Red Leary
May 6, 2006
OK, you baseball fans, what about Red Leary? When a coach yells “Red Leary!” at a base runner, what does he mean?
I thought that I knew baseball slang pretty well, but this is a new one for me. And where did I learn about it? Why, from my educational Forgotten English Calendar, that’s where.
Stealing Home
On May 7, 1879, John (”Red”) Leary, a New York City gang leader specializing in liquor and prostitution, broke out of jail with his wife’s help. Posing as the spouse of a longshoreman, she rented a fifth-floor room in a tenement adjoining the Ludlow Street Jail where Red was being held pending extradition to Massachusetts for an 1876 bank robbery. She directed two brawny gang members with a hydraulic “jimmy,” calculated the location of the escape hole, and successfully tunneled through five feet of masonry, in the process prying out, stacking, and removing a ton of bricks. On the night of May 7, the sweaty liberators cut through the last layer of wall to find the jailbird perched on a third-floor toilet, nervously sweating their arrival.
This exploit became so celebrated that it passed into baseball slang. The yelling coach wants the baserunner to break loose and steal a base.
Red Leary!
Baseball fan Dave, starting to wonder if this is for real.
Do the elbow bump
May 5, 2006
And keep your elbow out of your ear. Sorry. The quote below is from a Kiplinger Letter pitch for a Harvard Medical School report on Bird Flu. It’s hard to know what to do between the extremes of sticking head in sand and wearing a face mask and bumping elbows. I’m guessing the Quick Tips below would suffice to reduce the probability of coming down with bird flu to an acceptable level for most of us.
I’m reminded of the polio pandemic of the forties. Without disrupting our lives too much, except during the Kansas State Fair, we kids managed to survive. How much was due to semi-paranoid parents, I do not know.
Quick tips if you’re worried about bird flu
Don’t touch wild birds. If you find a dead or injured bird, don’t pick it up. Be careful not to step in bird droppings, pick up feathers, or handle them in any way. Wash hands thoroughly after handling bird baths and bird feeders.
Wash your hands frequently. This is one of the best ways to protect yourself from contracting any form of influenza, including bird flu.
Do the elbow bump. If a bird flu pandemic seems imminent, avoid greeting other people with a handshake or a kiss. Instead, World Health Organization officials advocate the “elbow bump”—a gentle touch of elbows between two people.
Don’t be a strap hanger. On public transportation, loop your arm around a pole or strap rather than holding it with your hand.
Dave, who apparently did suffer a bit of paralysis of the brain.
May walk ‘06
May 4, 2006
May the second dawned as one of those rare Bluebird days with a dark blue sky, only a slight breeze, perfect conditions for a walk with my camera slung around my neck. The favorite color of such a day is green, accented with Dogwood white and pink. Next week the Peonies will be adding their shameless splashes of white and pink, but for now it’s Dogwood time. So here we go.
Green leaves trump bare limbs, do they not?
My favorite Madison Park tree. It exhibits real character, and one wonders what in this grizzled old tree’s past caused the torturous twists in its trunk.
Twenty-fourth Street Dogwoods on display.
Here’s a little visual relief from greens and whites and pinks.
And back to 24th and Maine, where this Madison Park beauty may be past its peak bloom when the annual Dogwood Parade passes by on May 6. On years with an early spring, like this year, the parade usually misses the peak bloom by a week or so.
One last image and a plug for some exceptional college students who, I hope, are also exceptional house painters.
Dave, glad to be alive on such a day.
What’s up at GAC?
May 2, 2006
For those interested in what is going on within the Presbyterian Church (USA), this link will help a lot.
Kruse Kronicle: General Assembly Council: The Big Picture
Thank you, Michael Kruse, for your labors in the GAC on our behalf.
Dave
Mayday for America
May 2, 2006
This piece may not be the most closely reasoned analysis of “the immigrant problem,” but I suspect it reflects the instincts of many of us. It’s a shame that there seems to be no rational debate of the problem within the Beltway.
Imagine waking up to find your neighbor sitting on your couch, watching your TV, and calmly smoking a cigarette. He explains that since you have a nicer house than he does, as well as cable tv, he decided to enter through an unlocked window. As he puts his clothes in your closet and his decorations on your wall, the neighbor explains that he has a right to seek a better life and better things for himself. The fact that it’s your house doesn’t seem to bother him. When you call for help, the police explain that you must simply accept this new addition to your household. He’s already moved in, and it would be too much trouble to make him leave. After all, he cleans up after himself and takes out the garbage. Oh, and don’t lock that window — it wouldn’t be fair to your other neighbors to start doing so now.
What’s wrong with the view expressed in the above quote? I am hard-pressed to describe the contra point of view, which I think would be based on the idea that the rights of illegal immigrants are not based on their actions but on some overriding rights. Can someone help me out here?
Dave, sorta confused, as usual.
Scraich-o’-day
May 1, 2006
At scraich-o’-day on this May 1, it was a typical May morning. Yesterday’s showers have moved on for the moment, the air smells fresh, and it made me think of my morning jogs of days past. My Forgotten English Calendar offers this helpful advice for our morning libations this month.
The English alchemist and physician Tobias Venner’s health treatise, Via Recta: The Right Way of Living (1650) provided readers with dietary recommendations for each month and season. Of this time of year he wrote: “May is the most temperate season of the year, and therefore in it we ought to observe a mediocrity in our diet and a temperature in all things. In this month the diet alters not much from April. In both these months, drink a draught of white wine or stale beer in the morning fasting, wherein wormwood - rubbed a little between your hands or [in which] some linnen cloth hath a little been steeped - is very healthful, as you may see the virtues of wormwood before described. And so in this month, a draught of clarified whey in the morning fasting, wherein Fumitory and Sorrell hath been boyled, is an excellent drink for hot dry bodies that have hot cholerick stomacks.”
Sounds good to me, but I seem to have mislaid my stock of wormwood, fumitory, and Sorrell. I’ll have to check with Son Larry to see if it grows in Missouri.
Dave, also not too sure about that stale beer.
