The long and the short of it

So, OK, I am short. Not tall. Vertically challenged. Height deficient. Growth impaired. Always in the front row in group pictures, never chosen for basketball. My nickname at summer camp was Shorty. My brother called me Runt. I also frequently heard Half-Pint, Shrimp, and Squirt.

You would think I'd be used to this by now. And yet ...

There I am hanging around the house in my weekend stay-home clothes. My visiting sister-in-law (6'0" in her stocking feet) stares at my legs, a puzzled look on her face, and finally says, "How does Little Jan end up with pants that are too short?"

BECAUSE THEY ARE PEDAL PUSHERS, DAMN IT!

On anybody else, they would come a few inches below the knee. On me, they end a couple inches above the ankle.

I am dating myself calling them pedal pushers. They are called capri pants nowadays.

I've been to Capri. I didn't see anybody in short pants there.

Royal connections

I saw that today is the birthday of Queen Victoria. Born in 1819, I think it was.

I am descended from Edward I and so was she, and so is the current queen, of course. Elizabeth II, in fact, is my 22nd cousin. We both have Edward I and Eleanor of Castille as 21st-great-grandparents.

That would make Queen Victoria, who is QEII's great-great-grandmother, something like my 17th cousin removed five times.

Happy birthday, Cuz.

Where are those permanent records?

When I was in grade school, teachers tried to frightened us into submission by telling us that not only our grades but also every misdeed we perpetrated would become part of our permanent school records and that those records would follow us for the rest of our lives. College admissions officers and prospective employers, they said, would be justified in dismissing our applications when they read the awful truth about our behavior in the sixth or seventh grade.

Has anybody ever seen any of those permanent records?

What a crock that was. But we bought it.

Knez is Bohemian

I am Bohemian, not Czechoslovakian.

The Romans gave the name Bohemia to an area in Eastern Europe occupied by a Celtic tribe (the Boii) who were displaced by a race of people called Czechs in the first centuries of the Christian Era in that long sweep of migration and settlement generally referred to as the barbarian invasions.

Bohemia, apparently at times a kingdom and at others a principality, enjoyed a few centuries of independence here and there, but it was mostly in and out of the control of other empires, notably the Moravians, the Holy Roman Empire, and Austria-Hungary.

After the Habsburgs were defeated in World War I, their Austro-Hungarian Empire was broken up and several new countries created out of it. What had once been Bohemia, Moravia, and Slovakia were amalgamated into the new nation of Czechoslovakia.

After World War II, Czechoslovakia, along with all the other Eastern European countries, fell under the influence of Communist Russia and remained under their control until the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In 1993, the Czechs and Slovaks agreed to divide the country in two. Slovakia was reestablished, and that part of Czechoslovakia that had been Bohemia and Moravia was renamed the Czech Republic.

There are a number of places in the United States with significant populations of persons of Czech or Bohemian descent. Iowa and Wisconsin both have such enclaves, and so does Chicago. Many of these people refer to themselves as Czech or Czechoslovakian.

Czech can be thought of as an ethnicity and Bohemian as a nationality, so it is not necessarily incorrect to refer to me and my family as Czech. It is very incorrect, however, to call us Czechoslovakian since Czechoslovakia had not even been invented yet when my grandparents immigrated to the United States in the first decade of the Twentieth Century.

My family and their cronies in the Chicago area referred to themselves as Bohemians, called their language Bohemian, and named things for that place – my grandfather's Odd Fellows lodge was called Bohemia Loze (Bohemian Lodge), and he is buried at Bohemian National Cemetery in Chicago.

Proud to be Bohemian, I am. I'm not Czechoslovakian.

Name that name

Something came up the other day about dancers, maybe because it was Martha Graham's birthday, and then I thought about Twila Tharp. I remember how odd a name it sounded to me when I first heard it, lo these many years ago. It still is an odd-sounding name.

A long time ago I knew a girl named Ardith Klutz. Not that there's anything wrong with either name -- Ardith Wilson, Sue Klutz, no problem. But the two together takes it to a whole new level of humor.

People who have strange or funny or potentially funny last names should not give their kids first names that compound the problem.

Mary Blundstone, Carol Dingleberry, John Kornbleet are only moderately amusing, but Bertha Blundstone, Daphne Dingleberry, Thaddeus Q. Kornbleet are hilarious.

Those three (latter) are real people, by the bye. All dead now, probably.

It's the whiskey

I happen to own on DVD the entire five years' worth of Upstairs, Downstairs (my all-time favorite television show), which is set in England in the first decades of the Twentieth Century. A few years ago while going through the whole series again, I noticed the characters were drinking sidecars at one point. I looked it up on the Internet and found that the sidecar was a popular drink around the time of World War I. I had to try it.

A basic sidecar is brandy, triple sec and lemon juice. I made one with Courvoissier, Grand Marnier and lemon juice out of a green bottle (or maybe a yellow plastic lemon-shaped squeeze thing). Despite that, I liked it. A lot.

Then I discovered actual real lemons, squeezed by me and used in place of the "Realemon" lemon juice in the green bottle. It opened a whole new world.

I like my cocktail when I get home from work, or before cooking Sunday supper, or any time I feel like I want one. And I probably drink some sort of side car more often than anything else. My current favorite variation is the Irish Whiskey Sidecar, which I believe I invented, thus:

2 oz Jameson (12-yr-old only)
1 oz Cointreau
1 oz fresh lemon juice

I was out of Jameson 12 a few months back (the stuff is $40 a bottle) and tried making it with Jack Daniels. Now I like Jack Daniels, when I'm in the mood for sour mash whiskey, but it never was quite right. I fooled with the proportions -- less lemon, more Cointreau, less Cointreau, more lemon, although rarely less whiskey -- and I fooled with the proportions some more, but it never was quite right.

And then somebody bought me a bottle of Jameson 12 for Christmas, and I discovered the real truth. It's not the proportions. It's the whiskey.

My second favorite variation, and a close second it is:

2 oz Absolut vodka
1/2 oz Cointreau
1/2 oz lemon juice

More Cointreau and/or more lemon overpowers the vodka, that's why the proportions of those items are half what goes in against the Jameson 12. The vodka sidecar took a lot of fooling with the proportions too, but I got it.

Right now, it's a Jameson Sidecar I'm drinking, and I'm loving it. And writing about it.

Too bad somebody isn't here to share it with me. The drink, or the blog. Either one.