D.G. Reg. F.D.

NPR had a nice piece this morning about Elizabeth II and the Diamond Jubilee celebrating her sixty-year reign.

One thing they mentioned was a poll showing that 69% of Brits said they would be worse off without the monarchy (which beats the numbers the elected leaders got).  When they asked people about when Charles becomes king, however, the numbers went down, which means it's her they like.  But when you think about it, for everybody 60 and under, she's  the only sovereign they've ever known.  Apparently she hasn't disappointed them too much.  There was that one time they did get mad at her, when Diana died and the Queen didn't make a public fuss, but they have evidently forgiven her.

I was about five years old when Elizabeth II succeeded her father, so she is pretty much the only English monarch I've ever known too.  I have always admired her, more so every time I read another book about her.  I think the British people are fond of her for the same reason I am -- although not born to it, when circumstances conspired to put her on the throne, she accepted it and she gave up her life to take on the job.  And, yes, I know how that sounds.  Poor thing!  She has to be Queen of England and have castles and palaces and horses and Corgis and be one of the richest people in the world, a head of state to whom everybody bows and curtsies -- what a shame.

Yes, but I would not be surprised if every now and then she secretly wishes she could put on jeans and a sweatshirt and go out for ice cream.

What, again?

I think I understand the motives for crimes -- crimes like robbery, burglary, fraud, assault, even murder.  It will somehow have something to do with love or money.  What I have never been able to wrap my brain around is vandalism.  Unless somebody has a grudge, I cannot think what benefit a vandal derives from damaging somebody else's property.

This morning it became perfectly clear to me that somebody has a grudge against our mailbox.  Instead of standing proud at the end of our driveway, it is laying face-down in the ditch next to the road.  I investigated the crime scene myself, and an examination of the splinter pattern of the wooden post indicates that it was pushed toward the street from behind, so it was not hit by a car.  Most likely, it was kids.  Just like the last two times.  No -- I take that back.  The first mailbox got taken out by a snowplow.

Our handyman will come fix it, but -- gee whiz.

Cake, Again

When I wrote about the cupcakes earlier this week, I mentioned that cake isn't one of my favorite things.  I believe my lack of interest in cake stems from a lifetime of cake disappointments. 

I am frequently asked by well-meaning family members and friends what my favorite cake is, and I always say yellow cake with chocolate frosting, and they always make me chocolate cake with white frosting.  This has been going on all my life, and my mother was the most frequent and persistent perpetrator.

By the time I was in college, I gave up on the cake, and when my birthday was approaching and my mother asked me what kind of cake I wanted, I asked her to make me pumpkin pie instead.  That solved it.

Oh, come on.

I have been thinking very seriously about the current flap over the provision in the new health care law concerning contraceptives.

The law requires employers to provide contraception coverage in their group medical insurance.  Some religious organizations whose beliefs prohibit their adherents from using contraceptives are complaining that this violates their first-amendment rights.  That is pure horsebleep.

Congress is not passing a law respecting the establishment of religion, nor is it passing a law that says everybody has to use contraceptives.  It just says coverage has to be available if it is wanted.

So, let's consider, just for example, one of the complainers -- the Roman Catholic Church.  If all the employees in their churches and schools and hospitals are good Catholics, then no claim would ever be filed for birth-control pills, now would it?

A Piece of Cake

For some reason, I'm not a big fan of cake.  I have probably made fewer than a dozen cakes in my life, all of them from boxed mixes.  I was thinking about baking some sort of dessert today and it came over me strangely that I wanted cupcakes.

I was going to use a Jiffy yellow cake mix I thought was in the pantry, but it wasn't there, and I vaguely remember it being used for cupcakes a while back.  There was one cake mix on hand, but it would make 24 cupcakes, and I thought 12 was enough.  I toyed with the idea of running to the store, but I wasn't that serious about it.  Then it occurred to me that nearly everything I bake -- brownies and lemon bars and all my famous cookies -- are made from scratch.  So why couldn't I make a cake from scratch?

I found a recipe on foodnetwork.com for classic yellow cupcakes.  Sounded perfect, and I had every ingredient called for, even unsalted butter.  I filled a couple of the little papers too full, but otherwise, things went smoothly.  I made a buttercream frosting, also from scratch and also from foodnetwork.com.  I colored it blue just for fun.

I'm ready for Cupcake Wars.

Not bloody likely

Yes, times are tough, and yes, there are people who are out of work and need help.  I've been there myself, and I know how desperate one can feel.  I must say, however, it never occurred to me to beg on the street.

In the last week I have seen panhandlers in Lansing, Michigan, who will never get my sympathy, much less any of my money, because they quite obviously don't have their priorities straight.  One woman standing on Larch Street had a sign that said, "UNEMPLOYED AND HUNGRY."  She held the sign in one hand while busily texting with the other.  I would like to have suggested to her that she sell or trade the phone for food.

Then last Friday I saw a guy at the corner of St. Joe and MLK get a hand-out from the man in the car ahead of me, and I actually considered following suit until I saw the cigarette hanging out of the panhandler's mouth.  I am not giving anybody money to buy cigarettes.

Is that you, Gramps?

One of my great-grandfathers was William Thomas Weatherford (1856-1955) of Litchfield, Illinois.  While reviewing some genealogical information, I noticed that I have found a listing for him in every federal census from 1860 through 1940 except 1880.  So I started a search online.

I can't be sure it's him, of course, but I did find one W. Weatherford in the 1880 census for Dallas, Texas, who was a white male of the exact right age (24) and birthplace (Illinois).  He was living in a house alone.

Now, there are plenty of Weatherfords in Texas, many (if not all) from a branch of my family.  Two or three of my great-great-great-grandfather's brothers went to Texas from Illinois in the 1830's.  The town of Weatherford, Texas, was named for one of them, Thomas Jefferson Weatherford, who would have been William's great-uncle.
Although my branch of the Weatherford family stayed in Illinois, William's father did spend five years in Texas when in his teens, and I wonder if William wanted a similar adventure.  In any case, he didn't stay long after that census; in 1882 he was back in Illinois getting married to Claudia Adeline Kinder.

It would please me tremendously if this W. Weatherford of Dallas in 1880 really is my great-grandfather, because the census lists his occupation as "gambler," and that would  mean I come by it honestly.

Smile Not

I have decided I do not like smiley faces in written communication.  I think my biggest complaint is that it is the equivalent of saying "Ha Ha!" which I have always considered a rather juvenile practice. 

The smiley face is the original emoticon, those emotion icons that are meant to convey to the reader the mood of the writer.  It came out of IT and has become a staple of electronic communication.

It all started in 1982 when a dude named Scott Fahlman at Carnegie Melon University proposed to the computer science department that they use :-) (colon-hyphen-right parenthesis, read sideways) as a "joke marker" in their postings to electronic message boards.  He then went on to suggest that perhaps it would be better to use the left parenthesis instead to indicate when something was not a joke.  The practice spread and was picked up by computer nerds everywhere, eventually finding its way to the incipient Internet, and the rest is history.

Although emoticons can still be created with the symbols available on the standard keyboard, there are many programs that allow the insertion of actual images, and some applications will even automatically change :-) to J .

I do not use smiley faces myself, or haven't in a long time, as far as I remember.  I admit, however, that I do occasionally poke fun at something or somebody by putting [smiley face] at the end of the sentence instead of the image, just to be cute.

The real point here is that if you can't tell when I'm kidding, then I am not communicating very well, or you do not know me very well, or you are really stupid.  Ha ha!  Just kidding. 

Save the Grape Nuts

I bought a box of Grape Nuts over the weekend and had some for breakfast yesterday and again this morning, something I hadn't done in years.  I love Grape Nuts, but evidently not a lot of people share my enthusiasm.  There is talk about the brand being in trouble, and I, for one, would be sad if it was removed from the market.

Grape Nuts Cereal was created by Charles W. Post around 1896 after he had been a patient at the Kellogg Sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan, where corn flakes were under development.  Although detractors like to point out that it contains neither grapes nor nuts, Mr. Post thought that the concoction had a fruity, grape-like scent while baking, and the hard crunch reminded him of nuts, hence the name.  As far as I can tell from superficial research, the FTC considers the name "fanciful" rather than "deceitful," so it has never been challenged.

As processed food goes, Grape Nuts is a miracle of simplicity.  There are only four ingredients:  whole grain wheat flour, malted barley flour, salt, and dried yeast.  Apparently the dry ingredients are wetted with water, baked, and then ground up into the familiar little kernels.

I don't care about saving whales, I just want there to be Grape Nuts in the cereal aisle when I want it.  I guess I'm pretty simple myself.

Thinking About Shoes

There's a dude in Norway who is on trial for killing 77 people last year.  In the courtroom today, a relative of one of the victims stood up and threw his shoe at the guy.

It didn't say what nationality the shoe-thrower was.  In various places in the Middle East, it is considered a serious insult to throw a shoe at all, much less at somebody.  Remember that Iraqi journalist who threw his shoe at George W. Bush in Baghdad?

As a make-shift weapon or projectile, a shoe is handy, I guess.  It's heavy enough not only to fly through the air but also inflict a little bit of damage too, I suppose.  At least, a substantial shoe is.  I don't think you'd get much result by tossing fuzzy house slippers at anybody.

Nikita Khrushchev was said to have banged his shoe like a gavel (or maybe a hammer) on the lectern at the United Nations in 1960, although there are conflicting reports as to whether that actually happened or not.  Apparently the only photograph of the incident has been proven a fake.  Still, if you wanted to pound on something, your shoe is immediately to hand.

Some shoes figure prominently in literature, such as Dorothy's ruby slippers and the glass one Cinderella lost. 

One of the most important and storied battles of the American Civil War involved shoes.  The nearly barefoot Confederate army had heard there was a shoe factory in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and drove into Union territory in order to help themselves to its wares.

We can wait for the other shoe to drop, walk in somebody else's shoes, put the shoe on the other foot, and, if the shoe fits, wear it.

Shoes have long been excellent hiding places, for money, secret maps, knives, drugs, you name it. And then there was Richard Reid back in 2001 who got caught with a bomb in his shoe on an airplane.


I wouldn't have wanted to be in that guy's shoes.

Faster and Vaster

On this date in 1961, a dude named Newton Minnow, who was chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, gave a speech to the National Association of Broadcasters in which he said that television was a "vast wasteland." It caused quite a stir and, although I was only 14 at the time, I am sure I did not agree with him.

After all, there were sitcoms starring Dick Van Dyke, Danny Thomas, Andy Griffith, and Donna Reed, plus The Real McCoys, My Three Sons, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, The Flintstones, Leave It To Beaver, and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. Garry Moore, Ed Sullivan, Red Skelton, Steve Allen, Jack Benny and Dinah Shore had variety programs, not to mention a musical hour with Lawrence Welk. The cowboys were there with Bonanza, Cheyenne, Have Gun Will Travel, and Gunsmoke, and there were lawyers, cops and intrigue on The Defenders, Checkmate, The Detectives, The Untouchables, and The Naked City. There were doctors too, like Ben Casey and Dr. Kildare, and as if that were not enough, we also had To Tell The Truth, I've Got a Secret, and What's My Line?

And that was what appeared on three television networks. Nowadays, thanks to cable and dish and satellite, we have scores of channels showing programs that give us an inside look at tattoo parlors, automobile repossessionists, bounty hunters, pawn shops, people with more children than is morally responsible, midgets, and women with nothing to recommend them except that they are married and live in New Jersey.

I wonder what words Mr. Minnow could find today to describe this vastness of waste.

Could I be a vegetarian?

I just saw a picture on Facebook of my three-year-old great-nephew encountering a baby chick, and it brought back this awful experience I had over the weekend.  I watched a show on some cable channel -- it was kind of like "How It's Made," but it wasn't that one -- that was all about the process of raising chickens, commercially.

The beginning was all right.  There were a gazillion eggs, which were suction-cupped into an incubator, and after a while the baby chicks finally started poking out of the shells.  Once they dried off and were just as cute and fuzzy and cuddly as they could be, the teeny tiny little chickies were sent on a horrifying journey through the chicken factory, dragged along on conveyor belts, dropped down chutes and just generally bounced around on moving and separating machinery as if they were just little round wads of soft yellow lint.

I had to turn it off, I was so appalled.  Poor little baby critters.  I may never eat chicken again.

English Time

In a British movie I saw last night, somebody said something about the time being "half eleven." I wasn't sure what that meant, because I do know that the exact equivalent in German, halb elf, means 10:30, half before eleven.  To the Brits, however, it apparently means 11:30, "half eleven" being short for "half past eleven." 

I've encountered other British vagaries regarding time.  While in London once long ago, I was talking to a woman on the telephone about an event I wanted to attend, and when I asked her about the starting time, she said, "Try to be here by quarter to eight."  Then she immediately added, "Oh, that would be seven forty-five in your language."  I've always wondered who told her Americans don't know what "quarter to eight" means.

On a completely unrelated note, there is a horse running in today's Kentucky Derby called El Padrino (Godfather), and since it is Cinco de Mayo, he might be a good bet.  Or not.  The odds are 30 to 1, but it would be a nice payday if he did win.

The race starts this afternoon about half six.

Thoughts for May 1. (May one?)

The tradition of celebrating the first day of May appears to have Celtic roots, but it never reached me in the Chicago burbs post-World War II.  My mother used to talk about the things she did as a child on May Day but neither she nor any of my teachers ever attempted to provide me with an opportunity to mark the day by gathering flowers or dancing around a May Pole.  It's a wonder this deficiency didn't produce a significant sense of social disadvantage in me.

On a semi-related note, I recently learned that the distress cry "mayday" has nothing to do with the first of May.  It is a re-spelling of the French m'aider, "help me."

And, as if that were not enough, today is the birthday of Kate Smith (1907-1986).  The first association most people have when they hear her name is probably "God Bless America," but I always remember the time I asked my mother why Kate Smith wore the same black dress all the time.

Kate's first television show, a daytime variety hour, premiered in 1950, and I believe we must have seen it every day, or at least that's what was tuned in while I played and my mother worked around the house.  Otherwise, I would not have been prompted to ask the question.

In reply, my mother explained that heavy people often wore dark colors which made them appear not so big, but she also pointed out that it was probably not the exact same dress, since we couldn't see the color and all dark colors would appear black.  As to my inability to distinguish differences of cut or style -- well, I was only three or four at the time, not to mention that I was blind as a bat (corrective lenses didn't enter my life until 1952).

I wish I knew why I remember that so well six decades later.  But at least it does show that even as a tiny child I had fashion sense enough to understand that variety is essential.