What! Oct. 19, 2017
By Lisa Baker • 10-19-17
In Dallas, a police helicopter discovered more than 3,000 marijuana plants growing in a remote area. No suspects were found but Dallas police Major Max Geron urged anyone who might be missing their marijuana to be sure to “call us.” Oops.
The Dow just hit 23,000. That’s a huge milestone. It was just August 2, that it hit 22,000. Where’s all the hoopla?
Brian’s BBQ will have a new downtown Lake Jackson location called The Fill Station. IT WILL BE OPEN SOON! I promise. I know this for sure because I drive by every other day and yell, “I’m waiting!” They are now yelling back. Oh, and did I tell you that they are going to serve whiskey and there is a huge picture of John Wayne on the side of the building. Finally, someone that truly understands Texas and what we really want. John Wayne, Whiskey and BBQ. Heavy sigh. See you in line.
Coach Inc. brand is famous for is beautiful leather purses and had recently purchased Kate Spade and shoemaker Stuart Weitzman. They have now announced that they will rebrand and change their name (which seems to be a trendy thing to do right now) to Tapestry, Inc. Hmmm. I wonder what name Harvey Weinstein will pick for his makeover? I can think of a few names. That’s all I’m going to say.
Hurry. The Bellamy Brothers are entertaining on the last night of the fair, Saturday October 21st. Also, Nooney & The Zydeco Floaters. bcfa.org
In a place called Dumpty Doo (Australia’s Northern Territory) scientists are beginning an experiment to try and save the banana. Yes, the standard Cavendish Banana. The most popular fruit in the world. Baby’s first food. The fruit that is sweeter and better to cook with when it’s black, splotchy and overripe. Scientists are planting thousands of small banana plants that have been modified with genes from the musa acuminata banana variety hoping to escape the effects of fusarium wilt aka Panama Disease Tropical Race 4 or TR4. Fungicides and fumigants are useless against it. Once TR4 hits a banana farm, the only recourse is to eradicate all the plants and start over. If this doesn’t work, you may not be able to find this delicious fruit readily available in our grocery stores, in a few years.
JJ Watt suffered a tibial plateau fracture of his left leg, a break at the top of the shinbone within the knee joint. That hurts me just to type it.
The new River Oaks District shopping center on Westheimer has a 5-ft. tall security robot named ROD2 (a play on the River Oaks District and the famous Star Wars droid, R2D2.) Its eye-like cameras continuously compile information on surroundings, reading license plates, recognizing familiar faces and monitoring for unusual or suspicious activity, all while greeting you with a “good morning” or “good afternoon.” FYI. If you see its normally blue lights turn red, then you have hung around too long taking your selfie and ROD2 is mad. Be polite and move on.
A family cruise turned into a parent’s worst nightmare when an 8-year old child got on her tippy-toes for a better look over the rail (they were thinking that the railing was the same height and she couldn’t see over) and fell to her death two stories below.
An old canoe surfaced in Florida after Hurricane Irma. Using a technique known as radiocarbon dating, archaeologists determined that it could date back to the 1600’s. It could be that the wood is older than the canoe. Officials now begin a preservation process to make sure the canoe doesn’t deteriorate before it is relocated to a museum.
HAPPY BIRTHDAYS: Singer Jackson Browne is 69. Actor Scott Bakula is 63. Rock singer Sean Lennon is 42. Singer Jerry Lee Lewis is 82. TV personality Bryant Gumbel is 69. Country singer Gene Watson is 74. Farewell Party. Singer Daryl Hall is 71. Former auto executive Lee Iacocca is 93. Actress-director Penny Marshall is 74. Singer-musician Richard Carpenter is 71. I remember hanging at the skating rink every Friday and Saturday night listening to The Carpenter’s sing…Rainy Days and Mondays, Top of the World, We’ve Only Just Begun, They Long to Be Close to You.
Singer Tito Jackson is 64. Singer-musician Sammy Hagar is 70. Van Halen. Singer Marie Osmond is 58. Actress Kelly Preston is 55. Olympic silver medal figure skater Nancy Kerrigan is 48. Pro Football Hall of Fame Jerry Rice. Considered by some to be the greatest wide receiver in NFL history.
Britain’s Duchess of York, Sarah Ferguson is 58. Chef Emeril Lagasse is 58. Broadcast journalist Chris Wallace is 70. Actor Hugh Jackman is 49. Actor Kirk Cameron is 47. Growing Pains. Actress Melinda Dillon is 78. She was the mother in A Christmas Story in 1983. Yikes, has it been that long? Singer-musician Paul Simon is 76. I was in Houston at a Steve Martin and the Steep Canyon Rangers concert (Bluegrass) and Paul Simon came out on stage and sang a bit (it so happens that he is married to Edie Brickell who was touring with the band.) The crowd went wild and so did I.
Deaths: Remember Elizabeth Baur, who helped Raymond Burr bring the bad guys to justice as Officer Fran Belding on the long-running NBC crime drama Ironside? She died at age 69.
There was a best-selling business management book, “The One-Minute Manager,” by Spencer Johnson (who died recently at age 78 of pancreatic cancer.) His idea was that businesspeople needed to connect with their co-workers by spending a full minute giving sincere praise or if needed, a reprimand. It had a money-back guarantee. Business schools taught it and businesses everywhere handed the book out like candy. Other books followed. “The One-Minute Father” – “The One-Minute Mother” and “One-Minute for Myself.” The idea in these books was that there should be one-minute in the day is where you stop and look at what you’re really thinking and what you’re really doing…a quiet time that you can listen to your own inner wisdom. His No.1 best seller was “Who Moved My Cheese?” which had main “mice” characters named Sniff & Scurry and two people, Hem & Haw. The four of them lived happily in a maze eating cheese until one day the cheese disappeared. Sniff & Scurry scampered away to find new cheese while Hem and Haw whined and whined about their fate and their terrible hunger. How do you adapt to changing circumstances? Johnson was once a physician turned children’s book author. His decency and morals will be missed.
“The quicker you let go of old cheese, the sooner you find new cheese.” – Spencer Johnson
I haven’t said thank you enough to the City of Lake Jackson for everything that they did during Harvey. Those guys worked and they worked and they worked. I tried to do my part with breakfast for the pump guys or meals for different working locations during the flooding (anything besides pizza in a box – bless their hearts) but I know it wasn’t enough. Special thanks to Eddie Herrera (hope I got your name right) who was checking a drain valve in my alley, way after midnight one night and had been working since early that morning. It was so appreciated.
The Bible is available in nearly 2,500 languages including Klingon, Vulcan and Romulan, three languages created for the Star Trek series. Hmmm.
Elton John will be playing his piano at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas for the last time on May 19, 2018.
The landmark Sears store in Houston Midtown will close after this last holiday season. The liquidation sale will start on November 10th. The store opened in 1939 as a modern air-conditioned shopping center where the floors were connected by escalators. There was a muralist that painted walls with scenes from Texas history and a large painting of Sam Houston. Corrugated metal coverings were added in the 1960s, an effort to modernize the building. I can only hope that whoever owns this building now, understands that this art-deco needs to be saved.
Stephen King’s IT is back after 27 years and scaring another generation of moviegoers. Opening weekend IT took in an estimated $117.2 million, so IT officially had the third-largest opening weekend of 2017. IT also earned 87% on Rotten Tomatoes and a B-plus CinemaScore. You wonder what this does to the future of Sweet Potatoe and clowns like him who are loved and adored equally by kids and adults.
The Ronald McDonald House Houston on Holcombe is increasing its campus by 40 percent…adding 20 bedrooms to the 50-bedroom campus. This facility provides accommodations for out-of-town families of seriously ill children being treated in the Texas Medical Center and must turn away 12-15 families each day.
The Harlem Globetrotters are coming January 27th. If you have little kids, they need to see these guys. When I was in high school, I would buy tickets to take my date but tell him that my dad gave me the tickets. Because I love the Harlem Globetrotters. It’s always a fun time.
If the video title and description is fact, then I watched a video of a lady (I use that word loosely) at a convenience store, using a plant watering bucket to top off the gas tank on a rental car. The story stated that she was doing it before taking the rental car back, so that the gas tank appeared full. Hmmm.
If you’ve never been to Frankel’s Costume Shop in Houston, you better hurry because the 40,000-sq-ft building with its 57,000 rental costumes, will be closing soon. The land that the building sits on has been sold. Frankel’s is not just a Halloween shop – theatre and professional entertainers all have a special place there. If you couldn’t find it anywhere else, you could find it at Frankel’s. They have expanded their hours to allow them to sell their massive inventory in a dignified fashion and not garage sale style. My son was a magician so I remember some long hot hours spent in the magic section. They will be missed by many.
Leonardo Da Vinci could write with one hand and draw with the other simultaneously. He always wrote backward so that one could only read his writing with a mirror. Heck, I write notes to myself that I can’t figure out what I said the next day. Perhaps I should be using a mirror. Nah. I just need to write better.
It’s Daylight “Saving” Time not Daylight Savings Time. Benjamin Franklin did not originate the idea of moving clocks forward. His suggestion was that Parisians wake up at dawn, then they could save the modern-day equivalent of $200-million plus by using sunshine instead of candles. So, Franklin simply proposed a change in sleep schedules, not a time change. The American farmers were not happy with the change in 1918. They had to wait an extra hour for dew on hay to dry, hired hands worked less hours and the cows were not ready to be milked an hour earlier to meet shipping schedules. Hawaii and Arizona, except for the state’s Navajo Nation, do not observe daylight saving time and the US territories of American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and the Northern Mariana Islands. Some Amish communities also choose not to participate in daylight saving time. We change on November 5th.
Research at Mayo Clinic Cancer Center has shown that a three-month course of chemotherapy was almost as effective as six months of chemotherapy treatment for stage 3 colon cancer treatment. The shorter schedule also resulted in fewer side effects such as nerve damage because unlike hair loss and diarrhea, nerve damage doesn’t stop when the chemo ends.
Babe Ruth wore a cabbage leaf under his baseball cap to keep cool and changed it every two innings.
According to RawlingsQuoting Boutwell, McPhee says the average lifespan of a baseball in Major League play is six pitches. “Not that it wears out. But every foul ball is lost to the fans. Every homer is lost. Every time a ball gets scuffed, the umpire banishes it down to tomorrow’s batting practice.”
Additional tidbit:
There are 144 baseballs opened and ready for each game, and an additional 6 dozen in reserve.
– Lisa
