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The weekly post that highlights pictures I haven’t placed anywhere else here yet. Let’s get to it, then.
We went out for Chinese recently. As is the custom — because this is what makes them come true — I took a picture of the fortunes:
Allie enjoying a lazy afternoon in her tunnel:
Here’s brunch, which was pretty good, fried chicken and johnny cakes. It featured Chilton County peaches, pecan smoked bacon (yeah, that was good), toasted pecans, arugula and maple syrup.
We saw this guy on the deck at the pool.
We spent about seven hours there tonight, no kidding. It was a very nice time. Brian also invented a new hamburger for us, which was the other highlight of a fine Saturday.
Here are a few links for you to enjoy, just in case you aren’t at the pool, too.
There are some good points here. Some pertinent realities. John A. MacArthur says the internet makes bad journalism. He has a point. There are also some realities that can’t be ignored. That doesn’t make them better, or worse, but they remain our realities.
Pop-up ad creator: ‘I’m sorry’ There’s a great line in “The Execution of Noa P. Singleton,” dealing with a much, much heftier theme than pop up ads, but let’s consider it anyway:
But you see, the problem is that apologies are really just little weeds that grow over monuments and headstones. They keep coming back, but never stop ruining what lies beneath. If an apology is truly authentic, the pain is supposed to stop. Right?
A Medicare scam that just kept rolling:
This summer, in a Los Angeles courtroom, Bonilla described the workings of a peculiar fraud scheme that — starting in the mid-1990s — became one of the great success stories in American crime.
The sucker in this scheme was the U.S. government. That wasn’t the peculiar part.
Somewhere between here and $8.2 billion dollars were tied into the scheme. No one knows how much, though.
My toes are raw. I’ve checked them several times tonight, just to see if they were bleeding. But the pool has been fun.
The post with extra pictures returns to the place that needs them most, the Sunday space on this sleepy little site. Let’s get on with it, then.
Sometimes you just have to go to the big box stores. My second cousin needed a toy and candy and I needed to have some keys duplicated. Somewhere in all that I found a Spiderman mask. Why wouldn’t you take that opportunity?
These aren’t, by any means, the largest elephant ears my grandmother has ever grown, but they are pretty.
She’s growing things that she says are from Africa on her porch right now, huge plants that are probably trees that are threatening to overtake the place. And then she tells me she can’t grow anything, that it was really her mother that had the green thumb. A lifetime of evidence to the contrary.
Listened to this on the drive home on the 1940s channel. I’ll take it as a sign of good radio programming. Also, there are no vocals in this song:
Hodges Chapel, on the Samford University campus. I shoot this building a lot, I know, but it is on the way to my building. Also, see the crane in the background? That’s working on the construction site for the new business building, which everyone is excited to see completed:
Allie is enjoying her afternoon nap, or she would be if only I would stop disturbing her for pictures:
I was raised in a suburban and exurban lifestyle. It was grand. And, like so many Americans, that involved cars. Many cars. A lot of miles. A great deal of time on interstates and highways.
So, when I was however old I was, when I spent time on a mass transit bus and subway systems I noticed something. Everyone on board the thing would rather be somewhere else. Anywhere else. It is an energy-sapping experience and you can see it on everyone’s faces.
I make the joke, which my beautiful wife hates, that it is like “Lord of the Flies.” She hates it because she’s spent plenty of times on the subway, so she always rolls her eyes, which means the jokes continue until someone inevitably brings up the conch shell.
Well. I’m going to take this video as a piece of evidence for my side of the joke. The Broadway cast from “The Lion King” delivered a performance on the subway. Watch the commuters:
In contrast, when the Australian cast did it earlier this year, people actually enjoyed themselves. And they were on a plane:
Which brings up a good idea. If you’re organizing a flash mob — and why are you doing that, again? — you might want to have four or five people who have the very important job of acting shocked and amazed.
If you’re organizing a flash mob, be sure you top this one, which is perhaps the best one ever:
OK, one more video. This was 40 years ago, today, Richard Nixon had resigned amid the Watergate investigations, and was addressing the White House staff. It remains a fine speech lost in all of the important things that were happening.
He was wrong about one thing, well a few things, in that speech. There was a book written about his mother.
I wonder if Nixon would have liked The Lion King. I wonder what he would have been like on the the subway.
Something like this. Thanks, Internet.
My great-aunt and great-uncle are a pair of Southern archetypes. She is a the sweet kind of lady who raised two daughters, worked in an auction house and at the courthouse and took care of a neat little house with an inside dog and a pool out back. She has a syrupy accent that is difficult to reproduce. He is a gentleman farmer. He’d sailed into Pearl Harbor not too long after the nation figured out what Pearl Harbor was. He used to let us “ice skate” on his frozen pond, but you’d always get a second opinion from someone else. “Is that pond really frozen through?” He’s a rascal, the good kind, and is forced to be a good sport because of all the ribbing he does of others. To know them is to love them.
Recently, my great-uncle walked out to his garage, went inside, sat in his car, cranked it, put it in reverse and backed out.
Without opening the garage door.
My aunt says she glanced out the window to see him kicking the garage door, bang, bang, bang, BANG. He could have been trying to undo the damage or just kicking the things that need to be kicked after you crash into your garage. She thought he was having a fit.
So the full story goes on and it is bigger than life and cleaner than the countryside they live in and it is perfectly funny.
Today, after church, we drove over to visit them for a few minutes. No one was home. That little dog was barking inside, but all of the cars were gone. I made the joke about how, as I turned around in their driveway, I could back into the garage again or, if I went the other way, back into the garage that is attached to the house.
Instead, we remembered there was a roll of duct tape in the trunk. And, what do you know, there is duct tape all over the garage, too.
I said, “Wouldn’t it be great if we had some giant bandaids … ”
There was no need. As we looked closer, someone had taken a handful of adhesive bandages, probably from the kind of first aid kit that you stow in the trunk of your car, and attached them to the artwork.
But, really, to set off the effort, there should be a message on the tape. And, sure enough, as we looked closer we saw a little note. It looked like it had been painted on with a tiny little brush.
As we left we passed my great-aunt who was returning home from church herself. We only missed her by about 90 seconds or so. We got home to a voicemail about what someone had done to his garage, how it gotten that way while he was at church and they were just sure my mother might have done it.
Only she had not.
Well. It could have been anyone. His son-in-law denied it. He’s a very nice guy, but he just looks like the type. Any of his family could have done it. They’d like nothing more than to get one over on one of their own. Really, it could have been anyone that had heard the story from my great-aunt, and the whole thing was so humorous, how could you blame her for telling everyone about his driving habits?
He’s a good sport and takes it in stride. Their daughter sent us this picture:
We surely needed the laugh. I told you my grandmother delighted in practical jokes. She’d approve of this one, too, we think.
But she might have used more duct tape.
