A Dozen Dino-Wings, Please

Just what is going on with chicken?  Having just come from the grocery store, I can attest that there are a confusing range of terms and types of chickens and eggs.  Does it really matter if my eggs popped out of pampered free-range chickens?  Does a drumstick from a “factory” chicken taste as good as one from a humanely raised chicken?

Since I’m a historian, let’s start at the beginning…. Well, we can’t because no one is really sure where the chicken originated, though it was probably somewhere in southeast Asia.  We know it absolutely wasn’t in the New World or Africa, chiefly because there were predators in those places that probably would have made the species extinct long before anyone perfected a recipe for buffalo wings.  (Have you ever considered that a chicken is more closely related to a tyrannosaurus than to a buffalo?  Would a name change help or hurt marketing?)

Nor do we know exactly when the chicken was domesticated but it was somewhere between 10,500 and 4,500 years ago—a spread large enough to be useless.  What we are fairly certain of is that the birds were kept primarily for their eggs, not their meat.  It would be centuries before carefully selected crossbreeding produced a bird big enough to supply a meaningful amount of meat.

For millennia, relatively few people ate chicken meat, as the cost was too high for most people to afford until after World War II.  In my grandfather’s day, people ate far more pork, mutton, and beef than we do today, and chicken was considered a delicacy.  Even the price of eggs was too high for most ordinary people.  Part of the reason for this was that relatively few people raised the birds and those who did usually kept the birds in barns, since specialized chicken coops were relatively rare.  The birds were expected to scrounge around for their food, augmented by the addition of occasional kitchen scraps that weren’t consumed by pigs or the family dog.   Those who did raise egg-laying chickens could expect to lose 40% of the birds a year to accidents (meaning that something ate them) or disease.  The birds that were lucky enough to survive only produced 80-150 eggs a year.  (And the eggs were small.)

It seems strange today to remember that just a century ago, people were far more likely to eat mutton or lamb than chicken.  I’m not even sure that there’s a grocery store in town that sells mutton.  Anyway, you would need a bank loan to purchase enough lamb to feed a family of four.  This changed, however, in the 1920’s with the discovery of Vitamin D.  During the cold months of winter, chickens rarely got enough sunlight to remain healthy until spring, but with the addition of cheap dietary supplements, more chickens survived the winter and produced healthier and larger chicks in the spring.

In 1923, Mrs. Wilmer Steele of Delaware bought 500 chicks to raise, not for eggs, but for meat.  Her gradual improvements in housing and feeding the birds led to the first real “industrial” production techniques with indoor caging and better feed.  While some today might call these innovations cruel, Mrs. Steele’s 10,000 birds had a mortality rate of only 5%…Until someone ate them for dinner, I mean.   Better feed and dietary supplements raised egg laying up to 250 eggs a year.

During World War II, such industrialized chicken production increased rapidly.  The large numbers of chickens being slaughtered for consumption led to the development in 1942 of the ‘online eviscerator’, a machine that removed the internal organs of the bird making it ready to cook.  Since this meant that the carcass cooled more rapidly, it was safer to transport to market and less meat spoiled.  Up until this point, gutting and preparing a chicken was considered a kitchen skill.  Since the process by hand was time-consuming, butcher shops charged extra for preparing the birds for the home, meaning that the mechanized process lowered the price of chicken.  For the first time it became common for butcher shops to sell butchered chicken, so that the consumer could buy breasts and thighs, separately, without purchasing the entire bird. 

Shortly after the war, chicken production grew dramatically, in part aided by the rapid introduction of home refrigerators, making the meat safer to keep and use.  (I can remember being told sometime during the Eisenhower administration that if uncooked chicken attracted flies, it was no longer fresh enough to eat.  I doubt if that advice is still being taught today.)

Ever larger industrialized ‘chicken mills‘ producing both table meat and eggs, quickly put the small family egg farms out of business, forcing the USDA to begin a grading system for eggs.  So much chicken was sold, that mutton began vanishing from the dinner table.  By the end of the century, chicken consumption surpassed that of pork and beef and all across the plains of Texas, cowboys (poultry punchers?) herded vast flocks of clucking chickens to market….  Well, no.

What was actually developed were mechanized chicken and egg factories where birds rarely had enough room to exercise.  Antibiotics and hormones were added to the feed, making the birds grow faster and all but eliminating diseases.  Mortality rates dropped to low single digits and egg producers began striving for an egg a day.  These techniques also produced a backlash in publicity by people who believed that such practices were cruel and amounted to animal abuse.

In the last decade, a surprising number of people have begun to raise chickens at home again—and not only for food.  Pet chickens are now more popular as pets in American than either hamsters or guinea pigs.  Inevitably, people began pressuring stores to sell chickens and eggs that were more humanely raised.  This heralded the introduction of the free-range chicken.

Most consumers probably believe that a free-range chicken happily frolics among the flowers and trees while occasionally laying an egg on a velvet pillow.  This sounds suspiciously like the Happy Farm that parents describe to children to explain the sudden disappearance of a family pet.

The reality is that according to USDA guidelines, it means a free range chicken is a bird raised in a mechanized cage that has a ‘pophole’ large enough for the bird to stick its head through to observe the factory parking lot.  ‘Certified Humane Free Range’ chickens have it slightly better, since they are allowed two square feet of space per bird and are outdoors—weather permitting—at least six hours a day.  In practice, this means the cages have doors to access a fenced in yard, but the doors are open during good weather only.  While the word ‘range’ brings to mind vast open spaces, the math works out to a bird every seventeen inches in any direction.

If you factor in the size of a person versus the size of chicken, a free-range chicken is more crowded than a 300-pound man on a Southwest Airlines flight to Phoenix.  

But what about the taste?  Well, I’ve spent two days reading about taste tests conducting in America, England, France, and Italy.  Those tests boil down to this:  Of every kind of chicken you can name—including flash-frozen bags of breasts sold at Sam’s Club—each has won at least one of the tests, and there is no reason whatsoever to believe that more humane treatment of birds produces better flavor or nutrition.  Well, there is one exception:  all of the taste tests done by the producers of chicken proved dramatically that their own product tasted wonderful and might cure cancer.  I disregarded those tests.  

Reading those widely varied tests, it was almost like those chickens had been selectively bred for thousands of generations for size, not brains.

I can summarize the taste tests for you.  First, the more people paid for their chicken, the more likely they were to believe it tasted better.  When these same people were presented with blind anonymous choices, they rarely picked the expensive chicken.  If you buy the really expensive chicken from Holey Moley Foods, you are buying a Veblen good.  (A Veblen good is something that the higher the price, the more people want to buy it.  You know, Ferrari, Cartier, and anything made by in China with a Gucci label on it.  This is why some bottles of wine sell for thousands of dollars a bottle despite not tasting as good as grape Kool-Aid.).   The folks at the store over charging you for a plain chicken raised in a wire cage want you to believe that it spent its life resting on a mink lined nest while an au pair read Proust out loud.  In French, of course.

The second bit of information gleaned from those tests is that fresh eggs tasted better than older eggs regardless of whether the eggs came from birds were living in “humane” factories or were living on a family farm where a ten-year-old boy chased them around the yard beating them with a stick.  Any remaining difference between varieties of eggs is most likely due to the chef.

When buying chicken or eggs, you should buy what you want, what you can afford, and what tastes best to you.  Keep in mind that there are almost no stories about chickens that end with the phrase, “they lived happily ever after”.  There is a name for a book with stories about chickens:  it is called a “cookbook” and the stories in it usually end with “season to taste”.

Creative Destruction

In 1574, Queen Elizabeth issued a royal proclamation requiring her subjects to wear knitted caps on certain dates.  This decree was one of eight sumptuary laws dictating what kind of clothing commoners were allowed to wear, the permitted colors, and how luxurious the clothing could be.  The laws were very specific, describing what kinds of fabric, colors, and furs were allowed, even limiting the choice of buttons.  Naturally, the upper class was exempt from such laws.

All of society was concerned with keeping the poor from spending too much money on clothing but the personal reasons varied from preventing peasants from falling into debt to the more obvious motive of keeping the riffraff from imitating their betters.  Shakespeare referenced the clothing restrictions in several of his plays, such as in King Lear when a nobleman insults a servant, calling him a ‘three-suited, … filthy worsted-stocking knave’.  (Act 2, Scene 2).

As for Queen Elizabeth, there is no reason to doubt that she supported the maintenance of class differences, and she was probably genuinely concerned about preventing the poor for going into debt needlessly from buying clothes in a useless effort to emulate their betters—but her primary motivation was to placate the powerful textile guilds.  The guilds supported the queen politically in exchange for her guaranteeing their market.  

Shortly after the proclamation concerning the wearing of caps, Reverend William Lee in the village of Calverton noticed a woman spending long hours knitting caps to comply with the new law.  Exactly who the woman was depends on which flavor of the legend you prefer:   it was either his wife, his mother, or his sweetheart.  Considering that, as curate, Lee only received a tenth of the salary paid to the parish priest, he was forced to live in a small house owned by the church.  (Since he couldn’t afford a wife and the house was too small to live with his mother, I think it was probably the last of the three options.)

Watching that single pair of needles slowly working in the dim light to produce coarse cloth, Lee suddenly had a thought.  Wouldn’t multiple needles working together produce cloth faster?  Whether Lee was interested in saving labor or improving his financial condition will never be known, but after a couple of years of hard work, Lee developed a working stocking frame knitting machine, the first practical machine to produce clothing, arguably the first step towards the industrial revolution.  

Lee spent another two years improving both the speed and the quality of the machine to the degree that several working models were in production, producing coarse cloth faster than was capable by human labor alone.  Seeking to expand his business, William Lee went to London and began commercial operations.  His new enterprise caught the attention of Queen Elizabeth, who visited the shop and examined the machinery for herself.  After she expressed disappointment with the coarseness of the cloth, Lee further improved the machinery to the point where it could produce fine silk cloth.  Lee presented the queen with a pair of silk stockings hoping for a patent and her royal patronage.

To his request, the queen answered, “Thou aimest high, Master Lee.  Consider thou what the invention could do to my poor subjects.  It would assuredly bring to them ruin by depriving them of employment, thus making them beggars.”  Lee took his machines to Paris where the French King similarly rebuffed him.  Lee died in poverty, and the industrial revolution got off to a slow start.

While Queen Lizzie was probably more interested in keeping the guilds’ support than her having any fear that the machine might put workers out of work, this is still a great example of the fear of creative destruction—the fear that new technology will harm the economy by eliminating existing jobs.  Though this fear has always been irrational, it persists today.  At least once a week someone tells me they refuse to pump their own gas or use self-checkout registers in grocery stores because those actions eliminate jobs.

The fear of creative destruction is why the downtown department stores fought the building of malls, which in turn were against online retailers. It is the current reason why trains without coal or a firebox still have firemen (though still called firemen, they are usually engineers in training), why our major shipping ports are not modernized, and why many people fear the inevitable age of self-driving trucks on the highway.  That the low wages paid to checkers in grocery stores will be offset by the higher pay of designers, builders and repairmen of automated checkout computers is rarely considered—most people still fear that new technology will create poverty by eliminating jobs.

In the long run, however, these innovations lower the cost of goods for the consumers, saving them enough money that more goods can be purchased.   Increased purchasing power will power invention of newer, better goods, thus creating new jobs.  While thousands of current truck drivers will inevitably be replaced by computers in the coming decades, the driverless trucks will lower transportation costs, creating new jobs in the process.  The process will be painful for many of today’s drivers, but a half century from now, people will wonder why we were hesitant.

This process has been going on for centuries, but we just forget about it because we enjoy the new technology at cheaper costs.  I’m not typing this on my new IBM Selectric typewriter by the light of a kerosene lantern, my phone isn’t plugged into the wall, and I don’t take pictures on a Polaroid.  

Rent Control

Yesterday, I received a survey from a California university asking my opinions about the rent policy on some apartments I own.  From the obvious slant of the questions being asked, it was rather obvious what conclusions the researchers desired.  Some of the questions were so narrowly worded that no matter how I answered, I was confessing to being Simon Legree, gleefully raising the rent on widows and orphans shortly before I evicted them onto the nearest ice floe.

What I could not say in the survey was that in more than two decades of owning those apartments, I’ve never raised anyone’s rent, opting to impose only such increases after a tenant moves out.  (That policy may have to change, however, if the cost of utilities continues to skyrocket.)

The last section of the survey asked my opinion about rent control.  Since none of the multiple-choice responses was suitable, I’ll answer here.  Rent control not only does not work, it harms the poor by raising the cost of housing…while making such housing scarce.  Additionally, in my humble opinion, it violates the “taking clause” of the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States.  I’ll address each of those points separately.

Rent control is just another form of a price control—a universal stupidity where politicians believe they can somehow change reality.  Price controls have been around for more that 4000 years without a single recorded case of success, but politicians still regularly resort to the measure to placate the uneducated.  It is almost impossible to find an economist who supports the idea, but voters seem to like politicians who promise the impossible.

If the government arbitrarily sets a price below the market price, then the producers are left with few options:  they can lower the quality, sell on the black market, or cease production.  When price controls are placed on housing, the common response is for landlords to cut down on maintenance, to change the rental units into salable condominiums, or to shutter the property.  Far worse, cities that implement rent controls have far lower rates of development.  Or to put that more simply:  only an idiot builds apartments in a city where the government controls what you can charge for rent.  If you are going to invest millions of dollars, you are most likely to do it someplace where you can make at least some profit.

If no one is building new units, it won’t take long for a shortage to exist, forcing up the price of those units not on rent control.  The largest cities in the United States with some form of rent control or rent stabilization are New York, NY; Los Angeles, CA; San Francisco, CA; Oakland, CA; and Washington, DC.  This is not surprising when you consider that nine of the ten cities in the United States with the highest rents all have imposed rent control.  Not one of the cities with the lowest rents has any form of rent stabilization or control.  

Even as rent control keeps the price of some apartments down, the demand goes up while the available supply goes down.  You don’t have to have a Nobel Prize in economics to understand that this raises the price on all non-controlled apartments and increases the likelihood of controlled properties being converted to condos.

New York City has had a 41% price hike on a single bedroom unit in the last 12 months, even after the previous mayor made affordable housing his primary goal for eight years.  Despite more than half of the city’s apartments being rent controlled, available apartments for low-income people are scarce, with the average price of a one-bedroom apartment currently topping $3400.   Newspapers routinely report stories of prospective renters paying exorbitant bribes to landlords to secure a vacancy—a textbook definition of a black market. 

Despite the exodus of several hundred thousand New Yorkers, there is an urgent need for an additional half million apartments according to the city.  When asked, the most common reason developers preferred building in New Jersey or Connecticut was New York City’s policy of over regulation.   So far, both the city’s and the state’s response to the problem has been more restrictions on landlords and developers.

If rent control causes a dramatic increase in the cost of housing, it naturally follows that as rents increase, so does homelessness.  Of the top eight cities with the largest number of homeless people, seven impose rent control.  

A recent study by the Brookings Institute recently found that when apartments came off rent control, property values increased by 40%, creating a windfall profit for the city from property taxes.  The study also revealed a hidden problem with rent-controlled properties, that of “mis-matched housing”:  it’s the propensity of recent empty nesters to continue to live in apartments larger than their current needs because their current rent is cheaper than that of a smaller apartment.  Since tenants continued to occupy multi-bedroom apartments past their actual need, it created a shortage of units and raised the price for such units that were not rent controlled.

Lastly, there is a growing push for the Supreme Court to review decisions by lower courts that have upheld the constitutionality of rent control laws.  The “taking clause” of the Fifth Amendment states “Nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”  Since property rights include the right to sell your resources, it can be argued that the government cannot restrain your income from that property without compensation.  

This was exactly the argument used by the state legislatures in the thirty-seven states that have banned rent control.  Since such laws benefit only realtors and populist politicians, hopefully the other dozen or so will learn freshman economics.  

Yep, There’s a Precedent

In news that will no doubt sadden all of us, Warner Brothers has shelved the new Batgirl movie.  Despite having spent in excess of $90 million to finish shooting, the editing process has been dropped and the film permanently locked in the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet stuck in a disused basement lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'.

Personally, I’m a little tired of the endless recycling of comic book hero movies.  The genre was interesting for a while, but the idea was getting stale long before Hollywood started making its movies politically correct (complete with warning labels about harsh language and smoking).  For some reason, Hollywood seems to think viewers will go into shock at seeing someone lighting up a cigarette, but have no qualms about depicting a psychopath with a chainsaw working his way through a daycare center.  The John Wick movies leap to mind…. 

David Zaslav, the CEO of Warner Brothers refuses to go into specifics about why he axed Batgirl and the second Scooby-Doo movie (Was there really a first one?), but did use the word, “quality” a lot.  He didn’t specifically say that Batgirl was horrible, but declared that the movie would never be seen in theaters, on a streaming service, or released on DVD.  This was just weeks after he had shut down the fledgling CNN+ streaming service after spending $300 million on the startup.  While it will never be a movie, I’d buy a ticket to watch a video of Zaslav explaining to his board of directors why they just flushed half a billion dollars away.  What exactly does a CEO say under those circumstances?  “Sorry, I made a boo-boo?”

A rival studio exec, interviewed by Variety, claimed that axing a movie after spending such a large amount was unprecedented in Hollywood.

Well, no.  This is why Hollywood needs to hire more historians, and I don’t mean the current hacks who pretend to be consultants.  (I won’t mention any Tom Cruise movies by name, but no former Soviet bloc nations used the F-14, much less still have one functioning and sitting around fueled and ready to go sixteen years after they stopped making parts for them.) There is, indeed, a precedent to axing a movie like Batgirl.

In 1941, Howard Hughes was well on his way to establishing himself as a power in Hollywood and like everything else Hughes did, he started at the top, acting as both producer and director of movies.  Using the same publicists who had conducted a nationwide search for an actress to play Scarlet O’Hara in Gone With the Wind, Hughes conducted a similar search for a “busty” actress to star in a new movie about Billy the Kid, called The Outlaw.  Eventually signing Jane Russell, Hughes both produced and directed a western loosely based on the lives of Billy, Pat Garrett, and Doc Holliday.

In this case, loosely means they spelled the names correctly.  Though it is remotely possible that Doc Holliday and William Bonney both passed through Las Vegas, New Mexico in 1879, they were certainly not friends.  Other details, such as the years the men were alive or the dates they died, are wildly wrong.  My favorite scene in the movie is the closing scene, which shows Billy and his well-endowed girl sharing a horse as they ride off into a California sunset, complete with an automobile crossing in the background from left to right.

The movie, which you can watch above, is famous for Hughes’ obsession with filming Jane Russell.  He was particularly fixated on filming her in such a way that it would appear that the actress was not wearing a bra, even going so far as to design one that provided lift by using stiff underwire and stronger straps.  Though Russell assured her director she was wearing the custom bra for her scenes, in actuality she later revealed that she wore her own bra, but just tightened the straps and added a little tissue for padding.  Years later the bra designed by Hughes found a home in a museum, while Russell became a spokeswoman for Playtex.  Strangely, Hughes ignored the fact that, in the movie, Russell can be seen removing her nylon stockings 58 years before such a garment was invented.

Note.  If the movie above doesn't open on your device, click here.

When finished, the movie had some problems being approved by the Hollywood Production Code Administration, something that was hardly a surprise since Hughes had arranged that all of the publicity about the film emphasize Russell’s breasts.  Even the movie posters featuring sexy photos of Russell, such as the one at the right, depicted scenes not actually in the movie.  The media frenzy prompted one Hollywood writer to offer that the movie should be renamed, “The Sale of Two Titties”.

In reality, all Hughes had to do was cut 30 seconds from the movie to make the censors happy, and while those 30 seconds were milder than some of Russell’s later commercials for brassieres, Hughes promptly agreed and made the changes.  Then, Hughes announced that the Hollywood Production Code Administration would not allow the movie to be released.  No matter how loudly the Administration protested that they had not banned the movie, the press loved the bogus story and ran the Hughes version.

Hughes had his people contact newspapers, church leaders, and women’s organizations warning them about the “lewd movie”.  The resulting publicity created a demand for the public to see the movie, but Hughes kept the movie out of circulation for two years, only then allowing it to be shown in selected markets for a week before the movie was once again put into storage.  By the time the movie was finally released in 1946, the public could not wait to see it, making it a box office hit.

So a badly written movie, wildly inaccurate and directed by a man more obsessed with an unknown actress than with making a good movie, makes millions simply because the public is not allowed to see the film for years. 

If I’m correct, we will all be able to see exactly how horrible Batgirl is in about three years.  Right about the time Top Gun III comes out.

Pollyanna, the Book and the Game

Somehow, I missed reading Pollyanna while growing up—probably because the title was a girl’s name and as a young boy I knew that anything involving girls was likely to give you cooties.  (It is rather ironic that how to avoid catching cooties turned out to be rather useful during the pandemic.)  Accordingly, I never read Pollyanna or any of the Nancy Drew books while reading all of the Hardy Boys, Rick Bryant, and Tom Swift series.

There was a movie version of the book in 1960, and I may have seen it, but the only theater in town at the time was a drive-in theater and during any movie by Disney not involving John Wayne or Fess Parker, I usually spent my time in the playground directly below the screen paying scant attention to the movie.  Evidently, Hayley Mills was wonderful, but I’ll just have to take IMDB’s word for it.  I was going to watch the movie and call it research for this blog….but the Disney Channel insists I cough up a lung just to watch it.  Instead, I read the book and watched the 1919 silent version starring Mary Pickford.  Though there are eight different movie versions, the silent one was the only version available for free on YouTube.

Truthfully, I didn’t learn much watching the silent movie except that it was fairly faithful to the book.  I may have missed something because I got interested in researching the biography of Mary Pickford and forgot to watch most of the middle part of the movie.  You really don’t learn much from listening to the dialogue of a silent movie.  (Did you know, for example, that when Mary Pickford was called as a witness in a trial, a lawyer took advantage of the situation by asking her, under oath, to state her age?  Pickford answered, “Twenty-one, going on twenty.”)

Having read the book, I can tell you that it truly sucks.  The author, Eleanor H. Porter, was a turn of the century author of a long list of rather boring books that were published between 1910 and 1920, all of which were incredibly bad, even for that period.  The exception, supposedly, is Pollyanna, published in 1913, and became an overnight sensation and started a cottage industry of sequels that continued even after Porter’s death.

Pollyanna was a young girl who invariably saw the good in every situation, usually by playing the “Glad Game”, invented by her father, a poor minister.  Periodically, the Ladies’ Aid Society would send the minister a barrel of hand-me-down items to aid in his ministry.  When Pollyanna, hoping to find a doll, emerged from the barrel with a pair of crutches, her father told her she should be glad, if only because she didn’t need the crutches.  The ‘Glad Game’ and how Pollyanna taught the game to a town full of self-centered and heartless people and transformed them into lovable Stepford peasants is the basis of all of the books in the series. 

The book, hopelessly schmaltzy, is heavily influenced by Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer—even to the similarities in the names of several characters, orphans raised by spinster aunts, and faithful servants.  Unfortunately, the book does not have any of the same wit, satire, and insight into society.  You can read it for yourself, for free, here. 

The book came out in 1913, and became so popular that Parker Bros. did a product tie-in, producing a board game called Pollyanna, the Glad Game.  The game was patented in 1915, but did not go on sale until 1916.  George Parker, the founder of the company and developer of most of the early games, did what any good company in a rush to deliver a product would do—they took an existing game and modified it just enough not to be sued and claimed they had invented it.  In this case, the original game was Parcheesi. 

Note.  A lot of games were modeled after Parcheesi.  When I showed a friend the game of Pollyanna, she said how much it reminded her of a game she had played in Germany, Mensch ärgere Dich nicht.  I looked up the game, and sure enough, it was based on Parcheesi.    In the US, Aggravation is a popular game.  In England, they play Ludo or Snakes and Ladders.  Or you could play Ashte Kashte, Chaupur, Patolli, Parques, Sorry and a host of other games, all of which are versions of Parcheesi, which in turn was based on the ancient Indian game Pachisi. 

Parker Brothers owned the rights to the game, and brought it out every few years, usually when a new motion picture version of the book was released, with only minor cosmetic changes to the playing board.  For a brief period, the game was known as Dixie Pollyanna, but the rules of the game and use of dice remained constant.  For a brief time, there was an “adult” version of the game called “Parker Brothers Track Pursuit Game.”

I became aware of the game through my son, The-Other-One (not What’s-His-Name) and his wife, The Leprechaun.  Her family was addicted to the game and played it at family reunions and other gatherings.  Since the game was no longer commercially available, they made their own boards and held tournaments.  Naturally, over time, the rules had been allowed to evolve a little.  The way they played, for example, each player had his own color coded dice and at the end of a player’s turn, if the player had forgotten and left the dice on the board, any other player was allowed to pick up the dice and throw them in any direction—usually under a sofa—forcing that player to scramble and search for the dice.  This was definitely not an original rule for The Happy Game.  It does, however, speed up play.

My wife, The Doc, and I really enjoyed the game and began a search for a game of our own.  Eventually, we found an ancient board from EBay and assembled our own game, noting a few changes between the original game and the more modern version we had played at my son’s house.  Eventually, we even located a source for the original rules, available here.

I found one of the changes to the rules particularly interesting.  If a player positions two pieces on the same square, other players cannot pass this barrier.  My son’s in-laws called this barrier a wall, but the original rules refer to this as a blockade, an important distinction at the time when the game was first published in 1915.  In 1898, the U. S. Navy sent ships to blockade the ports of Cuba, preventing ships from Spain from entering.  At the time, a blockade was considered an act of war, forcing the proud country of Spain to declare war against the United States despite the fact that a single capital ship of the United States was quite capable of destroying the entire Spanish Navy.  When the US used the navy to prevent the Soviet Union from shipping nuclear missiles to Fidel Castro, they were very careful to refer to it as a quarantine. 

My son’s version of the game has a few other distinctions.  There are a few more spaces on each side, meaning pieces have to move a little farther on each side, a change that I believe adds to the strategic nature of the game.  At right is the version of the board as played today.  I think the game deserves a new life, and since it is no longer available, I suggest you make your own, using the board my son made as a guide.  You will also need a pair of dice (or more if you want to play by the new rules) and four sets of four differently colored pieces, all of which are available from Amazon.

I promise, you don’t have to read the book to play the game. 

Deal or No Deal

When I was a child, my uncle raised Nubian goats for their milk.  My parents, who believed an idle child was a sure sign of impending doom, gleefully arranged for me to be an apprentice slave.  I came to love the gentle and intelligent goats, though I would have denied it at the time.

A Nubian doe will give milk for an average of two years before drying up, and will produce no milk until she produces kids.  After a five month pregnancy, the goat will have an average of two kids, and shortly after, you can begin milking the goat again.  My uncle didn’t keep a buck (male goat) on the property, so every now and then, he would load a doe into the back of his pickup and drive over to a friend’s farm who kept a male goat for breeding purposes.  If I remember correctly, at that time the breeding fee was a case of Lone Star Beer, minus a small rebate consumed by my uncle as they watched while the doe was “serviced”.

This is the origin of the phrase “customer service”.

This principle was wonderfully demonstrated this week by the wonderful people at the local Mercedes Benz dealership.  My wife, The Doc, loves her Mercedes, a mid-priced SUV that handles well and has given us few problems (even at age 14).  Our only real complaint is that we live in a town that does not have a dealership.  To be more accurate, there is no Mercedes dealership in the entire southern half of New Mexico:  Our nearest dealership is 41 miles away, in El Paso, Texas.

This made the recent recall notice for The Doc’s car somewhat problematic.  More than a million vehicles were recalled due to a potentially defective brake booster.  It seems that—on one vehicle—the booster had rusted to the point that the pressure of hard braking could have burst the booster, totally disabling the entire braking system.  The danger of losing all of the brakes at once was so severe that the people at Mercedes demanded that the vehicles not be driven under any circumstances until the boosters were inspected.

Personally, I was not convinced.  This is the Chihuahuan Desert, and it is drier than Lubbock on Easter Sunday.  It is hard to imagine anything rusting in this desert.  But Mercedes insisted, pointing out that the inspection was free and that they would tow the car both to the dealership and back home.  The people at the national office were friendly, helpful, and most reliable. 

This friendly help turned out to be the exact opposite of trying to do business with the dealership, who told us we had to wait weeks for an appointment and would have to call a third division of Mercedes to arrange for towing.  In the meantime, the dealership told us not to drive the car and to put it into storage. 

Evidently, the dealership believes we only drive the car for a lark and we don’t actually need it.

Of course, we continued to drive the car.  Out of over a million vehicles, only a handful had experienced any problem, and all of those vehicles were probably used in places where rainfall was not considered an urban legend.  In any case, it is years too late for The Doc and me to die young.

After a few weeks, and many, many phone calls, Mercedes sent a tow truck and picked up the vehicle, promising to return it shortly and all at no charge.  Two days later, the dealership told us that they had inspected the car and the booster was rust-free and we could come and pick up the car.

I pointed out that they had promised—several times--to tow the car back to us free of charge.  Actually, all three branches of Mercedes involved—the dealership, the national office, and the Roadside Assistance People who had towed it—had all promised to bring the car back to us.  The dealership, while acknowledging that Mercedes had indeed promised to bring the car back to us, said it was their policy to not tow the car back unless the car’s brake booster was actually defective, then they would tow the car back to us while waiting for a part to repair it.

Why Mercedes thought I might need the car if it proved to be too dangerous to drive was never explained. 

Calls to Mercedes Roadside Assistance referred me to the National Office, who referred me to the dealership, who referred me to Roadside Assistance.  Essentially, everyone told me that it was not their job and that I should call someone else.  Everyone I talked to apologized and apologized and then did nothing but suggest I call someone else.  Mercedes does indeed make a great car, though in all honesty, I would suggest you deal with a company whose dealership actually wants your business and that certainly does not include the Mercedes dealership in El Paso.

Naturally, we drove over to Texas and picked up the car.  Halfway back home, the Mercedes National office called and said we had been correct all along, and that they would tow the car back to New Mexico. 

I hung up on them.

I can’t prove it, but I suspect that the dealership had always known that they were supposed to tow the car back to me.  Since Mercedes pays the dealership for warranty repairs and recall work, I suspect that the dealership just decided to screw me over and keep the fee they would have to pay the tow truck company.

I remember a politician in Houston telling me long ago that when a political party had gotten so used to a group’s support that the party stopped asking for their votes, that group no longer actually had a vote.  Evidently, the same thing works in business, too.

When a company has grown so large that it no longer believes it has to work to keep its customers happy and believes that the customers will just keep handing over their money no matter how they are mistreated….

Well, it’s not the first time some Germans have been dead wrong.

Let Them Eat Potatoes

“What’s an Irish seven course meal?  A six pack of beer and a potato.”

If you’re Irish, I hope you will excuse the crude joke, but I’m including it for a reason.  It is almost impossible to talk about potatoes and not mention the Irish.  When the potato blight hit Ireland in the middle of the 19^th century, over a million Irish immigrants came to America, enriching our country in ways too numerous to count.

There is still a lively debate going on about exactly when and where potatoes were first domesticated.  It was somewhere between 4500 and 10,000 years ago, and in either present day Peru or Bolivia, when Native Americans began gathering and planting the tuberous relative of the nightshade family.  Carefully selection of the best specimens to replant, year after year, century after century, with occasional cross-pollination of some plants, eventually gave us the 5,000 varieties of potatoes we have today.

The Spanish brought the potato back to Europe from the New World in the middle of the 16^th century, where it quickly became popular in Spain, England, and Ireland—but not in the rest of Europe.  Today, potatoes are an essential part of the diet in the entire world, with only wheat, corn, and rice being planted more often, but for well over a century after its first being imported, most of Europe had no use for the potato. 

Nowhere was the opposition to spuds more vehement than in France.  The church, using logic that only the French could understand, banned eating potatoes because they weren’t mentioned in the Bible, prompting the French King to outlaw their consumption.   Few French people disagreed with the law because of the popular belief that eating potatoes gave you leprosy. 

Note.  Obviously, French Fries are wildly misnamed.  The name comes from American soldiers stationed near the front during World War I.  The local peasants normally subsisted on a diet based on fish, but when the river froze over in winter, they fried potatoes.  Since the local language was French, the Americans (somewhat ignorant of the local geography) misnamed the dish.  They should have called it “Belgian Fries”.

In Prussia, Frederick the Great encouraged farmers to grow potatoes, even distributing cuttings for the farmers to use, but only to provide feed for livestock, since potatoes were still considered to be dangerous for humans to eat.  It was the Seven Years War that eventually led to the root vegetable being more widely accepted.

The Seven Years War (which lasted nine years—1754-1763–in the New World just to confuse future history students) raged across most of Europe and her colonies and was truly a “world war” before we had the good sense to start numbering them.  So many peasants were conscripted into the competing armies that there was not enough agricultural labor to produce food or raise livestock.  The predictable result was widespread starvation.

In 1755, Antoine-Augustin Parmentier was an apothecary in Paris who joined the French Army under King Louis XV to serve as a pharmacist.  While serving in present day Germany, he was wounded and captured by the Prussian Army.  With little food to spare for prisoners, the French prisoners were fed hog feed—potatoes.  As you have probably guessed, Parmentier did not catch leprosy and grew to love the potatoes.

In 1763, upon his return to Paris, Parmentier, while continuing to work as a military pharmacist, began to advocate the planting of potatoes as a cheap and nutritious source of food for the French people.  Though his work was not popular at first, Parmentier continued his experiments, laying the foundation to what eventually would be known as nutrition science.  It was through his efforts that the law banning the consumption of potatoes was finally repealed in 1771.  And though Parmentier developed easy recipes for using the inexpensive vegetable, potatoes were still not popular with French people.

Now an inspector general in the French Army, Parmentier plotted a publicity campaign that would have done a modern public relations firm proud.  Parmentier invited well-known celebrities, such as Benjamin Franklin and Antoine Lavoisier, to lavish dinner parties where most of the dishes contained potatoes and the bread was made of potato flour.  The pharmacist also presented bouquets of potato blossoms to both King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette; the latter wore the blossoms in her hair on several occasions.

To show his gratitude and to encourage more work on a sustainable food source, the King gifted Parmentier fifty-four arpents of land.  If you are not familiar with pre-metric French measurements, the arpent is a measurement of both length and area based on the even older Roman actus.  In total, the king’s gift was slightly more than sixty-eight acres of farmland fairly close to Versailles on which Parmentier could plant potatoes.

Effectively, the monarch was saying, “Let them eat potatoes.”  The king encouraged the idea, but it was not like he was losing his head over it.

Parmentier not only grew large quantities of potatoes, he made sure that others prized his crop, too.  During the day, his farm was conspicuously guarded by Imperial soldiers, deliberately giving the local peasants and farmers the idea that the farm’s crop was valuable.  Since the guards left as the sun set, the locals used the cover of darkness to steal the now valuable potatoes.  The news of these thefts so delighted Parmentier, that he would reward the messengers with handfuls of coins.

In 1785, the north of France had a disastrous harvest, threatening mass starvation.  The deaths were largely averted by a bumper crop of potatoes.  Four years later, the king subsidized the printing and distribution of a book Parmentier wrote, A Treatise on the Culture and Use of the Potato, Sweet Potato, and Jerusalem Artichoke.  Almost immediately after its publication, the French Revolution began.

In a long and distinguished career, Parmentier helped develop wine and cheese-making, experimented with refrigeration, promoted the use of cornmeal, improved the process of bread making, and promoted the drinking of mineral water.  When he died in 1813, he was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.  Appropriately, his tomb is surrounded with potato plants.

Merci beaucoup, Monsieur Parmentier!

It’s All Bananas

A few decades ago, I was one of the few passengers on one of the strangest trains in the world.  The train, run by an infamous fruit company and guarded by the Honduran Army, made no stops between the banana plantation and the port where ships were waiting to take the green fruit to Houston.  The railroad, now almost a century old, had been built solely for that purpose.

It would probably surprise you to learn that bananas are so profitable that they have been the cause of several wars and have caused some countries to suffer numerous revolutions.

About 120 years ago, a young immigrant figured out a way to buy “overripes” (the bananas that, while still good, would go bad before reaching retailers) directly off the banana boats in New Orleans and hustle them to the rail depot, delivering the bananas on the cheaper overnight trains to grocers along the Gulf Coast.  Since he paid almost nothing for the fruit and could deliver the bananas below the regular wholesale price, Sam Zemurray made a sizable profit by employing accurate timing and precise logistics.

Zemurray made his profit by improving logistics and more than a century later, as we shall see, that is still the crucial factor in the banana business.

Eventually, the larger fruit companies saw the profit in Zemurray’s enterprise and they bought him out, offering a small fortune for his business.  Zemurray promptly relocated to Honduras and bought a banana plantation, intending to modernize it and increase the yield enough to become a major player in the fruit business.  Unfortunately, Zemurray’s timing was bad, because Honduras had just raised import taxes on the type of machinery necessary to improve his plantation.  Worse, the United States was using its military to “stabilize” the economy (and the current president) of Honduras, so that the Central American nation could make regular payments on its national debt—most of which was held by American and British banks.

Undeterred, Zemurray hired a half-dozen mercenaries, then bought a crate of rifles and a very small boat that had been used in the Spanish American War.  Despite the best efforts of both the American and British navies, the small vessel successfully made its way from New Orleans to Honduras and in an incredibly unlikely war, overthrew the government and installed a new Honduran President, who had been handpicked by Zemurray, and who “coincidentally” allowed Zemurray to import, tax-free, the  equipment necessary to modernize that plantation.  One of the improvements was the train I was riding while researching that revolution.  Eventually Sam "the Banana Man" made enough money to buy the largest of the fruit importers, United Fruit.  Today, we call that company Chiquita Brands International.

Note.  The research eventually became the thesis for my graduate degree.  I think it is exciting reading and you can still request it through inter-library loan from Enema U.  Personally, I think it would make a great movie starring Brad Pitt.

Editor’s note.  I personally edited the thesis and I guarantee that it is a fascinating story.

There is a new revolution brewing in the banana shipping business, but this time it is the shipping companies that are acting like the armed mercenaries.  It is far too early in the war to predict who the winner is going to be, but among the guaranteed losers are the consumers and the Central American countries that produce the fruit. 

Green banana bunches used to be hung upside down in the cargo holds of freighters who raced to get them to American ports.  Bananas were considered a dangerous cargo and not just for the alarming numbers of poisonous insects that live among the bunches.  (A single banana is called a finger, several fingers together make a hand, and anywhere from 5 to 20 hands clustered together make up a bunch or a stalk.)  As green bananas ripen, they give off a lot of heat.  In the not too distant past, a number of cargo ships that had suffered ventilation system malfunctions actually caught fire from the heat of ripening bananas!

Today, green bananas are loaded into steel refrigerated cargo containers which are stacked on monster ships as long as the Empire State Building is tall (roughly 1250 feet).  These ships make their way to American ports—chiefly New Orleans, Houston, and Los Angeles—where giant cranes transfer the cargo containers to trucks equipped with wheeled rigs that swap  empty containers for the containers of still-green bananas, that are then transported to the wholesalers, who quickly ripen the fruit with ethylene gas.  It everything goes right, the simultaneous arrival of loaded and empty containers is a well-orchestrated ballet performed by cranes, trucks, and massive ships.

Unfortunately, for the last year and a half, the ballet has been performed by blind elephants on rusty pogo sticks.

It started with COVID’s shutting down the docks.  Ships arriving at ports waited for weeks to be unloaded, using massive amounts of fuel to maintain position offshore while the bananas in those containers turned to mush.  Once they were finally unloaded, the dockyards quickly filled with containers waiting to be delivered and empty containers waiting to be loaded onto ships and sent back to China.  Before long, companies wanting to return empty containers couldn’t do so because the dockyards didn’t have the space to store them.  The yards of trucking companies and warehouses quickly filled up with empty containers that the dockyards refused to accept.

For all of this, the costs kept rising, with the biggest cost being detention and demurrage fees.  Demurrage fees are charged to the recipient of a container who does not pick up the container from the dockyard on time.  Detention is the daily fee shipping companies charge for each day’s delay in returning the empty container to the docks.  The trucking companies, however, are only allowed to pick up or return the containers when the shipping companies allow access to the docks, and right now, there are long delays to do either.

Imagine you are on vacation and when you fly to your destination, the rental car company tells you there will be a five day delay to pick up your car, but that you will have to pay the daily rental fee for the car while you wait.  Then, when you try to return the car, you are told the car lot is full and you can’t return the car until next week, all the while still paying that daily rental fee.

Faced with such a dilemma, if you were the trucking company, you might be tempted to dump the empty container in the street outside the dockyard and tell the shipping company to handle it themselves (I originally expressed this more colorfully if not accurately, but my editor changed it, citing good taste.)  Several trucking companies have done just that so that it is not hard to find abandoned containers in the roads around the Port of Los Angeles.  A trucking company that does not pay the late fees can be slapped with a shut-out notice, meaning that the company’s trucks will no longer be allowed to enter the dockyards, effectively putting that company out of business.

To make dire matters even worse, some shipping companies only allow a trucking company to deliver an empty container if the trucker is picking up a filled container at the same time—a combination that is not always possible, especially now.  All of this means endless delays, mounting fees and charges, and… well, what do you think happens to those bananas after delivery has been delayed by two weeks?  Picture black banana pudding topped with dead spiders.

Currently, the only way a fruit importer can be sure that it’s cargo clears the docks in time to still be salable is by paying exorbitant fees to expedite the delivery.  These fees can easily mean that the retail price of the bananas rises by more than 50%.  (This increase in shipping costs raises the cost of more than just bananas—it affects everything we buy.  The cost of shipping a container of goods from China to Los Angeles rose from an average of $2,000 to over $20,000, from January, 2019 to now.)

The problem will be solved eventually by a combination of factors.  As the price of bananas from Central America rises, consumers will buy fewer of them, possibly substituting domestic fruit.  Fewer bananas will be purchased, leading to increased competition among plantations throughout Central America, to see who can produce the cheapest fruit.  Some plantations will fail, causing the revenue of some small countries to be lower, and forcing many, many former plantation employees to have to find work elsewhere…perhaps in the United States.

Meanwhile, more efficient dockyards with larger storage space will be serviced by new shipping companies.  Some of the freight that normally goes through California will be rerouted to ports on the East Coast.  Eventually, new companies in new locations will profit from innovation in states less regulated than California and, essentially, a modern version of Sam Zemurray will arrive.

Until then, bananas won’t be selling for peanuts.