A Snowy October Day in 2011

Surprise!  For the fifth time in recorded Maryland history, we are experiencing snow on an October day.  This, for us senior citizens, cancels three functions  that we were planning to attend today.  So, that means that I have time to update this blog for October 2011.

01.  Good News for Inebriates Down Under!

On this morning's Wait, Wait, Dont Tell Me show, a news clip mentioned that rubber sidewalks are being installed somewhere in Australia.  Those great Aussies love to slug down their giant Foster's Beers each night, and this will help them avoid hurting themselves as they careen down the street towards home.

Take a look at some of Foster's great commercials.  Be forewarned..it may take a long time to load, and you may  have to submit proof of your age!  However, if you like beer, you will probably think that it is all worth it.

http://www.fostersbeer.com/

02.  Royal Perqs

Also mentioned on the WWDTM show today was a section about nice things that you can have if you are members of the UK royalty, such as:

Help with Pressing Matters

For instance, the Prince of Wales has a servant who irons his shoelaces.

Help to eliminate Encrouchments

For instance, the Earl of Mountbatten has a servant who lubricates the Earl's tight pants so that he can slip into them easily.

What about the Duke of Windsor?

03.  Seattle's Best

After I sent a nasty email to NETFLIX, they reactivated my ROKU and now, once again, I have access to both mailed-to-me movies and online NETFLIX selections.  To celebrate, I pulled up and watched the first two episodes of the Frasier TV show.  It started in 1993 and I loved to watch it then because it always made me laugh.  It still does.  (La Comedia e Stupenda!) 

Two segments on these early shows knocked me out.

Lupe Velez

Roz told Frasier the story about the supposed suicide of Lupe Velez, the hot-blooded vixen of 1940's movies.  When she was in her forties, she decided to commit suicide and stage it so she would always be remembered.  She put on her finest clothes and had her beautiful bed draped with the finest coverings, and prepared by drinking some of the finest champagne and exquisite food.  She planned to then take poison, drape herself over the bed provocatively,  and await notoriety.   However, she must have eaten too much of that good food, got nauseous and was instead found drowned with her head in her toilet bowl.   She did achieve her notoriety alright, but perhaps not the way she would have wanted.

http://quiterevealing.com/personal/cafeq/fdtextlupe.htm

Punxsatawney Phil?

Frasier comes out of his bedroom in a disheveled manner, wearing a loose bathrobe.  During an argument with Roz, his bathrobe opens by accident.  Roz then delivers the line that I think is the funniest line I have ever heard on a TV sitcom:  "Oh.. I see that we will be having six more weeks of Winter."

04.  Gangsters!

The Brits are upset.  English kids are betting money on the game of marbles!  What next!

The Americans are upset.  American kids are betting money in online poker!  Moral depravity!

Members of the U.S. Congress are upset.  People who play the slots are now being deceived into thinking they are on the verge of winning, because of interactive messages now appearing on the slot devices that say things like: "Wow!  You just missed winning $1,000 by 4 pulls.".. or words to that effect.  A Congressional Hearing was held last Tuesday.  I hope that I can pull up some of this session on CSPAN and learn what to avoid when I go to Nevada.

No.. I don't really gamble.. just like all senior citizens, when I go to a slot machine parlor, I take $20 and when I lose that, I quit.  Besides, the slots are no longer fun.. they have taken away the buckets and the coins that would flow out of the machines when you won.. some have even taken away the metallic sounds.  Damn spoilsports!  I think I'll stick with the Maryland Lottery; at least, with them, I can play by mail and once in a while get a $2 winning check in the mail.

By the way, statistics show that the top three "sports" watched on TV are:

   1: NFL; 2: NASCAR; 3: POKER

05.  Pass me the Bacon, please.

For many years, certain people have maintained that Shakespeare did not have the brains or education to write the plays that list him as the author.  Since he was "just an actor", he did not have the "smarts" to write something like Hamlet or MacBeth.   The real author obviously must have been a nobleman who didn't want anybody to know he wrote them.

In fact, some critics have even gone so far as to ascribe the works to Sir Francis Bacon, (most notably, a lady named Elizabeth Wells Gallup) and state that words in some of the plays are cryptograms.  Sir Francis had developed a "biliteral" alphabet that used multiple type fonts/faces for letters of the alphabet and she had determined, by using this code to lines in Shakespeare's folios, that messages appeared.  For example purposes:  By assigning coded letters to the type faces on one line of Hamlet, the decoded line might then read: I Bacon am the author of this play.  And, yes, that was shown to work out in many cases.

However, a husband and wife team of cryptographic geniuses  (William and Elizabeth Friedman) also showed that the following might also be read by using the same alphabetic scheme:  I Mark Twain wrote this damn play.

Check out this background information for the Friedman's.  I think that you will find it interesting.  There are also whole books covering the Bacon Theory and how the Friedman's debunked it.

http://kakopa.com/geo/friedman.htm

Much other work over the years has been done to debunk the Bacon is Shakespeare theory.  For one thing, existing writing by Bacon does not come anywhere near the classiness of Will's work.

Anyway... what I am trying to show is that the theory of another (nobler) author of Shakespeare's works was long ago debunked.  So, why the sudden appearance of the movie Anonymous?

Roland Emmerich, the noted director of a lot of spectacular movies such as Godzilla, has a hit on his hand.. with remarkable photography and acting.  But, one must ask why he has to rationalize this work by coming up with ten reasons to defame the bard?  (Methinks thou may protest too much.)

http://www.traileraddict.com/trailer/anonymous/featurette-roland-emmerichs-10-reasons

I will order the movie from Netflix and probably will enjoy it.. however, I will still consider it a fictional story unless some other evidence comes up to convince me otherwise.

Goodby for now.
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Real Old News

Just like Melville's Ishmael, when the everyday worries become overwhelming, I long for the sea. However, since the sea is over one hundred miles away from Westminster, Maryland, I must settle for some other diversion. Sometimes it is escape to news from "yesteryear."

I'm looking at a copy of The Literary Digest dated October 31, 1908 (101 years ago!) Some items that were of interest to me:

01. An ad showing a young lady with a bow tie sitting at a vintage Remington typewriter. Model 10 has a column selector, and model 11 has a built-in tabulator. (My grandkids may not know what a typewriter is... they probably don't even need to know what a word-processor is, as long as their agile fingers can "text".)

02. An ad for a two month's summer tour of Europe for $250.

03. An ad for GRAFT.."The game of the hour; the game for Election days. More fascinating than Bridge or Eucre... 50 cents."

04. Ad for 1,000 acres in West Virginia for $9,000.

05. Ad for Miss Hess' French School for Young Ladies.

06. Ad for "The 1909 Fad!" This device projects any sort of "Post Card, Sketch, Photograph, or Clipping in all the brilliant coloring" on the wall as a six-foot reproduction. Cost for this machine in its fully assembled form: $5.

07. News about the William J. Bryan and William H. Taft strategic struggle to gain sufficient electoral votes to win the Presidency. Teddy Roosevelt puts in his two cents. (It all sounds so familiar.)

08. News that the United States Battle-ship fleet sailed around the world and in Sydney Australia the fleet was welcomed by 9,000 school-kids grouped to form the words "Hail Columbia" and to trace the pattern in colors of the American and Australian flags.

And then... get this.. in Yokohama, to quote the New York Post: "Toward the close of the reception, at a collation on the after deck of the battle-ship, Captain Okada drank the health of Ambassador O'Brien. Then followed a demonstration that will be long remembered by the Americans. The Japanese admirals and captains raised Ambassador O'Brien on their shoulders and marched around the deck with him, everybody on board wildly cheering. The same performance was repeated with Rear-Admiral Sperry and each of the other American admirals present."

And then, the New York Tribune said "Japan and America are, and are likely to remain for a long time, the chief, we might say the only important, naval Powers in the Pacific" and indicated that this friendly reception should put to rest any suggestion of friction between these two countries.

09. Lots of news about the Balkans and Austria .. sounds like the problems that led up to WWI.

10. News that unemployment in England has reached "painful proportions." Mr. Stewart Gray, the leader of "Hunger Marchers" clashed with the police at Trafalgar Square. About 150,000 men in London are out of work.

11. Sir Hiram Maxim analyzed a "sure fire system" for beating the bank at Monte Carlo, and found that the player would probably win.. "one dollar in 21,474 years."

12. Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Buchanan, of the British Army in India says: "The best way to put a stop to the plague where it is epidemic is to keep cats."

13. Professor Gaston Bonnier of Paris says that "a beehive is a perfect example of the equalitarian product of state socialism."

14. "A system by which a wireless-telegraphic apparatus may control from a central station the clocks of a whole city is now in use in Vienna."

15. Joseph Ruau, French Minister of Agriculture says that "fraud is common in food manufacture, and reminds us that absolute purity is not practicable or necessary."

16. There is now a simple test for distinguishing between butter and "oleomargarin". (Sounds like a time-consuming process utilizing fresh milk and a "stick.")

17. Mr. Israel Zangwill caused a commotion with his play "The Melting Pot", where he implies that Jews will be best off in America by being "absorbed" through marriage. The Jewish Comment (Baltimore) likes his play and agrees with his thesis.

18. Mr. Marc Debrol, French writer, was asked if people in the US are religious in the "real sense of the word".. He replied: "No. The American is too taken up with the practical side of life, too preoccupied with conquests and gain, to be meditative. There is no introspection... in this race for the dollar, the finer sensibilities dry up..." (!) Debrol says that America is a charitable country, but "Charity does not spring from private initiative; it is carefully organised, and in many cases by the churches... The poor must be fed and clothed, not out of pity, but out of prudence; they must not become discontented and revolt, disturbers of the national peace."

19. An ad for the Flexible Flyer, the Sled that Steers. "Send for a free cardboard model showing how it steers."

20. An ad for Whitelaw's Paper Blankets. Sanitary. Healthful. Warm. $3.00 a dozen.

21. An ad for Postum (coffee substitute still sold next to coffees in supermarkets.. I drank it for years. "There are still some well-informed persons who do not know that coffee contains a drug -- caffeine."

22. Ad for Harderfold Hygienic Underwear with the Inter-Air-Space System... "... affording protection against the vicissitudes of our variable climate..."

23. Ad for The Keeley Cure for liquor and drug using.

24. Finally...!! A joke from the Washington Star:

The Crank. "You say there is nearly always something broke about your automobile?"
"Yes," answered Mr. Chuggins, nervously.
"What is it, as a rule?"
"Me."

... so, not much has changed in 101 years.

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