The Saturday Picture Show, October 19, 2024

 

There just is not a prettier time of year for me. While cherry blossoms dance in spring, I'm already imagining falling leaves!

You remember the song "Winchester Cathedral" by the New Vaudeville Band? It was all over the radio, winter '66-'67, and we who love that era of music thought we were in for a long run of nostalgia. And then, nothing! But...this is what the cathedral looks like, anyway.

I know, this looks like Asian watercolor art, but it's a photograph from a blizzard one fine day.

Early fall snow in the Adirondacks landing on the changing trees. They call it "snowliage," and why not?

What a great idea for those of us who don't have 14" long skinny fingers. In Europe, your Pringles family of snacks is served in little trays.

What's sadder than an abandoned diner? Someone, somewhere, make some rice pudding and lemon meringue pie, order some bacon and eggs and pancake mix, and get this place open, please!

The person who posted this said they are really making those mazes a lot easier to solve now, and I don't know if they were kidding or not.

Someone mentioned tube socks the other day. (I get into the most wonderful conversations!) And the greatest example I could think of, even better than Mr T wearing two mismatched socks to show he came up from hard times, is the album cover photo from Skynyrd's "Street Survivors" album, showing drummer Artimus Pyle wearing the most 1977 socks of all time with his cutoff cargo denims. Good times! You should have been there!

This building in Belarus used to have a far more official purpose than its current incarnation for slinging $5 Tender Boxes, but progress is progress,

I saw this picture, I cannot tell you anything about it other than it shows a lot of red, like a map of Florida.

Dr Fermento

Ladies and gentlemen, we are here this morning before breakfast to talk about the gut-brain axis.

How about that? What affects your head also affects your stomach. So your eyes see something vile (I will not mention his name!) and your tummy does that Tullahoma Twist. Every time!

So a bad belly can mess you up! Let's ask Katherine Brooking, M.S., RD, who is a registered dietitian:  “Substances produced in the gut by bacteria can travel or send signals up large nerves, such as the vagus nerve, directly to the brain—triggering different brain activities that can alter mood, behavior, memory and cognition.”

There you have it. You thought all along it was all those Big Macs putting you in a bad way, when all along it was the thought of those Big Macs that did you in.

Well, I want you to know that fermented food are here to help. They have the good bacteria for your healthy belly and your proper mind. I found a list of the six best fermented foods for your brain health. 

1. Yogurt 

Yogurt is fine by itself or whipped up in a smoothie or as a dip. It contains probiotics - the good bacteria. It also reduces inflammation and enhances brain function.

2. Kimchi 

The traditional Korean Kimchi is made from fermented vegetables (cabbage and carrots) and ginger and garlic. Its probiotics are said to help improve cognitive function (make you smarter!) and it may help reduce the risk of neurodegenerative diseases (Alzheimer's disease, dementia.)

And it has vitamin K, (keeps your noodle tuned up) and antioxidants for your immune system. 

3. Kombucha

Kombucha is currently very trendy, like Sydney Sweenie, but fizzier. It's tea, but not your grandmother's tea, because this one supports gut health, with probiotics to reduce inflammation and promote mental well-being. Again, it can help manage anxiety and depression, unless you are anxious and depressed over having to drink something called "kombucha."

4. Miso

You take some fermented soybeans (check the pantry) and make a thick paste of them. That's miso, used in soups, condiments, or as a glaze for salmon. It's said to be packed with flavor and full of brain-boosting probiotics. 

Say that three times. Now have some miso and say it again.

Miso contains folate, niacin and choline, all of which are supposed to improve brains, all the while reducing inflammation of the brain and the body.

Not milkshakes, but kefir-berry smoothies! 

5. Tempeh 

Net chance you get, ferment some whole soybeans, and you'll have Tempeh, chock-full of protein for a plant-based source. Tempeh is said to be good at improving your memory, so remember, "Tempeh fugit"!

6. Kefir 

Not to be confused with Kiefer Sutherland, Kefir is a "fermented drinkable beverage product that is made with milk or water" that you are supposed to think tastes a lot like a milkshake. And you'll think so, if you also believe that eating mud is like eating chocolate pudding.

Because it's so full of Lactobacillus, kefir improves your memory to a point where you will usually forget to buy some and reach for ice cream instead.

Say what?

Somehow, this woman named Marjorie Taylor Greene became a U.S. Representative from Georgia, and she is up to her chit again, this time suggesting that  “they” control the weather. This nonsense was doled out as many Southern states, Republican-leaners all (including her Georgia), deal with the double wallops of Hurricanes Helene and Milton. 

What she said was: “Yes, they can control the weather. It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”

I limit my political content to snarky Facebook remarks and Instagram photos meant to embarrass a certain family, but I have to comment on this lunacy from MTG, because if there's one thing we of a certain age heard about all the time, it was the parental ban on nonspecific pronouns. For example:

"SHE won't let me to Towson Plaza to hang around the carnival."

The reply: "SHE has a name! Don't call people 'she'."

"We all had to write 'I will not talk in class" a thousand times because of HIM!"

In this landmark case from junior high, "HIM" referred to a martinet who taught social studies.

So, don't be afraid to name the people to whom you refer, unless you are speaking of an unschooled woman such as Greene, who once claimed that our government was trying to force us to eat fake meat grown by Bill Gates in a petri dish, although she called that glass dish seen in every school science lab a "peach tree dish," and once got mixed up and called the Nazi secret police of WWII Germany the "Gazpacho," instead of Gestapo, proving that it's foolish to serve a complete meal, soup to nuts.

Order up!

I happen to like waffles, so I support the people at Waffle House as they seek to serve our nation with pockmarked pancakes, bacon and eggs. You can't beat that for a morning chow-down.

And they are open 24/7/365, not just to sling the eats but also to operate a disaster preparedness center. That's right! The company is proud to tell you, they operate a storm center in “a real conference room converted for our crisis response” at their headquarters in Georgia.

“We have responded to hurricanes and the like for more than 30 years,” said Njeri Boss, vice president and Boss of food safety and public relations at Waffle House.

It was Hurricane Katrina in 2005 that led WH to augment their crisis management processes. They lost seven restaurants in that horrible storm, and another hundred were damaged enough to be shut down for some time, but as things got back on track down south, people flocked to Waffle House because they were open!

Katrina taught the company to prepare for disastrous storms. They developed disaster prep manuals for all their locations, and added portable generators and mobile command centers to keep their restaurants open when bad storms struck.

And people noticed! The public, and government emergency agencies, started keeping an eye on WH operations. To make it all easy for all to understand, management set up a color-coded system - and made the status of all restaurants available online - through the “Waffle House Index.”

There are three color-coded levels on the index:

🟩 Green means a full menu is available, lights are on, and any damage in the area is limited.

🟨  Yellow indicates a limited menu, what power the restaurant has is from a generator, and food supplies are not optimum.

🟥 Red means the restaurant is closed, there being severe damage or unsafe conditions in the area.

Government agencies have come to regard this index as an accurate gauge of how things are in any county or municipality.

I tell you, there is nothing like American commerce and cuisine! 

I'll have a classic waffle, a slice of country ham, eggs over easy, and hominy* grits, please!

*at least three or four hundred

 

Look up!

For the first time in a long time, what everyone around our town was talking about watching last Thursday night was not The Voice or the Golden Bachelorette or even the news. 

It was The Northern Lights, which put on quite a show visible to everyone in town except on our court, where we are seemingly hemmed in by too-tall trees or something. Peggy went out to look for the NLs and saw nothing in the sky except for a passing police helicopter (which is usually the #1 cause of excitement around here.)

Facebook and Instagram filled up with northern lights pictures, so I looked into the matter of what they are. It took a while to get a response, because the search engines were full of people trying to find a way to work a sponsorship deal, projecting advertising for car dealers, bariatric weight loss, and same-day floor covering services into the sky.

So here is what I found: It's all because of a solar storm, and believe me, you won't want to be outside when chunks of the sun come raining down. The sun is not doing that (yet) but it is releasing solar flares and coronal mass ejections, and these are showing up much farther south than usual in an effort to reach that vital mid-Atlantic market.

Look back in your diary for this past May. We had another solar storm then, but no one paid much attention to it because spring was springing and it was so nice out. That May storm was much more intense than the one last week. 

When the sun gets busy (!), that causes these auroras.  Auroras dance around the earth's poles, causing Northern Lights (aurora borealis) in this hemisphere, and southern lights (aurora australis) which shine brightly in the southern hemisphere. This is not to be confused with Aurora, Colorado, which shines brightly in the shadow of Denver.

And what's with all these vivid colors? They occur because energized particles from coronal mass ejections (expulsions of plasma and magnetic field from the Sun's corona) come to Earth’s magnetic field and want to show off a little, so they come in contact with atmospheric gases and presto! Different colored lights in the sky!

 

What's today?

  

Indigenous Peoples' Day is a holiday celebrating and honoring Native American peoples by commemorating their histories and cultures. After all, they were here first! It's time to recognize and pay them respect; this is a holiday in Baltimore City and all across the nation this second Monday in October. It is an official city and state holiday in various localities.

Sunday rerun: What fore?

 I remember playing golf a few times with some friends back in my carefree teens. I usually did pretty well, although a couple of times, I couldn't get the doggone ball past the little windmill and through to the hole.

Kidding. I did play 18 holes of golf, and only fell asleep once or twice.  

I get a lot of looks for saying this, but I think golf is deadly boring. In fact, any smart detective who wants to pin some sort of crime spree on me needs only to lock me in a room with a TV and a broken remote that's stuck on the Golf Channel. I'll confess to whatever I'm falsely accused of, and also help clear up cases that have baffled the local gendarmes for decades, just to get out of watching Bubba and his pants smacking a little ball around while a rapt crowd stands, well, rapt, and silent.  Until the guy sinks a two-foot putt, and a wave of polite applause ripples through the crowd.

If you play baseball, a sweaty man 60' 6" away is going to throw a small white ball toward you at 90-some miles per hour. Football players have to tackle a man the approximate size of Delaware as he lumbers down the field toting a ball, and basketball players get thrown around like toothpicks battling for rebounds.

And all of that is happening while tens of thousands of people hoot and ululate and holler.  

Have you ever heard a ballplayer say, "I was going to catch that fly ball, but a rude fan in the left field bleachers said something derogatory about my parentage and I lost concentration, so upset was I"?

No, and you haven't heard of a football player asking that the crowd sit on their hands while he tries to make a 47-yard field goal.  "You pays your money and you speaks your mind" is the law of the ballpark.

But oh no! Golf, and tennis, another game requiring funny pants, require total stillness while play goes on. In fact, they probably ask that you be totally silent while you're driving to the match, just to get quiet enough.  I don't get this, and since I wouldn't pay to attend a game during which I could not boo or cheer or razz someone, I turned to the good old internet to find out why the ban on volubility exists at The Snootington Tennis Club or Morning Wood Country Club.

"Etiquette," said United States Golf Association historian Robert Williams in the Florida Times-Union. "Golf has been a gentleman's game from the very beginning and players treated each other with respect. During the early tournaments such as the British Open and U.S. Open, the spectators were almost 100 percent golfers themselves so they all practiced etiquette and the tradition has carried on ever since."

"You know, despite what happened, I-I'm still convinced you have many fine qualities and I... I think you can still become a gentleman some day if you understand and abide by the rules of decent society."  - - The words of Judge Smails to Danny Noonan in "Caddyshack."

Judge Smails to Al Czervik: "You're no gentleman!"
Al Czervik to Judge Smails (as he dances away): "I'm no doorknob, either!"  (op. cit.)

You know what?  I'm with Al!

"It looks good on you, though!"

The Saturday Picture Show, October 12, 2024

 

If I may translate..."Juan Carlos, you cheated on me. Now all of Rosario (a city in Argentina) is going to see your nudes." The women in Rosario do not mess around! Run for it, Juan. Pronto!

Is this intentional, or just a happy accident, that the Aldi cow is happy to offer you some tasty nut-sweet Swiss Cheese?

Sunrise in Maine, where the blueberries and the mosquitoes grow large and juicy every summer.

The next time you're down at the State Fair in a state other than Maryland, where the state inspectors are notably fastidious about making sure amusement rides don't wind up putting funseekers in emergency rooms, make sure the Crazy Mouse is not propped on 6 x 6's.

This Mandarin Duck is preening for you at home in Cornwall, England, and he wants you to know that the American singer and entertainer known as Bobby Darin was born Walden Robert Cassotto, but took his stage name from the name of a Chinese restaurant called the Mandarin House. Your Picture Show staff spans the globe to bring you timely information.

Storm prep for Milton involved boarding up windows and saluting Milton Waddams and his Red Swingline Stapler, both stars of "Office Space."

I haven't seen such unalloyed bliss on anyone's face since they came and told me that there would be a "Jackass Forever." Musk looks like he's in a bliss frenzy over there, and even the guy on the left looks less dyspeptic than usual. We simply must get to Butler, PA, and see what's in the water up there.

There are words that just sound...yuck. "Phlegm", "moist", "mucus", "ointment", "ooze", and "seepage" lead my list, and let's not forget "membrane." Still, I like pumpkin seeds.

This shot has become a popular one for directors of live sports broadcasts - hands on head, stunned expression. This Tennessee fan modeled it for me last Saturday as his team lost to Arkansas (the team with a hog on its helmets) and so I was ready to wear this look later that evening when Vanderbilt beat Alabama (no photo available).

I might as well come out and admit to being a Gilmorean. Mark Consuelos said he streamed all 153 episodes of Gilmore Girls last summer, and every day when I go downstairs and ride my exercycle, the darn thing takes me right to Stars Hollow, a magical land of enchantment. I'm about 1/2 way through now. I love the GGs and I am proud to tell you so!

Ars Gratia Artis

I see videos from a mythical place called Katz's Delicatessen where sandwich makers make great pastrami and corned beef sandwiches. Say what you will about these sandwiches - they are big, they are expensive, they are not diet-friendly...but you will admit, they are works of art, however temporary they are.

Art is funny like that. It's all in the eye of the beholder. If you like corned beef sandwiches, these sandwiches are at the top of the heap - and what a heap that would be!

Speaking of art...someone threw some art in the trash at a Dutch museum. The "art" in question here was a pair of abandoned beer cans. Or, more accurately, homemade fake beer cans.

"All The Good Times We Spent Together," a 1988 artwork by French artist Alexandre Lavet, sure does look like a couple of empty suds cans, but no!

 "However, a closer look reveals that these dented cans were meticulously hand-painted with acrylics, with each detail painstakingly replicated," the LAM museum in Lisse said in a news release.

So the museum displayed this art in their elevator shaft. And someone - the elevator technician - thought they were real empty cans, and threw them out.

"The theme of our collection is food and consumption," said Sietske van Zanten, the museum's director. "Our art encourages visitors to see everyday objects in a new light. By displaying artworks in unexpected places, we amplify this experience and keep visitors on their toes."

This, my friends, is art. OK?

Alert museum staffers saw the cans were missing, and rummaged through the nearest trash bin, finding the art just in time. Mr  Van Zanten said the tech on duty that day was filling in for the regular elevator tech, a man with a greater appreciation for the treasures displayed there.

"He was just doing his job in good faith," he said. "In a way, it's a testament to the effectiveness of Alexandre Lavet's art."

I would like to invite Mr Van Zanten to my house on any Sunday evening. That's the night I take the recycling bin out to the curb for Monday morning's pickup. He can root through my old beer cans, seltzer bottles, newspapers and junk mail, and who knows? He just might find himself a winner!

Leave the neighbors to rest

In Baltimore City, leaves will continue to fall from trees every year, but soon, people will have to find another way to move them from the ground to a pile in the yard that some kid will want to jump into, because the City Council, by a vote of 10-5, voted to ban gas-powered leaf blowers. By this December 15, all city employees and contractors will have to stop using them, and residents will have a phase-out period: Landscape companies and residents can use gas-powered blowers between Oct. 15 and Dec. 15 of 2025 and 2026, and then they'll have to go electric or battery as the ordinance goes into effect year-round.

Supporters of the bill offered this statement from the National Audubon Society: 

In one hour, a commercial gas-powered leaf blower emits as much pollution as driving a car for 1,100 miles and four times as much as commercial lawn mowers. 

The only leaves I handle anymore are romaine, but in the day, I fiddled around with a gas blower or two. They are devilish little machines, and the wee two-cycle motors wanted more TLC than I felt like devoting to them, so I switched to an electric, which would have been great if I had hired someone to drag the cord around and keep me, and it, unentangled. I know they make great little battery-powered blowers now.

Speaking of "blow," neighbors have actually come to blows over someone's whiny Husqvarna at 7 AM on a Saturday. 

Speaking of Husqvarna, 74% percent of people buying them only chose that brand so they could go back to work on Monday saying, "Yeah, we had a mess o'leaves this year, but that Husqvarna is a burly machine, and Junior and I had them cleared up by the time "It's Academic" came on."

And the others in the office crooning, "Ohhhhhh! He got a Husqvarna!" 

Just the tip

People have become fond of giving advice prefaced with the phrase, "Pro tip!" As in, "Pro tip! Don't use a butcher knife as a toothpick!"

Well, for all you would-be bank robbers, Pro tip! Don't run off with a bag o' bank bucks and then stop for breakfast on the way!

But a guy in Brooklyn, New York, made that mistake the other day. He ankled into the TD Bank on Fourth Ave. near 39th St. in Sunset Park, told a teller he had a gun, and demanded (and got) money.

Pro tip #2! They put tracking devices in those bags, duh! So it wasn't long before cops showed up at the New Kim Tuong Restaurant on Chrystie St. near Hester St. and arrested the fool. 

I'm sorry.  Alleged fool.

Let the record show that the suspect, rakishly clad in a stained gray shirt and blue trousers, was tucking into a breakfast of shrimp fried rice as he was pinched.

He did not have a gun on him at the time of his arrest. A search of his pockets turned up several packets of duck sauce.

Bank robbery suspect and gourmet diner

According to the New York Daily News, the suspect told police, “You got the wrong dude, man. That’s my money. That’s my Social Security. I got a $50 million loan from the bank.”  

He should have just waited! It said on the news over the weekend that Social Security is going up 2.5 %.

Shrimp Fried Rice for everybody (except bank robbers!)

Church Bells Rang Out

In September, 1922, two people were found murdered on a secluded lover's lane in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Dead were Reverend Edward W. Hall, the pastor of the Episcopal Church of St. John the Evangelist in New Brunswick, and one of his choir singers and devoted church members, Eleanor Reinhardt Mills.

The Reverend and the lady

The bodies were found by a 23-year-old man and the 15-year-old female he had been dating. In fact, they spotted the bodies lying supine as they went into the woods along DeRussey's Lane, but figured they were just resting in post-coital bliss. (And you had no idea people were getting so busy 102 years ago!) But when the couple had finished their own unsanctified congress and found the preacher and the lady still where they had been, they figured something was up, and alerted the police. Today, this would be the lead story on every nightly newscast, and there would be a Made For TV Movie about it, starring William H. Macy as the reverend, Natalie Portman as Eleanor,  Tilda Swinton as Francis, the pastor's betrayed wife, and Steve Buscemi as Jim Mills, husband of Eleanor.

The Rev was married to an older woman known for her stern appearance and harsh personality, and there were rumors that he and Mrs Mills had been carrying on for quite some time, more or less right out in front of everyone. That older woman, his wife, Francis Stevens Hall, was wealthy, a doyenne of local society, while her husband, from all appearances a sobersided man of the cloth, was able to inspire his side girl to write this grace note, which was found at the scene:

"There isn't a man who could make me smile as you did today. I know there are girls with more shapely bodies, but I do not care what they have. I have the greatest of all blessings, a noble man, deep, true, and eternal love. My heart is his, my life is his, all I have is his, poor as my body is, scrawny as they say my skin may be, but I am his forever."

Well. As the song says, "Speak to me of love, And say what I'm longing to hear..."

Mills's husband, Jim, was a quiet man not given to sharing emotions. (Perhaps in another lifetime, he and the staid Mrs Hall could have gotten together, and the Rev and old Eleanor could have painted the town red.)

They (The "State of New Jersey" they) tried Mrs Hall and her two brothers for the murder, but there was no evidence to connect them. Which doesn't mean they didn't do it, nor does it mean that they did. Crime forensics not being a thing in 1922, the local cops allowed souvenir hunters to descend on the scene even before the bodies were removed. After all these years, surely all the people who argued about whodunit in local diners, parlors, and courtrooms have gone to their rewards and we still don't know.

But here is what I found most interesting about the whole case. Mrs Hall, being rich, lived in luxury, which allowed her to have her brother live in the mansion where she and the Rev got together on the rare evenings he didn't have "choir practice."

Her brother's name was Willie Stevens. He lived on an allowance his sister gave him and spent most of his time hanging around the local firehouse, where the crew gave him his own uniform and encouraged him to attend parades wearing it. They would even allow him to ride around on the engine from time to time. He was considered a step or two off base, not harmful but not very bright. That seemed to be the reason he was charged in the murders: he owned a pistol, and the prosecutor felt he might have been angry at the shame visited upon his family by his brother-in-law's canoodling with the songbird. But again, that was pure guessing; nothing came of it.

Except that for Willie Stevens, the trial marked the first time he had even been told that he was, in the words used by the prosecutor, a "half-wit" and not even capable of doing more in life than hanging around a fire house. And even though in his plain manner he was able to make the prosecutor who examined him on the stand look a little foolish (when asked how he could prove he was in his room the night of the murder, he said, "If someone sees me go upstairs, is that not proof that I was in my room?") he forever after regarded himself as less than, and spent his days at home, usually only going out after dark, making it less likely that he would be recognized as the man with bright red hair and a bushy mustache.

Only 102 years ago, and people were talking about each other in such an unkind fashion that it caused Willie to withdraw forever.

But he was always welcome at the firehouse.

 

She has nothing better to do?

Kim Kardashian decided to become an attorney at law in California, not by attending law school like Mike Slocumb probably did, but by reading the law books and hanging around a law firm. They allow this nonsense in California, by which I mean a state that is home to Kim and her family, the very kind of people who told Kim this is a good idea.

Take this simple test: if one of her family members gets into some sort of legal brouhaha (50-50 chance), are they going to consult a bona fide attorney, or get Kim's valuable input?

Free country, I realize, but let's take her at full value. She is calling for the Menendez brothers, those cuddly kids from Cali, to be granted their freedom, apparently in the belief that since their father was mean to Lyle Lyle Crocodile Menendez and his brother Erik, killing both of their parents is well within the law.

Someone  Kim wrote an essay published in the noted legal journal NBC News, saying that her “hope is that Erik and Lyle Menendez’s life sentences are reconsidered.”

“We are all products of our experiences. They shape who we were, who we are, and who we will be. Physiologically and psychologically, time changes us, and I doubt anyone would claim to be the same person they were at 18,” Kardashian wrote.

At ages 21 and 18, the brothers were sentenced to life without the possibility of parole, first degree murder style, for killing their parents in their Beverly Hills mansion. Their defense was that they were abused by their father and that their mother was in on it too. But no one believed that then, and no one should believe it now.

Kim believes in fighting for these two. This means she is taking her many minutes of law experience and trying to get two rich kids out of the cooler, instead of helping people who really need a lawyer, or some eye cream.

I remember those trials, and I remember their lawyers at the time had them show up in court wearing crew-neck sweaters, so they looked like a couple of frat boys on trial for stealing a goat mascot from State U.

L.A. County District Attorney George Gascón says his office will conduct an examination of this evidence that just materialized like pixie dust after 35 years because all this took place in the Land Of Make Believe.

Sunday Rerun (from 2019): Seal Later

Bogoslof Island is about a third the size of Central Park in New York City. Sitting out there in the Bering Sea, it doesn't seem like a great place to give birth and raise young ones, because not only is it remote, there is an undersea volcano right below that for two years has been spewing steam and mud and sulfuric gas.

And from Alaska (this will sound like a show on the Nature Channel) Here Come The Seals!

Northern fur seal mothers go to the rocky beaches of Bogoslof to have their babies and raise them!



“The population growth of northern fur seals on Bogoslof has been extraordinary,” said Tom Gelatt, head man for a NOAA Fisheries group that studies fur seals.

The thing is, there are plenty of uninhabited Aleutian Islands to choose from, and there is no evidence of a Bogoslof Tourism Bureau luring seals to their specific island with promises of plenty of fish, free evening whale-watching cruises, and inexpensive T-shirts ("My Mom went to Bogoslof to have another baby and all I got was this lousy T-shirt!")

Seals hang in the ocean from November to June and then head for land to breed and nurse in summertime.


One reason for the popularity of Bogoslof might be the natural birthing chairs - rock slabs as long as 33 feet that blew out of the underground in the volcanic activity. Chris Waythomas, a U.S. Geological Survey research geophysicist at Alaska's Volcano Observatory says, “They litter the surface. It’s pretty wild.”

Another tourist attraction, if you like such things, would be the Fumaroles.  No, not that new couple that just moved in from Cleveland. A fumarole is a gas-blowing, mud-tossing geyser that makes a sound like a jet engine as it hurls the earth into the sky. “It was amazing, the sounds that were being produced,” Waythomas says.

It might be that the seals find the chow appealing on Bogoslof. Seals there eat squid and northern smoothtongue, a deep-water fish that looks like a smelt.

I can't tell you how many times in my life I have mistaken a smoothtongue for a smelt.

Probably 8 or 9.

And you know what else stumps the researchers? Seals started going to Bogoslof in 1980, long before the volcano blew its top.

From this we can only conclude that seals are able to predict the future. They have already picked World Series, Super Bowl, and Preakness winners for this season and next.

The Saturday Picture Show, October 5, 2024

 

Let's see. Blockbuster is Gone With The Wind - you can't rent that movie anymore. But maybe you have it on VHS or DVD and you want to let someone else have it because your basement is full of old tapes and discs, and you stream what you want now. Brian Morrison also noticed that newspaper boxes were sitting unused as well, and he started FreeBlockbuster.org, which repurposes old newspaper boxes like those Little Free Libraries some streets have. Take a tape, leave a tape, go home with a copy of "Dirty Work" and rediscover the magic of Norm MacDonald.

"And all the children, they put flowers in their hair. And all the grown ups, they put daggers in their stare ..."  (T. Rex)  Someone has been kind enough to put flowers in the hand of Rosa Parks's statue. A woman of virtue and strength.

Les Voyageurs in Marseille-Fos Port, France. Statues named for emigrants, made by French artist Bruno Catalano, who felt that travelers and people who move to other lands always leave a part of themselves behind.

From nature, this is a wild peacock, as opposed to the Peacock app where we can see NBC shows instead of watching them on NBC, but I don't know why.

LeBron James and his son Bronny will play together for the Los Angeles Lakers this season, although Bronny has confirmed that they will not carpool together to work.

Here's an office that has installed a Nacho Cheese dispenser in the breakroom. And some people question the existence of a deity.

It's autumn already in Finland, and the leaves on the tree will soon decorate the ground, awaiting the work of a Finnish gardener to finish the lawn.

Two-tone tulips! Red and yellow, at the Keukenhof Botanical Garden in the Netherlands.

Someone had the idea to make Oreo-flavored Coke, while all along, Oreos go best with milk. I shouldn't have said that. Look for Oreo Milk on your grocer's dairy shelves soon.

Trucks and cars can't get through in Western North Carolina to bring needed supplies. Count on that delightful stubborn tenacious hybrid of horses and donkeys - mules - to get that delivery done!

There's always next year!

And another baseball season ends in Baltimore. The Orioles, just as I feared/predicted, snuck into the postseason playoffs and lost a two-out-of-three matchup with the Kansas City Royals, two games to none. They scored a grand total of 1 (one) run in the two games: a solo home run by Cedric Mullins in the second game. After his homer, the O's managed to load the bases with no outs, and did a faceplant. They scored no more that day, and now await next season.

The inevitable occurred on social media, sports talk radio, and around water coolers in offices around town. All the experts who last swung a bat in elementary school had to weigh in and call for the manager to be fired. 

Sure. It was Brandon Hyde who left all those men on base. And instead of giving him and his coaching staff credit for two games well-pitched (the Royals scored 1 run in game one, and 2 in the second game) they howl about the hitting.  Had the Orioles lost in two slugfests by scores like 9-7 and 13-10, the hue and cry would have been about how horrible the pitching was.

Baseball, as those who have followed it for more than the last six weeks know, is a long slog through 162 games in a season. There will be times your team scores a lot and gives up fewer runs. There will be times that the opposite occurs. With rare exceptions, it's not the genius of the manager that results in wins. 

As proof, I offer this: Brandon Hyde, the Orioles manager, is the same man who won the Manager of the Year award in 2023. He did not fall off a turnip truck in the offseason and suffer cranial trauma, forgetting everything he knew about the game. He used the same brain and experience and savvy this year, and this year, it just wasn't in the cards.

There's only one winner, but we can all count ourselves winners if we enjoy the game for the spirit of it all every summer.

All Rise!

Not trying to start trouble in your house, but you might want to ask that college graduate in the family if they believe that Judith Sheindlin, aka “Judge Judy,” is an Associate Justice on our "Supreme" Court.

Almost 10% of recent college graduates believe that she is, the reason I bring it up.

I prefer to take my daily dose of justice from Her Honor, Judge Lauren Lake, but a lot of those smarty-pants college kids think Judy is up there with Clarence Thomas and the rest of them.

I wonder if Clarence thinks so?

Other disturbing data from the survey shows that a mere 28.4% of grads know that James Madison was the father of the Constitution. 58% of them think Thomas Jefferson was the progenitor of the Constitution, instead of identifying him as the principal writer for the Declaration of Independence.

Want more?

• 60% of college grads don't know how a constitutional amendment is ratified
• 40% drew a blank when asked who has the power to declare war (Congress)
• fewer that half of them know where presidential impeachments are tried (The Senate)

I know stuff from the olden days because I was that kid who sat around reading the almanac and the dictionary. But there are many things I don't know, such as how to understand people who don't want to know things. 

The car from the last ride

Lovers of real country music attach deep reverence to this 1952 Cadillac, the car in which Hank Williams, Sr, died on New Year's Day, 1953. Hank was enroute to an appearance in Canton, Ohio, when the end came. 

Senior and Junior

A painful back condition had led him to a series of sketchy "doctors" who prescribed inappropriate medicines; a melancholic personality led him to the bottles that everyone knows hold more problems than solutions. And his son, Hank Jr, was born in the spotlight and found himself compared to his father, and struggled with the yoke of being a junior version of someone. No, he's not the songwriter his father was. Was there a Bill Shakespeare, Jr? We don't know for sure, but it would be unfair to expect anyone to write plays like the Bard. After some years of seeking his own spot, HWJr turned out to be very good as a singer, and a multi-talented musician, and yes, he'll pose for photos by this car, the machine in which his dad died, because he's in the same business that his dad was. 

5 x 20

So CBS News has their excellent reporter David Begnaud out "on the road" covering slice-of-life stories from all over, except that he does not have a whole other family that he's keeping out of sight, like Charles Kuralt did. In the present case, they call David's vignettes "Beg-Knows America."

In a nation whose population exceeds 333.3 million, there are going to be stories to tell all over, and Begnaud won't even have to tell them over again. He has that many to choose from.

The other day, his tale was about a woman who found an envelope stuffed with money. $400, I believe it was, and a name on the front. She tried for months and months to locate the owner by name. "Greg Throw," the envelope said, and that must have seemed odd, because not many peoples' names form a complete sentence, except for "Robin Quivers." Or "Ben Folds." Or "Jeremy Irons."

But here's where the story takes a twist. The guy who lost the money - the proceeds from a football pool - was not named Greg Throw at all, but, rather, Greg Thow. Once the finder found that out, it was easier to find the owner, and everything turned out just like in a Hallmark movie.

It took me back to our golden honeymoon, all those years ago, when the missus and I were just setting out on the "C" of matrimony. We found $100 - 5 US twenties - on the sidewalk on Duke of Gloucester St in Williamsburg, VA. We called the local cops and an officer came and took up the bills, telling us that his department would hold them for 30 days to see if anyone claimed them.

Two nights later, just before we were to come home, a young couple from New Jersey knocked on our door at the Wmsbg Lodge. They were on their honeymoon too, they said, and someone had told them that carrying their money in a shoe was the safe way to go. I could think of a hundred reasons for how wrong that was, but we were glad to see them reunited with their bucks.

Haven't thought about them for years, and of course we couldn't tell you their names now, but I wonder if they're still together. If you know people who got married in New Jersey in December, 1973, please ask them if they put their honeymoon in one of those stacked-heel shoes like David Cassidy wore. Here's what they looked like: (the shoes, not the people).