Goodbye Columbus

Congratulations to the football team at the Ohio State University, which won the first-ever national college football title on Monday night.  The Buckeyes were not kind to the web-footed Oregon Ducks in a 42-20 blowout, which was good for the OSU fans.

But then. Here's what was not good. Within minutes of the end of the game, held on the first day of classes for the spring term at State, students all over Columbus set aside their beer mugs   bongs   textbooks and decent upbringings to take to the streets en masse, jumping on police vehicles, burning couches and I don't know what-all else, and generally engaging in riotous behavior.

I don't want to be that man who stands on the front porch with his reading glasses in one hand, shaking his pointer finger at a group of adolescents eddying about by the Biscayne in the carport, hollering at them to "Get off this yard!"  The students of Ohio State, 136 miles from Kent State, have every right to assemble in a peaceable manner, congratulating each other on the team's victory.

I mean, if they planned to congratulate the team's individual members when they saw them in class, they would likely be waiting a long time to see them in a seminar on Euclidean geometry.

What they don't have the right, or need, to do is set fire to dumpsters or couches (why is it always the couches?) to mark the achievements of other people.

Yet, this is the new American norm.  You think of photos and newsreel footage of V-J Day, of baseball and football championships from the era in which people had a bit of respect for the property of others and their own dignity, and you see jubilant crowds dancing around and getting all happy.  You don't see overturned cars, 19-year olds dancing atop paddy wagons, clouds of teargas, Broyhill sofas becoming pyres to try to set the night on fire.

On the student paper website, students bragged and posted "sweet" pictures of dumpsters ablaze and crowds amuck.  These same students will decry lawlessness and savage vandalism to dumpsters and cars the minute they own dumpsters and cars, but for now, "We won!  So just let me make a mess all over your property!"

Charlie Who?

To be honest, I had never heard of the French satire magazine "Charlie Hebdo" before the recent terrible events in France, but as a fan of etymology (the study of the origin of words) I was able to deduce that the name had something to do with it being a weekly publication.

The word "hebdomadal" is not one we often see in wide usage, but I remembered reading it in one of Ring Lardner's essays from the 1920s, and I remembered looking it up.  I found that it means "weekly," and comes from the late Latin hebdomadalis, and from the Greek hebdomas, meaning seven, or seven days.  The French word for hebdomadal is hebdomadaire.

The "Charlie" part of the magazine's name came from two places. In a previous incarnation, it had been called Hara-Kiri as a monthly publication, and then Hara-Kiri Hebdo when it changed to a weekly.  The magazine got in a jam when they printed a story that satirized the death of former French President Charles de Gaulle, and changed their name thereafter to Charlie Hebdo, which was also a nod to Charlie Brown, yes, that bald-headed kid from Peanuts, the American comic strip that ran in a sister publication in France, a comic compilation called "Charlie Mensuel" - Charlie Monthly.

Looking back, I realize that this explanation was only slightly less wordy and confusing that my explanations for my whereabouts when I was between the ages of 13 - 18, after which people stopped checking on me.  Back then, I would get in some sort of trouble at least hebdomadally.

Getting the bends

William Lawrence Murphy (1876 - 1959) was an inventive fellow who was living in San Francisco around the turn of the 20th Century.

In those days, it was considered indecent for a woman to visit a man's bedroom, and he was living in a one-room apartment. What's an eager young swain to do?  How to get his girl to visit?

It's an amazing coincidence that his name was Murphy, because he invented the Murphy Bed!


You don't see these so much anymore, probably because rooms in hotels don't have the ceiling heights that they used to have. They're the beds that fold back into the wall when you're finished "sleeping" so as to give more room for a nice young man and his decent girlfriend to play Parcheesi, make fudge or discuss the great books of the world.

It's the Swiss Army Knife of beds...and I love the concept of something performing two functions.  Such as a little compartment in the back of the SUV where I can hide a set of jumper cables, or a lunch box with a knife and fork hidden in the lid, or a hammer that also doubles as a nutcracker.

OK, that last one was kind of obvious.  But the other great thing about a Murphy Bed, if you still have one, is that there is chance that a comedy movie producer will use your bedroom to film a movie.  The slapstick possibilities are endless when you put some unsuspecting guy in a folding bed, and just when his in-laws show up for dinner, the bed flies up and he gets caught behind the wall while the mother-in-law reminds his wife for the 735th time what a doofus he is, and why she should never have married him...

I've never had a fold-a-bed, and since my beloved Peggy and I are way past the courting stage, approaching our 42nd anniversary, it doesn't look like I'll be trundling down to the bed store anytime soon.

But my one-day dream house will have a Murphy bed, and one of those superwindy hand driers for the Men's room.

And a Men's room.

Sunday rerun: Come Fry With Me

In my ongoing effort to provide up-to-the-minute cultural information for today's with-it generation, all of whom I outrank in seniority by several scores, I now bring to your attention what some are calling the "vocal fry." I call it the "spoken sizzle," and it's that way some people have of letting the end of their sentence trail off in a guttural sound like this.

I think it was the late 90s when the uptalk phenomenon swept the country, much like the current fascination for following the lunatic pronouncements of Newton Leroy Gingrich (who said, "A mere 40 years ago, beach volleyball was just beginning. No bureaucrat would have invented it, and that's what freedom is all about” in 1996) and all those crazy rumors about Fonzie being killed in a car wreck.  People started talking like THIS.  The end of every sentence ended on an UP NOTE.  And simple declarative sentences sounded like QUESTIONS?  I'm sure you REMEMBER!

And then there was that trend, mercifully relegated to the past now, of people who dealt with children talking in a sing-song even when they weren't talking to children.  I can understand that, in order to cajole little Eggington to stop sticking the tines of his fork into the electric socket, it was effective to say, "Now, EGGY, you know that UPSETS Mommy when you BLOW OUT all the CIRCUITS in the house with your FORK so please knock it the hell OFF already."  But then that person would stop at the deli on her way home and say, "I need a QUARTER pound of HORMEL spiced ham sliced THIN please and a LARGE tub o' SLAW."  That sort of SPEECH cadence can be absolutely RIVETING, can it not?

But.  The sizzle, the fry.  A lot of singers trail off with it (remember Britney Spears, the way she growled "Oh Babbbbbbbbbby Babbbbbbbbbbby"?), and of course it's a staple when you hear the likes of Paris Hilton soliloquizing. It's almost as if Paris and her friends, when you hear them chattering in a cluster, run out of energy as each sentence trails off.  That's why their conversations sound like this:

"I like wanted to get that dress in like five different colors because I don't know what color boutonniere Chad will be WEARinggggggggggggggggggggg"

"Like Oh my Godddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddd"

So please be on the lookout for this trend in your home, and do you all can to nip it in the buddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddd.  See you tomorrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrow.

The Saturday Picture Show, January 10, 2015

Apparently, people named Clark have always said, "Poppycock!" Also, "Flibbertigibet!" and "Oh for crying out loud!"

I found this old ad from the 1880s for Lea & Perrins's Worcestershire Sauce.  Then, as now, who can pronounce the name of the product?

Here's a photo of a new cat mom snuggling with her newborn kitten.  I know, how can it get any cuter?  

Longtime Simpsons fans will remember when the Flowers By Irene van was parked in front of the house in the beloved "Bart The Murderer" episode.  While Bart was becoming "capo di tutti capi" in Fat Tony's mob, the boys from Hooverland were keeping an eye on his house for two weeks until Marge got wise.

I wanted to go through this entrance, but it was sealed off.

Those of us with a touch of OCD (hot dogs were six to the package and rolls came in bags of eight) will find an odd number of forks to be disconcerting.  Why not 52, one for every week?

This is one of those tiny plants that waters itself on the condensation formed when a glass-enclosed object sits in the sun, right?

So, just because he took the time, trouble and expense to get a license tag that promises
that he's not a police, you can be sure he's not a police.  But...what if this IS the police
and a fiendishly clever plot calculated to make you think they're NOT the police?

Your elected representatives in action (Frederick County edition)

I might have to reconsider my decision that Anne Arundel County, Maryland, is home to the goofiest politicians in the state.  Sure, they elected a serial drunk driver and boat skipper to the state legislature, but they voted him out last fall.  And so what if they voted onto their county council, in the same election, a fellow named Peroutka, who proudly carries the battle flag of the League Of The South as his standard?  We're a little bit north of the south, but hey. And let the record show that we count many AA County residents among our close friends and we love them all. It's not their fault.

No, I guess the nod for the title of dizziest politicos is heading out west to Frederick County, which is sometimes unkindly called "Fredneck," and not with good reason.  Frederick, the county seat, is actually home to a burgeoning technical business community, and to many hipsters who overuse the word "actually." 

But the county, in an effort to modernize, recently changed its form of government from the old-style county commissioner system to an elected county council and county executive setup.
One former-commissioner-turned-councilman, Billy Joe "Billy Joe" Shreve, is all worked up because he used to hide his office key in his county mailbox, but the key was taken back when the mailboxes were reassigned and he didn't want to shell out ten bucks for another.

And then we have Councilman Kirby DeLauter, another former commissioner, whose grasp on the first amendment is tenuous. DeLauter is all steamed because a reporter for the Frederick News Post paper mentioned him in her article about old Billy Joe and that dang key issue.  

“So let me be clear............do not contact me and do not use my name or reference me in an unauthorized form in the future,” - Delauter Facebook status update.

The state of American representative politics is now such that people who have been elected to serve the people want to tell the newspaper not even to dare mentioning their name, and they choose Facebook, America's headquarters for pictures of cute puppies, love messages, and memes that show embarrassing pictures of befuddled local officials, to send out their message.

“Use my name again unauthorized and you'll be paying for an Attorney,” Delauter wrote.  

I could write an entire blog about people who insist on capitalizing professional designations.  "An Attorney."  It's just an attorney, your majesty, and by the way, there once was an attorney from Frederick County named Key (speaking of keys) who wrote our national anthem.  How about you men settling down and governing your county, carrying your own keys and letting the press report on your activities?  

That's the key to good government.

Happy birthday, Sgt!

He was so hard up for money that in high school he sometimes wore the pants from his job as a movie usher to school - dark pants with a stripe down the side.

A buddy named Ed Leek gave him the 4 dollars it took to cut a "Make Your Own Record" at Sam Phillips's Sun Recording Company.  And even once he had the fee in hand, it still took him two months to get up the courage to go and make an acetate record of “My Happiness” and “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin” as a birthday gift for his mother.

At the height of his early fame, he was drafted into the US Army and served a two-year hitch, thereby exchanging an income of $400,000 a year for one of $78 a month, which he gave to charity.

In the second of the 31 movies he made, Loving You, his parents were seen as audience members in a scene. His mother passed away shortly thereafter, while he was away in the Army, and he never watched the film again.

In 1957, aged 22, he bought Graceland Mansion for $102,500. Three years earlier, he and his parents had been living in public housing.

He did exactly one commercial in his life - a jingle he sang for Southern Maid donuts, played during his appearance on the Louisiana Hayride radio show in November, 1954.  He played exactly three concerts outside of the United States, a mini-tour of three dates in Canada in 1957.

It's said that he never toured Europe, a potential gold mine, because his manager was an illegal Dutch immigrant who feared deportation if he tried to re-enter American soil. His manager was a born hustler who painted sparrows yellow and sold them as canaries and operated carnivals and sideshows as a young man, cadging the honorary title of "Colonel" from the governor of Louisiana and insisting on being called that until the day he died.

When fund-raising efforts to create a memorial in Pearl Harbor for the USS Arizona sputtered, he put on a benefit concert and raised the money for the monument built just above the sunken battleship that is toured by thousands annually.  He regularly gave large sums of money to charitable organizations.

His recording of "It's Now Or Never" was playing on the radio in a Los Angeles jailhouse, and was heard by a 17-year-old prisoner named Barry Eugene Carter, serving time for stealing $30,000 worth of automobile tires.  That prisoner vowed to change his name and his ways, and seek a career in music, and he did so, successfully.  His new name was Barry White.

His closest friends formed a retinue nicknamed "The Memphis Mafia." All of these men wore diamond and gold rings, given to them by Elvis.  Their logs was a thunderbolt with the letters TCB ("Take Care of Business").

He once subsisted on a diet of only meatloaf, tomatoes, and mashed potatoes for two years. He loved burned bacon, peanut butter & banana sandwiches, cheeseburgers, pork chops, sauerkraut and grape jelly.

The British Invasion of the 1960s changed the music business overnight, and his popularity waned. In 1968, he walked down a busy street in Los Angeles, unrecognized and unapproached, and knew it was time to launch a comeback, which he began with a television special that December.

His last concert appearance was in Indianapolis, at the Market Square Arena, on June 26, 1977. His last song at the concert was , as always, "Can’t Help Falling In Love With You," after which he left the building.  

His name is Elvis Aron Presley and he turns 80 today.

Here's a tip

Restaurant servers have an expression that they don't always share with all diners: "If you can't afford to leave a tip, you really should eat at home."

We all know that their base pay is so minimal, it wouldn't cover the expense of getting themselves a cup of coffee on the way home from a shift.  For whatever reason, the custom in America is to tip the server, and I think we should.

Now, we didn't all sign a contract that pays us 75 million clams, as Ravens quarterback Joe Flacco did, but still, it was generous of him to leave a $150 tip at a restaurant in Pittsburgh the night before the Ravens beat Pittsburgh in the NFL playoffs.  His tab was $208, so a tip of a yard and a half comes to about 72%, which is a tad higher than most of us can manage, but still, we tip as we can.   15 - 20% is the way to go.

I have dined (once only!) with people who say, as the check sits gathering dust on the table, "Well, she took almost 2 minutes to get over here and greet us, and the drinks took another 3 minutes, and she didn't bring enough butter for the rolls, and I think my Steak Tartare was too rare and the Vichyssoise was cold, so we only have to leave a 5% tip." 

There are people whose days are made all the sweeter by the very prospect of chiseling someone else out of money they deserve to have.  Thank you for not being one of them!

Let It Go, for the love of Pete

What a year 2014 was for singer Idina Menzel.  

John Travolta, who seems more Barbarino-ish than we ever thought possible, called her by the wrong name during the Academy Awards show, without the slightest sense of having a hint that her name is not Adele Dazeem.

It's actually Idina Mentzel, if you want to be technical about it. But most people in show biz change their names, to make them easier for John Travolta to pronounce.  And you see how that turns out!

I don't happen to be her #1 fan, but I know the woman is talented, and, again, 2014 was a good year for her, professionally. She was in a Broadway hit called "If/Then" (as in IF pigs start flying from here to Kankakee, THEN I will sit through another Broadway musical) and earned a Tony award nomination as Best Actress in a Musical. She also won the Breakthrough Artist award at the 2014 Billboard Women in Music awards ceremony. She released a popular album of holiday songs.

On the sad side, she was divorced from former husband Taye Diggs.

And of course, everyone under 12 sang along with the soundtrack of "Frozen," the Disney picture in which Menzel sang the role of Elsa and bestowed upon our ears the Academy Award-winning, and Grammy-nominated song "Let It Go".

Have you heard that song?  Note to law enforcement personnel: if you're ever sweating me in an interrogation room, trying to get me to confess to a string of strong-arm robberies, I won't crack, because I have never robbed anyone of their arms, strong or otherwise.  

But I will confess to everything short of the Watergate conspiracy if you lock me in a room and play "Let It Go" and that "Happy" song over and over and over.  

Idina Menzel

You might have seen and heard Idina on "Dick Clark's Rockin' New Year's Eve" up in Times Square, singing her "Let It Go" song, and apparently she hit a rough note or two, singing outside late at night with the temperature in the chillies.

And so people sitting at home, people who have never been asked to sing anything anywhere, took after her on Twitter and Facebook and at office water coolers, complaining that she missed a note.  I'm a longtime lover of country music, so hitting the notes with operatic precision doesn't count for too much with me as long as the singer or fiddler makes the emotional connection with the audience.

And she responded magnificently, saying, 

"There are about 
3 million notes in a two-and-a-half-hour musical; being a perfectionist, it took me a long time 
to realize that if I'm hitting 75 percent of them, 
I'm succeeding. Performing isn't only about
 the acrobatics and the high notes: It's staying in the moment, connecting with the audience 
in an authentic way, and making yourself 
real to them through the music. I am more than the notes I hit, and that's how I try to approach my life. You can't get it all right all the time, but 
you can try your best. If you've done that, all 
that's left is to accept your shortcomings and have 
the courage to try to overcome them."

In other words, if you think you can sing better than Idina Menzel, how come you weren't on Dick Clark's Rockin' New Year's Eve? She did her best, so...let it go.

Minute by minute

I did a little math, thanks to a calculator, and came up with the number of seconds in 70 years: 2,208,729,600 seconds.

I took 70 from the old Biblical life expectancy of three score and ten years, and multiplied it out to come up with that big number. Two billion, 208 million and so forth seconds in that many years. 

If you take away the amount of seconds we are asleep, watching television or shoving pizza down our necks, that still leaves an awful lot of seconds when we are engaged in life itself...working, shopping, talking, driving.

We've all seen Driver Ed movies about how many feet the car will travel while you're reaching over to switch the radio station because you just can't stand hearing Waterfalls one more time on the morning commute. 

No one except for Episcopal Bishop Heather Cook, the driver of the car that struck and killed a well-known Baltimore bicyclist named Tom Palermo, knows exactly what was going on in her car when the accident happened the Saturday before last.  It was quarter to three on a glorious sunny afternoon on a wide street with clearly marked bike lanes.  Her car hit him, she took off and returned at a later point, somewhere between 20 and 45 minutes, according to witnesses.

How many agonizing seconds took place in those minutes of her life?

We know from court records that Bishop Cook, the second-highest leader of her church in Maryland, has a drunk-driving probation before judgement on
her record from the Eastern Shore in 2010, when she was arrested for DUI and weed.

And we give second chances after first offenses.

Makeshift memorial at accident scene

City police and prosecutors are being very slow and deliberate in this matter. We don't know what her physical state was when she hit the man, we don't know if or how she was distracted.  We just don't know, and if charges are going to be brought, you can bet the new States Attorney in the city will make sure the i's are dotted and the t's are crossed, because this case has people upset, and justifiably so. We all feel we need to be safe when doing things like riding our bikes, taking a walk or going out for any reason, and if Bishop Cook was at fault in this matter, we want justice to be served.

While the legal mills spin and grind, we can all take a second to think about how seconds we would live over and do things differently if given the chance.  Things like this remind me that it's better to prevent an accident than to deal with the awful consequences of one.

Sunday rerun: You Never Know, nor do I

One thing you'll find as you experience more and more of life is how it is, what George Carlin said years ago: 

"No two ways about it, there are two sides to every story"

Take the other day.  I was leaving Towson, the county seat, and had parked in the big park-'em-up on the 7th floor.  I was not paying attention to a whole lot of other things beside my own job, and down by the police station, a guy was standing on the corner remonstrating loudly because a police car was parked alongside a fire hydrant.  His point was that if he did that right in his own neighborhood, he'd get a ticket, and who does this cop think he is, and why I oughta....

Was a time I might have agreed without looking into it a little bit.  I know that this is the sort of thing that people love to see, and I will say that yes, it does set a bad example...EXCEPT...


what if the cop had just had to run into the precinct house because someone else was under assault and needed help?

what if he or she had just brought in some crook who was resisting and needed backup to subdue him (or her)? 

what if the cop was having chest pains or some other hypercritical symptom?

What if, what if, what if.  Things are not always what they seem.  I know enough police to know that there might have been very good reason for parking by the plug...and enough to know that there might not have been.

And I know enough firefighters to know that if the police station or any other building on that block was on fire and they rolled up on, they would find a way to hook their hard sleeve and get water out of that hydrant.

Flowing nicely...

You might see a friend of yours driving away from a motel parking lot with a female, and never know that it's his niece, Bernice, from San Cerise.  She's in town for the amateur poet competition, specializing in stoic repetition.

You might see someone purchasing milk, butter, eggs and flour and assume they are making a cake, but you really shouldn't assume that you'll be invited over for some.


And you might feel certain that someone named Patrick O'Francis Hoolahan might be of Irish descent, but you never know.  Things are not always what they seem!

Which is not to say that Mr Enraged did not have a point about the car being parked illegally. But Mr Been Around For a While wants to tell him that sometimes, we need to look beyond the curtain to see what happened to set the scenario.  It's not always what it seems to be.

The Saturday Picture Show, January 3, 2015

I don't know if this has happened to you, but it seems to me that the passage of one old year into a whole new one is a much bigger deal when we were kids.  Maybe we need someone to come up with more hysteria like the whole Y2K deal to help us gin up some excitement next New Year's Eve.  Remember 12/31/99?  Everyone was so sure the computers wouldn't work in the morning, and yet...
NYE in Times Square, NYC, 1938.  We had a civics book in 9th grade that demonstrated the right of the people to peaceably assemble by showing a crowd scene like this, but some eagle-eyed kid in the class found someone in the lower right corner of the picture flipping the bird.  Nothing has been that cool since.

Chicago, last Wednesday.  The people at the Subaru dealership next door to the Morton Salt warehouse never figured on their relationship turning...salty.  If cows drove cars, they would want Subarus with built-in salt licks.

 If you get it, you get it.  Order yourself a Tea Shirt.

This is the old Camden train station in downtown Baltimore, adjacent to the old warehouse where they built the ballpark.  The train station is a sports museum now, but I always think of what my Dad said when we were there once for an Orioles game, that his parents had taken him to this station to send him off to war and that was the last time he ever saw them. Life and death intermingle.

If Pablo Picasso painted this at the age of 15, why didn't he continue to paint like this, instead of painting people with two eyes on the same side of their faces and whatnot?  Talk about peaking early!

Speaking of old-time art, this is what people used to do before they had television to while away the hours.  I am curious about what the guy in the pink coat is up to, though.

Just as anyone who picks up a baseball bat that's sitting around on display has the urge to grab the bat and assume a hitter's stance, it is impossible to see a handful of Legos without having the urge to start snapping some together.

Packing it in

There was a scene in the funny Woody Allen movie "Play It Again, Sam" in which Woody plans a weekend getaway with his friends, who want to take him to the beach to help him forget another failed romance.  Woody tells them he will be glad to ride in their car, but they'll need another vehicle to trail them to carry along all of his medications, prescriptions and nostrums.

I've seen the movie in the oldtime theatre at Pocomoke City, MD, at a mall theatre in Baltimore, and on television.  Every time that scene unfolds, everyone else around me laughs uproariously.  And I sit there thinking, "What a great idea!"

I am the very opposite of a light packer.  In fact, the Green Bay Packers travel with fewer packages and suitcases for all their players, coaches and trainers than I do for a weekend getaway.

Why, you and Peggy ask, why do I take so much stuff everywhere I go?

First of all, this being Maryland, you can't count on the weather to be the same two hours in a row, so you need long and short sleeved shirts, long and short cargo pants, wool sox and red cotton sox, and a light jacket and a heavy jacket.  Razors, aftershave, emollients, talcum powder, Tylenol, Tylenol PM, vitamins, aspirin.

Books, magazines, newspapers, cell phone, tablet, stamps for postcards, chargers, snacks, and bottled water all go for the ride, too.

In some other life, I must have been in a vacation spot and all the drugstores were closed, so I was forced to go on the beach without Sea and Ski or something.

It's hard to pack and carry all this gear, but on the other hand, I don't need to take as much money with me, because I'm always prepared.

In fact, sometimes the drugstore at our favorite beach place sometimes calls when they run out of calamine lotion or Noxzema.

They know I have some!

In case you didn't get a 2015 calendar in the mail...........Happy New Year!

What do you know about that?

Sometimes I sit around, thinking about what I can think about next.

And here is what I came up with today:  It's based on an aphorism attributed to Will Rogers - "Everybody is dumb, just on different topics."

Couldn't be more right.  Take me.  What I know about dinosaurs and the solar system could fit in one of the little plastic cups that come with cough syrup, and yet I know children - pre-schoolers! - who know more about those topics than I do, and I say good for them.  As long as T Rex isn't charging after me when I go to the Try 'N' Save, and the sun keeps coming up every day, I'm fine not knowing why the former doesn't happen and why the latter does.

Ring Lardner

I hasten to point out that there are topics on which I am quite knowledgeable, such as the works of Ring Lardner and Jerry Lee Lewis, and how to make grits just right (not soupy, not thick), and things related to the study of history, so I always have something to talk about in case I'm invited to a cocktail party. ("Benjamin Franklin was the only president of the United States who was never president of the United States!")

But...there's always a but. Why do so many of us talk of things about which we know nada, zilch, zed, zero. F'rinstance, the recent disappearance of the Air Asia plane - still a mystery as I write this - has brought out a veritable plethora (all plethoras are "veritable," just like all long waits are "seemingly interminable") of people whose work brings them no closer to Asian air travel than the latest issue of US Weekly, and yet are willing to state what happened to that Malaysian airplane earlier this year.

"It was shot down by the Taliban"
"It was hijacked to Syria"
"It was vaporized by gamma rays by the Martians"

And they make these statements so unabashedly, and their friends all form an echoing chorus of approval, never once asking, "How do you know that?"

Jerry Lee Lewis

The last moments of people who passed away under mysterious circumstances, the whereabouts of Jimmy Hoffa, and the reasons why Jennifer Aniston has never found true happiness in love are all grist for these mills.  They couldn't possibly know, but that doesn't stop them from sharing their uninformation.

And we're polite enough to act like we agree.

Circle the date!

A shameless plug for people and an event close to my heart:  If you live in or around Baltimore, you should bring your kids and yourselves to the Child Safety Day at the Providence Volunteer Fire Company, at 1416 Providence Rd in Towson.  (Take exit 28 off the Baltimore Beltway and go north a mile; the firehouse is on your left.)  Circle Saturday, January 10 on your calendar - 10 AM til 2 PM.

What goes on at Child Safety Day?  New York Life Insurance Co. (I should do a plug for them because that's where my nest egg is being kept warm) will be there to make identification cards for the kids.  That's important these days.  Kids (and folks of all ages who wonder) will learn how to call 911, and the family can find out how to set up an escape plan in case of an emergency in the home. There will be lots of fire department and police department exhibits. It's also a chance to meet the men and women who serve their community for free -  the firefighters of Providence VFC.

And - Holy Batmobile in the parking lot!  - there will be a special guest from Gotham City from 11-1...Batman himself!

Back in the day...

This is the volunteer fire company that was across the street and down one from my childhood home, so I pretty much came of age there, waiting to become a member at age 16, and fighting fires until I got married and moved to another part of town.  But this company is still in my heart as the place where my public safety roots grew, and Child Safety Day is the perfect place to spend a worthwhile time with the family on a Saturday in Baltimore MD USA!

The station today

Come see the new ladder truck!

She thought it would be something sweet to do

Just one quick reading of Heather Cagle's information page on the Catoosa, Oklahoma, Public Schools website makes me shudder for her spelling and grammar deficiencies, but that's not why the school board down there tied a can to her this fall.

Ms Cagle taught 6th grade math, and was yearbook advisor, at Wells Middle School right up until the day in October when she decided it would be a great idea to treat the kids to some WalMart candy.

That was a good idea.  Kids love candy.  What wasn't so good about the idea was to take the students off school grounds to the WalMart in her Honda Accord. 11  - eleven! - students, 12 to 15 years of age.

It's like the old "how do you get four elephants in a Volkswagen? joke (Two in the front seats, two in the back) but the clearly resourceful Ms Cagle had two kids in the front with her (I presume she was doing the driving), seven in the back, and two girls in the trunk.

This also sounds like one of those college student stunts from the 1950s.  Before they had XBox and Play Station to fool away the hours, students would see how many of themselves they could shoehorn into a phone booth, or they would eat live goldfish, or dance for seven days and nights.

Someone dropped a dime on Ms Cagle, and the local school board voted 4-1 to fire her for taking the kids off school grounds without parental permission.

Always dignified, Ms Cagle posts a picture
from a lighter moment for her students to enjoy

I love this ungrammatical quote from her attorney, Richard O'Carroll: "There wasn't any danger and it was a farce. All you got to do is cry a lawsuit or something these days."

There's nothing a lawyer hates more than a lawsuit or something.

In a related development, when I was in high school, I was often summoned to the office, where the vice principal would hand me a dollar with the instructions to go to the nearby drug store and get him a pack of Kents and a large Coke, "and get yourself something too."  No one asked my parents if it was ok for me to wander off school grounds.  They would probably have been shocked to find I was there in the first place.

Sunday rerun: This tragedy could be avoided

Zookeepers and others involved in the care and feeding of brass monkeys all across the Eastern United States are reporting that there are hardly any new ones being born!

Brass monkeys are traditional adornments for the well-to-do and the well-done, for the hale and hearty, the lean, the lank, the content, the querulous, in their swanky mansions and spare huts.  They are said to bring good luck to those who display them, and good fortune to all those who gaze upon them in the course of their daily meanderings.

And they just look so nice out on the porch, gazing beneficently on all who pass by!

But scientists and fanciers of metal animal replicas are all concerned by the recent, huge, decline in the birth rate of the primates in the phylum Chordata, subphylum Vertebrata, class Mammalia orichalcum - the common brass monkey, so beloved of American decorators and the locals of the United Brass Workers International.

Renowned expert Adel Vice, reached at his office high on a hill, pointed out that it's believed that the tendency of many Americans to leave their brass monkeys outside on nights like last night is to blame.

"People know good and well what happens when a brass monkey is left out in sub-freezing temperatures," he said in a phone interview that I just made up.  "It doesn't have to happen this way.  When you hear two 'thuds' on the porch in the middle of the night, it's already too late."

Don't let this happen to you!

The Saturday Picture Show, December 28, 2014

Here's a picture from a thrifty homemaker who wisely put up jars of the things we need to make it through a tough winter...

There came a time that I had cataract surgery and was sent home without the proper medications.  Peggy had gone on to work, so I had to put on the eye patch and bandage and the gigantic Elvis sunglasses the doctor gave me and run over to Walgreens.  And then the pharmacist told me I would have to wait 20 minutes. And they had an electric vibrating chair in the waiting area.  So I sat down, looking like a visionless mummy, and hummed along with the chair for about 90 seconds, at which time the druggist called my name and sent me on home, lest I scare any more children.

 I love the way that farmers cut their crops into fun shapes and designs.  It's even more interesting when you realize that very few farmers have airplanes or helicopters to oversee their work - but now they are getting drones!

 There's only one today.  Make the best of it!

What could be sweeter than two foxes exchanging Christmas presents over a nice cup of cocoa?

FedEx last Tuesday.  That package you got from Uncle Albert and Admiral Halsey is in there someplace!

 A World War I poster reminding citizens not to waste paper.  Printed on paper.

Castles Made of Sand thanks you for a wonderful 2014, and a happy holiday season!  See you back here all through 2015, how about it?

Two things I wonder about

I wonder why...when a consumer has an issue with a product or a company that sells the product, he or she can write and phone and camp out in their lobby and do just about anything to get the problem addressed...but when that consumer is asked by Amazon to rate the product, and they write an honest review that tells what's wrong, the company calls within 18 hours, begging for a chance to make everything right?

I needed a keyboard for the computer; the old one was all gummed up, and when you pressed a key it would stay down for a while. Not good.  So, I saw an exact replacement for the one I wanted, and ordered it from Amazon.

What I got was not an exact replacement. The old one was the "quiet" sort of keyboard and the replacement was not, and the old one had a picture of a 1/2 moon, which would put the pc in sleep mode.  That button wasn't there on the new one.  I can still put the computer to sleep in either of two ways: by pressing the Windows button and choosing sleep mode from the startup menu, or by telling one of my tired old jokes for the umpteenth time.  The one about the English hitchhiker ought to do it!

So Amazon asked me to write a review, and I did so honestly, saying that I did not get the keyboard that was pictured in the ad and that I wish I had.  That was late one night.  By midafternoon the next day, my cell was lit up by a phone call from an ENY (Excited New Yorker) who wanted to know what they could do to get me to take down the negative review.  I suggested that they could find, and send, the right product.

Still waiting.

Another thing I wonder about.  These little quizlets on Facebook, in which people dare each other to "think of a word that starts with a D and ends with a B"...are they for real?  Does anyone really have to stop and ponder this?  That's really dumb.  Some lives are too drab.  Just a little dab of fun ought to help!  But I don't want to be a dweeb about it.

Merry Christmas!

Keeping track of the sleigh

We pause on the eve of this sacred holiday and put aside our usual rantings, ravings, queries, adulations and nonsense to link you to the Santa tracking system, so that you can get an idea of when Mr Claus will arrive on your block.  I know that all of us who meet here every day have been good little boys and girls all year long, so the swag should be stupendous!  Enjoy the last-minute holiday hubbub, and track Santa here!

Dog days numbered?

Peggy said something interesting the other day about animals having more sense than many people give them credit for.  For one thing, when's the last time you heard a dog arguing with another dog over political matters?  That's a sensible approach.

And do you see cats taking drugs, driving while impaired, or wearing polyester clothing?  I rest my case.

But, animals have soft hearts and often love people who clearly deserve no love. Take the case of Connie Lay, a former resident of Dearborn County, Indiana, who recently passed away.  She was the human companion to a German Shepherd named Bella, and she could not face the Great Beyond without Bella by her side, so she stipulated in her will, according to her attorney, Doug Denmure, that upon her passing, Bella was to be euthanized to join her up in the clouds.

Bella

This sort of thing is what keeps my head spinning.  "I love my dog so much, I want her to die" is not a charitable outlook, but there is hope in this case.  People are trying to get the dog to a safe place, to forestall the legal action sought by her former owner.

If Bella could talk, she'd surely say, "Thanks a lot, Connie."

But, just to make us all feel better about people in this Holy Week, here's a story  about a woman named Megan Asadi, a waitress in Herndon, Virginia, a single mom and recent refugee from Iran, who was "tip bombed" $1200 on a $128 check.

The people who leave these large tips remain anonymous, but they seem to have enough moolah to pass some around, so let's wish them good luck!  And for the servers I know and love, I hope they come your way soon!

Inmate No. 174594, formerly No. 81

He just turned 25, an age at which most of us are just getting a career underway, but Aaron Hernandez has already had a career as a tight end in professional football and is now well into a second career as a jailbird.

Coming out of the University of Florida, All-American Aaron did very well for three years with the New England Patriots, until being held without bail following his indictment on three murder charges.

Hernandez was indicted in August, 2013, for the murder of Odin Lloyd, a semi-pro football player, in July of that year.  Additional charges were brought in May of this year for a double homicide in 2012, which took the lives of Daniel de Abreu and Safiro Furtado.

To the surprise of no one, Hernandez has maintained his innocence.  Against all logic, the charges indicate that his swollen ego gave him to believe that he could eliminate people he no longer had a use for, if he is indeed guilty.  But if he isn't, he surely was foolish to destroy his cell phone and his home security videos, and spend money having his new house surgically cleaned, as the police closed in.

Lloyd had been a friend of Hernandez, and the reasons for the murder are unclear.  This article in Rolling Stone paints an interesting picture of a man who could run past, or over, most any defender on the football field, but seems unable to have outrun the demons from his crime-and-drug riddled past, accounting for his current residence in a jail cell, awaiting trial to begin in January.

From a 7,100 square foot home to a
7 foot by 10 foot cell

It fascinates me that the judge in the trial to come has laid down 28 rules for those in attendance, and even limiting who may attend or not. Even though Patriots jerseys are considered fine attire for males and females alike in wintertime in Boston, they are banned from the courtroom, as are any sort of NFL hat, shirt, jacket, pin and (probably) tattoo.  The judge doesn't want to turn the murder trial of a star athlete into a sports-media circus.

Like it won't.

Sunday rerun: Miss Witherspoon regrets

Once upon a time, in Hollywood USA, a golden blonde named Reese Witherspoon made a movie and a name for herself by starring as Elle Woods in "Legally Blonde."

The years have come and gone, 12 of them all told, since that movie, and the glitter and gold seem to have worn off both Ms Witherspoon's hair and her career.  Once one of the top female stars at the box office, she is now making cheeseball independent movies in Atlanta, like her current film job in "The Good Lie."

Listen, no one has ever asked me to be in any kind of movie, except for a part as "Narrator" in several industrial training films a hundred years ago.  (I always had to voice-over lines such as "Let's review what we've learned.  Number one: work smarter, not harder...") So, I'm no position to judge Reese's position in the film industry, but if I were to make a training film with advice for her, it would contain lines such as "When a police officer tells you to remain in your car while he gives your drunken husband a field sobriety test, go park it already."

Yet, that's what happened to her the other night.  Her husband is Jim Toth, and he is an agent aged 42 years.  So you would think that in that amount of time, he would know better than to drive while drunk.  But, he did it, and the Atlanta cop who pulled him over into a Walgreen's parking lot (Man!  They have stores everywhere now!) was trying to test him for DUI and here comes old Reese out of the Ford sedan, butting into the whole deal.  

According to showbiz bible Variety:  Toth was pulled over  driving a silver 2013 Ford Focus, which the officer witnessed weaving across a double line on Atlanta’s Peachtree St. Toth appeared disheveled and his breath smelled of alcohol, according to the police report, prompting the officer to administer a sobriety test.

As Toth walked in the Walgreens parking lot where the officer instructed him to pull over to, Witherspoon became increasingly agitated from the vehicle, which prompted the officer to warn her to stay in the car for the sake of her own safety.

“Mrs. Witherspoon began to hang out the window and say that she did not believe that I was a real police officer,” according to the police report. “I told Mrs. Witherspoon to sit on her butt and be quiet.”

Once Toth was placed under arrest, Witherspoon exited the vehicle and was instructed to get back in the car. According to the report, she “stated that she was a ‘US citizen’ and that she was allowed to ‘stand on American ground.’”

The officer then detailed how she resisted as he grabbed her arms to arrest as Toth attempted to calm her down.

As the report details, “Mrs. Witherspoon asked, “Do you know my name?” I answered, “No, I don’t need to know your name.” 

Mrs. Witherspoon stated, “You’re about to find out who I am.”

The report also specified, “Mrs. Witherspoon also stated, ‘You are going to be on national news.’ I advised Mrs. Witherspoon that was fine.”

Though he told an officer he had only a single drink hours earlier, Toth blew a .139 on a Breathalyzer test administered at the scene. He also is facing a second charge for failure to maintain a lane while driving.

Witherspoon’s alleged violation, which is specified on the police report as “disorderly conduct (obstruction),” is a local municipal ordinance.

Oh well, Reese.  The old "Don't you know who I am?" line is so overdone.  Here in Baltimore County, we have a councilman who pleaded guilty of DUI the other day after a case in which he was arrested for driving with his lights out in more than one way, and followed up his arrest with a 3 AM phone call to the chief of police...a call which wisely went unanswered.

And then, right on schedule (as soon as her publicist could be rounded up and briefed on the situation) - along came the wholesome, heartfelt apology, directly from Ms Witherspoon's heart to you: "Out of respect for the ongoing legal situation, I cannot comment on everything that is being reported right now. But I do want to say, I clearly had one drink too many and I am deeply embarrassed about the things I said," the statement says. 


She goes on: "It was definitely a scary situation and I was frightened for my husband, but that is no excuse. I was disrespectful to the officer who was just doing his job. The words I used that night definitely do not reflect who I am. I have nothing but respect for the police and I'm very sorry for my behavior."

Too drunk to hold her head
up for the mugshot.  Way
to go, Reese. 

Just wait for the trial, when the husband's mouthpiece will stand in court, and say, "Your Honor, my client freely admits that he was in an impaired condition on the night of this unfortunate situation, and he wishes to thank Officer _________ for noticing this and removing him from the highway before tragedy ensued...."

Next up for Reese:  a Lifetime Movie Channel Movie Of The Week:  "Legally Blotto: The Reese Witherspoon Story."