Today, of all days, is Albert Anastasia’s birthday.  Yes, on this date in 1902.  Born under the sign of Libra.  Probably fickle.    But nonetheless, he was one of the most ruthless and feared Cosa Nostra mobsters in American history.

This bad dude was a founder of the American Mafia.  Seriously.   Anastasia ran Murder, Inc. during the prewar era and was boss of the modern Gambino crime family during most of the 1950s.  I, am not kidding about that one either.

Anastasia died in what was probably the most sensational assassination in mob history.  Crime doesn’t pay, I guess.

After an illustrious and colorful career as a mobster… like the biggest, baddest, most powerful gangsta of his time….  he met a rather untimely, and violent demise.

On the morning of October 25, 1957, Anastasia entered the barber shop of the Park Sheraton Hotel.  It is in  Midtown Manhattan.

Like any good gangster, he had a bodyguard.  So…..Anastasia’s bodyguard parked the car in an underground garage and then took a walk outside…. probably to have a smoke.  He left Anastasia unprotected.

As Anastasia relaxed in the barber chair, two men, with scarves covering their faces, rushed in to the shop.  They shoved the barber out of the way, and fired at Anastasia.

After the first volley of bullets, Anastasia allegedly lunged at his killers.  “ARRGGGGHHHHH.”  (He probably said.)  Or maybe  “@#$%#$%%*@@!!! ARRRGGGGHHHHH.”

Anyway, the stunned Anastasia had actually attacked the gunmen’s reflections in the wall mirror of the barber shop. The gunmen continued firing and Albert Anastasia finally fell to the floor, dead.  As a doornail.    His assailants still looked fetching in their scarves, I might add.

His murder generated a tremendous amount of public interest and sparked a high profile police investigation. No one was ever charged in this case.

Over time, speculation on who killed Anastasia has centered on Profaci crime family mobster Joe Gallo, the Patriarca crime family of Providence, Rhode Island, and certain drug dealers with the Gambino family.  Who put the hit on?  The likes of you and I will probably never know.  It is better that way.  I think.

The strangest thing…. the Libra Horoscope for that particular day read:  Expect big surprises today.  You may get a visit from unexpected guests.  Things may not appear as they really are.   This is probably not the best time to make any big decisions.  Probably not the best day for a haircut.  (New York Post)

Food can explain a lot in life.   Or maybe not…..

On getting old…..

Cheddar cheese that has been ripened for six months is considered “mild.” Seven months to a year of ripening makes “sharp” cheddar, and two years worth of aging yields an “extra sharp” product.

It is good… or bad… to be versatile…

During WWII, Tootsie Rolls were added to soldiers’ rations thanks to their durability in all weather conditions.

More slander against white pasty foods….  discrimination is never good….

Despite the well-known urban legend, if a bird ingests uncooked rice it will not explode.

Say it isn’t so Godiva….  you can’t always trust your senses…..

So-called white chocolate isn’t chocolate in the technical sense — it is comprised of cocoa butter, sugar, and milk, but no actual chocolate.

You boycotted these for nothing….  french fries and The Dixie Chicks…..

The “french” in french fries actually describes the way the spuds are sliced, not their country of origin.

Some times things seem much bigger than they really are….

There is one strand of corn silk for each kernel on an ear of corn.

You may have blamed the deer… alas ….  we all make mistakes….

A horn worm can eat an entire tomato plant by itself in one day!

And off topic…
Holy Hot Dogs….

Only one breed of dog is mentioned by name in the Bible: the Greyhound. (Proverbs 30:29-31).

Dog Races in the Bible, I guess.

The way up and the way down are one and the same. – Heraclitus

Oh.  You know me.  I have this big interest in knowing where “sayings” came from.

Like any of them.   Wet behind the ears.  He kicked the can.  She found the kitten’s mittens.  The last one… I just made up.  But nonetheless.

One that I’ve always liked to say is…   “Oh.  Just you mind your own beeswax.”

Now, I have read that “Mind your own beeswax” was a phrase used by women in the colonial period.  Hard-working women, no doubt.  There was no electric back in the day… hence all the candles.  And… unless you were stinking rich, you had to make your very own candles.

Women would  stand around together…. next to the fire stirring the wax from the bee’s endeavors.  Now…. it wasn’t like a big bunch of the women from the community.  Nope.  They all lived on farms… far away from one another.

It would be more like a bunch of sisters from the same farm.  So……they would stand around stirring the wax.  But…. they had to be careful not to let the wax or fire burn their huge billowing cotton dresses or long, long, locks of hair.

So when one of them would comment on the job another one was doing…. they’d look up from their wax pot…. and say emphatically….. OH!  Heaven’s to Mergatroid.   Just you mind your own beeswax.”  (Okay, again, I made the Mergatroid thing up…. but I have researched all the other stuff.)

But now it appears, this theory has been blown out of the water.

By none other than…. Cavemen.

So.  Jump back about 7,000 years or so.  It appears Cavemen had a bit of problems with holes in their teeth. Not from donuts or chocolate milk.  Not likely.  They were real Neanderthals when it came to their chompers.  Chewing on leather and rocks and sticks and things… to make tools.  And … as we know today… cavities can be excruciating.

There is new evidence which suggests that prehistoric man used a surprisingly sophisticated technique to deal with the pain: Dental fillings. A team of scientists in Italy has identified a 6,500-year-old cracked tooth repaired with beeswax, suggesting that our early ancestors knew a thing or two about dental work.

So… when they would walk out of Dr. Thubs office after being packed with the waxy filling… the kind, albeit hairy….. dentist would call out…  “Now… just you mind your own beeswax.”

And there you have it.  Phraseology.

But.  Which ever way it goes… whichever version turns out to be true… it confirms what I’ve know all along.

No matter who we are… we all should be keeping our own attention…. on our own fatty acids.

I think that everybody has a right to their own thoughts, their own feelings and their own private moments, if they want them. – K. Heighl

Today is Victoria Claflin’s birthday.  Born on a Sunday, in 1838.  Her birthplace was the rural town of Homer… which is in Licking County, Ohio.

Have you ever heard of her?  Well, Victoria was a real spit-fire, I will tell you that much right now.

Here is what I think about Victoria.  At the very deepest inner-core of her being…… was a woman highly concerned with freedom, human rights.  Her life seemed dedicated to  overcoming the barriers which stood in the way of those things.

She was the first woman to run for President in the United States of America.  Yep.  She ran in 1872, under the Equal Rights Party.  Her running mate was none other than Frederick Douglass.  It is not known for sure how many votes she actually garnered.  But she was faced with much resistance.

One thing… I can assure you…… none of this was covered in my American History classes, in grade school, even high school, and no… not college either.  Hmmmph.

Okay, as I said, Victoria was something.   What a life she had… from early childhood all the way until her dying day.  My life has certainly never been this interesting… and I doubt it ever will.  I am milktoast.  She was spicy enchiladas.

Some notable citations concerning her life….

She was an American leader of the woman’s suffrage movement.

She was married three times.  To Canning Woodhull (divorce), Colonel James Harvey Blood(divorce), and finally to John Biddulph Martin (his death).

Victoria Woodhull was an advocate of free love, by which she meant the freedom to marry, divorce, and bear children without government interference.

She was the first woman to start a weekly newspaper

Woodhull was an activist for women’s rights and labor reforms.

Together with her sister, she was the first woman to operate a brokerage firm on Wall Street

By age 11, she had only three years of formal education, but her teachers found her to be extremely intelligent. She was also a clairvoyant and medium at a very early age.

Her dad was a huckster.  He insured the family’s rotting gristmill quite heavily.  It mysteriously caught fire there in that little town of Homer.     When he tried to get compensated by insurance, his arson and fraud shenanigans were discovered; and he was run off by a group of town vigilantes.

Oh… her life story goes on and on in a thousand different little spins.

Colorful character.  Strong woman.  She was very much ahead of her time.

Late in life, she moved to England.  She died on June 9, 1927 at Norton Park in Bredon’s Norton, Worcestershire, England near Tewkesbury, England, United Kingdom.

Now this account falls short of even the Reader’s Digest Version.  What a dance ticket she had.

What interests me the most is her personal constitution.  What makes people like this tick the way they tick?

It amazes me.  People like this amaze me.

And.

It all makes me wonder.

Stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.  – Ray Bradbury

A lot of people wrote in about yesterday’s post.  The general comments fell in the lines of “it just didn’t make sense” or “I don’t get it.”  That sort of thing.  A few people asked if I was feeling okay….

Am I losing my marbles?  Have I fallen off my rocker?  Wading toward the deep end?  One sandwich short of a full and complete picnic lunch?  Well, I hope not.

But yesterday, I was simply having a difficult time putting my finger on “it”….. if you will.  I couldn’t quite make up my mind, or find clarity, on anything.  From the very mundane, to the lofty.

Seems I’ve felt this way  for a few days now.  Something is not sitting right in my little carton of eggs… or my basket of apples.  I am on the edge of the rim of the verge of something.   Maybe the Autumn Equinox is making the air molecules slow down and be thick.  I don’t know. It merely feels like Cream of Mushroom Soup everywhere around me.

To be honest, sometimes it appears that I am just going through the motions.  I don’t really feel like doing the actual motions with all my motion-doing-abilities.  So… I simply go through them.  Clunkety-Thunk.

And that is the all and the all of it. I don’t like it when this happens.  But there it is. Like a spinning top, but in slow motion.

The world is a large place.  The universe even bigger than that.     Multidimensional and multifaceted.

And when you look out on to the horizon, the world seems very flat.  Yet, you know in your heart… it is not.  A big bunch of mushroom soup, I tell you.

“Reality is merely an illusion, although a very persistent one” – Albert Einstein

There is a troupe of majestic animal trainers.  They spend Thursdays and Mondays around campfires, and roast marshmallows until all hours of the night.

The little group plays harmonicas.  Wilma Dowelbo is their leader.  Yes. Wilma the Leader of the Majestic Animal Trainers.  She now plays the trumpet. But not by choice.

A government agency investigated the bodacious troupe.  Her harmonicas were viewed through a microscope… and confiscated.  The Agency… Agency 511….  were nothing more than dense authorities with unlikely, startling interpretations of most everything.  They wore gray suits.

As they carted her favorite harmonica collection out of sight… Wilma called after them…”Sirs.  You have foolish toes.  And certainly there is nothing more than bats in your belfry.”

Just then, in the long-away distance, a wise old man tackled the zookeeper.

And at that exact moment…. a very large butterfly landed in the wilting soybeans.  It wore three very tiny pairs of Chuck Taylor’s.  One pair black.  One white.  One red.

The funny thing is… they were all double-knotted.  All of them.

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And there you have it.

All of the events are factual and truly occurred…

But not until the day after tomorrow.

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“We’re being taken for a ride again.” – The Talking Heads, Stop Making Sense

I am not an inventor.  I don’t have that particular circuit connected to any wires… in my brain.  I wish I did.

Inventors are an amazing lot, aren’t they?  Oh sure, there is the whole list of usual suspects.  The ones we know and love the best.  The Thomas Alva Edison’s, the Alexander Graham Bell’s.  Benjamin Franklin, Karl Benz, Eadweard Muybridge, Louis Pasteur, Eli Whitney, The Wright Boys, and on and on.

Now me…. I don’t have that punch card.  I am the person with the plastic spray can cap, which is duck taped to the end of a yardstick, and then carefully mounted with a tornado of bungee cords…. at the end of a broom handle.  And as I am struggling to balance my newly “devised” contraption while trying to get that “something” from above my reach (hence the new tool)…. someone saunters up behind me and says…”Polly. Why don’t you just step up on that milk crate right there?”

Oh Blast IT anyhow. Confounded innovation.   Foiled…… once AGAIN.

But… a lot of inventors in history have gone mostly unnoticed.   Think about all of our stuff…. around us… right now.   Somebody, at some point in time, thought of a better way.  And then devised it.

Some of it seems so very fundamental.  But someone thought of it first.   Oh, you say.  don’t reinvent the wheel.  And I  say to that … EXACTLY!

How about the first shelter?  The first big palm brush propped up against a stick to block the wind, or the rain?  Or… how about a sharpened stick for a spear?  Fire? Levers?   …… The iPad?

Okay, I jumped ahead just a bit. But you get the point.

So, to all of those brain-mavens out there… and the ones who have long passed.. I extend a heart-felt-and-whopping-big thank you.

Without you… I’d be sitting naked in the pitch dark.  Outdoors.  Eating bark.   Not typing this.

I love inventors.

 “I’m more interested in what I discover than what I invent”  – Paul Simon

I learn something new every day.

Today.

Don’t hit eight foot long fluorescent light bulbs with a hammer.

Don’t put the chicken sandwich at the edge of the counter and walk away.  A dog may be hiding… in wait.

Don’t run with scissors.  All those mothers weren’t kidding.

“When the student is ready. . . the lesson appears.” – Gene Oliver

There are times when things simply appear differently to me.

What ever that “thing” is……    I will see, or hear, or taste it… a thousand times or more.  Yet, every once in a great while… it just seems different.  Somehow.

Maybe I am more aware.  Maybe less.

It makes no difference.  But.. … .  … I like when this happens.

I truly believe there are dimensions around us that we cannot perceive.  I think this is true, for most of us… for most of the time.

Take for instance, the incredibly miniscule.  To the naked eye, we can not see the electrons spinning wildly around the clumped up protons and neutrons.  But there they are, at this very moment, moving at the speed of light.  Scientifically, we’ve been able to figure this one out.  Smart humans.

But consider perhaps, if we are (in fact), the very miniscule part of someone else’s much larger existence.  Who knows.

Today I saw some things that made me wonder about the all and all of it.

And then I walked past this leaf for the 1,000th time… and this is what I saw.  It sealed the deal.

So.  I don’t know what more to say about that.  I know there are the skeptical and even the cynical.  But really.  Who could possibly say it isn’t possible?  Who could know it all?

For me… I like the notion of finally seeing the things that I never knew could be there.  I like not knowing.  The unimaginable helps me… simply… to believe.

“It’s not the towering sail, but the unseen wind that moves the ship” – Old Proverb

On September 18, 1957, Elmer Dugall claims he was abducted by Aliens from his home in Owens County, Iowa.  He was taken aboard a UFO, and transported to the Planet Pawzania, in the Galaxy of Tunafileaish.

He was experimented on for hours, and then placed in a prison where he had to clean the Queen’s Ears every hour.  Her name was Tabbiana.  She resembled a very, very large cat.

These days, Elmer still resides on his corn farm in Owen County.  Elmer has three dogs, Jed, Buster, and Skipper.    He does not have any cats.

In fact, he is deathly afraid of them.

While Elmer cannot prove the validity of his story, friends and family say that he smells oddly of ear wax.

“Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible player” – Albert Einstein