Never the Twain

People have been quoting Mark Twain saying, "Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it" for 129 years now. Just let it rain for two days in a row, or let the scorching heat turn your front yard into one of those cocoa doormats, or let a blizzard maroon the kids at home for four days and someone will pull that one out of an old quote bag, and someone will say, "Yes, Mark Twain...very wise fellow."

Twain

And there is a case to be made for Twain's wisdom, but according to The Weather Channel, don't try to make it on the back of this quote, because he did everything but say it.

As the WC says, in in the late 1800s, Mark Twain was the top gun in American wit...sort of the Jimmy Kimmel of his time. And remember, there was no radio or TV or internet back then. The only way jokes got spread around was by newspaper, or maybe some cowboy taking them to Wichita with him on a cattle drive.

We know the "nobody does anything about it" quote came out this day in 1897 in the Hartford Courant, but it was printed in an unsigned editorial most probably written by Charles Dudley Warner, who was the editor of the Courant, and well-known in his own right for brilliant, incisive essays.

Warner

AND he lived next door to Samuel "Mark Twain" Clemens, so maybe, when the paper landed on Twain's front lawn the next day, he enjoyed it so much that he said to Warner, "What a great line! I wish I had said it!"

And then Warner could have said, with some justification, "Don't worry. You will!"

With the luxury of history, I can tell both of these gentlemen that we can do a lot more about the weather than people could do in 1897. We're at a point that we know it's going to rain, with thunder and lightning. We know about when it will start and end, and how much precipitation to expect.

We just don't know how to make it start raining, which would be helpful in areas stricken by wildfire or drought, or how to make it stop, for the flood-ravaged parts of the country.

I'm sure Apple is hard at work on their new apps, iWishItWouldRain  and iWishItWouldStop.

 

 

Take tea and see

People who say they don't like tea are not really my cup of...well, you know...

Water is the #1 beverage worldwide, but I hate to tell you residents of Coffeeville, tea is second. Nearly two thirds of people around the world sip tea. 

I have three or four cups of tea daily in my Yeti mug, and lots of iced tea for dinner and after. Because of this, my health is something that people sometimes form a small mob to marvel at.

Here's why: Research is showing us that tea can protect your blood vessels, lower inflammation, aid relaxation and potentially boost your gut microbiome. There's a magazine called Life Sciences (been meaning to subscribe) in which scientists say tea is “Nature’s gift for promoting human health.”

Of course, we all know this is because tea contains many antioxidants, polyphenols and other beneficial plant compounds, according to Jenifer Bowman, a cardiac dietitian at UCHealth in Fort Collins, Colorado.

Of course, not everyone knows this, but no matter what kind of tea is in your mug - green, black, white and oolong - they all come from the same plant: Camellia Sinensis. 

It's been far too oolong since I've seen old Camellia.

And I want you to know that it's a consistent scientific finding that tea drinkers tend to live a little longer than those who don't drink tea.  This is because we tea drinkers do not engage in the kind of behaviors that shorten the lives of others: driving while impaired by alcohol or drugs, taking risks such as doing calisthenics on the roofs of buildings, and forgetting to put money in the kitty by the coffee machine at work.

And research shows that drinking tea promotes relaxation. Scientists did a study that says tea reduces anxiety and helps your memory, but only for things that you want to remember. Forgetting a lot of things is marvelous for those who want to relax.

Now what was I saying?

Mr "No" It All

 There have been way too many arguments online lately - since the return of measles to the list of diseases we once had eradicated, but have come back in full force - about how, instead of listening to doctors and others who have devoted their lives to science, it would be wiser to take advice concerning vaccinations from Hollywood actors and former heroin addicts.

Balderdash!

And then the other night, a local meteorologist here in Baltimore said he was driving past a high school in the late afternoon and football practice was going on despite the fact that a thunder and lightning storm was just beginning.

Here is his post; I deleted his name because I have no right to repost his words.

And from out of the woodwork came the legion of non-meteorologists! To quote from one,

"They have lightening (sic) sirens at schools. They generally go by that. To be paranoid when it rains is not an ideal message in my opinion. That's a bit extreme. Sorry Mr _____ that I disagree."

Oddly enough, a cursory glance at this man's page revealed no degrees or experience in Meteorology or Psychology, so I'm not sure why he pretends to know more than an experienced scientist about the weather or whether being safe with teenaged athletes in a thunderstorm constitutes paranoia. 

Ever since Ozz E. Osbourne bellowed that "Paranoid" song, people are so quick to throw that word around. 

But hear me on this: it is not safe to be outside during a lightning (correct spelling) event. And you can bet your boots that if, heaven forfend, a child had been struck by lightning out on that football field. the hue and cry from the public would have been long and loud.

There's a phrase that is good advice for both driving a car and driving home a point you think you know about, and that is "stay in your lane." When an educated person says something, it tends to be right, hence the adjective.

I'm planning to hear from a cadre of "But I've done my research" folks. Please show your advanced degrees as you file in.

Sunday rerun: The spy who did not seem to like me very much

 A guy I knew (briefly, mercifully) had been in the Air Force, assigned to guard an important missile site in one of the Dakotas: North, or South, or Fanning. I can't remember much about him, except that he was a real Barney Fife kind of guy, loved uniforms and rules and marching around.

He told me one time that while making his rounds about the base, he saw a dog that had somehow "penetrated perimeter security" (service talk for "jumped the fence") but when this guy corralled the pooch and interrogated him (I swear that's how he put it) the dog clammed up and would not bark, and a search of his collar yielded nothing, so he was "taken into custody" for "disposition to be determined at a future date," which I hoped was service talk for "someone with a little sense will take Poochie to the fence and send him home," for crying out loud.

Meanwhile, back in this year, police in India were holding a "suspected Chinese spy pigeon" for eight months, only to find out that the bird was an open-water racing bird from Taiwan. It had escaped Taiwan and gotten to India by air (hitchhiking is forbidden there) and was captured near a port in Mumbai (so maybe it chartered a boat?) When apprehended, the bird had two rings tied to its legs, so police naturally suspected espionage and sent the pigeon to Bai Sakarbai Dinshaw Petit Hospital for Animals. 

There is a precedent here from 2016, when another pigeon (let's assume it wasn't the same one!) was arrested after being found with a note that threatened Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

But upon asking the bird to write his side of the story, police saw that he, indeed, could not write, which was a strong piece of evidence in the defense claim that he could not have written the note.

 

The Saturday Picture Show, August 22, 2026

 

   Someday, your grandchildren will be in a college classroom hearing a professor talk about the rise and fall of the American mall. He or she will say there was a food court, three or four large department stores, record stores (and the students will want to know what they sold!), at least three shoe stores, and four or five stores whose names ended in "and things": Candles and Things, Cards and Things, Potpourri and Things, Muffins and Things, and of course Things and Things.

Just as it takes a heap of cookies to make a house a home (per Edgar A. Guest), it took a heap of musicians to make Steely Dan records over the years. But if this is what it took to make their great records, thank them for it!

If you ever want to see a X-Ray tech blush, ask them if during slack times, anyone gets on the rack to pose for a gag photo. I love it when they tell you things; you can see right through them.

My third-grade classmates will remember singing "Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree, merry merry king of the bush is he." This blue-winged Kooka is too cool!

Sign from Sammy Davis, Jr's home in Beverly Hills. And I mean that, man.

You know that old bumpersticker "If this van's a-rockin', don't be knockin'"? I want a sign for my front door saying, "If you're hearing me snore, don't be knockin' on my door!"

I would rather be in the one-horsepower carriage, please.

The geographic center of the United States is a point approximately 20 miles (32 km) north of Belle Fourche, South Dakota. If you're only looking at the true center of the 48 lower states, you want to head to Lebanon, Kansas, but since Alaska and Hawaii joined up, people with protractors and compasses figured it out, and you need to go to SD to see the GC of the USA!

There is a yard near us where people live who figure their dog, restrained by three fenced boundaries, will not test that one unbounded line. They are wrong.

Welcome to the Vaalserberg Hill near Aachen, where Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium meet. There is this stone marker, and a maze and observation towers.

It's not real!

The list of things about which I know nothing at all begins with any movie or show that has the word "Star" in it, and then goes right through all 187 Harry Potter books, movies and I don't know what-all else Harry had. I just avoid the whole thing like iceberg lettuce.

But I read the other day 5 words that showed me how happy I was not to get embroiled in the Potter tales. These words were "Dobby, a freed house elf." I mean really. But I guess the rest of you know that old Dobby dies in Harry's hairy arms in “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1.”

And after Dobby hobbles off to wherever elves die (hint: it's not on a shelf!) Harry says, “I want to bury him. Properly. Without magic.”

Well, friends, they filmed that scene where they pretend to bury an elf on the  Freshwater West beach in Pembrokeshire, Wales.  And then fans somehow found the time to take from reading the next installment of the Harry Chronicles to put up a sign saying “Here lies Dobby, a free elf” atop a pile of stones.

And don't you know, people flocked to see this pile of stones!

But evil forces were afoot, and people who didn't believe in flying elves but DID believe in supplying electricity to homes, businesses, and elf habitats needed to run a jumbo electrical cable under the beach. It was needed, in 2019, to carry electricity between Ireland and Britain.

Mr Simon Ludlam, the project manager for the electric cable project called  Greenlink, appeared on BBC Wales to explain the whole thing. He stood on the beach where "Dobby" was "buried."

Remember now! This is all fiction! In the book "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," Dobby dies in Cornwall, not Wales. 

And Elves are not real. Elvis was real.

But Harry fans got all worked up.

                                         The Sun on the Beach

 

Mr Ludlam  said, “After it aired, we began to get calls. Many, many, many calls.”  And after that barrage of phone messages, Mr Ludlam figured out that the concern over all this fiction was real...

He found out that people were leaving messages to Dobby on this pile of beach rocks, and that the crush of tourism was having a negative environmental impact on the beach. People cooled that after a time, but the Welsh officials asked people to stop leaving socks, which were a symbol of Doby's friendship with Harry.

I repeat: Welsh officials asked people to stop leaving socks, which were a symbol of Doby's friendship with Harry.

In the end, Ludlam and Co. arranged to reroute the electrical line so as to avoid the fake grave of an elf who never lived so that people in England and Ireland could have electricity so that people wouldn't have to read these novels by candlelight.

Now where did Dobby leave my socks?

 

Blooper time!

Over in Jollie Olde Englande last May, a volunteer at a radio made a big mistake.

I'm sure most of you realize that the radio stations have their "death tapes" already recorded and ready to go. If you don't know that, you probably wonder how radio and TV stations present long threnodies about a famous (or infamous) person for whom the final bell has tolled right away. They are written in advance, recorded, with space left to add just how it was that Death Came Calling.

Sometimes, these tapes sit around for years, waiting for their chance to get in the game. But that chance will come for those recordings. No one has yet figured out how to beat the clock.

But, back to England, a volunteer at what is described as "former pirate radio station Caroline" found the tape announcing the death of King Charles of Britain, and in classic blooper fashion, hit the "play" button just to see what it sounded like. He thought it was off the air, and then he heard the announcement that the station was "suspending normal programmes as a mark of respect following the passing of His Majesty King Charles III". 

So what the guy did was, he fled the station in a panic. The station went to dead air for 16 minutes, and then it took Mr Unlucky another 15 minutes to pull it together and apologize for his blunder.

I could tell you about a few mistakes I made on the radio, but, look, I'm all out of space, so I can't.