Mr Fashion Advice

Hot a'mighty, what a "Hugh N. Cry" (as I once saw it written) there was right before the Olympics when it was revealed that the uniforms that the American athletes would be sporting as they paraded around London were made in China.  Remember?  Wow, what a commotion. Ralph Lauren made the uniforms, which is to say he designed them and then had the actual tailoring done in China.

Well sir, everyone from the water commissioner on up to the President of the United States and the man who wants to be the next one of them had something to say about this outrage.  Well, sources said that Willard "Mitt" Romney did not like hearing people remind them that when he was head cheese of the US Olympic team in 2002, he had the uniforms made in Burma, also known as Myanmar, also known as a human rights hellhole.

But leave it to good old "Smokey John" Boehner. The Speaker of the House decried the decision to outsource the uniforms.  “You’d think they’d know better,” he said.

This has been on my mind since the Olympics.  It really doesn't matter much to me where the uniforms were made.  I understand the political hay to be made off the issue, but since most people chattered about their ire via cell phones and computers and laptops made far far away from here, what the heck?

This did not have to happen

My objection is that the uniforms were made at all. Look at how weird they were!  Sort of like tour leaders at some industry exhibit at a convention of life insurance salespeople.  Do Americans wear berets?  Au contraire, ma cheri amour!  Do athletes need to wear ties? 

No one asked me, but they could have had all the athletes run down to WalMart and be issued a couple of pairs of Dickies® pants, some polo shirts and a denim jacket, and there you go.  Nikes for the land athletes, flip flops for the swimmers and divers. 

You wanted them to look like Americans, didntja?

Sit right down and write yourself a letter

In this hustle-bustle world of email and text messages and shouts and grunts, the fine art of letter writing is a thing of the past, along with wearing a tie to dinner and wearing a tie anywhere. When was the last time you received a handwritten letter from someone?

Same here. And so, the folks at www.ohlife.com have come up with a way for you to get a letter.  Not handwritten and sealed in a fragrant envelope with X's and O's and other snappy codewords, as in the past, but it's a way to write yourself a letter today and have it emailed to you on October 27, 2045 if you plan to be around then.  The website is here if you want to try it.  If I were forty years younger, I would write a letter to Future Me advising myself to buy Apple stock.  As it is, I have to write a note to remind myself to buy apple juice.



And all this reminded me of a song.  Country music oddball David Allan Coe, a man with talent and skill who decided to fritter both of them away by making racist and salacious music, recorded "X's and O's" early in his career, and for those of you under 80, this sort of thing actually happened.  Men and women would write love letters to each other, and then write cute codes on the envelope, presumably for the amusement of the letter carrier (who gets mentioned in the song this way: "p.m.p.m.d.s.o.f. 's not hard at all -  -
please mr. post man don't stumble or fall").

One thing about emails and texts: you can't write on the envelope.

Another thing about them is, they are free.  As soon as you pay for a computer, a phone, a text service and internet access.

Be a lot cheaper to buy some stamps, but anyway...

Sunday rerun: He wrote a song called "You Can't Wynn, Stewart"

There was considerable excitement (at least with me) during the Ravens game the other afternoon when a new Volkswagen Jetta commercial came on, and the music in the commercial was the great Wynn Stewart singing his great hit "Another Day, Another Dollar," which he recorded in 1962.  You can see the commercial here.

I am going to try to find some way to write to the ad executive from VW - someone who, I'm pretty sure, was born after 1962 - and thank them for saluting one of the best country singers ever.  I hope his family gets a nice payday from this, because Wynn (born Winford Lindsey Stewart in Morrisville, MO, in 1934) never quite got the big payday he deserved.  By the time he reached his teens, his family had moved to California, and young Wynn did the usual route - smalltown radio shows, talent contests, small-label record deal - until he signed with Capitol Records in 1956.  That big break didn't pan out, so he went with Challenge Records for a few years and cut hit after rockabilly hit there.  This was the genesis of what's called the Bakersfield Sound, a grittier sound for Country music than what was coming out of Nashville.  Nashville was veering more toward what they called a "country-politan sound," meaning that they wanted city folks to buy country music. If only they had realized that we city folks would be happy to buy any real country sound, such as what Wynn Stewart, Buck Owens and others were making out west.

One of the others was a former jailbird named Merle Haggard, who showed up looking for work and was hired to play bass in Wynn's band.  Always more generous with others than with himself, Wynn wrote Merle a sad song to sing.  It was called "Sing A Sad Song," and it became the first of Haggard's several hundred country hits, while Wynn had to wait a while for his ship to come in.

Ironically, that ship docked when Wynn moved his sound more to the east.

I'm sorry, but the online radio station to which I am listening - KYMN in Northfield, MN - just did a PSA for an all-you-can-eat waffle breakfast at St Anne's Church this Saturday.  If ever two phrases blended in perfect harmony - "all you can eat" and "waffle breakfast," those are the two best, I'd say.  Sorry for the interruption.

Pardon me.  Wynn Stewart moved his sound more to the east - a little more country-politan, if you will - and hit with the Record Of The Year in 1967 with "It's Such A Pretty World Today," which was used in a K-Mart commercial a few years back.  After that came a few more hits, but as the 70s came along, more and more country artists were doing the rougher-hewn style that Wynn had pioneered twenty years earlier, and Wynn, Buck Owens and others were relegated to cast-off status, prophets without honor in their own hometown, as it were.  He only lived to be 51, dying of a heart attack in the middle of an attempted comeback in 1985.  I saw him perform here in Baltimore in the late 60's  and he was great.  I'm glad you get to hear him now.  Please, go buy a Volkswagen, would you?  Tell 'em Wynn sent you!

Guest Speaker Day

Here is the text of President Bill Clinton’s speech to the Democratic National Convention as prepared for delivery and released by the convention’s press office:
We’re here to nominate a President, and I’ve got one in mind.

I want to nominate a man whose own life has known its fair share of adversity and uncertainty. A man who ran for President to change the course of an already weak economy and then just six weeks before the election, saw it suffer the biggest collapse since the Great Depression. A man who stopped the slide into depression and put us on the long road to recovery, knowing all the while that no matter how many jobs were created and saved, there were still millions more waiting, trying to feed their children and keep their hopes alive.

I want to nominate a man cool on the outside but burning for America on the inside.  A man who believes we can build a new American Dream economy driven by innovation and creativity, education and cooperation. A man who had the good sense to marry Michelle Obama.

I want Barack Obama to be the next President of the United States and I proudly nominate him as the standard bearer of the Democratic Party.

In Tampa, we heard a lot of talk about how the President and the Democrats don’t believe in free enterprise and individual initiative, how we want everyone to be dependent on the government, how bad we are for the economy.

The Republican narrative is that all of us who amount to anything are completely self-made.  One of our greatest Democratic Chairmen, Bob Strauss, used to say that every politician wants you to believe he was born in a log cabin he built himself, but it ain’t so.
We Democrats think the country works better with a strong middle class, real opportunities for poor people to work their way into it and a relentless focus on the future, with business and government working together to promote growth and broadly shared prosperity.  We think “we’re all in this together” is a better philosophy than “you’re on your own.”

Who’s right?  Well since 1961, the Republicans have held the White House 28 years, the Democrats 24.  In those 52 years, our economy produced 66 million private sector jobs.  What’s the jobs score?  Republicans 24 million, Democrats 42 million!

It turns out that advancing equal opportunity and economic empowerment is both morally right and good economics, because discrimination, poverty and ignorance restrict growth, while investments in education, infrastructure and scientific and technological research increase it, creating more good jobs and new wealth for all of us.

Though I often disagree with Republicans, I never learned to hate them the way the far right that now controls their party seems to hate President Obama and the Democrats.  After all, President Eisenhower sent federal troops to my home state to integrate Little Rock Central High and built the interstate highway system. And as governor, I worked with President Reagan on welfare reform and with President George H.W. Bush on national education goals. I am grateful to President George W. Bush for PEPFAR, which is saving the lives of millions of people in poor countries and to both Presidents Bush for the work we’ve done together after the South Asia tsunami, Hurricane Katrina and the Haitian earthquake.

Through my foundation, in America and around the world, I work with Democrats, Republicans and Independents who are focused on solving problems and seizing opportunities, not fighting each other.
When times are tough, constant conflict may be good politics but in the real world, cooperation works better.  After all, nobody’s right all the time, and a broken clock is right twice a day.  All of us are destined to live our lives between those two extremes.  Unfortunately, the faction that now dominates the Republican Party doesn’t see it that way.  They think government is the enemy, and compromise is weakness.

One of the main reasons America should re-elect President Obama is that he is still committed to cooperation.  He appointed Republican Secretaries of Defense, the Army and Transportation.  He appointed a Vice President who ran against him in 2008, and trusted him to oversee the successful end of the war in Iraq and the implementation of the recovery act.  And Joe Biden did a great job with both.  He appointed Cabinet members who supported Hillary in the primaries.  Heck, he even appointed Hillary! I’m so proud of her and grateful to our entire national security team for all they’ve done to make us safer and stronger and to build a world with more partners and fewer enemies. I’m also grateful to the young men and women who serve our country in the military and to Michelle Obama and Jill Biden for supporting military families when their loved ones are overseas and for helping our veterans, when they come home bearing the wounds of war, or needing help with education, housing, and jobs.

President Obama’s record on national security is a tribute to his strength, and judgment, and to his preference for inclusion and partnership over partisanship.

He also tried to work with Congressional Republicans on Health Care, debt reduction, and jobs, but that didn’t work out so well.  Probably because, as the Senate Republican leader, in a remarkable moment of candor, said two years before the election, their number one priority was not to put America back to work, but to put President Obama out of work.
Senator, I hate to break it to you, but we’re going to keep President Obama on the job!

In Tampa, the Republican argument against the President’s re-election was pretty simple: we left him a total mess, he hasn’t cleaned it up fast enough, so fire him and put us back in.

In order to look like an acceptable alternative to President Obama, they couldn’t say much about the ideas they have offered over the last two years.  You see they want to go back to the same old policies that got us into trouble in the first place: to cut taxes for high income Americans even more than President Bush did; to get rid of those pesky financial regulations designed to prevent another crash and prohibit future bailouts; to increase defense spending two trillion dollars more than the Pentagon has requested without saying what they’ll spend the money on; to make enormous cuts in the rest of the budget, especially programs that help the middle class and poor kids.  As another President once said – there they go again.

I like the argument for President Obama’s re-election a lot better. He inherited a deeply damaged economy, put a floor under the crash, began the long hard road to recovery, and laid the foundation for a modern, more well-balanced economy that will produce millions of good new jobs, vibrant new businesses, and lots of new wealth for the innovators.

Are we where we want to be? No. Is the President satisfied? No. Are we better off than we were when he took office, with an economy in free fall, losing 750,000 jobs a month.  The answer is YES.

I understand the challenge we face.  I know many Americans are still angry and frustrated with the economy.  Though employment is growing, banks are beginning to lend and even housing prices are picking up a bit, too many people don’t feel it.

I experienced the same thing in 1994 and early 1995.  Our policies were working and the economy was growing but most people didn’t feel it yet.  By 1996, the economy was roaring, halfway through the longest peacetime expansion in American history.
President Obama started with a much weaker economy than I did.  No President – not me or any of my predecessors could have repaired all the damage in just four years.  But conditions are improving and if you’ll renew the President’s contract you will feel it.
I believe that with all my heart.

President Obama’s approach embodies
the values, the ideas, and the direction America must take to build a 21st century version of the American Dream in a nation of shared opportunities, shared prosperity and shared responsibilities.

So back to the story.  In 2010, as the President’s recovery program kicked in, the job losses stopped and things began to turn around. The Recovery Act saved and created millions of jobs and cut taxes for 95% of the American people. In the last 29 months the economy has produced about 4.5 million private sector jobs.  But last year, the Republicans blocked the President’s jobs plan costing the economy more than a million new jobs. So here’s another jobs score: President Obama plus 4.5 million, Congressional Republicans zero.

Over that same period, more than more than 500,000 manufacturing jobs have been created under President Obama – the first time manufacturing jobs have increased since the 1990s.
The auto industry restructuring worked.  It saved more than a million jobs, not just at GM, Chrysler and their dealerships, but in auto parts manufacturing all over the country.  That’s why even auto-makers that weren’t part of the deal supported it.  They needed to save the suppliers too. Like I said, we’re all in this together.

Now there are 250,000 more people working in the auto industry than the day the companies were restructured.  Governor Romney opposed the plan to save GM and Chrysler. So here’s another jobs score: Obama two hundred and fifty thousand, Romney, zero.

The agreement the administration made with management, labor and environmental groups to double car mileage over the next few years is another good deal: it will cut your gas bill in half, make us more energy independent, cut greenhouse gas emissions, and add another 500,000 good jobs.
President Obama’s “all of the above” energy plan is helping too – the boom in oil and gas production combined with greater energy efficiency has driven oil imports to a near 20 year low and natural gas production to an all time high.  Renewable energy production has also doubled.

We do need more new jobs, lots of them, but there are already more than three million jobs open and unfilled in America today, mostly because the applicants don’t have the required skills.  We have to prepare more Americans for the new jobs that are being created in a world fueled by new technology.  That’s why investments in our people are more important than ever. The President has supported community colleges and employers in working together to train people for open jobs in their communities. And, after a decade in which exploding college costs have increased the drop-out rate so much that we’ve fallen to 16th in the world in the percentage of our young adults with college degrees, his student loan reform lowers the cost of federal student loans and even more important, gives students the right to repay the loans as a fixed percentage of their incomes for up to 20 years.  That means no one will have to drop-out of college for fear they can’t repay their debt, and no one will have to turn down a job, as a teacher, a police officer or a small town doctor because it doesn’t pay enough to make the debt payments.  This will change the future for young Americans.

I know we’re better off because President Obama made these decisions.

That brings me to health care. The Republicans call it Obamacare and say it’s a government takeover of health care that they’ll repeal.  Are they right? Let’s look at what’s happened so far. Individuals and businesses have secured more than a billion dollars in refunds from their insurance premiums because the new law requires 80% to 85% of your premiums to be spent on health care, not profits or promotion.  Other insurance companies have lowered their rates to meet the requirement.  More than 3 million young people between 19 and 25 are insured for the first time because their parents can now carry them on family policies.  Millions of seniors are receiving preventive care including breast cancer screenings and tests for heart problems.  Soon the insurance companies, not the government, will have millions of new customers many of them middle class people with pre-existing conditions.  And for the last two years, health care spending has grown under 4%, for the first time in 50 years.

So are we all better off because President Obama fought for it and passed it? You bet we are. There were two other attacks on the President in Tampa that deserve an answer. Both Governor Romney and Congressman Ryan attacked the President for allegedly robbing Medicare of 716 billion dollars. Here’s what really happened. There were no cuts to benefits. None. What the President did was save money by cutting unwarranted subsidies to providers and insurance companies that weren’t making people any healthier. He used the saving to close the donut hole in the Medicare drug program, and to add eight years to the life of the Medicare Trust Fund.  It’s now solvent until 2024. So President Obama and the Democrats didn’t weaken Medicare, they strengthened it.

When Congressman Ryan looked into the TV camera and attacked President Obama’s “biggest coldest power play” in raiding Medicare, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.  You see, that 716 billion dollars is exactly the same amount of Medicare savings Congressman Ryan had in his own budget.
At least on this one, Governor Romney’s been consistent.  He wants to repeal the savings and give the money back to the insurance companies, re-open the donut hole and force seniors to pay more for drugs, and reduce the life of the Medicare Trust Fund by eight years. So now if he’s elected and does what he promised Medicare will go broke by 2016.  If that happens, you won’t have to wait until their voucher program to begins in 2023 to see the end Medicare as we know it.

But it gets worse.  They also want to block grant Medicaid and cut it by a third over the coming decade.  Of course, that will hurt poor kids, but that’s not all.  Almost two-thirds of Medicaid is spent on nursing home care for seniors and on people with disabilities, including kids from middle class families, with special needs like, Downs syndrome or Autism.  I don’t know how those families are going to deal with it. We can’t let it happen.

Now let’s look at the Republican charge that President Obama wants to weaken the work requirements in the welfare reform bill I signed that moved millions of people from welfare to work.
Here’s what happened.  When some Republican governors asked to try new ways to put people on welfare back to work, the Obama Administration said they would only do it if they had a credible plan to increase employment by 20%.  You hear that? More work.  So the claim that President Obama weakened welfare reform’s work requirement is just not true. But they keep running ads on it. As their campaign pollster said “we’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers.” Now that is true. I couldn’t have said it better myself – I just hope you remember that every time you see the ad.

Let’s talk about the debt. We have to deal with it or it will deal with us.  President Obama has offered a plan with 4 trillion dollars in debt reduction over a decade, with two and a half dollars of spending reductions for every one dollar of revenue increases, and tight controls on future spending. It’s the kind of balanced approach proposed by the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles commission.

I think the President’s plan is better than the Romney plan, because the Romney plan fails the first test of fiscal responsibility: The numbers don’t add up. It’s supposed to be a debt reduction plan but it begins with five trillion dollars in tax cuts over a ten-year period. That makes the debt hole bigger before they even start to dig out.  They say they’ll make it up by eliminating loopholes in the tax code.  When you ask “which loopholes and how much?,” they say “See me after the election on that.”

People ask me all the time how we delivered four surplus budgets.  What new ideas did we bring? I always give a one-word answer: arithmetic.  If they stay with a 5 trillion dollar tax cut in a debt reduction plan – the – arithmetic tells us that one of three things will happen: 1) they’ll have to eliminate so many deductions like the ones for home mortgages and charitable giving that middle class families will see their tax bill go up two thousand dollars year while people making over 3 million dollars a year get will still get a 250,000 dollar tax cut; or 2) they’ll have to cut so much spending that they’ll obliterate the budget for our national parks, for ensuring clean air, clean water, safe food, safe air travel; or they’ll cut way back on Pell Grants, college loans, early childhood education and other programs that help middle class families and poor children, not to mention cutting investments in roads, bridges, science, technology and medical research; or 3) they’ll do what they’ve been doing for thirty plus years now – cut taxes more than they cut spending, explode the debt, and weaken the economy. 

Remember, Republican economic policies quadrupled the debt before I took office and doubled it after I left.  We simply can’t afford to double-down on trickle-down.

President Obama’s plan cuts the debt, honors our values, and brightens the future for our children, our families and our nation.

My fellow Americans, you have to decide what kind of country you want to live in.  If you want a you’re on your own, winner take all society you should support the Republican ticket.  If you want a country of shared opportunities and shared responsibilities – a “we’re all in it together” society, you should vote for Barack Obama and Joe Biden. If you want every American to vote and you think it's wrong to change voting procedures just to reduce the turnout of younger, poorer, minority and disabled voters, you should support Barack Obama.  If you think the President was right to open the doors of American opportunity to young immigrants brought here as children who want to go to college or serve in the military, you should vote for Barack Obama.  If you want a future of shared prosperity, where the middle class is growing and poverty is declining, where the American Dream is alive and well, and where the United States remains the leading force for peace and prosperity in a highly competitive world, you should vote for Barack Obama.

I love our country – and I know we’re coming back. For more than 200 years, through every crisis, we’ve always come out stronger than we went in.  And we will again as long as we do it together. We champion the cause for which our founders pledged their lives, their fortunes, their sacred honor – to form a more perfect union.

If that’s what you believe, if that’s what you want, we have to re-elect President Barack Obama.

God Bless You – God Bless America.

Read all about it

Ms Curry

In publishing news, there's a story going around that some unnamed book-publishing firm is ready to offer Ann Curry eight million semolians to write a "tell-all" book about how the Today Show tied a can to her, and also to tell about how Matt Lauer ALLEGEDLY likes an occasional piece of chicken on the side and how Savannah Guthrie ALLEGEDLY took some Englishman away from his wife and later married and divorced him.

Mr Lauer (r)

Have we reached the information saturation point in this country?  Do we all have enough knowledge about the history of this nation, do we all speak at least two languages, is everyone up to date on everything we all ought to know?  OK then.  If that's the case, then I guess it's time to take our feet off the gas pedal and coast for a while.  Nothing says "putting my mind on hold" like "reading a book about Matt Lauer getting some strange nookie."

I guess this book will be ghostwritten and I guess it will come out on the bookstands and on the Kindles and the E-readers and the Whooz-Its and people will read about all this fooling around involving people who have to get up in the middle of the night to go to work.  I used to have to do the same (get up for work in the middle of the night), and yet there seems but scant interest in my memoirs.  Which is good, because I retired of my own free will and I never knew the taint of scandal and I don't know anything about people horsing around on the job.  I just don't.  Other peoples' sex lives should be of interest to them and them alone.

I always ran away faster than Paul Ryan at a marathon when people (always males) would begin telling me about how they "did it" to someone the night before. They always made it sound so, so...one sided.  Which it might have been.

Eye on Crime

On Labor Day night, Baltimore County's Police and Haz-Mat teams were called to a house just east of Towson to deal with some stored hazardous materials.

Two young men, entrepreneurs as it were, are charged with coming up with a business plan and then trying to put that model into action.  Only problem is, according to the police, what they were planning to sell was Mountain Dew bottles, filled with engine starter fluid and water. 

For those of us who are not up to date on the latest methods of chemical self-abuse, the point of having one of those bottles is to inhale the fragrant contents and put yourself in a doped-up state.

It must work well, judging by the look in the eyes of one of the young men charged in this caper:

I cropped this picture out of the Parkville Patch just to show the look his countenance beamed toward the cop taking his mug shot. Not to say that he's guilty of anything, but in case he is by some wild chance, let's show this picture to any person of any age who says, "Hey! Let's sniff some engine starter fluid as a means of increasing our vitality and joie-de-vivre!"

Beside the danger to the neighborhood of having chemical production going on down in the basement, the risk of having inhalants circulating among us is serious.  Think about it.  You don't want to wind up like this.

Turning on the Fans

There's a movie that I wanted to see when it was out in the theatres for fifteen minutes, but I missed that narrow window of opportunity.  It's on free-per-view right now, on the Sundance channel movies, and it's called "Big Fan."

Patton Oswalt, who played a guy who lived with his mom and sold subway tokens in a tiny booth on "King of Queens" really steps out of his comfort zone in this one. He plays Paul Aufiero, a guy who lives with his mom, but is a parking garage cashier in a tiny booth in this movie.  But I'm not knocking it.  The movie is great.  All I can tell you is that it's about a guy who devotes his entire life to being the #1 fan of the New York Giants football team.  Tell you any more, and I'd be ruining it for you, and I do recommend it.  Trust me.  I was right about "Ernest Has Jury Duty," wasn't it?

With football season approaching, people in Baltimore are in an odd state.  The baseball team is doing better than it has in any season since 1997, and the football team wasn't much good in that year.  Now the Orioles are right in the middle of the pennant race and the Ravens start their season this Monday with expectations that this has to be the year they win it all.  (No pressure there...)

I'm a big fan, myself, but I enjoy the game from the perspective of watching talented athletes do what they do so well.  Paul Aufiero is a character who represents those people who seem to misplace the perspective, taking the wins and losses of his team entirely too seriously, and even saying, "We're gonna win..." as if he were out there at left tackle or something.

I don't even think the players themselves get so stoked up as to call and argue a botched double play or dropped interception with a guy on a radio show or another caller.  In fact, I have read stories about people who became professional athletes because they were born with a preternatural ability to throw, hit or catch a ball, and not because they were deeply interested in it.  They even say, in some cases, that they couldn't care much about the history of the game.  They see it as a nice way to earn more than they would at almost any other occupation except for being CEO of Bain Capital, and they drive home after the game, wondering why people are hollering on the radio about a game that's already over.

Listen, it's no problem if some wish to display an overwhelming interest in sports, but "Big Fan" will show you that there is a dangerous side to all this.  And I might as well admit that we watched it on Monday evening, because the Orioles had played (and won!) in the afternoon that day, and so there was no baseball to watch that night. 

Getting off on the big foot

Please raise your right hand if you know what a "Ghillie Suit" is.

No, it's not the suit that they make you wear when you go to meet Marge and Nick Ghillie.  It's a camouflage outfit that makes the wearer look like a field of parsley.

You can see why being dressed like that could be helpful in trying to sneak up on people in vegetative surroundings.

Now, let's see right hands from everyone who thinks that putting on a Ghillie Suit and hanging around the local highway is a good idea.

Take that right hand and use it to pat yourself on the back if you didn't raise it this time.  Because, that practice proved fatal for one Randy Lee Tenley of Kalispell, MT, who donned his Ghillie and then positioned himself in the right-hand lane of Highway 93 not so long ago, and was promptly struck by two cars.  He was pronounced dead at the scene.

The trooper who investigated, Jim Schneider, said that Tenley "was trying to make people think he was Sasquatch so people would call in a Sasquatch sighting. You can't make it up. I haven't seen or heard anything like this before. Obviously, his suit made it difficult for people to see him."

It comes as a surprise to those of us who spend our days living our lives, working and earning, loving and learning, that we have others among us whose primary interest is dressing up like a gigantic hairy primate who lumbers around the woods of the northwestern United States and western Canada. Well, listen, it's like juggling chainsaws:  you can do it if you wanna, but you gotta be careful.

Or, you oughta.

And don't be afraid of the dark

Well, it's Labor Day, and we all know what that means.  Time for the Labor Day Love Network, the Jerry Lewis MDA Telethon!  Joining Jerry and his live all-night and all-day show will be absolutely no one, because it ain't happening this year. 

The people at the Muscular Dystrophy Association let Jerry go last year and there is no more telethon.  This tears my heaven all to hell, because, as great as the cause of fighting these neuromuscular diseases is, I regard Jerry as the French do.  I think he is almost the funny man ever born, taking second place only to gagmeister Mint Romney.

Last year, when his role was significantly diminished, Jerry promised to let us know how it came that the MDA people threw him out after 45 years, $1.6 billion raised, and one Nobel Peace Prize nomination.  But Jerry is far too classy a guy to complain about shoddy treatment, so here we are, no Telethon, no Jerry singing "You'll Never Walk Alone," no tympani rolls accompanying toteboard updates, no referring to his pals (e.g. Sammy Davis, Jr) as "mahvelous pehfohmehs." 

I think it's a shoddy way to treat a great man, but I point you to this YouTube video as another way to pass the time today, Labor Day, a day that used to mean Jerry Day as well, but no longer does.

Peggy and my parents and I went to the Lyric Theater to see Jerry star in "Damn Yankees" in 1995.  When Jer appeared out of a cloud of Luciferian smoke, the audience arose as one, greeting him with a standing ovation that ended only when my father yanked on the knee of my khakis and told me it was time to sit down, at long last. 

But I never thought they'd say that to Jerry.  Look how wrong I was!

Sunday rerun: Go on, Goon

Calvin and Hobbes, the 1985 - 1995 comic strip that is still available online was a daily wonder to me.  I wondered how its creator and artist Bill Watterson was able to come up with so many (3,160!) dead-on satires of daily life in America, our schools, our love of TV over most everything else, and the senseless limits that we place on a child's creativity.  

The old strips might as well have been drawn yesterday.  The past few weeks, we have enjoyed seeing young Calvin and his friend Hobbes battling a battalion of Snow Goons that have taken over their neighborhood.  Funny stuff! Some of the best cartoons that Watterson ever did were about snowmen and Calvin out there playing in the snow and making his own snowpeople.

But when I think of Snow Goons, I think of:

• The person who tailgated me all the way down Stevenson Lane yesterday morning.  For the benefit of my many readers in Gila Bend, AZ, we had snow on Monday night, followed by freezing rain on Tuesday morning.  It made all the world look like a gigantic Honey-Dipt Donut, and when I left for work, it was still an even freezin' 32°, and the roads were icy in spots.  Stevenson Lane is downhill with a hard right turn at the bottom of the hill, and the speed limit there is 25, which means you go 25 in the best of conditions, which were not the conditions yesterday morning.  So, to the man or woman driving a tan SUV right on my back bumper all the way down the hill - please don't force me to go buy a set of Yosemite Sam mud flaps! 
• People who shovel the snow and slush from their driveway out into the middle of the road for the rest of us to steer around.  Please don't force me to go buy a Yosemite Sam snow shovel!
• Shopowners who rip the public off at the very thought of snow and ice, jacking up the prices of rock salt, car window scrapers, mud flaps, and snow shovels.  I know capitalism means following the laws of supply and demand, but gouging is illegal and immoral and unethical.  Don't make me come to court, represented by Yosemite Sam, Esq!

Snow Goons, you have been warned!  

Saturday rerun: Where there's a will.i.am

To everything there is a season, and a time unto every purpose.  Not that Peggy and I have immediate plans to depart this vale of tears, but you never know, the way some people drive.  And I would hate to pass away and leave no will, leaving the bereaved survivors to scramble and squabble, enduring decade-long legal battles over an estate that may very well total in the six figures (if you count the figures on the right of the decimal point.)


I read that the term for dying without a will is to die "intestate."

Similarly, to die by being crushed between two behemoth tractor-trailers on I-95 is to die "interstate."

I'd prefer to do neither, to tell you the truth.

But, beyond the vast financial legacy that my clever investing will yield (I was among the first to buy stock in BetaMax VCRs, New Coke and Colgate Beef-Flavored Toothpaste) there is also a fortune in memories down in the basement.  I think it's best to specify clearly which lucky legatee will wind up with all my old records, so that there is no fighting over the original vinyl of 1964's "Jerry Lee Lewis: The Greatest LIVE Show On Earth!" or the 45 of Bobby Helms's "He Thought He'd Die Laughing (And He Did)" from '67.  There are several thousand albums and a gazillion 45's down in the basement, and some lucky music lover is going to be able to say, "Oh, Ernest Tubb and the Texas Troubadors?  I've got lots of their stuff on vinyl.  I've been into them for years! I inherited all this when my crazy uncle fell into the vat during the brewery tour."

Also residing in the basement are Bill and Hillary Clinton, Elvis, Bart Simpson and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  No, not the real people, but life-size cardboard stand-up cut-outs.  Besides giving me someone to talk to while I'm down there on the exer-cycle, they provide amusement for those unaware guests whom I ask to step down to the pantry and "bring up a bottle of catsup."  Whoa! Do they get scared, to think that the secretary of state is standing right by my hoarded canned goods!

Books, magazines, pamphlets, fliers, ephemera: all are down in the basement in a hundred or so boxes.  I have several hundred old LIFE magazines, so someone will enjoy, as do I, photo essays on country doctors who deliver calves and babies with equal skill and get paid in rhubarb pies, and hard-hitting looks at juvenile delinquency, modern kitchen designs, and redneck sheriffs chawing on Red Man tobacco while the world changed riotously around them.  Books? Max Shulman, Ring Lardner, Tom Wolfe, Thomas Wolfe, all here ready to read.  If your taste runs to Robert Ludlum or Danielle Steel, you'll be sadly disappointed.  In fact, there is very little fiction, except for a mint copy of Ronald Reagan's autobiography.

Hand tools that date back to the Paleolithic era are down there, too.  I got a lot of them from my dad and my grandfather.  I tell you, they don't make tools like this anymore, screwdrivers with wooden handles and crosscut saws that you can cut a 2 x 4 with in the afternoon and play a waltz in 4/4 time on that evening.  In fact, this type of performance is where the expression "I saw it on the radio" came from a long time ago.  Here's another example of guy playing the musical saw: click here for your birthday greeting!

Upstairs in the den are more books and a lot of baseball memorabilia, a veritable treasure trove for the discerning fan.  

Frankly, I think I'll look into this "you can't take it with you" rule.  I want my stuff with me when I'm up on my cloud, rolling around heaven* all day with my angel Peggy. If someone gets one tenth of one percent of the amount of joy that I've gotten from all my stuff, though, that will make me happy too.  

* I'm counting on getting a pass because Peggy's sure to be there!

You never sausage a fair

Yesterday, I made my annual trip to the Timonium State Fair, and it was as great as ever to strut around the midway and exhibits.  The great thing about a fair is that there is something for almost everyone...the kids like the rides, almost everyone likes the food, crafters and domestic engineers like the jams and jellies and needlepoint, and there are booths and kiosks selling everything from aluminum siding to political philosophy.  And, for crying out loud, there's a chance to sit there in a tent and play bingo.  Everyone's happy at a fair.  Give a kid some Coca-Cola, some cotton candy, candy apples and deep-fried Twinkies, along with some sausage sandwiches for ballast, and you have a happy, bouncy kid.

By the way...manufacturers of Roma Sausage...your chow is far better than your spelling.

I like to walk around and see it all, but year after year, I get the biggest kick out of wandering down to the livestock barns, where farm kids bring the sheep, hogs, goats and what-all else they have raised and groomed all year and enter them in exhibitions.  The kids even bunk right there, and you see their cots and their laptops and their cans of Red Bull and bags of Doritos right there two feet from the living quarters of their four-legged friends.  This, to me, is America at its finest: farm kids working and being proud of their work, and farm animals doing their thing in the late August sun.

When I was there, I felt like I was a million miles away from a land where people throw peanuts at a human being and claim that this is how they feed animals down there.   I wish the people who did things like that really were a million miles away.

Beyond the blue horizon (waits a beautiful day)

I was stunned one Saturday morning not long ago when I picked up the Sunpaper and there was the obituary of a very good friend of mine.  Roberta came to work for the county about twenty years ago, and we wound up working on a lot of projects together.  We made a good team because she was all policy by the rules and she followed directions to a T, and I brought to the table my knowledge of many people in many different departments and my knowledge of many jokes concerning visits to barrooms and medical offices.

So I knew she retired and moved to Virginia, where she lived in some sort of spiritual community. Before she moved, I helped her do a few things around the house to get it ready for sale.  As a woman alone, she appreciated the fact that I owned a ladder and some tools and knew several different ways to mask an unsightly crack in the basement masonry. We stayed in touch while she was down in VA, and then about a year ago, we fell out of touch, and my messages went unanswered and her facebook page remained unvisited (by her).

What had happened was that she had come down with cancer, and apparently felt the way to close the curtain was to do so in quiet contemplation.  She did not contact me at all, or leave word for others to do so (but someone directed me to the death listings that Saturday morning.)  I'd never say it wasn't her right to close the door on an old friendship as the light faded within, but I surely wish she had seen fit to do otherwise.

Otherwise, a good friend of a great friend recently lost her husband to cancer.  Amazingly, it took 22 days from diagnosis to the final chapter.  22 days.  She hardly had time to turn around once he came down with that damned disease and it was time to plan for what they call the final arrangements.

And together, they did a tremendous thing.  They held a living wake.  All their friends were invited, and some 100 people came to their house to say goodbye to him.  Five people at a time went into his bedroom, and with three days left on earth, he had a chance to greet them all, reminisce a bit, and bid a fond farewell.  When the day was over, he felt as if he had just run a marathon, but imagine the memories he took with him to his reward, and imagine how much better his friends feel for having had the chance to be part of that goodbye.

While we're on thanatological topics, it brings to mind the phone call I got from the cemetery where my Dad is.  I mean, this was like two weeks after his death and I was still a little ruffled by it all, and a guy is on my phone, cooing in my ear about how he wonders if I have "made any plans for my final destination."  I got steamed and told him that his place would be the last place anyone would ever see me.

Hey. Wait a minute.

Just my style

I am not one bit stylish.  Heck, since I retired in March, I think I have only worn long pants three times, and two of those occasions involved visits to funeral homes, where shorts just don't make it.  I am seriously planning to give all but five of my ties to Goodwill, and I see no further wardrobe expansion in the future beyond my daily uniform of cargo pants and polo shirt.  If only I could find ankle length red socks, I'd be in tall clover.

Popped collars on multiple polo shirts, unbuttoned dress shirt buttons, t shirts with a suit, scarves with a suit and no tie or ties unfurled on an open neck (who do you think you are, Boz Scaggs or something?) and straw fedoras with Sting-EE-Brim brims are all fine for people who appear on, or watch, "Big Brother."  I am no more ready to wear that stuff than I am ready to head to Tampa for this week's festivities.

So I pay but faint attention to ads for men's clothes. And this George Zimmer, the face and voice (and former CEO) of Men's Wearhouse, always says that I'm going to like the way I look  - and he guarantees it.  Which is good, because now George is talking about selling you a new style of men's suit: shorter, with shorter arms, and a generally skimpy look all over.  I won't be buying any of them, which pretty much means that I'll like the way I look.

I guarantee it!

Don't let an anchor drag you down

I don't want to turn today's ramblings into a big get-down-on-the-media hoohah.  And having spent most of last evening being lectured on the absolute impossibility of any gun control measure ever doing anything about the stunning amount of gun crimes and assaults in this country, I just don't want to open that can of worms again right now.

But for those of you outside the greater Baltimore area, we had a horrible thing happen on the first day of school here.  Perry Hall High School, right near us, was the scene of a shooting incident in which, as the story goes, a young man was being hassled in the cafeteria and he snuck outside to where he had secreted a disassembled rifle, then snuck back inside and shot another student.  A very brave guidance counselor then pinned the ALLEGED shooter against a vending machine and got him down until the school resource officer ran over and effected the arrest.  The victim was flown to Shock Trauma in critical condition.

As you might expect, all hell broke loose around the high school.  Students were dismissed, but not all of them.  The public was told to meet their kids at the Perry Hall Square Shopping Center, and a couple of thousand kids started trooping up the street to the home of Dollar Tree and Asian Fusion, where it took about three minutes for the parking lot to fill with anxious parents.  Eventually, the meeting place was changed to the middle school across the street, leading to hundreds of kids darting across the street playing dodge-'em with hundreds of cars and trucks. But eventually everyone met up with their rides.

Over in TV Land, this was one of those events where you get to see the news teams scramble, and that's not often pretty. The helicopters were up, showing cops swarming the school grounds and kids hauling @$$.  And that's when something really bugged me. A certain news anchor, who has been on the air here for a long, long time, said something so thoroughly wrong that it made me yelp.  And I'll not call his name here, because for all I know, some uninformed producer was whispering this false information in his ear, although I kind of doubt that.

The overhead scene from the news helicopter showed quite a few ambulances around the school, and this news guy said, "We have found over the years that the volunteer fire companies tend to show up at these sorts of events, to back up the regular fire department."

Dude.  Where to begin?  There is but one Baltimore County Fire Department, and it comprises both career and volunteer units, both fire and EMS.  Both types of companies are dispatched in order of closeness to events without regard to career or volunteer status. In a major event like this, involving thousands of people, it's only smart to have plenty of ambulances standing by.  People tend to be injured running out of buildings, people suffer cardiac distress, and other perfectly valid reasons exist as well.

And I have no idea where he got this idea, but fire engines, ambulances and what-all else do not just listen to the fire radio and decide to ride on over to see what's going on.  For a unit to respond to an incident without being dispatched is about as serious a breach of protocol as there could be.

So, my suggestion for all news anchors who find themselves having to extemporize and not rely on a teleprompter would be to know what they're talking about...or not talk.

Dear old golden-rule days

Well, today is the day that means summer is over for millions of schoolkids, and their parents, and for anyone trying to drive to work between 7 and 9 in the yawning.

That leaves me out.

But back-to-school it is for almost everyone, and I always seem to get that same old nostalgic feeling.  Sometimes, before I can stop myself, I go to a store and come out with a new looseleaf binder, plenty of three-hole punched paper, some new pens and pencil, a protractor in case I need to protract anything and a compass so I can jab myself in the palm with the pointed end and stay awake during seemingly-interminable lectures about plant life in a biodome, George Washington's winter in Valley Forge, word problems involving two trains leaving Chicago at different times, and the need to wear white socks and a clean uniform in phys ed.

See, the problem is, if you doze off in one class and wake up in another, you get your facts transposed and soon find yourself wondering why Geo. W (the good one) would be boarding a westbound train wearing white socks, shorts, and a reversible t-shirt with "TOWSON Boys' Physical Education" neatly emblazoned on the chest, while carrying a glass hemisphere with lichens growing inside.

And I'll here renew my annual query about why every single student needs to be driven somewhere...either to school itself or to the bus stop.  Have we, as a nation, lost the hearty hardy spirit that allowed yours truly to walk to the morning bus - a journey of well over a block - and then walk almost all the way home after detention  school?  To see a child pile out of an SUV and desultorily saunter to another oversized vehicle for the final leg of his or her journey to Academia is to see heartbreak with two legs wearing Crocs.

Mom?  Dad?  Nannies, caretakers and au pairs?  Please just open the front door and send little Marmaduke or Fontanella off to school on their own, if they are in middle school or above.   They'll thank you for it later.

Sunday rerun: Booth sides now

Besides Garrison Keillor, the other personal favorite who wore red socks was the late writer/interviewer/radio host/actor/raconteur Studs Terkel. He did the coolest thing: he interviewed people - from kid to old timer, rich to poor, smart to dumb - on the radio and then edited the interviews into book form, usually all on one topic, such as World War II or the racial issues in our country, so the reader could learn a lot from a lot of people.

I guess his best-known book is "Working," and I find myself picking that volume up from time to time, reading again certain favorite parts. Reading the book, in which people just talk about their jobs, reminds us that there are good part and bad parts about every job, and that you might not want to spend too much time envying the other guy, whose job looks to be situated on a much greener lawn than yours does. There are drawbacks to every job, with the possible exception of being Little Richard.

I was thinking about this on the way to work because I had to stop for gas , and I always feel a nice thought toward those who sit in booths all day long taking gas money, making change, selling loose cigars for blunts, surrounded by auto de-stink-alizers that either look like pine trees or skunks (the selling point there being irony), condoms, cigarettes and Slim Jims. One place where I like to gas up is over by the Parkville fire house and police station. It's convenient because it's on the right side of the road for me heading to work, the prices are reasonable, and there is a car wash, although my truck prefers Mother Nature's rainy days to the hi-pressure Suds-O-Matic.

The young woman who sits in the booth at this station is unfailingly polite and pleasant, and frankly, I don't know what the worst part of her job would be. Is it the men who attempt to make time with her by hollering through the little voicebox in her bulletproof Plexiglass window? How many times, really, do you think she has to deal with someone commenting on the weather ("Hot one today, huh?") or the price of gasoline ("It's highway robbery - get it???") or how pretty they find her ("Looking gooooooooood today!") while the rest of us shuffle about in line behind them, eyes rolling, wondering why they just don't get it that they aren't going to get anywhere.

Or maybe the worst part is that at this time of the year, right around sunrise, the sun beams directly into her eyes, forcing her to wear sunglasses while she doles out change and fends off 1/2-ass Harry and his frustrated flirtation. I mean, really; you could perform an appendectomy in that booth at ten til seven this month, and still have plenty of light left over. It's that bright.

They don't offer squeegees there any more to clean off the windows; I guess they were tired of having them ripped off, right there in the shadow of the police precinct. Middle-aged guys riding mopeds and scooters - always a sign that they no longer have a license to drive a vehicle that requires one - stop in, people on their way to work who need ten gallons of hi-test and a pack of Kools run in, and I'm there a couple of times a week too, just because I like to see people in action.

Here's to you, nice gas-station lady, and I hope you have all nice days. I bet you have some stories to tell!

Saturday rerun: Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without

At first glance, one might think this is a picture of some sort of horrible carnage, but it's not. It's actually vegetablage, to coin a neologism, and it's a sign of misplaced priorities, to me.

Here's the story as I found it on one of the internets:

La Tomatina is a food fight festival held on the last Wednesday of August each year in the town of Buñol in the Valencia region of Spain. Tens of thousands of participants come from all over the world to fight in a brutal battle where more than one hundred metric tons of over-ripe tomatoes are thrown in the streets.
Approximately 20,000-50,000 tourists come to the tomato fight, multiplying by several times Buñol's normal population of slightly over 9,000. In preparation for the dirty mess that will ensue, shopkeepers use huge plastic covers on their storefronts in order to protect them.

Now, I have nothing at all against the Buñolians throwing tomatoes around if that's what they want to do. However, I used to work in a building with a homeless shelter located therein, and I know that the earnest people who try to supply food for people experiencing homelessness go to all sorts of measures to try to locate nutritious food for the people. You have to figure that "tens of thousands of metric tons" of tomatoes would make at least enough spaghetti sauce for hundreds of thousands of spaghetti dinners. I'm just sayin'.

And ketchup! My grandmother made her own ketchup, or catsup if you will, as well as root beer, mayonnaise, pickle relish and canned beets, and one of the last things she ever told me as she drew me closer to her deathbed was, "Mark...remember..they don't use the best tomatoes for ketchup...I'm just sayin'.."

I have to wonder, quite frankly, what the devil it is with Spain, with people willing to travel great distances to get involved in activities of dubious value, for which one needs goggles. What the hell is it over there? 

Remember those dialogues from Spanish class, all about "¡Hola, Juan! ¿Como esta usted?" Well, what's up with Juan next? Is the new next line "¿Quiere ser pisoteado por un toro o quieres tener tomates lanzado en usted?" ("Do you want to be trampled by a bull or do you want to have tomatoes thrown at you?")

The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind. Along with the aroma of enteric fermentation of ruminant cattle, and a tangy, rich, tomatoey-goodness wafting by.

REALLY Staying Alive

Quick! Name a famous American author who was also a noted photographer!

Ready?

F. Stop Fitzgerald!

That homemade joke has made me chuckle and guffaw for years now, and it only comes to mind now because F. Scott Fitzgerald was also famous for saying "There are no second acts in American lives."

But there are!

Jim Joyce is a Major League umpire.  Prior to 2010, he was chiefly famous for his elaborate facial hair.  He was known as a pretty good ump.

And then Armando Gallarga, then of the Tigers, was pitching what is certain to be the best game of his up-and-down career one night.  Joyce was the first-base umpire.  26 batters up and 26 batters down went the Cleveland Indians that June night in MoTown, and Gallaraga was one out away from that rarest of baseball events: a perfect game. (This season there have been two, bringing the total in all the history of big league baseball to 23.) 

The 27th Indian batter, Jason Donald, hit a grounder to first baseman Miguel Cabrera, who tossed to Gallaraga, covering first for the putout.  As the picture will show you, Donald was out, no doubt about it.  Everyone at the ballpark, excepting one person, saw that and began celebrating Gallaraga's achievement, only to have that celebration die aborning when Joyce, for reasons known only to himself, signalled the batter was safe.

Of course, if you know nothing of baseball, it might occur to you that the other three umpires might have called Joyce aside and told him that Gallaraga almost had time to light up a cigar in the time between when he caught that ball at first and Donald's arrival on the base.  But they don't do things that way in baseball.

Anyway, everyone was all upset.  Gallaraga handled the situation with remarkable equanimity and forgave the weeping Joyce time after time.  Joyce apologized time after time and made his way into Bartlett's Familiar Quotations by intoning, "Nobody's perfect."  But his contrition was apparent and genuine.

Two years later now. Gallaraga, a Venezuelan by birth, has been released by the Tigers, the Orioles, and, most embarrassingly, by the inept Houston Astros the day before yesterday, and is now looking for work. 

Jim Joyce

And Jim Joyce, child of ignominy, two days before the Astros tied a can to Gallaraga,  was in Phoenix, walking to the umpires' dressing room before working the plate at a Diamondbacks-Marlins game.  He saw a woman who works for the D-backs shaking and collapsing in cardiac distress.  He ran to her and administered CPR, even remembering to time his chest compressions to the tune of "Staying Alive," as recommended by the American Heart Association and Barry Gibb, until he was relieved by a paramedic.

She is alive now and Jim Joyce deserves credit.  I'm glad that now, he sees himself on the news or in the paper and it's for a good thing.

Whole Lotta Shaking Goin' On

Happy first birthday today to the 2011 Virginia earthquake!  One year ago today at 1:51 PM, the earth shook, rattled and rolled for what seemed to be an eternity, but it was less than a minute.  Californians among us stuck their dainty noses in the air and pointed out that they have them worse than this almost every week. Still, a lot of damage was done...this was a 5.8 magnitude earthquake after all, and it did between $200 million and $300 million in damages to buildings as far away as Georgia and Brooklyn, New York.  No one was killed, and the only injuries reported were minor, although in Suitland, Maryland, eight jars of preserved fish specimens fell from shelves at a Smithsonian Institution storage facility, which surely resulted in a bad stank.

The epicenter of the quake was Louisa County, Virginia, in the Piedmont Mountain range.  I have a friend who was born down there, in Wedlock, Va.  Well, actually, he was born just out of Wedlock, but still. 

The geological blame for the shifting earth's crust goes to the Chopawamsic Fault, a thrust fault.  And we've all committed them from time to time.

In Washington DC, several buildings - the Washington Monument and the National Cathedral among them - suffered severe structural damage. Here in Baltimore, the building most badly compromised was St Patrick's Church in Fells Point.

Either a seismograph or an EKG

I was at my mom's nursing home and none of the superannuated got too shook up about it, you'll pardon the expression.  But I watched with some amusement how the employees of a semi-large office tower across the street filed out as a safety precaution, and then,  on that sunny, warm day, they stood as close as possible to the building they had just fled for fear that it might tumble down.  I guess they figured, yeah, it might crumble on us, but hey, ain't it nice in the shade?

If nothing else, the Eastern half of the United States showed once again that when something like this happens, phone networks are jammed in seconds.  Everyone had to call everyone else to let them know that an earthquake had just occurred.  And they called, as soon as their hands stopped shaking.

"Manners are a sensitive awareness of the feelings of others"

You know what?  I thought we were doing better than this!  Wrong again.

NTSB photo

Yesterday morning, two young ladies about to enter their sophomore years in college, high school friends, were taking pictures from the railroad bridge in Ellicott City, MD.  The train people said they didn't even see them on the track, that just as the train approached the bridge something went wrong and an emergency brake activated, causing the train to jam up.  Fifteen cars on a coal train bound for Baltimore from West Virginia derailed, and the two women were killed.

And shortly thereafter, a very nice person identifying him-or-herself as "Chris Ar" tweeted that "these two idiots were killed trespassing on RR property" and that he or she "actually care(s) more about the engineer on the train, who has to deal with guilt due to the stupidity of these girls."

Say, that was real nice of him or her, wasn't it now?  Before the girls' bodies were recovered from underneath the tons of coal that killed them, this person took time out from tweeting about favorite topics among conservatives, always using filthy, nasty language.  Not that conservatives are the only ones to use intemperate words, but it's not right for anyone.

And then, in the world of sports, someone named Skip Bayless is an NFL commentator for ESPN.  That name "Skip Bayless" just screams out "ESPN NFL commentator" somehow, doesn't it?  But unlike most NFL commentators, who limit their remarks to what people do with their arms and legs, the Skipper decided to weigh in on the annual Washington Redskins quarterback controversy, which dates back to the days of Norm Snead vs Sonny Jurgensen and is an annual feature in the DC sports microcosm.  Instead of having a good team down there, they are glad to have a good argument on the merits of Theismann vs Kilmer.

So this year the Redskins drafted Heisman Trophy winner Robert Griffin III in the first round and, in the fourth round, they picked one Kirk Cousins, who is only a household name in his own house.  But the other night, in a meaningless exhibition game, Griffin III failed to make everyone forget Johnny Unitas, so naturally the good people of DC have started grinding on Griffin.

I guess I should mention that on this team with a name so horribly offensive to native Americans, Griffin happens to be an African-American and Cousins is European-American.  You need to know those facts ONLY for one reason.  This Bayless piped up yesterday morning with this statement:
  
'It's human nature if you're white to root for the white guy'

I guess we can be glad that not too many people take big portions of their worldview from Skip Bayless.  Comments like that take social progress in this nation back to the Jim Crow era, and we need not be there again.  

Of course, he backpedaled faster than a used-car dealer rolling back an odometer, saying that such an attitude is WRONG but he just had to point out that there are people who WOULD think like that.  

Skip Bayless, who sees the need to bring the color of people's skin into a discussion of who should play for the Redskins, say hello to Chris Ar, who can't wait for people to be buried before dumping hatred all over them.

Folks, we're moving backward.   We'll do better tomorrow.

Your call is impotent to us

Yesterday, the computer doohickey attached to the pfisteris that makes pictures and words come up on the screen went down, or "went down," in technical parlance.  WiFi became NoFi! Or maybe WiNo!   And I couldn't see email or any videos in which wide-eyed kids and skateboarding dogs and cats amuse an entire nation, so I called the good folks at Comcast, or "Xfinity," in technical parlance. 

It's always a good idea for a large company to go by two names.  Is it still Comcast, or is it Xfinity, or what, huh?  It's so confusing that one friend of mine, who uses them for phone, cable and internet service, says he has "Verizon Fios," which sounds like a great Greek dessert.  But I assume my friend's check gets to the right place every month, or I wouldn't be getting emails from him.

I wasn't getting emails from anyone, the reason I called Comcast.  By means of answering 27 questions, I got to the lightning round, where I got to sit and listen to Muzak for seven minutes.  It was almost a relief when the problem-solver picked up my call, uttered a sigh heard round the world, and promptly disconnected me.  Within seconds, I was being entertained by that "If you'd like to make a call..." lady, who sounds for all the world like a grade school librarian hollering at the kids for picking up books and not shelving them properly, or at all.

Second call, waiting time was much faster, and as a free bonus, I got to talk to someone and also help him learn a new language: English.  I had to repeat and define something in just about every sentence, but I considered it my "hands across the sea" gesture.  Reading from his script, he told me not to worry, and that he was sure we could get me back on line.  Then he said something that sounded like tech talk when he told me what he was going to do and suddenly, we were like Abbott and Costello:

Him: Fine, sir, at this time I am going to flapper the noddistrand, so please look at your obfuscator and tell me what you see.

Me: What does that mean?

Him: What does that mean, "what does that mean?"

Me: I don't understand what you are going to do.

Him: (Silence)

Me: (two minutes later)  Are you still there?

Him: Yes, do you see the lights going off?

Me:  On the modem, you mean?  Yes they're off, and now here they come, one at a time...

Him:  How can that be happening?

Me:  I dunno, but here comes my email!

Him:  What does that mean, "here comes my email"?

Me: It means my email inbox is filling up with important emails.  I must go at once and reply to the widow of a Nigerian prince.

And then, just like when you go to look at a video, I got a commercial.  The guy asked me  - and I am not making this up - if I planned to put an addition on my house.  I thought at first he wanted to move in and be my tech team, but he said he was asking in case I wanted to add more cable outlets or anything.

Some people just live to torment me. 

C_H_E_A_T_E_R_

From the Associated Press:

ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — One of the top young Scrabble players in the country has been kicked out of the game’s national championship tournament in Florida after he was caught hiding blank letter tiles, organizers said Tuesday.

John D. Williams, Jr., executive director of the National Scrabble Association, said that a male player was ejected from the 350-player event in Round 24 of the 28-round event.

The cheating was spotted by a player at a nearby table, who noticed the ejected player conceal a pair of blank tiles by dropping them on the floor. Blank tiles can be used as wild card letters. When confronted by the tournament director, he admitted to it, organizers said.

Williams, who has served as executive director for 25 years and co-authored a book on the popular Hasbro board game in 1993, said this was the first incident of cheating at a national tournament. However, he said it’s been known to occur at smaller, regional events.

“It does happen no matter what. People will try to do this,” he said. “It’s the first time it’s happened in a venue this big though. It’s unfortunate. The Scrabble world is abuzz. The Internet is abuzz.”

Williams would not identify the player by name or age because he’s a minor. 

So, this bozo decides he's going to cheat at Scrabble.  You know, that is a sure sign of a society in decline, when even teenaged wonks try to get ahead in a board game by cheating, and do so in a feckless manner.

You get the feeling that the young unnamed man here was some sort of genius right out of the crib: probably read a lot, knew a lot of words, and shouldn't that have been enough?  No.  You also get the feeling (at least, you do if you are I) that his parents encouraged him to go into the high-pressure world of competitive scrabble, where the top prize of $10,000 looms like a huge carrot in front of frenzied contestants.  And maybe, his mom and dad told him that it's ok to get an edge in life.  After all, son, it's ok to cheat on your taxes, so long as you don't get caught.  And if mom "forgets" to pay for the 100-lb sack of Dog-B-Fed down at the Food Clown, well, so Rover eats for free.  What could be wrong?

I might be all wet here; it could be that the parents of this misguided youth guided him as well as any parents ever, and he got off track all on his own.  Maybe.  But I do know that somewhere he got the idea that cheating is right. And that is so wrong.