What Would Jimmy Do?

A couple of days ago we celebrated our friend Anne’s birthday and today our neighbor’s kids are having a party. Anne is in her 80s and the neighbors are probably 3 or 4. We went to a favorite restaurant to celebrate with Anne; the kids have a blow-up bouncy house on their lawn.

I don’t remember our kids having anything fancy like a bouncy house on their birthdays but I remember they usually had a party of some kind. One year Claire came up with a Cookie Monster costume and one of our neighbors dressed as the Cookie Monster as a surprise for the kids. I’m not sure where she got the costume but one of Cookie Monster’s eyes kept falling off… one of the kids kept saying it wasn’t the real Cookie Monster, there was a man inside…
I think having the Cookie Monster was about as fancy as we ever got… mostly the kids just showed up and with any kind of luck, we tried to play some games, the kids opened their presents and everyone got cake and ice cream.

When I was a kid, you just had a party. Your friends came, maybe played a game or two, had some cake and left. There were no “themes” for parties — if you had a birthday party, it was a birthday party…. just like everyone else had. I remember one time when my mother (who may have been ahead of her time} decided on a cowboy “theme” for my birthday. She sent out hand-made invitations inviting everyone to a roundup at the “Lazy J” Ranch. She even made a sign over the driveway, identifying our house as the Lazy J Ranch. Everyone was supposed to wear western attire and we were to play Cowboys and Indians (that was a popular game back then.) Well, of course, no one understood it… no one wore “cowboy” clothes, or brought their “guns” or “bows and arrows” — because, well because it was a birthday party. You only wore birthday party clothes and played birthday party games at a birthday party.

As usual, there’s no real point to this entry… I just happened to remember my roundup party at the Lazy J Ranch, when I noticed the activity next door. Birthday parties, like everything else, have changed — probably for the better.
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Seems like a lot of people we know, or at least know their relatives, have recently, or are going to have twins. I read somewhere that between 1980 and 2009, twins birth rates rose 76 percent. I was going to do some extensive research into that, but I decided that it wasn’t something that I wanted to spend a lot of time researching. One article that I browsed over indicated that the increase might possibly be due to the fact more women over the age of 30 are having babies (apparently older women are more likely to have twins — who knew?) Another theory chalked it up to the use of fertility drugs that also supposedly contribute to the birth of twins.

In case you’re wondering how/why I decided on this particular topic today, I guess it’s now ok to say that we are going to be grandparents again. In fact, the number of grandchildren we’ll have is about to double. Dave and Chassie are expecting twins — they’re both girls and they are identical. That’s absolutely all I know about it, so don’t bother calling or e-mailing me for additional details.

I read the other day that the new iPhone X won’t have a fingerprint sensor, it’ll use “face recognition to unlock the phone. A question was asked (and never answered to my satisfaction) if identical twins could unlock each other’s iPhones…I’ll let you know the answer to that in a few months. Accessing the phone with the fingerprint sensor doesn’t pose a problem, because identical twins don’t have identical fingerprints — fun fact number one.
More twins are born in Massachusetts than any other state. Connecticut and New Jersey round out the top three. New Mexico has the fewest twin birth rate. Fun fact number two.
About 25 percent of identical twins develop directly facing each other — in other words, they become exact reflections of one another. They may be right and left handed, have birthmarks on opposite sides of their bodies, etc. Fun Fact number three.
Mothers of twins may live longer (or maybe it just seems longer) — the theory being that women who gave birth to twins were very strong and healthy to begin with, so were likely to live long lives. Fun fact number four.
Forty percent of twins invent their own language.What sounds like babbling may actually be cryptophasia, a language developed between twins that only they can understand. Fun fact number five.

But whether any of these “fun facts” are true or not, we’re super excited to be getting two new grand babies. There’s all sorts of joke and rhymes about twins, like double the giggles and double the grins, or two to argue, two to cry and other “two” analogies along with things like “double the trouble,” but in reality there’s two to love. Obviously Dave and Chassie will have their hands full, but that doesn’t compare to what will fill their hearts.
As I said, we’re super excited to have twins in the family and while they may look alike, we won’t lose sight of the fact that they’ll both be one of a kind…..
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We have a somewhat “famous” place here in Shepherdstown called the Bavarian Inn. It’s restaurant serves German food and people come quite a distance to dine on their favorite German dishes.

Every year the Bavarian Inn holds a German festival, known as — your guessed it — Oktoberfest. This year it was held on September 17… in fact it’s held in September every year. So you’re probably asking why, if it’s called Oktoberfest, it’s not held in October. I’ve often wondered that myself over the years.

The first time I ever experienced an Oktoberfest was in Germany. I think the original, and probably still the biggest and best known, is held in Munich. However, the only Oktoberfest festival I ever attended in Germany was in Frankfort. Apparently the magnitude of the Frankfort festival doesn’t compare to the one in Munich… but it’s pretty big!!
This year, the real Oktoberfest (in Munich) began on Saturday, September 17. At noon on that day, the Mayor of Munich tapped the first keg of Oktoberfest beer. The mayor tapping the first keg of beer officially starts Oktoberfest. The mayor declares, “O’ zapft is!” (“It’s tapped”.) Once that first keg is tapped, the first person to get a beer is traditionally the Minister-President of the State of Bavaria, but after that, all visitors are allowed to quench their thirst. This year’s festival ends on October 3 (officially at 11:30 pm.)

So how did these festivities get started in the first place? Well, in 1810, Bavarian Crown Prince Ludwig married Princess Therese von Sachsen-Hidburghausen, and all the citizens were invited to the celebration. Since then, the festival has grown to include horse races, games, rides, music and — beer. It’s interesting that originally the celebration did not include beer. In the festival’s early years, beer was only served outside the fair, or festival, grounds. Of course that’s no longer the case — now more than 7.5 million liters are consumed each year.
Oktoberfest regulations say that the only beer that can be served for the celebration must be from one of Munich’s six breweries — Paulaner, Spaten, Hacker-Pschon, Augustiner, Hofbrau, and Lowenbrau. And, like all other German brews, Oktoberfest beers must pass the “purity” law or Reinheitsgebot, which was passed in 1516 to ensure the beer’s quality.

When there’s a 16-day long beer festival, some people, or a lot of people, are bound to have one pint too many. When someone passes out from too many beers, the locals call them “Bierleichen” — or, “Beer Corpses.” I saw many of them at the one Oktoberfest I attended in Frankfort. In fact, you could hardly walk for all the Beer Corpses. The protocol seems to be, you just step over them and carry on….

So back to wondering why Oktoberfest begins in September… by moving the festivities up, it allowed for better weather conditions. Because the September nights were warmer, visitors were able to enjoy the gardens outside the tents and stroll over “die Wiesen” or the fields much longer without feeling chilly. Historically, the last Oktoberfest weekend was in October and that tradition continues today. Having better weather is also nicer for the Beer Corpses when they come back to life…..
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Well, here be me most favorite holiday again — Talk Like a Pirate Day. Today everyone around here will be calling each other ‘me hearties,’ be donning their finest eye patches and pulling the usual shenanigans that they do every year. Needless to say me and me wench Claire have been lookin fore t’ it since last year.

Both my favorite readers know I get very excited about today every year. But on a serious note, the day is more than just saying aaargh a lot and using ye instead of you. Even though many people just substitute ‘me’ when they usually use ‘my’ and celebrate by having a drink, for those of us who honestly wish that we had been pirates, it’s a day to reflect on what could have been… and especially today, we can can imagine ourselves the image of swaggering pirateness.

Even though some think pirates just ran around looting gold and causing terror on the seas, pirates like every one else, had their own personal problems. So today is also for celebrating and forgetting your woes.
Happy TLAP Day, me hearties!!
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Seems like lately I wake up, go downstairs, turn on the TV and await whatever catastrophe or crisis has happened overnight or is pending. It’s kind of a bummer to start the day off this way. I could just turn the TV off and imagine that all is well in the world, but I figure that, realistically, before the day is over, someone will tell me it isn’t. So I thought I’d just try to change my attitude a bit. I did a little reading on the Internet and came across something that seems to have helped put things into a better perspective for me.

In 1857 an editorial appeared in the Boston Globe bemoaning the sad conditions of the nation. The editorial states, “Not in the lifetime of most men has there been so much grave and deep apprehension. Never has the future seemed so dismal.”
I suspect that many of the readers of that editorial agreed with it. Back in 1857, it was looking more and more like a Civil War was inevitable and the future did seem bleak and unpredictable. It is our natural tendency to focus on the negative aspects of situations and imagine them as only getting worse.

Each generation thinks that their times are the most difficult the world has ever seen. We characterize our yesterdays affectionally as “the good ole days.” Because the future often causes us to fear the worst, we seek consolation in the past. Imagine how many “good ole days” have taken place since 1857. Looking back, the nation survived the Civil War (and World War I, World War II, Vietnam, 9/11, and countless other catastrophic events.)
Once again, today we are in the midst of a number of situations seemingly without any apparent solution. But the future has a way of bringing pleasant surprises.

I saw a sign once that said, “These are the good old days.” Our tendency is to think that some other time or place was, or will be, better than today. All days can’t be good or great, but all days aren’t bad — most probably aren’t as bad as we think. There’s a song in the play Annie that goes something like, “Tomorrow, tomorrow, I love you tomorrow… The sun will come out tomorrow.”
So no matter how dark and depressing things seem, we’ll get through them and the sun will come out…
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Recently I mentioned a left-handed shovel. Of course there is no such thing as a left- or right-handed shovel. Some tools are built, or are configurable, to be used with either the left or right hand, but a lot like hammers and shovels are not. I think it’s always been popular, in construction jobs especially, to send the new guy off to get a left (or right) handed hammer or shovel or something like that. It’s all part of the initiation to the job. A lot of people don’t fall for it, but an amazing number do. Of course, the construction industry isn’t the only one that uses these kinds of practical jokes. There are certain initiation rites in just about all offices, workplaces and professions.

One place that I worked for a while was located next door to a teletype repair shop. In case you’re so young that you don’t know what a teletype is — it’s a machine that’s kind of like an automatic typewriter and was just about universally used in communications until the early 1970’s. Anyhow, these machines use a roll of paper to print out the messages. The rolls where packed 6 or 12 to a box and to keep the ends from getting crushed so they wouldn’t fit into the machines, there was a little round metal disk inserted on each side. When a new roll of paper was inserted, the littles disks were just tossed in the waste basket.
So almost anytime a “new guy” came into our shop, it wasn’t long before he was sent next door to get a couple of LRMDs. Of course when he showed up in the teletype shop, everyone rolled their eyes and depending on how busy they were (and possibly how gullible the new guy was) would give him a long story about how they had run out and send him on a wild goose chase, or have him look in the back room, or question him as to what size he needed or — well, you get the idea.
LRMDs were the Little Round Metal Disks that were always discarded with each new roll of paper… sometimes the victim figured it out, sometimes he finally just had to be told that he’d been “had.” I suppose most workplaces still operate pretty much the same way, but probably have much more sophisticated ways of initiation.

I guess we’ve all had times that we searched for LRMDs… it’s probably not important whether we found them or not, it’s important that we learned from the experience….
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Labor not — for one day
just sit, breathe, and rejoice
drinking what you please
and enjoying what you may.
~ Terri Guillemets

Couldn’t have said it any better — Happy Labor Day!!
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We attended a dinner party a couple of nights ago and I’ll spare you a long story about why right and left handed actions came up while pouring a glass of wine.
There was only one “leftie” in the group and during the conversation, he said that basically the only thing he did not do left-handed was shovel. Well of course that brought about all sorts of jokes about left-handed and right-handed shovels. But it turns out that he was serious and believed that people are either left- or right-handed shovelers.

I obviously had never given this much thought, but after he explained what he was talking about, it made sense to me. For the sake of discussion, let’s talk about shoveling snow. If you shovel with your right hand near the base of the snow shovel and your left in the D handle, does that make you a right handed shoveler or a left handed shoveler? My friend’s opinion is that if your right hand is at the bottom of the shovel, it makes you a right handed shoveler. If your left hand is at the bottom of the shovel, you are a left handed shoveler.

It turns out that I’m right-handed… I do pretty much everything with my right hand. But when I shovel, my left hand is near the base of the shovel and my right hand is on the D handle. So I guess that makes me a left-handed shoveler… who knew?

I was going to do some of my extensive research on this subject, but I decided I just might open up a can of worms — probably a lot of people would start worrying that they’d been shoveling all wrong over the years. Even though I didn’t get into the extensive research mode, I did give it some thought over a glass of wine. I decided that the reason I shovel the way I do is that your hand near the base of the shovel is just a pivot point — either hand will do. It doesn’t take a lot of extra strength there, it just acts as a pivot. The dominant hand (in my case, the right) wants to do the control. The hand in the D handle is doing the control of the shovel… like the angle of attack, etc. But — again — that’s just my theory. Of course it still doesn’t put to rest the question of whether l’m a left- or right-handed shoveler.

I knew shoveling was hard work, but I hadn’t realized it was so complicated… makes me even “more glad” I got a snow blower….
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I just used my iPhone to scan a receipt so I could e-mail it to our homeowners’ association for reimbursement. That’s just one of almost countless things I do with my phone every day… phones are becoming pretty much constant companions and we use them constantly — and hardly ever to make phone calls.

I remember when I was a kid not having a phone (they were called ‘telephones’ back then.) It wasn’t that we were poor or lived out in the sticks somewhere, almost no one in the part of Oklahoma that I grew up in had a telephone — including the businesses.

I remember when we got our first phone/telephone. It was black and heavy. It didn’t have a dial, even though it was shaped like the old dial telephones — where the dial would have been was just a small circle with our phone number written in it… I’m pretty sure our phone number was 42, or maybe 47 — but it was only two digits. The phone didn’t have the fancy spiral cords that became popular later — it just had a long black (cloth covered) wire attaching the handset to the base. If you wanted to make a phone call, you just picked up the handset and an operator would answer with the phrase “number, please.” But the operator in Maysville always knew everyone and usually called you by name. If the phone rang, you waited to see if it was for you… you could tell by the number of long and short “rings.” I don’t know of anyone that had a private line — everyone had to share their line with someone else.

I remember getting a dial phone — it looked just like the old phone except the little circle in the middle was replaced by a dial. It was still black. When we got a dial phone our phone number changed to four (!!!!) digits. But the last two digits didn’t work and it didn’t matter if you used them when you dialed or not. Only the first two digits counted and they were the same two digits you had when you didn’t have to dial your phone. Of course everyone was all upset… now everyone had to remember people’s phone numbers (or look them up in something new that came along, called a phone book.) People just couldn’t believe it was now necessary to remember two numbers if you wanted to talk to someone on the telephone.

I remember leaving home after finishing high school and the phone in our house had progressed to a phone on the wall in the kitchen — still with a dial, but I think it was white, not black. And the four digits had acquired a letter prefix… I think ours was UN-xxxx. Of course you didn’t have to “dial” the UN, or even all four digits most of the time.

I remember my first “push button” phone — no more dials, just push a button and you didn’t hear all that interrupted dial tone that you did when using a dial phone — just a different tone for each button you hit. Some people were clever and learned to play simple tunes using the buttons on the phone.

I remember our first cordless phone. We were living in Vienna at the time and I bought a cordless phone at Radio Shack for Claire’s birthday. I don’t think Claire particularly wanted a cordless phone, but the one we had on the wall in the kitchen had a cord long enough to reach almost all over the house. Claire used to tour the house when she was on the phone — she’d just tuck the phone between her ear and shoulder somehow and that kept both hands free as she went about her business. I never did figure out how she did that…. Anyhow, the cord would often knock things off the cabinets or stove and fairly regularly strangle me if I happened to be at the kitchen table. So I figured the solution was a cordless phone. It worked pretty well, but suffered from interference some of the time, but here we were one of the pioneers moving into the future.

I remember our first portable or “cell” phone. It came in a bag and sat on the floor of Claire’s van between the drivers and passenger seat. It had a handset just like a home phone and it had a cord… just like a home phone. And it was black. But it worked well and we could make (and receive) calls when we were on the road or at one of the kids activities, like ball games. Since there weren’t many cell towers yet, there were a few “dead” spots, but again — here we were one of the pioneers charging into the future.

I remember my first true “cell” phone — Claire gave it to me for father’s day and when I called to activate it, the operator was almost excited as I was, so I’m pretty sure once again we were leading the charge into the future — at least in Vienna. The phone was a “flip” phone that was popular for a number of years. Phones got smaller, but the basic design stayed the same… just flip open the phone to expose the screen and keyboard.

I remember the first iPhone I got — it was an iPhone 4. Claire didn’t get one, she just upgraded her “flip” phone. Her first iPhone was a 4S… and I got one at the same time.

I still remember all my experiences with telephones over the years… I remember a lot of things, but I don’t remember how I ever got along without an iPhone….
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A few days ago we experienced an eclipse of the Sun — total in some parts of the United States, supposedly about 83% totality here. It was supposed to be the event of the century and all sorts of weird things were supposed to happen… birds would stop flying, animals would act strange, the temperature would drop, and on and on.

We’ll, for me the great eclipse of 2017 was a bust. I admit I didn’t have the approved viewing glasses and I wasn’t as brave as the President to look at the Sun with no eye protection, but to me it was a non-event. The birds didn’t stop flying, the animals seemed as bored with the whole thing as I was, the temperature didn’t drop and at the peak of the eclipse we had more sun here that we do on a cloudy day. So if you saw it and were impressed, I’m happy for you… it just didn’t happen for me.

I suspect if I had been someplace where the eclipse was total, I’d have been impressed, but with all the media hype about everything that happens, it’s hard for any event to live up to expectations.
Apparently before everything was discussed on the news and the Internet, an event like this caused fear and panic. Before these things were explained by science, people just didn’t know what was happening. People attempted to explain eclipses the best way they could. Many people believed that gods and demons were involved and some blamed dragons. The Shan people (in what we now know as Vietnam) thought it was an evil spirit that took the form of a toad. But it seems like all the cultures shared the sentiment that somehow, there was a conflict between the celestial bodies.

Most of the stories about eclipses are folklore, but probably some are at least close to the truth and people really did act out of fear and lack of knowledge…
Chippewa people shot flaming arrows into the sky to try to rekindle the Sun. People in Peru did the same thing, but they were attempting to scare off a beast that wa attacking the Sun. In Transylvanian folklore, an eclipse stems from the angry Sun turning away and covering herself with darkness in response to men’s bad behavior.
In German mythology, the hot female Sun and the cold male Moon were married. The Sun ruled the day and the Moon ruled the night. Seeking companionship, the Moon was drawn to his bride and they came together — thus, a solar eclipse.

Solar eclipses seem to cause fear associated with pregnancy… many ancient people worried that an eclipse caused pregnancy issues such as blindness, cleft lips and birthmarks. Even today, many superstitions remain — pregnant women are sometimes warned to stay inside and not eat or carry sharp objects during the eclipse. Modern baby blogs ask if pregnant women should wear some sort of metal, such as a safety pin, to protect the baby. Baby superstitions may have originated with the Aztecs, who believed that a celestial beast was biting the Sun — and the same thing would happen to a baby if the pregnant mother watched.

The day of the eclipse I heard this on the radio: Thirty-eight years ago we had Steve Jobs, Bob Hope and the Sun. Today, we have no jobs, no hope and no sun. I actually know a couple of people than think like that. But ny favorite eclipse joke is about a boy that asked his dad if could tell him what an eclipse was. The dad’s response was, “No Sun.”

Another total solar eclipse will take place in the United States on April 8, 2024 and one of the places that will experience totality is Cleveland. Since I was so disappointed with 83% totality, I’m anxious to see if 100% will impress me. We’ve already got reservations.
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