A little test

 I thought I'd get back to the Blog by trying a quick experiment. 

In 1976, I was working at WISZ radio in Baltimore. That summer, the Orioles traded away a relief pitcher named Grant Jackson. Jackson went on to have an 18-year career in the big leagues; this trade to the Yankees was his third team of seven.

I thought, and said out loud,, that the most fascinating thing about Grant, or "Buck," as he liked to be called, was that he was born in Fostoria, Ohio. 

A guy I worked with, Les Bagley, added to the conversation that Fostoria is the location of the world's deepest hole. Now, that's grist for my mill. I love that sort of information. In fact, I often lead with it, in any conversation involving deep holes or Ohio.

I think of that conversation every time I see this picture: 

And here is the experiment. Les and I are still friends on Facebook. Will he remember that conversation after 48 years?

 

Tuesday rerun: Up Euphemism Creek

   I'm a big fan of Chris Elliott (we have our annual convention in a very tiny room) so I watched the "Schitt's Creek" show when it started out. Back in those days, it was on the beloved TV Guide Channel, which then became Pop TV when people realized that most of us figured The TV Guide Channel was something that showed what time the King of Queens rerun came on.

I liked the show, the whole fish-out-of-familiar water premise, and the trademark Chris Elliott snark went well with the goofiness of the Levys père et fils. I lost the show somehow, heard that Chris had left, and somehow managed to go on with my life without "Schitt's Creek."

I've heard that it was on Netflix now and very popular, and I thought it was nice to hear the other night that the show, and the actors on it, won every Emmy award for this year. 

And then came the morning TV shows, when all the network people shied away from naming the show. On the Today Show, Hoda Kotb grumbled mildly that she was not allowed to say the name of the big winner because NBC only allows them to say "that word" once.

In a nation where the president spews indelicate profanities with the zest of a longshoreman, in a world where any sort of language can be heard on the playgrounds and radio shows and classrooms, it seems to be almost quaint to see Hoda and Savannah with their knickers in a spin over a homophone for poop.

Please don't Bowdlerize my news! 

I can hear you saying, "I would never Bowdlerize your news," but that's a term derived from a Dr Thomas Bowdler (1754 - 1825) an English physician of whom it can be truly said that he was born in a town called Box, near Bath, and is buried in a place called Oystermouth.

And oh yes, he found it necessary to produce expurgated versions of great books written by others. He removed all the words that might make one giggle or blush from fine literature written by that naughty Mr Shakespeare, and others, and for his inane efforts he will be remembered with the word "bowdlerize," meaning to "remove 'offensive' material from the writings of others, rendering the work less meaningful."

Another person whose name became a verb was Horace Fletcher, a 19th century man who, with no background in medicine or physiology whatsoever, proclaimed that we should chew every bit of food 32 times ("one for every tooth"). Fletcher became known as the "Great Masticator" and to this day, chewing your food 32 times is called "fletcherizing" it.

I hope I gave you something to chew on.

Monday rerun: Rakish

 We all look forward to riding around looking at the pretty fall leaves in October and November.

Raking them up is not quite so appealing, leading many people to just let them lie there and eventually blow onto my yard.

Whatever your fall pleasure, don't rush out just yet.

The Weather Channel (what did we ever do without them?) says our rich autumn golds and browns will be here a little later this year. Blame the warmer temperatures of September.

And on the other hand, the Weather Channel, the good people who sponsor Jim Cantore's visits to wherever it's really hot or cold or snowy or rainy or floody, says that because it was a wet summer before it became a hot one, the foliage (pronounced "foilage" in Baltimore) will be really, really vivid, unless it gets windy.

Things change first in Western Maryland, where Garrett County Forester Melissa Nash reports that a sugar maple in New Germany State Park "… is telling us fall is just around the corner! If these warm days and cool nights keep up along with intermittent rain we should get some good color this year."

So count on the peak of pretty leaves to hit Garrett and Allegany counties in mid-October.

I have to look this up every autumn, because I forget, but it's photosythesis - your old friend from 7th grade Science class - that begins the process of leaf color change.  From spring until fall, the leaves on the trees make chlorophyll, the chemical that allows a tree to make its own glucose for nourishment. Chlorophyll being green, the leaves are as well - or so it would seem.

Actually, the colors of the leaves in October are the true colors of the leaves! And once they stop being all chlorophyll-ish, gone is the green and here comes the brown and yellow and what-have-you.

The same substance that makes carrots orange (beta carotene) makes some leaves orange, and something called anthocyanin makes them red, and flavonol, which sounds like something from a commercial ("Try Certs! Now with added flavonol!") makes them yellow. 

And nothing about any of these facts will help you rake them. Enjoy the fall!

Rerun: Cute Triangle

 One day, it's Liv Tyler, and then it's Paris Hilton, or Ariana Grande, and who knows who the current "It Girl" is in American pop culture? It changes almost every day, and it's always the same: a young woman, blessed with looks and sometimes a certain amount of talent, is suddenly all over the place, famous for being famous.

Imagine how it was when the mass media consisted of daily newspapers, and no "Entertainment Tonight" or E! channel or Instagram to make the unfamous famous overnight.

Evelyn Nesbit was the It Girl of the early 20th Century, a young lady from Philadelphia blessed with a gorgeous face.  She became a model in the very early days of mass advertising, and performed in Broadway musicals, where she caught the eyes of Harry K. Thaw and Stanford White.  White was a very well-known architect, a man who designed many famous buildings of the day (including the Lovely Lane Methodist Church in downtown Baltimore.) White both created beauty and appreciated beauty, and he took up with young Evelyn, becoming both her lover and her generous benefactor. They never made it to the altar, though.

Harry K. Thaw sounds more like a man of these days...rich by inheriting a ton of moolah, leader of a dissolute lifestyle, an avid drug abuser, and severely mentally deranged.  Thaw liked the ladies too, and to his voracious sexual appetite, he added the fillip of being into bondage and whips and so forth. So when he fell for Evelyn, she refused his hand in marriage for four years, since she knew that he valued chastity in the women he sought to debauch and defile.

Evelyn

But they later married, when his ardor overcame his puritanical weirdness.  That was in 1905.  The top of Thaw's head probably would have come off had he known that his dream girl had done the hibbidy-dibbidy with others besides White, most notably John Barrymore, the greatest actor of the time, and Drew Barrymore's grandfather, to connect this sordid tale with today.                   

Thaw's obsession with the man who had "ruined" (his term) the lovely Evelyn overtook his life, and at the rooftop theatre of Madison Square Garden on June 25, 1906, during a performance of a musical called "Mam'zelle Champagne" (as the cast sang "I Could Love A Million Girls") Thaw approached White, brandished a pistol, and fired three shots at White, killing him instantly, while Thaw hollered  "You've ruined my wife!"

Harry

The trial that followed was that century's Trial Of The Century, and Thaw was found to be insane.  He wound up in a mental institution, until he escaped in 1915 and paid off enough people to get a new trial, at which he was adjudged no longer insane. In the 1920s, he moved to Clearbrook, Virginia, lived on a farm and  joined the local volunteer fire company, dying in 1947 of a coronary thrombosis.

He was insane, all right.  He was crazy about old Evelyn.

Rerun: Canned Laughter

 It's almost axiomatic that anytime after Christmas is over, if you see a blue metal tin that used to hold Danish Butter Cookies sitting around someone's house, it contains someone's sewing kit. You know, a pair of dull scissors, two dozen random spools of off-color thread, a jar with 27 buttons, none of which match, and half of an iron-on patch for mending knee holes.

It stands to reason that a lot of people buy the tin of cookies and toss the contents to have room for all the sewing impedimenta that's been inhabiting the junk drawer for so long. They need the room for more dead batteries and the remote to some long-broken appliance.

But if you like tin boxes, say hi to Yvette Dardenne, a woman from Belgium who has rounded up 60,000 tins in a collecting career lasting thirty years.

Tins? She's got 'em! Former canisters of chocolates, toffees, coffee, rice, tobacco, talc and shoe polish, from all over the world!

Ms Dardenne is 83, and she needs four houses to hold all her stuff. The whole thing started when she came into possession of a Cote d'Or chocolate box replete with a painting of a blonde girl wearing a blue hat. She keeps that one in the medieval waterfall that stands next to her house.

And, as so often happens with collectors, one tin became a dozen, and then hundreds of dozens, and, next thing you know, there you are with 60,000 of them!

"I haven't been anywhere. I was not travelling. People still think I have travelled a lot. It quickly became known (that I collected boxes). Sometimes, right after my husband left for the office, someone would show up to offer me something," said Dardenne, a resident of Grand-Hallet in Belgium's Liege province.

Lithography is the process of applying a picture or image to a hard surface through chemical reactions. Those who know such things believe that the first lithographed tin box dates to 1868 and features a logo of two horses, the symbol of the biscuits (cookies) made by Huntley & Palmers of Reading, England.

Guess who owns that treasure?

What's more, Ms Dardenne's collection may be viewed by anyone, provided they ask for an appointment.

It would be very nice to bring her a new addition to the collection. How about this oatmeal tin from 1991?

 

Rerun: Marc: My Words

 My friend Liz from work commented the other day when I put up a quote ("Life's a gas - I hope it's gonna last!") from Marc  Bolan as my Facebook status. Bolan was a guy, born Marc Feld in England in 1947, who became known as the leader of the rock band T Rex, who gave us memorable records such as "Bang A Gong (Get It On)," "Jeepster," "Mambo Sun," and my favorite, "Raw Ramp." I mean, who could not love music with an insistent boogie-woogie backbeat, conga drum percussion and albums with titles such as "My People Were Fair and Had Sky in Their Hair... But Now They're Content to Wear Stars on Their Brows." And how was I to know, way back then, that the phrase "Baby, I've got metal knees!" would take on added significance in my life, what with having knee replacement surgery and all.

In the intro to Raw Ramp, we hear this verse, which has ricocheted across my tender brainpan countless times since 1972:

"There was a time everything was fine,
we got drunk on the day like it was wine,
and all the children, they put flowers in their hair
and all the grownups, they put daggers there instead."


Which totally explains Dick Cheney's baldness.

But Bolan, who was not only a marvelous lyricist and great singer, was also a fantastic guitarist, good enough to play on sessions for the likes of Ike and Tina Turner, and David Bowie.
 
Ike and Tina Turner

He was only two weeks away from turning 30 when he died, one month after the passing of Elvis and one month before the death of Bing Crosby. It was a car crash that claimed his life; he was riding in his own car that was being driven by his girlfriend. The car hit a sycamore tree and Marc, who never learned to drive because he feared that he would die in a car crash, died in a car crash.

So. Am I the only person who thinks of him when people talk about riding the commuter line known as the MARC train? There must be someone else who would sooner ride the Maryland Area Regional Commuter Train than drive a car. Get it on, or get on it, whichever. Let's go Bolan.

Rerun: Cheddars Never Win

 We called him "Cheese Man" for obvious reasons, but how sad it was that he chose to behave in a manner that led to him being given such an unflattering sobriquet.

We were in the supermarket down by the park and stopped for some deli to make a sandwich.  A man ahead of us in line had ordered some cheddar cheese slices, and when the clerk handed him the bag with the cheese in it, he looked and reacted as if she had handed him a bag of floor sweepin's or rotten salami.

"I can't have cheese like this!" he exclaimed.  "This is all wrong!"

Well, he got my attention.  I love seeing public demonstrations of jackanapery, so I was right there watching.  

As he whined and whinged, it turned out that he did not like the way the cheese was sliced. It was too thin and the slices broke in half.  Cheddar cheese is like that.  That's because it's not like American cheese, which is also suitable for use as spackle, if you're patching a hole in the wall.  Cheddar's not all rubbery and bendy.  

The lady tried again to slice his cheese...a little thicker ("That's too thick!") and then a little thinner ("But it's breaking in half again!") Finally, he saw a male deli guy up the way by the pizza oven and said, "That guy knows how to slice cheese!" and so "that guy" dropped what he was doing to slice the same cheese in the same way and hand it to Mr Cheese, who then went into an unrequested soliloquy about how important it was for his cheese to be sliced just ever so.  And of course, he did not say he was sorry for being so picky. Just slice it my way and do it now, see?

And we can only assume that he was planning to put this cheese on a sandwich and shove it all down his neck, so who cares if the cheese was broken?

After he (mercifully for us) departed, I talked to the women behind the counter. One of them said she was brand new and in training for the deli job, and in her eyes I saw the look that meant she was already hoping to go sell yoga pants somewhere. The other women said that sort of thing happens a lot, and it was suggested that maybe Cheese Man is bossy at work and then brings that with him to the deli line.

Not that it matters, but I have a different slant. This objectionable fellow did not look or dress like the sort of man whom someone had placed in charge of anyone else.  Rather, he seemed like the kind of guy who spends his days feeling oppressed because other people keep telling him what to do all day, and he really enjoys stopping for a half a pound of cheddar so he can assert himself and push someone around, as he feels he is.

Of course, I might be wrong, and he might have replaced Ben Carson as chief of neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins, but then, he wouldn't be likely to be wearing flip flops and shorts on his way home from work, would he now?