This made him Happy

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!

 

Sunday Rerun: A saint and a sinner

  “More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.” - attributed to Saint Teresa of Avila (1515-1582)

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.

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.

The Saturday Picture Show, April 18, 2026

 

Many neighborhoods in Baltimore don't have access to fresh fruits and vegetables. The Arabbers, as they are called (pronounced AY-rabbers) rent a horse and cart and take produce to the people. My grandma used to buy watermelons from a guy who came up the back alley chanting, "Waaaatermelon! Ripe to the rind!"

The tropical version of those Russian nesting dolls.

Nice ride, lots of fun, but I have to ask about getting on it and getting off it.

It's true! Those World War II army jeeps so important in winning the war were shipped overseas unassembled in wooden crates. They were easy to assemble, once you got the hang of it with the first 75 or so...

The message is, get cool, or you'll wind up in a place even hotter than this.

With temperatures in Baltimore this past week tipping over the 90° mark, I thought I would bring up this image from last winter's snow. As a reminder, no matter how much it snows and how cold it gets, you can always put on another sweater.

Well, this shopper was in such a hurry to go, they left their Yeti behind. Haste maketh waste as always.

The Beatles said it and it's still true - Love is all you need!

There's a lot of buzz around this new restaurant that doesn't even have a name...

Well, they've been living at the shore since, well, forever, so maybe seagulls get bored and have to yawn now and then.

She's not well

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.

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.

 

How's your old tomato?

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!

 

Zoom meeting

Over in England, a fellow named Mark Cody, 36, lost his grandma during COVID-19. But it was not the virus that took her. She took her own life because of the feeling of isolation she felt. 

Cody had been planning to take her for a ride in his fancy car, but ... “My promise to her was always to take her out in a Lamborghini and the opportunity never came, so I thought I'd love to be able to exist to stop someone being in the situation that my nan was in,” Cody told the BBC.

So what he did, he started a new program called "Granborghini." Participants round up elderly people and take them for the ride of their lives to make them feel young again. According to the article I read, there are few things that can break a senior out of their daily routine quite like a blast in a Lamborghini or a McLaren. Maybe it's more fun than the Wild Mouse down on the boardwalk. That's one I'll never forget!

Cody has a squad of volunteers who share their time and vehicles with the folks. I really don't know that going 148 miles an hour up Dulaney Valley Road would do it for me, but who knows?  Take it from Robin Gibbons. Robin hauls people around in his McLaren, he enjoys seeing the looks on his passengers' faces: "You buy these cars to make people smile, and that's the value for me," he says.

I smile just thinking about it. See you in line for the Wild Mouse.

The phantom knows

Our pantry door hinges had a little bit of a squeak going on, only when you opened the door, or closed it. At all other times, no noise at all.

First chance I got (give or take three months) I grabbed the WD-40 and now there is no more squeak at all. 

So here's the crazy thing! How come, every time I open the pantry to get cat food, pretzels, more cat food, or whatever, I still expect it to make that noise? Did I psychologically condition myself to plan for that squeak, and now that it's gone, I miss it?

I was watching a tv movie wherein a woman suffered the loss of her lower leg, and had to deal with the phenomenon of "phantom pain," the sensation of feeling pain in a body part that sadly no longer exists. This thing with expecting the squeaking noise is not painful at all, but it just seems odd, almost like I miss the stupid sound.

Maybe I'll go outside and plants hollyhocks.