April First Rerun: April the Onest

 Oh yeah, look at the calendar today before you believe anything anyone tells you, except for me, because I will never lie to you, cheat you, deceive you, or fool you.

It's April Fool's Day, commonly celebrated as the day that radio DJs do each other's shows under the other person's name, kids turn off their parents' alarm clocks, swap sugar for salt, call someone's spouse and tell them lurid tales...

We don't know where April Fool's Day, or All Fools' Day, even began. I guess even the cavemen tied each other's shoelaces together or sent each other on an errand to get a left-handed monkey wrench, although how did cavemen know the date was April 1? We know that insurance companies didn't even start handing out calendars until Columbus's day.

You ancient Romans just missed your big day: they call it Hilaria, and it's every March 25. There is also the Holi celebration in India, which was held from sundown on March 17 through sundown the next day. It's also called the festival of sharing and love, or the festival of colors. Put it on your 2023 calendar for March 7.

I didn't know this, but it used to be that Christendom started their New Year on Easter Sunday, until Edict of Roussillon (August 1564). That's when King Charles IX said, "Let's start the new year on January 1, while the kids are out of school for Christmas break anyway." But notice: Easter was a lunar festival, not set in stone on a calendar. It's a moveable date, and those who insisted on clinging to the old ways were the “April Fools.”

There is also speculation that the oldtimers chose April 1 because it's right around the time of the vernal equinox, and many people are fooled by changes in the weather at this time of the year. Take this week, for example.

We don't know if this is Charles IX's fault, but to this day, a victim of April Foolery in France is called "poisson d’avril" or “April fish.” French children go around pinning or taping paper fish to the backs of friends.

I went to a tough school.  We taped real fish to the backs of unsuspecting pianists while they practiced their scales.

Hot Chocolate

Here is a crime in which I can prove my innocence from far, far away:  Nestle said that twelve tons of KitKat chocolate bars were ripped off in Europe last week. Thieves got away with a truckload of KitKat and the KitKat truck as well.

A truck carrying 413,793 ‌of the candy bars left central Italy to satisfy the cravings of KitKat lovers throughout Europe. The truck was supposed to arrive in Poland, but never showed up. And no one knows a darn thing about it.

KitKat announced that the purloined sweets all have a unique batch code, so anyone who scans the batch numbers of the missing bars will receive instructions on how to get in touch with KitKat headquarters.

And they addressed the thieves with words that are at least partly conciliatory: "Whilst ​we appreciate ​the criminals' exceptional taste, the fact remains that cargo theft is ​an escalating ‌issue for businesses of all sizes."

My original point is that no one can pin this on me, because no one has ever seen me with a KitKat in my hand. Never will, as long as they keep making Snickers and Milky Way!

Worldwide

The worldwide ubiquity of the internet has been a wonderful gift to me. I like to meet new people and learn about their lives, and the www has afforded me the chance to form friendships with people all over. I love relating how I heard about the Key Bridge collapse in the middle of the night here in Baltimore from friends in Turkey and India. They had seen the news and wrote to see if we were all right.

But I have to tell you this, the respect for the USA is not near what it used to be. I will let you decide how and why you think this came to be. I have my explanation and you surely have yours. 

No matter how you look at how the world looks at America, you cannot deny this: The Pew Research Center took a survey, and 53% of American adults (admittedly, this leaves a significant portion of the Senate and House of Representatives unrepresented, but...) say the morality and ethics of their fellow citizens is “bad” (somewhat bad or very bad).

In contrast, Pew asked people in two dozen other countries, and most people responding said their fellows are "somewhat good" or "good."

Just over the border in Canada, 92% of the population thinks Canadians are good folks. Just 7% say they live among bad people.

Scott Schieman is a University of Toronto sociologist. He studies the "social psychology" of Americans and Canadians, and it's his stance that there is a negativity here about how we feel about that guy down the street and his family. “Americans tend to think broadly that most other people are worse than they [themselves] are,” he says.  

Maybe that's because we know so much about each other - or think we know. I will never get over the tons of phone calls 911 got in the wake of 9/11 from people calling to report their neighbors for simply "looking foreign," or "coming into their house with grocery bags that might be filled with bomb-making materials."

Things even out, and it's been my observation over the years that most of us have the reputation we earn. Sure, there are mistaken impressions and misapprehensions, but we know each other pretty well, and maybe that's a sign we should begin exhibiting more honorable behavior.

And also, let's start talking about the good things people do, and that will help the way others see us.

 

Sunday Rerun: Forget About It

  The Statler Brothers had a catchy song called "Whatever Happened To Randolph Scott," which contained a very true line: "Everybody's trying to make a comment about our doubts and fears...'True Grit's the only movie I've really understood in years." 

We like to watch old old movies on Turner Classic Movies, and the other night we hit on one which, while not the greatest movie you'll ever see, did a least say a lot about the times in which it was made.

The picture was called "The Housekeeper's Daughter." It came out in 1939, a comedy directed and produced by Hal Roach, who had previously produced Laurel And Hardy and "Our Gang" movies. The stars were Joan Bennett and  Adolphe Menjou, and it featured the film debut of Victor Mature, a man famous for saying many years later, "I can't act, and I have 140 movies to prove it."

The brief rundown goes like this: Joan Bennett plays a gangster's girlfriend who goes home to her mother, who runs the house for the high-class Randall family, but all but one Randall goes away, leaving Robert Randall, who wants to be a newspaper reporter, so he gets a job through connections and stumbles on a murder case which is a huge scandal and leads to the police converging on the house and people shoot off firecrackers and the gangsters think it's gunshots and Robert winds up with Joan Bennett.

OK, I left out some minor details, but the point is this. We look at movies like this, 80-some years later, and we shake our heads.

There were others, called "screwball comedies," around that time. Try to spend some time watching "You Can't Take It With You" sometime and see if your head doesn't spin. That's the one with a crazy family whose normal daughter falls in love with a normal boy and the families get together and all hell starts popping.

There was a movie called "Hellzapoppin' " a couple of years later which was nothing but crazy antics without the barest semblance of a plot.

But think about the times: the Depression was still going on. People were either out of work or just eking out a drab existence, and the only reasonable entertainment was the neighborhood movie theatre where for a nickel or dime ticket, you could take your mind off your troubles and not worry about next month's rent or another night of cereal for dinner or the storm clouds of war menacing Europe (Nazi Germany attacked Poland on September 1, 1939, leading to France, Australia and the United Kingdom declaring World War II.The US was inevitably drawn to the conflict on December 7, 1941, with the invasion of Pearl Harbor.) Tough times call for at least an hour or two of diversion.

And at the Bijou or the Rialto or the Towson Theatre, all that trouble seemed far away  for a while as people, in the pre-television world, watched their favorite stars sing and dance and act, with the exception of Victor Mature.

Victor Mature (l) and Joan Bennett

The days of people going to the movies two or three times a week are long past, but today we download movies to take our minds off what's out there.  And with Victor Mature gone, we still have problems to forget about, and that's why we have Will Ferrell.

The Saturday Picture Show, March 28, 2026

 

The old county jail in my hometown of Towson, Maryland, no longer holds miscreants of any type. But rather than tear down a historic building, the county had a developer with an appreciation for history take it over. They lease space in there now to a variety of firms, and can you just imagine having an all-hands meeting in this room? It makes me feel all Shawshanky!

I don't think you can call these tasteless discs "candy," any more than you can call liver "meat" or non-alcohol beer "beer," but since they've made them since 1847, clearly someone is buying them, and, against all odds, eating them.

You can blow up the picture if you don't believe me, but all of this drawing is made up of little tiny cartoon people faces!

This machine rides around the streets somewhere in Germany, and if the driver is going too fast, just holler, "Hang on, Snoopy!"

I can see people getting a big print of this made up and framing it and hanging it on the wall so they can always feel like they're at the pier in Huntington Beach in California.

I think we begin to mature at the very moment we understand how true this is. We learn to cope by succeeding in spite of this truth.

When they held auditions for the replacement for the Gorton's fisherman, one applicant seemed to have all the qualifications!

They will be glad to hem your pants, if you catch my drift...

For some people, it takes a little while to realize retirement means their Wednesday can be your Saturday any day of the week...

Next week! Try the deep-dish olive pie!

Ouch!

Well, I never dreamed it would come to this, but here we are. In Florida (where else?) some people got into a tussle following a sporting event at a country club, and it wound up with one player slugging his opponent's face and beating him right down to the ground.

The sport in question here is the deadly game of pickleball.

The guy, the slugger, is a 63-year-old, and he stands charged with with two counts of felony battery on a person 65 or older (hey cool! It's a whole separate crime to beat on a senior!) His 51-year-old wife also joined the fight in Port Orange, and she has one single count of felony battery on a person 65 or older hanging over her head, which is not as gray as nature intended, I assume.

Here's where the fracas began: they were taking on another married couple but they began arguing about shots being made in what pickleballers call the kitchen (a marked-off zone on either side of the net.) The rule was you can only hit the ball there once it has landed; otherwise they must avoid it like I avoid pickleball entirely.

Well, you know how these things go. The players started insulting each other, and then the slugger insulted the other player's wife, and then words led to fisticuffs.

And then! At least twenty oldtimers  members of the club got into it. It must have been as glorious as when Morty Seinfeld clobbered Jack Klompus over that astronaut pen on "Seinfeld."

I'm printing this out and carrying it around in case anyone is crazy enough to try to get me to join a country club, or a game of pickleball.

"But I'm famous, don't you understand?"

Please come along with me as I add to my collection of famous people putting on the "Don't You Know Who I Am?" routine.

Today's special guest is Justin Timberlake, arrested in June, 2024, in Long Island, NY, for DWI.

First of all, let's get this straight: He is a talented performer, no denying that. But he is also 45 years of age now, way past the point where we can say, "Oh, he's just a big KID!" 

He left a restaurant and was observed running a stop sign and failing to stay in his lane. This sort of thing tends to attract the attention of police, who are supposed to be taking drunks off the road before they kill people with their cars.

Timberlake's hi-priced attorney, Edward Burke, Jr, maintains that Justin was not intoxicated, and was able to negotiate a plea deal in which JT copped to a lesser offense.

He was not charged with being a preening jackanapes, however. Should have been, wasn't.

I'm not sure why the video of his arrest is just surfacing, but it's chock-full of foolishness. Such as when the officer asks him about his car, and he says it's a rental, and the officer, not recognizing him, asks what he's doing in that part of the woods. JT says he's following his friends back to their house, and that he is "on a world tour."

You know what, when you think about it, we are all on world tours. Some just go farther than others, and most do it while sober. But when the officer asks what the devil he's talking about, Timberlake says: "It's hard to explain ... umm ... I'm Justin Timberlake."

Busted! He was taken in and booked, and the matter was settled in court, but recently, the tape of his most famous appearance since he walked around with his noodle in a box came to light.

So it was that he filed a petition on March 2 in Suffolk County Supreme Court, claiming that if people saw how he acts while cruising the streets it would be bad for his image.

“Public dissemination of this footage would cause severe and irreparable harm to [Timberlake’s] personal and professional reputation, subject [Timberlake] to public ridicule and harassment, and serve no legitimate public interest,” the petition states.

I have to disagree. As a member of the public, my legitimate interest in laughing at people like Justin Timberlake was served quite nicely.

Red-rimmed eyes tell no lies.

 

He gave us "Werewolves Of London"

I'm going to share three words of advice I just read, advice from the marvelously witty songwriter and performer Warren Zevon. Warren died in 2003, leaving behind a colorful life full of ups and downs, periods of success in performing and writing, and periods marked by drug and alcohol abuse. He was only 56 when he died.

It's noteworthy that he was famous for recording other peoples' songs, and having other record his. See him here on the Letterman show singing Prince's "Raspberry Beret"...and Linda Ronstadt had the hit version of his song "Poor Poor Pitiful Me."

But 56 years on earth is plenty of time to reflect and share what one has learned. Once he learned that his death from mesothelioma was inevitable, he let his mordant, thanatotic side out to play...recording a final album called "My Ride's Here," in which he posed for the album cover looking out the passenger window of a funeral limousine.

The reason I bring all this up is to share his thought that he passed along to David Letterman. Those two really appreciated each other. And in his final months, he appeared on the Late Show and gave this advice to one and all:

Enjoy every sandwich.

When I saw that written somewhere last night, I wondered about how foolish we are to race through life without stopping to think about the farmers who grew the wheat and threshed it for us for someone to make bread...the arborist who raised raspberries for use in making jelly...and the farmer down in Georgia whose peanut crop turned into a jar of Skippy.

Don't get me wrong! I'm not writing because I got some bad news. I didn't! Why, just last week my personal physician assured me there is no reason I won't live to be a hundred and some. (I've got great insurance!) That's a lot of years left, and believe me, I am going to feel and express appreciation for the people, places, emotions, and sandwiches that come my way. 

Some gotta win, some gotta pout

 Something really distressing is going on with young male athletes, and of course it comes right back to their raising.

We're talking about competitors refusing to shake hands. You see it in high school and college football games, where the captains meet at midfield for the coin flip before the game. One team's leaders will reach out their hands for a shake with their opposite numbers, and the other guys just lock their elbows, maybe shake their heads.

It's a trend...

See the guy in the Iowa wrestling uniform? That's Mikey Caliendo, up until now the pride of Geneva, Illinois. In the past weekend's NCAA wrestling tournament, Mikey lost again to Penn State wrestler Mitchell Mesenbrink. Mesenbrink's record against Caliendo now stands at 9-0. But the really bad thing is that instead of congratulating Mesenbrink on earning his second individual national title on Saturday, callow Caliendo spurned the handshake he was offered by the winner, keeping his paws in his pockets and not even acknowledging Mesenbrink.  

If I could talk to young Caliendo, and right now I don't think I'd care to, I would tell him to pull himself up to his full 5'8" height and act like somebody. It might take decades, but the chances are he will grow up one day and look back with regret on the day he had the chance to be a man and instead acted like a petulant boy. Right now, he has the irritating countenance of a spoiled brat who has always been told he's the best and demands a recount if he loses, "because it was rigged." 

If I could talk to his coach, I would tell him that "Mikey" needs additional training in areas far off the mat. 

"It's a new armoire!"

 I've heard the good advice "Never meet your heroes," and I have to throw an asterisk * in there, because if you were ever fortunate enough to meet Brooks Robinson, you felt like you were in the presence of a true nobleman.

However, after seeing the Dirty Rotten Scoundrels episodes on E! television concerning the way Bob Barker treated people during his time atop the game show world at "The Price Is Right," I am taking another big old head off my personal imaginary Mt Rushmore. The show says that after Bob's wife died, he made a beeline for the boudoir (or dressing room) of Dian Parkinson, where he urged her to Come On Down. She grew tired of playing Plinko and was pushed out of the show.

Bob then turned to picking on Holly Hallstrom, my favorite of all the models. He picked on her weight, as if she had any extra to worry about. This all started when she refused to back him up in court over the lawsuits filed by Parkinson. That did it, and she found her stuff packed up and herself shoved out the door with it.

Holly and Bob in happier days

The show said Bob demanded 100% loyalty, and was sexist and racist as well. And that he kept in place a producer who grabbed other people where they sit down, and ruthlessly bawled employees out over the smallest things. OH! and that CBS instituted a "ten-second rule," meaning that male employees were only allowed to ogle females on the staff for ten seconds, after which, presumably, their eyeballs were supposed to retract into their sockets.

Parkinson eventually withdrew her suit, saying that the pressure of all that was too much for her, but Holly Hallstrom filed suit also, and she did not back down, although it went on for years and years, and although she had to sell her house and car and couch-surf with friends, her courage paid off in a nice settlement, which did not compensate her for the misery she went through, but still.

As someone who told his fourth-grade teacher that "being a game-show host is the highest calling known to mankind" (and meant every word of it), I tended to agree with Bob, whose dressing room door was labeled "WGMC" for "World's Greatest Master of Ceremonies," but, sadly, it's possible to be that and simultaneously be a filthy dirtbag. 

So, let's see, I still have Brooks, and the Obamas, and Ernest Tubb. Do not tell me anything bad about them, or my Mt Rushmore will have to rush more new ones up there. Think about that for ten seconds!

Sunday Rerun: The brain that wouldn't be right

 I don't know much about artificial intelligence. I don't even know much about real intelligence, and then along comes AI and it looks like it's saying "Al" as in Al Bundy and I'm so confused, it's not fair.

But now even the Googlers are admitting that it's more like artificial unintelligence at times. For one thing, being soulless like some people, AI can't tell a joke from a fact.  And that is dumb. 

Someone recently asked Google AI how to keep cheese from sliding off a homemade pizza.  AI said to mix some glue - I'm guessing Elmer's - into the cheese to hold that mozzarella right in place.

And years ago, I got picked on for suggesting we drop some Visine into chili so my eyes wouldn't water when I hit a really hot pepper in the mix.

Google (they have taken this one down, but still...) advised us to drink a lot of urine to help pass a kidney stone.

Asked when John F.  Kennedy was graduated from college, AI said the most Harvard-y man ever was a U of Wisconsin grad, and specified six different years, including 1993, the thirtieth anniversary of his death.

Asked for an African country that started with a K, AI said there were none, which must have really hurt the feelings of millions of people in Kenya. 

Now, to be sure, some people with nothing better to do on a lovely day like today try to trick Google AI into giving wrong answers. Later, for even more fun, they go to hospitals and loosen the bolts on the wheelchairs.

However, one palm up! We are being told that with Google's generative AI, OpenAI’s, ChatGPT,  and Microsoft’s Copilot, you should just count on them being wrong until you see proof that they're right.

Get this explanation, which is similar to a lot of people explaining what that bag o' of stolen bank money is doing in their pants pocket:  

“The vast majority of AI Overviews provide high quality information, with links to dig deeper on the web, ” Google says. And they add that they are using these and other mistakes to “develop broader improvements to our systems, some of which have already started to roll out.”

Oh, so they KNOW it was wrong and they are now out to prove it. Sorry for any student who did a term paper on JFK Sr, though.

The Saturday Picture Show, March 21, 2026

It's really quite simple. Put an eyedrop in your mouth and then, without swallowing it, get it into your eye. 3x/day for 7 days, and I'll bet by the 21st time you'll be really good at it!
 

I follow some pizza sites because why not? And I'm seeing more and more people cutting them this way, instead of the traditional 6 or 8 pie-shaped slices. Go ahead, but not me.

Just waiting. For what, I can't tell you.

Now, there's what I call a well-stocked pantry! Everything from sauce to syrup.

I guess you've heard, Punch the Abandoned Monkey has found himself a girl. This is for all the lonely people....

Bakersfield College is a community college in California. Just recently, they noticed that the name of that august institution of higher learning has been misspelled on diplomas since 2024. And no one noticed until now.

It looks like some town had a broken-down bus and needed a shelter for a bus stop. It's the perfect marriage of need and availability!

Leonard can be excused because of his lactose intolerance, but have you ever seen anyone else on the Big Bang Theory order cheesecake at the Cheesecake Factory?

Good morning, sunrise, from Baltimore's beautiful Washington Monument!

Someone spotted this picture taken at the Titanic wreckage. Do you think those are personal pan-sized pepperoni pizzas? It couldn't be, could it???

Bell-ringers

I think it's really good that high school students have to complete a certain amount of service time during their school years in order to graduate. It helps them learn that the world does not just revolve around them, for one thing, and for another, it accomplishes good things for the community.

It wouldn't have been a problem for me if that requirement had been in force during my school days, also referred to as the Paleozoic Era. I was proud to be a volunteer firefighter. It taught me a sense of duty and responsibility, gave me a feeling of comradery, and also imparted valuable tips that make me hard to beat in the card game called Crazy 8s even to this day.

I'm second from left here, 1971.

My former company, Providence Volunteers, has a deal that offers free room and board at the station for volunteers who are college students. And tonight, I see that there is a similar program outside Philadelphia, where some Villanova University students are attending classes and serving as volunteer firefighters.

Colton Musselman, Anne Earp, John Burns, and Dominic Cipriani are engineering majors and volunteers. Musselman is studies mechanical engineering, and the others are majoring in civil engineering.

Also, Kylee Hall, a Villanova graduate from 2024, still serves, and she made history  as the first female line officer in the Bryn Mawr Fire Company.

Interesting that they're up in Philadelphia, where the purely American concept of volunteer fire companies was launched by Ben Franklin, who formed the Union Fire Company on December 7, 1736. Yes, Ben Franklin was a volunteer firefighter, among his other valiant pursuits.

I'll bet he was great at Crazy 8s.

 

LED Zeppelin

The guy who did the electrical design on our house was not the best at thinking. I don't think he was thinking when he put a light above the outside basement door that could only be controlled by a switch down in my workshop area.  As if I were going to scoot down there every night to turn it on, and scoot back in the morning to turn it off. 

So I changed it to a light fixture that turned on when it got dark and off when the sun came up, and that lasted for a few years until it got tired of waiting for the sun, and would not come on for any reason. Then ten years or so ago, I got the idea to get one of those new-fangled LED bulbs >>> for the new fixture and just leave it shining 24-7. 

Which I did, and I hope I'm not jinxing anything, but through dead of winter with temperatures far below freezing, and summer sun and heat up to almost 100°, it burns on like Edison intended, even though he was incandescent about it. I'm saying, that bulb down by the cellar door has had a longer life than several Galapagos tortoises.

So who wants to tell me why the LED bulb I installed over my shower lasted two weeks? Every time I turn around, I'm clambering up in the ceiling with a new bulb in my mouth, making the switch. 

I'm counting on the LED empire to make this right.

Nighty-night!

The Washington POST reports on a man who once had trouble getting to sleep, so he stayed up all night figuring out how to beat the problem.

The man's name is Luc Beaudoin, and his field is cognitive science and psychology, so he used his own mind to try some experiments, and the result was a system that does consciously what the brain is doing when we start sawing logs.

“If you wake people up as they’re falling asleep, they often report that they’re having these little micro-dreams,” he says, adding that you can treat yourself to your own mini-dreams, and wouldn't you love to?

Beaudoin's manner of thinking puts him in a dreamlike state, and that tricks the brain into thinking it's asleep, so let's fall asleep for real!

This is what he calls a "serial diverse imagining task," or cognitive shuffling, because you take your random thoughts and shuffle them like you were going to play Crazy 8s.

So, next time you find yourself staring at a clock that says 0341, shuffle the deck! Here's how to do the cognitive shuffle:

Take a word, any word, nothing weird, just neutral. Let's say you choose "phone."

Now, think of as many words as you can that start with "p": penny, philosopher, pen, prattle, and so forth.

As you come up with each word, come up with a scenario involving that word as you picture the word for 5 to 15 seconds.

...you found a penny and you remember the things you used to be able to buy with a cent...

...you picture Kant or Hegel or one of the philosophers of the modern era, such as Snoopy. You remember the fun you always had watching Snoopy win the tree decorating contest...

...you marvel at how many types of pens there are, and how you have come to prefer the ones with gel ink and how many colors of them there are...

...you conjure an image of a politician prattling on and on while everyone in the crowd is excited to get to the pie-eating contest. 

Beaudoin says, don't try to find a connection among the words. Just let your mind be awash in images, and that should be enough to put the old noodle to rest.

The trick is, this sort of thinking requires a certain bit of brain power, and that stops the brain from worrying about that noise you heard in the car, or figuring how you're going to pay for your vacation to Packwood, Idaho.

I might add, as a last resort, you could always picture yourself at work. That puts a lot of people into the arms of Morpheus for good every night.

Weathering the times

You can't win. And when I say "you," I mean anyone who is affected by not only the weather, but also the weather forecasts.

Case in point: starting late Saturday, the weather people were saying that yesterday (Monday) was going to be a dicey day, with chances for heavy rain and wind, even possible tornadic activity (formerly known as "tornadoes").

The school systems reacted by planning to close early yesterday, two hours, sometimes three hours. The rationale is that if the storms hit in mid-afternoon, just as the kids are being dismissed, you'd have chaos on the parking lots and roads. Better to let them out early, right?

Well, the late afternoon news was full of parents who had a LOT to say about this.

 "The kids need to be in school all day! It's safer there, and I have work to do, and I can't interrupt my day to get the kids!"

 "They should have closed the schools! How did they know when the storm would come?"

 "It was right to close early, but they closed too early!"

And then, there was this: as of late evening, the only area that really seemed to get hit hard was out in Carroll County, toward Westminster. Farmers there had wind damage to outbuildings, and one guy had his small herd of Texas longhorns running around free after the fence blew down. So naturally, people drop their worrying and pick up their keyboard and start knocking the meteorologists.

 "They don't know nothing! They just guess!"

 "They make a couple hundred thousand dollars to get people all worked up for no reason!"

  And my perennial favorite: "I could do their job and do it a whole lot better than them!"

There was a time when there was absolutely no scientific weather forecasting, unless you counted Uncle Amos's rheumatism acting up when it was "fixin' to rain." Today we have people doing their best to warn us and help prepare for the worst, while we hope for the best. 

There's no way to foretell the weather with 100% accuracy. Even Uncle Amos got it wrong sometimes. 

Just be glad you're not chasing longhorn cattle all over Carroll County, and take it easy!

My tribute

When I was younger, I tended to see things as absolute. Love baseball and football, don't like basketball or soccer. Love pizza and cold-cut subs, won't touch brussels sprouts or okra. Love an ocean beach, don't care for mountains. Like beer, no hard booze.  And I would rather have a Welch's grape juice than the finest wine you can squeeze out.

As I have matured (pause for laughter) I have found some moderation in a moderate amount of things. F'rinstance, at one point in my life, I thought that Jerry Lewis could do no wrong. I thought every thing he did in the movies was a riot, and I centered Labor Day weekends around his Muscular Dystrophy Association telethon, just to marvel at how he introduced a cascade of "mahvelous pehfohmas" from the likes of Sammy Davis, Jr, to some to Vegas comic or "chantoosie" with the same enthusiasm. And of course, he would work his own act into the show, leaving me apoplectic.

He was born a hundred years ago today as Joseph Levitch, son of a half-way famous "niteclub singer" who went by the name Danny Lewis. Danny, instead of encouraging his vastly more talented son, criticized, demeaned, and humiliated young Jerry. One story tells it all: Danny always wanted a Cadillac, so Jerry got him one as a gift, led the old man out to the driveway and presented it to him. Danny said, "What? You couldn't afford a convertible?"

Inside the entertainer who ran amuck on stage and film, acting like a child with no controls or filter, there you found a man who created equipment and techniques still used today, and a man completely in charge of his productions. But when things went wrong, and they will, and people told him to take it in stride and keep going, he had a most interesting reply, "You can say that. You don't have to live with Jerry Lewis."

This most generous of men (his efforts on behalf of the MD charity added up to billions) referred to the inner Jerry as "that miserable bastard." If only he could have been half as happy as he made so many of us feel. 

Jerry once said, "Going unnoticed has never been my strong suit." People such as he need, demand, the attention and love they felt they never received. In return, they will give you the gift of a laugh. It sounds like a fair deal to me. 

I hope he's happy up above. I'm not sure he ever was, down here. Happy birthday, Jerry!

Sunday Rerun: Tomb It May Concern

 You know the old joke about the guy who was so important at his job, he had several hundred people under him? 

He cut the grass at the cemetery.

Well, the TODAY show introduced us to Haley Hodge, who is fixing to have her fourth child. She has a husband name of Rivers, and the three kids: Finley (10), Crew (3) and Banks, (16 months.)

So where to come up with that crucial fourth name for the soon-to-be new member of the Hodge fund?

Cemeteries. Read the tombstones in the field of stones!

“I know some people might find it creepy, but my mother was a history buff and when we were growing up, she would take us on field trips to cemeteries,” says Mrs Hodge, a physical therapist. “You can learn so much about cultural aspects of the past."

After all, she points out, her sister Cooper got her name from a tombstone. And does she have a daughter named Alice? I guess not, or they would have said.

Mrs Hodge was in Southport, North Carolina, prowling the Smithville Burying Ground, and she came up with two ideas for her daughter-on-the-way...Galloway, and Salem.

Good luck to the Hodges and the new little one. I used to take my turn mowing the lawn at the little cemetery in Providence, and I don't remember any names being particularly inspiring, except for Jehoshaphat, and I don't see that one making a comeback soon.

The burial plot of Jerry Lee Lewis, (there are three names for you seekers!) who said, "Don't put a headstone on my grave. I want a monument!"

The Saturday Picture Show, March 14, 2026

Oh, I think the men in the crowd will get this one all right: the stairs are for sitting down to put on your socks when you leave the tub!

Squirrels are known to prefer dunking their fries in catsup, but when the chips are down, they will take them without. 

Hanging around with a red-shouldered hawk!

This looks like some sort of impressionist painting, but it's a photo of the Kīlauea volcano erupting in Hawaii. Nature puts on a show.

If you're whompin' up a salad, make mine with Romaine, please. And tomatoes and carrot strips and celery and bleu cheese and black and green olives and a few anchovies swimming on top, if you will.

I didn't mean to alarm you with this fisheye; I only did it for the halibut.

Down here on the ground, we might not realize how big an eagle's talons are. Now you know.

The true song of spring is the irritating cacophony these trucks bring. Can't blame them; they have to let the kids know it's time to grab some money and get ready for Fake Mr Softee!

Meteorologists are always telling us there's a blizzard watch, or a blizzard warning. Not being educated in the field, we need help figuring what each situation means. I think Alena Lee from WBAL TV 11 had a great idea: gathering crabmeat, eggs, cracker crumbs, Worcestershire sauce, Old Bay seasoning and parsley means the ingredients are on hand to form crabcakes, while mixin' all those fixin's means grab a plate. What a great way to tell us the difference!

 Here's a news rack from 1942 with reading material for a world and a nation at war. Notice the headline on the SF Chronicle: ROMMEL DRIVES ON DEEP INTO EGYPT.  That bit of war news about the "Desert Fox" was later turned into a collection of poetry by SF-based writer Richard Brautigan.