Weekly Dozen @ Jan 30, 2010

Today, I am going to talk about some news items, but also some other things that my ancient brain thinks about a lot.

01. SNAP,CRACKLE,POP: This is the fiftieth anniversary of bubble wrap. What did we do without it before?

02. MARMITE: I have always heard that British people love to spread marmite on their bread. However, I have also heard that it is nasty. I had to try it myself. This morning I did. YES! It is nasty! I am trying everything I can think of to get rid of the taste in my mouth.

As a yeast product, I'm sure this product is good for you.. but apparently it requires a lot of getting used to. I'm sorry.. I'm too old to take the time to aquire a taste for it. I will stick to jam or jelly on my toast in the morning.

03. FEBRUARY 2ND: Animal rights folks feel that Punxatawny Phil should be replaced by a fake groundhog.

04. SPECIAL LICENSE PLATES FOR REPEAT DRUNK DRIVERS: A Maryland State Delegate has proposed a special plate for repeat drunk drivers. It would be bright yellow and would have the first three letters of the plate showing DUI. Some other states have the procedure in place already; for instance, Ohio and Minnesota, where cars with such special plates are avoided by other drivers. Begging some questions:

Why not expand this to include convicted felons, child molesters, and deadbeats?

What about innocent family members who have to ride in cars with such tags?

Have the delegates read The Scarlet Letter?

05. UNCONSUMATED DIVORCE: Under current Maryland law, a couple must live apart for one year before an uncontested divorce can be granted. A Maryland lawmaker wants to change that to require that a couple not have sex for one year instead. (What would Governor Marvin Mandel say about that?)

06. STRIP-SEARCHING: Last year, Maryland Senators held a hearing where women who said that they had been victimized by strip-searching were to testify. None of them showed up because of embarassment. Senators still passed an anti-strip-search bill, but it was killed in a House committee. A similar bill will be pushed again this year and it is expected that at least one woman will testify. Questions:

Will the bill address the following situation? A while ago, a judge found that Baltimore County police acted unreasonably when they searched the buttock cheeks of a suspected drug dealer in a car wash.

Should the police be given "see-through" equipment like they now have at airports?

07. ART NEWS: Somebody tripped and put a hand through a painting by Picasso. Curators are now in a quandary about how to tell what is damage and what is art.

I visited a Picasso exhibition in 1955 in Cologne, Germany, where I could have bought Picasso prints for a very cheap price. Unfortunately, I could only afford to pay for a colorful book outlining all of the works on display.. which probably still would be worth a lot on EBAY (why would I want to put a price on art?)

Also, in London, an artist's modernistic work consisting of filled ashtrays, bottles and plastic cups was swept up and disposed of by a custodian. (In this case, I think he did the right thing.)

08. IPAD: Steve Jobs introduced the new IPAD with the unfortunate name, and the catch phrase: Hold the Internet in your hands. Someone said that the IPAD looks like an IPHONE for the elderly.

I visited the local Verizon store and told a salesman that I was thinking of switching to an IPHONE and could he persuade me to buy a DROID instead. He told me that under the terms of my current agreement, if I purchase the DROID right now, it will cost me $600, but if I wait until May, I will be able to pay only $150. Now, what would you do?

09. YOUNG HUNTERS: Recently, newspapers have been publishing pictures of young hunters standing next to their "kills", some as young as nine years old.
Question:

Would you want to be walking through woods where a nine-year-old is busy stalking Bambi?

I can see a need to cull deer populations, and I think that the meat that is not needed should be donated to the poor. However, I think that the hunters of such deer should be at least 25 years old, when their medula oblongatas have matured enough so that they can tell the difference between a young child in a bright red coat and an 8-point buck.

When I was 16 years old, two of my buddies asked me to accompany them on a raccoon hunting trip. I did not own a rifle and wasn't sure I wanted to hunt anyway, so I declined. During the hunting trip, one of my 16 year-old friends accidently shot and killed my other 16 year-old friend. That cinched it for me. No hunting.

I understand that the city of Fairfield, Connecticut has opened all of their parks to hunters. Watch your children, mama.

I've mentioned before that my brother-in-law is a bear hunter. Each year, he travels from Massachusetts to Maine to take care of his bear bait trap near the bottom of the tree where he has erected a platform from which to shoot a bear. After he feels that bears have gotten used to eating the bait, he climbs up the tree with his rifle, and waits for a good shot.

I asked him: But aren't bears good tree climbers? Suppose you miss your shot.

He replied: If you miss, it might be the last shot you will ever make, because that bear can make it up that tree to your spot in just a few seconds.

So, this "bears" out the old phrase: Sometimes you get the bear; sometimes the bear gets you.

10. BIBLICAL REFERENCE: Speaking of hunting, those who do cryptic-type crossword puzzles might enjoy this clue in a 1963 puzzle by Frank W. Lewis in The Nation magazine:

Salome wasn't the type Hemingway might have hired!

The answer: head bearer.

If you want to know more about cryptic puzzles or this clue in particular, let me know.

11. REPUBLICAN MATCHMAKERS?: The new Republican Senator for Massachusetts has daughters and the new Republican Governor of Virginia has twin sons. Both mentioned their progeny in recent speeches.

12. REPTILE INTELLIGENCE: London zookeepers say that they have taught some crocodiles to recognize their names. (Remember the song: Never smile at a crocodile...")

Bonus:

Important things to think about: TEETH AND JAIL:

Prisoners in certain jails will no longer be able to play "Dungeons and Dragons" in their cells and Massachusetts daycare providers will be required to brush their charges' teeth each day.

Suppose that jailers had to brush the teeth of their prisoners each day. This may seem silly, but there is a big problem with the cost of caring for prisoners' teeth..

probably most prisoners are the type of people who don't take care of their teeth and then when the damn things rot, the State has to pay a lot of money to a dentist to pull them..

I have it on good authority that dentists have to triple-glove to avoid getting HIV from mouth blood...and that means that not many dentists are willing to get involved with prisons.


On that note, I will bid you adieu, mes amis.

..................................................

Avoid Alzheimers, try Cryptic Crosswords

Have you ever done Cryptic Crosswords? Not the usual ones you see in almost every newspaper, but the ones that British people love.

When I was a child, I sat next to my grandfather, in his smoke-filled stinky den while he compiled the world's greatest crossword puzzle dictionary. He would give me puzzles to solve and I became quite expert in the American style crosswords.

I became a member of the National Puzzlers League in 1974 and branched out into all kinds of mental puzzles, and discovered Cryptic Crosswords. These are the crossword puzzles that people in the British Empire enjoy solving. These employ tricky word-play. If you want to keep exercising your brain and you want to do something quite different from the normal crosswords, such as appear in most daily papers, I would highly recommend Cryptic Crosswords.

You can find these puzzles in magazines like The Nation and BBC Music. The Atlantic Monthly as well as The New Yorker used to have good ones each month, but they were dropped, apparently because there wasn't enough interest by ordinary subscribers.

British newspapers, like the Times and the Guardian publish cryptics. I hate to admit it, but I have NEVER completely finished even one of the Times cryptics. However, I have done some of the Guardians as well as ones from other British papers. BBC Music Magazine has a great music-themed cryptic each month. They are quite tough for me, but I learn something about classical music each month when I attempt to solve them. British puzzles naturally contain a lot of terms and words that Americans usually are not used to, and this makes them a bit tough, at least for me. But I love the challenge.

The cryptic in The Nation has been posed each month for years by a gentleman with a great sense of humor and a very wide knowledge of all kinds of things. I am able to solve almost all of them, but they do give my brain a workout.

Recently, the magazine THE WEEK has begun a regular crossword that is similar to a cryptic in humor and wordplay.

I have my regular puzzle "fixes". Every month, I do cryptics from The Nation, BBC Music Magazine, British newspapers, the National Puzzlers League, books from Borders, and wherever else I can find them. But I try not to ignore regular American crosswords, especially the tough ones in The Week magazine and the New York Times. (I'm sure you know that the American style puzzles in the Times start rather easily on Mondays and get progressively harder as the week progresses.)

Cryptic puzzles emply a number of different wordplay types.. such as anagrams, hidden words, charades, etc. If you haven't tried them, you are in for a mental treat.

Outside of the National Puzzlers League, I have only been acquainted with one other person who loved cryptic crosswords. His name was Chuck Adkins, and he worked for me at the Social Security Administration. Chuck was a puzzler and I got him interested in Cryptics.. and all of a sudden, he was submitting cryptic puzzles to Games Magazine. If you subscribe to that magazine, take a look at the names of the cryptics contributors, you may see a puzzle submitted by him. Even though Chuck passed away a couple of years ago, that magazine still publishes his cryptics periodically. Chuck was an amazing person and a good friend. I miss him.