Sunday Rerun: Through the years and the tears

 Someone had a great idea lately. I'm sure it came from all this free time so many people have had lately, with no school or work or money to fret over.

The idea was to have everyone post their senior picture on Facebook so we could show solidarity with the class of 2020, high school and college, who will not have graduation exercises and ceremonies, proms, senior trips to the beach, spring sports schedules, and yearbooks.

This present pandemic has had consequences we need not discuss here. The loss of lives, the illness, the emotional toll, all have been devastating, and add to that the economic hardships befalling millions upon millions and I said I wasn't going to get into that, so enough.

I do like the idea of posting graduation pictures. If it helps the class of 2020, I'm all for it.

 There for a while, she was in every other movie. Now she's home counting her money and planning a comeback, I hope.

 You say you're a dork? You aren't the only dork in the world. A lot of them get better hairdids and find success!

 Not every famous person has two names, but this is both Channing Tatum and Tanning Chatum.

It wasn't bad enough that this man wore a tan suit to work one day, but here he is with that Goober open collar look.

This picture of Carrie Underwood could have been taken last week for all we know. She always looks the same, which is to say, great.

America has a rich tradition of people who say they were awkward nerdy needy dorks in high school, and then they show you their picture and there's no nerd.

And then, you have high school athlete Lance Armstrong. If he told you he was annoying then, you could easily say, "And you still are!" But he'd never say that.

The Saturday Picture Show, March 11, 2023

Because of my huge shortness of information about Earth Science, I recently learned that a rainbow does not just form an arc, but actually makes a full circle in the sky. We just can't see it all, which is also a handy metaphor for how much we don't know about other people. They're making circles and we don't see it all, so wish them peace and love...

This photo from 1936 shows the neverending process of painting structures such as the Golden Gate Bridge. By the time you finish, it's time to start over again at the other end. 

My fellow Baltimore Ravens fans will appreciate the symbolism in this one, showing a raven perched atop a Saguaro cactus.  Will our team be heading into a barren stretch, or will we figure out who wants to be the quarterback to lead us back to the Super Bowl? Find out in the next installment of "Life With Lamar."

Keeping the bird theme going...here are a Northern Cardinal, a Bluejay, and a Finch out for a nice breakfast.

I have a couple of friends in Seattle so I will ask that we get input from the Pacific Northwest on this:  the caption reads "Seattle Gum Wall" and all I can think is, oh no, they don't just randomly stick their masticated Dubble Bubble all over the wall...do they? 

Here is one of 495 reminders you'll get today about turning the clock ahead tonight. And of course, on the news, you'll see senators and representatives breaking their necks to sponsor legislation banning Daylight Savings Time. Then you won't hear another word about it until Autumn.

They call it twinning, don't they? It spans the years!

They are really asking the impossible here, but I will try to revert to fetal stage, even though I didn't have a wallet at the time. I did have a watch, however.

Oh, how wonderful it is when corporations rake in huge profits and thank the workers who made all that money for them by handing them, not a life saver in the form of a decent share of the loot, but a daggone LifeSaver candy mint. Telling people they are "appreciated" in that Papyrus font really helps them pay off their debts, buy a house, feed their children....

Here's a pay stub dated 1954 from someone who worked construction for $2.50 an hour, times 40 hours, minus federal income tax and "old age benefit." Detach before cashing check.
 

If I leave here tomorrow

It was sad to see that Gary Rossington, the last surviving member of the original Lynyrd Skynyrd band, passed away on Sunday at 71.  

On the band's Facebook page, this message: "It is with our deepest sympathy and sadness that we have to advise, that we lost our brother, friend, family member, songwriter and guitarist, Gary Rossington, today. Gary is now with his Skynyrd brothers and family in heaven and playing it pretty, like he always does. Please keep Dale, Mary, Annie and the entire Rossington family in your prayers and respect the family's privacy at this difficult time."

No cause of death was given, but Rossington had cheated the cemetery several times before. If you remember the Skynyrd song "That Smell" from the 1977 "Street Survivors" album, well, that was about his car accident the year before, when his Ford Torino collided with a tree ("Oak tree, you're in my way!") Then came the plane crash later in '77 which killed singer Ronnie Van Zant, guitarist Steve Gaines, and backing vocalist Cassie Gaines, and left Rossington with two broken arms, a broken leg, and a punctured stomach and liver.

More recently, Rossington had quintuple bypass surgery in 2003, had a heart attack in 2015, and had several other heart surgeries. For the past several years, his participation with the band had been limited due to his health concerns. 

Stop me if you've heard this before, but the band's name did not come from the mention of a Leonard Skinner, who "got ptomaine poisoning last night after dinner" at Camp Grenada, in a 1963 song by comedian Allan Sherman.  

It wasn't until a decade later, 1973, that the band released their first album, "Pronounced 'Lĕh-'nérd 'Skin-'nérd" in 1973. If you fell in love with the country-blues-rock sound of LS (I did!), well, that slide guitar on the classic rock classic "Free Bird" was by Gary Rossington, who had been a student at Robert E. Lee High School in Jacksonville, Florida. 

(For those of you not born and raised in the USA, it was, inexplicably, for several centuries a matter of pride to the side that lost the Civil War to name schools, armories, ships, and shopping malls for the leaders of the losers that fought with the rest of the United States over their right to own human beings.)

The physical education teacher at good old Robert E. Lee was a man named Leonard Skinner. If you sent out to Central Casting for a bullet-headed unreconstructed good-ole'-boy Confederate-style gym teacher, you couldn't find a more ne plus ultra example anywhere.

So conservative was he that he regularly upbraided the boys he instructed in the arts of pole vaulting, basketball, and cross-country running, reserving particular venom for guys with long hair, such as Ronnie Van Zant, Bob Burns and Gary Rossington. These three were regularly sent to the principal's office for the infraction of having hair that covered their ears and neck.

Van Zant was a singer, Burns a drummer, and Rossington played a pretty mean guitar, so when they got together and added a few other locals, they formed a band that became you-know-who.

And they took the name from the despotic gym teacher who proudly had the name LEONARD SKINNER tooled on a leather key fob he toted around. 

Mr. Skinner never cottoned to the music or the hairstyles of the band, but in later years he allowed that they were good, hard-working boys. He retired from teaching and got into into real estate, telling an interviewer later that he had no idea there was a band using that name until he heard a radio DJ introduce a song "by Lynyrd Skynyrd." 

At his death in 2010, the New York Times called him "arguably the most influential high school gym teacher in American popular culture."

Way to go

A relic from long ago is making a comeback, and no, it's not The Big Orange. It's the way people used to find their way from here to Sheboygan. 

First, we would go by the verbal directions from the guy at work who knew how to get everywhere from anywhere. You could tell he knew his way around, because he peppered his directions with such phrases as, "You stay on Rt 222 and that dumps you right onto 372" and "once you get off the back roads, you pick up 40 and you can really make time."

Classic changemaker

But once you found that his directions are no doggone good, you would stop at a gas station where the attendant, who always had a rag hanging out of one pocket and one of those changemaker things on his belt, would present you with a folded roadmap that showed you all the roads in beautiful color, and also all the locations along the way of his company's service stations ("World's Cleanest Rest Rooms").

Caution: once you unfolded that roadmap, you would never fold it up again as crisply as when you got it. Mapmakers worked around the clock to make sure of that.

A lot of it has to do with many of us yearning to hit the road again, and not necessarily wanting to be lectured by the voice on our dashboard GPS ("At the next intersection, hard left turn, and then proceed one quarter mile to your location"). It's more fun to have your co-pilot say, "Hang a louie up here and then it's just down the road a piece."

"We're seeing obviously an uptick in travel across the board. So, as we're sort of coming out of the COVID pandemic, people are really traveling more," said AAA's Ragina Ali.  AAA, the auto club, printed up a million paper maps last year to go with its "TripTik" direction planners. 

Another point to remember: having a TripTik or map with you means you don't have to worry about getting a cell signal. Who knows what kind of coverage you'll have outside of Sheboygan? 

"Don't cheat, son, but let me show you how to..."

I like to remember the old expression about "how the twig is bent, so grows the tree." I think it's the example we set - they call it "modeling" today - for the younger ones that gives them something to live up to later, or something to live down.

We present the Kelly family, out of Fernandina Beach, Florida. Their son Kannon (!?) is three, and not quite tall enough to get on the rides at Dizzyworld. They have a strict policy down at that sun-baked paradise - one must be 38" inches tall - but Kannon's parents, Ty and Haley, came up with the perfect solution. Rather than telling Kannon that he would have to wait until he was tall enough to meet the safety requirements of the attraction, they togged him out in elevator shoes, like politicians wear, for the same reason.

Not only that, but they went on Instagram and Tik Tok and Doo Dad and any other site they could find to brag a little about getting over on The Mouse.

And of course, social media residents accused the Kellys of being Kareless where Kannon was Koncerned and said they failed to meet with minimum Kwality standards for Konscientious Kare of the youth.

(OK I got it out of my system now).

The Kellys took down the video and apologized all over the place.

"We are truly sorry about the whole situation," Ty Kelly tells TODAY.com. "I want my kids to know that parents follow the rules and we are trying to raise them right. In this situation, we bent the rules and I don’t want that to be my legacy."

So work with me a minute, TikTok Ty...you want your kid to know his parents follow the rules, and you post videos of you and the missus showing him how to cheat the rules?

Howzat work?

 

I can dream, can't I?

With my birthday just 116 days away, this is a good time to start dropping hints that what I have always wanted is a good drawing of myself done by a courtroom sketch artist. I would prefer that the drawing depict me as I sit triumphant on the witness stand, having just delivered bombshell evidence that will clear a very rich person from the unjust charges of felonious nepotism that threatened their freedom and their entire financial empire.

Of course, in my daydream, the person whose freedom I just delivered looks a lot like Mr Drysdale from the Beverly Hillbillies, and he can't wait to shake my hand as I make my way through the cheering crowd of well-wishers as he introduces me to his exuberant family. 

Mind you, the judge is pounding his gavel, demanding order in the court, but the crowd pays him no mind as the devastated prosecutors gather up their briefs and slink away and "Mr Drysdale" tells me and Peggy that he is having his Alabama-born-and-bred cook whomp up a mess of sausage and gravy and biscuits and hominy, all to be delivered to us in time for breakfast every day for the next six months. 

Just as it happened in The Simpsons, the sketch artist should be French, and say that the sketch, which will be framed in the finest wood and matting that Michael's can offer, is "but a simple charcoal rendering..."  

Listen, I know where this all started. I got so used to seeing the Alex Murdaugh Show every afternoon on cable, and now the series is over and Alex is sporting a drab khaki jumpsuit. I wonder what he's having for breakfast today. 

Guess I'd better go. The cook just got here with mine.

How do you say "Jerk" in German?

From the good people at Volkswagen, who last made the news for rigging their cars to pass emissions tests illegally, this little gem: They have something like OnStar, but they call it Car-Net. Car-Net helps you find your car if it is lost or stolen. It's a paid subscription service, and that's the hangup in this tale.

A sheriff's office in Illinois was trying to track a stolen VW with a 2-year-old boy inside by going onto the Car-Net, but Car-Net said, no, sorry, the owners of that car did not subscribe to our service after their free initial trial period ran out, so no. 

The heck with the toddler, I guess.

"While searching for the stolen vehicle and endangered child, sheriff's detectives immediately called Volkswagen Car-Net, in an attempt to track the vehicle," the Lake County sheriff's office said. "Unfortunately, there was a delay, as Volkswagen Car-Net would not track the vehicle with the abducted child until they received payment to reactivate the tracking device in the stolen Volkswagen."

The Chicago Sun-Times reported that "the Car-Net trial period had ended, and a representative wanted $150 to restart the service and locate the SUV."  The article continues...

"The detective pleaded, explaining the 'extremely exigent circumstance,' but the representative didn't budge, saying it was company policy.

Ah! Company policy! It is Volkswagen company policy to let people be terrorized with their child in a stolen car while the detective contacts them, gets their credit card number, and reactivates the Car-Net service for a $150 charge?

And that's all it took! As soon as the VW cash register put that yard-and-a-half in their till, the representative gave the police the location of the stolen vehicle, which, in case I failed to mention it, had a two-year-old child in it.

Toyota is a good example of a car manufacturer
that wouldn't charge you $150 if your missing
child is in one of their vehicles.

And as it happens, by the time the police went through this whole silly 30-minute ballet with the car company, the car had been located "by other means."

For their part, Volkswagen called this a "serious breach" of arrangement with the third-party vendor administrating the Car-Net service.

Why, "Volkswagen has a procedure in place with a third-party provider for Car-Net Support Services involving emergency requests from law enforcement. They have executed this process successfully in previous incidents. Unfortunately, in this instance, there was a serious breach of the process. We are addressing the situation with the parties involved," the company huffed in a statement.

So you see! It's not their fault, and they are going to address the situation, probably through several harshly-worded emails and memos with the subject line: ATTENTION ALL PERSONNEL: IMPORTANT POLICY CLARIFICATION.

Because you know that a huge multi-national corporation has better things to do than to worry about an abducted child, with $150 hanging in the balance.

Sunday Rerun: The Real Scoop

 They make so much money up in Vermont, these Ben & Jerry Ice Cream people, that they maintain on their property a fake graveyard where they "bury" the ice cream flavors they have tried and seen fail.

Does any ice cream really sound bad to you? Everybody loves it and everybody basically loves vanilla, and then you add some whatevers, and it's all good.  I really like that Haagen-Dazs Vanilla with Brownie Chunks, in case you're starting your Christmas shopping early.

And who remembers that song "Porcupine Pie" by Neil Diamond? It was a nonsense song about food mixtures like vanilla soup, tutti fruit with fruity blue cheese, and chicken ripple ice cream.

And that might be as good as when Burger King came up with Bacon Ice Cream a couple years ago, and the local ice creameries here in Baltimore that are always coming up with Old Bay Ice Cream.  You never know what people are going to like.

But now you can know what they DON'T like in a cup or cone. These are the Ben & Jerry failures...


1. Schweddy Balls (2011-2011) This was based on the SNL bit featuring Alec Baldwin in the days pre-DT. This was vanilla ice cream with a bit of rum, plus

 fudge-covered rum and malt balls. 

2. Wavy Gravy (1991-2001) This caramel and cashew and Brazil nut flavor and roasted almonds and chocolate hazelnut fudge swirl treat was named for Hugh Romney, the hippie's hippie from Woodstock. 

3. Turtle Soup (2006-2010) tasted like those gooey turtle candies: vanilla fudge covered ice cream with fudge-covered caramels, cashews, and a caramel swirl.

4. Fossil Fuel (2005-2010) had chocolate cookie pieces and fudge dinosaurs, with a fudge swirl. 

5. Miz Jelena's Sweet Potato Pie (1992-1993) Easy to see whythis one only lasted one year. It was ginger ice cream with a fudge swirl. Notice: no sweet potato. I think I spotted the problem.  

6. White Russian (1986-1996) They say it's still available in their scoop shops. It was a collusion of coffee ice cream and Kahlua. 

7. Tuskegee Chunk (1989-1990) was peanut butter ice cream with chocolate chunks. This violated my law of peanut butter, which is that peanut butter must be Skippy and must not come on contact with chocolate for any reason. Sorry, Reese's.

8. Oh Pear (1997-1997) Maybe the French woman you hired to take care of your kids would have like pear ice cream with some almond and a light fudge swirl.

9. Dastardly Mash (1979-1991) Chocolate ice cream with pecans, almonds, chocolate chips, and raisins sounds like a Chunky candy bar. It didn't last as long as the M*A*S*H TV show, though. 

10. Economic Crunch (1987-1987) crashed the world's ice cream shelves soon after the 1987 stock-market crash. It was vanilla with chocolate covered almonds, pecans, and walnuts.

Make mine vanilla, please! Two scoops.

The Saturday Picture Show, March 4, 2023

 

You get the feeling that this Peruvian trombonist waited half of his life for the chance to amuse kids like this, and I'm pretty sure he made the most of his chance. 

I'm guessing this is the Fire Chief in LaVergne and I guess he or she likes to sneak up on fires.

 Nature saves some of its most colorful getups for macaws.

 This week's wallpaper is this Arkansas sunrise.

I am totally impressed by this library and spiral staircase at the Iowa State Capital!

 OK! Here you go - the first spring robin, bob-bob-bobbing along....

I think a lot of people make the mistake of gauging their daily progress against that of others, when it all comes down to doing better than we did yesterday. That's steady progress. 

Someone had the vision to imagine turning a border rock into something much more...and then they made it happen!

 The Corner Pole wishes to say goodbye. Woody like to stay? He sure would.

Way up there in the Pistachio seating area, he's wondering if it would have been worth it to spend a couple more dollars on something closer. On the other hand, if a vendor comes by, he's all set.

Customer Disservice

I don't find the Post Office to be particularly reliable these days, given the amount of times that they do not deliver the mail on our street at all, and the amount of times we get mail intended for people somewhere else in our Zip Code. So when it's time to send our tax information to our friend who does this sort of thing for a living, I am loath to send it via USPS.

For quite a little bit of money (but for the feeling of confidence in the people whose slogan is “When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight”) I sent it via FedEx. This is not a long ride, where it's going: 13 miles via the Beltway, and 11 miles via air, in case FedEx hired some carrier pigeons. I dropped it off on a Thursday afternoon and the receipt said it would be delivered by the next afternoon.

The middle of the next week, our friend texted to ask where our envelope was. I was not able to speak to a human at FedEx; apparently all their employees were busy losing packages. But over the next 5 days, I was able to track the wayward pack and see it take an amazing trip from Baltimore to White Marsh, MD, to Sparrows Point, MD, to Hagerstown, MD and back to Sparrows Point, and finally it arrived at its intended destination (Pikesville) in a mere 11 (eleven) days. 

Next year, we will drive to where it goes and hand it off personally and still treat ourselves to a nice lunch with what we save in money, not to mention the aggravation (so I won't)

But speaking of lunch, I went to the deli at a supermarket near us - not my usual place, but just needed some ham and cheese for ham and cheese sandwiches. The cheese was not an issue, but when I told the counterman what kind of ham I wanted, he said he couldn't find that brand in his pile of cold cuts or in his walk-in cooler in the back. "No problem," I offered, "there's one right here in the window, all fresh and new." 

This is the best deli ham around,
if you can find someone who will sell it to you.

He said he wasn't allowed to cut that ham until he had sold all the "old-fashioned" ham he had sitting there nearby. I said I wanted the new-fashioned ham and he insisted he could not sell the new ham to me until someone bought all the rest of the old ham.

I told him to send me half a pound, sliced thin, via FedEx. It should be here by Easter.

Auction Action

You probably remember when the new iPhone came out in 2007, because you remember Steve Jobs, head of the Apple orchard, in his black turtleneck and beat-up jeans, striding around the stage, showing off the electronic marvel. 

Sure! A phone that had a PC and a camera and just about everything else, all sized to fit in your pocket. It was The Thing To Have right away

And at the same time, a woman by the name of Karen Green was starting a new job, and her friends figured, what better gift to start her off with than that first-generation iPhone? So they bought her one.

But Ms Green already had a cell phone, not a smart one. It was probably a flip phone. And it was a brand new phone for her and she was happy with her Verizon service contract and did not wish to go with AT&T.

So just like that off-putting chartreuse scarf from Aunt Rozene, the gift stayed in its box.

"I didn't want to get rid of my new [not-smart] phone, and I figured it's an iPhone, so it'll never go out of date," Green told a daytime television program in 2019. Some "expert" on the show told her that her 8GB antique was worth maybe $5,000.

Well. Guess again, because that Price was not Right. Green put that phone up for an online auction recently, and someone paid her $63,356.40 for it. That's over  100 times more than its original cost.

The deal was handled by LCG Auctions out of Lousiana.  They describe the relic as a hot item for electronic collectors and said it "presents magnificently, showcasing sharp corners front and back, rich color, and 'case fresh' features."

Of course, it's hard to find an unused, unopened iPhone because everyone who got one wanted to use it right away.

Now and then you find a story about someone who bought one of the first Ford Mustangs in 1964 and put it away in a barn for safe keeping, only to wind up never driving it for some reason. 

Closest I can come is a Carhartt jacket that a woman at a flea market we go to had bought for her boyfriend just before he dumped her. She sold that coat to me for far less than she had paid for it, just to get it out of her closet and into mine, where it still keeps me warm all these years later.

Let's see an iPhone do that!

  

"You look 'armless!"

Foreign Accent Syndrome might sound like something someone on the writing staff of "Seinfeld" made up, but it is a real thing, defined as "a speech disorder that causes a sudden change to speech so that a native speaker is perceived to speak with a “foreign” accent." The most frequent cause is not watching too many British shows on PBS, but, rather, damage to the brain from a stroke or TBI (traumatic brain injury). 

Some years ago (12, to be exact) a woman named Karen Butler had dental surgery, and when she came out from under the sedation, she had picked up a pronounced foreign accent. She wasn't fooling around; it was FAS, apparently from  an injury to the part of the brain that controls speech.

Now Ms Butler was born in Illinois and moved out to Oregon with her family as a baby, and she had never been to Europe at all, but suddenly she sounded English/Irish/slightly European. Just from having a couple of teeth removed.

And this is far different from cases like that of entertainer Madonna, who belied her Michigan roots by spending a week in England and suddenly trying to talk like Helen Mirren. 

"I just went to sleep and I woke up and my mouth was all sore and swollen, and I talked funny.  And the dentist said, 'You'll talk normal when the swelling goes down,' " Butler reported.

When the swelling went away, the foreign affect in her speech did not. Neurologist Ted Lowenkopf, director of the Providence Stroke Center in Portland, told her it was indeed FAS.

Most people who see this picture can "hear" Ricky in their mind, speaking with his accent!

Foreign Accent Syndrome was first reported in the 1940s. You may have heard of a Norwegian woman who was hit by German shrapnel in World War II and later developed a pronounced German accent. Most cruelly, she was was ostracized by friends and family as a result.

Strokes and other forms of brain trauma usually cause major brain damage that leave truly staggering speech problems, but Lowenkopf says with FAS, only a small part of the brain, that which concerns vocal patterns and intonations, is affected.

Doctors told Ms Butler she may have suffered a small stroke while she was under anesthesia, but only a brain scan would say that for sure, and her insurance wouldn't cover one.

I used to enjoy going to new grocery stores and asking for a certain item by using a French accent just to see the reaction of the clerks whom I asked. Most often, they would raise their voice while saying "Aisle 5, sir!" in the apparent belief that if I were foreign, I was also partly hard of hearing.

I hear fine. Just enjoying my life here. 

Where there's a will, there's a relative

Before we get into today's story, I feel obliged to point out that anyone who wishes to leave me money in their last will and testament should do so freely, and rest easily, knowing that the money will be put to very good use. Just saying.

Because this is the story of Audrey and Charles.

Audrey was a chemist, with a PhD, and a very private lifestyle. She lived alone all her life, which ended at age 56 in 1997 in the one-bedroom apartment she rented in Louisville, Kentucky. She was known for paying her rent early every month, wearing black clothing most of the time, and her hobby of fencing.  And one other word to describe her would be thrifty. She was known to save every nickel she could.

Charles was born Charles Dennis Buchinsky, but you would know him better by the name he took to pursue a career as an actor. As Charles Bronson, he became the top box office attraction in the early 1970s, invariably as a tough guy. You would never confuse him with, say, Lawrence Olivier, but then again, he was never asked to play Hamlet.

Now, these two people never met or corresponded or ever were in the same place, except for the time Audrey spent enamored over Charles's image on TV and movie screens. That was enough for her to leave her entire pile of nickels - $291,975 worth - to Charles Bronson.

One year before she died, Audrey took a sheet from the phone book that was to be used as an emergency phone list and wrote out her final will and testament, to wit:  “Under no circumstances is my mother Helen to inherit anything from me – blood, body parts, financial assets. I bequeath to Charles Bronson (the talented character actor) and what he doesn’t want can pass through to the Louisville Free Public Library.”

Audrey was a regular patron of the library, and their records show she regularly checked out his movies, and books about Bronson. 

At first, Bronson said he was willing to take $160,000 of the loot. The Louisville Free Public Library urged him to pass everything on to them, saying the full amount would allow them to purchase 20,000 books and stock a new branch library.

Enter Audrey's sister Nancy, who, on behalf of the family, disputed the will on the grounds that Knauer was mentally unstable.

“This is a few, really kind of like hysterical lines scratched on top of a phone list. I don’t know what mental state she was in when she wrote that,” Nancy said. But the state of Kentucky allows such nonstandard wills to be executed.

Nancy went on to claim that her sister's infatuation with Bronson was plenty of proof that Nancy was in an impaired mental state.

"She saw the Death Wish [films] where he is avenging his family. She became obsessed with Charles Bronson. She has never met the man. I look at him and I think please, you know, how can you not? I don't understand. You didn't know her. You didn't love her. I did,” Nancy said.

But an expert on such matters (now, there's a great job to have!) ruled that leaving money to Charles Bronson does not necessarily mean one is mentally incompetent. And no one could testify about her emotional state, because she did not seek either medical or psychiatric care during the 20 years she lived in Louisville.

And then, to stir the stew even more, people going through Audrey's personal effects found three more wills, all written in April of 1999, and all leaving all her money to Charles Bronson. One of them detailed her admiration for the beefy actor and said she, a believer in reincarnation, felt sure that Bronson was her father in another lifetime.

In the end, Nancy and Bronson arrived at what lawyers love to call an "undisclosed settlement," and the Louisville library wound up with $10,000.

Again, if anyone wishes to remember me in their will, just have it say, "Hi, Mark!!" 

Strawberry Letter #24

Well, look at that calendar! February 27th again, and you know what that means  - it's National Strawberry Day!

I have to be honest, of all the berries, I rate straw- right down there with boysen- and huckle-. They are pretty to look at, but they taste...I dunno...sandy or something.

But I can find something good about everything, and this is the day I treat myself to lots of listens to both the Shuggie Otis original and the Brothers Johnson versions of the great 70's psychedelic favorite, "Strawberry Letter 23." 

Shuggie is a guitarist, singer, and songwriter, born Johnny Alexander Veliotes, Jr. His father was John "Johnny Otis" Veliotes, who was the guy behind a lot of great tunes in the 1950s, including "Ma (He's Making Eyes at Me)," recorded by Johnny Otis and His Orchestra with Marie Adams and the Three Tons of Joy) and the original "Willie and the Hand Jive." 

Shuggie wrote the song after writing 22 letters to his girlfriend, making the song the 23rd of his "strawberry letters." Strawberry papers were very popular back then. 

Since it's National Strawberry Day, I think we all should sing along with either Shuggie or the Brothers Johnson, so here are the lyrics:

Hello, my love, I heard a kiss from you

Red magic satin playing near, too

All through the morning rain I gaze, the sun doesn't shine

Rainbows and waterfalls run through my mind

In the garden, I see, west purple shower bells and tea

Orange birds and river cousins dressed in green

Pretty music, I hear, so happy and loud

Blue flowers echo from a cherry cloud

Feel sunshine sparkle pink and blue

Playgrounds will laugh

If you tried to ask, "Or is it cool?" (Is it cool?)

If you arrive and don't see me

I'm gonna be with my baby

I'm free, flyin' in her arms

Over the sea

Stained window, yellow candy screen

See speakers of kites

With velvet roses digging freedom flight

A present from you

Strawberry letter twenty-two

The music plays, I sit in for a few

Sunday Rerun (from 2015): "I'm 18, I get confused every day" - Alice Cooper

 Someday, I hope to understand how certain people think, and how, when they go to think about something, they forget what they were like when they were 18.

Now, I love people of all ages, and 18 is a pretty good age.  It was for me. I finished high school (owing in no small part to a reluctance among the faculty to see me looming in their classroom doors again that fall) and I had a union job at the A&P that paid pretty sweet and I had friends to run around and guzzle beer meditate on the meaning of life with and I was a volunteer firefighter and that summer alone, I had three different women ask me to get married.

The fact that they were my mother, my sister and my grandmother takes nothing away from what a happy dude I was at 18.

But I was not responsible enough to get behind the wheel of a big rig semi and roar across the nation's highways, no Siree Bob.  

However, right now, some people in Congress (I won't mention what party they're with, but you can guess) are proposing to change the regulations that so far have kept you and me alive to allow people as young as 18 to roll 18 wheels under 16 tons.

Right now, you have to be 21 to drive a truckload of turnips to the Buy Bye Bye warehouse, but these senators want to allow an unlimited amount of contiguous states that join together in "compacts" to drop the age limit to 18 for interstate trips.  

That means if Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania sign such a deal, that goofy kid down the street could be pushing a big Mack from Portsmouth to Williamsport, from Hershey to Harrisonburg, or from St Mary's PA to St Mary's County, MD.  And probably without stopping or even slowing down very much!

The Senate plan would allow them to start careers careering up and down the roads, and then after four years, the Secretary of Transportation would be required to see whether teens have "an equivalent level of safety" in comparison with older truckers.

In 2013, drivers aged 18-20 were in 66 percent more fatal traffic accidents than drivers 21 and over.  

You want to see an 18-year old driving this?  Like
the kid down the street who races to pick up
his girlfriend at 127 miles an hour?

But there's a shortage of truck drivers, because everyone these days is breaking their neck to enter the burgeoning fields of computer repair, forensic investigation at gooey crime scenes, and running for US president.  So, instead of trying to get mature individuals to stop watching "Judge Mablean" all afternoon and start driving truckloads of velour track suits to WalMarts so people could dress right for the casinos, the trucking industry is choosing to get the Senate to allow callow youths to drive 82 hours a week behind the wheel of a giant tractor-trailer. 

The hope here is that Congress will hear from the public and let teenagers drive their parents crazy in every state, instead of driving trucks along the interstate.

The Saturday Picture Show, February 25, 2023

 

After a lengthy period of rebuilding, the Baltimore Orioles are set to take the field at Oriole Park at Camden Yards for what should be an exciting season with lots of wins. I take a different tack about how I feel when the team wins; I love watching the game played by people who are the best at it, and that's the pleasure for me, the poetry of the game. Wins and losses, I don't take personally, but wins are more fun, certainly.

Baltimore, set against a late winter sky. Very pretty.

I'm certain that many of you are Peeps fans and look forward to your springtime marshmallow treats. You can have any Peeps that come my way, and all the Pepsi, too. I will trade them for your unwanted peanuts and Grapefruit Seltzer. By the way, someone was asleep at the switch at this company, and missed the chance to label this drink "Peepsi."

I never worked in a shoe store, but my sister did. Someone must know, is this a common way of shipping shoes to stores...a ton of right shoes, and then the lefts?

Add to the long list of things I don't get: science fiction. I don't believe there are Martians looking for a place to land so they can take over Earth, and I don't think AI or manmade robots are trying to nudge us out of the way, either.

She lifts her lamp beside the golden door, but we rarely see this view of Lady Liberty.

This is an exhibit at the B&O Railroad Museum in Baltimore. It seems like it was two weeks, not two decades ago, when the big President's Day blizzard collapsed the roof there, but they are back on track now.

This hellacious, atrocious mess is what was left behind by revelers in New Orleans at a Mardi Gras parade. I wouldn't dream of tossing a used toothpick on the ground, and look at what people are willing to do with the detritus of their fun evening.

It started with those Little Free Libraries, and then we saw the Stick Library near the dog park, and now here is a sled loaner. But where's the snow? Where's the SNOW???

My wonderful wife is into adult coloring books, and our friend Gail introduced her to reverse coloring books in the pages of which are printed amorphous shapes, onto which one draws the edges. It's quite interesting, and so is this new way of doing jigsaw puzzles: taking puzzle pieces to form an approximate image of the original picture. I need the New York TIMES to come up with a reverse Wordle for me.