Cheers, Y'All!

Thought for the day:  Whiskey is, by far, the most popular of all remedies that won't cure a cold. [Jerry Vale]

In 1952, Armon M. Sweat, Jr., a member of the Texas House of Representatives, was asked for his opinion of whiskey. Being the true politician that he was, this was his response, as recorded in the Political Archives of Texas:

"If you mean whiskey, the devil's brew, the poison scourge, the bloody monster that defiles innocence, dethrones reason, destroys the home, creates misery and poverty, yea, literally takes the bread from the mouths of little children; if you mean that evil drink that topples Christian men and women from the pinnacles of righteous and gracious living into the bottomless pit of degradation, shame, despair, helplessness, and hopelessness, then, my friend, I am opposed to it with every fiber of my being.

"However, if by whiskey you mean the lubricant of conversation, the philosophic juice, the elixir of life, the liquid that is consumed when good fellows get together, that puts a song in their hearts and the warm glow of contentment in their eyes; if you mean Christmas cheer, the stimulating sip that puts a little spring in the step of an elderly gentleman on a frosty morning; if you mean that drink that enables man to magnify his joy, and to forget life's great tragedies and heartbreaks and sorrow; if you mean that drink the sale of which pours into Texas treasuries untold millions of dollars each year, that provides tender care for our little crippled children, our blind, our deaf, our dumb, our pitifully aged and infirm, to build the finest highways, hospitals, universities, and community colleges in this nation, then my friend, I am absolutely, unequivocally in favor of it.

"This is my position, and as always, I refuse to compromise on matters of principle."

You've gotta love a politician who can speak so articulately out of both sides of his mouth, but he's right, ya know. The abuse of alcohol can lead to all kinds of horrors, but as a social lubricant, it can also be quite... delightful.

Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. [Ben Franklin]

Whoever drinks beer, he is quick to sleep;
Whoever sleeps long, does not sin;
Whoever does not sin, enters Heaven!
Thus, let us drink beer!   [Martin Luther]

While Smarticus and I were in Dahlonega, we went to a wine tasting... in broad daylight even. How decadent! I must admit, I'm a lightweight when it comes to alcohol, so those little bitty glasses of delight put a giddy little giddy-up in my step and made the world look even rosier.

Here's to alcohol, the rose-colored glasses of life. [F.Scott Fitzgerald]

While in that wine-tasting shop, I took pictures of some stuff that tickled my funny bone. So this post is gonna take a look at the funny side of drinking. Yeah, like the good politician Sweat from Texas, I know alcohol has a nasty underbelly, but who wants to write... or read... about a nasty underbelly? Far better to share a smile or two.

A cute bar towel, huh? Not that it's at all applicable to any women I know.

I cook with wine; sometimes I even add it to the food.  [W.C. Fields]

I should've bought some of these napkins, darn it.

I like to have a martini,
Two at the very most.
After three, I'm under the table,
After four, I'm under the host.
[Dorothy Parker]

Another bar towel.

I knew I was drunk. I felt sophisticated and couldn't pronounce it. [anonymous]

Yet another towel.

In wine there is wisdom, in beer there is Freedom, in water there is bacteria.  [Ben Franklin]

My personal favorite. This sign was next to the cash register.


Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut. [Ernest Hemingway]

This sign was at an antique shop we visited after the wine tasting. It cracked me up. Of course, after three teensy weensy glasses of wine, everything cracked me up.

Not all chemicals are bad. Without chemicals such as hydrogen and oxygen, for example, there would be no way to make water, a vital ingredient in beer.  [Dave Barry]

Here's one of those fun make-believe billboards from the fine folks at dribbleglass (Which reminds me, we're overdue for one of those road trip posts, aren't we?)

Actually, it only takes one drink to get me loaded. Trouble is, I can't remember if it's the thirteenth or fourteenth.  [George Burns]

One must always respect one's beverage.

When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading.  [Henny Youngman]

I drink too much. The last time I gave a urine sample, it had an olive in it.  [Rodney Dangerfield]

Don't try to join the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. It turns out they're apparently against all three.  [Wiley Post]

Wine is sunlight, held together by water. [Galileo]

The mouth of a perfectly happy man is filled with beer. [Ancient Egyptian proverb, circa 2200 B.C.!!!]




The following video is just over nine minutes long, which may be longer than you want to hang around. No problem. But if you have time, I think you'll get a kick out of Bill Cosby's 30+ year-old take on drinking...

And one final clip. A short one, which I could hardly believe I found. This is one of the folk songs my cousin Phyllis and I used to sing when we were teenagers. Anybody else ever hear of it before?

Okay, that's it for now. Until next time, take care of yourselves. And each other.

Follow Your Internal Compass

Thought for the day:  Plagiarism: the unoriginal sin  [Roy Peter Clark]

This picture from seniorarkhas absolutely nothing to do with today's post. I just thought it was funny.

This post has nothing to do with plagiarism, either. I mean, I can't copy from myself, right? Which is to say... today's post is a somewhat edited rerun. Another oldie but goodie you may have missed the first time around, when it ran in September of 2011 as Trust Yourself; You Know the Way.

I hope you enjoy it.



*********************

Thought for the day:  Going in the wrong direction beats sitting still on the tarmac.

Did you hear about the student pilot who got hopelessly lost on his first solo flight? When the air traffic controller tried to help him out by asking for his last known position, the poor guy said, "When I was taxiing for take-off, sir."

Ever feel like that? Like you aren't sure where you are, how you got there, where you're supposed to be going, or how you're supposed to get there?

High school and college graduation speeches are always filled with optimism and confidence about conquering the future, aren't they? The world is our oyster. Only problem is, nobody provides us with a darned oyster knife. We each have to figure it out for ourselves.

When we graduate into adulthood, we have to stop taxiing. It becomes time to file our flight plans, and for better or worse, take to the skies. Few of us followed the flight plan we expected for our life, or landed exactly where we expected to be when we proudly walked across the stage to accept our diplomas. That doesn't mean we took the wrong path. Sometimes our internal compasses lead us in a different direction, and what do you know? It turns out to be exactly the one we were meant to take all along.

                                           It's time for a little story.

Douglas Corrigan was one of the airplane mechanics who built Charles Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis, and after Lindbergh's successful flight cross the Atlantic in 1927, it became Corrigan's dream to follow suit. Being of Irish descent, he desperately wanted to fly non-stop to Dublin.

So he got his pilot's license and bought Sunshine, a second-hand single-engine 1929 Curtiss Robin, and applied for permission to make the flight.

Wouldn't ya know it? The dastardly FAA denied his flight plan. Said his plane was too old, and unfit. So he worked on his plane some more, and filed another and another and another NY-to-Ireland flight plan. All denied.

But his plane WAS approved for transcontinental flight, so in 1938, Corrigan flew from California to New York. There, he filed a flight plan to return to California.

Because of heavy fog covering New York that fateful day, Corrigan was directed to fly east  . . . just until he rose above the fog . . . and then turn back toward the west.

Only he, um,  never did. He kept going... east. Claimed his compass wasn't working properly, and he didn't even know where he was when he landed . . .  in (ahem) Dublin.

For this, he earned the nickname Wrong Way Corrigan. As it turned out, the FAA had a point about his airplane being a crate. Sunshine developed a gas leak on the California to New York flight, and when he was over the Atlantic, so much gasoline was leaking into the cockpit, Corrigan had to punch a hole in the floor. It took him 28 hours and 13 minutes to complete the flight to Ireland, and by the time he landed, he was a celebrated hero on both sides of the ocean.

Needless to say, the bureaucrats at the FAA were furious, but how could they throw the book at America's hero? Corrigan was slapped with a perfunctory 14-day license suspension, which was already completed by the time he arrived (by ship) back in the U.S.

And know what? New York City gave him a bigger parade than they'd given Lindbergh in 1927.

Until the day he died in 1995, Corrigan maintained that his navigational error was purely unintentional. I'll let you be the judge of that. But in that one flight, he broke the law, charmed the Irish, became an American hero, and earned an unforgettable nickname: Wrong Way Corrigan.


So, what's the moral of the story?

Others may try to dictate your flight plan through life, but you're the one in the pilot's seat. Only you can decide where you're going and how you're gonna get there. Trust your internal compass.

Remember where you came from, and which end goes up, and you'll never get lost.

                                  Until next time, take care of yourselves. And each other.
           
 [Photos of Corrigan courtesy of National Archives. The duck's adorable dupa is from morguefile]                                          

What's Old is New Again

Thought for the day:  Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do doesn't mean it's useless.  [Thomas Edison]

Some people have a real knack for taking a bunch of seemingly useless odds and ends, and turning them into pieces of artwork... or into something new and useful. They often rescue items that were otherwise destined for the dump, clean them up, and turn them into something entirely different.

Some developers have the same sort of talent, but on a much grander scale. They see an area that looks like a dump, and picture its potential as a place of beauty. Let me tell ya, what developers did to transform Baltimore's Inner Harbor is nothing short of miraculous. Locals are still somewhat bemused to see tourist buses in town, but they're darned proud of their city's phenomenal face lift, too.

The Tin Decorating Company of Baltimore, or Tindeco for short, opened in 1900, and by 1914, was the largest tin decorating plant in the world. When the presses were running, all the windows had to stay closed, because a draft could mess up the images in the wet paint. So with all that heavy machinery running, not to mention giant ovens in use... can you imagine how beastly hot it must have been inside that factory in the middle of a sweltering Baltimore summer? Oh, and they also had an in-house surgical department, too. Those big sheets of tin they worked with weren't only slippery when wet with paint; they were sharper than razor blades. In other words, I'll betcha lots of guys who worked there had the nickname Stubby.

The factory changed hands a couple times over the years, but closed down for good in 1965, and quickly deteriorated into an eyesore. Then voila! Like magic, in 1985, it became repurposed as luxury apartments. Who'd a thunk it?  

And... it happens to be home sweet home for one of the characters in Hot Flashes and Cold Lemonade:

Pearl turned onto Boston Street and followed it from Ida's neighborhood of want all the way to Luke's neighborhood of plenty. His apartment looked down its nose at the harbor from atop a converted seven-acre building that used to be Tindeco, the largest tin decorating company in the world. Now the former factory was called Tindeco Wharf, and in addition to upscale offices and shops, it offered high-dollar living at its finest. Much to the amusement of Baltimore's old-timers, the rich and trendy couldn't whip out their platinum cards fast enough for the privilege of living there.

Because I was curious about the old tinware and nouveau living quarters, I thought you might find it interesting, too.

Check this out. There's an Olympic-sized pool out back, right next to the harbor. I'll bet those guys who were shut up in that hot-as-hell factory would've gladly given up another finger or two for the luxury of being able to cool off in a pool. (Even a kiddie pool!)

This lobby sure doesn't look like it was ever part of a factory, does it? You can only see one in this picture, but there are actually two cabinets against the wall on the left, and they both hold spiffy samples of Tindeco tinware.

Here are some candy and cookie tins. Peter Rabbit was a popular design, as was Mother Goose.

Cigarette tins. Lucky Strike... no strike back! (Anybody remember that?)

Intricately painted containers for Christmas and Halloween are very popular with collectors.

How do you like these Roly Poly fellas? Each of them originally held about a pound of tobacco.

Dunno why, but I only took one picture of this other cabinet. Too bad, because some of this stuff was pretty neat, too. (We probably high-tailed it out of there to get some lunch.)

Here's a closer look at a couple Peter Rabbit tins. The first was produced in the '20s, and the second, in the '40s.

Animal crackers, anyone?

Uneeda has to be one of the best names ever for a brand of tea, dontcha think?









Pretty cool, huh? Have any old factories in your town turned into trendy places to live?

What's the most unusual case of repurposing you've ever seen... or done yourself? Smarticus pulled off a pretty cool one. (In addition to his repurposed-out-the-wazoo 1930 Model A ratrod, that is.) At a hamfest some years back, he bought a wooden shipping box full of vacuum tubes. Not that he needed the tubes; he already had a ton of them. What he did need was something handy-dandy to put beside his end of the love seat, and that box looked like the perfect size. It still has the old Ft. McPherson mailing address stamped into it, but with the addition of a couple pieces of wood (which secures the crate's lid.. I mean, table top... about six inches above the crate) and a coat of polyurethane, it makes a dandy... and very unique table/magazine rack.

As we like to say... it suits us!

                                Until next time, take care of yourselves. And each other.