What Would Jimmy Do?

In the United States, Mother’s Day is celebrated on the second Sunday of May each year. Today is the second Sunday of May, so today is Mother’s Day. 

Usually I try to find something not well known or trivial about these special days… during the Middle Ages, the custom developed of allowing people who had moved away from where they grew up to come back to visit their home or ‘mother’ church, and their mothers, on the fourth Sunday of the Christian festival of Lent. Back then, it wasn’t uncommon for children to leave home to work when they as young as 10 years old, so this was an opportunity for families to meet up again. This custom became Mothering Sunday in Britain — and, because the dates of Lent vary each year, so does the date of Mothering Sunday. Even though it’s often called Mother’s Day in the UK, it has no connection with the American Mother’s Day.

Mother’s Day is not a federal holiday. Organizations, businesses and stores are open or closed, just as they are on any other Sunday of the year. Public transit systems run on their normal Sunday schedules. Restaurants are busier than usual, because people take their mothers out for a treat.

Mother’s Day has become a day that focuses on generally recognizing mothers’ roles, and it’s become an increasingly important event for businesses — especially restaurants and businesses manufacturing and selling cards and gift items.

As I’ve said before, mothers deserve to be honored every day, but it’s nice for them to have a special day of recognition and appreciation. 
So Happy Mother’s Day to my favorite three Moms, that also happen to be the best three Moms I know — Claire, Kelly and Chassie… 
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Well, we survived Cinco de Mayo and today is another big day — anniversary day. Just like last year, according to the experts, this one doesn’t deserve any special designation. It sure seems like 49 years of marriage should be special ‚ but it’s not. There are no traditional themes associated with the 49th wedding anniversary. 

According to the Census Bureau, more than half of currently married couples (55 percent) have been married for at least 15 years, and 35 percent have reached their 25th anniversary. But — only 6 percent have made it to their 50th wedding anniversary. 

So I guess we’ll just have to wait one more year for what is, apparently, the mother of all anniversary milestones. I’ll just have to be content with the fact that we’ve put one more year in the book that Claire has again made me laugh and be happy and appreciate her more than I did last year.
Tune in here next year for a much longer blog….
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Both faithful readers know that the month of May is usually busy around here…. yesterday was “may the 4th be with you”  or Star Wars Day and today is Cinco de Mayo — the holiday that celebrates the date of the Mexican Army’s May 5, 1862 victory over France at the Battle of Puebla during the Franco-Mexican War. 

The Mexican Army that won the battle was largely outnumbered and poorly supplied. In fact, they were known as a rag-tag army and only had outdated guns at their disposal. But as few as 2,000 Mexican soldiers, some of whom hid behind tall cactus plants, defeated 6.000 French soldiers during the battle, that lasted from daybreak to early evening.

Ignacio Zaragoza was the Mexican general that led the army that defeated the French. He was born in what’s now Goliad in southern Texas and was only 33 years old when he led his troops to victory. Puebla was renamed Puebla de Zaragoza in his honor.

Although it was celebrated in the United States just weeks after the Battle of Puebla, Cinco de Mayo wasn’t officially recognized here until 1933. President Franklin D. Roosevelt enacted something called the “Good Neighbor Policy,” which was meant to improve relations with Latin American countries and communities. After Cinco de Mayo was officially recognized, it really began to pick up steam in the 1950s and 60s. I guess drinking seemed like a good way to improve international relations to FDR — sounds like a good idea to me.

The town of Chandler, Arizona has a typical Cinco de Mayo celebration — food, music, parades, dancing and Chihuahua races. Townspeople enter their Chihuahuas into the race and receive a large cash prize if their Chihuahua is the fastest.

Cinco de Mayo is not a federal holiday in Mexico, but it’s always been popular with the kids — even before the pandemic, schools were closed for the day.

So happy Cinco de Mayo — no matter how you celebrate and even if you don’t take in the Chihuahua races, you can’t go wrong with a Margarita.
— 30 — 

Chinese is one of the most popular cuisines for take-out. During the pandemic, we’ve either eaten outside at a restaurant or gotten “take-out” from all kinds of restaurants, but I was thinking about all the Chinese restaurants we’ve eaten at over the years. For a while, it seemed like it became a challenge to find the “best” Chinese restaurant in whatever city or country we were in.

A lot of Chinese dishes aren’t really “Chinese.” I’m sure you could say the same about most nationalities. 
But one dish you find in just about all Chinese restaurants in the United States, that you almost never find in other countries is General Tso’s Chicken.

So who was this General Tso anyhow — and how did he become such a great chef?  I guess I might as well get this out of the way right now — General Tso has essentially nothing to do with this Chinese chicken dish. 

General Tso (Zur Zongtang) was a real guy —  an actual Chinese general that rose to fame during the Taiping Rebellion of 1850-64. By the time that rebellion ended, General Tso was a household name. I know that beef Wellington is a dish named after the Duke of Wellington. So it seems reasonable that this chicken recipe might have been invented and named after General Tso, right? No — wrong.

General Tso’s chicken, as we know it today, wasn’t invented until the 1970s, in New York City — not in the southern provinces of China where General Tso earned his glory. 

My extensive research determined that General Tso’s Chicken, a sweet, spicy, crispy chicken dish, was introduced in 1973 by Peng Jia, a onetime chef to  the Chinese military and political leader Chiang Kai-shek. At the time, Peng Jia was the proprietor of a Manhattan Chinese restaurant named Peng’s.

Peng claimed that he actually invented the recipe while working for Chiang sometime in the 1950s, but that the original recipe was far different from the dish that many americans love today. 

When Peng opened his New York restaurant in 1973, Hunan cuisine was virtually unheard of in the United States. Most Chinese restaurants in the US featured Cantonese cuisine, that is far blander and sweeter than Hunan food.

Peng was convinced the American taste was unprepared for the fiery, sour taste of his original dish, so he sweetened the recipe. The dish became an instant hit and gained massive exposure when Henry Kissinger, whose every move was covered in the social and gossip pages of the day, made Peng’s restaurant a regular hangout and General Tso’s Chicken was his usual meal. Before long, General Tso’s Chicken could be found on Chinese menus all across the United States. 

Peng never explained why he came up with the name Genera Tso, but considering that he invented the dish for Chiang Kai-shek, he probably arrived at the name because it was one of several that the chef used to honor Chinese military greats of the past. 

In 1990, Peng returned to Hunan province and opened a restaurant that featured the dish that made Hunan a popular Chinese cuisine, but the restaurant closed quickly. Apparently General Tso’s Chicken, the symbol of Hunan cooking in the US and much of the world, was too sweet for the Hunan people. I guess there’s no accounting for taste…
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Cinco de Mayo is coming up soon and a few days ago we were discussing how we make margaritas. Everyone had a slightly different recipe and everyone made them using different “techniques.” Well, this conversation eventually led to to how other drinks are made and to martinis and the “shaken or stirred” controversy — or at least difference of opinions.

So — James Bond is noted for lots of things, among them a famous phrase that goes something like, “A vodka martini, shaken, not stirred.” You’d think a world famous superhero like James Bond would know the proper way to make a martini…. but from what I’ve learned over the years, he apparently doesn’t.

Should a martini be shaken or stirred? Just about every bartender I’ve talked to and every “bar book” I’ve read are very clear on the subject — there’s no gray area. If the cocktail contains only alcohol-based ingredients (spirits, vermouths, liqueurs) it should be stirred; if it contains any non-alcoholic ingredients (citrus juice, fresh fruit, eggs, cream or herbs) it should be shaken. 

Most bartenders agree that there is a right way and a wrong way to mix the ingredients in various cocktails. As to why certain drinks should be stirred and not shaken is an area that will probably never be agreed upon.
Stirring a drink, like a martini, produces a silky mouth-feel with precise dilution and perfect clarity. Shaking adds texture and aeration, changes the mouth-feel and binds ingredients that would readily separate with simple stirring. Naturally, this is just one school of thought.
And if you’re making a drink like a daiquiri — that should be shaken — stirring is as outrageous as shaking a martini.

But back to James Bond… he always demanded from the bartender: vodka, straight up, very cold, and —always, always —shaken, not stirred. So if you’re a James Bond fan, I’m sorry to tell you that even though he might know a lot about wearing tuxedos, using ingenious gadgets, and getting female foreign agents to bend to his will, when it comes to the martini, he’s a bit of a rube. All traditionalists will tell you that a martini is made with gin and is always stirred.

I hate it when I have to disappoint a lot of people, but sometimes we just have to face the facts…. contrary to what James Bond often famously declared, a martini should never ever be shaken, and it should contain gin — not vodka.
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Oklahoma, the Sooner state, is noted for a few things — the parking meter was invented there, it was Indian Territory for some years before statehood, it’s the home of Will Rogers and Mickey Mantle and I grew up there.
But if that’s not enough, something we’ve come to accept as necessary and something that literally changed the way the world shops was conceived in Oklahoma using a simple folding chair.

In the late 1930s (1936, I think) Sylvan Goldman, like any good business man, was trying to find a way to increase sales. Goldman had two grocery store chains in Oklahoma City — Standard and Humpty Dumpty. (There were Humpty Dumpty stores in the area of Oklahoma that I grew up in — I don’t remember any “Standard” stores.) Anyhow, Goldman noticed that when the wire hand-held baskets his stores provided became full or heavy, most customers headed for the checkout. He figured the problem could be remedied if shoppers had a way to conveniently carry more items through the isles. Well, inspiration struck one evening while he was in his office pondering the problem. As the story goes, a simple wooden folding chair caught his eye. What if that chair had wheels on the bottom and a basket on the seat? Or — it might be even better if there were two baskets.

Goldman explained his idea to Fred Young, a carpenter and handyman that worked at the store. Young began tinkering and after many months and a quite a few prototypes, they hit upon a design they thought would work. (The original design was two metal folding chairs stacked on top of one another with wheels at the base of the legs to roll the cart around the store.)

The first carts used metal frames that each held two big baskets — 19 inches long, 13 inches wide and 9 inches deep. When not in use, the baskets could be removed and stacked together, and the frames folded up to a depth of only five inches — that preserved floor space, a precious commodity of any retail store.

The shopping cart was once called the “greatest development in the history of merchandising.” Interestingly enough, the shopping cart didn’t catch on right away. In order to generate interest and sway public opinion, Goldman took out newspaper ads, but they didn’t work. Most women’s reaction, was ‘no more carts for me. I’ve been pushing enough baby carriages. I don’t want to push any more.’ And the men said, ‘you mean with my big strong arms I can’t carry a darn little basket like that?’ The initial try to sell the idea was a complete flop. Kind of as a last resort, Goldman hired attractive men and women to walk around his stores pushing the shopping carts — that last ditch effort proved to be a stroke of genius. The carts became acceptable and his business went through the roof. It was so successful that he began selling the carts to other supermarket chains…. and by 1940, he had a seven-year waiting list.

While we’re on the subject, I guess now is as good a time as any to air one of the “little” things that irritate me the most. To return a shopping cart to the proper place in the store, or to a designated area in the parking lot is easy… and most of us recognize it as the correct and appropriate thing to do. I can’t think of any situation, with the possible exception of some kind of dire emergency, that a person should not be able to return their cart. 

I think whether someone does, or doesn’t return their cart says a lot about a person. As far as I know, it isn’t illegal to leave a cart in the parking lot, on the sidewalk, in the aisle or up against some else’s car. So what a person does with the cart serves as a perfect example of whether that person will do what’s right without being forced to do it. Since there is no punishment for not returning a shopping cart, a person gains “nothing” by doing so. People return shopping carts because it’s the right thing to do. What a person does with a shopping cart is a good indication of whether that person is a good or bad member of society.
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The other day after golf, one of the guys was complaining…. about everything, it seemed. One of the group said, “Boy, you must have got up on the wrong side of the bed today.” Well, that got me to thinking…. I’d heard that phrase used to describe someone that’s grumpy, or unhappy, fairly often over the years. If you get up rested, happy and ready to tackle the day, then you must have got up on the right side of the bed. 

I sleep on the left side of the bed — every night, and I get up on the left side of the bed every day. So how can it be the right side one day but the wrong side on another day?

Sayings like these, whose meanings aren’t clear from the words themselves, are called idioms. I’ve talked about idioms on this blog many times. My extensive research discovered, not surprisingly, that there is no clear explanation as to how the idiom “getting up on the wrong side of the bed” came about. But, like most of these things, there are a few theories — for example:

One theory claimed the saying came about as the result of an old superstition that it was unlucky to get out of bed with your left leg first. This superstition appears to have started in Ancient Rome, where many Romans were careful to always get out of bed on the right side. This fit with other superstitions of the time that the “left” side was unlucky. Some people, including Augustus Caesar, believed that it was bad luck to put on your left shoe first. 

Others believed that this and other idioms that contain the phrase “the wrong side,” merely reflect the fact that there are positive and negative aspects of any situation. 

The ancient Egyptians believed that good and bad spirits lived among earthlings. They believed that the “left side” belonged to the forces of death and destruction. Hence, if you woke up on the left side of the bed, you were most likely possessed by evil spirits and you were probably going to do bad things during the day. 

These beliefs have taken root so deeply in the collective mind of mankind that even today some of the hotels in various parts of the world face the left sides of the beds in their rooms to the wall to prevent customers from waking up on the wrong side. But of course, someone always has to be different… in this case, it’s the Chinese. The left side belief is reversed in ancient Chinese tradition. Feng shui experts believe that it’s best to get out of bed on the left side. The left side is associated with money, power and health — getting out on the right side will being death and despair. 

So ‚ is it possible that there’s actually a right and a wrong side of the bed? Some people think there is. 
(Some) sleep scientists rely on psychology to conclude that the left side of the bed is right and the right side of the bed is wrong. They know that the left side of the brain controls logic and rational thought, while the right side of the brain controls emotion and imagination. If you get out of bed on the left side, they believe that you may focus your energy on logic and stay away from volatile emotions. 

So what do you think? Is there a right and wrong side of the bed? I’m not sure, but no matter which side you get up on, Claire has the solution — she says, “Every day when I wake up I can be happy or unhappy. I choose happy!”
— 30 —

A few days ago I discussed the use of the the word “john” when referring to the toilet or bathroom (among other things.) Well, obviously my mind is still in the toilet, because I got to thinking about the other terms I’ve used to refer to the toilet over the years.

The term “toilet” itself comes from the French “toilette,” which meant “dressing room.” “Toilette” was derived from the French “toile,” meaning “cloth” — specifically, referring to the cloth draped over someone’s shoulders while their hair was being groomed. During the 17th century, the toilet was simply the process of getting dressed, fixing your hair, applying make-up and the like — more or less the grooming of one’s self. This gradually began to refer to the items around where someone was groomed, such as the table, powder bottles, and other items. During the 1900s in America, the term began being used to refer to both the room itself where people got dressed and ready for the day, as well as the device itself now most commonly known as “the toilet.” 

The British word for the toilet, “loo,” derives from the French “guardez l’eau,” meaning “watch our for the water.” This comes from the fact that, in medieval Europe, people simply threw the contents of their chamber pots out the window onto the streets. Before throwing the waste out the window, they’d yell “Guardez l’eau!” The term “guardez l’eau” first came to the English as “gardy-loo” and then shortened to “loo,” which eventually came to mean the toilet itself.

The term “latrine” comes from the Latin “lavare,” which means “to wash.” The earliest reference to this term being used in English goes all the way back to the mid-17th century.

The term “lavatory” is also derived from the Latin “lavare,” but from the Latin variation “lavatorium,” that means “washbasin.” This began to be used in English in the late 19th century.

The term “restroom” seems to be American in origin and came into use in the early 20th century. It comes from the notion of “rest” referring to “refreshing” one’s self. About the same time “restroom” came into use, the British term “retiring room,” derived from more or less the same notion, began to be used among the upper class in Great Britain. 

The term “crapper” comes from the company name “Thomas Crapper & Co Ltd,” that made toilets in Britain. American soldiers in WWI stationed in England found this funny because of the play on words with the previously existing term “crap” and began calling the toilet “the crapper.”

The toilet is also sometimes known as the “head.” Most anyone that’s been in or around the Navy, uses that term. It was originally a maritime euphemism, and comes from the fact that, traditionally, the toilet on a marine vessel was located at the front of the ship (the head.) This was so that water from the sea that splashed up on the front of the boat would wash the waste away. The first known documented occurrence of the term was from 1708 by Woodes Rogers, Governor of the Bahamas. He used the word to refer to a ships toilet in the book “Cruising Voyage Around the World.”

The movie “Psycho” (1960) is believed to be the first movie where a toilet is shown being flushed. (The flushing took place just before Janet Leigh’s character takes a shower and subsequently gets stabbed to death.)

The first toilet shown on a TV show appeared on the pilot episode of “Leave it to Beaver” in 1957, titled “Captain Jack.” Wally and the Beaver hide a mail order baby alligator in the toilet tank. Special care was taken during the filming to only show the tank and never the seat — so as not to offend people. 

I’ve alway heard that if you live in the southern hemisphere, below the equator, water spins the opposite direction when the toilet is flushed. That isn’t true… the way water spins down a toilet is entirely determined by which way the jets are pointed. 

At this point, this subject simply begs for one of the thousands of toilet jokes I’ve heard over the years, but I’ll spare you that and and take my usual high road by leaving you with something informative or something to ponder, like…. if you can see the handwriting on the wall — you’re on the toilet.
— 30 —

I grew up in what was, and is, called “Tornado Alley.” Beginning just about this time of year and lasting until the first part of June, tornado warnings were pretty much a daily occurrence. When I was a kid, it seems like most tornadoes struck somewhere along Tornado Alley, a flat stretch of land from western Texas to North Dakota. This region was a hotspot for tornadoes because the dry polar air from Canada met the warm moist tropical air from the Gulf of Mexico — for most of the rest of the U.S, tornadoes were a rarity. But for whatever reason, that’s changed today…. just about anyplace can have a tornado. 

My mother was the ultimate “cloud watcher,” especially around this time of the year and she almost never saw a cloud that she didn’t think a tornado was going to drop out of. I heard all sorts of her theories about tornadoes and some I still hear today, but most of them are simply not true. 

When we lived in Oklahoma, pretty much all the weather moved from the southwest to the northeast. I still hear today that you should go to the southwest corner of your basement during a tornado warning. Tornadoes can move in any direction, so hiding in one corner is no more beneficial than any other. In fact, occupying the area that is closest to the approaching tornado — whether above the ground or in the basement — results in the most fatalities. A study conducted in the 1960s showed that the north side of a house is the safest area, both above ground and below. I might mention that where I grew up in Oklahoma, houses didn’t have basements, so during tornadoes, people went the “southwest corner” of their houses — or into the bathroom, which was supposedly a safer place because of the plumbing pipes being well anchored in the ground. But most people, like my mother, insisted on having a storm cellar — a hole dug underground to protect you from tornadoes.

Another (false) precaution that minimizes damage due to a tornado, is opening all the windows in your house — to equalize the pressure. Engineers agree that a storm with 260-mile-per-hour winds — classified as an F4, or “devastating” tornado — creates a pressure drop of only 10 percent. Houses and building have enough vents and natural openings to easily accommodate that. 

One belief is that tornadoes never strike large cities. This is another myth that persists today. The combination of traffic, dense activity, and considerable amounts of concrete and asphalt in large cities creates what is known as a “heat island.” This rising warm air has the potential to disrupt minor tornado activity, but it’s no match for the fury of larger tornadoes. Cities also occupy a much smaller geographic area than rural regions of the country, so the chance that a tornado will strike a city is relatively small. But — on a single day in 1998, three major tornadoes struck Nashville, Tennessee. St. Louis, Missouri, witnessed ten tornadoes between 1871 and 2007, resulting to more than 370 deaths. An F3 tornado tore through Dallas in 1957. In 1997, tornadoes touched down in Miami and Cincinnati, and another hit Fort Worth, Texas, in 2000.

Other “myths” about tornadoes I grew up hearing constantly include…Tornadoes are alway clearly visible ahead. No — tornadoes can be obscured or even invisible due to rain or nearby clouds.
If you’re in a car, you can out-drive a tornado. No again — tornadoes can travel well over 60 mph… and cars can easily be lifted or blown over by the storm.
The best protection from a tornado while in the car is hiding under an overpass. Experts agree that this will put you at more risk. The structure may not be stable and increases your risk of bing hit by flying debris. 
You only need to worry about tornadoes during “tornado season.” That almost, kind of, seemed to be true when I was growing up, but today tornadoes often happen at any time of the year, not just the spring. 

The formation of a tornado is so complex that scientists still don’t completely understand it. And the unpredictability of tornadoes makes them difficult — and dangerous — to study. A tornado will demolish everything in its path, including measuring equipment. And so, the secrets behind one of nature’s mysteries are yet to be discovered…. Happy Spring!
— 30 —

At the course where we most often play golf, the “club house” area was closed during the pandemic. They installed a window so you could pay your green fees without entering the facility. There was a sign on the door that said the facility was closed to the public — and you could enter only if you needed to use the “John.” The use of the word John to refer to the toilet is common, but it’s not usually used on a sign like this one.  Well, of course, this got me to wondering…. how did “John” come to refer to a toilet? I wonder what John did to deserve so much disrespect?

The most common explanation for why we call the bathroom the John is that it retained an association with the first name of British nobleman Sir John Harington, who invented the flush toilet in 1596. But the truth is that although Harington is usually credited with devising a prototype of the flush toilet, the “john” moniker for the bathroom is probably not related to his achievements. (This is probably a good time to note that the flushing toilet concept is credited to Thomas Crapper…. yea, that leads to another popular myth — and maybe another blog entry.)

But back to Harington — the newfangled toilet idea never really caught on during Harington’s lifetime; it didn’t come into widespread use until after 1775, when another British inventor, Alexander Cummings, received a patent for it. The term “john” for the bathroom wasn’t recorded in print until the mid-18th century. And of course “john” is an American term — you don’t hear people in Britain call the bathroom “john” — they call it the “W.C.” (water closet.)

As I mentioned, the first recorded use of the term “john” to refer to the bathroom dates back to 1738 and is found in the rules that governed the actions of incoming Harvard freshmen…. “No freshman shall mingo against the College wall or go into the fellows’ cuz john.” Supposedly, “cuz john” was short for cousin John, an 18th-century American slang term for the bathroom.

The word “mingo” was slang for urinating. It’s interesting to note that the college elders at Harvard found it necessary to enact a rule prohibiting students from peeing on the sides of college buildings. 

Cousin John’s actual identity is a mystery, but he probably wan’t anybody in particular. “Going to visit cousin John” was probably just a euphemism for using the bathroom.

Of course the name John is one of the most common names and, probably because it is so common, has become a generic designation for any man — like… Mac, Jack, or Joe. We’re familiar with phrases like Hey, Mac! Got a light? and the term G.I. Joe has come to mean any man serving in the military. “Johndarm” or “John” is a slang word for a policeman — especially in France. The term “John Doe” originated in English law as a fictitious name to describe one of the people involved in certain types of litigation. John Doe is also often used to refer to a corpse whose identity is unknown. A demijohn is a large bottle, usually encased in wicker, like a bottle of Chianti. A prostitute’s client is often referred to as a john. A John boat is a small, flat-bottomed boat used on inland waterways. A johnny cake is a cake made of cornmeal and toasted over a fire. A shameful name from the past, in the United States, is “John Crow.” We’ve all been asked to sign our “John Hancock” and many people have received a Dear John Letter. Most of us have heard about John Henry and John Q. Public as well as John Law. And if you’re a Johnnie-come-lately, you’ve probably wondered who shot John?

So those whose name is John should feel honored that their name has spawned so many expressions, even though not all of them are likely to please bearers of the name.
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