“Life is partly what we make it, and partly what it is made by the friends we choose.”

Tennessee "Tuxedo" Williams said that quote above, and I have to agree.  

I am, by nature, gregarious, and also, I enjoy meeting new people and maintaining friendships old and new.  People are endlessly fascinating to me, because each and every one of our fellow citizens is like an artichoke.  You keep finding layer after layer of good things, and it's always fun to discover that someone you know happens to be the world champion in hopscotch.  

Scotch has a lot to do with a lot of people I know, come to think of it.

But really, finding out that one of my parents' friends was a man who earned a handful of ribbons and stars at the Battle of the Bulge was a big deal to me.  Everyone is more than they seem.

And sometimes, just being what we seem to be is more than enough.

I bring all this up because of something stunning on my facebook page.  I noticed the other night that I have a stunning amount of friends there.  Now look, as BHO would say: they're not all close boon companions or anything.  In fact, you could categorize them pretty well in five groups:

•  really close friends!
• kinfolk by blood or marriage
• people I have known since I was a barefoot boy with cheek of tan
• people I have never met but we friended because of fic's (friends in common)
• people I went to school with or knew long ago 

 
I am a lucky man.  I look at the tiny pictures of my friends and for each one, I recall a dozen happy memories right off the bat. Maybe I'm crazy, but I'd rather have my friends than all the money in the world.  Friends can say nice things and support us when we're down, pat us on the back in good times and bad, and make a crumby day into a slice of crumb-cake in a jiffy. 

We have Mother's Day and Father's Day and Arbor Day and Doris Day: all great celebrations.  I think that at least one day a month, we all should take time to thank our friends for being our friends.

Thanks, friends! I appreciate it!

Bad Office Manners

Never ones to be outdone, the good folks at the Comcast website have published a list of the Top Ten obnoxious things that people do at work.  I looked it over, but I can't say they hit everything.  I mean, for some people, the obnoxiety starts before they even GET to work, the way they drive and, once there, take up two places or so.  The other day, we got an email advising that someone had parked out front in a B.A. Ford Excursion, taking up FOUR spots at once.  That's got to be some sort of record, but where would you look it up?

I haven't even taken a gander at the Comcast list of offensive things to do at work.  I thought of my own - and I must point out that this list is not reflective of where I work now!  Those people are all angels, and put up with my singing and bad jokes. 

But let's go with:

I like to use a picture every day. Say hi to Phil Silvers!

1. wearing stanky cologne or perfume or aftershave, or having other forms of bodystank.  Will cause people to use the fisheye.
2. playing someone's favorite music loudly on a scratchy cheap broken clock radio that they didn't want in their bedroom any longer, it's such a brokedown relic, but it's good enough to play Cyndi Lauper's execrable "Time After Time" every day around 10.
3. having an office that looks like the Rain Forest down at the Aquarium, with vines and trailing arbutus hanging in one's face when one stops by to pick up the Bramblebury account folder.  Notice: this sort of foliage is often accompanied by macrame.  Beware.
4. Setting up what looks like the Salad Bar area from a Golden Corral buffet on the work area.  
5. Similarly, setting up what looks (and smells like) the coffee section at a WaWa.  Mr Coffee, Keurig, French Press, Drip-O-Lator: we've seen all the coffee setups in offices, with the little note about remembering to feed the kitty, and the IOU's in the coffee mug where dollars ought to be.
6. The people who have something to sell on behalf of their children, fraternal group or Chowder And Marching Society every week.  Every so often, sure, and everyone likes a chance to purchase pizzas and candles and popcorn, especially when it benefits a good cause.  But...every week?? For young Brattleboro's Free Form Ballet group?  How much candy can we eat?
7. Smokers who congregate right by the door so they can exhale something KOOL right in your face as you enter the building.  I am sorry for smokers, a group that once numbered me among them, but I am willing to betcha that most smokers would still go out and puff up if they were required to put on some sort of clown costume and ride around the parking lot on a unicycle while getting their nicotine fix.
8. People whose cell phones are set on maximum volume with the weirdest ringtones you ever heard...and will hear...all day.  Enchanting as the lilting love ballad "Beaten, Gagged, Bound and Chained," by Sadie O' Masochist might be to you, others  might find it, well, repugnant.
9. People who "speak' to service personnel by using only hand gestures (pointing the index finger at them, and then pointing that finger at a spill or pile or trash) or third-person irregular ("Custodial! Custodial! Overflowing bidet in executive men's room!")
10. Insensitive, inappropriate "jokes" or comments about someone else's race, color, creed, ethnic background, physical condition, area of domicile, or sexual preference tell us a lot about the boors who spout this bilge.

That's your Top Ten, and be sure to tune in next week to see if anything changes.  "Using swear words, cheap vulgar terms or taking the Lord's name in vain" is moving up fast!
 

Look at me, I'm an Old Timer already

And then was I was 16, I decided to end my on-and-off romance with Sandra Dee.  I say "on-and-off" because her lawyers told me if they caught me ON her property again they would see to it that I was hauled OFF to jail. Just kidding. I've never been to Hollywood or even any further west than Oakland...Maryland. Sandra was my first crushlet, but I doubt that she even knew I existed.  Had she known the depths of my love and devotion, she certainly wouldn't have married that Bobby Darin character.  I just loved her, but I'm sure I was only one of millions of young men whose hearts were set aflutter by the adorable visage of the woman born Alexandra Zuck.

So, I decided to join my local volunteer fire company to put Sandra's rejection behind me, and in June, 1967, I joined the Providence Volunteer Fire Company. I always point out that if the requirement for high school kids to do a certain amount of public service hours had been in place back then, that would have been one high school requirement I could accomplish easily.  I spent many an hour learning the skills of firefighting and putting those skills to work in all sorts of emergency situations.  Not only did this teenage avocation lead directly to the career path I have followed in the public safety field, it taught me lots of things that come in handy to this day, such as preparation.  I never pull into a parking spot or garage; I always back in, so I can leave without delay if I need to. I never enter a gathering hall without scouting out all the exits, and to the many shop owners and grocery store managers I have hectored over the years when their fire exit doors were blocked, I am not the least bit sorry.  I always make sure to have emergency tools and equipment and basic life support gear in my vehicle - you never know when they will come in handy.

And more valuable than anything are the relationships with the people from the volunteer days.  We had our "Old Timer's Night" the other evening, and if you ever want to feel your bones creaking, just open your mailbox one day and find yourself on the Old Timer's list for anything.  Boom. Reach for the Geritol. Some of the guys have gone to their rewards, in many cases far too soon, and lots are still kickin' around and have gone on to see their children take their own places in the fire company.  That's got to be an awesome feeling. 

As you might expect, the science of firefighting and handling emergencies in general has changed a billion percent since 1967.  The predominant theory in those days was, if something's burning, or some fluid is somewhere where there shouldn't be fluid, pour many hundreds of gallons of water on it.  Since then, we have learned that for certain types of fires and hazardous material situations, the last thing you'd want to do is add water, but again, we did what we knew how back then.  


And no one ever dreamed, 44 Septembers ago, that a foreign enemy would so coldly and calculatingly hijack airplanes full of jet fuel for really long flights and crash them into buildings and the Pentagon (and try for the Capitol, only to be thwarted by incredibly brave men and women).  No one ever envisioned the resultant hellish inferno of 9/11/01, and no fire department anywhere ever lost 343 firefighters in one Stygian river of pain and agony until that awful Tuesday.


The ineffable loss of that day can't be summed up in words, which might be why, even as the tenth anniversary of 9/11 approaches, we haven't seen a flood of books and special editions of magazines on the topic.  Better to let symbols speak for us, and that is behind the significance of my old company obtaining a section of a steel beam from the World Trade Center.  It was acquired through New York City officials, and brought down to the fire house here outside Baltimore to serve as an inspiration, a touchstone, a sacred symbol of the losses of that day, and the resolve that saw the nation through them.  It will be mounted outside the meeting/training room, where everyone will have a chance to be in the presence of something that was with those 343.  The significance is profound, and the fact that our Old Timer's Night came five days after the death of the bastard bin Laden, who wreaked this wretchedness, reminds me that, in whatever fiery corner he now dwells, my only regret is that it took almost ten years. AMF, OBL.

During those ten years, the lovely Sandra Dee, my childhood ideal of beauty and wholesomeness and all attractive things, passed away (2005).  I'm sure she is in a special sweet place in Heaven.  


They tell that it's not for us to predict or discuss, but I'm gonna go out on a beam here and say that bin Laden is far, far away from there. 

Sunday Rerun: Fishing for Compliments

When you order Chilean Sea Bass

at Chez Can You Sea, would you let me know if you would have ordered it if it were on the menu under its original name: Patagonian Toothfish?

Hah?






Monkfish (r)

is another one.  Nice name, makes you think of a frugal, monastic sort of person who would order this especially on Fridays.  Fishmongers started selling this fish heavily a few years ago and promoted it as "poor man's lobster."  Well, this poor man didn't confuse it with lobster, but maybe that's because I remember these guys when they used to be called Goosefish.  And the taste won't make you forget lobster at all.  You know what it really tastes like?  Monkfish!

It's all in the nomenclature.  I love how real estate developers, building new houses in a crime-ridden, sketchy part of town, name the streets "Hobson's Choice Lane" and "Admiral's Helm Way."  Well, I checked with Hobson, and his choice is not to live in a neighborhood where gunfire rings out like downtown Beirut every night.  The Admiral steered himself a good many nautical miles away as well.  And watch for this trick:  say they build some houses in Stankville, but the crime rate in Stankville rivals that of Crackton in The

Simpsons.  Down the road in the valley, a good 10 miles away is the quiet hamlet of Happytown.  The developer will name the new community Happytown Heights, sure as shooting.  If you will.

One more fish story - and these are all true examples of modern piscatorial marketing at its best - everyone loves Orange

Roughy, right? (There it is, on the right >>)
I mean, it sounds perfect. Orange, so you feel like you're getting some fruit, and Roughy, so you're adding a good bit of roughage.  And the taste is so...so...so-so.  Still, you order it because it sounds good now.  Back in the day, they called these beauties Slimeheads.  Not what you want to order on a first date, unless your date comes from Crackton!

Don't Cell Yourself Short

Now that we have the bin Laden matter wrapped up satisfactorily, there are other concerns plaguing the nation, and we should discuss them, if you have a minute.

I don't think there is a more pressing concern than cell phone etiquette.  Take ringtones. Currently, people within one hundred yards of me get to hear "Roll Tide Roll," as performed by the University of Alabama Million Dollar Band when someone calls.  I can also switch over to that bell sound from the beginning of AC/DC's "Hells' Bells" or the theme songs to TV favorites "The Price Is Right" or "Human Target," or one of those cartoon sound effects: hapless pedestrian slips on banana peel, guy gets clomped on melon by frying pan.  I like to mix it up.

It's for you

But please don't use some soppy love ballad with intensely personal lyrics if you want to avoid the stankeye when you're in line at Pete Ceria's and someone calls you and everyone else waiting hears "Crazy" by Patsy Cline, or "Blue" by LeAnn Rimes, or "The World is a Horrible Place Full of Pain and Misery and I Don't Know How Much Longer I Can Possibly Hold onto my Sanity or my Position" by Tori Amos. Also, you want to be careful where you are and what your posture is, should you get an incoming ring-a-ling and your ringtone is that "I Love Big Butts" song.  

And clearly, I don't know what goes on in ladies' rooms, and perhaps it's best that I don't.  But guys in stalls on cell phones?  Really, men! Nothing will weird your afternoon quite like ankling up to the porcelain and hearing this from the stall:

"Really good baby...yeah...you know I'm your man..."

or

"It makes that rrrr-rrrr-rrrrrr noise every time I turn it on..."

or

"You got papers on me? I got papers on YOU!"

or, perhaps worst of all:
 
"Hi there!"

There needs to be a signal, some sort of way to let those not in the stall know that the person in the stall just has to be on the phone right now, so his remarks, although tender or humorous or just plain weird, are not meant for you.  In college, a necktie hanging on a doorknob is an indication that the person within is getting with the hibbidy-dibbidy, and barging in would not be appreciated.  In business, a white placard in the front window is a signal for the FedEx man to stop.  Two palms upraised by a third-base coach let a ballplayer know not to try to go past third.  Similarly, two hands upraised by Dick Cheney's friends mean "Stop! Don't Shoot!"

Signs, signs, everywhere a sign.  

And of course, the ultimate rude cell behavior - taking a phone call OUT LOUD during a movie, concert, play or bris. The last three are great examples of live performances in which the performers really need to concentrate on their craft. My buddy Dennis down in Prince Frederick points out that we should assume that anyone who brings a live cell phone to such events must be on the waiting list for a vital organ. If the phone should ring, it's The Uvula Center, calling about their replacement part.

Just take your seat, and we'll come and get you when that call comes in!

Bunker Mentality

I saw an interesting story about Cary Grant on CBS Sunday Morning on Sunday morning, and they shared the old one about the time Cary Grant showed up without a ticket for some sort of Hollywood gala.  Without looking at him, the lady taking tickets said, "Who are you?" and the Sultan of Suave, the Cardinal of Cool, the High Priest of Handsome said, "I'm Cary Grant."  And the ticket lady looked up and said, "You don't look like Cary Grant," and the Übermensch of Urbanity replied, "No one does."

And they didn't tell the one  - and try to stop me if you've heard it before - where a reporter on deadline, writing a story about the Dean of Dapper, sent a telegram to his agent asking, "HOW OLD CARY GRANT?"  And Grant himself got the wire and sent a reply: "OLD CARY GRANT JUST FINE. HOW YOU?"

We know that Cary Grant was born Archibald Leach in England and that he took his stage name by looking for names that started with a 'C' and a 'G' because that combination had been lucky for Clark Gable and Gary Cooper.  (Not so much for Charles Grodin, but it also worked great for George Clooney and Curious George!) It wouldn't have lessened his total coolness by one whit had he gone into the movies with the name Archie Leach, would it?

Sammy's famous scene

Wally

Archie

Archie Bunker: that would not have been as cool, but then again the laughable lug from "All In The Family" was saying goofy flamethrowing things 40 years ago that today sound a lot like a certain party's leading presidential candidates, if you catch my drift.  Did you know that when Norman Lear and his writers were crafting the role of Archie Bunker for Carroll O'Connor, they settled on the surname Bunker because of its connotations with hunkering down in the bunker of long-held specious theories, and then they planned to call him "Wally" Bunker because that name sounded so typical of a New York kinda guy.  No sports fans, they.  But just before they started shooting the pilot for the series, someone pointed out that the Orioles had a pretty good right-handed pitcher by the name of Wally Bunker, a flamethrower whose career peaked with a win in the '66 World Series over the Dodgers.

Cary Grant, Archie Bunker, Wally Bunker.  Three men with nothing in common, and yet, here I am writing about them. 

What do you get when you cross an overly licentious individual with an encyclopedia?

I might be opening a giant can of worms here, so I'll say right up front, I don't know how I feel about all this.  But I value what I hear from y'all quite highly, so here's what happened, and let's talk about it.

When Peggy and I were in an antique store last week up in PA, I was waiting to buy some old LIFE magazines when I saw four people huddled around an old book. Apparently, the book was a now-outdated volume on astronomy.  

Any book on astronomy is outdated as soon as someone with a telescope finds a new planet or asteroid flying around, anyway.

But in this case, a youngster, male, roughly ten years of age, was holding forth on the shortcoming and inaccuracies he had found in the book.  For one thing, I am quite certain that this young fella knows a lot more about what's up in the sky than I do.  I do remember the mnemonic device M VEM J SUN, which helped us learn the planets in order: Mercury Venus Earth Mars Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune.  In those days, Pluto was a dog in the pre-frozen Disney era, and then it became a planet, and now it isn't again. But that is all I know, I'm telling you, and if this young man was discoursing on how and why the book was wrong, I'd have had to take him at his word.

But the man who ran the store was beaming! And the boy's parents were a-beam! And the boy beamed more brightly than the sun! They beamed all four, as he explained why the book was wrong.  And then he continued ranting about how much he knew about all this, and why didn't someone just let HIM write a book, and everyone else is just dumb dumb dumb, and the man who ran the store beamed no more.  The parents and the boy were the only three beamers left, as they turned to foray more deeply into the aged merchandise, the better for Einstein, Jr., to find more things that have changed since the day they were made.

And here comes the kicker:  As they ankled by me, triumphantly, I noticed that the buy wore a t-shirt with this printed on front:

 I was able to find the image at right through a quick Google search.  There are thousands of images for this, which I take to be the defiant slogan of the homeschool community.  These parents were definitely, defiantly, proud of their unsocialized little asteroid.


I look at it this way: people who are very smart and well-educated and sensible, and who have the time and inclination to do so, should, by all means, school their children at home IF they can also find a way to incorporate socialization into the curriculum.  Being unsocialized is one of four ways NOT to go through life, the others being (say it with me) "Fat, drunk and stupid."  


As to the education aspect, again, if you know what you're doing, go ahead.  It's just that I once talked to a person who said, "I don't want no kid of mine in no public school.  They don't teach 'em nothin'!" See, it's been my experience that people don't talk that way to me at noon, and then speak like John Gielgud when they get home.  Bad grammar sticks around, even when people try to bring out the good.  


And even people who use good grammar and teach it to their kids are not apt to be scholars in every field, which is why schools employ more than one teacher.  There are math teachers, science teachers, history teachers, French teachers,  physical education teachers, metal shop teachers, home ec teachers, fried shrimp, shrimp salad and...well, you know.  Being well-intended and following an approved curriculum guide: is that enough?  


And the socialization skills that come from being in a building with others of the same age can't be replaced by sitting at the kitchen table while mom cooks dinner and talks about the Peloponnesian Wars.  There's a real skill in asking out a girl during a class break and then, five minutes later, having to go to the front of the class and solve for 'x' in a complicated equation.  Depending on the girl's answer, the equation of your life may or may not have just become more complicated, and you still have to solve for 'x'.


So, again, I'd like some opinions on homeschooling from those who have tried it or even those who have not.  I can see that a capable parent or two would make a fine teacher, but there is more to school than readin', writin' and cipherin'.  There's socializin', too!

It's Too Oily

So Osama bin Laden is dead. Navy SEALS did him in, although the lanky terrorist son of a millionaire went down firing. Not what you'd call a great loss, and still our fighting forces had the dignity to follow the traditional Muslim rituals of washing the body and wrapping it in a white sheet before burying it at sea off the bow of the USS Carl Vinson.  

This wraps up the most intense manhunt in our nation's history and opens up a slot on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List, where bin Laden has resided since shortly after that awful day in 2001.  He's probably going to be replaced by a bank robber from Oregon named Rob Banks, or a guy who steals airplanes in flight, named Hi Jackson.

George Bush and his henchman, Mr Cheney, could not accomplish this and it's to President Obama's great credit that under his direction, bin Laden was taken care of in the best way possible.  Of course, people are now quick to holler that Obama's success in this venture was just piggybacking on the groundwork laid by Bush's staff, which, if you will stop to think about it, DID NOT CAPTURE BIN LADEN so this jelly is full of sour grapes.

It gave the nation cause to celebrate, and as soon as that tumult quiets down some, maybe we can stop and look around and figure out what's next.

Retaliation seems a given, but you have to wonder where...and how.  We have learned a lot since 2001, and we have to hope that our intelligence will enable us to head off a return punch from the horrible terrorists over in the Mideast. 

Meanwhile, oil prices went down and so did the stock market.  But if you were losing sleep over how well our good neighbors down at Exxon are doing, well, rest easy: (from Bloomberg News)

Exxon Mobil Corp., the world’s largest company by market value, posted its largest profit in almost three years as soaring gasoline prices fueled discontent among consumers and policymakers. 

With U.S. motorists paying the most for gasoline since prices reached a record $4.11 a gallon in the summer of 2008, Exxon said that its first-quarter net income jumped 69 percent to $10.7 billion. The Irving, Texas-based company is sitting on a cash pile of $13.2 billion, even after distributing more than $7 billion to shareholders in buybacks and dividends. 

Net income in Jan-Feb-Mar '11 = $10,700,000,000.  Minus the cost of the calendars they gave away, and the juice glasses with every fillup, and the road maps...wait.  What?  They don't give anything away any more?  And they took in 10.7 BILLION semolians?  An oil company did that?

Well, who cares?  The other night it was time to buy some pretty plants to decorate the front porch where Peggy and I will sit on a summer evening, listening to:

• crickets chirping
• carloads of angry teenagers with low-riding cars with speakers the size of tanning beds
• the guy down the street and his wife bickering 
• and the ballgame.  

All the while swatting 'skeeters.  And we needed little plastic pans to catch the runoff water from the planters.

 Two plastic pans, the size of dinner plates, at Home Depot, $3.49 each.  They're made of a petroleum derivative. 

It's a gas!

The Land Down Under

It happened in an outlet mall, at a place called either Socks Galore or Socks, Socks and More Socks.  Peggy whispered to me, "Do you need boxer shorts?"

Like most men, I need new underwear but keep on wearing the old.  Once you get used to a pair, it's tough to say goodbye, and if you're going to say,"Oh look! You have a couple of holes in you!" and then toss away an otherwise perfectly fine pair, well, what does that say about your loyalty?

So the answer there is, of course I do, and I'd be willing to see about investing in some new ones if they are of an interesting plaid pattern, or show Stewie Griffin doing something outrageous.  But the amusing thing is that Peggy, always the discreet one between us, whispered this to me, lest the teenager at the register hear talk of What's Underneath It All.

Not I.

I lack discretion, among other things.  I'll tell you right here and now that I wear underwear.  I think most of us do.  I'd just as soon not be seen publicly wearing underwear, so I spare my neighbors the sight of me darting out to chase the trash truck with my B.A. drawers flapping behind me.  I do find it amusing that so many people would just about have a conniption if you walked in on them and they were only wearing their skivvies, but will wear less than that ten minutes later, prancing down to the beach. And this goes for both men and women, although I will have to say that you'll see Donald Trump wearing a crew cut before you'll see me in a Speedo®.  You're welcome.


I have never had problems buying anything for anyone in any kind of store, and of course, that usually means asking someone a question.  I can tell you how they figure a baseball player's slugging percentage, I can tell you three different ways to get anywhere around here (scenic route, quickest route, or shortest), and I can bake an apple pie from scratch, but, for all my many failings, I cannot tell you what "wings" are - as in, the kind of wings on certain products only used by the female gender and sold in that one aisle at the Try 'N' Buy down which most males will not venture.  All I need is to have it written down - blue box, pink writing, "wings," and then I show it to a woman, asking, "Is this the right thing?" Simple. 

How do I know the woman knows what I'm trying to buy? Simple again.  Women know everything they need to know!

Make Your Breaks

I once met a man whose life was not turning out the way he had seen it unspooling in his youthful dreams.  Problem seemed to be that no one accepted him for the genius that he was (or considered himself to be).  He had a very good job in his 20s but quit that in a moment of peevishness, and then began that slow, sad spiral of descent that leaves those around him wrinkling their brows and shaking their shaggy heads.  He sold aluminum siding, but "Baltimore's a crummy town for selling something like that."  He worked in a retail store, but "I can't deal with these jerks, always wanting to buy something they don't even know how to operate." He worked for a drugstore, but "business is way down and I got laid off."  Back to his original line of work, he got an entry-level job up the road in the field in which he once was a supervisor, but that didn't work because "They were out to get me from Day One.  They knew I coulda come in there and run the place, so of course they wanted to keep me out of their lives."  Another job didn't work out because "they stacked the deck so I was physically unable to do the work."  

A cynic might point out that if aluminum were magnetic, most of Baltimore would be facing the North Pole, for all the siding on our houses.  It's amazing that people here don't have their cars enhanced with siding. Also, money spent by people on things they don't need or can't work right is called "money just the same" in most towns. The drug business around here - and I'm speaking only of the Rx's from your kindly doctor - means we keep seeing drugstores the size of the Astrodome on most big corners. No one is out to get anyone. Most firms welcome the chance to hire someone who might have innovative ways and usable ideas for the business. And employers with openings really don't have the time, money or the inclination to hire people clearly unable to do the work.  Employers tend not to have time to stack decks, unless they're in the porch business.

I thought about this man, whom I haven't seen in many a summer, because the other day at a work event I met a young woman who works for our local school system as a night-shift custodian.  I am fascinated by "off-hours" jobs like that, so of course, right away I had to ask if she ever goes to the band room late at night and pounds on the bass drum ("no") or blasts a note on the tuba ("No!") because, truth to tell, those are things I would do.  But we had a while to chat, waiting for something to happen for this event, and she told me that she and her husband both work the overnight shift - he as a nursing assistant in a nursing home - and go to college in the afternoon - she for paralegal studies, he for his RN degree.  Her sister lives with them and functions as baby sitter for their little girl and will do so for their little one on the way with a July arrival.  

That's a couple of heapin' plates right there: jobs, school, parenting.  She told me that she had seen people who just sat and waited for life to come to them, for all their dreams to come true, and she had vowed as a young woman that she would not be like that.  So she works, maybe not in the most glamorous of jobs for now, but she is on the track to making her life what she wants it to be.

And somewhere along the way, she realized that if she and her husband wanted the better things in life, she and her husband would be two fine candidates for the job of making that happen.

I'm willing to bet that good things will come her way, and even though cynics like my man above here will say, "Oh they got a lucky break/ they knew someone/ they were in the right place at the right time? etc etc etc," this lady and her husband will know better than that how they got there.

I don't know where I'll be in thirty years, but I bet I know where these two will wind up! 

Crime means punishment

Last week, Monday evening, one of the brilliant young people in our town, all of 13, went out in his backyard and aimed his laser pointer at the Maryland State Police helicopter flying overhead on a training mission.

This had the result of temporarily blinding the two pilots and one paramedic in the aircraft.  Big fun, huh?

But the thirteen-year-old then ran back into his own house, which was spotlighted by the MSP chopper, whose crew radioed to county police, who drove over to the youngster's house and filed juvie papers on him for reckless endangerment and unsafe use of a laser device.  They also confiscated the laser device. Experienced police were able to deduce that the youngster was an inexperienced prankster, because he ran to his own house while being jacklighted like a deer by the helicopter!

By now the young man has had time to repent.  I wonder, though, how will his parents weigh in on this.  Two scenarios come to mind:

a) his parents will realize that his actions placed the lives of three people in jeopardy, along with those on the ground, others in the air, and the aircraft itself and take appropriate measures, e.g. grounding him until his honeymoon

b) his parents will say this was a harmless prank, and why the heck are those nasty old police picking on young Brattleboro, who was only expressing himself in his own back yard?

Now, the truth is, Peggy and I don't have any kids of our own, because of certain codicils in the Smoot-Hawley Tariffs and the Stamp Act.  But one thing I do know about child-rearin' is, the parents ought to be the ones to a) model the correct behavior and b) point it out to the child when the child fails to a).   I hear all the time from parents who don't want to hurt little Petunia's fragile ego by correcting her, and all the while, Petunia keeps acting up, doing anything she can to get her parents' attention for a minute, hoping for some direction in her 17-year-old life.

Anyway, back to Brainiac and his pointer, this is not really something to make fun of.  We have to hope that either his parents or the juvenile justice system will see that he learns the error of his ways.   A great deal of today's parents are loath to correct their children, lest they harm their psyches in some way.  I'm telling you this: kids want direction, same as you do when you set out on a car trip for Ashtabula.  You don't want just to drive around until you stumble upon the Ohio town whose name derives from softening the Algonquin Indian term originally pronounced "Hush-tah-buh-lah", which means "River of many fish."

You know the Native American term for parents who don't take the time to provide direction to their children? They don't have one! They teach their children well!

Dateline: The American Future

"What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish?

Son of man, you cannot say, or guess

for you know only 

a heap of broken images

where the sun beats."   T S Eliot  from "The Waste Land"

 If you saw NBC's Dateline a couple of Sundays ago, I'm sure your heart was touched by the story of the young man named Vanya, born in Moscow to an unfit mother and given over to the state because he was challenged. He has cerebral palsy, but he was placed in the Russian version of mental institutions as a child.  His life there was horrible, a Dickensian nightmare, and through a remarkable series of coincidences and lucky breaks, he was adopted by a woman in Bethlehem, PA, and now lives here, loved and loving.

I found it more than a bit ironic that this program aired on the same weekend that Congress narrowly averted shutting down the government by agreeing to a 2011 federal budget that contains billions of dollars worth of cuts to early childhood development programs, job training for unemployed workers, energy assistance for needy families, and family planning programs.  This was all pushed through by the Republican majority in the House, and it doesn't even begin to satisfy the hollering coming from tea partiers who want funding for all sorts of good things cut way, way back. At the same time, the GOP defends spending 295 billion dollars this year on Bush era tax cuts for wealthy people and big corporations they own.

So, when today's young rightwingers have children, let's hope and pray that none of them have special needs or disabilities.  Or at least, we'd better hope that the parents of children so challenged also happen to own oil companies or Wall Street banks, because we are dashing headlong down the road to taking away everything that makes America so great. 

Now is the time for your tears

And meanwhile, just so there is always a circus to take the peoples' minds off the lack of bread, the Republicans offer the lurid spectacle of a Donald Trump presidential candidacy.  

That's Donald Trump, who once said, "I'm a bit of a P. T. Barnum. I make stars out of everyone."

That's P.T. Barnum, who once said, "There's a sucker born every minute."

Letters! We get letters!

I didn't think this kind of email was still going around, but I got it recently, right in the old inbox, and it tickles me that this person who never even met me was able to know me so well.  Here's what she wrote:


Hello my dear,
Complements of the season to you. I wish to express my sincere gratitude to you. My name is Miss Rejoice Xxxxxx.
I am a young beautiful girl with full of love and caring and also romantic. well I come in contact with your profile  and I loved it so i decided to write you this mail. I hope we can click together as one body and soul.

Please I will appreciate if you can use my mail address to contact me directly to my mailbox and at the same time I will show you my picture and you also know more about me. Moreover, I want you to know that distance ,race or religion is never a barrier in the course of love.

Thanks for your love, understanding and co-operation. Please I hope favorably to get your reply, contact me with this email address above.
Yours sincerely,
Rejoice.....

Normally,when I receive an email of this sort, I react with interest.  That's because usually, the letter contains the news that the writer's late husband, Mr Lovedaddy, had served as a consular official deep in the nation of Baki-Baki, and had recently passed away following a lengthy illness.  Imagine how surprised she was, as she went through his personal effects, to find a sum of $4.3 US squirreled away in a secret offshore bank account.  In case you just got email yesterday and have never seen one of these before, the hook is, she can't figure out how to smuggle the loot out of Baki-Baki and into the First National Bank in Sandy Shorts, Ohio.  And here's how you come in:  just send her your social security number, credit card number with PIN, and any and all other personal data, to prove that you're honest, along with $43,000 earnest money, and she will arrange to put those 4.3 million smackers right into your account!  And also, you'll wake up with Mila Kunis!


So, I have to wonder what "Rejoice" (maybe her mother's name was "Joyce" and she's a Junior) is up to here, and of course I will never know.  She's only fooling herself if she saw anything about my profile anywhere that would lead anyone to find me anyhow romantic. And while I agree that distance, race or religion would never be barriers to the true course of love, her lousy spelling ("complements" of the season), awkward syntax ("Please I hope favorably to get your reply") and use of a comma to separate two independent clauses has spelled a sad end to our love, before it even went aborning.


Pity, when you think of what might have been, eh?

I hope they have fun

Aye Aye Aye do!

So, tomorrow, who's going to get up at 4 in the yawning to watch these two crazy kids get hitched?  Show of hands...one..two..three?

I remain amazed by the devotion of some Americans to the Royal Family.  I understand the devotion of English people to their activities, but until we see people wearing the Union Jack t-shirts to a Kennedy wedding, it does not seem to be reciprocated, and that upsets our balance of foreign trade.

True, his mother was an incandescent beauty and seemed to be a good soul.  People loved her around the world because she tried to do good things for people everywhere.  And when she met her end, it was not tough to understand the sorrow and the grief.

But, had I met Lady Di somewhere - at a baseball game, shopping at the outlet malls, or at a crab feast down at someone's shore house - I would not have felt compelled to bow and call her "Your Majesty," or "Lady Diana" or "Princess of Wales."  She was younger than I, and I, in all my grace, would have been perfectly at ease saying, "Hello, Diana; I'm Mark.  How are you?"  or a breezy, "Yo Di! 'Sup?"

Prince William here, or "Wills," same thing.  "Billy! Mr Willsworth!  Gettin' married! Flyin' a helicopter!  Whirlybird Willie!" I would chant, until a guy with a stiff upper lip and a tweed vest walked up to me and said, "Now see 'ere!  Hrrrrmph!"


I also read that Willie is not planning to wear a wedding ring.  Well, sir, mine has been on my left meathook since 1973 and will not be coming off.  That little band of gold means that a wonderful woman was willing to commit her love to me, and joined us for all time in the circle of love in which we dwell.  And I hope that his thinking isn't, well, "I can still do the 'in 'n' out scream 'n' shout' and no one will know I'm married."  This sort of poor thinking has led to trouble for people such as Gary Hart and Tiger Woods, and he ought to avoid angering his grandmother, "Queen" Elizabeth, who seems to have even less of a sense of humor than John Boehner.

Gary "Glitter" Goldsmith

I also read that Kate, or Kate, as she likes to be called, has a drunk uncle named Gary Goldsmith, who sold his computer business for $275 million, canoodles with hookers, does cocaine on video and has now, according to reports, been told by Palace bigshots to knock it off.  I bet you anything, a guy with a stiff upper lip and a tweed suit and a mustache and a monocle showed up and said, "Now see 'ere, Mr Goldsmith..."


Mom's a drama queen, uncle-in-law's a party guy, brother dresses in Nazi regalia.  I just figured out why Americans love these people so much.  They're just like us after all!

Final Salute to Cpl Buckles

Not far from where we live in the northeast Baltimore suburbs is the little community of Pikesville, home to the headquarters for the Maryland State Police.  Their administration building is in a complex of buildings old and new.  One of them was built as a United States Arsenal in 1819 and was a military post and weapons storage site until 1879, when it was turned over the state of Maryland.  The State, needing to find a home for 130 Confederate Civil War veterans, turned it into the Confederate Soldiers Home in 1888. On the site, the old rebels grew their own food and put on their dress grays every June 10 to celebrate something called Confederate Decoration Day.  (I never heard of it, either.)  But when the Depression was at its worst in 1932 and there were only two Johnny Rebs left, they were moved to private homes, where, for who knows how long, they kept hollering "Forget, hell!"  And the old building became State Police Headquarters.

So, the reason I was thinking about old soldiers is that Frank W. Buckles, the last American World War I veteran, passed away not long ago on his farm in West Virginia.  The last known survivor! Close to 5 million Americans served in World War I, our involvement being from 1917 - 1918, and Mr Buckles outlived them all!

 "I knew there'd be only one someday," he said a few years back. "I didn't think it would be me."

"We have lost a living link to an important era in our nation's history," Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric K. Shinseki said of Mr. Buckles. "But we have also lost a man of quiet dignity who dedicated his final years to ensuring the sacrifices of his fellow doughboys are appropriately commemorated."

You can read history in books, magazines, encyclopedias, and online.  But, just as one picture is worth a thousand words, one original source who saw the original picture is bound to be better than a lot of words written by people who didn't.  I wish I could have talked to Mr Buckles, or to those two age-old Confederate soldiers. 

Nothing like hearing about how things were from someone who was there!

Cpl. Buckles 1917

The obituary in the Washington POST made an excellent point - how many other people, born during the William McKinley administration, lived long enough to have a Facebook page?  When he was born, 110 years ago, had you told his parents that someday, their son would be living in an age when we had a pocket-sized device that was a phone, a portable information source, and a camera all in one, what would they have said? 

Or what if you had told them that Americans would have been to the moon, flown through the sky, sent moving pictures through the air and elected an African-American president? 

Those of you having babies this year - I hope they all live to be 110 and will see the same phenomenal growth in our nation.  I would love to be around in 2121 to hear about it, but go ahead and start without me!

Gettin' the juice

You know, if you can't get a decent apple juice at a place called APPLEbee's, where can you get a decent apple juice?

News item: The Applebee's restaurant chain says it's changing the way it serves juice after a toddler was mistakenly given a small amount of alcohol at a Detroit-area location.

The Detroit Free Press and The Detroit News report that Applebee's will pour juice for children from single-serve containers at the table starting this week. Applebee's also plans to retrain workers.

Madison Heights police say the drink mislabeled as apple juice was actually a leftover mixed drink combination.

Fifteen-month-old Dominic Dill-Reese's mother ordered her son a kid's meal and asked for apple juice as the beverage Friday afternoon. Dominic was checked out by doctors, and the family was told the child's blood alcohol level was .10 percent. That's over the legal limit for an adult driver.

Dominic is expected to be OK.

So, what does this mean?  Some gozzlehead in Madison Heights MI poured an AJ for a 15-month-old and couldn't tell the difference between applejack and apple juice.  Now, in order to reassure anxious Moms in Detroit and across the nation, the waitron will show up at your table with a clearly marked single-serve portion and decant it before your very eyes.  And every single person who works for the Applebee chain will have to attend a mandatory "This is Apple Juice  -and this is NOT Apple Juice" training class. 

Just as long as it isn't Beech-Nut Apple Juice.  Moms with long memories will remember when that firm was caught selling artificially-flavored sugar water as apple juice.  A guy from the firm, ironically named the Beech-Nut Nutrition Corporation, went to the Ironbar Hilton for a year and a day, and another bigwig did six months of community service.  I hope he had to hand out Kool Aid in a day care center.  And the Beech-Nuts paid a $2.2 million fine, too. 

I have an idea!  Why not stay home and have breakfast there?  Go to a farm stand, get some cider that you know is pure, and live it up.  And then your kid won't want one of those t-shirts that say, "I went to Applebee's for breakfast and all I got was a buzz!"

The Olde Restaurant Reviewer

Just to be clear, I don't frequent too many trendy restaurants, and to those who like their food served in teeny portions with squiggles of sauce like yin/yang doodles all over the plate: enjoy it!  I'm a diner kind of guy from a gourmet sort of family, so look me for in a booth somewhere.

Not long ago, Peggy and I happened to be out near her office when dinnertime rolled around, so we went to a "nice" restaurant out that way.  No names, please.  It's not the individual eatery that I am taking to task here, but, rather, the entire way we have of calling places "nice."  

This place was "nice," if by "nice" you mean it seems unlikely that a brawl will break out and a guy with a sleeveless denim jacket will fashion an improvised weapon out of a broken beer bottle.  That seemed a remote chance, although it's a safe bet that the bottle guy's lawyer will be here dining on most nights, so you could get a message to him if you needed to.  

But, if the purpose of dining in a nice place is to sit and enjoy a quiet meal and have a pleasant chat, why does this place have a giant bar right in the middle of the house?  (Question is rhetorical; answer is "huge profit in draft beer and mixed drinks.")  Oh, the humanity, mobbing that bar!  And it seems impossible for the men to stand with elbows cocked without hollering the names of each new arrival.  Out loud!  And they all seem to know each other, but they still have to holler their names! And there was one woman whose voice rose above the other clatter with a giggle so piercing that wine glasses shattered.  Every thirty seconds, something amused her so much that she let one go.  And the bar felt it necessary to play a DVD of a Bruce Springsteen concert, so hey - there really WAS a guy in a sleeveless denim jacket after all!


It was so loud that Peggy and I could not hear each other speak; that's a break for her, but I might have missed out on something worth hearing.  Just way too loud for the high-class sort of chow they dish out.  


And did I tell you about the couple at the next table, a few feet away?  It was a guy in his late 50s - had to be, and he looked just like "Bulldog" from "Frasier" - and a woman, maybe 35.  Well now, the love bug just bit those two real hard, about five minutes before they showed up for dinner, from the way they were making out.  I said, making out.  You know, like a couple of eighth-graders on the bus on the field trip to Washington.  But the next time this guy goes to Washington, it will be to drop off his Social Security application.  I almost hollered, "Get a room!" but I'm too classy.  Or not.  But man oh man, they were really putting it down.  Again, time and place, people!  Maybe this man had just returned from eighteen months of being held as a political prisoner in Paraguay, or, maybe he had just found out that he had a rare tropical disease, the only cure for which is to suck on a female's tongue for fifteen minutes every day while other people are trying to eat.

This semi-porno sideshow ended when the rest of the party showed up, and the smoochers were forced to break off their facial vacuums.  And then, guess what else showed up!  Our dinner! Served by the guy who was also filling everyone's water glass!

I had ordered scallops, which were to be served with "a Medley of Rices" (I expected Condoleezza, Ray, and Jerry Rice to sing some songs) and the vegetable of the day (turned out to be the dreaded asparagus, which, I will forever insist, resembles something cut down by a Weed-Wacker).  I offered my asparagus to Peggy, who seems to like it, and got down to work.  The rice was cold.  The scallops, mostly cold and uncooked.  So I looked around for the waiter, who had not brought the food, and he was nowhere to be found.  I guess maybe he was enjoying the Springsteen DVD, or something.  So when the water guy sauntered past, I asked him to stop by.  He asked if I wanted any water, but all I wanted was hot, cooked, food.  Moments later, our waiter skidded to a halt by our table.  Examining my plate as if it were evidence in an autopsy, he summed up the problem:


"The rice, well they cook a whole tub of that, and then it sits on a steam table, and they spoon it off the top, where it's not heated."  I took this to mean that this restaurant had found a way to cook food hot, keep it hot, and yet serve it cold! Genius!


"And the scallops, well, we don't cook them all the way.  Do you like it cooked all the way through?" he wondered, as if I looked like a sushi consumer.


He took the plate away, presumably nuked it, and brought it back.  My cursory examination showed no obvious signs of befoulment.  We finished eating.  Peggy's steak was ok.  


So, to Pete Stomatoes down at the Diner: I am sorry I strayed; I won't do it again.  You take a scallop served at the diner; that's a scallop that's been cooked and knows it!


And lest anyone else suffer as I did that night, here's my advice: You see the words "in a balsamic reduction" or "confit" anywhere on the menu, run for your life!

Sunday Rerun: The Ant's Pants

If you're on Facebook, you might have encountered what I guess might be known as the Disappearing Friend Syndrome, or DFS. This occurs when you suddenly realize, whilst reading everyone else's status updates or news feeds, that you haven't seen anything online from good old Ursula lately.

What to do? Do you check your friends list to see if she's not on there anymore? If you do, that only tells you that she's off your list. You then have to enter Ursula Whatchamacallit to see if she's even ON Facebook any longer. If she is, and she's not on your list, and you did not remove her from your list, well, welcome to Dumpville: Population, YOU. As Homer Simpson once said.

If you check and Ursula is NOT on Facebook anymore, then you can at least say, "Maybe she just quit Facebook, and not just me." This brief moment of relief is then tempered by apprehension. What if Ursula was run over by a trolley? Forced to move into reduced circumstances following a scandalous unsanctified congress with a traveling dry-goods salesman from Pittsburgh? Captured by left-wing insurgents from Paraguay? (thanks, Police Squad!) Died of intellectual thirst at a Tea Party?

It's really better not to have these thoughts. Make new friends, and keep the old. One is silver and the other, gold. I think Edgar A. Guest came up with that one.

And while we're scratching around looking for things, what the heck happened to all those "My Top 5 Times Tom Cruise Jumped Up On Something" polls that were all the rage in the summertime? How about those crazy gifts - virtual Berger's Cookies, handcuffs, I <3 NJ t-shirts and hands-free back massages?  They were the ant's pants there for a while, and now you don't see them any more.

A warning in time

Man, you talk about things that you thought had been rightly relegated to the dustbin, things like polio outbreaks, pay phones and film cameras...and along comes this news item from the local PATCH:

Baltimore County police are searching for a man who exposed himself to two Carney Elementary School students Tuesday morning.
According to Cathy Batton, a spokeswoman for the Baltimore County Police Department, the students were walking to school in the 3400 block of Upton Road when a man stopped his vehicle and offered them a ride to school.
The students, both 9, accepted the ride and got into the back seat; the man drove them to the dead end of Upton Road where a path leads to the school, but before they exited the vehicle, the man unzipped his pants and exposed himself to the students.
Police continue to search for the suspect, whom they identify as a light-skinned black man in his 40s with dental braces. The vehicle is faded red, possibly an SUV or a minivan.
The students safely made it to school, but did not report the incident until a few hours later.
"We're urging parents to talk to their kids—tell them not to talk to strangers, not to get into vehicles. I know I talked to mine last night," Batton said. "We're also asking parents to remind their children to report incidents like this immediately so that officers have a chance to respond while the suspect may still be in the area."

This is serious business, but I thought there was not a child in town who had not been told not to speak to strangers, let alone get in a car with one.  You never see people hitch-hiking any more, and that was a preferred mode of travel when I was a teen.  I'd stand with a winsome look, thumb extended on a busy corner, and wait for someone to pull his/her dinosaur (or later, covered wagon) over and let me have a ride to some important destination or bowling alley.  But those were simpler times, and people felt safer. 

Carney School

I guess maybe that's it - young parents today grew up in that post-hitching world, and maybe they don't even think about how necessary it is to give their kids a good talking-to on this topic.  In that case, we got lucky, and these kids made it out of the situation safely.  This is the elementary school closest to our house, and so I feel this story more deeply. This is a chance for all parents to talk to the kids - even if they're sure the kids know not to do this - and tell them again not to do this.

It's better to say it one time too many than one time too few.

"Ground Control to Major ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ..."

...Your eyes are getting heavy...

In what can only be seen as a 30-year-anniversary tribute to Ronald Reagan's firing of those union members in the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Association who had struck over job conditions (less than a year after that union had backed the onetime movie actor's presidential candidacy), air traffic controllers all over the place are falling asleep on the job.  Washington DC, Seattle, and now Reno  - just in this year - have had jets overhead with uh pilots uh trying to uh reach ground control and uh getting no answer.


Flying scares the dickens out of me.  First, you have to worry about getting to the airport something like three days in advance for your flight to Cleveland, and then you are felt up by some cheese-breath security guy named Chad, who also goes through your luggage and goofs on your underwear.  Then you have to worry about a skyjacker. Then you have to worry that the pilot is drunk on his aspirin, and also you have to worry about your meal.  And the landing, and getting your luggage back, and finding a cab in Cleveland, all the while knowing that your underwear is being used as a headdress in some sort of ancient Druid rites, performed by Chad and his tree-worshipping friends.

Now. the poor guy who was in charge of these sleeping beauties is out on his tarmac.  Item:


(Reuters) - The official overseeing air traffic operations resigned over a controversy involving disclosures about sleeping air traffic controllers.
Hank Krakowski, who is director of the FAA's Air Traffic Organization, stepped down amid the revelations, the agency said in a statement.
Krakowski's resignation was accepted by FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt, who said he was conducting a full review of air traffic operations.
"Over the last few weeks, we have seen examples of unprofessional conduct on the part of a few individuals that have rightly caused the traveling public to question our ability to ensure their safety," Babbitt said in a statement. "This conduct must stop immediately."
U.S. aviation regulators suspended two air traffic controllers this week for falling asleep on the job, including one who was out of radio contact while a medical flight was trying land.
The latest incident early on Wednesday in Nevada and one on Monday at Boeing Field in Seattle added to concerns about safety prompted by two other controllers found to have slept at work in recent months in Washington, D.C., and Tennessee.


I just have to say, is it really all that important to fly?  We drove to Pensacola in 2004 and had a wonderful time, the whole way down and back.  We saw planes flying overhead but we were on the ground, driving I-95, I-85 and I-65, right through the heart of pancake-and-grit country.  Unlike people a mile up in the air, we got to meet real authentic Americans, many of whom were awake.  I say, get some gas for the family truckster and go go go!