"Hey You!"

We look forward to this every year at about this time: Www.names.org is out with their list of the predicted-most-popular baby names in Maryland in 2022.

On the boys' side, Liam is #1, followed by Noah, James and Lucas.

In Maryland, Ethan and Daniel still trend popular, and that's not the case all over.

As for the girls side, let's just say that first grade teachers in 2028 can count on lots of Olivias, as well as Sophias, Avas, and Emmas.

And they don't get these lists from just asking ten friends or anything so unscientific, no siree Bob (not on the list).  Names.org derives information from the Social Security Administration birth data what they hear from users on their website.

They look back over 5 years' worth of names. They would have to go much farther back to see a day when "Mark" was still being bestowed upon infant males.

Predicted 10 Most Popular Names for Boys in Maryland in 2022

• Liam
• Noah
• James
• Lucas
• Oliver
• Benjamin
• Henry
• Ethan
• William
• Daniel

Can you hear the name Daniel without thinking of "Daniel is traveling tonight on a plane, I can see the red tail lights heading for Spain"?

Predicted 10 Most Popular Names for Girls in Maryland in 2022

• Olivia
• Sophia
• Ava
• Emma
• Charlotte
• Isabella
• Mia
• Amelia
• Evelyn
• Luna

I have to admit, the only "Luna" I know is the wife of Sgt. Grey on "The Rookie" - the likable, supportive Luna Grey. She is enough to make me a Lunatic for life.

I know it's radical, but I would like to see some provision made by which people are allowed to choose their own name when they turn 30. What to call them before that is something I haven't quite worked all the way out yet, but give me time.

As for my own moniker, I would have wished for "Leon," with the nickname "Tito." And I can't explain it.

Frasier Crane

I'm not so sure that the people involved in this crime caper down Alabama way are familiar with the word chutzpah. 

 chutz·pah /ˈho͝otspə,ˈKHo͝otspə/

It's an informal noun, originally Yiddish, meaning extreme self-confidence or audacity.

Which a certain 26-year-old seems to have plenty of, as he ALLEGEDLY called a wrecker service to ask them to pull a 70-ton crane out of the woods.

His woods? Apparently not. His crane? Definitely not.

So now the sheriff has him charged with stealing the crane.

The tow guy called the Chilton County Sheriff’s Office not so long ago, saying he had a call from a man from Clanton who claimed that someone had given him a crane, and he just needed someone to pull his gift out of the woods so he could sell it to the scrapyard.

This is the perfect gift for some people!

However, Mr Tow remembered having dragged that crane before, years ago, and sure as tarnation, the man on the phone was not the man who owned it back then, and darn the luck anyway, for the would-be new owner, who then attempted to make good his getaway by driving off in the crane itself (only to run afoul of a ditch.)

The hapless alleged crook has been in trouble before, as witness his new charges of probation violation and first-degree theft. There was no defense attorney listed in court records. You have to figure it's hard to find a Perry Mason to match up to this case.  

“We have worked a lot of theft cases over the years, but this one definitely takes first place in the heavyweight category,” Sheriff John Shearon’s office said in a statement, thanking the wrecker service.

We shouldn't be so tough on the man; he's only trying to better himself by going into the crane business. He just wants to get up in the world.

 

Slammin' Sammy

Golf, the game where people take a nice long walk and chase a little ball with a set of clubs, holds little interest for me, but that's ok.  Plenty of people are into it, and this past weekend we saw the highest point in the golf pantheon, the Masters Tournament in Augusta, GA.

It's always fascinating to me to see the people in the gallery down there, so rapt in their attention to the golfers, chowing down on pimento cheese sandwiches - the great local tradition.

Here's an interesting angle on those sammies: they only cost $1.50, and for those who attend football games, baseball games, and so forth, it's traditional to shell out thirty or forty semoleons on a sandwich and a couple of beers. The people who run things in bigtime sports figure they have a captive audience, so why not gouge them for the money. They even make you walk through a meat detector on the way in to make you aren't smuggling in a ham and cheese.

It's just the opposite down at Augusta National. They figure they can sell you a sandwich at or below their cost because (here's the hitch) they've got you paying  $2,000 for a single day, and more than $10,000 for the four-day pass.

In case that made your eyeballs fog up, the people you see on TV in their festive pants have paid 10,000 American dollars to stand there and watch other people, dressed similarly, play golf.

For your dollar fifty, you get a sandwich served in a green biodegradable plastic bag...but the purveyor changed a few years ago. Used to be, Nick Rangos, a caterer from Aiken, S.C. made the sandwiches, but for reasons no one seems to know (or be prepared to discuss) he lost the contract in 1998, after forty-five years. 

The golf course awarded the contract business to a local fried chicken chain called Wife Savers, who already had the fried chicken concession at the course. BUT - here's the twist. 

Instead of hiring someone who worked for Rangos and knew the recipe, or buying the recipe itself, the people at Augusta had neither, and Wife Savers's first attempts at recreating the cheesy spread did not measure up to the original. They got lucky when a woman who worked at the course had frozen some spread for the year before, and skilled food scientists went to work, analyzing the food in minute detail like they were on one of those CSI shows or something. 

And they finally duplicated the original, and it sells like hotcakes even today. And when you think about it from a nutritional standpoint, it's a perfect BLD (breakfast, lunch, and dinner). You get starches and sugars in the bread and protein from the cheese and indigestion if you gobble it too quickly.

It's what they call Southern Comfort food.

And, courtesy of a woman down there who knows about the sandwich, here is a good way to make yours at home:

Ingredients

2 cups sharp cheddar cheese, shredded

1 cup Monterey jack cheese, shredded

4 ounces cream cheese, softened to room temperature

1/2 cup mayonnaise

4-ounce jar pimentos diced in jar, drained

1 tablespoon onion, very finely minced

1/4 teaspoon garlic powder

1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon black pepper

Instructions

Combine all ingredients in a medium bowl and mix until smooth and creamy. Refrigerate for at least an hour to allow to firm.

Serve on white bread.

Sunday Rerun: She voted for the Labor Party

 Well, now that the election is over, and everyone is happy about the results, and the losing side is vowing to work with the winners for the betterment of all the nation and all the world...

I couldn't sustain that for much longer. But let's look back at someone who really wanted to vote. And if you don't vote, please tell me why.

A woman in Florida (what IS it down there? Is it the heat, the humidity, the Disney, what???) was in labor when she got to the Orange County Supervisor of Elections Office in Orlando last Tuesday.

Fox 35 news channel talked to poll worker Karen Brinceno Gonzalez, who said that a woman was on the way to the hospital, her husband at the wheel, when she told him to swing by the polls on the way.  It was only a half mile out of the way.

The mom-to-be sat in the car while dutiful dad went in, got in line, and when it was his turn, asked poll workers to come out and help her vote early.

“He's like ‘Yeah, she's about to have a baby, but she won't go to the hospital to have a baby until she votes,’” Gonzalez told the news. “I was like, OK, what can I do to facilitate her to vote? Where is she? Where can I go to help?”

Everyone is "like" something, you see.

Ms Gonzalez stepped out to the parking lot, found the woman breathing heavily, checked her ID and gave her a mail-in ballot to be returned by 11/3.

“She said, ‘No! No! No! I need to fill it out right now,’” Gonzalez said. “So she filled it out. I gave her an 'I VOTED' sticker, and she was off to the hospital.”

These are serious Floridians down there.

Eileen Deliz is also on the staff at the Orange County Supervisor of Elections Office, and she told the Orlando Sentinel that this was not in the usual course of events. 

“We are very, very busy, but when something like that happens it just makes our day," she told the paper. “It kind of validates what we do [and] the importance of voting. Every election cycle brings us a great little story.”

The Orange County Supervisor of Elections Office did not release the woman's name. I would love to know what she and her husband named the baby.

Looking back, there was a time when Baltimore Colt season ticket holders had to go to Memorial Stadium and line up to get their playoff tickets. People who worked there reported in different years that a Fire Dept ambulance, lights on for an emergency call, pulled up, and so did a hearse with three people aboard...if you know what I mean.

The Saturday Picture Show, April 9, 2022

 

We'll open and close this week with night lights. Just imagine how dark it would be if this bulb went out!

We tend to forget that woodpeckers still have to eat food! Yes, they peck their way into trees and find insect larvae, ants, termites, beetles and their larvae, and spiders for lunch, but sometimes they want seeds, like everyone else.

This is a weird feeling, when a passing cloud obscures the sun for a minute on a day that's been bright. It's like when you're in the ocean and suddenly you're in a very cold stretch of water.

Can you just imagine how great a book you could write about the inhabitants of a Nova Scotia fishing village?

Don't forget to take your Christmas wreath down before nesting season next year, or you'll have to leave it up all year (and in August, people will ride by your house and point.)

Old country song: "You've got a smile like an acre of sunflowers, and your eyes are bluebonnet blue..." But these are bluebonnets, and they're more like lavenderbonnets.

That's the real Michelle Carter on the left, and Elle Fanning, who plays her perfectly in "The Girl From Plainville" on Hulu on the right. Michelle was the woman who persuaded her boyfriend to commit suicide, ostensibly so that she could garner sympathy as "the girl whose boyfriend offed himself." It's a sick story, well told.

Zouaves (pronounced zoo-AHVS) were Civil War soldiers who dressed in the mode of French soldiers serving in North Africa. The Philadelphia Fire Zouaves were the 72nd Regiment of the Pennsylvania Volunteers from 1861 until 1864. All the cool stuff happens in firehouses.

I love this cartoon from Stephan Pastis's strip "Pearls Before Swine." We know how true it is, am I wrong?

Good night!

To the very end

Yesterday we talked about how, one day, the pandemic will end, and there will have to be the one person known as the last to succumb to the COVID-19 virus. What a shame, when it could be prevented.

There's a story about another "last death" that might have been prevented as well, and it comes from the end of World War I, and it involves a soldier from Baltimore!

The date is November 11, 1918. The time is 5 AM. The location is a railroad dining car in a dark forest north of Paris, where German, British and French officials have met to sign an armistice ending the war. The Allied commander, Ferdinand Foch, rejects the Germans' request to end the shooting at once. Foch says let's stop shooting at 11 AM so we can get the word to the soldiers on the front lines.

Foch tried to make it seem all practical, but the underlying goal was to end what was foolishly called "The War To End All Wars" at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. So, ok. End it on a splashy note. Never mind that 3,000 more soldiers died between 5 AM and 11 AM, and one of them was an American private who was out to regain his good reputation at the very end.

One of the groups still in the fighting for those hours was the 313th Infantry Regiment of the 79th “Liberty” Division, a regiment known as "Baltimore's Own," since most of its soldiers came from the city not yet known as Charm City.  “There will be absolutely no let-up in the carrying out of the original plans until 11 o’clock,” said subordinate brigadier general William Nicholson, as he kept his men fighting. 

The men of the 313th were deep into the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. Some ten miles north of Verdun, they had just seized the town of Ville-devant-Chaumont.

And one of those Baltimore soldiers was Private Henry Gunther, who had left behind a fiancée and and a nice job at a bank when he was drafted into the Army. He had just left for the war the previous July and was serving as a supply sergeant.

But he made the mistake of writing a letter to a friend at home, complaining about Army life and advising his buddy to avoid serving at any cost. Army censors read the letter, and he was busted down to private. AND THEN his fiancée got word of the demotion, and she dumped him.

As these things go, those were two tough blows, and Gunther was no longer the same cheerful guy. Perhaps it was to save his reputation that he volunteered to serve as a runner (a carrier of information in those pre-walkie talkie days.) He was injured by shrapnel in his hand in that duty, and could have been sent home, but he demanded to stay in the fight.

So it was that at 10:44 AM on November 11, the regiment was told to stop the fighting in 16 minutes. Realizing the war would be over after those minutes passed, Gunther took the opportunity to attack a German roadblock/machine gun nest with his rifle and bayonet, and as his comrades called for him to stop, the Germans stopped him with five shots to the temple.

He was declared dead at 10:59 AM.

General John Pershing, chief of the American Expeditionary Forces, logged Gunther's death as the last among American troops.

Most people familiar with the man and his death believed that his shame over the demotion that dishonored himself and his family was too much to bear, so he was trying to redeem himself. 

His burial place, fittingly enough, is in the Most Holy Redeemer Cemetery in Baltimore. He received the Distinguished Service Cross and was posthumously promoted back to sergeant after the war.

  

The List

No matter what some people are saying for whatever reason, COVID-19 is not over with, and in Great Britain, where more than 166,000 people have reportedly died of COVID-19 during the ongoing pandemic, they are adding to their list of official symptoms. By comparison, some 81,867,963 cases have been reported in the US as of Monday night, with 1,008,679 resultant deaths. 

Infection rates are rising in the United Kingdom; here, they are dropping after the post-holiday spike earlier this year. But still, this seems to be a virus we will be dealing with for a long time. Gone are the predictions that "it'll go away like a miracle as soon as it warms up" in April, 2020. 

So, still, it's good to be vaccinated and boosted and to maintain caution about one's surroundings and associates.

The British list now includes these symptoms:

• A high temperature or shivering (chills) — a high temperature means you feel hot to touch on your chest or back (you do not need to measure your temperature).
• A new, continuous cough — this means coughing a lot for more than an hour or three or more coughing episodes in 24 hours.
• A loss or change to your sense of smell or taste.
• Shortness of breath.
• Feeling tired or exhausted.
• An aching body.
• A headache.
• A sore throat.
• A blocked or runny nose.
• Loss of appetite.
• Diarrhea
• Feeling sick or being sick.

“The symptoms are very similar to symptoms of other illnesses, such as colds and flu,” the new NSA advisory notes. 

It's starting to remind me of one of those historical sidelights about some soldier being killed by a bullet on the day of an armistice. It happened to a man from Baltimore. About that, more tomorrow. But for now, be sure to be wise, and don't take a chance on being that last statistic.

 

Monkey Time

If you can imagine Hell on earth, I think I just read about it in The New Yorker, which ran an article detailing a Jimmy Buffett-themed senior housing complex in Florida. Heat, humidity, spiders, alligators, panthers, lizards, "Cheeseburger In Paradise" playing nonstop. If that sounds like good livin' to you, go get all you can of it, and take my share too. I've seen the Buffett folkways and I guess you need more of those Hawaiian shirts, flip-flops, and baggy shorts to fit in. I have none. 

I know this makes me seem an outlier but the thing I like about Florida is reading things like this: 

There is a troop of vervet monkeys that live near a busy runway at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport.  There are no native American monkeys, but in the 1940s, someone brought some little vervets from West Africa and set up a breeding facility and spectator zoo. There are now 40 descendants of those original arrivals running around a 1500-acre section of Dania Beach.

These simians get assistance from members of the Dania Beach Vervet Project, who all work to preserve the colony.  These monkeys are local stars! TV and newspapers all go out to cover them when the news about not being able to tell people there is such a word as "gay" slows down in the Sunshine State. Visitors and nearby residents feed the monks, despite signs saying not to do so.

The vervets (Males typically grow to 2 feet and weigh 15 pounds; females reach 18 inches and 10 pounds) are used to posing for pictures with passersby, and live about 20 years. Not bad, for a state where the governor flouts science and common sense in his effort to be on fox news all day and all night.  

And they have adapted away from their traditional dinner fare of spiders, ants, lizards, seeds, and flowers in favor of what humans bring them: Sugary things and salty things.

So for centuries, they were used to chowing down on the bounty of the wild, and now they only want Pop-Tarts and Cheez-Its.

Maybe we could chip in and get them all little Hawaiian shirts and flip flops and surf shorts to really complete their humanness.

 

Buy The Numbers

I always seem to wind up in the same line at the Kwik-E-Mart: behind someone who is buying Lotto tickets for everyone in his family.  And his church. And every other person they ever met. I don't bother with it, the lottery. I know lots of people do and they get a thrill out of hoping. I personally get a hope out of thrilling, and I don't even know what that means!

A lot of the people in line at the K-E-M seem to know the clerk and his family, so they get into a long conversation about the time his daughter's car broke down in the Mall garage and the towtruck couldn't get in to help. At length, the customer gives the clerk his numbers, and invariably mentions that his digital skein consists of birthdays, old addresses, and his draft lottery number from 1969.

There is no reason to think that a personal list of "lucky" numbers is more likely to win than a random set chosen by the lottery computer, but why not? You rarely hear of anyone saying they used to have a set of lucky numbers that were not really lucky, so they do the random route. Winners will tell you why!

Last week, a woman from Detroit won a $482,217 jackpot from the Michigan Lottery's Fantasy 5 game. She happily said she has been sticking with her numbers for a long time, and now, they finally hit! 

The lady is 45 years old, but notice, "45" is not one of the numbers she picked: She selected the numbers 02-10-11-17-21 and played them on the Michigan Lottery website.

 

"I have been playing the same set of numbers, which is made up of special dates, for a long time," the player said. "When I logged in to my account and saw I'd won the jackpot, I called my mom in a panic. She thought something was wrong until I told her I'd won the lottery. We were both in shock and couldn't believe it!"

She's taking the jackpot and plans to pay off bills and augment her savings account.

"Winning is an awesome feeling. It's a huge relief and couldn't have happened at a better time," she said.

I just might have to make a number salad out of my birthday, Peggy's, the cats', and some other significant dates. I'll get back to you if I do.

If this blog suddenly ceases to publish, please assume that I hit it big and can be reached care of General Delivery, Beaver Trap, Maine.

Shaboom shrooms

Who said that it's a fool who pretends to be a lawyer and have himself as a client?

I don't know, but I do know that you should not mess around with drugs - prescription or otherwise - unless you know what you're doing. And since so few of us are doctors of pharmacology or medicine, I'm going to say it's better to leave it up to those kinds of people before doing this kind of thing...

A man from Nebraska, hearing that the psilocybin in “magic mushrooms” can be effective for dealing with a variety of mental health issues, decided he would just get a mess of shrooms, boil them down, and inject them into his bloodstream.

Huge surprise. He almost died. The medicine from these mushrooms is meant to be taken orally.  

The Nebraskan is a bipolar opioid addict. He decided to stop taking his medications in order to ween himself off the pills. 

This led to a manic-depressive episode during which he read about the wonders of "magic mushrooms" and then decided to try the intravenous route. This led to organ failure within days.

The result? Nausea, diarrhea, early signs of jaundice, and the vomiting of blood. His family took him right to the ER, where doctors found his liver and kidneys near failure. He was eight days in the intensive care unit and more than three weeks on a ventilator.

As they flushed his system and began a program of antibiotics on him, doctors took a blood test and found that he tested positive for Psilocybe cubensis, which confirmed the man injected himself with mushrooms — which had begun to grow in his blood.

I'll let you read that last sentence again. Mushrooms were growing in his bloodstream.

He had injected himself with a species of psychedelic mushroom containing psilocybin and psilocin. These are what science calls "psychedelic" drugs. If you were around in the 1960s, it was then cool to be considered psychedelic. If you wore brightly colored bell bottoms and listened to The Electric Prunes while burning your library card, you were being psychedelic.

Psychedelic drugs are the ones that produce hallucinations and apparent expansion of consciousness. 

Psychedelic mushrooms in the wild

He was lucky. A team of doctors saved his life, but he was in the hospital for 22 days.

My favorite mushroom recipe involves buying fresh white mushrooms at ALDI, taking them home, and sautéing them in butter and Worcestershire sauce before crowning a nice rare steak with them. It's not psychedelic, and the only hallucination I ever get is when I top the whole deal with some zesty horseradish, which, if I add enough, can make me feel like the top of my head is coming off.

But in a good way! And I don't need to expand my consciousness when I'm grinding on a steak. In that moment, I am at one with my inner carnivore. 

Add baked potato with sour cream and butter, and a side salad, and you're talking dinner!

Sunday Rerun: Behind The Velvet Rope, Please

 I'm not trying to blame an entire educational movement for the foolish actions of some people, but I am puzzled by the tendency of our fellow citizens to do what they damn well please at any time in any situation.

Many teachers follow the Montessori movement, which allows children to be "at liberty to choose and act freely and act spontaneously for optimal development." Theoretically, this means you leave someone in a kitchen with a package of bacon, some green leafy vegetables, a tomato and a loaf of good bread, and if you give them enough time they will learn to make a BLT.

Or, give a person a block of wood and a whittling knife, and they will cut away everything that doesn't look like a duck.

That's the theory, but there is a problem with the "Let 'Em Figure Out How To Do It" school of learning...it leaves people feeling that they can just do as they please when they please.  This is why people - not talking about kids here - climb over bars and ford streams to get into the lion's den at the zoo, why they go for boat rides without personal flotation devices, why they play with fireworks, why they run through the streets of Pamplona being chased by bulls, why they jump out of airplanes that are still aloft.

People love to take risks, probably because at some point in their lives, they were encouraged to "think outside the box" and "push the envelope" and "go for the big picture."  

Sometimes, the rules are there to say "don't think outside this box because doing so might mean sudden death in a boiling acidic pool of water."

"No significant human remains were left" to recover after Colin Nathaniel Scott, from Portland, Oregon, decided that his visit to Yellowstone National Park would be best enhanced by going off the designated pathway near a geyser basin.  He and his sister wandered 225 yards off that boardwalk before he lost his footing on gravel and tumbled to his quick death. 

In boiling acidic water.

Of course, there are regulations and rules and signs, the same kind of sign that tells people not to try to engage in civil intercourse with bears, and look how many people break that rule. 

Last year, 4.1 million visitors went to Norris Geyser Basin, where water boils at 199° at the park's high elevation.

Lovely. Fatal.

Please avoid any area where you are likely to fall into a pond of 199° acid. Leave the lions alone, wear your life preserver, attend fireworks shows put on by trained professionals, avoid Spain when the bulls are on the run, and stay in the plane until it lands. 

It might not be as thrilling to live that way, but you'll live longer that way.

The Saturday Picture Show, April 2, 2022

 

Some pretty nice brickwork in Gwent, Wales. I suppose the bricks are formed in a mold before coming out of the kiln. Never saw anything like this...

If this seems like a great picture of a mountain range...it's actually a closeup of one rock!

You always need someone to chock the ladder for you. No one said it has to be a human!

"Objects in mirror may be the same size they really are because this is your wife's mirror from the bathroom and she needs it back"

Bruce McCall is a cartoonist, illustrator, commercial artist, and essayist. He's done great things like this for decades. This is from the National Lampoon Dacron Republican-Democrat newspaper satire from 1978.

Ukraine seems like such a lovely country. 

Until you get where you're going, be where you are.

George is flabbergasted.

People used to force you to sit in their basement while they dragged out the slide projector and showed you their vacation pictures. The best part was when the beam of light shone on the screen and we played Shadow Stumpers.

This egret just picked up dinner and is on the way home! Enjoy!

April the Onest

Oh yeah, look at the calendar today before you believe anything anyone tells you, except for me, because I will never lie to you, cheat you, deceive you, or fool you.

It's April Fool's Day, commonly celebrated as the day that radio DJs do each other's shows under the other person's name, kids turn off their parents' alarm clocks, swap sugar for salt, call someone's spouse and tell them lurid tales...

We don't know where April Fool's Day, or All Fools' Day, even began. I guess even the cavemen tied each other's shoelaces together or sent each other on an errand to get a left-handed monkey wrench, although how did cavemen know the date was April 1? We know that insurance companies didn't even start handing out calendars until Columbus's day.

You ancient Romans just missed your big day: they call it Hilaria, and it's every March 25. There is also the Holi celebration in India, which was held from sundown on March 17 through sundown the next day. It's also called the festival of sharing and love, or the festival of colors. Put it on your 2023 calendar for March 7.

I didn't know this, but it used to be that Christendom started their New Year on Easter Sunday, until Edict of Roussillon (August 1564). That's when King Charles IX said, "Let's start the new year on January 1, while the kids are out of school for Christmas break anyway." But notice: Easter was a lunar festival, not set in stone on a calendar. It's a moveable date, and those who insisted on clinging to the old ways were the “April Fools.”

There is also speculation that the oldtimers chose April 1 because it's right around the time of the vernal equinox, and many people are fooled by changes in the weather at this time of the year. Take this week, for example.

We don't know if this is Charles IX's fault, but to this day, a victim of April Foolery in France is called "poisson d’avril" or “April fish.” French children go around pinning or taping paper fish to the backs of friends.

I went to a tough school.  We pinned real fish to the backs of unsuspecting schoolmates while they practiced their scales.

The Devil you say!

Kids know about "Taz," a Warner Bros cartoon character, a grunting, growling carnivore based on a real animal, the Tasmanian devil, which is the largest surviving carnivorous marsupial.

Until recently, you could only find a Tasmanian devil on the island of Tasmania, off the coast of Australia, but people involved with Aussie Ark are bringing them to breed in New South Wales, on the Australian mainland. Aussie Ark calls themselves "the life raft of threatened, endangered native species to create an insurance population."

They are calling this the #DevilComeback. The Devil has not lived on Australia for some 3,000 years, but people have decided that the time is right to "rewild" Australia and bring balance to the bush.

[Those of you who love the English language will note the birth of a new word, along with the new devils being born. "Rewild" is new, and let's not send it any presents.]

These Devils might seem cute and cuddly like teddy bears, but they are incredibly temperamental and have one of the strongest bites of all mammals.

But that strong set of teeth and jaws were no match in 1000 BC, when dingoes were first brought to Australia by Asian migrants. In no time at all, there were no Devils left on the mainland and the only survivors had wound up in Tasmania.

 

So, in 2020, the good folks at Aussie Ark set free 26 Tasmanian devils into the  mainland wilderness and hoped for the best, and in 2021, seven healthy joeys were born!

Live long and prosper, joeys! Life evolves.

Dig it

If you've ever been to an ocean beach in the morning or early evening, you've seen people out there with metal detectors and long-handled sieves, going through the sand in search of treasure. The metal detector detects metal, and gives off a ping sound, and the digging begins. Soon enough, the beachcomber comes up with a treasure: either a high school class ring from Mayfield High School (with the inscription "W Cleaver '63") or a nut and bolt that came off a deck chair on the Titanic. 

Well, it's free fun (after you pay for the metal detector) and who knows? There's a lot of metal washing up on the beach.

We here on the coast tend to limit our metal searching to the seashore, but there are muddy fields and yards all over, just teeming with prizes for you, F'rinstance...

Over in Norfolk, England,  Andy Carter, 65, made quite a find a couple of years ago. He and 30 other metalhunters had spent looking for buried treasure on the muddy field of a farm, when all of a sudden, he got that magic ping as most of the others were starting to give up and head for home.

Digging through ten inches of mud,  Andy found a small coin, gold as can be!

 

“When I brushed off the soil, I saw the hind leg of a big cat,” Carter tells the Guardian newspaper’s Harriet Sherwood. “I thought, ‘It can’t be a leopard.’”

But it is! The big cat on the 23-carat coin is certainly a leopard. These coins, from the days of Edward III, were called leopard florins (a florin was an English gold coin worth about two shillings). 

Andy sold the coin for $185,000.  A private coin collector from the United Kingdom ponied up the money for the leopard coin. 

Edward III ruled England from 1327 to 1377, and he had the idea to put out these gold coins, replacing the former silver standard pocket money. France and Italy had gold coins, and Edward was goldarned if he was going to have England left out.

“[A] man with pretensions, ... seeking to unite the thrones of England and France, [he was] acutely aware of the irony of not having his own economically and politically prestigious international currency in gold,” is how the coin and the man were described in the auction listing.

He minted  £32,000 worth of gold coins in 1344, with leopards, double leopards, and helms (an old time helmet) pictured on them.

By August,1344, Edward tired of trying to get people to accept the new gold coins, and everyone in England went back to silver coins and fish-and-chip coupons are currency.

But in 1344, with one of these coins in your pocket, you could have bought a single sheep and a gallon of wine - that's about $2670 in today's money.

So Mr Carter can plan to get a bottle of wine, a pizza, and a tankful of gas!

Hole lot of shakin' going on

A popular thing for men to say when talking about how the transmission dropped out of their car, or how their favorite horse lost by a nose at Laurel, or that their mother-in-law is coming for a two-week vacation, is "Well, hell." The very expression denotes a certain weary acceptance of a sad fate, as in, "What can you do?" 

In the al-Mahra province of Yemen, there is a sinkhole  figuratively full of broken down Chevrolets, losing horses, and the vacation plans of mothers-in-law that is known as the "Well Of Hell." It's a crater 98 feet wide and 367 feet deep. It's been there for centuries, but has never been explored. The locals stay away, believing the hole to be a prison for jinn, the shape-shifting spirits from ancient Arabian folklore.

As legend has it, anyone who dares descend into the Well Of Hell might get swallowed whole, cursed with bad luck, or forced to attend an Adele concert. But recently, geology professor geology professor Mohammed al-Kindi and seven others from the Omani Caves Exploration Team rappelled down there for a looky-loo. Two others waited at the tops of the ropes.

What they found was, 30-foot high stalagmites and bright green cave pearls, waterfalls where flowed torrents of subterranean liquid from 150 feet above, and colonies of snakes, beetles, frogs, and birds that have been thriving for all these years! 

They encountered no evil spirits, at least, not as far as they know. No one knows how this sinkhole formed in the first place, but the research team came back with samples to test. 

And maybe the reports of a Hell on earth were overblown. "All we saw was pure freshwater down there,” said al-Kindi. “We even drank an entire bottle, and nothing happened to us!”

Let's check back with him in a year. Maybe his mother-in-law is moving in.

Go fish

My wife Peggy and I were talking the other night, and it occurred to us that there might be very few couples like us anywhere. We don't agree on a whole lot as far as music and books and movies go. We usually like the same TV shows and of course the local baseball and football team. 

But we both like anchovies, and how many couples can say that? I mean, swimming on top of a pizza, or nestled around some croutons atop a Caesar salad, that's where we find the anchovy, a small, common forage fish of the family Engraulidae. They are classified as oily fish, and to make it even slicker, they come in a little tin can or glass jar with more oil and salty brine to give them that extra anchoviness.

I looked it up and found their description: small, green fish with blue reflections.

And haven't we all had blue reflections!

Anchovies have a long silver stripe down them. They have tiny sharp teeth in both of their jaws, and they eat plankton and newly-hatched fish on their way to being part of our dinner.  

That's what they eat. In turn, they are eaten by just about every predatory fish around such as the halibut, rock fish, yellowtail, shark, chinook, and coho salmon. Marine mammals and birds like them as much as we do! They are an important part of the diet of California brown pelicans and elegant terns.

And I must say, this blog has certainly taken an elegant tern today.

They come to our tables, salad bars, and pizzerias having been gutted and salted in brine, and then, once cured, it's into an oily salty can or jar for them. 

The ancient Romans liked their anchovies too! They made a fish sauce of them and called it "garum."

I have a simple test I use to see if a dictionary is good. There is a word, from Latin, that refers to charitable endeavors. The word is "eleemosynary." If I see a new dictionary, I pick it up and thumb to the "e" section, and if "eleemosynary" is there, I think it's a good dictionary.

Same way, if your pizzeria offers anchovies, it's a good pizza place, and might even be great if they add them for free! That would be eleemosynary of them.

 

 

Sunday Rerun: Measuring Tape

 There was an episode of The Simpsons in which Sideshow Bob was temporarily let out of jail so he could help the Springfield Police track the fiend who was attempting to kill Homer. Living among the Simpsons, he came outside to find Homer trying to trap the would-be murderer with an effigy of himself hanging in front of 742 Evergreen Terrace. But Homer flipped out and began assaulting the hanging dummy, leading Sideshow Bob to ask the rest of the family, "And none of this seems odd to you?"

"It's Sideshow Bob!"

Those words ring in my head ever since SB spoke them. And if you're paying attention, your head is shaking too at what people are up these days.

Let's go to the videotape!

For those who haven't noticed, everything is on video these days. So people's interactions with police out in public are most likely available for review from many surveillance cameras, and, soon, from cameras on the police themselves. Time after time, we see people whose account of some melee or fracas is shown to be at wild disparity with the reality that video provides.  So, the next time a delivery driver throws some fragile package 20 feet onto a porch, he or she should figure on being recorded...along with the sneak thief who darts onto the porch to rip off the package.

I make it a habit to wave wildly and do something flamboyant at the little smoky gray camera covers on the ceilings of banks and liquor stores. Might as well leave 'em smiling!

And the other day, a once-respected rabbi pleaded guilty to 52 counts of voyeurism. He had set up surreptitious video cameras to record women using the ritual bath at his synagogue.

And the other day, the proprietor of a string of bar/concert venues in our town was arrested for ALLEGEDLY installing video cameras in the ladies' room at one of his spots.

And there was the respected gynecologist from Johns Hopkins, one of the finest hospitals in the world, who was recording his examinations of hundreds - thousands! - of the private parts of his patients via the use of a video recording pen in his pocket.  He committed suicide when confronted with his enormous evil.

Now, you can ask any prostitute, or late-night radio call-in host. There is no limit to what people are into. There are probably millions of people who get a thrill from hidden-camera videos of others taking a bath or using the commode or being examined down there.

And so I ask the Rabbi or the night club guy, "None of this seems odd to you?"

It's a problem when some people's pleasure comes from misusing others.

The Saturday Picture Show, March 26, 2022

 

Sometimes we are confronted with facts that just seem impossible to believe. Gary Oldman is younger than Gary Numan! One 18-inch pizza is more pizza than two 12-inch pizzas! The Apollo 11 astronauts were unable to purchase life insurance, so, to provide for their families, they each signed hundreds of autographed photos for their survivors to sell! Sonny Bono was once elected to the US Congress! And, most incredible of all, the Allman Brothers' "Eat A Peach" album is 50 years old.

This is the week for Cherry Blossom lovers to go to Washington DC to see them in their full flower.  With any luck, you'll see Lindsey Graham hanging around the reflecting pool.

On the other hand, yes, the flowers get all the attention, but sometimes the leaves are just as interesting, like the ones on this rose.

Those who read history know the story of the Maginot Line, a defensive wall of concrete, obstacles and weapons installations named for the French Minister of War André Maginot. It was supposed to keep Germany from invading France. It would have worked, had it not been for the ability of the clever Germans to sneak in through The Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. This ballfield is not safe!

No scaffolds or hoists for these guys! House painters in Thailand get it done!

This 1950 Oldsmobile showroom is no longer needed to sell the non-existent Olds line, but if it's still standing, it's probably a Starbucks.

This week in 1963, the last inmates were moved out of Alcatraz prison off the California coast. They don't paint those rocks white, by the way; they are covered with pelican poop. The island is rightly named Yerba Buena Island, but was earlier known as "Isla de Alcatraces" (Island of Pelicans).

It would take a real Maverick to pile into one of these homemade campers and travel the country.

It seems like it was really important for early students of geometry to dress up in foppish finery.

Many people resisted getting a home computer for a long time, because they thought there would be a setup like this in their living room.

Have a spare

Editor's note: Official Blogger statistics inform me that this entry will be my 5,000th entry in a series I began a long time ago...like 2006. I still write it five times a week, and add a Saturday picture show with 10 pictures I enjoyed, and a rerun of an old blog on Sundays. I still love it and get a lot of fun from writing it and hearing your feedback. So please keep feeding me back and I will write another 5,000 blogs! Thanks - Mark

 We moved into this current iteration of the "Lazy 'C' Ranch" in summer 1999, and my mother thought that a refrigerator for the basement would be a nice gift that Christmas.

It was a great idea and I recommend it to anyone with a little extra room. I mean, when Giant marks down the price of hams right after Christmas and Easter, I can pick up a couple of semi-boneless specials, all the while wondering how anything can be "semi" boneless. Either something is boneless, or it is not boneless, am I wrong? 

It's been good to have an extra icebox. There are some things that it's good to have in duplicate, such as eyeglasses, tea pots, and, of course, refrigerators.

The refrigerator had two jobs: keeping frozen things frozen, and cold things cold. And until recently, it did both jobs perfectly. Broccoli florets, a couple of bagels, and homemade tomato sauce kept company in the freezer with Stouffer's Entrees and ice cream, and down below there was lettuce and tomatoes and carrots and celery and milk and OJ and cheese and life was great until the night I went to get some ice cream, grabbed the carton of Breyer's, and it was...squishy. 

Funny, some things in the freezer were still rock hard, and everything in the refrigerator part was cold. But we had a repairman come out and add some freon, and by that night it was 40° in the freezer and the broccoli florets were complaining it was too hot.

A couple of days later, another repairman came out and took us aside, like a doctor in a sad movie. He said he was trying one last transfusion of freon, but we had to understand, if there was an internal freon leak, the prognosis was dim.

And sure enough, that night, it was almost warm enough inside there to toast the bagels. We removed the food, threw some out, and moved the rest upstairs to the kitchen icebox, where they got acquainted with some new neighbors and chilled right out.

NO! This is not our old refrigerator and if it were, you know I could never
post a picture of it! Rust is forbidden in our house!

It's hard to find a basic refrigerator these days, one without French doors and crushed ice coming out of the door and all that, but we found one and it will be here today, if you want to come and see it begin what should be another 22-year run.

In 22 years, I will be 93 years of age, and I won't want my ice cream to be too cold, so let's hope for the best.