The Saturday Picture Show, April 18, 2026

 

Many neighborhoods in Baltimore don't have access to fresh fruits and vegetables. The Arrabers, as they are called (pronounced AY-rabbers) rent a horse and cart and take produce to the people. My grandma used to buy watermelons from a guy who came up the back alley chanting, "Waaaatermelon! Ripe to the rind!"

The tropical version of those Russian nesting dolls.

Nice ride, lots of fun, but I have to ask about getting on it and getting off it.

It's true! Those World War II army jeeps so important in winning the war were shipped overseas unassembled in wooden crates. They were easy to assemble, once you got the hang of it with the first 75 or so...

The message is, get cool, or you'll wind up in a place even hotter than this.

With temperatures in Baltimore this past week tipping over the 90° mark, I thought I would bring up this image from last winter's snow. As a reminder, no matter how much it snows and how cold it gets, you can always put on another sweater.

Well, this shopper was in such a hurry to go, they left their Yeti behind. Haste maketh waste as always.

The Beatles said it and it's still true - Love is all you need!

There's a lot of buzz around this new restaurant that doesn't even have a name...

Well, they've been living at the shore since, well, forever, so maybe seagulls get bored and have to yawn now and then.

She's not well

If you weren't around catching the news in October, 1987, let me catch you up:

Eighteen month-old Jessica McClure fell into a well in her aunt's backyard in Midland, Texas. For the next 58 hours, the nation, yea, the world, hung on by their cable TV, waiting for "Baby Jessica" to be rescued from the well, 22 feet below the surface.

They got her out, all right, and she was so widely known that even The Simpsons did an episode about Bart being stuck in a well.

The last we heard of the woman known now as Jessica McClure Morales, she was doing ok, but now comes news that she was arrested Saturday night following a reported domestic disturbance at her Midland County home.

Jessica made my mugshot collection

 Police say the Midland County Sheriff’s Office responded to a residence in the area of South County Road 1140 around 10 PM last Saturday. Morales, now 40, was taken into custody at the scene, charged with assault causing bodily injury involving family violence.

The County says it might take up to ten days for the arrest affidavit to be released, so we know nothing about how she wound up trapped again, although she did bond out over the weekend.

So, now we wait for details, which I will pass along as soon as. Here's a piece of advice, Jessica: maybe get out of Midland County. It's nothing but pitfalls for you.

 

How's your old tomato?

Faithful people will tell you that anyone can count the seeds in an apple, but only God can tell you the amount of apples in a seed.

Think about it! You plant the seed and who knows what will grow...

James Prigioni took that leap. Taking two tomato slices from two McDonald’s Quarter Pounders, he took the seeds and wound up growing healthy tomato plants in 124 days.

He went two ways with his seeds. The one tomato, he planted two seeds in a red Solo cup.  The other, he sliced off a sliver and put that tomato morsel into a Solo cup filled with soil.

He kept both cups inside for 23 days, and then moved them outside- the sprouting seeds in a bucket and the slice right into the ground.

By the 94th day, he was picking fruit off the vine of the ground plant. 

And below, the results of the plant grown from the slice! It had dozens of little tomatoes on its branches.

Prigioni's taste test: “No acidity, sweet but a mild sweet,” he said. “The kind of tomato that you could just eat a bunch of.”

And if you ask him why, since you can get a ton of Roma tomatoes at Lidl for next to nothing, he will tell you, “For me, it was just about fun. And it actually helped improve my whole garden because I was so excited to get out there and see how those tomatoes were doing… that I stopped and looked around at the garden.”

I've written before about the horrible soil around our neighborhood, which was built over the long-ago-cleared out remains of a huge gravel pit. One of the neighbors grew some tomatoes once. They were baseball-sized. And they tasted like baseballs.

See you at Lidl, but gardening caps off to Mr. Prigioni!

 

Zoom meeting

Over in England, a fellow named Mark Cody, 36, lost his grandma during COVID-19. But it was not the virus that took her. She took her own life because of the feeling of isolation she felt. 

Cody had been planning to take her for a ride in his fancy car, but ... “My promise to her was always to take her out in a Lamborghini and the opportunity never came, so I thought I'd love to be able to exist to stop someone being in the situation that my nan was in,” Cody told the BBC.

So what he did, he started a new program called "Granborghini." Participants round up elderly people and take them for the ride of their lives to make them feel young again. According to the article I read, there are few things that can break a senior out of their daily routine quite like a blast in a Lamborghini or a McLaren. Maybe it's more fun than the Wild Mouse down on the boardwalk. That's one I'll never forget!

Cody has a squad of volunteers who share their time and vehicles with the folks. I really don't know that going 148 miles an hour up Dulaney Valley Road would do it for me, but who knows?  Take it from Robin Gibbons. Robin hauls people around in his McLaren, he enjoys seeing the looks on his passengers' faces: "You buy these cars to make people smile, and that's the value for me," he says.

I smile just thinking about it. See you in line for the Wild Mouse.

The phantom knows

Our pantry door hinges had a little bit of a squeak going on, only when you opened the door, or closed it. At all other times, no noise at all.

First chance I got (give or take three months) I grabbed the WD-40 and now there is no more squeak at all. 

So here's the crazy thing! How come, every time I open the pantry to get cat food, pretzels, more cat food, or whatever, I still expect it to make that noise? Did I psychologically condition myself to plan for that squeak, and now that it's gone, I miss it?

I was watching a tv movie wherein a woman suffered the loss of her lower leg, and had to deal with the phenomenon of "phantom pain," the sensation of feeling pain in a body part that sadly no longer exists. This thing with expecting the squeaking noise is not painful at all, but it just seems odd, almost like I miss the stupid sound.

Maybe I'll go outside and plants hollyhocks.

Tiger burning

 

The car you see, what's left of it, belongs to Tiger Woods, the troubled golfer. It got bent up that way when, like so many luxury SUVs in his past, he drove it when he was no in condition to do so.

PEOPLE magazine is out with an article saying  Tiger is "embarrassed and ashamed" following his most recent arrest for alleged DUI.  We all saw it, like so many times before. Google "Tiger Woods car" some time and see the junkyards' worth of demolished steel he's left behind.

And the article goes on to say that “Tiger can be defensive at times but he was embarrassed and ashamed at the latest accident. He wants to fix his problems. There is nobody more interested in seeing Tiger come out a winner again than Tiger," the friend went on. "He doesn’t do well with defeat and embarrassing public situations.”

Tiger is no longer 50 and it's sort of a wonder he's made it that far. What bothers me about his behavior is that it's so......continuous. It's mistake to drive while unable to do so, it's a sin to do it twice, and this is, what, the third time for him? Unforgivable. 

Most of us would be in the hoosegow for quite some time with a record like this, but Woods only was at the police station for several hours at the jail before bonding out. He stands charged with DUI with property damage, refusal to submit to a lawful urine test and careless driving. 

His breath-alcohol test came up negative. He's not drinking, he seems to be gassed on hydrocodone pills, and the pain he is in is said to be the aftermath of multiple spinal injuries and numerous surgeries. And some say the intensity of how hard he swings a golf club has worn and torn his spine, resulting in a spinal fusion and a lumbar disc replacement.

Not to mention the toll that his various car crashes has taken on him.

So now he is "stepping away for a period of time to seek treatment and focus on (his) health."

And his friends and family are behind him, everyone wishes him the best, and it's just a good thing that he only seems to drive on deserted road where he doesn't have a chance to smash up other people's cars and bodies.

A friend tells the magazine, “People are quick to judge Tiger but he’s living through a lot of pain and has been for enough years where it has taken a toll on his quality of life in addition to his golf game."

He's been a menace on the roads for years. Let's see how a judge judges Tiger. That's enough second chances.

 

Sunday Rerun: Another reason for brownbagging

 In the first place, before we get to the "meat" of this story, I have to say that of all the fast food joints that dot the nation's highways and boulevards, I have to rank Arby's down toward the bottom, and Five Guys at the top, for taste and snappy serving.  Five Guys cooks each burger to order, and Arby's might have slapped together that Chicken Bacon Swiss yesterday morning, for all you know. 

And another reason not to like Arby's so much is the way they refused to sell dinner to a police officer in Pembroke Pines, FL last week. Sgt. Jennifer Martin says she ordered up at Arby's drive-thru on Tuesday night. Windowman Kenneth Davenport, 19, took her credit card, but restaurant manager Angel Mirabal, 22, stuck his head out of the window without a bag of food in his hand, saying, "[Davenport] doesn't want to serve you because you are a police officer." 

So the police officer, whose only offense was ordering meals from these goons, went back inside to get the refund on her card and ask for the employees' contact information. She says that Mirabal laughed, and said Davenport was allowed to refuse her service. He gave her back her money and his contact info, but Davenport refused to give his name.

Remember this, if you plan to invest a million bucks into a franchise selling roast beef loaf and reconstituted chicken sandwiches:  all that money, all that marketing and promotion and work to build up a business, can be undone by turning over the keys to some 22-year-old whose main qualification for the job is being able to clean out the grease trap in the Fry-O-Lator.

Sgt Martin reported it to her chief, the local news got involved, and the HMFIC* of Arby's, one Paul Brown, wrote a corporate PR statement of apology, and offered a free combo meal to any officer in the area last Friday.

Wow!  A free combo meal! You could get a Grand Turkey Club AND a small fries AND a small drink just to make Paul Brown feel the sweet satisfaction of expiation!

Yuck-o

Oh, and they fired the manager but "as a company that highly values trust and fairness, we ultimately found that the crew member (Davenport) was not involved other than to attempt to remedy the situation," the corporate geniuses said.

Davenport's grandfather told a local TV news station that the whole thing was a joke, and that young Kenneth's words were "taken out of context and blown into something much bigger than what it should be."

Ha ha.  What a hilarious remark!  You can't have the dinner you just paid for because you're a police officer!  

As Homer Simpson would say, "Be more funny!"

And as I would say, you're a part of the reason your grandson is a jerk, gramps.

*Head Man For Internal Correspondence