Heaven knows

Sometimes a thought comes to my mind (and it gets lonesome fast!) and I think, "I should write a few words about this topic."

How about...funerals?

There are funerals that are more like celebrations of lives well-lived, and there are times when the recently-departed has suffered so greatly that the call home seems like a relief for them.

And then there are those for young people taken away in the very early spring of their lives. When a child dies from accidental injury or some damned disease, their family and friends are left stunned by it all.  And we try to console ourselves with thinking that Heaven knows what's best. 

And sometimes, there are just no words.

If you're like me, you probably have periods in your life when it seems that you lose friends or acquaintances two or three per month, and it's like when you're in the ocean and get knocked down by one wave, only to get tossed around by another before you even catch your breath.  Yes, life is like that.

Going to funerals and viewings and wakes is no one's idea of a good time. But let me tell you something, please...

I think of a friend I knew once whose friend's mom passed away, and she said, "Oh I don't know if I'll go to the viewing...I'd have to go right after work, and I need to stop at Rite-Aid, and I didn't know her mom all that well, and who cares if I go?"

In one of my rare moments of sagacity and taciturnity (wisdom and keeping the piehole shut) I simply said,"You should go."

And the next day she reported that she was glad she took my advice, and that she learned what we all do sometime...funerals and gatherings associated with them are for the living.

I can't begin to tell you how much I appreciated each and every face that came to me and Peggy and the rest of us when my Dad died in '97, and when Mom left in '14. I will always believe that the emotional support we got at Mom's service is what helped me and Peggy deal with Deanna's sudden departure two weeks later.

People go out of their way for others at the best and worst of times. Speaking of sagacious people, Yogi Berra had a lot of truth in his statement that you should always go to other people's funerals, or they won't come to yours.

Two Brians

Brian would hate me for writing this, the Perryville Brian, that is, but I'm gonna write it and that's that.

The other Brian, New York Brian, might have seen this story, as he does the news from a network in New York.  And I guarantee you that if he has driven up I-95 North through Cecil County, Maryland once in his life, he's done it dozens of times.

Brian Williams is a man I worked with when I was a supervisor at Baltimore County 911.  At the time, he was a career firefighter for Baltimore County, assigned as a Fire Liaison in the communications center. He retired from that county job just last year after 28 years, but continued to serve his community as a volunteer firefighter and Emergency Medical Services Captain at the Community Fire Company of Perryville, MD, a nice little town of 4,300 people in Northeast Maryland.

Brian Williams, the New York Brian, served his community as a volunteer firefighter in Middletown, New Jersey as a younger man and now hosts a late night news program on MSNBC as well as breaking coverage on the NBC networks.  


This past Sunday morning, Perryville Brian was out there on I-95, doing his part time job as a tow truck driver, assisting the driver of a broken-down car, when a man lost control of his car and hit him as he stood alongside the road. Brian Williams is dead, at 51.
Perryville Brian is being remembered as the kind of guy you would want to have in your neighborhood - helpful, kind, resourceful enough to get things done. His wife, Kerri, worked with us a police dispatcher and is a volunteer firefighter herself at Perryville. Their daughter was graduated from Towson University and now lives down south. All in all, a fine family, now torn all to hell by the apparent careless driving of a man said to have a spotty driving record.

The men and women who serve America as volunteer firefighters and EMS workers are carrying on a tradition begun by Benjamin Franklin in 1736. Many, like Perryville BW, serve in dual capacities, working for the government and volunteering in off hours.

Still others, like New York BW, serve during high school and college years and move on to other pursuits. But I can tell you from my own life, if you have the Fire Department in your life once, you have it forever.  

The volunteers BW left behind on that busy superslab highway want you to know that you can help his memory by moving over when you see emergency or service vehicles in the road ahead.




We who mourn Mr Williams know that other hands will show up when the bell rings. Someone will learn to hold a hose line or apply life-saving advanced life support to accident victims, especially on that stretch of I-95 that Perryville serves. Others will come along and serve. It's the way things are done, but in losing Brian, we lost a special guy, and we seem to lose ten of them a day some of these days.

The towns and the county

It happened the other night when my teen bride and I were on the way home from my terrific birthday dinner at Friendly Farm. We stopped at Walmart to look for t-shirts (my main fashion component in summer, until they're replaced by long-sleeve t-shirts in winter.)

As it happened, the Walmart (known in Baltimore as "Walmarts," as Giant Food is called "Giants" and Sears is "Searses") we visited is in Cockeysville. I checked in on Facebook, and sure enough, an out-of-town friend asked me, "Is there really a town in Maryland called 'Cockeysville'?"

Yes, Todo, there is a Cockeysville, founded by the Cockey family a long time ago, and there are still plenty of them around here. In the 60s, someone from, I guess, the Chamber of Commerce came up with the idea to call that part of Baltimore County "Hunt Valley," because a) it's not far from where people go fox hunting and b) it's sort of a valley. I guess someone from Walnut Knob, Maine, thought "Cockeysville" was a funny name.

I also guess that people find "Cowpens Avenue" a funny name for a road, although in my dim memory, I remember when there were cow pens on that road. Hence, the name. And where Cowpens Avenue meets Cromwell Bridge Road (named for an old railroad crossing), they tore down many acres of apple trees and built Loch Raven High School, named for the reservoir nearby that was created by tearing down the town of Warren and flooding it with the Gunpowder River it so that we'd have drinking water.  And yes, Warren, a town in the memory of no one still alive, was named for the Warren family, which settled it.

I'm sure that there were marriages between Warrens and Cockeys, but there is no evidence that there were feuds between the clans.

Baltimore County also has a town called Phoenix, one Texas, a Jacksonville, and of course the world-famous Boring, Maryland. An annual highlight for anyone approaching that town on Rte 30 is the sign advertising the "Boring Firemen's Carnival," which is a big fundraiser for their volunteer fire company, and not the ennui settling in over people wearing red suspenders, and helmets, but with nothing to do.

There's Hyde Park, not the one where Franklin Roosevelt had a place, and Nottingham without a sheriff, and Hebbville, which is often Sunny but not named for Bobby.

There are no incorporated towns in our county, so we don't get to enjoy the antics of someone who is the mayor of a burg with a population of 314 souls making proclamations proclaiming an official language or anything. But years ago, due to some unfortunate choices, a friend of mine wound up living in Houston, Texas, and he was flabbergasted to ask a co-worker what part of town he lived in, only to get "Exit 13" as a reply.

Here, we identify by our local town names and are glad to tell you their provenance and their exact limits. For instance, I'm from Providence, which begins at Providence Rd and Cowpens Avenue, and ends where the road runs into Loch Raven Drive, which snakes around the reservoir I told you about.

Going up York road toward Pennsylvania, there is an exact place at which Lutherville ends and Timonium begins, and then further up you come to Cockeysville, Sparks, Hereford, and then Maryland Line.

The east side borders on waters and rivers off the Chesapeake Bay. The two principal towns over there are Essex and Dundalk, and there are Essexites who will not travel to Dundalk for any purpose, and vice versa.

The west side borders other counties (Carroll and Howard) and the west side is where Woodlawn is, and that's where Social Security Headquarters is located, meaning thousands of jobs for thousands of people who are at this very minute making sure your retirement will be plentiful, so you can come here and take your choice of where you want to live.

Sunday Rerun: On a role

As a kid, I was that kid who read the Information Please Almanac as if it were a novel or something.  I would just sit and read and read that book, learning stuff.  I figured there would come a day when someone ran up to me, demanding to know the height of the tallest building in Cleveland, Babe Ruth's lifetime batting average, or Edward G. Robinson's real name (Emanuel Goldenberg).

So the Internet was a natural fit for me, being a cornucopia of information.  And with a few taps on the keyboard, one can hopscotch from place to place, learning this, that, and the next thing.

We watched "Key Largo" on tv the other night, that great black and white movie from 1948 with Edward G. Robinson and Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall and Jay Silverheels.

Jay Silverheels?  The guy who played Tonto on The Long Ranger? 

Yes, Kemo Sabe!  Silverheels played John Osceola in the movie.  I am always thrilled when I see someone who later became known for other big roles playing smaller roles at the beginning of their careers, such as the time that Jack Nicholson appeared on The Andy Griffith Show as a guy whose child was lost, or the time that Ronald Reagan shared billing with a chimpanzee. The chimp went on to do some great things.  So I went to Wikipedia and found out some facts about Jay Silverheels, one of which is that he was born a Mohawk from Six Nations of the Grand River in Ohsweken near Brantford, Ontario, Canada.  Another interesting fact is that his birth name was Harold J. Smith.  He changed it to Silverheels when he went into acting, taking his old nickname from when he was a speedy lacrosse player in the 1930s.

So, from there I went to an article about the experiences of Native North Americans in the field of showbiz and learned something about that Iron Eyes Cody guy, the guy who was in the public service announcement in the early days of the ecology movement.  You probably remember it - Cody is paddling along in his birchbark canoe when people zooming along in a speeding car throw some trash out of the car.  Cut to old Iron Eyes, and a tear rolls down his eye as William Conrad says "People start pollution.  People can stop it." You can watch it by clicking here.  Go ahead; we'll wait for you!

All right then.  The man who billed himself as Iron Eyes Cody, the man who claimed to be Cherokee, was no more a Native American than Cher.  He was born Espera DeCorti in 1904 in Louisiana, son of Italian immigrants Antonio DeCorti and Francesca Salpietra DeCorti.  When Espera was five, the senior DeCorti decamped for Texas, where he was to change his surname to Corti.  Espera and his brother later showed up in Texas to join their dad, after their mother remarried, to one Alton Abshire, and bore him five children.  After his father died, Espera "Corti" moved to Hollywood and got into the motion picture business by presenting himself as a Native American, appearing in hundreds of movies and television shows.  He married a woman of Indian descent and they adopted two Indian boys, and for the rest of his 94 years on earth, Iron Eyes Cody went everywhere in Indian garb, pretending to be an Indian.


By the way, the articles I read online also said that the tear that rolls down Cody's cheek in that PSA was glycerine.  Not a real tear. It reminded me of what Oscar Levant said about Hollywood, how when you strip away the phony tinsel of Hollywood, you'll find the real tinsel underneath.

The Saturday Picture Show, July 8, 2017

It's hard to criticize the people of Whitley County, Indiana, for their nice attempt at adding a bench to their commemoration of those who perished in defense of the nation. But then I read the article in the paper out there, and see that the person in charge of the project says that one misspelled word is not that big a deal, and I throw my hands up. (They have ordered a replacement slab for the bench.)

It's always hot in July, and here's a free way to decorate your kid brother for some outdoor event!

Apparently there was a time in our past in which young boys could wear derby hats and smoke cigars.

Ladies and gentleman, this is a photo of the actual hatchet that George Washington used to cut down that cherry tree. Of course, the handle broke a long time and we got a new one, and then the head finally got sharpened down to a little nub and we replaced it, but it is the original hatchet!

They say we should look up at the clouds, and every time, I want popcorn.

Is there some deal about ladybugs being lucky, or unlucky? How about an odd number of them hanging off a tendril?

Oh Lily! This is a Day Lily! No word on what it is at night.

You'll please excuse my ongoing fascination with the late Broadway and movie musical performer known as Stubby Kaye. Born Bernard Sholom Kotzin on the day World War I ended (11/11/18), he died on the day my father died, 12/14/97, which was also the date of the last football game ever played at Baltimore's Memorial Stadium. It didn't seem to bother him that he was called "Stubby."  After all, he used to bill himself in vaudeville as the "Extra Padded Attraction." He played many roles well, and you might have seen him do this in "Guys And Dolls."

Nikki Haley and The Comics

Much like when crickets finally stop chirping in late autumn, when my working career came to an end, I looked back when I retired and noticed that some things are still happening that always have and always will. 

Have you seen this? Someone works and preps and prays and does all they can to get that dream job they've wanted since someone who did that job came to Career Day in fourth grade.

And then the big day comes and they get that dream job, and they go through the training, and they start in to doing that job, a job they always wanted, and one that thousands - millions - would love to have the chance to do.

And within six months come the Facebook posts and Twitter tweets and Instagram epigrams:

FML I have to work AGAIN on Saturday night while everyone else gets to go to Toby Keith!  #wheresthejustice
Oh no, I don't mind the job, but the people drive me crazy #godgivemestrength
I just toted it up and I only have 17,293 more shifts to go until retirement #countingthemdown

So you know I'm building up to something.  

Nikki Haley, former governor of South Carolina, and a woman once heralded on magazine covers as "The Face Of the New South," currently serves as your United States Ambassador to the United Nations.

And on the morning of July 4, North Korea tested a long range ballistic missile that seemed to be much more powerful than the ones they had been fooling with before. This is the sort of threat to the stability of the world that the United Nations exists to deal with, and so the people gathered at the UN at the behest of the U.S., Japan, and South Korea and prepared to call for a meeting of the full Security Council.


This is serious business. These people are talking about preventing further and further escalation of this armed madness, which could lead to global warfare, so your faithful and grateful public servant, Ms Haley, took a moment out to reassure America, yea, the world, that she was on the job looking out for us all.

Please pick which of the following tweets was sent from her verified Twitter account the other day:

a)  "North Korea's launch of an ICBM has prompted meetings here at the United Nations as we seek a solution to an ever-growing problem."

b) "Spending my 4th in meetings all day. #thanksnorthkorea

Later on, Haley gave updates and showed pictures of herself with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, but offered no apology or explanation for whining about working on a holiday, as do millions upon millions of police officers, firefighters, EMS personnel, 911 calltakers and dispatchers, doctors, nurses, store clerks, custodial personnel, news reporters, public works people, servers, cab drivers, radio personalities, meteorologists, bus drivers, highway toll takers, and the current governor of South Carolina.

  
 Sorry, Nikki. It's a hard-knock life.

Pop Quiz!

I know these online quizlets are throwbacks to the era of the Mario Brothers and the Teletubbies...but unlike those two things, these are still fun!

1. Do you make your bed? No, but I do the laundry
2. The first car that was officially yours? Plymouth Barracuda 1966
3. Three grocery items you don't run out of? Peanut butter, cracker barrel cheese, Peggy's Cinnamon Raisin bread
4. When did you start doing your own laundry? When I left home to pursue Fame and Fortune, who were a couple of twins who lived up the street...
5. If you could, would you go back to High School? In many ways, I'm still there
6. Can you parallel park in 3 moves? Deftly and assuredly
7. A job you had which people would be shocked to know about? I once recorded a radio commercial for a dive bar for the "talent fee" of a bottle of Jack Daniel's.
8. Do you think aliens are real? Leave that up to the TSA.
9. Can you drive a stick shift? Yup.
10. Guilty TV show you watch? Any Hallmark Channel movie with Lacey Chabert
11. Would you rather be too hot or too cold? Too cold. I can always put on more sweaters
12. If the world ends do you want to be one of the survivors? Along with Keith Richards, Steven Tyler and Betty White? No.
13. Sweet or Salty? Salty. I really can do without sweets.
14. Do you enjoy soaking in a nice bath? Only after shoveling snow
15. Do you consider yourself strong? Sorta
16. Something people do, physically, that drives you crazy? Public displays of manicuring
17. Something you do, physically, that you are sure drives other people crazy? Looming over them
18. Do you have any birthmarks? No
19. Favorite childhood sport? Baseball
20. Do you talk to yourself? I'm just telling myself what the voices are telling me
21. Do you like doing jig-saw puzzles? Online only
22. Would you go on a reality show? I loathe them
23. Tea or coffee? Tea
24. First thing you remember wanting to be when you grew up? A firefighter and a radio DJ and I did both
25. No matter how much money you have or don't have, what are you an absolute snob about? Grammar, spelling, and pronunciation. 

Ice ice baby

For those who like to look ahead, past the day when the last drop of oil has been squeezed out of the earth, after all the gas pumps at all the Gas 'N' Go outlets are dry, and after there's not even enough petroleum to make Vaseline...there is an energy source that is just being developed.

In China, they have figured out a way to extract gas - methane - out of ice from the South China Sea.

Already, we can plan on Ford coming out with gasmobiles...cars with big ice chests in the back.

There is a lot of gas in methane hydrates, but it's not so easy to get it.  And what they are calling "flammable ice," even though it seems like a variation on those boozy ice luges so popular at wedding receptions and Senior Center picnics, is like a Slurpee in which methane molecules are trapped by water molecules.

It must be awful to be trapped like that, like you want to stay in New York but your spouse takes a new job and you wind up having to move to Washington. That is a frozen drag.

Ice burn

Anyhow, this slushy mixture can stay in the ocean or on land in permafrost, and if you hold a lighter up to it, whoosh! A flame appears, and this is why energy company executives are all excited by another chance to make a fortune off the earth. 

This could be the last-ever source of carbon-based energy, which is fuel that comes from burning biofuels (corn) or fossil fuels (dinosaur remains.)  

Earth science teachers will notice my tendency to reduce everything complicated to very simple terms.  We power our cars from corn stalks or Dino the T-Rex, and now a snowball looks like it can run the world someday, as long as we choose "regular" and not "egg custard."

Of course, there is a risk in all this. If the ice is not handled properly, a great deal of methane will escape into the environment, which would cause a whole lot more environmental damage than all the carbon dioxide we currently dump in the air out of the exhaust pipes of our mini-limos.

But we can always listen to our US Energy Secretary Rick "Rick" Perry, a man who gets the date of the American Revolution wrong by 200 years and the amount of Supreme Court justices wrong by 1. Fortunately, he once called for the abolition of the agency he now is in charge of, so maybe by the time Slusho Methane stations are open across America to fuel up your Icemobile, there will be no problems.

Happy Fourth!

The First Family Planning Book

Is it a tiny book  
or a huge quarter?

With all the current interest in tiny houses, I thought I should research tiny books, since they would make a fine gift for any friend moving into a wee home. Printers made many of these tiny books back in the day, and one of them was the first sex manual and guide to contraception published in the US. Attitudes and provincialism being what they were in those days, the authorities couldn't wait to put the author, Dr Charles Knowlton, in the calaboose for a few years.

Things were different back then in terms of how one became a doctor. What Knowlton did was to study as sort of an apprentice (oh no!) under several doctors, attend two 14-week sessions of lectures at Dartmouth College, and then dig up some interred bodies to further his study of anatomy. At age 24, he was awarded his M.D. degree, set up a practice in Hawley, Massachusetts, and -oh yeah - went to jail for two months for illegal dissection.

Instead of spending all his time in the weight room or appearing on MSNBC on the weekends, as modern prisoners do, Knowlton spent his time researching methods of how to help society stop reproducing, and he came up with 4 methods that are still in use today in varying forms.  This being a general interest blog, I can't tell how many 7-year-olds are reading it, and I don't want them running to their parents asking what I mean with these contraceptive methods that stop a "certain substance" from reaching an area that would result in needing to run to BJs for boxes of Pampers in nine months.  You can read the book for yourself right here anyway. 

So he wrote a tiny version of his advice in a book, called it "The Fruits of Philosophy, or the Private Companion of Young Married People" and had copies printed up.  They wanted to put Fabio on the cover, but there was no room! It was a tiny book!

The printer's name was Abner Kneeland, and he got in the jackpot when local minister Mason Grosvenor complained of "infidelity and licentiousness,"  and said that Knowlton's book for married people was the cause of people running around. 

You can just imagine what sort of swinging singles scene was happening in Massachusetts in the 1830s.  

Knowlton reported back to the town stoney lonesome hoosegow for three months of hard labor while the sinbuster Grosvenor went after Kneeland, apparently forgetting that First Amendment thing and all. Grosvenor gave up trying to clean up the local dirty book market and wound up going to work as an agent for Aetna Insurance. There is no word as to whether he was "glad he met ya."

Dr K

Meanwhile, old Doc Knowlton was quite a guy. Once he got out of the Walled-Off Astoria, he founded a group called "The Friends of Mental Liberty", one tenet of which held that "Female members of this Society shall enjoy the same rights and privileges as male members."

He only lived a few more years after that, but he and his tiny book were the beginning of family planning in America.  You would think that with 175 years of book-learning on the topic, all Americans of reproductive age would have a great idea about where all these kids are coming from.

You would be wrong. But Knowlton did all he could.

Sunday Rerun: Moves Like Luigi

My favorite part of 5th grade was when we put a copper strip and a zinc nail into a half a lemon, attached a wire between the metals, and caused that wire to light up a flashlight bulb.


On another occasion, we touched recently-severed frogs' legs during a unit on French cooking bioelectricity with two metal sources, causing the legs to twitch and flail.

Fans of Frankenstein movies might be familiar with the term electrophysiology, which means the use of electricity to bring life to organisms.  That's how they got Frankenstein's Monster to come alive, by hooking up a jerry-rigged body to some Energizer batteries or some such. It was based on research by Italian physician Luigi Galvani, and the process of introducing electricity into living objects became known by his name. It's all in Mary Shelley's book Frankenstein, and since then, we have used the term "galvanized into action" for those moments when an electric tingle seems to get people stirred up.

After he saw his Uncle Luigi perfect the technique on amphibians, Giovanni Aldini demonstrated the electro-stimulation technique of deceased limbs by hooking up the juice to the recently-executed criminal George Foster in London in 1803, causing Foster to do an early version of The Stanky Leg.

Don't feel too bad for Foster; he had murdered his wife and child by drowning them.  

That metal garbage can out back, the one that won't rust but you don't use it too much anymore since Eleanor ran over it with the Buick...the reason it's not rusty is that it has been dipped in a protective zinc coating to prevent rust.  That's called Galvanized metal.

September 9, 1737 – December 4, 1798

And how do radio stations decide which records to play? Well, sometimes, they gather a roomful of listeners and hook up little electrodes on their skins.  See, people might tell you they don't like to hear Maroon 5, but if they really do like a record, their skin reacts with tiny voltage - called Galvanic skin response -  that tells the station to go on playing "Moves Like Jagger" all day and all night.


For all these things, we salute Luigi Galvani by paying the electric bill every month. 

The Saturday Picture Show, July 1, 2017

Big thanks to my friend Addy, who took this picture on a trip to Toronto. It's what they call trompe l'oeil, French for "fooling the eye," and it's just too cool!

I saw another guy on the news, paddling a canoe through flooded streets down south while wearing a T-Rex suit. Or it might have been this same dude, before the storm hit. Another idea I had too late would be to persuade Marc Bolan to perform T-Rex songs in a T-Rex suit.

I'm sure that what happened here was that there was a sunflower seed among the wheat seeds. Or...someone snuck out in the wheatfield and planted it!

This is a little tiny miniature edition of a book called "Little Flirt". It was published in 1871, and called a "a handy guide to 'decipher' flirting with a handkerchief, a glove, a fan or an umbrella."  You see, people used to signal their intentions toward each other by using such things. Man oh man, if a woman draped her handkerchief over her shoulder, it was ON! 

I love mushrooms and I also love knowing that when I purchase them at Giant Food, they are not poisonous toadstools out to ruin my dinner (and future!) So no thanks, no wild ones for me. 

What could be sadder than an abandoned radio station in Trenton, N.J? Just think, if that building could talk! Once, it did.

Before you complain about the new neighbors, make sure to find out about them. For instance, they could turn out to be the type who keep their yard and house neat and take out the trash in proper containers!

OK! It's Saturday, and a lot of people will be getting their nails done.