Sunday rerun: Belief

 It's the middle of August, what I call Elvis Week, and once again, our crepe myrtle in the back yard is fully ablaze in pink!

Funny tree, or shrub, or bush, whatever it is. Some people spell it Crepe Myrtle, some go with Crape Myrtle, and now and then you'll see Crepemyrtle.  However you spell or name it, its blooms appear right in the middle of hellish summer heat, long after the forsythias and azaleas have lost their luster and retreated back to stubborn green.

Ms Myrtle waits until all the other bloomers have had their turns, and then she does her thing. And with her blooms at the top of long tall branches, they wave majestically at the people piling into their SUVs to get back-to-school shopping done.

(Kids - ask your folks if they had Trapper Keepers back in the day! They drove teachers nuts, for some reason.)

We planted our CM shortly after we moved in, maybe 2001 or '02. And every year since it took a notion to bloom, it has done so in this very week. Like being able to expect people to say, "The Ravens will never win a Super Bowl with Lamar," it's as dependable as an Accutron watch. 

Except for one year, and I will tell you this with my hand on a Bible if you wish...

D.

In 2014, that sad June, my mother (who bought and brought the little plant to us) died, and in July, our dear Deanna went to be with the Lord. Deanna's funeral was in Phila on July 19 that year, and when we got home that night, we looked out back and the crepe myrtle was gloriously pink and waving greetings from above.

A month early.  And it never happened before then, or since.

I believe in signs and messages. This is one that lives with us every day.

The Saturday Picture Show, August 1, 2026

 

It turns out that some of the funniest writers in the world work in the field of clothes labels.

Squirrel with catsup looking for another with fries. Object: matrimony.

The US Department of State put out this chart showing aid expenditures in Africa. Big surprise: every nation on the chart was incorrectly identified. Bigger surprise: they used AI. I think AI is as useful as a sundial in a blizzard.

Nice idea, Tom! I like this! I also like using cash register receipts, the checkout receipt from the library or bookstore where the book came from, any of the 51 playing cards left in the pack since you lost the Ace of Spades, or one of the billions of bookmarks the library hands out so we won't dogear a page. That's a criminal offense, you ask me.

Live coverage on ESPN with your hosts Tony Romo and Cris Collinsworth, Sunday at 8!

If this is the Colton High School in Riverside, CA, be aware that they are ranked the 975th best high school in the state! 

We loved The Beatles in A Hard Day's Night, and crusty old Wilfrid Brambell played Paul's grandfather ("He's very clean.") Crusty, he was. Old, he wasn't! He was 52 when they made this movie. 

"This is Friday. I already heard."

Don't do drugs! Stay in school! But for the love of Pete, get a better pencil!

I think it's a cat thing, liking the sunbath in the middle of the day. Enjoy yourself, Tabby!

Neither A Borrower...

This is not really a "guy thing," more a "woman thing," but here we are.

Oprah Winfrey was on the Keke Palmer podcast (available wherever you find your podcasts under "Baby, This Is Keke Palmer") the other day and she astonished millions by saying she and herbestfriendGayle (it's all one word) do not share clothes.

Oprah and Gayle have been hanging together since the days they worked together here at Baltimore's WJZ-TV.  They vacation together, they shop together, they dine together, but they don't have a common wardrobe area.

In fact, Oprah says, “I don’t share things. Once you take something of mine, keep it.”

To be honest, my list of eccentricities is so extensive as to disallow buying or wearing used clothes. I mean, if I were over at your house and somehow wound up with a gallon of marinara sauce down my shirt and pants and socks (you would be amazed at how often this happens!) and you offered me an old sweatsuit so I could go home with at most an eighth of my dignity intact, I would probably go with it (probably) but I'm not going to ask to wear your sweater because it would look perfect with my new shirt.

A, I have a sweater, and 2, I haven't had a new shirt since little Bush was president.

On the other hand, if there is some particular item in my closet that you find enchanting, you can have it, and you can keep it, except for my orangish red sweater that I wore in 1988 when we went to see "The Phantom Of The Opera" on Broadway.

I love that sweater. It reminds me of one of the best afternoon naps I've ever had, and I've had many.  I was sawing a log, dozing away when some stupid chandelier came crashing down out of the ceiling. 

Oh hear my tale of woe

 Say, how would you like to be famous? I mean, not just known in the neighborhood for handing out dog treats to every passing hound, but really show-biz famous like this Robert Pattinson, an actor in no movie I ever saw.

But lots of people took my place and saw him in most of his dozens of movies. I know he played an ashy-faced guy in the Twilight movies, and I know he must be English because he has two middle names. They must have a lot of time over there to paste monikers like Robert Douglas Thomas Pattinson on a baby.

I would like to think that, given an extra ten minutes to fill out my birth certificate, my parents would have given me an extra name like "Tito" or "Leon," but they ran out of time.

Anyway, Pattinson is a big star in the world and people in his shoes get lots of email and mail mail and messages from their fans. I imagine it can be a hassle, having fans chase after you with offers of undying love as they tear your clothes off. But he seems to be a practical man, because - in his words:

You see what he did there? He pulled back the velvet rope that some of us have to separate us from the rich and famous, and let the fan see that it's not all that great to walk around all pasty-faced and handsome all the time.

I would love to see his list of kvetches (a term for a constant flow of gripes, from the Yiddish word kvetshn, meaning "to squeeze or press") but I would imagine it's  basically similar to everyone's list, just that the cold coffee that bothers him, or the car that broke down, are a lot more expensive than yours or mine.

I Yam what I Yam

People my age are often told to make serious plans for their final arrangements, which is the kind way of saying, "Figure out what kind of box you want us to shovel you into, old man." 

I will leave that to future generations. I plan to live to be a ripe old age, so I'm only 3/4 of the way through.

What I plan to so is settle just how I'll shuffle off to Buffalo, and that is going to be a long, slow shuffle. I used to tell our doctor, while he was listening to my staccato heartbeat or probing you-know-where, that I thought it would be fun to die of rickets, or scurvy, if I couldn't find somewhere to catch a case of rickets. He told me to cut down on limes.

Tell you one thing for sure - I won't go the way that American frontiersman Daniel Boone  <<<  is supposed to have gone. One legend (thoroughly disputed) says that ole Dan'l died from eating too many sweet potatoes in 1820. That will not be my undoing. I can't stand sweet potatoes, so they won't get me unless someone throws a bag of them right at my head.

Again, though, I have a long way to go before I settle my bills. I always like to leave people with a smile on their face, so let me think about it. 

Buy him some peanuts and Cracker Jack!

Watching the Orioles in Detroit last night also offered a little nature study along with the old ballgame.

In the middle innings, a black squirrel appeared on the field, offering to be a pinch runner or whatever. 

Later in the game, fearing an attack on a player resulting in rabies or whatever, home plate umpire Bill Miller got the grounds crew and several of the Orioles outfielders to do a big roundup and chase the varmint back to the bullpen area where he lives. If you sent out to a Hollywood casting director and asked for a typical baseball umpire type, what you would get would look exactly like Bill Miller: benignly gray, barrel-chested, and loud of voice, which is what he used to address the crowd and ask them to give a hand for the crew that sent Squirrely Joe off to his domicile. Nice touch!

The black squirrels are outnumbered by the common gray, or fox, squirrels by about 10,000 to one. And they are not a separate species or anything, not at all. They are just regular old squirrels born with a genetic trait known as melanism, which gives their fur more dark pigmentation.

They do appear frequently in cold northern area such as Ontario and Michigan, where that dark fur absorbs and retains heat in the winter.  And you have never seen a black squirrel wearing a down vest, so there you go.

I've never seen one in my part of the world here in Baltimore County, but we were up at Mariner Point Park in Joppatowne, Harford County, and we saw a slew of them running around. 

I hope this little guy comes back out for the next two games up in MoTown. The Orioles won because a squirrel put the hex on the Tigers!

Up In My Memories

 This one is just for fans of really old movies, or The Andy Griffith Show, or really sweet secrets.

I think that covers most of us.

Let's work backwards. Episode 9 of season 4 of the Andy Griffith Show aired on December 2, 1963 -  some 10 days after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It was entitled "Up In Barney's Room," and was the episode where we got to see Deputy Barney Fife's living arrangements with Mrs Mendelbright, who rented him a room in her boarding house. The plot goes that Mrs Mendelbright kicked Barney out of the house for cooking chili in his room, but the real reason was that she had fallen under the spell of the old charmer J. Pat O'Malley, who was only trying to rip her off. She wanted Barney gone so she could move Oscar Fields (O'Malley) in. Big surprise: everything worked out in the end.

Bigger surprise: Enid Markey, who played Mrs M, was one of the original stars of silent movies, having played Jane in the first two Tarzan movies fifty years earlier. She also performed in vaudeville and in stage productions, and after being injured making a movie, she decided she really wanted to learn to act by appearing on Broadway shows. She was to do 29 shows on the Great White Way all together, beginning in 1919 with a play called...."Up In Mabel's Room."

The writers of that Griffith episode, James Fritzell and Everett Greenbaum, wanted to salute one of the grand ladies of American theatre, so they swapped in Barney's name and wrote a nice tribute that way.

Life is full of little treats like this!

Here's Enid Markey as Mrs Mendelbright and Don Knotts as Barney Fife, as the landlady catches the deputy using a 75-watt bulb, against her rule requiring bulbs no brighter than 40 watts. She also accused him of being afraid of the dark.