iFull

Well, not really, but my iPod is filling up and I want to spend some time clearing out songs I don't want to hear anymore ("Isn't It Time," The Babys) and songs that are in there twice under different names ("S.Y.S.L.J.F.M."  a/k/a/ "The Letter Song" , Joe Tex)  and songs that I have no idea how they got in there ("The Clouds" by The Spacemen, or is it "The Spacemen" by The Clouds?)

But it's like when I find a really great Goodwill store or Salivation Army outlet - I go in there with a plan, and an hour later, I'm browsing like a loon and nothing is done.  Peggy can tell you countless tales of my plans to clean out the garage (not now, when it doubles as a walk-in coolerator for beer and bottles of water) and two hours later,  she finds me rolling an old lacrosse ball that I found off the roof into an old first baseman's mitt that I also found.

A damn fool with his
selfie bobblehead

I love my iPod.  If you could have told me 40 years ago that: a) I could possess a magic box the size of a pack of Chiclets that contained all of my favorite songs to listen to on tiny earbuds  and b) 3-D printer technology would allow any damn fool mortal to create a selfie bobblehead, I would jumped all over the music machine.  I pop it on the melon and take my walk around the neighborhood, vacuum the house, rake the leaves, do whatever without anyone having to hear what I'm listening to.

And that's for the best, because a lot of the songs on there - and as of this typing, there are 1743 songs, which the bottom of the screen assures me would take 3.7 days to listen to - are songs no one else wants to hear. Trust me.

Like I have that kind of free time! Oh wait, I do.  But still, time to weed it out. But don't get mad if it takes me a while.  I bring up the iTunes page and start at the "A"s ("Above and Beyond," two versions of a Wynn Stewart song, by both Wynn himself and by Buck Owens also) and I decide to keep them both.  Not a tough call.  But lookie here!  Right after "Ain't Wasting Time No More" (Allman Brothers) here's "Alabam" by Cowboy Copas, and then "Alabama Jubilee" AND "Alabama Wild Man" by Jerry Reed.  

How many other performers have two songs in here that name the same state in each? I guess I'd better spend the next hour checking into that little matter.

I'll never finish this.  

Sunday Rerun: C'mon, Get Therapy!

Wisecracking redhead Dante Daniel "Danny" Bonaduce will turn 50 years of age this August, and you really have to say he has packed a lot of living into what will then total 18,250 days on this earth.

He first came to public attention playing wisecracking redhead Danny "Danny" Partridge on the Partridge Family tv show, which ripped off The Cowsills in the manner of The Monkees ripping off The Beatles. That show went off the air in 1974, and even though Danny was very good at playing a wisecracking redhead kid brother, he found but limited demand for his acting services thereafter. Within three years he was doing The Love Boat and making quickie auto theft movies with Farrah Fawcett and the late Sonny Bono (R, CA).

Danny had a childhood which could best be described as awful; his father, who wrote sitcoms such as The Andy Griffith Show and One Day at a Time, is said to have beaten him regularly. This tendency to use fists where wits might serve better was to surface again and again in Danny's life.

But think about it. What would you do? What would you do? Here, one minute you're famous for being on a tv show, pretending to sing along with Susan Dey and getting to hear Shirley Jones and David Cassidy sing for real, and the next minute no one wants you to fake anything. Fame is a harsh mistress. Danny soon found himself a mister without a mattress, homeless on the streets of LA, a drug abuser seriously in need of mental rehabilitation. Cassidy, whose post-teen idol career has not been the second act that there aren't any of anyway even hired him as a supporting act in his Las Vegas show for a while, but that failed to cause a stampede of eager ticket buyers.

What's sad about America sometimes is how we so worship fame that we are even somewhat in awe of those who once had it. Bonaduce came to find out that he could always turn a quick $500 by appearing at KMart stores at the holidays, billed as a Partridge in a pear tree. 500 bucks is 500 bucks, and it led to even greater media exposure as a radio sidekick, and then as the host of his own radio shows in Phoenix, Los Angeles, and now Philadelphia. For one season he had a syndicated talk show titled "Oprah" I mean titled "Danny" in which he tried day after day to show just how pugnacious he was willing to become for money. One sad highlight of that show was his promised reunion of the Partridge Family cast, except that Susan Dey called in with her memories and David Cassidy was too busy recording an album that no one was going to buy. Sort of like saying we were gonna have spaghetti and meatballs except I cut out carbs and meat, so here's some sauce.

Danny, never shy with an opinion that might not be too popular, has taken a sharp rightward turn away from the peace and love of the Partridge 70's, lambasting Jane Fonda and Rosie O'Donnell for expressing political viewpoints unlike his own. But this sort of stuff keeps him in the public eye. In his job as a wacky morning radio host up in the City of Brotherly Love, he regularly incites petty feuds with such as Jose Canseco, former baseball player best remembered for having a fly ball bounce off his skull and over the fence for a homerun, and also for bouncing off Madonna. Recently, Danny boxed Canseco to a draw, the point of the match still being in question.

Yes, we Americans love our stars and still want to keep them in the firmament (maybe to keep a wary eye on them.) As Dante Bonaduce nears a half-century of this life, he can surely look back on the recent show The Smoking Gun Presents: World's Dumbest.. in which he ripped off one of his own eyebrows.

Whatever's best for him, as long as he keeps it classy.

The Saturday Picture Show, February 15, 2014

 "Clean up on Aisle 6!"  I love how that lady is looking like," I didn't do it!"  We're going to need a lot of sawdust for this oil slick.

 One of my favorite gags has always been to call someone's office when I knew they were not in, so I could leave the message "Arrived in Venice.  Streets flooded.  Please advise."  Can't do it this week; the streets are frozen and that's not as funny.

 Can you beat the look on this little seal's face?  He's looking like someone just told him "No dessert tonight!"

 It sure has been a tough winter here in Baltimore; just the other day we had two feet of snow in some areas around here, and the polar bears had to be fed by the Army, which had set up camp near the zoo. No, just kidding.  This picture was taken in 1950, but as you see, polar bears still dress the same as they did then.

A lady was opening an oyster and found within a rare gold pearl.  Pearls are produced when a piece of sand gets in the ligament between the two sides of the creature.  The oyster is smart enough to cover the sand with nacre, which lines the inside of its shell, to protect itself from the irritating presence of the grain of sand.  And we think animals are dumb.  Have any of us created a substance with which to cover Donald Trump?

Run right out and buy this DVD for one reason!

I am delighted to see that the Walt Dizzy Co. has released "The Jungle Book," their 1967 animation version of the Rudyard Kipling stories in which animals act like humans, only better, to serve to teach lessons to kids.

Not that I have seen the movie ever, or plan to, but I am thrilled because this will give the young people in my life their first chance to experience the talent of Phil Harris.  And by Phil Harris, I mean the entertainer born Wonga Phillip Harris in Indiana in 1904, not the fisherman who shared his name.  (Phil's first name "Wonga" was a tribute his vaudeville-performer parents paid to a native American by that name whom they knew and liked.)

Baloo

Phil voiced the part of Baloo the Bear in the Jungle Book and was tickled to have children come up to him and recognize his distinctive Southern hepcat vocalizing.  Here is his song "Bare Necessities"  - notice how cool, and how much it sounds like his dozens of hit records from decades earlier, songs like "Smoke, Smoke that Cigarette," "Up A Lazy River," "Stars Fell on Alabama," "Row, Row, Row," "Is It True What They Say About Dixie," and his biggest hit, "That's What I Like About the South."  Phil also played in "The Aristocats" as the cat Thomas O'Malley and starred again as Little John in the animated movie "Robin Hood."

Alice and Phil

Starting as the 12-year old drummer in a circus band, Phil became a bandleader, a comedy performer, a featured performer and bandleader on the Jack Benny radio show and his own show with his wife Alice Faye, an actress and singer in her own right.  The Harris character was a vain, overbearing, error-prone guy who always had to be rescued from his nutty plans and plots by the lovely Alice, while in real life, Phil was known to be modest and self-effacing.  Isn't that always the way?  

Tell you what - why not take some time to check him out on You Tube in his various incarnations on radio, records, tv and movies.  Phil passed in 1995, but we can still enjoy his talent. 

And if your kids love chanting nutty songs, let them listen to "The Thing" - his novelty hit from 1950 - and they'll be "Dum de Dum"-ing all over the house for days!

Go out and make it a good day for someone, including yourself

It was with a certain irony that some of the people I used to work with (and I) used to sing an old song called "It's A Good Day."  It was written by singer Peggy Lee and a fellow named Dave Barbour way back in 1947.

"It's A Good Day"



Oh it's a good day, for singing this song
and it's a good day, for moving along
Yes it's a good day, how could anything go wrong?
It's a good day from morning till night
Yes it's a good day for shining your shoes
and it's a good day, for losing the blues
everything to gain and nothing to lose
cause it's a good day from morning till night (you're right!)
I said to the sun, good morning sun
Rise and shine today
You know you got to get going if you're gonna make a showin
And you know you've got the right of way
Cause it's a good day for paying your bills
And it's a good day for killing your ills
So take a deep breath, throw away all your pills
Cause it's a good day from morning till night
Just this very day I said to the sun: "Good morning sun"
Rise and shine (why don't you rise and shine)
You know you got to get going if you're gonna make a showin
And you know you've got the right of way
Cause it's a good day, for paying your bills
And it's a good day, for killing your ills
So take a deep breath (ahhh) throw away all your pills
Cause it's a good day from morning till night
yes it's a good day from morning till night
cause it's a good day from morning till night!

Perry Como had a hit with the song in 1955, and of course there's the version by Peggy Lee.  And there's this one by The Ferko String Band out of Philadelphia, one of the top acts in Philly's annual Mummers Parade. 

The song is a powerful antidote to the endless dirge of songs about how tough things are and how no one cares and life is sad.  To my way of thinking, even when your best girl or guy gives you the air or the dishwasher breaks down or you don't get the promotion you deserve because the boss is propping up his wife's second cousin, it's best to stop and count five of your favorite blessings.  And music is everyone's blessing, if you'll just take a second to enjoy it.  Go ahead.  The right guy or gal will come along, you can switch to paper plates for a couple of days, and the boss's kin will soon be exposed as a faker, as soon as they forget to attach a cover sheet to their TPS report.

Stay happy!  Let me know if I can help you in that.  But you can find it within, too.  Please quit wasting time and enjoy your life.

Read it and Don't Weep

Peggy reads books with great thoughts and spiritual meanings and worthwhile messages for all.  My choice of reading material is much less high-tone, but if you want to know anything about the life of Barry Livingston, the man who played Ernie Douglas on "My Three Sons," then I'm your guy, since I read his autobiography "The Importance of Being Ernie."

But here's the point:  Peggy can read what she wants and I can read what I wish to read.  I just got that shipload of books from Amazon and I look forward to lots of entertaining reading.

Meanwhile, down in rustic Boone, NC, someone's mother is attempting to tell an entire class full of kids just what they can read.  At question is a book entitled "The House of the Spirits" by Isabel Allende.  I can't tell you what the book is about.  I think Peggy might have read it, with no noticeable damage to her soul.  As the online article puts it,  "House of the Spirits," published in 1982, is described on the author's website as "both a symbolic family saga and the story of an unnamed Latin American country's turbulent history ... The Trueba family's passions, struggles and secrets span three generations and a century of violent change, culminating in a crisis that brings the proud and tyrannical patriarch and his beloved granddaughter to opposite sides of the barricades."

Sounds interesting and educational enough.  But here comes the challenge from outraged mom Charity Lesesne, who is probably all fed up with her kids having to experience real life, so she called the book "graphic" and "immoral" and said the challenging themes and ideas the book presents are lost within the novel's graphic descriptions of rape, prostitution, violence, abuse, abortion and death, as she told the online Watauga Democrat.com.

This engendered quite a debate down there on Tobacco Road.  One Ashley Adams from Appalachian State University said, "If you trust her judgement then I am assuming that you have not read any of the books contents. I do not think any parent with any sense of moral right and wrong would be in favor of this book."

But then again, you wouldn't trust Ms Adams's ability to spell "judgment" correctly or use the possessive form "book's" where indicated.  And notice that she points out that if you want your child to read this book, she doesn't think you have any sense of moral right or wrong.  So there.

Like the overuse of the term "slippery slope," banning books takes us on a...greased incline.  Here's a nutty idea:  let the teacher decide what to teach, and parents can show the children where the moral shortcomings of the book's characters lie.  Suppressing books and dissenting points of view can't be good for anyone


As Lenny Bruce said, "l would rather my kid watches a stag movie than a clean movie, like King of Kings. Why? Because King of Kings is full of killing, and l don't want my kid to kill Christ when He comes back."

Not Too Smart

My favorite character in "Modern Family" is Jay Pritchett, the dad played by Ed O'Neill.  Now and then, when things are going crazy in the family, he is prone to stand far from the madding crowd and holler, "What the hell is happening?"

I have to holler that now and then, or at least, I want to.  I can't be hollering around the house, what with other people taking naps and all.

Down in Lubbock, Texas, the town nice enough to send Buddy Holly out to a world that needed him and his music, there is Texas Tech University.  They have a basketball team, and a man who supports them to the extent of calling himself a "superfan."  This man's name is Jeff Orr, and he lives in El Paso, TX, a short 343 miles from Lubbock.  “I don’t hunt, fish, golf or any other normal guy activities. I just sort of follow the team around,” he said in 2010.

Marcus Smart apologizes

But he shows up for game after game, which is his right, after all.  Man wants to drive 5 hours to see younger men play a game, no problem.

Here's the problem with superfans:  they don't act like normal fans, and that's not to say they are good for anything.  This Orr was caught a couple of years ago making an obscene gesture at a player for Texas A&M, and the other night during a game between Oklahoma State and TTU, an OSU player, Marcus Smart, wound up flying into the seats just beyond the basket following a hard play under the basket.

So Orr calls Smart a "piece of crap."  We know that much for sure; still in dispute is whether or not he tossed in that familiar racial slur.  Some seated in the immediate vicinity say yes, some say no.  Smart, to his discredit, shoved the blowhard and is about to sit out the next three games for that infraction.  No matter what was said, he should not be pushing fans at all.  He is 19 years of age and has, from what I'm told, a future playing in the NBA, where he will come in contact with more superfans, sad to say.

We've all known these people, mainly men, who feel that their mere presence or actions at a sporting event can tilt the machine in their favor and help their team win.  They dress up in outlandish costumes and holler.  It's one of those things where you go to the ball game and some clown two rows behind you starts hollering at the other team, and the first 27 times, it's fairly funny and by the 4th inning or halfway through the second quarter you start to hope that he will suddenly be stricken with a sore throat, or remorse, or both.  

This is Jeff Orr.  Tell me you've never seen losers like
this hanging around, watching others play sports.

It's sad that some people feel that by being close to the action, they are part of the action.  I'll say this - no one in that crowd Saturday night paid their money to watch Jeff Orr holler at people.  They paid to watch people play basketball.  

You should also know that Orr is an air traffic controller, so you won't react with so much surprise the next time you hear a story about an air traffic controller falling asleep or screwing things up high over El Paso.

Meet The Measles

On February 9th, 1964, I was among the 4 billion, give or take, who watched The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show and felt the earth shifting.  Bobby Vinton, Ricky Nelson, Andy Williams,  and yes, Elvis Presley were going to have to step aside for at least a while.  

I was 12, about to turn 13 that summer, and a world that had seemed so bleak just months before, with the assassination of John F Kennedy, was about to start seeming hopeful again.  It's been said a thousand ways better than I can, but The Beatles were just what we needed at that time.  It's difficult to explain to those not yet alive just how it felt when John, Ringo, George and Paul threw the switch to light up our lives again.  

Two weeks and a day later, I put a smile on, along with a button-down Oxford shirt, khakis, and Jack Purcells and prepared to leave for another day of 7th grade, only to be met by mother at the door.  She wanted to know what I had done to my face in the time between finishing my sausage and hominy breakfast and brushing many of the same teeth I still use to eat sausage and hominy.

There were red spots all over my face that had just popped up.  The golden ticket - the measles!  I ran to change back into pjs and begin getting sick. These things must be handled just ever so.  I probably had more hominy for lunch and maybe some rhubarb.  The measles were gone in a few days.

Then, two weeks later, I was glad for any hope, because on that Sunday, March 1, 1964, I woke up up unable to move my arms and legs.  I had spiked a fever the night before and woke up all sweaty and having spasms.  Not good.  An ambulance took me to Church Home and Hospital down on Broadway (no hospitals in Towson then) and things began looking dire as doctor after doctor came in and presented their diagnoses.  Polio, encephalitis and epilepsy were leading the pack for most of the day as I lay in bed, my only company being the transistor radio that I took along on the ambulance ride downtown. I heard a lot of Beatles songs that day.

My parents were conferring with doctors most of the day, and so, were not around when a kindly old priest came in with oils and other impedimenta.  He talked to me in a very soothing manner about how there is a brighter world awaiting the righteous and how sometimes God calls us home before we would want to leave what we're doing here and how heaven is said to be a land with no illness, no pain, no suffering and somehow in the middle of this, it dawned on me that he was telling that the odds on me being around to watch "The Andy Griffith Show" at 9 the next night were not all that great.

"So, I've come to administer to you the last rites..."

I have relived this a million times in my mind and I always see myself as much pluckier than I really was when I said, "Father, I'm...I'm not Catholic."

And he put aside his oils and sacramental gear before I even had a chance to say penance for breaking my sister's baton ten years before (a transgression that still is discussed at family gatherings.)  And he said, "Son, it can't hurt."

I know it sounds like something out of a Dead End Kids movie, but it happened. As many of you know, I lived, and find myself now fifty years older and still penitent.

As all of you know, The Beatles went on to have a long and prosperous career. 

The doctors never found out what was wrong with me.  That May 3rd, I wound up in Mercy Hospital with the same symptoms. My radio came along again and I listened to the Orioles lose to the Indians, 3-0. There was still still no determination of the problem after another week in the hospital. But ever since, people have wondered just what is it about me.

But all those early Beatles songs bring me back to places I remember...

There are places I remember

All my life though some have changed

Some forever not for better

Some have gone and some remain

All these places have their moments

With lovers and friends I still can recall

Some are dead and some are living

In my life I've loved them all.

Sunday Rerun: The big lake they call Gitchigoomie

If you know me, you would agree that not many people look, talk, walk, think, drive or choose things the way I do.

Which is fine!  It's variety that makes life so interesting.  Takes every kind of people to make the world go 'round.

The Carnival "Splendor" (sic)

I say all this for one reason. If someone who looks like me, talks like me, walks like me, thinks like me, etc etc, ankles up to you one day and says, "Peggy and I are going on a cruise to the Gilligan Islands!" I want you to call the police right away.  That person is an impostor, out to claim my vast six-figure fortune (if you count the numbers to the right of the decimal point in our bank statement) and parade around as me, for whatever horrible reason he might have.

Appealing as the prospect of floating around the seas off Mexico on a broken-down boat with no electricity or running water or air conditioning or TV, but plenty of stench, Spam and discontent among our fellow sail-ers might be, I just can't imagine it.

Those who enjoy cruises are welcome to my share of the high seas, and I'll just stay here, watching "Titanic" and listening to Gordon Lightfoot sing about his friend Ed.

Edmund.

Edmund...Fitzgerald.

The Saturday Picture Show, February 8, 2014

 I think this seems like some good words to follow, and if I owned a huge corporation I would make a copy of it was posted in all my branch offices.

 I don't often do this, but this is my own photograph edging its way into the Picture Show.  I was up early as always and the trees were getting glazed. Lovely part of nature, but when tree limbs and power lines come down because of the ice, winter loses a lot of its appeal all of a sudden.

 If I had a choice of one season to live all year long, I'd vote for autumn, and if pressed for a reason why, I'd say, look at this!

I don't know where this was taken; I don't know how often it happens that three locomotives pass through the same three tracks at the same one time. I'm just saying that it takes a lot of training.

All A Twitter

According to the article I read, Kevin Jonas of the Jonas Brothers, a pop rock band that never quite managed to find a place on my iPod, is sitting on a fortune of 18 million semolians, none of which he earned selling me CDs or concert tickets or anything else he had to peddle.

So, since $18,000,000 might not be enough to keep him in the sort of unusual clothing and hair product he favors, he has entered into a new commercial venture, commercializing his life by selling sponsorships of his tweets.

Young Jonas and his ex-hairdresser wife recently welcomed a baby they named Alena Rose into this crazy old world.  Millions of babies are born around the world every day, but very few of these births are accompanied by messages on Twitter reminding other young parents to wash the kids' swaddling clothes with a certain detergent that is paying this fellow and his wife cash money to intermingle their blessed event with a cheap payday.

He would want me to mention the name of the detergent here.

It got me to thinking.  Not that I am of a commercial-type mind, but what if my parents had decided to commemorate the important events in my young life with tie-ins to brands, services and products?  As the impressionists would say, I think it would go something like this...

My first letter home from a teacher (the one in which Mrs Reed alleged that I viewed every classroom as my personal stage) would be brought to you by BIC, the pen that writes first time, every time.

The first huge gooey pink bubble that I blew would be sponsored by Bazooka Joe and all the good people over at Dubble Bubble, whose tiny cartoon inserts provided me with jokes and gags that I use to this day ("I can always tell you the score of a ballgame before it begins - Nothing to nothing!")

Sponsorship of my first shaving experience would go to Band-Aid and English Leather.  Other sponsors lining up to cash in on my teen days would include the makers of Tackle!, an acne preparation that made its users smell like the vast chemical warehouses of Linden, NJ, and the producers of National Beer and Boone's Farm Apple Wine, which we counted as a fruit for our diet choices.

Plymouth, makers of the first car I owned, and the Hot-Shotz Corporation, makers of the jumper cables that I always carried so I could get the Plymouth started, would certainly leap at the chance to advertise on my tweets, had there been such a thing back in the days before the Jonas Bros. started doing whatever it is that they do.

One last tie-in - the various makers of Canadian bacon can slide in on this ad...the one that says I would have breakfast with Michael Buble for five days in a row before I would read another story about any Jonas brother.

The Needles and the Damages Done

What are we to take away from the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman at age 46? A man of great talent, respected by the movie-going and play-attending public as perhaps the finest character actor of his generation, a man who could choose what roles he wished to play for the rest of his natural life, and a man whose life ended with a syringe in his arm with between 50 and 70 glassine bags of heroin scattered around in his Greenwich Village apartment.

I feel sorry for his friends and survivors, his three children, his former partner Ms O'Donnell, and for the fans who will be deprived of his performances in years to come.

It's sad to look back on the old '60 Minutes' interview and see him describe his avid interest in gobbling as many drugs as he could get his hands on, but that was in the days when he gotten straight, and the assumption was that he would remain free of heroin's grip, or death grip, I should say.  

More sadness comes from realizing that this will not serve to dissuade one person from embarking on a walk down this same road, if they have decided to do so.  Everyone thinks they will be the one to beat the odds.

I've been around long enough now to see marijuana described as a killer drug in my teens to its current state as a punch line on late night talk shows, as states and cities legalize recreational use of weed.  Here in Maryland, a law was passed in the General Assembly last year to allow the medical use of grass for pain relief.  While they're toking away in Denver, no hospital in Maryland has so far been willing to administer a plan for medical marijuana, and the governor is unwilling to support recreational use.

But the point is, drugs - including alcohol, don't fool yourself - remain a scourge of society, because, after all, their overuse/abuse leads to nothing but sadness and gloom.  Heroin and cocaine were once in use as pain medications, but you see how they are used now.  We banned alcohol in the 1920s, and you see where that wound up.

Hofmann was an educated, gifted person, reduced to stumbling around his neighborhood in an apparent stupor while the drugs fought it out against the demons within him.  Or maybe the drugs teamed up with the demons.  Now, for all his talent, fame and ability to transform himself into new characters and different personas, he is just another resident of the morgue, a life wasted, a future shot to hell.

And there's a lesson in that. 

Good deeds

I can't imagine an America where people didn't act this way.

Last week down in Atlanta GA they had some weather of the sort that does not normally visit the Peach State.  They had snowy ice and icy snow that fell across the town right in the middle of the day.

They don't stockpile road salt down South like we do, in giant roadside igloos filled with sodium chloride.  Nor do they have a lot of plows or salt brine mixed with beet juice to pre-treat the highways the way we old Northern salts do.

So Atlanta had a traffic jam the size of, well, Atlanta, and for many thousands of people, it wasn't matter of being a few minutes late for dinner.  Some of the stranded motorists didn't get home until dinnertime the next night.

(I will once repeat the good advice to avoid leaving the house in wintertime without having at least a half tank of gas, a blanket, some nutrition, and some water and an extra empty bottle in the car.  You'll figure out what the empty bottle is for soon enough.)

But lookie at what this fellow did.  Matthew Miller heard that people were stuck in their cars without the vitals and he threw together some sammies and cereal and hot cocoa for people doing the sit and stew near his house.  Instead of wishing that someone would go out and help people, he went out and helped people.

We hear about heroes all the time, and I think that someone down in the 404 who knows Mr Miller should give him a fist bump from all of humanity.  We need more people like him all over the country.

Also from that storm, as the New York Times here describes, some students had to spend the night in their schools  - with the teachers there - which must have been a nightmarish night for all concerned.  Just the thought of myself as a grade school boy padding down the hall to the mens' room and running into Miss Van Breeman in the hall would have given me bashful bladder for fifty years.

The Home Team

Well, that was a hell of a Super Bowl, huh?  How about those Broncos?

I'm writing this 12 hours before the game even starts, but either way, it's a fair question.  Whether or not the Broncos won or the Seahawks did,  you can still ask about a team.  How about those Ravens, while we're at it?

With the Super Bowl over, we now enter that dead zone in my sports world.  I don't get into basketball at all, so the gap between the end of football and the beginning of baseball seems enormous.

And spring training baseball games don't count, because no one ever seems to take them too seriously.  TV news reports of a strapping farmboy slugger from out of Olathe, KS, who will make them all forget Ruth and Aaron turn out to be not so accurate when the regular season begins.  The Orioles had a kid named Andrés Mora from Río Bravo, Coahuila, Mexico, and every spring from 1976 - 1978, we got reports from the Grapefruit League that indicated that he should make plans for enshrinement in the Hall of Fame, once his playing days were over.  Well, he is in the Baseball Hall of Fame, all right: the Mexican Baseball Hall of Fame.  He starred down there in his home country until 1997, but never learned to hit an American big league curveball.

So what looks good in Florida in March doesn't mean much until it also leads us back to the playoffs in Baltimore in October.  Right now, it's February, and time to forget about Punxsutawney Phil and concentrate on getting our fill of sacrifice bunts, stolen bases and slides into home.


It's the Orioles' 60th anniversary season!  And today is Peggy's 60th birthday. Talk about people who belong in the Hall of Fame!  Happy birthday to the wife who wins the prize as World Champion every year!

Happy birthday to my wonderful wife!

Mall Shook Up

Here's the story from China, and sad to say, it's not a joke.  If you click, you'll see the pictures from the day in December when a man who had been shopping with his girlfriend for five hours chose to jump to his death from the 7th floor of a mall rather than go to one more shoe store.

Five hours is a rather long time to be prowling through shoe stores, certainly so, but he didn't have to jump, for the love of Pete.  I'm sorry for how this trip to the mall turned out for this man, but for those of us still facing more trips to the Shoepermarket, I offer this advice from someone who has been married for 40 years:  wear your watch and take your phone.

Just as separate bathrooms keep your Old Spice and her Imprévu in their own olfactory zones, most stores in the mall are not set up for couples to shop merrily, so it's the smart guy and gal or guy and guy or gal and gal who synchronize their Timexes (if you're wearing Rolexes, you already have someone doing your shopping for you) and set a time and place to meet up after all the tryin' on and goin' to the changin' room is over.  This is because five minutes spent outside the changing room, waiting for the door to open so you can see if the clothes fit or not, can be a longer time to wait than the time we have spent in a holding pattern while Jennifer Aniston sought her perfect soulmate.

The advantages of getting to the mall at 2:30 and saying "Meet you at Yogurt Yogurt Yogurt at 4" are innumerable.  I will immediately head for Dollar Tree and stock up on shower gels, sweet potato muffin mixes and DVDs of cinematic triumphs such as Artie Lange's "Beer League" and still have plenty of time to people-watch a while.  And Peggy gets to shop without hearing me caterwaul "Can we go home now?" every five minutes.

And I get to avoid having to answer the question, "Which dress do you like better?"  Because there is no right answer to that. 

Sunday Rerun: Bruise Clues

           

  

 A few years ago, there was a goofy mugger in New York City who begged the judge at his trial to put him in the Ironbar Hilton for a long long time.  Since there is almost always something else behind such a request, the judge found out that the mugger had mugged the wrong mug's mother.  He knocked down a lady and stole her purse - and that lady was the mother of a made man in the Mob.

Oooops.  And no chance to say "ooooooops I did it again."

Now we meet Anthony Miranda (above).  Young Anthony, until last week, earned his keep in Chicago by committing strong-arm robberies.  I guess it's always a risk, when you walk up to people in cars and wave your phallic substitute gun in their face and demand their money and their dignity and their sense of well-being in a world that is set up to keep the bad people away from the good.

Anthony, it turns out, is a convicted felon!  And yet, he was let out of jail before he had learned all the lessons that his penologists should have taught him.  One of those lessons should have been: Get a job, you dreg of society, and work to earn a living.  Any form of gainful employment is more honorable than your current procedure.

And for his part, Anthony, as he sits and waits for his face to mend, can tell us that he has learned this valuable lesson as well:

Always make sure that the guy you are attempting to rob is not a 6'2", 250-lb. Romanian mixed martial arts champion.

That's what he tried to do last week, Friday night in Chi., and he picked the wrong guy.  He walked up to the man in his parked car and asked for a light off his car lighter, and then pulled out the gun and told the guy to get out of the car and hand over his wallet and valuables. 

With about as much effort as it takes the rest of us to brush away a gnat, the Romanian, who works as a bodyguard and hostage rescuer, disarmed young Anthony and decorated his face for Christmas,  all red and green.  

Anthony shot  himself in the ankle during all this.

The good guy told (laughing Chicago) police that bad guy Anthony was begging for mercy, saying that he had a baby.  

If the baby is over six wks. of age, he already knows what kind of guy his Daddy is. 

The Saturday Picture Show, February 1, 2014

 As anyone sitting in Spanish III these days can tell you, "Doritos" is Spanish for "little gold things."  That's what this tasty snack chip is, and we can imagine they'll be gobbled up by the bucketful tomorrow night during The Big Game That Advertisers Cannot Call By Name So They Call The Super Bowl The Big Game XLVIII.  Here's an interesting story about how this little crunchable munchable came to exist in the first place.  Teaser:  how did Disneyland find a use for all their unused tortillas from the taco stand?

 For my friends in the ATL:  click and save on this picture as a reminder of how either a foot of snow or a finger of ice can bring a major American city to its knees.  We all got a reminder of how four-wheel drive can get your SUV through that foot of snow, but a little ice means tough going.

 This is the latest thing in downsized living (look on your newsstand any day now for the new magazine, "Downsized Living").  It's an old unattractive shipping container turned into an attractive tiny house...so tiny that you have to go outside to change your mind.

The English knew that the best way to prevent scurvy was to eat plenty of limes.  Or, if you can't get fresh limes where you are, listening to this song by Harry Nilsson will keep you scurvy-free.  I like the smell of lime and the taste, too. It's sublime.

Lessons Learned

I was one dumb kid, I wanna tell you that right now.  The stuff I believed!  The things I didn't know!  in such fields as astronomy and algebra, the dreaded A&A of my unknowing.  But in all that, there was one thing that I thought was right when I was a young man, and that turned out to be all wrong, wrong, wrong.  

And there was one thing I came to learn that I have never forgotten, and I have always offered it to young people who, through some sort of horrible error, turn to me for advice.

First point - like the picture above reminds us, I remember being an adolescent and seeing people in their late 20s, early 40s, middle 60s and thinking, "Man! This (guy) (woman) (proprietor of an Asian carryout) (irate police officer giving chase on foot) really has it all figured out!"  And I figured that all people above the voting age (21 then) were full-fledged grownups who acted responsibly, knew the difference between right and wrong, knew there were limits to all this fooling around, and knew where the lines were drawn.

That was a foolish generalization I made, which is something that all teenagers do. (There's another foolish generalization!)  The fact is, while the overwhelming majority of people old enough to marry and vote are mature, fully-realized and well-functioning adults, there are plenty who are not, who are crooks, vagrants, ne'er-do-wells, boozehounds, cheats, tramps and thieves.  

Not that I have to associate with them, and neither do you, but just remember, they are out there!

On the other hand, there came a moment in my mid-to-late 30s when I came to realize that people who were ding-dong dipsticks and doofuses at age 16 tended to be that way at 26, 46 and 106.   As Isaac Newton, who later invented quite a tasty cookie, once said,  "Every body persists in its state of being at rest or of moving uniformly straight forward, except insofar as it is compelled to change its state by force impressed."  Which means, if you're in the recliner, you tend to stay there unless some force (thirst) compels you to get up.  And without the thirst to do better, people who have found it easy to be fools just stay in that condition.

Fortunately, there aren't many people like that.  And thank you for being none of them.

He thought, she thought

I'm a gregarious fellow, so I guess you might say I had my share of friends and acquaintances at work before my glorious retirement, and not that many people turned on their heels and ran the other way at the sight of me lumbering down the hall.  I still consider my work family to be like a family, except that they have more birthdays.

One person who was always a special friend was someone with whom I kept in fairly close phone-and-text touch after I left.  She had gone to work someplace else by then, and we made vague plans to meet up for lunch someday. 
Meanwhile, we texted and chattered until last fall.  I called right after Labor Day, and she said she'd have to call me back; something was up and she couldn't talk. And then a couple of days later, same deal, and a couple of days after that, yet again she said she'd have to call me when she got a minute, and then that minute never arrived.

I tried to noodle it out, thought about anything I might have said to offend her and things of that nature, and came up with nothing.  (For once.) I figured I'd hear something when the time was good for her, so I went back to my hectic busy schedule of watching morning news shows, writing this blog (there's five minutes a day shot to hell right there!) and calling rightwing talk shows, hollering, "Baba Booey!  Baba Booey!" and hanging up, along with my other varied, worthwhile pursuits.  

Then, last Friday, I had to look up a number on the cell phone.  I got past the "D" section, which is populated heavily with Doctors of many disciplines, dedicated medical professionals who work on things from my feet to my choppers to my eyes (Dr Melissa Connolly!  Call me for her number if you don't see perfectly!) and, of course, my surgically-repaired back and knee.  When I got a couple letters further, I came upon my friend in the phone listings,  and you know what, I said right there and then,  I was going to call to find out what happened to us being friends and all.

It turned out she lost her job in September.  And she was embarrassed, and did not want to tell anyone. 

And because I thought she was too busy or whatever to let me know, all these months have gone by and she is still down about it all. 

Pick up the phone and make that call!

I can totally understand what happened on her job.  She is such an excellent worker - and dedicated - that she would sometimes call from her office at 8 PM, having been in the office since dawn broke. But something went haywire on the new position, and her new boss arbitrarily cut her adrift on the icy sea of unemployment.

It's not too late; I can stay in touch now and offer support, encouragement,  and my patented mix of inappropriate jokes and unsuitable comments, but I'll always regret losing four months' time and all those chances to have helped.   Why wait when there's a chance a friend is in need? Next time, I won't wait around.  

My Salad Days had no salads in them

My mom was, in her day, a great cook.  Holidays at our house were always filled with splendid eats.  

My dad was not up to that level in the kitchen; he could fix himself a bowl of cereal, maybe toast some white bread.  BUT he had a recipe for a deep-dish olive pie that he poured almost every day, so there's that.

This all comes to mind because my sister gave me a copy of Better Homes and Gardens magazine from December, 1956.  The food ads and recipes in there are good reasons to help understand why everyone walked around feeling awful during the 1950s.  The food was disgusting. Don't take it from me!  Google "Disgusting 1950s food" and see a veritable cornucopia of jellied, sauced, overcooked improbable mixes of terrible chow.

Last week, one of those things was going around on Facebook showing oldtime foods, and I mentioned that we were often served a meal of hot tuna in a casserole with peas mixed in and crumbled potato chips on top.  My buddy Ralph down in North Carolina pointed out, in response to my bellyaching about putting that gruel in my belly, that we ALL ate like that back then.

Listen to some of the recipes in that magazine:  Calico Bean Bake! Lemon Mayonnaise! Tomato Aspic! Nesselrode Pie! (we used to have this all the time until I took my little hatchet and cut down the nesselrode tree.)  Fluffy Mustard Sauce!  Snowball Loaf!  Peppermint-Marshmallow Sauce! Upside-Down Date Pudding Brown Sugar Sauce! Hot Turkey-Salad Souffle! Cookie Tart!

No, wait.  Cookie Tart was the name of a girl I kept company with one summer.  It was her mom who was to teach me all I would ever learn of the world of Fluffo, the butter-colored shortening that was so integral to the recipes for both Devil's Food Cake and hellishly greasy fried chicken (fried for 45 minutes in 4 inches of boiling fat.)

Those peas aren't just STACKED there, you know.
They're held in place by unflavored gelatin, made from
the skin, bones, and connective tissues of animals
 such as domesticated cattle, chicken, pigs, and fish. 

It's crazy to blame the times for what we ate.  I do know that all our dads were just a few years removed from eating truly horrible foot on battlefields, in rusty hulking ships and in the ball turrets of bombers, so I guess Noel Eggnog Pie seemed so much better.

Also advertised in the magazine:  Tums® for the Tummy, page 191, and Phillips' Milk of Magnesia, page 177.

I should say so.

Can we have kippers for breakfast?

When I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful, a miracle, oh it was beautiful, magical.  

And then...

I'm sure you've heard the album "Breakfast in America," by Supertramp, from 1979.  The English progressive-art rock-pop band made an album that was one you just had to have, because it had great tunes like "The Logical Song" and "Breakfast in America" and "Goodbye Stranger" and "Take The Long Way Home."

It sold a bazillion records for A&M Records, it's the biggest selling English language in the history of France, and it won two Grammy Awards in 1980.

And yet, you haven't played your copy lately.  Probably the last time anyone dragged the worn old vinyl record out of its jacket was in the early 90's, when Jan and Fred came over that night to talk about Fred's new job with that dot.com outfit out of Cleveland. Of course, who could have foreseen how that was going to turn out?  And Fred says to this day that he is just as happy teaching Driver Education down at U-Driv-Urself as he would be at, say, Apple or Samsung.  Who needs the pressure?

That was really the last time you thought about that ancient record, with the picture of the diner waitress  "Libby," holding a tall glass of orange juice, in place of the Statue of Liberty in an illustrated New York City.  It all seemed like a tribute to the great tradition of Breakfasts in America, and then someone named David Icke, a former English soccer player who now sponsors wacky conspiracy theories, put out his claim that the album serves to prove that way back in the latter part of 1978, while the band was recording the album in Los Angeles, people were already planning the 9/11/01 attacks on America, and this album jacket proves it.

A member of the Icke Forum, "Eve", wisely points out:

"Album came out in 1979," it reads.

"9/11 reference.

"9/11 was served with breakfast...not to mention the everyday fight for freedom: "Breakfast In America."

'Eve' appears to be convinced and continues:

"Orange juice = fireball," she adds.

"You are looking out of the window of a plane, she is showing the target."

'Eve' even posts a reversed view of the cover which 'appears' to show the 'U' and 'P' of Supertramp flipped around to look like the figures '9' and '11'.

 This is not unprecedented.  The formation of a "splinter" group of people who were "board" with the standard brand of reactionary politics was presaged by this record album, from the 1950s.  It shows the first meeting of what we now call the Tea Party.  It turns out, it all started in Boston, where a silver-haired man entertained a bevy of beauties and so enchanted them that they all went out that very night to eliminate taxes ("we can do fine without 'em!"), reduce government ("we can have the police driving the snow plows to reduce the work force and get two jobs done at oncet") and promote individual responsibility for taking part in a strengthened local government ("Just not on Monday nights; that's my poker night") just as soon as they finished their tea and cookies.

Old records hold the key to the future, but it can't really be locked up.

Sticks and stones may break my bones

"(Name of political leader) is a idiot."

I'm not going to say whom this was about; I saw it on Facebook the other day, and my response has nothing to do with the political ideology of the "idiot" or of the person who so ungrammatically called him one.

A friend of mine was attending a college on North Charles Street in Baltimore - we'll call it "Loyola" - years ago and saw an interesting bit of graffiti on a lavatory wall.  "ROTC is dumb," read the slogan.  Now, I never took ROTC, I was not interested in being an officer in the Reserve Army, but if I had been so enrolled and found it unlikeable, I hope I might have been able to express myself better than to say "it's dumb".

Unrelated graphic content
showing scoring methods in
Rock-Paper-Scissors game

I don't know, I just guess I expect more fact than that. Everyone is entitled to like or dislike people, places, and concepts, but can we elevate the level of our discourse a little above "Oh you're a big old poophead and I hate you to smithereens!"?

The old quote attributed to Daniel Patrick Moynihan - "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts" - rings true.  Please feel free to say how you feel about things, but do it with facts!  It can really prove your point!