The Saturday Picture Show, September 19, 2020

 

This is the work of an artist who calls himself Seth Globepainter. You know, the Harlem Globetrotters played basketball in 124 countries and territories worldwide, and Seth wants to cover the earth in as much of his art as he can, so he is planning to do wall murals everywhere. He uses "Globe" in his nickname because creates his wall works all over the world. Very interesting work, to use the wall of an old brick building as your canvas.

It's popular in England to build these curved brick walls. They call them "crinkle crankle," or "serpentine" garden walls. Yes, it's pleasing and pretty, but guess what else? This masonry uses fewer bricks than a straight wall, because the curving form gives stability, allowing the mason to use just one layer of bricks. A straight wall with one layer and no buttressing would tumble down faster than Humpty Dumpty could call for help. 

Townhouses in Baltimore are known for having painted screens like this. It all began in 1913, when a Czech immigrant grocer named William Oktavec daubed paint on his screen door - from the inside! Soon, everyone and his brother wanted their door, window, or transom screen painted up, so a tradition was born.

It's not just that it's amazing that these critters can build their honeycomb, it's how uniform every cell is!

You know I kid; I'm a kidder. But this resident of the warm parts of the Atlanic Ocean is colloquially known as the Chocolate Chip Sea Cucumber. I'm not kidding. I looked it up! Its formal name is Isostichopus badionotus, and please file it away in your holiday card mailing list as a member of the family Stichopodidae. 

I guess they still sell these make-your-own pizza kits, complete with flour and yeast and a stingy can of sauce. There are better ways, trust me.

Stuart Little's third cousin is El Ratoncito Pérez or Ratón Pérez (Perez the Mouse) and he is the Spanish and Hispanic American version of the tooth fairy. Notice his tiny mask. He knows more than some humans do.

Rows and rows and lots of different colored tulips in Voorhout, Holland. 

Paper View

Besides being the name of the second-most overused computer font in the world (running close behind the annoying Comic Sans), Papyrus was what they used in Egypt many years ago because they couldn't borrow notepaper from the people at the next desk.  There is a plant called Papyrus, and Egyptians extracted the pith from that plant and sliced it thin, let it dry, and they had something on which to write a grocery list.  You couldn't call it paper, per se, but it did well enough until someone invented paper as we know it today.

The first type of paper used in America was made of old cotton and linen rags, but you can see how that was not going to work for long, since most people wear their tee shirts until someone throws them out, or the dryer tears them to bits. We needed a more efficient source of paper for Ben Franklin to print his Almanack. People considered silk (too expensive) and bamboo (too heavy), but it wasn't until a Frenchman named René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur went for a nature walk one day, as Frenchmen will.

Standing out there in the woods, watching the wasps chew paper and mix it with saliva to produce a substance from which to build nests, old Ferchault de Réaumur was heard exclaiming to no one in particular, "¿ Où ai-je laissé mon déjeuner?" ("Where did I leave my lunch?")

And as he gnawed on his Pastrami on Rye, he said, "¡Ces guêpes ont la bonne idée!" ("These wasps have the right idea!")

But no one heard him. He was alone in that forest, in more ways than one.

Eventually, after several hundred thousand false attempts at getting enough wasps to make paper for us, we decided that getting stung a dozen times just to have enough paper to send a love note to the new girl in Geometry was not going to cut it, and we invented giant machines to chew trees and make paper for us.

You really can't blame wasps for being mad at people who swat at them with a rolled up newspaper. I mean, after all...

Speaking of paper, a designer and artist named Wolfram Kampffmeyer makes animals out of paper.  He calls it creative taxidermy, and no animals need lose their lives in the process!

This last one is for baseball fans in Detroit, and football fans in Cincinnati and Louisiana.

Sticky Situation

One thing I miss about work (and it might be the only thing, beside the hearty camaraderie of my happy coworkers as we spent days deep down in the salt mines) is the time-honored ritual in which someone comes back from a week's vacation, slightly sunburned, a little worn out, reeking of Sea & Ski sun lotion, and bearing either some Fisher's caramel popcorn or some salt water taffy. Enough for everyone in the office to share, including that summer intern who had to be reminded to wash his hands before sticking a grubby paw into the goods.  

When the talk turned to salt water taffy, someone would always pass around the old stories about how the gooey treat got its name. It's one of those candies you only see by the seashore, after all, so the ocean water seems naturally to be a part of the recipe.

Truth to tell, they might as well have whomped up the first batch in Keokuk or Kankakee, for all the salt water it contains. Sure, there is salt in there, and water too, but not scooped out of the ocean, no no. Today's taffy is made primarily from corn syrup, glycerin and butter, with flavorings as needed.

When you go to buy your taffy, you get to see the "pulling" process, in which the mixed ingredients are pulled and stretched and aerated. That addition of air makes it lighter and chewier. This process was developed by a candy man from Atlantic City, New Jersey, by the name of Enoch James. He also figured out a vital part of the saltwater taffy appeal: he made it less sticky, so that it was easier to peel off the wax paper from the taffy itself, which comes in little patties or little links the size of your pinky.

Oh! As to the apocryphal stories about where they got the "salt water" taffy name, one has it that some underassistant candy cook was told to get a bucket of water and add it to the ingredients, and out of either ignorance or indolence (that deadly combination) he just went down to the surf and added some ocean aqua.

That account would miss the fact that the factory sink had to be closer than the ocean, unless we're to believe that the young man just wanted to get his feet wet awhile.

And the other tale is just as big a whopper. In that version, the candy guy made his candy but left it in an open tub, and overnight there was a super high tide and the ocean washed into the store and everything got wet but the taffy still tasted as good, if not better, so why not?

If you're going down the ocean, don't forget me, please! 

Right on cue

The Baltimore Orioles baseball team has had some surprises for us fans this year, both on the field, where they have been better than anyone expected them to be, and in the broadcast booths for radio and TV, where they have all sorts of new people calling the games for us.

Ben McDonald, who pitched very well for the O's for a few seasons in the 90s, is one of the announcers on the TV side, and he talked about the difficulty for a catcher to pick up a hot bunt that has "English" on it, spinning as it bobs around in the dirt and grass in front of home plate.

Because I have lots of time to Googulate these things, I am now prepared to report on my findings. I didn't even have to go anywhere!

We're familiar with pool, the game that developed from billiards. If you've ever seen "The Music Man" (and I think you should!) you know that the protagonist, "Professor" Harold Hill, engenders fear among the humble villagers of River City by foreshadowing the evil represented by a pool table being brought into the genteel billiard parlor. 

He sings (or more properly, raps): 

But just as I say

It takes judgment, brains, and maturity to score

In a balkline game

I say that any boob can take

And shove a ball in a pocket!

A balkline game, I found out, is a sort of billiards where the object is to have the ball carom off the side of the table and then do something other than go into a hole, as in pool. I don't see the difference, but what matters is, one of the tricks of billiards is to make the ball spin around by hitting it in a certain manner by hitting it off center.  And when pool players ("poolers"?  "poolists"?) use this trick, they called it "putting English on the ball" because they called billiards the English game.

OK, so I hope that clears it up for all of us. You know what, in baseball, when your teammate encourages you to throw the ball a little harder, they say, "Put some mustard on it!"  And that could be confusing. 

"Put a little French's mustard on it so the batter won't be able to put much English on it!"

Keep On Truckin'

Just as Baltimore has our own town band, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, New York has the NY Philharmonic as their own orchestra.  Their president is also a violinist, Deborah Borda by name. Since the pandemic, she says, "Our musicians, their life is making music. They have been completely cut off from being able to give their gift to people."

Has anyone ever noticed that when you have a problem, it's very often a woman who comes up with a solution?  Ms Borda came up with a winner.

As you've heard, New York was for a time the epicenter of the coronavirus in the US. In the six months since the dreaded virus came ashore here, more than 23,000 New Yorkers lost their lives from it. And since the spring, many of the city's restaurants, businesses, museums, and offices have been shuttered.

That includes Lincoln Center, where the Philharmonic played, but has not played since March. Ms Bonda came up with the idea for a bandwagon. She rented a Ford pickup, rigged up a sound system, rounded up staff and some musicians, and they tour the Big Apple's five boroughs, playing music where the people are, while the people can't come to where the music is.

"It's a little rough and ready," she admitted. "That's just typical New York."
'Forget everything and do what we do.''

This is a totally casual operation. They don't even announce where they will be parkin' and playin', so that the crowd size will stay low and social distancing, high.  They only play for 15 minutes tops, to keep the crowds down.

"This is a way that we can connect with people," said Cynthia Phelps, the Philharmonic's principal violist. "It allows us to forget everything and do what we do."

"It gives us hope," violinist Yulia Ziskel said.

"We haven't played together since March," said cellist Sumire Kudo.

Recently, Anthony Roth Costanzo, noted countertenor with the Metropolitan Opera, grabbed a mic and joined the band in bed...uh, the bed of the truck...and gave the classical music version of "All right, Schenectady! Lemme hear you say yeah!"

"We're so excited to find you here in Brooklyn Bridge Park!" was what he said.

Three players performed a serenade in C major by Hungarian composer Ernst von Dohnányi, and then segued right into what Costanzo introduced as "the saddest aria"-- Henry Purcell's "Dido's Lament."

It's an appropriate song for that city, for our nation, for the world. Costanzo sang, "Remember me but forget my fate. Remember me but forget my fate."

"Those are powerful words," Costanzo said to the audience when the aria ended. "They stick in my head."


Borda also says that during the quick concerts, volunteers from the League of Woman Voters are signing people up to vote in the upcoming election.

The truck will make three stops a day on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, and will eventually get to perform in all five boroughs.
"This is something we'll keep doing for a while," Ms Borda said.

Again: problem, woman, solution.

Locked up

My birthday isn't coming up for a while (if ever) but here's a great idea for that Lincolnphile in your life:

UPI reports "A lock of Abraham Lincoln's hair wrapped in a telegram stained with the 16th president's blood is up for auction online."

An auction house called RR Auction, up in Boston, is peddling the lock of hair and the stained telegram, and they figure to get about $75,000 for it.

Anyone who paid attention in History can tell you, Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth (the first in a long line of three-named assassins) at Ford's Theatre in Washington, April, 1865.  Soldiers carried the poor man across the street to the Petersen family boarding house, where his dying body was laid diagonally on a bed, awaiting the end.

And as the postmortem examination was conducted, someone said, "Hey! Hand me the scissors, so's I can snip off a couple of inches of his hair!"

In death there is no dignity. But there will be no snipping around my recumbent form, if death should ever overtake me, or those responsible will be plagued with everything I can throw down on them.

Anyway.  Dr. Lyman Beecher Todd, a cousin of Lincoln's widow, Mary Todd Lincoln, and great-grandfather of Abigail Beecher, scooped up the lock of hair and wrapped it in a telegram he had received the day before. It was fortunate for him that he had the telegram, as ZipLoc bags were not invented until 1968.

The message said "All goes well but you are missed," and that had to be the eeriest harbinger since Keith Moon sat down in a chair stenciled 'NOT TO BE TAKEN AWAY' three weeks before he died and was, indeed, taken away.

If you want to buy the hair and telegram, be aware that bidding closed September 12. I wonder where Moon's chair ever wound up.

Sunday Rerun: It's The Berries

I am always in search of superlatives. Tell me something or someone is the best or the tallest or the tastiest, and I'm right there with you, wanting to know more. 

And if Casey Stengel, a man who once doffed his cap at home plate to allow a bird to fly away off his head, says someone is the strangest man ever to play baseball, that man automatically enters my Hall of Heroes.

Stengel said that about Moe Berg, the polymath who played a almost a decade and a half in the major leagues, but never took it too seriously.  What the backup catcher took seriously was learning, and he did that in 12 languages, reading books and newspapers by the ton.  

I can hardly imagine how happy he would be to be alive today, what with the internet serving a torrent of information with the stroke of a few keys! Plus, he would be 115 years of age, so he'd have that going for him.

But today I don't want to write about his baseball exploits, or how he went on a tour of Japan in the 1930s to spread the love of baseball worldwide and wound up taking home movies of Japanese defense plants and munitions storage that wound up being used by US spy agencies in World War II, or that he parachuted into Yugoslavia as a spy, or that he did not speak to his brother, Dr Sam Berg M.D. for over 30 years, or that Moe trained as a lawyer and worked for several of the big firms in New York during baseball offseasons, but gave up the practice of law because he found it boring.

No, I want to give gardening advice, because one of my favorite stories in one of the books I've read about Moe, and there have been a few, came from The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg, written by Nicholas Dawidoff and published by Pantheon Books in 1994.

And in that book we learn that Moe's sister Ethel, who was a kindergarten teacher for many years and served as a trainer for new teachers, had the habit of roller skating through the halls of her school. And that she raised raspberries in her home garden, raspberries so tasty that she would regularly trade a quart of them for a meal at New York's finest restaurants, where the pastry chefs used them for their finest pies and tarts.

And that the secret to her great raspberries was that she lived a block away from a mounted police stable.

The Saturday Picture Show, September 12, 2020

They did not allow spectators at the Kentucky Derby this year, so maybe that's why this horse named Authentic broke bad during the presentation of the roses. He's headed for the Preakness here in Baltimore next. Get ready!

Some other guys tried to capture the prize for turning in a 240-lb tuna, but they were disqualified because he was a piano tuna.

You can like or dislike Kamala Harris as you see fit, but you can't argue with the wisdom of her choice of sneakers for the campaign trail. Out on the hustings, it's Converse Chuck Taylors for her - she has six pairs.

They're making these pre-fabricated houses in California now. If 46 square meters sounds a little small, how about 495.14 square feet? That sounds larger, at least.

Of course, no matter how tiny or immense your house is, the great outdoors is the same size for all of us.

300 years ago, people in Scotland made this perfectly-arched stone bridge.

However much "£3" is worth, I think you deserve a refund for this improperly-marked merchandise. But I can't stop thinking about your grandchildren studying 2020 in 20 years.

I don't know where this is, but this is a veterinarian's office where they have a comfort dog to comfort their patient dogs.

A 9/11 story

It's September 11, and everyone has their memories and feelings about that day that really changed everything.

And it's good for us "of a certain age" to remember that 9/11/2001 was 19 years ago, meaning that for people currently in high school, and some in college,
they have no personal connection to the events. Sure, they have seen video and heard a lot about it, but there's always room for everyone to learn more.

F'rinstance, not a whole lot of us know a whole lot about the 9/11 Boatlift. With what seemed to be the entire world crashing down on them, people who found themselves around Ground Zero came to a staggering realization: Manhattan is an island, and when the streets and highways that are usually clogged in the town where gridlock began, there's only going to be one escape.

The water.

Those who know such things believe that more than half a million people needed to be transported out of the southern tip of Lower Manhattan.  You remember the videos, the dazed survivors out in the streets, a long way from home and comfort.

As so often happens here in the greatest country in the world (it never needed to be made great again; it always has been) saw ordinary people respond to an extraordinary situation and become a team of heroes in what is regarded as the world's largest water evacuation of all time.

Of course, there was no plan for how to get 500,000+ humans off the island and on their way. It's hard for civic officials to even grasp the concept. (Here in Maryland, the last plan I ever heard about for what we would do in case of a nuclear attack, devastating earthquake or catastrophic weather event was no more detailed than "Everyone get in your cars and head for West Virginia.")

And there certainly was no way for New York officials to lay out a plan for getting folks off Manhattan.  But as so often happens, leave it to the people, and good things result.  Boats and ferries are always active in those waters, of course, and they began turning for shore to pick people up.  Destination? To be determined. Just getting away from the desolation was the goal.

What happened was that feeling we get when there's a chance to help a stranger - someone we don't know, nothing in it for us but the feeling of helping a fellow citizen. So mariners did what they could.  And the United States Coast Guard -  the first to protect our seas and shores - operates the marine radios that all afloat listen to, and they put out the Mayday call for everyone to come help.

And along came tugboats, party pontoons, water taxis, runabouts, whatever, heading for the scene to take on passengers.

Let us not forget that all who headed for the tip of Manhattan that horrible but beautiful Tuesday morning saw what they were headed for - smoke and gases in the air and airborne debris were plentiful.  And that's what they SAW. None of them had the slightest idea if there would be further attacks, exposing the makeshift fleet to disaster. In fact, it's probable that few of them knew a whole lot about what HAD happened, and none of what might.

But with steadfast determination, the American kind, they loaded as many as their vessels held, dropped people off at a safe dock, and went back for more, as many times as it took to move 500,000 terrified fellow citizens.

The Coast Guard adds it up as more than 150 boats, crewed by 800-some people, getting that half a million off Manhattan.  It took until well into the night, but no one was left stranded.

Tom Hanks narrated a documentary entitled “Boatlift: An Untold Tale of 9/11 Resilience” in 2011. It told tales of people such as Vincent Ardolino of Brooklyn, captain of the Amberjack V. He recalls saying to his wife,“I’ve got to go do something … I’m going to take the Amberjack up into the city and help … I have to do what I have to do … Even if I rescue one person, that’s one person less that will suffer or die.”

And remember, he had no way of knowing if he would come home to his wife. America was at war, and he did what he could, and if you multiply that by 800 other good people, that's how every one of those survivors got on their way home on September 11, 2001.

Thought for food

There were more than two fascinating things about my father's Aunt Dot from Philadelphia, but I will just share these two:

A - she grew up on the Jersey Shore down around Cape May, and one of her childhood playmates was a little lass who grew to be...drum roll please...Mrs Paul of seafood fame!

2 - she worked as a packer for W. Atlee Burpee & Co, the premier seed supplier. So we never lacked for the freshest of corn and other vegetables and flowers around the yard during my Opie-esque childhood.

I got to thinking about my childhood days running around, barefoot boy with a hoe, when I saw an article about something that's becoming popular again.

People had a lot of time on their hands this year, and that led to having a lot of dirt on their hands, and fertilizer. Being home and having nothing much to do, many people started home gardens as a way to spend time in the out of doors, and also get a some kohlrabi and carrots and poppies for the table. Seeds were bought, seeds were planted.

And then...

After a record-setting spring season for sellers of seeds and garden implements and pain medications (Google searches for "growing food" were up 4650%, and the good people at W. Atlee Burpee & Co had the biggest sales year in their  144-year history), here came the crops!

So many that people were begging their friends to take eggplants, cucumbers, and squash that many got into the habit of locking their cars and night and leaving the porch lights off, lest they find themselves with someone else's bounteous harvest all over the Adirondack chair or the front seat of the Biscayne.

And all that leads to the magic of home canning!

“I have definitely noticed an uptick in canning interest during the pandemic,” says Marisa McClellan. Ms McClellan is a canning expert (who awards these titles?) who runs the Food in Jars website. “Traffic is up on my site, I'm getting more canning questions, and there's a shortage of both mason jars and lids.”

I saw that reflected on the community social pages.  Where to find Mason jars? And the answers came back that stores all over are backordered on canning supplies and there won't be more supplies for a month or two.

Indeed, stores across America are reporting canning supply backorders that won't be filled for months.

But if you find and fill Mason jars, you are taking part in home technology that has been around since the 1850s, when one John Landis Mason, a tinsmith from New Jersey, figured out how to make screw-top jars that are air-and-water-tight.

Our family used the pre-Mason method, which was to make the jam or whatever you were canning, and then cover the surface of the food with molten Esso wax.

A few takeaway thoughts:

• why do we call it home "canning" when it's not going into a can, but a jar?
• this might be a good time to collect Mason jars for next year. They keep very well unfilled, with no need to seal the lids.
• take some paper towels, put them in a jar, fill the jar with liquid cleanser, put a lid on it, and voila! You have canned your own Lysol Wipes!

It's only a boring game

I would like to give a gift to any police detective (redundancy) who finds him/herself tasked with the chore of getting me to confess to some trumped-up charge. 

Here's how to get me to talk: force me to watch tennis. 

I know lots of people who like to watch tennis, and I guess that as a game, it's certainly better than golf or bowling or NASCAR.  But just like with golf, it's like the end of the world if a spectator so much as yawns or speaks or hollers during the match.  It's not a problem with bowling, because at their matches, the only people watching are parents who came to pick up the bowlers to get them home for dinner.

Heading home early

But I'm sure you saw what happened last weekend at the US Open. A tennis player named Novak Djokovic had himself quite a little flare-up during a game on Sunday. He didn't like how things were going, so she smacked the ball with his tennis racket, and the ball hit the line judge, Laura Clark, in the throat.

Very childish behavior, and he was given the gate for it. Disqualified and sent back to Serbia in disgrace.

Almost immediately, his fans took to social media to claim that it was unfair to throw him out, because he's the Novakiest of all Djokovics.  Many of these people would call for the head of a football player or baseball star who threw one of their balls at an official, but give Novak a break, they cried!

And to no one's surprise, his fans started sending abusive and threatening messages to the lineswoman!

A Serbian tabloid paper revealed her identify and social media info, and that opened the sluice gates for people who sit at home watching tennis to slag the woman with their bile.

It seems that Ms Clark had a son who died. One of these galoots emailed her a picture of that son along with the message, "Don't worry. You'll join him soon."

And there were other messages from other illbred scuzzballs.

To his credit, Djokovic spoke up on Instagram:


“Dear #NoleFam thank you for your positive messages.. Please also remember the linesperson that was hit by the ball last night needs our community’s support too. She’s done nothing wrong at all. I ask you to stay especially supportive and caring to her during this time. From these moments, we grow stronger and we rise above. Sharing love with everyone. Europe here I come.”

Although he pled with officials to be allowed to keep playing in front of a replacement line judge on the grounds that Ms Clark didn't require hospitalization, Djokovic did write an apology after his disqualification, saying that the whole situation left him “sad and empty”.

“I’m extremely sorry to have caused her such stress. So unintended. So wrong,” he had written in his previous post.

He was fined $10,000 for unsportsmanlike conduct in addition to losing out on the $250,000 prize money he was odds-on favorite to win.

Djokovic stated that he will play in the French Open later this month, so that should give the officials plenty of time to go on Amazon and purchase football helmets for themselves.

Perhaps a mental health counselor could help him get over these anger issues.

They're already wearing tuxedos

In the animal kingdom, they seem to be more accepting of the lifestyles of others.

I say this because at an aquarium in Spain, a couple of gentoo penguins are raising a baby chick they adopted as an egg.

And - clutch your pearls - they're both FEMALE!

Electra and Violet built a nest over at the Oceanogràfic València. They made a nest of stones and "began to have the usual attitude and actions prior to reproduction," according to an official news release.

Since they were into family prepping, their caregivers let them adopt and incubate another penguin couple's egg. Now, Electra and Violet are proud parents of a baby penguin which will become independent after about 75 days.

75 days from birth to independence! How many humans would wish for the same?

In the world of penguins, parents take turns doing the incubating, which is about a 38-day process.

Oceanogràfic València says that same-sex adoption is fairly common in the zoo world, but this is their first time around for it. There have been same-sex penguin families in zoos in London, Berlin, and Sydney.

What's more, the zoo says, same-sex pairs happen in over 450 animal species - in the wild and in the zoos.

But they all have the advantage of not having self-righteous fools complaining because two people love each other and want to live together.

Happy Labor Day!

Sunday Rerun: Ars Gratia Artis

You can still get paint-by-number sets on Amazon and at real stores, but the man who invented that art delivery system and set off a national craze has passed away.

His name was Dan Robbins, and he spent years Baskin' in the glow of his success.

(I wish to have that pun stricken from the record, your honor).

Robbins was working for the Palmer Paint Company as a package designer and graphic artist out in Detroit in the late 1940s. His boss came to him asking for ideas about how to sell more paint, as bosses will.

Palmer Paint specialized in washable paints for children, but Dan figured that there was an adult market in helping people find painting fun. And he knew that Leonardo da Vinci had used a system of outlines on canvas, given to apprentices with instructions to fill in the outlines with colors.

The idea came along at the right time, because after World War II, Americans, tired of fighting and conflict, turned to hobbies such as home decorating, woodworking, procreating, and art.  Before the war, there was no time for leisure time, as everyone was too busy churning their own butter, making shirts from old flour sacks, and walking seven miles through mounds of snow to get to school (according to what we heard as kids in the 50s).

But oh man, the 50s were big for paint-by-number! And people started wearing smocks and berets and really getting into it, and dens and living rooms across the nation were festooned with the little masterpieces as soon as the paint dried.

Those tiny numbers corresponded to tiny bottles of paint. Fill in the blanks,
and hang it up on the den wall.

I'm no artist, but it seemed like the paint version of Mad Libs, that party favorite where you toss in a word as directed and everyone laughs. But no one thinks the people who play Mad Libs are "writing" anything, and it never seemed to me that paint-by-number pictures of wagon wheels propped up against a cactus, or a Vermont town with a church steeple towering over everything, or a fishing boat setting sail for a day of fun out on the bay were really art.

What's really sad is that Robbins (pictured above in paint-by-number glory) didn't even get rich from his invention, because he didn't own the paint company, or Craft Master, the parent corporation to Palmer Paint.  That's where the money went. And Craft Master was sold to General Mills, purveyors of Cheerios, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, and Frosted Lucky Charms.

Seems to me he deserved better.

The Saturday Picture Show, September 5, 2020

It's still a mystery to me that some of us go to college and on to advanced studies in medicine and epidemiology, and some of us see what these learned people advise us to do about the virus and then say, "It's a media hoax. I know a guy whose brother worked with a woman whose second cousin says they ain't no such a thing."

Not only is it cool that the Human Rights Foundation is collecting old thumb drives and filling them with information to be disseminated in North Korea, but the collection station for the donated drives is sort of tongue-in-cheek as well!

Everything in perspective. Of course, the sun is larger than a dandelion, but don't tell the dandelion!

I'm trying to figure out what used to be made in this abandoned factory. VCRs? Pagers? Pocket calculators? Polaroid cameras? Time marches on.

Speaking of factories, this is the Yamaha piano factory in Japan, where they have upgraded the Purell dispenser with piano pedals!

In 1900, people feared electricity and created overwrought depictions of mass deaths from alternating current.

Men can be divided into three groups: those who know how to tie a four-in-hand tie, those who do not know, and those from the first group who are willing to tie the tie of a guy from the second group so he can look right for a job interview.

Here's a man who really knows how to make sure that others stay at least six feet away. More like ten, to be honest.

We can fly!

Sometimes, you have to follow along to notice the trends. One person shaving their head and then getting tattoos all over the melon is now fairly commonplace, but the first guy who did it (notice, it's always a guy!) stood out.

Imagine being the first guy to slurp, "Yes, I will eat a raw oyster! Let's see how this goes!"

So it was that on Wednesday, all the morning news shows were aghast (and no one does aghast like Hoba Kotb!) that a man in a jetpack was hovering over LAX airport in Los Angeles. Two different pilots radioed in from their planes in their Glenn Quagmire voices, "Uh, yeah, LAX, Adam Bravo Niner here, we uh have a guy at 3000 overhead...roger that...in a jetpack..."

Great story to tell your friends, if you live, but how dangerous can it be? He was up there at 3,000 feet with the big old jet airliners, running the risk of being sucked into an engine, killing not only himself but everyone aboard the plane. Capt Sullenberger is not flying anymore, and I don't think there's anything like the East River in Los Angeles, so it wasn't going to end well.

Then yesterday, everyone was burbling about how wonderful it was that this David Blaine, most notable in my mind for once having levitated to impress his erstwhile girlfriend Fiona Apple, still can't keep his feet on the ground. 

Blaine attached himself to a huge cluster of balloons (50 of them, filled with helium, at a time when Party City is running out of balloon juice) and went up, up and away over the Arizona desert in a stunt he called "Ascension."

"Every single stunt that I've ever done is about endurance and pushing past what I thought would be possible," Blaine said before the YouTube Live performance. "I can't imagine that many people would dream of doing it."

Blaine wound up floating 4.7 miles in the air, being careful to avoid the two great enemies of someone flying balloons over the desert: gravity and cacti.

And, as all great explorers will, he landed with great and sage words for mankind: "Wow! That was awesome!"

She's better off.

So if you're keeping track, jetpack over LA bad, balloons over AZ good. I'm just glad that Fiona survived going around with him.

You Never Know

There are times when my behavior drifts to the bumptious side, so I have to admit that I am rarely embarrassed (because that calls for a high degree of self-awareness!)

But it's with no small shame that I tell this on myself. Years ago I worked with a woman who retired; I hadn't seen her for quite a while, and then we attended a work event together. She had lost a lot of weight so I cracked wise with something about "being retired and having time for diet and exercise" being really good.

And she told me she was not in good health. She only lived another few months, but if there is one lesson I've learned, it was not to clap someone on the back to tell them it's great that they've dropped 20 without being sure they were in good health.

And for the love of Pete, hold your congratulations to all women about their pregnancy until you see them holding the baby!

This sad memory bobbed up the other day when actor Chadwick Boseman died. We were shocked to hear of it, of course; such a young man should have decades left to explore his talent.  And unlike many others, he had vowed to keep his fight for his life personal, and did not tell a word of his cancer.

This past April, the star of "42" paid tribute to the real 42 on Jackie Robinson Day, and his appearance (above right), gaunt and drawn, came as a surprise to many.  And many people questioned his countenance.

Looking back over the comments shared about him in April, about the kindest thing anyone said was, "I hope he's doing ok."  Most were much worse, alleging drug abuse, poor life choices, and the like.

Had he gone public with the fact that he was dealing with a terminal case of colon cancer, people would have known better than to say such things, but then Boseman would have had to give up the privacy he was entitled to, the same as any other person, star or not. He made his decision, he kept it to himself and his family, and his legacy will be burnished in future should the plan in his hometown of Anderson, SC, to replace a monument honoring a Confederate Civil War general with a statue saluting the man who gave great and uplifting performances in so many pictures come to fruition.

I hope so. He meant a lot to a great many people, and he showed rare dignity to the end.

Love is all you need

By now, you have probably heard the tale of Arthur "Mac" Love IV, who was, up until last Saturday, the deputy director of the Maryland Governor’s Office of Community Initiatives.

As the Baltimore SUN describes it, that agency's mission is to oversee the state’s ethnic and cultural commissions, community service programs and religious outreach.

Last week, in furtherance of that mission, Love posted on his Facebook page memes and quotes in support of 17-year-old vigilante hobby cop Kyle Rittenhouse, the kid who got his mommy to drive him 30 miles to Kenosha so he could strut around and (allegedly) kill two people and maim a third with his rifle.

One of the images showed young Rittenhouse shooting people in Wisconsin, fellow citizens protesting the shooting of Jacob Blake, and added the caption  “This is the definition of self-defense.”

Another of the images Love posted depicted a police officer giving a thumbs up, with the slogan, “Don’t be a thug if you can’t take a slug.”

Keeping in mind that his job was helping ethnic communities and the religious, Love posted these images, and had a can tied to him for his efforts on Saturday.

He now says he should not have been fired and wants his life back because he is an "innocent American."

Shareese Churchill, a spokeswoman for Gov. Hogan, said, “These posts are obviously totally inappropriate,” and Love's boss, Steve McAdams, Executive Director for the Office of Community Initiatives, put this out in a statement:

“These divisive images and statements are inconsistent with the mission and core values of the Office of Community Initiatives. Earlier today, I relieved this employee of his duties."

“I was appalled by what I saw and what I read,” said Del. Darryl Barnes, the chair of the Maryland Legislative Black Caucus.

As you might have expected, the Facebook furor was quick and mighty, with the usual chorus of "But his First Amendment rights!" and a lot of indignation, some of it righteous, some not so much.

Once again, we are reminded that no one abrogated his right to free speech. Indeed, he did speak freely!  We shouldn't confuse free speech with prior restraint. The Constitution forbids us from being kept from saying what we want beforehand.

McAdams and Gov. Hogan used their right of free speech to tell Love, "You're fired!"

That's the way it works when you think that pasting dumb memes is more important than the $77,000 a year job you just tossed away.

It doesn't HAVE to be "what it is"

It's easy to forget (and maybe some people don't know it) but when the Baltimore Orioles are playing a game on the road, the radio and TV announcers who are giving us the play-by-play are right here in Baltimore, in studios at Oriole Park, describing action from hundreds of miles away.

And you know what? It doesn't make a difference. They're watching the game on TV monitors just as we are at home, and calling the balls and strikes, hits and errors. I haven't heard one announcer yet say anything like, "Man oh man, if only we were actually in Tampa Bay/Philadelphia/Buffalo (home of the Toronto Blue Jays) (long story)." No, they give us a professional job, and it leads me to wonder, when/if the long-predicted miracle occurs and the covid "just goes away...No question it will go away. Hopefully sooner rather than later" as underinformed officials have repeatedly stated, what changes in our society will it leave behind.

TV weather and traffic reporters are doing their work from home just fine.

Jobs? Well, the baseball announcers might just not travel again. Small potatoes as compared to 51,000,000 Americans currently unemployed and wondering what the future has in store for them. Some say that as many as 40% of restaurants will close. Schools will open, either in person or online, but that's all up in the air. Will we ever feel like gathering in huge enclosed arenas again? Do you understand that in 2030, there will be college history classes teaching one topic: "2020 101"?

In 2001, after 9/11, we learned that global terrorism was indeed just as likely to occur here as elsewhere. Seven years later, when the big banks tottered on the edge and we skirted past the specter of another 1930's-style Great Depression, we saw that it could happen again, and now we see that the 1918 Pandemic, which to our memory was some grainy black and white footage of jampacked hospitals and morgues, was not unique.

We can come out of this better, when vaccines are introduced and we learn to live in a new way. More people might be working from home, and how bad can that be? New innovations will lead to new industries and new jobs. And when we all look back on 2020 and shout "Humbug" at its very mention, the wise among us will be looking for ways to make sure it doesn't happen again.

1918

Things come back. I have to feel that the economy will, too, but will we be the same as we were in January of this year?

And, do we WANT to be?