Interesting...

"Reader's Digest" used to have a page called "Points To Ponder." Maybe they still do; I don't know....I'll have to think about it.

But this would be a nice fit for that column. An Englishman named Harold Nicolson, described everywhere as a "politician, diplomat, historian, biographer, diarist, novelist, lecturer, journalist, broadcaster, and gardener," once took time from all the above pursuits to point out, diplomatically, that "99 out of 100 people are interesting...and the 100th is interesting because he is not."

By Jove, he makes a point! Sometimes we have to dig and dig to find it, but just about everyone has a story to tell. 

And when you find that one-in-a-hundred whose personality is as lively as a wax gong, your consolation is that you will meet 99 more people before you meet your next dud.

Mr Machine

News Item:  Apple has reportedly launched a hush-hush project to develop a personal robot as the iPhone maker seeks to find “the next big thing” after its failed foray into manufacturing an autonomous electric car.

This is the news we have been waiting for. I'm still not sold on electric cars, since we hear all the time about people having trouble making the battery charge last long enough to find an outlet, if you will, for their hobby machine. There just doesn't seem to be a sufficient quantity of charging stations, and then, when you do get the battery juiced up, they tend to catch fire, leaving your car a charred pile of rubble.

But a home robot! Now, you're talking! Imagine having a full-sized, real-life Mr Machine clanking around the house. Think of the things I could have him do, saving precious time to do I don't know what-all!

• empty the dishwasher
• make our morning tea and coffee
• go out and get the newspaper off the driveway
• fry my bacon and eggs
• clean the pan and plates
• wipe off the countertop and stovetop
• make sure my tablet is charged and my seltzer tumbler is full

And that's just before lunch! Playing with Eddie The Cat would still be my job. I'm not giving everything over to this mechanical wonder, after all.

 

Sunday Rerun: Hernando needs a hideway

 I'd like a minute to speak to the young job seekers who are reading this.

I have one thing to tell you.  If someone named Joseph Michael Brannen ever gets out of jail and writes a book about how to go about getting the job of your dreams, turn and run the other way.

Young Brannen, the pride of Brooksville, FLA (why are there so many crazy people in that state, I wonder parenthetically) came up with a novel approach to getting hired.  He wanted to be a firefighter.  So he bought some firefighter turnout gear online and...ALLEGEDLY set fire to the East Hernando Library in that book-crazy town.  Someone called 911, and when the engines arrived, they found Brannen at the scene, all decked out in his gear, including an air tank, which was likely as empty as his thoughts.  Since he didn't know what he was doing, standing like there a sore thumb at a hand clinic, he was told to stand back.

Nice try, son.

The fire was extinguished, there was half a million dollars damage to the library, and the fire department started looking around for clues to what was clearly a deliberately set fire. It didn't take either of the Hardy Boys to look around and settle on a suspect.

Apparently, Brannen does not come from a hugely affluent family.  He is currently cooling his heels in the Hernando County Hoosegow, unable to come up with $3,000 bail.

He wanted to be a probationary firefighter and now he will probably be a non-firefighter serving a term on probation.

So, job hunters, let this be a lesson.  If you want to play for the Orioles, buying a uniform and showing up for batting practice at Camden Yards is not the ticket you're looking for. Becoming a brain surgeon will not happen just because you get some stylin' scrubs and a nice pair of clogs and loiter around the scrub room, just as getting a plaid polyester suit and a salmon-colored shirt and a garish tie will not automatically let you sell used cars at one of those corner car lots with hundreds of clear light bulbs strung overhead and pennants of red, yellow and blue flapping in the breeze.

But if you lean your head real close to the window of Brannen's jail cell, you can hear those pennants.  Soon he will go to court, accompanied by a person in a nice blue suit.  He should hope that person went to law school and paid attention.

The Saturday Picture Show, April 6, 2024

 

This little kitty was named Telemachus, after the son of the Greek hero Odysseus and his wife, Penelope. You have seen his picture several million times if you are "of a certain age" because he appeared with his human on a certain record album that has sold over 25 million copies.

It's Too Late to thank him personally, but like all felines, his spirit lives on!

Nature is truly amazing in its ability to camouflage its fauna. Sure, you see the owl  hanging on the tree, but look again and see the giraffe right behind him!

Meanwhile, in Seabrook, NH, this lobster tried to hide from the trap by holding his breath until he turned blue.

Every time I see Radio City pictured, in my mind I hear Holden Caulfield hearing that guy behind him watching the Rockettes who "kept saying to his wife, ‘You know what that is? That’s precision.’ He killed me.”

This is a residential neighborhood in Dubai. You have to admire the wide variety of options. It's a numbing form of precision.

You know that AC/DC song about the Highway To Hell, well, this is a road in Montana called the Highway To Heaven. Nice!

I worked in the Baltimore County Courthouse for years and years and years and walked past this handsome oil painting of disgraced former County Executive Spiro T. Agnew a million times, always with a handful of scorn. (The painting hangs near where Crooked Ted took bagsful of money from paving contractors and the like.) But it's cool to see that used as the setting for the great John Waters picture "Serial Mom" in the courthouse scene where Katherine Turner backhands Patty Hearst (!) for wearing white shoes after Labor Day. Fashion violations are sternly dealt with in Towson, MD.

If the tiniest among us can remember, why can't we all remember to appreciate the beauty of our world?

Some people don't find retirement all that agreeable, so they find other work. Nice to see Pac-Man working in the sidewalk construction field.

Chicken by choice - you can have Bojangles or the new alternative, Bojagnles!

Goodnight, sun!

As John Cougar Mellencamp once asked, "Ain't that America?"

The latest example of something I will have to explain to friends who live in other countries is that prisoners in New York have filed a lawsuit against their hosts, the Department of Corrections, who have wisely decided to lock down the lockups during this coming Monday's solar eclipse.

The basis for the suit is that being confined in their semi-private suites will "violate inmates' constitutional rights to practice their faiths by preventing them from taking part in a religiously significant event."

In the spirit of incarcerated ecumenism, six men from five religious backgrounds put up the papers. The opening line is, "A Baptist, a Muslim, a Seventh-Day Adventist, two creyentes (believers) in Santeria, as well as an atheist walk into the warden's office..."

I'm not knocking anyone's religion here. It's understood that a solar eclipse is a rare event, with meanings in many faiths, but people who are in prison are there because they have forfeited the right to participate in Christmas tree lightings, Easter egg hunts, family seders, and home gatherings for all sort of religious observances. 

No religion lists "A solar eclipse" as a standard holiday on the state registry of such things.

The eclipse will be total or almost so in western parts of New York on Monday, when, at about 3:15 PM. the moon will pass between the Earth and the sun, shading out the sun and turning Monday afternoon into Monday night for a little while.

Listen up, inmates. There will be another eclipse in August, 2044. Try not to be in local, state, or federal custody then, and it's all yours.

 

 

 

  

Always something new

OK, class, please take out a sheet of paper and a pencil and write down today's vocabulary word. It's prosopometamorphopsia.

You can call it PMO for short, and what it is, is a malperformance of the noggin that makes people you see appear to be demons, with ears, noses, and mouths pulled back, and groove lines in their cheeks, chins, and foreheads. 

Victor Sharrah, out of Clarksville, Tennessee, woke up one day and found this sight problem going on. He says, “My first thought was I woke up in a demon world. You can’t imagine how scary it was.”

Oh yes, we can. 

Prosopometamorphopsia is not a common thing. It's a perception disorder that distorts how its victims see the faces of others. And it only happens when the patient sees people live and in person, not in pictures or via computer screen.

Based on Sharrah's descriptions, scientists at Dartmouth College made a visual of what he sees...

In most cases, doctors say the symptoms resolve after a few days or weeks, but Sharrah's case persists and he still sees the demons.

So far, fewer than 100 cases have been documented. Researchers think it all has to do with a dysfunction in the part of the brain where we process facial recognition, but they have no idea why, so far. 

Some of the victims of the disorder had head trauma, stroke, epilepsy or migraines in their history, but some had no such touchpoints in their history and still deal with PMO.

In Sharrah's case, he had a head injury at the age of 43, which he sustained by falling onto concrete. He has a lesion on the left side of his brain.

 Antônio Mello of Dartmouth is the lead on this study, and he reports that other patients have presented with different symptoms and histories, with no single event apparently responsible.

And more and more people are coming forward to report PMO symptoms of their own, having refrained from saying anything before, for fear of what others would say.

I would say it's all the more proof that we think we have everything just about figured out, only to figure out that we really don't.

It's interesting.

 

This will phil your heart with joy

From Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, this news phlash: Punxsutawney Phil, the weather-predicting groundhog upon whose shadow millions base their mood every February 2, had plans he did not disclose this time around.

Phil and his wife Phyllis Groundhog became parents over the weekend. A member of the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club stopped by to drop off fruits and vegetables for P & P to chow down on, and found two of the cutest little critters you'll ever see right there in their semi-luxurious accomodations.

The gestation period for G-Hogs is 32 days, so a lot's been going on up there since this year's festivities.

The club did not specify the genders of the kids or mention names. I humbly suggest "Harley" and "Wart" for the first names of the young 'uns.

The happy couple have opened a registry at Target, BabyBump, Amazon, and Groundhogs "R" Us.

Up All Night

 And then, there was a man named Alonzo Wire, who was for some time chief of the Hackettstown (NJ) Police Department. Mr Wire became famous for not sleeping for 20 years. 

At night, he would recline on a couch in his living room, sit in the dark and allow his thoughts to wander, but he never quite fell asleep in the final decades of his life, which ended in 1910 as a result of respiratory issues.

Doctors examined him and had no explanation, even for the fact that without sleep, he was robust and otherwise healthy. He did go down to 200 lbs. from a previous high of 280.

Mr. Wire believes that his peculiar condition resulted from his being struck by lightning as a young man. However, some years passed between the bolt and the cessation of sleep, so who knows?

It's even possible that we get the term "wired" (as in, "I had to study all night, so I guzzled coffee and was really wired by 3 AM") from Mr Wire, but don't lose any sleep over it.

Life's twists and turns

We will be hearing and sharing stories about the collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge here in Baltimore for years to come. And we'll hear more stories about  cuckoobozos like this Congressman Dan Meuser from Pennsylvania. Our kind neighbor to the north came out the other day and said he does not think the federal government should replace that bridge.

Say it with me, Danny Boy: The Bridge carries traffic over Interstate 695. Interstate highways are part of the federal government, duh.

And just like Texas threatening to secede every other week and then turning to Washington with their palms out every time a hurricane comes along, do you not think that Meuser would want federal money to help in case of a bridge collapse in his district up there? The hypocrisy is deafening.

BUT here is some perspective. A fellow named Larry Desantis is head baker at Herman's Bakery in Dundalk. I haven't been there for a while, but they used to make a strawberry shortcake that would make you want to shout in exultation. I hope they still do.

Mr Desantis

Anyhow, Desantis works two jobs and used to cross the Key bridge early every morning to start job 2 at Herman's. Last Tuesday, he made the trip at about 1:26 AM. Three minutes later, the bridge collapsed. Police were able to stop traffic from coming onto the span, but were unable to reach the repaving crew working on the roadway, with tragic results.

But, "If I had been one minute later, I wouldn’t be here,"  Desantis said on Saturday. "It’s an eerie feeling because there was no vehicles at all. Normally at that time in the morning, even that time in the morning, because it’s right there at Amazon, you’ll see 20-30 tractor trailers coming and going," said Desantis.

And...he said he usually stops to talk for a few after getting off from his first job, but that night he didn't.

"There's a divinity that shapes our ends." If you stuck with "Hamlet" through Act 5, Scene 2, you heard the prince say that. "Rough-hew them how we will..." 

No matter how we play it, the big decisions are made upstairs. That's why I try to stay in good with them.

 

 

Easter 2024

We wish you and yours, and all who celebrate, an Easter Sunday of devotion and reflection.

The Saturday Picture Show, March 30, 2024

 

The guy who made this mugshot mug had a really nice Chevy van back in the day. He had it all rigged up to go very fast. You should have seen that van go.

This is the picture featuring the most living presidents ever taken. Ask your children to name them all.

Just when you think we have invented everything that needed to be invented, behold the Burrito Bumper. Just place a tortilla in the red part below and chow down on tacos overhead. In no time, your taco detritus will fill your new burrito. I tell you, this could go on infinitely!

Even the Pope has to deal with March winds.

Not a bottle of catsup in sight. That's the way to dine.

Here's a really clever way to mount and display your collection of seaglass.

They say that spotting a female cardinal is a sign from your loved ones gone on that they are holding you in their hearts. I saw one the other morning, hanging around the Bradford pear tree out front. The bird was outside, not I. But still.

Somehow, I doubt this handicapped ramp met with approval from the code inspector.

And I just don't know...is this a huge architectural foulup, or a clever stairway to the attic?

This week we all had the chance to meet some experts in bridge construction and maritime operations. Just the other day, they were experts on infectious disease control, women's reproductive health issues, and vaccine safety. Amazing, the degrees one can be granted online these days.

For shame

You know, it's really a shame what's going on in the schools these days. People are out of control with their arrogance, their misbehavior, their constant flouting of the rules and the laws, and I really have little hope for the future unless someone somewhere steps up and puts a very fast halt on this conduct.

Now would be the time for me to tell you, I am not talking about the students or the teachers. Kids are what kids are and always have been and always will be. Teachers do their best, and succeed admirably, especially in light of the fact that a person with degrees after their name could make better coin as a district manager for Cracker Barrel or a home visitation speech therapist.

The teachers are there trying to teach, and once the students file into the class in their time-honored desultory fashion, they get taught. 

And sometimes they get taught too much, as in the case of the Stemmers Run Middle School in eastern Baltimore County, where the kids pounded the pavements and the parking lots and wore out a lot of sneaker rubber selling that World's Finest Chocolate as a school fund raiser. 

It must have been bittersweet chocolate. The treasurer for the parent teacher student association, James Michael Harris, 46, has pleaded guilty to ripping off $29,000 of the candy money.

Baltimore County prosecutors says that from April 2022 to March 2023, Harris drained the school's non-profit bank account. They say he used PayPal to line his own pockets, eventually using the money to gamble on sports.

“Those kids worked so hard to raise that money and they got nothing for it in return,” says Rosemary Roos-Whitney, president of the PTSA.  “It’s really disappointing.”

Harris could get 10 years in prison, but you know how that works. These guys always wriggle off somehow. 

Gambling is a sucker's game, anyway. In all of recorded history, there has only been one man stupid enough to go bust in his own casino. Except for that orange exception, the people on the other side of the gambling table are more than happy to take your money as you dream of cleaning up on betting that the Steelers will win and the Seahawks will cover the spread.

Meanwhile, the kids are the losers. People like this man should be shunned, as they do in Amish Country.  And then send him to the hoosegow and try to explain to the kids that all their work and hustle was for naught. 

Being young, the kids will likely forgive more readily than I will.

 

.

Take Me Out To Eat At The Ballgame

Depending on what happens with all this rain they've been talking about all week, the Baltimore Orioles (defending champions of baseball's American League East) will open their season this afternoon at 3:05 against the California Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, California (their official title) who come to town with their all-star Mike Trout and several dozen other players.

Rain or not, ballgame or not, there will be chow for the multitudes. Fan favorite Boog Powell will be slinging the sammies; his Boog's BBQ famed rolling smoke will fill lots of bellies. It's described as "a fan-favorite, the low-roasted beef top round rubbed with Boog’s famous spice blend, smoked in-house to a perfect medium rare, and served atop a corn-dusted Kaiser roll." 

Life is nothing without corn dust on your roll! Boog's stand is on Eutaw St, where everyone has a chance to eat great Bmore beef. It's so close to the field, even the outfielders can dart up there during pitching changes...

And I think this is great. Oriole Park at Camden Yards has a new sensory room, designed for individuals with sensory processing needs. It's near Gate F along the main concourse. The room offers adjustable lighting, calming visions, and comfortable seating.  Sensory tools to enhance the experience include bubble walls, bean bags, and tactile objects. 

And last but not yeast, local favorite National Bohemian beer (we just call it "Natty Boh," hon), is back for those who like a can of beer with their baseball. It's also available in the coolerator in our kitchen at substantial savings.

 

 

 

A Bridge Too

We will talk about yesterday's bridge collapse in Baltimore forever. If you didn't see the story, a freight ship allided (that's the maritime term for when a moving ship hits a stationary object) with the buttress of the Key Bridge, demolishing in 40 seconds the connection from southeast Baltimore County to Anne Arundel County, passing over the Patapsco River in the Baltimore Outer Harbor.

When the bridge opened in 1977, it completed the circular "Beltway" highway around the town, making an easy trip for ten of thousands daily. The bridge is gone, six lives of men working on its roadway are most tragically gone, but just as surely, the bridge will be rebuilt.

I695 circles Baltimore. The blue oval shows the part now destroyed.  Alternate routes will be the order of the day for many days.

It got me to thinking about a waterway further northeast, so much so that it's almost not in Maryland. Up in Cecil County you'll find the little town of Chesapeake City, home to 736 people in the 2020 census. The town is divided in two by the C&D Canal, which opened shipping traffic to the bay for vessels in the Delaware River with the destination being the Chesapeake Bay, the Atlantic Ocean, and the entire world.

Once larger vessels started traveling the canal, a lift bridge needed to be built for them to pass under, and one opened in 1926 to replace an old swing bridge. 

However, in 1942, the empty oil tanker Frank Klassen, tugged by three tugboats, was carried away on fluctuating tides, and struck the bridge, knocking it down. With World War II barely underway (and American forces seeing some setbacks) the focus was on the war effort, and the little town of Chesapeake City had no connection to the mainland, except for ferry service, until 1949, when a new high-level bridge was constructed.

Old timers up that way will tell about how they rode that ferry all those years for basic needs - or how stores got their supplies trucked in by the ferry. 

I bring all this up to say that, as grim as things look this morning, and with the sadness in our hearts as it is, Baltimore, Maryland, and the United States have always prevailed, and we will again, because we have always been great.

 

Good advice costs nothing and it's worth the price

I would never presume to tell a woman what to do with her life, but I stumbled upon this list of  Things You Should Never Say to Your Partner ( According to Therapists) so I thought I would share it with you menfolk. Many's the time I have cringed while watching a man take his verbal shovel and dig himself a hole that would take anyone two weeks to crawl out of, so guys, pay heed...

Generalizations A sure way to end a meal is to say, "No one on earth could be a worse cook than you." Or how about, "You always order the worst kind of pizza that no one likes!" Bad for business. 

And the therapists say, this moves the discussion out of conversation mode and into attack zone. Suggestion: "Next time, could we look over the carryout menu again and order something we both like?"

My wife and I have been married for 50 years. We both love anchovies. Those two items are related.

Deflections When the other person brings up a significant concern, address it, and don't go, "Yeah but you forgot to return that book to the library." 

The therapists say that coming back with a big "but" just says you are perfunctorily acknowledging their concern, but you don't really validate it. Best reply is something like, "What I'm hearing is..." which honors their issue.

Comparisons are odious. I've even seen it written that they are "odorous," and either way, they are not fair. Best to avoid, "You should be more like (so and so)."

“You should be more like _____.” Comparing your partner with someone else is “never, ever a great strategy,” Gaines said.

Remembering that every person is different might help cut back on comparison. No one likes to hear that the neighbors are going out more, buying better cars, whatever. It's awful to hear that and feel you don't measure up, so don't throw that around. Keep it to the two of you.

Dismissals None of us are in the position of being able to determine if someone else's reactions are appropriate, and to tell someone that they are overreacting is just a way to minimize that person's feelings. The therapists recommend saying, "OK, I’m listening. Tell me more. Help me understand what you’re having a hard time with."

And for the record, can you think of a time when someone hollering, "Calm down!" resulted in anyone calming down? Me neither.

Better to understand you're both coming from different places, and try to see how an issue might be important to your partner for reasons you never understood before. 

*******************************************************************************

If you've read this far and are still looking for one of my corny jokes or pallid banalities, they took the day off today. 

 

Same but different

It's interesting to read about a life that parallels yours in some ways. Rosearl Julian West and I are the same age, went to school in the same time, and our paths crossed in the radio business and when we both worked for Baltimore County Government. She has written a book about her life and times through her school and college days, and I give it two hearty thumbs up.

Rosearl Julian West

"Reflections: My Journey On Arunah" takes place on the west side of Baltimore City, where Rosearl grew up with her brothers and sisters as the proud progeny of a family physician, Dr. Emerson Julian, who, in the old fashioned way, had his office in his house and saw patients there regularly. Dr Julian served three terms on the Baltimore City Council, and Rosearl's mom was his campaign treasurer. They formed a magnificent family and this book is full of stories we can all relate to.

Memories, good and bad. The disappearance of a little girl from the city when we were 13, the riots following the assassination of the Rev. Dr. King when we were 17, and the "Decency Rally" that turned into a mob riot at the old Memorial Stadium during our senior year in high school....the good memories of homemade waffles and riding bikes, the bad times of the riots and the burning of homes and businesses owned by friends and acquaintances of the Julian family.

Not only does Rosearl take me on a walk down Memory La, which runs from her old home on Arunah Ave. in the Northwest part of the city to my old stomping (literally) grounds in the Northern suburbs. Simultaneous childhoods make for interesting comparisons. It's funny how many times, reading the book, I said "I did something like that." But my bike riding was on woodsy trails, not city streets. My volunteer fire company helped out in the city during the riots by filling in for Engine 42 in Hamilton but we saw nothing of the destruction except on the news. Where Rosearl's childhood bête noire was a mean neighbor all the kids called "Yogurt Man," ours was the local habitually-intoxicated lawyer up the street who had kids on bikes and adults in cars scattering like bowling pins as he lurched along in his green '61 Chevy, a safety hazard which continued until he drove that car into my mom's car as she was bringing me and my sister home one sunny afternoon.

Different times, different memories, but still so much the same. Rosearl says that at 16 she possessed a "myopic but optimist view of the world." What 16-year-old doesn't? 

I'm glad Ms West brought up her upbringing in such a readable, enjoyable book!

I await Volume 2!

Sunday Rerun: "It's not personal, Sonny. It's just business."

 When I was a child in the 50's (the 1950s, that is) there was nothing more respected in America than The Businessman.  Oh, he (and it was almost ALWAYS a male, white, with a white dress shirt and a tie in a Hart Schaffner Marx dress suit) was the object of veneration.  It was assumed that he had Made It when he was seen tooling around town in a Cadillac, shopping at all the right stores, golfing at the right course, sending his 2.3 kids to the right schools.

That .3 of a kid was tough to teach, though.

It was all part of the comfortable environment of those days.  We kids went to school, learned math and science so we could beat the evil Russians to the moon, participated in atom bomb fallout drills (we were assured that getting in the school hall and covering our heads with our elbows would keep us safe from the effects of nuclear detonation) and did all we could as young citizens to make the world better.  The businessmen built and developed huge corporations to employ our dads, feed us, sell us cars and all was good.  We watched "Leave It To Beaver" and we felt good about things, because things that were out of the norm, such as alternative lifestyles, were swept into a corner as being only for "weirdos."  Just picture Red Forman from That 70s show.

Something happened somewhere along the line, though.  The line itself was blurred and people were hopping along either side of it. Just yesterday, I turned on the news in the morning to see that:

• The head of a peanut business in Georgia, knowing that his product contained salmonella, told his subordinates to ship it anyway so he wouldn't lose out on the sales.  Now he himself is being shipped off to the stony lonesome for 28 years, and his lawyer whines that that is like a life sentence for a 61-year-old man whose foul peanut butter killed nine and sickened hundreds.
• A company called Turing Pharmaceuticals jacked up the price of Daraprim, a medicine used for treating a food-borne illness suffered by AIDS patients and others with compromised immune systems, from $13.50 per pill to $750 overnight. That's a rather large markup, but Turing chief executive Martin Shkreli dismisses his critics as "people who don't think logically," and, when asked via Twitter how he manages to sleep at night, replies, "You know. Ambien."



Pharmacy Boss celebrates himself

• Just a few years after Hitler and his atrocities threatened to obliterate the world, the Volkswagen car he had commissioned became popular the world over. Plenty of men who had fought World War II were driving VWs to work by 1960, little suspecting that in 2015, that corporation would be found to have cheated emissions control tests on 11,000,000 vehicles that were sold to people who thought they were environmentally sound.  

Don't get me wrong.  There are plenty of businesspeople doing honest business and improving the public weal.  Bill Gates, without whom I would be writing this with a pencil (and you'd never see it) is not only the richest man around but also the most generous, and companies large and small live in harmony with the world and its people and its environment.

Volkswagen stock prices took a slight dip when the news came out

But reading about those horrible people who sell poison food, raise the price of life-saving medicines by 1500% and sell cars geared to cheat on emissions tests makes me shake my head in sorrow for the way we used to think things were.

The Saturday Picture Show, March 23, 2024

 

What a great idea for a beach shower! No one likes trooping back from the beach with half the beach stuck to them, so rinse and relax. Just...tell me again that it's water, and not Sprite, ok? 

From 1820, a library table that unfolds to become a library ladder for reaching that dust-collector on the top shelf. How did they have the time to come up these ideas, and then make them happen so beautifully? They weren't sitting around watching judge shows on TV, that's how!

In 1969, the New York Police Department responded to a rash of assaults on women by dressing up the homeliest male police they could find as decoys. As the passersby indicate, you can't fool a real woman with anything.

It really does look like Top Cat here has found a magic flying bucket, but it's just dirt, not a shadow.

A supermarket chain tried having singles nights in the 80s, in the hope that love would blossom amid a backdrop of Jimmy Dean sausage sandwiches, fig newtons, and ginger ale. Have you met a couple that found true love in aisle 8?

Call me a cheeky lad, but I always had a little crush on her late majesty, Queen Elizabeth. Thought she was cute as a young girl and elegant as she aged. She was never my #1 boyhood crush, though. Sandra Dee still reigns supreme. Look at her!

They say that Meyer Lemons, which are not lemons at all but a Chinese hybrid of citrons and pomelos, are expensive because they are thin-skinned. Usually, we associate that quality with orange things. 

HRING: One cption wrtr nt ovrly fnd of vwels.

The caption said this is I-70. I haven't been through Howard County for a long time; I guess things are changing over there...

Rebecca will fix you Mexican dinners for the rest of your life if you'll just buy this house!