The Saturday Picture Show, June 8, 2024

 

So, if one of the little wires powering your wristwatch happens to go bad or get disconnected or whatever, you can now look into the matter for yourself.

It wasn't Maryland's turn for a cicada invasion this summer.  We were visited by millions of flying buzzing bug-eyed bugs last in 2021 and their progeny will arrive in these precincts in 2038. Cicadas are currently bedeviling the American South, as seen above.

"Good morning, Titanic guests and crew! Here's today's menu!" My advice is to skip the oatmeal porridge for breakfast if you're planning to have the gruel for supper. Too much roughage.

I've told this before, but I love to talk about the great Moe Berg, major league catcher and US spy during World War II. Moe's sister was a librarian and teacher in New Jersey, and in spring and summer, she could walk into any restaurant in New York and have the finest dinner in return for a peck of her home-grown raspberries, which were favored by all the pastry chefs. And her secret was that she lived just one block from the police stable in her town. You can take it from there.

This is an alley in Prague so narrow that only one thin pedestrian at a time can walk it. That's why they have a traffic light! My claustrophobia is off the charts right now.

Someone can tell me what kind of bird this is. I know one thing - he or she is great at picking up nuts and berries!

I've never been stuck behind a chicken truck in Alabama, but if you click on this song this song by John Anderson, he'll tell you all about it!

The year was 1961 and Ham the Space Ape was just back from a suborbital flight and was picked up by the USS Donner for a ride home. He said he enjoyed his flight but didn't want to stay around for the Donner party.

You know those slivered almonds you love on your ice cream? Here's where some of them come from - the almond orchards in Turkey!

We'll never know if the stray hairs at the nape of this young lady's neck were accidentally or intentionally made to spell out LOVE but I hope it was a natural sign from above!

A pejorist is one who sees the world negatively

Some pejorist I don't even know was telling me the other day that I had better get ready for the next Civil War to come to America. He seemed to be upset about the verdict in some trial up north, I don't know. 

I just can't stand the thought of it. And I would hate to have to wear one of those itchy wool uniforms, so let's try to find a way to Appomattox our way out of another war like that.

Some people seem to try to start them everywhere they go. I had no more walked into Dr Lauring's office the other day for my annual skin screening (I passed) when some old guy about my age was kicking up a fury with the receptionist. He showed up at 2:15 for his 1 o'clock appointment and could not understand why he couldn't be seen at once.

"Oh, all right, I'll just come back tomorrow morning and she'll see me then," was the next foolish thing he said. The receptionist said they don't take walk-ins, and offered him a slot at 1:45 this Thursday, to which he replied, "I have somewhere to be at 2, but they'll just have to wait."

With that charming colloquy, we saw the very essence of the spoiled American soul. Show up late and see me now! Everyone else can wait. He was a nasty, self-important old curmudgeon, and my hat is off to the receptionist for not reaching out and scotch-taping his tongue to his cheek. 

But hey, if there is another civil war, I choose not to be on his side!

D-Day is today

Today, June 6, marks the day in 1944 when the fortunes of the world took a great turn for the better. That was D-Day (the D stood for nothing but "Day," signifying how much was riding on this military operation), the invasion of France by beach landings in Normandy to defeat German troops occupying France. Planning for it began in 1943, and General Dwight D. Eisenhower was appointed Supreme Commander of the entire operation, which all might have been scuttled in that very year except for one man's nearsightedness.

An early version of the plan blew out a window that summer in London's Norfolk House, but a man who picked the papers off the street couldn't read them without his glasses and could only see the large type, indicating that they had some military import, so he dropped his find off at a military post.

And the plans called for the invasion, which brought 156,000 troops or paratroopers ashore (73,000 from the U.S., 83,000 from Great Britain and Canada) to take place on June 5, but bad weather forced a 24-hour postponement.  When June 6, 1944, dawned clear, Eisenhower told troops: “You are about to embark upon a great crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you.”

1,900 Allied bombers attacked German lines, dropping seven million pounds of bombs that day.

10,521 combat aircraft flew a total of 15,000 flights, with 113 lost.

The naval bombardment was delivered by seven battleships, 18 cruisers, and 43 destroyers.

By the evening of June 6, 20,000 vehicles and 150,000 soldiers were in place on French soil to begin pushing German forces all the way back to Germany, leading to the merciful end of the war in 1945.

50,000 German troops were in place to counteract the invasion, but several things hampered them.

For one, the Germans were deceived by a fake army of dummy camps, planes and tanks built further up the English coast at  Kent and Essex, leading the Germans to figure on an invasion at Calais.

For a second, German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. the man in charge of defending German holdings in northern France from any invasion, was not around. His staff told him that the English Channel was far too rough for a landing, so he was in Germany, celebrating his wife’s 50th birthday.

And for a third, Adolf Hitler, Chancellor and Fuhrer of Germany, was also back home, sound asleep, and his aides so feared waking him that they let him sleep in, which severely delayed getting additional troops sent in. 

Nice work, dummkopfs. Thanks!

And speaking of using dummies...Eisenhower and his men were truly geniuses, thinking of everything as they planned. On the morning of the 6th, as the invasion began, they had planes flying over other locations, dropping DUMMY paratroopers to convince the Germans that the invasion was taking place elsewhere.

Oh for the days when brilliance and fortitude saved the world!

If you have a spare minute today, think a minute today about what it felt like for all involved, from the newest private to Eisenhower, to know that failure would have cost the world its freedom, and think of the men invading that beach, and be glad they did, and mourn those lost.

Pack It In

I have a sneaking suspicion (aren't they all?) that some companies put exorbitant prices on their merchandise because, well, if people will pay 40 bucks for something worth 5, they'll just as likely pay 80.

It all comes up because of something I saw on Amazon. Now, I am a fan of Yeti drink tumblers. I have one filled with berries, a grapefruit wedge, ice, and seltzer at my side all day around the house. And I have another Yeti for hot drinks. When I first got it, I thought it might be a problem to put my hot tea in there, because it couldn't be reheated in the microwave.  But...it never needs reheating! You put a hot drink in the Yeti, and it stays hot until the cows come home.

Which is at about 8 or 8:30, these days.

So, yes, it's Yeti for your hot and cold drink needs, certainly. 

Available in 19 fashionable colors

But what stopped me cold on Amazon was seeing this "Daytrip Packable Lunch Bag" they're hawking now. As a longtime lunchbagger, I took my sammy, chips, and TastyKake to school for 12 years in brown paper sacks, and later I hauled the same lunches to work in a succession of insulated lunch bags. I would put a cold bottle of Coke or ginger ale in there to keep everything cool til lunchtime. Those totes would last a couple of years and then the handle would fall off or something. I promise you before any grand jury that I never spent more than ten simoleons for one of them.

I have to tell you right now that even if I had Scrooge McDuck money, I would not pay you the asking price - $104! - for the Yeti lunchbag. There's no way it's going to keep a salami sandwich any better than the el cheapo model.

If people buy these for their kids, I predict an upswing in lunch thefts across the land.  Not for the contents, but for the bags themselves.

Maybe I'm crazy, I don't know. 

Take it easy there

In 1922, one I. I. Cammack, superintendent of the Kansas City (MO) school system, asked his state legislature to ban jazz music. 

I checked, and in 1922, Missouri was one of the 48 United States, whose citizens enjoyed the liberties enumerated in various documents back in the 1700s.

I.I. (it would have been great if he had joined the Navy and said "Aye aye, sir" when either given a command or asked his name) said, "I think the time has come when teachers should assume a militant attitude toward all forms of this debasing and degrading music."

I looked up the most popular songs from 1922 (I have all sorts of time for these pursuits) and I see high up on the chart "I'll Stand Beneath Your Window Tonight and Whistle" by Aileen Stanley and Billy Murray (not THAT Billy Murray!)  Then there was "Three O'Clock In The Morning" by Paul Whiteman, and Aileen Stanley left Billy alone long enough to record "Homesick."

None of these songs seemed bad enough to ruin the morals of young Kansas Citizens. Maybe I.I. was just grumpy that day. Perhaps if he had listened to Al Jolson sing "Toot Toot Tootsie Goodbye" he wouldn't have been such a Superintendent Cranky Pants.

I Googled Cammack to see what his deal was, just to be able to write a complete report for you. But the only other reference anywhere was an article he wrote in 1926 about "Aviation In The Public Schools," and access to this piece is granted only to subscribers to a website that keeps the past in mothballs for academics and researchers, not people like me who wish people would stop getting all worked up about everyone else's music. 

I'm sure old I.I. was all in favor of his students getting up in an American Eagle A-101 and flying down to Devils Elbow for the weekend, though.

On the book

I love libraries, and I love old books, and a lot of those library books are about long-lost loves coming back.

Dateline Helsinki, Finland, where a  book by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle came back to the Central Library just 84 years past its due date.

The Oodi Library reports that someone returned a Finnish translation of Doyle's historical novel Refugees. It was supposed to be back in the stacks on Dec. 26, 1939.

"Always better late than never," the library said. Heini Strand, the librarian, says no one had an explanation, but she figured that "these kinds of loans returned decades after the due date are books found when people go through deceased relatives' belongings." 

History buffs will recall that one month before that due date, the Soviet Union invaded Finland, so there's that. "The return of the book might not have been the first thing on the borrower's mind when the due date approached," Ms Strand said.

You know me well enough to predict that my theory is, the borrower just wasn't Finnished with the book yet.

 

Sunday Rerun: Zip It

 Police officers, penitentiary workers, and lovers of bondage everywhere were rankled several weeks back when the insurrection was raging and people were seen running in and out of the Capitol with flex-cuffs. Their rankle-rage stemmed from the fact that some were calling these ersatz handcuffs "zip ties." They are also called "flex cuffs," but they work on the same principle as that zip tie I use to seal my trash bags every Monday night.  There is a flexible tape with "teeth" that grab a little thing called a "pawl." When the tape is pulled tight, the teeth engage the pawl with a ratchet action that cannot be reversed, forming a tight link that our refuse collectors always seem to appreciate.

Just as William Claude Dukenfield is better known as W.C. Fields, zip ties have a real name. Their brand name is Ty-Rap (why hasn't some hip hop artist chosen that as a stage name?) and their origin is one of those stories I love to share, so here 'tis...

A man named Maurus C. Logan worked for Thomas & Betts, an electrical company. He happened to be touring a Boeing aircraft plant one day in 1956 and was watching people assemble wiring for airplanes. As you might imagine, the wiring for an airplane is a tedious, cumbersome undertaking, a lot more complicated than repairing a lamp or an extension cord. There's so much wire, they had to lay it out  - thousands of feet of it - on 50-foot long wooden sheets to be bundled up into thick cords. Back in the day, people wrestled these thick cords and tied them together with waxed nylon rope. Each knot of the rope had to be pulled tight by hand. Logan, in talking to the workers, heard that their hands became so callused by hundreds of tiny cuts that they referred to each other as "hamburger hands." He figured there had to be a way to gang these wires with something than bound them quickly and safely.  

It took two years, but he developed and patented Ty-Rap in 1958, and from the aircraft industry to the weekly task of sealing my trash bags, they are everywhere now. 

And while I was researching all this, I found these some other uses for zip ties on a site called https://www.onegoodthingbyjillee, so why not share them, I thought? 

1. Key Ring

2. Binder Rings

3. Organize Cables - you'll save a lot of hassle if you put a red zip tie on each end of cords and cables running to your pc. One day when you're guessing which plug to pull out of the power block, you'll be glad!

4. Luggage Lock- run one between two zipper pulls. But he sure you have a knife on you to cut it off when you get where you're going! Be funny if the knife were inside the sealed carryon bag.

5. Bubble Wand - a small loop at the end of a long zip can be a bubble wand, sure!

8. Childproofing cabinets - zip two adjacent knobs!

9. Plant Support - a loosely-looped zip around a plant stem, with a pencil for a stake in it, and there you go!

and the most amazing of all: Zip Tie traction aids for shoes! 

Some icy morning when you're headed out to scrape ice off the car, run a zip tie around the toe of your shoe, and pull it tight, with the fastener pointing to the ground, trim the excess, and away you go!

The Saturday Picture Show, June 1, 2024

 

I try to avoid black-and-white photos here because, well, because they lack color, but I found this to be remarkable. A drive-in grocery store in Georgia years ago. Easy to see why this idea failed to catch on. By the time you got home with your flank steak, it smelled of car exhaust, and if the cars drove in single file, and you were only getting a lb. of bacon and the sedan ahead was filling a week's worth of grocery orders, with no express line, you'd be there 'til the cows came home.

Is there some certain protocol for waving at the people riding past you in the Weinermobile? Can you ask if they have any Grey Poupon?

The story of Tater Tots is a classic in the annals of American ingenuity...the factory was scooping out all the potato meat from the skins, and that left a lot of waste product, until someone realized they could mash the spudskins and extrude that into millions of tasty Tots, and dinners are the better for it.

I've never been to Kansas, and it would be cool to see acres and acres of flat acreage with amber waves of grain. No wonder Miss Gulch rode her bike so fast- no hills!

Nature has a way of reminding us that even the lowly weeds that grow at the edges of the lawn can have a pretty bloom!

I'll keep looking for this variety of tomato in the produce aisle. It's called Purple Norfolk. You'd think they could come up with a sponsorship deal with the Ravens!

Cats love to look outside at the passing wildlife, knowing they have 27 places inside to take a nap.

Look again! It's not a real trolley; it's just chalk art on the street, an example of trompe l'oeil, French for "deceive the eye." Another helpful French expression is "attention aux trains" - watch out for the trains!

Until it rains, the kids on this court will have an a-maze-ing day!

Coolest kid of the week is this little sidekick, whose Dad made him his own lumber cart so they could go to Home Depot together. Who woodn't love one of these?

Tomb it may concern

You know the old joke about the guy who was so important at his job, he had several hundred people under him? 
He cut the grass at the cemetery.

Well, the TODAY show introduced us to Haley Hodge, who is fixing to have her fourth child. She has a husband name of Rivers, and the three kids: Finley (10), Crew (3) and Banks, (16 months.)

So where to come up with that crucial fourth name for the soon-to-be new member of the Hodge fund?

Cemeteries. Read the tombstones in the field of stones!

“I know some people might find it creepy, but my mother was a history buff and when we were growing up, she would take us on field trips to cemeteries,” says Mrs Hodge, a physical therapist. “You can learn so much about cultural aspects of the past."

After all, she points out, her sister Cooper got her name from a tombstone. And does she have a daughter named Alice? I guess not, or they would have said.

Mrs Hodge was in Southport, North Carolina, prowling the Smithville Burying Ground, and she came up with two ideas for her daughter-on-the-way...Galloway, and Salem.

Good luck to the Hodges and the new little one. I used to take my turn mowing the lawn at the little cemetery in Providence, and I don't remember any names being particularly inspiring, except for Jehoshaphat, and I don't see that one making a comeback soon.

The burial plot of Jerry Lee Lewis, (there are three names for you seekers!) who said, "Don't put a headstone on my grave. I want a monument!"

Sling Sting

A two-year-old child hurls his dinner plate at the wall and gets hauled away to quiet time and whatever other punishment his parents deem appropriate. He is taught that we must eat the food put before us, unless, of course, someone drops asparagus on my plate, and then you'll see some flying greenery.  There are limits, after all.

Same way when Dennis The Menace, Jr, runs around the neighborhood winging other kids or someone's patio window with his slingshot or pea shooter or whatever. He will learn his lesson when a deputized squad of bigger kids gets ahold of him and his bike and his weapon, and he enters a reeducation program that will likely involve opening a can of whoopass, which might involve the administration of purple nurples.

In this way, young men learn the dangers and consequences of an errant lifestyle, the hope being that by the time they reach 81 years of age, they don't have to be arrested for going around striking residential windows, denting car windshields, and shooting off pellets a bit too close to several neighbors out in Azusa, California.

The search of the Kingdom

But such a felony spree took place over like 10 years, so the Azusa Police Department termed it a  “quality of life issue” victimizing dozens of citizens over the decade.

Warrant in hand, police appeared at the residence of one Prince King. They found the slingshot and ball bearings there.

Lt. Jake Bushey of the APD says no injuries were reported in all this.

“It’s been ongoing for many years because we just didn’t identify who the suspect was,” Bushey says, adding that no one has any idea why the man was doing this juvenile prank as his his 70s turned into his 80s.

“We’re not aware of any kind of motive other than just malicious mischief.” 

If I may hazard a guess, maybe it's the result of a lifetime of confusion over whether he's a Prince or a King.

 

Locked In

Ever notice how one good idea will take years to germinate and spread around to benefit all, while one really bad idea will take off like Marjorie T. Greene at a free hairdye giveaway?

Case in point: at the Grand Canyon, couples are so taken by the impressive romantic view that they a) stand and enjoy it for a good long while, soaking in the majesty of nature and making memories to last a lifetime   or   b) they hook a padlock  - a "love lock" onto the fence and throw the key down to earth below. That pure drippy symbolism means their love is here forever to have and to hold etc etc.

But the National Park Service wants to point out that endangered California condors that live in northern Arizona and southern Utah - home of the Grand Canyon Nat'l Park - love to nibble on shiny objects, such as keys.  And the Park Service also reminds all that this dangerous practice is also a form of graffiti and littering.

Love locks are a problem all over. In Paris, a footbridge known as Pont des Arts (Bridge of the Arts) had so many Master Locks and Abus Locks and antique Slaymakers locked onto it, the structural integrity of the bridge was being compromised, which, if left unchecked, would let to the bridge collapsing, or "c'llapsing," as one of our local news anchors misstates it.

Park Rangers are kept busy removing the locks

Keys can become lodged in a condor's digestive tract

 

California condors nearly went extinct during the 1980s; they are scavengers, feed on a lot of roadkill, and that introduced metals into their bodies, leading to death. There were but 22 of them left in 1982, but 40+ years of careful conservation have brought those numbers back. There are said to be 350 condors in the wild now and another 200 in captivity.

So don't be a dodo and toss metal keys around, and don't fall in with the Love Lock crowd. Instead, grow your hair to luxuriant lengths and donate it to Locks Of Love - a much better way to make a lasting statement.

 

Mixed-up Martial Artist

Let's start the short week off with some remarks by a man who is seemingly short on common sense. Meet American mixed martial artist Bryce Mitchell, who says he feels a need to home-school his infant son for the simple reason that he doesn’t “want him to be gay.”

Mr Mitchell has lived for 29 years now, and still hasn't learned not to say things like “We’re going to have to home-school all our kids or they’re all going to end up turning gay.” His son, Tucker (presumably named after talk show guy Carlson) was just born on March 29, and even he knows better than to say things like  "That’s the reason I’m going to home-school Tucker, because I don’t want him to be a communist. I don’t want him to worship Satan. I don’t want him to be gay.”

They call him "Thug Nasty" on the fighting circuit.  Have you ever seen one of those guys who struts around with clothing and jewelry and weapons that attest to how tough they are? You get the picture. 

This guy  - a cattle farmer besides being a martial artist - also says that people shouldn't have their children vaccinated, and that public schools are wrong for not having students read the Bible.

“They took it out of the schools and replaced it with Edgar Allen Poe," he grumbles. “My son ain’t going to be reading no Edgar Allan Poe, OK? He’s going to be reading the Bible.”

"The eyes are the windows to your soul." - Shakespeare

The article I read does not answer the burning question of who will be a-teachin' readin', writin', an' cipherin' to Tucker. One can only hope that it won't be this man, who also believes Earth is flat.

 Here is a sample of his writing and his abundantly wonderful thoughts:

Funny that a man who makes his living as a fighter can't spell fight. Or know the difference between the Department of Homeland Security and Child Protective Services. 

That's all I'm "gunna" say.

Memorial Day

 Please remember to think a few good thoughts for those who gave their lives in battles to save our nation. 

Sunday Rerun: John F. Kennedy at war

 (Note: this is a Sunday rerun, and today just happens to be the 107th birthday of the man we're writing about!)

 Maybe I should have been a history teacher! I keep finding stories that I feel like sharing.

We talked about Richard Nixon the other day, a US Navy lawyer during World War II. He served as vice president under Dwight Eisenhower, the man who led the D-Day invasion that turned the tide of the war. After serving as president of Columbia University, "Ike" became the president of the US. Little is known of Nixon following his two terms as vice president. Rumor has it that he served a term and a half as president, but it's hard to find verification on that.

Lt. John F. Kennedy

Eisenhower was a true war hero, and I'm sure Nixon's service as a lawyer was appreciated. Fifteen years after the war ended, Nixon ran for president (for the first time) against John F. Kennedy, a war hero on a much smaller scale, but a hero nonetheless, so much so that he was elected president and was the subject of a hit record by sausage king Jimmy Dean.

The record, "P.T. 109" documented Kennedy's valiant service about a patrol torpedo boat in the South Pacific war. The "109" was rammed and split in half by a Japanese destroyer off the Solomon Islands in August 1943. Kennedy, the skipper of the boat, was 25 years of age, and went to heroic measures to save his crew. There was a sailor who was badly injured, and Kennedy had him hold onto a rope, then towed the man three-and-a-half miles through dark ocean waters, to the safety of an island while holding his end of the rope IN HIS TEETH! Kennedy was injured in that battle, and for the rest of his life dealt with back problems. He became famous for using a rocking chair at his desk in the White House to ease the strain.

The "109" is lost forever, but remains of the vessel Kennedy commanded next have recently been found! JFK next served aboard the "PT 59," and in that capacity, torpedoed Japanese barges and rescued ten stranded Marines.

PT-59 during World War II

After the war, the Navy sold the "59." It was used as a fishing vessel/charter boat, eventually falling into the hands of Redmond Burke, who bought it for $1,000 and used it as a houseboat. Realizing the significance of the boat, he attempted to sell it to Kennedy memorializers, but, finding no takers, he let it sink to the bottom of the Harlem River in the 1970s.
Now, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA)  of New York is trying to prevent a recurrence of the flooding they experienced from Superstorm Sandy in 2012, so they are building a seawall along the riverfront near the 207th Street train yard. They have recovered a hatch door frame, a rudder and a  generator from the "59," and the MTA is working with museums, such as the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston, and the Battleship Cove maritime museum in Fall River, Massachusetts, to see about displaying the relics.

It's wonderful when history comes back to us. Mr Kennedy, rest in peace, sir.

The Saturday Picture Show, May 25, 2024

 

So you bought a bag of Cheetos and it looks like Chester Cheetah left you a little surprise in there...

Hey, don't throw away that used leather sofa! Be like this guy and make a pair of gloves out of it!

This is the lovely garden in Abbotsford, British Columbia, Canada. Abbotsford was the baronial home of author Sir Walter Scott, whose books and other paper products fill our homes even today.

This is the section of Brooklyn, New York that is called DUMBO for its exact location being Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass. It's described in tourist media as being one of Gotham's greatest "glow-ups," meaning it's not as horrible as it used to be. I guess every city has a dumbo neighborhood and I think I'll just leave that right here,

I've hauled our laundry to the Fluf-n-Fold when our machines were down, and it was fun to engage in communal sudsing with others. But it would be so creepy at night to be sitting there alone, it would put me in a spin.

Sure, you've been hungry. But have you ever been hungry enough to eat licorice yogurt? Didn't think so.

This was the week in Annapolis, MD, home of the US Naval Academy. Commencement and commissioning exercises and the ritual Blue Angels flyovers are all part of the pageantry.

This is an observation tower in Lithuania, built to make it easier to observe Lithuanians.

See? This is why we sticklers insist on careful punctuation. The missing hyphen between "crab" and "walked" makes all the difference here, my friends.

The man on the left is my old-time baseball hero, "Shoeless" Joe Jackson, shown here attending an exhibition game in 1942 with Washington POST sportswriter Shirley Povich, father of Maury Povich, who made his fortune identifying the fathers of other people while thousands howled. 

Best Foot Forward

Words matter. I am particular about spelling, grammar, punctuation, and syntax, because scrambled sentences scramble meanings.

Take the words of former government official Don Trump, who claimed that because the FBI was allowed to carry weapons while performing the duties of their job, he "nearly escaped death."

Think about what that means. Think about when two airplanes almost collide and people call it a "near miss." Nope. That's a near non-miss, a/k/a a collision. The former president did not nearly escape death. He escaped death. Big difference.

I was reminded the other day of an expression I haven't heard since my working days. In talking about some tasty food, someone said the cook "really put his foot in it." 

That's a Southern vernacular expression, far removed from the colloquial "you really put your foot in your mouth" that people will say when you just talked about some school being a real dump...to the father of a current student there. (I've seen it happen and it was not pretty.)

But the thing about tasty food...some say it came about to build upon the saying "dip a toe in the water," meaning to make a trial effort at something. I guess they're saying that if you put your whole foot in, you are committing to the work.

Some say that great cooking is a great feat, and then conflate "feet" with "feat."

Some say that to cook a great dish is to really kick that dish's @$$, so there goes your foot....

Some say the expression came from standing over a hot oven for so long that your feet began to hurt.

The French have an expression advising against putting your feet in the dish ("Mettre les pieds dans le plat") but that means not talking about a delicate topic, so that can't be it.

We can't go back in history to find out who said it first, and why, so it's up to anyone who uses the expression to let it mean what they wish it to. 

Enjoy your dinner, and put your feet in it! I just thought of something else....maybe this is about stomping grapes to make homemade wine!

Will travel for bacon

It will take a trip of 91.18 miles if we drive, or 81.23 miles if we just sprout wings and fly, but one way or another, the bride and I are going to get to Philadelphia soon to check out a restaurant with the delightful name of Bake N' Bacon.

It started out as a food truck, but that has been parked, and brick-and-mortar Bake - N - Bacon has opened at 11th & Ellsworth St in South Philadelphia.

South Philadelphia is an American cultural mecca, having given us such luminaries as Fabian, Kevin Hart, Joey Bishop, Frankie Avalon, Chubby Checker, Larry Fine, Eddie Fisher, mobster Max "Boo Boo" Hoff, DJ Hy Lit, Meek Mill, and...Kevin Bacon!  

The business was created by Justin Coleman and his business partner Kelvin Anderson, and my gratitude is boundless for their menu, which includes bacon brisket burgers, smoked brisket, and pound cake with bacon caramel sauce.

And some people say there's no heaven on earth.

And maybe Kevin Bacon will be there having his supper!

There she goes

First off, any time I hear about Miss USA or Miss Something Or Other, I immediately check the calendar to make sure it's still 2024 and not 1954, a time when beauty pageants were important to people, before we all had our consciousness raised about what makes people great. 

Hint: It's not beauty.

But they still have these pageants, and maybe their time is coming to a merciful end, because recently, Miss USA 2023, Noelia Voigt, resigned her post, tossing away her tiara because of differences with pageant management.

Ms Voigt

Then, two days later, Miss Teen USA UmaSofia Srivastava gave up her title as well, and people are paying attention to all this.  Voigt made a statement about her mental health being adversely affected by the way the business is run. 

It seems that turmoil is the order of the day in that business, and maybe it's because the women involved feel like mannequins being told to look pretty and stay quiet about things that matter to them, such as their mental health.

It will be interesting to see if these extravaganzas even exist in a few more years. You certainly don't see them on TV like you used to, and can you even name a Miss America like you could back in the day? 

Here's a sign that things are wrong: Laylah Rose, who is both CEO and president of the Miss USA Organization put out a statement that said her goal is "to inspire women to always create new dreams, have the courage to explore it all, and continue to preserve integrity along the way."

Now there's a statement that really states nothing. Pure air.

But people who really follow this game caught something interesting about Ms Voigt's letter of resignation: If you take the first letter of each sentence, that spells out the words "I am silenced." 

I am honored to see this tradition continue. It was, oh, about 1996 that my supervisor forced me to write a letter of apology to someone we dealt with, to atone for an honest mistake made by a person I supervised. I thought it was unnecessary, but she still made me write the letter. So I did, and I sent it. And was it my fault that the first letter of each of the fourteen words spelled out a novel method of self-gratification?

It felt good.

 

Table For Two, please

It's been the Trial Of The Year in legal circles, and a breathless public steals every chance to check in on the goin's-on in the packed courtroom.

For reasons of national security, live television coverage is not available, and no cameras are permitted after a brief morning interlude when still cameras, and only still cameras, are permitted to snap a photo or two of the scowling participant, as outside the courtroom, his adherents clamor in support.

I have the scoop for you now. The judge has ruled that tacos and burritos are sandwiches.

Huh?

We are, of course, talking about the epic case in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in which Martin Quintana, a developer and restaurateur out that way, has been trying to open The Famous Taco Mexican Grill in the famous Quintana Plaza strip mall.

Quintana had agreed to avoid putting a traditional fast-food joint in his plaza, and it fell upon noted jurist Superior Judge Craig J. Bobay to delineate the subtle difference between, say, a Whopper, and a Shrimp Taco.

He pointed out that the FTMG "...falls within the scope of the general use approved in the original Written Commitment. The proposed Famous Taco restaurant would serve made-to-order tacos, burritos, and other Mexican-style food, and would not have outdoor seating, drive through service, or serve alcohol. The Court agrees with Quintana that tacos and burritos are Mexican style sandwiches, and the original Written Commitment does not restrict potential restaurants to only American cuisine-style sandwiches.”

Note: He had to go to law school to figure that out. Salud y felicidad to the new taco stand!