Sunday Rerun: Chore Boy

 You might know the name Nikkole Paulun from the days when she was a reality star on MTV, as the leading character in some atrocity called "16 and Pregnant."  

I didn't see it; at the time I was "59 and Completely Uninterested."

But now that her days of riding around in fancy limousines and canoodling with Carson Daly or whomever from MTV are over, she finds herself being 22 years of age, with two kids, a girl and a boy, and she wrote a Facebook post about how she gets her son to do household chores, and the sky lit up with indignancy. 
  
Here is her side of it (I happen to agree with her, but I am perplexed about her use of ampersands (&) and then the switch to "and" 1/2 way through her screed):

I teach my son to cook & do household chores. Why? Because household work isn't just for women.
Because one day he might be a single man, living on his own, who will actually know how to do laundry & not eat take out every night.
Because one day he might want to impress a significant other with a meal cooked by his own hands.
Because one day when he has kids & a spouse, he's going to need to do his fair share around the home.
Because I live in a generation of people who complain that school didn't teach us how to cook, do laundry, tie a tie, or pay taxes.
Because teaching my son how to do these things and be a productive member of society both outside the home and inside, starts with ME.
Because it's okay to let your child be a child but still teach them lifelong lessons along the way. My son will never be too "manly" to cook or do chores.
He will be the kind of man who can come inside from changing a tire to check on his pot roast. Who can properly sort his laundry and mow the lawn too. Remember parents, a man who believes he shouldn't have to cook or do chores was once a boy who was never taught any better.

Since she wrote it, she's gotten over 140,000 likes, and 60,000 people have shared it.  It would appear that most of the moms who replied think Nikkole is on the right path here. 

"I teach mine the same thing," said one mom. "He helps with laundry, vacuums, washes windows and does yard work. They'll only be great men if we teach them how! I wish I could love this post!"

I'll interject here to say that I learned a lot about cooking from my mother, who recognized early in my life that I was going to be spending a great deal of time in home kitchens, garnishing, sauteeing, baking, frying, fricasseeing and roasting. I leave julienning to others, and I blanch at the thought of doing my own blanching. At home I also learned some basic needlework and so I can replace buttons handily. Mopping floors, I learned at the firehouse, and as for yard work, my father conducted a master class in transplanting, lawn mowing, mulching, and, of course, leaf raking.  

I never assign a gender to skills like this.  I think everyone ought to know how to do general household skills, and frankly, if I call in someone highly skilled for specialized skills in plumbing, electricity or dermatology, I don't care if the person is male or female.  

Young Mark, harvesting 'taters

Apparently, some people do, and complained to Paulun that changing tires and mowing lawns are traditionally male jobs. Well, I see plenty of women pushing lawn mowers here in Painan Acres, and I've long felt that changing a tire should be part of the driver's license test. So, no. Paulun said to that, "Yes my daughter will know how to do all of those things. She's just too young to teach still. They're raised seeing me do both since I'm a single mother."

And then there was the mother who confused "having a child learn to fend for themselves while helping around the house" with "being held in slavery," who said Nikkole should not have her kids "be your slave. Or to do the chores that you yourself don't want to do." 

Here's a funny thought, the very notion that I would have sat down with my parents and gone over my list of chores and pointed out that they made me haul out the trash cans and cut the grass and trim the hedge and stir the compost heap just because THEY didn't want to.  It would have been the only time in my father's life that he ever said, "Duh!!!!"

The Saturday Picture Show, November 7, 2020

 

This person wore a Rick Astley mask because Rick is never gonna give you up, let you down, run around, desert you, make you cry, say goodbye, tell a lie or hurt you - all laudable characteristics for a presidential candidate who is not a) British and b) an actual candidate.

You can't even see the White House lawn anymore due to safety concerns. Oh for the days when we all laughed.

Caretakers at the Mt Hope Cemetery, in Rochester NY, have had to cover the tombstone of Susan B. Anthony with plastic because of so many people festooning the actual gravestone with I VOTED stickers. Fun Susan B fact: she had no middle name. When she was a child, it became a fad for people to take a middle initial just for the fun of it. This reminds me of U L Washington, the baseball shortstop whose actual first and middle names were U and L. Built-in abbreviations!

I love scenes like this in autumn. 

A Brazilian woodpecker had made his home in a utility pole. Kindly Brazilian utility workers had to replace the pole, but saved his house for him, attaching it to the new pole. I love this a Brazilian times.

I love potatoes, even though they could use a bath before we cook them.

They call these "sliders" because they go down the hatch easily, and frankly, they make a nice meal because they aren't all that filling. Add a salad, maybe a couple of fries, and you're in business. Pass the catsup, please!

Two of my favorite authors. Two of the best dressed men of all time! Gay Talese, (left), the pride of Ocean City, New Jersey and a celebrated alumnus of the University of Alabama is the son of a tailor and always wore the best bespoke suits. Tom Wolfe (right) is credited as the developer of the New Journalism, along with Talese, and his talents extended to fiction, as well as factual reporting on popular culture from car shows to space exploration to architecture.

You smell something funny?

A few years ago, Yankee Candle came out with a line of candles with scents designed to appeal to men. There was the smell of freshly-mown grass, freshly-sawn lumber, a newly inflated football, and something they called "Man Town" (no zipcode given), which blessed us with the aroma of "spices, woods and musk."

I guess this marketing venture turned out to be as popular as a skunk-scented jar candle, because you don't see them around any longer. And for the record, I don't want to live in "Man Town" if there are no females in town.

But never let it be said that other companies aren't willing to try something new, and here comes the Hasbro Corp with something for everyone who didn't forget what their childhood smelled like.

They've come out with Play-Doh for adults! The popular kid's goop, made of sensible household products like water, a starch-based binder, a retrogradation inhibitor, salt, lubricant, surfactant, preservative, hardener, humectant, fragrance, and color (according to their patent filing) is coming out with “Grown Up Scents” like “Overpriced Latte” or “Mom Jeans,” a fragrance vaguely described as that of “clean denim.”

Leena Vadaketh is the general manager of Play-Doh (can you imagine putting that under "occupation" on your tax return?) and she told the Huffington Post "the scents should evoke the pleasures of adulthood, such as the floral ambiance of a 'Spa Day' or that strong smell of suburban success — freshly cut grass, for the 'Lord of the Lawn' in your life."

For those whose olfactory senses want to work overtime, they can try new Play-Doh "Smoked meat" ("for the Grill King") and, heaven forfend, "Dad Sneakers." We can only hope that last one smells like brand-new Chucks, not stanky old Chucks sitting in the garage drying out from the dewy lawn.

Ms Vadaketh adds that these are for anyone who loves a good laugh.

Don't get too worked up about it yet, though: adult Play-Doh is sold out on Amazon right now.

And that makes for Happy Hasbro days. The toy giant says that the 'Rona year is making for big profits for them. They're selling Monopoly games and Play Doh like "no one's ever seen before" because of so many people sitting home with nothing but time and Play-Doh on their hands.

Sad news

 We moved into our house in 1999. It's on a court, or a cul-de-sac if you want to raise the resale price. There is not a whole lot of re-selling, though. Of the 13 houses, 10 are still owned and occupied by originals who moved in when the places were built in 1999 and 2000.

That's going to change, though. A woman who lived at the very top of the hill is gone.

It's funny. We had lived on the same court and talked a million times as she walked her dog, but it wasn't until about ten years ago that a conversation led us to realize that she lived up the road from me when we were teenagers. She was two years younger, and you know, two years in high school might as well be an eternity. So we were teenaged nodding acquaintances, and then we wound up living on the same court.

"C" had a job in the financial sector, and was very successful at it. She stayed home after the Crash of 2008, still active and befriended in the neighborhood, until the last two years when she fell ill with leukemia.

She was a single woman, so being in and out of the hospital meant she needed help with the dog and taking care of things around the home. She got that, all she needed, and she fought the in-and-out of the hospital battle valiantly for all this time.

But we could tell in the past few months that the sand was piling up in the bottom of the hourglass. She didn't have her customary zip, but she still walked the pooch four or five times a day, and exchanged a friendly word every time. I always figured she enjoyed the walks as much as the dog did!

But a couple of weeks ago she knocked on our door, and with the same accepting way she might have used if she were saying that she needed a new water heater, she told us that the doctors had told her that there was no more they could do, and sent her home with hospice to live out her time - three weeks, they said.

And as we talked that night on our porch, I was so struck by her brave forbearance. Not a single note of bemoaning her fate passed from her.  She was going door to door as she could find us all, to say goodbye individually.

The end came this Monday, and her brother and his family were here from St Louis to arrange her journey. Because of the damn Covid, they are asking that only family attend the funeral this weekend, and then I guess they'll put the house up for sale, and another family will make that house their own, and I imagine we will all enjoy knowing them.

If you know me, you know I am the guy who still laughs at silly jokes and pranks. My youthful demeanor is not a front. I am not much older at heart than the skinny kid who rode the bus with "C" to Towsontown Jr High and Towson High. (I did not ride the bus home all that often, being a regular on the detention squad.) But the mature side of me recognizes the dignity and nobility it took to face life and death with strength and not one word of complaint.

The new neighbors will have a magnificent trail to follow.

It Could Be Worse

There is a new commercial for auto/life/home/personal protection insurance that shows a woman being rolled up into a pile of blankets and rolling on down the street, evading death at every turn and piling up more protection as she goes. The theme of the ad, as Bill Withers's yacht rock anthem "Lovely Day" darts across your ears, is that this insurance company will wrap you up in the blanket of their love and indemnification for a low, low monthly price, and what a fool we all are for not picking up the phone right this second to enroll.

Then there is another spot with people driving all around town with Jell-O molds and I don't know what-all else on top of their cars. The lesson there is, don't pile stuff up on top of the Studebaker and expect it to be there when you get to Martha's house, unless you're a very good driver, and if you are such a driver, you should be covered by (this) insurance company.

I don't care how many bags and boxes and pizzas and jackets I have to juggle. I have always made it a point not to use the roof of my vehicle as a staging area for items yet to be stored inside. This started when my junior high Spanish teacher piled a box of school papers on the roof of her aging Biscayne and motored homeward, decorating that stretch of York Rd known to longtime Towsonites as "Sandy Bottom" with tests and dialogues and maps of Spain.

Then came the time that a fairly new Assistant State's Attorney for Baltimore County piled all the files for the next day's docket at one of the District Court atop a car and buzzed away, leaving a snowfall of legal paperwork that probably even yet today is part of the mulch down by the Old Jail on the corner.

I bring all this up to make one point. We all do screwy things. I once got home, found a screw protruding from one of my tires, and foolishly removed it. I don't know what I was thinking, or even if I was thinking. Certainly I knew that even the best of 4-ply radial tires don't form scabs and heal themselves, but instead of driving to a service location, there I stood, looking up the number for AAA.

Things sometimes seem like the end of the world, but Spanish tests can be re-given and court documents can be reproduced and tires can get patched. When it seems like the whole world of gloom and doom is crashing down upon us, that's the time to remember the words of Linda Ellerbee.

Linda Ellerbee became a fine journalist on NBC and on a Nickelodeon news show for kids. In her early years of work, she was a copywriter for the Associated Press, and in those early days of word processing, she was using the work keyboard to write a letter to a friend. The letter contained some rather pithy observations she had made about coworkers. But when she went to hit "print," she hit "send," and so every broadcast outlet and newspaper and anyone else who subscribed to the Associated Press got to read her letter hot off their teletypewriter.

Panic set in, at first, until she came to realize that the worst that could happen was, she might be fired. "They can't kill me," she deduced, and in fact, they did neither of those things.

And someone important saw the letter and liked the way she wrote, and she was hired by a big station in Houston - and soon after that, Linda Ellerbee was on the air in New York at WCBS TV.

SO, what the heck! You mess up, you fess up, and things will work out. Sometimes, for the very much better! 

Why are you here? You should be out voting!

 

Oh Mickey You're So Fine

Many a baseball fan has been enchanted over the years to see a break in the action as suddenly a cat comes running onto the field, eluding outfielders and umpires as it skittles around for a while. No doubt embarrassed by the hoots and hollers of the summer night crowd, soon enough it heads back to whence it came, and the ballgame resumes.

And then people say, how about that? A cat came to the ballgame!

It's more like the fans came to the cat's house (for younger readers, there was a time in America when people attended sporting events in person, believe it or not!). Look at the average ballpark. 81 times a year, a crowd shows up to watch baseball, pop popcorn and hot dogs down their necks and guzzle beer and soda and whatever else.

I hope you don't think that a thorough sweeping and cleaning ensues. Sure, the big stuff is hauled out, but there is enough food left behind to feed a battalion of...get ready...rodents. Mice and rats live in the same place, but not as long as the cats do.  That's the order of things. Ballparks and other large open areas have always had a tacit arrangement with the cat kingdom: they can hang around, but they have to take the background while the athletes are doing their thing.

I mean, think about farms you have visited. Siloes full of corn and grains! That's a buffet dinner for a rodent, and so Farmer Al Falfa (above) needs to get the mice and rats out of there, before they eat his bottom line and half the corn. Why hire a professional exterminator when the original professional exterminator is right there, looking for something to eat. 

And by the way, they don't want the corn.

So please don't let it come as a surprise that DisneyLand out in California has a squad of some 200 felines on the job for this very purpose. They are feral cats by definition, but feral cats are known to shy away from people. They understand they're on the night shift. People who go to the park say it's rare to see Felix strolling down the way, although it's not unheard of.

Disneyland does provide them with food, and veterinary care as needed. And should any cat be seen cozying up to guests one time too often, it loses its job and is placed up for adoption among park employees.

According to the legend, it was The Big Man himself, Walt Disney, who, prior to opening the park in 1955, took a crew to Sleeping Beauty Castle for final preparations, and found a large cat contingent had already made themselves at home. Disney knew it would be a public relations nightmare to hold a mass purge, and was also smart enough to see the rodent problem that lay ahead with all those people and all those food scraps, so the herd was maintained and is still on the job to this day.

It falls upon the crew at the Circle D Ranch, who also husband the horses who pull the big trolley and the goats at the ranch, to manage the cats (as much as cats can be managed, let's be honest!) They try to keep the population spayed and neutered, but Zero Population Growth is not the plan to follow when you're looking for free labor, so there are births, and the other thing.

Disney being an open shop, there is no union for the cats. And by the way, Disneyland in California is forthcoming about their cat squad, while there is no official confirmation that one exists in Disney World in hellish Florida that I can find. But people say they are there, and why not?

There is a certain circle of life to a park founded by a mouse enlisting the help of cats to get rid of mice, though.

Sunday Rerun (from 2016): Chow Down

 Two big bits of news from the world of food, a world where we all dwell, this week...

On the upper end of the food spectrum was the news that America's Next Top President and his chief of staff, a man named Reince Preibus, dined in fine style with Mitt "Mitt" Romney, a man who derogated them both loudly for the past several years.  The hatchet was buried, along with garlic soup, frog legs, and diver scallops for appetizers, prime sirloin for Trump and Priebus, and lamb chops with a mushroom bolognese sauce for Romney's vittles. 

All three had chocolate cake for dessert.

(Does anyone else find it to be a little too cute to say "a" mushroom bolognese sauce?  When you're wiping your chin after wolfing down a Big Mac, do you say you're removing "a" special sauce?)

The deal at the joint where these three swells tied on the feedbag - Jean Georges - is, you choose from a selection of prix fixe (French for "way too expensive") menus. The cheapest way to get out of there is the three-course blue-plate special, ticketed at $138 a person. There are also two six-course tasting menus for $218 a person, and a two-course lunch for $58 each.

And that brings us to the sad passing of Michael "Jim" Delligatti, the inventor of the Big Mac (50 cents then, $3.99 today).  He was running a McDonald's in 1967 and one day, it came to him to pile two all-beef patties, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions and special sauce on one colossal sesame-seed-bunned sandwich.

He only lived to be 98, and to the end, he had a Big Mac at least once per week.

TBH, would you rather have a Big Mac, or garlic soup and frog leg?

I knew it!

The Halloween Saturday Picture Show, October 31, 2020

 

Sad to say, this the most perfect Halloween symbol for 2020. Next year will be better!

This kid lives in a generous neighborhood and came away with a sweet bag of loot! I have never had Kit-Kat, Twix, or Starburst, but I'll fight you for those Snickers!

Never take a dinosaur to lunch. They'll say they're reaching for the check, but then they'll say they couldn't reach that far.

More and more, you see people decorating outside for Halloween. Then they have to rush to get the Thanksgiving decorations up in time for Christmas.

It's Lifesize Work-From-Home Barbie!

What a great mask! Too bad we need to wear them, but isn't it nice that they can be fun!

This is the cover of The Country Gentleman magazine (sister publication to the Saturday Evening Post), painted by Norman Rockwell for the October 22, 1921 edition.

Happy Halloween from all of us grinning jack-o-lanterns to you and yours!

Take two and call me in the morning

If you knew this, you're one up on me: "Aspirin" is a trademark owned by the Bayer company, a German pharmaceutical firm. So technically, they aren't fooling around when they say "All aspirin are not alike," in that only Bayer aspirin is real aspirin.

Now, you are certainly free to go ahead and buy a bottle of 50 Bayer aspirin for around 5 bucks at your big name drug store if buying the name brand makes you feel better! That's the aspirin's job, anyway, making you feel better. Plus, you'll feel richer if you do like I do and go to the Dollar Tree with your fiver. That's where you get 5 bottles of 24 tablets each, a total of 120 little white pain relievers for that 5 dollars.

The kicker is, no matter what you spend on it, aspirin tablets are acetylsalicylic acid, no matter the brand name. And now these little tiny miracle pills, which I use for everyday pain relief, have a use we didn't suspect until a new study at the University of Maryland School of Medicine dug it up.

They found that  COVID-19 patients taking one daily low-dose aspirin (many people pop one a day to protect against cardiovascular disease) are also significantly lowering the chance of death and complications from coronavirus.

For real, while the world chases after expensive cures and palliatives and vaccines, it turns out that an aspirin makes a Coronavirus patient 50% less likely to pass away in the hospital, and much less likely to wind up on a ventilator in the ICU.

Research says that the COVID tends to cause blood clots, and aspirin is excellent for that!

Dr. Jonathan Chow,  Assistant Professor of Anesthesiology at the U of M Med School, says, “When you have a disease like COVID that leads to increased formation of blood clots, and then you have a medication like aspirin which thins your blood and prevents those blood clots from forming, it makes clinical sense that it would work.” 

He studied the records of 400 patients this spring and summer.

But! although this would mean that aspirin would be the first over-the-counter drug to reduce mortality in COVID patients, Dr Chow says don't go running out and starting a self-prescribed aspirin regimen.

“That is not what we are suggesting,” Dr. Chow said. “We advise that patients go to their primary care doctor because they are the ones that are qualified to determine the risks and benefits of this drug.”

Doctors are optimistic, but they still need to do a "randomized control trial" to get final approval.

But as my personal physician, Dr Pepper, said on more than one occasion, "It can't hurt."

Up the creek with a paddle

If we were all thinking ahead when the 'rona first came to our shores, we would have figured that the best way to avoid it would be to go offshore...far offshore.

A Latvian adventurer, Karlis Bardelis, just finished rowing across the seas. It took him 140 days of solo rowing, and now he has advice for anyone coping with lockdowns.

His trip had nothing to do with the coronavirus anyway; he left Peru in July 2018, got to French Polynesia in five months, and wound up in Malaysia this past June.

His adventures at sea included having his boat rammed by sharks off Papua New Guinea, losing an anchor (replaced with an old battery) and several near misses with other watercraft.

Let's start calling near misses "near hits."

At one point, he was asea for five months without seeing another living being that didn't have fins, and I hear some of you already hollering, "Where do I sign up?"

Back in his native Latvia, the 35-year-old Bardelis spent two weeks in quarantine, and then said, "If we can't change the circumstances, we can change our attitudes towards them." 

"A lot of people asked me if I didn't lose my mind or become insane. No, I just enjoy it, because that's what I choose to do," he told the homefolks.

All told, he rowed 16,155 miles.  You can catch up with him on his Bored of Borders Facebook page.

Remember, he had no engine and no sails! He rowed that 23-foot boat for as many as 13 hours a day from South America to Asia.

Reaching two metres at its widest point, the row boat is equipped only with a small cabin for sleeping and storing supplies and equipment.

"I'm 200 percent certain that I made the first solo rowboat trip from South America to Southeast Asia," Bardelis says.

Along the way, he talked to people in Tuvalu, French Polynesia, the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea and Indonesia. His long blond hair and big hairy beard made him quite the object of curiosity among the folks he met, and he reports that everyone was invariably welcoming, which is nice. Indonesians helped him drag his boat ashore to scrape the hull for barnacles and shells.

And, Bardelis says that after all this time alone, he never felt lonely.

"The ocean is full of life: I wasn't alone, but rather together with birds, fish, whales," he said, adding that podcasts and audiobooks, downloaded while at port, also helped.

He wasn't doing this for the first time, either. Four years ago, he and a buddy rowed the Atlantic from Namibia (known by the current US president as "Nambia") to Brazil.

And why row, when other ways would be easier?

"It would be easy to pull up a sail, but I love rowing, and using sails would feel like cheating, even if only to myself," he said.

You have to figure he won't need to work out until the year 2046, after all that!

Don Q very much

Peggy and I are friends with a woman who said some wise things in her day. One of them, and I'll paraphrase, was that "if there is more of you than there is bathing suit, go up a size."  This was in reference to those who had a lot spilling over the dam, as it were.

And another time she said words that I have quoted a thousand times, and I will do so verbatim here:

"Some people, if they don't have enough drama in their lives, go out and make more drama for themselves"

The latest case involves this fellow up in Harford County, one Daniel Swain, from Fallston. He was arrested after refusing to wear a mask to vote at the Jarrettsville Volunteer Fire Company the other day. 

It was the first day of early voting, and the place was packed, as all the early voting locations have been. Swain, 53, showed up to vote with his 22-year-old son, and would not cover his face as required by the governor's mandate for all people over the age of 5 to wear a face covering indoors in public places.

Deputies were sent to the Jarrettsville fire house at 2:46 p.m. on Monday after election officials reported two people were refusing to cover their mugs. 

Recognizing that some people would throw up objections to wearing a mask to protect others while voting, the state put alternate plans in place. So, officials gave Swain, who retired this year as a captain at the Baltimore County Detention Center, a chance to step outside to an outdoor booth to vote.

By this time, three officers had been taken away from important patrol duties to deal with this insanity. There is no record of Swain being either an attorney or a law enforcement officer, but nevertheless, he persisted. He told three officers that the request that he follow the governor's lawful order was “unconstitutional," claiming that Maryland law allowed people to vote indoors without face masks, according to the police report.

The debate raged for another half an hour, with Swain refusing exhortations from the police and the election officials to don a mask. At length, the two men were asked to leave the firehouse. Swain’s son complied. Swain did not. 

He was charged with trespassing on private property and failure to comply with a health emergency, per court records.

"Deputies worked to resolve the situation for nearly 30 minutes. At that time, one man complied and left the premises," the Harford County Sheriff's Office said in a statement. "However, Mr. Swain made the choice to continue to refuse to comply directives given by the Election Judge. When it was clear there were no other options, Mr. Swain was placed under arrest."

Released on his own recognizance, Swain faces trial on December 4 in Harford County District Court.

The Sheriff's Office added, "It is worth noting, Mr. Swain was not banned from the location, and is still able to cast his ballot." 

"Since the coronavirus pandemic began, Sheriff Jeffrey Gahler has been very clear that deputies would handle reported mask violations through education and would not be making arrests or issuing criminal citations solely for refusing to follow the Governors' order on wearing masks," the sheriff's office reported. "However; if a private property owner, store manager, or in this case, Election Official needed assistance in having a person vacate a premise, we would enforce a trespassing violation. That is exactly what occurred in the following incident. While the polls are open to the public, they are subject to compliance with the rules and regulations set forth by the Board of Elections and the Governor of Maryland."

I don't know this man, although we both get our pension checks from the same munificent source. But I do know that my sixth-favorite Don (after Cheadle, Geronimo, Knotts, Stark, and Everly) is Quixote, who said, “Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them.”

And his buddy Sancho replied, "Take care, sir," cried Sancho. "Those over there are not giants but windmills."

The lesson is clear. Pick a fight that's worth fighting and don't go chasing windmills. Or waterfalls. Just do the right thing and get along.

Planting an idea

There's a town called Sisters in Oregon, and the people out there are lucky enough to have a newspaper called the Nugget, and therein I found a nugget I wanted to share! I thought it might plant a seed.

A woman named Katie Diez lost her father, and she waited ten years to unbox his belongings that had been stored away. She thought it would be cool to take his old shirts and make a quilt, and so she did, and then...

She was going through the shirts, cutting them up, and found a tomato seed stuck to one of them. Without even thinking about it, she flicked the seed away and continued to work, but soon came to wish she hadn't been so hasty, because an idea was sprouting.

She continued working with the aged fabric and came across another seed, a sign from above if there ever was one. She jumped at the second chance. In her journal, she wrote:

"I find that I feel guilty when I don't use every scrap of fabric. Almost as if I'm wasting the animal I just shot," she wrote. "Planning the cuts feels like I'm field-dressing a deer, which is ironic - Dad was a hunter. I found another tomato seed. I had discarded the first one and regretted not trying to sprout it. I feel like I won the lottery finding ONE MORE seed! I'm soaking it and will try to plant it."

As it happened, her father was not only a hunter, but a gardener, as well as an avid consumer of tomatoes. The seed found purchase in soil.

"I've been nurturing it for the past two months and it's now four feet tall and growing tomatoes," she said. "And it was in a box stuck to a shirt for 10 years."

Through the fall and winter, she kept that sprout sprouting and had her family help her keep a Gro-Lite beamed on the plant.

And the tomatoes came along and the quilt will be here forever, and who knows how many more fertile seeds the fruits of it will bear?

Who knows what other surprises nature has for us, if we just open our eyes and hearts?

Patience Pays

Jesse Katayama is from Osaka, Japan. At 26, he set a goal of going to Machu Picchu, the 15th-Century Incan settlement in Peru.

Jesse is a savvy traveler. He made his plans and booked his reservations and tickets.

Good plans, bad luck. He arrived in Aguas Calientes, Peru, on March 14 of this year.  That was when Peru shut down due to COVID-19.

Stranded in his room, Jesse, with the versatility and flexibility that a lot of young people have, made his way by teaching boxing to local kids, enjoying yoga classes, and studying for his exams awaiting him back home.

There were still things to do in Peru. Katayama took in sights like the Putucusi Mountain and the Calientes Waterfalls.  

But every morning, he went out for a run and he could see Machu Picchu looming in the distance. He told CNN, “I thought I would never make it to Machu Picchu as I was expecting it [wouldn’t] open within this year.”

But here's a case of patience paying off. Sure, he had to hang around for seven months, but eventually the Peruvian government allowed Jesse to have the Machu Picchu experience! And he had it all to himself, just about.

Alejandro Neyra, Peru's minister of culture, said it was decided that Jesse should get to see what he came to see, and so, his patience was rewarded. 

“He had come to Peru with the dream of being able to enter [the park],” Neyra said, as quoted by the Times. “The Japanese citizen has entered together with our head of the park so that he can do this before returning to his country.”

Of course, Katayama shared his happiness with the world in Instagram, posed with a park representative.

“After the lockdown, the first man to visit Machu Picchu is meeeeeee,” was his caption.

Machu Picchu, way up high at 8,000 feet in the Andes Mountains, above the Urubamba River valley, normally draws as many as 2,240 visitors per day, all drawn to see the 15th-Century terraces, temples and fountains there.

“I thought I [would] never make it [to Machu Picchu] but everyone asked the government and the town and they [gave] me super special permission,” Katayama added on Instagram post.

Super special! Even better than double secret!

He added, “Peruvians are soooo kind. Thank you soooo much!”

Sunday Rerun: Sweets for the sweet

 If it's October, it's time to get the candy for the kids who may or may not show up at your door for Halloween!

It's a shame that we can't bake cookies or brownies or make homemade treats of any sort for the kids, but tampering incidents in the past have made people too wary of anything unless it's manufactured and sealed in a factory far away. A real shame, it is.

So you give out candy or you sit inside watching "Law and Order: SVU" in the dark, hoping that no one will knock on the door. If you choose to go the candy route, again, there are two choices:

• Get the candy you like, the good stuff, that kids will like. This way, if you have leftovers, you have candy all winter, so when you come in from shoveling the driveway, you can grab a Snickers and munch away.
• Get the candy you don't like, so that when you have leftovers, you can take it to work and leave it on the desk in the reception area. The bonus here is that you get to see that person from Accounting - the one suspected of pilfering lunches in the break room - gobbling an Everlasting Gobstopper outside his cubicle.

I like to find and share this list every year about this time. CandyStore.com, a bulk candy delivering service, runs data from all the states and figures out the three most popular Halloween candies in each. They get the figures from candy manufacturers and distributors. 

Once again here in Maryland, the #1 candy is Milky Way. You'll find Reese's Cups in second place, and Hershey Kisses in third. Those first two spots are the same as last year, but in 2017, Blow Pops came in third.

I mean, really. Who wouldn't rather have a Hershey Kiss?

For the record, our favorite, Milky Ways, aren't even in the top 10 nationally.  They roll out this way:

Skittles
M&M's
Snickers
Reese's Cups
Starburst
Candy Corn
Hot Tamales
Hershey's
Tootsie Pops
Jolly Ranchers

And once again, the horrible candy corn ("neither candy, nor corn" - Lewis Black) sneaks into the top 10. I cannot explain some things.

The Saturday Picture Show, October 24, 2020

 

I'd like to see what the Smucker Brothers could do with this - great looking Rainbow Grapes for tasty jams and jellies!

The guy who shared this said it was his view as he walked down the lane to get his mail, and he allowed as how many others might be jealous of where he gets to live! Heck, I'm jealous that he gets his mail in the daytime! Most days, ours comes later than the 6:30 News!

There's no crying in baseball, and none at all at Halloween if you and the kids dress like the cast of "A League Of Their Own."

The great thing about Nicolas Cage is how natural he is. Like in this picture. You can't really tell if he is scratching his foot as part of a movie role or if he is scratching his foot in real life! The great ones, and their toupees, make it look easy.

If you worked at the A&P or some other grocery store back in the day when each can of peas, each package of Fig Newtons, and every bottle of ReaLemon had its price stamped on it in purple ink, then you recognize the tool of my trade: the official Garvey Repeating Price Stamper. It made a satisfying ker-CHUNK sound as it did its job, as did I.

This week's free wallpaper is from dusk on a fall day!

If you wonder why pumpkin-pickin' looks like from the sky, wonder no more. This is Wyoming.

Everything here screams 70s - the hairdids, the Wrangler corduroy bellbottoms, the Nerf ball....

Let's go mooning

I'm sure I've told you this story before, but when did that ever stop me from being redundant and saying the same thing over and over?

There was a time when my sister called me, cell phone to cell phone, from Paris, which is a leading city in France, land of fromage et vin. The connection from Europe all the way over to here in Carney, land of crabs and beer, was as clear as the proverbial bell. The only way I could have heard her more clearly would have been had she in the car with me.

Then I had to call Peggy at her office in Timonium, land of state fairs and horse racing, and I could hardly hear her on the cell. I'm going "Hello? Hello? Hoy hoy!" and she's hearing nothing.

Now it turns out, we should have made the phone call from the moon, for, you see, NASA is putting a 4G network on the moon.

By 2028, NASA wants to build a base on the moon and set up a "human presence" up there (I have prepared a list of people I would suggest as the first inhabitatants of Lunatic Acres) by the year 2028.

And here it is, 2020 already.

While you're back here on earth fretting about how much Chris Davis is being paid, NASA has shelled out 370 million US dollars to companies developing technology on the moon. They'll need to work on generating electric power (since no currently-available extension cord will reach that far), cryogenic freezing (don't ask why), robotics, safe landing procedures, and a 4G system so that moon dwellers can order green cheese pizzas for dinner and phone home.

Anticipating a large crowd of hungry travelers, NASA has installed the first
Weber grill on the moon.

I don't know how many Gs are in place on the moon right now, but NASA says 4G will give them better long-distance service on the moon, plus TikTok, which will soon be abolished here because they made fun of the ruler. And don't worry, the plan is to give them 5 Gs as soon as possible.

Remember the old Nokia flip phone you loved so much, how it fit so nicely with your acid-washed jeans and Crocs? How about this? Nokia's Bell Labs got $14.1 million to make this happen. They'll be working with a company called Intuitive Machines.

I knew they were in on it. I just had a feeling.

Bell Labs says that lunar explorers will use wireless technology for sending data and grocery lists back home, controlling lunar robot cars, a sort of Google Maps system for the moon, and streaming video.

The good news is that no one will have to build enormous cell towers on the moon. The trade off is that Bell Labs came up with small cell tech instead...it's limited in range, but it's easier to set up.

And getting a building permit to erect cell towers on the moon would be an arduous task. We have no idea how local governments are set up out there, but they probably use different application forms for all this stuff.

Cruising for many bruisings

I see on CNBC that General Motors, best known for building a Chevy Traverse that had the annoying habit of shutting down in traffic while being driven by a friend of ours, is branching out beyond the old unreliable gasoline engines and looking to get into the business of making selling unmanned autonomous vehicles by the end of this year in San Francisco.

Remember, "unmanned" means no one is driving, and autonomous means "no one is driving." 

They call it the Cruise because owning one will cause you to jump up and down on Oprah's sofa.

The Cruise people say they have received permission from the California Department of Motor Vehicles to do away with the human backup drivers from its self-driving cars.

Remember, "human backup drivers" means "the only person controlling the vehicle's acceleration and braking except for some robot who never took driver's ed."

“Before the end of the year, we’ll be sending cars out onto the streets of SF (San Francisco) — without gasoline and without anyone at the wheel,” Cruise CEO Dan Ammann says. “Because safely removing the driver is the true benchmark of a self-driving car, and because burning fossil fuels is no way to build the future of transportation.”

This will make Cruise cars the first privately operated fleet on the road without drivers, which CNBC says is the goal of the company.

They had hoped to get these autocars on the road for testing by 2019, but said they needed "further testing."

If you're the kind of person who would allow a blindfolded person to shoot a gun in your direction, if you would let someone who knows nothing a brain surgeon trepan your noggin, and if you would walk a tightrope that looks a little frayed across Niagara Falls, please report to the nearest Cruise dealer the minute they open.

They have a deal just right for you!

...there's a way

One of my favorite standup comedians was Alan King, who used to appear agitated at all times about everything, f'rinstance:

• "The supermarket sign said Ample Parking. That means there's only one spot left on the lot, and it's reserved for the manager, Irving Ample."
• "There was a kid sleeping in the grocery cart. My kids knew him. He always sleeps in shopping carts. The other kids call him 'Waffle Face'."
• "You only live once, except for Shirley MacLaine."
• "My brother-in-law is a lawyer. He says to me, 'Alan, don't you understand, if you die without a will, you could die intestate.' I looked up the word intestate. It means 'without a will'." 
  


What brings all this up? The news came last week that Chadwick Boseman, the great actor from “Black Panther” and “42,” died without a will. Now his widow, Taylor Simone Ledward, has filed documents in probate court, which is what our survivors have to do in such cases.

He died of cancer two months ago, leaving an estate of around $938,000 for his wife and his parents to settle. I saw friends of my parents go through this mess when one passed on and the other was left to deal with the Registrar of Wills, the MVA, this and that lawyer. It's a mess and it's easily avoided...just by filing a will.

Prince died without a will, which led to any number of lawsuits and actions being filed. Jimi Hendrix left no will either, but these two musicians were not being treated for a deadly disease, as Boseman was for the past four years. 

Aretha Franklin is said to have left three different wills, with some of them outdated, or with illegible handwriting, written out on legal pads. Stan Lee, who created the Marvel Universe that Boseman acted in, left what is called a "messy legal plan" which will take years to untangle, you may be sure.

But the surprise is that these celebrities are not alone! In this crazy year we call "2020," only about a third of us have wills on file. That is way down from 2017, when about half of us did. Surveys are finding that older and middle-aged "adults" are less likely to have their final wishes spelled out. Reasons given include

• "I haven't gotten around to it"
• "I don't have enough to leave anyway"
• "It costs too much"
• "I don't know how to do it"

Here's free legal advice from me, a non-lawyer. Go get a will. Even if you don't have a ton of loot, you have vehicle(s), personal possessions, semi-valuable tools in the shed, all sorts of stuff. Spare your family the mishigas of dealing with people who have a whole carousel of rubber stamps on their counter in the courthouse.

And if saving your loved ones all that hassle doesn't persuade you to do it, just the thought of seeing the cousin you can't stand, driving away in your car, ought to.

You deny Dino Flintstone?

Is it the heat in Arizona that makes people do goofy things? The latest is, some people are trying to make a McDonald's get rid of a fiberglass dinosaur statue because.....you won't believe why.

Well, there is a group called Christians Against Dinosaurs. 'Twas they who denounced a fun statue of T.Rex. On their Facebook page they rallied their followers to bunch up and do something about getting rid of that statue because

a) dinosaurs were known to be racist

b) dinosaurs often drove drunk past kindergartens while tossing fireworks out of their car window and firing revolvers

c) dinosaurs never picked up a dinner check after a night out with friends, claiming that their short little arms couldn't reach any further

d) 23,000 people think they never existed.

At least, that's how many people have "liked" the Facebook page Christians Against Dinosaurs, which states that its purpose is to let us all see the "truth" about the "dinosaur lie." They say that dinosaurs never roamed the earth, but were a scam that scientists cooked up in order to "thwart religion."

[Take ten seconds right now and say the word "thwart" three times slowly. Like the word "ointment," it gets sillier every time you say it.]

Their cry for help was printed in the Arizona Daily Star. "Please help! This McDonald's has this dinosaur and refuse (sic) to remove it! This is in Tucson, Arizona. Call the manager and demand the removal of this blasphemy!"

And then they give the name of the local franchisee so their nuts  adherents could hassle whoever answered the phone there.

Meanwhile, this T. Rex has been hanging around the McD's on Grant Road and Tanque Verde Road since 1994, bothering no one, amusing millions.

Some people think these people are just kidding, but then again, some think that of the Flat Earth believers, and where did that get us? The guy who spoke to the Daily Star said this ain't no joke, no sir:

"Yes, the dinosaur should go unless they're willing to compromise with a plaque of some kind stating that it's a fictional character," Josh Brown told the outlet.

Not this T Rex!

The Patch news site contacted CAD and were told that it's not a joke to deny T. Rex. "We're fed up with everybody acting like the people of Tucson are imbeciles and we want to help," a spokesperson for the dino-deniers told the Patch. "Having a big dinosaur outside a cultural hub like McDonald's makes Tucsonians look like they're mentally deficient and that isn't right."

The group also told Patch that they are not science deniers; they merely deny the science of dinosaurs.

The group also took issue with claims that its page is satirical, saying that they are not science-deniers. They just don't believe in dinosaurs. "We simply recognize that dinosaurs are not supported by anything scientific," the group wrote. "They're a parlor game that got out of hand."

No. Uno is a parlor game that got out of hand. Paleontology is for real.

It is funny, though, that the members of this group keep driving past McD's to fret about the T. Rex, forgetting that without the real T. Rex and other dinosaurs, there would be no oil to power their Buicks.