Dressed for success

If you have an interest in athletic uniforms, you already know that baseball jerseys and pants used to be made of woolen flannel. The main reason why ballplayers were so reed-thin in the days up to the 1970s was this simple: imagine lugging around a sweat-soaked shirt and pants in the heat of a July afternoon! That's a workout, I tell you. Since the Pirates began the trend in 1970, the uniforms are Nike synthetic fiber, double-knit polyester, lighter and easier to maintain.

Speaking of which - ballplayers traditionally wear white uniforms at home games and grey on the road, for the most part. This was not a choice made by a fashion designer, but, rather, laundry services. Clubs on the road would wear their uniforms day after day rather than seek out a laundromat, so grey was chosen to hide the dirt better. 

If you think like George Carlin did (and more of us ought to!) you wonder why baseball managers and coaches wear the same uniform as their players, and you laugh at the thought of Bill Belichick having his fits on the sidelines in a Patriots uniform instead of one of his ratty hoodies. Dressing as if you were a player only takes place in baseball, and the official reason is the time-honored "We always did it this way!"

But flannel, double knit, burlap, whatever the fabric, it did not matter in Ancient Greece, because in the days of the Ancient Olympics, athletes ran around naked! Fact is, our word “gymnastics” derives from the old Greek words “gumnasía” (“athletic training, exercise”) and “gumnós” (“naked”).   

This being nekkid was to "achieve closeness to the gods" and also help detox skin through sweating. I bring this up in order to inform married guys who are being told to "go put on some pants" are now free to say, "I'm getting close to God and detoxing, honey!"

Results not guaranteed.

On an open fire

I can list 273 reasons for loving fall and winter, and maybe 3 in favor of summer. So it's fall now and time for chestnuts! As you see to the left, chestnuts are ready to toast in the oven and wind up in the snack bowl or in the stuffing for turkey next month! 

There was an old guy at the firehouse who always carried a chestnut in his pants pocket on the grounds that it drew the rheumatism from his aching old bones. We used to scoff at this. Now I'm willing to try it!

And here's another use for chestnuts if you want to keep the kids occupied. The English have a game called "Conkers." To play the game, you get a chestnut, drill a hole in it, and string it up on a lace, then you find another conkerer and hit each other's chestnut until one of them breaks.

 

But this year, as the excitement of the annual upcoming World Conkers Championships reaches a fever pitch, the officials in charge have started a buzz by creating a rules change because too many of the chestnuts around this year are squishy.

 

"It's one of them mad British little pastimes," says James Packer, chair of the World Conkers Championship's organizing committee.

St. John Burkett is also on the organizing committee and serves as a spokesman for the event, and he reports that they will be baking the nuts this year to harden them. Normally, that's not allowed, but this year's chestnut harvest came in soft and mushy on account of all that rain they had this year in England. The nuts fell off the trees early this time, and did not fully mature before that.

But naturally, traditionalists are howling mad! They see this as heresy for their beloved sport of conkers. Just listen to Yanny Mac, organizer of the Waveney Valley Conkers Tournament. He says, "We do not hold with the idea that there is a conker crisis. I just checked my stash ... and conkers are emphatically not softer this year."

As the always do, the English will work this out amongst themselves in time for the World Championships, set for Sunday in Northamptonshire.

I'll have to check to see which network will have live play-by-play.

Look Out!

As soon as one quotes from Snopes these days, a chorus of nay-sayers begins crooning that Snopes is not a reliable source of verifications. However, I asked Snopes if they were reliable, and they said they were, so what else do we need to hear?

Snopes said this is unverified, but the All That's Interesting website says that "More than 2,500 left-handed people are killed every year from using equipment meant for right-handed people." As an ambidextrous American,  I write left - how ironic - and do most everything else with whatever hand I have...handy. 

But over at lefthandedrights.com, they also claim that 2,500 people who were here on January 1 of any year will not be around to see December 31 because they were lefties who tried to use, for example, a righthanded power saw. 

But don't feel too safe just because you avoid power saws. Some 250 people worldwide die from having a coconut hit them on their coconut. A coconut that falls 80 feet will be traveling at 50 mph when it clunks your melon, so if you ride a bike to a thatch of coconut palm trees, you might want to leave your helmet on.

The word "coconut" comes from the old Portuguese word coco, meaning "head" or "skull." I sometimes call peoples' heads their "coconut" or their "melon," which lends a tropical air to any conversation.

Over and over

 I'm sure most of you saw something on the news about the shooting at Baltimore's Morgan State University last week. Five people were shot, none fatally, and as of this writing (as they say) the police have no idea who did it, although they have circulated video of "persons of interest" who were seen on campus cameras just before the shooting started. 

An all-too-familiar scene

Which proves nothing, of course, and even if the victims knew who the shooters were, they are apparently not saying anything.  Again, we don't know hardly anything just yet, but the news talked to lots of the students and people on campus. I could understand the fear that many of them related, as they mentioned that Homecoming Activities were all cancelled or delayed while the investigation went on. I mean, for all they knew, the shooters were still around them, and who knew when they might strike again?

Which is the question that one female freshman asked on the news. She said (paraphrasing) this is the third homecoming in a row that this sort of thing has happened, and since they knew that, why couldn't the administration prevent it?

I guess she's 18 and is just coming to grips with a problem that has gripped this country for 18 decades at least. People have guns and they damn well want to shoot them off when they damn well want to. 

As Yogi Berra said, "If people don't want to come out to the ballgames, how are you gonna stop them?" 

Same way: if people want to go around shooting their guns, how are you gonna stop them?  

Taylor Made

I have quoted this guy before, but it bears repeating: the scene in "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles" in which Steve Martin is racing for a cab and is just beaten out for one by a guy to whom he says he's in a terrible hurry to get to the airport. The guy tries to make a deal...

            Sir? Sir?

            Excuse me.

            Could I appeal to your good nature and ask you for your cab?

            I don't have a good nature. Excuse me.

            Come on!

            Could I offer you $10 ?... I'll give you $20.

            I'll take  50.

            All right.

            Anyone who would pay $50  for a cab would certainly pay $75 .

   And he pays $75 for a cab! Money money money.

The difference between people like that and me and my friends (and anyone who would be my friend) is that we don't think of money day and night.

Now I see the fashion world is being knocked on its mannequins by Taylor Swift and her relationship with this Kelce person. 

And the big news, the topic of discussion, is not whether they are good for each other or have any kind of future together, no sir. It's all about the short pants she was wearing the other night at the football game.

What they are, see, is a pair Area nameplate hot shorts.

They look like the jorts I see all summer, maybe with a bit of the Bedazzler treatment. 

People noticed she was walking around in these pants and now you can't find a pair to buy for yourself to save your life.

 Women's Wear Daily reports that Mods Sens, and Farfetch are only two of the   websites that regularly sell Area products, and they are moving off the shelves like ...hot pants that Taylor Swift would wear. She's that popular.

They say these hot shorts have diamond embellishments front and derrière, with appliques around the zipper and the front pocket. On the back, the brand name is spelled out in appliques. Very elegant. 

I had a pair of jeans that had no diamonds or appliques, and the only embellishment on those pants was a Keep On Truckin' patch.

Oh, and if you can find of pair of Taylor shorts online or in a store, plan to shell out $695 for them.

That's what I mean...someone WILL!

 

Sunday Rerun (7/26/2020) Counting On You

 I was just thinking the other day about December. Oh, how I love December, the month when it starts to get chilly and there are no mosquitoes and humidity and crazy birds howling outside at 0445 but there are all those "Year In Review" news specials on television every night.

And I thought, if they're going to do a "2020 In Review" wrapup special, they'd better start the night after Thanksgiving and make it a four-hour thing every night.

And even then, by the time they discuss the coronavirus and the unrest in the streets and the presidential campaign, there won't be much time to discuss sports.

And since it's starting to look like there won't be any baseball played this year, the only bats we'll talk about are the ones that New Hampshire will be counting.

That's right. It's not just humans who are having their census taken this year.
Fish and Game Department officials in the Granite State want to round up  volunteers to go around counting bats.

If you're into it, they will have you count the bats on your property and around your town. They want to get a head count on bats.

Hint: good places to look include barns and church steeples.

There is a disease - biologists call it "white-nose syndrome" -  that is dropping the bat population faster than the popularity of Mike Myers.  As a result, the bat census in the Northeast US is expected to be way down, and science wants to keep an eye on their maternity colonies.

I see you right now, reading this and saying you don't care about bats. When pressed, most people give "they're ooogy" as the reason behind their disdain.  And even though bats are important to the world's biosystems because they help pollinate plants, and swallow insects that won't ever get the chance to bite me, we still don't like them.

So please, if you have spare time this summer because that trip abroad just ain't happening, think about going to bat for the two bat species in New Hampshire: the little brown bat and the big brown bat.

A Big Brown Bat

A Little Brown Bat

Show of hands: who else is surprised to see how big their teeth are?

The Saturday Picture Show, October 7, 2023

 

People resist following clearly posted rules because their moms and dads always told them they were special, and the rules were only for everybody else. I can think of no other reason.

"Hi? This your golf ball, mister? I'll be tickled to sell it back to you..."

It's interesting, how many stars go into other lines of work when their showbiz fame begins to dim a bit. You remember this guy who went into landscaping as Kermit The Frog!

I will drive you crazy with fall pictures until every last leaf is bundled up and gone. I love autumn!

It looks like Letitia James, the attorney general of New York State, is being protected by identical twin court guards.

We who are fortunate enough to live within arm's reach of an ocean should remember those who live in the middle and have a long drive to go surfing. How about this young woman, doing her homework with an amazing view of New York City? I'd be staring out the window instead of an Algebra book.

So Helen Hunt, star of such movies as "As Good As It Gets," "What Women Want," and "Twister" goes to a thrift store and sees her work in the DVD bin.

If you live in Miami, Tucson, or San Diego, you might not be familiar with the concept of salt boxes, which are wooden containers for the rock salt we sometimes need to get our cars moving on the icy roads. In recent years, the city has been allowing local artists to decorate them, such as this example.

Our beloved local hero Brooks Robinson is soaring with the angels now. This historic photo from the cover of the Sunpaper shows the moment when the Orioles won the 1966 World Series.

If you haven't ordered your Nakatomi Plaza advent calendar for 2023, maybe you should do so this weekend. Every day closer to Christmas can be marked off by Hans Gruber's precipitous decline!

Boom and Bust

July 2, 1980, was a very big deal in Baltimore City, Maryland. The two Harborplace pavilions downtown, right on the water, opened to great fanfare.

Developer James Rouse turned old ratty docks and vacant fields into a glitzy shopping-eating-fun factory that had people coming from all over. "It's the new wave of city planning," everyone said, and business boomed and the city and state built a baseball stadium and football arena nearby and everything was going to be crabcakes and fudge. The Fudgery was a popular shop where fudge was made and while the young men and women who worked there flopped the fudge with giant spatulas on marble, they sang in such beautiful harmony that a group of them got together, formed a singing quartet called Dru Hill (after the Baltimore way of saying "Druid Hill," their northwest neighborhood) and had some hit records. One of the group, Sisqó, had solo hits including the wedding-reception favorite "The Thong Song."

Oh, it was glorious down there for the first couple of years and then, four decades later, people started noticing that one by one, businesses (and crowds) were leaving Harborplace, and what had been the hope of the newly revitalized Inner Harbor was just a couple of tumbleweeds short of ghost town status.

So now, they're going to tear it down and do something else there. David Bramble is the developer from West Baltimore who is heading up the project to turn Harborplace around, and he has decided to tear down both pavilions and start from zero.

It's going to take time (5 years) and money (millions of dollars in public and private investment) but it's going to happen.

I don't know what sort of store or restaurant will be popular down there, but someone will think of something.

I don't know much, but I do know people will always need to eat and wear clothes, so let's see who comes up with what!

 

 

Local thang

I'm not much of a traveler (and that's even an understatement) but I do know one thing about this great country of ours:

It's getting to be the same all over.

Peggy and I took a car trip through America's sunny Southland years ago, and when we went through small towns and little sections of big towns that happened to be close to I-95, I-85, I-65 and I-10, I was surprised to see that everything looked like we were still home. Same restaurants, same banks, same big box stores. Even the local police and fire vehicles seemed the same as home. Back in the day, all banks were local, and then someone at Bank of America got to thinking, "If McDonald's can do it...."

Of course, the good thing about that is, you can always cash a check, same as if you were back home.

It's all part of the Homogenization of America; we've blended into one huge small town, if you follow.

But there are exceptions and one of them is regional speech. I still notice southern accents, especially when watching college football, and there are things that people say in one area that no one else says anywhere. 

Here is an example that puzzles me. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is just about 100 miles northeast of Baltimore, but when the new list of new words for the new dictionary came out, it contained this entry:

jawn

noun. Informal. Chiefly Philadelphia. something or someone for which the speaker does not know or does not need a specific name.

Example: Can you hand me that jawn right there? 

📝 Philadelphians know that their favorite regional catchall term isn’t new—the first records of its use come from the early 2000s, when it started to be popularized in the Black community. Its addition reflects an increasing awareness of the term outside the region. Its ultimate origin is uncertain, but it may be a local Philadelphia variant of joint, which is used in a similar way in the New York City metropolitan area. 

This "jawn" word is in regular use right up the road in Philly, but in all my decades around here, I have yet to hear a Baltimorean ask me to hand them a jawn.  We prefer Standard English, so we call things for which we can't come up with a proper name a "thingamajig," a "whatchamacallit," a "whatsis," or a "doohickey."

Language is a fascinating thingamabob.

Ban Rolls On

I read that in California, they are banning book bans. I think that's a good thing because the schools and the public libraries should not be in the business of limiting what people are allowed to read. That should be monitored by parents or guardians, am I wrong? As in, if you don't want your kids to read Salinger or Burroughs or Jodi Piccoult, then tell your kids they can't read those authors. But other parents should have the right to allow or disallow their kids to read this and that.

I read in the Washington Post about a woman named Jennifer Peterson down in Spotsylvania, Virginia. Ms Peterson seems to spend an inordinate amount of time reading books and filing objections over them, and attends every school board meeting down there (a school board which contains at least two members who advocate burning books they don't like, so there you go) to harangue the people who are trying to educate children.

Wouldn't it be nice if she reallocated the time she spends making a dent in her sofa reading children's books to teaching children to read? That way, every one could decide what's good for them and what isn't.

I don't believe I need to say here what kind of governments in history have gone on book-banning rampages. And I don't believe that banning "dirty" books is an effective way to keep kids from reading said books. 

I just keep thinking about a man I knew who said that he was not going to allow his children to read about or hear about or see about or talk about sex, because that way, they would never think about sex.

Yeah, that worked.

After while, crocodile

Seems to me, anyone with sense does not take their emotional support animal to a baseball game, especially when the ESA in question is an alligator.

But it happened in Philadelphia last week, a place where lots of odd things happen. A Phillies fan named Joie Henney showed up with his reptile to see the game. The alligator wears a harness vest with his name, "Wally," on one side.

And, even though you have to think this was a publicity stunt for Henney, he still played it out straight, walking up to the ballpark gates before being given the bum's rush: Citizens Bank Park policy states: "Certified service dogs or service dogs in training for guests with special needs are welcome. All other animals are prohibited."

Folks in the know say that cats have been admitted to major league games, those meanies in Philly would not make an exception for Wally.

Henney told the newspaper up in Phila that "the gator has never bitten anyone" (editor's note; YET!) and the big green thing helps him battle depression. And guess what? Wally has his own Instagram acct. (@wallygatornjoie) and a TikTok too.

Henney claims he shares a bed with this monster and that the monster gives people hugs. And, no surprise, the alligator helps him with his depression.

That's fine, but he needs to see that the very thought of an alligator getting loose and slithering its way through a crowd of baseball fans might, I don't know, upset some folks? Nah, never thought of that, because that would take some thinking outside the box labelled "My personal ego gratification at the expense of the safety of others."

Is there any chance that Noah is coming back to round up some of these carnivores?

 

They can't budge it

I'm writing this on Friday night the 29th, so I have no way of knowing whether the government shut down or not over the weekend. I called Mitch and Chuck and Kevin and offered my services at brokering a deal, but I never heard back.

Which is good for those gov't bigshots, because I'm fairly certain we would be ok if we just left everything to two people - one red, one blue, with a nice pizza and a sack o' suds. Tell them to work it out and we'll be here in the morning when you do.

But in the last days before the deadline, we kept hearing the term "making a last-ditch effort" to avoid the shutdown. And since I reckon that darned few congresspeople have ever been near a ditch, let along dug one, I had to look that phrase up to see where we got it, and whether the warranty has expired yet. 

The dictionaries define last-ditch effort as a desperate, final attempt to do something. Like, if you're trying to talk your neighbor into going halvies on paving your shared drive, you take him and his kith and kin for a nice dinner out somewhere.

And where did we get the term? 

William of Orange, who really looked a lot like that one guy from Queen, was dealing with some unpleasantness with the French and the British in the 17th-century. He vowed to end it all and pledged that "I mean to die in the last ditch." 

The term did not gain popularity until around 1900; I guess it took that long before people were no longer afraid to volunteer to die in a ditch. But that's where we got the term, and I hope no one died over the weekend over this silly budget battle.

Sunday Rerun: "Roses are red and violets are purple and sugar's sweet and so is maple surple" - Roger Miller

 Faced with a shortage of vital fluid, the great nation has decided that the only course of action would be to uncork some of the precious reserves it has laid up for just such a rainy day as this.

No, we're not talking about the US tapping into our strategic oil reserves. That's old news, and we don't deal in that. We're talking about Canada, the great nation to our north, and they have a shortage of their own. This is serious: they are short on maple syrup.

The Quebec Maple Syrup Producers has opened the stopper to allow 50 million pounds of their strategic syrup reserves. That's about half of their emergency stash.

70% of the world's maple syrup comes from Quebec. The US, where we know that there ain't no substitute for the real sweet thang, is Canada's biggest customer, but this year, as more people stayed home eating waffles, worldwide demand for real maple syrup jumped by 21%.

People are often surprised to hear that the goo sitting atop their pancakes is made from the sap of the maple tree. The sap is harvested by tapping a metal tap (so that's where they got that term) right into the tree's trunk. 

In Grandpa's era, a bucket was hung from the tap to catch those precious drips, but now, a network of plastic tubes and vacuums collects the drips and transports the product to a syrup refinery.

The trees will only yield sap under very specific weather conditions. This year's short and warm Spring resulted a very low flow, according to industry spokesperson Mrs Butterworth.

That was a fake! I hope you caught it.

But Helene Normandin is a real person. She is the Quebec Maple Syrup Producers' communications director, and she says, "That's why the reserve is made, to never miss maple syrup. And we won't miss maple syrup!" 

She sounds quite resolute about this winter's breakfasts, and she also is when discussing plans to avoid another shortage next year. 

"What we can figure at this moment is maybe the season here in Quebec will start a bit earlier in February, instead of March, and end earlier also," she said.

The Quebec Maple Syrup Producers will be sticking their taps into some 7 million more trees soon to refill the reserve tanks.

Syrup costs money, and money does not grow on trees. It does grow IN trees, however.

The Saturday Picture Show, September 30, 2023

 

Have you ever been driving in a hailstorm? What an experience! It happened to me once, and it sounded like the Battle of Hastings. This is a Texas-sized hailstone from last week's storm. One of them, no big deal, but imagine several thousand of them smacking your car all at once!

This is an effective reminder of what happens, quite deservedly, to drunk drivers. But as an dedicated aficionado of all things either way outsized or way undersized, I really want to know, where did they get that nail?

I will live for the rest of my life wishing for a getup like this! Beautiful fits for the Wilburn Brothers (Doyle, left, and Teddy) flanking the amazing Cousin Minnie Pearl!

This is just the little trailer you need to bring some quackers home from the store.

"I can't go out tonight; I have to stay home and water my shoes."

We always see pictures of the outside of the famous Flatiron Building in New York. What I would love to see is what it looks like inside!

I love the Amazon Hub pickup lockers. They're handy for when you don't feel like worrying about a porch pirate ripping off your order of cat food or t-shirts. Each one has a name - the one I usually use is called "Contribution." But this, naming this one "Imbalance," sounds a bit personal, you know what I mean?

Nature puts on a free show all day every day. All we have to do is take time to watch!

This is a bar in France that is said to be quite popular among the locals. Clearly they are not looking for new customers. They don't want you to know what it is, if you don't already.

Sunset shadow. Make this a good day before the sun sets, won't you? 

Zzzzzzzz

How many times did we all get caught sleeping in class? And by "we," I mean "I," and by "how many times," I mean at least a dozen.  

But I could always claim to be practicing sending Morse Code mentally, or naming all the US presidents in order.  Which very few of them were.

But let's go across the ocean to Lincolnshire, England, where the Seascape Cafe at the Observatory holds yoga classes on Wednesday evenings. 

And last week, a well-intended passerby looked in on the class and saw the group in "final resting position" (is there really no better way to phrase that?) and so they called 999, the English version of our 911. He/she reported a "mass killing" at the yoga studio.

 

That final resting pose is also called "corpse pose" (not really better) or "savasana" (which is great as long as you speak Sanskrit) and it means everyone gets down on their backs, supine and ready to sink into meditative state.

Seascape's Facebook page reports that the caller “reported a mass killing in our building. Having seen several people laying on the floor.  Which actually turned out to be the Yoga Class in meditation.”

It all turned out fine, everyone acted with good intent, and yoga teacher Millie Laws told the Washington Post that "seven students were lying on their backs for about 30 minutes" as she "banged on a shamanic drum in a dark room lit by just candles during Wednesday’s hour-and-half restorative yoga class."

She saw a couple outside peering in through the window, walking a dog and appearing bewildered.  So...

“They reported to the police that they’d seen somebody walking around in a room lit up with candles and what looked like dead people lying all over the floor,” Laws told The Post. “The couple thought it was some sort of ritual mass killing.”

When youth soccer started becoming wildly popular in our area, 911 got a few calls reporting similar situations, but upon checking, the police invariably found that the spectators, and many of the players, had fallen asleep out of sheer boredom.

 

Passing the bar

I've decided that my life has been a trivial pursuit, so I am going to delve into the questions and issues that all America ponders.

Here's one:  Why do they call the 3 Musketeers candy bar the "3" Musketeers?

It goes back to World War II. 3 Musketeers came out in 1932, brought to us by the good people at M&M/Mars. And in those days, there were three pieces of candy in the package: Chocolate, Vanilla, and Strawberry, enough to split with two friends, or gobble all by yourself. I wasn't there then, so I don't know.

Yes, they did cop the name from The Three Musketeers, a novel written in 1844 by Alexandre Dumas, a book that followed the exploits of three inseparable swashbucklers named Athos, Porthos, and Aramis.

But along came the Second World War, and there were restrictions on sugar, so the candymen decided that Vanilla and Strawberry had to get the heave-ho, leaving only the chocolate part (which was the most popular part anyway!)

Milky Way bars are similar to 3 Musketeers, except that they have caramel on top of the nougat. There was never any restriction on the use of nougat in candy, as the United States is home to all of the nougat mines known to exist in the world. The photo below shows raw unrefined nougat, just unearthed in Caramel, California.

Misspellings just jump off the page

There seems to be an recurrent discussion about the last words of the Marquis de Favras. He was born Thomas de Mahy, and became the Marquis by being a supporter of the House of Bourbon during the French Revolution.

I looked it up, and to my surprise, the House of Bourbon was not a saloon on Harford Rd. But it still might be, someday.

He was hanged in 1790 for being on the wrong side of the French Revolution, and after he read his death sentence, he shook his head ruefully and said these words which will live through the ages:

"I see you have made 3 spelling mistakes".  

I would like to think that I would respond in kind if I ever find myself in his shoes, and here's why:  

In doing my research for this blog, I came across this sentence, in which someone is suggesting that maybe we don't know if the Marquis said this, or why:

"Despite the flurry of interest, no-one seemed quite sure whether we were supposed to be commending the marquis's sangfroid, or his equally laudible regard for correct orthography."

And I shook my head, because this person misspelled laudable.

It's called Spell Check! Don't turn your back on it!

Science Is Real

In his hilarious Jerry Reed song "Lord Mr. Ford," the songwriter, then known as Dick Feller, and now known as transgender woman Deena Kaye Rose, listed her grievances about the modern automobile, including the notion that "all the cars, placed end to end, would reach to the moon and back again. And there'd probably be some poor fool pull out to pass."

Along the same line, the length of your circulatory system is almost 100,000 miles - 60,000 miles if you are a child. Imagine. All our veins, arteries and capillaries, if you were to stretch them out flat. That's the length of 16 round-trip flights from London to New York. 

That trip to the moon that Deena talked about would be 238, 655 miles, or roughly Two And A Half Men.  

 

Lucky Find

Serendipity: 

ser·en·dip·i·ty

/ˌserənˈdipədē/

noun

the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way.

That's just what happened recently to  Andrew F. Gulli, managing editor of "The Strand" magazine. Gulli went to the Library of Congress in Washington to look for information about James M. Cain, the Maryland author of "The Postman Always Rings Twice" among other novels, and Gulli instead walked off with a great prize: an undiscovered short story written by Truman Capote, who wrote great books, short stories, novellas, and really, anything he wrote was compelling. I'm sure his grocery lists would keep you hanging on til the very end.

And there, in the Library of Congress among Capote's papers was this story "Another Day In Paradise" hidden in plain sight in a red notebook.  This is like looking through the used picture frames for sale at Goodwill and finding a Van Gogh or even a Rembrandt!

"Then in a red notebook, there was a handwritten short story from Truman Capote. Actually, I couldn't believe it, this can't be happening, because, you know, I was researching his work years ago, and I could not find it," Gulli told CNN.

The story concerns a fictional American woman, Iris Greentree, who is living in Sicily, after shooting her life savings on a beautiful Italian villa by an unfaithful lover.

Capote and I have one thing in common: our handwriting requires a team of forensic experts to decipher. Gulli assembled a squad of transcribers, including an executive from the Capote Estate, to help him put the penciled words into type. I'm sure that was quite a task!

Gulli said that it was all worth it: "...The story is satisfying, finished, complete, it has his wry sense of humor."

One theme of the story, he said, is that, "You could be living in some wonderful type of paradise, you can be living in a wonderful country, but a lot of times, if people aren't settled, the most wonderful setting on the planet can feel like a hell."

I don't think that Truman Capote ever really found happiness on this earth, but at least he shared his thoughts on paper.  And left some surprises behind!

Sunday Rerun: Walls

 Here's a story we've seen over and over: Some rando from  Virginia was arrested  for crashing a car into Taylor Swift’s New York City apartment building. His goal, you see, was to get into the building and enjoy time with Ms Swift.

Morgan Mank, 31, (they do give them perfect creep names, don't they?) was arrested last week. He had driven the wrong way on the street in the Tribeca section where Swift owns a townhouse and also a couple of apartments in an adjoining building.

Although police were able to confirm that Mank was the man who drove his Jerkmobile into the lobby of the building, they could not confirm reports that he was telling the police he would not leave until he had his Taylor time that day.

The law took Mank to a hospital for an evaluation, later arresting him on charges of driving while intoxicated and driving while ability impaired. 

Swift is a young woman of vast talent and popularity among all sort of people - country fans, pop fans, young, old. It's great that people love her and stream her songs and attend her concerts and buy her merchandise, but that's where being a fan should end. 

But no. Swift also has homes in California and Rhode Island, and everywhere she goes, these people are trying to be near her, to such a dangerous extent that she told Elle magazine that she carries army-grade bandage dressing "for gunshot or stab wounds." 

"I've had a lot of stalkers show up to the house armed. So we have to think that way," she told the magazine.

Isn't that nice, that a girl born on a Christmas tree farm in Pennsylvania is blessed with such looks and talent that people just can't leave her alone and admire her many gifts from a proper distance?

Here I am, saying that one of the many problems in this old world is that we don't know where the walls - figurative and otherwise - are. I'm sure Ms Swift appreciates the well wishes of her fans. They have provided her with the wherewithal to have all those houses and all the accouterments of fame.

But is it worth it, when you can't leave the house to run to the $1.25 Tree without packing battleground wound dressings and being accompanied by beefy security types?

Just Google "Taylor Swift stalker" and sit down for a long reading session. 

And of course, she is not the only one. There was actress Rebecca Schaeffer, who was killed by crazed stalker Robert Bardo in Hollywood in 1989. He had previously stalked other young female celebrities, and stabbed Ms Schaeffer in the doorway of her home.

He returned to his hometown of Tucson where he was arrested by Police Chief Peter Ronstadt (brother of Linda) while running in and out of traffic. Brought back to Los Angeles for trial, he was prosecuted by Marcia Clark, who later served as lead prosecutor in the O. J. Simpson murder case. 

She was successful in the Bardo case and he now spends his days and nights, serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole at the Avenal State Prison in Avenal, California.

People like Mr Mank should be there with him until they learn where the walls are.