Kent: But first! Let's check the death count from the killer storm bearing down on us like a shotgun full of snow.
Weatherman: Well, Kent, as of now the death count is zero. But it is ready to shoot right up.
Kent: Oh my God. [shakes fist at heaven] Damn you snow!
Apparently it really is a shotgun - two different systems converging into a double-barreled blizzard, blasting everything from the Mid-Atlantic to Southern New England. Should be a fun day tomorrow.
At my mom-in-law’s facility, the nursing and caretaking staff are making beds for themselves. They’re preparing to be on-site for the duration. Thank goodness for professional dedication.
The grocery store was looking pretty bare in the bread and milk departments again, but there was still product on the shelves. The liquor store next door was also doing a brisk business. The other shop that was doing a land-office business was Procolino’s, the most awesome pizza joint on the Eastern Shore. Looks like people want to hunker down with pizza and beer and watch the flakes fall.
The big problem, of course, is that municipalities down here are already pretty much out of salt, the crews and equipment are worn out from long hours since Saturday, and now they don’t have anywhere to put the new snow. They’ve spent since Sunday opening the lanes on the major interstates, but many of the secondary roads are in rough shape. Just like Boston in ‘78 when we had two blizzards in succession, the first blow is staggering but the second punch knocks you flat.
During the First Gulf War, CNN’s Peter Arnett and Christiane Amanpour reported live from Baghdad while the bombs fell. The Unindicted Co-Conspirator and I will bring you up-to-the-minute reports of each new flake falling in Great Fell Winter of 2010 from our Holiday Inn Command Center. Stay tuned!
Contrary to Einstein, God does indeed play dice.
He also cheats.
One day, not long ago, Satan walked into a saloon. God was busy smearing the glasses with a rag made sanitary only by the antiseptic properties of alcohol dregs, but he smiled a greeting to his old friend.
"The usual?" he asked.
Satan nodded as he settled onto a stool.
God filled a pint glass from the tap and slid it across the bar. "Double or nothing?" he asked.
Satan nodded again. God pulled out the dice cup and handed it Satan. He rattled the bones vigorously and rolled seven. God picked up the cup, gave a single shake, turned it over on the bar, and lifted it to show boxcars.
"Twelve," he said. "That'll be five shekels."
Satan scowled as he slid the silver coins towards God. "Remind me to bring my own dice next time."
"Haven't seen you in here lately," said God, pocketing the silver. "Where've you been?"
"Oh, going to and fro and up and down," replied Satan. "Saw a friend of yours the other day. Said his name was Job."
"Yeah, he's a great guy," said God. "He'd give you the shirt off his back."
"Sure he would. He'd never miss it. He's got a closet full."
"No, I mean it," said God. "A real mensch. Like that song, what was it? He gets knocked down, he gets right up again, ain't nothing gonna keep him down."
"Bull," said Satan. "People like him are only nice because they're comfortable. I'll bet that if you took away all that stuff he's got, he'd spit in your eye."
God gripped the dice cup. "You're on," he said.
( And then what happened? )
We’d seen the news. Snowpocalypse, some called it. A horrible hideous blanket of snow such as had not been seen since the Fell Winter of 1772, a storm recorded by both Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. The Big Snow of 2010. The Epic Storm.
The Baltimore Sun put it in perspective by repeating the front page headlines of the last ten great storms to hit the city.
2003: SNOWBOUND (28 inches)
1922: 109 PERSONS PERISH IN THEATRE DISASTER (the roof of the Washington Theatre collapsed under the weight of 26.5 inches of snow)
1983: 22-INCH SNOWSTORM BURIES STATE; GUARD MOBILIZED
1996: SNOWED UNDER (22 inches)
1942: HEAVY SNOW CLOSES SCHOOLS TODAY (22 inches, but apparently Maryland didn’t need the National Guard)
1899: WORST BLIZZARD EVER KNOWN HERE. 15.5 INCHES SNOW IN A DAY. (Wusses)
2009: WHITEOUT. AREA STRUGGES WITH RECORD DEC. STORM. (21 inches)
1979: 22-INCH SNOWSTORM BURIES AREA; STORES LOOTED IN PARTS OF CITY. MAYOR IMPOSES CURFEW.
1892: A GREAT SNOW-STORM. MARYLAND AND MANY SOUTHERN STATES MANTLED IN WHITE
1958: 8 DEAD IN HEAVIEST SNOW IN 16 YEARS; ANOTHER DAY OF NEAR-SHUTDOWN LOOMS AS CITY STRUGGLES OUT OF 16-INCH FALL
We set out for Maryland before dawn. It was going to be a difficult trip. Doubtless the roads from southern New Jersey to our destination in Maryland would be littered with the hulks of the cars that couldn’t make it through the storm, their last resting place marked only by white mounds. We packed water and jerky, blankets and sweaters, and a sturdy snow shovel, and set out for the Heart of Whiteness.
The bright cold sun rose in our rearview mirror as we sped down the Mass Pike. The highway through Connecticut was strangely quiet. We sped through the deserted Cross Bronx Expressway at sixty miles per hour and flew across the George Washington Bridge.
Halfway through New Jersey, we saw it, off on the shoulders, under the trees. Just a dusting at first, then thicker. The Turnpike was still dry and clear, but we stopped to top up our gas tank just in case. Who knew how long we might be trapped?
It was in Delaware we saw the real aftermath of a winter storm. There was slush on Route 13.
We arrived in Chestertown in record time. The last thirty miles were a little slower than usual. The most snow we found was in the parking lot of the Holiday Inn. Whoever they contracted to do their ploughing really ripped them off. From my window I can see three cars still buried under a desolate blanket of white.
The horror... The horror...
(In all seriousness, the reason things were cleaned up so quickly was that people heeded warnings and stayed off the roads. Big state ploughs and snowblowers were still out on the secondary roads this afternoon, and they did a great job. It looks like Kent County got a couple feet. Public schools and offices will be closed Monday and Tuesday.)
Diphtheria is a highly contagious and often fatal disease, transmitted by direct contact and by breathing aerosolized bacteria from the coughing of infected individuals. It comes on gradually: a mild sore throat, trouble swallowing, fatigue. Then comes fever, chills, nausea, and vomiting. In some people, the neck swells. The bacteria that causes the disease releases a toxin that causes tachycardia. It can lead to heart damage, nerve damage, paralysis of the throat and respiratory muscles, organ failure, and death. The hardest hit are children under 5 and adults over 40, where the mortality rate is as high as 20%.
In the 1920s, the United States buried 15,000 diphtheria victims per year. The most famous outbreak was in Nome, Alaska, in 1925.
Nome had only one doctor, Curtis Welch, for its over 10,000 mostly native people. In the summer of 1924, the seven-year-old supply of diphtheria antitoxin expired, but no new supply arrived before winter closed the port. Two weeks after the last ship of the season, an Inuit child displayed symptoms. Dr. Welch thought it might be tonsillitis, but the child died the next day. Several more children came down with similar symptoms. Two more children died before the first characteristic lesions on the throat and tonsils were seen in a three-year-old boy. He died shortly after the confirmed diagnosis. It was diphtheria, it was becoming epidemic, and the mortality rate among the Inuits was running at 100%.
They couldn’t get the serum in by boat, they couldn’t get it by plane, so they moved it by dogsled relay. Twenty mushers and a hundred and fifty sled dogs pulled the antitoxin 674 miles through bitter cold and treacherous snowstorms in five and a half days. It was an amazing example of human and animal endurance, memorialized every year in the Iditarod race from Anchorage to Nome.
Interestingly, a reenactment was held in 1975. Many of the mushers were descendants of the original twenty. It took them more than twice as long. Truly, there were giants in those days.
I recount this story because the Unindicted Co-Conspirator and I are setting out on our own mission of mercy. First thing tomorrow morning, we’re heading south, through the snow-ravaged wastelands of New Jersey, past the desolation of Delaware, and into the heart of the white wilderness once known as the Eastern Shore. The mid-Atlantic coast lies buried under the Snowpocalypse, but we’re going to brave it. Take heart, you frostbitten survivors of the howling blizzards. Help is on the way.
Mush! Mush!
I have always loved radio. There’s something magical about plucking far away voices out of the air with little more than a bit of wire. It’s both exotic and yet strangely intimate. When I was a kid, I built a crystal set and ran an antenna wire to the apple tree. An uncle gave me an old Philco radio in the mid-sixties, and I used to carefully tune up and down the dial after dark, listening for those far-off clear-channel stations like KDKA in Pittsburgh and WOR in New York. Once I picked up the faint strains of something that sounded very much like rapid-fire Spanish interspersed with the words “Radio Habana Cuba.”
In the mid-seventies, I sat in a building in the English Midlands linked to a huge circular antenna array eleven stories high and a mile around, intercepting Soviet code. I could tune in the world on those systems, and picked up signals from as far away as the South China Sea.
In the late seventies and early eighties, I entertained the notion of working in radio. A couple Boston DJs thought I had a good voice for it, and a Fort Worth DJ let me hang around the station, but I just didn’t have the nerve to go for it. Probably just as well; it’s not exactly a booming field, and there’s a surfeit of booming voices.
Now we’ve got the Internet and satellite radio, and what was once exotic is utterly commonplace. From this laptop, I can tune in to audio or video from almost anywhere in the world. The voyeuristic thrill of intercepting distant signals bouncing from the ionosphere is gone, but the sheer variety of available broadcasts makes up for it.
Radio survived television. MTV told us that video killed the radio star, but MTV is just another basic cable station now. You can’t stop the signal.
The Unindicted Co-Conspirator and I were once in the online social media business. When our favorite BBS went belly-up, we got together with friends and decided to build our own. I had a spare computer, bought a copy of TBBS and a few modems, and we became WithoutaNet. The Internet was then the province of defense contractors and academics, so we were on FidoNet, a phoneline store-and-forward network.
At our peak, we had a few dozen members. Every once and a while, a kind and thoughtful soul would send a few bucks to help cover the phone bills, but we never got close to breaking even. I think “hobby” is such a nice word, don’t you? Much more pleasant than “expensive obsession.”
Facebook has over 300 million users worldwide. It’s accessible by browser, iPhone app, Blackberry, and Windows Mobile smartphone. President Obama is on Facebook. So is Scott Brown, the newly-anointed Junior Senator from Massachusetts. Martha Coakley is on Facebook, too. His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI and His Serenity the Dalai Lama are on Facebook.
It might be a shorter list to name the people who are NOT on Facebook. It is the major social media site, with a membership larger than the population of the United States, and just six years ago, it didn’t even exist. Do you know how much money it’s made? Do you know how hugely profitable it’s been? Do you know how many Facebook millionaires there are?
Ah, well, there’s the problem. Depending on which business articles you read, it either just started making a profit, or it’s just about to make one. Sooner or later, they’ve got to make more from those stupid tiny ads and imaginary gifts than it’s costing them to maintain data centers and provision new computers. And then, the world will be their bivalve. Just you wait. Come the Initial Public Offering, somebody is going to make a killing.
The trouble with an IPO, however, is that it makes the company Public. Right now, we have no idea what the internal profit and loss statement looks like. Forbes guesses their burn rate is $200 million per year. They’ve got at least a dozen offices worldwide and somewhere around a thousand employees.
I don’t know about you or the boys on Wall Street, but I’m seriously burned out on speculative bubbles. Taking a loss on each unit but making it up on volume has been a favorite strategy in the fledgling dot-com era, but the only people I know who are really making money are those who are selling hard goods and services.
Maybe it’s just a hobby.
Delaware ratified the Sixteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, bringing the number of states which had ratified the measure to the magic thirty-six. Our own Commonwealth of Massachusetts was number forty-one (just like our new Senator-Elect!). Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Utah rejected it outright, and Pennsylvania, Florida, and Virginia never even put it to the vote.
The Sixteenth Amendment reads:
The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.
Thanks to the Sixteenth Amendment, we have Income Tax. And note the “from whatever source derived.” If you’re running a string of Ladies of Negotiable Affection, or successfully betting on the ponies, or just standing on the street corner selling sausages inna bun, Uncle wants his cut. In the words of Will Rogers, “The income tax has made more liars out of the American people than golf has.“
On This Day In 1959, The Music Died.
Twenty-four cities in three weeks by bus is the Hell on Wheels Tour. Tired of the cold and uncomfortable coach, Charles Hardin Holley, Richard Stephen Valenzuela, and Jiles Perry Richardson boarded a single-engine Beechcraft Bonanza B35 piloted by twenty-one year old Roger Peterson. The plane took off from Mason City Iowa at 12:55 a.m., bound for Moorehead, Minnesota. Five minutes later, the red tail light was seen descending. It crashed five miles from the airport. Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, The Big Bopper, and the pilot were all killed instantly.
On This Day In 1979, The Music Was Fabulous
Not all bands are made up of talented musicians. Sometime it’s prefabricated, like the Monkees, The New Kids on the Block, The Jonas Brothers, and Hannah Montana. One such group was created by a French composer named Jacques Morali. He put together a group of men dressed as iconic gay characters and called them the Village People.
Their first hit was ”Macho Man“ in 1978, but ”YMCA“, a song about the availability of gay sex in Christian gymnasiums, peaked at #2 on the Billboard Top 40 chart on February 3, 1979. The Navy was interested in using their song ”In the Navy“ in a recruiting campaign, even letting them use the USS Reasoner to film their video. Apparently someone actually listened to the lyrics, and the Navy quickly changed its mind (this was long before ”Don’t ask, don’t tell“).
The Village People went on to make a movie staring Steve Guttenberg, Bruce Jenner, and Valerie Perrine. ”Can’t Stop The Music“ was one of the worst films ever made, and the group went from cutting edge to camp overnight.
And that’s the way it was, (echo chamber effects) On This Date In History!
But you’d never know it. The godless secular humanists, waging their ceaseless war on the Church, have instead devoted the day to a rodent. Marmota monax, the common groundhog or woodchuck.
Nothing is sacred anymore. This is the day, forty days after the birth of her son, that Mary was finally considered clean enough to enter a synagogue. (Childbirth, like any other issue from those icky lady parts, is definitely unclean and will contaminate men.) Of course, she had to undergo a ceremony of purification first, but we try not to think of such things.
As the years went on, the Church tried to find other things to celebrate on this day. The idea of a lady taking a bath led the fervid and fevered imaginations of ostensibly celibate clergy to less spiritual meditations, which in turn led to other forms of uncleanness. The priests and brothers wanted to think of something cleaner, something more masculine. Something upright and long and smooth and hard and... Candles! We’ll bless the candles today!
So the Purification became Candlemas, the day on which the Church blessed the candles to be used in the year ahead. And it has nothing whatsoever to do with those pagan fertility festivals marking the beginning of lambing season. It is definitely NOT Imbolc, the Festival of Lights. Don’t even think of it. Those stories about a hedgehog seeing its shadow meaning six more weeks of winter are just heathen superstition. The Church substituted her own almanac:
If Candlemas day be sunny and bright, Winter again will show its might.
If Candlemas day be cloudy and grey, Winter soon will pass away.
Fight the creeping secularization of our holy days. This is a Christian country, after all. Boycott any store that doesn’t wish customers a Happy Candlemas. It’s time to take the War on Candlemas to the streets!
I had to have a medical test done today. One of those uncomfortable, undignified tests, involving a reel of garden hose with a camera on one end. I spent yesterday “prepping”, which is another uncomfortable, undignified process.
I arrived at the hospital this morning, traded my clothing for a backless gown, and lay down on a gurney to wait. The doctor came in with a sheaf of papers. “Sign these,” he said, “and we’ll give you some good drugs.”
I signed. One of the drugs was a powerful opiod, about a hundred times more powerful than morphine, called Fentanyl. This, apparently, was to make sure that I did not feel any pain during the procedure. The second was an amnesiac called Versed. This was to make sure that even if I did feel any pain, I wouldn’t remember it.
Versed is a benzodiazepine drug, in the same class as Rohypnol, better known on the street as Roofies, the most popular date-rape drug after the Long Island Iced Tea. It’s quite fascinating, really. Although you remain present in the moment, events simply do not imprint on your memory.
I do not know if I was awake during the procedure. I remember briefly watching, with singular detachment, a few of the convoluted twists and turns of my innards on the large television in the room (soon to be a new series on NBC). But that’s it. Next thing I knew I was being handed my clothes.
I’m not allowed to drive, operate machinery, or sign any legal contracts today. But it’s OK, I’m still feeling quite well indeed. Except for one thing. He never even gave me his phone number. I feel so cheap...
Some explanation may be in order to enlighten you heathen. Holy Water is just dihydrogen oxide that's been blessed by a priest. It is then used by Roman Catholics and Episcopalians - you know, the sensible people - to dip their fingers and then touch their foreheads, torsos, and shoulders. It's also sometimes kept in a small stoup in the more devout homes (we had one for a while).
Any good religious supply house (Like Matthew Sheehan’s - no relation) can sell you a crucifix that contains a tiny bottle for holy water and two tiny candles. If someone were suddenly possessed by Satan, you'd already have all of the necessary supplies for exorcism conveniently at hand.
Holy Water is also sprinkled on the congregation on certain holy days, either via branch (preferably hyssop) dipped into it, or from something that looks like a metal Mister Microphone, containing the water within it. This water shaker is called an aspergillum, and the act of sprinkling, asperges.
Holy Water is a sacramental, which means among other things that it cannot be poured down the sink. It must be reverently poured out upon the ground, via a special dry sink variously called a piscina (stop sniggering),Sacrium,or thalassidion (Anglican, Catholic, and Orthodox, respectively) that discharges directly to the earth.
Why all this fuss over water? Well, it's supposed to represent the purifying water of baptism. Being blessed, it is imbued with power and wards off evil. Kind of like homeopathy.
To this day, if I enter a church, I have to physically stop myself from automatically dipping my fingers in the magic water, the habit is that strong. But drinking it? That's just silly superstition!
The source of the banshee howls was the dryer. At fault were the two rollers on which the dryer drum sits. These rollers do not provide any motive force to the drum, they just support it. And for some reason, they lack any kind of ball bearings, so when they wear, they screech against the big metal spindle on which they’re mounted.
They’re very inexpensive, but you have to completely disassemble the dryer to install them. Each one is held on the spindle by a fiendish device called a snap ring. This is open loop of metal with a tiny hole at each end. It requires a special pair of pliers to remove. They’re called snap rings because they will invariably snap and fly into some utterly inaccessible corner. The third or fourth time it happens, the user also snaps. Wise is the spouse who discovers that she has work to do elsewhere, as far from the scene of the crime as possible.
Fortunately, the Unindicted Co-Conspirator is the brains of this operation, and knows me all too well. Our marriage remains intact, and no harsh words were spoken. The drum rollers were replaced, the dryer re-assembled (with only one screw left over!), and it’s happily and quietly spinning the towels dry as I type.
And now I can sit in my feasting hall, quaffing my (ginger) ale and recounting the manly deeds of manliness that were accomplished today. Truly, it is a good thing to be male and wield the mighty weapons of my fathers. Let all home appliances quake and tremble! (But not too much, because I’ve put my socket wrench set away.)
I am an Apple fan (derived from the word “fanatic”). I’ve used almost every professional computing platform ever made. My OS experience would fill three whole cans of alphabet soup. Mac is the one I use the most. Mac is what I use when I want to get some work done. There’s at least one Mac in almost every room of our house, as well as on my desk at work.
I also love my iPhone. We are completely inseparable. If, heaven forfend, I should drop my iPhone in the sink this morning, I’d have a new one by this afternoon.
So I was ready to love anything that Steve Jobs announced. But I can’t.
A small computing device is always a compromise between power and portability, between fun and functionality. According to His Steveness. this device is meant to straddle the region between the iPhone/ iPod Touch and the Macbook. “The bar is pretty high,” he said. Being a cyclist, I’m all too familiar with what happens when you’re not quite successful in straddling the high bar on a bike. I have a similar deep aching feeling when I look at the iPad.
What’s right: The size is good, though the bezel is much too wide. The speed looks good. The touchscreen interface looks like it works well. The connectivity looks good. The OS looks good.
What’s wrong: No microphone. No camera. No multitasking. No Flash animation support. A clumsy on-screen virtual keyboard that cannot be used with setting the device down flat on a table or using the one-finger peck method. The screen is the wrong resolution for modern widescreen movies. Storage is too limited. No USB port. No SD card support. It might be called a big iPod touch, except that the iPod Touch supports voice controls.
All that said, it’s too early to make a buy / no buy decision. It’s not for sale yet. Everything will depend on (a) what the application developers do in the next couple months and (b) what happens when you hold one in your hand. Remember when the iPhone first went on sale? Apple employees walked down the line offering to let you hold the new Jesus Phone, and the minute I felt it in my hand and ran a finger across its glass screen, I was sold. It was just too neat not to own. It still is, three years later. Who knows, maybe the iPad will reach out and grab me, too. When all is said and done, it’s not about a checklist of features. It’s about what it can do for you personally.
Talk to me again in a couple months.
It seems he’s decided, after eighty-two years of operating nothing more technical than a microwave, that it’s time to join the online world. He’s enrolled himself in a Computers for Seniors class, and wants to send email and look things up on The Google. There’s just one problem.
He doesn’t know how to type.
Dad has got beautiful cursive handwriting. It was something they instilled back when he went to school. The Palmer Method, introduced in 1894 in the book Palmer’s Guide to Business Writing, was still being taught when I went to school, but I never attained his proficiency. I learned to type as soon as possible, and now can barely scrawl my own name.
It got me to thinking. We’ve had other means of computer input for many years. Why does typing persist?
There are many kinds of specialized input, such as mouse gestures and waving your hands in the air (Microsoft’s Natal), but only four suitable for text input: Hardware keyboard, touchscreen virtual keyboard, handwriting via stylus or finger, and voice.
The keyboard we all know and love. It fits all ranges of experience, from hunt and peck with two fingers to a high-speed stenographer’s machine-gun entry. Myself, I type about 75 words per minute, which is probably faster than I think.
Next we have the touchscreen keyboard. You’d expect a touchscreen of the same size as an ordinary keyboard, like the new Apple iPad is supposed to have, would allow for similar speed. The lack of tactile feedback, though, slows you right down. Still, even a two-fingered typists (like on the Apple iPhone) can do pretty well.
Handwriting by stylus is the slowest form of data entry. The problem is that handwriting is terribly difficult for computers to decipher. Hell, I can’t read my own writing, how can a computer. I learned Palm’s Graffiti and Jot, and got pretty good at them, but it was only bearable for very short messages.
Most people can speak at over 120 words per minute, so you’d think that dictation would be fastest. What slows you down is the unnatural manner with which you must speak [comma] and the fact that you must carefully proofread for homonyms and other errors. Ken you really [no, not ken, you idiot. Can!] work in an office with everyone speaking at their computers [question mark]. Some people, with office doors that close, do quite well with it. But it’s going to take a few more iterations of Moore’s Law before we can comfortably speak (or subvocalize) to our computers.
I had hoped that the iPad would combine voice and fingertip gestures, but they went with fingertips and a virtual keyboard. So far as I can see, there isn’t even a microphone on the new tablet.
It looks like Dad’s going to have to use the old hunt-and-peck method. You’re never too old to learn...
We recited the traditional Selkirk Grace as used by Burns:
Some hae meat and canna eat,
And some wad eat that want it;
But we hae meat, and we can eat,
Sae let the Lord be thankit!
We read each other favorite Burns verses, like:
</span>Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim'rous beastie,
O, what panic's in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi’ bickering brattle!
But one thing was missing. The “Great chieftain o’ the puddin-race” did not “The groaning trencher there ye fill.” There was no haggis.
Haggis is a traditional dish made from minced sheep innards, oats, onions, and suet, which is then stuffed into a sheep’s stomach, and simmered for a few hours. By UK standards, it’s a savory pudding. It’s traditionally served with “hacket neeps and tatties” (turnips and potatoes, boiled and mashed) and drams of uisge beatha, the Water of Life itself, Scotch whisky.
Alas, it has been illegal to import Scottish haggis to the U.S. since the Mad Cow scare of 1989. Some of the offal is sheep’s lungs, which can carry Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy.
The good news is that the U.S. is finally looking at lifting the ban, since there have been no cases of BSE in years. It comes too late for this year, but maybe in 2011 we can, “haggis fed, / The trembling earth resounds his tread.” Gie us a haggis!
(The traditional Burns poem, Address to a Haggis, and its translation into the vulgar modern tongue, can be found here.)
Today is bubble wrap’s fiftieth birthday. It’s actually a brand name owned by Sealed Air Corporation, but like kleenex and xerox, it’s become a generic. Bubble wrap is some of the most useful stuff in the world. It protects your frangibles from the depredations of couriers and handlers, and when it’s fulfilled its purpose, it can be used as a tension reliever. There’s nothing like popping a bubble or a hundred to improve the mood.
Bubble wrap is simple to make. Take two roles of plastic film. Heat one layer as you’re running it through a silicon die that looks like an anti-skid bathmat, and puff a little air through the holes in the bathmat to create the bubbles. Then, before it has a chance to cool, roll it on top of the un-puffed layer. Run the line out far enough to cool it and take it up on a big cardboard tube at the end of the line. When the roll gets big enough, it’s quickly sliced, another tube is slotted into place, and the process continues. Take the completed (enormous) roll and toss it on a cart for transfer to the warehouse. Simple.
Bubble wrap wasn’t originally made for cushioned packaging. It was originally manufactured to be a textured wall covering. Remember, it was 1960, and there were all kinds of “mod” materials being put on walls. Remember foil wallpaper?
In celebration of bubble wrap’s half-century, the folks at Sealed Air have created an online application. It won’t protect your china, but it will calm your nerves. Go ahead. Pop a couple. You can stop any time. Sure you can.
His partner, who owned the land, was a German immigrant who’d run from debt in Europe to find a new life in the New World. It was on this date in 1848, while Marshall was working on the mill, that the course of American history changed.
As Marshall later wrote, “I went down as usual, and after shutting off the water from the race I stepped into it, near the lower end, and there, upon the rock, about six inches beneath the surface of the water, I discovered the gold.”
His first thought was that it was iron pyrite, “fool’s gold”. He wrapped it in a kerchief and brought it to the landowner. After looking up the subject in an encyclopedia and testing with nitric acid from a medical kit, it was confirmed. Marshall had found gold, pure gold, at John Sutter’s mill.
The two men tried to keep it a secret, but word got out. Sam Brannan, a Mormon shopkeeper, was reported as running down a San Francisco street shouting, “Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!” Within a few days, San Francisco was nearly a ghost town.
News spread like a prairie fire. By 1849, would-be gold miners were arriving from the four corners of the earth. Europeans with money sailed west and crossed the Isthmus of Panama, then took passage north. Those without took up to five month to sail from Europe to Africa, around the Cape of Good Hope and across the South Pacific, then up to California. Asians escaped the opium wars and the Taiping Rebellion and voyaged to the land they called Golden Mountain.
( More! More! More! )
Next week, parent company Intercontinental Hotels Group will complete their billion-dollar relaunch of the Holiday Inn franchise. This massive upgrade included new lobbies with piped in pre-approved light contemporary music, new exterior lighting with distinctive green uplighting elements, new landscaping, new signage displaying a new logo, employee training, new Kohler showerheads and bathroom amenities, a distinctive Holiday Inn scent (sort of a tea and ginger pumpkin-pies-cooling-in-Mom’s-kitchen aroma), new complimentary Breakfast Bar items like hot gooey cinnamon rolls, and new bedding.
The new bedding is particularly nice. Crisp Egyptian cotton triple-sheeting, a comfy blanket, and at least four pillows on every bed. The king-sized bed is loaded with enough ammunition to launch The Mother of All Pillow Fights.
But there’s always something else. There’s always one more thing a good hotelier can add to make guests feel at home. Holiday Inn now offers a free human bed warming service. At the London Kensington Holiday Inn, you can request a member of the staff crawl beneath the covers in a one-piece sleeper suit (complete with cap and gloves) and warm up your bedclothes for you. Holiday Inn’s spokesperson Jane Bednall said it was “Like having a giant hot water bottle in your bed.”
OK, this might be a little bit over the top. I don’t think I’ll be requesting this service. First, this is the twenty-first century. Even in London, they now have double-glazed windows and central heating. It’s not like we need servants with warming pans to thaw the sheets in the frosty unheated bedchamber of the stately old manor house. Second, how can body heat be adequately transmitted when the heater is thoroughly wrapped in a sanitary snuggle suit?
Besides, this is the Unindicted Co-Conspirator’s job.
I wish I'd said that. But I've said quite enough already. I've tickled my tonsils with my toenails so often that my adenoids have athlete's foot. Truly, there is wisdom in the old saw that it is better to be silent and be thought a fool than open your mouth and prove it.
It's also a lot more profitable. Look at Apple. They are the masters of silence. To Apple, information is foreplay. They tease and titillate with unofficial and deniable leaks. The more excitable websites prematurely, um, come forth with ecstatic pronouncements and fuzzy Photoshopped pictures of what they think Apple’s latest technological triumph will be. Excitement builds to a fever pitch. Because no one has specific information, everyone is free to use their imaginations and dream up the most incredible thing ever. And then Steve Jobs (Peace Be Upon Him), the Guru of Cool, takes the stage and begins generating his patented Reality Distortion Field, the fans go crazy, and Apple sells millions of 'em.
There are only four days, 17 hours and 47 minutes until Apple's Media Event at which they will (hopefully) unveil the new iPad / iSlate / iGottaHaveOne. Haven't you heard? It's going to be AWESOME!
According to Senate Rule 22, as amended in 1975, three-fifths of the Senate must agree to limit debate, an action known as cloture. As long as debate remains unlimited, senators can filibuster to prevent debate from ending. The longest filibuster on record was the fifty-seven day action by the Southern Bloc against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. (The last speaker in that filibuster is still a member of Senate: Robert Byrd of West Virginia.)
Now the Republicans have one more than two-fifths of the seats, and Senator McConnell has dubbed their newest member “Forty-One.” Something about that rattled around in the pachinko machine charitably called my mind. Then the bell rang:
The movie: Ben Hur. The scene: A Roman galley manned by ragged and grizzled slaves. The Roman Consul, Quintus Arrius, addresses one by the numeral carved at his station:
“Your eyes are full of hate, Forty-One. That’s good. Hate keeps a man alive. It gives him strength.”
Ah, yes. Something to remember, Senator-elect Brown. “We keep you alive to serve this ship. Row well, and live.“
I love how easily German encompasses modern complexities. Where would we be without zeitgeist or schadenfreude or sturm und drang? The closest English equivalent to Eierlegende Woolmilschsau might be Jack-of-all-trades or Swiss Army knife, but those are such a pale figures of speech beside the rich full-blooded egg-laying-woolly-milk-pig.
It means something both useful and versatile, possessing a combination of skills and functions. It was first applied by the Bundeswehr to a multi-purpose fighter aircraft in 1970, and became part of the everyday German language in the mid-eighties.
It’s been applied to computers, kitchen equipment, and smart phones. And increasingly, it’s now used ironically, as in “The candidate for this position must possess a Masters degree in Cultural Anthropology or a related discipline, be proficient in COBOL, FORTRAN, and Transactional Analysis, present a neat and professional appearance, and have at least ten years’ experience developing applications for the Apple iPhone.” It also applies to a person who believes him or herself to be singularly blessed with talent and proficiency in an improbably wide range of disciplines.
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