The Saturday Picture Show 3/23/13

 Whenever I see a picture of a kangaroo carrying her kid around, I wonder about the bonding process among the marsupials, and if they have a problem cutting the apron string, as it were.  Since there is no Kangaroo Channel with shows about how the offspring is 34 and still hanging around the pouch, perhaps they work it out somehow.

 This is our friend Ann.  We have literally known her since she was born; her mom has been a friend since she attended college here and let me tell you something, Ann is just like her mom: outstanding in every single way.  Ann went on a trip on her spring break this year (she's a freshman at Villanova) to Meridian, Mississippi, where she and other students worked with Habitat for Humanity to help fix up peoples' houses.  I said she was great, didn't I?  I mentioned to Ann that Meridian was the birth and death place of one of the founders of Country Music, the Singing Brakeman, Jimmie Rodgers, and look here: she was kind enough to find Jimmie's star in front of the Civic Opera House down there and show me a picture of it.  Any time you're worried about the future of this world, just write to me and I will tell you all that Ann has done in her 18 years.  "Outstanding" really isn't descriptive enough for how we feel about her and her family!

Well, this must have been right tasty.  This is a menu from the last lunch served aboard the RMS Titanic.  At 11:40 PM that night, the mighty ship struck an iceberg and you know how that worked out.  So, we have to hope that the ship's passengers enjoyed this lunch.  Cockie Leekie, despite its name, is not a situation requiring penicillin, but, rather, a soup consisting of chicken, beef, prunes and leeks.  I can't imagine ordering it without being greeted by a gale of guffaws, but then again, people were so proper in those days.  But notice, you could have Chicken a la Maryland, which is the proper way to serve chicken.  It starts off with frying the chicken, all floured and lightly breaded, in a cast iron pan in plenty of fat.  You're supposed to put a lid ("lead") on the pan to help the chicken steam as well as fry, and then when you've taken the breasts, legs, thighs and wings out of the pan, you add some cream and flour to make gravy.  A bottle of hot sauce later and you're on the way.  It's just interesting to see that they dined so royally on the Titanic.  I'd still rather be on that ship than on anything Carnival floats past us these days.

The top picture shows an interesting sort of windchime at the National Veterans Art Museum in Chicago.  A friend sent this to me, and here is the story attached with the pictures: When visitors first enter the museum, they will hear a sound like wind chimes coming from above them and their attention will be drawn upward 24 feet to the ceiling of the two-story high atrium.

Dog tags of the more than 58,000 service men and women who died in the Vietnam War hang from the ceiling of the National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum in Chicago on Veterans Day, November 11, 2010. The 10-by-40-foot sculpture, entitled Above & Beyond, was designed by Ned Broderick and Richard Stein.

The tens of thousands of metal dog tags are suspended 24 feet in the air, 1 inch apart, from fine lines that allow them to move and chime with shifting air currents. Museum employees using a kiosk and laser pointer help visitors locate the exact dog tag with the imprinted name of their lost friend or relative.

This is something I found online; it appears to date back to the late 19th Century, and while many of us have scroll saws down in the shop (I do!), I daresay most of them are electric and very few are operated by leg power like this dude is doing to his, all the while running the risk of getting his beard tangled up in the saw blades or having a wood chip fly off the board and hit him in his unprotected eye.  And they wonder why need OSHA.