Sunday Rerun: It's Chili Inside

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!

The Saturday Picture Show, February 11, 2017

It's sort of an odd week here at Saturday Picture Show headquarters.  For instance, here we have an elephant wearing an afghan and pants.

And here is a bull elephant with a pretty impressive set of tusks. Even though the left one is broken (trunk-ated?) he can still get a lot done, just not at the circus anymore.

Now this is a magnificent shower.  I don't see a drain, or shower curtains, or even the mop that you're surely going to need.

Here's a guy who is going nuts about getting some lunch!

When I was younger, I was quite the flamboyant preppie.  I had plaid pants, bright green pants, barn red pants, yellow pants the color of giant lemon drops, and so on. Peggy asked me about those pants and I had to let her know that we called them "Go to hell pants," because, if someone said anything critical about them, we said they could take their complaints directly below.

This is the traffic jam that resulted when ONE traffic light broke in São Paulo, Brazil.  I mean, really.

I have to figure that this trail was carved out by floodwater, but it looks like a great place to take a hike.

And let's close this week out by sharing a picture of a guy with two dogs in his hoodie, walking a duck wearing shoes.  And you think YOU'RE crazy!

Responsibility

"Kenny spent his life trying to tolerate negative words and actions."

Kenny Suttner

The words of the mother of a friend of Kenneth Suttner, of Columbia, Missouri, speak millions of words for the plight of Kenny and millions of others in his situation.

Kenny was bullied in his high school.  He was overweight and he had a speech impediment, two prime sources of material for high school bullies. "A lot of people, kids, made fun of the way — basically everything about him," his best friend Lexie Graves told the local paper.

The high school in question is Glasgow High, and the school superintendent is Mike Reynolds, who told the paper that while he admits that there is bullying in the school, he doesn't feel it was too serious.  During an inquest, Barbara Smith, a mom of another GHS student, said she enrolled her son in a school elsewhere because of how horrible the bullying is, and because nothing seems to be done about it.

The inquest is into the cause of death for Kenneth, who ended his life with a gun just before Christmas, because he reached the limit of his tolerance for the hell he was put through.

Part of the hell came from his job at a Dairy Queen, where his supervisor, Harley Branham, seemed to delight in tormenting the lad.

Ms Branham constantly made fun of Kenny, according to the testimony of Allison Bennett, who also worked at the fast food place. Bennett says Branham made Kenny crawl on his belly while he mopped the floor, and that one time when he made a cheeseburger wrong, she threw the burger at him. 

It's no surprise that Branham said this was all in jest, and claims that young Suttner took it that way.  

Uh huh.

After the coroner's inquest into Kenneth's death, a jury was asked to decide whether his suicide was an accident or a crime. Their recommendation for the local prosecutor was to charge Branham with felony involuntary manslaughter. They also decided that  Dairy Queen was negligent for not training its employees about harassment and that Glasgow High School was negligent in bullying prevention.

Branham, in her testimony, admitted calling the youth an "a-hole," but also said, "There’s a lot of people at Dairy Queen saying I was the reason [he killed himself], but I don’t understand why it would be that way."

Of course she doesn't.  That's why she acted the way she acted.

The DQ store in question

Kids picking on other kids is horrible enough, but corporations and businesses have to be vigilant in hiring, training, and supervising their staffs. It's the old story of the weakest link. A multi-billion dollar business can be wiped out because they turned the keys and the responsibility for properly running a local branch to someone who can't handle that responsibility.

The shame of all this bullying is that we as a nation don't feel much shame about it at all. To the contrary, we elect people who act just the same way as those high school kids!

On the other hand...

You know the old saying, currently popular in D.C: "the shoe's on the other foot now."  That would really be uncomfortable.  But how about if the pencil's in the other hand?

In my neverending search to find new interesting material to share, my web surfboard washed up on a site called http://hubpages.com/education/Creativity-and-the-Non-dominant-Hand

and this is some fascinating stuff right here.  


This article makes the point, or tries to, that if you are stuck in a mental logjam, or a bucket of strawberry jam, you can get your brain back in gear by...using your other (non-dominant) hand.

Read the article with either hand on the mouse, and see if you think it would work.  

Yessirree Bob! 

Have you ever, for instance, sprained your wrist reaching for a lunch check (laughter) and found yourself unable to use your right hand for mousing purposes for awhile?  I know someone who had shoulder surgery and is currently left-mousing it, and from all indications, it is not easy.  

The article says if you pick up your pen with your other hand and write with just that hand for a week or two, you will:

• soon be writing legibly with the new hand
• have all sorts of new thoughts to write about in your new handwriting
• find that hoodie that you thought you left at the pool but wasn't there when you checked the lost-and-found

And THEN, the article says, if you normally write with your right hand, use that hand to write a question, and write the answer with your newly-trained left hand.

They say it works! To quote from the story: 

 It is allowing that part of your mind, which normally 'switch-boards' through the right-hand side of your brain, access to consciousness via writing. The predominantly 'creative' right hemisphere of the brain, which channels most of our imaginative processes, our sense of rhythm, spatial awareness, our daydreaming, colour and sense of dimension, our 'picturing' and visualization, is thereby made available. The flow is through the right-brain and down through that left hand.

I will leave it to the clinical psychologists among us - and you know who you are - to determine if this is valid.

My plan, since I'm left handed, would be to take that hand and write "What the heck is this consarned reverse-hand foolishness?" and then see what the right hand writes.

It's funny how we always put on the same shoe first, or use the same hand to brush our teeth.  

It works better if you use a toothbrush, you know.

No shirt no service

The Lieutenant Governor of Texas is a man who calls himself Dan Patrick nowadays. Born Dannie Scott Goeb here in Baltimore, he used to be a DJ on WISZ, the Baltimore Country Music station where I worked for five years after he was gone.  In those days, he called himself Dan Scott, and that's as stereotypically "radio" as a fake name gets. Later on, he started calling himself "Dan Patrick," he ran a chain of sports bars that made him go bankrupt, and he decided to become a conservative.  It happens.

All I know is, the women in the accounting and traffic office at WISZ loved old Dan Whatever. I guess that natural gift of having people like him is what drove him into politics. The ladies talked about what a great guy he was. I never met him, but it's not every DJ who winds up becoming the lieutenant governor of a state that wishes to secede from the union.

Now, instead of the eyes of Texas being upon us, the eyes of the nation are upon Texas, where the Super Bowl was played the other night, as you might have heard. And someone stole Tom Brady's jersey after the game, not figuring on the reality that it might be as hard to sell that holy relic to a memorabilia collector as it would be to unload the original Mona Lisa to an art lover, since it's well known that it was ripped off.

But Dan Patrick, a man who said that God uses that hirsute rural oddity Phil Robertson to bring us important messages, decided to send the Texas Rangers (the state police, not the baseball team) in on the case.

"In Texas we place a very high value on hospitality and football. Tom Brady's jersey has great historical value and is already being called 'the most valuable NFL collectible ever.' It will likely go into the Hall of Fame one day. It is important that history does not record that it was stolen in Texas."

Have you seen this shirt?

In a world where we are being told that our way of life is coming to end in 3-2-1, let's look at that statement. Assuming that Brady didn't mistakenly pack the sweaty garment in his Dopp kit with his unused razor and colognes, the shirt was stolen, and it was stolen in Texas, and even if it turns up underneath Bill Belichick's pile of unwashed hoodies someday, it happened in Texas, and that's the deal.

What ruins everything for the person who currently possesses the #12 jersey is that people all over can run out, buy an official copy of the shirt and get it all sweaty, then claim it as the real deal.

It's tough way to make a living.  These ragpickers who skulk around stealing dirty jerseys remind me of Scrooge's maids, selling his bedclothes.

You bet

I have never been to Las Vegas, Nevada, and the odds are (!) that I will never go.  People who go there - American people! - tend to call Elton John "Sir" Elton John, and I recognize no one as royalty (except The King Of All Media.)

So all I know about the casino lifestyle is what I see in movies and television shows, and what I read, and I have heard so much about the fact that the casinos are vast, windowless rooms with no clocks, which would drive me nuts.  I have to know what time it is every five minutes. Hold on, I'm going to check the time right now.

OK I'm back. I know that the deal is; the casino operators don't want you to stand and stare at the beautiful sunset.  They don't want you to say, whoa, 3 AM, better hit the sack; got that big meeting with the rest of the conventioneers today at 9.

Nope. They want you gambling, buying drinks and gambling, and eating and gambling. Stay there, run up your credit cards, and get ready for the big Celine Dion Show later.

I did not know this, though! The carpeting in those casinos is deliberately ugly.  I mean, really: 

These are real pictures of really ugly rugs in casinos in LV.  I don't know where such ugly designs spring from, but I'm gonna guess that people with issues, shall we say, get their paints and pencils and design these atrocities.

So, since I have all the time in the world, I researched why casino operators (and I am told that they are some of the finest people alive, with such colorful nicknames) would call up "Rugs Rugs Rugs" and have this mess put down.

Three stories I came up with follow:

1) They don't want you to look at the floor.  The floor leads to the door, and the door leads you out, and they don't want you to leave. So these carpets make sure you give but a passing glance to what's beneath your Rockports.

B) It's hard to tell a scotch-and-soda stain mess when the floor is already a mess. So, they don't have to worry about cleaning the floors up.  Since they're in 24-7-365 operation, it's not like Hazel is coming through with a Bissell mop-vac after hours.

III) One story has it that if you drop a chip on this awfulness, you'll never find it, and the casino sweeps up extra profit that way. But that contradicts "B" above, and, furthermore, one card dealer says that people who drop or lose chips demand replacements, uninterested in crawling around looking for the ones that got away.

So, to sum up, I'm not going to Caesars Salad Palace, and if you do, please, don't look down.