Watching the tide roll away

A reporter for the SF Gate out in San Francisco was wandering around  Waldo Point Harbor in Sausalito recently, checking out a hunch.

From the story he wrote, I glean that Sausalito is one of those waterfront areas, a bayside version of our Hampden, where bohemians and bon vivants have long dwelled, but recently it's become the hip thing to move there, and suddenly housing prices are shooting skyward. 

And out there, when you talk about housing, a lot of where people live is on houseboats docked along Richardson Bay. A lot of returning GIs pitched their tents there, as it were, after World War II, and never quite got around to moving. 

Today there are 282 floating homes, and one great memory to tell you about.

Otis Redding, the great soul singer of the 1960s, came from Macon, Georgia and was a member of Little Richard's band at age 15. By his early 20s, he was driving the bus and singing onstage for Johnny Jenkins And The Pinetoppers. A break came his way when some recording time was available in a studio where Jenkins was cutting a record. Otis took that chance and recorded his first hit - "These Arms Of Mine."

Otis Redding

Redding's first records after that were hits on the soul chart, but his appeal was broad, and between 1964 and 1967 he had hits on the chart such as "Mr. Pitiful," "That's How Strong My Love Is," "I've Been Loving You Too Long," "I Can't Turn You Loose,"  his version of "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction," "Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa (Sad Song)," "Try a Little Tenderness," and his version of Sam Cooke's "Shake."

That's a string of hits, but by 1966, Otis saw changes ahead in the music world and he wanted to broaden his style past the soul stompers and into folk-type ballads, done his way. He performed in 1966 at the Fillmore West, a rock music palace in San Francisco, and was held in high regard by the - the word must be used - hippies in the crowd. From there to the Monterey Pop Festival in summer of '67, Otis was moving, not so much away from his gospel-flavored soul, but adding rock and pop to it. 

After that appearance at Monterey, Redding needed some down time and legendary Fillmore promoter Bill Graham gave him the use of his houseboat on the Sausalito harbor.

This is the dock of the bay that inspired the song.

It was while staying on the boat and walking along the harborside that Redding missed his home in Georgia and began writing about it. Earl “Speedo” Sims, Otis's manager, heard him singing to himself the lines “sittin’ in the morning sun, I’ll be sittin’ when the evening comes” and add “I left my home in Georgia / Headed for the Frisco Bay” as the second verse.

Of course, the song he wrote was “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay,” his biggest hit, but sadly a posthumous one. He was in a hurry to get back on the road when he made the demo version of it in December, 1967, which is also the month that saw him lose his life in a plane crash at age 26.  The single was almost instantly a #1 hit after its release in January of '68, and is always on the list of top songs of the decade. 

And just so you know the rest of the story...listen to it here.  At the end, Otis whistles, and that is one part of the record that makes it so haunting to hear again. 

BUT - he didn't mean for the record to sound like that. What the record company put out was an incomplete, early version of his song. Otis did not finish writing the words just the way he wanted to, so he whistled at the end in the demo version, with the intent to go back and record a final version after the tour he did not survive.

And now you know etc etc.

Duke Duke Duke Duke of Earl

I'm sure you heard the big news! The Duke and Duchess of Sussex  - that's Harry and Meghan to us! - welcomed their baby girl last Friday at 11.40am at Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital out in California. Instead of having a trumpeter walk around heralding the news, they put it on their Archewell website, saying they were “blessed” by the newborn.

They have named the baby Lilibet Diana Mountbatten-Windsor. Lilibet is how Queen Elizabeth said "Elizabeth" when she was young, so it's sort of a family nickname for the queen. As a child, I tried giving myself the nicknames "Tito" and "Leon," but neither stuck. The Sussexes, as they like to be called, will refer to this new child as "Lily."

What doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me is that The Harmeister and Meghasauras Rex are getting inquiries from regular folks on this side of the ocean and that as to where to send gifts, in the apparent delusion that these two can't afford to buy onesies and Diaper Genies and baby butt wipes and all that. Let me put your fears to rest. Little Lili will never wear the same "Daddy Is Sixth In Line For The British Throne And All I Got Is This Crummy T-shirt" T-shirt twice.

But to their credit, M & H said, instead of sending them gifts, people should support these four women's charities: 

• Girls Inc
• Harvest Home
• CAMFED
• and the Myna Mahila Foundation.

Meggie has been involved with each of these groups and is able to recommend them without question. They deal with specific areas of women's lives from poverty to pregnancy.

And in case you were wondering: M & H said on their webpage that they are on  “on parental leave” for now.

Found!

Early in 1975, a woman named Colleen Distin went to a movie theatre in Ventura, California, as thousands of people did.

But Ms Distin put her purse on the floor of the theatre while she enjoyed the feature, which might have been "Jaws," or "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," or "Shampoo," or "Dog Day Afternoon," all popular cinematic fare during the early days of the Ford Administration.

And as she left the theatre to go grab a bite to eat, or go home to watch "Welcome Back, Kotter," or stop by a bookstore to get a copy of "Angels: God's Secret Agents" by Billy Graham, "Winning Through Intimidation" by Robert Ringer, "TM: Discovering Energy and Overcoming Stress" by Harold H. Bloomfield, "The Ascent of Man" by Jacob Bronowski or "Sylvia Porter's Money Book." by Sylvia Porter, her wallet fell through a hole in the purse.

She called the theatre the next day to report the missing billfold, but no one had turned it in. She lost a check for $200, family photos, a 1973 Grateful Dead concert ticket stub, and her California driver's license.

Tom Stevens is a man employed in 2021 to renovate the old theatre, and he was digging underneath floorboards when he found the old red leather wallet.

He went on the theater's social media to find Ms Distin: “Does anyone know Colleen Distin? While doing some maintenance we have found her wallet. There are a bunch of pictures of people, and they are super cool from that era also. Someone may want them. So if you are, or if you know Colleen, drop us a line and we will have it here for you!”

Loanne Wullaert is Stevens's boss. It was her idea to use Facebook to find the owner, and she was pleased at the crowd size the post reached. “We’re at almost 1,000 shares, a ridiculous amount of comments and then it went to all these other sites. I think it’s cool that people care and are interested.”

And at that, it only took two hours after that post for people to contact Ms Distin and tell her about it. She is a lifelong Ventura resident, and she went to the theatre to retrieve her stuff, saying it was like "opening a time capsule.”

“I'm shaking," Distin told news station KCAL-TV as she went through the wallet. It contained poetry and notes, photographs of high school friends, the $5 ticket to a Grateful Dead concert at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and photos of her mother, who died several years ago. “It's really wonderful."

At first, she was reticent about discussing the lost-and-found, but felt the positive experience was worth sharing.

“It says a lot about our society, that people are looking for a human story and something to feel good. People need to see the gratitude. I think there’s so much other negative stuff that I think this is what touched people.”

Anyone wishing to view the contents of my 1975 wallet can just examine what's in the 2021 version. I just put the old junk in a new billfold and carry on. Wallets come and go, but my coupons for PayLess shoes, Radio Shack, and Toys "R" Us will be worth something again someday!

Brewing up a vaccine

I'm no longer arguing about the vaccines, as the insanity rolls on about conspiracies and Chinese laboratories and Fauci making a fortune from it. Those who insist on getting substandard information will carry that information around forever, and that's that. 

But now several states - Maryland among them - are giving lottery-style chances at winning a pitch-pot full of money for getting the COVID vaccine, and there are other blandishments being brandished. Down in gun-loving West Virginia, someone claiming to be the governor went on tv to brag about these prizes: two new customized  trucks, 25 weekend getaways to local state parks, five lifetime hunting and fishing licenses, five custom hunting rifles and five custom hunting shotguns. For those Mountaineers interested in further education, two full four-year scholarships to any institution in West Virginia are up for grabs to vaccinated 12- to 25-year-olds.

And now comes word that Anheuser-Busch, America's largest beer company, will give all of us free suds IF we reach the president's goal of having 70% of us vaxxed by the Fourth of July.

"Anheuser-Busch announced that beer's on them July the Fourth," President Biden proclaimed. "That's right, get a shot and have a beer! Free beer for everyone 21 years or over to celebrate independence from the virus."

For their part, A-B CEO Michel Doukeris said, "At Anheuser-Busch, we are committed to supporting the safe and strong recovery of our nation and being able to be together again at the places and with the people we have missed so much. This commitment includes encouraging Americans to get vaccinated, and we are excited to buy Americans 21+ a round of beer when we reach the White House goal."

All we'll need to do is upload a picture of ourselves sipping a beer at our favorite place, wherever that may be. Send that snap to MyCooler.com/Beer and you'll get a $5 virtual debit card that can be used for an Anheuser-Busch product.

"Since last March, we've been focused on pivoting all our plans in order to ensure that our brands remained relevant and meaningful, through tangible actions," says A-B's chief marketing officer, Marcel Marcondes. "There's never been a better time to be able to say, 'let's grab a beer.'"

As of the other day when I wrote this, dreaming about free beer,  52% of American adults were already fully vaccinated, and 63% had gotten at least one dose.

I hope there's no age limit to these pictures we send in, because I want to use this classic of yours truly at age 17 when some right-wing insurgents from Paraguay forced me to drink beer at a friend's wedding.

Sunday Rerun (from June, 2016): D Day

 Today is D-Day, June 6.  In 1944, on this day, the largest seaborne invasion in history took place when more than 160,000 Allied troops hit 50 miles of beach on a fortified French coastline, to fight the Nazis in Normandy.  This began the liberation of northwestern Europe from German occupation and was a key step to ending World War II.  

I think about how it must have felt to be on one of those landing crafts as they came close to ashore, with their front gate opening and discharging a crew of men who really had to be petrified, storming a beach full of mines with Germans shooting at them from the shore and bombs dropping from overhead. They saved the world from Hitler, that's all. Had that invasion, called "Operation Overlord," not been successful, who knows how the war might have played out?

Durning

And while those men and some women on the beach were largely anonymous outside their family and friends, how about some people you know well who were there?

Charles Durning - who played all sorts of parts as a character actor in movies like The Sting and The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas and Tootsie - was a private first class in the US Army that day.  He was the only member of his squad to survive the invasion, and later fought in the Battle of the Bulge, where he was stabbed and taken prisoner of war.

Salinger

J.D. Salinger - the author of "Catcher In The Rye" - landed at Normandy and also fought later in the Battle of the Bulge, largely regarded as the most vicious bloody battle of the war.  While "Catcher" concerned a loopy high school kid, some of Salinger's short stories were set in wartime (for example, "For Esme, with Love and Squalor.")  Salinger is said to have carried the rough draft of the first six chapters of his masterwork "Catcher" in his gear at Normandy.

Yogi

Yogi Berra, the great Yankee catcher, manager and quote machine ("We're lost, but we're making good time!")  who sat behind the plate for all those years, sixty feet, six inches from the pitcher, was sixty feet off shore during the battle, manning a rocket launcher boat as a Navy seaman.

English actor David Niven and Canadian soldier James Doohan - later "Scotty" from "Star Trek," also served on the fateful day we remember today.  

By the way, for all those who say that today's young people would have trouble mustering up that much courage to fight a similar battle now, I say they would. People are still people and they still have the right values, once you get to know them a little.

It will be up to their elders to make sure we don't get in that situation again, though.

The Saturday Picture Show, June 5, 2021

 

My summer is just fine, thanks, because ME-TV has The Addams Family at 6 PM! I love wacky humor, and since this is based on the Charles Addams cartoons in The New Yorker, 001 Cemetery Lane is right up my alley! Fun Facts: Blossom Rock ("Grandmama") was the older sister of Jeannette MacDonald, the actress in those musicals with Nelson Eddy from the old days, and "Gomez," John Astin, a Johns Hopkins University alumnus, still lives here in Baltimore and is on the faculty at JHU.

Happy Pride Month! Allies unite.

If you don't recognize this actor right off, here's a hint: "Yippee Ki Yay, Mother"!

The doggone Roadrunner can do miracles with a can of paint!

I don't know if they still sell Life Savers anymore but I know, if they do, they cost a lot more than a nickel. 

This photographer's name is Charles C. Ebbets. He was one courageous cameraperson. You might not know his name, but you know his most famous picture...

I would sooner skip lunch.

This young woman found a wonderful surprise when seventy - 70! - of her classmates shaved their melons in support when she lost her hair to cancer. 

This is a good reason to get off the beach in Point Pleasant, NJ.

One good thing about limited pandemic seating was being able to move into the shade as the sun moved.

Right in my Madhouse

There's something about being human. We just refuse to follow 100% of the time. I know a police officer (you'll never get the name out of me) who likes to take their personal vehicle out for a late-night cruise on a deserted highway and drive along at, oh, say, 120 mph for a stretch. Is it the thrill of speed, or of breaking a dozen laws, that holds the appeal?

Now and then you will find a devotee of the fine arts - the finest in painting or photography - skulking out of the art gallery where they sell the paintings of wide-eyed kids or dogs playing poker or former presidents with insanely impressive musculature.

And without question, the finest chefs and cooks and gourmets just have to stop off for some Marshmallow Circus Peanuts from time to time.

That said, I will add that I am no expert on what makes a good movie. I think the last time I was in a theater, popcorn was a dollar, and everybody was all excited about "Gone With The Wind" coming out soon. 

But there is a movie called "Madhouse" that I can't seem to get enough of. And the ratings of 0% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer seem a tad low to me. Take the calm, deft comedy of John Larroquette - so popular in "Stripes" on the big screen and "Night Court" on the small one - add the magic that is Kirstie Alley, the quirky raised eyebrows of Alison LaPlaca, and throw in a curveball named John Diehl, memorable as "Cruiser" in "Stripes" and as "Larry Zito" in TV's "Miami Vice," stir lightly with madcap friends and relatives and a broken leg, and the result is comedy magic on a scale rarely seen outside of the collaborations of Mike Nichols and Neil Simon.

It's available for viewing on Amazon Prime and I can't think of a single thing I would rather do right now than to watch it again. The scene where Laroquette and Diehl mime "Bernadette" by the Four Tops in a bar is worth the afternoon in itself!

I always felt that Alison LaPlaca was going to be the next Katharine Hepburn, but it turned out, no one wanted another Katharine Hepburn.

The thing with the movie getting 0% still rankles. It reminds me of a certain TV show that got a Neilsen rating of -2. Not only was no one watching, but two people called to say they never would!

Do you take this woman...or maybe that one...

I have to be honest, as always: I feel for the guy in this story. Not that I showed up at the wrong place for my wedding; I didn't. But once I went to pay respects to the mom of a coworker, and I wound up in the wrong room at the funeral parlor. I didn't know a soul, but I went along with the mournful murmuring...until I looked across the hall, and saw my coworkers assembled.

Exit, stage left.

So this guy in Indonesia was relying on GPS find his wedding venue....

The press from over there is not giving the guy's name. All we know is that he was set to tie the knot in Magelang, a town in Central Java. But GPS steered him and his posse wrong, and they wound up at another place because GPS said he had arrived at his destination.  And they always sound so sure, don't they?

But TribunNews.com reports they were at the wrong place at the right time. The house they stopped at had an engagement party swinging inside. Oh the place was packed...friends, family, caterers, photographers, a man and wife getting ready to marry...

The groom’s entourage walked on in, started shaking hands and making the rounds, and took their seats.

Well, they thought they were their seats...

And then the groom-to-be from the engagement party and his friends thought the new arrivals were friends of the bride-to-be. And her family thought they were the fiancé's family...

Add to all this, the real fiancé and his family were showed up late for the event, according to the bride-to-be, a lady named Ulfa, who told TribunNews.com that she had been getting her makeup touched up when her groom got there.

Just like one of those silly TV sitcoms, when everyone figured out the whole thing was just a merry mixup, the lost groom and his squad gathered up their offerings and split.

"[The groom] said that the share location point stopped near my house," Ulfa, 27, told the Indonesian news outlet. "Sometimes the internet can shift if it is not smooth."

Videos of the embarrassed departure are all the rage in Indonesia right now.

Tribun reports that the groom and his team beat feet to the correct venue in another part of Losari Village.

And when he got to the altar, I'll bet he said something along the lines of, "Honey, you're not gonna believe this, but...!"

Put a stamp on it

They say that life follows nature, or nature follows life, like a cat follows a fish truck. 

Our estimable Congressman Ruppersberger is demanding an audit of some local post offices that are not delivering mail. And we're not talking about "they missed our delivery last Wednesday" or "my birthday card from Aunt Eliza was a day late." There are neighborhoods in and around Baltimore where people just don't get mail for weeks on end, and they finally go to the post office to pick up their letters and magazines and prescriptions and what-have-you, only to be told "it's out for delivery." And they go home and nothing is delivered. It's infuriating that the efforts of a twice-impeached loser trying to thwart mail-in voting has dismantled a postal system that used to be the best in the world, but there you have it. 

What you don't have is your mail. But intelligent people are going to get it back to normal again.

The only thing slower than getting your birthday card from Aunt Eliza is sending a message in a bottle. This story fascinates me. Natalia Kunowska is a Polish woman who was a student at Krakow's AGH University of Science and Technology in 2011. During a trip to Russia that year, she wrote out a message, put it in a bottle, and tossed it into the Gulf of Finland.

Natalia was part of an international student exchange at the time, and as she put it on Facebook, "I was with my friend at the beach and we came up with the idea to write a letter and throw it into the water." She put a 10-ruble note in the bottle as well, but don't get all excited...10 Russian rubles in 2011 had a value of 17 American cents.

And look here! In just ten short years, she got a reply! 

She said she finally heard last week from a man named Maksim who reported he had found the bottle near where it had been launched a decade earlier.

So, it didn't travel far, but what do you want for 17¢?

"I just got a message with a picture of a bottle and a question asking if I recognized it. I was really shocked," Kunowska said.

It turns out, Maksim is an ecologist, but he said he didn't mind Natalia littering.

I hope they get to be friends or something. I sense a Russian Hallmark movie in this!

"Money is not everything in life"

So you find a million dollar lottery ticket. But you know it's not yours. What do you do? What DO you DO?

If you're Abhi Shah, from the family that owns a convenience store in Southwick, Massachusetts, you do the right thing.  Abhi, 30, was going through a pile of discarded scratchers recently, when he found a Diamond Millions that wasn't completely scratched off. He found it was a million dollar winner.

Just like any of us, his first thought was "I'm rich!" He thought of buying a house...a Tesla...another convenience store. But he talked it over with his parents and they even called a grandmother in India, who told them they were right to be honest and give the ticket back.

The article in The Washington POST doesn't really make it clear, but somehow the family knew who had bought the ticket and carelessly put it in the reject stack.   

“We had mixed emotions,” Shah told The Post. “We didn’t sleep for two nights, but I don’t know what happened. My inner soul told me, ‘That’s not right. You know who that person is. You should give that ticket back to them.' And that’s exactly what I did.”

"That person" is Lea Rose Fiega, who is a regular at the store. She works nearby for an insurance company, and pops in a couple of times a week on lunch to buy scratchers. It's her habit to give the clerk the losing tickets; they stack them up behind the register.  She bought this $30 ticket from Aruna, Shah's mom, and handed it back, without fully scratching it off. “I was in a hurry, on lunch break, and just scratched it real quick, and looked at it, and it didn’t look like a winner, so I handed it over to them to throw away,” she told the Associated Press.

                                                           The winner!

It was ten days later that Shah saw the ticket and scratched the remaining square.

Even though Fiega would never have known what happened, the family insisted on her having the ticket. Shah even drove down to her office when she didn't come in the store for several days. Fiega thought maybe she was in trouble for having forgotten to pay for something, but Shah reassured her: “No, you’re good. It’s something that’s going to change your life.”

Back to the store they went, and when the family handed her the $1,000,000 ticket, she began crying, her body shaking.

Wouldn't you do the same?

“It was a really great moment,” Shah told The POST. “Seeing her happy, I got so happy. I knew I did the right thing. I shouldn’t keep anybody’s money. Money is not everything in life.”

Fiega told the AP she duked the family in on some of her winnings, and of course the family gets $10,000 for selling the ticket, so everybody is bucks up. 

It's never the wrong time to do the right thing!

 

The Shah family (Abhi, Maunish, Varija, Aruna and Anjani). 

Memorial Day, 2021

 In memory of those who gave their lives for us.

Sunday Rerun (from October, 2018) Deeeeeelightful!

 I wrapped up my radio days doing the overnight show at WPOC in Baltimore, and this was in 1983, when country music still had at least a tiny tinge of country left. Sure, there was the evil Dave and Sugar influence, but George Jones and John Anderson and Hank Williams, Jr, and Ronnie Milsap were still making hits in those days, and I actually enjoyed listening to those songs all night long, waiting for sunrise over Hampden.

One of the bigger hits that spring was by a band called Alabama.Those guys were a money machine for RCA Records back in those days, cranking out hit after hit after hit. Their tune "Dixieland Delight" was outside the norm for country songs. Sure, it was all about going out "On a Tennessee Saturday night
Couldn't feel better
I'm together with my dixieland delight
Spend my dollar
Parked in a holler 'neath the mountain moonlight
Holdin' her up tight
Make a little lovin'
A little turtle dovin' on a Mason Dixon night
It's my life
Oh so right
My dixieland delight..."

But there was a fiddle finale and a change in tempo at the end of the record, which was not the norm then.

Well, now, even though the lyrics mention going out in the mountain moonlight on a Tennessee Saturday night, the song became a fourth-quarter favorite at the Bryant-Denny Stadium in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where the U of Alabama Crimson Tide entertains their fans, 101,821 at a time. The stadium sound system would play the song, and every would sing the lyrics exactly as performed by the band on the record, and all was well.  Good night!

Well, no.

It got to where the fans sang along, and added war cries about the opponents, things along the lines of "The heck with Auburn!" and "We don't care for Clemson any which way."  And then it got even saltier, so much so that they haven't even played the record since the Auburn game of 2014, in which Alabama was able to eke out a 55-44 win. They stopped playing "Dixieland Delight" because profanity was raining down from the stands on an Alabama Saturday afternoon!

But Alabama's Athletic Director, Greg Byrd, told the kids that they would play the song again, and if you were watching Saturday night, you heard the stands rocking to the song as the Tide rolled over Missouri, 39-12.  It took appeals from Byrd, running back Damien Harris, Coach Nick Saban’s wife, Terry Saban, and the student body president to get promises from fans just to sing the the “Dixieland Delight Done Right” lyrics: “ROLL TIDE” and “BEAT AUBURN, AND LSU, AND TENNESSEE TOO.”

Big Al, the mascot, lives in Alabama, where the Tuscaloosa.

From all I've heard, there were no major outbreaks of scurrility or obscene language among the faithful, and that would mean that a precious tradition has been restored.

And for other colleges seeking to engender a little enthusiasm in the stands, Alabama (the band) had dozens of other hits for you to play. If the score of your game is a bit too tight for comfort, how about "The Closer You Get"?  or if your team makes a big comeback, you could salute them with "Can't Keep A Good Man Down"!

Meanwhile, Roll Tide, I say! 

The Saturday Picture Show, May 29, 2021

 

We open today with something for the many librarians I know and cherish. Our libraries are just reopening for a quick browseroo for now, but I hope they will be back to full service soon. And I hope too that we go back to the old days with total silence observed. Call me old-school, but I think there should be a certain level of quiet in the cathedral of knowledge. I hear more loud chatter in a modern library than I do in a hamburger stand. Perhaps this signal would help.

This used to be a beautiful theater. Do you know what ruined it? Too many people talking during the movie!

Sonny and Cher, circa 1965. Someone should make a movie about them and tell the fascinating tale of Salvatore Bono, a man who sold meat door to door and became a hustler in the record business, learning the ins and outs as he worked as factotum for the great Phil Spector. At 28, he met 16-year-old Cherilynn Sarkisian and soon they were wed, at least unofficially. She became a backup singer for Spector's great Philles Records by the Ronettes, Righteous Brothers, and Darlene Love. Sonny got them a record deal, and soon they were world-famous for "I Got You Babe" and other pop hits, which led to a weekly tv show in which Cher played the glamorous model for extravagant gowns and Sonny played the fool for huge paydays. They broke up, she went on to solo shows and records, and Sonny became a mayor and, as God is my witness, a US Congressman. Only in America.

I'm going to go ahead and guess that the owner of this car wash has had his troubles finding and keeping good workers.

There were great tunes on this 1970 album by the Grateful Dead, which somehow gets left out when we talk about early versions of country music by rock and rollers. And officially the record was named "American Beauty," but look closely...you could just as soon see "American Reality" on the cover.

The little town of Groningen, Netherlands looks like a nice place to live!

Hello, weather buffs! If you called this one a west Texas mature supercell thunderstorm, you advance to the head of the class! Looks like it was a bad one.

It was quite prescient of this cartoonist to foresee all the "advantages" of having a pocket telephone. It's even more amazing when you consider this was in an English newspaper in January 1923!

I'll drink tea for the rest of my days and be happy about it! If only coffee tasted as great as it smells!

Our cats are Piscean. Like all cats, they don't give a rat's asterisk about what we think that means.

Roger and Out

It's summertime as of this weekend! And for many Marylanders, Delawarites, Pennsylvanians, Virginians and whatever you call people from other states, it's time to visit the Jolly Roger Amusement Park in Ocean City, MD. That is the gigantic seaside spot for bumper cars, go-cart tracks, Splash Mountain/Aqua Loop, a Wild Mouse, Jungle Golf, and a billion ways to spend your fun money. 

And sure, we know that the very term Jolly Roger connotes fun. Who doesn't like being jolly, and who doesn't like people named Roger?

But hold on. The black flag with a leering skull and crossbones that we call a Jolly Roger and associate with pirates is actually not a real Jolly Roger. There were, back in the glory days of high seas piracy, as many pirates plying their trade as there are varieties of Cheerios on the shelf, and that's a lot. This logo to the left developed over the years as a pirate flag, as many buccaneers used variations of it on their ships, but it was not the true Jolly Roger.

(Stop and think - why would a pirate fly a flag that says "I am here to pillage and plunder"? It's like a house burglar in the suburbs driving a white Chevy van with "J. Carson Bagswell - Residential Property Removal Specialist" painted on the side along with his phone number and, of course, his website ("Bagswellbagsyourstuff.com"). 

But I digress. The real Jolly Roger came from the pirate from Pembrokeshire, England, born Bartholomew Roberts, but better known as Black Bart. He originally had a flag showing a whole skeleton on a black background. and he started the trend. But he wore a red coat  Other pirates liked the design and copied it. Black Bart wore a red coat, so French sailors took to calling him "Le Joli Rouge" ("Pretty Red" in English). The pirate to the left is known as "Bartbeard."

British and American sailors then couldn't wait to turn a perfectly lovely phrase like that into a corrupted Franco-American one, so "Jolly Roger" came to mean the flag that Bart flew. It's here >> as it can be seen in the National Museum of the Royal Navy (NMRN) at Portsmouth Historic Dockyard.

The red background meant that no lives would be spared if Bart captured your ship.

Jolly well right! Tell the ticket taker at Splash Mountain about it.

Pointing fingers

Early one morning in June, 2015, a man named Kevin Jones, employed as a security guard at Pimlico Racetrack, was shot to death.  There is no doubt about that.

Who killed him is an issue that's bounced from courtroom to courtroom, and now to the downtown Baltimore waterfront bar called Sandlot.

Baltimore State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby and her office say that the murderer is one Keith Davis, Jr.  The first time they took him to trial, the result was a hung jury. Second time out, he was convicted by a jury, but his attorneys got that conviction overturned. Third time, another hung jury. 

Then in 2019, his fourth trial brought a conviction by jury of second-degree murder.  The judge sentenced him to 50 years.

And then...last week, Circuit Judge Sylvester Cox granted Davis, 29, a new trial, after the state's highest court said that Davis's defense lawyers had not been allowed to quiz prospective jurors about their feelings about a defendant's right not to testify.  

Davis, his legal team, and his wife still say he did not kill Jones, but that the police pinned the murder on him, chased him for no reason, and shot and wounded him, leaving a planted gun behind to bolster their case.  

So that's where things stand. One of these statements is true: Davis killed Jones, or he did not. Predictably, the case has jumped from the courthouse to the court of popular opinion, which is where people who don't know what happened that morning in June any more than you or I do nonetheless weigh in with their thoughts. It's how we do things, sad to say.

A certain percentage of citizens believe Davis to be innocent, the victim of police and prosecutorial misconduct. One such individual is Sean Gearhart, 32, who has played his bagpipes during at least one "Free Keith Davis, Jr" rally. 

Fate has ways of bringing people together. Last week, Mosby and some work colleagues were enjoying an evening out at this Sandbar when, all of a sudden, here came Gearhart, with his phone video cranking out a mini movie of him hollering at Mosby, and Mosby replying with hand gestures. 

At first she gave him the thumb, and then gave him the finger, so they say. 

“She flipped me off. That’s all that really happened. The whole ordeal lasted 10 seconds,” Gearhart said later. The photo below is a still from that video.

The first statement from Mosby's office, in reply to media questions, said, “This is clearly a thumb guys — enough already. Let’s move on.”

When more questions were raised about exactly which digit the State's Attorney proffered, Mosby said that Gearhart's actions were threatening.

“Last night while I was out with work colleagues, a male stranger aggressively biked towards me and two female friends and shouted into my unmasked face,” she said in a statement. “As he biked off, I responded the way any normal woman would to a threatening strange man. No woman — elected or otherwise — should be expected to put up with that type of behavior from a man.”

“I’ve been following the Keith Davis Jr. case since it happened,” Gearhart told the Baltimore SUN. “It’s clear that this is personal at this point.”

Zy Richardson, spokeswoman for Mosby, said that Davis supporters have been protesting outside the Mosby family residence, putting flyers on cars in her neighborhood, shouted her down at community forums, and shown up at her daughter's school.

Davis's supporters say they did no such thing at the school.

So that's where we are, and no matter how this next trial comes out, you can already see what the losing side will say - all this commotion has muddied the waters, making it impossible for the truth to be seen.

If you thought I wasn't going to have anything else to say, I'm sorry to let you down. 

First, I think it's time for the Baltimore State's Attorney's office to turn this prosecution over to a visiting prosecutor from another jurisdiction, someone uninvolved and uninterested in the case.

And...there was a time that judges and lawyers and the law were held in respect, but now, we have people riding on bikes in sandy waterfront bars hollering at the state's attorney, and the SA, for her part, making a hand gesture that might be seen as an umpire calling someone out at the plate, or suggesting that he go off and find satisfaction elsewhere. 

At any rate, the founding fathers are shaking their heads.

Has the name "Stormy" been on the list yet?

 

Look out! Here come The Hurricanes!

No, not Rory Storm And The Hurricanes, the bullpen band that Ringo Starr warmed up with before he got with The Beatles. No, the official list of storm names is out, and the fun will be seeing if any of the boys and girls from work and school will have their names buffeted about this summer. 

As always, the weather service predictors are calling for an “above-average" season. They say they can see where we might see as many as 20 named storms forming. And of those 20, maybe 10 will end up becoming hurricanes. (An average season has 14 named storms, of which 7 are hurricanes.) 

This will be on the test: a tropical storm takes one of these names when it features sustained winds of 39 mph. If/when those winds crank up to 74 mph; it's a hurricane.

Swiss people are noted for being neutral in all things. They are not hoping for storms, so don't blame them if we get a bunch this summer. The group that selects the names is the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), out of Geneva, and the names are chosen several years in advance, so just because someone named "Alvin" does something noteworthy one spring, it would have to be a coincidence to have that name on the list.

Same with "Simon" and "Theodore."

If you see your name on the list below, and if "your" storm turns out to be a really destructive or deadly one, the name is retired and you won't have to be tormented about it any more. Right, Katrina?

Hurricane Names 2021:

Ana

Bill

Claudette

Danny

Elsa

Fred

Grace

Henri

Ida

Julian

Kate

Larry

Mindy

Nicholas

Odette

Peter

Rose

Sam

Teresa

Victor

Wanda

"I'm a Neanderthal man..."

There are two key phrases in the world of journalism: "Who what when where why and how" cover the basic instructions to any brand new reporter off to cover a courthouse scandal, or deluxe scented candle, or an assault with an ax handle. The answers to those six questions will tell you all you need to know.

And the other shibboleth, or old custom, required a change in spelling. The concept is "Don't bury the lead," and they meant the "Lead me on" pronunciation, not the "led astray" pronunciation. But so that people wouldn't say "led" me on, they came up with a whole new word - lede - as in "Don't bury the lede."

An example of burying the lede would be "Laura Keene gave an outstanding performance as Florence Trenchard in 'Our American Cousin' at Ford's Theatre last night. A capacity crowd was moved to tears, laughter, and applause during the production, which continues to set box office records in the nation's capitol.

One disappointing aspect of the evening was that Abraham Lincoln, 16th US President, was shot and killed during the second act."

So no, don't bury the lede. Big news goes right up at the top of the story, which is why I found this amusing, during my daily perusal of the latest stories from the world or archeology.

It seems the people digging in Italy found the fossilized remains of nine Neanderthals at a prehistoric cave site south of Rome recently.  They came up with skulls, skull fragments, two teeth and some other bone pieces.

One of the skeleton crew is from between 90,000 and 100,000 years ago, and the other eight probably danced their last rhumbas 50,000 to 68,000 years ago.

All of this turned up at the Guattari Cave in San Felice Circeo, where a Neanderthal skull was discovered in 1939. Local officials say this makes Guattari Cave "as one of the most significant places in the world for the history of Neanderthals."

AND THEN! Here, all the way down at the bottom of the doggone article, they dig a ditch, throw the lede in, and bury it for all time, hidden away from all but the most gimlet-y of eyes: 

Neanderthals died out roughly 40,000 years ago, but small traces of their DNA still exist in modern humans.

So there it is, right from the Associated Press. Neanderthal blood and DNA still course through the veins of the guy who cut you off in traffic the other day, the person who didn't bother to bring their tv along when they moved here from Panama because it only got shows in Spanish, and certainly the person who thought that doubling a cookie recipe to make a double batch meant turning the oven up to 800°. The Neanderthals are still here, and every time we go on social media we see evidence that they are extant yet today.

I'll stop here, because there is a third rule: Don't overstate the obvious.

 

 

 

The Needle And The Contest Won

I'm thinking there should be a new malady associated with the pandemic. Let's call it "Covidnesia," for the tendency of some people to be slightly forgetful when it comes to the details of the pandemic that, might I remind you, has killed 590,000 Americans - so far.

Why I worry about people's memories is that they seem to forget that when the first vaccines came out around Christmas time, people were fairly clamoring to get theirs. Oh, how they hollered, and lined up, and called their cousin's ex-girlfriend's mother-in-law who used to be the Chief Admitting Nurse at Rick Springfield General Hospital to try to get in line. People were even willing to lie about their eligibility, just to get their pfix of Pfizer or their jolt of Johnson and Johnson.

Well, that was then, this is wow. Because from January, there has been a great diminution of demand for COVID vaccine. Not only that, but also, demand has gone way down!

And for all the public yakety-yak about how we'll be fine when we reach herd immunity (also known as "heard" immunity in some quarters), that takes having 70% of the public take the needles. Maryland isn't there yet, and do we think people will still come and get in line?

We do not, which is why affable Maryland governor Lawrence "Hulk" Hogan announced a new gimmick for Maryland residents - it's a chance to snag some serious moolah just for getting the free vaccine that might save your life.

So for this, people need to be paid?

The Maryland Department of Health and the Maryland Lottery have teamed up to create a new sub-lottery.

Beginning tomorrow, May 25, there will be a daily drawing with a prize of $40,000. The excitement doesn't abate until it reaches a crescendo on July 4, when the big winner will walk away with the grand prize of $400,000.

“Entry is very simple — all you have to do is get vaccinated here in Maryland, be a Maryland resident and be 18 or older,” Hogan said.

If you've already had the vax, you're entered, don't worry.  And the Director of Maryland Lottery and Gaming, Gordon Medenica, says it's all being  handled anonymously, so don't sweat about your personal info being used inappropriately. They are setting up a number string on a spreadsheet with name and contact info for each person who got the needle(s).

Hogan, always the master sloganeer, says, “Remember Marylanders: Get your shot for a shot to win. That’s a good line.”

The best news of all is that the prize loot is not coming from the Lottery prize bank, but, rather, from their promotional budget, which will mean fewer corny lottery ads on TV!

And that makes us all winners already!

Philadelphia freedom, I looove you, Yes I do!

Series television shows really got fancy in the 80's with some very clever writing and stories. There was the ending of "St Elsewhere," the medical show in which it turned out that the whole show was actually all in the mind of a young man who lived with autism, and saw a snow globe with a miniature version of the hospital.

There was "Newhart," which technically ended in the 90s, but the final scene was all about Bob Newhart dreaming that this show was all a dream. He woke up to tell his wife from the first show all about the nutty cast of the second.

And who can forget when "Dallas" had slipped in the ratings because Bobby Ewing died, so they had him come back, and the whole thing where he died was just a bad dream, since his wife found him taking a shower one morning a year later.

And the classic "L.A. Law" way of getting rid of an unlikeable character by having her descend in an elevator. Or not.

Which reminds me of a story from Philadelphia the other day. Philadelphia, you might have heard, is a large city in Pennsylvania, a state founded by pacifist Quakers, and Philly is a city where football fans once booed Santa Claus.

So, in a high rise building, three guys get into a fight, presumably over the longtime Phila controversy about whether Cheez Whiz or provolone is the better coagulation of milk casein to apply on a steak sub.

Whatever the reason, the brawl raged on, as brawls will, and it was all fun until they all fell at least eight stories down the elevator shaft.

I guess the eighth floor of the 251 DeKalb Apartments residence was not the best choice for a mêlée. One guy was atop the elevator car when it landed on the second floor and he was able to say, "Well, at least I didn't fall all the way to the first floor!" like the other two did. 

"The steel elevator door, when you push the button the door opens, they broke through that door and there was no elevator there so they just fell eight floors to the bottom,” said Upper Merion Police Lt. Al Elverson, a master of breaking things down for easy understanding.

Tenant Derrell Washington told the local news, “That’s not an elephant that flew into the elevator. It’s three humans. I’m pretty sure it was faulty equipment.”

“Elevators are supposed to have a bunch of fail-safes so I don’t know why it would’ve had trouble,” fellow resident Jared Day added.

All three combatants were transported to local hospitals and given huge salty pretzels*.  Meanwhile, back at the apartments, Nicole Coello was saying,"I saw a lady earlier today and she was taking her dog and her dog was scared but she was like I’m not taking the elevator right now and she was pushing it downstairs."

And that's all I know about it.

* another local favorite