The Lion Sleeps Tonight

This happened a week or so ago, a man named Gerson de Melo Machado, 19, clambered over a chain-link fence and down 18 feet to begin training for his intended career goal of being a lion tamer.

This all took place at Parque Zoobotânico Arruda Câmara in João Pessoa, a zoo in Brazil. The lioness waited patiently for him to arrive and then mauled and ate him as horrified visitors recoiled.

The zoo later said that the lioness will not be euthanized, as she is healthy, and has not exhibited violent tendencies before, and mainly because she was only doing what lions do when fools invade their homes. 

Remember, kids, whatever training you sign up for, don't start until your instructor arrives.

This brings to mind the recent news that the late comic Jackie Vernon (born Ralph Verrone), always in the public mind in December for having voiced "Frosty The Snowman," had started as many as three families with three women before marrying for the first time to a woman named Hazel, who had no idea how many branches were going to sprout on that family tree. 

As a standup comic, Jackie did a great bit in which he narrated slides from his summer vacation:

• "Here's me starting off on my vacation, driving away in my new car."
• "Here's a hitchhiker on the highway."
• "Here's me stopping to pick up the hitchhiker."
• "Here I am driving along with the hitchhiker in my car."
• "Here's the hitchhiker hitting me, throwing me out of my car, and driving away"
• "Here's me hitchhiking"
• "Here's the hitchhiker stopping to pick me up in my own car.."

The funny thing is that we all understand, on different levels, that bad people are going to do bad things, lions are going to eat you if you're foolish enough to invade their kingdoms, and "Qué Será, Será" (What Will Be, Will Be), a hit record for Doris Day from the movie "The Man Who Knew Too Much."

Looks like some of us don't know enough.

Nature in action!

Brazilian landscape artist Roberto Burle Marx (the long-forgotten 5th Marx brother after Groucho, Chico, Harpo, and Zeppo) designed a park in Rio de Janeiro in the 1960s.  And look out! Palm trees he planted there all that time ago are just now flowering!

The life of a palm tree can run between 40 and 80 years, but it's not until almost the end of its days that a palm shoots out a central plume all full of millions of tiny white blossoms high above its leaves.

People passing by Flamengo Park in Rio are simply entranced, and they're making a point of going to see the blossoms and take lots of photos.

This particular type of tree is the talipot palm. They originally came from India and Sri Lanka and can grow as tall as 98 feet high. All that reproductive energy over all those decades allows the tree to produce like 25 million flowers when it finally gets around to it.

Aline Saavedra, a biologist at Rio de Janeiro State University, says these trees are happy to live in that "Brazilian rhythm of daylight" so popular in movies such as "Blame It On Rio."

And in case you were getting ideas about corralling a couple of talipots for your back yard, environmental laws say you can't, so just run on down to the local nursery and be happy to get a Loblolly pine, a tree that allows you to walk around your yard saying "Loblolly" a lot.

 

Out with the old

I am an unhappy resident of Hululand right now, because the Hulu streaming service removed "NYPD Blue" from its bill of fare, and Peggy and I enjoyed the drama provided by Andy Sipowicz and company. I wish they hadn't taken it off, but whaddya gonna do?

Meanwhile. I get an email from Hulu Headquarters telling me I could win a trip for two to the New Year's Rockin' Eve "Experience" in Times Square this 12/31, and even though the email promises a chance at a "VIP experience," "overlooking the excitement of New Year's Rockin' Eve" with a "view of the world-famous New Year’s Eve Ball Drop, the confetti shower, and the thrilling energy of the Times Square crowd below: it's going to be an unforgettable New Year’s Eve! Flight and accommodations included" my interest in going is nil.

Year after year, we sit and watch the people thronging "The crossroads of America," as Times Square likes to be called, on New Year's Eve, and year after year we raise higher the estimates of what it would take to entice us to stand there glute to glute with several million strangers, none of whom have been able to visit a restroom since about 4 o'clock.

And here it is, almost midnight.

How could they stand it? I guess it Depends. 

To get us to go, I would want a personal spot-a-potty with sink and heated towels, concierge meal and snack service, and ear plugs.

I'm not entering the drawing, but even if I win, I will gladly award the prize to a friend so we could stay home, watching on ABC, ready to say, "Oh look! There's Jim Bob now!"

Three

 I'll admit it; things confuse the dickens out of me. What have I decided to do about it? I stew on them one at a time, and then I bring them to you, the Court of Special Public Opinion, for a final ruling, which I will then appeal to the US Supreme Court and see if Justice Amy Comey Farrah Fowler will see things my way. Spoiler alert: She never has.

Anyway, what's on my mind?

✅ watching a movie set in a high school, some kids were sitting at a table in the cafeteria discussing the need for a favorable balance of trade or some such, and I notice there's a ketchup squeezie bottle sitting right there. You know, those red plastic bottles (yellow ones hold mustard). I suggest to you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that the writers of this show have not seen inside a high school cafeteria since the days of fender skirts on cars and ankle-length skirts on women. "Hey, tomorrow is Red Shirt Wednesday!" 

✅ every time a "massive storm" "sweeps" across the "heartland," dozens of cars and trucks wind up in piles of fifty or so cars and trucks.  Back East here, people who have lived among the Nebraskans always say, "You guys here always make such a big deal of a couple of feet of snow! Back home, due to being so burly and all, we know how to drive in this!" Well sir, if that's the case, and all these folks are the greatest snow drivers since Santa Claus, how does it come that they have these interstate fifty-car pileups, huh?

And it's not even all that snowy!

✅There may be very good reasons for these questions that torment me until all hours, but why do the television news people all always say "the storm is wreaking havoc on the roads"? And why do they all nod their heads as they are being introduced by the anchor, back home and snug in the studio?

Could they balance it all out in springtime by saying "the 68° temps on this sunny morning are wreaking pleasure on the roads today"?

It's Magic

Do you know your home WiFi password? You can bet the kid down the block knows it, but when you go to log your 47th mobile device into your home network on Christmas morning, the pressure's really on!

You might have punched it into one of those Dymo labelmakers tapes and stuck the tape on the side of your router. Trouble is, one sultry day, that tape fell off and got suckulated by the vacuum cleaner, so there went that great idea.

Here's good news if you're a Comcast Xfinity customer. And no, the good news is not that they have finally decided to go by just one name. The corporate thinking is, as long as Verizon Fios is dual-named, CX will stick with two too. That's 2.

The good news: this will make you look like quite the Wizard (and I don't mean the supremely bizarre Jeff Goldblum.) I mean, you can dazzle the family AND the kid down the street by grabbing your remote, pressing the MIC button, and saying, "What's my WiFi password?" and in a trice, the information will appear on your screen. 

But so will Jeff Goldblum, if you're not fast enough.

Sunday Rerun

 According to strength and conditioning coach Mike Antoniades, there is a definite speed at which jogging becomes running. That speed is 6 mph. So if I go by Joppa Rd, the county courthouse is 6 miles away from our house. 

Algebra question: Mark leaves his house at 8:13 AM, running at 6 miles per hour, westbound on Joppa Rd. What time will the ambulance get him to the hospital?

Forget it. I don't run, and the only thing I "jog" is my memory. But I guess Antoniades has a point, not that I even know who he is. You jog fast enough, you're not jogging any long; you're running. 

So let's set some other rules for when one thing becomes quite another:

• after six Buffalo wings, wings are no longer your "appetizer," they are your "entrée."
  
  
  
• you step into the walk-in cooler at O'Hoolahan's for some barley, wheat, and yeast juice and then up the register. It's cool in there. That's a "draft." But when you're stuck waiting for the MTA in a sleet storm and little icicles are forming on your nose and eyelashes, that's a "CHILL!"
• You do four laps walking around the high school track. That's a "stroll." You walk to the Bay Bridge (unless you live at that McDonald's down there) and that is "hiking" for sure.
• A surgeon lances your boo-boo at an "outpatient surgicenter." That's a ''procedure." A year later, you have a major organ transplant. That's an "operation!"
• The weather forecast calls for a foot of snow, so you run to the Try 'N' Save and stock up on Doritos, clam dip, hamburgers, hamburger rolls, frozen pizza, milk, bread, toilet paper (of course) and sidewalk de-icer. The forecast changes in the morning; we wind up with an inch of rain and 54°. You put all that extra chow in the freezer. The next week, they call for rain, and the front stalls and colder Canadian air rolls in, so we get a foot of snow and you're right back at the freezer, getting out all your chow. That's called "Baltimore weather!"
• Finally: you're in line at the delicatessen. An attractive person takes the number following yours and lingers near the corned beef. You ogle her/him for 30 seconds. And that's "enough!" Or so her/his significant other says.

The Saturday Picture Show, November 29, 2025

 

He wants you to appreciate the irony, and toss some popcorn in the air.

The good people at Paul Newman are looking out for your carbohydrate consumption by making their pizzas much smaller than their boxes seem to indicate. 

I may be the only person you know who actually likes these cookies! We keep our stitch-it-up kit in something else.

There's not any way this scene from "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles" could be more heartfelt and poignant. John Candy and Steve Martin, great comedians, were also fine in dramatic scenes. Remember,  those aren't pillows!

This is the exit from Hoover Dam. Tell me why there is one.

No frost on this pumpkin!

I'll save you the trouble of figuring. It took 200,000 Legos to make this model World Trade Center. 

So many pictures of the view of the Statue of Liberty. This is the view FROM the Statue.

"Your kids" should be a new streaming series on Netflix. 

This man moved to Florida and is writing to friends back home about how safe it is.