Sunday Rerun: When In Rome

I always thought the Spanish Steps were what you did to dance the Flamenco, so that shows what I know.

Somewhere in this picture you will see a guy
with a pencil and sketchpad.
He is drawing a crowd.

The Spanish Steps are a stairway over Via Condotti, a swanky street in the fashion district of Rome. They were built in 1725, back in the days when you get really could get marble work done for a pittance.  Today, it would cost you a few million zucchini to get the same steps put in your back yard.

But you would get the same result.  All over the world, where you and I see stairs as a way to get up or get down, some people see a place to park their carcasses and "set" a spell.

So, with these marble steps being polished by so many glutei over the centuries, and so many people spilling their pizzas and vino all over the place, the marble steps, once shiny and bright, got to looking a tad crummy.

The good people at Bulgari (they say they are a luxury jewelry firm, but that means nothing to me, a guy who shops for jewels at Walmarti) spent $1.7 million to restore the Steps. It has taken a year, but finally the Spanish Steps look just like they did in 1725, when Betty White was there to cut the ribbon on Opening Day.

The problem is that Paolo Bulgari, who, in an amazing coincidence is both the chairman of the jewelry firm AND the nephew of its founder, wants to protect his investment.  

"Restorers have done a great and difficult job. The steps were coated with anything from coffee, wine, chewing gum," he told the Italian newspaper La Repubblica.

"But now I am worried. If we don't set strict rules, the steps will go back to being used as a camping site for barbarians," the billionaire reportedly said, adding that a gate or a Plexiglas barrier "doesn't seem like an impossible task."

"Barbarians."

There it is.

I don't know how they do things in Italy, having never traveled any further east that the boardwalks at several Atlantic Ocean resorts, but I can't see an American businessperson spending private bucks for public good and then calling the public "galoots," "heathens" or "brutes."  It's bad for public relations.  People don't like being called names or being accused of wrongdoing as part of a whole group lumped together in vain. I hope I'm not being too subtle here.

Bulgari clearly did not live in Baltimore in the heyday of Royal Parker (born Royal Pollokoff) who passed away earlier this year but could host newscasts, kiddie cartoon shows and bowling shows with equal skill and zest.

And commercials!  Millions of them.  The most memorable of them, for clear slipcovers, showed kids bouncing up and down on some cheesy living room sofa and chair, while we heard Royal holler, "Hey, kids, get off that furniture, what are you trying to do, ruin it?"

This very sentence was known for years in our town as the only way to greet Mr Parker when we saw him at the ballpark or the mall.  He was always a good guy about it, and if he were still with us on this mortal coil, he would likely tell Bulgari that encasing the priceless stairs in some hi-grade see-thru vinyl could keep the marble shiny while keeping food, wine and tracked-in shoedirt off!

The whole world would be a better place if everyone had grown up in Baltimore.

The Saturday Picture Show, August 10, 2019

I know lots of people like the game of soccer, but I also know for sure that many games have been held up while referees and fellow players try to awaken a midfielder or goalie who has fallen dead asleep out of sheer boredom.

Now to a great game, our national pastime, baseball. On Sunday, 4,000 young men and women from Great Britain came to town after being at a jamboree in West Virginia. They enjoyed an afternoon of baseball at Baltimore's Oriole Park at Camden Yards, where their left field seats put them in proximity with Orioles left fielder Anthony Santander, and there began a lovefest between an athlete from Venezuela and the thousands of British kids, who cheered like mad for his every move, to an extent that he began tossing spare balls to them as they chanted his name.  Had there been a doubleheader, Santander would probably be a Member of Parliament or a Duke. Baltimore already had an Earl.

I have no way to prove this isn't the result of a really great dye job, but man oh man, does this dog look like Salvador Dali!

I had to look it up to find that this is a Yellow Heron, but the thing I liked about him was the intent look in his eye as he guzzled some lake water.

For a while, people were having fun by opening two dictionaries at once and randomly pointing to one word in each, and then putting both words in a sentence. This would be the result if your words were "sumo wrestler" and "Sunflower field."

It looks like a picture of grains of sand magnified 134,000 times, but this is sea glass. I assume these all began with bottles of wine broken (or guzzled) at sea 200 years ago, tossed about on angry seas until it gets tumbled and lands on the beach.

"Rusty barb wire with cobwebs" sounds like a minimalist meal at a New American restaurant.

I don't like to go with black and white photos; I like to make the picture show both snarky AND colorful, but this is just too good to pass by.

His cash ain't nothing but trash

I found a great story in the New York POST!

If you are in search of just one honest person, I have one for you.

Actually, a few. They are people who work at the Recology plant in Humboldt County, California, a recycling outfit that handles the rubbish from the town in Oregon where the luckiest man in Oregon lives.

Last week, a man in Ashland, Oregon, for reasons best known to the demon called carelessness, tossed out a shoebox in the recycling. 

His life savings - $23,000 - was in the box.  Big whoopsie.

Once he realized what he had done, he called his local trash authorities, who told him his box o'loot was taking a trip to Cali. 

He got on the phone to Recology.  They handle the tossaways from over a million locations in the Pacific Northwest.  It's probably best that they didn't tell the hapless man that.  They told him they'd keep an eye out for the box, and they did.


“We take quite a bit of material every day, so the odds of finding that are not much better than a needle in a haystack,” Linda Wise, general manager of the Samoa Resource Recovery Center operated by Recology, told the local paper out west.

And she went on to say they kept a lookout, and then..."The box showed up and came down the sorting line, and we were all excited to see it,” says Wise.

Somewhere between Oregon and Humboldt County, $320 was missing from the box, but all the rest of the money was there.  The man and his family drove five hours to get it all back.

“Everyone who was on the sorting line was beaming this morning,” Wise said. “And now this gentleman will get to have a great weekend.”

And now, so will we!

OU Kid

Education never ends. We don't stop learning just because our days sleeping sitting in classrooms come to an end.

Donell Cooper used to a) attend Ohio University and b) play basketball for OU. He did not find employment in the NBA here, so he's been playing pro basketball in Greece and Monte Carlo for a living.

Up until now, that is. He's currently suspended from European basketball. He did coach the Bosnian national team, and has applied for citizenship in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

But, he needed to pass a urine test to keep playing or coaching over there, so he dutifully supplied a sample.

Of his girlfriend's urine.

And that's where the learning came in! When the test results came back, Cooper learned a) you can't get away with passing off someone else's urine as your own and b) his girlfriend is pregnant.

The tinklewater that he provided showed positive for human chorionic gonadotropin, or hCG.  That's a hormone made by the placenta during pregnancy.

I know a great joke along these lines and if you ever worked with me, you've heard it. I'm trying to figure out how to retell it now and work the phrase "Hanging With Mr Cooper" into it.

Where No Man Had Gone

We've been talking a lot, in this summer of the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, about the American/Russian space race and what led to it.

Two huge events occurred on Friday, October 4, 1957. It was on that afternoon that the Soviet Union put Sputnik I into orbit.  It was the world's first artificial satellite, just about 23 inches in diameter, and it spent 98 minutes orbiting the earth.  And by the time schools opened on Monday the 6th, the nationwide cry of "Why can't our kids be good in math and science like them Russians?" was heard in every PTA, supermarket and bar & grill in the land.  We just had to get up in space right away!

Also that night, 10/4/57, it only took 30 minutes for ABC-TV to show the first ever episode of "Leave It To Beaver" ("Beaver Gets 'Spelled"). The series was to end in 1963, 234 episodes later.

So if history has taught us anything, it shows that it took longer for Americans to get to the moon than it did for Wally Cleaver to finish high school and Beaver to be graduated from 8th grade.

Along the way, brave men like John Glenn paved the way for the steps on the moon of 1969. Glenn, the first American to orbit the earth, took off on the Friendship Seven on February 20, 1962, circling the planet three times in five hours as every schoolkid tried to watch it on a 12" black and white TV in the auditorium.

We talked the other night about fireflies, and on that day, Glenn was talking about them as well! As he made his second lap around Earth, he looked out the window of Friendship Seven and saw many many tiny glowing lights!  In fact, his report to Mission Control said he was "in a big mass of thousands of very small particles that are brilliantly lit up like they're luminescent." They were yellowish-green, he said, and went on to say that each of them was like "a firefly on a real dark night."

Well, even in those early days of space travel, science guys and ladies knew that even Baltimore fireflies are not meant to be up there among the stars. Glenn said it was some sort of miraculous apparition, but the slide-rule folks down at NASA eventually figured it out:

Glenn's spaceship had a vent system that removed his bodily fluids - you know, like perspiration and tinkle - and shot them into space. At that altitude, liquids freeze at once, and light from the craft made each little teeny frozen pellet light up like a lightning bug.

So there you have it.

Tomorrow, we'll look at another Mystery Of Science: why people fail to wipe down gym equipment after they sweat all over it. And here on Earth, that doesn't make anything miraculous.

Insurance!

One of the greatest things about having a job is that you get insurance coverage. Most of us are fortunate enough to be able to know that if we fall down go boom on the patio, the hospital and doctor bills will be covered and we won't have to take on a paper route forever to pay them ourselves.

By the way, did you ever wonder why it's expensive to have trees removed or trimmed back? The guy who did some tree work here at the Lazy 'C' Ranch a couple years ago told me his daily insurance nut is $750. It's pretty steep to cover people who work at some pretty steep heights.

When the Apollo 11 astronauts—Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins - took a business trip of 238,900 miles, rocket-propelled at thousands of miles per hour, the trip was so parlous that the president of the United States already had his speech prepared to read to the nation in case everything went wrong on the moon and Armstrong, Aldrin, and Colloins were to be marooned there, fated for death.


It's not hard to figure why NASA was not in a position to offer them a nice life insurance package. They had an insurance plan, sure, but it “originally did not cover astronauts when flying—it was considered high risk and experimental,” says Brandi Dean, a spokesperson for NASA’s Johnson Space Center. All three men had families, but they had to find their own way to offer security for the wives and kids.  After all, just two years before, three astronauts had died in a flash fire on the launch pad in Florida.

They really did come up with a great way to rack up some coin just in case. As the launch day approached, they spent their hours of pre-flight quarantine autographing hundreds of envelopes that had been made up with a special design commemorating their mission and Apollo postage stamp. The plan was to have the envelopes postmarked, either on the day of the the launch or the day of the Moonwalk, and then those envelopes would be very valuable to autograph collectors and history buffs.
 

Howard C. Weinberger, an expert on all things Apollo, says, “It was driven by the fact that, given the nature of the astronauts’ livelihood, they were not able to secure much life insurance.”  He figures that there were between 500 and 1000 signed envelopes.

Stamp collecting was a very big deal at the time, and the families banked a bit of money after the men all came home to heroes' welcomes. Other crews continued the practice, which came to an abrupt halt when the crew of Apollo 15 came up with the idea of taking the envelopes to the moon with them, thereby putting the value of each out of this world.  So to speak.

The value of these "insurance covers," as they are known to philatelists, goes up every day, and why not? These men took huge risks to take us to that new frontier, and letting their family prosper is only fair.

Misty History

We'll just call this man "Bob." For reasons that are about to become quite apparent, there's no need to go further.

Bob is his first name, and that's all we really know about him for sure, because the rest tends to be a bit misty. He lives in Anne Arundel County, with its rich maritime tradition as the home of the US Naval Academy.  He was proud to dedicate a monument he created to military members and first responders. I mean after all, he was a former Navy SEAL and prisoner of war, right?

Well, no. And it's funny that by creating something worthy to honor the work and sacrifice of others, he washed away the clay around his own feet, and was found to be a fake.

The Capital Gazette newspaper - the one which suffered the horrible tragedy last summer when a madman invaded their offices and shot to death five members of their staff - sent a reporter to cover the monument dedication, and Bob told the reporter that he had been a SEAL and POW in the Viet Nam war.

Once the story of Bob was published, the ship hit the sand, as they say in the Navy. People called the newspaper to cast doubt on his story, and Bob backpedaled, denying he had ever claimed to be a POW or SEAL.

But the interview was on tape, with him saying, "I was a Navy SEAL. I was one of the first…,"

Reminded of this by the reporter (herself a veteran), Bob could only say, “I worked with them, but that was it. Please accept my apologies. I don’t remember saying that. It caught me totally by surprise when I read it in the paper. I don’t know what to do.”

A man from Cambridge, retired SEAL Don Shipley, is a member of the POW Network, and any time he or his fellow members get a Google alert of someone claiming to be a SEAL or POW, they check it out.  Their research indicated that, most likely, Bob was in the Navy in the Viet Nam war, serving as a meteorologist on the USS Constellation. Shipley cannot find any evidence of Bob completing SEAL training or working in that capacity.

“I knew it was BS as soon as I saw the POW thing. No SEAL has ever been a POW. He wasn’t either, hoisting weather balloons off the USS Constellation,” Shipley told the newspaper.

There is this trend called "stolen valor," in which people claim to be more than they ever were, and, possibly, even more than they might have dreamed. And what could be more glamorous than the double honor of being both a SEAL and a POW?

The newspaper story said that Bob's friends and neighbors, and even his wife, had bought his story as he wove it over the years.

Perhaps now he can begin to set the record straight. I wonder if he feels both the shame of having his perfidy revealed, and the accompanying relief of not having to maintain the false front he built up to so many for so long.

Sunday Rerun: Road Hog

I love having friends all over the world. As they explain to me the customs of their faiths and cultures, they in turn listen rapturously as I explain the goins-on in Baltimore and Maryland. A lot of the times they think I make stuff up, I'm sure, but such is not the case. Just look at the news!

One thing people overseas, not to mention the rest of the United States, can't figure out is this Baltimore Chaise Longue situation. That's the one that happens every winter when it snows and someone shovels out a parking place for him or herself on the street where they live, right in front of their cottage.

And then they go to work or to the Bi-So-Lo or Honest Herman's Liquors, and come home to find someone parked in THEIR parking spot which they feel THEY own because THEY dug it out and marked their turf with a chaise longue which Norm from two doors down moved so he could park there.

I tell you honestly, the police have had to be called in on these deals many, many times. There is a certain thing that is whispered in the ear of each and every lil' Baltimore baby upon emergence from mom's womb: "The street out in front of your house is YOURS."

It's not so, but many believe it to be.

Another interesting facet of life here in Mobtown is that the physical features of Maryland are interesting. The state is virtually bifurcated by the Chesapeake Bay, and many on the Eastern Shore side of that split wish that it were more so, and that no one had ever built that bridge to take us and our money to the shoreside.

But I like everyone over there fine, and I point to the following story as evidence that maybe they are all a little like Baltimore anyway.

Down in Willards, MD, on the way to Ocean City, a local resident, one David Catrino, was recently arrested and charged with disorderly conduct and littering with a weight exceeding 500 pounds. The Wicomico County Sheriff's Office says he blocked a road.

Again, please? He blocked an entire ROAD?

Booking photo

The sheriff says Catrino, 50, somehow placed one-ton (2,000 lbs)  concrete road barriers to block off completely the 7000 block of State Street in Willards.

No Chinese restaurant worth its chopsticks would erect won-ton barriers.

It's a dead end road, this State Street ("that great street, I just wanna say") and the barriers stopped people living on the far side of the street from...living on the far side of the street.

Catrino lives there too, and he told the sheriff that he put down the barriers because he believes he owns the street.

Well, I believe that the Orioles will play in the World Series, so beliefs are a funny thing, but State Street is a county road, owned by the town of Willards.

The deputies had to call in heavy equipment to move the concrete barriers while Catrino argued with the police and became disorderly, earning himself a free trip to central booking.

No one has been able to figure out how Catrino built his mini-Stonehenge, but it will all come out at his trial, scheduled for August 9, when he will face charges of dumping/littering over 500 pounds, and disorderly conduct.

All of this is just an allegation, mind you. The judge will decide.

The Saturday Picture Show, August 3, 2019

They didn't come out with the really cool lunchboxes until I was at an age that made it uncool to have a lunchbox. But this one would have been a nice way to tote my PB&J and TastyKake to school.

I was sorry to see that Woodstock 50 had to be cancelled because of a lot of bad vibes and whatnot. But at least we can look forward to Woodstack.

Pretty cool t-shirt here.

My bad luck - too old for a Beatles lunchbox, too young to be a beatnik.

This 48-Star Flag, from the Landing Craft Control 60 LCC 60, flew in battle during the D-Day landings on June 6, 1944, and was recently presented to the Smithsonian. The ragged old flag was tinged by diesel smoke, and the hole in the star field is said to have been made by a German bullet, and yet the flag - and our great nation - survives to this day.

This must be a Florida or California thing; we don't have lemon trees here, but soon it will be time for people to bring dozens of tomatoes and squash to work for free distribution. It must be cool to walk out in the back yard and grab a lemon, though.

I promise this will be the last of the Four Seasons Of The Same Scene pictures for a while.

It's a shame we can't read books while we drive, but examining the stick families on rear windows of the cars ahead of us is almost as good. I hope this family is completed again soon.

Turning the Paige

I'm no criminologist, but it seems to me that some very smart people do some very bad things and then feel bad about it, so they do something to give themselves away.

Arson investigators will tell you that their suspect is usually hanging around the scene of the fire he just lit. Bank robbers frequently return to the scene of the crime, just like in the movies, and I remember 911 calls from people who were calling to report their car stolen and then saw the car thief drive the car right past their house as they reported it.

One other thing I know as an amateur crime-buster is that bad people are often crazy, and look it.

Say hi to Paige Thompson. Paige is 33, a resident of moist Seattle, and a software engineer by trade.
 

She is now being held in connection with the data breach of Capital One, and putting the personal business of over 100 million people out there for all to see. It looks like one of the biggest breaches of a major bank ever.

It took brilliant police work to round Paige up for this caper. She admitted to it, even bragged about it online.

Perhaps she thought the police would think she couldn't have done it because who would be crazy enough to admit such a thing.

Thompson goes by the internet handle "erratic" in the same way I should go by "tall" and Taylor Swift should use "cute." Sometimes one word is enough.

All in all, 100 million Americans and 6 million Canadians were affected, having their Social Security numbers and credit scores and bank balances revealed for what they are. The bank will offer free credit monitoring services to those affected.

The FBI reports that someone named "erratic" was on social sites such as GitHub and Slack, bragging about distributing Capital One's data:

“I’ve basically strapped myself with a bomb vest, (expletive) dropping capitol ones dox and admitting it,” the message said. “I wanna distribute those buckets I think first.”

I think "dox" means "documents" like "vax" means "vaccines."

Thompson was on the Meetup network talking about having a "hack night" and saying that her cat needed veterinary care, and then posting the vet bill WITH HER NAME AND ADDRESS on the site.

Maybe she wanted to be caught, maybe she's just "erratic."  I hope that when she goes to prison for a long time, her cat finds a better human companion.

8/1/71

There are very few times when we have a tremendous thunderstorm followed by rivers of rain and flooding that my thoughts don't go back to August 1, 1971.

For national historical perspective, that was the day when two concerts to raise money for the refugees from the Bangladesh Liberation War were held at Madison Square Garden in New York. Between the afternoon and evening shows, George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton and dozens of others raised not only a quarter of a million dollars for UNICEF to use in bringing aid to people there, but also they raised the consciousness of the world to the struggles in the Indian subcontinent. The movie and record of the event are still among the best of the early 70s, and this was the first time for fundraising of this type, to be followed by LiveAid, FarmAid, and the like later.

Back home here in Baltimore County, we dealt with torrential rain and flooding, especially in the area around Philadelphia Road and Pulaski Highway, on the east side. I remember being on many calls that night with my fire company, but hearing on the fire radio about the lives lost among members of the Cowenton Volunteer Fire Company (now known as the White Marsh VFC) and the Bowley's Quarters Volunteer Fire Company.


Charles Hopwood, 42 and Douglas Mueller, 18, of  Cowenton, and Milton DeSombre, 49, and Warren Schaeffer, 23, of Bowleys Quarters all lost their lives that evening.

Two other firefighters from Cowenton, Robert Carr and William Barton, were injured, but survived. Carr was carried away by floodwaters as he worked to attempt the rescue of four people whose Chevrolet was overtaken by the rising water from Bean Creek at Philadelphia Rd and Bush Street, and survived by clinging to a telephone pole downstream for 3 1/2 hours.

A total of 10 people were carried away by those floodwaters, and eight were to die: the four firefighters, a tow truck driver who had stopped to try to help, and three people of the four people in the car.

White Marsh VFC honors the
fallen men annually.

Here is a link to the National Weather Service report on the conditions of that Sunday evening. Things have changed. As the report notes, there was little time to warn people of the impending rainfall, and in the days without cell phones and personal computers, very little way existed to warn people anyway.

Now we can have alerts delivered right to our phones and devices, but one thing hasn't changed and never will: storms and floods will always be part of our lives, and so will the heroic efforts of people such as the crews from Cowenton and Bowley's Quarters.

Ackknowledge them, praise them, and pray for them, please.

Vegas Vexation

Deep in the dim (very!) recesses of my mind, I keep a mental jotto on things. One category is Reasons To Dress Up All Fancy, but unless you're getting married or shuffling off to Buffalo, I can't think of any reasons. Another is Excuses To Use When Offered Asparagus, because I am reliably informed that "it looks like something the weed wacker spit up" is not polite.

Another is the eternal question, Vegas Vacay: Yea or Nay?  Reasons FOR include the proliferation of buffets and the chance to be given a lift by Wayne Newton if I wind up hitchhiking.

Reasons AGAINST start with the heat, and Celine Dion. And having to call Elton John "Sir."  And now, add grasshoppers to the list!

There are so many grasshoppers hopping around LV these days, they are showing up on weather radar, looking for all the world like a BA rainstorm.

It's not rain, it's bugs!

It's been rainy out there in Las Vegas  - in the first half of the year, they've already received more rain than they usually get in the whole year (4.2 inches). Because of all this rain, there has been what the bug people call a massive migration of grasshoppers who are visiting Las V on their way north.. The area has seen more rain in six months than the roughly 4.2 inches it typically gets in a year.

These critters are common in the desert, and they won't hurt you, unless you break an ankle running like a maniac when 237 of them light on your jacket at once.  And in a town that thrives on attractions to lure folks in by

the busload, people are standing around taking pictures and videos of black clouds of grasshoppers clustering under lights in the evenings.

Unlike their friend the lightning bug, grasshoppers don't carry a flashlight in their tail.

If you were around here in 1970, 1987, and 2004, you remember the invasion of 17-year locusts, whose deafening chirps make conversation all but impossible on late spring evenings.

I know you just did the math! They'll back in 2021!

I'm a Rocket Man!

I've been meaning to write for a little while now about the huge amount of people who "forget" that they had a gun in their suitcases as they hop aboard a plane bound for Disneyville or other exotic ports of call that feature humanistic animal characters.

The irony is that most gun owners I have known are so in love with their shootin' irons, they don't forget them for one moment of the day. But certainly, you don't think for a moment that any of the 19 gun-toters who have been nabbed at the BWI checkpoints this year were trying to take their guns with them on vacation and just hoped those TSA people were TFD to catch them, do you?  I mean, that just could not be it.

If you're scoring at home, this puts BWI on a pace to far exceed last year's total take of 22 Smith & Wessons.  The lesson is, you can carry on Smith Bros cough drops and a small bottle of Wesson Oil, but no Smith & Wesson guns, ok?

OK.

There are five months left in the year, more than enough time for at least 4 more gun enthusiasts to pack their roscoe in with their whitey tighties and try to get it through, and then, we can play for the bonus round, where the scores are doubled and the fun never lets up.

But just to break up the tedium of all the handguns caught in the net, here's an active duty military member who thought it would be a good idea to bring a missile launcher in his checked luggage.

The man is from Texas (really!?) and was coming home from Kuwait, and apparently took a notion that a rocket launcher would make a good souvenir. Down in his hometown of Jacksonville, TX, this sort of acquisition would make him the king of the local domino parlor, so into his bag it went, as he hoped no one would notice it, I guess.

One wouldn't think this necessary to say, but Lisa Farbstein, a TSA spokeswoman, clarified that "military weapons are not permitted in checked or carry-on bags."

The man was allowed to catch his plane without being arrested. I guess if he wants to drive back up here from the Lone Star State, he can pick up his souvenir WMD and haul it on back home, maybe lob a turnip or two out of it for old time's sake on the way.

Farbstein told the Capital Gazette newspaper that a Florida man tried to get on a plane at Lehigh Valley International Airport in Pennsylvania recently while carrying a rocket propelled grenade launcher.

Used to be, we'd bring home postcards or corncob pipes as remembrances, but not anymore.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion........

Quite a lively debate here in the old hometown, the usual much ado. The Baltimore County Fire Department held their graduation the other night, and three members of the new class (below) did not salute the flag during the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance.

You can just imagine the horrified responses, from retired fire personnel and active fire personnel and members of the local populace. Disrespect! Fire them all! Outrageous! How much longer can our republic survive in the face of such sedition?

Now, hold on just a moment, please. First of all, congratulations to the men and women in the class. They have been through an arduous regimen of training in fire suppression and emergency medicine, the result of which being that they are trained to take their place in our community as active first responders.

Oh, and three of them are Jehovah's Witnesses.  Here is a statement issued by Fire Department Public Information Officer Elise Armacost:

We are aware of concerns about three recruits who stood but did not salute during the National Anthem during tonight's 113th Recruit Class graduation ceremony. These new BCoFD members are Jehovah's Witnesses, whose faith prohibits displays of national allegiance. They are successful graduates with a commitment to public service. BCoFD respects members of all faiths, as well as the Constitutional right to free speech. We congratulate our graduates on their accomplishments and look forward to their service to Baltimore County. EA

My point is this. We are a nation founded on the rock of freedom of religion. Among the tenets of the Mennonite, Amish, and Jehovah's Witness faiths is the belief that they offer allegiance only to God's Kingdom, instead of any government or nation. They do not salute flags or sing patriotic songs, because to them, such things are forms or worship antithetical to their faith. They stand, out of respect, as the men in the Fire Department class did.

It turned out, as the debate raged on, that there have been Witnesses graduated in the past from the Fire Academy, and they did not salute, and somehow, it didn't cause the furor that this did.

And how about a nice hand for the fire-stokers who whipped up this brouhaha, ensuring that these three men will now begin their careers in the fire service marked as men apart, because of their religion.

Let us be basic here for a second. Imagine that, God forbid, your house is on fire or you are having a medical emergency or you are trapped in the crushed wreckage of a car accident.  When the firefighters arrive to help, do you care what religion they follow, or whether they saluted a flag when they were graduated?

I don't think you do.

Just let people do the job they're trained to do, please.

Sunday Rerun: A tip of the slongue

The afternoon guy on our local public radio station committed a classic Spoonerism the other day, referring to our Governor Larry Hogan as "Governor Harry Logan."

This dates back to the days of Reverend William Archibald Spooner (1844–1930), the pastor of New College, Oxford, England, who would stand up in the pulpit and say "The Lord is a shoving leopard" instead of "a loving shepherd," or end a wedding with, "It is kisstomary to cuss the bride."

So linguists call that a Spoonerism, in his honor, defining it as "an error in speech or deliberate play on words in which corresponding consonants, vowels, or morphemes are switched between two words in a phrase."

From what we can read of the Rev. Spooner, he was a very intelligent man whose thoughts sometimes came to him faster than his words could be formed, such as time he found a worshipper in the wrong seat in church ("You are occupewing the wrong pie") or asked to see the Dean of his school ("Is the bean dizzy?").

Just as every statement that seems goofy but has a kernel of wisdom deep within ("If people don't want to come out to the ballpark, how are you gonna stop them?") winds up being attributed to Yogi Berra, every slip o' the tongue seems to get lumped in the dap of the good preacher.  Does it matter whether it was he who said, at the end of World War I, "When our boys come home from France, we will have the hags flung out," as long as SOMEONE did? 

The Saturday Picture Show, July 27, 2019

This is a picture of the inside of a prison in California. I share this with you in the hope that anyone considering a life of crime will look at it and remember that this could be their view of the world for 5 to 10 years. No thanks!

 

This yogurt cup was made in 1976. Sometime that year, some oaf ate the yogurt and tossed the cup away, where it found a home in the sea until it washed up on a beach and someone in the #trashtag movement finally picked it up for recycling. Plastic is forever, folks.

Someone had a persistent memory of a Salvador Dali painting when they came up with this.

I am here to tell you that cats of all sizes love to lie around like this, but only the luckiest get to have a daddy who can shade them on a sunny day.

I love these Four Seasons pictures, and especially the last three! Come on, winter!

This is the very very wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiide beach at Ocean City, Maryland. There was a time when they did not have those wooden walkways, resulting in many a scorched foot as people headed for the surf.

Show this to the twelve-year-old in your life and wait for them to ask what that thing is that's plugged into something or other...

Greene Day

I used to be an avid reader of a man named Bob Greene, who wrote a column for the Chicago newspaper for many years, and who cultivated a print version of Charles Kuralt-sort of image, a man of the people who covered the lethal adulteration of Tylenol capsules as well as writing stories of everyday people dealing with everyday gains and losses. His career ran well over 30 years, and one of the most memorable stories he wrote concerned a man who took one of Greene's columns and had it published in his army base newsletter, on the grounds that he wanted a little recognition and was not able to write with the flowing clarity that Greene brought to the page.

He went and met with the man, flattered by being copied, but puzzled over why. That was the kind of thing that he wrote about day after day.

Bob Greene was one of the early exponents of participatory journalism. For example, while it might be interesting to write about life on the road with a major rock band - in this case Alice Cooper in 1973 - the focus changes when you're actually performing with the band.  Greene didn't need a guitar to do that; the members of the band on stage with Alice didn't even play their own instruments. The music was provided by musicians offstage and the drama was supplied by Alice himself, acting out his macabre Grand Guignol-style show.

And Greene played Santa Claus in the show, the rousing finale of which featured Santa Claus being pummeled by five musicians.

Hey, it was the 70s! What can I tell you?

Greene also turned his high school diary into a sort of nonfiction novel called "Be True To Your School," he became an associate member of Jan And Dean, the 60s surf group, he wrote about his family and his daughter's birth and turning 50, and he wrote a lot about The Greatest Generation.

It seemed like he would hang around long enough to become one of the Grand Old Men of newspaper writing. Instead, horribly, he was revealed as one of the Dirty Old Men of newspaper writing.

Greene's career crashed and burned in 2002, after a young woman brought it to the attention of the newspaper publishers that he had been in the habit of luring young women who sought to interview him about his techniques into unsanctified congresses in a hotel room that he maintained for just that purpose.

Four months later, his wife, who had been ill for some time, passed away.  He has not written for newspapers or magazines since. He wrote a book about the sad slow death of newspapers, and of his days with Jan And Dean, and a book about the five living presidents, and one about catching up with his high school friends.  None of these books were anywhere near the best-seller list.

In his heyday, he would have been all over the story of a man such as he, who had it all and tossed it away in the name of debauching young women who came to him for career guidance.

He has not written a word about that. I'm sorry that I had to.

ET Phone Home

Ever have the feeling that there is a whole 'nother world right here with us?

As evidence, I offer the story that says over a million and a half people with nothing better to do have told Facebook that are "attending" an event scheduled for September 20 of this year at three o'clock in the morning.

The event is called "Storm Area 51, They Can't Stop All of Us." Area 51 is a test and training area in Nevada. Conspiracy theorists are under the impression that the United States government (led by a man who doesn't particularly believe in UFOs) has a lot of UFOs and extraterrestrials caged up in there.

Really.

You see, in 1947, in Roswell, New Mexico, before the US Air Force became a separate armed service, a US Army Air Forces balloon, sent aloft to do nuclear testing surveillance, crashed, and that's where the whole Unidentified Flying Object thing started.  For years thereafter, people were running around claiming that "little green men from Mars" had landed in America, demanding to be "taken to our leader."

I can understand why they are unwilling to do so currently.

But the US government spent 22 years and untold millions investigating the whole UFO deal. The result was, in official language, "Nada Zilch Zero Bupkis" -  none of it was real, and there was "no evidence indicating that sightings categorized as 'unidentified' were extraterrestrial vehicles," according to the Air Force.

And just to throw everyone off the track, the investigation, known as Project Blue Book, was conducted at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, not at area 51 in Nevada or at Roswell.

That'll show 'em!

So this massive meet-up is all set, per Facebook:

"We will all meet up at the Area 51 Alien Center tourist attraction and coordinate our entry," according to the Facebook page. "If we naruto run, we can move faster than their bullets. Lets [sic] see them [sic] aliens."

"Naruto run" refers to how Japanese anime character Naruto Uzumaki sprints around with his arms stretched behind him.  It is now known how running like a sandpiper is supposed to help these funseekers storm a government safeguard, but let them dream on.

Air Force spokesperson Laura McAndrews weighs in: "The United States Air Force is aware of the Facebook post. The Nevada Test and Training Range is an area where the Air Force tests and trains combat aircraft. As a matter of practice, we do not discuss specific security measures, but any attempt to illegally access military installations or military training areas is dangerous.”

This is not exactly like having everyone meet at the food court in the Galleria Mall to do one of those flash mob deals. This range covers 2.9 million acres of land and 5,000 square miles of airspace.  The airspace is restricted. Do not try to fly over it. The government doesn't want you seeing all those downed space ships from Mars and the strange visitors who rode them here, currently caged up and being fed Space Food Sticks left over from the 70s.

{Note to the editor - be SURE that last line is deleted! If that gets out, we're doomed!}

The Apollo Credence

Some of the treasures of the early days of television were lost over the years when some network technician needed a new blank tape, so he (always a 'he') erased some priceless video of a papal visit or a Pablo Casals cello solo or Soupy Sales getting hit with a pie in the face. There are countless episodes concerning lost episodes like this.

Many people believed the moon shot actually
took place, but believed this historic summit
meeting to be an elaborate Disney animation hoax.

But surely, the people at NASA, men and women smart enough to stand on earth, look up at the moon, and say, "I know how we can get a rocket ship and a crew up there to plant an American flag and play golf!" would never be so shortsighted as to get rid of video tapes recorded directly from a camera on the moon, showing the entire moon walk as seen by the Mission Control staff, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin bopping about the surface, and the famous phone call from with then-President Richard Nixon, just a year before he met with Elvis, would they?

I'll save you the suspense in this heat. They would.

A guy named Gary George was interning at NASA in that Leisure Suit Summer of 1976, and at a government auction, he bought 1,150 used reels of videotape from NASA for $217.77.

Some of them he sold, some of them he gave away, but the ones labelled "APOLLO 11 EVA | July 20, 1969 REEL 1 [--3]" and "VR2000 525 Hi Band 15 ips" - some 2 hours and 24 minutes of history - seemed to be worth hanging on to.

As the years went by, NASA came to regret dumping those tapes for pennies on the dollar, realizing that even though they have not been edited or enhanced in any way, they had to agree with the people at Sotheby's auction house that these tapes are the "earliest, sharpest, and most accurate surviving video images of man's first steps on the moon."

Cassandra Hatton, vice president and senior specialist in Sotheby's Books & Manuscripts Department said, "Fifty years ago today, we achieved the world's greatest human accomplishment, and what we universally recall about that event is best documented on these tapes. We are truly over the moon about today's outstanding result."

Yes, she actually said they were "over the moon."

Sotheby's unloaded those tapes from the original $217 bundle for $1.82 million.

This whole story gives hope to all of us dumpster divers, thrift store habitués, and auction attendees. All I have to do is find an original Soupy Sales pie plate, and I'll be in tall cotton.

Warmup act

The dangerous heat wave that took hold of most of the eastern half of the U.S. broiled millions of people, almost literally. The heat was blamed for at six least deaths.

From the midwest to the Atlantic Shore, temperatures were in the 90s. Baltimore hit 100° on both Saturday and Sunday, marking the first time that we've seen triple digits since 2016.

We had to run out to dinner on Saturday and traffic at 5 PM was more like it is at 5 AM...hardly anyone was out; most people were in pools or camped out in air conditioned rooms, icing themselves or each other down with drippy bags of ice right out of the Kelvinator.

In Montgomery County, Maryland, a woman was hiking a mountain path called the Billy Goat Trail and succumbed, apparently from the heat, on Saturday.

And on the national news, CBS showed a guy in New Jersey, all sweaty and thirsty. He was saying that he was running in the heat and said, "I thought I was having a heart attack a couple of times, but I pushed through."

Here is my message to this man.  Go right ahead and "push through," if you must.  If running and sweating in dangerous weather is that important to you, if your health and your future with the people who like you and love you and, one presumes, wish to have your continued presence in their lives means so little, and if you think that losing another gallon of water and half a lb. of gluteus maximus means more than being safe, then, by means, you just push on through.

But do us a favor. Young people might be watching, and they might see an adult on television advising people to keep running in 100° weather even if they feel that they are having a heart attack, and we don't want young people seeing that sort of thing.

Because we already have enough fools.

¡Ay, caramba!

I once scratched my cornea (never mind how!) and after three days of rubbing my eye and washing it out with gallons of eye drops, I gave up and went to the hospital walk-in clinic near where we used to live. A doctor dropped an eye drop - just one! - in there, and the pain went away at once.  Amazing.

On my way out, I asked him for the brand name of the eye drops, so I could be prepared for the next time I walked into a tree branch. (Ooops). He said it wasn't available at Pharm-A-Lot, because these eye drops contained cocaine.

Ohhhhkay.

So I can report from firsthand experience, or eyewitness testimony, as it were, that cocaine is an effective pain reliever, and, sadly, for the past fifty years or so, people have come to use and abuse it for a lot more than treating corneal abrasions.

This leads, of course, to a huge international business in the production and distribution of the stuff, sad to say. People go to great lengths to hide bags of the insidious white powder in or on themselves to sneak it past customs inspectors.

But if you know me, you know I can wring humor out of anything, so with that in mind, I present to you The Stupidest Smuggler Of All Time.

They don't even give his name, for fear of his entire family being made laughingstocks, but he looks like this:

Yes sir. I know it's funny to Google "Florida man" and roar at the resultant tide of goofiness, but how about this Colombian who cleverly secreted half a kilo of cocaine under his toupee, only to be stopped by eagle-eyed police at the Barcelona Airport?

The police said the man drew their attention because "he looked nervous," and maybe that was because he looked like he had two heads and wasn't really using either of them.

And when they took off his hat and toupee, there he stood, with $34,000 worth of the drug on his melon.

“There is no limit to the inventiveness of drug traffickers trying to mock controls,” said the police in a statement.

The report I saw stated that over 100 kilos of cocaine were seized by police at the Barcelona-El Prat airport in 2018.

Come on. It's like you criminals aren't even trying anymore!