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.

 

 

We need more Autumns

 If you didn't see CBS Sunday Morning the other day, and see the story about Autumn Mowery, the young woman who owns a candlepin bowling alley in Ellsworth, Maine, you should watch this! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKObxUjrgn0

Autumn bought the bowling alley and took it over, rescuing it from demolition, and now she does everything from repairing the gears of the pin-setting equipment to wiping down the tables after people have eaten a pizza made by her boyfriend, who also runs a shop next door.

So now she is working 7 days a week to keep the place open, and if you watch the story you can't help but think she will succeed marvelously. She is just one of those special people.

Other people recognize that. Since Sunday, the GoFundMe Autumn started to bankroll her renovations has brought in over a quarter million dollars, and you have to feel that if there were more people like her scattered over the land we love, there would be more good feelings all over.

Watch the story and feel better!

Say your name again

As someone christened with a famous name, I pay close attention to people like Ty Cobb, the ornately-mustachioed attorney whose real name is Ty Cobb. You have to figure his parents were paying homage to baseball immortal Tyrus Raymond "Ty" Cobb when they named him that.

Last night when the Orioles were playing the Minnesota Twins, the Twins trotted out a shortstop named Bruce Lee. He hit and fielded the usual way, not with karate chops.

And then there was the time I met a woman named Linzy Buckingham and asked her if her parents were Fleetwood Mac friends. She looked at me as so many woman have over the years, with quizzical stupefaction: "Why would they be?"

We Social Security types hear "Steve McQueen," and we think of the old actor who played in "Bullitt" and "Wanted: Dead or Alive." Today's with-it young folks think of the movie director of the same name.

Or mention Michael Douglas, and we think of Mike Douglas, the glib former talk show host, or the actor by that name who was the son of Kirk Douglas. And all along, that is Michael Keaton's real name (he took Buster Keaton's name so no one would confuse him with Michael Douglas, if you can still follow all this.)

Or think of Anne Hathaway, who is either Wm. Shakespeare's wife or the Oscar-winning actress who frequents the same ice cream place we used to go to in Cape May, New Jersey.

And I love telling Peggy that Jerry Lee Lewis never used his middle name as a child growing up in beautiful Ferriday, Louisiana until he started making records in Memphis, and someone pointed out that there was already a famous "Jerry Lewis," so he started billing himself with the Lee in the middle. Peggy didn't really care for either of them, but she was crazy about Andy Taylor from Duran Duran.

And I know him only as a sheriff!

Andy's mints.

We need to feel loved

Lt. Mike Hotz of the Nashville Metro Polilce responded to a bridge in that city on July 23. A man was standing on the edge, literally and figuratively.

“Stay back,” the man told him. “Don’t come any closer.”

Hotz, a 16-year police veteran, knew that the man was livestreaming on social media and planned to make a spectacle of his suicide.

“I was the first vehicle that arrived,” Hotz told The Washington Post. “I just stopped and got out and attempted to speak to him.”

He knows how to relate to people in crisis, having served as a leader on his department's crisis negotiation team. He spent 45 minutes talking to the man while other officers stopped traffic in both lanes on the bridge.

He told the Post, “It was emotional. This was an individual who had reached a level of frustration where he was having the worst day of his life. I just wanted to be able to develop trust with him and help him realize that tomorrow is another day and it will get better.”

And after a while, after a patient rapport-building, the man began to open his feelings. “It was a combination of life circumstances that happened that brought him to a level of ultimate frustration and desperation,” Hotz said.

Still, the man leaned over several times, and Hotz remained worried about what might happen.

Hotz served two terms in the Army, and while the man on the bridge was not a veteran, the stories Hotz shared about his service days seemed to help the man feel less alone.

“I just let him know that we love him and we are there to help him and he wasn’t in any kind of trouble,” Hotz said.

Having built a level of trust, Hotz eventually walked up to the man and extended his hand...

“He stepped forward from the bridge and he just kept walking toward me while I had my hand extended, and I could tell he was going to go in for a hug,” Hotz said. “He just kind of broke down.”

Hotz's bodycam footage shows the man weeping in the lieutenant's arms as Hotz told him he loved him.

“This guy needed to know that people cared about him,” Hotz said. “When I was thinking about how to communicate with this individual, that is what I felt, and it is what I meant.”

In a way, love built a bridge to save a man on a bridge.

Sunday rerun: He brought Nixon down

 Today is a very important anniversary in American history.  Very few of us will ever forget waking up to the news the day after an inept group of burglars, masterminded by the mentally unbalanced G. Gordon Liddy, attempted to break into the Democratic National Headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington DC.  

You know, they would have gotten away with it had it not been for Frank Wills, a security guard who noticed tape covering the latches on doors leading to the DNC offices, removed it, and then found tape re-attached an hour later as he made his rounds.  If not for his vigilance, the five clowns sent by the President of the United States of America, one Richard M. Nixon,  to install spying devices in phones and photocopy documents would not have been caught, there would have been no ensuing scandal as the facts came out linking Nixon and his criminal cohorts to the stupidest crime in history, and the crook who later insisted "I'm not a crook" would have been able to serve out his entire second term instead of being sent off in abject disgrace, which is what he was anyway. 

What made it so stupid was that Nixon ordered all this espionage because he feared that he could lose the 1972 election to whomever the Dems threw against him.  As if!  He was a lock, being so popular in his beloved "Middle America," where he sent Vice President Spiro Agnew out to deliver speeches in which he regularly insulted people of all sorts.  Nice couple of guys, and they had 99 problems, but that election wasn't one of them.

Frank Wills

It took diligent reporting by the team of Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward to uncover the many criminal secrets and coverups that sprang out of the well that Frank Wills (1948- 2000) uncapped this day, 42 years ago.  If not for him, and the Washington Post, history would be far different.  For want of a nail, the shoe was lost....

The Saturday Picture Show, August 8, 2026

 

My nature-loving bride Peggy saw this cardinal on the back fence, and he was kind enough to hand around and pose. It's said that cardinals bring messages from the beyond, a little love song from the departed.

I think this is a nice policy. I remember when our cats came home for the first time. Deanna was sort of shy and sweet, and took her time looking around. Eddie ran upstairs and downstairs, checking out all three floors and the garage, and then decided that these humble digs would suit Her Majesty. I guess they still do; she hasn't said otherwise.

It's never been an issue for me, but I think I would rather be honestly short than dishonestly tall. You agree, MarKwayne?

You could drive a nail with a hammer still in its wrapping, and you could stir your oatmeal with a spoon still covered in cellophane. But when you bring home a doorstop, it's better to take it out and give it some air before putting it to work!

Attention all ships at sea: There has been a Mothra sighting off the Chilean coast.

Pizza: the round meal in a square box served in love triangles!

I guess the expiration date was supposed to be on the burrito wrapper, but this makes sense, so you can see if your lunch is still good.

Jimothy, the raccoon born with spine issues, is having a great summer, and here is someone who did a 3-D Jimmie at a street fair. Love it when art meets nature!

I don't know how to explain this picture to anyone who wasn't around in 1965, but let's say one of these men went on to become a United States Congressman, and Bob Dylan didn't.

You wanted to come back as a whatttttttt?

Lend me your comb

One of the wonderful gifts that come with subscribing to Comcast Xfinity cable TV is that channel 4164 is the LITB channel, which plays every episode of "Leave It To Beaver" in sequence, beginning with the first one in 1957, and ending with the series finale, 1963. You can turn it on any time day or night and see a little page from the memory book.

Yesterday while cleaning up breakfast, I saw "Wally's Haircomb" (season 2, episode 34) in which Wally, inspired by Eddie Haskell, began combing his hair in an elaborate pompadour. Of course, his mother about had a cow, and had to deal with the shame of having a son with an outré hairdid.

Kookie

Looking back, it's hard to believe that people made such a big deal about hair, but that was the day of Edd "Kookie" Byrnes combing his hair so much on "77 Sunset Strip" that it inspired a hit record. Check this out to see a real 50's frenzy: https://youtu.be/MT9QZBGyXjU?si=LIGYlRJuad-7E8De

Of course, the next thing you know, it's 1977, and there's Kookie playing the Dick Clark character in the "Grease" movie.

Before that, the next thing you know, it was 1964, and The Beatles wore hair so long that it drove everyone crazy. Parents had to unite against the menace of young men whose hair actually touched their ears or collar. Long hair became the symbol of youthful revolution, and old people just couldn't put up with that! 

I am glad to see that parents have better things to do (and more important things to worry about) than how their sons and daughters wear their hair. They finally got that smog out of their noggins!

 

Slice of life

I am telling you, some times the littlest things become the biggest, you know what I mean? Here's an example:

Up in Point Pleasant Beach, New Jersey, a nice quiet oceanside town, one of the 47 pizzerias they have is all up in a hassle with a customer and everyone around with social media. The whole thing started when a family brought in a cake for a kid's fifth birthday party.

You should know, if you haven't had your first morning chuckle, the pizza joint is called Joey Tomato's. There you go. 

And the family brought a cake to the restaurant, which we have all seen done 40 million times. 

But when the family asked to borrow a knife to cut the cake (which doesn't seem so unreasonable) a female who works for the Tomato's concern went a little pizza-postal, telling the family they were "inappropriate" for even asking. "You just don't walk into a restaurant and do whatever you want," she said. "OK, so when I come to your house with my candles and my cake, am I going to be able to do whatever I want to there now? You just don't walk into a restaurant and do whatever you want. It's inappropriate. You owe us an apology. I don't owe you anything," she continued, against all good sense and decorum.

Perhaps she didn't know that the people she was berating didn't just roll in there on a head of cabbage. The father of the child is Tom Jurkowski, founder of Vintage New Jersey, a website with hundreds of thousands of followers. He posted the video of the entire unpleasant thing, said his family called in advance to make sure it was ok to bring a cake, and spent around $250 on food.

Jurkowski said, "We simply asked if we could borrow a knife to cut our birthday cake. We were even willing to pay any additional fee if there was one."

It's the talk of the Jersey Shore, but Joey Tomato's isn't talking. They shut down their website and their social media is blanked. Their Yelp page has so many irate comments that there's a special note appended to it.

You have to wonder if some people have forgotten the hospitality aspect of the restaurant business. 

I imagine a lot of people are forgetting about that restaurant, whatever it was called.

I believe I once met a lawyer named Selkirk Bannock

Flatbreads are a big deal now in carryout shops and sit-'em-down restaurants. I think the perceived advantage is that you get the grain and flour or whatever but without the added weight of leavened loaves. 

I read that medieval peasants made a simple flatbread out of oats, barley, dried peas, and beans. 

Hold the beans and dried peas on mine. No, wait, hold the whole thing and give me a big slab of grainy bread by Dave's Killer Bread.

This Middle Age cracker, if you will, was called Bannock. The Scots invented it and had one variety - Selkirk Bannock - made with wheat flour and fruit. 

What I read in the Encyclopedia Britannica is that old-time people back in the day made these crusty flatbreads all the time, but the common superstition of the day warned against stirring the batter clockwise, because that action was believed to bring bad luck to the whole house. 

I don't hesitate to point out that while the Middle Ages are commonly held to have taken place from 500 AD to 1500 AD, and clocks were invented in 13th-Century Europe, which means that from the year 500 to the year 1200-and-some, if you told someone not to do something "clockwise," the only answer you could have expected was, "What? What's a clock and why is it wise?"

 

Coming and going

 The owners and management of the Baltimore Orioles baseball team sometimes have to make tough choices. Yesterday, they did a housecleaning, because if there's anything that the first 2/3 of this season is proving, it's that being in the playoffs is not in the cards for the current team. So they discard and deal again.

People around here are howling mad because popular catcher Adley Rutschman was traded to the Red Sox for some prospects with what's thought to be very high potential - so high, in fact, that Red Sox fans are taking to the internet, howling mad because they feel their club gave up too much to get Rutschman. "We were fleeced," they vehemently cry.

We all know that Adley was the cornerstone of the rebuilding of the Orioles, the re-establishment of values and skills that were to take the team back to the top again. Check the calendar, folks. He's been here since 2022 and we have won exactly zero (0) playoff games since then. Not that it's his fault, although he has been bogged down with injuries lately. He's had a comeback year this year, which is why the Sox wanted him, so dealing him (and his newly-acquired backup Jake Rogers) for some promising talent, while ceding the #1 catcher spot to  Samuel Basallo, seems to make sense on paper.

Farewell, Adley!

But baseball is not played on paper; it's played on dirt and turf.  I'm sorry that so many people are upset about losing a popular player, but the management of the team has to shuffle around their chess pieces as they see fit, and maybe in the next couple of years, these new guys will be just what makes the pieces fit, and the O's will be back in the playoffs.

If that doesn't happen, just forget I said anything. I've been a baseball fan since I was a little boy, and I try not to take it personally.  

More than one

The other day, I saw a woman at the self checkout who had selected Spanish as her language, so the machine was talking to her in the words she understood best, and I hoped that no one would come over and start berating her to "Speak English!"

And it was a reminder that not everyone speaks English first, or even second.

I read in the Washington POST that learning a new language is good for your brain, and that's good for any brain at any age anywhere.

They went on to explain that being conversant in another tongue offers mental stimulation, and that keeps the old noodle active and sharp. They're even thinking that knowing more than one language may delay a diagnosis of dementia, or stop your brain from aging (or at least slow that down!)

Ellen Bialystok, a distinguished research professor emeritus of psychology at York University in Canada, has looked into this for more than fifty years. She says that some people might practice music for a couple of hours a day, but the study of new language(s) is "intense and constant," so that's like strength training for your brain.

And even if you aren't actively speaking your second language, your brain has it "on" at all times.

Que será, será’!

And please remember, when you are hearing someone speaking haltingly in English, it's probably their second language!