Go fish

Fishkeepers all over have been abuzz over a latebreaking development in their world. The fish you see above is called a rose-veiled fairy wrasse, a fish native to the Maldives. Now, the Maldives is a nation of islands in the Indian Ocean. There are 1192 islands that make up the country there, southwest of Sri Lanka and India, and aren't you glad you don't have to remember the names of all those islands? But back to the fish above. He was first noticed in the 1990s, same as Weezer and the Spice Girls, but at first, fishlovers thought they were another example of a different species, the red velvet fairy wrasse. 

But the confusion was cleared up when everyone recognized that "red velvet" is a type of cupcake. It was a Maldivian scientist named Ahmed Najeeb who said no, this is an entirely new species and he lives in the Maldives' "twilight zone" reefs, which was down deep in the sea. And because these twilight zones are so deep down, they are largely unexplored. That means, grab your goggles and head for the Maldives, and you might find an entire new fish and get to name it yourself.

You may NOT call your discovery the "Filet-O-Fish," however. That is a copyrighted name for what McDonald's calls "Heaven on a bun."

As reef fishes go the fairy wrasses are fairly small - adults coming in between three and six inches. They are sexually dimorphic, but don't get all worked up and call the governor of Florida to make sure the poor students down there aren't being taught about sexual dimorphism. That only means that the males and females of a species have different body forms. 

By the way, you'll be either amused or shocked to find that Florida is now rejecting the purchase of a large percentage of mathematics textbooks in use elsewhere. I suppose they have word problems in Algebra dealing with two trains leaving terminals hundreds of miles apart, traveling toward each other at specified rates of speed, and how many of the people on the train heading for Florida are known to be cross-dressers?

 

Oh, K!

Before KMart, the same company ran S.S. Kresge stores all over America. Think of a mini-KMart, with a delicatessen and lunch counter/soda fountain, stationery, yard goods for those who made their own clothing and draperies. a smattering of tools and hardware, live goldfish, baby clothes, some books and magazines...you get the picture: a little of everything and not enough of anything. 

Starting in 1962, the company opened KMart stores, and for a while, they were big...bigger than WalMart and Target, two competitors who swallowed them whole over the years (not to mention Amazon, which is threatening to shutter just about everything but mortuaries and gas stations, and will probably figure out a way to deliver caskets and gasoline to Americans at home), leaving KMart in the sad state they currently occupy: just three stores left in the US. Once there were more than 2,000.  Now, there are three.

If you have the urge to hear "Attention KMart shoppers!" one last time, and sip a Slush Puppy while gnawing on salty popcorn, here are the final three: 

• Miami, Florida: 14091 SW 88th St.
• Westwood, New Jersey: 700 Broadway
• Bridgehampton, New York: 2044 Montauk Highway

Fortune magazine, the people who spend time sweeping up the figurative rubble left behind when formerly big businesses get tiny and then close up, say Big K "often focused on discounts, but failing to appeal to a specific demographic hurt the business. Kmart wanted to appeal to everyone, but instead it became bland and lacked an image.”

Having shopped at all these chains, I tell you, I can't really say there is a difference between the KMart crowd and the WalMartians. 

“Kmart was part of America,” said Michael Lisicky, a Baltimore-based author who has written several books on U.S. retail history. “Everybody went to Kmart, whether you liked it or not. They had everything. You had toys. You had sporting goods. You had candy. You had stationery. It was something for everybody. This was almost as much of a social visit as it was a shopping visit. You could spend hours here. And these just dotted the American landscape over the years.”

You could spend hours there, and I heard from lots of people who said they knew parents who dropped little Abercrombie and Ursula off at noon on a Saturday, did their errands, and returned about 4 to pick up the kids, all sticky from Cherry Guzzles and Sugar Daddy candies. 

It was in front of our KMart in the North Plaza Mall  which is no longer a mall that I first felt the creaking of old age, for it was there that I pulled up in front of the store to let Peggy run in and pick up one thing one day when I was maybe 30 and a county police officer drove up slowly and said, "Sir, you're going to have to move, please."

My father's words rang in my ears: "The first time a policeman calls you 'sir,' you're old."

PS - That store closed a couple of winters ago. They are turning it into a flooring and rug store, with no slush puppies.

Sunday Rerun from 2013: That sinking Feeling

 In footwashing news from last week, the popular new Pope Francis washed the feet of Italian youthful offenders as a sign of humility during Easter week. This was done by Jesus Christ, who washed the feet of his disciples before the Last Supper. All around the world, Christians found this gesture moving and uplifting.

Meanwhile, down Tennessee way, State Senator Bill Ketron, a Republican from Murfreesboro, raised all sorts of tarnation over a question from one Judd Matheny, a Republican out of Tullahoma.  

Tennessee Muslim Prayer Sink   

What got old Judd's dander up was his sneaking suspicion that during the $16 million worth of renovation done recently to the state capital building, some good ol' boy built one of those Muslim foot sinks into one of the rooms.

Muslims are required to wash their feet, along with their faces and hands, before praying.  This could be seen as part of their daily ablutions, or down in Tennessee, as an act of terrorism.

Judd went a-hollerin' down to Bill's office with his crazy fear that the Muslims were fixin' to get a foothold, as it were, right there in the state capital!  Lookie here, they're installing a foot sink!

Well, an official inquiry was launched, costing who the heck knows how many dollars and wasted time, and back came the answer that was already known to anyone on earth who has ever taken half a moment to stop running around all busy being important to engage a custodian to see how he/she mops up the soup that you spill all over the break room.  They use what they call a mop sink.

Tennessee mop sink

“I confirmed with the facility administrator for the State Capitol Complex that the floor-level sink installed in the men’s restroom outside the House Chamber is for housekeeping use,” Legislative Administration Director Connie Ridley wrote in an email.

But, Tennessee legislators are doing the right thing, casting a chary eye at the activities of these people.  Imagine, praying in public!  And with clean hands, faces and feet!

The Saturday Picture Show, April 16, 2022

 

This picture was described as "A morning walk in England." A foggy, misty morning indeed!

We've all wondered, and now here it is: this is what sunset looks like when you're flying high above it!

Devotees of the 70s band T Rex know their deep cut "Raw Ramp," part of a song trilogy that also included "There Was A Time" and "Electric Boogie." Whatever connotation they gave the word ramp, it really and truly is a plant, like a spring onion or a leek. Supposed to be very tasty, but then again, they say that about beets.

Just the other day Ginger Zee was on ABC showing hailstones the size of lemons, We've seen them before, but what's new is a hailstone that looks like a jackrabbit or cat. Mother Nature is always coming up with something new, so stay tuned.

This 2,000-year-old Roman shoe, found in an Italian well, shows that wingtips have been around for a long, long time. 

I'll tell you what's always fun to do in Baltimore. Take an out-of-towner or a new-to-towner out to dinner and get a softshell crab sammy.  I/2 the time they will ask if that's a spider on your plate.

Having saturated urban, suburban, and exurban markets with their quasi-authentic Mexican cuisine, Taco Bell is making a move to take on the rural competition.

You may ask me really nicely and everything but I am not climbing these stairs!

The old pizza wheel is out of style, replaced by the new pizza axe. With this behind the counter, I bet they get very few complaints about not having enough toppings.

In the 1950s, families would pile into the Chevy or Ford or Studebaker and go buy everyone a new Hula-Hoop or coonskin cap. A stop at the Tastee-Freez on the way home made it a perfect day!

Anyone for cannoli?

We sure do love to talk about tomato sauce here, don't we? I mean, we love anything but the canned stuff, and jarred Ragu. Make it yourself; it's easy! Would Clemenza lie?

Peter Clemenza was a mafia soldier in Don Corleone's army, and his duties were many and varied in "The Godfather." He taught Michael Corleone how to shoot, and drop, a gun, he remembered to bring home the cannolis so his wife didn't kill him, and when the gangs were going to the mattresses (preparing for warfare) he showed Michael how to cook pasta sauce for twenty guys. All good skills to have, in his line of work.

Never break a promise to your wife

So how many times have you heard someone offer you an authentic homemade Italian dinner, with a promise that it's gonna be good because "I follow Clemenza's recipe!"?

Maybe you saw the movie in the theater, where it's hard to take notes, and maybe you saw it on home video, where someone is always walking off with the pencil you leave by the TV, but anyway, here it is, in honor of "The Godfather" 's 50th anniversary.

"You never know, you might have to cook for 20 guys someday."

I believe it was watching the movie over and over again that convinced me, the WASP of all time, that I could try a Sicilian favorite. And even though I have never had to cook for 20 armed and angry people, I have cooked for six or seven peevish ones (names withheld).

You can use this sauce as gravy over pasta or you can use it as the red part of a lasagna.

"You see, you start out with a little bit of oil. Then you fry some garlic."

Get the EVOO (extra-virgin olive oil) hot in the frying pan, but not smoking hot. Saute some garlic along with a fresh sweet onion 'til all is golden brown

"Then you throw in some tomatoes, tomato paste, you fry it; you make sure it doesn't stick. You get it to a boil . . ."

Clemenza uses two large cans of tomatoes (spend a little extra and get San Marzanos) and two cans of tomato paste (it is all the same, no matter how much more they want for the name brand over the cheap Aldi can. There is somewhere in Italy a huge processing plant for tomato paste; they produce giant storage tanks of it, and all cans of all brands come from there.

By "frying" it, Clemenza means to let it simmer just below the point where giant globs leap out of the pan and onto your white shirt, but let it bubble awhile, and then cut the heat way down to "simmer." I leave the lid on so that the condensate goes right back into the pan. Let it simmer while you go watch your show.

" . . . You shove in all your sausage and your meatballs."

Fry the meats a little first before letting them swim in the sauce, what I do. You could always fry them along with the garlic and onions at the beginning and then fish them out of the pan until this step. However you do it, this is where the meatballs and sausage go for a swim awhile while you watch the news.

 "Add a little bit o' wine, and a little bit of sugar, and that's my trick."

Add some wine (cheap Chianti) at this point, then stir, and stick a spoon in it and see how sweet it is. Some like it sweeter than others. If you want to sweeten it, add some of that honey that Aunt Heloise brought you back from Coral Gables instead of the coconut patties you were hoping for.

I saw a Hallmark movie about an Italian restaurant and they were all acting like it's a sin against God to break your spaghetti in half before you boil it. I hereby say it's ok to do that if you want to. I checked with Clemenza and he said it's ok, and he will bring dessert.

 

  

Remember The Maine Helmet!

If you have time on your hands and are looking for something to do with most of it, why not think about joining the Wide World of Blogging? I enjoy finding interesting stories to share and it gives me something to do between the early morning news and the noon news. My blog  - the one you're holding in your hands right now, so to speak - is what you might call a "general' blog, meaning that it's generally a chaotic mess. 

But let's say you are a person of specific interests. In that case, why not consider a blog that focuses on one narrow area or realm? I might suggest one...you could delve into the worldwide problem of things floating all the way across the ocean and winding up on distant shores!

For instance: Sigbjørn Eide, a Norwegian, came across a Maine Department of Transportation hard hat more than 3,300 miles away from its home.

There was Mr. Eide, out there picking up trash along Norway’s coast, and what does he come across, all buried in seaweed, but a white helmet. The American flag and a MaineDOT logo gave him all the clues he needed as to its provenance.

Mr. Eide took the hard hat home, Googled the Maine DOT, and reached out to them.

He told them via social media that he “was astonished and impressed about the long voyage the small helmet had taken,” the Boston GLOBE reported.

The MaineDOT Facebook page told the tale of the long voyage the helmet took, so many miles away from Maine.

“Sigbjørn was on a walk and found a MaineDOT hard hat in a fjord, about 3,300 miles from MaineDOT headquarters,” the department said. “We’re not quite sure how this happened, but we’re glad we have a new pen pal!”

Always big-hearted, MaineDOT says they didn't ask Eide to return the hat, and is planning to send him some more items from the state. Hmmm, maybe some local maple syrup to put on some Norwegian pannekaken (pancakes) and skanke (ham)!

Mr Eide

"Hey You!"

We look forward to this every year at about this time: Www.names.org is out with their list of the predicted-most-popular baby names in Maryland in 2022.

On the boys' side, Liam is #1, followed by Noah, James and Lucas.

In Maryland, Ethan and Daniel still trend popular, and that's not the case all over.

As for the girls side, let's just say that first grade teachers in 2028 can count on lots of Olivias, as well as Sophias, Avas, and Emmas.

And they don't get these lists from just asking ten friends or anything so unscientific, no siree Bob (not on the list).  Names.org derives information from the Social Security Administration birth data what they hear from users on their website.

They look back over 5 years' worth of names. They would have to go much farther back to see a day when "Mark" was still being bestowed upon infant males.

Predicted 10 Most Popular Names for Boys in Maryland in 2022

• Liam
• Noah
• James
• Lucas
• Oliver
• Benjamin
• Henry
• Ethan
• William
• Daniel

Can you hear the name Daniel without thinking of "Daniel is traveling tonight on a plane, I can see the red tail lights heading for Spain"?

Predicted 10 Most Popular Names for Girls in Maryland in 2022

• Olivia
• Sophia
• Ava
• Emma
• Charlotte
• Isabella
• Mia
• Amelia
• Evelyn
• Luna

I have to admit, the only "Luna" I know is the wife of Sgt. Grey on "The Rookie" - the likable, supportive Luna Grey. She is enough to make me a Lunatic for life.

I know it's radical, but I would like to see some provision made by which people are allowed to choose their own name when they turn 30. What to call them before that is something I haven't quite worked all the way out yet, but give me time.

As for my own moniker, I would have wished for "Leon," with the nickname "Tito." And I can't explain it.

Frasier Crane

I'm not so sure that the people involved in this crime caper down Alabama way are familiar with the word chutzpah. 

 chutz·pah /ˈho͝otspə,ˈKHo͝otspə/

It's an informal noun, originally Yiddish, meaning extreme self-confidence or audacity.

Which a certain 26-year-old seems to have plenty of, as he ALLEGEDLY called a wrecker service to ask them to pull a 70-ton crane out of the woods.

His woods? Apparently not. His crane? Definitely not.

So now the sheriff has him charged with stealing the crane.

The tow guy called the Chilton County Sheriff’s Office not so long ago, saying he had a call from a man from Clanton who claimed that someone had given him a crane, and he just needed someone to pull his gift out of the woods so he could sell it to the scrapyard.

This is the perfect gift for some people!

However, Mr Tow remembered having dragged that crane before, years ago, and sure as tarnation, the man on the phone was not the man who owned it back then, and darn the luck anyway, for the would-be new owner, who then attempted to make good his getaway by driving off in the crane itself (only to run afoul of a ditch.)

The hapless alleged crook has been in trouble before, as witness his new charges of probation violation and first-degree theft. There was no defense attorney listed in court records. You have to figure it's hard to find a Perry Mason to match up to this case.  

“We have worked a lot of theft cases over the years, but this one definitely takes first place in the heavyweight category,” Sheriff John Shearon’s office said in a statement, thanking the wrecker service.

We shouldn't be so tough on the man; he's only trying to better himself by going into the crane business. He just wants to get up in the world.

 

Slammin' Sammy

Golf, the game where people take a nice long walk and chase a little ball with a set of clubs, holds little interest for me, but that's ok.  Plenty of people are into it, and this past weekend we saw the highest point in the golf pantheon, the Masters Tournament in Augusta, GA.

It's always fascinating to me to see the people in the gallery down there, so rapt in their attention to the golfers, chowing down on pimento cheese sandwiches - the great local tradition.

Here's an interesting angle on those sammies: they only cost $1.50, and for those who attend football games, baseball games, and so forth, it's traditional to shell out thirty or forty semoleons on a sandwich and a couple of beers. The people who run things in bigtime sports figure they have a captive audience, so why not gouge them for the money. They even make you walk through a meat detector on the way in to make you aren't smuggling in a ham and cheese.

It's just the opposite down at Augusta National. They figure they can sell you a sandwich at or below their cost because (here's the hitch) they've got you paying  $2,000 for a single day, and more than $10,000 for the four-day pass.

In case that made your eyeballs fog up, the people you see on TV in their festive pants have paid 10,000 American dollars to stand there and watch other people, dressed similarly, play golf.

For your dollar fifty, you get a sandwich served in a green biodegradable plastic bag...but the purveyor changed a few years ago. Used to be, Nick Rangos, a caterer from Aiken, S.C. made the sandwiches, but for reasons no one seems to know (or be prepared to discuss) he lost the contract in 1998, after forty-five years. 

The golf course awarded the contract business to a local fried chicken chain called Wife Savers, who already had the fried chicken concession at the course. BUT - here's the twist. 

Instead of hiring someone who worked for Rangos and knew the recipe, or buying the recipe itself, the people at Augusta had neither, and Wife Savers's first attempts at recreating the cheesy spread did not measure up to the original. They got lucky when a woman who worked at the course had frozen some spread for the year before, and skilled food scientists went to work, analyzing the food in minute detail like they were on one of those CSI shows or something. 

And they finally duplicated the original, and it sells like hotcakes even today. And when you think about it from a nutritional standpoint, it's a perfect BLD (breakfast, lunch, and dinner). You get starches and sugars in the bread and protein from the cheese and indigestion if you gobble it too quickly.

It's what they call Southern Comfort food.

And, courtesy of a woman down there who knows about the sandwich, here is a good way to make yours at home:

Ingredients

2 cups sharp cheddar cheese, shredded

1 cup Monterey jack cheese, shredded

4 ounces cream cheese, softened to room temperature

1/2 cup mayonnaise

4-ounce jar pimentos diced in jar, drained

1 tablespoon onion, very finely minced

1/4 teaspoon garlic powder

1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon black pepper

Instructions

Combine all ingredients in a medium bowl and mix until smooth and creamy. Refrigerate for at least an hour to allow to firm.

Serve on white bread.

Sunday Rerun: She voted for the Labor Party

 Well, now that the election is over, and everyone is happy about the results, and the losing side is vowing to work with the winners for the betterment of all the nation and all the world...

I couldn't sustain that for much longer. But let's look back at someone who really wanted to vote. And if you don't vote, please tell me why.

A woman in Florida (what IS it down there? Is it the heat, the humidity, the Disney, what???) was in labor when she got to the Orange County Supervisor of Elections Office in Orlando last Tuesday.

Fox 35 news channel talked to poll worker Karen Brinceno Gonzalez, who said that a woman was on the way to the hospital, her husband at the wheel, when she told him to swing by the polls on the way.  It was only a half mile out of the way.

The mom-to-be sat in the car while dutiful dad went in, got in line, and when it was his turn, asked poll workers to come out and help her vote early.

“He's like ‘Yeah, she's about to have a baby, but she won't go to the hospital to have a baby until she votes,’” Gonzalez told the news. “I was like, OK, what can I do to facilitate her to vote? Where is she? Where can I go to help?”

Everyone is "like" something, you see.

Ms Gonzalez stepped out to the parking lot, found the woman breathing heavily, checked her ID and gave her a mail-in ballot to be returned by 11/3.

“She said, ‘No! No! No! I need to fill it out right now,’” Gonzalez said. “So she filled it out. I gave her an 'I VOTED' sticker, and she was off to the hospital.”

These are serious Floridians down there.

Eileen Deliz is also on the staff at the Orange County Supervisor of Elections Office, and she told the Orlando Sentinel that this was not in the usual course of events. 

“We are very, very busy, but when something like that happens it just makes our day," she told the paper. “It kind of validates what we do [and] the importance of voting. Every election cycle brings us a great little story.”

The Orange County Supervisor of Elections Office did not release the woman's name. I would love to know what she and her husband named the baby.

Looking back, there was a time when Baltimore Colt season ticket holders had to go to Memorial Stadium and line up to get their playoff tickets. People who worked there reported in different years that a Fire Dept ambulance, lights on for an emergency call, pulled up, and so did a hearse with three people aboard...if you know what I mean.

The Saturday Picture Show, April 9, 2022

 

We'll open and close this week with night lights. Just imagine how dark it would be if this bulb went out!

We tend to forget that woodpeckers still have to eat food! Yes, they peck their way into trees and find insect larvae, ants, termites, beetles and their larvae, and spiders for lunch, but sometimes they want seeds, like everyone else.

This is a weird feeling, when a passing cloud obscures the sun for a minute on a day that's been bright. It's like when you're in the ocean and suddenly you're in a very cold stretch of water.

Can you just imagine how great a book you could write about the inhabitants of a Nova Scotia fishing village?

Don't forget to take your Christmas wreath down before nesting season next year, or you'll have to leave it up all year (and in August, people will ride by your house and point.)

Old country song: "You've got a smile like an acre of sunflowers, and your eyes are bluebonnet blue..." But these are bluebonnets, and they're more like lavenderbonnets.

That's the real Michelle Carter on the left, and Elle Fanning, who plays her perfectly in "The Girl From Plainville" on Hulu on the right. Michelle was the woman who persuaded her boyfriend to commit suicide, ostensibly so that she could garner sympathy as "the girl whose boyfriend offed himself." It's a sick story, well told.

Zouaves (pronounced zoo-AHVS) were Civil War soldiers who dressed in the mode of French soldiers serving in North Africa. The Philadelphia Fire Zouaves were the 72nd Regiment of the Pennsylvania Volunteers from 1861 until 1864. All the cool stuff happens in firehouses.

I love this cartoon from Stephan Pastis's strip "Pearls Before Swine." We know how true it is, am I wrong?

Good night!

To the very end

Yesterday we talked about how, one day, the pandemic will end, and there will have to be the one person known as the last to succumb to the COVID-19 virus. What a shame, when it could be prevented.

There's a story about another "last death" that might have been prevented as well, and it comes from the end of World War I, and it involves a soldier from Baltimore!

The date is November 11, 1918. The time is 5 AM. The location is a railroad dining car in a dark forest north of Paris, where German, British and French officials have met to sign an armistice ending the war. The Allied commander, Ferdinand Foch, rejects the Germans' request to end the shooting at once. Foch says let's stop shooting at 11 AM so we can get the word to the soldiers on the front lines.

Foch tried to make it seem all practical, but the underlying goal was to end what was foolishly called "The War To End All Wars" at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. So, ok. End it on a splashy note. Never mind that 3,000 more soldiers died between 5 AM and 11 AM, and one of them was an American private who was out to regain his good reputation at the very end.

One of the groups still in the fighting for those hours was the 313th Infantry Regiment of the 79th “Liberty” Division, a regiment known as "Baltimore's Own," since most of its soldiers came from the city not yet known as Charm City.  “There will be absolutely no let-up in the carrying out of the original plans until 11 o’clock,” said subordinate brigadier general William Nicholson, as he kept his men fighting. 

The men of the 313th were deep into the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. Some ten miles north of Verdun, they had just seized the town of Ville-devant-Chaumont.

And one of those Baltimore soldiers was Private Henry Gunther, who had left behind a fiancée and and a nice job at a bank when he was drafted into the Army. He had just left for the war the previous July and was serving as a supply sergeant.

But he made the mistake of writing a letter to a friend at home, complaining about Army life and advising his buddy to avoid serving at any cost. Army censors read the letter, and he was busted down to private. AND THEN his fiancée got word of the demotion, and she dumped him.

As these things go, those were two tough blows, and Gunther was no longer the same cheerful guy. Perhaps it was to save his reputation that he volunteered to serve as a runner (a carrier of information in those pre-walkie talkie days.) He was injured by shrapnel in his hand in that duty, and could have been sent home, but he demanded to stay in the fight.

So it was that at 10:44 AM on November 11, the regiment was told to stop the fighting in 16 minutes. Realizing the war would be over after those minutes passed, Gunther took the opportunity to attack a German roadblock/machine gun nest with his rifle and bayonet, and as his comrades called for him to stop, the Germans stopped him with five shots to the temple.

He was declared dead at 10:59 AM.

General John Pershing, chief of the American Expeditionary Forces, logged Gunther's death as the last among American troops.

Most people familiar with the man and his death believed that his shame over the demotion that dishonored himself and his family was too much to bear, so he was trying to redeem himself. 

His burial place, fittingly enough, is in the Most Holy Redeemer Cemetery in Baltimore. He received the Distinguished Service Cross and was posthumously promoted back to sergeant after the war.

  

The List

No matter what some people are saying for whatever reason, COVID-19 is not over with, and in Great Britain, where more than 166,000 people have reportedly died of COVID-19 during the ongoing pandemic, they are adding to their list of official symptoms. By comparison, some 81,867,963 cases have been reported in the US as of Monday night, with 1,008,679 resultant deaths. 

Infection rates are rising in the United Kingdom; here, they are dropping after the post-holiday spike earlier this year. But still, this seems to be a virus we will be dealing with for a long time. Gone are the predictions that "it'll go away like a miracle as soon as it warms up" in April, 2020. 

So, still, it's good to be vaccinated and boosted and to maintain caution about one's surroundings and associates.

The British list now includes these symptoms:

• A high temperature or shivering (chills) — a high temperature means you feel hot to touch on your chest or back (you do not need to measure your temperature).
• A new, continuous cough — this means coughing a lot for more than an hour or three or more coughing episodes in 24 hours.
• A loss or change to your sense of smell or taste.
• Shortness of breath.
• Feeling tired or exhausted.
• An aching body.
• A headache.
• A sore throat.
• A blocked or runny nose.
• Loss of appetite.
• Diarrhea
• Feeling sick or being sick.

“The symptoms are very similar to symptoms of other illnesses, such as colds and flu,” the new NSA advisory notes. 

It's starting to remind me of one of those historical sidelights about some soldier being killed by a bullet on the day of an armistice. It happened to a man from Baltimore. About that, more tomorrow. But for now, be sure to be wise, and don't take a chance on being that last statistic.

 

Monkey Time

If you can imagine Hell on earth, I think I just read about it in The New Yorker, which ran an article detailing a Jimmy Buffett-themed senior housing complex in Florida. Heat, humidity, spiders, alligators, panthers, lizards, "Cheeseburger In Paradise" playing nonstop. If that sounds like good livin' to you, go get all you can of it, and take my share too. I've seen the Buffett folkways and I guess you need more of those Hawaiian shirts, flip-flops, and baggy shorts to fit in. I have none. 

I know this makes me seem an outlier but the thing I like about Florida is reading things like this: 

There is a troop of vervet monkeys that live near a busy runway at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport.  There are no native American monkeys, but in the 1940s, someone brought some little vervets from West Africa and set up a breeding facility and spectator zoo. There are now 40 descendants of those original arrivals running around a 1500-acre section of Dania Beach.

These simians get assistance from members of the Dania Beach Vervet Project, who all work to preserve the colony.  These monkeys are local stars! TV and newspapers all go out to cover them when the news about not being able to tell people there is such a word as "gay" slows down in the Sunshine State. Visitors and nearby residents feed the monks, despite signs saying not to do so.

The vervets (Males typically grow to 2 feet and weigh 15 pounds; females reach 18 inches and 10 pounds) are used to posing for pictures with passersby, and live about 20 years. Not bad, for a state where the governor flouts science and common sense in his effort to be on fox news all day and all night.  

And they have adapted away from their traditional dinner fare of spiders, ants, lizards, seeds, and flowers in favor of what humans bring them: Sugary things and salty things.

So for centuries, they were used to chowing down on the bounty of the wild, and now they only want Pop-Tarts and Cheez-Its.

Maybe we could chip in and get them all little Hawaiian shirts and flip flops and surf shorts to really complete their humanness.

 

Buy The Numbers

I always seem to wind up in the same line at the Kwik-E-Mart: behind someone who is buying Lotto tickets for everyone in his family.  And his church. And every other person they ever met. I don't bother with it, the lottery. I know lots of people do and they get a thrill out of hoping. I personally get a hope out of thrilling, and I don't even know what that means!

A lot of the people in line at the K-E-M seem to know the clerk and his family, so they get into a long conversation about the time his daughter's car broke down in the Mall garage and the towtruck couldn't get in to help. At length, the customer gives the clerk his numbers, and invariably mentions that his digital skein consists of birthdays, old addresses, and his draft lottery number from 1969.

There is no reason to think that a personal list of "lucky" numbers is more likely to win than a random set chosen by the lottery computer, but why not? You rarely hear of anyone saying they used to have a set of lucky numbers that were not really lucky, so they do the random route. Winners will tell you why!

Last week, a woman from Detroit won a $482,217 jackpot from the Michigan Lottery's Fantasy 5 game. She happily said she has been sticking with her numbers for a long time, and now, they finally hit! 

The lady is 45 years old, but notice, "45" is not one of the numbers she picked: She selected the numbers 02-10-11-17-21 and played them on the Michigan Lottery website.

 

"I have been playing the same set of numbers, which is made up of special dates, for a long time," the player said. "When I logged in to my account and saw I'd won the jackpot, I called my mom in a panic. She thought something was wrong until I told her I'd won the lottery. We were both in shock and couldn't believe it!"

She's taking the jackpot and plans to pay off bills and augment her savings account.

"Winning is an awesome feeling. It's a huge relief and couldn't have happened at a better time," she said.

I just might have to make a number salad out of my birthday, Peggy's, the cats', and some other significant dates. I'll get back to you if I do.

If this blog suddenly ceases to publish, please assume that I hit it big and can be reached care of General Delivery, Beaver Trap, Maine.

Shaboom shrooms

Who said that it's a fool who pretends to be a lawyer and have himself as a client?

I don't know, but I do know that you should not mess around with drugs - prescription or otherwise - unless you know what you're doing. And since so few of us are doctors of pharmacology or medicine, I'm going to say it's better to leave it up to those kinds of people before doing this kind of thing...

A man from Nebraska, hearing that the psilocybin in “magic mushrooms” can be effective for dealing with a variety of mental health issues, decided he would just get a mess of shrooms, boil them down, and inject them into his bloodstream.

Huge surprise. He almost died. The medicine from these mushrooms is meant to be taken orally.  

The Nebraskan is a bipolar opioid addict. He decided to stop taking his medications in order to ween himself off the pills. 

This led to a manic-depressive episode during which he read about the wonders of "magic mushrooms" and then decided to try the intravenous route. This led to organ failure within days.

The result? Nausea, diarrhea, early signs of jaundice, and the vomiting of blood. His family took him right to the ER, where doctors found his liver and kidneys near failure. He was eight days in the intensive care unit and more than three weeks on a ventilator.

As they flushed his system and began a program of antibiotics on him, doctors took a blood test and found that he tested positive for Psilocybe cubensis, which confirmed the man injected himself with mushrooms — which had begun to grow in his blood.

I'll let you read that last sentence again. Mushrooms were growing in his bloodstream.

He had injected himself with a species of psychedelic mushroom containing psilocybin and psilocin. These are what science calls "psychedelic" drugs. If you were around in the 1960s, it was then cool to be considered psychedelic. If you wore brightly colored bell bottoms and listened to The Electric Prunes while burning your library card, you were being psychedelic.

Psychedelic drugs are the ones that produce hallucinations and apparent expansion of consciousness. 

Psychedelic mushrooms in the wild

He was lucky. A team of doctors saved his life, but he was in the hospital for 22 days.

My favorite mushroom recipe involves buying fresh white mushrooms at ALDI, taking them home, and sautéing them in butter and Worcestershire sauce before crowning a nice rare steak with them. It's not psychedelic, and the only hallucination I ever get is when I top the whole deal with some zesty horseradish, which, if I add enough, can make me feel like the top of my head is coming off.

But in a good way! And I don't need to expand my consciousness when I'm grinding on a steak. In that moment, I am at one with my inner carnivore. 

Add baked potato with sour cream and butter, and a side salad, and you're talking dinner!

Sunday Rerun: Behind The Velvet Rope, Please

 I'm not trying to blame an entire educational movement for the foolish actions of some people, but I am puzzled by the tendency of our fellow citizens to do what they damn well please at any time in any situation.

Many teachers follow the Montessori movement, which allows children to be "at liberty to choose and act freely and act spontaneously for optimal development." Theoretically, this means you leave someone in a kitchen with a package of bacon, some green leafy vegetables, a tomato and a loaf of good bread, and if you give them enough time they will learn to make a BLT.

Or, give a person a block of wood and a whittling knife, and they will cut away everything that doesn't look like a duck.

That's the theory, but there is a problem with the "Let 'Em Figure Out How To Do It" school of learning...it leaves people feeling that they can just do as they please when they please.  This is why people - not talking about kids here - climb over bars and ford streams to get into the lion's den at the zoo, why they go for boat rides without personal flotation devices, why they play with fireworks, why they run through the streets of Pamplona being chased by bulls, why they jump out of airplanes that are still aloft.

People love to take risks, probably because at some point in their lives, they were encouraged to "think outside the box" and "push the envelope" and "go for the big picture."  

Sometimes, the rules are there to say "don't think outside this box because doing so might mean sudden death in a boiling acidic pool of water."

"No significant human remains were left" to recover after Colin Nathaniel Scott, from Portland, Oregon, decided that his visit to Yellowstone National Park would be best enhanced by going off the designated pathway near a geyser basin.  He and his sister wandered 225 yards off that boardwalk before he lost his footing on gravel and tumbled to his quick death. 

In boiling acidic water.

Of course, there are regulations and rules and signs, the same kind of sign that tells people not to try to engage in civil intercourse with bears, and look how many people break that rule. 

Last year, 4.1 million visitors went to Norris Geyser Basin, where water boils at 199° at the park's high elevation.

Lovely. Fatal.

Please avoid any area where you are likely to fall into a pond of 199° acid. Leave the lions alone, wear your life preserver, attend fireworks shows put on by trained professionals, avoid Spain when the bulls are on the run, and stay in the plane until it lands. 

It might not be as thrilling to live that way, but you'll live longer that way.

The Saturday Picture Show, April 2, 2022

 

Some pretty nice brickwork in Gwent, Wales. I suppose the bricks are formed in a mold before coming out of the kiln. Never saw anything like this...

If this seems like a great picture of a mountain range...it's actually a closeup of one rock!

You always need someone to chock the ladder for you. No one said it has to be a human!

"Objects in mirror may be the same size they really are because this is your wife's mirror from the bathroom and she needs it back"

Bruce McCall is a cartoonist, illustrator, commercial artist, and essayist. He's done great things like this for decades. This is from the National Lampoon Dacron Republican-Democrat newspaper satire from 1978.

Ukraine seems like such a lovely country. 

Until you get where you're going, be where you are.

George is flabbergasted.

People used to force you to sit in their basement while they dragged out the slide projector and showed you their vacation pictures. The best part was when the beam of light shone on the screen and we played Shadow Stumpers.

This egret just picked up dinner and is on the way home! Enjoy!

April the Onest

Oh yeah, look at the calendar today before you believe anything anyone tells you, except for me, because I will never lie to you, cheat you, deceive you, or fool you.

It's April Fool's Day, commonly celebrated as the day that radio DJs do each other's shows under the other person's name, kids turn off their parents' alarm clocks, swap sugar for salt, call someone's spouse and tell them lurid tales...

We don't know where April Fool's Day, or All Fools' Day, even began. I guess even the cavemen tied each other's shoelaces together or sent each other on an errand to get a left-handed monkey wrench, although how did cavemen know the date was April 1? We know that insurance companies didn't even start handing out calendars until Columbus's day.

You ancient Romans just missed your big day: they call it Hilaria, and it's every March 25. There is also the Holi celebration in India, which was held from sundown on March 17 through sundown the next day. It's also called the festival of sharing and love, or the festival of colors. Put it on your 2023 calendar for March 7.

I didn't know this, but it used to be that Christendom started their New Year on Easter Sunday, until Edict of Roussillon (August 1564). That's when King Charles IX said, "Let's start the new year on January 1, while the kids are out of school for Christmas break anyway." But notice: Easter was a lunar festival, not set in stone on a calendar. It's a moveable date, and those who insisted on clinging to the old ways were the “April Fools.”

There is also speculation that the oldtimers chose April 1 because it's right around the time of the vernal equinox, and many people are fooled by changes in the weather at this time of the year. Take this week, for example.

We don't know if this is Charles IX's fault, but to this day, a victim of April Foolery in France is called "poisson d’avril" or “April fish.” French children go around pinning or taping paper fish to the backs of friends.

I went to a tough school.  We pinned real fish to the backs of unsuspecting schoolmates while they practiced their scales.