Category Archives: History

First World Problem

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Did you ever wonder why your stick of margarine comes out of the waxed paper broken in the middle?

margarineWe don’t use a lot of margarine but every stick in the last few pounds out of the freezer has looked like this.

I tried Googling for the answer. Out of about 6,290,000 results, 6,289,004 came back that “No insect will touch margarine and neither should any human.”

I don’t care about the butter aisle wars. Butter was a no-no. Saturated fats are a no-no. Now trans fats are a no-no. Butter is “all-natural.”

Pfui. According to the Code of Federal Regulations, Title 21, butter and margarine each must contain a minimum of 80% fat. The difference between them is simply the source of the fat: butter is made from cream (moo), and margarine is made from vegetable oil. (“For the purpose of this subpart P ‘butter’ means the food product usually known as butter…”)

Margarine can be used just like “butter” in most types of baking. Since margarine is softer than butter, you probably should not use it pastries and candy made from a boiled syrup. For the record, Anne makes excellent pie crusts but she uses lard.

This is a slippery slope and I don’t care what’s at the bottom. I just want to know why the stick is broken.

Heh. Slippery.

The Pennsy1 still ran when my mother and grandmother were at Swarthmore College but that train station is now part of SEPTA. The fare to and from Central Philadelphia is currently $4.25 during off-peak hours, about the cost of two pounds of butter on sale. Despite the fact that butter comes from cows, this is not the story of the cow in Parrish (cows will climb up but can’t come back down the stairs).

It seems a group of students who shall remain nameless because their legacies might still want admission saved their butter from the dining hall for most of a term. Freezers weren’t available then, so I’m not sure I want to know its condition when that same group wandered down to the Media Local tracks and slathered and slathered and slathered. As you might expect, the train rushed into the station and rushed right on through, much to the surprise of everyone aboard.

College students are one reason butter costs so much more than margarine.

Can I freeze margarine?
Yes, but probably not the whipped style or the low-fat brands which charge you to replace about half the fat with water. Place the package in an air-tight container or freezer bag. Freeze before the use-by date on the package, and store frozen up to six months. The limit is mostly to inhibit freezer smells.

I don’t think freezing had anything to do with the broken sticks I have. We’ve been buying margarine on sale and freezing it for most of my semi-adult life. The sticks sometimes come out a little bent at the corners but they rarely look licked and never have been so consistently pre-divided.

The floor is open for suggestions or scientific proofs.

Me? I think someone dropped the entire pallet of margarine off the top rack of the warehouse.

1“The Pennsy” was the affectionate name for the Pennsylvania Railroad, the largest railroad by both traffic and revenue in the U.S. for the first half of the twentieth century. It was at one time the largest publicly traded corporation in the world.

Giving Thanks

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AAA predicts that 43.6 million Americans will travel 50 miles or more from home during the holiday weekend. That’s up about 1% over the 43.3 million who traveled last year, mostly because of “lower gas prices.” This is the fourth consecutive year for holiday travel growth since 2008, when Thanksgiving travel plummeted 25% as the economy tanked. Nationally, 90% of travelers will take to the road rather than fly, up about half a percent.

The Associated Press says “filling up the tank will take less money than people expected” when AAA conducted the survey early last month “because of a dramatic drop in gas prices.”

Dramatic? Drop?

Gasoline cost $2.87/gallon for Thanksgiving, 2010.

Gasoline cost a record $3.32/gallon on Thanksgiving Day last year.

How is it that gas prices “dropping” to $3.44 is better?

Ben Franklin thought the turkey should be America’s bird so I’m thankful to have found a big inflatable turkey in a local yard for this week. The real Thanksgiving column is here.


ahh, supper

We are staying put for the day but I am thankful that we have friends coming from afar. Joe will join us. He lives next door. Ed says he is very, very hungry. He lives across the street.

BAM

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Naps are grand but I don’t like the idea of second sleep. I prefer to slam down into unconsciousness and have absolutely no interaction with the outside world for 855 contiguous minutes. I don’t want to wake for the (imaginary) dog barking or the ringing phone or to feed the wood stove. I don’t even want to have to get up to pee.

Cartoon Cat thanks to OCALIn the far reaches of history, before the advent of the electric light orchestra or Dick Tracy’s two-way wrist TV, most people slept in two separate phases, divided by an hour or more of wakefulness. Writers have long liked the uninterrupted time to write and crooks to steal. Field workers could awaken to have sex. Priests might use the time to pray.

Hmmm. Four hours of sleep. Hot weasel sex. Four more hours of sleep.

Yeah, that has a good ring to it.

I was particularly awake at 6 this morning, enough that I considered getting up after just 5-1/2 hours sleep. Shotgun fire woke me again at ten-to-seven and kept doing so for more than an hour. The 2012 Vermont Migratory Bird Hunting season for Ducks, Coots and Mergansers restarted at 6:50 this ayem. Somewhere in there I dreamed that I was feeding the (imaginary) dog who was romping across a chopped corn field.

Did you know that coots are medium-sized water birds with mostly black feathers except for their white forehead which gives rise to the expression “bald as a …” And the common merganser is a really big duck while the brant is a really small goose.

Duck Cartoon thanks to Luis TorresAs far as I can tell, duck hunting is like fishing from a boat except colder. You go out, motor across the lake burning a lot of gas, then sit around all day in a 4×6 room. You end up spending $500 per pound for something I don’t want to eat anyway.

Now deer hunting, on the other hand, means you get to take a tramp in the woods, shoot off as many as a few $1 cartridges, and stock your freezer for pennies a pound. Mmmm. Bambi steaks. Bamburgers. Bambighetti sauce. I understand deer hunting.

Tom Ripley’s father-in-law is a deer hunter. He keeps inviting me to deer camp.

“At the end of the season he shoots our Christmas tree,” Tom said. “BAM BAM. BAM BAM BAM. Then he calls everyone out to ‘see what I got.’ Of course that means everyone (else) gets to drag the tree back to camp.”

Duck hunting just got a lot more attractive.

They. Just. Don’t. Listen.

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My old friend Lido “Lee” Bruhl is a retired newspaper editor who enjoys the wordplay that happens in social media today. He passed along this poster:

“The planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as we have defined it.”
–David Orr

Fredo “Two Fingers” Caronia was the first to respond.

“Amen!” he said.

18 more similar responses appeared, most posted from one or another flavor of Apple computer.

I counted six more knee-jerk agreements, two Make Love Not War bumper stickers, five bashing the one-percent, three people against Big Banks, one plea to kick the peace keepers out of Pakistan (?), and one that announced Ross Perot’s poodle had caused all of our country’s problems.

Hello? Somebody has to earn the gelt to pay for the peacemakers and healers and restorers and storytellers and lovers. If you want a world that is un-habitable and inhumane, try one where all the businesses are forced to fail and all the inventors and entrepreneurs are ostracized, wrote the one contrary voice in the Wilderness.

Apple computer was created and marketed by a remarkably successful kid who had been frustrated by his formal schooling and who dropped out of Reed College after six months.

“Words to live by! LOVED, ‘Liked,’ Shared. Thanks, Lee!!!” Fanny Guay wrote even after I had weighed in.

“To my perplexion,” Liz Arden said, “no one paid attention to the fact that the context they put Mr. Orr’s quote in dooms us to scrabble in the dirt eating bugs.”

The quote itself was lifted from environmental educator David Orr’s 1991 article, What Is Education For? in which he discusses six myths about the foundations of modern education, and six new principles to replace them. He repeated it in the 1994 polemic Earth in Mind, a book that examines not the problems in education but the problem of education. It is a topic he has emphasized since the 1980s.

He argues that much of what has gone wrong with the world is the result of “inadequate and misdirected education that alienates us from life in the name of human domination.” He also quotes Thomas Merton who called education the “mass production of people literally unfit for anything except to take part in an elaborate and completely artificial charade.” (Mr. Merton’s advice to students was to “be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success.”)

Meanwhile entrepreneur, Chess Master, PayPal co-founder, and Stanford Law School grad, Peter Thiel is paying college students to drop out.

I agree with most of the points Dr. Orr made. After all, a college education has indeed ruined many a good garbage collector. (He said “our education up till now has in some ways created a monster.”)

He lost me by quoting the Trappist monk and mystic, Father Merton.

See, the problem isn’t that we ought not prepare our students to succeed. I don’t want to scrabble around in the dirt eating bugs, either. The way to assure that I don’t have to is to keep teaching the next generation and the next and the next. The problem is that so so many people here equate success with bad.

Success is good. But the bashers simply don’t hear us when we say so.

Dr. Orr, by the way, is the Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics and Special Assistant to the President of Oberlin College and a James Marsh Professor at the University of Vermont. He holds a B.A. from Westminster College, an M.A. from Michigan State, and a Ph.D. in International Relations from the University of Pennsylvania.

Interesting that we the loudest critics of education already have ours, innit.

Of course I want change our schools so kids do gain knowledge, some culture, and the critical thought skills necessary to interpret next year’s data.

Santana Strumming

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One of my oldest friends sent me the Geezer Test! Are You “Older than Dirt?” It included a question that took me back 45 years.

How was Butch wax used?
a. To make floors shiny and prevent scuffing
b. To stiffen hair cut into a flattop so it stood up
c. On the wheels of roller skates to prevent rust

My granddaughter doesn’t understand my haircut.

There’s a (back)story. Of course, there is always a story. When I was born (OK, it’s a longish story) I was covered with fine, black hair that started at my eyebrows — or perhaps started as my eyebrows — and continued up, over, down my back, around my toes, and all the way back to my nose. My grandmother was aghast. And worried.

She needn’t have worried. Men’s hair falls out.

Hair Today ...Mine did, but then a lot of it grew back.

My mom’s favorite baby picture of me as about an 18-month old came before my first ever haircut. My folks, having grown up in the Depression and then gone through WWII, considered the crew cut the height of fashion. They subjected me to the weekly travail of itchy fur down the back of my shirt all the way through high school.

In early 1921 Mathew Andis, Sr. built the first electric hair clipper but the John Oster Manufacturing Company became the USA industry standard in 1928. I never knew a barber without that particular sheep shearing implement.

I rebelled in senior high. It was the era of the Mop Top Beatles so I grew my crew cut out into a … flat top!

“A flattop is a type of very short hairstyle similar to the crew cut,” Wikipedia reports “with the exception that the hair on the top of the head is deliberately styled to stand up (typically no more than an inch) and is cut to be flat, resulting in a haircut that is square in shape. It is most often worn by men and boys, particularly those in the military and law enforcement in the United States.

“The haircut is usually done with electric clippers to cut the side and back hair to or near the scalp, and then more intricate cutting is done on the top hair to achieve a level plane. When cutting a new flattop, the top hair is usually cut to about an inch long, then blow-dried to stand up straight, and then finally cut with clippers and scissors to achieve the final look. Wax can be used to stiffen the front of the flattop.”

The real issue with a flat top is that it leaves a nearly bald strip right down the center of that aircraft carrier landing deck on the very top of one’s head. Some few flat top fanciers worry about drones landing there but that rarely happens here in the States.

Hair Today ...I shaved my head for the Cap Cancer fund raiser and kept it shaved until about November of that year. It gets cold in Vermont about September. I let my hair grow out a little for insulation and discovered I had enough to square it off. Woo hoo!

A real flat top, baby! No butch wax, though.

I don’t exactly want to fess up to thinning hair but I am 62 now and the hair atop my head is still fine but no longer black. In fact, my beard is white and most of the hair above it is steel gray. About the same color as the navy paints its carriers. Unfortunately, the hair at my very crown is finer and whiter than anywhere else. It is very hard to see. Especially when it’s just 1/8″ long.

My granddaughter says it looks like I’m bald down the middle with a row of fence posts down the sides.

Kids have no sense of history.