An Occasional Story or Magazine – Stories and songs from the pen of Stephen Baum, alias Bumba.

July Magazine

I know I haven’t written a genuine Bumbastories post in a while. Mostly I’ve just been reposting the monthly March through the Numbers ones. OK, I’m lazy. But, it’s also because to post a real magazine, you have to carry the news. And I’m tired like everybody else to be talking about Trump all the time. It’s just so sad the way he’s been hurting the country and the world.. For gosh sake! Even when we have the World Cup Trump has to try to eff it up.

But I did want to present to the blogging public some sidewalk graffiti that I’ve been passing by for several years now. So it might as well be a regular magazine – with a Sports Section, Art reviews, Local News Dept, and maybe a song.

Local News

OK. Let’s start with the La Brea Tar Pits. It closed on July 6 for two (hopefully only two!) years of renovation. All the magnificent, assembled fossils and skeletons need to be carefully dismantled, packed, moved, stored etc, etc. What a job!

We’re definitely gonna miss the Tar Pits. I’ve been volunteering there for nine years as a docent and I just love the place. And I’m not the only one. For the past few weeks thousands of Angelinos and tourists have been visiting before the closure. Dozens have shared with me their personal stories and connection with the LA Tar Pits. It’s a special place.

And it’s here in the center of Los Angeles! We eagerly await its re-opening. Still, the lake pit and the park is still open. And with the adjacent Los Angeles County Art Museum now re-opened in all its glory, the County Tar Pits Park, which includes the Art museum, remains a wonderful place to visit.

Atheistic Grafitti Art

For several years now, a brilliant grafitti artist (identified as SHP) has been inspiring pedestrians in my neighborhood with messages of unadulterated atheism.

Sports Section

It’s the World Cup! As a sports fan I typically confine my psychic energies to NBA basketball and Major League baseball. I usually don’t follow soccer too much.
Except for the World Cup. And it’s been great. The World Cup always is great. ALL the teams, all the nations, have fielded great teams and given us great games. We’re in the quarterfinals now. Hurray for football.

Meanwhile, on the home front – actually again on the home front – the LA. Clippers have parted ways with the Southland’s own Kahwi Leonard after five years of some great play, but largely injuries and missed opportunities. Management has decided to move on. We Clippers fans have come to love Kahwi. We loved Kahwi earlier when he was on San Antonio and Toronto. And we loved him as a Clipper. He’s such a beautiful player to watch. Anyway, he’s gone, traded. The Clippers are “rebuilding”and life goes on. As the players say when they get traded and shuffled around the league: “ it’s a business”, and payroll constraints and financial considerations call the shots. Such is life.

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OK, here’s a song to send you on your way

It’s the Streamline Cannonball which starts with one of the finest lyrics ever composed:

It’s a long steel rail and a short cross tie

I’m on my way back home

Another Bumbastories Bi-Millennial July Magazine

Warning: the following is a re-post.

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Bumbastories continues its walk through the numbers. Let’s talk about the seven. Lucky Seven.

Mathematically, the seven doesn’t seem very promising A regular seven sided heptagon or septagon is hard to construct, doesn’t tesselate, and doesn’t appear to be of much use mathematically. Nevertheless the seven is significant to our psyches. It pops up incessantly in our language.

To wit:

Seven Seas, Seven Samurai, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, the Seven Fates, Seven Furies, The Dance of the Seven Veils (OK, we’ll drop it there). The 7-Eleven Convenience Store comes to mind (and I wish it wouldn’t). And then there’s the 7-Up logo. I always liked 7-Up, although ginger ale tastes better. And then those sevens on a slot machine – 777 – a sight, I must add on a very sorry note, that I’ve seen on rare occasions only.

The seven is holy in the Jewish tradition as well as in other traditions, as it combines the wordly 4 with the divine 3. The seven is 6 (the perfect number) plus one (unity). The Shabbat, of course, comes on the seventh day.

Rolling the dice, the seven comes up 1/6 of the time. You can either bet on the seven or “crap out”.

There are seven days in a week. Seven years in a Shabbaton or Sabbatical. After seven years professors, lucky stiffs, get a year off, a Shabbaton. Even the farmers’ fields must lie fallow and replenish themselves every seven years. (Hey, maybe that’s where all those professors are hanging out. I hear some of them are outstanding men in their field).

Movie titles seem obsessed with the number seven.

There’s Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (as mentioned). There’s The Seven Year Itch (one of my all-time favorites!), There’s Seven Days in May (Burt Lancaster’s in that one), as well as a movie called Seven (a dud as I remember it). There’s Seven Years in Tibet, The Seventh Seal, Seven Pounds, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Seven Samurai, and there’s even one called Seven Psychopaths, which is probably not a musical. Did I mention Seven Brides for Seven Brothers?

And did I mention the Seven Deadly Sins? I didn’t? OK, I’ll enumerate:

There’s Lust, Sloth, Avarice, Pride, Gluttony, Wrath, and Envy.

Enough to keep a guy busy seven days a week! It was the clerics of the Dark Ages who came up with this elegant seven-fold conception of morality. You can only imagine how some of those guys were spending their week. Anyhow, when it comes to sins, why only seven? What is it about the number seven?

There were the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, Seven Pillars of Wisdom. There are seven notes in the scale, Seven Chakras.

Mickey Mantle wore Number 7. Then there’s 007…..Bond, James Bond.

Lucky 7

Bumbastories Semi-Annual June Magazine, Special Tri-Centennial Re-Post

Welcome to June, the sixth month. Summer of course is hard on spring’s heels. I certainly hope that summer is watching her step! In fact I sincerely hope everyone is watching their step. Because these are strange days, my friend. Nevertheless and all the same, June is the sixth month, and Bumbastories is again obliged to celebrate the number six, the “perfect number” six.

The six has long been regarded as “perfect”. Its factors: 3, 2, and 1, when summed, add up to 6. For some reason, Greek mathematicians thought that this little oddity makes the six “perfect”. According to the Bible the world was created in six days – which, according to the great medieval scholar Maimonodes, indicates that the holiness of six actually preceded God. That’s very holy.

Six is the atomic number of carbon, the basis of life on earth – unless, of course, you’re “six feet under”. There’s the six-shooter, the six-pack, six degrees of separation, The Moon and Sixpence, and the Six Flags Amusement park. You can get your kicks on Rte 66 and gas up at Phillips 66. And there’s always a light on for you at Motel 6.

Six was the uniform number for the great Bill Russell, arguably the greatest basketball player ever, also Dr. Julius Erving, arguably the most exciting. Baseball’s Al Kaline of the Detroit Tigers, and Stan the Man Musial of the St. Louis Cardinals wore the number six. The best reserve player on a five-person basketball team is called the sixth man. The Clippers’ Jamal Crawford won the “Sixth Man of the Year Award” three times (that’s half of six). We at Bumbastories still love Jamal and we love the six. Someone complained to me the other day. They said to me: “For goodness sakes, Bumba. Six, six, six! That’s all you ever talk about! What are you, some kind of six maniac? …

Guilty as charged.

The six sided figure is the hexagon, a favorite shape for bees and people alike. Bees also like fives and anything symmetrical, but most any bee will wax (sorry) nostalgic and tell you that hexagons are wonderfully stable shapes, and make a honey (not sorry anymore) of an apartment complex.

Six tesselates so easily. Six conveys completeness and order. The Star of David has six points. And while we’re talking religion, did I mention the six pack?

Escher, inspired by the tesselations at the Alhambra palace in Grenada, often used hexagons to plot his magnificent drawings.

The radius of a circle circumscribes exactly six times in a circle! Try it: take a compass, draw a circle, and then start marking off lengths of that radius along the circumference. It fits exactly six times! Why this should be so is a mystery. Mathematics has a number of these fortuitous sorts of”coincidences”.

And, as Yogi Berra said: “There’s too many coincidences for it to be a coincidence.”

So, I suppose it’s no coincidence that we like the six so much.

Happy sixth month of the year,

Happy June!

Take Five: The Bumbastories Penta-Centennial May Magazine

Welcome to the merry month of May! Spring has arrived. As an iconoclast who thinks about these kind of things, I’m still not really sure why it is that people like the Spring so much. But clearly they do. It’s a pretty universal thing, this affection for the spring season. And people especially like the month of May. “And why shouldn’t they?” you ask. May is a lovely name – as are April and June for that matter. Spring months all. It’s curious, too, that they’re all feminine names, which may or may not be a politically correct thing to point out. All the same, it’s an indication of people’s positive feelings for the season of Spring that the spring months are so often used to name people (girls). No one calls their children February (male, female, or otherwise), at least not very often as far as I know. January and December are also low on the popularity list.

As I was saying, the name May, a variation on Maria, is a quite a pretty one, and pops up….well… like May flowers wherever you look. There’s the great Mae West (she spelled it with an e, she did). Hurray for Mae West, who asked “Is that a pickle in yer pocket, or are yer glad ta see me?” And then there’s the talented writer and comedienne Elaine May, the psychologist Rollo May, and the geological formation of Cape May, North Carolina. There’s May Britt, Mai Zetterling, Seven Days in May, and

Chuck Berry’s Maybelline. Not to mention, the may fly, mayhem, and the May Pole ceremonies (which I never understood, but mention just for good measure)

Then there’s the Pilgrims’ ship the Mayflower, Mayflower Day, and May 1, May Day, (Workers of the World Unite!). And then of course, there’s Willie Mays, the Say Hey Kid. And guess what? Willie Mays’ birthday was in May. Poor Willie was a wonderful man and the greatest ball player I ever saw, except maybe for Shohei.

But getting back to May and it’s being the fifth month, let’s talk about one of my most favorite subjects: the number five. I’ve already talked about the number five a number of times. See the Numbers Game Category in the Bumbastories header. Five is the most interesting and intriguing of the numbers – at least to me. Its symmetry is the most subtle. The five is the framework, the nuts and bolts, of the DNA molecule. The five underlies Euclid’s Golden Proportion, nay, our sense of beauty. We can’t help but like five-fold symmetry. It’s in our genes.

So here’s to the number 5!

Musical interlude: A song that uses the word five: Five Hundred Miles to be exact. Maybank and Bumba finished a fifth of it (well, we sure were finished after that fifth) to get through this sappy, but popular folk classic. Sing along if you must.

images — “This is just one dog’s opinion, but I think that the high-five is OK, even during this pandemic. However, the licking stuff is still on hold. Which is too bad, because I quite enjoy the licking stuff”

A bit more bout the five…

There’s the five pointed star, the Pentagon, the gimme five handslap, 5 card stud, Dave Brubeck’s Take Five, the circle of fifths in music, the fifth of liquor in the bottle, and Five Corners in the Bronx. And don’t forget, that Cinqo de Mayo is the fifth day of the fifth month, so, while we’re at it, let’s raise a glass to Cinqo de Mayo.

Third Tri-Centennial March Magazine and Third Tribute to the Number Three

03/01/26
Happy March! Happy Third Month of the Gregorian Calendar!

Hurray for the Three! The Triad! The Triangle! The Holy Trinity! The Three Graces……

Numbers soon become spiritual.

The Two (the number two, the concept of duality) splits unity (the One) into our world of opposites: here or there, present or absent, life and death, matter and energy, up and down, back and forth, figure/ground, yin and yang, Etc and etc

When you connect two points you create a line: One dimension. Connect three points you create a plane: Two dimensions. Connect four points and now you’re in three dimensional space. Now we’re getting somewhere. Connect five points and you can talk about the fourth dimension. Past the time-space fourth dimension gets impossible to imagine. If each dimension is the expression of an exponent….Yikes!There’s an infinite number of exponents, so there could be an infinite number of worlds or universes! Yikes again. However, to my understanding, the scientists seem to have the number of possible dimensions capped at ten.

The intersection of two circles: the vesica picsis – which in Latin means it’s shaped like a fish – generates the equilateral triangle. The three is created by the intersection of the two. Thus we obtain the triangle! How do you like that? We were introduced to the triangle in geometry class. Remember? Congruent triangles, similar triangles, isoscoles, and right angle ones? The triangle is the cornerstone of trigonometry – and the main character in Euclid’s plane geometry – which has provided scientists and the rest of us with the template for logic – a system where you need to prove things before you think they’re true.

Once again, hurray for the triangle! Hurray for its strength of structure!

More about the three.

As children we grow up listening to stories about the The Three Bears, The Three Little Pigs, The Three Wishes! The Three Blind Mice. It’s always three. As adults we encounter the Three Musketeers, Three Coins in the Fountain, Three Days of the Condor, Three Dog Night, the Three Stooges, and the Tri-State area. In basketball there’s the Triple Double (which sounds like an oxymoron). Baseball has the triple play (it’s a treat to see one. I saw one once at Dodger Stadium). Baseball has three bases to touch or tag (the fourth base is called Home). And three strikes and you’re out! Hey, baseball season is fast upon us. It’s spring season! It’s spring, the time of rebirth, the time to plant seeds. It’s a time of renewal and new beginnings.

But don’t get too excited about spring, ’cause one two three, it’s summer.

Valentine’s Day Special

Valentine’s Day Song

Welcome to the Bumbastories Valentine’s Day Card Special Edition!

Roses are red/violets are blue/and here’s a Valentine’s Day Song for you!

Everybody Needs Love

Everybody Needs a Heart to Share

Everybody Needs Love, Everybody Everywhere

This is a song that I’m still working on, but it’s definitely a Valentine’s Day message. And definitely a sing-along.

About the heart. It is amazing how many times a day we use the word heart, and in how many different ways we use the word heart. We use words like heartfelt, heartwarming, and broken-hearted. We are heartened by good news, enjoy a good heart to heart – not to mention our delight in finding artichoke hearts in our salads.

In all sincerity(not) – and this is from my heart, nay from the bottom of my heart – the heart is our center, where our souls reside, where our love hides out.

The heart, ach, it’s only a mere pump, you say. Only a muscle. A quite amazing and sophisticated little muscle pump it is, but nonetheless it’s just a bloody pump. So why do we use the word to describe our spiritual center? Why do we put our hands on our hearts? Why are our hearts so special? How can our hearts be filled with love? Why are we so sure in our heart of hearts about our love? Well, (sorry) I guess it’s something we just know in our hearts. Happy Valentine’s Day!

Amethyst Heart courtesy of Marina Kanavaki

February Magazine

It’s February apparently. Time flies when you’re having a good time. Time goes by even when you’re miserable however. Anyhow, February being the second month, Bumbastories feels obliged to return to a consideration of the numeral 2. A second look? Our March Through the Numbers continues!

The two – the dos, the deux, is the first real number, because one can’t be considered a “regular” number, since all the numbers are multiples of the one. One is unity, the All.

Our world, the world of opposites, comes into being with this division: heaven and earth, good and evil, life and death, present and absent, holy and secular, male and female, up and down, true and false, etc. and etc.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

Life as we know it began when the first organism split in two. This fundamental process of mitosis has put us in good stead. The cells of our body are reproducing all the time. These things go on whether you know it or not, which is quite a relief. Imagine if you had to sign off on several million mitosises every day.

Two is the first prime number! It is also the first even number! In fact the two generates all the odds and evens. Numbers are either 2n or 2n +1.

The symmetry of the two, bilateral symmetry, is basic to all vertebrates and arthropods, even down to worms. That’s to say all us more “advanced” animals. Let’s face it: we bilaterals, or bilaterians, have a definite edge when it comes to getting around. Bilateral symmetry gives you the ability to steer. Unlike the corals, the sponges and jellyfish, we have a left and a right. A front and a back too! Advanced animals like us humans can even get to conceptualize and ponder things like “going forward” and “making progress” in our lives. Generally it’s considered a good thing to be moving forward. Presumably a jellyfish would have a different point of view.

The yin and yang, the dialectic, the class struggle, the dynamism of the two is how the world operates, and how we see things as happening. Instinctually, we discriminate between figure and ground. When you come down to it, things are either there, or they ain’t. Two is how it is, my friend.

It takes two to tango. The dance, the interplay – and I’m trying to keep this clean – of the sexes, is the greatest game in town. Meiosis and sexual reproduction has accelerated the pace of evolution, which some may regret, but that’s how it is. The Good Lord put two of every animal on Noah’s ark. The ark, by the way used port and starboard, fore and aft, and also used a lot of mops and pails.

So many things come in pairs. How many can you think of? Personally, I can think of franks and beans, corned beef and cabbage, wine and roses, and burgers and fries. Not to mention peanut butter and jelly. In baseball 2nd base is right there in the middle, and a double is a very good hit.

There's nothing like going for a double! Except going for a triple, but that's already the next number!

As for the two in our language, there are just too many twos to mention. And please, don’t mention the ballerina’s tutu.

Before we get sentimental about the two, let’s remember that to “speak with a forked tongue” is not a cool thing. Neither are “snake eyes”, second-in-command, or Bi-Polar disorder. To quote Joe E. Brown (at the end of Some Like It Hot),“Well, nobody’s perfect”. Neither is the two. Nothing is perfect it seems. And that includes the two. It is also incumbent upon me to remind you that “number two” is the well-known toilet euphemism for poop. Well, I won’t waste any more of your time. Except to remind you that 2 is the atomic number of helium, and that Hank Williams said “If you loved me half as much as I love you, you wouldn’t worry me half as much as you do….”Click to twice to hear

Am I Insignificant???

Am I insignificant?

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Am I insignificnt in the grand scheme of things?

OK, OK. Please calm down. Let’s take things slowly.

The word significant means “sufficiently great or important enough to be worthy of attention, something noteworthy”, according to Ms. Mirriam Webster. Significance is rooted in the Latin word signum: a mark or an indicator, combined with facere, to do or make happen.

It’s quite amazing how many meanings and inflections the word significance. can hold. Just the root word sign has a cornocopia of meanings There are good signs, bad signs, signs from the catcher to the pitcher, street signs, traffic signs, neon signs, and signs of things to come.

On a psychological level we all have “significant moments” in our lives. Carlos Castaneda (or is it Don Juan himself?) stated that in our lives we have but a handful of these spiritually significant moments or turning points, moments that are significant and worth worrying about. Having only a few of these significant moments obviously means that all those other moments you have in your life don’t matter much. According to Don Juan, you don’t need to worry about them too much. If a significant moment lasts say a minute or two, then 99.95% of our moments -like most of what you usually worry about -are not significant. Indeed most of what happens is quickly and conveniently forgotten.

We can also include our nocturnal REM dreams among these forgotten moments. Most of us can barely remember anything when they wake up! However, there are some powerful dreams and images that stay with us – the significant ones.

Then there’s statistical significance – which is typically defined as the probability that something is not a random occurence. In scientific experiments a statistically significant result carries a 90% or 95% chance of being correct. Of course if you repeat a 90% result a couple of times, then you’re talking about a near certainty. And that’s a “significant” result.

So, are you significant? Do you ask yourself: “What do I matter in this world anywaze? What difference do I really make, huh?” “What, out of all the 8 billion people walking around the globe makes me so special?” It’s true. It’s kinda unlikely that you, perrtsonally, are particularly important in the grand scheme of things. However, when you consider the unlikeliness, the statistical improbability for the several hundred billion individual atoms of your physical body to have so organized themselves as to have created a living creature that is currently alive and kicking (and that is entertaining all that dystopian nonsense about being insignificant) – well, that’s pretty impressive.

So don’t be so hard on yourself!

Auld Lang Syne

On New Year’s Eve we sing Auld Lang Syne. It’s one of the most widely known songs in the world. I think it’s magnificent. It’s an old Scottish song, written down by the poet Robert Burns in 1788 and thus immortalized for us to sing every year. It’s a sing-along of course. Click below to hear it.

Whenever I hear the song I think of that marvelously sentimental scene from Chaplin’s Gold Rush – when we hear the melody played as we watch the New Year’s party from the outside. Tremendously sad and beautiful at the same time. Such was Chaplin’s genius. Sing along! And Happy New Year!

So, let’s “drink a cup of kindness yet” and wish everyone out there a Happy and Healthy New Year! “Cheers!”

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And days o’ lang syne!

Chorus:
For auld lang syne, my dear
For auld lang syne,
We’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet
For auld lang syne!

We twa hae run about the braes,
And pu’d the gowans fine,
But we’ve wander’d mony a weary foot
Sin’ auld lang syne.

We twa hae paidl’t in the burn
Frae morning sun till dine,
But seas between us braid hae roar’d
Sin’ auld lang syne.

I Love My Coffee in the Morning

As I read the AmericaOnCoffee blog I thought of this song that I wrote thirty something years ago. It’s a silly song, but I always liked it. Perhaps America On Coffee can use it as a theme song.