Goodbye To All That

I have, as a general rule, enjoyed decadal years. My first, 1960, was a good year, even though I was in school, and no longer had the freedom of a child. It was an exciting time: we were poised to go into space, and the grandparents in the White House would soon be replaced with someone much younger, whether Nixon or Kennedy. The year 1970 was another excellent year. We had landed on the moon the previous year, and it was clear that we (as a country) could do anything we wished, except, perhaps, to extricate ourselves from Vietnam. I began that year as a high school junior (the best year of high school, in my opinion) and ended the year as a senior.

The decadal year of 1980 was a year of hope. The preceding year saw the return of gasoline lines, the Iranian hostage situation, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Things must surely get better in the new year. Things did eventually get better, and I believe the year 1980 marked the beginning of the turn-around. In 1990, we finally sold our home in Virginia, and the family joined me in Georgia, where we bought a new home, enrolled the kiddies in their new schools, and began our tenure as Georgians. I have lived in Georgia since moving here to take a job, in 1989, and have lived here longer than I have lived in any of the four states that have served as my permanent residences.

Which brings us to Y2K, the funkiest of the decadal years. The world did not end with the beginning of the new millenium, and life was very good, at least for a year. Then the 9/11 terrorist attack occurred, and the world changed. The year 2010 was not bad at all. I had moved to Madison, Georgia, back in 2005, and the good life here in the non-metropolitan area of Georgia was blissful.

Which brings us to 2020, and the pandemic.

The worst aspect of the year 2020 was not the virus released in the Wuhan region of China. Yes, the Wuhan Flu has been deadly, though not, perhaps, as deadly as the numbers indicate. (I recently saw an interview with a medical examiner in Michigan, I think it was, who was quite upset when she learned that the corpse on her table with the three gunshot wounds, one of which was fatal, was listed as a Covid-19 death.) But people die all the time, with or without the Wuhan Flu.

I checked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website a moment ago. According to the CDC, there have been 337,419 deaths from the coronavirus in this country. I checked on the cancer statistics, also using a link on the CDC website, which directed me to the National Cancer Institute’s website. This year there were a total of 606,520 fatalities related to cancer. The number of deaths from cancer this year is 1.8 times the number of Wuhan Flu deaths. A similar fact holds for heart disease: according to the CDC website, “About 655,000 Americans die from heart disease each year – that’s 1 in every 4 deaths.” So the number of deaths from heart disease is nearly twice the number of deaths from the Wuhan Flu.

Yes, the Wuhan Flu is deadly, and every death associated with it is a tragedy. But it isn’t the deadliest disease facing us today. It has assumed such prominence in our thinking because it has been endlessly hyped by a media that apparently finds little else interesting to report on.

Which brings us to the worst aspect of the year 2020. Because of the hype, because of the fear generated by those who report on the disease, we have voluntarily given up many of our freedoms. Governors impose lockdowns, destroying jobs, and lives, while they go about their business as if nothing has happened. People who resist are harrassed, charged, and jailed. Yet others are allowed to congregate in mobs, if the leadership of the state, or city, agrees with the mob’s objectives. It is an arbitrary and capricious rule, not by law, but by fallible humans. It is not a republican form of government, which means that it is unconstitutional. Yet we put up with it.

A friend sent a funny meme to me It was a picture of the comedian Jeff Foxworthy, whose shtick is “You may be a redneck if . . .” The caption said: “If your Democrat governor killed your small business, and you still support that same governor because you hate Donald Trump, you ain’t a redneck, because rednecks ain’t that stupid.”

If you are willing to submit to these anti-constitutional governors, I can only hope that your chains rest lightly on you.

There is some hope. I will leave you with an observation by the journalist Salena Zito. “Americans need something to aspire to — a purpose or someone who will take us to a better place. If 2020 taught us anything, it taught us that that journey upward will not come from a politician, nor will it come from the loudest voices, which means it will likely come from within us as a people. That might be the best news for 2021.”

Happy new year, everyone!

Among The Intellectualoids

First, let me confess to a bit of intellectual property theft. The American Spectator, a lively journal of opinion, used to run a monthly column with the title Among The Intellectualoids, and I have stolen that title for the title of this post. (I haven’t seen The American Spectator in awhile, so it may still run that column.)

The summer of 2020 was interesting, to say the least. The death of George Floyd in Minneapolis set off a series of protests nationwide. Some have been quite violent and costly. Apparently, the only way to atone for the death of George Floyd, caused by one human in Minneapolis, is to commit looting and pillaging on a national scale. How many 72-inch flat screen televisions does it take to atone for Floyd’s death?

We have been lectured for some time now by the intellectuals who attribute all our woes to systemic racism. What, exactly, does this mean? I once had a cat, a stray that we adopted, and at its initial vet visit, the vet informed us that the cat had ringworm, a fungal infection. We had two options for treatment: topical or systemic. What, pray tell, do those terms mean? The topical treatment was applying an ointment to the infected spot of the cat’s skin, while the systemic treatment involved a pill that entered the bloodstream, permeated the cat’s entire body, and killed the fungus wherever it was. We opted for the systemic treatment, as it would also take care of any ringworm we could not see.

So systemic racism is like that systemic ringworm treatment: it permeates the entire body. It is there whether you know it or not. You commit acts of racism daily, whether you know it or not, and your victims are maligned daily, whether they know it or not. It is in the bloodstream of our society.

This is what the intellectuals tell me. Let’s break that down a bit further: I am racist because I am a person of pallor. It does not matter that I treat everyone equally. It does not matter that acts of racism make me sick. I am not a person of color, hence I am a person of privilege, and that very fact makes me racist. I am, in short, irredeemable.

Hmm. I am defined by the color of my skin, not by my character. That sounds vaguely familiar. Wasn’t that the basis for the Jim Crow laws in the South? That sounds, well, racist.

Another area in which the intellectuals tend to get it wrong has to do with the sins of capitalism and the virtues of socialism. The intellectuals, who occupy positions of privilege in our colleges and universities, made possible by the fruits of capitalism, worship the virtues of socialism. Equality, you see, is the desired outcome.

Well, we have a perfectly socialist institution in this country, an institution that pays people the same amount of money for the jobs they do, provides the same clothing and meals to everyone, provides free health and dental care to everyone, and grants the same living accommodations to everyone. We call it prison.

The intellectuals never will understand that there is a tradeoff between freedom and equality. We are not born under equal circumstances. My parents weren’t Vanderbilts. Yet I have been free to pursue the occupations that I have enjoyed, and have no regrets that my talents and abilities did not lend themselves toward making me a wealthy man. I have done what I wanted to do. I prefer freedom to equality.

The fact that most of our intellectuals are closet, or even out-of-the-closet, Marxists, means that our college students are indoctrinated, steeped in the Marxist broth. Those students who become primary or secondary school teachers pass on what they were taught. We are all Marxists now, with apologies to Richard Nixon and John Maynard Keynes.

According to data from the Open Syllabus Project, which has reviewed something on the order of 1.1 million syllabi (over the course of a decade) from colleges and universities in the UK, US, Canada, and Australia, The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx, “ranks among the top three most frequently assigned texts”. This is from Dr. Susan Berry, and it was published in a 2016 Breitbart article. In departments of economics, Marx is the most assigned economist. And why not? Marxist societies are generally recognized as utopias. We can all learn from them. (Pulled trigger warning: that was sarcasm.)

It has been my experience that Marxist writers generally use such turgid and unintelligible prose, perhaps in an attempt to hide the contorted logic behind their ideas, that they are virtually unreadable. Currently I am working on Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by the Brazilian Marxist Paulo Freire. I am told it will help me understand something about systemic racism, although it is ostensibly about pedagogy. I have read only the first few pages of this work, and the only thing I have been able to gather is that the oppressor is also the oppressed. Presumably teachers oppress their students. Or the students oppress the teachers. Or something. The truth is, I have no idea what this 1968 book is about, other than the fact we are all oppressors. And all victims. I think. Compared with Marxist literature, Anna Karenina is a light-hearted comedy.

Another intellectual is Lisa Bender, the president of the Minneapolis City Council. On the Tuesday, November 10, 2020 episode of the Tucker Carlson Tonight show, a video clip aired that showed a CNN interview with Lisa Bender. It was an old clip, I think, from earlier in the summer, and the topic was the “defund” or “dismantle” the police movement. Here is the question the interviewer posed, and the answer by Lisa Bender:

Q: “Do you understand that the word ‘dismantle’ or ‘police free’ also makes some people nervous. For instance, what if, in the middle of the night, my house is broken into. Who do I call?”

A: “Yes, I mean, I, I hear that loud and clear from a lot of my neighbors, and I know that myself, too, I know that comes from a place of privilege because for those of us for whom the system is working I think we need to step back and imagine what it would feel like to already live in that reality where calling the police may mean more harm is done.”

Minneapolis now lives in a different reality, one that the intellectuals didn’t see coming, but one that was predictable. However, according to Lisa Bender, intellectual, if you expect police protection as a result of the taxes you pay, you are privileged, and, of course, don’t deserve it.

Pop quiz: here are three quotations. Tell me if the author is an intellectual.

“Donald Trump is not an Adolf Hitler. At least Hitler improved the daily life of his followers, had discipline, and required more of himself to gain the respect of his followers. . . . A refusal to make comparisons has been a problem, when they have such similarities. Donald Trump’s death count is higher than Hitler’s at the same period.”

“Donald Trump is actively trying to kill our children.”

“I can only imagine the envy with which [Donald Trump] watched Derek Chauvin’s casual cruelty and monstrous indifference as he murdered George Floyd. I can only imagine that Donald wishes it had been his knee on Floyd’s neck.”

The first quote is by Bandy X. Lee, a professor at Yale University. Yale, an Ivy League school, tuition $55,500. What parent in his or her (or their) right mind(s) would pay that kind of money for this kind of drivel?

The second and third quotes are from Rob Reiner and Bette Midler, respectively. They are not intellectuals. They are intellectualoids. See how difficult it can be to separate the wheat from the chaff, when they all tend toward chaff?

My favorite George Orwell quotation is “Some ideas are so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.” Based on the absurd nonsense sent our way daily, it is safe to say that our world is run by intellectuals.

Robert Ray Jones

My mother was one of eight children. My father, too, was one of eight children. I am completely honest when I say that I have no idea how many cousins I have.

Of my 14 aunts and uncles by blood, there is only one I never met: Robert Ray Jones. He died eight years before I was born, just about 30 days or so after D-Day. My mother was 14 years old when her older brother died, and along about 1998 or 1999, the fact that his body was never found began preying on her mind. His name is engraved on a wall in the Brittany American Cemetery in Saint-James, Normandy, France, and there is a marker in the family cemetery in just outside Kenly, NC, but as his body was never found, there is no grave.

Unfortunately, there are only two of my mother’s siblings still alive: her twin brother George, and the baby of the family, my Aunt Lorraine. I love my Aunt Lorraine dearly, and would thus never be so crass as to reveal her age, but suffice it to say, both have a few years in the rearview mirror. And so it is that bits and pieces of the family history are being lost.

According to my mother (and this was late in life, so the recollections may be faulty), the last family member to see Robert alive was my Uncle Roy, who saw him in England just prior to the D-Day invasion. Alas, my Uncle Roy is no longer around to confirm this story. But it may explain why he named his son, my cousin, Robert. According to my Aunt Lorraine, Robert was “blown up” during actions in northern France subsequent to the invasion, and that is why there was no body. Another family tale had it that the family buried a casket in the family cemetery that contained nothing but his dog tags. That story does not ring true for many reasons: would the family really go to that extraordinary expense during a time of fiscal hardship; when did the government start returning dog tags (note the plural) to families; and if Robert truly was “blown up” to the point that no body was available for burial, how did the dog tags survive?

Before going further, I should note what I think I know of dog tags, based on my viewing of many, many World War II television shows during the 1960s. My understanding is that each GI wore two dog tags, giving his name, serial number, date of tetanus toxoid inoculation, blood type, and religion (P for Protestant, C for Catholic, H for Hebrew). There was no + or – for Rhesus blood factor. Up until 1943, the name and address of next of kin was included, but that was later removed from the dog tag, as it could be used to mentally torture any GI who was captured. One dog tag was worn on a chain around the neck, the other on a chain around the neck chain. If a soldier died in battle, the second dog tag was pulled and kept until the death of the soldier could be recorded officially, while the first stayed with the soldier, so that the burial detail could identify the victim that was being buried.

In 1999, I went with my mother, my father, one of my daughters, and about nine or so other relatives and family friends to the Brittany American Cemetery, where we saw Robert’s name engraved on a wall, and generally enjoyed the peacefulness of this wonderful place, filled with close to 5,000 graves, including some 500 or so unknowns. It brought some peace to my mother.

All that is background. Now, on to the story.

I have an Ancestry.com account primarily for Kathy, who enjoys doing a little genealogical work from time to time. I don’t remember my log-in information, so it really is an account for her. In other words, I am not Mr. Genealogy. My sister, though, is Mrs. Genealogy, and she is quite active on Ancestry. Through her activities, we have discovered four cousins we were previously unaware of. I gather she has been building a family tree on Ancestry, or something similar to that, because one day she received a communication through Ancestry, asking about Robert Jones. The gentleman who contacted her lives in Seattle, Washington, and he asked for Robert’s serial number. My Aunt Lorraine has that information, and when my sister transmitted that information to him, he sent her a picture of Robert’s dog tag, pictured above.

Oh, man, do we have questions!

But as of now, we have no definitive answers, so there will, I hope, be a part two to this post. It seems that an elderly French woman had the dog tag in her possession, and our Seattle, Washington contact came to know of it through friends who live in northern France and know the woman. The woman has had it for many years. Did she know my uncle? Where is the other dog tag? Does she know what happened to the body?

For now, this is an unfinished story. I will keep you posted, if any more information comes to light.

Isn’t technology grand?

Barratry, Champerty, and Maintenance

How old were you when you learned the meaning of the word “Mommy”? Where were you when you learned the meaning of the word “paradigm”? When we are young, our brains are like little sponges, absorbing all we see and hear. After that, we learn a bit more slowly, and we tend to remember the circumstances under which we learn something new. I don’t remember when I learned the meaning of the word “baseball” but I remember, to within a few months, when I learned the meanings of the words “barratry” and “champerty”.

Sam Ervin Jr. became a United States Senator from the state of North Carolina, my home state, when I was a bit more than a year and a half old, and retired during my senior year in college, some 20 years, five months, and 20 days after taking the oath of office. He was born in 1896, a mere 19 ½ years after the end of Reconstruction, an event that made Ervin and most of his generation of fellow North Carolinians Democrats. He was the product of his time. Like many orators of his age, he knew his King James Bible and his Shakespeare, but he also knew funny tales of his fellow man. He belonged to a political species that is now extinct: the conservative Democrat.

Most people my age who have heard of Senator Sam know him from the Watergate hearings, as he chaired the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities (aka, the Senate Watergate Committee). Those of us who grew up with Sam Ervin Jr. as our senator had the opportunity to hear him speak, and to marvel at his elegance with words. Once, when giving a Confederate Memorial Day address, I even stole from Senator Sam, referring to our honored dead as having descended into “the tongueless silence of the dreamless dust”. I did not know at the time that he had stolen that line from Robert G. Ingersoll, but that does not matter. If I had not heard the Senator use that phrase, regardless of its origin, it would have been lost to me.

He could tell a funny story, as well. These tales are generally not knee-slippers, but were used to make a point. There is the story of George, a teen-aged youth, who was hired to remove the weeds and briars from the grave of a dead relative of his employer. George started his work, but then suddenly burst out laughing so hard that he could no longer finish his work. “What are you laughing about,” his employer asked. “Boss,” he said, “I’m laughing at them funny words on this gravestone.” “George, I don’t see any funny words on the gravestone.” “Look here, Boss,” replied George. “It says ‘not dead but sleeping’. He ain’t fooling anybody but himself.”

After serving on the Watergate Committee and achieving his moment of national fame, he retired to his home in Morgantown, NC, and wrote his memoirs. The problem is that he let a few too many years pass between his moment of fame (1974) and the publication of his memoirs (1984). With Watergate 10 years in the rear-view mirror, and with the Reagan Revolution in full swing, he seemed a quaint but not very interesting bit of the past. He had trouble finding a publisher. He ended up having the book published by The Michie Company, a publishing firm in Charlottesville Virginia, which handled the state of Virginia’s legal publishing (annotated state statutes, state agency publications, and, as Wikipedia puts it, “other reference publications used by the legal profession”). I can’t imagine that Michie had the budget to promote the book that, say, a Simon and Schuster would have had, but there you have it. Timing is everything in this business.

I bought the book in early 1985, and in a chapter entitled “Illustrative Judicial Aberrations” I found a reference to a 1963 Supreme Court ruling in the case of NAACP v. Button, in which the Supreme Court “held that the First Amendment rights of freedom of expression and association prohibited Virginia from prosecuting the NAACP and its attorneys for violating its laws against barratry, champerty, and maintenance”.

Barratry, champerty, and maintenance?

I didn’t have the internet in 1985, so I was limited to what my dictionary contained. The closest word I could find to “barratry” was “barracking,” a rough synonym for heckling or abusing. A friend, who is a patent attorney, later loaned me a copy of a legal dictionary, where I determined that “barratry” was “litigation for the purpose of harassment”, what I think we would call today the “frivolous lawsuit”.

Champerty is something else. Let’s take a hypothetical situation. Let’s say Tim Cook is President of the United States, and is no longer the big boss at Apple, but he still has shares of Apple, from which he can profit if Apple does well. Let’s say a foreign dignitary buys a MacBook Air. I decide that constitutes an emolument. Yes, I know, money was exchanged for a product or service, and not given as a gift, so it can’t be an emolument, but go along with me on this one. I decide I don’t like President Cook, so I file a lawsuit, claiming he violated the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution. I don’t expect the suit to go anywhere, as it clearly has no basis, but it will harass and generally incommode President Cook. I have engaged in barratry.

But let us stipulate further that I really don’t have the money to go through with the suit. I find a sugar daddy, another person who dislikes President Cook, and who will be happy to see him inconvenienced. Sugar Daddy pays for the suit, and we both enjoy the spoils. Sugar Daddy has engaged in maintenance, and if there is a monetary reward at the end of the case in which he shares, Sugar Daddy has also engaged in champerty.

So why did these archaic terms come to mind? Last night, at a bit after 9:00, I found myself in my pickup, in the metropolis of Rutledge, Georgia (population 820). I remembered it was debate night, so I flipped on the radio to listen to the debate during my 10 minutes ride home. After a few minutes the word “barratry” formed in my mind. I was not remembering the actual definition, but my early guess at the definition, back before I borrowed that legal dictionary: the act of abusing. Stereo barracking.

I arrived home, and turned on a humorous podcast (Kimmer Show podcast: check it out.) I hope this election ends soon.

It’s A Slow Read

When I moved to Madison, Georgia, I signed up for cable television, primarily because there was only one television station that I could pick up with an antenna. That station happened to be a Spanish-speaking UHF station out of Athens, and I do not speak Spanish. [The one thing I noticed about that television station is that every program, whether it be the news, the weather, a game show, a sitcom, a drama, whatever, featured at least one scantily clad, buxom young lass.] After subscribing to cable for a couple of months, I decided that I would be better off without television. At that point, reading became my number one hobby.

It quickly became apparent that my reading speed was terribly slow. I believe my reading speed peaked while I was in high school, and began a slow decline thereafter. One cannot spend decades reading scientific papers without suffering a decline in reading speed. It simply isn’t possible to read scientific papers very quickly. To be honest, I’m surprised my lips don’t move when I read. Still, given that the television set was off, I had several hours every night to devote to reading, and I managed to read a lot of books. For a couple of years I averaged reading one book per week, which is a pretty good clip for a slow reader.

This is the month of September, the ninth month, and I have managed to read exactly eight books thus far this year. If I can manage to finish the one I am currently working on, A History of Georgia (Kenneth Coleman, Editor, 1977), within the next two weeks, I will be zooming along at the pace of one book per month. And to make matters worse, two of the books I read this year were actually books I’d read earlier.

The book on Georgia history is taking a very, very long time to read, because I am easily distracted. Back during the summer, while working on the Beaufort, SC house, I was reading the portions of the book that dealt with the Trustee and the Royal Province periods of Georgia history, and I was surprised to see the town of Beaufort, SC show up prominently in Georgia’s early history. I soon focused on Fort Frederick, the fort where Oglethorpe and his band of settlers stopped before making their way to what is today Savannah. Fort Frederick, I soon discovered, was transferred by the United States to the State of South Carolina, which has it listed as a heritage site. There it sits, on the river (well, partly in the river), between Beaufort and Port Royal, and I had to go see the place.

Problem: it isn’t open to the general public. I spent a couple of days trying to figure out how to get to the fort without trespassing on private property or getting arrested by the Navy. (It appears that the easiest access to the fort can be had if I slip over the fence and the concertina wire surrounding the US Navy hospital there.) So I still haven’t seen Fort Frederick, and the two days I spent trying to get there certainly slowed my reading speed considerably.

Last month it was Fort Frederick. Yesterday afternoon it was Penfield, Georgia. I am now up to the immediate antebellum days in Georgia’s history, and the book is reviewing the state of higher education in Georgia just prior to the war. I knew, of course, that Emory University, now in Atlanta, began as Oxford College just outside Covington. I did not know that Oglethorpe University, now in Brookhaven, used to be located just south of Milledgeville, but that does not come as a total surprise, given that Milledgeville was once the state capitol. But I was shocked to learn that Mercer University began life in the little community of Penfield, Georgia, located some 26 miles from my house, over in Greene County.

As far as I can tell, Penfield never had a city charter, and has always been a farming community.

According to Google maps, there is a place in the community that either makes yarn or sells yarn to the public (Google maps isn’t all that clear). And that is it. Google maps show no other businesses, not even a gasoline station. It is a funny place for a university.

Like my alma mater, Mercer University began life as a Baptist college. (My alma mater is no longer associated with the North Carolina Baptist Convention. I am not sure about Mercer’s relationship today with the Georgia Baptist Association.) Josiah Penfield donated some land for the college in 1833, and hence the school was located in the community of Penfield. This lasted only a few years. In 1871, Mercer moved to Macon, and the school’s Penfield properties were donated. The Penfield Baptist Church received the school’s chapel, and the academic building became the Penfield public school building.

So, yesterday afternoon, in the middle of part three of the book, I drove to Penfield to see the remains of history for myself. It took a mere two hours to get through page 176. My reading speed is terrible.

Losing My Grip

I have my grandfather’s bolt action 12 gauge shotgun. It holds only three shells, two in the magazine and one in the chamber. If I remember correctly from my quail hunting days, this is the maximum number of shells allowed for hunting migratory game birds. That shotgun has been in every residence I’ve lived in since graduating. The reason is simple: the shotgun is probably the very best home defense weapon there is.

When children lived in the house, I had the shotgun mounted on a rack over the master bedroom door. Now that the kiddies are out of the house, I keep it under my side of the bed. I do not leave a shell in the chamber: I figure that any home invader with a minimal number of active brain cells will, upon hearing the bolt of that shotgun being worked, decide that there must be some easier home to invade. I sincerely hope that is true: I’m not that good at repairing drywall.

My father died in 2001, and a few years after his death I ended up with his pistol. That was the very first pistol I ever owned. It was not exactly a fine piece. The Armi Galesi 25 ACP has mixed reviews these days. I’m pretty sure the reviews were not all that great when my Dad purchased this pistol in 1959. (Then again, there was no internet in 1959.) The war had been over for about 14 years, and I’m not sure that the Italian manufacturing sector had recovered its quality standards by that time. I deemed the pistol unreliable because of the number of jams and misfeeds I encountered.

Because of my experience with that one semi-automatic weapon, I became a revolver man. Don’t write in and tell me that revolvers can fail: I know that, and I also know that revolver failures tend to be catastrophic. However, failure of that sort is very rare, much, much, much rarer that the rate of misfeeding or jamming with a semi-automatic. If you own a pistol for self defense, it is counter productive to own one that jams frequently.

The first pistol I purchased (a revolver, of course) was the Taurus Judge Public Defender. The Judge is an excellent pistol for self defense. It is chambered to hold either 45 caliber long Colts, or 410 gauge shotgun shells. Mine is loaded with three shells (triple aught buckshot), followed by two 45 long Colts. The upside is that this pistol has serious stopping power. There are two downsides: it holds only five rounds, and it is very, very heavy.

I bought an inexpensive Blackhawk hip holster for the Judge, which was a mistake. Now, Blackhawk makes very good, affordable holsters. I own several, and am pleased with all of the others. But the Judge is so heavy and bulky that it requires a little more support than the Blackhawk offered. The Blackhawk shoulder holster worked well, but I don’t often wear a jacket, especially in summer, so the shoulder holster was not a solution to my problem. Finally, quite recently in fact, I found the perfect holster for the Judge, which means that it has once again become my everyday carry piece. I heartily recommend Wright Leather Works LLC. Their holsters are hand made, and are the products of true craftsmen. My Predator pancake style outside the waistband holster has made the Judge a comfortable piece to carry.

Before obtaining the proper holster, I decided that the Judge should be relegated to the house for home defense (or to the car for protection on long trips), and that I needed a less heavy, more comfortable everyday carry weapon. A little research pointed me to the Smith and Wesson Model 642 .38 Special +P. This is a much lighter pistol than the Judge, but it still has serious stopping power. It shares the same downside: only five rounds. But this pistol is small enough to be carried inside the waistband, which I do, with a Kydex holster.

A funny aside: when the .38 Special became my everyday carry weapon, I decided that it would be wise to buy slacks that were a couple of inches bigger than my waist, in order to accommodate the bulk of the pistol. Sometime after that, daughter Reilly asked me my waist size. (She must have been doing birthday or Christmas shopping.) I gave her my new size, which was met with a moment of silence, followed by “We’ve chunked up a bit, haven’t we?”

I wish I could say that the .38 Special made me completely happy, but the truth is I was still bothered by the fact that it held only five rounds. I’m a pretty good shot, at the range, but I understand that under duress, with adrenaline flooding my system, I’m probably going to miss a few shots. That’s not so good when you have only five. I began looking for a backup pistol, a small one. Based on the advice of a knowledgeable friend, I settled on the Kel Tec P3AT. Yes, not only did I actually buy a semi-automatic, but I bought one with a polymer frame.

I am glad I did. It is a great little gun. It uses .380 ACP ammunition, which was good enough for James Bond. It is very light (8.3 ounces). It holds seven rounds. It fits neatly into a Blackhawk Size 1 pocket holster or an ankle holster. There is only one problem.

I am losing my grip.

Semi-automatic pistols usually have a slide that must be racked in order to put a bullet in the chamber. That requires a firm grip, and sad to say, I’m losing mine. As I am right handed, I would normally rack the slide with my left hand, but in order to rack the slide of the P3AT, I have to transfer it to my left hand, rack the slide with my right, then either shoot left handed or transfer the pistol back to my right hand. That is not something I want to do under duress.

There are pistols that are easy to rack, the Walther PK380, for example. I believe a three year old has sufficient power in its grip to rack that slide. Unfortunately, that does not apply to the P3AT.

But technology is wonderful, and a very low tech solution to this problem has been found by a company called ArachniGRIP. They sell the Slide Spider, which is essentially a piece of “skateboard tape” laser cut to fit over the grasping grooves of the slide. The surface of the tape is rough, which improves your ability to grip the slide.

Or so they say. I ordered mine today, and it will be a few days before I can try it. If it doesn’t work, I will let you know.

With summer nearing an end, I will have to stop wearing the Hawaiian shirts that cover the Judge, and go back to the .38 Special as an everyday carry. But the P3AT will still be on me, somewhere.

So Long, Ron

I recently received word that a friend of mine, who moved away from the area a few years ago, had died. His name was Ron Daughtry, and we had a few adventures together. He died of pneumonia, not related to the Wuhan Flu, which is of little comfort to his widow and other loved ones. Still, it reminds us that people die every day of other illnesses. He was way too young. I figure he was around 80 at the time of his passing.

I was thinking of Ron even before his death, primarily because I was thinking of the newspaper article I published around one of our misadventures. I was thinking of the article because I am in the process of planning a similar, though unrelated, excursion. I will have to do this one alone.

The article that follows was published in the Morgan County Citizen in August of 2010. I entitled the article “In Search of Elizabeth Lumpkin,” but I think the newspaper changed the title to something else.

The photograph you see above is one I took with an early digital camera. (Ron is the fellow in red shirt that you see in the photo.) The quality is not very good. Before publishing the article, the newspaper sent me back to the grave site with their photographer, and she took several high quality photos. Unfortunately, the newspaper’s website does not include articles from 10 years ago, so I couldn’t use their photos. This caused me to search for any photograph of the grave that I could find. I couldn’t find a single photo, but I did run across a master’s degree thesis from the University of Georgia, in 2012, which made reference to the following article in a footnote. I truly have become a footnote to history.

In Search of Elizabeth Lumpkin

I blame my friend.

My friend loaned me a copy of the book “Rambles Through Morgan County, Georgia” by Louise McHenry Hickey (1971, reprinted 1989), and in reading this book I discovered that Elizabeth Lumpkin is buried in our fair county.

Elizabeth Lumpkin, who died at age 33 in the year 1819, was the first wife of Wilson Lumpkin, a man who held several important public offices during his life, including that of governor of the state of Georgia (1831 – 1835). Elizabeth Lumpkin is just the sort of minor historical figure that intrigues me, and so I decided to visit her grave.

It is interesting to visit the graves of the famous, and I’ve visited my share, but the graves of the nearly famous can be just as rewarding. I value a photograph of the grave of Ottmar Mergenthaler that I took in the late 1970s or early 1980s, in Baltimore. Once upon a time school children learned about Mergenthaler and his invention, and I suspect that even today newspaper publishers of a certain age still recall fondly the inventor of the Linotype machine. He is no longer famous, but still intriguing.

And so it is with Elizabeth Lumpkin. She married a future governor, gave him children, lost three in infancy, and died young. Best of all, she is buried nearby. I had to see her grave. The problem was finding the grave.

Mrs. Hickey was not very helpful. Here is her description of the grave’s location, in its entirety:

“Some miles out from Madison and Rutledge, on the Centennial road, and then turning off on an old but seldom used road today, and into a forest of tall, whispering pines, that makes one gasp, ‘this is the forest primeval,’ we suddenly came to an old rock chimney of a burned house. And a few yards further on, treading over a floor of pine needles, through tangled vines and overgrowth, among the shadowy trees, we found the moss covered tomb, a square kind of vault, several feet high, built of rocks. Inserted in one side is a marble slab with the following inscription, which dates back to an epoch of Georgia history: ‘Sacred to the memory of Mrs. Elizabeth Lumpkin and three infant children, being the wife and sons of Wilson Lumpkin. Mrs. Lumpkin died November 30, 1819 in the 33rd year of her age. Beloved and lamented by her family and friends. She lived the life and died the death of the righteous.’”

A few minutes spent with Google Earth will convince most anyone that the grave cannot be near Centennial Road. This is a problem with portions of Mrs. Hickey’s book: the book is a collection of articles, some dating back to the 1940s, and a few street and road names have changed during the years. We know, for example, that Old Post Road was once South First Street, and that Academy Street was once South Second Street. Clearly, the Centennial Road that we know is not the Centennial Road that Mrs. Hickey knew. Either that, or the seldom used road that she described is a very, very long dirt road that has been obliterated with time.

During this phase of my research I happened upon a Cemetery Survey of Morgan County, dated 2007, posted on the county’s website. Each cemetery is marked with a fairly large cross on a not-very-detailed county map. In most cases, the lack of detail is not a problem. For example, it is not difficult to find the Mars Hill Church Cemetery using the survey map, given that the cross is shown near US Highway 278, and there is a Mars Hill Church Road intersecting US Highway 278. But the cross that marks the location of the “Elizabeth Lumpkin Cemetery” is in the middle of a cluster of parcels of land off Davis Academy Road, and there is not a landmark, such as a road, that can be used to fix the location of the grave.

I drove along Davis Academy Road until I was fairly convinced that I knew where to begin. The most likely location was a parcel for sale, accessible by what appeared to be nothing more than a logging trail. I guessed that the grave would be found somewhere on that parcel. But, given the fact that there really wasn’t a road there, I decided that it would be a good idea to enlist the aid of a like-minded but more experienced partner. So, I contacted Ron Daughtry, retired timber buyer, and a man who had spent years hiking along logging trails, and in a moment of insanity, he agreed to join me on this quest. Ron called the realtor who listed the property, and obtained permission to hike in and search for the grave. And so it came to pass that on one hot, humid Saturday morning we plunged into the woods, in search of Elizabeth Lumpkin.

We did not find the grave that day, but we did find the remains of her house, the stone fireplace that Mrs. Hickey described. The grave was supposed to be near the house, but we were not sure just what Mrs. Hickey considered to be “near.” We decided that asking the county for help in finding the grave was the reasonable thing to do.

A very nice lady at the county sent me an aerial photo of the area we had hiked, showing the division of the land into numbered parcels, and locating the grave with a red dot. It was not on the parcel we had received permission to explore. Unfortunately, according to the photo, we had already strayed onto this parcel, and so it was time to contact another property owner for permission.

The owner of this second parcel gave us permission to explore his land, and said that he recalled seeing the grave, some 25 years earlier. He believed that Elizabeth Lumpkin was not buried on his land, but that is not what the county indicated. We decided to go with the county’s aerial photo, given that it was more recent. In the process I called the owner of an adjacent parcel, which contained a road of sorts that might run near the grave. I left messages, but didn’t hear from him before our second plunge into the woods.

The county was wrong. Ron and I spent more than two hours exploring nearly every square foot of that parcel of land, and we did not find the grave. The owner was probably correct: the actual location of the grave must be south-southwest of the spot marked by the county, on yet another parcel of land.

Sometime after this second adventure, land owner number three, the fellow who owns the road, returned my call. Yes, he knew the location of the grave. It was on his land, near the road, south-southwest of the spot marked by the county. He agreed to show it to us. We met him, drove up his dirt road, and within 50 yards from where we stopped our trucks we saw the grave of Elizabeth Lumpkin.

This owner does a very nice job of maintaining her grave. The county had an old photo, showing a tree growing out of the walled grave. The owner had cut the tree down, and he periodically cleans up the area.

Elizabeth Lumpkin rests in a quiet, beautiful spot, cared for by a land owner who shows respect for the departed. I almost felt guilty, disturbing the tranquility of these surroundings.

And so our visit to the grave of Elizabeth Lumpkin was far from a simple drive to the cemetery. It was a detective story followed by a treasure hunt, which kept us occupied for three or four weeks. And for that, I blame my friend, the one who loaned me Mrs. Hickey’s book.

I haven’t revealed the exact location of the grave for a couple of reasons. First, I never asked the owner of the land for permission to use his name. It doesn’t seem right to disturb his peace and quiet by putting a score or more of grave hunters on his trail. Second, it seems a shame to disturb the tranquility of Elizabeth’s resting place. When she was buried, her grave was near a major north-south stagecoach line, but the stagecoach hasn’t run in awhile, and our paved roads have passed her by. It is quiet there now. Let her slumber in peace.

But, if you decide that you really must visit her grave, then by all means, do so. I have provided enough hints in this article for you to find the grave, and just in case that doesn’t work, I’ve given approximate coordinates for the grave to the county. It will require some work on your part, and for that you, too, can blame my friend.

Here Endeth The Lesson

It still sticks in my craw, 16 or 17 years after the event. I can feel my cheeks turning red as I write this. But it happened, and I am here to tell you about it.

I had taken one of my daughters out for a birthday dinner, and was returning her home to her mother. I was probably no more than two miles from her house in DeKalb County, when I made the left turn that took me past the liquor store, a fairly busy place just off a road with a 45 miles per hour speed limit. The 1980s model car with Gwinnett County plates pulled out in front of me, from the parking lot of the liquor store, and proceeded to move at the amazing speed of about 15 miles per hour. I’ve seen that move before: I’ve used that move before. Drink a little too much, and you worry about getting pulled over, so your natural reaction is to drive slowly and carefully. But your perception is warped, so you find yourself pulled over because you are driving 30 miles per hour below the speed limit. “Oh, great,” I thought, “I’ve got to follow this drunk for the next couple of miles?”

I did what I normally did in that situation (which, by the way, I no longer do): I pulled up close to the car’s back end, hoping that having me on his tail would encourage him to pick up the pace a bit. It didn’t work. A short space up the road, I needed take a right hand turn. I thought that maybe, just maybe, he would go straight. He didn’t. He slowed down to make the right hand turn, then came to a complete stop in the middle of the road. I nearly ended up in his back seat. I’m not sure how I managed not to rear-end him.

His driver’s side door opened, and I began mentally kicking myself for having removed the baseball bat from the back seat floor of the car. Then I saw the gun on his hip.

The gun was like an eye-magnet. I was focused on that pistol like a radar beam focused on an airplane. It was only a second later that I saw the police uniform. The fellow in front of me, who had pulled out of the liquor store parking lot and was driving slowly, like a drunk, was an off-duty DeKalb County policeman, on his way home to Gwinnett County. He closed his door and moved slowly back to my car.

This was not my idea of a good end to a very nice evening. I kept trying to figure out what to do. It was apparent he had been drinking. Should I call 911 for another police officer? Would another police officer uphold the law, or protect his brother? And what about my daughter, sitting in the passenger seat? What lesson would I be teaching her? And did I really want her to see her father taken away in handcuffs?

In the end, I did nothing. As I recall, he did not ask for my license, a good move as he was off-duty and a bit under the weather. He gave me a very hard time about following him too closely. He berated me and generally made me feel about two inches tall. It was humiliating, especially occurring as it did in front of my daughter. I wanted to ask him if he had witnessed a car driven like his, suddenly hitting the brakes in an effort to cause an accident, would he have given that driver a ticket? But I didn’t. Discretion was the better part of valor.

Eventually he returned to his car and drove off slowly. I gave him plenty of room. I didn’t want him to see where my daughter lived, so I sat there for awhile before returning her to her home.

That man had issues.

Three or four months later, I heard a radio newscast that described a DeKalb County policeman who had been arrested in a mall parking lot. Apparently he lost his temper with someone in the parking lot, and proceeded to damage the other fellow’s car. I really would like to think that it was my off-duty, tipsy policeman from that night a few months earlier. I will never know, of course, but I think that if he lost his job and his pension, it would only be his just desserts.

But, as the title of this post suggests, there is a lesson here. I am writing this, still feeling somewhat humiliated, 16 or 17 years after the fact. I can write this because I did not die that evening. I wanted to castigate that officer, I wanted another policeman present to give him a field sobriety test, I wanted to do something. The fact that I didn’t do anything that I wanted to do means he did not have the excuse to pull out a baton, or a Taser, or, the worst in my book, his service pistol. And so I lived.

I don’t give advice, but I will share with you my rules, which have never failed. Never try to hit or otherwise attack a policeman. Never talk back to a policeman. Never try to run from a policeman. Never, never, never make a move in front of a policeman that even remotely resembles pulling a weapon. Just shut up and take it. You can always file a civil suit and try to get justice in a court of law.

You can then look forward to the rest of your life on earth, even if it is tinged with occasional bouts of remembered humiliation.

Shortages

Back in March, the shortages of toilet paper and paper towels made the news. These shortages have been alleviated, or so it appears, as the shelves in our local Ingles and Wal Mart are once again full of paper products. But I am surprised at the other shortages I have encountered.

A nice, new, white shirt suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune after a spaghetti dinner one night. The stain proved stubborn, and my usual bag of stain-removing tricks appeared not to be working, so I consulted that know-it-all, Mr. Internet. Mr. Internet suggested that I try Dawn Dish-Washing Liquid. Now, I was skeptical that any one brand of cleaner would be significantly better than any other brand, but I was also desperate, so I trudged off to Ingles to discover that, while there were several bottles of dish-washing detergent on the shelves, the Dawn was all gone. I finally found a bottle – one bottle – at Wal Mart. Why the run on Dawn? It didn’t remove the offending stain, so I am a bit surprised that it is in short supply.

Kathy and I spent some time at the shooting range recently, which is another story of shortages. I keep weapons for the purpose of self defense, so it makes sense that I keep several hundred rounds of self defense ammunition, i.e., hollow points, on hand at all times. Hollow points are more expensive than standard bullets, and are wasted on the range, so when we go to practice, I end up buying target rounds for our pistols.

Not this time.

I had enough target rounds in 45 caliber, 38 special, and 25 caliber to get a good workout, but I didn’t have a single target round of 380 caliber. This is a problem, as Kathy and I both own 380s, so we go through a fair number of rounds when we practice. The real problem occurred when we tried to buy some: the range was completely sold out. The recent turmoil has caused demand for ammunition to skyrocket. When the stores ran out of hollow points, they sold target ammo. And now, the target ammo is depleted.

We practiced with our other weapons, and at the end of the day, I made a run to another range in another town. I was able to purchase a box of 250 target rounds in 380 caliber. We went back to the range the next day, and brushed up on our 380s. But it is surprising when you can’t even buy target rounds.

And so it goes. I have a nice matching pen and pencil set, and the pen’s ink cartridge needed replacing. I went to the store to buy a cartridge, and came home empty handed. The store sold the pens still, but there was not a single ink replacement cartridge for my pen, indeed, for ANY new pen the store sold. I had to order it on Amazon.

It continues. I tried to order a set of DVDs for a British television comedy I used to watch in the 1970s. Everybody advertised it, but when I tried to put it in my shopping cart, the vile words “temporarily out of stock” came up, on every website. I finally found a second-hand set of DVDs, and probably paid too much for it.

We have enjoyed cooking during the past few months, but it became painfully obvious that a really nice, really sharp, set of kitchen knives would enhance our cooking experience. A student of mine was selling a very nice set, and we bought it. Apparently the month of June was a good month for this knife manufacturer, as it was two weeks before the knives could be shipped.

There isn’t an N-95 mask for sale in the entire county.

The King Of All Shortages story follows, and it involves a refrigerator. Our refrigerator came with the house that I bought 14 years ago. The ice maker stopped working last year, and it began leaking water periodically. Neither worried me: I don’t need ice very often, and a towel shoved under the front of the fridge took care of the leak. Kathy didn’t quite see it that way, and so I finally relented and said, “Okay, go get a new fridge.” She went everywhere: Costco, Home Depot, Lowes, a local appliance store, and even an appliance store up in Asheville. Just deciding on one model was a royal pain: why are there so bloody many options? Why do refrigerators need computers? Why on earth should I connect a refrigerator, of all things, to WiFi?

At every place, the same thing happened. She decided, finally, on a model, only to be told that it was not in stock. I can’t tell you how many times this happened, but it stopped being funny a long time ago.

At long last, Lowes had a model she wanted, and it was in stock. She paid for it, and it was scheduled to be delivered on Thursday. On Wednesday they called to say that, unfortunately, they sold the refrigerator to someone else, and that it had been delivered already. That didn’t sit very well, given that she had paid for the thing the week before. Kathy grabbed her bag, hopped in her car, and drove to Lowes. She was gone for a couple of hours of quality, bonding time with local Lowes management.

The next day, the refrigerator pictured above was delivered to the house.

I don’t know why everything seems to be in such short supply these days. In some cases, it is probably due to our trade disagreements with China. Even our “Made in America” refrigerators use parts manufactured in China. But in other cases, such as the ammunition shortage, China is not the problem. I am not accustomed to shortages, and do not want to get used to them.

Here I Come To Save The Day!

Last Saturday we had to make a quick, unscheduled trip to Asheville. The last time I made that trip I was by myself, and it was snowing. I saw a truck spin out in front of me just above Commerce, GA, and by the time I hit Rabun Gap, I was in four-wheel-drive. This time, Kathy was with me, which explains why, despite the fact that the weather was lovely and I never had to slow down to go into four-wheel-drive, it still took longer than my “Nanook of the North” trip.

We traveled up on Saturday afternoon, and were back home in Georgia by Sunday afternoon. I did all the driving, and the truth of the matter is that the trip was made tougher by the fact that we were not making good time. “Thou shalt make good time” is my 11th commandment. At any rate, we finally returned home, and I decided to reward myself with my favorite in-between-meals snack of a fresh, unopened box of Cheez-Its. Like a good addict, I always keep one in the pantry. When I grabbed the box, I saw the unevenly-edged hole in the top of the box.

We have a mouse, and the little varmint is eating my Cheez-Its! This means war!

We live within the city limits of Madison, but Madison is not a booming metropolis. You may recall seeing the photos of our late dog Ronnie with the cows that graze in the pasture behind our house, a pasture that is also within the city limits of Madison. Recently I read that the population density in either New York City, or in the borough of Manhattan (I can’t remember which it was, sorry), is something like 26,000 people per square mile. As of the 2019 census update, our entire county doesn’t have 26,000 people. In fact, we don’t yet have 20,000 people. So it is not surprising that we occasionally meet up with creatures a bit further down the evolutionary chain.

I am, as a general rule, pretty tolerant of wildlife. On the first day that I moved into this house, a fairly large black snake wandered through the backyard, and I had to restrain Ronnie from chasing the creature. One still lives under the steps to our back deck. Harry, the lizard on the television show Death In Paradise, would not be lonely at all were he to move to our house. I haven’t given them names, but there are several. Every now and again, one makes it into the house, and we have to jump through hoops to get it out of the house without injury. About three weeks ago, after mowing the weeds in my yard, I stripped down to enjoy a refreshing shower when I noticed a young snake stretched out along the baseboard next to the shower in the master bathroom. With some difficulty I moved it onto the blade of a round - point shovel, took it out the front door, and released it into the yard.

So you see, when it comes to wildlife, I’m a live-and-let-live guy. But this mouse is eating my Cheez-Its, and that crosses the line.

I bought six large glue boards from Lowes, placed a dollop of peanut butter in the center of the boards, and scattered them throughout the house, including my office. About 15 minutes later, when I returned to my office, I noticed that the peanut butter was gone. I reloaded the trap, and a bit later, the peanut butter was gone. It dawned on me that Lucy, the 90-pound puppy, who loves peanut butter, was making life difficult for me.

A bit later, I opened the pantry door, and there he was: a tiny little thing, probably not even two inches long. I couldn’t get to him (I’m not going to reach in and grab anything that has teeth), but I made lots of noise and watched him scurry off.

You know that little warming compartment under the oven, the drawer where you store all your cookie sheets and whatnot? I cleaned that out, and placed a glue board there. When I opened the drawer to check on it, I was astounded: the peanut butter was gone, and there were little bitty mouse footprints on the board. This little creature had traversed the glue, eaten the peanut butter, and gone back. It must have been a mighty struggle. From this point on, the mouse had a name: Mighty Mouse.

Finally – FINALLY – one of the glue boards worked. I opened the pantry, and there he was, struggling to get his two hind feet off the glue board. His front two feet were clear of the board, and his two back feet were close to being free of the sticky mess. It was time to act. I grabbed the board, and started to peel off a kitchen garbage bag. It was trash day, and the board and mouse were going into the bag, and subsequently into the trash can. You may think that cruel, but this is the mouse that ate my Cheez-Its.

I was out the kitchen door, out of the garage, and heading down the drive to the trash can when Kathy called out to me. She is a sensitive soul, and she was imploring me to release the mouse in the wild. Why, I asked, so that he can return and eat my Cheez-Its? While we were having this conversation, Mighty Mouse, finally pulled free of the glue board, and found himself sticking to the outside of the plastic trash bag. (Thanks to Kathy’s intervention, I hadn’t quite put the board in the bag.) But he didn’t stick there for very long. With a great heave-ho, he pulled free of the trash bag, dropped to the driveway, and promptly RAN BACK INTO THE GARAGE!

We were of two minds. Kathy figured he had his fill of our household, and would run away. I figured he would stick around. If I were a mouse, living in a house with Cheez-Its, I would stick around. We kept the garage door open for awhile, just so he could leave if he wished.

The next morning, we found mouse droppings – larger mouse droppings. Either Mighty Mouse is truly mighty, or he has a partner. I supplemented the glue boards with good, old-fashioned Victor Model M032 wooden mousetraps baited with cheese. And today, at 6:01 AM, Mighty Mouse’s partner met his maker.

I’ve always heard the quote “Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door.” There is no better mousetrap than the good, old-fashioned wooden ones with kill bars.

And now, two recorded treats. The first is the original theme song from Mighty Mouse (1958), performed by the Mitch Miller Orchestra (remember “Sing Along With Mitch”?) with vocals by The Terrytooners; and the second is the comic genius, Andy Kaufman, doing the Mighty Mouse Theme Song on Saturday Night Live. This is one of the two funniest skits ever on SNL, the other being Bob and Ray singing “If you want my body and you think I’m sexy, come on, Sugar, tell me so.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJvM8eYcpL0

https://vimeo.com/groups/326115/videos/141371878

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JASON!

Social Distancing From The Kelvinator

I should begin by explaining the term “Kelvinator”, a term I know only because of my maternal grandmother, Launa Phillips Jones Allen. My grandmother called every refrigerator she owned a “Kelvinator”. The company that manufactured the Kelvinator began life in 1914 (when my grandmother was just a teenie-bopper) as the Electro-Automatic Refrigerating Company, but two years later became the Kelvinator Company. The name was a tribute to the Scottish physicist William Thomson (a.k.a., Lord Kelvin), who accurately determined the value of absolute zero, a temperature we cannot reach, and below which no temperature can exist. (For your information, that is -459.67 degrees Fahrenheit.) My guess is that her first refrigerator was a Kelvinator, which set the stage for the rest of her life.

I spent most of my life about 40 pounds underweight. According to the old height and weight charts from the 1960s, the days before “body mass index”, I should have weighed about 185 pounds when I graduated from high school. I weighed 147. My weight stayed pretty close to that figure until August of 2007, when I quit smoking. Almost overnight I found myself 10 to 20 pounds overweight, a swing of 50 to 60 pounds. Suddenly I couldn’t fit in my clothes (most of which were bought in the 70s and 80s – God, I miss those collars and lapels!).

I was able to drop my weight back to the 185 pound region fairly simply: I stopped buying Cheez Its, Starburst Fruit Chews and Skittles, and started buying Braeburn apples. Still, this required a new wardrobe, as 185 was considerably heavier than 147. I bought new clothes, and began to enjoy being a normal weight.

That changed sometime after May 21, 2013, the date I married Kathy. Later that year we found her bathroom scales in a mover’s box, and on October the 19th of that year, I began my routine of weighing first thing in the morning, and entering the data into a spreadsheet. Periodically I printed out a graph of my weight versus time. This is the figure at the top of this blog, which covers the dates of October 19, 2013 through May 21, 2020.

The first thing to notice is that, although there are fluctuations, the trend is upward. There are a couple of dips along the way, but in general, like a graph of the stock market versus time, the graph tends to go up, up, and up. The second thing to notice is that, very recently, there are no fluctuations. My weight is up, and it appears to be staying there.

Clearly I am not successful at social distancing from the Kelvinator.

Kathy tells me we are going on a diet, if she can just remember the name of the diet. We had lunch with a college roommate last November, and he was telling us about a wonderful diet that he and his wife used with great success. Perry, if you see this, send me a message and tell me yet again the name of that diet, so I can placate Kathy. I prefer the Braeburn apple diet, but Kathy isn’t buying it.

There is one positive thing to report. The bathroom scale that I have been using since October of 2013 finally died. Kathy bought it about 20 years ago, and apparently the batteries in it need changing. I cannot see any easy way to get into the thing to change the batteries, so I made the executive decision that it should go into the trash. With no scale to measure my weight, and no spreadsheet on the bathroom mirror to confront me with my failings, I will now lead a happier, if somewhat heavier, life.

Bon appetit!

Frankly, My Dear . . .

My obsession – and make no mistake, it is an obsession – had humble origins. It began with music.

I bought an iPod in 2006, and quickly became enamored of the ease with which I could carry around my music library. Of course, I immediately transferred all my CDs to my iTunes account, and subsequently to my iPod. That was the easy part. The hard part was digitizing every album, eight track tape, and cassette tape in my library. This task was made more difficult when my friend Charley gave me his jazz record collection, which included some fairly rare 78s. The process of digitizing all this music took a couple of years, and it isn’t finished yet. (I have run across some old albums and 78s that Charley gave me that were somehow misplaced for a few years.) Yes, I even bought a few hundred tunes from the iTunes store (the invention of which should be celebrated as a major historical event, even if the Apple folks are beginning to aggravate me with all the changes they keep foisting on me). But most of the 17,872 songs in my iTunes library are from my record collection, or from Charley’s record collection.

By the way, let me put in a good word for Carbonite. As I noted above, Apple keeps changing iTunes. I hate to download any new version. I believe they honestly think they are making it better. They aren’t. Recently I hit a button in iTunes that should have backed my record collection up to the cloud. It backed up all the music I had purchased from the iTunes store. Unfortunately, it DELETED all the music I hadn’t purchased from the iTunes store. After watching years of work just disappear, I was fit to be tied. Then Kathy reminded me that I subscribe to the Carbonite file back-up system, which operates quietly in the background, backing up files to a cloud somewhere. Within seconds, the 17,000 plus songs had been restored.

Then came video.

I moved to Madison, GA in 2005. After hooking up my television, I discovered that the only channel I could receive was a Spanish language UHF channel from Athens, some 25 miles away. The picture was snowy, and as I don’t speak Spanish, it was useless to me. So I contacted the local cable company, and signed up for the basic service at $60 per month. (You know THAT had to be a long, long time ago!) After a couple of months, it dawned on me that I had only watched one half-hour show. At that rate, I would watch an hour of television every four months, for a price of $240 per hour. I called the cable company and canceled my subscription.

Thus I entered into a very happy time: no television in the house. I spent my evening hours reading, watching movies, and listening to the radio. I discovered an absolutely outstanding radio program, The John Batchelor Show, out of WABC in New York. (If you don’t have an internet radio, you can either stream the show or download the podcast.) Twice a week he focused on book reviews, conversations with the authors that might last as long as two hours. I found myself jumping back and forth between the radio show and my computer, ordering books from Amazon as I listened to the reviews.

All this changed when my son introduced me to WDTV, a little box manufactured by Western Digital, that, one one side, hooked up to a television set, and on the other side, hooked up to a hard drive or flash drive. The Western Digital box allowed me to play video files (that formerly could only be played on a computer) on my television.

Thus began the obsession.

My son loaned me a hard drive that contained maybe 50 or so movies and television shows in either avi, mp4, or mkv format. (Although WDTV plays a wide variety of files, these are the three most popular.) I remember that the drive included the Addams Family television show from the 1960s, as well as the complete Get Smart and Hogan’s Heroes, also from the 60s. Hard drives, and the little WDTV box, take up such a small space in the entertainment center! I soon got rid of my DVD player, ripped all my DVDs to (mostly) mkv files, and settled down to enjoy a little television.

And so it began. I copied the videos from friends’ hard drives. My video collection grew. Every boxed set of DVDs I purchased, along with every bargain movie purchased from the reduced price bin at Wal Mart, and
every gift of a DVD, was added to the hard drive. And somehow, over the course of the years, I ended up with quite a video library. It stands, at the time of this writing, at 9,461 video files (either movies, documentaries, or television shows). They reside on an eight terabyte hard drive.

I have copied the video files I have not yet seen to a two terabyte hard drive. At the time of this writing, there are 3,046 of these files. (This doesn’t include the cartoons and children’s movies that I have for the grandchildren.) I have my work cut out for me.

If I use 365.25 days per year (which takes into account leap years), and if I watch one of these not-yet-viewed videos every day, it will take a bit over eight and one-third years for me to go through my current inventory of videos. This takes me through August of 2028. I should be caught up a bit before my 76th birthday.

Does this seem a silly obsession to you? If so, I have to tell you: frankly, my dear . . .

When in the Course of Human Events

Today, April 27, is a happy day. Farmview Market opened its restaurant today for customers to dine in, and Kathy and I had our first meal out since March 16. Coincidentally, we were the first diners they served.

The thing that I missed most during the quarantine was dining out. I did not realize just how accustomed we had become to visiting restaurants and enjoying a nice, relaxing meal. A typical week would see us eating out two or three times. It has been a long 41 days.

Yes, some of our restaurants served takeout meals, and we enjoyed several of those, but it just wasn’t the same as sitting down at a table, being served by friends, and facing absolutely no cleanup.

We live in Georgia, and our governor has received his share of criticism for reopening the state to business. I believe he is criticized unjustly. Let us recall just why we decided to shut down commerce in the country. The reason given for this drastic action was to prevent the health care delivery system from being overwhelmed.

We have achieved that objective.

Remember the early days of the pandemic. The usual talking heads predicted overflowing hospitals, triage at the hospital door, life and death decisions based on the presumed likelihood of a patient living a long and useful life afterwards, and all sorts of bio-ethical conundrums related to lack of ventilators, hospital beds, etc.

New York City, the epicenter of the pandemic, at least in this country, has bid farewell to the hospital ship the president dispatched to the city. It has released ventilators for distribution to other states. Some hospital wings are nearly empty, as elective surgeries have been postponed. The mission has been accomplished.

My fear, in fact, is that because of the quarantine, we will be hit hard in the fall with a second bout with the Wuhan Flu. We can avoid a devastating second bout, if we have herd immunity. Unfortunately, the quarantine prevents the development of herd immunity.

Herd immunity happens when a fairly substantial part of the population (I’ve heard 60%, but haven’t confirmed that number) develops antibodies to the infection. If enough people have antibodies, the further spread of the infection is inhibited. So, ideally, those with low risk of developing a serious (i.e., fatal) infection get exposed to the virus, recover, and develop antibodies that help prevent the second wave of infections. Those of us at high risk remain sheltered.

This is the approach that Sweden has taken. We should watch the outcome in Sweden, and see what we can learn from it.

By all accounts, the virus is extremely contagious. But the further we go into this wave of infections, the more apparent it is that the fatality rate estimates at the beginning of the quarantine were vastly overstated. For example, an antibody analysis at the University of Miami suggests that the rate of infection in the state is 16 times greater than the initial estimates. So, in calculating the fatality rate, the bigger the denominator, the lower the rate. As best I can tell, this infection has a fatality rate similar to that of the good old fashioned garden variety influenza. That, of course, is bad enough, but we don’t shut down the economy every fall when flu season comes around.

So congratulations to Governor Kemp, and to the governors of Tennessee, South Carolina, and the other states who have decided to re-open cautiously. And congratulations to Farmview Market: breakfast was simply outstanding!

Congratulations! You Are Now More Valuable!

On New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s Facebook page there is a video (Job One Has To Be Save Lives) of the Governor addressing the current shortage of ventilators in the state. About 1:10 into the video, the Governor says: “No American is going to say ‘accelerate the economy at the cost of a human life’, because no American is going to say how much a life is worth.”

I beg to differ with the Governor. Our Federal Government has said “how much a life is worth.” In fact, this being the Federal Government, three different departments have come up with three different values for a single human life.

Let us begin with the Department of Transportation, which in February of 2011 valued a human life at about $6 million. (This figure, and the figures for the EPA and FDA that follow, were taken from a New York Times article “As US Agencies Put More Value on a Life, Businesses Fret”, written by Binyamin Appelbaum, and published February 6, 2011. The hyperlinks embedded in the NY Times online article, which used to take the reader to government websites, are, alas, no longer active. But these numbers seem to be supported by other sources. See, for example, Green Hell a 2009 book by Steven Milloy, p. 62.) According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics Inflation Calculator, $6 million in February of 2011 is worth $7 million in February of 2020. (The figures for March are not yet in.)

The Food and Drug Administration is much more generous. In the Times article mentioned above, the FDA valued a human life at $7.9 million, or $9.2 million as of February, 2020. But the leading government agency, in terms of the value of a human life, is the Environmental Protection Agency, which placed a 2011 value of $9.1 million on a human life, or $10.6 million today. So according to our Federal Government, a human life today is worth somewhere between $7 million and $10.6 million.

I have a different way of using government statistics to measure the value of a human life. The loss in Gross Domestic Product for 2020, due to the virus, is estimated to be $2.3 trillion. (Let’s write that out, as we seem to be tossing trillions of dollars here and there: $2,300,000,000,000. We can tick off one trillion seconds every 32,000 years. In order to spend the money in the recent “stimulus” package in one year, we would have to spend about $64,000 every second, 24/7, for the entire year. That is on top of our normal spending of about $128,000 every second of the fiscal year.) $2.3 trillion ain’t pocket change.

So we have the cost. The question is the denominator. How many people will die?

We can use the estimate I keep hearing, that we could have as many as 200,000 deaths. I think that figure is terribly high, but we can go with it. If so, each death is worth nearly $11.5 million! Congratulations! You really are worth more than you thought!

But what if the death rate is much lower? There was a paper published just a couple of weeks ago, not in some lunatic right wing journal, but in a peer-reviewed, rather prestigious journal, The New England Journal of Medicine. There were three authors, all M.D.s. You have probably heard of one of the authors, a fellow named Anthony S. Fauci. This paper, Covid-19 – Navigating the Uncharted, contained the following interesting tidbits:

“On the basis of a case definition requiring a diagnosis of pneumonia, the currently reported case fatality rate is approximately 2%. In another article in the Journal, Guan et al. report mortality of 1.4% among 1099 patients with laboratory-confirmed Covid-19; these patients had a wide spectrum of disease severity. If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively.”

That is great news! It may have a fatality rate no worse than the good old ordinary flu

So what are the numbers for the flu? According to the CDC website, the estimates for flu illnesses between October 1, 2019 and March 21, 2020, are as follows: 38,000,000 – 54,000,000 flu illnesses, 24,000 – 62,000 flu deaths.

Using the higher figures for both deaths and illnesses, we have a fatality rate of 0.115%. At the time this was written, there have been 351,890 confirmed cases in the United States, with 10,377 deaths, for a fatality rate of nearly 3%. These are confirmed cases only, and we really have no idea how many unconfirmed cases were mistaken for the flu. It is likely that there are more actual cases than confirmed cases. (Remember Dr. Fauci’s comment: “If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases . . .”) This allows us to put the fatality rate in a range from 0.12% to 2.95%. This makes the infection much less hazardous than either SARS or MERS.

And now, the last bit of math. We are shutting down the economy, and losing approximately $2.3 trillion, with the hope that we can keep the number of deaths down at the current level, about 10,377. We know there will be more deaths, so let us use the number of deaths from influenza (62,000), as a reasonable estimate of how this will end. That puts the value of a human life at nearly $37.1 million.

Again, CONGRATULATIONS! You really are quite valuable.

N is for Nick!

I see that my last blog post was on Christmas Eve of last year, a bit more than three months ago. A whole quarter of the year gone without your hearing from me!

The last posting was written after we buried my best friend, and I knew I would not be writing any time soon. It never occurred to me that “any time soon” meant three months. I had come to terms with my loss,
and was ready to write again, when life happened. Things got busy at work. Things got busy at my other work. Things got busy at home. And here we are, three months later, ready to go again.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that I’m going to engage in some sort of discourse on the Wuhan Flu. Wrong! I’ve had enough of it. It is on the television 24/7, it is on the radio 24/7, it is in every issue of my newspaper, and it occupies a fair amount of space in the magazines I read. I’m fed up with this, and I’m quite properly pissed off about it. I am teaching from home using one of those meeting platforms, so it seems that I never leave my home office anymore. I can’t escape by going out to dinner, because the powers that be in the city and state have shut the restaurants down, except for takeout. I can’t go to the movies, because of ditto. But the main thing that I’m pissed about is toilet paper.

My modest little house in Madison has two bathrooms. We generally buy an eight-pack of toilet paper whenever our previous eight-pack gets down to two or three rolls. At the onset of the toilet-paper-hoarding
phase of the pandemic, we had seven rolls in the house. I was not worried, until two subsequent trips to the grocery store in two consecutive weeks indicated that there was no toilet paper in the county.

Amazon was no help. Most storefronts indicated that they were out of toilet paper. The storefronts that said they had toilet paper really didn’t: the delivery times were one to two months out. Ridiculous!

Apparently that part of the crisis is over. I was in Wal-Mart yesterday, and there was a good amount of toilet paper, sitting on two pallets, ready for purchase. We grabbed an eight-pack, breathed a sigh of relief, and headed home.

Seriously, I hope the people who hoarded toilet paper choke on it.

And that’s the extent of my discussion of the Wuhan Flu.

Back some time ago, the 1980s, I think, a fellow named Gurganus wrote a novel entitled Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All. I remember the name Gurganus, because I had an acquaintance named Gurganus. At one time I thought it was a Greek surname, such as Galifianakis, Costa-Gavras, and Savalas. Turns out, it’s Welsh. Oh, well, live and learn.

I’m sure you’ve heard of the director Costa-Gavras, and who hasn’t heard of Telly Savalas? You may wonder about that other name, Galifianakis. Nick Galifianakis was a North Carolina Member of Congress, active in the 60s and 70s. I wasn’t in his district, but the television stations I watched in those days must have broadcast to his district, because every two years his political commercials were on the air. He was a reasonably successful politician, until 1972, when he won the Democratic primary for the United States Senate, and had the misfortune to have as an opponent a fellow named Jesse Helms. That year, for the first time in anyone’s memory, the state of North Carolina went Republican in a big way: Nixon, Holshouser, and Helms.

But I digress. Nick Galifianakis must have employed an outstanding PR firm. To this day, I remember his campaign ditty:

N is for Nick,  Nick Galifianakis,

I is for his integrity,

C is for Congress,

K is for Keep him there!

We need Nick in Washington, DC!

All of this, just because I thought Gurganus was a Greek name!

Sometime in the 1980s, the intellectualoids were all atwitter over this first novel from Gurganus, about the oldest living Confederate widow. Of course, I bought the book, and managed to finish it, how I do not know. It was a bit preachy, smug, and did a disservice, I thought, to the real oldest living Confederate widow, who was still alive at the time. (She died in 2008. The penultimate surviving widow of a Confederate soldier, who happened to be the last widow whose marriage to a Confederate soldier resulted in offspring, died in 2004.)

I gave my copy of that book away, so I cannot check the details, but if I recall correctly, towards the end of what seemed like a never-ending novel, the widow takes a plane flight to Atlanta, and is astonished to see, out the window of the airplane, streaks of dark, luscious green vegetation, much darker and greener than the vegetation she had been seeing. When she asked about it, she was told that the beautiful green vegetation was a result of Sherman’s march. The total destruction by burning of the forests resulted in a growth that was even more hardy, even more green, even more luscious.

I have no idea whether Gurganus made that up, or whether it is actually true. I am inclined to believe that it is actually true. Here is why.

I once lived in the middle of the largest hardwood forest in the eastern half of the United States. I was working for a paper company at the time, and the middle of a huge hardwood forest seemed an ideal
location for a paper mill. In fact, that paper company had three mills in this hardwood forest, stretching from Virginia, through Maryland, and into Pennsylvania. And all the time I lived in that hardwood forest, I never suffered from pollen. Never.

My pollen problems started when I moved to Georgia. Gee, thanks, Sherman!

I understand that a pollen count of around 150 or so is so high as to be considered dangerous. Yesterday’s pollen count: more than 6000. Six thousand!

I mowed the lawn today, and was forced to wear one of those masks you wear when sanding down joints in drywall. I hated it. When I hosed down my truck, a mighty yellow river of pollen rolled out the back
and down the driveway. (We have a Yellow River in Georgia. I wonder how it got its name?) I enjoy fresh air, but only a fool would leave a window open this time of year, even though the temperatures are pleasant. The entire interior of the house would be coated with pollen.

One day, the panic over the Wuhan Flu will be gone. But we’ll always have pollen. Now THAT is something to worry about!

Bookends

Many of my generation would call Bob Dylan the philosopher of the baby boomers. I disagree. Simon and Garfunkel are more to my taste. The duo did not put out many albums during their existence (I have only four), but most were classics. My favorite is Bookends, which I think was their fourth album. One tune from the album, Old Friends, has lyrics that begin:

Old friends, old friends sat on their park bench like bookends.

For the last two months that song has been tormenting my brain. A bit more than a month ago, I attended the funeral of my best friend, a gentleman I had known for 27 years. I kept thinking of the song, telling myself that I really wasn’t cut out to sit on a park bench with an old friend, anyway. But the loss of an old friend hurts.

I lost my father a bit more than 19 years ago. We were father and son, not the usual combination one thinks of as best friends. His loss was different. My definition of a happy childhood is a childhood without fear, a childhood of knowing that whatever may befall you, your parents can take care of the situation. My father gave me a happy childhood. He had all the answers to all my problems. Of course, eventually I grew up, and had to take responsibility for my own actions. My father no longer had all the answers. But he continued to serve as a sounding board, a source of advice, and let the record show, wisdom. I still feel his loss all these years later.

A bit more than four years ago, I lost another friend, Jim. Jim was a retired lawyer, but in spite of the fact that we practiced different professions, Jim was a mentor. I learned a fair bit about life from him, and even a little bit about the law. We had known each other for about 15 years when he died, quite suddenly. Kathy and I were getting ready to leave for a spring break visit to Taiwan, and I chatted with him on the phone just before we left. When I returned, a week later, I called him to tell him all about the trip. He never answered either his landline or his cell phone. After a few missed calls, I called a mutual friend, who told me that Jim had passed away while we were gone.

Charley, my friend who was died last month, was 55 years old when we met. He was able to retire from his employer in Connecticut with full benefits, but he was unwilling to be put out to pasture at that tender age. Thus, I hired him and moved him to Georgia, in 1992. We got along well, and soon became fast friends. He, too, was a mentor. He is the fellow who talked me into attending my very first jazz party, in Clearwater Beach, Florida. We attended many a jazz party together after that first event in 2000.

One day Charley told me that he had more music than he could ever listen to in the years he had remaining, and so he had decided to give me his entire record, tape, and CD collection of jazz music. I was overwhelmed, as he had some classics dating back several decades. Of course, I did the decent thing: I digitized all the records and tapes, and ripped all the CDs. I then presented Charley with a hard drive containing all the music he had given to me. It turns out that he had quite a few more years to enjoy that music. We also recorded all the music from the jazz parties we attended. I must admit that I am a bit behind on organizing and labeling the music from the last couple of jazz parties we attended. Charley will not be able to enjoy those tunes, but I will think of him when I play them.

I last saw Charley a couple of weeks before he died. He was complaining of various ailments, only one of which sounded remotely serious. As it happens, that is not the ailment that did him in. He suffered a heart attack, and passed quickly.

Given the timing of Charley’s death, I cannot help but feel a bit down this Christmas. Still, he had a good run, and more importantly, he made a difference. I cannot speak for others, but I can state with certainty that my life would have been very different, and much the poorer, if I hadn’t known him. That is, perhaps, the best that can be said for any of us.

Where Are My Balls?

“Alexa, what is the temperature in Madison, Georgia?”

“Right now, the temperature is 59 degrees. Today, expect a high of 82 degrees.”

“Damn, winter is here.”

Now that the cold weather has arrived, it is time to begin the indoor activities appropriate to winter. Yeah, right, you know I'm kidding. The summer's too hot to do outdoor activities anyway. I'm pretty much a creature of the indoors all year round.

I play the vibraphone. Perhaps I should rephrase. I attempt to play the vibraphone, and I quite enjoy the noise I make with my overgrown set of door chimes. And, as with every hobby I have ever undertaken, I tend to study it to death.

I know a few professional vibraphonists, and the conversations I have with them invariably gravitate toward the mallets they use. Vibraphones are fairly expensive. Once you buy one, you keep it until the frame rusts away. Any variation in the sound you get from the instrument thus boils down to technique and mallets. Technique is something I'm still working on. But mallets, well, that's easy. Just buy different mallets and you will get different sounds.

That seems so easy, and it would be if one were rich. But since we're talking the life of a musician here, we can rule out the prospect that one is wealthy. Mallets come in sets of two or four. I buy four, as I play with three and can always use a spare. They generally sell for around $20-$30 per mallet. That gets expensive after awhile.

There are three parts to a vibraphone mallet: the shaft, the core, and the winding. The best shafts are rattan. They have a little, but not too much, flex to them. Wooden dowel rods, on the other hand, have no flex to them, and are not preferred. And don't even mention plastic shafts. Vibraphonists are such snobs!

The core is key. The core is generally rated by its hardness. Hard mallets have a hard plastic ball as a core, and produce a louder, and “pingier”, sound, if “pingier” is indeed a word. Soft mallets use soft rubber balls as cores, and are generally lower in volume. Unfortunately, they also tend to muddy up the low notes. Then there are the composite mallets. My pair of composites has a core that is a hard plastic ball, which is covered with a bit of Tygon tubing. The tubing softens the sound, when compared with the hard plastic ball.

The winding is also critical. The core can be covered with yarn of various types (cotton, bamboo, wool, etc.) or cord. This generally attenuates the sound one gets from just the core. I've tried winding with cord. It isn't easy, and I can't make the mallet sound the way I want it to sound, so I stick with yarn. Of course, just settling on a yarn can be problematic. There are all sorts of different sizes. Do I use number 3, number 5, or number 10 (the three sizes I can find in a Wal Mart)? And let's not even talk about colors!

I once made a set of mallets using dowel rods (not ideal) and rubber stoppers (ground down from a trapezoid of revolution to a cylinder) from Lowes. I like the sound they produce, but I want a little more flex in the handles, and I would prefer a circular, as opposed to a cylindrical, core. So, I visited the Internet, and bought two pounds of rattan. I have no idea why they sell it by the pound, but they do. These two pounds comprise two different diameters: 7mm and 9mm. The 7mm has a good bit of flex to it. I will probably try the 7mm first.

In my imagination, I figured out that I could wind a soft rubber ball very tightly, compressing the ball, to produce a mallet that was not as hard as the hard core mallets (goodbye metallic ping), but harder than a soft core mallet (bringing clarity to the low notes). This should be the easiest thing in the world, yes? I just go down to Wal Mart and buy some rubber balls. How hard could that be?

As it turns out, it is practically impossible.

I suspect the problem is that we are all too stupid to realize that a child can choke on a small rubber ball, thus someone, perhaps the government (conspiracy theory, anyone?), has decided that the only way to save small children from choking on vibraphone mallet cores is to ban them from Wal Mart. Based on the size of the heads on my wound mallets, I am looking for rubber balls anywhere from ½ to 1 inch in diameter. These seem to be missing from Wal Mart. The larger ones they carry. The Lowes employee gave me a very funny look when I asked for rubber balls, and the Tractor Supply lady just said “Huh?”

Back to the Internet. Unfortunately, in order to get the size balls I wanted, I had to order a few hundred. So here I sit with two pounds of rattan (some of which needs to be straightened with a propane torch), waiting for a few hundred balls to appear on my doorstep. I've already bought all the yarn that Wal Mart carries.

I'm beginning to see why vibraphone mallets are so expensive!

61*

The month of September brings us the equinox, and the beginning of fall, at least, on this side of the equator. The month of October ends with the celebration of Halloween, a celebration of interest to me because it coincides with my birthday. In between these two dates we find a date of significance that is not often remembered. It is October 1, 1961. On that date, Roger Eugene Maris broke Babe Ruth’s record (from 1927) of 60 home runs in one season. In the fourth inning, during the last regular game of the season, and in front of a little more than 23,000 fans, Maris nailed a pitch from Boston Red Sox pitcher Tracy Stallard, sending it into the right field bleachers for home run number 61 of the season.

The home run was controversial at the time, primarily because Babe Ruth, who died in 1948, still had friends in Major League Baseball. The most significant friend was Ford Frick, the commissioner of baseball, and a friend to Ruth’s widow, Claire. Frick saw himself as the protector of the Ruth legacy, and he found a way to discredit Maris’ achievement even before it happened.

In Ruth’s day, the baseball season was 154 games long. In 1961, the league was expanded to ten teams with the addition of the Los Angeles Angels and the Washington Senators. In order to balance the schedule, the season was extended to 162 games. Frick announced at a mid-season press conference that, in his opinion, Ruth’s record would stand unless it was broken in 154 games. Any home run past 60, hit in any game after the 154th, should contain some “distinctive mark” in the record books, indicating that it was set in the “extended” season. While Frick himself did not suggest that the record be marked with an asterisk, Dick Young, a sportswriter for the New York Daily News, proposed the asterisk as the “distinctive mark”. Major League Baseball did not control “the record books” at that time, so Frick’s suggestion of a “distinctive mark” was just that, a suggestion that Maris’ record should occupy a different category than Ruth’s.

The controversy hides the remarkable nature of the achievement. The Ruth record stood for 34 years, and Ruth came close to that record only one other time in his career, in 1921, when he hit 59 home runs. He hit 54 home runs twice more in his career (1920, 1928). Aside from those four years, Ruth was never in the 50s with respect to home runs. (In Ruth’s day, what we now call an “automatic double,” a ball that hit the ground in the outfield then bounced over the fence, was considered a home run. I have been assured that none of Ruth’s 1927 home runs came that way, but I do not know whether any of his other three seasons of 50 plus home runs contains “automatic double” homers.) All major league players recognized how difficult it would be to tie the Ruth record, much less best it.

The 50 Home Run Club, made up of players who had hit 50 or more home runs in a season, contained, in 1961, only eight members: Ruth, Hack Wilson, Jimmie Foxx, Hank Greenburg, Johnny Mize, Ralph Kiner, Willie Mays, and Mickey Mantle. Foxx and Greenburg led the pack of runners up with 58 home runs each (in 1932 and 1938, respectively). Mantle hit 52 home runs in 1956, and he would end the 1961 season with 54 homers. It was an exclusive club, one difficult to break into. Sixty home runs seemed like a dream.

Yet both Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris were in the running to break Ruth’s record in 1961. Late in the season, Mickey Mantle was sidelined with a hip infection. He had no regular season at bats after September 26, 1961. As noted above, he finished the regular season with 54 home runs. It would have been a fantastic season if Mantle had remained healthy.

The 1961 New York Yankees was blessed with its “Murderer’s Row” of heavy hitters. In addition to Mantle(CF) and Maris(RF), the heart of the lineup contained Moose Skowron(1B), Yogi Berra(LF), and Elston Howard(C). For the most part, Maris was third in the lineup, followed by Mantle, Berra, and Skowron. Opposing pitchers did not have the luxury to pitch around Maris, so he saw some pretty good pitches.

At any rate, the 154th game passed with Maris at 59 home runs (September 20). He hit number 60 on September 26 (game number 158), and the 61st on October 1 (game number 162).

In my opinion, Maris’ achievement should never have been marred with the suggestion that it wasn’t in the same category as Ruth’s. For one thing, Ruth didn’t have to travel all the way to Los Angeles to play a game. Travel does tend to wear on the body. The addition of eight games to the schedule seems to have had no effect on any other records. By the time Hank Aaron broke Ruth’s total home runs record (714) in April of 1974, there was no suggestion that an asterisk or other distinctive mark was necessary to denote that some of Aaron’s home runs had occurred during extended seasons. The same holds for single season hits, or walks, or stolen bases, etc. I believe that Maris was the target of an unfair discrimination that would not occur today.

Curiously enough, Maris is still not in the baseball Hall of Fame. I understand why: except for 1961, he really didn’t turn in hall of fame quality years. However, 61 home runs in a season is, in my opinion, enough to overcome the mediocrity of some of his baseball career. He should be in the Hall of Fame.

His achievement still stands, in my opinion. Oh, I know, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and Barry Bonds have hit more home runs in a season, and the record books even note that Bonds has beaten Aaron’s record of most home runs (755). I put a great big asterisk next to each of those records, with the qualifier: “These so-called records were set with the aid of performance enhancing drugs.” They are not records in my record book.

The decade of the nineties was a terrible time for baseball. Were I the King of Baseball, there would be no players from that decade inducted into the Hall of Fame, and no records from that decade entered into the record book. It is my sincere hope that Major League Baseball has the performance enhancing drug epidemic under control. Unfortunately, it comes too late for me.

My interest in baseball began its death spiral after the revelations of steroid abuse. But my admiration for Maris, Mantle, and all the other true athletes of the pre-drug era, increased substantially.

So, on Tuesday, October 1, 2019, I will stop and remember with awe the accomplishment of Roger Maris back on that Autumn day some 58 years ago.

Get Back On That Horse!

My former father-in-law, the late Perry Smith, paid me two high compliments. The higher compliment came sometime after his daughter and I had split, and thus was entirely unexpected. He paid me the compliment not to massage my ego or to engender any good will with me, but simply because he was a decent human being. I miss him.

The other compliment came after a session in our kitchen. He was a very good cook, and when he visited us, he invariably ended up in the kitchen. We always looked forward to whatever surprise he decided to prepare for us. One day, he paid me this compliment: “George, the knives in your kitchen are always sharp.”

You may not think that high praise, but he and I were both technical types who appreciated the right tool for the right job, and who believed that any tool ought to be kept in good repair. The most useful kitchen tool is the kitchen knife, and he recognized that I tried to keep the tools in my kitchen in good repair. It was high praise, indeed, from a master in the kitchen.

I have just finished sharpening the kitchen knives that needed work. Sharpening day in the Batten household is a big production, primarily because, back in February, I began shaving with a straight razor. Sharpening a razor has changed my perspective on what constitutes an acceptable level of sharpness in a knife. It has also increased the number of sharpening appliances that I now employ on sharpening day.

In the past, when my ex-father-in-law was using my kitchen knives, I employed a hard Arkansas stone to sharpen my knives. The stone I use has to be at least 50 years old. It has a coarse side and a hard side. After applying mineral oil to the surface of the stone, I would sharpen first on the coarse side, then finish with the fine side. This produced an edge that impressed my father-in-law. However, when I tried to sharpen my straight razor with the Arkansas stone, the result was unsatisfactory. It did improve the edge somewhat, but not enough for a good, close shave.

A colleague at work suggested a Japanese water stone, and Yellowstone compound added to the backside of my leather strop. The water stone I purchased has two sides, one 5,000 grit, the other 10,000 grit. I start with the 5,000 side, then finish with the 10,000 side. I cannot compare these two stones by grit numbers, because Arkansas stones are rated by hardness, not grit. I can report, though, that the fine side of the Arkansas stone does not feel as smooth as the 5,000 side of the water stone.

The water stone does a nice job, but the secret to a really sharp razor’s edge is the Yellowstone compound. I scrape off bits of the compound, and rub it into the back of the strop, as if pushing butter into it. Stropping the razor on the back side of this treated strop results in an extraordinarily sharp edge. I then finish the process by stropping the razor on the smooth side of the strop.

And so it is with my favorite kitchen knife (an Old Hickory butcher knife) and with Kathy’s favorite kitchen knife (a Sabre Bowie knife). If I go too long between sharpenings, the knives see all four stones, beginning with the coarse side of the Arkansas stone and ending with the 10,000 grit water stone. All the knives are stropped with Yellowstone.

This does not mean that I have not used other sharpening gadgets. For many years I used the grindstone on the back of an electric can opener to put an edge on a ridiculously dull knife. I would still use that device, but I haven’t seen it since the divorce. My guess is that it is in the basement workshop of my ex-house.

Jason recently gave me a little device with the brand name Kitchen iQ (for some reason the “i” is upside down in the brand name: silly millennial marketing guru!) that uses ceramic to sharpen knives. There are two “V” shaped slots, one labeled “coarse” and the other “fine” that I use to replenish the edge on our knives while in media res.

There is one other knife sharpening device that I used 30 years ago. It is pictured at the top of this post. I had a bad experience with it, and it has taken me nearly 30 years to “get back on the horse that threw me”. When she divided up the kitchen utensils, my ex-wife made sure this device went with me. She wanted no part of it.

The device, sold by Sears, carries the name “Cedar Block Sharpening Rod Kit” and is just that: a block of cedar wood with two holes drilled in at an angle. The holes are occupied by removable pressed silica rods. Its operation is simple: hold your knife vertically on the inside of one rod, move it down to sharpen, then do the same with the other rod to the other side of the knife. You hold the cedar block still with your non-dominant hand. It does a very nice job, and reminds me a bit of the 10,000 grit side of the water stone.

But if you aren’t paying attention, or if you get a bit sloppy, you can hurt yourself, as I did one Sunday night in the 1980s. The London broil was out of the oven, and I was preparing to slice it with my Old Hickory butcher knife. All I needed to do first was to run the blade on the inside of both rods a time or two.

So, without paying very much attention, I raised the knife higher than the top of the left silica rod, and when the blade came down, it hit the top of the rod. After that, instead of veering right, the knife veered left. I had embedded the knife in the back of my left hand, severing a tendon. The only good thing I can say about that experience is that it was a good, clean incision produced by a knife that was already very sharp.

I visited the emergency room, and I later spent some quality time with an orthopedic surgeon. My recovery was complete. The Sears Cedar Block Sharpening Rod Kit was stored away, I thought for good.

Now I am glad that I did not throw it away. It is very useful. I don’t use it daily, but I do use it frequently.

It is just that I am a good bit more careful now when I use it.

Eighty-Nine Inches

Our Beaufort, SC, home was built in the 1940s. Originally, it was a one bedroom, one bathroom house. It was added to at some later date, probably between 1978 and 1995, and is now a three bedroom, two bathroom house.

The reason for that 17 year guess on when the house was enlarged has to do with polybutylene (PB) piping, which was used fairly extensively in housing water supply applications between 1978 and 1995. Cheap, flexible, and easy to install, PB was considered the “pipe of the future.” Housing experts believe that between 6 and 10 million homes in the country were built during that period with PB piping. It was a wonderful material. That is, it was wonderful until it was discovered that after 10 to 15 years of life it degraded, cracked, and failed, flooding the houses that used it as water lines.

No one is sure why PB piping fails. Some attribute its failure to exposure to the UV light found in sunlight (meaning that if it had been sitting out exposed to sunlight for a long time before being installed, it is more likely to fail). Others think it is due to local issues, primarily periodic over-chlorination of the water supply. While am no more certain than the experts, I tend to favor the latter explanation. The house two doors down from our Madison, GA, home has PB piping, which has not failed, even though the house is at least 25 years old. At any rate, this being America, there was a class action lawsuit sometime in the 1980s or 1990s which was settled for megabucks. Shell no longer produces the stuff, and presumably all homeowners are happy.

There are two things that cause me not to buy a house: aluminum wiring, and PB piping. Aluminum wiring is like an engraved invitation to have a house fire visit. I always look for it when buying a house. Fortunately, I’ve never found it. PB, on the other hand . . .

The reason why I know that the house two doors down from mine has PB piping is because, 13 years ago, I made an offer on that house, and later withdrew it when the home inspector found PB piping. (PB is gray in color; PVC is white. The piping that I could see in that house looked white. As it turns out, it had been painted white.)

So, a few years ago, when we bought the Beaufort home, I was concerned when the home inspector found some PB piping. The only reason we went through with the purchase of the house was because there was so very little of it: 89 inches, to be exact, with 12 inches of that piping on the hot water heater’s pressure relief valve, a position that caused me no concern. That left 77 inches, half of it running up to the laundry room to the hot water side of the washing machine, and half of it running up to the laundry room to the cold water side of the washing machine. These lines were under pressure, and they worried me so much that I finally resolved to replace them, which I did this week.

I spent some time in the crawl space taking photos, then headed off to the local hardware store, Grayco Hardware and Home, on Lady’s Island. Beaufort has a Lowes, which is nice, but when it comes to a job like this, I needed to talk to someone who knows what they are talking about. Grayco has an employee, Dick something or another, who is a plumber. He looked at my photos, sketched out what I needed to do, and sold me the supplies. I grabbed my goodies and headed back to the house to get dirty (it is a crawl space, after all) and wet (no matter that you shut off the water to the house, when you cut into a water line, you get wet).

There is a rule I follow for all household projects. I call it Batten’s Rule. It is simple: figure as realistically as possible the length of time it will take to finish a project, then multiply it by three. I estimated one hour. I finished it in three.

I am happy to report that all went according to Hoyle. My problems were not with the plumbing fixtures, but with the holes through which I tried to slide the PEX I bought to replace the PB. I hate threading needles, running electrical lines through existing walls, and fitting ½ inch lines in holes that just barely accommodate ½ inch lines. But, eventually, the deed was done, and I was able to take a nice shower before heading off to The Jazz Corner on Hilton Head Island.

Even though it caused me no concern, I even replaced the PB on the hot water heater’s pressure relief valve. The house if completely free of PB piping.

I do not understand why the 89 inches was there in the first place. With all the PVC and copper under the house, that little bit of PB seemed out of place. But no matter why it made an appearance, it is gone, and my quarterly work week at the house has ended.

And now I am back home in Madison, just in time to mow the lawn. It never ends.