Detective John Reilly and Trooper

The horseman’s name is Detective John Reilly and for the past decade he and Trooper have had the rare distinction of being the New York Police Department’s only mounted team dedicated to patrolling Central Park.  But their days of patrolling the urban range are ending.

Detective Reilly is retiring this week — and not by choice. On Thursday, he turns 63, the department’s mandatory retirement age.

Trooper, his horse, at age 15, is also being put out to pasture, having logged 10 years on patrol, the typical limit for a city police horse.

Corey Kilgannon.  NYT. 

Life is pretty much a crock

when you've been around the block

and the boss says 'adios' --

you're 63; don't be morose.

A man and horse in Central Park;

a job, of course, but what a lark!

Happy in his work, no doubt.

And no existential drought.

Competent and satisfied;

such a worker, with real pride,

makes the world a better place --

justifies the human race.

Fare thee well, Detective John;

we'll miss you out on the Great Lawn.

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The Surveillance State

In China, evading the watchful eyes of the government sometimes feels like an exercise in futility. The place is wired with about 200 million surveillance cameras, Beijing controls the telecom companies, and every internet company has to hand over data when the police want it. They also know where journalists live because we register our address with police. In Shanghai, the police regularly come to my apartment . . . 
Paul Mozur in the NYT

No matter what you're doing and no matter where you go

the State is always watching with great vigor and gusto.

A sneeze in Beijing registers way off in old Shanghai,

and loudspeakers will offer a 'gesunheidt' or 'banzai!'

But China ain't the only place where snooping's universal;

busybodies now enjoy a great world-wide dispersal.

Kayaking in Canada or eating snails in France,

some agency is watching you and making notes askance.

You're free to travel as you please, to do most anything;

but just remember GPS will generate a ping.

A ping some zealot or some spy will enter in your file;

and data on your foibles will be growing mile by mile.

And then a knock upon your door, as sure as God made grapes,

when you will have to answer to officious prying apes;

who follow cyber footprints like detectives in a book,

and like to hang the innocent upon their pointed hook.

It's not only reporters that now need encrypted apps,

or use the Bag of Faraday to foil attempted taps.

The common man and woman are in peril from those ops

who stalk the internet like bandits or the fell Cyclops.

Luckily each agency that's spying on your life

is fighting other agencies with long and deadly strife.

They share no information and are at each other's throats,

feuding over sectors like a bunch of randy goats.

And so the day may come when all those snooping bureaucrats

will destroy each other with their internecine spats.

But that has been repeated until now a shibboleth;

The thought of no more prying -- well, I wouldn't hold my breath. 

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The Crusader's Head

DUBLIN — The head of a mummified Crusader, laid to rest in a Dublin church some 800 years ago, was stolen and a crypt vandalized, the police in Ireland discovered on Monday.
Ed O'Loughlin for the New York Times.

The head of a Crusader from eight hundred years ago

was recently dissevered with a single brutal blow.

Police have not discovered who the perpetrators are,

and label such misconduct both a puzzle and bizarre.

  What good is such an ancient head, beginning to decay?

Why go to all that trouble just to take it far away?

Because I am a poet, and have access to the Muse,

I humbly wish to offer up my cockamamie views:

I suspect that hoary head was taken from its crypt

and to the highest bidder will undoubtedly be shipped.

The purpose, I imagine, is the transplant of that skull

onto a Leader's body who's become a little dull.

I can think of dozens who could use a better noodle;

dictators and presidents who think just like a poodle.

With the antique wisdom of that head of a Crusader

a dullard now in office could become a new Darth Vader.

Yes, it is very sinister -- what that old head could do

upon the neck of someone bent on mischief or voodoo.

If Kim Jong-un obtains it and begins to use its brain

he will have our diplomats delivering chow mein.

Should Nicolas Maduro place it on his shoulders broad

he can get away with ten more years of blatant fraud.

And if Assad of Syria decides to take a chance

there is ev'ry hope that poison gas tech will advance.

Putin needs a new head -- no one doubts that in the least.

His current one is doughy and quite lacking in good yeast.

I wonder if the CIA that creaky head did steal?

Trump could use a new one as he tries to wheel and deal.

Perhaps I ought to see if I can buy it for myself

and become as famous as the Oracle of Delph.

I could write a Cookbook of Crusader Recipes --

or go in for some weight loss with Bubonic Plague disease.

The Crummiton Pill

Leaders from seven drugmakers representing $140 billion in U.S. revenue defended their pricing in a Senate hearing . . . . Executives . . .  pushed back on some of the proposals mentioned by lawmakers, especially linking the price paid for drugs in the U.S. to their cost overseas . . . 

WSJ

"This is the place where you'll tell us the truth!"

said a Senator to the Drug Lords.

"Don't bribe us with money or foreign vermouth;

we've none us us need your rewards."

The Senator pounded his gavel to mush;

such was his passionate haste

it caused all the pages to vividly blush

and swallow much library paste.

Senator Bellman (for such was his name)

glared at the Drug Lords with spite;

he wanted their egos to very much maim,

and give them a tumbelous fight.

Those Drug Lords sat back like a rack of roast beef,

with never a wink or a snort;

each one a cold-blooded and snatchering thief,

who thought gouging dollars good sport.

One was named Fatcher, another one Scropp,

and one was called Bashi-Bazouk;

then there was Hooner and Feepy and Mopp,

and two only answered to Ook.

Their lawyer replied to the Senator's sneers

by pulling his ears till they rang

with gongs like the ones in the city Algiers

when anyone wants to harangue.

He shuffled some papers and gave a broad wink,

then said that it might snow today --

implying the Senators needed to shrink

and ought to go jump in the hay.

And this caused an uproar that quietly spread

throughout the congressional floor

until legislators fell down as if dead

(and most of 'em started to snore.)

But Senator Bellman was not to be jinxed

or kept from demanding some proof

that all of those Drug Lords never had sphinxed

or sent prices right through the roof.

He cited the case of a Crummiton pill,

which used to cost less than a dime --

NOW it retailed for a couple of mill,

and was THAT not a serious crime?

"Pooh pooh" said the lawyer. "Pish tosh and belay;

such nonsense I never have heard."

"Crummiton pills are much cheaper than clay,

because they are laid by a bird."

"Ah ha!" cried our Bellman, suffused with delight,

"at last I have trapped you, my friend."

"The Crummiton bird is extinct, as is right,

and the pills are all made from hornblende!"

The lawyer, he made such a terrible face

that babies in Hartford did wail;

the Drug Lords out exits all started to race,

pursued by the janitor's pail.

Now all of the Drug Lords, including the Ooks,

are snugly ensconced in a cell

where guppies continually hand them rebukes

and give them brown apples to sell.

And pills and injections cost nothing at all,

or at least you can steal them with ease.

For Senator Bellman has won the long brawl

(and now swings on the flying trapeze.)

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The Ringling Press Kit

The Ringling press kit was a thing of beauty. It was created to bewitch hard boiled newspaper reporters and editors into granting the show reams of free publicity. It was the keystone of the circus marketing strategy. 

When I joined the Greatest Show on Earth back in 1971, newspapers still ruled the earth. If you wanted to know the weather forecast you read the newspaper -- TV and radio 'meteorologists' were considered strictly fly-by-night parvenus. If the newspaper said it was gonna rain, it was gonna rain -- and if it didn't rain that only meant the weather was wrong, not the newspaper. The sports scores were lined up in proper accurate order to settle many a bet. The shenanigans in Washington were faithfully analyzed and skewered by a legion of reporters who were respectful of the Presidency and Congress and yet faithfully critical of them at the same time. The comics section was generously splashed across several pages, and printed in a bold, large font, very easy for Grandma to read even without her bifocals -- on Sundays it was always in color.

 Newspaper journalists were the louche guardians of public morals and trusted chroniclers of everything from an obscure military junta in French Guiana to depressed pork belly futures in Des Moines.

Back then hard-living reporters were killed by damaged livers and tobacco-induced lung cancer, not by assassination.

 Every morning, without fail, when I was on the road back in those halcyon days, I never went to work in clown alley without first buying a pack of Juicy Fruit gum, a bottle of Yoo-hoo , and a newspaper. A day without reading the newspaper was a day steeped in ignorance.

And the Ringling press kit reflected that long-ago peculiarly American desire to kowtow to the Fourth Estate. It was a massive affair, and must have weighed at least five pounds. Inside a red vinyl case, that closed with an ornate gilt clasp, were over seventy 8x10 black and white glossies of every performer on the show. Even MY photo was in there. There was a six-page precis of the history of the original Ringling Brothers -- all five of them. It was printed on elegant cream colored card stock, suitable for framing. On the side of the case was a pouch that held a tin medallion, like something out of a cereal box, that gave the bearer the right to enter the Big Top on the cuff at any time during the current season. It could be attached to the lapel of a suit coat or pinned to a blouse, and usually started to corrode after a few weeks.

And the press releases . . . 
There were over a hundred of 'em. There were biographies of all the tanbark stars -- Gunther Gebel-Williams; The Flying Gaonas; Ursula Bottcher and her trained polar bears; and Peggy Williams, the first female clown (although she really wasn't -- but she was the first female clown with a college degree.)     

There were stories on what elephants ate (which was anything they could get their trunks around -- especially cigar and cigarette butts); articles purporting to describe the strange superstitions of clown alley, such as the belief that it was bad luck to lay a hat on your clown trunk and that each clown painted their own clown face on a Titleist golf ball, which was then sent to the John Ringling Museum in Sarasota, Florida, to be trademark registered (all a bunch of hooey, but good publicity for Titleist.) There were press releases on how many miles of electrical cable the show carried and the secret recipe for pink cotton candy. Why the number 99 is considered unlucky for circus performers (aerialist Lillian Leitzel fell to her death after 99 turns on the Spanish web when the swivel snapped.) And why John Philip Sousa's Stars and Stripes Forever is never played by the circus band, except to clear the tent or arena during an emergency. 

The Ringling press agents were prodigal with those wonderful press kits -- it didn't matter if you worked for the New York Times or the Podunk Weekly Gazette; when the show hit town you automatically were handed one in person by a Ringling press agent. 

Reporters took a more relaxed view of their duties back then -- those news releases were printed, verbatim, in dozens of papers across the land, with the reporter's byline smugly attached. I know, because I would cut them out to paste in my scrapbook. 

At the end of the season the leftover press kits were sent down to winter quarters in Venice, Florida, where they were stored in a damp backroom of the rehearsal arena -- there to rot away. When the arena was abandoned by Ringling because of a property tax dispute with the city years later, there wasn't a single decent press kit left. But by then the internet was taking over and newspapers were receding in relevance. The Ringling press kit had become about as pertinent as the rotary dial phone.

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Playing Footsie in Clown Alley

PLAYING FOOTSIE IN CLOWN ALLEY

4:30 this morning finds me awake and marinating my feet in something called Orange Blossom & Neroli, with Honey Extract, Bath Soak -- from a company called The Orange Tree. This is by no means an endorsement of said product. Indeed, I have not yet decided if it's doing my complaining tootsies any good or not. The bag of bath soak was given to me by my daughter Sarah, along with a dozen French milled lavender scented soap balls, after cleaning out her linen closet recently.

 Being awakened so early this morning by my burning fiery feet serves to remind me, once again, of what a life of circus clowning has left me with -- namely, fallen arches and a tendency towards plantar fasciitis. 

The culprit in all this is not the oversized clown shoes I wore for so many years. Those babies were hand made by experts, just like a pair of regular custom-made boots or shoes from the finest gentlemen's shops in London. In those long ago times there were clown cobblers, artisans that specialized in sewing together massive footwear, made of the finest leather and stuffed with horsehair, for the discerning professional clown. Gamboling along in them was a pleasure. They cost me the equivalent of a month's salary, but they were well worth the price. My first pair lasted me for nearly ten years.

No, the guilty party in this case was Capezio, a dance shoe company out of Totowa, New Jersey. Ringling Brothers Circus contracted with them to provide each denizen of clown alley with a pair of flimsy satin ballet slippers for the half dozen production numbers we were obligated to cavort in. John Ringling North, a nephew of one of the original Ringling Brothers from Wisconsin, decreed in 1945 that circus dance numbers would henceforth be performed not in just any old clown shoe or comfortable old sneaker, but in pink satin Capezio ballet slippers -- in order to give the show some sorely-needed class, like a Broadway production. That ukase had never been rescinded, and so when I arrived on the scene in 1971 I had to pound out dance routines on the unforgiving cement floors of sports arenas across the U S of A with a mere gossamer covering to protect my feet. True, the show laid down a grooved green rubber mat around the entire arena track -- but it was not designed to cushion our frail feet but to provide traction for the elephants and horses so they wouldn't slip and stumble into a litigious member of the audience.    

Those cursed slippers had absolutely no arch support of any kind -- it was like jumping up and down on a block of concrete for hours at a time in nothing but a pair of thin socks. And they were so tight we could feel the blood being squeezed out of our feet. Soon enough all of us First of Mays began to develop shin splints and other Dr. Scholl's maladies. By the time the show hit Madison Square Garden in the spring fully half of clown alley was limping around like Civil War veterans who'd lost a foot to gangrene during Bull Run. 

And how did the seasoned clowns avoid this torture? They bribed the wardrobe department to glue arch supports into their Capezios -- something us newbies didn't have the wit, or ready money, to do.

Finally, after the show played two weeks at the Philadelphia Spectrum arena in June and then headed out west to Denver and beyond, we First of Mays staged a revolt. Arms akimbo, we refused point blank to put on the Capezios -- and defiantly mamboed and foxtrotted our way through Opening, Manage, and Spec, in our comfortable and sturdy clown shoes. Charlie Baumann, the formidable Performance Director, threatened us with salary cuts and banishment from the show, but we stuck to our guns, or, rather, our slap shoes, and dared him to do his worst. Anything was preferable to hammertoes and collapsed tarsal bones.

Baumann reported our insurrection to the owner of the show, Irvin Feld, and like the biblical Solomon he proposed a wise compromise -- if we would buy our own pink high top Keds we could wear those instead of the hated Capezios. But no clown shoes during the dance numbers -- that was O.U.T. 

We agreed, and soon my feet stopped throbbing very much. But alas, the damage had been done and I never actively did very much to reverse it. My feet started to really bother me again when I was an ESL teacher in Thailand twelve years ago -- but all I had to do was walk into the nearest foot massage parlor and have a lovely Thai maiden pummel my feet for a full hour for just five dollars. It was a delicious agony.

Today, of course, on my modest Social Security, foot massages here in the States are out of the question. So I soak my hoofs in whatever mishmash of mineral salts I can find on the cheap. And I invest in shoes with the maximum arch support. Still, walking is becoming more of a chore and less of a pleasure.

I hear that they used to soak sore feet in a mixture of water and Colman's Mustard powder back in Teddy Roosevelt's time . . . kinda like a mustard plaster for the feet. I just may have to try that. It'll probably make me hungry for a hot dog.

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Restaurant Review: Bumblebee's KBBQ Fusion. Provo.

Bumblebee's KBBQ Fusion Grill is located at 1254 North State Street in Provo. The decor, from the standpoint of an old fat man like myself, is depressingly utilitarian.

I don't think this place is meant for customers to sit around in comfort and relax over a steaming bowl of kimchi. Although I can't fault their kimchi, which is sweet and more tart than fiery, which is how I like it. Most kimchi in America is adulterated with white vinegar, but not here. 
I took my daughter Sarah and my granddaughter Brooke along for my review. That way I could go shopping at Macy's afterwards and get a ride home with my ten pound sack of potatoes and three pound eye of round beef roast for Sunday dinner. 

I asked the cashier, when we were ordering, what the favorite was. She said the K-Pop Fries, which are just Canadian poutine with soy sauce. We didn't order it. We got bibimbop with beef and something called K-Noodles with chicken. 

What I can say about the bibimbop and K-noodles is that the portions are generous -- there was enough for Sarah and I to divide both dishes in half and still have enough left over for her to take home to her husband Jonny. Brooke had chicken strips and regular french fries. Sarah pronounced the food 'good -- especially the beef.' I, on the other hand, found the whole dining experience disheartening. The food was so-so and my butt started to ache after just ten minutes sitting in one of their damn kindergarten chairs. I only give the place 2 burps out of a possible 4, and my advice is to order your food to go. 

Our total for the bibimbop, K-noodles, chicken strips, and french fries came to $32.00. We only had water to drink. I could have eaten just as well, and in more comfort, at the nearby Chick-fil-A -- at half the price. Which only goes to show that this particular fat old man is also a skinflint. 

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Postcards to the President