Amateur Night and Day

One thing of which this nation will never have a shortage is people who think they know they're doing, when, in fact, they don't have the sense God gave 'em.

If you're ever at the scene of a large building fire, there will always be some sidewalk fire chief saying, "they shoulda done this!" or "we need more water over heah!" 

Of course, you need look no further than Facebook to meet dozens of people every day from all walks of life who are actually experts in staffing and managing a big-league baseball team. Just ask them!

Police detectives spend years learning their trade from the ground up, beginning as beat patrol officers, and then spending time in technical training courses. But now, with the advent of true-crime podcasts and YouTube videos, crimes that have baffled police from Keokuk to Kennesaw Mountain are being resolved by dedicated amateur sleuths.

And so we meet one Alec Wysopal, from Tucson, Arizona. Wysopal is 38, and if he's the same Alec Wysopal who listed his availability on a house-sitting opportunity website, he definitely should be regarded as more than capable. Here he lists the reasons why one should hire him to house-sit:

Nice to meet you! My name is Alec Wysopal. I'm seeking a house sitting provider job in Tucson, Arizona. I'm aiming to contribute my abilities as a House Sitting Provider. Flexible scheduling for clients.

Service Abilities:

I am comfortable doing pool maintenance, mail collecting, and light landscaping. I have personal transportation available. With respect to prior history, I have previous experience.

I remember poring over job applications back in my day, looking for a specific person for a specific job, and reading that "with respect to prior history, I have previous experience" would be enough to seal the deal for me.

Assuming that there are not two Alex Wysopals trooping across the desert of Tucson, this is the same guy written about in the New York Times, and he has set up a livestream to share his results with an anxious world as he investigates the disappearance of Savannah Guthrie's mother. 

People are setting up camp around the Guthrie house.

And recently, he announced to his stunned audient (I can't say how many people actually watch his activity) that he found a bone on a dried-up river bank near the Guthrie residence.

 He called 911 breathlessly with his important find.

And sure enough, among those who ghoulishly devote time to the deaths and disappearance of well-known people (or their parents) there came a frenzied murmur that at last, a break had come along for those who have looked for Ms Guthrie mère.

The excitement died aborning, though, when James T. Watson, curator of bioarchaelogy at the Arizona State Museum and an expert on prehistoric remains, examined the bone, and said it came from the days between between 650 and 1250 A.D., when the Hohokam people tended farms and lived in the area.

So now the legbone, rudely removed from its sacred resting spot, will be brought back to the Native American archaeological site that Wysopal had no business digging in.  

From what I read, people with nothing better to do with their days are hanging around Phoenix these days, playing Columbo Jr for reasons I have yet to understand. 

Ain't Miss Agnes hot!?

The happy fellow you see here beginning a jaunt around all four bases on the field at Oriole Park is Colton Cowser, an outfielder whose season has not gone well at all this year. In fact, even though he hit a walkoff home run against the Rays on Sunday, he took a .191 batting average to the plate with him in the 13th inning of yesterday's Memorial Day matinee.

Wouldn't you know it?! He hit another game-winner, and maybe this is what will get him off the dime on the diamond this year! I hope so. He's a nice, earnest young man, and we are happy for this burst of success.

AND...if you were watching the Orioles telecast, you heard announcer Kevin Brown chirp, "Ain't the milk cold!" as Cowser connected. Cowser's nickname is The Milkman, because of you know why. COWser!

And the other part came from one of the all-time greats in the sports announcing business, Chuck Thompson, whose voice was the sound track to thousands of Baltimore evenings listening to ballgames. Chuck had a great voice and an encyclopedic knowledge of baseball and football. His two pet expressions were: "Go to war, Miss Agnes!" when something exciting happened, and "Ain't the beer cold!" when something great happened.

He said he got "Go to war, Miss Agnes" from a golf buddy who never cursed and used that as a substitute epithet. My mother, who was from the same generation...let's not say she never cursed (she did live in the same house as I, so that was a reason right there) but she did limit it. And her version of that was, "Holy go to war, Miss Mitchell!"

I don't know if the expression had anything to do with World War II. Chuck Thompson served as a sergeant in the US Army in the Battle of the Bulge, and if you know history, you know that was "going to war."

And Baltimore is a beer-guzzling town, and the baseball team was owned by National Brewing, so "Ain't the beer cold!" might have reminded people to celebrate with a cold one.

Hats off to Kevin Brown for knowing that expression and working it into the game so well yesterday! 

Memorial Day 2026

 

Today is Memorial Day, the day set aside to honor those who gave their lives in service to the American dream of liberty and prosperity and peace for all. Not to be blunt, but remember, it's not Veterans Day (November 11) or Armed Forces Day (May 16).

Let's not lose perspective about those who died to keep us free, and try to keep a thankful thought for those men and women.

Sunday Rerun (from 2015): Going My Way?

 After we got our pneumonia shots the other day (retirement is a continuing series of thrills!), Peggy and I headed down to my old high school to walk around the track four times and get fresh air and exercise.

As I love to do, I reminisced about my high school days, and showed Peggy where the sub shop and delicatessen called Smetana's used to stand on York Rd.  And how, after detention, I would hurry to get there to join the crowd for a cold cut sub, chips and soda, and how after that I would walk up to Read's Drugstore for an ice cream before cutting through Hutzler's and Towson Plaza so I could get to Goucher Boulevard and Providence Road and hitchhike home for supper.

By the way, I weighed 140 lbs at the time, and had to run around in the shower to get wet.  I could not drink from a straw, lest I fall in.

Anyway, that word hung heavy in the air. Hitchhike! When is the last time you saw someone hitchhiking around here?  Man oh man, the time was that you would see guys and the occasional teenaged girl with their right arm and thumb akimbo, waiting for a ride from a suburban mom in a Buick Estate Wagon, a businessman with time to tell a young person his theories about personal and business success ("And one thing I learned from taking that course is, no matter what you think you're selling, be it cars or buggy whips, you're really selling yourself !"), or a three-time loser with nothing else to lose, driving a stolen Dodge.

Sorry.  That last one was from Dragnet.

Maybe this kind of movie ruined everything

If you moms of teenagers can even think of it, yes, there was a time when we got around by hopping into cars driven by total strangers, without a cell phone or tracking device of any sort on us for our parents or Inspector Flanagan from Police Headquarters to track us with. I know the last time I saw someone thumbing a ride, gas was about 45 cents a gallon but I still didn't pick the guy up.

Frankly, I don't know who stopped hitchhiking first - the kids who were afraid to get in the car of Harry Homicide, or the innocent driver scared to death to stop for Stanley Slasher with his algebra book and his looseleaf notebook with "ME + YOU = ?" on the front in magic marker.

Good times.  Good times.

The Saturday Picture Show, May 23, 2026

 

So, wait a minute before you go shopping for bathing suits, Nebraskans!

This is Korea, 1954, Marilyn Monroe cheering up the troops as only she could. But this scene was the first crack in the marriage of Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn, which lasted from January until September of that year. Marilyn was never as confident in her ability as an actor as Joe was about his baseball stardom (he insisted to the end of his life on being introduced as "America's greatest living baseball player") and she was truly on top of the world with the ovation the GIs gave her. "Oh, Joe," she said happily, "You never heard such applause."  His cold reply: "Yes, I have." 

Happy birthday tomorrow to the one, the only Bob Dylan, who will see 85 candles ablaze that day. Look out, indeed!

A great example of micro art is this person's tiny oil paintings of cats, using bottle caps. Purrrfect!

We who appreciate hot sauce simply LIVE for the moment when we might see a Sriracha vending machine!

Science Does Not Make Sense: Ornithologists, please explain how this bird is called a Red-Bellied Woodpecker and its belly is pale while its head is red, and how does it come that there is a Red-Headed Woodpecker who does have a red head! I'm so confused.

Showing that the Alysa Liu hairdid is still popular...

Sofia blocked this guy and the best way he knows to get back with her is to stick a note on her windshield, which blew away on the parking lot in maybe 5 minutes. The best way is to show up at her door with a gift and a winsome smile, saying, "You and I can MAKE it baby, I know we can!"  That way, he might get to meet her new boyfriend. Girls named Sofia do not give second chances.

The Beatles once took turns drawing caricatures of each other. The more I look at these, the funnier they are!

Print this out, glue it on a magnet (over the ad for the cesspool cleaner) and stick it on your fridge. And then read and heed!

Forget it

We just had a nice steaming bowl of axolotl stew on Monday, and someone said it was horrible, and tasted like imitation axolotl!

How dare they! That was first-class imported Albanian axolotl, and it was great! We even had some left over and made axolotl pudding for dessert the next night.

The axolotl is sort of salamander mole that can re-grow lost or damaged body parts. Very helpful, if you are one.  And many of them have achieved fame in both athletic competition and in the field of entertainment. I'm sure you remember the lead singer for Guns 'N Roses, the great W. Axolotl Rose.

But that guest slagging me on the stew brings me to the point I had planned to make before I went off the point. I won't soon forget that insult, because the human brain remembers insults for up to 20 years, but forgets those kind compliments in just 30 days.  

It's because of your daggone amygdala, you see. That's the part of your noggin near the sneeze reactor which is your primary emotional processing center. It holds on to stuff, I want to tell you. 

They say that gratitude journaling - writing down every good thing that comes to you - is helpful.  Tell you what: get a legal pad and write down all the nice things people say to you in a month, and then ask yourself if life isn't the greatest thing going.

I'll start you off with two compliments: You look marvelous today! And your amygdala is a liar.

All Aboard (and stay there!)

Last June, the unthinkable occurred (on a cruise ship, of course) when a little girl fell off a Disney Dream ship. 

Her father had thought it a good idea to have her pose in front of an open porthole, and the report released afterward said the 5-year-old "climbed on the railing and sat down" and then "lost her balance and fell backward off the railing into the ocean.”

Her father jumped right in after her, and they both were pulled from the water by a trained Disney rescue team and returned back aboard.

The father was injured; the child was not.

The police investigated, finding that the railing in front of the porthole (window, as landlubbers would say) was 47" high. The parents felt that Disney should be responsible. Disney, naturally, felt otherwise.  What's more, the Broward County State Attorney’s Office declined to file charges of neglect against the parents.

I feel like the parents have a duty to keep an eye on their kids, and even if a kid wants to do something as dangerous as hang in front of an open window, someone has to be the adult in the room, or on the ship, as it were.

I'm glad everyone survived and will tell the story to generations yet unborn. And I hope to find out that various member of the Disney rescue squad dress like Walt's beloved characters as they perform their lifesaving work.

It wouldn't be too Goofy.