What Would Jimmy Do?

I’ve mentioned several times lately that there seems to be a big increase in conspiracy theories and rumors — even about some pretty mundane things. Things that make you wonder why even bother to make something up about them because they are so insignificant.

My last entry talked about a “conspiracy” to convince people that we say “hello” when answering the phone because Alexander Graham Bell’s girlfriend was named Hello. How stupid is that? But — here’s one that’s maybe even more stupid. A rumor has been circulating that the “creator” of Pringles was cremated when he died and his ashes were put into cans of Pringles and sold to unknowing customers.

Needless to say, I’m petty sure that story/rumor isn’t true. Dr. Fredric Baur was employed as a chemist by Proctor & Gamble; he was assigned the task of finding a way to get around the problem of stale and broken chips in bags — he worked on finding an alternative “chip” and container. He came up with the “saddle” or Heyerbolic Paraboloid shape for the chips. However the chips he produced just didn’t taste very good and he was eventually assigned to a different project. Alexander Liepa was able to improve on the flavor of the chips and is generally considered the inventor of Pringles. Dr. Baur did invent the Pringles can for packaging the chips. The “chips” that the two came up with were originally called “Pringles Newfangled Potato Chips.” But Pringles are made using only about 42% potato based content — most of the rest being from wheat starch and various types of flour, including corn and rice. Because of their ingredients, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration made them change the name because the product didn’t technically meet the definition of a potato chip.

But Fredric J. Baur was proud of his “invention” of the packaging system used for Pringles. He died in Cincinnati, just short of his 90th birthday. It turns out hat he had, in fact, requested his cremated remains be buried inside a Pringles can. Since not all of the ashes would fit in a Pringles can, most of his ashes were placed in a traditional urn. His kids actually decided to honor his request when they were on the way to the funeral home to collect his ashes. They stopped off at a Walgreens and purchased a can of Pringles and some of the ashes were placed in the Pringles container that was placed in the niche with the traditional urn. According to one of his children, there was some discussion at Walgreens as to what flavor Pringles to buy… of course the obvious decision was — “Original.”
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When I answer the phone, I usually say, “hello?” I think most people do. We really don’t think about it, it’s just instinctive… hello is just “what you say” when you answer the phone. Why is that? Well, it turns out that the guy that invented the telephone suggested answering the phone with — not hello — but “ahoy.”

Now this seems like a pretty benign subject…but just like about everything these days, the subject contains rumors and hoaxes. One answers the phone and says, “hello.” Why hello? Well, here’s the story making the rounds. Hello was used because hello was the name of Alexander Graham Bell’s girlfriend. Margaret Hello was the first person with whom Bell conversed on his newly invented phone. Sounds far-fetched, romantic, or maybe stupid, but I guess it would be nice to honor your girlfriend by using her name as a greeting. Of course there are a few issues with this story. One — do you usually call your girlfriend by their last name? Another problem with the story is that Bell didn’t have a girlfriend — he was already married when he invented the telephone. His wife’s name was Mabel Gardiner Hubbard (she took the name Mabel Bell after marriage.) And — she wouldn’t have been conversing on the phone with her husband, because she was deaf since childhood.

At the time Bell invented the telephone, the term hello was being used as a word to garner attention — such as, “Hello, what are you doing?” Or “Hello, who is there?” Hello wasn’t used as a greeting at all. People just didn’t use hello as a greeting — that would have been considered rude. They used the traditional Good Morning, Good Day, or Good Evening. When Bell used the phone, he preferred to use “Ahoy,” which is basically a nautical greeting.

Thomas Edison gets the credit for the use of hello when answering the phone. Edison offered and used “hello” as a standard greeting when using the telephone. He actually suggested the term because there was a need for a greeting that allowed a person to get the attention of the person on the other end of the line. At the time, telephones were an open line, which meant that phones were always connected, one just had to pick up the instrument and start talking.

Bell’s “hello” won out, over “ahoy,” as the accepted greeting when answering the phone. So today, we don’t have to” talk like a pirate” every time we pick up the phone… you can thank Thomas Edison for that.
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There’s been a lot of discussion here (on this blog) lately about Prohibition. It was certainly an interesting time in our nation’s history. When I was growing up, I’m pretty sure Prohibition would have been viewed as a good thing in the church I was raised in… Proponents of Prohibition stressed that the removal of alcoholic beverages from our society would, among other good things, reduce crime. Statistics say that just the opposite occurred. When the 18th Amendment banned the production, sale and transportation of alcohol, the Volstead Act gave the government the authority to enforce that ban. The Internal Revenue Department was charged with regulating the alcohol ban and they took their job very seriously. The commissioner of internal revenue from 1921 to 1929, David Blair, stated that every bootlegger should be stood up before a wall and shot to death. He encouraged people to anonymously report their law-breaking neighbors.

Many religions were probably ok with Prohibition, but some were not. Catholic Churches need wine. It’s written in the Code of Canon Law that uncorrupted grape wine be served during communion. Even though he was obviously very much opposed to the use of alcohol, in 1922 Blair removed the ban from sacramental wine, allowing priests to use wine in religious services. At the same time, doctors could also prescribe it with a special prescription pad. There were, of course, legitimate, medicinal purposes for whiskey. But doctors reportedly earned an estimated $40 million in 1928 by writing prescriptions for whiskey during Prohibition.

While the lifting of the ban on sacramental wine wasn’t intended to be a loophole, it turned out to be one (especially for California wineries.) It pretty much kept wineries making church wine in business during Prohibition. Getting a permit wasn’t easy — Commissioner Blair’s rules included a host of measures meant to keep sacramental wines in the hands of the church. Wineries had to obtain permits from the Prohibition director. A religious leader had to act as the proprietor of the winery when it came to production and distribution, and the same leader had to ensure that the wines were used for religious purposes — not general consumption. No wine was allowed to be consumed at the wineries.

But, as with any loophole, people manage to cram a lot through it. With houses of worship one of the only legal outlets for alcohol, production of holy wine skyrocketed. One estimate is that grape production in heavily Roman Catholic California increased by 700 percent during Prohibition. The increase came despite the fact that at the time, the laity was forbidden to partake of the wine. A lot of people wondered where all that sacramental wine was going if not into the rituals. Someone noted that having a friend in the clergy might lead to better parties, at the very least.

During Prohibition, churches became targets for thieves, or at least for people that just needed a glass of wine. There’s also pretty strong evidence that Prohibition turned a number of priests into bootleggers. There is a book regarding Prohibition written by Edward Behr that contains a story about Georges de Latour, a Catholic and good friend of the archbishop of San Francisco. The archbishop insisted that all the priests in his diocese buy their wine from Latour. Behr concluded that the amount of wine purchased from Latour was so great that is was clear that most of the priests must have been bootleggers as well.

There’s no question that Prohibition was a colorful time in our history and maybe contributed to at least a few violations of the “law of the land” by some clergy. Today, the sacramental wine market is less than a half of one percent of all wines sold in the United States. That number will probably continue to fall as the country becomes less religious.

A legitimate argument can be made that Catholic (and other) churches pretty much saved the wine industry during Prohibition. Thinking about all that wine purchased/consumed by the Catholic Church….. it’s amazing what can make a person get religion, isn’t it?
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If you’ve recovered from last night’s New Beer’s Eve, it’s time to celebrate Beer Day. To recap, National Beer Day is celebrated in the United States every year on April 7, marking the day that the Cullen-Harrison Act was enacted after having been signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on March 22, 1933. This led to the Eighteenth Amendment being repealed on December 5, 1933, with the ratification of the Twenty-first Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. In 2017, National Beer Day was officially recognized in the Congressional Record by Congressman Dave Brat and also officially recognized by Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe. House Joint Resolution 90 was introduced in the Virginia general Assembly to officially recognize National Beer Day in the Commonwealth of Virginia in 2018.

Although a lot of breweries went out of business during prohibition, the brewer of one beer that we usually have in our house — Yuengling, established in 1829, survived with a unique solution. During prohibition, the company sold near-beer products and opened a dairy across from their brewery. The dairy turned out quite well for the company — they produced ice cream for over 65 years, even after Prohibition was repealed.

The first ode to beer dates to abound 1800 BC — the Hymn to Ninkasi, the Sumerian goddess of beer, was found inscribed on a tablet.
Beer is the world’s most widely-consumed alcoholic beverage.
India Pale Ale is the most popular craft beer in America.
Craft beer has lots of silicon in it, which helps build and maintain strong bones.
George Washington, Barack Obama, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison all brewed their own craft beers at home — while in office.

So here’s to National Beer Day, especially to those who suffer from “Cenosillicaphobia,” the fear of an empty beer glass — grab a beer and toast to it never again being empty.
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America’s relationship with alcohol is interesting, to say the least. The United States banned the sale of alcohol for 13 years. That contributed to an entire industry of bootlegging — a term I learned early in life when I was growing up in Oklahoma, a state that was one of the last to lift fairly restrictive laws on liquor sales. But bootlegging in Oklahoma is the subject for another time on this blog. Back to the subject at hand….

Once upon a time, one couldn’t (legally) drink beer in the United States. The government ratified the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920, banning all intoxicating liquors, including beer. And thus began a 13 year period in U.S. history known as Prohibition. But in 1933, the government saw the light and President Franklin Roosevelt ended Prohibition. The date was April 7, so now we celebrate New Beer’s Eve each year on April 6!

I think New Beer’s Eve should be an official Holliday — if you think about it, it symbolizes how the government used to work and how it should work today….  We didn’t always get it right, but when we didn’t, we sure knew how to fix it. Think about all those people that had to go 13 years without a drink and the leaders who realized that was no way to live, committed to fixing it, and did so. Isn’t that the way our government is supposed to work? Maybe it will again someday… there’s always hope. Cheers!
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We got a little newsletter the other day from “Bobbie the Nun” that contained some interesting short articles. The date of the publication was March 27, 2019 and one little blurb mentioned that today (March 27) is “Joe” Day.

We’ve all heard the term “average Joe.” Average Joe, Joe Schmo…he’s bland, vanilla, just average. He’s faceless, but not nameless — and it’s probably not “Joe.” Every country needs a way to talk about just “some guy.” Here’s some of the names listed in the newsletter that various countries use to call that typical guy that probably has no specific qualities….

In Germany he’s Otto Normalverbraucher (Otto “normal consumer” or “middlebrow”); Denmark calls him Morten Menigmand (Morton Everyman); In Australia, he’s Fred Nurk (sounds like a normal guy to me); Russia refers to him as Vasya Pupkin (sounds like a typical schmo); In Finland, the guy’s name is Matti Meikäläien (Meikäläien means “one of us”); In both the UK and New Zealand an average Joe is still Joe — Joe Bloggs (but Joe can also be a Fred in those countries); The Italians just pick a common name — Mario Rossi and the same goes for Latin America… they typically use Juan Pérez to talk about their typical guy.

Everywhere you go, there’s more of us “average Joes” than celebrities or royalty — and there’s nothing wrong with being average. I remember a couple of Presidential elections ago, “Joe the Plummer,” an average guy, played a role in national politics. So what’s in a name? Lots… but no matter the name, he’s still “one of us.”
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Even though, when reading the news, it may seem like every day is April Fools’ Day, today is the real deal. Although today, also called All Fools’ Day, has been celebrated for many centuries by different cultures, the exact origins remain a mystery. A popular theory is that April Fools’ Day dates back to 1582 when France switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar, that was called for by the Council of Trent in 1563. People who were slow to get the news or failed to recognize that the start of the new year had moved to January 1 and continued to celebrate it during the last week of March through April 1 became the butt of jokes and hoaxes.

I mentioned earlier that, especially in Washington, it seems like we’re living a perpetual April Fools’ Day. Sometimes the line between what’s a prank and what’s not isn’t always clear-cut. When Donald Trump announced he was running for president, it seemed like a prank… maybe it was, but the fact that he ended up winning — is it still a prank? I’ll leave that judgement up to you.

But in 1959 something almost similar happened in Brazil… students in Sãn Paulo, Brazil were tired of the city’s overflowing sewers and inflated prices, so they launched a campaign to elect a rhinoceros to the city council — and won. The rino’s name was Cacareco (Portuguese for “rubbish”) and was already a popular figure in Sãn Paulo when the students launched her campaign. The four year old rhino had moved to the city from Rio de Janeiro when Sãn Paulo’s zoo opened, and was scheduled to return to Rio soon. When the students looked at the 540 candidates vying for Sãn Paulo’s 45 city council seats and feared that none of them would address the city’s problems, they decided to make a point by asking people to vote for the popular rino instead. Cacareco won a city council seat with a whopping 100,00 votes — far more than any other candidate. Of course, she didn’t end up serving on the council because the election board disqualified her. But she remains one of the most famous protest votes in Brazilian history.

Maybe if a rhinoceros is on the ballot in 2020, the race might get a lot closer — or — maybe a runaway. Just remember, April Fools’ pranks used to be pretty easy to spot — today, not so much sometimes. That says a lot about our world… I’m not sure if that’s good or bad. But go play a prank on someone — it is April Fools’ Day….
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I was very excited to learn that today, March 31, is National Backup Day. I thought, what a great subject for my blog. When I think about cars, I think about the Model T, built by Henry Ford. We all know it was the first car made that was affordable to “average” people — not just the rich. But the first vehicle developed by Henry Ford wasn’t the Model T, it was the Ford Quadricycle. The Quadricycle was just a frame, powered by an engine that burned ethanol — four bicycle wheels were mounted on it. It was driven by a chain — the transmission had only two gears, first and second. It did NOT have a reverse gear. I think you can see where this story on National Backup Day is going… The success of the Quadricycle led to the founding of the Henry Ford Company and later the Ford Motor Company (in 1903.) But back to the Quadricycle and backing up.

The first 800 Quadricycles actually produced for sale could back up and were put in reverse with a lever. All units produced after that put the vehicle in reverse using a pedal between the clutch and brake pedals. The middle peddle was used to engage the reverse gear when the car was in neutral. After the Quadricycle, Ford went on to produce the famous Model T. Its transmission was a planetary gear type that was billed as “three speed,” but in today’s terms it would be considered a two-speed, because one of the three “speeds” was reverse.

You’re probably wondering what’s the fastest anyone has ever driven backwards… well, a few years ago, a stunt driver named Terry Grant drove a Nissan Leaf (really!) backwards over a course about three miles long and and averaged about 55 mph — in reverse. If you think that’s impressive, in Germany, Marco Hellgrewe drove a truck backwards for 39.7 miles in 5 hours and 21 minutes.

I know by now you’re as excited as I am about back up day, but after putting together all this fascinating data, I’ve been told that National Backup Day doesn’t have anything to do with going backwards — it’s a day that everyone is supposed to make a copy of all their data on their computers. To say I’m a little bummed would be an understatement. I think a day dedicated to backing up should be about…. backing up.
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We’ve had a lot of rain around here lately and it seems like our cars are always dirty, so we seem to spend a lot of time at the car wash. There’s a really nice full-service car wash not too far from our house and we go there often. I’ve wondered what it would be like to be “stuck” in one of those car wash tunnels… well, last week it happened. We were probably half way through the tunnel and everything just stopped. I thought of all sorts of things like what if it never starts again and no one finds us for weeks and weeks. This particular car wash has windows along the side so it really wasn’t super dark — if it had been really dark it might have been a little spooky.

Anyhow, it’s one of those experiences in life that our grandkids probably won’t care much about. I can’t imagine Locke saying, “hey, Poppi, tell me again about that time you were stuck in the car wash.” But if someone wants to play that stupid ‘never have I ever’ game with me, to “been stuck in a car wash” I can answer yes — or maybe no — I forget how it’s played…..
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When I was growing up, one of the things we always did in the spring, was fly kites. Maybe I’ve just missed it, but kite flying doesn’t seem as popular these days — at least not for the “average” kid.

I know they still have the Kite Festival on the National Mall every year (this year it’s Saturday, March 30) but I don’t see many local kids out flying kites. Living overseas in Asia, kites were a big deal, kids flew them all the time… in the streets, off balconies, in the parks — just about anywhere you found kids, there were kites. I used to like to build and fly kites, but neither Dave or Kelly ever showed much interest and I’m pretty sure that goes for our grandkids so far.

A kite is a heavier-than-air craft that depends on the wind to overcome gravity to fly. All kites have one or more surfaces to be acted upon by the wind, a bridle to hold the kite at an efficient angle into the wind and a flying line to keep the kite from blowing away.

In the history of flight, the kite might be number one — existing long before other types of “flying machines.” I couldn’t find any information about when the first kite was flown, but I’m pretty sure they originated in China. I found some information indicating that they were flown in China more than two thousand years ago. One legend suggests that when a Chinese farmer tied a string to his hat to keep it from blowing away in a strong wind, the first kite was born.

One of the earliest written accounts of kite flying was about 200 B.C when the Chinese General Han Hsin (of the Han Dynasty) flew a kite over the walls of a city he was attacking to measure how far his army would have to tunnel to reach past the defenses. Kite flying eventually was spread by traders from China to Korea, and across Asia to India. Each area developed a distinctive style of kite and cultural purpose for flying them.

Over the years, kites have served all sorts of useful purposes — Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Wilson used their knowledge of kite flying to learn more about the wind and weather. The Wright Brothers experimented with kites that contributed to the development of the airplane. During World War I, the British, French, Italian, and Russian armies all used kites for enemy observation and signaling. The US Weather Service flew kites to raise meteorological instruments and cameras. A guy by the name of George Pocock came up with one of the strangest uses of kite power. In 1822, he used a pair of kites to pull a carriage — at speeds of up to 20 miles per hour. Some of his kite trips were recorded at over 100 miles. Because road taxes at the time were based on the number of horses used to pull a carriage, he was exempted from any tolls.

Gas doesn’t seem to be getting any cheaper and the wind seems to blow continuously around here — maybe it’s time to hook a couple of kites to the front of my car….
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