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.

 

Medical Marvel

Where were you on May 3, 1964? I was in Mercy Hospital in Baltimore, racked by some sort of mystery illness. Encephalitis? Meningitis? Hedgehopper Syndrome? They never did figure it out, but I remember lying in my bed that Sunday afternoon while my parents huddled with the doctors.

I listened to the second game of the doubleheader against the then-Cleveland Indians as a rookie pitcher named Tommy John threw a three-hitter and beat the Orioles and their pitcher, Robin Roberts.

No, not THAT Robin Roberts.

For the next 26 years, Tommy John kept winning ballgames against the Orioles and everyone else in the American League. 

But in 1974, pitching for the Dodgers, something went kablooie in his left arm, the one he used to throw with, and it didn't take long to determine that his ulnar collateral ligament had ruptured.

In those days, that meant the end of a playing career, without a throwing arm to throw with. 

“It felt as if I had left my arm someplace else,” he told Sports Illustrated. “It was as if my body continued to go forward and my left arm had just flown out to right field, independent of the rest of me. I heard this thudding sound in my elbow, then I felt a sharp pain. My fingers started to tingle.”

But, rather than go home and open a bar and grill or sporting goods store, he took advice from Dr. Frank Jobe, the Dodger team physician, who said he had an idea for how to fix it.

And with nothing to love, Tommy John offered up the left arm for which thousands of operations in his name have been done since.  Listen to any ballgame, no matter what the team, and you will hear the announcer talk about some guy having had Tommy John surgery. Guaranteed!

Dr Jobe had come up with the idea while performing surgeries on polio patients, replacing atrophied ligaments and tendons in their legs and helping them walk. So, why not try it on a pitching arm? He transplanted a tendon from Mr. John’s right wrist to his left elbow, first drilling holes in the bone to make room for it.

It took one more surgery and a lot of physical therapy, but Tommy John got back on the mounds and pitched another 14 years, becoming the first patient of the eponymous Tommy John surgery.

He won 124 games before his elbow surgery, and 164 games in the 14 years after it, and died on Saturday night at 83. The cause was bladder cancer.

“There are only two players that have any medical things named after them — Lou Gehrig and Tommy John. Gehrig’s is fatal and mine gives life.” - Tommy John

Check into this

It happened to us once - Peggy wrote a check to a charity and it was stolen from  the collector's desk -  so we are very wary about writing paper checks around here. 

I know a lot of people who can't remember the last time they wrote a check, and even more who have mailed off birthday cards with a gift card inside that never got to the intended destinations.

And I was dropping mail into the mailbox in front of the 21128 Post Office when a lady who works there came to the door and said, "Never put mail in the mailbox. They will steal it by the morning."

So, maybe it's time to give up writing checks, even the pretty ones you ordered from the back pages of PARADE Magazine next to the cartoon about The Lockhorns. The FBI, for what they're worth, and the Postal Service itself say check fraud is out of control, with reports of it doubling from year to year.

Because people in this country can't seem to keep their sticky fingers off the property of others, experts are recommending paying by e-checks, automatic payments, and other forms of electronic payment.

Used to be, we'd get the electric bill in the mail, write a check to cover it, put a stamp on the envelope, and leave it in the mailbox. The USPS would get here by noon every day and take it away. Most of the time now, the sputtering mail truck comes after dark, and leaves ads about hearing aids, gutter replacements, Susan G. Komen, and Liberty Liberty Liberty (Liberty).

Once a crook steals your check, they use regular household chemicals (bleach, acetone, Kool-Aid) to wash away the payee's name and dollar amount. Then they rewrite the check to suit their own purposes and pay for their new ballroom.

So, don't put outgoing checks in the mailbox, get your mail as soon as the truck chugs away, and keep an eye on your monthly balance statement.

The whole world is unbalanced, you ask me.

 

Benefits of age

Being aged 3/4 of a century is not as bad as you young whippersnappers want to make it out to be, and while you crack wise about how long it takes me to get out of the car and into the drugstore, when I do get there, it's Senior Discount Day, and you look at me like "Could you get me 10% off this Axe Body Spray?" 

And I have to say no. No one should want to smell like an axe. 

But here's an article in the Washington POST about this very topic. Richard Sima writes about how you have fewer regrets when you get up to the age at which people look upon you sort of dolefully. 

Sima says you have fewer regrets when you get up in the age that you don't always feel like you should get up at all. Middle age is the time for regrets: wishing you had gone back for that advanced degree or gone back for another slice of pizza, ruing the day that you didn't tell the boss to shove that box of old files up his attic, reliving the time you had the chance to drive in the winning run at the softball picnic, but you struck out.

Old age helps you realize that the degree would have put you in a higher tax bracket, the slice of pizza would have kept you up that night, the boss would have tied a can to you, and who cares about some softball game thirty years later?

Sima also cites "more knowledge" as a reason for reveling in the golden years. You remember the old saw that Mark Twain cranked out about how dumb your father was when you were 16, and how much the old man had learned in just 5 years when you hit 21, right? We get a lot of things wrong in our 30s and 40s, and then by the time the band is looking for the sheet music to "Closing Time," you've had a chance to read up on things, so you know better than keep playing when you should fold, you know the difference between Robert F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy Jr, and surely by then you have learned that the car that's been tailing you is probably not a fire chief, so slow it down, buddy.

And he wraps his treatise up by saying we have more wisdom, too. Knowledge is having facts at our fingertips. Wisdom is knowing that maybe those fingertips and the rest of the hand should be home reading a book.

Sima says that we old geysers did better emotionally during the pandemic than the young and the restless, because we have been through bad times before and know the outcomes tend to be better than we fear. I've told many a younger person than I that it really seemed like the world was coming to an end in 1968, with riots and assassinations and turmoil from here to Czechoslovakia, and yet, along came 1969 and the promise of a new day, led by an energetic and dynamic young man named Richard Nixon.

Well, anyway. Enjoy being young and restless for now, but hang in there long enough, and you will be the Victor, a New Man.