Guidance

This is a perfect example of what the news business calls "burying the lead."

You may have seen this story on the news, about a Kentucky mom who allowed her son to play on her phone "as a reward," only to find out that he went on Amazon and ordered $4,200 worth of Dum-Dums lollipops, without her knowledge, of course.

The woman involved is Holly LaFavers of Somerset. Last week, she told "Good Morning America" that he had the urge to check her bank account last Sunday before church, and found out she was deep in the red because of the $4,200.

Fun fact: 4200 simoleons will get you 70,000 Dum Dums from the big A. That is 70,000 more Dum-Dums than I have ever had, being a Tootsie Pop kid in my day.

Holly does allow her son, Liam, to window-shop on Amazon, but he's a second-grader, so he might not know the difference between "just looking" and "ordering."

Old joke from my childhood: "My girlfriend can't stop window shopping. Last week she went out and came home with 47 windows."

Back to Holly's house...there was a mixup for sure. The Amazon guy dropped off 22 cases of suckers on the front porch and was coming back with more, but Holly contacted Amazon and got the whole thing credited back. So in the end, no harm, no foul.

BUT only if you read all the way to the end of the story do you learn that Liam  lives with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD). His mom says he was diagnosed at age 4.

FASD is defined as "a range of physical, behavioral, and cognitive impairments resulting from alcohol exposure during pregnancy. Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) is the most severe form of FASD. It's characterized by specific birth defects, developmental disabilities, and neurodevelopmental problems due to prenatal alcohol exposure."

I'm no expert in this field, but it's plain to see that the young man will need professional help with the sort of problems that come along with his syndrome, namely, low birth weight, slow growth, physical deformities, learning disabilities, behavioral issues, and mental health challenges, according to experts. 

Can't blame the boy for playing on the phone, and it's probably good for him with his development. BUT can the mother not find a way to disable the app from placing orders? Or give him a phone that doesn't connect to the internet, maybe. 

I feel bad because the mother has allowed the situation and the publicity to point out her son's mistake, and that might not be the best thing for him. I hope someone who is trained in early childhood development can step in and help them both.  

Give me your tired, your poor, and your money

By the time one gets to be 85 years of age, most people, at least, have figured out the path forward, and have put it in autopilot for the descent.

I don't know any other way to say it, but if you don't have your life plan in place by the time you hit four score and five, you might as well forget it.

OR, you can be like Televangelist Jim Bakker, who with his bizarre wife Tammy Faye was deep into one of the biggest religious scandals since someone swiped the bingo money. Jimbo says he’s in desperate need of cash right now, and if you don't shell out a million clams but quick, he will lose errthang and be homeless.

I'll wait while you dry your eyes.

“If everyone that watches this program will give $1,000, we’ll be able to pay our bills and stay on the air,” he said on his show the other day. “Otherwise we got about another, maybe a month.”

And... 

“If they foreclose on this ministry, they will take my house too, so I’ll be on the street,” he said.

He says he doesn't take a salary out of the all the moolah he rakes in, and that he has no money to call his own. He even adds that an unnamed "they" has been ripping him off for millions! 

It seems that his financial woes began during the pandemic, when he began selling something called "Silver Solution," which he said was an "Enhanced Colloidal Silver Liquid – Ultimate Immune Support Supplement... Immunity Boost & Immune Booster for Adults.

One of the inevitable lawsuits that landed on his altar wound up as a settlement with the Missouri attorney general that involved a restitution of $156,000.

Like all these shifty sinbusters, Bakker used the threat of impending bankruptcy to beg his flock to sheepishly replenish his coffers.

And now he goes with this hoary pitch: if you give him your money, "I guarantee you God’s going to do something. God’s gonna bless you as you give, because when you give, you’re gonna receive.”

And while he asks for your money to line his future with your gold, he continues to claim that we are in the "end times," so he is selling food buckets and prepper items on his shows and website.

So stock up on food for the future that might not take place.

Sounds right.

I see a sad career

I remember watching that "Sixth Sense" movie a long time ago. I think the writers and producers were trying to turn the sentence "I see dead people" into a national catchphrase, but it didn't work out. I think that was because that picture came out just a few years after "Titanic," and that's the movie where, when it (finally) ended, relieved theatregoers were walking out, saying, "Icy dead people," and there was too much confusion.

But that wide-eyed kid from the "6th" movie is back in the news, and not for anything good. For lack of anything else to do, he apparently got himself a little buzzalilly on, went to a ski resort in California, and turned the air fetid with some antisemitic slurs about the officer who was fitting him for a pair of handcuffs.

He's 37 now, well past the age at which he should have known better. He is also the older brother of Emily Osment, who plays Mandy on  "Georgie and Mandy's First Marriage, " so he should stay home on Thursdays and watch that show, rather getting shafaced at ski lodges. 

And Haley Joel Osment wants you to know that he is “absolutely horrified by my behavior. Had I known I used this disgraceful language in the throes of a blackout, I would have spoken up sooner.”

He used some really, really offensive language while discussing his arrest with the officer. The district attorney out in Mono County, Calif., said that Osment was  charged with possession of cocaine and disorderly conduct under the influence of alcohol in public, both misdemeanors.

He blames all this on having lost his house in the recent Altadena Fire in California, but tell me: if you lost your house in a fire, horrible as that is, would you a) shove cocaine up your nose and booze down your neck and go skiing, or b) get to work rebuilding your life?

Come on, son. Pull it together. There are always parts in movies and TV shows for odd-looking former child stars.

Osment's mud shot (left) and movie still (right).

 

Happy Mother's Day!

 

The Saturday Picture Show, May 10, 2025

 

Beautiful, scenic, Alcatraz Island sits off the San Francisco coast. Its name comes from "La Isla de los Alcatraces" ("The Island of the Pelicans") as it was called by Spanish explorer Lt. Juan Manuel de Ayala. It was closed as a prison facility due to hundreds of practical reasons in 1963, and only someone whose cultural apprehension revolves around Jimmy Cagney gangster movies would want to reopen it as such.

Whenever we can't find Eddie around the house, we know she has taken a people break and found comfort underneath the comforter.

Today's free wallpaper is a closeup of barby branches with a cloudy moon behind them, like that ghostly galleon Alfred Noyes wrote about. 

There was a crematorium in the county that did its business in the early mornings, and every so often, on a cloudy day, the smoky miasma hung low in the atmosphere, prompting people to call 911 and report a fire in the building. I'm sure a great many people have seen the sun reflect on this building's windows and said the same.

Whatever else happens to me in life, I can always say that I was just ten feet away from Alice Cooper when he performed at the County Courthouse steps in September 1991. Now, when I tell people that Peggy was born on the same day as Alice Cooper (Feb 4), they ask, "Who is she?"

My buddy worked at a radio station down the road where one of the other guys was one of those fanatics who stuck a Dymo label on many things, so the cool guys chided him by sticking a Dymo label on EVERYTHING. I would love to see this tag in real life so I could stick a VANITY PLATE sticker on it.

There is no day so bad that it can't be made right with a nice big ol' hunk of blueberry diner pie.

Big dogs are the best, they say, because they guard you against people breaking into the house. Yeah.

This water heater knows he has warmed up the last shower at the house and is now headed to the landfill. Rest well, faithful servant. Stay...warm.

Are you like me? Would you just HAVE to use this table, even if you didn't really need a table?!

In the Loops

With all the talk about Red Dye in your Froot Loops being bad for you (why not talk about the nutritive value of Froot Loops to begin with?), I thought I'd take you back to 1959, when all of our Thanksgivings were wrecked because of Aminotriazole.

Aminotriazole, as it turned out, was not your father's inelegant second cousin twice removed from Philadelphia (and soon to be removed from Baltimore as well.) No, that's the name of an herbicide which had been applied to a certain amount of the cranberry crop from the Pacific Northwest that year, and several weeks before Thanksgiving that year,  Arthur S. Flemming, US Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, had announced that some of the cranberries harvested in  the Pacific Northwest had tested positive for it. The herbicide was known to cause abnormal growths in lab rats.

Ocean Spray, then as now the big name in the cranberry business, claimed that a person would “have to consume carloads” of cranberries to suffer any illness, but Flemming, ever cautious as a good Secretary of Health would be, told berry gobblers not to buy berries, jellies and whatnot if they couldn't determine the origin. That meant a lot of families had to do without the cranberry sauce that year.

 You might not believe it, but in those days, people took health warnings seriously, and by December '59, the industry trade paper "Cranberries" (longtime subscriber here) said that the sales of fresh cranberries were down 63%, with sales of canned jellies down 79%. I love how the jelly plops out of the can with little Van Allen belts dented into it.

This was, at the time, a fifty-million (that's a lot of meeyuns today) dollar per year business, knocked out by a bug spray. And Ocean Spray market researchers found that almost half of those who abstained from cranberry products that winter said they were swearing off the tart red berries for life.

Which brings up a side point: this past week alone, I have seen people vowing not to watch anything ever again on CBS because they dropped "The Equalizer," and a good number of folks saying they will never watch the Baltimore Ravens again because they cut their kicker, a man with charges of sexual misconduct swirling around him.

Say it with me now: Oh well now I mean really!

The 'berry brouhaha was over almost by the time panic shook the nation. Shortly before Christmas '59, the government realized it might have acted a bit hastily and released ton upon ton of berries for dinner. 

In retrospect, we know now that the government inspectors insisted that no product be allowed on the shelves if it was found to induce cancer in man or animal. 

Listed among products already suspected of being carcinogens (cancer-causers) were radiation, and tobacco smoke, both of which are still around. So is cranberry juice and jelly, but it had to go through a lot to get back on the market so that your father's inelegant second cousin could hoove on a Lucky Strike while passing the Ocean Spray Cranberry Jelly to you.

 

  

 

Play it again, before it breaks

I love music! Many types of music! If you pull up next to me in traffic and my windows are down, you might overhear anything from Jerry Lee Lewis to Porter Wagoner to Phil Harris to Outkast to Matt Monro to Wanda Jackson to The Cornelius Brothers and Sister Rose to classical stuff, like Moe Tzart and Bay Toven. 

I grew up listening to radio and also the tunes I played on various record players. The first record I bought was Sixteen Tons by "Tennessee" Ernie Ford, a 45 single. I bought albums by the dozens, and switched to cassettes when that medium became large, and then went over to CDs when the digital revolution caught up to us.

To listen to a favorite song, I used to have to get the record, tape, or CD out and take it to the appropriate machine to play it. Now, after years of digitalization, the songs I want to hear are on an iPod device half the size of a pack of baseball cards...something else I used to collect by the score. I just ask the iPod to play the songs or artists I want to hear, plug in ear pods, and away I go, transformed into my world.

Now, all of a sudden, according to CBS Saturday Morning, the show that keeps its index and middle finger on the nation's cultural carotid pulse, the hep cats and cool chicks are getting into cassettes! What? Why?

That technology was a stopoff between vinyl records and digital music, and it was never intended to be permanent, as anyone who has ever seen 12 to 18 inches of their favorite song get wrapped around the capstan of a cassette player can tell you. Or the tape just breaks, and stretches, making Bonnie Raitt sound like Bob Dylan. Or the shell breaks, or the pressure pad wears out.

I guess it's cool for those who didn't live through the Golden Age of Tape to romanticize cassettes. They will soon find out the hard way, as the rest of us did when our tape of the Grease soundtrack bit the dust, there was a very good reason to move on.