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November 29
Death of a Jug and Washtub Bass Player
Fritz Richmond died on November 20 at age 66 of lung cancer. According to the Boston Globe’s obituary, Richmond drew “on his expertise as a U.S. Army helicopter mechanic [by stringing] the washtub bass with a steel cable, turning it into a usable instrument. To play it, he developed his own steel-and-rawhide gloves. He won national attention in 1963 with the Jim Kweskin Jug Band, where he learned that he'd be playing the jug as well as washtub bass.” He learned how to play the instruments from old records. The obituary notes that he was one of the earliest performers to wear dark granny glasses (See photo), a style copied by musicians and other denizens of the era. For him it wasn’t a style. He wore them to hide that he went cross-eyed when he played the jug.
I was reminded of Jim Kweskin, Fritz Richmond, Geoff and Maria Muldaur and the band just a couple of days ago when I was listening to John McEuen’s show on The Village, XM Satellite Radio’s Folk Channel 15. McEuen, a seminal influence in rock, folk, and other genres, a founding member of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and creator of the great and famous recording, “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” has thousands of stories to tell, which is why listening to his XM show is worthwhile, never mind the music. Anyway, in his last show he spoke warmly of (and played some of the music of) the Kweskin Jug Band and I got to remembering the first time I saw and heard them - or a version of them - play. It was probably 1963. My wife (then not quite that) and I went to The Unicorn, a bar/coffee house in Boston near Kenmore Square, to hear Dave Van Ronk. Van Ronk was a regular there and either I got the billing for the night wrong, or Dave just didn’t show up for some reason. Kweskin did show, though, and played, as I recall, with one or two other people, though he mostly played solo. I had heard a lot about him, especially from one friend who thought Kweskin was the best picker around (and he sure wasn’t bad!), but I had never actually heard him play. I was confused that night. Expecting Van Ronk, and hearing a picker and singer who didn’t sound at all like him, I still wondered if I was seeing and hearing Dave. The person at the scene who straightened me out was Robert J. Lurtsema, who was hanging at the time with the folk crowd. This was before he became a Boston morning classical radio icon on WGBH.
Amazing how memories work, how they link, how they conjure whole periods of one’s life. Just remembering that one coffee house visit brings a flood of memories: the crazy place my wife and I lived in then, the crazy Moto Guzzi motorcycle we rode. Forty two years ago. And now the washtub bass player is gone.
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More Foil Helmet Examples
Our Washington area correspondent Allen Janus has sent along reference to a photo of the custodian of the Janus Museum, Gus Norbeck, wearing a fez-style aluminum cap worn in defense of radiation from an expected solar storm. This is an important addition to the topic and to the general literature of aluminum foil caps and helmets. We thank Mr. Janus.
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November 25.
Aluminum Foil Helmet News
Our California correspondent Louis Cohen, a graduate of MIT, has brought a very important study to our attention. Researchers at his alma mater have come up with some surprising findings about the relative effectiveness of the shapes of aluminum foil helmets. The study abstract states:
“Among a fringe community of paranoids, aluminum helmets serve as the protective measure of choice against invasive radio signals. We investigate the efficacy of three aluminum helmet designs on a sample group of four individuals. Using a $250,000 network analyser, we find that although on average all helmets attenuate invasive radio frequencies in either direction (either emanating from an outside source, or emanating from the cranium of the subject), certain frequencies are in fact greatly amplified. These amplified frequencies coincide with radio bands reserved for government use according to the Federal Communication Commission (FCC). Statistical evidence suggests the use of helmets may in fact enhance the government's invasive abilities. We speculate that the government may in fact have started the helmet craze for this reason.
This breakthrough study could have long-lasting effects on the health and safety of those who are subject to the depredations of invasive radio signals. Unfortunately, the study’s authors did not provide names of suppliers of the various helmet shapes. Apparently the fez styles come from Turkey. The Centurion style is distributed, we understand, by Biggus Dickus Products. The “Classic” type can be purchased at any Truck Stop of America.
One can, if one so wishes, view another kind of radio-wave-deflecting headgear here.
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November 24 - Thanksgiving Day
Ruth Siems & Stove Top Dressing
Ruth Siems has died at age 72 or 74, depending upon which obit you read. She was the listed lead inventor on the patent for Stove Top Dressing. The newspapers and Internet are filled with appreciations, some of them of her, many of them warm prose poems to the dressing, a hugely successful product to this day. Here’s what the AP had to say:
“Siems helped develop Stove Top in 1971 while working at General Foods' technical center in White Plains, N.Y. She was listed first among four inventors when the patent was awarded in 1975 for the quick and easy way of making stuffing without actually stuffing a turkey.
Kraft Foods, which now owns the Stove Top brand, sells about 60 million boxes each year around Thanksgiving. The five-minute stuffing comes in several flavors, including turkey, chicken and beef.
As a member of the research and development staff for General Foods, Siems helped find the ideal bread crumb size for making instant stuffing with the same texture as the real thing, said her brother, David Siems.”
For many people, Stove Top has become “the real thing,” a comment of some sort on “this modern world of today in which we now live in,” as a former writing student of mine so aptly put it.
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November 23
Lewis & Clark and Language
Today’s Chicago Tribune has a really interesting article about the language of the journals of Lewis and Clark, “Lewis and Clark's paper trail opens up new world of words,” by Nathan Bierma. To get to the article you have to subscribe to the online paper.
According to Bierma, “ One lexicographer [Alan Hartley in "Lewis and Clark Lexicon of Discovery" (Washington State University Press, 234 pages, $24.95)] who has studied the language of the journals Lewis and Clark kept says the explorers were lexical trailblazers. Their spelling and vocabulary provide a unique linguistic portrait of the English of their era.”
Clark was the less literary of the two, and his written prose closely parallels how he pronounced the words he was writing.
“Because Clark often spelled words as they sounded to him, his writing gives us a window into early-19th Century pronunciation.
‘His misspellings are an invaluable gift, providing hints of his actual speech,’ writes Hartley, an independent scholar and lexicographer in Duluth, Minn.”
Further, “ For instance, Clark wrote in September 1805, "Great numbers of Indians reside on all those foks as well as the main river," spelling "forks" as "foks."
Elsewhere, he spells "board" as "boad" and "horse" as "hose," while Lewis spells "sharp" as "shap" and "shortly" as "shotly." These phonetic spellings suggest the men pronounced the words without an "r" -- a phonetic feature of the accent of Virginia, where both men were born.”
To me it’s interesting - and certainly was when I lived in Virginia - how certain locutions sounded so similar coming from Bostonians and from Virginians, though one would not ordinarily think that they would be anything like the same. But in Lewis & Clark’s time, the spoken language was still very close to the British English of the time.
And it isn’t just pronunciation that fascinates one in looking at the journals. Hartley’s book also, “helps shed light on words and expressions that are common today but whose origins are no longer obvious. When Clark wrote, "The Indians were pointing their arrows blank," it means firing at a short distance. This sense survives in our phrase "point-blank," with the word "blank" bearing its older meaning of "target."
Another shooting-related term is "offhand," meaning to shoot a rifle without resting it on anything to stabilize it. Lewis writes of shooting "at the distance of fifty yards off hand." Today we use the term metaphorically to mean "without an external aid," as in, "I don't know offhand," (that is, without asking someone or looking it up).
Sounds (you should pardon the expression) like a book I need to read
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Problem Solving
I like to think of myself as a problem-solver. I’m just not as good as whoever solved this one.
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November 22
St. Cecilia’s Day
I was awakened this morning by the magnificent “Sanctus” (the link is an excerpt) from Charles Gounod’s Messe solennelle de Sainte Cecile (St. Cecilia Mass). Today is St. Cecilia Day, her “feast day.” Of course, it’s not her day alone in the Catholic pantheon. It is also the feast day of
As far as I know, Gounod didn’t write music about any of them.
The story of St. Cecilia, called by some “the patron saint of music” and by others “the patron saint of church music,” is one of those wonderfully plastic myths that evolved over time. She is usually depicted playing an organ - not a likely thing, since she lived, if she lived at all, in the 3rd century. The “organ” idea derives from a mistranslation of an element of her story. As one discussion of St. Cecilia notes, “History records, ‘The day on which the wedding was to be held arrived and while musical instruments were playing she was singing in her heart to God alone saying: Make my heart and my body pure that I may not be confounded’ Many historians believe that this text led to the eventual naming of Cecilia as the patroness of music. In the original Latin, the term for musical instruments is "cantantibus organis," and in later texts it was translated that she was playing an organ instead of listening to music as she prayed.”
Did she live at all? Even the Catholic histories seem uncertain, assigning the beginnings of the story of Cecilia to a Greek romance with two characters named Valerian and Cecilia who exemplify the life of chastity. A pope in the 5th century dreamed of the former existence of Cecilia (probably from reading this story) and posited that she had been a real and saintly person.
What’s important is that her myth lives on and caused Gounod to write his wonderful piece. He’s not the only composer to do so. Purcell, Handel, Herbert Howells and Benjamin Britten all wrote music based on the story of St. Cecilia.
I’ll talk at some point about my musical fixation on the “Sanctus” sections of a large number of choral masses. For whatever reason, I find them by far the most dynamic parts of most such masses - and I’m apparently not alone. Often when producers, choral directors, or classical radio programmers want to excerpt parts of a mass for recording or playing, the part is the Sanctus, as witness what usually gets sung or played out of the Faure Requiem, or Durufle’s or Verdi’s or any of several Haydn masses. But I digress.
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November 20 & 21
Holiday Ales and Beers: An Introduction
Last night I participated in a beer tasting run by a couple who are good friends with whom we’ve conducted such tastings in the past. This was all their show. Its basic theme was the pairing of specific beers and beer types with specific foods and food types, demonstrated by the serving of great varieties of foods with the 16 beers we tasted. It was great fun and just wonderfully tasty.
The last two beers of the evening were the Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale and the Anchor Steam “Our Special Ale” 2005 Christmas brew. Thus begins a season I anticipate every year: the Season of the Holiday Ales and Beers.
The season always begins just before Thanksgiving each year. It is a season that has a relatively short history, beginning seriously only 15 or so years back. Anchor began brewing their “Our Special Ales” over 30 years ago, but they were pretty much alone in doing that for quite a while. The current phenomenon had to wait until we had a significant number of microbrewers in the US and, at the same time, enough interest in importing European holiday beers, which had been brewed there for a very long time, but not brought here.
The variety is substantial, and even within types the differences are remarkable. The Anchor brew is typically spiced (they don’t reveal their recipe, but one can discern certain clear flavors, often orange, coriander, nutmeg, cinnamon, and the like) and quite hearty. Several other brewers create the same beer each year. Certain spiced beers, such as Samuel Adams “Old Fezziwig,” are like this, as are some highly hopped ales (the Sierra Nevada is one). Samuel Adams covers all the bases by having not one, but three winter/holiday beers. Along with Old Fezziwig, SA also distributes their Winter Lager and their Holiday Porter, and both are very good.
Holiday and winter beers and ales come from both domestic microbrewers and European brewers. The European holiday beers come in huge variety. The British “winter warmers” are strong beers (Young’s and Sam Smith’s). The greatest variety of holiday brews comes from Belgium, naturally. So many of the Belgian brewers have their own concoctions that it’s just about impossible to list them. But I’ll try.
What I’ll plan to do over the next month and a half is to list out the beers I find or find out about and discuss them in the left column under the heading “Winter and Holiday Beers” at the top. In some cases, the beers will be available only in the Chicagoland area, where I live; but most of them will or should be available in urban areas in the US, at least theoretically.
More coming. Stay tuned.
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November 17
Saint-Saens, “Babe,” and 23/8 time
Today on the way to pick up a client (I drive a sedan limo part time) I had my XM Satellite radio playing. I was moving from station to station, as I usually do, and on XMPops stopped surfing to listen to the Saint-Saens 3rd Symphony, the “Organ” Symphony. I greatly enjoy Saint-Saens’ music, always marveling especially at the music he composed for piano and organ. He was a celebrated virtuoso of the organ and famed for his ability to improvise. He was also a brilliant pianist, having made his debut in a Paris salon before he was 5 years old. He very clearly enjoyed composing for piano and for organ.
As a composer he was ahead of his time. Nicholas Slonimsky says of him that “Solidity of contrapuntal fabric, instrumental elaboration, fullness of sonority in orchestration, and a certain harmonic saturation are the chief characteristics of his music, qualities that were not yet fully exploited by French composers at the time, and the French public preferred the lighter type of music.” Ironically, as ahead of his time as he was as a younger man, he came to hate modern music, particularly disliking Debussy.
As I listened to the magnificent 3rd Symphony, which is always new and thrilling to me, I recalled one of my favorite versions of it: the “If I Had Words” song the mice sing in the movie “Babe.” As my friends are tired of hearing (Friends, if you want to exit here, I can’t blame you; go have some coffee, find another blog, go out for a walk - but be sure to come back later) I was quite amazed at this song when I saw the movie. Of course, the running theme music in the film is drawn from the grand organ movement of the Saint-Saens 3rd, and it is handled (by composer Nigel Westlake) very cleverly and beautifully. But the song of the mice is especially clever, and in my first hearing, I knew it was in an odd meter, but could not initially figure out what meter. I finally determined (as I sat there counting) that it was probably in something like 23/8 - kind of a classical Don Ellis tune. I purchased the sound track CD and listened carefully to it. It is actually in more like 6/8-5/8-6/8-6/8, which all adds up to 23/8. Or maybe it doesn’t. I’m no expert
You want to count it for yourself, you say? Go ahead and listen. Someone has kindly put it on her own blog. All you need is a plug-in that will play a streaming mp3 file.
Me, I think I’ll go put on one of my CDs of the Organ Symphony.
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November 15
The Incas Invented the 64-oz. Beer Growler? Geddoudadere!
Here I thought the growler was invented in brewpubs - for that matter, as far as I knew, it was the idea of John or Greg Hall at Goose Island Brew Pub in Chicago.
But I was wrong. Very wrong.
The Chicago Tribune reports today that nearly 1000 years ago there were 64 oz. beers on tap at an ancient brewery in Peru.
The brewing of beer was, until quite recently, the province of women. In fact, the English name “Brewster” commemorates the practice. A “brewster” is a woman brewer (etymologically the same formation as “ baxter”, a female baker, and “webster,” a female weaver - you could look it up in the OED). In keeping with that ancient tradition, the Peruvian beer was brewed by women. It was apparently brewed for and served to visiting guests of the Wari, one of several “advanced pre-Columbian civilizations living along South America's Andean mountain chain,” according to the Tribune article. According to one of the anthropologists who has been studying the culture, "The Incas chose their most beautiful royal women from all over the empire to perform ritual work like brewing beer and weaving the finest cloth for the fabulous robes that connoted status to those who wore them."
Field Museum anthropology curator Patrick Ryan Williams and his wife, “an adjunct professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, are among the co-authors of a paper on the excavations being published Tuesday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.”
According to their studies, “ The beer was fermented from corn mash--making a potent concoction called chicha that is still brewed in the Andes--and spiced with peppercorn tree berries.
"This was no mini-brewery operation," said Williams. "It was the biggest early brewery anyone has so far seen. The brewing facility had three main areas: a grinding room for corn, a boiling room with at least 20 huge vats that allowed them to brew 1,000 to 2,000 liters of beer at a time and a storage area with huge, 4-foot-high clay storage vessels."
That meant every five or six days the brewery could turn out at least 500 gallons.
At official functions, the brew was served in seven distinct sets of beautiful drinking vessels made from clay, narrow at the bottom, flaring up to much wider tops. Some held as much as 64 ounces.”
So there you have it. Your half-gallon growler has been around for a very long time.
By the way, the beer they made, chicha, was made from corn (no barley in that part of world in that far-off time). It was probably fairly low in alcohol.
Here is a very good precis on the history and making of chicha.
Me? I think I’ll head for the Goose Island Clybourn Brewpub. Looks like the current beers are just lovely, among them Imperial SmokED Brown Goose (9.2% abv); Autumn Ale (6.4% abv), from a blend of barley, oats, wheat, rice, corn and rye malts; and Dunkelweizenbock (7.3% abv), Goose Island’s strong, brown Bavarian style wheat beer. I’ll ask for the Inca growler.
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November 14
The Twelve Moons of the Year
The weather changed emphatically this weekend. Saturday was warmish during the day, but the wind started kicking up in the afternoon and by the evening was blowing in gusts up to 50 mph. Sunday morning was still on the warm but very windy side. By the afternoon the temperature had dropped into the 40s (F) and it was distinctly unpleasant to be outside. The forecasts for this week have at least one day with a high in the 30s, most in the 40s. We have seen the end of Indian Summer.
At this time of year I always seem to take out my copy of Hal Borland’s Twelve Moons of the Year, the book of selections Hal Borland started to put together from his New York Times nature editorials and which his wife Barbara Dodge Borland completed after his death.
The book contains 365 entries, one, of course, for each day of the year, arranged by Moons, though not, as he explains in his preface, “literal moons,” running from new moon to new moon; rather, he plays a bit loose, using calendar months as his time periods.
His entry for November 14, entitled “The Witches’ Flowers,” is about witch hazels which “deep into autumn . . .come to bloom.” It’s just a short reflection on the autumness of witch hazel, why it is so named, and how the seed capsule, “when ripe . . .pops open with explosive force and hurls the seeds up to forty feet from the parent tree.”
I cannot recommend this sweet book enough, particularly for how it conveys the feel of the change of seasons so beautifully.
Amazon is listing only collectors’ copies of both the hard bound and paper editions for sale from $29.95 and up. The hard bound original came from Knopf in 1979. The paperback version was published in 1979 by G. K. Hall & Co. (where my spouse once worked - a very strange, very specialized company, so much so that I’m very surprised they published this book - must be a story there).
No matter. Find it if you can. Have a copy of your own. You won’t want to be running to the library every so often to consult it.
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November 13
A Small Apology
I saw my blog on someone else’s computer a couple of days ago and realized that I had made an error that caused an odd display, probably for most people. At the top of the page right now, next to the word “Overtones,” you should be seeing a graphic of a musical staff. That’s because it’s a graphic. What I had before I thought cute and clever because it was a staff made by a font called “MusiQwik.” It spelled “OVERtones” in musical notes. What hadn’t occurred to me was that most people don’t have that font on their computers. So what happened was that most people saw, in whatever font their computers chose, the word “OVERtones” redundantly to the left of the title “Overtones” in the center.
I fixed it. Sorry.
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November 12
Florence Foster Jenkins
A few years back I was visiting the home of the estimable Herb Grossman. We sat in front of a lovely fire, several of us, drinking wine and eating cheeses and talking about bad singers. Herb, a now retired conductor of many symphony, pops, show and opera orchestras , was in a position to know bad singing. We got on to the topic of intentional and unintentional bad singing somehow, and the conversation led to the wonderful collaboration between Jo Stafford and her husband Paul Weston, the “artistry” of Jonathan and Darlene Edwards.
As we talked, Herb got up and a few minutes later we heard a most arrestingly bad sort of singing coming out of his stereo system. I was the real victim here, since all the others in the room had heard this nasty but actually very funny stuff. What most astonished me was that the singer was clearly serious. She wasn’t trying to be bad. She just was; and someone had actually been on hand to record it!
The singer was Florence Foster Jenkins. accompanied on the piano by, as he is often described, “long-suffering” Cosme McMoon (the FFJ stage name of Edwin MacArthur).
Herb has told many stories of FFJ. He actually attended one of her “recitals”, recalling, “Among other things, she had bouquets of roses on the piano from which she threw flowers to her adoring audience. Before she would proceed to the next group, ushers combed the audience, taking back every single rose and forming them into bouquets once again, that she might repeat the procedure when the spirit moved her.” Herb also says that she had ushers in the audience who removed all patrons who snickered or laughed.
Sadly, Florence Foster Jenkins (1868 - 1944) died one month after making her Carnegie Hall “debut.”
Herb warned us some months ago that a play about FFJ was brewing and would be presented in New York. It has hit the stage at the same time as a different play about her life has opened in London. The play here, Stephen Temperley's "Souvenir," is playing on Broadway at the Lyceum Theater and has received a middling review in the New York Times.
No matter how good the play, we owe Stephen Temperley a rousing cheer for keeping the legend alive.
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November 11
Veterans’ Day
Rev. Edward Searl, minister of The Unitarian Church of Hinsdale, IL, talked this past Sunday about remembering veterans and the hope that every war we fight is the last one of all time. On the occasion of this Armistice/Veterans’ Day he chose to recall an event that occurred on a very small island in the Pacific 60 years ago. I have, with his permission, edited and posted his remarks here.
In March, 1945, after 5 weeks of horrific battle against a well-fortified and fiercely determined force of 22, 000 Japanese soldiers, a force of 70,000 Marines had captured a 7 ½ square mile island in the Pacific—Iwo Jima. 7,000 Marines died and 19,000 were wounded. 21,800 Japanese soldiers died, leaving 200 prisoners of war.
In the Marine contingent were some 1,500 Jews, including the first Jewish Chaplain, Rabbi Roland Gittlesohn, who endured all that the combat Marines endured, earning three battle ribbons himself. Of course, he ministered to all, regardless of religious persuasion. Such distinctions disappear in battle.
Rabbi Gittelsohn so distinguished himself that the head Division chaplain, a Protestant, asked him to deliver the “sermon” at a combined religious service dedicating the cemetery on Iwo Jima. Almost all of the Christian chaplains, including all the Catholics, objected to a Jew praying over Christian graves.
In the face of such controversy, Rabbi Gittelsohn graciously didn’t persist. As a result, there were three separate religious ceremonies. The rabbi presided over a congregation of 70, including 3 Protestant chaplains who, in a show of solidarity as well as disgust, boycotted the other 2 ceremonies.
Rabbi Gittelsohn’s experience became a cause celebre, with stories about it published in such periodicals as Time. His remarks have been printed and anthologized throughout the world. Fittingly, no recollection of the other services remains.
His sermon, “ The PUREST DEMOCRACY: Sermon on the Dedication of 5th Marine Division Cemetery On Iwo Jima,” whose tenor and sentiments apply today to the dead and wounded in our current misadventure, can be read in its entirety here. It is also a wonderfully subtle condemnation of the sort of discrimination so insultingly visited on Gittelsohn himself.
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November 9
The Kansas Wall
Congress today overrode the President’s veto of a bill authorizing $100 billion to build an impenetrable wall around Kansas. The wall is intended to protect the citizens of the state from large bands of marauders intent on ridiculing the state’s citizens. According to reports, the public perceives that the level of thinking in Kansas is in malignantly hopeless condition. The sorry cognitive state apparently came about as a result of debilitating adherence to a medieval system of belief. Congress acted in part because of recent actions within the state and in part because certain Kansan cadres have taken to spreading this belief in a virus-like manner.
Provision has been made to transport individuals and groups thought to have escaped from Kansas to create viral “cells” in other states. Many of these “cells” had gotten cell members elected to school boards and had attempted to corrupt biology curricula in affected districts. The major concept they propound is known by the almost innocent sounding name, “intelligent design.”
Scientists, teachers and school administrators say they are spending inordinate amounts of time combating the efforts of these stealthy religionists. They have had to divert funding and administrative effort away from useful classroom work to turn back, as one science writer put it, paraphrasing Nobel physics laureate Wolfgang Pauli, “arguments so bad that they don’t even qualify as wrong.”
The wall will be constructed immediately. No Kansans will be allowed out. The only entrants will be individuals from stealth cells who are captured. They will be returned to the state through the one door in the wall. All airports in the state will be shut down. Supplies will be parachuted in on a regular basis
As soon as there is solid evidence that rational minds have turned back the forces of mindlessness, consideration will be given to removing the barrier
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November 8
At Hot Doug’s
Got a call today from my friend Steve Zimmerman. He’s in town from Colorado visiting with his flying buddy, Stuart Cornew. Yesterday they went down to Bloomington, IL to retrieve Stuart’s powered glider and flew it back to Chicagoland. Today they decided that they needed to try Hot Doug’s, The Sausage Superstore and Encased Meat Emporium at 3324 North California, Chicago, one of the finest sausage sandwich shops in the city - no, in the county - no, in the state - no in the entire country! That’s it! The whole country, by gum! They got in touch with another friend, John Donohue, the prominent Evanston lawyer, called me, and all four of us spent a fine hour or so at Hot Doug’s.
At my behest, all had the special of the week, the Cognac-Infused Smoked Pheasant Sausage with Dijon Mustard Cream and White Truffle Cheese - $7.00, along with a small fries and a soft drink. Stuart had brought along a bottle of Australian Shiraz, which we poured into the paper Coca-Cola cups generously provided by Doug.
The sated crew with the wreckage before them.
Doug himself splendidly selling superb sausage.
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November 6
Very Important Book Event
Lighter-Than-Air-Craft expert and Smithsonian Air & Space Person Allan Janus, who is quite possibly a figment of the imagination of the custodian of The Janus Museum, has a new book out. The author is actually either the putative Janus using his real nym or someone else using his nym as a pseudonym. It is all spectacularly unclear. The book, however, is real. It is called Animals Aloft and contains many photos of animals involved in the history of aviation. It is available from Amazon or by click-through from the blog of the Museum (a better alternative, since it supports the Museum’s work, which is importantly nondescript). Here’s one of the photos.
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November 5
Freakonomics
We attended a lecture by Steven D. Levitt at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory last night. Levitt is co-author, with Steven J. Dubner, of Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explains the Hidden Side of Everything. He is also Chair of the Economics Department at University of Chicago.
Neither of us having read Freakonomics, we went based on the title of the lecture, “Using Data to Catch Cheaters.” The lecture was excellent. Levitt is a very engaging, warm speaker. He demonstrably enjoys his work. I loved his statement that he, like many experimentalists, doesn’t really favor any answer when he poses questions. He goes where the data will lead him.
He spent most of his time talking about how he and his team examined whether or not the “No Child Left Behind” law had encouraged cheating in the Chicago Public Schools on the annual achievement exams and, if so, by whom. He found that indeed, cheating had occurred and that, indeed, it was traceable.
When he reported his findings to the head of the Chicago Public Schools, he fully expected denials and rejection. Instead, he was given access to a large sample of classes to re-test them for achievement in a fashion that made teacher cheating impossible. Ultimately he did find over 40 instances of cheating teachers, but also found multiple instances of really fine teaching that did, indeed, improve learning and test scores. Teachers had cheated by erasing wrong multiple choice answers and filling in the correct balloons; and by answering sections of questions that students had been unable to get to.
When he made his report he was asked what he would do about it . He said he’d fire the cheaters and reward the really good teachers. The Chicago Schools fired 12 teachers. They fired only the ones who confessed when confronted with the evidence, which was solid and damning. They allowed the others to stay, no matter that the evidence on them was just as solid and damning, because they did NOT confess. This was an attorney-driven decision. Oh, and they did not reward the good teachers.
A fine lecture.
It will be available as a video stream from Fermi’s web site by the end of the month. Look for it here.
Freakonomics has its own web site. Within the web site is the authors’ blog. Its worth a look.
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November 4
Note #1: Fantasy Sports
At a meeting last night at my Unitarian Church the topic of Fantasy sports came up. One of the young women in the group mentioned that she and her husband are very involved in a Fantasy Soccer League (deriving from their interest in the Chicago team in Major League Soccer).
Another woman in the group was puzzled, never having heard of Fantasy sports leagues. When the concept was explained to her, and the comment was made that it was mostly a guy thing, she thought for a moment, then said, “Hmm. Fantasy Soccer. Those guys probably never score there either.”
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Note #2: Ancestry by DNA
Over to the right there you’ll see a note about Brent Staples’ NY Times article on the implications of genetic screening for ancestral origins.
The company he discusses in the article is DNAPrint Genomics. This company has two products for determining ancestry by DNA sample. The following information, taken from their web site, explains what they do:
DNAPrint™'s genealogy product, ANCESTRYbyDNA™ 2.5, is a pan-chromosomal assay for genetic ancestry. The test surveys 176 Ancestry Informative Markers (AIMs) to provide an inference of genetic ancestry or heritage. The AIMs were carefully selected from large-scale screens of the human genome; and are characterized by sequences of DNA that are more prevalent in people from one continent than another. Using complex statistical algorithms, the test can determine with confidence to which of the major bio-geographical ancestry groups, Sub -Saharan African, European, East Asian or Native American, a person belongs, as well as the relative percentages in cases of admixed peoples. It’s a great tool for those individuals or groups interested in more deeply understanding their ancestry and lineage, or for certain people (i.e. some adoptee of mixed heritage) learning about their genetic ancestry.
The EURODNA 1.0 product is similar except it measures European sub-ancestry. “European” ancestry from Ancestrybydna 2.5 actually refers to a type of ancestry shared by people who derived from the fertile crescent of the Middle East some 50,000 years ago and spread to occupy Europe, the Middle East, parts of Eurasia and South Asia. EURODNA 1.0 breaks the European ancestry into 4 groups, reporting individuals’ percentages for each: Northwestern European, Southeastern European, Middle Eastern and South Asian.
So if you have a consuming need to determine genetically who you are, sounds like this is the place to go. How much does it cost? No idea. Call them and find out.
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November 3
A brief additional note on Skitch Henderson: A very thorough Henderson obit is available in the November 3 New York Times.
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Today’s tortured topic: Trains.
Trains fascinate people. It’s not really clear why, but they do. I’m sure that all kids, at least, and most adults are momentarily mesmerized by a passing freight train while they sit at the crossing gate waiting for it to pass. How many cars? How long is it? What are those weird cars? What’s inside the tankers?
We moved two years ago from a suburban house a distance into the western suburb of Chicago to a condo much nearer the city and, therefore, much nearer my wife’s work. The building we live in is across the street from a viaduct that carries a very active 3-track commuter and freight line. Trains run on that line day and night, and the freight trains often stop and start at this point, sometimes very noisily. Amazingly, we have gotten very used to the noise. We actually don’t hear them during the colder weather because the soundproofing of the building is very good.
[From the Spousal Disapprobation Department two days later: “You make it sound like we live in some railroad flat, Can’t you point out that it’s a really nice building in a really nice area?” OK. I just did.]
One of the most frequent types of freight on the line is coal. Several times a week very long coal trains pass by on their way into Chicago. They’re on their way to two Midwest Generation coal-fired electric plants in the city. Other tracks south of us carry coal from Wyoming to plants in Detroit and beyond. These plants, and several like them in the nearby Midwest, are responsible for much of the acid rain one hears has had such devastating effect on forests in upstate New York, New England, Ontario and Quebec. Detroit Edison has a description of its coal handling facility here.
Our street crosses under the viaduct and I often walk through the underpass. One day I noticed that two cars of a stopped coal train (why is it I always think of jazz when I say that?) were sitting atop the viaduct. I read on the side of one of the cars that its load limit was 240,000 pounds. A quarter of a million pounds. One hundred twenty tons. So two of them represented a half million pounds just over my head. Made me a bit nervous. Quickened my step. Did not want to become a compressed hydrocarbon my own self.
At around that same time I had been walking toward the Chicago Transit Authority line near my home in River Forest, IL. My path follows that same freight line (which from River Forest to a good distance east parallels the CTA line). I saw some coal cars that had either “ROTARY END” or “ROTARY COUPLING HERE” painted on them. I wondered what that meant. The Detroit Edison web site I mentioned above gives you some idea:
“The unit trains enter the 200 acre terminal site via a 3.5 mile perimeter track. Movement and unloading of each unit train is accomplished using a remote controlled car indexer and rotary dumper. The car indexer pulls the entire train forward to position each railcar onto the rotary dumper. Special swivel couplings on each railcar allow the individual railcars to be turned upside down and unloaded without uncoupling. The unit trains are unloaded at a rate of 5,000 TPH.” Here’s a majorly serious rail fan’s site that contains many photos of coal handling at a Canadian rail/shipping port and, most importantly, a video of, among other things, coal car dumping.
By the way, rotary dumping, while the industry standard, is not the only way to unload coal cars. You could always put a back hoe atop the train and dig the stuff out. Here’s proof.
The other thing this web site tells us is that coal trains are unit trains - trains that never add or subtract cars - and are up to 123 cars long and carry upwards of 14,000 tons of coal. Another factoid from another source concerns the ultimate per-car load limit on American rail lines. According to a Recycling Today online article, “There are two payload limitations for railcars. The first is called Free Interchange, meaning the railcar and its load cannot exceed 263,000 pounds. Any railroad that is a member of the Association of American Railroads, Washington, is required to accept a Free Interchange load. The other is called Controlled Interchange, where the combined railcar and load can be has high as 286,000 pounds. In Control Interchange, the receiving railroad must give the sending railroad prior permission to accept the shipment. A typical railcar weighs 70,000 to 75,000 pounds, and the average railcar load weighed 65.3 tons, or just more than 130,000 pounds, according to one recent study by the AAR.”
That right there is far more than you or just about anyone wanted to know about this topic. But just in case you DO want to know more, the estimable John McPhee has written a long article in two parts about coal trains forThe New Yorker. The two parts were published in the October 3 and October 10 issues. As I’ve noted at other times, The New Yorker does not have a particularly useful online presence, so I can’t point you to a web version of this article.
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November 2
Skitch Henderson, Steve Allen and the Gang
Today, the AP reported, “Skitch Henderson, the Grammy-winning conductor who lent his musical expertise to Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby before founding the New York Pops and becoming the first ‘Tonight Show’ bandleader, died Tuesday. He was 87.” Henderson was Steve Allen’s bandleader on “The Tonight Show” during Steve’s reign there from 1954 - 1956. He lost his job when Jack Paar took over, then was back with Steve on “The Steve Allen Show” from 1956 - 1959.
The sad thing is the progressive disappearance of the denizens of the original “Tonight Show” and of Steve Allen’s band of merry men. Louie Nye (“Hi ho, Steverino!”) died on October 9th at age 92 (hard to believe he was that old!). Dayton Allen (the “Why not!” guy) died just about a year ago (November 11, 2004). Gabe Dell (the vampire on the street) left us in 1988. Steve himself died just over 5 years ago (10/30/2000). Tom Poston and Don Knotts are still around, as is Bill Dana, who was both a performer and the head writer of the show.
From about 1959 through 1961, when I worked at MIT’s experimental foundry, I watched “The Steve Allen Show” religiously (sort of a replacement for church, you might say). On the Monday mornings (later Thursday mornings) after the show, I would commune with one of the graduate students in metallurgy (Damn! I can see his face but cannot remember his name. Wait . . .it was Ivan . . .can’t get that last name), repeating the lines from the show and laughing all over again. I can still remember many of Dayton Allen’s segments from that show.
It’s not as if we can’t expect these folks to die. It’s just that the genius of those people, while some of it is preserved, is leaving us as they leave us.
Genius, you say? Indeed. My friend Ric has a laserdisc of some of the great Steve Allen comedy routines. Steve introduces one of them by pointing out that the real surprise of the bit is the guest actor in the routine - one of the last people you’d expect to be funny, but he’s hilarious. It is Charlton Heston with Steve’s usual suspects in a skit about the filming of scene for a Western movie. Ric and I call it by its tag line, “Roll “em!.” I have seen this piece probably twenty times. I cannot watch it any more without starting to laugh helplessly at the very beginning of it, even knowing everything that’s coming. The routine runs for quite a while, with multiple building re-takes of the scene occasioned by the mistakes the players (that’s where the comedy is). It was done live, in front of an audience, and, naturally, in one take. Find it if you can. It is truly one of the great classic pieces of television comedy of any era.
So, so long Skitch. So long Louie. So long all of you. You still make me laugh.
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November 1
Introducing Overtones - the Blog
It’s far too interesting a world. Every day brings something that astonishes me in some way. An encounter. A conversation snippet overheard as people pass by. A surprising building or sign or web site or bit of news. A sudden insight or epiphany - mine or somebody else’s.
I intend in this space to record some of that astonishment, some of the joy, some of the exasperation, some of the anger that these moments bring.
Sometimes I’ll go on at length, but I’ll try to keep that habit under control. Mostly, I’ll try to inform and point to good and exciting things.
Fair warning: I’m very much a liberal. I try to be fair, but don’t much care if I’m not fair all of the time. I can be profane - in fact, enjoy that. Sometimes I’m a profane liberal. It’s all part of my inability to abide fools. I greatly dislike poor political thinking, and see so much of it to my right - ”thinking” that starts with a conviction or conclusion and “reasons” to a foregone premise. There is so much of that in our lives these days and so few people who recognize it for what it is. Keeping in mind that “naming calls,” I will go about naming.
But enough of that.
Yes, I will rant every now and again. But I plan to have a lot of fun here. Hope you do too.
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