Generous

People from other countries often have difficulty comprehending the concept (there's that word again!) of volunteer fire companies. I guess it's a purely American idea, people doing something at considerable personal risk, inconvenience, and expense that one could say is the responsibility of the government to handle.

But since the days of Benjamin Franklin, who organized the first "fire brigade" in Philadelphian, people here have dropped - literally! - what they're doing and run to the fire house to go help someone or some someones in need.

Things like this don't happen for free, and that was the problem for a volunteer company in Calhoun, Missouri, where chief Mark Hardin gloomily scanned the balance sheet for his company and saw a bottom line of $169. 

169 bucks won't go far when you need new turnout gear and mobile equipment. They had not been able to afford either since the 1980s.

“It was pretty discouraging — we’d already been paying for stuff out of our own pockets to keep things going,” said Hardin. He retired as a firefighter in Arkansas and moved to Calhoun, winding up as chief of the company, serving a town of maybe 500. “I probably shouldn’t tell how much of our own money we’ve spent. My wife would divorce me," he said. 

On an annual stipend of $4800, his 28 volunteers were trying to keep two engines on the road and scrape by for fuel and other supplies. They are lucky in that they receive donations of hand-me-down gear and other necessities from other departments. Volunteer companies are like that. They'll as likely give a recently-replaced engine to a smaller company down the road as trade it in. It's all part of the giving-back ethos.

As Hardin was noodling his way out of the financial morass, along came a phone call from 91-year-old Sam Sloan, who lives two miles up the road from the fire house.

Hardin said: "I’d never met Sam, but he invited me to breakfast. He wanted to ask me a bunch of general questions about the fire department.”

They went to breakfast again the next week, and the third week, Sloan invited Chief Hardin to come up to his house, where he presented the company with a check for $500,000.

“I walked in the door and Sam said, ‘What do you think about this?’” Hardin said.

And what he thought about that was, that he had never seen that many zeroes in a check.

Sloan told the chief that his cattle and seed businesses had been good for him, and he decided that when he sold his businesses and land that he was determined to make a contribution to the volunteers.

He and his wife Jan have a nice house and 60 acres to pass on to their one son someday, and for now the couple want to share their bounty with deserving people. He just says he has always admired volunteer firefighters.

“I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, and I knew at this point in my life, I could help. It’s important to have a good fire department, especially with all the grass we have around here.”

Hardin thanked Sloan 20 times for the kind donation, then drove straight to the bank to increase the company's balance to $500,169.

Chief Hardin plans to get a new fire engine and some other equipment, plus new protective gear for all the members. 

And they bought a helmet for their new honorary chief Sloan to wear around.

Sunday Rerun: Anglers' Angles

 Cheating takes place all the time in sports, even more than we think. The Houston Astros stole a page from the cheater's manual when they tipped their batters off to what sort of pitch was coming in the 2017 and 2018 seasons. This was done in much the same fashion by the 1951 New York Giants: someone would watch to see the catcher's signals and then relay the purloined information to the hitter.

In football, Tom Brady can tell you, the best way to cheat is to have someone deflate the other team's footballs. 

Let's face it: as long as there are humans involved in any gainful activity, someone will look for a corner to cut. But surely no one involved in the time-honored sport of fishing, the classic Huckleberry Finn activity where a kid and his dad bond over a bamboo pole, some string, and a bent pin, would do anything so dastardly as to cheat in a fishing tournament, right?

Hold the presses. Officials in Ohio are saying that  Jake Runyan and Chase Cominsky won a pro fishing tournament with a $30,000 purse by stuffing their fish, not with crabmeat, but with weights. They have been indicted; each of them faces three felony charges.

 

The charges are for cheating, attempted grand theft, and possession of criminal tools. The Cuyahoga County prosecutor has filed fifth-degree felony charges that could land these jokers in the Walled-Off Astoria for a year, with $2500 in fines to boot.

 Prosecutor Michael C. O'Malley said,  "I take all crime very seriously, and I believe what these two individuals attempted to do was not only dishonorable but also criminal."

The prosecutor really took a deep dive into the charges he could lodge, adding on top a misdemeanor count of unlawful ownership of wild animals, because they allegedly had raw fish filets on their boat. Their fishing licenses could be suspended indefinitely if they are guilty on the filet rap

It all happened at the Lake Erie Walleye Trail tournament in Cleveland. A routine inspection of the fish they submitted showed lead weights and fish filets shoved down the gullets. Before their stupid scheme was detected, they were set to win the competition and be named Team Of The Year and split a sway of $28, 760.

The scales (!) of justice started turning when someone noticed that the fish they claimed to have caught seemed to weigh a lot more than others of that size. Judges cut the walleyes open, and out came the hardware while the other fishermen howled and carped, their hopes of winning floundering.

"We got weights in fish!" declared Jason Fischer, director of the Lake Erie Walleye Trail fishing tournament.

Some of us who have no interest in fish that don't come from a supermarket seafood counter packed in ice might find it hard to believe that something is fishy with these tournaments, but these contests are a big deal to a lot of people. Runyan and Cominsky claimed to have won more than $300,000 last year - but that was when one of them failed a tournament's polygraph test and had to return some of his ill-gained loot.

I have the same question I have all the time in these matters: how do these people go home and face their friends and families in the wake of such perfidy?

The Saturday Picture Show, September 14, 2024

 

Ed O'Neill told this story on himself: A woman came up to him, seemed to know him, and asked for a selfie. Ed sorta knew he sorta knew her, so he sent the picture to his daughter, who said that he ought to be committed for not recognizing the world's most famous unmarried cat lady.

What are voters looking for in a pickle commissioner? The Committee to Elect Nick Phillips hopes you'll consider their candidate to be the real dill.

You've heard it a million times, and here's one more: timing is everything. Fortunately, fish have a marvelous sense of both cooperation and timing. 

The person who took this photo says the bee was taking a nap in his passion flower. I guess bees need a nap the same as everyone, and a pretty flower is just as nice a place as can be. For bathroom visits, they will still go to the nearest BP station. 

It's odd that they would mention this rule.

The vibrant colors and signature music make this Pow Wow in Santa Fe special. 

Advice for newlyweds: Don't even in this area either. Men, if you think

the objets d'art you and your friends got at Spencer Gifts for your bachelor hovel will be highly regarded by your spouse, you're wrong twice.

Here's that unmarried feline fancier now! With Benjamin Button.

Cal Ripken, Jr, served as Honorary Mr Splash on the 29th anniversary of 2131, and you understand all of that if you are lucky enough to live in Baltimore.

Yes, this really is Willie Nelson, who has just released his first album on Liberty Records in 1962. "And Then I Wrote..." introduced to the world Willie's songs such as "Funny How Time Slips Away," "Crazy," and "Hello Walls," and once the world heard his words and music, well, 62 years later, we're still Willie fans. 

"Wedding Bell Blues"

Not only do I love today's newspaper, I love yesterday's as well. I just love reading old papers, and with the internet, I don't get inky fingers from reading stories such as this one from 1924, when two really really rich girls eloped...

Don't bother with the magnifying glass; I'll tell you what happened. This Winthrop family from Lenox, Massachusetts, is American bigtime semi-royalty since they all climbed off the Mayflower or the next boat in. So here in 1924 was Grenville Lindall Winthrop, a lawyer and all-over rich guy, widowed, eighth-generation descendant of John Winthrop, first governor of Massachusetts. Grenville had two daughters (Emily and Kate) whom he had tried to raise by giving them everything under the sun. 

They wanted more. They wanted love, which Grenville found out the day he caught thirsty Emily clapping cheeks in the chicken coop with the chauffeur (Corey Lucien Miles) who had apparently misunderstood Grenville's orders when he told Miles to drive his daughter around. 

And not only was Emily getting busy, so was her sister Kate, who took a fancy to Darwin Morse, who is described as both an electrician and the man who took care of the chickens around the mansion. I guess that made him a Chicken Tender!

Morse's mother wanted to help, so with the two girls 'n' guys, she helped cook up a scheme to get old Grenville out of the house for a few days, and then here comes the preacher man, and presto! Two weddings, and away those kids ran! And the preacher was quoted saying, “Well, they are nice young people—as nice as you’ll find anywhere these days.”

The next day, the headline in the New York TIMES said  

NEWS OF ELOPEMENT UNNERVES WINTHROP; Treated for Shock Due to Daughters' Marriage to Chauffeur and Electrician.

and that meant for a fun Thanksgiving that year. The couples took off separately - one "borrowing" Dad's limousine - and the next story I could find about them was from a year later, when the women were received at the family home and the grooms were not. 

I'm sure that many movies and TV shows have borrowed from this story, and I'm sure that in each of them, the guy playing poor old Dad is seen saying, "Now see here! This is highly irregular!" and calling for an aspirin and some bicarbonate of soda. 

My research couldn't answer my question as to whether Kate Winthrop was the person talked about in the 1922 hit song "I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate." I'm sure Big Daddy's plans for his daughters did not include having them getting with "the help," and that makes the whole thing funny even now, a hundred years later, when they're all up in Heaven watching Glenville say "Hrrumph" about the whole sweet thing.

Grenville Lindall Winthrop
(1864 - 1943)

10-57

I know better than to pay much attention to some of the nuts  people who populate Facebook, but there I was the other night, reading about a local woman who saw a car smack another vehicle on the supermarket parking lot and then keep going. This Good "Samerican" (my homemade portmanteau; it's for sale) took pictures of the crime car and reported everything to the store office. Store personnel found the driver of the banged car and all the information was turned over to her. Good deed, right?

You're wrong, according to the people who called her "snitch" and said she needs to mind her own business. 

One of the posts that decried the woman's actions in reporting the hit & run.

Of course, it's YOUR car being used in the demolition derby at the Weis store, you doggone well want to be told whodunit, I'm sure. 

We're all in this big rowboat called Life and we need help paddling to the other shore. Someone needs to know if someone else is drilling holes in the boat to make it sink. That's not being a snitch. That's making things right.

Yeah, that'll buff right out.

The Eleventh

 

The stunning, clear skies and cooler weather of the past few days is reminiscent of September 11, 2001. If you'll recall, that was a beautiful late summer day on the East Coast. The loveliness of the day was in stark contrast to the horrible events, the enormity of the attacks, the deaths, the loss, the destruction.

The Greater Baltimore area joined the sad list of towns where a school shooting has taken place. On Friday - another pretty day - one student shot another in a restroom at Joppatowne High School up in Harford County. The victim died on the way to the hospital; the alleged shooter is in police custody.

Did you ever see a true sleight-of-hand artist at work? So-called "magic" tricks, involving playing cards or even something as simple as pulling a quarter out of some kid's ear, depend on distraction - getting you to look at something else while the deception is pulled off right in front of your eyes. There is no quarter growing out of young Joey's ear, but the skillful practitioner of legerdemain (French for "light of hand") misdirects your eyes, and with them goes your mind. 

This old painting "The Conjurer," by Hieronymus Bosch, shows a pickpocket filching a purse from someone whose attention has been misdirected by a magician.

I bring this all up to make a simple point. School shootings and acts of terrorism continue to occur, despite our heartfelt thoughts and prayers. Some politicians, who should be running for office on platforms of decisive counteraction, find it easier to distract the easily-distracted by misdirecting their attention. Don't mention how many schools are being turned into shooting galleries, because that's a tough topic to handle. 

Just tell people that children are going to school and having transgender surgery performed upon them without the knowledge or consent of their parents. It's not happening, but it sure sounds like something we ought to worry about!

I wonder why we hear people in the immediate backwash of one of these tragedies say, "I never thought it could happen here!" It can happen anywhere. I pray that it doesn't, but telling people that their sons will become girls during school is an insane way to live.

Insane.

T & T

Let's say you run the National Football League. What is the dumbest thing you could possibly do? 

If you guess "tip people off that Taylor Swift is coming to the Chiefs-Ravens game in Kansas City," that would come close to the top of the list.

It's the Chiefs who are upset, according to what I read, that the league tipped off a sports news source that the #1 pop star in the world - a woman whose security situation rivals that of any world leader - was coming to the game.

She is dating Travis Kelce of the Chiefs, as you know, unless you just got back from a year in the steppes of Russia.

If you didn't know about her love life, you might not know that she had to cancel three shows in Austria this summer and hike up her threat level because of the preponderance of buttheads in this modern world.

Her people are upset any time her whereabouts are known, so letting people know she was heading to Arrowhead Stadium the other night was not good.

The Chiefs were ready for the throng of gawkers; they had to learn on the fly when love was just aborning for those two crazy kids. 

“We’ll be prepared for her, and obviously welcome her with open arms,” Chiefs president Mark Donovan said before the game. “She brings a lot with her, and it’s a pretty valuable, targeted demographic when you look at the makeup of her fan base. And we’ve looked at ways that we could be respectful.”

Last year, Taylor came to Baltimore when the Chiefs played the Ravens in the AFC Championship game and there was no huge security problem, but that was long ago. 

It seems to be a uniquely American thing, to chase after celebrities - with or without mayhem in mind. I couldn't imagine a day of life under the scrutiny and fan frenzy she and Kelce face if they so much as go to the Dollar Tree to stock up on licorice.

That's their life; I wouldn't want it, but I wouldn't want to make it worse for them by tipping off their stalkers to where they are going to be.

As we are

I saw this meme and I got to thinking...life is so much simpler when we live as ourselves. 

When we see monster movies about Martians from Mars and Venusians from Venus and what-have-you, notice, they all look alike out there. Boxy bodies, antennae, metallic sheen - you can't tell Mr Roboto from Junior Roboto. 

Here on Earth, we are all born pretty much the same size and dressed alike in birthday suits. but as the years go by our bodies grow differently, we choose different clothing, and we have different and distinct personalities.

If we didn't wear our hair as we please, dress as we please, express ourselves and find pleasure in different ways and means, what would we be? Non-unique automatons, moving in machine-like precision to the Grand Parade of Sameness?

I got a great piece of advice one time, and I would give anything if I could remember what it was. But I figured on my own that it's best for us to be ourselves and learn to like ourselves as we are. 

 

 

Sunday Rerun: It only takes tenants to rent an apartment

 Someone left a coffee cake too close to the fax machine in an office where I worked. And I want to tell you, the ants that came to gobble the cake over the weekend also checked into the fax machine. By Monday, the fax machine was not working, but the ants were. 

We had to replace the machine. You never saw so many ants in one colony.  (A group of ants is a colony; a group of aunts is a book club.)

And yes, ants come to pester us around here every spring. One single ant, as far away as Cleveland, can tell when one single grain of sugar falls onto our kitchen counter, and the next thing you know, that ant and his entire family move in, until remedial measures are taken.

But now, here we are in 2023, finding out that ants can do medical research, when they're not busy bedeviling suburban homeowners.

Researchers have now trained ants to detect cancer in urine.

I know, it's a lot to imagine, but with ten million people dying of cancer every year, any tool we can use to diagnose the dreaded disease is for the good.

And scientists have figured that ants can use their tiny antennae to sniff out cancer in urine. 

The full story is in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: journal (your copy should be in the mail). Without getting too gross, let's just say that we now know that some types of cancer change the smell of our liquid waste, and the reason for this is that cancer cells emit what science calls VOCs: volatile organic compounds.

And just as dogs can sniff out cancer by identifying body smells, ants, which do not detect smells through their noses as we do, have antennae, as we do not, and scientists have had ants traipsing through puddles of pee and coming back to report they smell cancer VOCs.

And they learned to do this in just three training sessions, which is two fewer than it took a crack team of Baltimore County IT trainers to get me to learn to work Excel spreadsheets!

So, next time, how's about not stepping on that ant you see? Someday, it might just save your life with an early diagnosis.

 

The Saturday Picture Show, September 7, 2024

 

The old switcheroo! Always open, until they're not. Try IHOP!

If this were my eggplant, I would name it "Nixon" and display it proudly among my other presidential treats, including the Jimmy Carter peanuts and Dolley Madison snack cakes.

Cruel summer trickery: this a stick-on, fake electric outlet bound to frustrate  someone at an airport trying to plug in their charger. 

I used to work down near the Baltimore Washington Friendship Thurgood Marshall airport, and it was not uncommon to be out on the parking lot and see the belly of one of those BA jets looking like they were ten feet overhead. But of course, that was before Boeing planes started dropping parts like cones off a spruce tree.

From the real estate listing: "Wide open spaces! Drift along with the tumbling tumbleweeds! This airy handyman's special is just right for your special TLC! Directions: go to the end of the earth and turn left for six miles."

This little baby mantis is just learning to pray!

Today's free wallpaper is these really pretty fall wildflowers! I can feel autumn coming right around the corner!

These are called ice flowers, but if you plan to take a bouquet home to your one and only, get there before they melt!

When you checked in for a lengthy stay at the Alcatraz Hilton, they made it quite clear that you had four entitlements, and I don't see premium cable anywhere on that list. Stay out of prison, be my advice.

This sign was on display at one of those rallies where people try to show how decent they are by pointing out the moral shortcomings of everyone else. I looked over the list, and just about everyone I know is going to blazes...according to "them."

Full Circles

We baseball fans might not remember to pick up the dry cleaning, or how many cups are in a quart, but we remember things that happened on baseball fields long ago.

The year is 2002. The San Francisco Giants, managed by Dusty Baker, are in the World Series against the (then) Anaheim Angels. Baker thought it would be cute as all get out to have his 3-year-old son Darren serve as a batboy, and then when a play at the plate was coming up in Game 5, Darren wandered out to home plate to pick up a bat left lying there by the previous hitter. He did not appreciate the danger he was in as large men converged on the area, but Giant player J. T. Snow swooped in and scooped the tot up. Big news then, and still remembered by the millions watching.

2002

Now the year is 2024, and Darren Baker, now 25, was just called up to the big league roster by the Washington Nationals after a stellar season at minor-league Rochester. He got a hit in his first at bat, a single as a pinch-hitter in the ninth inning the other night as the Nats lost 14-1, sort of a microcosm of the season for them. But that will be a night Baker will remember forever, no matter how his major league career turns out in future. 

And that will be his biggest baseball memory for the time being, because his father insists his night in the spotlight in 2002 is something the young man "doesn't even remember. He's reminded of it constantly, but he doesn't remember. That's quite a story.  At the time, it seemed kind of funny or embarrassing or whatever, but in the full circle of life, maybe it was supposed to happen."

And isn't that what life is, a lot of full circle moments?   

2024

The Honour of your presents

One of the things I have always wanted to do was to maintain a running list of things I have always wanted to do.

And I have not started the list, but one of the items was always going to be a list of things I have not heard of before. 

That's based on George Carlin's line about sentences no one ever said, e.g. "Hand me that piano" or "Please saw my legs off."

Add this to the list: People getting married are asking their guests to pay their way to attend the wedding.

And I don't mean the price of your ticket and lodging at the Gilligan Islands resort hotel to see Elinore and Trevor tie the knot, I mean they want you to pay for your dinner at the reception at the gala shindig at Les Bouffons. And bring a gift.

File this under unmitigated gall, but don't mention that to Hassan Ahmed from Houston. He's 23 and he wants his guests to shell out $450 each for a seat at his wedding next year.  As of now, he hasn't heard from many of the 125 stunned friends who got the bill in the mail, but he's already $100,000 deep in this affair, having plunked down loot for the venue, the DJ and the photographer.

Ahmed is surprised that the money isn't pouring in, since his friends "have paid a lot more than $450 on Beyoncé or Chris Brown tickets."

That wedding planning website called The Knot asked 10,000 couples who got hitched here last year, and the average cost was $35,000 - up $5,000 from the year before.

Now I feel really chintzy, handing brides and grooms an electric can opener.

Over in London, Matthew Shaw, who runs Sauveur, another wedding planning company but with a French name, says selling tickets “introduces a strange relationship between you and your guests, turning your guests into customers.  You’re no longer hosting — you’re offering them a paid experience, which introduces a very different narrative in terms of what guests are expecting.”

What he's saying is, if you want The O'Hoolahans (Frank and Mildred) to plop down serious coin to attend your hitching, you'd better be certain that the prime rib is truly prime and the salad is crisp and studded with croutons like walnuts on a sundae, which they will also expect.

 

This year's winner was Oliver Closeoff

Congratulations! We have now arrived at a point in our civilization at which organizers of the annual Philly Naked Bike Ride saw fit to hold the event in August instead of September, because those chilly September winds threatened to freeze the WaWas off the riders.

So, they had the event in late August, and you don't have to be nekkid as a jaybird to participate. They had riders "in various states of undress" around the City of Brotherly Love, riding their Schwinns and getting cheered all over.

It's all for a good cause, promoting riding a bike as a key form of transportation and "fuel-conspicuous consumption." As an aside, it encourages body positivity, as people get as bare as they dare.

They even have folks riding skateboards and scooters and rollerblades - any form of "human-powered transportation” is fine.

I don't mean to brag, but in my fair city of Baltimore, people scooting around au naturel is not going to be a thing. You rent a bike to take part, and who knows where that seat has been?

 

 

Don't swallow this rumor

So there he was,  the guy once known as Chris Bridges and now he's Ludacris, once known as a rapper and know he's an actor as well as being a musical performer, and he dipped his water bottle into an Alaskan glacier and drank that water, and you would think he drank liquid fire or Dr Pepper or something.

He posted a video (of course he did) of himself guzzling that water and hollering. "Oh my God" and millions of Tik Tokers and Instagrammarians saw this action and immediately assumed he was drinking poison.

It wasn't all that long ago that we thought that the streams of our land flowed with crystal clear water. Beer companies sought to associate their product as being cans full of mountain spring water, plus hops, whatever they are. Movies and TV shows were filmed for years showing people with those blanket-wrapped canteens, filling up in an eddying whirlpool near a forest and then taking a long pull from the jug, before climbing back on their horse and telling him, "Kay, boy, let's hit the trail, Many a mile between here and Wichita."

And you know the horse was thinking, couldn't you just drive, instead of me toting your asterisk all over the west?

Back to Ludacris. Glacier experts from the University of Alaska in Fairbanks (which is precisely where I would expect to find them) said this commotion online is, well, "ludicrous.”

Glaciologist Martin Truffer said, "He’s totally fine.”

“It’s sort of understandable that somebody would be concerned about just drinking untreated water, but if you drink water from a melt stream on a glacier, that’s about the cleanest water you’ll ever get.”

 

Ludacris was in Alaska to perform at the State Fair, and to quaff some tasty water at the same time. Walking this Knik Glacier, some 40 miles north of Anchorage, was on his bucket list.

“I’m a water snob,” he said later. “It was the best tasting water I’ve ever had in my life.”

He only says that because, it would appear, he has never tasted the ambrosia we all know as Baltimore Tap Water. Ours comes from Loch Raven Reservoir and is filtered at the Montebello Water Filtration Plant to get all the fish waste and McWrappers out.

So here's an invitation, Ludacris. Come to BMore and drink like we do!

Labor Day 2024

 a

Unless you thought that the Labor Day holiday, the eight-hour day, and health and safety benefits were the result of the beneficence of the wagemasters...

Frederick Douglass (1818 - 1895)  “is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice.”

 - a president of the United States, 2017

Sunday Rerun: On Further Review

Do they even still sell Baby Ruth candy bars? I know they sold a ton of them when I was a bicycle riding, Coke swigging, candy bar munching ball of energy. I was not for the Baby Ruths at all. I liked the Snickers and the Mars bars so much, I invested some stray dollars in a nougat mine out West, but it didn't pay off. The miners didn't take the right kind of drill with them.

But the name of the Baby Ruth candy bar was always questioned. Most people just assumed that the candy company ripped off the name of the Baltimore-born Yankee slugger Babe Ruth, whose popularity zoomed in the early 1920s.

At that same time, the Curtiss Candy Company in Chicago had a treat called the Kandy Kake that wasn't selling so well, so they changed the recipe to a chocolate-covered peanut-caramel-nougat bar and changed the name to Baby Ruth. 

And within five years, Curtiss was selling a million dollars worth a month, a nickel a throw. The money was coming in so fast that the company hired airplane pilots to fly around dropping thousands of Baby Ruth bars from their planes, with little parachutes to guide them to earth and the waiting hands of hoi polloi.

Back in New York, Babe Ruth noticed all this commerce and decided he wanted a slice of the candy, so he put out a bar called "Ruth's Home Run Candy." The Curtiss people said hold on a second here: our lawyers can spot copyright infringement a thousand miles away, and anyway, our candy bar is not named for you, but for President Grover Cleveland's oldest daughter, Ruth.

And that would have been much more believable had not Baby Ruth Cleveland been born in 1891, thirty years before the candy bar. Not only that: Baby Ruth was not even alive anymore; she died of diphtheria in 1904.

So it would seem that claiming they named the candy bar after a baby born three decades before was stretching the truth a little. Stretching is ok... if you're a Bonomo's Turkish Taffy. 

And that taffy has nothing to with the nation of Turkey whatsoever.

Maybe I'll switch to Clark Bars and claim to have invented them!