What Would Jimmy Do?

Claire got a message from Mike and Sue who were apparently driving through or by a corn field. I guess that inspired them to wonder how high the corn should be since it’s getting close to the 4th of July. Naturally they asked that Claire pass the question along to me — the smart uncle.

There are a lot of “old adages” that have been passed down through generations. One of those old adages that is still in circulation today is that corn should be “knee high by the Fourth of July.” Besides being kind of a cool rhyme, it was probably somewhat accurate at the time the phrase was coined — probably back in colonial times. Actually there is really no clear explanation as to where, when (or why) the rhyme got started.

When I was growing up a lot of the farmers around Maysville grew corn, even though the “next town over” was considered the broomcorn capital of the world. (You can check the archives of this blog if you don’t know what broomcorn is…) But I remember corn being about 18 to 24 inches high by around the first of July. So “knee high” was probably pretty accurate. However I noticed driving around Shepherdstown this week that all the corn was a lot higher than ‘knee high.”

There’s actually a good scientific reason for this — back when I lived in Maysville, if the corn crop had gotten as high as you knees by the 4th, it meant that the crop was doing well, and the farmers could plan on a good harvest. But today, the corn farmers plant isn’t like the corn the farmers around Maysville planted. The genetics of corn have improved tremendously in the past 70 or 80 years. Corn (and other crops) is much more stress tolerant. That toughness has allowed the corn to be planted earlier in the spring — sometimes it I can even be planted in less than ideal conditions.
So because of the improvements made to the corn, if the crop is only knee high by the 4th of July, that’s not a good sign — it’s a bad sign.

I think the knee high phrase is still popular, but the phrase “corn as high as an elephant’s eye” may be more accurate today. (The elephant’s eye phrase originated in the Oklahoma musical as part of the lyrics from “Oh What A Beautiful Morning.” There’s a bright, golden haze on the meadow. The corn is as high as an elephant’s eye and it looks like it’s climbing up to the sky.) To put this in perspective for you, according to Google, the average size of an elephant is 10 feet tall. So today, a corn stalk’s growing success is held to a much different standard.

While I was doing my extensive research for this blog, I ran across one theory that claimed that the “knee high” rhyme came about during colonial times and meant knee high by the 4th of July to a man sitting on a horse. Of course this begs the question, how tall of a horse? I think horses are measured in “hands” so that complicates things even more.

So today, knee high by the fourth of July isn’t a good thing but it’s got a nice ring to it and it’s fun to say.
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Evolution is strange… thinking back about how things we use today have “evolved” over the years is both interesting and sometimes confusing. Sometimes you wonder why some things stay and some things go.

Aluminum siding kind of evolved into vinyl siding and eight-track players kind of evolved into CDs and then maybe into MP-3 players. And then some things didn’t evolve, they just went away. I’ve had a car almost since I was old enough to have a drivers license. Thinking about the cars I’ve had, white-wall tires have just gone away. So have chrome bumpers. You rarely see whip antennas, curb-feelers, fuzzy dice hanging from the rear-view mirror or those knobs that used to be on steering wheels.

The other day Claire mentioned that cars don’t have wing windows anymore. I’m not sure “wing window” is the correct term but that’s what we called them. In case you’re too young to remember, cars used to have small, triangular windows in front of the driver and passenger windows. These vent windows could be unlocked and then angled outward so they would catch the wind and blow it directly onto your face, or some part of your body that needed cooling by fresh air.

Why these little windows went away isn’t totally clear to me, but I suspect it has to do with air conditioning. Before air conditioning, the little windows were almost the only way to get air to circulate when it was raining (without getting the driver or passengers soaked.) Almost every car today has air conditioning, but that’s a fairly recent thing. And — cars are being made more aerodynamic today, partly because of the need to meet fuel milage standards required by the government.

I remember these windows being fairly easy to open, so it probably made cars easier to break into and when you pushed one of these windows out, it was perpendicular to the car and it funneled in fresh air, but also bugs, including stinging insects. That probably contributed to accidents because of drivers swatting and swerving because of the bugs. Some of the cars had crank-out wing or vent windows, but most versions merely pushed out.

Anyhow, I suspect that wing windows went away as a result of air-conditioning and aerodynamics. I’ve read that cars are actually more fuel-efficient with all their windows closed and the air conditioner on — even when you factor in the energy used to power the air conditioner. Also, when it became easier to produce more complex curved glass shapes it allowed manufacturers to do away with more of those drag-inducing surfaces and surface variations. Sometimes I still think it would be nice to open one of those little triangle windows instead of running the air-conditioner.
They say that evolution is all about looking forward — in this case, just not through those wing windows…
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Yesterday, June 25th, was a special day. I pretty much always update this blog on June 25 for some very special reasons. But I just didn’t get around to it yesterday — I had a couple of jobs to finish and the newest member of our family came over to spend a few days with us. Kona, the Golden Retriever puppy that lives in Leesburg is going to experience country living for a while. Kona’s owner, Emily, is off to a dance competition in Virginia Beach.

But back to the 25th of June. It’s a special day because when that day in June arrives, it is exactly six months until Christmas. But the real reason that the day is so special is because it’s two of my kids birthdays. That’s right — I have two kids with the exact same birthday.

You might note that I said my two kids, Dave and Chassie, have the same birthday. I didn’t say that my son and daughter-in-law have the same birthday. I don’t refer to Chassie as my daughter-in-law or Chris as my son-in-law. When I told them both, “welcome to the family” I meant it — they’re all my kids.

So this blog is a day late and we still haven’t got to celebrate with them, but Happy Birthday Dave and Chassie!!
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We were talking the other day and I’d remarked that something Claire had made was really good. She said that all recipes that have booze in them are good. “Booze” is a funny word — how’d we come to refer to alcoholic beverages as booze?

A number of sources I discovered credited the origin of the term to E.C. Booz, who was a distiller in the United States in the 19th century. I’m pretty sure those sources are wrong because the term was used long before Mr. Booz became a distiller. The first references of the word booze, meaning “alcoholic drink,” seems to have appeared in the English language around the 14th century. At that time, the word was “bouse.” The current spelling didn’t appear until about the 17th century — still long before E.C. Booz and his distillery.

Booze isn’t the only term used to describe some kind of alcoholic beverage — I’ve heard the various beverages referred to as hooch, moonshine, vino, draft, suds, liquid courage, redneck wine and of course native Americans used the term fire water.

Whatever you call it, it’s been around (and popular) for a long time…. I think Benjamin Franklin summed up our relationship with drinking when he said, “In wine there is wisdom, in beer there is freedom, in water there is bacteria.”
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A lot (most) nights we have wine with dinner. Without getting into whether drinking wine is healthy or not, or how much wine is good for you and how much would be bad or any of those other discussions that basically come down to someone’s opinion anyway, the fact is — we drink a fair amount of wine.

The other night, I didn’t have wine, I had a beer. Well, I got to thinking… which was invented first — wine or beer. Extensive research? You bet! Seems like the perfect subject for some of my extensive research. That extensive research came up with a conclusive, “it’s hard to tell” for an answer.

There is evidence of beer production all the way back to the caveman. Some of the earliest of the Sumerian writings by the Sumerians of Mesopotamia (about 3500 – 3000 BC) mention beer. The earliest writings mentioning wine appear to be in the Bible — much later than the Sumerian writings. I don’t recall any mention of beer in the Bible, but I’m not sure that means anything.

One argument (discussion) makes the point that which came first might be dependent on the region of the world. In some areas, grains might be more protected as foodstuffs — in other areas they might be allowed to sit out in containers, allowing natural fermentation to occur. In other areas, fruits could have been more prevalent, and allowed to sit to “cure.” If some of the juice leaked out and fermented, someone probably figured out that might be pretty good to drink.

So after all my extensive research, I’m not sure what to think. I don’t understand either process, but there’s some technique to making beer and I’m pretty sure that wine just happens. If you take some grapes and squish them a little to get some juice out and don’t do anything else — just wait, wine happens pretty much naturally and automatically. If you wait too long, that natural process proceeds to vinegar, but it starts as wine. Maybe not good wine, but wine nonetheless.

So after all my extensive research, my guess is that wine probably came first, because it can just happen naturally. Beer on the other hand, requires a process and people had to figure that out. But I like wine and I like beer. I don’t appear to be alone in that, because both were invented before we got around to inventing the wheel.
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Yesterday, I talked about a phone incident when I was in Peking, China. The time was 1972 and the city was called Peking. Today, it is known as Beijing. Now cities and countries change their names all the time — for a lot of different reasons. But since I mentioned it, I thought it might be interesting to at least one of this forum’s faithful readers to know why it was changed….

When I was growing up and when I first visited mainland China, the capital city of the country was Peking. I’m not exactly sure of the precise day it happened, but Peking became Beijing sometime after 1979. The name wasn’t actually “changed” — it just became Beijing when the Pinyin method of conveying Mandarin in the Roman alphabet was adopted as an international standard. It took a while for the Pinyin system to become an international standard. It was developed by the People’s Republic of China government in the 1950s and (eventually) would replace a system known as the Chinese Postal Map Romanization. That system was adapted from an earlier system — the Wade-Giles system.

The Wade-Giles system was invented in the 18th century by Thomas Francis Wade. As you might have guessed, Thomas was British and fought in the Opium Wars in China. He learned Mandarin and was able to come up with a system that allowed Chinese words, made up of dashed funny symbols to be written using “proper” letters.

If you’re interested, he’s a pretty interesting guy to read about… he was a Professor of Chinese at Cambridge and the British ambassador to China for a while. Anyhow, as Paul Harvey used to say, now you know the “rest of the story.”
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We were watching a program on the History Channel the other evening about all the technological advances made in the 60s before computers became possible. Sometimes we become so dependent on technology and especially our iPhones that we can’t remember how we got along without them.

In 1972, I was in Peking, China for an extend period (Peking didn’t become “Beijing” until after 1979.) Claire was at home in Manila in the Philippines. We missed each other, and she decided to give me a call. In those ancient times of 1972, before iPhones, in most countries, you had to go through an operator to make a long distance phone call. You gave the operator all the information as to who you wanted to call and the connection was made for you (by the operator.)

At the time, most international calls from Manila went through an operator in Tokyo. Claire called the operator in Tokyo and told her she wanted to talk to me in Peking. She had all the information, including the phone number of the hotel in Peking. After a few minutes wait, the operator and Claire had the following conversation:
Operator: I’m sorry, but we don’t have phone service to Peking, China. I can connect you to Shanghai though.
Claire: But I don’t want to talk to Shanghai — I don’t know anyone there. I want to call Peking.
Operator: I can’t connect you to Peking, but I’ll be glad to place your call to Shanghai.
Claire: I don’t want to call a city — I want to call a person. And that person is in Peking.
Operator: Oh, I see. I’m sorry… but if you’d like to call Shanghai, I’ll be glad to connect you;
Claire: Aaaarrrrgggghhhh!

Remember, this was only 1972 — I’ll bet that I could call Peking in less than 10 seconds on my iPhone today. I often wonder if the operator ever got any takers on her Shanghai offer…..
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Special Day around here….
My best friend’s birthday.
Happy Birthday Claire!!!
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We went to Emily’s (end of season?) dance recital last night. There were a lot of dancers and it was pretty long, but Emily just keeps getting better and better. There was a lot of talk about her being the star of the show. I heard that even the Queen of England and Donald Trump had a long conversation during their recent visit about how good she is.

Actually, I don’t care what the Queen and Donald’s opinion is — I think she’s really good and I’m really proud of her. Good job Emily!!!!
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The last time I wrote something here, I talked about tomorrow land becoming today land and then yesterday land. The point was that time somehow seems to have speeded up. I’ve often heard it said (and maybe I agree) that the older you get, the faster time seems to go. I’ve also heard that time flies when you’re having fun. But I’m pretty sure that as you get older, time flies whether you’re having fun or not.

Seems like when we were kids, the summers were long — I never remember feeling rushed at all. Now, just when the weather starts to get warm, we’re getting ready for fall.

So, anyhow, I figured I’d do some extensive research and see if there really is anything to this “time speeding up” school of thought. Interestingly, I found a theory — supposedly a scientifically proven fact — that time really is speeding up. The explanation of how time is speeding up is explained by something called the “Schuman Resonance.” This is a measurement of the resonance, or frequency, of the earth. I don’t pretend to understand it very well, but all matter has a frequency (kind of an electro magnetic “pulse.”) The earth’s “pulse” is measured by Schuman Resonance. When that resonance was first measured in the 1950s, the earth’s frequency was 7.8 hertz. It has recently been recorded at 12 hertz. That means that a 24 hour day now feels like it’s just 16 hours.
If you were, or are, a fan of Einstein you’ll remember that he calculated that the faster we go, the slower time goes and conversely the slower we go, the faster time goes. When an object’s speed increases toward the speed of light, time moves more slowly. If we were in a spacecraft moving at the speed of light for just a few days and then returned to earth, we’d find that while we were gone, decades had passed.

Then there’s another theory of why time speeds up, or at least we think it does as we get older. Maybe time perception is relative to the length of our lives and the number of recurring milestones. When you are doing things for the first time and when you are younger, that experience becomes a big milestone and forms a significant percentage of your life (to date.) As you get older, your life (of course) becomes longer and the percentage of your life taken up by an experience becomes smaller. When you’ve done things before, or do them routinely, they seem (to you) to take less time. Remember when you were a kid, Christmas took forever to arrive. Now it shows up right after Halloween.

My extensive research found a study that asked people of various ages to describe time. I didn’t read the entire study, but the conclusion was that younger people tended to use phrases like, “time is like a motionless ocean” or “time is quiet” to describe time. Older people were more likely to use phrases like, “time is like a speeding train.”

So what’s going on? Maybe time is actually speeding up, or maybe it’s just our perception… but one thing is certain — once time is gone, we can’t bring it back. That should give us all reason to use it wisely. I often think of something Dr. Seuss said, “How did it get so late so soon?”
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