Stone Face

There is a television commercial in which the Geico gecko is at Mt. Rushmore walking along through a tunnel that turns out to be George Washington's eye socket. The last time I saw it a fugitive thought swept through my mind concerning which Presidential faces would be carved into that mountain if it were being done today.

Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln, absolutely, but Teddy Roosevelt? Probably not. For all that he was bigger than life in a lot of ways, he has faded from the American memory, and whatever his accomplishments, he was not in the same class as the other three. Maybe that's why Borglum stuck him back in the corner.

I have been to Mt. Rushmore twice, once with my parents when I was in high school and most recently with my wife and her sister about three years ago. It's an odd kind of thing, as tourist attractions go. There's really nothing to do, so despite paying a bunch of money to park the car and walking a long way, you just sort of stand there and look up at it and then turn to your companions and say, "Well, I've seen it. Shall we go?"

We did manage to have a slightly more interesting experience there on our most recent trip to South Dakota. My wife wanted a souvenir from Mt. Rushmore to add to her little rock collection. She drove around the park until we were more or less behind the carvings, although we could still see George in profile. She pulled over to the side of the road and her sister jumped out of the car and picked up a couple small rocks which, considering our position, probably were not even chiseled from the faces.

At that moment, however, a park ranger in an SUV pulled up across the road from us, rolled down his window and said in stentorian tones, "Madam, all rock resources must remain in the park. Please replace the rocks." She did, and then as we drove away, the ranger turned his vehicle around and followed us until we left the park.

It's really rather exhilarating to be considered dangerous and capable of desecrating a national treasure.

You just never know

Many years ago while I was visiting my brother and family in Minnesota, my five-year-old niece was starting to go stir crazy because it had been raining for two or three days straight. My sister-in-law handed me a Sesame Street things-do-when-it's-raining book and asked me to please find something in it that would amuse the child. My niece immediately opened the book to the Cookie Monster's baking project.

I tried to talk her out of it -- I was sure it would be a complete waste of good butter, sugar and flour -- but she was adamant, so we made the cookies. And they were the best sugar cookies I ever had.

For anyone interested, here's the recipe:

3/4 cup margarine

1 cup sugar

2  eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla

2-1/2 cups flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon salt

  

Cream margarine and sugar together.  Add eggs and vanilla and blend well.  Gradually add dry ingredients.  Chill dough at least 1 hour.

Roll to 1/4" thickness and cut out. Place on ungreased cookies sheet.

Bake at 400° for 6 to 8 minutes.

Watch where you park it

While I was cleaning up the kitchen earlier, I dropped a dish towel on the floor. As I bent to pick it up, I said out loud, "I hope this isn't true." Not that I don't like having people stop by, I just didn't want anybody to come today.

I got to wondering where that old saw comes from, that dropping a dish towel means you're getting company. I looked online to see what I could find, and there was one web site that had hundreds of such sayings and superstitions. There were several about company coming if you drop things, such as, if you drop a knife, a man will come, but a fork means a woman, and a spoon means a child.

There were many, many more, all about spilling salt and spilling milk and rocking chairs with nobody in them and opening umbrellas indoors and getting money if your palm itched, but my favorite was this:  It's bad luck to sit on a pair of scissors.

I'm betting that pithy little bit of folklore originated with somebody who found out the hard way.

Unless the point actually is silent...

When I was active in a Toastmasters Club, I would sketch notes whenever I got ideas for possible speech topics. Today I ran across one such document, entitled, “Things People Say Wrong.” It lists a dozen or so words and phrases that are often used incorrectly. I didn't give a  speech about it, but I never pass up an opportunity to complain about the way people talk. Here are a few I jotted down:

“[Some sound] rose to a crescendo.” Wrong. Crescendo means gradually getting louder – the crescendo is the rising, not the resulting final decibel level.

“A myriad of things.” In correct usage, myriad is an adjective, not a noun, and fundamentally (and etymologically) it means “countless,” and you wouldn’t say, “a countless of things,” would you? No, just myriad things is all you need to say.

“Different than.” No, it should be different from, because different is the adjectival form of the verb to differ, and you don’t say, “They differ than each other,” do you? No, you say, “They differ from each other;” therefore, you should say one thing is different from another.

“The reason he fell is because he was drunk.”  No. Reasons are not because. Either, “The reason he fell is that he was drunk,” or “He fell because he was drunk,” but  never, the reason is because.  Reasons are not because of anything. Reasons just are.

The best way to learn correct usage and meanings of words and phrases (not to mention learning new ones) is to read a great deal of well-written prose. I think people do not do anywhere near enough of that these days.

I know a fellow who habitually says, “It’s a mute point.”  I know that if he saw the word moot in print and noted it spelling, he wouldn’t think it rhymed with cute. On the other hand, he’s the same guy who said, “I am anxious to bring this project to frutation."

Maybe people should read a lot of well-written prose with a dictionary at their elbow.

To Diss Service is a Disservice

I saw this morning in the New York Times’ feature “On This Day” that today is the birthday of Robert Service (1874-1958), whom they identified as “Canadian verse writer.”

Verse writer? Not poet? I remember reading some Robert Service in school, and it appeared to be poetry to me.

The word verse has many definitions, but in all of the references I consulted, the definition that was at or near the top was something like “a series of metrical feet forming one line of poetry.” Well, whatever you call what Service wrote, it was longer than one line, so that can’t be it.

Looking further, however, I found a few sources that included a definition of verse as “metrical writing distinguished from poetry because of its inferior quality” and which “lacks depth or artistic merit.” I also found a couple critical discussions that stated Service’s work was considered doggerel by the literary elite.

Obviously, whoever puts together the list of birthday people for the New York Times thinks so too. I did a little more checking and found that the Times even called Rod McKuen a “poet” on his birthday, and if ever there was verse that lacks depth and artistic merit, it’s the junk he writes.

Somebody definitely needs to call attention to the poetic prejudices of the New York Times.

Look Out, Weight Watchers

I have just heard about the Paleo Diet, although it appears to have been around for a few years. It is the invention of some dude named Loren Cordain, who has a Ph.D. in exercise physiology from the University of Utah. The idea is to eat what the people (at least the nearly human ones) ate during the Paleolithic Era, a.k.a. the Stone Age. This was when our human-like ancestors began developing stone tools but before they started cultivating crops. So, on this diet you basically eat only what a hunter-gatherer was able to hunt down and/or gather up.

And what would that be?  Well, you get to have lean meats, poultry, fish, fruit, vegetables, nuts, seeds, eggs, and "healthful" oils (olive, nut). Didn't sound too bad to me until I came to the list of forbidden foods. As soon as I saw I could have absolutely no dairy, no grains and no salt, I said forget it.

Tree bark without salt is simply not palatable.

Hidden in plain sight, as you might say

I made peanut butter cookies yesterday that are excruciatingly yummy and just like my mother used to make. That should come as no surprise since it's her recipe, although, according to the notation on her recipe card, she got it from a bag of Gold Medal flour.

My mother believed it was necessary to have something sweet on hand at all times, for dessert after supper, to have with coffee if somebody dropped in, or just to have when the demands of a sweet tooth could no longer be resisted. To that end, she baked something every couple days -- pies, cakes, coffee cakes, quick breads, and, of course, cookies. In order to maintain acceptable levels of on-hand cookies, she often hid them to keep us kids (and Dad) from gobbling them all up.

My brother and I sometimes made a game of finding the hidden cookies and taking one each (that we knew she'd never miss). One afternoon when she had gone out to the store, we decided to find the cookies we knew she had baked that morning. We looked in all the usual places and came up empty. We broadened our search, looking into every cupboard, every drawer, even the bread box. Nothing.

When she came home, we complained of being absolutely starved and in need of a snack, and she said, "Well, why don't you have a couple cookies?" and we said, "Okay, but where are they?" and she said, "In the cookie jar, of course."

Oh.

WARNING: YOU MIGHT BE STUPID

We had to buy a new toaster recently. Whilst waiting for the browned bread to pop out of it this morning, I happened to see that there were words on it, actually stamped into the metal top: WARNING - HOT SURFACE.

Really? The top of a toaster gets hot? Who knew?

The warning is repeated in French and Spanish, so obviously it's not just English speakers who need to be enlightened.