What Would Jimmy Do?

This year is coming to a close, so as I do every year around this time, I make New Year’s Resolutions. A lot of people don’t make resolutions for the new year, and a lot of people make resolutions that they don’t keep. But lately, I usually make resolutions for the next upcoming year. As I’ve said in the past, keeping any resolutions you make is nice, but when you make resolutions you’re expressing to yourself a desire to change something about yourself, or accepting a new challenge. If you succeed, great — but jut making the effort is important, too. 

So I make resolutions because I do — and over the years, I’ve tried to make them more realistic and achievable. Sometimes when I don’t keep a resolution (usually for reasons beyond my control) I repeat it for the next year and give it another try. That’ll probably be the case again this year.

So for 2024, I do resolve:
• I resolve to think about becoming more fit, by driving by the Wellness Center every week. 
I’ve made this resolution in past years and for some reason, I’ve never achieved my goal. This year I’m going to put renewed effort into it and I have high hopes for success.

• I vow to eat more ice cream.
It appears to me that ice cream contains a lot of healthy ingredients, so this seems like an admirable resolution. I know it doesn’t sound that hard, but I’m pretty sure there will be plenty of, as yet, unseen challenges. 

• I vow to learn pig latin and speak only in that language on all appropriate occasions. 
I’ve been to a lot of foreign countries and know a few words in lots of languages, but I consider pig latin to be mostly American, and I think being familiar with it would be very patriotic.

• I vow to transform my life into a permanent vacation.
This may be my toughest resolution. I know some people think I’ve already accomplished this many times over, but even though I may look like I’m on vacation, I’m very physically or mentally active almost all the time.

• I resolve to work “time will tell” into a conversation at least once a week.

• And finally, I once again resolve to become really good at procrastination.
Even though I’ve tried this one before, I’m determined to achieve my goal this time.

So there you have it — once again my resolve to make me a better person and the world a better place. 
Making resolutions to begin the new year is a tradition that goes back thousands of years — it’s believed to have first been practiced by the ancient Babylonians. So I’m in good company — a lot of us think resolutions are important. I encourage everyone to resolve to do better in 2024. And don’t worry — the second Friday in January is recognized as “Quitters Day,” which is when most people give up on their resolutions. So if you can’t keep your resolutions — you’ve got an out, but it’s ok to just keep trying!
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Well, we’ve arrived at the winter solstice. If there was a popularity contest, I’m pretty sure that the winter solstice would win as the least popular solstice. The winter solstice occurs on the shortest day — and longest night — of the year. The good news is that after this day, we can look forward to the extra hours of sunlight coming in the new year. 

We talk about the winter solstice here in the Northern Hemisphere, but the Southern Hemisphere has a winter solstice too. 
For us here in the Northern Hemisphere, the Sun is closer during December, but the Earth’s tilt away from the Sun results in less direct sunlight and that causes colder temperatures. The same thing happens in the Southern Hemisphere, but not in December…. our winter solstice occurs around December 21. The Southern Hemisphere celebrates the winter solstice around June 21.

I’ve mention this before, but the winter solstice is actually just one brief moment when the Sun in exactly over the Tropic of Capricorn. But the event is marked by a whole day on our calendars. 
Astronomers consider the winter solstice to be the first day of winter, but meteorologists consider December 1st to be the first day of winter. 

The likelihood of seeing a full Moon on the night of the winter solstice is pretty slim. Since 1793, a full Moon has occurred on the winter solstice only 10 times. The last time it happened was in 2010. The next full Moon on a winter solstice won’t be until 2094.
A lot of our Christmas traditions can be directly traced to winter solstice celebrations. 

The word “solstice” originated from the Latin solstitium, meaning “point at which the Sun stands still.” Early on, everyone figured that everything revolved around the Earth — including the Sun. If you’re a student of history, you know that the astronomer Nicholas Copernicus figured out that everyone was wrong. 
So we’ve arrived at the winter solstice — with its oppressive darkness — but — the promise of brighter times ahead. 
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Well, it is the Christmas season, and a few days ago, I heard the term “Jimminy Christmas” used. I’ve heard this phase pretty much all my life — more so when I was younger than in recent years. ButI wondered about it and thought some extensive research might be in order….
Jimminy Christmas is a direct reference to Jesus Christ and dates back to 1664, when it was first recorded as “Gemini,” a twist on the Latin phrase Jesu domini. It turns out that the name of the Walt Disney character “Jimminy Cricket” was (probably) based on the same phrase.

And while we’re on the subject of Christmas, what is the origin of “Yuletide?” The word Yuletide originated from the word Yule, which was recorded in Latin writings as early as A.D. 726. At that time, the form of the word was guili. Bothe terms refer to a 12-day pagan feast celebrated around the time of year that has come to be known as the Christmas season.

Evergreen trees have been a traditional symbol of winter festivals for thousands of years — well before Christianity. Plants and trees that remained green all year had a special significance for people that lived in cold winter climates. Ancient people hung evergreen boughs over their doors and windows. Some believed that evergreens kept witches, ghosts, evil spirits, and illness away. Romans decorated evergreen trees with trinkets and topped them with an image of their sun god at the festival of Saturnalia. And Christians started using evergreen as a symbol about 400 years ago in Germany as a sign of everlasting life with God.

Have you ever wondered how the custom of giving Christmas gifts originated? Contrary to popular belief, it was not thought up by the department stores. The ancient Romans gave each other gifts on the calends (first day) of January, and the practice spread throughout the Roman Empire. 
Christians give gifts at Christmastime to commemorate the visit of the Magi or Wise Men. 

Many cultures believe in a “gift giver.” Many countries, especially some in Europe, celebrate Santa Claus or Father Christmas on St. Nicholas Day in December. In the Netherlands, children leave clogs or shoes out on the night of December 5 (St. Nicholas Eve) to be filled with presents by morning. In parts of Germany, they believe that it is the Christkind, an angle who comes on Christmas Eve with gifts. In parts of Italy, there is an old witch called Befana. In Spain, children await the Three Kings’ Day on January 6.

Claire still sends out Christmas cards — these days lots of people don’t. I guess it’s one of those Christmas traditions that is just slowly fading away. People used to write their own cards. The first printed Christmas card is thought to have been printed in England in 1843 by Sir Henry Cole. Cole was a prominent educator and patron of the arts — he founded the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Since a man of his position needed to send out lots of cards, he asked a friend to create a design for him. His cards had the “To:” salutation at the top so he could personalize it. The design on the card was of a family party, beneath which were the words “A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you.” Apparently his cards got mixed reviews, but people realized the time savings of printed cards and started creating, or commissioning their own designs. Those early Christmas cards were very artistic and many became collectors’ items.

And while it maybe isn’t directly related to Christmas, I ran across an interesting explanation of the term “Godspeed.” The term dates back to a 15th-century song sung by English ploughmen on Plough Monday — the first Monday after Twelfth Day, that marked the end of the Christmas holidays. Before farm laborers went back to the fields, they dressed all in white and went from door to door drawing a plough and soliciting “plough money” to spend on a last celebration before returning to work. The song lyric “Godspeed the plough” expressed a wish for success and prosperity and was soon shortened to just “Godspeed.”

So Christmas has generated a lot of traditions over the years — most families have some. I’ve heard it said that tradition is nothing but ancestral peer pressure. I don’t agree — traditions serve as a path for creating lasting memories. Without traditions, our beliefs will get so diluted over time, we won’t remember who we are or where we came from — we’ll open our eyes one day and won’t recognize “our world.”
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Yesterday, we talked about the Spanish-American War and the fact that it was a pretty lop-sided affair. Something that I didn’t mention and probably should have, because it’s interesting, is that war kind of spawned the term “yellow journalism.” You may not be familiar with that term today, but if you read any of the newspapers that are left, or news in any format, you are exposed to it every day.

Most newspapers before and around the time the Spanish-American War started were typographically bland — they had narrow columns and headlines and very few illustrations. 
Then around 1897, they started incorporating half-tone photographs into most every issue and bold type and multicolumn headlines appeared. And newspapers started to take an activist role in news reporting.

Yellow journalism is a form of journalism that relies on eye-catching headlines, exaggeration and sensationalism to increase sales and it was actually born from a rivalry between the two newspaper giants of the era — Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. 
The story goes that Hearst wanted New York Journal readers to look at page one and say, “Wow,” to turn to page two and exclaim, “Holy Moses,” and then at page three, shout “God Almighty!” 

That sort of attention-grabbing kind of exploded in the media’s coverage of the Spanish-American War. The newspapers around that time certainly heightened public calls for U.S. entry into the conflict, even though they didn’t cause the war. (There is no evidence that President Williams McKinley paid any attention to the yellow press to get foreign policy guidance.) 

But the notion lives on — like most media myths, it makes for a good tale — and — it strips away the complexity of the situation and offers an easy-to-grasp, if badly misleading, explanation about why the country went to war in 1898. It also says that the media at their worst can lead the country into a war it otherwise would not have fought.
No rational person believes that the yellow press instigated or brought on the war with Spain. Newspapers, after all, did not create the real policy differences between the United States and Spain over Spain’s  harsh colonial rule of Cuba.

The term yellow journalism, was coined about the time of the Spanish-American War, and that war provided fodder for the practice but the term was actually born from a rivalry between Pulitzer’s and Hearst’s newspapers. In 1895 Pulitzer started printing a comic strip featuring a boy in a yellow nightshirt, entitled the “Yellow Kid.” Hearst then poached the cartoon’s creator and ran the comic strip in his newspaper. A critic at the New York Press, in an effort to shame the newspapers’ sensationalistic approach, coined the term “Yellow-Kid Journalism” — referring to the cartoon. The term was then shortened to “Yellow Journalism.”
Even though you don’t hear it referred to as such, newspapers (and all news media) still practice “yellow journalism.” We’ve grown so use to it, we hardly notice anymore.
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As you well know, the news has been, and is, full of news about wars — Gaza and Ukraine headline the news most days. I guess there’s been a war going on somewhere just about forever. Some we can remember and the history books are full of them.

One war that we all learned about in school is the Spanish-American War. In case you don’t remember, the Spanish-American War was an 1898 conflict between the United States and Spain that ended Spanish colonial rule in the Americas and resulted in the U.S.’s acquisition of territories in the western Pacific and Latin America.

But it’s an interesting war… and hey, they started it. Actually, they did. A little-known fact about this war is that Spain declared war on the United States first — on April 24, 1898. The United States, more than a little bit ticked off at being caught napping on the issue, declared war the very next day — and then backdated the declaration to April 21. The “Battle of the Declarations” was the very last thing the Spaniards won. 
A week later a fleet of American battleships steamed into Manila’s harbor and sank the entire Spanish Pacific fleet — like shooting fish in a barrel. Considering the Spanish fleet was anchored — and silent — it really was just that easy.

A couple of months after that, Americans landed in Cuba. Teddy Roosevelt had resigned as Secretary of the Navy to lead his “Rough Riders” into battle. The Rough Riders forced the Spanish fleet into a retreat that found it beached and burning up and down the Cuban shore line. The whole war took less than four months, and at the end of it, America got Guam and Puerto Rico for free, and bought the Philippines at a cut-rate price. And — in all the hubbub, the U.S. somehow managed to annex Hawaii. Apparently, some folks there still aren’t too happy about that.
Spain never had a chance. Oh sure, Spain could kick around Cuba, who’s bid for independence, and Spain’s brutal repression of that effort started the whole shebang to begin with. But when they tangled with the U.S., Spain got spanked by superior firepower, and a country that was itching to use it. 

Yet another little-known fact about this war was that for years the United States had a contingency plan to kick some serious butt up and down the entire Western Hemisphere — called the “Kimball Plan.” It was kind of the national equivalent of a sixth-grader waiting for that second-grader to rough up a younger kid, so he’d have a legitimate excuse to beat him up and take his lunch money.

The Spanish-American War was America’s debut out of the ranks of the second-raters. Up until that time, all our other wars — like those couple of wars with Britain and the nasty intramural squabble among the states, that we called the Civil War — had been fairly even skirmishes.

The Spanish-American War, however, was a slam dunk. We lost more people fighting the Filipinos, who apparently didn’t think much more of the Americans buying their country for a lousy $20 million, than we did fighting the Spanish. (Actually, there was a Philippine-American War — it lasted three years and cost 4,200 American lives.)

Since 1898, we’ve been involved in other lopsided wars — but in those wars, we had help, and we didn’t come away with any real estate to speak of. I’ve always heard that real estate is the gold standard in war gains….
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This year — 2023 — we’ll celebrate the 120th anniversary of the Wright brothers’ first powered flight. That flight took place on December 17, 1903.

Wilbur and Orville Wright are regarded as the geniuses who ushered in the “age of flight.” When their contraption (airplane) — named the Wright Flyer — left the ground, it proved that heavier-than-air flight was possible.

The Wright brothers really were brothers and they weren’t the only Wright kids. Two of the Wright family siblings, Otis and Ida, both died before they were one year old. There were two other brothers, Lorin and Reuchlin, and one sister — Katharine.

Neither Wilbur or Orville ever finished high school. Supposedly Wilbur, who was the brilliant brother, was very athletic and planned on going to Yale, but during a hockey game during his senior year in high school, he was badly injured and he suffered severe depression for a few years. During that period of depression he began to read extensively about flight. 
Orville was a gifted writer and dropped out of school to create his own newspaper, the West Side News. 
The Wright brothers were raised and lived most of their lives in Dayton, Ohio. Wilburn was born near Millville, Indiana and Orville was born in Dayton. 

On the day of their historic flight, Orville and Wilbur decided who would fly first that day with a coin toss. Wilbur won the toss, but his first attempt failed. Orville went second and managed to fly for 12 seconds. Later that day, Wilbur flew their plane for 49 seconds, over a distance of 852 feet. 

In 1892, Orville and Wilbur opened a bicycle repair shop. They designed their own bicycle with features like an oil-retaining wheel hub and coaster brakes — things still used today in many/most modern bikes. The bicycle business financed their work to invent the world’s first controlled flight, power driven, manned, heavier-than-air airplane. 
The Wright brothers only flew together once — on May 15, 1910, they made a six-minute flight together, piloted by Orville with Wilbur as his passenger.

Wilbur Wright was only 45 when he died — in 1912. He probably died from shellfish he ate in Boston, but the headlines said he died of Typhoid Fever. With Wilbur no longer a part of the Wright Company, the aircraft company the brothers founded, Orville decided it was time to retire, and he sold the company.
Neither brother ever married.
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Scientist have discovered and know a lot about matter. The dictionary defines matter as a physical substance in general, as distinct from mind and spirit; (in physics) that which occupies space and possesses rest mass, especially as distinct from energy.
Anyhow, the news article that brought this to mind indicated that scientists are on the verge of discovering an entirely new type of matter. They’ve already come up with dense matter, dark matter and even found anti-matter, but I guess there’s always more matter to be found. 

But all this got me to thinking… all of us non-scientists would be hard pressed to get along without the word matter. As a matter of fact, it’s the subject matter of this blog. No matter how you slice it, the fact that we use the word matter so much is no laughing matter.
We all have to deal with family matters and the way we do that sometimes only makes matters worse. While it’s not a matter of life or death, it’s only a matter of time that we must come to an agreement on how to handle waste matter. 
The crux of the matter is that no matter what, we use matter a lot.
Whether or not you like this blog is a matter of opinion — and if you don’t, it doesn’t matter.
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Today, December 15, is Bill of Rights Day. The Bill of Rights Day didn’t exist until Franklin D. roosevelt’s presidency — President Roosevelt made it a national holiday in 1941 — one the document’s 150th anniversary.

The Bill of Rights is the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution. These ten amendments were adopted in 1791 in order to protect individual rights and limit the federal government’s power. The Bill of Rights is made up of amendments that guarantee fundamental rights such as freedom of speech, religion, and the press, the right to carry arms, the right to a fair and quick trial, protection from unreasonable search and seizure, and protection from harsh and unusual punishment. 

At the time the Constitution was being written, many Americans were concerned about the new federal government’s potential abuse of power. The modifications, or amendments, to the Constitution were intended to protect individual liberty while also preventing the government from exceeding its authority. The original intent of the Bill of Rights was to limit the federal government’s powers and preserve individual liberty from federal overreach — it did not, however, apply to state governments. Of course, this meant that state governments could violate individual rights in ways that the federal government couldn’t. 

The Bill of Rights wasn’t applied to the individual states until the twentieth century — and — that only happened because of a series of Supreme Court decisions. The process of applying the Bill of Rights to the states is known as “incorporation.” It began in 1925 with the case of Gitlow v. New York, that extended the First Amendment’s free speech and press protections to the states.  Following that judgement, the Supreme Court gradually incorporated other Bill of Rights provisions. Throughout the twentieth century, the Bill of Rights became an increasingly essential aspect of American philosophy of law. 

The Bill of Rights also didn’t apply to all Americans when it was first enacted. Certain groups of people, like slaves and Native Americans, were not covered. Even after incorporation, certain groups of individuals continued to be denied full protection under the Bill of Rights.

The Bill of Rights is one of the most important and enduring documents in American history and the original document is on display at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.
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On today, December 14, in 1807, residents from Vermont to Connecticut looked up at the sky and saw a red fireball. The fireball was described as being about two-thirds the size of a full Moon. The fireball broke apart and fell to Earth in at least six areas of Weston (that is now Easton,) Trumbull, and Fairfield, Connecticut.According to news reports, whizzing sounds were heard close to the impact sites, and three sonic booms were heard as far as 40 miles away. 

A few days after the event, Yale professors Benjamin Silliman and James Kingsley traveled to the area to talk to witnesses, examine impact sites and collect specimens — including some from enterprising townsfolk who were selling them as souvenirs. Stiliman confirmed that the object was a meteorite — the first recorded in the New World. At the time, meteorites were a concept slowly being accepted in Europe, but their study was still a relatively new science. The Stilliman and Kingsley findings were published in the Connecticut Herald and rapidly spread to other newspapers. The professors findings were discussed by notable scientific organizations in Philadelphia, London and Paris. But there were still lots of skeptics about the idea of meteorites — including, U.S. President Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson was said to have remarked, “It is easier to believe that two Yankee professors could lie than to admit that stones could fall from heaven.”
But nonetheless, Sillimans and Kingsley’s meteorite fragments collected in Weston were the first cataloged items in the Yale meteorite collection, which is the oldest in the United States.
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Today is St. Lucia (also called Lucy) Day — she was a fourth-century martyr. Her name is derived from the Latin lux, meaning “light.” Before the Gregorian calendar reform (in 1582, and adopted in Great Britain and the American colonies in 1752) her feast day occurred on the shortest day of the year. There is an old saying, “Lucy light, Lucy light, the shortest day and longest night.” As you might guess, St Lucia is associated with festivals of light. 

St Lucia’s Day is celebrated mostly in Scandinavian countries, but it’s also very popular in Italy.
In Scandinavia, each country each town elects its own St. Lucia. The festival begins with a procession led by the St. Lucia designee, who is followed by young girls dressed in white and wearing lighted wreaths on their heads and boys dressed in white pajama-like costumes singing traditional songs.

Centuries ago, the Scandinavian countries celebrated the winter solstice with large bonfires — to scare off evil spirits and alter the course of the Sun. Later, after converting to Christianity, they incorporated the legend of St. Lucia into their celebration that has resulted in the modern festival of light celebrations of today.
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