What Would Jimmy Do?

I know some things that I wonder about don’t seem important to a lot of people, but they must be important to me. Why else would I wonder about them? 
One thing I’ve wondered about for a long time is why is the famous police force that patrols London called Scotland Yard?

I’ve spent a fair amount of time in England and I realize that their language is loaded with misleading terms. For instance, plum pudding isn’t pudding — and — it doesn’t contain plums. But Scotland Yard has always puzzled me. So — I figured it was time for a little extensive research. As is often the case, my research didn’t really come up with a definitive answer, but here’s what I found….

It started in 1829, when Charles Rowan and Richard Mayne were given the job of organizing a citywide crime-fighting force in London. At the time, the two men lived together in a house at 4 Whitehall Place, and they ran their newly formed outfit out of their garage, using the back courtyard as a makeshift police station.They apparently decided the “Rowan and Mayne’s Backyard” didn’t seem like a good name for the headquarters of a police force. So it was called Scotland Yard. 

Why Scotland Yard? There seems to be two stories that possibly explain the origin of the name. The first explanation is that Scotland Yard sits on the location of what was once the property of Scottish royalty. The story is that back before Scotland and England unified (in 1707) the present day Scotland Yard was a residence used by Scottish kings and ambassadors when they visited London on diplomatic missions for short stays. The second explanation is that 4 Whitehall Place backed onto a courtyard called Great Scotland Yard, named after a previous landowner — Scott — who owned the property.

But anyhow, the metropolitan police was a successful organization and grew. In 1809, they decided that they needed new digs and moved to a larger building on the Victoria Embankment. That gave them the opportunity to rename their new headquarter something more appropriate with a name that actually made sense.
So the London police chose to name it the New Scotland Yard.
— 30 —

One of my favorite TV shows was the Big Bang Theory. It was on for a number of years and is still being re-run on various channels today. I thought it was a pretty funny show, but the Big Bang elicits serious discussions and is truly hard to understand for most people.
According to a lot, if not most, scientists, our universe started out as this really small piece of matter and metamorphosed into an ever-expanding universe.  But some creation scientists don’t believe it happened.

Explanations of the Big Bang usually cause headaches to people like me. I’ve heard the theory described something like this — A really long time ago there was nothing, and suddenly there was a whole lot of nothing, which was actually something, but nobody could really see it, even if there was somebody there, which there wasn’t.
See what I mean?

The Big Bang Theory was announced in 1948 by Russian-American physicist George Gamow, saying it was based on Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and Cosmological Principles.
Here’s what (I think) it says….
Some 12 to 14 billion years ago, maybe longer, the portion of the universe we can see today was only a few millimeters across (that’s a little smaller than a gnat) and extremely hot. The bang being mentioned is the expansion of this small, hot dense state into the vastly expanding and much cooler cosmos that we currently inhabit. The universe is still expanding, gradually increasing the distance between our galaxy and other galaxies. 

For a theory to be taken seriously on its way to becoming accepted as fact, it has to undergo rigorous testing. Since 1948, when Gamow first mentioned it, scientist have found the Big Bang Theory consistent with a number of important observations:
• Astronomers can observe the expansion of the universe.
• There is an observed abundance of helium, deuterium, and lithium in the universe — three element that scientist think were synthesized primarily in the first three minutes of the universe.
• The existence of significant amounts of cosmic microwave background radiation.

The cosmic microwave background radiation is an important observation because radiation appears hotter in distant clouds of gas. Since light travels at a finite speed, we see these distant clouds at an earlier time in the history of the universe, when it was denser — and hotter.
One big question is whether the currently expanding universe will continue to expand or will it ultimately contract and implode. Apparently contraction is a definite possibility.

There’s a bunch more to the theory, like about how space and time are altered by gravity, and the possible shape of the universe  — is it saddle-shaped, ball-shaped, flat or, as some think, doughnut-shaped. And is the universe open or closed — is it infinite or not.
The doughnut shape is an example of a closed universe — in such a universe, you could start off in one direction and, if allowed enough time, ultimately return to your starting point. If the universe is infinite, you would never return. I’m not sure what universe Star Trek operated in… I would guess it wasn’t an infinite universe, or Kirk and Spock would never have returned for all those re-runs.
— 30 —

Over the years I’ve written a lot about China. China is one of the most unique places I’ve ever been, and their history is absolutely fascinating. They also have quite a cast of characters that have made their impact on the world. 

China’s been around for over 2,000 years and if you think our society and government has accumulated a lot of rules, you can imagine how many have been created in China. The Chinese are very good at following complicated rules — in fact, following rules isn’t just a part of the day’s work, it’s a religion. That religion is called Confucianism.
Confucianism doesn’t deal with questions of the soul, or God, or life after death. It deals with how we should behave — toward our parents, toward our superiors — and, in the case of government officials, toward the public. 

The guy that came up with all the rules is Confucius, who was born in the province of Lu in 551 B.C. His father died when he was three, and Confucius worked hard after school to support his mother. After leaving school, he gave lessons in his home, charging whatever his pupils could afford. He taught history, poetry and — his favorite subject — the rules of proper behavior. He initially only had a few pupils, but the word spread, and at the end of his life he boasted that he’d taught 3,000 young men. 
Through the years, Confucius was invited to take a job in the government. But he wouldn’t work for any government he disapproved of, so for many years he turned down all the offers. He once said, “I don’t care that I’m not known. I seek to be worthy of being known.” An official he disapproved of once asked him for advice on how to rule. Confucius replied that he should learn to govern himself before trying to govern others. 

Confucius taught his students how to behave through a collection of rules, all of which were written down by his followers and compiled in a book known as the Analects. Many of his sayings start with the words “Confucius said,” or sometimes “The Master said.”

Confucius was nearly 50 when he finally accepted a government position as chief magistrate of Chung-tu, a town in the province of Lu. One story is that under his rule, the people became so honest that wallets and purses accidentally dropped in the streets would lie untouched until their owners returned to find them. 
Confucius’ reputation continued to grow after his death, and in time the Analects became the basis of one of China’s oldest and strongest religions. Mao Zedong tried to stamp out Confucianism  when the Communists took over in 1949, but old habits die hard,and Confucius’s principles are still widely practiced, both in government and in private life, even today.

We hear Confucius sayings all the time and often don’t realize they should be credited to Confucius. I think maybe may all time favorite is: “Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.”
But another comes to mind that maybe we should give some serious thought to at this very moment in our history — “In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of.”
If Confucius was running for office, I think he’d get my vote…..
— 30 —

Over the years, we moved around quite often. One good thing about those moves is that the government took care of packing and shipping our belongings. Maybe one of the bad things about those moves is that the government took care of packing and shipping out belongings.

We never had any serious issues, but we did have some “interesting” experiences, like having a bowling pall packed in the same box full of Waterford crystal, and having nothing stolen out of all of our effects except a box of umbrellas — just weird things like that.

On one move, when our belongs were unpacked, there was about 12 or 14 frisbees —they were all bright colors, looked brand new and were neatly stacked together. The only problem was that they didn’t belong to us. We didn’t think much about it and for some reason, either Claire or myself put them in one of the kitchen cabinets in our new apartment. I didn’t think any more about them until several days later we were having a dinner party for a few of our friends. We were again fortunate to have a very good cook and Claire told her that the people coming to dinner were very good friends and she wanted it to be “special.” 

As usual, dinner was great. The cook took away the dinner dishes and then served dessert. She came in with the biggest smile on her face and served everyone an individual dessert — each one in a different color frisbee. I didn’t know what to think, and the guests didn’t say anything. But the frisbees weren’t “flat” on the bottom, so they tend to roll around on the table when the guests tried to cut into the dessert (I think it was cake of some kind.) At that time both myself and Claire couldn’t keep from laughing. After explaining what we thought had happened to the guests, they thought it was pretty funny, too. I’ve never looked a a frisbee the same way since that night.
— 30 —

You may find this hard to believe, but a bank in Vernal, Utah, was built from bricks delivered by the U.S. Postal Service — in 1916. The builders discovered that it was cheaper to mail them than to ship them from Salt Lake City. Times change….
— 30 —

Abraham Lincoln said you can fool all of the people some of the time and and some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all the people all of the time. After listening to the news and the political campaigns lately, I’m not sure that’s true anymore, but it’s interesting what people choose to believe. I actually know people that to this day believe the Moon landings were staged and never really happened. 
Anyhow, some “beliefs” are hard to understand….

William Miller, a farmer in northern New York, founded a doomsday cult in the 1800s. His study of the Bible convinced him that humanity was due for damnation. He began preaching that message in the early 1830s. His first prediction was that Jesus Christ would “come again to the earth, cleanse, purify and take possession of the same” between March 1843 and March 1844. When a comet appeared early in 1843, a number of his followers killed themselves, believing the end was near. However, when his prophecy didn’t come to pass and the world survived, Miller stood by his message but became reluctant to set actual dates. Some of his followers took it upon themselves to announce October 23, 1844, as the big day, and Miller reluctantly agreed. The date came to be known as The Great Disappointment. Regardless, Miller and his followers established a basis on which the Seventh-Day Adventist Church was later founded.

In the early 19th century, John Cleves Symmes promoted the Hollow Earth Theory, which stated that the planet was actually several populated worlds nesting inside one another. Simmer’s ideas influenced Cyrus Teed, who developed Koreshan Unity, a religion based on the theory. For about 100 years, Koreshan Unity drew thousands of followers worldwide. The Hollow Earth Theory was revived during World War II, when some people theorized that the Nazis actually came from an underground civilization. More recently, Kevin and Matthew Taylor spent 12 years investigating the idea — they wrote a book about their findings, The Land of No Horizon.

Claude Vorilhon, a French race car driver and onetime musician, asserted that he was visited by an extraterrestrial in 1973. It was a life-altering experience for him that caused him to change his name to Rael and found the Raelian Church. Rael’s religion proclaims that the Elohim (“those who came from the sky”) created everything on Earth. Although many turn a skeptical eye toward Vorilhon, whose faith also preaches free love, the Raelian Movement is said to include as many as 65,000 members worldwide.

The Vampire Church has offices throughout the United States, Canada and Australia. However, don’t expect to find much about the “undead,” like vampires have been portrayed in stories for years. Instead, the church offers insight into vampirism as a physical condition that sometimes requires unusual energy resources, such as blood. In addition, it explains the difference between psychic vampires and elemental vampires.

The battle cry of the Church of Euthanasia is “Save the Planet — Kill Yourself.” The church was established by Bostonian Chris Korda in 1992. Korda, a musician, had a dream one night about an alien who warned her that Earth was in serious danger. The extraterrestrial, which Korda dubbed “The Being,” stressed the importance of protecting the planet’s environment through population control. As a result of the encounter, Korda established the Church of Euthanasia, which supports suicide, abortion, and sodomy (defined as any sex act that is not intended for procreation.) According to the church’s Web site, members are vegetarian, but they “support cannibalism for those who insist on eating flesh.” Although it reportedly has only about 100 members in the Boston area, the church claims that thousands worldwide have visited its Web site and been exposed to its message. 

So — religion is a very personal thing. Faith is also a very personal experience, and by definition, it isn’t based on fact. I certainly can’t tell anyone what to believe, but what some people believe is pretty unbelievable — if you don’t believe me, watch the news…..
— 30 —

This story is hard to believe, but as they say —truth is stranger than fiction, sometimes. During my tour in Vietnam, I was assigned a jeep and I owned a motorcycle. So you’d think I didn’t lack for transportation. But — on one occasion I had left the jeep to be serviced at the motor pool at Tan Son Nhat (the motor pool was located on the airport grounds.) So I rode my motorcycle for a few days, but one morning the battery on my motorcycle just died, and as luck would have it, I got a call on my radio that I needed to be in Biên Hòa (nearby city to Saigon) as soon as possible. I weighed my options and decided, given all the circumstances, my best bet would be to take a taxi. You’ve probably seen pictures of Saigon during the war and the streets were jammed with taxicabs and they were all little Renault vehicles. I might add that most polluted the air big time and probably contributed to global warming. They all seemed to be held together with rusty bolts and duct tape. And needless to say, they were small. 

Anyhow, I swallowed my pride and called one. It came to the curb belching soot-black exhaust, and I climbed in the back seat. I told the driver where I wanted to go and we were off — all taxi drivers drove like they were race car drivers and my driver made one fine Le Mans start. The taxi was so small my knees were up around my chin and it was hard to breath with all the soot coming from the engine. 

And true to form, the driver seemed to have the gas pedal all the way to the floor — we were really zooming through traffic. Then all of a sudden, there was an enormous scraping and a thunderous crash — even louder than the engine, which was loud enough. I looked up and the driver’s head, which seemed like it was only a few inches from my nose, disappeared. Actually, not only the driver’s head, but the entire front end of the car disappeared.Suddenly I was the front end — zipping down the street in my back seat, with no steering wheel or a windshield. It didn’t take long for the back seat and rear of the taxi to come to a stop. I stepped out, through the front, where the driver’s seat had been — there was no reason to open the side door. Just about then, the driver appeared, out of breath. The car had hit a large bump and had broken into two pieces. The rusted body and, probably rusty, drive shaft had separated precisely at the back of the driver’s seat, leaving each half to go it’s own way. My half (the back seat and rear wheels) ended up near the curb. The driver and the rest of the car had come to a stop further down the street. 
I would love to have had a video of that incident — it would have been a big hit on U-Tube today. 
It was fortunate that no one was hurt. The taxi driver hailed me another cab and I was off to Biên Hòa.
— 30 —

My apologies for this entry — it’s just one of those days…..
I never meant for this to be a whining blog. I’ve tried to make it about something that has happened or whatever happens to be on my mind when I sit down to write something.

Unfortunately, for the past few days my mind doesn’t seem to be working and I can’t get away from, for lack of a better word, grief. 
I guess what I’m carrying around — call it grief or whatever — is for someone that I haven’t yet let go of. Obviously my mind has dwelled a lot on this subject lately. I”m not sure when two people were connected like we were, that the connection can be broken. Just a physical death doesn’t break the connection — it stays. I certainly have to listen differently, and I talk differently…. but the connection isn’t broken. I’ve decided that as long as I exist, that connection will be there.
— 30 —

The Olympics in Paris just concluded and I was reading an article about memorable Olympics. It was interesting — a lot of the Olympics mentioned, I remember. In 1972 I was in Jakarta, Indonesia during the Olympics and was in the communications center at the American Embassy when a flash message came in about the Israeli hostages being killed. 
But the Olympics mentioned in the article that caught my eye was the 1936 Olympics in Berlin…..

In 1931, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) awarded the 1936 Summer Olympic Games to the city of Berlin. This was meant to mark Germany’s unofficial welcoming into the international arena after her discipline following World War I. But — the IOC didn’t foresee the rising tide of Nazism and the coming to power, in 1933, of Chancellor Adolf Hitler, who saw the games as a showcase of Aryan supremacy.

He considered the games to be an opportunity to show a skeptical world how he’d lifted his nation from the depths of despair and transformed it into a well-oiled machine that allowed the natural Germanic superiority to flourish. The games would be perfect, just like Germany. 
His first step was to clean up Berlin. The streets were cleared of the homeless, and anti-Jewish signs were removed. Hitler’s architects deigned four massive stadiums and a splendid Olympic village. German spent $25 million getting ready — an enormous sum of money in those days. And of course, the amateur German athletes were supported while they trained full time in the years leading up to the games.

Between 1931 and 1936, there was a growing movement around the world to boycott the games because of the German government’s anti-Semitic policies.There was a proposal for an alternative event, dubbed “The People’s Games,” to be held in Barcelona. But the Spanish Civil War squashed that movement. In the end, the 1936 Olympic Games would see more participant countries (49) and more competitors (4,066) than any previous Olympics.

When the medals were tallied in the end, Germany easily won with 101 medals overall, including 41 golds. It’s nearest rival, was the United States (a country with three times the population) with 66 medals, 25 of which were gold. But all of Germany’s achievements were cast into the shadows by the unbelievable performance of an American — his name, of course, was Jesse Owens. 
They called Owens the “Tan Cyclone” and he brilliantly lived up to that name by bagging four gold medals — in the 100 meter dash, the 200 meter sprint (in world record time,) the 400 meter relay, and the long jump.

Jesse started badly in the long jump, fouling on his first two jumps by overstepping the mark. He only had one more chance to get it right. As he psyched himself for his final jump, he was approached by his major rival, a stocky blond German who was a prototype of Hitler’s ideal. The man’s name was Luz Long and in one of the great acts of sporting comradeship he offered Owens some advice — he suggested that Owens draw a line a few inches in front of the take-off board and use that as his mark. It worked.

I’ve heard that Hitler snubbed Jesse Owens because he was a black man, but it seems that’s not technically true. On the first day of the games, Hitler formally shook hands with the medal winners from German and Finland. But that night, Hitler received a polite message from the President of the international Olympic Committee, Count Baillet-Latour, that informed him that it wasn’t proper protocol for a national leader to congratulate the athletes — he was there merely as a spectator. Hitler took the advice and from then on, didn’t congratulate the individual athletes. So Jesse Owens was not personally congratulated by Hitler, but neither were any of the other competitors. When Owens was interviewed about the matter a few years later, he said, “When I passed the Chancellor, he arose, waved his hand at me, and I waved back at him.”

Unfortunately, the real snub came when Jesse returned to the United States. His own president, Franklin Roosevelt, refused a face-to-face meeting with him and did not congratulate him in any way, by letter or phone call, on his outstanding accomplishment. (It’s also interesting that back in Hitler’s Germany, Jesse could sit wherever he wanted to on a bus.)

Sports announcer Marty Glickman was at the games that year —as a participant. He was generally considered to be the fastest man on the U.S. relay team. The day before the big event, 18-year old Marty and the other runners were called in for a team meeting. Their coach, Dean Cromwell, had an announcement: Marty wouldn’t be running — his replacement was wonder boy Jesse Owens. Glickman’s fellow athlete Sam Stoller was also bumped, in favor of Ralph Metcalfe. No reason was given for the substitutions. But — everyone understood. Glickman and Stoller were Jewish. The U.S. Olympic Committee was afraid a loss to a couple of Jewish guys would compound the damage that Jesse and the other black athletes had already caused to Germany’s Aryan image of itself. 
Jesse Owens protested…. “I’ve won the three gold medals I set out to win. I’ve had it. I’m tired. Let Marty and Sam run. They deserve it.” Owens was informed that he would do as he was told. And so the relay event was run without Glickman and Stoller. The U.S. team won by nearly 14 meters.

In the history of the modern Olympic Games no other fit American athlete has been pulled from an event. And until the day he died, Marty Glickman had a bitter taste in his mouth — a bitterness caused, not by Adolph Hitler or Germany, but by his own American Olympic Committee. 

It’d be nice to think that the Olympics have finally become non-political…. of course, that’s not the case. And it’d be nice to think something like what happened at the 1936 Olympics couldn’t happen again…. that’s not the case, either. 
— 30 —

As grandkids are prone to do, they usually leave something behind when they visit. Not long ago, I ran across a pair of tennis shoes. I noticed that they didn’t have laces — they used Velcro. II appears that even a lot of adult tennis shoes use Velcro instead of laces this days. 

I got to wondering how somebody came up with the idea of this “hook and eye” material.
When I looked into it I found a pretty cool story…..
Swiss mountaineer George de Mestral was out hiking with his Irish pointer one day in 1948 when he noticed little burrs sticking to his pants and clinging to his dog’s fur. The burrs that clung so tightly inspired de Menstral to go home and examine the burrs under a microscope. He noticed hundreds of little hooks clinging to the fabric. That led him to think he might be on to something that would replace the zipper — funny how some minds work. The idea “stuck” in his head and a number of years later he had it patented — in 1955. It took a few years for the public to get “hooked,” but eventually it became popular. His invention was given the name Velcro — a combination of the words “velvet” and “crochet” — and became a multi-million dollar industry.
— 30 —