The Shrinking Book of Numbers

Two things of note happened in our household during Thanksgiving week.  On the day itself, Nancy and I celebrated our wedding anniversary.

Only 56 of them.

The national record for longest marriage is that of Herbert Fisher Sr. and Zelmyra George Fisher, who made it to 86 years, 290 days before Herbert died on February 27, 2011.  Here’s the happy couple on their wedding day:

We are within 30 years and change of setting a new United States record.

The all-time record is held by Karam and Kartari Chand, who were married in India but lived in England when Karam ended 90 years, 291 days of married life by dying on September 30, 2016.  He was 110.

So we’re 34 years and change from setting a new world’s record.

We haven’t discussed it but I’m in if she is.

Incidentally, the longest current marriage is between Evert Stolpe and Annni Lepisto Stolpe, who are still hitched in Narpes, Ostrobothnia, Finland after (as of Thanksgiving Day in the USA) 82 years, 244 days.

Studies show (What The Average Marriage Length In US Says About Your Divorce Risk (fatherly.com) that the highest risk of divorce happens within the first two years of marriage, before there are children to complicate things. The possibilities flare up between years 5-8, the infamous “Seven Year Itch” period. But years 15-20 are average but growing because in this time of late marriages, people reach their 50s, the kids are gone, and who wants to stick around with this person through their declining years when there’s fun to be had?  “Gray Divorce” is increasing.

Apparently, we missed our chances.  Now, we’re stuck with each other, which is fortunately very good for both of us.

When I sent my parents a letter informing them of the upcoming nuptials in 1967, my father wrote back to note of congratulations and hope that we would be as happy as my parents had been.  “We never thought about divorce,” he wrote.  “Murder, sometimes, but never divorce.”

Or something like that.

Bowling Green University’s National Center for Family and Marriage Research published a study that only seven percent of American marriages make it to 50 years or more.

Hooray for Us!!!

The second thing that happened during Thanksgiving week was the arrival of the telephone book.

The 1967 phone book was the first one in Jefferson City to have my name in it.  Right there, Priddy, Bob  1519 E. Miller Street.  It was a third floor attic turned into an apartment reached by a laong narrow flight of stairs. The kitchen was the biggest room in the place.  I lived there for about three months before we moved in together after returning from our Thanksgiving Holiday honeymoon in St. Louis (how old-fashioned that must seem in today’s relationships).

The house number later was changed when the city decided to renumber houses so that there was some logic to addresses (so first responders had a better idea where the fire was or the heart attack or the overexuberant family disagreement).

We later moved to an apartment closer to my work, which was a radio station in a building that no longer exists on Capitol Avenue (the radio station doesn’t exist in Jefferson City, either—it’s one of several radio formats crammed into a single building in Columbia).  Then to a rented house where our Ericofon sat on the floor between the bedroom and the living room.

(Have you seen the video of two 17-year olds trying to figure out how a dial phone works?  Check it out at (107) Hilarious video show 17 year old teenagers baffled by rotary phone – YouTube or another example at (107) Rotary Phone Challenge for Students in 2022 – YouTube).   I’d hate to see them figure out an Ericofon, which was the first phone Nancy and I had as a married couple.

For any younger readers: the dial was on the bottom and there was a button that was pressed when the phone was put down that disconnected the call.

Look back at that 1967 phone book’s cover showing Capital City Telephone Company serving Jefferson City. But there also was Midstate New Bloomfield, Midstate Centertown, Mistate Taos, Midstate Brazito, Midstate Eugene and dial St. Thommas. It had 77 pages of residential numbers with “favored businesses”—meaning they paid more—set in bolfface and 128 Yellow Pages advertising businesses by category.

(United Telephone moved in in the early 70s.  One day I spied a company pickup truck with the first name of the company misspelled, “Untied,” on one of its doors.  I quickly called the newspaper, which ran an embarrassing picture on the front page the next day.)

The phone book for 2020-2021 was 234 Yellow Pages and 70 White Pages. It was small and obviously a lot thinner than that historic 1967 book.  But it was about half the size, top to bottom and side to side—about the dimensions of what is known in the book biz as a “trade paperback” edition—about the size of my Across Our Wide Missouri books. But way thinner.

The new pre-Thanksgiving book had 16 pages of “featured businesses.”  It has 118 Yellow Pages.  And it has only twelve white pages—people who still have land lines.

Nancy found the names of a couple of friends on those pages. I have learned of a couple of other wons.  I felt a strong urge to call them, land line to land line, to celebrate our distinctions.  But I was interrupted by dinner.

Here’s the cover of the new one.

Look at the list of towns. It takes 21 of them to generate just twelve white pages.  I’m not sure how important it is for somebody from Tipoton, 36 miles to the west on Highway 50, to have my home number in Jefferson City but what few people there have phones that don’t fit in their pockets have it now.  Same goes for people in Syracuse, 41 miles away from our house, or Otterville (where the James gang pulled one of its last train robberies), 49 miles away, or Smithton, named for railroad promoter George R. Smith who was so disappointed the town didn’t want a railroad that he moved a few miles farther west and founded another town that would be more welcoming—naming it for his daughter Sarah whose nickname was “Sed” and therefore the town became Sedalia.

Well, we got a little carried away there. But the phone book lets a person with a landline 54 miles west of my landline to call me.  The number is small enough we might invite everyone to a picnic at the Memorial Park Pavilion. We will provide a small Waldorf Salad, without marshmallows because I can’t eat them anymore.

Phone books are one of many commonplace things that remind us of the changes in our world over time.

Fifty-six years of marriage and phone books.  And phones.  We now have three numbers, two of which reside in our pockets unless we’ve forgotten where we put them.

Has anybody ever kept track of how many hours in a year we spend looking for our cell phones?

Anyway—

56 years of family and phones.  And we’re in no mood to hang up.

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The Sacred Burial Site, and Other Musings 

I knew a man named Ed Bliss who wrote the news for Ed Murrow and Walter Cronkite.  They wrote their commentaries; he oversaw the writing of their newscasts.  We often had Ed conduct newswriting seminars at our national broadcast journalism convention.  One day I asked him,  “When is a person no longer ‘late,’ but is only ‘dead?’’  Ed didn’t know.

When will we no longer refer to “the late” Queen Elizabeth II?  Why don’t we refer to “the late Harry Truman?”

King Tut is dead, not “late.”

A related issue showed up a few days ago in a news story that salvagers plan to start plucking unattached objects from Titanic despite an international agreement that considers the wreckage “a sacred burial site.”

What is a “sacred burial site” and does it become less sacred after a certain number of years?

RMS Titanic Inc., based in Georgia, has the salvage rights to Titanic. It plans an expedition next May to shoot a new film of the deteriorating ship and recover any unattached artifacts despite an agreement among Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and France that the wreckage is considered a sacred burial site off-limits to looters and salvors. There is a United States law supporting that position.

RMST, on the other hand, reached an agreement in 1994 with the owners of Titanic (Liverpool and London Steamship Protection and Indemnity Association to be considered the exclusive salvor-in-possession of Titanic. It has retrieved many items from the sinking and has put them on display in museums such as the one in Branson and in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee.  The place is worth seeing.

Video: (12) Titanic Museum VIP Guided Tour in Branson, Missouri – YouTube

The museums are owned by John Joslyn, who led a 1987 expedition down to the Titanic.  The museums hold artifacts recovered after the sinking but not from the wreck of the ship proper.

Other artifacts are housed in other museums in this country, Canada, and the UK.

(Your correspondent has some of the anthracite coal recovered by RMST from the debris field)

RMST says it does not plan to alter the wreckage.  But deterioration of the hull has opened new ways to get remotely operated vehicles inside. Court documents say the company also would “recover free-standing objects inside the wreck.”  The Associated Press reports that includes items in the Marconi (radio) room that aren’t bolted down.

The telegraph that sent out the distress calls that fateful night is a specific target.  RMST wants to pull it out.  A judge has rejected a federal government challenge to that plan saying the historical and cultural significance of that device should not be lost to decay.

There are fears that the creatures and the elements will leave the wreckage nothing more than a huge pile of rust within another twenty years.

Very large.  A couple of months ago the BBC reported on the completion of the most detailed view of the wreck, shaped from more than 700,000 digital photos that create a 3D rendition.  The network superimposed the image(s) on the stadium used for the 2012 Summer Olympics in London.

Titanic: First ever full-sized scans reveal wreck as never seen before – BBC News

or: Titanic: Scan reveals world’s most famous wreck – BBC Newsround

The concept of the Titanic site as being a sacred gravesite brings us back to the “late/dead” discussion.

We have heard of only one human remain found at the wreck site in the many dives to the site, a finger bone with part of a wedding ring attached that was concreted to the bottom of a soup tureen.  It was retrieved but was returned to the sea floor on a later dive. It is generally concluded that the passengers’ and crews’ bodies have long ago been consumed by various deep sea organisms.

Some have pointed to shoes on the ocean floor as being remnants of the people who wore them.  But that contention is questionable.

Some argue that the Titanic is a graveyard—-an argument heard at the Arizona memorial at Pearl Harbor and for other lost (and many later found) ships.

But if the bodies have long since disappeared, is it valid to consider such sites as sacred graveyards?

And how long must a body be dead before it can be removed from its burial site, perhaps to be studied by various kinds of scientists?

The mummies of Egypt, mummies found high in the Andes mountains, bodies preserved in peat bogs in northern Europe, skeletons excavated at Williamsburg, Virginia—all of these people clearly are not “late” and society does not demand that they stay buried.

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990, however, requires that Native American remains that are unearthed or located be transferred to their lineal descendants, for reburial—-the sacred ground philosophy.

And that raises a secondary question.  Is it sacred ground only because it is OUR ancestors, OUR people?

And why shouldn’t the Titanic be explored and artifacts be brought to the surface?  Are we dishonoring the dead by displaying the clothes they were wearing when they died—long after any physical trace of the person who wore those clothes has disappeared?  Or are we instead honoring their memories?

An autoworker in Wichita, Kansas—Joe Combs—was looking for answers when he saw pictures from the titanic debris field of shoes:

Titanic Shoes: Myth & Reality | joeccombs2nd

I think your thoughtful correspondent comes down on Joe’s side—that we honor the victims of the great tragedy—-and those who died less tragically hundreds or thousands of years ago by seeing something tangible about them and in doing that we recognize they were people rather than one of x-number of casualties of a tragedy or citizens of lost civilizations.

This concept is brought home strongly at the Titanic museums when entering visitors are given a card with the name of one of the ship’s passengers on it.  At the end of the trip through the museum, the patron can learn if “they” survived or died in the sinking. It’s a good way to humanize the experience.

As for referring to someone as “the late,” maybe we have the answer.  It comes from Robert Hickey, the director of the Protocol School of Washington. In his 550-page book, Honor & Respect: the Official Guide to Names, Titles, and Forms of Address, he writes:

Use ‘the late’ before a name of someone who is deceased – often recently – when one wants to be respectful. For example, on a wedding program:

—-John Smith, the bride’s uncle, will give away the bride in place of her father the late Thomas Smith.

—-The groom is the son of Mrs. James K. Gifford and the late Stephen R. Gifford

Some style guides say a person can only be ‘the late’ if they have been dead less than a decade. 

That sounds like a reasonable guideline.  Even at that, ten years is a long time to be late.

 

How Could Anyone Survive?

Readers of these columns who bypass the Tuesday entries because they deal with sports, especially automobile racing, might want to stick with us for a while today because we’re going to explain how a miracle happened Saturday night—or maybe it wasn’t a miracle because the event had been anticipated and a plan was in place..

NASCAR has not had a fatal crash in one of its major touring series since Dale Earnhardt Sr.’s death in 2001.  Saturday night, at Daytona, with the laps winding down and drivers desperate to claim one of the sixteen spots in the Cup series playoffs, Ryan Treece got turned into the car of teammate Chase Briscoe.  What happened next is recorded from the NASCAR site, NBC Sports, and Youtube:

treece crash nascar – Google Search

It is difficult to quantify what we have just watched here—a 3,500 pound car travelling 200 mph or thereabouts rotates in the air about thirteen times, strikes the ground about five times and finally lands on its wheels.

Treece got out of the car and stood talking to medical personnel before he laid down on a stretcher and was taken to a hospital for observation.  He was sent home the next day.

If your or I were to roll our car at, say, a mere 70 mph, our chances of survival would be limited even with airbags and seat belts and shoulder harnesses.

Treece survived because his car protected him.

Here’ s a drawing from NASCAR of the frame of his car.

The center section is welded steel designed to keep the roof from collapsing.  Along each side is foam padding to minimize damage from side impacts. But it’s the roof that is the key in this crash.  The cockpit was so rigidly built that when the car stopped after landing on its top during its long series of rollovers, the windshield was still in place and the roof was still up. The roll cage is designed to withstand forces from all angles.

The driver sits low within this cage in a seat that is made to fit his body with side and leg protections built in.

The driver is tightly strapped to his seat so his movements are severely limited despite the g-forces generated by an extreme crash of the type Preece experienced.  Not visible in the picture but required by NASCAR is the HANS device that was mandated after Earnhardt’s death from a basilar skull fracture, a severe movement of the head forward and back in a collision that causes a spinal breakage.  The Head and Neck System is a collar that slips over the shoulders of the driver and is attached to the driver’s helmet, limiting the movement of his head in a collision.

In Preece’s case, he probably took his hands off the steering wheel and probably crossed his arms during the barrel rolls —so that his arms and hands did not fly around—and rode it out.

Earlier this summer, Indycar driver Simon Pagenaud survived a similar horrifying rollover crash. The video of the crash starts at about 2:45 into this excerpt from the NBC broadcast.

Simon Pagenaud walks away from wildest crash of IndyCar career; will miss Mid-Ohio qualifying – NBC Sports

As you watch Pagenaud get out of his car and walk away, you’ll seen the HANS device as the black collar on his shoulders.  His personal seat, tight seat belts, and HANS device kept him anchored inside the safety of the car’s cockpit.

A few years ago, IndyCar adopted what it calls an Aeroscreen, a cockpit protection system that not only provides greater protection than a roll bar provides, but also provides protection against foreign objects getting into the cockpit during a crash. The system was developed after debris from a crash struck driver Justin Wilson, causing fatal head injuries in 2015.   Pagenaud has ben ruled out for the rest of the IndyCar season because concussion symptoms remain.  We’ll learn soon whether Preece’s crash produced concussion symptoms, too.

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Now the races—

(NASCAR)—Chris Buescher has won for the third time in last five races to establish himself as the driver with the momentum going into the last ten races of the year that will decide the eventual NASCAR champion.

Martin Truex Jr., finished the first 26 races as the regular season champion despite crossing the line 23rd at Daytona.

Buescher’s win was good news for a guy who finished 12th in the race, Bubba Wallace, who is the last driver to make the 16-driver field on points.

(L-R)  Kevin Harvick,  Michael McDowell, Joey Logano, Ryan Blaney, Christopher Bell, Kyle Busch, Denny Hamlin, William Byron, (the regular season championship trophy), Martin Truex Jr., Kule Larson, Ricky Stenhouse Jr., Ross Chastain, Tyler Reddick , Chris Buescher, Bubba Wallace  (NASCAR photo)

Buescher was second on the last restart of the race—after the Preece crash—with teammate Brad Keselowski behind him.  Keselowski pushed him into the lead and the teammates finished 1-2, the first 1-2 finish for what is now Roush-Fenway-Keselowski racing since Columbia’s Carl Edwards and Ricky Stenhouse Jr., went 1-2 at Briston in 2014.

The 1-2 finish was the first for RFK Racing since Carl Edwards and Ricky Stenhouse Jr. claimed the top two spots for owner Jack Roush at Bristol in 2014.

The first three-race round of the playoffs will be next Sunday at Darlington.

(INDYCAR)—Scott Dixon has outrun two other drivers whose COMBINED ages are only one year more than his.  Dixon, 43, famous for stretching a gallon of fuel farther than anybody else in IndyCar, finished more than 22 seconds ahead of Pato O’Ward, 23, and David Malukas, 21.

Dixon started 16th but ran a three-pit stop strategy while other drivers were making four or five, and led the last forty laps with an unaccustomed time cushion. He led 123 laps at World Wide Technology Raceway within sight of the Gateway Arch. It’s his 55th career victory, second only in IndyCar history to A. J. Foyt.  He, O’Ward, and Malukas were the only three of the 218 drivers to finish on the same lap.  His winning margin over O’Ward, 22.2256 seconds was the biggest margin for an IndyCar race in track history.

Defending champion Josef Newgarden was hoping to win all of the oval races on the IndyCar schedule this year. He led 96 laps but got into the turn two wall trying to regain the lead just past the halfway point. The crash also put him out of contention for the national championship.

Season points leader Alex Pallou was seventh and saw his lead over Dixon shrink to 76 points with two races left in the season—both on road courses, which are more to his liking.  If Pallou comes out of the next race, in Portland, with a lead of 55 points, he will lock up the championship.

Pallou and Dixon are teammates at Chip Ganassi Racing.

(FORMULA ONE)—Max Verstappen has won his ninth F1 race in a row, equaling Sebastian Vettel’s record set a decade ago. It also was his 12th straight victory from the pole, equaling a record set my Michael Schumacher in 2003-2004.

The Dutch Grand Prix was run on Verstappen’s native ground.

But he wasn’t the only record-setter.  By finishing second, Fernando Alonso broke Schumacher’s record for most days between first and last podium finishes (7,399 days).  And with Alonso having a solid year, this might not have been his “last” podium finish.

And it was a distinguished day for Aston Martin, which achieved its first podium finish in the 64 years it’s been competing in F1.

—FOOTBALL—

(MISSOURI TIGERS)—Our first look at what Coach Drinkwitz has molded this year will be Thursday night against the South Dakota Coyotes of the Missouri Valley Conference.  Missouri has never lost against a Football Championship Subdivision team—that’s a Division One level below the really big-time schools.

South Dakota as 3-8 last year. Missouri is 20-0 agaianst FCS Schools.  Drinkwitz says the Coyotes are a “very good football tam” with a “great head coach.”  The coach is Bob Nielsen who is 32-42 in seven seasons.

Coyotes like to run and these do—averaging about 185 yards a game on the ground last year.

Their starting quarterback has some top division experience. Aldan Bouman was at Iowa State Last year, completed 61% of his throws. Eight of them were for touchdowns. One was intercepted.

Missouri could use multiple quarterbacks—last year’s starter Brady Cook, redshirt freshman Sam Horn and maybe Mike Garcia, who transferred to Missouri from Miami in the off-season.

(CHIEFS)—The Chiefs open their NFL season the Thursday after Labor Day. The Detroit Lions will be at Arrowhead.

—BASEBALL)—

The St. Louis Cardinals need to win six more games (going into Monday’s night’s contest) to eliminate the possibility of losing 100 or more games this year. They start the week 56-75.  The Cardinals opened a series last night in St. Louis against the Padres. The Royals were at home against the Pirates

The road is tougher for the Royals. They’ve already lost 91 games (as of Monday night). They have to go 21-8 or better to stave off the 100-loss year.

The Cardinals have been playing miserable baseball for a week and a half.  They’re 2-9 going into last night’s game and they’ve been outscored 73-30.

The Royals also are 2-9. They’ve been outscored 66-36.

What will these teams look like next year?  Mark your calendars:

The Cardinals first spring training game actually is two games. They’ll split their squads and play the Mets and the Marlins on February 24.  The Royals first game will be on the 23rd against the Rangers.

Just thought we’d give you something to live for.

 

 

Bye, Bye, Bulbs 

If you have them, use them. They’re still legal.  But once they’re gone from the store shelves, they’re gone, period.

The incandescent light bulb, perfected by Thomas Edison almost 150 years ago, is being turned off.

There are likely to be some nut cases who will say the federal government will be sending agents around to your house to confiscate all of your light bulbs.

That’s a crock.

Sixteen years ago, President George W. Bush—a Republican—signed a law that set new efficiency requirements for lightbulbs and started a timeline to phase out incandescent light bulbs.

But through the years there have been individuals and groups who have decided it is highly-profitable to convince people they are victims of government (as opposed to being thinking partners in it), and the humble lightbulb has become part of a broader conspiracy theory.

President Trump bought into that and rolled back the Obama administration’s rules phasing out the Edison bulbs in favor of more energy efficient lights. Vanity might have played a role in his decision because he once complained to Congressional Republicans, “I always look orange” under LED lights.

There has been a lot of speculation about that and lights have nothing to do with his orangeness.  Mother Jones has suggested Trump’s close friendship with Steve Hillbert might be a reason. Hilbert is the CEO of a company that makes tanning products. The magazine says they became friends about the time people began noticing Trump’s hue. (Melania reportedly got a one-million dollar contract to promote the Hillbert company’s line of caviar-based skin products).

Trump’s longtime personal doctor has suggested the coloration might come from Rosacea, a skin condition that produces redness of the skin.

Informally, we might suggest that his constant rage against those who suggest he seriously disregarded the statutory rules of public behavior might contribute to his coloration.

We have wandered afield from our intended topic.

The Biden administration’s Department of Energy reinstated the policy in April of ‘22 with a new rule that says light bulbs have to have a minimum of 45 lumens per watt. Light bulb maker Phillips says traditional light bulbs that have come down from Edison’s time produce one-third of that amount.

Lumens are ways to measure brightness. And, actually, modern LED bulbs produce 75 lumens per watt.

The rule does NOT mean you and I must immediately throw out our incandescent light bulbs—or the government will force us to do so. It DOES outlaw the manufacture and sale of them, though.

And there are several kinds of incandescent bulbs that can still be made and sold in our stores.  The Department of Energy says they are:

  • Appliance lamps, including fridge and oven lights
  • Black lights
  • Bug lamps
  • Colored lamps
  • Infrared lamps
  • Left-handed thread lamps
  • Plant lights
  • Flood lights
  • Reflector lamps
  • Showcase lamps
  • Traffic signals
  • Some other specialty lights, including marine lamps and some odd-sized bulbs

Why is the government making this switch?  Because these lights are more energy efficient and because they will lessen the human impact on climate change.  The DOE thinks these bulbs eventually will save consumers about three-billion dollars in utility bills.  The department also estimates they will reduce carbon emissions (a factor in global warming) by 222 million metric tons in the next three decades, the equivalent the carbon dioxide emissions of 28-million homes.

A metric ton is about 205 American pounds more than an American ton.

We have several of the old-fashioned bulbs in our fixtures at our house. It is legal for us to use them until they burn out.

The United States Energy Information Administration’s 2020 Residential Energy Consumption Survey says about half of all American households are using LED bulbs already.

The changeover to higher-tech lighting isn’t done. Compact fluorescent bulbs are next on the ban list.  Last December the DOE proposed a rule saying the minimum lumen level would have to be more than 120, a move that would, in effect, ban CFL bulbs. That rule is to go into effect at the end of next year.

All of this conveniently fits into the right-wing conspiracy theory that federal agents will soon be confiscating our gas stoves.

Everything is a big conspiracy these days. It helps gin up a too-sizeable segment of the population willing to immediately believe almost anything that can be manipulated into a profitable anti-government movement.

Your light bulbs are safe, folks.  Your stoves are, too, but that’s another story for another day.

Lost, Strayed, or Stolen

I have often said computers are wonderful things because they can teach us new and innovative ways to cuss.

A few days ago as I was moving a bunch of pictures into a new file, they wound up in the wrong place.  In getting out of that place I appear to have hit a key that wiped out my shortcut to the files of great thoughts that I have prepared for this space.

I have been assured by my Geek Squad consultant that the files are not lost. They have just strayed into an unknown place.  I would offer a reward for their return if I thought they were stolen. So,while I am searching I will be able to post only new lightning strikes of wisdom.  And since Nancy and I shall be traveling for a few days the search will be suspended.

But I have found that travel can produce new wisdoms.

Years ago, in the so-called Golden Days of Radio, there was a popular show called “Mr. Keane, Tracer of Lost Persons.”  The comedy trio of Bob & Ray parodied the show with a routine called “Mr. Trace, Keener than Most Persons.”

Should any of you be more “Mr. Trace” than “Mr Keane,” your suggestions will be appreciated.

Unfortunately, the only reward will be getting to read the lost wisdom.

 

Remembering the Shade Tree Mechanic

You have to own a really old car these days to do your own significant repairs.

Back when I was in college, there was a day when I helped someone replace a head gasket on their car’s engine.  We did it in the yard, under a shade tree, on a warm July day.

Changing the oil, changing the spark plugs, replacing burned out bulbs in the tail lights—-simple enough work; putting on a new head gasket was a little more complicated, but it would be done.

When I bought my car  nine years ago (gasp!), I popped open the hood about the second or third time I got gas so I could check the oil.  I spent several minutes trying to find the dipstick.

Heck, I couldn’t even find the engine!  It was, and is, under some big plastic cover. The only things readily visible were the radiator overflow tank, the windshield washer fluid reservoir, and access to one pole on the battery.

I got frustrated and resorted to reading the owner’s manual.

My car does not have a dipstick.

If I want to check the oil I have to turn on the car, turn a knob that brings up the correct maintenance category on the screen, scroll down until I get to “oil,” and it tells me how much I have left and how many miles I can go before I need to add more.

I have had my car now for more than nine years.  I bet I haven’t opened the hood more than ten times for anything other than cleaning dead leaves out of the windshield wiper resting areas and pouring stuff into the windshield washer fluid reservoir.

A few days ago I got a warning on my dashboard that my right turn signal wasn’t working correctly.  A few days later my dashboard told me my right brake light wasn’t working correctly either.

Understand that I am no more mechanically oriented that my cat is capable of typing Hamlet on my computer.  So I took the car to the dealership in Columbia where, after it was plugged into a shop computer, the dealership learned that indeed, my turn signal and tail light weren’t working.  The cost of this computer diagnosis was $99.

In the old days I would have had Nancy go stand at the right rear corner of the car and I would ask her to tell me if the lights were working.

Then the service manager told me they couldn’t fix the car that day because they had to order a new taillight assembly.   So I’m headed back to Columbia Wednesday, the seventh day after paying $99 dollars to have a computer tell me something Nancy would have told me for free.

And replacing a light bulb is out of the question.  I need a whole new “assembly.”   I don’t know how much the assembly will cost or how much the labor will be to install it.

Probably a whole lot more than I would have spent at the local auto parts store for two light bulbs in the old days.

Junking Up the Place

We were chatting with our minister, Dr. Michel Dunn, at breakfast in the Capitol restaurant last Thursday morning about the upcoming Earth Day weekend and a new program at our church that aims to reduce our carbon footprint—-another one of those phrases that is fingernails on the blackboard to some folks (even those who think a tree needs a good hug sometimes).

We talked about how mankind has an outstanding record of trashing its surroundings.

We once did a story at the Missourinet about how much it costs the Highway Department to pick up roadside trash in which we said the department spent the equivalent one year of the costs of building a two-lane highway between Jefferson City and Columbia.

One thing led to another in our conversation and we talked about our bigger surroundings—how much junk there is circling the earth. It’s gotten to the point that anybody launching a satellite or a crewed spacecraft has to calculate where the junk is and try to fit the flight within it.  And we’ve heard some stories about the space station getting hit.  Space.com recently reported that as of last December, the ISS has made course corrections to avoid satellite and other debris 32 times since 1999.

The European Space Agency reported, as of March 27:

Number of rocket launches since the start of the space age in 1957:

About 6380 (excluding failures)

Number of satellites these rocket launches have placed into Earth orbit:

About 15430*

Number of these still in space:

About 10290

Number of these still functioning:

About 7500

Number of debris objects regularly tracked by Space Surveillance Networks and maintained in their catalogue:

About 33010

Estimated number of break-ups, explosions, collisions, or anomalous events resulting in fragmentation:

More than 640

Total mass of all space objects in Earth orbit:

More than 10800 tonnes

Not all objects are tracked and catalogued. The number of debris objects estimated based on statistical models to be in orbit (MASTER-8, future population 2021)

36500 space debris objects greater than 10 cm
1000000 space debris objects from greater than 1 cm to 10 cm
130 million space debris objects from greater than 1 mm to 1 cm

How big is that:  Our calculator shows 10 centimeters is about 3.9 inches. Doesn’t seem very big but when it’s whizzing along at 17,500 mph it can cause serious damage.

Some of this stuff eventually will lose enough momentum to burn up as it hurtles out of orbit. But more seems to be going up than seems to becoming down.

*We checked the United Nation’s Office of Objects Launched Into Outer Space  yesterday (Sunday the 23rd) and it was counting 15,442 objects that had been launched into outer space.

And this is just stuff flying around in near earth.

Twelve Americans walked on the moon 1969-1972.  The Atlantic magazine reported in its December 19, 2012 issue that almost 400,000 pounds of human-made material was littering the moon, including these items left behind by the six Apollo landings:

Some of these items were left as tributes. Others were left because the landing capsule didn’t need extra weight as it headed back to the command module and, eventually, back home. The two golf balls were taken to the Moon by Alan Shepherd on Apollo 14. He had the head of six iron golf club modified so it could fit on one of the lunar digging shovels. He hit the two balls, the second of which he said, tongue-in-cheek, went “miles and miles and miles.”  NACA later scanned the film and determined the balls actually traveled about 24 yards and about 40 yards.

Writer Megan Garber also noted various craft were crashed into the moon intentionally, or landed on the moon with no way to get back—more than 70, and that was more than a decade ago.

Now, back to all of that stuff in orbit.  Not all of it us junk.  A growing amount is satellites.  Of late, the biggest (worst?) contributor is SpaceX with its Starlink satellite system.  It wants to have at least 12,000 operational satellites in low earth orbit soon and has applied for approval of—get this—30,000 more. It claims these satellites have the means to move out of the way of things. Space.com reports that SpaceX  already had about 4,000 satellites up.

Jonathan McDowell with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics told Space.com in February, “It’s going to like an interstate highway at rush hour in a snowstorm with everyone driving too fast except that there are multiple interstate highways crossing each other with no stoplights.” as Starlink keeps shooting up satellites, joined with OneWeb and Amazon Kuiper.

Trash above.  Trash below.  We produce it by the ton. Earth day reminds us we can find some better ways to do some things.  At least, a little bit.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes from a quiet  street  (Happy New Year edition) 

For the rare and cherished few who expect to find something new on this site a couple of times a week, we must explain that it is not because we had run out of pithiness. It is because a company that calls us a “valued customer” apparently doesn’t value our customership very much at all.

On September 29, Mediacom laid a cable on top of our street to restore our internet service after the Socket folks ripped up the buried line while digging to install their fiber optic cable.  A couple of weeks later I suggested to the folks at the local Mediacom office that it would be good to bury that cable before the first big snow brought out a snowplow that would collect it—and who knows how many above-ground connector boxes and private mail boxes that the cable pulls down as the snowplow proceeds down the street.

That line was still lying on the street until the afternoon of December 22.  It snowed and as I had told the foretold in the Mediacom office and the first snowplow did yank out the.  I saw several feet of orange cable in the yard of a neighbor up the street. On the 20th, I had visited the local office for a second time and a friendly lady behind the desk said repairs are usually made within 24 hours. I told a nice Mediacom lady from Iowa who answered the company trouble line that I expected this problem to be solved regardless of the temperature (which was below zero, you might remember) within 24 hours. The company sent us a notice that it would be a week before anything was done, that repairs would be made on the 28th and required us to be at home between 10 a.m. and noon.

On the afternoon of the 27th, Mediacom—without ever calling us or ringing our doorbell—stretched a new line across the top of the street. The line was only partly covered so vehicles going over it did not damage it. The next day, the Mediacom tech person who was supposed to respond rang our door bell. We had a nice discussion in which he told me, among other things, that we would lose our internet service as many times as the snowplows came out this winter.  Too bad. But that’s Mediacom Life.

I sent a letter to the editor of the News-Tribune, who published it yesterday. Several folks at church or at the noontime restaurants we checked out told me they agreed with it. They’re apparently valued customers, too.

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I made a big mistake the week before Christmas.

I bought a new computer because my old hard drive was dying.

For the price I paid for the computer, I could have bought about eight of Donald Trump’s superhero cards.

Buyer’s remorse has not yet set in, though.

If you bought any of them, would you let me know if any of them show him as a Capitol policeman on January 6, 2021 or as a Ukrainian freedom fighter?

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There’s this old and somewhat indelicate saying, “When you’re up to your ass in alligators, it’s too late to drain the swamp.”  The release of the January 6 Committee report has called that observation to mind in reference to someone who once promised to drain a certain swamp.

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One of the fun things about researching history is prowling through the millions of pages of old newspapers at the State Historical Society.  And reading the old advertisements is often fun.  I made a copy of a headline for one and it’s magneted to our refrigerator.

It says “Ice Cream is Real Food.”

Now that’s real truth in advertising.

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State Conservation Department Director Sara Pauley Parker wrote in her Missouri Conservationist  “Up Front” column in December of 2021 that she’s a dog person. She wrote, “I especially appreciate dogs that will look you in the eye, know their role in life, and want to serve honorably.”

I’m hoping the Missouri House and the Missouri Senate will be kennels, starting Wednesday.

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It’s hard to beat honey by itself and honey-butter on a hot roll is an unacknowledged delicacy.  A old newspaper ad I came across recently urges people to “Get that quick relief that brings back the normal ‘pep’ and energy. Don’t suffer a minute longer than you actually have to.” The cure?  Dr. Bell’s Pine Tar Honey for Coughs and Colds.

If Dr. Bell’s cure isn’t tasty enough, you might try a spoonful of a variation made by the Certified Hospital Products Company: Pine Tar Honey and Eucalyptus (Mentholated).

Menthol.  That will do the trick.

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Retired Missouri football coach Gary Pinkel has been inducted into the National Football Foundation College Football Hall of Fame, something he could not have imagined after his teams had gone 10-14 in his first two years in Columbia.  In fact, he admits he started wondering if he’d made a mistake going to Missouri and if he would last much longer.

In his first four years the Tigers were 22-25.   But Missouri kept him.

The Tigers played their 34th bowl game a few days before Christmas. (Their 35th bowl game was Covided out a couple of years ago).  Their fourth bowl loss in a row left Eliah Drinkwitz’s record at 17-19.

The fourth year will be a critical one for him, as it was for his predecessor, Barry Odom.  Odom was sacked when his Tigers were 25-25.  But Gary Pinkel was only 22-25 after four years and Missouri kept him.

How have other Mizzou coaches done after four years? Larry Smith was 18-27.  Bob Stull was 12-31-1 before he left the field and became an athletic director at another school.  Woody Widenhofer was 12-31-1 and Al Onofrio was 22-24.

Incidentally, Don Faurot, whose name is on the field on which Drinkwitz’s players perform, was 0-4 in bowl games.

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The last man

We have enjoyed some of the images sent back to earth from the Artemis spacecraft and its crew of three mannequins as it made its first rehearsal for a trip to the Moon.

We suspect an 87-year old man in Albuquerque, New Mexico has noticed them, too.

Harrison Schmidt not only saw the Moon from that perspective; he walked on the moon.

He is one of four surviving Moonwalkers. He is the only survivor of the last manned landing. Harrison Schmitt, Gene Cernan, and Ronald Evans were crewmates on Apollo 17 which lifted off from Cape Kennedy at 12:33 a.m., Eastern Standard Time.

Cernan, the mission commander, climbed back into the Challenger moon lander after Schmitt went up.  He signed a piece of artwork for me shortly before he died five years ago.  The third member of the crew, Ronald Evans, stayed in the command module while Cernan and Schmitt explored the surface.

Schmitt is the only scientist to have walked on the moon. He was a geologist who made one of the more startling discoveries in the Taurus-Littrow region where they landed. On their second excursion outside the Challenger, Schmitt excitedly proclaimed, “There is orange soil!” Cernan assured listeners back on earth, “He’s not going out of his wits. It really is.”

Fifty years ago, in the early morning hours of today, I watched the Saturn V rocket begin taking these three men to the moon.  To say that it “lifted off” is a gross   misunderstanding of what those of us at the press site witnessed that night. It was, simply, the most awesome thing I have ever seen.  Or heard.  Or felt.

The press site was three miles away from Launch Pad 39A. The flames from the rocket were so bright that the camera’s exposure setting barely captured the rocket as it broke ground.  The colors have faded but the memory remains vivid.

We were three miles away but I still was about 100 yards closer than Walter Cronkite and the other broadcasters describing the event.

Imagine a rocket so tall that if it was on the railroad tracks below the capitol would be as high as the statue of Ceres on the dome.  It had to carry so many tons of fuel that the flames and the smoke seemed to boil about it for several seconds as the engines built up the thrust to push all of that weight toward the sky.

For several seconds, night became day for miles up and down that part of the Atlantic coast.

The roar drowned out my voice as I tried to record what I was seeing and what I was seeing was beyond my powers of description.  The ground shook so much that an alligator in the swampy area between us and the Launchpad was startled and crawled up on the shore, causing some of the reporters to scatter.

If you have ever been close to a cannon going off, you probably have felt a concussion against your chest from the explosion of the shot. Imagine feeling that same concussion constantly, powerfully, during that slow climb that soon took the great rocket past the tower and into the darkness of that early December morning. And the roar could still be heard minutes later as the fire of the engines merged into a single distant dot.

My God!

Three men were on top of that thing!  And

They

Were

Going

To

The

Moon.

We knew they were the last, for now.  We had no idea it would be fifty years before another spacecraft capable of carrying humans to the Moon would do it again.

They were 28,000 miles out when one of the astronauts—history has lost which one—turned a 70-millimeter Hasselblad camera back toward where they had started.

It’s called “The Blue Marble” photograph.  It, and Apollo 8’s “Earthrise,” are two of the most widely produced images in photographic history.

No human eyes have seen us this way since Cernan, Schmitt, and Evans saw us a half-century ago.

The Artemis spacecraft is headed back to earth now. It’s to splashdown on Sunday. It will be two or three years yet before another Artemis capsule carries people back to the Moon.

I wonder if any of the twelve men who walked on the moon will be around to greet the next people to go there.

Schmitt is 87.  Buzz Aldrin, the second man to leave footprints there, will be 93 next month. Apollo 15’s Dave Scott, the seventh man to do it, is 90. Apollo 16’s Charlie Duke, the tenth man and the youngest Moonwalker, is 87. Schmitt, the 12th man to touch the moon—although Cernan was the last man to be on the Moon—is the second-youngest.

Only six others who saw the moon up close but never landed are still with us. Frank Borman, who commanded the stirring Christmas visit to the Moon on Apollo 8, is 94.

One of his crewmates, Jim Lovell, who later commanded the most successful failure of the space program on Apollo 13, is the same age. Bill Anders, the third member of that crew, is 89.  Apollo 10’s Tom Stafford is 92.  Apollo 13’s Fred Haise is 89, and Ken Mattingly from Apollo 16 is 86.

My brother-in-law, Curt Carley, who went with me on that trip and who shot the launch image with my camera while I was off trying to verbalize the impossible, and I went to our motel, finally, had a good morning’s sleep, then headed back to his home in San Antonio.  It took a couple of days.  We stopped in Houston at the Johnson Space Center and watched television screens showing us that the men of Apollo 17 were seeing.  In the time it took us to drive to Houston, they had reached the Moon.

There were supposed to be three more Apollo missions but they were cancelled because of shrinking budgets and shrinking public interest.  Short-attention span Americans and their “been there, done that” nature, had other things to do.

It was a time when nothing seemed impossible.

Fifty years have passed.  And I can still feel the pounding against my chest and see with my mind’s eye the moments when night became day at 12:33 a.m., December 7, 1972.

 

The Inner Troglodyte 

My friend Derry Brownfield had a phrase he like to use to describe something that the “smart people” thought was special: Ignorance gone to seed.

I got a new cell phone a few months ago.  My old one was 15 model numbers behind the newest model.

A few days ago I was on a Zoom conference call, away from home and in a place with a lot of background noise.  I took the little headphones with little microphone with me to plug in so I could hear the meeting and unmute myself long enough to make a comment while keeping the background noise from distracting from the meeting itself.

That was when I learned the new phone does not have a headphone jack.  So instead of protecting my meeting attendees from the background noise of my surroundings, I contributed to the noise level at my location by listening to the meeting discussions on my cell phone speaker.

I suppose I would have known about this sort of thing if I had read the operator’s manual for the cellphone.

But it didn’t come with an operator’s manual either.

To get the operator’s manual I had to use the cell phone to get to the operator’s manual website. There were no instructions that I could find that would instruct me how to find the instructions for looking for the instructions.

Oh, and on top of all of that, the company has changed the little thingie that connects the power re-charging cord to the phone, so I couldn’t use the cable from my old phone to charge the new one. And the recharging cord is almost long enough to reach from the outlet to the nearby table where the phone can sit while charging.

So there I was, on the road 400 miles from home.  The charger I keep in my car to re-charge my cell phone had the older thingie on it so I couldn’t charge my cell phone in my car.

The other day I went back to the phone store.  I now own a pair of ear buds that have a wireless Bluetooth connection to my phone.   But I have to charge them to make them work. Fortunately, they came with a power cord with the appropriate thingie on it.  And I got an extension cord for my wall plug-in to charge the phone.

And I got a new car charger.  So now I have to carry two car chargers, one for my phone and the old one because the new charger doesn’t fit the charging port of the tablet we take with us on our trips.

As a result I have more things to worry about plugging in and more things to worry about making sure I pack for a trip. I’m not sure but I might have to leave behind three changes of underwear on the next trip so there’s room in my suitcase for all of the new charging cables, earbuds, and earbud containers.  Plus adaptors for foreign outlets.

That’s quite a racket the phone company has going for it.  I wound up spending $200 so that I can take part in my next remote meeting and so I can make sure my phone is charged enough that I can watch the whole thing.

And I still haven’t found the instruction book.

Sometimes I think cell phone companies and other tech manufacturers change things for the same reason dogs lick certain parts of their bodies—because they can.

Oh well, I can still use the earphones with my desktop computer.  And they don’t need to be charged.