Grimmer Fairy Tales

Few things are as comforting as an old familiar favorite book.  For me, that book is Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.  I’ve read the book so many times that I can recite whole pages from memory, yet after a few months, I’m invariably drawn back to read the book again.  I guess everyone has a favorite book.

For my wife, The Doc, it is an ancient copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, that collection of harmless stories that Disney has been strip mining fo public domain and royalty-free content for decades.  Evidently, The Doc and her sister used to read the stories as children from a now lost book.  So, when she found a duplicate copy at an estate sale, she had to have it.  

The auction sold the vintage copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales along with another book, Billy Whiskers: the Autobiography of a Goat, by Frances Trego Montgomery.  Though I had never heard of either the book or the author, it turns out that after the book was published in 1902, several million copies of the book and the 24 sequels were published, making the author the J.K. Rowling of the 1920’s.  According to Rose Kennedy, her son Jack read them all.  If you are interested, you can read the book online here.

Like everyone else, I kind of knew about Grimm’s Fairy Tales.  Well, to be honest, most of what I knew came from watching Fractured Fairy Tales on the Rocky and Bullwinkle television show, but that counts, right?  So, I read a few of the stories, spent at least ten minutes researching the brothers Grimm online, looking at most of the pretty pictures and discovered that I knew absolutely nothing about these stories.  While my research was a little spotty, it was way better than what Disney had ever done.

First off, the Grimm brothers were sort of the prototype of the orphans who despite being poor, still worked their little Hessian asses off, studying law and anthropology after their parents died while the brothers were off at school.  The brothers collected old folk stories from books and transcribed stories told to them by friends and family members.  In 1812, the first volume of 86 stories was published, followed 3 years later by the second volume containing 70 more.  Interestingly, the volumes were published with the title we all know so well, Children’s and Household Tales. 

The stories are dark—dark even for Germans—and are the kind of stories you would only tell children if their parents were Lizzie Borden and the Son of Sam.  By the second printing of the stories, the Grimm brothers had already been forced to make certain revisions…take the story of Rapunzel, for example.  

Rapunzel’s parents lived next door to an evil witch who had a vegetable garden protected by a high wall.  I have no idea why anyone would think living next to a witch was a good idea; perhaps the obvious risk made the rent lower? The wife, having pregnancy cravings, sees rapunzel growing in the garden and refuses to eat anything else.  We never actually learn just what kind of vegetable rapunzel is, but since the wife is growing weak with hunger, the husband climbs over the wall to steal some for his beloved wife and is immediately confronted by the evil witch.  Desperate, the husband works out a deal wherein he trades the future infant for an unlimited supply of the unknown veggie.  (In all of the stories, the lives of children aren’t worth much more than a fistful of root vegetables.). 

In time, the witch takes the beautiful infant and locks her in a doorless room atop a tall tower.  Access to the room is only available by Rapunzel—named after the vegetable—letting down her long, beautiful golden hair.  (Presumably, the tower grew about as fast as the child’s hair).  The witch brought food to the girl daily, and on one of those visits a passing prince learned the secret of getting Rapunzel to lower her hair.  Intrigued, the prince began visiting Rapunzel daily.  After a few weeks, Rapunzel mentioned to the witch that her dress was getting tight in the belly.

What?  Rapunzel is R rated???  From there, the witch cuts off the girl’s hair and blinds the prince, then he and Rapunzel wander the dark forest for years, destitute and miserable until they finally discover each other and live happily ever after.  The story doesn’t mention it, but presumably the witch goes unpunished, and Rapunzel’s mother remained a vegan.

Most of the original stories are far different than the versions you think you know.  Cinderella went to the ball several nights in a row, wearing luxurious mouse fur slippers.  Her evil mother, changed later into an evil stepmother, had her sisters mutilate their feet with a knife in an effort to fit their huge feet into the small furry slipper.  Little Red Riding Hood is eaten by the wolf, Rumpelstiltskin is torn into two pieces, and in Hansel and Gretel, the villain is the children’s mother.  The Frog Prince is not transformed back into his human form by a kiss, but by the princess smashing him against a wall in sexual frustration.

Reading the original stories is a little alarming at first, but after a while, you start to enjoy the dark humor and the lack of the sugar sweetness of the animated versions.  If the Grimm brothers had included Bambi, it would probably end with a recipe for venison jerky.  (Though if you think of it, even Disney’s version of Bambi starts with a murder.)

I’m not the only one who thinks these stories should be read by adults:  many contemporary authors have suggested that you should give the fairy tales a second chance.

Someday, you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.  – C. S. Lewis

Fantasy is a recurring ingredient in living. – Dr. Seuss

There wouldn’t be so many stories about vampires and zombies and other such creatures if they didn’t really exist.  – R. L. Stine

"Fairy tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten. – C. K. Chesterton

Besides, if you don’t read the stories for yourself, how will you learn about Snow White’s sister, Rose Red?

Back to the Future

Two years ago, I wrote about the Grain de Sail—a small cargo ship powered exclusively by its sails, that makes two voyages a year bringing 1,500 cases of wine from France to New York, then takes a load of humanitarian supplies to Dominican Republic, then returns to France with a load of cocoa and green coffee.  The ship’s owners maintain that the gentle rocking of the cargo sailboat helps the wine age and produces a superior flavor.  I’ll have to take their word for it since the price for a bottle is a little above my comfort zone.

As much as I like the idea of cargo ships returning to the Age of Sail, I don’t think the Grain de Sail, an 80’ schooner, is likely to be financially competitive against massive container ships.  Thankfully, there are positive signs that even the largest cargo ships may be making limited use of sail in the near future.

Berge Bulk, one of the world’s largest dry bulk shipping companies, has just announced the relaunching of one of its newcastlemax ships, the M/V Berg Olympus, that has been retrofitted with four WindWings.  Yeah, I know that is a lot of jargon, so let me decode it all.

A dry bulk shipping company is one that ships the type of cargo that does not use those metal containers—primarily loose goods.  Think of it this way:  if you had a pile of this kind of cargo in your front yard and wanted to move it to your backyard, you’d use a wheelbarrow (think coal, iron ore, timber, wheat, and barley).  Since Newcastle, Australia shipped massive amounts of wheat and coal to Europe aboard large (or maximum) cargo ships, those types of ships became known as newcastlemax.  

And those WindWings?  Well, the days of wooden masts with miles of ropes and flapping canvas sails started to end in the 19th century because steam-driven ships were faster and didn’t require as many men to crew them.  That doesn’t mean that the days of ships taking advantage of all that free air were over, however:  it just meant that the nature of sails had to change.  Today, many ship designers are using modern, high-tech versions of all that flapping canvas.  

Take those WindWings for example.  These massive, tall steel and composite-glass, rigid rectangular sails can rotate to catch the best angle of the wind.  Controlled by computer, they have adjustable flaps on their leading edges to maximize the amount of thrust the wind can provide the ship.  Ships that use this technology do not rely solely on wind for propulsion, but each sail on the ship cuts down the amount of bunker oil the ship needs to burn.  The Berg Olympus (right), for example, uses four WindWings that together will reduce fuel usage by 20%.

There is an alternative version of those metal and glass sails, called rotor sails, that use large vertical rotating columns to catch the wind.  When the wind flows over the surface of the rotor, it creates a pressure difference between the windward (front) and leeward (back) sides of the rotor. This pressure difference generates a force known as lift.  The rotor is mounted on a vertical axis…. Well, from there it gets technical.  So, just trust me—those massive rotating columns effectively work as sails.

Sails are coming back.

It really hasn’t been that long since there were true square-rigged windjammers carrying trade to Europe.  There even used to be an annual event, called The Great Grain Race, that people followed and even bet massive amounts of money on.  Every year, when the wheat crop was harvested in Australia, it was loaded into large, steel-hulled, square-rigged sailing ships that sailed west, around the Cape of Good Hope, and up the Atlantic to England.  

Since there was little profit to be gained by the shipping companies if the transit time was made shorter, they had little reason to use steamships instead of the venerable windjammers.  The only drawback to using the old-style ships was that it became increasingly difficult to find experienced able-bodied seamen.  While in port, sailors applying for a position were told to climb one of the four tall masts to the top, then imagine having to perform that task at sea with the mast swaying violently in a storm.  Most applicants quickly vanished.

While they certainly weren’t supposed to, the captains of the twenty-odd ships raced to see who could make the crossing in the shortest time.  There was no financial incentive for the captains and crews of these ships to race (actually there was quite the opposite).  The passage was rough and hazardous, with ships routinely losing as much as half their rigging on a single voyage.  Pushing their ships to the maximum meant that such losses could dramatically increase, costing the shipping company large sums of money, resulting in the officers responsible being fired.  Still, the owners of the ships didn’t mind when their vessels won and the results of the races were reported in newspapers around the world.  Sometimes, the amount of money bet on the outcome of the races was more than the value of the cargoes the ships carried.

A normal passage took roughly 100 days, with the fastest time of 83 days set by the Parma in 1933.  While, technically, the grain races stopped in 1949, the races really came to an end with World War II.  As you can imagine, employing a large, slow, steel-hulled sailboat wasn’t practical while there were submarines plying the North Atlantic.  And while a few of the old windjammers were laid up during the war and made a few voyages after the war, the large number of surplus military transport vessels sold to private shipping companies cut shipping rates and made the old sailing windjammers impractical.

The old grain races are fascinating, and there is a great book that describes them in detail.  In 1938, 18-year-old Eric Newby, who was destined to later become a great travel writer, signed on board the Moshulu, a 396 foot four-masted windjammer.  Newby was on board the Moshulu as it left Ireland bound for Australia, where it picked up a load of barley bound for the distilleries in Scotland.  On the return voyage, though, the ship was hit by a tornado, but still managed to win that year’s grain race by making the transit in 91 days, docking at Falmouth just before the start of the war.

Newby went on to write The Last Grain Race in 1956—a book that I heartily recommend.  The Moshulu was…. I’ll bet a dollar that, by now, you’re wondering where the hell that stupid name came from.  The ship was originally part of a German shipping company and named the Kurt.  When World War I started in 1914, the ship sailed to Oregon to avoid British warships, where it was interned for the duration of the war.  When the United States entered the war, the ship was seized by the government and renamed Dreadnought by the First Lady, Edith Wilson.  Since there was already a registered ship with that name, the definition of dreadnought or “one who fears nothing,” was translated into the Seneca language, resulting in Moshulu.  Blame Edith.

During the war, the Moshulu transported wool between the United States and Australia.  After the war, the ship was sold and resold and sold again until World War II effectively ended her sailing career.  For a time, she was a floating grain warehouse, but today, she is a floating restaurant in Philadelphia.  If you have a good eye, you can see Sylvester Stallone run by it in Rocky.  (The first one, not one of the eight or nine sequels.)

There are going to be a lot more ships with sails carrying grain and lumber across the oceans.  They’ll probably look more like the Berg Olympus than the Moshulu, they’ll probably have more solar panels than sails, but that’s okay.  Let me know when we can start betting on the races again.

My Quasar Microwave

Overall, the new microwave is wonderful.  It is powerful enough to incinerate food in just a few seconds, big enough to cook a turkey (does anyone actually do that?) and even connects wirelessly to one of the household gods, Ahexonya.  Until now, I hadn’t known I needed to control my microwave with voice commands, but it was available and I bought it.  (In case you are wondering, all of the other household gods are feline.)

To be fair, that voice feature turned out to be more useful than I thought.  Without having to remember which button does what, you can simply say, “Ahexonya, defrost at 30% for two minutes, then cook for 3 minutes.”  Or “Ahexonya, reheat my coffee cup.”  This turns out to be as handy as a pocket on a shirt.

As wonderful as all the features were, it had one small drawback—the first unit delivered by UPS turned out not to work, as it was missing a small piece of plastic that turned the glass turntable.  The piece probably cost about the same as those cheap ballpoint pens the banks give away, but without it the microwave wouldn’t work right.  So, the whole microwave had to be re-boxed and shipped back to California while we were forced to wait for a replacement.

Somewhere in China, someone had spent a few minutes looking at a spreadsheet and announced, “In the long run, it will be cheaper to reship units than to implement quality control checks.”  Nowhere in the box was a tiny piece of paper that said, “Inspected by Inspector #8.”

This may change in the future.  Currently, the White House is reexamining the tariff rates on imported goods from China.  Back in 2000, the United States granted “permanent normal trade relations” (PNTR) to China after the country joined the World Trade Organization.  PNTR is almost the same as “most favored nation” (MFN) status, meaning that the U.S. agreed to drop all tariffs on a wide variety of imported goods, including my microwave. 

For most of the Twentieth Century, particularly following World War II, it has been the policy of the United States to promote free trade between countries.  This policy slowed during the Trump and Biden administrations, with Biden stressing the importance of saving American jobs by extending tariffs.

This is a bad mistake.  For the moment, forget that free trade fosters peace among nations.  You can even forget that, in today’s globalized economy, it is almost impossible to protect domestic jobs by erecting tariffs, since tariffs erected against a particular nation will just mean that the foreign goods will be imported through a third nation with higher prices.  You can even forget that the immediate and direct result of protective tariffs is always retaliatory tariffs from the targeted country, something every politician should have learned from the disastrous Smoot-Hawley Act of more than 90 years ago.  (Hell, even Ferris Bueller’s history class knew that.)

Note.  The only real qualification placed on candidates for federal office is age.  Speaking from experience, it doesn’t take any brains to grow old, it just takes a long time.  Perhaps it is time for more stringent standards to be required of potential candidates than for a good bottle of wine or a block of vintage cheese.  Let’s require all candidates to pass a simple test on the Constitution and on American history that includes an essay question on Smoot-Hawley.  This simple test would cancel the eligibility of quite a few current congressmen and at least two recent presidents.

Cancelling PNTR for China will result in American consumers paying an additional $31 billion dollars a year, or roughly $240 a year per household, for the goods we currently purchase.  And that will NOT result in large numbers of local industry suddenly springing up to manufacture American made televisions and microwaves.  It will result in Americans buying fewer goods at higher prices and it will result in American companies selling fewer goods abroad.  And—far worse—it will result in American capital and labor being reallocated to inefficient production, because somewhere, some company will attempt—probably ineffectively—to manufacture an inferior product to attempt to compete with an imported good in the hopes that they can sell their product due to the protective tariff.

Falsely promising to protect domestic jobs has been a mainstay of politicians for more than a century, but by now even the most dedicated isolationist should realize that no matter how many catchy jingles are sung in television commercials, the garment industry is not coming back to the United States and no matter how high the tariff, Quasar and Magnavox are not going to start making American television sets again.  (Ironically, about 40 years ago Quasar was sold to the same Japanese company that made my microwave.)  What these empty promises fail to disclose is that such tariffs will not only be inflationary but most of the burden will hit families with lowest incomes who spend a higher portion of their income on such products compared to families with higher incomes.

America should focus instead on the goods in which we are globally competitive.  American is one of the leaders in production of high quality and high-tech goods where highly productive labor is important.  We lead the world in innovation, research, and development.  And these are the areas where we are likely to be the most successful in the future.  

My new microwave was built in China for a company based in Japan.  The technology, however, was developed in the United States.  A Raytheon engineer named Percy Spenser invented the microwave oven back in 1945 and for years, Raytheon licensed the technology to other companies.   I don’t know what the next generation of appliances will be, but I hope whatever replaces my new microwave is based on technology that came from American laboratories.

There really isn’t any choice since raising tariffs simply won’t work.  America needs global markets to sell our surplus goods meaning we will always have some favored nation trading partners who can sell goods here without tariffs.  Foreign companies that can sell to a global market will have huge advantages in economies of scale that will spread the fixed costs of manufacturing across larger numbers of products, lowering the price per unit.  Domestic companies that seek to produce smaller quantities of goods will have to base those sales on either unique features or significantly higher quality than their mass market competitors.  Those kinds of companies don’t need to hide behind the false protection of a tariff and would suffer from the inevitable retaliatory tariff imposed by foreign countries.

Personally, I’m ready to support a presidential candidate who is willing to admit that we are in the 21st century and that America is not going to go back to ineffective trade policies from the Gilded Age.  I just wish such a candidate was running.

The Super Cub

First off, I will admit that the words “Super Cub” immediately bring to my mind a 1949 Piper two-seat tail-dragger.  This is the beautiful airplane that Max Stanley said was “so safe that it could just barely kill you.”

I suspect that for most of the world, “Super Cub” conjures up an image of the most widely produced motor vehicle in the world.  It’s still in production and at last count had sold well over a 100 million units.  That’s more than all the Volkswagen Beetles, Ford Model T’s, all the various models of Toyota Corollas, and all the military Jeeps ever produced.  Actually, the number of Super Cubs produced exceeds all of those types of cars combined.

We are talking, of course, about a 50 cc moped.  Technically….well, it’s bigger than a bicycle and it has a motor, but it is definitely not a motorcycle.  It’s a small step-through motorbike that is part mechanical perfection and part fun.  Or, as the Beach Boys put it:

It's not a big motorcycle,

Just a groovy little motorbike.

It's more fun than a barrel of monkeys,

That two-wheeled bike.

We'll ride on out of the town

To anyplace I know you like.

To really understand why this motorbike has been so important, you have to understand the motorcycle market when the Cub was first introduced.  In America, the only two motorcycle companies that survived the Great Depression were Harley Davidson and the Indian Motorcycle Company, with the latter shutting down at the end of the Korean War.  Since Harley was facing no real competition, consumers didn’t have much to choose from, with most bikes being very large, heavy machines with a reputation for being mechanically unreliable.  Even in Europe, clip-on bicycle motors were more popular than small motorcycles.

Two men changed all that.  Soichiro Honda and Takeo Fujisawa opened business in a small wooden shack where they manufactured bicycle motors in 1948.  During the postwar economic boom, the company expanded into making motorcycles.  Fujisawa handled the business details and Honda designed and built the bikes.  Fujisawa told his partner that if he could come up with a reliable motorbike, one with a cover that protected all the wires and assorted mechanical parts, it would sell well.  The only other requirement was that the rider had to be able to drive the new machine with one hand so the other hand would be free to hold a tray of soba noodles.  At that time, the streets of Japan were crowded with bicycles delivering soba noodles to the hungry salarymen (white collar workers) in their offices.

It took two years of design work, but Soichiro Honda produced a prototype of the Super Cub.  With a small, low-compression 50cc engine that starts easily (so easily that even today many purchasers opt for the model without an electric start), the bicycle could go over 200 miles on a single gallon the poorest grade, low-octane gasoline that one would expect to find in remote areas of developing countries.  The motorbike engine was air-cooled and had a three-speed automatic transmission with a top speed of 50 mph, meaning that you could learn to ride the bike in just minutes.  As the Beach Boys have said, the first gear was “all right” with a speed just barely faster than walking, but it would do so going uphill with two people on it.

As for reliability, it would be difficult to find anything more reliable that had more than three moving parts.  There are testimonials from owners who claim the bike still worked after everything on the bike had broken.  A few years ago, the Discovery Channel decided to test those claims by torturing a Cub to death.  After replacing the motor oil with vegetable cooking oil, loading it down with four times the normal load, and even setting the bike on fire at one point—the motorbike still operated normally.  (Though people said it smelled like French fries.). Finally, the show’s producers threw it off the roof of a building.  The bike fell 66 feet, bounced, bent, and still started and moved when put in gear. 

Soichiro Honda had delivered the bike his partner had wanted, so now it was up to Takeo Fujisawa to sell it.  Fujisawa didn’t start small:  he anticipated that the Cub would increase sales for the company at least ten-fold, so he built a large new factory—one that copied the latest assembly line techniques of the Volkswagen factory in Germany.  Altogether, the factory was designed to produce a staggering 50,000 motorbikes a month if the factory ran a double shift.  Fujisawa estimated that building so many units at a time, the economy of scale would effectively lower the cost of production of each bike by 18%.  

The next problem was to actually sell the bikes, first in America, then in the rest of the world.  The biggest problem selling the bikes in the United States was that the word motorcycle was nearly always followed by the word ‘gang.’  People who rode those loud obnoxious motorcycles were anti-social thugs who were either just out of jail or on their way there.  Before the movie Easy Rider came out, motorcyclists were the people you told jokes about.  (What’s the difference between a Harley and a Hoover?  The location of the dirtbag.)

Honda used a new marketing slogan:  “You meet the nicest people on a Honda.”

If you click on that photo to the right, you might be able to read the advertising print where you will find that this marvel of engineering sold for $245.  Add another $5.00, and you could buy  enough gas to drive from New York to Los Angeles.  (If you drove 10 hours a day at the motorbike’s top speed, you could get there in a week.)

It is hard to say what this bike did for the world.  Fifty years ago, I saw them on dirt roads in the Yucatan.  They mobilized whole nations in Africa and Asia.  This was reliable transportation for almost anyone.  Teenagers drove them home and their parents wanted to ride on them.  (And they still do.)  And they absolutely became the standard mode of transportation for delivering pizzas and soba noodles.

I can come up with only a small list of man’s creations that were so perfect at the time they were created that they seem to defy time, living on for generations.  The DC-3, the works of Mark Twain, the Browning M2, the paintings of Vermeer, and recipe for mole poblano all make the list.  I am not a great fan of motorbikes—and I have the scars to prove it—but I may be forced to add the Honda Super Cub to that short list.

Because—to paraphrase Max Stanley—it’s a reliable motorbike so safe it can just barely kill you.