Maui beachwear, Peggy Lee inspire rested Rusty

After our yearly trek to Maui, my wife and I are back in God's Country after visiting paradise. Many thanks to the Spring-field Business Journal writers who so ably filled in while I was away. They were terrific!

Once I kept a notebook filled with neatly written ideas for future columns. Alas, over the years, the "notebook" has de-generated into scribbles on scraps of paper indecipherable even by the Allied cryptologists who broke both the German and Japanese World War II military codes.

My wife has learned not to throw away crumpled pieces of paper that look like paper-wads-in-progress with phrases that could easily pass for a doctor's prescription.

She knows that if she does she may have thrown away the next Rusty Saber column. I say this to put it into the proper context when I say that this column consists of items from the "idea notebook" I kept while I was away.

An observation while watching sunbathers on the beach: Hundreds of years from now, archaeologists may conclude that for some unknown reason, people once spent hours under the broiling sun trying to get a suntan while rubbing sunscreen all over themselves so they won't get a tan.

What will the archaeologists make of that?

Another observation from the beach: Some people should be prohibited by legislation if necessary from wearing extra-brief bathing suits in public. Now, some women and men are, shall we say, er, well, perfectly constructed for wearing bathing suits consisting of little more than an ounce or two of fabric.

Others and I include myself in this genre should be forced to cover up as much of themselves as possible. This may be a job for the Environmental Pro-tection Agency.

Other items remain in my va-cation notebook that would have made the cut and used in columns I didn't write.

For instance, I would have worked into a column that the year 2002 is a palindrome; it reads the same forward or backward. The names Otto and Anna are palindromes; likewise, the phrase "madam I'm Adam" is a palindrome.

Actually, the 20th century palindrome year was 1991. Ac-cording to my calculations, the next one will be 2112; we have plenty of time to prepare for the celebration.

Jazz singer Peggy Lee died while I was away; I know this would have been a Rusty Saber topic. Peggy Lee was a jazz giant both as a singer and composer; however, she was able to move over into the pop field without harming her jazz credentials. She made only two movies, but for one of them, "Pete Kelly's Blues," she was nominated for an Academy Award.

Her career spanned more than 60 years (I wonder, will Britney Spears still be entertaining audiences 60 years later?) If you have never heard Peggy Lee's version of the jazz standard "Black Coffee," you have missed a spine-tingling performance.

Peggy Lee is one of the last of a long line of great female jazz singers: Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn, Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington, June Christy, and now Peggy Lee, all are gone. I miss them.

Back in January, an incident occurred that, had I been at the helm of the Rusty Saber, I would have labeled it "Foot-in-mouth disease strikes again." Surely, you read about it. As a part of the celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King's birthday, distinguished actor James Earl Jones was being honored with an engraved plaque.

The foot-in-mouth disease kicked in when it was discovered that the name on the plaque wasn't James Earl Jones, rather it was James Earl Ray.

Good heavens! Of all the bloopers to make for an occurrence honoring Dr. King, can there be a bigger one than a plaque with the name of the convicted assassin of the be-loved civil rights leader? To his everlasting credit, the classy James Earl Jones didn't make an issue of the engraver's faux pas.

He shrugged it off by saying that confusion of the two names has happened before, which I doubt.

You can safely bet the deed to the family farm that when it happened, I would have written about it.

Next week from the notebook comes a column about tattoo removal ... at American taxpayer expense.

Stay tuned.

(Joe McAdoo is former chairman of the communication department at Drury Un-iversity.)