"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 friend, 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.

Nighty-night!

The Washington POST reports on a man who once had trouble getting to sleep, so he stayed up all night figuring out how to beat the problem.

The man's name is Luc Beaudoin, and his field is cognitive science and psychology, so he used his own mind to try some experiments, and the result was a system that does consciously what the brain is doing when we start sawing logs.

“If you wake people up as they’re falling asleep, they often report that they’re having these little micro-dreams,” he says, adding that you can treat yourself to your own mini-dreams, and wouldn't you love to?

Beaudoin's manner of thinking puts him in a dreamlike state, and that tricks the brain into thinking it's asleep, so let's fall asleep for real!

This is what he calls a "serial diverse imagining task," or cognitive shuffling, because you take your random thoughts and shuffle them like you were going to play Crazy 8s.

So, next time you find yourself staring at a clock that says 0341, shuffle the deck! Here's how to do the cognitive shuffle:

Take a word, any word, nothing weird, just neutral. Let's say you choose "phone."

Now, think of as many words as you can that start with "p": penny, philosopher, pen, prattle, and so forth.

As you come up with each word, come up with a scenario involving that word as you picture the word for 5 to 15 seconds.

...you found a penny and you remember the things you used to be able to buy with a cent...

...you picture Kant or Hegel or one of the philosophers of the modern era, such as Snoopy. You remember the fun you always had watching Snoopy win the tree decorating contest...

...you marvel at how many types of pens there are, and how you have come to prefer the ones with gel ink and how many colors of them there are...

...you conjure an image of a politician prattling on and on while everyone in the crowd is excited to get to the pie-eating contest. 

Beaudoin says, don't try to find a connection among the words. Just let your mind be awash in images, and that should be enough to put the old noodle to rest.

The trick is, this sort of thinking requires a certain bit of brain power, and that stops the brain from worrying about that noise you heard in the car, or figuring how you're going to pay for your vacation to Packwood, Idaho.

I might add, as a last resort, you could always picture yourself at work. That puts a lot of people into the arms of Morpheus for good every night.

Weathering the times

You can't win. And when I say "you," I mean anyone who is affected by not only the weather, but also the weather forecasts.

Case in point: starting late Saturday, the weather people were saying that yesterday (Monday) was going to be a dicey day, with chances for heavy rain and wind, even possible tornadic activity (formerly known as "tornadoes").

The school systems reacted by planning to close early yesterday, two hours, sometimes three hours. The rationale is that if the storms hit in mid-afternoon, just as the kids are being dismissed, you'd have chaos on the parking lots and roads. Better to let them out early, right?

Well, the late afternoon news was full of parents who had a LOT to say about this.

 "The kids need to be in school all day! It's safer there, and I have work to do, and I can't interrupt my day to get the kids!"

 "They should have closed the schools! How did they know when the storm would come?"

 "It was right to close early, but they closed too early!"

And then, there was this: as of late evening, the only area that really seemed to get hit hard was out in Carroll County, toward Westminster. Farmers there had wind damage to outbuildings, and one guy had his small herd of Texas longhorns running around free after the fence blew down. So naturally, people drop their worrying and pick up their keyboard and start knocking the meteorologists.

 "They don't know nothing! They just guess!"

 "They make a couple hundred thousand dollars to get people all worked up for no reason!"

  And my perennial favorite: "I could do their job and do it a whole lot better than them!"

There was a time when there was absolutely no scientific weather forecasting, unless you counted Uncle Amos's rheumatism acting up when it was "fixin' to rain." Today we have people doing their best to warn us and help prepare for the worst, while we hope for the best. 

There's no way to foretell the weather with 100% accuracy. Even Uncle Amos got it wrong sometimes. 

Just be glad you're not chasing longhorn cattle all over Carroll County, and take it easy!