Clownfish are hermaphroditic - they are all born as males, and have the ability to step up in class and become female. Clownfish schools are led by a large dominant female. And then if she dies, the dominant male in the school will change over and become the dominant female, and then a younger male takes up the mantle and becomes the dominant male.
But he knows his days of wearing the pants, so to speak, are numbered.
Holiday dinners must really be fun with these fish!
News item: In an April 19 interview, Kayti Edwards — the step-granddaughter of Julie Andrews — said that she has a 15-year-old daughter, Ever, with Cher's younger son, Elijah Blue Allman.
I read these People magazine stories for you to save you the trouble. Reading further, I find that Ms Edwards is the former girlfriend of the man always described as "beloved actor" (now deceased) Matthew Perry.
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| He looks just like his father. She looks like people who used to look like Cher. |
Elijah B. Allman was in the news last week because Cher filed papers to put him under conservatorship, because he seems to spend almost every nickel he gets from his father's estate on drugs, food, and alcohol, and just wastes the rest. He is currently being held in preventive detention, incarcerated at the Rockingham House of Corrections in Brentwood, New Hampshire. He committed several b & e's in New Hampshire for no apparent reason in February and March.
Allman, who goes by the professional name P. Exeter Blue I for reasons best known to himself, was born six days after the American Bicentennial, July 10, 1976. Cher and Gregg Allman were married at the time, for reasons best known to themselves.
In your wildest imagination, could you have ever imagined that Gregg Allman (when he was still alive) and Julie Andrews could be linked by family relations so close that they could have done a duet on "Ain't Wasting Time No More" after Christmas dinner one cold December?
Let's hope that everyone involved gets help and that Elijah will be around for America's semiquincentennial this July.
This happened last year. I didn't hear about it then; if I had, I would have broken my neck to tell you about it, because it involves honoring someone whose cultural contributions to his adopted home of the US of A are manifold and glorious. He's an Englishman by birth, but has made his home in Westport, Connecticut for 41 years, while sharing his talents as a musician, singer, author, and actor.
We're talking, of course, about Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, the first recipient of the Connecticut Governor’s Award of Excellence. That's a new honor celebrating residents who epitomize the state’s core values: creativity, resourcefulness, passion, dynamism, and generosity.
Keith received a custom-designed medallion and a ribbon at the ceremony, where he delivered remarks both witty and wise.
“I’d like to say thank you to you all, and thank you to the state of Connecticut,” Richards said in accepting the award. “You kind of get lost for words with something like this around your neck. I’ve been here for 40 years, and it’s been a great place for me. I brought the kids up here. When the kids were young, I said, I have to get the kids out of New York City before they don’t get any fresh air at all. So, we moved up here, and ever since, we’ve had a great life. … I’m incredibly happy about everything, especially things like this, because you don’t get them every day.”
Keith was recognized for his work with a group called SPHERE, which enhances the lives of adults with disabilities, and The Prospector Theater, which provides meaningful employment through the magic of film.
What's more, Governor Ned Lamont recognized Keith for advocating for arts, education, and accessibility initiatives across the state, and said, "I’ve been inspired by the Rolling Stones for more than 50 years, I hope you have as well. Keith Richards is an amazing member of our community. We’re so proud that he’s here and I’m so proud to have the opportunity to give him this award of excellence.”
And in closing his remarks, Keith Richards spoke highly of his adopted city and libraries all over:
“This is a great building, a wonderful library, which even I didn’t know the full extent of. Without our books, without knowing things, without knowing their special meaning — this isn’t movies, this is not someone drawing you images. This is a book, and you have the movie in your head. It’s very important that we keep our books unburnt.”
Stirring words from a great man!
“More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.” - attributed to Saint Teresa of Avila (1515-1582)
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| Saint Teresa |
I saw this quote as the epilogue to an essay about the life of Truman Capote (1924-1984), the novelist/essayist/poet/critic/biographer who was born with a great facility for written language and turned it into great success in many fields, only to waste it all away by overindulgence in drugs, alcohol, and debauchery.
Saint Teresa was a 16th-century Spanish saint, a noblewoman who became a Carmelite nun, church reformer, and mystic. The chances are good that, had she and Capote existed at the same time, they would not have traveled in the same circles, for she gave up social prominence and chose an ascetic lifestyle, giving up the sinful pleasures to attain higher spiritual goals. She came from a well-to-do background and forwent the mundane pleasures, while Capote came from a simple Southern background and strove mightily to taste of those pleasures until his life became all party and no worthwhile work.
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| Capote |
My life, your life, and the history of the entire world are all filled with examples of people who miss planes that crash, people whose car broke down on the way to work and kept them safe on 9/11, jobs we wanted that we didn't get and it was better that we didn't...it's an endless cornucopia of lessons learned.
As an admirer of Capote's work, I wish he had found it in himself to do more of it. In Cold Blood, his 1965 classic book was one of the first, and certainly the best, attempts at telling a non-fictional story in the style of detective fiction. Capote actually moved to Kansas to follow the arrest, trial, and conviction of two men who murdered four members of the Herb Clutter family in Holcomb in 1959. He was a perfectionist in his writing, known for spending a day fussing over one word on a page of his brilliant prose, and the world of books has been the less for his passing.
Although self-awareness was not always a hallmark of Capote's personality, he was wise enough to take a friend along to Kansas to help him gain the trust of the locals and take notes as he interviewed them. He knew that his...quirkiness...might not play too well out there in the Grain Belt. That friend was his friend since childhood...Harper Lee, who somehow found time to work on her own novel, the excellent Pulitzer prize-winning "To Kill A Mockingbird.
Capote first published his findings in serial form in The New Yorker before editing them as a book. It was later that he revealed that the magazine had sent him out to cover the story and had given him the choice between the Clutter murders and a day with a New York cleaning lady as subjects to write about. He chose the Clutter story first, but later spent a day with his cleaning lady in 1979 and wove the tale of her work and life into a short story called "A Day's Work."
Choices...we make them and wait to see how they turn out.
If you weren't around catching the news in October, 1987, let me catch you up:
Eighteen month-old Jessica McClure fell into a well in her aunt's backyard in Midland, Texas. For the next 58 hours, the nation, yea, the world, hung on by their cable TV, waiting for "Baby Jessica" to be rescued from the well, 22 feet below the surface.
They got her out, all right, and she was so widely known that even The Simpsons did an episode about Bart being stuck in a well.
The last we heard of the woman known now as Jessica McClure Morales, she was doing ok, but now comes news that she was arrested Saturday night following a reported domestic disturbance at her Midland County home.
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| Jessica made my mugshot collection |
Police say the Midland County Sheriff’s Office responded to a residence in the area of South County Road 1140 around 10 PM last Saturday. Morales, now 40, was taken into custody at the scene, charged with assault causing bodily injury involving family violence.
The County says it might take up to ten days for the arrest affidavit to be released, so we know nothing about how she wound up trapped again, although she did bond out over the weekend.
So, now we wait for details, which I will pass along as soon as. Here's a piece of advice, Jessica: maybe get out of Midland County. It's nothing but pitfalls for you.
Faithful people will tell you that anyone can count the seeds in an apple, but only God can tell you the amount of apples in a seed.
Think about it! You plant the seed and who knows what will grow...
James Prigioni took that leap. Taking two tomato slices from two McDonald’s Quarter Pounders, he took the seeds and wound up growing healthy tomato plants in 124 days.
He went two ways with his seeds. The one tomato, he planted two seeds in a red Solo cup. The other, he sliced off a sliver and put that tomato morsel into a Solo cup filled with soil.
He kept both cups inside for 23 days, and then moved them outside- the sprouting seeds in a bucket and the slice right into the ground.
By the 94th day, he was picking fruit off the vine of the ground plant.
And below, the results of the plant grown from the slice! It had dozens of little tomatoes on its branches.
Prigioni's taste test: “No acidity, sweet but a mild sweet,” he said. “The kind of tomato that you could just eat a bunch of.”
And if you ask him why, since you can get a ton of Roma tomatoes at Lidl for next to nothing, he will tell you, “For me, it was just about fun. And it actually helped improve my whole garden because I was so excited to get out there and see how those tomatoes were doing… that I stopped and looked around at the garden.”
I've written before about the horrible soil around our neighborhood, which was built over the long-ago-cleared out remains of a huge gravel pit. One of the neighbors grew some tomatoes once. They were baseball-sized. And they tasted like baseballs.
See you at Lidl, but gardening caps off to Mr. Prigioni!
Over in England, a fellow named Mark Cody, 36, lost his grandma during COVID-19. But it was not the virus that took her. She took her own life because of the feeling of isolation she felt.
Cody had been planning to take her for a ride in his fancy car, but ... “My promise to her was always to take her out in a Lamborghini and the opportunity never came, so I thought I'd love to be able to exist to stop someone being in the situation that my nan was in,” Cody told the BBC.
So what he did, he started a new program called "Granborghini." Participants round up elderly people and take them for the ride of their lives to make them feel young again. According to the article I read, there are few things that can break a senior out of their daily routine quite like a blast in a Lamborghini or a McLaren. Maybe it's more fun than the Wild Mouse down on the boardwalk. That's one I'll never forget!
Cody has a squad of volunteers who share their time and vehicles with the folks. I really don't know that going 148 miles an hour up Dulaney Valley Road would do it for me, but who knows? Take it from Robin Gibbons. Robin hauls people around in his McLaren, he enjoys seeing the looks on his passengers' faces: "You buy these cars to make people smile, and that's the value for me," he says.
I smile just thinking about it. See you in line for the Wild Mouse.
Our pantry door hinges had a little bit of a squeak going on, only when you opened the door, or closed it. At all other times, no noise at all.
First chance I got (give or take three months) I grabbed the WD-40 and now there is no more squeak at all.
I was watching a tv movie wherein a woman suffered the loss of her lower leg, and had to deal with the phenomenon of "phantom pain," the sensation of feeling pain in a body part that sadly no longer exists. This thing with expecting the squeaking noise is not painful at all, but it just seems odd, almost like I miss the stupid sound.
Maybe I'll go outside and plants hollyhocks.
PEOPLE magazine is out with an article saying Tiger is "embarrassed and ashamed" following his most recent arrest for alleged DUI. We all saw it, like so many times before. Google "Tiger Woods car" some time and see the junkyards' worth of demolished steel he's left behind.
And the article goes on to say that “Tiger can be defensive at times but he was embarrassed and ashamed at the latest accident. He wants to fix his problems. There is nobody more interested in seeing Tiger come out a winner again than Tiger," the friend went on. "He doesn’t do well with defeat and embarrassing public situations.”
Tiger is no longer 50 and it's sort of a wonder he's made it that far. What bothers me about his behavior is that it's so......continuous. It's mistake to drive while unable to do so, it's a sin to do it twice, and this is, what, the third time for him? Unforgivable.
Most of us would be in the hoosegow for quite some time with a record like this, but Woods only was at the police station for several hours at the jail before bonding out. He stands charged with DUI with property damage, refusal to submit to a lawful urine test and careless driving.
His breath-alcohol test came up negative. He's not drinking, he seems to be gassed on hydrocodone pills, and the pain he is in is said to be the aftermath of multiple spinal injuries and numerous surgeries. And some say the intensity of how hard he swings a golf club has worn and torn his spine, resulting in a spinal fusion and a lumbar disc replacement.
Not to mention the toll that his various car crashes has taken on him.
So now he is "stepping away for a period of time to seek treatment and focus on (his) health."
And his friends and family are behind him, everyone wishes him the best, and it's just a good thing that he only seems to drive on deserted road where he doesn't have a chance to smash up other people's cars and bodies.
A friend tells the magazine, “People are quick to judge Tiger but he’s living through a lot of pain and has been for enough years where it has taken a toll on his quality of life in addition to his golf game."
He's been a menace on the roads for years. Let's see how a judge judges Tiger. That's enough second chances.
In the first place, before we get to the "meat" of this story, I have to say that of all the fast food joints that dot the nation's highways and boulevards, I have to rank Arby's down toward the bottom, and Five Guys at the top, for taste and snappy serving. Five Guys cooks each burger to order, and Arby's might have slapped together that Chicken Bacon Swiss yesterday morning, for all you know.
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| Yuck-o |
If you believe in teleportation (being moved from place to place by means of magic or something like it), then you might have seen the story about Gregg Phillips, who is some sort of senior official with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and said, during a podcast whose audience is likely in the single digits that he "was involved in multiple incidents of teleportation, including once where (my)car was flown through the air to a church and once where (I) ended up at a Waffle House, like 50 miles away from where I was.”
Gregg, my man, many of us have had episodes where we find ourselves with syrup all over us after a night out. I don't know about cars sprouting wings and coming to a landing at First Baptist, but I'm sure it could happen.
Phillips claims the Waffle House in question is in Rome, Ga. The New York Times went down to Rome, ordered a #2 platter with eggs over easy, and grilled the staff about any recent teleportations. No one saw anything of the sort, although they did agree that a pickup truck loaded with U of Georgia football fans drove into the lot, tried to stop, but couldn't, due to failing brake pads. Seems accurate.
In Times-ese: "None of the interviewees said they were aware of anyone traveling to the 24-hour restaurants by paranormal means.”
"I’ve seen it all,” (and don't you know THAT'S true!) longtime Waffle House server Shastoni Burge told the paper. “But I’ve never seen that.”
But Phillips, the man who said it happened to him, came back with a tweeter: “God will not be mocked. People can debate me. Question me. Even ridicule what they don’t understand. I know what I’ve experienced. I know Who (sic) I serve.”
No one here is mocking God. We respect God. Guess whom I don't.
Assuming that you are not really interested in the difference between a low-power local FM radio station and a real full power station, I'll just get to the story here by telling you that some smaller communities have licenses for low-power stations that are simply designed to serve the needs of a small town or part of a county. The low power means that not many radios can receive the station's signal, except for those living close by. LP stations tend to feature the sort of programming that not a lot of people want to hear. And they are non-profit enterprises, so there's not a lot of loot involved.
Now then. There is currently a station known as WKRP-LP serving a section of Raleigh, North Carolina since 2015. The call refers back to a popular 1978 - 1982 sitcom called "WKRP in Cincinnati," about the wacky doin's of the people at a fictional radio station. The people at the LP station say their format is "what radio used to be 35 years ago in small-town America...Greats of the ‘80s, Sounds of the ’70s, ‘90s Rewind,” as well as local news and “specialty programming.”
And they have a weekly two-hour show “Weird Al and Friends,” all about the musical prankery of Weird Al Yankovic.
Well then. The people who run the station are getting older and are losing interest in their radio hobby (after hearing "Beat It" so many times, can you blame them?). But they are going out with a bang: they have auction off the call letters to a group from Cincinnati who wants to put them on a real station, so get ready, Reds and Bengals fans and all else who call the Queen City home: soon you will be able to hear the modern equivalent of Dr. Johnny Fever and Les Nessman, and have a Herb Tarlek kind of guy try to sell you advertising time.
And as they always say on sitcoms, "That's crazy! But it just might be crazy enough to work!"
I don't know how many people there are in the world at this precise moment, but I do know that however high that figure might be, there are still not enough worthwhile things to keep all of us busy doing something worthy of our time.
For instance: Raspberry Circle, a tech company from Britain, decided that it has been long enough that we have all waited to see what the world record is for dropping stuffed animals out of the sky. So they dropped a plushie named Emy (nine ounces, fluffy, yellow and green) out of a high-altitude balloon 116,419 feet over Kingston, NY and let it plummet earthward.
The Emy plushie landed uninjured in a tree in Windsor, Connecticut, according to the CEO of Raspberry Circle, one Sachin Raoul.
If I wouldn't miss Peggy and Eddie so much, I mean I would get in my car today and drive to where the next drop is supposed to take place, in hopes of getting Eddie a new toy for free. Mr Raoul says he is doing this to get kids to go outside more often - even at the risk of getting plunked on the bean by a stuffed toy.
If I do go out, I'm wearing a helmet.
Way up in space, they are doing us proud back home.
The four astronauts on the NASA Artemis II mission have named two lunar craters for significant reasons. Astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Hammock Koch and Jeremy Hansen are almost through orbiting the moon on their 10-day trip on the Orion capsule Integrity.
Floating around in the spacecraft yesterday, the four explained that they found “relatively fresh craters on the moon.” They came up with two ideas:
One is to name a crater "Integrity," in honor of their ride to and from lunar orbit.
And the other is in a spot visible from Earth at certain times... “The second one, and especially meaningful for this crew, is a number of years ago, we started this journey and our close-knit astronaut family and we lost a loved one."
“We lost a loved one, her name was Carroll, the spouse of Reid, the mother of Katey and Ellie... (The crater is) a bright spot on the moon and we would like to call it Carroll,” said Hansen.
Reid Wiseman’s late wife “dedicated her life to helping others as a newborn intensive care unit Registered Nurse,” according to his biography on the NASA website. Timonium native Wiseman is raising their two children, Katey and Ellie.
The biography goes on to say that Wiseman “considers his time as an only parent as his greatest challenge and the most rewarding phase of his life," and that's a lot, for a guy who's been to the moon.
Touching tribute from far away. I can see lots of people around here breaking out the telescopes now.
I know the name "Pablo Escobar" sounds like something from a "Miami Vice" rerun, but Pablo was the prototypical South American drug kingpin in his day, which ended in 1993 when he was killed by the Colombian National Police. Before that, he amassed a fortune estimated at around $70 Billion with a B, and so naturally, he had enough loose change from the sale of drugs to entertain himself with a private menagerie of hippopotami.
The current head count is 70 hippos needing to be moved out, because who is about to stop the herd from procreating? Actually, they tried to stop them from reproducing. Methods employed included castrations, shooting them with contraceptive darts, and forcing them to watch Julia Roberts movies.
It's going to cost approximately $3.5 million to farm them out to other sanctuaries, with 10 of them destined for the Ostok Sanctuary in Mexico; the other 60 will find a home in India. There's no way to take them to Africa, where the herd originated; that would upset the local ecosystem.
Escobar originally imported one male and three females, and now look. They are spreading all over Colombia from their original home at Escobar’s former ranch of Hacienda Napoles, which is now some sort of theme park in the country where he is still regarded as sort of a Robin Hood for his habit of providing basic needs to the poor with a fortune derived from selling enough cocaine around the world to alter and/or end millions of lives.
Not to get all gross, but the Colombians need these beasts removed because, with no natural predators, they are running rampant on the countryside, and their waste is having deleterious effects on oxygen levels in the waters, reducing water quality and killing many fish in the Magdalena River basin.
Say it with me now: ewwwwwwwwww.
I haven't the slightest idea how people are supposed to find their dream spouse or significant other these days. I mean, do people even go on dates anymore? Do they ask co-workers if they want to see a movie? Do they wait for someone to ankle up to them at Starbux and strike up a convo? Do they swipe on dating apps?
They're trying something new in the London pubs, something new and old. Over there, they're using a PowerPoint presentation about the friend they wish to see matched up, and everyone gets to look over the available one.
The young people are good with that stuff, those computer programs, so putting together a slide deck is the new version of plastic sheets on an overhead projector.
They call it "Date My Mate," but in the cockney part of London, you say "Dite me Mite"! It's all slides and no swiping...
"I hate the swiping," said Annie, 27, who was hoping that her friend's two-minute presentation would find her a guy to hang with.
People are saying they have had bad experiences with apps like Tinder and Hinge, so they are willing to look at something new for someone new.
And it's a good way for a couple to help a single friend turn three into a foursome.
"It's just so much fun," one woman told the news, adding that it was a way to avoid "horrible dating stories."
We want happy stories! And if computer science can bring them to you, I say, log on!
Everyone seems to want to be better looking. Even good looking people report regularly for plastic surgery to get those cheekbones raised, those eye bags hemmed, and those crows' feet around the eyes taken to the woodshed.
Plastic surgery is expensive. The way people mistake me at the liquor store or Dollar Tree for Colin Firth or Keanu Reeves is gratifying, and they often pay me the compliment of subtly, indirectly, asking how I achieve this look of steely manliness combined with youthful exuberance.
What they do, these strangers, is to inquire, "What the hell happened to your face?"
I know, you can take that two ways. Well, this old face is what you have when you have spent almost 75 years laughing all the time. The smirk might as well be tattooed on me. And as Shel Silverstein wrote in "The Winner," "my eyes still see and my nose still works and my teeth are still in my mouth. And you know, that makes me, the winner!"
Or maybe, I am a winner of sorts because I have not resorted to doing a doggone thing to my face except for whittling off whiskers a couple of times a week and splashing on the Bay Rum. My face is not my fortune, Cookie.
And that makes me sad to see young people ( and a few who should know better) resorting to bone smashing to improve the lines on their countenances. I looked it up.
Bone smashing" is a dangerous, trending social media practice within "looksmaxxing" subcultures where individuals intentionally hit their facial bones with blunt objects (such as hammers, bottles, or massage guns) to induce microfractures. Proponents falsely believe that as the bones heal, they will become thicker and more chiseled, resulting in a more attractive, structured face.
If you know someone so hung up on their appearance as to smash their face with whatever, please point them in the general direction of help for the rest of their head.
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.
