Sunday Rerun (from 2019): Seal Later

Bogoslof Island is about a third the size of Central Park in New York City. Sitting out there in the Bering Sea, it doesn't seem like a great place to give birth and raise young ones, because not only is it remote, there is an undersea volcano right below that for two years has been spewing steam and mud and sulfuric gas.

And from Alaska (this will sound like a show on the Nature Channel) Here Come The Seals!

Northern fur seal mothers go to the rocky beaches of Bogoslof to have their babies and raise them!



“The population growth of northern fur seals on Bogoslof has been extraordinary,” said Tom Gelatt, head man for a NOAA Fisheries group that studies fur seals.

The thing is, there are plenty of uninhabited Aleutian Islands to choose from, and there is no evidence of a Bogoslof Tourism Bureau luring seals to their specific island with promises of plenty of fish, free evening whale-watching cruises, and inexpensive T-shirts ("My Mom went to Bogoslof to have another baby and all I got was this lousy T-shirt!")

Seals hang in the ocean from November to June and then head for land to breed and nurse in summertime.


One reason for the popularity of Bogoslof might be the natural birthing chairs - rock slabs as long as 33 feet that blew out of the underground in the volcanic activity. Chris Waythomas, a U.S. Geological Survey research geophysicist at Alaska's Volcano Observatory says, “They litter the surface. It’s pretty wild.”

Another tourist attraction, if you like such things, would be the Fumaroles.  No, not that new couple that just moved in from Cleveland. A fumarole is a gas-blowing, mud-tossing geyser that makes a sound like a jet engine as it hurls the earth into the sky. “It was amazing, the sounds that were being produced,” Waythomas says.

It might be that the seals find the chow appealing on Bogoslof. Seals there eat squid and northern smoothtongue, a deep-water fish that looks like a smelt.

I can't tell you how many times in my life I have mistaken a smoothtongue for a smelt.

Probably 8 or 9.

And you know what else stumps the researchers? Seals started going to Bogoslof in 1980, long before the volcano blew its top.

From this we can only conclude that seals are able to predict the future. They have already picked World Series, Super Bowl, and Preakness winners for this season and next.

The Saturday Picture Show, October 5, 2024

 

Let's see. Blockbuster is Gone With The Wind - you can't rent that movie anymore. But maybe you have it on VHS or DVD and you want to let someone else have it because your basement is full of old tapes and discs, and you stream what you want now. Brian Morrison also noticed that newspaper boxes were sitting unused as well, and he started FreeBlockbuster.org, which repurposes old newspaper boxes like those Little Free Libraries some streets have. Take a tape, leave a tape, go home with a copy of "Dirty Work" and rediscover the magic of Norm MacDonald.

"And all the children, they put flowers in their hair. And all the grown ups, they put daggers in their stare ..."  (T. Rex)  Someone has been kind enough to put flowers in the hand of Rosa Parks's statue. A woman of virtue and strength.

Les Voyageurs in Marseille-Fos Port, France. Statues named for emigrants, made by French artist Bruno Catalano, who felt that travelers and people who move to other lands always leave a part of themselves behind.

From nature, this is a wild peacock, as opposed to the Peacock app where we can see NBC shows instead of watching them on NBC, but I don't know why.

LeBron James and his son Bronny will play together for the Los Angeles Lakers this season, although Bronny has confirmed that they will not carpool together to work.

Here's an office that has installed a Nacho Cheese dispenser in the breakroom. And some people question the existence of a deity.

It's autumn already in Finland, and the leaves on the tree will soon decorate the ground, awaiting the work of a Finnish gardener to finish the lawn.

Two-tone tulips! Red and yellow, at the Keukenhof Botanical Garden in the Netherlands.

Someone had the idea to make Oreo-flavored Coke, while all along, Oreos go best with milk. I shouldn't have said that. Look for Oreo Milk on your grocer's dairy shelves soon.

Trucks and cars can't get through in Western North Carolina to bring needed supplies. Count on that delightful stubborn tenacious hybrid of horses and donkeys - mules - to get that delivery done!

There's always next year!

And another baseball season ends in Baltimore. The Orioles, just as I feared/predicted, snuck into the postseason playoffs and lost a two-out-of-three matchup with the Kansas City Royals, two games to none. They scored a grand total of 1 (one) run in the two games: a solo home run by Cedric Mullins in the second game. After his homer, the O's managed to load the bases with no outs, and did a faceplant. They scored no more that day, and now await next season.

The inevitable occurred on social media, sports talk radio, and around water coolers in offices around town. All the experts who last swung a bat in elementary school had to weigh in and call for the manager to be fired. 

Sure. It was Brandon Hyde who left all those men on base. And instead of giving him and his coaching staff credit for two games well-pitched (the Royals scored 1 run in game one, and 2 in the second game) they howl about the hitting.  Had the Orioles lost in two slugfests by scores like 9-7 and 13-10, the hue and cry would have been about how horrible the pitching was.

Baseball, as those who have followed it for more than the last six weeks know, is a long slog through 162 games in a season. There will be times your team scores a lot and gives up fewer runs. There will be times that the opposite occurs. With rare exceptions, it's not the genius of the manager that results in wins. 

As proof, I offer this: Brandon Hyde, the Orioles manager, is the same man who won the Manager of the Year award in 2023. He did not fall off a turnip truck in the offseason and suffer cranial trauma, forgetting everything he knew about the game. He used the same brain and experience and savvy this year, and this year, it just wasn't in the cards.

There's only one winner, but we can all count ourselves winners if we enjoy the game for the spirit of it all every summer.

All Rise!

Not trying to start trouble in your house, but you might want to ask that college graduate in the family if they believe that Judith Sheindlin, aka “Judge Judy,” is an Associate Justice on our "Supreme" Court.

Almost 10% of recent college graduates believe that she is, the reason I bring it up.

I prefer to take my daily dose of justice from Her Honor, Judge Lauren Lake, but a lot of those smarty-pants college kids think Judy is up there with Clarence Thomas and the rest of them.

I wonder if Clarence thinks so?

Other disturbing data from the survey shows that a mere 28.4% of grads know that James Madison was the father of the Constitution. 58% of them think Thomas Jefferson was the progenitor of the Constitution, instead of identifying him as the principal writer for the Declaration of Independence.

Want more?

• 60% of college grads don't know how a constitutional amendment is ratified
• 40% drew a blank when asked who has the power to declare war (Congress)
• fewer that half of them know where presidential impeachments are tried (The Senate)

I know stuff from the olden days because I was that kid who sat around reading the almanac and the dictionary. But there are many things I don't know, such as how to understand people who don't want to know things. 

The car from the last ride

Lovers of real country music attach deep reverence to this 1952 Cadillac, the car in which Hank Williams, Sr, died on New Year's Day, 1953. Hank was enroute to an appearance in Canton, Ohio, when the end came. 

Senior and Junior

A painful back condition had led him to a series of sketchy "doctors" who prescribed inappropriate medicines; a melancholic personality led him to the bottles that everyone knows hold more problems than solutions. And his son, Hank Jr, was born in the spotlight and found himself compared to his father, and struggled with the yoke of being a junior version of someone. No, he's not the songwriter his father was. Was there a Bill Shakespeare, Jr? We don't know for sure, but it would be unfair to expect anyone to write plays like the Bard. After some years of seeking his own spot, HWJr turned out to be very good as a singer, and a multi-talented musician, and yes, he'll pose for photos by this car, the machine in which his dad died, because he's in the same business that his dad was. 

5 x 20

So CBS News has their excellent reporter David Begnaud out "on the road" covering slice-of-life stories from all over, except that he does not have a whole other family that he's keeping out of sight, like Charles Kuralt did. In the present case, they call David's vignettes "Beg-Knows America."

In a nation whose population exceeds 333.3 million, there are going to be stories to tell all over, and Begnaud won't even have to tell them over again. He has that many to choose from.

The other day, his tale was about a woman who found an envelope stuffed with money. $400, I believe it was, and a name on the front. She tried for months and months to locate the owner by name. "Greg Throw," the envelope said, and that must have seemed odd, because not many peoples' names form a complete sentence, except for "Robin Quivers." Or "Ben Folds." Or "Jeremy Irons."

But here's where the story takes a twist. The guy who lost the money - the proceeds from a football pool - was not named Greg Throw at all, but, rather, Greg Thow. Once the finder found that out, it was easier to find the owner, and everything turned out just like in a Hallmark movie.

It took me back to our golden honeymoon, all those years ago, when the missus and I were just setting out on the "C" of matrimony. We found $100 - 5 US twenties - on the sidewalk on Duke of Gloucester St in Williamsburg, VA. We called the local cops and an officer came and took up the bills, telling us that his department would hold them for 30 days to see if anyone claimed them.

Two nights later, just before we were to come home, a young couple from New Jersey knocked on our door at the Wmsbg Lodge. They were on their honeymoon too, they said, and someone had told them that carrying their money in a shoe was the safe way to go. I could think of a hundred reasons for how wrong that was, but we were glad to see them reunited with their bucks.

Haven't thought about them for years, and of course we couldn't tell you their names now, but I wonder if they're still together. If you know people who got married in New Jersey in December, 1973, please ask them if they put their honeymoon in one of those stacked-heel shoes like David Cassidy wore. Here's what they looked like: (the shoes, not the people).