One with everything, to go!

The world tells us not to break ourselves down into groups, not to build partitions between us, and yet sometimes we need to.

For instance, you can divide the English-speaking world into two groups - those who call a dividing wall a "petition," and those who call it a "partition."

Other places where we draw the line are between those who can stand the music of Yanni and those who run from the room as soon as they hear it...those who would willingly eat hummus and those who only keep it around to use as spackle...those who will watch golf on TV and those who would rather have a colonoscopy...and those who love anchovies, and those who don't.

Put me firmly in the anchovy camp. A handful of those bad boys on a pizza and I'm as happy as I can be. But I can understand why some don't like them...they're sort of fishy...and sort of salty.

But maybe the anti-anchovyites know something I don't. Psychologists will tell you the reason our blood pressure goes up and we get all anxious in the face of trouble stems back to the days when we lived among the saber-toothed tigers and had to be ready to beat feet at the first sign of one.

And now comes this news: Anchovies, the fish who populate Caesar salads and pizzas, come from a long line of scarier fish.

ITEM: An international group of researchers recently reported two species of fishes that roamed the seas about 40 to 45 million years ago. The two species had fangs lining their lower jaws, and a single saber tooth on their upper jaws, suggesting that they were predators who hunted smaller fishes.


And they are related to...Anchovies.

Alessio Capobianco from the University of Michigan wrote this to CNN: "This discovery adds an important piece to the broader picture of fish evolution and of how marine environments changed into what we see nowadays."

Fish researchers have studied fossils left behind by two species: Clupeopsis straeleni, from Belgium, was almost two feet long!

And, coming in at about three feet in length, say hi to this old Pakistani fish:  Monosmilus chureloides.

Looking at the fossils, scientists found the teeth and several other anatomical features of these old fish were a lot like our pizzatoppers.

"That was another big surprise for us, as all living anchovies are much smaller than those extinct forms and most of them are specialized to eat plankton and have very tiny teeth," Capobianco says.

Artist rendering (pizza not shown)

He does also say that these two species are not directly related to anchovies, but, were, rather, an "offshoot from the lineage leading to anchovies that did not survive to the modern day. However, because most living anchovies are plankton-feeders with tiny or no teeth, the discovery of saber-toothed anchovies poses the question: were the anchovies' ancestors also fanged, fish-eating creatures, and only later they evolved adaptations for plankton feeding?
Or were they similar in habits to the living species, and the saber-toothed forms evolved from plankton eaters?"

He's supposed to be the expert, and he's asking US the questions. However it works, they're related, just like those people who show up for Christmas, Easter, and weddings...no one knows for sure how they fit in with the family, but they do bring those dinner rolls everyone likes.

Next they'll tell us that pepperonis grow wild on trees in Montana.

Monkey time

Anthropologists and veterinarians and zoologists can tell us a lot about what's going on in the animal kingdom these days vis-a-vis us two legged types.

For years, people grew up and wanted to "get the hell out of this city" and move to the suburbs and beyond.  But for every townhouse development, every development with 48 houses on 24 acres total, every McMansion, the land we live on used to be farmland or woods or I don't know what-all else. That means we are giving deer and monkeys and newts and squirrels and all manner of fauna have to look around for a new place to live, and they holler, "We've gotta get the hell out of these suburbs" and head for the courthouse to set up show.  That's something that's been happening for years.

In the most instant matter, this pandemic means a lot of people are working from home, kids are "having school" at home, and not many people are going on weekend getaways.  Although I can tell that a significant portion of the population could surely use a month of weekends off right now.

There are so few people on the roads, we're all getting money back from our car insurers because no one even smashes up their Buick anymore.  And this means the cities and towns are open for animals to run around.  All over the world, you can see pictures of boars roaming the streets of Haifa or shaggy mountain goats strutting through the streets of Llandudno, a coastal town in Wales.

And I haven't had Llandudno for years! Used to get it in Little Wales.

And then there's this from India, where a laboratory technician, or lab tech, was walking around a medical college in Meerut. And then, out of the blue, here comes a squad of monkeys, attacking that tech and snatching away blood samples of patients who had tested positive for coronavirus.

“Monkeys grabbed and fled with the blood samples of four COVID-19 patients who are undergoing treatment ... we had to take their blood samples again,” reported Dr S. K. Garg, a top official at the college.

Official police sketch of ringleader

And you know how monkeys are. No one knows where they went or if they spilled the blood samples out of the vials they ripped off, or it they went to set up their own testing lab.

Dr Garg can't say if the monks could catch the 'Rona if they touched the blood, but told Reuters, “No evidence has been found that monkeys can contract the infection.”

So if you'e going to Meerut anytime soon, stay alert, and carry a banana at all times. The monkeys will leave you alone. They are sick of bananas.

Put a ring on it. Also, keep a ring on it.

As devastating as the pandemic has been, and it has been that and more, there is always something good to come out of such things, and here it is...

A man and his wife from New York went to South Florida three years ago and were chowing down at a restaurant called Coconuts.

Well, of course it was!

We don't know who was doing what while they had their dinner, but somehow, the man's ring came off his finger, rolling off the table and hitting the floor.

No problem, you say? Well, no. Coconuts has, or had, one of those floors with slats, and down through the slat when the ring. Boom, gone.

Ryan Krivoy is the manager down at Coconuts, and he decided to make good use of the shutdown this spring, and have the porous floor replaced.

In came the flooring crew, pulling up boards and slats and I don't know what-all else, and what do you think they found in the mud below?

A gold coin, some $100 bills, and one silver wedding ring!

The engraving inside the band read "Mike & Lisa 08-21-15".

Sasha Formica (really) is the marketing manager for Coconuts, and Sasha knows that the answer to every problem these days lies in asking Facebook for help, so they posted the picture of the ring, and, 5,000 shares later, the restaurant got a call...

"'You're not going to believe this, but I'm Lisa," the caller told Ms Formica.

Lisa told Sasha that her husband got his fingers all greasy at dinner that night, and even sent along pictures of the ill-fated meal.

Now all is well again, and Mike, Lisa's slippery-handed hubby, has his ring on again, and the staff at Coconuts benefited from the cash and coins too!

And...Mr Krivoy took the $100 bills and the cash he got for the rare 1855 coin ($2,000) and shared it all with the staff.

Crabby

I'm not going into detail here, not because I want to defend this man or help him escape the well-deserved wrath he is currently feeling, but because he is certainly not the only person to be as he is.

There's a guy who owns some crab houses here in Baltimore County, and one in Harford County. Owning crab houses around a crab-happy town like Baltimore is also known as a license to print money, because we love crabs around here and will spend the money to get them on our tables at home (or at crab houses around town).

The man had black customers, white customers, brown, surely all types of people. If not for my wife being allergic to shellfish, we would probably have been his customers. Poor people, rich people, people who drink beer with crabs, people who will drink soda, those who only take water...you get the point.  The man had a great business going.

We love 'em.

So, for whatever reason, he decided to make a stupid racist joke on Facebook, linking the current protest movement and conflating those noble people seeking to change society with those scoundrels who see protest as a chance to burn stuff and loot stores. These are two different crowds, but anyway, he makes this idiot joke about how no one is going to burn the social services office haha ha haa.

Very funny. And then, once the fit hit the shan, people were aghast that the man who happily took their two hundred dollars for a bushel of dinner and shoved it into his pocket with all the other bills was happy to take green money from black people, but still disrespected them.  They let him know it, first online, and then by showing up at his places of business to let others know that they might wish to think twice before spending their money with a man with such a dark soul.

And THEN, because this is America, Land of Denial, the guy posts a nine-minute non-apologetic "apology," highlights of which include a shrugging, "I don't know, I went to bed a businessman and then woke up to find I'm a racist" and then the declamation that all such people drag out: "Some of my best friends are black."

Sir, some of your best friends are outside your business right now, and probably will be until you come to your senses. The world is moving quickly now, and people who fool themselves into thinking they aren't something when their words and deeds clearly indicate otherwise are going to be left behind.

This man is selling a line of bullhockey and a line of crabs. Fact is, plenty of other people sell crabs, and we can get bullcrap for free. Admit you were wrong, promise to change, and then, most important, SHOW US THE CHANGE.

Today would be a good time to start.

We need more kids like him

I was the sort of kid who was fascinated by comedians. Anyone who could get up in front of a crowd and make people laugh and smile was a hero to me, so

I started ripping off their jokes to tell at Sunday dinner with my grandparents.  I still remember two good ones I "borrowed" from Jan Murray, a comic and game show host of the day:

* I just got back from a pleasure trip. I took my mother-in-law to the airport.

* I've been in love with the same woman for 49 years! If my wife ever finds out, she'll kill me!

You have to admit, those are two typical 1950s jokes. And I found out later that Jan (born Murray Janofsky, October 4, 1916 – July 2, 2006) always regretted having to drop out of high school at 13 when the Depression hit. He had to help his family eat and pay rent.  BUT he arranged to finish his classes later and was a proud high school graduate - in 1962!

And that allowed him to say, as he approached his 50s, "I can't be getting old! I just graduated from high school!"

Jan developed his comic styles early. His mother was ill throughout his youth, and he would go to vaudeville shows and come home to his mom and act out the skits and jokes he had seen to entertain her, and even though his first job after dropping out was putting heads on dolls in a factory, he knew where his talents lay, and followed that.

That was then. This is now:  Meet Callaghan McLaughlin, 6, of British Columbia. Callaghan has been working on his one-liners around the house, and now he moved to the big time...a joke booth at the end of his driveway, where he regales passersby with surefire material such as...


“What does a rain cloud wear under its coat?
Thunderwear!”

“What kind of bug is bad at football? A fumblebee!"

“What does a duck snack on? Cheese and quackers!"

Last fall, his mom gave him a joke book called “Laugh out Loud Jokes for Kids.” He memorized 16 of the knee-slappers and told them all, and told them again, and again, and again.

He's been on local TV and on the Canadian Broadcast Corp., and now the pint-sized punchliner is putting his town, the District of Saanich on Vancouver Island, on the map.

Callaghan's mom, Kelsea McLaughlin, says that in the year 2020, with all that's going in the world, people are happy to be entertained.

“He knows there is a pandemic and that people are getting sick and are scared,” she said. “He knows that many people don’t have jobs right now and he knows that means they don’t have money to spend on extras.”

Callaghan was considering setting up a lemonade stand with his extra time while school is closed, but he figured, “Even when you are scared or sad, a good joke makes you feel a little bit better.”

His mom said that he found it fun to tell his jokes to the family, and adds, "He can talk the hind legs off a donkey. He is outgoing and chatty, so this is his wheelhouse.”

I need to tell him what we call a cow with no legs at all.

Ground beef!

Sunday Rerun: "Pass the Gooseberry Fool!"

And I know you are tired of the same old carryout Moo Shu Poo Poo Platter, and the kids are howling because of all the carbs in pizza, and everyone else is not sure if they are vegan or meatan.  I think I stumbled upon the answer!

They didn't have the internet in 1838, but they did have Mrs. Mary Randolph, whose motto was "Method is the soul of management."

And she said that long before Method Man and Wu-Tang Clan were widely known. Perhaps Mary presaged their rise to fame, or perhaps it's all a crazy coincidence.

She imprinted her slogan on the cover page of her cookbook "The Virginia Housewife: Or, Methodical Cook." 

Click on the link and be transported to a world in which dinner was made without microwaves, without Rachael Ray, without so much as an air fryer.  No. In 1838, they had to fry their own air! And that was not pretty!

The cookbook was published here in Baltimore, at Plaskitt, Fite and Co.  I don't think they're in business anymore, and maybe it's because they put out cookbooks with recipes for "Soup of any kind of old fowl," and "Mock turtle soup of calf's head." Why they don't just call that "Calf's Head Soup" is not a topic covered in the book, but let's make a big kettleful and find out!

People who just ate calf's head soup for supper

Or, jump to page 87 and find out how to make "A Nice Twelve-O'Clock Luncheon."  "Cut some slices of bread tolerably thick, and toast them slightly; bone some anchovies, lay half of one on each toast, cover it well with grated cheese and chopped parsley mixed, pour a little melted butter on, and brown it with a salamander; it must be done on the dish you send it to table in."

First, I have to figure that the anchovies of 1838 were a whole lot bigger than your 2018 anchovy. How are you going to bone something no larger than 1/2 a stick of Juicy Fruit? I know a salamander is like a primitive toaster oven, though. This does sound like a tasty lunch, but who has anchovies sitting around ready to jump into action?

I find the cookbook fascinating! Check the recipes for Syllabub (page 148), Salamagundi (153), Walnut catsup (169), Gooseberry Fool (149) and soap (178).

All these recipes are like a walk down a long lonely memory lane. You know why people were so much thinner then? It's because they sat around putting walnut catsup on their syllabub, and soon lost whatever appetite they had in the dark to begin with.

The Saturday Picture Show, June 6, 2020

 In some parts of the world, leaders act like anyone else, follow rules, wait in line. This is the Prime Minister of Portugal.

 Trust me on this one thing...when your cats look in the mirror, this is what they see.

 The ship is the USS Ronald Reagan, an aircraft carrier with a flight deck 4.5 acres in size. She was recently moved from Bremerton WA to a new home in San Diego. But to save all the crew the hassle of having their private vehicles transported to their new home port, the men and women of the Reagan were allowed to take them with them on the ride!

 Who wouldn't love a baby turtle!

 You think you see camels, but you're seeing their shadows on the sand. The white lines you are the camels.

 Wouldn't you love to have dinner in this Italian restaurant where, if you need a lemon for your fish or your tea, you just reach above you and grab a fresh one?

 Recently I have developed quite the hankering for some pistachio ice cream so I will be on the prowl for it this weekend.

And let us never forget the sacrifices and valor of our troops this day in 1944.

Bats, man!

When I think of bats, I think of Louisville Sluggers, but there is the other kind, the flying kind that eats mosquitoes and menaces the general public.

And then I have to tell you about a friend who had a bat problem (as opposed to a Ratt problem) in her attic a few years ago, and called a licensed exterminator, who told her that the bats "must be laying eggs in the attic."

Egg-laying mammals, in the land of the free!

Bats don't reproduce that way, and you'd think they would have mentioned that during the extensive afternoon-long training that man received.  But meanwhile, down Texas way...

A large bunch of bats - a "swarm" in Bat-talk - caused a ripple on the weather radar as they flew away from a thunderstorm.

Chris Suchan, meteorologist for WOAI-TV in San Antonio, reported that a batswarm flew out of Frio Bat Cave in Uvalde County not long ago.

There were millions of them, Mexican free-tailed bats! And they got to be on live TV on May 20, and the radar footage shows the millions of encountering a thunderstorm.

Chris Suchan

✔@ChrisSuchanWOAI

Bats heading out for night facing headwinds from storm gust front moving in (thin green line) #txwx

A powerful mighty wind - a gust front, in weather parlance, caused by heavy rain pushing pushing downdrafts out of the way - collided with the bat brigade, sending them toward Utopia, Sabinal, and points east.

"Dual-Pol radar works beautifully to distinguish these bats from rain when storms and the bats are on radar," Suchan told his audience.

"[It's] easy to identify the ring signature, but on occasion, when they're starting to come out, it can look like a storm core until you see the ring show itself as they fan out."

If you can't tell a storm core from a ring show, Chris Suchan is there to help you, in case you don't mind living near some literal hellhole called the Frio Bat Cave, which bills itself as the second-largest bat colony in the world.

I don't even want to know what is the first.

Live from somewhere

I guess most of us are not thrilled with the lockdown, and those of us who like television can't be too happy watching "The View" and "The Talk" and "The Viewtalk" with all the participants at home, broadcasting via Zoom in their underwear, with their home furnishings on full display.

On the other hand, the weekend editions of the CBS Evening News have been farming out anchor duties to hometown anchors across the nation, and a lot of those people have done well while the main CBS News studios are being sanitized or whatever.

I know they're doing their best on these chat shows, but it works so much better when everyone is at the same table. Having four people in four houses makes it awkward when no one knows when the other people have stopped talking (which, in the case of Meghan McCain, is never).

Howard Stern has been doing his morning radio show from the cramped quarters of his house in the Hamptons (left). I guess he and Beth pushed some stuff off to a corner and set him up with a card table and a microphone in the basement.


But who cares where the people are, really? ABC's popular morning show "Live with Regis and Kelly Except Regis Left, So Now Ryan Seacrest Is Here" rolls on every day. But people are all worked up over the "revelation" that Kelly Ripa is in the Caribbean doing her show. I don't understand the complaining.

Seacrest has been taking some time off anyway. With radio shows, several TV shows, and a weekend job selling Volvos at a dealership in Kankakee, he was scaring people with how tired and confused he was, so he stepped aside and allowed Mark Consuelos to handle co-hosting duties for a while.

And how convenient! Consuelos is married to Kelly, has been for years, and the entire Ripasuelos family was down in some tropical paradise when the lockdown hit.  So they just said, we'll stay here. Kelly (and now Mark) can do the show just as easily as if they were in New York anyway, so what the what?

For her part, Kelly has gone on tv and shed a tear over how she misses her parents back in New Jersey, and how her kids won't hug her.

“I’m like, ‘Guys, we’ve all been on lockdown together. We’re fine, you can give me a hug,’” she said.

It's ok with the bosses too: Debra O’Connell, president and general manager of WABC, which produces “Live,” told the NY Post: “We have required our staff to work remotely until we decide to return to studio operations. We are incredibly thankful for all that Kelly, Ryan and [executive producer Michael] Gelman have done to make ‘Live With Kelly and Ryan’ the No. 1 syndicated daytime talk show during this time.”

Talking about being in the Caribbean rather than New York City, Kelly says, “I hate to use the word ‘stuck,’ but we were. We decided to stay where we were.”

And who wouldn't?

We're in for a rough spell

Calling all Scrabblers! I guess there must be some sort of World Scrabble League, and a big deal like that is going to have to have some rules, so the Collins Dictionary folks maintain a list of words that are allowed to be  played on the board.

They like to keep things current over at Collins, so they just updated the list with more than 6,500 new words on the Official Scrabble Wordlist.  The list encompasses terms from everywhere...social media, slang, technology, food, and English from all over.

I think it might be interesting to augment the wordlist even further, by allowing us to spell words the way people pronounce them (or not) such as "weathah" for the meteorology report from Boston, "dis" and "dat," (New Yorkese for this and that) and "Dezember," the most festive month of Baltimore's year.

But until they decide to add them, here are some words with which to rack up lots of points...

LOLZ
(13 points)
The list says this means laughs at our expense or someone else's. I still laugh when the deli person hands me my Land O' Lakes sliced cheese and the label says "LOL Cheese."

FACETIME
 (15 points)
As an Androidian, I don't facetime with anyone, and there is not a long list of people who are eager to see my pasty mug while they talk to me. If I had the kind of face you wanted to see while I talked to you, I would have been in television, not radio.

BLECH
 (12 points)
I remember MAD Magazine using this term for disgust, but they spelled it "BLECCH".  As a young scholar, I learned how to spell "Potrezebie," "Axolotl," "furshlugginer," "veeblefetzer," and "halvah" in the pages of MAD. Every time we have axolotl pudding for dessert, I always come back for more.




EMOJI
(14 points)
If you can put a smiley face in the middle of your Scrabble word, you get an extra 114 points!

TUNEAGE
 (8 points)
Pretty sure this started in the movie "Son-In-Law," where Pauly Shore referred to food as grindage.

CHECKBOX
(28 points)
The little box on an online form where you check to indicate that you have read the terms and conditions of using an app. None of us ever read this. Ever.

WAAH
 (10 points)
Even better if you can offer someone a ride in a WAAHMBULANCE.

PODIUMED
 (14 points)
I always quote Calvin from "Calvin and Hobbes." Verbing weirds nouns. If you win a medal at some athletic competition, you are entitled to stand at the podium to receive your prize, but you are not entitled to use the podium as a verb.

BEZZY
 (18 points)
Someone said this is the term for best friend. I never heard it. Let me ask my BFF.


CAKEHOLE
 (17 points)
More points than "piehole."

Who was that masked man?

We call it an anachronism when someone fakes a picture of Abe Lincoln driving a Trans-Am. Everyone knows he was a Fords man to the end.

No kidding, it's important not to mix up time references. The Founding Fathers did not write the Constitution on an iPad, and World War I happened before World War II. They numbered them to make it easier to remember.

Lately, as we all strain to hear each other speak with masks over our snouts,  I have heard people say, Those bird beak masks that doctors used to wear were used in the days of the Black Death.

The Black Death killed 25–200 million people in Eurasia and North Africa, and hit its peak from 1347 to 1351 in Europe.  But the beak mask was not invented until a French doctor named Charles de Lorme came up with it in 1619.  The bird beak mask was paired, as they say in the fashion industry, with a wax-coated coat to give medical providers protection all over.

Another word you rarely hear is "miasma." That's an unpleasant and/or unhealthy odor that wafts off something, like those musky colognes from the 70s, or a bag of grass clippings that has sat in the August sun for a week, waiting for the recycling guys, or Satan on a throne of rotting onions.

Back in the day, we thought that plagues were airborne, carried around by miasmas. Dr deLorme's mask and coat were worn by plague doctors during the Plague of 1656. That one was much less awful than the Black Death, but it did account for the deaths of 145,000 people in Rome and 300,000 in Naples.

That beak was packed with dried flowers - often lavender - or other herbs and spices. There was a common belief that the grotesque mask was worn to scare the disease away.

No, it didn't, any more than COVID-19 was frightened off by repeated viewings of "The Joker," but it can't hurt.

Tube it and do it

I got this idea from Peggy, and she has a million good ones a day.

If you're trying to do something around the house or yard, look for a YouTube video on the subject. 

Chances are, someone has already shot one and put it up for you.

As in: I can never remember which way the printer cartridges go in my printer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhMgzJDwJ7s

I wanted a new way to make cornbread.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQITurEv6vM

Peggy's reading lamp needed a new socket.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B68Y4hjY_d0

I wanted a rakish bandana to wear to the supermarket.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hcSCgAD8f8

The outlet in the powder room needed replacing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhwClKlh_G8

Everyone loves beer can chicken.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0A1I8sK0LkQ

Got mustard on my t-shirt again?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mgDU7686QI

You want to do that fancy calligraphy, but you're a lefthander.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Q4kLqrHTPQ

In case my other knee needs replacing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiLf4KGd494

I just wish there was a link to a video telling me how to make my own videos, in case I ever learn to do something on my own!

Sunday Rerun: "Forever starts today"

You probably heard that a rising baseball star, José Fernández, pitcher for the Miami Marlins, was killed early Sunday in a boating accident. The boat he owned crashed into a rock jetty early that morning, and he was killed, along with two friends.


It's known that Fernández was at a dockside bar at 2:20 that morning, and the Coast Guard found the wreckage and the three victims at 3:30, so sometime in that 70-minute span, something awful happened.

Fernández

At first, I thought of writing about the sad loss of three lives, especially that of Fernández, whose harrowing attempts at defecting from his native Cuba are part of his interesting story.  It took four tries.  The first three times he tried, he was arrested and put in jail for "Being a traitor to Fidel Castro." On his fourth try, he was finally successful, but only after diving into the Gulf of Mexico to save someone who had fallen off the boat he and others were on.  

It was not until he had rescued that person that he found out that the person was his own mother.

So that makes it doubly - infinitely  - tragic that he lost his life in the water.  

Make what you will of this: on Monday, the day after he died, a bag of baseballs Fernández had autographed, seemingly as a gift to one or both of his friends Emilio Macias, 27, and Eduardo Rivero, 25, washed ashore in Miami Beach.

Meanwhile, the Marlins team all dressed in jerseys with José's name and #16 for their game on Monday night, and there was quite a moving ceremony on the field.  The team has retired that jersey number, and there are plans to make permanent the memory of a young man who had lived through so much, and still had so much ahead.

"It's our job to make his life matter, so we're going to do that forever, and forever starts today," Marlins president David Samson said Monday.

The Saturday Picture Show, May 30, 2020

Many of us are said to "wear our hearts on our sleeves." This is sort of like that.

This is the Buffalo Bills' fifth-round draft pick in the recent NFL draft. He's a quarterback from the U of Georgia, and if he doesn't get an endorsement deal from a large insurance company, somebody there fumbled the ball, because, you see, his name is Jake Fromm, State Farm.

I know, I promised no more Irate Lady and Smudge The Cat pictures, but this one was found on the back of bus seats. In Kenya.

As June 1 approaches, here is my annual tribute to the most admired man in my summer lifetime. Ladies and Gentlemen: he invented air conditioning. He's Mr Willis Carrier.

Two gentlemen of Verona were over there digging, and lookie here - they unearthed an almost entirely intact Roman mosaic villa floor!

These Homeowners' Associations really can go too far. Here's a lady forced to dress in the colors of her house in order to go out and whack the weeds.

Thirty years from now, when they teach entire courses about the year 2020, people will still be surprised at two neighbors whose social gathering hinged on their fences.

To welcome a new fox who's been darting around our court, here's a fox kid from another town. We can't get ours to pose.

Ask away

A young friend was asking me (for a quiz on Reddit):
Well, let's be quite honest. I am 40+++++++ and I am happy with my life, and to you young 'uns in your 20s, this is what I say...

a) don't worry so much
b) you're as good as anyone!
c) ain't no use a-worrying.

The great sage Mickey Rivers taught us many things in his day, one of which was, "It was so cold today that I saw a dog chasing a cat, and the dog was walking."

And the other one was, “Ain't no sense worryin' about the things you got control over, 'cause if you got control over 'em, ain't no sense worryin'. And ain't no sense worryin' about the things you don't got control over, 'cause if you don't got control over 'em, ain't no sense worryin'.”

Of such wisdom, great religions have been constructed and have flourished.

Real talk, when you're in your twenties, you have all the time in the world to sit around fretting about your job and your love life and that funny noise the car was making, because you aren't in your sixties and worried about that funny noise your left ear is making.  But you know what you're going to find out?

Things work out according to plan.  A few years ago a friend of mine, who thought he was set with a dream job for years to come, was startled to find the job eliminated in one of those corporate wipeouts, and there he stood in the lobby with his discharge in his hand. I called him with words of consolation, but he said, "No problem, Mark. This is life, playing out as nature intends.  And all I have to do is show up every day and play my part."

It's really much easier when you leave the worry out. And, as I have said a million times, never exaggerate!  No, as I say, you can't name a time when worrying about things did a bit of good. So let it go and let it flow.

Something else you learn when you get a few more summers is that while you think everyone else around you really has it all figured out, they don't. You think that people aged 40 or 50 have learned all the lessons and apply that knowledge in their daily activities, and then you find out that one of your friends just invested his life savings in some stupid pyramid scheme and it looks like he'll be in the hole until he's literally in a hole.

Dr Ben Carson, formerly the pride of Baltimore, may have been the greatest neurosurgeon around, but that didn't stop from pronouncing "Hamas" like "hummus" in public, and saying out loud that Muslims cannot be president of the US and being gay is a choice and people go to prison to make that choice.

Sometimes, the smartest guy is the one who shuts his piehole in time.

SO yeah, I'm here to tell you that most people are not quite as smart or pretty or funny or tall or naturally blonde as they appear to me. There's nothing wrong with you! Always remember that.

And one more quote from an oft-quoted New Yank Yorkee:

If you ask me anything I don't know, I'm not going to answer. 
 - -Yogi Berra

Life to go!

We talked yesterday about mondegreens - words that sound alike, so much so that people confused them.

Today let's talk about a gangster and a gangster rapper who both chose to go by the same name, and why this is so funny.

The gangster was "Machine Gun Kelly," born George Kelly Barnes. He was really nothing more than a fairly mild-mannered bootlegger (liquor smuggler) during the Roaring Twenties - the 1920s, that is. The current Roaring Twenties are off to a less-than-sensational start, eh?

He ran into trouble with the local cops in Memphis and headed west to Tulsa; so as not to besmirch the Barnes family name, he started going by Kelly. Convicted of smuggling liquor onto an Indian Reservation, he was sentenced to  three years at Leavenworth Penitentiary, Kansas, in 1928.  He was regarded as a model prisoner and all-around nice guy by the staff and fellow inmates.

Released early for good behavior, Kelly started acting up, because he had a thorn in his side. Her name was Kathryn Thorne, and she was a real piece of work, experienced in crime, gunplay, and quite a handy homemaker to boot.

Not so much the homemaker, but she was adept at spreading the lore of Kelly. She bought him a Thompson submachine gun and spent hours teaching him to use it. In those days of famous mobsters like "Pretty Boy" Floyd, Alvin "Creepy" Karpis, Kate "Ma" Barker, John "Public Enemy No. 1" Dillinger, and Lester Joseph "Baby Face Nelson" Gillis, a crook had to have a snappy name to go along with a snappy fedora, and a gimmick or catch phrase, such as "Hand over all your cash" or "Make America Great Again." Kelly learned to sign his name by shooting bullets that spelled out MACHINE GUN KELLY on billboards as he fled the scenes of bank robberies, gas station heists, and jaywalking.

Not much about his legend stands up. A bank teller in Tupelo said that Kelly "really didn't look like a guy who held up banks."  Thorne was the driving force behind him, and her plan to have them kidnap oil tycoon and businessman Charles F. Urschel in 1933, collecting a $200,000 ransom, led to the both of them being arrested within weeks and sent to prison for life.

I used to use an old joke "I'm not saying my mother-in-law is old, but her Social Security number is 14!" to mixed reviews, but Kelly, as one of the first prisoners at the new Alcatraz Home For The Federally Convicted, was prisoner # 114 there! Pretty cool, to have a low number like that.

And actually, MGK started his life term at dear old Leavenworth, where he bunked until Alcatraz was finished, so I'm sure there were many tearful reunions with guards and crooks he knew from his first term.

Sometimes, crooks and ne'er-do-wells don't get a second term, but Kelly did, becoming known as "Pop Gun" to his fellow Alcatrazians, right up until he died there in 1958. Gun moll Thorne did 35 years in a women's hoosegow, and was paroled in 1958 to Tulsa, which is another form of prison, as hot as it gets down there.

The other Machine Gun Kelly was born  Richard Colson Baker in 1990.

He's out of Cleveland, and took the Machine Gun handle owing to his rapid-fire delivery on rap songs such as "Death In My Pocket," "Rap Devil," "Bullets With Names," and the lovely, haunting "Hollywood Whores."  

Actress Megan Fox just left her husband for the warm comfort of young Kelly's tattooed arms. I wish those crazy kids six good months together, at least.

I have notified our local police and state's attorney that if I am ever charged with any sort of flagrant crime, I am to be referred to in all official court documents as Mark "Pretty Boy" Clark. 

At Christmas time, we sing of Round John Virgin

I heard a DJ talking about mondegreens the other day. He didn't pronounce the word correctly (it's MOND-a-green, not Mondgreen) but it's one of those things that we all know and don't always know, like the term for the little holes where the shoelaces go (grommets) or the punching bag thing at the top of your throat (uvula).

A lot of mondegreens are in the lyrics of songs. Here's the perfect example: Jimi Hendrix did not sing, "Excuse me while I kiss this guy" when he sang, "Excuse me while I kiss the sky," but so many people think the first. Bob Dylan sang, "the answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind." He didn't say, "the ants are my friend" any more than The Turtles sang, "You and me and Leslie, grooving" on a Sunday afternoon.

Excuse me.

But when we mishear or misunderstand words or a series of words, and instead believe we heard something else, that's a Mondegreen, and has been since 1954, when a writer named Sylvia Wright wrote in "Harper's" magazine that she really misunderstood something she heard as a child.


Her mom (Sylvia's mother!) would read to her from a book called "Reliques of Ancient English Poetry", a dusty old volume from 1765, and young Sylvia thought she was reading, "Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands / Oh, where hae ye been? / They hae slain the Earl Amurray, / And Lady Mondegreen.”

But it was all in the way she heard it. In the poem, one person and only one died. The actual line is "They hae slain the Earl Amurray, and laid him on the green."

Poor Earl. It was bad enough that he died, but now a simple misunderstanding made it worse.  And then in The Beatles' "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds," "the girl with kaleidoscope eyes" becomes "the girl with colitis goes by."

"There's a bad moon on the rise" in Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Bad Moon Rising sounds like "There's a bathroom on the right" for millions of people.

Even disco songs were not immune: "Take your pants down, and make it happen" is the mondegreen for "Take your passion and make it happen" as Irene Cara sang in "Flashdance."

Pity the doctor who tells a patient they will need a bone marrow transplant, only to have them think he/she said, "You need a bow and arrow transplant."

And then there are the ones that double back on themselves.  The English make a fine meal called Welsh Rarebit. It's a delightful combination of cheddar cheese, Worcestershire Sauce, Dijon mustard and beer served on rye bread that was originally called Welsh Rabbit. Somewhere along the line, possibly in response to people who felt shortchanged because there was no rabbit on their plate, they switched to calling it Rarebit.

And who among us has not seen someone on Facebook describe someone's overreaction as an "ovary action"?

Color me Happy

The child in me rejoices when we sit down at a fine restaurant and, instead of tacky linen and ringspun cotton napkins and tablecloths, I find a place mat with a connect-the dots game, a Spot The Differences quiz, and a place to doodle with crayons. After ordering my epicurean feast, I turn to the business at hand. It's best to finish before the soup comes, so having quality crayons is important.
(At least, that's how I remember it, when restaurants were open).

I hate to say it, but most restaurants that hand out free coloring mats and crayons are not handing out the real thing, the ne plus ultra of the crayon business: the real Crayola crayons. The second-rate wax sticks would be better off if used at the Used Appliance Store down Belair Rd, to write "AS IS / MECH PERF on an aging Whirlpool icebox.

In the whole crayon world, there are the real and only Binney & Smith Crayola Crayons, and everything else that pretends to be crayons. Crayola is actually part of Hallmark (I did not know that!) and it's still a big business, even though there are other ways to make colored markings now!

A company doesn't stay on top of the world without changing and adding to the product line. Many of us in the age range where no asks for verification to give a senior discount on some denture adhesive, which sells a lot better to our gang than does pimple cream.  Crayola came up with the idea of the 64-pack of crayons with a sharpener built in a long time ago, and since then, they've come up with neon colors and the 96-pack Big Box (featuring colors named by kids!) and washable markers.

I fully expect them to come up with plaid crayons any day now.  But speaking of colors, it was 1962 when Crayola looked around and saw that not everyone's skin was the same color! Huh! Up until then, they had a color called "flesh" which was the perfect color for the Hiltons and the Kennedys. They might as well have called that flesh color "upper crust," but they did wise up and call it "peach."

But here we are in 2020, and Crayola is catching up, releasing 24 new "Colors of the World" to represent the dozens of skin tones people really come in all over the world!

There is a bid deal called "UN World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development" and the multicultural crayons are coming out in conjunction with that glorious day of growth for all of us (except for Bob Ehrlich, former one-term governor of Maryland, a lout who once brayed, "Multiculturalism is bunk.")

Multiculturalism reflects the way the world is. We come in many colors, and vive le difference! "With the world growing more diverse than ever before, Crayola hopes our new Colors of the World crayons will increase representation and foster a greater sense of belonging and acceptance," said Crayola CEO Rich Wuerthele. "We want the new Colors of the World crayons to advance inclusion within creativity and impact how kids express themselves."

You can find the new in packs of 24 and 32.  The jumbo 32-pack also has four crayons each for hair and eye colors. And each crayon will have their color name in English, Spanish, and French.

My skin tone can best be described as "mottled," so it might be hard to match me up. But this is a major step for all the kids who felt left out when the time came to draw a self-portrait. And that's a step for self pride.

It's Memorial Day, the day we honor those who gave their lives in service to the nation

Sunday Rerun: What's Your Name?

There was a time that a woman would marry a man (often against the best advice of her friends and his parents) and quit her job and change her name to his and become a full-fledged housewife and that was that.

All good, and it's still done, but there are options. If a woman wants to get married at all, she may change her last name to that of her partner, or not.  Or she may hyphenate the two ("Mrs Cecilia McDonald-Berger").

There used to be this weird thing in which married women were known by their husband's full name, as in "Mrs Drew P. Weiner," which made no sense to me.  "Mrs Otis Campbell"?  A woman named Otis?

I have seen married couples in which a man will take his wife's surname, and same-ex couples who exchange last names.  All cool with me.

I bring all this up to say that there is still mumbling going on about the woman formerly known as Amal Alamuddin, a 38-year-old British-Lebanese woman who is a lawyer, activist, and author, universally respected as a force for good and an expert in several fields.

She also happens to be a married woman, who married an American actor named George Clooney.

And people are losing their grips because she wishes to be known as Amal Clooney. That's how she is listed on the website for Doughty Street Chambers, the London-based law firm by which she is employed. 

"But she's a femininist!" came the cry, and I say that being a feminist is more about allowing women to choose to do what's best for them than following some vague list of rules and regulations.

Amal and Geo. were married in Venice, and own a 17th-century manor on the River Thames in the British countryside, so it's safe to say they know their ways around the world and did not just ride into Tulsa on a turnip truck.

George Clooney is most famous for his starring roles in "Ocean's 12", "Ocean's 13", and "Ocean's 127" (coming to theaters near you in 2028). No, seriously, he is a fine actor, with lots of good movies and even more worthwhile statements on the world as we know it.

Read the list of Amal Clooney's educational and professional accomplishments, her awards, honors and appointments here. By any measure, she is a woman of great stature in the world.

And here is the list of all the people in the world who should have any say in the matter of what Amal Clooney's name should be:

1. Amal Clooney