Look away!

 After Alabama finished off Florida State, 50-36 on Saturday, the eyes of the college football world turned to Oxford, Mississippi, in hopes that Ole Miss could send Louisiana State home empty-handed.

The score of that game did not mean that much to me, but I often look back on the days when Mississippi finally had to face up to their past and allow African American students to enroll in their university (which is and was for the people who live there, not a private institution.) The struggle for basic human decency and opportunity for all came to Ole Miss in the fall of 1962, when Air Force veteran James Meredith (eventually) enrolled as the school's first Black student. With support from the NAACP, Meredith had sought to transfer to the U of MS, and a federal court order was granted to make that happen.

(The sports teams at that fine institution of higher learning were, and are, called the Rebels. That should tell you something about how popular the Civil War was there.)

Mississippi's Governor Ross Barnett openly defied the federal court order trying to keep Meredith registering. In fact, riots brought out on the campus on September 30, 1962, with segregationists fighting the federal marshalls sent by President John F. Kennedy. Two rioters died; hundreds more were injured. Faced with armed rebellion, Kennedy federalized the Mississippi National Guard and sent thousands of U.S. Army troops and federal marshals the campus. That worked, and Meredith enrolled for classes on October 1. He needed, and was given, round-the-clock federal protection just to be able to go to class and get an education. 

The amazing thing to me continues to be that such a basic right offered to all citizens had to be fought for at all, let alone with soldiers and deaths. I was in sixth grade and already an keen watcher of the nightly news with Douglas Edwards, who was to tell us just two weeks later about the Cuban Missile Crisis unfolding. Just to think, in that one month, we faced destruction from within and from without, and the strong hand of John F. Kennedy guided us to safe conclusions.

That's the sort of thing that should be considered honorable.

By the way - the backup quarterback on the undefeated Rebels football team that autumn was a guy who found his living in music, instead of football. Jim Weatherly wrote "Neither One Of Us," "Midnight Train To Georgia," and "Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me," and also composed music for movies and television show. 

Jim Weatherly passed away in 2021. Long before that, African American students and athletes became vital parts of the University of Mississippi. It's just a shame that it took courts and deaths and so much time for it to happen. 

Tonight's the night!

 Do you remember the 21st night of September? As the song goes, "Love was changin' the minds of pretenders, While chasin' the clouds away..."

Tonight is the 21st night of September, and this song by pop-funk group Earth, Wind, and Fire urges you to remember the happy times in your days gone by, and not to dig too deeply into what the song is about. 

The chant of "Ba-de-ya" was written as a hook that anyone in the world could sing, no matter their usual language.

The song was released in November in 1978, so the month was not significant.

Matter of fact, the day - the 21st - didn't matter either. The songwriters say they tried any number of dates in the first line, and "the 21st" fit in best.

That's all. Listen, I come from the days when people took the lyrics to a song and spread them out on their desk like a buffet of words and then tried to say, "When they wrote about watching the roll on by, they were talking about tears rolling down the cheeks of someone who just had their heartbroken."

No. Sometimes the words are just the words. Listen to the song and try not to dance around the floor.

Sunday Rerun: Generous

 People from other countries often have difficulty comprehending the concept (there's that word again!) of volunteer fire companies. I guess it's a purely American idea, people doing something at considerable personal risk, inconvenience, and expense that one could say is the responsibility of the government to handle.

But since the days of Benjamin Franklin, who organized the first "fire brigade" in Philadelphian, people here have dropped - literally! - what they're doing and run to the fire house to go help someone or some someones in need.

Things like this don't happen for free, and that was the problem for a volunteer company in Calhoun, Missouri, where chief Mark Hardin gloomily scanned the balance sheet for his company and saw a bottom line of $169. 

169 bucks won't go far when you need new turnout gear and mobile equipment. They had not been able to afford either since the 1980s.

“It was pretty discouraging — we’d already been paying for stuff out of our own pockets to keep things going,” said Hardin. He retired as a firefighter in Arkansas and moved to Calhoun, winding up as chief of the company, serving a town of maybe 500. “I probably shouldn’t tell how much of our own money we’ve spent. My wife would divorce me," he said. 

On an annual stipend of $4800, his 28 volunteers were trying to keep two engines on the road and scrape by for fuel and other supplies. They are lucky in that they receive donations of hand-me-down gear and other necessities from other departments. Volunteer companies are like that. They'll as likely give a recently-replaced engine to a smaller company down the road as trade it in. It's all part of the giving-back ethos.

As Hardin was noodling his way out of the financial morass, along came a phone call from 91-year-old Sam Sloan, who lives two miles up the road from the fire house.

Hardin said: "I’d never met Sam, but he invited me to breakfast. He wanted to ask me a bunch of general questions about the fire department.”

They went to breakfast again the next week, and the third week, Sloan invited Chief Hardin to come up to his house, where he presented the company with a check for $500,000.

“I walked in the door and Sam said, ‘What do you think about this?’” Hardin said.

And what he thought about that was, that he had never seen that many zeroes in a check.

Sloan told the chief that his cattle and seed businesses had been good for him, and he decided that when he sold his businesses and land that he was determined to make a contribution to the volunteers.

He and his wife Jan have a nice house and 60 acres to pass on to their one son someday, and for now the couple want to share their bounty with deserving people. He just says he has always admired volunteer firefighters.

“I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, and I knew at this point in my life, I could help. It’s important to have a good fire department, especially with all the grass we have around here.”

Hardin thanked Sloan 20 times for the kind donation, then drove straight to the bank to increase the company's balance to $500,169.

Chief Hardin plans to get a new fire engine and some other equipment, plus new protective gear for all the members. 

And they bought a helmet for their new honorary chief Sloan to wear around.

The Saturday Picture Show, September 19, 2026

 

Autumn starts next week! I'm already dusting off my hoodies. Here's a preview from Lake Yamanaka in Japan! C'mon, you leaves! Change, doggone it!

There are so many things about which I know nothing. Up until today, I did not know that you could paint a picture of tangerines on newspaper.

This is inside an abadoned house somewhere, but I wanna tell you, with a little TLC, that chair could look great in someone's den! 

Why should old Marmaduke here have to sit with his business on the cold, cold ground when some other huckleberry hound will be glad to serve as his pillow?

I was telling someone the other day how I razzed my father for going to the Revco drugstore on Wednesdays to get his Skin Bracer aftershave on Senior Discount Day. Times have changed and now I'm all over the 10% off! 

I was never a big fan of Baseball Hall of Famer Robin Yount, but i have to say I like his taste in sportscoats!

I would never sign in under a gag name at the Doctor's Office, no sir. But if you ever heard the clerk at the pick-up window at Best & Co announcing an order was ready for "Colin O'Scopy," I might have known the prankster involved.

I think this is someone's dream, but what a great idea, with so many jerks zooming past stopped school buses. Just let the bus driver mark up the offending vehicles.

So, from here on in, Snooky won't be left out when you place the Girl Scout cookie orders. "Patch Pal" dog cookies are new for this year!

We Simpsons fans know Santa's Little Helper (Santos L. Halper to the credit card company). In the very first show, SLH was discarded by his owner, and it looks like life is imitating art. Someone please take him home!

A bit of a rough spell

 This picture happens to be from England, so it proves that the English are not the only ones who have a tough time with English.

The woman who posted it was all upset because she wanted balloons that spelled out H A P P Y   B I R T H D A Y for her son, but she feels that a mistake was made: "They left out the D in birthDay, but they gave me an extra A...."

Who wants to give her a hand before young Cholmondley's birthday is totally ruined? Anyone? Anyone?

Yan Canned Food

 This year, the New York Mets have an interesting relief pitcher named Jefry (correct spelling) Yan. He shows some promise, and got off to a good start this summer, but people are paying attention to him because of his exuberance when he strikes a guy out. He does this whole "jump up - jump down" thing that is supposed to convey his elation, but in sports, that is considered bad form, because it shows the other guy up, and he will be looking to hit the next pitch he sees halfway to Cooperstown.

BUT seeing that surname Yan made me think of someone we haven't seen for a while. His name is Martin Yan, a chef by trade, and when cooking shows were all over PBS in the era of mauve furniture and shoulder pads for men and women, his was one you saw every day..."Yan Can Cook." His schtick was teaching you how to whip up his home-gourmet food - hot and sour soup, egg rolls, stir fry, egg foo young, and of course, my favorite Chinese food dirty joke item, beef and broccoli.

I don't remember if you could send away for his recipes or what. This was before the internet, so there had to be a way to get the details down, unless you were good at shorthand. He made it look simple enough, not to mention tasty, and along the way, he would throw in jokes along with the bean sprouts and mushrooms.

And when he was finished making the Moo Goo, he would hold the dish up and proudly say his closing line: "Yan can cook and so can you!"

Hello, PBS? Put me on with my sure-fire simple chow recipes. We can call it "Eaty Gourmet"!

Covfefe Break

Ah, for the days when we went to high school to learn enough things to go to college or get a job. Not any more, apparently. And this story brings me to another of the peevelets that keep me up during my nap, namely: why can't people have their coffee and their breakfast before they leave the house? 

Dateline, BEAVER FALLS, New York, where a high school student ran afoul of a new policy on the first day of class at Beaver River Central School because she strolled into her first-period class with a cup of java in her hand.

Julie Kaputa, a senior at Beaver River (!) told WWNY News, “I walked in, I had my coffee with me. I got to my first-period class and my teacher said, ‘I’m either going to need you to dump that out or consume it on the spot or go down to the office.’”

Apparently, none of those options met with her approval, so she was given an in-school suspension for violating the school's outside food and drink rule, which was a new addition to the school's code of conduct.

I remember toting a brown bag lunch (roast beef sammy, some sort of heavily salted snack chips, and a Tastykake pie or cake) for years...for lunch. It never dawned on me that school was a place for a kaffeeklatsch.

And so the undercaffeinated young lady's mother got into it with the school, and doesn't believe the "code is valid" and the superintendent agreed and feels the August meeting at which the new code was promulgated was not sufficiently publicized and he's sorry and Julie is glad it's all worked out and through all of this, I see no mention of whether Julie went back to class or anything, and now I know why I grumble that high school students should be able to identify the Battle of Hastings and the Pythagorean theory and the difference between the words "versus" and "verse."

But first things first! Coffee for everyone, and then we'll look at your hypotenuse.