Book It

I live among books. Literally! Between me and Peggy, we have stacks and stacks of books...books we've read and want to save for later reference (or an annual re-reading, such as In Cold Blood or The Catcher In The Rye), books we have yet to read (I've never gotten around to even cracking A Child's Guide To Richard Nixon, which someone gave me when Old Pinocchio-Face was vice president), and extra copies we somehow acquired and will donate (there's a Little Free Library right around the corner from my Planet Fitness), and of course there's always The Book Thing Of Baltimore, the internationally famous warehouse full of free treasures. Just imagine, a free education, yours for the taking. You really have to see this place!

Fortunately, we have enough space in the house for the stacks and shelves of books we own. I find comfort in books, and knowledge, and enjoyment. If I have a book with me, I figure I'm never alone.

And some books, even if I haven't opened them since Watergate was in the news, it just feels good to have them around. It's like an old friend that you don't necessarily have to talk to every five minutes, but you know they would be there in one minute if you need to hear from them. The collections of Robert Benchley's essays or compendia of letters from writers such as Jack Kerouac or Gore Vidal are books I can pick up, open at random, and find myself awash in the memory of the first time I read that selection.  Or the fourteenth time!

I will confess to one big change in my reading habits. Because I was raised by parents who lived through the Great Depression, I was acclimated to not wasting anything, be it food, clothing, or money.  For that reason, many times earlier in life, I continued to plow through books that I found absolutely awful.
It might have been because I spent money for the book, maybe it was because I kept thinking that no one could really write this poorly and I thought with each turn of the page, it would all get better, but it didn't (John Grisham comes to mind).

But The Corrections changed everything. This hefty turgid log was a winner of the National Book Award and was on all the best seller lists, and the critics all broke their necks to praise it. I bought it, I started it, and I was stultified from the first. I kept thinking of the line in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne ceaselessly into the past.” I really had the feeling that the books was dragging me with the current into the Sea of Bad Fiction, but did I stop reading?  I did not, but when I was finished at last, I vowed never again to stick with a book I was not enjoying. I dropped it like a bad habit! Because it was.

You can usually spot a dozen or so copies of it at the Book Thing!

The Climb

Trevor Hahn is one of the people who have climbed a dozen of Colorado's "14ers," the 14,000 + foot peaks that dot that state like cloves on a ham.

"I’m a huge outdoor enthusiast,” Hahn, a Colorado native, told a news station. “Just getting into the back country where you don’t see a soul.”

“I just love to be on top of a mountain because I can hear the expanse around me,” Hahn said.  Hearing matters to him...

He can only see light, no shapes at all. Hahn has been legally blind since birth, living with macular degeneration, iritis and glaucoma.

But he wasn't about to let visual challenges keep him on the ground.  He uses  adaptive techniques, things like hearing bells and moving in the direction of the sound, or hearing voice commands from hiking partners.

With these methods, he climbed Gokyo Ri mountain in Nepal - a 17,575-foot summit, but didn't find the experience as satisfying as he hoped it would be. "It it didn’t really give me a purpose. Like, I was just following this bell,” Hahn reports. “It would be really cool if I could have a purpose on the trail.”

And then...

Last year, Hahn and his wife Mandy met Melanie Knecht through No Barriers USA, a group that exists to help people with challenges get into adaptive sports. Melanie lives with spina bifida; she has never walked, but when she met a man who depends on hearing voices to be guided up mountains, she said, "Well, I have a voice."

They became friends and realized the possibilities of her eyes helping his and his legs working for her.  They call it “Hiking with Sight.”

They rigged up a harness that Hahn wears like a backpack; she sits in it, facing forward to see what's ahead, and she gets to leave her wheelchair behind and see places she couldn't previously reach.

“We both serve a purpose on the trail and a huge responsibility to each other,” Hahn said.  Knecht's voice commands tell Hahn about rocks, cliffs, logs, and what-all else is ahead.

For Knecht, the toughest part is remembering the task of calling out the obstacles ahead while enjoying the beautiful views.

“I want to describe what we’re seeing so Trevor has a mental picture,” Knecht said. “Then, I have to be like, 'Oh gosh, we’re turning left!'”

For Hahn, the hard part is building the strength to carry and balance a person on his back. That takes endurance. It's understandable that he needs to stop often for breaks.

“If you have a crazy idea, find another person that also agrees with that crazy idea and then it’s not crazy anymore. It’s just an idea,” Knecht said.

I saw their story on CBS News and it's amazing to see them getting up and down those hills. But it's our daily reminder that two humans can unite to conquer any challenge.

Did someone MAKE you do this?

Yesterday, we talked about the San Fermin Festival in Pamplona, Spain, where humans undertake the foolhardy task of running through cobblestone streets as bulls, unhappy in the knowledge that they are about to die in a bullfight, try to exact the same bad ending on the humans among them.

Spanish tourists can round out their summer of fun by partaking in La Tomatina on August 28.  That's the day when 20,000 people will waste food, and an afternoon they might have spent reading, by heaving 30,000 pounds of tomatoes at each other in Buñol, a little village near Valencia, Spain.

I saw the story on "60 Minutes" this Sunday past about Chef Massimo Bottura  ("The Pavarotti of pasta") who has worked out a way to take food that's about to wave goodbye to its expiration dates from grocery stores and use it to feed the unemployed and homeless.  This takes place in "refettorios" - high grade shelter food service spaces - and there are six of them: London, Paris, Rio de Janeiro and three in Italy, and more are planned.

Bottura is a man who makes paper out of seawater to wrap around his filet of sole. He gets $500 for a 12-course tasting menu supper. so maybe he would have a better use for 30,000 pounds of tomatoes than this wanton waste.

                                        Quite frankly, the worst of this is the unconscionable waste of food, and the other appalling aspect reminds me of when people started wearing Doc Marten shoes when they didn't have to orthopedically, but just wanted to be like everyone else, lugging around a pair of anvils all day for fashion's sake. I used to wonder what they would say if someone forced them to wear those shoes, or if being chased by bulls or pelted with ripe tomatoes were some sort of punishment or forced prank.


















I guess I'll never know.

Bull

Eight.  The total this year came to eight. Four Spaniards, two Australians and two Americans.

No, we're not talking about winners of the Nobel Prize or the Academy Awards or even the Teen Choice Award. This motley crew of eight fools comprises all the people who were gored this year during the weeklong funfest known as the San Fermin festival, held annually in the northern Spanish city of Pamplona.

On the final day of the gala bloodarama Sunday, a chocolate-colored bull named Rabanero let the other five he had been running with go on ahead while he, playful as ever, hung back and started a commotion all on his own. Rabanero flipped a guy over his horns, slamming him into the cobblestone street, and then clipped two other runners, forcing them into a wall like Stork did to the marching band in "Animal House."

All over Spain, admirers are filling out applications to join the Rabanero Fan Club.

Ernest Hemingway popularized all this San Fermin foolishness in his 1926 novel “The Sun Also Rises.” People travel to Spain and drink  stay up all night to be on the scene when the rooster caws the bulls to action. The, runners dressed in white outfits with a red sash run like thieves in the night as animals weighing around 2,400 lbs  - who are slightly peevish about the whole thing - chase after them like Joey Chestnut chases hot dogs.

Festival organizers fell all over themselves to share the news that there has not been a fatality in this insanity since 2009.

Mississippi Burn

“I don’t trust the perception that the world puts on people when they see things and they don’t ask the questions, they don’t look to find out the truth."

Those are the words of a man from Mississippi, current state Rep. Robert Foster (R-Hernando) who is running for governor of his state. He went on to say to CNN, "Perception is reality in this world and I don’t want to give anybody the opinion that I’m doing something that I should not be doing.”

Oh my Jumpin' Jehoshaphat! What is it that he is so afraid that people will think he's up to?

Well, it's that age-old sin of being with a woman.  And not in that carnal sense, either.  The story is that a reporter, Larrison Campbell, from the nonprofit news site Mississippi Today, asked to spend a day on the campaign trail, a ride-along with the candidate, as it were.

The problem is that Campbell is a woman! So Foster said he'd be willing to have her along, but she would have to bring a male colleague along so's the tongues down South wouldn't get to waggin'.

He wants to be governor of
a state with this flag.

(I just checked my calendar. It's still 2019 here in Maryland.)

“I’m a married man and I made a vow to my wife. And part of the agreement that we’ve also made throughout our marriage is that we would not be alone with someone of the opposite sex throughout our marriage. And that is a vow that I have with my wife” is how Foster said it to CNN, going on to say, "I didn’t want to end up in the situation where me {sic} and Ms. Campbell were alone for an extended period of time throughout that 15- to 16-hour day. And so out of precaution, I wanted to have her bring someone with her, a male colleague.

Back home in Yazoo City, Foster can't be too mad about all this, because his inane fear has brought him national attention, most of it negative, but still. It's all susPENCEfull, you know.

Foster

And when Foster told CNN that he would have acceded to the same request from a male reporter, Campbell replied, sensibly, "Why is it my responsibility to make you feel comfortable about something that, you know, that is — that, again, as your campaign director said on the phone with me, is this weird request that you have?”

Foster's reply:  "It’s my rules, my truck.”

I very much doubt that any couple ever made vows that preclude being in a room with a person of the opposite sex, but this is probably appealing to people whose sense of sanctimony is highly defined. I know that casting onself in that self-righteous "I'm so divine and so much better than you sinners" mode is a solid election strategy for those seeking the votes of the easily duped, but I have to tell you this: if a man is going to cheat on his wife, he will do so if he is chained to a gurney and on the way to the hospital with severe injuries possibly requiring amputation following an accident involving his car and a southbound freight train and one of the onlookers looks pretty that day.

And on the other hand, if a man is not inclined to cheat, he could be placed in a harem full of wanton, licentious women and nothing would happen.

Sorry to tell you that, Mr and Mrs Foster, but that's the truth, and what's funny is, deep inside, you both know it.

Sunday Rerun: Pants on Fire

Sometimes as I cast about the world wide nets to find news to share with you, I see a story that I figure must be fake news.  I mean, when you see a story about a lifelong beer lover winning a brewery in a lottery, or someone falling down while getting off the x-ray machine, thus breaking the leg that the x-ray has just shown not to be broken, or a hapless motorist driving a Ford crashing into the display room of a Chevrolet dealership, it catches the eye, am I wrong?

But how does "lawyer's pants catch fire" sound?  And add to it what he was doing at the time the tweed started blazing...

His name is Stephen Gutierrez, and he practices law in Florida. And his defense (unsuccessful) of one Claudy Charles, 49, was taking place in a Sunshine State courtroom when, suddenly, the attorney's slacks began smoldering.   

And Charles was on trial for arson! He set his own car on fire, or, at least, the guilty conviction the jury handed down said he did.  I imagine the jurors were spellbound by Gutierrez's defense of his client ("Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, pay no attention to the evidence the state showed you, and remember, the police have been out to get my client for years and years!") as he stood in the Miami-Dade county courtroom, weaving his masterful defense in an oration that led many observers to compare him to the young Clarence Darrow, or would have if they knew who Clarence was.

And then his pants caught fire.

He was trying to convince the jury that Charles's car had just *poof!* spontaneously combusted, but it was his trousers that did that. It wasn't all that spontaneous. He had several batteries for those electronic cigarettes in his pants pocket, and the cells contacting each other led to sparks and smoke and embarrassment, as Gutierrez darted out of the courtroom and into the mens' room  to scoop water out of the sink and onto his onto his britches.

Gutierrez

The word that stunned witnesses used in describing the smoky scene to the Miami Herald was "surreal."

The attorney returned to the chamber with his pants all wet and his pocket all singed.

"This was not staged," Gutierrez told the paper. "No one thinks that a battery left in their pocket is somehow going to explode. After careful research, I now know this can happen. I am not the only one this has happened to, but I am in a position to shed light on the situation."

And what's great about it is, he doesn't need a flashlight to shed light on it...he can just hold up his pants!

The Saturday Picture Show, July 13, 2019

My advice: don't bother. They don't keep well in captivity, and there are so many of them, anyway.

If you don't think women's soccer is at least as important as men's, let me ask you to name two players on the US National Men's team.

You can duck all you want, but the one on the right shows that the dog days are on the way.

I think this is a good idea for a pooch - it gives him/her a little room to call their own.

They really are so cute when they're little.

It's funny, the contrast between a pretty reflection of water droplets, how the light refracts and disperses, giving the image of a spectrum when it comes in the sky (that's a rainbow) and when it comes in an oily puddle (that's an oily puddle).

I don't see any snow, but I am told these are snow crocuses. I guess that's right. I just like the way they brighten up the field.

One year it's elephants, one year it's horses, and this year it's the unicorn's turn in the sun and in the shadow, if you can get your daughter and yourself positioned just right in the shadows.

Is that an avocado in your pocket...

I have to admit, every time I write a story like this one, I worry that some misguided soul will attempt to commit the crime I describe, but without the part where the perpetrator gets tossed in the clink.

So I will preface this by saying, you'll never away with it, Dillinger, Jr.

Here's the story: a man (isn't it always!) in Israel robbed two banks of more than £6,500 ($8093.54 in American money). His M.O, as Joe Friday would say, was unique: he held out an avocado that he had dressed up to look like a hand grenade.

Unlike Joe Friday in the "Dragnet" era, police have another crime-busting weapon these days: they tracked him down using cell phone data.

The man is 47, and not particularly inclined to do great art. Both times, all he did was paint an avocado black and TELL the cashiers it was a grenade.

You can't fool too many people with a black avocado, but it did work twice, first at a bank in the southern city of Beersheba, and later at another cash house where he told the cashier to “put the money in the bag quickly or I’ll throw this grenade.”

Yeahhhhhh, see?  Hand over the loot and nobody gets hurt, see?

I wonder if they have Turner Classic Movies in Israel. Clearly, the man has seen too many George Raft movies.

Speaking of the movies, security video in both incidents showed him wearing a hat that tried to cover his face, with sunglasses, and in one of the heists, an eye patch.

The arrestee already has prior arrests in his past, and one three-year prison term for robbery.

It would have been easier for him to get away with it if he had just eaten the grenade  avocado, but not even crooks like the taste of avocados.

Things are hopping again

There's one thing you have to say about beer: it will always, always be around. 

Over in Belgium, a brewery operated by the Grimbergen abbey was smashed and burned down by French troops, so the brewing stopped, but the monks have decided to get things going again.  They will use the same Latin motto as before: “Ardet nec consumitur” (“Burned but not destroyed”) and, one assumes, will put the same care into making beer as they used to before the unpleasantness with those troops.

After all, 1795 was a long time ago. 

But that's when the last beer was made at Grimbergen, and they're over it now.  They brewed from the 13th century until the late 18th, so if they still have the recipe and all, they should be good to go.

Grimbergen is just north of Brussels, if you're planning to grab a cold one. The first new ales will be canned or bottled or kegged late next year.

“For us, it’s important to look to the heritage, to the tradition of the fathers for brewing beer because it was always here,” Father Karel Stautemas told Reuters news last week, after the brewery plans received final approval from the local local government council.

“Brewing and religious life always came together,” said Karel, one of 11 Norbertine canons (members of the order) living in the abbey. He will be attending a beermaking course at the Scandinavian School of Brewing in Copenhagen in order to learn his new craft.

Why did no one tell me about this school when I was young?

Carlsberg Brewery will help finance the project, and the abbey has already planted hops in their fields and is building a visitors' center. Profits from the newly-restored venture will go toward abbey maintenance and charity.

There's a lot to like about this!

Deny, deny, deny

Down in Boca Raton, Florida, a principal at one of the public high schools has an interesting take on the Holocaust.

He's not so sure it even happened.

His name is William Latson and he is principal at the charmingly-named Spanish River High School. Last year, he responded to an email from a student's mother asking for clarification on the level of Holocaust instruction at the school by saying that  he couldn’t say the World War II genocide was “a factual, historical event.” And, as so many people do when advancing lunatic notions, he pointed his finger around the room, claiming that “not everyone believes the Holocaust happened.”

He might be right about that last part, because there is no way to count the gozzleheads who believe there was no Holocaust, that man has never walked on the moon and we are being duped by a gigantic Disney animation, and that the government hands out vaccines in order to track our very movements and control our thoughts.

I guess that for every insane notion that people can dream up, there will be fools to believe it.

Now, predictably, with people calling for his dismissal, Latson is making with the apologies. “I regret that the verbiage that I used when responding to an email message from a parent, one year ago, did not accurately reflect my professional and personal commitment to educating all students about the atrocities of the Holocaust,” is how he expressed his regret to a local newspaper.

That newspaper is the Palm Beach Post, and the article they published last week shows the email exchange between that parent and Latson, showing his statement that the Holocaust is something one believes as opposed to historical fact. The parent was asking about how the school teaches the Holocaust.

“The Holocaust isn’t a debatable point, it’s not philosophical,” Matthew Levin,  CEO of the Jewish Federation of South Palm Beach County, told the paper. “I don’t think that in this particular case that the principal is denying the Holocaust per-se but he’s certainly asking questions that he should not be asking. It’s not his job to do anything but teach the facts and political correctness doesn’t get in the way of the facts.”

Apologies and denials pour out of Latson like water over a dam. He went on to tell the paper that he regretted what he wrote in that email, as it does not reflect his personal or professional views. So is he saying that since last year, when he wrote that stupid message, he has come to see that history is real? Or is he retreating for cover to save his job, his closely-held beliefs tucked into a pocket?

Frank Barbieri, chairman of the school board, issued a statement on Sunday to  reaffirm the district’s commitment to Holocaust education, and saying the situation was being investigated at the highest level of the district.

Mr Barbieri can figure how a man can be in charge of the education of children and hold such unbelievable beliefs. I surely cannot.

Gettin' Saucy Wit It

I've no intention of turning this blog into a cooking column, for crying out loud, but when I know of something good, I pass it along.

And listen, if you're as disappointed as I am with canned (jarred) spaghetti sauce, I have the answer for you. It's fairly cheap, yes a bit more money than a jar of Ragu, but since you get what you pay for in this world, you're better off spending another dollar or two and getting better sauce for your noodles, trust me on that.

This is generally called "the most famous tomato sauce on the internet," and it comes from a book called "Marcella Hazan's Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking." The beauty of it is in the simplicity. The base is tomatoes, of course, and even there, it's up to you to use fresh tomatoes, or canned. I prefer a 28-ounce can of San Marzano tomatoes and it's always good, or you can use 2 pounds of fresh.

For the Sauce

• 2 pounds fresh, ripe tomatoes cut up, or 2 cups canned imported Italian tomatoes, cut up, with their juice
• 5 tablespoons butter
• 1 medium onion, peeled and cut in half
• Salt to taste

Put tomatoes in a saucepan, add the butter, onion, and salt, and cook uncovered at a very slow, but steady simmer for about 45 minutes, or until it is thickened to your liking and the fat floats free from the tomato.

Stir from time to time, mashing up any large pieces of tomato with the back of a wooden spoon.

Taste and correct for salt. 

Hazan recommended removing the onion before tossing the sauce over noodles, but I leave it in.

And that's all there is to it...The slow low simmer works its magic, and you wind up looking like a master chef in just three ingredients, plus salt.

"If opera is entertainment, then falling off a roof is transportation!" - Alfred E. Neuman

I guess it was inevitable. When Donald Trump picked on Pete Buttigieg by saying the mayor looked like Alfred E. Neuman recently, Buttigieg said he had to Google "Alfred E. Neuman" to find out what the aged real estate salesman was talking about.

There is no greater failure than an insult that lands flatter than a McPancake.

Children, trust me on this.  There was a time when every adolescent male had this picture of Alfred on his wall, and we all read the magazine avidly every month like young seminarians poring over a new Dead Sea Scroll. We managed to save a quarter to buy it ("Our Price - 25¢ - CHEAP") and we saved each issue for later reference to Dave Berg's "The Lighter Side of..." cartoons, "Spy vs. Spy," Don Martin cartoons, and the MAD Fold-in.

Now we elect people with Alfred's perspicacity and sagacity to govern us, and the jokes are on us, and that means they aren't as funny.

I picked up a recent edition of MAD in the library not long ago. It was about as funny as a grocery list, and I notice two additions to the pages that weren't there long ago. 

First, there were advertisements. The old MAD would never run advertisements; they were too busy running spoofs of real ads for cigarettes, cars, alcoholic beverages and hair product to take money for advertising the real thing. They would not sell out like that.

Second, there were off-color words, and it's funny; my quotidian lexicon is dotted with profanities (as needed) like jimmies on a sundae, but they seem so out of place in MAD. As my wise old Dad used to say, curse words are for those who don't know the real words. (I always replied, "Damn right, Dad!")

So the word is that MAD will no longer be so on newsstands, so there goes my chance to go to Read's Drugstore with my quarter. It will be sold by subscription only, and with no new material, but, rather, reprints from the vaults.

As the Washington Post points out, correctly as ever, "a journal of subversive humor is funny only if there’s someone up front attempting to maintain order," and there seem to be no adults trying to get the class to come to attention and act right anymore, so what's the use?

MAD used to call their writers and cartoonists "The Usual Gang of Idiots" and there are just too many people answering that description anymore to fit on the masthead of a magazine.

So, goodbye to another fond memory. What's next? What, me worry?

Sunday Rerun: This is not...

There's an old adage, often attributed to either Maya Angelou or Joe Torre, that says, "You did what you did then because that was all you knew."

Joe

If you've had time lately to watch the morning news shows, there has been a veritable cornucopia spilling out of people accusing other people of sexual harassment, sexual improprieties or just downright other forms of disgusting misbehavior.

It involves mainly people from spotlight professions such as show business and news broadcasting and publishing, which is not to say that aberrance does not take place in grocery stores, insurance offices, and muffler shops all across the nation, because it does, to our national shame. I don't know if it's being in a position of power that adds an aphrodisiac quality to putting the mash on some other person, but it just needs to stop!

And the accusations are met with a combination of the following replies:

• "I absolutely swear on all that is good and holy that I did not do this, never thought of doing this, and would not have anyway."
• "I might have done this but I was too (CHOOSE ALL THAT APPLY:) drunk, depressed, drugged up, young, impotent, neurotic to remember it, if it even ever happened." 
• "I am sorry. This is not who I am."

That last one - the "this is not who I am" defense - try that in case you're on trial for bank robbery, DWI, or nepotism.  

"This is not who I am" is another cop-out, a way to say, "Maybe I did this, but my heart wasn't in it." Maybe you don't like the way you acted, but it was you who acted that way, so it's sort of hard to say it wasn't.

I don't want to hear that anymore, but I'm sure I will. If you do bad things, or used to, it's time to atone and take the responsibility for past or current misdeeds. If you're sorry, say so, but don't claim not to be the person who did it! 

I like existentialism, the philosophy that tells us that we are each responsible for our own actions and deeds. We have all sinned, all fallen short of God's expectations that we do good things. Forgiveness is available, but receiving it begins with owning the sin. And then, we can say, "That is who I am. I did wrong and I accept the punishment and vow to improve."

Sorry for getting all philosophical. More bad jokes and jejune political jabs tomorrow, I promise.  That's also who I am.

The Saturday Picture Show, July 6, 2019

I'll be down at the Lodge for the secret meeting. Don't tell anyone we moved it up to Friday night!

Oh, how cool we were with our Walkmen (Walkmans?) The 40th anniversary of the revolutionary Sony musicmaker was this past week. Of course, cassette tapes being a thing of the past, the Walkman is not a big deal at all anymore, but at one time, it sure was a tiny little big deal.

As long as we're looking backwards, here's a guy on an early version of a cell phone, which was actually a two-way radio like police use, patched to the telephone land line so this guy could call his wife, 1958-style.

I see so many complaints about the Amazon guy, but our delivery guy rings the doorbell and then sends a picture of the package he just left to my cell phone. If we asked him to bring it in and open it, he'd probably do that too!

I never cared for soccer that much, but like with basketball, I think the game is much better to watch when it's women playing it. This picture of American star Megan Rapinoe should serve as inspiration to anyone willing to work and train for the success they hope for. The final game is tomorrow!

This doggy dogg is a trash-picker-upper like no other. It's unbelievable that people would despoil a beach by leaving this trash behind, but the dawg goes and gets it!

This would make a good wallpaper or jigsaw puzzle - an old mill in Estonia.

Show up, hustle, repeat every day for 40 years and I promise you, you will be at least this happy!

A Royal Canadian Air Farce

Some years ago, when I worked at a 24-hour operation with different shifts, the 3-11 shift left at 11 when the overnighters came in.  Except for one night, when one of the 3-11 guys was so deeply asleep that he slumbered on through all the noise of the others coming and going, and did not wake up until after midnight, I was told.

Imagine sleeping past quitting time and waking up to a roomful of people snickering at your indolence.

OR, imagine waking up in a seat on airplane all alone, strapped in by your seatbelt, and no one else is around.  And it's cold!

A lady named Tiffani Adams flew from Quebec City to Toronto via Air Canada, and landed at Pearson Int'l Airport recently. A simple 90-minute flight.

Ms Adams deals with anxiety and insomnia, but she was out like a light on this flight, all alone in an entire row of seats (the flight was almost empty). She was in such deep sleep that she didn't even wake up while the plane landed, everyone else got off, and the plane was tucked away in a corner of the airport, far from the terminal.

Of course, as it happens in these stories, her cell was dead, and so she could not call for help, and the plane was totally dark.

In that Stygian (I love to use that word) blackness, she bumped and fumbled her way to the cockpit, and found a flashlight after rooting around awhile. With that, she was able to open the exit door, and, you know, in the movies, she would have jumped to safety.

This ain't no movie. She looked down and found no staircase, and a 40 - 50 foot drop (that's about 15 metres for you loyal Canadian readers!) to the ground below, a drop she wisely chose not to make.

Ms Adams kept flashing her flashlight outside the plane, and eventually a guy driving one of those baggage carts drove over to see what was up.

Air Canada gave her a ride home and have called her twice to apologize and they have opened an investigation into how the entire crew of a jetliner could miss a human being aboard the plane before they put it away for the night and headed for TGICanada.

Ms Adams is still recovering: "I have not got much sleep since the reoccurring night terrors and waking up anxious and afraid I'm alone locked up someplace dark," she says.

Air Canada says they remain in contact with her, and you can assume that lawyers on both sides of this case are hovering like fans outside a Neil Young concert (it is Canada, after all).

Happy 4th

Happy 4th of July!  Enjoy the holiday!

Breaking things up is fun to do

One of the ways you can tell if someone is new to Baltimore is to have them see the name of the Hampden neighborhood in print and see how they pronounce it. If they say it like "Hampton," you can tell they are new.  There is a "Hampton," but it's well north of Hampden (pronounced HAMden). And it does not have a Wreck Room.

You know what a rec room is; there's where the laundry piles up on the ping pong table that no one has used since tube socks were the thing. No, this is the Wreck Room, and it's just the thing for those in need of purgation of the spirit.

It's been one of those days, right?  Traffic was annoying, couldn't find a place to park at work, the boss was being a Richard all day, they got your lunch order wrong and you had to eat falafel or starve, traffic was worse on the way home, and the mail brought a pile of bills so large that the letter carrier had to make two trips.

Emotional catharsis is why The Wreck Room is there for you in Hampden. They call it DESTRUCTOtherapy, right there at 3317 Keswick Road, sharing space with Maggie’s Medical Cannabis Dispensary.

Generally, when you go into a place of business and break something, they ask you to pay for it. Here, you are expected to break stuff (and still pay.)


It's not clear from what I read that they are even open yet, but the one article said they stocked up on  helmets, goggles, visors and similar protective gear, along with a ton of glassware, alarm clocks (of course! who doesn't want to send the alarm clock to Smithereens?) and bustables.

The website I saw was comebreakstuff.com, and it mentioned choices like BYOB (bring your own box) ($25 for 20 minutes of smashing your junk). a Date Night special (30 minutes for a couple to go to town for $70) and the El Supremo package:  a blindfolded “Extreme Piñata” session for $40.

How I would love it if they offered Pizza Shooters, Shrimp Poppers, or Extreme Fajitas with the Extreme Piñata!

This seems to be a worldwide thing, giving people the opportunity to expel the demon of rage and frustration within by smashing the hell out of a Mr Coffee. Whatever works for you, I suppose, although Kevin Bennett, PhD, writing in Psychology Today says, "We should be working towards minimizing aggression and violence in society, not encouraging it even if it is dressed up as a fun afternoon demolishing things normally off limits."

What a buzzkill. Does that make you mad?

'Roid rage

I think it's a riot that Asteroid Day was celebrated on Sunday, June 30, which was my birthday, and the funny thing is that for years, people have been calling me an asteroid.  Sometimes they leave off the "teroid" part, but still.

The United Nations does not fool around, though, and they designated the day to make people aware of the possibility of a huge space rock smashing into an important populated area, or even Cleveland; we do not know.

Actually, they chose June 30, because, as I'm sure you'll remember, it was 6/30/1908 when a big asteroid smashed into Tunguska, Russia and destroyed hundreds of forested acres before the people even had a chance to rake the forest!

The UN wants us to be aware of four (4) gigantic space rocks floating around that could be hurtling earthward at any moment.

Take "1979 XB," for instance. Scientists do not get overly sentimental when naming the 'roids, but this hugger is 900 meters wide, just over half a mile. Pretty impressive, and it's traveling at 44,000 miles per hour IN A 40,000 mph ZONE! Someone has to pull it over and write 1979 XB a ticket, that's all there is to it.

To make XB feel better, scientists have started referring to it as a "minor planet," and how do you think that makes Jupiter feel? Anyone?  XB does have a chance of hitting Earth in the middle of this century. Wave to it in 2024, which is the next time its orbit will bring it close to Earth.

The space guys also fret about an asteroid called Apophis (Greek for B.A. Rock) which is the size of four football fields, but is still 124,274,238 miles away, and it hasn't stopped for lunch yet.

So you can prepare: Apophis will be 18,000 miles away when it darts past us in 2029.  We could at least put out some chips and Fresca, and make it feel at home.

The other two are known as 2010 RF12 and 2000 SG344, but I feel I've upset you enough already.

Just be sure to wear a helmet when you go outside, is all I'm saying.

The way it happens

From all indications, this man named Scott Robertson was a troubled soul. 

His girlfriend's daughter told the Baltimore SUN that he was a “loyal and caring person” but that he had inner struggles, and could become "on edge and agitated."

Those are the words of Angelika Ullsperger.  She and her mom lived with Robertson in Phoenix, northern Baltimore County, until the morning of June 22, when, as Ullsperger puts it, Robertson became disruptive.  Angelika rushed home when her mother called to say Scott had a gun. 

She called 911 to get the police to respond. She now says neither she nor her mother felt their lives were in danger, but they wanted the police to handle the matter.

“We thought they could de-escalate everything,” Ullsperger told the newspaper.

Ullsperger, her mother, and another friend ran for their lives when they saw the police arrive. Officers on the scene walked up to the house and told Robertson to come out of the house.

Instead, he came out a side door with a gun in his hands. The police hollered to him to drop the gun.  Instead, Robertson raised the gun, and was shot.

He then ran into the house and was found later, dead from the bullet wound.

Now comes the part where the second-guessing starts. Ms Ullsperger, the woman who thought that the police "could de-escalate everything," says she and her mother tried to tell the police at the house that Robertson suffered from PTSD and would only become more agitated by having police confront him.

“I tried to tell them, ‘If you come at him with a bunch of people, that would scare him. He’s going to end up dead,’” she told a reporter.

The part I don't understand is that she says she understands that the police had to do something, what with a man pointing a gun at them, but wonders why they shot him.

“I’m just hoping that something good can come out of this terrible injustice,” she says.

I am trying to see both sides of this, but to begin with, it's not like the police invited themselves to this melee. The woman now complaining is the woman who called them to come handle the situation. Unfortunately, the police take a very dim view of people who point guns at them. Why this man even had a gun available to him, in light of his history of violating a protective order against his ex wife and receiving probation and counseling in that case, is a mystery. Even Ms Ullsperger knew of his emotional swings, and when this last one swung too far out of reach for her mother and her to handle, she called the police. 

Perhaps Robertson wished to commit suicide by police; I don't know.

But I do know this: if you have someone with emotional problems in your life, they need to be helped. 

And if you come at the police as Robertson did, they are going to defend themselves. 

It's so easy to call the police to handle your issues and then later blame them for handling things as they will.

Sunday Rerun: Being a baby about it

I know they are doing marvelous things in the field of human procreation these days, just as I know that many marvelous humans do their procreation in a field.  You want to get a room back there?

Again, I know that science has made great strides, but the fact remains that every single person on the face of Earth has, or had, a mother. So did all the married people.

You can't deny it, whoever and wherever you are; you had sets of atoms from two humans who might or might not have even known each other, getting together and getting all fertilized and so forth.

So if it follows that every person walking around today was borne by a pregnant woman, why do some people get so bent out of shape over the shape of a pregnant woman?

Latest example comes to us from sunny Augusta, Georgia, where Laura Warren anchors the news on WRDW-TV.  She's expecting a baby, but she didn't expect a nasty voicemail from some random viewer slamming her appearance. 

"Please go to Target and buy some decent maternity clothes so you don't walk around looking like you got a watermelon strapped under your too tight outfits. Target's got a great line of maternity clothes in case you've never heard of such a thing. You're getting to where you're being disgusting on the TV."

Laura's first reaction was shock and hurt feelings, to be slagged by another female in this way.

"Did she just call a pregnant person disgusting? What kind of...I am only at week 20 of this? Am I going to have to deal with this crap another 20 weeks? Should I have my consultant or my boss call her and tell her tailored, form fitting clothes look way better on air than baggy ones, especially when pregnant? Is that a WOMAN who called me?!? Is she a MOTHER?!?!? The freaking nerve," she writes in a blog post titled "Week 20: Sticks and stones.

I recall the same thing happening to a wonderful meteorologist in Philadelphia when she had the audacity to be pregnant with twins. The criticism and clamor for her to do her forecasts from inside a tent or something like it got so insane that she finally spoke out before going off to deliver two sweet bundles of joy.

Ms Warren says that since she shared this blasting voicemail, she has received plenty of encouraging messages from others in her town.

But it makes one wonder about who would say, "Where's the phone? I feel the need to call that woman on the TV and tell her she no longer pleases my finely-honed aesthetic senses and pass along some fashion advice from a woman who thinks TV anchors shop at Target."

I know, it was a woman who made this critical call, and that's horrible. I'm sure people in the public eye get this sort of deranged commentary from both genders.  

I'm just not sure why.