Sunday Rerun (from 2020): Born Every Minute

 There is actually something worse to worry about than the coronavirus.  And that is that good old Swindlin' Jim Bakker, the horny televangelist, is trying to tell people that the silver potion he is hawking can cure the coronavirus.

And there's something even worse than that.

People are buying it! They're sending money to that charlatan as soon as they get home from BuySumMor with 137 bottles of Purell, cases of toilet paper, and 35-packs of water.

Bakker's latest endeavor is The Jim Bakker Show, and it's among seven companies sent warning letters by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for selling unapproved products and treatments.


"The FDA considers the sale and promotion of fraudulent COVID-19 products to be a threat to the public health. We have an aggressive surveillance program that routinely monitors online sources for health fraud products, especially during a significant public health issue such as this one," FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn said in a statement.

Johns Hopkins University, where people who know what they're talking about work, reports that there are no vaccines or approved drugs to treat or prevent the coronavirus. COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus, is responsible for  at least 24 deaths in the U.S. as of Monday. More than 3,800 have died around the world.

"There already is a high level of anxiety over the potential spread of coronavirus," FTC Chairman Joe Simons said in a statement. "What we don't need in this situation are companies preying on consumers by promoting products with fraudulent prevention and treatment claims. These warning letters are just the first step. We're prepared to take enforcement actions against companies that continue to market this type of scam."

Bakker is selling nostrums that he claims contain silver, such as "Silver Sol Liquid," and he says this stuff will diagnose or cure COVID-19. He admits that his product hasn't been tested on COVID-19, but he does allow that God sent it to us.

A proud moment, when Jim swapped his expensive suits for prison jumpsuits

Some of you were not around for the Bakker heyday. Although he claims to be a minister, he is not a graduate of any college or university that offers divinity degrees. Instead, he is an evangelist, which anyone can be. He started out in the 60s with Pat Robertson's network and formed his own in the 70s. By the 80s, when cable tv brought both Ozzie and Harriet reruns and godless men of God to our living rooms, Bakker was rolling in dough with his daily "PTL Club" show. We knew people who were sending him a couple of hundred bucks a month, and "Jim and Tammy" (his then-wife was the oddly-made-up Tammy Faye Bakker) became America's new religious icons, rolling in ill-gotten gains.  They even had an air-conditioned dog house, and the now-defunct Heritage USA, a Christian themed amusement park in Fort Mill, South Carolina.

It all ended in the most 80s way possible. A bosomy church secretary, Jessica Hahn, charged that he paid her hush money (sound familiar, Donald?) to keep their affair a secret. That led him to resign from the "ministry." And then Bakker was indicted in 1988 on eight counts of mail fraud, 15 counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy, after which  Judge Robert Daniel Potter sentenced Bakker to 45 years in federal prison and imposed a $500,000 fine.  He served 5.

Tammy Faye divorced him, and after laying low for a few years, he remarried and started a new hustle called the Jim Bakker Show, from the Morningside Church in Blue Eye, Missouri.

Besides "cures" for coronavirus, he also peddles survival food in "Bakker Buckets."  His "50-day Survival Food" sampler bucket contains 154 meals. He wants $135 for it, but when the world comes to an end and the Apocalypse is nigh, you'll be sitting pretty on your Bakker Bucket with freeze-dried dinners and your silver solution.

The Saturday Picture Show, August 17, 2024

 

I look at this New Yorker cartoon and to me, what's funny is not the fish-out-of-water image of a cat in a barber's chair, and it's certainly not that it wants a head scratch. They want them every day. What cracks me up is the cat knowing the barber's first name is "Carl." It goes with David Letterman's rule that any name with a "K" sound (or hard "C") is funnier than a name without it. If the clipper's name was George, it wouldn't have been this funny. Frank would be hilarious, too.

My favorite part of paying compliments, besides the good feeling, is that it's one thing that it doesn't cost a nickel to pay.

I assemble the picture show every week by sorting through various sites and old pictures I've saved. I choose them at random on Tuesday night. Sometimes it seems like I'm working a theme, but trust me, I'm not that clever. So if it seems like a lot of cat pictures are in this assortment, it's not by design.  PS Look how happy Nancy is, surrounded by purrrfection!

I love my Orioles and all the various logos and pictures about them. Now that they are a great team again, it's fun to look back on when they were not so good, and be happy about it!

Sure, you can pay a bricklayer or stonemason a prince's ransom to build you a nice pizza oven in the yard. Or you and your buddy with a pickup can stop by Lowe's one Saturday for the bricks, go home, and start stacking! That pizza's gonna be great!

I can see the advantage for church ushers to use these long-handled baskets when it's time to take up the collection. Passing the plate can mean that some deadbeat will just pass it on without dropping in some lucre, or he can pretend not to notice the plate at all. But with this, an usher can gently tap a parsimonious parishioner on the shoulder or temple to shake a buck out of him.

This is where we get the term "busy as a bee." 

Your free wallpaper for the week is a view of our nighttime sky. We so rarely stop to look up and observe the majesty over us.

The window washer took time to leave a caricature of the feline who was watching him work!

Get ready for four years of Hollywood Olympic hype!

Fishing for fun

In Baltimore, we have the National Aquarium, a must-see stop with tanks full of fish for spectating tourists who will later head out for a seafood dinner.

In Brooklyn, New York, they have a puddle, and they're making a BFD (big fish deal) about it.

It's not a really deep puddle, just a little lagoon by a leaky fire hydrant where people keep placing goldfish who need a new home.

It seems like no matter what the cause is, you can always find someone willing to label themselves an "advocate" for it, and so there are people so invested in this tiny sidewalk lake that they have started, you guessed it, a GoFundMe campaign.

People who moan about the horrid state of the American economy will be cheered to hear that as of last week, people had dug $1100 out of their pockets to try to "help build a better habitat for the fishes to thrive and also funds for food and an outside ventilation system for them so they can survive through the seasons, so the community can continue to enjoy the beauty of nature. We appreciate all and any support we can get to help the fire hydrant goldfish."

I'll show you the "pond" in a sec, but some in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood up there in B'klyn are laughing at the effort to even call it that.

But..."We don’t have an aquarium, so it's good as we're going to get," Laura Dexter, a Bed-Stuy resident, says.

If you still have vacation time left, head on up to the corner of  Tompkins Avenue and Hancock Street, 11216, and bring your camera! Because it's become quite the local cause. Just ask local Ken Garner, who says, "Everybody takes a turn. Did you feed the fish? Did you check on the fish?"

It all started when Je-Quan Irving and his buddies invested $16 at a pet shop. That got the 100 goldfish, many of which are still bobbing around in the sidewalk spa.

But...someone turned to the expert in the situation, and that would be Julius Tepper, DVM, who runs the Long Island Fish Hospital.

They really DO have everything in New York!

Dr Tepper points out, "You’ve got issues with pollution that could be a problem. You've got issues with predatory birds."

What's more, a crew from the city's Department of Environmental Protection crews showed up last week and shut off the trickling hydrant.

And folks are showing up with red Solo Cups, scooping up guppies to take them to safer surroundings.

And as soon as the crew took off, someone opened the water flow again, vowing to keep the mini-aquarium going until the cold weather arrives.

You'll remember from the time you read The Catcher In The Rye that Holden Caulfield was all worked up about what happened to the goldfish in Manhattan in wintertime: 

"If you was a fish, Mother Nature'd take care of you, wouldn't she? Right? You don't think them fish just die when it gets to be winter, do ya?"

This is the scene of the piscine pandemonium. We'll keep you posted!

Right?

People who know these things say that interjecting the word "right" in our speech is called using a "filler word."

A lot of people do this. And it can backfire. I think they do it in the first place to seem authoritative or polished. But when they do it while speaking to someone such as I, who thinks everything through way too deeply, it slows down the conversation, because I answer them!

If you say to me, "The Orioles are a baseball team, and for many years they did not do very well, but for the past several seasons they have been near to or at the top of the standings in the American League East, right?"

I'll say, "Yes, that's right."

And you'll say, "Yeah, they're great, you know what I'm saying?"

And I will say, "I do know what you're saying, so please just say it without all the excess verbiage."

Using a rhetorical crutch like this can really distract from the message one seeks to share. This really hit home when I was watching the morning news the other day, and a child psychologist (actually a grown woman) was talking about the ways to get a child off to a good start in the new school year. And her advice was great! As someone who was inevitably the first kid in any class to be sentenced to detention, I know the difference.

But I wonder how many parents got her message, because - I am not exaggerating - she inserted "right?" in virtually every sentence. And after a while, I think that bespeaks not confidence or polish, but the exact opposite? It's as if the speaker keeps asking, "Am I right about this? Should I go on?"

Take this simple test: Here is William Shakespeare's immortal Sonnet 116 in its original form:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments; love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove.

O no, it is an ever-fixèd mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wand'ring bark

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come.

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom:

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

****************************************

And now let's muck it up with nonsense:

 Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments, right? love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds, right?

Or bends with the remover to remove.

O no, it is an ever-fixèd mark, you know what I'm saying?

That looks on tempests and is never shaken, right;

It is the star to every wand'ring bark

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken. You follow me?

Love's not time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come, right?

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom:

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved. You know?

That distant rumble you just heard was old Willie rolling over in his grave. We should use geometry in speaking, that old rule about a straight line being the shortest way to get from point A to point B. Saying more with fewer words and verbal crutches is that straight line.

And that's all I have to say.

Belief

It's the middle of August, what I call Elvis Week, and once again, our crepe myrtle in the back yard is fully ablaze in pink!

Funny tree, or shrub, or bush, whatever it is. Some people spell it Crepe Myrtle, some go with Crape Myrtle, and now and then you'll see Crepemyrtle.  However you spell or name it, its blooms appear right in the middle of hellish summer heat, long after the forsythias and azaleas have lost their luster and retreated back to stubborn green.

Ms Myrtle waits until all the other bloomers have had their turns, and then she does her thing. And with her blooms at the top of long tall branches, they wave majestically at the people piling into their SUVs to get back-to-school shopping done.

(Kids - ask your folks if they had Trapper Keepers back in the day! They drove teachers nuts, for some reason.)

We planted our CM shortly after we moved in, maybe 2001 or '02. And every year since it took a notion to bloom, it has done so in this very week. Like being able to expect people to say, "The Ravens will never win a Super Bowl with Lamar," it's as dependable as an Accutron watch. 

Except for one year, and I will tell you this with my hand on a Bible if you wish...

D.

In 2014, that sad June, my mother (who bought and brought the little plant to us) died, and in July, our dear Deanna went to be with the Lord. Deanna's funeral was in Phila on July 19 that year, and when we got home that night, we looked out back and the crepe myrtle was gloriously pink and waving greetings from above.

A month early.  And it never happened before then, or since.

I believe in signs and messages. This is one that lives with us every day.

Kevin!!!

All this talk about Paris the last couple of weeks makes me want to tell that you can now buy the great big brick house featured in the original "Home Alone" movie in 1990 for a mere $5.25 million.

The last time the manse in Winnetka, Illinois, was sold, the year was 2012, and the family that had owned it during its time of movie-set stardom still owned it. They got $1.585 million for it, a dozen years ago.

Getting down to the details, the five-bedroom house measures out at 9,126 square feet. There are six bathrooms, a wood-burning fireplace and a hot tub for your bubbling pleasure.

And there is an indoor basketball court! So there you go! You can dribble before you bubble!

Never at a loss for hyperbolic house descriptions, the real estate people describe this old (built in 1921, refurbished in 2018) pile of bricks as “one of the most iconic movie residences in American pop culture” and “a masterpiece of traditional style.” 

And in case you don't feel like buying the house and running it like Twitty City - the home of the late country singer Conway Twitty, who allowed paying guests to traipse through his house and stay behind the velvet ropes while the man who sang "You're The Reason Our Kids Are Ugly" in a duet with Loretta Lynn munched his Post Toasties and walked around looking for the remote - the sellers have installed security fences to keep the curious at bay.

 

 

Getting back to the Paris connection, it seems that a favorite conversation among fans of the Home Alone movies is adding up how much it would have cost, even in 1990, to haul an entire family (minus one) to Paris for a vacation. 

And that provides a jumping-off point for discussing what sort of job paterfamilias Peter McCallister was holding down to shell out that sort of moolah.

People really get into this in online chat groups, none of which seemed to be named "Let's Remember It's A Movie."

The Brain That Wouldn't Be Right

I don't know much about artificial intelligence. I don't even know much about real intelligence, and then along comes AI and it looks like it's saying "Al" as in Al Bundy and I'm so confused, it's not fair.

But now even the Googlers are admitting that it's more like artificial unintelligence at times. For one thing, being soulless like some people, AI can't tell a joke from a fact.  And that is dumb. 

Someone recently asked Google AI how to keep cheese from sliding off a homemade pizza.  AI said to mix some glue - I'm guessing Elmer's - into the cheese to hold that mozzarella right in place.

And years ago, I got picked on for suggesting we drop some Visine into chili so my eyes wouldn't water when I hit a really hot pepper in the mix.

Google (they have taken this one down, but still...) advised us to drink a lot of urine to help pass a kidney stone.

Asked when John F.  Kennedy was graduated from college, AI said the most Harvard-y man ever was a U of Wisconsin grad, and specified six different years, including 1993, the thirtieth anniversary of his death.

Asked for an African country that started with a K, AI said there were none, which must have really hurt the feelings of millions of people in Kenya. 

Now, to be sure, some people with nothing better to do on a lovely day like today try to trick Google AI into giving wrong answers. Later, for even more fun, they go to hospitals and loosen the bolts on the wheelchairs.

However, one palm up! We are being told that with Google's generative AI, OpenAI’s, ChatGPT,  and Microsoft’s Copilot, you should just count on them being wrong until you see proof that they're right.

Get this explanation, which is similar to a lot of people explaining what that bag o' of stolen bank money is doing in their pants pocket:  

“The vast majority of AI Overviews provide high quality information, with links to dig deeper on the web, ” Google says. And they add that they are using these and other mistakes to “develop broader improvements to our systems, some of which have already started to roll out.”

Oh, so they KNOW it was wrong and they are now out to prove it. Sorry for any student who did a term paper on JFK Sr, though.

 

Sunday Rerun (from 2020): At least we learned something

 We can't seem to escape one thing: every horrible event, such as this current pandemic, adds to our vocabulary.

It's not a new word; certainly it was known to doctors and other medical professionals, but we all know now that the technical term for "losing the sense of smell" is "anosmia."  We used to just call it "can't smell nothin' " but now we know better.  It's pronounced uhNAHZmeea, not uhNOSEmia, by the way.  I checked!

Holly Bourne is a woman from London who says anosmia is "one of the most upsetting things (she's) ever gone through. I woke up and couldn't taste or smell anything. It was the most acute thing I've ever experienced."

She did not have the cough or high fever, but when she was cooking one day with her back to the stove and failed to notice the scent of a plastic margarine tub on the stovetop until her boyfriend alerted her, she noticed she couldn't smell a thing, and called her doctor, who said he was able to diagnose her "straight off the bat" with Covid-19 over the phone.

This novel coronavirus is all new  - hence the "novel" characterization - and so there have been no studies yet on the link between coronavirus and sense of smell or taste, but the reports of it among people with the COVID-19 are so numerous as to make it seem unlikely to be coincidental.

And there's also a condition known as hyposmia, or partial loss of the sense of smell. I was planning to call it Anosmia, Jr or Anosmia Lite, but hyposmia it shall be.

But how long will it last?  That's unknown, according to Professor Steven Munger, Director of the University of Florida's Center for Smell and Taste.


"What we've known for a long time is one of the major causes of smell loss are upper respiratory tract infections due to viruses -- a common cold, influenza -- a subset of people lose their sense of smell, most of them temporarily, but a small subset lose that smell permanently," Munger told CNN.

Munger adds that there is "a real emotional component to smell, a connectedness that comes with it" and that gets into how our social connections are involved with food or drink. Even beyond the angle of safety - not noticing the smell of fire or that of spoiled food - that social aspect is important, especially as we look forward to getting together with friends and family after the pandemic is over.

There's every reason to believe that senses of taste and smell will return as soon as the malls reopen.  That's either a good or bad thing, depending.

The Saturday Picture Show, August 10, 2024

 

Olympic photographers line up the best shots during the athletic action, and then it's just a matter of luck and good timing!

This is not just any old apple tree, no sir. This is the apple tree under which Sir Isaac Newton was sitting when an apple fell off and plunked Ike on the noggin, leaving him to appreciate the gravity of the situation. The tree is still thriving at Woolsthorpe Manor in Grantham, England - it's over 350 years old!

Say hi to Babe The Blue Ox, mascot of the Kents Store (Virginia) Volunteer Fire Company! Paul Bunyan's companion is usually found in Minnesota. I couldn't find out why these volunteers use his image, but the engine looks great, am I wrong?

Some people go out of their way to prove how awful they are. First, they get one of these Musk Trucks and then they block the pedestrian walkway. Later, he'll steal coins from the poorbox.

This barn has seen better days, but there's a fortune in the old wood! People pay top dollar for weathered planks like this.

Baltimore's Senator Theater is like this, the Alabama Theater in Birmingham.  A lobby and waiting area so luxe, you would almost want to hang around waiting to see a director's cut of The Rise of Skywalker. Almost.

Your free wallpaper for the week is a walk in the park.

Someone always thinks it's cute to label lavatories "Stallions and Mares," or "Señores and Señoritas" or some such. Why not gender-appropriate pictograms?

Simone Biles is more than a story of physical excellence. Even more important, she overcame self-doubt and whipped the world this summer, and for that she deserves all the respect in the world!

Just as Florida State has their mascot Osceola ride atop Renegade, these high schoolers from Washington Irving country have a cool rider for their games. I'm sure it's a high honor to lose your head for your high school!

Slice of Life

You know what the worst book ever was? It was the old World Book Encylopedia!

Not in terms of content, certainly not. That old multivolume information compendium got me through many a report in elementary school ("Why The Sun Promotes Growth On Earth"), junior high ("The Sights and Sounds of Sunny Seville") and high school ("Journalism Careers - Our Link To Our Future"), and the surest way to tell that old Mark had been hitting the blue books was the evidence of a thousand paper cuts on my fingers. 

The World Book was printed on the thinnest, sharpest-edged paper known to man, and just thumbing through its fact-filled pages was an adventure in lacerations. 

 

After all these years and all those band-aids, I decided to look into the matter of why the better paper was the most likely to cut skin open. After all, no one ever suffered from reading the New York POST, unless they took its contents seriously. 

Science to the rescue, with the explanation that paper that's too thin will curl up before it even has the chance to slice your index finger, and thick paper won't pierce the skin. It's like when a knife is dull and unable to push force on the skin.

But physicist Kaare Jensen and her team went to work on this vital topic and they found that paper 65 micrometers thick is just right to slit the leather.

If you used to have one of those dot matrix printers (or if you ever dated Ms Dot Matrix from Poughkeepsie), well, that was the deadliest sort of paper. Magazines come in second, now that the space in family libraries where once encyclopedias dwelled is filled with dusty Wii devices and exploding Gameboys.

So, armed with this information, the researchers looked for something useful to do with it, and they have designed a 3-D printed tool they're calling  the Papermachete. Just put a strip of that printer paper into it, and you have a single-use knife to shop and slice fruits and veggies and meat and cheese.

Of course, you have to change the paper strip often...

Ms Jensen, of the Technical University of Denmark in Kongens Lyngby, says her team is always looking to experiment with these new types of cutting technology, but ... “Ideally you would want some test subjects, but it’s hard to find volunteers.”

I'm sure they printed their research paper, but if you get a copy, please handle it very carefully!

Wave it

Any political candidate who wants to get the union vote makes sure that all printed materials he or she plans to mail or hand out has the union bug, the little seal that testifies the printing was done in a union shop. 

They print it in a tiny lower corner, but it's important. 

Same way with the American flag, our lovely star-spangled banner. Wouldn't you think that any right-thinking American seeking American votes would want to make sure that the 1,776 flags they use to bedeck their platform (literal and figurative) are sewn in America? Not to mention their campaign caps.

Well, bipartisan efforts in Congress are making sure that Old Glory is really made here in the land that we love. 

Republicans and Democrats alike passed a proposal that says the federal gummint can only buy American flags that were completely manufactured here. You won't believe this, but it's true: we import millions of flags from foreign countries, mostly China...over $4 million worth a year!

Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine and Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio put forth the proposal, saying that it goes beyond the symbolism, that making the banners here will bring back American jobs. 

"The American flag serves as a symbol of our identity, resolve, and values as one people. To honor its significance, the federal government should only use flags entirely manufactured in the United States," Collins said.

Look at me, agreeing with something Susan Collins said!

Just in time

From the Crime Beat: Dateline 1987. Person or persons unknown stole a loaned silver pocket watch from the Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural National Historic Site in Buffalo, New York. Yes, the watch belonged to beloved Teddy Roosevelt, US president from 1901 - 1909. His sister and her husband gave him the watch before he was president and even before his noted victory at the Battle of San Juan Hill in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, his days as a wild game hunter in Africa and his exploration of the Amazon through South America.

I guess he didn't have bone spurs.

But 37 years after it was ripped off, it came back last week to the Roosevelt Site in Buffalo. It was found last year at a Florida auction house, and federal agents verified its provenance and returned it. It's a Waltham watch from Massachusetts, with a plain silver exterior and the engraving  “THEODORE ROOSEVELT” and “FROM D.R. & C.R.R.,” (that's Roosevelt’s brother-in-law and sister, Douglas Robinson Jr. and Corinne Roosevelt Robinson) on the inside.

Tweed Roosevelt and the returned watch

Even those words were not proof of its authenticity. After all, anyone could have anything inscribed on a watch. But, it's the real McCoy, and TR's great-grandson, the magnificently-named Tweed Roosevelt, is glad to have it back among the family heirlooms.

“This was feel-good news,” Tweed, 82, said last week. “For me, it kind of felt like almost as if a piece of TR’s spirit being returned to Sagamore Hill, like a little bit of him was coming back. And so I felt that was really cool.”

I think the only thing cooler than having a great-grandson named Tweed (who, it should be noted, was in the crowd at Woodstock in 1969!) would be to be one of the four presidents pictured on Mt Rushmore - and be the one with the cool pince-nez* glasses on!

 * Pince-nez (pronounced POHNCE-NAY) glasses are those specs that literally pinch one's nose to stay on one's face. It's directly from the French for "pinch nose".

 

 

Shipping and Handling

We've all seen that picture of Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, sitting at a folding table in his garage in the nascent days of Amazon. 

He's done pretty well for himself since then, has he not? He started the company as a way to buy books on line and now one can purchase just about everything from him. Not gonna lie, my first thought when we need cat litter/wet food/dry food, granola bars in big boxes, creams, powders, lotions, printer paper, Bay Rum aftershave, vitamins, compression socks, dishwasher gel, candles, dish towels, batteries, and yes, books...is no longer a run to the mall or Wally World. I grab my tablet and let my index finger do the walking, as the Yellow Pages used to urge us to do. 

As avid Amazonians, we are happy to have gift cards to use for above items and many more. But Mr Bezos, I know you follow every word I write online. I need only mention an interest in playing the trumpet, learning to bake homemade bread, or making the headlights on our cars sparkle like new, and the next thing I know, my feed is coincidentally full of ads for musical instruments, flour, bread pans, and Shine-Like-Nu headlight cleaner. 

Thanks, Jeff, for the suggestions, and here's one for you. Try to make it so that removing the gift card from the little black cardboard folder does not mutilate the redemption code, as below:

It only took a fifteen-minute phone call to somewhere far, far away and delightful chat with an Amazon CSR to get this card value appended to my account, and while I enjoy meeting people from far, far away under these circumstances, that was fifteen minutes I could have spent buying things on Amazon! So Jeff, please fix this, and keep on shipping the things I need!

PS - don't try to figure out this garbled code, wise guy. It's ABC (already been cashed!)

Can we just get rid of these things?

From the news: A 5-year-old boy from La Plata died Friday night after authorities say a gust of wind carried a moon bounce he was playing inside up to 20 feet in the air before landing on a baseball field at Regency Furniture Stadium in Waldorf.

As the moon bounce at a Southern Maryland Blue Crabs baseball game lifted into the air, it caused “children to fall before it landed on the playing field,” according to a Charles County government news release. The 5-year-old, whose name has not yet been released, was transported to a hospital and was later pronounced dead. Authorities said another child, whose name and age was not shared, suffered non-life-threatening injuries.

Witnesses are saying that the bounce house was staked to the ground, but no one is sure how many kids were playing in it when the wind gust carried it away. 911 was called at 9:20 pm.

  

This is the collapsed bounce house, still on the field.

This seems to happen too often. 479 people were hurt and 28 were killed in wind-related bounce house incidents from 2000 to 2021. Experts advise that even a minor gust of wind can be dangerous, and that an adult should always be monitoring the house at all times.

We don't know what was going on Friday night.  All of Central Maryland had wind, lightning, and rain storms that night, but who knows if the blast of wind that carried these kids off, killing one of them, was the first to come to the stadium. Were storm and wind warnings posted? There were advisories up here where we live, but I don't know how much advance notice they had in Waldorf. 

Chemistry sets, lawn darts, Super Elastic Bubble Plastic, real tire swings, clackers, metal sliding boards, lead paint, Easy-Bake ovens, Creepy Crawlers are all things that we didn't know enough to know were bad and/or dangerous. I know these bouncy toys are incredibly popular with kids and young families. 

I believe kids can live without them.  

 

Sunday Rerun: The First of its Kind

  I have to admit, we are a little late watching the MAX miniseries "White House Plumbers," about the bumbling ineptitude of G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt as they carry out their sworn mission to make sure that R. Milhous Nixon would win the 1972 presidential election.

Justin Theroux (l) and Woody Harrelson as Liddy and Hunt.

It just dawned on me when I sat down to write to you about the show that maybe the entire concept of a "miniseries" came about when television bigwigs saw this drama unfold night after night on the Evening News. It was 51 years ago tomorrow that the first crack in the damn dam appeared, when Hunt and Liddy sent a "crack" team of burglars to the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate complex in Washington to get information that might harm the chances for George McGovern to defeat Nixon.

McGovern did not have a chance in hell of winning that election. Even with all the trouble Nixon got into before the election, he still won 60.7% of the vote, but because he had a deeply suspicious nature, he was certain that "THEY" were out to get him.

That seems to be a recurrent theme in presidential politics.

But again, Nixon sent people on all sorts of nefarious missions to sew up the election for himself, and he really should not have bothered. Because the doofuses (doofi?) Hunt and Liddy sent to break into the DNC offices were caught taping the doorlatch open, and a poorly-paid security guard named Frank Wills saved the nation by catching the dunderheads in the act.

Wills called the police, and as it happened, three members of DC's finest happened to be in the area in plainclothes, looking for drug deals and street crimes. They responded to the call and arrested the burglars, who had a lookout named Alfred Baldwin stationed in the Howard Johnson's hotel across the street. Baldwin would have seen the police entering the building and could have notified his compadres, but he was watching a movie called "Attack Of The Puppet People" on TV and, well, he let his guard down.

Starting with those arrests, and the investigation that led up the ladder past Hunt and Liddy all the way to the Big Man In Charge - Nixon - the nation was transfixed night after night as crimes were revealed and Congress took action to investigate and punish the wrongdoers. Spoiler alert: they did.

But maybe that is where someone got the idea to have limited-run series of dramatic events, because this stuff is endlessly fascinating.

And just to show you that 51 years later, things have not really changed all that much, Nixon held a press conference on November 17, 1973, as the investigation began squeezing out the truth. That was the night he said, "People need to know whether their president is a crook. Well, I am not a crook."

And people laughed. It was fun and entertaining. Of course it was - it took place in Walt Disney's Contemporary Resort in Florida.

Then as now, it all comes back to the mouse.

The Saturday Picture Show, August 3, 2024

 

Foxes are omnivores, meaning that like a lot of people, they will eat most anything. Here's one lugging home the fixin's for a nice stew he's gonna whomp up.

Lt. Dan, his legs having miraculously regenerated, and Bubba came back to that park bench where Forrest Gump wove his tale so sweetly thirty years ago. Yes. 30.

So, you can't always trust words, but you can count on actions. OK.

Weiner dogs go Parisian for the Olympics!

There's not much on AM radio these days, but if you still have your Burger King AM radio headphones, you can catch news stories about how much it costs to eat at Burger King, and some church services.

Gold medals for the US Women's Gymnasts, and how about Simone Biles, making such a terrific comeback to lead the way. Believe me when I say, you cannot keep a good woman down!

White shirt and tie used to be the rule for office wear for men, and of course no one would appear on TV without some silk wrapped around their neck. One day, Johnny Carson walked out on the Tonight Show set wearing a turtleneck under his suit jacket, and within six weeks, turtlenecks were the thing in offices and everywhere else. He tried to do the same thing with Nehru jackets, but naaaaaah.

The US men's gymnastics team took the Bronze medal, in large part because of the skills of Stephen Nedoroscik on the pommel horse (which looks a lot like the hoss I had in this year's Preakness, but anyway...) Nedoroscik has crossed eyes — or strabismus, as your eye doctor would say, a condition of the eye muscles. He doesn't need his glasses when he's doing his thing (he knows by the feel of his hands where he is) and glasses would fly off, so he does a Clark Kent thing and doffs them before doing amazing feats.

A park added this sign to a bench and it has encouraged people who need encouragement to talk to talk. I wonder how that would feel.

I just want to say one mature, grownup thing about the stupid things some stupid people are saying about childless people. It's none of your beeswax, so shut your piehole. You don't know this, because you don't care, but your words hurt people who wanted children and were unable to have them, or who had them and lost them. So if you have kids, good for you! Love them and nurture them and raise them to be people who don't say mean things.

Fragrant mail

America has been slipping in the race to make the most accurate bobbleheads, and we are apparently lagging behind in another crucial field of human endeavor.

The brilliant people of France have taken the worldwide lead in scratch-and-sniff production. While the best we seem to do is to stick a 25-coupon in the mail and have it smell somewhat like Irish Spring soap, the French are making baguette-inspired scratch-and-sniff stamps. 

And while some purists, the bakers with the big puffy hats, are claiming insufficient yeastiness on the stamp smell, postal worker Clarisse Briend says, "You just have to rub the stamp here like this with your nails.  You can smell the bread, the baguette.”

Here's a bakery manager, Jeanne Barrere, saying it smells more like vanilla. And her chief baker, Harlem Gbodialo, can't pin it down any more than to say the stamps have a “sugary, fruity aroma.”

As you may have heard, baguettes, those long, thin rolls, are a big deal in France. The postal service says they are the “bread of our daily life, symbol of our gastronomy, jewel of our culture.”

French bakers bake six million of them per day, not bad for a country with a population of 68 million. 

I guess a few of them have to share. 

Anyway, maybe one of us will get a postcard from France with a special scratch-and-sniff stamp. Let me know if it passes the sniff test!

 

Dream a little dream

In rating the gods and goddesses of Greco-Roman mythology, I have always felt that Morpheus, son of Hypnos, the God of Sleep, deserved more attention for his gift to us of good nights of sleep and midday naps to augment them. When we want to be poetic about catching someone asleep, we say they are "in the arms of Morpheus," as long as we are not their supervisor.

Anyway, athletes need a good night of rest after all that work they do, and this summer's Olympics in Gay Paree are providing small bedrooms with cardboard beds for the Olympians.

Well, most of them, at least. Tennis player Coco Gauff, a flag bearer for Team USA at the opening ceremony, told social media that "all the tennis girls moved to a hotel" except her.

Her post summed it up handily:  "10 girls, two bathrooms," and anyone who knows numbers knows they were eight bathrooms short.

Gymnast Simone Biles said on TikTok that the "bed sucks" but pointed out "we are getting mattress toppers."

They're sleeping on cardboard (the really stout kind like your new stove came in) bedframes and mattresses made from something called AirFiber by a company called Airweave. They wanted this to be the most sustainable Olympics ever, so these mattresses are going to be donated and reused.

Australian field hockey player Nathan Ephraums says the mattresses are like a  "Scrub Daddy" sponge.

In just a few short years, we have gone from Sean "Puff Daddy" Combs to "Scrub Daddy" mattresses. Is that progress?