A 9/11 story

It's September 11, and everyone has their memories and feelings about that day that really changed everything.

And it's good for us "of a certain age" to remember that 9/11/2001 was 19 years ago, meaning that for people currently in high school, and some in college,
they have no personal connection to the events. Sure, they have seen video and heard a lot about it, but there's always room for everyone to learn more.

F'rinstance, not a whole lot of us know a whole lot about the 9/11 Boatlift. With what seemed to be the entire world crashing down on them, people who found themselves around Ground Zero came to a staggering realization: Manhattan is an island, and when the streets and highways that are usually clogged in the town where gridlock began, there's only going to be one escape.

The water.

Those who know such things believe that more than half a million people needed to be transported out of the southern tip of Lower Manhattan.  You remember the videos, the dazed survivors out in the streets, a long way from home and comfort.

As so often happens here in the greatest country in the world (it never needed to be made great again; it always has been) saw ordinary people respond to an extraordinary situation and become a team of heroes in what is regarded as the world's largest water evacuation of all time.

Of course, there was no plan for how to get 500,000+ humans off the island and on their way. It's hard for civic officials to even grasp the concept. (Here in Maryland, the last plan I ever heard about for what we would do in case of a nuclear attack, devastating earthquake or catastrophic weather event was no more detailed than "Everyone get in your cars and head for West Virginia.")

And there certainly was no way for New York officials to lay out a plan for getting folks off Manhattan.  But as so often happens, leave it to the people, and good things result.  Boats and ferries are always active in those waters, of course, and they began turning for shore to pick people up.  Destination? To be determined. Just getting away from the desolation was the goal.

What happened was that feeling we get when there's a chance to help a stranger - someone we don't know, nothing in it for us but the feeling of helping a fellow citizen. So mariners did what they could.  And the United States Coast Guard -  the first to protect our seas and shores - operates the marine radios that all afloat listen to, and they put out the Mayday call for everyone to come help.

And along came tugboats, party pontoons, water taxis, runabouts, whatever, heading for the scene to take on passengers.

Let us not forget that all who headed for the tip of Manhattan that horrible but beautiful Tuesday morning saw what they were headed for - smoke and gases in the air and airborne debris were plentiful.  And that's what they SAW. None of them had the slightest idea if there would be further attacks, exposing the makeshift fleet to disaster. In fact, it's probable that few of them knew a whole lot about what HAD happened, and none of what might.

But with steadfast determination, the American kind, they loaded as many as their vessels held, dropped people off at a safe dock, and went back for more, as many times as it took to move 500,000 terrified fellow citizens.

The Coast Guard adds it up as more than 150 boats, crewed by 800-some people, getting that half a million off Manhattan.  It took until well into the night, but no one was left stranded.

Tom Hanks narrated a documentary entitled “Boatlift: An Untold Tale of 9/11 Resilience” in 2011. It told tales of people such as Vincent Ardolino of Brooklyn, captain of the Amberjack V. He recalls saying to his wife,“I’ve got to go do something … I’m going to take the Amberjack up into the city and help … I have to do what I have to do … Even if I rescue one person, that’s one person less that will suffer or die.”

And remember, he had no way of knowing if he would come home to his wife. America was at war, and he did what he could, and if you multiply that by 800 other good people, that's how every one of those survivors got on their way home on September 11, 2001.

Thought for food

There were more than two fascinating things about my father's Aunt Dot from Philadelphia, but I will just share these two:

A - she grew up on the Jersey Shore down around Cape May, and one of her childhood playmates was a little lass who grew to be...drum roll please...Mrs Paul of seafood fame!

2 - she worked as a packer for W. Atlee Burpee & Co, the premier seed supplier. So we never lacked for the freshest of corn and other vegetables and flowers around the yard during my Opie-esque childhood.

I got to thinking about my childhood days running around, barefoot boy with a hoe, when I saw an article about something that's becoming popular again.

People had a lot of time on their hands this year, and that led to having a lot of dirt on their hands, and fertilizer. Being home and having nothing much to do, many people started home gardens as a way to spend time in the out of doors, and also get a some kohlrabi and carrots and poppies for the table. Seeds were bought, seeds were planted.

And then...

After a record-setting spring season for sellers of seeds and garden implements and pain medications (Google searches for "growing food" were up 4650%, and the good people at W. Atlee Burpee & Co had the biggest sales year in their  144-year history), here came the crops!

So many that people were begging their friends to take eggplants, cucumbers, and squash that many got into the habit of locking their cars and night and leaving the porch lights off, lest they find themselves with someone else's bounteous harvest all over the Adirondack chair or the front seat of the Biscayne.

And all that leads to the magic of home canning!

“I have definitely noticed an uptick in canning interest during the pandemic,” says Marisa McClellan. Ms McClellan is a canning expert (who awards these titles?) who runs the Food in Jars website. “Traffic is up on my site, I'm getting more canning questions, and there's a shortage of both mason jars and lids.”

I saw that reflected on the community social pages.  Where to find Mason jars? And the answers came back that stores all over are backordered on canning supplies and there won't be more supplies for a month or two.

Indeed, stores across America are reporting canning supply backorders that won't be filled for months.

But if you find and fill Mason jars, you are taking part in home technology that has been around since the 1850s, when one John Landis Mason, a tinsmith from New Jersey, figured out how to make screw-top jars that are air-and-water-tight.

Our family used the pre-Mason method, which was to make the jam or whatever you were canning, and then cover the surface of the food with molten Esso wax.

A few takeaway thoughts:

• why do we call it home "canning" when it's not going into a can, but a jar?
• this might be a good time to collect Mason jars for next year. They keep very well unfilled, with no need to seal the lids.
• take some paper towels, put them in a jar, fill the jar with liquid cleanser, put a lid on it, and voila! You have canned your own Lysol Wipes!

It's only a boring game

I would like to give a gift to any police detective (redundancy) who finds him/herself tasked with the chore of getting me to confess to some trumped-up charge. 

Here's how to get me to talk: force me to watch tennis. 

I know lots of people who like to watch tennis, and I guess that as a game, it's certainly better than golf or bowling or NASCAR.  But just like with golf, it's like the end of the world if a spectator so much as yawns or speaks or hollers during the match.  It's not a problem with bowling, because at their matches, the only people watching are parents who came to pick up the bowlers to get them home for dinner.

Heading home early

But I'm sure you saw what happened last weekend at the US Open. A tennis player named Novak Djokovic had himself quite a little flare-up during a game on Sunday. He didn't like how things were going, so she smacked the ball with his tennis racket, and the ball hit the line judge, Laura Clark, in the throat.

Very childish behavior, and he was given the gate for it. Disqualified and sent back to Serbia in disgrace.

Almost immediately, his fans took to social media to claim that it was unfair to throw him out, because he's the Novakiest of all Djokovics.  Many of these people would call for the head of a football player or baseball star who threw one of their balls at an official, but give Novak a break, they cried!

And to no one's surprise, his fans started sending abusive and threatening messages to the lineswoman!

A Serbian tabloid paper revealed her identify and social media info, and that opened the sluice gates for people who sit at home watching tennis to slag the woman with their bile.

It seems that Ms Clark had a son who died. One of these galoots emailed her a picture of that son along with the message, "Don't worry. You'll join him soon."

And there were other messages from other illbred scuzzballs.

To his credit, Djokovic spoke up on Instagram:


“Dear #NoleFam thank you for your positive messages.. Please also remember the linesperson that was hit by the ball last night needs our community’s support too. She’s done nothing wrong at all. I ask you to stay especially supportive and caring to her during this time. From these moments, we grow stronger and we rise above. Sharing love with everyone. Europe here I come.”

Although he pled with officials to be allowed to keep playing in front of a replacement line judge on the grounds that Ms Clark didn't require hospitalization, Djokovic did write an apology after his disqualification, saying that the whole situation left him “sad and empty”.

“I’m extremely sorry to have caused her such stress. So unintended. So wrong,” he had written in his previous post.

He was fined $10,000 for unsportsmanlike conduct in addition to losing out on the $250,000 prize money he was odds-on favorite to win.

Djokovic stated that he will play in the French Open later this month, so that should give the officials plenty of time to go on Amazon and purchase football helmets for themselves.

Perhaps a mental health counselor could help him get over these anger issues.

They're already wearing tuxedos

In the animal kingdom, they seem to be more accepting of the lifestyles of others.

I say this because at an aquarium in Spain, a couple of gentoo penguins are raising a baby chick they adopted as an egg.

And - clutch your pearls - they're both FEMALE!

Electra and Violet built a nest over at the Oceanogràfic València. They made a nest of stones and "began to have the usual attitude and actions prior to reproduction," according to an official news release.

Since they were into family prepping, their caregivers let them adopt and incubate another penguin couple's egg. Now, Electra and Violet are proud parents of a baby penguin which will become independent after about 75 days.

75 days from birth to independence! How many humans would wish for the same?

In the world of penguins, parents take turns doing the incubating, which is about a 38-day process.

Oceanogràfic València says that same-sex adoption is fairly common in the zoo world, but this is their first time around for it. There have been same-sex penguin families in zoos in London, Berlin, and Sydney.

What's more, the zoo says, same-sex pairs happen in over 450 animal species - in the wild and in the zoos.

But they all have the advantage of not having self-righteous fools complaining because two people love each other and want to live together.

Happy Labor Day!

Sunday Rerun: Ars Gratia Artis

You can still get paint-by-number sets on Amazon and at real stores, but the man who invented that art delivery system and set off a national craze has passed away.

His name was Dan Robbins, and he spent years Baskin' in the glow of his success.

(I wish to have that pun stricken from the record, your honor).

Robbins was working for the Palmer Paint Company as a package designer and graphic artist out in Detroit in the late 1940s. His boss came to him asking for ideas about how to sell more paint, as bosses will.

Palmer Paint specialized in washable paints for children, but Dan figured that there was an adult market in helping people find painting fun. And he knew that Leonardo da Vinci had used a system of outlines on canvas, given to apprentices with instructions to fill in the outlines with colors.

The idea came along at the right time, because after World War II, Americans, tired of fighting and conflict, turned to hobbies such as home decorating, woodworking, procreating, and art.  Before the war, there was no time for leisure time, as everyone was too busy churning their own butter, making shirts from old flour sacks, and walking seven miles through mounds of snow to get to school (according to what we heard as kids in the 50s).

But oh man, the 50s were big for paint-by-number! And people started wearing smocks and berets and really getting into it, and dens and living rooms across the nation were festooned with the little masterpieces as soon as the paint dried.

Those tiny numbers corresponded to tiny bottles of paint. Fill in the blanks,
and hang it up on the den wall.

I'm no artist, but it seemed like the paint version of Mad Libs, that party favorite where you toss in a word as directed and everyone laughs. But no one thinks the people who play Mad Libs are "writing" anything, and it never seemed to me that paint-by-number pictures of wagon wheels propped up against a cactus, or a Vermont town with a church steeple towering over everything, or a fishing boat setting sail for a day of fun out on the bay were really art.

What's really sad is that Robbins (pictured above in paint-by-number glory) didn't even get rich from his invention, because he didn't own the paint company, or Craft Master, the parent corporation to Palmer Paint.  That's where the money went. And Craft Master was sold to General Mills, purveyors of Cheerios, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, and Frosted Lucky Charms.

Seems to me he deserved better.

The Saturday Picture Show, September 5, 2020

It's still a mystery to me that some of us go to college and on to advanced studies in medicine and epidemiology, and some of us see what these learned people advise us to do about the virus and then say, "It's a media hoax. I know a guy whose brother worked with a woman whose second cousin says they ain't no such a thing."

Not only is it cool that the Human Rights Foundation is collecting old thumb drives and filling them with information to be disseminated in North Korea, but the collection station for the donated drives is sort of tongue-in-cheek as well!

Everything in perspective. Of course, the sun is larger than a dandelion, but don't tell the dandelion!

I'm trying to figure out what used to be made in this abandoned factory. VCRs? Pagers? Pocket calculators? Polaroid cameras? Time marches on.

Speaking of factories, this is the Yamaha piano factory in Japan, where they have upgraded the Purell dispenser with piano pedals!

In 1900, people feared electricity and created overwrought depictions of mass deaths from alternating current.

Men can be divided into three groups: those who know how to tie a four-in-hand tie, those who do not know, and those from the first group who are willing to tie the tie of a guy from the second group so he can look right for a job interview.

Here's a man who really knows how to make sure that others stay at least six feet away. More like ten, to be honest.

We can fly!

Sometimes, you have to follow along to notice the trends. One person shaving their head and then getting tattoos all over the melon is now fairly commonplace, but the first guy who did it (notice, it's always a guy!) stood out.

Imagine being the first guy to slurp, "Yes, I will eat a raw oyster! Let's see how this goes!"

So it was that on Wednesday, all the morning news shows were aghast (and no one does aghast like Hoba Kotb!) that a man in a jetpack was hovering over LAX airport in Los Angeles. Two different pilots radioed in from their planes in their Glenn Quagmire voices, "Uh, yeah, LAX, Adam Bravo Niner here, we uh have a guy at 3000 overhead...roger that...in a jetpack..."

Great story to tell your friends, if you live, but how dangerous can it be? He was up there at 3,000 feet with the big old jet airliners, running the risk of being sucked into an engine, killing not only himself but everyone aboard the plane. Capt Sullenberger is not flying anymore, and I don't think there's anything like the East River in Los Angeles, so it wasn't going to end well.

Then yesterday, everyone was burbling about how wonderful it was that this David Blaine, most notable in my mind for once having levitated to impress his erstwhile girlfriend Fiona Apple, still can't keep his feet on the ground. 

Blaine attached himself to a huge cluster of balloons (50 of them, filled with helium, at a time when Party City is running out of balloon juice) and went up, up and away over the Arizona desert in a stunt he called "Ascension."

"Every single stunt that I've ever done is about endurance and pushing past what I thought would be possible," Blaine said before the YouTube Live performance. "I can't imagine that many people would dream of doing it."

Blaine wound up floating 4.7 miles in the air, being careful to avoid the two great enemies of someone flying balloons over the desert: gravity and cacti.

And, as all great explorers will, he landed with great and sage words for mankind: "Wow! That was awesome!"

She's better off.

So if you're keeping track, jetpack over LA bad, balloons over AZ good. I'm just glad that Fiona survived going around with him.

You Never Know

There are times when my behavior drifts to the bumptious side, so I have to admit that I am rarely embarrassed (because that calls for a high degree of self-awareness!)

But it's with no small shame that I tell this on myself. Years ago I worked with a woman who retired; I hadn't seen her for quite a while, and then we attended a work event together. She had lost a lot of weight so I cracked wise with something about "being retired and having time for diet and exercise" being really good.

And she told me she was not in good health. She only lived another few months, but if there is one lesson I've learned, it was not to clap someone on the back to tell them it's great that they've dropped 20 without being sure they were in good health.

And for the love of Pete, hold your congratulations to all women about their pregnancy until you see them holding the baby!

This sad memory bobbed up the other day when actor Chadwick Boseman died. We were shocked to hear of it, of course; such a young man should have decades left to explore his talent.  And unlike many others, he had vowed to keep his fight for his life personal, and did not tell a word of his cancer.

This past April, the star of "42" paid tribute to the real 42 on Jackie Robinson Day, and his appearance (above right), gaunt and drawn, came as a surprise to many.  And many people questioned his countenance.

Looking back over the comments shared about him in April, about the kindest thing anyone said was, "I hope he's doing ok."  Most were much worse, alleging drug abuse, poor life choices, and the like.

Had he gone public with the fact that he was dealing with a terminal case of colon cancer, people would have known better than to say such things, but then Boseman would have had to give up the privacy he was entitled to, the same as any other person, star or not. He made his decision, he kept it to himself and his family, and his legacy will be burnished in future should the plan in his hometown of Anderson, SC, to replace a monument honoring a Confederate Civil War general with a statue saluting the man who gave great and uplifting performances in so many pictures come to fruition.

I hope so. He meant a lot to a great many people, and he showed rare dignity to the end.

Love is all you need

By now, you have probably heard the tale of Arthur "Mac" Love IV, who was, up until last Saturday, the deputy director of the Maryland Governor’s Office of Community Initiatives.

As the Baltimore SUN describes it, that agency's mission is to oversee the state’s ethnic and cultural commissions, community service programs and religious outreach.

Last week, in furtherance of that mission, Love posted on his Facebook page memes and quotes in support of 17-year-old vigilante hobby cop Kyle Rittenhouse, the kid who got his mommy to drive him 30 miles to Kenosha so he could strut around and (allegedly) kill two people and maim a third with his rifle.

One of the images showed young Rittenhouse shooting people in Wisconsin, fellow citizens protesting the shooting of Jacob Blake, and added the caption  “This is the definition of self-defense.”

Another of the images Love posted depicted a police officer giving a thumbs up, with the slogan, “Don’t be a thug if you can’t take a slug.”

Keeping in mind that his job was helping ethnic communities and the religious, Love posted these images, and had a can tied to him for his efforts on Saturday.

He now says he should not have been fired and wants his life back because he is an "innocent American."

Shareese Churchill, a spokeswoman for Gov. Hogan, said, “These posts are obviously totally inappropriate,” and Love's boss, Steve McAdams, Executive Director for the Office of Community Initiatives, put this out in a statement:

“These divisive images and statements are inconsistent with the mission and core values of the Office of Community Initiatives. Earlier today, I relieved this employee of his duties."

“I was appalled by what I saw and what I read,” said Del. Darryl Barnes, the chair of the Maryland Legislative Black Caucus.

As you might have expected, the Facebook furor was quick and mighty, with the usual chorus of "But his First Amendment rights!" and a lot of indignation, some of it righteous, some not so much.

Once again, we are reminded that no one abrogated his right to free speech. Indeed, he did speak freely!  We shouldn't confuse free speech with prior restraint. The Constitution forbids us from being kept from saying what we want beforehand.

McAdams and Gov. Hogan used their right of free speech to tell Love, "You're fired!"

That's the way it works when you think that pasting dumb memes is more important than the $77,000 a year job you just tossed away.

It doesn't HAVE to be "what it is"

It's easy to forget (and maybe some people don't know it) but when the Baltimore Orioles are playing a game on the road, the radio and TV announcers who are giving us the play-by-play are right here in Baltimore, in studios at Oriole Park, describing action from hundreds of miles away.

And you know what? It doesn't make a difference. They're watching the game on TV monitors just as we are at home, and calling the balls and strikes, hits and errors. I haven't heard one announcer yet say anything like, "Man oh man, if only we were actually in Tampa Bay/Philadelphia/Buffalo (home of the Toronto Blue Jays) (long story)." No, they give us a professional job, and it leads me to wonder, when/if the long-predicted miracle occurs and the covid "just goes away...No question it will go away. Hopefully sooner rather than later" as underinformed officials have repeatedly stated, what changes in our society will it leave behind.

TV weather and traffic reporters are doing their work from home just fine.

Jobs? Well, the baseball announcers might just not travel again. Small potatoes as compared to 51,000,000 Americans currently unemployed and wondering what the future has in store for them. Some say that as many as 40% of restaurants will close. Schools will open, either in person or online, but that's all up in the air. Will we ever feel like gathering in huge enclosed arenas again? Do you understand that in 2030, there will be college history classes teaching one topic: "2020 101"?

In 2001, after 9/11, we learned that global terrorism was indeed just as likely to occur here as elsewhere. Seven years later, when the big banks tottered on the edge and we skirted past the specter of another 1930's-style Great Depression, we saw that it could happen again, and now we see that the 1918 Pandemic, which to our memory was some grainy black and white footage of jampacked hospitals and morgues, was not unique.

We can come out of this better, when vaccines are introduced and we learn to live in a new way. More people might be working from home, and how bad can that be? New innovations will lead to new industries and new jobs. And when we all look back on 2020 and shout "Humbug" at its very mention, the wise among us will be looking for ways to make sure it doesn't happen again.

1918

Things come back. I have to feel that the economy will, too, but will we be the same as we were in January of this year?

And, do we WANT to be?

The hand that rocks

You won't believe this (or at least you won't want to believe it) but there is a preacher, to wit, a Bishop, named Edir Macedo who says that "daughters should not be allowed to seek out higher education because if they do they will be smarter than their husbands."

Oh yes he did!

Bishop Macedo is with the very well-known Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, and he unwisely continued to speak, explaining that it's his belief that he didn't want his daughters to attend college because he believes that "an educated woman cannot have a happy marriage."

I'm sure that by this time, someone much wiser than he was begging him to call it a day or a night or a career, but he droned on, saying that higher education is not for women because they supposed to “serve God” and not themselves:

"When they (his daughters) went out, I said they would just go to high school and they wouldn’t go to college. My wife supported me, but the relatives found it absurd. Why don’t you go to college? Because if you graduate from a particular profession, you will serve yourself, you will work for yourself. But I don’t want that, you came to serve God."

And there's more:

"Because if … she was a doctor and had a high degree of knowledge and found a boy who had a low degree of knowledge, he would not be the head, she would be the head. And if it were the head, it would not serve God’s will."

"I want my daughters to marry a male. A man who has to be head. They have to be head. Because if they are not head their marriage is doomed to failure."

SO, The Bish says that only by submitting to man can a woman find happiness.

AND he's not alone in this.

There is a "Christian" radio host Jesse Lee Peterson who says that you won't find good wives and/or mothers among the educated.

He sayeth:

"Women, God has given you the gift of being the assistant of the man, to watch over his children, to make sure things are well at home, to be there when the kids come home, to cook, clean, provide in that way. There is no greater job for a woman than that. And I don’t know why these men would marry these women if they don’t have that mindset. It’s like being married to another man. It’s selfishness, it’s not love."

"Men, you need to come back to your proper state of being so God can give you the right kind of woman to marry. I wouldn’t recommend you marry these educated women with these degrees; they don’t make for good wives and mothers."

Ever see a woman do this? No. And you won't.

Owing to a rare outburst of common sense, I have chosen to let these men speak for themselves here. They feel that uneducated women make the best spouses, and urge men seeking female mates to look for one unschooled.

They don't want men to get involved with women smarter than themselves.

But if they listen to this mindless blather, they aren't going to find anyone as foolish as they are.

Most men have all they can do to be as smart as they were yesterday, and most women are smarter than tomorrow already.

Sunday Rerun: The itch to scratch

The Maryland Lottery used to have a commercial jingle that said, "You gotta play to win."

I mean, for all I know, that's still their jingle. I tune it out because the whole lottery thing just never worked for me. I have bought tickets from time to time, and I wanna tell you, if there were a prize for having the FEWEST matching numbers, I'd be a millionaire.

I'm so lottery-unlucky, sometimes my ticket has letters, instead of numbers.

And they spell out SORRY PAL.

So don't take me to the Farm Store when you're getting in line for your lottos or scratchers.  Instead, find this guy.  Somewhere in Maryland there is a 75-year-old man who just pulled in $20,000 on a scratch-off ticket.

And seven years ago, he won $30,000 the same way.

The man told the lottery officials that he bought three "$250,000 Rich" scratch-offs at Downtown Tobacco in Lexington Market, and all of them were duds.

So he dug a little deeper and bought a fourth ticket, and Bingo!

Or Scratcho!, more accurately.

20 Gs.

"I just really like scratch-offs," the man said. "I try to get a few every time I'm out."

The man (the news story I saw did not mention his name) plans to share his loot with his family, and save the rest.

Now, a lot of people would tell him to save that money! At 75, he should plan to live to be 95, and set something aside for rainy days.

And I would tell him he can plan to win three or four more times in the next twenty years, so live a little!

The Saturday Picture Show, August 29, 2020

I guess you didn't know that Bill Murray was one of the founding fathers. He really has been everywhere.

The perfect gift for the guitarist in your life - a string-and-fretboard ring!

I mean, why not? It could be legit, the way things are going. "Mel's Covid-19 Testing, open late every night."

A great year for sunflowers! That big 'un is 13 feet!

What's going on in California is so sad, and as a nation, we need to work on things together, because I'm fairly certain that sweeping the forest floors is not going to be the answer.

A nice sweet old lady with a nice sweet little lady puppet to feed squirrels in the park.

I recently subscribed to the Saturday Evening POST. I mean, for 15 bucks a year, I get to read all their back issues online, from the golden days of American culture. Better enjoy it now. Macaulay Culkin just turned 40.

I'm stunned at the brilliance of this idea. It answers the old question of "Where's my charger for the phone and tablet?" with the new question of "Where are my phone and tablet?"

It should hurt to be this daft

It's interesting when they bring back things you thought were long gone. Like "Original recipe" canned Chef-Boy-Ar-Dee noodles, or Mountain Dew made with real sugar, or lunacy.

What's that? You thought lunacy was gone for good? Well, I guess you haven't heard about Abby Johnson, who spoke the other night at a gathering of people who support the candidacy of a bankrupt real estate King of Queens.

Abby is all in favor of "household voting," which sounds innocuous enough. Sure, everyone of legal age who has no felonies on their record should vote, right? But to her mind, that means being for a head-of-household voting system.

"OK Dad, you vote and that will count for all of us!" said no one ever.

Household voting means that women and people of color can just not even think about casting ballots.

“I would support bringing back household voting,” Johnson tweeted in May.  “How anti-feminist of me.”

This month, we non-lunatics celebrate the 100th anniversary of the adoption of the 19th Amendment, which gave voting rights to women.

Of course, to our shame, only certain women, I know. But before the 19th Amendment, and the 15th, which stopped states from denying U.S. citizens the right to vote based on race, it was only, for the most part, white men who were allowed to vote.  White men who owned property and were of the right religion, in some cases, I should add. 

There were states that gave the vote to Black men, and to white guys who did not own property, but it was not universal.

Johnson's bizarre head-of-household voting scheme would give the right to vote only to the head of a household.  And you can bet your sweet bippy she doesn't see females ever filling that role. She wants the male to be the de facto decision maker.

Someone asked her on Twitter, "But what happens when the husband is a Republican and the wife is a Democrat or vice versa?”

“Then they would have to decide on one vote. In a Godly household, the husband would get the final say,” she replied.

Abby Johnson

Looking into Ms Johnson's history, we see that she worked at Planned Parenthood for eight years, and then quit that job to become an anti-abortion activist. She is the founder of And Then There Were None, an organization that "supports the career transitions of individuals working in facilities that perform abortions."

Everyone has an opinion about abortion, and I don't even want to discuss it here, but I didn't dream until this week that a movement to limit voting to the men who "are in charge of their households" was even a thing. I would say that most of the men I know who are married to women are married to women smarter than themselves. Also, it would be hard to find other people dumber than most men, so there's that.

They made a movie about Abby Johnson last year, but, apparently, we don't get that channel.

Two years ago, a woman in Utah wrote on Facebook: “The more I study history the more I think giving voting rights to others not head of household has been a grave mistake!”

If I could have a moment with that woman, I would like her to know that I feel she might want to go back and study history a little bit more. I'm sure that would be all right with her husband.

Change is good

Because I have time, in between naps and bidding on Chevy Sparks on "The Price Is Right" to devote to pondering matters of the public weal, I have figured out how to solve one of the pressing matters confronting us.

The Coin Shortage has stores asking us to round up purchases or paying by VISA or taking two dimes for a quarter and yet...there is hard money left behind, up for grabs!

Airline passengers walked away from about a million bucks in loose change at the airports across America last year!

There are three airports serving Marylanders who feel the urge to fly away to distant locals, Ronald Reagan Airport, Baltimore Washington International Thurgood Marshall, and John Foster Dulles, and Dulles led the three in unclaimed moolah.

Someone has the job of putting out a report entitled "Unclaimed Money at Airports" for the reading enjoyment of members of Congress. Here is what we learned from that:

Last year, the Federal Aviation Transportation Armed Security Service (FATASS), known also as the TSA, rounded up $926,030 in unclaimed money, including $18,899 in foreign currency.

Francly, a lot of it was French money, although a lot of Mexican pesos were in the hopper too. Mexican money is called that because they have to peso much for things down there.

The airplane security people are going to use that 926 thousand simoleons for   "aviation security programs." The last time I was on an airplane, Wilbur Wright was there too, so I don't know what that entails anymore, besides taking off everyone's shoes.

When the security people are patting you down, you have to empty your pockets and put everything in them into bins. The TSA says there are advertisements in the bottom of those bins, and reading them seems to distract people.

Advertisements are everywhere! I have no doubt that when they close the lid on that one-man bungalow with silver handles down at the Stiff Bros. Funeral Home, an ad is the literal last thing we see.

But, to get back to the point, the TSA should spend those coins and get them back in circulation.

Tomorrow, let's figure out how to open the schools in time for Christmas break.

"It's...Good"

Since the pandemic began, we're so focused on our hands...and everyone else's. Wash them! Sanitize them! Put gloves on them! Don't touch your face with them! Hand someone at KFC a double sawbucks and bring home dinner with them!

Truth to tell, I'm not nuts about KFC, and prefer Popeye's hands down, as it were. Also ahead of The Colonel on my Chicken Dance are Weis Markets, Royal Farms (even though I insist on calling it RoFa instead of RoFo), and of course, Friendly Farm, the ne plus ultra of fried everything. Even Wendy's, when they had fried chicken, was pretty good, and I must say Chick-fil-A is the worst. Greasy slabs on spongy hamburger rolls? No thanks.

But, if you are in the habit of saying that KFC is "finger-lickin' good," you can just stop that right here and now. The chain says that slogan is not the thing for a hand-conscious nation, so they are pushing that motto off to the side for a while.

You kinda get the impression that the catchphrase will be back, because instead of replacing their signs and coming up with an entire new logo, they blurred and pixelated out the now-unused words.

The message still rings true: "It's good!"

I don't remember spending a lot of time licking my fingers while eating fried chicken. But maybe I should have, because I am famous around here for dousing a thigh or wing with Texas Pete hot sauce, eating right on down to the bone, and then scratching my itchy, weepy eye.

Catherine Tan-Gillespie, global chief marketing officer for the chicken giant, says, “We find ourselves in a unique situation – having an iconic slogan that doesn’t quite fit in the current environment. While we are pausing the use of ‘It’s Finger Lickin’ Good’, rest assured the food craved by so many people around the world isn’t changing one bit.”

Rest assured, we are resting assured, Ms Tan-Gillespie.

By the way - "It's finger lickin' good" dates back to the early days of Colonel Sanders founding the chain. He was no more a colonel than he was a kernel, but but anyway, after his death, they stopped using that slogan in the late 1990s and brought it out of mothballs in 2008.

So it will be back!

Crime Notes from All Over

On Sundays, we go for a ride in the country to change our view a little and see something different, and now and again we will see a woods that looks like no one has been in there since Native Americans lived here. I always wonder about what goes on down there in a land where snakes and mice and birds and groundhogs and deer and all sorts of flora and fauna live together, but I don't wonder enough to go down there and investigate.

If I did, I might stumble upon stories like this...

There was a Lithuanian guy whom the British police were looking for in connection with a murder some five years ago. He disappeared and was presumed to be dead.

His name was Ricardas Puisys and he was not seen hanging around anywhere since Sept. 15, 2015 when he was working his job at a food company in Chatteris, England.  The article I read does not give details about the murder in question, but they do say that Puisys took it on the lam since 2015 until the Cambridgeshire Constabulary found him in a deep woods 17 miles away in the town of Wisbech on July 1.

(Attention, Maryland housing developers who use British names for the roads in your developments: "Wisbech Ct" and "Chatteris Way" would be much nicer than "Happy Hollow Avenue" or "Morning Dew Lane," just saying.)

They do things differently over there. US Police, having nabbed a suspect, put him or her in handcuffs and have them do the "perp walk" into the court commissioner's office for their arraignment, for display on the 6 O'Clock News.
British police say that, in order “to protect him and put safeguarding measures in place,’’ they waited a while to reveal his whereabouts.

While Puisys was living in that dense undergrowth, he was “very well concealed” after “having not spoken with anyone for some time,” say the police.

“For almost five years Ricardas’ disappearance has been a complete mystery. That was until we received information at the end of June which led us to finding him,” Detective Chief Inspector Rob Hall of the Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire Major Crime Unit said in a statement.

“He is safe and we are working very closely with him to ensure he remains safe, but also to ensure he gets the support he needs after having lived through extremely difficult circumstances during the last five or more years.”

If the kind way they treat criminals in England becomes common knowledge over here, maybe more of our crooks will ship out for Worcestershire and pull their capers!

A Titanic discovery

They say if you want good French dressing, go to France. For Italian food, you can't beat Italy.

And so it goes that if you want the best Scotch whisky, you need to get to Scotland. Go ahead. You take the high road and I'll take the low road.

I'm sure there are liquor stores all over Scotland, land of plaid and bagpipes, but here's a chance to spend a small fortune on a bottle of hooch you aren't even supposed to drink (but wouldn't it make a cool display piece on your mantel?

Dateline: Eriskay, in the Outer Hebrides, February, 1941. The British cargo ship known as the SS Politician runs aground, taking everything from biscuits to cotton goods for customers in Jamaica and New Orleans.

Oh, and whisky. 264,000 bottles of whisky.  And if one of those bottles should happen to fall, 263,999 bottles of whisky on the wall.

Fun fact: They take this stuff seriously! Whisky is booze from Scotland, Canada, or Japan. Whiskey refers to distilled grain spirits from Ireland and the United States.

One result of this was that suddenly, a large percentage of the populations of the Outer Hebrides took up an interest in deep-sea diving.

After giving everyone plenty of time to scavenge what they could, the locals blew up the hull of the foundering Politician (no comment) to sink the ship, and still, now and then, a bottle of sauce would bob to the surface.

One of those bottles of hoochy-koo was salvaged by pro diver George Currie and is up for auction this month at Scotland’s Grand Whisky Auction. Last reported bid was $8,000, and while the bad news is that the firewater is "not suitable for human consumption," the winning bidder will also get a diver's helmet and a couple of bricks from the ship.


There was so much whisky on board that—following an initial rush among locals to rescue what they could from the foundering ship—freeloaders would still be recovering bottles nearly half a century later, even after the ship’s hull was blown up and sunk to discourage more salvage (that is, looting). Some washed up on local beaches, and others were brought up by divers. One of the latter, found by professional diver George Currie in 1987, is now up for sale at  where bidding will close on August 10, 2020. At press time, the bottle was already going for nearly $8,000. Though the auction house warns unequivocally that the “bottle is not suitable for human consumption,” the winning bidder will also be treated to a diving helmet and bricks from the ship itself.

Hey, wait a minute. The ship was carrying bricks? No wonder it sank!

Also packed aboard the ill-fated Politician: 290,000 10-shilling Jamaica bills, In 1958, the government announced that 211,267 of them had been accounted for, leaving 78,733 of them, well, unaccounted for.

I wouldn't know anything about them, guv'nor.

Sunday Rerun: A night at the theater

You know how stuff you hear from childhood sticks with you all your life? Like the first time you hear that pickles are shrivelly cucumbers and raisins used to be grapes, and the startling realization that your parents know, and once used, the same off-color words you think someone just made up...

I was ten when the Civil War Centennial started. You Dixie-fried readers know that struggle as the War Of Northern Aggression. But just after it ended, a disappointed Confederate sympathizer shot Abraham Lincoln to death while the 16th president enjoyed an evening at Ford's Theater.

Well, at least he enjoyed it up until John Wilkes Booth cunningly slipped past a missing drunken guard to enter the presidential loge and fire his Derringer.


The play that evening at Ford's starred Laura Keene (an English actress whose real name was Mary Frances Moss) in "Our American Cousin," a comedy about uncouth Americans. As an actor himself, Booth had seen the play, and knew exactly what the big laugh-getting line was.

I heard about this as a kid and it's one of the factoids that lodged itself in my noggin, along with Chuck Estrada's pitching record for 1960 (18-11, with a 3.58 ERA) and the formula for water (two atoms of hydrogen in a molecule of water).
The laugh-getter was when Asa Trenchard says this to Mrs. Mountchessington:

Don't know the manners of good society, eh? Well, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal — you sockdologizing old man-trap.

I suppose I had other things to do, but it took a few years before I found time to find out what "sockdologizing" means. (I knew what a man-trap was, having seen plenty of Katharine Hepburn movies.)

"Sockdolager" was a word that came to our language in the early 1800s, combining "sock" for a knockout blow and a mangled form of "doxology," which is the word for the final part of a hymn. "Sockdolager," meaning an exceptionally crushing punch effect, was then boiled down a little more by Tom Taylor, the playwright behind "Our American Cousin," to mean that the character toward whom the word was lobbed was an overwhelming force. That's what linguists call a nonce word, a word made up for just one occasion.

If that was the funniest line in the play, the whole audience must have been out cold when it was said, and Booth's plan was to fire his pistol while the audience convulsed over it. Then, in true theatrical fashion, he jumped off the balcony, shouting  “Sic semper tyrannis!” (“Thus ever to tyrants!”– then, as now, the Virginia state motto).

But, in non-theatrical fashion, Booth caught his spur on the American flag bunting draped over the president's box, and landed so awkwardly on the stage that he broke his leg and limped off to ride away on his horse.

154 years later, America still mixes show business with politics, and still with disastrous effect. But at least we know a sockdolager when we see one now!