Poll attacks

The United States Supreme Court, the only tribunal that outranks Judge Mablean, will decide if the State of Ohio ("Where Cleveland Is!") has the right to take away your right to vote just because you don't vote.

Under President Barack Obama, the  Justice Department said that  Ohio's method for "purging" people who do not vote from the rolls was in violation of the National Voter Registration Act. 

Guess what? The current federal government says, "Nuh-uh. It's ok to cancel your right to vote" because they are interested in having fewer people on the rolls.

So it's up to The Supremes to tell Ohio to Stop! In The Name Of Love, and when the decision is handed down, it's going to be Nothing But Heartaches for a lot of people, Baby Love.

I understand that one reason for cleaning up the voter ranks is to remove people who have a) passed away, b) moved to Kankakee or c) both.  This leaves old Uncle Jehoshaphat listed as eligible to vote, even though he "bought the ranch" in 1936, a full two decades after he really bought the ranch. 

But wait a second.  If you have a license to drive a car, and choose not to, they don't take that right away from you, as long as you renew your license when the time comes. 

Stacked.

And even that example requires some interaction with the government. Here's one that doesn't: you have the absolute right to walk 47 miles a day on the sidewalks of your town, if you wish. 

It's your right not to sell that set of FiestaWare if you don't feel like it. 

For crying out loud, and I would if you made me do this, but you even have the right to own, and read over and over, the Collected Works Of John Grisham. 

Compared to that, I guess maybe we should take a vote on it. 

So an Englishman walks into an igloo...

No globetrotter am I, but still I would like to visit Hamburg, Germany, Sandwich, Massachusetts, and Worcestershire, England, just for the burgers and the sammies and the sauce.

And if I hurry to get to Worcestershire, I can see where an Englishman built an igloo in his girlfriend's back garden. 

Just because it snowed there, I guess. 

The fellow's name is Ben Crutch and he said he could have used some "tips from real Eskimos" to make the job easier.

Uh, we call them "Inuits" now, but whatevs.

Ben has this bucket list, and when he sprang forth on a recent Sunday, he saw that only making 500 ice bricks and stacking them up stood between him and checking off "having an igloo."

He's a carpenter-joiner over in England, so he went all the way, making the bricks, stacking them, and installing a light, a door, and and a window. 

It took eight hours ago, and really, if you had started on your igloo eight hours ago, you'd be reading this in a much chillier room. 


He's a self-taught iglooer.  He made each of the 500 bricks by packing snow into a washbowl, and even though he said later he should have "googled the correct method," his worry that there might be a problem with the roof did not come true.

Friends came over and brought him wheelbarrows filled with snow, and that's how he was able to stack that thang to over seven feet in height. That made it cozy inside, with the ice acting as a great thermal barrier. 



The differences between the blog you're reading, whimsically entitled "Castles Made of Sand," are (a) that the only wheelbarrow we have around here sits unused in the shed, and (b) it takes a lot less than eight hours to crank out this word salad every day.

In eight hours, I can write four of these and take two naps.  And I often do!

In honor of Dr King, from 2016

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
addresses crowd
in Washington, DC

“With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.” - Dr Martin Luther King, Jr

Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. was a preacher in from Atlanta, serving as minister of a Baptist church in Montgomery, Ala. It's hard to believe, but this occurred in America some sixty years ago: Black citizens were required to ride in the back of the municipal buses (they did pay the same fare as all others), and were not allowed to shop in certain stores, dine at some restaurants, or even use public toilets or water fountains. Or Vote. 

Inspired by the resistance of a hard-working seamstress named Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her bus seat to a white man and move to the back of the bus, Dr King led a boycott of those buses.  It took almost two years, but in the end, the buses in Montgomery were desegregated, open to all.  

Today, we pause from the day-to-day to honor a man who had the courage to lead the nation away from the awful practices of legal racial prejudice and discrimination.

 He went on to lead the fight to allow all citizens to vote.  Again, I am writing this for the benefit of the young, who might find it hard to believe there was a time and place in this country when a man or woman of legal voting age could be denied the right to vote because of the color of their skin.

Of course, even the young can see that a political platform that damns an entire race or religious group or seeks to keep them from coming to the Land Of The Free is based on "hair-brained" foolishness.

There was an interesting article in the Washington POST the other day about the Dr King Memorial in Washington.  National Park Service guide John W. McCaskill, stationed there, encounters all sorts of visitors to the monument.  Some are just learning about the fight for civil rights in the US, and some are people who were there on the front lines of the fight - literally.

One day, he met Rev. C.T. Vivian.  In 1965, Rev. Vivian was on the steps of the Birmingham municipal building, trying to register new voters. And a violent sheriff, one Jim Clark, stood in their way and said they could not register.  

Vivian stood firm for the right to vote. Clark hit Vivian so hard that he broke his hand. As blood poured from his nose and mouth, Rev Vivian had the courage to say this to the news cameras recording this horror:  

   "We are willing to be beaten for democracy."

And that courage flowed from the heart of the man whom we honor today. 

Please remember that, the next time that voting seems an inconvenience, or kindness to persons of a different faith or background seems to be too much trouble. 

Sunday Rerun: With Mallets Toward None

Billy the Kid (born Henry McCarty, but that doesn't sound like a name for a legendary gunslinger) was a pretty tough hombre in America's Wild West days, the days when people walked around with guns, shooting at each other. (Can you even believe such a time ever existed in our country?)

He became a hero, a well-known name in cowboy lore.  There is even a kid's clothing line named after him, which leads me to wonder why no one ever came up with "Lil' John Dillinger" suits, overalls and jeans for America's youth.  

The original Billy was a common crook, a thief and murderer, and he met his maker at the age of 21 in a gunfight.  He died as he lived, with a gun in one hand, and possibly a croquet mallet in the other.

No kidding. Historians have just authenticated a photograph as being of a group that included BTK.  He is seen in the picture playing croquet with his posse ("The Regulators") in New Mexico in 1878.  It was taken after a wedding that summer, just a month after the gang took part in the brutal Lincoln County war, a dispute between rival factions over dry goods and cattle that was resolved by having people shoot guns at each other repeatedly.

Having been imported from England, croquet became popular in 19th Century America. There is even a letter from Gen. George Custer to his wife, asking that she procure and bring him a croquet set so he could play the game with his Army buddies in Kansas. There's no word on whether he took that equipment to his final battle at Little Big Horn.

Billy's other picture

A fellow named Randy Guijarro paid $2 for the picture in a junk shop in Fresno, CA, in 2010, and it's on the auction block now, expected to bring in a few cool million bucks.  The only other picture we have to keep the young felon's dear memory alive is the picture taken in 1880, the one where he looks like a member of Blake Shelton's entourage.  

Billy also went by the moniker "William H. Bonney." It would seem that he had more names than good qualities.  He was a horse thief, cattle rustler, and murderer of at least eight people (although he claimed to have killed 21) and was not missed at all by anyone who liked it peaceful and crime free.  Still, in the inexplicable way we have of turning scoundrels into folk heroes, his name alone inspires people to reach for their checkbooks to buy the original tintype of this photo for their den walls: 

This picture for sale

That's Billy on the left in this closeup

By the way, the historians went to a lot of trouble to make sure this is not a picture of a Billy the Kid impersonator or something. In the course of a year-long investigation, they where it was taken: Chaves County, New Mexico. They even dug up the remains of the building shown. Jeff Aiello, director of a National Geographic Channel documentary on this story, says, “We found the old lumber underneath. We found those exact rock piers are still there.”  There will be a TV show about this later this month.  

137 years from now, Keith Richards, who will still be alive, will be hosting a TV special about a VHS tape that someone just found that shows Tonya Harding's wedding night, and people will pay billions for it.

The Saturday Picture Show, January 13, 2018

It's my long-held belief that some of the wittiest wits in America are working in the field of roadside sign, fortune cookie and T-shirt epigrams.  Dream on!

This person might have just been in New Jersey, where, often, left turns are made from the right lane on what they call a "jughandle." Good luck to him/her either/or way.

Someone in the quality control department over at Staircases "R" Us needs to step up just a bit...I guess they need to rail at someone...

I have this weird relationship with the Cleveland Browns, the spectacularly inept football team with some really good players. I love their uniform colors (brown and orange) and would gladly give up the Ravens' purple surple to go brown and orange. But, anyhow, the Browns had 16 Losses and 0 Wins in 2017, and then celebrated with a Shirts With No Ws.

This must be the idea of some flinty local judge somewhere. Do you think public shaming is the answer? We'll see if she steals again.

Hi! Welcome back to The Late 1960s, where Mr. Jimi Hendrix is fixing a spaghetti dinner and a cup of tea for you. 

Yes, it snowed in the Sahara Desert, and nothing makes a bit of sense at all.

If only the reason for people being so cranky was solely because their toilet paper irritated them, all the domestic backbiting in this country could be wiped out. I mean, eliminated. 

Don't be pedantic when telling someone what pedantic means

One of the advantages of being my age is getting to sit up and watch college football games that last until almost one in the yawning.

The other is seeing some of life's eternal truths coming true, and therefore I can share some wisdom that must have fallen into my brain when I bent over to pick up a string bean or something.

Here is a truth that comes true time after time, and the sooner young people learn it, the better they are.  

Be prepared for the next step up, because you never know when the chance will come to take that step.

Viewers of the "Sunday Today" show on NBC saw an interesting turn this past week: Unctuous host Willie Geist showed up at the beginning of the show, but said he had a cold and sore throat and "no one wants to hear this voice for an hour."  So he called NBC Correspondent Morgan Radford, who apparently lives near 30 Rock, and asked her to get down to the studio and pinch hit.  She did, and she filled in just perfectly! If you look at her wiki page, you see that she is studded with degrees like cloves on a ham, as Max Shulman once said, and so she is smart and capable  - and she was ready when the time came to step up.  

She might not turn out to be the next "Today" host, and Geist might not be this year's Wally Pipp, but it cannot hurt her professionally to have been seen doing so well at sitting in on the anchor desk - and so good for her!

The same can be said for someone who got their chance to fly the next day. Monday evening brought Tua Tagovailoa, the second string Alabama quarterback, the chance to step up when starter Jalen Hurts couldn't get his team moving in the championship game. Ask anyone how that turned out! (Hint: that is he holding the championship trophy after the game.)

Another piece of wisdom is:

Be a mature team player, even when things don't go your way.

Because, you might ask, what of Hurts, the sophomore star quarterback who led the Crimson Tide to a 12-1 record this season? How did he react to being told at halftime that he was being taken out of the game in favor of Tagovailoa? Did he pout, throw a clipboard or a fit, refuse to leave the locker room?

He did not. He was on the sideline cheering, encouraging, exhorting his backup to go out and win the game, and when the game was won, Hurts was the first guy out there for a hug 'n' shake.

That sort of thing gets noticed too. 

Think about it

It became clear to all that the abrasive sports commentator Howard Cosell was deep into his dotage on the night of September 5, 1983, when, broadcasting a Monday Night Football game on ABC, he said, "That little monkey really gets loose, doesn't he?" to describe the play of Washington Redskins wide receiver Alvin Garrett.

Now, most of us became aware of the horror of using such a foolish, demeaning term to describe an African-American man such as Garrett long before 1983. There are pejorative terms for every race, ethnicity, religion, whatever grouping one can belong to. Cosell's protests that he called his own grandchildren "monkeys" did not do much to stem the tide of disapproval, and 1983 turned out to be his final season braying about MNF games.

People are uncomfortable around people using language like that, and you'd like to think that people would think about it before they use it. But no.

The H&M clothing stores were selling this hoodie with the belittling slogan pictured above until someone noticed how insulting it was, and now they are breaking their necks to take these hoodies off. Off their shelves and catalog pages, that is. The company's statement is a masterpiece, in case there are any students of corporate stilted speech out there: 

“It’s obvious that our routines have not been followed properly,” H&M said of the monkey hoodie. “This is without any doubt. We will thoroughly investigate why this happened to prevent this type of mistake from happening again.”

George Carlin used to talk about how you could go into a novelty store and buy fake vomit and dog feces to leave around on someone's desk for "comic" purposes, and he always pointed out that someone was at their desk, at work, when they came up with the idea to make and sell fake dog droppings.

Someone was at work when they decided to make and sell such an offensive hoodie, and someone needs to go away and think about that for a while.

People hate to be labelled, but appliances don't care

Maybe I should label each cat.

I like having one of these DYMO labelmakers around the house. My handwriting is not so good, even to write "OREGANO" on a spice jar lid, so I let the good people at DYMO take over. I have labelled flash drives, keys, DVDs, CDs, clipboards, framed photos and newspaper clippings, books, and, in the ultimate Zen moment, the labelmaker itself (with my name, in case Lightfinger Louie tries to rip me off.)

And, you know, nothing lasts anymore. My first labelmaker stopped making labels right before Christmas, so I treated myself to a new one from Amazon. And, in the interest of not buying 36 AA batteries a year, I sprang for the extra ten bucks for the AC adapter, so I could plug the thing into an outlet and roll on through the new year, happily printing labels and sticking labels on everything like a loon.

So along comes UPS with the new labeller and the adapter, and there is no place for the adapter to plug into the new device. So, I picked up my phone, which is labelled, and called the DYMO people on their customer service hotline, only to be told that the new models do not have ports for the adapter anymore.

So how come the adapters are still for sale, I had to ask.

The lady on the phone was very nice and I know it's not her fault that I felt like a guy with an electric car and no place to plug it in. I packed up the charger and emailed Amazon, and got a prepaid shipping label, and dropped the package off at Postman Plus, and by the time I got home from running errands, the ten bucks was credited to me and I ordered a package of AA batteries, for which I will make a label as soon as it comes to my mailbox (also labelled.)

For those of you looking forward to retirement, this is the sort of thing that makes the whole thing worthwhile...all this puttering around! I have to go to BJs now.

The Oregon Trail

Many moons ago, a wise old friend told me that things are very different out West in the US, that people out there think and act very differently from back here in the stodgy East.

Oh, and he also told me never to go out there, or the top of my head would fly off. Reasons cited included a tendency out on "the coast" to be chronically late and underdressed for business meetings, and a habit of spreading guacamole all over everything.

But now, if I were to decide to Oregon, I could pump my own gas when I get there.

Readers in other parts of the world might find it odd that it only became legal last week for Oregonians to pump their gas at filling stations. Until January 1, Oregon and good old New Jersey ("Home of Chris Christie") were the only two states where drivers were not allowed to hop out at the Gas 'N' Go and fill up with Hi-Test. 

We go to New Jersey for the annual Christie Days festival, and it does make you feel like you're a Hilton or something to pull up to the pump and tell the guy "fill 'er up!" We've been pumping our own here in Maryland for a while now, and it's a nice break from scrinching behind the wheel to get out and nozzle up. It also gives you a chance to squeegee the windshield and go inside the FillMore and see the array of items for sale: blunts as yet unstuffed, Slim Jims, energy drinks, and the complete line of TastyKake treats.

But in Oregon, they are flipping out all over the place!

The new law signed into law last year by Gov. Kate Brown lets drivers pump their own gas in half of Oregon’s 36 counties.

And a tv station in Medford, Oregon was hosed down with Facebook comments from its viewers, who were outraged at the very thought of getting out of their Priuses (Pria?) to do something for themselves.

Among the exasperations: 

“I don’t even know HOW to pump gas and I am 62, native Oregonian … I say NO THANKS! I don’t want to smell like gasoline!”  - - To which I add, go to Dollar Tree, get a pair of cotton jersey gloves for pumping purposes, and store them inside the little door to the gas cap!

“I’ve lived in this state all my life and I REFUSE to pump my own gas … This a service only qualified people should perform. I will literally park at the pump and wait until someone pumps my gas.”
 - - As much as I respect other people who pump their own gas and find employment at service stations, it does not require a PhD to squirt gasoline into a car.

“I go to work at 5 in the morning. Not a lot of people at the gas pumps at that time in the morning. And yes, I will not feel safe pumping my own gas … Not to mention it’s freezing and rainy. So thank you to all who voted to change it. You have now taken away a nice luxury that most of us enjoyed.” - - So you didn't mind the people who work there getting frozen and rained-upon? And that canopy overhead will protect you at all hours of the day and night.

“Many people are not capable of knowing how to pump gas and the hazards of not doing it correctly. Besides I don’t want to go to work smelling of gas when I get it on my hands or clothes. I agree Very bad idea.” - - Again, it's an easily-acquired skill, and the hazards are pretty much limited to not setting yourself, your car, or the gas station on fire. Think you can manage that?

“Yuck! Pumping my [own] fuel in freezing temperatures and handling a nasty ole fuel nozzle that 50 other people have touched that day (and who knows what cooties are on there), no thank you. It’s nice to not have to pump your own fuel.” -  - After you pump your gas, pump your Purell!

Someone, please tell Oregonianites that millions and millions of Americans fill their cars with precious petrol every day and manage to go to work without a) being on fire b) reeking of gasoline and c) having cooties.

It's been years and years since I ever saw a cootie, and it wasn't at a gas station, I'll tell you that right now!

"I love that Dirty Water" - The Standells, 1966

I like to wake up in the morning and watch the morning news shows while I gobble breakfast. I shouldn't pay such close attention, because sometimes I shake my head so vigorously that the turkey bacon slides off my English muffin when I see news stories such as the mention of a new "health" "craze": the consumption of raw water.


That's raw, as in untreated, as in water right out of some stanky pond where the deer and the antelope pee. Untreated water is becoming popular among certain folks because they have convinced themselves that evil folks down at the water treatment plant are purifying the water they are about to put in the Keurig, and that's just not safe. 

The people who are so disdainful of non-chunky tap water are paying $60 a gallon for it, because it would be foolish to pay $40.

They should become familiar with the names Cryptosporidium, Shigella, norovirus, and Giardia infection, because those are just a few of the cooties that might get into your gizzard by drinking water that has not seen the benefits of being made potable.

Here it is, 2018, and people are still running around telling themselves that the government adds fluoride to the water to turn us all into Godless commies. These people look forward to autumn every year, because that's the time when they drag out their cherished belief that the government puts something in flu shots that allows them to track our whereabouts and make us vote in certain ways.

Then they go to a rodent-themed amusement park, allow themselves to be fingerprinted at the entry, and wear a radio wristband that allows Big Walt to follow their every move and expenditure.

Sunday Rerun: "I'm not a comedian. I'm Lenny Bruce."

I don't know why, but sometimes I get to thinking about Lenny Bruce, the comedian/philosopher of the 50's and 60's.  As children back then, any time we asked an adult, "Who is Lenny Bruce?" the answer was always, "He's a dirty comedian, he tells dirty jokes, now sit down and watch 'Leave It To Beaver'!"

Lenny, born Leonard Alfred Schneider (1925 - 1966) was many things, but calling him a dirty comedian would be like calling Babe Ruth a right fielder.  He served in the Navy in World War II and then scrabbled around New York City, becoming a nightclub comic ("I won't say ours was a tough school, but we had our own coroner") with the mother-in-law jokes and Edward G. Robinson impersonations that were the standard of the time.  In Baltimore, he performed at the long-gone Club Charles and met a stripper named Honey Harlow, who became his wife and mother of his only child, Kitty. 

But as the Eisenhower era ended, people woke up from the long postwar sleep and began taking a long look around at things such as racial discrimination, wars undertaken for the sake of war, sexual repression, and hypocrisy.  And, friends, if you went out hunting for those topics in those days, you had more targets than you had arrows, believe me.  Lenny saw his niche and went for it - humor with a point!

So Lenny prospered among the hip and was condemned by the staid and sobersided.  He was, by the time of the early 60's, a radically relevant social satirist, and he used the real language and spoke the real truth, which made some people really uncomfortable. 

"The 'what should be' never did exist, but people keep trying to live up to it. There is no 'what should be,' there is only what is."
So he used the vernacular of people everywhere to talk about the things that people everywhere talked about!  Big deal, in those days, and now, when mainstream comedians such as Mindy Kaling turn an alternative bedroom practice into a half-hour sitcom, you wonder if they know that Lenny paved the road for them away from the "I'm not saying he's old, but his Social Security number is 14" routines of Bob Hope types.  Over and over, he reminded us that four-letter words were only words...

I've watched with amusement as one of his remarks came true a thousand times for friends of mine: "One generation works and saves to buy their kids rubber boots, and the next generation digs running barefoot in the rain."  George Carlin, Richard Pryor, and every other "hip" comic owed huge debts to Lenny, and so does anyone else, no matter what they did for a living, who woke up one day and realized that the horrors of the day were greed, repression, and hypocrisy, not four-letter words and sexual references.  Sad to say, people couldn't see past the four-letter words their ears heard.

He even presaged his own early demise: "There's nothing sadder than an aging hipster. I'm 33, and already, I can't relate to Fabian."

Hounded by the police who were called to nightclubs to arrest him for saying "dirty words," Lenny grew despondent and fell deeply into a morass of narcotics abuse, which claimed his life in August, 1966.   That was a year after he published his autobiography How To Talk Dirty and Influence People, and only a couple of years before people began to realize that hiding the truth doesn't do away with the truth, it just moves it around a little.  In the last line of the book, Lenny replies to those who ask him what inspired him, and he says, “I am influenced by every second of my waking hour. ”

Dick Schaap wrote a eulogy which concluded:

One last four-letter word for Lenny.
Dead.
At 40.
That’s obscene.

But don't forget this...if not for Lenny, Mindy Kaling would be doing jokes about the roast burning or the dishwasher breaking, there would be no "Family Guy," and we might not think twice before damning someone for their race, creed, or origin.

The Saturday Picture Show, January 6, 2018

You know those whole wheat pastas and spinach/rutabaga pasta and all those healthful alternatives to good old white spaghetti? They taste like boiled Pick-Up-Stix! Give me regular bisketti, please!

I've never seen one of these, but I've seen this picture of one. It's a 360-degree rainbow!

Publicity agents used to keep busy sending staged photographs of their clients to newspapers. Here's a good example, a picture of Fabian talking to a clerk at the Ernest Tubb record store in Nashville. Fabian (born Fabiano Forte) was literally discovered the way stars used to be discovered: he was sitting on his front porch in South Philadelphia, bereft because his father, a Philly police officer, had suffered a heart attack and the family didn't know where their support would come from with Dad out of work. Record czar Bob Marcucci saw the young man sitting there, gave him a pompadour hairdid and a pair of white buck shoes, and sent Fabian off to hit records and performances on American Bandstand. 

365 days of a year in 365 photographs, stitched together.

On January 16, Phil Murphy, above, will be sworn in as governor of New Jersey, succeeding Chris Christie, below, who succeeded at nothing but being a complete son of a beach.

What do you think she ordered?

It's a very good thing that I was not in a logging camp in 1917. But if I have to choose, I "wood" like #4, please. With maple syrup. 

Spread the seeds of music and let the joy ring out!

And Mariah Carey never got the cup of tea she was promised

Most people start their New Year, year after year, making resolutions, looking back over the past year, and planning for the year that just opened. 

But resolutions, like hearts and promises, are made to break. Memories are faulty, and we often forget the best parts of the year that went into the history books more often than many of us ever looked at a history book. And plans? You have to make plans! You know the old expression, failing to plan is planning to fail.  Except that you're not really planning...

What I do each and every 12/31 and 1/1 is, I sit there looking at a television set and wonder why people throng to Times Square in New York to be among tens of millions of people who have nothing better to do than to stand there in way-below freezing weather for 16 hours with nowhere to tinkle.

And 50 tons of trash.  

You can just imagine what-all's in there. 

"Cigarette butts, party hats, favors, you name it," says Paul Visconti, the chief of the New York City Department of Sanitation, and a man who has 30 years experience overseeing cleaning operations. "It’s not easy because you also have the challenges of weather."

So, for my money, the only people who have any business being in Times Square on New Year's Eve are the 246 men and women who start cleaning the place up, and the work literally begins as the ball is dropping.

I mean, why wait?

They have all 50 tons of the confetti, food waste, bags, cups, clothing, lost cell phones, gloves and scarves and such all gone by daybreak on the first.

The army of cleanup people brings with them 30 mechanical brooms, 58 backpack blowers, 44 basket/litter trucks and 58 good old-fashioned hand brooms.

“You will see a night and day difference in eight hours,” Visconti said. “It’s something short of a miracle what we get accomplished.”

It must be a fascinating sight to see, those 246 people showing up as people like Jenny McCarthy leave the Square. I'm so daggone anti-litter, I would probably volunteer to stay and help clean up everyone's detritus, which will never happen because I won't go.

"It’s rewarding to see 50 tons of debris disappear," Visconti says. "It’s not easy but we make it look easy."

Angry tiger, bag of nuts

Some people just have their standards, ya know?

Take Cho Hyun-ah for instance.  You remember her as the former big shot at Korean Air who went flippo in 2014 when she asked a flight attendant for nuts, and was given a bag of nuts rather than a nice nutdish of nuts.

Cho is the daughter of the airline's chairman, and had been given the sinecure position as "head of cabin service" at the company, so she wrecked it all by going nuts about the nuts and demanding that the attendant be taken off the flight, which meant they had to turn the plane around and go back to the gate at Kennedy Airport in New York, resulting in flight delays that continue to this day, some four years later.

Cho Hyun-ah

They don't take this sort of thing so lightly in Seoul. She was charged and tried and given one year in prison, but then a high court cut down the term to ten months and suspended it. 

That ought to teach her!

The Korean Supreme Court decided that diverting a plane as it taxied down the runway to takeoff did not mean that the plane's route was changed, although that would seem to be the very definition of the term "changing the route."

And all this over a bag of nuts. 

Macadamia nuts, to be exact. I love 'em, and if you handed me a sack o' macs, I would not protest. But Cho did, and according to the official report on what has become known as the "nut rage incident," she forced the flight attendant, Kim Do-hee, to be removed from the flight, and called over cabin crew chief Park Chang-jin to listen to her whine. The report also points out that Park "was forced to kneel down before her and beg for forgiveness. Cho repeatedly struck his knuckles with the edge of a digital tablet, and immediately dismissed him."

And a crew member said that she was behaving "like an angry tiger."

It also came to light that in 2013, Cho had attacked a flight attendant over some poorly cooked ramen noodles.

Every now and then, well-intended friends and relations will ask me why the missus and I are not in the habit of hopping a plane to journey here, there, and everywhere.  I wish to thank the Korean Supreme Court, and Ms Cho, for yet another reason not to get on an airplane. The very notion of being 8 miles up in the air in a flying metal tube while being served nuts in a bag, or undercooked noodles, is just too abhorrent to consider.

Her dad, the chairman and CEO of Korean Air, is Cho Yang-ho, whose two sons, Donald, Jr, and Eric, were not involved in this fracas.

Free Medical Advice

Baseball fans around these parts happily remember Rich Dauer as a sharp-fielding infielder for ten great Oriole seasons (1976-1985). Since then, we've enjoyed seeing him, still on the field as a first base coach for several teams.  He's two years younger than I, and he still gets to put on a baseball uniform every summer day and do cool stuff like spitting, and hollering at other grown men, for a living. 

He's in the first-base coaching box for the Houston Astros these days, and you will recall that they recently won the World Series. But the night before their victory parade, Dauer slipped on a wet floor and hit his head. He didn't have a headache or any apparent signs of any problems, so off he went to the parade.

And once there, he felt awful. As the team assembled at Houston's City Hall following the march through the city, Rich was staggering, and told assistant hitting coach Alonzo Powell, "I don’t really feel too good." Soon after that, he became unresponsive. The manager, A.J. Hinch, alerted the team doctor, who put in a call for an ambulance.

But with the insane traffic congestion around the celebration, it took about a half an hour for the medic unit to arrive.


He was taken to  Houston Methodist Hospital, where another team doctor, James Muntz, M.D. went to work on Dauer, who was by then in respiratory arrest, with a CT scan revealed bleeding on his brain. 

“He was unresponsive, just a disaster,” Muntz said, pointing out that Dauer's symptoms indicated severe brain damage. . 

Another doctor, a surgeon named Dr. David Cech, arrived to find Dauer "in a coma, almost brain-dead."  

The diagnosis was acute subdural hematoma, with a 3% chance of survival.  And even when Dauer made it out of surgery, doctors still worried about brain damage. 

But miracles happen every day, and Rich Dauer's breathing tube was removed three days later, and he went home in November pronounced "perfectly fine."

"The magnitude of what he had wrong was intimidating, astonishing," Dr. David Lintner, the Astros' lead physician, said. "The pace of his recovery was just as astonishing."

Dauer, who was nicknamed "Wacko" by pitcher Jim Palmer for his comical ways as a player, was planning to retire anyway, and this will allow him to join the no-work-no-more crowd with a warning to all. In a subdural hematoma, bleeding fills the brain area very rapidly, compressing brain tissue, so let's let this serve as a reminder to all to get the noggin checked out in case of such a bump. He had no way of knowing the blood was collecting up there, but we can learn from his experience.

Dr. Muntz is glad that Dauer lived and enjoyed a text from him in early December:  "Hey Dr. Muntz, we’re doing well. My workouts are up to 50 minutes on elliptical and treadmill. I lifted light weights today and just left Taco Bell with a seven-layer burrito! Life is good!" 

And the doc said, "If the subdural didn’t kill you, the burrito will."

Clean Slate

Of all the quotes we see at this time of year, I think it's hard to top this one from former Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb for being six yards wide and an inch deep:

"Whatever happened in the past, hopefully it's over."

Even if you are willing to overlook the misuse of "hopefully," which I of course am not, this sentence is just full of the sort of apparent wisdom that comes out of athletic locker rooms and, as I said, seems wide in wisdom but is actually not very deep.

Yessirreee Bob, the past is over, and that's why Shakespeare said, "What is past is prologue."  Antonio said this in "The Tempest" when he was thinking that he and Sebastian might get in trouble again if they do again what they did before.

I had a friend in high school who drove a Pontiac Tempest, but his name was not Antonio. 

And just because that Pontiac started on a Wednesday was no guarantee that it would run on Thursday, and what's worse than not being able to cut school because the car won't go? 

The past, for all its victories and disappointments, for all the surprises that burst out and the hopes that died out, for all the things we thought we wanted and were glad not to get, and for all the things we thought we didn't want but were happy to have in the end, is the past. If you won last week's lottery, congratulations, but that ticket is not valid again this week.  Same deal if you lost. You get a new chance every day, and that's why I like this time of year. It's like Opening Day in baseball.  All the teams have identical records and the sky is the limit for hopes and expectations. 

Let's make the most of 2018 by not comparing it to 2017.  

Happy New Year!