What Would Jimmy Do?

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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And here it is St. Patrick’s Day again — it’s also the closing ceremonies for Cinco de Marcho, that started on March 5. Check the blog entry for March 5th if you’re confused.

St Patrick’s Day, or the Feast of St. Patrick, is a religious and cultural celebration held on 17 March — the death date of Saint Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland. St. Patrick’s Day is celebrated in the United States, but it’s not a “holiday.” In the Republic of Ireland, today is a national public holiday, and the banks are closed. The first St. Patrick’s Day parade in the American colonies was held in New York City in 1762.

I think I’ve mentioned before that when I was working, a guy in our office always went out to lunch for St. Patrick’s Day, leaving about 11:30. You could pretty much set your watch that the phone would ring at just about exactly 4:30. The voice on the other end always said, “ I won’t be back today, I’ve been kidnapped by leprechauns.” Lots of people celebrate the day by tipping a few — green beer used to be very popular, but not so much anymore. Nonetheless, there’s lots of Irish drinking jokes and poems, like: I went out drinking on St. Patrick’s Day, so I took a bus home…that may not be a big deal to you, but I’ve never driven a bus before.” And one of my favorite Irish poems is:
There are many good reasons for drinking,
One has just entered my head,
If a man doesn’t drink when he’s living,
How the heck can he drink when he’s dead?
Happy St. Patrick’s Day to everyone!
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Beware the Ides of March. You can check this blog’s entry of March 15, 2017 for more information on Kalends, Nones and Ides. But why should you “beware the Ides of March?” Well, if you’ve never read Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, there’s really no reason to fear the Ides. Back in Shakespeare’s day, the months of January and February didn’t exist — they were just referred to as “winter.” So March was the first month of the year. Using the Roman calendar, the midpoint of every month was known as the Ides. The Ides of March fell on March 15, that correlated with the first full moon of the year (winter didn’t count.)

Supposedly, in 44 BC, a seer told Julius Caesar that his downfall would come no later than the Ides of March. Caesar ignored him, and attended a senate meeting at the Theatre of Pompey, and was murdered — by as many as 60 conspirators.

So all the drama about the Ides of March is attributable to Caesar — before he got himself killed, the Ides of March was just a date. Ides isn’t anything — just a name given to a single day that falls in the middle of the month, and March isn’t alone… every month has its ides. The ides only got a sinister reputation after Shakespeare used the word in his play. But for some reason, this day has gained notoriety for being a day on which bad things happen — like the abdication of his throne by Czar Nicholas II in 1917 and the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939. When I was younger, March 15 was also tax day. But on the bright side, it was seen as the first day of spring on the Roman calendar. Spring is good enough reason to celebrate for me… beware if you must, but I think I’ll celebrate.
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This day every year is Pi Day and a lot of years it doesn’t get the recognition that it deserves on this blog. But today, let’s talk about and celebrate Pi which is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter and equals 3.14…. In 2015, this date (3-14-15) was the only day this century that match pi, commonly approximated as 3.1415. Supercomputers have now worked pi out to over 13 trillion places — and still there no patterns or repetitions.

In 1897, Indiana state legislators tried passing a Pi Bill that legally defined pi as 3.2. Edward J. Goodwin, a physician, convinced a well-known mathematical monthly newspaper that he had solved what mathematicians had tried to do for generations: squaring the circle. Squaring the circle is the impossible task of finding the area of a circle by finding the area of a square around it. Goodwin claimed that pi was 3.2 instead of a continuous number. The bill never became a law thanks to Professor C.A. Waldo who convinced the Indiana Senate that Goodwin’s discovery was not possible.

You faithful readers may remember that a couple of years ago, I challenged a popular belief that during the spring equinox brooms will stand by themselves — straight up. My extensive research and experiments proved the concept to be no more than an old wives tale — check the March blog entries from a couple of years ago if you don’t believe me.  Well, now I’m about to take on another challenge concerning pi. I have read and heard, that you can prove pi exists with matches, toothpicks, a pen, or anything else that is the same length. Here’s the way it works: You find a floor with parallel lines; you find matches, pins, pens, or any item exactly the same length. If you drop a hundred of them at random on the floor, the points touching a line will equal pi. The matches (or whatever you’re using) must be equal to the distance of the two parallel lines. After the matches are dropped, you multiply the number of matches thrown down by two and divide it by the total number of matches (or whatever) that touched a line, which will equal pi. I intend to duplicate that experiment and determine for myself if it’s really true. Hopefully it is and I won’t have to go through the disappointment I suffered with the broom experiment. I’ll probably report my findings here, so stay tuned — but instead of matches, I intend to use Eskimo Pie sticks (I thought that would be appropriate for a pi experiment.) So I now must eat 100 Eskimo Pies before I can begin my study. I figure after 100 Eskimo Pies, I won’t really get upset no matter what the results. Just another example of my contribution to science.
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In just a few hours, Daylight Saving Time is back — I like DST with the longer days, just seems like I get more done.Most everyone knows that daylight saving was proposed by Benjamin Franklin, but not everyone knows that he proposed it as a joke. Franklin wrote a satirical letter, in 1784, to the editor of the Journal of Paris outlining how many pounds of candle wax the city would save (64,050,000 pounds, according to his calculations) if its clocks were better aligned with the rising and setting of the sun.

It was more than a century after Ben’s letter that a British builder named William Willet became a champion of daylight saving, and lobbied Parliament to adjust the time in April and September in order to take full advantage of the day’s light. Germany and several other European countries had already mandated DST as a way of reducing energy and saving coal for the war effort. Recently, several studies have questioned this line of thinking and there is some data indicating that DST probably doesn’t really save that much energy.

After World War II, the US repealed the national law requiring states to institute daylight saving. Some towns decided to stick with it — some didn’t. This ultimately led to chaos. One 35-mile bus ride from Mounsville, West Virginia to Steubenville, Ohio, took its riders through seven different time changes. In 1966, the Uniform Time Act standardized DST, but the federal government has no law requiring states to observe DST — Hawaii and Arizona have chosen not to implement the time change.

I’ve often wondered why daylight saving time didn’t occur at midnight — that certainly seems more logical than waiting two more hours until two in the morning. Apparently there’s no really good explanation, at least not to me. The two in the morning time appears to have been chosen because most people aren’t awake to notice it — most workers with early shifts will still be in bed and most bars and restaurants will already be closed.

We have twin granddaughters and it never occurred to me until recently that if they had been born around the time of the clock change it might complicate things, especially discussions as to who came first…. If one twin is born right before the hour of 2 a.m., then the second twin is born after the clocks roll back — which one is older. I’m sure this has happened more than once, but my extensive research found an instance when twin brothers were born in Massachusetts on November 6, 2016, right at the weirdest possible time. Samuel was born first, at 1:39 a.m.;  his brother Ronan arrived about 30 minutes later, at what should have 2:10 a.m. But because of DST, it was only 1:10 a.m. — paperwork-wise, that made Ronan appear to be “older.” I imagine this contributed a bit to their sibling rivalry. Anyhow, it’s good to have the longer days back — long live DST.
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I was talking to my neighbor a couple of days ago and he mentioned that his lawnmower had conked out at the end of the summer and he hadn’t gotten it back from the repair shop yet. Well, that got me to thinking about grass (the kind you mow.) I’ve often said that I thought it would be easier to just pave our lawn area and paint it green. Maintaining a lawn takes a lot of work.

I don’t know who came up with the bright idea that the area surrounding your house should be lush and green, but apparently, that’s what has become most acceptable to modern society. Having a nicely trimmed green field leading up to your front door has become kind of a status symbol. And in some communities a messy front lawn gets you in trouble with your neighbors and may even result in a fine from some homeowners associations.

It seems that the grass lawn as a status symbol originated in European aristocracy. The first “lawns” were grassy fields surrounding English and French castles. Castle grounds had to be kept clear of trees so soldiers/guards protecting the castle had a clear view of the surroundings to prevent enemies from sneaking up through the forest. The word lawn comes from the word launde, which meant a “glade or opening in the woods.”

I’m not sure how the lawn became the “standard” for single family dwellings, but the movement was certainly helped along by Frederick Law Olmstead, the “father of American landscape design.” Olmstead designed Central Park in New York and also designed suburbs where each house had its own little lawn. Suburbs proved popular because a lot of people wanted to move away from the industrialization of cities and away from all the concrete. The first lawn mower was developed by Edwin Budding in 1830, but didn’t draw that much attention until the average person was faced with the chore of keeping their own lawns nicely trimmed.

But it appears that the guy that has to shoulder the blame for all of us having to cut the grass every week during the summer is Abraham Levitt. Levitt was the founder of Levittown — declared the “ideal” of American suburbia in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Levitt, and his sons, created the first suburb where healthy lawns were already in place when the occupants took possession of their new homes. The homeowners were given pamphlets about the importance of maintaining a perfect lawn, with tips about how to keep it green, lush, and weed-free. So, thank Abe for that hour or two, or more, that you spend every week keeping your property up to neighborhood standards.

Claire’s dad always had a “perfect” lawn — it would be the envy of most golf courses. He always had a beautiful lawn. I’ve always had a yard.
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I know that you’re thinking that we don’t need another holiday, but I can’t let today pass without mentioning that it’s Cinco de Marcho Day. Don’t get this one confused with Cinco de Mayo, a Mexican holiday celebrated every year on May 5. That holiday celebrates the anniversary of the defeat of the French army during the Battle of Puebla in Mexico on May 5, 1862.

Cinco de Marcho was first celebrated in the United States in 2007 — it’s sort of a kick-off to get ready for St. Patrick’s Day on March 17. Even though Cinco de Marcho is today, it really isn’t a day — think of it more like a season. You know about the 12 days of Christmas…. well, today starts the 12 days of Cinco de Marcho. It’s a season that begins on the 5th of March and ends with the closing ceremonies — on St. Patrick’s Day.

Some people have said that the holiday marks the beginning of a 12-day period when “people train their livers for drinking huge amounts of alcohol on St. Patrick’s Day.” That assessment made the holiday offensive to some people, but Cinco de Marcho doesn’t officially promote excessive drinking. It’s a chance to celebrate the two cultures — of Mexico and Ireland. If you think about it, there are some commonalities… like Margaritas — they’re green (like St. Patty’s Day) and they’re Mexican.
So I think this is a great start to promoting international cooperation and peace.
Hope everyone has an enjoyable Cinco de Marcho Season!
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In my younger days, I spent a lot of time on airplanes — a lot of different kinds, military and civilian, and lots of time on commercial airliners. All that travel tapered off in the early 80s. It occurred to me that when I flew most of the airplanes didn’t have those fin-like airfoils protruding from the tip of the wing. These things are called winglets, at least mostly they’re called winglets — apparently Airbus calls them sharklets. They use that name as opposed to winglets to get around a patent on the winglet technology held by Boeing.
Anyhow, Chris is an aeronautical engineer, so I asked him about them a few years ago. His explanation was fairly technical… something about equalizing the pressure on the upper surface and the lower surface of the wings and reducing the vortex formed because of the difference in pressure. I think he told me the bottom line was that they basically reduce drag and allow throttling back the engines to increase fuel savings. During my extensive research on the subject I discovered that NASA became aware of winglets aerodynamic benefits in the 1970s. Use of the devices typically yield a 1-2% increase in fuel efficiency — that amount of fuel savings is very significant to airlines.

Vertical wingtips certainly aren’t anything new — airplane designers have long known that modifying wingtip flow is important. Soaring birds, such as eagles, have strong feathers that flip up at the wingtips to reduce drag and give the birds more lift. So as smart as we think we are coming up with these innovations, nature and the birds beat us to it.
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Goodbye February, hello March. I’m always happy when March rolls around every year because it means that I’ve survived the two most depressing months of the year. I think the old Roman calendars had it right when their year was only ten months long — beginning with March. They didn’t even bother naming January and February — those two months were just referred to as “winter.” I’m thinking that it might be good to return to those days of old…

I feel better now that it’s March, even though as I write this, it’s snowing outside. “They” always say, if March comes in like a lion, it will go out like a lamb. I’m not sure if there’s really any truth to the saying, but I’ve read that many of these “sayings” are based on careful observations and turn out to be fairly accurate.There are always a lot of theories as to where these proverbs, sayings or folklore originated. Long ago, people often believed that bad spirits could, and did, affect the weather adversely, so they were cautious as to what they did or didn’t do in certain situations. They also believed that there should be a balance in weather and life. So — if a month came in bad (roaring like a lion), it should go out good (docile, like a lamb.) Maybe that’s the reason for the saying/proverb… why it stuck for just March, well….

I guess the Lion/Lamb proverb is probably the most famous March weather one, but I’ve also heard:
A dry March and a wet May? Fill barns and bays with corn and hay.
As it rains in March, so it rains in June.
March winds and April showers bring forth May flowers.

I’m sure there are many more, but they don’t immediately come to mind. But this year March certainly came in like a lion, so we can hope it will end on a calm note and exit like a lamb — but the key word is hope.
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Last weekend at (after) Mass, we heard the annual financial report for our church. The church, like a lot of people and organizations, is struggling to make ends meet these days. One of the charts presented during the presentation indicated that the church has something more than 500 members and during the last year, only a little over 300 contributed any money to the church. That means that at least 200 didn’t contribute anything — not even a dollar. Not only did they not contribute, I’m pretty sure they never attended, certainly not regularly.

I don’t know that that makes our church unique in any way — it very well may be typical. People become members of a church for various reasons. Many people consider the church just one more place where they can go to have certain social, political and even physical needs met.

In nineteenth-century China (and other parts of Asia) there was a name that was used for people who attended church because they were hungry for physical sustenance. It was known that Christian missionaries could provide food — primarily rice. So, people converted, were baptized and attended churches that had been started by the missionaries. They remained active members as long as their physical needs were met. But once their prospects improved through employment or help from family members, they drifted away from the church. Christian missionaries began calling them “rice Christians.”

Of course these “rice Christians” had missed the whole point of going to church, but maybe we actually have rice Christians as “members” of our church. These people chose to join the church and become members for some reason — maybe their “reason” is no longer valid, maybe the church no longer can fill their “needs.” People tend to look for a church that has the “right” kind of worship, the “right” pastor or the “right” kind of people, that provides the “right” activities for their kids, does the “right” thing with financial contributions, etc. A lot of people seem to be looking something that will satisfy a particular need or sustain them physically. The church offers something that will sustain them spiritually — kind of like “soul food.”

I’m not sure why I thought about this right now, except maybe to prove that I do pay attention in church, at least most of the time. But looking around at the attendance at our church this past weekend as compared to say, Easter and Christmas…. maybe the “rice Christians” didn’t fade away in the nineteenth century.
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