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Mad Tv – The price is right 1986

very funny

Frank Caliendo – Impressions

. . .when you train your dog?

A friend in my past had a very obedient and well-trained Australian sheep dog. She did everything my friend told her to do, including turn away when he ate, leave the room, or drop something that was in her mouth.

Having smaller dogs, whose behavior, however errant, is at least "small," I decided my next dog would be as trained as if he were a guide dog for the blind.

Since he seemed inclined to carry anything and everything in his mouth, be it my cell phone, a credit card, money anyone’s pockets, or important papers (and some unmentionable things–I have a cat, also), I decided the first rule of obedience would be for him to drop whatever he decided to pick up, immediately, on my command.

Just saying the word "drop" seemed to have little or no effect, so I decided to reinforce the idea with a treat. "Drop" and a treat began to work and soon the word elicited the proper action–he let go of what was in his mouth and I would fetch him a doggie cookie.

I was proud of my work and began to feel like the "Dog Whisperer" but it was not long before the whole thing backfired and I became the trained one.

I don’t know when the dog figured this out but the usual scene is now he searches and seeks for something to carry around and bring to me in exchange for a treat. It can be anything his little legs and mouth can reach with nothing excepted. He stands up and reaches into purses, bags, trash cans, and spends most of his time listening and watching the panorama of floor from his 6 inch height.

Before something even hits the floor, he is on it, has it, and is ready to exchange it for his treat. In fact, if anyone drops something small, like a contact lens, or an earring post, I just tell them to give the dog a second and he will locate it for us and we can pick it up.

The point is he educated himself to teach me this trick. He taught me to exchange anything he finds for a treat.

My marriage to language began with Sister Maxentia of the Blood of the Crown of Thorns in second grade. She was extremely old and extremely fat. Her black and blue gowns and veils added to her size and the giant sail boat like starched linen on her head accentuated her age. This white headpiece itself was also veiled and draped in blue. Given my knowledge of age now, she was probably in her late nineties and despite her frequent dozing she managed to control over 100 second graders.

Sometimes if she slept too long we took it upon ourselves to wake her from slumber especially when she snored. Her size, age, or disability prevented her from easily removing herself and her garments from the chair. The males always were seated in front of the girls and it fell upon the four boys closest to her to assist her when she wanted to stand or move. My surname begins with B and I was usually one of the four. Two would take a hand and two would go behind and push parts and draperies until she was up. She always stood to teach us diagramming of sentences and this Sister of the Order of the Most Perpetual Pain and Agony of Jesus on the Cross sparked my love affair with language, languages, all language, spoken, written, prose, verse, and structure; a love of words and why they are.

The faculty at St. Azarius the Beheaded Roman Catholic Children’s School dedicated themselves to language in all its forms. In third grade I was introduced to Latin and in fourth grade to German. In fifth it was Italian and by then I saw and heard the connections of language and languages.

Nary a day has gone by that I have not researched or investigated or at least questioned some word or its origin. I have observed that like people or even nature, the languages of the world are more connected than they are not. Even “dead” languages are connected to the words on this page.

In college it was more than natural I majored in English language and its uses, and the history of the words became my hobby. I continued studying foreign languages as well although few languages are foreign to me, I always thought. After college I flew the world as a flight attendant thus sharpening my skills at learning new languages or new words in known languages. I also used my free time to dabble and learn of little used dialects. Some of these are so removed from the parent they constitute an independent language from the parent, Sicilian an example of a child emancipated from its Italian parent.

People have scant knowledge of the intricacies and reasons of language. By virtue of standing upright man connected the larynx to the lungs. The good part of this change is the ability to speak because words come from controlled movement of air but the bad part is man is one of few creatures able to suffocate by something lodged in the windpipe. That is why a dog can bark with his mouth full of food and we risk choking to death. While that biological knowledge might be known, most people are surprised when I say language originated from grunts and groans; thus most of our basic need words, regardless of the language, are one syllable having been born of a simple sound. You, me, they, and them, eat, drink, food, talk, walk, run, jump, and fall; help, hurt, heal, and pray; he, she, him, and her; book, look, took, crook, and cook; fear, fire, fail and no, yes, sure, when, how, what, where, and who; fat, thin, old, young, live, dead, sleep, bed, brain, think, eye, ear, nose, mouth, and teeth. Most of our daily speak is in one syllables.

Sometimes people are surprised to hear that languages like Hawaiian still exist and are actually spoken. Some know not that Tagalog is the official language of the Philippines, this having evolved from a “pidgin” language over many centuries. Pidgin means a language started as a bastard language and becoming common but unique to be a language of its own. The word “pidgin” has its origins from the word “business.” English colonists referred to native speakers whose pronunciation of “business” sounded like “pidgin.”

Language so engages me that I read every cereal box or ketchup bottle top to bottom. While language might be my bride, my mistress is electronics so instruction booklets and manuals are often my bedside reading, be it a one page insert on inserting batteries or a sixty page DVD manual.

With the plethora (which is the origin of our plenty, fill, full, and plentiful) of electronics and their distribution worldwide, a favored pastime of mine is to search through an electronic manual and program the item into the various languages offered via the menu. While people enlist me almost daily to program their set tops or recorders or even their cell phones, I frustrate them by leaving them with the menus in French or Italian.

I have noticed that in the last few years the amount of language choices has grown particularly in the area of DVDs which by their nature allow so much information to be stored on them that an obvious element would be a variety of languages for subtitles packaged in the same box. It might be a small world but for film makers it is quite complex and logic mandates the more languages on the DVD the more it will sell and with small cost to the maker by adding the extra languages.

Languages like Italian, Spanish, German, Russian, French, Portuguese, and Greek are pretty standard. I recently noticed that some less familiar languages have cropped up like Swedish, Albanian, Swahili, Arabic, Polish, Japanese, Icelandic, and Hungarian. Some people might think these languages are either not often spoken or their speakers also comprehend English, but nevertheless I have watched their proliferation and availability.

When I purchased my newest Sony DVD player, I noticed two pages were dedicated to the languages and the codes the unit contained. The book explains that if the DVD offers the language it must be properly coded into the player since only the most common languages are already set within the chip.

Perhaps I missed Sister Maxentia’s lesson on pride because I did indeed pride myself on my knowledge of world language but Sony has humbled me into shame. Beyond the languages of I have mentioned, there are languages in the Sony index indicating countries that even I did not consider spoke a language of its own. Of course, I had not ever considered those same speakers would have the desire to see a film in their own tongue with the proliferation of American entertainment and language but here are a few of the choices the Sony system offers:

Afrikaans, Bulgarian, Bengali and Bangla, Tibetan, Corsican, Czech, Welsh, Basque, Persian, Finnish, Fiji, Irish, Scots Gaelic, Hindi, Croatian, Yiddish, Javanese, Greenlandic, Latvian and Lettish, Malagasy, Maori, Macedonian, Moldavian, Burmese, Maltese, Nepali, Somali, Sudanese, Tonga, and Zulu.

Quite odd indeed and much to my surprise those are the ones I somewhat identify to their mother land. The booklet, itself in eight languages, offers codes for nearly 200 languages and I wonder what Sister Maxentia of the Blood of the Crown of Thorns and her other Sisters of The Most Perpetual Pain and Agony of Jesus on the Cross might think. After all, they had a hard time convincing most of the boys they needed to know Latin which even they acknowledged was a dead language.

I wonder how those ancient sisters would have diagramed sentences in Catalan, Esperanto, Faroese or Frisian. What geography, concurrent with learning about Jesus, might they have included in the lesson plan for Hausa, Interlingua or Interlingue, Inupiak, Kannada, Occitan, Pashto and Pushto, Quechua, Sangho, Tamil, Telugu, Tigrinya, Tatar and Twi, Volapuk, Wolof, Xhosa, and Yoruba.

Surely even they would have been stumped and asked why. Two language offerings on the code stood out to me as being more than unusual or quizzical although I am sure Sister Maxentia would delight to see them.

The Sony Manual for the five DVD system, compact style, even offers a code for native speakers wishing to watch films in their own language of not only Sanskrit but also Latin.

Odd. By the way “odd” technically means pointed upward, from the notion that a pointed vertical object is a triangle. A triangle has three sides and three is one left after two, hence indivisible by two, which made it peculiar, so it is “odd” as in odd man out.

One more “by the way.” If anyone knows anything about some of the more unusual or obscure languages listed in this article, please add your comments about them. Thanks.

This is Doris Eaton Travis who will soon be 104. She is the last surviving Ziegfeld Girl and still dances better than most people ever could dance. She performs yearly at “Broadway Cares,” a fundraiser held in New York City. Below is the link.

See Doris Dance! – ‘Century Girl – 100 Years in the Life of Doris Eaton Travis, Last Living Star of the Ziegfeld Follies’

Yesterday is history, tomorrow is mystery, our gift is today, this moment, and that’s why it is called the present. This is my adaptation of a quote by Eleanor Roosevelt.

I believe we only have the second we are in and if we focus on that, all the other past and future seconds become negligible and they lose their power over us.

Guilt is thinking about the past and worry is thinking about the future. Look at any other living creature and see how much time it spends in the past or the future. I was once at the Honolulu Zoo where brightly feathered chickens roam free. I watched a mother with about six babies. She was watching her babies, in particular one who kept falling down, always in the back of the line. She would run to this little chick and encourage it to keep moving. Whether she saw the 200 pound tortoise or new she was in its enclosure, I don’t know but I saw the giant, slow, lumbering creature following, keeping an eye on the little, apparently ill chick.

I thought they were primarily vegetarians but within about five minutes the tortoise had the little chick in its mouth. The mother ran back and created a ruckus but the tortoise was fast and when the little chick, still showing from the mouth of the tortoise, stopped peeping the mother went and tended to her other healthy chicks, just as if nothing ever happened.

That is living in the moment and although I don’t think human beings should disregard the past or the future but they should spend less time living there and more time living the now.

Many religions and cultures adhere to this thought but we as individuals don’t. In the Christian bible Jesus says, and again, I take liberty in quoting:

Don’t worry about what you will wear tomorrow or what you will eat. Look at the birds of the air, are they worried? Look at the lilies of the field. Solomon in all of his glory did not look as beautiful as any one of them and tomorrow they will be cut down with grass and turned into the fire. Don’t you think you are looked after more than all of them? So worry not about tomorrow, for the moment has trouble of its own.

There is an actress whose name is Anne Jeffreys. In the 1950’s she and her husband, Robert Sterling, appeared on the “Topper” TV show as the ghosts, Marion and George Kirby. They were a constant presence for Cosmo Topper, the only person who could see them and they were a constant source of trouble.

Unfortunately Mr. Sterling died last year but Miss Jeffreys remains youthful and extremely beautiful. Normally one might caveat that clause with “for her age” because simple math tells you Miss Jeffreys’ approximate age–if she was an adult star in the 1950’s, it’s not hard to make a rough reckoning of her age.

If you go to the IMDB.com website and read her biography, you might find out your cyphering is not so accurate. Her bio reveals Kurt Weill chose her for one of his shows and Cole Porter enjoyed her singing. Go to

http://us.imdb.com/name/nm0420331/

and figure it out for yourself. But be sure to look at the photos of Miss Jeffreys right there and taken within the last two or three years. Some are close ups, some are full body and all are stunning. She has the beauty and presence of someone half her age. She defies everything you might believe about age and beauty and it is clear this woman remains youthful, vibrant, and beautiful with little surgical intervention–little as in her contemporaries say so little as to amount to zero.

Miss Jeffreys is an example of beauty that is ageless and timeless. Thank you, Miss Jeffreys, for your example, your artistry, and for being the most beautiful woman over 70 I have ever seen.

As I promised, much of this blog would be about the view from my window. Yesterday’s view was a homeless woman and today’s is the complete antithesis to that–in two words, the view is Jennifer Lopez.

Yup, as I write this she is in the next apartment filming her new video and during the daylight hours, she stands across the street, walking back and forth into a store, while being filmed.

So how is that for opposites. If you would like your own picture of what I see, please join and I will send you a photo of what is today’s view–Jennifer Lopez.

If you have ever worked with one or more equals on a project, you have collaborated. In the case of musical theatre, one often collaborates because by its very nature, musical theatre requires more than one person, at least two, and often three or more, just to create a show or part of it.

There is the lyrist, although in more recent times that person is called the lyricist, and there is the composer, the one who writes the melody for those lyrics. The third person is the book writer, the one who actually creates the story you are watching. This person writes the play from which the lyric writer draws much of his or her song. If you were to compare “Auntie Mame,” the play, with “Mame,” the musical, you would find the lyrics were already written by the playwright long before the lyric writer collaborated with a composer to create the musical.

But this is not how to make a musical but rather a lesson in how to treat people around you. Recently I collaborated for nearly a year with a man, the two of us hoping to create a musical from an old movie.

I was the book writer and he was the lyricist/composer. We had our differences, one of the major ones being spelling. He could not and I am excelent at it. (Just kidding, it’s “excellent”)

The organization under whose auspices we create has a name, the last word of which is “Theatre.” This collaborator argued back and forth with the administration that he is free to spell “theatre” with the “er” at the end of the word. They argued back that since it was the name of their workshop, he should please use the correct spelling in his advertising for “our,” the collaborators’, upcoming presentation of this work.

Sick of his inept and horribly misspelled defenses, I wrote him and appropriately called him an idiot. His response to me was to remind me of every personal bit of information I shared with him, confided in him, trusted to him, and mentioned in passing to him. He wrote these things back to me with a vengeance and betrayal, even treachery, that only an enemy could do.

Now you ask why am I writing this? I write it to remind you to stay within the box when it comes to criticism of anything or anyone, anytime, anywhere.

When you need to offer your opinion, at another’s request or because you can’t keep your big mouth shut one more second, keep your words to the point at hand and do not finger point about what is unrelated to the issue or was offered up to you as a confidant.

When Aunt Mary asks if you like the sweater she gave you last year, if you must be truthful, tell her no, or yes, but don’t tell her you did not like what she gave you the year before and for sure don’t tell her she is too fat and absolutely never shout out what she revealed to you privately and in confidence, like she finds Madonna’s breasts succulent, and now you yell in front of the whole family that Aunt Mary is a lesbian.

And so Greg, that is precisely what you did. And through it all I never uttered a word about what I really think about you or words you spoke to me about yourself, your doubts, your life, all said with the assumption or at least the belief that I would never throw them back at you like a weapon.

So remember, all, when one confides in you, there it stays. It’s bad enough people tend to blab secrets to others around, but by all means keep them to yourself when you are miffed with the person who trusted you.