Sweet story

Who's with me for being a fan of large versions of little things?

I mean, who wouldn't have fun with the Pee Wee Herman Ear Phone?

Or this Giant Pencil?

I've always enjoyed the Jumbo versions of everyday objects, which is why I was stoked to hear that the Mars Wrigley candy people had created a 4,728-pound Snickers a couple of weeks ago.

You talk about their slogan, "Packed with peanuts, Snickers really satisfies!" That hugger was more than two tons of satisfaction, caramel and peanut style!

But competition in the world of candy is fierce. (Remember that Candy Crush game that had everyone, well, stuck on it a while back?)  Not to be outdone, the people up at Hershey had to strike back.

They have this thing called a Take 5 bar. I've never had one, being an Almond Joy loyalist, but a Take 5 contains milk chocolate, peanuts, caramel, peanut butter, and pretzels.

Chocolate and pretzels must be kept far apart from each other, to me, like maple syrup and pizza.

Anyway, someone must like Take 5, and so Hershey's master candyminds made one that weighs in at 5,943 pounds.

They couldn't have added 57 pounds of peanuts and made the thing an even 3 tons already?

People from the Guinness Book of World Records - "adjudicators," if you will - verified that weight of the gigantic treat, and measured it at 9 feet by 5.5 feet. Even larger than Jason Momoa.

America: first with the biggest.

Ha ha ha

Normally, I like to wait until the week is over before I award the coveted Jackass Of The Week Trophy to some deserving gozzlehead, but I don't see how anyone this week will be able to edge past James Potok this week, and he faced some very stiff competition down in Washington D.C.

Potok calls himself an artist.  His "art," such as it is, consists of making videos and posting them on YouTube.

I have an issue about this "artist" designation anyway. You will notice that just about everyone is an "artist" at what they do. Some guy who slices prosciutto at the deli is an artist and the sandwiches he makes you are "artisan" sandwiches. Subway even calls the kid who slaps ham and cheese on your roll a "sandwich artist" to make you feel a little more special about the experience. Not to knock the people at Subway, but there is a bit of difference between sculpting a statue out of bronze or whittling a duck decoy and slicing a roll and placing salami in it.

Back to this jackanapes from Canada, Potok (who performs under the nom de gag Potok Philippe, an apparent joke about the luxury watch brand Patek Phillippe, whose timepieces cost in the $200,000+ range - this man is a laugh factory!) found humor in the idea of forcing a plane to make an emergency landing by claiming that he might have the deadly coronavirus.

But doggone it, don't get all mad at him! He says he only wanted to make a viral video based on a virus.  And he has apologized and everything.

It happened this past Monday when WestJet Flight 2702 took off from Toronto, bound for Montego Bay, Jamaica.  Two hours into the flight, funnyman Phillippe stood up and said, "I just came back from Hunan province, the capital of the coronavirus…I'm not feeling too well. Thank you."

And the plane turned around and returned to Pearson International Airport in Toronto.

Jim Carrey is a funny Canadian. So is Howie Mandel. This jerk is now.

He didn't even have the location right. This coronavirus broke out in Wuhan, not Hunan. At that, hundreds of people in Wuhan have died from it, and millions are quarantined as we speak, so you can understand how funny this must have struck all the 243 people on board.

On the way back to Canada, the airline crew put Potok in a mask and gloves. They should also have added a gag, leg irons, handcuffs and shackles, and forced him to listen to Michael Bublé  the whole way home.

A passenger on board, Julie-Anne Broderick, told her  Facebook that her flight returned "because SOME IDIOT pretended he had the Coronavirus to post on YouTube."

Of course, the airline, WestJet, had no choice but to follow infectious-disease protocols "out of an abundance of caution."

Ontario Police had Potok inspected and found him asymptomatic, as well as humorless. They arrested him for the most Canadian-sounding crimes you ever heard of: mischief and breach of recognizance.

"They've charged me criminally, and I have court to go to," Potok told the news, adding, "I'm an artist; any publicity for myself is good publicity."

"I had my camera with me — I was looking to get a viral video," he said. "I was looking to get it up on all the social-media platforms. I was looking to create a video, yes, that would go viral," he said.

And, as so often happens way too late to do any good, he became apologetic for ruining everyone else's trip.

"It seems to me like this was in poor taste, in retrospect," he told Global News. "What I did was wrong. I ruined the flight for 200 and somewhat people. I ruined their flight."

Why must people be such horses' asses? Come and get your trophy.

Airplane!

The Maddox Brothers and Rose. What I wouldn't
give for one of these getups to live in!

No one ever said we all have to live in houses or apartments or any other standard structure.  I've seen people who made homes out of old railroad cabooses. Rose Maddox and her family, Okies seeking better times in California in the Dust Bowl 1930s, lived for a time in a section of concrete culvert pipes in Oakland, CA before becoming famous country music performers.

And there was an old lady who lived in a shoe. She had so many children, she didn't know what to do. (She had married a heel, and had trouble keeping body and sole together.)

Meanwhile, in Oregon dwells a fellow named Bruce Campbell, an engineer by trade, who lives on an airplane. They tell me that Oregon and its woods are home to many oddities, and "they" never steer me wrong.

But you cannot steer Mr Campbell's plane. The engines etc are long gone, and it is parked in the woods like a 1959 Ford Pickup in a farmyard in Kentucky.

Propped up on concrete stands in a wood outside of Portland stands Mr Campbell's Boeing 727.  Instead of a tarmac, it has a driveway.

Somehow he has rigged up a shower and lavatory facilities, which I'm sure comes as a relief to the nearby woods, and he can cook and do laundry inside.

He only lives here six months of every year, spending the rest of his time in Japan, where he is looking for room to park a Boeing 747 fuselage as his other home.

I don't know. Maybe he's onto something. He seems to have the Wright idea.

The Music Died

When that helicopter crash last week ended the lives of Kobe Bryant, his daughter, and seven other people who were just trying to get from one place to another, we started thinking about how many times it seems that celebrities and athletes perish in aviation accidents. The list is too long: Patsy Cline, Hawkshaw Hawkins, Cowboy Copas, Jim Reeves, Jim Croce, Aaliyah, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Ricky Nelson, Otis Redding, the members of the Lynyrd Skynyrd band come to mind at once, and there are many more.

Yesterday (Feb 3) was the date that in 1959, people woke to the news that Buddy Holly had died in a plane crash after an appearance in Clear Lake, Iowa, along with J.P. Richardson ("The Big Bopper") and Ritchie Valens.

To say that Buddy Holly was a founding father of rock 'n' roll is 100% accurate. His career grew along with the music, in fact: he began as a member of a country duo ("Buddy and Bob") and soon developed a three-man rock band. So skilled as a guitarist that he was able to handle both lead and rhythm guitar, he only needed a bass and drums to round out his sound. He only lived long enough to record three albums, but we all know his songs: "Peggy Sue," "That'll Be The Day," and "Oh Boy!" and many more.

To show how far ahead of his time was, listen to "Rock Around With Ollie Vee," recorded in 1956. It was written by Sonny Curtis, who also wrote "Love Is All Around," the Mary Tyler Moore Show theme.

The Big Bopper was an afternoon DJ on KTRM in Beaumont, TX, and performed a number called "Chantilly Lace" along with writing "White Lightning," a country hit for George Jones.

Valens, born Richard Valenzuela, was only 17, but was riding high on his hits "Donna" and "Come On, Let's Go," both of which are among the very first hit records by a Latino rock and roller.

The three were appearing on a circuit called the Winter Dance Party, and Holly was the star. It's not possible to overstate his influence even today, when you consider that The Beatles so revered him that they took their name as a tribute to Holly's band The Crickets.

Personal differences and financial troubles had broken up Holly and his band, and by the winter of 1958 he was living in New York City, far from his native Texas, and was developing new music that would likely have flowered for years to come. But he needed money, so when he was offered this tour, off he went.

The travel was awful and the weather was cold. Someone came up with the idea to charter a plane to get to the next show in Moorhead, Minnesota by way of Fargo, North Dakota. Valens flipped a coin with Holly's new guitarist and unfortunately won a seat. Richardson got a seat because he had the flu, and Waylon Jennings, then the bassist for Holly and later a big country star, gave up his spot for him.

To his death, Jennings was haunted by the last words he spoke to Holly: "I hope your damn plane crashes."

left to right: Holly, Valens, Richardson

After the February 2 show in Clear Lake, Holly, Richardson, and Valens, with pilot Roger Peterson at the controls, left the Mason City airport just after midnight. The weather was inclement, and Peterson was not qualified to fly by instruments only.  A few minutes later, the plane crashed in a cornfield, taking all four lives.

I try to think of the moral and meaning in all this, and I am not wise enough my many miles. People will continue to take risks with their transportation in spite of all entreaties and exhortations, and lives will be lost over and over. I guess the thing to think of is how many people HAVEN'T gotten into a car with a drunk driver or flown in foggy or snowy conditions or taken other chances, and we don't hear about them because they lived to tell other stories.

Meanwhile, our memories:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eq9FCBatl3A (Buddy)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMcHbh6HBDk (Ritchie)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGXFVOc5I8Q (Bopper)

One final thought: before he married, Buddy dated a girl in Texas named Echo McGuire. To this day, when I think of the 1950s, I think the entire decade reminds me a girl named Echo.

My review of the Super Bowl

I remember so many boring Super Bowls where two dull teams slog it out to an exciting 35-18 finish, and the halftime entertainment was KISS and I'm falling asleep by the middle of the third quarter.

Football has changed a lot in the past few years. The day of the pocket quarterback who stood like a cigar store Indian and either passed or ran for his life are all over, and those immobile guys have been replaced by people like Lamar Jackson of the Ravens and this Patrick Mahomes of the new champion Chiefs, who can run as well as, if not better than they can throw, and we at home don't know what they're going to do.  It's entertainment, and more often than not, the games come down to the final few minutes, or even seconds, and you can't doze off or pick up PARADE magazine and chuckle at the Lockhorns comic.

The halftime show this year featured two magnificent women, Jennifer Lopez and Shakira, singing and dancing their way into my heart and then right on past it, since I couldn't understand the lyrics (and I'm fairly proficient in Spanish.) That style of music is not for me, but I see on social media that a lot of people were thrilled with the show, so good. That's not why I tuned in to begin with!

The commercials were good, the ones where I knew what they were talking about. Faute de mieux, the people who make commercials go for a frame of reference far outside of mine - usually science fiction movies and reality TV. But, the Jeep commercial with Bill Murray was brilliant, and how appropriate that it ran on Groundhog Day, allowing the setup of a parody of Bill's own classic movie. But, on the morning news yesterday morning, as they previewed the ads, the weatherman was talking about the movie to the anchor, who had never seen the movie, so I guess that spot went right over her head.

As did the other really great commercial, a string of references to Rock and rocky things, which wound up with a guy wearing a Rocky Balboa boxing robe at the 72 stone steps before the entrance of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  And then the guy turns around and it turns out to be CHRIS Rock. And then Balboa himself, Sylvester Stallone, lurches into view and "You were expecting...me?" or words to that effect, and I wonder how many people in their 20s know anything about any of the many Rocky movies that entertained us in our day.

It's hard to think of something that EVERYONE knows or cares about. I see the #1 album this week on the Billboard charts is "Music To Be Murdered By" by Eminem. Perhaps it's best I don't know any more than that, but I have to imagine what it'll be like 46 years from now, when young couples look back and remember that as their favorite song from courtship.

Whereas, Peggy and I had for "our song" the tender ballad "Bongo Rock" by the Incredible Bongo Band from the album "The Thing With Two Heads."

See the difference? No one ever got murdered by a bongo drum.

Sunday Rerun (from 2017): The local diner might name a sandwich after him

If you watch enough police-lawyer shows, you can count on seeing some grizzled state's attorney mutter, "You can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich!"

Here in Baltimore County, home of fine fare for all, there's a chance that a man will be indicted because of a grilled cheese sandwich.

Daniel Brian Blackwell, 55, of Dundalk, started shooting one of the 15 guns he owns the other day, which led to a) holes in the kitchen floor of his house b) his wife and three teenaged children running for their lives and c) an hours-long barricade situation, as he held off the attempts of the police to bring him to justice.

It's a mercy that no one in his family was injured.  Blackwell himself was taken to a hospital for minor injuries.

And of course, all this took place for a good reason.  I mean, no one is going to shoot a gun inside their house just over nothing at all.

Especially a man who is not supposed to own any guns at all. Blackwell is not legally allowed to own guns because of prior assault convictions. But he ALLEGEDLY had 15 of them in his house, four of them loaded.

He was taken into custody and charged with attempted murder, assault, reckless endangerment and various firearms violations.

Police booking photo

Oh yes! We were saying that no would have acted this way without sufficient provocation. Well, Blackwell’s wife told the police that her husband had shot at her through the basement floor "after he became angry when she took a bite out of his grilled cheese sandwich."

The police statement continued: "She said the first shot was fired as she was in the kitchen making dinner. At that point, she went down to the basement to check on her husband, found him surrounded by guns and ammunition and went back upstairs. Soon after, the wife heard three more gunshots, the projectiles of which came through the kitchen floor near where she was standing.”

You know me...if I were running the county hoosegow, what do you think the "guests" would be getting for breakfast, lunch, and dinner this week?

The Saturday Picture Show, February 1, 2020

These are the pyramids of Egypt, but from a different angle than what we usually see.

How sad to see good theaters go bad.  Abandoned, in fact, and left to rot. The spray paint kids have done their thing, and now, so is time and dry rot. But everything comes back, and some day in the future, someone will restore this old movie palace and sell people on the revolutionary idea of leaving their phones off and going out among other humans and seeing a movie on a big screen!

It looks like wiring for the space shuttle, but no, it's a threaded needle, greatly magnified.

Remember the tumbling tumbleweeds in the old western movies? I don't know where this was photographed, but it really is a tumbling snow weed!

A large boulder the size of a small boulder?

Sing along with me now...Baby shark, doo doo doo doo doo doo...

This toothbrush holder, otherwise mundane, becomes a sight to see every day at a certain time, as soon as the sun hits it.

The island of Burano in Venice features these colorful houses, and very little in the way of paved streets.

"You pettifogger, you!"

Some people love numbers; I love words. I love to learn new ones and old ones and enjoy seeing people make them up.

And I love it when people dredge up an old, old word and use it all over the place.

Of course, I'm talking about Chief Justice John Roberts, who blasted both the  Democrats and Republicans during the impeachment trial.  Because senators on both sides were being so vociferously contumacious and disputatious, he dressed them down with a fine old rare word -- pettifogging -- to settle them down.

Roberts, who ordinarily spends his days in the company of well-reasoned individuals who behave like grownups, and Brett Kavanaugh, sat through the barbs and insults, and said that sort of talk was inappropriate, citing history to remind a roomful of lawyers why they need to act like big boys and girls.

"In the 1905 Swayne trial, a senator objected when one of the managers used the word 'pettifogging' and the presiding officer said the word ought not to have been used," Roberts said. "I don't think we need to aspire to that high of a standard, but I do think those addressing the Senate should remember where they are."

Roberts did not make it clear just what the objection was. Possibly, the solon lodging the gripe did not know what it means ("worrying too much about details that are minor or not important," according to Merriam-Webster) but I suppose he was saying that in 1905, senators found it objectionable to nit-pick, and in 2020, they're openly calling others dishonest.

The Chief Justice continued, "I think it is appropriate for me to admonish both the House managers and the President's counsel in equal terms to remember that they are addressing the world's greatest deliberative body. One reason it has earned that title is because its members avoid speaking in a manner and using language that is not conducive to civil discourse."

Or not. Perhaps he figures that saying so makes it so.

At any rate, his job here is largely ceremonial.  He presides over the trial by  keeping the clock, reading aloud the rules, and announcing the vote tallies.
The Senate majority could overrule any decisions he were to lay down, so it's better than he serve us to use rare words that we can learn and use.

I would suggest that Roberts turn to merriam-webster.com, a site I visit like kids go to YouTube. They feature a Word of the Day, and recently, that page has featured some fine ones: "parvenu," "sublimate," "lackluster," "euphoria," "outlandish" and "nurture" among them.

All but the last of these could reasonably be expected to be seen in any article about Congress. Nurturing is not a thing they do.

Insensitive

We speak of, and bemoan, the divisiveness in our country, and we wonder what we can do about it.

And then we see people who should be the very people who work to bring us together being the people who create the divisions.

Take this soldier:

This John Evans is a big deal in the Army, I guess. I mean, a Major General! Wow! Is that better than a General General?  Anyhow, on Sunday, when the news came along of the deaths of Kobe Bryant and his daughter and seven other American citizens that Beetle Bailey Evans here is supposed to be serving, Evans chose to send that text marginalizing those nine deaths.

By the way, you and I are paying him a salary of $15,381 per month, plus housing and benefits and free camouflage clothing.

"Lots of people mourning a basketball player this morning."  As if that's a bad thing. Soldier Guy goes on to say HE will use his time to remember SPC Moore and his Family (sic).

Where did people get this habit of Capitalizing initial letters to stress the importance of nouns?

No doubt about it, SPC Antonio Moore, who was a 22-year-old Army Reserve combat engineer who came from Wilmington, N.C. deserves our mourning, and his family, our sympathy. He died in Syria on January 24 in a vehicle rollover accident. Regrettable, and sad.

But  - earth to Evans - it is possible to mourn this brave soldier, and to mourn "a basketball player" and his daughter and the seven others aboard the helicopter, and to feel sorrow for their survivors.

The United Nations World Population Prospects analysis says that an average of 7,452 people die every day in the US. That's one every 12 seconds.

Every one of those 7,452 had two parents, and every one of them had people who knew and loved them, no matter how glorious or lachrymose their individual lives turned out to be.

And guess what else, Major Doofus? It is entirely possible to grieve for more than one of them at a time!

You would know that if you were a fully-realized person, but your "you're in the Army or else you don't matter" myopic tunnel vision is keeping you from joining the rest of who have feelings for all that matters.

And, most of the time when people say, "I meant no disrespect"...they did.

Youth will serve

One great idea that schools have of late is this concept of a senior project, where, before being handed a diploma, a student has to accomplish something meaningful.

Here in Baltimore County, MD, a student must complete (1) Seventy-five hours of student service that includes preparation, action, and reflection components and that, at the discretion of the local school system, may begin during the middle grades; or (2) A locally-designed program in student service that has been approved by the State Superintendent of Schools.

(Hint to anyone seeking hours: join a volunteer fire company.)

I'm sure students and teachers alike understand that doing this sort of thing is much more valuable than writing an essay on the causes of the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC).

For example, how about this young man named Hunter Wart? (With a name like that, he should go into radio. He'd be a natural!)

But here's what he did for his senior project:

Hunter Wart

Hunter spent more than a year fundraising - cutting grass and hauling in scrap metal  - and he came up with $10,000, with which he bought a Safe Haven Baby Box for the Seymour, Indiana, Fire Department. These boxes are meant to provide a place for babies of parents in distress to shelter the child. When the door is opened to provide access to the little haven, an alarm notifies firefighters.

"It was a lot of hard work," his mom Julia Kwasniewski said on CNN. "A lot of blood, sweat and tears."

The hard work paid off last June, when he proudly oversaw the installation of the box at the fire department. Such boxes are meant to prevent abandonment of newborns.

Then, last week, the alarm went off, firefighters checked it, and found a healthy baby girl inside - only an hour old, says Fire Chief Brad Lucas.

"We are ecstatic that the system was used," Lucas told CNN. "It worked perfect, exactly how it was designed to work."

Lucas's people provided care and took her to a hospital by ambulance. Once the baby is released, she will in the custody of state child services workers, and, at Hunter's request, she will be called "Baby Mia."

A Safe Haven Baby Box

Safe Haven Baby Boxes has now installed 24 of their units in several states. They are a nonprofit organization founded by Monica Kelsey, who was herself abandoned as an infant.

Kelsey said that around two to three abandoned babies died annually in Indiana before she started her lifesaving crusade, and not one has perished since.

As for young Mr Wart, he says, "I'm hopeful that one day she will see the story of how she was safely surrendered in the Safe Haven Baby Box I raised the money for...and search online for me."

And now, he is starting a new campaign to buy another box for his city.

Stupid games

There's an anger in this world that you can almost feel in the air when you read stories like this one.

I'm sure that Mr and Mrs Og, the first cave dwellers who put a door on their antre, were bothered when the troglodyte kids from down the street knocked on that door and ran off to invent fire or something.  The Ogs went to the door, found out they had been pranked, and were angry for a second, and then went back to painting pictures of mammoths on the cave walls.

Something is wrong when such a prank, stupid as it is, turns out fatal, but it happened the other day in Southern California, where a man chased after a carload of kids who had played ding-dong-ditch on him and rammed their vehicle.  Three of the six boys in the car were killed.

The six buddies had been on a sleepover when one of them came up with the idea of jumping into someone's pool or ringing someone's doorbell and hightailing it out of there. Dumb ideas, but they should have been harmless as well.

Sergio Campusano, 18, was the oldest of the crowd, and he was driving them around in a Prius. He survived, as did two other guys. Drake Ruiz, Daniel Hawkins, and Jacob Ivascu were all killed when a car driven by Anurag Chandra, 42, a resident of Corona CA, about 60 miles southeast of Los Angeles.

The carload of guys apparently picked a house at random and one of them rang Chandra's bell.  I'm sure they did not expect an enraged man to barrel out of the house and chase them down in his own car.

“He got really close and I was like, What is this guy doing?” Campusano told NBC4. “And I felt like a nudge forward like he hit me from the back and I was like, There’s no way he just did that… like, this guy is insane.”

Campusano said that when the man rammed their car from the side, he thought, "If anything happens, I love these guys.”

“He just got next to me and I was confused. What is he going to do?” Campusano said. “I just saw him ram his car into my back. And I whipped into my window and I blacked out and then I remember I woke up on the floor. I don’t remember how I got there. I was shaking."

The teens' car had collided with a tree, killing the three 16-year-olds. Chandra fled the scene, but witnesses followed him to a nearby house, where he was arrested, and charged by the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office on three counts of murder and three counts of attempted murder. The DA’s office also filed a “special circumstance allegation of multiple murders” against him.

The three victims

Our lives are filled with minutes, and inside all of those minutes are crossroads and choices.  Some choices are obvious; when we're cutting a sandwich in half, we understand that we could do serious damage to ourselves if we deliberately use the knife on our fingers or arms. 

But you can be sure that if any of the seven people involved in this horror had their choices to make over again, things would be far different for all of them now.  That's why it's important to stay in the moment and choose wisely, to avoid a lifetime of sorrow.

Roll Over, Rover

If you're like me, you think that "Jezero Crater" is one of the men vying for the honor of playing second base for the Orioles this year, and that means neither of us know much about Mars.

Mars is a planet, and we are interested in seeing what goes on there, so we have rovers roving around the place, including the Curiosity rover, the InSight stationary lander, and several Mars orbiters flying overhead.

And NASA is about to send a new rover up there this year, so they have a contest going on to pick the name for the machine. Students in grades K-12 submitted 28,000 potential names. 4,700 volunteer judges cut down the list to 155 semifinalists, and now that list is down to 9.

It's like the Wimbledon brackets, only without the annoying tennisness.


Students across the US, ranging from kindergarten to high school, submitted more than 28,000 potential names for NASA's Mars 2020 rover. A panel of 4,700 volunteer judges whittled that list down to 155 semifinalists.

Here they are, and we have to choose before liftoff this summer:

• Endurance, (Kindergarten to 4th grade, by Oliver Jacobs of Virginia)
• Tenacity, (Kindergarten to 4th grade, by Eamon Reilly of Pennsylvania)
• Promise, (Kindergarten to 4th grade, by Amira Shanshiry of Massachusetts)
• Perseverance, (5th to 8th grade, by Alexander Mather of Virginia)
• Vision, (5th to 8th grade, by Hadley Green of Mississippi)
• Clarity, (5th to 8th grade, by Nora Benitez of California)
• Ingenuity, (9th to 12th grade, by Vaneeza Rupani of Alabama)
• Fortitude, (9th to 12th grade, by Anthony Yoon of Oklahoma)
• Courage, (9th to 12th grade, by Tori Gray of Louisiana)

I note with dismay that the following names were overlooked:

• Elvis
• Leon
• Beep Beep Yr'Ass
• Lynyrd
• Skynyrd

Lori Glaze, director of NASA's Planetary Science Division, says, "Thousands of students have shared their ideas for a name that will do our rover and the team proud. Thousands more volunteered time to be part of the judging process. Now it is the public's opportunity to become involved and express their excitement for their favorites of the final nine."

My Rover would have decals
like this and Yosemite Sam
mud flaps

Once the poll closes, each contestant will speak to a panel that includes Glaze; NASA rover driver Nick Wiltsie; NASA astronaut Jessica Watkins; and Clara Ma, who named the Curiosity rover when she was a sixth-grade student in 2009. 

At first glance, I thought it said that Nick Wiltsie was a NASCAR driver, and that would have been funnier.

After all this, the decision will be made, just in time to have someone letter the name on the expensive Marsmobile.

The winning name  will be announced on March 15. The student will also get to go to Florida in July, which is as close as one can come to Hell on Earth, to see  the launch from Cape Canaveral.

It turns out that Jezero Crater is the site of a lake that existed 3.5 billion years ago. Mitch McConnell and his first wife honeymooned there when it was new.

Sunday Rerun (May 2018): "Love Is A Hurting Thing" (Lou Rawls)

I'm happily married for 45 years as of soon, so it's been a long time since I was diving into the dating pool, and I guess the rules have changed.

Back in the day, the dating ritual involved meeting a girl, taking her out once, and then driving past her house 129 times a day, just hoping she was coming out to dump the trash.

Now, in the electronic age, no one takes out the trash; they "hit the delete button." And that's what a man in Phoenix ALLEGEDLY had to do 65,000 times recently, just because he had one date with a woman by the name of Jacqueline Ades.

It turns out, there is a dating site for verified millionaires, a site known as Luxy. Ms Ades, 31, met her inamorato there, and they went out once.

Once was plenty for the man, unnamed in charging documents.  But, “I felt like I met my soul mate and I thought we would just do what everybody else did and we would get married and everything would be fine,” Ades said, instead of saying, "He didn't like me, so that's that."

The eyes. Look at the eyes.

No, what she did was, she sent him 65,000 text messages, which is even more than I get from those Nigerian princes-in-exile.

Apparently, the first 64,999 messages did not get her in trouble, but when she hit "send" for the 65,000th time, she was arrested and charged with threatening, stalking, harassment and failure to appear in court, according to The Washington Post.



Ms Ades told the local news in AZ that she sent her date all those texts  because “loving him selflessly brought me his information.”

A lot of the "selfless" texts included anti-Semitic insults and threats to kill the man, which moves this case from the realm of the peculiar right into psychoville.

She was getting those messages out at a 500-per-day clip, but she must have grown fearful when she got no replies, so she upped her game, breaking into his house and taking a bath.

I know that sounds nutty, but she did use the bathtub. Taking a bath in his kitchen sink, now that would be odd.

Police say she also showed up at his work pretending to be his wife.

Never lacking for nerve, Ades admitted sending 65K texts and said she thought she had sent more than that, intoning these immortal words:

 “Love is an excessive thing.” 

Her trial is pending.

The Saturday Picture Show, January 25, 2020

I feel sorry for people who never made a call in a phone booth. They were actually like little rooms where you could have a private phone conversation without everyone within 100 yards having to hear all about how your boss and your spouse and your entire immediate family and workgroup don't understand you. There was little room to pace in that little room, but still, you could feel privacy.

This is a basketball game made from a Pizza Pizza box. I guarantee you, it would take longer to assemble this mess than it would interest you to play with it.

If you live to be a centenarian - or turn 100 years of age - in Barbados, they put you on a postage stamp, which is even cooler than a Smucker's jar. I'm more than 2/3 of the way there!

And they wonder why I think I would love to live in Canada!

A little bit of plywood, some tools and stain, and here's the coolest cat toy around!

We live in a global society. The Koreans now have their own version of the Cat Lady memes.

You can't hold nature back. Even as they are cleaning up in Australia, scorched trees are budding with new growth.

The folklore has it that when you see a cardinal, it means a departed relative is thinking of you. OR, that a cardinal lives near you. You make the call.

Sword of weird

Love and marriage. People fall in love, and the lure of marriage overcomes many of them, and things are great for weeks on end, and the next thing you know, there's a nasty divorce and the guy winds up in a crappy one-bedroom apartment with a bullfight poster and a Keurig machine.

But even at that, some people just have to carry everything to extremes.

This brings us to David Ostrom, 40, from Paola, Kansas.  Long removed from the rice-and-shoes-at-the-reception days, things did not go well when he and Bridgette tried the marriage thing.  So now, he's asking a judge in Iowa to grant him a trial by combat.  He wants to take on his ex and her lawyer in a sword fight.

(Check your calendar. This is the year 2020 and you are still in the United States.)

Ostrom says Bridgette, now of Harlan, Iowa, and her attorney, Matthew Hudson, have "destroyed him legally," according to papers he dropped in court out there.

Accordingly, he's asked the Iowa District Court to let him have 3 months to find katana and wakizashi swords for his battle.

He seems normal.

In court records, Ostrom is arguing that, "To this day, trial by combat has never been explicitly banned or restricted as a right in these United States," and that it was used "as recently as 1818 in British Court."

You won't find it surprising that the Ostroms are bickering over custody rights, visitation rights, and "who's gonna pay those property taxes?" -  common themes in divorces, they tell me.

Mr Ostrom said that part of all this stems from frustration with attorney Hudson, whose legal training allowed him to deduce that since a duel could mean a death or two, “such ramifications likely outweigh those of property tax and custody issues.”

"It should be noted that just because the U.S. and Iowa constitutions do not specifically prohibit battling another person with a deadly katana sword, it does prohibit a court sitting in equity from ordering same," Hudson wrote.

Hudson asked the court to suspend Mr Ostrom's visitation rights and get him to have a court-ordered psychological evaluation.

Judge Craig Dreismeier, said in a court filing, not to look for his decision anytime soon. I guess not. He has to finish laughing first.

Hot stuff

Woody Allen once said that it isn't the venom of a rattlesnake that will kill you - it's his bad breath!

Well, here's news about a red hot chili pepper that actually can kill you.

From England comes the Dragon's Breath pepper, developed by Mike Smith at the University of Nottingham.  Don't try to eat it, though; it might be the last thing you ever have.

 You see, there is a thing called the Scoville Scale, which measures how much capsaicin a pepper has.

And as you know from watching commercials and Dr Oz, Capsaicin is a neuropeptide releasing agent selective for primary sensory peripheral neurons... an agent to control peripheral nerve pain.

The Scoville Scale says that Dragon's Breath rings up 2.48 million heat units, which completely blows the current record holder, the Carolina Reaper, out of the ballpark.  U.S. military pepper spray hits about 2 million on the scale.

It's almost as if one could make one's own personal pepper spray for self defense by loading some Texas Pete hot sauce into a water pistol, but you didn't hear that from me.

There is even a website for devotees of hot peppers. My favorite is a sauce someone bought me from T.J. Maxx, of all things. It was called Smokin' Tonsils, and they did!

But they look so tasty!

But from that website we learn that bell peppers, mainstays in the produce aisle at Try 'N' Save, have a recessive gene that blocks production of capsaicin,  habanero pepper is way down the scale (350,000 Scoville units) and the jalapeño pepper, which people think is a hot number, only registers 8,000 heat units.

Chances are, you won't find Dragon's Breath by the bagful at your grocery, but in no case should it be regarded as a food or condiment. Just ingesting it can put you in anaphylactic shock, so just stick to Texas Pete for your fried chicken, please. The real purpose of Dragon's Breath is as a topical numbing anesthetic for people who are allergic to regular anesthetic.

I love the intersection where food meets medicine.

Stool Sample

I found a dollar bill that someone had been using as a bookmark in a library book I took out once.

For days, every time a car drove up our street, I thought it was the racket squad, come to knock down the front door with a battering ram as a guy in a trench coat stood on the front lawn, barking, "Awright, we know you're in dere, come on out with your hands up and bring dat dollar bill!"

I about broke my neck to take the book and the ill-gotten gain back to the library, where the librarian looked at me askance as I turned in the loot.

SO imagine how it feels to be Howard Kirby, of Owosso Township, Michigan.

After Christmas, he dropped $70 at a Habitat For Humanity store and took home some furniture, including a footstool which "didn't feel right" once he got it home.

His daughter-in-law unzipped the cushion on the stool and found $43,170 stashed within.

What Kirby did was, he went back to the shop and found out who donated the lot of furniture he had bought.

“I do what I can to be as much like Christ as I can, and this is the moral thing to do,” Kirby, 54, said. "This is going to help them. I’m so happy for them.”

It turns out, the footstool was part of a living room set donated to Habitat For Humanity by Kim Fauth-Newberry and her husband. The couple inherited the  furniture from her grandfather, Phillip Fauth, who died in July.

Ms Fauth-Newberry said Grandpa Fauth was one of those old-timers who paid his way in cash all along, and he had stashed this loot in the footstool, telling no one about it.

“This is crazy,” Fauth-Newberry told the news last week, staring at stacks of hundred dollar bills.

Mr Kirby (l) and Mrs Fauth-Newberry

Odds are, I will buy the farm one day, and if you come and pick through what I leave behind, take care to find a hollowed-out book titled "See? I Told You I Was Right About Everything!" by R. Limbaugh.  Look inside that book, very carefully, and you will find the words cut out of every page, leaving enough space to hide almost $50,000.

You won't find any money, just a place to put some, if you have any.

The Yanks are coming

In a pinch, I once went to a dentist for a wisdom tooth extraction. I guess the first hint would have been that he was open for business on a Saturday afternoon, and said, "Sure, I'm here! Come on up!"

So I did, and he offered me the laughing gas, and served up a shot of hooch in one of those Tony The Tiger mugs that Exxon stations used to hand out with a fillup.

"Drink this, and we'll get started," he chortled. I was young and dumb then, so we plowed ahead with this ill-advised surgery. I am no longer young and dumb. I'm old now.

I bring this up by way of introducing you to Seth Lookhart, until recently a professional toothyanker up in Anchorage, Alaska.  He will soon have a new address featuring iron bars, following his conviction on dozens of charges, after he was filmed pulling a patient's tooth as he stood on a hoverboard, according to the Alaska Department of Law.

A total of 46 felony and misdemeanor counts were dropped on Lockhart in Anchorage Superior Court. The judge, Michael Wolverton, called the evidence presented by the state during a five-week bench trial "overwhelming." the Department of Law said in a news release.

The state of Alaska charged Lookhart with "unlawful dental acts," making the outrageous claim that performing a dental extraction procedure on a sedated patient while riding a hoverboard "did not meet professional standards."

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And it's not like turning his operatory into a clown show was where he drew the line. They also got him for medical assistance fraud.  He was billing Medicaid for procedures that were either unnecessary or not properly justified. They convicted him of theft of $25,000 or more because he diverted funds from Alaska Dental Arts, among dozens of others.

Wolverton said it looked like Lookhart "believed that he could get away with his fraud indefinitely, and that he believed his scheme was foolproof."

And he said the evidence of what this joker was up to "was often supported, and often in excruciating detail, by Lookhart's own texts, photos and videos."

Veronica Wilhelm was just one of his victims, and she testified she did not consent to being filmed while sedated nor to having her tooth taken out while Lookhart was on the hoverboard.

You know how these trials go. They had to ask.

Ms Wilhelm didn't even know about the video until she was contacted by investigators, she said. "I would've said 'hell no!' No, that's unprofessional," she testified. "It's crazy."

And of course, according to the local news up in the 49th state, Wilhelm looked at  Lookhart and told him she thought he "could've made better choices."

The thing that I'm taking away from all this is that Lookhart went through 12 years of education, then college, then dental school, and that somewhere along the line he figured that performing Jackass-style stunts while conducting a tooth extraction would be all right.

What?

“The time is always right to do what is right.” - Dr. Martin Luther King Day 2020

Sunday Rerun: Noises On

"I'm officially at the age where I hate loud and unnecessary noises."

That was a tweet from someone that was re-posted by a friend of ours, a young woman we like a lot. And it got me thinking.

I really dislike noise when others are playing their music loudly on stadium-sized speakers, disturbing others for miles around. That's a sign of inconsideration.  And frankly, the music that others play is rarely the music that I want to hear. So no, just spare me from the latest by Marshmello and Bastille. Or the Captain and Tennille, either way.

On the other hand, guys like noises, and since every man of every age is just a larger version of what he was in 5th grade, we like noises all the time. My wonderful perfect wife often stares at me in wonderment as I amuse myself with gargling noises, cracked knuckles, and the amazing air-driven noises I can make just by squeezing my palms together.

Not to gender-generalize, but let's just say I don't know a lot of women who laugh at noises men make...

But any man will tell you, a crashing, breaking tray, dropped in a diner, accompanied by a crescendo of tinkling china and clattering silverware, delights us like few other things. We look around the room and wait for the chortling to begin.

Popping popcorn, sizzling bacon, a baseball being hit by a wooden bat and being sent on a trip of 450 feet, popping bubble wrap, wind in autumn that makes the drying leaves on a tree rattle and sigh, thunder, rain on a metallic roof...these are a few of my favorite things!

Ironically, when a comedian launches a joke that falls with a thud and no one is laughing, it's said that all that's heard in the room is the sound of crickets.  And even that is worse than silence!