November 18, 2009

by James Smart

The second war of independence

     Watching assorted people sing The Star-Spangled Banner at the start of the World Series games, it occurred to me that our national anthem is unusual. It describes a specific historical event.

     The French anthem evokes their Revolution. The Germans continue to insist that Deutschland is uber alles in der welt. Ireland, Mexico, and others sing of clobbering foes or tyrants. Australia’s anthem reports that “our land abounds in natures gifts of beauty, rich and rare.” Canada sings of “true patriot love in all thy sons,” which I trust includes a few daughters, also.

     Our anthem describes a moment in our history, and doesn’t even mention the name of the country. The Star-Spangled Banner came about in September, 1814, when Francis Scott Key, a Baltimore lawyer, visited British warships in Baltimore harbor under a flag of truce to arrange an exchange of prisoners, in the War of 1812 then raging on the mainland. He completed his mission. But he overheard British plans to attack Baltimore, so he was detained until the fleet bombarded Fort McHenry.

     That is why Key was aboard a British ship on Sept. 16 when a barrage of cannon and rocket fire blasted the American fort. He waited through a rainy night to see that the fort’s huge 15 star, 15 stripe flag was still flying at dawn.

     Aboard the ship, Key wrote a poem on the back of a letter he had in his pocket. When he was released, he gave the poem to his brother-in-law,who fit the words to a well-known tune and had copies printed. Baltimore newspapers published it a few days later, papers around the country copied it, and it quickly became popular.

     And it stayed popular. Bands played it on patriotic occasions. Soldiers marched off to the Civil War to its strains. During World War I, President Woodrow Wilson ordered it played at all appropriate occasions. (One new such occasion was the 1918 World Series.) It didn’t become the official anthem until 1931.

     Why has the song been ingrained in the national psyche for 195 years? Because the War of 1812, now somewhat marginalized in our historical lexicon, was a psychological high point in our national identity. Modern historians like to cite commercial and political interests at the root of the war. To the average American of the time, the situation was more personal.

     The last British troops after the Revolution had left the United States only 30 years earlier. The British had not taken our indepence very seriously. They preyed on our ships, kidnapped U. S. citizens for service in the British navy, and largely believed that the American experiment could not last. When the U. S.government declared war, many Britons were eager to teach the American upstarts a lesson. They invaded the country, burned the Presidential mansion and destroyed the infant Library of Congress. The British still call it the Second American War.

     We beat them, and Americans who had been insecure about the future at last could believe that the United States was here to stay. Francis Scott Key’s Star-Spangled Banner remains the symbol of endurance of the land of the free.

November 11, 2009

by James Smart

True false teeth facts about zinc

        There’s no way you can chase an ambulance on the World Wide Web, but some lawyers come close. Currently, the Web is loaded with material from lawyers trolling for people who think they have been made sick by the gummy stuff they use to glue their false teeth in. About 25 lawsuits from 11 states have been strung together for consideration by a federal judge in Florida, who will make the sticky decision of whether the complainants have a case.

       The problem is that the major brands of denture adhesives contain zinc. A medical journal last year published a report suggesting a link between the zinc in denture cream and neurological damage. The litigationometer lit up in law offices everywhere.

       An additional suit-worthy problem then popped up. Not only do high levels of zinc in your carcass wallop the nervous system, they also reduce the amount of copper. And low levels of copper cause a blood disorder.

       In the stampede to sue the two major manufacturers, thus garnering hefty fees for the benevolent law firms with perhaps a bit left over for the zinc-filled victims, nobody seemed to notice that the medical journal’s report described only four cases, and all four people who got zinced were using ridiculously high amounts of the adhesive.

       The directions on the box of your typical denture cream show a diagram indicating that the stuff should be applied in little strips or dots. The manufacturers expect a 2.4 ounce tube to last from three to 10 weeks. The folks who claim they got zinc poisoning from tooth goop were using two or three tubes a week. They must have been living on apples, corn on the cob, beef jerky and salt water taffy to need that much gum cement to keep the teeth attached.

       The Food and Drug Administration approved the zinc in denture creams about 15 years ago. A smidgen of zinc helps the adhesive adheve. The FDA classifies the tooth gunk as a class one low-risk medical device. How something that gets squeezed out of a tube becomes a device, only the FDA knows. But a device isn’t required to list its ingredients on its box, so the word zinc doesn’t appear on the product’s containers.

       Everybody needs a little bit of zinc, according to nutritionists. Many multi-vitamin pills contain some zinc. Presumably, anybody who ingested three to 10 times the recommended dose of a multi-vitamin might overdose on zinc. I would like to think that nobody would be that daffy, but then, there are those three-tube-a-week denture gluers, aren’t there.

       Running around the edges of all this are the dentists. On the one latex-gloved, drill-wielding hand, they would say that if somebody needs to slather a quarter inch of adhesive on his plate once an hour, the reason probably is that the choppers don’t fit right. On the other hand, dentists don’t like to suggest that their creations might be faulty.

       Many cough drops contain a bit of zinc, too. I wouldn’t be surprised that there are people who consume cough drops like candy. Maybe they will come down with zincitis, and can get together their own class action suit.

November 4, 2009

by James Smart

Some truth about lying

       Lying isn’t what it used to be. In the multitude of comments about Rep. Joe Wilson shouting, “You lie!” at President Obama, I haven’t noticed anybody commenting on the ironic fact that the congressman was accusing the president of lying because he agreed with him.

       The president was talking about the possibility of government health care for illegal immigrants, which Rep. Wilson opposes. "The reforms I'm proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally,” Obama said.

       That’s exactly what Rep. Wilson wanted. You would expect him to holler “Amen,” not “You lie.” But in the constricted thinking of your typical politician, it’s impossible to believe that a Democrat president could really say something a Republican legislator could agree with.

       Rep. Wilson is from South Carolina. In 1861, President Lincoln notified that state that Fort Sumter was being supplied with provisions only, and “no effort to throw in men, arms or ammunition will be made.” The South Carolinians expressed their conviction that he lied by blasting the fort with cannons and starting the Civil War. Rep. Wilson may come by his suspicion of presidential truth naturally.

       Presidents have been known to tell a lie on occasion. The names Clinton and Nixon come to mind. Political opponents and/or the news media have often delighted in catching a president lying.

       When I was doing some reporting for Time magazine back in the 1950s, correspondents got a 50 page booklet from 9 Rockefeller Plaza, telling us operatives here in the provinces how things are done in the big city. It demanded “an extra calibre of reporting,” asking for an amount of fact documentation “which no newspaper ever bothers with.” (If I had shown that to my editors at the old Evening Bulletin, they would have uttered rude responses.)

       As an example of Time’s thoroughness, the booklett mentioned a three-word sentence that had required several thousand words of documentation, with hours of leg work and digging. The sentence was, “The president lied.” But in those simple days of my youth, a lie was defined as an untrue statement, not a possibly true statement that the hearer refused to believe.

       A vaguely related situation was the attempt by Philadelphia authorities to make tourist guides take history tests, to weed out the dumbells who misinform visitors to our historic sites, often with scandalously absurd inaccuracies. (My favorite: a guide who saw a re-enactor in a Continental Army uniform on the street, and gushed to his tour group, “Look! A pirate!”)

       Some of the high-level professional guides denounced the testing plan, calling it an infringement of their free speech and accusing the city government of trying to impose some mysterious political agenda on them. One would think that the respectable guides would defend truth, by supporting tests that weed out the dolts who spout false information and give their profession a black eye.

       I’ve always been rather fond of the truth, though it is often in short supply. Neither truth nor lying seem to be what they used to be.

October 28, 2009

by James Smart

The Barrymore roots in Philly

     Drew Barrymore, the actress, has directed her first film. Good for her. She is not exactly a local girl, but her family’s five generations of American actors began in Philadelphia.

     The dynasty started in June, 1827, when Eliza Lane, recent widow of British actor Thomas Frederick Lane, came from London to join an American theater troupe. Her daughter, Louisa, age seven, was with her. Louisa had made her stage debut at age one, portraying a baby.

     In September of 1827, little Louisa Lane appeared in a play at the Walnut Street Theater, and was soon a sensation in Philadelphia, and later in New York, Baltimore and Boston.

     She appeared exclusively at the Walnut from 1838 until 1850. Then, she married John Drew, an actor, and they traveled the country performing.

     They leased a theater at 6^th and Arch in 1853. Louisa became its manager in 1861, and it was called Mrs. Drew’s Arch Street Theater until 1892. She starred in many productions, often playing men’s roles.

     She had three children, Louisa, John Jr. and Georgiana. The latter two became actors.

     In 1875, Georgiana’s brother introduced her to an actor recently arrived from England, complete with top hat and monocle. His real name was Herbert Blyth. He was born in India, son of a British diplomat, and studied law at Oxford. But he went on the stage, and changed his name to Maurice Barrymore.

     Georgiana and Maurice were married, and had three children: Lionel and Ethel, born at 119 N. 9^th St., and John, born in a house on Columbia ave. The siblings grew up at 140 N. 12^th St. The first two took to the theater, debuting in 1901 at age 22 and 23. John resisted the family profession, and became an artist.

     One night in 1901, at a New York music hall, Maurice Barrymore interrupted his performance with a confused harangue, denouncing all Broadway producers. Management dropped the curtain. Barrymore, raving, rushed out of the theater and down 113^th St., with his son John in pursuit.

     John took his father to Bellevue Hospital. He was hospitalized and irrational for two years. In 1902, John Barrymore gave up art and became an actor. His father died in 1903.

     John Barrymore became a stage and film legend. He married four times and had three children. His son, John Drew Barrymore, had an acting career, never as illustrious as his father’s.

     John Drew Barrymore married four times and had four children. One daughter was Drew Barrymore.

     The family was far from its Philadelphia roots by then. But family history resonated with John Drew Barrymore. His father, Uncle Lionel and Aunt Ethel had been buried in Calvary Cemetery in Los Angeles. In 1980, young John had his father’s body exhumed and cremated, and brought the ashes to the family grave in Philly’s Mount Vernon Cemetery, where Louisa, Maurice and Georgiana rest.

     Like her great-great grandmother, Drew Barrymore started acting as an infant (in an ad.) She was in a TV film at three, in her first theater film at five, and a star in “E. T.” at seven.

Maybe she should do a play at the Walnut some day. Louisa Lane’s ghost would appreciate it.

October 14, 2009

by James Smart

Saudi Arabia goes hi-tech

      Our good friends in Saudi Arabia have opened up the multi-billion dollar King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, a sand-breaking educational venture in which men and women will attend classes together. The women will not be required to wear veils, and will be allowed to drive cars.

      It is somewhat revolutionary when a man in that part of the world can hang out with a woman who is naked from the chin up, and neither of them get arrested. This risky concession to things Western and/or satanic is made because King Abdullah believes that his country needs 21^st century technological know-how to diversify its economy

      The king took over a fishing village called Thuwal on the Red Sea coast, 50 miles up Saudi route 5 from the city of Jeddah, and built a state-ahead-of-the-art campus including the world’s 14^th most powerful computer. (Of the top 13, two are in Germany and 11 in the United States; number one is a Department of Energy data masticator in Los Alamos, New Mexico.)

      The university staff has electric cars, even thought Aramco, the Saudi state oil company, runs the university. There are 817 students to start; there will be 2,000 in eight or 10 years. The students passed stringent admissions tests. They not only get free tuition, but are paid a stipend.

      All are not Saudis. They come from 61 countries, and 70 faculty members are from abroad, also. The president, Choon Fong Shih, is from Singapore.

      This is not the work of some Westernized young Saudi hotshot. King Abdullah is 85, and has been around the dune a few times. He laid out his views heavily in his speech at the opening ceremonies last month.

      "Humanity has been the target of vicious attacks from extremists, who speak the language of hatred," he said, possibly a swipe at one of his well-known countrymen, Osama bin Laden. "Undoubtedly, scientific centers that embrace all peoples are the first line of defense against extremists. And today this university will become a house of wisdom ... a beacon of tolerance.”

      Tolerance there might be seeing a veiless woman at the wheel of a BMW and not cursing at her. But later in the speech, the king explored the relationship of science and religion better than some of our Christian clerics do:

      “And the Islamic nation knows too well that it will not be powerful unless it depends on, after God, science. For science and faith cannot compete except in unhealthy souls. And God has graced us with our minds, which we use to understand and recognize God’s laws of nature.”

      Speaking of unhealthy souls, let’s go a bit to the east, where President Ahmadinejad of Iran is also interested in technology, and is busy testing missiles and enriching uranium. Last month, the Iranian Security Police told the clothing retailers’ organization in Tehran, the capital, to stop using shapely female store mannequins to display women’s clothing. In Iran, even a dummy can be immoral.

      Also, male clerks are forbidden to handle women’s undergarments, and there is a crackdown on sale of that satanic Western garment, the necktie.

October 7, 2009

by James Smart

Keeping in touch with trash

    Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have created a system that tracks trash wherever it goes. In the summer, MIT operatives went to 3,000 homes in Seattle, and in each, presumably with the owners of the homes and trash looking on proudly, attached little transmitters to 10 or 15 unwanted items such as pizza boxes, banana peels, water bottles and what most reports of the project call Styrofoam cups.

    The web site of the Dow Chemical Co. plaintively insists that Styrofoam, a Dow trademark, is not the expanded polystyrene foam used for coffee cups. But that’s another problem.

    The MIT folks stuck the battery powered electronic tags on the odds and ends of refuse, and the home owners disposed of them as usual. Then, the assorted objects were able to phone in to the Trash Track project computers at MIT in Massachusetts. The researchers could follow them in real time as they wended their way to landfills, recycling centers, or other wendable destinations. This gives a new meaning to the old computer platitude, garbage in, garbage out.

    The Trash Track team also hung their tracking devices on 50 items that were thrown out when the Architectural League of New York moved its Manhattan headquarters last month. The league members watched computer screens in fascination as a plastic water bottle reported in regularly, on its way from 51^st and Madison to Kearney, N.J. The 18 mile trip totaled four days of trucking.

    Exhibits of the electronic adventures of meandering refuse are on display at the main Seattle Public Library and the Architectural League. There is also a Trash Track web site, but my poor little laptop was so overwhelmed by being connected to the MIT computers that it went all goofy and declined to download.

    The purpose of this technological extravaganza, if you’ve been wondering, is said to be to gather data that will change consumer habits. Actually, consumption doesn’t seem to be involved here. It’s discarder habits that are being studied.

    Trash picking to get information about consumers is nothing new. It goes back at least to Charles C. Parlin, often called the father of commercial research by those who worry about the parentage of such activities.

    Parlin established the world’s first commercial research department at the Curtis Publishing Co. in Philadelphia in 1911. One of his first assignments was to persuade the Campbell Soup Co. to advertise in the Saturday Evening Post. The Campbell executives were convinced that the Post’s readership was largely working class families, who didn’t buy canned soup because women of that ilk enjoyed hanging over a hot stove, cooking their own soup.

    Parlin proved them wrong by dispatching Curtis employees around the city neighborhoods on trash day, looking for soup cans. The results of the survey made Campbell a Post advertiser for years to come.

    I have heard stories that the Parlin trash survey grew until Curtis was hauling in trash regularly to be analyzed, and ultimately had a warehouse full of household waste that became a problem. Parlin would love Trash Track.

September 30, 2009

by James Smart

The oldest person died again

The oldest person in the world died earlier this month, and newspapers everywhere reported her demise. The oldest person in the world dies fairly frequently. Not the same person, of course, but there is always one oldest person, and when he or she shuffles off this mortal coil, there is always a penultimate oldest person waiting to assume the title.

The youngest person in the world never gets media attention, because of the incessant flow of contenders. There are about 150 babies born in the world every minute, according to the Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat, and you know that an organization with a name that impressive must know what it’s talking about.

The most recent oldest person to pass on was Gertrude Baines, who was 115, according to the gerontological busybodies who keep track of the situation. Her age has been certified by the Guinness Book of World Records, a distinction that sanctifies any record.

Mrs. Baines was said to be in good shape. I didn’t read of her giving any of the traditional advice about longevity that reporters try to drag out of centenarians, but it has been mentioned that she enjoyed eating fried chicken, bacon and ice cream. Not all at once, I assume. And I doubt that adopting that diet is a guarantee of long life.

Now that Mrs. Baines has left us, the honor of being the next world’s oldest person to expire will fall on Kama Chinen, 114, a woman in Okinawa. There isn’t much information about Mrs. Chinen so far. Some Web outlets, including Channel 5 in Chicago, somehow confused things and declared Mrs. Chinen dead instead of Mrs. Baines.

Back in the 1990s or so, somebody coined the word supercentenarian to identify anyone over 110. One of the first people so designated was Jeanne-Louise Calment, of Arles, France, who posthumously retains the chronological championship as the oldest person ever Guinnessed. She died in 1997 at the age of 122.

There are other current claimants of the oldest human designation. A woman in Kazakhstan and a Palestinian woman in Israel both insist they are 130. The Guinness people say there is insufficient evidence to support either assertion. The Cubans say they have a 124 year-old citizen, but have never asked Guinness for authorization. The man lives in the Province of Granma, such an obvious pun that they may be putting us on.

September has been a hard month on world’s oldest record holders. The world’s oldest known living military veteran died a few weeks ago. She was Gertrude Noone, of Connecticut, who was 110. She enlisted in the Women’s Army Corps in 1943, served through World War II, and left the army as a sergeant first class in 1949.

And, while I don’t want to be accused of disrespect for our supercentenarians, living or deceased, it seems appropriate to note that, also earlier this month, a wirehaired dachshund named Chanel died on Long Island. Chanel was recognized by the Guinness Book as the world’s oldest dog. Chanel was 21. That’s 147 in supercentenarian dog years.

September 16, 2009

by James Smart

What to pack in your Go Bag

     Public service advertising recently has been warning us to be prepared for miscellaneous disasters. We are advised to assemble a Go Bag, containing things we should take with us if evacuating because we got word that there is going to be a flood, an earthquake, a hurricane, or that Osama Bin Laden is on his way down Ridge Pike with a platoon of suicide bombers.

     I checked the Web to learn what should be packed in a Go Bag. The first web site I found on the subject originated in San Francisco, a good source, since they have had some dandy earthquakes out there, one that busted up the whole down town and, much worse, one that interrupted a World Series.

     The site gives a list of recommended items, if you want to load up a Go Bag and set it by the front door, so you can grab it and run when called upon. Among them are a flashlight and radio, with batteries for same; a pocket knife; sturdy shoes, a change of clothes and a hat; prescription medicine and first aid supplies; copy of health insurance and identification cards; list of allergies; toothbrush and toothpaste; extra prescription eye glasses, hearing aid or other vital personal items (extra dentures, maybe?), and other odds and ends.

     The list suggests bringing some quarters for phone calls. That sounds like an outdated emergency measure. It’s hard to find a phone booth these days, even when no disaster is in progress.

     The list also includes a whistle. It doesn’t say what kind of whistle. I suppose it’s to attract help if you are trapped under water or rubble or attack by automatic weapons. Is the average whistle loud enough to do the job? It might be better if you took along a trombone.

     Naturally, the list advises including some food and water. No details are given. My presumption is that the list-makers do not mean hoagies or Tastycakes or porterhouse steaks, but rather Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup, tuna fish, Spam and other canned goods that will last forever, whether they deserve to or not. (Missing from the list: a can opener.)

     Another entry on the list is “photos of family members and pets for re-identification purposes.” I’m not sure what re-identification means. I guess if the family gets separated in the evacuation, and you tend to forget what each other looks like, the photos will come in handy. (“Excuse me, ma’am, but are you my wife? I think this is your photo here.”)

     The list also says to pack a local map. I don’t need a local map to flee for my life from home; I know how to get out of the neighborhood. What the Go Bag needs is a map of strange places where a self-evacuator is likely to end up.

     Of equally doubtful value is the instruction to take extra keys to your house and car. What does extra mean? Should I leave the original keys under the door mat, so looters can bust in more easily (assuming that the house is not under water, totally collapsed or blown into a nearby suburban township)?

     And, says the list, remember to make a Go Bag for your pets. Aren’t they those little plastic bags the dog walkers carry when they go by our house?

September 9, 2009

by James Smart

For whom the highway tolls

     Pennsylvania legislators have been conducting their annual experiment with discombobulating the state budget, and they get better at crisis creation every year.

     This puts public transportation and highway officials in their usual mode of despair. The $900 million a year the Legislature, in an uncustomarily cheerful mood, promised them in 2007, may be short by about half in the coming year.

     The reason is that half of the funds were to come from tolls collected on I-80, a highway that passes 311 miles through upstate Pennsylvania, on its merry interstate way, 2,899.54 miles from downtown San Francisco to Teaneck, New Jersey.

     The Federal government is not enthusiastic about Pennsylvania’s proposal for tolls on I-80, and folks who live along the route see the idea as potential economic disaster and, even worse in some upstate minds, favoring the Philadelphia area, that Gomorrah on the Delaware.

     There are complaints that tolls would cut truck traffic and create financial decline. They have a sort of cargo cult up there, waiting for the legendary big rigs to roll through, bringing gifts. Tractor trailers account for nearly half the vehicle count on the central and western part of I-80 from Jersey to Ohio.

     The worriers say that tolls would cause truckers to use another route. They apparently don’t own maps. Truckers do, and would point out there is no other sensible fast route, except to come down to the Pennsylvania Turnpike, which is already well tolled.

     Which brings us to the upstate gripe that I-80 toll money would help fund roads and transit in our area. We’ve been paying tolls on the Pennsy Turnpike down here for 50 years. Presumably some of that has trickled up into toll-free I-80 territory. Isn’t it their turn to pay?

     The Turnpike here and the Keystone Shortway from Sharon, Pa. to Stroudsburg were both proposed in 1938. The first Turnpike section, from Carlisle to just east of Pittsburgh, opened in 1940. It was built on an abandoned railroad right-of-way that dated to the 1880s, taking advantage of several existing tunnels.

     World War II delayed the start of the Shortway to 1954. It was finished in 1970, and is now the Confair Memorial Highway, named for former State Senator Zehnder H. Confair, who had headed the Keystone Shortway Association.

     The Turnpike was built east to King of Prussia in 1950, connected to the Ohio Turnpike in 1954, and finished north of Philly to the Jersey Turnpike bridge in 1956.

     I-76 got the toll booths, until it hit the Schuylkill Expressway, a confusing situation. The widely used Google maps designate the Schuylkill a toll road.

Pennsylvania’s application for the toll system to the Federal Highway Administration says that I-80 is crumbling. There are 69 obsolete bridges, and others with various problems.

     The projected need is $250 million a year for the next 10 years to reupholster I-80.

     People upstate who love the highway so much should install the toll booths and help pay for it. As we dwellers in the dense part of Pennsy contribute, at our Turnpike booths, we promise we’ll feel your pain.

September 2, 2009

by James Smart

Who is acting like Nazis?

     For weeks now, we have been regularly entertained by citizens at public meetings enjoying their first amendment rights to free speech at the top of their voices, huffing in the faces of congressmen and even the president. They are expressing their conviction that proposals to renovate existing health insurance arrangements will inject the government with the dreaded disease of socialism.

     It’s the conservatives’ turn to express fear of the government. They haven’t had the opportunity to worry about federal oppression since the Clinton administration, when the panic was that jack-booted agents in black helicopters were going to swoop down and seize their cherished firearms.

     Those worriers went on hiatus during the Bush years, letting frightened liberals tremble at the prospect of a government that spied on citizens, and tortured uncooperative wrong thinkers willy-nilly.

     Folks on both extremes, media commentators and ordinary fanatics alike, had one thing in common. They denounced the administration they dislike by comparing it to the Nazis.

     In current episodes, swastikas were spray painted on buildings where Washington speakers appeared, and in Boston, a young woman displayed a photo of President Obama with a Hitler moustache painted under his nose.

     Younger people throw the Nazi appellation around casually. I wonder whether they have any idea of the Nazi’s brutal oppression in Europe. If a woman defaced Hitler’s photo at a public meeting in those days, her whole village might have been machine-gunned.

     Being an old guy, I started reading newspapers in the years when it seemed that every day, Nazi troops were bombing, invading and seizing control of one European country or another. My naïve little mind didn’t understand how it could happen. I remember asking my father, “Why doesn’t somebody do something about this guy Hitler?” He said he didn’t know.

     Young people who shout “Nazi” without knowing what they’re talking about also are implying that their targets are allied with the bigots and fanatics of the world who still admire the Nazi anti-Semitism and racism.

     There are plenty such admirers. Well-armed militias are practicing in the woods out west, claiming they are ready to rebel against a government in which a black man has been installed as president by Zionist conspirators. It would be hard to take them seriously, if we hadn’t seen such men blow up the Federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995.

     Nazi-style behavior has devotees among America-hating extremists in the Middle East, too. A bizarre example: David Remnick, a New Yorker magazine writer, reported a few years ago that in a West Bank city, he met a Palestinian fruit-and-vegetable vendor named Eichmann Abu Atwan; the man’s father had been an admirer of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi evil genius who orchestrated the deaths of millions of Jews.

     I have news for the unruly people who disrupt public meetings by shouting down the speakers and those they disagree with. You’re the ones acting like the Nazis of 70 years ago, not the persons you insult.

August 26, 2009

by James Smart

Getting a diploma’s worth

     A young woman in New York who was recently graduated is suing her college. She has been unable to find work, and wants her tuition back, claiming that the college didn’t give her what she thought she paid for, an education that would get her a job.

     She is suffering from a misunderstanding a lot of young people have. Because they are told they can’t get a good job without a degree, they believe that if they get the degree they will automatically get employed.

     It doesn’t work that way. That comes as a shock to many people. And now that I’ve revealed that harsh truth to readers of tender years, I’ll let them in on another possible shock. If you do get a job, pursuing the vocation for which your degree was supposed to prepare you, you may find that you still have a lot to learn.

     Unfortunately, no institution of higher learning (or even lower) has yet been established that renders its graduates smart, or endows them with good sense. Those attributes come from the parents’ genes, experience, and other mysterious sources over which we have no control, and for which no certificate or diploma is issued.

     The young woman in New York has the litigious instincts that are common to our times. She sues her college, blaming it for not making her marketable.

     These days, someone so inclined might also sue individual professors, guidance counselors, and possibly even the printer who produced the ineffective diploma.

     An enterprising lawyer might leap into the situation and start a class action suit against a college or university, or maybe against all of them, on behalf of all recent graduates whose diplomas have not lured anyone into giving them gainful employment. The pool of possible litigants and educational institutions is enormous.

     This subject is related to the frequent discussions of how to evaluate the results of schools and teachers. There are arguments about whether teachers should somehow be held accountable for the results they get. This is usually expected to be measured by giving the students tests.

     Suppose teachers’ performance was measured by whether the student was able to get a job, along the lines of the New York woman’s thinking. Passing exams can get a student a diploma, but the diploma may not carry educational success with it.

     Beyond getting work, success of students can’t really be measured until they have worked for a while. A guy who spends his 50 year career in the mail room may have more of a complaint against his alma mater than the chief executive officer, though both have degrees from the same institution.

In the public schools, it has been suggested that teachers’ salaries might by based on student performance. Maybe it should be the teachers’ pensions instead. Modern computer science could make it possible to keep track of every student instructed and influenced by every teacher. At the end of a teacher’s career, his or her pension could be based on how much money his students have made and how high in their professions they have risen. It would be better than getting sued now.

August 19, 2009

by James Smart

Is Satan behind the Census?

     The Census Bureau is getting ready to count all of us again next year, because the Constitution insists on it. The Bureau has created a whole bunch of new jobs, using federal stimulus money, to employ some of the unemployed until next summer, when the economy will be finally Obamafied and larks will be singing over Wall Street.

     Once again, the Census busybodies promise to try to reach the many citizens who are believed to remain thoroughly uncounted after every census. Philadelphia, like other big cities, estimates that residents by the dozen decline to fill out census forms that come in the mail, and craftily elude any census operative who knocks on the door looking for noses to count. Last census, 70 percent of Pennsylvanians who got census forms in the mail didn’t send them back.

     It’s important to politicians that the government accounts for every inhabitant, if not more. Dispersal of federal funds of all kinds is based on population. So is the number of representatives a state has in Congress, which is the reason the Constitution’s creators invented the census in the first place.

It’s not clear why people avoid getting themselves enumerated. Theories involve illegal immigrants, tax evaders, wanted criminals, absent-minded folks and other possibilities.

     A little mentioned motive for dodging Uncle Sam’s request for personal information is that a lot of people don’t think it’s any of the government’s blankety-blank business. Want some proof? Type “don’t trust the census” into Google; you’ll be offered 2,870,000 results.

     Some anti-census people protest that it’s a free country, and their own affairs are their own. Some argue that censusing violates the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, which protects persons, houses, papers and effects from unreasonable searches and seizures.

     Resisters maintain that the Constitution directs the government to count citizens every 10 years, but not to ask them about their race, their income or how many bathrooms they have.

     There is even a religious objection raised by some people. They point out the story that Satan “provoked David to number Israel.” King David counted heads, and “God was displeased with this thing, therefore He smote Israel.” All you Sunday School alumni, dust off your old King James version and check I Chronicles, chapter 21, and II Samuel, chapter 24.

     Most census objectors aren’t worried about divine smoting. They just are suspicious of the denizens of Washington.

     Similar paranoia came up when television commercials were constantly exhorting people to buy a converter to receive high definition television. I was in line at a Post Office behind three women who were expressing disbelief that anybody would install one of those suspicious black boxes. They agreed that the government was seizing control of broadcasting to use high definition signals to track what people are doing.

     The women concurred that they can do without television; it’s not worth much anyway. I’d liked to hear what they say to a census taker who comes to their door.

August 12, 2009

by James Smart

So which profile are you?

     Profiling individuals on the basis of a group they belong to has been in the news lately, in an odd variety of ways. Let’s begin with a kind of profiling that gets little notice.

     On web sites, and in letters to editors, some young adult whiners have complained about Social Security. They perceive the money they pay into the system, which they would like to retain, as going directly into the hands of unworthy old people.

     One writer picked up on the word entitlement, and asked why the elderly think they are entitled to a monthly stipend just because they are old.

     As an old guy, I would like to straighten out those gripers. When I was 15 years old, and in that summer got my first non-farm, clock-punching, adult job, the U. S. government said to me, in a figurative but enforceable voice:

     “Well, kid, your benevolent government is going to be taking a few bucks out of your pay every week for the next 50 years. But, fear not. When you are 65, if you live that long, we will give you back a small monthly stipend to keep you from starving while you sit around being useless.”

     So, down through the years, I allowed Uncle Sam to heist from my pocket some money I could have happily applied to squandering or other uses. Now he is keeping his promise, and depositing in my bank account every month an amount of money that pays some of the bills.

     I’m entitled. I paid for the entitlement. Keep your noses clean, young gripers, pay through said noses, and someday you will be elderly and entitled, too.

     I thought of the young people who resent old folks when the news media went wacky over the confrontation between Henry Louis Gates Jr. and the Cambridge, Mass., police. The whole population became polarized with several different poles, and even the President of the United States ended up not sure which profile to accept.

     The way members of the opposing races look at each other is similar to the way the elderly and the youngerly make judgments of each other based on generalized misinformation.

     It’s temporal profiling when members of a younger generation decide that Social Security recipients are undeserving parasites. Many old timers return the disfavor by pronouncing all members of the younger generation deficient in one way or another, and not the paragons we were in the good old days.

     Another strange example of group profiling in the recent news was the fatal beating outside Citizens Bank Park. Three brutal misfits, out of a crowd of about 45,000, commit a despicable crime, and our society’s profilers hold them up as examples of Phillies fans.

     It’s obvious that all members of any given group are not alike. They have something in common. They’re white, black, Asian, Hispanic, men, women, old, young, whatever nationality, whatever religious persuasion. Yet each one is different. A young black male Hispanic Catholic Phillies fan could be accused of the worst behavior perceived of six different groups. It must be hard for your typical bigot to sort it all out, sometimes.

August 5, 2009

by James Smart

Your mail box is in danger

     A little town in Maine got recent media attention because it rebelled when the U. S. Postal Service tried to take away its mail box. When a postal worker arrived to remove the mail box, the town’s road commissioner parked heavy machinery around it to protect it.

     The town’s population is 1,700. It doesn’t have a post office, or even its own zip code. The mail box, outside the town hall, averages only six pieces of mail a day. If your favorite blue box on the corner doesn’t average 25 or more a day, the Postal Service will haul it away.

     To save money, the post officers have removed more than 188,000 mail boxes all over the country in the last 10 years. About 175,000 remain. They’re being eliminated at the rate of about 60 a day.

     This situation starts me, being an old guy, reflecting on the Postal Service of years ago. When I was a boy, my grandmother would often write a postal card, which cost one cent, at the breakfast table, and tell me to run it down to the mailbox so her best friend, who lived about four blocks away, would get it in the afternoon delivery. That was the 1939 equivalent of texting or twittering.

     A letter needed a two cent stamp 70 years ago. Pay another 10 cents for a Special Delivery stamp, and a special carrier from the receiving post office would take it to the  addressee’s door immediately.

     Air mail was fairly new then, but in 1939, you could send a letter by air anywhere in the United States for six cents.

And air mail history was made on July 16, 1939, when Eastern Airlines started the world’s first scheduled air mail service by autogiro. (An autogiro, kiddies, was a forerunner of the helicopter, with a rotor on top for lift and a propeller on the front for forward motion.)

     That groundbreaking (or air breaking) aerial mail service ran from the roof of the then-new Post Office at 30^th and Market sts. to the Central Airport in Camden. The giro made five flights a day, doing the six mile trip in five minutes, compared to a half hour by truck.

     There were lots of mail boxes on the streets, back then. They were not blue like the current ones, but were painted a sort of military khaki color. We had a Postmaster General in those days, and maybe he chose the army color. Maybe there is a Postmaster Admiral working for the modern Postal Service, who changed to the navy blue paint.

     Anyway, the postal masters are eliminating mail boxes, one by one. It has long been true that you don’t have to walk to the nearest mail box. You can leave your outgoing mail in the incoming mailbox of your house, and the letter carrier will take it away when he or she makes a delivery.

     I don’t know how carriers feel about that extra work, and I don’t know how people with mail slots and other non-boxy receptacles can handle it. But maybe street mailboxes should be abolished, and letter carriers carry everything both ways.

     Meanwhile, I’m keeping an eye on the mail box on the street about 100 feet from our front door. I don’t have any construction equipment to chain to it, like the folks up in Maine. Maybe the power mower.

July 29, 2009

by James Smart

Cashing in on civic treasures

Citizens who thought that Vince Fumo got a light sentence roundly criticized statements from local leaders that Fumo had, while heisting funds for his own purposes, also done a lot of good in the city.

This is nothing new in Philadelphia. Politicians often extract money from the municipal treasuries by cashing in on beneficial projects. When the grafters are long forgotten, their boondoggled creations remain, regarded as civic treasures.

Fumo managed to pump a lot of other people’s money into projects around town. They’ll be part of Philly when he is gone.

And, unfortunately, if it weren’t for guys like him, we might not have City Hall, the Art Museum, the Parkway or Roosevelt Boulevard.

Philadelphia’s first modern political machine was organized around the original Gas Works. City Council established the gas company in 1835. At first it was administered by respected citizens, but gradually its board became dominated by politicians and turned into a source of patronage jobs, cushy contracts and a grip on city government itself. Critics alleged that the “gas trust” paid a dollar a ton above market price for coal (from which gas was manufactured,) and that the extra money was kicked back into the pockets of the political bosses. The trust’s power was finally squashed by a reform movement in 1886. But with all its faults, we still have the Gas Works serving the city.

     Meanwhile, ground was broken for City Hall in 1871, starting years of complaints by newspapers about graft and waste, cheating on marble contracts and whatnot. When the building was finished 30 years later, the grumbling diminished, and Philly soon was bragging that only the Eiffel Tower and the Washington Monument were taller than City Hall.

     The 19th century ended with Mayor Samuel H. Ashbridge entering City Hall. He unabashedly issued city contracts for horse feed to the highest bidder, paid nearly three times the going price for road grading, and found other ways to enrich his favorite contractors. But they built such enduring public works as the original Torresdale Filtration Plant and part one of Roosevelt Boulevard.

     In 1901, the city began demolition to make way for a beautiful new Parkway, to run diagonally from City Hall right through Logan Square to the Fairmount Reservoir. Hundreds of homes were wiped out, including fine mansions around Logan Square. The street reached its full length in 1918, and was named for Ben Franklin in 1937. Despite hints of wasted money and political shenanigans, later generations embraced the Parkway.

     Work started in 1919 on the Museum of Art. Early estimates placed the cost at $3 million. By 1923, the cost hit $8 million, and the architect admitted that he had expected it to exceed $8 million from the start. There were accusations of favoritism in contracts. By 1925, the price tag was nudging $15 million. The Park Commission stopped spending, leaving many planned embellishments unfinished. But we have the museum.

     The sad truth is that many a politician has been able to enrich Philadelphia and himself simultaneously.

July 22, 2009

by James Smart

What’s new in historic sites

The promoters of an American Revolution Museum have given up on their plan to intrude a new building, with visitors’ center, hotel and other peripherals, at Valley Forge. They have made a deal with Independence National Historical Park to install their museum in the brick building at Third and Chestnut.

That building was erected to be the Visitors’ Center for the National Park about 40 years ago. The thinking from the Parks brain pool in Washington was that most late 20^th century visitors would be arriving on the proposed I-95 expressway.

The Independence Park planners placed the Visitors’ Center in a spot where ramps from I-95 would feed arriving tourists right into the center’s parking garage. There, visitors could be subjected to a boring orientation film, the reason all good visitors’ centers exist, before wandering off to look at something actually historic.

The ramps never got built, and tourists obstinately insisted on going directly to Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell.

The square brick tower with wide openings, atop the center, was originally intended to house the Liberty Bell. The National Parks experts determined, correctly, that the bell had to be removed from Independence Hall. The hall was built in 1732, and was not made to handle a million or two visitors a year tromping in randomly.

The tower of the Visitors’ Center was designed to suspend the bell from cables, hanging on a level where tourists could touch it. The openings high up in the tower were placed to send dramatic shafts of light down to illuminate the bell.

The plan to move the Liberty Bell prompted squeals of outrage. Philadelphians for generations had been able to wander into Independence Hall any time they wanted. There were demands that the Bell stay put, from the public and from city officials (the city owns the bell.) The Park Service gave in.

The Liberty Bell has ultimately had two new buildings of its own since then, and folks are used to it. A bell that was a Bicentennial gift from England’s Queen Elizabeth in 1976 was hung at Third and Chestnut.

That building has had various uses. The Revolution Museum seems the best. Tourists and day trippers abound there anyway. Valley Forge doesn’t need a museum. It speaks for itself, interpreting the troops’ bitter winter ordeal that tells a lot about the American character. The National Park Service does a good job of preserving Valley Forge’s message and its dignity.

If only the Park Service would do the same for another local landmark that should be a National Historic Site. I mean Fort Mifflin. There are the walls and buildings of what was an active military installation from the Revolution to the Korean War. Its pivotal battle with the British in 1777 was a prelude to Valley Forge.

The government is currently striding across the countryside like Johnny Appleseed, scattering stimulus money where jobs will sprout and public improvements bloom. Cash has been sprinkled on National Parks out west. Maybe Arlen Specter and Bob Brady could stir up some National Park interest in Fort Mifflin.

July 15, 2009

by James Smart

Gambling in Philly? You bet

     Folks at City Hall and in Harrisburg are proposing that fancier gambling games join the slot machines in our new casinos, if the Philly ones ever get built. Debates over the government sponsoring games of chance didn’t deter the introduction of state lotteries a few decades ago, and I suppose that blackjack and roulette will be happily accepted now.

     Gambling goes back to the earliest days in Philadelphia. Games of chance were practiced in taverns, and around the markets on Market Street. The Quaker establishment wasn’t fond of such activities.

     The state Assembly in 1705 passed an “Act Against Riotous Sports, Plays and Games,” outlawing cards, dice, lotteries, tables, rowley-powley, loggats, shovegroats, shovel-board, billiards, kayles, clough-cales, ninepins, nine-holes, quoits, bowles, half bowles, “or any other kind of game whatsoever, now invented or hereafter to be invented.” (No, I don’t know what all those games were, either.) Queen Anne repealed the law in 1709 as “unreasonable restraint on the King’s subjects from taking innocent diversion.”

     Lotteries were popular fund-raisers. A lottery raised money to buy cannon in 1747 to defend the port. The steeple of Christ Church was financed in the 1750s by a lottery.

     Private citizens held lotteries. A 1730 law forbade them, but the governor often made a deal allowing a lottery, so long as part of the proceeds would pay the prescribed fine. Schools and churches used lotteries to raise funds. The city used them to finance street surfacing in 1748.  The Assembly authorized lotteries for educational funding, and 36 lotteries, by 27 schools, were held from 1754 to the last one allowed in 1811. The College, Academy and Charitable School of Philadelphia (the fledgling University of Pennsylvania) held nine lotteries between 1755 and 1761.

     The state averaged more than one lottery a month from 1796 to 1808. Some were fund-raisers; an 1806 game helped pay off the debt of the Bustleton and Smithfield Turnpike Company.  The Union Canal lottery from 1811 to 1833 awarded more than $33 million in prizes.

     But many were privately organized, for profit. Sponsors advertised cash prizes and a number of tickets, then keep selling tickets until all were gone. Lotteries could last two or three years. In 1833, more than 200 lotteries were in progress in Philadelphia, and there were more than 200 ticket brokers in town, with names like “Enoch L. Colcord & Son’s Lottery and Exchange Bureau” and “Allen’s Truly Lucky Office.” A Philadelphia lawyer reported that a lottery’s “deluded victim does not regard it as a tax, but as a road to sudden wealth, dispensing with the necessity of labor.” He listed insolvent persons whose bankruptcy petitions blamed lottery losses, as many as 17 a year.

     The Legislature passed a resolution in 1830 that “lotteries are an acknowledged evil of great magnitude,” and passed a law setting heavy fines and mandating the “entire abolition of lotteries”.

     Now we have lotteries and slot machines. Maybe the casinos can offer some rowley-powley and shovegroats, too.

July 8, 2009

by James Smart

Political scandals, then and now

     There seems to be a steady flow of reports that one or another of our distinguished national leaders has been caught applying inappropriate affection to a woman other than his wife. This dismays the wives, the clergy and the members of the penitent sinner’s own political party, while it delights the news media and the wrongdoer’s opposition party.

  Such behavior also stimulates discussion in pulpits, bars, workplaces, living rooms and other places where thoughtful citizens gather, philosophizing about why men in high and respected positions endanger their careers by engaging in dubious behavior. The answer is that congressmen, governors and other lofty muckety-mucks are (despite occasional evidence to the contrary) human beings.

  Human beings have been stumbling off the edges of the traditional paths of righteousness ever since righteousness was invented. Most of the offenders are just average fellows. Their offense usually has consequences, such as tears, forgiveness, attack with a heavy kitchen utensil, divorce, assault by a brother-in-law, and countless other reactions up to, unfortunately, homicide.

  But average fellows who get caught enjoying diversions with unsanctioned ladies are not required to stand in front of a crowd of salivating news-gatherers, with grimly distraught wife at their side, and confess their transgressions to the entire world (or at least, the portion that watches the TV news.)

  There is no question that we ordinary Americans love a good scandal among the rich, famous or political. The history books are full of juicy tales from the earliest days. In 1797, Jefferson supporters published details of Alexander Hamilton’s dalliance with another woman while his wife and kiddies were away. The publicity forced him to write a confession.

  In 1802, the newspapers were smacking their journalistic lips over tales of Thomas Jefferson’s affair with Sally Hemings. The 1828 presidential campaign saw public exposure of Andrew Jackson’s alleged (and partly true) adultery and bigamy.

  One of American history’s most entertaining scandals hit the newspapers in 1859 when Daniel Sickles, Democratic Congressman from New York, shot his wife’s lover dead on a street in downtown Washington. He had learned that his wife, half his age, had been indulging in romantic trysts with Philip Barton Key (whose father wrote “The Star Spangled Banner”.) Sickles went looking for Key, and shot him first in the groin, then fatally in the head.

The newspapers not only went into a frenzy over the shooting, but went gaga over the ensuing trial, in which Sickles used the temporary insanity defense for the first time in history, and was acquitted.

  Sickles later became a general. When his leg was shot off at the Battle of Gettysburg, he donated it to the Army Medical Museum in Washington.

  That kind of guy knows how to produce picturesque fodder for the journalism industry. It’s a shame that the current crop of pathetic philanderers who practice politics, when they get caught outsourcing their affections, can’t do any better than a lame apology.

July 1, 2009

by James Smart

The threat of cow belches

There has been an outbreak of articles recently about one of the pressing problems of our time: cow gas. This often-reported crisis is now being studied by the environmental worriers of the Obama administration.

According to the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency, methane gas being released into the atmosphere is a major contributor to global warming, and about one quarter of the methane exuded into the air in the United States is emitted by cattle, sheep and pigs.

Reporters who enjoy writing about the subject usually pin the guilt on cows, and use the word belch to describe just how the methane gets into the air. I suspect that much of the methane emerges from the other end of the cow, but journalists and editors, universally known for their great delicacy, tend to avoid that somehow less pleasant aspect.

Sewage treatment plants, factories, trash landfills and coal mines also seep methane into the atmosphere, but writers don’t get excited about them. They’re not as picturesque as belching cows.

The EPA requires factories to pay for air pollution permits if they let methane loose. The federal protectors have hesitantly considered a similar plan to charge a fee for cow belching, but farmers find the idea distasteful. Congresspersons from cow infested states will surely not approve such a plan.

It’s odd that most articles on the subject accuse cows as the chief culprits in producing the methane that presumably is helping to overheat the atmosphere, melt the ice cap, deepen the oceans and otherwise damage the global ongoings. Reporting on the subject usually reveals briefly that sheep and pigs are also puffing out methane. I haven’t noticed goats being mentioned, but it stands to reason that they’re involved, too. Perhaps it’s worse with cows because they have two stomachs.

Researchers in the glamorous field of cow intestinal emissions have developed changes in diet that might reduce the gas output of the bovine digestive system. I suppose they’ve already tried Pepto-Bismol and Beano.

The sad thing is that methane is useful, in the right place. It’s a component of the gas that good old PGW pipes into the gas stoves and furnaces of Philadelphians.

Can’t there be some way to collect all that methane currently oozing out of your typical cow, and put it to good use? We’ve been able to extract milk from the critters for years. Good old American know-how should be able to remove the methane that’s being a nasty greenhouse gas and bottle it up for use as fuel.

Animal rights activists wouldn’t care for the idea, but it’s easy to envision old bossy, while the milking machine is hooked up to her middle, having methane collectors attached, fore and aft, capturing that valuable gas. Maybe some engineering genius can create a system in which the methane generated by the dairy herd can power the milking machines.

Automotive engineers looking for an alternate to petroleum fuel should check into the possibility of car engines that operate on cow flatulence. I wonder how many horsepower you can get out of a cow.

June 24, 2009

by James Smart

Titanic: Iceberg not included

A fancy catalogue from a fancy store with fancy prices is offering, for a mere $2,500 (plus freight charges from factory to your door,) a six foot long scale model of the RMS Titanic. I presume that no explanation of the Titanic is necessary.

The model is remote controlled, with a rechargeable battery-powered motor. It can hit five miles per hour in calm water. The catalogue says it is handcrafted, with more than 400 man-hours of labor, and detailed down to the life boats and maple plank decks.

The scale is 1:150, which would bring the six foot model to an equivalent of 900 feet long. The late, lamented original Titanic is usually described as 882.5 feet, which I guess makes the model close enough.

I’m not sure who has enough calm water available to play with this remarkable toy. I wouldn’t trust anything that expensive on a bay at Ocean City or Long Beach Island. Some nice lake in a state park might be the best bet.

Anybody who has $2,500 to spend on this plaything might well own his own lake. Or could rent one. Or build one.

There is something sterile and sad about having a six-foot model of that great doomed ship just gliding along, all bright and shiny. The model builder should include, or at least offer as optional extras, some supplementary material.

The model just cries for a painstakingly reproduced 1:150 scale iceberg. Maybe it could be radio controlled, too, so nifty little scale model collisions could be played out.

Another worthwhile extra would be a half-inch tall Leonardo de Caprio action figure, to stick on the tip of the bow in his “top o’ the world” pose.

I guess it would be too much to ask to have any other action figures, such as folks swimming for their lives, clinging to overturned lifeboats or floundering around in the water. At that 1:150 scale it would be difficult to reproduce any highly detailed floundering.

The last survivor of the Titanic disaster died just a couple of weeks ago. She was only four months old when the unsinkable liner sank, in April, 1912.

I knew one Titanic survivor, R. Norris Williams II, who was long-time president of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. He was reluctant to talk about the sinking, but told me a little of his experience, at the urging of another historian, when having lunch one day not long before he died in 1968 at age 77.

He was 21, a tennis player, on his way home to Philadelphia from playing in England. He survived the sinking by holding onto an overturned life boat. His legs were so severely frost bitten that doctors recommended his legs be amputated. He refused, fought back, recovered, and went on to play on seven Davis Cup teams.

I think I recall him saying that at one point, someone held his belt to keep him afloat, and that he still had the belt and wore it regularly. I never saw that mentioned in historical accounts of the disaster. Either I have a piece of inside information, or a defective memory.

Anyway, I believe that Dick Williams would be amused to know that a six-foot model of the Titanic is now an expensive toy, 97 years later.

June 17, 2009

by James Smart

Saying names the American way

     A prominent conservative leader got upset when Sonia Sotomayor was nominated for the Supreme Court, not because of politics or ideology, but because Her Honor insists on pronouncing her name in the Spanish way, putting emphasis on the last syllable, SotomayOR.

     “Deferring to people’s own pronunciation of their names should obviously be our first inclination, but there ought to be limits,” he complained. “Putting the emphasis on the final syllable of Sotomayor is unnatural in English . . . “

     That’s an example of the good old All-American belief that anybody who doesn’t speak English must be kinda dumb, but holler a bit louder and maybe they’ll understand you. The yahoos who can’t handle words from another language never seem to notice that the folks who don’t speak English to their liking are smart enough to know more than one language.

     It astonishes me how easily many people come to this country speaking Chinese, Arabic, Russian, Hindi and other languages that have not only different languages but different alphabets, and learn English quickly and easily.

     The reddest-necked guy I ever met, years ago, was required to take a language class in high school, and quickly found Spanish to be puzzlingly absurd. “They call light luz,” he grumbled. “Why don’t they call it light. That’s what it is. And why do they call blue azul? Everybody knows it’s blue.” The man who finds Spanish pronunciation “unnatural” isn’t far from that mind set.

     But beyond the stupid prejudices against people with other languages, there is the issue of “deferring to people’s own pronunciation of their names.”  That conservative leader thinks “there ought to be limits.” He doesn’t want anyone going around telling other people how to say their names.

     Conservatives believe in government staying out of people’s private lives (except for gay marriage, abortion, labor laws and a few other things.) Yet here is someone who wants to limit the way I pronounce my name.

     Names are important to people. Mine is easy to handle, but I get annoyed when people don’t believe it’s real. Many people are proud of their names because of family, ethnicity or just because it’s who they are.

     I went to junior high with Phil Lipiecki, who later led the Polish American String Band. The correct Polish pronunciation of the name is “lipeski”. I watched a television reporter interviewing him, who kept calling him lipee-ecky. Phil would quietly correct him with right pronunciation, but the reporter kept saying it wrong. Some Port Richmond people held that against the TV station for years.

     But some yokels would demand that the name be pronounced “the American way.” I suppose that next, somebody will be proposing a constitutional amendment declaring that no citizen shall pronounce his name in a way that does not sound natural. We could have a Federal Commission on Nomenclatural Naturalness to rule on which names are being pronounced improperly. The first thing they should do is rule that two well-know names should be given more natural pronunciations:  Barrick Obb-ay-ma and Joe Bidden.

June 10, 2009

by James Smart

Side effects: a medical mystery

    There seems to be a medical crisis going on in our society today, and nobody is doing anything about it. I’m talking about the proliferation of side effects.

    Side effects have become almost epidemic. The pharmaceutical industry is certainly aware of that. Their ceaseless television commercials for prescription medicine spend more time reciting long lists of the side effects of a medication than telling us what the main effect is expected to be.

    No other advertisers do that. The automobile commercials don’t recite all the things that can go wrong with a car. They don’t mention any restraints on buying the product; there’s no suggestion to “ask your auto dealer if Volvo is right for you.”

    The beer commercials never warn about side effects, such as obnoxious behavior at ball games, frequent trips to the bathroom, belligerence, or, in rare but documented instances, driving a SUV through a Dunkin’ Donuts window.

    Fast food chains don’t have a fast talking announcer chanting possible side effects of burgers and fries, which are known to include excessive calorie intake, cholesterol build-up in blood vessels, and inability to squeeze into last year’s bathing suit.

    Maybe the time has come for the formation of a National Side Effects Association, to raise funds to finance research into how to fight annoying and sometimes deadly side effects. There could be walks on Kelly Drive, 5K runs or marathons to raise awareness of side effects. (Caution: This type of ambulatory fund raising has, itself. side effects including calluses, Charley horses and exaggerated later accounts of the time made.)

    Medical schools should offer courses with career paths toward side effect treatment.  The medical industry is always on the lookout for new specialties, and being a side effects specialist would be a lively occupation, since there are so many and varied side effects.

    The health insurance people shouldn’t object to this. They’re paying for treatment of side effects anyway, and identifying them as a separate condition might make it easier to control the outlay.

    There is plenty of research to be done. Just look at the list of side effects that comes in that 50,000 words of fine print on the scrunched up sheet of flimsy paper stuffed in a prescription medicine container. You’re likely to find the caution that the stuff may cause sleepiness, and also may cause insomnia.

    Another medicine says that it may cause constipation or diarrhea. If you’re lucky, the two conditions will be caused at the same time, cancel each other, and you won’t even notice them.

    One frequently prescribed antibiotic offers the dismaying information that it sometimes causes the Achilles tendon to break. How something that kills bacteria can wander down to your heel and damage a tendon is indeed a medical mystery.

    (Caution: Weekly reading of this column may result in annoyance, amusement, edification, boredom, irritability, confusion, and a compulsion to turn the page before finishing. Ask your doctor if this column is right for you. He’ll get a laugh out of it.)

June 3, 2009

by James Smart

 Not your father's Pontiac

When General Motors eradicated the old Pontiac brand, it seemed somehow appropriate in these troubled days for the auto industry. Chief Pontiac once besieged Detroit.

     Pontiac, the person, was born in about 1720. He had an alternate name, Obwandiyag. Let us be thankful that General Motors didn’t name the car the Obwandiyag.

     There was a period in 1763 and 1764 that historians have christened Pontiac’s Rebellion. The chief and his Ottowa Indians had just helped the English drive away the French, in the French and Indian War, but then the English moved in. Pontiac decided that he had enough of all those illegal immigrants coming into the neighborhood.

     The French had installed Fort Detroit in 1701, led by a colonist named Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac (ah, there, General Motors.) The Detroit River is a strait that separates Lake Erie from Lake St. Clair; “de troit” is French for “the strait.”

The British captured Fort Detroit in 1760, which annoyed Pontiac. He called the British soldiers “dogs dressed in red.”

In May, 1763, Pontiac took a notion to attack the fort. He showed up with 300 men, but the assault failed. About 900 other Indians from various tribes then joined him, and camped outside the fort.

     Besieging and being besieged is a pleasant way to spend a summer, with not much fighting and lots of spare time and fresh air, so the Indians stayed until October. Nearby Canadian folks helpfully, and sneakily, sold food and supplies to both sides.

     Pontiac later beat a British unit at the brief Battle of Bloody Run, and otherwise made a nuisance of himself, so the British put a contract out on him. On April 20, 1769, a Kaskaskia Indian assassinated Pontiac while he was walking in the woods near Cahokia.

     Cahokia is in Illinois, a bit east of St. Louis, Mo. It was long the major Native American city in North America, occupied from about the Seventh Century until shortly before Europeans started butting in.

     Experts estimate that Cahokia peaked at a population of about 40,000. And it wasn’t a bunch of teepees, like the Indian villages in old John Wayne movies. It had dozens of mounds, similar to those we usually associate with ancient Mexican and Central American sites.

     The biggest structure covered 14 acres and was 100 feet high, with a 50 foot high building on top. There are vestiges of some circles of wooden pillars, too, sort of woodhenges, which scholars believe functioned as calendars.

     The relics of that Indian metropolis are now in Cahokia State Park, where archaeologists have unearthed some fancy burial sites, including the remains of an ancient Indian mahoff laid out on a mosaic of seashell wampum in the image of a giant bird. They think there is evidence of human sacrifices; too, a kind of behavior we tend to think happened long ago in Guatemala, not Illinois.

     None of that has much to do with General Motors manufacturing vehicles named for the late Chief Pontiac, or with the discontinuing of that make of car. But the chief has a city in Michigan named after him, so his memory doesn’t depend on an automobile.

May 27, 2009

by James Smart

Two men, 70 years of baseball

     When Harry Kalas bereaved local baseball fans last month, old guys like me were compelled to reminisce about Philly’s other broadcaster who received the Ford Frick award from the Baseball Hall of Fame. That was Byrum Saam, whose mild Texas voice narrated Philadelphia baseball from 1938 to 1975.

     By Saam was born in Fort Worth in 1914, and worked out West before 1937. He was in Minneapolis when the old N. W. Ayer advertising agency hired him to announce baseball on Philadelphia radio, sponsored by Atlantic Refining, an Ayer client. There was no television.

     In 1938, By began broadcasting Athletics and Phillies games. Neither baseball nor radio was ready for announcers to travel with the teams, so By described whichever team was occupying Shibe Park at the moment.

     I was in second grade then (told you I’m an old guy,) and the only time my father ever attended one of our elementary school’s Home and School Association meetings was the night By Saam was the guest speaker.

     By was wearing a gray felt Stetson, like the one my father and most other men wore, but By kept his on while speaking. I asked my father why Mr. Saam didn’t take off his hat, and Dad whispered, “because he’s getting bald,” a situation my father was familiar with.

     Whether the team was winning or losing, By’s announcement that “we’re rolling along into the bottom of the ninth,” or any other inning, made any game simultaneously soothing and exciting.

     Things began changing about 1949. TV came along, and more announcers were needed. By and six-foot-eight Gene Kelly took turns doing TV and radio every other day. He was uncomfortable on TV with his thinning hair, and installed what he called a “fright rug.”

     The A’s left town in 1954, and By did the Phils exclusively. Bill Campbell, Chuck Thompson and Claude Haring entered the booth. By did some national work, too, including the 1959 and 1965 World Series for NBC.

     Richie Ashburn joined him in 1962. In 1970, young Harry Kalas arrived.

     In June, 1970, I was assigned by my editor at the Evening Bulletin to “take a long look” at By Saam for an article in mid-July. I hung out with By for a few days, and saw his pre-computer system of loose leaf binders, a red book with play by play of every game that season, a yellow book of every player’s game by game performance, and other ring binders and scrap books that catalogued statistics and personal information about the whole National League.

     He showed me around his two acre property in Penn Valley, and described each tree and shrub with the same play-by-play style he described ball games. Driving off to lunch, he recited stats of the neighborhood, telling who lived in each house and what they did for a living, as though it were a starting line-up.

     By Saam retired in 1975. He was only 61, but his eye sight was failing. He got his Hall of Fame recognition in 1990. By died in 2000. Like Harry Kalas, he had a stroke, although in a retirement home, not the broadcast booth. He was 85.

     From By Saam’s first game to Harry Kalas’s last was just about 70 years. That’s a lot of baseball.

May 20, 2009

by James Smart

Ladies, languages and the links

     There was a squall of outrage when the LPGA suggested it might make a rule that anyone who doesn’t speak English could not take part in its tournaments. The idea was quickly withdrawn, but not before much bilingual criticism.

     LPGA stands for Ladies Professional Golf Association, although the organization seems to prefer being called by its initials. The ladies seem to avoid calling themselves ladies.

     My dictionary’s first two definitions of “lady” are: “1. a woman of good social position, a woman of polite and kindly behavior; 2. (in polite use) a woman.”  It is common, as definition two suggests, to call a woman a lady, whether or not she qualifies in the social position or behavior departments.

     I often wonder why modern women, sensitive to the linguistic nuances of sexism, don’t protest the vaguely quaint connotation the LPGA name has, and ask for it to convert to the WPGA. Indeed, it puzzles me that female college athletes don’t object to such “polite” uses as Temple University’s women’s teams being Lady Owls or Villanova’s being Lady Wildcats.

     As for the LPGA’s fleeting stumble into the world of ethnic sensitivity, the English language requirement was instantly perceived as an attack on Hispanic-Americans, although the rule would have seemed to discriminate against speakers of French, Latvian or Tagalog as well.

     The situation may have uncovered a form of intolerance that hasn’t been included in the long list of protected civil rights. Is it time to propose that, after the now languishing Equal Rights for Women Amendment finally gets hung on the end of the Constitution, we start the campaign for an amendment guaranteeing equal rights for speakers of assorted languages?

That would still leave some latitude if the ladies who golf want to toss off the course some interloper from another country.

     The LPGA was founded in 1950, but lady amateurs have been around for quite a while. Mary, Queen of Scots, was one of the first women known to play golf. Her clubs were carried by a soldier ranked as a cadet, which is where the word caddie comes from.

     Mary Q. of S. could have been a supermodel if they had needed any in the 16th century. She was poised and beautiful, and was six feet tall (until the English cut her head off.)

     Her great-great grandfather, James II of Scotland, had briefly outlawed “futeball and golfe” in Scotland in 1457, because golfing was distracting Scots from practicing for war, also a popular Scottish sport. When James II got blown up by one of his own cannons in 1460, the Scots probably headed back to the links.

     In those days, they used a ball made of a leather cover stuffed with feathers. Whether they threw anyone off the golf course for not speaking English, I don’t know, but Mary Q. of S. had, on and off, a French husband, a Spanish suitor and possibly dallied with her cute Italian male secretary. She most likely spoke some Scottish Gaelic, and perrrhaps rrrolled her RRRs a wee bit in English, so she probably wasn’t fussy about languages. What is the Spanish word for “fore?”

May 13, 2009

by James Smart

Some assorted odd little items

     Item one: Congress or the FCC or some enforcer should ban pre-recorded sales calls to cell phones. There's a no-call list to stop unwanted calls from land lines, but on cell phones it's okay for some oily-voiced guy to tell you that you've won a vacation in Cancun, or to offer a quote on your auto insurance.

     Item two: Auto dealers advertise a nice low price for their cars in big, bold type. Then you read the fine print, and find that the price comes after a bunch of rebates. The price for an active military, recent college graduate, credit union member, eligible for dealer discount, factory rebate and employee price. There never seem to be any rebates I qualify for. I’m waiting for an inactive civilian rebate, a barely made it through high school rebate or a pathetic income rebate.

     Item three: A fellow from Georgia moved in down the street last year. He has a 15 year old dog that never saw snow before this past winter. The mutt figured out a system for walking in snow. It walks on three legs. It holds up its right front paw for a block or two, then shifts and holds up the left rear for a while, and continues to rotate so that each foot has a chance to warm up a bit.

     Item four: Folks who read my (award-winning, he mentioned modestly) column last December about the Supreme Court case of Pleasant Grove City v. Summum may be interested to know that the Supreme Court ruled against Summum, a self-anointed spiritual organization. Pleasant Grove, Utah, cannot be forced to place Summum’s Seven Aphorisms in its park next to the Ten Commandments. This was based on Constitutional law, and not because thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s park.

     Item five: An institution I enter frequently has a guard at the door, who asks me to show my identification. I always show my driver’s license, which proves conclusively that I am, without a doubt, me. I then proceed inside, wondering what contribution I have made to the security of the building, and hoping that none of Osama bin Laden’s associates have driver’s licenses.

     Item six: Foreign news you may have missed: In a murder trial in Italy of an American woman who stabbed a British student, a Latvian witness testified that the accused murderess threatened him with a knife. A lawyer asked how he defended himself from her deadly attack. The man said that he threw olives at her. I hope the olives were in a jar. Another report, from Sweden, said that thugs on a street beat and robbed a Japanese rock star who was dressed as a pineapple. No mention of whether he was armed with olives.

     Item seven: The Franklin Institute has started calling itself The Franklin. That seems undignified for a venerable scientific organization. What’s next? The Academy of Natural Sciences becomes The Nat? The American Philosophical Society  becomes The Phil? I guess this is nothing new. The Zoological Society has been The Zoo for a long time, and Thomas Jefferson University Hospital likes to be called The Jeff. If this trend spreads to Baltimore, will people refer to Johns Hopkins as The John?

April 29, 2009

by James Smart

Capt. Bainbridge vs. the pirates

     Reports of the recent Somalian pirates episode mentioned the irony that a ship on the scene, the USS Bainbridge, was named for a captain held hostage by pirates in 1804. No articles that I saw gave details of William Bainbridge’s complex ordeal.

     Bainbridge was born in Princeton in 1771, and became a merchant seaman when he was 15. He was a ship’s master at 18.

     He was in Philadelphia in 1798 when President John Adams was preparing to deal with the Barbary pirates of the Mediterranean. Bainbridge was commissioned a lieutenant in the U. S. Navy, and given command of the schooner USS Retaliation.

     Cruising off Antigua in November, he was surrounded by a French fleet and forced to surrender his ship, the first U. S. Navy officer ever to do so. Despite that embarrassment, he was promoted to captain and in November, 1800, took command of the USS George Washington, a converted merchant ship with 24 cannons.

     The Washington was assigned a diplomatic mission to take gifts from President Adams to Bobba Mustapha, the Dey of Algiers. The Washington pulled into Algiers harbor and unloaded a cargo including tea, coffee, sugar and gunpowder.

     Mustapha then trained cannons on the American ship, and forced Bainbridge to haul a load of horses, cattle, sheep, lions, tigers, parrots and 100 slaves as gifts to Selim II, sultan of Turkey. At Constantinople, the Sultan befriended Bainbridge, and gave him Ottoman Empire credentials that forced Mustapha to let him return to Philadelphia.

     In October, 1803, Bainbridge was commander of the USS Philadelphia, a frigate paid for by Philly merchants. Chasing a pirate ship off Tripoli, the Philadelphia ran aground, and Bainbridge surrendered it to the Tripoli pirates.

     The Philadelphia’s 307 officers and men were marched to Bashaw Yusef’s palace in a torchlit procession, through crowds shouting and spitting at them. The crew was quartered in an old warehouse. The officers were put in the American Consulate, abandoned since the war with the pirates began.

     The crewmen, under guard and beaten if uncooperative, were put to work building fortifications and ships. They worked from dawn until dusk, with a lunch of bread dipped in olive oil. At first, they were fed salt pork and beef from their frigate. When that ran out, dinner was bread and couscous. Many men got sick, and six  died. Two attempts to dig escape tunnels failed.

     On one occasion, four men were mustered to carry loads of supplies through the streets, to Yusef’s harem. The women there, naked to the waist, giggled at the Americans and offered them dates, olives, oranges and milk until the guards hustled the men away.

     In February, 1804, American forces sneaked into Tripoli harbor and burned the USS Philadephia. Much fighting and diplomacy followed. A bombardment and $60,000 cash finally convinced the Bashaw to set Bainbridge and his men free on June 4, 1805, after 19 months captivity. Bainbridge had a further naval career, and died in Philadelphia in 1833. He has had four navy ships named for him, and also a street in South Philly.

April 22, 2009

by James Smart

Free TV, except for the fee

     The National Football League and the Comcast cable TV establishment have been arguing over their agreement that expires May 1. The NFL wants to charge Comcast more to continue pumping excessive amounts of football coverage into the nation’s homes.

     The NFL has its own television network, and feels entitled to make Comcast shell out for the privilege of showing its contents. That includes some football games, minor NFL activities occupying only a few hours every week.

     Pictures of actual live football being performed are mere interruptions of such other benefactions as interminable coverage of the annual football draft, tedious analysis and predictions by ensembles of retired players with sharp suits and dull opinions, pretentious documentaries, replays of games from former seasons, interviews with athletes whose predictable statements could be shortened 50 percent by excising every use of the phrase “you know,” and other material that is the plastic peanuts filling of the NFL package

     Comcast probably doesn’t really object to all that aggregate of football leftovers, punctuated by commercials. Comcast is happy to air such non-athletic excitement as Country Living Quilts, Naughtiest Celebrity Scandals, Bid Whist Party Throwdown, El Gordo y La Flaca, and that enduring favorite, Paid Programming.

     No, the real issue is that Comcast doesn’t want to pay extra for all that NFL stuff. And the position the Comcasters take is curious. A Comcast executive said that the NFL is “trying to use its enormous market power to force millions of our customers to pay for games they have always seen for free.”

     When a Comcast chieftain says “for free,” he really means at no extra charge beyond the monthly fee the viewer is already dispensing to the cable provider. “For free,” in this context, used to mean broadcast over the air, not through wires. More and more sports events are available only to people paying for cable reception.

     Back in the early 1990s, when the 76ers suggested that they would like to have most of their games shown on cable television, there was an immediate orgy of moaning and muttering. Newspaper editorials denounced the idea, one of them bitterly protesting, “The teams are forcing fans to decide whether to attend or watch games according to their wallets, not their loyalties.”

     Fans who objected to paying for TV sports seemed to forget that there was a time when anyone who wanted to see a professional sporting event had to pay for it. Back in those primitive pre-electronic days, sports fans could not sit down in the living room with a six-pack and an assortment of health-hazardous snacks and watch professional sports on a tube. They faced the inconvenience of hauling themselves to a stadium or arena and paying cash to watch the competition in person.

     Today, folks routinely pay fat monthly charges to see most television, and it’s the cable company complaining that the cost of content is getting too high. Now Comcast knows how it feels to old-timers who remember television with no monthly bill.

April 15, 2009

by James Smart

Old City Council, big and unpaid

     City Council members have been emitting piteous cries because some ungrateful citizens want to prevent them from collecting pensions without the inconvenience of giving up their salaries. Other Councilpersons, and a few political savants, contend that Council is too big, and should shed a member or two.

     History geeks like me enjoy harking back 90 years, when a “reform” City Charter upset many politicians by altering both the size and the income of City Council. Alter is not entirely the word, since before the 1920 Council, (take a deep breath here, modern Councilpersons,) members of City Councils received no salary.

     And that plural of City Councils is not a typographical error. There were two branches of City Council under the old system. From 1796 to 1919, the city was governed by a Select Council and a Common Council.

     When that arrangement ended in 1919, Select Council had 48 members, and Common Council 97. Folks who claim that the present 17 Council seats are too many must tremble when they contemplate the 1919 total of 145 Councilmen. One Selectman was elected from each ward. (There was a period when it was one from each State senatorial district.) Common Councilmen were elected from wards, based on population. One Councilman was elected for each 4,000 ward residents.

     Under the new 1919 charter, Council membership dropped to 21. Eight Council districts were created, with from one to four Councilmen elected from each district, depending on population. (If I lived in the  Sixth District in the northwest in 1919, I would have voted for one candidate because of his nifty name: Pringle Bothwick.)

     Republicans won in every ward in 1919, but everyone knew that in advance. The real contest was between the Independent Republicans and the ruling faction known succinctly in the newspapers as the Organization. The Independents were led by aristocratic, scholarly, overweight U. S. Sen. Boies Penrose. The Organization was run by the Vare brothers, George, Ed and Bill, South Philly pig farmers who had the city contract to collect garbage, fed it to the pigs, and made money at both ends of the deal. The new charter dealt a nasty blow to the Vare enterprises by creating something new, a city department to collect trash, garbage and the ubiquitous ashes from coal furnaces.

     The Independent Penrose faction won 11 of the 21 seats, but four or five Vare men, led by “Football Bill” Roper, a former Princeton coach, joined the tiny majority in supporting new Mayor J. Hampton Moore, a former Morning Ledger reporter and Congressman.

     As for salary, from the first City Charter in 1701 (there were 12 Councilmen then) until the 21-member 1920 Council was sworn in, Councilmen were never paid. Serving was considered a private citizen’s civic duty, and/or an opportunity for profitable wheeling and dealing. Politics was generally not considered a full time profession.

     The 1920 Councilmen were paid $5,000 a year. By comparison, the Police and Fire Chiefs got $5,500. The mayor’s salary was $15,000. I don’t think that anyone then mentioned pensions.

April 8, 2009

by James Smart

The octs and the quints

     Somebody gave the name Octomom to that woman who begot eight babies in one maternal eruption, with excessive postpartum publicity. Now the news media and the comedians have adopted the word Octomom and placed it firmly in the American language.

     I’m not aware of anyone having twins being called a Duomom, and women have produced quadruplets or quintuplets without being designated Quadromoms or Quintomoms. But the concept of Octomaternity has caught on in a big way.

     Writers seem to love those Latin numerical prefixes. They denote folks in their eighties Octogenarians. Those in their Nineties are Nonagenarians, and in their seventies, Septuagenarians. Sexagenarian is in the dictionary, but you don’t see it used much for people in their sixties, possibly because it has a risqué connotation.

     Quintagenarian, which would be expected to describe people in their fifties, is not in the dictionary I’m using, The word quint is there, defined as the informal identifier for one quintuplet. Therefore, one octuplet should be called an oct.

     That’s not the only worrisome thing about octo as a prefix meaning eight. The dictionary also tells us that opera is the plural of opus. Consequently, an eight-act opera must be an octopus.

     The word Octomom is generally used in derision, since the multimother in question is perceived to have been more interested in celebrity than maternity. Back in the days when conception was achieved the old fashioned way, and multiple births were acts of God, not test tube, people were interested and sympathetic in the multi-blessed events. Quadruplets and, especially, quintuplets got much attention and publicity.

     The press of North America went wild after Elzire Dionne gave birth, on May 28, 1934, to what were claimed to be the world’s first quintuplets to survive birth. Mrs. Dionne, 24,  already had six children at home in Callander, northern Ontario. The Canadian government declared the babies wards of King George V, and erected a building for them across the road from the family farmhouse, where they were exhibited until age 10. An estimated three million people paid  to see the girls in their unnatural habitat.

     At age one, the quints performed in a movie about the doctor who delivered them, Allen Dafoe. They were the subject of books and articles, and pulled in a fortune endorsing products.

     Most little American kids considered the five quints equal in importance to Shirley Temple and Mickey Mouse. Their names were Marie, Cecile, Yvonne, Annette and Emilie. (In the Blondie comic strip, the dog had five puppies, and Dagwood named them Marie, Cecile, Yvonne, Annette and Elmer.)

     At age 18, the Dionne quints left home to live separately. Emilie entered a convent, where she died during an epileptic seizure a year later. At age 21, the survivors were given shares of a million dollar fund from their earnings. Annette, Marie and Cecile got married. Marie died in 1970 and Yvonne in 2001; Annette and Cecile are okay.

Maybe the Octokiddies should become wards of Gov. Schwarzenegger I.

April 1, 2009

by James Smart

A comedian of merry memory

     April Fools Day seems a good day to salute Joe Miller, whose joke book was published 270 years ago this year. Joe Miller’s name isn’t invoked much these days, but such modern comedians as Bob Hope and George Burns used to banter about Miller’s jokes frequently.

     Miller is the secular patron saint of old jokes. Comedians make fun of a bad joke by invoking poor Joe’s name. Actually, Miller’s supposed book was written by somebody else, a year after he died, and only four of the book’s 247 jokes are attributed to Miller.

     Joe Miller was born in England in 1684, probably in a family of actors. His first known appearance was 300 years ago this year, in London’s Drury Lane theater, playing the comic lead in Sir Robert Howard’s play, “The Committee,” a popular satire of the recently ended Puritan government.

     He went on to star in “Love for Love,” a five-year-old hit play by William Congreve, and as the wisecracking gravedigger in “Hamlet” and one of the witches in “Macbeth.” By 1730 he had performed 59 roles. He also worked in theater management, and was a favorite on the London stage for nearly 30 years.

     Life expectancies were short in Miller’s day. He died at age 54. The London Daily Post on Aug. 17, 1738, reported: “Yesterday morning died Joe Miller, comedian, of merry memory. Very few of his profession have gained more applause on the stage, and few have acted off it with so much approbation from their neighbors.”

     Within a few months, a London publisher got the idea of producing a book of jokes and capitalizing on Joe Miller’s name and fame. Nobody would have asked him to write a book, because Joe Miller never learned to write, or read. Most of his life, his wife read his parts to him and he memorized them.

     A writer named John Mottley compiled the jokes for the book. It was published, to great success, with the title, “Joe Miller’s Jests, or the Wits Vade-Mecum.”  (There was no apostrophe in the word wits, though there was one in Miller’s name.)

     Vade mecum is a Latin phrase meaning “traveling companion,” and anybody who told one of the jokes in the book had better start traveling, fast. They may have been hilarious gags in 1739, but most of them wouldn’t hold up in the worst comedy club today.

     And most of them are off color, depending for laughs on body parts and functions, with much rude language (just like what passes for humor in modern TV and movies.) Many are anecdotes about celebrities of Miller’s era, who are unknown to folks now.

     Some jokes depend on a knowledge of life in early 18th century England. In one story, a “witty knave,” just out of prison, went into a lace shop and asked the shopkeeper the price of a piece of lace that would reach from one of his ears to the other.

     After the proprietor agreed on a price, the knave began to measure out a long piece of lace, explaining, “One of my ears is here, and the other is nailed to the pillory in Bristol.”

     At that time, a thief would be punished by having an ear cut off and nailed to the wooden pillory in which he had been locked for a few days. You can laugh now.

March 25, 2009

by James Smart

A raunchy mayor 200 years ago

Looking through some history sources to see what was new in 1809, I noted that John Barker was mayor of Philadelphia 200 years ago. Gen. Barker was known for making vulgar political speeches. A newspaper once accused him of “swearing, cursing, and employing language at which a Hottentot would blush, a Christian tremble.”

          In those days, citizens didn’t vote for mayor. City Council elected one of its members, for one year terms. Barker served in 1808 and 1809, and again in 1812.

He was a tailor, and an obscure Revolutionary War general, when he was elected sheriff in 1803 and served four years. His opponent in the 1806 election got the most votes, but an investigation uncovered illegal voting. Gov. Thomas McKean  declared the result “no choice,” and directed that Barker stay in office until the 1807 election.

     Trouble was brewing on the high seas. In 1802, England became annoyed with Napoleon, and began intercepting French shipping. American vessels tried to stay neutral, so both the French and English navies picked on them. English warships stopped American merchant ships and drafted any British-born American sailors into the British navy. A few American-born sailors were also “accidentally” impressed into British service.

     The situation got tense in 1807, when HMS Leopard stopped the USS  Chesapeake off the Virginia Capes, and carried off some U. S. Navy seamen. The news reached Philadelphia, and there was an excited meeting in the State House yard (Independence Square) on July 1st, where citizens voted to “discountenance all intercourse” with the British.

     War seemed likely. President Jefferson called for 100,000 militia, of which Philadelphia’s quota was 88 artillerists, 177 cavalry and 1,500 infantry. The Philadelphia Militia Legion volunteered immediately, but had only 816 members.

     Sheriff Barker was named to form volunteer companies to protect the city. He exhorted men willing to take up arms to trust in God, whom he described as “the omnipotent generalissimo that led your fathers.”

     Volunteer units organized, including one that called itself “The Young Men of Correct Democratic Principles.” Irish citizens, welcoming an opportunity to have at the British, held a mass meeting with the platform carpeted with a British flag, allowing the speakers to walk on it.

     A politically opposed newspaper derided Barker as “Maj. Gen. Nightcap,” and said his speeches were “rhodomontade,” a word for bragging which blessedly seems to have been forgotten lately. But Barker was effective, and in December, 5,000 uniformed men paraded in Philly.

     His success helped get him the mayor’s job in 1808 and 1809, even though the war with Britain didn’t happen. He was elected again in 1812, when the expected war finally started, giving him the opportunity to make many rousing (and probably profane) speeches.

     His son, James Nelson Barker, who wrote nine hit plays between 1797 and 1824, was military commander at Fort Mifflin during the War of 1812. James was elected mayor in 1819. I don’t know if he made any raunchy speeches.

March 18, 2009

by James Smart

Holding my breath on the river

     Mayor Nutter’s plans for the river front seem ready to start, with his proposed park on Pier 11. Being perverse by nature, I always liked the waterfront the way it was when I was a boy. Riding down town on the Frankford El, you could see the line of big freighters nosing in beside moldering municipal piers, flying foreign flags and cheerfully emptying their gross bilges into the already putrid water.

     Since we now have marine terminals and other newfangled ways of parking ships, it would be nice to turn the waterfront into something like Chicago’s lake front or Baltimore’s inner harbor. Hit-or-miss development is already intruding along the river. Hurry with that new plan, Mr. Mayor. But forgive me if I don’t hold my breath.

     I remember when the modern compulsion to glamorize the waterfront began, in 1961, with a plan for an $85 million development including a 25 story port office tower at Market Street, a pedestrian walkway, museums, restaurants, office space, a boat basin with historic ships, and perhaps a motel. The tower and walkway would be in place by 1963.

     Mayor Dilworth presided at the start of demolition of three piers in January, 1962. The project was then named Penn’s Landing. A replica of William Penn’s ship Welcome would be there, and the Academy of Natural Sciences would move there.

     In October, new Mayor Tate kicked off demolition of three more piers. By then, the port tower was going to be 30 stories, and the cost $100 million.

     The next pier demolition was in 1965, and the price tag was up to $120 million. In fall of 1966, reports said that construction would soon begin on a $240 million waterfront development, including that 30 story port headquarters, a hotel and office building, a “science park” and museum, an exhibit of historic ships, and a restaurant and shopping center. It would all be done by 1975.

     A contract was let in mid 1967 to fill in the 3,000 foot strip of river bank, 500 feet wide. There was a groundbreaking on Halloween, 1967. In 1968, three more piers were demolished. The waterside walkway materialized in 1969.

     A new plan for the 30 muddy acres was announced in 1970. Occasional sightseers enjoyed the river front on the walkway. Piles of dirt were the major feature.

     At the end of 1972, officials announced that they were looking for a developer. One was chosen in 1973. He quit in 1974. In the Bicentennial year, the sculpture garden was unfinished and the museum empty, although there were historic ships and the riverside walkway. In 1977, the city looked for a new developer.

     Today, 30 years of unrealized plans and vanishing developers later, the Maritime Museum is active, there are festivals, concerts, an ice skating rink and a marina at Penn’s Landing, and the city would still like to snare a developer. Curiously, the waterfront above and below the officially designated Penn’s Landing has privately blossomed with restaurants, night clubs and condo towers.

     The Nutter administration may give us an admirable waterfront at last. But it’s been 48 years. I’ll continue exhaling regularly.

March 11, 2009

by James Smart

A historic history of Manayunk

     This year is the 140th anniversary of the publication of a little book called, in the verbose style of mid-19th century titles,  “Early History of the Falls of Schuylkill, Manayunk, Schuylkill and Lehigh Navigation Companies, Fairmount Waterworks, Etc.”

     It was written by Charles V. Hagner, who grew up in Manayunk before it was named, and built the second “modern” mill along the canal. In the 1820s he served as the town’s first magistrate and first school director, and organized the first post office and the first stage coach service to Philadelphia.

      Hagner sold his mill and left Manayunk in 1839. In 1869 he published his reminiscences of the area, called Fort St. David’s when he was a boy. It was named for the log club house of a fishing club on the banks of the Schuylkill, established before the Revolution by wealthy Philadelphians of Welsh descent, whose patron saint was St. David.

     Hagner reports that his father always dated his letters “Fort St. Davids,” and complains that the name Falls of Schuylkill “is a misnomer, there being no falls there.” Hagner’s father built mills powered by water wheels on local creeks. By the time of his book, he writes, the Wissahickon was much smaller than in his youth.

     When the Schuylkill Navigation Company’s canal was finished in 1819, the controlled flow opened up a new era for water power. Many millers feared that freshets, sudden bursts of flood water, would damage mill apparatus on the canal. But Capt. John Towers pioneered, buying what was designated the first power, of 100 inches, in 1819. Hagner bought the second power, 50 inches, in 1820. An inch cost $3 a year.

     An inch was defined as the amount of water that will pass through an aperture one inch square, under pressure of three feet of water measured from the surface of the water to the center of the aperture. An aperture of 100 square inches yielded water pressure sufficient to grind 10 bushels of wheat per hour.

     That technology of the old-time water mill men is a mystery to us. They confronted their own mystery about 1859, when coal-fired steam engines began to replace water power. They had a hard time figuring out how to make those black rocks from up state burn.

     Among the many colorful tales in Hagner’s book is his account of meetings of the citizens of what was then called Flat Rock, in May, 1824, to choose a name for the village.

Hagner’s brother proposed “Udoravia.” The residents put the name on a signpost.

     But mill owners complained that they didn’t like it. When the bosses spoke, the citizens listened.

     The townspeople then chose Manayunk, a version of the old Indian name for the river, which had been replaced by the Dutch word Schuylkill. Manayunk is usually translated “place we go to drink.” Mana Yunk literally meant “water place.”

     Hagner tells of the paving of muddy Main St. so Manayunkers could avoid the Ridge Turnpike Road, of sleigh rides on the frozen Schuylkill, of the cholera epidemic that swept the town in 1832, and other things that were history 140 years ago, and still are.

March 4, 2009

by James Smart

Tom Swift meets Uncle Wiggily

     John Higson Cover, Jr., 88, died last month. He invented the Taser, the nifty weapon that cops use to shoot electrical darts into belligerent miscreants and immobilize them without killing them (most of the time.) I had never heard of Jack Cover, but reading his obituaries scattered my thoughts to such mismatched topics as lunar exploration, Tom Swift, Franklin Field and Uncle Wiggily.

     The obits described Cover as a scientist who worked on the Apollo moon excursions of the 1960s. I checked the indexes of 11 books on the Apollo program, and he wasn’t there. That doesn’t mean anything; my father-in-law worked on the moon program, and nobody ever heard of him, either.

     The recent articles said that the name Taser was inspired by one of Cover’s favorite boyhood books. The letters T. S. E. R. stand for Tom Swift and his Electric Rifle.

     The Tom Swift books, about a boy inventor, were written between 1910 and 1941. Then, a more modern series started, about Tom Swift, Jr. As a boy, I found both generations dull. The high spot for me was in book six of the original series, Tom Swift and his Wireless Message, published in 1911, when Tom flew to Philadelphia in his airship with his associate, Mr. Damon.

     As they approached the city, Damon asked where they were going to land. (Tom had not yet invented the airport.)

     “I’ll have to pick out the best place I see,” said Tom.

     “What’s the matter with Franklin Field?” cried Mr. Damon. “Out where they play football.”

     “The very thing,” said Tom. That’s where they landed.

     The recent articles about Jack Cover identified the author of the Tom Swift books as Victor Appleton. Actually, Victor Appleton didn’t exist. Several authors wrote under that name, which was made up by Edward Stratemeyer.

     Stratemeyer, and later his daughter Harriet, dominated the children’s book industry for years. He started the children’s series genre when he invented the Rover Boys in 1901.

     Next came the Bobbsey Twins, starting in 1904, written by Laura Lee Hope, another non-existent person who was really Stratemeyer himself, his daughter and a few other people. The Stratemeyers created the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Buddy, and other series protagonists. Stratemeyer died in 1930, but the Stratemeyer “syndicate” existed until 1982.

     The first 35 Tom Swift books were written by Howard R. Garis. He was known under his own name as the author of the Uncle Wiggily stories.

     Garis was a 36-year-old reporter for the Newark Evening News in January, 1910, when his editor asked him to do a daily column for children. Garis conceived Uncle Wiggily Longears, “an elderly rabbit gentleman.” He wrote six Wiggily adventures a week until 1947, chronicling the rabbit’s ploys to outwit his beastly enemies, the Skeezicks and the Pipsisewah. The series spun off many books, and even a board game. Garis’s wife, Lillian, wrote 25 volumes of Bobbsey Twins. Together, the couple produced hundreds of kid’s books.

     As a boyhood fan of Uncle Wiggily, I wish that he could have owned a Taser, and zapped that nasty Pipsisewah.

February 25, 2009

by James Smart

That statue is really George

     George Washington’s 277th birthday got me thinking about that 44 foot monument across from the Art Museum, with George on his horse atop a jumble of bronze moose, elks, Indians and what-not sitting in a dribbly fountain.

     It really is George Washington. A year or two ago, I heard a tourist ask a National Park guide at Independence Hall who that statue was, and the guy didn’t know. Philadelphians on the tour disagreed on whether it was Washington or Lafayette.

     The statue’s identity is an old problem. I first became aware of that in 1963, when a reporter for Channel 10 was looking for a gimmick to acknowledge Washington’s birthday. A view of the statue was shown on the 11 o’clock news.

     John Facenda hadn’t even finished wishing the audience a good day tomorrow when a phone caller told the station that the statue was not George Washington, but Ludwig Von Steuben, the Prussian general who trained the Continental Army. Another caller said it was Lafayette.

     Next day, the reporter called the City Representative’s Office about the statue. He was told that the horseman was Gen. “Mad Anthony” Wayne.

     The newsroom copy boy was sent to visit the statue and compare it to a picture of Washington. He climbed up among the bronze buffaloes to get a close look, which aroused the ire of a Fairmount Park Guard. (Ire arousal is a basic law enforcement activity.)

     After release from the clutches of the law, the kid told his TV news bosses that the statue was Lafayette astride Von Steuben’s horse. Lafayette’s horse had been shot in battle, and he had borrowed Von Steuben’s. Some of the Channel 10 newsies believed him for a while.

     Then I got interested, and did a little research. I found that the statue’s beginnings go back to 1810, only 11 years after Washington died, when the Society of the Cincinnati, an organization of Washington’s former Revolutionary officers, started a fund for a monument to their old commander. Plans were interrupted by the war. (Of 1812, that is.)

     Gen. Lafayette visited from France in 1824, and seemed to expect to see some kind of memorial to Washington in Philadelphia. Embarrassed locals started another fund drive, but nothing came of it.

In 1832, the centennial of Washington’s birth, fund raising began again. A base for the monument was placed in Washington Square. I think remnants of it are still there.

     A movement was started in 1880 to merge the several funds, which led to a battle among various factions over the money, and over the location of the statue. That went all the way to the Supreme Court.

     Finally, Rudolf Siemering, a German sculptor noted for such monuments in Europe, was commissioned. He worked with pictures of Washington, photos of animals, and some live Indian models, to create the granite and bronze extravaganza.

     The monument was dedicated by President William McKinley on May 15, 1897, at the Green St. entrance to Fairmount Park, where it stood before the Art Museum and Parkway were built. It was moved to the present site in 1928. And it’s still really George Washington.

February 18, 2009

by James Smart

Washington needs a grandmom

     There was extensive to-do in the news media about the out-break of government appointees being discovered not to have paid taxes or met other normal obligations. The exposed petty malfeasances of those worthy citizens doesn't seem to bother most folks inside the celebrated Beltway, especially if the exposed person is of the same political persuasion as the unbothered person.

     It's an interesting spectacle when a high-level government operative can say without much embarrassment that it was just an oversight, it just slipped his mind, he just procrastinated, in keeping track of his legal affairs and taking care of his financial responsibilities.

     Ordinary mortals like us may wonder how someone can forget about a tax bill for a sum higher than most of us earn in a year. And did the Internal Revenue Service simply disremember those unpaid taxes of big shots? I have the feeling that if you or I owed them 100 grand or so, they'd be on the doorstep making strong suggestions that we cough up.

     I have reached the age where maybe 85 percent of the population is younger than I am, so there's no use apologizing for being old-fashioned. But most of my generation, growing up in a row house Philadelphia neighborhood, got the idea from our elders that you should pay your taxes, you should pay your bills, and it was a disgrace if you didn't.

     Paying the bills was almost a ritual. After I got to be nine years old or thereabouts, it was often my job. My grandmother would get a sugar bowl out of the kitchen cabinet, dump out currency and coins that had been systematically stored in it, and count out the amount for the gas bill, the electric bill and the telephone bill.

     I would take three carefully filled envelopes Down the Avenue to the major intersection where those esteemed public utilities had offices. In each, persons behind counters would accept the cash, ceremonially wallop the receipt with a rubber stamp, and send me proudly on my way home, duty done.

     Those gas, electric and telephone people also said "thank you." Clerks always thanked customers in those ingenuous days. These days, not only do clerks in stores and offices often neglect to say thanks, but I find myself saying "thank you" to them.

     That would puzzle Grandmom. To her, please, thank you and other expressions of courtesy were basic requirements of life. I often think of her when involved in modern transactions that are faintly devoid of civility.

     One behavior I have had to modify in the past few decades is leaving a hat on inside buildings. It's standard to keep a baseball cap on in restaurants, theaters and public buildings. I've become used to it, but even today, I sometimes think I hear Grandmom behind me in a revolving door, saying, "Take your hat off."

     And when bills are due, though I use checks and the mail now, with no sugar bowl or walk Down the Avenue involved, I'd be uncomfortable ignoring financial obligations, a feeling that apparently is foreign to some Washington insiders. They should have met my grandmother.

February 11, 2009

by James Smart

A bunch of random items

      Random Item One: A local guy got radiation treatment, and the dosage he received was listed as 76 Gy. I consulted a reputable "Dictionary of Science," which I will not further identify, to learn what Gy means. Under "radiation units," the book explained that an absorbed dose of radiation is measured in grays, abbreviated Gy. (The unit formerly used was a rad.) A gray, said the dictionary, equals one joule of energy imparted to one kilogram of matter.

     So I looked up the word joule. The dictionary said that one joule equals 4.2 calories. Then I looked up calorie. The dictionary said that one calorie equals  4.2 joules. I know that modern physics is getting intensely complex, but that doesn't seem likely.

     Random Item Two: A fellow I know moved to an area of Tucson where all the streets are named for famous golfers. There's Arnold Palmer Drive, Tom Watson Drive, and so on. I wrote to ask if they have back alleys with such names as Arnold Palmer Putt. He hasn't answered yet. Maybe he's out in the yard with the birdies.

     Random Item Three:  My column about the switch from analog television signals to digital drew some interesting comments. One was that it's strange that the TV industry makes set top boxes, while at the same time making flat screen sets that would require some fancy balancing to have a box on top. Another was the conviction some people have that the introduction of converters and digital television sets is a government plot. Some say it's so the Feds can keep track of what we're watching on TV. A few believe it goes deeper, and that the digital boxes are going to watch us in our homes.

     Random Item Four: About another column, regarding Saudi Arabia's strict moral code, someone asks the meaning of Wahhabi, the name often applied to the Saudi segment of Sunni Islam. The Saudis usually call their strict code salafi, referring to old Muslim teachings. Outsiders tend to call the beliefs Wahhabi, named for Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab, an 18th century religious reformer.

     Random Item Five: The Web pumps a lot of valuable information into your computer, but also tosses out some really stupid misinformation. One of those sites that culls biographical material from the Web, and presents it to the world without checking, had my occupation listed as "researcher, turn signal enforcement." The site's fact-gatherer, either non-human software or a soft-brained human, had picked up a contest judge's description of a prize-winning column I wrote in 2007, which included the sentence, "He visits Mitt Romney's My Space page and ends up researching the National Campaign for Turn Signal Enforcement." Strange that it didn't list me as a professional Romney-visitor.

     Random Item Six: Future researchers will be confused by the way our news magazines post-date their issues. That thought struck me when Newsweek's "Special Inauguration Edition," dated Jan. 26, arrived in the mail on the morning of the 20th, before Obama was sworn in. (Time's Jan. 26 edition arrived on the 16th.)

February 4, 2009

by James Smart

A cure for graffiti artists

    Four teenagers in Guadelupe, Mexico, complained to their state's human relations commission that some local cops spray painted their hair, shoes and buttocks after nabbing them painting graffiti on some public buildings. The kids obviously didn't get the message. They think their rights have been violated.

    They don't understand that they had first violated the rights of other people by also applying unauthorized paint to personal property. (Shoes, hair and even buttocks qualify as personal property in this situation.)

    Your average urban graffiti artists justify affixing their elaborate decorations on any surface they please by insisting that it is art. Even some members of the legitimate artists' community claim that the perpetrators of that urban scrawl are merely expressing their artistic sensitivity.

    They miss the point that most folks believe that it's poor form for someone to paint unsolicited designs on someone else's wall, no matter how lovely the adornment. It would be equally offensive if someone came along and painted the doors and window frames another color than the owner's choice..

    There are formal murals on walls all over Philadelphia, but even one of them would be offensive if done without the wall owner's permission. There is a deep emotional content underlying possession and control of property.

    For instance, DaVinci did a nice job on the back wall of that dining room at Santa Maria delle Grazie, but you can bet that the monks of the monastery would have been seriously teed off if they had arrived for breakfast one morning and found that Leonardo had slapped that painting up there in the dark of night without asking if it was okay.

    It's annoying that there are serious artists and art lovers who defend the graffiti virtuosos as prodigies of self-expression who should be indulged as they deface railroad embankments and abandoned factories with well-rendered unintelligibilities. It's a form of intellectual slumming, or a patronizing head-patting like a professional musician praising a junior high band concert.

    At the extreme opposite are people who equate the carefully created wall murals of the city with graffiti. They've decided that elaborate murals on otherwise looming blank walls are all right for the "inner city," but have no place in the "better" areas.

    It would be great fun if a prominent American artist, whose work is in museums and collected by all the right people, bought a building on the Main Line or in Chestnut Hill or in Moorestown, and announced that he was going to paint a two-story masterpiece on a side wall. Think of the entertaining arguments that would start among the neighbors.

    As for graffiti, I hope those Guadelupe policemen are not in too much trouble for their attempt at a homeopathic cure. They were just applying a philosophy set forth in Gilbert and Sullivan's 1885 operetta "The Mikado," in which that wise ruler proposed, "My object all sublime, I shall achieve in time, to let the punishment fit the crime." Spray paint the spray painters.

January 28, 2009

by James Smart

Visits from Lincoln and Poe

    There is much observing this year of the 200th birthday of two notable Americans, Abraham Lincoln and Edgar Allan Poe. A search for local connections finds that Lincoln visited Philly four times, and Poe lived in the city for five years.

    Three of Lincoln's visits were as candidate and then president. His first was as a delegate to the national Whig Convention in June, 1848, in the Chinese Museum at 9th and Sansom Sts. Gen. Zachary Taylor, hero of the war with Mexico, was nominated for president. Lincoln was a little known young Illinois legislator.

    An Evening Bulletin reporter at the convention paraphrased a June 9 speech by a man he didn't identify:

    "A delegate arose and said he was a live 'sucker,' and only wanted to say that, so far as 'suckerdom' was concerned, that place was as dark as Egypt in Loco Focoism. They had to fight against fearful odds in 'suckerdom,' but he believes all opponents could be 'licked jist as easy as old Zack'ry licked Santa Anna. Let us all pull together, and we'll lick 'em clean out of their boots.'"

    Illinois was called the "sucker state;"Loco Focos was the nickname of the radical Democrats. The rube rhetoric surely sounds like Abe.

    Lincoln would visit Philly again in 1860, on his way to New York to make the Cooper Union speech that made him famous, in 1861 on his way to Washington for his inauguration, and in 1864 to attend the Civil War fair held in a structure that covered Logan Square.

    Edgar Allan Poe had visited Philadelphia three times, and lived here at five different addresses after he moved from New York in 1839 to be co-editor of Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine. He was an army veteran, a drop-out from both the University of Virginia and West Point, and a prolific writer.

He quit when Burton’s became Graham’s Magazine a year later, but kept writing. “The Fall of the House of Usher” was first published in Burton’s in 1839, and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” in Graham’s in 1841. “The Gold Bug” was published in The Dollar Newspaper, a literary weekly. The detective tale won a $100 prize offered by the publishers for best story.

    Poe lived the longest in an unpretentious brick house on Brandywine St. west of Seventh. With him were his wife, Virginia, his mother-in-law, who was also his aunt, Mrs. Virginia Clemm (he called her Muddy) and their cat, Kate. He had married cousin Virginia in 1836 in Richmond, when she was not yet 14. She was dying of tuberculosis.

    In the Brandywine St. house, while his wife played the harp by the fire, Poe created the poetic fantasies that made him famous. They did not make him rich, however. He was so perennially threadbare and unkempt that the Library Company barred him from the members’ room.

    Poverty did not make him humble. Once, he showed another Philadelphia writer one of his poems. The colleague said it was “uncommonly fine.”

    “Fine?” roared Poe. “It is the greatest poem ever written, sir!’ He snatched back the manuscript and sent it to a New York magazine, which printed it. The title was, “The Raven.”

January 21, 2009

by James Smart

Lost change at the airport

    A newspaper article mentioned that those assiduous operatives who scrutinize our luggage and our persons in airports have accumulated more than a million dollars in small change. It's money that was left behind in those plastic trays into which we empty our pockets to send down the belt through the x-ray contraption.

    That's just the total of spare change reported in 2004 through 2007. In the early years after the 9/11 attacks, nobody was sure what to do with the abandoned coins. Some went into airport lost and found depositories. Most were turned over to the general fund of the U. S. Treasury.

    In 2004, Congress approved the use of the coin collections to help defray the cost of airport security, so it gets counted. It is impressive that inconsequential money that folks forget or ignore quickly added up to a million bucks.

    One report says that, in the period from Sept. 30, 2004 to Oct. 1, 2007 (even airport security devices seem to have fiscal years) the leading airport for small change left behind was Los Angeles, with $89,393. Chattanooga reported only $1.20.

(If you are an airport security worker, please skip to the next paragraph. Thank you.) Now, between the rest of us, do you think that maybe a security checker here and there might put the glom on a forgotten 35 cents or so, once in a while?

    The steadfast guardians of airport security checkpoints get a lot of criticism and complaint, but they have a hectic and sensitive job, and deserve a little sympathy. They are supposed to watch for things that can be used as weapons. Their judgment is necessarily arbitrary.

    There was a fuss among critics of airport security last year when a geologist in an airport was forced to surrender a rock he was taking to a scientific conference. It is quite true that a rock can be used to knock someone silly. But the same thing could be done with your typical carry-on suitcase, and just about everybody getting on an airplane has one of those.

    It's hard to envision a group of terrorists suddenly standing up in an airliner and their leader snarling, "We are taking control of this plane. Don't move. We each have a large chunk of Wissahickon schist, and we aren't afraid to use it."

Someone I know has an artificial knee, made mostly of titanium, guaranteed to agitate any respectable metal detector. She carries official documentation allowing her, knee included, to pass through airport security.

    At some airports, she is waved through the electronic bulwark cheerily. In others, she is made to stand aside for a long and uncomfortable period on her handicapped leg, until someone has a chance to wave a magic wand over the knee and confirm the presence of the metal joint.

    Unlike flesh-covered knee replacements, whole artificial legs are visibly metal, yet folks who have them are not denied airline travel, although those legs would be dandy weapons.

At least, the securers can be sure that the passengers who leave small change behind won't attack the pilot by throwing a handful of coins in his face.

January 14, 2009

by James Smart

Digital TV for rabbit ears

    This is for people who have rabbit ears. No, I'm not recruiting for a carnival side show. I refer to those venerable metal arms on top of the old television set. Still got your 21 inch, 13 tube, 12 channel Muntz? This is for you.

    Next month, as incessant announcements remind us on every channel, the government will compel TV stations to throw the switch on the old analog channels, and replace them with digital signals that make it possible for folks to see high definition broadcasting and for a lot of manufacturers and also the U. S. Government to make some money.

    Allow me some low-scale bragging. I warned in a column in May, 1997, that Uncle Sam was going to shut down the existing TV channels, when little had been written about it. The time has come, with results too complicated to deal with comprehensively here.

    People who keep track of Dr. House, Dr. Phil and Dr. Ducky via cable or satellite don't have to make any changes. If they don't have a high definition set, they will see the digital picture in low-def. Satellite transmissions are digital to begin with.

As an early test of the change, Wilmington, N. C. television "transitioned" (a government verb) on Sept. 8 without much commotion.

    Only broadcast stations must change in February. Cable companies can do as they please, as usual. Changes may hit cable users later. But this column is for rabbit ears people (or rooftop people,) and I suspect that there are more of them than the TV industry believes.

    The government dispensed $40 cards to help such citizens pay for a converter box. Some who bought boxes learned that their old ears didn't work, and had to buy newer ones.

    Once connected, they found that several local stations already have digital signals they can watch. A few have two; Channel 10, for instance, has its regular programs on 10-1, and an NBC weather channel on 10-2.

    They also found that contrary to the FCC list of "DTV Stations on Air" on the Web, one or two are never available, and others are okay part of the time and apologize "Weak Signal" or "No Signal" at other times. And they are occasionally annoyed when the picture crumples briefly into what looks like something done by Picasso on a bad day. It's pixellation, which can be caused by assorted weather conditions or even by a satellite passing in front of the sun.

    The reason for the new system is that analog frequencies are dandy for cell phones and other newfangled uses, and six digital channels can fit in the bandwidth of one old-time analog channel.

    In the early days of radio, national and international agreements decided who could use what frequency. The Federal Radio Commission was created in 1927 (and renamed the Federal Communications Commission in 1934) to control call letters and license the use of frequencies. Control of TV naturally followed. The government, exercising that control, already has cheerily begun auctioning off the old channels, raking in nearly $20 billion.

    But don't worry about such stuff. You can still see Oprah with just rabbit ears.

January 7, 2009

by James Smart

Saudi Arabia lightens up

    Our valued friends, allies and oil suppliers in Saudi Arabia have been in a good mood lately. There were reports last month that there were a public showing of a movie, an advertising campaign to ask Saudis not to beat or starve their servants, and an attempt by the religious police to improve their image by being nice (when not busy beating up somebody who skipped prayers.)

    The movie was the first one shown legally in public in Saudi Arabia for 30 years. Saudi citizens watch films at home on DVDs and television. The new film is the second production by an entertainment company owned by a Saudi prince who is an oil tycoon on the side. It drew big crowds when it was shown in auditoriums in two Saudi cities. It's called "Menahi," and is the movie version of a hit Saudi TV comedy show about a simple farmer who gets into funny situations.

    The newspaper and TV ads urging good treatment for servants has drawn some support and some criticism in the Arab world. Many households in oil-rich Saudi Arabia's 28 million population have a servant or two, often including a driver for the women of the family, who aren't allowed to drive. There are an estimated 8 million servants, about one for every 3.5 persons

    The workers come from many countries, notably India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia and the Philippines. The Human Rights Watch organization has reported instances of domestics working without pay, in forced confinement, with inadequate food and an excessive workload, and with instances of physical abuse. (Slavery in Saudi Arabia was abolished only in 1962, and a few folks may not have gotten the message.)

    The religious police, the Mutaween, often translated as "pious men," are from an organization called, in English, Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. They patrol streets and businesses, and sometimes pop into houses unannounced, and arrest or beat unrelated men and women caught chatting, storekeepers who don't close during the five daily prayers, someone ingesting alcohol or pork, homosexuals, prostitutes, or listeners to foreign music CDs. There was a report that some Mutaween tried to improve their image by going bowling with  young people. (The Mutaween won. If I were one of those kids, I would let them win, too.)

    One chap last year was arrested and punished for sending a Valentine card. The nation recognizes only two holidays, religious observances called Eid. Citizens are not supposed to celebrate birthdays, not even Muhammad's.

    As Saudi Arabia struggles to catch up to the 21st century, the World Wide Web presents a problem. All Web material must pass through a massive government filter system to block out undesirable content, such topics as religious tolerance, sex, booze, lingerie, Western film or music, and uncomplimentary mentions of Saudi Arabia or Islam. The system filters out the "Women in American History" section of the online Encyclopedia Britannica.

    Meanwhile, watch the movie advertising, in case "Menahi" comes to a theater near you.

December 31, 2008

by James Smart

A big year for the Middles

    We've come to the end of an interesting year, with significant changes in the White House and on Wall Street. It was a big year for Middles. Globally, we continued to deal with trouble in the Middle East, and in politics at home we heard a lot about Middle America and the Middle Class.

    Middle America is the political code name for the good folks who live in the Heartland, in small towns or on big farms, happy that they aren't condemned to live in big cities full of snooty elitists and homicidal drug dealers.

    The Middle Class exists in the Heartland, too, but is mostly identified with urban areas. Middle Class people are those who don't consider themselves poor, but don't consider themselves rich, either. Economists and demographers probably have a formula to determine who is Middle Class, but it's a pretty loose classification.

    Another Middle revealed itself strongly in 2008. That was the white people in the Middle of the racial attitude scale who voted for Barack Obama.

    All year, pundits and analysts and political soothsayers fretted over the potential response of white Americans to an African American candidate. Typical Liberal election observers, and typical African American election observers, both heavily invested in the notion that racial prejudices trump most other attitudes and opinions, worried that white voters in that racial Middle would reject a black candidate.

    The truth is that members of that white Middle have, for generations, not been nearly as racist as the social activists believe. They merely accepted the ever-shifting status quo that was created through centuries of struggle for racial equality.

Many average people, of any color, just go along living their lives, working, raising children, enjoying life when they can, making do. The opinions of Middle white citizens lay between the extremes of racial equality. They weren't going to take part in any civil rights demonstrations, but they weren't going to burn any crosses, either.

    Folks in that Middle of the last few generations generally assumed that everybody should stay "in his place," and be content. That was prejudice, but not hatred.

    In a taproom in a working class Philadelphia neighborhood 50 or 60 years ago, when the city's African American population was beginning to increase, if you asked the guys at the bar what they thought about black neighbors moving in, they would be negative about it, to say the least. If you pointed out that there were already black residents in the neighborhood, the guys would explain patiently, "Sure, but they've been here a long time." It was the status quo thing. Since then, gradually, "they've been here a long time" in sports, entertainment, the workplace, politics, government, everywhere.

    Those white Middle people, so often expected to be biased, quietly voted for the president they perceived to be the best, regardless of color. Why did so many so-called experts not know how that Middle really thinks? Maybe because the 2008 election was the first time anybody asked them.

December 24, 2008

by James Smart

A visit from St. Nick's poet

    Twas the night before Christmas, and no part of my computer was stirring, not even the mouse. I was dozing a bit, trying to think of something to write about Christmas, when my wondering eyes noticed an old guy sitting in the chair by the book shelves.

    "Who are you?" I asked.

    "My name is Clement Clarke Moore," he said

    "The poet?"

    "That's right," he said.

    "But, you're dead."

    "I'm a ghost," he said. "Deadness is a basic requirement for ghosthood."

    "You wrote 'The Night Before Christmas'."

    "No," Moore said, puzzled." I never wrote anything of that title."

    "It begins, 'Twas the night before Christmas. . ."

    "That poem's title was 'A Visit from St. Nicholas'," Moore corrected. "I wrote that for my six children in 1822. Some of the old time Dutch families in New York, where we lived, called St. Nick something like Santa Claus."

    "Here's a picture of Santa," I said, showing him a Christmas card propped on the shelf.

    "Wearing a red suit?" Moore scoffed. "My poem says plainly that he was dressed all in fur from his head to his foot."

    "Well, he's into red suits these days. But your poem influenced the way everybody thinks of Santa Claus. Your names for the reindeer have caught on."

    "Yes," Moore recalled, "a miniature sleigh and eight tiny reindeer."

    "There's a ninth one now," I informed him. "His name is Rudolph. He has a red nose."

    "What!" Moore snapped. "Who ever heard of a reindeer with a red nose?"

    "If you ever saw it," I told him, "you might even say it glows."

    "Such nonsense," said Moore. "But I see that your Santa Claus has the nose like a cherry that my poem mentioned. Perhaps people confused that with the reindeer's nose."

    "Santa has the beard white as snow that you described," I pointed out, "and the little round belly."

    "It appears to be a rather large beard and a rather large belly," Moore observed. "Does he continue to come down chimneys with a bound?

    "Yes," I said, "where chimneys are available. There aren't as many fireplaces as in your day. And there have been other changes. For instance, not many dads wear night caps these days, although I suspect that a few football fans may wear Eagles caps to bed."

    "What is a football fan?" Moore asked. "I did mention in my poem that the reindeer were more rapid than eagles."

    "Westbrook is pretty rapid," I said.

    "It's all very confusing," said Moore. "I think I'll be leaving now. It has been nice haunting you. Happy Christmas, and to all a goodnight."

December 17, 2008

by James Smart

Pirates who didn't say "aargh"

    Recent nautical capers of Somalian pirates off the coast of Africa, hijacking big ships and holding them for ransom, has attracted the interest of the current generation,