The Saturday Picture Show, June 15, 2024

 

The next time someone tells you that you're as cute as a nestful of two-day-old robins, here's what you can picture!

So you want to be a country music star? Here's the cover photo for your first album, "Sundown On The Tracks." I'll start you off with the lyrics for your first hit, then you take it from here:  "Oh, there was sundown on the tracks the night she left me, and her mom said she had gone to Kankakee, but I always thought that if she ever dumped me, she'd'a left me for some dump in Tennessee..."   Your turn! 

New wall paint color coming soon from Sherwin-Williams: Robin's Egg Blueberry Blue.

But Wu-Tang is forever. Write that down.

Baltimore once was the hub of all umbrella-making, and even then, no one thought to umbrellate an entire city block.

The original poster said they've been feeding this stray cat and her family, and every night when they put the food down, the mama makes sure her kids get all they need before she even takes a morsel. True love.

I don't know, but if I got this fortune in my Chinese cookie, I might have to seek help just because of what this said!

So when you register this car with the MVA, under "color," just say "All of them."

Where Are They Now? 2024 edition: Apparently, Mr T is teaching math to some unruly cake-loving kids. I pity the fools!

The building in the background - the one that looks like it's leaning over onto a very jampacked neighborhood - is the Hotel Grand Lisboa in Macau, China. This picture won the NatGeo Travel Photograph of the Year Award in 2010.

The Employment Line

It was not my favorite part of being a supervisor to hire and fire people, but I hadda do what I hadda do. In fact, I was once transferred to a better slot because I knew how to get rid of people who refused to work and at least stay around for an entire shift.

Interviews...I could tell you a million stories...the guy who showed up late wearing a torn shirt and said his main weakness was punctuality...the one who explained a nine-month gap in his employment history by saying "I was working for Hechinger's and the boss asked me to do something, but I was on my lunch hour, and I don't play that s@&t!"...

...the many others who cursed, spoke disrespectfully about everything and everyone...the ones with all sorts of conditions ("I don't work nights, weekends, holidays, or snow days"), the one who put his feet on my desk in mid-interview (I can still see the soles of his Nikes in my mind's eye)  and the ones who claimed technical expertise or experience they clearly lacked ("You worked for Permits And Licenses?" "Yes, I worked for both of them." "They are the same agency." "Not when I worked there." "When was this?" "Oh, it's been YEARS and YEARS.")

But the clear topper of them all was the dude who sat down while telling me he knew he was getting hired because his mother told him so. I just had to know more and so I asked who his mother was. She was a County employee, not in any position of influence over anything at all, but she had told Sonny Boy that the fix was in, and all he had to do was show up and get put on the payroll. I started to think it was some sort of Candid Camera stunt. He mumbled half-answers to whole questions, he had no idea about what the job entailed, and he had no experience, as I recall, beyond being the cart guy at Food-A-Rama or some such. He really acted like he had left his bowl of Crispy Critters at home and wanted to get back to finish breakfast before it got all soggy.

Sure as you're born, his mother was on the phone the next day to wrap up the details and find out when he would be up for Employee Of The Year. She asked me straight up, was he hired? I told her that was privileged information between the applicant and the Office of Personnel.

Her reply? "But I'm his MOTHER!"

I still wonder if he ever got a job anywhere. 

Parents, do your children a favor and let them handle their own lives at work. I counselled a young woman for repeated lateness reporting to work, and her mother called to complain about it!

I wonder where she wound up, as well.

Buffaloed

Out at Yellowstone (not Jellystone) National Park the other day, an 83-year-old woman received serious injuries by being gored by a bison.

The park recommends that visitors on two feet remain 25 yards away from large animals like bison and 100 yards away from bears and wolves. This woman apparently wanted to get up close and personal and this is the result. The bison was simply defending its space when it gored the South Carolina woman, lifting her a foot off the ground with its horns.

The park also noted that more people have been injured by bison there than by any other creature. I guess they look approachable and friendly.

"Bison are not aggressive animals but will defend their space when threatened. They are unpredictable and can run three times faster than humans," the park warned.

These animals are the largest mammals in North America, larger than even Travis Kelce, and they don't mind you watching them from afar. Google maps tells me I am currently 1770 miles away from being gored if I don't get any closer.  

I think that's afar enough. I won't even go to Buffalo, New York, just to be safe.

NAAW!

June is National Accordion Awareness Month!

There was a time when every town had a television show on Saturday afternoons, usually called something like "Talent Time," and there was always some kid wailing away on an accordion.

I love the sound of a squeezebox.

Somewhere around the house I have an old CD called "Legends of Accordion." Peggy always said it sounded so much better in my truck, so maybe I should leave it there. Hmmm. 

For those who might say the accordion is not hip or cool or whatever the hip or cool people say now, I say listen to this version of "So What's New?" by Milton DeLugg (before he had the Band With A Thug.)  Listen to it and I promise you will tap your toe 'til your corns start to hurting.

Milton DeLugg led the band with his accordion on the first version of the Tonight Show.

Let the rest of this month ring out with accordion favorites day and night! Roll out the barrel and let's hear it! 

Back to the Past

The BBC tells us about a couple, Liberty Avery and Greg Kirby, from Ditchingham, Norfolk, England. Liberty and Greg are totally into history - specifically the 1940s - and totally into living as if it were still the 1940s!

She's 24 and he's 29, so it's not like they have any living memory of the decade marked by World War II, the Berlin Airlift transporting food, fuel, and medicine to West Berlin during a Soviet blockade, the 1948 London Olympics (Germany and Japan were excluded), Big Band music, great movies and theater performances, and books by Dr Spock on how to raise kids and by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry on how to raise a little prince.

But they're into it! They get traditional style clothing from the era, drive a 1942 American Jeep (we left thousands of them behind!) and have their house furnished in all vintage 40's furniture.

Greg says, "It's just a simple life, really.  We tried to make our wedding as 40s as possible; traditional, as perhaps our grandparents would've done it," he pointed out.

"They wouldn't have necessarily spent a huge amount, so we didn't, either."

For her part, Liberty says, "The reaction to us when walking down the street is generally positive. We do get the odd joke but it's a nice way to meet people because people do approach us."

As you might expect, these two aren't sitting around on Facebook and Instagram all the time. They play board games in the evenings and look for dances to attend on the weekends. And Liberty bakes, using recipes from the era, and makes reproductions of clothes using old patterns.

And then...every now and then, when the old black-and-white war movies get too heavy, they give "Mrs Miniver" a shove aside and "watch something recent now and then."

And how did these happy honeymooners meet? He walked into a hair salon where she was an apprentice, and that was it!

"He hasn't been able to get rid of me since," she laughs.

Make me wanna shout

On my mind today: unconventional behavior among  people.

I don't know if it started when that goober Addison Graves "Joe" Wilson Sr, Congressman from S. Carolina, hollered, "You lie" (he didn't) during an address to a dual session of Congress from President Barack Obama in 2009. 

Maybe it was before that. I can remember drunks taking part in a wedding ceremony in a church, so sloshed that they had to lean on the altar rail for support. People think nothing of hollering at servers and cashiers and bank tellers, creating awful scenes. People go to church services and funerals dressed as if they were headed out to the beach in a minute. Who hasn't sat down somewhere where the previous occupant left behind peanut shells and banana peels? 

The list goes on and on, and just when I thought I had seen my fellow citizens model every type of rude behavior, here came this, in the Baltimore SUN this past week. There was a story about the former general manager of the Baltimore Blast indoor soccer team, who admitted to ripping the team and its owner Ed Hale off to the tune of over $100,000.

They had a trial for this person in Baltimore County Circuit Court. Let the newspaper clipping show you how some people can't tell the difference between a courtroom and a soccer arena:

A spectator during a court proceeding stood up and hollered an exhortation to    a businessman during a trial, as if he were at a ballgame and screaming for a batter to slap a sharp single between second and third. Or whatever they want a soccer player to do. 

In a day when people call teachers by their first name and heat up fish in the office microwave and cut other people off in traffic, nothing should surprise us. 

I want to holler about it all, but in an appropriate manner, time, and place.

Sunday Rerun: Big Shot

 Yesterday, we spoke of the folly of chugging 25 energy drinks.

Today, as much as I wish it weren't necessary to even bring it up, we need to spend a moment on the non-salubrious effects of shooting each other in the head with a pistol.

The location is a restaurant in Memphis and the event is the "No Lackin' Challenge," the latest fad in a year that began with children biting down on detergent pods. My wood-workin' whittling Dad used to know an old guy who demanded a dollar payment from any of his friends who couldn't produce a pocket knife on demand, but this challenge means that you'd better be able to show your friend a shooting iron if he asks to see yours.

You can go on the YouTube thing and see videos of this nonsense. It's just supposed to be an excuse to pull out your substitute phallus and show it off. No bullets are supposed to be fired.

But at the restaurant, E's Cafe on Union Avenue, a 17-year-old guy was shot right in the melon.

According to police, 21-year-old Sherman Lackland was sitting in a booth with two friends, playing the No Lackin Challenge, when he reportedly, accidentally, shot his friend.

Thomas Fitzpatrick was inside E's, and says there was a "a real loud bang, then I see the guy across from him fall in the floor."

There's no report on the condition of the young man shot, but Lackland is now facing charges for playing this dumb game.

Memphian West Moore spoke for all sensible souls when he said, "It's something that you shouldn't tamper with. It's too many kids being killed as it is."

So we wrap up another week of Tips For Healthy Living by reminding all people of all ages and genders not to eat soap, or chug-a-lug dozens of caffeine drinks, or shoot others in the head.

We really should set the bar a little higher, no?

The Saturday Picture Show, June 8, 2024

 

So, if one of the little wires powering your wristwatch happens to go bad or get disconnected or whatever, you can now look into the matter for yourself.

It wasn't Maryland's turn for a cicada invasion this summer.  We were visited by millions of flying buzzing bug-eyed bugs last in 2021 and their progeny will arrive in these precincts in 2038. Cicadas are currently bedeviling the American South, as seen above.

"Good morning, Titanic guests and crew! Here's today's menu!" My advice is to skip the oatmeal porridge for breakfast if you're planning to have the gruel for supper. Too much roughage.

I've told this before, but I love to talk about the great Moe Berg, major league catcher and US spy during World War II. Moe's sister was a librarian and teacher in New Jersey, and in spring and summer, she could walk into any restaurant in New York and have the finest dinner in return for a peck of her home-grown raspberries, which were favored by all the pastry chefs. And her secret was that she lived just one block from the police stable in her town. You can take it from there.

This is an alley in Prague so narrow that only one thin pedestrian at a time can walk it. That's why they have a traffic light! My claustrophobia is off the charts right now.

Someone can tell me what kind of bird this is. I know one thing - he or she is great at picking up nuts and berries!

I've never been stuck behind a chicken truck in Alabama, but if you click on this song this song by John Anderson, he'll tell you all about it!

The year was 1961 and Ham the Space Ape was just back from a suborbital flight and was picked up by the USS Donner for a ride home. He said he enjoyed his flight but didn't want to stay around for the Donner party.

You know those slivered almonds you love on your ice cream? Here's where some of them come from - the almond orchards in Turkey!

We'll never know if the stray hairs at the nape of this young lady's neck were accidentally or intentionally made to spell out LOVE but I hope it was a natural sign from above!

A pejorist is one who sees the world negatively

Some pejorist I don't even know was telling me the other day that I had better get ready for the next Civil War to come to America. He seemed to be upset about the verdict in some trial up north, I don't know. 

I just can't stand the thought of it. And I would hate to have to wear one of those itchy wool uniforms, so let's try to find a way to Appomattox our way out of another war like that.

Some people seem to try to start them everywhere they go. I had no more walked into Dr Lauring's office the other day for my annual skin screening (I passed) when some old guy about my age was kicking up a fury with the receptionist. He showed up at 2:15 for his 1 o'clock appointment and could not understand why he couldn't be seen at once.

"Oh, all right, I'll just come back tomorrow morning and she'll see me then," was the next foolish thing he said. The receptionist said they don't take walk-ins, and offered him a slot at 1:45 this Thursday, to which he replied, "I have somewhere to be at 2, but they'll just have to wait."

With that charming colloquy, we saw the very essence of the spoiled American soul. Show up late and see me now! Everyone else can wait. He was a nasty, self-important old curmudgeon, and my hat is off to the receptionist for not reaching out and scotch-taping his tongue to his cheek. 

But hey, if there is another civil war, I choose not to be on his side!

D-Day is today

Today, June 6, marks the day in 1944 when the fortunes of the world took a great turn for the better. That was D-Day (the D stood for nothing but "Day," signifying how much was riding on this military operation), the invasion of France by beach landings in Normandy to defeat German troops occupying France. Planning for it began in 1943, and General Dwight D. Eisenhower was appointed Supreme Commander of the entire operation, which all might have been scuttled in that very year except for one man's nearsightedness.

An early version of the plan blew out a window that summer in London's Norfolk House, but a man who picked the papers off the street couldn't read them without his glasses and could only see the large type, indicating that they had some military import, so he dropped his find off at a military post.

And the plans called for the invasion, which brought 156,000 troops or paratroopers ashore (73,000 from the U.S., 83,000 from Great Britain and Canada) to take place on June 5, but bad weather forced a 24-hour postponement.  When June 6, 1944, dawned clear, Eisenhower told troops: “You are about to embark upon a great crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you.”

1,900 Allied bombers attacked German lines, dropping seven million pounds of bombs that day.

10,521 combat aircraft flew a total of 15,000 flights, with 113 lost.

The naval bombardment was delivered by seven battleships, 18 cruisers, and 43 destroyers.

By the evening of June 6, 20,000 vehicles and 150,000 soldiers were in place on French soil to begin pushing German forces all the way back to Germany, leading to the merciful end of the war in 1945.

50,000 German troops were in place to counteract the invasion, but several things hampered them.

For one, the Germans were deceived by a fake army of dummy camps, planes and tanks built further up the English coast at  Kent and Essex, leading the Germans to figure on an invasion at Calais.

For a second, German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. the man in charge of defending German holdings in northern France from any invasion, was not around. His staff told him that the English Channel was far too rough for a landing, so he was in Germany, celebrating his wife’s 50th birthday.

And for a third, Adolf Hitler, Chancellor and Fuhrer of Germany, was also back home, sound asleep, and his aides so feared waking him that they let him sleep in, which severely delayed getting additional troops sent in. 

Nice work, dummkopfs. Thanks!

And speaking of using dummies...Eisenhower and his men were truly geniuses, thinking of everything as they planned. On the morning of the 6th, as the invasion began, they had planes flying over other locations, dropping DUMMY paratroopers to convince the Germans that the invasion was taking place elsewhere.

Oh for the days when brilliance and fortitude saved the world!

If you have a spare minute today, think a minute today about what it felt like for all involved, from the newest private to Eisenhower, to know that failure would have cost the world its freedom, and think of the men invading that beach, and be glad they did, and mourn those lost.

Pack It In

I have a sneaking suspicion (aren't they all?) that some companies put exorbitant prices on their merchandise because, well, if people will pay 40 bucks for something worth 5, they'll just as likely pay 80.

It all comes up because of something I saw on Amazon. Now, I am a fan of Yeti drink tumblers. I have one filled with berries, a grapefruit wedge, ice, and seltzer at my side all day around the house. And I have another Yeti for hot drinks. When I first got it, I thought it might be a problem to put my hot tea in there, because it couldn't be reheated in the microwave.  But...it never needs reheating! You put a hot drink in the Yeti, and it stays hot until the cows come home.

Which is at about 8 or 8:30, these days.

So, yes, it's Yeti for your hot and cold drink needs, certainly. 

Available in 19 fashionable colors

But what stopped me cold on Amazon was seeing this "Daytrip Packable Lunch Bag" they're hawking now. As a longtime lunchbagger, I took my sammy, chips, and TastyKake to school for 12 years in brown paper sacks, and later I hauled the same lunches to work in a succession of insulated lunch bags. I would put a cold bottle of Coke or ginger ale in there to keep everything cool til lunchtime. Those totes would last a couple of years and then the handle would fall off or something. I promise you before any grand jury that I never spent more than ten simoleons for one of them.

I have to tell you right now that even if I had Scrooge McDuck money, I would not pay you the asking price - $104! - for the Yeti lunchbag. There's no way it's going to keep a salami sandwich any better than the el cheapo model.

If people buy these for their kids, I predict an upswing in lunch thefts across the land.  Not for the contents, but for the bags themselves.

Maybe I'm crazy, I don't know. 

Take it easy there

In 1922, one I. I. Cammack, superintendent of the Kansas City (MO) school system, asked his state legislature to ban jazz music. 

I checked, and in 1922, Missouri was one of the 48 United States, whose citizens enjoyed the liberties enumerated in various documents back in the 1700s.

I.I. (it would have been great if he had joined the Navy and said "Aye aye, sir" when either given a command or asked his name) said, "I think the time has come when teachers should assume a militant attitude toward all forms of this debasing and degrading music."

I looked up the most popular songs from 1922 (I have all sorts of time for these pursuits) and I see high up on the chart "I'll Stand Beneath Your Window Tonight and Whistle" by Aileen Stanley and Billy Murray (not THAT Billy Murray!)  Then there was "Three O'Clock In The Morning" by Paul Whiteman, and Aileen Stanley left Billy alone long enough to record "Homesick."

None of these songs seemed bad enough to ruin the morals of young Kansas Citizens. Maybe I.I. was just grumpy that day. Perhaps if he had listened to Al Jolson sing "Toot Toot Tootsie Goodbye" he wouldn't have been such a Superintendent Cranky Pants.

I Googled Cammack to see what his deal was, just to be able to write a complete report for you. But the only other reference anywhere was an article he wrote in 1926 about "Aviation In The Public Schools," and access to this piece is granted only to subscribers to a website that keeps the past in mothballs for academics and researchers, not people like me who wish people would stop getting all worked up about everyone else's music. 

I'm sure old I.I. was all in favor of his students getting up in an American Eagle A-101 and flying down to Devils Elbow for the weekend, though.

On the book

I love libraries, and I love old books, and a lot of those library books are about long-lost loves coming back.

Dateline Helsinki, Finland, where a  book by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle came back to the Central Library just 84 years past its due date.

The Oodi Library reports that someone returned a Finnish translation of Doyle's historical novel Refugees. It was supposed to be back in the stacks on Dec. 26, 1939.

"Always better late than never," the library said. Heini Strand, the librarian, says no one had an explanation, but she figured that "these kinds of loans returned decades after the due date are books found when people go through deceased relatives' belongings." 

History buffs will recall that one month before that due date, the Soviet Union invaded Finland, so there's that. "The return of the book might not have been the first thing on the borrower's mind when the due date approached," Ms Strand said.

You know me well enough to predict that my theory is, the borrower just wasn't Finnished with the book yet.

 

Sunday Rerun: Zip It

 Police officers, penitentiary workers, and lovers of bondage everywhere were rankled several weeks back when the insurrection was raging and people were seen running in and out of the Capitol with flex-cuffs. Their rankle-rage stemmed from the fact that some were calling these ersatz handcuffs "zip ties." They are also called "flex cuffs," but they work on the same principle as that zip tie I use to seal my trash bags every Monday night.  There is a flexible tape with "teeth" that grab a little thing called a "pawl." When the tape is pulled tight, the teeth engage the pawl with a ratchet action that cannot be reversed, forming a tight link that our refuse collectors always seem to appreciate.

Just as William Claude Dukenfield is better known as W.C. Fields, zip ties have a real name. Their brand name is Ty-Rap (why hasn't some hip hop artist chosen that as a stage name?) and their origin is one of those stories I love to share, so here 'tis...

A man named Maurus C. Logan worked for Thomas & Betts, an electrical company. He happened to be touring a Boeing aircraft plant one day in 1956 and was watching people assemble wiring for airplanes. As you might imagine, the wiring for an airplane is a tedious, cumbersome undertaking, a lot more complicated than repairing a lamp or an extension cord. There's so much wire, they had to lay it out  - thousands of feet of it - on 50-foot long wooden sheets to be bundled up into thick cords. Back in the day, people wrestled these thick cords and tied them together with waxed nylon rope. Each knot of the rope had to be pulled tight by hand. Logan, in talking to the workers, heard that their hands became so callused by hundreds of tiny cuts that they referred to each other as "hamburger hands." He figured there had to be a way to gang these wires with something than bound them quickly and safely.  

It took two years, but he developed and patented Ty-Rap in 1958, and from the aircraft industry to the weekly task of sealing my trash bags, they are everywhere now. 

And while I was researching all this, I found these some other uses for zip ties on a site called https://www.onegoodthingbyjillee, so why not share them, I thought? 

1. Key Ring

2. Binder Rings

3. Organize Cables - you'll save a lot of hassle if you put a red zip tie on each end of cords and cables running to your pc. One day when you're guessing which plug to pull out of the power block, you'll be glad!

4. Luggage Lock- run one between two zipper pulls. But he sure you have a knife on you to cut it off when you get where you're going! Be funny if the knife were inside the sealed carryon bag.

5. Bubble Wand - a small loop at the end of a long zip can be a bubble wand, sure!

8. Childproofing cabinets - zip two adjacent knobs!

9. Plant Support - a loosely-looped zip around a plant stem, with a pencil for a stake in it, and there you go!

and the most amazing of all: Zip Tie traction aids for shoes! 

Some icy morning when you're headed out to scrape ice off the car, run a zip tie around the toe of your shoe, and pull it tight, with the fastener pointing to the ground, trim the excess, and away you go!

The Saturday Picture Show, June 1, 2024

 

I try to avoid black-and-white photos here because, well, because they lack color, but I found this to be remarkable. A drive-in grocery store in Georgia years ago. Easy to see why this idea failed to catch on. By the time you got home with your flank steak, it smelled of car exhaust, and if the cars drove in single file, and you were only getting a lb. of bacon and the sedan ahead was filling a week's worth of grocery orders, with no express line, you'd be there 'til the cows came home.

Is there some certain protocol for waving at the people riding past you in the Weinermobile? Can you ask if they have any Grey Poupon?

The story of Tater Tots is a classic in the annals of American ingenuity...the factory was scooping out all the potato meat from the skins, and that left a lot of waste product, until someone realized they could mash the spudskins and extrude that into millions of tasty Tots, and dinners are the better for it.

I've never been to Kansas, and it would be cool to see acres and acres of flat acreage with amber waves of grain. No wonder Miss Gulch rode her bike so fast- no hills!

Nature has a way of reminding us that even the lowly weeds that grow at the edges of the lawn can have a pretty bloom!

I'll keep looking for this variety of tomato in the produce aisle. It's called Purple Norfolk. You'd think they could come up with a sponsorship deal with the Ravens!

Cats love to look outside at the passing wildlife, knowing they have 27 places inside to take a nap.

Look again! It's not a real trolley; it's just chalk art on the street, an example of trompe l'oeil, French for "deceive the eye." Another helpful French expression is "attention aux trains" - watch out for the trains!

Until it rains, the kids on this court will have an a-maze-ing day!

Coolest kid of the week is this little sidekick, whose Dad made him his own lumber cart so they could go to Home Depot together. Who woodn't love one of these?

Tomb it may concern

You know the old joke about the guy who was so important at his job, he had several hundred people under him? 
He cut the grass at the cemetery.

Well, the TODAY show introduced us to Haley Hodge, who is fixing to have her fourth child. She has a husband name of Rivers, and the three kids: Finley (10), Crew (3) and Banks, (16 months.)

So where to come up with that crucial fourth name for the soon-to-be new member of the Hodge fund?

Cemeteries. Read the tombstones in the field of stones!

“I know some people might find it creepy, but my mother was a history buff and when we were growing up, she would take us on field trips to cemeteries,” says Mrs Hodge, a physical therapist. “You can learn so much about cultural aspects of the past."

After all, she points out, her sister Cooper got her name from a tombstone. And does she have a daughter named Alice? I guess not, or they would have said.

Mrs Hodge was in Southport, North Carolina, prowling the Smithville Burying Ground, and she came up with two ideas for her daughter-on-the-way...Galloway, and Salem.

Good luck to the Hodges and the new little one. I used to take my turn mowing the lawn at the little cemetery in Providence, and I don't remember any names being particularly inspiring, except for Jehoshaphat, and I don't see that one making a comeback soon.

The burial plot of Jerry Lee Lewis, (there are three names for you seekers!) who said, "Don't put a headstone on my grave. I want a monument!"

Sling Sting

A two-year-old child hurls his dinner plate at the wall and gets hauled away to quiet time and whatever other punishment his parents deem appropriate. He is taught that we must eat the food put before us, unless, of course, someone drops asparagus on my plate, and then you'll see some flying greenery.  There are limits, after all.

Same way when Dennis The Menace, Jr, runs around the neighborhood winging other kids or someone's patio window with his slingshot or pea shooter or whatever. He will learn his lesson when a deputized squad of bigger kids gets ahold of him and his bike and his weapon, and he enters a reeducation program that will likely involve opening a can of whoopass, which might involve the administration of purple nurples.

In this way, young men learn the dangers and consequences of an errant lifestyle, the hope being that by the time they reach 81 years of age, they don't have to be arrested for going around striking residential windows, denting car windshields, and shooting off pellets a bit too close to several neighbors out in Azusa, California.

The search of the Kingdom

But such a felony spree took place over like 10 years, so the Azusa Police Department termed it a  “quality of life issue” victimizing dozens of citizens over the decade.

Warrant in hand, police appeared at the residence of one Prince King. They found the slingshot and ball bearings there.

Lt. Jake Bushey of the APD says no injuries were reported in all this.

“It’s been ongoing for many years because we just didn’t identify who the suspect was,” Bushey says, adding that no one has any idea why the man was doing this juvenile prank as his his 70s turned into his 80s.

“We’re not aware of any kind of motive other than just malicious mischief.” 

If I may hazard a guess, maybe it's the result of a lifetime of confusion over whether he's a Prince or a King.

 

Locked In

Ever notice how one good idea will take years to germinate and spread around to benefit all, while one really bad idea will take off like Marjorie T. Greene at a free hairdye giveaway?

Case in point: at the Grand Canyon, couples are so taken by the impressive romantic view that they a) stand and enjoy it for a good long while, soaking in the majesty of nature and making memories to last a lifetime   or   b) they hook a padlock  - a "love lock" onto the fence and throw the key down to earth below. That pure drippy symbolism means their love is here forever to have and to hold etc etc.

But the National Park Service wants to point out that endangered California condors that live in northern Arizona and southern Utah - home of the Grand Canyon Nat'l Park - love to nibble on shiny objects, such as keys.  And the Park Service also reminds all that this dangerous practice is also a form of graffiti and littering.

Love locks are a problem all over. In Paris, a footbridge known as Pont des Arts (Bridge of the Arts) had so many Master Locks and Abus Locks and antique Slaymakers locked onto it, the structural integrity of the bridge was being compromised, which, if left unchecked, would let to the bridge collapsing, or "c'llapsing," as one of our local news anchors misstates it.

Park Rangers are kept busy removing the locks

Keys can become lodged in a condor's digestive tract

 

California condors nearly went extinct during the 1980s; they are scavengers, feed on a lot of roadkill, and that introduced metals into their bodies, leading to death. There were but 22 of them left in 1982, but 40+ years of careful conservation have brought those numbers back. There are said to be 350 condors in the wild now and another 200 in captivity.

So don't be a dodo and toss metal keys around, and don't fall in with the Love Lock crowd. Instead, grow your hair to luxuriant lengths and donate it to Locks Of Love - a much better way to make a lasting statement.

 

Mixed-up Martial Artist

Let's start the short week off with some remarks by a man who is seemingly short on common sense. Meet American mixed martial artist Bryce Mitchell, who says he feels a need to home-school his infant son for the simple reason that he doesn’t “want him to be gay.”

Mr Mitchell has lived for 29 years now, and still hasn't learned not to say things like “We’re going to have to home-school all our kids or they’re all going to end up turning gay.” His son, Tucker (presumably named after talk show guy Carlson) was just born on March 29, and even he knows better than to say things like  "That’s the reason I’m going to home-school Tucker, because I don’t want him to be a communist. I don’t want him to worship Satan. I don’t want him to be gay.”

They call him "Thug Nasty" on the fighting circuit.  Have you ever seen one of those guys who struts around with clothing and jewelry and weapons that attest to how tough they are? You get the picture. 

This guy  - a cattle farmer besides being a martial artist - also says that people shouldn't have their children vaccinated, and that public schools are wrong for not having students read the Bible.

“They took it out of the schools and replaced it with Edgar Allen Poe," he grumbles. “My son ain’t going to be reading no Edgar Allan Poe, OK? He’s going to be reading the Bible.”

"The eyes are the windows to your soul." - Shakespeare

The article I read does not answer the burning question of who will be a-teachin' readin', writin', an' cipherin' to Tucker. One can only hope that it won't be this man, who also believes Earth is flat.

 Here is a sample of his writing and his abundantly wonderful thoughts:

Funny that a man who makes his living as a fighter can't spell fight. Or know the difference between the Department of Homeland Security and Child Protective Services. 

That's all I'm "gunna" say.

Memorial Day

 Please remember to think a few good thoughts for those who gave their lives in battles to save our nation.