The Saturday Picture Show, May 9, 2015

"So let's see...there's a fire pit area below the ocean observatory, a gazebo, a deck with ocean front view, a hot tub, and a staircase to the ocean."  

"What, no pool??"

I revere this man more than most people do, I know, but at 89, he's still Jerry Lewis, and that's enough.  In case you missed it, the MDA Telethon, the people who fired him a couple of years ago in a most unkind fashion, have cancelled their Labor Day weekend show.

Nature is a wonderful thing.  Here are some birds waiting for their breakfast.

Kanye West and his callipygian wife Kim (cal·li·pyg·i·an ˌkaləˈpijēən/ adjective: having well-shaped buttocks) are shown here, just a couple of birds waiting for their table at a sushi place.  You can tell he's not used to waiting for a table, while she is always more than ready to hoist her breasts up for a maximum display.

I happen to believe that the USA landed a man on the moon in 1969 and again later, although there are still people who don't think it really happened, and feel that the entire thing was a Disney creation.  Uh huh.  Well, a lot of people don't believe that Andy Kaufman really died 31 years ago next week (5/16/84), preferring to figure that Andy faked his own death as a stunt. REM sang,       "If you believed they put a man on the moon (man on the moon)
If you believe there's nothing up his sleeve, then nothing is cool." But I believe it's foolish to unbelieve.

Classic Album Cover of the Week goes to The Byrds for this groundbreaker from 1968.  I remember hearing it on the local country station while on the way downtown to get my senior picture taken, and the DJ was saying it was real country music by 

a rock 'n' roll band, which it was, and is. The marriage of country and rock was a wedding I was happy to attend.

This building was the old county jail in my hometown of Towson, MD.  They say that in the 19th Century, the sheriff scheduled hangings for Saturday afternoons so that families could come to town that day, get their supplies, get a haircut, and get some dinner after a picnic lunch on the lawn overlooking the jail...while they sat and watched some horse thief or murderer swing from a rope.

I am going to miss David Letterman (seen here with Emma Watson of 'Harry Potter" and just-being-glamorous fame) quite a lot when he signs off on May 20.  I don't care for Fallon or Kimmel any more, and Colbert, although I will give his show a shot, never gets to me as he does many others.  If it were up to me, we'd be getting ready for "Late Night with Norm Macdonald," so now you know why it's NOT up to me!

Hmmm...so they left the Coast Guard out...

I have to give the state of Texas a pass on this current silliness, because they did give the world Willie Nelson, Ernest Tubb and Old El Paso taco shells.  But still...

They're all worked up down there because this summer, the elite members from four branches of the U.S. military - Army! Navy!  Air Force! Marines! -  will launch an practice operation. They will move about covertly among us, and zip about from state to state in military aircraft. Texas, Utah and a section of southern California will play hostile territory, and New Mexico isn’t much friendlier, what with the cacti and roadrunners.

Jade Helm planning map...or is it???

They call it Jade Helm 15, and it will run from July 15 to Sept. 15. Army Special Operations Command says the size and scope of the mission makes it much different from other training exercises.

Or...could it be a diabolical plan by the federal government to take over Texas? That's what a certain amount of trepidant Texans believe. As proof of their lunatic notions, they cite the closing of some WalMarts in Texas and other states.

Clearly you don't see the connection between the world's largest retailer closing some stores temporarily for maintenance, and the world's largest federal government swooping in, using those closed stores as supply depots, communication hubs and pre-processing centers, and building vast underground tunnels to connect them.

Or maybe you DO see the connection, but you fake like you don't because you are part of this gigantic conspiracy to invoke martial law in the Southwest United States!

Is that it?  Huh?  

The Army says that they have conducted this sort of training enterprise many times in the past, such as Bold Alligator (the person who thinks these names up used to work for builders, coming up with names for new housing developments such as "Beaver Valley Acres" or "Morningwood").  Bold Alligator was a naval exercise for Marines and sailors. Its war games included "amphibious landings to prevent insurgent groups in the fictional country known as Garnet — Georgia and part of Florida in real life — from launching attacks" according to the Washington Post.

Check out the news story from Bastrop County, TX, that shows irate citizens getting all irate and everything. 

All kidding aside, what is it that happens to a person who becomes part of a hostile mob that like to feel like they are targeted for extinction by the federal government?  Where did this paranoia - this hunch that something sinister lies beneath something like army training - get its start?  

Someone knows, and they just aren't telling us.  Hmmm.

These people are citizens of the United States, prepared to put down their TV remotes and come to the aid of their county sheriff under the "posse comitatus" common law and repel the invasion of the United States by the United States.  Fine looking crowd.

They call it Live-Streaming

The great Leslie Nielsen

I happen to think that Leslie Nielsen was one of the greatest Americans who ever came here from Canada.


People who only know the silver-haired actor from his later days as a comedian in Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker movies ("Airplane"..."The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!"..."The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear"... and "Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult") might not know that he began his career as a handsome leading man type in movies like "Forbidden Planet" and "The Poseidon Adventure".  Until the night he sat home watching himself in a made-for-tv movie in which he was ludicrously cast as the boyfriend of someone about a third his age, and realized it was time for something new.

And that brings us to a little film called "Airplane," as James Lipton would have said had he interviewed Leslie.  (I guess spoof movies were not his cup of tea...)   Nielsen played Dr Rumack in that film, and from the moment he said, "You'd better tell the Captain we've got to land as soon as we can. This woman has to be gotten to a hospital" and flight attendant Elaine Dickinson said, "A hospital? What is it?" and Rumack said,"It's a big building with patients, but that's not important right now" a new career was made.

Don't shake Mayor
Ross's hand!

And he also played Sgt Frank Drebin, "Detective-Lieutenant with Police Squad" on TV and in movies, and in the first of those movies, we see Drebin visit the men's room and forget that he still has a live microphone on.

Sure, that's funny, but it couldn't happen in real life, could it now?Well sure it did.  Watch the hijinx as Mayor Dale Ross, from someplace called Georgetown, Texas, leaves the room to visit Tinkletown and pulls a Drebin, as the whole meeting goes down the drain.

And no, he didn't wash his hands on the way out.  Yuck.

All about clovers

Take a second - 144 seconds, actually, and give a listen to this record from 1948.  Of course, it's Art Mooney, his orchestra and chorus, doing their version of the old song "I'm Looking Over A Four-Leaf Clover," and this version was the #1 song in America for 18 weeks.

Of course, this week, the #1 song in America is the lovely, enchanting "See You Again," by Wiz Khalifa Featuring Charlie Puth. But I'm not telling you anything new there.

This is Jazzbo.  DJs almost always look like
this, which is why they aren't on TV.

But Art Mooney's catchy tune from 1948 gave a Salt Lake City disc jockey a way to get famous enough to work in bigger markets. His name was Al "Jazzbo" Collins, and he took a notion to play the song for hours and hours and hours on end on his show on KNAK until people started calling and begging him to play ANYTHING else.  This is widely considered to be the first (of many) deejay publicity stunts like this. Jazzbo went on to work at big stations on both coasts until he passed in 1997...quite a career!

By the way, why are there four leaf clovers, anyhow?  Most of them are three-leafers!  Four-leaf clovers are a mutation of the   White Clover plant, Trifolium repens.

Why do we consider four-leaf clovers to be good luck? That goes back to Eve, who carried one out of Eden, meaning that if you have one, according to legend, you carry a bit of paradise with you.

Of course, if you have a dozen steamed crabs and a six of Natty Boh, you also have paradise with you, so there's that...

The Streisand Effect

Sherman Alexie is a Native American writer who had a movie out years ago called "Smoke Signals," about the lives of some people out West on reservations.  Alexie has also had his work published in The New Yorker, which I bring up to make the point that he didn't just ride into town on a head of cabbage.  He's a seriously talented writer, but try telling some parents in Idaho about it.

The junior class at Mountain View High School in Meridian, Idaho has a young lady named Brady Kissel among its students. Her school recently banned Alexie's 2007 book “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” from the school curriculum. The novel concerns a 14-year-old Native American student who goes off to attend a school where “where the only other Indian is the school mascot.”  It's been a best seller, all the critics loved it, and it won a National Book Award.

So naturally, it joined the list of books that had to be banned, lest young people read them and learn a little about someone's life.

Ms Kissel went to the school board meeting with a petition signed by 350 other students who wanted to read the book, only to have the school board ban it anyway.

So, stop me if you've heard this one before.  The school board says, "You can't have this in school," and it sold like hotcakes at the local bookstores and the library reported there were 61 people on the waiting list to borrow it and people who have better sense than the board raised the money to buy a copy of the book for every one of those 350 students.

They set it up to hand out the book in a town park on National Book Night, and there they were - the kids who want to read a book, the young firebrand who stood up for their right to do so, and...the town cops.

Someone called 911 to report that kids were getting books to read!

Ms Kissel and the book

Here's where the story veers away from "Footloose" and becomes a little more reasonable. The police determined that no laws were being violated (!) and the kids all got their books and the publishers shipped an additional 350 copies of “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” to Ms Kissel, to be distributed to others who wish to be so bold as to read a book.

Speaking of books, if you ever write one, be sure to remember the Streisand Effect.

Barbra Streisand, a talented woman who just gets a liiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiitle full of herself now and then, once filed a $50 million lawsuit against a man who took aerial photographs of her beachfront property for use in trying to get the state of California to take remedial action against coastal erosion.

This is not Barbra Streisand's beachfront home
(But wouldn't it be funny if it were?)

Streisand was certain that people were going to see a picture of her estate. After all, six people had seen the picture (known as "Image 3850" in the photo array) of her joint before she filed the lawsuit!

A month later, the picture had been seen by 420,000 people attracted to it by the publicity from the lawsuit.

Good move, Babs.

What FONT is this?

Like that kid Brick on "The Middle," I am a bit of a font snob. Most every computer comes loaded with dozens of font choices for your word processing and email needs. So why does everyone just go with the default Times New Roman when they go to do a resume?

The people at Bloomberg want you to use something a little more creative when you write up your curriculum vitae in search of a new job.  And they say, don't use Comic Sans unless you're applying for a position at Clown College.

They recommend Helvetica, which I avoid because it sounds like Velveeta, the "cheese" that needs no refrigeration.

Courier would be great if you are applying to work in an office in 1947, with manual typewriters and large pastepots and office boys running around bringing people cigarettes and coffee and some guy hollering on the phone, "Get me those accounts or don't come back in here, Jenkins!"

That one they call Papyrus is overused, and it's always seen at health food stores and places where they sell every kind of tea to drink but Lipton.

And don't even start on me people using Olde English in ALL CAPS.  This is often seen where people want to look "elegant," and on misspelled tattoos. <<<

My idea, for those composing a resume or opening a new lunch counter where you plan to sell a ton of those sandwiches with Muenster cheese, tomato, romaine and a truckload of alfalfa sprouts, is to see a professional graphic designer.  Or at least, look through the vast assortment of free fonts that came preloaded on your machine.

Would you buy a car from a company that uses a cheesy logo and expect it to run?  Or stop?

All caps? I ain't going!

Sunday Rerun, May 3, 2015

Hang it all, the good among us keep slipping earthly bonds. Latest notable to depart is the great writer John Updike, who died of lung cancer yesterday, aged 76. The one little mercy is that he will no longer have to hear, as we did tonight on NBC Nightly News, sentences such as, "Although they were born nine weeks premature, doctors say the octuplets are breathing on their own." I don't believe that the circumstances of the doctors' births, no matter how great the coincidence of prematurity, should figure into the reporting of the health of these eight tiny tots.

Updike wrote novels, essays, short stories, poems, sick notes for his kids, grocery lists and, probably, a papal bull or two in his long career. He wrote well over 50 novels, which is more than some people read in a lifetime. But I have this poem, published in the December 6, 1999, New Yorker posted on bulletin boards all over - even on some that don't belong to me. I feel these words should be read, and savored, so without further bloviation on my part, here is John Updike's 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.

The Saturday Picture Show, May 2, 2015

Old-fashioned as I am, I believe that the proper color of a fire engine is white over red, as it was in my fire company.  But from time to time, other fire departments incorporate other colors into the scheme.  This is an engine from the Chapel Hill (NC) FD, where they have decided to give nods to the sky blue of the U of NC Tarheels.

 I love the Book Thing of Baltimore, a warehouse in Waverly with very simple policies.  People donate books, used and new. People come to the Book Thing on weekends and take books home.  For free. I love the clearly stated hours of operation.  Find them online (http://www.bookthing.org/).  These are the hours.  (As the website states, there is a strict rule on how many books you can take home: 150,000 per visit.)

This week's Album Cover of the Week is the last album I bought on vinyl, to the best of my memory.  Things switched to cassette for a couple of weeks and then along came CDs and mp3s.

Orioles pitcher Ubaldo Jimenez is shown here pitching to the White Sox in Wednesday's game, which attracted a total paid attendance of 00,000.  No one was allowed in the ballpark in riot-torn Baltimore as the Orioles whomped the Chisox, 8-2.

If there's anything cuter than a baby rhino galloping along, I don't know what it would be, unless it's a kitten.

George Carlin had this to say about that fake rubber vomit that pranksters used to like leaving around for comedic purposes: Someone was at work, at their desk, when they came up with the idea to make and sell that loathsome thing.  In the same manner, some bigshot at Anheuser Busch thought it would be a good idea to suggest to eager young men that plying their dates with their crappy, watered-down beer would enable them to do the nasty with a woman of lowered resistance.  Class move, beer barons. They've apologized and will come up with something a little better, although about the only thing worse would be an exhortation to commit murder or mayhem.

in late 1939, second-hand furniture dealer (that's what his business card said) Al Capone, of Chicago, came to Baltimore for treatment of paresis — a psychotic dementia caused by brain damage caused by syphilis.  He graciously donated two weeping cherry trees to improve the view around Union Memorial Hospital on 33rd Street (a short walk from the Book Thing!).  One was cut down in the 50s when the hospital expanded; the other is seen here.

And then in February, 2010, Baltimore saw chaos unlike anything we had seen since Oprah left town.  Two blizzards came along...within five days. A large branch of the remaining tree came down, and from that felled branch, a man from Virginia made this bowl, among other objects.  Life really is a bowl made of an old gangster's cherry tree.

We go on, hurting each other

There's no need for me to detail the incidents that led to the rioting in Baltimore this past week.  But I keep thinking of Mike McCormack, The Carpenters, and car salespeople during all the fallout that keeps settling on us, even on those of us who don't even live in the city.

Car salespeople have a trick that they might have used on you; it's called "closing on a minor point."  It works like this: you're thinking of getting a new car to replace the old Family Truckster. You're not sure what model you want, you're not sure what manufacturer you want, and you're sure not sure about what color car you would choose if you were about to make the decision.  Salespeople know this, and they know what cars make them the most commission, and they steer the conversation over to the Gadabout 4-wheel drive SUV with power everything, and they sidle up to you, all confidential, and say, "Now, Mr Mxyzptlk, if you WERE to settle on the Gadabout, which color would you choose, and which interior?"  Now he's got you picking out the color of the floor mats, and from there, it's just a matter of time before you're signing on the bottom line.

So there it is, and as you drive home in your new Chamois Tan Gadabout, ponder this:  Baltimore is full of people arguing, not over police procedures or what the true facts are or whether lawlessness is an appropriate response to kindlessness.  No, we are arguing over whether the word "thug" is hurtful and harmful, and on what level.

Of course it is.  But is that the most important point to settle on right now?  Of course it isn't.

Mike McCormack was a great big guy whose play with the Cleveland Browns of the 1950s earned him a spot in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.  An offensive tackle, he moved men out of the way for running backs and protected quarterbacks.  Later in life he went into coaching, and it was his misfortune to coach the Baltimore Colts under the ownership of Bob "Bob The Drunk" Irsay.

During that time, I wound up sitting at a luncheon of Colts fans, and McCormack was the guest speaker.  He said something I will never forget, referring to the people who were falling all over themselves trying to assign blame for the Colts' lousy record: "When you're pointing fingers at someone else, there are three more pointing back at you."

For those of you who want to play the blame game about the conditions, some of them in existence for hundreds of years, and some of them occurring on the morning of Freddie Gray's arrest, and for the rioting, looting and arson that resulted, there is plenty of blame to go around.  People point to the cops, who point to the criminals, who point to the joblessness and hopelessness, which comes from the...This can go on all day.  But we cannot do anything about the past, beyond investigations and trials for those at fault.  The important thing is to move forward and make improvements in our city and for its people and for their children's children's children. Learn from the past, but don't live there.

And if we can progress and change the city, then maybe I can stop hearing that treacly "Hurting Each Other" song over and over in my mind.

Bananarama Republic

Someday, a long long time from now, when we who tread earth and water get to meet our ancestors in the clouds, I have no doubt that the cooler among those of us who Went Before will smile at us and say how lucky we were to have lived in the age of Bananarama.

Fun Girls Three!

Yes, Bananarama, the English pop group from the 1980s.  Original members were Sara Dallin, Siobhan Fahey and Keren Woodward. Fahey quit the band in 1988, which was a shame, as she was the first person I ever heard of named Siobhan.  It's a pretty name, but I had to ask the Irish woman I worked with at the time about how to say it (you say "ShaVAHN")! For three years, the threesome was rounded out by Siobhan-substitute Jacquie O'Sullivan, but since 1991, it's just been Sara and Keren making the music.

To be regarded as deep and intellectual,
always pose ostentatiously with a
book of poetry.

And what music!  80's synthesiser pop is not normally my choice, but the secret to this group, who made up their name from a portmanteau tribute to The Banana Splits tv show and a Roxy Music song "Pyjamarama," was that, unlike any other band alive during the 1980s, they did not take themselves seriously at all! Can you even imagine how great it would be if Bono from U2 and Duran Duran and Yes and Emerson, Lake and Palmer and Rush and Kansas would have lightened it up for two goshdarn seconds, long enough to record songs like "Robert DeNiro's Waiting" or "I Heard A Rumour"?

Pure pop for now people, as fellow Englishperson Nick Lowe said.

"Shav, Sare and Kere" was the nickname for their nickname, and they just did not worry about pretense or any kind of tense. Notice, they didn't even try to sing three-part harmony, or dance like ballerinas.  They clomped through their singing and dancing and seemed to be having the time of their lives.  They even sang backup harmonies for Fun Boy Three's version of "Ain't What You Do" just because they did that sort of thing for fun, boy.

And it's still going on! They toured the US in 2012 and are currently on tour across Europe.  No, they didn't change the world with their music, but they made it a little more fun to be alive, and can Bono say that?

Sad days in the city

I was around in 1968 when, as all the journalists said, Baltimore "exploded" in rioting following the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr.   It took years and years to rebuild the city - most of it, that is.  There are entire blighted blocks down there that have never been fixed up.

Notice I say, "down there."  People across the nation don't always understand that Baltimore City, where the rioting has been taking place, is a totally separate jurisdiction from Baltimore County, where I live.  It's a whole 'nother world down there, as we say.

Once again, rioting is taking place in the city.  It started last Saturday night, when a peaceful protest march attended by thousands mourning the death in police custody of a young man named Freddie Gray turned to violence and destruction when a small segment of those thousands saw the chance to rob, pillage and set fires down by the Orioles ballpark.

Then on Monday, following Mr Gray's funeral, high school students went to a city mall/transportation hub for a "purge," apparently inspired by a movie called "The Purge" which I am glad to know nothing of.  Lots of people see movies like this and come out of the experience ready to confuse them with real life.  Leaders of this after-school special told the news that the plan was to have a peaceful march in protest of Mr Gray's death, but within minutes of school letting out, they were throwing rocks and bricks at the police who had assembled in response to their plans.

And then all hell broke loose, and there was looting all over town, and fires, and arrests, and injured police, several of them seriously hurt.

I see on my newsfeed a lot of articles detailing allegations of abuse by the city police over the years.

I see on my newsfeed a lot of posts by police and their supporters detailing allegations of shootings, mayhem, and crime committed by city residents over the years.

I see on my newsfeed a lot of dithering over fine points, such as whether it's proper to call people throwing burning trash cans at police officers "thugs", or whether an overreaction to an overreaction is an overreaction.

I see on the horizon a need for everyone to behave.  Is that asking too much?

It's Porn down rain!

Ted.

Like you, when I first heard of Carly Fiorina, I thought they were talking about Ted Fio Rito, popular 1930's bandleader who gave us "Fly Away To Ioway" and dozens of other big smashes.

But, as so often happens, I was wrong.  Carly Fiorina is a woman who used to run the Hewlett-Packard company, the people who made the printer that sits right here atop my desk and works about every third time I hit the "print" key. 

Carly

During her six years at the helm of H-P, she tripled her own salary, laid off 30,000 people (one of whom should have made my printer work a little better, but...) and presided over a 50% plunge in the tech giant's stock value. 

Her employees loved her to such an extent that they greeted her with a solid round of "Boo" and other expletives at an annual meeting.

Naturally, to reward her for these great accomplishments, the powers that be H-P gave her a $42 million severance check to get her to go home.

And I know a lot of people who would go away for a lot less - and go a lot farther.  But Ms Fiorina is still around, whereas most of us would be living on a South Sea island with our 42 million semolians buying us mango desserts and rummy coffee.

And she wants to be our next president.

Clearly gifted with the ability to reach out to the working class, she reported to Chris "Son Of Mike" Wallace on the Wolf News that American workers sit and watch pornography all day at work.

The quote was:  “How many Inspector General reports do we need to read that say, you know, you can watch porn all day long and get paid exactly the same way as somebody who’s trying to do their job?”
   
I've been retired for three years now, and I guess I didn't hear about work changing this much.  Apparently, the lights are dimmed in every office from 9 til 5, suggestive throbbing saxophone music is played over the loudspeakers, and everyone's PC comes to life with the greatest porn of the 70s, 80's, 90's and today!

Bosses are now required to dress in crushed velvet tuxedos with outrageously large bowties, all in garish neon colors.

You can try sending your Fiscal Year breakdown report to the printer, but what comes out is an autographed picture of the cast of "Twin Cheeks."

I'll leave it to your imagination what happens when the front desk calls for a pizza, a plumber or a parcel delivery.

The annual holiday party now takes place down on the highway at the Motel Hourly, with all in attendance being asked to dress appropriately for the theme, dressing like characters from the movie "Pulp Friction."

Don't laugh!  Last year, it was "The Beaverly Hillbillies"!

From what Ms Fiorina believes, the modern office is such a sybaritic pleasure dome that no one even wants to leave their cubicle for lunch.

But maybe that's because they heard about what's in the mashed potatoes.

Does he have a prayer?

Well, once again, the calendar let us down, and we missed National Pretzel Day.

How wonderful. As a nation, we pause to salute crooked dough.

Write it down for next year - April 26 is the day to pause and chomp on the tasty snack that was said to have been invented in 610 AD by an Italian monk who wanted to give a little treat to children who had learned to say their prayers. He twists the dough to look like two praying hands across the chest and bakes it.  The Italian word "pretiola" means little reward, you see, and that's how the snack got its name. 

Next week, let's find out where they got the name "hummus"!

So, an Italian invented pretzels, but it was only when the French people got involved that someone figured out we need to add mustard.

But if you live in or around Philadelphia PA, where they love their pretzels soft and doughy, they have had many players on their football team who were a little too soft and doughy as well, and therefore, the Eagles have never won the Super Bowl.  But now they have a secret weapon.

Tebowing

For reasons best known to the people who came up with this idea, the Eagles signed Tim Tebow to play for them this year.  Tebow was a very good college player (he won the Heisman Trophy) but he washed out with Denver, the Jets, and New England in the NFL, and has not played for the last two seasons, years he spent waiting for his phone to ring from a team in need of his services. He is best known for his habit of "Tebowing," which is dropping to one knee to pray in a publicly ostentatious manner.

Philly signed him, I don't know why, but a clever pretzel maker in the City of Brotherly Love has come up with a Tebow Pretzel...salty dough in the shape of a man making heavenly entreaty. 

A half-baked idea?

You might recall that Philadelphia fans threw snowballs at Santa Claus when old St. Nick appeared at an Eagles game years ago. Tebow should be concerned, because chances are those fans are better than he at throwing things, and these pretzels might make easy missiles. 

Sunday rerun: "Other than that, Mrs Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?

Rocky: "I can't see nothin, you gotta open my eye.
 Cut me, Mick."
 Mick: "I don't wanna do it."
 Rocky: "Go ahead, cut me."

Being so busy training for upcoming marathons (they are about to rerun the entire Murphy Brown series on Encore, and there's always the Rocky marathons on TCM) that I neglected to write about this on April 14,  I hope today is not too late to learn about something that was probably on one of those "Rest Of The Story" deals that Paul Harvey used to do.

April 14, 1865 looked like a pretty good day for President Abraham Lincoln.  Although he had no way of knowing that we'd still be arguing about it in 2014, the Civil War had ended with Robert E. Lee surrendering at Appomattox, VA.  All of the soldiers were sent home, with prisoners freed and sent home as well. The nation was set for Reconstruction, and all prospects pleased Lincoln, except that his wife wanted him to go see a play.  "It's only one night," he probably thought as he went about his presidential business, signing this and proposing that.

One of the bills he signed that day, the last day of his life, created the “Secret Service Division of the Department of the Treasury.”   That's what we call the Secret Service today, men and women who accompany the president on his travels, protecting him, and also getting drunk and having intoxicated arguments with prostitutes around the world.  Lincoln could not have predicted this that day. He signed into law the bill that created the agency that today protects the president, we hope, and went off to see "Our American Cousin," devoid of protection.  Because?

Because the reason for the creation of the Secret Service in those pre-FBI days was to stop the flow of counterfeit currency.  They figure that one-third of all American money in circulation in those days was fake.  With diligent effort and hard work, today we're down to just one-quarter of our folding money being bogus. People wishing to make counterfeit nickels might as well go ahead, since it takes so many of them to buy anything anyway.

But rooting out the scourge of fakeout dollars was the prime focus of the Service for decades, until presidents James Garfield (1881) and William McKinley (1901) were assassinated.  Presidential security became their goal after McKinley was shot by a man inevitably referred to as "crazed anarchist Leon Czolgosz." (Garfield - the president, not the cartoon feline - was shot by the man inevitably referred to as "disappointed office-seeker Charles J. Guiteau.") Theodore Roosevelt, McKinley's uneasy successor, was the first president given Secret Service protection, and also the namesake of the Teddy Bear.

All high school history students may feel free to print the above and turn it in as evidence of how hard they studied over spring break.  All the facts are true,  just made more amusing with the addition of whimsy, which is in short supply these days.

The Saturday Picture Show, April 25, 2015

We know why the geese fly in a Vee pattern. Each of them flying just above the bird in front cuts down on wind resistance. The birds take turns being front goose, dropping back in the pack when they get tired. By so doing, they can travel a long way in a day - further than a family in a Family Truckster, but then again, geese don't have to stop at a WaWa for the kids to tinkle.

Great places for a picnic, #472.

Someone, please tell Mitch Ryder the Detroit Wheels are here, a little rusty but ready to hit the road!

If I begin to collect great paintings depicting everyday life in ye Olden Days, I might start with "The Reading Lesson" by Ekvall Knut. I bet that Dad, here, is reading "I The Jury" by Mickey Spillane.

This is one of the albums I have on vinyl, cassette, CD, and my iPod.  It's the best of the after-the-folk-craze Dylan.  Interesting: Triumph motorcycles used to have a big office and warehouse right up the road in Timonium, MD, next to another dearly missed business, the Timonium Drive-In Theater.

We Americans do love our bizarre oversized fruit, don't we? 

They say this is the best way to make a homemade universal knife block - fill an upright wooden box with bamboo skewers.

We don't know how successful the Ravens will be in 2015, but it sure looks like a colorful season!

How does the historical truth Affleck me?

News item (from the Hollywood Reporter):

Ben Affleck has responded to the controversy surrounding his episode of PBS' Finding Your Roots.

In a Facebook post Tuesday, the actor-director wrote that he was sorry for asking the Henry Louis Gates Jr.-hosted show to censor his slave-owning ancestor from his installment, which aired Oct. 14, 2014.

"I didn't want any television show about my family to include a guy who owned slaves," Affleck wrote. "I was embarrassed. The very thought left a bad taste in my mouth."

How this affects me:

Now that our parents have both passed, my sister and I often go through old documents, pictures and ephemera left behind. Neither of us knows much about the family tree, and she is interested in finding out who sawed off some of the branches of it and I am not.

We never met our paternal grandparents, both of whom died while Dad was off fighting WWII. Our mom's parents, though, lived to ripe old ages, and from my grandfather I got the love of reading, incredibly corny jokes and practical gags, and collecting junk from sources such as buying used stuff at Goodwill or finding used stuff in dumpsters.

He did not live long enough to enjoy The Simpsons, but I know he would have loved Bart's motto, "Poorly guarded construction sites can be gold mines."

From my grandmother, I got the love of cooking, watching TV in the daytime, and a certain detached way of looking at the world. Her motto, recited every time someone did something preposterously stupid, was "And they shot Lincoln!"

But what I know of their parents would fit into that little watch pocket in a pair of jeans. And beyond that - nothing.  And that suits me fine, because, even though genealogy web sites abound, I don't really want to know what www.hoosierdaddy.com would tell me about my long-gone kinfolk.

And it's not that I suspect anything nefarious would turn up by turning over some pages in yellowed crumbling ledger books.  My father's father was born in Macon, GA, but I never heard of any sprawling plantations in the family name, and certainly no Aunt Scarlett or Uncle Rhett.  

I'd hope not to be related to a slave owner, or a bank robber, or a despoiler of young women, or a South American military strongman.  I agree with Affleck that we deserve neither credit nor blame for our ancestors.  But pretending that stuff good or bad didn't happen is to deny the truth, and no good comes from that.

Rooting for the family tree

Why, just the other day, to prove that point, I got a letter from an attorney representing a man said to be my great-uncle's second cousin Randolph Clark-Barr.  Apparently this old relative was so deluded as to believe he was a moth, and went to a dentist to seek help.

The dentist said, "You should be going to a psychiatrist.  I'm a dentist. What are you doing here?"

And Randolph said, "Your light was on." 

The best teachers also learn from their students

I remember a story about a man named Adam Braun, who met a destitute child in India and asked the boy what he wanted more than anything in the world.

His answer: A pencil.

A pencil. I have pencils all over the house, a thousand pencils and pens, most of them bearing the names of insurance brokers or bail bondsmen.  Yes, I am a hoarder of this sort of thing.  A bucket of free pencils at the State Fair will find me reaching in every time for a #2.

No, I didn't package up some of my extras and send them to India, but I did make a donation of another sort.  How can we not, when we see other human beings whose lot it was not to be born here in the lap of human luxury amidst an abundance of every single thing a human could want?

I thought of that situation when I saw this, about Kyle Schwartz, a third-grade teacher from Colorado who came up with a lesson plan called "I Wish My Teacher Knew."

The vast majority of the kids at Doull Elementary get free and reduced lunches.  This is not the prosperity that most of us have known, and it was a brave move to ask a deprived child to share his or her deepest secret, because there's a real chance of opening the bitterness locker in doing so.

"As a new teacher, I struggled to understand the reality of my students' lives and how to best support them. I just felt like there was something I didn't know about my students," Ms Schwartz says.

And the sadness piled up on her desk.

"I wish my teacher knew I don't have pencils at home to do my homework."

How many teachers have hollered at how many students for not doing how much homework, little knowing that the kid spent the previous evening cowering behind a sofa because dad was drunk and he and mom were in a three-hour fistfight?

How many kids can't do their homework, and thereby set the stage for a successful life, due to lack of basic study supplies...a desk, computer access, a lamp, a damn pencil?

There is a happy side.  Ms Schwartz reported that a child who said she had no friends and no one to play with and read that out loud found that a group of kids sought her out on the playground later.

Kyle Schwartz

By sharing our needs and feelings, we can reach out, and sometimes, have them met.

I think we can all take this a step further and just ask our friends, our coworkers, our family members if there is anything they want to share.

We might be surprised at how simple it is to help!

What's your beef?

Friends, it's all in the metabolism.  I never tire of telling people how, every day in high school as soon as detention was over, I would head up York Rd to the great Smetana's Deli, where I would enjoy a cold cut sub, chips and a Coke.  Eastern European delicatessen owners have always been fonts of knowledge and humor, and Joe and Gus, the genial Czech brothers who would hand out fake World Series tickets along with your sandwich, always had a joke or two for me to steal and repeat forever.

Then I'd hike up the road to Read's Drugstore, where I'd have an ice cream sundae and another soda.

Then I'd cut through Towson Plaza and hitchhike home to dinner with the family, and by the time I had finished what homework I was going to do, I'd be back in the kitchen, snacking on chips and pretzels and Hawaiian Punch.

I weighed 140 lbs at this time. I had to run around in the shower to get wet.  I couldn't drink through a straw, for fear of falling in. My pajamas only had one stripe. I was skinny.

Those days are over, obviously. It's all in the metabolism; as one gets older, the old calorie-burner slows down and leaves corpulence behind.

Which brings me to Molly Schuyler, all 120 lbs of her, a Nebraska native who lives in California now and went to Texas over the weekend for dinner, which consisted of  three steaks, three baked potatoes, three shrimp cocktails, three salads and three rolls, consumed at a restaurant called the Big Texan Steak House in Amarillo.

Snack time for Molly

The deal there is, if you can shove that much down your neck in an hour, it's free. Otherwise, you pay $72, tip not included.

Ms Schuyler is 35 now, and in 20 years, she will be 55, and I'm sure she won't be able to chow down like that. So she should enjoy it while she can!

PS: She started in on a fourth steak, but stopped.  Not because she was full, but because she was tired of eating steak.

There ya go.

Playing the symbols

This admission won't come as a surprise to anyone, but I have to admit, I am rather dense in certain areas.

Birdbrained, boneheaded, chuckleheaded, dense, dim, and slow... all of these apply to me in certain fields.  Interpreting modern dance, appreciating modern art, and enjoying a mime show are all areas in which I am markedly deficient.  Anyone who has ever seen me shaking my head as I walk away from such events realizes that.

But what people might not know is that I am the one and only person in the United States - a country with a current population of 320,000,000 some-odd people (some much more odd than others, but anyway) - who does not get symbolism in books, movies and TV shows, even when it's so heavy-handed as to drown out the plot.

People read "A Christmas Carol" by Chuck Dickens and marvel at the old Victorian's ability to symbolize the evil that took place at the firm of Scrooge & Marley by understanding that the chain Marley "forged in life" was made of "cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel."  I read that and came away figuring that whoever took Marley to his fate just grabbed the heaviest steel stuff sitting around the office, and then I am happy for Bob Cratchit that they didn't take away the coal scuttle.

Or let's say we're watching a movie, and for the 427th time, I have to watch "The Wizard Of Oz" and when it's over, the cinema buffs go on about how Dorothy’s walk down the Yellow Bricks stands for her spiritual quest, Toto the dog represents the "incredible unanimal mankind" side that Cummings described, and the haggy Wicked Witch of the West is the symbol for the repressed dark thoughts of the subconscious, and I just sit there saying I can count 17 people who could play Miss Gulch today.

When you see this hamburger chain logo, you are
supposed to get the subliminal message that her
collar says "MOM."  I don't.

And of course, amateur psychologists had a field day with Bill Clinton's cigar, trains going into tunnels in Fellini movies, and even the silver and black of the Oakland Raiders uniforms inspire their players and fans to adopt pirate personae during games.

I don't look too deeply into things, but I get a boot out of people who do.

A boot. You know what THAT stands for, don't you?

Oh no.........

O, say can you see, McHenry?

Even when she's not posing next to Pete Rose, ESPN reporter Britt McHenry is, by any account, an attractive person. Posing next to Charlie Hustle just makes anyone look magnificent. But that's not the issue.

By now, you've likely heard the story about what happened to McHenry a couple of weeks ago.  She went to the Hunan restaurant in Arlington VA and left her car in the restaurant lot after dinner while she hit a couple of other local hot spots. Coming back to retrieve her car, she was not the first person out on the town to find her car had been towed away for being parked on a lot with strict parking rules and a deal with a local tow company.  The restaurant provides parking for patrons while they dine, but they don't provide parking for afterhours carousers.

I just decided to form a band called The Afterhours Carousers.

Anyhow, she goes east to the tow lot to pick up her ride and things go south in a hurry.  We see her on video tape speaking harshly to the cashier, who warns her that video is capturing every second of her captiousness. She then yammers on, slamming the woman's appearance, job, weight and right to be on this earth. ESPN, the sportscaster's employer, suspends her for a week after the tape becomes an internet sensation.

Now, of course the video is edited, and we don't see too much of what the other woman says to her.  And that doesn't matter, because two wrongs would still not make a right, and knowing that she is a person in the public eye, Ms McHenry would be wise to lend me an ear and keep her nose clean by keeping her public mouth shut.

We all know many people whose good looks or other innate qualities (musical talent, athletic ability, born rich) make them very attractive, and so often, these people can get along in life just by smiling and looking great or playing a saxophone or throwing a baseball or writing a check.  But it's often the case that there is an ugly side to pretty people, which Ms McH will demonstrate for you if you can stand to watch this tape of her in action.

But, you know what?  I happen to know some highly attractive people, people who would NEVER stoop so low as to abuse another person in this high-handed manner.

And that's just another reason to love my friends all the more.