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.

The Saturday Picture Show November 29, 2014

Can you even imagine seeing a stage show this great for two bucks? Sure, $2 was a lot more money in 1956, but what a lineup!

Beer manufacturers have always had to deal with the image of their product being seen as somehow déclassé, in comparison to wine and hard liquor. I happen to like the taste of the stuff and have since I was 13 21.

 If you missed the 70's, you didn't miss much. It was a decade in which people said, "Here's a nice shirt! I think I'll buy it and wear it." And then, this is look how they looked.

I've seen staircases with railings made of old baseball bats, but you have to give it to the chair with ax legs.

I love doing the grocery shopping, and I really loved it back in the days when Metro Foods had Taco Bell kiosks right in the store.  I could combine lunch with shopping! But this is an idea whose time has come somewhere...a bar inside a supermarket!

Some creative stone masonry on display!

"See? I TOLD you it would be OK to park here!  The sign says so!"

For those of us who love winter, here's a sneak preview!

Nothing to kick about

The Iron Bowl is the annual football game pitting the clearly superior University of Alabama and the woeful, makeshift team from some college called Auburn.  In all honesty, I can't even tell you how I became an Alabama fan, but there is something about college football, and when you connect with one team and go for the ride, it's a thrill a minute all through the fall.

This year's installment will be played tomorrow night at 8 on ESPN and I will be sure to watch and will also be sure to have dinner first.

Here's why:

Griffith (99)

Last year, the game came down to the final second in regulation play.  The score was tied 28-28 and Alabama asked freshman placekicker Adam Griffith to boot a 57-yard field goal and win the game.  We all know how that turned out.   You can watch the CBS coverage here if you really want to.  The kick fell just a bit short, and Chris Davis from Auburn ran it back for a winning touchdown and while I stood in the kitchen at home, staring at the TV in dumbstruck disbelief, the cream of mushroom soup I was heating for dinner boiled up and out of the saucepan, resulting in a mess that took quite some time to clean up.  It was awful. I don't think I've had mushroom soup at home since.

They showed this guy on TV and he symbolizes the despair of 'Bama fans everywhere

But here's something about that kick, and that kicker.  Seven years before that game, there was a young man then known as Andrzej Debowski, living in a sad Polish orphanage.   Life there was miserable, to put it mildly.  But in Calhoun, Georgia, a married couple of math teachers, Tom and Michelle Griffith, figured that 2 + 1 would = a good 3, so they adopted Andrzej and brought him to America, where he chose the first name "Adam" to go with his new surname.  He kicked for his high school team, won the state championship with them, and walked onto the Alabama team and kicks for them, wearing number 99.

When you read about the young man's earlier days, and how the love of his new parents changed everything for him, you'll see that losing a football game is not the worst thing that can happen to a person.

Still, I hope he is much happier this time Sunday morning!

Happy Thanksgiving! and please drive safely!

Ivy League for every drop of rain that falls, a flower grows....

In the middle of the sprawling campus of Towson University just outside Baltimore there lies a twelve-acre glen called "The Glen" by literal-minded students.  Within the glen are 94 of the 120 tree species native to Maryland.

These are everywhere!

You know that one of those tree types thriving in Towson would be the Ailanthus altissima, the tree originally from China that some people call the "Tree of Heaven" and some call the "stink tree." Ailanthus would grow in a paved schoolyard or a crack in a sidewalk. Or in a sidewalk without a crack, I don't know.  They're everywhere around here.

And so is English ivy (Hedera helix) which has been threatening to take over The Glen.  This rampant green invader can show up out of nowhere and, in no time at all, take over everything in sight, like your uncle from Cincinnati who showed up that time and just stayed and stayed, and ate all the scrapple and almond bark that Nora gave you for Christmas. 

English Ivy sounds very nice, like a nice tower at a college where people wear tweed suits and read Wordsworth and sip Darjeeling, or the other way around.  But once it takes over a garden or glen, it's curtains for the other flora...it will take over and choke everything in a curtain of green.  Even the ailanthus!

Getting your goat

So, bring in some fauna, figured the University brass, and they did, in the form of a herd of 18 goats from Harford County, who arrived by truck, entered the woods and commenced to chowing down on the ivy and I don't know what-all else...leaves, tree bark, probably some empty beer cans. This is a trial, but if the goats eliminate the ivy from this part of the campus, they will get to dine on all the overgrown sections.

It's more earth-friendly than herbicides and cheaper than hiring people.  And there is one other benefit...people get stung by bees and suffer reactions to poison ivy.  In my Opie-like childhood, when my parents moved to our long-time home outside Towson, the front yard had been allowed to run riot, and was full of poison ivy.  A friendly neighbor brought over his goat, who made a brunch of the problem, no problem.

 

We (finally) Gather Together

It's Thanksgiving Week, and what better time to watch "Planes, Trains and Automobiles," the 1987 movie starring John Candy and Steve Martin that shows how much fun it is to travel this week.

"Over the river and through the woods, to Grandmother's house we go, the horse knows the way to carry the sleigh through the white and drifted snow..." was the opening line in a song we always sang in elementary school as Turkey Day approached.  Maybe a horse and sleigh would have been an easier way to get around; certainly it would be a preferable mode of transport to the methods Candy (as Del Griffith) and Martin (as Neil Page) tried.

And of course, following a Monday that saw near-record setting temperatures in our part of the world, the forecast for T'Giving Eve tomorrow is for a coastal storm, bringing rain or snow to the Eastern United States, and the airline industry to its knees, or whatever an airplane has.  The TV news will show people sleeping in airports, or getting off a plane that sat for 27 hours on the tarmac with only a bag of Corn Nuts and a 3-liter Diet Sprite for the passengers, and those of us already where we are supposed to be will shake our shaggy heads and say, "You ain't gonna get ME up in one of those things!"

Good luck to all who take to the highways, the rails or the roads! Have a great trip and a wonderful Thanksgiving!

How about Jonas, brothers?

Even if you don't watch NFL football, you probably know the visage, and maybe the name, of Bill Belichick, coach of the New England Patriots.

You know, the guy stomping along the sidelines as a late Sunday game ends and you're waiting for "60 Minutes" to start tick tick ticking...and he's wearing the same ratty hoodie, the one that looks like he's going to patch the shingle on the roof as soon as the game is over.

He's not an enjoyable personality, not a happy-go-lucky fellow, but what he is, is a very successful coach.  And part of that is that he has rules, and they are to be followed, or this non-happy-go-lucky guy will be happy to tell you where to go.

Take running back Jonas Gray, a Notre Dame product who made the Patriots this year after kicking around with the Baltimore Ravens and Miami Dolphins in 2012 and 2013. The Sunday before last, he became the first NFL running back since 1921 to score four rushing touchdowns in a game, when he had never scored at all before that game.  Gray and the Patriots beat the stupid Colts that day, he ran for those touchdowns and for a total of 201 yards, and he made the cover of last week's Sports Illustrated.*

Looking for the
hot dog guy

Four days later, last Friday, as his team had one of their final practices before playing the Detroit Lions on Sunday, Gray failed to show up on time, using the "my cellphone battery died so my alarm failed to wake me up" defense.  When he did finally stroll in to work that day, Belichick sent him home, and then when his team took the field against the Lions, Gray took a seat on the bench, and we hope he got a good view of the game from where he was, because he didn't play in that game any more than you or I did, and that's "not a bit" in my case.

Reporters asked later why Gray did not play, and coach Belichick gave one of his standard terse replies: "We do what we think is best. That's what we did today."

One assumes that Mr Gray stopped at Try 'N' Save on his way home to purchase three alarm clocks and a rooster.  And as a longtime punctuality fanatic, I applaud Bill Belichick.

Maybe that sort of discipline explains why his team wins so often!

*Gray is only the latest in a long line of victims of the Sports Illustrated cover jinx.

The Saturday Picture Show, November 22, 2014

So this time of year as the fields lie fallow and await a spring planting - it's my favorite time of year!

I'll tell you, I couldn't pick Tom Hiddleston out of a police lineup...not that I think I'll be called upon to do so.  He's an actor, and he is shooting a picture now called "I Saw The Light," in which he plays Hank Williams, Sr. And just from the way they have him dressed and wearing that Stetson, it's clear he's got the moves like Hank. I can't wait to see this movie.  But for all I know, Hiddleston will be the guy standing in the lobby and I will walk right past him because I don't know him from Hank.

Because I watched Jackie Gleason all the time, I can never meet someone named Norton without hollering "NAWTON!" right back, to their complete surprise.  And because I read "The Catcher In The Rye" all the time, I can never see a picture of The Rockettes without saying, "You know what that is?  That's precision!"

Some time ago, we shared a picture of a NASCAR fan with his baseball cap on backwards, using his hand as an eye visor to shield himself from the hot sun of Talledega.  Now we see a kid who wants to bowl, at a bowling alley, playing a bowling video game. It's a wonder he's not wearing a backwards baseball cap.

It was 51 years ago today...

This nice stack o'logs won't do anyone any good this year, being unseasoned and fresh, but this time next year, someone will hear it snappin' and cracklin' on the hearth.

"When there's no future
How can there be sin
We're the flowers in the dustbin
We're the poison in your human machine
We're the future, your future"
What a powerful metaphor for a disaffected generation - flowers tossed into the trash by unappreciative old men and women. Remember being 17 and thinking you knew it all?  Some people at that age are closer to knowing it all then many of us will ever be. So why not listen to them?

Hey, you Buffalo hooligans!  You can't steal those chips!  They don't belong to you!  They're nacho chips!"