April First Rerun: April the Onest

 Oh yeah, look at the calendar today before you believe anything anyone tells you, except for me, because I will never lie to you, cheat you, deceive you, or fool you.

It's April Fool's Day, commonly celebrated as the day that radio DJs do each other's shows under the other person's name, kids turn off their parents' alarm clocks, swap sugar for salt, call someone's spouse and tell them lurid tales...

We don't know where April Fool's Day, or All Fools' Day, even began. I guess even the cavemen tied each other's shoelaces together or sent each other on an errand to get a left-handed monkey wrench, although how did cavemen know the date was April 1? We know that insurance companies didn't even start handing out calendars until Columbus's day.

You ancient Romans just missed your big day: they call it Hilaria, and it's every March 25. There is also the Holi celebration in India, which was held from sundown on March 17 through sundown the next day. It's also called the festival of sharing and love, or the festival of colors. Put it on your 2023 calendar for March 7.

I didn't know this, but it used to be that Christendom started their New Year on Easter Sunday, until Edict of Roussillon (August 1564). That's when King Charles IX said, "Let's start the new year on January 1, while the kids are out of school for Christmas break anyway." But notice: Easter was a lunar festival, not set in stone on a calendar. It's a moveable date, and those who insisted on clinging to the old ways were the “April Fools.”

There is also speculation that the oldtimers chose April 1 because it's right around the time of the vernal equinox, and many people are fooled by changes in the weather at this time of the year. Take this week, for example.

We don't know if this is Charles IX's fault, but to this day, a victim of April Foolery in France is called "poisson d’avril" or “April fish.” French children go around pinning or taping paper fish to the backs of friends.

I went to a tough school.  We taped real fish to the backs of unsuspecting pianists while they practiced their scales.

Hot Chocolate

Here is a crime in which I can prove my innocence from far, far away:  Nestle said that twelve tons of KitKat chocolate bars were ripped off in Europe last week. Thieves got away with a truckload of KitKat and the KitKat truck as well.

A truck carrying 413,793 ‌of the candy bars left central Italy to satisfy the cravings of KitKat lovers throughout Europe. The truck was supposed to arrive in Poland, but never showed up. And no one knows a darn thing about it.

KitKat announced that the purloined sweets all have a unique batch code, so anyone who scans the batch numbers of the missing bars will receive instructions on how to get in touch with KitKat headquarters.

And they addressed the thieves with words that are at least partly conciliatory: "Whilst ​we appreciate ​the criminals' exceptional taste, the fact remains that cargo theft is ​an escalating ‌issue for businesses of all sizes."

My original point is that no one can pin this on me, because no one has ever seen me with a KitKat in my hand. Never will, as long as they keep making Snickers and Milky Way!

Worldwide

The worldwide ubiquity of the internet has been a wonderful gift to me. I like to meet new people and learn about their lives, and the www has afforded me the chance to form friendships with people all over. I love relating how I heard about the Key Bridge collapse in the middle of the night here in Baltimore from friends in Turkey and India. They had seen the news and wrote to see if we were all right.

But I have to tell you this, the respect for the USA is not near what it used to be. I will let you decide how and why you think this came to be. I have my explanation and you surely have yours. 

No matter how you look at how the world looks at America, you cannot deny this: The Pew Research Center took a survey, and 53% of American adults (admittedly, this leaves a significant portion of the Senate and House of Representatives unrepresented, but...) say the morality and ethics of their fellow citizens is “bad” (somewhat bad or very bad).

In contrast, Pew asked people in two dozen other countries, and most people responding said their fellows are "somewhat good" or "good."

Just over the border in Canada, 92% of the population thinks Canadians are good folks. Just 7% say they live among bad people.

Scott Schieman is a University of Toronto sociologist. He studies the "social psychology" of Americans and Canadians, and it's his stance that there is a negativity here about how we feel about that guy down the street and his family. “Americans tend to think broadly that most other people are worse than they [themselves] are,” he says.  

Maybe that's because we know so much about each other - or think we know. I will never get over the tons of phone calls 911 got in the wake of 9/11 from people calling to report their neighbors for simply "looking foreign," or "coming into their house with grocery bags that might be filled with bomb-making materials."

Things even out, and it's been my observation over the years that most of us have the reputation we earn. Sure, there are mistaken impressions and misapprehensions, but we know each other pretty well, and maybe that's a sign we should begin exhibiting more honorable behavior.

And also, let's start talking about the good things people do, and that will help the way others see us.

 

Sunday Rerun: Forget About It

  The Statler Brothers had a catchy song called "Whatever Happened To Randolph Scott," which contained a very true line: "Everybody's trying to make a comment about our doubts and fears...'True Grit's the only movie I've really understood in years." 

We like to watch old old movies on Turner Classic Movies, and the other night we hit on one which, while not the greatest movie you'll ever see, did a least say a lot about the times in which it was made.

The picture was called "The Housekeeper's Daughter." It came out in 1939, a comedy directed and produced by Hal Roach, who had previously produced Laurel And Hardy and "Our Gang" movies. The stars were Joan Bennett and  Adolphe Menjou, and it featured the film debut of Victor Mature, a man famous for saying many years later, "I can't act, and I have 140 movies to prove it."

The brief rundown goes like this: Joan Bennett plays a gangster's girlfriend who goes home to her mother, who runs the house for the high-class Randall family, but all but one Randall goes away, leaving Robert Randall, who wants to be a newspaper reporter, so he gets a job through connections and stumbles on a murder case which is a huge scandal and leads to the police converging on the house and people shoot off firecrackers and the gangsters think it's gunshots and Robert winds up with Joan Bennett.

OK, I left out some minor details, but the point is this. We look at movies like this, 80-some years later, and we shake our heads.

There were others, called "screwball comedies," around that time. Try to spend some time watching "You Can't Take It With You" sometime and see if your head doesn't spin. That's the one with a crazy family whose normal daughter falls in love with a normal boy and the families get together and all hell starts popping.

There was a movie called "Hellzapoppin' " a couple of years later which was nothing but crazy antics without the barest semblance of a plot.

But think about the times: the Depression was still going on. People were either out of work or just eking out a drab existence, and the only reasonable entertainment was the neighborhood movie theatre where for a nickel or dime ticket, you could take your mind off your troubles and not worry about next month's rent or another night of cereal for dinner or the storm clouds of war menacing Europe (Nazi Germany attacked Poland on September 1, 1939, leading to France, Australia and the United Kingdom declaring World War II.The US was inevitably drawn to the conflict on December 7, 1941, with the invasion of Pearl Harbor.) Tough times call for at least an hour or two of diversion.

And at the Bijou or the Rialto or the Towson Theatre, all that trouble seemed far away  for a while as people, in the pre-television world, watched their favorite stars sing and dance and act, with the exception of Victor Mature.

Victor Mature (l) and Joan Bennett

The days of people going to the movies two or three times a week are long past, but today we download movies to take our minds off what's out there.  And with Victor Mature gone, we still have problems to forget about, and that's why we have Will Ferrell.

The Saturday Picture Show, March 28, 2026

 

The old county jail in my hometown of Towson, Maryland, no longer holds miscreants of any type. But rather than tear down a historic building, the county had a developer with an appreciation for history take it over. They lease space in there now to a variety of firms, and can you just imagine having an all-hands meeting in this room? It makes me feel all Shawshanky!

I don't think you can call these tasteless discs "candy," any more than you can call liver "meat" or non-alcohol beer "beer," but since they've made them since 1847, clearly someone is buying them, and, against all odds, eating them.

You can blow up the picture if you don't believe me, but all of this drawing is made up of little tiny cartoon people faces!

This machine rides around the streets somewhere in Germany, and if the driver is going too fast, just holler, "Hang on, Snoopy!"

I can see people getting a big print of this made up and framing it and hanging it on the wall so they can always feel like they're at the pier in Huntington Beach in California.

I think we begin to mature at the very moment we understand how true this is. We learn to cope by succeeding in spite of this truth.

When they held auditions for the replacement for the Gorton's fisherman, one applicant seemed to have all the qualifications!

They will be glad to hem your pants, if you catch my drift...

For some people, it takes a little while to realize retirement means their Wednesday can be your Saturday any day of the week...

Next week! Try the deep-dish olive pie!

Ouch!

Well, I never dreamed it would come to this, but here we are. In Florida (where else?) some people got into a tussle following a sporting event at a country club, and it wound up with one player slugging his opponent's face and beating him right down to the ground.

The sport in question here is the deadly game of pickleball.

The guy, the slugger, is a 63-year-old, and he stands charged with with two counts of felony battery on a person 65 or older (hey cool! It's a whole separate crime to beat on a senior!) His 51-year-old wife also joined the fight in Port Orange, and she has one single count of felony battery on a person 65 or older hanging over her head, which is not as gray as nature intended, I assume.

Here's where the fracas began: they were taking on another married couple but they began arguing about shots being made in what pickleballers call the kitchen (a marked-off zone on either side of the net.) The rule was you can only hit the ball there once it has landed; otherwise they must avoid it like I avoid pickleball entirely.

Well, you know how these things go. The players started insulting each other, and then the slugger insulted the other player's wife, and then words led to fisticuffs.

And then! At least twenty oldtimers  members of the club got into it. It must have been as glorious as when Morty Seinfeld clobbered Jack Klompus over that astronaut pen on "Seinfeld."

I'm printing this out and carrying it around in case anyone is crazy enough to try to get me to join a country club, or a game of pickleball.

"But I'm famous, don't you understand?"

Please come along with me as I add to my collection of famous people putting on the "Don't You Know Who I Am?" routine.

Today's special guest is Justin Timberlake, arrested in June, 2024, in Long Island, NY, for DWI.

First of all, let's get this straight: He is a talented performer, no denying that. But he is also 45 years of age now, way past the point where we can say, "Oh, he's just a big KID!" 

He left a restaurant and was observed running a stop sign and failing to stay in his lane. This sort of thing tends to attract the attention of police, who are supposed to be taking drunks off the road before they kill people with their cars.

Timberlake's hi-priced attorney, Edward Burke, Jr, maintains that Justin was not intoxicated, and was able to negotiate a plea deal in which JT copped to a lesser offense.

He was not charged with being a preening jackanapes, however. Should have been, wasn't.

I'm not sure why the video of his arrest is just surfacing, but it's chock-full of foolishness. Such as when the officer asks him about his car, and he says it's a rental, and the officer, not recognizing him, asks what he's doing in that part of the woods. JT says he's following his friends back to their house, and that he is "on a world tour."

You know what, when you think about it, we are all on world tours. Some just go farther than others, and most do it while sober. But when the officer asks what the devil he's talking about, Timberlake says: "It's hard to explain ... umm ... I'm Justin Timberlake."

Busted! He was taken in and booked, and the matter was settled in court, but recently, the tape of his most famous appearance since he walked around with his noodle in a box came to light.

So it was that he filed a petition on March 2 in Suffolk County Supreme Court, claiming that if people saw how he acts while cruising the streets it would be bad for his image.

“Public dissemination of this footage would cause severe and irreparable harm to [Timberlake’s] personal and professional reputation, subject [Timberlake] to public ridicule and harassment, and serve no legitimate public interest,” the petition states.

I have to disagree. As a member of the public, my legitimate interest in laughing at people like Justin Timberlake was served quite nicely.

Red-rimmed eyes tell no lies.