The Saturday Picture Show, June 6, 2015

This old album shows Frank Sinatra at his peak. He had his vocal shortcomings (I thought he hit flat notes all the time, and prefer Bing Crosby and Perry Como) but he sure knew how to wear a fedora.

A fascinating early 50's prom picture shows young Buddy Holley (before he dropped the 'e') and his girlfriend at the time, the wonderfully-named Echo McGuire.  I love Buddy's music, and I love "Echo" as a first name.

A bonus album cover for you this week...Buddy and his band.

I did not know of this habit, but it seems I am the only person in the world who didn't know that people in Paris like to snap a padlock onto a bridge as a token of their unbreakable love.  But when it gets to where tons and tons of extra metal are hanging from the bridge, that's where the bridge might have some structural safety issues, so they are being removed.  Next time, lovers, try a sticky note!

Raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, huckleberries...I love most berries, but, even as pretty as they are, I am not a fan of strawberries.  If they had a Facebook page, I would not "like" it!

I have used the expression "since Hector was a pup" for a long time, but I never heard of this old dog food until I found this picture.

Sea gulls, the flying pooping aerial shows at beach resorts, like ice cream.  Just so's you know.

Christian McPhilamy is 8 yrs of age and lives in Melbourne, FL.  He put up with bullying for 2 1/2 years while growing his hair long, and he produced four 10-inch long sections that the family sent to Children With Hair Loss, a charity that provides free wigs to kids who have lost their locks for any reason, including cancer, alopecia and burns.  No one can do everything, but everyone can do something.  Awesome, indeed.

If you're not at Burger King, you can't always have it your way

A friend of mine has a relative who took her children to one of those farm stand places where they have Apple Festivals in Autumn, and cider and doughnuts and hay mazes and hayrides. They arrived too late; the hayride tractor was being put away and the employees were closing up everything, but this person, an attorney, loudly and publicly clamored for her children to be able to have a hayride.

The employees said they were sorry, but the sign posted said that hayrides were over at 5 PM, and they should have come earlier, and they tried to be as kind as possible, but this person, an attorney, would not hear of it.

"I DEMAND a hayride for my children!" she shouted.

And don't you know, they got that tractor back out and loaded up the kids and took them on what must have been a helluva happy hayride.

Lion Park is a wildlife center in South Africa's Gauteng province, where one can drive along the roads and see all sorts of animals, including lions, zebras, giraffes and wild dogs. Upon entering, visitors are given a piece of paper with the rules, the main one being that the car windows have to be rolled UP at all times, which only makes sense.  But the other day, a 29-year-old woman, Katherine Chappell of Rye, New York was killed at the safari outside Johannesburg. She was taking pictures of a lioness, with her car window down to get a better picture, and the lioness, who was with her cubs, reached in through the window that should not have been open, and killed her.

We see this all the time...people jumping into the cages of large cats and other dangerous animals at zoos and parks.  Sometimes, they are sadly deranged individuals bent on suicide, sometimes, they are under the delusion that getting closer to our animal kin is good for the soul, and sometimes, they just want to take photographs.

This is not a housecat

And of course, there is this curious human tendency to demand that things be done the way we want them - or else!

Unlike the people who operate hayrides and apple festivals, animals don't operate with the same sort of logic that a rational human employs in making decisions.  A mother lion sees her offspring being encroached upon, and responds the only way she knows.

And that's the way it's going to be, until animals evolve to the point at which they have attorneys to resolve these matters.  So until then, I urge each and every one of us to follow the rules of animal engagement.  They're in place for a reason.

Do what you do do well

Sammy Davis, Jr.

I get a daily feed from Delanceyplace.com, which sends interesting snippets from interesting books every day. The other day, it was a section from Paul Shaffer's autobiography, "We'll Be Here For the Rest of Our Lives: A Swingin' Show-biz Saga." And the story concerned Paul's effort to get Sammy Davis, Jr, booked as a guest on the Letterman show, to sit down and listen to the arrangement of "Just Once In My Life" that Paul and his band had worked out.

By this time in his life, Sammy was getting older, and was frail, and busy, and tired, yet he finally gave in and listened to a cassette recording of the tune after Paul begged him time and again.  When the tune was over, Sammy had this to say:

"It's swinging, man, but think of how much more fun we could have had if I hadn't heard this tape."

What was Sammy, in his wisdom, saying, ever so gently? Something like, "If I don't know how to sing 'Just Once In My Life' by now, then grits ain't groceries."

Sammy Baker Davis, Jr.

Now, Sammy was not a modest man. Rarely are people with his level of talent and achievement self-effacing and overly humble. I often quote him saying, "It's gotten to the point where there are only three important people in the world:  Sammy, Davis, and Junior."  So he was not shy about his many gifts, but one gift he surely had was the confidence to do what he did with those gifts, such as get out in front of an audience and perform.  He knew that song, and unless Paul had planned to have the band playing the tune to "God Save The Queen" while Sammy sang, Sammy was going to do just fine.

I bring this up because I just finished reading an excellent book, "Man In Profile," by Thomas Kunkel.  It's about Joseph Mitchell, the great writer for The New Yorker who has been one of my favorite authors for years.  He wrote about people who didn't get written about...saloon keepers, vagrants, fishermen, movie ticket ladies.

His writing style was, in a word, thorough.  Mitchell came to New York from his native North Carolina and found work as a newspaper reporter in the heyday of that medium, and there was a lot to write about in the 1920s, and he batted out three or four stories per day back then.

When The New Yorker hired him to write Profiles - long biographical sketches - he slowed down the pace of his writing, and first spent long periods of time with the subject of his story, getting to know them, and then writing and re-writing and editing dozens of times.  And this was in the days before the computer, so he typed and cut with scissors and pasted with glue and did so over and over before finally finishing.  From three or four completed stories in a day, he was down to three or four per year.  And then, after he wrote of how he was bamboozled by a man named Joe Gould, who claimed to have written a long and detailed history of our times, but who had, in fact, not written any such thing, Mitchell went behind a writer's block.  That was 1964, and he still went to work every day until his death in 1996, and never finished another story.  He typed and he thought and he planned new works, but nothing bore fruit.

Joseph Mitchell at his favorite restaurant

So there you have them. Two ways of approaching one's life work: do it on the fly, or do it over and over and over and never get anything done.  I have to believe that even Mr Mitchell would give it up to Mr Davis, Jr, and let it fly, had he another chance.

Walk a mile in your shoes

I've never been to Lake County, Ohio.  Never even been to Ohio, but I like this judge they have there, Judge Michael A. Cicconetti, who is really great at making the punishment fit the crime.

I have whiled away many an hour, often while being paid for doing something else, imagining myself as a judge.  Black robe, gavel, stern bailiff, the whole deal.

And in every courtroom scenario that unreels in my mind, I always hand down sentences  that the entire court finds just perfect - even the person I had just found guilty - because I would take driver's licenses away from people who abuse that privilege by driving drunk or too fast, make vandals repair whatever they damaged, and send big business moguls who cheated widows out of their meager homes off to hard time on a rockpile for 20 years.
OK. The moguls did not like it, but everyone knows, when a kid breaks a window with a rock, the child learns a lesson by having to give up his allowance to pay for the new window.  Sure, it's a "pane," but you gotta learn, right?

I'll bet that Victoria Bascom learned her lesson.  Ms Bascom is a resident of Lake County who recently found herself in need of a lift from Cleveland to Painesville.

(Ohio must be the sort of state where people willingly go to a town called Painesville.)

She called a cab, rode in the cab, and, upon arriving at her destination, got out of the cab, which is all standard procedure, except that she got out and ran like a thief in the night, which she kind of is, for doing that....

Ms Bascom

Apparently the cab driver could run just as fast as she, and she was caught and taken before His Honor Judge Cicconnetti, who reasoned that she took the cab on a 30-mile ride, so she should take a 30-mile walk to think about what she did, or serve 60 days in the Ironbar Hilton.

And pay back the cab company the $100 fare she tried to beat, and serve four months of probation.

She strapped on a GPS device and some good walking shoes and started hoofing around the Lake County Fairgrounds on Friday.

Joe Walsh and The James Gang were from Cleveland, right? Maybe she's heard their big hit, "Walk Away."

Cut it into six slices; I don't think I can eat eight

Everyone knows of the great inventors such as Thomas Edison, Bill Gates, and Henry Ford.  Ford had such a nimble mind that he figured out ways to make money out of making money, such as taking the wood scraps from the process of making wheels for the Model T and turning them into charcoal.  Along with a relative named Kingsford, old Henry did for the grilling industry what he also did for the auto industry.

But Tom, Bill and Henry will all bow deeply to Sean Berthiaume, a man of vision and taste, a man whose notion will soon transform the way we all eat, a man employed by Vinnie's Pizzeria, of 148 Bedford Ave, Brooklyn, NY.

We have all yearned for and sought after new toppings for pizza. Pepperoni, sausage, mushroom, Canadian bacon, ham, fried eggs, spinach, artichokes, asparagus, sun-dried tomatoes, baby arugula, mature arugula:  all have been tried, with or without extra cheese.

There's a place near us that offers a cheese steak sub pizza.  They sizzle up the steak 'n' provolone 'n' onions that they normally would put on a roll, but instead, they lovingly slide it atop a cheese pizza, which they then top with another crust and bake until you just can't stand it no more.

But Sean has seen the future of pizza and it is a pizza pizza.  That's right, a pizza topped with cut up pieces of another pizza. Here is what this slice of heaven looks like:

Bill Gates, the man who gave the world the ability to sit down in front of a screen and see pictures of dancing babies and Mitt Romney boxing with Mike Tyson, once said, "Until we're educating every kid in a fantastic way, until every inner city is cleaned up, there is no shortage of things to do."

Thomas Edison, without whose light bulb we would be watching television in the dark, once said, "When I have fully decided that a result is worth getting, I go ahead of it and make trial after trial until it comes."

Henry Ford, who got the nation out of horse-and-buggy days and into broken-down Ford cars, is famous for saying, "Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probable reason so few engage in it."

These great minds and thoughts are all reflected in Sean Berthiaume, who will be remembered for saying, "I see inspiration all around, in the hearts and minds of the customers that frequent Vinnie's everyday (sic). Their eyes seem to say, ‘Pizza, I like it, I would like more of it.' That, and I was bored on my break."

If you can be ready by 9, we could be at Vinnie's for lunch!

When you're wrong you're wrong

For those who still enjoy what they call country music these days, you should know that what you hear on the radio is the product of people sitting around at computers, figuring the "metrics" and the positive flow of what people think about the songs, and calculating what records to play when, just like your tax accountant figures out how to hide your income behind a computer.  It used to be, the deejay would have a stack of records and would choose the music based on what he or she knew the audience wanted to hear, and some requests, and a hunch or two.

Whether you're in Sheboygan, Brattleboro or Kankakee, what you hear on your local radio is programmed days in advance by people far away, people such as a man named Keith Hill, who modestly calls himself “the world’s leading authority on music scheduling.”

Picture him in 7th grade as Ms O'Hoolahan asks him what he wants to be when he grows up.

"I want to tell disc jockeys what records to play."

Anyway, that's what he does, and he kicked up a tempest in a teapot the other day by dishing out this advice for country radio stations : Don’t play too many songs by female artists.

Hill says he has data to back his sexism up, and says (in that "Some of my best friends are _____ " voice) that he happens to like female singers, but recommends against playing them on the radio because other people don't like them enough to keep listening.

He says no more than 15 percent of the songs a station plays should be by females.

“If you want to make ratings in country radio, take females out,” he told industry publication Country Aircheck. He says it's because more of the listeners of country radio are women, and his statistics show they prefer hearing males over women. “Trust me, I play great female records and we’ve got some right now; they’re just not the lettuce in our salad. The lettuce is Luke Bryan and Blake Shelton, Keith Urban and artists like that. The tomatoes of our salad are the females.”

Now here is where he ran into trouble.  He seems to have spent too much time with his research and his computers and his calculations and not enough time with real women, most of whom do not prefer to be called salad ingredients of any sort.

Miranda Lambert, Martina McBride, Jennifer Nettles and Terri Clark were among the females of Nashville music to fire back at his foolishness, and social media lit up with the outrage.

So...guess what Hill did?  Did he say he was sorry for calling women tomatoes?

He did not.  He dug his heels right into the pile of dogma he was burying himself in, and said he was misunderstood and he's not supposed to care about who gets played, because his job is to get the ratings.

“All I have done is read a dashboard of metrics and read a suggestion to an internal part of the industry," he said. And he also said he's like a radio doctor and he diagnoses what ails a station and how to fix it.  

“Now, that may come off as arrogant. I share this information, and just because it doesn’t fall into the natural break of the gender that populates our country or the globe, seems like that’s an issue. To me, it’s not a gender issue at all. It’s a marketing issue.”

Still holding to his own supremacy, Hill goes on to say:  “When I say ‘the sun rises in the east,’ that’s not controversial in any way.”
And what has he learned, besides all this about the sun and the moon and the stars above?

Allison Krauss

“There are a lot of uptight women” out there.

He just doesn't seem to understand that sometimes, it's better When You Say Nothing At All.  Hey! That was a song by Allison Krauss.

I guess he didn't play it.

Sunday rerun, May 31: Surrender "Dorothy"!

Surrender "Dorothy"

Seems to me that no one ever likes their hair, what there is of it.   Compliment a woman's long flowing curls, and she will likely say, "I worked for hours to straighten it!"  And then a woman with straight hair will tell you they rolled it and curled it and wadded it up in italics for hours, only to have it go straight again.

Most men, as long as their bangs don't block their view of whatever screen they're looking at, do not care.

But how about their names?  Do people like their first names? Well, the high school class of 2032, 18 years from today, will have a lot of boys named Noah ( a whole flood of 'em!), Liam, Jacob, Mason, William, Ethan, Michael, Alexander, Jayden and Daniel. Noah just bumped Michael out of the top spot for the first time since 1960.

Over in the girls' locker room, they'll be answering to Sophia, Emma, Olivia, Isabella, Ava, Mia, Emily, Abigail, Madison and Elizabeth.  Sofia with an 'F' is # 13 and moving up fast, especially among viewers of Modern Family.

Now, a hundred years ago in 1914, the top boy names were names by which every person my age knows a dozen of each, at least: John, William, James, Robert, Joseph, George, Charles, Edward, Frank, and Walter.  For girls in the nineteen-teens, you had Mary, Helen, Dorothy, Margaret, Ruth, Anna, Mildred, Elizabeth, Frances and Marie.  All lovely names, worn by some mighty wonderful people.  #100 that year for boys was Irving, and you don't meet too many of them anymore, but Sophie was #100 for girls then and it's still around in various iterations.

Tito Puente

What names made the biggest jumps in popularity, you're asking me?  Well, say hi to Jayceon (#262).  That's the birth name of the rapper known as The Game, and he has a reality show on VH-1, so his name is out there and being given to lots of little Jayceons.  For girls, it's Daleyza (#585), the name of the young daughter of Larry Hernandez, a Mexican-American singer with a show called "Larrymania."

Tito Tito

All I know is, I wished my folks had named me either Leon or Tito. How cool would that be, to call somewhere and go, "This is Tito.  I'm on the way over.  Have everything ready."

And you know, they would!

Toriano "Tito" Jackson

John Patsy "Tito" Francona

The Saturday Picture Show, May 30, 2015

Somewhere, in some old brick on some old building, someone named "Junior" pulled out his knife and left his name for posterity. It's so great, the human need for recognition, just to have someone know we are around and to notice us.

This week's Album Cover shows two models who couldn't be more than, say, 35 posing as typical lovestruck teenagers in a phony malt shop.  The people who made this record didn't even bother having the models pose in a real malt shop, choosing to let us think that there are ice cream parlors around with golden wallhangings for backdrops.

Being the younger brother of Dennis Bennett was not the only thing remarkable about Dave.  He was truly old before his time.

I love everything about this monkey...his little jacket, his resolute strut, the way he seems ready to take on the world.

Ornithology buffs, please identify this little guy.  I just thought it was a pretty picture of the rare (      ) bird.

Up in New York, they are celebrating Manhattanhenge, the moment when the setting sun aligns precisely with the street grid and monolithic buildings.  This is 42nd St in Manhattan from a previous year.  The phenomenon was visible last night and will be again tonight.

While in other parts of the country that don't have 88-story buildings in the way of everything, here is what the sunset looks like every night.

Those are those really old-time light bulbs.  This looks like the ceiling of an amusement arcade or movie theater that has seen a few too many setting suns.  See you next week!

Tell me about it

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but I don't know how to say it in Swedish.  I don't know a thousand Swedish words. The only one I do know is "Smörgåsbord," which is a word made from two other Swedish words: "gåsbord" - a table upon which hundreds of foods are spread, many of them fibrous, and "S'mör" - which means the same in any language.

I love to shop at IKEA, though, and I hope you have one in your town.  It's a giant yellow-and-blue store that sells everything from frozen salmon to the refrigerator to keep it cold to the oven to bake it to the table to serve it upon to the cutlery and dishes to use while gobbling it.  It would be possible to live in an IKEA, since they have beds, too, and telephones scattered around the store for free local phone calls, and a snack bar and a restaurant.  If you've never been to an IKEA, I can promise you, it's not like any place you've ever been before.

I love IKEA.  But there is a hitch.

This looks like a faucet that is going to drip
and needs a good tightening,  But how?  HOW?

Actually, it's only a hitch if you, like me, are the victim of pictographophobia, the fear of assembling something when the instructions contain only pictures, not words.  I am a wordy person, a prolix, pleonastic sort of guy, which means I use far more words than necessary.  Which is fine, but I could use all the help I can get when I go to put together a bookcase or a kitchen faucet.  Tell me to flurble the pfisteris and tell me how, and I can do it.  Show me a picture of a pfisteris being flurbulated, and I need words.

When you open your IKEA package and go to read the assembly instructions, you realize in a jiffy that you don't need to know how to read anything for the next several hours.  No sir, you're in for a period of trying to figure out what the picture means.

The instructions for ruining your afternoon begin by showing just what you're going to need to put together your BÅGVIK SINGLE KITCHEN FAUCET and what they should tell you is, besides the two screwdrivers and hammer, the other thing you need is to be hiring the pantless man shown at the left, since he is the only person who knows how to handle your BÅGVIK.

And that's really an ömka (Swedish for "pity.")

Do you?

When I want to hear music when I'm on the computer, and none of the 2,381 songs on my iTunes is getting it done, I go to iTunes Radio and flip around.  There's a channel for most every artist you could name...Sammy Davis, Jr. Radio, Perry Como Radio, Bing Crosby radio, and so forth.  They also have stations for people who have been popular in the current century, but I don't care for them.

Bing

But while I was listening to Bing Crosby Radio the other day, here just after Memorial Day in the merry, merry month of May, they started playing Christmas songs!  It sounds incongruous, but then when they played my favorite holiday song ever by der Bingle, it gave me hope, and these days, you can't get enough of that.

The song is "Do You Hear What I Hear?" and it wasn't really written as a Christmas song at all, although it was first made a hit by the Harry Simeone Chorale, the people who made that "Little Drummer Boy" a holiday evergreen.  Back in October, 1962, at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the world was playing a dangerous game with its new nuclear weapons, and we came awfully close to an awful close, as America and Russia bickered over Russian missile sites aimed at us from 90 miles away in Cuba. That's when the song was written. For those who only know of the missile crisis from history books, let me assure you, it was a terrifically scary time, wondering if the world was about to blow itself up.   

Noël Regney wrote the words to the song, with music by his wife, Gloria Shayne Baker.  Regney had set out to write a Christmas song on an autumn day, but events in Washington and Moscow made him, along with millions of others, wonder if there would be a December that year, so he expressed his feelings in words and his wife's music: 

Said the king to the people everywhere

Listen to what I say

Pray for peace people everywhere

Listen to what I say

The child, the child

Sleeping in the night

He will bring us goodness and light

He will bring us goodness and light

Riots and disharmony all across the country. Texas wants to secede from the nation, and claims that the Federal government is set to storm in and take their state away, and then a storm storms in and takes a large portion of the state, and the state begs the Federal government for help.  ISIL and other enemies proliferate, and as if we don't have enough external enemies, we have our own homegrown hate, and drugs, and tormented souls running around.

So I say, May is not a bad time to hear this song, and whether you are Christian or Jewish or Muslim or whatever, or atheist or agnostic or whatever you are or are not, if you have an interest in being around for a while longer, can you at least hope for someone to bring us goodness and light?

Just this once

I don't want to pile more misery on this man's family, but seeing the story about a man in Riverdale, Maryland (one of those DC suburbs that might as well be in Hong Kong for all we know about it in Baltimore) who decided that it was a good time to take a smoke break as he pumped gas, and was killed in the resultant fire, makes me think about a lot of things people do that, if they took .3 seconds to mull them over first, they would not do.

In the non-fatal category, let's talk about how, in six months or so, the guy who got the KFC Double Down Sandwich tattooed on the back of his calf will wish he had not done so. A Double Down Sandwich is bacon, Monterey Jack cheese and "the Colonel's sauce," sandwiched between two 100% white meat Original Recipe® filets. That's right.  Instead of bread up and down over the bacon and cheese, they substitute chicken filets, and even as tasty as this concoction might be, is it something you want permanently on your epidermis?

Tattoos are not a crime, but ankling out of a restaurant without paying for your chow is. An officer with the Lakeview PD in Texas was chasing a guy who ran out of Gabacho's Mexican Restaurant, and suspected he was in a nearby vacant building. Entering through an open door, the officer called out "Marco!"

Police arrested the suspect after he responded, "Polo."

And of course, Brian Williams will remind you that smart people will not only do a dumb thing, but will also decide to keep riding that pony all the way to oblivion.

Again, not to trivialize the sad death of the man at the gas station, but unless this was a suicide, he paid a mighty high price for doing something something many people do dozens of times per day. Just like taking a chance and passing a slow truck on a blind curve, or jumping from roof to roof, you might get away with stuff many times, but there's always that once.

Pain of Glass

And mistakes can act like the tiny little time pills in Contac cold medicine.  Stephen Glass was a young man doing very well in journalism until it was revealed that one of the reasons for his early success was that he just plain made stuff up...people, companies, quotations, events: stories he presented as fact were all fiction. Disgraced, he went to Georgetown law school instead, but twelve years after graduation, he is still barred from passing the bar because the lawyers in both New York and California don't want him and his past prevarications around them.

In other words, they feel that admitting him to their ranks is not a mistake they wish to make.

Warning! Dangerous Curb Ahead

For those seeking an easy way to make some side money (or front money, for that matter!) I can suggest opening a tire and wheel repair shop.

The State of Maryland, in its finite wisdom, has decided to remove the requirement to demonstrate ability to parallel park a car from its driving test.  It follows, obviously, that driver's education schools and classes in high school will no longer be teaching this valuable skill, and this will lead to people in neighborhoods where there is only on-street parking waiting for 20 minutes or so while Junior or Sis from down the street try to put the Impala away.


And of course, they will slam the poor Chevy's tires into the curb out of frustration when that awful man from down the street who would never purchase any pizzas or cheese or cookie dough to help the annual fund drive at Saint Ronald's School hollered out his truck window.

And that's where you come in, with your all-service tire business. I can't see how you won't become a millionaire by Christmas

I also can't see why Maryland is making it easier for people to get a a driver's license.  And no, this is not my old-guy "I had to learn it and so should you!" rant.  This is just the word coming from someone who has sat in his truck watching as someone made 27 attempts to park their car before zooming off in a huff.  Or a Hyundai.

(But I never hollered.)

The Washington Post's story about this said that a man who runs driving schools is hearing from driving test inspectors that the state wants more people to pass the test. So! Let's not raise the bridge, let's lower the water! Or the standards.

Maryland's future

I guess next, Maryland will say that too many young people who want to be neurosurgeons have had their feelings bruised when a tester reported that they didn't know the difference between a trepan and a bedpan, so they will make the test easier now.

It says here, there should be a test to pass for the people who run the Motor Vehicle Admin. before they can make it easier for someone to drive, which is, after all, an activity that could have fatal consequences for the poorly-skilled.  The test would have one question:

1.  Are you insane?  ____ Yes   _____ No

Memorial Day

However you spend your day today, please remember the reason for it is to salute those who have given their lives and limbs in battle under our flag.  We await the day when war is but a dim, awful memory.

Sunday rerun: Calling All Earthlings

Sometimes I like to pretend that I'm not from here, meaning earth.

So I'll take a turn looking at things as if I were ET <<(and not Ernest Tubb) and wondering about things that people on earth do.

Such as...they will spend untold fortunes on 92" television screens. That's 7 feet, six inches of video right on your wall, 5 inches taller than Shaquille O'Neal laid diagonally. (And he probably has been.) Twin speakers the size of Chevy Volts, with a sound system so loud that you expect to see that THX guy rolling out of your kitchen, sandwich in hand, ready to crank it up.

Then they sit down and watch their shows on their cell phones.

Some Americans give birth to babies and, from the moment that young Brattleboro emerges, they want to help the child establish his own identity in the world.  No slave of the mass culture, he! 

Then they mail away for a baby toupee for the kid to wear.

And how many times have you seen this?  Slim and trim, toned and zoned, they strut into Jittery Joe's Java Hut for a cuppa mocha java and a protein bar.  They're talking about their workout, their carb intake, their plan to reduce their BMI to HFA (hardly friggin' anything!) 

Then they take their coffee and their snack outside to have with their cigarette.

And of course, you'll see earthlings NOT calling 911 when someone is having a coronary occlusion or a baby, saying that it's better to put the patient in the Explorer and drive on over to the medical center.

And then a week later they'll call 911 to ask if the medic crew outside saving their neighbor's life could be a little quieter as they save the guy's life.

The Saturday Picture Show, May 23, 2015

There's something very sad about a ballpark being torn down. This is what's left of venerable old Candlestick Park in San Francisco.  I tell you, sometimes I drive past where Memorial Stadium used to be in Baltimore, and I can still hear the crowd roar.  But it turns out, it's just some impatient motorist behind me wanting me to get moving.

Baseball uniform purists are overjoyed at how many young ballplayers are wearing the old-style stirrup sox, as Adam Jones and David Lough model here. You can't beat the orange and black color scheme, either.

Just so's you know, if you have a baby pygmy hippo over for lunch, serve salad!

This is Mary Winsor, a colorized picture of her, and she was a suffragette in the early 20th Century, working for the cause of women's suffrage, which is to say the right of women to vote.  I still see people writing that they wish to end "women's sufferage," a noble notion, but not a word.  It still boggles the mind to realize that women couldn't vote before the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920.

In the canalways of dear olde London, someone has created a duck lane, which could also be called the fowl line.

This is what happens when you ask an OCD person to straighten up the Ballroom at Kiddieland.

Yes, it is! One pizza dog, coming right up! Makes me think of the good old days when I weighed 140 and gobbled whole pizzaburger subs and washed them down with a quart of Budweiser and weighed 141 later.

This week's classic album cover art is from the great group Love, of which I am a huge devotee. This is their 1967 album "Forever Changes," which was the summit of their achievements before drugs and crime washed them up on Dismal Beach.  The title comes from when their genius leader, Arthur Lee, was breaking up with a girlfriend who told him that he had promised they would stay together forever.  "Yeah," he said, "but forever changes."  Not for me, but anyway...happy Saturday!

He's a pistol

You might want to sit down for this news.

Former New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez, who gave up his jersey number 81 for prison shirt #174954,  took part in a jailhouse fracas Monday at the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center in Shirley, Massachusetts.

Hernandez, who is supposed to be very busy serving a life sentence following his murder conviction in the shooting death of Odin Lloyd, took time away from his deep penitence to serve as a lookout for another inmate who confronted another prisoner in that inmate's cell.  That's what officials told CNN, anyway.

After the two inmates had their fight, they, along with Hernandez, were disciplined, and the former NFL star was sent to what prison officials call a "special management section."

Aaron must be a very busy guy up in the Ironbar Hilton, what with preparing an appeal for the life sentence he got last month and preparing for a double-murder trial coming up in Boston.  He is accused of shooting two men in 2012 after one of them made him spill his drink at a nightclub that I heard is called T.J. Shootington's.

"Hi there!  I'm Aaron!  What's YOUR name?"

Nah, I made up that last part, but here is my question.  Hernandez, at the very least, is an unpleasant fellow, already guilty of one murder and about to stand trial for two more.  Why is he out and about, strolling through the cell block, available to serve as lookout for a friend in a fight?  Why are these people not locked up in their cells, away from each other and far away from us?

But, look at the bright side.  At least old Aaron is making new friends in the calaboose.  So many times, it's hard to reach out and connect with the other vermin.

There's one in every zip code

One of the reasons that we decided to move our vast financial resources (six digits, if you count the cents column) from the Bank of These United States of America to our Baltimore County Employees Federal Credit Union (and there were many reasons) is that the credit union is not very likely to be the scene of an armed holdup, since bad guys know that lots of police are in and out of there all day, some in uniform, some in plain clothes, but all toting sidearms.

Whereas, the BoTUSoA has to hire an off-duty cop to hang around, armed, all day to deter armed robberies and whatnot.

It's a good idea to have public safety personnel out and about, in my opinion.  It shows the public that they are on the job, which is why for the life of me I can't get this guy's point.  He's out in California, and he sees the local fire crew getting their groceries at a store (they have to eat, too, you know) and he does not like it, so he starts honking on them.

Apparently he is upset that they are not buying groceries - even he acknowledges that firefighters cannot just punch out and go to H.R. Stuffingburger's for a two-hour three-martini lunch- but he chooses to quibble over their choice of where to shop!  He insists that they deal with some specialized meat shop just because it's closer to the firehouse.  Never mind that it's probably much more expensive than at a chain supermarket.

The next time you see a police officer taking a break to see a man about a horse and maybe grab a drink, or see a fire crew at the BuySumMor gettin' the fixin's for chop suey, how about just a) thanking them for going into a line of work that provides protection for you and yours  - or at least b) leaving them to their business?

People.  I tell you.  They come in all types.

Sometimes...

Out in Weld County, Colorado, lives a young man named Tanner Brownlee.  Tanner's father, Sam, was a county deputy sheriff when he was killed in the line of duty five years ago.

And his patrol car was being put up for auction.  Lots of people like to drive used police cars, Jake and Elwood Blues among them, but this was a little different, since it was a chance for Tanner to reconnect with his dad.  And the auction was to benefit Concerns Of Police Survivors, a group that assists the survivors of slain officers.

It was good all around, so Tanner started a Go Fund Me page to come up with the scratch to get the car.  It really meant a lot for him to be able to have the winning bid and get that car, but it was not to be.

Tanner raised $50,000, but he was outbid by a local rancher named Steve Wells, who plunked down $60,000 for the keys to that Dodge Charger Pursuit squad car with over 100,000 miles on its odometer.

But it became clear that Wells had a noble reason for buying the car, as he handed the keys right over and said, "Tanner, here's your car."

The key to happiness

Every now and then you hear about some act of generosity or selflessness or kindness, acts that negate the awful deeds of some others, and this is one of those times.

Twice so, because Tanner turned over the money he had raised to the COPS fund, as well!

The Devil if I know

"I'm not sure whether I knew it was a crime or not,” said St. Louis Archbishop Robert Carlson, who is part of a lawsuit accusing more than 100 priests and church employees of sex abuse. “I understand today it's a crime.”

Oh.  OK then.

Nancy Gordeuk

Then there's Nancy Gordeuk,  the founder of TNT Academy, a nontraditional high school where students can follow nontraditional paths to a diploma.  Recently, at her school's graduation exercises, she messed up the order of speakers and had to call the audience back to hear the valedictorian speak.  You know how that was going to go; the crowd was excited to share in the moment with their graduates, and suddenly they're told to sit back down, and things got confused and some people got up again to leave.

"Look who's leaving! All the black people," she said, in what turned out to be her last official act at the school, which fired her several days later.  But before they let her go, she said, "My side is I’m not a racist, I didn’t know black people was a racist term, I didn’t say the n-word or anything like that, because that’s not in my vocabulary!” she said, arguing that it was merely an observation. “I made a statement, it wasn’t a racist remark.”

Some observations don't need to be made, in case she didn't know that. Here's another one, from the email she sent to the parents of her students:  “The devil was in the house and came out from my mouth. I deeply apologize for my racist comment and hope that forgiveness is in your hearts.”

So she admits racism and drags the devil into all this, and she went on, asking her school community to move forward and forget all this unpleasantness.

Travis Gordeuk

And then her son Travis got on Facebook and backed his mother with these well-chosen words: "If anyone has something to say about my mom and how she ran her graduation—come say it to my face," he wrote. "Yall [n--gas] aren’t talkin about [s--t] so if u got somthing [sic] to say come see me face to face."

And he included their home address, for those wishing to see him face to face.

Meanwhile, a Boston jury rejected the notion proffered by the Dzhokhar Tsarnaev defense team that the Boston Bomber was influenced by his radical older brother.  Surely, no one of 20 years has their own mind, and is always willing to do as their older sibling suggests/demands/orders.  Ask any older brother.

We look to clergypeople to uplift us all and provide the moral underpinnings of society, and here we have one whose defense is that he did not know it was illegal to have sex with children.

We look to educators to teach our young and lift them from the morass of stupidity and ill-preparedness that awaits the uneducated, and here was a school principal laying out her prejudice for all to see, and blaming Satan, who is down in hell preparing for the arrival of a young man who killed and maimed out of hatred, and was defended by lawyers who blame his older brother.

No one wants to accept responsibility for their actions and harmful behavior? Are we just going to say "the hell with it"?

Reading is FUNdamental!

"The outlook wasn't brilliant for the Mudville nine that day," if you mean "yesterday" for "that day," and "The Baltimore Orioles" for "The Mudville Nine."  They've gotten this baseball season off to a muddy start, winning one, losing one, and never getting momentum built up.  This past weekend, they lost games to the Anaheim, California Angels of Greater Los Angeles, California on Friday and Saturday nights, scoring only one run in each game and looking, shall we say, either lacklustre or slapdash as a team. Possibly even haphazard.

So, what a ballclub needs to get out of a slump is a good pitcher, and when one regular pitcher reported out with bronchitis and another said his back was sore, the team turned to a rookie without one inning of big-league experience, Mike Wright. All Wright did was, he pitched 7 1/3 scoreless innings as the team beat the Angels, 3-0.
Now, you might expect that Wright might have been a trifle jittery before making his major-league debut.  He said he was a little nervous in the first inning, and then settled in for the rest of a great day.

I refuse to make a
"The Wright Stuff" joke

“That’s everything you dream of going into it, and it was really fun,” said Wright, who gave up four hits, walked none and struck out six. “I was a little nervous the first inning. It’s to be expected.”

Here is the secret, one I'm glad to pass along to those of you still employed in situations bound to make one jumpy:  Instead of sitting in the locker room with the rest of the team, hearing all the baseball team chattering and getting all worked up, Wright took a book and sat reading in the vacant stands.  Several hours later, some fan sat in the very seat once occupied by the man the fan was watching pitch so well!

And the book that Wright, a graduate of East Carolina University was reading?   “Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows,” the last of the tripartite novel series by J.K. Rowling. 

Wright says he has always stayed in the habit of reading in the stands before a game, and also says he has read all the Harry Potter books at least three times.

Let's hope the next book he reads will be that sensational best seller "Adam Jones and The Coconut Cream Pie of Victory."