What's on TV

Since television watching is such a personal thing, and since there are only about 637 channels available to watch, I am not in the habit of recommending shows or going on about what I watch.  If you like Keith Olbermann as much as I do, you make it a point to watch him every day, as I do, and the same for my Andy of Mayberry reruns and several other situation comedies and situation tragedies.

Yeah.  Act like you're not doing her.

One of the few shows that Peggy and I both watch is "The Affair," and although we have no experience in that field, I can spot a lot of things the cheating couple do wrong, e.g. if your little piece of chicken on the side leaves her red lacy bra in your bedroom, don't try to hide it by wedging it into your drawer along with your boxer shorts and handkerchiefs.  Just dumb.

But if watching television since I was a kid has taught me anything, it's that women wearing red lacy unmentionables are up for most anything.  It's a standard timeworn stereotype, just like scenes with Italian-American families sitting around eating pasta while the father argues with the son until the mother, always wearing an apron, exclaims, "Enough, already!" and the men retreat to an icy silence.

You'd think the people who write shows and movies would have just a teeny bit of imagination, wouldn't you?

The Greatest Talkshow Story Ever Told

One television event that never lets me down will be tomorrow night on the David Letterman show on CBS:  one last time for The Quarterback Challenge with Jay Thomas (and he HAS to tell his Lone Ranger story again!) and the triumphant singing of Darlene Love doing her Phil Spector classic "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)."

Phil and Darlene

The joke and the song have both been heard a million times and still they entertain.  If this will be your first time to hear them, it will be your last chance, so I urge you not to miss it!  This show revived the careers of both Jay Thomas and Darlene Love, and if you don't know why there's a meatball atop a Christmas tree, you soon will.

Ya Got Trouble?

Do you remember the musical "The Music Man"?  The deal was, a phony who claimed to be a music professor went from town to town selling the locals on the idea of having a boys' band in their small town.  But, to get the stubborn Iowans to reach into their wallets to pay for trumpets and uniforms, he had to create a need for a band.  The answer was to seize on some trivial local issue and blow it all out of proportion, instilling fear in the citizenry until they would gladly pay for something  - anything! - to save their sons from the demon of a pool table in their community.  "Well, ya got trouble, my friend, trouble right here in River City..." he rapped. and as soon as the rubes heard that a pool table would corrupt their sons, they were on board with the crooked scheme.

I don't know if there is any money in it for anyone, but this commotion about "they're trying to take Christmas away from us!" reminds me of that made-up trouble.  For instance, this picture, which circulates every year about this time on Facebook. You've seen it if you're on The Book, and do you really know anyone who has posted a manger scene with the birth of Christ, only to come back and find that it's been removed?

Of course you don't, and you don't know anyone who has been fired from their job at the hardware store for wishing customers a Merry Christmas, so I'll tell you what. Let's leave the worrying up to the worriers. They enjoy it so much. And the people who spread these rumors get a weird sort of thrill from upsetting the goodhearted among us. The rest of us can go on worshipping as we choose, or not, and posting pictures and exchanging warm happy holiday greetings to members of whatever faiths and not fretting about The War On Christmas, which never existed and never will.

Unless you let it.

Pardon Me?

Then.

Marky Mark Wahlberg, actor, spent 45 days in jail in the late 1980s, and not for stealing my nickname.  In those days before he began what the movie "Clueless" called "his busy pants-dropping schedule," he was quite the thug in Boston.

Now.

Cooling his heels in a Boston jail, discussing what theatuh to attend after pahking the cah at Hahvahd yahd, Wahlberg found penitence in his soul over his brutal beating of Vietnamese immigrant Johnny Trinh.  All these years later, Wahlberg still believed that he had blinded Trinh in one eye that night when he was out to steal booze from a convenience store.  He also punched another guy in the face, trying to elude police, who rounded him up and took him to trial that sentenced him to 90 days.  During the 45 that he served, he decided to turn his life around, becoming a leader, not a follower, and has filed for a pardon with the governor of Massachusetts, Deval Patrick.

And it turns out that Trinh did in fact lose an eye, but not at Marky Mark's hands.  That happened in a grenade attack during the Viet Nam war.

“He did hurt me, but my left eye was already gone. He was not responsible for that,” Trinh said. “He was young and reckless but I forgive him now. Everyone deserves another chance.”

“He paid for his crime when he went to prison. I am not saying that it did not hurt when he punched me in the face, but it was a long time ago.”

The Massachusetts Parole Board would have to review Wahlberg's case and make a recommendation to the governor, who can grant pardons. But pardons rarely are issued in Massachusetts. Gov. Deval Patrick has not approved one in his nearly two terms in office. Nor did former Gov. Mitt Romney, who, if his name sounds vaguely familiar, also ran for president later, and we all know how that turned out.

And there is a lot of pushback on Wahlberg's request from people who say the mistakes he made while young and high should stick with him forever, and just because he's in every other movie released these days, his celebrity should not be his magic ticket to clearing the slate.

People say he shouldn't get to expunge his record just because he's famous.  He says his fame should have nothing to do with it, that he has done a lot to help others out of the jams he dealt with in his own life, and he wants his name cleared.

I don't know how to go on this.  What say you?

Digging the past

I see that up in Massachusetts, they are unearthing a time capsule made of cowhide and, so they say, buried at the State House under the "Golden Dome."  Word is, the time capsule dates back to the days of Samuel Adams and Paul Revere and the Raiders, and it was first opened in 1855 to celebrate the birth of Bill Belichick, who always wears a hoodie from that same year. The time capsule is believed to contain old coins that date between 1652 and 1855, an engraved silver Paul Revere plate, newspapers, a Commonwealth seal and a title page from the Massachusetts Colony Records.

As I was writing this, the excavation continues, and the first things that fell out were some old coins, so the hope is that, at least, some folding money will be in there as well, so that the town of Boston can go all out and have a wingding to celebrate.  I can't wait to find out what-else is in there.

Time capsules and buried things from the past fascinate me, and I remember a guy at work who had done some drywall work at Johns Hopkins Hospital here in Baltimore.  Prying open an old wall to be removed, he found a small area where, apparently, a workman in 1908 had his lunch and then plastered in a wall, leaving behind a paper sack and some wax paper that must have held a sandwich or something, a Coke bottle and a 1908 edition of the Baltimore SUN.

I wish I had gotten a chance to see that newspaper to see how hard the Jumble (That Scrambled Word Game) was in those days. Or, if he had found the August 2, 1908 edition of the SUN, he would have read about the new practice of the Baltimore Police. Every morning, all the detectives assembled in a large room, put on face masks, and everyone who had been arrested in the previous 24 hours was trotted in before them so the gumshoes could get a look at them, and see what they were up against in the battle against crime.

I suppose this made a lot of sense in 1908.

Sunday Rerun: I might write a book and call it "Breakfast at IHOP"

I believe there was an episode of "Leave It To Beaver" in which Beav and Gilbert fail to read a book as required by their teacher, preferring instead to watch a movie version of the book starring the Ritz Brothers.  Hilarity ensues when they base their book report on the movie version, and Beaver and Gilbert get bad grades, as they should have, for even thinking of watching a Ritz Bros. film.

I know it's late in the school year, but any high-schooler who turns in a book report of "Breakfast at Tiffany's," the 1958 novella by Truman Capote, after watching the 1961 movie starring Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard is going to feel like young Mr Cleaver upon getting a failing grade.

The movie should have got a failing grade as well. The original short novel features the delightful Holiday ("Holly") Golightly as what Capote called "an American geisha," who would wine and dine with well-to-do men of the upper strata of society, with an eye toward marrying one of them and landing in a sweet blueberry pie made of uppercrust.

In the movie, Holly is presented as a happy sort of diz-bang, more emphasis on the diz than the bang. The book takes care to point out that she suffered from something called the "mean reds," even worse than the blues.

Truman Capote packed a lot of living into his time on earth, which ended in August, 1984, a month before what would have been his 60th birthday.  He said he did not like the changes that the moviemakers made to "B at T," although there were no reports of him failing to cash the checks they sent him.   At the time the movie was made, it must be pointed out in his defense, he was busy in Kansas, researching the murders of a farm family of four for his 1966 book "In Cold Blood."  This was a first in American literature: a true story written as if it were a novel.  And, as is the case with the "Tiffany's" movie, the book - the masterful way he had of crafting sentences, paragraphs and pages - far exceeds the movie. The movie co-starred Robert Blake, an actor who played a guy who committed murder in the story.  Some years later, Blake stood trial for the actual murder of his wife.  He was acquitted on the murder charge but later found liable for his wife's death in a civil trial, as is the custom in California celebrity-murder sprees.

If you haven't experienced both the movie and the book versions of "Breakfast," I recommend you enjoy the movie first and then savor the book. In fact, you might want to read the book while playing the DVD of the movie, which would be a lot like having your dessert and your entrée on the same plate.

The Saturday Picture Show, December 13, 2014

Nick Markakis was an Oriole rightfielder for nine years, and his departure via free agency this winter was a bit of surprise to the many fans who figured that he and the team could get together on a new contract.  But that didn't happen, and Nick will be playing ball for the next four years in Atlanta, his hometown.  What was not a surprise to us fans was that he was classy enough to take out this ad in two pages of the Baltimore SUN Sports Section this week to say thanks and goodbye.  Good luck, Nick!

A solid glass ball left in a sunny window creates a magnification of the sun's rays, so don't do it! It could potentially cause a huge fire.

For your collection of weather-related photographs: This is the oldest known photo of a tornado, taken about 20 miles SW of Howard, South Dakota, August 28th, 1884.  Rumor has it, it was taken by Jim Cantore.

If you've never done this, try it at your next dinner party or corporate get-together.  Take a nice loaf of bread, cut off the "lid," and toast it for a few minutes to anneal the inner surface, and then ladle in some cream soup or oyster stew and you've got something!

Someone was talking about the rock group Foo Fighters, not knowing where the name of the band came from.  It was from this comic strip.  Smokey Stover was a foo fighter in the local foo department.  The puns, the sight gags, and the inevitable "NOTARY SOJAC" sign kept me laughing for years.

Down in Shreveport LA, they are just finishing filming the movie about country music deity Hank Williams, Sr.  This is the recreated wedding cake from the scene in which Hank marries Billie Jean Jones Eshliman, baked by Faye Fair, the lady proudly posing here.  See the article from the local paper and see how much it looks like the original cake, and plan to join me at the theater next summer when "I Saw The Light" comes out, because if they are this painstaking about a wedding cake looking like the original, imagine the whole picture.  Then we'll all go around saying, "I saw 'I Saw The Light'!"

This is a recently discovered painting from late 1969, called "Crosby, Stills and Nash arrive at Woodstock on horseback."  I know great art, by cracky!

Pro tip for those of you getting your first kettle-style grill from Santa Claus:  don't pay any attention to the people who tell you to scrape the burned-up goo off of it.  That's where the real smokey flavor comes from!

Coach needs some coaching

Harford County, Maryland, is rather conservative country, full of the sort of people who love to point out that we elect people to serve us in political office, not the other way around.

So it was a bit of a surprise this week when the new Harford County council president, one Richard Slutzky, came up with a new rule to keep a space between constituents  - aka "the people" - and elected representatives within council chambers.

Apparently, Mr Slutzky did not like the way that people would stay in council chambers and wait to discuss matters of concern with the people they elect and pay to handle matters of concern. Quite possibly, he saw Al Anybody sitting there and thought it was Al Qaeda, or he saw Aunt Iris with a question about a loose dog and took Iris for ISIS.  Displaying an almost-incredible lack of political sense, Mr Slutzky had Sherrie Johnson, the newly-appointed council spokeswoman (and a former Channel 2 News reporter) put the policy in place and did not even tell the councilmembers about it.

Slutzky claims that "security" is the primary reason for not allowing citizens to have face-to-face contact with their elected representatives following public meetings, although uniformed Harford County Sheriff's deputies provide security at the council chambers, and all in attendance pass through metal detectors and security checks by the deputies.

"At this time it is our intent that unless invited by the council we recommend that neither the press nor the citizens approach the dais at the end of a council meeting and councilmembers are free to leave the dais" if they want, Slutzky said at Monday night's meeting, which led to a Tuesday full of councilmembers saying "Don't blame me! It's not MY idea!" to their constituents who called to find out why they couldn't see their councilperson about an issue.

"Just like many of you I didn't know about the policy until it was already out there," Councilman Chad Shrodes said. "That's not good."

"I am just as available today as I was yesterday," Councilman Jim McMahan said.

Newly-elected Councilman Curtis Beulah said he wants the people he represents to feel comfortable in asking him about issues.

"I have no boss here. I answer to the citizens," he said.

By Tuesday night, Slutzky (whose campaign signs identified him as "Coach") had started whistling a whole new tune. "The intent was to become more efficient and effective in managing the requests for information," he said.

But he went on to say that he is not the boss of the councilmembers and they can do what they want about being approached by citizens.

So to sum it up: on Monday the head of the Harford County council was telling lowly citizens to keep clear of their exalted rulers on the council, and not to bother them with their importunings for trash pickup, police protection and zoning problems.  And on Tuesday, he was acting like he never said such a thing and he wouldn't have had the authority to say it anyway.

Memo to The Coach:  Your salary is paid by the people who might just want to take a few moments of your valuable time.  And try to remember, before you cook up these goofy policies, you might share them with the people you work with so they can tell you how goofy they are.

The nerve of some people

It begins the night before Thanksgiving and continues well into January, this season of holiday madness that comes around every year as reliably as free calendars from veterans, disease-fighting charities and just about every charity you can name.  To tell you the truth, I worry about the people who make and sell calendars and return-address labels, because who needs to buy them anymore?  The letter carrier brings them around every day.

Everyone is tense, uptight, nervous as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs.  Take Haloti Ngata (and if you could, you'd be playing in the NFL!), the mountain of a man who, until his recent suspension, has been the Baltimore Ravens' star defensive end.  By the numbers, Ngata (pronounced NAHT-a) wears #92, stands 6'4", weighs 340 pounds, and is 30 years of age, married, with three kids.

A lot of guys wear that same jersey and are married with three kids. The difference is that they probably don't earn $8.5 million per year for picking up opposing runners and quarterbacks and tossing them aside like last week's magazine.  

You may have heard that Ngata is missing the Ravens' final four games this year, due to a suspension from the league for violating drug policy.  He was caught with Adderal in his tinkle.  According to the charmingly named Drugs.Com, Adderall contains a combination of amphetamine and dextroamphetamine. Amphetamine and dextroamphetamine are central nervous system stimulants that affect chemicals in the brain and nerves that contribute to hyperactivity and impulse control.

Do you remember that kid in 5th grade who threw ice-cream sandwiches in the cafeteria, hollered the Pledge of Allegiance at the top of his voice during morning announcements, and couldn't pay attention in class for more than 14 seconds?  That's the kid for whom they make Adderall.  It's for the hyperactive among us.

Haloti Ngata is saying that, yes, he took the drug, no question, but is offering a unique rationale:  According to CBSSports.com, Ngata is telling the team that "with three small children at home and feeling the grind of the season, he took the drug to be in a better state of mind to help with them around the house and tend to them."   Thanksgiving and family fatigue.  The bugaboos of a man trying to make things work out on just a crummy eight-and-a-half million semolians a year.  

Anyone else out there with three kids trying to hold it together?

And then there was this.  Heather Cho, the head of in-flight service for Korean Air (she's 40 and is the daughter of the airline's chairman, Cho Yang-ho) was flying home on one of her own airplanes last week when a flight attendant had the nerve to serve her some macadamia nuts IN A BAG rather than in a dish. Imagine.  And you have to figure the flight attendant did not know who Ms Cho was at the time of this horrible offense.  I guess it was because of the holiday hysteria that Ms Cho forced the pilot to return from the runway so the service crew aboard could be replaced, causing the flight and others to be delayed and causing this masterpiece of a boss's daughter apology to issue from her: "I am sorry to our customers and the Korean people that I unintentionally caused social uproar and I ask forgiveness from anyone who has been hurt by me. I take responsibility for the incident." 

Sounds like what she should take is a couple of Adderall.  

Everyone calm down! Please.

Weird Scenes from Retail

Two odd things happened to me in one day, a day which happened to be in December, when all the rules of shopping and retail commerce are reduced by 60%.

By the way, when the big department store advertises diamond cocktail rings, microwave ovens and reversible mackinaws at a "low low doorbuster price of 60% off," do you ever wonder, off of what?  

Anyway. I went to my favorite deli in my favorite Giant supermarket; I needed some ham and turkey.  I was the only person in front of the glass case, overlooking the display of cheeses, tubular meat products, olive loaves and homestyle turkey and ham.  The turkey looked pretty good so I had the deliman slice a pound for me, but the ham, not so much.  It had the look of a Sunday ham has-been on a Thursday morning...a little sad around the edges and lacking in that pink color that we like in a ham.  So I asked the guy what other ham he had, and he asked what flavor I wanted.

"Uhh, ham flavor, I guess," came my witty riposte.  

"Because I have maple, honey, barbecue...."

"Just ham-flavored ham, please."

At this point, he pulled out a section of a pig's rear end that was about the size of a...well, a pig's rear end. He sliced a slice and offered it to me, and suddenly, a youngish hipster who had just then ankled up the deli said, "Uh, I'm actually in a bit of a hurry here, if I could just get some potato salad..."

Potato Salad

Well then. First of all, thank you for clearing up the confusion about whether you were in a hurry or not. There had been some debate, I'm sure, but finding out that you were actually in a bit of a hurry shined a different light on the situation. The deliman seemed not to have encountered this sort of rudeness before, and murmured, "I'll be right back" as he slipped away to the Land Behind The Swinging Door, where we get a glimpse of vast jars of pickled onions and giant tureens of cole slaw and ham salad.  A woman who works there came back with him and waited on Mr Potato Salad.  As she scooped, I looked in his cart and he had yogurts, milk, soda, Jello and other stuff that indicated that he hadn't just run in for some potato salad for his lunch in between shifts at the hipstery.  When I left the store a few minutes later, he was still in line with his week's worth of food.  I felt so sorry that I wanted ham at the very moment he was in a hurry, but I got over it.

And then later I found myself at Dick's Sporting Goods, looking for a shirt in size 3T.  The clerk on the floor was less than helpful, saying he didn't "think" they carried that size, and so I went to the cash register, where a young man treated me to an unencumbered view of his cavernous maw as he yawned in my face and said three words which should live in retail infamy..."Go to Marshall's."  

Which is what I did, since they were going to be Dick's about it.

It isn't what it seems to be

The rock band Creed, not to be confused with Creedence Clearwater Revival, sold 27 million albums in this country, a grand total of zero of them to me.  In fact, if the members of the band walked down my street, I would have no idea who they were.  Sorry, guys.

But 27 million record buyers can't be wrong, so there must be something about their music.  And selling 27 million records must mean that someone made some money from such hits as "Torn," "My Own Prison," "What's This Life For," "Are You Ready?" "What If," "One Last Breath," "Bullets," "My Sacrifice" and
"Weathered."

With cheery titles like that, there's every reason to feel that Hallmark will soon offer a line of Creed greeting cards for every occasion.

The lead singer of the now-defunct band is Scott Stapp, and we would be so wrong to assume that he took the millions he earned through record sales, songwriting royalties and concert appearances and is now living the good life in his homes in tropical paradises and suburban pleasure domes.

What's more, it becomes increasingly apparent to me every day that I will not become the leader of a famous rock and roll band and retire again to a villa in Eleuthera in the Bahamas, with servants and chauffeurs and a butler to choose which hoodie to wear. But Scott Stapp is not living that way either.  I feel sorry for the man; he's another in the incredibly long line of people who reach for the top of his profession, get there, make a tidy bundle, and have nothing - material or otherwise - to show for it.  Last month, Stapp was on Interstate 10 in Madison County, Florida, calling 911 asking for an ambulance to take him to a hospital because, as he told police, “someone was trying to kill him.” Reports are that he is living in his car.  The 41-year-old singer's estranged wife, Jaclyn, says through her attorney that Stapp, her husband for almost nine years, "has a history of going on drug binges and disappearing for days or weeks at a time."  The attorney adds that Mrs Stapp loves Stapp very much, but is seeking a divorce and temporary sole custody of their two children.

Stapp posted a video on YouTube to describe his plight. In it, he says he has audited his record label and “personal finances”and discovered “a lot was stolen or royalties not paid.” In order to recover the funds, he needs to hire a lawyer to pinpoint the theft and file the appropriate charges. But a source tells The Hollywood Reporter that no attorney has stepped up to take the case, which tells you a lot about how much validity the claims might carry.

I'm not here to slag this guy, but to remind us all that when we see show biz kids making money hand over fist and sipping Dom Perignon from crystal goblets, the fact is that most of us here in the real world are better off in every way with our little bit of loot, sipping National Bohemian beer from a glass with a picture of Mr Boh on it.

41 yrs.

When we get a chicken box, she likes the breasts, and I tear into drumsticks, thighs and wings.  She doesn't like "food with anything else in it," so there goes butter pecan ice cream.  In books, she likes poetry and fiction, where I read nonfiction and biographies almost exclusively.  She can't stand to watch the news, disdaining the awfulness of actual everyday events in this world, and I run from the room when she watches "Grimm," "Once Upon a Time," and "Oprah" - three shows I find sorely lacking in the actuality of this or any other world.  She likes the more modern styles of rock and country music, and regularly suggests that a good deal of my old-skool music CDs really sound a lot better in my truck, so why not leave them there?  And she will not give an inch in my seemingly lifelong battle that if people are going to call Doritos "tor-tee-ya" chips, they also have to call that hairy animal a "yama," not a "lama." She has given up dealing with my insistence on the correct pronunciations of "mayonnaise," "fifth," "sixth," and "February."

There is no better way to tell the differences between us than to say if we go to a restaurant on a birthday, it would kill me if they didn't bring out a free dessert, and it would kill her if they did!

On the other hand, we both love anchovies, although that's a wash, because those few restaurants that even have them on hand hate to serve them.  However, I am sure that Edwina and Deanna, the cats we've recently been adopted by, would love anchovies.

We both love the cats.

I am the luckiest man in the world, in love with the most wonderful woman in the world.  She puts up with me, and that is saying a lot; if you know me, you can't gainsay that.

Today is the 41st anniversary of the day we married, a long time as measured by a lot of marriages but only a downpayment on the eternity we plan to spend together. The secret is simple; I quote it all the time, and it came from Sheriff Andy Taylor on The Andy Griffith Show, who taught us that when someone loves you, the polite thing to is to love them right back. 

I fell in love with Peggy at first sight, and nothing about that has ever changed, which is why I was only too glad to rent a tux and get my hair cut for the wedding on December 8, 1973.  We scooted down to Williamsburg VA for a honeymoon which has never really ended, if you ask me. 

So now that we have entered our precious metal, or "golden" years together - and I have the silver hair and titanium knee to prove it - we're as happy as a couple of lightning bugs with new batteries.  We like to go places and see things just as much as ever, only now, we don't have to hurry home for anything.

Except the cats! 

Thank you, Peggy, for being the most wonderful wife in the world and the sweetest angel ever sent to earth.  There's an old Chinese saying, "Married couples who love each other say a thousand things without talking."  After 41 years, we know each other and predict each other and the fun is that we still have a lot to learn about each other, and infinity together ahead to learn it.

Sunday rerun: I'm looking for a safe way to shop

We talked the other day about how busboys (and it's always a busBOY - why do restaurants not have women doing this? I'm sure they would be too smart to) keep taking plates away from diners who aren't finished their meals.  Our conclusion seemed to be that we should blame the whole thing on some sort of national plate shortage.

And then something else came to mind, and it must be attributed to a shortage of time.  I'm going to ask a question here:

What's the big rush in the grocery store?  Why, when I am trying to load my groceries on the belt and get everything packed and carted and ready to take on home, do people keep shoving their carts into my achin' anklebones?  Here's the deal...I'll be putting ginger ale, fig newtons or burrito wraps on the belt and then wham! Earl and Marge, next in line, shove their cart up to me. Excuse me, but neither one says, "excuse me."  And then - since as a veteran A&P register operator/ bagger I know enough to put the stuff like eggs and potato chips that goes on top of the bags at the end of the line - Earl starts wedging his bottled prune juice, flank steak and Metamucil right up against my light bulbs, hippie bread and eggs.  Do they even think about using one of those plastic logs as a divider?  They do not.

It just so happens that I love shopping for, cooking, and consuming groceries.  As a young man, I looked forward to a trip to the A&P on Joppa Rd, which closed down years ago and became the home of a Dodge dealership, but then times got hard and people couldn't afford new American cars, so the Dodge people left and now it's about to become a BMW agency.  But when it was an A&P, my mom would take me there, and then and there I began my lifelong love affair with aisles crammed with Realemon, Snap-E-Tom, Bisquick, Reddi Wip, TastyKakes and Ugli Fruit.

It does not go unnoticed that grocery manufacturers do not hold to my devotion to good spelling.  But I love to peruse the aisles of a good supermarket.  It's not until I go to check out that the assault begins.

It's often my luck to be behind a veteran shopper who wants to break the cashier's cashews over the current price of food, how many items to place in a bag (paper inside plastic of course), and why he or she won't accept this 7¢ coupon on Parkay margarine clipped from the December 5, 1972 issue of LIFE magazine.  While I wait, hoping to avoid seeing my loaf get smashed, Marge and Earl are noodging their cart ever closer to my ankles, and I can only wonder why?  Daring to take my eyes away from my lower appendages for a quick look at my watch, I see that it's 2:43 on a Saturday afternoon.  So what's the rush?

If I find out why everyone is suddenly in a hurry to get out of the BagUrSelf every Saturday afternoon, I might join the rush.  Until then, I'll be in aisle 10, wearing ankle braces.

The Saturday Picture Show, December 6, 2014

I know bananas are good for me, so I eat half of one every day at lunch.  This is not easy, because if the banana is even slightly ripe, the taste puts me off something awful.  I had a Spanish teacher from Colombia who said he would not eat a banana that was not green; that's all they know down there.  I am waiting for the person who will grow a banana that tastes like bacon.

You know this town.  You love this town.  You've been here a million times, at least in your mind.  This is the set for Main Street in Mayberry, courthouse and all.

All right.  It's almost 2015, so this is what happens when a guy in Houston gets stuck in a traffic jam: he sends his drone aloft to see what's up ahead. Soon there will be no more traffic reports on the radio; we'll all simply launch our own drones.  I can't stand it.

When we think of Utah, we think of...growing watermelons?  I don't know...

This is my picture from the Yuletide exhibit at the DuPont family's Winterthur Mansion in Delaware.  This is the butler's dining room, where he could have his meal while the DuPonts chowed down in the next room.  But, if the DuPonts needed hot sauce or another oyster fork, they just rang a bell to summon help.  The butler and his family were smashing their eats in these used chairs, ready to jump up.  I suppose they entered the dining room and said, "You rang?"

My Dad was in the Navy in World War II, so I have no idea what Spam tastes like.  He vowed never to eat it again, having had it for breakfast, lunch and dinner every day for three years.

Someone said the Orion mission to Mars cost $370 million, and someone else said, no, it was $370 Billion with a B. Really, when you're wasting that much money going to other planets when we can't seem to act right on the one where we were born, what's the difference?

Tomorrow is Pearl Harbor Day, the 73rd anniversary of the Japanese attack on Oahu.  Note the date that the picture of the USS Arizona memorial was taken.  You never know.

You can usually catch an Ida Lupino movie on TCM every couple of days.  She always played a poor but classy girl who wouldn't mind being a little bad.  Here she was, in real life, doing a lot of good in World War II as a Lieutenant in the Women's Ambulance and Defense Corps in her native England.

The Mask of Comedy

At left, you see one of those funny things that go around on Facebook and all the world wide webs.  It's funny, right?

Yes, funny to think about, but let me caution you against actually doing it.  From my personal experience, it's not so funny.

Way back when Peggy and I were newlywed, things were tight in the wallets, so I scrimped and saved every way I could.  One way I had was to walk to the bank at the now-demolished Golden Ring Mall, instead of driving the car.  I know, it saved maybe a sip of gasoline, but it was also free exercise and fresh air, so a win-win.  We were living off Ridge Rd and Philadelphia Rd at the time.

One freezing frigid Friday, I strutted over to the bank to cash my paycheck.  For those of you born before direct deposit, well, it was a lot of fun to have to run to the bank every week, but lucky for me, I didn't make much money, so it wasn't hard to carry it all. I put on a yellow and brown ski mask and went to the bank on foot, and of course I removed the ski mask before entering the bank.  I did my banking and proceeded on home, and on the way I took a notion to stop at the local tavern and pick up a quart of beer to go with a late supper.

It really was cold that night, so cold that my face, even below the ski mask, was Frozen, so I decided to Let It Go!  (See how I work current-day references into my tired old stories from a generation ago?) I totally forgot that the ski mask was on when I entered the local bistro known then as the Ridge Inn.

And it was like a movie, with the doofus being played by yours truly. I've been in car wrecks, so I know the feeling you get when time seems to stand still and a moment feels like an eternity, like when you're watching a Gwyneth Paltrow movie that goes on at 8 and runs until the next morning, or so it seems.  I walked into the bar and...Everyone stopped talking. Someone turned off the jukebox.  The guys who were playing pool stopped playing pool and took up their pool cues as weapons to be used to rearrange the part in my flowing long blond hair.  The lights came on brightly.

And I pulled off that ski mask faster than any other garment I have ever removed from my face and said something like, "Oh! Sorry! I forgot I had it on!"

In the movies, that would be when everyone chuckled and the lights would dim and the pool game would clack back into life and the record on the jukebox would firrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrre  up again and it all would be so much fun.  That did not happen.  I walked out of there with my quart of National Bohemian, all right, and also a lot of trepidation.  But I lived to tell you not to try it out.  Today, they might nuke you!

Color Me Confused

Well, the  votes have been counted and the decision has been made, and if you didn't vote, then you have given up the chance, indeed the right, to grouse about the selection.  No matter how you wanted the election to come out, we will all live with the decision that Marsala is the color of the year for 2015, a year that has not even begun.

And none of us has ever heard of Marsala, outside of Veal Marsala, and Louie Marsala, the guy who lived down the street from your grandmother and drove a green Buick with fender skirts.

There is a group of people called Pantone, and they are "the authority on color, provider of color systems and leading technology for accurate communication of color,"  according to Wikipedia, and, probably, themselves. We need this in our lives, people to say, "Oh no, that's not a beige Ford Pinto, that color is "Chamois Tan."   That is an actual sentence once said to me by someone I used to talk with.

As a youth, I remember getting the big 64-pack of Crayola Crayons, and using the "burnt sienna" down to its little brown nub. And while I was in school, we learned the colors of the spectrum from Mr. Roy G. Biv: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.

And that would be quite enough colors and names for colors for most of us, but the good people at Pantone will be glad to help. Last year's, or should we say, "2014's" Color Of The Year was Radiant Orchid.  And I have several Tshirts and a hoodie, none of them in that color.


Pantone takes those 7 colors and breaks them into 2100 colors, each with its own number, meaning that you can't tell your printer that you want your logo to be "orange" in the brochure for your new delicatessen. At left are the choices, and you can have your choice, but please be specific!  There is a world of difference between Pumpkin Orange(Pantone 158) and Goldfish Orange (Pantone 166), especially when it comes to pie.

So here, for your shirt and dress-picking pleasure, we proudly unveil to you, your Pantone Color Of The Year.  Ladies and Gentlemen, Marsala!  Wear it in good health - you know, until you're "in the pink"! (Pantone 691-U)

Harrison Schmitt is not the guy from the movies, as it turns out

I don't think there are many people funnier than Norm MacDonald, the standup guy who used to do Weekend Update on Saturday Night Live back when that was a comedy show.  Norm's comic persona is that of a slightly spacey guy, but he happens to be very intelligent (the only celebrity to make it to the million-dollar level on "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?"). And even then, he was wrong while being right.

And the only one to point out that children grow up "so slowly," and are much less cute when they are in your front yard, punching you in the chest.

Norm is a high school dropout, and that puts him and fellow Canadian, the late Peter Jennings, in the same group of "Canadians who dropped out of high school and achieved great fame."  Norm quit school at age 15, but then again, his father was his teacher in 6th and 7th grades.

He's a regular on Letterman and Conan and all the other late late shows, and tossed in there among the great jokes ("Scientists believe they may have discovered a primitive form of life on Jupiter's moon Europa. That primitive form of life? You guessed it, Frank Stallone.") there is a lot of thoughtful commentary.

Check out this appearance on Letterman from 2011 and enjoy the laughs, although, if you know who Khloe Kardashian is, but don't know who Harrison Schmitt is, (I didn't either) maybe we can learn more from Norm than we think!

Say what?

We were discussing the sad karma of Elizabeth Lauten - that former Congressional spokesperson who had such awful things to say about the president's children and wound up having a can tied to her, even before The Smoking Gun turned up legal documents from when she was arrested for stealing from a department store - and how it would have been so much better for her to keep her thoughts to herself.  Unless her goal was to get herself fired and made to be an object of national scorn...

But someone said, "What of her First Amendment rights?" Here is what the First Amendment to the US Constitution says:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

OK?  So the government can't force you to be Lutheran, nor can they stop you from being one. You can speak on street corners, on your front porch, or in the car driving the kids to soccer, and no government official will crack down on you for speaking your mind.  And you can form a flash  mob (is that still a thing?) and you can email your county councilperson asking that something, at long last, finally be done about the potholes on Main Street.

That's how I understand it.  I'm no lawyer, no Constitutional scholar, but I look things up to learn.  I found this list of the types of speech that are NOT protected by Amendment 1:

Obscenity
Fighting words
Defamation (includes libel, slander)
Child pornography
Perjury
Blackmail
Incitement to imminent lawless action
True threats
Solicitations to commit crimes

Say what you will! It's America!

And that's as it should be.  None of these nine do anything to improve society as it is.

And another thing - there is no "get out of jail" card that comes with the Amendment. All it says is that you can say what you want. If you work for a meat packing company and you want to tell the world that you hate the thought of preparing, selling and eating meat, you can say whatever you want to.  If you work for a law firm and you think they are the biggest crooks since Capone, go for it. You can say what you think here.

But remember - so can your boss.  And "you're fired" is something he or she can say, too.

 

An acute triangle

One day, it's Liv Tyler, and then it's Paris Hilton, or Ariana Grande, and who knows who the current "It Girl" is in American pop culture? It changes almost every day, and it's always the same: a young woman, blessed with looks and sometimes a certain amount of talent, is suddenly all over the place, famous for being famous.

Imagine how it was when the mass media consisted of daily newspapers, and no "Entertainment Tonight" or E! channel or Instagram to make the unfamous famous overnight.

Evelyn Nesbit was the It Girl of the early 20th Century, a young lady from Philadelphia blessed with a gorgeous face.  She became a model in the very early days of mass advertising, and performed in Broadway musicals, where she caught the eyes of Harry K. Thaw and Stanford White.  White was a very well-known architect, a man who designed many famous buildings of the day (including the Lovely Lane Methodist Church in downtown Baltimore.) White both created beauty and appreciated beauty, and he took up with young Evelyn, becoming both her lover and her generous benefactor. They never made it to the altar, though.

Harry K. Thaw sounds more like a man of these days...rich by inheriting a ton of moolah, leader of a dissolute lifestyle, an avid drug abuser, and severely mentally deranged.  Thaw liked the ladies too, and to his voracious sexual appetite, he added the fillip of being into bondage and whips and so forth. So when he fell for Evelyn, she refused his hand in marriage for four years, since she knew that he valued chastity in the women he sought to debauch and defile.

Evelyn

But they later married, when his ardor overcame his puritanical weirdness.  That was in 1905.  The top of Thaw's head probably would have come off had he known that his dream girl had done the hibbidy-dibbidy with others besides White, most notably John Barrymore, the greatest actor of the time, and Drew Barrymore's grandfather, to connect this sordid tale with today.                    

Thaw's obsession with the man who had "ruined" (his term) the lovely Evelyn overtook his life, and at the rooftop theatre of Madison Square Garden on June 25, 1906, during a performance of a musical called "Mam'zelle Champagne" (as the cast sang "I Could Love A Million Girls") Thaw approached White, brandished a pistol, and fired three shots at White, killing him instantly, while Thaw hollered  "You've ruined my wife!"

Harry

The trial that followed was that century's Trial Of The Century, and Thaw was found to be insane.  He wound up in a mental institution, until he escaped in 1915 and paid off enough people to get a new trial, at which he was adjudged no longer insane. In the 1920s, he moved to Clearbrook, Virginia, lived on a farm and  joined the local volunteer fire company, dying in 1947 of a coronary thrombosis.

He was insane, all right.  He was crazy about old Evelyn.

Why apologize when you felt that way all along?

I'm not even about to discuss how wrong I think it was for this Elizabeth Lauten, communications director for right wing congressman Stephen Fincher, to say that the president's daughters Sasha and Malia showed disrespect and lacked "class" after their appearance at a Thanksgiving ceremony.  Complaining about presidential children is out of bounds and always has been, for those who know their way around Washington.  And even though we seem to have a new breed of people being elected to Congress, we can still expect better, even from people like Lauten.

Even my friends on the right agreed over the weekend that Lauten was wrong to pick on two young women like that.  But what chafes me even  more is that, once she became aware of how awful her comments were, she reverted to the time-honored, good old, all-American apology, saying, "After many hours of prayer, talking to my parents, and re-reading my words online I can see more clearly just how hurtful my words were. I'd like to apologize to all of those who I have hurt and offended with my words, and I pledge to learn and grow (and I assure you I have) from this experience."

The horrid appearance and completely unacceptable behavior of the president's children at the turkey-pardoning ceremony.

Lauten

Why does she throw up the fact that she (claims to have) prayed about all this?  Why does she drag her poor, embarrassed parents into this?  And why didn't she re-read her words before putting them on line?

A truly prayerful person knows better, lives better, acts better. She should have spared us the insincere, mawkish apology.  She slagged Sasha and Malia for no reason anyway, because they are not at the turkey-pardoning ceremony to be judged by Elizabeth Lauter, a grown woman without an ounce of class or decency.

Live your life, live and let live, and spare us the phony atonement.

Sunday rerun: Up, Up and Await

We were talking about George Plimpton the other day, and of the sort of things he did, and here's a time when he played a more traditional role in journalism and wrote about someone else doing something, as opposed to the sort of participatory journalism he more or less created.  Plimpton was the man who pitched to major leaguers and quarterbacked an NFL team and rode with firefighters and had all these adventures we would all like to have, and then wrote about them.

But in 1998, George wrote about this fellow Larry Walters, who, in 1982, attached forty two helium-filled weather balloons to one Sears Roebuck folding lawn chair and lifted off into the skies above Southern California.  Before you go to thinking that this idea seemed sort of 1/2-baked, Larry would have wanted you to know that it was, in fact, completely baked.  Or, he was.  Anyway, he planned to regulate his altitude by bursting the balloons one at a time by shooting them with a bb gun. And that would have worked, most clearly, except that a gust of wind tilted the chair and the gun plummeted earthward, leaving Larry aloft with plenty of extra bb's and nothing to shoot them with.

Imagine being the pilot of the TWA plane who saw this fellow and his chair flying over SoCal.  Imagine being the air traffic controller who got the radio message from the TWA jet, "We have a man in a chair attached to balloons in our ten o'clock position, range five miles."  Imagine that happening today; people would immediately suspect terrorism was afoot.  Or afloat.

Larry Walters was a former Army cook who never quite got ahold of the handle. He quit his job after the flight (he landed in some wires above the house of a startled off-duty pilot) and worked for a time as a motivational speaker, apparently speaking to groups who wanted to be motivated to foolhardiness. There was a play about his adventure, called "The Man In The Flying Lawn Chair" but this last burst of fame was posthumous; he committed suicide in the San Gabriel mountains in 1993 and the play was produced nine years after that.

Today, of course, he would have his own reality show and be a featured guest on sixteen different talk shows, and Sean Hannity would holler about how unfair it was that he was investigated and fined for his goofy flight, and his tell-all book "Beyond Earthly Bonds" would sell tons of copies and bump Bill O'Reilly's "Let Me Tell You The Truth Or Else" from the New York Times best seller list.  

Timing is everything.