How Did They Come Up with That?

Quick, what role did Pauline Wayne play in the Taft Administration?  And what did President Theodore Roosevelt think of Emily Spinach?  And long before Dwight Eisenhower became president, who was the “Old Ike” who lived at the White House?

Pauline Wayne held the position of First Cow from 1910 to 1913.  This was back when pasteurized milk was not commercially available, and President Taft liked fresh cream in his coffee, so Pauline grazed on the White House Lawn until the next president (the arrogant stuffed shirt, Woodrow Wilson) decided that live-in livestock was not in keeping with the dignity of the Presidency.  

Wilson, who kept canaries, promptly changed his mind about keeping exotic animals during World War I, when there was a national labor shortage.  Wilson used sheep instead of groundskeepers to maintain the White House Lawn.  One of the sheep, Old Ike, was a notoriously bad-tempered Shropshire Ram, who routinely threatened the staff until he was given tobacco to chew.

And, of course, Emily Spinach was a garter snake that Alice Roosevelt, the daughter of President Theodore Roosevelt, carried around in her purse and occasionally produced at formal White House dinners to shock the guests.  Alice named the snake after an Aunt Emily, whom Alice claimed had an equally flexible spine, and after spinach because the snake was green.  When complaints about Alice’s outrageous public behavior reached the president, he replied, "I can either run the country or I can attend to Alice, but I cannot possibly do both."

The strange names of pets came to mind this morning while Charlie was sitting in my lap.  (Charlie is a black cat, not to be confused with Charli, my granddaughter, or Charlie, my friend and bridge partner, or even, Charles, his son.)  I’m allergic to cats, so we have five of them.  Charlie (The cat who is named after the 15th century Burgundian Duke, Charles the Bold) loves to climb into my lap and rub his wet nose up and down my arms, producing burning red welts that last for about an hour.  Obviously, a better name for an acid-dripping black monster would be “Alien”.

Once you start thinking about the pets of prominent people, it is almost impossible to stop.  For example, when Lord Byron was at Oxford, he was forbidden to keep a dog—so he kept a bear.  The bear was nameless (probably because you don’t need a name for something until you have two of them and whoever heard of someone with two pet bears?).

Pablo Picasso was fascinated by the Diego Velazquez painting, Las Meninas.  (So am I, see the blog about it here.). In total, Picasso painted forty-four different versions of the Velasquez paintings, fifteen of which included his pet dachshund, Lump.  Picasso painted a portrait of the dog on a dinner plate that was used to feed the dachshund.  That plate recently sold at auction for an undisclosed price (between $20,000 and $90,000).  (I’ll sell you Charlie’s dish for $20 and will paint anything you like on it.)

In 1960, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 5, the first spacecraft to orbit the Earth and safely return with two live dogs.  One of the dogs was Strelka, who later gave birth to a litter of puppies.  When Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev visited the While House, First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, inquired about the dogs, so Khrushchev sent one of the puppies, Pushinka (Russian for Fluffy) to the president’s wife.  The dog was extensively x-rayed and examined with a magnetometer by the CIA before being given a home at the White House.  When Pushinka became pregnant by the President’s dog Charlie—no relation to my cat—the President dubbed the resulting litter “pupniks”.  As of this writing, Pushinka’s descendants are still alive.

Lots of writers have kept pets whose names tell us more about the writers than their pets.  Mark Twain had a cat named Sour Mash.  Dorothy Parker’s cat was name Cliché.  Ernest Hemingway had several six-toed cats, one of which was named Marilyn Monroe.  Beatrix Potter wrote stories about Peter Rabbit, but called her own pet bunny, Benjamin Bouncer.

Equally revealing are the names singers have given their pets.  Frank Sinatra had a dog named Ringo, while David Bowie kept a cat named Elvis.  One of my favorite tunes is the song, Martha, My Dear from the Beatles’ White Album.  Part of the lyrics include:

Martha my love,
Don't forget me,
Martha my dear.
Hold your head up,
You silly girl,
Look what you've done.

When you find yourself in the thick of it,

Help yourself to a bit of what is all around you, silly girl.

I only recently learned that Martha was Paul McCartney’s English sheepdog.  

Sometimes, the pets of the famous are just inexplicable.  Boris Karloff was famous for portraying several frightening monsters including Frankenstein or the Mummy, so you would expect that he kept vampire bats or a jar full of spiders.  Actually, Karloff kept a penguin named Oscar in his backyard pool, personally feeding Oscar fish.  (To be fair, Karloff also kept a pet leopard.)

Since it’s that time of the year, I should probably end with the story of Abraham Lincoln’s first Thanksgiving.  On October 3, 1863, Lincoln signed a proclamation making the last Thursday of November a national “day of Thanksgiving and Praise.”  A citizen sent Lincoln a live turkey to be used for the holiday feast, but Lincoln’s ten-year-old son, Tad, taught the bird to follow him around the White House lawn and named him Jack.  When Tad learned that the bird was to be slaughtered, he interrupted a cabinet meeting, demanding the bird be spared.  Lincoln hastily wrote out a note granting the bird a stay of execution—thus starting an annual tradition that is still honored.  

City Founding

The Consul of Rome was worried.  The recent attempted coup by Cataline had been suppressed by the Roman Army, but had exposed that in the countryside—particularly to the north—there was widespread discontent among the landless poor, to whom Cataline had promised land reform in his failed bid to be elected consul.

The Consul decided to shoot two hares with one arrow.  He would strengthen the security of The Po Valley while co-opting Cataline’s policy, by creating a little land reform of his own:  He would create a new city.

Sending a cohort of soldiers to secure the area along the Roman road, Via Cassia, and within the Valley of the River Arno, a site was chosen close to a narrow point in the river, where fording the river was easy.  A short distance from the river, a level site was chosen for the camp.  After an auger from Rome carefully examined the livers of a pheasant and a rabbit from the area and certified that the area was suitable, the gods were thanked, and construction was begun.

The cohort quickly erected a castrum, a rectangular military camp.  A ditch was dug and a wooden stockade was erected within the ditch.  Within the stockade two broad streets, one running north and south and the other, east and west, were created.  At the northern end, a large open area—the forum—was erected and the commandant’s tent placed at the end.  The rest of the rectangle was filled with orderly rows of tents for the soldiers and slaves who would erect the city.  Slowly, over the coming weeks and months, these tents would be replaced with more permanent structures.

The engineers carefully planned the city.  After calculating the amount of water that could eventually be brought to the city by an aqueduct and measuring the amount of arable farmland in the vicinity, the engineers determined that the maximum population for the city would be 50,000.  The city would be designed to accommodate that many inhabitants and would not be allowed to grow past that number for fear of polluting the water supply.  When the population grew to that number, a new city in a different location would be created.

The engineers carefully enlarged the rectangular camp to enclose an area 720 yards by 620 yards, with the castrum forming the center of the new city.  The wide north/south road was called the Cordo, with the equally broad east/west road called the Decumanus.   The remaining area was subdivided with six more roads running north/south and four roads running east/west.  This meant the city was laid out in a grid pattern with each block, called an insula, of roughly the same size.

Surrounding the new city, a large double wall began construction, with the stone coming from a government quarry.  The long rectangle of walls, roughly a mile and a half in length, were broken only at the four points where the two main roads crossed.  Just within the walls there was a thirty-yard-wide open space called the pomerian separating the city from the walls.  In times of warfare, this open space could be used by the military or the civilians from nearby farms seeking safety.

Each insula was divided by a narrower back street running east/west, creating two large rectangular areas that could be filled with a double row of buildings facing either a main street or a back street.  These rows of double buildings could be further divided by alleys as necessary.  Each street was paved, with a drainage ditch on both sides and lined with a stone sidewalks.  Roman law required buildings along major street to have a protective cover over the sidewalks and limited the height of buildings to no more than twice the width of the street so that sunlight could reach the street.

The engineers designed a new and larger forum at the center of the city, large enough to be the civic center of the city.  Nearby, they established a public market, created a public fountain to be fed by the aqueduct, and set aside spaces for bath houses, toilets, an amphitheater, and a coliseum to be located just outside the walls.  The rest of the space inside the walls was set aside for private owners to build in as they liked.

To help settle the area, the Consul gave some of the interior land to 2,000 retired soldiers.  This seemingly generous gift actually solved several problems for the Roman government.  The new residents of the city were fiercely loyal to a government that they had fought for and would serve as the leading citizens of the new city.  The soldiers would be loyal and grateful to the Consul who had rewarded them, and most important—at least in the mind of the Consul—it safely removed from Rome large numbers of unemployed men who knew how to fight.

Besides the soldiers, many more workers were needed to build the city, most of whom  were slaves, belonging either to individuals who wished to build in the city or to  the government.  Many of the slaves were from the recently conquered Gaul, but others came from Greece, Egypt, and every corner of the Roman Republic.  Other workers were poor farmers who lived near the new city and were eager to find work to supplement their income.

By now, the interior of the city was beginning to fill up.  While it would take years to complete the walls, the theater, and the coliseum, the signs of growth were everywhere.  Workshops, forges, and the huts of the workers were scattered across the city.  While a stone bridge across the Arno was planned, a makeshift bridge of wooden planks across wooden boats already bore the weight of wagons bringing building material and food for the workers.  The market, though not yet under a stone roof, was already busy every day with merchants selling their wares to the inhabitants.

Eventually, both the forum and market would be in large stone buildings.  The water wells within the city would be replaced by the stone aqueduct that brought water the thirty miles from the mountains to the north.  A bridge high enough to allow for boat traffic was to be built, and the roads of the Via Cassia would be paved with stone all the way to Rome.  

Though it would take much longer for the city population to reach 50,000 than expected, the town was firmly established.  It would quickly become a center for textile production, the remains of which were just recently discovered by archaeologists.  Today, the city that Julius Caesar founded—Florence—is far more famous for being the birthplace of the Renaissance.  

The Pencil

Sixty-six years ago, an economist named Lawrence Read published a tidy little essay about all of the different companies from around the world that contributed the materials to make a simple common pencil.  Written to show the folly of a centrally planned economy and how a free market is the most efficient method of production, Read’s very short story called I, Pencil is just as readable and enjoyable today as it was when it was written.  You can read it here for free.

Read’s little essay is wonderful—despite its failing to include any mention of the history of the pencil (And as we all know, history is the tail that wags the dog of all knowledge…Or something like that).

It will surprise no one that the history of pencils—and damn near everything else—starts with the Romans, who used a stylus to carve letters into wet clay or wax tablets.  Historians are still arguing whether they also used silverpoint or leadpoint techniques—in which a soft metal is used to leave soft marks on papyrus.  (No, the stylus the Sumerians used to create cuneiform is not a precursor to the pencil because it wasn't used to draw or write, since it pressed a shape into the clay, it is the precursor to the rubber stamp.)

Paper did not become widely available in Europe until the 11th century and the only methods of writing or drawing employed either charcoal or ink.  By the Renaissance, artists could use charcoal sticks, which were an improvement over lumps of charcoal, but the pencil as we know it still did not exist.

In 1565, a large deposit of fine solid graphite was discovered in the British hamlet of Seathwaite.  The properties of graphite were already known, but the mines in the Cumbria region of England produced solid graphite that could be sawn into solid sticks suitable for drawing.  The resulting sticks were brittle, so the graphite was wrapped in either string or long strips of sheepskin.  To this day, no other source of natural graphite that is pure enough to use for writing—but hard enough to be sawn into usable sticks—has been located. 

At this point, pencils were almost lost to the world because someone realized that graphite was soft enough to be carved and that it remained stable at very high temperatures, all while remaining slippery.  Those three traits combined meant that graphite was perfectly suited to make cannonball molds.  The graphite mines were quickly made a royal monopoly and to ensure that none of the precious material was smuggled out of the country, the mines were flooded when not needed for military production.

Smaller blocks of graphite could be smuggled out and sawn into thin sticks suitable for use in drawing.  Almost immediately, a two-piece rectangular or square wooden encasement for the graphite stick was invented.  The groove was sawn in the wood—which was usually a soft wood such as red ash or juniper—to prevent splintering—so the lead in the center of the pencil was also square or rectangular.  The picture at right shows one of those early pencils (this one was made in 1630).

Note.  There is no real “lead” in that lead.  In the 16th century, alchemists believed that everything was made up from four basic elements: earth, air, fire, and water.  At the time, graphite was believed to be a form of lead ore.  Half a millennium later, the mistake is still with us.  In most European languages, the word for pencil translates to “lead pen”.  Consider the irony that slippery graphite is composed of the same element as practically indestructible diamonds:  pure carbon.

A century later, Germany began making a usable (but somewhat inferior) pencil, using powdered graphite treated with antimony and sulfur.  When the mixture was allowed to dry out, it formed a usable graphite stick that could be encased in wood.  While the higher quality British pencil was preferable, the German pencils were a practical compromise.

Which brings us (as faithful readers have probably already guessed) to Napoleon.  Great Britain went to war with France in 1793, establishing a naval blockade of French ports.  At the same time, English merchants were forbidden to trade with France.  French artists and writers were used to pencils and were loath to return to the days of using charcoal, and, unfortunately, France was also at war with Germany.  (Well, more accurately, France was at war with the German-speaking States within the Holy Roman Empire, but let’s not quibble.)

France needed an alternative, not only for convenience, but by this point, using a pencil was a military necessity.  Military officers routinely drew maps, scribbled written orders, and had to solve the complicated math problems required for accurately firing artillery.  Napoleon urged the French government, technically the National Convention, to find a solution.  The Convention asked Nicolas-Jacques Conté, a scientist and French army officer, to find a solution to the problem.  Conté worked on the process for several days and came up with a brilliant solution:  By mixing powdered graphite with a fine clay, the mixture could be extruded into whatever shape was desired and then baked in a kiln.  By varying both the proportion of graphite in the mixture and the baking time, pencil leads of varying hardness could be made, producing not only cheaper and more practical pencils, but production of pencils in a variety of diameters and hardnesses heralded the invention of the art pencil.  (A few years later, in his spare time, Conté also invented the colored crayon.)

The new French-style pencil was easy to produce and was quickly copied all over the world.  Within a few years, inventors had substituted colored pigments for the graphite, added wax as a binder and were producing colored pencils.  The new pencil industry quickly put the hard graphite mines of England out of business, though if you go to Cumbria, where the mines were located, you can see the world’s largest pencil at the Derwent Pencil Museum.

I guess that’s enough history lecturing for now.  I could tell you why England banned the use of the mechanical pencil sharpener during World War II, but I think I’ll save that story for another day.

My Annual Bitch about Daylight Savings Time

Quick quiz:  Are we currently on Standard Time or DST (Dumb as Shit Time)?  Now ask the same question of a couple of friends.  When I tried this, the answers were pretty evenly split.  I’ll give you the correct answer farther down.

There is an awful lot of misinformation about DST floating around out there.  No, the Romans didn’t use DST.  I don’t know who started this silly internet myth, but the Romans did not have accurate mechanical clocks and depended on either sundials or water clocks.  The Romans divided the daylight into twelve parts, and since the length of the day varied with the season, so did the times.  If you had tried to explain the concept of DST to a Roman, he would have just asked why you didn’t get up either earlier or later, as you saw fit.  

Nor was DST invented by Benjamin Franklin.  While serving as the American Ambassador to France in 1784, Franklin wrote a letter to The Journal of Paris, a daily newspaper, suggesting that Parisians could save a small fortune spent on candles if they would just shift their clocks an hour, to use more daylight.  Since then, proponents of screwing around with our clocks have suggested that if a man as wise as Franklin supported DST, we should adopt it.

What these morons fail to notice however is that Franklin’s letter was satire.  It was a joke.  Franklin didn’t really want to make the blanket longer by cutting off a foot at the top and then sewing it back onto the bottom.

And no—periodically messing around with our clocks doesn’t save either energy or money.  Two different government studies concluded that DST either saves negligible amounts of energy or actually increases the cost of lighting our homes.  Think about it for a second:  do businesses and schools routinely turn off the lights indoors during the day and get by on just the light from windows?  Do you have lights on during the day in your house?  

Careful computer modeling of energy costs by the hour suggests that the farther north you live, the more likely that DST might save you an insignificant amount of energy costs.  If you live in North Dakota, you might see 0.5% reduction on your heating and lighting costs.  If you live somewhere warmer, say in the high deserts of New Mexico, messing around with your clocks probably sends your energy bills up an equal amount.  

There are other costs associated with time switching.  The disruption in sleep patterns caused by the shift to DST has been linked to various health issues.  Studies show increases in heart attacks, strokes, and depression immediately following the clock changes, especially in the spring.  The hour lost in March can worsen sleep deprivation and increase stress levels, with some research suggesting that this impacts long-term health and well-being.

Adjusting to DST leads to a temporary drop in productivity.  Sleep-deprived workers are less efficient, and studies have shown that in the week after the clocks shift forward in spring, they suffer an increase in workplace injuries and make more mistakes.  This downtime from inefficiency and injuries adds hidden economic costs.

DST is associated with a higher risk of traffic crashes, particularly on the Monday following the Spring shift.  The abrupt change can make people drowsier behind the wheel, leading to more crashes.  Studies have shown an increase in fatal car crashes by 6% in the days following the switch.

So why don’t we end this nonsense and just leave our clocks alone all year long, like countries around the world have already done?  Many politicians have suggested doing just that, but legislation always fails to pass because politicians can’t agree on whether to just end DST or implement it all year long.  It’s kind of like our politicians all agree that eating pizza is a great idea but can’t decide if they are hungry enough to have the pizza cut into eight slices or just six. 

As the law stands today, any state can decide to end DST—as Arizona and Hawaii have already done—but the states are forbidden to implement DST all year long (that being a right reserved for Congress).  Here’s a wild thought:  Let’s stop messing around with the clocks and just change the time that stores and schools open.  

Nah.  That will never work.  However, if we can seasonally adjust our clocks, why stop there?

Let’s seasonally adjust our scales.  Every year in the Fall, let’s adjust our scales down by ten pounds so that every American can really enjoy the holidays.  Then we can eat all the Halloween candy we want and pig out on Thanksgiving and Christmas, because all of us have received a free ten-pound reduction in our weight.  

Of course, when Spring rolls around and we adjust the scales back up, we’ll have to work off the extra weight.  But we can adjust for that and simply increase everybody’s height by six inches, which should average out the body mass index.  And what short person wouldn’t want to be taller for half the year?

My wife gave me a great little convertible for my retirement.  In the summer, it’s too hot in New Mexico to not use the air conditioner, but the rest of the year has wonderful weather to drive with the top down.  How about we seasonally raise the speed limit by twenty miles an hour in the fall and then drop them in summer?

And the holidays are expensive, let’s seasonally adjust our bank accounts.  Just add $1000 to everyone’s bank account before Thanksgiving, then take it back in February.  It’s too cold to do anything fun in February anyway….  Wait, if we added about 20 degrees to the thermometer in late fall, then dropped it 40 degrees in the summer, we could have “temperate” weather all year long!  In your face Hawaii!

Now if any of these suggestions sounds ludicrous, please tell me how they differ from screwing about with our clocks.  (And for the record, we are on Standard Time.  Temporarily.)

The Astronomer

If you go to the Louvre (which is the most famous art museum in the world), the most crowded room is always Room 38, the Salle des États.  There is always a throng of camera-wielding tourists who are trying to take the definitive photograph of the most reproduced work of art in the world, the Mona Lisa.  Most of these tourists will leave slightly disappointed, since the painting is smaller than most imagine, it is firmly secured behind several inches of bullet-proof glass, and its protective varnish coating has become so dark in the two centuries since it was last replaced that it is hard to see any details of the painting.

At right is a view of the reverse of the Mona Lisa—the view the museum rarely shows.  If you watched the recent movie, The Glass Onion, you know they mistakenly showed the painting on canvas but as you can see, it is actually painted on a poplar wood panel.

If you go there, ignore the Mona Lisa because the gift shop will sell you a postcard that gives you a much better image than you can see competing to stand in front of the painting, itself.  Instead, look around the room at some of the Louvre’s most famous paintings that are all in the same room and which are, for the most part, completely ignored.  The Virgin and Child with St. Anne is there (also by Leonardo da Vinci), along with The Coronation of Napoleon by Jacques-Louis David.  One painting that is hard to miss is the Wedding at Cana by Paolo Veronese (It’s the largest painting in the museum).

That last painting, The Wedding at Cana, really shouldn’t even be in the Louvre, since Napoleon looted it from Venice.  In the last two centuries Venice has demanded it back several times, but the Louvre says it is too fragile to survive the trip.  Recently, the Museum gave Venice a high-resolution copy of the painting and declared the matter closed.  (It costs 15 Euros to enter the museum and it won’t accept high-resolution copies of the currency.) 

When you are finished viewing the paintings in Room 38, go up to the second floor to room 837 in the Richelieu Wing.  There you will find two incredible Vermeer paintings.  The first is The Lacemaker, in which a young woman is depicted, focused intently on her lace-making.  She sits at a table with various lace-making tools and materials, illustrating Vermeer’s masterful use of light and texture.  

The second painting is The Astronomer, in which a scholar is seen who is deeply engaged in his studies.  The painting shows a man seated at a desk that is covered with books and scientific instruments, such as a globe and a book of astronomical charts.  The man wears a Japanese robe—garb that was reserved for scholars at the time.  

The Astronomer originally was part of a pendent painting—a pair of paintings with the same theme.  This painting was meant to be displayed with another Vermeer painting, The Geographer, that depicts the same man studying a globe.  Both paintings were produced during a period when scientific discoveries were sweeping through Europe.

Both works were signed by Vermeer and both works used the same model, who is believed to be Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, the self-taught scientist and the founder of the field of microbiology.  

The two paintings remained together for over a century, being sold to various owners.  Such sales were usually part of estate sales after the deaths of their owners.  In 1803, at one such sale, the two paintings were finally separated.  After many sales, The Geographer was sold to the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, in 1885, where it remains today, while The Astronomer was sold to Alphonse James de Rothschild, and it stayed in the family until the Rothschilds sold it to the French Government in partial payment of estate taxes in 1983.  The little brass plaque at the Louvre explains this to the viewer.

What the brass plaque does not explain is that for a few years, the painting was part of the personal collection of Adolf Hitler.

Although it is common knowledge that the Nazis looted artwork—particularly art owned by Jewish families—from all of occupied Europe, it is less well known that both Hitler and Goring had lists of artworks of special interest that that were actively hunted for the Nazi leaders’ personal art collections.

While there is evidence that The Astronomer spent some time in Hitler’s personal residence, by the war’s end, the painting had been put in storage, awaiting the construction of the  Führermuseum, to be built in Linz, Austria, that Hitler envisioned to showcase “his” vast collection of art.  

Hitler planned on building the largest and best art museum in the world and planned to fill it with the finest art in the world.  It was not revealed until after the war that Hitler actually had compiled a list of the art works he wanted (including art from both the United States and the Soviet Union).  The fact that all of the art in his museum was to be be stolen didn’t matter to der Fuehrer.  

After the war, the Allies’ Monuments Men recovered the painting from a salt mine of Altaussee  returned the painting to the Rothschild Family.  The photo at right shows the actual recovery of the Vermeer painting.

When the Nazis took the painting, they stamped the reverse of the painting with a Swastika in black ink.  It’s still there, and while the Louvre will share a photo of the back of the Mona Lisa with the public, it won’t publish a photo of the back of The Astronomer.

And that’s okay, we don’t need to see it…It’s only the front of the painting that is important.