What Would Jimmy Do?

Since I seem to haven gotten on the topic of eating tools lately, I thought before putting the subject to rest, it would be only fair to mention the one we all probably use the most… the fork.

Today when we sit down at the table for a full meal, each place usually has a knife, fork and spoon — all used to prepare, or to shovel the food into our mouths. In the history of these utensils, apparently the knife came along first — of course some version a knife, which is is just some kind of sharp thing, and can be used for lots of other things besides eating. Next was probably the spoon… spoons somewhat mimic the shape of a a cupped hand, that was originally used to scoop up food.

But on to the fork, which is basically a stick with prongs on the end. It was originally used to grab and flip meat on the grill or cooking surface by the Romans, Greeks, and Egyptians, but wasn’t used for eating until somewhere around the 8th or 9th century.
My extensive research on forks revealed that in the 11th century, people, especially in the western world, viewed the fork with fear and hostility. This was probably due to the association with the Devil and his pitchfork. (The word fork comes from the Latin world “furcus” that means pitchfork.) The fork became popular in Europe when Catherine de Medici brought the device to Italy and France, where it became a trendy dining accessory.

The early forks usually had two big prongs and were relatively heavy and cumbersome. Owning one became a status symbol and people who owned them often carried them to meals with them, sometimes in a lavish carrying case. By about the 18th century, the fork had established itself as an accepted eating utensil and was used by most dinners alongside the spoon and knife.

At any rate, over the years the fork seems to have won out as the preferred eating utensil – I guess that’s progress, except in those places that don’t use forks. Those people probably have a different view… maybe they question if it is really progress if a cannibal uses a fork?
— 30 —

Since I got onto the subject of eating utensils (chopsticks) in my last blog, I thought it would be appropriate to talk about the oldest eating utensil — the hands. I’ve been fortunate enough to have been many places in this world and experienced lots of things… and it seems like almost every culture has traditions centered around food. People eat different things, at different times, in different ways and use different “tools” to accomplish the process.
(I’m not referring to hamburgers, french fries, fried chicken or other “fast foods” that are typically eaten with the fingers in the United States… I’m referring to full meals — consumed in a dinner table environment)

I’ve been in a number places in various countries that primarily (or totally) consume their food using their hands.
The first time I experienced eating with my hands was in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I ate at a small Indian restaurant — so small there wasn’t room to eat inside. I ordered curry and it was served to me on a banana leaf… that’s it — just a banana leaf — no eating utensils, napkins — or — directions. I looked around and other patrons were sitting on the curb outside with their banana leaves of food and eating with their fingers. So that’s what I did. I don’t think I was quite as neat as the other patrons, but I got plenty to eat.

Since that time, I’ve had a number of “opportunities” to eat with my hands. The first place I remember it being commonplace was in Africa, but I encountered the practice in more places and found it even more common in India. I’ve also noticed it seems to be fairly common in various countries in the Middle East.

Even though the thought of sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner with no silverware may seem uncivilized, or even barbaric, I suppose it’s all what you get used to. In India, where I’ve practiced this style of eating more than any other place, the etiquette associated with the meal varies with the religion. Like all cultures, some things are acceptable, some are not. So if you happen to be in India and are invited to someone’s house for dinner, you should be aware that Indians always wash their hands thoroughly prior to dining and then eat with their hands without any cutlery. I was told once that this practice is historic and premised on the belief that eating is a sensual activity and touch is part of the experience… along with the aroma and taste of the food as well at its presentation. The fingers are also used to feel the temperature of the food. I learned — some years after I had eaten in Kuala Lumpur, that a Thali is a large plate made from a washed banana leaf, or several leaves stitched together and commonly used in India.  In rural settings, eating on floor mats is common… in city homes and restaurants, diners typically use a table and chairs.

Even though you’re eating with your hands, there are certain “rules” or an etiquette that you should follow, lest you be viewed as barbaric. Always wash your hands and when eating with your fingers, you should only use one hand — the other hand should remain clean and only be used to pass dishes or to drink.

So if your mother always told you, “don’t eat with your hands,” you can be pretty sure she was from some place like Ohio, not India, Africa or The Middle East.
— 30 —

We went out to dinner at the Kazu restaurant last Friday. I always eat with chopsticks when we go there… in fact if chopsticks are available, I usually use them no matter where I’m eating. After dinner, Anne and Winfried gave me a set of chopsticks — made from cherry wood. They don’t use chopsticks and almost always comment when Claire and myself use them.
So being completely fed up with the political, economic and racist news and nothing better to do, this is going to be my first chopstick blog…

I don’t remember the first time I used chopsticks, but l’m sure it was in a foreign country and more than fifty years ago. I don’t remember ever having a problem with them — that proved to be fortunate because when I spent a few months in China in the early 70s, knives and forks were hard to come by…..
Early chopsticks were used mainly for cooking — it wasn’t until about 400 A.D. that people began eating with them. About that time, a population boom in China sapped resources and forced everyone, including cooks, to develop cost-saving habits. Cooks began chopping food into smaller pieces that required less cooking fuel. As food became “bite-sized” knives became less useful, and chopsticks were just right for picking up the bites of food.
It appears that Confucius, a famous Chinese guy that you’ve probably heard of, had a lot of influence on things in China, including chopsticks. Confucius believed that knives were associated with acts of aggression and didn’t think they belonged at the dinner table. In the past I’ve blogged a lot about the Chinese New Year and various superstitions associated with it. One superstition is the use of knives during the Chinese New Year. The Chinese believe that the food needs to be prepared ahead of time and all knives put away. If a knife is used during the first day of the New Year, the good luck will be cut away for the following year.
When chopsticks became popular for eating, different cultures, especially in Asia, adopted them — usually with a different style… Chinese chopsticks usually feature a blunt, rather than a pointed end. In Japan, chopsticks were 8 inches long for men and 7 inches long for women. The Japanese invented (in 1878) the first disposable set — typically made of wood or bamboo. The wealthy could eat with ivory, coral, jade, brass or agate versions, but the most privileged used silver chopsticks.It was thought that the silver would corrode and turn black if it came into contact with poisoned food.

Eating with chopsticks lends itself to some types of food more than others — if you think about it, rice isn’t one of the first foods that pop into your head. But if you live in Asia, or have visited the area, the rice there is of the short or medium grain variety. This type of rice contains starches that when cooked, make the rice gummy and clumpy — not like the fluffy rice that most Americans eat… most rice here is a “long-grain” variety.

So why, if you’re not in China or other parts of the world, and don’t have a choice, would you eat with chopsticks? The best answer is — it’s fun… part of the experience. By the way, the fear of chopsticks is called consecotaleophobia. If you don’t use chopsticks and would like to try, I found some directions on how to do it that are simple… take one chopstick, hold between thumb and index finger of the right hand — then extend your right arm up over your head and calmly call out to the waitress, “Excuse me ma’am, could you please bring me a fork?”
I’ve heard it said that chopsticks are one of the reasons the Chinese never invented custard.

But there’s an old Chinese story involving chopsticks that makes a point that we could all take to heart — especially today. It goes like this…. A man is sent to Hell. He arrives in a room where everyone is sitting at a round table trying to eat with 3 foot chopsticks. No one is getting anything to eat, even though there is plenty of food and everyone is unhappy. The man is then sent to Heaven where he walks into an identical room, where everything is exactly the same but everyone is well fed and happy. How? Each one is feeding the other opposite to them. So whether you eat with chopstick or a fork, maybe sharing is a good thing.

— 30 —

A week or so ago we spent some time at Dave and Chassie’s new house to do a few “chores” while they were working. Dave came home first and we went with him to pick up Locke from pre-school. Locke seemed a little excited to see us and pretty much talked our ears off on the way home. During the day Claire had found a couple of his toys that had been packed away and he was super excited to see them when he got home.

After Dave and Chassie had calmed him down a bit and he had a chance to try out his new-found toys some, he decided that he wanted to watch TV — a show called Sam the Fireman, or something like that. (Apparently, he’s allowed to watch a little TV after pre-school assuming things a going well…)

Anyhow, Locke decided he’d had enough playing with the toys and was ready to watch some television. He got the remote and told Chassie that he wanted to watch “Sam.” Chassie said, “Grammy and Poppy are here, so let’s wait until they have to leave and then we can watch it.” With absolutely no hesitation, Locke said, “Bye Grammy, Bye Poppy!”

We took the hint and left — even the best Grammy and Poppy in the world can’t compete with Sam the Fireman….
— 30 —

If you’ve been paying much attention to the news lately, you’ve obviously heard the term “loyalty” used a lot. The President uses it often and a lot of people believe he means it solely as it applies to him and that he’s not of the opinion that loyalty is a two-way street.

Anyhow, I decided to do a little extensive research on the subject and discovered that loyalty is apparently pretty important to the United States because May 1st has been designated as Loyalty Day by Congress.
Congress passed a resolution May 1, 1955 proclaiming that day as Loyalty Day. In 1958, Congress made it an annual “day.” The resolution set aside a special day (May 1) for “the reaffirmation of loyalty to the United States of America and for the recognition of the heritage of American freedom.” It called for the President to sign a proclamation each year calling for the display of the American flag and inviting observances at schools and “other suitable places.”
True to form, President Trump signed a proclamation this past May 1st. He described it as a day meant to express our country’s loyalty to individual liberties, to limited government and to the inherent dignity of every human being.”
The entire proclamation is just one short paragraph (you can look it up if you’re interested) and it’s not particularly politically laced like much of the information coming from the Oval Office. It does mention ISIS by name, and I thought that was a little strange, but I think the thought is pure.

I got to wondering how much do we really value loyalty today? Does it have the same meaning to us as honesty or integrity? It’s always been a little suspect to expect loyalty from our politicians, but lately I’ve noticed that athletes don’t seem to be particularly loyal to their team, their country, their fans and sometimes even to the rules of the game. And loyalty in the workplace certainly takes a different form than it did when I was among the working class.

General Colin Powell defined loyalty as: “Loyalty means giving me your honest opinion, whether you think I’ll like it or not. Disagreement, at this state, stimulates me. But once a decision is made, the debate ends. From that point on, loyalty means executing the decision as if it were your own.” I guess that kind of sums up my idea of loyalty during my working years. Maybe it still does, but without a common “mission” that was always present in the work environment, I probably think of loyalty a little differently… I’ve kind of moved loyalty into my category of things that you can’t buy — it’s something that has to be earned.
— 30 —

My dad was a pretty neat guy — although we never had the kind of relationship where we’d go out and have a few beers together, we did manage to have a few “private” conversations. I certainly wish there could have been more of those, but it “is what it is” as they say.

Of course our grandkids never got to know their great-grandad and someday in the future, if they’re interested in learning about their ancestors, I’d like them to have a little more insight to their great-grandad than when he was born, when and who he married and other rather mundane things that they might find on ancestry.com… I’d like them to learn that he was a real person, not just a name on the family tree.

One of the stories he told me once (that probably would have been even better over a couple of beers) happened when he was in his late teens just before he graduated from high school. My dad and couple of his friends had been to Oklahoma City and didn’t get back to Maysville until about 2:00-2:30 in the morning. Now Maysville Oklahoma had a sheriff during the day and also a “night watchman” sheriff during the night. The main street in Maysville was about 2 or 3 blocks long, and near one end of the street there was a gas station built on the “corner” of the block. The pumps were covered by a roof and so during nice weather, the “night watchman” would sit in a cane-bottomed chair, leaning up against the side of the building. That gave him a pretty much unobstructed view of the entire main street.

Anyhow, when my dad and his friends got back into town that night/morning, they decided to drive up and down main street a few (or more) times. I know that sounds dumb now, but back then, that’s what you did if you were lucky enough to have a car — it was called “dragging main.” I forgot to mention that directly across the street from the gas station on the opposite corner, was the town’s only bank and unknown to the night watchman and my dad and his friends, the bank was going to be robbed that night. The robbers were about to make their move when the “Williamson gang” roared into town and disrupted their plans. The robbers waited for things to settle down before proceeding, but dad and his friends, rather than going home, stopped to “bs” with the nighttime sheriff (everyone knew everyone in Maysville.) Apparently the robbers got tired of waiting and approached the group with guns drawn. They herded dad, his two friends and the sheriff into the bank. Back in those days, sometimes the bank locked the vault and sometimes they didn’t. (This was before all the fancy time-locks they have today.) Well, on this particular night the vault hadn’t been locked, and it was “easy pickings” for the robbers. But they put their “hostages” in the vault and did lock it. When the bank opened at 9:00 o’clock the next morning and they unlocked the vault, it was the first time anyone knew the bank had been robbed.

According to my dad, he and his two friends spent the next day chasing bank robbers. He said he didn’t remember how or where they came up with a couple of shotguns but he remembered not finding any bank robbers, but shooting ducks down by the river.
I don’t remember all the details of the story, but evidently the robbers were caught sometime later and they were apparently unknown to anyone living in or around Maysville.

So someday, if this blog survives and our grandkids are looking around for information about their ancestors, they may conclude there was more to their great-grandad …than he was the son of George and Josephine….
— 30 —

Both the faithful readers of this blog know that I’ve written about my dad having the first television set in Maysville, Oklahoma. He sold furniture and appliances (including radios) and for some reason he had gotten a Motorola TV along with a shipment of Motorola radios.
Anyhow, I have often talked about how I was lucky enough to catch probably the first TV pictures ever broadcast over the air in Oklahoma….

The TV station was WKY-TV and it first officially signed on the air on June 6, 1949 – I was eleven years old. The station was owned by the Oklahoma Publishing Company that published the two Oklahoma City newspapers at the time (The Daily Oklahoman, published in the morning, and the Oklahoma Times, published in the afternoon.) As I’ve mentioned before, their first studio was housed in the Municipal Auditorium in downtown Oklahoma City. Because of a freeze on broadcast licenses imposed by the FCC, WKY-TV was the only television station in Oklahoma City until 1953.

All of this is well and good, but it wasn’t what I started to blog about…. the subject of this blog was going to be weather and weather warnings. I got to thinking about this a couple of nights ago when a “banner” came across the TV screen warning of severe weather in several locations around us. When I lived in Oklahoma, we had severe weather (tornados) all the time. People just looked at the sky and if it looked like there was going to be a tornado, they went to their (or a neighbor’s) storm cellar. We didn’t have people to tell us the weather was going to get bad.

But back to my first years with television… WKY-TV came up with another “first,” when on March 21, 1952 it aired the first tornado warning ever broadcast on television. The station had hired a meteorologist by the name of Harry Volkman who broke into the regular programming with a bulletin about a thunderstorm containing a tornado approaching Oklahoma City. That seemed like a nice thing to do — except — at that time, the FCC prohibited broadcasters from disseminating public tornado alerts because they believed that relaying them to the public would cause panic. Volkman was at risk of losing his job for a while, but the station received a number of letters sent by “survivors” of the tornado thanking him and the station for the warning.

I’m not sure why I thought of this the other evening… it just popped into my head. If you’re one that grew up in the age of “breaking news” it’s hard to believe that in 1952, telling people (especially in Oklahoma) that a tornado was coming would spark panic….
— 30 —

Although the weather was nice, today started out a little slow for me… I could just never get going and for some unknown reason seemed to be a little depressed or something. I sat down to watch some of the Sunday morning “news” programs and read the news of the day and that didn’t help my mood at all. I’m sure I’ll feel better by tomorrow, but today I couldn’t help but think of something one of my favorite authors ( Dr. Seuss) wrote one time….

My uncle ordered popovers
from the restaurant’s bill of fare.
And when they were served,
he regarded them
with a penetrating stare…

Then he spoke great Words of Wisdom
as he sat there on that chair:
“To eat these things,”
said my uncle,
“you must exercise great care.
You may swallow down what’s solid…
BUT…
You must spit out the air!”

And…
As you partake of the world’s bill of fare,
that’s darned good advice to follow.
Do a lot of spitting out the hot air,
And be careful what you swallow.

Advice from Theodore Seuss Geisel is always good, but it seemed especially appropriate to me today…
— 30 —

A lot, or at least some, of Claire’s friends are fond of cats. I have stated (correctly) that I’m not a big fan of cats. When I tell people that, they usually assume, or say, that I must be a dog person. That’s not necessarily true… I do like dogs, but I wouldn’t say I’m a dog person. When I’m asked what my favorite animal is, my answer is always a mongoose. Then I invariably get the question, “why a mongoose?”

Well, not that I have to have a reason, but I have a couple… the plural of mongoose is mongooses and I like to say that word. Mongooses aren’t afraid of snakes and battle them to the death, with the mongoose usually winning… even against the king cobra. Who wouldn’t like somebody that could do that? And… even before the immigration ban, mongooses were banned from the United states — you can’t even see one in a zoo. that makes me a little sad and enhances my sympathy vote for my favorite animal.

I’ve only seen a real mongoose in a couple of zoos in foreign countries, but probably the real reason I’ve always liked them started in about the second or third grade, when I read a story about a mongoose, named Rikki-tikki-tavi (The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling.) That was always one of my favorite stories… I don’t remember either one of our kids being especially interested in it, but it always was (and is) one of my favorites.

Anyhow, mongooses don’t get the respect and credit they deserve… Egyptian tombs contained mummified mongooses along with mummified human bodies. If you’re an artist, a really good artist, you probably have some paint brushes made from the fur of mongooses. They are very expensive and can’t (legally) be sold in the US. Add to all this the fact that mongooses have horizontal pupils and it’s easy to see why I chose them as my favorite animal….
— 30 —

I try to stay away from discussing the news on this blog, but it’s becoming harder and harder to ignore some of the insanity that seems to be going on all around us. I read an article yesterday about a poll that had been taken asking people to pick the first word (one word) that came to mind when the President’s name was mentioned. I’m sure this poll, like most, was biased to some degree, but the list of words was pretty extensive, and none of them was flattering. One word that didn’t make the list was “truth.”

Of course that got me to thinking about truth… what the heck is truth anyhow? Usually I go to the dictionary for a definition and then go from there, but it seems to me that truth is simply the way things really are. Obviously, that’s an over simplification, especially today… some people think there is no absolute truth — truth for them is simply what they think. Actually, we all live our lives based on things we think, or believe, are true. We get into elevators that we believe will go up — or down, we get on airplanes we believe will fly, we go to stadiums believing the game will be played….
Time magazine published an issue fairly recently with no picture on the cover, only the words “Is Truth Dead?”  One of the articles in that issue was titled, “Can Trump Handle the Truth” and contained an itemized list of a lot of the untruths tweeted by the President and floating around his administration. Seems like since January, we’ve read and heard mostly about “fake” news almost constantly… so much so, that it’s truly hard to distinguish “real” from “fake.” The TV program 60 Minutes devoted part of a recent program to fake news and interviewed a number of people that deliberately distribute fake news. Obviously Facebook and social media sites are a prime target of fake news, but some amount makes its way into the mainstream media. Interestingly, the program concluded that it wasn’t the uneducated that were most likely to believe these things, it was the college educated!

It appears to me that one of the problems facing politics and the news media today is, for lack of a better word, ideology. The news media often simply omits any news that they don’t like or agree with.
I took a couple of journalism courses in college and one of the first basic rules that was stressed, was the necessity to distinguish between reporting and editorializing. That line seems to have become very, very blurred lately.

So I think answer to the question on Time’s cover (Is Truth Dead?) is no, but it’s maybe close to being on life support…
I ran across a quote a few days ago and I’m sorry I don’t know who to contribute it to, but I think it’s very appropriate for today: “Above all, don’t lie to yourself. the man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others…..”

I guess truth, like most other things, will remain subjective, even though I don’t believe truth is subjective. Winston Churchill once stated, “Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.” That seems to be about where we are…
— 30 —