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| 1950 on Broadway in New York City. Right out of "Guys and Dolls" with the orange juice and 15-cent slices of pizza. |
Saturday, September 26, 2026
The Saturday Picture Show, September 26, 2026
Friday, September 25, 2026
Free advice costs nothing and it's worth the price
I see that it's the fall of the year, and people have put away their bathing apparel and summer wardrobes. That's usually a sign that people are (gasp!) going to work, often for the first time ever!
So, as a man who went to work on many first days, may I share something I saw online? Someone's wise father typed up this list of hints, and I urge the newly-employed and future employees alike to check it out:
Yes! For those bosses who think being on time is being late, be early! Make a lot of new friends, and this starts with a pleasant greeting first thing. Yes, the receptionist knows everything, and trust me, you will learn how true this question is: "Do you want to speak to the Man In Charge, or the Woman Who Knows What's Going On?"
I was often the older guy but never the quiet older guy, but either way, go on. No, it's not a family. It's a workplace, and you have to be aware of whom to trust, and that may or may not be the person you are told to trust. Hold your gossip until you know for sure who is friends/married to/related to/sleeping with whom.
Yes, have a pen and a something to write on. A little stack of index cards will come in handy often! But don't be the goofus whose boss asks them to jot down something important, only to have to say, do you have a pen?
And by all means, respect yourself and your own time, too! This unpaid overtime "It's all for the good of the company" nonsense is nonsense. You deserve your lunch break and you deserve to go home when the day is done, and don't let them guilt trip you into hanging around til 7 to clear up that O'Hoolahan matter.
Thursday, September 24, 2026
Rest in peace?
How many times have you seen this? A beloved celebrity dies, and the family problems come pouring out of the woodwork.
Late last year, right around Christmas time, the father of Tejano music star, the dearly beloved and sadly departed Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, died. His name was Abraham Quintanilla, Jr. He had been running the family business and Selena's estate since she was murdered in 1995. And then the curtain came up on the family drama.
Selena's brother, A.B. Quintanilla, and her sister, Suzette Quintanilla, are going after each other in a legal battle over the family business (Q Productions) and Selena's personal estate.
A.B. sued Suzette and the production company earlier this month, seeking a million dollars in damages and a complete financial accounting of the family money.
Suzette and her mother, Marcella, deny any mishandling of the money.
Remember, this family hung together and helped Selena become the queen that she was until she was murdered by a woman she trusted. Now, 31 years later, with the father gone, they're fighting over the money.
Sometimes it doesn't take decades for the fighting to begin. Dolly Parton has just been laid to rest, and her relatives are fighting already.
Dolly's estate has filed suit against her nephew Bryan Seaver, the son of her sister Cassie. He was Dolly's head of security for more than 20 years, and he got bounced earlier this month. So now comes the family suit, claiming he threatened to ruin the wonderful name and legacy Dolly left behind. It also claims he made repeated violent threats toward her employees.
All of this brings up the age-old question of why people can't just let each live in peace. Dolly and Selena deserve better!
Wednesday, September 23, 2026
Deez nutcrackers
I am proud of another member of my family, one who can fly around and bury seeds and remember where they are buried!
There is this bird, see, a whole lot of them, sharing the name Clark's Nutcracker, and every fall, they round up as many as 98,000 pine seeds and bury them in about 5,000 little caches, 2 to 4 seeds per location.
Technically, they are passerine birds in the family Corvidae, native to the mountains of western North America. So they don't live around here, but they do send pretty pictures....
And then, they remember where they buried almost all of those seeds! They have a map in their tiny bird brains about where they left those snacks behind, meaning that no matter how cold and long the winter is, they remember their cache of seeds. Science knows that they use triangulation...measuring angles and distances between landscape features (rocks, big trees, fallen logs) to pinpoint the hiding places.
And get this! They intentionally over-cache, so there are seeds planted they will not need and will not return for, and a certain amount of those seeds will germinate and become new pine forests.
I mean, what could be better for nature than this? I am proud to be kin to these nutcrackers!
Tuesday, September 22, 2026
Look away!
After Alabama finished off Florida State, 50-36 on Saturday, the eyes of the college football world turned to Oxford, Mississippi, in hopes that Ole Miss could send Louisiana State home empty-handed.
The score of that game did not mean that much to me, but I often look back on the days when Mississippi finally had to face up to their past and allow African American students to enroll in their university (which is and was for the people who live there, not a private institution.) The struggle for basic human decency and opportunity for all came to Ole Miss in the fall of 1962, when Air Force veteran James Meredith (eventually) enrolled as the school's first Black student. With support from the NAACP, Meredith had sought to transfer to the U of MS, and a federal court order was granted to make that happen.
(The sports teams at that fine institution of higher learning were, and are, called the Rebels. That should tell you something about how popular the Civil War was there.)
Mississippi's Governor Ross Barnett openly defied the federal court order trying to keep Meredith registering. In fact, riots brought out on the campus on September 30, 1962, with segregationists fighting the federal marshalls sent by President John F. Kennedy. Two rioters died; hundreds more were injured. Faced with armed rebellion, Kennedy federalized the Mississippi National Guard and sent thousands of U.S. Army troops and federal marshals the campus. That worked, and Meredith enrolled for classes on October 1. He needed, and was given, round-the-clock federal protection just to be able to go to class and get an education.
The amazing thing to me continues to be that such a basic right offered to all citizens had to be fought for at all, let alone with soldiers and deaths. I was in sixth grade and already an keen watcher of the nightly news with Douglas Edwards, who was to tell us just two weeks later about the Cuban Missile Crisis unfolding. Just to think, in that one month, we faced destruction from within and from without, and the strong hand of John F. Kennedy guided us to safe conclusions.
That's the sort of thing that should be considered honorable.
By the way - the backup quarterback on the undefeated Rebels football team that autumn was a guy who found his living in music, instead of football. Jim Weatherly wrote "Neither One Of Us," "Midnight Train To Georgia," and "Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me," and also composed music for movies and television show.
Jim Weatherly passed away in 2021. Long before that, African American students and athletes became vital parts of the University of Mississippi. It's just a shame that it took courts and deaths and so much time for it to happen.
Monday, September 21, 2026
Tonight's the night!
Do you remember the 21st night of September? As the song goes, "Love was changin' the minds of pretenders, While chasin' the clouds away..."
Tonight is the 21st night of September, and this song by pop-funk group Earth, Wind, and Fire urges you to remember the happy times in your days gone by, and not to dig too deeply into what the song is about.
The chant of "Ba-de-ya" was written as a hook that anyone in the world could sing, no matter their usual language.
The song was released in November in 1978, so the month was not significant.
Matter of fact, the day - the 21st - didn't matter either. The songwriters say they tried any number of dates in the first line, and "the 21st" fit in best.
That's all. Listen, I come from the days when people took the lyrics to a song and spread them out on their desk like a buffet of words and then tried to say, "When they wrote about watching the roll on by, they were talking about tears rolling down the cheeks of someone who just had their heartbroken."
No. Sometimes the words are just the words. Listen to the song and try not to dance around the floor.
Sunday, September 20, 2026
Sunday Rerun: Generous
People from other countries often have difficulty comprehending the concept (there's that word again!) of volunteer fire companies. I guess it's a purely American idea, people doing something at considerable personal risk, inconvenience, and expense that one could say is the responsibility of the government to handle.
But since the days of Benjamin Franklin, who organized the first "fire brigade" in Philadelphian, people here have dropped - literally! - what they're doing and run to the fire house to go help someone or some someones in need.
Things like this don't happen for free, and that was the problem for a volunteer company in Calhoun, Missouri, where chief Mark Hardin gloomily scanned the balance sheet for his company and saw a bottom line of $169.
169 bucks won't go far when you need new turnout gear and mobile equipment. They had not been able to afford either since the 1980s.
“It was pretty discouraging — we’d already been paying for stuff out of our own pockets to keep things going,” said Hardin. He retired as a firefighter in Arkansas and moved to Calhoun, winding up as chief of the company, serving a town of maybe 500. “I probably shouldn’t tell how much of our own money we’ve spent. My wife would divorce me," he said. 
On an annual stipend of $4800, his 28 volunteers were trying to keep two engines on the road and scrape by for fuel and other supplies. They are lucky in that they receive donations of hand-me-down gear and other necessities from other departments. Volunteer companies are like that. They'll as likely give a recently-replaced engine to a smaller company down the road as trade it in. It's all part of the giving-back ethos.
As Hardin was noodling his way out of the financial morass, along came a phone call from 91-year-old Sam Sloan, who lives two miles up the road from the fire house.
Hardin said: "I’d never met Sam, but he invited me to breakfast. He wanted to ask me a bunch of general questions about the fire department.”
They went to breakfast again the next week, and the third week, Sloan invited Chief Hardin to come up to his house, where he presented the company with a check for $500,000.
“I walked in the door and Sam said, ‘What do you think about this?’” Hardin said.
And what he thought about that was, that he had never seen that many zeroes in a check.
Sloan told the chief that his cattle and seed businesses had been good for him, and he decided that when he sold his businesses and land that he was determined to make a contribution to the volunteers.
He and his wife Jan have a nice house and 60 acres to pass on to their one son someday, and for now the couple want to share their bounty with deserving people. He just says he has always admired volunteer firefighters.
“I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, and I knew at this point in my life, I could help. It’s important to have a good fire department, especially with all the grass we have around here.”
Hardin thanked Sloan 20 times for the kind donation, then drove straight to the bank to increase the company's balance to $500,169.
Chief Hardin plans to get a new fire engine and some other equipment, plus new protective gear for all the members.
And they bought a helmet for their new honorary chief Sloan to wear around.
Saturday, September 19, 2026
The Saturday Picture Show, September 19, 2026
Friday, September 18, 2026
A bit of a rough spell
This picture happens to be from England, so it proves that the English are not the only ones who have a tough time with English.
The woman who posted it was all upset because she wanted balloons that spelled out H A P P Y B I R T H D A Y for her son, but she feels that a mistake was made: "They left out the D in birthDay, but they gave me an extra A...."
Who wants to give her a hand before young Cholmondley's birthday is totally ruined? Anyone? Anyone?
Thursday, September 17, 2026
Yan Canned Food
This year, the New York Mets have an interesting relief pitcher named Jefry (correct spelling) Yan. He shows some promise, and got off to a good start this summer, but people are paying attention to him because of his exuberance when he strikes a guy out. He does this whole "jump up - jump down" thing that is supposed to convey his elation, but in sports, that is considered bad form, because it shows the other guy up, and he will be looking to hit the next pitch he sees halfway to Cooperstown.
BUT seeing that surname Yan made me think of someone we haven't seen for a while. His name is Martin Yan, a chef by trade, and when cooking shows were all over PBS in the era of mauve furniture and shoulder pads for men and women, his was one you saw every day..."Yan Can Cook." His schtick was teaching you how to whip up his home-gourmet food - hot and sour soup, egg rolls, stir fry, egg foo young, and of course, my favorite Chinese food dirty joke item, beef and broccoli.
I don't remember if you could send away for his recipes or what. This was before the internet, so there had to be a way to get the details down, unless you were good at shorthand. He made it look simple enough, not to mention tasty, and along the way, he would throw in jokes along with the bean sprouts and mushrooms.
And when he was finished making the Moo Goo, he would hold the dish up and proudly say his closing line: "Yan can cook and so can you!"
Hello, PBS? Put me on with my sure-fire simple chow recipes. We can call it "Eaty Gourmet"!
Wednesday, September 16, 2026
Covfefe Break
Ah, for the days when we went to high school to learn enough things to go to college or get a job. Not any more, apparently. And this story brings me to another of the peevelets that keep me up during my nap, namely: why can't people have their coffee and their breakfast before they leave the house?
Dateline, BEAVER FALLS, New York, where a high school student ran afoul of a new policy on the first day of class at Beaver River Central School because she strolled into her first-period class with a cup of java in her hand.
Julie Kaputa, a senior at Beaver River (!) told WWNY News, “I walked in, I had my coffee with me. I got to my first-period class and my teacher said, ‘I’m either going to need you to dump that out or consume it on the spot or go down to the office.’”
Apparently, none of those options met with her approval, so she was given an in-school suspension for violating the school's outside food and drink rule, which was a new addition to the school's code of conduct.
I remember toting a brown bag lunch (roast beef sammy, some sort of heavily salted snack chips, and a Tastykake pie or cake) for years...for lunch. It never dawned on me that school was a place for a kaffeeklatsch.
And so the undercaffeinated young lady's mother got into it with the school, and doesn't believe the "code is valid" and the superintendent agreed and feels the August meeting at which the new code was promulgated was not sufficiently publicized and he's sorry and Julie is glad it's all worked out and through all of this, I see no mention of whether Julie went back to class or anything, and now I know why I grumble that high school students should be able to identify the Battle of Hastings and the Pythagorean theory and the difference between the words "versus" and "verse."
But first things first! Coffee for everyone, and then we'll look at your hypotenuse.
Tuesday, September 15, 2026
His name is...
I haven't heard this lately, but people used to say, "Now that everyone knows about the trouble I'm in, I guess my name is mud!" when their reputation was besmirched.
I guess today's cool people say, "My reputation has been besmirched!" It's shorter, and quite to the point.
But there was really a man whose name was mud, and here is his story. You remember reading that John Wilkes Booth killed President Abraham Lincoln with his derringer pistol at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C. in April, 1865, just as the Civil War was ending. Booth was a Confederacy fan.
The assassin made his getaway on horseback with a broken leg, by which I should make clear, Booth had the busted leg. The horse went on to win the fifth race at Laurel the next afternoon, after dropping Booth off at the Charles County home of Dr. Samuel Mudd.
Mudd's descendants, including Roger Mudd, the newsman on CBS, fought for years to clear Dr Sam's name, because it was he who set the fracture for Booth and allowed him to hide out in Waldorf, MD.
Booth took it on the lam and made it as far as a farm in Port Royal, Virginia, before being killed by a Union Army Sergeant, one Boston Corbett, whose troops had set fire to the barn in an effort to flush Booth out.
As the investigation went on, it was determined that Mudd had known Booth and had indeed offered help with the assassination of Lincoln, although it was never proven that he knew what was cooking that particular night. Nonetheless, he was tried by a military commission and convicted of conspiracy, and sent to the military prison on Fort Jefferson, a remote island 70 miles west of Key West.
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| Dr Mudd |
Two years later, an outbreak of yellow fever swept through the prison camp. One of the first to die was the prison doctor. Mudd rose to the challenge, using his medical skills to treat the afflicted and contain the epidemic. Responding to a petition signed by soldiers and officers at the fort, President Andrew Johnson granted Mudd a full and unconditional pardon, and Mudd returned to Charles County, still a convicted, but pardoned, man.
So, that explains that name thing. We still don't understand why people thought it was all right to own slaves, though.
Monday, September 14, 2026
Out with a bang
Here is news from Willemstad, Curaçao. It's an island in the southern Caribbean Sea with a temperate climate (82°-88° year-round) and a location out of the standard hurricane path. It belongs to the Kingdom of the Netherlands as an autonomous, self-governing constituent country.
Speaking of which, a guy Baltimore remembers fondly for his skills at playing second base for the Orioles, Jonathan Schoop, got himself in Dutch down there. It's his home country, but last January, he was arrested after an investigation at his home turned up firearms, ammunition, cartridge casings and knives. He was locked up for a month at the time, and after his trial, he was sentenced on Friday to 30 months in prison with six months suspended.
And this is actually a lighter sentence than he might have received had the judge followed the prosecution's request for four years with eight months suspended. He also missed playing for the Kingdom of the Netherlands team in the World Baseball Classic in March, although his major league career in the US ended in 2023 with his release by the Detroit Tigers.
Now, you have to figure he knew the gun laws were strict in Curaçao, having grown up there. Why he felt the next to have an artillery handy is something he can ponder for the next 24 months.
I salute the island nation for taking steps to keep guns out. You're probably less likely to get shot to death in a place like that. Yes, the US homicide-by-gun rate is decreasing, probably because people can't afford the gas to go out and buy bullets, but it's still unacceptable to have people strutting around in any nation carrying weapons of mass destruction.
Let's contact old #6 in a couple of years and see how he feels about the proliferation of guns.
Sunday, September 13, 2026
Sunday Rerun: Here Come The Renters
Two of my favorite Beatles, John Lennon and George Harrison, have gone on to their rewards, leaving my third favorite, Ringo Starr, and that guy with the eyebrows, Paul, I think is his name.
And as we all know, all four of the Fab Four came from working class backgrounds in Merrie Olde England. George came from such a family: his father, Harold, was a school bus driver; his mom, Louise, kept the home, raised four kids, and taught ballroom dance.
And I would think that a real Beatles fan would jump at the chance to do an Airbnb thing, and rent that house where George lived from ages 6 to 18, right? Here's the story...
The home where The Beatles rehearsed many times is at 25 Upton Green in Speke, which is a southeast suburb of Liverpool, England. It's what the British call a terrace house, and we call a rowhouse or a townhouse. George and his three siblings and their parents moved in in 1949, moving out in 1962 just as Beatlemania swept England and headed for our shores.
Another family bought the house from the Harrisons; they stayed for 50-some years, moving out in 2014. At that point, the new owners turned it into a rental for a while until 2021, when it went up for auction. A Beatle fan from New Hampshire, Ken Lambert, bought it then for £171,000, (about $223,000), having seen the listing from Omega Auctions calling the house a “truly unique opportunity to own the property where George spent his formative years and that played an important part in helping The Beatles flourish.”
Lambert, with help of a Liverpudlian local, has been ever since working on the place, getting it ready for company. He found furniture and wall treatments appropriate to the time of the fifties and early sixties, and posted photos and added furniture for the right feel. He studied old photographs and found period-appropriate furniture and wallpaper to help transport guests back in time. Of course, he brought in a record player and a stack of Beatles albums.
“I wanted to do it for myself, to play the guitar and play the Beatles in the room the Beatles played guitar,” Lambert tells the Herald. “That really is a cool thing for people to experience.”
While the childhood homes of Paul McCartney (THAT'S his name!) and John Lennon are maintained for preservation by the National Trust, a European conservation organization, Harrison’s house has not been given that treatment. I don't know why. But Mr Lambert is doing his part, opening the place for rental by fans on a pilgrimage.
And you can rent it for less than the price of a top beach resort! The erstwhile Harrison home is available for short-term rentals on Airbnb (£200, or $260, per night).
If you go, please share lots of pictures, and send me a postcard!
Saturday, September 12, 2026
The Saturday Picture Show, September 12, 2026
I cannot explain this one, except to guess that the angry man is also the photographer. Why was he angry and how did he channel that anger? Those are two questions I might assign to a Creative Writing seminar, were I teaching one.
Friday, September 11, 2026
A rerun of a 9/11 story
It's September 11, and everyone has their memories and feelings about that day that really changed everything.
And it's good for us "of a certain age" to remember that 9/11/2001 was 19 years ago, meaning that for people currently in high school, and some in college,they have no personal connection to the events. Sure, they have seen video and heard a lot about it, but there's always room for everyone to learn more.
F'rinstance, not a whole lot of us know a whole lot about the 9/11 Boatlift. With what seemed to be the entire world crashing down on them, people who found themselves around Ground Zero came to a staggering realization: Manhattan is an island, and when the streets and highways that are usually clogged in the town where gridlock began, there's only going to be one escape.
The water.
Those who know such things believe that more than half a million people needed to be transported out of the southern tip of Lower Manhattan. You remember the videos, the dazed survivors out in the streets, a long way from home and comfort.
As so often happens here in the greatest country in the world (it never needed to be made great again; it always has been) saw ordinary people respond to an extraordinary situation and become a team of heroes in what is regarded as the world's largest water evacuation of all time.
Of course, there was no plan for how to get 500,000+ humans off the island and on their way. It's hard for civic officials to even grasp the concept. (Here in Maryland, the last plan I ever heard about for what we would do in case of a nuclear attack, devastating earthquake or catastrophic weather event was no more detailed than "Everyone get in your cars and head for West Virginia.")
And there certainly was no way for New York officials to lay out a plan for getting folks off Manhattan. But as so often happens, leave it to the people, and good things result. Boats and ferries are always active in those waters, of course, and they began turning for shore to pick people up. Destination? To be determined. Just getting away from the desolation was the goal.
What happened was that feeling we get when there's a chance to help a stranger - someone we don't know, nothing in it for us but the feeling of helping a fellow citizen. So mariners did what they could. And the United States Coast Guard - the first to protect our seas and shores - operates the marine radios that all afloat listen to, and they put out the Mayday call for everyone to come help.
And along came tugboats, party pontoons, water taxis, runabouts, whatever, heading for the scene to take on passengers.
Let us not forget that all who headed for the tip of Manhattan that horrible but beautiful Tuesday morning saw what they were headed for - smoke and gases in the air and airborne debris were plentiful. And that's what they SAW. None of them had the slightest idea if there would be further attacks, exposing the makeshift fleet to disaster. In fact, it's probable that few of them knew a whole lot about what HAD happened, and none of what might.
But with steadfast determination, the American kind, they loaded as many as their vessels held, dropped people off at a safe dock, and went back for more, as many times as it took to move 500,000 terrified fellow citizens.
The Coast Guard adds it up as more than 150 boats, crewed by 800-some people, getting that half a million off Manhattan. It took until well into the night, but no one was left stranded.
Tom Hanks narrated a documentary entitled “Boatlift: An Untold Tale of 9/11 Resilience” in 2011. It told tales of people such as Vincent Ardolino of Brooklyn, captain of the Amberjack V. He recalls saying to his wife,“I’ve got to go do something … I’m going to take the Amberjack up into the city and help … I have to do what I have to do … Even if I rescue one person, that’s one person less that will suffer or die.”
And remember, he had no way of knowing if he would come home to his wife. America was at war, and he did what he could, and if you multiply that by 800 other good people, that's how every one of those survivors got on their way home on September 11, 2001.
Thursday, September 10, 2026
Blow-up about a blow-up
You might remember seeing this on the local news, if you live in Maryland. It was August of 2024 when a house on Arthurs Woods Drive in Harford County exploded early one morning, killing the homeowner and a contractor working there, and injuring three others. The blowup also damaged several neighboring houses. The house itself was literally blown to tiny bits.
The National Transportation Safety Board investigated, and found that there were communication failures at Baltimore Gas and Electric and its parent company, Exelon.
An underground electrical fault - electric lines were buried too close to gas lines - was the initial cause of the explosion, but the NTSB blames the deaths on BGE's "ineffective response to the initial gas leak."
The night before, a passerby sniffed the gas in the neighborhood and followed protocol, reporting his findings to BGE.
The BGE gas dispatcher sent a trouble truck to check the situation, but sent it to an intersection, instead of the exact address of the ill-fated house.
There seemed to be confusion at the utility, and no one was sent to the right location to look for the problem. It came to light that the BGE dispatcher was consuming alcohol and fell asleep at his work station, although his supervisors failed to send him for drug and alcohol testing.
In a classic case of locking the barn door a bit too late, BGE says they have made several policy changes. All gas leak calls are now monitored 24/7, dispatchers are receiving additional training, and there is now fitness-for-duty screening of their calltakers and dispatchers.
This is not like sending a truck to replace a street light. People all know that gas leaks can be deadly and should be handled with utmost care at once. You would like to think that the gas company knew that.
Wednesday, September 9, 2026
Lightnin' Strikes
Before 1994, about the only music that Antony (" Tony") Cicoria listened to was that good old rock 'n' roll. His parents had stuck him in piano lessons when he was 7, but he hated it and it did not stick.
In 1994, aged 42, he was a medical doctor, specializing in orthopedic medicine, orthopedic surgery, orthotics, prosthetic supplies, and sports medicine. He kept himself in excellent condition, which may explain why he lived through getting struck by lightning in Albany, New York, that summer.
Another reason he may have survived? He was outside waiting to use a pay phone when the bolt hit him. The next person in line to use the phone was an intensive care nurse.
Aside from a burn mark on his head and left foot where the lightning hit him and exited, he seemed to have no physical damage at first. Several weeks later, he developed memory issues and was sluggish. He consulted a neurologist, whose examination (EEG and MRI) found nothing wrong.
He went back to work, and two weeks later, his memory was restored and he felt energetic again.
Over the next few days, Dr Cicoria became obsessed with an insatiable desire to hear piano music. He bought a piano. He taught himself to play it, and within three months of the lightning strike, he was spending nearly off of his days writing and playing piano music.
Doctors who studied the case said that he had suffered a cardiac arrest during the incident, and that may have caused his brain to re-wire itself. He still practices medicine and the piano.
I always wanted to play the piano, too, so maybe I'll take out the garbage during the next electrical storm. Don't worry; I'll wear rubber-soled shoes to ground myself.
Tuesday, September 8, 2026
I mean, really
I don't know what part of this is worst! Starting from the beginning: last Friday night the umpire Doug Eddings was behind the plate for the game between St Louis and Colorado.
For whatever reason, he got a wild hair about the way that the Cardinals' rookie pitcher Hancel Rincon was wearing his hat while pitching. It was sort of cockeyed across his forehead, but facing the right way. Lots of guys have worn their hats that way. The Orioles used to have a guy (George Sherrill) who wore his hat right as it came out of the box, with a totally flat brim. They even called him "The Brim Reaper," but no one made a big deal of it.
Of course, as things tend to happen when people get off on power trips, things spun downhill fast. Eddings actually ordered the young man from the Dominican Republic to straighten out his cap.
During the ensuing argument with St. Louis manager Oli Marmol, Eddings handed Rincon a pitch clock violation for not pitching during the specified time even though the umpire and the pitcher's manager were busy hollering at each other.
But I don't know that that was the worst of it, because on Saturday, someone calling herself Holly Baylor of "FAX Sports" wrote a tweet "reporting" that "MLB has suspended umpire Doug Eddings for the remainder of the 2026 season, including the entire postseason, following his controversial performance during Friday night’s Cardinals-Rockies game.
This did not turn out to be true, of course. But just as someone needs to sit down with Doug Eddings and tell him that his personal choices in millinery have nothing to do with the onfield hats of the ballplayers, someone somewhere needs to prevent "Holly Baylor" (if that is her name) from writing literal fake news stories.
And it's my personal feeling that every player in baseball should turn their brims 30 degrees toward their left ear for the next three games.
And that Doug Eddings should have to umpire whatever games he is assigned to for three days while wearing a complete clown outfit - giant shoes, rubber nose, red fright wig. If he needs to clean the plate, let him use a seltzer bottle spray.
UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE
Eddings heard from someone - maybe his bosses at Major League Baseball, maybe his inner sense. Who knows? But he did apologize to the pitcher before the game on Saturday, a game in which all of the Cardinals wore their hats off-center.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that maybe Eddings came to his senses shortly after the whole thing started, but refused to back down. When that happens, you might as well back down right away.
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