Which twin has the Toni?
by Bryce Martin

Or, which quip is mine?
Is it:

1. On a clear day you can see Claire Trevor

2. (regarding Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden) The Mork and Mindy of radical chic

3. He gives diarrhea a new egress

4. He has delusions of adequacy

5. (regarding Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker) children of a lesser god

6. After getting caught in an army of lies, as a general rule I received corporal punishment in a private place.

7. He's such a liar he'd lie when the truth would be better

8. (Candy, to anyone, at the Bonanza Bar, Argus, Calif., C. 1965) Hang it in yer ear, Fluffy

9. Pop culture is an oxymoron

10. Oxymoron is probably an oxymoron.

Unfortunately for me, I guess you could say, it is No. 6. Quipping is something I'm still working to improve after all these years.

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I am not well envoweled
by Bryce Martin

I found out that I am not well envoweled but that I might be a monkey's uncle, or something close to one.

This all from a site called isthisyour.name:

Etymology:

Forename:
Origin: English (Root: Brice)
Meaning: Son of Rice

Surname:
Origin: (Origin Scottish) This name may be derived from the Latin martius, warlike, from Mars, the God of War. In the Gaelic, mor is great, and duin, a man. Morduin, a chief, a warrior.

Top 5 Facts:

1. How well envoweled is Bryce Martin? 27% of the letters are vowels. Of one million first and last names we looked at, 87.6% have a higher vowel make-up. This means you are poorly envoweled.
2. Backwards, it is Ecyrb Nitram... nice ring to it, huh?
3. In Pig Latin, it is Ebrycay Artinmay.
4. What is Bryce Martin in binary code? 01000010 01110010 01111001 01100011 01100101 00100000 01001101 01100001 01110010 01110100 01101001 01101110.
5. People with this first name are probably: Male. So, there's a 98% likelihood you sweat just thinking of the price of shaver blades.

3 Things You Didn't Know:

1. Bryce Martin, what is your Power Animal? Bryce Martin, based on your name and a process known to only three people on the planet, we can tell you that your Power Animal is the: Cynomolgus Monkey.
2. Your 'Numerology' number is 2. If it wasn't bulls**t, it would mean that you are supportive, diplomatic, analytical, and play well with others. A team-player, you seek peace and harmony in a group.
3. According to the US Census Bureau°, 0.016% of US residents have the first name 'Bryce' and 0.2778% have the surname 'Martin'. The US has around 300 million residents, so we guesstimate there are 133 'Bryce Martin's.

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Is lead the killer it's made out to be?
By Bryce Martin

Galena is the name of my home town. Galena means lead. My home town had the largest lead smelter in the world, starting around a hundred years ago.

"Long-term exposure to lead dust poses a health risk, particularly to young children."

I've heard that.

A killer tornado blasted the old home front over the past weekend. In the region, typical summer dust devils traditionally blew dust off mountains of mining waste, known by locals as chat piles.

We breathed it.

Still do.

The most recent tornado destruction in the region, and perhaps deadliest of all, that fairly well put Picher, Okla., to waste for good, was making news in stories and headines nationwide and alarming EPA people as to what extent it had stirred up ancient lead dust to wreak its own kind of havoc in the wake of front-end tornado damage.

I would surely imagine that breathing and taking into the body by other means elements of lead ore would be harmful to the body and, as most anything else, there are always exceptions. The exceptions might explain why at least three people from Galena that I am aware of have lived to be 100 years old, and many more have lived well into their 90s.

While I would not expect research later on to indicate that breathing lead dust over a long period of time is beneficial to a human being, I have to wonder if it is truly the menace it is made out to be by today's standards, where even a flake of lead paint on a child's toy causes an uproar.

My Galena is in Kansas. Other Galenas exist in Missouri, Illinois, and elsewhere, but mostly in the geologic lead belt that supplied lead ore turned into bullets for most of the rifle munitions used in World War II. Other Galenas have different names, such as Picher. There are, in fact, hundreds of towns not named Galena in roughly a six-state area that could have been thus named.

I knew her as Norma Thompson in the 1950s when she was my music teacher. She died at age 100 on October 20, 2003, in Oswego. With a zest for life, she taught vocal music appreciation and stressed such things as inflection and proper breathing while vocalizing. She didn't live all her wonderful years in Galena, but she was in the immediate region all that time, breathing in the times, if you will.

Questions remain after all these years. Why do some suffer and die from lead exposure and why do others just as touched go on to lead long and normal lives?

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Did McCain vote for Bush or did he not?
by Bryce Martin

Why does it have to be one of the two?

I imagine the truth is that John McCain did both. He voted for George Bush in 2000, but at a party later on, to appear cool to the sick left, he told Arianna Huffington he didn't and others overheard it.

In saying that I am in no way defending Huffington. Based on her track record, that would be impossible. Unless, you were one of the "sick left" that I noted, as she is.

The liberals really are a pathetic bunch of sick puppies. When I hear from certain TV pundits that recent victories by Barack Obama show that his stand on the fever-brained Rev. Wright proves that dip in the road is now behind him. Please. This is a democratic primary, please keep that in mind to aid any relevance. An apology from an ax-murderer would be sufficient, if that cretin was a democratic front-runner.

Just being a democrat automatically makes you upstanding to other democrats. This is the godless, anything-goes party. Liberal dems would back Hitler if they thought he could take Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Tell me that Obama is not defined by his association with the misguided Rev. Wright when it comes up in the general election, and Republicans, the ones who actually have a few scruples left, question the odd association between candidate and religious mentor. Tell me then -- Oh, pundits! -- that Obama has put that issue behind him. He can't put that issue behind him. It's part of who he is, a big part, and it's not good.

McCain, as undesirable and as big a phony in his own way as Obama, is not a choice, either. Democrats, though, always have a choice. Any democrat will do.

In a comment that a majority of Americans should be thinking and expressing out loud, I have only heard it voiced once when I heard Sean Hannity say he is surprised that Obama has even 25 percent of the democratic vote, much less the lead that he does enjoy. I can believe that from the democrats. I would hate to believe that for all America.


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Sure, this'll be my summer beach read
by Bryce Martin

Headline:

Barbara Walters discusses her candid autobiography

Aside from the old canard about how any life story would make an interesting read, I can't imagine anyone actually wanting to read Barbara Walter's autobiography. Nor can I conceive that a publisher would even consider the notion.

However, I also remember the other old canard about never underestimating the bad taste of our citizens. Kenny Rogers not being around much anymore has made me lose my edge on that one. After further consideration, Rogers might rightfully fall under the category of no taste.

Walters, a woman born in this country, who cannot speak English, and who was incensed by the Saturday Night Live segments that poked fun at "Barbara Wah-wah," is the female version of Regis Philbin. It's not so much that she has never accomplished anything noteworthy, it's that she has accomplished nothing. At least, not in the terms of reasonable noteworthiness.

To each his own, unfortunately.

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Titans bring out dart board again
by Bryce Martin

The Titans dart-chunkers are at it again.

Chris Johnson? Why pick an injury prone running back when it is not necessary? The Titans recently rid themselves of Chris Brown, a running back who could not stay healthy no matter what. Just show him some grid marks and he gets gimpy.

I realize by looking at past years that what looks like safe picks for teams sometimes turns instead to be disastrous picks. Still, if someone has not proven themselves in college why would you expect them to do so at the pro level? Wouldn't you want to pick someone based on what they have done, not what they might do?

And Vince Young needs some weapons, huh? Sure, let's steer away from the bigger problem. He needs an arsenal to overcome his inefficiencies. So, Titans talent stratego Mike Reinfeldt was asked (in a Tennessean article) if Young had any input regarding the draft:

“Obviously he is concerned with the process and its impacts and he may share his thoughts,” Reinfeldt said. “We listen to those thoughts, but at the same time we have guys that spend their whole lives out in the field going from school to school to school, watching endless hours of tape. This is their job; this is their profession.”

I guess this would explain why six of the seven picks last year are washouts, as easily predicted by this writer last year at this time. They quite obviously picked on potential last year instead of what was actually there. They're off to the same start this year.

Las Vegas would love these Titans pickers. You could build a town with them.

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A Ben Day artist on a lesser palette
by Bryce Martin


Our school newspaper was called the Bulldog Growl. I was somehow voted to assume duties as a class reporter for the Growl and our advisor, Mr. Paul Ferguson, designated me as the ben-day artist for the sheet.

On such occasions that my services were needed, a class runner would find me and I would be excused from whatever classroom I was partaking of knowledge to prepare me for life in the outside world some soon day, and I would join the crew in preparing a new issue. Mr. Ferguson would give me my art kit and tell me what holes he wanted me to fill with illustrations or cartoons. Other than specific details he ordered, such as doing a masthead overhaul, I was free to add my own cartoons or to design illustrations as I saw fit.

The ben-day tools included some small, square plastic plates. They had various sized, raised dot patterns on each. Once I made my drawing, I would decide what areas of it I wanted shaded. It was a technique to simulate the dot patterns used in the printing process for newspapers and magazines. If you looked at a printed photograph or even the artwork in a comic book, you would see it was all composed of tiny dots. The ben-day technique merely simulated that process. I would slide the chosen plate with the preferred dot pattern under the stencil carbon and reach for my burnisher. The burnisher looked like a probing tool a dentist might use. It had a rounded end that I rubbed over the drawing to get the dots to appear where I wanted them. I did the actual drawings with other similar tools.

My artwork was added in holes purposely left to help aid or illustrate a particular news or feature story or, as I mentioned, to fill up space, such as the use of a cartoon. The stories were typed with the ribbon removed so the bare keys could strike the stencil. With a typist doing that and me using my art tools it amounted to "cutting a stencil." I was a staff writer also, but all our typing for the stencil was done by a special typist. We turned our stories in for that typist. It took a special touch because, to offer just one example, if you typed too hard an o would not be an o but a solid circle. After the stencil was ready, someone ran copies from the mimeograph machine and others helped in assembling and stapling together the pages.

This "benday" word was so foreign to me and Mr. Ferguson spoke it so casually. I thought of India ink and of Egyptian words and contexts. After mind groping for clues and quickly exhausting those, I asked Mr. Ferguson what the name of the technique referred to. He said it was named for the man who invented it, a man named Ben Day. I thought he was kidding, of course, though I didn't know why. Some years later, I came to find out that indeed a Benjamin Day and his skill with dot patterns was the single driving force behind a popular new art movement.

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