The Saturday Picture Show, August 26, 2023

 

This farmer is really a big fan of The Doors.

Reflectors on an exercycle? You're expecting someone to ride up on your tail?

This is the wreck of the Amoco Cadiz, an oil tanker that capsized off the coast of France in March 1978. It just looks like a giant dolphin now, that's all.

This cat in Rome knows where to wet his whistle.

You'd be smiling too, if you were wearing a free down jacket!

I'm going to have to insist on this.

Pro football in the 1950s: no facemarks, and re-used jerseys! Look at the numbers on the uniform top of  Y.A. Tittle here. You can see they removed someone else's number and sewed Tittle's 14 in its place. Imagine asking Lamar Jackson to wear someone's used uniform from last year. 

For Heaven's sake, do not waste money on substitutes. Insist on the real Klutch!

Air Travel back in the day...no one has told Mr. Worthington here that his suitcase is going to Sheboygan while he flies to Ashtabula.

Wherever it was, this was one fine record store. While you shopped, you heard this.

30 minutes, please

I make no pretensions of being thoroughly cultured. I don't care for subtle comedy, or movies loaded with symbolism. When I have seen one, other people have to tell me, "Mark, you understand, when he set fire to his shoes, that was the filmmaker's way of showing the rejection of conformity as evidenced by the blah blah blah."

What I have loved since childhood is a good half-hour situation comedy. I could name dozens of favorites - "The Life Of Riley" starring William Bendix, "The Andy Griffith Show," "Barney Miller," "That 70's Show," "Mom," and one that I just got into, "Fresh Off The Boat."

To me, a good sitcom is one that I can watch a hundred times and still laugh at the same joke, like when Jackie Gleason roars at Art Carney on "The Honeymooners" or when Sgt. Frank Drebin on "Police Squad" is asked by a gangster who he is and how he got in the guy's office and replies, "I'm a locksmith. AND I'm a locksmith."

It's great that there are so many streaming channels that we sitcom nuts can swim in. I could watch them all, and often do. 

But for all these years, I have noticed three cardinal rules about sitcoms that should never be broken:

🠶 Never have the family suddenly adopt an adorable moppet with a shiny head of hair and a winsome smile. "The Brady Bunch" was done when that little kid who looked like John Denver showed up.

🠶Never have the whole gang go on a merry trip, be it to Hawaii (Brady Bunch) or Taiwan (Fresh Off The Boat) or Australia (Modern Family). These episodes are never classic, and leave me with the impression that the producers were just trying to get a free trip out of it.

🠶Never have a one-hour season or series finale. It upsets the balance, like Double-Stuff Oreos or Snickers Minis. Everyone will agree that the worst episode of Seinfeld was their lengthy closer, which made me wish that Alton Benes would come back and clunk their heads together like Moe.

Ten Dollars on Regular

The list of American states where drivers can expect to have someone pump gasoline into their tanks now contains just one entry: New Jersey.  And who knows how long that will last, so I encourage all Marylanders to drive up I-95 and cross over that imposing Delaware Memorial Bridge and go into NJ. Pick up Route 40 and sail along through the towns with names like Woodstown, Elmer, Newfield, and Buena. 

In any of these boroughs, you can pull into a filling station and remain in your car! In fact, you have to. And while you sit and fiddle with the radio, someone will come to your window and ask how much and what grade. It's just like Chuck Berry wrote about in "Too Much Monkey Business":

Workin' in the fillin' station, too many tasks

Wipe the windows, check the tires, check the oil, dollar gas

Too much monkey business, too much monkey business

Don't want your botheration, get away, leave me be...

Of course, when Chuck wrote that, a dollar's worth of gas would get you a lot farther than it would today. But the song remains the same; it's a luxury to have someone top off the Toyota for you.

Oregon had been the other state where U-Fill-It was No-U-Can't, but they just changed their law this summer, and Alex Fox, out in Portland, welcomed self-serve. 

Alex is 28 and he just learned how gas pumps work!

“I was a little bit anxious. I actually had to ask someone next to me if they knew how to do it. But once they explained it, it was pretty easy.”

Oregon changed the law in 1951 to make it unlawful for people to squeeze Ethyl, citing fire safety and the need to maintain solid jobs for gas station attendants.

If you really know how to cruise the gas pumps, try to find a station around here where you can get a soft ice cream cone to fill your tummy after you fill your tank. 

There is no better feeling than Soft-Serv on top of Self-Serve.  

 

 

Where are you?

I know what you're thinking....free advice costs nothing and it's worth the price.

But let me give you just a little of it.

Recently in Baltimore there was a mass shooting at the Brooklyn Homes. 28 people were shot, and two others, so unfortunately, were killed. 

The news played the audio tapes of people in distress calling 911 for help. You could hear the commotion and panic in the background as they called and said a number of people have been shot, please send help, we need police and an ambulance....

"OK. Where are you?"

The advice, for what it's worth.  Always know where you are! It sounds silly, maybe, but I can't tell you how many times in my 911 days people just didn't have a handle on where they were, especially out of their homes, reporting an auto accident. You would be amazed at how many people call every highway - I95, I83, I70, I895, I795, I695 "The Beltway" -  when, in fact, among those roads, only I695 is our beltway, engirdling the city and county.

My advice, if you're in a car or driving one, pay attention to the road signs, know what road you're on, and your direction of travel. If you go out somewhere, mentally file away the address or at least the closest street names. When you need help, you'll need it in a hurry, and being able to tell 911 your exact location will save time.

"Yes, 911, I am at 3144 North Pierce Avenue, Springfield, Missouri 65803."

Just always assume that within the next 5 minutes, someone will ask you exactly where you are. Eventually, you'll be right!

Read Some About It

Here's a fun variation on that "Florida man" game that was going around (just type "Florida man" in Google, hit enter, and be rewarded with a story about some goober shooting his rifle to stop a thunderstorm or some such...)

Let's play "Florida Schools." Ready?

Florida schools are removing Shakespeare due to sexual content concerns. Yes, the schools in the Too Much Sunshine State have concerns about sexual content in the educational material in their "schools." The State That Made DeSantis Famous has something called "Bench-marks for Excellent Student Thinking" and how do you like this, that dirty old Willie Shakespeare is on the list for writing materials with sexual content.  

Several Florida school districts are now avoiding Shakespeare's works, and other classics, because Ron D. Santis feels there is too much sexual content in them. Hillsborough County is instructing teachers to assign excerpts from plays like "Romeo and Juliet," instead of having them read the whole daggone play, says the  Tampa Bay Times.

Joseph Cool is a teacher at Gaither High School. He points out that  "Taking Shakespeare in its entirety out because the relationship between Romeo and Juliet is somehow exploiting minors is just absurd." He added “I think the rest of the nation — no, the world, is laughing at us." 

The teacher is right, as usual.

I never thought I would see the day when classic literature is taken out of the classroom. Of course, they need the time down there during the school day to teach kids that slavery was a marvelous internship opportunity, and that Native Americans were offered the chance to relocate to a Valhalla at the end of the Trail Of Tears.

Oh Ron, it's time you Woke Up.

 

 

 

Tell the teacher he's surfin', surfin' USA

A young man I once taught was arrested years after I apparently taught him nothing. He committed a felonious assault, and failed to plan on a smooth escape from the scene of the crime.

He was on an airplane at the time. Last I heard, he was a guest at a federal prison.

But here's a guy who was out to top that fool, up in North Wildwood, New Jersey.

He was wanted for burglary and theft last week and he thought a nice escape route would be to run into the ocean.

Yes, the Atlantic Ocean. 

North Wildwood police simply ran right into the water and pulled him in, so to speak. 

The man charged is Ryan Verdi. He's 38 and comes from Mullica Hill, a nice little town up the road from Wildwood where antiques and niceness abound. 

Actually, Verdi was arrested twice by North Wildwood PD last week.

The first time, they spotted him with a flashlight in one hand while the other hand sifted through the contents of the vehicle he was sitting in that wasn't his.

(That might be the most awkward sentence I ever wrote, and also one of the saddest, according to R. Verdi of Mullica Hill, NJ.)

He then got out of that car and tried to open the door of another when he was arrested and charged with burglary.

Two days later, while Wildwood was dealing with a massive power outage, the police say he entered a garage that had a door stuck open, and stole the bicycle he was riding when arrested again.

As police approached him about the allegedly stolen bike, he ditched the two-wheeler, ran onto the beach, and into the ocean. Police Sgt. Brian Harkins and Officer Domonic DeMusz splashed into the surf, and arrested him for burglary, theft, and other offenses. 

It's not known whether he had a valid beach tag in his possession, or if he was wearing adequate sun protection.

Sunday Rerun: Burgers and Sighs

 I'm seriously contemplating changing the name of this blog to "Oh, For Crying Out Loud."

Here we go with today's asinine behavior: some members of a volunteer fire company went to the new Sonic drive-in in their town and demanded the same discount that is given to cops and military personnel.

And they didn't get the discount.

They aren't cops or military personnel.

Oh, but they do have Facebook accounts, and so now eight members of the fire company are in hot water (!) because they wrote things on Facebook about how "unfair 'your' being" (for the five millionth time, it's "you're"! "YOU'RE!" "YOU'RE"!) and how maybe they just might not respond to a fire at the Sonic.  And then one of the brainiacs wrote that maybe they ought to set fire to the dumpster at the Sonic.

And the fire company president had to apologize for these guys and the image of the volunteer fire service takes another punch in the eye.

Place #1, any smart fast food operator offers discounts to police.  Nothing deters an armed robbery like pulling up to the place you plan to take down and seeing a prowl car in the parking lot.  Second best is the thought that if the cops aren't here now, they might be sliding by for a burger any minute now.

Volunteer firefighters, people do appreciate your service and sacrifice.  But if you are willing to withdraw your service and sacrifice over a 50% discount on a bacon double cheeseburger (pictured) and a shake, perhaps you might want to think about why you got into the Fire Department in the first place.

And place #2 - on the comments page of one of the news sites discussing this burger imbroglio, a woman who claims to be a lawyer (although she uses the term "bi-laws" in place of "by-laws") says that the firefighters do not give up their right of free speech by donning turnout gear.  And she could not be more correct.  We all have the right to say what we think.  And we all have to face the consequences of saying something wrong.

For a firefighter to threaten to commit arson or threaten not to respond to an emergency call is the ultimate dereliction.

And all this over a damned cheeseburger.

Oh, for crying out loud.

The Saturday Picture Show, August 19, 2023

 

I'm sharing this without comment, except to report that it was posted as "Bathtub shared by roommates, one female, one male."

After we hear from Janet on this, we should see who else in the room has been hysterical. 

Is it really necessary to label your Corolla with a vanity tag that says the same thing? It reminds me of these people who get a Dymo or Brother Tag Maker and set about labelling every single item in their house. 

You remember the autoharp from fourth-grade Music class. I asked the teacher if we could play "Take an Old Cold Tater (And Wait)" by "Little" Jimmy Dickens and got nothing but an old cold stare.

Wouldn't this be a great place for a stroll on a crisp Autumn afternoon?

Sunflower season! Where's everyone going this year to walk among the mammoth plants?

Cursive writing practice from 1910, found in an old bureau in Baltimore and written by Alexander Cummings. Do they still teach cursive? 

Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome warmly, The Discontinued Colors Of Crayola! I always have to check to make sure my favorite, Burnt Sienna, is still around.

There was a time when signs told the story of a business, and even those who could not quite read the words knew this would be the place to get new soles and heels on those beat-up brogans.

There have been 488 episodes of the original (and still best) Law & Order on NBC. We like to pick one out to enjoy Sunday Breakfast With Lennie! You can't beat this cast, with Jerry Orbach as Det. Lennie Briscoe.

Safe at home

There are only two or three, well, four, tops, things more intriguing than a long-locked safe of which no one knows the contents. Sitting around a taco restaurant waiting to see the server bring your fajitas while enveloped in a steamy miasma is one of them...seeing how big a prat your new boss is one...and peeling off a Maryland Lottery scratcher is a third. 

But here in Baltimore, there was a mystery of a big safe at a place called Red Emma's Bookstore, and the results were just as disappointing as the time Geraldo Rivera pried open Al Capone's vault to find the square root of zero.

No bags of money, no stock certificates or pieces of eight from a pirate shipwreck, and certainly no antique art or books, or even one of those kitchen wall clocks with a cat face and tail.

There was a scrap of history almost a century old, though: excited onlookers report finding a pay stub from February 1924. Someone worked for seven hours and was paid a little over $5.

I can hear a lot of schoolteachers out there right now, saying, "Righteous bucks!" 

A safe-cracker from Canada saw an online appeal from Red Emma's, looking for someone to swing open that door. He came, he saw it, he opened it, and his dreams of taking big money back to Canada crumbled like the Yankees' dreams of playing in the World Series. 

Too bad, Eugene!

 

Round One!

It usually happened on one of the first bright Spring days, that someone in high school would challenge someone else to a fight that was to take place off school grounds after school that afternoon. The reasons for the fight were generally things like "he tried to get with my girl" or "he bumped into me in the hallway outside the gym." For whatever reason, the opponents were locked in, and their seconds readied themselves to support their buddy, and everyone buzzed about it all afternoon.

Then, when the melee began, the police would show up within three minutes, having been tipped off by school administration. Then everyone got in their cars and went to Gino's, building up the fight in their minds to where it was sort of a local version of the Battle of Gettysburg.

And every time I drive past the BMW dealer in Towson, I remember the epic battle that took place at that corner of West Rd & Kenilworth Drive one nice afternoon. Not one punch was thrown, just a lot of shoving and taunting and bragging. That spirit lives on today in the 2023 BMW M8 Convertible, which is advertised as being "ADRENALINE AT ITS APEX." 

Talk about adrenaline and testosterone! Look who is supposed to be duking it out...worldwide tough guys Mark Zuckerberg of Meta and Elon Musk of X.

These rascals have been bloviating about having a cage match, and it was supposed to be all ready to go, but now Elon says his back hurts and he needs an operation.

 

Zuck took to his new Threads social network and said, “I think we can all agree Elon isn’t serious and it’s time to move on. I offered a real date. Elon won’t confirm a date, then says he needs surgery, and now asks to do a practice round in my backyard instead. If Elon ever gets serious about a real date and official event, he knows how to reach me. Otherwise, time to move on. I’m going to focus on competing with people who take the sport seriously.”

Just like a couple of high school Harrys...they didn't really WANT to fight, they just wanted to want to fight.

Time to move on. 

"Talitha, cumi" is in the Bible, Mark 5:41. Jesus spoke this when He raised Jairus’s daughter from the dead.

 Note: I post this poem by John Updike every year on the date of Elvis's passing. When I read it in The New Yorker in December, 1999, we were getting ready for the Y2K nonsense, fearing that our computers and water pipes and elevators and clocks were all going to stop at midnight on New Year's Eve. Even so, the words and imagery moved me, then as now.

January 1, 2000 came in as scheduled. We simple believers got up and went to work, still believing in The King. I still do.

From The New Yorker, December 6, 1999

 

JESUS AND ELVIS



Twenty years after the death, St. Paul

was sending the first of his epistles,

and bits of myth or faithful memory -

multitudes fed on scraps, the dead small girl

told "Talitha, cumi" - were self-assembling

as proto-Gospels.  Twenty years since pills

and chiliburgers did another in,

they gather at Graceland, the simple believers,

the turnpike pilgrims from the sere Midwest,

mother and daughter bleached to look alike,

Marys and Lazaruses, you and me,

brains riddled with song, with hand-tinted visions

of a lovely young man, reckless and cool

as a lily.  He lives. We live. He lives.



                                           John Updike

In the alley of the Jolly Green Giant

All of a sudden, everything is about "the farm." I have never lived on a farm, but we were farm-adjacent when I was a kid. 150 acres of corn and tomatoes and squash and rutabagas were literally in our backyard, and we were privileged to pick, cook, and eat what we wanted all week, and then settle up with the farmer when he set up his roadside stand on Sundays. I like the farm lifestyle from the distance it is from me, meaning what I don't have to get up and 5 AM to shovel manure (unless you want to count writing this blog....)

And I don't know what started all this.  Perhaps it was when restaurants started claiming their food was of the "farm to table" variety.  Yes, that okra was grown on a farm, but it took lots of detours on the way to your plate.  And what difference would it make?

Not long ago, out on Harford Rd, they built some houses on a big lot where a restaurant used to be. They advertised the houses as being "farmhouse townhouses." Townhouse is the Baltimore term for what other cities call rowhouses. That's fine, but in all the farms I have visited or driven past, there were always individual houses, not a row of them. Each farm family had their own house, so they wouldn't wake the other families while shoveling manure at 5 AM. The houses they built in this development look nice and substantial, but they are no more "farmhouses" than Rocky Mountain oysters are seafood. And no farmer I have ever spoken with referred to his house as a "pied-à-terre," so there goes that. 

Of course, you like shredded cheese on your taco and burrito, but why do the cheese companies now call the thicker shreds of cheddar "farm style" shreds? You could get a brick of cheese and grate it yourself in the kitchen of Trump Tower, and that's as far from a farm style home as you can get.  

It's a honor to know farmers, and I'm sorry that city folks are trying to co-opt their lifestyles for commercial purposes. I have to figure they don't really care. They know how people are!

Winter Ahead

I don't know how it is in the rest of the world, but in America, there are two accurate ways of predicting the weather: Listening to the forecasts of a trained and educated meteorologist, and seeing how your Uncle Eugene's knee is doing.

It's stunning, how many of us eschew the words of people who have studied weather and climate forecasting and prepare detailed reports for us, which they present around the clock on television, and put their faith in old husband's tales. They say that when you see pigs gathering sticks and woodpeckers sharing the same tree, that means to keep the snow shovel handy and the hatches battened down.  

The Farmers' Almanac says that when you see this - one Woody moving into Apartment A, and another moving above him into the penthouse, that means we're going to have a harsh winter. These two pileated woodpeckers are just beginning to make this tree a duplex.

Or you might have that guy down the street who says to look at the next woolly bear caterpillar you see, and the wider his orange stripe is, the milder the winter ahead will be. You can take your time watching him; he doesn't move fast.

I actually feel sorry for the men and women who have devoted their lives to the scientific study of weather, only to have their voices drowned out in the chorus of people claiming that it's going to rain all weekend because Uncle Nutsy's goiter is acting up again.

Then there's the Farmers’ Almanac, which annually prints "The 20 Signs of a Hard Winter Ahead.” Their winter 2023-24 forecast  predicts “traditional cool temperatures and snowy weather conditions” will return. Here in the Northeast/ Mid-Atlantic, we can expect “lots of rain/sleet and snowstorms to contend with.”

In other words, hold on to your hopes, fellow snow lovers, but don't put your tank tops and shorts too deep in your storage!

Some of the harbingers of lots of snow and sleet include: 

• Thicker than normal onions and corn husks
• Woodpeckers sharing a tree
• Snowy owls arriving early, geese and ducks leaving early and Monarch butterflies migrating early
• The hair on the nape of a cow’s neck is thicker than usual, raccoons have thick tails and bright bands
• Heavy and frequent fog in August
• The “early arrival of crickets on the hearth”
• Pigs gathering sticks
• Ants marching in a line
• Early seclusion of bees in the hive
• An abundance of acorns and squirrels gathering them earlier than usual
• Muskrats burrowing holes high on a river bank
• High hornet nests “will tell how high the snow will rest”
• “Frequent halos or rings around the sun or moon” indicate “numerous snowfalls”
• And of course, the absence of milk, bread, and toilet paper on store shelves is the sure sign.

 

Sunday Rerun: You Take The Highway

 

Since the late 1950s, the Baltimore Beltway has engirdled the Baltimore Metropolitan area like a boa constrictor squeezing the last boar at a buffet. The plan was for a road that would take one from one part of town to another by means of a high-speed limited access highway. And it's a great idea on paper. The problem is, we do our driving on asphalt, not paper.

When I worked midnight shift, I would pile into the car and drive for miles and miles in the middle of the night (the beauty of a 3 AM lunch hour). No one else was on the Beltway (fun fact for Baltimoreans: the official name of what we call the Baltimore Beltway is the McKeldin Beltway. Since 2005, it has been named for former Governor Theodore "Beaver" McKeldin, during whose administration many big roads were planned and constructed. I would be four quarters short of a buck if I had a quarter for every time I have heard someone call it that, though) at that hour, so I could pretty much loop the town and enjoy the all-night radio serenade as I cruised about.

The official speed limit on I-695 is 55 miles an hour, but depending on the hour you happen to be on it, you might not get much above 20 miles an hour. It's like anything else with these roads: when everyone wants to use them, there can't be enough, and the rest of the time, it's wide open. The West Side of town is where your national Social Security Headquarters is, so you have a lot of people working there who need to get there when the pandemic is over. The East Side used to have a steel plant and a Chevrolet plant; now they have an Amazon warehouse, and that tells you all you need to know about your American economy. The Central part of town - my stomping grounds when I do get in the mood to do some stomping - has universities and colleges and courts and lawyers.

And 99% of the working population gets on the Beltway any time I happen to use it. I had to go to the west side the other day, and no, nothing has changed. There are still fools trying to go 90 in the left lane, and fools trying to go 30 in the right lane, and fools who have watched too much NASCAR zipping in and out of lane and lane to get ten feet ahead. And people who may be going only 45 miles an hour, but have that tricky muffler that makes it sound like a fully loaded Kenworth Tractor-Trailer is right behind you. 

I do mean right behind you, too. A guy (notice, it is ALWAYS "a guy") in a maroon Honda tailgated me from Greenspring Av to I-795, and if he had gotten an inch closer, I was going to have to ask him to put a mask on his hood, I wanna tell ya. Tailgating is a popular means of driving that allows many people to meet their fellow commuter, a state trooper, a body and fender repairman, and a chiropractor.

And of course, it always seems that no one pays attention in Driver Education to the part where they discuss merging onto a highway. Git out my way, sucker, is the approach as they zoom off the ramp.  You stop or else!

The all-too-often aftermath

As Bernie Mac used to say, "America, I'll be honest with you." As a retired American, if I drive anywhere, it's to the grocery store or the hardware store or Popeye's, so I don't encounter crazy rush-hour driving. 

But for those of you who must drive the McKeldin, please slow down or switch to the Enya station or recite calming mantras. The way some of you drive reminds me of the old bumper sticker: Drive Like Hell And You'll Get There.

The Saturday Picture Show, August 12. 2023

 

These dinette sets were very popular in the 1950s, an era in which so many cakes were baked that they didn't even bother storing the MixMaster in one of the cabinets, so often was it used. This is called the polished steel-and-vinyl Mid Century Modern look, and when everyone switched over to wooden seats and tables, all of these were stored in a giant warehouse in Topeka to be brought back out for sale as part of the Mid Century Modern Revival.

You've heard of the Little Deuce Coupe, right? The Beach Boys song was about these very cars - 1932 (hence the "deuce") Ford 5-Window Coupes, which had tons of room to drop in much bigger engines to make these the hottest of hot rods. 

The popularity of cowboy boots ebbs and flows, but now a certain diminutive Florida governor is stomping around in a pair to make himself appear to be an inch or two taller as he tells one and all that slavery was just a happy internship.

I've seen pictures of these swimming pools on the edges of roofs around the world and I am certain I can do without getting in one.

On the other hand, I can testify that I never saw these hats for sale, or perched atop someone's head. Maybe they only sold them in certain areas. If I had seen them for sale, I would be wearing one right now. 

Notice that the still-standing 2,000-year-old Pula Amphitheater in Croatia shares a design with those multi-purpose stadiums that were built in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and other towns in the 1970s. But this one is still in use!

Whoever drew this has a cat and knows that look on its face.

I hope that wherever this cool tree carving is, there's a library right nearby.

What a treat for us Baltimore Orioles fans last Saturday! The World Series champs from the 1983 team held their 40th reunion at the ballpark downtown. 40 years zipped right on by, I wanna tell you.

This is my final post for today.

Calling the kids

There is a voice that people use when ordering a sandwich, and a voice we use to tell people to watch their step as they approach a hole in the carpet, and the sweet voice we use to talk to a little baby.

Now it comes out that mother dolphins speak a high-pitched baby talk!

Researchers who had the time to look into this situation studied the tones used by 19 bottlenose dolphins who were addressing their calves.  And then they studied the same dolphin mamas and the tone they used to "speak" to other adults, or when they were talking to themselves, as many young parents find themselves doing.

The researchers found that in every case, the mother's whistle was higher when calling to their own calves.

Dolphins use a certain whistle that is unique to each one as a way to keep track of each other as they bob around in the drink.  

"They’re periodically saying, ‘I’m here, I’m here’,” said study co-author Laela Sayigh, a marine biologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution up in Massachusetts.

And they had to talk the mother dolphins into wearing special microphones over more than three decades in Sarasota Bay, Florida, to get the data. 

In  other dolphin-related news from Florida...the Miami Dolphins  changed their helmet logo years ago. Before that, the flipper wore a helmet on the helmet. This leaves only the Raiders as a team whose helmet has a picture of a helmet.

For "tropical heaven's" sake

Please note that I wrote this last weekend, before the horrible wildfires hit Hawaii. I wish everyone there - residents and visitors alike - the best in everything. 

I don't know much about Olivia Rodrigo, except that l liked that "Driver's License" song she did, but now I read that she is being picked on because she took a vacation in Hawaii.

Hawaii happens to be one of the United States, so you wouldn't think that people would have a problem with her going there and sharing a 'vacay dumpppp' of photos on Instagram, but, I read, there are people promoting an anti-tourism movement in the 50th state.

Among the comments on her Instagram:  'Stop vacationing in Hawaii' and 'how do people not know not to travel to Hawaii?' 

The story is that Hawaiian natives and some others who live there are claiming that too much tourism is a bad thing.

 It's said to be a nice place to live and visit, which, of course, makes it more expensive than, say, some backwater tank town. The cost of living there is among the highest in the country.

And the anti-tourist folks claim that natives are not sharing in the loot coming in from out-of-towners visiting.

'I mean no disrespect to her but can celebrities please stop going and promoting going to Hawaii?' said one person on her Insta page. 'The people living there don’t benefit from the tourism and it is very unethical considering the damage tourist (sic) do to the environment and just not respecting the culture and Island.' (sic) 

Another person asked how people could have the audacity to go on vacation there.

'How are people still going there after the people that lived there begged y’all (sic) to stop,' their tweet read.

I know. The woman wanted to go on vacation for a few days and she ran into the one solid American truth of 2023: whatever the issue, someone, somewhere, will find a way to get all worked up over something that's none of their beeswax.

 

Nonsense

Congratulations to the ownership squad of the Baltimore Orioles! They got the #1 spot yesterday on Keith Olbermann's list of the Worst Persons In The World, because they removed their excellent play-by-play guy Kevin Brown from broadcasting games because of something he said on July 23 before a game against Tampa Bay.

Oh, it was awful, what he said. He said that the Orioles have won more games at Tampa Bay's Tropicana Field this year than the last three years combined.

Can you just imagine! It's an enormity, an awful thing for the young Brown to have said. People who heard his calumnious remarks were seen running from their houses, offices, and saloons to get as far away from them as possible.

But wait. It was true. The Orioles are doing much better against all teams this year, especially against the Rays, who have been a thorn in their sides for years. There was nothing wrong with saying that the team is doing better now, is there? Perhaps the bosses were peeved that he pointed out their past shortcomings, but that's over now, fellas! Let's enjoy today.

Not only today, but all Brown was doing was reading from the official Orioles media notes for the July 23 game...the information provided for the use of writers and broadcasters covering the game. So he used it! And he's the bad guy?

But wait. The team stuck him in the radio booth for the three games against the Phillies that followed the Rays game because some other broadcaster had to be punished for not wearing official team clothing during a broadcast. 

Kevin Brown, seen here wearing official Orioles gear, at least.

The Orioles, asked for a comment on the situation, said they do not comment on employment decisions blah blah blah.

Well, I do comment on everything! And this is just crazy go nuts. Watch Brown leave the team for a place where his talents will be appreciated, and we'll be stuck with another adenoidal third-rater again. 

Misplaced

It seems odd to me that the very people who self-describe as patriotic are having way too much fun celebrating the loss by the US Women's National Soccer team in the World Cup competition. 

A lot of the people who demean star forward Megan Rapinoe for her actions - kneeling in support of Colin Kaepernick's fight against police brutality, her suit against the United States Soccer Federation for gender discrimination, and her talking back when the former president - himself a frequent loser - told her to "win before talking" - are people who thank servicemen and women for their service, salute the flag as it passes, and sing the National Anthem lustily at ball games.

Pretty sure the Bill of Rights grants the right to speak her mind.

As the New York Times said, "The light of Rapinoe’s renowned and polarizing career as a player and activist has now gone into shadow on the World Cup stage, where she played her best and emphatically spoke her mind."

What's more, the team represented the entire country, yet, just because one player held some differing viewpoints, some "patriots" are willing to root against our national team. 

During the 2021 Olympics, someone with the name Grant Stinchfield, a Newsmax host, giggled that he took “pleasure” in Team USA’s basketball loss because of its players’ “woke” politics.

Another quote, this from ESPN journalist Pablo Torre:  “Nothing says AMERICA FIRST more than rooting against *checks notes* the literal U.S national team because they *checks notes* peacefully exercised freedom of speech.”

So instead of supporting their country's athletes, some people boo them. And instead of waking up, they would rather stay asleep.

Remember how great cars used to sound?

If you remember the episode of "Leave It To Beaver" in which the Beav says he's going to Gilbert's house to work on some new noises, well, welcome to American boyhood.

We love noises, at all ages. And if we can't make our own noises, we always have recordings to enjoy.

Noises are part of maleness, and are something that most women don't seem to enjoy, in my experience.  I might be wrong.

But over in England, where they seem to do everything right, the British Library, noticing that Jaguar cars are going to be battery-powered soon, has made recordings of the last combustion-engine Jaguar sports car made, so that future generations will be able to marvel at the sounds of perfectly tuned engines roaring, shifting gears, and accelerating.

As the Jaguar company moves toward a "quieter electric future," the recordings are being made at their engineering plant in central England.  Appropriately for a car with a feline name, the Jag engine growls, and that sound will be available for your children's children to hear at the library, which also has available the recorded sounds of the first automobiles.

Purr.

Charles Richardson, a senior sound engineer with Jaguar, said the sounds were "something we want to be available for generations to come. Archiving it with the British Library allows us to do that, and that's something we're very proud of."

They have recorded a 30-second and a 47-second track featuring the engine starting, and being revved up, and "the crisp upshifts and downshifts through the 8-speed Quickshift transmission, and the distinctive, hallmark crackles and pops on the overrun from its quad tailpipes."

Apparently, riding in a Jaguar sounds like eating Rice Krispies! 

In 2025, Jaguar will become a "pure electric modern luxury brand," and that means no more of the polluting internal combustions engines we have driven since who knows when.

But don't worry. Guys will make the noises even if the cars do not.

  

Sunday Rerun: Greater Love

 Don't get me wrong; it's certainly a form of heroism to join the military or a police/fire/EMS service, because the simple act of entering those ranks means that one is ready to make the ultimate sacrifice, if that's what unfolds.  Think about that the next time you grouse about a speed cop writing you a ticket - he or she is sworn to protect your life at all costs.  And the same with those who go into the Army, Air Force, Navy, Marines or Coast Guard. It's their choice and they take it seriously.

But maybe we need another word for a higher designation among them - the most special of the special people, because to me, it dilutes the truly heroic deeds of those who valiantly lay down their lives in the service of others when everybody in the class is called a hero.  Some people serve for years and never find themselves in a situation that requires super amounts of bravery and courage and strength and know-how.   We never know how the cards will be dealt.

And it's not just people in uniformed services who can be heroes. I'm thinking now of two people we lost just this week - one famous worldwide, one hitherto unknown until this week.  Both were heroes.

Dean Smith is the man you know as the head coach for the basketball team at the University of North Carolina for 36 years. His accomplishments in gymnasiums, getting young men to play great basketball, are well known.  But how about the fact that, as early as 1964 - three years after taking over a scandal-ridden UNC program - Smith became known for promoting desegregation in the South, which took amazing courage, that being the time when civil rights workers in this country were routinely killed by their opponents.  Smith, a local minister, and a black North Carolina theology student entered a segregated restaurant in Chapel Hill, and when they left, The Pines was an integrated restaurant. 

(Doesn't it seem amazing to think that just over 50 years ago in the Land of the Free and the Brave, not all citizens could go to whatever restaurant, movie theater or amusement park they wished?)

Charlie Scott, Dean Smith

Dean Smith also integrated the Tar Heels basketball team by recruiting Charlie Scott as the university's first black scholarship athlete. Off the court, he helped a black graduate student buy a house in an all-white neighborhood. Coach Smith opposed the Vietnam and Iraq wars and the death penalty, and supported gay rights and a freeze on nuclear weapons.  

He should have been president.  Coach Smith died this past weekend from complications of advanced dementia.  He lived for 83 wonderful years.

On the other side of the city of Baltimore lies a community known as Brooklyn Park, where, the other morning, a fire broke out in the parsonage of the United Brethren in Christ Church.  The pastor, Samuel Sinnah, lost his wife Lettitia and his son Sundima Sinnah, 17.  Christopher Rickman, a 45-year old man living across the street, ran into the house to try to save the woman and her son, and lost his life in the bedroom fire.

Especially in a time when we find out about a news anchor who tried to pass himself off as a survivor of a downed war chopper, although he was an hour away, it is reassuring to know that we still have people who try to make a real difference.  Mr Rickman, Coach Smith, we salute the heroes you are.