The Saturday Picture Show, November 8, 2014

Upcoming: this Tuesday, the 11th of November, is Veterans Day (Remembrance Day in Canada.)  This picture says a lot about the men and women who were strong enough to save us from untold horrors in World War II, and all those who have fought for us. Please thank a veteran!

I can't ever forget my happy days as a clerk at the good old A&P. It seems odd, but in those days, grocery stores limited themselves to selling groceries, and here and there a bottle of aspirin. Now, you wouldn't be too surprised to walk into the Try 'N' Save and find a brand new Dodge Varmint SUV for sale near the produce.

Something you don't see every day: clouds flowing downhill like a river.

Cover of The New Yorker, January 14, 1928.  The Roaring Twenties were really roaring then, with the nightclubs and illegal booze and everyone guzzling bathtub gin and dancing with showgirls.  In the fall of the next year, it all came to a Crashing end.

This is the Nicaraguan bullet ant, species Paraponera clavata, who is also known as the 24-hour ant, because when he bites you, it hurts like a son of a gun for a whole day.  This is not a life-size picture, by the way.  In real life, these guys appear to be the size of a Whirlpool double-wide refrigerator-freezer, especially when they are chasing you through a jungle.

If you remember the school shooting in Newtown CT in December 2012 (there are so many school shootings to remember, sad to say), this is the young teacher, Victoria Leigh Soto, whose birthday was last week.  She died saving her students from the hail of gunfire wrought by an insane young man who was armed to the hilt.  Now, as her family tries to keep her memory alive, they are continually harassed by lunatics who claim that the school shootings never took place, that they were total fiction invented by the president as part of his campaign to go door-to-door and take guns away from the likes of Adam Lanza. Remember: for every deranged thought that leaks from the mind of a conspiracy theorist, there will be a dozen or so people who aren't bolted down tightly enough to believe that theory.

Bazooka Gum has discontinued the popular Bazooka Joe waxpaper comic that used to engirdle every piece of gum.  For years, I stole gags from Bazooka Joe and his gang.  I just looked it up and found that he did in fact have two working eyes, but he wore the patch as a fashion statement.  But I still use the gags.  "I always know the score of a ballgame before it starts!" "Oh yeah?" "Yeah - nothing to nothing."

It wouldn't be November without scenes like this.  It's the prettiest time of the year, for my money.  Have a great weekend!

Oh, my stars!

While you and yours are bickering over discussing where to go for vacation next summer (Outer Banks? Rocky Coast of Maine? Twitty City?) big shots like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie and Ashton Kutcher are planning to fly far, far away to the galaxy that Kutcher came from, via Virgin Galactic, the first airline to take you to outer space, unless you count Allegheny's flights to the Ozarks.

Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson says he's not about to give up on taking stars beyond the stars, even in the light of last week’s crash of one of its spaceships, a crash in which one pilot died and another was injured.

In fact, Branson, a man worth $4.6 billion, was all over the TV early this week, saying that space travel is still “absolutely … worth the risks.”

“It’s a grand program which has had a horrible setback,” Branson told Matt Lauer on the "Today" Show, “but I don’t think anybody watching this program would want us to abandon it at this stage.”

He told "CBS This Morning" that after Friday's accident, two more people with money burning holes in their pockets signed up that very day for rides to space, and they paid in full “as a gesture of goodwill.”

Branson, who founded his empire with the Virgin record store chain and has dabbled in railway, airline, comic book and blood bank interests, said that Friday was an “incredibly sad” day for the family of pilot Mike Alsbury, who was killed, and the Virgin Galactic team. “But we’ve now picked ourselves up, the team are pushing on building the next spaceship and waiting for the final report from the NTSB.”

Looking into the crash, the National Transportation Safety Board said late Sunday that SpaceShipTwo's co-pilot changed the spacecraft's aerodynamic controls too soon in the flight, which may have caused the tail to rise and create drag, which caused the plane to disintegrate.

You know what?  Maybe it is rocket science after all!  This is complicated stuff, launching space ships skyward, and it can only be worse for the crew if Ashton Kutcher is aboard, he being the actor who once pointed out that "Modeling is the best because you have to look hot, which comes easy to me, you know. I'm blessed with that."  If I'm flying somewhere on vacation (and I won't) and I look over and see Kelso in the next seat, I'm going to do what Red Forman always threatened to do.  

Thinking of traveling through space with that crowd makes it a lot easier to sit through backups at the Delaware Memorial Bridge.

Two Orders of Rice to go

I'm no musicologist; all I know is what I like.  

And people who do know music will tell you that a song needs a good melody to be memorable and catchy.  Being a wordy nerdy kind of guy, I insist that a song has good lyrics, too, to be good for me.  Even if the title of the song is "Papa Oom Mow Mow" or "Sh-Boom," the lyrics have to mean something to me.

We've all been in love, some of us even with other people, and we can only imagine what it must feel like to attend the wedding of your former inamorata as she marries your (former) friend. That one's got to hurt; I'm not going to lie to you.  And it had to be worse back in the day when the custom was to throw rice at the happy couple so that they emerged from the church in a hail of Uncle Ben's finest.  I think that was so that the couple would not start their marriage without any food.  I know that I got some rather odd looks when I would throw chicken fried rice at weddings, as I recall.

But the music, that's what we were talking about.  Eddy Arnold, one of the first old-style country singers to put on a tuxedo and go for the "countrypolitan" sound, wrote and sang a #1 tune called "I'm Throwing Rice (At The Girl That I Love)" in 1949.  

I'm throwing rice at the girl that I love

After she just said, "I do"

I'm throwing rice with a smile on my lips

But my heart is breaking in two

She was my gal and he was my pal

But she loved him better somehow

I stepped aside after I kissed the bride

And I'm throwing rice at her now

I'm throwing rice at the girl that I love

After she just said, "I do"

I'm throwing rice with a smile on my lips

But my heart is breaking in two

She was my gal and he was my pal

But she loved him better somehow

I stepped aside after I kissed the bride

And I'm throwing rice at her now

Jerry Lee

Eddy

You can hear Eddy's version of the plaintive song here, but I also want to share the uptempo, country-rock version done by the one, the only Jerry Lee Lewis.  It was 1980, and the Killer recorded at a studio called the Caribou Ranch, recording some 36 classic country, rock and pop tunes.  You can hear that this was a rough recording, in need of final production, but for pure passionate playing and singing, you have to give the nod to old Jerry Lee.  For reasons I don't understand, no record company ever released the songs from that session.

I believe that if you click on both versions and compare and contrast, you'll hear two fine interpretations of the same sad experience.   It gets me when JLL says, "Jerry Lee's heart is br-br-br-breaking in two."

I'm glad that no one ever dumped me and then invited me to her wedding.  I might have thrown a fit, instead of rice.

 

 

It's chili inside

Shavie Nicks

It was Saturday.  It was chilly and cloudy and intermittently raining in sideways slants that felt like a million little shaving nicks.  You needed a hat to keep the rain off your melon, but you also had to hold the hat on your melon, or the wind would blow it away into a puddle.

Stevie Nicks

In other words, just my kind of day!

Norton!

But we were at the big store buying cat supplies (there's a teaser for you!) and whatnot, and Peggy had mentioned feeling like it was a good day to have chili for dinner.  Chili con carne, as they say in sunny Mexico, not to be confused with Art Carney.


Chili sounded good, as I edged toward the food department of the BA store.  But it had to be fresh, homemade chili.  Canned chili? Just look at the ingredients!

I didn't know what exactly I needed to make a couple of great bowls o' chili, but Google knows everything, and I asked Ms Google for the best chili recipe.  I was directed at once to the gimmesomeoven.com website and their recipe for five-ingredient easy chili.

When they say "five ingredients" and "easy," they ain't kiddin,' boy! A pound of ground beef (or a "lb" of ground beef), 3 cans of Ro*tel tomatoes with diced green chilies (buy the store*brand), 2 cans of kidney beans (again with the store brand), two tablespoons of chili powder, and a cut-up onion.

You round up those ingredients and you go home and find that big stockpot that came with the 147-piece home cookware set that Aunt Fritzi gave you, heat it up with a little olive oil, toss in the beef, brown it, toss in the diced onion and the chili powder and the canned tomatoes/chilies and beans, bring it all to a boil and then let it simmer for fifteen minutes or so, which gives you time to round up some grated cheddar and plain yogurt to dollop on the top of the best chili ever!

Sure, there are Texans who will tell you that if you want chili this Saturday, you should have started cooking last week.  We don't have time for that.  Counting the time you have to wait in line behind the family buying cookies and snack cakes for next week's school lunches, and the ride home, you can have great chili in just about an hour if you start right now.

Go ahead!  We'll be right here when you get back!

"They'll never miss this"

I talk to people in all lines of work.  There was a great book by Studs Terkel, "Working," that had people talk all about their jobs. I mean, I'm interested in your job, no matter what it is you do. Pizza maker, bridge/tunnel toll taker, bread baker, football sideline pom-pom shaker...I love to hear about the ins and outs of jobs.  And most people will talk about their work, if they take any sort of pride in it. 

Like, you ask someone behind the counter at the sub shop about what the worst order to prepare in a hurry is, and who are the hardest customers to deal with, and they'll tell you!   Servers, hotel maids, grocery cashiers...they've got stories!  Just ask.

A lot of the stories, it's sad to say, concern the America habit of theft, wrapped in a blanket of entitlement.  Such as those people who will go to a restaurant and, as they leave, take 127 packets of sugar, and fake sugar, and the mustard and the ketchup.  And the salt and the pepper and the little jar of grated cheese.  And people will all tell you about their sweet Aunt Mildred whose kitchen contains cutlery and condiments from every diner in town, and old Millie always says some variation of, "Well, I paid for this when I paid my bill."

You paid for your Salisbury steak, mash and peas, but it's your kitchen, stock it any way you want, and IKEA charges for their kitchen implements, so into the purse it all goes.

Hotels and motels probably lose enough towels, blankets, sheets, coffee makers and clock radios to outfit the Army of Slovenia, what with people traveling home with souvenir towels, blankets, sheets, coffee makers and clock radios to mark their trip to East Awful.   

And of course, you do realize that this racket just makes them raise the price for everything to cover the loss.  

I don't figure it, to be honest with you. (And I wish everyone was!) 

Inside a sick mind

Eric Frein

Residents of our neighboring state of Pennsylvania were able to return to normal living last Thursday, as their police arrested Eric Frein following a long manhunt in the woodsy northeastern part of the state. He was booked at the same barracks where he allegedly ambushed state troopers last month. For reasons buried deep in the foul rag and bone shop of his heart, Frein, an avid hunter, military recreationist and cop hater, shot one state trooper and wounded another outside their barracks on September 12, leading to a seven-week manhunt.

Tiffany Frein

During the search, his sister, Tiffany, was interviewed by Reuters near the family's home in Canadensis, PA.  She said the week before the arrest that she thought her brother had fled the area, and she urged him to give up. If she could have talked to her brother, Tiffany Frein told a reporter, she'd have told him "to do us all a favor and turn yourself in. This is too much," the sister said. "This is just too stressful."

None of us know what went on inside this man's mind, or how he was raised to be so hateful as to carry out a blood vendetta against police who, from all indications, had no contact with him. People said he had a bizarre interest in playing soldier. Frein is part of a collection of groups called "Red Alliance."  They practice MilSim -- recreating battles or wars with real uniforms and weapons for recreational purposes, with a particular interest in Eastern European armies. Frein helped found the MilSim group Eastern Wolves, according to ABC News.

Shortly after authorities found him Thursday, they shackled him with handcuffs belonging to Cpl. Bryon Dickson, the state trooper he allegedly fatally shot on September 12.

The fugitive was then driven away in the slain officer's police car.

"We just thought it was fitting," State Police Commissioner Frank Noonan said.

For the dead officer's family, the wounded officer and his family, the rest of the PA State Police and the dozens of personnel from other agencies who helped in the search, the Frein family, the terrified locals who dreaded leaving their houses while the madman roamed the wooded countryside - all of this had devastating consequences.

And all because he wanted to play Army.

Sunday rerun: 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!

The Saturday Picture Show, November 1, 2014

This weekend in Mexico it's Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead), a holiday observed to pray for and remember friends and family members who have died.  These effigies are part of the remembrance.

I saw the lady from Redbox at the grocery store, filling the Redbox with DVDs, and I told her I had never seen anyone doing that task, so I always figured that little elves came around at night, restocking the machines.  She told me she has another job: baking cookies in a hollow log.

I feel so sad for the people of Hawaii who are losing their houses and homes to a slow-moving natural catastrophe.  Volcanic lava spewing, and nothing that Man has come up with can stop it.  That sort of tells you who's really in charge, huh?

You don't see this sort of thing all the time - a rug for all seasons. Leave the green side up in spring and summer, and then when autumn arrives, turn over a new leaf!

 This is a subtle reminder to take time to read.  We'll be watching!

You can't beat a good pizza for dinner, lunch, or your pc wallpaper.

This past Wednesday marked the 43rd anniversary of the day Duane Allman died in a motorcycle crash in Macon, GA. His influence is still felt in music circles in which guitarists spin and spin, trying to recreate the sounds he got playing slide guitar with a Coricidin bottle.

Before you go off on your merry Saturday way, take a better look at this parrot and comment what you see, please!

10 thoughts, and Happy Hallowe'en!

I got one of those challenges in which I was challenged to list 10 thoughts.  I don't question these things.

1. I wonder how hard it is for some people to pass up such challenges.

2. There are two kinds of people in the world: those who look forward to attending high school reunions, and those who would sooner have a colonoscopy without proper anesthesia than attend one.  Look for me in group "A" - our class of 1969, Towson High School, will reunite on Saturday, November 15.  I can't wait.

3. I'm a little wary of things that purport to be "healthier" for us and really might not be...such as turkey bacon and turkey sausage, which make up for the utter tastelessness of turkey by dumping a ton of salt into the mix.  Margarine and "I Can't Believe You Want Me To Put This On My Muffin" type of spreads are a chemical nightmare. I'll ride the pork and real butter train, please. Everything in moderation!

4. Peggy and I were stunned to go to the early voting last Saturday and waltz in and out with absolutely no delay.  I don't know what kind of turnout to expect on Election Day itself, but I do know that people who make a big thing of patriotism and rah-rah Americana and then don't even bother to vote - no matter how much they think that no one is worth their vote - are just giving their votes to others.  Just vote!  Write in another candidate's name if you must, but don't just skip it.

5.  We didn't really "waltz" in and out.  I don't dance well at all, except for those moments when my wet feet hit the tiled bathroom floor and I skid into the wall like a member of Holiday On Ice or Dance Fever.  I do enjoy watching others who can, dance.  I just lack the talent.  Some people are born to dance and some are born to watch.

6.  Speaking of groups of people - I once heard that all of us fit into one of four groups: those who know, and don't know they know...those who know, and know they know...those who don't know, and know they don't know...and those who don't know and don't know they don't know.  That last group is the most dangerous, so they say.

7. I know what I know and I know what I don't know.  Which is why you will not see me dance, attempt to perform a nephrectomy (surgical removal of a kidney) or attempt any repair better left to a trained electrician, plumber, or surgeon.

8.  Three of the founding dinosaurs of rock 'n' roll - Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Little Richard - remain with us to this day, but this of course cannot be permanent. We who love our rock and/or roll owe them so much, yet we don't take time to honor them while they're still living. Once they're gone, the tributes will flow and Brian Williams will look sad reading the story and people will say, "Oh! I've been into him for years!" but now is the time to say, thank you, Mr Berry, Mr Lewis, and Mr Penniman for giving us a way to avoid hearing dreck music by giving us this and this and this.    You'll notice in the Chuck Berry video that he does a step he called the Duck Walk.  There is nothing new under the sun.

9.  Amanda Bynes was a talented young actress.  We enjoyed her on TV and in the remake of "Hairspray."  Once again, it seems that she is battling mental illness and is back in a hospital for treatment. You can be rich, attractive, talented or famous.  It doesn't matter. So many among us have the fight to deal with.

10. I would really like for someone to explain to me how there is joy or fun or satisfaction in playing these Candy Crush games and other games of the sort.  I don't see as many people playing them as before, but when they do, it always seems to involve frustration and stress.  Don't we get enough of that without asking for more?

What the hell??

"CBS Sunday Morning" had a look at Heaven and Hell this past Sunday morning, a look at how we perceive Heaven and Hell.  I was interested to see old paintings showing Old Beelzebub himself hanging around the gates of Hell, with some fallen angel who is shown as having the key to Hell.

Am I all alone in wondering why there would be a key to Hell?  I mean, isn't it like a Denny's or a Kwik-E-Mart - always open? Who's coming to the door of Hell, anyway? Siding salesmen?  Door-to-door home improvement people who "just finished a job for one of your neighbors"?

This being Halloween week, I thought we could put the pumpkin pie aside for a minute to find out just why we all go to farm stands to purchase pumpkins, then take them home, cut lurid mouth and eye shapes in them and put a candle inside to celebrate All Hallow's Eve.

The Devil can take many forms

Well, this practice didn't just start when Dick Cheney was a boy. People have been carving jack-o’-lanterns at Halloween for hundreds of years. It all started with an old Irish myth about a guy they called “Stingy Jack,” who went out drinking with the Devil. Being stingy, Jack didn't want to pay, so he talked the Devil into turning himself into a coin (remember, he can take many forms). Remaining cheap, Jack decided to keep the coin in his pocket, next to a silver cross, which prevented the Devil from changing back into his original form. Jack continued to torment the hell out of the Devil for years, until Jack died, after carving a cross into a tree where he had the Devil cornered.

The legend has it that God would didn't want an unsavory type like Jack in Heaven. But the Devil, tired of being played for a fool by Jack, would not allow Jack into Hell, so he sent Jack away with just a burning coal to light his way in the dark night. There being no farm stands in Hell (but plenty of turnips),  Jack put the coal into a carved-out turnip and has been roaming the Earth with this homemade lamp ever since. The Irish called this ghostly figure “Jack of the Lantern,” which became “Jack O’Lantern.”

And here in America, since we were going to make so many pumpkin pies, Jack's descendants had a ready source of hollowed-out gourds to illuminate.

Next, we'll take a look at how it is that Carson Daly is famous. Hint: there might be a connection!

Might as well Jump!

Not too far from us, on a road that I often use as a shortcut to physical therapy, used to live a family named the Simpsons. Their name was right on the mailbox! I have no idea if they still live there, but I can understand why they now have a plain mailbox with no name on it, since the local ne'er-do-wells and rakehells, in the flush of Bartmania, must have stolen the first three they saw by the driveway.

I know the feeling of having a famous name, although, the longer it's been since World War II ended, the fewer comments I get about being named for a famous general.  Even though I wasn't.

Jumpin' Gene

The other day, I posted a song on Facebook from YouTube that was a Halloween hit in 1964. The song was "Haunted House," and it was the only top 40 hit for a man from Mississippi named Morris Eugene Simmons, who went by the name Jumpin' Gene Simmons.  JGS didn't write the song, but his is the best-known version of the story of a man who moves into a house with all sorts of creepy people from outer space drinking hot grease and boiling coffee and rattling their chains. He recorded the song six years after the original version was cut by Johnny Fuller.  (Tim McGraw fans, and you know there must be some out there, will recall McGraw's rather racist 1994 hit "Indian Outlaw." Jumpin' Gene wrote that one.)

Gene...about your hair....

History does not record how the original Gene Simmons felt when an Israeli immigrant, born Chaim Witz, took the name "Gene Simmons" for use in his activities as a rock star and leader of the execrable KISS, and source of idiotic statements about the world in general, but I'm pretty sure that Jumpin' Gene took his name off his mailbox before he passed away in 2006.

I know I would have!

"When you're pointing one finger at me, three more are pointing back at you"

Did you ever notice that the very people who are always harping on what others wrong have an awful lot going on in their lives?  

This Rabbi Barry Freundel, of Kesher Israel Congregation in Georgetown, D.C, is the latest in a long line of folks who were caught with their panting down.  D.C. police are working an investigation about a camera, or several cameras, placed in the mikvah.  A mikvah is used by Orthodox Jewish women, who do not touch their husbands while menstruating.  They must immerse in a mikvah before resuming sexual relations, according to doctrine.   DC police say they found video recording equipment in the mikvah, and the police at Towson University over here in Baltimore, where Rabbi Freundel is a tenured associate professor, also report that a search of his office at the college turned up the box for a tiny keychain camera, along with flash drives and enough memory cards to holding more than 200,000 images and 25,000 hours of video...and a picture of nude women and handwritten lists of names.

I don't know what if he's guilty.  I don't know anything about mikvahs or Orthodox Judaism.  But my eyebrows get raised when I hear anyone say, as Rabbi Grendel said last month: “The lack of sexual morality that pervades this society is all over the place...and it creates terrible problems. Pornography and its accessibility is wrecking marriages. It’s two keystrokes away. You get on the computer, you hit the button twice and you’re there. I have not counseled a couple in any level of relationship in the last five years where pornography hasn’t been an issue.” 

I just got on the computer, hit "the button" twice, and wound up with some sort of picture that set forth the proposition that excess belly fat can be wiped out with "this weird trick that has doctors enraged!"

The Swaggart confession

While I was hitting buttons, I looked up "Jimmy Swaggart quotes" and found that the pentecostal preacher and cousin of Jerry Lee Lewis is fond of gay-bashing ("I've never seen a man in my life I wanted to marry") and of himself ("If I do not return to the pulpit this weekend, millions of people will go to hell") but not at all fond of other people knowing anything ("Sex education classes in our public schools are promoting incest").  But Rev. Swaggart is most famous for saying "I have sinned against You, my Lord, and I would ask that your precious blood would wash and cleanse every stain until it is in the seas of God's forgiveness" after that incident in New Orleans where he was caught in a motel room with a prostitute.  I can't remember what sort of self-serving homily he spouted three years later, when he was caught in a limousine with another hooker in Indio, CA.  Swaggart has a lot to say about how unholy everyone else is.  You know who "everyone else" is...people who are home with their families while the preacher cruises for streetwalkers.

Time after time, less famous but not less hypocritical people we all know rant and rave about others cheating, running around, doing the devil's work, and time after time, they're the ones getting busy with a little piece of chicken on the side.  A more moderate person with nothing on his or her conscience doesn't worry about what others are up to when they get down.

Minute by minute

The Baltimore, Maryland area has a few roads that start out in the inner city way downtown and take travelers on a long ride to way out in the country.  Harford Rd, Belair Rd, York Rd - all are known by their final northern destinations, Harford County, Bel Air or York, Pennsylvania.

Falls Rd, MD Rte 25

And then there's Falls Rd, which begins in northern Baltimore County, almost to the Pennsylvania line, and winds up downtown, where it parallels the Jones Falls waterway and the Jones Falls Expressway, known by the two nicknames "The JFX" and "the worst damn highway ever built."  Every day, motorists clog that road to get downtown, and then, from 4 til 6 in the afternoon, they all head home to the suburbs together bumper-to-bumper.

But Falls Road, Maryland Route 25, is what we're talking about today.  On the city end, there is Hampden, home to the coolest urbanites in town, and Mount Washington and a community called Cross Keys, where the visiting baseball clubs used to stay at the Cross Keys Inn when the Orioles played at old Memorial Stadium. Toward the end of the 1985 season, pugnacious Yankee manager Billy Martin was at the hotel bar there and decided to pick a fistfight with one of his pitchers, Ed Whitson, who had 4 inches of height and 40 pounds of weight on the scrawny Martin.  Martin suffered a broken arm, cuts, bruises, and another in a series of firings by lunatic Yankee owner George Steinbrenner.

Farther up the road,  you'll come across little towns such as Brooklandville and Butler, where there is some of the most beautiful fall foliage you'll ever see on display right now.  So there is beauty, and history, and happiness, and sadness along that road.

A few years after high school, a woman who was a year behind our class was driving down Falls Rd, coming home from work as I recall, and she was hit by a stray bullet fired from a gun that some kids were playing with in a vacant lot.  She was pregnant, and she and her baby were both lost.

Tuesday's accident scene

And not far from there, on this week's rainy Tuesday morning, a woman was driving to work at Johns Hopkins Hospital when a tree along the roadway fell suddenly, crushing her fatally within her car.

Two people on a road that runs from packed city to rustic country, minding their own businesses, taken away too soon.  Had they been held up for a few seconds along the road, they would both still likely be among us.  That's something to think about, the next time we're fuming about the slowpoke ahead of us, or the red light that won't change, or whatever holds us up.

I
t just might be holding us up higher than we know at the time.

Sunday rerun: Taking the time to look around

There is a difference between living in a house and cleaning that house.  This basic fact of life has been made quite clear to me over the past few weeks.  Now that I am retired (applause) and Peggy is still working 4 days a week until next fall, I thought I could take over the housecleaning and laundry type stuff.

The first thing I realized was that I should have been doing more of this all along.

The second thing I realized is that it's much easier to vacuum the steps if one starts at the top and works one's way down.

The third thing happens every time.  When I go around with the duster or the can of paste wax, instead of just walking past objets d'art, decorations, knick knacks, gewgaws and memorabilia, I actually have to pick them up and do something with them...dust them, wipe them down or wax them.    And this gives me the pleasant experience of recalling where we got the thing being dusted, wiped or waxed.  Take our bedroom furniture.  There's the bed and bureaus we got from Hochschild-Kohn right before we got married in 1973, and there's the hand-painted box that my Dad made when I was a kid, and there is this and that that we've gotten from antique stores and antique relatives. (!)

All of this brings back memories.  My collection of Oriole and Ravens memorabilia allows me to remember meeting ballplayers, going to games and events, and that's a canoe ride down Memory Creek every time.  Dusting the bookshelves, I remember reading certain books and think of knowledge I got from this volume or that.

I think it's interesting that, just the other day while vacuuming, I needed to rearrange the wires underneath the computer table at which I sit to pound out these scattered thoughts.  I needed to see what was going on with the wire that connects the PC to the printer and the other dingus.  Sure, I have any number of LED flashlights in every room except the guest room (when we have overnight guests, I don't want them horsing around with flashlights all night long.  It would only make them late for their blueberry pancakes in the morning) but I chose to grab my Dad's World War II Navy flashlight.  Every time I use it, I wonder how he felt, using this very flashlight aboard the USS Delta while men from other navies were doing the same thing on their ships.  That very flashlight has been mine since Dad passed away, but it's only been since I retired that I've had to time to ponder the very real significance of articles around the house.

The Saturday Picture Show, October 25, 2014

The old MixMaster and waffle iron are ready to serve up a wonderful Saturday breakfast for you here.

This would seem to be a 1950s photo of a 1950s woman who gave birth to a 1950s baby and is being helped in filing the infant away.

You have just crossed the Delaware Memorial Bridge and have landed safely in New Jersey, land of bridge traffic studies and the most amazing food you'll ever see.

 Just a reminder that winter is coming.  Snow shovels ready?

We don't have this deal down here at our Ocean beaches, but in most of the beach resorts along the Jersey shore, there is a fee for sitting on the beach or romping in the raging surf.  It's not a huge fee, but the money collected goes to beach maintenance.  The tag will not prevent you from getting chafed when sand gets in your drawers, by the way.

The larger picture shows actor Frank Sivero, who of course rocketed to international fame and acclaim by playing Frank Carbone in the Goodfellas movie.  It's hard to remember a time when his name was not headlining every movie marquee in town, isn't it?  Such a famous star.  Well, sir, Frank now claims that the persona of "Louie," who along with "Legs" serves as henchman to "Fat Tony," leader of the Springfield Mafia on The Simpsons, was a carbone copy of his groundbreaking goombah role in a Joe Pesci movie.  For $250,000,000, he will feel better about things.

Barnstorming Black Baseball stars really had to go far to draw a crowd by the time television came along to keep people at home rather than at the ballpark.  So they added comics to the game. Whatever it took to get the turnstiles clicking!

If you don't have the hacienda all duded up for Halloween by now, here's a simple solution featuring some old cat-eye marbles and dental X-rays.

Wrestling with the truth

I saw the name of Jesse Ventura in the news the other day. Ventura, a large man known as James George Janos when he was born in 1951, is known for being large and also for being a politician, actor, author, US Navy SEAL, and a professional wrassler known as Jesse "The Body" Ventura.

He was in the news because he won a defamation suit against another former SEAL who had claimed that Ventura, who opposed our intervention into the Mideast conflicts,  once stated that the United States "deserved to lose a few guys" there and that the SEAL, Chris Kyle, punched Ventura out in response in a barroom brawl.

Well, you know how these "he said/he said" things go.  It took years to wend its way through the courts, and by the time the trial concluded this summer, Kyle had been shot to death in an unrelated incident.  The court awarded Ventura a sizeable judgement against the profits earned by a book Kyle wrote that related the punchout tale, seemingly because it was felt that Kyle came up with the story to make his story more interesting.

And that's not even the most interesting thing about Ventura, about whom controversy swirls like carrots in a blender (there are those who claim he never really was a SEAL.)  Think back to 1998, when the biggest threat facing our nation was Monica Lewinsky hooking up with President Clinton.  There was a governor's race that fall in Minnesota, and, having served as mayor of Brooklyn Park, MN (population 75,000), for a four-year term, "The Body" offered himself as a Reform Party candidate.  What happened stunned everyone in Minnesota.  So many voted for old Jesse as a statement against politics as usual that he won! Ventura got 773,713 votes, against the Republican Norm Coleman's 717,350.  Hubert H. Humphrey III, of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, came in third with 587,528.

A man named "Fancy" Ray McCloney,  running as the "People's Champion," came in with a respectable 919 votes.

His honor the former governor

Of course, his term as governor was marked with controversy spawned by ineptitude and his failure to understand that he was now the governor of a fairly large state and not a wrassler anymore.  He referred to the reporters who covered him as "media jackals," and appeared on David Letterman's show once. Letterman asked, "Which is the better city of the Twin Cities, Minneapolis or St. Paul?"  And Governor Ventura responded, "Minneapolis. Those streets in St. Paul must have been designed by drunken Irishmen."

So, you can understand why he only served one term and has been absent from ballots anywhere ever since.  His political career always reminded me of the "Barney Miller" episode in which Harris went out west and came back with one of those bolo ties as a joke gift for Barney...but Barney didn't know it was a joke, and started wearing the tie all around.

You only get one vote in each election, and it's not something to use as a joke.

Another cheesy use for classical music

Rossini

Italian composer Gioachino Antonio Rossini (1792 – 1868) wrote 39 operas, as well as many other songs, but we know him best for "The William Tell Overture," which was used for years as the theme song to "The Oprah Winfrey Show" "The Lone Ranger" on radio and television.  William Tell was a 14th-century Swiss hero immortalized today for splitting an apple off the head of his son Walter, as ordered by an overlord who was steamed at Tell for not bowing before the hat of the overlord, which was hung in the town square for all to revere.

I'm not making this up!

The overlord was going to kill Tell, but forced him into the arrow-apple bit, and Tell secretly took two arrows out of his quiver before launching one at old Walter, the idea being that if he got Walter in the Adam's apple, rather than the Red Delicious atop his head, Tell would use the other arrow on Gessler, the politically-appointed head cheese who was causing all this trouble.

Gonna need hot sauce, please

Speaking of cheese...The William Tell Overture was the last opera that Rossini wrote, although he lived almost 40 more years.  He was a noted gourmand over in Italy and spent a lot of those years devising recipes and dishes that we still order today. Working with his close friend, Dante "Veal" Parmigiana, Rossini came up with Tournedos Rossini, described as "filet mignon pan-fried in butter, served on a crouton, topped with a hot slice of fresh pan-fried foie gras, garnished with slices of black truffle and finished with a Madeira demi-glace sauce."

That's not quite as catchy as "two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles and onions on a sesame-seed bun," but it's close.  And Tournedos Rossini doesn't even have cheese!

The reason this song is on my mind is that baseball season is over here in Baltimore, and with it goes the radio commercial for a certain car dealer, which we all heard a thousand times per game, it seemed.  The jingle for the car dealer (let's call him "Rog Dodge") took the Lone Ranger melody and chirped, "Save a buck, save a buck, save a buck buck buck on a Rog Dodge Jeep, car, van or truck!"

That is not at all what either Gioachino Antonio Rossini or Buck Showalter, for that matter, had in mind, I'm sure.  It's just another way of misusing great classical music for modern commercial gain.

Tick Tock

Just as hand surgeons dread weekends (bagel-slicing accidents) and orthopedists get ready to get really busy after the first day of icy sidewalks, we all should be ready for added shin injuries these days, because it's not quite time to go back to Eastern Standard Time, but it's dark by 7 PM and still dark til 7 in the yawning, so people are bumping into ottomans (ottomen?) and open cabinet drawers in the gloaming all over town.

I love fall, and I think it's the best time for enjoying "the gloaming" - the poetic way of saying twilight, or dusk.  Nights in October and November gloam like no others.  I guess that's a word...

But here at the Lazy 'C' Ranch, I have lamps on timers in several rooms to light the rooms so as to avoid bumping into furniture or other people in the house.  They come on at whatever time I set them for, but they are not smart enough to change their own time settings, so there is a short period in which it's dark outside, and dark in the living room, family room or dining room, and it's so still and nice and quiet that the only sound you'll hear is my "Owwww!" when my lower leg smashes into some stupid chair.  Who put that chair here, for crying out loud?  Oh, that's right.  I did.

I don't care, because fall is my favorite season and when we turn the clocks back, we even get an hour of snoozing.  Even with that extra rest, I still have trouble figuring out what time it gets dark. Running around the house changing all the clocks and timers is fun, but first I have to go to the digital weather station in the kitchen to set my watch, because you can't call the phone company to get the right time anymore.  Oh, but they will tell you when it's time to pay your bill.  They might even call you on the phone!

It's starting to seem like I should just sit around with my CDs and iPod and try to stay out of life's way.

While there's still time

I've seen enough people pass away in my day, especially people from my family, that I have come to realize the old expression is true:  

No one, on their deathbed, has ever said, "Gee!  I wish I had spent more time at work!  I could have done more Quarterly Reports, most Cost/Benefits analyses, and done deeper research and development on the fragellated hydrostan that we were trying to market!"

Nope.  Here's the word from an Australian nurse, Bonnie Ware, who has counselled the dying in their last days.  As a palliative nurse, she reveals the most common regrets we have at the end of our lives. And among the top, from men in particular, is "I wish I hadn't worked so hard."

There was no mention of more sex or bungee jumps.

Ms Ware recorded dying epiphanies in a blog called Inspiration and Chai, and that blog turned into a book called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying.

Ware feels that people finally (an appropriate use of that term) gain clarity at the end, seeing the larger picture, and she thinks we might learn from their wisdom. "When questioned about any regrets they had or anything they would do differently," she says, "common themes surfaced again and again."

Here are the top five regrets of the dying, as Nurse Ware recorded them:

1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
"This was the most common regret of all. When people realise that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made. Health brings a freedom very few realise, until they no longer have it."
2. I wish I hadn't worked so hard.
"This came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children's youth and their partner's companionship. Women also spoke of this regret, but as most were from an older generation, many of the female patients had not been breadwinners. All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence."
3. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.
"Many people suppressed their feelings in order to keep peace with others. As a result, they settled for a mediocre existence and never became who they were truly capable of becoming. Many developed illnesses relating to the bitterness and resentment they carried as a result."
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
"Often they would not truly realise the full benefits of old friends until their dying weeks and it was not always possible to track them down. Many had become so caught up in their own lives that they had let golden friendships slip by over the years. There were many deep regrets about not giving friendships the time and effort that they deserved. Everyone misses their friends when they are dying."
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.
"This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. The so-called 'comfort' of familiarity overflowed into their emotions, as well as their physical lives. Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to their selves, that they were content, when deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have silliness in their life again."

Now, how old are you right now?  63?  60?  52?  34?  26? Here's the thing, and by the way, you look marvelous today!  You cannot count on 64, 61, 53, 35, or 27.  I'm sorry.  You never know.  Why so many wonderful people are called home so early, we don't know.  I do know that when the newspaper or tv news does a story about someone turning 100, they are never crabby or crotchety people. Ever notice that? Sometimes they attribute their superannuation to tossing back a juice glass full of scotch every morning and hooving on a pack of Luckys every day (very rare, you know) or they chalk it up to faith or friends or family or lots of molasses and bulgur wheat, but no one blowing out five times twenty candles ever said, "Oh boy! I'm so glad I worked/worried/fretted and fussed all day and all night for all these years!  It's really paying off now, boy howdy!"

"I can see right through you!"

We have the unique chance to learn from Ms Ware's patients, who, like Jacob Marley, are trying to send us a message. Are you too busy to hear it?