Thank your local kestrel

I remember the days before they merged George Washington and Abe Lincoln's birthdays. George was really smacked on the hindquarters for the first time on February 22, 1732, and in his honor, stores used to have huge sales on 2/22. They'd sell cherry pies (in his honor) and various glorious items for 22 cents! 

AND...if you got one of those pies, or one today at a much higher price, you can thank a American kestrel.

A kestrel is not a new SUV from Hyundai, or a new mixed drink involving three types of rum and ginger ale, or a spam-blocking app for your tablet. The kestrel is the smallest falcon in North America, just about the size of a blue jay. 

And the ones who live in Michigan - where we get our supply of tart pie cherries - help the farmers bring in their crop every year. 

Kestrel on duty for America's desserts!

Being predators, kestrels go after insects, rodents, even other birds. This makes them unpopular aboard the Ark, but the cherry farmers love how they keep those cherry-eaters away. Many cherry farmers put up kestrel nest boxes in their orchards as Holiday Inns of sorts. Robins and grackles are not welcome; they have cherry stains on their plumage. BUT someone did a study on this very thing, and found out that for every dollar a farmer spends on these little bird huts, he or she gets $357 worth of extra cherries out of his trees, cherries that would have fed those grackles and robins, who had to go to McDonald's and dine on those red-hot fried pies.

And. not to mention it, but I will: there's a whole lot less bird poop when the kestrel is on patrol.

That's why the pies taste so much better these days!

Annual Groundhog tribute

   Other than it being Peggy's birth month, February is no favorite month for me.

For one thing, for 28 days (sometimes 29) we have to hear people mispronounce the name of the month, which is FEBrooary, not FEBuary. Sorry to be punctilious about it, but Mrs Rennie insisted on us saying it properly in 4th grade, and I shall not let her down now. 

What's more, no one seems to stumble over "May" or "October," so let's give Feb a little love. It's Valentine's month, after all (known in Baltimore as "Valentime's Day," but anyway.

No, here's the thing with February. I have friends from other places around the world, and every year around this time I get texts and emails asking if we really truly believe that what some groundhog sees on February 2 is an accurate prognostication of the weather for the next month and a half.

I mean, if you read that some remote villagers thousands of miles removed from what we laughingly call "civilization" took a rodent out of his habitat, gave him a human male name, and held him up before lights and camera and the rising sun, and then decided that he did or did not see his shadow, and stated that the weather for the next six weeks had some relevance to the beast's shadow, you would shake your head.

Folklore it is, and I wouldn't even fuss about it, except that it comes in a time in our nation's history that people who can vote, drive, own property and hold office are awash in other folklore - "JFK Jr is really alive!" "You can drop nuclear weapons on hurricanes to blunt their damaging effects!" "School shootings didn't happen!" "Wildfires in California were started by Jewish space lasers" "No one should make money by shorting stocks except for established capitalist entities" and "Benjamin Franklin was the only president of the United States who was never president of the United States."

All right, I stole the last one from Firesign Theater. But when my international friends, who still can't believe that Sonny Bono used to be a US Congressman, ask me about the others, I'm just going to be Greene with envy.

Sunday Rerun: Wheels in Motion

 Add this name to the list of people we like:

Eliot Middleton, out of McClellanville, South Carolina, is multi-talented. He owns a barbecue restaurant (they have a million of them down there!) and he works part-time as a auto mechanic. He began fixing up old beaters and donating them to people in need of transportation, and a news outlet featured him to show his generosity.

Next thing you know, he had more than 800 cars donated to the cause and over $100,000 in cash donations.

The thing to understand about McClellanville is, it's a small, rural town. There is no sort of public transportation like buses. No taxicabs or Ubers or anything. You either drive, or get a ride, or you walk.

Middleton takes old, seemingly unusable “junkers” and makes them run again. Then, he gives them away to people who need cars. He does this on his own time and with no payment beyond a heartfelt thanks. So far, he has donated about 30 cars.

People in the small rural community are dependent on cars. There is no public transportation. Taxis and rideshare companies don’t exist here.

Eliot helps a lot of single moms, older folks, and people who are out looking for work. We've all known people with that mechanical gift of taking a wheezy old Wrangler or a crappy Chrysler and getting it back on the road, and Mr Middleton does it for the sake of others. He doesn't take money for the car once he signs it over to someone in need.

So there he was, the day after the news and the social sites showed him, sitting there with over 1500 phone messages. And he already had two jobs plus his car repair thing.

His sister Desiree stepped up to the plate and set up the Village to Village Foundation as a nonprofit organization, and that outfit was given the Jefferson Award for public service.  That's an award created in 1973 "to honor public and private citizens who show the power of service to others in bringing out the greatness that lies within us all.”

The older and wiser among us always counseled, "If you want something done right, ask a busy person." Mr Middleton has his restaurant and his part time job and he still finds time to staff his foundation and get an assembly line of sorts underway, bringing in junkers and sending out hope for those in need.

It's easy to spot the holes in society where hopes and dreams fall through to the ground. People such as Eliot Middleton are fixing the holes in that net and helping. Let's thank them and encourage them!

 

The Saturday Picture Show, January 31, 2026

Some day, this will be an exhibit in a museum, and students will be told that it was a prehistoric telephone that couldn't be carried in a pocket, but could make calls to anywhere for a dime or a quarter!
 

This is just what you want to see, right after you give your hands a good scrubola. Clean this drier, please!

We have always welcomed new citizens! And this is a cool display on a building in San Diego to make that point in a simulated newspaper.

I don't think that American street artists get the acclaim they deserve. Now watch 'em pave over this masterpiece!

"No, Wilbur, it's MY turn to sit in the orange one!"

You know this is from Canada because a) Tim Horton's is a Canadian chain of coffee and donut joints and b) there's a ton of snow.

That was a very good idea, sticking the wipers out like that.

Already, we have a winner in the How Many Fire Codes Can You Break At Once? competition. I don't think we'll see anything stupider all year.

I put this in as a reminder that summer will be here shortly.

Cold? It was so cold, this Target ball spent the night in the lobby to stay warm!

Nice try

Once again, Baltimore is unwillingly thrust into the national crime spotlight, as some doofus named Mark Anderson, 35, was pinched in New York City on charges of impersonating an FBI agent.

Mangione, hero to the lonely

Anderson (I hate it when people give Marks a bad name!) showed up at the Metropolitan Detention Center in New York the other night, the current domicile of Baltimore's own Luigi Mangione, who sits in stir charged with the murder of an insurance bigshot. This took place in December, 2024, and all because young Luigi didn't like insurance companies. More perplexingly, owing to his dashing looks and dark, brooding countenance, Luigi has become sort of a folk hero to the people who really don't choose their heroes carefully.

So, when Anderson showed up at the Ironbar Hilton at 6:50 PM, which is well after the time of day when legal transactions take place, he aroused suspicion by claiming to be an FBI agent in possession of court papers " ‘signed by a judge’ authorizing the release of a specific inmate,” apparently, Mangione.

All the best people wear backward ballcaps

Guards at the MDC in NYC didn't just ride into town on a head of cabbage. I mean, among the other denizens of that lockup are Nicolás Maduro and Sean "Diddy" Combs, so they know how to handle people like Anderson. They asked him for his FBI credentials, and Anderson showed them a Minnesota driver's license, and stated that he was in possession of weapons. One supposes that was said in order to scare the pants off the guards, but all they could was laugh and keep their pants right where they were as they searched Anderson's backpack and found a barbecue fork and one of those pizza-cutting wheels.

The tools of a master criminal

Anderson said he recently came to the Big Apple for a job that somehow didn't work out when whoever hired him realized he is a lunatic and had stayed around to accept a position at a pizzeria, which he will probably lose because a) he's in the hoosegow and b) he stole a pizza cutter.

Maybe the prison can use the cutter if P Diddly or Maduro decide to treat the Big House to some 16 inchers with extra cheese, pepperoni, and sausage.

As of yesterday,  Anderson was still detained and being refused bail as a flight risk, although the riskiest thing about him might be not knowing whether to travel on the inside or the outside of an airplane.

 

Club 99

Why do we remember the longevity of Bob Hope, who lived to be 100 years and two months of age, less vividly than, say, Betty White, who fell just short of a century, passing on eighteen days before her 100th birthday? 

These people meet up in a little luncheonette in Heaven called Club 99: Betty, Bob Barker, Billy Graham, Prince Philip, Zsa Zsa Gabor, and Rose Marie Bentley.

No, not that Rose Marie from the Dick Van Dyke Show (speaking of people who saw 100 candles!) Rose Marie Bentley was a woman from New York who died at 99 in 2018 - and not until her death did anyone realize that all of her vital organs, except for her heart, were in the mirror image of where they were supposed to be. This happens to one person in 50 million. It's called situs inversus with levocardia, this condition where your whatsis is where your whosit ought to be, and vice versa. 

I'm guessing that Ms Bentley, who is said to have lived a hale and hearty life, never posed for X-rays or MRIs. Her condition was discovered by a team doing an autopsy as an assignment in medical school.

Little-known fact: It was from Rose Marie Bentley that we get the expression, "...but her heart was in the right place..."

Oh Lillian!

Everyone in the "99" Club welcomed Lillian Gish as a new member in February, 1993. Being born in October, 1893 meant that the lovely actress, whose career spanned stage roles, silent pictures, movies, and television, roamed this earth for 99 years without making it to triple digits.

I saw her not long ago playing a cool-for-her-age biology teacher on "Mr Novak," and I learned some cool things about her at the same time. She was credited as being the first true movie star. Her acting was highly regarded at a time when others became famous for being in the movies but couldn't act for beans (much like Nicolas Cage of this era.)

In the mid-20s, movie producer Charles H. Duell claimed that Gish had an ironclad contract forbidding her from making movies for any company but his. He took the case to Federal Court. He should have kept all this to himself, because the outcome of the suit was that Gish was vindicated and Duell was found guilty of perjury, and disbarred. Oooops.

During the trial, her fans came to learn that Lillian Gish was a vegetarian, and there were not many of them around at the time. She had the habit of eating raw carrots during times of stress or for a snack. This picture <<< of her chomping on a carrot during the trial was so widespread that gnawing on raw carrots became an American obsession for a time.

Gish later dropped vegetarianism for a healthy carnivorous diet of boiled eggs, fruit, meat and veggies. As a former smoker, I can say I have never had a serious urge to fire up another KOOL, but I would walk away from kale salad and go for bacon cheeseburgers very quickly if I fell into the hands of vegetarians, and still plan to live to be 99.

In fact, I think I'll throw a patty in the pan right now in honor of Ms Gish, and grind on a raw carrot while it sizzles.