Weekly Stuff for May Day 2010

Today I want to cover a bunch of stuff that I find interesting. I'll keep the long stuff for the end so that readers can quit early if they want to.

01. ET?

Dr. Hawkings says that we should not be so anxious to look for alien life. Remember what happened to the Indian population of the New World when Europeans discovered them.

Someone on Wait, Wait said that if aliens happen to land their space crafts in Arizona, they will be immediately arrested as being undocumented and we won't have to worry about them any more.

02. I Feel the Earth Move...

That Iranian cleric who said that women wearing sexy clothing was causing earthquakes was right. As a group of women were protesting his statements, an earthquake of 6.5 magnitude hit Taiwan.

03. Phoney Fido?

Does anyone remember when leashes were sold for invisible dogs? When was that? In the 1970? Now that there are a couple of generations who did not have the experience of paying lots of money to walk an invisible dog may be willing to kick in a few bucks to do so. Hey, somebody could become a millionaire with this ploy. I wonder where all those left-over leashes are being held. In a storage room with pet rocks?

04. WC?

At the local Ag Center, the rest room for ladies is labeled: Ladie's and the rest room for men is labeled: Men. What happens in Scotland? Women: Ladies' and men: Laddies.

Is Men's a valid usage? Is Ladie's a valid usage? Is Lady's a valid usage? Men Room? Women Room? Rest room? Who cares?

05. A Statement?

I have a blue Toyota Rav-4. I think that it must be a drawing card for nasty birds, because almost every morning I find that birds have left calling cards all over it. Now, I can kind of understand that the birds around my home like to poop on my car and I can live with that.. but why is it that when I park in a large parking lot at a super market or department store, when I come out of the store, I find that my car has been visited by those nasty birds... but none of the other cars in the vicinity have been soiled?

Is this getting even for me chasing cat birds away from my blue berries every year at my last home?

06. They have found me again.

Once again this week, Republican organizations have sent me letters stating how much they think of me and appointing me to some kind of local committee, as soon as they receive a contribution between $15 and $1,000. Last week, it was the Democrats. They must both have the same fund raising companies working for them.

With these letters, I get "have you stopped beating your wife?" type questions from both parties, although the Republicans are the most virolent. As an Independent, I was hoping not to get these stupid requests for money. As a former member of one of the parties, I got only one letter of these types, from that party.. now, I get them from both sides.

I hear that the Republican party in California is paying an $8 bounty for every new member that is signed up. (Shades of what they said about Acorn?)

07. The greatest invention!

This is the 30th anniversary of the Post-it note. What a wonderful tool. What did we do before? It's hard to remember. Paper clips? Staples? Corner folds? I buy the little yellow ones, about 1 1/2" by 2". I love them. I buy them by the gross. The story of its invention is interesting. American ingenuity.

08. Well done!

I hear that fuel is being developed from meat. (Maybe those aliens mentioned above will come to earth to refuel with some of the billions of people being cultivated on this planet. Remember the SCI FI story, where the aliens drop off breeding couples on each earth-like planet as a long range food supply.)

09. Wisdom.

On Wait, Wait, someone stated a translation of a German phrase that should be considered by us in the U. S.

"When the rooster crows on the dung heap, the weather changes... or doesn't."

10. Incarceration figure.

The Drug Policy Alliance cites the fact that there are over 2 million Americans behind bars in the U.S., or 1 in every 99.1 adults. This is the highest incarceration rate in the world.

11. A Collection of Nouns

Carroll County Times writer, Sue Yingling, writes about collective nouns.

A peep of chickens.
A paddling of ducks.
A hover of hummingbirds.
An exultation of larks.
A wisdom of owls.
A pounce of cats.
A slither of snakes.
A giggle of girls.
A stumble of drunks.
A wad of paper.

I don't know if she made some of these up or not. Some years ago, I worked with a guy at the Social Security Administration named Bob Hale. When he wasn't doing the Government's bidding, he collected collective nouns like this. He had a very large collection.

Bob was an interesting guy. His great, great, great grandmother was Sarah Hale (see #12 below.) Bob ran a club for writers called "Wordsmiths" and I was priviledged to make a presentation to the group about one of the world's "bad boy" writers, the infamous Frank Harris. I've always wondered what became of Bob. (He's not on Facebook or Twitter and his name is too common to connect with on other search engines.)

12. Sarah Hale (1788 - 1879)

Bob Hale's famous relative had a number of interesting happenings connected with her name. She was instrumental in getting President Lincoln to declare a day of Thanksgiving in the U.S. in 1863. She was also editor of Ladies' Magazine and Godey's Lady's Book.

But her most famous accomplishment was as the author of the poem: Mary had a Little Lamb.

Most of us learn the first part of that poem, but there are two more parts. You can check them out on Google.

And to leave you with a smile (perhaps), you may remember the "take-off" verse:

Mary had a little lamb,
And the doctor darn near fainted.

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Thoughts for a Snowy Saturday in December

I'm sitting at a bay window, watching a junco on our porch and lots of sparrows at our bird feeders. The birds seem to be enjoying the blizzard.

I see by the Sunpaper that the greatest recorded snowfall in the Baltimore area was 28.2 inches right after Valentine's Day in 2003. Elaine and I were in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania at that time and when we got back to Reisterstown, we got stuck and couldn't get close to Elaine's home. I remember trudging through what seemed like a million miles of snow drifts to her house, so I could feed her cat.

I'm surprised to see that the Sunpaper did not list any large snowfalls in the 1960s. Once, during that time, there was a large snowstorm and I felt that I could get in to work even though the authorities in the Baltimore area had downsized by selling off most of their snowplows.

I was one of two persons responsible for preparing everybody's monthly Social Security checks, and I felt duty-bound to walk through unplowed Randallstown streets, through the unplowed country roads, to the unplowed Woodlawn Social Security Headquarters building.... Nobody was there except one guard.

It was nice working there all alone.. the only smoke was from my pipe.. but.. I was a little upset that my fellow worker did not even try to make it in. That night, instead of spending another few hours trudging home through snowdrifts, I stayed overnight at the home of a friend who lived nearby.

I vowed at that time to never again do such a stupid thing as walk miles through snowdrifts to a workplace where I was only one of a couple of people there, when the usual workforce was over 5,000.

But guess what... in that same year, we had another big snow storm.. and once again I felt that I could walk in.. at the time, we had what was considered an immovable deadline.. so, duty called once more. Luckily for me, a little way into the walk, a snow plow driver felt sorry for me and drove me in to work. Again, only a few workers made it in.

What did I get for these two "duty calls" efforts? My boss said: "You damn fool, why didn't you stay home?" I felt like saying to him: "Would my hero, Abraham Lincoln have stayed home?" I didn't.. but, the next time we had a big snowstorm, I stayed home just like everybody else. (However, my efforts did gain a kind of notoriety for me at Social Security.. I became the subject of a legend.)

I grew up in New Bedford, Massachusetts and big snow is not unusual there. That city is on the edge of Cape Cod and it catches every storm that comes up the coast, and also those that come across the northern part of the U.S. In 1959, while attending college, I drove a taxi sometimes, and a little snow would never deter me from trying to make a few dollars. Lots of people took cabs in snow storms.

One weekend it snowed 48 inches.. yes, I said 48 inches (probably not a record for New Bedford).. Armed with a shovel, I dug myself out of my house and walked (yes, you guessed it, through snowdrifts) the two miles to the cabstand, dug out my cab, put on chains and went to work. In Massachusetts, streets are usually all fairly clear shortly after any kind of snowfall, but I still made a lot of money that day.)

So, you see a little 22 inch snowfall in Maryland was not about to keep me from going to work, at least until I wised up.
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Let me tell you one more story about snowfall in New Bedford. I love to tell this story.

One night in Winter, I had taken a trolley to visit my future bride and her family, who lived three miles away. This was in the early days of television and my fiance's family had one of the first sets in the neighborhood. We all lost ourselves watching some of the old popular shows, like Uncle Milty, What's My Line, The Ed Sullivan Show, or somesuch. When the test pattern came on at 11 pm, I got ready to go and catch the late trolley.

That was when we noticed that we were having a blizzard. The snow was already quite high. My fiance's family insisted that I stay the night. I sacked out on a couch in their front parlor. The next morning was Sunday, and everyone but me rose at 6 am. As usual, all the streets had been cleared already.

My future father-in-law said "You need to wake Joe up because he has to get ready to go to mass with us." My fiance said: "He doesn't need to get up this early, he's not Catholic."

"HE'S NOT CATHOLIC!" bellowed my future father-in-law.

Well, I survived that crisis and we did get married, in a Catholiic church, and at the altar to boot.
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If you live on the East Coast, stay home today, look out the window and enjoy the beauty of the pure white snow. Throw some bread out to the birds, they look happy, but they are probably very hungry.
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