The Saturday Picture Show, March 13, 2021

 

This is a restaurant in Dubai. I think it's called the No Way Inn, as in no way in hell am I ever eating there.

The Pandemic has given so many people so much time to do worthwhile things. For example, someone found the time to take an X-Acto knife to all 52 cards in this deck and carve out a three-dimensional masterpiece.

My problem was that I had quite a large collection of rubber bands and nothing around which to wrap them. My solution was to bundle up some old bills I had sitting around gathering dust.

Buffy The Vampire Slayer premiered this week in 1997, and it's still the only show of its sort that I ever watched. The premise was simple: All Buffy had to do was save the world from gruesome creatures from under the earth, and still get her homework done on time. 

This is the first vial of Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine used in the fight against the pandemic. It's in the Smithsonian now, along with the vaccine card, ID badge and scrubs of nurse Sandra Lindsay, the first American to be vaccinated against the COVID-19.

Tomorrow is pi Day! I could eat 3.14 slices of this bad boy right here and now!

Here's a horse who carries a horse around with him. This slows him down in the backstretch, as I found out one sad day at Pimlico.

There were many issues raised the other night in this interview with the royals, but someone took the time to address H & M's tailoring shortcomings, such as his too-short socks, non-existent shirt cuff, and chest gaposis on both their parts.

Soon, we will be inarculated, as Barney Fife would say, and maybe after that, can we stop saying "global pandemic," as if there were simply local pandemics? Those would be epidemics. It's all academic.

We children of the 50s have been through a lot, and I think that luridly-painted clowns eating heavily-sugared cereals with their pinkies extended accounted for many of the psychodramas we still experience. Please feed your children better than this for a better tomorrow.

Reach for it

Ever since I studied Journalism I under the remarkable Clarinda Harriss at the fabled Towson High School, I have  been interested in clever news headlines, grabbers that make you want to read more.

Such as the one she shared from a Baltimore CYO basketball league game:

ARCHBISHOP CURLEY TRAMPLES LITTLE FLOWER

Ever since, I can't fully get rid of the image of an elderly cleric in a cassock, jumping up and down on a helpless peony.

And here's one from 2006:

WORLD'S TALLEST MAN USES ARM TO SAVE DOLPHINS

Caught your interest? But wait! There's more!

Bao Xishun is a Mongolian herdsman who happens to stand 2.36m (7ft 8.95in). They can put the trophy for being The World's Tallest Person on the highest shelf in town, and he can reach it easily.

That's not all he can reach. In the northeast China town of Fushun there is an aquarium, and a pair of dolphins who live there accidentally swallowed some plastic pool devices.  Veterinarians tried to use tools to reach down and extract the plastic, but the dolphins' stomachs contracted, rendering the tools useless and leaving the big fish in big danger.

Days went by and the dolphins were not eating, and sinking into depression. 

Just picture the discussions: surgical instruments were not the answer. It was going to take human hands to extricate the material that would kill the dolphins if not removed. "We need someone who can reach down their necks and get that stuff, but who? WHO?"

Bao, that's who. He agreed to come over and help. Aquarium staff held the fishes' heads back, and wrapped towels around their teeth so that they couldn't hurt Bao, and down he reached.

His arm is just about 42" long, plenty lengthy to reach into the mammal's tummies, and soon the deed was done!

Chen Lujun, the manager of Royal Jidi Ocean World, said the dolphins were in very good condition thanks to Mr Bao.

And a local doctor told the news that "Some very small plastic pieces are still left in the dolphins' stomachs. However the dolphins will be able to digest these and are expected to recover soon."

Bao succeeded Radhouane Charbib of Tunisia, previous holder of the coveted Tallest Man Alive title, by just about 3/4".

My fellow teenagers with growth spurts will be happy to read that Bao was of normal height until age 16, when he went crazy tall and topped out at 93 inches seven years later. 

I'm glad I stopped at 77 inches, although I would be glad to help a small fish in similar circumstances. That's how they developed stuffed flounder, you know.

Born To Be Mild

Did you ever see that 80's movie called "My Bodyguard"? It was about a smallish high school kid who needed help fending off bullies, and he got it, and also learned a few things about the size of courage.

I don't cotton to bullies. I didn't deal with them personally because of my outsized size and my propensity for talking loudly and often, so they moved on to less-crazy prey. But I always look to pass along stories of people stepping up to defend a kid, and here's a great one!

It all started in the 90s, like so many things. John Paul Lilly, a clinical social worker and professor was counseling a young boy who feared to leave his house, so tough were the neighborhood hoods who lay in wait. Lilly had been abused as a kid, but he had an ace in the hole: some local bikers who came to his aid.

“They became my family,” Lilly says. “I just never felt more secure than when I was with them.”

It worked for him, so he founded Bikers Against Child Abuse. He himself has been getting around on a motorcycle since he was a teen, and he says, “Bikers have a soft spot for kids,” and goes on to say he knows a lot of bikers were abused children, and, " When they see a chance to step in and release some of their own demons, they have no problem standing up for a child. It was just such a natural fit.”

Twenty years in, BACA is now an international - New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and the United States - nonprofit that finds volunteer bikers to form a support system for kids who are the victims of family abuse. 

Of course, they don't just say, go help that kid. First they screen all applicants thoroughly, and conduct training for dealing with sensitive situations. The kid gets his or her own BACA vest, and the bikers, who might in other situations be known by colorful sobriquets such as "Shovelhead," "Bad Mama Jama," or "Warren," tell the kids to call them "Scooter" or "Pooh Bear" and such.

Then, they visit with the children in their care, stand by to protect them if the children fear a certain adult, and accompany them to court as needed...all for free.

The group is a nonprofit, and there have been times that participants have reached into their own denim pockets to get special things for "their" kids.

For a kid who has been conditioned to feel unpowerful and fearful, to have a person associated with the images of power and fearlessness in their corner is terrific. 

“When we tell a child they don’t have to be afraid, they believe us,” another volunteer named Pipes says. “When we tell them we will be there for them, they believe us.”

It's far too late for me to start riding a motorcycle, but I'm glad to share the BACA story!

Less talk, more action

I have mentioned before that we really love living where we do, here in the storied Carney section of Baltimore County, MD.  And one reason is the outstanding people around here.

One of the most outstanding is our nonpareil county councilman, Mr David Marks. It was Tip O'Neill, onetime speaker of the House of Representatives, who said, "All politics is local," and he made a great point. You can discuss issues of cosmic importance, matters that affect the state, the nation, and the world, but if your trash and recycling isn't getting picked up, if you turn on the faucet and get nothing but rusty dust, if you have a crowd of rakehells and whoresons terrorizing your neighborhood, well, the Keystone pipeline doesn't mean that much to you right then. Take care of the local business, and everything works out fine.

And that's why Councilman Marks is so outstanding. I tell you, if you set out to design the perfect local politician, the first thing you want is a man or woman who knows the district and the issues, has the intelligence to sort out what matters are most pressing and which can wait, and more than anything, someone who is THERE! Woody Allen said that 90% of genius is just showing up, and you can't name a community event where you don't see Mr Marks. And you see him participating, not just standing around handing out smiles and bumper stickers.

Case in point: one of the complaints his office receives concerns trash and litter. Yes, even in 2021, there are ignorami who toss beer cans, McBags, and used face masks on the streets and parking lots. 

In the face of this, some politicians will issue position papers in which they take a hard line AGAINST throwing lunch leftovers onto the highway. Some politicians will call for a press conference, where they announce that they are "seriously looking into" the matter. Some  - but not many - will actually DO something about the problem, which is why I am happy to point local residents to a Facebook page enlisting volunteers to meet at the snowball stand this Saturday to begin to clean up our highways and streams. Mr Marks is the prime mover behind this.

Meet here.

For those who say, "I'm just the average Joe (or Josephine), so what can I do?" here is the answer. Turn up this Saturday at Kona Ice at 0830, dressed to get something done, and help do it!

EnCOURAGEment

All right, enough for a minute with the pandemic and people cutting the vaccine lines and the cratered economy and the arguments over school reopening and insurrections and disputed elections and unsolicited corrections.

Please take a minute to hear about something that will cheer you up, if you have any heart and soul at all (and I know you do or you would be reading the stock market page).

A young mom wrote on our neighborhood Facebook page the other day about her 8-year old son. They live near the Villa Cresta Elementary School and like to take walks down there.

The other day, her son saw some older guys, maybe 12-16 yoa, playing football on the field. So her boy asked if he could join the fun.

As the mom wrote, she talks to her son about finding age-appropriate friends and activities, but with the 'Rona keeping everyone housebound, it's not so easy to find, make, and keep new friends. Like 99% of us, he misses peer interaction.

So even though she was nervous that the older guys might ignore him or even make fun of him for being smaller and quiet and not all that experienced at football, she must have trusted the winds to which she threw caution, and let him go play.

I'll steal her description here, because no one but a proud, happy, and relieved mom could say it like this: 

At first he was lurking, not playing much, just darting around in the back of the group. After some time the boys split into 2 huddles and I saw one of them give my son the ball. The boys blocked (for) him and shouted: “let him take it” as my kid ran, still in an awkward darting motion, and made a touch down! 

He felt SO amazing, receiving high fives, and had no clue it was a set up. 

Happy little story for our neighbors tonight and if you had a kid out there today, job well done, thanks.

Is there anyone who can't put themselves in the shoes of that little guy right now, and remember how great it must have felt when the bigger kids let you shine?

Years ago, Bob Greene, a columnist in Chicago, wrote about a woman who had come to California as a college student from her native Japan. Getting used to an entirely new world and doing so in her second language was tough, and then she found herself in a coed exercise class, playing volleyball - a game she had never heard of. At first, she tried doing what volleyball takes - serving, returning, volleying, and found herself embarrassed by being so maladroit. She was about to quit and give up - give up the exercise class, her tuition at an American university, on living in America altogether.

And then a friendly guy in her class, whom she didn't know from a sack of laundry, took her aside and encouraged her with four words: "You can do this!"

In the Hallmark movie, she went back on that court, became an All-American in college volleyball, and proudly represented her homeland in the next Olympics. But life is not Hallmark, and probably shouldn't be. In real life, the woman went back on the court, did her best, and found she was good enough. 

She carried the same attitude with her in her other classes, and as I recall, finished her university courses with excellence and was working in her chosen field when she recounted to Greene the four words that changed her life.

And sometimes, like on the field at Villa Cresta the other afternoon, it wasn't so much someone coming out and telling that little fella "You can do it," as much as it was the guys letting him do it, so he could find out how good it felt.

I try to encourage younger people every chance I get, and that's quite easy, because pretty much everyone but Betty White and Dick Van Dyke is younger than I.

You can do it!

And he shall be Elon

Ralph Kramden, on The Honeymooners, often invited his wife Alice to go to the moon. That was back in the mid 50s, when interstellar travel was just a dream of science fiction fans.

Here in rocket-fast 2021, a Japanese billionaire is on his way to the moon, and he wants to take eight people with him!

It's not like they will land and play golf and horse around on the moon. They will be orbiting la luna, and you can go!

The rich guy is Yusaku Maezawa. He was chosen to be SpaceX's first private passenger back in 2018, and now he is going public, looking for people who want to fly with him to the moon.

"I’m inviting you to join me on this mission, eight of you from all around the world," Maezawa said in a video he released last week.

If you go, set aside "2023" in your Hallmark datebook. The Starship spacecraft that will carry this bunch of literal lunatics into space is being developed by Elon Musk's "private space-faring firm" SpaceX.

"I will pay for the entire journey," Maezawa said. "Ten to 12 of us will be on board, and I hope that together we can make it a fun trip."

He says that now, and then watch. He won't want to stop at Dairy Queen or anything.

Maezawa says at first he planned to bring world-famous artists with him, but now, "the plan has evolved" which is the new way to say, "No one I asked would go."

"I began to wonder...what do I mean by artists?" he said. "The more I thought about it, the more ambiguous it became. I began to think that maybe every single person who is doing something creative could be called an artist."

Lowering his standards a bit, Maezawa now says the flight is "open to anyone who has the goal of going into space to help other people and greater society in some way."

Maezawa adds that anyone coming along for the ride must be "willing and able to support other crew members who share similar aspirations." In the real world, this comes under the heading "other duties as assigned."

But, "If that sounds like you, please join me," he said.

Don't forget, Maezawa is in league with Elon Musk. 

I understand that Musk is a very wealthy man, a centibillionaire to be precise, and he made that fortune as co-founder of what became PayPal,  CEO, and product architect of Tesla, and he has this SpaceX thing going on now. 

And, he's into a startup company called Neuralink, looking into ways to implant chips into people's brains to create a "brain-computer" interface.

And he wants to colonize Mars, building factories and sandwich shops. He also wants to hit Mars with thermonuclear weapons. This would warm that planet, and  create the equivalent of two suns over the planet's poles.

I wouldn't ride to the mall with him if he were driving, but hey, if you're up for it, enjoy your trip to the moon! 

 

He's so rich, his lost hair found its way home out of sheer respect!

Sunday Rerun: from 2018: Farewell To A Genius

 I was very sad to see that Tom Wolfe had passed away last week, but he certainly lived "A Life In Full," to steal the title of one of his novels.

And novel-writing was what he turned to later in his life. Not many people can lay claim to inventing a whole new form of writing, but Wolfe was right there in the early 1960s when what came to be called New Journalism was born.

And it wasn't like New Coke or the New Math, both of which came to be disliked just minutes after they were opened. In the old days of journalism, a reporter went to cover an event - a fire, say, or a gangland slaying - and came back to the Daily Globe to pound out a couple hundred words about the Who, the What, the When, the How and the Why.  ("A warehouse belonging to Tuxedoville, a men's formalwear chain operating in the local area, caught fire yesterday evening in the 5400 Block of Swallowtail Av. Fire Department spokesman Hugh Burnham reported the building, and its contents - approximately 350 heavily-used, out of style dress outfits for men - were completely destroyed. All of the firm's newer tuxedos and rental haberdashery, by good fortune, had been moved to an another warehouse just last week. The arson squad is investigating the apparent presence of a liquid accelerant and some partially used matchbooks found at the scene.")

Old and stodgy.  Wolfe, a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune, had come to realize that he could get at the part of a story that people were really interested in by going to the story himself and finding out what happened - and then writing it in his own inimitable fashion:

This is how he described the masses of stock car racing fans heading to a race, in his article "The Last American Hero is Junior Johnson. Yes!" from Esquire magazine in 1965:

Ten o’clock Sunday morning in the hills of North Carolina. Cars, miles of cars, in every direction, millions of cars, pastel cars, aqua green, aqua blue, aqua beige, aqua buff, aqua dawn, aqua dusk, aqua aqua, aqua Malacca, Malacca lacquer, Cloud lavender, Assassin pink, Rake-a-cheek raspberry. Nude Strand coral, Honest Thrill orange, and Baby Fawn Lust cream-colored cars are all going to the stock-car races, and that old mothering North Carolina sun keeps exploding off the windshields. Mother dog!

Doesn't take much to see how that turned the literary world on its ears 50+ years ago, and, along with Truman Capote's great idea of writing the story of the murder of a Kansas farm family as if it were a novel called "In Cold Blood," things have not been so stodgy since.

Tom Wolfe became an acclaimed observer because he seemed to go everywhere, see everything, and write it up for those of us who couldn't join him. He wrote about the space program ("The Right Stuff"), late 60s hippie culture (“The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”), well-off sympathizers of liberal causes (“Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers”), the art world (“The Painted Word”) and architecture ("From Bauhaus to Our House").

All the while, he carried on lively rivalries with novelists such as Norman Mailer, John Updike and John Irving. Those three, and others, dared to criticize Wolfe's writing and soon were on the receiving end of his barbs, saying that Updike and Mailer were "two old piles of bones, " and that "Irving is a great admirer of Dickens. But what writer does he see now constantly compared to Dickens. Not John Irving, but Tom Wolfe . . . it must gnaw at him terribly."

Wolfe's chief complaint against those writers was that they sat in tony Manhattan homes writing about "real people" elsewhere in America, so he went to do his research when he shifted to writing novels. For example, he immersed himself in relationships with bond traders and other free-wheeling billionaire types before writing "The Bonfire Of The Vanities," and in a group of insecure college freshmen and women for "I Am Charlotte Simmons."

If it sounds like I can go and on about Tom Wolfe, it's because of my admiring his every word for over half a century, and I will close this with my favorite story about him.

Esquire magazine sent him to California in 1963 to write about a custom car show, at the time when hot rods and custom machines and Beach Boys surf music was just being noticed in the national cultural pulse. He spent a weekend with the car-crazy folks, but was not able to find the handle on the article Esquire wanted. He didn't know how to approach a topic that was so foreign to East Coasters. Finally, in desperation, he called his managing editor, Byron Dobell, who told him to just write up his notes in memo form, and the magazine would shape them into some kind of story.

Wolfe began typing at 8 p.m. “I wrapped up the memorandum about 6:15 a.m.,” he later wrote, “and by this time it was 49 pages long. I took it over to Esquire as soon as they opened up, about 9:30 a.m. About 4 p.m. I got a call from Byron Dobell. He told me they were striking out the ‘Dear Byron’ at the top of the memorandum and running the rest of it in the magazine.”

The title that Esquire gave the piece was “There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy Kolored (Thphhhhhh!) Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,” soon to be the title of his first book.

No false modesty this man whose talent made him great. “I regard myself in the first flight of writers, but I don’t dwell on this,” Wolfe said in 1981. “If anything, I think I tend to be a little modest.”

I think he was entitled to be impressed with his ability. I will be forever!

The Saturday Picture Show, March 6, 2021

Long before Ring cameras and all the newfangled surveillance devices we have now, this was the original patent application for a home video burglar detection system. The man who devised it was an electronics tinkerer who worked nights. His wife was fearful of home intrusions, and he came up with a way for her to be in bed and monitor the front door. Extra points for the cartoon of the would-be burglar; like all cartoon thugs, he is wearing a horizontal-stripe shirt and a sports jacket and a newsboy cap and a three-day beard.

I don't know if all fish have names, but this one has to be "Rusty."

Peggy and I once found ourselves all alone in an Italian restaurant in Williamsburg, VA. I'm fairly certain that we were the only two people in town who didn't know the place was mobbed up, and I got the feeling that they wanted us to finish our spumoni so they could drag in some guy who failed to pay a loan back and beat him mercilessly by the salad bar, his head resting sadly on the antipasto. But the maître d' played his part to the fullest. He summoned us to our table with the most insouciant "table for two, right this way" you ever saw.

You might look at this and call it a good sketch but nothing great. But if I tell you this is a "long-lost masterpiece," Vincent van Gogh's "Scène de rue à Montmartre," you might regard it more highly. Either I am the king of all philistines, or I know a high school artist who can do as well as this.

Learning a lot today. Apparently, back in the day, Battlecats roamed the earth, clad in protective gear. I like the little ear slots. The winner in any cat fight is the second one to fall asleep!

2021: I write down my grocery list as the week goes along, and then when it's time to shop, I take a picture of the list and go to the store. 1955: You clicked off what you need on this little metal list thing. Don't forget the delicatess.

A bench in the public library in Alexandria, Egypt.

Vacation tip: To get the very best shot at the Olde-Time Photo Booth on the Boardwalk as you dress like Machine Gun Kelly (the original one) and his gun molls, make sure you're not wearing flip flops. You'll only look silly.

The other day, one of those "27 Things You Never Knew About" lists popped up, and since I had nowhere to be for three days, I clicked on it, and one of the things looked like this, and was properly called a "mustache cup." But the 14-year-old who wrote the description got it all wrong. He/she said it was the mug a shaver used so he could whip up lather with a brush and soap, and the half closure was a place to rest the brush while shaving. No. A mustache cup was for those guys with the elaborate bushy mustache, so he could drink coffee without soaking the cookie duster. Trust me. I'm old.

I have been staring at this album cover since 1966. The local connection is that Triumph Motorcycles were made in Timonium, at the place that became the Timonium Drive In and is now a big hotel. But the look on Dylan's face, the unisex blouse in place of his usual chambray work shirt, the sunglasses, the person behind him with the camera all add up to an example of the "studied unstudied fake casual look." It's all part of a way to say "This is not a Fabian album."
 

Country Joe and the Fish

Attn: Aspiring Musicians: Here's a great idea for a band name. How about "The Immortal Jellyfish"?

Because there is one! And unlike us, he/she has the ability to face an imminent threat by just reverting to childhood and starting all over. 

The only critter on God's green earth (or blue sea) who can do this is this little tiny jellyfish known technically as Turritopsis dohrnii. Turri, as they like to be called, hangs around in the Mediterranean Sea, where they were first spotted in the 1880s.

Now, don't confuse Turri with those giant globby jellyfish that attack unsuspecting beachgoers in the summer at Ocean City or Cape May. Turri measures a full 0.18 inches, which is about the size of the eraser on your pencil before you start doing your taxes.

They start out as a larva that drops from a fertilized egg. That larva is called a planula.

This will be on the test!

The planula swims around for a while and then joins A Cylindrical Colony Of Polyps (another free band name for you.)  In a matter of weeks, the colony becomes a medusae, and gets a drivers license and a gym membership.

The great thing is, when the Turri has a problem - anything from starvation to a tuna picking on his bright red stomach - he/she can just revert to polyp status, and watching shrimp swim around the rest of the afternoon.

There seems to be no way that humans can get in on this cellular process, but medical research calls it transdifferentiation because stem cell research centers on finding ways to have the body replace damaged cells.

Another interesting aspect to the life of Turritopsis dohrnii: they are excellent hitchhikers! I mentioned hitchhiking to someone the other day as my primary means of getting around before I got a driver's license. Being young, this person could not relate to the practice of getting in a car driven by a stranger (except if it's an Uber). But Turri will swim into the ballast of a ship and sail around the world for free.

Don't be too envious, though. They don't have cable TV or reliable internet.

On the books

Did you ever go into someone else's house (remember the days?) and feel like something was a little off? And then it hit you. Not a book in sight.  

But in a house where books are abundant, you feel safe and surrounded by words and facts and feelings and emotions, and that's why I like libraries. Living in Baltimore County, MD, is an advantage for bookworms such as I, because we have probably the finest library system in the nation right here (remember - they will reopen soon!)

It would feel awful to walk up to the doors of a library and find it closed, but there was good reason last week at the University of Michigan, where their library was shut down for two days - not because someone with the COVID-19 had been in there, but because some travelers from the Mediterranean were found roaming around the basement. 

The travelers were not humans, but three venomous spiders found down in the cellar.

The crawly trio were found at the Shapiro Undergraduate Library at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and instead of being given the royal welcome and campus tour, they were sent to spider expert and Associate Professor of Biological Sciences Ann Danielson-Francois from the University of Michigan-Dearborn for identification.

It didn't take Danielson-Francois long at all to pick the critters out and name them as being Mediterranean recluse spiders, a species that likes to come home with travelers. They have been found in 22 states, but Danielson-Francois said it was the first time she had encountered any in Michigan.

She said that instead of coming in by hanging off someone's book bag or being dropped off by their parents, the spiders might have tunneled into the basement of the library.

Professor Danielson-Francois

Tunneling spiders.  The mind reels!

Professor Danielson-Francois said, yes, these guys are venomous, but they probably wouldn't bite someone in an open area such as a library.

Probably.

"They don't have a huge amount of venom, but they have enough to start necrosis, which is the eating away of the flesh," she told WJBK-TV.

She really didn't need to clarify that necrosis is better known as "tissue death." After all, how many of us have called in sick on a Monday citing "necrosis" as the reason?

Cat Ballyhoo

From the This Does Not Happen Often file: In Gir National Park, in India, there was an abandoned baby leopard running around with no family, no nothin'. 

The animal kingdom often has admirable ways of dealing with sadness like this.  Stotra Chakrabarti, an animal behaviorist, has spent the last seven years keeping an eye on the lions at the park, but this was a new one on him:  One of the park’s mama lionesses took in the baby leopard to raise as her own.

The ecology journal Ecosphere, in this month's issue, carried Chakrabarti's account of the relationship between mama lion and baby leopard. It's called cross-species adoption.

Researchers have been able to see the lioness nurture and protect the little leopard while at the same time caring for her own two cubs. She hunts, brings back meat, and distributes it to her kids, much as we pick up a pizza for dinner. That's nurturing. And she protects the leopard from other lions in the area. That's protection. Just as good mothers do everywhere.

And I know this doesn't happen all the time among the two-legged population, but the mama's own two cubs are getting along with the leopard, who cannot change his spots, after all. And did you know that expression didn't just start a couple of years ago? It goes back to the Old Testament, where the prophet Jeremiah said, "Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard its spots?”

I really do go off on tangents.  Anyhow, Chakrabarti said all three cubs played very nicely and, “It looked like two big cubs and one tiny runt of the litter.”

This is considered an anomaly in the animal world, because normally the species are too busy fighting over land and food to get along like this. 

And from that example, all of mankind can learn something and try to follow it. If you want to get along with certain people, give them a baby leopard.

It's not 1927 any more

It's far more disappointing to be let down by people of whom you expect goodness than to see some dimwitted oaf behave badly.

By this I mean that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who seemed to have such skill in handling the coronavirus pandemic in his state, has been shown to be...a dimwitted oaf.

And I'm not even talking about the evidence that has come out that he bungled and fabricated stories about nursing home deaths in the Empire State. That looks bad for him, but I don't know all the particulars.

I am concerned by his reaction to allegations made by female staffers, though. In just one week, Cuomo was supposed to have sexually harassed two women he worked with, and now he comes out with acknowledgements that some of the things he said in the office "may have been insensitive or too personal" and adds he is "truly sorry" to those who might have "misinterpreted (the remarks) as an unwanted flirtation."

Backing up faster than a cha-cha dancer, Cuomo states that he never touched anyone in an improper manner (although I feel that the only proper times to touch a member of the opposite sex at work are to a) elbow bump them or b) perform CPR on them) and he never propositioned anyone.

He denied that he kissed a former aide on the mouth after a briefing attended by just the two of them.

When these allegations first came to light, Cuomo's plan was to have the state attorney general, Letitia James, and the chief judge of NY select a lawyer to  conduct "a thorough and independent review" of the claims. Ms James rejected that notion, and will file an official referral to have an outside law firm, with subpoena power, handle the investigation.

Cuomo is in his third term and had been considered the odds-on favorite to win reeletion to a fourth next year. Now he faces calls for his resignation from not only Republican opponents, but also from Democratic allies, such as New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

In the latest allegations, Charlotte Bennett, 25, who was an executive assistant and health policy adviser to Cuomo, told the New York Times that Cuomo, who is 63, asked her questions about her sex life and said he was into having relationships with women in their 20s.

The original claims came from Lindsey Boylan, another former aide, who wrote on the Medium website about her own claims of sexual harassment from Cuomo. Boylan's story was that Cuomo invited her to "play strip poker" during a business flight, and that Cuomo stunned her by kissing her on the lips after discussion of economic and infrastructure projects in his New York City office. Cuomo has people on his staff who deny Boylan's claims.

In reference to Bennett, Cuomo says, "The last thing I would ever have wanted was to make her feel any of the things that are being reported," Cuomo said, saying that "she came to me and opened up about being a sexual assault survivor" and that "I tried to be supportive and helpful."

I understand that people try to explain away these things - and I can't say for sure that any of this is even true; I wasn't there - by saying that powerful successful men have overstimulated egos that need burnishing and satisfying, and that they get this satisfaction from pushing themselves on women who are uninterested in their advances. So, again, I don't know if he did these things, said these things, had improper thoughts, but here's my point: he was sent to Albany to be the governor, not to be a playboy.

There is plenty of work to be done in New York and every other state, by the governors and their staffs, so there is no time for this fol-de-rol.

Second, to be frank, Andrew, do you really think these women find you attractive?

I know this stuff used to take place in the dark ages, but son, this is 2021, and you should know that women are not office playthings, there to be abused and misused for your bizarre pleasure.

My advice: go take a cold shower and behave yourself, instead of being a dimwitted oaf.

Up Up and No Way

If you're from Baltimore, you think of several things as springtime approaches. Lemon sticks are there at every festival and church bazaar; they are simply a lemon cut in half with a peppermint stick stuck in it to use as a straw. Doesn't take long for lemon juice to commingle with peppermint on its way to your delighted taste buds.

Pro tip: you finish the peppermint and save the 1/2 lemon. Next stop at any festival will be the beer truck. Have that big man draw you a cold one, and drop the lemon right on in there. Now you got yourself something to drink, hot-a'mighty!

And the other spring thing we spring on you around here is the spring Balloon Ascension. Very popular at schools, because they can sell a balloon full of helium as a fund raiser. The hook is that the balloons have an index card hanging off them with a card asking that the farmer in Grand Forks or the fisherman in the Grand Strand or the music lover at the Grand Ole Opry who finds the sad remains of the deflated balloon return it postpaid, and the person whose balloon traveled farthest wins a Hebrew National salami.

Thing of it is, the nonbiodegradable balloons themselves are hazardous to wildlife. Just on the beaches around here, they can get caught up in the throat of a sea turtle, and the strings that once moored them to the table where they were sold can wrap themselves around turtles’ flippers and necks.

SO Virginia, our neighbor to the south, is taking steps to ban the practice of intentional balloon releases. Lawmakers there passed a new law that would fine violators $25 per balloon. Next stop for the bill is the desk of Gov. Ralph Northam.

Conservationists, environmentalists, and shoreline residents tired of picking up all those empty balloons and strings are behind the pressure to get bills passed.  Here in Maryland, it's already illegal in Montgomery County to let one fly. The fine is a whopping $750.

There is always one in every crowd: in the Virginia Senate, Sen. Bill Stanley (R-Franklin) babbled on about whether "police would be hiding around the bouncy house" to look out for people sending balloons aloft. 

The voice of reason came from Sen. Jen Kiggans (R-Virginia Beach), who said the police would not be dispatching balloon squads, but the point of the bill is to raise awareness of the unintended, but still wildlife-unfriendly, consequences of balloon ascensions.

As always, the trade group involved touches the discussion with a note of humor. The Balloon Council, a national balloon trade group (!), told WAMU radio that while it supports efforts to stop people from doing balloon releases, it does not support bans on balloon releases.

I love America.

Sunday Rerun: Just Something We Say

 There are verbal solutions that we all fall back on.  A lot of people end almost every sentence with "you know what I'm saying?" or some variation thereof. 

You will find that if you answer them ("Yes, I do!") they are as surprised as the guy who lit a match to see how much he had left in the gas tank.

There's a new one going around. I think it was first popularized by Donnie Wahlberg in his sensitive portrayal of NYPD detective Danny "Danny" Reagan, who spices up his accusatory speech with "not for nothing."

As in:

"Not for nothing, but why were you carrying a two-foot sword on the subway?"

or

"Not for nothing, but I think you're guilty as hell."

(No one is ever innocent as hell, you know? Not for nothing)

Wahlberg said it a lot, and now I am seeing others do the same.  Just the way everyone on cable news answers a question now by starting with the word "So..." That replaced "Basically...."

There is a debate among linguists (and these become high-pitched, I assure you) as to whether "nfn" is a literal phrase or an idiomatic phrase.

I think it's both.

In the literal sense, here's an example: "Not for nothing, he had thought to pack jumper cables in his trunk, knowing his battery was unreliable."

And the idiomatic (slangy or trendy) sense: "I think you need to stop and buy me a hamburger. I'd appreciate it, not for nothing."

Idiomatically, it's just something to say to fill up space while waiting for your hamburger.  Gotta run, see you tomorrow, not for nothing.

The Saturday Picture Show, February 27, 2021

 

They're so cute when they're young, aren't they? Baby Hippo, salute!

The way it worked out, the old Picture Show is sort of animal-heavy this week, but this is not an animal...it's an animatronic Chuck E. Cheese that someone found discarded in a county dump. Let's bring it back to life!

For Frosty the Snowman had to hurry on his way, But he waved goodbye, Saying "Don't you cry," "I'll be back again some day!"

I've tried for years to hire this act for my birthday party, without success, because they don't list the area code on this billboard!

I understand that the old days of orange pickers going tree to tree with a ladder and a huge canvas bag on their shoulders are over. Today they encircle the tree with a giant shakedown machine, in the manner of old time politicians.

It's cool to see a hummingbird hanging around.

Real pure creamery butter on a Saltine cracker. They say this treat is coming back! We heard about butter crackers a lot when we were kids, and along with descriptions of the sparse snack came the slogan, "We ate them all the time during the Depression, and we were GLAD to GET them!" 

Who else was hoping that movie-style Martians with the little antennae were going to pull up in their Marsmobile and ask if we had a permit for this thang?

There's only one way this could have been a cooler picture, and that would be for Mama here to be wearing a pill-box hat.

With my newfound passion for all sorts of potatoes, I think I need to order a potato sorter. We don't use the dining room all that often anyway...