The Saturday Picture Show, January 17, 2025

This is the Feline Gene Simmons, welcoming you to this week's Picture Show!

Maybe next week, what do you think?...

A pair of thin waffles sandwiching some syrup is the Dutch treat known as "Stroopwafel."

This is a wildflower spring in Texas. Sing it: "You've got a smile like an acre of sunflowers, and your eyes are a Bluebonnet blue...Shake hands, it's grand you're from Texas, 'cause I'm from Texas too!" (But I'm not.)

For such a beautiful area in which to live, nature is not going to just send any old swaybacked hoss! Look at all this beauty!

Sorry for you vegetarians and vegans and avocado fanciers. This is the ne plus ultra of the carnivore experience. Pass the Worcestershire sauce, please!

You've heard of the sardonic expression "rearranging the deck chairs on the 'Titanic' ", meaning to try to straighten up a hellacious mess before the whole thing sinks in the North Atlantic. Well, this is an actual deck chair from the 'Titanic," and it's arranged nicely!

This shrimp is all alone. I usually see them fried up with eleven of their friends, aswim in cocktail sauce.

The good folks at Waffle House have set up break areas for employees to enjoy a few minutes of peaceful solitude, away from the din and clatter of the bacon and batter.

This does not look a bit like the plastic stork they always have at baby showers. I was part of that unenlightened generation whose parents handed out nonsense about the stork bringing babies and metal desks saving us from radioactive fallout and working hard for giant corporations bringing security and happiness. 
 

Infamy

Wednesday, January 14, 2026, will long be remembered as the day when the cell phones stopped working for half the day, and oh my heavens! The weeping and wailing!

It was just after noon when I looked at my phone and saw "Emergency Calls Only" where it usually says "Verizon." I tried to figure if I had fatfingered something wrong, but then Peggy said her phone said the same thing, so I figured it was some network outage. 

Within minutes, two great teams went to work on the problem. First, the network engineers, who, some 12 hours later, figured someone unplugged something or the whole network needed to be rebooted or whatever, and then the public relations all-stars went to work, putting out soothing messages about how "we know this is an inconvenience to your day" and "our people are working to restore service as soon as possible." My guess in these techie things is that someone had to call home and ask their 17-year-old kid what to do. As always, one of them knew, and then went back to watching his K-Pop.

This is not a picture of someone with the measles. It's a chart of the Verizon snafu.

This morning, we awoke to news that Comcast was going to give us all 20 bucks for the inconvenience, but the last I saw, we had to go online and submit a request for the double sawbucks. They know exactly who was out and who should get the 20 simoleons, but they're going to make us work for it.

I should ask that bigshot's kid how to get my twenty.

And oh yes, it was fun to be back in 1991 again - no phone, no text, nada. My landline still worked, though, and this is why I told Peggy I will never ever again ask if we can get rid of it. You can call us to hear how we feel about that landline! It's either 1-800-DONTNEED IT  or 1-800-GLADWEHAVEIT.

NYPD True

Yesterday we talked about the goof who was caught porch-pirating from the Police Commissioner of Baltimore City.

So let's talk today about Willie King, the New Yorker who mugged a 94-year-old lady in 1996, getting away (but not far) with her wallet with family pictures and $90 inside.

The little old lady was out for a walk with her son, Louis Gigante, as in the Rev. Louis Gigante, a priest.

Father Gigante did mention this to his brother, the lady's other son, Vincent "The Chin" Gigante, who was, at the time, the city's most feared Mafia don. Although Vince, or "Vinnie," as he liked to be called, was at one time an amateur boxer, he didn't come by his nickname for taking punches on his chin. Seems that as a boy, he was called "Chenzo," a short form of Vincenzo. 

Vince, 1957.

In much the same way, pugnacious Yankee manager Billy Martin, born Alfred Manuel Pesano, was such an adorable child (!) that his grandmother called him "Bello,"  meaning "beautiful" in Italian. Other people in the area, refusing to see Alfred as handsome, guessed she was trying to say "Billy," and it stuck.

Anyhow - naturally Willie was a little scared when he found out whose mom he knocked down while stealing her purse. But not to worry: Father Louis told him "the Chin" was a forgiving sort:  “This is stupidity,” he told the press. “I know you like to talk about my brother. I just want to be left alone. My brother is sick enough to be what he is. He’s home with mama.

During his arraignment later, King, 37, was all loose and smiley, and his defense attorney, Steven Wershaw, saw no reason to ask for protective custody for King.

“He does not seem to have any fear,” Wershaw said. “Mrs. Gigante was not injured in any way, and other than the alleged reputation of the family, I don’t think he has anything to be worried about.

Other than that, Mrs Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?

The Chin had his own legal problems. The government was trying to try him on murder and racketeering charges, so Gigante took to wearing a bathrobe and walking around the streets in a bid to mount an insanity defense.

A heck of a town, New York is.

His other brother Darryl

This is the kind of dumb thing they read at the end of the news, to send you off to sleep on the lighter side.  Here you go: Be glad you are not Darryl Nichols.

Darryl Nichols, master criminal, knows how to pick 'em when he sets out to rip someone off. In November, he cunningly stole a stainless steel bowl (valued at $20) from the front porch of a house in North Baltimore.

He was seen on the Ring doorbell camera and probably wishes his high school graduation photos came out that well. Police spotted him making his well-planned getaway on a bicycle.  As he pedaled along, he had a bag slung over his shoulder, a bag containing packages he had helped himself to from another porch.

When he was taken into custody, the police took those packages and returned them to their rightful owner; it was a dress and a pair of children's pants, total value, $35.

The bowl was not recovered. 

Nichols is 60, and Judge Ana D. Hernandez, in Eastside District Court, arranged for him to be a guest of the city for the next two months this past Monday.  In view of his lengthy criminal record (theft, malicious destruction of property and burglary) Nichols will be able to spend time with friends on the Inside for those 60 days.

His parting remarks to the court? “I just want to apologize,” Nichols said. “I’m sorry for what I did.”

All rooms have unobstructed ocean views.

He's also sorry that he stole the bowl from Police Commissioner Richard Worley, but he didn't mention that. The commissioner's wife appeared in court to send him off with the police department's best wishes.

 

Meal time

Some people love a new car, a new restaurant, a new mixed drink. I love a new word, or, at least, a word new to me. 

Peggy read to me from a magazine article and the quote contained the word "inchmeal." I figured it meant "a little at a time, progressing inch by inch" because of the "meal" suffix, as in piecemeal.

Having nothing better to do, I looked up "meal," and not the five-piece fried chicken meal at Popeyes. No, this sort of "meal" comes to us from Old English and Middle English, and means a way to "denote a fixed number, measure, or amount at a time."  There's also "wordmeal," which is how we read certain people's public writings - one word at a time. 

It would have been good to know "inchmeal" back in the days when the Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration offices were bottlenecks that kept us hostage on hard tubular steel seats as you waited to be waited upon. You'd be there for hours, making inchmeal progress! But some smart cookie decided to run the place on an appointment basis now. We had business in there last week, and we were in and out in no time at all. 

We had time to pick up a  chicken dinner on the way home! We ate it piecemeal.

All alone

I challenged myself the other day! Nothing too precarious, you understand. I was waiting for a doctor and sat in the exam room with nothing between me and rank immodesty but a thin, cotton-poly exam gown the color of pea soup. The self-competition was to see how long I can sit in a room by myself without reading something.

There was a time I would rifled through the drawers in search of free alcohol wipes and tongue depressors, but why? I buy rubbing alcohol at The Tree, and it is not possible to depress my tongue, which is always busy saying something salacious or provocative, and never sad about it.

The big asterisk here * is that I did not need to be without something to read; my phone is a little Kindle and I have dozens of books on there just a couple of buttons away. My phone was in my pants pocket, at rest on a chair. But I decided it was going to be me against time. Nothing to read.

I started balancing my cane on the tip of my index finger. That was fun for 45-60 seconds, but I worried that they had some sort of monitor at the front desk and would see me raising cane with my malacca, so I quit it.

Then I figured, if they have a camera in here, where is it? So I looked high and low for a spycam and found nothing, unless the dispenser tip of the alcohol bottle is a cleverly disguised lens. 

Then I realized that spying on patients would be a huge impropriety for any doctor, and so I figured that nothing of the sort was going on. This notion was reinforced when I realized that I have never walked out of the exam room anywhere to hear the staff giggling and guffawing, so I know no one saw nothing they shouldn't have.

That means he never even told the receptionist that I said he ought to take me out for dinner and drinks before he checks me for a hernia. So I'm good.

My reverie ended when the doctor politely knocked before entering my exam room. And no, I could not resist going falsetto and asking, "Who is it?" 

You get me alone long enough and I can always crack myself up.

Sunday Rerun: Out of the bag

 When I was a kid, I didn't wish for things like go-karts and trips to a theme park based on a rodent, although Capybara Country would seem like a fun place right about now.

I used to wish to live in an abandoned school, where I would have plenty of room to collect rocks and snakeskins and display them, a gymnasium so I could play indoors on rainy days (or sunny days), a full industrial kitchen so I could roast and bake and deep-fry, an auditorium with a stage where I could declaim to my heart's content, a fully-equipped health suite to care for my sniffles and sprains, and a fully-stocked library.  What's not to like?

Now, if I were a cat, naturally I would choose to move into a fish market...or maybe a nice home improvement megastore, where I could find all manner of things to climb, cozy corners to sleep in, bag after bag of kibble and the occasional mouse for dinner, and a lot of people in and out, to scrinch my cheeks and the top of my head. Yes! Feline paradise!

There's a cat down in Richmond by the name of Francine. She's been living in a Lowe's on West Broad St for some eight years now and is the official unofficial mascot for the local branch of the hardware giant.

Recently, she was missing, and the employee family was worried that she got a better deal at a Long John Silver's or had been spirited away by a cat-worshipping group of Egyptians.

Francine was listed as missing in mid-September, and somehow, her co-workers deduced that she had gotten onto a delivery truck that took her away 85 miles to the chain's distribution center in Garysburg, N.C, a town that lives in my memory as being the home of a barbecue restaurant that once served me a plate of meat that was more than I could eat for dinner. Hard to believe, but true. 

Maybe that's why Francine wanted to go to Garysburg.

Anyhow, the workers in a giant warehouse looked all over for her, and even put thermal cat-seeking drones to aid in the search, and nothing. But you cat lovers will understand, Francine came out of hiding when she was damn well ready to, and not a moment before. 

They saw her on a security camera on October 4, rounded her up, and the manager, Wayne Schneider, and another guy from the store drove down to pick her up.

"She looked at us," Schneider said, "and gave this big meow like, 'What took you so long?'"

She's back at home base in Richmond now, and store staff are asking well-wishers to give her a couple of days of r&r to get over her vacation, after which she will be available for paw shakes and belly rubs.