Roger and Out

It's summertime as of this weekend! And for many Marylanders, Delawarites, Pennsylvanians, Virginians and whatever you call people from other states, it's time to visit the Jolly Roger Amusement Park in Ocean City, MD. That is the gigantic seaside spot for bumper cars, go-cart tracks, Splash Mountain/Aqua Loop, a Wild Mouse, Jungle Golf, and a billion ways to spend your fun money. 

And sure, we know that the very term Jolly Roger connotes fun. Who doesn't like being jolly, and who doesn't like people named Roger?

But hold on. The black flag with a leering skull and crossbones that we call a Jolly Roger and associate with pirates is actually not a real Jolly Roger. There were, back in the glory days of high seas piracy, as many pirates plying their trade as there are varieties of Cheerios on the shelf, and that's a lot. This logo to the left developed over the years as a pirate flag, as many buccaneers used variations of it on their ships, but it was not the true Jolly Roger.

(Stop and think - why would a pirate fly a flag that says "I am here to pillage and plunder"? It's like a house burglar in the suburbs driving a white Chevy van with "J. Carson Bagswell - Residential Property Removal Specialist" painted on the side along with his phone number and, of course, his website ("Bagswellbagsyourstuff.com"). 

But I digress. The real Jolly Roger came from the pirate from Pembrokeshire, England, born Bartholomew Roberts, but better known as Black Bart. He originally had a flag showing a whole skeleton on a black background. and he started the trend. But he wore a red coat  Other pirates liked the design and copied it. Black Bart wore a red coat, so French sailors took to calling him "Le Joli Rouge" ("Pretty Red" in English). The pirate to the left is known as "Bartbeard."

British and American sailors then couldn't wait to turn a perfectly lovely phrase like that into a corrupted Franco-American one, so "Jolly Roger" came to mean the flag that Bart flew. It's here >> as it can be seen in the National Museum of the Royal Navy (NMRN) at Portsmouth Historic Dockyard.

The red background meant that no lives would be spared if Bart captured your ship.

Jolly well right! Tell the ticket taker at Splash Mountain about it.

Pointing fingers

Early one morning in June, 2015, a man named Kevin Jones, employed as a security guard at Pimlico Racetrack, was shot to death.  There is no doubt about that.

Who killed him is an issue that's bounced from courtroom to courtroom, and now to the downtown Baltimore waterfront bar called Sandlot.

Baltimore State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby and her office say that the murderer is one Keith Davis, Jr.  The first time they took him to trial, the result was a hung jury. Second time out, he was convicted by a jury, but his attorneys got that conviction overturned. Third time, another hung jury. 

Then in 2019, his fourth trial brought a conviction by jury of second-degree murder.  The judge sentenced him to 50 years.

And then...last week, Circuit Judge Sylvester Cox granted Davis, 29, a new trial, after the state's highest court said that Davis's defense lawyers had not been allowed to quiz prospective jurors about their feelings about a defendant's right not to testify.  

Davis, his legal team, and his wife still say he did not kill Jones, but that the police pinned the murder on him, chased him for no reason, and shot and wounded him, leaving a planted gun behind to bolster their case.  

So that's where things stand. One of these statements is true: Davis killed Jones, or he did not. Predictably, the case has jumped from the courthouse to the court of popular opinion, which is where people who don't know what happened that morning in June any more than you or I do nonetheless weigh in with their thoughts. It's how we do things, sad to say.

A certain percentage of citizens believe Davis to be innocent, the victim of police and prosecutorial misconduct. One such individual is Sean Gearhart, 32, who has played his bagpipes during at least one "Free Keith Davis, Jr" rally. 

Fate has ways of bringing people together. Last week, Mosby and some work colleagues were enjoying an evening out at this Sandbar when, all of a sudden, here came Gearhart, with his phone video cranking out a mini movie of him hollering at Mosby, and Mosby replying with hand gestures. 

At first she gave him the thumb, and then gave him the finger, so they say. 

“She flipped me off. That’s all that really happened. The whole ordeal lasted 10 seconds,” Gearhart said later. The photo below is a still from that video.

The first statement from Mosby's office, in reply to media questions, said, “This is clearly a thumb guys — enough already. Let’s move on.”

When more questions were raised about exactly which digit the State's Attorney proffered, Mosby said that Gearhart's actions were threatening.

“Last night while I was out with work colleagues, a male stranger aggressively biked towards me and two female friends and shouted into my unmasked face,” she said in a statement. “As he biked off, I responded the way any normal woman would to a threatening strange man. No woman — elected or otherwise — should be expected to put up with that type of behavior from a man.”

“I’ve been following the Keith Davis Jr. case since it happened,” Gearhart told the Baltimore SUN. “It’s clear that this is personal at this point.”

Zy Richardson, spokeswoman for Mosby, said that Davis supporters have been protesting outside the Mosby family residence, putting flyers on cars in her neighborhood, shouted her down at community forums, and shown up at her daughter's school.

Davis's supporters say they did no such thing at the school.

So that's where we are, and no matter how this next trial comes out, you can already see what the losing side will say - all this commotion has muddied the waters, making it impossible for the truth to be seen.

If you thought I wasn't going to have anything else to say, I'm sorry to let you down. 

First, I think it's time for the Baltimore State's Attorney's office to turn this prosecution over to a visiting prosecutor from another jurisdiction, someone uninvolved and uninterested in the case.

And...there was a time that judges and lawyers and the law were held in respect, but now, we have people riding on bikes in sandy waterfront bars hollering at the state's attorney, and the SA, for her part, making a hand gesture that might be seen as an umpire calling someone out at the plate, or suggesting that he go off and find satisfaction elsewhere. 

At any rate, the founding fathers are shaking their heads.

Has the name "Stormy" been on the list yet?

 

Look out! Here come The Hurricanes!

No, not Rory Storm And The Hurricanes, the bullpen band that Ringo Starr warmed up with before he got with The Beatles. No, the official list of storm names is out, and the fun will be seeing if any of the boys and girls from work and school will have their names buffeted about this summer. 

As always, the weather service predictors are calling for an “above-average" season. They say they can see where we might see as many as 20 named storms forming. And of those 20, maybe 10 will end up becoming hurricanes. (An average season has 14 named storms, of which 7 are hurricanes.) 

This will be on the test: a tropical storm takes one of these names when it features sustained winds of 39 mph. If/when those winds crank up to 74 mph; it's a hurricane.

Swiss people are noted for being neutral in all things. They are not hoping for storms, so don't blame them if we get a bunch this summer. The group that selects the names is the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), out of Geneva, and the names are chosen several years in advance, so just because someone named "Alvin" does something noteworthy one spring, it would have to be a coincidence to have that name on the list.

Same with "Simon" and "Theodore."

If you see your name on the list below, and if "your" storm turns out to be a really destructive or deadly one, the name is retired and you won't have to be tormented about it any more. Right, Katrina?

Hurricane Names 2021:

Ana

Bill

Claudette

Danny

Elsa

Fred

Grace

Henri

Ida

Julian

Kate

Larry

Mindy

Nicholas

Odette

Peter

Rose

Sam

Teresa

Victor

Wanda

"I'm a Neanderthal man..."

There are two key phrases in the world of journalism: "Who what when where why and how" cover the basic instructions to any brand new reporter off to cover a courthouse scandal, or deluxe scented candle, or an assault with an ax handle. The answers to those six questions will tell you all you need to know.

And the other shibboleth, or old custom, required a change in spelling. The concept is "Don't bury the lead," and they meant the "Lead me on" pronunciation, not the "led astray" pronunciation. But so that people wouldn't say "led" me on, they came up with a whole new word - lede - as in "Don't bury the lede."

An example of burying the lede would be "Laura Keene gave an outstanding performance as Florence Trenchard in 'Our American Cousin' at Ford's Theatre last night. A capacity crowd was moved to tears, laughter, and applause during the production, which continues to set box office records in the nation's capitol.

One disappointing aspect of the evening was that Abraham Lincoln, 16th US President, was shot and killed during the second act."

So no, don't bury the lede. Big news goes right up at the top of the story, which is why I found this amusing, during my daily perusal of the latest stories from the world or archeology.

It seems the people digging in Italy found the fossilized remains of nine Neanderthals at a prehistoric cave site south of Rome recently.  They came up with skulls, skull fragments, two teeth and some other bone pieces.

One of the skeleton crew is from between 90,000 and 100,000 years ago, and the other eight probably danced their last rhumbas 50,000 to 68,000 years ago.

All of this turned up at the Guattari Cave in San Felice Circeo, where a Neanderthal skull was discovered in 1939. Local officials say this makes Guattari Cave "as one of the most significant places in the world for the history of Neanderthals."

AND THEN! Here, all the way down at the bottom of the doggone article, they dig a ditch, throw the lede in, and bury it for all time, hidden away from all but the most gimlet-y of eyes: 

Neanderthals died out roughly 40,000 years ago, but small traces of their DNA still exist in modern humans.

So there it is, right from the Associated Press. Neanderthal blood and DNA still course through the veins of the guy who cut you off in traffic the other day, the person who didn't bother to bring their tv along when they moved here from Panama because it only got shows in Spanish, and certainly the person who thought that doubling a cookie recipe to make a double batch meant turning the oven up to 800°. The Neanderthals are still here, and every time we go on social media we see evidence that they are extant yet today.

I'll stop here, because there is a third rule: Don't overstate the obvious.

 

 

 

The Needle And The Contest Won

I'm thinking there should be a new malady associated with the pandemic. Let's call it "Covidnesia," for the tendency of some people to be slightly forgetful when it comes to the details of the pandemic that, might I remind you, has killed 590,000 Americans - so far.

Why I worry about people's memories is that they seem to forget that when the first vaccines came out around Christmas time, people were fairly clamoring to get theirs. Oh, how they hollered, and lined up, and called their cousin's ex-girlfriend's mother-in-law who used to be the Chief Admitting Nurse at Rick Springfield General Hospital to try to get in line. People were even willing to lie about their eligibility, just to get their pfix of Pfizer or their jolt of Johnson and Johnson.

Well, that was then, this is wow. Because from January, there has been a great diminution of demand for COVID vaccine. Not only that, but also, demand has gone way down!

And for all the public yakety-yak about how we'll be fine when we reach herd immunity (also known as "heard" immunity in some quarters), that takes having 70% of the public take the needles. Maryland isn't there yet, and do we think people will still come and get in line?

We do not, which is why affable Maryland governor Lawrence "Hulk" Hogan announced a new gimmick for Maryland residents - it's a chance to snag some serious moolah just for getting the free vaccine that might save your life.

So for this, people need to be paid?

The Maryland Department of Health and the Maryland Lottery have teamed up to create a new sub-lottery.

Beginning tomorrow, May 25, there will be a daily drawing with a prize of $40,000. The excitement doesn't abate until it reaches a crescendo on July 4, when the big winner will walk away with the grand prize of $400,000.

“Entry is very simple — all you have to do is get vaccinated here in Maryland, be a Maryland resident and be 18 or older,” Hogan said.

If you've already had the vax, you're entered, don't worry.  And the Director of Maryland Lottery and Gaming, Gordon Medenica, says it's all being  handled anonymously, so don't sweat about your personal info being used inappropriately. They are setting up a number string on a spreadsheet with name and contact info for each person who got the needle(s).

Hogan, always the master sloganeer, says, “Remember Marylanders: Get your shot for a shot to win. That’s a good line.”

The best news of all is that the prize loot is not coming from the Lottery prize bank, but, rather, from their promotional budget, which will mean fewer corny lottery ads on TV!

And that makes us all winners already!

Philadelphia freedom, I looove you, Yes I do!

Series television shows really got fancy in the 80's with some very clever writing and stories. There was the ending of "St Elsewhere," the medical show in which it turned out that the whole show was actually all in the mind of a young man who lived with autism, and saw a snow globe with a miniature version of the hospital.

There was "Newhart," which technically ended in the 90s, but the final scene was all about Bob Newhart dreaming that this show was all a dream. He woke up to tell his wife from the first show all about the nutty cast of the second.

And who can forget when "Dallas" had slipped in the ratings because Bobby Ewing died, so they had him come back, and the whole thing where he died was just a bad dream, since his wife found him taking a shower one morning a year later.

And the classic "L.A. Law" way of getting rid of an unlikeable character by having her descend in an elevator. Or not.

Which reminds me of a story from Philadelphia the other day. Philadelphia, you might have heard, is a large city in Pennsylvania, a state founded by pacifist Quakers, and Philly is a city where football fans once booed Santa Claus.

So, in a high rise building, three guys get into a fight, presumably over the longtime Phila controversy about whether Cheez Whiz or provolone is the better coagulation of milk casein to apply on a steak sub.

Whatever the reason, the brawl raged on, as brawls will, and it was all fun until they all fell at least eight stories down the elevator shaft.

I guess the eighth floor of the 251 DeKalb Apartments residence was not the best choice for a mêlée. One guy was atop the elevator car when it landed on the second floor and he was able to say, "Well, at least I didn't fall all the way to the first floor!" like the other two did. 

"The steel elevator door, when you push the button the door opens, they broke through that door and there was no elevator there so they just fell eight floors to the bottom,” said Upper Merion Police Lt. Al Elverson, a master of breaking things down for easy understanding.

Tenant Derrell Washington told the local news, “That’s not an elephant that flew into the elevator. It’s three humans. I’m pretty sure it was faulty equipment.”

“Elevators are supposed to have a bunch of fail-safes so I don’t know why it would’ve had trouble,” fellow resident Jared Day added.

All three combatants were transported to local hospitals and given huge salty pretzels*.  Meanwhile, back at the apartments, Nicole Coello was saying,"I saw a lady earlier today and she was taking her dog and her dog was scared but she was like I’m not taking the elevator right now and she was pushing it downstairs."

And that's all I know about it.

* another local favorite 

Sunday Rerun: This Will Bug You

 The Top 20 Countdown is in, and my town is #15 with a bullet! Or a stinger.

The list we speak of is the list of the most mosquito-ridden towns in America, to wit:

1. Atlanta
2. New York 
3. Washington, D.C. 
4. Chicago 
5. Houston
6. Dallas-Ft. Worth, Texas 
7. Detroit 
8. Philadelphia 
9. Charlotte, N.C.
10. Raleigh-Durham, N.C.
11. Phoenix 
12. Los Angeles 
13. Boston 
14. Miami 
15. Baltimore 
16. Richmond, Va.
17. Nashville 
18. Tampa 
19. Indianapolis 
20. St. Louis 

Actual Jersey Mosquito

By listing Philadelphia at #8, the good people at Orkin, who produced this list to remind you to use their services, must be including the South New Jersey area as well, because, as fierce as Baltimore 'skeeters are, the ones in New Jersey are the only ones I have ever seen with their own hangars.

Now and then, someone will say, "What a wonderful world it would be if there were no mosquitoes!"  Come on now, George Bailey, there is room for all of God's critters here on earth.  But mosquito larvae are very important for the ecology of aquatic life, because others bugs and little fish eat them, and then become food for bigger feeders.

So, then. Mosquitoes are here to stay, and there are ways to at least keep them away from your place.

1. Dump out any standing water near your home. Mosquitoes will date, mate, and reproduce in 14 days (faster than Harry and Meghan!) if there is still water in any old container around the yard. So if you have a pond, have a waterfall or fountain put in to keep the water moving around.

2. Keep them outside. Use screens on the windows.

3. Use a mosquito repellent. You pick the brand, but make sure to slather it on your ankles, feet, lower legs and wrists. That's where your skin is thinnest, making you easy pickin's.

4. Wear light-colored clothing outdoors. Colors such as black, navy blue and red stand out to a bug, according to bug eye doctors (as opposed to bugeyed doctors). Also, wear clothing outdoors. You know why.

5. Stay indoors at dusk and dawn. That's when the little anklebiters are hungry for breakfast or dinner. You're safe at lunch; that's when they all go to the buffet.

6. Make yourself less of a target. Don't drink beer or fail to shower - they love the odor you put out when you're belting back the Buds and haven't used your Irish Spring yet. BUT slather on a little Victoria’s Secret Bombshell perfume or Avon’s Skin So Soft Bath Oil, and the bugs will leave you alone for someone who had one beer and zero showers. — a popular mom’s remedy.




Feel free to print this out, and mount it on stiff cardboard, which you can use to swat mosquitoes.

The Saturday Picture Show, May 22, 2021

 

Oh, I'm sure there are other ways...

As a fan of ventriloquism, I am fortunate enough to have been the right age to see Shari Lewis and Lamb Chop in her first show ("The Shari Lewis Show," NBC, 1960 - 1963) and her second ("Lamb Chop's Play-Along," PBS, 1992 - 1997). It's good to see the old wool puppet still get some play time! 

No humans will be injured by Bucket Hat Boy here, but dozens will be fooled!

"Hey Mom! What's for dinner?"

An abandoned house in midtown Detroit. Think of what this used to be, how many happy memories were made there, and how many more could be made after someone puts some rehab money into it!

If this is not called "Monster Rock," someone is missing out on a sure tourist opportunity!

Great idea - a view with a room! 

The competition ends right here. You can't find better camouflage than this, from the Turkish Army. We wanted to give the designer a prize, but we couldn't find him.

The city government of Paris, France, thought they were doing a good thing to buy a fleet of electric cars for their officials to scoot down the Champs-Élysées on their way to La Tour Eiffel and the colorful Sous-vêtement. But, you know what they say about good intentions. Replacement batteries are currently prohibitively expensive, and the city had already passed environmental laws making it illegal to dispose of used electric car batteries. So here sit these defunct vehicles in a giant cimetière automatique. C'est dommage.

This has the look of an old painting, but it's a new (2019) painting of old books. It is entitled "Old Books," and it was done by Elena Nikolaeva. I love the texture and even the musty smell of old books!

Workin' 9 to 5

We turn now to a topic that I have avoided like poison.

Overwork.

Don't you love how a group of experts will do a long detailed study to come up with a totally obvious conclusion? 

• Gargling with gasoline can be dangerous!
• People who drive while drunk tend to be involved in car accidents!
• Ham and cheese together on a kaiser roll makes a tasty sandwich!
• Working long hours poses an occupational health risk that kills hundreds of thousands of people each year, according to the World Health Organization!

You really didn't have to do much to convince me, but the WHO says "People working 55 or more hours each week face an estimated 35% higher risk of a stroke and a 17% higher risk of dying from heart disease, compared to people following the widely accepted standard of working 35 to 40 hours in a week."

This came out in a WHO study published this week in the journal Environment International.

"No job is worth the risk of stroke or heart disease," WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. He wants governments, businesses and workers to find ways to protect workers' health.

The study dates back to 2016, when 488 million people suffered the hazard of working long hours. And more than 745,000 people of them died that year from overwork that resulted in stroke and heart disease.

Of course, the statistics don't even touch this past year, when COVID-19 threw a giant wrench into the works all over the world. But one trend that developed, and seems likely to stay around, is telework, and all indications are that people whose home becomes their office or workplace tend to put in more hours on their tasks, because the home/work borders melt away.

"Teleworking has become the norm in many industries, often blurring the boundaries between home and work," Ghebreyesus said. "In addition, many businesses have been forced to scale back or shut down operations to save money, and people who are still on the payroll end up working longer hours."

One of the saddest things I have ever heard is when people packing for vacation also pack up their office laptop, and plan to keep up with office emails, and the vicissitudes of the O'Callahan account, and that Brown & Serve merger on the west coast. It seems to me that it's insecurity, more than ambition, that drives this "gotta work 24-7" mentality. People worry that that new man or woman is angling to take their job away.

If you're good at your job, do it and go home. There is a life out there for you. People who stick around the office til 9 PM (and you know who they are; they always say something like "I heard a noise from your office last night about 8:30. I hope everything was ok, but you weren't there...") are just saying they aren't capable of getting their job done on time.

And I'll be even more blunt. If you disappear tomorrow, sure, the gang will miss you. They'll send flowers, they'll clean out your desk, they'll mention your name for a week, tops. Then someone else will slide right on in there, and life will go on, trust me.

As Casey Stengel said, "The parks are full of statues of people whom everyone used to think were indispensable." 

Son of a Bee

In some places, the very sight of a bee causes panic, screaming, running away from them, and even the introduction of a can of insect killer into the situation.

And while it is true that I once had an unfortunate (for both of us) encounter with a bee who happened to be on my lawn one morning when I stepped out barefoot to retrieve the newspaper, I don't fear bees; I respect them and I enjoy their contributions to our wellbeing.

In the South American nation of Colombia, the world's second-most biodiverse country, there are at least 550 varieties of bees. That's the count from the environment ministry, and even they say there might be as many as 1,445 bee species down there.

So it's not surprising that bees in Colombia get pampered like nowhere else. As a matter of fact, in the town of Barbosa, the Aburra Valley Metropolitan Authority is building tiny hotels to give unswarmed solitary bees a place to rest up and charge up after a busy day spent pollinating.

These little teeny Holiday Inns are wooden hexagonal constructions, and have plastic roofs to keep sleepy bees dry in the rain. Inside under the roof, a bee will find bamboo canes to allow for a night of undisturbed sleep.

"It's like a hotel because here they're going to have a quiet moment in their room  before setting off again," said Hector Ivan Valencia, an assistant for the local authority's risk management unit. There's no mention of air conditioning or cable tv.

After checkout time, Valencia and his colleagues take small paint brushes and clean out the "hotel rooms."

"If this were a regular hotel, I'd be one of the people cleaning the rooms," Valencia said.

(Hector, better make sure that everyone has checked out before you start sweeping!)

Bees play a vital part in agriculture, of course. They fertilize plants, and for all their trouble, they are threatened by what humans do. Pesticides, fertilizers, and climate change are challenges to bee survival.

The authorities in the Aburra Valley are doing what they can to help the bees, and their ten municipalities (including Barbosa and Colombia's second city, Medellin) are putting up the hotels to help the buzzers.

"Globally (bees) are being negatively impacted and they are losing more spaces every day," says Juan David Palacio, director of the metropolitan area's environmental and transportation authority, by way of explaining why they want to help.

Valencia points out that most people are aware that honey bees are in danger, but the solitary, pollinating, bees, need some love too. 

"These little bees are supremely sensitive to poisons and since they don't produce honey no one speaks up for them, so we're coming to the rescue," he said.

It doesn't take much to help the world be better. Be Best, as they say!

The Champ of all Half-wits

You can say what you want about Rick Schroder - a one-time fairly well-known actor who was in the remake of "The Champ" as a little kid, wound up on "Silver Spoons" and "NYPD Blue," and was last seen playing Dolly Parton's father in two TV movies about Dolly's childhood - but you can't claim that he is still famous. Most people wouldn't know who in the hall he is.

At 51, Schroder has become one of "those people" who decide to lambast people who work at stores and restaurants over things those harried employees do not control. Over the weekend, he was able to find time in his busy schedule of not being an actor any more to make a trip to Costco in Los Angeles.

Now, the California law still requires people who work and shop there to wear masks, so even though the CDC said last week that it’s safe for fully vaccinated people to skip face-coverings inside, that law still supersedes what the CDC says. If you watch the video, you will see an extraordinarily patient front-end manager named Jason explaining to the washed-up thespian why he needs to cover the face that no one recognizes anymore anyway.

That's not good enough for this Schroder, who was last in the headlines for ponying up $150,000 to bail out Kyle Rittenhouse, the irritating child from Illinois who got his mommy to drive him to Wisconsin so he could shoot protesters. 

When his complaints about how the government has ruined his life fall on deaf ears, Schroder demands a refund on his membership dues, which gives him maybe $50 to work with when he goes to stock up on Alka-Seltzer, peanut butter, and books that will be turned into movies that won't have Rick Schroder in the cast.

He then urges all of California to renounce their Costco memberships, as people continue to mill past him to shop, grateful to be freed of the sound of his voice.

Rick, left, and the poor man who had to endure his stupidity on the right.

I urge everyone to take a look around at themselves - "take stock," as my parents used to exhort me to do. If you find that you are the sort of person who takes time to argue with people who are manning the front door at a warehouse store, if you're the guy who demands free stuff and extra service and imported soy milk instead of half-and-half, if you're "that guy" who won't let a cashier scan your food so that laser beams don't befoul your yogurt, if you pull up at Jittery Joe's Java Hut and ask for a "hot iced coffee," maybe it's time to change before you become a tool the size of Rick Schroder.

A buoy named Suez

You remember Driver's Ed, right? Poor Mr Adkins, at Towson High, had the uncool job of sitting in the passenger seat of a BA Chevy Biscayne while young drivers careered through the streets of Towson and surrounding communities. Driver's Ed wasn't mandatory then, but if you passed it, you saved on insurance, so, yeah. Nerves of steel, that man had. Oh, and he had a brake pedal on his side of the car, but no steering wheel.

You also will recall earlier this year when the Ever Given cargo ship got wedged in the Suez Canal waterway in Egypt. The BA ship was turned sideways by high winds and a sandstorm, and anyone who remembers trying to parallel park that Biscayne between two stanchions surely remembers the feeling of being wedged in.

There is a sort of Driver's Ed program in Port Revel, France, and the hope is that cargo captains can learn to avoid the fate of the Edmund Fitzgerald Ever Given by taking the course, which uses replica boats in the middle of a French forest and is supposed to teach those captains and pilots how to navigate the Canal.

It's a scale model -  one twenty-fifth the size of a passage in the real Suez.  The philosophy is, if you can learn to get a ship through in this tiny likeness, you'll have no problem with the real thing.

"It's a bit hard to recreate sandstorms," said  Francois Mayor, the managing director of the Port Revel training facility. "But we have gusts of wind which will push our ship to one side or another."

Instructors know what to expect on the real waterway, so they create fake steering problems and engine outages to see how trainees handle themselves.

"You have little space to maneuver. You have to be particularly focused," said Mayor.

And just to keep it really real, they also have a mini-San Francisco Bay, and an ersatz Port Arthur, Texas, to teach docking and maneuvering cruise ships and tankers through those crowded ports. Turbines beneath the surface create currents and waves.

Mayor expects to see lots of trainees soon, as shipping firms try to avoid another massive snafu like the Ever Given incident, which blocked a vital shipping canal for six days and cut global trade off.

"After each accident... we see new clients coming," said Mayor. "The cost of training at Port Revel is nothing like the cost of having a vessel like that stuck for a day."

Attention, Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration! This could be a great idea for some of our less-than-adroit motorists. Send them to France!

Not for training. Just send them to France.

Subterranean Homesick Blues

We've been talking about it since 2004, and here they are again - the once-every-17 year hatch of periodic cicadas is busting out of their long subterranean dormancy all across the eastern United States. And they are gonna be LOUD. And ugly.

In years past (2004, 1987 and 1970, in my memory) they were here by early May, but just like you and me, they didn't want to get out of bed while we enjoyed a chilly early May this year. The cicada nymphs that have been getting their nutrition from tree roots all the years are coming out of the ground, shedding their exoskeletons, and looking for mates. 

First, they ought to stop off at the dry cleaners and pick up their good outfits, and maybe get some decent shoes to go a-courtin'!

Dr. Jessica Ware, an associate curator of invertebrate zoology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, has been looking forward to this month since May, 2004, a month memorable for Massachusetts becoming the first U.S. state to legalize same-sex marriage, the Arizona Diamondbacks' Randy Johnson throwing a perfect game (2-0 vs Atlanta), the final episodes of "Friends" and "Frazier" airing on TV, the entire town of Hallam, Nebraska, being wiped out by a powerful 2.5 mile wide F4 tornado, with but one fatality, and a horse with the cool name of "Smarty Jones" winning the Kentucky Derby. 

"May is going to be a loud month, for sure, for cicadas," said Ware, a bit too happily, if you ask me. "It's kind of exciting to think about Brood X emerging because the last time these individuals were above ground was in 2004.  And so when you think about it - a lot's happened in the last 17 years," said Ware.

In much the same way that 17-year-old American males seek to attract mates by playing Luke Bryan too loudly, showing off giant belt buckles and turned-around ball caps, and hollering, "Duuuuuuuude! Watch this!," 17-year-old male cicadas emit a mating chirp by vibrating a plate called a tymbal located on their abdomens.

If American teenaged males had a tymbal, so would they.

"It's this kind of dance; males are showing that they can call as loud and as long as possible, which means they're probably a good mate. Females are listening. Are they calling loud? Are they calling long?... it's kind of a complicated acoustic dance that they're doing," Ware says. 

It must be similar to dancing the "Renegade" on TikTok, but cicadas are not online.

Ware wants us to remember that cicadas are harmless, and they become part of the food chain, supplying snackage for food for birds, animals and other insects.

This all takes place in the mid- Eastern United States, from down in East Tennessee to southern parts of New York.

Sorry, Kansas, Utah, California, Texas. You can join me in feeling sorry for the cicadas that can't get dates and then wind up as a squirrel's lunch.

Sunday Rerun (from July 2020): Life's Path

 It's 1983, December, and Deirdre Taylor is 4 years old, living in a loft apartment in the SoHo section of New York with her mother. When a fire broke out in the apartment, a man on the street hollered to a firefighter who was doing one of the side duties the Fire Dept handles - checking water pipes in buildings for adequate pressure.

That firefighter ran up to the apartment and found Taylor's young mom, who was screaming for help to save her baby. He was Vincent Pugliese, who served the city of New York for decades before retiring 24 years ago. He remembers that day vividly, naturally.

Deirdre today

He ran up to the sixth-floor apartment and rescued Deirdre's mom, who gasped that her daughter was still inside the smoke-filled apartment.

"She kept screaming, 'My baby!' so I went back in and found a young girl who was unconscious," says Pugliese, recounting that he gave the child rescue breathing until she came back to consciousness.

Deirdre told CNN recently, "I always knew I came close to losing my life that day. Without him, I wouldn't be here. I had a second chance at life, thanks to him."

Fast-forward to 2020. Remember how, when New York City was hit so hard by COVID cases this spring, nurses and doctors from all over the nation came to help them out?  Deirdre Taylor is an emergency room nurse in Alexandria, Virginia now, and she was one of those volunteers.  Before she left to fly to NYC, she took along a tattered old newspaper about a firefighter who saved a little girl there a long time ago.

Along life's path, Deirdre met her husband, and they have two kids. She always wondered about that brave fireman who save her life, but found nothing about Vincent Pugliese online.

Vincent today

She spent two months doing valiant service at BYU Langone Hospital in Brooklyn, and found out a secret, which is that firefighters either know everybody who ever was in the fire department, or they know someone who knows someone who does. She asked a firefighter whom she met in the hospital, and he called the captain of FDNY Ladder 20 in Manhattan, and that led her directly to her hero.

She called him and was glad to make the connection! "I wondered about him on 9/11 and hoped I would get the chance to thank him, and I finally did," said Taylor.

Pugliese is 75 years of age now, and says she was "on cloud nine" when he got that call from Taylor.

Vincent has had that same newspaper article, framed, hanging on the wall of his home in Spring Lake, NJ, for all these years as well. "The two of us just sat there crying on the phone," he told CNN. "She turned out to be a remarkable woman with a magnificent life."

Taylor was just a tot when Pugliese saved her, so of course her memories are sketchy, but he says, "I didn't see her ever again after that, but I always wondered about her."

He was awarded the Walter Scott Medal for Valor for his rescue of Taylor, who joined the Army on her 17th birthday and became a National Guard helicopter pilot before she started her family.  Military service is something else the two share; he was a Marine in Vietnam before joining the FDNY.

"On top of that, we're both die-hard Yankees fans!" said Taylor, proving that no one, no matter how heroic, is perfect.

They haven't met up, but they do chat on the phone, and have made plans to go see a Yankee game with her family. This year, that might just take another miracle, but we'll see.

The Saturday Picture Show, May 15, 2021

 

Let's start today with a sunset view of Cairo, Egypt. Not every city has a view of the ancient pyramids.

This ad probably appeared in the late 1950s and here we are, STILL waiting for plug-in electric flying carpets. Hurry up, already!

Homeowners' Corner: Why go to Lowe's and purchase high-priced shower heads when Dollar Tree sells just what you need, but in the garden aisle?

There was a time when the simple process of finding out what time it is involved pulling out a pocket watch, which was carried on a chain attached to something called a fob. I notice fewer and fewer people using watches, on the wrist or in pockets, anymore. A lot of people will tell you, they rely on their cell phones to tell them the time. Even more will tell you they just don't care what time it is!

This week in 1972 saw the release of the Rolling Stones' "Exile On Main Street," featuring great tunes like "Tumbling Dice" and Keith Richards's "Happy." It hardly seems like it's been 49 years.

Someone drew this with markers. If you stare at it for 49 years, you will hear "Tumbling Dice" in your mind.

Some really cool mom put a handmade cartoon in her kid's lunchbox every Monday just to get the week off to a good start. And the kid saved them! What a treasure!

When squirrels build their nest up against your window...

We never thought we would see Fonzie go fishing. Ayyyyyyyyyyyy!

Starting today, I am going to make sure all my desserts are labeled, so as to avoid confusion.

What in the hill

We Americans like to say that something clearly superior is "the bee's knees," but in Australia, the superlative gets called "the ant's pants."

And with more than 12,000 species of ants all over the world, that's a lot of pants! Here's how they break it down: In any ant colony, you'll find three kinds of ants:  The queen, the female workers, and males.

Funny, that's how it is in most workplaces! (Notice, it said female WORKERS, and males. Draw your own conclusion about how stuff gets done.)

Second graders will find this interesting: An ant can lift 20 times its own body weight. I mean, you've seen them carrying cake crumbs the size of Joe Pesci! But if you second graders were as strong as ants, you would be able to lift a car! So give it up for the ants, unless you can lift a car.

While I was looking up stuff about ants (because I wanted to write about Ansan, a city in South Korea, but I didn't get far enough in the dictionary) I discovered that at one time on earth, the total weight of ants running around on earth equaled the total weight of people.

Entomologists  - or "bug experts" - figure there are at least one million trillion insects among us. One percent of them are ants. 

That comes to ten thousand trillion ants. 

2,000 years ago, Before the days when there was a froyo stand on every corner and people were less, uh, corpulent, if you had a giant scale, and had all the ants on one side and all the humans on the other, it would have balanced out perfectly, says Francis Ratnieks, professor of Apiculture at the University of Sussex.

Professor Ratnieks would probably agree, that would look silly, all those people stomping on all those ants.

Murder is forever

 

The more you read about some people, the more you can't believe most people.

You heard about these two young Americans who went to Italy for a good time and wound up in hell. Finnegan Lee Elder was 19 in July, 2019, when he and his old high school buddy Gabriel Christian Natale-Hjorth, then 18, tried to purchase cocaine on a Roman street corner. Big surprise, they got burned, so they robbed the guy who had steered them to the drug dealer. They took his backpack and demanded 100 Euros and a bag of cocaine if he wanted it back.

Natale-Hjorth, left, Elder, right

The man agreed, and also notified the police. Italy's Carabinieri paramilitary police force got in on it, and in the early morning of July 26, 2019, Carabinieri Vice Brigadier Mario Cerciello Rega, 35,  and his partner met the two American idiots near their swanky hotel.

The police were in plainclothes. Next thing you know, they all four were fighting, and Elder allegedly stabbed Cerciello Rega 11 times with a 7" combat knife that he wisely packed for his big trip (remember this fact!). Meanwhile Natale-Hjorth was busy belting Cerciello Rega's partner repeatedly, according to prosecutors. 

Cerciello Rega had just come back to the job after his honeymoon. He died at age 35 from his wounds.

The two young Americans were sentenced to life in prison.

Two years later, here come Ethan and Leah Elder, parents of the man who killed a policeman, to tell "Good Morning America" that they are concerned about their son's mental health behind bars.

The Elders

"We just want Finn to be able to survive this," Leah Elder said. "He has a noted history of attempted suicide, and we're really worried and really concerned. He was utterly devastated by the verdict, just devastated. It was completely unexpected for him."

(He went to a foreign country and killed a cop and he didn't expect to get sent to prison.)

During the trial, Elder's mother testified that he had attempted to commit suicide several times in the past.

"He struggles with anxiety and depression, and his current situation is really perilous," she said.

(Knowing this, she sends him off to Italy, rather than making sure he gets treatment.)

Elder's parents told the morning show that he is "incredibly kind, incredibly sensitive" and "painfully honest."

"He does not see a reason to lie," Leah Elder said of her son. "From the moment Finn was detained, he has not changed his version of that night one iota."

(Simply telling the truth does not relieve one of the burden of guilt.)

Elder, the incredibly honest young man, and Natale-Hjorth were seen on surveillance video running away from the murder, still holding the backpack they had ripped off. A block away, at their hotel, police found their bloody clothing and the murder weapon stashed in the ceiling.

Elder and Natale-Hjorth were questioned by police and confessed.

Natale-Hjorth testified that the amazingly kind and sensitive Elder told him to hide the knife he had just used to kill a newlywed policeman.

Elder's parents said that their boy was "illegally interrogated" by police "without a lawyer present."

(But he was always honest.)

"We raised Finnegan, as I’m sure many other parents do, to tell the truth and things will be okay," Ethan Elder said. "And part of his utter devastation at this verdict is he has told the truth from the very moment he was being illegally interrogated."

("I admitted to killing the man, so why do I have to be punished?")

In Italy, an accomplice in murder can also go up on murder charges, so both Elder, now 21, and Natale-Hjorth, now 20, were found guilty on all five identical charges and received life sentences. That is the toughest penalty in Italy.

Elder's parents, who seem immured in a world that keeps reality away, told ABC  they were "shocked" that their son's sidekick was charged and convicted the same.

"My heart breaks for that entire family," Leah Elder said.

(Heartbreak for the policeman's wife? Nope.)

Elder's parents said they feel their son's sentencing was too harsh, given his mental health issues and young age, and that they plan to appeal the ruling.

(But he was old enough and mentally sound enough to traipse across Europe, killing people.)

"He feels like he has been sentenced to something worse than the death penalty," Leah Elder said of her son.

"I understand that a man's life was lost that night, I understand that Finnegan should serve some time," she added. "I would like Finnegan to have some sort of sentence that’s proportionate and something that helps at least acknowledge his mental health issues."

(What's proportionate for taking the life of another man? A week in jail and a strong talking-to?)

The parents said their son's new reality -- his life as a prisoner -- is at times "too painful" to think about.

(They are not thinking of the policeman's widow.)

"This tragedy that happened, it's changed us all," Ethan Elder said. "Watching your son mature in prison is very hard."

(Attending your husband's funeral is harder.)

"Tyger Tyger, burning bright, in the forests of the night..."

"And checking the American League baseball schedule, I see the Tigers are in Houston..."

We saw this on the news, and now, here are the details. Over the weekend, in a city called Houston, in a crazy state the natives call "Texas," a tiger was roaming around a residential area. The police have taken a suspect into custody.

And because it's "Texas," the suspect was walking around free, on bond, from a murder charge.

He's 26, his name is Victor Hugo Cuevas, and now he has to face an additional charge of evading arrest with his pet tiger.

As of this writing (yesterday morning) the tiger is still on the loose, police said.

Attention people attending law school: there might come a time in your legal career when you will need to issue a statement such as this:

"My client is not the owner of the tiger."

KHOU-TV reports that Cuevas's attorney, Michael Elliott, went on to say, "HPD was in such a hurry to wrap it and find their guy that they just assumed because my client was the one who caught this tiger, who went out and got it and brought it back into safety, everyone is just assuming that he is the owner of the tiger."

Please take a moment to read that sentence out loud. Then, look at yourself in a mirror. You'll see that your eyes are spinning like slot machine cherries.

Attorney Elliott went on to lament, "He's already been convicted, which is a shame."

He went on to claim that Cuevas had a deal with the police that he would turn himself in at 8:15, but the cops double crossed Cuevas and pinched him at 8.

This whole confusing situation began on Sunday when a neighbor called 911 to report the big cat strutting around the neighborhood. Someone came along and corralled the beast and they drove off in an SUV. 

The only person in this whole saga whose story holds up is the tiger. Stay tuned for more!

Winning by cheating is not winning at all

Against all odds and common sense, it really seems to mean a lot to some people to hold titles such as "Homecoming Queen." 

Sure, when you're 16, 17, whatever, a large part of your self-image comes from being so highly regarded as a local deity. It's understandable for people of that age, and if the competition is fair and open to all, it's all right.

But there is a reason why parents - or someone - should keep eyes on their children as they compete in these things. Suppose the desire to be the Queen is so overriding that it blinds a teen to what's right? That's when you need a responsible adult to provide direction.

Emily Rose Grover, down in Florida, needed some guidance a couple of years ago, and she got it - but in the wrong direction. She was running for HQ at Tate High, in an election where the other kids voted on their computers, and now the state is charging Emily Rose with felonies as an adult.  Also charged is the person who should have been guiding her toward more wholesome ways of competition, her mother, Laura Carroll, former assistant principal at Bellview Elementary School.

It's staggering that people who are paid to educate can be involved in scandals like this, and in fact, Ms Carroll's job led to the whole scheme, because the allegation is that old Emily Rose used her mom's password to get into the school computer network and rack up votes for herself. She got enough votes to win...for the time being.

Grover and Carroll stand accused by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement with one count each of felony offenses against users of computers, computer systems, computer networks, and electronic devices; felony unlawful use of a two-way communications device, felony criminal use of personally identifiable information, and conspiracy to commit these offenses.

Mother (l) and daughter

They have both bonded out, and are at home reading Glamour magazine while awaiting trial.

The computer network is called FOCUS and it's the student information system for the Escambia County School District. District officials called the law when they noticed that hundreds of student accounts had been breached. The presidential campaign of 2020 was not the only closely-watched contest down there in the Fla panhandle. The vote for Tate High School’s Homecoming Court seemed a bit shady, what with 117 votes coming in from the same IP address within a short period of time.  It took cops about 5 minutes to link Carroll's cellphone to this, and that included 3 minutes for coffee. 

Part of the school system's computer setup is an app called Election Runner, for such things as homecoming court elections. The people at Election Runner notified the police of over 100 questionable votes, and an ethics complaint, about the election that Grover "won," but didn't.

Carroll was expelled from Tate High over all this, and even though her mother protested, the expulsion was upheld.

So, nothing to do until the trial. But this mom and daughter, like the rest of us, have plenty of time to wonder how it can be so important to be the homecoming queen that it's worth all this trouble. And could Grover have been comfortable wearing the vaunted crown, knowing she "won" it by illegitimate methods?

Even more troubling - how many students (and teachers!) did Carroll come in contact with over the years, exposing them to her deficient sense of right and wrong?

The Reasons

In Mexico, Cinco de Mayo is considered a relatively minor holiday. It is not their version of July 4; it isn't their Independence Day.

What happened on Cinco de Mayo - May 5, 1862 - was the victory of the Mexican army over France in the Battle of Puebla during the Franco-Mexican War. 

That war came about after Mexico, torn apart by years of internal fighting, had to default on loan payments to France, Britain, and Spain. Those three nations sent their navies to Veracruz, Mexico to settle things in the time-honored way of warfare, but Britain and Spain came to a sensible conclusion and arranged settlements with Mexico. 

Napoleon III, Emperor Of The French, saw a chance to take some Mexican territory for himself, and kept fighting, sending a large fleet and strong forces to Veracruz.

With 6,000 French soldiers and sailors on the attack, Napoleon III nonetheless saw his dreams of carving out some of Mexico as a "Little France" when 2,000 Mexicans, led by Texas-born General Ignacio Zaragoza, sent the French packing, ending the invasion at the Battle of Puebla.

Today, the Battle of Puebla is still a cause for national celebration and pride among the Mexicans. They have parades, battle recreations, and other fiestas but May 5 is not a national holiday in Mexico. Offices, banks and stores remain open as usual.

I mention all this as a bit of historical perspective, because May 5 has become one of those holidays in the United States that is nothing more than a reason for people to throw a party.

I worked with a woman who was born and raised in Ireland. Every year, she was aghast at the way this nation turns what is considered a holy day in Ireland into a day of green-tinged decadence.

I doubt that a lot of the people who were wearing sombreros and guzzling Dos Equis the other night knew the reasons why Cinco de Mayo matters in Mexico, any more than the revelers on March 17 know why St Patrick is important in Ireland. 

I've noticed a trend to what I call "Hallmark Holidays," events promoted by the greeting card and balloon industries to sell more of their product. Why not? It's a free marketplace, and have fun, I say!

But not like this:  Maryland State Police arrested 21 impaired drivers, issued more than 700 citations and nearly 1,000 warnings during their increased enforcement last Wednesday, Cinco de Mayo.

Three people died in car wrecks on that day, and also, a state trooper investigating a crash on I-95 was almost hit by a box truck that the police say was being driven by an impaired 45-year-old driver.

I'm not trying to get all preachy. People are going to drink and misbehave even without beer, whiskey, and wine manufacturers creating silly reasons to encourage them. But maybe they could also take time to educate people about the real meaning of holidays at the same time. 

The Sunday Rerun (from January 2017): Color Me Surprised

 In a mountain greenery,

Where God paints the scenery
Just two crazy people together. 

- Mountain Greenery (Rodgers & Hart)

Well, the wait is over, and for those who thought the election results would never be final, relax...the Color Of The Year has been chosen.

The other colors are all green with envy, because this year,  the good people at Pantone - "the authority on color, provider of color systems and leading technology for accurate communication of color" - have decided that Greenery is the color of the year.

It's a yellowish green, to be sure, "refreshing and revitalizing" in the words of Pantone, and "symbolic of new beginnings."

I've had plenty of new beginnings, and none of them reminded me of this color. What's more, we say someone is "green" when they are inexperienced, callow. 

Rougned Odor (r) finally had
his fill of Bautista as well.

As a lover of all things Autumn and Winter, I'm more of a brown and orange kind of guy. Spring does not thrill me because it inevitably leads to the horror we call summer, with its heat, humidity, broiling sunshine, mosquitoes and Jose Bautista.

Some years ago, a celery-colored color called Celadon was briefly popular.  This was just after all doctors were required to outfit their waiting rooms in mauve and gray shades, but before all rooms were decorated in the color known as "stainless steel."  I liked celadon.  I like celery, the negative-calorie food (you burn more calories grinding on it than you take in.  It's sort of a reverse milkshake in that.)  Celery adds the green to shrimp salad and the crunch to a tossed salad, too.

They're trying to make this greenery look like mint, but mint is the one crop that grows well here at the Lazy 'C', and it's much darker than this "greenery."  Home gardeners, and lovers of iced beverages, I recommend that you visit your local greenhouse in spring, buy some potted mint, and plant it down by the shed or near the spigot.  You'll snip leaves of tasty greenery-goodness forever, and be delighted as they add that certain zest to your iced tea.


And I hereby nominate "iced tea" to be color of the year for 2017.