The Needles and the Damages Done

What are we to take away from the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman at age 46? A man of great talent, respected by the movie-going and play-attending public as perhaps the finest character actor of his generation, a man who could choose what roles he wished to play for the rest of his natural life, and a man whose life ended with a syringe in his arm with between 50 and 70 glassine bags of heroin scattered around in his Greenwich Village apartment.

I feel sorry for his friends and survivors, his three children, his former partner Ms O'Donnell, and for the fans who will be deprived of his performances in years to come.

It's sad to look back on the old '60 Minutes' interview and see him describe his avid interest in gobbling as many drugs as he could get his hands on, but that was in the days when he gotten straight, and the assumption was that he would remain free of heroin's grip, or death grip, I should say.  

More sadness comes from realizing that this will not serve to dissuade one person from embarking on a walk down this same road, if they have decided to do so.  Everyone thinks they will be the one to beat the odds.

I've been around long enough now to see marijuana described as a killer drug in my teens to its current state as a punch line on late night talk shows, as states and cities legalize recreational use of weed.  Here in Maryland, a law was passed in the General Assembly last year to allow the medical use of grass for pain relief.  While they're toking away in Denver, no hospital in Maryland has so far been willing to administer a plan for medical marijuana, and the governor is unwilling to support recreational use.

But the point is, drugs - including alcohol, don't fool yourself - remain a scourge of society, because, after all, their overuse/abuse leads to nothing but sadness and gloom.  Heroin and cocaine were once in use as pain medications, but you see how they are used now.  We banned alcohol in the 1920s, and you see where that wound up.

Hofmann was an educated, gifted person, reduced to stumbling around his neighborhood in an apparent stupor while the drugs fought it out against the demons within him.  Or maybe the drugs teamed up with the demons.  Now, for all his talent, fame and ability to transform himself into new characters and different personas, he is just another resident of the morgue, a life wasted, a future shot to hell.

And there's a lesson in that. 

Good deeds

I can't imagine an America where people didn't act this way.

Last week down in Atlanta GA they had some weather of the sort that does not normally visit the Peach State.  They had snowy ice and icy snow that fell across the town right in the middle of the day.

They don't stockpile road salt down South like we do, in giant roadside igloos filled with sodium chloride.  Nor do they have a lot of plows or salt brine mixed with beet juice to pre-treat the highways the way we old Northern salts do.

So Atlanta had a traffic jam the size of, well, Atlanta, and for many thousands of people, it wasn't matter of being a few minutes late for dinner.  Some of the stranded motorists didn't get home until dinnertime the next night.

(I will once repeat the good advice to avoid leaving the house in wintertime without having at least a half tank of gas, a blanket, some nutrition, and some water and an extra empty bottle in the car.  You'll figure out what the empty bottle is for soon enough.)

But lookie at what this fellow did.  Matthew Miller heard that people were stuck in their cars without the vitals and he threw together some sammies and cereal and hot cocoa for people doing the sit and stew near his house.  Instead of wishing that someone would go out and help people, he went out and helped people.

We hear about heroes all the time, and I think that someone down in the 404 who knows Mr Miller should give him a fist bump from all of humanity.  We need more people like him all over the country.

Also from that storm, as the New York Times here describes, some students had to spend the night in their schools  - with the teachers there - which must have been a nightmarish night for all concerned.  Just the thought of myself as a grade school boy padding down the hall to the mens' room and running into Miss Van Breeman in the hall would have given me bashful bladder for fifty years.

The Home Team

Well, that was a hell of a Super Bowl, huh?  How about those Broncos?

I'm writing this 12 hours before the game even starts, but either way, it's a fair question.  Whether or not the Broncos won or the Seahawks did,  you can still ask about a team.  How about those Ravens, while we're at it?

With the Super Bowl over, we now enter that dead zone in my sports world.  I don't get into basketball at all, so the gap between the end of football and the beginning of baseball seems enormous.

And spring training baseball games don't count, because no one ever seems to take them too seriously.  TV news reports of a strapping farmboy slugger from out of Olathe, KS, who will make them all forget Ruth and Aaron turn out to be not so accurate when the regular season begins.  The Orioles had a kid named Andrés Mora from Río Bravo, Coahuila, Mexico, and every spring from 1976 - 1978, we got reports from the Grapefruit League that indicated that he should make plans for enshrinement in the Hall of Fame, once his playing days were over.  Well, he is in the Baseball Hall of Fame, all right: the Mexican Baseball Hall of Fame.  He starred down there in his home country until 1997, but never learned to hit an American big league curveball.

So what looks good in Florida in March doesn't mean much until it also leads us back to the playoffs in Baltimore in October.  Right now, it's February, and time to forget about Punxsutawney Phil and concentrate on getting our fill of sacrifice bunts, stolen bases and slides into home.


It's the Orioles' 60th anniversary season!  And today is Peggy's 60th birthday. Talk about people who belong in the Hall of Fame!  Happy birthday to the wife who wins the prize as World Champion every year!

Happy birthday to my wonderful wife!

Mall Shook Up

Here's the story from China, and sad to say, it's not a joke.  If you click, you'll see the pictures from the day in December when a man who had been shopping with his girlfriend for five hours chose to jump to his death from the 7th floor of a mall rather than go to one more shoe store.

Five hours is a rather long time to be prowling through shoe stores, certainly so, but he didn't have to jump, for the love of Pete.  I'm sorry for how this trip to the mall turned out for this man, but for those of us still facing more trips to the Shoepermarket, I offer this advice from someone who has been married for 40 years:  wear your watch and take your phone.

Just as separate bathrooms keep your Old Spice and her Imprévu in their own olfactory zones, most stores in the mall are not set up for couples to shop merrily, so it's the smart guy and gal or guy and guy or gal and gal who synchronize their Timexes (if you're wearing Rolexes, you already have someone doing your shopping for you) and set a time and place to meet up after all the tryin' on and goin' to the changin' room is over.  This is because five minutes spent outside the changing room, waiting for the door to open so you can see if the clothes fit or not, can be a longer time to wait than the time we have spent in a holding pattern while Jennifer Aniston sought her perfect soulmate.

The advantages of getting to the mall at 2:30 and saying "Meet you at Yogurt Yogurt Yogurt at 4" are innumerable.  I will immediately head for Dollar Tree and stock up on shower gels, sweet potato muffin mixes and DVDs of cinematic triumphs such as Artie Lange's "Beer League" and still have plenty of time to people-watch a while.  And Peggy gets to shop without hearing me caterwaul "Can we go home now?" every five minutes.

And I get to avoid having to answer the question, "Which dress do you like better?"  Because there is no right answer to that. 

Sunday Rerun: Bruise Clues

           

  

 A few years ago, there was a goofy mugger in New York City who begged the judge at his trial to put him in the Ironbar Hilton for a long long time.  Since there is almost always something else behind such a request, the judge found out that the mugger had mugged the wrong mug's mother.  He knocked down a lady and stole her purse - and that lady was the mother of a made man in the Mob.

Oooops.  And no chance to say "ooooooops I did it again."

Now we meet Anthony Miranda (above).  Young Anthony, until last week, earned his keep in Chicago by committing strong-arm robberies.  I guess it's always a risk, when you walk up to people in cars and wave your phallic substitute gun in their face and demand their money and their dignity and their sense of well-being in a world that is set up to keep the bad people away from the good.

Anthony, it turns out, is a convicted felon!  And yet, he was let out of jail before he had learned all the lessons that his penologists should have taught him.  One of those lessons should have been: Get a job, you dreg of society, and work to earn a living.  Any form of gainful employment is more honorable than your current procedure.

And for his part, Anthony, as he sits and waits for his face to mend, can tell us that he has learned this valuable lesson as well:

Always make sure that the guy you are attempting to rob is not a 6'2", 250-lb. Romanian mixed martial arts champion.

That's what he tried to do last week, Friday night in Chi., and he picked the wrong guy.  He walked up to the man in his parked car and asked for a light off his car lighter, and then pulled out the gun and told the guy to get out of the car and hand over his wallet and valuables. 

With about as much effort as it takes the rest of us to brush away a gnat, the Romanian, who works as a bodyguard and hostage rescuer, disarmed young Anthony and decorated his face for Christmas,  all red and green.  

Anthony shot  himself in the ankle during all this.

The good guy told (laughing Chicago) police that bad guy Anthony was begging for mercy, saying that he had a baby.  

If the baby is over six wks. of age, he already knows what kind of guy his Daddy is. 

The Saturday Picture Show, February 1, 2014

 As anyone sitting in Spanish III these days can tell you, "Doritos" is Spanish for "little gold things."  That's what this tasty snack chip is, and we can imagine they'll be gobbled up by the bucketful tomorrow night during The Big Game That Advertisers Cannot Call By Name So They Call The Super Bowl The Big Game XLVIII.  Here's an interesting story about how this little crunchable munchable came to exist in the first place.  Teaser:  how did Disneyland find a use for all their unused tortillas from the taco stand?

 For my friends in the ATL:  click and save on this picture as a reminder of how either a foot of snow or a finger of ice can bring a major American city to its knees.  We all got a reminder of how four-wheel drive can get your SUV through that foot of snow, but a little ice means tough going.

 This is the latest thing in downsized living (look on your newsstand any day now for the new magazine, "Downsized Living").  It's an old unattractive shipping container turned into an attractive tiny house...so tiny that you have to go outside to change your mind.

The English knew that the best way to prevent scurvy was to eat plenty of limes.  Or, if you can't get fresh limes where you are, listening to this song by Harry Nilsson will keep you scurvy-free.  I like the smell of lime and the taste, too. It's sublime.

Lessons Learned

I was one dumb kid, I wanna tell you that right now.  The stuff I believed!  The things I didn't know!  in such fields as astronomy and algebra, the dreaded A&A of my unknowing.  But in all that, there was one thing that I thought was right when I was a young man, and that turned out to be all wrong, wrong, wrong.  

And there was one thing I came to learn that I have never forgotten, and I have always offered it to young people who, through some sort of horrible error, turn to me for advice.

First point - like the picture above reminds us, I remember being an adolescent and seeing people in their late 20s, early 40s, middle 60s and thinking, "Man! This (guy) (woman) (proprietor of an Asian carryout) (irate police officer giving chase on foot) really has it all figured out!"  And I figured that all people above the voting age (21 then) were full-fledged grownups who acted responsibly, knew the difference between right and wrong, knew there were limits to all this fooling around, and knew where the lines were drawn.

That was a foolish generalization I made, which is something that all teenagers do. (There's another foolish generalization!)  The fact is, while the overwhelming majority of people old enough to marry and vote are mature, fully-realized and well-functioning adults, there are plenty who are not, who are crooks, vagrants, ne'er-do-wells, boozehounds, cheats, tramps and thieves.  

Not that I have to associate with them, and neither do you, but just remember, they are out there!

On the other hand, there came a moment in my mid-to-late 30s when I came to realize that people who were ding-dong dipsticks and doofuses at age 16 tended to be that way at 26, 46 and 106.   As Isaac Newton, who later invented quite a tasty cookie, once said,  "Every body persists in its state of being at rest or of moving uniformly straight forward, except insofar as it is compelled to change its state by force impressed."  Which means, if you're in the recliner, you tend to stay there unless some force (thirst) compels you to get up.  And without the thirst to do better, people who have found it easy to be fools just stay in that condition.

Fortunately, there aren't many people like that.  And thank you for being none of them.

He thought, she thought

I'm a gregarious fellow, so I guess you might say I had my share of friends and acquaintances at work before my glorious retirement, and not that many people turned on their heels and ran the other way at the sight of me lumbering down the hall.  I still consider my work family to be like a family, except that they have more birthdays.

One person who was always a special friend was someone with whom I kept in fairly close phone-and-text touch after I left.  She had gone to work someplace else by then, and we made vague plans to meet up for lunch someday. 
Meanwhile, we texted and chattered until last fall.  I called right after Labor Day, and she said she'd have to call me back; something was up and she couldn't talk. And then a couple of days later, same deal, and a couple of days after that, yet again she said she'd have to call me when she got a minute, and then that minute never arrived.

I tried to noodle it out, thought about anything I might have said to offend her and things of that nature, and came up with nothing.  (For once.) I figured I'd hear something when the time was good for her, so I went back to my hectic busy schedule of watching morning news shows, writing this blog (there's five minutes a day shot to hell right there!) and calling rightwing talk shows, hollering, "Baba Booey!  Baba Booey!" and hanging up, along with my other varied, worthwhile pursuits.  

Then, last Friday, I had to look up a number on the cell phone.  I got past the "D" section, which is populated heavily with Doctors of many disciplines, dedicated medical professionals who work on things from my feet to my choppers to my eyes (Dr Melissa Connolly!  Call me for her number if you don't see perfectly!) and, of course, my surgically-repaired back and knee.  When I got a couple letters further, I came upon my friend in the phone listings,  and you know what, I said right there and then,  I was going to call to find out what happened to us being friends and all.

It turned out she lost her job in September.  And she was embarrassed, and did not want to tell anyone. 

And because I thought she was too busy or whatever to let me know, all these months have gone by and she is still down about it all. 

Pick up the phone and make that call!

I can totally understand what happened on her job.  She is such an excellent worker - and dedicated - that she would sometimes call from her office at 8 PM, having been in the office since dawn broke. But something went haywire on the new position, and her new boss arbitrarily cut her adrift on the icy sea of unemployment.

It's not too late; I can stay in touch now and offer support, encouragement,  and my patented mix of inappropriate jokes and unsuitable comments, but I'll always regret losing four months' time and all those chances to have helped.   Why wait when there's a chance a friend is in need? Next time, I won't wait around.  

My Salad Days had no salads in them

My mom was, in her day, a great cook.  Holidays at our house were always filled with splendid eats.  

My dad was not up to that level in the kitchen; he could fix himself a bowl of cereal, maybe toast some white bread.  BUT he had a recipe for a deep-dish olive pie that he poured almost every day, so there's that.

This all comes to mind because my sister gave me a copy of Better Homes and Gardens magazine from December, 1956.  The food ads and recipes in there are good reasons to help understand why everyone walked around feeling awful during the 1950s.  The food was disgusting. Don't take it from me!  Google "Disgusting 1950s food" and see a veritable cornucopia of jellied, sauced, overcooked improbable mixes of terrible chow.

Last week, one of those things was going around on Facebook showing oldtime foods, and I mentioned that we were often served a meal of hot tuna in a casserole with peas mixed in and crumbled potato chips on top.  My buddy Ralph down in North Carolina pointed out, in response to my bellyaching about putting that gruel in my belly, that we ALL ate like that back then.

Listen to some of the recipes in that magazine:  Calico Bean Bake! Lemon Mayonnaise! Tomato Aspic! Nesselrode Pie! (we used to have this all the time until I took my little hatchet and cut down the nesselrode tree.)  Fluffy Mustard Sauce!  Snowball Loaf!  Peppermint-Marshmallow Sauce! Upside-Down Date Pudding Brown Sugar Sauce! Hot Turkey-Salad Souffle! Cookie Tart!

No, wait.  Cookie Tart was the name of a girl I kept company with one summer.  It was her mom who was to teach me all I would ever learn of the world of Fluffo, the butter-colored shortening that was so integral to the recipes for both Devil's Food Cake and hellishly greasy fried chicken (fried for 45 minutes in 4 inches of boiling fat.)

Those peas aren't just STACKED there, you know.
They're held in place by unflavored gelatin, made from
the skin, bones, and connective tissues of animals
 such as domesticated cattle, chicken, pigs, and fish. 

It's crazy to blame the times for what we ate.  I do know that all our dads were just a few years removed from eating truly horrible foot on battlefields, in rusty hulking ships and in the ball turrets of bombers, so I guess Noel Eggnog Pie seemed so much better.

Also advertised in the magazine:  Tums® for the Tummy, page 191, and Phillips' Milk of Magnesia, page 177.

I should say so.

Can we have kippers for breakfast?

When I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful, a miracle, oh it was beautiful, magical.  

And then...

I'm sure you've heard the album "Breakfast in America," by Supertramp, from 1979.  The English progressive-art rock-pop band made an album that was one you just had to have, because it had great tunes like "The Logical Song" and "Breakfast in America" and "Goodbye Stranger" and "Take The Long Way Home."

It sold a bazillion records for A&M Records, it's the biggest selling English language in the history of France, and it won two Grammy Awards in 1980.

And yet, you haven't played your copy lately.  Probably the last time anyone dragged the worn old vinyl record out of its jacket was in the early 90's, when Jan and Fred came over that night to talk about Fred's new job with that dot.com outfit out of Cleveland. Of course, who could have foreseen how that was going to turn out?  And Fred says to this day that he is just as happy teaching Driver Education down at U-Driv-Urself as he would be at, say, Apple or Samsung.  Who needs the pressure?

That was really the last time you thought about that ancient record, with the picture of the diner waitress  "Libby," holding a tall glass of orange juice, in place of the Statue of Liberty in an illustrated New York City.  It all seemed like a tribute to the great tradition of Breakfasts in America, and then someone named David Icke, a former English soccer player who now sponsors wacky conspiracy theories, put out his claim that the album serves to prove that way back in the latter part of 1978, while the band was recording the album in Los Angeles, people were already planning the 9/11/01 attacks on America, and this album jacket proves it.

A member of the Icke Forum, "Eve", wisely points out:

"Album came out in 1979," it reads.

"9/11 reference.

"9/11 was served with breakfast...not to mention the everyday fight for freedom: "Breakfast In America."

'Eve' appears to be convinced and continues:

"Orange juice = fireball," she adds.

"You are looking out of the window of a plane, she is showing the target."

'Eve' even posts a reversed view of the cover which 'appears' to show the 'U' and 'P' of Supertramp flipped around to look like the figures '9' and '11'.

 This is not unprecedented.  The formation of a "splinter" group of people who were "board" with the standard brand of reactionary politics was presaged by this record album, from the 1950s.  It shows the first meeting of what we now call the Tea Party.  It turns out, it all started in Boston, where a silver-haired man entertained a bevy of beauties and so enchanted them that they all went out that very night to eliminate taxes ("we can do fine without 'em!"), reduce government ("we can have the police driving the snow plows to reduce the work force and get two jobs done at oncet") and promote individual responsibility for taking part in a strengthened local government ("Just not on Monday nights; that's my poker night") just as soon as they finished their tea and cookies.

Old records hold the key to the future, but it can't really be locked up.

Sticks and stones may break my bones

"(Name of political leader) is a idiot."

I'm not going to say whom this was about; I saw it on Facebook the other day, and my response has nothing to do with the political ideology of the "idiot" or of the person who so ungrammatically called him one.

A friend of mine was attending a college on North Charles Street in Baltimore - we'll call it "Loyola" - years ago and saw an interesting bit of graffiti on a lavatory wall.  "ROTC is dumb," read the slogan.  Now, I never took ROTC, I was not interested in being an officer in the Reserve Army, but if I had been so enrolled and found it unlikeable, I hope I might have been able to express myself better than to say "it's dumb".

Unrelated graphic content
showing scoring methods in
Rock-Paper-Scissors game

I don't know, I just guess I expect more fact than that. Everyone is entitled to like or dislike people, places, and concepts, but can we elevate the level of our discourse a little above "Oh you're a big old poophead and I hate you to smithereens!"?

The old quote attributed to Daniel Patrick Moynihan - "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts" - rings true.  Please feel free to say how you feel about things, but do it with facts!  It can really prove your point!

Sunday Rerun: Act Naturally

Worldly and sophisticated, I am certainly no stranger to the Seven Lively Arts (music, literature, drama, painting, dance, conversation and Fleming) but I remain as a child, in awe of the masters of each.  If I could write or perform music, write great books or plays, act in a movie or play, tap dance like Danny Effing Kaye, conduct colloquies with the likes of world leaders and those who should be, and remember to give my answer in the form of a question, I'd be one well-rounded citizen.  

And yet, given enough time, I could learn to play "Mary Had a Little Lamb" on the harmonica, write some short story that might hold someone's interest for three minutes (Opening line: "Spring comes late to Carney."), smear some paint around in the impressionist manner, or talk with Obama or Castro.  But acting? No. Forget it. Couldn't do it.

We tend to forget that there is such a thing as acting; at least, I forget it.  We see stars such as, oh let's say, John Travolta.  We first saw him as Vinnie Barbarino on "Welcome Back, Kotter" and every role since has been sort of variation on that theme.  We had Greaser Vinnie in "Grease," Disco Vinnie in "Saturday Night Fever" and so on down the line, right up to Goon Vinnie in "Get Shorty" and Firefighter Vinnie in "Ladder 49."  And listen, people still want to see him in movies, so it's all good.

Old timers like Phil Silvers - cocky, strutting, wiseacre burlesque comics - were in movie after movie, always pretty much the same guy, too...a cocky, strutting wiseacre buddy with Victor Mature, or a cocky, strutting wiseacre Army sergeant. 

Lindsay, Lindsay, Lindsay!

On the other hand, I had always heard that Meryl Streep was a great actress, able to assume different personae in different movies.  Of course, you could have been handing out $100 bills to the audiences of "Sophie's Choice" or "Kramer vs Kramer" and I would still be without a $100 bill.  True, Peggy was able to inveigle me into seeing "The Bridges of Madison County," although I spent the entire movie hoping that Clint would suddenly turn into Dirty Harry and just go really Mad-ison, but no.  

Then, I went to see Garrison Keillor's movie "A Prairie Home Companion," and there she was, a New Jersey girl playing the part of a country singer from Minnesota! And then,  we watched "The Devil Wears Prada," and she was acting like a completely different human being!   I said, "Peggy, this shrewish harridan is nothing like Yolanda Johnson from Mr Keillor's movie!"

And Peggy, with the tenderness that we use to explain to children that Superman is just a made-up character, told me that she was able to appear to be different people by acting!

Phil Silvers! Phil Silvers! Phil Silvers!

Well, cut off my legs and call me Shorty!  Here's to all those who can do this sort of thing!  I can't act like anyone other than myself, which some will be quick to point out is a tragic shortcoming.  Here's to Meryl Streep.  And Phil Silvers, too.

The Saturday Picture Show, January 25, 2014

 Well, they always said that the grass was greener on the other side of the unpaved dirt road out in the middle of nowhere, didn't they?  This must be somewhere in the middle of the country, where the land is flat.  I've heard that's how it is there, but I'm afraid to go; I might fall off the edge.

 For those who just can't wait for spring to get here, and your numbers are vast, here's a peek at some morning glories.

 I wonder if "writing sentences" is still an effective punishment.  It was when I was in school.  The entire class would be forced to waste paper and time, writing "I will not chew gum" or "I will learn to spend my library time wisely," which were promises rarely kept.  I remember our 5th grade teacher, Miss Robertson who became Mrs Lynch, having a more well-thought-out plan.  She made transgressors transcribe the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and as a result, I am to this day a huge admirer of the works of Ralph Waldo Kramden.

Speaking of what goes on all across America, here's a trend:  there is every kind of Depot in every kind of town:  Home Depot, Office Depot, Landscape Depot, Beer Depot, and on and on.  Just Brakes?  There's Just Tires, Just Guns, Just Dentures, and Just Cabinets, just in Baltimore's Yellow Pages.  When it gets hot, I'll be searching for Just Ice and probably never find it.

The Friday Review of Cinema

I have always loved this movie called "Career Opportunities" but loving it puts me in a very small group, which is not uncommon for me and movies, music and food.

It's an old movie now anyway; it came out in 1991 and features Frank Whaley, now seen in many places as a character actor, and Jennifer Connelly, who is still around, but I think more as a model than as an actor.  It was one of those John Hughes movies, and the deal is that Whaley plays a 21-year-old working at a Target store (back when you could shop in one of them without having your credit history on display all across Mexico) with plenty of what the Irish call "blarney."  Connelly is the beautiful daughter of the richest man in town.

One of them is the victim of cruel physical abuse.  One has a perfectly normal family life with all that a person could hope for.  One has no firm grip on reality; the other has a grip but sees nothing hopeful down the line.

You'll have to see the movie to see who has what going on but I think it's worth it, as a reminder that the lives of others, behind the curtain in front of which we all perform, are not always as wonderful as we think they are - nor as awful, for that matter.

Key to the story is that the Target store is locked up all night while Jim Dodge (Whaley) cleans the place.  It's also key to me because on the nights when I, in my early days as a clerk for the A&P, wound up working the overnight shift, filling shelves with Vienna sausage, Fig Newtons and ginger ale, the store was locked from the outside.  If one of us had gotten burned roasting a chicken that we happened to find in the meat department, they would have had to break the door to get us to help.  Those were the days in retail when everything had to have a price stamped on it, so all night long, while chickens roasted for our 4 AM meal, we heard the ka-CHUNK of the prices stampers marking up No Bugs M'Lady (a shelf liner paper treated with insecticide), Cut-Rite wax paper, and Rice-A-Roni (the San Francisco treat!)

There was plain yogurt only in those days.  No flavors. The people who bought it also purchased wheat germ and carrot juice.

Then we would dine and doze off, dreaming of new horizons and new career opportunities. I can still hear the hearty morning cry of the ass't manager coming through the door at 6:30 AM.  "Wake up, you stupid SOBs!" he would cry.

And we often did.

My favorite password is ALLENLUDDEN

I got an email from Yahoo! the other day.  At first I was so excited to hear from 1997.  That was a great year; everyone was running around crooning "Yahoooooooo!" and their website had everyone signing up for their own news pages and email.

But just like a friend who moves away and never calls or writes, I sort of lost touch with Yahoo! until they wrote to tell me that someone in Viet Nam was trying to log in to my email account.  In Viet Nam, this was.  Late on Tuesday, and here it was still early on Tuesday, so I cleverly deduced that something was amiss.

The email told me to go ahead and change my password for the sake of security, so I did that. I mean, the only email in that folder seems slightly dated, containing information that I might want to consider concerning the possible candidacy of one Mitt Romney for president, and several emails touting quinoa as the new wonder dry grain.  The first 27 times I typed in a new email, the Yahoo! brainiac told me that my suggestion was not strong enough to withstand this Viet Namese invasion, so I finally came up with one that will keep everyone out of my Yahoo email, including me.

But then later I saw an article that said that SplashData, a group that tracks such things, had a list of the most popular passwords of 2013, and here they are, along with the changes in each from the year before:

1.  123456 (Up 1)

2.  password (Down 1)

3.  12345678 (Unchanged)

4.  qwerty (Up 1)

5.  abc123 (Down 1)

6.  123456789 (New)

7.  111111 ( Up 2)

8.  1234567 (Up 5)

9.  iloveyou (Up 2)

10.  adobe123 (New)

11.  123123 (Up 5)

12.  admin (New)

13.  1234567890 (New)

14.  letmein (Down 7)

15.  photoshop (New)

16.  1234 (New)

17.  monkey (Down 11)

18.  shadow (Unchanged)

19.  sunshine (Down 5)

20.  12345 (New)

21.  password1 (up 4)

22.  princess (New)

23.  azerty (New)

24.  trustno1 (Down12)

25.  000000 (New)

Now.  I would think "123456789" would not be all that hard to crack.  How about a slight little change, such as "1235476890"?  And there is also information around that suggests that #22 - "princess" - is in use by a Mr. T. Brady from Boston, MA.

For anyone seeking a really fun password that also suggests a tasty and nutritious lunch, here is one I used to use but now pass along lovingly to you:  I_8_3_BLTs    Because, if you can eat three BLTs, you're having too much fun to waste time on the computer!

DDIY - DON'T Do It Yourself

Let me tell you one thing that happens as the days dwindle down to a precious few. Relatively speaking, that is. Clearly I don't have as long a future in front of me as, say, Justin Bieber.  Although if he keeps throwing eggs at his neighbor's house, and his neighbors are anything like people I know who have been egged, I wouldn't place a bet on being around for my eulogy either.

Here's the one thing I have found as I was dragged into entered my sixties:  Sometimes, it's better just to let other people do things.  It saves your time. For instance, why spend time getting your knickers in a twist over political issues, sports events or weather forecasts calling for snow?  A quick walk down Facebook Street will introduce you to thousands - millions! - of people who are all worked up over those very things, leaving you time to worry about how much quinoa is enough, and whether Kathie Lee Gifford is getting a little, well, strange, and how does one pronounce quinoa, anyway?

Case in point:  You like pickles?  Same here!  Make mine dill, please, and put 'em in a salad or on a burger or alongside some patootie salad with fried chicken.  Good stuff!

Now, here is a web page that shows you how to make your own dill pickles.  All you have to do is run to the store and buy some "pickling" cucumbers (as if there are "non-pickling" cucumbers) and then run down the spice aisle for sea salt and dill weed, down the glass aisle for vinegar and then back to Produce because you forgot you need fresh garlic.

Then you go home and find an old quart Mason jar, like the one that spaghetti sauce - or even pickles - came in.  You wash it out nice and clean, and add the ingredients and WAIT FIVE DAYS for your pickles to finish marinating.

There are 7200 minutes in 5 days.  How long does it take you to run to the Food Clown and buy a jar of Food Clown® Brand Kosher Pickles?

Moreover, by the time you purchase cukes, garlic, salt, dill weed and vinegar, and add in the value of your own time (just for argument's sake, let's figure on your hourly salary being that of the brain surgeon or corporate attorney you might have become) and those homemade pickles of yours will wind up costing you roughly $14.37 per spear.

I hope they're tasty!

Just a Trace of Mystery

Because first names for country singers such as Faron, Ernest, Hank and Hank, Jr., were already taken, we have among us a country singer named Trace.  Trace Adkins.

Trace, who used to be a pipe-fitter on an offshore drilling rig before becoming a Grand Ole Opry music star twenty-some years ago, has topped the charts with toe-tappers such as "Ladies Love Country Boys" and "You're Gonna Miss This", "Brown Chicken Brown Cow" and the immortal "Honky Tonk Badonkadonk."  He admits to an ongoing battle with alcoholism, and I wish him the best with that.

But his latest fall off the wagon came about under odd circumstances, and since I love odd circumstances more than anything, here's the story.

Adkins was booked on some cruise ship for a voyage called "Country Cruisin'," in which land-locked music fans can spend a week on the high seas with some country singers.

One of the fans is a man named Michael Larsen, who, since 2007, has made a hobby, and a full-time living for all I know, by parading around pretending to be Trace Adkins.

Really.  This is what the guy does.  They say he even signs autographs.  And at the drop of a cowboy hat, will get and sing that catchy "Badonkadonk" number.

It reminds me of that sitcom "Still Standing" where the nutty sister-in-law started dating a guy who was in a Foghat tribute band, and Bill, the lead guy in the show, asked the musician if his main competition was other Foghat tribute bands.

"No," the man said, "it's Foghat."

Arrow indicates real Adkins

So Adkins is on the ship and, according to TMZ, he sees the guy pretending to be Adkins at the karaoke bar on the big boat.  A fight ensues, and the next thing you know, when the boat hit land in Jamaica, the real Adkins jumped ship and headed to rehab.

And the fake guy, with the competition way down, stayed aboard and may yet be afloat on a sea of badonkadonk.  

Where's The Love? It's in McSherrystown, PA, for one place

It's hard to believe that, come this Labor Day weekend, Hurricane Katrina, the most costly and deadly Atlantic storm in history, will be 9 years in the past.  Katrina hit in late August of 2005, causing $125 million in damages, and causing misery that lingers to this day in the Gulf region.

As Americans have always done, we rallied to help our friends and neighbors in Lousiana and Mississippi, sending whatever resources we had to share.

Some sent people and equipment, as my hometown Baltimore County Fire Department did, to assist in the rescues and recovery.  Many sent money and donated canned food. Breweries sent canned water.

And up in McSherrystown, PA, the kids attending Delone Catholic High School raised cash to send down South by an age-old system of fund raising.

Here's the story as reported by CBS in September, 2005.  The deal was, they played the amazingly catchy "Mmm Bop" by the rock trio we revere, Hanson.  They played it over the loudspeaker before school and after school and during lunch and between classes.

Hanson

There were 650 students in the school at the time and they raised over $3500 by blasting Taylor, Isaac and Zac all day back in the day.

Hanson matched their donation and gave each kid in school a copy of their then-current CD "Underneath."

All these years later, imagine how much money could be raised by threatening to play Celine Dion.  I know I'd pay a pretty penny.

Sunday rerun: The stores! The chores!

It's happened again and this time it wasn't my fault!

"It" is my bizarre predilection for having some famous, semi-famous or infamous person come to my mind for no particular reason, and then find out two days later they died.

This time, it's Frank Cady.  If you're saying, "Whose Frank Cady?" we need to discuss a little grammar issue. If you're saying, "Who's Frank Cady?" we need to talk about Green Acres and Ozzie and Harriet.

Cady as Sam

Frank Cady was a character actor, playing neighborly kinds of characters on shows such as Ozzie and Harriet ("Doc Williams") and of course he was "Sam Drucker," the genial owner of the general store in Hooterville where  Oliver Wendell Douglas and his wife Lisa shopped on Green Acres.

Well, over the weekend I was reading a book about the history of The Andy Griffith Show. I am sort of serious about my classic sitcoms.  Among the many nuggets of information I gleaned was this one:  Hal Smith, who played the loveable town drunk Otis Campbell back in the days when drunks were thought to be loveable, was not the first to play that part!  No sir. Do you want to guess who played Otis in the Griffith pilot episode?

If you said Frank Cady, doggone if you aren't right.  And I read this on Saturday, and on Monday I opened up the World Wide Web to find that Frank had died on Friday in California at age 96.

"Oliverrrrrhhh!"

Eddie Albert, who played Oliver, lived to be 99.

Ralph

Mary Grace Canfield, who played Ralph Monroe and said "Howdy Doody!" when she greeted people in her role as a fix-it-lady, will be 88 in September.



It appears that Green Acres really IS the place for me, since I want to live a long long time as well! Rest well, genial storekeeper!

The Saturday Picture Show, January 18, 2014

 Stubbornness is not a becoming quality for any of us, but there's a way out of it.  Try seeing things in a different way for once.  That's what I keep telling myself to do!

 I can't tell if this was done on purpose, as some sort of front yard gardening/sculpture project or what, but the trees certainly grew together in an interesting fashion, didn't they?  It reminds me of the guy I knew who had to resign from his job as a tree surgeon because he kept falling out of his patients.

 So, you want to be famous, huh?  Here is an example of one of the drawbacks...poor Adam Sandler can't even stroll down to the Hollywood WaWa and get a coffee and a malted milk without having his picture taken.  It makes me sad to think that there are people whose job it is to hang around where people who are famous might go, and snap their picture.

This makes me sad, and mad, and disappointed.  This is a print ad for used models of a certain brand of car, which will remain nameless because I don't care to give them a free mention. The ad is aimed at men in my age group and older, and it's supposed to make them think, subliminally, that they would have a chance with a pretty girl like this if they just buy a car. The intimation that the girl and the car have both been in other hands before is sexist and rather stupid, but that's how they sell cars...by appealing to the id, rather than common sense, which flies out the window for some guys every time they see a pretty woman.  Listen, men: this woman does not want you. Buy a Toyota or something like it,  and pay your wife a little attention, for the sweet love of...your wife!