The Cape Cod Canal

  If you ever drive down to old Cape Cod, you'll have to have to cross one of two bridges that cross the Cape Cod Canal, unless of course you're driving a boat. That reminds me of the time Jerry and Marion Solom drove their boat Indian Summer to Cape Cod. Jerry planned to traverse the seven mile canal from west to east. 

  Storm clouds were gathering as Jerry and Marion approached the entrance to the canal. They had lowered the sails and were motoring along when Jerry sent Marion below to monitor the compass. Just then a blinding squall hit. A violent wind churned the waters as Jerry kept heading east. At least it felt like he was traveling in the same direction, till Marion called up "You're going west!"

  At first Jerry couldn't believe it.  He was sure he had been going the same direction all the time. The rain was so heavy he couldn't see shore. "Are you sure?" He asked. "Yes, the compass says you're going west, out of the canal." So Jerry did a 180 and when the rain slackened he could see they were now headed into the canal as planned.  Jerry realized the violent winds had turned Indian Summer completely around. After that Jerry liked to say "Always believe your compass," though he didn't add, "and your wife," but I'm sure he was thinking it.

  The Cape Cod Canal opened on this day in 1914, cutting 62 miles off the trip up or down the coast. People had been talking about a canal since colonial days. One settler in the 1700s found a way between a deep cove on one side of the Cape and a stream on the other. It was called Jeremiah's Gutter and Jeremiah collected a toll. 

  During the 1800s there were numerous attempts to build the present canal. These schemes all ran out of money until a New York financier took on the job. He had already financed the first subway in New York and he hired the leading engineer in the country to oversee the job.  

   In 1909 crews began digging at both ends of the proposed canal. They immediately ran into numerous 100 ton boulders the glaciers had left behind a few thousand years previously.  Divers had to set explosives under the boulders to clear the way. After great expense and five years of work, the financier blended the waters of Buzzard's and Cape Cod Bays and opened the final dam. Meanwhile down in Panama Another canal would open its gates for two weeks later.

  The first vessel through the canal was a rowboat manned by the financier's son.  A destroyer soon followed carrying assistant secretary of the Navy Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The financier planned to recover his expenses by charging a toll.  Because this canal was narrower than the present one, ships could only go in the direction of the tide, which changes every seven hours. Also, a series of accidents in the canal scared ships away. The financier tried to get the government to take the canal off his hands.

  In 1928 the government took over the canal and during the depression the improvement of the canal was made a Works Progress project. The canal was deepened and widened from 100' to 480'.  New and higher bridges were built so ships no longer had to wait for drawbridges to be raised. During WWII the canal was a way for ships to avoid German subs lurking off the coast.

   The canal continues to be a popular route for pleasure boats and commercial ships. There are bike and walking trails along both shores of the canal. During the 1990s some jokers made up bumper stickers which gave drivers access to a fictitious Cape Cod Canal Tunnel.  The stickers were a commentary on the horrendous traffic backups on the bridges during the tourist season. Smart people go by boat.

Fastest way to the Cape 

Tarcasso

 Every couple of years the highway department goes up and down the roads with a vat of hot tar to patch cracks.  They did our road last summer and after four seasons and thousands of vehicles, their work has taken on the beauty of an Old Master.

[Tap on the photos for full size.]

A Near-Death Experience

    You don't hear much about self-drive cars these days. All the talk now is about electric vehicles.  But I had a near death experience in a self-drive bus about twenty years ago. The administrator of the small rural hospital where I worked was fascinated with the self-drive concept as was the hospital's IT guy who was a true genius. The IT guy, Bryce, developed a self-drive apparatus for the hospital bus. He and the administrator, Mr. Jacobs, secretly tested their self-drive system on the gravel roads in the surrounding country.

   One Thursday morning in the early nineties I showed up early at the hospital. Several nurses and I were signed up for a two day conference in a city six hours away. We were all surprised to find Mr. Jacobs sitting in the driver's seat of the bus. This was most unusual because Mr. Jacobs always went to administrator's conferences in Florida or Hawaii. It was then he revealed that the bus was a self-driving vehicle. He said he and Bryce had made the trip to the city a half dozen times in the past year and had worked out all the bugs. This would be the first trial with passengers.

   We were waiting for Bryce to show up when Mr. Jacobs got a call on his bag phone. Bryce was sick and wouldn't be able to come with us.  Mr. Jacobs said we'd be fine without him. Mr. Jacobs sat in the driver's seat, but let the self-drive system control the bus. It worked perfectly. Once we got on the freeway closer to the city Mr. Jacobs came back and sat with us. "The freeway is the easy part," he said. The nurses and I looked at each other uneasily. One of the nurses said, "Mr. Jacobs, shouldn't someone stay in the driver's seat just in case?"

   Mr. Jacobs brushed her off. He was clearly elated with the bus's performance. "We plan to license Bryce's system and the hospital will be able to expand with the added income," he said. Right after saying  this, he clutched his chest and slumped to the floor. As soon as that happened, the bus slowed, pulled into the breakdown lane and stopped. The nurses started working on Mr. Jacobs. One of them knew how to use the bag phone and called 911.

   An ambulance from St. Bonaventure Hospital soon arrived and took Mr. Jacobs away. Our conference was at this same hospital so we planned to drive the bus there. Suddenly, the bus door closed and the bus pulled out into traffic. I got in the driver's seat but the bus was under the control of the self-drive system. The bus cruised past the exit to St. Bonaventure, keeping up with traffic.

  None of the nurses' suggestions to shut off the bus worked. I couldn't even get the four way flashers to come on. One of the nurses called 911 again and explained our situation. Soon highway patrol cruisers were in front and behind us. The one in front gradually slowed and the bus slowed as well. Soon cruisers were in all four lanes, gradually slowing until all traffic on the freeway was stopped.

   A trooper told me to pop the hood and he disconnected the battery. Soon a wrecker arrived to haul the bus away and the troopers dropped us off at the hospital. Mr. Jacobs was doing ok but did not want any visitors. I went to my conference, but didn't get anything out of it which was not atypical. 

   Next day we rented a van and drove home. I kept badgering Bryce in his lair until he came clean. He was proud that the bus pulled over when Mr. Jacobs lost consciousness, but admitted the GPS in the bus had been mistakenly set for the St. Bonaventure Rollerdrome in another city. 

  The hospital paid a hefty fine to the state which agreed to keep the self-drive fiasco quiet. The nurses and I received nice "bonuses" to keep mum and no more was heard about licensing Bryce's system. Everyone involved in the bus ride is now either dead or retired so I see no harm in releasing my story in this remote corner of the web. According to google stats, my blog only has four regular readers, one of whom I know because he always leaves a comment. The other three I suspect are bots.

It was an OJ kind of day. 

 

Sunday Squibs

 Men will go to a wedding to party, to a funeral for lunch, while giving the baby shower a miss to play golf.

If my guest wants to discuss politics or religion that’s fine, but he won’t learn my opinion unless it jibes with his own, which discussion will then be mere valium. 

The WASP smiles when the LBGT group adds another letter, but what sorrow and pain is within each of those little letters.

My role as grand puppeteer I think I’ll let go. 

It’s gotten too much for my fingers and toes

We must tie up this strong man Satan in order to plunder his goods. Better let Jesus to do the tying and let the plunder go to charity. 

Our eyes adjust naturally to the darkness. We need new eyes to see in the light. 

The hierarchy ranges from self to family, to country, to God. We must chose which we’re most loyal to without worshipping the idea of hierarchy itself

Life is a puzzle with unwritten clues. 

Life gives us a pencil. The answers, we choose. 

Negotiating old age is like flying through a field is asteroids. No matter how good we are, we’re eventually going to crash and burn. 

St. Paul says the wages of sin is death. The sinner counters: then let’s eat, drink and be merry. 

The revolutionary has bullets, the diplomat only bullet points. 

If love is the answer, the question remains how to let go of hate. 

Intelligent Design comes from a God created by man. Science uncovers the design of a God free enough to look random to us.

The church advises looking at others as though they were Jesus. The virtue of patience is available on request. 

Marriage is a testing ground for sainthood. You’re making progress when you realize your spouse is having a rougher time of it than you are. 

Conservative dystopia: a world without guns. 

Some people no matter how much they love a book will never read it again. They feel a reread would delay their goal of reading every book ever written. 

We’re all in favor of a clean environment so long as it doesn’t affect our comfort, our income, and we don’t have to kiss any rabbits. 

Mackenzie

  In Canada they call them First Nations. Them being the people living there in various tribes before the Europeans arrived. The First Nations were happy to exchange beaver pelts for steel knives, guns and glass beads, but were leery of the downsides. Disease seemed to follow these newcomers and they had strange notions about property. They thought a person could own land for himself.

   The newcomers propagated like the beaver themselves. But they wanted so many pelts that when the beaver were wiped out in one place, they had to push further west for fresh pelts. If the newcomers got too pushy perhaps they too could be exterminated.

  One of the pushiest of the newcomers was Alexander Mackenzie from the country of Scotland. His mother died when he was ten and his father took him to New York. When the American Revolution broke out, his father fought for the British. Alexander was sent to Montreal for safety. Soon he was working as an apprentice for the North West Company.

   The Company sent Mackenzie on a mission to find a northwest passage to the Pacific Ocean. He made his way to Lake Athabasca in northern Saskatchewan. The First Nations people told Makenzie the rivers all flowed northwest. Perfect. Except the river flowed more north than west and on July 14, 1789 he arrived at the Arctic Ocean. Even this would have made a decent route to the Pacific if Alaska hadn’t been in the way. The river was later named in his honor. It has the second largest drainage system in North America after the Mississippi.

   Makenzie went to Great Britain to study longitude, then returned to Canada to try again for the Pacific. In October, 1792 he headed west with two native guides, his cousin Alex, six voyageurs, and a dog unimaginatively named Dog. They made it as far as the Peace River in Alberta where they built a fort to wait out the winter.

  When the snow melted in early May, Mackenzie wanted to head down the Fraser River to the Pacific but was warned that the First Nations people that way were hostile. He was directed over the mountains on a grease trail, so named because it was used to haul smelt oil to the interior. Smelt oil was a valuable commodity among the tribes.

  On this day in 1793 Mackenzie and his group arrived at North Bentinct Arm, an inlet of the Pacific about 300 miles northwest of Vancouver, British Columbia. Mackenzie wanted to continue west another seventy miles for a clear view of the ocean, but the local First Nation tribe brandishing spears in their war canoes blocked his way. It’s unclear what their problem was. Perhaps they had an omen Mackenzie and his ilk portended bad medicine for their descendants.

   Mackenzie mixed up bear grease and vermilion and wrote “Mackenzie was here” on a rock then headed for home. He and his group had completed the first recorded crossing of North America north of Mexico and they did it twelve years ahead of Lewis and Clark. 

  Back east, Mackenzie published his journals, got knighted, and served in the Ontario legislature. In 1812 at the age of 48 he returned to Scotland and married the 14 year old Geddes Mackenzie (same clan, no blood relationship). They had three children and were apparently happy, until Mackenzie died of Bright's Disease at the age of 55 or 56. No one knows the exact date of his birth c.1764.

Alexander Mackenzie, at the age of 35 or 36

  

   

Pizza Repair

   It's good to have occasional accidents and disasters as long as no one gets hurt. The other night we had a couple of guests in the Shêdeau for pizza. Normally I would prepare and bake the pizza in the Shêdeau so I could chat with our guests. But I was on the final chapter of an audio book and my loan was ending that evening.

   I left Teresa to entertain our guests in the Shêdeau while I retreated to the big house and put my ears on. When the pizza was done I picked the pan up with hot pads and headed out the door. 

  The mosquitoes have been bad and as I hastened to shut the door behind me the pan leapt out of my hand and fell face down, half on the welcome mat and half on the wooden porch floor. It made a clanging noise which I thought would alert the others 137 paces away, but the noise of the river rapids covered my boo-boo.

  I got our largest spatula and turned the pie face up. The half that had been on the floor looked ok. The part that landed on the mat looked like a fresh lava flow. I tried smooshing the ridge of cheese back in place while scraping the toppings off the mat and spreading them on the cheese.

  I knew I couldn’t  present this mess to our guests. Then I got the insight that would turn this evil into a good. I turned the oven to broil and slipped the pie onto the top shelf for a couple of minutes.  Except for the dent in one part of the perimeter, it looked like new.

  As our guests munched on their slices I held my breath waiting for someone to bite into a pebble. I was prepared to apologize for the stray olive stone even though I hadn’t used any olives.

  A person may tell him or herself they are never going to drop their freshly baked pizza on the floor. What I say to that person is you haven’t made many pizzas.

Galileo discovered gravity by dropping a cheese lovers and a personal pan pizza off the Tower of Punza.

Sunday Squibs

 

It’s good to avoid evil, but we should not automatically dump everyone we happen not to like into that sulphuric bin. 

We’re so busy inflating our our portfolio, we don’t notice our betrothed is doing the same. 

For the retiree, hump day has been flattened into the never ending weekend. 

Don't brag about your skills. People will be constantly asking for help with things they could do just as well themselves. From the meek and humble no one expects much.

Which is better? Too much time or too much money? You can spend time to making money but money can’t buy you time. 

People pity the shy and the bashful for all the fun they’re missing. But the shy are like the deer, inhabiting an austere secret world the boisterous cannot know.

I give ten percent of my income to the poor and ninety percent to the rich. 

Without the promise of coffee there are many who would stay in bed all day. 

The world is full of messes. Some are benign, such as the constant construction around hospitals. 

If you’re able to come up with two or three facts about the historical figures everyone has heard of, people will call you a genius. And pay for your coffee. But not your beer. 

Sleep is a kind of dementia with this difference: we can’t recall the earliest, the youngest dreams of the night but only those closest to our awakening. 

A person gets rids of all his bad habits only to make smugness his new poison. 

Wealth can build a road across the swamp or it can be content with simply owning the swamp.

By taking care of number one and number two at the same time, even the slothful can be multitaskers. 

Not content with loving a girl

The poet insists on describing each curl

In exchange for wearing a hair shirt composed of his neighbor’s foibles, the saint is granted an occasional view of God’s back. 

The honey do list is an acknowledgment that men are poor multitaskers. 

We screw up in life about as often as we screw up in typing. A back space key is more needful than a forward delete. 

Though both feelings are off the mark, it’s better to live life feeling it’s too early rather than feeling it’s too late. 

We wash up on this shore like a message in a bottle, to be read by whoever finds us, while we read the message in them. 

Great River

  

"The Nile" in Hieroglyphics 

   Back in the day there were four  centers of civilization, all of them along great rivers: the Nile, the Indus, the Tigris and Euphrates (count as one) and the Yellow River in China. If I had to live in one, I'd choose the Nile. Every spring the Nile would flood and fertilize my fields.  When the water retreated I'd plant my crops.

   After the harvest, my buddies and I would go off and work on the monuments. At night there would be beer. Not bad. I might even have done some hieroglyphics carving. Not that I could read them. That was for the priests.

   The last person who could read hieroglyphics died about the same time the Roman Empire expired. The Arabs later tried to translate them, as did scholars in medieval Europe. That last Egyptian priest had left a dictionary behind but it was full of errors which slowed things down. 

   The big breakthrough came when Napoleon invaded Egypt. It was on this day in 1799 that French soldiers looking for materials to build a fort discovered a stone near the village of Rosetta. The stone was covered with writing on one side. The soldiers' officer realized the stone was important and had it moved to Cairo.

   The stone had three different scripts. The first two looked like different styles of hieroglyphics and the third was an ancient Greek script. Copies of the inscriptions were made and distributed to scholars all over Europe, and the race was on to translate the lost hieroglyphic scripts.

   Two years later the British defeated the French army in Egypt and confiscated the stone. It was placed in the British Museum after the floor was reinforced. The stone weighs almost 1,700 lbs. In the early days, a visitor could touch the stone. Now it's behind a barrier.

     It took many brilliant brains coming at the stone from varying angles to figure out what the stone was saying. The British scientist Thomas Young and the French linguist Jean-François Champollion made the ultimate breakthroughs in 1822. These two initially collaborated, but later a dispute arose among them over who had done the most.

   The writing on the stone was a decree written in 196 BCE announcing the coronation of King Ptolemy V and establishing his divine cult. The stone would have been part of a stele or stone pillar and several would have been placed in temples around the country. The top set of hieroglyphics were for the gods. The second, a speedier hieroglyphic script, was for the priests, and the Greek script was for the commoners, if they could read.

   In 2003 Egypt asked Britain to return the stone. The head of Egyptian antiquities said the stone was an "icon of Egyptian identity," which is ironic since the Ptolemys were descendants of the Greek general who took over Egypt after the death of Alexander the Great. In response to Egypt’s request, the British sent a replica of the stone, along with a note saying that they were taking care of the stone not just for themselves, but for the world.

  In the room at the British Museum where the Rosetta Stone is displayed, there are portraits of Young and Champollion. French visitors complain that the portrait of Young is larger than that of Champollion.  British visitors complain that no, Champollion's portrait is larger than Young's. It turns out the portraits are the same size.

Pedestrian friendly Rosetta Stone at Champollion's birthplace 

   

  

Sunday Squibs

 My defense mechanisms in the face of aggression are but a Maginot Line. 

For every homicide the police have three classes of suspects: primary, secondary, and tertiary. On tv the culprit is always from the third group. In real life the guilty party is sometimes from the secondary group, but the jails are filled with primaries. 

A writer exorcises his demons who then fly to the reader’s soul. 

If people you find preachy could spend time as you, the end of the day would find them in the confessional box. 

Botany Bar pickup line: Mycelium or yours?

Husbands are facetiously accused of having selective hearing, but it’s because they’re so busy with their wife’s current request that they can’t focus on anything else. 

A writer without feedback grows reckless. 

Peasantrification: return of a previously gentrified neighborhood to its original slum state. 

Only a few can follow Jesus’ admonition to sell everything and give to the poor. The rest of us are still negotiating with the devil. 

The antidote to the fact that everyone is random is to swallow the pill that everyone matters. 

Poop stinks to warn our ancestors not to eat it and us not to play in it. 

If I could get a vision of earth as it really is in the solar system and in the galaxies, I’d have to lie down and close my eyes till the vertigo passed. 

My Christian belief oscillates between only a few being saved or that everyone eventually gets in, depending on how much of an angel or a demon I’ve been that day. 

Cooking is a solitary pleasure. The crowd is happy to talk among themselves till dinner is served. 

The challenge of marriage is to make someone happy without making yourself miserable.  

Flexibility? Resilience? Get married and you’ll find out how much resilience or flexibility you’ve got. 

When my investment statement comes with a cover letter offering free psychological counseling,  I know that a bear has been gutting my piggy bank. 

That yardarm yonder is used to hang miscreants as well as to determine if the sun is high enough for the day’s first drink. 

Based on how often people get me wrong, I must also get them wrong just often. Maybe more so since I presume they don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. 

I can judge the age of a vehicle by the number and size of its cup holders. The introduction of Supersize drinks in 1987 was a watershed event.  

It's curious that rationalization of one’s motives has a bad name, since mankind defines itself as the rational animal.

We howl when trying to remove a purchase from its plastic packaging. Take a deep breath. Relax and remember that it came from those puzzle masters, the Chinese.

TAXI

 

  My friend Kim recently sent me a link to a writing competition called Literary Taxidermy. The participants are offered the first and last lines from four works of literature, two short stories and two poems. The idea is to use the lines as the first and last lines of your own story or poem. You can write whatever you want preferably without reference to the original work of literature. 

  I liked the lines from the Edgar Allan Poe story, MS FOUND IN A BOTTLE. The first line is, Of my country and of my family I have little to say. The last line is, Going down!

  The deadline for submission is next week. I just finished my story but I’m not going to submit it. It's not the ten dollar fee, my wife Teresa would spot me that. It’s because I couldn’t handle the adulation if I won. What a lie. I’m eager to spill my guts in public, see my blog. 

So here’s my story:

  Of my country and of my family I have little to say. Indeed what could I say about them growing up in a foreign land, my true country and family left behind. Fortunately my mother and father were kind and did their best to cobble together a history. 

  This was long before DNA testing and all I could do was question my parents. My father thought the family had come over to escape the famine. In our attic was a broken Civil War era drum, but dad didn’t know where it came from or who had beaten it. 

  My mother’s parents had come over in the last century for better opportunities. My old nana was still living when I was a child and she told me of putting potatoes in a sack as the men unearthed them. I said that sounded like fun, but she just smiled and shook her head. 

  I showed nana a small scale map of Ireland and she pointed out the village north of Dublin she had grown up in. My father thought his side was from around the town of Kenmare in the west. When I got old enough I went to Kenmare. 

  I went to the big church in the middle of town but it was locked. In the pub next door I met Brian who worked for Guinness Brewing. He said I would have to know which parish the family lived in to get any information. He said if I bought him a pint he’d take me around the countryside. 

  Fifteen minutes later we were driving down a narrow road in Brian’s Guinness Quality Control van. It was his day off.  The door was open at the first church we came to and Brian found the baptismal records, but my family was not in them. Brian suggested we inquire at the pub. They hadn’t heard of our family either. 

  A half hour later we were on the road again. We spent all of that day visiting the churches and pubs in a seven mile radius around Kenmare. We ended the day at the pub we had started at. Brian said it was his turn to buy. He promised to contact his co-worker in my nana’s town so I could continue my search. As we raised our glasses I said, “Going down.”

The Big Soap

   Soapy Smith. What a perfect name for a con man. Smith’s best known con was to set up a table on a busy street corner in boomtown Denver. He wrapped money around bars of soap, wrapped paper around the soap and the money, then mixed up the bars and sold them for a dollar each. He made sure only his buddies got the bars with the money.

   Jefferson Smith was born in 1860 into a wealthy family in Georgia. The family's fortunes declined as a result of the Civil War and the family moved to Texas. Smith's mother died when he was 17 and he left home to begin his career as a con man. He gathered a gang of like minded operators and separated victims from their cash with shell games, three-card monte and rigged poker games.

   Smith shared his profits with the police and politicians at City Hall which allowed business to flourish. He soon opened a gambling saloon with a sign over the entrance which read, "caveat emptor" (buyer beware). Fortunately for Smith, his patrons did not speak Latin.

   Smith had underworld rivals and there were several attempts on his life, but Soapy always shot first. Things got so bad, the citizens of Denver brought in anti-gambling reforms and Smith moved to the silver mining boomtown of Creede southwest of Denver. He used Denver based prostitutes to convince property owners in Creede to sign over leases to him and soon he was king of the Creede underworld. Smith wasn't all bad. He ejected troublemakers more violent than himself from town. He built churches, gave money to the poor, and paid for the burial of unfortunate prostitutes.

   The reforms in Denver didn't last long and Smith returned there just before a huge fire destroyed much of Creede. Smith's luck always seemed to be in. Finally, a reformed-minded governor decided to clean up Denver. When the governor tried to remove several corrupt city officials, Smith and his armed gang barricaded themselves in city hall to defend the officials. The governor sent in the militia then thought better of it and got the state Supreme Court to rule in his favor.

   The final straw for Smith was being charged for the attempted murder of a saloon manager. To avoid the heat Smith took his business to Skagway, Alaska where there was plenty of gold lying around. Smith put the local sheriff on the payroll and set up a fake telegraph office even though telegraph wires did not reach the town for another two years.

   Things came to a head when Smith bilked a miner out of a sack of gold worth $85,000 in today's money. The Skagway Vigilance Committee demanded that Smith return the gold. On this day in 1898 Smith went to the Juneau Wharf where the committee was holding a meeting and confronted a guard. A gunfight broke out and both Smith and the guard were killed. Smith was 37.

Caveat emptor

Sunday Squibs

 When I travel through America’s well built bustling cities, I imagine this is what London and Berlin looked like before the bombs began to fall. 

Praying for the dead is like dropping stones into faith’s bottomless pit. 

The problem drinker should worry more about the time of his last drink than about the hour of his first. 

When I visit Italy I become an Italian who has forgotten everything and is just beginning his treatment for amnesia. 

The mountains are beautiful, but the view from the valley is always the same. The plains dweller enjoys an ever changing sky and cloudscape. 

If the noonday sun prevents you from sleeping then you haven’t earned that nap. 

Can a person raise children and remain a narcissist? Yes. A narcissist is capable of anything. 

He spoils our sleep. He turns the screw. 

No other trace, a ghost who’s true. 

The ghost who’s real leaves not a trace

He turns the screw, empales our face

It is a healthy penance to allow another to blather on about himself all evening when you’d rather be blathering on about yourself. 

What annoys us in others is the shadow of our self. 

On-the-job training is ad hoc. Schooling leaves you in hock. 

As I climb the mountain of my faults, the air grows thin, my muscles ache, and the backslide option looks better with each step. 

Enjoyment of a Netflix series requires suspension of belief. By season three, belief is suspended over a foggy abyss. 

The egoist's actions are often unkind 

The sun of the self to the other makes blind

All writing benefits from the legibility of print, except the love letter, which must be written by hand. 

The "what about" style of political argument soon grows tiresome, even when your what abouts are much meatier and more numerous than those of your opponent. 

The narrow path to salvation is lined with billboards saying: Be thou not such a little bitch.  

Do we truly care about the players, the teams, and the rich men who own them, or is Sport just a chance to drink beer. 

Until we figure out what came before the Big Bang, the God theory is still in the running. 

Our friend Old Man Winter has earth on a string

On the day of the solstice he reels back the fling

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!

    When I first started sending emails, I wrote the whole message in caps, probably because I didn't trust the new-fangled Internet to deliver my message. One day a colleague told me politely that it was rude to use all upper case letters. She said it was like yelling.

   The first commercial typewriter, put on the market on this day in 1874, had the same problem. It could only produce upper case letters. People didn't like that. Also, the keys hit the paper from below so the typist could not see what he or she was typing.

   People had been trying to invent a typewriter since the 1830s. An early model was described as a cross between a piano and a kitchen table. After the Civil War, with the country booming, business needed a machine for fast and legible correspondence. In 1867 an inventor named Sholes got together with a mechanic named Glidden to build a typewriter  

   They sold a share of their business to a financier named Densmore to provide capital to produce a working machine. Densmore sent out typed letters to entice businesses to order the machines. Western Union ordered several for recording messages, but the machines broke down easily.

   Meanwhile, the Remington Company was looking for a new product to replace the rifles they had been making for the recent war. Remington had the equipment and the machinists to produce a more reliable machine. The manager of the project had been in charge of Remington's sewing machine division, so the first typewriters looked like sewing machines, with a black lacquer case, floral designs on the front, and a foot treadle to move the paper up. The QWERTY keyboard was designed to put the most frequently used letters on opposite ends of the typebar to prevent the keys from jamming.

   Businesses began buying typewriters but the public did not like them. People felt the big machines took away the personal touch and that the machine could be rigged to cheat the customer. At $125, a typewriter cost as much as the average person’s annual income. There was no need for the individual to own a typewriter.

   The typewriter was a boon for woman workers. A woman working in an office made several times as much as one working in a factory, though she only made half as much as a man in the same office. The year the typewriter came out, only 4% of clerical staff in the U.S. were women. By 1900 it was 75%. Women now earn about 80% as much as men.

"I've got a long way to go, and don't call me baby."