As Austin Powers would say, "Oh, behave!"

Here's the thing about leaving home - when you get where you're going, you're not home anymore.  So your behavior might require a little definition.

In Bali, the Indonesian resort Island, they have a sacred Hindu ritual on the Day of Silence (known locally as Nyepi, March 19.) It would never work out well for me, but for those 24 hours, everyone -  residents and visitors - has to stay in, in homes or hotels, keep the lights and the noise low, and perform quiet meditation.

Well, Swiss tourist Luzian Andrin Zgraggen, 26, couldn't/wouldn't comply, and as a result, he is serving a yearlong sentence because he was in Bali on vacation at the time of the holiday, and despite being briefed on the proper way to commemorate it by the staff where he was lodged, defiled it.

  

Here's how: Zgraggen became angry that he could not leave his hotel and strut around looking for food. Then, he “displayed his anger” on social media, according to his indictment.

 He posted videos of himself walking in the dark and saying it was "pretty peaceful  outside," and then he chose to curse about the religious holiday rules. Naturally, this was met with lots of negative comments, so he took down the videos, but as we all know, The Internet Is Forever, and people reposted the screen recordings they had made of his blasphemy.

In response, Zgraggen reposted his videos and said, "They want smoke."

He tried to apologize, but was met by the cybercrime unit of the Bali Police, and found himself charged with disseminating hate speech based on religion through electronic information.

His trial was last week and he was given a year in the Ironbar Hilton.

So, when you go away, when in Bali, follow the rules or don't plan on going home right away.

Simple enough. 

Sunday Rerun: That Shirtin' Feeling

 So, what do you do with your old shirts?

Speaking for myself, I wear them until they vanish. I once gave a few of my old T-shirts to the kids in the neighborhood who wore them around as beach coverups, too.

But - if you are friends with someone who you feel is destined to become a baseball legend, and that person offers you his soiled, game-worn jersey, hang on to that garment. Here's why:

You've heard of Babe Ruth, the baseball player from the streets of Baltimore, right? And probably, you have heard of his "called shot" in the 1932 World Series.

Ruth's Yankees were playing the Chicago Cubs in that "fall classic," and he was receiving maybe even more than his usual hoots and catcalls from the Windy City crowd. According to the legend of Ruth, he stopped for a moment to make sure all eyes were on him during game 3, as the shrieking reached a crescendo. It was then that Babe took a step out of the batter's box, and with his Ruthian bat, which was a whale of a war club at 35 ¾ inches and weighing approximately 38 ounces, he pointed to the deep center field stands without a word.

Then, he stepped back into the box and hit the next pitch right where he had pointed. Instant legend! Another chapter in the Book of Ruth.

Ruth, an expert shirtmaker himself (a trade he learned at the St. Mary's Industrial School for Boys, having been shipped off there after a judge found him "incorrigible and vicious...beyond the control" of his parents) later gave the jersey he wore on that historic day to one of his golfing buddies, who really should have told his descendants to hang onto it!

Because...that "New York" uniform jersey sold this past weekend at auction for a sweet $24.1 million, making it the most expensive piece of sports memorabilia ever.

These Yankee fans have deep pockets! The previous record was the $12.6 million someone shelled out for a Mickey Mantle baseball card, and you can't even put that on and wear it around.

Well, you could, but there would be trouble.

 

The Saturday Picture Show, August 29, 2026

 

People were supposed to fill out recipe cards for a wedding shower, with hints for easy meal prep. It doesn't get much easier than ripping open a bag!

So here's another reason to buy a drone - they will clean your windows!

The Breakfast Club: Ally Sheedy, Judd Nelson, Anthony Michael Hall, Emilio Estevez, and Molly Ringwald. 1985 and now.

And...this is lovely Lake Ontario. Always and forever.

You can post all the no-fishing signs you care to. This scofflaw is going to fill his craw!

Not named for Earl, but this nest-maker is actually known as a Weaver Bird.

So you say the kids keep losing the remote, huh? I'll bet the guy who made this is an eighth-grade teacher who is tired of people losing the hall pass.

George cannot tell a lie. No one likes these spy cameras and we wish they would get them the flock out of here!

It's a fool who criticizes our fair city, or our football team. High hopes heading into this season!

Last week, Connie Smith surpassed the late Jean Shepard to become the longest-serving female member of the Grand Ole Opry, with 61 years on the stage! Her husband and #1 fan Marty Stuart was there, as always.

Thanks to the kids!

 According to Instagram, this took place at Westerly High School, and the only such school according to Google is in Rhode Island.

And that's where a group of students kept seeing a five-year-old kid named Ryder out there in the elements every morning - sun, rain, wind, snow (remember - it's New England!) waiting for the school bus.

His family had rigged up a patio umbrella, but you know how spotty their coverage is, and when the wind blows the rain sideways...well, you know that, too.

So the shop classes at Westerly saw this and decided NOT to do nothing. They made him a customized weatherproof shelter with room for the family to be with him while waiting for his ride. 

The kids in Carpentry Shop class get a little experience that will hold them in good stead as they prepare to learn their trade, young Ryder gets comfort and the feeling of gratitude, and seeds of good karma are planted in Westerly.

Please don't ever try to tell me that high school kids aren't great people. They are, even though a lot of adults try to jive their strides. 

Post-Parton Depression

I don't want to beat this drum any more than others already have, but hot-a-mighty, the toll has been hard to take these last few days.

• Hayden Panettiere, 36, known for "Nashville" and "Remember the Titans" and dozens of Neutrogena commercials (they let her go when she was dealing with depression following the birth of her daughter, and cited the morality clause in her contract, as if all those people running Neutrogena were not born of mortal women.)
• Shelley Fabares, 82, comic actress from "The Donna Reed Show," "One Day At A Time," and "Coach," plus three Elvis movies.
• Dolly Parton, 80, a woman beloved by just about everyone on earth for her charm, her talent, and her philanthropy.
• Jaye P. Morgan, 94, singer from the classic pop music era perhaps best remembered as bawdy "Jaye P. Morgone" from The Gong Show.
• Tim Curry, 80, British star from "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" and "Clue"

I have always noticed how often the "they go in threes" phenomenon seems to come true.  In this case, we are either two over the set of three, or one short of a second set of three. As always, time will tell.

We feel it hard when a favorite celebrity goes all the way home, and it almost seems like a death in the family for some of us some of the time. But watch, this December, when they publish the lost of those we lost this way, there will be about the same amount of the noted and celebrated who will not see 2027.

For those of us who will, let's try to make the best of everything.

Never the Twain

People have been quoting Mark Twain saying, "Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it" for 129 years now. Just let it rain for two days in a row, or let the scorching heat turn your front yard into one of those cocoa doormats, or let a blizzard maroon the kids at home for four days and someone will pull that one out of an old quote bag, and someone will say, "Yes, Mark Twain...very wise fellow."

Twain

And there is a case to be made for Twain's wisdom, but according to The Weather Channel, don't try to make it on the back of this quote, because he did everything but say it.

As the WC says, in in the late 1800s, Mark Twain was the top gun in American wit...sort of the Jimmy Kimmel of his time. And remember, there was no radio or TV or internet back then. The only way jokes got spread around was by newspaper, or maybe some cowboy taking them to Wichita with him on a cattle drive.

We know the "nobody does anything about it" quote came out this day in 1897 in the Hartford Courant, but it was printed in an unsigned editorial most probably written by Charles Dudley Warner, who was the editor of the Courant, and well-known in his own right for brilliant, incisive essays.

Warner

AND he lived next door to Samuel "Mark Twain" Clemens, so maybe, when the paper landed on Twain's front lawn the next day, he enjoyed it so much that he said to Warner, "What a great line! I wish I had said it!"

And then Warner could have said, with some justification, "Don't worry. You will!"

With the luxury of history, I can tell both of these gentlemen that we can do a lot more about the weather than people could do in 1897. We're at a point that we know it's going to rain, with thunder and lightning. We know about when it will start and end, and how much precipitation to expect.

We just don't know how to make it start raining, which would be helpful in areas stricken by wildfire or drought, or how to make it stop, for the flood-ravaged parts of the country.

I'm sure Apple is hard at work on their new apps, iWishItWouldRain  and iWishItWouldStop.

 

 

Take tea and see

People who say they don't like tea are not really my cup of...well, you know...

Water is the #1 beverage worldwide, but I hate to tell you residents of Coffeeville, tea is second. Nearly two thirds of people around the world sip tea. 

I have three or four cups of tea daily in my Yeti mug, and lots of iced tea for dinner and after. Because of this, my health is something that people sometimes form a small mob to marvel at.

Here's why: Research is showing us that tea can protect your blood vessels, lower inflammation, aid relaxation and potentially boost your gut microbiome. There's a magazine called Life Sciences (been meaning to subscribe) in which scientists say tea is “Nature’s gift for promoting human health.”

Of course, we all know this is because tea contains many antioxidants, polyphenols and other beneficial plant compounds, according to Jenifer Bowman, a cardiac dietitian at UCHealth in Fort Collins, Colorado.

Of course, not everyone knows this, but no matter what kind of tea is in your mug - green, black, white and oolong - they all come from the same plant: Camellia Sinensis. 

It's been far too oolong since I've seen old Camellia.

And I want you to know that it's a consistent scientific finding that tea drinkers tend to live a little longer than those who don't drink tea.  This is because we tea drinkers do not engage in the kind of behaviors that shorten the lives of others: driving while impaired by alcohol or drugs, taking risks such as doing calisthenics on the roofs of buildings, and forgetting to put money in the kitty by the coffee machine at work.

And research shows that drinking tea promotes relaxation. Scientists did a study that says tea reduces anxiety and helps your memory, but only for things that you want to remember. Forgetting a lot of things is marvelous for those who want to relax.

Now what was I saying?

Mr "No" It All

 There have been way too many arguments online lately - since the return of measles to the list of diseases we once had eradicated, but have come back in full force - about how, instead of listening to doctors and others who have devoted their lives to science, it would be wiser to take advice concerning vaccinations from Hollywood actors and former heroin addicts.

Balderdash!

And then the other night, a local meteorologist here in Baltimore said he was driving past a high school in the late afternoon and football practice was going on despite the fact that a thunder and lightning storm was just beginning.

Here is his post; I deleted his name because I have no right to repost his words.

And from out of the woodwork came the legion of non-meteorologists! To quote from one,

"They have lightening (sic) sirens at schools. They generally go by that. To be paranoid when it rains is not an ideal message in my opinion. That's a bit extreme. Sorry Mr _____ that I disagree."

Oddly enough, a cursory glance at this man's page revealed no degrees or experience in Meteorology or Psychology, so I'm not sure why he pretends to know more than an experienced scientist about the weather or whether being safe with teenaged athletes in a thunderstorm constitutes paranoia. 

Ever since Ozz E. Osbourne bellowed that "Paranoid" song, people are so quick to throw that word around. 

But hear me on this: it is not safe to be outside during a lightning (correct spelling) event. And you can bet your boots that if, heaven forfend, a child had been struck by lightning out on that football field. the hue and cry from the public would have been long and loud.

There's a phrase that is good advice for both driving a car and driving home a point you think you know about, and that is "stay in your lane." When an educated person says something, it tends to be right, hence the adjective.

I'm planning to hear from a cadre of "But I've done my research" folks. Please show your advanced degrees as you file in.

Sunday rerun: The spy who did not seem to like me very much

 A guy I knew (briefly, mercifully) had been in the Air Force, assigned to guard an important missile site in one of the Dakotas: North, or South, or Fanning. I can't remember much about him, except that he was a real Barney Fife kind of guy, loved uniforms and rules and marching around.

He told me one time that while making his rounds about the base, he saw a dog that had somehow "penetrated perimeter security" (service talk for "jumped the fence") but when this guy corralled the pooch and interrogated him (I swear that's how he put it) the dog clammed up and would not bark, and a search of his collar yielded nothing, so he was "taken into custody" for "disposition to be determined at a future date," which I hoped was service talk for "someone with a little sense will take Poochie to the fence and send him home," for crying out loud.

Meanwhile, back in this year, police in India were holding a "suspected Chinese spy pigeon" for eight months, only to find out that the bird was an open-water racing bird from Taiwan. It had escaped Taiwan and gotten to India by air (hitchhiking is forbidden there) and was captured near a port in Mumbai (so maybe it chartered a boat?) When apprehended, the bird had two rings tied to its legs, so police naturally suspected espionage and sent the pigeon to Bai Sakarbai Dinshaw Petit Hospital for Animals. 

There is a precedent here from 2016, when another pigeon (let's assume it wasn't the same one!) was arrested after being found with a note that threatened Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

But upon asking the bird to write his side of the story, police saw that he, indeed, could not write, which was a strong piece of evidence in the defense claim that he could not have written the note.

 

The Saturday Picture Show, August 22, 2026

 

   Someday, your grandchildren will be in a college classroom hearing a professor talk about the rise and fall of the American mall. He or she will say there was a food court, three or four large department stores, record stores (and the students will want to know what they sold!), at least three shoe stores, and four or five stores whose names ended in "and things": Candles and Things, Cards and Things, Potpourri and Things, Muffins and Things, and of course Things and Things.

Just as it takes a heap of cookies to make a house a home (per Edgar A. Guest), it took a heap of musicians to make Steely Dan records over the years. But if this is what it took to make their great records, thank them for it!

If you ever want to see a X-Ray tech blush, ask them if during slack times, anyone gets on the rack to pose for a gag photo. I love it when they tell you things; you can see right through them.

My third-grade classmates will remember singing "Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree, merry merry king of the bush is he." This blue-winged Kooka is too cool!

Sign from Sammy Davis, Jr's home in Beverly Hills. And I mean that, man.

You know that old bumpersticker "If this van's a-rockin', don't be knockin'"? I want a sign for my front door saying, "If you're hearing me snore, don't be knockin' on my door!"

I would rather be in the one-horsepower carriage, please.

The geographic center of the United States is a point approximately 20 miles (32 km) north of Belle Fourche, South Dakota. If you're only looking at the true center of the 48 lower states, you want to head to Lebanon, Kansas, but since Alaska and Hawaii joined up, people with protractors and compasses figured it out, and you need to go to SD to see the GC of the USA!

There is a yard near us where people live who figure their dog, restrained by three fenced boundaries, will not test that one unbounded line. They are wrong.

Welcome to the Vaalserberg Hill near Aachen, where Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium meet. There is this stone marker, and a maze and observation towers.

It's not real!

The list of things about which I know nothing at all begins with any movie or show that has the word "Star" in it, and then goes right through all 187 Harry Potter books, movies and I don't know what-all else Harry had. I just avoid the whole thing like iceberg lettuce.

But I read the other day 5 words that showed me how happy I was not to get embroiled in the Potter tales. These words were "Dobby, a freed house elf." I mean really. But I guess the rest of you know that old Dobby dies in Harry's hairy arms in “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1.”

And after Dobby hobbles off to wherever elves die (hint: it's not on a shelf!) Harry says, “I want to bury him. Properly. Without magic.”

Well, friends, they filmed that scene where they pretend to bury an elf on the  Freshwater West beach in Pembrokeshire, Wales.  And then fans somehow found the time to take from reading the next installment of the Harry Chronicles to put up a sign saying “Here lies Dobby, a free elf” atop a pile of stones.

And don't you know, people flocked to see this pile of stones!

But evil forces were afoot, and people who didn't believe in flying elves but DID believe in supplying electricity to homes, businesses, and elf habitats needed to run a jumbo electrical cable under the beach. It was needed, in 2019, to carry electricity between Ireland and Britain.

Mr Simon Ludlam, the project manager for the electric cable project called  Greenlink, appeared on BBC Wales to explain the whole thing. He stood on the beach where "Dobby" was "buried."

Remember now! This is all fiction! In the book "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," Dobby dies in Cornwall, not Wales. 

And Elves are not real. Elvis was real.

But Harry fans got all worked up.

                                         The Sun on the Beach

 

Mr Ludlam  said, “After it aired, we began to get calls. Many, many, many calls.”  And after that barrage of phone messages, Mr Ludlam figured out that the concern over all this fiction was real...

He found out that people were leaving messages to Dobby on this pile of beach rocks, and that the crush of tourism was having a negative environmental impact on the beach. People cooled that after a time, but the Welsh officials asked people to stop leaving socks, which were a symbol of Doby's friendship with Harry.

I repeat: Welsh officials asked people to stop leaving socks, which were a symbol of Doby's friendship with Harry.

In the end, Ludlam and Co. arranged to reroute the electrical line so as to avoid the fake grave of an elf who never lived so that people in England and Ireland could have electricity so that people wouldn't have to read these novels by candlelight.

Now where did Dobby leave my socks?

 

Blooper time!

Over in Jollie Olde Englande last May, a volunteer at a radio made a big mistake.

I'm sure most of you realize that the radio stations have their "death tapes" already recorded and ready to go. If you don't know that, you probably wonder how radio and TV stations present long threnodies about a famous (or infamous) person for whom the final bell has tolled right away. They are written in advance, recorded, with space left to add just how it was that Death Came Calling.

Sometimes, these tapes sit around for years, waiting for their chance to get in the game. But that chance will come for those recordings. No one has yet figured out how to beat the clock.

But, back to England, a volunteer at what is described as "former pirate radio station Caroline" found the tape announcing the death of King Charles of Britain, and in classic blooper fashion, hit the "play" button just to see what it sounded like. He thought it was off the air, and then he heard the announcement that the station was "suspending normal programmes as a mark of respect following the passing of His Majesty King Charles III". 

So what the guy did was, he fled the station in a panic. The station went to dead air for 16 minutes, and then it took Mr Unlucky another 15 minutes to pull it together and apologize for his blunder.

I could tell you about a few mistakes I made on the radio, but, look, I'm all out of space, so I can't.

 

Medical Marvel

Where were you on May 3, 1964? I was in Mercy Hospital in Baltimore, racked by some sort of mystery illness. Encephalitis? Meningitis? Hedgehopper Syndrome? They never did figure it out, but I remember lying in my bed that Sunday afternoon while my parents huddled with the doctors.

I listened to the second game of the doubleheader against the then-Cleveland Indians as a rookie pitcher named Tommy John threw a three-hitter and beat the Orioles and their pitcher, Robin Roberts.

No, not THAT Robin Roberts.

For the next 26 years, Tommy John kept winning ballgames against the Orioles and everyone else in the American League. 

But in 1974, pitching for the Dodgers, something went kablooie in his left arm, the one he used to throw with, and it didn't take long to determine that his ulnar collateral ligament had ruptured.

In those days, that meant the end of a playing career, without a throwing arm to throw with. 

“It felt as if I had left my arm someplace else,” he told Sports Illustrated. “It was as if my body continued to go forward and my left arm had just flown out to right field, independent of the rest of me. I heard this thudding sound in my elbow, then I felt a sharp pain. My fingers started to tingle.”

But, rather than go home and open a bar and grill or sporting goods store, he took advice from Dr. Frank Jobe, the Dodger team physician, who said he had an idea for how to fix it.

And with nothing to love, Tommy John offered up the left arm for which thousands of operations in his name have been done since.  Listen to any ballgame, no matter what the team, and you will hear the announcer talk about some guy having had Tommy John surgery. Guaranteed!

Dr Jobe had come up with the idea while performing surgeries on polio patients, replacing atrophied ligaments and tendons in their legs and helping them walk. So, why not try it on a pitching arm? He transplanted a tendon from Mr. John’s right wrist to his left elbow, first drilling holes in the bone to make room for it.

It took one more surgery and a lot of physical therapy, but Tommy John got back on the mounds and pitched another 14 years, becoming the first patient of the eponymous Tommy John surgery.

He won 124 games before his elbow surgery, and 164 games in the 14 years after it, and died on Saturday night at 83. The cause was bladder cancer.

“There are only two players that have any medical things named after them — Lou Gehrig and Tommy John. Gehrig’s is fatal and mine gives life.” - Tommy John

Check into this

It happened to us once - Peggy wrote a check to a charity and it was stolen from  the collector's desk -  so we are very wary about writing paper checks around here. 

I know a lot of people who can't remember the last time they wrote a check, and even more who have mailed off birthday cards with a gift card inside that never got to the intended destinations.

And I was dropping mail into the mailbox in front of the 21128 Post Office when a lady who works there came to the door and said, "Never put mail in the mailbox. They will steal it by the morning."

So, maybe it's time to give up writing checks, even the pretty ones you ordered from the back pages of PARADE Magazine next to the cartoon about The Lockhorns. The FBI, for what they're worth, and the Postal Service itself say check fraud is out of control, with reports of it doubling from year to year.

Because people in this country can't seem to keep their sticky fingers off the property of others, experts are recommending paying by e-checks, automatic payments, and other forms of electronic payment.

Used to be, we'd get the electric bill in the mail, write a check to cover it, put a stamp on the envelope, and leave it in the mailbox. The USPS would get here by noon every day and take it away. Most of the time now, the sputtering mail truck comes after dark, and leaves ads about hearing aids, gutter replacements, Susan G. Komen, and Liberty Liberty Liberty (Liberty).

Once a crook steals your check, they use regular household chemicals (bleach, acetone, Kool-Aid) to wash away the payee's name and dollar amount. Then they rewrite the check to suit their own purposes and pay for their new ballroom.

So, don't put outgoing checks in the mailbox, get your mail as soon as the truck chugs away, and keep an eye on your monthly balance statement.

The whole world is unbalanced, you ask me.

 

Benefits of age

Being aged 3/4 of a century is not as bad as you young whippersnappers want to make it out to be, and while you crack wise about how long it takes me to get out of the car and into the drugstore, when I do get there, it's Senior Discount Day, and you look at me like "Could you get me 10% off this Axe Body Spray?" 

And I have to say no. No one should want to smell like an axe. 

But here's an article in the Washington POST about this very topic. Richard Sima writes about how you have fewer regrets when you get up to the age at which people look upon you sort of dolefully. 

Sima says you have fewer regrets when you get up in the age that you don't always feel like you should get up at all. Middle age is the time for regrets: wishing you had gone back for that advanced degree or gone back for another slice of pizza, ruing the day that you didn't tell the boss to shove that box of old files up his attic, reliving the time you had the chance to drive in the winning run at the softball picnic, but you struck out.

Old age helps you realize that the degree would have put you in a higher tax bracket, the slice of pizza would have kept you up that night, the boss would have tied a can to you, and who cares about some softball game thirty years later?

Sima also cites "more knowledge" as a reason for reveling in the golden years. You remember the old saw that Mark Twain cranked out about how dumb your father was when you were 16, and how much the old man had learned in just 5 years when you hit 21, right? We get a lot of things wrong in our 30s and 40s, and then by the time the band is looking for the sheet music to "Closing Time," you've had a chance to read up on things, so you know better than keep playing when you should fold, you know the difference between Robert F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy Jr, and surely by then you have learned that the car that's been tailing you is probably not a fire chief, so slow it down, buddy.

And he wraps his treatise up by saying we have more wisdom, too. Knowledge is having facts at our fingertips. Wisdom is knowing that maybe those fingertips and the rest of the hand should be home reading a book.

Sima says that we old geysers did better emotionally during the pandemic than the young and the restless, because we have been through bad times before and know the outcomes tend to be better than we fear. I've told many a younger person than I that it really seemed like the world was coming to an end in 1968, with riots and assassinations and turmoil from here to Czechoslovakia, and yet, along came 1969 and the promise of a new day, led by an energetic and dynamic young man named Richard Nixon.

Well, anyway. Enjoy being young and restless for now, but hang in there long enough, and you will be the Victor, a New Man.

Sunday Rerun: "Talitha, cumi" is in the Bible, Mark 5:41. Jesus spoke this when He raised Jairus’s daughter from the dead.

  Note: I post this poem by John Updike every year on the date of Elvis's passing. When I read it in The New Yorker in December, 1999, we were getting ready for the Y2K nonsense, fearing that our computers and water pipes and elevators and clocks were all going to stop at midnight on New Year's Eve. Even so, the words and imagery moved me, then as now.

January 1, 2000 came in as scheduled. We simple believers got up and went to work, still believing in The King. I still do.

From The New Yorker, December 6, 1999

 

JESUS AND ELVIS

Twenty years after the death, St. Paul

was sending the first of his epistles,

and bits of myth or faithful memory -

multitudes fed on scraps, the dead small girl

told "Talitha, cumi" - were self-assembling

as proto-Gospels.  Twenty years since pills

and chiliburgers did another in,

they gather at Graceland, the simple believers,

the turnpike pilgrims from the sere Midwest,

mother and daughter bleached to look alike,

Marys and Lazaruses, you and me,

brains riddled with song, with hand-tinted visions

of a lovely young man, reckless and cool

as a lily.  He lives. We live. He lives.

                                           John Updike

The Saturday Morning Picture Show, August 15, 2026

 

Sure, you put him in the coat closet on New Year's Day, up with the gloves and scarves and knit hats. But he is ready to come out and keep an eye on the kiddos!

Ease those nagging aches and pains with this simple solution.

It's the 45th Anniversary of Baltimore's White Marsh Mall, and this is the lady, Miss Kitty, who sold balloons all over the mall from opening day in 1981 until not that long ago. Anyway! She will be at the mall today, in full regalia, from 1 until 3, I assume with her merchandise available, so maybe go see her, and let her know you're not the same mall rat who ran around in a Members Only jacket blasting Loverboy tapes real loud.

The epitome of hope is this woman who was late to the airport, and hoped that waving to the plane she missed would help. No.

Baltimore didn't see much of the eclipse this time, but there's always the next one. 

Is this a pelican or an ibis, riding a crocodile or an alligator?

Cool wallpaper for you this week...the seaside is placid and calm, and yet, you can smell the Thrasher's Fries already!

That is one tall sunflower there, sir, way up past the six-foot fence!

Take your banged-up Buick to the ballroom and see who wants to have the next dents.

Here's the crazy thing - they probably found him, just based on this sketch!

How is this any of your beeswax?

My sainted father gave me some good advice over the years. "Never get married until you're ready to act like you're married (I was, still am), never try to win an argument with a police officer (I have tried and rarely succeeded), and never buy a house in a community with a Homeowners' Association (never did, never would.)

But there are websites and Instagram pages that document the ridiculous lengths these HOA people go to in an effort to control the lives of others. I've seen hearings concerning people who were not clergy members performing baptisms in their pool, "There are men visiting Marcie's house for about an hour and then they leave, bless their hearts, I don't want to know what's going on over there, but...," a man singing opera in his outdoor shower at 6 AM, a woman who went through a neighbor's house to get to their deck to forcibly take their leaf blower away because "I told her to stop running it and she ignored me," and my favorite of the day, the HOA lady who ruled that kids in the neighborhood were only allowed to ride bicycles from point A to point B. "There is no point C," she averred, because the neighborhood streets were not designed for aimless recreational bike riding. So kids may use their bikes if they're going to a friend's house or headed for the pool or some other specific destination, but the kids are to be told NOT to just get on those doggone bikes and ride around.

Here she is.

Notice that another member of Most High Exalted Board of Homeowner Association HMFICs is eating a corn dog during her pronouncement.

These people only exist to make a BFD out of every grievance, real or imagined. What's a BFD, you ask?

That's a Barney Fife Deal!

On the ropes

Jory Thomas is my kind of kid...he's not sitting around playing computer games and making fakey Ticky-Tocks all night.

As young men did in my day, 14-year-old Jory, from out of Big Timber, Montana, spends his time perfecting his lassoing skills.

And that came in handy not long ago when Jory and his family were camping out along the Yellowstone River, and Jory saw a small boat and paddleboard that had gone under after hitting a bridge.

Three of the boaters were paddling toward shore, but a fourth was clinging to a gray cooler and drifting away. 

Jory's father called 911 while Jory grabbed his lariat. (Spanish for rope is "la riata," so that's where we came up with lariat for lasso.)

Jory ran across the riverbank and into the chest-deep water. Ten feet from the helpless man, he circled the lariat loop in the air and threw it toward the victim...

And all that practice paid off. He lassoed the man around the head and arm on his first try!

 

As if he had roped a prize steer, Jory tied his end of the lasso to his belt buckle and walked ten feet backward, pulling the man to shore.

And by the time first responders got there, the man was safe on shore.

“It’s a really good possibility that search and rescue would’ve been looking for a body by that time,” Sweet Grass County Sheriff Alan Ronneberg said.

No one was badly injured, and Jory is home now getting ready for ninth grade.

So please, everyone, encourage your children to learn basic water rescue skills. The only way Jory could have been cooler with this would have been to do the whole rescue on horseback!

Jory learned his roping skills as he and his brothers took turns snaring each other's legs on their ranch.

Perhaps I shouldn't have said that part. Don't tell your kids.