The Saturday Picture Show, September 13, 2014

If I ever had a boat, I would have named it something awful, like "Titanic" or "Sinker."  Good thing I have no nautical inclinations.

Sorry, vegans, vegetarians, and everyone who doesn't enjoy a good hamburger now and then.  A nicely-grilled hunk o' ground beef on a tasty roll with grilled onions, a pickle or two, a slice of yellow American, and whatever else you like...sometimes, it's just the perfect thing!

You know how happy it makes some people when Spring comes bursting out?  Well, that's how giddy I am about Autumn, with its lovely colors and crisp air and everything smelling and tasting pumpkin-y.

There was a fellow named Graig (yes!) Nettles who played for a few big-league baseball clubs.  Nettles is famous for saying, while a member of the 'Bronx Zoo' Yankees of the 70s,  "When I was a kid, I wanted to join and the circus AND play for the Yankees. Lucky me, I got to do both!"

So I can set this up in my own kitchen, and make big-time bucks peddling iced raisin donuts at restaurants, grocers, drugstores, cafeterias and plants?  We have all of them close by!  I'm gonna be rich!  Rich, I tell you! I always wanted to get to the top of the donut game, and now, here's my ticket to Easy Street!

Down by Baltimore's Patterson Theatre, now known as "El Teatro Patterson," someone made a pretty cool bus stop.  I'll see you on the upper section of the 'B.'

It was a cool summer here in Bmore.  We got plenty of rain, and the lawns stayed green and lush.  Now the trees are just starting to change, and soon from garages to sheds to basements all over town, you'll hear the annual question: "Where did I leave that rake last year?"

It's been a fun week, so Thank You!

I might just change my name to "Buster Move"

Many times, people ask me what's the secret of the long and happy marriage that Peggy and I have enjoyed since gas cost a quarter. It's the little things; we don't need to traipse all over the globe to find the amusement we get just from moments like our early morning discussions of "Who did the better version of 'Rock 'n' Roll Dreams Come Through' ?"  Enjoy the Jim Steinman version, or order the Meat Loaf; you can't go wrong.  

Peggy is the one of us who delights in nature and all its wonders; I would much rather read about flowers and birds and bees and the like than have bees and tree limbs land on me, but that's the glory of life and love if you take it easy long enough  - you get to take your choice and enjoy it.

Johnny Burke, 1908 - 1964

It seems to me that a lot of people who shuffle off this mortal coil at early ages were finished their work in time to punch out before the others. Take a man named Johnny Burke, a lyricist who teamed with several composers to write songs such as "You're Not the Only Oyster in the Stew" for Fats Waller, "Swingin' On a Star" for Bing Crosby, and "It Could Happen To You," which was done by dozens, including Diana Krall. 

Burke only lived to be 56, and if you're 16, that seems like a pretty ripe old age, but let me assure you, it isn't.  At any age, it's good to stop and appreciate the gifts of life, gifts that Burke used his gifts of words to describe in "Aren't You Glad You're You?"


Every time you're near a rose
Aren't you glad you've got a nose
And if the dawn is fresh with dew
Aren't you glad you're you?

When a meadowlark appears
Aren't you glad you've got two ears
And if your heart is singin' too
Aren't you glad you're you?

You can see a summer sky
Or touch a friendly hand
Or taste an apple pie
Pardon the grammar, but ain't life grand

And when you wake up each morn
Aren't you glad that you were born
Think what you've got the whole day through
Aren't you glad you're you?


Burke wrote this before anyone thought of challenging their friends to list the things for which they were grateful.  I am grateful for almost every song that has delighted my ears and eyes, to tell you the truth.  When I hear a favorite song, I song along, I smile, I guffaw, and I holler "Whoomp There It Is!"

What so proudly we hailed

What Key saw by the dawn's early light!

Two hundred years ago this weekend, the British, still smarting from their defeat in the Revolutionary War, showed up in Baltimore Harbor for The Battle of Baltimore. The War of 1812 had gone into overtime, and the British were attempting to get to Washington by taking the Baltimore-Washington Parkway invading the port of Baltimore by land and sea.  The battle had actually begun here in Baltimore County, at North Point, where the American forces had to retreat, but not before they slowed the enemy forces down enough to allow the people at the port of Baltimore to prepare for battle. As that battle raged on the night of September 13, 1814, Francis Scott Key stood on the deck of a British ship and watched the American resistance "by the dawn's early light" and wrote a poem he called "Defence of Fort McHenry," which, set to the music of the then-popular song "To Anacreon in Heaven," became "The Star-Spangled Banner," the national anthem of the United States of America.

Why was Key, an American lawyer, aboard the Royal Navy vessel? Well, at the time, lawyers were not allowed to advertise their services on television.  Reasons given for this ban generally include the sad fact that even those who had TV sets in 1814 had no electric outlets anyway. So Key got legal work as he found it, and had to go aboard HMS Tonnant, as the guests of three British officers, as he negotiated the release of prisoners. One of the prisoners held by the British was Dr. William Beanes, of Upper Marlboro, MD.  Beanes had put "rowdy stragglers" under citizen's arrest in what is today Baltimore's fabulous Inner Harbor, a worldwide mecca for rowdy stragglers.

Not really my license tag

So this weekend, Baltimore will celebrate the 200th anniversary of all this.  Most of us have the special Maryland license tags commemorating the writing of the anthem which is played before games just several long fly balls away at Oriole Park at Camden Yards and a few long punts away at M&T Bank Stadium, home of the Ravens.

One of these kids was my maternal grandmom, Mary Elizabeth Willis! 1914.

2014 human flag being formed

Somehow, some brave people got 7,000 schoolchildren to wear red, white, or blue plastic ponchos and stand still long enough to form a human flag, a repeat of the human flag that schoolchildren did on the same spot a hundred years ago, when one of the kids was my grandmother.

That same summer of 1914, Baltimore's own George H. "Babe" Ruth, who grew up one long fly ball away from OPACY, went to work for the Boston Red Sox, beginning a legendary pro baseball career.

History follows cycles, and it's interesting to me to reflect on them.  It's fascinating to think that the kids in this year's Living Flag might have descendants around in 2114 to see it done again.

Baseball fever

Now that Peggy is retired and no longer has to go to bed in the 7th inning of the Orioles games, she is able to stay through the thrilling conclusions, and I don't think it's a coincidence that the club is in first place by a good margin, and is a sure bet to be in the playoffs for the first time in a couple of years.  She's a good luck charm for everyone!  Lifelong fan that I am, I have enjoyed some great years with Oriole baseball, and some pretty doggone awful years too.  (at left, the Sports Illustrated cover told the story of the 1988 season's sad beginning. It didn't get much better that year, and then in 1989, they were in the pennant race up until the very end. You never know!)

This year has been good all along and the games are fun to watch.  We sit at home watching on cable, enjoying the play-by-play of Jim Hunter and Gary Thorne, and the color commentary supplied by former Oriole greats Jim Palmer and Mike Bordick, and the colorful pie-in-the-face post game antics of Adam Jones, who delivers instant dessert to the game's hero after a big win.

One thing I notice, watching on tv at home, is how many people sitting in the stands are paying but scant attention to the ballgame going on in front of them!  When the camera scans the seats behind home plate, all sorts of people are staring in the palms of their hands, palms which contain cell phones.  They're talking on the cell phones, they're reading their emails and texts, they're watching YouTube videos of the very game that they are attending, they're mugging the for the cameras, they're watching other people in the stands, their eyes are everywhere but on the field, where exciting major league baseball action is unfolding right before their unseeing eyes.

At the least, they're missing the game.  At worst, they run the risk of foul balls and slippery bats coming their way very, very quickly. If you're sitting close to the field, you have to keep an eye out for flying objects.  Keep this sign in mind, and enjoy the game!

Up to you

You know, I just don't get how some people are.  They have to force their wills and beliefs on others to an extreme point.

Not trying to start a thread about religion here.  I have my faith and deeply-held beliefs, and you have yours, as you see fit.  That's why the Pilgrims came here all those years ago, remember?  That, and the availability of much better seafood than they had been getting. And some people seem to enjoy feeling that they are more religious, or more favored by the Deity, than the next guy, and if that makes them happy, I guess they can stay happy.

But.  Down in the hopping town of Winter Garden, Florida, a citizen of the United States was forced to leave a town commission meeting.  Not for throwing bombs, or chairs, or epithets, but because he would not stand up for a prayer as ordered by hizzoner Mayor John Rees. The prayer thanked God for “allowing us to live in a country where we’re free to believe, think, and pray.”

A man in the crowd, Joseph Richardson, said, “I don’t believe I have to do that, thank you.” After the prayer, Rees told Richardson to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance as “children have to in school.” Richardson again politely demurred.

And then the mayor had the cops make him leave the meeting.

Well, Mr Mayor, you have by now read the case of "WEST VIRGINIA STATE BOARD OF ED. v. BARNETTE," a 1943 US Supreme Court decision - handed down at the height of World War II - that sorted out the matter of the West Virginia Board of Education, which had set a policy saying that a student's refusal to salute the flag was "insubordination," punishable by expulsion and charges of delinquency.

In a 6-to-3 decision, the Court held that compelling public schoolchildren to salute the flag was unconstitutional, saying that such a salute was a form of utterance and was a means of communicating ideas. They went on to say that "Compulsory unification of opinion" was against the First Amendment's prohibition of laws concerning religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right to peaceably assemble and the right to petition for a governmental redress of grievances.   

All of this is the long way of saying that Americans have the right to participate as they see fit in patriotic or religious moments, or not participate at all.  I have to love the irony of the mayor beaming with pride over a country where we're free to believe, think and pray as we wish...and then throwing a guy out of a public meeting because he wished otherwise.

I pray, I salute the flag, I proudly recite the pledge, but if the person on the left of me follows suit and the one on my right does not, I don't judge.  It's the American way.  As I see it.

The Department of Redundancy Department

Here's an interesting word: "tautology," defined as saying the same thing two or more times. The word comes from the Greek words “tauto” (the same) and “logos” (a word or an idea).  Saying that "applesauce is a sauce made of apples" would be an example.  

Dan Snyder owns the Washington team in the National Football League.  I'm not going to get into the whole thing about the team's name, which many people regard as offensive, but Snyder, whose name comes from the Greek words "Sny" (smug) and "der" (rich guy), is on the record as saying "The name of the team is the name of the team," which makes me wanna holla, and shout, and call out, and shriek.  Repetition is unnecessary and uncalled for.  Do you see what I mean, do you understand?

I'll tell you why that sort of verbal excess annoys me, and that's because it's usually done in an attempt to pose the speaker as some great thinker.  The first person who said, "It is what it is" must have thought they were really onto something.  Now it's the catchphrase for when we don't know what to say.  Your boss came in and laid down an order banning use of your personal social media during the workday? "It is what it is!"  You were making a nice roast for dinner but the timer didn't ding and now that rump roast is a smoldering cinder?  "It is what it is."  You wanted to have a picnic, but a tropical storm swept through your town?  "The weather is what the weather is."

This old songbook hangs around in my den,
where I do no algebra (and hardly any geometry!)

In my 10th grade Algebra II classroom, the teacher, Mr Dittmar, had huge banner across the breadth of the chalkboard.  In freehand calligraphy, the banner read "Any number multiplied by zero equals zero." When I took Algebra II again that summer, that fact stuck with me, as it does today, every time I use algebra in my daily life. 2(3h-1)+4h=10(2-3h)+38h, you say?   That's a long way of saying "h=11."

Why not just say h=11 in the first place?

Sunday Rerun: Watch your English!

More for the driving rhythm and early-punk music than for the lyrics, I have always liked the Sex Pistols' song "God Save The Queen."  My many English and Anglophile friends will forgive me; I promise you it's the music and not the disloyal-to-the-royals theme of the song that so enchants me.  I wish all connected to the House of Windsor the best of health and happiness.  I just need jumpy music to drive to.

Now, if you clicked on the link and heard the song, which dates back to 1977, you might have had some trouble discerning the lyrics, as growled by lead singer Johnny Rotten.  One verse has always interested me, as a lover of the English language:

When there's no future
How can there be sin
We're the flowers in the dustbin
We're the poison in your human machine
We're the future, your future

We call it "Public Housing," while the
English say "Council Estates."

For all of us who love metaphors, how can you top the lament of a disconnected generation, feeling that they are flowers tossed into a dustbin?  Especially knowing that dustbin is what the British call a trashcan.  And it sounds so much nicer!  "Could you hand me that dustbin, please!" is so much more genteel than "Gimme dat trashcan, wouldja?"

I think that with few exceptions (in America, à la mode means you get ice cream atop your pie, and in England, it means "fashionable"), English English sounds so much nicer and better-bred.  We have news "anchors," which sound like they are dragging everything all to Helena Handbasket, while the British have "presenters."  How nice!  They present you the news!

In England, "graft" means hard work; in America, it means payoffs and political corruption (SEE:  AGNEW, Spiro T.)

An English hooker is the person in the middle of a rugby play. An American hooker will play rugby with you, all right, but it costs a lot extra.

The first floor in England's buildings would be what we call the second floor, which makes a big difference if you need to jump.

Across the pond, a bureau is a writing table, where people sit down and compose lovely letters to each other ("My dearest Wilberforce...") and over here, it's where we keep our underwear, including the boxer shorts with the big rip in the seat that we just can't bear to throw in the ...dustbin!

The Saturday Picture Show, September 6, 2014

Here is the official logo for this year's World's Serious.  Who knows where it will be played, except that it won't be in Boston ha ha.

How are ya, 5-0?

Have you wondered why you see first and third-base coaches wearing batting helmets as they prepare to pat the butts of baserunners and tell them how many outs there are?  It's because, from local retiree Don Scott to noted rapper Half A Dollar, celebrities are throwing out the "ceremonial first pitch" at ballgames all over, and the only person with no chance of catching the ball is the man standing behind the plate.  Baseballs fly every which way when in the hands of the unskilled.

There's a chance that this isn't the least-appealing dinner ever plopped down on the card table, but you can't prove it by me. Just Google "1950s food" some night when you have time and no appetite to lose.

The Buddy Holly crash site is near the corner of Gull Ave and 315th st, north of Clear lake, Iowa. The crash site is 1/2 miles from the street sign shown in the photo. Note the eyeglasses used as a marker!

The county tore down my old junior high school, the beloved Towsontown Junior High, and I found a couple of old pictures I had saved from the days long ago.  Here are some of the guys in my homeroom in shop class.  Our work was sold around the state along with products of other state-supported institutions.  Many of the guys I went to school with went on to enjoy lucrative careers fixing things, such as cars, horse races, and trials.

And here we see the young ladies of my class in Home Economics, learning to make simple frocks and chemises for our annual spring dance.  Oh, how we danced!

Fall will be here soon!

I thought this would make a nice wallpaper somewhere, as the summer sun dapples a majestic morningwood tree.

Philosophisin'

It was a shame to see Helen Hunt listed in one of those innumerable lists you see on Facebook, numbered among the "washed up" formerly famous actors of Hollywood.  Nicolas Cage was also on the list, to the surprise of no one except himself.

I'm no big fan of Helen Hunt, but one movie she starred in (along with Jack Nicholson) is one of my all-time favorites.  Have you ever seen "As Good As It Gets" ?  There is a lot going on in that movie.

Nicholson plays Melvin Udall, a successful writer of 62 novels, all of them apparently on the Danielle Steel or Nora Roberts level of literary achievement.  He grinds out these pageturners in a nice apartment in Manhattan, where he lives alone, walling off all but the most odd of human contacts.  He is an obsessive-compulsive, following ritual after ritual, not stepping or cracks or using the same bar of soap twice, for instance.  Melvin is cranky, sardonic, and seems out of touch.  He says unbelievably cruel things to people, not even having any idea that his sharp words are so cutting.

But when a crisis affects his neighbor, Melvin steps up in a way that you wouldn't expect, and what follows changes his life and the lives of others.

I know the above sounds like the capsule summary of the movie that you might read in the TV listings, but I don't want to ruin the movie for those who have not seen it.  I recommend it with my two heartiest thumbs up!

While you're going to Netflix to find the movie (you won't be sorry!) let me say this about walls.  We don't know, always, what's behind them.  (You'll know what I mean after you see the picture.)

We need some walls.  No one needs to see their neighbors changing their underwear or their sheets or their minds as they set out for an evening stroll. Walls afford privacy, allow for furtive office naps (although everyone can hear you snoring, boss!) and also make a great place to hang pictures, plaques, awards, and R. Crumb posters or big pictures of dogs playing cards.

Sometimes we build imaginary walls to keep others out of our emotional beeswax or to try to keep them in it.  As humans, though, we don't thrive in vacuums.  You never heard of any books full of the warm wit and wisdom of bachelor lighthouse keepers along the rocky shoals of Maine.  We need a certain amount of interaction with others...not too much, not too little.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr Conway Twitty.

Approaching things Gingerly

If you want some wise outlooks on life and the human condition, just talk to someone who's dealt with humans for a long time.  I was a young firefighter when an old police officer told me that you could pay some people $700 a week (that was some righteous money in those days!) to work as pie tasters, and sure enough, they would complain, "Cherry again!  I had cherry LAST week! How come I never get blueberry?!"

I bring this up to say that for the entire time she has been on the Good Morning America show, first on the weekends and now on the weekdays, we have found Ginger Zee to be quite enchanting. She's the meteorologist, she delivers news of massive storms and twisters and high pressure systems homing in on Omaha and she seems to love that stuff.  She shows up twelve hours later on the nightly news and she hops into airplanes to chase storms from the head of the Colorado River to the last toe of the Florida Keys, and she brings zest and zeal to the weather.  And she's pleasant about it, and she shared her wedding this summer with viewers, and she doesn't seem to take the non-serious stuff too seriously.  

She does make the point that she is not a "Weather Girl," which sounds awfully much like what they called women in 1957 who did the weather with a puppet or a monkey or a guy dressed up in a gas station outfit.  Meteorologists are college-educated and skilled individuals.  

Recently, proving once again that even famous people have to deal with the Beavises and Buttheads of the world, people with a keyboard in front of them and not much behind them but sad, lonely lives.  When a guy with no face wrote to try to make her feel bad about her face, our dear Ginger had the perfect response:

So Brian?  You feel better now?  Hope not.

Sign right here

You know something? You don't have to be a genius to be a famous person.  I've met my share of famous people and they are just people, only famous.  

Taylor Momsen signs for the
grandfather of one of her fans

We tend to expect too much from our celebrities. Take autographs.  A ballplayer or singer or movie actor can sign his or her name two dozen times for people thrusting paper at them hoping for a handwriting sample, and that's fine...until their ride or dinner or whatever arrives, and they really have to go, and cousin Emmaline doesn't get an autograph, and suddenly that person is more evil than the leader of ISIS, and everyone hears about it forever.

Last week, Adam Jones of the Orioles ballclub found himself in a mini hailstorm of complaints.  It was "Social Media Day" at the ballpark, and a group of fans with an extra 50 bucks spent it on a meet-and-greet opportunity with Jones.  Apparently he made some jokes that did not go over so well with the crowd, and then the time was up and he had to go get ready to play the ballgame, and suddenly he's got a problem.  People tweeted about his jokes not being funny and the tv stations responded by interviewing people who weren't there for their opinion about what happened, as if they knew.  

Adam Jones is paid (well) to play baseball, and that's what we should expect him to do.  If you want to hear a comedian, go to a comedy club.

While I'm handing out the advice, here's some for the celebrities. (I'm an equal-opportunity advice-dispenser).  Famous people, many of you have wonderful bodies, and you work hard to keep them that way, and they photograph very well.  But when you store your nekkid images in The Cloud and some hacker gets a hold of them and plasters them all over the internet, you shouldn't be surprised, you know.  

I almost think you HOPED it would happen!  

"It's all true! My girlfriend was there and she saw it!" - Manti Te'o

You can usually rely on a Trojan to keep you out of trouble, but you can only stretch one so much before it breaks and things leak out.

Talking about a University of Southern California football Trojan here.  (What were YOU thinking??) He's Josh Shaw, captain of the team, a senior playing cornerback. Until the Saturday before last, that is.

On that night, he suddenly fell ill with a case of double sprained ankles. Now, there is some speculation among sports reporters, college football fans, and police detectives as to how it came that a man who looks just like Shaw was involved in something a little odd. Los Angeles Police Department Cmdr. Andrew Smith said last week that Shaw’s name was "mentioned" in a burglary report in an incident that occurred Saturday night in the 500 block of Figueroa Street, in downtown Los Angeles.  But the police pointed out that Shaw, who was named team captain the very day of his injuries, was an acquaintance of the victim, not a person of interest or a suspect.

As the week went on, speculation arose that the entire thing had to do with a domestic dispute between Shaw and his girlfriend, who lives on that block.

So.  You're a football star, entering your final year at one of the top schools in the nation, with a chance to earn a diploma that will mean something or a spot on an NFL roster, which will mean moolah and plenty of it.  You don't want to do anything to mess that up, but you need a cover story to explain why you're having so much trouble limping, what with two high ankle sprains.

"AH!  He said," in a moment that must have looked like a balloon inflating right over his head, "I'll just tell 'em I was in Palmdale, California, and I leaped from a second floor balcony to save my young nephew, who was floundering in a swimming pool."

Things are just going swimmingly

"And then I'll say I landed 'painfully' on the concrete below, crawled into the pool on my hands and knees, rolled into the pool, and helped the 7-year-old out of the pool.  And then I dragged myself out of the pool and pulled myself hand over hand across the pool deck."

You could hardly hear anything in Los Angeles the early part of last week for all the whistles being blown on this fairy tale. But when it came totally unraveled like a cheap pair of socks, Shaw admitted the whole fabrication was a “complete fabrication,” USC's sports information director.

In his statement, Shaw apologized for misleading the team, coaches and the public.  The school's football family will accept Shaw’s apology for behavior that was “out of character” for him, head coach Steve Sarkisian said.

“We are extremely disappointed in Josh,” Sarkisian said in the statement. “He let us all down. As I have said, nothing in his background led us to doubt him when he told us of his injuries, nor did anything after our initial vetting of his story.”

"I would do it again for whatever kid it was. It didn’t have to be my nephew,” Shaw had said on Monday. “My ankles really hurt, but I am lucky to be surrounded by the best trainers and doctors in the world.”

It might also be a good idea to surround yourself with the best lawyers in the world, Josh.

He has hired one Donald Etra as his mouthpiece, his ambulance chaser, his shyster, and Etra is now telling Shaw to stop saying anything.  At all.  To anyone.

Has anyone thought to talk to Shaw's nephew, supposed near-drowning victim?

Happy Labor Day!

Sunday rerun: I think it's time we leave

Every year at about this time, I get the same question from friends and family.  It's always a variation on the same theme, but the question boils down to, "What the hell is the matter with you, anyway?"

No, just kidding.  You know I get that question all year long.  The question that pops up as the nights grow longer and people start looking around for the blankets and quilts they put away in May is, how come the leaves change color every year?

And I thought I ought to look it up, because until I just did, I would have to tell people to ask my friend Mr Damifeyeno.

I got this scoop from www.sciencemadesimple.com and, as with all things scientific, it wasn't quite simple enough the first time I read it, but after a couple of passes, it cleared up somewhat.

Here 'tis...

All spring and summer, plants (which trees are, after all) take water out of the ground through their roots, and they take carbon dioxide through the air. Through photosynthesis, the process we were supposed to learn about in high school science while we were trying to figure out how to get a date with the girl at the next bunsen burner, the trees use sunlight to turn water and carbon dioxide into oxygen and glucose. Like Jumpin Jack Flash, Oxygen is a gas gas gas in the air that we breathe.  Plants use their glucose as food for energy and for growing, as they are not able to shop for food on their own, and very few pizza places will deliver to "The Third Elm on Maple Street."  Chlorophyll is involved in this photosynthesis, and it's chlorophyll, along with envy, that turns plants green.

When autumn is on its way, days get shorter, and the trees get less sunshine, so they figure it's time to put on the winter clothes.  Meanwhile, we have people driving cars and owning property who can't figure out that it's not tank top weather anymore.

Photosynthesis takes off all winter, without light or water to operate, so trees live off the glucose they put in their little wooden pantries all summer long and stop preparing food. Well, there goes the chlorophyll!  And the leaves become yellow and orange.  It's not so much that the leaves turn yellow and orange; they lose the green when photosynthesis ends, and with the green pigmentation that used to cover up the golden colors no longer there anymore, we get what we get.

Red leaves, such as on maple trees, occur because glucose is trapped in the leaves when photosynthesis stops, and a combination of sun and cool nights turn the leaves red, just as reading The SUN on a cool night makes Robert Ehrlich turn red. For the same kind of reason, oak leaves turn brown from what's left in them when photosynthesis ends. We just don't know why a tree with like 200 leaves on it will drop 200,000 leaves to be raked up.

And that's what I got from the article.  I hope it sheds some light on the amazing natural process known as the changing colors of leaves in autumn.  Next week here on Science Corner with Uncle Mark, let's try to figure out whatever happened to Axl Rose.

The Saturday Picture Show, August 30, 2014: Special "Things For Which I Am Grateful" Edition

Things for which I am thankful: my relatively good health, which means that most of my relatives are quite healthy and so am I. Access to good health care is a good thing, too.  Just look at the "D" section in my phone contacts...doctors from head to toe, literally!

I am very thankful for my home, seen here posing in all its winter finery.  The best part about it is that my Peggy lives here with me.  I would put more pictures of her on here, but she is modest and shy, and would only say, "What's with all these pictures of me? Who am I, Jennifer Aniston all of a sudden?"

Like any former DJ, I have a basement full of old 45s and album and cassette tapes of my playing old 45s and albums on the radio. My records are not this neatly organized, but give me a while and I'll find what you want to hear.  In the meantime, listen to this by T. Rex...

The joy of watching the Orioles play baseball is a treat.  I've been a fan since the days when Gus Triandos was lumbering around the bases, and I've been a fan through the great years and the lean years.  I know that football is the bigger deal now, but baseball is the thinking person's game, I think. Plus, as opposed to the hebdomadal scheduling of football games, as Earl Weaver said, in baseball, "We do this every night."

 I love Baltimore winters.  Sights such as this fill my heart with glee. I know they don't for many people.

As we come closer to the end of a week of things we're grateful for, I realize that the hard part for me was cutting the list down to a few each day.  I am a thankful person, grateful for so many things. One of them is the the ready availability of dictionaries. I like to just pick them up and rummage through them, learning new words and finding out the etymologies of others.  Many a person who looked up "greatful" in a dictionary was grateful that they did!

Gratitude, Three times Seven, #5

We have friends up in Canada who just adopted a doggie from a rescue agency. You ought to see this little guy, whose name is Mocha!  He's cute as a bug, with a great big grin.  He's really the ant's pants, and they love him.  But he was abused by his former "family."  He was abused, and the abuser's wife, happily, decided to find another, better, home for him, and so they have.  I am grateful that animals, many times more that humans, have the ability to forgive one abuser and trust other people not to treat them like footballs.

And of course I am also grateful for the people who take in a dog such as Brittany and Justin did, knowing that the pooch might need a little extra TLC because of his past.  They are giving him the love he needs and has deserved all along.

And for a third thing for which I am grateful today, how about LOVE?  The love of my wife is a greater gift than any I could dream of.  We have a friend who was patient enough to wait for love to come her way, and she is now living the dreams she had only dreamed of before.  And there are people who love their jobs, their hobbies, their baseball team...love takes many forms, but we ought to spend more time enjoying it and seeing others do the same, and less time deciding if a certain love is right for a certain other person.

I'd really love that.

Gratitude, Three times Seven, #4

It's a lot easier to find my way to places I have never been with a GPS device, and with Google Maps on the cell phone, I get turn-by-turn directions to any place I want to be...around the corner, or around Eugene, Oregon, if need be.  Our new phones have a new female voice giving out the advice, and she is sort of, well, breathy, in that way that certain actresses use instead of acting. Which is ok by me; it's sort of entertaining, but what happened the other day with the GPS never happened to us before.  We were looking for a house on a block where the numbers ran in the opposite direction of the next block, and there was a left turn to make that left us on the same street even though we turned, and it was too much for the GPS, which then said, "You have ARRIVED." It said this as we sat in the middle of an intersection, waiting for the light to change, so I was pretty sure that my cousin and his family did not live in an invisible house right on the street.  We found it the old-fashioned way -we called them, and a real live nice human voice directed us to the house, where we had a wonderful brunch.

I'm grateful for the people who run the UK 1940s Online Radio Station, which is on the net 24 hours a day, serving up the music that the world at war listened to, and more.  They not only play the authentic old music of the era, but also news broadcasts and relevant speeches.  I recommend it to anyone who runs around today with their arms in the air, fearing the end of the world could come any day.  We've been at that precipice before.

Image from the Cape May beach camera

I'm grateful for beachcams and webcams  that take us worlds away. I'm no voyeur, not at all interested in watching what people are doing in Hong Kong, Baluchistan or Nome, but I like those live webcams that allow you to see traffic in Scotland, a giraffe preparing to give birth somewhere in Europe, the beach at Cape May NJ, or a water cooler in some office someplace.  We Skype with our friends in Canada and that's about it for us appearing on camera.  Hollywood has yet to devise a reality show that would feature us...but there's always tomorrow!  Hear me, The Learning Channel?

Gratitude, Three times Seven, #3

Continuing the Seven Days of Gratitude...

The last big picture he made

I love winter, and all that comes with it...the chill, the downright cold, the need for wool sox and long johns and scarves and stocking caps and gloves and all that.  You can always put on more clothes if it's cold.  This also entitles me to dislike summer like Nick Nolte dislikes having his picture taken. I do not like heat or humidity or gnats or mosquitoes or any of the 101 horrible things about the season that everyone else loves, leaving me alone to love winter, the ugly stepsister of all seasons.  Therefore I am grateful to Willis Haviland Carrier (November 26, 1876 – October 7, 1950), father of modern air conditioning, and the man who made it possible to survive summer south of the Yukon. Not that I would want to make this choice, but if it came down to having a stereo in the car or A/C, I'd do the singing for myself, windows up and cool.

Farnsworth in 1939, looking miffed
because nothing good was on TV
 that night

While we're thanking great people of industry and invention, let's mute the TV for a second and give it up for Philo T. Farnsworth (August 19, 1906 – March 11, 1971), holder of some 165 patents, many of which were crucial to the development of television. Without Mr Farnsworth, what would we know of the magical world of professional football, giant spinning wheels of fortune on game shows, and news accounts of "people who make a difference" in their communities? Television makes it possible for an entire nation to be terrified of the same things at once!

And we all can be proud to live in the land that was home to Henry Ford, inventor of the new car smell! Fun fact: when you load up the briquets in the charcoal grill this Labor Day, remember that the charcoal industry was started by Henry and a distant relative named E.G. Kingsford as a way to get rid of the wood scrap generated in the Ford Motor Company plant in the 1920s. Ford hated waste, and when he saw wood chunks being tossed out from the assembly line, he said, "Let's scorch the wood and grind it up and add coal and sawdust and borax and I don't know what-all else and make little briquets that will burn in a bowl-shaped metal tub, so that everyone can enjoy a smoky hamburger outside." Henry is also thought to be the first man ever to say, "Don't be getting all up in my grill."

Gratitude, Three Times Seven, #2

"You're never too old to learn," someone said to me, probably someone who was about to deliver a painful lesson.  But the point was well taken.  You know the old expression attributed to Mark Twain: "When I was sixteen, my father was the stupidest man I ever met.  Now, five years later, I'm amazed at how much the man has learned."  When we're sixteen, sure, we think we know everything.  That sort of youthful zest and zeal sounds like an Italian salad: Bravado à la Braggadocio,  but we need it to deal with being sixteen.  Face it, the time you're in your late 40s, you don't have to worry about zits or having your voice crack, so you can settle down a little.  This summer,  I learned lessons about mourning, lessons that I should have learned earlier in life, I suppose, but "what's learned last is learned best," as Ralph Waldo Emerson never said.   What Pastor Bruce Wilson said at my dear Deanna's funeral got past the veil of tears I wore.  He told us that her work on earth was done, admittedly much sooner that we would have liked or expected, but she wouldn't trade places and come back from the Kingdom of Heaven for anything.  Glory be, she has reached the mountaintop, and no matter what I used to think, I'm grateful to have learned to appreciate a loss in a new way. 

I put a picture in every blog entry.  This place has
nothing to do with anything in this page today, but if
 you ever find yourself a) hungry and b) in Lusby,
 Maryland, may I suggest the Frying Pan Restaurant? 

And I'm grateful that a wonderful woman named Holly Jackson happened to read my blog entry about an odd woman who taught me and a whole roomful of baby boomers in third grade. Holly had just been to an estate sale of the belongings of a woman with the same name. Was she the same woman? We don't know. But Holly wrote to me and therefrom sprang a friendship which, not even a year old, has already seen us share ineffable loss and sweet joy in dizzying turns of fate. 

And I am grateful for the online Merriam-Webster dictionary . which reliably informs me that the word "therefrom" is, indeed, a word, but it is archaic, along with most of my vocabulary. Consarn it all! 

Three times seven, take 1

I liked being a teacher; I taught DJ Techniques, Radio Production and Current Events and, as most people do when they teach, I found that I learned a lot from my students, as I hoped they learned from me as well.

Because of this Facebook thingamajig, I find that I still learn from them.  One of them, a fellow from one of our favorite towns, Havre de Grace, MD, is named John Gross, and he recently challenged me to dump ten gallons of ice water over myself  list daily three things for which I am grateful, for seven days.

Easy as pie. In fact, easier than pie, since I won't have to make a crust for this daily list.  Three times seven is 21, and if I can't list 21 things I appreciate, then grits ain't groceries, and they're on my plate for sure.

THIS Phil Harris, voice of Baloo

We'll start with Peggy, my teenaged wife of almost 41 years.  I won't go into a dissertation about how I fell in love in the first three seconds of a blind date that's still going on, but let's just say that I'm a lucky man in that my wife and my best friend are the same person, so when I want to tell my best friend how much in love I am, she's always right there!  How convenient!  And, I will hasten to point out that I realize that life with me is not easy.  Just the music that pours out of my den (Phil Harris!  Perry Como with the Fontane Sisters! Kris Kross!  The Fralinger String Band from Philadelphia!) and the jokes that pour out of my den ("Conjunctivitis.Com is a site for sore eyes!") and the books that are stacked in my den, and my projects down in the basement workshop ("I need two parts Hydrogen, one part Oxygen, and I'll be swimming in free water!)  None of that bothers her, as long as she has our lovely home to share with the man she has loved since that blind date many Junes ago.  I love Peggy above all.  But I need to list more things for which I am grateful.

Young Frank Zappa

I'm grateful for my new iPod, with the capacity to hold a lot, an awful lot, of music and podcasts, which means if you drive through our neighborhood, you might see a man walking along with earbuds in his ears and a happy smile on his face.  It's I, strutting to the oldies! And the "random" setting means hopping from Slatz Randall and His Orchestra ("Let's Not 'n' Say We Did") to The Beau Brummels ("Laugh Laugh") to Frank Zappa ("Holiday In Berlin, Full Blown").  I love my music!

And for the third thing today, let's say I love the world and almost all the people in it.  We spent Saturday dinner and Sunday brunch with my cousin, second cousins and third cousins and it was wonderful fun to chatter about this and that.  I've been blessed with lots of good friends in this happy life, and the chances are that if you're reading this, you're one of them, so thank you for that, too!

More tomorrow!

Sunday Rerun: Boss Tweeds

I guess it's reality TV, if you need to specify the genre, but it doesn't have any Kardashians, and hardly any fishing, and no icy roads at all, so I like to watch "Undercover Boss" when someone interesting is on.

The premise of the show is very simple.  The head cheese of some big company puts on a disguise and works among hoi polloi, so as to get a little taste of life on the other side of the assembly line, pizza oven or fish nets.

The setup never varies.  The show opens with a look at the company involved, and then we meet the HPIC* who talks a bit about how well the company is doing, but he/she thought it would be a good idea to leave the home office for a couple of days and work with people who actually do the work.  So the boss gets fitted for hair extensions, or a toupee in the case of a man experiencing baldness, and they add or remove facial hair, glasses, and color the hair.  Slip Mr or Ms Big into a company uniform or whatever mufti they wear delivering pizzas, and away we go!

They always come up with a cover story for the people on the job site, lest they become concerned as to why there are 27 cameras pointed at them.  They say that they are part of a reality show where one lucky guy just won his own Domino's franchise and is learning to make pizzas and drive real fast with pizzas in his car so as to run the place.   Or that they are shooting a reality show about people whose businesses went under and are trying to get back in the game in this new line of work.


The hitch is, it has to be a huge company for this to work.  I mean, if you're the head sandwich maker at Nick 'n' Tony's Deli, and you come to work one day and neither Nick nor Tony are around but you see someone who looks a lot like Tony prowling around trying to slice prosciutto, you're gonna get wise in a hurry, you know what I'm saying to you here?  But if you are one of 83,000 burger flippers working for Checkers, and the boss looks like the guy on the left above, and then one day a guy in a red shirt and vest is introduced to you as a new trainee who used to run a Blockbuster, you'll go for it, sure as heck.

So, the tycoon reports to work and there's always a problem, always a complaint.  Working conditions are awful, the equipment is so bad that "I have to bring in my own cleaning supplies from home" (Popeye's) or "I can't hear the customers in the drive-thru line" (Checkers.)  We get to hear the personal problems of the people tasked to work with El Supremo, and that comes in handy later.

As does all the pointing-out-of-problems, because like in last week's episode about Oriental Trading Company - America's #1 source for inflatable golf clubs, giant gag eyeglasses and pink lawn flamingos - the guy loading the truck on a day when the temperature hit 103° told the cheese that they used to get free sports drinks when it was that hot.  The boss is then shown in deep remorse as he realizes that it was his idea, when the economy hit the skids, to cut back on the free electrolyte replacements.  Hey, it's never 103° in the boardroom!

Then all the employees are called to the home office, and the big shot prances in and watches the dawn of recognition break across their furrowed brows.  He/she then earnestly avows to take their suggestions and complaints to heart, hands out money for cars, scholarships and medical bills, and there you are for another week.

Peggy was asking what percentage of the promises of sweeping reform benefiting the working person I thought were actually carried out.  I guess 50-50, but maybe that's high. Or low. I have to figure that at least once, as soon as the camera crew drove away, some boss said, "That guy in Omaha who said I made pizza like a drunken aardvark...get him in here...NOW!"

Tune in next week for our new hit series "Unemployment."


*HPIC= Head Person In Charge