The Saturday Picture Show, July 15, 2023

 

This was an very popular radio from the 1930s through the 1950s. It was sort of a forerunner to "Seinfeld," in that it was a show about nothing. McGee was a fulltime bloviator, and his long-suffering wife Molly knew what a bullshipper he was, but she went along with his nutty schemes and dreams. Every 30-minute show had a performance by a big band and a vocal harmony song by The Kings Men, and all that nothingness helped America get through one depression and one world war. Today, of course, McGee would run for president.

The Datsun Auto Hammock was a great idea, and it must have been ahead of its time. Or way behind it, who knows?

Here's what Calvin & Hobbes had to say on the 4th of July, 1986. I agree.

Uh, I think I'll just wait for the elevator....

The people who make Dr Pepper must have had a lot left over, so they called the bean factory down the street and said, "Hey, got an idea..." It says here, if you want your beans to taste like Dr Pepper, open a can and pour some in, and let Uncle Nuttsy finish it. He loves the stuff.

Test your sense memory! Look at this picture and tell me you can smell the freshly mown grass.

Somehow I get the feeling that the chow is really good here, and the service is impeccable and friendly. I might be wrong, but a lot of the time a fancy, shiny veneer hides a multitude of messes.

Who's for buckwheat pancakes this morning? Just me, huh? Oh well, I love 'em.

Same as I enjoy seeing dilapidated cars in junkyards and speculating on their happier days of yore, it's hard to look at what once must have been quite the magnificent mansion, now reduced to tatters and rotten rust.

Let's assume this is a typo on the part of the bridge repair crew. One again, fellas: Spell Check is not your friend. Let's hope the wedding went off in spectacular fashion.

Ah-ooooooooooo! Werewolves of Kansas City!

We have them here in Baltimore; I guess they exist anywhere that sports exist.  We're talking about "superfans," the people who go to games but are not satisfied wearing a jersey or hat to show their allegiance. These superfans are the ones who turn going to a game - primarily football; you don't see a lot of this at baseball games - into a sort of Kabuki theatre, with elaborate facial makeup and related accessories. This sort of thing... 

Now, that's fine for these men and women, if that's what they're into. But this isn't...

 

News item: 

 A man known as Kansas City Chiefs superfan “ChiefsAholic” has been charged in federal court with one count of bank theft and one count of transporting stolen property across state lines after being a fugitive for four months, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Western District of Missouri.

The man's real name is Xaviar Michael Babudar. He's 28. He was arrested in Lincoln, California, last week, charged originally in Tulsa County, Okla. in connection to a December, 2022, robbery.  He was released on bond in February and allegedly removed his ankle monitor late in March.

He was rounded up near Sacramento. 

 

 

Prosecutors claim that Babudar paraded around the Midwest pulling a string of holdups at banks and credit unions, laundering the money through area casinos and banks. They say that Babudar was famous for wearing a werewolf costume to Chiefs games and that he was quite active on social media with other fans, super or otherwise.

I'm not saying that other "Superfans" are engaged in criminal conduct. But I'd be careful about whom I engage with on social media, all I'm saying.

Counting on you

So you want to be younger all of a sudden? Well, forget about updating your wardrobe so you look like a hipster, and that surgery to remove your neck gobbler will not be required, because all you have to do is...move to South Korea!

Yes, South Korea is changing the way they used to total up how many years a person has been prowling around this old earth, and ages there are going down by a year or two!

Kim Da-in told a tv reporter that she "turned 6 and then became 5 again." The new law means that South Korea will be going by the international age-counting method, so people can add up their years accordingly. 

Up until now, their age-counting custom counts every baby one year old at birth, and adds another years on January 1. So if you were born on New Year's Eve, say, you were one for a day and then turned two the next day.

South Korea's president, Yoon Suk Yeol, says going with the international system has been a key goal of his government, as it will reduce “social and administrative confusion” and arguments.

Seoul resident Choi Eun-young is proud to be 49 again, so don't go calling her "50."

“The law doesn’t make you biologically younger and there are no real benefits other than feeling good about being called a year younger than before,” she admitted. “But if that’s the international standard, there's nothing bad in following it."

 

Happy birthday again, young ladies!

I would like to take this opportunity to announce that I am joining the worldwide trend of using the metric system, which makes me 22.2 years old Celsius.

 

Itchy and Scratchy

I don't play the lotto, and the only time I have anything to do with scratchers is after I take the trash down to the end of the driveway and a skeeter gits me, so I can say that I am always happy when someone strikes it rich in the lucrative career field of playing the Maryland Lottery.

Dateline CARNEY, MD, where the news is:  "A 61-year-old Baltimore veteran is calling himself “Million Dollar Man” after winning a $1 million top prize on a Maryland Lottery scratch-off."

The lucky winner is a bus driver who plays the Racetrax and scratchers all the time, and diversified is portfolio by playing the Hot 777 game when they started that in April.

His big day started off as a big bad day. He got to work and realized he left his phone at home. From that, he deduced that "something out of the normal" would happen to him that day, so on the way home to grab that phone, he stopped at the Royal Farms (RoFa) in Carney to play his number hunches. 

He only won a little bit with his first ticket, so he went for the $20 Hot 777 scratch-off because it offers a top prize of a million US simoleons. He scratched, he won what he thought was a thousand simoleons, and then when he scanned the ticket, bingo! A cool million bucks.

He wishes to remain anonymous, this million dollar winner. He's won a few thousand before, but nothing like this, ever! “I don’t think I’ve ever seen that many zeros together,” he says. 

His plan is to put the swag in a high-yield savings account and also make some investments to benefit his four grandchildren as well.

I bring all this up if only to point out that my loving wife and I are longtime residents of Carney, Maryland, so who knows? Maybe good luck will touch us all.

TIL

Today I learned...that when people write "TIL," it stands for "Today I Learned." And it's never too late to do that. 

F'instance, if you have been eating Spam (and I never have) believing the name to be some sort of acronym for "scientifically processed animal matter," or "squeezed pork and meh," or "shoulder of pork and ham," please lay those rumors to rest. Spam is a brand name for the combination of "spice" and "ham." 

But when you look at what those spices and ham parts are, you will understand how their brand name became the perfect nickname for junk mail. 

Similar story: all my music-loving life, I figured that the name Stax Records came from the term "Stacks of wax," which is what disc jockeys called a pile of records back in the day. But now I looked it up. Stax began as Satellite Records in Memphis, until they found there was another label by that name in Los Angeles. So the owners of the fledgling record company, brother and sister Jim STewart and Estelle Stewart AXton put their names together and soon were selling millions of records by Sam & Dave, Isaac Hayes, the Staples Singers, and many more.

 

Coming soon: We examine the military records of General Motors, General Mills, and Captain Crunch.

" I feel like I know you from somewhere..."

From the It's A Small World Dep't: Here's one about a labor and delivery nurse who was the first in the family to meet and hold and love a little baby girl. Now, 22 years, later, that baby is her daughter-in-law!

It all started out in Utah where Tyler West was looking through baby photos with his then-fiancée. “I think that’s my mom. It looks like she was your nurse!” Tyler said, as they saw a picture of his intended, Kelsey Poll, and the L&D nurse who brought her into the world.

It had to be a surprise, all right. What a coincidence, even though Layton, Utah, is not home to 70 million people or anything (83,291 as of 2021, to be exact.) 

The photo was from June 2001 and showed Tyler's mom prepping baby Kelsey's foot to have footprints made for her birth certificate. West says he was shocked at the coincidence, as they sat on the sofa leafing through photo albums back in March.

(Note to people preparing to enter marriage or long-term relationships: Prepare to do a lot of photo-peeping. When pictures of babies are waved in your face, resist at all costs the temptation to point out that all babies look like Leonardo DiCaprio. Trust me on that.)

Paging through the photo album, Tyler and Kelsey found her birth certificate from  Lakeview Hospital in Bountiful, Utah, on June 15, 2001, and Tyler recognized her mother's handwriting!

Next stop was Kelsey's basement, where they dug out the video her dad took at the hospital on her natal day. And you have to figure, in 2001, it was shot on one of those shoulder-busting camcorders, but there they were on video tape - the mothers-in-law of the future couple.

“I thought it was really cool — it made me feel grateful to know I had this tie to my new family,” said Kelsey Poll, 22. “I always wanted to have a good relationship with my future parents, and it also confirmed that I want to be with Tyler for the rest of my life.”

Cool indeed! Our history follows us around.

Sunday Rerun (from 2020): It's...Good!

 Since the pandemic began, we're so focused on our hands...and everyone else's. Wash them! Sanitize them! Put gloves on them! Don't touch your face with them! Hand someone at KFC a double sawbucks and bring home dinner with them!

Truth to tell, I'm not nuts about KFC, and prefer Popeye's hands down, as it were. Also ahead of The Colonel on my Chicken Dance are Weis Markets, Royal Farms (even though I insist on calling it RoFa instead of RoFo), and of course, Friendly Farm, the ne plus ultra of fried everything. Even Wendy's, when they had fried chicken, was pretty good, and I must say Chick-fil-A is the worst. Greasy slabs on spongy hamburger rolls? No thanks.

But, if you are in the habit of saying that KFC is "finger-lickin' good," you can just stop that right here and now. The chain says that slogan is not the thing for a hand-conscious nation, so they are pushing that motto off to the side for a while.

You kinda get the impression that the catchphrase will be back, because instead of replacing their signs and coming up with an entire new logo, they blurred and pixelated out the now-unused words.

The message still rings true: "It's good!"

I don't remember spending a lot of time licking my fingers while eating fried chicken. But maybe I should have, because I am famous around here for dousing a thigh or wing with Texas Pete hot sauce, eating right on down to the bone, and then scratching my itchy, weepy eye.

Catherine Tan-Gillespie, global chief marketing officer for the chicken giant, says, “We find ourselves in a unique situation – having an iconic slogan that doesn’t quite fit in the current environment. While we are pausing the use of ‘It’s Finger Lickin’ Good’, rest assured the food craved by so many people around the world isn’t changing one bit.”

Rest assured, we are resting assured, Ms Tan-Gillespie.

By the way - "It's finger lickin' good" dates back to the early days of Colonel Sanders founding the chain. He was no more a colonel than he was a kernel, but but anyway, after his death, they stopped using that slogan in the late 1990s and brought it out of mothballs in 2008.

So it will be back!

The Saturday Picture Show, July 8, 2023

 

The world lost a great talent when Bruce McCall died recently. He was both a writer and a cartoonist for the National Lampoon, The New Yorker, and other publications. This page of fake ads from the Lampoon in 1973 reminded me, any time after that when I was looking for a job, that Airline Mail Sorters Eat Steak. 

I know, Calvin, I know. Just two weeks ago, everyone was hollering about it being chilly, and now look!

This campaign poster is from 1935, supporting the re-elections of Franklin Roosevelt as President and Herbert Lehman as Governor of New York. As more states see fit to de-regulate labor, you will see children doing factory work again, and then someone will say it's time to abolish child labor. Bad things run in cycles.

I have no idea where this house is, but I am fairly certain it's near a beach. Hence the 148 windows to catch that sea breeze.

We are glad to have a whole-house policy with a local utility for plumbing, appliance, HVAC, and appliance repair. This is what a kitchen sink looks like when someone's cousin's brother-in-law shows up with a tool kit.

Kentucky is urging people to get off the interstates and try the local highways and byways. I worked with a guy whose brother got lost down there once, and had a state trooper advise him to get back on the interstate and not go sightseeing, or he might never be heard from again. All right, then.

I never understood the concept of "evaporated milk." If something evaporates, it dries up, am I wrong? 

This AM radio station in Livingston, Montana, is one of the hundreds of local AM stations that have "gone dark" in that past few years.  AM, which once ruled the airwaves, is now home to one or two big legacy stations in each city, and a dozen or so others running inane sports talk, foreign language or religious programming. 

This is a colorized picture of a banana boat unloading in the early 1900s. Some of these bananas are just now ripe enough so that someone will say, "Hey! Don't throw them out! I'ma make banana bread, first chancet I get!"

We will remember the Canadian Wildfires tinting our sunsets and polluting our air.

A week to remember

 Something a little different today..

I collect a lot of things, from the tangible (old LIFE magazines, Orioles memorabilia) to the intangible, like the list I keep of actors who will play the part of everyone I know, should it ever become necessary to make a movie about my life. 

(It won't.)

Another list I've been working on is one of well-known people whose names form a week of days. Without further ado, let's meet them now!  

Rick MONDAY played major league baseball from 1966 until 1984, after being the first #1 draft pick in the very first amateur player draft. He signed for the then-astonishing bonus of $104,000, which is what today's players call "lunch money."

TUESDAY Weld was born Susan Weld, but the closest her cousin could come to pronouncing "Tuesday" was "TuTu", and you can see how that turned out. She's an actress, mainly known for playing impetuous, saucy types, but unfortunately, she will turn 80 next month, and there is very little call for a cheeky octogenarian type. We loved her as Thalia Menninger on "Dobie Gillis."

There have been at least three WEDNESDAY Addamses that I can recall, but it's hard to top the original, as played by Lisa Loring on TV's Addams Family. Her dance with Lurch puts her on top for me.

My week, as it were, was made when Peggy told me about a character named Detective Inspector Fred THURSDAY on a PBS show she watched called "Endeavour." Welcome to the list, Fred!

Deadpan actor Jack Webb played LA Police Sergeant Joe FRIDAY on the radio and on two TV series, all called "Dragnet." The show told police stories from the point of view of the police and gave little sympathy to hippies and protestors, who were forced to wear ridiculous clothing and recite corny dialogue. Jack inspired a thousand parodies of his character, few of them flattering.

Apparently, there is a football team in Indianapolis, Indiana, although with all my research, I can find but scant information about it. I'm told that for the last eight games of the 2022 season, they invited a former player named Jeff SATURDAY, who had not coached football above the high school level, to be their head coach. The team responded to his hiring by losing seven of the eight games, leaving Jeff without a job, although Keith Olbermann says that his eyes are definitely "dreamy."

Billy SUNDAY was an average major league baseball player in the late 1800s who became an above-average histrionic evangelist in the early 1900s. He never attended college or seminary, but made a name  - and a fortune - for himself preaching hellfire and damnation. And all before there was such a thing as cable TV!

A new word and an old joke

I used to subscribe to one of those "Learn A Word A Day" deals, but then I figured out that I could learn just as many words by reading things, and here's an example of a sentence with a new word for me:

California conservationist Beth Pratt was hiking in Yosemite National Park on June 25 when she came across miles upon miles of suncups.

This was in the Smithsonian's website, which goes on to explain: 

Suncups are depressions in the snow that occur repeatedly, one next to the other. They’re quite common and form in snowfields around the world. Usually, they’re shallow and look like salad bowls, but they can also be several feet deep. Sometimes they look like egg cartons or honeycombs.

Perhaps it's because we don't get much snow anymore thanks to the global warming which is definitely not taking place, but I had not heard of suncups before. Sunups, yes, sure. 

Ms Pratt, the regional executive director of the National Wildlife Federation’s California Regional Center, went on to tell the Smithsonian, "I’ve been hiking in the Sierra for 33 years. I’ve encountered them a lot but never to this extent."

Andrew Schwartz, lead scientist and manager at UC Berkeley’s Central Sierra Snow Laboratory at Donner Pass, says we get suncups early in the winter as wind blows across freshly-fallen snow, "scouring the surface and creating these various features on snow..." He added that suncups occur later in the year, too, as snow melts unevenly.

  

Ms Pratt and Mr Schwartz are learned people of science, and probably wouldn't give two chuckles at my longtime practice of giving the name "Donner" when lining up for a table at a restaurant. It will always thrill me to hear the hostess say, "Donner, party of 6!"

 

He's Finnished

Let's turn to the News From All Over The World:  The deputy mayor of the capital of Finland is in a legal jam. People want him to  pay compensation for damages and to quit his deputy mayorship, because he was caught spray-painting graffiti in a railway tunnel.

The guy's name is Paavo Arhinmäki, he is one of four deputy mayors in Helsinki, and the Finnish Transport Infrastructure Agency says it's going to cost them 3,500 Euros ($3,830 American) to sandblast the graffiti.

It's not like he's 13, the average age of someone with a can of spray paint in their hand. This dude is 46 and holds a responsible position, and now it seems he is responsible for the damage to a rail tunnel.

Finnish art experts appraised his work and say it looks like he was inspired by New York City sprayed damage from the 70s.

And this being 2023, Arhinmäki couldn't wait to get on Facebook to talk his way out of it, or try to. He admits to being a graffitier in his younger days and supporting "street art," that field of endeavor in which the artist confuses public property for his own canvas. 

Oh, and he apologized for his "stupid fooling around."

Finland’s largest newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat, showed off the deputy mayor's handiwork in a tweet.

This is in a tunnel used by cargo trains, so it's not like he chose a "canvas" where his genius would be shared with many people, just a conductor and a hobo or two.

“I have committed a crime and bear full responsibility for it,” Arhinmäki said, but he also said he refuses to quit.

Every year, Helsinki spends almost 3/4 of a million dollars to remove illegal graffiti in that city of 650,000 residents, whose lives are not measurably improved by having a politician spraypaint all over the place.

 

Happy!

 

H A P P Y     F O U R T H   O F    J U L Y !

And I stood tall

I saw a story on Instagram that caught my eye. It quoted the comedian Tom Dreesen, who used to be the opening act for Frank Sinatra in Las Vegas...

According to the story, Dreesen said that Sinatra was coming back to his car late one night, passing through a hotel lobby, and a lady approached him, saying she had been waiting five hours to see him. She went on to say that her husband was quite ill and she thought that if she came home with an autograph from the great saloon singer, it might make him feel better.

And at that, went the tale, Sinatra took off his cufflinks and presented them to the lady, and Dreesen was surprised that Sinatra was handing off a pair of links for which he had shelled out $5,000.

Sinatra then said, per Dreesen, "We're all just renting here. When I'm dead, someone else will wear those cufflinks, drive my car, live in my house. Nothing will be around forever, so we're just using things for the now. And if those cufflinks bring that woman and her husband happiness, well, they're doing them more good than they're doing me, so let them have them!"

Now, again, I can't say with any certainty that those are words said by Francis A. Sinatra. It's just something I heard about him, just as I once heard that he always had a couple of goons with him when he went out so he could say, "Hey, go beat dat guy up" if someone displeased him in some way. I don't know that that's true, either. 

But how about those words, anyway? True? I think so. I don't have any expensive cufflinks, for sure. I have a vast collection of books and recordings and tools that I would hope would go to good hands upon my demise (don't line up yet; it's a long way off!) 

And if I happen to have something I don't see a need for, I'd give it away. Peggy will be glad to see a lot of my stuff go.

I have a lot of hand-me-down tools that are better than what's made today, and I am glad to have them. Someone else will be one day, too. 

And one of my upper teeth wears a gold crown. Someone can use one of my many pairs of pliers and remove that once I am done chewing with that molar. That's a couple hundred in gold right there.

So that's today's lesson from Frank Sinatra. Like him or not, I'm doing it My Way.

Sunday Rerun from August 2020: The Most Baltimore Thing

 The Most Baltimore Thing In The World is not the unrest and contumacious behavior we see in the streets and on the news sometimes.

The Most Baltimore Thing In The World showed up the other day when a gas explosion blew up three houses on Labyrinth Avenue in the city's northwest corridor.

It happened just before 10 in the morning, and the news stations had live coverage all day and into the night.  By the time the noon news came on, they were showing people showing up with needed supplies.  It was fortunate, at least, that the scene of the explosion was a few steps away from the Reisterstown Road Plaza, which afforded the helpers plenty of room to set up.

Meanwhile, at the scene, people living nearby had run out of their homes - often without socks or shoes - to start the rescue effort. Seven people were injured, and two lost their lives. Families and friends came together as people emerged from the detritus, with their possessions scattered to the four winds, but, with those exceptions above, their bodies and souls still among the quick.

Baltimore City police were there along with the Fire Departments from the city and Baltimore and Howard Counties. The Jewish community group known as the Chesed Fund was passing out water to neighbors and the many fire, police, utilities and other agencies on site.  The temperature was 90°, with oppressive humidity, so water was a must.  And because of the uncertainty of the source of the gas leak, power had to be shut off in the neighborhood for safety, leaving more people in need of a cool drink and shade.

One of the people rescued was barefoot, according to the article in the Baltimore SUN. Na-Shaé Carter, 20, went to her house and came back with a pair of her mother's pink socks for the lady.

“I got 10,000 socks,” said her mother. “One pair ain’t gonna hurt. To give it to somebody in their time of need, I don’t even care. I was out here giving out water. … I wasn’t worried about me. I was worried about my neighbors.”

Meanwhile, the American Red Cross was on the job to find temporary housing for those left without a home, and they were supplying water and food on the lot near the Applebee’s. 

But here is the most Baltimore thing on an awful Baltimore day: a man was on the news, no bigshot he, just a working class salt of the earth guy. He said, "I had $500. I took $300 and bought 30 pizzas at Papa John's, and $200 worth of water at Giant's*."

And he delivered all that to people he didn't know, just people he wanted to help. That's Baltimore.
___________________________________________________________
*Something else that's pure Baltimore - we make the names of all grocery stores and hardware outlets possessive. I can meet you at Safeway's or Home Depot's if you want to hear more.

The Saturday Picture Show, July 1, 2023

 

I have several questions about this intake procedure. I don't expect answers.

The Fire Department of New York had to do a "roof rope" rescue, one of the toughest operations in the firefighters' manual. The only way to save this man from his burning fourth-floor apartment was out the window and down to the street, and they pulled it off - another daily miracle for New York's Bravest!

You love him as Carl Winslow on "Family Matters," and as Sergeant Al Powell in "Die Hard" twice. Reginald VelJohnson is TV Dad all the way! 

Think about the Fourth of July in 1942, seven months after Pearl Harbor. Patriotism then was not something one displayed by wearing a hat or slapping a sticker on the car. It was something one lived, earnestly and fully.

If I enter your house, I can live if you have no cats, but I get really weirded out in houses with no books handy. I always feel like coming back later with a box of extra books.

It's #6 for me.

After working a shift at the A&P one day, I picked up Peggy after work, and she needed something from the A&P over her way. So I went in with her, still in my tie and nametag, and the next thing you know, people were asking me where was the soap and the cereal and the ginger ale. I didn't ask for extra pay, though. 

Our library branch has a very nice arrangement; there's a drive thru window for picking up books you've requested online, and a dropbox too. Very handy for the avid reader who is not so spry, or is busy, or both. Oh, and we have no Cathy.

When I see junked cars on their way to becoming razor blades or props in billboard ads, I think about that long-ago happy day when Dad came home from the dealership with a brand-new Hedgehog LE, and the whole gang piled in for a ride, and lots of happy times ensued until the transmission fell out.

She loves rock and roll and the Orioles! Joan Jett has been an O's fan for a long time. She sang the National Anthem at a few games and usually shows up for spring training. She's here with star catcher Adley Rutschman, who has anything but a Bad Reputation.