The Homestretch

  

The way they used to write in the newspapers back in the day...very formal, very flowery language. 

F'rinstance, this, from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle: "The grim reaper paid a sensational visit to the Belmont Park track yesterday,” in an article from 1923.

And it was accurate, although ponderous. What happened at Belmont that June 4 has never happened before or since: Frank Hayes, a 22-year-old jockey, brought home a winner in the one and only race he ever entered, up on a nag named Sweet Kiss.

Oh sure, lots of people have jockeyed just one race and lots of people have only won one race, but all the others lived. Frank Hayes did not.

He was a stablehand and at the last minute, he was asked to fill in for the regular rider. Sweet Kiss went off at 20-1 odds that day; the crowd was backing a hoss named Gimme.

They figure that sometime in the latter part of the race, Frank Hayes died in the saddle from either a heart attack from the excitement or from complications of going from 142 lbs to 130 in a very short time.

Sweet Kiss was owned by Miss A. M. Frayling, who, not knowing that her jockey was no longer with us, went to congratulate Hayes after the steeplechase race. Sweet Kiss had thundered down the home stretch and won by a head.

“The exertion and excitement proved too great,” said the New York Daily News, which also described Hayes as “well-liked … favorite in the saddling room and stable and took a great pride in his calling.”

Reflecting on Hayes's weight loss, the Buffalo Morning Express said, “He was confronted with the task of taking off nearly 10 pounds in 24 hours. This morning he spent several hours on the road, jogging off surplus weight. He strove and sweated and denied himself water and when he climbed into the saddle at post time he was weak and tired.”

Miss Frayling is believed to have retired Sweet Kiss, who never raced again, but was tagged with the rather unfair nickname "Sweet Kiss Of Death." 

One week later, they buried Hayes in the racing silks that he wore for his one and only race. 

It was surprising to me that people went on those crash diets 98 years ago. They are still dangerous.

"Don't follow leaders, watch the parking meters"

All across America, citizens realize that parking meter overtime violations are just one of the ways that governments tax us to raise money. Those roads and bridges and new fire engines and softball field maintenance and COVID-19 clinics have to be paid for, ya know?  

I went to get gas the other day and there was a small, tastefully hand-scrawled sign on the window with words to the effect that due to recent tax changes in Maryland, cigarettes are now about ten dollars a pack (so quit hollerin' at the cashier about it!) I mean, hot a-mighty! And people are still smoking them! I doubt that raising the tax another ten bucks per pack would stop them. One of the small pleasures in life is telling a young puffer that "in my day," ten bucks would have bought 40 packs of Kools. And then they all give me that look that only says one thing: Shut up, old man.

But parking meters bring in a lot of revenue for a city - when they are working. Detroit, Motor City,  has come to realize that they are losing a bundle because while they have 3,404 parking meters planted in the cement here and there, fully half of them are broken, so parking is free at that spot and no money flows to the city. 

Last year, Detroit became the largest American city to declare bankruptcy, and they figure that they could rake in $6 million in revenue every year if they would just get the rest of the meters working.

And you knew I would be coming in with an ironic twist to all this, and here it is: the city inflicted this wound upon itself. They tried to cheap out and cut back on the quality of batteries that run the electronic meters. They used to use Duracell batteries ("Dura, as in durable. Cell, as in power cell") but some high muckety-muck decided to swap them out for cheap unreliable batteries to save a buck. 

City workers used to go to each parking meters twice a year to swap one Duracell for another, but switching to El Cheapo means the meters don't hold a charge and parking is free at that meter - and no quarters come into the city coffers.

AND, not only that, but the city recognized some time ago that they needed to upgrade the cylinders on the locks for the little battery doors. The old ones are vulnerable to seizure from water or gunk getting in them. But "someone" said to wait a while before investing in the new brass locks that are needed, and now the city has a lot of batteries they can't even get to to replace with good batteries if they want to!

Sometimes, you have to spend a buck to earn two bucks.

A Giant of a man

The Baltimore Colts football team meant a lot to those of us in Baltimore in the 1950s and beyond. I mean, there are guys running around this town with names like Gino Marchetti Jones, Alan Ameche O'Hoolahan and Johnny Unitas Jackson. People named their children after these guys.

Let me tell you something about Gino Marchetti if you have a minute. He was the 6-foot-4, 244-pound defensive end who played 14 seasons in the NFL and retired after founding a hamburger chain that I still miss. To this day, I would drive past 5 McDonald's to get one Gino Giant, but that's another story.

He passed away two years ago at age 93 and was a good man to the very end.

There's a picture of him on an ambulance gurney, taken toward the end of the 1958 NFL Championship Game. He had broken his leg, but insisted on remaining on the field as long as possible to see his team win. That's tough.

But here is the most impressive thing about Gino. He played for the University of San Francisco, and I don't even know if they have a football team anymore, but in 1951, Marchetti's senior year, they went 9-0 and earned a trip to the Orange Bowl in Miami.

Ollie Matson

Burl Toler

I should say, they earned an invitation to the Orange Bowl. They did not take the trip. That USF team had a pile of great players. Eight of them went on to play pro football. That was appealing to the Orange Bowl people.

Two guys on the team were Black men (Ollie Matson and Burl Toler.) That was not acceptable to the Orange Bowl people, who insisted that the invitation was contingent on leaving the African-American men behind.

Things were like that in 1951.

Gino was the team captain. He took a vote. 

"Nobody on that team ever said that they regretted the decision that we had made," Marchetti said. "It was 100 per cent in favor of not playing. So, we didn't go. I went home and went back to work."

Within months, he was drafted by the Dallas Texans, the team that became the Colts, and the legend grew. 

Gino, and Ollie Matson as well, went on to play a long time in the NFL. Burl Toler injured a knee in a College All-Star game, ending his chances to play professionally, but he did became an NFL referee for many years.

I mentioned before that life was that way in America in 1951. But in 1944, American forces participated in The Battle Of The Bulge in World War II. Gino Marchetti, at the age of 18, fought in the US Army in that battle, which is widely regarded as the toughest of all WWII fights.

After that, having fought against fascist forces that sought to overturn all that we stand for in terms of liberty and justice, Gino Marchetti came home and enrolled in college. 

After what he had seen as a younger man, standing up for his fellow Americans against the redneck hicks on the Orange Bowl selection committee could not have been much of a challenge.

Sunday Rerun: Salad Daze

 Can someone explain the thing about getting kids to eat salad? I mean, sure, asparagus looks like something the weedwacker dragged in, and beets are purple death balls, and lima beans, brussel sprouts and cauliflower are best bought in frozen plastic bags to be applied to sprained wrists, but you pile up some lettuce, tomato, shredded carrot and green cabbage, some olives and croutons and bacon bits in a bowl and that's what you call your basic salad and that's tasty.

Maybe it was easier for me; I love salads and always have, although you have to add some meat or seafood if you're going to think of it as anything other than an appetizer.

Just as with books - some kids will take to reading and do so avidly for the rest of their lives - with salads, choosy moms know, you have to find a way to get some green stuff into the kids, so Kraft Foods (makers of fine wholesome nutritious products such as Cool Whip imitation whipped cream, Country Time imitation lemonade, Jello-O, the sweetened processed flavored collagen-based dessert, Kool-Aid imitation Country Time drink mix, Kraft Singles pasteurized prepared cheese product, Lunchables mystery meat and cheese in a box for busy moms and kids, Miracle Whip imitation mayonnaise, Tang imitation Kool-Aid, and Velveeta, the Pasteurized Prepared Cheese Product) now introduces their latest contribution to American haute cuisine: Salad frosting.

I said Salad Frosting.

This is not really an advancement in food preparation, but, rather, an adventure in misnaming something that is as laden with chicanery as fake apple pie made with Ritz crackers or Krusty Brand Imitation Gruel.

Kraft has brought out "Salad Frosting," and it's just a tube of ranch dressing!

The goal is to make kids think they're putting sweet frosting on their salad as if it were a cake, but it's just dressing.


And they're not even trying to make it sound like it's even remotely healthy for Junior or Sis to put the stuff they think they want on the salad they know they don't. Their press kit accompanying the product says, "Kids will eat anything with frosting, right? It's a match made for dinnertime bliss."

Not to drag science into it, but there are 110 calories,11 grams of fat, and 290 milligrams of sodium in 2 Tablespoons of ranch dressing.

The same amount of vanilla frosting has 140 calories, but only 5 grams of fat and and just 70 mg of sodium.

So, in some cases, you'd be better off by spreading cake frosting on a tomato and telling your kid it's a salad.

Then for dessert? A nice slab of baloney pie!

The Saturday Picture Show, April 3, 2021

 

It's very nice of the owner of this pair of sneakers to make room for the one to be a frog condo. If the frog goes a-courtin', he can move his wife in right next door! 

This chart shows the home base for all the baseball teams, except they forgot the poor Chicago White Sox! Now the Orioles don't have to feel so bad about having such a tiny fan base.

Salt cellars are becoming popular again, just when you thought people were so heart-conscious that they weren't even using that much table salt. This example will only cost you $1150, but it is sterling silver.

It now comes to light - 6 years later - that Madonna, rather than posing for her picture herself, used the picture on the right and glued her own head onto it for an Instagram picture. The woman whose head was removed is Amelia Goldie, and she is mad about it, now that she has found out what the Immaterial Girl did to her. In fact, she is so irate, you might say she lost her...temper.

Who among us is not crazy about Mona Lisa Vito from "My Cousin Vinny"? Is she qualified to answer questions about automobile? "Well, my father was a mechanic, his father was a mechanic, my mother’s father was a mechanic, my three brothers are mechanics, four uncles on my father’s side are mechanics..." Yeah. She's chahming!

I saw this picture of a little duck and image-searched it. It comes back as some sort of Russian duck logo, so now we can picture Russians standing around wearing polo shirts with this little guy's picture, along with Madras shorts and Topsiders.

I don't know where this is either, but I am not going down those steps, no sirree. Plus, it seems to be a smoking area just outside the doors of Hades.

I'll let you in on a little secret. All cats think of themselves in high positions, trust me. Where do you think we get the word "lionize"?

As closely as I can figure it, this is a turtle who picked up a hitchhiking frog, who had picked up a hitchhiking snail. Later on, when they asked the turtle what was going on, he said, "I don't know! It all happened so fast!"

This week's death of G. Gordon Liddy, the "mastermind" of the bungled burglary at the Watergate building, reminds us that for want of a nail, the horse was lost...etc. Because Liddy's bumbling fools taped down a latch bolt to allow them to sneak back into the Democratic Nat'l Committee offices, alert Security Guard Frank Wills, who earned $80 a week in 1972, spotted the whole caper, alerted the DC Police, and all that led to the dethronement of Richard Nixon. From the National Archives, this notation in Will's nightly log book records a tiny moment that soon loomed large.

"She was only a jockey's daughter, but all the horsemen knew her"

If you were a horse, and you were thundering down the backstretch at Old Hilltop, what you would be seeing in front of you would look totally different from what the jockey riding you sees. And it has nothing to do with how much mud is on the jockey's goggles.

They're big and brown, a horse's eyes, but they work differently from our peepers.

At the University of Exeter, they researched horse eyes and found some differences that go beyond just being interesting - they affect racetrack safety.

So if this helps you win at Pimlico someday, remember to duke me in! 

F'rinstance, race people thought it would be a good idea to paint crossbars on fences and hurdles orange, because we see orange and it alerts us to be careful.

But Professor Martin Stevens, who lectures on sensory and evolutionary ecology at Exeter, has shown that to horses, orange shows up as sort of green, meaning that horses see orange as looking like grass, so they get no warning.

And Dr. Janel L. Jones, a cognitive scientist, says that what humans can see from 30 feet, a horse can only see from 20 feet.

And Mr Ed is the only horse who could get away with wearing glasses.

"A horse has to be 50% closer to see the same details," Dr Jones says. "A 50% deficiency is enough for any rider to consider...even in sunshine, the horse's view of a jump is blurry, hazy, dim, vague...all the adjectives you'd rather not ponder as you're galloping 30 feet per second towards a big oxer (fence) that could ruin your day."

So, people at the U of Exeter tried painting obstacles and such white and yellow. This did not help the horses see the fences any better, it helped them jump better.

And of course, the hope is that jockeys and horses will be safer from falls and spills and the injuries they cause because of all this work. 

Prof. Stevens explains that whereas we humans have three types of cone cells in our eyes, horses only have two.

So, "Basically it means they can only see colors that we only perceive as blues and yellows and they can't tell the difference between reds and greens," he said.

Which is why you never get a Christmas gift from a horse! They don't see all the red and green decorations!

April Fooled

The great comedian and social commentator Lenny Bruce was hounded unmercifully (as all houndings seem to be) over his desire to express himself onstage in the ordinary language of the people. He was hauled into court so often that he started to believe he was the victim of unjust persecution. But he still could turn a joke, as when he suggested that "one of these days, a guy with a camera and a microphone is going to come out from behind some curtain and say, 'Wow, Lenny! You've really been a good sport! This whole thing has been a huge practical joke, and you played it just great!'"

Lenny was referring to a TV show called "Candid Camera," in which average people were filmed having practical jokes played on them. Practical jokes. The phrase has the word "joke" in it, but it's not always funny, depending on whose face is getting plastered with a cream pie. Hitting a stranger with a pie? Not all that funny. That's why the revered and beloved "Jackass" movies and shows work so well - for the most part, they get each other with pies and locked portapotties on giant springs and rooms to crawl through while nekkid and dodging mousetraps and bullfighting while blindfolded and I don't know what-all else. Sure, the foil is some stranger when Johnny Knoxville climbs a tree on a golf course and lets loose with an airhorn just as some golfer swings, but that's a golfer! Is there any other sort of person who's just begging for a good pranking than a golfer?

High school was always a fertile field in which to plant practical jokes. I remember a lot of us bringing in alarm clocks and stashing them in our lockers, setting them to go off during class. Or signing up for Library Study under the name "Richard E. Normus." Or rolling someone up in the wrestling mats and dropping me off in the girls' locker room, a Trojan Horse, if you will. I mean dropping "him" in the girls' room. Him, not me. I wasn't there. (ahem.) 

April Fool's jokes can be elaborate, and take hundreds of people working in concert to bring them off. As an example, the state of Georgia, where one would suppose that the leaders want as many people as possible to vote, recently came up with some bogus laws meant to make the public believe they were trying to limit voter turnout! Because the governor, who once appeared on television as the younger brother on "Those Doggone Kemps," a short-lived sitcom on the CW, was able to act like he was serious, the public actually believed that the Georgia Legislature made it illegal to give a person who had been standing in the southern sun for five hours, waiting to vote, a bottle of water.

In this recent photo, members of the Georgia legislature's republican caucus meet outside after lunch to plan their next humorous stunt.

Fox news

 A lot of people get all up in arms (their own arms, one supposes) over the dreaded scourge they call "cancel culture."

If you subscribe to a newsletter or podcast or whatever, and after a while you find you don't like the content and have no interest in following any longer, you have every right to cancel your subscription. For instance, I was sure I would enjoy hearing the "Ted Cruz reads Rudyard Kipling" Podcast, but after hearing a few of his mealy recitations, I decided I didn't give an "If."

When things are wrong, it's never too late to correct them. Take the Anne Arundel County School Board. They had some joker named George Fox as their superintendent of schools from 1916 - 1946, and only recently someone pointed out that during his superintendence, he openly opposed equal pay for Black teachers and had plenty of demeaning things to say about minorities as he danced about to the tune called by Jim Crow.

That is not the sort of legacy we would want the community to hold in pride.

But oh buddy!  Someone somewhere along the line thought it would be a great idea to name a middle school after him! George Fox Middle School is in Pasadena, and right on their website, they state their motto is, "We are focused on honoring our past, investing in the present, and being focused on the future."

If you want to honor your past, it's better to have a honorable past. So the school board has now decided to give GFMS a new name.

With a unanimous vote, board members disavowed the school's namesake.

“To have students sit in a building named for a man who championed Jim Crow and segregationist policies and structures does not align with the AACPS core value of All Means All,” said Jamie Hurman-Cougnet, a committee member and vice president of the George Fox Middle School PTSA.

It wasn't until last summer's national racial reckoning that school officials down there decided to look into the school's name heritage. A committee looked into the pros and cons of renaming the school, although it's very tough to see what the cons might have been. They recommended the change and the board agreed.

On they go with the renaming process. The school principal will meet with parents and have suggestion s submitted in writing, then share the suggestions with the board, which will make the final decision.

They cannot name the school after someone currently alive (leaves me out) or someone who died within the past three years. It would be good to make sure that, if they name the place after a person, that said person was not a racist.

For now, they can call it The Middle School Formerly Named For An Awful Man.

Boater Suppression

All around the world, boats carry people and cargo and fishing gear and coolers full of beer.

We also have to make sure they carry liability insurance, because here's what can happen.

Small scale:  Florida police say a 40-foot boat fell off a trailer last week, and blocked several lanes of traffic on a busy interstate for several hours. 

This took place on I-10 in Crestview, FL, the county seat of lovely Okaloosa County.  Police say the boat trailer was swaying violently like a horse dislodging flies as the pick-'em-up truck that was dragging it crossed under State Road 85 and the trailer hit a guardrail.

I hear "I-10 at State Road 85" and I see Waffle House, Waffle Hut, House of Waffles, and Cracker Barrel, all nearby.

Anyhow, the boat broke loose, flipped over a time or two and came to rest on the traveled portion of the roadway, blocking both lanes of 10. The truck wound up in the median.

No one was hurt in all this, except for the pride of the driver and the many irate Floridians who didn't get to the Piggly Wiggly on time to take advantage of the big sale on boiled peanuts.

Large scale: worldwide commerce was drastically affected when a 1,300-foot, 220,000-ton container ship blocked traffic in the Suez Canal for nearly a week, and that ain't peanuts.

The world watched yesterday morning as finally the great ship was freed and once again afloat as we see in the picture above.

The ship is called the Ever Given, and as of lunchtime yesterday it was slowly headed up north in the canal, as thousands cheered. It was a week ago today that  high winds and low visibility lodged the mighty vessel cross-ways in the canal, running it aground. That shut down all ship traffic in one of the world's most vital waterways.

Ever Given has a beam of 200 feet, making it one of the largest container ships at sea, so having the canal clear for others to pass by makes everyone beam!

Billions of dollars of cargo, and everything you and I just ordered from Amazon, has been floating around for a week. Some shipping lines were considering taking the long way around, down by the Cape of Good Hope, the southern tip of Africa.

Fun fact: the Cape of Good Hope was originally named the Cape Of Storms way back in the 1480s by  a Portuguese explorer named Bartolomeu Dias. Somewhere along the way, some Chamber of Commerce people sat down and said, "Maybe calling it "the cape of storms" is bad for business. Let's hold a contest for a new name!"

The Wright Stuff

We talked before about when an astronaut, against all regulations and good sense, packed a corned beef sandwich in his gear as he went into space. It's not so much that it seemed like a fraternity-prank sort of thing to do, but spaceships really need to have a pure atmosphere, and a little crumb of bread or a caraway seed from the rye bread could cause problems up there. So, no. 

But on the recent excursion that Perseverance took to Mars, they packed up a little surprise for the world.

The little surprise was a small piece of the fabric from the wing of the 1903 Wright Flyer, the first airplane. The helicopter is nicknamed Ingenuity. It rode to Mars along with the rover from Perseverance.

Sometime very soon - between now and April 8 - the plan from NASA is for Ingenuity to take the first powered, remote controlled flight on another planet. In the words of Bobby Braun, the director for planetary science at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, that will be a real “Wright brothers’ moment.”

Wilbur and Orville Wright were from Dayton, Ohio, and that's where they have the Carillon Historical Park. That museum donated the postage-size piece of muslin from the plane’s bottom left wing.

In 1903, the Wright plane flew 12 seconds for a distance of 120 feet. This little bit of the wing that went aloft that day just traveled 300 million mile to Mars, And Steve Lucht, curator of the Carillon Park, said the cloth had the blessing of the Wrights' great-grandniece and great-grandnephew.

“Wilbur and Orville Wright would be pleased to know that a little piece of their 1903 Wright Flyer I, the machine that launched the Space Age by barely one quarter of a mile, is going to soar into history again on Mars!” Amanda Wright Lane and Stephen Wright* said in a statement provided by the park.

It's just a wee little helicopter, all of 4 pounds, and the goal is to have it rise 10 feet in the extremely thin Martian air. Imagine controlling that from 300 million miles away. Imagine how long that cord is! 

The swatch is attached to the underneath part of the 'copter's solar panel, seen below. 

*Stephen Wright is not to be confused with comedian Steven Wright, who said, "I went to a fancy French restaurant called 'Deja Vu.' The headwaiter said, 'Don't I know you?'"

Sunday Rerun: Playing the library card

 

There is a town in Texas, a state that seems to pride itself, with the exception of the good citizens of Austin, on becoming a barren land of howling lunatics, called White Settlement.

In 2010, the White Settlement Public Library, in need of cheap rodent control, hired a kitten right out of the local animal shelter. They named him "Browser," this docile grey tabby, and put him to work at once.

He must have been doing a fine job de-mouseulating the joint, and he was happy as a cat in a library until July, when some city hall worker got all worked up because he was told he could no longer bring his puppy to work.

Kwik Kwiz: What did the aggravated city employee do about being told he couldn't bring Poochie Dog to work?

a) he stopped bringing the dog to work and went back to work with renewed vigor and enthusiasm

b) he whined that the people at the library were allowed to have a cat

Elzie (you can see where his cowboy
hat mashed his hair down)

Of course he a) didn't and b) did. And this unnamed local drone got the matter before the White Settlement City Council, and during a meeting which surely rivaled the Philadelphia Congress sessions of 1776, the matter of Browser's continued residency at the libes was taken to a vote.

Only one councilperson, one Elzie Clement, 
 was catty enough to vote for giving Browser the gate. The others weren't feline like sending him back to the shelter, which is paid for by the city kitty.

Now, Mayor Ron White (not the comedian) (I guess) says Browser’s job title is now "Library Cat for Life."

"Browser is still employed and will be as long as he wishes to continue his duties as mascot and reading helper for the children at the library," White said.

(Not to mention his Mickey-hunting duties.)

Hizzoner the Mayor says he's getting litterboxes full of mail and messages for all over with support and offers to adopt Browser.

So it's a happy story all around, and, master storyweaver that I am, I saved the best for last:

Elzie Clements is a councilman no more, having been defeated in a landslide.

Meow.

The Saturday Picture Show, March 27, 2021

 

Oh, we know all about the tortoise and the hare. How about the tortoise and the butterfly, who could just as easily fly away but prefers the free lift?!

If only the car had one of those roof racks to carry a bicycle around...

This is the work of a person whose job it is to clean new houses just prior to settlement. That's in the wintertime. In summer, she mows patterns into the outfields at major league ballparks.

You don't see these together very often, if at all...a rainbow and a lightning bolt.

This kid is my kind of kid! He knows just which mask to wear on eye exam day!

Regardless of what you may have heard, this is the original nickel bag! I always loved Mr Peanut.

"For oft, when on my couch I lie, In vacant or in pensive mood, They flash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude; And then my heart with pleasure fills, And dances with the daffodils." A little Wordsworth on a Saturday morning...

People pay top dollar for this oil, made from the fat of that annoying big bird on the Liberty Mutual car insurance commercial. It's supposed to be good for all sorts of ailments, from dry skin to achy breaky hearts. I'll stick with Vap-O-Rub.

The Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington DC is in full swing through April 11.

With good reason, when I have supped on fine Chinese cuisine at China Taste, I feel like I have Wonton Brain. It looks like this!

Zoo's Blues

The situation: you're at a stuffy dinner party (the year is 2022) and there is a lull in the conversation. After a short period of "ahems" and "erruhhhs" and someone mentioning what cute thing Marmaduke said the other day, here's your chance to get a conversation going again.

Just ask "how long does it take an elephant to notice a damn fool daddy who brings his 2-year-old child into an elephant's den?

(Answer: 30 seconds!)  Just ask José Navarrete. Navarette, 25, fell out of the running for Father Of The Year in San Diego for being so poorly-thought out that he came up with the idea of clambering his way into the habitat of Asian and African elephants at the San Diego Zoo. Of course, as a true fool, he carried his daughter along, although you have to figure she was not up for the idea to begin with. It says here that José was looking to update his FB cover photo. What looks cooler than an enraged 12,000 lb. pachyderm thundering toward you?

So now José is facing a child cruelty charge for *allegedly* bringing his child into an elephant habitat at the Zoo on Friday, say San Diego police.

No one, human or otherwise, was harmed.

San Diego Police Sgt. Ariel Savage said the elephant was agitated when the intruder and his child appeared, and the peanut-eater seemed to be getting ready to charge.

It was a witness, Matthew Passiglia, who told the TV news that only took about 30 seconds for the elephant to notice Navarrete. "A lot of people froze and didn’t know really how to take it in, then immediately everyone was pleading with him and then it became frantic and hysterical," Passiglia said.

"It was a big roar. [The elephant] stuck its head up in the air and its tusks and he started trotting toward them," Passiglia said.

Passiglia says people were trying to help Navarette get back on the side of sanity and safety, but the poor fool tripped and dropped his unlucky child, as the mighty beast got within 5 feet.

"I didn’t think it was going to end well. There was a moment when the elephant had the option and luckily the elephant took a second guess and there was confusion right there on the floor with them," Passiglia said.

And then, just before the elephant got to the fence, Navarrette scooped up his child and got back over the fence as the Loxodonta africana stuck his giant tusks through the fence.

Arrested on child cruelty charges, Navarette is being held on $100,000 bail and will be arraigned on March 30.

He should be glad I'm not the judge.

 

Crab Goes On a Trip

Just the other day we talked about a walrus who hitched a ride on an ice chunk from the Arctic Circle all the way to the coast of Ireland. I assume someone gave him a lift home. 

But now comes the story of another marine animal - a thousand times smaller and tastier - who took a sea voyage. It's Maryland's own “Chesapeake blue crab,” a native of the Western Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico which somehow turned up on Dollymount Strand recently.  Dollymount Strand is a beach, and blue crabs go to beaches all the time. But this beach is in Dublin, Ireland!

And Ireland's National Biodiversity Data Centre says the CB crab is bigger and more competitive that local Irish crabs, and that the female can lay up to six million eggs a year.

So, if enough Blue crabs wind up in Ireland, the Irish crabs would lose, and we would have to start shipping mallets, National Beer, and Old Bay seasoning to the Emerald Isle. They have their own newspapers for use as tablecloths.

As attempts to interrogate the crab proved fruitless (who likes fruit with crabs, anyway?) the Irish are still stumped as to how the crab wound up over there. Actually, there have been two sightings at Dollymount, but the hope is that it was the same crab, seen twice. 

And they are hoping that blue crabs will not feel so welcome in their area. By comparison, the Chesapeake Bay, and of course the Gulf, are much warmer than the Irish Atlantic Coast, so maybe this will one will text his family members back home here and tell them not to swim over.

Irish officials say that maybe someone released the crab over there, hoping they were doing the right thing, but if they were to proliferate, it could disrupt an entire food chain, so "never release a non-native into the wild."

And we need them over here this summer, so don't send them to Ireland, please.

 

It's on tape

I still have a couple thousand audio cassettes around the house, as well as the equipment to record and play them. The technology is far from perfect, but I come from the days when we were thrilled to have a record player and if you liked a song, you had to go get the record of it.

Cassette recorders changed all that, and we have a man named Lou Ottens to thank for their creation.  He just died a couple of weeks ago at age 94, over in the Netherlands. Without him, our music was just a stack of records, but once he figured out how to put tiny tapes in a tiny shell, we had our mixtapes and playlists!

Yes, we had reel-to-reel tapes, but the word for them was clunky and large. I guess that's two words. But they were not so practical to carry to the beach, or to provide background music at a reception, and they needed to be threaded, and all that mishegas. I worked with reel tapes, and they were usually major PITAs (or PsITA). A nice cassette recorder, with some blank tapes and fresh batteries, you could record anything, from the sound of the seashore to your cousin's wedding, both of which got a little salty.

So it was that Ottens, head of new product development in Hasselt, Belgium, for the Dutch Philips technology company, set out to shrink those big reels in the 1960s. 

A man named Zack Taylor (not to be confused with the 12th US president) has made a movie about the cassette story, and he says, "Lou wanted music to be portable and accessible."

Besides coming up with the great idea, Ottens wanted his product to be inexpensive and accessible to all. To this end, he persuaded Philips to allow all other manufacturers to use cassette technology for free, which allowed the new format to go global in no time at all.  It's true, we are seeing huge corporations sharing work and information on the coronavirus vaccines, but not with too many other products. When video tape cassettes became the logical child of Ottens's audio tapes, two different formats, VHS and Betamax, vied for the top slot, which meant that a lot of the "special" tapes your buddy had in that box in back of his basement were not usable anymore, because they were Betamax and no one had a Betamax player. There went the viewing parties for "Saturday Nut Fever." 

My favorite part of the whole deal was that Ottens, in trying to create something that really didn't exist, came up with a wooden block that would fit into a pocket easily. He used the wooden chunk as his ruler to make sure that whatever he and his team devised would be that small. That was the key!

And Lou Ottens's creation, the compact cassette, came out in 1963 and revolutionized the world of sound duplication. And Ottens was quite unsentimental about his brainchild. Over the years to come, as over 100 Billion cassettes were made and sold worldwide, he devoted his time to working on compact discs, and stated publicly that cassettes were "primitive and prone to noise and distortion" - problems not found in digital CDs.

And I would love to show you the original piece of wood that he used as a yardstick for his invention, but he smashed it, using it as a leverage prop for his jack while changing a tire on his car.

I hope he was listening to "Free Bird" on a cassette while he changed that tire!

Lucky

It would appear that people visit the Potawatomi Hotel & Casino in Wisconsin from all over the country. Even in these pandemic times, that's a lot of visitors, enough that someone there at the Potawatomi found enough time and visitors to poll 1,000 guests about what the #1 superstition is back home.

If you ask me, the #1 superstition in Maryland is "being on I-95 with a Delaware driver on your tail," but that one didn't make the list.

Think about all the things you'd sooner die than do (or not do): throwing salt over your shoulder when you spill the Morton's? holding on to luck pennies? freaking out when a black cat crosses your path? Knocking on wood to ward off evil spirits?

The casino poll shows that 65% of Americans believe in superstitions. And remember, this was a survey conducted among people who go to a large place and wager on cards, slot machines, and roulette wheels. And the location of the plebiscite might explain that 83% of their patrons believe in good luck, and only 50% say there's such a thing as bad luck.

I've never gone in for this throwing salt over my shoulder (except when the driveway is icy) but it is the most common superstition in 17 states! That's the odd thing about this game. Spilling salt means nothing to me, but lots of folks seem to feel that if they don't toss some sodium chloride over their left shoulder as soon as it happens, all sorts of horrible things will happen to them.

On the other hand, out of 50 US States plus DC, 17 of them have a large population going around spilling salt.

Anyhow, here's the breakdown of top misbeliefs and hoodoo all across the US:

Alabama - Throwing salt over shoulder

Alaska - Throwing salt over shoulder

Arizona - Owls are a bad omen

Arkansas - Throwing salt over shoulder

California - Lucky pennies

Colorado - Friday the 13th

Connecticut - Throwing salt over shoulder

Delaware - Throwing salt over shoulder

D.C. - Friday the 13th

Florida - Ladybug landing on you

Georgia - Good luck ladybug

Hawaii - Throwing salt over shoulder

Idaho - Throwing salt over shoulder

Illinois - Good luck horseshoe

Indiana - Lucky rabbit's foot

Iowa - Lucky pennies

Kansas - Throwing salt over shoulder

Kentucky - Throwing salt over shoulder

Louisiana - Lucky rabbit's foot

Maine - Throwing salt over shoulder

Maryland - Throwing salt over shoulder

Massachusetts - Four leaf clover

Michigan - Lucky prime numbers

Minnesota - Friday the 13th

Mississippi - Lucky rabbit's foot

Missouri - Lucky prime numbers

Montana - Bad luck comes in threes

Nebraska - Bad luck comes in threes

Nevada - Lucky prime numbers

New Hampshire - Bad luck comes in threes

New Jersey - Good luck ladybug

New Mexico - Lucky prime numbers

New York - Black cat crosses your path

North Carolina - Black cat crosses your path

North Dakota - Throwing salt over shoulder

Ohio - Throwing salt over shoulder

Oklahoma - Owls are a bad omen

Oregon - Owls are a bad omen

Pennsylvania - Good luck ladybug

Rhode Island - Throwing salt over shoulder

South Carolina - Black cat crosses your path

South Dakota - Bad luck comes in threes

Tennessee - Friday the 13th

Texas - Lucky pennies

Utah - Throwing salt over shoulder

Vermont - Bad luck comes in threes

Virginia - Friday the 13th

Washington - Lucky rabbit's foot

West Virginia - Throwing salt over shoulder

Wisconsin - Bad luck comes in threes

Wyoming - Throwing salt over shoulder

7777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777

I think I would choose Wisconsin if I had to live somewhere based on old husbands' tales, because I don't like odd numbers of anything. When I was on the radio, I didn't like to play records by the Three Degrees. I thought they should either add another singer or talk one into quitting. 

Be Less Miserable!

Any nugget of apparent wisdom that flows from me is quite accidental, I assure you. I don't take myself, or life itself, seriously enough to sit about opining and sharing deep and profound thoughts.

But one occurred to me the other day and I thought I'd run it up the flagpole to see how it unfurls. 

A friend of mine was done dirty by someone, and my first thought was that it was an act that resulted from a cry of jealousy. My friend has a lot of the qualities that might make one envious, although that is not any good reason for doing nasty things to a person.

But, just like the time that someone decided that a peanut butter sandwich could only be made better by adding a little jelly, I had one of those  A-Ha! moments, and it occurred to me to say that miserable people lead miserable lives, and that is their punishment.

Think about it! How many times have you known someone so captious and objectionable that they demean and deride everyone and everything? They're the people with the nasty bumper stickers. They're the people calling talk shows, yammering about things of which they do not know. They're the ones standing up at the PTA meeting calling for an end to sex education and same-sex dating and an end to being asked to volunteer for committees. They're the ones who try to get away with ethnic jokes because "Hey, I can say this, I'm a _______ myself!" They are the people who will steal a neighbor's newspaper or trash can; they're the porch pirates; they're the ones who don't tip servers and food delivery people. They're the ones who begin their restaurant order with "Gimme a _____"; they're the ones who take up two parking spots at the supermarket and then let their cart roll away freely. They're the ones who don't RSVP to a wedding invitation, or do reply in the affirmative and then don't show up. They click pens, rattle pocket change, and snap their gum.

They're the ones who steal from the charity collection bowls, or show up at food drives and load up on free chow, even though they are in no particular need.

And then when you wind up in the company of these people, you find that they have no grace, no warmth, no music, no comedy, no pet, and certainly very few friendships except with people of their own ilk - but they usually can't stand to be around them any more than you and I can!

They're sad and lonely people; even when they're with others, their hollow existences hold nothing. No one likes a mean person, not even other mean people.

So if you are the person who wronged my friend, keep wallowing. The good people always walk right past people like you, and miserable people sit by the wayside, jealous and looking for petty revenge.

If you're happy in life, that's the reward you get for being happy! And if you're miserable, you can always change, but you have to do it. The rest of us are too busy being happy to send you invitations.

Sunday Rerun: Musical Depreciation

 This happened a few years ago, but it still seems like it could happen today. Paula Dawning, the school superintendent of Benton Harbor, Michigan, would not allow the McCord Middle School marching band to play their version of rock classic "Louie Louie" at a Blossomtime Festival parade because, well, "Louie Louie."

"Louie Louie" is a song, originally written as a calypso tune in the 1950s by one Richard Berry, but when a group from Portland, Oregon, The Kingsmen, recorded it in 1963, it became a big to-do for this main reason. It was cheaply, and poorly, recorded. 

I mean super cheap, in a boxy room with one microphone hanging from the ceiling, which is why it sounds like singer Jack Ely was in Milwaukee phoning in his vocals. It would appear that only one take was made; 56 seconds into it, drummer Lynn Easton drops a drumstick (you can hear him shout a curse) and the whole thing just sounds shoddy on a technical level. On a musical level, at 2:02, Easton slams out a drum fill that has nothing to do with the beat or the melody whatsoever. And let's say that the guitarists and keyboard players were not exactly headed for glory either.

Again, because the record sounded so crappy, it was easy for the rumor to take root that the lyrics were really, really filthy. I remember guys in junior high passing around pieces of three-ring binder paper with the "real" lyrics scribbled on them, lyrics that took the song from one expressing the wistful wait for a love to come from another shore to this one and made it sound like something out of "Caligula."

We had nothing better to do, in that era after the Cuban Missile Crisis and before the Kennedy Assassination.

People love to think they're "in the know," getting the "real lowdown" from a guy who knew a guy whose sister dated the cousin of the bass guitar player from Frankie And The Frenchmen, who were such a hit last summer at Hampton Teen Center, until the drummer got grounded and Frankie's dad said he was tired of driving the band all over Towson every Friday night.  

Of course, this would never happen today, since the wise hands of true statesmen and stateswomen guide our ship of state, but the Federal Government of the United States of America, in the entities of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Postal Inspection Service, and the Federal Communications Commission spent two years and plenty of tax dollars looking into the matter of whether Sis and Junior were being ruined by these lascivious lyrics.  You can see the fruits of their labors here in the official, heavily redacted, files.  

Back to the Michigan misunderstanding, Superintendent Chalmers Dawning, as all good leaders will, blamed her staff for allowing the kids to even practice the song in the first place. "It was not that I knew at the beginning and said nothing," she said. "I normally count on the staff to make reliable decisions. I found out because a parent called, concerned about the song being played."

Ah. A PARENT called!  The bane of educators everywhere! A parent called and said this song is smutty and trashy, and without any further investigation, the marching band was forced to yield. 

Do you recall what was revealed, the day someone finally told you the real words?  

Louie, Louie, oh no, I said we gotta go
Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah I said
Louie, Louie, oh baby, I said we gotta go
A fine little girl, she waits for me
Me catch a ship across the sea
Me sail that ship all alone
Me never think how I'll make it home
Louie, Louie, no, no, no, no, no, I said we gotta go
Oh no, I said
Louie, Louie, oh baby, I said we gotta go
Three nights and days I sail the sea
I think of girl constantly
On that ship, I dream she there
I smell the rose in her hair
Louie, Louie, oh no, I said we gotta go
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah I said
Louie, Louie, oh baby, I said we gotta go
Okay, let's give it to 'em, right now!
Me see
Me see Jamaican moon above
It won't be long me see me love
Me take her in my arms and then
I tell her I'll never leave again
Louie, Louie, oh no, I said we gotta go
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah I said
Louie, Louie, oh baby, I said we gotta go
I said we gotta go now
Let's get on outta here
Let's go!