The Saturday Picture Show, November 19, 2022

 

This little hummingbird would be upset to be called a "birdbrain," and he/she would be right. Lots of "smarter" animals aren't smart enough to set up housekeeping on a branch that affords solar protection for free!

This is just the perfect vehicle for a crew to take to the annual Firefighters' Convention.

"Nothing going on here. You didn't see a thing. Move on out now..."

Here's a can that shows that someone really follows directions! Same as with that yellow "wet floor" sign in the men's room. I do it every time.

It's still a month away, but I think we're ready this year!

I feel sorry for those of you who live in areas where you get no snow. Besides bringing a delightful chill to the world, it covers everything in what Simon & Garfunkel called a "freshly fallen silent shroud." You could leave a dented rusty soup can on the back porch and when snow lays its shawl over it, it looks like an object of art!

A door hook and a talented artist, making hardware fun again!

I think it would be the funniest thing in the world to buy one of these tins full of cookies, only to find it full of needles and thread and scissors and stray buttons when you get it home. Everyone has their sewing kit where the Danish Butter Cookies used to reside.

I found another example of a press agent's artistry at work. You can almost hear him on the phone, around 1954, "I got this kid Dean...uh, James Dean. Brooding, strong silent type. Wanna get a couple publicity pics of him reading a book. And say, the kid's from Indiana...real midwestern boy...let's have him reading that James Whitcomb Riley, the Hoosier poet who wrote about the frost on the pumpkin. OK? Solid!"

I'm here to tell you, there is not a morning so bleak or drab that it can't become perfect just by whipping up some blueberry muffins.

They're so cute when they're little

We are wrong when we say people "laugh like a hyena." Hyenas emit harsh howls and yelps when they are on the prowl, which happens a lot, because they are some tough little critters, and they are plenty scary to other animals, although they usually leave humans alone out of fear that we will attempt to make them listen to Yanni music. In some cultures, people think that hyenas are in league with the demons who seek to influence our spirits, or steal children, or rob graves.

I worked in radio with a guy named Rob Graves. You don't think he....no.

But, since the young versions of most species are so doggone cute, here's a baby spotted hyena who was spotted at the Hattiesburg Zoo in Mississippi. The baby's mom is Pili, and those who know of such things say Pili's baby is the only surviving hyena cub born in North America so far this year.

Kristen Moore is the animal curator at the Zoo down there in Hattiesburg, and she says they are "thrilled with the birth of this cub.  We feel good that Pili is doing well and is being a great mom to her first-born cub.”

The youngster was born on October 17 and is not out there on display just yet. For now, the walkway in front of the hyena habitat is closed so that zoo officials can keep their eyes on mama and cub. 

“We ask our guests to be patient while our animal care team closely monitors the cub and mother in these important early stages as they acclimate to their habitat and spend time together,” said Rick Taylor, executive director of the Hattiesburg Convention Commission, which manages the zoo.

Too much information department: it is difficult for hyenas to give birth, because their birth canals are about an inch in diameter. Zoologists report that the fathers tend to be very apologetic before, during, and after the birth process.  

“Pili is nursing her baby who is suckling well, but we have hurdles yet to cross so we are cautiously optimistic at this point,” Moore said.

What's more, no one will know the gender of the newborn for another month or so, until a blood sample can be taken.  No one working at any zoo anywhere has the temerity to walk up to a hyena and look down there.

I'll let you know if they have a "Name The Baby Hyena" contest!

Vintage

The headline said:  Two vintage World War Two-era planes have collided and crashed at an air show in the US state of Texas, killing six people.

Of course, as with anything that happens anywhere, there is video available, showing the planes colliding at low altitude. One of the planes breaks in half, causing a fireball that plunges to earth.

These planes were involved in an air show near Dallas over the past weekend. One of them was a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress. The B-17 bombers were a huge part in our defeat of Germany in World War II.

Six people on board the planes died; there were no injuries to the people watching.

Two former American Airlines pilots - Terry Barker and Len Root - were among the dead, so it's not as it these were unskilled pilots up there. Something went wrong; we don't know just what.

 

These airshows draw big crowds on weekends all across America. The crowd in Dallas was estimated at between 4,000 and 6,000.  Chris Kratovil was an eyewitness, and he told a BBC reporter he had "never seen a crowd grow more quiet or more still in just a blink of an eye".

"It went from being a fairly excited, energetic crowd... to complete silence and stillness, and a lot of people, including myself, turned their children towards them and away from the airfield because there was burning wreckage in the middle of the airfield."

I asked someone who posted pictures of this on Instagram whether it was wise for people to take aging airplanes up for exhibition purposes. 

One responder said that "they died doing what they loved."

Another said, "no one was forced to be up there. It's not necessary to drive cars, but I bet you still do."

A third person said, "History needs to preserved (sic) no matter the costs. These history buffs and reenactors knew that there's always a risk. They died keeping history alive."

Sometimes, just when I think I'm starting to understand people, I get told that it's ok to die just so some people can see an old airplane fly over them.

I have no wish to die, but there are things to die for. History is not one of them.

 

 

You can't catch me

As the man says in the beginning of "Law & Order":  "In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: The police, who investigate crime, and the district attorneys, who prosecute the offenders. These are their stories."

Specifically, this is one of their stories, from New Jersey, where the cops didn't have to conduct a widespread search for a wanted fugitive, because she applied for a job to work with them.

You read it right. 

We're talking about Ms Zyeama Johnson, who was wanted in Monroe County, PA, on fraud charges. Jersey City, NJ, also had papers on her for traffic charges - some ten bench warrants, all told.

But they didn't have to employ any sort of fancy sleuthery at all to bring her in. With these two active warrants in her name, Johnson filled out an application for an opening as a security guard with the Hudson County Sheriff's Office.

Hudson County is the county where the traffic charges were filed on her.

Given an easy opportunity to clean up the local blotter, police invited her in for a follow-up interview.  That's where she was taken into custody, and during a search, was found to be in possession of two stolen credit cards.

She was arrested on a charge of “being a fugitive from justice.” 

“While conducting a routine inventory of Johnson’s property following her arrest, sheriff’s officers discovered that she was in possession of two credit cards believed to be stolen, and she was subsequently charged with credit card theft,” according to Hudson County. It also turned out that she once worked for the the U.S. Postal Service, which has opened their own investigation after being tipped off by the sheriff's office.

American criminals long enjoyed a worldwide reputation for evading arrest by moving far away, surgically altering their appearance, and other measures meant to trip up the gendarmes. Now they make it so easy. What a shame.

On the wing

Up the road in Philadelphia, things have been up and down. On the up side, the commonwealth of Pennsylvania elected a great new US Senator, and the Eagles are doing great, in first place in the NFC East Division with an 8-1 record. The down side meant that the Phillies lost the World Serious and the soccer Union team lost whatever they call their championship.

But amidst the clamoring chaos, one man stood tall and unified The City of Brotherly Love in peace and harmony.

He was born 31 years ago and given the name Alexander Tominsky. He's been working as a server at Barclay Prime in Center City.

But that's in the past, that name, because now he is known far and wide as the "Philadelphia Chicken Man."

Even though he seemingly forgot that "everyday" is an adjective, he was proud to point out that he took a video of himself for 40 days in row, and every video every day showed him eating a rotisserie chicken, which is not an everyday feat.

In fact, his original goal was a 30-day chicken spree, but you know how it goes. After your 24th roasted bird, you get your second wind, and you plow on right ahead. So, to include the whole town in the fun, he posted an invitation on social media, with a misspelled printed version posted here and there: 

"Come watch me eat an entire rotisserie chicken. November 6th will be the 40th consecutive day that I have eaten an entire rotisserie chicken. 12 o'clock noon. The chicken will be consumed on the abandoned pier near Walmart. This is not a party."

 

And then, hundreds of people attended the non-party, where Chicken Man set up a red carpet and police caution tape to hold back the hordes.

As he licked his greasy fingers for the 40th time, he was surrounded by blissful fans, cheering and celebrating.

Mr Tominsky spoke these profound words to Action News, by way of explaining his reasons behind his Herculean feat:

"I just felt like it seemed right."

Adepti sumus magnitudine! (Latin for "we have achieved greatness!")

I declare!

With so many of us wanting to travel to distant cities for family holiday gatherings, many of us will be boarding airplanes to save the time of driving all the way to Kankakee.

And, judging from anecdotal evidence I garner from these pages, most people find it wise to show up to family gatherings with a big iron on their hips, and I'm not talking about a Black & Decker or Rowenta steamer.

However, although it might seem like a great idea to pack your shootin' iron inside the poultry you are packing to present to Aunt Pauline, security officers in South Florida caught some joker who had stuffed a chicken, not with bread cubes, but a loaded pistol.

It was like that Turducken on which John Madden traditionally feasted on Thanksgiving: a chicken inside a duck inside a turkey. This was a gun inside a chicken inside a suitcase.

The people at the Transportation Security Administration, wits all, showed photos of the chicken gun with a punny caption on their Instagram.

 “We hate to beak it to you here, but stuffing a firearm in your holiday bird for travel is just a baste of time,” the post said in part.

So you can be prepared for your fun trip, the TSA reminds us all that fresh meat, seafood and other non-liquid food items are permitted in both carry-on and checked bags, but they have to be packed in ice. You can carry an unloaded firearm in a checked bag, but you have to declare it and pack it in a locked hard-sided container.

One of your cousins will give you bullets when you get there. 

Sunday Rerun: Pudding things to good use

Before we proceed, we need to define some terms. For instance, "head cheese" is not cheese at all, but an undesirable delicatessen selection. The Hundred Year War was over by the second weekend, a foot-long sandwich measures 11 inches, the Civil War was quite uncivil, Chinese Checkers are neither Chinese nor checkers, koala bears are not bears at all, and Poor Richard's Almanac was not written by anyone named Richard, but by Ben Franklin, and he was plenty rich, having been the only president of the United States who was never president of the United States!

So don't be fooled if an English person offers you pudding. Don't think of vanilla, chocolate or pistachio.  Over there, pudding is blood sausage, which is hardly a dessert item with some Cool Whip on top.

But while English pudding is no way to end a meal, it did save the life of a British butcher.  Chris McCabe was locked in a freezer and the lock froze after a gust of wind blew the door closed. (Well, things are supposed to freeze in there, right?

Chris's butcher shop is in Totnes, southwest England, and he did all he could by kicking at the door to no avail, so he got the idea to pick up a frozen blood sausage weighing 3.3 lbs and using it as a battering ram.

What blood sausage looks like, in case you wish to have some

He whomped on that thang a few times and finally the button came unstuck and off he dashed, to have a cup of tea, one supposes, with a nice slab of blood pudding, which, if you really want to know, consists of pork fat or beef suet, pork blood and a ton of oatmeal, and your choice of groats: oat or barley. 

Maybe he needed something stronger than tea. You know, to take the chill off.

The Saturday Picture Show, November 12, 2022

 

This little guy is just bursting out of his shell to let us know he's a baby tortoise, not a turtle.

I guess we've all used these pay binoculars before. It's hard to look across the bay at the pretty boats and birds or at the spectacular scenery of Lookout Point while the clock is ticking on your 50 cents worth of binocular time.

I found a really nice place to get your nails done.

I do love a well-worn set of old tools. You can always tell when they are used by someone who knows what to do with them. Bonus points for the monkey fist bolo.

It was 1964 when I went to the New York World's Fair with my parents. We stayed in the Hotel New Yorker, which, I can assure you, was not, in 1964, an "iconic" midtown Manhattan hotel. It was clean and nice, not too deluxe, and I kept asking for Maurice, the elevator guy, but he was off that weekend.

Today's free wallpaper: Calvin and Hobbes in their lunar explorer.

Back in the 80s, the late Dinka dunker Manute Bol, at 7' 7", and 5' 3" Muggsy Bogues, the shortest NBA player ever, formed part of the Washington Bullets, now the Wizards.  A friend of mine once was sitting next to Muggsy on an airplane and said, "I feel like I know you from somewhere," to which Bogues said, "I play basketball," and my pal said, "No, really, what do you do?"

I say, let them battle it out.

I just finished a great biography of Charles Addams, the great cartoonist and creator of the Addams Family drawings, which led to the TV show, movies, and Broadway musical. There is nothing more satisfying than learning.

I'll be in the basement while everything gets sorted out with these elections and all. That's where my records are, and as they used to say on KLAC radio, "This is KLAC Country, and that's country country!"

Veterans Day

 

Today is Veterans Day, a day set aside to honor all who have served in our armed forces. We often conflate Memorial Day, a day when we salute those lost in combat, and Veterans Day, along with Armed Forces Day, when we acknowledge those currently serving. Three separate days, each equally important.

World War I came to an end on November 11, 1918, and the day was set aside to honor those who served. The holiday was known as "Armistice Day" until 1954, when the name was changed to Veterans Day, in honor of all who served at any time.

Incidentally, for my fellow grammar enthusiasts, the proper name for the day is Veterans Day, not Veterans' Day.  The US Department of Veterans Affairs website says the attributive case (no apostrophe), rather than the possessive case, is correct "because it is not a day that 'belongs' to veterans, it is a day for honoring all veterans."

And honor them we shall!

Winner winner family dinner

Are you like me, fascinated with the actions of lottery winners? Like the plumber who won a hundred-and-some million bucks but couldn't wait to get back to his clogged sinks, the ones who file for bankruptcy a year after cashing their BA check, the ones who lost their ticket and had to go through ten tons of compost at the county dump...and now this, from the news:

A Chinese man who recently won $30 million says he’s keeping his giant jackpot secret from his wife and child because he doesn’t want them to get lazy.

It happened October 24, and the big winner is only identifying himself as Mr. Li, but he's also Mr Li With 219 Million Yuan that he didn't have on October 23. 

That's Mr Li on the right (yellow suit)

 

Mr Li, a resident of Nanning, Guangxi, showed up at the lottery office dressed in a yellow outfit, so as to hide his identity from everyone, including his entire family.

“I didn’t tell my wife and child for fear that they would be too complacent and would not work or work hard in the future,” Li told the Nanning News.

Li had to go to a hotel near the lottery offices and spend the weekend holed in a room before cashing in the ticket last Monday.  “I did not leave the hotel because I was afraid to go out and lose the lottery ticket,” he explained, although he did not explain how he told his family he was hoteling it for the weekend...

China uses lottery income to pay for welfare and cultural programs. Lottery players choose six red-numbered balls and one blue one. Li won by playing the same numbers he's played for years:  2, 15, 19, 26, 27, 29 and 2.

“I only won a few dozen yuan in the past,” he explained.  “I regard buying the lottery as a hobby, and my family does not care. Plus, I do not spend much money on it, and the lottery provides a ray of hope for me.”

That's the key. No one can really expect or count on lottery money, but for two dollars, we get to dream of being like Mr Li.

But not like his family.

 

I see

All right, we all heard this from our mothers back in the day: "Eat your carrots! They're good for your eyes!"

Well, yes and no, like almost everything your mother said. Yes, carrots are good for you in that they are full of Vitamin A, which is good to keep your corneas (the outside covering of eyes) clear. Vitamin A is also high in rhodopsin, which is good for helping us see in dim light. It is not a component of "retsyn," that combination of copper gluconate and hydrogenated cottonseed oil that was the main ingredient in those Certs breath mints sold to halitosis patients the world over.

But you could gobble carrots faster than Bugs Bunny without appreciable improvement in your ability to read an eye chart twenty feet away. Don't get mad at Mom for foisting off that story on you, though. She was just repeating what governments were saying while waging World War II.

Before the United States was attacked and forced to enter the war (it's in all the textbooks!) Great Britain was fighting Hitler's Germany alone, and had to rely on food coming from their colonies, and their former colony - us - to feed their citizens and their armed forces. People were also encouraged to plant vegetables to grow their own food in their yards, their soccer fields, their castles...anywhere there were two square feet of earth, someone was liable to plant something to eat.

Such as carrots, which are simple enough to grow, and they don't taste all that bad, so lots of British people had carrots in various forms with dinner. And as the Blitzkrieg raged, England came up with a secret weapon to fight back.

It was called AIR - Airborne Intercept Radar. It was a simple matter of putting radar, which helped to guide pilots to their destination, in the airplanes themselves, thus giving bombers a great advantage in fending off aerial invasions. The big hero was Royal Air Force Squadron Leader John "Cat's Eyes" Cunningham, who shot down a total of 20 German planes, 19 of them at night.

And the British government made a huge deal of Cunningham's prowess, claiming that he had the same night vision as cats do, and attributing that to all the carrots he was consuming.  And that was the point, to let the Germans think the carrots were the trick and nor the AIR.

It was a little while before Hitler's people came up with their own version of Airborne Intercept Radar, and by then, England was getting some help fighting the Axis powers, but the carrot industry did not complain about the boost they got from the legend meant to distract Berlin.

And your mom just wanted you to have something good in your tummy, alongside all those potato chips and Popsicles.

 

Vote Today!

Say what you will, believe as you believe, vote for the candidates of your choice, but do not stay home and fail to vote. Think of Veterans Day coming up later this week...people who fought for our rights. We would dishonor their valor by not voting.

 

Some cheery notes

I thought it would be nice to start out Monday morning with a cheery topic.

The Black Death wiped out 30% to 50% of the population in Europe, the Middle East, and northern Africa. This was in the 14th Century, but those old medievals left us modern types with a sad biological legacy: in those times, men and women developed genes that seem to have helped them survive the Black Death, and those genes, still swimming in our bloodstreams today, make us more susceptible to some diseases today.

“Our genome [note: genomes are the complete set of genetic material we carry around] today is a reflection of our whole evolutionary history" as we adapt to different germs, said Luis Barreiro, a senior author of the research.  Take the genes that bring the bubonic plague: they have a huge impact on our immune systems.

After taking DNA from the skeletons of over 200 Black Death victims, Barreiro and his colleagues picked out four genes that, for some, protected them against the bacteria that brings bubonic plague, and for some, provided protection against it. The Black Death was spread by bites from infected fleas.

Black death victims in mass grave

“A hyperactive immune system may have been great in the past but in the environment today it might not be as helpful,” said Hendrik Poinar, an anthropology professor at McMaster and another senior author.

Of course, this brings up the question of whether the COVID-19 pandemic will have a large impact on human evolution down the line. Barreiro says no, on the grounds that the death rate is so much lower, and most COVID victims have already had children.

But he adds, that doesn't mean that other pandemics aren't lying in our future, and the more deadly ones will continue to shape human genetics.

So, you see, this is all far off in the future, so don't worry about it!

 

Sunday Rerun: I'm All Mixed Up

 

A friend and I got to e-talking (as she lives in California, it's hard to holler loudly enough to be heard) and the topic turned, as it so often does, to Chex Mix.


Salty snack of the holidays, sometimes known as Nuts and Bolts, Chex Mix is more than the sum of its parts. Breakfast cereal never had it so good as when you toss it around in some butter, with nuts and Worcestershire sauce and pretzel sticks. Here is the classic recipe:

1/2 c. butter
1 1/4 tsp. seasoned salt
4 1/2 tsp. Worcestershire sauce
2 c. Corn Chex cereal
2 c. Rice Chex cereal
2 c. Bran Chex cereal
2 c. Wheat Chex cereal
1 c. salted mixed nuts and/or pretzel sticks

Preheat oven to 250 degrees. Heat butter in large shallow roasting pan (about 15 x 10 x 2 inches) in oven until melted. Remove. Stir in seasoned salt and Worcestershire sauce. Add Chex cereal and nuts. Mix until all pieces are coated. Heat in oven 1 hour. Stir every 15 minutes. Spread on absorbent paper to cool. Makes 9 cups.

"Don't bother looking for a Tupperware© tub to store it...there won't be any left over."

And here is the look of the classic Chex Mix. Note the use of the disposable foil pan: it's great because you can cook it in what you serve it in.



I found this picture on Google. If you Google "chex mix recipe" you get over 93,000 hits, and they're all bound to be good. As we closely examine the texture of this batch, we note that the cook has added Cheerios - always a nice touch, and when you serve Chex Mix at your holiday party and a Freudian is in the crowd and notices his pretzel stick and a Cheerio are hooking up, well, there's your entertainment for an hour. Also, looks like Mr or Ms Fancy Pants here added cashews along with peanuts...interesting. And to add a dash of cheddar-licious goodness, I always go with a good pile of Cheez Nips. I once wound up with a Cheez Nip that was stained by Worcestershire sauce so as to accidentally create a tiny cameo of Eve Arden, although none of the cracker museums I contacted wished to buy it for their permanent collection, so I went ahead and ate it.


New Year's Eve around our house always had the aroma of Chex Mix and Old Bay; the folks would serve the Mix along with steamed shrimp while their friends watched Jack Paar and listened to Guy Lombardo. But give me a little bowl of C'Mix and a beer and that's what I call good snackin'!

And if anyone knows anyone at Yankee Candle Headquarters, let them know that if they made a candle that smelled like freshly made Chex Mix, they would not be able to keep them in stock! Free, money-making idea, courtesy of Castles!

The Saturday Picture Show, November 5, 2022

 

This is one of those neighborhoods not far from Baltimore's Inner Harbor. Some of these cars have been parked in the same spots since 2004, because the minute you move, some jerk driving a Dodge will park there!

All of this is good advice, especially baking with apples, and embracing hygge. That's pronounced "HOOgah," and it's defined as "a quality of coziness and comfortable conviviality that engenders a feeling of contentment or well-being." It's regarded as a defining characteristic of Danish culture. It is impossible to be in a state of hygge while wearing polyester clothing.

This bird can actually talk! He keeps saying,  "We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. It’s going to be just fine" but we know better.

Next time you go out for pancakes, say, "Make mine buckwheat!" You won't be sorry.

Yes, the rumors are true. They've made a sequel to "A Christmas Story." I have no plans to watch. To me, this is like when you've had a really great meal, and then someone whips up a leftover casserole out of it two weeks later. I fear that this new .2 version might sully my memories of the first one. The original author, Jean Shepherd, died a long time ago (1999) so, no thanks.

I think this might be the new slogan for promoting the excellence of Baltimore. Among the rejected suggestions were: "Baltimore: It's not as bad as Fox 45 says," "Baltimore:  We put Berger Cookies on our Berger Cookie Ice Cream," and "Baltimore: Did you just hear a helicopter?"

I suppose the architect who designed this building was having a really bad day.

If ever a hill cried out for an escalator, it is this one.

When you have a checkerboard but no checkers, you improvise as you can. It must be fun to move into the other person's back row and holler, "Pickle me!"

Did you ever have french fries with lunch and potato chips with dinner and wonder if they came from the same potato?

Art Department

I hear this often: "I don't know a doggone thing about art; all I know is what I like." 

I hear this, because I am the one saying it. I'm sorry for those who know a lot about art and what makes some art great and some not so.  They - those who know -  will tell you that paintings of kids with huge eyes, or dogs playing cards, are not great, but a paint-spattered drop cloth is terrific.

Well, ok. It's up to each of us to decide what we like, and go on from there. Do you remember that old movie about Dorian Gray based on the novel by Oscar Wilde? Dorian lives his libertine life to the hilt and remains attractive and youthful, while a portrait of him ages while noting all of Dorian's sins. 

I thought of that story when I saw a self-portrait done by Pablo Picasso at the age of maybe 14. His father was teaching him how to paint, and here is how young Pablo saw himself:

Pretty good for anyone at any age, huh, especially at 14? The only thing I could paint at that age was the shed, and I had to go back and give it another coat when my father noticed several shoddy areas.

Please compare that with this effort. At age 51, Picasso painted what he thought a "Girl Before A Mirror" looked like, and he turned this out:

There's a lot going on here, and frankly, I think he should have called the good people at MyEyeDr for an annual vision checkup. I have seen women looking in mirrors all of my life, and they all had their arms and neck and face right where they belonged. 

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to frame this picture of Nixon and Elvis.

 

 

 

 

Bristol Stomp

 The New Yorker magazine runs little fillers at the bottom of pages, and one recurrent category they use is "There Will Always Be An England" in which they print amusing tales of a tipsy vicar or some such.  I'm descended from the English people and I enjoy their stories and idiosyncrasies, and here is one that appeals to my British blood:

There's a hubbub in Bristol and it has to do with an "apostrophe catastrophe" at a certain landmark. There is a place over there, a nature reserve called "one of the most spectacular wildlife spots in the city," but they argue about whether to call it Trooper's Hill, Troopers' Hill and Troopers Hill.

And the great English thing is, the debate has been going on for over 200 years!

The latest round is a sign put up by Bristol Parks, a subgroup of the Bristol City Council, which spells it out "Public Footpath to Trooper's Hill."

Putting it this way, it matches an old chimney sign that dates back to the 1790s and 1800s.

But there are two other signs around saying "Troopers" Hill and "Troopers'" Hill.

The support group known as Friends of Troopers Hill, a volunteer group that works with the Bristol City Council to maintain and preserve the area. They use no apostrophe at all.

Rob Acton-Campbell said: "The apostrophe has never been fixed - with all three options having been used on maps in the 1800s. Some of the early minutes of Friends of Troopers Hill meetings use the apostrophe before or after the s, but I think we settled on not using it mainly because, although there wasn't social media then (2003), we did want a website and knew we couldn't have an apostrophe in a domain name - and none of the options could be said to be wrong.

"Troopers Hill is a really important site for biodiversity with 83 different species of bees having been recorded on the site, there are also fantastic views. I hope that the publicity around this issue will inspire more people to visit."

Another group spokesperson says, "It's slightly amusing that the council over the last few years has put up signs probably, sort of two years between them - and each time they've come up with a slightly different arrangement with the apostrophe.

"It's grammatically correct if there was more than one trooper then it should be apostrophe after the 's - but it doesn't fit with what we do at Friends of Troopers Hill."

 

Even so, someone came up with an 1826 map that uses no apostrophe at all, and someone came up with a map from 1840 that called the reserve Trooper's Hill... and yet a third map from the 1880s puts it as Troopers' Hill.

The council is straddling the lines right down the middle: "We're grateful that a member of the public with an eagle eye for correct grammar has brought this to our attention.

"Generally our policy would be to reflect the place name and road name spelling on the council's pinpoint mapping derived from Ordnance Survey base maps.

"In this case 'Troopers Hill' the place name has no apostrophe, but the road name 'Troopers' Hill Road' has an apostrophe... Therefore there is room for a bit of ambiguity."

People have taken to social media to debate the issue, with some agreeing with the choice of Friends of Troopers Hill; others are not quite as sure.

One person agreed: "TROOPERS HILL. No apostrophe.

"The place doesn't belong to a trooper nor to several trooper. Apostrophe means possession, no possession no apostrophe.

I admire people who will continue to aver their side of a debate for years and years. Over on these rocky shores, we have to deal with the lack of apostrophizing on "Wegmans" and "Caesars Palace." I've never been to the latter place, but every time I shop in the former, I want to take a Magic Marker and add the missing '. 

Forget About It

 The Statler Brothers had a catchy song called "Whatever Happened To Randolph Scott," which contained a very true line: "Everybody's trying to make a comment about our doubts and fears...'True Grit's the only movie I've really understood in years." 

We like to watch old old movies on Turner Classic Movies, and the other night we hit on one which, while not the greatest movie you'll ever see, did a least say a lot about the times in which it was made.

The picture was called "The Housekeeper's Daughter." It came out in 1939, a comedy directed and produced by Hal Roach, who had previously produced Laurel And Hardy and "Our Gang" movies. The stars were Joan Bennett and  Adolphe Menjou, and it featured the film debut of Victor Mature, a man famous for saying many years later, "I can't act, and I have 140 movies to prove it."

The brief rundown goes like this: Joan Bennett plays a gangster's girlfriend who goes home to her mother, who runs the house for the high-class Randall family, but all but one Randall goes away, leaving Robert Randall, who wants to be a newspaper reporter, so he gets a job through connections and stumbles on a murder case which is a huge scandal and leads to the police converging on the house and people shoot off firecrackers and the gangsters think it's gunshots and Robert winds up with Joan Bennett.

OK, I left out some minor details, but the point is this. We look at movies like this, 80-some years later, and we shake our heads.

There were others, called "screwball comedies," around that time. Try to spend some time watching "You Can't Take It With You" sometime and see if your head doesn't spin. That's the one with a crazy family whose normal daughter falls in love with a normal boy and the families get together and all hell starts popping.

There was a movie called "Hellzapoppin' " a couple of years later which was nothing but crazy antics without the barest semblance of a plot.

But think about the times: the Depression was still going on. People were either out of work or just eking out a drab existence, and the only reasonable entertainment was the neighborhood movie theatre where for a nickel or dime ticket, you could take your mind off your troubles and not worry about next month's rent or another night of cereal for dinner or the storm clouds of war menacing Europe (Nazi Germany attacked Poland on September 1, 1939, leading to France, Australia and the United Kingdom declaring World War II.The US was inevitably drawn to the conflict on December 7, 1941, with the invasion of Pearl Harbor.) Tough times call for at least an hour or two of diversion.

And at the Bijou or the Rialto or the Towson Theatre, all that trouble seemed far away  for a while as people, in the pre-television world, watched their favorite stars sing and dance and act, with the exception of Victor Mature.

Victor Mature (l) and Joan Bennett

The days of people going to the movies two or three times a week are long past, but today we download movies to take our minds off what's out there.  And with Victor Mature gone, we still have problems to forget about, and that's why we have Will Ferrell.

Noodle it out

Baltimore was home to Gino's, a popular hamburger stand chain founded by the great Baltimore Colt defensive end Gino Marchetti.  At their peak around here, they were more popular than McDonald's, because their food tasted better!

Nevertheless, it was still fast food, and it did give rise to a popular joke about taking a date "to an Italian restaurant and going to Gino's." Gino was of Italian ancestry, but he was born in West Virginia, so he was not really an Italian by birth.

That's the crux of a dumb lawsuit now oozing its way through a California courtroom. The good people at Barilla pasta are being sued for allegedly misleading American pastagobblers with fake ads purporting that their noodles are made in Italy.

The suit was brought by Matthew Sinatro and Jessica Prost, who claim that they were fooled by the slogan "Italy's #1 Brand of Pasta" on the pasta packaging.

So, you're in the Try 'N' Shop and you pick up some Barilla pasta - angel hair, fusilli, bowtie, whatever, and you see the green/white/red Italian flags on the box, does that make you think that the noodles came over here on a boat or something? Ok, most of their products are made in Iowa (primo wheat country!) and New York.  What's the problem?

 

Sinatro and Prost put forth the argument that were hornswoggled by "false advertising" and deceptive marketing.  Between them, they spent $6 on Barilla past (Sinatro bought a box of angel hair in San Francisco and Prost went for two boxes of spaghetti in Los Angeles) and they aver that they never would have spent that kingly sum had they only known that they were getting American pasta and not genuine Italian.

"[C]onsumers willingly pay more for Italian sounding and/or looking products," and Barilla leveraged the implied connection to Italy "[i]n an effort to increase profits and to obtain an unfair competitive advantage," the suit states.

Just look at Barilla's website if the hometown of your pasta is such a big deal: "Barilla Pasta that is sold in the United States is made in our plants in Ames, IA and Avon, NY, with a few exceptions. Barilla Tortellini and Barilla Oven Ready Lasagne are made in Italy."

Read further, and you will see that the US manufacturers use the same recipes as do the noodlemakers of Parma, Italy, and on the same type of machines.

Barilla filed for dismissal of the case, on the grounds that Sinatro and Prost couldn't prove financial harm. Yes, they spent six bucks, but they did have dinner with what they bought, right? A judge rejected the request for dismissal last week, though.

In other news, I want my money back for every Belgian waffle, order of French Fries, Chinese dumpling, Fuji apple, Korean barbecue, and Hungarian goulash I've ever had.

I feel abused, and only money can make me feel better. Get me a lawyer.