What Would Jimmy Do?

We all know that 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C is the address of the White House. But that building was originally named the “President’s House.”

It was designed by Irish architect James Hoban under the direction of George Washington. The cornerstone was laid in the fall of 1792. George Washington never lived there — he left office before construction was completed. The house’s first occupants were President John Adams and his wife, Abigail. They moved there in 1800.
By the time John and Abigail moved in the gray-quarried-sandstone exterior had started to look weathered and was given a coat of whitewash to protect it from harsh winter conditions. When the third U.S. president, Thomas Jefferson, moved in, the house was given a fresh coat of white paint. From that point on, it was given a fresh coat of white paint whenever it was needed.

At the Battle of York during the War of 1812, Canadian Parliament buildings were destroyed as a result of arson. In a retaliatory act, British troops set fire to many buildings in Washington, including the residence of then President James Madison and his wife, Dolley. This left the outside of the house charred and blackened. Madison ordered the house to be repainted in the familiar white color.
There is a notion that this led to the President’s house being called the White House, but before the attack, a British ambassador referred to the president’s residence as “the White House at Washington.” Then in March of 1812, a congressman by the name of Bigelow reported that “there is much trouble at the White House, as we call it — I mean the President’s House.”

So the president’s residence was referred to as the White House long before the building was officially named the White House.
It’s nickname didn’t become official until September of 1901 when President Theodore Roosevelt signed an executive order that designated the building “The White House.”
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Claire, like myself, had many jobs, and like me, couldn’t talk about most of them. But for a period of time she was a recruiter — she found “the right people for the right job.” Like everything she did, she was very good at it. In fact management wanted her to stay in that position permanently…. but that’s another story. 

The reason that I mentioned it was because in that position she was referred to as a “headhunter.” That and the fact that I saw a program on headhunters on TV the other night convinced me that the topic for today should be — headhunters. 

As opposed to Claire’s job, the term headhunter usually conjures up the practice of cutting off an enemy’s head and keeping it — and that’s been going on since the Stone Age.

Who came up with the brilliant idea to cut off their enemy’s head and keep it? According to the program I watched, headhunting might be barbaric, but there was (maybe) a good reason for doing it. Aboriginal Australians and tribes such as the Dayak in Borneo believed that the head contained the victim’s spirit or soul. They believed that taking the head took the essence of a person’s soul as well as his strength.

During the Qin Dynasty, Chinese soldiers carried the heads of conquered enemies into battle to frighten their foes. The heads also served as proof of their kills, which enabled the soldiers to be paid.

At the end of the TV program, the preview of the next episode indicated that headhunting wasn’t always associated with war — the ancient Celts incorporated it into fertility rites and other ritualistic practices. Unfortunately, I think I missed that next episode. 

It turns out that once you’ve got the head, it doesn’t take long for it to begin to decompose — that’s a problem for headhunters. Some headhunters kept only the skull — they cleaned and boiled the head to remove all the tissue and brain matter. Some cooked and ate parts of the head, and others preserved the heads — some of which are still in existence today.
In New Zealand, Maori headhunters removed the flesh from the skulls of their enemies, then smoked and dried it. That process preserved distinctive tribal tattoos, and made it possible to identify the deceased. Some of those heads were eventually sold to Europeans for private collections or museums.

Some of the best-preserved heads come from the Jivaro tribe of South America. These are shrunken heads — known as tsantsa. (The dictionary defines tsantsa as a shrunken head, specifically one prepared by a Jivaro Indian.) They are unique among headhunting trophies because of the way the Jivaro preserved them.
After killing and decapitating an enemy, the Jivaro cut and peeled the skin from the skull in one piece and discarded the skull. Then they turned the skin inside out and scraped it to remove the tissue. the skin was then boiled for as long as two hours to shrink it to about one-third its original size. After sewing the eyes closed and skewering the mouth shut, the Jivaro filled the skin with hot rocks, being careful not to burn it, and molded the skin as it cooled so it retained its features. Finally, they removed the rocks, filled the skin with hot sand, and finished the process with a smoking technique. What resulted was a small, hard, dark mass that was recognizable as a human head. I’m not sure about today, but a number of years ago, the Jivaro sold replicas of tsantsas to tourists. A friend of mine had one  — not sure if he still does.

There is evidence that some Allied soldiers took skulls as trophies and souvenirs during World War II, and there are at least rumors of similar practices during the Vietnam War. In 2001, the Borneo Dayaks practiced headhunting during conflicts with another ethnic group, the Madurese. Even today, reports of headhunting still surface occasionally, so if you find yourself in some remote location, it might be wise to “keep your head about you.”
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It seems like I’ve written a lot about some of our dinner parties lately. We had a lot over the years, and believe it or not, some of them went off without a hitch. Then, of course, there are the ones that make this blog — those are actually some of the most memorable ones. Another one that came to mind today was one that really went well…. but it’s another example of how well Claire was able to handle just about any situation.

I’ve mentioned that the last year we lived in Manila, we moved into a house in the suburbs from an apartment downtown. Our house was very nice and really much too large for just the two of us. But we had a lot of parties with large groups of people. On those occasions, several of the Filipinos that worked at the embassy would help out, by serving as bartenders and serving the food, etc. They were all super nice and they had dinner at our house numerous times. In fact, they felt so much at home, that when they helped out at dinner parties, they wandered around just like part of our family.

But one night we had “dignitaries” from Washington coming to our house for dinner, and Claire wanted it to be more formal than the normal parties we had.

I should mention that our house had a  “butler’s window” — a pass-through between the kitchen and the dining room. It was a small opening I would guess about a foot and a half by 2 feet. Instead of having all our Filipino helpers wandering in and out of the kitchen like they usually did, Claire stressed that she wanted all the courses — everything — to come through the butler’s window. All the help understood and said “no problem.”

When our guests arrived, we sat in the living room talking, and having cocktails and finger food. When it was announced that “dinner is served,” we all made our way to the dining room — all the guys from work had done an amazing job of setting the table. Claire had decided she would signal when we were ready for the next course of the meal by ringing a little silver bell (really classy, and in all honesty, a little out of character for Claire.) The first course was soup, and Claire rang her little silver bell. The butler’s window opened and a large covered soup bowl came through — followed by an arm — then a foot and a leg. Then came the head and upper body, then the other foot , leg and arm. Amazingly, there wasn’t a drop of soup spilled. Claire looked at me and I looked at her — and the guests broke into spontaneous applause. 

Claire excused herself momentarily and went into the kitchen. The remaining courses came through the butler’s window — but in the “normal” manner. 
Years later a friend told me that when the “dignitaries” returned to Washington, they told everyone that dinner at our house was the highlight of their trip.
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What did the snail say when it was riding on the tortoise’s back? Whee!
We’ve all heard the phrase “a snail’s pace,” but just how fast does a snail travel?

According to The World Almanac and Book of Facts, garden snails have a top speed of about .03 miles per hour.
However, in a championship snail race, called the Guinness Gastropod Championship, the snails were much slower. The course consisted of 13-inch track and the winner of the race was a snail named Archie, who made the trek in two minutes and 20 seconds.This comes out to 0.0053 miles per hour. 
Why, if this was a championship race did the snails run so slow? Maybe snails just lack ambition when it comes to competition. Maybe they would move faster if they thought their lives were in danger.

But if a typical snail moves like Archie, they might cover a yard in 6.4 minutes and they could make a mile in slightly less than eight days.
So I guess if you have a pet snail, you don’t have to worry about building a fence. You can just put him on the ground and there’s a good chance he’ll be pretty close to where you left him when you come back — of course that assumes no one steps on him…… 
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This has been a very hot summer here in Shepherdstown — lots of days of over 100 degrees. The weather is always a good topic for discussion, but any discussion about the weather is typically pretty boring. Heat waves like we’ve had this summer invariably encourage people to say things like “It’s so hot outside you can fry an egg on the sidewalk.” Most people know that the expression is an exaggeration — but can you really fry an egg on the sidewalk? I figured my extensive research should come up with the truth on this one…. here’s what I found.

Eggs must reach 144 to 158 degrees Fahrenheit to change from liquid to solid and be considered cooked, according to the American Egg Board. Even on the most extremely hot day summer days, the typical sidewalk falls way short of the 144 degrees necessary to fry an egg. 

A book, What Einstein Told His Cook: Kitchen Science Explained, by Robert Wolke says that pavement of any kind is a poor conductor of heat. When you crack an egg onto the pavement, the egg slightly cools the pavement’s surface. In order to fry an egg, the temperature of the sidewalk has to climb enough to start and maintain the coagulating process. If there is not a constant flame or source of heat from below or from the sides, pavement can’t maintain a temperature that’s hot enough to cook eggs evenly. About the best you can hope for is a runny mess.

All that said, frying an egg on the sidewalk isn’t impossible. There is a Solar Egg Frying Contest, held each Fourth of July in the town of Oatman, Arizona. People come from far and wide in hopes of winning a trophy for “the most edible” solar-cooked egg.

But technically, these people are cheating. Contestants are allowed to use mirrors, magnifying glasses, aluminum reflectors, and any kind of homemade cooking surface or contraption they can come up with to harness the power of the sun.And  Arizona in July is probably a good time and place to hold the contest — heat is high, humidity is low, and the liquid in the eggs dries out a little faster. 

Anyhow, we all agree that it’s been hot this summer, even if we don’t all agree that we could cook eggs on the sidewalk. Some people think it was so hot that we didn’t even need to worry about using the sidewalk — it was the kind of heat that would fry an egg inside the chicken…….
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I went to lunch with my neighbor last week and he insisted on picking up the check, because he could claim it as a business expense. He asked the waiter to split the check and include the drinks on a separate check. He said he had to keep the bean counters happy. Well, of course that got me to thinking about bean counters — I’ve heard the term all my life and it usually makes me think of some grumpy, briefcase-toting accountant. But why did these guys come to be called bean counters?

I guess beans have never been held in high regard by most people. I’ve heard the phrase “he doesn’t know beans” used to describe someone that’s clueless about something. And I remember my dad always used the phrase “it doesn’t amount to a hill of beans” when he thought something was meaningless or worthless. I guess if your job was to count beans, you’d be stuck in a pretty boring, joyless job — maybe that’s why the label is associated with accountants….

Anyhow, I figured the subject was worth some extensive research. One theory I found suggested that the derogatory nickname originated in the 1920s, when the marketing and sales-analysis firm the Nielsen Company (now known for the television ratings system) was just a fledgling operation. Supposedly the founder, A.C. Nielsen, was so diligent in his analysis that his employees counted the beans one by one at grocery stores they were auditing. That seems like a reasonable explanation, but it’s probably not true. The argument against it is that the preferred unit of a crop economy is the bushel — not individual grains, seed, ears, etc.

From what I could determine, the term “bean counter” first appeared in a Forbes article, in reference to a particularly careful account. It expanded to mean any accountant and then took on a negative implication, suggesting that accountants overlook value for numbers. 

Today, the term is used to describe any soulless individual that cares more about the bottom line than quality. Actually, this subject doesn’t amount to a hill of beans….
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We’ve been to lots of places in the world and we have currencies from all or most of those places. We even have some “coin dolls” from Indonesia that are made from old Indonesian money.

When I was in China, an “old” Chinese worker told me about Cowry shells. I had never heard of them before — they are marine snails that have brightly colored and patterned shells. But my friend told me that they were the medium of exchange used in China abound 1200 B.C. The shells were so widely traded that their appearance or “pictograph” became the symbol for money in their early written language. In fact, the early metallic money in China was cowries made of bronze or copper. 

But apparently cows represent the oldest of all forms of money. The words “capital,” “chattels,” (an item of personal property,) and “cattle” have a common root, and the word “pecuniary” (meaning “financial”) comes from pecus, the Latin word for cattle. But — cattle weren’t the only livestock used as legal tender. Until well into the 20th century, the Kirghiz (indigenous people of central Asia — found primarily in Kyrgyzstan) used horses for large exchanges, sheep for lesser trades, and lambskins for barters that required only small change.

Throughout history, salt and pepper have been used as money, mostly because of their value as seasonings and preservatives and for their importance in religious ceremonies. In ancient Rome, salt was used as money (Sal, the Latin word for salt, is the root of the English word “salary.”) If you’re interested, search this blogs archives for “salt” for more information. Roman workers were paid with salt, hence the expression “worth one’s salt.” And — in England in the Middle Ages, rent could be paid in peppercorns.

I think the largest pieces of money are 12-foot limestone coins from the Micronesian island of Yap. A coin’s value was determined by its size. Displaying a large one outside your home was a sign of status and prestige. Because of the coins’ size and immobility, islanders would often trade only promises of ownership instead of the actual coins. Several thousand coins still exist around the island, though the U.S. dollar is now the official currency. 

So these currencies sound strange to us, but just think about it — our grandkids will find it hard to believe we used coins and paper money to pay for things. Their idea of money is a rectangular plastic thing…..
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Got a text with picture from Suzanne and Mike (niece and nephew) — they apparently found a part of a pirate ship down around Lake Erie. I’ve always wished I had been a pirate and often blog about them. So I Figured why not another pirate blog today…. how about we talk about walking the plank?

One of the earliest definitions of the phrase “walking the plank” appeared in the 1788 book A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. The book explains it as “a mode of destroying devoted persons or officers in a mutiny on ship-board.” The victim was bound and blindfolded and forced to walk on a board that was balanced on the ship’s side until they fell into the water. This deed, “as the mutineers suppose,” might avoid them being charged for murder. Actually, no record exists of charges being brought against anyone who forced their victims to walk the plank — so maybe them old scalawags were right.

But from what I’ve read, plank-walking was an extremely rare occurrence — if it ever really happened at all. A lot of “experts” scoff at the notion, saying that the practice existed only in fiction. But some non-fiction stories have been written about the practice. In 1821, a Jamaican newspaper reported that pirates from a schooner had boarded the English ship Blessing. When the pirates were not able to get any money from the Blessing’s captain, the head pirate made him walk the plank. The buccaneers then shot the ousted captain three times as he struggled to stay above water. They they musket-whipped the captain’s son and pitched him overboard, and set the entire ship on fire. 

I have a pamphlet that says the notion of walking the plank originated with the pirates that plagued the Mediterranean Sea when it was dominated by the Roman Empire. (Pirates have been around for a long time!) When the pirates captured Roman ships, they would mock the sailors by telling them that they were free to walk home. Of course, at sea, there’s really no place to walk….

Probably, the reality is that unwanted men at sea were dealt with by marooning — leaving a man on a desert island to die — very popular among pirates. And sometimes, prisoners were tied up and tossed overboard to drown or be eaten by sharks. And then, of course, hanging, shooting, whipping, and torturing were all fun for pirates. I guess pirates weren’t all  that committed to justice.
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I had a visitor a few days ago from out of state. We were sitting on the patio having a drink when the visitor exclaimed, “oh look, there’s a woodchuck.” Well, actually the animal was a groundhog. We have lots of them in our area. But a lot of people do refer to groundhogs as woodchucks. Since we moved to West Virginia, I’ve heard groundhogs referred to as whistle pigs.

The word woodchuck is probably derived from the word wuchak —the local Native American word for groundhog. Probably the early settlers couldn’t be bothered to learn a language other than English (kind of like Americans today) so they just transformed the Algonquian Indian word into an English word that sounded similar.

But anyhow, I thought of the old tongue twister, “How much wood would a woodchuck chuck, if a woodchuck could chuck wood?” Actually, I don’t know if woodchucks even can chuck wood — I’ve never seen one do it. But what if woodchucks could chuck wood? I don’t think this topic has received the amount of research it probably should have, and I haven’t seen any studies that have proved that woodchucks are even capable of chucking wood. I do know that they seem to enjoy gnawing through wood though.

If the woodchucks in our neighborhood are any indication, one thing they are good at is chucking dirt. They have lots of tunnels near our house that are very long and at least several feet deep.
Now — I’m not making this up — I  did find one “woodchuck expert” that determined that if the displaced dirt in a typical woodchuck burrow was replaced with wood, the average woodchuck might be able to chuck about 700 pounds of it. So there you have it — maybe. 

If I remember the rhyme, it goes, “How much wood would a woodchuck chuck, if a woodchuck could chuck wood? A woodchuck would chuck all the wood he could, if a woodchuck could chuck wood.” 
That might be none…..
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This has been a particularly dry summer around here, but mother nature attempted to make up for it the last couple of days. The remnants of Hurricane Debbie dumped bunches of (much needed) rain on us. 
I thought today would be a good day to talk about rain, and maybe even attempt to answer the age old question: running through the rain or walking through the rain —which technique keeps you the driest?

If you think about it, it makes intuitive sense that running through the rain will keep you drier than walking. If you’re running, you spend less time in the rain, after all. But there’s an argument that says it won’t do any good. 
So — every time there’s a downpour and you need to get to your car, you’re faced with this confounding question: should you walk or run?

The argument against running is that more drops hit your chest and legs when you run. If you’re walking, the theory is the drops mainly hit your head. So those that favor walking say that running exposes you to more drops, not fewer.

Of course an important question like this has been pondered by a number of scientists. In 1987, an Italian physicist determined that sprinting keeps you drier than walking, but only by about 10 percent — which might not be worth the effort and the risk of slipping. And in 1995, a British researcher concluded that the increased front-drenching of running effectively cancels out the reduced rain exposure.

Well, like any theory about such an important subject, not everyone agrees. Those findings didn’t seem right to two climatologists at the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, North Carolina, who decided to put them to the test. They put on identical outfits with plastic bags underneath to keep moisture from seeping out of the clothes and to keep their own sweat from adding to the rainwater. One ran through the rain for about 330 feet. The other walked the same distance in the rain. They weighed the wet clothes, compared the weights to those when the clothes were dry, and determined that the one who  walked got 40 percent wetter than the one who ran.
So it appears that if you need to get to your car in the rain and you wan to to get less wet — run.
But lately, if I need to get to my car and it’s raining, I just wait until it stops.
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