Sunday Rerun: This Will Bug You

 The Top 20 Countdown is in, and my town is #15 with a bullet! Or a stinger.

The list we speak of is the list of the most mosquito-ridden towns in America, to wit:

1. Atlanta
2. New York 
3. Washington, D.C. 
4. Chicago 
5. Houston
6. Dallas-Ft. Worth, Texas 
7. Detroit 
8. Philadelphia 
9. Charlotte, N.C.
10. Raleigh-Durham, N.C.
11. Phoenix 
12. Los Angeles 
13. Boston 
14. Miami 
15. Baltimore 
16. Richmond, Va.
17. Nashville 
18. Tampa 
19. Indianapolis 
20. St. Louis 

Actual Jersey Mosquito

By listing Philadelphia at #8, the good people at Orkin, who produced this list to remind you to use their services, must be including the South New Jersey area as well, because, as fierce as Baltimore 'skeeters are, the ones in New Jersey are the only ones I have ever seen with their own hangars.

Now and then, someone will say, "What a wonderful world it would be if there were no mosquitoes!"  Come on now, George Bailey, there is room for all of God's critters here on earth.  But mosquito larvae are very important for the ecology of aquatic life, because others bugs and little fish eat them, and then become food for bigger feeders.

So, then. Mosquitoes are here to stay, and there are ways to at least keep them away from your place.

1. Dump out any standing water near your home. Mosquitoes will date, mate, and reproduce in 14 days (faster than Harry and Meghan!) if there is still water in any old container around the yard. So if you have a pond, have a waterfall or fountain put in to keep the water moving around.

2. Keep them outside. Use screens on the windows.

3. Use a mosquito repellent. You pick the brand, but make sure to slather it on your ankles, feet, lower legs and wrists. That's where your skin is thinnest, making you easy pickin's.

4. Wear light-colored clothing outdoors. Colors such as black, navy blue and red stand out to a bug, according to bug eye doctors (as opposed to bugeyed doctors). Also, wear clothing outdoors. You know why.

5. Stay indoors at dusk and dawn. That's when the little anklebiters are hungry for breakfast or dinner. You're safe at lunch; that's when they all go to the buffet.

6. Make yourself less of a target. Don't drink beer or fail to shower - they love the odor you put out when you're belting back the Buds and haven't used your Irish Spring yet. BUT slather on a little Victoria’s Secret Bombshell perfume or Avon’s Skin So Soft Bath Oil, and the bugs will leave you alone for someone who had one beer and zero showers. — a popular mom’s remedy.




Feel free to print this out, and mount it on stiff cardboard, which you can use to swat mosquitoes.

The Saturday Picture Show, May 22, 2021

 

Oh, I'm sure there are other ways...

As a fan of ventriloquism, I am fortunate enough to have been the right age to see Shari Lewis and Lamb Chop in her first show ("The Shari Lewis Show," NBC, 1960 - 1963) and her second ("Lamb Chop's Play-Along," PBS, 1992 - 1997). It's good to see the old wool puppet still get some play time! 

No humans will be injured by Bucket Hat Boy here, but dozens will be fooled!

"Hey Mom! What's for dinner?"

An abandoned house in midtown Detroit. Think of what this used to be, how many happy memories were made there, and how many more could be made after someone puts some rehab money into it!

If this is not called "Monster Rock," someone is missing out on a sure tourist opportunity!

Great idea - a view with a room! 

The competition ends right here. You can't find better camouflage than this, from the Turkish Army. We wanted to give the designer a prize, but we couldn't find him.

The city government of Paris, France, thought they were doing a good thing to buy a fleet of electric cars for their officials to scoot down the Champs-Élysées on their way to La Tour Eiffel and the colorful Sous-vêtement. But, you know what they say about good intentions. Replacement batteries are currently prohibitively expensive, and the city had already passed environmental laws making it illegal to dispose of used electric car batteries. So here sit these defunct vehicles in a giant cimetière automatique. C'est dommage.

This has the look of an old painting, but it's a new (2019) painting of old books. It is entitled "Old Books," and it was done by Elena Nikolaeva. I love the texture and even the musty smell of old books!

Workin' 9 to 5

We turn now to a topic that I have avoided like poison.

Overwork.

Don't you love how a group of experts will do a long detailed study to come up with a totally obvious conclusion? 

• Gargling with gasoline can be dangerous!
• People who drive while drunk tend to be involved in car accidents!
• Ham and cheese together on a kaiser roll makes a tasty sandwich!
• Working long hours poses an occupational health risk that kills hundreds of thousands of people each year, according to the World Health Organization!

You really didn't have to do much to convince me, but the WHO says "People working 55 or more hours each week face an estimated 35% higher risk of a stroke and a 17% higher risk of dying from heart disease, compared to people following the widely accepted standard of working 35 to 40 hours in a week."

This came out in a WHO study published this week in the journal Environment International.

"No job is worth the risk of stroke or heart disease," WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. He wants governments, businesses and workers to find ways to protect workers' health.

The study dates back to 2016, when 488 million people suffered the hazard of working long hours. And more than 745,000 people of them died that year from overwork that resulted in stroke and heart disease.

Of course, the statistics don't even touch this past year, when COVID-19 threw a giant wrench into the works all over the world. But one trend that developed, and seems likely to stay around, is telework, and all indications are that people whose home becomes their office or workplace tend to put in more hours on their tasks, because the home/work borders melt away.

"Teleworking has become the norm in many industries, often blurring the boundaries between home and work," Ghebreyesus said. "In addition, many businesses have been forced to scale back or shut down operations to save money, and people who are still on the payroll end up working longer hours."

One of the saddest things I have ever heard is when people packing for vacation also pack up their office laptop, and plan to keep up with office emails, and the vicissitudes of the O'Callahan account, and that Brown & Serve merger on the west coast. It seems to me that it's insecurity, more than ambition, that drives this "gotta work 24-7" mentality. People worry that that new man or woman is angling to take their job away.

If you're good at your job, do it and go home. There is a life out there for you. People who stick around the office til 9 PM (and you know who they are; they always say something like "I heard a noise from your office last night about 8:30. I hope everything was ok, but you weren't there...") are just saying they aren't capable of getting their job done on time.

And I'll be even more blunt. If you disappear tomorrow, sure, the gang will miss you. They'll send flowers, they'll clean out your desk, they'll mention your name for a week, tops. Then someone else will slide right on in there, and life will go on, trust me.

As Casey Stengel said, "The parks are full of statues of people whom everyone used to think were indispensable." 

Son of a Bee

In some places, the very sight of a bee causes panic, screaming, running away from them, and even the introduction of a can of insect killer into the situation.

And while it is true that I once had an unfortunate (for both of us) encounter with a bee who happened to be on my lawn one morning when I stepped out barefoot to retrieve the newspaper, I don't fear bees; I respect them and I enjoy their contributions to our wellbeing.

In the South American nation of Colombia, the world's second-most biodiverse country, there are at least 550 varieties of bees. That's the count from the environment ministry, and even they say there might be as many as 1,445 bee species down there.

So it's not surprising that bees in Colombia get pampered like nowhere else. As a matter of fact, in the town of Barbosa, the Aburra Valley Metropolitan Authority is building tiny hotels to give unswarmed solitary bees a place to rest up and charge up after a busy day spent pollinating.

These little teeny Holiday Inns are wooden hexagonal constructions, and have plastic roofs to keep sleepy bees dry in the rain. Inside under the roof, a bee will find bamboo canes to allow for a night of undisturbed sleep.

"It's like a hotel because here they're going to have a quiet moment in their room  before setting off again," said Hector Ivan Valencia, an assistant for the local authority's risk management unit. There's no mention of air conditioning or cable tv.

After checkout time, Valencia and his colleagues take small paint brushes and clean out the "hotel rooms."

"If this were a regular hotel, I'd be one of the people cleaning the rooms," Valencia said.

(Hector, better make sure that everyone has checked out before you start sweeping!)

Bees play a vital part in agriculture, of course. They fertilize plants, and for all their trouble, they are threatened by what humans do. Pesticides, fertilizers, and climate change are challenges to bee survival.

The authorities in the Aburra Valley are doing what they can to help the bees, and their ten municipalities (including Barbosa and Colombia's second city, Medellin) are putting up the hotels to help the buzzers.

"Globally (bees) are being negatively impacted and they are losing more spaces every day," says Juan David Palacio, director of the metropolitan area's environmental and transportation authority, by way of explaining why they want to help.

Valencia points out that most people are aware that honey bees are in danger, but the solitary, pollinating, bees, need some love too. 

"These little bees are supremely sensitive to poisons and since they don't produce honey no one speaks up for them, so we're coming to the rescue," he said.

It doesn't take much to help the world be better. Be Best, as they say!

The Champ of all Half-wits

You can say what you want about Rick Schroder - a one-time fairly well-known actor who was in the remake of "The Champ" as a little kid, wound up on "Silver Spoons" and "NYPD Blue," and was last seen playing Dolly Parton's father in two TV movies about Dolly's childhood - but you can't claim that he is still famous. Most people wouldn't know who in the hall he is.

At 51, Schroder has become one of "those people" who decide to lambast people who work at stores and restaurants over things those harried employees do not control. Over the weekend, he was able to find time in his busy schedule of not being an actor any more to make a trip to Costco in Los Angeles.

Now, the California law still requires people who work and shop there to wear masks, so even though the CDC said last week that it’s safe for fully vaccinated people to skip face-coverings inside, that law still supersedes what the CDC says. If you watch the video, you will see an extraordinarily patient front-end manager named Jason explaining to the washed-up thespian why he needs to cover the face that no one recognizes anymore anyway.

That's not good enough for this Schroder, who was last in the headlines for ponying up $150,000 to bail out Kyle Rittenhouse, the irritating child from Illinois who got his mommy to drive him to Wisconsin so he could shoot protesters. 

When his complaints about how the government has ruined his life fall on deaf ears, Schroder demands a refund on his membership dues, which gives him maybe $50 to work with when he goes to stock up on Alka-Seltzer, peanut butter, and books that will be turned into movies that won't have Rick Schroder in the cast.

He then urges all of California to renounce their Costco memberships, as people continue to mill past him to shop, grateful to be freed of the sound of his voice.

Rick, left, and the poor man who had to endure his stupidity on the right.

I urge everyone to take a look around at themselves - "take stock," as my parents used to exhort me to do. If you find that you are the sort of person who takes time to argue with people who are manning the front door at a warehouse store, if you're the guy who demands free stuff and extra service and imported soy milk instead of half-and-half, if you're "that guy" who won't let a cashier scan your food so that laser beams don't befoul your yogurt, if you pull up at Jittery Joe's Java Hut and ask for a "hot iced coffee," maybe it's time to change before you become a tool the size of Rick Schroder.

A buoy named Suez

You remember Driver's Ed, right? Poor Mr Adkins, at Towson High, had the uncool job of sitting in the passenger seat of a BA Chevy Biscayne while young drivers careered through the streets of Towson and surrounding communities. Driver's Ed wasn't mandatory then, but if you passed it, you saved on insurance, so, yeah. Nerves of steel, that man had. Oh, and he had a brake pedal on his side of the car, but no steering wheel.

You also will recall earlier this year when the Ever Given cargo ship got wedged in the Suez Canal waterway in Egypt. The BA ship was turned sideways by high winds and a sandstorm, and anyone who remembers trying to parallel park that Biscayne between two stanchions surely remembers the feeling of being wedged in.

There is a sort of Driver's Ed program in Port Revel, France, and the hope is that cargo captains can learn to avoid the fate of the Edmund Fitzgerald Ever Given by taking the course, which uses replica boats in the middle of a French forest and is supposed to teach those captains and pilots how to navigate the Canal.

It's a scale model -  one twenty-fifth the size of a passage in the real Suez.  The philosophy is, if you can learn to get a ship through in this tiny likeness, you'll have no problem with the real thing.

"It's a bit hard to recreate sandstorms," said  Francois Mayor, the managing director of the Port Revel training facility. "But we have gusts of wind which will push our ship to one side or another."

Instructors know what to expect on the real waterway, so they create fake steering problems and engine outages to see how trainees handle themselves.

"You have little space to maneuver. You have to be particularly focused," said Mayor.

And just to keep it really real, they also have a mini-San Francisco Bay, and an ersatz Port Arthur, Texas, to teach docking and maneuvering cruise ships and tankers through those crowded ports. Turbines beneath the surface create currents and waves.

Mayor expects to see lots of trainees soon, as shipping firms try to avoid another massive snafu like the Ever Given incident, which blocked a vital shipping canal for six days and cut global trade off.

"After each accident... we see new clients coming," said Mayor. "The cost of training at Port Revel is nothing like the cost of having a vessel like that stuck for a day."

Attention, Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration! This could be a great idea for some of our less-than-adroit motorists. Send them to France!

Not for training. Just send them to France.

Subterranean Homesick Blues

We've been talking about it since 2004, and here they are again - the once-every-17 year hatch of periodic cicadas is busting out of their long subterranean dormancy all across the eastern United States. And they are gonna be LOUD. And ugly.

In years past (2004, 1987 and 1970, in my memory) they were here by early May, but just like you and me, they didn't want to get out of bed while we enjoyed a chilly early May this year. The cicada nymphs that have been getting their nutrition from tree roots all the years are coming out of the ground, shedding their exoskeletons, and looking for mates. 

First, they ought to stop off at the dry cleaners and pick up their good outfits, and maybe get some decent shoes to go a-courtin'!

Dr. Jessica Ware, an associate curator of invertebrate zoology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, has been looking forward to this month since May, 2004, a month memorable for Massachusetts becoming the first U.S. state to legalize same-sex marriage, the Arizona Diamondbacks' Randy Johnson throwing a perfect game (2-0 vs Atlanta), the final episodes of "Friends" and "Frazier" airing on TV, the entire town of Hallam, Nebraska, being wiped out by a powerful 2.5 mile wide F4 tornado, with but one fatality, and a horse with the cool name of "Smarty Jones" winning the Kentucky Derby. 

"May is going to be a loud month, for sure, for cicadas," said Ware, a bit too happily, if you ask me. "It's kind of exciting to think about Brood X emerging because the last time these individuals were above ground was in 2004.  And so when you think about it - a lot's happened in the last 17 years," said Ware.

In much the same way that 17-year-old American males seek to attract mates by playing Luke Bryan too loudly, showing off giant belt buckles and turned-around ball caps, and hollering, "Duuuuuuuude! Watch this!," 17-year-old male cicadas emit a mating chirp by vibrating a plate called a tymbal located on their abdomens.

If American teenaged males had a tymbal, so would they.

"It's this kind of dance; males are showing that they can call as loud and as long as possible, which means they're probably a good mate. Females are listening. Are they calling loud? Are they calling long?... it's kind of a complicated acoustic dance that they're doing," Ware says. 

It must be similar to dancing the "Renegade" on TikTok, but cicadas are not online.

Ware wants us to remember that cicadas are harmless, and they become part of the food chain, supplying snackage for food for birds, animals and other insects.

This all takes place in the mid- Eastern United States, from down in East Tennessee to southern parts of New York.

Sorry, Kansas, Utah, California, Texas. You can join me in feeling sorry for the cicadas that can't get dates and then wind up as a squirrel's lunch.

Sunday Rerun (from July 2020): Life's Path

 It's 1983, December, and Deirdre Taylor is 4 years old, living in a loft apartment in the SoHo section of New York with her mother. When a fire broke out in the apartment, a man on the street hollered to a firefighter who was doing one of the side duties the Fire Dept handles - checking water pipes in buildings for adequate pressure.

That firefighter ran up to the apartment and found Taylor's young mom, who was screaming for help to save her baby. He was Vincent Pugliese, who served the city of New York for decades before retiring 24 years ago. He remembers that day vividly, naturally.

Deirdre today

He ran up to the sixth-floor apartment and rescued Deirdre's mom, who gasped that her daughter was still inside the smoke-filled apartment.

"She kept screaming, 'My baby!' so I went back in and found a young girl who was unconscious," says Pugliese, recounting that he gave the child rescue breathing until she came back to consciousness.

Deirdre told CNN recently, "I always knew I came close to losing my life that day. Without him, I wouldn't be here. I had a second chance at life, thanks to him."

Fast-forward to 2020. Remember how, when New York City was hit so hard by COVID cases this spring, nurses and doctors from all over the nation came to help them out?  Deirdre Taylor is an emergency room nurse in Alexandria, Virginia now, and she was one of those volunteers.  Before she left to fly to NYC, she took along a tattered old newspaper about a firefighter who saved a little girl there a long time ago.

Along life's path, Deirdre met her husband, and they have two kids. She always wondered about that brave fireman who save her life, but found nothing about Vincent Pugliese online.

Vincent today

She spent two months doing valiant service at BYU Langone Hospital in Brooklyn, and found out a secret, which is that firefighters either know everybody who ever was in the fire department, or they know someone who knows someone who does. She asked a firefighter whom she met in the hospital, and he called the captain of FDNY Ladder 20 in Manhattan, and that led her directly to her hero.

She called him and was glad to make the connection! "I wondered about him on 9/11 and hoped I would get the chance to thank him, and I finally did," said Taylor.

Pugliese is 75 years of age now, and says she was "on cloud nine" when he got that call from Taylor.

Vincent has had that same newspaper article, framed, hanging on the wall of his home in Spring Lake, NJ, for all these years as well. "The two of us just sat there crying on the phone," he told CNN. "She turned out to be a remarkable woman with a magnificent life."

Taylor was just a tot when Pugliese saved her, so of course her memories are sketchy, but he says, "I didn't see her ever again after that, but I always wondered about her."

He was awarded the Walter Scott Medal for Valor for his rescue of Taylor, who joined the Army on her 17th birthday and became a National Guard helicopter pilot before she started her family.  Military service is something else the two share; he was a Marine in Vietnam before joining the FDNY.

"On top of that, we're both die-hard Yankees fans!" said Taylor, proving that no one, no matter how heroic, is perfect.

They haven't met up, but they do chat on the phone, and have made plans to go see a Yankee game with her family. This year, that might just take another miracle, but we'll see.

The Saturday Picture Show, May 15, 2021

 

Let's start today with a sunset view of Cairo, Egypt. Not every city has a view of the ancient pyramids.

This ad probably appeared in the late 1950s and here we are, STILL waiting for plug-in electric flying carpets. Hurry up, already!

Homeowners' Corner: Why go to Lowe's and purchase high-priced shower heads when Dollar Tree sells just what you need, but in the garden aisle?

There was a time when the simple process of finding out what time it is involved pulling out a pocket watch, which was carried on a chain attached to something called a fob. I notice fewer and fewer people using watches, on the wrist or in pockets, anymore. A lot of people will tell you, they rely on their cell phones to tell them the time. Even more will tell you they just don't care what time it is!

This week in 1972 saw the release of the Rolling Stones' "Exile On Main Street," featuring great tunes like "Tumbling Dice" and Keith Richards's "Happy." It hardly seems like it's been 49 years.

Someone drew this with markers. If you stare at it for 49 years, you will hear "Tumbling Dice" in your mind.

Some really cool mom put a handmade cartoon in her kid's lunchbox every Monday just to get the week off to a good start. And the kid saved them! What a treasure!

When squirrels build their nest up against your window...

We never thought we would see Fonzie go fishing. Ayyyyyyyyyyyy!

Starting today, I am going to make sure all my desserts are labeled, so as to avoid confusion.

What in the hill

We Americans like to say that something clearly superior is "the bee's knees," but in Australia, the superlative gets called "the ant's pants."

And with more than 12,000 species of ants all over the world, that's a lot of pants! Here's how they break it down: In any ant colony, you'll find three kinds of ants:  The queen, the female workers, and males.

Funny, that's how it is in most workplaces! (Notice, it said female WORKERS, and males. Draw your own conclusion about how stuff gets done.)

Second graders will find this interesting: An ant can lift 20 times its own body weight. I mean, you've seen them carrying cake crumbs the size of Joe Pesci! But if you second graders were as strong as ants, you would be able to lift a car! So give it up for the ants, unless you can lift a car.

While I was looking up stuff about ants (because I wanted to write about Ansan, a city in South Korea, but I didn't get far enough in the dictionary) I discovered that at one time on earth, the total weight of ants running around on earth equaled the total weight of people.

Entomologists  - or "bug experts" - figure there are at least one million trillion insects among us. One percent of them are ants. 

That comes to ten thousand trillion ants. 

2,000 years ago, Before the days when there was a froyo stand on every corner and people were less, uh, corpulent, if you had a giant scale, and had all the ants on one side and all the humans on the other, it would have balanced out perfectly, says Francis Ratnieks, professor of Apiculture at the University of Sussex.

Professor Ratnieks would probably agree, that would look silly, all those people stomping on all those ants.

Murder is forever

 

The more you read about some people, the more you can't believe most people.

You heard about these two young Americans who went to Italy for a good time and wound up in hell. Finnegan Lee Elder was 19 in July, 2019, when he and his old high school buddy Gabriel Christian Natale-Hjorth, then 18, tried to purchase cocaine on a Roman street corner. Big surprise, they got burned, so they robbed the guy who had steered them to the drug dealer. They took his backpack and demanded 100 Euros and a bag of cocaine if he wanted it back.

Natale-Hjorth, left, Elder, right

The man agreed, and also notified the police. Italy's Carabinieri paramilitary police force got in on it, and in the early morning of July 26, 2019, Carabinieri Vice Brigadier Mario Cerciello Rega, 35,  and his partner met the two American idiots near their swanky hotel.

The police were in plainclothes. Next thing you know, they all four were fighting, and Elder allegedly stabbed Cerciello Rega 11 times with a 7" combat knife that he wisely packed for his big trip (remember this fact!). Meanwhile Natale-Hjorth was busy belting Cerciello Rega's partner repeatedly, according to prosecutors. 

Cerciello Rega had just come back to the job after his honeymoon. He died at age 35 from his wounds.

The two young Americans were sentenced to life in prison.

Two years later, here come Ethan and Leah Elder, parents of the man who killed a policeman, to tell "Good Morning America" that they are concerned about their son's mental health behind bars.

The Elders

"We just want Finn to be able to survive this," Leah Elder said. "He has a noted history of attempted suicide, and we're really worried and really concerned. He was utterly devastated by the verdict, just devastated. It was completely unexpected for him."

(He went to a foreign country and killed a cop and he didn't expect to get sent to prison.)

During the trial, Elder's mother testified that he had attempted to commit suicide several times in the past.

"He struggles with anxiety and depression, and his current situation is really perilous," she said.

(Knowing this, she sends him off to Italy, rather than making sure he gets treatment.)

Elder's parents told the morning show that he is "incredibly kind, incredibly sensitive" and "painfully honest."

"He does not see a reason to lie," Leah Elder said of her son. "From the moment Finn was detained, he has not changed his version of that night one iota."

(Simply telling the truth does not relieve one of the burden of guilt.)

Elder, the incredibly honest young man, and Natale-Hjorth were seen on surveillance video running away from the murder, still holding the backpack they had ripped off. A block away, at their hotel, police found their bloody clothing and the murder weapon stashed in the ceiling.

Elder and Natale-Hjorth were questioned by police and confessed.

Natale-Hjorth testified that the amazingly kind and sensitive Elder told him to hide the knife he had just used to kill a newlywed policeman.

Elder's parents said that their boy was "illegally interrogated" by police "without a lawyer present."

(But he was always honest.)

"We raised Finnegan, as I’m sure many other parents do, to tell the truth and things will be okay," Ethan Elder said. "And part of his utter devastation at this verdict is he has told the truth from the very moment he was being illegally interrogated."

("I admitted to killing the man, so why do I have to be punished?")

In Italy, an accomplice in murder can also go up on murder charges, so both Elder, now 21, and Natale-Hjorth, now 20, were found guilty on all five identical charges and received life sentences. That is the toughest penalty in Italy.

Elder's parents, who seem immured in a world that keeps reality away, told ABC  they were "shocked" that their son's sidekick was charged and convicted the same.

"My heart breaks for that entire family," Leah Elder said.

(Heartbreak for the policeman's wife? Nope.)

Elder's parents said they feel their son's sentencing was too harsh, given his mental health issues and young age, and that they plan to appeal the ruling.

(But he was old enough and mentally sound enough to traipse across Europe, killing people.)

"He feels like he has been sentenced to something worse than the death penalty," Leah Elder said of her son.

"I understand that a man's life was lost that night, I understand that Finnegan should serve some time," she added. "I would like Finnegan to have some sort of sentence that’s proportionate and something that helps at least acknowledge his mental health issues."

(What's proportionate for taking the life of another man? A week in jail and a strong talking-to?)

The parents said their son's new reality -- his life as a prisoner -- is at times "too painful" to think about.

(They are not thinking of the policeman's widow.)

"This tragedy that happened, it's changed us all," Ethan Elder said. "Watching your son mature in prison is very hard."

(Attending your husband's funeral is harder.)

"Tyger Tyger, burning bright, in the forests of the night..."

"And checking the American League baseball schedule, I see the Tigers are in Houston..."

We saw this on the news, and now, here are the details. Over the weekend, in a city called Houston, in a crazy state the natives call "Texas," a tiger was roaming around a residential area. The police have taken a suspect into custody.

And because it's "Texas," the suspect was walking around free, on bond, from a murder charge.

He's 26, his name is Victor Hugo Cuevas, and now he has to face an additional charge of evading arrest with his pet tiger.

As of this writing (yesterday morning) the tiger is still on the loose, police said.

Attention people attending law school: there might come a time in your legal career when you will need to issue a statement such as this:

"My client is not the owner of the tiger."

KHOU-TV reports that Cuevas's attorney, Michael Elliott, went on to say, "HPD was in such a hurry to wrap it and find their guy that they just assumed because my client was the one who caught this tiger, who went out and got it and brought it back into safety, everyone is just assuming that he is the owner of the tiger."

Please take a moment to read that sentence out loud. Then, look at yourself in a mirror. You'll see that your eyes are spinning like slot machine cherries.

Attorney Elliott went on to lament, "He's already been convicted, which is a shame."

He went on to claim that Cuevas had a deal with the police that he would turn himself in at 8:15, but the cops double crossed Cuevas and pinched him at 8.

This whole confusing situation began on Sunday when a neighbor called 911 to report the big cat strutting around the neighborhood. Someone came along and corralled the beast and they drove off in an SUV. 

The only person in this whole saga whose story holds up is the tiger. Stay tuned for more!

Winning by cheating is not winning at all

Against all odds and common sense, it really seems to mean a lot to some people to hold titles such as "Homecoming Queen." 

Sure, when you're 16, 17, whatever, a large part of your self-image comes from being so highly regarded as a local deity. It's understandable for people of that age, and if the competition is fair and open to all, it's all right.

But there is a reason why parents - or someone - should keep eyes on their children as they compete in these things. Suppose the desire to be the Queen is so overriding that it blinds a teen to what's right? That's when you need a responsible adult to provide direction.

Emily Rose Grover, down in Florida, needed some guidance a couple of years ago, and she got it - but in the wrong direction. She was running for HQ at Tate High, in an election where the other kids voted on their computers, and now the state is charging Emily Rose with felonies as an adult.  Also charged is the person who should have been guiding her toward more wholesome ways of competition, her mother, Laura Carroll, former assistant principal at Bellview Elementary School.

It's staggering that people who are paid to educate can be involved in scandals like this, and in fact, Ms Carroll's job led to the whole scheme, because the allegation is that old Emily Rose used her mom's password to get into the school computer network and rack up votes for herself. She got enough votes to win...for the time being.

Grover and Carroll stand accused by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement with one count each of felony offenses against users of computers, computer systems, computer networks, and electronic devices; felony unlawful use of a two-way communications device, felony criminal use of personally identifiable information, and conspiracy to commit these offenses.

Mother (l) and daughter

They have both bonded out, and are at home reading Glamour magazine while awaiting trial.

The computer network is called FOCUS and it's the student information system for the Escambia County School District. District officials called the law when they noticed that hundreds of student accounts had been breached. The presidential campaign of 2020 was not the only closely-watched contest down there in the Fla panhandle. The vote for Tate High School’s Homecoming Court seemed a bit shady, what with 117 votes coming in from the same IP address within a short period of time.  It took cops about 5 minutes to link Carroll's cellphone to this, and that included 3 minutes for coffee. 

Part of the school system's computer setup is an app called Election Runner, for such things as homecoming court elections. The people at Election Runner notified the police of over 100 questionable votes, and an ethics complaint, about the election that Grover "won," but didn't.

Carroll was expelled from Tate High over all this, and even though her mother protested, the expulsion was upheld.

So, nothing to do until the trial. But this mom and daughter, like the rest of us, have plenty of time to wonder how it can be so important to be the homecoming queen that it's worth all this trouble. And could Grover have been comfortable wearing the vaunted crown, knowing she "won" it by illegitimate methods?

Even more troubling - how many students (and teachers!) did Carroll come in contact with over the years, exposing them to her deficient sense of right and wrong?

The Reasons

In Mexico, Cinco de Mayo is considered a relatively minor holiday. It is not their version of July 4; it isn't their Independence Day.

What happened on Cinco de Mayo - May 5, 1862 - was the victory of the Mexican army over France in the Battle of Puebla during the Franco-Mexican War. 

That war came about after Mexico, torn apart by years of internal fighting, had to default on loan payments to France, Britain, and Spain. Those three nations sent their navies to Veracruz, Mexico to settle things in the time-honored way of warfare, but Britain and Spain came to a sensible conclusion and arranged settlements with Mexico. 

Napoleon III, Emperor Of The French, saw a chance to take some Mexican territory for himself, and kept fighting, sending a large fleet and strong forces to Veracruz.

With 6,000 French soldiers and sailors on the attack, Napoleon III nonetheless saw his dreams of carving out some of Mexico as a "Little France" when 2,000 Mexicans, led by Texas-born General Ignacio Zaragoza, sent the French packing, ending the invasion at the Battle of Puebla.

Today, the Battle of Puebla is still a cause for national celebration and pride among the Mexicans. They have parades, battle recreations, and other fiestas but May 5 is not a national holiday in Mexico. Offices, banks and stores remain open as usual.

I mention all this as a bit of historical perspective, because May 5 has become one of those holidays in the United States that is nothing more than a reason for people to throw a party.

I worked with a woman who was born and raised in Ireland. Every year, she was aghast at the way this nation turns what is considered a holy day in Ireland into a day of green-tinged decadence.

I doubt that a lot of the people who were wearing sombreros and guzzling Dos Equis the other night knew the reasons why Cinco de Mayo matters in Mexico, any more than the revelers on March 17 know why St Patrick is important in Ireland. 

I've noticed a trend to what I call "Hallmark Holidays," events promoted by the greeting card and balloon industries to sell more of their product. Why not? It's a free marketplace, and have fun, I say!

But not like this:  Maryland State Police arrested 21 impaired drivers, issued more than 700 citations and nearly 1,000 warnings during their increased enforcement last Wednesday, Cinco de Mayo.

Three people died in car wrecks on that day, and also, a state trooper investigating a crash on I-95 was almost hit by a box truck that the police say was being driven by an impaired 45-year-old driver.

I'm not trying to get all preachy. People are going to drink and misbehave even without beer, whiskey, and wine manufacturers creating silly reasons to encourage them. But maybe they could also take time to educate people about the real meaning of holidays at the same time. 

The Sunday Rerun (from January 2017): Color Me Surprised

 In a mountain greenery,

Where God paints the scenery
Just two crazy people together. 

- Mountain Greenery (Rodgers & Hart)

Well, the wait is over, and for those who thought the election results would never be final, relax...the Color Of The Year has been chosen.

The other colors are all green with envy, because this year,  the good people at Pantone - "the authority on color, provider of color systems and leading technology for accurate communication of color" - have decided that Greenery is the color of the year.

It's a yellowish green, to be sure, "refreshing and revitalizing" in the words of Pantone, and "symbolic of new beginnings."

I've had plenty of new beginnings, and none of them reminded me of this color. What's more, we say someone is "green" when they are inexperienced, callow. 

Rougned Odor (r) finally had
his fill of Bautista as well.

As a lover of all things Autumn and Winter, I'm more of a brown and orange kind of guy. Spring does not thrill me because it inevitably leads to the horror we call summer, with its heat, humidity, broiling sunshine, mosquitoes and Jose Bautista.

Some years ago, a celery-colored color called Celadon was briefly popular.  This was just after all doctors were required to outfit their waiting rooms in mauve and gray shades, but before all rooms were decorated in the color known as "stainless steel."  I liked celadon.  I like celery, the negative-calorie food (you burn more calories grinding on it than you take in.  It's sort of a reverse milkshake in that.)  Celery adds the green to shrimp salad and the crunch to a tossed salad, too.

They're trying to make this greenery look like mint, but mint is the one crop that grows well here at the Lazy 'C', and it's much darker than this "greenery."  Home gardeners, and lovers of iced beverages, I recommend that you visit your local greenhouse in spring, buy some potted mint, and plant it down by the shed or near the spigot.  You'll snip leaves of tasty greenery-goodness forever, and be delighted as they add that certain zest to your iced tea.


And I hereby nominate "iced tea" to be color of the year for 2017.

The Saturday Picture Show, May 8, 2021

 

Birds of a feather, etc....this man went out to feed his chickens and found a mama duck had made herself a little nest and is expecting a couple of dozen kids! Nature will find a way!

I always think of people looking back on their days, and I know that very few of them are saying, "I should have stayed late at work more often, come in on days off, and given more of myself to a company that couldn't care less about me." Do your best, make your way, and take care of yourself as you go. 

It's also free range, if you want it.

Orioles left handed pitcher John Means is shown here celebrating his no-hit game from this Wednesday. It was the first one-man no-hitter by an Orioles pitcher since 1969, when I was just finishing my distinguished high school career. Jim Palmer pitched that last great game. It's been a long time!

It's funny to see Western movies. The good guys all look like Jimmy Stewart or Clint Eastwood, and the bad guys are all Brad Pitt or Clu Gulager - handsome, rugged, raw-boned (however that works!) and then you see a picture of a real bad guy, and he looks like this addled delinquent. This is Billy The Kid, who went by "Henry McCarty" at his birth in 1859. He died in a gunfight at 21, after taking 8 lives himself. Seeing him for real makes the Wild West a little less enchanting.

One great thing about this internet thing is that we learn a lot more about the rest of the world every chance we get. Never forget the reason why we are still the greatest country in the world. This 19-year-old is Olga Misik, a Russian who went to a demonstration and read the Russian Constitution to riot police. For this sin, she will be sentenced to two years in prison. Never take your freedom for granted.

Of course, you recognize Marilyn Monroe, meeting Queen Elizabeth in 1956 in London. The man next to her is movie performer Victor Mature. I would call him an actor, but he himself told his daughter Victoria, "I'm no actor, and I have 64 movies to prove it." He often played guys who just got out of prison and were handed a 5 dollar bill and a custom-made suit that fit like, well, like a custom-made suit.

"Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a disorder in which people have recurring, unwanted thoughts, ideas or sensations (obsessions) that make them feel driven to do something repetitively (compulsions)." - from a psychology textbook.
"Texas never backs down" - from a T-shirt.

This is one of those situations where you figure someone knows enough to know whether this is ok, but I am not setting foot in this building. Or under it.

The last line, and the title, of a great poem by Robert Frost (1874 -1963) used to appear on this wall, but, ironically, those words couldn't stay.  The complete poem:

Nature’s first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf’s a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.