Lured Off The Ring

 In an elaborate ceremony attended by dozens in December, 1973, Peggy and I were wed. After the long, long silence that greeted the preacher's question about anyone seeing any reason why this man and this woman should not be legally wed, we slipped golden bands on each other's third-finger-left-hand and embarked on our voyage on the sweet sea of matrimony. 

Coming up on 52 years later, we're still cruising along, but last November, my knee replacement surgeon insisted that my ring come off prior to the cutting and stitching. My fingers are not the same skinny sticks as they were all those decades ago, so prying it off was no good. An intern, brandishing a tiny Sawz-All, showed up and carefully went to work. Another long silence, broken only by the whine of the saw and the patient, followed, and at length, the deed was done.

So, months later, I took my naked finger and the severed ring to Smyth Jewelers in Timonium, out by the State Fairgrounds, for repair, and for just 85 clams, they restored the ring that cost 30 clams in 1973.

All repaired, shined, and reinstalled.

But they told me that the same ring today goes for $1000, so my advice is, if you're going to get married, do it in 1973.

And marry someone who will put up with you, as I did.

Jim Irsay dead at 65

I have mixed feelings about the late Jim Irsay, whose father, Bob, bought the Baltimore Colts football team and gave Baltimore such misery by moving them to some town in Indiana somewhere. I understand they did not change the name of the team after they arrived in Hoosierland, but I will never call them the Colts.

Before the team moved, we used to see Jim around their training camp acting as ball boy and gopher for the coaches. I guess he stayed in that role of subordinate to his unbearable father, whose own mother once called him "the devil on earth,"  until he assumed ownership of the team when Bob finally shuffled off to wherever in hell he went. 

But let's be fair. It wasn't Jim's fault that his father took the team away, and he did have a good quality or two.

He collected rock 'n' roll memorabilia. He was a great admirer of Jack Kerouac, and purchased the original scroll on which Kerouac typed out his picaresque masterpiece "On The Road."

Not only that, but he wasn't one of those collectors whose idea of having is not sharing. Jimbo put that scroll on the road and exhibited it all around the country so that others could see the treasure. He honored Kerouac that way, and lots of people benefited from his generosity.

Irsay was 65 when he died in his sleep yesterday afternoon. He once told an interviewer that he overdosed "one time" because he "mixed multiple drugs that I didn't know anything about," and went "code blue" and stopped breathing, and had been in rehab "at least 15 times."   

 

Life will go on, someone will inherit the football team and the massive collection of whatnots, and some of us will wonder if he wasn't happiest chasing footballs around the playing fields of Goucher College when the team trained there. I'm not sure money brought him as much happiness as some might think.

Life is a but a dream

 I don't put much stock in dream analysis. Who can say what a dream means? As that wise old Englishman E. Scrooge said,  a dream "may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato.."

And I used to follow a blog called Pepperoni Dreams, in which people deliberately ate spicy pizza right before a nap, and reported on the results. But I haven't seem the blog online lately. Maybe I dreamed about it all along.

All right. Recently, when I am occupying the recliner, I have seen a hornet hovering outside through the deck window. He may well be related to the hornets into whose nest I shoved my nine-year-old hand while climbing a neighbor's tree, which led me to replicate Isaac Newton's discovery of gravity as I plummeted earthward. I don't know. He just hangs around for a minute and then flies off.

But here's the scenario of yesterday's daynap dream: Someone has given Peggy a porch swing for her to use while she sits outside in the morning, sipping coffee and chatting with passersby while I cook breakfast and watch "Kojak." (We are two very different people.) But in the dream, I volunteer to attach the swing to the porch ceiling, so I know I need to brace it with a 2x4. I measure for the 2x4 and go to attach it, and I see a hornet's nest up in the corner, and I head to the garage to get the hornet-and-wasp spray...

And that's when I woke up. 

Dream analysts, do your thing. I know Peggy would enjoy gently swaying on the swing, but she would insist on the hornets being displaced. In the dream, do the hornets represent my longstanding resentment of being bitten by some hornets  and falling out of Mrs Gallup's tree? Does the swing represent the recent fluctuations in the stock market? Is the 2x4 a metaphor for the logs it sounds like I'm sawing when I snore?

I can't wait to hear what you think.

Sweet are the uses

I can't blame you if you say you don't know the name of Marsha Hunt, an actress who brought a lot to the world in her life, which ended just five weeks short of her 105th birthday. Yes, 104 years, from 1917 - 2022, and that belies the old saw that says "Only the good die young."

They don't come much better than Marsha Hunt, as you can find out if you stream the documentary "Marsha Hunt's Sweet Adversity" on TCM. She wanted to be an actress and got into it by starting out as a Powers Model at age 16 in New York at the height of the Depression. It wasn't long before she found herself in front of movie cameras in Hollywood and launched a film, stage, and radio career that was going quite well before she was blacklisted for daring to be a compassionate person.

If you don't know about that dark age in American history, it was after World War II. Powerful people here decided that "communists" (or "Godless communists") were out to ruin our nation of freedom and independence, so anyone who had ever spoken out in favor of freedom and independence wound up on a list of people who were not to be hired as actors, screenwriters and so forth.

No it didn't make sense but remember, Ronald Reagan was involved...

Whoever wrote about her in the Wikipedia said it best: "In the midst of the blacklist era, she became active in the humanitarian cause of world hunger and in her later years aided homeless shelters, supported same-sex marriage, raised awareness of climate change, and promoted peace in Third World countries."

Quite a woman. She was not content to simply pose for publicity photos for worthwhile causes or have press agents sign her name to releases. She worked and served on committees to help people.

If you watch the documentary, you will feel pretty good about how helpful a person can be when they devote themselves to worthwhile causes. Marsha's acting career was seriously dented by the right-wing maniacs, but she still played roles and wrote songs and performed them right until the end.

Because, to steal another old phrase, you can't keep a good woman down.

https://www.facebook.com/marshahuntdoc

"Tonight on....."

 Unless you are abnormally prescient, you don't have the faintest idea what's going to happen to you in the day ahead as you pull on your socks and underwear in the morning. Sure, you plan to finish the pile of work that's getting dusty on top of your desk, grab some lunch, go to a work meeting at 2 and go home to a dinner of baked salmon and a nice salad.

Tell me how often that works out. It's more like you get to work and your pc is down, and it takes the IT guy an hour to get to you, and then the boss wants to talk about the O'Hoolahan account, and you wind up having to eat crackers out of the machine for lunch, and there's a cake for some joker you don't even know, but it's his birthday....

Life rarely works out like you plan for it to, which is why I don't like that the guide channel on cable TV puts the little synopsis on the screen when you're streaming a show. "Rusty feels guilty when he's caught rummaging through Pat's trash can. Vernon forgets to hit the ATM and has to bum a dollar to get a soda at lunch. Half of the office is being transferred to Akron, and half of the half doesn't know where Akron even is. And Danny discovers the true meaning of life when he meets a Tibetan working at the emissions test station."

Excuse me, but I would rather have these things come as a surprise to me, as they do in real life. 

I don't want to have to worry about Stewie being forced to throw Rupert in the trash! Let the stories come as surprises.

Sunday Rerun: I had a braunschweiger called "The Wurst That Could Happen"

 Unless you're of an uncertain age, the name Jimmy Webb doesn't mean much to you. But if you've ever ridden in an elevator, you have heard his music, or someone's version of one of his songs.

He wrote hundreds of songs way back when, stuff like MacArthur Park, Wichita Lineman, The Worst That Could Happen, Galveston, Up, Up And Away, Honey Come Back, By The Time I Get To Phoenix  and Where's The Playground Susie?

His own website modestly proclaims him to be "America's Songwriter," and invites you to subscribe to his emails on the "World Wide Webb."

So now he has published his autobiography, "The Cake And The Rain." The title, of course, refers to the line in "MacArthur Park" about someone leaving a cake out in the rain, and Webb took that allusion from poet W.H. Auden, who said that when he looks in the mirror his face looks like a cake someone left out in the rain.

I don't think that I can take it.

I read the book because I am interested in popular music, but Webb should stick to writing lyrics, because the book is disjointed in the extreme. He jumps between vignettes from the 1950s and the 1970s, he talks of characters in his life without bothering to tell us who they are (there is one person present with him at many events who is only referred to as "the devil") and he leaves out many details. 

But two things he never fails to mention are what a genius he thinks he is, and how unfair it is that the "left-wing folkie exclusivity" fails to give him the respect he is due. Webb was a fine songwriter, no doubt, but that never meant that people wanted to hear him sing his own songs.  Time after time, he tried to mount a performing career, only to receive solid evidence that people preferred The Fifth Dimension and Glen Campbell singing his songs over Webb's weak-throated bleating.

I'm harsh on him because he has obviously had an interesting life but failed to tell us about it clearly. Reading this book, I kept feeling like I was trying to watch a movie on a bad DVD player that kept skipping and stalling. He has stories to tell but he didn't tell them.

He did mention that he consumed an awful lot of drugs, shoving pills down his throat and powder up his nose to ease the pain of his wealth and success. And time after time, he tells of how harshly and cruelly he treated women and fellow musicians. That sort of thing leads to karmic consequences, you know, Jimmy?

I can't recommend this book unless you have a kitchen table with one leg two inches too short.

The Saturday Picture Show, May 17, 2025

 

It's been awhile since there was a 7-alarm fire in Baltimore, but here it was the other night. It burned for well more than 24 hours at a multi-story mattress warehouse at North Bentalou Street and Edmondson Avenue. What's left of the building will be torn down. If you live here in the Northeast, this is why Amtrak was shut down for a while between here and DC...this is right by the tracks. 

Apparently, Paul was the cause of the formerly-high labor rates, but they tied a can to him, so come on over and get your transmission overhauled for much less!

Here's what can only be called an "idyllic English countryside scene." 

I have seen the Weinermobile, but the LL BeanBoot car has not driven down here, as far as I know. I'd go!

Popeye and Olive Oyl take in the carnival!

If you ever see me out at a swanky restaurant, that's not I. But if someone forces a side of asparagus on me, come on over and help yourself. Nice joke, though!

The new Pope is a baseball fan, so Jason Perash, an Orioles fan from Colorado, took some baseballs to the Vatican in hopes of getting a papal-autographed ball. Before he signed it, Pope Leo XIV asked Perash the key question: "White Sox or Cubs?" Perash got it right and the Pope got write to it.

 

Perhaps it will help you get the joke if I tell you that the beret is sort of raspberry-colored...

Anyone sharing their home with a cat knows, you can buy all the Karpeted Kitty Kondos they make, and Felix would rather have a shoe box. 

One was considered to have "made it" in the cultural world of the 50s and 60s and maybe the 70s by being depicted on the cover of TIME Magazine. Everyone saw your mug on their coffee table, the doctor's waiting room, and the checkout stand at the Try 'N' Save. Today, I don't even know if there is a print edition of TIME, and all you see at the cash register is skinny pictures of Ariana Grande. Sad times.