turn out to be a real doozy.

It seems we get to learn a new weather term every time we get some new weather. Late one hot June night a few years back, a thunder and lightning storm right outta hell did tremendous damage in the Baltimore area. We had been told that the possibility of having strong thunderstorms that night was high, but what we got was a thousand times worse than we thought. And the next morning, the weather people were on TV saying, in that reassuring manner, "Oh, but you see, this wasn't a horrible thunderstorm...it was a DERECHO!"

Here is the definition of bombogenesis:  A central pressure drop of at least 24 millibars in 24 hours which often creates increased wind speeds, precipitation, heavy snowfall and potential blizzard conditions.

This "weather event" we're about to enjoy is named Winter Storm Juno. By the time it's over on Wednesday morning, parts of seven states in the northeast could see more than 2 feet of snow.

From New Jersey to Maine, this affects 28 million people, almost all of whom will be running to Home Depot for snow shovels, rock salt, and snowblowers.  11 million more people are under winter storm warnings, people like us here in Baltimore, and we're all at the grocery store now in search of milk, bread, and toilet paper.

And even brainy people who know words like bombogenesis and derecho don't know why we need all that toilet paper!

Sunday Rerun: Casey in the sunshine, banned

I sympathize with all those who are so torn up over the Casey Anthony verdict. Upon her release into the pre-dawn darkness of Sunday morning, old Casey vaulted right over everyone else to take the lead in the Most Hated Person in America poll by the time the sun began to shine. 

Did you see that she left the hoosegow with $538.67 in cash - money sent to her by supporters, admirers, as it were?  It was like in the oldtime movies when a guy got let out of the Ironbar Hilton, and they gave him five bucks and a new double-breasted suit.  And when the guy was played by Victor Mature, the suit fit him immaculately.  It never failed; a suit right off the rack looked to be bespoke. 

Casey at the Tat

Casey paraded out of the big house wearing a baggy sort of fuchsia top, blue jeans, and a very apprehensive look.  We can't blame her for that.  Best advice I can offer her would be to leave the country, dye her hair, gain twenty lbs., and move to somewhere where her tattoo would fit in. Italy comes to mind, since her tat says "Bella Vita."  I think that if she seeks the beautiful life the ink on her back calls for, she won't find it if she is around people who still suspect her of being guilty of killing her own child.  

Just as in the Simpson case and many other high-profile felony trials, the jury has spoken here.  I'm sure that if you took a poll, most Americans figure Casey did it, but most Americans were not on the jury.  Only twelve were, and they were not given enough evidence by the smiling, laughing, prosecution team, who bungled the case six ways from Sunday, as Monday morning quarterbacks are wont to say.

As late as Sunday evening, the news was still showing a mob eddying about the Orange County (FL) Courthouse.  One woman said that she and her family had done the Disney thing all week and now wanted to stop by and see the other tourist attraction, that being the very sidewalk where Casey took her first free steps in three years.  Another woman said she couldn't "concept (sic) of someone doing what she did to her child."  Inconceivable, yet true.  

I know that many are flailing about, trying to make sense of what happened to Caylee Anthony, what happened in the trial, and what to do about it all.  Well, I don't think we are ever going to know what happened to the child.  Knowing that she is gone is sad enough.  What happened in the trial will be talked about in law school, and by whoever is so unlucky as to dine with Nancy Grace, for the next few decades.

I have an idea.  It's simple, as are most of my ideas.  Since there's not a thing we can do about what happened, let's work on what's going to happen. How about if everyone who has energy and drive enough to hang around the courthouse hollering at Casey would drive to an orphanage or homeless shelter or some place similar and volunteer to help out?  How about, if you're an experienced Mom, in honor of Caylee, you help out a young Mom in your neighborhood by sharing some of that experience?  Caylee is gone, and Casey's in the wind, but there are plenty of other little kids around who need help, and hollering outside a courthouse is helpful to no one, even if it does feel like it is.

The Saturday Picture Show, January 24, 2015

This is the cover of "Man's Life" magazine from September, 1956, smack-dab in the middle of the golden era, such as it was, of what they called Men's magazines, not the kind with nudey pictures, but the kind that either featured "men in combat" fantasy stories or "men attacked by crazed marauding animals" fantasy stories. Of course, you have never met anyone whose flesh was ripped by weasels, but this made for good reading for those with no interest in Shakespeare or Shelley.

And then came Frank Zappa, musician and satirist, leader of the Mothers of Invention.  For this 1970 album, he commissioned artist Neon Park to come up with something even more weird than that Man's Life cover.  I believe he did.  Park and the Baltimore-born Zappa were both born in late 1940 and both died in late 1993, but doesn't greatness live forever?

I read that white-feathered chickens with white ear lobes lay white eggs, and red-feathered ones with red ear lobes lay brown eggs. This may be true, for all I know.  I now know the chickens have ear lobes, too.

I took this picture at our favorite Cracker Barrel restaurant because we used to see this little placard all over town while people were painting porches, walls and I don't know what-all else. It was a cue to passersby to see if the paint was, indeed, still wet.

There's a whole art to displaying and presenting food in an attractive setting.  Making tangerines, bananas and kiwi fruit look even more tropical adds a certain something!

This will make a nice computer wallpaper for those who like European scenery!

What a beautiful place to live!

Here's the home of baseball's San Francisco Giants, world champs again last year.  I know two things about San Francisco: it can be hot as blazes in the afternoon and then be parka weather that very evening, and they don't like to have their town called "Frisco." And really, who would?

He sure did show that safe who was boss

I can't tell the taste of one whisky from another, so if you want to tell me that Jack Daniel's is the best one out there, I can't come back with anything.  I'll toss a toothpaste-cap-size drop of hooch into my tea at night sometimes, but I get the cheapest rotgut I can find in the boozeatorium.  And a bottle will last me as long as a ham will last a vegan.

Death Certificate

Jasper Newton "Jack" Daniel died at age 61 in 1911, so there goes the theory about 86 proof corn juice being good for longevity. But how did he die?  Folklore has long claimed that the distiller always had trouble remembering the combination to his office safe, and one day, he gave the safe a good swift kick.

I'm sure that helped open it right up.

Jack's safe (36L - 17 R - 24 R)

Anyhooch, the story goes on that in so doing, he injured the toe, and the boo-boo got infected, and he got blood poisoning, and met his maker soon thereafter.  More recent biographies dispute this point, but you can see the safe at the Jack Daniel's plant in Lynchburg, TN.

Those of us who enjoyed physical education classes at Towsontown Junior High School will remember being told that we HAD to wear white socks for gym because the son of a president once got a cut foot while engaged in some sport, and was wearing colored socks, and got blood poisoning and died.  Well, now that I am retired and have all the time in the world to look stuff up, I can set the record straight.  The young man in question was Calvin Coolidge, Jr, son of our 30th president, Herbert Hoover*.  He was playing tennis at the White House tennis courts (since removed to make room for Nixon's recording equipment) WITHOUT ANY socks at all, got a blood blister and died from the resulting infection a week later.

This proves, once again, that History is stranger than Physical Education, although, if you don't get a shower after PE, you'll really stink in History.

*There might be a test on this later.

...And I cannot lie

Ladies and gentlemen, it's time we had a little talk about the need to be a little smarter about your medical treatments.

I didn't think it would ever come to this, but, ladies, please don't allow unauthorized people to inject silicone into your seating area in an effort to make it look more callipygian.

Callipygian?  Is that one of the Kardashian sisters?  

Well, sort of.  It comes from the Greek words kallos, meaning ‘beauty’ and  pūgē  (‘buttocks) so we use it to describe a well-shaped posterior.

That's great, and if nature blessed you with natural callipygiancy, then strut your stuff proudly, as you see fit.  But I have to recommend against having some non-doctor try to make a Kim of you, if nature didn't.

Item:  Six women in New Jersey had someone inject silicone into their keisters.  The women are from Essex County NJ.  Someone up there talked them into this, but, instead of medical-grade silicone, they used the sort of silicone that is used to caulk bathtubs and showers.  They are recovering from the abscesses that the makeshift procedure caused them in the search for a big caboose.

I couldn't find a picture for this story, so here's
one of some lilies in a field.

They are far more fortunate than the woman in the Maryland suburbs who died from having silicone injected into her rump at a hotel in Capitol Heights by a man who is a stranger to graduation from any medical school, as far as is known.

All in the name of having a jumbo bounce house tagging along behind.  People are ill and dying because it's important enough to them to allow a non-doctor to inject plumbing fluids into the one precious body they were given.

And yet we laugh at "backward" people from other parts of the world and their "ridiculous" practices and notions, while some of us make asses of ourselves like this.

The President Takes His Lunch

I've never been to this restaurant called Charmington's, but like most everything else in this life, it reminds me of The Simpsons, in whose hometown of Springfield, the expensive department store is Costington's (slogan: "Over a century without a slogan.")

The Simpsons do their shopping at the Try 'N' Save, or the Kwik-E-Mart.

Charmington's is in the area of Baltimore where Charles Village meets Remington. If you're not from Baltimore, you will need to understand one thing about us...we are defined by our high schools and our neighborhoods.  You have to keep up with things, because one minute, a neighborhood is known as "hardscrabble" and "tough working class," and then then next minute, someone opens a coffee bar in a space once occupied by a TV repair shop, and someone else rips the cheesy 70's paneling from the wall in their living room, finds an original brick wall, and runs to the porch to hang a sign indicating that herbal cough drops and smudge sticks are for sale within.  And boom, here come the hipsters! And in another part of town where once dwelled the upwardly mobile and the Buick drivers, "Cash for your gold" shops and laundromats suddenly sprout.  In other words, we change.

So, back to the restaurant, the president of the United States came there for lunch last week, on a day when he came to Baltimore to talk about the need for fair sick leave for all.  At this time of the year with the flu reaching epidemic levels, people are told, "If you're sick, stay home from work," but many people don't get paid sick time, and would have trouble explaining to their children that they don't get to eat next week because Daddy or Mommy was ill last week.

The owners of Charmington's have had a progressive policy about sick leave for employees, so the commander in chief came for lunch, and ordered a roasted beet salad (but he asked them to hold the beets), a turkey-avocado wrap, and a roast beef and cheddar sandwich on white (he took half of that with him.)  He picked up the tab for others at his table, to the tune of $60 in all, and left a $30 tip.

The food was prepared under the watchful eye of a Secret Service person, and those seated in the restaurant were given the opportunity to leave before he arrived if they wanted, but once he arrived, they had to stay until he split.

There were no reports of the Secret Service being involved in either hi-jinx or shenanigans, for once.