What about Major Major?

Today we kiss 2011 goodbye, which I will do without regret.  I can't come up with any enthusiasm for taking a look at the year in review.  In my life, the biggest event of 2011 was my retirement, and I think I've beat the hell out of that subject enough.

So, let's talk about General George C. Marshall (12/31/1880 - 10/16/1959), whose birthday is today.  This guy was the Army Chief of Staff during World War II and later Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense.  He is widely considered one of the brightest, ablest military men ever.

The thing for which I remember him fondly was his promotion in 1944.  Roosevelt wanted to elevate him, among other army generals, for setting us on the road to victory, but Marshall was already at the ceiling as a  four-star General.  The United States had never had a rank higher than that before.  Other countries with equivalent ranks did have one higher, the rank of field marshal.

But George Marshall did not want to be known as Field Marshal Marshall, so somebody decided to resurrect General of the Army for a five-star general.  (During the Civil War, that designation went with a rank of four stars, held only by Union Generals Grant, Sherman and Sheridan.)

There have only been four other Generals of the Army:  Douglas MacArthur, Dwight Eisenhower, Henry Arnold, and Omar Bradley.

I personally would have loved for him to be called Field Marshal Marshall, and I bet Joseph Heller would too. 

Happy new year, everyone.

That's how you get that way

On the way to the store yesterday, I heard something on the radio for orchestra and extremely bombastic piano that sounded like a Rhapsody in Blue knock-off, and as it came to a noisy conclusion, I was thinking that it was a rather poor imitation of Gershwin.  Then the announcer said it was Gershwin -- Rhapsody No. 2 for Piano and Orchestra. Oh, well, nice try, George.  I don't think I had ever heard that piece before, probably because it isn't famous enough, and it's not famous because it isn't very good.

There are levels of fame for works of music.  At one end are real esoteric things famous among music scholars (like L'homme Arme masses) and on the other you have the Top 40 Smash Hits of Classical Music, stuff that even my Aunt Blanche knows -- Scheherazade, Beethoven's Fifth, the Hallelujah Chorus, Peer Gynt Suite, things like that.

Those pieces well known to almost everybody got famous because they are very good, although I admit that there was a time when I sometimes tended to dismiss them as beneath the attention of a serious music scholar.  Actually, Scheherazade was one of those to which I gave little attention or credit until the university orchestra, of which I was a member, performed it.  During rehearsals, while I hung out in the percussion section waiting for it to be my turn to bang on something, I had an opportunity to listen, really listen, to it and its parts, and I gained a serious appreciation of it.

So I learned a lesson.  And did it make me change my ways and stop being a music snob?  Of course not.  (Remember my story about going to Barnes & Noble to buy a CD of Johann Herrmann Schein?)

Questions

I frequently find myself pondering questions to which I can find no good answer.  For instance:

Why is the mascot of the Lansing Lugnuts (minor league) baseball team a bolt?

Why does tea go from too hot to drink to cold?

Why does the most famous version of "Dueling Banjos" feature one banjo dueling with a guitar?

And here's one that came to mind this afternoon as I was driving home from the store:  Why do people insist on driving their cars when I'm driving mine?  Why can't they get the hell off the streets and out of my way?

Anybody who can shed light on any of these, feel free.

Post-Holiday Post

I have neglected the blog the last few days, but I've been pretty busy the last week what with Christmas and its attending requirements and distractions, which included company from out of town.  As I look back over the weekend, I feel like all I did was cook, and I must say that some of my culinary efforts were rather disappointing.

From watching too much of Anne Burrell's cooking show, I over-salted the water in which I boiled the potatoes, and the resulting potato salad was so salty as to be basically inedible.  One of our guests liked it a lot, however, so I sent all the rest of it home with him.

I decided to try Paula Deen's crock-pot macaroni and cheese.  Our crock-pot must be hotter than hers because after 60 minutes on low (one-third of the required time) it was about to burn.  And the eggs Paula said no southern mac and cheese dish was complete without actually curdled.  It tasted all right, but it looked mighty ugly.

I did have one gastronomic triumph by way of a tomato-cucumber salad that I more or less made up, and I was told the cherry pie was very good, even though I had to use frozen instead of fresh cherries.

It was my partner who had made the original request for potato salad and, therefore, felt cheated out of being able to eat on the left-overs, so yesterday I made another batch of potato salad just for her, which we had with our supper last night.  It should come as no surprise to anybody that it needs more salt.

An Overnight Guest

The garage door got left open yesterday.  I suddenly remembered it about 10:15 last night and went to shut it.  As soon as I hit the button and the door began to move, something came flying out of the far corner of the garage.  Scared the livin' daylights out of me.  After circumnavigating the garage twice, it came to rest on top of a tall shelf, and I was able to see it was a female cardinal.

I stopped and started the door a dozen times, which got her flying, but she always flew around near the ceiling, too high to get out the door.  My partner came to help, clapping her hands and woo-hooing to get the bird to move, and I waved a broom around when she was in flight, hoping to shoo her out the door, but she was always too high.

We tried closing the big door and opening the man-door that opens into the back yard, but she never went near that one.  We finally gave up, shutting the doors and wishing her a good night.

This morning I went to see how our house guest had fared.  When I opened the big garage door, she took off flying high again, but now she was bouncing her head repeatedly on the ceiling, which I took as a clear sign of desperation.  It was starting to get light out, so I just left the door open and turned off the lights in the garage, hoping she'd be able to see where the outdoors was.  When I went back to check ten minutes later, she had made her escape.

Bless her little heart.

Ralph. In Memoriam.

After posting yesterday's bit about left turns, my thoughts ran in the other direction, and I thought about hanging a Ralph, and that made me think of Linda Eisenstarck with whom I was very good friends when we were in high school.

One time when a bunch of us were somewhere, somebody told this joke:  A traveling salesman, driving in unfamiliar territory, stops at a gas station in a small town.  While the attendant is filling his tank, the salesman says to him, "Where am I?"  The gas-jockey says, "This is Queersville."  The salesman says, "That's a strange name for a town.  Why do they call it Queersville?"  The attendant says, "I don't know.  Let me ask my wife," whereupon he turns and calls out, "Hey, Ralph!  Why do they call this town Queersville?"

Okay, I know, I know, but to dumb teenagers in the early 60's, it was funny.  As a matter of fact, Linda Eisenstarck laughed so hard at that joke that we thought she would never recover.  Thereafter, any time you wanted to get Linda to laugh, all you had to do was say, "Hey, Ralph!" and she would crack up.  After a while we started calling her Ralph, and that nickname stuck with her for the rest of our school days.

A couple years ago, Linda Eisenstarck (whose name isn't Eisenstarck any more) got a hold of me via Facebook.  We emailed back and forth for a while, and on two occasions I mentioned something about how we used to call her Ralph.  Not once did she even acknowledge my having brought it up.

I could show her where in my senior yearbook she signed her name "Linda Ralph," but I suppose it is sometimes best to let sleeping memories lie. 

Hang Louie

If you are in the left-turn-only lane, do you have to put on your turn signal?  Doesn't everybody realize you're going to turn left?  Otherwise, why would you be in the left-turn-only lane?

When I was younger but no less a smartass, I would put on my right turn signal when I was in the left-turn lane, just for fun.  Just one of those things that makes me so damn cute.

It's in the mail

I went to the post office today to mail a couple things, and while I was there a woman made three trips from her car to bring in three large packages -- picture a 24-roll package of toilet paper.  Each one was covered in Christmas wrapping paper and had ribbons around them tied in an elaborate bow on top.  The name and address of the recipient was taped on the top also, just south of the bow.

The clerk said to her, "Are you going to ship these like this?"  The woman said, "Sure, I don't care if the bows get squished."

Squished?  The bows and ribbon and that flimsy Christmas paper will be torn off of them before they get halfway there.  I've seen how the post office handles packages.

A long time ago I worked at a place that had a huge, empty warehouse.  At Christmas time they leased this space to the post office for sorting packages.  Two guys took the packages off a truck and threw them into (or, more precisely, in the direction of) one of a couple dozen big canvas bins.  They frequently missed, especially with the bins farthest away from them, of course.  Another postal worker walked around picking the packages up off the floor and throwing or dropping them, if they were lucky, into the correct bin.  Sometimes one of the guys would shout, "Hey, Bill -- this one says fragile," and Bill would make an attempt to catch that one as it came flying through the air.

Those bows don't stand a chance.

Chef, Football, and Postage Stamps

While watching The Next Iron Chef on the Food network last week, it came to me suddenly that Chef Beau MacMillan looks a lot like Buzz Lightyear.  Don't you think?

He was eliminated last week, so he won't be the next Iron Chef, and neither will Anne Burrell, who got the hook last night.  She is the particular favorite of my partner, so there was a little bit of sadness at our house.

I was already sad because the Bears lost to Denver in OT, but I am taking the rest of this season's results philosophically since their quarterback and now their star running back are both injured.

I needed to put $1.48 on an envelope today (which I know because I weighed it on my handy USPS-issued postal scale), so I got out my glassine envelope of postage stamps to see what I could come up with.  I had a $1 stamp and a 44-cent stamp, and a 4-center, which would have done admirably, but why use three stamps when twelve would do just as well?  The cents-worth I stuck on there were 44, 24, 17, 17, 10, 10, 10, 5, 5, 4, 1, and 1.  I believe the result is much more aesthetically pleasing.

I also believe I am believed to be something of a nut case, but as long as I'm having fun, who cares?

Truth in Advertising

Pizza Hut has a television commercial in which a bunch of people are eating a bunch of pizzas, and the voice-over guy says, "Any pizza, any size, any crust, any toppings -- for only $10!"  Then a disclaimer appears at the bottom of the screen that says, among other things, "Additional charge for stuffed crust."

Didn't the guy just get done saying "any crust"?  Huh?  Didn't he?

What if you were blind and could only hear the commercial?  You would call them up and say you wanted a 45" pizza with 18 toppings and stuffed crust, and they would say, okay, that comes to $54.78.

And you would say, no, it's supposed to be $10.

And they would say, no, there's an additional charge for stuffed crust.

And then you would say, but the television commercial says any pizza, any size, any crust, any toppings is ten bucks.

And then they would say, but it also says in the disclaimer that stuffed crust is extra.

And you would say, what disclaimer?

And they would say, the one that's right there on the screen in plain sight -- what're you, blind?

Let It Snow

I came across a reference this morning to that old axiom that no two snowflakes are exactly alike.

That's horsebleep.

How would anybody know that?  Who has had a chance to see, catalogue, and compare every snowflake that has ever fallen on the planet Earth?

The number of snowflakes that will fall on Michigan this winter alone will be something like a gazillion to the gazillionth power, and you cannot tell me that among them there won't be at least one that is a dead ringer for some other flake that has fallen somewhere on this planet in the last, say, 10 million years.

I mean, really.

Another one of those days in history

Today is Grandma Knez's birthday.  She was born Otilie Tekla Melka in 1889 in a small town called Černice in what is now the Czech Republic.  She was 4 foot 10 and very round, probably because she enjoyed her own cooking and baking -- and so did everybody else.  When I think of her, I generally see her in her kitchen, a large crockery bowl on her hip, beating its contents vigorously with a wooden spoon.

It is also St. Nicholas Eve today, December 6 being the feast day of the 4th-Century Nicholas, Bishop of Myra, who is the patron saint of, among others, sailors, archers, merchants, and children, and who becomes Santa Claus in our culture.  When I was young, we hung stockings on St. Nicholas Eve, a tradition my grandparents brought with them from the old country.  Candy and toys were good, coal and potatoes were bad.  (When coal was getting harder to come by, my mother decided a raw potato conveyed the same message.)  To emphasize her belief that no child was ever completely good, there was always at least one piece of coal or one potato in our stockings along with the treats.

And as if that were not enough, it was on this date in 1933 that Prohibition was repealed.  Now there's something to celebrate.

It is good to obey the rules

I see that today is the birthday of Austrian composer Anton Webern (born in Vienna in 1883).  He studied with Arnold Schoenberg and became a leading proponent of twelve-tone serial music, but he also extended serialization to include other musical elements, such as rhythm and dynamics.

I have always had a soft spot in my heart for Webern.  I believe a paper I wrote about him is what got me accepted into Michigan State's doctoral program in music theory.  Actually, it wasn't so much about him but about his String Trio, Op. 20, which I analyzed to within an inch of its life.  It's a fascinating piece from an analytical standpoint, but it isn't very pretty to listen to.  Most of Webern's music isn't pretty to listen to, actually, but he holds an important place in 20th-Century music.

What is really fascinating about Webern is his untimely end.  He was living in Salzburg during the Allied occupation of Austria following the end of World War II.  One evening in September, 1945, Webern, in violation of a curfew, went out onto his front porch to smoke a cigar.  A passing patrol of American soldiers saw the flame from the match and shot him to death.

A matter of perspective

This morning while perusing the list of people born on December 1, I noted that among them are Mary Martin (12/1/1913 - 11/3/1990) and Cyril Ritchard (12/1/1897 - 12/18/1977).  I find that interesting because she was Peter Pan to his Captain Hook in the musical adaptation of Peter Pan that opened on Broadway in October of 1954 and ran for 152 performances until February, 1955.

In March of 1955, an anthology series called "Producers' Showcase," which NBC used to showcase its color programming, broadcast a 90-minute version of the Broadway hit.  Mary flew around on wires, and Cyril was as evil as he could be.  I remember watching it, live and in black-and-white (because we didn't have a color TV).  I was eight and a half years old at the time, and I thought it was marvelous.

The show was so well received that it was repeated, live, in 1957 and again in 1960.  Video tape had been invented by then, and in 1973, NBC decided to show that last performance again.  They made a big deal out of it, hyping it for weeks.  A friend of mine made a small party out of it, inviting me and a couple other twenty-somethings to watch it at her house and share in the collective nostalgia.  Before the show came on, we assembled drinks and snacks and entertained each other with our memories of the original event.

Finally it was time for the show to start.  With giddy anticipation we all settled down in front of the tube.  After watching about ten minutes of what we unanimously declared to be the hokiest thing we'd ever seen, we turned it off and spent the rest of the evening playing pinochle.