His name is...

I haven't heard this lately, but people used to say, "Now that everyone knows about the trouble I'm in, I guess my name is mud!" when their reputation was besmirched. 

I guess today's cool people say, "My reputation has been besmirched!" It's shorter, and quite to the point.

But there was really a man whose name was mud, and here is his story. You remember reading that John Wilkes Booth killed President Abraham Lincoln with his derringer pistol at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C. in April, 1865, just as the Civil War was ending. Booth was a Confederacy fan.

The assassin made his getaway on horseback with a broken leg, by which I should make clear, Booth had the busted leg. The horse went on to win the fifth race at Laurel the next afternoon, after dropping Booth off at the Charles County home of Dr. Samuel Mudd.

Mudd's descendants, including Roger Mudd, the newsman on CBS, fought for years to clear Dr Sam's name, because it was he who set the fracture for Booth and allowed him to hide out in Waldorf, MD. 

Booth took it on the lam and made it as far as a farm in Port Royal, Virginia, before being killed by a Union Army Sergeant, one Boston Corbett, whose troops had set fire to the barn in an effort to flush Booth out.

As the investigation went on, it was determined that Mudd had known Booth and had indeed offered help with the assassination of Lincoln, although it was never proven that he knew what was cooking that particular night. Nonetheless, he was tried by a military commission and convicted of conspiracy, and sent to the military prison on Fort Jefferson, a remote island 70 miles west of Key West.

Dr Mudd

Two years later, an outbreak of yellow fever swept through the prison camp. One of the first to die was the prison doctor. Mudd rose to the challenge, using his medical skills to treat the afflicted and contain the epidemic. Responding to a petition signed by soldiers and officers at the fort, President Andrew Johnson granted Mudd a full and unconditional pardon, and Mudd returned to Charles County, still a convicted, but pardoned, man.

So, that explains that name thing. We still don't understand why people thought it was all right to own slaves, though.

 

 

Out with a bang

Here is news from Willemstad, Curaçao. It's an island in the southern Caribbean Sea with a temperate climate (82°-88° year-round) and a location out of the standard hurricane path. It belongs to the Kingdom of the Netherlands as an autonomous, self-governing constituent country. 

Speaking of which, a guy Baltimore remembers fondly for his skills at playing second base for the Orioles, Jonathan Schoop, got himself in Dutch down there. It's his home country, but last January, he was arrested after an investigation at his home turned up firearms, ammunition, cartridge casings and knives. He was locked up for a month at the time, and after his trial, he was sentenced on Friday to 30 months in prison with six months suspended.

And this is actually a lighter sentence than he might have received had the judge followed the prosecution's request for four years with eight months suspended. He also missed playing for the Kingdom of the Netherlands team in the World Baseball Classic in March, although his major league career in the US ended in 2023 with his release by the Detroit Tigers.

Now, you have to figure he knew the gun laws were strict in Curaçao, having grown up there. Why he felt the next to have an artillery handy is something he can ponder for the next 24 months.

I salute the island nation for taking steps to keep guns out. You're probably less likely to get shot to death in a place like that. Yes, the US homicide-by-gun rate is decreasing, probably because people can't afford the gas to go out and buy bullets, but it's still unacceptable to have people strutting around in any nation carrying weapons of mass destruction.

Let's contact old #6 in a couple of years and see how he feels about the proliferation of guns.

 

Sunday Rerun: Here Come The Renters

 Two of my favorite Beatles, John Lennon and George Harrison, have gone on to their rewards, leaving my third favorite, Ringo Starr, and that guy with the eyebrows, Paul, I think is his name.

And as we all know, all four of the Fab Four came from working class backgrounds in Merrie Olde England. George came from such a family: his father, Harold, was a school bus driver; his mom, Louise, kept the home, raised four kids, and taught ballroom dance.

And I would think that a real Beatles fan would jump at the chance to do an Airbnb thing, and rent that house where George lived from ages 6 to 18, right?  Here's the story...

The home where The Beatles rehearsed many times is at 25 Upton Green in Speke, which is a southeast suburb of Liverpool, England.  It's what the British call a terrace house, and we call a rowhouse or a townhouse. George and his three siblings and their parents moved in in 1949, moving out in 1962 just as Beatlemania swept England and headed for our shores.

Another family bought the house from the Harrisons; they stayed for 50-some years, moving out in 2014. At that point, the new owners turned it into a rental for a while until 2021, when it went up for auction. A Beatle fan from New Hampshire, Ken Lambert, bought it then for £171,000, (about $223,000), having seen the listing from Omega Auctions calling the house a “truly unique opportunity to own the property where George spent his formative years and that played an important part in helping The Beatles flourish.”

Lambert, with help of a Liverpudlian local, has been ever since working on the place, getting it ready for company.  He found furniture and wall treatments appropriate to the time of the fifties and early sixties, and posted photos and added furniture for the right feel. He studied old photographs and found period-appropriate furniture and wallpaper to help transport guests back in time. Of course, he brought in a record player and a stack of Beatles albums.  

“I wanted to do it for myself, to play the guitar and play the Beatles in the room the Beatles played guitar,” Lambert tells the Herald. “That really is a cool thing for people to experience.”

While the childhood homes of Paul McCartney (THAT'S his name!) and John Lennon are maintained for preservation by the National Trust, a European conservation organization, Harrison’s house has not been given that treatment. I don't know why. But Mr Lambert is doing his part, opening the place for rental by fans on a pilgrimage.

And you can rent it for less than the price of a top beach resort! The erstwhile  Harrison home is available for short-term rentals on Airbnb (£200, or $260, per night). 

If you go, please share lots of pictures, and send me a postcard!

The Saturday Picture Show, September 12, 2026

 

This orange will give your morning a smile and he hasn't even been turned into juice yet!

Compact Cars Only? Sure, and this is my compact little Rolls Royce Phantom.

I'll have half a dozen figs, hold the Newton.

He's a baby, sure, but he's still a rattlesnake and will grow to be a bigger one!

This is in Hanoi, North Viet Nam, where the train comes right through the shopping district.

The remote will never get lost again if you chain it to a couple of pounds of marble.

How cool would it be to have a national leader as cool as Mark Carney, the Canadian Prime Minister seen here having lunch with Bryan Adams in Ontario?

If you don't own a cat, the first two things you will learn about them when you get one are A) they sit where they wish to sit and 2) no box is "too small."

I cannot explain this one, except to guess that the angry man is also the photographer. Why was he angry and how did he channel that anger? Those are two questions I might assign to a Creative Writing seminar, were I teaching one.

Burt Reynolds had a fine sense of humor, if you like pranks like the time he grew tired of the National Enquirer printing half-truths and untruths about him, so he rented a helicopter and flew over their headquarters in Florida for the purpose of dumping several buckets of meadow muffins, cow patties, and cattle dung on them. 

A rerun of a 9/11 story

It's September 11, and everyone has their memories and feelings about that day that really changed everything.

And it's good for us "of a certain age" to remember that 9/11/2001 was 19 years ago, meaning that for people currently in high school, and some in college,
they have no personal connection to the events. Sure, they have seen video and heard a lot about it, but there's always room for everyone to learn more.

F'rinstance, not a whole lot of us know a whole lot about the 9/11 Boatlift. With what seemed to be the entire world crashing down on them, people who found themselves around Ground Zero came to a staggering realization: Manhattan is an island, and when the streets and highways that are usually clogged in the town where gridlock began, there's only going to be one escape.

The water.

Those who know such things believe that more than half a million people needed to be transported out of the southern tip of Lower Manhattan.  You remember the videos, the dazed survivors out in the streets, a long way from home and comfort.

As so often happens here in the greatest country in the world (it never needed to be made great again; it always has been) saw ordinary people respond to an extraordinary situation and become a team of heroes in what is regarded as the world's largest water evacuation of all time.

Of course, there was no plan for how to get 500,000+ humans off the island and on their way. It's hard for civic officials to even grasp the concept. (Here in Maryland, the last plan I ever heard about for what we would do in case of a nuclear attack, devastating earthquake or catastrophic weather event was no more detailed than "Everyone get in your cars and head for West Virginia.")

And there certainly was no way for New York officials to lay out a plan for getting folks off Manhattan.  But as so often happens, leave it to the people, and good things result.  Boats and ferries are always active in those waters, of course, and they began turning for shore to pick people up.  Destination? To be determined. Just getting away from the desolation was the goal.

What happened was that feeling we get when there's a chance to help a stranger - someone we don't know, nothing in it for us but the feeling of helping a fellow citizen. So mariners did what they could.  And the United States Coast Guard -  the first to protect our seas and shores - operates the marine radios that all afloat listen to, and they put out the Mayday call for everyone to come help.

And along came tugboats, party pontoons, water taxis, runabouts, whatever, heading for the scene to take on passengers.

Let us not forget that all who headed for the tip of Manhattan that horrible but beautiful Tuesday morning saw what they were headed for - smoke and gases in the air and airborne debris were plentiful.  And that's what they SAW. None of them had the slightest idea if there would be further attacks, exposing the makeshift fleet to disaster. In fact, it's probable that few of them knew a whole lot about what HAD happened, and none of what might.

But with steadfast determination, the American kind, they loaded as many as their vessels held, dropped people off at a safe dock, and went back for more, as many times as it took to move 500,000 terrified fellow citizens.

The Coast Guard adds it up as more than 150 boats, crewed by 800-some people, getting that half a million off Manhattan.  It took until well into the night, but no one was left stranded.

Tom Hanks narrated a documentary entitled “Boatlift: An Untold Tale of 9/11 Resilience” in 2011. It told tales of people such as Vincent Ardolino of Brooklyn, captain of the Amberjack V. He recalls saying to his wife,“I’ve got to go do something … I’m going to take the Amberjack up into the city and help … I have to do what I have to do … Even if I rescue one person, that’s one person less that will suffer or die.”

And remember, he had no way of knowing if he would come home to his wife. America was at war, and he did what he could, and if you multiply that by 800 other good people, that's how every one of those survivors got on their way home on September 11, 2001.

Blow-up about a blow-up

You might remember seeing this on the local news, if you live in Maryland. It was August of 2024 when a house on Arthurs Woods Drive in Harford County exploded early one morning, killing the homeowner and a contractor working there, and injuring three others. The blowup also damaged several neighboring houses. The house itself was literally blown to tiny bits.

The National Transportation Safety Board investigated, and found that there were  communication failures at Baltimore Gas and Electric and its parent company, Exelon.

An underground electrical fault - electric lines were buried too close to gas lines - was the initial cause of the explosion, but the NTSB blames the deaths on BGE's "ineffective response to the initial gas leak."

The night before, a passerby sniffed the gas in the neighborhood and followed protocol, reporting his findings to BGE.

The BGE gas dispatcher sent a trouble truck to check the situation, but sent it to an intersection, instead of the exact address of the ill-fated house.

There seemed to be confusion at the utility, and no one was sent to the right location to look for the problem. It came to light that the BGE dispatcher was consuming alcohol and fell asleep at his work station, although his supervisors failed to send him for drug and alcohol testing.

In a classic case of locking the barn door a bit too late, BGE says they have made several policy changes. All gas leak calls are now monitored 24/7, dispatchers are receiving additional training, and there is now fitness-for-duty screening of their calltakers and dispatchers.

This is not like sending a truck to replace a street light. People all know that gas leaks can be deadly and should be handled with utmost care at once.  You would like to think that the gas company knew that.

Lightnin' Strikes

Before 1994, about the only music that  Antony (" Tony") Cicoria listened to was that good old rock 'n' roll. His parents had stuck him in piano lessons when he was 7, but he hated it and it did not stick.

In 1994, aged 42, he was a medical doctor, specializing in orthopedic medicine, orthopedic surgery, orthotics, prosthetic supplies, and sports medicine. He kept himself in excellent condition, which may explain why he lived through getting struck by lightning in Albany, New York, that summer.

Another reason he may have survived? He was outside waiting to use a pay phone when the bolt hit him. The next person in line to use the phone was an intensive care nurse.

Aside from a burn mark on his head and left foot where the lightning hit him and exited, he seemed to have no physical damage at first. Several weeks later, he developed memory issues and was sluggish. He consulted a neurologist, whose examination (EEG and MRI) found nothing wrong.

He went back to work, and two weeks later, his memory was restored and he felt energetic again.

Over the next few days, Dr Cicoria became obsessed with an insatiable desire to hear piano music. He bought a piano. He taught himself to play it, and within three months of the lightning strike, he was spending nearly off of his days writing and playing piano music.

Doctors who studied the case said that he had suffered a cardiac arrest during the incident, and that may have caused his brain to re-wire itself. He still practices medicine and the piano.

I always wanted to play the piano, too, so maybe I'll take out the garbage during the next electrical storm. Don't worry; I'll wear rubber-soled shoes to ground myself.