The Saturday Picture Show, July 31, 2021

 

Sometimes we think of a white whale as just a really big fish, so when you see one swimming underneath a dinghy, the perspective hits you. And, after years of waiting, I finally had a reason to use the word "dinghy"!

My geographical non-knowledge is stunning. I did not know there was a desert in China, so of course I never suspected there was an Oasis there.

Talk about a win-win: this guy turned his lawn over to his wife (no more mowing!) and she has a garden where she raises vegetables for a food kitchen.

I love old barns, but I guess I should have loved this one a few years sooner.

It's hard to believe that the man who created the happiest place on earth had no place for women in some of his departments. This is why laws had to be written to make this sort of discrimination illegal.

On the other hand, I am heartened to see young men standing up for their female classmates in dress code hassles. They stood strong and refused to skirt the issue.

Did I ever tell you that I own George Washington's hatchet? I inherited it years ago. Of course, my great uncle Woody sharpened the head so often that it wore down to a tiny nub and had to be replaced, and then, late in the 1910s, someone broke the handle, and he got a new one, but this is George's for sure!

"Do something that makes you laugh." OK. I read this and chortled about the face mask. I do drink a tall glass of lemon water every morning, and I eat a colorful plant based meal often, if you count beef tacos. 

OK, this is the cake I want for my next birthday, and as a gift, I want a charcoal drawing of myself as rendered by a courtroom sketch artist.

A group of peacocks is called a muster!

Lashing Out

A tacit understanding is an agreement made without anyone saying anything; it's just understood without discussion.

That's what I have with the women of the world who put on false eyelashes and whatnot. I don't question that choice and they keep mum on my predilection for wearing cargo pants, and everyone is happy.

Listen, a little bit of sumpin' is always good, and there are fake lashes that look fine. But the other day at the checkout stand at the BuySumMor, the cashier had eyelashes that looked like she could have swept up the dust with them just by leaning forward. They must have been an inch long, but I said nothing because I was reaching into the pocket of my cargo shorts for my change holder, which shares a pocket with my calendar and several knives.

Mike Nichols, the movie and Broadway director, was totally depilous - left hairless all over from a bad whooping cough vaccine he received as a child in Germany in the 1930s. He wore wigs and false eyebrows ever since childhood, but he had no eyelashes, meaning that when he cried, the tears ran directly down his cheeks with no lashes to hold them back. 

I guess if he had wanted to, he could have added false lashes, but he didn't, and that was in the days before auxiliary lashes became as popular as they are now. The other day,  U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents grabbed three thousand pairs of false eyelashes that were illegally imported from China to New Orleans.

Officials took away four boxes of long lashes at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport. They were headed for a local beauty supply store, as agency spokesperson Matthew Dyman reported. 

I didn't even know that there was a federal Eyelash Approval Committee, but these hadn’t been approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration and weren’t labeled with the distributor's name or the manufacturer’s name, Dyman said.

As Dyman said, "There’s no way to tell whether the eyelashes had been exposed to disease during manufacturing or whether they were stored properly and kept away from insect-infested areas."

Oh! Now I see why there's a need for the eyelash squad.

“There’s no telling what’s on these eyelashes,” Dyman said.

Ewwwwwww.

You take synthetic eyelashes and adhere them to your lids and you're looking at  allergic reactions, eye irritation or worse, Dyman wants you to know.

WVUE-TV reports that unlabeled, non-FDA-approved false lashes are often seized in New Orleans, but this shipment was “particularly large,” according to officials.

"Beauty is bought by judgement of the eye." - William Shakespeare

The Christmas Drive-In

Lover of language that I am, I am a proud subscriber to wordsmith.org, where facts about words are tossed out like meat to hungry lions, and we devour it gleefully. It's the kind of website to which one can turn for succor after hearing a tire salesman say, "Hopefully, we'll get you out of here by noon."

The other day, their popular A.Word.A.Day feature, written by the website's founder Anu Garg, taught me a new word: contrafactum, pronounced KON-truh-fak-tuhm. It means counterfeit music: "A composition that makes use of an existing piece of music with different lyrics."

Mr. Garg goes on to say the word comes from the Latin contrafacere (to counterfeit), from contra- (against) + facere (to make or do). Its earliest documented use was in 1940.

I'm sure there are dozens of examples of using the same tune, different words in the world of classical music, and maybe my more cultured readers can supply some. But of course, in the world of popular music, I think of one example right off the bat.

In 1963, Brian Wilson, leader of the Beach Boys, got word that Phil Spector was about to release a Christmas album (and what a record that was!) Brian quickly wrote a hot-rod themed Santa Claus song called "Little Saint Nick," and it was released in time for the 1963 holiday season.

In 1964, while recording the album "All Summer Long," Brian included a new song called "Drive-In," about the good old days of drive-in movies where no one watched the movie.

And during those same recording sessions, Brian, as close to a musical genius as anyone who walked this earth, came up with a great idea: "Let's play the background track to "Drive-In" and sing the lyrics to "Little Saint Nick" and it will come out sounding like this. That version was not released until 1998, however, when Brian put out "Ultimate Christmas," a CD with all the band's holiday songs.

Did Brian know what a contrafactum is? Or that there's a word for it? We know that later on, he settled a beef with Chuck Berry for using the melody to Berry's "Sweet Little Sixteen" for an early Beach Boys hit "Surfin' USA," but this time, it was his own music he was recycling.

And that was long before we started putting out empty beer cans and spaghetti sauce jars for the county to take away.

Tell me more contrafacta!

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEVlePSvkSM   st nick drive in

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJ5tJY9551A drive in

Time To Go

Burt Bacharach and Hal David wrote about 478 great songs together, and one of them came to my mind tonight while I was facing the book or booking the face or whatever the expression is.

In the musical "Promises, Promises!" they had a showstopper entitled "Knowing When To Leave," and here are some of the lyrics Hal David wrote:

Go while the going is good

Knowing when to leave may be the smartest thing anyone can learn.

Go!

I'm afraid my heart isn't very smart.

Fly while your still have your wings

Knowing when to leave will never let you reach the point of no return.

Fly!

... 

Though I'm sure that no one can tell when a wish is a hope,

Somehow I feel there is happiness waiting for me.

It came to my mind to share those words because I saw that someone who works where I once toiled has had enough, and gave two weeks' notice. In that job, people put up with day work and then night work, and 12 hours at a time, and that's nights, weekends, snow days, holidays, you get the picture. It's not a breeze-in, breeze-out deal, and the emotional strain of dealing with life and death and awful sadness can weigh heavy on the mind.

People were telling her it was time to go, but she was telling herself that she's not a quitter, so she stayed until she knew for sure that leaving was the only way to go on. I hope she doesn't feel like she's a quitter; she put in twelve years of stress and strain on her physical and emotional health, and the time has come, and she will seek a new tomorrow tomorrow!

The door goes both ways

Someone was talking about "Irish leave," which is the practice of slipping out of a party without announcing your departure and telling the whole crowd that you have to go home to change the filter on the furnace or something. I may start doing just that, on the grounds that people aren't as interested in anyone else's comings and goings nearly as much as they are in their own!

(Incidentally, I don't know why the Irish have to be branded with this. They already have to explain the concept of "Irish twins" - two kids born in the same calendar year. I used to ask my mother why she didn't have any more kids after me, but all she did was smile and shake her head.)

I worked with someone who dedicated herself so deeply to the job that it cost her several marriages and a few friendships and relationships. One day, she lamented to me, "I have given a lot for this job!" and all I could say was, "And for what?" because the bosses aren't going to tuck a little something in your pay envelope because you came in on your day off to rearrange the phone books. 

No. I always said, I was a jukebox, and when the quarters ran out, I stopped playing - and when I was tired of the songs, I juked on over to another spot. We owe our employer an honest day's work for the pay, and that's it. 

Same with friends and lovers and the guy who details your car. Be honest. If it's not good to you, it isn't good for you, so move on with your head held high.

 

Say It Again, Slowly Please

I can tell you exactly when it was that I realized that every single citizen of the United States had been to therapy (hooray for us all!) It took place at noon one hot August day in the West Side Market in seaside Cape May, New Jersey. Standing in line for a sub (a "hoagie," in Jersey parlance) with Philly style cold cuts and Jersey tomatoes, I was witness to a conversation between two teenagers, one male, one female. With my usual adroitness at figuring out the subtle nuances of a conversation, I discerned that the young man wished to see the young woman outside of work, away from the wistful vista of Taylor Pork Roll, potato salad, and Funyuns. She had apparently mulled over his offer and declined it; unwilling to bow out gracefully, he persisted, and soon she said the words that have been the death knell of young swains since Olivia dumped Orsino in "Twelfth Night;" "Forget it, already!"

I know I took the long way around to get to the point, but here it is: I knew the young man was no stranger to the counseling couch when he said, "I'm not going to let you marginalize me!"

Good for him, good for her, and good for Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, the 19-year old actress who plays Devi on the Netflix series "Never Have I Ever."

Devi is conflicted in lots of ways: she is an immigrant, and an outsider in her school in Southern California, and her father died suddenly the year before. Add that to the usual amount of teenage trauma, and Devi is dealing with a lot. You watch the show, you root for her, because she has the right stuff.

The picture shows the actress with
a bowl haircut as a kid!

So,  Maitreyi went on Twitter the other day to do something that I don't think someone in her shoes would have done in the past: she wants people to say her name correctly.

We all know people whose names are hard to pronounce, and there is nothing more marginalizing than having people mispronounce a name, whether it's because they don't know how to say it right (LEARN, dammit!) or because they just don't give a flip (STOP being that way!)

Long before the current self-improvement movement began, a fellow named Dale Carnegie wrote a book called "How To Win Friends And Influence People." It's been reasonably popular, selling 30 million copies over the years, even more than the beloved "Trump: The Art Of The Deal," which is generally regarded as the most wonderful book since the Bible (and both of them can be autographed by the author of "Trump..."!) 

One of the basics that Carnegie taught was, "There is no sweeter sound to one's ear than the sound of his name.” Maitreyi's point is that, like so many in her situation, she allowed people to butcher her name, but please, no longer: "I’m asking for basic respect when I want people to say my name right."

She chose a good time to make this statement. Season 2 of her show just came out, and so she is getting lots of publicity, and that's a good time to clear up the mispronunciation!

She said, "Names are so important, and I find that it’s a big part of your identity — it personally is for me. I love my name so, so much. And constantly I get people saying, 'Oh, you don’t even know how to say your own name right.' It’s like, 'No, no, no, I do. I do know how to say my own name right.'" 

She went on, "Because reality is, no one knows how to say someone else’s name except for the person themselves, you know? Like, this is my name. I’m sorry, but I get to call the shots here. There is one answer and that answer is my own. There’s no discussion for that."

And she used to accept it, but now... "So personally, when I was younger, I used to tell people, 'Yeah, you can call me My-tree like whatever, I don’t care,' because I used to think I was inconveniencing them, but I’m not. I’m asking for basic respect when I want people to say my name right, as many of us do, right? Like, we just want our names to be right."

"We don’t want it to be butchered, but sometimes we just, you know, accept it, which really, really sucks. And I hope you guys don’t have to go through that too often."

And she concludes, whimsically, "But nowadays, being my great, wise, 19-year-old self, I ask people to say my name correctly and I put a lot of active effort whenever it’s like an interview, or, you know, just meeting people in general, like new people. I make sure that they say my name right."

The Orioles' Anthony Santander came to us from Isla Margarita, Venezuela, and down there, people know that his last name is sahn-tahn-DARE. For the first year or so that he was here in Baltimore, he must have heard himself called sanTANduhr enough times that he made a plea, which all but the most obtuse and obdurate have heard and followed, that we say his name correctly. It's not too much to ask, is it?

You can go to Twitter to hear Maitreyi explain her point and demonstrate saying her name: "Yeah, I like to pronounce my name...My-tray-yee Ra-ma-krish-nin."

As Maitreyi says, "Names have power."  Let's give everyone their share of it.

  

You take the high way

Since the late 1950s, the Baltimore Beltway has engirdled the Baltimore Metropolitan area like a boa constrictor squeezing the last boar at a buffet. The plan was for a road that would take one from one part of town to another by means of a high-speed limited access highway. And it's a great idea on paper. The problem is, we do our driving on asphalt, not paper.

When I worked midnight shift, I would pile into the car and drive for miles and miles in the middle of the night (the beauty of a 3 AM lunch hour). No one else was on the Beltway (fun fact for Baltimoreans: the official name of what we call the Baltimore Beltway is the McKeldin Beltway. Since 2005, it has been named for former Governor Theodore "Beaver" McKeldin, during whose administration many big roads were planned and constructed. I would be four quarters short of a buck if I had a quarter for every time I have heard someone call it that, though) at that hour, so I could pretty much loop the town and enjoy the all-night radio serenade as I cruised about.

The official speed limit on I-695 is 55 miles an hour, but depending on the hour you happen to be on it, you might not get much above 20 miles an hour. It's like anything else with these roads: when everyone wants to use them, there can't be enough, and the rest of the time, it's wide open. The West Side of town is where your national Social Security Headquarters is, so you have a lot of people working there who need to get there when the pandemic is over. The East Side used to have a steel plant and a Chevrolet plant; now they have an Amazon warehouse, and that tells you all you need to know about your American economy. The Central part of town - my stomping grounds when I do get in the mood to do some stomping - has universities and colleges and courts and lawyers.

And 99% of the working population gets on the Beltway any time I happen to use it. I had to go to the west side the other day, and no, nothing has changed. There are still fools trying to go 90 in the left lane, and fools trying to go 30 in the right lane, and fools who have watched too much NASCAR zipping in and out of lane and lane to get ten feet ahead. And people who may be going only 45 miles an hour, but have that tricky muffler that makes it sound like a fully loaded Kenworth Tractor-Trailer is right behind you. 

I do mean right behind you, too. A guy (notice, it is ALWAYS "a guy") in a maroon Honda tailgated me from Greenspring Av to I-795, and if he had gotten an inch closer, I was going to have to ask him to put a mask on his hood, I wanna tell ya. Tailgating is a popular means of driving that allows many people to meet their fellow commuter, a state trooper, a body and fender repairman, and a chiropractor.

And of course, it always seems that no one pays attention in Driver Education to the part where they discuss merging onto a highway. Git out my way, sucker, is the approach as they zoom off the ramp.  You stop or else!

The all-too-often aftermath

As Bernie Mac used to say, "America, I'll be honest with you." As a retired American, if I drive anywhere, it's to the grocery store or the hardware store or Popeye's, so I don't encounter crazy rush-hour driving. 

But for those of you who must drive the McKeldin, please slow down or switch to the Enya station or recite calming mantras. The way some of you drive reminds me of the old bumper sticker: Drive Like Hell And You'll Get There.

Sunday Rerun (from April 2016) Ice Ice Baby

 I postponed writing about this topic until the temperatures became a little nicer outside. No one wants to talk about ice in the middle of winter, but that used to be the time of year to make money on ice.

Nowadays, if we want ice, we just ankle into the kitchen and open the freezer door on the Kelvinator, where crystal-clear cubes drop into a white container automatically.  Very simple deal.

But imagine yourself living in India in the early 1800s...no Whirlpool refrigerator in the kitchen to make your ice...and even if there had been one, there was nowhere to plug it in!  And all across the Caribbean, Europe, and India, there were no frozen ponds to chip off a chunk of ice and cool your limeade.

Where is there plenty of free ice?  Massachusetts in winter!  So the only problem is, find a way to get that ice over the sea to places where they need it, and you'll be rolling in the long green in a minute.

The Wright Brothers weren't even twinkles in papa Wright's eyes at the time, so Frederic Tudor (1783 - 1864) knew he couldn't count on an airplane to send the ice to the Old World.

So he packed huge ("yuuuuuuge!") ice slices, cut from Walden Pond in Concord, Mass, and other waterways, packed them onto a ship and covered them with sawdust and shipped them off to places that wanted ice.

Ice King Tudor

His first effort was sending ice aboard his ship "Favorite" to Martinique with a load of frosty coolness.  It took three weeks for the ship to get there (I suppose they stopped off somewhere for beer and pizza on the way) and a lot of the ice had become watered down, and then had become water, which is hard to sell on an island surrounded by it.  Tudor sold what little ice there was to sell, and took a loss of $4500 on the deal.

That was 1806, but by 1810 he was profiting from selling ice to the tune of a cool $7400.  But there was no Forbes Magazine then to give him business advice, so Tudor had to spend some time in debtor's prison in 1812 and 1813, before springing out in the fall of 1815 with a new scheme - an icehouse in Havana, nicely insulated, and large enough to hold 150 tons of ice.

In the years to come, he brought back Cuban fruit as the boats returned to New England, and it's stunning to think how much he could have taken in by combining the fruit with the ice and some Cuban sugar and inventing the snowball. 

Tudor also missed out on making some bigtime starbucks when he invested in coffee futures in the 1830s...he couldn't envision iced coffee!

Today's modern entrepreneur knows how to diversify, spreading his income and investments across all spectra of the business world, before indictments, jail terms and disgrace get in the way.

The Saturday Picture Show, July 24, 2021

 

Terryville, Connecticut, is proud of native son Ted Knight (born Tadeusz Wladyslaw Konopka), who left local television in New England when he got a part as a prison guard in the movie "Psycho," but it was the roles of Ted Baxter on the Mary Tyler Moore Show, and Judge Smails in "Caddyshack" that made him a big star. Remember, "the man worthwhile is the man who can smile when his shorts are too tight in the seat"!

Another movie I can recommend with two hearty thumbs up is "Leave No Trace." It raises a lot of questions about parents and issues both personal and global.

Just as I see old cars in junkyards and think of how many times Mom, Dad, Junior and Sis piled into the Biscayne to go to the beach, I see rusty Ferris wheels in abandoned amusement parks and think of the screams and laughs that once resided there.

I will admit to being one of those who used to think that "charcuterie" meant a plate of axolotl eggs and watercress. But I learned! It's just a fancy word for cold cuts, like "career transition" means "getting fired." Pass the salami, Tommy!

Life hack: help your duck fix a dinged-up foot with duck tape. Similarly, repair a broken bottle of whisky with Scotch tape.

You don't see these as often as the old days: a Model T Ford turned into a hot rod! Cool ride.

If you find one of these, you'll have enough good luck for a whole life!

This alley in East Baltimore shows how creative people can use a small space to make a big life!

The story went around this week that the Tokyo Olympic committee supplied athletes with cardboard beds in order to keep them from doing the horizontal hula. How hilarious that anyone anywhere thinks that anything anywhere is going to keep young people away from the no-pants dance, the old Dipsy Doodle!

Let's all try to recover from my spate of lewd euphemisms by thinking about the all-natural organic Summer Popsicle!

Hieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

 A woman calling herself "Connie" called my cell the other day. Ordinarily, I would not have answered, but I was expecting a call from someone whose number I don't know, so I was answering everything.

"Connie" said she was with Disability Associates and was calling to set me up with a phone appointment to discuss my possible benefits.

I said no one here is in need of any disability benefits, and why was she calling me?

"Connie" said someone from our household had signed up for an appointment.

I asked for details.

She had none to offer.

As I gave her the air (sent her packing, gave her the bum's rush) it came to me that this woman is working for a firm that has people calling people who are on some master list of Who Is Old In America, tricking them into talking to some unctuous salesperson who will have them sign up for Jitterbug cell phones and WOW computers and I don't know what-all else.

Phone solicitors have known for years that people of the raised-in-the 50's generation, and the people who raised them, are programmed to answer a phone and not hang up on a caller. This knowledge is what allows them to get a person on the phone and keep yammering on and on. Many times, a person will sign up to buy something just to get the annoying son of a Grinch off the phone.  And many times the person will have no intention of signing up for long distance service or  a delivery of steaks or a lottery ticket or a donation to the U S Semi-Olympic Team  , but they get bamboozled.

As I say, I don't normally answer those calls, but I had to in this case. And while we all hear all the time that Congress is going to do something about these junk calls, remember, the phone companies make good money off these crooks, and they are not about to allow Congress to stop that good deal.

So they, and their chosen Congresspersons, put out occasional press releases saying that ..."This massive invasion of privacy is un-American, and a nettlesome aspect of our lives that we are going to eliminate once and for all! Together, our Congress and our beloved telecom service providers have formed committee after committee to identify the problem at the source! Meanwhile, please join the do-not-call list so we can all pretend there is one."  

If the powers above were really serious, they would make it so that if anyone bothered a citizen with an unwanted phone call, said citizen would be allowed to go to that nuisance's house and rub an unpleasant ointment all over him/her while playing the songs from "Frozen," as performed by Iggy Azalea.

There used to be a guy who played for the Baltimore Colts back in the days when players made per season about as much as the second-string left tackle makes now. This guy was one of those prototypical football players back in the day, hailing from a mining town and eking his way though college on the GI Bill and onto a Colts roster because he was willing to do anything for a job. They needed offseason jobs in those days, and this fellow came to training camp one summer day and reported that he had worked a job as a troubleshooter.

But, as he said, he could find the trouble, but they wouldn't let him shoot it!

I don't want to shoot anyone just for calling me and fibbing about why. Just give me their home number and I will gladly return their call at my earliest opportunity. How's 3:15 AM for you, "Connie," if that IS your name?

 

Avant Guards

The great Baltimore Museum of Art counts me as a regular visitor (last time was December, 1991) but I know they are a world-respected gallery of fine art, loved by people familiar with the best in the cultural field, just like our beloved Baltimore Town Band (aka the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra). 

But think about it a minute. Who spends more time in the museum checking out the pictures and other objets d'art  than the museum's security officers? So it's only fair that this is happening: the security guards are going to be organizing an exhibition at the BMA. They will be serving as guest curators.

They're going to call the show "Guarding the Art," and it will open next March. As the Museum says, it will "bring together a selection of works that resonate with each of the 17 participating officers, and offer "different perspectives from within the museum hierarchy." 

The regular curator is art historian Lowery Stokes Sims (seen at left). She has been helping to put this whole thing together. 

"The security officers are guarding the art, interacting with the public and seeing reactions from visitors that most museum staff don't have access to from our offices," Stokes Sims said. "I was struck and moved by the extraordinarily personal, cogent arguments that each officer made for their selection, which was so different from the intellectual and filtered approach that a trained curator would take."

Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, ca. 1964

I like what she's saying - that Joe Public can have an opinion about art without having taken years of classes and seminars about stuffy art-type topics. Philistines such as I can see the merits of a painting of a gigantic monster driving a hot rod, a velvet portrait of Elvis, or a lifesize oil painting depicting a grocery freight truck being unloaded. It's the untrained eye that often experiences greatness. 

Officer Richard Castro is of Puerto Rican lineage, and he will exhibit a series of pre-Columbian sculptures "as a means to inject some of my Puerto Rican-America culture in the exhibition." Officer Dereck Mangus wants you to see a painting that shows Baltimore's Washington Monument off in a corner in the picture called  "The House Of Frederick Crey." A Baltimorean, Thomas Ruckle, was a self-taught painter, and he did this work in the 1830s.

"The House of Frederick Crey" shows a long-gone house in Baltimore's Mount Vernon
neighborhood. The Washington Monument is way off to the left.

"The painting was hung salon-style in the American Wing and stuck out among all these other disparate images," Mangus said. "It's a glimpse into an old Baltimore by a Baltimore-centric artist that most people have never heard about before, and it shows the neighborhood I live in."

The officers involved are now huddling with the museum brass to set up the design for the show and to make a catalog and public educations outreach based on the exhibition.

"I've been impressed by the diligence, devotion and investment they have into this project," Stokes Sims said. "It will be interesting for the public to see that there can be a multiplicity of curatorial voices in major institutions."

I think it's quite cool that our town's art community is saluting the people who keep an eye on the art all day.

They have stripes so they can't be spotted

Back in the day, "bar code" meant not stealing someone's stool when they got up for a second to "shake hands with the governor."

Then someone invented the bar code for products! It saves a lot of time, since products don't all have to have a price stamped on them.  With this 

array of bars on your pack of razor blades, pork sausage, or dish detergent, one pass over the magic eye at the register, and the right prices is rung up.

And the bar codes do more than keep prices straight! They can be used for ordering, or for people with vast collections of stuff to keep their stuff all straight, for e-coupons, and in hospitals, so the right person has their duodenum worked on.

But these are all bar codes that people create and add to stuff. How about the natural sort?

Someone far smarter than I has come up with a way to scan pictures of zebras just like bar codes, making it easy to distinguish Zelda Zebra from Zane Zebra.

 

They call it “StripeSpotter,” and it's the gift to zebraology (I made it up) from the University of Illinois-Chicago and Princeton University. Researchers tracking databases of herds of zebras are using this hi-tech in Kenya right now.

It's a simple app to add to a computer, this StripeSpotter, and then you wave a digital picture of a member of the zeal in front of your screen, and StripeCode extracts image features that an algorithm checks for a match. If no match is found, ecologists open a new file for the new animal, and log in field notes, GPS coordinates of where it was found, and other pertinent information.

Coming soon: spotters for tigers and giraffes!

We sure try to get one step ahead of nature, don't we?

Unlucky Shot

The 1951 National League baseball regular season ended when Bobby Thomson of the New York Giants hit a walk-off three-run homer known ever since as "The Shot Heard Around The World."

This took place at the long-ago ballpark in upper Manhattan known as the Polo Grounds. Interesting to note, the year before, another shot at the same ballpark was more tragic but lesser noted.

I bring this up because, as you might have heard, the game at Washington between the hometown Nationals and the San Diego Padres last Saturday night was halted in the sixth inning when, thanks to the NRA's unstinting efforts to put weapons in the hands of everyone all over the country, people started shooting at each other outside the ballpark, leading to a frenzied departure of the 33,000 in attendance. It was quite a scene in the nation's capital, and just another in the endless parade of gun violence in America. Three people, one of whom was leaving the game, were injured. 

Back to 1950, when gun violence seemed a bit more rare. On July 4, 49,314 fans packed the Polo Grounds to watch a doubleheader between the Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers. 49,313 of them survived.

A man named Barney Doyle, an Irish immigrant aged 54 years who had once managed heavyweight champion James Braddock, had taken a family friend to see the twin bill, as newspaper writers insisted on calling double headers. His guest was 13-year-old Otto Flaig. The two of them settled into their seats in the upper grandstand and were watching pregame practice when a bullet struck Doyle in the forehead, knocking his hat off and staining his white shirt red. 

As Flaig's son Chris related years later, “Poor Barney wasn’t bothering anybody. He was minding his own business on a nice summer afternoon.”

His summer afternoon ended forever when the bullet hit him. He was pronounced dead by a doctor who was at the game.

The following events ensued:

• Fans previously relegated to the Standing Room Only section fought with each other to get the seats vacated by Doyle and Flaig.
• A squad of 80 cops was detailed to find the source of the mystery bullet.
• Young Flaig was taken for questioning to the police station and released.
• Perhaps because his being 13 prevented him from appreciating the full gravity of the situation, Flaig complained about having to miss the games.
• Forensic evidence led the police to the roof of 515 Edgecombe Avenue, an apartment building 1,200 yards away from Doyle's seat.
• 14-year-old Robert Peebles, a resident of the building, admitted to firing the one bullet that he said was in the gun that he said he found in Central Park. He fired the gun as a means of celebrating the Fourth of July, not intending harm to anyone. 
• Peebles led the police on a search of the area where Peebles said he threw away the pistol, but it was never found. Charges against him were eventually dropped, but he did two years at a state training school for boys because police found two .22 rifles in his apartment.
• The Dodgers and the Giants both left New York for California in 1958. The Polo Grounds became the home of the expansion New York Mets in 1962 and 1963 and was torn down in 1964 to build housing projects.
• Flaig joined the Marines, came home and became a police officer, retiring as chief of police in Teterboro, NJ, a Mets fan to the end of his days.

Flaig being questioned by police.

What the shell

Darius and Farshid Assemi left Iran and came to California from Iran in 1978. They built a huge business, the Touchstone Pistachio Company. Pistachio nuts are fairly popular here; those of us of a certain age remember when they used to be dyed red. It seems that long ago, harvesting and processing methods for the nuts left them splotchy and unattractive, like anyone cares what a nutshell looks like! It's the taste we like!

So they don't dye them anymore, which robbed me of the old joke about the kid eating pistachios in class being caught red-handed. But I moved on. And I learned that pistachios are a very big deal in Iran! They are "a cherished and beloved food" there, says the The Washington Post.  And the Assemi brothers have done well for themselves and for the central California economy. In 2020, pistachios accounted for more than 47,000 jobs and added $5.2 billion "with a B" to the economy.

And so, you know what comes next. Thieves.

Touchstone, being a smartly-run business, did an audit in June and found that they were missing 42,000 pounds of pistachios. 21 tons of tasty nuts gone! And it took exactly one day to crack the shell of this case.

The Sacramento Bee reports the Tulare County Sheriff’s Office (TCSO) got the theft report on June 17, and investigators determined that one of Touchstone's tractor-trailers had been driven from its parking spot on their lot in Delano to another location nearby.

They opened the trailer, did the police, and found all 42,000 pounds of the nuts inside. They had been removed from the original 2,000-lb bags and put into smaller bags for resale. 

The Sheriff's Office arrested 34-year-old Alberto Montemayor, the owner of Montemayor Trucking, and charged him in the theft. The sheriff said Montemayor, who contracted with the company to transport stock, was in a position to know how much stock was there for the taking.

Last year, Tulare County Sheriffs arrested a 23-year-old man for stealing two truckloads of nuts, with a value of $294,000. The TCSO points out that the appeal of pistachios as an item to be stolen, aside from their retail value, is that they are untraceable. No serial numbers, no way to identify one nut from another.

Nuts production is a big deal in Central California. The minor league baseball team is proudly known as the Modesto Nuts. And between 2014 and 2017, nut producers were ripped off to the tune of 7.6 million dollars.

At last report, Montemayor is awaiting trial, and could face up to three years and eight months in prison, according to the district attorney’s office.

Sunday Rerun (from April 2015) I was goated into writing this

 

We were talking about goats the other day and I decided to spend some time learning more about the domestic goat (Capra aegagrus hircus), which is a subspecies of goat descended from the wild goat of southwest Asia and Eastern Europe.

When you retire, you'll have time to do this stuff, I promise you.

Fred (left) and Doris Ziffel

Even if all you know about goats is that we call the style of beard worn by Fred Ziffel on Green Acres is a goatee, that's a good start!  But also, consider these:

I got to thinking about why we call children "kids," and it's because it's what we call the offspring of adult goats: Female goats are referred to as "does" or "nannies", males as "bucks", "billies", or "rams."

If your indoor pool or hot tub smells kind of rank, it might be because bromine is being used to kill algae that might grow there. Bromine, the only liquid nonmetallic element (I'm sure we all knew that, so why even mention it?) is used in compound form for water treatments and to control algae and bacterial growth. The very word bromine is from the Greek: βρῶμος, brómos, meaning "strong-smelling" or "stench of goats."

Naval Academy goat

The current worldwide goat population is thought to be around 924 million.  America has almost three million of them.  Those who do not find work as college football team mascots wind up making milk or cheese or some other food that requires even more involvement, such as goat-b-que.

According to country music legend, Tex-Mex singer Johnny Rodriguez was heard singing while he was in jail for stealing and barbecuing a goat, and a kindly Texas Ranger got word of his talent to Tom T. Hall and Bobby Bare, although this story is now cast in the shadows of doubt, as there are no Texas Rangers known to be kindly.

Just kidding.

The cornucopia, from which all good Thanksgiving chow pours forth, is based on goat horns, which are considered a symbol of plenty and wellbeing.

In Norse mythology, Thor, the god of thunder, rides around in a chariot pulled by two goats (unless they're too Thor.)

Guitars that don't have steel strings have nylon, or what they used to call "catgut," which was actually goat intestine, which is also used to make surgical stitches.

A baseball player who strikes out with the game on the line, a football kicker who blows a potential game-winning field goal and anyone else whose bad play causes a loss is said to be getting fitted for goat horns...the same horns that are supposed to signify plenty and well-being.   Mixed metaphors!

The Washington POST ran this chart, showing the USA's goat population.  Helluva lotta goats in Texas, pardner.

The goat is an animal in the twelve-year cycle which appears in the Chinese zodiac calendar. Certain personality traits are linked to every one of the animals; those born in a year of the goat (1919, 1931, 1943, 1955, 1967, 1979, 1991, 2003, 2015, 2027) are predicted to be shy, introverted, creative, and perfectionist.

Final fun fact: those born in 2027 have not been born yet at all, or even dreamed of, in most cases.

The Saturday Picture Show, July 17, 2021

 

Leading off this week is this cool shot from down by the docks in Baltimore's Outer Harbor. 

“Hey Boo Boo, let's go get us a pic-a-nic basket.” I guess Ranger Smith wasn't around to keep Yogi away from the apple stash; let's hope they left some for cider this fall! 

A supermarket near us was so overstocked with paper towels and T.P, they were giving it away with every purchase a couple of weeks ago. Funny how things turn around. A year or so ago, people were cutting down trees to make their own, so slim was the supply. And when someone saw the Try 'N' Save stocking the Charmin, they'd text their friends and it would be gone by noon. And now sanitizer is going begging. Maybe figure out how to run your car on it?

I guess it makes sense, but I had not heard of indoor raspberries. I love raspberries. Why is this not growing in my den?

Time was when people had a job at one of the 5 shoe stores at the mall, and if you couldn't get off on a Saturday night to go to the big dance at the VFW, you'd just quit Hahn's and start work at Baker's on the following Monday. Then jobs got tighter and people hung onto them, and now, when the entire crew at a Burger King walks out because Wendy is paying 50 cents more per hour, the labor market is unbalanced. I don't know what to do about it. All I know is, no one is calling me to ask me to flip burgers.

How would you feel about living in Sameville? One advantage is that if you need a house repair, chances are it will be easy to find that color paint or shingle. One disadvantage is that you can't very well tell your good time party guests to look for the grey house with the red roof.

At first I thought this was some sort of joke, but when's the last time a Finn told you a joke? This is what they are doing in Finland these days, putting reflective paint on the antlers of reindeer so people can see them at night.

One way to tell if someone is from Baltimore: this time of year, they see this picture and their first thought is, where to go to get peach cake. The true Baltimore peach cake has been baked here since the late 19th century. It's not overly sweet and it uses yeast instead of baking powder and slices of beauties like these. Try Fenwick Bakery on Harford Rd.

Bob Dylan sang, "She's a hypnotist collector, you are a walking antique." This is not that. It's a homemade solar collector. These empty Cokes and Pepsis etc sit in the sun and store warmth for heating your home. You could call it canned heat.

If you want to know the reason why I am not about to get on a plane anytime soon, just ask Timmy and Lassie here. I mean, really.