Basketball is the most popular sport in the Republic of Lithuania.
The second-most popular sport in Lithuania? Would you believe it’s foraging for wild mushrooms?
From the Washington Post:
Hundreds of Lithuanians ran around with baskets and buckets Saturday in a southeastern pine forest.
Why you ask? It’s the national championship of wild mushroom picking – a competition always held on the last Saturday in September. . . .
A rainy, relatively warm summer created ideal conditions for the foraging festival in Lithuania, where forests cover more than 33 percent of the Baltic country and mushroom-hunting is considered the second-most popular sport after basketball.
“Walking between trees and looking for big brown mushrooms is a great way of spending a Saturday,” said Julius Sostakas, an IT engineer from Vilnius.
Lithuanian mushroom hunters
Mushrooms — fresh, dried, salted or marinated — are considered an essential element in Lithuanian cuisine, used in many dishes to add special flavor to meat, fish and potatoes.
More than four hundred edible varieties can be found in Lithuania’s forests, including edible boletus, slippery jacks, chanterelles, blewits and morels. . . .
A local team called Mushroom Nightmares won Saturday’s contest by delivering 58 kilograms (128 pounds) of mushrooms.
That has to be fake news – right?
Apparently not. You can’t always trust what you read in the Washington Post, but this story was on the Fox News website as well. So it’s the real deal.
* * * * *
I don’t know much about Lithuania. But based on ten minutes or so of Wikipedia research, it sounds like a pretty interesting place.
Lithuanians use a lot of funny expressions. For example:
1. Lithuanians don’t have a dirty mind . . . they have “curly thoughts” (garbanotos mintys).
2. Lithuanians won’t give you a lecture . . . they’ll “show you where legs grow from” (iš kur kojos dygsta).
3. Lithuanians won’t lie to you . . . they’ll “hang pasta on the ears” (kabinti makaronus).
4. Lithuanian kids don’t go to the bathroom . . . they “go and visit the dwarves” (eiti pas nykštukus).
5. A Lithuanian doesn’t go crazy . . . his or her “roof drives away” (stogas nuvažiuoja).
6. In Lithuania, there are no fights . . . just “clarifications of relationships” (aiškintis santykius).
7. A Lithuanian doesn’t talk crap . . . he or she simply “slices a mushroom” (grybą pjauna).
(Enough with the damn mushrooms already, Lithuanians!)
* * * * *
Growers of Mushroom was the one and only album released by the English rock group, Leaf Hound.
It is a very good album – I kid you not. If you ask me, its best song is the title track, which we’re featuring today on 2 or 3 lines.
Gemellology is the scientific study of twins and twinning. I’ve been an amateur gemellologist ever since I found out that I was going to be the father of twins.
My twin daughters are identical twins – that is, they developed from a single zygote, which split within days of fertilization and formed two embryos.
Fraternal twins develop from two different eggs, each of which is fertilized by a different sperm cell. (You learned about a very unusual kind of fraternal twins in the previous 2 or 3 lines.)
I’m sort of a twin snob. As far as I’m concerned, only identical twins are really twins. Fraternals (which are three times as common as identicals) are just siblings who happen to be born at the same time.
Identical twins married to identical twins
Identical twins may not be exactly the same genetically, but they are very similar – one study indicated that about one in every ten million nucleotides in the DNA of identical twins is different.
“Close enough for government work,” as we used to say when I worked for the federal government.
* * * * *
According to Webster, the definition of “quaternary” is “of, relating to, or consisting of four units or members.”
The term “quaternary marriage” is used to describe the marriage of a pair of identical twins to a second pair of identical twins.
When twins marry twins, the two couples often live in the same house, which saves money and makes taking care of the children and the chores much less stressful.
Think about it. Most married couples either divide up household duties, or take turns doing them. But someone living alone would have to do all chores by himself or herself, or pay someone to do them.
Another quaternary marriage
In a quaternary marriage, you have four people instead of two to share the chores (or split the cost of hiring someone to do the chores). That may largely explains why quaternary marriages are much less likely to end in divorce. After all, economics – in particular, the economic pressure that result from the need to provide care for small children – is a major reason why many marriages fail.
When quaternary marriages do fail, both couples usually split up. When twins marry twins, it’s rare for one couple to stay married if the other one splits up.
* * * * *
According to one scientist who has studied quaternary marriages, husband-wife pairs in such marriages rarely switch sexual partners.
That’s somewhat surprising, given the way men think.
Identical twins who married identical twins and had identical twins
Let’s say you have two male twins named Tom and Jack, who occasionally go out together and have a few drinks. Sooner or later, Tom and Jack are going to agree that Tom will go to Jack’s house and try to persuade Jack’s wife or girlfriend that he is Jack, not Tom – and vice versa.
I’m sure this happens all the time, but that you rarely hear about it because the wife or girlfriend usually doesn’t catch on.
Occasionally the deceitful twin gets caught. From a 2009 story in the Stamford (CT) Advocate:
[Jared Rohrig] was charged Friday with posing as his twin brother to trick a 25-year-old woman into having sex with him . . . .
(FYI . . . Jared Rohrig was a police office at the time.)
The unnamed woman told police that she . . . had been having a sexual relationship with Joe Rohrig since March, and on July 19 she talked on the phone with someone she believed was him and agreed to meet at his house, according to a search warrant.
When she arrived, she got into the hot tub with the Rohrig brother she believed was Joe, began kissing him and agreed to go to an upstairs bedroom with him.
But as they were having sex . . . she noticed something missing: the cowboy tattoo on Joe's left buttock was not there.
The woman “immediately began to cry and asked him where his tattoo went,” the warrant states. “The male replied that he had never had a tattoo and told her that she must have hooked up with his brother who had a tattoo.”
(Just one more reason why it’s a mistake to get a tattoo.)
Jared Rohrig allegedly told the woman that his brother, Joe, who had a steady girlfriend, did not want to meet her that day, but “he told me to go for it.”
Jared Rohrig
This kind of thing would never have happened if Jared and Joe had been married to or dating identical twin sisters.
You might think that if a man is attracted to one identical twin, he’s going to be tempted by her sister as well – right?
Probably not. If a male is of a mind to stray from the friendly confines of his marital bed, he’s probably going to be looking for a woman who is very different from his wife – not her doppelgänger.
I mean, what’s the point of sleeping with someone other than your wife if that someone is a dead ringer for your wife?
* * * * *
I spent some time searching for accounts of a female impersonating her identical twin sister in order to have sex with the sister’s husband or boyfriend, but I couldn’t find any.
That may be because that’s never happened. Or perhaps it’s because a man would never complain to the police if it did happen.
* * * * *
“He’s Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother” was written by Bobby Scott and Bob Russell, who were introduced by legendary songwriter Johnny Mercer. (Russell was suffering from cancer when the two met. He died only weeks after the Hollies released their recording of the song in the U.S., where it was a top ten hit.)
The song’s title was inspired by the famous slogan for Boys’ Town, which was coined by that orphanage’s founder, Father Flanagan.
The lines from “He’s Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother” that are quoted above seemed apropos given what happened after the unnamed woman who hooked up with Jared Rohrig noticed he didn’t have a tattoo on his left buttock.
Still lying about which twin he was, Jared tried to drive the woman home in his pickup truck. But he got hopelessly lost on the way.
That probably wouldn’t have happened if he had been Joe, who had previously visited her at her home several times.
Here’s “He’s Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother,” which features Sir Elton John on the piano:
According to Greek mythology, Castor and Pollux were fraternal twin brothers who had different fathers.
Castor was the mortal son of King Tyndareus and Queen Leda of Sparta. But Pollux was one of the immortals, because his father was Zeus – who had taken the form of a swan and seduced Leda after she had sex with her husband. (In some versions of the myth, that Zeus-Leda coupling also resulted in the birth of Helen of Troy.)
"Leda and the Swan" (Rubens)
Castor and Pollux got into a fight with two of their cousins over the ownership of a herd of cattle, and one of the cousins killed Castor with a spear. As the son of Zeus, Pollux didn’t have to worry about dying, but he was devastated by his brother’s death.
Zeus transformed the brothers into the two brightest stars in the constellation Gemini so they could be together forever.
* * * * *
The myth of Castor and Pollux illustrates the phenomenon of heteropaternal superfecundation – The term used to describe the fertilization of two or more eggs produced during the same cycle by sperm deposited by different fathers. (Homopaternal superfecundation is the term used to describe the fertilization of two or more eggs produced during the same cycle by sperm deposited during two separate acts of sexual intercourse by the same father . . . which is much less naughty.)
Statues of Castor and Pollux in Rome
Genetically, Castor and Pollux are only half-brothers. By contrast, the offspring of identical twins who marry identical twins are genetically as similar as siblings – but we consider them to be cousins.
* * * * *
Heteropaternal superfecundation is more common in animals such as cats and dogs than in humans for two reasons.
First, female cats and dogs routinely produce several eggs each time they ovulate (unlike human females).
Second, female cats and dogs are somewhat more receptive to having sex with multiple partners in a relatively short time span. (Human females – most of them, at least – are more discriminating.)
* * * * *
In 2015, a mother of twins went to court in New Jersey to force the man she said was the father of those twins to pay child support. When she admitted that she had had sex with another man at about the time that she became pregnant, the judge ordered a paternity test.
It turned out that her twins had two different fathers. So the man she had sued was ordered to pay child support for one twin but not the other one.
I’m guessing that a lot of instances of heteropaternal superfecundation go unnoticed.
After all, siblings don’t necessarily look that much like one another, and fraternal twins are just siblings who happen to be born at the same time.
The problem comes when there is a difference in the appearance of the twins that makes it obvious that the father of one isn’t the father of both.
Oops!
For example, imagine you have a white mother and a white father, and one of the twins looks a lot like Barack Obama looked like when he was a baby.
Lucy . . . you got some ‘splaining to do!
* * * * *
Stephen Stills’ “Change Partners” was released in 1971 on the Stephen Stills 2 album.
Its lyrics were apparently inspired by the country-club dances that Stills attended as a young man growing up in the South – dances where young women often danced with as many different partners as there were musical numbers performed during the course of the evening.
But some viewed the song as a metaphor for the constant comings and goings of the individual musicians who had at one constituted Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.
The recording features Jerry Garcia on pedal steel guitar.
If you don’t know the answer to that question, you obviously don’t have any children.
The only thing about babies that makes them tolerable is that they usually sleep a lot – like 15 or 16 hours a day.
I've never forgotten how depressed I was when my identical twin daughters stopped taking a morning nap.
They still took long afternoon naps and slept a good ten hours every night. But I needed that morning nap!
* * * * *
Speaking of identical twins . . .
In the last 2 or 3 lines, you learned about identical twin sisters from Cape Cod whose first babies were born less than 24 hours apart.
Today I’ve got another amazing story about Cape Cod twins.
Last November, Emily Peterson delivered twin sons at Cape Cod Hospital. Samuel was born at 1:39 am, followed a short time later by Ronan, who entered the world at 1:10 am.
The Peterson twins
That’s no typo, boys and girls.
You see, the Peterson twins were born on the night that Daylight Savings Time ended. Samuel was born 21 minutes before the end of Daylight Savings Time, while Ronan was born ten minutes after standard time went into effect and the clocks were rolled back an hour.
So Samuel was born first – but Ronan’s birth certificate makes it appear that he is 29 minutes older.
(I told you it was an amazing story. A-m-a-z-i-n-g!)
* * * * *
Today’s featured song was released in 1985 on Little Creatures, which was the biggest-selling studio album ever released by the Talking Heads.
My oldest son was two years old when I bought that album, and my twin daughters were born the year after the album was released. I played it to death back then – especially “Stay Up Late.”
Jack can stay up late whenever he wants
And when my first grandchild was born last year, “Stay Up Late” was one of the first songs I thought of.
* * * * *
The Talking Heads’ bass player, Tina Weymouth, is married to the band’s drummer, Chris Frantz. She gave birth to their first child – a boy – not long before the band started work on Little Creatures.
I have to think that their experiences as parents of a baby boy may have inspired some of the lyrics for “Stay Up Late,” which was written by Talking Heads frontman David Byrne:
Cute, cute little baby
Little pee pee, little toes
The song’s lyrics also reflect the fact that Byrne had no children at that time he wrote them:
I'm the last splash I have two wonderful daughters who just happen to be identical twins, so I’m always interested in reading stories involving twins.
My twins were married seven weeks apart. One of them had a baby boy – my first grandchild – last July, while the other is due to deliver a boy in January. That’s an 18-month age difference, which is pretty close.
But not as close as two 34-year-old identical twins from Cape Cod, whose first babies were born only 20 hours apart last month.
Rebecca Pistone and Rachael McGeoch have always loved being twins. They wanted their children to be close to the same age, which they thought would be the next best thing to having a twin.
Pistone and McGeoch – or maybe it's McGeoch and Pistone.
From the Cape Cod Times:
Pistone and her husband, William “Todd” Pistone, were married in 2016 and began trying to conceive their first child soon after, McGeoch said.
After several months with no success, Pistone suggested that McGeoch stop her birth control as well, in case it would also take her sister some time to become pregnant.
(It sounds like McGeogh just consulted with her sister – not the prospective father – before deciding to go off birth control and become pregnant. That was my wife’s approach as well.)
Within a few weeks, McGeoch learned she was pregnant and immediately called her sister.
“You’re supposed to be pregnant first, I’m just supposed to be waiting,” McGeoch said. “You have to take a test.”
To their surprise, Pistone learned she, too, was pregnant, and the sisters’ due dates were just 13 days apart.
But McGeoch ended up delivering her son William at 10:41 pm on August 15, while her twin – who was assigned a hospital room that was next door to her sister’s – gave birth to her daughter Andi at 6:54 pm the following evening.
William and Andi – or maybe it's Andi and William
Pistone’s husband is named William, as is McGeoch’s fiancé. (I’m so old that I remember when women got married before they had babies.)
The twins’ father is also named William. (Cue the Twilight Zone theme music.) But his nickname was “Andy.”
So the names of both babies honor their grandfather, which is exactly as it should be.
Shortly after little William and Andi were born, McGeoch and her fiancé bought a house on the same Cape Cod lake where the Pistones live. So the two cousins will grow up as neighbors – which is also exactly as it should be.
* * * * *
“Cannonball” may be the best song ever recorded by a group whose members included identical twins.
Kim Deal was the original bass guitarist for the Pixies. (Kim had never played the bass before joining the Pixies, but she was the only person who responded to the band’s classified ad seeking a bass player who was a fan of both Peter, Paul and Mary and Hüsker Dü.)
Her identical twin Kelley was asked to be the drummer for the Pixies, but she chose to move to California and pursue a career as a computer programmer instead.
Kim and Kelley Deal – or maybe it's Kelley and Kim Deal
A few years after Kim left the Pixies and formed the Breeders, she asked Keeley to be the band’s drummer. Kelley wanted to be the lead guitarist, although she barely knew how to play the guitar. I guess Kim couldn’t say no to her twin sister, so she taught Kelley how to play the lead parts.
Today’s featured song was released in 1993 on the band’s second and most successful studio album, Last Splash. (Is it really possible that “Cannonball” is almost 25 years old?)
I can’t explain why “Cannonball” is a great record, but it is. I have no idea what the lyrics mean – assuming they mean anything – and the musical structure of the song is elementary. (It consists of a couple of good riffs, some feedback, and not much else, but the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.)
Here’s the music video for “Cannonball”) which was directed by our old friend, Spike Jonze):
Unlike most Cape Cod visitors, I don’t spend much time on the beach.
But when I do have a hankering to collect sea shells or just feel some sand between my toes, I eschew the busy public beaches where the day trippers and other hoi polloi hang out, and walk down the stairs that lead from our belvedere to the quiet strand below.
Our beach – from the belvedere
The last time I visited Mayflower Beach, which is only a mile or so to the west of our house, it was to rescue my clueless son, who had driven the family Toyota Camry on to the beach one Saturday night and gotten stuck in the loose sand.
Did I mention that the tide was coming in?
I’ll never forget how he described his situation when he called from the Mayflower Beach parking lot: “Dad, I’m in a bit of a bind.”
* * * * *
I suppose I should be grateful that none of my kids ever called me from a Cape Cod jail.
Four sets of parents did receive such a call when their teenagers were arrested for “acting inappropriately in the water” at about 1:30 pm this past Fourth of July.
I’d give you three guesses as to what that inappropriate behavior was, but do really need three? Isn’t one guess plenty?
British newspapers do a much better job reporting on this kind of things than American journalists, so I’m going to quote from the account on the Daily Mail’s website:
Four teenagers were arrested for allegedly having sex in the sea in full view of a large crowd of beachgoers in Cape Cod during July Fourth celebrations.
(“Large crowd” is no overstatement. This was 1:30 pm on the Fourth of July at a popular public beach. It was sunny and about 80 degrees at the time. You best believe that was one crowded beach.)
Mayflower Beach (Dennis, MA)
According to the police report, a lifeguard first approached a local detective at about 1:30 pm on Independence Day.
The lifeguard informed the detective that he was told that a number of people were having sex in the water. . . .
[Detective Matthew] Turner wrote in his police report that he saw four individuals “embraced with one another” as they swam 100 feet from shore.
(I doubt that the teenagers were actually swimming. The water is very shallow in that part of Massachusetts Bay – it was probably only waist-high or at most chest-high a hundred feet out.)
“I could not observe exactly what was going on, however both couple[s] were extremely closely embraced,” the detective wrote in his report.
“Each embraced couple were at a minimum kissing and stumbling about in the waves.”
I admire Detective Turner’s delicate prose – “extremely closely embraced” is a very tasteful way to describe the situation.
At the same time, Turner noted there were about 30 people in the water who witnessed the event up close and were cheering on the participants.
Police arresting the extremely closely embraced teens
“This is disgusting, why is this allowed to go on here,” one angry beachgoer was heard saying.
(Every party has a pooper – that’s why we invited you!)
Turner then started to yell at the teens several times, but they did not respond.
A lifeguard then began to blow a whistle repeatedly, but to no avail, as the teens kept on “embracing and kissing.”
It was only after a second lifeguard entered the water and swam toward them that the youths began to make their approach to shore.
Turner said that as he was in the process of detaining the four teens, he detected a strong smell of alcohol and slurred speech from the entire group.
(That comes as no surprise.)
As the detective was taking the teens into custody, a crowd of about 300 people gathered to watch.
The four made efforts to shield their faces from the public after they walked out of court on Wednesday.
Here’s a photo showing them hiding their faces:
Did they really think that was going to do any good? The Daily Mail found about a zillion pictures of the kids on Facebook and Instagram, and posted them on its website. You can click here to see those photos if you must, but don’t expect to them see on 2 or 3 lines – I despise such exploitative journalism!
The judge agreed to their request to postpone their arraignments while they take part in a program for youth offenders.
I assume that this “program for youth offenders” relates to underage drinking, not “extremely close embracing.”
* * * * *
I’ve saved the best detail for last.
Here’s a video that went viral almost immediately after this incident. In a scene somewhat reminiscent of the legendary American upset of the Russian hockey team at the 1980 Olympics, the crowd is chanting “U – S – A! U – S – A!” as the hormone-and-alcohol-crazed teenagers extremely closely embrace:
* * * * *
“Beach Baby” has many of the same characteristics of some of the greatest Beach Boys songs. But anyone who hears “Beach Baby” and thinks he or she is listening to a Beach Boys record knows nothing about music.
That’s not to say “Beach Baby” isn’t a great pop song, because it is.
That’s not a surprise given that it was co-written by John Carter, who also co-wrote “Can’t You Hear My Heartbeat” (a #2 hit for Herman’s Hermits), “Little Bit O’ Soul” (a #2 hit for the Music Explosion), and the truly great “My World Fell Down” (which should have been a huge hit for Sagittarius, but inexplicably flopped).
Carter was one of the founders of the Ivy League, a British trio that had a couple of top ten singles in the UK in 1965.
Carter was also a successful studio singer – he did backup vocals for the Who’s “I Can’t Explain” and Tom Jones’s “It’s Not Unusual,” and sang lead on “Winchester Cathedral,” a nostalgic oddity that made it to #1 on the Billboard “Hot 100” in 1966.
But Carter didn’t sing lead on “Beach Baby.” He hired Tony Burrows – who had replaced Carter in the Ivy League when Carter got tired of touring – to record that song.
In addition to handling the lead vocal on “Beach Baby” for the First Class, Burrows was also the singer for four different one-hit-wonder group whose sole hits were all released in the first four months of 1970: Edison Lighthouse (“Love Grows Where My Rosemary Goes”), White Plains (“My Baby Loves Lovin’”), The Brotherhood of Man (“United We Stand”), and the one and only Pipkins (“Gimme Dat Ding”).
Here’s a video of five musicians who had nothing to do with the recording of “Beach Baby” lip-synching to that record on a TV show. (The two First Class albums – “Beach Baby” was on the first one – were recorded by a group of studio musicians that Carter put together. When the song became a hit, he hired five other musicians to perform live as the First Class.)
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