YES, I AM STILL HERE peeking out my window on Main Street, and you can stop holding your breath if you were worried this column would be critical of the President.
It isn’t.
Instead, this column will laud the organizers of the Ultimate Fighting Championship event which is planned as a tribute to America’s 250th birthday.
The event will tastefully be held on the White House lawn. Perhaps you’ve seen photos of the giant ‘cage’ being erected for the bouts. I do not know if the contestants’ names have been released yet but I am sure they are the best and most famous in the business.
Unfortunately, progress on the new ballroom has been interrupted.
If you go to the UFC event, you will have a marvelous chance to purchase a souvenir coin. The cheapest coin sells for $249.99. Reduced from $250 for this event only.
If you really want a nice souvenir you can buy the topflight coin for a mere $11,999.99 reduced from $12,000 also for this event only. I have been assured that the President does not personally benefit from the sale of the coins.
A patriotic plus — the image of our President is on every single coin, no matter whether it is the cheapest or the topflight golden one. There might be a strict limit on how many souvenir coins you can buy. That hasn’t been announced yet. For a small untraceable cash consideration an exemption might be available from the coin’s honoree.
We Americans really do go ‘all out’ for special occasions, don’t we!
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ANIMAL CRACKERS. Possibly resulting from all the recent rains, flies are a real nuisance this year. I’ve tried many things, but the best I have found is to just stay indoors until October.
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THE GOOD EARTH. There is a place in England where wild plant seeds are stored in order that the species will not go extinct.
The place is called the Millennium Seed Bank, and it holds some 2.5 billion seeds from 40,000 species that were gathered from 190 countries.
The seeds are first dried, then stored in subfreezing condition. They are estimated to remain viable for hundreds of years, although — of course— no one actually knows if after a looooong time they will come back to life if needed.
This place is a couple of decades old, going back to a time when some perfessers recognized that loss of habitat plus natural disasters (like fires or floods or predators) were wiping out some species.
I truly hope that the perfessers are not storing poison ivy or briars or sweetgum tree seeds. Noah blew our chance to permanently get rid of some nuisances. Instead, he let houseflies and skeeters come aboard the Ark. I could write more about this but I’m sure you wouldn’t be interested.
Seriously, every now and then you read about some cave up in the Siberian permafrost where some seeds of a long-extinct species are found in the belly of a frozen mastodon and are able to sprout plants anew.
Stories such as: Archeologists digging at King Herod’s site in the Middle East found a buried jar containing a handful of seeds of the Judean Date Palm, a tree which had been extinct for more than a thousand years. The seeds were estimated to be 2,000 years old.
Some perfessers somewhere were able to germinate one of the male seeds, and that survivor then gave them a half-dozen more seeds, some of which were female. Can’t explain.
Since then lots of Judean Date Palms have been grown. People everywhere are once again able to enjoy Judean dates.
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MORE THINGS I LEARNED from opening an email: Everyone has a photographic memory; some just don’t have film.
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WORD GAMES. I love oxymorons. “Journalists were unable to get an Accurate Estimate of the size of the crowd at the White House cage fighting event.”
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HE SAID: “You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.” Mahatma Gandhi, activist
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SHE SAID: “Somewhere out in this audience may even be someone who will one day follow my footsteps, and preside over the White House as the president’s spouse. I wish him well!” Barbara Bush, 1st Lady
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SWEET DREAMS, Baby
