Getcha socks on!

According to the Washington POST, people who have trouble getting to sleep and staying there are cold-footed, and need to heat up those dogs!

Those in the know say that warming the extremities before dozing off is the key.  

“It’s a natural sleep medication,” said William Wisden, a professor at Imperial College in London. Professor Wisden studies how nerve cells signal sleep. One wonders if he uses his students as test subjects if they nod off during lectures...

But he goes on to say that animals, which we are, after all, like to "nest" to get ready for a long winter's nap. That creates a warm microenvironment around our bodies. You could curl up, wrap yourself in a snuggy blanket or fuzzy socks or turn the blanket up to "igloo" as well.

Wisden's wisdom:

• Take a warm bath or shower.
• Do a quick foot soak in warm water.
• Wear socks to sleep.

Sleep well!

Breakin' the law

 Years ago, when Comcast was running cable lines to some new houses down the street, the guy two doors down (who later achieved local renown for throwing his son's PC through the window when the pre-teen failed to shut it down one night) brandished his police revolver (Baltimore PD) and refused to let the workers work. After a testy colloquy involving city police, county police, and Comcast supervisors, the work continued. 

It always does.

I was reminded of that when I saw a guy on Instagram standing in his yard, garden hose in hand, gleefully spraying a work crew while they tried to install a sidewalk utility box. 

Same result. 

Around the corner from here, developers bought a wooded area that connected to a main street and a side street some time back. They got the necessary approvals and were breaking ground to build a dozen or so houses when a citizen, to wit, a schoolteacher, came out of his house and fired gunshots at the Bulldozers.

Guess how that turned out.

And no listing of foolishness would be complete without recounting the time the governor of Florida found it necessary, as a hurricane bore down on The Sunshine State, to remind Florida Men that stepping outside and shooting a shotgun at it would not halt its crazy career.

Well, hot a-mighty!

Born To Be....

I found an autobiography online, so I'm gnawing my way through it, a few pages at a time. It's "Magic Carpet Ride : The Autobiography of John Kay and Steppenwolf" by the leader of Steppenwolf, widely regarded as the first heavy metal band for their first big hit "Born To Be Wild" ("I like smoke and lightning, heavy metal thunder, racin' with the wind...")

Kay was born Joachim Fritz Krauledat in 1944 in the land then known as Tilsit, East Prussia, Germany (it's now Sovetsk, Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia.) In his early days, it was just he and his mother; his father, Fritz, died in World War II combat a month before Joachim was born.

His mother took the baby in early 1945 to escape wartime conditions, and they eventually made their way in 1949 to Hanover, West Germany, where he grew to learn English and love American rock and roll.

Their next stop as refugees was Toronto, Canada (1958) where the teachers could not pronounce his name and began to refer to him as "John K." 1963 saw him and his mother move to Buffalo and become American citizens. A couple of years later, John got his first piece of US Mail - from the draft board.

Something I did not know was that John Kay, composer and performer of many great songs, is legally blind. The draft board ruled him 4-F (medically ineligible) because he has achromatopsia. From birth, he has been extremely sensitive to light and legally blind, as well as colorblind. He mentions in the book that he loves to have his house decorated up for Christmas, but had never seen all those pretty decorations and lights in anything but black and white.

...hence the dark glasses

And that was the reason his mother took him halfway around the world as a kid, to avail themselves of Western medical care and better nutrition, which doctors advised her to find for Joachim.

Just think: one of our favorite performers started off as part of the huddled masses yearning to breathe free! What a story.

 

Color Us Fans

 I love colors of sports uniforms and fall leaves and the bright plumage of birds. Oddly enough, I love old movies and TV shows in black-and-white. They let us dream about what colors Miss Landers (the teacher on "Leave It To Beaver") wore that night when she came over for a cookout, and we were startled to see Lucille Ball's red red hair in the movie "The Long Long Trailer," because as Lucy Ricardo, you couldn't tell the difference between her hair or Ethel Mertz's.  Or Fred's, for that matter.

We see the Ravens' purple looking great on color TV and at the football palace downtown. If you wonder what those colors really are, you can Google the exact color code for each team.

(I saw a sign on a hardware store once that said "No man can buy custom color paint without a note from his wife. It's just like the combinations of colors on the paint machine at Lowe's. Just by putting the right numbers in your computer, you can "mix" custom colors and make your wallpaper the same shade as Lamar's jersey.)

By the way, we call them The Purple And Black, but the Ravens' "purple" is really  Persian Indigo (#241075), and it's augmented by University Of California Gold (#BC9428), NCS Red (#C8032B), White (#FFFFFF) and Black (#000000).

Over in the land of 10,000 lakes, the Minnesota Vikings dress in KSU Purple (first used by Kansas State University #4F2185), Philippine Yellow (#FFC704), and Crayola's Gold (#EABF99).

And please don't make the mistake of saying the Baltimore Orioles dress in orange! It's Sinopia, if you please (#DF4400), White (#FFFFFF), Black (#000000) and Philippine Silver (#B5B6B8).

We have a car whose color is officially known as "Hot Lava." It's a distant cousin to Sinopia.

I think I have a Cousin Sinopia, too!
 

Sunday Rerun: With a name like Smucker's...

 While a lot of people skip lunch altogether, many of us still tie on the noon feedbag every day. Gigantic heaping deli sandwiches, tureens of soup, pizza by the slice, salads, wraps, tacos, quinoa bowls, the list goes on...

I hardly eat any lunch at all, but if I want something while the noon news unravels, I'll get a slice or two of that flourless bread, schmear Skippy and Smucker's Sugar-free raspberry preserves all over everything, and go to town. 

(I don't literally go to town. Town has nothing I need.)

Yes, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are nothing to look down the end of your nose at, now that the mercilessly well-conditioned athletes of the NFL are gobbling 80,000 Uncrustables per week.

In simpler terms, that's equivalent to the weight of three Travis Kelces, who is known to slide Uncrustables down his neck daily.

I've never had one. I'm not out there doing NFL drills every day, so I have time to make my own Sammies.

But in order to keep the hungry maws of both the NFL and the elementary schools of the nation, the J.M. Smucker Co. just built a 900,000-square-foot Uncrustables sandwich manufacturing facility in McCalla, Alabama.

Big sandwich factory 

Smucker introduced the idea of prepackaged sandwiches in 1998 to meet the needs of the many who lack the time to spread PB and J on bread.

Try this toasted!

The Saturday Picture Show, September 13, 2025

 

There's a documentary coming out soon about the great John Candy. Someone found a 1986 Chrysler LeBaron and togged it out to look just like the one John and Steve Martin were riding in in "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles." Ryan Reynolds showed up at the premiere, driving the car. I can only hope he was listening to "Mess Around" by Ray Charles.

Yes, Neitokainen (it's actually a pond) is in the exact shape of the country it resides in. How do you say "Really Cool" in Finnish? 

It's a possum saying, "Snap the picture now while the moon's right behind me!"

And that would be a whale skeleton on the side of the hill. My guess is that the whale went over the hill for supplies, and then the tide went out, and he was left behind.

So you're looking for four-leaf clovers, and you come up with a fiver. 

You've seen those memes where people with mock sympathy say they are playing the world's tiniest violin...here's the world's largest. It's in Sydney, Nova Scotia.

Somewhere, they are recreating the good old days of elopement at a town festival. The woman playing the bride has the added challenge of walking a tightrope to get to her intended, who's playing a cello. There's a lot of symbolism in this picture, but we don't do symbolism, because who knows what to stand for?

Thought I'd get a picture of a covered bridge before everyone starts posting the ones where the leaves are changing. These were built with roofs to make the bridges last longer in bad weather.

Look closer. please! This is a diorama of a bridge culvert, replete with graffiti, but the whole thing is inside a cut-away spray can!

He wants to take a picture of himself playing with your camera, but he needs the camera to do it. Hmmm.

Fun Fact Time

The map below shows what you would have if you made a Casserole of Many Nations using Australia as a base. Not answered is the question, Why would you want to do that? You would want to do that to prove that Australia is wider than the moon.

 Mr Moon sits up there, 2112 miles wide. Australia is 2485 miles wide. You can verify this tonight by looking up in the sky after dinner. Measure the moon by sighting it between your thumb and forefinger, and then come back inside and measure the gap 'tween thumb and pointer. 2112 miles, right there.

Now, Australia is flat. A lot of people will try to tell you that Earth is flat, but it's spherical. Its continents are flat as a kitchen table, yet they spin on a giant beach ball. How can this be? Discuss.

One of you dear readers must have a son or daughter studying geometry. Maybe you are that student! Can you tell us the surface area of the moon?

This is part of my continuing series called "Learning Never Ends." I sent for a banner to hang up with that slogan, but they misspelled it. It says, "Leering Never Ends."

That's one way of looking at it!

Left behind

For weeks after September 11, 2001, there were cars left behind in the parking lot at the Giants/Jets stadium across the river in East Rutherford, NJ. Many people would park there before catching a train or bus into New York City, but that trip turned out to be the last for many of the people who parked on that beautiful morning.

As the police undertook the grim job of having friends or family claim the cars, they noticed the tiny details we all have in the car...CDs or tapes, dry cleaning to be dropped off, library books, something to take to a friend after work, a hoodie or rain jacket, all that we take for granted.

I think it's good to take a second when we leave the house or park the car or come home in it to give thanks that we're still here, to ask God for help, or just to thank him and ask him to bless the memory of those we love and lost.

One day, who knows? Appreciate this day and hope it's as great as that day started off to be.

Keep your hands to yourself

About the Ravens' loss to the Bills the other night, the less said, the better, but let me pass along a little free medical advice to people who think it might be a good idea to reach out of the seating area and shove a football player, or smack one on the helmet:

Don't do that, if you ever want to come back and see another game.

A 17-year-old boy decided to try that during the third quarter Sunday night, giving DeAndre Hopkins a little helmet punch and then trying the same on Lamar Jackson, who gave him a free two-handed chest compression.

The youth was ejected by stadium security and has been banned indefinitely by the NFL, but at least he was able to go home a little early and finish up his essay for English 11 the next morning. It was called "Live and Learn."

Fans see players do this sort of thing to each other, but there is no invitation for Hoi Polloi to come down and join in the smacking. You pay to see a football game, watch a football game, no more, no less.

Son, in the immortal words of Red Forman, don't be a dumbass.

 

The Wizard NOT from Waverly Place

I saw that "psychic" "medium" John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt on the television with Kelly and Mark yesterday. It's always a treat to see people bamboozled as people "gifted with powers far beyond the normal" are able to read minds and foresee the future.

They used to call these people "soothsayers." The word comes from the Olde English "sooth" meaning truth, and "sayer" meaning "he won't stop talking." And The Amazing Randi could tell you how these sharpies operate, but he's dead since 2020...and he knew about it well in advance.

What I saw on the TV was a guy talking to a woman "chosen totally at random from the audience" who just happened to be sitting there with a microphone in her hand as the wizard peered out at her. She asked if her late husband had a message for her from beyond the grave. The soothsayer said, "Which one? I'm seeing two husbands."

These days, two marriages seem to be the arithmetic average. But her mouth was agape.

Then, He Who Knows All said, "I'm seeing August. Did he leave in August?" Clearly befuddled, the woman shook her head, but the seer kept on: "I'm seeing the number 8!" Still no sale.

And he said, "I'm seeing a kitchen remodel in your past." Safe guess; at this lady's age, she's seen a Radarange or two installed. She nodded enthusiastically, but the guy took one too many steps when he said, "I'm seeing a disagreement about one corner of the kitchen. Is that anything?"

Seeing him floundering like a goldfish who jumped out of the bowl, Kelly and Mark swept the segment to a close.

Randi explained how these guys operate. The key is that there some questions that everyone will nod to, and from there, just get the person to tell their story, and claim the credit for "knowing" it.

Of course, if the man from TV is any kind of psychic, he already knows that I blogged about him today, and should be contacting my attorney, Perry Mason, sometime later.

From the animal kingdom

 With the exception of Kate "Ma" Barker, matriarch of the boys who ran the Barker-Karpis Gang during the 1930s, the animal kingdom is replete with stories of mothers who go to great distances to prepare their children for future success.

Just as human moms and dads take the young 'uns to the Y for Diaper Dip toddler swimming tips, an otter mom will make a makeshift life vest for the pups from a bundle of kelp, until Otter, Jr, learns to paddle around.

And somewhere along the way, groups of otters learn to hold on to each other by the flippers so they don't drift apart.

It must work. You've never heard of an otter calling 911, claiming to be lost...

Sunday rerun: Pants on Fire

 Sometimes as I cast about the world wide nets to find news to share with you, I see a story that I figure must be fake news.  I mean, when you see a story about a lifelong beer lover winning a brewery in a lottery, or someone falling down while getting off the x-ray machine, thus breaking the leg that the x-ray has just shown not to be broken, or a hapless motorist driving a Ford crashing into the display room of a Chevrolet dealership, it catches the eye, am I wrong?

But how does "lawyer's pants catch fire" sound?  And add to it what he was doing at the time the tweed started blazing...

His name is Stephen Gutierrez, and he practices law in Florida. And his defense (unsuccessful) of one Claudy Charles, 49, was taking place in a Sunshine State courtroom when, suddenly, the attorney's slacks began smoldering.   

And Charles was on trial for arson! He set his own car on fire, or, at least, the guilty conviction the jury handed down said he did.  I imagine the jurors were spellbound by Gutierrez's defense of his client ("Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, pay no attention to the evidence the state showed you, and remember, the police have been out to get my client for years and years!") as he stood in the Miami-Dade county courtroom, weaving his masterful defense in an oration that led many observers to compare him to the young Clarence Darrow, or would have if they knew who Clarence was.

And then his pants caught fire.

He was trying to convince the jury that Charles's car had just *poof!* spontaneously combusted, but it was his trousers that did that. It wasn't all that spontaneous. He had several batteries for those electronic cigarettes in his pants pocket, and the cells contacting each other led to sparks and smoke and embarrassment, as Gutierrez darted out of the courtroom and into the mens' room  to scoop water out of the sink and onto his onto his britches.

Gutierrez

The word that stunned witnesses used in describing the smoky scene to the Miami Herald was "surreal."

The attorney returned to the chamber with his pants all wet and his pocket all singed.

"This was not staged," Gutierrez told the paper. "No one thinks that a battery left in their pocket is somehow going to explode. After careful research, I now know this can happen. I am not the only one this has happened to, but I am in a position to shed light on the situation."

And what's great about it is, he doesn't need a flashlight to shed light on it...he can just hold up his pants!

The Saturday Picture Show, September 6, 2025

You know his stereo won't play "Born To Be Wild." Maybe, "Pass Me Not, Oh Gentle Saviour"?

It's hummingbird season, and this guy has his best courting outfit on. Put out the sweet nectar, please! 

I know there's talk about adding the craggy visage of a current political performance artist to the four men enshrined on Mt. Rushmore. However, the rock structure there (you see the cracks) is crumbling and cracking due to aging and erosion. As it is, what's left of the National Park Service is working to fortify the monument, without which maintenance it would crumble and fall. So, maybe find another mountain? 

Photographer Ray Guibulo was at the proverbial right place/right time and caught this shot at the US Open.

What a cool idea! Just a nice long strand of used-car-lot lights to light up that old red barn all fancy!

Face it: the rotgut fluid seen here was to wine as tofurkey is to Butterball, as bilge is to mountain spring water, as John Grisham is to Truman Capote. But, at a dollar a bottle, they sold a gazillion bottles here.

As we approach the sad 9/11 anniversary next week, here’s a current view of the World Trade Center area. We moved on. We forgot nothing, though.

How nice to have a walking trail with a bridge and a pond!

This is not why people join the National Guard. Sure, the parks in DC need maintenance. But that work should be done by maintenance staff, not soldiers. 
 

All right, the first tree has gone red. That's it! Get out the flannel shirts, put a shoulder in the crock pot, find the rake, choose a goblin getup. Fall. Is. Here!

Cornball

Get ready for the 2025 Corn Moon! That's what moon watchers call the September full moon. It will occur this Sunday, September 7, at 2:09 p.m. EDT. 

This year's Corn Moon is a big deal because there will be a total lunar eclipse at the same time. That's what they call a Blood Moon". Your friends and kinfolk in the Eastern Hemisphere will enjoy the eclipse, but North America will experience the moonrise after the eclipse has passed. We'll have to be satisfied with watching it on CNN or something. 

Still, Americans by the millions will gather in backyards, taverns, and 1960s-era fallout shelters and greet the Corn Moon with corn on the cob, corn pancakes, corn muffins, and corn fritters. 

Anyone who shows up bearing Candy Corn will be imprisoned. 

The first Mr T

I got to thinking about Conway Twitty the other day, and not about music. I know, everyone knows the story of a man named Harold Lloyd Jenkins from out of Friars Point, Mississippi who changed his name by picking two Southern towns (Conway, Arkansas and Twitty, Texas) and became one of the first Elvis-style rock-and-rollers in the 1950s.

And if you've known me for more than half an hour, you know that the Broadway musical "Bye Bye Birdie" was about an Elvis-style rock-and-roller in the 1950s who was drafted into the Army, and how his farewell was turned into a giant Elvis-style publicity stunt. And Broadway named that fictional character "Conrad Birdie."

You see the similarity, right?

The real Conway had a big hit with "It's Only Make Believe" in 1958, but after that, he was hard put to make a good living as a second-rate Elvis. After a bad showing at Atlantic City's Steel Pier in 1965, with The Beatles even topping Elvis in popularity on the record charts, Conway gathered his band around him and said, "Boys, we're going country."

And there began a series of hit records and concert appearances rivaled by few.  He had his first country hit in 1968 with "The Image of Me," and when "Hello Darlin'" spent a month as the #1 Country song in America in 1970, his new path started paying off. 23 consecutive singles hit the Top Ten; 10 of those were #1. 

And "Family Guy" fans will remember how, for no apparent reason, Peter Griffin would say, "Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Conway Twitty," and you'd see a tape of him singing on "Hee Haw." That's the proof that he reached the top of American culture.

But that's not even what I'm talking about. I think of Conway, and I think of him rounding up his band in Atlantic City one summer night, with the sound of crashing waves in the distance, and announcing his abrupt change in direction.

It reminds me of when you see an old friend with whom you're sort of lost touch, and he/she announces that they've turned in a far right radical, or a far left radical, or joined the Constructionist Party, or subscribed to Fortean Times magazine or become a pescatarian ('with an occasional burger") or decided to cut down on showers (once a week) or meals (one per day), or refuse to spend any $5 bills they get in change or buy seven pairs of sox per week and only wear a pair once, discarding them at bedtime.

Or let's say they have decided that AI is part of a plan to overtake the world, and they spend countless hours weekly trying to rid the world of artificial intelligence, or they have vowed never to put fresh laundry away and have their furniture as stacking areas for pants, shirts, undies and sox, and sleep on the closet floor.

Or maybe they have decided to quit their job and follow a band around nomadically. but instead of Dave Matthews, they trail behind a Philadelphia Mummers group.

I can accept any of these decisions, it being none of my beeswax what people do. I just want to know if they hold family meetings and announce that from here on, every member of the family will be issued a musical instrument and expected to join the chorus of "Over the River and Through the Woods" every Thanksgiving.

GTH

In my dotage, I don't really care about what I wear; as long as the neighbors aren't shocked when I take out the trash, no problem. It's jeans or shorts or sweats and some t-shirt or t-shirts layered.

Ah, but in the day...my part of town is regarded as Preppie Town, so of course it was Weejuns on my feet, button-down Oxford shirts, ties either repp (stripe) or club (little figures rampant), and GTH pants.

That's GTH as in "go to hell" pants as in if anyone doesn't like them, they can go to hell. The pants must either be brightly colored or dotted with figures such as sailing, golf, lacrosse, whatever.

Guys my age, if we can find our old GTH pants in some dusty old wardrobe, we tend to find that cotton shrinks over time, so we need new, larger, pants. And just for the record, we never call them "slacks." Why would we?

Ooops part 2

 Here's the way it usually goes:

Someone rich, or famous, or both, makes a horse's ass of himself in public. (Except for Roseanne Barr, it's always a man.)

He's caught driving drunk, or swiping money from a poorbox at church, or cheating on his wife, or waving his whatsis from a beachside balcony, or asking for Swiss cheese on a cheese steak sub.

Step one in response is usually silence, and a request that "the family be left alone as we face this situation in faith together."

Then a carefully written screed appears, purported to be the words of the subject of the furor, but crafted in a way that only someone who recently emigrated from one of those Brazilian jungle communities so cut off from the world that they've never seen "America's Got Talent" would fail to recognize its inauthenticity. Always expect the words "this is not who I am" to appear in the text.

Then, if we're lucky, the jerk disappears for six months, only to re-emerge in time to promote his "frank tell-all" memoir in an interview with Michael Strahan.

Those six months are usually some of the sweetest days of any year.

This past weekend, we saw a slight hiccup in the normal procedure. A rich guy grabbed a hat that a tennis player was giving to a young man at the US Open.

At first, this Polish millionaire went full-on horse's patoot, saying, "You've got to be quick to get ahead" and other self-serving righteousness. He quickly deleted his social media as social media turned on him. 

Two days later, apparently under the direction of a wise public relations person, he's changed his tune. 

Now he says he "made a huge mistake" and was convinced the tennis player was passing the hat to him.

Sure. He gave it to the kid to pass to you, buddy.

But here it comes:  "I know I did something that seemed like consciously collecting a memento from a child," he wrote in a statement. "This wasn't my intention, but it doesn't change the fact that I hurt the boy and disappointed the fans. I would like to unequivocally apologise to the injured boy, his family, as well as all the fans and the player himself."

A little late, a little too late. As the proverb says, the best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best is today.

Meaning, don't be a jackass in the first place, but when you're caught in jackassery, don't make it worse by doubling down with more.

Labor Day reminder

 

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: Do you have a Denarius for two nickels?

 I once found a copy of the cassette version of "America's Greatest Hits" on the sidewalk in Towson during a pouring rainstorm. I let it dry out for a week or so, and then it played just fine, but it was only a matter of time before it was replaced by a CD of the same album, which I am still looking for on the sidewalks of the county seat. No luck yet.

Another time I found the a tiny version of a Swiss Army knife. It has a small blade, scissors, and a screwdriver. Not bad for something I found free for nothing while walking a nature trail.

And that's about it for the entries in the What I Found file, but we can't all be lucky like 8-year-old Bjarne, over in Bremen, Germany, who was playing in the sandbox at his school when he dug up a silver Denarius. 

No, that's not a fancy racing car, it's a Roman coin at least 1,800 years ago. 

Uta Halle, the Bremen state archaeologist, says, “We are glad that Bjarne was so careful. [The discovery is] very special, because there have only been two comparable coin finds from the Roman Empire in the city of Bremen.”

It's a puzzle how the coin even got there, because much of what we now call Germany was within the borders of the old Roman Empire, but Bremen was not!

So maybe someone in the last 1,800 years went to Rome and bought sandals or something and went back home with this coin as change from the purchase.

Or maybe it fell in the River Weser and washed up on shore in Bremen and was part of a pile of sand scooped up for the sandbox.

Or it could be that a careless coin collector was playing in the sandbox.

It's a pretty cool souvenir and I wish young Bjarne a lot of fun showing it to people for the rest of his life. 

Two sides of the same coin.

The Saturday Picture Show, August 30, 2025

I don’t know where this is, but I guess it's a museum where one can insert one's hand into a slot and touch a piece of Mars. If that doesn't do it for you, try aisle 11C at your BuySumMore supermarket and grab a full-size Mars bar.

This owl in North Carolina is Raleigh good at camouflage, and i think that's a hoot.

Just a little time and some seeds, and you, too, can make your own hot sauce! 

Hold up real quick! Is this giant billboard not also a giant distraction? "Well, Judge, I ran off the road because I was driving and saw this sign about not getting distracted..."

As many times as I went to the movies as a kid, I never once had Dots. No Black Crows, Necco wafers, or nonpareils either. I did put a hurting on some Milk Duds, I want to tell you.

Here's a look at two pigeons: one just born, and one yet to hatch. 

Sunrise at Yosemite. Not YO-sem-ite.

It says here, there's nothing like creamy, cheesy, Baltimore cheesecake. They’re great after crabcakes.

Warm, inviting light in this painting of a house so real that it seems to invite you to come in and get warm. 

You have to imagine that these steps once led to a magnificent mansion. Once.