Blame it on Rio

Hello and welcome to "Ask Fake Doctor Mark M.D.", which will appear the second Tuesday of each week from here in this spot. Let's reach into the mailbag!

"Lance A." from Urinetest, Arizona, wants to know why it's so bad that he lied about taking drugs for all those years, and also what is this thing called "cupping," and could he have gotten away with using performance-enhancing drugs if people had been distracted by giant red sores all over his back.


Well, Mr Strongarm, cupping is the big thing going on at the Riolympics and among the happy hipsters everywhere.  I mean, once Gwyneth Paltrow does something, we all must follow like dominoes toppling (or when someone pulls out the bottommost can of peas from the display at Try 'N' Shop) and do what she does.

What it is, is an acupuncture technique in which a flammable liquid is lighted in a glass cup.  When the flame goes out, the drop in temperature creates suction, and the glass cups stick to your body.

And then...all that sucking pulls up the skin and makes the blood flow, which promotes healing, as anyone who has been to physical therapy has heard while being mauled by man and machine.

Hickey, not cuppey

The red spots stay on the skin for three or four days, just like their teenaged cousin, the hickey. 

Gymnasts, runners and swimmers are all over Rio with these cupping marks, and they swear by them, or at least at them. US gymnast Alex Naddour told USA Today that cupping was "better than any money I've spent on anything else".

Alex.  Stop by on your way home and let me tell you a couple of nice ways to drop your loot. 

The British Acupuncture Council (BAcC) says that on "rare occasions" the hot cups can cause mild burns, and recommends that you only go to cuppers who know how to cup right.

Pharmacologist Prof David Colquhoun, from University College London, dismissed cupping as "hocus pocus" and told the BBC: "It's just pulling up a bit of skin, it is not going to affect the muscle to any noticeable extent. And taken to extreme, it can cause harm, it usually doesn't, it's usually just a - what [British physician] Ben Goldacre would call - a voluntary tax on the gullible."

The picture at left is actually from an old medical textbook. There really is nothing new under the sun.

Wooden you just know it

If you read the novella "The Shawshank Redemption" by Stephen King, you remember the part where Red Redding (Morgan Freeman in the movie) follows clues to the location of a certain tree, which was described to him by his old prison sidekick Andy DuFresne (Tim Robbins).  Andy had told Red that the tree was where he had proposed to his wife (and we know how she ended up!) Red finds the tree, digs up a letter and bus money to get to Mexico and things turn out nicely for everyone but the warden.

In the original story, the tree was located in Buxton, Maine, but when they made the movie, they found a tree in Mansfield, Ohio, and I can't tell Maine from Ohio anyway.  It's only 810 miles away! So the tree you see in the movie was in Ohio, and that's the only place you'll see that white oak anymore, beside your imagination, because it's down. Five years ago, a lightning strike weakened it, and last week, high winds finished it off.

Jodie Snavely with the Mansfield & Richland County Convention and Visitors Bureau (a branch office, I suppose...) says, "It's a sad day for Shawshank fans." I was surprised to read that the tree and the field where it sat became an international tourist destination.

People even Tweeted their Twitter (and you should try that soon!) to hope that something good will be made of the wood. 
My suggestion would be to go out on a limb and make a life-size statue of Rita Hayworth.

"I have had a chance to see the tree and if it's a stump left, I'm sure people will still come see it because hope is a good thing, and a good thing never dies," Snavely says. 

In Maryland, the venerable old white oak tree called the Wye Oak down in Talbot County was really down in Talbot County after a thunderstorm in 2002. It was the largest such tree in America and was 460 years old.  I'm not saying it was old, but Dick Van Dyke was there when they planted it!  

Now it's a desk in the governor's office in Annapolis, where politicians never know when to leave, and can't cedar forest for the trees. I don't have any more tree puns, so I guess I willow you one.

From dust we come...

I don't know everything about everything, which is why I'm not about to run for office (or run anywhere) but as everyone goes on and on about this poor young man who lost his life on a giant waterslide in Kansas over the weekend, maybe we should try to remember that a young man lost his life, his neck broken on a giant waterslide.

They call it the Schlitterbahn Water Park. (Schlitterbahn means "slippery road" in German.) No one knows as of this minute what happened to 10-year-old Caleb Thomas Schwab, the son of Kansas State lawmaker Scott Schwab and his wife Michele, while he was on the ride.  

"The ride" is the Verrückt ride. (Verrückt means "insane" in German).  At 168' 7", it's the world's tallest water slide, taller than the Statue of Liberty from toe to torch. Three people get on a raft and slide to the bottom at speeds around 65 miles per hour.

Of course, there will be questions, and finger pointing, and wondering whether it's reasonable to assume such risks, and why a 10-year old was on the ride that was supposed to be limited to those 14 and up.

Lawyers will file briefs, the funeral will be covered, the way we've seen before and, no doubt, will again.

What caught my attention is what the little guy's family said.  

"Since the day he was born, he brought abundant joy to our family and all those he came in contact with," said the family statement.

Can we hope for anything better than that, no matter what our age when we depart for the Great Beyond, than to have people remember us as having brought "abundant joy" to everyone?

Amusement parks, water slides, games and trips and hot dogs and ice cream and holidays in the sun all precede what awaits every single living being: the sad finale.  As Hank Williams said, "I'll never get out of this world alive."  I take this family's eulogy as a reminder to bring joy whenever and wherever possible.   

Somebody's watching me!

I always think these things I read about are on satire sites, but the way you can tell is, when they have detailed schematic drawings of the robots that will soon control us all  the plans for new technology, and the article is written without a sense of irony or humor, then it's "emmis" - the Yiddish word for truth.

So, believe it or not, you might want to take a change of shoes to troop through the Magic Mouse Kingdom in the Happiest Place On All The Earth.  Disney is developing a system that will take pictures of your shoes when you stroll through the front gate. And then, special Mousecomputers will obtain your name and hometown, and favorite Disney character, food, and ride. 

And then robots will be garnering more info as you parade around the acreage, stuff like how long you wait in line, where you go in the park, and they say they will take this intel and customize your visit by matching it up with your interests.

This is the future: while you are visiting an amusement park, robots know where you are and what you're doing. 

They use facial recognition technology now, you know, and I just have this terrible fear of a guy in a polyester uniform, seated in a dark control room before a giant bank of video monitors, suddenly pausing and zooming in on an image of me giving the stankeye to one of his robots, and then having me rounded up and brought to his Goofy Gulag underneath Tinkerbell's Beef 'n' Beer.

Gone are the days when we could just be anonymous, but I don't like being followed just because of my footwear.

Tracking you every step of the way!

Although, there was a day when I came home from a long day at work and kicked off my kicks in the garage, only to notice that I had worn a left Reebok and a right New Balance.

That'll mix Mickey up!

Sunday Rerun: High School Consequential

High school teachers, please don't think I'm grinding on you here.  I think my concern is more with our culture overall.  

You see, the other day I was talking with a man of about 30; he was a graduate of one of our local private high schools, and I asked him if he knew that the school was located right across the street from the house occupied by Spiro T. Agnew back in the day.

"I've never heard of Spiro Agnew," he pointed out.

"What kind of education excludes learning about Nixon/Agnew/Watergate, etc?" I asked myself.  I've long since learned that people don't really appreciate these questions, no matter how valid I find them.

I get into this all the time with Peggy, and her point is that people don't tend to learn about things that occur before their birth.   My rejoinder is that if that were true, no one would know much about the Civil War, the Industrial Revolution and the Monroe Doctrine.

Her rejoinder is that no one really does.

So, teachers, why not?  We've argued about the way schools teach math these days, with less reliance on basic arithmetical principle and more concentration on just how all those digits make up a Facebook status change.  We've been all over English.  I mean that in every sense of the word; I believe that each and every day, our lovely language is dragged down to the town square and beaten to within an inch of its life by television hosts, athletes, and the people who write commercials for television hosts and athletes to read. How a person can sit there and read aloud "A portion of all the donations go to charity in your area" without decrying the lack of subject-verb agreement is beyond me.  How a person can fail to comprehend basic English words is also beyond me.  And how the schools can hand a diploma to someone who cannot write a simple declarative sentence is so far beyond me, it would take extra postage to get me there.  


But history?  Don't we want the children to know about how we got to where we are?"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," said George Santayana, to which I can only add, "How can one remember the past if one's school focused their curriculum on the teaching of tone poems and performance art?"

Just for those unfamiliar, Spiro T. "Spiro" Agnew was a local politician here who took sacks full of money from paving contractors while in several high-ranking offices, was chosen by Richard M. "Dick" Nixon to be his vice-president because "No assassin in his right mind would kill me, because then they'd get Agnew as president" (as Nixon was quoted by felon John Ehrlichman) and then Agnew resigned the office in disgrace when the Feds finally brought him down on tax evasion charges, and later Agnew wrote an autobiography which implied that Alexander Haig told him to "go quietly...or else" when the G-Men showed up with the papers. 

That's a story worthy of repeating, so that today's youth will learn not to repeat it.  Or something.

The Saturday Picture Show, August 6, 2016

At first I thought, this is someone re-using an old microwave as a mailbox. Clever. But then I looked again. There's a power cord running to it!  Could this be the mailbox of the most considerate person on earth - someone who put a microwave out there for the letter carrier so he or she could heat up a Hot Pocket for lunch, and then leave the grocery fliers, PEOPLE magazine and dentist bills behind?
You know Popeye, the sailor man from the comics and future fried chicken magnate?  Well, say hello to Frank Fiegel, the real-life sailor on whom the character was based!  He was strong to the finish, it was said, because he always ate his spinach.

There was some sort of nationwide poll taken among fans of all the major league baseball teams, and guess whose hat is the most popular of them all?  O-R-I-O-L-E-S!

You are here. (spot your place in the world)

Here's one you can use for a wallpaper if you wish...the sun, the clouds, the bay...

Come on over and get lit at the annual Thailand Lantern festival!

While you and I were sleeping, eating breakfast and reading the paper, this random stranger poured ten billion salt crystals on a black surface and rearranged them to look like Alfred Einstein.

Before we go...this is the look of the damage done in Ellicott City, Maryland a week ago by a sudden thunderstorm that tossed over six inches of rain on a flood-prone town. They will rebuild it again.

All the world's a stage

Robert Young was an actor who played lovable wise daddy Jim Anderson on the 1950's sitcomadrama "Father Knows Best," in which he rose to every occasion and straightened out all the problems at home, as soon as he got home from the office and switched from suit jacket to beat up old sports coat with leather patches on the elbows.  The dress shirt and tie, of course, remained on as he figured out how to get Bud back on the football team or help Betty get over coming in second in the election for homecoming queen or sell another box of cookies for Kathy.

What no one knew at the time is that Robert Young had a substance abuse problem, and hid his bottles of alcohol in the closet on the "FKB" set where his sports coat was hanging up. Sober, he couldn't deal with the realities of real life, but on TV, he could handle anything.

And I'm not trying to rag on Robert Young. Being alcoholic was a disease he had to deal with, but I'm trying to say that we often see actors as the people they play, not the people they are.

The next big role for Young was "Marcus Welby, M.D." And that was a character who was the wise family doctor who could cure anything with a few comforting words and some Bactine. And, Young always said that any time he was out in public, people walked up to him and asked for medical advice!

And that says a lot about how good an actor he was, and how foolish we are, sitting home with the tube on.

So I had to laugh when people recently got their dithers up because Bradley Cooper, who played the "American Sniper" Chris Kyle in the film version of Kyle's biography, attended the Democratic National Convention!  Oh, how the fools carried on about it! 

Again, let's go over this: people are paid to act in movies, TV shows and theatrical productions.  They don't necessarily portray people who have their physical attributes or attitudes about life and politics and how things ought to be.  The person who plays the funny guy on your favorite show might be a really nasty jerk, and vice versa.  Cooper played a raccoon in "Guardians Of The Galaxy," and there is no evidence that he is really a small mammal that eats garbage and peanuts.

Here, for the information of all, is a list of all the actors whose roles always mirror their true personalities:

1. Pee-Wee Herman
   
   

All the others are just acting.

Take me out

Today's stories are from the world of baseball, but they really don't have as much to do with the sport as they do with the way people act (as opposed to the way they ought to act!)

The Liberty Bell tattoo is not your pass to annoy
everyone from here to Valley Forge

Story The First took place in Philadelphia, the town where Santa Claus was pelted with snowballs during a football game.  As the Phillies were playing the Giants, a leather-lunged fan sitting behind home plate was hollering at umpire Bob Davidson, apparently suggesting that the ump had something in common with an industrial vacuum cleaner. For six innings, the verbal assault continued, loudly enough to be heard all over the ballpark, and Davidson fixed things by calling time out and signalling to security in the stands that it was time to send this "fan" to the shower.

The shame.

Story The Second comes from Cincinnati, where the Cardinals were taking on the hometown Reds.  Reds first baseman Joey Votto went over to the stands to try for a foul popup, only to be blocked by a hometown fan getting in the way.  Before returning to his position, Votto took time to grab the man's Reds shirt to emphasize where his loyalty ought to lie, and then shook his head balefully.

The Phila story wraps up with the (apparently) intoxicated fan being given the gate, waving his arms and displaying a real red neck as he departed to the applause of other fans in the area.

In Cincy, Votto autographed a ball for the pushy fan, inscribing it with "Thanks for being so understanding when I acted out of character."  Then they posed for a selfie and everyone went home happy.

In both of these cases, we see illustrated one of the basic problems of today's society: that "It's all about ME" attitude that makes everyone think they can be involved in everything just because they WANT to be.  Short and clumsy?  Demand a place on the basketball team anyway!  Can't walk without tripping over linoleum?  Get out there and dance your pants off! Not enough grazing land for your cow? Occupy federal land and just take all the acres you need! Can't pronounce "Tanzania"? Run for the highest office in the land anyway!

You wouldn't like it so much if you went to a classical music concert and some joker two rows ahead pulled out a harmonica and began honking away to the Rondo Alla Turca. Out for an evening of fine cuisine, you do not expect someone's cousin from Kankakee to go to the kitchen, elbow the chef aside, and prepare your ricotta and asparagus quiche, nor would you want the dining room to be fouled with the colorful billingsgate of the loading dock.

Simply stated, the people sitting near the contumacious Phillies fan paid their way in and deserve to enjoy a ballgame without his profane word-assault.  And the people watching the Reds game want to see Joey Votto play baseball, not you.  

Just enjoy the game, be it baseball, Parcheesi, or life itself.  

Through the years

In 1995, the first Yahoo! search engine was launched (try Googling it!). The state of Mississippi finally got around to ratifying the Thirteen Amendment, which the rest of the nation had gone for in 1865.  That was the Amendment that abolished slavery.  Also in 1995, Tejana pop singer Selena was fatally shot at a motel in Corpus Christi, Texas by her former employee, Yolanda Saldívar. Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, Americans, killed 168 of their fellow Americans by blowing up a federal building in Oklahoma, eBay was founded, and the appropriately-named Windows 95 came out.

And in Miami, Florida, which was one of the 50 United States at the time, a Walmart store removed a T-shirt from its sales shelf because a customer - one customer - complained about it.

This horribly disgusting item of apparel, something so egregiously heinous that it led to weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth on WalMart parking lots, features Margaret from the Dennis the Menace comic strip saying, "Someday a woman will be president."

Again, this was only 21 years ago. A woman named Ann Moliver Ruben heard from a WalMart buyer that they quit selling the shirts because it went against "Walmart's family values."

While we all mull over the stuff that Walmart sold in 1995 - and still sells today - that go against ANY sort of value, remember this. Ruben is actually Dr Ruben; she's a psychologist in Florida, and she designed the shirt to send a positive message to young women.

And a random woman opposed this in 1995.  I wonder how she feels now, with a woman on the ticket on one of the major parties.

And this is 2016, and things have changed.  Danit Marquardt, Director of Corporate Communications at WalMart, says, “Wow, it still pains us that we made this mistake 20 years ago.  We’re proud of the fact that our country – and our company – has made so much progress in advancing women in the workplace, and in society.”

And by the way...Jeannie Russell is the name of the young lady who played the role of Margaret in the Dennis The Menace TV show. Today she is a chiropractor in Los Angeles.  One of her patients is Jay North, who played Dennis, and who still deals with issues resulting from physical abuse he suffered at the hands of his aunt, his "guardian" on the TV soundstage.  She would beat the little boy if she found his acting not quite up to her standards.

I'm glad this is 2016.  We've finally awakened.

Balloon payment

It's easy to say you don't want government regulations and inspections and Big Bro getting all up in your business when you're just trying to run your little business and bring home the bacon for Betty, Sis and Junior.

It's quite another when 15 people  - people who have people who will have to live without them forever  - get up in a hot-air balloon in Texas on a Saturday morning, and the pilot sails the balloon right onto some high-tension wires and you know the rest.

Ask yourself: would you, or anyone else you know and love, have gotten into that ill-fated flying machine, knowing you were going up with a man who had at least four drunken-driving convictions, two prison stays and more than 40 customer complaints on his record?

The man's name was Alfred “Skip” Nichols.  Employed by Heart of Texas Hot Air Balloon Rides, he was the pilot of the balloon that took him and all his passengers to their graves, crashing into a pasture near the central Texas town of Lockhart.  

This is the fertilizer plant that blew up in West, Texas, in
2013, killing 40 people, 10 of them emergency
 Police/Fire/EMS personnel.  The plant had last been inspected
in 1985.  28 years before.  28.

The Washington Post reports that before he showed up in Texas - a state known for lax attention to regulatory policies - Nichols had "extensive criminal and business troubles in the St. Louis, Missouri, area."  Highlights include: 

1990: pleads guilty to DWI in St. Louis County.

1997: Better Business Bureau in St. Louis receives its first complaint against Nichols’s business, Air Balloon Sports.

2000:  Convicted of a drug crime, spends about a year-and-a-half in prison.  Also, the BBB issued a "consumer alert" that year against another of his businesses, Manchester Balloon Voyages, after 11 complaints are received.

2001: Another BBB warning, after more than 36 complaints come in from customers who paid for voyages which Nichols failed to supply or remunerate customers. One of the customers cheated is a Catholic nun who paid $364 for a flight for herself and three friends to commemorate her 50 years of service.

2002: Nichols pleads guilty to two DWI charges.

2008:  A third warning from the BBB comes out, following eight more complaints from cheated customers. The BBB advises that Nichols was on probation in Missouri for distribution, delivery or manufacturing of a controlled substance.

2010: He's back in prison until 2012 after his parole was revoked because of a drunk-driving conviction.

2013: He is sued by, and settles with, a woman who was aboard his balloon when it crashed.  She suffered neck and back injuries. Nichols blames the accident on a "lack of wind" and states that his driver's license was revoked for 10 years in 2010.  

2014: Nichols sets up shop in Texas. 
2016: 

We need inspections and regulations and people to make sure that the right hands are operating equipment that might kill or maim in the wrong hands, the same as you need your annual physical and your car needs maintenance.  People whose privilege to drive a car on the highway has been revoked have no business taking you up in a balloon.

The Nature of things

Saturday was like most any other summer day around here...stultifyingly muggy with alternating clouds and sunshine, and temperatures in the upper 80s. But all day long the weather people were warning of storms to come later, and when they did arrive, they were awful. 

There are "flood-prone" areas in the central Maryland area. One of them is along the banks of the Jones Falls, which runs from the county down to the reservoir at Lake Roland and finally ends up in the Inner Harbor downtown. Along the way are old buildings built in the milling days, when the rushing water powered waterwheels, and, naturally, these old mills are quaint and popular now as restaurants, bike rental shops and the like.

Unfortunately, they flooded on Saturday, with people coming out of dining spots after dinner to find their cars were headed to the inner harbor without benefit of a driver.

Ellicott City, Saturday night

And it was even worse in historic Ellicott City (pronounced ELLikit, for the benefit of new reporters in town). 6.4 inches of rain fell in the early hours of Saturday evening, and there is tremendous damage.  I'm writing this on Sunday afternoon, and two people - a man and a woman - have been found dead in the debris. There might still be others, sad to say.  And the property damage is stunning.  Ellicott City is an old mill town with a charming old Main Street with shops and bistros and art galleries. But it's at the bottom of a valley with the Patapsco River for a neighbor, and when there's too much rain, there is nowhere for it to go.

This being America, the greatest nation on the face of the earth (no disrespect to my friends in other countries, but nowhere else do people pull together for the common good like we 'Muricans) there are already people organizing to round up needed supplies, so if you're not too far from the North Saint Johns Pool on Marydell Road, tonight from 4-7 pm, people will be collecting large 5-gallon buckets with lids, heavy duty trash bags, snow shovels (to remove mud and debris), bleach, rubber gloves, large sponges, scouring pads, scrub brushes, Lysol, dust masks, and cash/checks made out to The Ellicott City Partnership to be used to buy items.

Why even try?

I can't let this go without one more word.  We saw the news videos of people forming human chains to pull others out of cars and floodwaters. And, of course, we saw people trying to drive their cars through floodwaters, and one man holding his car by the opened door frame, literally trying to pull it to the side of the road. The motto "Turn around, don't drown!" is good to bear in mind. Please decide right now, because when things like this flood happen, they often happen without warning, that you will regard your life as more important than an automobile. Just don't take the chance!

 

Sunday Rerun: It's Only Natural

Those movie people, man, I wanna tell you.  They take a story from real life and turn it into a...movie!

You might have seen that movie "The Natural," starring Robert Redford.  Baseball guy goes to girl's hotel room and she plugs him a good one right in the belly, see?  But then the kid comes back, see?  And hits a ton o' homers, see?

It was all LOOSELY based on a real story.  Eddie Waitkus was the name of the first baseman, and he looked like the young Redford like I look like any two members of 1 Direction.  But he played for the Cubs in postwar Chicago and a teenager named Ruth Ann Steinhagen had the hots for him.

It happens.

She was fine swooning over him from the stands at Historic Wrigley Field, but when Waitkus was traded to the Phillies after the 1948 season, she wasn't about to commute to Philadelphia to see him play.

So she decided to shoot him.

When the Phillies came to Chi to play the Cubs in June of '49, she got a room in their team hotel and sent Waitkus a note, saying that she was in the Edgewater Beach Hotel and had something to discuss with him.

As you might imagine, Eddie about broke his neck to get to her room and see what was up.  So to speak.

She leveled a rifle at him and fired, striking him in the chest.  But he refused to press charges, citing both the 2nd and 5th Amendments.  Waitkus then joined the list of World War II veterans who came home from the war unscathed, only to be shot in his own country.

Waitkus flashes the high sign to an anxious nation

Adjudged insane, Ruth Ann Steinhagen was confined to a mental institution for three years, released in time for the 1952 season.  But she stayed "in the shadows" until she passed away this past December.  So deep in the shadows was she, according to John Theodore, who wrote a book about the subject in 2002, that no one around her seemed to know why she was once so notorious.  There's nothing anywhere about her having a job, family, marriage, anything.

Waitkus returned to play six more big-league seasons,although he was never the great player that his cinematic alter ego Roy Hobbs was, died in 1972, and to his dying day, was wary about visiting strangers in hotel rooms, we may rest assured.  Ruth Ann Steinhagen's parents took her in, and they survived into the 1990s. Even the Cook County Coroner, who confirmed Ruth Ann's death, had no idea in December until a reporter dug up her background last week. 

How a person once so famous can learn to hide in a house, and how the entire community can forget why she was so infamous, are fascinating topics to think about. It would never happen today.  Between TMZ and reality shows, she would be a fixture on television nightly. Hell, she might even have her own show on FOX News.


In the old wire-service picture at right, RA is seen in an institution, apparently writing to her idol while gazing lovingly at his graven image.  This sort of  staged photography used to pass for journalism.

The Saturday Picture Show, July 30, 2016

Boy oh boy.  Garrison Keillor spent every Saturday since 1974 talking about the mythic town of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, only to retire and have the good people at USA Today get the whole state wrong.

I've always loved seeing yards that look like claw machines, and you could reach in and grab a prize.  Extra points for the classic donkey cart.

When I was born, there were no cameras yet, so my parents hired a painter named Eugenio Zampighi to record my joyful arrival in oils. This would account for my lifelong attachment to cats and accordion music. 

The hardest thing in the world to get rid of is an old trash can. Leave it out there with the trash, and someone will always bring it back, saying, "Good thing I got this for you before the trash men took it!"  The second hardest thing to dispose of is an old tv or monitor.  No one wants them! My advice: put it in a UPS box, seal it up and leave it on your porch.  It will be gone by dinnertime.

"Hey, everyone! Let's pile into the BelAir station wagon and go camping in the middle of nowhere! Don't forget to pack 127 jars of pickles and condiments, Pearl!"

Strolling along the boardwalk in Ocean City, MD, in a long-ago summer.  It must be a long time ago.  Everyone is wearing a shirt.

Too hot to make great art in summer?  Just leave your crayons out on the porch (next to the boxed-up Sylvania) and let the sun do it for you!

Now, here you go.  What could be better in summer?

An inside look at shoplifting

It was time to get some new plastic tubs to hold my grilling gear (fourteen spatulas and a left glove) so I went to the Home Depot to get two of these BA containers.

It was sad when I took them to the checkout, because the cashier, slightly embarrassed, had to open each one and peer inside, making sure that I hadn't hidden a drill press or six 2x4s inside.

I understand the need for this scrutiny, although I think it's funny, because anyone who knows me would know that I am the last person to try such a ripoff. First, because I am one of those who believe that karma would deal me a swift kick in the twig and berries if I tried it. Second, because my face would be a virtual lie detector...I would be blushing, sweating, my nostrils would flare, and I would stutter and stammer and yak and yammer until they had to call someone over to assist me to a seat.

So, I asked the lady how often it happens that people are found smuggling stuff inside other stuff.  "More often than you'd think," she said. 

And what do they say when you find a set of Vice-Grip Pliers and a bottle of Gorilla Glue inside a storage box they're buying? "One of two things...either they say they meant to buy that stuff and just stuck it in the box to carry it up here, or they say they have no idea how it got there and it must have been in there when they picked up the box."

I love talking to people about their jobs.  I worked with a woman who worked part-time at a tuxedo rental shop, and she reported that Mondays were days for guys to show up looking for the cell phones, cigarettes, car keys, knives, jewelry, wallets and bags of weed they had left in the pockets of the tux they wore on Saturday for Tony's wedding. 

And on Tuesdays, they came back, looking for Tony. 

Get the camera!

I could easily drone on and on about how this could have been avoided.  You have to figure, if a dryer catches fire (and doesn't that sound like a Dr Seuss book?) one of two things happened.  Maybe there was an electrical fire in the motor, sure, but more likely, the lint trap had not been cleaned out since Clinton was president (the first one.)

So, next time you take a load of fresh laundry out of the Maytag, please check and empty the lint trap. That stuff is combustible!

That's not even what's on what there is of my mind today. Think for just a second about the top picture there.  

Are you thinking what I'm thinking?  Someone walked by the laundry room and saw it ablaze.

So?  the response to this is:
a) run and call 911
b) grab a fire extinguisher and put out the fire
c) take out the phone, select the camera app and take a picture.

I hope you chose a) or b). Unless you are an insurance adjuster.

I don't get the tendency of some to record everything, take a picture of everything, pull out the camera/phone when a Dorothy-get-outta-Kansas hurricane comes along. The first priority, to me, when a tree falls across the trunk of another car or someone is being swept away by a swollen stream or a fire is engulfing a whole development or rioting breaks out at a Justin Bieber concert or Justin Bieber breaks out, would be to deal with the situation! Grab a rope, or a hose, but just do something!  

Stormchasing  - the art of deliberately going to places where weather is bringing hell to earth - is silly enough, and dangerous, but when you add "taking pictures of Bob while he's driving into the path of the tornado," you lose me. 

First things first, when seconds count.

Space Doubt

In the days before microwave ovens made it possible for us to nuculate Hot Pockets and Jimmy Dean Breakfast Sandwiches at work for lunch, lunch choices were limited to whatever one could stuff in a brown bag.

And it was even worse for astronauts! Floating around in space in a multi-million dollar space capsule, those brave men couldn't very well pack cheese and crackers for lunch. There were very delicate electronic parts aboard, and crumbs hanging in the air in a weightless environment could very well get in the works and jam things up.

If you remember Space Food Sticks, that was Pillsbury's idea, bringing to American pockets, lunch pails and vending machines the tubular Astronaut food with the consistency of a Tootsie Roll and the taste of tree bark and sawdust. But food for grinding on in a space ship had to be crumb-free and molded into blocks or tubes. All other food was strictly not A-OK, in NASA parlance.

John Young was the pilot of the Apollo III mission in March, 1965. Later, he became the ninth man to walk on the moon (1972) but first, he became the first man to smuggle a corned beef sandwich aboard a NASA mission. As Apollo III hurtled spaceward, he reached into the pocket of his spacesuit and pulled out a corned-beef-on-rye-with-mustard and began to chomp away.

It turned out that another astronaut with a penchant for practical gaggery, Wally Schirra, had slipped off to a deli in Cocoa Beach FL, brought the sammy to Young, and sat back to enjoy the hijinx.

We can say that this was not the worst thing that ever happened in the state of Florida or in the province of American space travel. No beef or rye molecules ruined any onboard equipment, although the next guy to take that spaceship for a ride did complain that there was mustard all over the steering wheel.

And the bigshots at NASA had to do some fancy scrambling when, at the next Senate Appropriations Committee hearing to determine how much more of our tax money would be wasted spent on flying around like William Shatner, Sen. George E. Shipley blasted NASA: “My thought is that after you spend a great deal of money and time, to have one of the astronauts slip a sandwich aboard this vehicle, frankly, is just a little disgusting.”

To end the suspense, they got their money anyway and Americans landed on the moon in July 1969.  


Or so you think.

In a world...

I follow a Facebook page called BALTIMORE COUNTY BREAKING NEWS.  We live in Baltimore County (which, to those of you in far-off Ashtabula, Baluchistan or Kankakee, is a whole separate jurisdiction from Baltimore City) and I like reading the breaking news so I know what's going on.  These people follow the scanner action and the goin's-on of the emergency service personnel, and pass it all along.

Now, this was on their page the other day: 

A story shared with us by one of our followers.
"I don't know if you can show this but this evening my vehicle was on fire at perry Parkway and Joppa rd. I had my 3 small children with me and there was 2 males that stopped and help me. One was a guy in a white pick up truck that had a fire extinguisher that put the fire out and other was a male in a silver Suv that ran over at stayed with me and my children and even let me us his phone until the fire truck and police showed up. I don't know what I would have done if they didn't stop and help me today. I just want to thank them so much for everything they did. It is nice to know there is still some good people in this world that would stop and women that is 9 month pregnant and her children. The one male didn't want to leave us until he knew we would get home safe and left his wife waiting for him in there car while he came and helped calm my children down as well since they were upset."

You see what I'm thinking? Like they say in the movie trailers, IN A WORLD where people of all sorts are killing other people of all sorts for all sorts of reasons...IN A WORLD where natural disasters, some of them caused by manmade disasters, threaten Earth and all its inhabitants...IN A WORLD where the Zika virus is as yet uncontrolled...IN A WORLD where a guy can go into a nightclub and gun down 49 people out of the pure enormity of hatred in his heart, and two weeks later we can't even think of his name, muddled as it is among the names of the other mass slayers or shooters who break our hearts almost every day...IN A WORLD where compassion, caring and helping a stranger are almost unheard of (except as cynical parts of campaign slogans), here they are, right near where I live, just a couple of blocks from the police and fire stations. Two strangers stopping to help a third, and staying with her to the end.  

This is America, the land that I love, the country that is great, and always has been, and always will be.