The Saturday Picture Show, January 21, 2023

 

The problem with living here is, once you think you're done with the outdoor chores, someone points out that the roof needs to be mowed. 

Do you think I will ever stop cracking cornball jokes and puns? No, I'm a frayed knot.

"Mod" styles in the mid-60s included pop art such as paper dresses, and how handy it was to wear your own napkin to lunch!

Credit where credit is due: I saw this terrific photo of the Baltimore Harbor and it was taken by Benjamin Jancewicz. Really nice!

It's always an adventure to reach into the roll bin. No hands, please! Or tongues.

Around the corner from one of our local library branches stands a house where I think the guy who built it ordered too much concrete and brick, but rather than let it go to waste, he turned the front yard into a huge Italianate wall with small moats and flying dolphins. 

We can do this IF we ever get any snow around here this winter! Come on, man!

"Just gotta run into Target for a coupla things, honey; be right home!"

Just about every American grocery store has their "English" section, several shelves at the end of the tuna aisle featuring imported Heinz beans, HP sauce, digestive biscuits, and I don't know what-all else. I wonder if English grocers stock an "American" aisle with Cheez Doodles, Quaker Oats, Bachman Pretzel Stix, and TastyKakes?

"He ain't heavy, he's my brother." Ireland, 1975.

Support for the troops

Since the days of my childhood (1951 - present) one of my favorite Christmas gifts has been an almanac or two.  You can choose among The Farmer's Almanac, The Old Farmer's Almanac, The Hagerstown Almanac and others. They all have pretty much the same content: astrological data so you can plan on what time the sun up will go up and come down every day, crazy weather prognostications written far in advance ("January 16: partly cloudy, chance of rain or snow, highs 30s") (that's the forecast for every winter day in Baltimore!), gardening tips, advice on when to plant the corn and when to fish for the fish, home maintenance tips ("Store your shovel face down in a bucket of soil to keep it from rusting") and the occasional feature article on odd topics, which I devour like Hoss Cartwright on a T-bone.

And so now I can share with you this: Carrier pigeons, or homing pigeons, really did a lot of good getting messages from point A to point B during World War II, which actually was the peak of carrier pigeon use (we have cell phones now to get us our messages). 

Those birds were amazingly reliable at toting messages, medicines, even tiny cameras. More than 95% of their missions had successful outcomes (attention, USPS!) The US trained 56,000 carrier pigeons for World War II.

The way it worked, the birds were carried strapped to the chest of paratroopers, and when the paratroopers landed behind enemy lines, they released the pigeons to fly off on their important messages. The birds were outfitted in special pigeon vests, special protective garments made to protect carrier pigeons as they parachuted through the air strapped to the chest of paratroopers during World War II. Once the paratroopers hit the ground behind enemy lines, they would release the pigeons so they could fly off to deliver important messages.

And here's the kicker: those pigeon vests were made - 28,500 of them - by Maidenform, makers of the famous brassieres.

By 1963, Maidenform was back to selling
their foundation garments, including this
one showing a ill-equipped firefighter.

Maidenform had suspended bra manufacturing to concentrate on making parachutes for the war effort, and that was just another sacrifice made by Americans on the homefront. Some things might have sagged, but not our national spirit! And the pigeons were uplifted on their missions on regulation Maidenform gear.

 

 In all, 32 pigeons were awarded medals for their service in the war effort; one of the most famous among them was a bird named G.I. Joe, who carried a message ordering the cancellation of a bombing mission, which saved the lives of around a thousand Allied troops.

The world is full of fun facts!

 

Buyer's choice

We tend to buy and enjoy the same things over and over, and then one day, when we can no longer buy them, it's sad news. 

F'rinstance, our cats enjoyed doing their royal business on a fresh layer of Yesterday's News, which was recycled newspaper in little pellets. It made the perfect poop-and-pee base, and I'm sure that lots of people saw the delightful irony of cat waste being mixed with last week's New York Times. We used to buy it in huge sacks, which the Amazon guy really seemed not to enjoy lugging up to the porch, and maybe he was the one who talked the manufacturer, Purina, into discontinuing the product.  

But we found a similar product for less money, and Eddie, now that she is an only cat, seems not to notice the change in her toilet ritual. 

Now for another problem: there will be no more Stoned Wheat Thins. It was always the best cracker, and now it's been discontinued, and it's even hard to say whose fault this is. According to SLATE online, "The cracker was produced by Red Oval Farms, which is a brand name of Mondelēz International Inc., which itself is a rebranding of Kraft Foods’ 'global snacking business.' ”

I mean, really. 

I loved STWs in all their forms: regular, low sodium, and mini. All went well with  a nice hunk of cheese or salami, with maybe an olive or an anchovy flying up top like a banner. 

Perhaps the problem with Stoned Wheat Thins was the confusion with the inferior Wheat Thins, the stamp-sized wafers with a curiously salty taste. The real STWs did not bring their own flavor to the party; they relied upon you to slam meat or cheese on them, or plunge them headlong into some dip or pimento cheese spread.

As store shelves grew increasingly bereft of our favorite cracker, some turned to Amazon and found they were asked to pay $25 for two boxes, and who am I to pay for crackers like that? I'm not J. Paul Spaghetti, you know. And Amazon now has placed SWTs on their "currently unavailable" list, which is their way of saying, Go to Trader Joe's and see what he has.

Anything but Wheat Thins or the Nabisco alternate, Wheatsworth, with always seemed like a regular Saltine with a touch of rough flour thrown in.

I don't know, you find something you can count on, and poof! It's gone. I wish I could be as flexible as Eddie about these things.

New beginnings

Maryland will be swearing in a new governor today, a man named Wes Moore, who now becomes Maryland’s first black governor and just the third elected black governor in our nation's history.

Mr. Moore will take the oath, swearing to show "true allegiance to the State of Maryland and uphold its constitution and laws,” while holding a Bible that once belonged to Frederick Douglass. Douglass, born in Maryland into slavery, escaped that wretched existence and became an abolitionist leader.

New Governor Moore says he is a disciple of Douglass and so he prevailed upon the National Park Service to arrange to borrow the Bible for the ceremony. 

“I’m not just an admirer, I’m someone who is a true connoisseur of his life, his teachings and his writings,” Moore said upon finding that his request was granted. “And I was wondering what he would think of that moment, especially his life, his sacrifice, his frustrations.”

The old Bible was given to Douglass in 1889 by the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church of Washington. It is part of the collection at the  Frederick Douglass National Historic Site. The new First Lady of Maryland, Dawn Moore, will hold the bible in a protective case. Only Mr. Moore's hand will touch the sacred book.

The Douglass Bible

Even though he began his life journey as an enslaved person, Douglass never lost his love for Maryland. He escaped and headed north to freedom in 1838, not returning until a new Maryland Constitution finally banned slavery in 1864. 

Frederick Douglass was born in Talbot County on Maryland's Eastern Shore in 1818 and passed away in 1895. 

In the early days of his single term as president of the US, Donald Trump offered proof of the depth of his understanding of the history of the country he swore to serve and protect, saying this at a Black History Month event in 2017:

“I am very proud now that we have a museum on the National Mall where people can learn about Reverend King, so many other things, Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more, I notice. Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, and millions more black Americans who made America what it is today. Big impact.”

For the record, Frederick Douglass was not alive at the time, nor had he been for many years. 

On that visit, Trump asked that the National Museum of African American History and Culture be closed to visitors during his time there, but museum staff did not find it appropriate to shut out the public on that day, which happened to be Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Day. “The notion that we could shut out visitors on the first King holiday since the opening of the museum was not something I could accept,” said Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch.

During his visit to the museum, Trump paused in front of a mural depicting the role of Dutch people in the slave trade, remarking, "They love me in the Netherlands."

"Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past." - Isaiah 43:18 

  

Sailing, sailing

Last March 13, the great big container ship we ironically called the "Ever Forward" stopped moving forward, backward or sideways in any direction in our Chesapeake Bay. There were 5,000 shipping containers aboard for a trip from Baltimore to Norfolk when it literally ground to a halt in the Craighill Channel shipping lane. 

This caused many a problem. Other ships had to sidestep the floating wreck, people's shipments were delayed, and the State of Maryland has sent a bill to the vessel's owners, the Taiwanese shipping company Evergreen Marine, asking for $676,200 to pay for restoring oyster bars which were damaged following the grounding of Ever Forward.

(Side note: an oyster bar is not a saloon where people guzzle beer and slurp oysters, but, rather, a bay bottom where watermen bring up the bivalves right out of the water.)

So now comes the U.S. Coast Guard to issue their findings about the whole mess, and they say the Ever Forward got stuck in the bay because its pilot wasn't paying attention.  As you'll recall, it took over a month to dig out the EF and send it back to Annapolis.

In the same government-ese that once changed the term "fireman falling off a moving fire engine" to "involuntary dismount," they label the fact that someone was not paying attention as the behemoth ship cruised down the bay as "inadequate bridge resource management."

The Coast Guard says the pilot of the craft was making phone calls, sending texts, and writing emails on a cell phone instead of noticing that the ship was not where it was supposed to be. He or she was using the marine version of AutoPilot, something called the Portable Pilot Unit (PPU), to navigate the ship. There came a time when the ship was supposed to turn in a certain direction, but ooooops.

The Coast Guard wisely points out that ships "could prevent any similar problems by clearly defining when crew members are allowed to use their cell phones."

Aye aye, Skipper!

 

The Rev. Dr. King

  “With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.” - Dr Martin Luther King, Jr

Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. was a preacher in from Atlanta, serving as minister of a Baptist church in Montgomery, Ala. It's hard to believe, but this occurred in America some sixty years ago: Black citizens were required to ride in the back of the municipal buses (they did pay the same fare as all others), and were not allowed to shop in certain stores, dine at some restaurants, or even use public toilets or water fountains. Or Vote. 

Inspired by the resistance of a hard-working seamstress named Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her bus seat to a white man and move to the back of the bus, Dr King led a boycott of those buses.  It took almost two years, but in the end, the buses in Montgomery were desegregated, open to all.  

Today, we pause from the day-to-day to honor a man who had the courage to lead the nation away from the awful practices of legal racial prejudice and discrimination.

 He went on to lead the fight to allow all citizens to vote.  Again, I am writing this for the benefit of the young, who might find it hard to believe there was a time and place in this country when a man or woman of legal voting age could be denied the right to vote because of the color of their skin.

There was an interesting article in the Washington POST the other day about the Dr King Memorial in Washington.  National Park Service guide John W. McCaskill, stationed there, encounters all sorts of visitors to the monument.  Some are just learning about the fight for civil rights in the US, and some are people who were there on the front lines of the fight - literally.

One day, he met Rev. C.T. Vivian.  In 1965, Rev. Vivian was on the steps of the Birmingham municipal building, trying to register new voters. And a violent sheriff, one Jim Clark, stood in their way and said they could not register.  

Vivian stood firm for the right to vote. Clark hit Vivian so hard that he broke his hand. As blood poured from his nose and mouth, Rev Vivian had the courage to say this to the news cameras recording this horror:  

   "We are willing to be beaten for democracy."

And that courage flowed from the heart of the man whom we honor today. 

Please remember that, the next time that voting seems an inconvenience, or kindness to persons of a different faith or background seems to be too much trouble. 

Sunday Rerun: Wrap It Up!

 People who buy first-aid kits for car and home are often surprised to find a Mylar blanket tucked away along with the bandages, ointments and disposable gloves. As we all know, the real name for Mylar is BoPET (Biaxially-oriented polyethylene terephthalate).

I feel silly for even mentioning that. I mean, we all call BoPET "Mylar," and vice versa. But anyhow, Mylar is a thin polyester film with amazing qualities of heat retention and liquid blocking, and they say that you can keep warm by wrapping yourself in a big ole sheet of it. And it's not very costly, so that's why you find it in that first-aid kit you got from KMart before they closed.

Ever notice that they use something like Mylar in potato chip bags? Same thinness, same heat-reflecting quality. And people who take an interest in protecting people experiencing homelessness have noted that an efficient sleeping bag for those without basic comforts can be fashioned from old chip bags!

Up in Detroit, Michigan, where it gets cold as Hell, Michigan, people have help from an environmental activist named Eradajere Oleita. Eradajere saw a video from England that showed an English woman homemaking sleep sacks: "The process is simple: collect bags, cut them open, iron them and then line with plastic."

25-year-old Ms Oleita took the idea and ran with it. She rounded up as many old snack sacks as she could find, asked online for more, and got to work.

The sleeping bags she makes comprise about 150 chip bags to make, but when they are complete, they last a long while, they're watertight and they weigh next to nothing.

Born in Nigeria,  Ms Oleita moved to Michigan as a high school sophomore. She's been a land and water works ambassador at Americorps the last four years. She seems to be on the those gifted individuals who spots a problem and does something about it.

"I want people to think about these things and for our products to come full circle. I have never been shy of humanitarian work because firstly I am ... a human."

I can only hope all her dreams come true. 

The Saturday Picture Show, January 14, 2023

 

This is the sunset view enjoyed by many in the Canton neighborhood in Baltimore at the waterfront park down there. 

There are two books I read as a teenager that I still re-read annually. One is "Catcher In The Rye" and the other took place largely at the home in Holcomb, Kansas, here pictured. This was the Clutter residence, site of the murders so perfectly written of in Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood," the first true crime story written as if it were fiction. The Clutters were murdered by a pair of worthless drifters in 1959, and the house is still occupied by another family. I re-read "In Cold Blood," not to see how it turns out, but to marvel at Capote's incomparable way with words, and also to wonder how there can be such pure evil in such a beautiful world. 

"A dog is the only thing on earth that loves you more than he loves himself"

 - Josh Billings

I'm happy to see Red and Kitty Forman from "That 70s Show" coming back to TV in the new "That 90s Show." Red always had a cool way of planning what to do with his foot.

Wooden eye be glad to use this as a wallpaper?

Sometimes I get to thinking about those days, the Camelot era in his 1000 days in the White House, his tragic loss, and how the national gloom of November was lifted in January by The Beatles. If you weren't there, there's no way to describe it fully.

When I worked at the A&P, they made a big deal of grinding coffee beans right in the store. I used to enjoy picking up a stray bean and enjoying it like a caffeinated Life Saver.

It's unbelievable, what happened in Brazil. A band of right wingers refused to accept that their candidate lost the presidential election, so they stormed government offices and laid waste to the property of others in their stupid rage. Thank God that could never happen here, no sir. 

Ice fog on a country road! Enchanting!

Anything can become art, in the right hands.

When You're Smiling

 We're not sure why they call them "Mummers" - those painted up, costumed up paraders who come out in Philadelphia around New Year's every year. Perhaps the name "mummer" comes from the ancient Greeks, who used to have Momus, the god of satire and mockery.

Or there's an Olde English word "mommer," which the Olde English used to talk about mimes wearing masks while frolicking around.

Whatever the derivation, the Mummers are a big thing in the City of Brotherly Love, strutting around playing a particular sort of music I happen to love - the music of the string band. It sounds like this - "Alabama Jubilee" by the Jos. A. Ferko String Band or "When You're Smiling" by the South Philadelphia String Band or the "Four Leaf Clover Medley" by the Quaker City String Band.

A string band is limited to these instruments: saxophones, banjos, accordions, violins, bass violins, and percussion instruments. And notice in the videos I linked, the people listening are happy, the bands are strutting and happy, and good times are in the air. You will not find the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra strutting their way through some lugubrious tunes like Danse Macabre in G Minor or the Peer Gynt Suite No. 1. 

And these musicians come from all parts of Philly and hold all sorts of "real" jobs...so the guy playing the sax next to a banjo player might be the guy who delivers hoagie rolls to WaWa, or he might just be a medical doctor.

In fact, on New Year's Day at the Philadelphia Eagles game, a Mummer all dressed up and painted up in pink and blue swaggered in a parade to the stadium before the game, and was in the stands with his bandmates when a fan suffered a medical emergency, causing him to turn blue in the stands.

Fortunately for the fan in distress, that particular Mummer was Dr Vincent Basile, M.D. who has been on the ER staff at Einstein Medical Center for three years. 

"I didn't really expect this to happen when I was at the Eagles game in a Mummers suit on the first day of the year," the multi-talented physician joked.  

"He's like blue in the face," Dr. Basile said. "He's not moving. He's not really breathing. Thankfully I have some great training, so it kind of kicked in at that point to help out," he added.  

"I'm in full face paint, sunglasses, costume, the whole nine," Dr. Basile said. "I have to convince everyone that I'm a doctor when I get up there because it's a little hard to believe when I'm wearing that suit."

A nurse came from the crowd to back him up doing CPR, and the patient came to after three minutes of CPR ("Color started coming back into his face a little bit," Dr. Basile said. "He starts breathing and he wakes up a little but and he's dazed and confused.") and then the doctor and the nurse went back to their seats and watched the game, later learning that the patient was still recovering in the hospital.

I wish the patient many happy years of being able to tell his friends, "You're not gonna BELIEVE who helped me!"

 

Dry wit

Someone once said something along the lines of "any amount of work can be accomplished, as long as it's not what you're supposed to be doing at the time."

It makes sense, then, that whoever said that was supposed to be doing something else when that thought occurred to him or her. I'm in the clear; I am not supposed to be doing anything anytime, which gives me lots of time to think about stuff.

I take as many as two or three showers per day, so it stands to reason that I have a lot of drying off to do (because I'm all wet, see?) And that can take a while. I don't think terrycloth towels are all we need, because I still find myself a little dampish even after toweling off a while. They say that high-cost Turkish towels are superior in soak-ability, even as they grow softer over the years, and they fold flat, taking up much less space than terry. 

But I can't just toss my old towels away or turn them over to the animal shelter, because they are a fine matched set, with "DO NOT REMOVE / HOTEL PROPERTY" delicately embroidered on them.

I put my brain to work on this, once I had toweled it off. You know how you go through the car wash, and after the sudsin' and rinsin' and all that, suddenly you're in a huge huff of hot air, drying off the Corolla just ever so? Why can't we have something like that in our shower rooms, a huge fan showering us with warm concentrated air that will have us shiny and dry in a jiffy?

                                        Home version needed!

I leave this here for some brilliant young person to pick up and run with. Just promise to install one of the first units right here at the Lazy 'C' Ranch and I'll be happy. 

A date to remember

I oppose capital punishment for several reasons, not least of which is how often real exculpatory evidence turns up later, long after a trial, and if the person mistakenly convicted was also mistakenly executed, there's nothing anyone can do about it.

And for those without-a-doubt cases, such as ones with video evidence showing the accused actually committing the murder, well, I say, staying in prison a long time is the worst punishment of all. 

And what's more, you'll forgive me for saying this, but having worked in the Courthouse for almost two decades, and seeing the jury pools into which justice dives every day, well, let's just say a lot of them seemed easily convincible - by either side. 

So no, I'm not a fan of the capital punishment. But get this - if that's your fate in America, at least you are given the date of your date with the devil. You know you'll go out on the xxth of Xxxxber, 20XX, and can plan accordingly with your magazine subscriptions and Jelly-Of-The-Month Clubs.

In Japan, prisoners on death row are not told of their due dates. Now that is tough to deal with. Every day those inmates wake up, not knowing if it will be their last.

As my witty wife Peggy said when I told her about this, "Maybe they figure it out when everyone else gets a dinner tray and they don't."

Yikes!

Not funny

Anyone who's finished growing up knows there's a time and a place for everything. Celebrations on the football field are getting out of hand, according to my old geezer self.  You never saw Johnny Unitas performing a dance routine after throwing a touchdown pass.  Art Donovan sacked many an opposing quarterback and he wouldn't have thought to do The Bristol Stomp over the other guy's recumbent form.  Players today can be losing 42-14 with three minutes to play, and if they tackle a guy, they want a tickertape parade and a full-on dance fest with pantomime stunts.  As experienced players will tell you, if you do something, act like you've been there before.

But this week, the several of the Pittsburgh Steelers are coming in for criticism because after linebacker Alex Highsmith sacked Cleveland quarterback Deshaun Watson in Sunday's game, a teammate gave Highsmith fake CPR on the field as a celebratory show.

They say this is just one of the stunts that the Steelers perform on the field. But did they forget that just six days before, the Bills' Damar Hamlin went into cardiac arrest on the field in Cincinnati and had to have CPR performed on him to save his life? 

I'm sure they heard about it in Pittsburgh. It was in all the papers.

And Steelers fans were quick to point out that Highsmith had been showing support online for Hamlin. 

Still.

 

 Speaking of timing, this might be a good time to remind one and all that everyone should know CPR. The real kind. 

Knowing when

On February 11, 2013, Pope Benedict XVI mentioned during a routine Vatican ceremony that he had made  “a decision of great importance for the life of the church.”

Saying that he had he had “repeatedly examined my conscience before God," the then-85-year old German-born theologian went on to say that the modern world,  “subject to so many rapid changes and shaken by questions of deep relevance for the life of faith,” called for a pope who was in better condition. He concluded with this: “My strengths, due to an advanced age, are no longer suited” to the papacy.

This was the first time in 600 years that a pope had retired.  And from that day in 2013, Pope Emeritus Benedict lived until this past New Year's Eve, in his own space, at his own pace, at the Vatican.

As a Protestant, I don't have a nickel in the internal struggles of the Catholic church, nor can I pretend to understand that church and how it works. As an outsider, all I can say is, why was it a big deal that he retired?

The Washington Post described Benedict an "intellectual giant and rock of moral certitude who had spent a lifetime defending the faith from outside forces." I know that he was born in the 1920s and became a priest in 1951. So he served his God and his church actively from 1951 until 2013...62 years! I happen to think he deserved to step aside, if that's how he felt.

I know retirement is not for everyone. US Senator Charles Grassley from Iowa, elected to the Senate in 1980, was just elected to an eighth term at the tender age of 89. Listen, if he wants to keep working - he already filed to run again in 2028 - that's his business, and, of course, that of the voters in Iowa.

I thought the Pope did a wise thing by stepping down when the thought the time was right. What I will never understand is why so many people thought it was all right to tell an 85-year-old man to just keep on working. 

Many people look at work as their sole reason for living. Those of us who enjoy pursuits beyond the bounds of time clocks, memos, meetings, and asinine rules are happy to set our own agendas.

 

Sunday Rerun: A special birthday

 

I'm sure that lots of people born this date, January 8, in 1935, are still with us. I wish them well; they're turning 88 years of age today.

And one such person born that day, who left this mortal coil in August of 1977, is still with us in spirit, for his name is Elvis Aron Presley, and he brought coolness to music like no one had before.

The life of the King began in this shotgun shack in Tupelo, MS, and it ended in the  mansion below in Memphis.

The great paradox of Elvis is that his greatest strength was that he never really changed from the unsophisticated country boy he was from birth, and his greatest weakness was that he never changed from the unsophisticated country boy he was from birth.

To the end he called his seniors "Ma'am" and "Sir." He accepted his draft notice and went into the army for two years at the very height of his fame and earning power. 

But he accepted bad advice, trusting a crooked manager, "Colonel" Tom Parker, who cheated him and held him back from true artistic accomplishment, instead miring him in two dozen of the stupidest movies you ever saw. And like so many people caught in a vortex that takes them from everyday life to a whirlwind, he fell in with "doctors" who gave him very, very poor medical advice - advice that ended his time with us at 42.

But what he left behind is the spirit that gives a man the confidence to dress like this without regret:

 Happy birthday, Elvis. We're still enjoying what you brought us.

The Saturday Picture Show, January 7, 2023

 

Macaulay Culkin is here to remind one and all that it's still wise to wear a mask in public settings...even if you are home alone.

People today might not even know why we always had a BIC pen in our pockets...to tighten up the reels on a mixtape so we could keep listening to Meatloaf. That sentence probably doesn't even make sense if you're 12.

This is a perfect example of truth in advertising! Don't build up people's hopes too highly. "He's doing a good job!" should be the motto of all office seekers. Schrunk went on to become Mayor of Portland, Oregon, so I guess he did do a good job.

We all need to be a little more Calvin. We're fine, and so is Terry Schrunk.

In 1942 people waited for others to finish eating at the counter in the diner. I don't know; it feels like they were rushing others to gobble their BLT and get out.

It's a shame that the late great Zappa came to be defined in so many minds as an oddball, when in fact most of what he said makes perfect sense, then and now.

This is what happens when they eliminate shoes, clothes, groceries, toys, home goods, and books.

Uhhhh, no thanks.

Raise your hand when you get it!

Groceries, cold meats, fruit, and beer. America in the 1940s. 

Goal!

I had a speech impediment as a child, and not until I got to the first grade did any adult see fit to do anything about it, except to have me say things wrong for their amusement. 

I'm almost over it.

But when Pelé, widely regarded as the best soccer player everywhere any day, died over the holidays, I was interested to see where a guy born Edson Arantes do Nascimento came up with the mononym by which we knew him. 

When I found out The Rest Of The Story, I also learned that he really hated the nonsense nickname his schoolmates laid on him, so much so that he would fight the other kids who called him Pelé. 

The soccer idol's parents named him "Edson" because they got electricity in their home just before Thomas A. Edison died in 1931, and they wished to salute the "Wizard of Menlo Park," the name admirers hung on Edison (and which he did not dispute.) No reason is given for why the folks dropped the 'i' in Edison, though.

The story most often given was that young Edson's favorite soccer player was a guy named Bilé. But as a child, Edson had trouble pronouncing that name, and when he spoke of Bilé, it came out sounding like "Pelé," and you know how kids will torment each other over little things like that.

In later years, I suppose he came to accept the moniker, but he always felt it sounded like Portuguese baby talk, and he told an interviewer in 2019, "I had a happy childhood. My name is Edson, then they started calling me Pelé."

My advice to parents is that your children will get 100% of their Minimum Daily Requirement of teasing and torment from their peers, so please don't add to it by piling on. 

I've had a few

Regrets! I've had a few REGRETS! That's all. 

But not as many as the film crew on the beef commercial where we see a fly walking around on top of the new hunk of Brie Cheese.

I know it's hard to see him in this photo, but trust me, he's marching to Pretoria right on that cheese in the commercial. I wonder if he's related to the fly that landed on Mike Pence's hair helmet during the vice-presidential debate a couple of years ago. I don't like flies much but at least I don't pretend they don't exist.

I regret not calling Pence during that televised debate to let him know.

And this is for real. I regret not getting a copy of the ninth-grade Civics Book I studied at the dear destroyed Towsontown Junior High School. There was a chapter about the Bill of Rights, and along with an explanation of the First Amendment (Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances) there was a picture of people peacefully assembling somewhere on New Year's Eve, a vast crowd of people blowing horns and wearing funny hats and doing conga dances, and down in the lower right corner were two raffish young men displaying the rigid digit. You know, flipping the camera off. Giving the bird. Showing half a peace sign.

How that picture escaped the sight of the author of the textbook (probably called something like "The American Parade" by Roger Nussbaum Von Loon), the editors, the printer, and the people who bought the books for the school system to bore teach us with is beyond me, but if you learn nothing else from me this entire new calendar year, please let it be this: You could print a 1,000 page textbook and fill it with pictures, charts, graphs, and I don't know what-all else, and plop a copy of that meatloaf in front of a 14-year-old boy, and if there is a picture anywhere in it of a dude giving the Jersey salute, the kid will find it within thirty seconds and show it to his friends within thirty-five.

Generosity

In 2017, someone awful (the world is full of them) blew up a bomb at the Manchester Arena in England as an Ariana Grande concert was coming to a close. 22 people died and countless others are still dealing with post-incident trauma, physical and emotional, Ms Grande among them.

I am a fan of Ariana for her amazing singing voice with its four-octave range, although I don't usually care much for the songs she chooses to sing with that great instrument. You've never seen anyone reach for the remote as quickly as I when her version of "Santa Tell Me" looms on the speaker, to be honest. But she is also  a gifted impersonator  of her fellow performers, and she spent a year with Jennette McCurdy amusing me as Cat on "Sam and Cat." (I love situation comedies.)

A lot of people would walk away from the Manchester disaster and not look back, but not Ariana. This holiday season, as in years past, she sent tons of Christmas presents to children in hospitals in Manchester.

On Boxing Day (December 26, the day we all watch "Rocky,") the Royal Manchester Children's Hospital Charity said Ms Grande had sent the gifts again.

The charity said: "Thank you Ariana! We were so excited to receive Christmas gifts for young patients across our hospitals from Ariana Grande."

"The presents were distributed to babies, children and teenagers at the Royal Manchester Children's Hospital, Trafford Hospital, Wythenshawe Hospital and North Manchester General Hospital."

Ariana has been made an honorary citizen of Manchester, and I like seeing that sort of generous kindness!

What matters most

In the stunned silence of the Cincinnati stadium last night, as the injured Buffalo player Damar Hamlin was removed to the hospital and was (as I write this) still listed in critical condition, a remarkable thing took place.

The referees were telling the players and coaches to get ready to play in five minutes.

And the head coaches walked over to each other and told the referees that wasn't going to happen.

As Ryan Clark, a retired player, said on ESPN, this is a situation we have not dealt with before, a player falling to the field unconscious, receiving CPR and further medical attention, and being taken away by ambulance. But what should stand out more than anything is that the players had made it obvious to the coaches that playing football was the last thing on their minds at the time.

There was a time, trust me, that the players would have feared to speak up and refuse to play, but that's not the case anymore. 

I don't know right now what will happen next and what effect this will have on the two teams in last night's game, the rest of the players in the league, and the fans all over. But at least this is for sure: people will have it in mind now that there are lots of things more important than football or any other game.

Testing 1, 2, 3

I love words and I enjoy studying where they came from. There's a word for that: etymology.  We could discuss the etymology of the word "etymology" for days on end, and wind up exhausted.

One of the places we can find out about words is a dictionary. I love them and I will often just pick one up at random and thumb through it, looking for new words, or words new to me.

However, I realize that there are good dictionaries and bad dictionaries, just as there are good and bad hamburgers, hammers, and hammocks. And without spending a lot of time reading a dictionary that might not be all that good ("Webster's" is good, "Stan Webster's" is probably not) how are we to know?

I came up with a simple test. I flip to the "e" section  and look for the word "eleemosynary." It means relating to charity. 

Substandard dictionaries exclude words such as this because they are not part of the daily lexicon for most of us, but they still should be in the dictionary in case someone wants to look it up.

I don't know, I just think it's easier to have yardsticks by which to measure. And I bring all this up because I read that churlish chef Gordon Ramsay always orders a crab cake to size up a restaurant's quality.

The answer, as reported on Quora, is "By choosing to have crab cakes, Gordon can not only judge the cooking ability of the kitchen staff, but he can also taste whether they’re using fresh ingredients or blitzing a frozen cake in the microwave (as the latter kills the texture)."

"In a few cases the smell of the crab cakes was so horrendous, he was even able to tell the restaurant served expired ingredients and did a bad job at storing the food they had…"

I'm writing to you from Baltimore, MD, USA, Crab Cake capitol of the world, where everyone still has, and treasures, their family crab cake recipe. We know if you're trying to slip us a fakeroo around here, so that's good for cranky Gordon to use as a test.

Knowing whether a restaurant serves good crab cakes is a gift. It's very...eleemosynary.

Sunday Rerun: Soul Finger! Soul Fingerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

 Got a minute for a little pop/soul music history?

I'm glad you do. More and more I find my mind drifting away from the current times anyway. How about 1967?  

In April of that year, along came a hit record, an instrumental, by a new group called The Bar-Kays.  They were on Volt Records, part of the Stax/Volt company out of Memphis, and this was their first single release, called "Soul Finger."

The band had been noodling in the studio, rehearsing to "But It's Alright," the song by J.J. Jackson.  As instrumentals often do, the band started with a melody (this time, it was the eight notes of "Mary Had A Little Lamb") and built the tune from there.

And in the studio that afternoon so long ago was none other than Isaac Hayes, about whom I could write three blogs, about his careers as a musician, producer, and actor. Isaac was an idea man, and he came up with a beauty for this record. First, he said, let's call the song "Soul Finger" (which must have been a tribute to James Bond, the double-naught spy from "Goldfinger").

And then, Isaac said, let's get some kids to help us out here by having them holler the title! David Porter, Hayes's production partner, knew whom to ask, when he saw kids out in the street in front of the Stax studios in Memphis, playing hopscotch, tag, chasing each other around on bikes...the usual kid stuff.

Porter went out and asked the group of kids if they wanted to help make a record...and he sweetened the deal by offering Coca-Cola for everyone! In came the kids, down went the soda, and the next thing you know, the kids are screeching "Soul Finger!" right on cue!

And the record was an instant hit, reaching # 3 on the U.S. Billboard R&B singles chart and # 17 on the Billboard Hot 100, with the B-side "Knucklehead" also getting some airplay.

As joyous as the sound of this record is, 1967 ended horribly for the Bar-Kays. Chosen by Otis Redding to go tour as his backup band, four of the band - guitarist Jimmie King, organist Ronnie Caldwell, saxophonist Phalon Jones, and the great drummer Carl Cunningham - died along with Redding and one other man when the star's airplane crashed into Lake Monona, near Madison, Wisconsin.

Other musicians continued playing as the Bar-Kays, notably on Isaac Hayes's "Hot Buttered Soul" album, but "Soul Finger" remains their essential legacy, and it's all due to some kids in Memphis, all sugar-rushed on Coca-Cola and hollering their hearts out!