Clownfish are hermaphroditic - they are all born as males, and have the ability to step up in class and become female. Clownfish schools are led by a large dominant female. And then if she dies, the dominant male in the school will change over and become the dominant female, and then a younger male takes up the mantle and becomes the dominant male.
But he knows his days of wearing the pants, so to speak, are numbered.
Holiday dinners must really be fun with these fish!
News item: In an April 19 interview, Kayti Edwards — the step-granddaughter of Julie Andrews — said that she has a 15-year-old daughter, Ever, with Cher's younger son, Elijah Blue Allman.
I read these People magazine stories for you to save you the trouble. Reading further, I find that Ms Edwards is the former girlfriend of the man always described as "beloved actor" (now deceased) Matthew Perry.
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| He looks just like his father. She looks like people who used to look like Cher. |
Elijah B. Allman was in the news last week because Cher filed papers to put him under conservatorship, because he seems to spend almost every nickel he gets from his father's estate on drugs, food, and alcohol, and just wastes the rest. He is currently being held in preventive detention, incarcerated at the Rockingham House of Corrections in Brentwood, New Hampshire. He committed several b & e's in New Hampshire for no apparent reason in February and March.
Allman, who goes by the professional name P. Exeter Blue I for reasons best known to himself, was born six days after the American Bicentennial, July 10, 1976. Cher and Gregg Allman were married at the time, for reasons best known to themselves.
In your wildest imagination, could you have ever imagined that Gregg Allman (when he was still alive) and Julie Andrews could be linked by family relations so close that they could have done a duet on "Ain't Wasting Time No More" after Christmas dinner one cold December?
Let's hope that everyone involved gets help and that Elijah will be around for America's semiquincentennial this July.
This happened last year. I didn't hear about it then; if I had, I would have broken my neck to tell you about it, because it involves honoring someone whose cultural contributions to his adopted home of the US of A are manifold and glorious. He's an Englishman by birth, but has made his home in Westport, Connecticut for 41 years, while sharing his talents as a musician, singer, author, and actor.
We're talking, of course, about Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, the first recipient of the Connecticut Governor’s Award of Excellence. That's a new honor celebrating residents who epitomize the state’s core values: creativity, resourcefulness, passion, dynamism, and generosity.
Keith received a custom-designed medallion and a ribbon at the ceremony, where he delivered remarks both witty and wise.
“I’d like to say thank you to you all, and thank you to the state of Connecticut,” Richards said in accepting the award. “You kind of get lost for words with something like this around your neck. I’ve been here for 40 years, and it’s been a great place for me. I brought the kids up here. When the kids were young, I said, I have to get the kids out of New York City before they don’t get any fresh air at all. So, we moved up here, and ever since, we’ve had a great life. … I’m incredibly happy about everything, especially things like this, because you don’t get them every day.”
Keith was recognized for his work with a group called SPHERE, which enhances the lives of adults with disabilities, and The Prospector Theater, which provides meaningful employment through the magic of film.
What's more, Governor Ned Lamont recognized Keith for advocating for arts, education, and accessibility initiatives across the state, and said, "I’ve been inspired by the Rolling Stones for more than 50 years, I hope you have as well. Keith Richards is an amazing member of our community. We’re so proud that he’s here and I’m so proud to have the opportunity to give him this award of excellence.”
And in closing his remarks, Keith Richards spoke highly of his adopted city and libraries all over:
“This is a great building, a wonderful library, which even I didn’t know the full extent of. Without our books, without knowing things, without knowing their special meaning — this isn’t movies, this is not someone drawing you images. This is a book, and you have the movie in your head. It’s very important that we keep our books unburnt.”
Stirring words from a great man!
“More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.” - attributed to Saint Teresa of Avila (1515-1582)
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| Saint Teresa |
I saw this quote as the epilogue to an essay about the life of Truman Capote (1924-1984), the novelist/essayist/poet/critic/biographer who was born with a great facility for written language and turned it into great success in many fields, only to waste it all away by overindulgence in drugs, alcohol, and debauchery.
Saint Teresa was a 16th-century Spanish saint, a noblewoman who became a Carmelite nun, church reformer, and mystic. The chances are good that, had she and Capote existed at the same time, they would not have traveled in the same circles, for she gave up social prominence and chose an ascetic lifestyle, giving up the sinful pleasures to attain higher spiritual goals. She came from a well-to-do background and forwent the mundane pleasures, while Capote came from a simple Southern background and strove mightily to taste of those pleasures until his life became all party and no worthwhile work.
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| Capote |
My life, your life, and the history of the entire world are all filled with examples of people who miss planes that crash, people whose car broke down on the way to work and kept them safe on 9/11, jobs we wanted that we didn't get and it was better that we didn't...it's an endless cornucopia of lessons learned.
As an admirer of Capote's work, I wish he had found it in himself to do more of it. In Cold Blood, his 1965 classic book was one of the first, and certainly the best, attempts at telling a non-fictional story in the style of detective fiction. Capote actually moved to Kansas to follow the arrest, trial, and conviction of two men who murdered four members of the Herb Clutter family in Holcomb in 1959. He was a perfectionist in his writing, known for spending a day fussing over one word on a page of his brilliant prose, and the world of books has been the less for his passing.
Although self-awareness was not always a hallmark of Capote's personality, he was wise enough to take a friend along to Kansas to help him gain the trust of the locals and take notes as he interviewed them. He knew that his...quirkiness...might not play too well out there in the Grain Belt. That friend was his friend since childhood...Harper Lee, who somehow found time to work on her own novel, the excellent Pulitzer prize-winning "To Kill A Mockingbird.
Capote first published his findings in serial form in The New Yorker before editing them as a book. It was later that he revealed that the magazine had sent him out to cover the story and had given him the choice between the Clutter murders and a day with a New York cleaning lady as subjects to write about. He chose the Clutter story first, but later spent a day with his cleaning lady in 1979 and wove the tale of her work and life into a short story called "A Day's Work."
Choices...we make them and wait to see how they turn out.
If you weren't around catching the news in October, 1987, let me catch you up:
Eighteen month-old Jessica McClure fell into a well in her aunt's backyard in Midland, Texas. For the next 58 hours, the nation, yea, the world, hung on by their cable TV, waiting for "Baby Jessica" to be rescued from the well, 22 feet below the surface.
They got her out, all right, and she was so widely known that even The Simpsons did an episode about Bart being stuck in a well.
The last we heard of the woman known now as Jessica McClure Morales, she was doing ok, but now comes news that she was arrested Saturday night following a reported domestic disturbance at her Midland County home.
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| Jessica made my mugshot collection |
Police say the Midland County Sheriff’s Office responded to a residence in the area of South County Road 1140 around 10 PM last Saturday. Morales, now 40, was taken into custody at the scene, charged with assault causing bodily injury involving family violence.
The County says it might take up to ten days for the arrest affidavit to be released, so we know nothing about how she wound up trapped again, although she did bond out over the weekend.
So, now we wait for details, which I will pass along as soon as. Here's a piece of advice, Jessica: maybe get out of Midland County. It's nothing but pitfalls for you.
Faithful people will tell you that anyone can count the seeds in an apple, but only God can tell you the amount of apples in a seed.
Think about it! You plant the seed and who knows what will grow...
James Prigioni took that leap. Taking two tomato slices from two McDonald’s Quarter Pounders, he took the seeds and wound up growing healthy tomato plants in 124 days.
He went two ways with his seeds. The one tomato, he planted two seeds in a red Solo cup. The other, he sliced off a sliver and put that tomato morsel into a Solo cup filled with soil.
He kept both cups inside for 23 days, and then moved them outside- the sprouting seeds in a bucket and the slice right into the ground.
By the 94th day, he was picking fruit off the vine of the ground plant.
And below, the results of the plant grown from the slice! It had dozens of little tomatoes on its branches.
Prigioni's taste test: “No acidity, sweet but a mild sweet,” he said. “The kind of tomato that you could just eat a bunch of.”
And if you ask him why, since you can get a ton of Roma tomatoes at Lidl for next to nothing, he will tell you, “For me, it was just about fun. And it actually helped improve my whole garden because I was so excited to get out there and see how those tomatoes were doing… that I stopped and looked around at the garden.”
I've written before about the horrible soil around our neighborhood, which was built over the long-ago-cleared out remains of a huge gravel pit. One of the neighbors grew some tomatoes once. They were baseball-sized. And they tasted like baseballs.
See you at Lidl, but gardening caps off to Mr. Prigioni!
