Sunday Rerun: Bad Office Manners

Bad Office Manners

Never ones to be outdone, the good folks at the Comcast website have published a list of the Top Ten obnoxious things that people do at work.  I looked it over, but I can't say they hit everything.  I mean, for some people, the obnoxiety starts before they even GET to work, the way they drive and, once there, take up two places or so.  The other day, we got an email advising that someone had parked out front in a B.A. Ford Excursion, taking up FOUR spots at once.  That's got to be some sort of record, but where would you look it up?

I haven't even taken a gander at the Comcast list of offensive things to do at work.  I thought of my own - and I must point out that this list is not reflective of where I work now!  Those people are all angels, and put up with my singing and bad jokes. 

But let's go with:

I like to use a picture every day. Say hi to Phil Silvers!

1. wearing stanky cologne or perfume or aftershave, or having other forms of bodystank.  Will cause people to use the fisheye.
2. playing someone's favorite music loudly on a scratchy cheap broken clock radio that they didn't want in their bedroom any longer, it's such a brokedown relic, but it's good enough to play Cyndi Lauper's execrable "Time After Time" every day around 10.
3. having an office that looks like the Rain Forest down at the Aquarium, with vines and trailing arbutus hanging in one's face when one stops by to pick up the Bramblebury account folder.  Notice: this sort of foliage is often accompanied by macrame.  Beware.
4. Setting up what looks like the Salad Bar area from a Golden Corral buffet on the work area.  
5. Similarly, setting up what looks (and smells like) the coffee section at a WaWa.  Mr Coffee, Keurig, French Press, Drip-O-Lator: we've seen all the coffee setups in offices, with the little note about remembering to feed the kitty, and the IOU's in the coffee mug where dollars ought to be.
6. The people who have something to sell on behalf of their children, fraternal group or Chowder And Marching Society every week.  Every so often, sure, and everyone likes a chance to purchase pizzas and candles and popcorn, especially when it benefits a good cause.  But...every week?? For young Brattleboro's Free Form Ballet group?  How much candy can we eat?
7. Smokers who congregate right by the door so they can exhale something KOOL right in your face as you enter the building.  I am sorry for smokers, a group that once numbered me among them, but I am willing to betcha that most smokers would still go out and puff up if they were required to put on some sort of clown costume and ride around the parking lot on a unicycle while getting their nicotine fix.
8. People whose cell phones are set on maximum volume with the weirdest ringtones you ever heard...and will hear...all day.  Enchanting as the lilting love ballad "Beaten, Gagged, Bound and Chained," by Sadie O' Masochist might be to you, others  might find it, well, repugnant.
9. People who "speak' to service personnel by using only hand gestures (pointing the index finger at them, and then pointing that finger at a spill or pile or trash) or third-person irregular ("Custodial! Custodial! Overflowing bidet in executive men's room!")
10. Insensitive, inappropriate "jokes" or comments about someone else's race, color, creed, ethnic background, physical condition, area of domicile, or sexual preference tell us a lot about the boors who spout this bilge.

That's your Top Ten, and be sure to tune in next week to see if anything changes.  "Using swear words, cheap vulgar terms or taking the Lord's name in vain" is moving up fast!

The Saturday Picture Show, May 16, 2015

 

As the last of the spring blossoms fade away, I give thanks to the good people at Flonase. I don't mind giving them a free plug in exchange for two squirts of their magic fluid up my nose every morning, squirts which stop my itchy watery eyes, itchy watery nose and itchy watery non-stop whinging about spring allergies! This is from our jaunt to the lovely Winterthur Garden and Museum last weekend.

Harry Shearer says he is leaving The Simpsons, and this time, his annual threat to stop being the guy who plays the voice of authority figures from Principal Skinner to Monty Burns to local news anchor Kent Brockman might be for real.  The show has never replaced actors before.  Phil Hartman and Marcia Wallace both passed away, and so did Troy McClure and Edna Krabappel with them.  Let us pray that cooler heads - if there are any in Springfield - will bring sense to this sorrow.

Two album covers make the list this week...and this one is,

just simply, plain dreadful. Clowns are just too bizarre.  Still, it would be funny if you opened this album and 117 little records came piling out.

Not long after The Beatles released their groundbreaking "Sgt Pepper" album, Baltimore-born Frank Zappa and his Mothers of Invention replied as only they could.   This is thought to be the only album cover to contain a photo of Lee Harvey Oswald.

Everybody say "Awwwwwwww" for this little fox cub who was "adopted" by a collie as stepmom.  Thanks, Lassie!

They say that everything is bigger in Texas.  Here's a photo of a tornado-producing storm cell from down there this past week.

This young lady and her cat both are living with "Heterochromia iridium" - each have two eyes of different colors.  

Of course, the most famous person alive with Heterochromia iridium is David Bowie.  I asked for a picture of him showing his two different-colored eyes, and here's what I get.  See you next week!

Suspicions unfirmed

Sunrise, come wrap me in the warmth
Of your crimson sky
I spent a long time believin'
In a dream that had passed me by - - Eric Carmen

I read that Lindsey Vonn, the skier who was with Tiger "Tiger" Woods for a couple of years, recently dumped him, and her friends are saying that it was because she found out he cheated on her.  Woods has quite a record in both golf and in the other great spectator sport: infidelity.

It's none of my business what Tiger does with Little Tiger, but I'm thinking about how it must feel to believe in something or someone, as Lindsey must have believed he was being a faithful partner, only to find it was all an illusion, just like water running through one's hands.  What's that moment like, when the big epiphany hits you right in the proverbials?

Sure, I've been disillusioned, found out that people I once admired were not all that admirable, but it's never been someone or something I was totally into that turned out bad.  How did I get that lucky?  Well, I was very lucky to have fallen in love with the greatest woman in the world, one whose loyalty and love are beyond question, and that's just the angels working things out for me, as always.

Sinister UN invasion, or local commerce?

But, here's what I'm circling around here.  There are people in this country, people who live and breathe and work and play and shop and drive among us, people who believe that the president of the United States is in league with some sort of international cabal that has plans to invade Texas, and make federal prisoners of all Texans.

Even Willie Nelson will not be spared this ignominy, this awful hellish roundup, in their stories.

Texas...why?

It's all about this military exercise scheduled for the Southwest US from June through September.  Just Google "Texas UN invasion" or words to that effect, and sit back and watch insanity and inanity pour out of your screen like pancake batter.  I don't like to use psychological terms like "paranoia," since they refer to specific emotional conditions, but that's the common term we employ for people so bedeviled by fears and unreasonable suspicions that their lives become a web of worry and panic.

I once talked to a person on the phone, a man from the west side of the county.  He had called my office about a county service, and we had a nice, amicable discussion about how the county could help him and his neighbors.  At the close of the call, I told him I would call him back to let him know when to expect our plan of assistance, and I asked him if he had a cell phone I could use to reach him, in case he was out when I called.

"Oh, I wouldn't have one of those cell phones," he said. "You know, the police ride around the Beltway all day long with their car radios tuned in so they can hear everything you say on a cell phone, and then they can follow you and arrest you for what you're thinking."

Long pause.

He wasn't joking.  He meant it.

So I knew there are people who feel that their very lives and freedom are under imminent attack in these parlous times, and I suppose there always will be.

What I wonder about today is, how will these people feel on September 15, when the soldiers and National Guard people go back to where they came from, and the world keeps turning, and Texas was never invaded?  Is it like when one is in a dark room for a long time and then someone comes along and turns on a light?

Those UN trucks they're seeing on the highways in the Lone Star State are made in, and shipped to the UN for its international peacekeeping force, from Texas.

But one should never let a fact intrude on their darkness and flick on a light.

Mirror Mirror

I heard about a survey that said that men look at themselves a lot more than women do.  Startled, I had to find out more about the survey, and it turns out that it was taken in England and commissioned by a company that caters to the sort of man who would use products such as Peppercorn Tightening Face Moisturizer, Sumptuous Sandalwood Body Butter, Tinted Face Cream, Woodland Beard Shampoo, Strawberry Lip Shine, and something called Mr Bright Eyes.

So, I mean, yeah, you ask guys who use that sort of grooming aids how many times they adore the image they see in the mirror, and you're going to get a lot of guys who identify as metrosexuals saying, "Oh, five or ten times an hour."

(Note:  don't make the mistake I made of thinking that a metrosexual was a guy who liked to have liaisons on the bus or subway.  A metrosexual is a guy who is especially painstaking about his grooming and appearance, that's all.)

In the world I inhabit, a mirror is used when I first get up to check and see if I am indeed vertical and how many cats are riding my back.  (Eddie has that way of letting me know it's 0515 and she is hungry.)

Later, I will check the mirror while I shave.  I use a razor, so it's best to avoid severing the carotid artery while whittling off the whiskers.

And then at night, I look in the mirror when I start to floss the old choppers, so I don't wind up flossing my ear lobes again.

Three times per day does me fine, but the Avaj company over in England says their respondents eyeball the looking glass 23 times a day, and women who answered, answered "16 times for me."

The guys said the main use for their mirrors (and you can be sure, there are plenty of them in the Houses Of The Vain) is to admire themselves and the body parts they like the most.

Most of the of women surveyed said they looked  for reassurance that they look OK.

Oh and there's this - the average man in this survey spends 10 minutes a day ogling himself!  That's six and a half days per year that these men lose, and I get to spend, on pursuits such as going to Dollar Tree to get $1 shampoo, bars of Pear's Soap, shaving cream and toothpaste.

And here's the topper to it all...these guys spend a king's ransom on their beauty  grooming aids, and then they go out and dress up in those ill-fitting Pee Wee pants and jackets and look like, well, Pee Wee.

I'm not kidding: I found this on www.moron.com

The bedraggled visage of Jeff Waters, seen here, belies a business sense that would be the envy of Wall Street and Silicon Valley.

Jeff, here, bought a blank check from one Tito Watts for a hundred bucks.  (Note to self: purchase lock for checkbook.) Jeff then went into a Bank of America, attempting to cash a check for $368,000,000,000 dollars.  I love the next line in the story: "Tellers at the bank in Jacksonville, FL,  were immediately suspicious."

And before you jump to the conclusion that Jeff's story is totally bogus, please be advised that he considers himself to be in the clear, because Tito told him the check would be good for any amount he wrote on it.

He needed the $368 billion to open his dream business: an Italian restaurant.

“It’s always been my dream to own the best Italian restaurant in the earth,” Waters told police. “I’m 10% Italian. Cooking authentic Italian food is in my blood. I had planned to make the restaurant 80 million sq. feet and able to accommodated (sic) 30 million eaters at once, plus it was gonna be totally underwater so people could look at sharks while they ate. But the bank wouldn’t give me my money they owed me. Tito said the check was good for any amount I wanted to write it for. So blame Tito, not me. I’m as innocent as a schoolgirl.”

While the police were booking Chef Boy Oh Boy for the attempted check fraud, they also charged him with unlawfully carrying Chinese throwing stars and possessing bath salts. He was released after posting $23,000 bail.

Gee, I hope he didn't write them a check for it.

Be sure to use a condiment every time!

You've seen those pictures in which someone photoshops and colorswitches, so that lawns appear purple and scrambled eggs are magenta, and you wonder how they even have time to fool around like that.  I mean, if The Creator had intended for mint to be orange, the people who make Life Savers would have been the first to know.

Now, when it comes to splashing extra flavor on hot dogs, I need a lot...pickle relish, sauerkraut, mustard, and catsup.  (I'm the last holdout calling it 'catsup.') The overwhelming market leader in the mustard world is French's.  The good people over at 1 Mustard Street have 30% of America's mustard business, while Heinz has the catsup industry in a virtual stranglehold, with a tight grip on 60% of the red-goo sales.

So, just like two fat dogs fighting over one lean bone, they have each decided to go after the other's business.  Heinz is not new to making mustard; they've sold it by the tank car load to the food service industry for years, but now, beside the handy ten-gallon tub for ballparks, they have come out with a plastic bottle for sale at the Buy'N'Bag on the same shelf as French's.

French's has retaliated by coming out with their own brand of catsup, the sales pitch being that they don't use high fructose corn syrup, which, as we all know, is potentially fatal even in small doses.

French's isn't even owned by anyone named French or anyone French at all. It's owned by the England-based Reckitt Benckiser Group, whose president, Elliott Penner, denies that a food fight between his outfit and the Heinz folks is in progress.

“Oh, I don’t think it’s a war so much,” he told the New York Times. “I think it’s just about doing a better job of making ketchup.”

For the record, I only buy store-brand mustard and I prefer Hunt's catsup.  I just don't like getting caught up in these arguments.

The fleek is in!

I like to think I stay up with the English language, both the formal variety that frowns on people saying, "Your looking great" or, "I should of stayed home that night"  and the colloquial, in which people say something is "bad" when they think it's good, or "sick" when it's well, or "near miss" when two airplanes nearly hit, and "the alarm went off" when, in fact, it went on.

I love language and the words it uses.  And I read a lot, from newspapers to magazines to almanacs and biographies, and you know what?  That's a good way to run into a lot of words, and when I come across a word I don't know, I like to look it up.

And so, it has come to my attention that a new term meaning great, good, fantastic, groovy, marvelous, purt-near-perfect is being used.

I like to have a picture with every blog entry, but what picture could I use
to illustrate a word?  Then it hit me...this is a picture of a Taylor Pork Roll
sandwich from Uncle Bill's in Cape May, which is three fleeks right there!

I have to admit, I thought I heard it wrong the first time someone said someone was "on fleek."  I thought they were saying they were down on Fleet Street, and I thought, oh man, I have to go down to Fell's Point to pick her up?

But "on fleek", a term that no one can really pinpoint the etymology of, means all of the above terms.  Your hair is on fleek. That song is on fleek. Your shirt, your sox, the sandwich you gobbled at lunch, your roommate's willingness to share the cheese tray her mother sent her, and the likelihood that love will follow a new bride and groom all the days of their lives: all of these things are on fleek.

And just so you know, I checked, and it's not all right to say that rotten fish, running out of gas on the Beltway, losing your all-day MTA pass and catching a cold from the snotty cashier at the Save'N'Run are "off fleek."

Sunday rerun: NASA's gone funky

Stop me if you've heard this story before.  It's true, and it says a lot about predictions.

Gaylord Perry was a major league baseball pitcher from 1962 - 1983.  When I say "major league," I mean it, because he pitched for just about every team in the major leagues.

His strong points as a pitcher were two: throwing spitballs, and making batters believe he was throwing spitters.  You know that putting a foreign substance on the ball - saliva, Vaseline, WD40, mayonnaise, tofu - is totally against the rules of baseball.  Wetting the ball makes the pitcher able to throw an elusive dipping pitch.  Making the batter think that an elusive pitch is coming his way is effective too - and drier!

Gaylord Perry

Gaylord won 314 games in the big leagues and was voted #97 in the Sporting News list of the 100 greatest baseball players.  This was not for his batting prowess.  In fact, his manager for the San Francisco Giants, Alvin Dark, said in 1964 that the US would put a man on the moon before Gaylord Perry hit a home run.

In 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon one warm Sunday afternoon.  An hour after Apollo 11 got to the moon and found a parking spot, Gaylord Perry hit the first of his six career home runs. While Neil and Buzz flipped packages of Tang to see who would hop out first, Perry ran around the bases on earth while the astronauts were on the moon.

And I read about it in the SUN!

The Saturday Picture Show, May 9, 2015

"So let's see...there's a fire pit area below the ocean observatory, a gazebo, a deck with ocean front view, a hot tub, and a staircase to the ocean."  

"What, no pool??"

I revere this man more than most people do, I know, but at 89, he's still Jerry Lewis, and that's enough.  In case you missed it, the MDA Telethon, the people who fired him a couple of years ago in a most unkind fashion, have cancelled their Labor Day weekend show.

Nature is a wonderful thing.  Here are some birds waiting for their breakfast.

Kanye West and his callipygian wife Kim (cal·li·pyg·i·an ˌkaləˈpijēən/ adjective: having well-shaped buttocks) are shown here, just a couple of birds waiting for their table at a sushi place.  You can tell he's not used to waiting for a table, while she is always more than ready to hoist her breasts up for a maximum display.

I happen to believe that the USA landed a man on the moon in 1969 and again later, although there are still people who don't think it really happened, and feel that the entire thing was a Disney creation.  Uh huh.  Well, a lot of people don't believe that Andy Kaufman really died 31 years ago next week (5/16/84), preferring to figure that Andy faked his own death as a stunt. REM sang,       "If you believed they put a man on the moon (man on the moon)
If you believe there's nothing up his sleeve, then nothing is cool." But I believe it's foolish to unbelieve.

Classic Album Cover of the Week goes to The Byrds for this groundbreaker from 1968.  I remember hearing it on the local country station while on the way downtown to get my senior picture taken, and the DJ was saying it was real country music by 

a rock 'n' roll band, which it was, and is. The marriage of country and rock was a wedding I was happy to attend.

This building was the old county jail in my hometown of Towson, MD.  They say that in the 19th Century, the sheriff scheduled hangings for Saturday afternoons so that families could come to town that day, get their supplies, get a haircut, and get some dinner after a picnic lunch on the lawn overlooking the jail...while they sat and watched some horse thief or murderer swing from a rope.

I am going to miss David Letterman (seen here with Emma Watson of 'Harry Potter" and just-being-glamorous fame) quite a lot when he signs off on May 20.  I don't care for Fallon or Kimmel any more, and Colbert, although I will give his show a shot, never gets to me as he does many others.  If it were up to me, we'd be getting ready for "Late Night with Norm Macdonald," so now you know why it's NOT up to me!

Hmmm...so they left the Coast Guard out...

I have to give the state of Texas a pass on this current silliness, because they did give the world Willie Nelson, Ernest Tubb and Old El Paso taco shells.  But still...

They're all worked up down there because this summer, the elite members from four branches of the U.S. military - Army! Navy!  Air Force! Marines! -  will launch an practice operation. They will move about covertly among us, and zip about from state to state in military aircraft. Texas, Utah and a section of southern California will play hostile territory, and New Mexico isn’t much friendlier, what with the cacti and roadrunners.

Jade Helm planning map...or is it???

They call it Jade Helm 15, and it will run from July 15 to Sept. 15. Army Special Operations Command says the size and scope of the mission makes it much different from other training exercises.

Or...could it be a diabolical plan by the federal government to take over Texas? That's what a certain amount of trepidant Texans believe. As proof of their lunatic notions, they cite the closing of some WalMarts in Texas and other states.

Clearly you don't see the connection between the world's largest retailer closing some stores temporarily for maintenance, and the world's largest federal government swooping in, using those closed stores as supply depots, communication hubs and pre-processing centers, and building vast underground tunnels to connect them.

Or maybe you DO see the connection, but you fake like you don't because you are part of this gigantic conspiracy to invoke martial law in the Southwest United States!

Is that it?  Huh?  

The Army says that they have conducted this sort of training enterprise many times in the past, such as Bold Alligator (the person who thinks these names up used to work for builders, coming up with names for new housing developments such as "Beaver Valley Acres" or "Morningwood").  Bold Alligator was a naval exercise for Marines and sailors. Its war games included "amphibious landings to prevent insurgent groups in the fictional country known as Garnet — Georgia and part of Florida in real life — from launching attacks" according to the Washington Post.

Check out the news story from Bastrop County, TX, that shows irate citizens getting all irate and everything. 

All kidding aside, what is it that happens to a person who becomes part of a hostile mob that like to feel like they are targeted for extinction by the federal government?  Where did this paranoia - this hunch that something sinister lies beneath something like army training - get its start?  

Someone knows, and they just aren't telling us.  Hmmm.

These people are citizens of the United States, prepared to put down their TV remotes and come to the aid of their county sheriff under the "posse comitatus" common law and repel the invasion of the United States by the United States.  Fine looking crowd.

They call it Live-Streaming

The great Leslie Nielsen

I happen to think that Leslie Nielsen was one of the greatest Americans who ever came here from Canada.


People who only know the silver-haired actor from his later days as a comedian in Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker movies ("Airplane"..."The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!"..."The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear"... and "Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult") might not know that he began his career as a handsome leading man type in movies like "Forbidden Planet" and "The Poseidon Adventure".  Until the night he sat home watching himself in a made-for-tv movie in which he was ludicrously cast as the boyfriend of someone about a third his age, and realized it was time for something new.

And that brings us to a little film called "Airplane," as James Lipton would have said had he interviewed Leslie.  (I guess spoof movies were not his cup of tea...)   Nielsen played Dr Rumack in that film, and from the moment he said, "You'd better tell the Captain we've got to land as soon as we can. This woman has to be gotten to a hospital" and flight attendant Elaine Dickinson said, "A hospital? What is it?" and Rumack said,"It's a big building with patients, but that's not important right now" a new career was made.

Don't shake Mayor
Ross's hand!

And he also played Sgt Frank Drebin, "Detective-Lieutenant with Police Squad" on TV and in movies, and in the first of those movies, we see Drebin visit the men's room and forget that he still has a live microphone on.

Sure, that's funny, but it couldn't happen in real life, could it now?Well sure it did.  Watch the hijinx as Mayor Dale Ross, from someplace called Georgetown, Texas, leaves the room to visit Tinkletown and pulls a Drebin, as the whole meeting goes down the drain.

And no, he didn't wash his hands on the way out.  Yuck.

All about clovers

Take a second - 144 seconds, actually, and give a listen to this record from 1948.  Of course, it's Art Mooney, his orchestra and chorus, doing their version of the old song "I'm Looking Over A Four-Leaf Clover," and this version was the #1 song in America for 18 weeks.

Of course, this week, the #1 song in America is the lovely, enchanting "See You Again," by Wiz Khalifa Featuring Charlie Puth. But I'm not telling you anything new there.

This is Jazzbo.  DJs almost always look like
this, which is why they aren't on TV.

But Art Mooney's catchy tune from 1948 gave a Salt Lake City disc jockey a way to get famous enough to work in bigger markets. His name was Al "Jazzbo" Collins, and he took a notion to play the song for hours and hours and hours on end on his show on KNAK until people started calling and begging him to play ANYTHING else.  This is widely considered to be the first (of many) deejay publicity stunts like this. Jazzbo went on to work at big stations on both coasts until he passed in 1997...quite a career!

By the way, why are there four leaf clovers, anyhow?  Most of them are three-leafers!  Four-leaf clovers are a mutation of the   White Clover plant, Trifolium repens.

Why do we consider four-leaf clovers to be good luck? That goes back to Eve, who carried one out of Eden, meaning that if you have one, according to legend, you carry a bit of paradise with you.

Of course, if you have a dozen steamed crabs and a six of Natty Boh, you also have paradise with you, so there's that...

The Streisand Effect

Sherman Alexie is a Native American writer who had a movie out years ago called "Smoke Signals," about the lives of some people out West on reservations.  Alexie has also had his work published in The New Yorker, which I bring up to make the point that he didn't just ride into town on a head of cabbage.  He's a seriously talented writer, but try telling some parents in Idaho about it.

The junior class at Mountain View High School in Meridian, Idaho has a young lady named Brady Kissel among its students. Her school recently banned Alexie's 2007 book “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” from the school curriculum. The novel concerns a 14-year-old Native American student who goes off to attend a school where “where the only other Indian is the school mascot.”  It's been a best seller, all the critics loved it, and it won a National Book Award.

So naturally, it joined the list of books that had to be banned, lest young people read them and learn a little about someone's life.

Ms Kissel went to the school board meeting with a petition signed by 350 other students who wanted to read the book, only to have the school board ban it anyway.

So, stop me if you've heard this one before.  The school board says, "You can't have this in school," and it sold like hotcakes at the local bookstores and the library reported there were 61 people on the waiting list to borrow it and people who have better sense than the board raised the money to buy a copy of the book for every one of those 350 students.

They set it up to hand out the book in a town park on National Book Night, and there they were - the kids who want to read a book, the young firebrand who stood up for their right to do so, and...the town cops.

Someone called 911 to report that kids were getting books to read!

Ms Kissel and the book

Here's where the story veers away from "Footloose" and becomes a little more reasonable. The police determined that no laws were being violated (!) and the kids all got their books and the publishers shipped an additional 350 copies of “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” to Ms Kissel, to be distributed to others who wish to be so bold as to read a book.

Speaking of books, if you ever write one, be sure to remember the Streisand Effect.

Barbra Streisand, a talented woman who just gets a liiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiitle full of herself now and then, once filed a $50 million lawsuit against a man who took aerial photographs of her beachfront property for use in trying to get the state of California to take remedial action against coastal erosion.

This is not Barbra Streisand's beachfront home
(But wouldn't it be funny if it were?)

Streisand was certain that people were going to see a picture of her estate. After all, six people had seen the picture (known as "Image 3850" in the photo array) of her joint before she filed the lawsuit!

A month later, the picture had been seen by 420,000 people attracted to it by the publicity from the lawsuit.

Good move, Babs.

What FONT is this?

Like that kid Brick on "The Middle," I am a bit of a font snob. Most every computer comes loaded with dozens of font choices for your word processing and email needs. So why does everyone just go with the default Times New Roman when they go to do a resume?

The people at Bloomberg want you to use something a little more creative when you write up your curriculum vitae in search of a new job.  And they say, don't use Comic Sans unless you're applying for a position at Clown College.

They recommend Helvetica, which I avoid because it sounds like Velveeta, the "cheese" that needs no refrigeration.

Courier would be great if you are applying to work in an office in 1947, with manual typewriters and large pastepots and office boys running around bringing people cigarettes and coffee and some guy hollering on the phone, "Get me those accounts or don't come back in here, Jenkins!"

That one they call Papyrus is overused, and it's always seen at health food stores and places where they sell every kind of tea to drink but Lipton.

And don't even start on me people using Olde English in ALL CAPS.  This is often seen where people want to look "elegant," and on misspelled tattoos. <<<

My idea, for those composing a resume or opening a new lunch counter where you plan to sell a ton of those sandwiches with Muenster cheese, tomato, romaine and a truckload of alfalfa sprouts, is to see a professional graphic designer.  Or at least, look through the vast assortment of free fonts that came preloaded on your machine.

Would you buy a car from a company that uses a cheesy logo and expect it to run?  Or stop?

All caps? I ain't going!

Sunday Rerun, May 3, 2015

Hang it all, the good among us keep slipping earthly bonds. Latest notable to depart is the great writer John Updike, who died of lung cancer yesterday, aged 76. The one little mercy is that he will no longer have to hear, as we did tonight on NBC Nightly News, sentences such as, "Although they were born nine weeks premature, doctors say the octuplets are breathing on their own." I don't believe that the circumstances of the doctors' births, no matter how great the coincidence of prematurity, should figure into the reporting of the health of these eight tiny tots.

Updike wrote novels, essays, short stories, poems, sick notes for his kids, grocery lists and, probably, a papal bull or two in his long career. He wrote well over 50 novels, which is more than some people read in a lifetime. But I have this poem, published in the December 6, 1999, New Yorker posted on bulletin boards all over - even on some that don't belong to me. I feel these words should be read, and savored, so without further bloviation on my part, here is John Updike's Jesus and Elvis:




Twenty years after the death, St. Paul
was sending the first of his epistles,
and bits of myth or faithful memory–
multitudes fed on scraps, the dead small girl
told "Talitha, cumi"–were self-assembling
as proto-Gospels. Twenty years since pills
and chiliburgers did another in,
they gather at Graceland, the simple believers,
the turnpike pilgrims from the sere Midwest,
mother and daughter bleached to look alike,
Marys and Lazaruses, you and me,
brains riddled with song, with hand-tinted visions
of a lovely young man, reckless and cool
as a lily. He lives. We live. He lives.

The Saturday Picture Show, May 2, 2015

Old-fashioned as I am, I believe that the proper color of a fire engine is white over red, as it was in my fire company.  But from time to time, other fire departments incorporate other colors into the scheme.  This is an engine from the Chapel Hill (NC) FD, where they have decided to give nods to the sky blue of the U of NC Tarheels.

 I love the Book Thing of Baltimore, a warehouse in Waverly with very simple policies.  People donate books, used and new. People come to the Book Thing on weekends and take books home.  For free. I love the clearly stated hours of operation.  Find them online (http://www.bookthing.org/).  These are the hours.  (As the website states, there is a strict rule on how many books you can take home: 150,000 per visit.)

This week's Album Cover of the Week is the last album I bought on vinyl, to the best of my memory.  Things switched to cassette for a couple of weeks and then along came CDs and mp3s.

Orioles pitcher Ubaldo Jimenez is shown here pitching to the White Sox in Wednesday's game, which attracted a total paid attendance of 00,000.  No one was allowed in the ballpark in riot-torn Baltimore as the Orioles whomped the Chisox, 8-2.

If there's anything cuter than a baby rhino galloping along, I don't know what it would be, unless it's a kitten.

George Carlin had this to say about that fake rubber vomit that pranksters used to like leaving around for comedic purposes: Someone was at work, at their desk, when they came up with the idea to make and sell that loathsome thing.  In the same manner, some bigshot at Anheuser Busch thought it would be a good idea to suggest to eager young men that plying their dates with their crappy, watered-down beer would enable them to do the nasty with a woman of lowered resistance.  Class move, beer barons. They've apologized and will come up with something a little better, although about the only thing worse would be an exhortation to commit murder or mayhem.

in late 1939, second-hand furniture dealer (that's what his business card said) Al Capone, of Chicago, came to Baltimore for treatment of paresis — a psychotic dementia caused by brain damage caused by syphilis.  He graciously donated two weeping cherry trees to improve the view around Union Memorial Hospital on 33rd Street (a short walk from the Book Thing!).  One was cut down in the 50s when the hospital expanded; the other is seen here.

And then in February, 2010, Baltimore saw chaos unlike anything we had seen since Oprah left town.  Two blizzards came along...within five days. A large branch of the remaining tree came down, and from that felled branch, a man from Virginia made this bowl, among other objects.  Life really is a bowl made of an old gangster's cherry tree.

We go on, hurting each other

There's no need for me to detail the incidents that led to the rioting in Baltimore this past week.  But I keep thinking of Mike McCormack, The Carpenters, and car salespeople during all the fallout that keeps settling on us, even on those of us who don't even live in the city.

Car salespeople have a trick that they might have used on you; it's called "closing on a minor point."  It works like this: you're thinking of getting a new car to replace the old Family Truckster. You're not sure what model you want, you're not sure what manufacturer you want, and you're sure not sure about what color car you would choose if you were about to make the decision.  Salespeople know this, and they know what cars make them the most commission, and they steer the conversation over to the Gadabout 4-wheel drive SUV with power everything, and they sidle up to you, all confidential, and say, "Now, Mr Mxyzptlk, if you WERE to settle on the Gadabout, which color would you choose, and which interior?"  Now he's got you picking out the color of the floor mats, and from there, it's just a matter of time before you're signing on the bottom line.

So there it is, and as you drive home in your new Chamois Tan Gadabout, ponder this:  Baltimore is full of people arguing, not over police procedures or what the true facts are or whether lawlessness is an appropriate response to kindlessness.  No, we are arguing over whether the word "thug" is hurtful and harmful, and on what level.

Of course it is.  But is that the most important point to settle on right now?  Of course it isn't.

Mike McCormack was a great big guy whose play with the Cleveland Browns of the 1950s earned him a spot in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.  An offensive tackle, he moved men out of the way for running backs and protected quarterbacks.  Later in life he went into coaching, and it was his misfortune to coach the Baltimore Colts under the ownership of Bob "Bob The Drunk" Irsay.

During that time, I wound up sitting at a luncheon of Colts fans, and McCormack was the guest speaker.  He said something I will never forget, referring to the people who were falling all over themselves trying to assign blame for the Colts' lousy record: "When you're pointing fingers at someone else, there are three more pointing back at you."

For those of you who want to play the blame game about the conditions, some of them in existence for hundreds of years, and some of them occurring on the morning of Freddie Gray's arrest, and for the rioting, looting and arson that resulted, there is plenty of blame to go around.  People point to the cops, who point to the criminals, who point to the joblessness and hopelessness, which comes from the...This can go on all day.  But we cannot do anything about the past, beyond investigations and trials for those at fault.  The important thing is to move forward and make improvements in our city and for its people and for their children's children's children. Learn from the past, but don't live there.

And if we can progress and change the city, then maybe I can stop hearing that treacly "Hurting Each Other" song over and over in my mind.