The Saturday Picture Show, April 11, 2026

 

Artemis II sent back this amazing picture from the other side of the moon. Taco about an amazing view! This will wrap up our space coverage for today.

What is the square root of an oak tree?

This will make a nice wallpaper for you, if you wish...it's the most-recognized symbol of Baltimore's Harbor: the Domino Sugar sign!

Here's why you might be out-foxed if you spend the money on the name brand crocs.

OK - you followed instructions very well. Just not sure you understood the plan!

The guy driving the street-striper truck isn't so good at thinking outside the box, either.

The great thing about boiling up herbed potatoes for dinner is, if you have leftovers, you slice 'em up and fry 'em up for breakfast!

We see a sunrise every morning, but you have to be really out of sight to see an earthrise! (and I said no more space coverage! oooops!)

The fire department wherever this is spotted it and went to ask the homeowner what's the deal. He told them the hydrant is on his property and he has the right to fence it in. It's such a shame that people are allowed to be so foolish. Try and stop them!

Read and heed!

Where'd he come from?

If you believe in teleportation (being moved from place to place by means of magic or something like it), then you might have seen the story about Gregg Phillips, who is some sort of senior official with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and said, during a podcast whose audience is likely in the single digits that he "was involved in multiple incidents of teleportation, including once where (my)car was flown through the air to a church and once where (I) ended up at a Waffle House, like 50 miles away from where I was.” 

Gregg, my man, many of us have had episodes where we find ourselves with syrup all over us after a night out. I don't know about cars sprouting wings and coming to a landing at First Baptist, but I'm sure it could happen. 

Phillips claims the Waffle House in question is in Rome, Ga. The New York Times went down to Rome, ordered a #2 platter with eggs over easy, and grilled the staff about any recent teleportations. No one saw anything of the sort, although they did agree that a pickup truck loaded with U of Georgia football fans drove into the lot, tried to stop, but couldn't, due to failing brake pads. Seems accurate.

In Times-ese: "None of the interviewees said they were aware of anyone traveling to the 24-hour restaurants by paranormal means.”

"I’ve seen it all,” (and don't you know THAT'S true!) longtime Waffle House server Shastoni Burge told the paper. “But I’ve never seen that.”

But Phillips, the man who said it happened to him, came back with a tweeter: “God will not be mocked. People can debate me. Question me. Even ridicule what they don’t understand. I know what I’ve experienced. I know Who (sic) I serve.”

No one here is mocking God. We respect God. Guess whom I don't.

On the radio

Assuming that you are not really interested in the difference between a low-power local FM radio station and a real full power station, I'll just get to the story here by telling you that some smaller communities have licenses for low-power stations that are simply designed to serve the needs of a small town or part of a county.  The low power means that not many radios can receive the station's signal, except for those living close by. LP stations tend to feature the sort of programming that not a lot of people want to hear. And they are non-profit enterprises, so there's not a lot of loot involved.

Now then. There is currently a station known as WKRP-LP serving a section of Raleigh, North Carolina since 2015. The call refers back to a popular 1978 - 1982 sitcom called "WKRP in Cincinnati," about the wacky doin's of the people at a fictional radio station.  The people at the LP station say their format is "what radio used to be 35 years ago in small-town America...Greats of the ‘80s, Sounds of the ’70s, ‘90s Rewind,” as well as local news and “specialty programming.”

The original situation comedy cast. I promise you, no one who ever worked at a real radio station looked like these people.

And they have a weekly two-hour show “Weird Al and Friends,” all about the musical prankery of Weird Al Yankovic.

Well then. The people who run the station are getting older and are losing interest in their radio hobby (after hearing "Beat It" so many times, can you blame them?). But they are going out with a bang: they have auction off the call letters to a group from Cincinnati who wants to put them on a real station, so get ready, Reds and Bengals fans and all else who call the Queen City home: soon you will be able to hear the modern equivalent of Dr. Johnny Fever and Les Nessman, and have a Herb Tarlek kind of guy try to sell you advertising time.

And as they always say on sitcoms, "That's crazy! But it just might be crazy enough to work!"

  

For Earth Below

I don't know how many people there are in the world at this precise moment, but I do know that however high that figure might be, there are still not enough worthwhile things to keep all of us busy doing something worthy of our time.

For instance: Raspberry Circle, a tech company from Britain, decided that it has been long enough that we have all waited to see what the world record is for dropping stuffed animals out of the sky.  So they dropped a plushie named Emy (nine ounces, fluffy, yellow and green) out of a high-altitude balloon 116,419 feet over Kingston, NY and let it plummet earthward.

The Emy plushie landed uninjured in a tree in Windsor, Connecticut, according to the CEO of Raspberry Circle, one Sachin Raoul. 

If I wouldn't miss Peggy and Eddie so much, I mean I would get in my car today and drive to where the next drop is supposed to take place, in hopes of getting Eddie a new toy for free. Mr Raoul says he is doing this to get kids to go outside more often - even at the risk of getting plunked on the bean by a stuffed toy. 

If I do go out, I'm wearing a helmet.

 

The sweet side of the moon

Way up in space, they are doing us proud back home.

The four astronauts on the NASA  Artemis II mission have named two lunar craters for significant reasons. Astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Hammock Koch and Jeremy Hansen are almost through orbiting the moon on  their 10-day trip on the Orion capsule Integrity.

Floating around in the spacecraft yesterday, the four explained that they found “relatively fresh craters on the moon.” They came up with two ideas:

One is to name a crater "Integrity," in honor of their ride to and from lunar orbit.

And the other is in a spot visible from Earth at certain times... “The second one, and especially meaningful for this crew, is a number of years ago, we started this journey and our close-knit astronaut family and we lost a loved one."

“We lost a loved one, her name was Carroll, the spouse of Reid, the mother of Katey and Ellie... (The crater is) a bright spot on the moon and we would like to call it Carroll,” said Hansen.

 Reid Wiseman’s late wife “dedicated her life to helping others as a newborn intensive care unit Registered Nurse,” according to his biography on the NASA website. Timonium native Wiseman is raising their two children, Katey and Ellie.

The biography goes on to say that Wiseman “considers his time as an only parent as his greatest challenge and the most rewarding phase of his life," and that's a lot, for a guy who's been to the moon.

Touching tribute from far away. I can see lots of people around here breaking out the telescopes now. 

Monday Rerun: Pedro wanted a hippopotamus for Christmas, only a hippopotamus would do

 I know the name "Pablo Escobar" sounds like something from a "Miami Vice" rerun, but Pablo was the prototypical South American drug kingpin in his day, which ended in 1993 when he was killed by the Colombian National Police. Before that, he amassed a fortune estimated at around $70 Billion with a B, and so naturally, he had enough loose change from the sale of drugs to entertain himself with a private menagerie of hippopotami.

The current head count is 70 hippos needing to be moved out, because who is about to stop the herd from procreating? Actually, they tried to stop them from reproducing. Methods employed included castrations, shooting them with contraceptive darts, and forcing them to watch Julia Roberts movies. 

It's going to cost approximately $3.5 million to farm them out to other sanctuaries, with 10 of them destined for the Ostok Sanctuary in Mexico; the other 60 will find a home in India. There's no way to take them to Africa, where the herd originated; that would upset the local ecosystem. 

 

 

Escobar originally imported one male and three females, and now look. They are spreading all over Colombia from their original home at Escobar’s former ranch of Hacienda Napoles, which is now some sort of theme park in the country where he is still regarded as sort of a Robin Hood for his habit of providing basic needs to the poor with a fortune derived from selling enough cocaine around the world to alter and/or end millions of lives.

Not to get all gross, but the Colombians need these beasts removed because, with no natural predators, they are running rampant on the countryside, and their waste is having deleterious effects on oxygen levels in the waters, reducing water quality and killing many fish in the Magdalena River basin.

Say it with me now: ewwwwwwwwww. 

 Easter 2026:  We wish you all a Happy Easter!