He gave us "Werewolves Of London"

I'm going to share three words of advice I just read, advice from the marvelously witty songwriter and performer Warren Zevon. Warren died in 2003, leaving behind a colorful life full of ups and downs, periods of success in performing and writing, and periods marked by drug and alcohol abuse. He was only 56 when he died.

It's noteworthy that he was famous for recording other peoples' songs, and having other record his. See him here on the Letterman show singing Prince's "Raspberry Beret"...and Linda Ronstadt had the hit version of his song "Poor Poor Pitiful Me."

But 56 years on earth is plenty of time to reflect and share what one has learned. Once he learned that his death from mesothelioma was inevitable, he let his mordant, thanatotic side out to play...recording a final album called "My Ride's Here," in which he posed for the album cover looking out the passenger window of a funeral limousine.

The reason I bring all this up is to share his thought that he passed along to David Letterman. Those two really appreciated each other. And in his final months, he appeared on the Late Show and gave this advice to one and all:

Enjoy every sandwich.

When I saw that written somewhere last night, I wondered about how foolish we are to race through life without stopping to think about the farmers who grew the wheat and threshed it for us for someone to make bread...the arborist who raised raspberries for use in making jelly...and the farmer down in Georgia whose peanut crop turned into a jar of Skippy.

Don't get me wrong! I'm not writing because I got some bad news. I didn't! Why, just last week my personal physician assured me there is no reason I won't live to be a hundred and some. (I've got great insurance!) That's a lot of years left, and believe me, I am going to feel and express appreciation for the people, places, emotions, and sandwiches that come my way. 

Some gotta win, some gotta pout

 Something really distressing is going on with young male athletes, and of course it comes right back to their raising.

We're talking about competitors refusing to shake hands. You see it in high school and college football games, where the captains meet at midfield for the coin flip before the game. One team's leaders will reach out their hands for a shake with their opposite numbers, and the other guys just lock their elbows, maybe shake their heads.

It's a trend...

See the guy in the Iowa wrestling uniform? That's Mikey Caliendo, up until now the pride of Geneva, Illinois. In the past weekend's NCAA wrestling tournament, Mikey lost again to Penn State wrestler Mitchell Mesenbrink. Mesenbrink's record against Caliendo now stands at 9-0. But the really bad thing is that instead of congratulating Mesenbrink on earning his second individual national title on Saturday, callow Caliendo spurned the handshake he was offered by the winner, keeping his paws in his pockets and not even acknowledging Mesenbrink.  

If I could talk to young Caliendo, and right now I don't think I'd care to, I would tell him to pull himself up to his full 5'8" height and act like somebody. It might take decades, but the chances are he will grow up one day and look back with regret on the day he had the chance to be a man and instead acted like a petulant boy. Right now, he has the irritating countenance of a spoiled brat who has always been told he's the best and demands a recount if he loses, "because it was rigged." 

If I could talk to his coach, I would tell him that "Mikey" needs additional training in areas far off the mat. 

"It's a new armoire!"

 I've heard the good advice "Never meet your heroes," and I have to throw an asterisk * in there, because if you were ever fortunate enough to meet Brooks Robinson, you felt like you were in the presence of a true nobleman.

However, after seeing the Dirty Rotten Scoundrels episodes on E! television concerning the way Bob Barker treated people during his time atop the game show world at "The Price Is Right," I am taking another big old head off my personal imaginary Mt Rushmore. The show says that after Bob's wife died, he made a beeline for the boudoir (or dressing room) of Dian Parkinson, where he urged her to Come On Down. She grew tired of playing Plinko and was pushed out of the show.

Bob then turned to picking on Holly Hallstrom, my favorite of all the models. He picked on her weight, as if she had any extra to worry about. This all started when she refused to back him up in court over the lawsuits filed by Parkinson. That did it, and she found her stuff packed up and herself shoved out the door with it.

Holly and Bob in happier days

The show said Bob demanded 100% loyalty, and was sexist and racist as well. And that he kept in place a producer who grabbed other people where they sit down, and ruthlessly bawled employees out over the smallest things. OH! and that CBS instituted a "ten-second rule," meaning that male employees were only allowed to ogle females on the staff for ten seconds, after which, presumably, their eyeballs were supposed to retract into their sockets.

Parkinson eventually withdrew her suit, saying that the pressure of all that was too much for her, but Holly Hallstrom filed suit also, and she did not back down, although it went on for years and years, and although she had to sell her house and car and couch-surf with friends, her courage paid off in a nice settlement, which did not compensate her for the misery she went through, but still.

As someone who told his fourth-grade teacher that "being a game-show host is the highest calling known to mankind" (and meant every word of it), I tended to agree with Bob, whose dressing room door was labeled "WGMC" for "World's Greatest Master of Ceremonies," but, sadly, it's possible to be that and simultaneously be a filthy dirtbag. 

So, let's see, I still have Brooks, and the Obamas, and Ernest Tubb. Do not tell me anything bad about them, or my Mt Rushmore will have to rush more new ones up there. Think about that for ten seconds!

Sunday Rerun: The brain that wouldn't be right

 I don't know much about artificial intelligence. I don't even know much about real intelligence, and then along comes AI and it looks like it's saying "Al" as in Al Bundy and I'm so confused, it's not fair.

But now even the Googlers are admitting that it's more like artificial unintelligence at times. For one thing, being soulless like some people, AI can't tell a joke from a fact.  And that is dumb. 

Someone recently asked Google AI how to keep cheese from sliding off a homemade pizza.  AI said to mix some glue - I'm guessing Elmer's - into the cheese to hold that mozzarella right in place.

And years ago, I got picked on for suggesting we drop some Visine into chili so my eyes wouldn't water when I hit a really hot pepper in the mix.

Google (they have taken this one down, but still...) advised us to drink a lot of urine to help pass a kidney stone.

Asked when John F.  Kennedy was graduated from college, AI said the most Harvard-y man ever was a U of Wisconsin grad, and specified six different years, including 1993, the thirtieth anniversary of his death.

Asked for an African country that started with a K, AI said there were none, which must have really hurt the feelings of millions of people in Kenya. 

Now, to be sure, some people with nothing better to do on a lovely day like today try to trick Google AI into giving wrong answers. Later, for even more fun, they go to hospitals and loosen the bolts on the wheelchairs.

However, one palm up! We are being told that with Google's generative AI, OpenAI’s, ChatGPT,  and Microsoft’s Copilot, you should just count on them being wrong until you see proof that they're right.

Get this explanation, which is similar to a lot of people explaining what that bag o' of stolen bank money is doing in their pants pocket:  

“The vast majority of AI Overviews provide high quality information, with links to dig deeper on the web, ” Google says. And they add that they are using these and other mistakes to “develop broader improvements to our systems, some of which have already started to roll out.”

Oh, so they KNOW it was wrong and they are now out to prove it. Sorry for any student who did a term paper on JFK Sr, though.

The Saturday Picture Show, March 21, 2026

It's really quite simple. Put an eyedrop in your mouth and then, without swallowing it, get it into your eye. 3x/day for 7 days, and I'll bet by the 21st time you'll be really good at it!
 

I follow some pizza sites because why not? And I'm seeing more and more people cutting them this way, instead of the traditional 6 or 8 pie-shaped slices. Go ahead, but not me.

Just waiting. For what, I can't tell you.

Now, there's what I call a well-stocked pantry! Everything from sauce to syrup.

I guess you've heard, Punch the Abandoned Monkey has found himself a girl. This is for all the lonely people....

Bakersfield College is a community college in California. Just recently, they noticed that the name of that august institution of higher learning has been misspelled on diplomas since 2024. And no one noticed until now.

It looks like some town had a broken-down bus and needed a shelter for a bus stop. It's the perfect marriage of need and availability!

Leonard can be excused because of his lactose intolerance, but have you ever seen anyone else on the Big Bang Theory order cheesecake at the Cheesecake Factory?

Good morning, sunrise, from Baltimore's beautiful Washington Monument!

Someone spotted this picture taken at the Titanic wreckage. Do you think those are personal pan-sized pepperoni pizzas? It couldn't be, could it???

Bell-ringers

I think it's really good that high school students have to complete a certain amount of service time during their school years in order to graduate. It helps them learn that the world does not just revolve around them, for one thing, and for another, it accomplishes good things for the community.

It wouldn't have been a problem for me if that requirement had been in force during my school days, also referred to as the Paleozoic Era. I was proud to be a volunteer firefighter. It taught me a sense of duty and responsibility, gave me a feeling of comradery, and also imparted valuable tips that make me hard to beat in the card game called Crazy 8s even to this day.

I'm second from left here, 1971.

My former company, Providence Volunteers, has a deal that offers free room and board at the station for volunteers who are college students. And tonight, I see that there is a similar program outside Philadelphia, where some Villanova University students are attending classes and serving as volunteer firefighters.

Colton Musselman, Anne Earp, John Burns, and Dominic Cipriani are engineering majors and volunteers. Musselman is studies mechanical engineering, and the others are majoring in civil engineering.

Also, Kylee Hall, a Villanova graduate from 2024, still serves, and she made history  as the first female line officer in the Bryn Mawr Fire Company.

Interesting that they're up in Philadelphia, where the purely American concept of volunteer fire companies was launched by Ben Franklin, who formed the Union Fire Company on December 7, 1736. Yes, Ben Franklin was a volunteer firefighter, among his other valiant pursuits.

I'll bet he was great at Crazy 8s.

 

LED Zeppelin

The guy who did the electrical design on our house was not the best at thinking. I don't think he was thinking when he put a light above the outside basement door that could only be controlled by a switch down in my workshop area.  As if I were going to scoot down there every night to turn it on, and scoot back in the morning to turn it off. 

So I changed it to a light fixture that turned on when it got dark and off when the sun came up, and that lasted for a few years until it got tired of waiting for the sun, and would not come on for any reason. Then ten years or so ago, I got the idea to get one of those new-fangled LED bulbs >>> for the new fixture and just leave it shining 24-7. 

Which I did, and I hope I'm not jinxing anything, but through dead of winter with temperatures far below freezing, and summer sun and heat up to almost 100°, it burns on like Edison intended, even though he was incandescent about it. I'm saying, that bulb down by the cellar door has had a longer life than several Galapagos tortoises.

So who wants to tell me why the LED bulb I installed over my shower lasted two weeks? Every time I turn around, I'm clambering up in the ceiling with a new bulb in my mouth, making the switch. 

I'm counting on the LED empire to make this right.