"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. 

Fox News

Did you know that the average fox in the wilderness can jump higher than a house?

It's true, but to be fair, the average house cannot jump.

But...jump up to New York City, where a red fox that somehow jumped onto a westbound ship was nabbed after he got here. Customs officers took him off to be re-homed, as the current expression for "adoption" has it.

He apparently boarded the ship in Southampton as part of a Titanic deception and is thought to be about two years of age. 

He got here Wednesday, weighed in at 11 lbs, and now awaits more permanent quarters than what he's been given for now at the Bronx Zoo, whose spokesperson said,  "The  Zoo regularly works with officials to help rescue wildlife that is illegally trafficked through nearby ports and airports." 

In Britain, they are called "urban foxes" because urban sprawl squeezed them out of their rural homes, and now they ride double-decker buses and eat fish and chips! There are tens of thousands of them darting through the streets, many of them walking the streets of Soho in the rain.

Oh wait, sorry. That was a wolf.

 

Good afternoon, Mrs Cleaver!

I don't understand human psychology, let alone that of animals. I mean, it's one thing to analyze human behavior (as if behavior happens anymore), because we can gain insights by talking to the other humans.

Question: "Why did you steal your mother's car?"

Answer: "She looked at me funny when I was 7."

Everyone has all the reasons and all the justifications, but you wonder how right they are.

I bring all this up, because the other day, someone asked if anyone else watched, or left on, the Leave It To Beaver channel on Comcast, which plays nothing but old "LITB" episodes 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The show premiered on October 4, 1957, which became a memorable day not only for introducing us to Beaver,  Wally,  June and Ward Cleaver, but also for the launch of the first Russian Sputnik, which kicked off the Space Race. America won the race by putting a man on the moon in 1969. 

You understand, in the days before cable and streaming and DVRs and whatnot, if you wanted to see the Beaver, you had to be there on Saturday night (or Wednesday night or Friday night; they jumped around a lot!) in front of the TV when it was on, or you missed it!

In October, 1957, I had just begun first grade, and when the last new "Beaver" ran in spring of 1963, I was finishing my sixth grade at Hampton Elementary, so that fit nicely.  And six years later, just after I scraped through high school, that's when the Americans got to the moon, in spite of what your loony friends tell you about it all being a Disney fakeout.

So yes, leaving the Streaming' Beave on Channel 4164 all day suits me fine. And we make sure to leave it playing for Eddie Cat when we go out, so she will feel right at home with Gilbert and Larry and Eddie Haskell and Lumpy and all the rest.

It's comfort food for the mind! 

It shouldn't happen, but it does

Do we chalk this up to a stupid local custom, or to national stupidity? You probably saw this on the news - a high school teacher and golf coach in Georgia, Jason Hughes, was killed when a stupid juvenile prank went horribly wrong. 

It's prom season down there, and the local custom in Gainesville GA is for kids to "roll" the houses of teachers and what-have-you, which means covering the dwellings in hundreds of sheets of two-ply Charmin.

Mr Hughes, 40, was said to be excited about the prank, and was skulking around in his own yard hoping to "catch" the kids in the act, according to his widowed wife.

It was raining last Friday the 6th when the kids did their prank, and Hughes came running toward them, and slipped on the wet road, and got run over by a pickup truck driven by Jayden Ryan Wallace, 18, according to local sheriff’s office.

The story is that the students got out of their vehicles and tried to help Hughes until medics arrived, but you know how that went.

The New York TIMES reports that Mrs Laura Hughes is also a teacher at the same school, North Hall High, and she says her husband and the students all loved each other.

 

Aware of the annual tradition, Hughes was approaching them, not to be confrontational, but to be part of the fun with them.

Mrs Hughes says the family supports dropping the charges against all the kids,

These are the charges:  Wallace is up on a felony charge of homicide by vehicle in the first degree, as well as charges of criminal trespass, reckless driving and littering. Four other individuals involved in the prank face charges of criminal trespass and littering.   

The school district put out a warning about prom season pranks just days before the incident:

“While we understand that prom is a time for celebration and creating lasting memories, we must emphasize the importance of responsible behavior and respect for others and their property. In previous years, some pranks during prom season–sometimes referred to as Junior/Senior Wars– have gone too far, resulting in damage to property.”

I don't even know how to think about this. Of course, you can already hear people saying, "Never in anyone's wildest DREAMS did the thought occur that someone would be injured, let alone KILLED, by a seemingly innocuous bit of fol-de-rol..."

Any time you have moving vehicles and six people running around them, plus wet streets, you run a horrible risk.

I'm not trying to be Mr Buzzkill. I'm trying to be Mr Find A Better Buzz.

Great moments

And so, we add another name to the "99 Club," for those who fall a year or so short of living to 100 years of age.

But this man deserves all the glory and honor, for he was Alexander Butterfield, a former Nixon White House aide, who passed away in his California home yesterday morning. During his time working in that disgraced administration, Butterfield was involved with the installation of a covert voice-recording system that recorded the voices of the president and All His Men.  “Everything was taped … as long as the president was in attendance,” Butterfield testified on July 16, 1973, at a hearing of the Senate Watergate Committee panel, led by Sen. Fred Thompson, a Tennessee GOP lawmaker and chief minority counsel to the Watergate committee. 

TV viewers will remember Fred for playing District Attorney Arthur Branch on "Law & Order," where he chewed scenery for five seasons, attempting to be a down-home country lawyer running the prosecutions in Manhattan. Bad fit.

I was watching the Watergate Hearings myself that day, and when Butterfield bravely broke ranks and told the truth, I leaned my head toward the window in the direction of Washington, D.C. because I was sure I heard the sound of lawyers running and subpoenas being typed. All the Nixon chicanery, dirty tricks and lies, so long suspected and rumored, were actually recorded! 

55 weeks later, his last pitiful defenses shattered, Nixon stepped down into ignominy, and the courage of Mr Butterfield largely made that possible. 

When they finally dug out the tapes, I'm sure there was one with Nixon going, "Butterfield said what????"

He didn't give a hoot

There's an antique store in Durham, upstate New York, where one can really find anything on earth. As so it was that recently, a shopper looked over a cookie jar in the form of a chicken and saw a real live owl next to it.

No word on whether the owl was full of cookies or not, though.

The little town of Durham is 127 miles north of Manhattan, in case you want to shop up there. 

Customers, apparently used to seeing nature on display, told the front counter that something "extremely lifelike" was on the novelty shelf.

And when the environmental conservation police officers got to the store, they found a brown-and-white owl perched on a shelf with its eyes firmly shut.

And the officers took the sleepy owl out of the store and into a woods, where it flew into a tree, with a heck of a great story to tell his friends and family.

Eastern screech owls are nocturnal and spend most of their time nesting in tree cavities, when they're not out shopping for a gift for their moms.

Sunday rerun (from 2021): Get up!

Here we sit in 2021, with all the latest inventions and conveniences, living like I don't know what.

But I'll bet that at least half of us awoke this morning because an alarm pierced our ears as we tried to sleep a little more...a phone, a watch, a clock radio, whatever. My clock radio sounds off at 0505; if not, the cats would pile in at 0506 demanding food, water, and attention, all of which I am glad to offer.

But what if we were back in the olden days, without alarms and clock radios, and I wanted to get up before the rooster woke up and starting his caterwauling?

I would engage the services of a knocker-upper. How about that? More about that in a minute...

Even longer ago, there were candle clocks, invented in China. The deal was, candles were filled with nails down toward the bottom, and allowed to burn all night. At a certain point, the wax would melt all the way, allowing a cascade of nails to make a hellish noise on a metal tray below it. Nice way to wake up, but it must have been tough to set the candle clock to disturb you at some specific time.

And of course, on The Simpsons episode "Miracle on Evergreen Terrace" (season 9, episode 10) we see Bart drink 10 glasses of water at bedtime on Christmas Eve so he can get up early the next day to tear into his presents. It's always about the Simpsons for me.

Lisa tells Bart, "You didn't invent that, Bart. The Indians used to drink water to wake up early for their attacks."

To which Bart replies, "It's always about the Indians, isn't it, Lise?"

I hate to tell Bart this, but when you are of Social Security age, ten glasses of water won't let you sleep for more than 45 minutes, trust me.

As society grew, factory whistles and church bells woke some people, whether they wanted to get up or not.  And those knocker-uppers...

Wake-up girl Mary Smith, 1930, London

Bob Cratchit had to get up early to get to the office before Mr Scrooge, so he could put one lump of coal on the fire. People in London, people known as "knocker-uppers" went door to door with a list of what time people wanted to get up. With a long stick in their hand, or a pea shooter for those whose rooms were on the ground floor, they went around doing their duty, getting Scrooge and Cratchit alike out of bed and off to the office.

What history does not tell us is, who woke up the knocker-uppers? Just like how the snow plow driver gets to work in a blizzard, there are things we are not meant to know.

The Saturday Picture Show, March 7, 2026

 

Now it's the restroom, requesting a review. It's a wonder it doesn't ask for a tip!

A great "gift for him" for any occasion - a wallet that makes his license photo look like Batman!

Here is a one-horsepower Mustang!

Amish Country in the spring is a ride worth taking!

This can be your free wallpaper for the week and also the name of your alternative-country band: Turkeys In The Fog.

You won't see this in the Army recruiting commercials. Here's your breakfast, Eisenhower. 

The Halloween pennant dragonfly (Celithemis eponina) pays homage to the wonderful Alysa Liu.

The new home of the Philadelphia Kansas City Oakland  Las Vegas A's baseball team is taking shape in the desert. No rush, fellas. They'll just play in Sacramento for now. But hurry up before they move again!

This happened to me at work one day as well as to this person: I looked down at my feet and saw one Nike and one New Balance. I spent the rest of the day trying to hide my stompers. But I was able to remark that I had "another pair at home just like these!"

This crash victim grew tired of explaining his scars, so he added pictures.

Crazy at the store

Sometimes I feel like the steel ball in a pinball game, just careering from one odd thing to the next. 

Do you ever feel like some massive series of pranks is afoot? Do you wonder why does it always happen to you?

You tell me. I was in the grocery store - no names, please, but it rhymes with cries and tries - just for a couple of things (tea bags and brownie mix, to be exact.) When I got to the checkout area, there was a bit of a line at the one (ONE!) register with a live employee on duty, so I broke one of my cardinal rules and went to a self-checkout. Never again, grrrr.

Ahead of me was a young mom with a few items and her two little girls. Each of the girls had one of those little "shopper in training" miniature carts. Cute and cuter, I thought to myself, and waited for them to finish. Since the mom had to wrangle her purchases into a bag and then get the girls lined up to push their wee carts to the exit, this took a little time, of which I have nothing but, right?

Along comes the trail boss - an officious young woman who works for the store and wanted to break up the eddying mob around the checkout. "You can step up here to #6," she looked at me and commanded.

"All right. I'm just waiting for these ladies, no problem."

"Well, did you say, 'excuse me'?" she snarled.

I have to admit. I've been taken out to dinner, taken for a ride and taken for a fool, but it is rare that I am taken aback. I was yesterday, though. In fact, I was so surprised that I said, "Did you really ask me if I said 'excuse me' to these ladies?" and she said, "We got to keep these lines moving."

I guess the total time it took for the three females to move out was 7 to 8 seconds, but here it is, hours later, and I am still reeling from the shock of being offered etiquette lessons from someone who just months ago was attending the Junior Prom. 

Years ago - even before the age of cell phones - the Roman orator Cicero went around saying, "O tempora, o mores!". It was all right for him to speak in Latin, as that's what everyone did back then. The expression means "Oh, the times! Oh, the customs!", and Cicero was talking about the decline in manners and proper behavior in the days of the Roman Republic. 

Maybe I should say that to her the next time she tries to get an old man hustling.

Last Call

I can't say for sure, but we've all heard that after the Titanic hit an iceberg, the band played the hymn “Nearer, My God, to Thee.”

We don't know for sure if the bandleader was taking requests, or if he thought of that number on his own. 

But recently, at the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City, N.J, the well-to-do put on the feedbags and heard that song while having the dinner served on the ill-fated ship as its last supper. And the guests were served a cocktail called "Nearer, My God, To Thee."

(Could I just have a glass of beer, please?)

It must have been at least a bit eerie to chow down on soup (consommé and cream of barley) and main courses such as salmon, duckling and squab. While everyone talked about how it must have been aboard the Titanic as the craft took  on water, the guests were taking on desserts such as peaches in chartreuse jelly, éclairs and French ice cream. 

A cookbook author and food-television personality named Gail Simmons threw the shindig. “We made the portions smaller,” she said, and she also cut the meal down from ten courses to seven.

The thought is that the diners hit the hay shortly after dinner was over (no karaoke that night) and you have to figure, the last thing anyone was worrying about was sinking a supposedly unsinkable ship.

Surprise!

Back to the bill of fare, because some of the survivors tucked a menu in their pockets that night, that's how we know what they ate. But none of the recipes survived, so today's chefs have to guess.

Around the Lazy 'C' chuckwagon, I use the traditional Clark family recipe for Salmon in Mousseline Sauce. I just run out to the garden and, just before cooking the fish, I cut up some fresh mousseline, right off the mousseline bush.

And a guy in traffic recently shared his recipe for Consommé Olga when he hollered at me the name of a really great sauce only available in Tasmania until recently. The guy said to call his friend, whose full name is Olga Fack-Yaselph. She told me exactly what to do with my consommé.