Nixon and The Great Library of Alexandria

The other day, I walked the two blocks down the street to a very large retirement center.  As neighbors, I really like these people—they never shoot off fireworks, never hold loud parties, and always mow their lawn regularly.  Other than a few residents whose driving skills have deteriorated in the six decades since they were first licensed, these people make great neighbors.

The retirement home features a library for residents and I was taking them a bag of novels that I no longer needed.  All of the books were new hardbacks, in excellent condition, and written by prominent authors that most readers would instantly recognize.  Since the retirement center also serves as my neighborhood’s polling center, I knew the library to be fairly large, but with less than full shelves and with ample room to expand.

When I walked into the library, the librarian was seated at her desk reading a copy of Death of an Expert Witness by P. D. James.  I thought that was a good omen, for if she liked that mystery, she’d likely approve of several of the books in my bag.

“Hello,” I said.  “Does your library accept donations?”

Carefully putting a bookmark in her book and placing the book on the desk in front of her before answering me, the librarian said, “Yes, but only if they have published in the last four years.  We don’t have the room to handle books older than that.”

“Really?  The book you are reading is almost 50 years old and the author has been dead for eight years.”  Frankly, I was a little irritated.  The retail price of the books I was bringing was a couple of hundred dollars, and the librarian was acting like I was imposing on her.

“We don’t have the room for old books,” she repeated.  “What do you have there?”

As I turned to leave, I answered, “Oh, you wouldn’t like them…they’re old.  It’s a Shakespeare First Folio and a Gutenberg Bible.”  

A week later, I donated the books to a post library on a nearby military base where the books were accepted without question.  The fact that I just dropped them through a book return slot on their door might have something to do with their not commenting.

Naturally, I have been thinking of libraries all week.  I hope to share a little of that obsession with you.

Most librarians probably disagree with me, but I’ve always thought there are several absolute necessities for a great library.  It should be abundantly stuffed with overflowing bookshelves, with plenty of stuffed chairs and with wooden tables for patrons.  And, if it is to be a truly great library, there should be at least one cat.   A good corner alcove with windows and leather reading chairs would be nice, but I would trade that for a single, totally necessary cat.  Why is it that so many good bookstores and so few libraries have cats?

The greatest library historically was the Great Library at Alexandria, founded by Alexander the Great, though not finished in his lifetime.  Alexander was tutored by Aristotle, who instilled in the young general a great love of books (these were then growing increasingly popular owing to the recent invention of papyrus.  Books, in the form of papyrus scrolls, were readily available to most educated Greeks, prompting the start of libraries.  When Alexander decided to transplant Greek culture to Egypt, his plan to build a great city included plans for the greatest library of the ancient world.

Historians are unsure exactly how many scrolls the library contained, with estimates ranging from 40,000 up to a million.    What is known is that the collection was organized by genre and alphabetized, so that paid librarians could locate the necessary works for researchers…And the library very aggressively expanded the collection.  Agents scoured the countryside to buy or arrange for the copying of books.  According to legend, library agents searched every ship coming into the port of Alexandria for unknown books, either seizing them for the collection or holding the books until they could be copied.  Since the process of copying a book took more time than most ships could spend idling in a port, most such ‘borrowing’ was likely to become permanent.

We know that the library remained a center of learning for centuries, with some salaried scholars provided with room and board to stay, study, and write.  Among these ‘tenured’ scholars were Euclid, Strabo, and Archimedes.  The first professional librarians kept the library running and expanding, however, the library eventually came to a tragic end.  While most of the facts surrounding the library’s demise are simply lost, there are countless legends and wild stories about the library’s end.  One of the wilder stories recounts how the Romans burned the scrolls to heat their baths.

It’s much more likely that some of the scrolls were actually taken to Rome after a fire destroyed the largest Roman library.  Some warehouses that may have stored library property were lost to fire that engulfed the harbor at Alexandria during fighting while Julius Caesar captured the city.  The most likely reason for the destruction of the library however, was simple neglect.  While papyrus was far superior to the clay tablets used before its invention, papyrus was highly vulnerable to dampness and had to periodically be replaced with new papyrus.  The collection of irreplaceable books at Great Library of Alexandria most likely just rotted away from neglect, only to be resurrected by the most unlikeliest hero.

Centuries passed and then, in 1974, just months before his resignation, President Richard Nixon toured the Middle East, flying into Cairo and taking the train to Alexandria.  When the president innocently asked to be shown the site of the former library, his hosts were embarrassed:  Even the site of the greatest library had been lost to history.

A few city leaders saw this as an opportunity.  Even since the presidency of Nasser, whose anti-colonialism had resulted in the city of Alexandria being officially slighted, local politicians had looked for a way to return the city to a position of world prominence.  Rebuilding the long-lost library looked like a perfect opportunity.  And who would not want to donate to rebuilding the lost great library?

Well, one of the people who couldn’t refuse was Saddam Hussein, who became the largest private donor.  Donations of books and funds came from countries around the world and the project received large donations from UNESCO.  Finished in 2002, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina has space for eight million volumes and is the National Library of Egypt.  After more than 1700 years, the library is once again open for business.  

I checked:  Unfortunately, the library’s only cat is a statue of Bastet in one of the four attached museums. 

“Trickle down” Economics

About half a lifetime ago, I went to Honduras to research a peculiar military revolution that had toppled the government back in 1913.  Finding the documents necessary for my history thesis meant traveling to almost every corner of the Central American country, searching through libraries and government records. 

Happily, while traveling around the country, I got to take in some of the sights—I toured a banana plantation, saw what little was left of a tropical jungle, and visited a coffee plantation that had been gifted to my alma mater, Enema U.   The foreman graciously gave me a tour before we returned to his office to try some fresh coffee from beans that had just been roasted.

I can vividly remember the three best cups of coffee in my life.  The first has to be when I was about nine years old.  A freezer case stopped working in my father’s grocery store, and early Sunday morning, the two of us moved all the contents to other freezer cases or one of the walk-in freezers in the backroom.  We had to shift a lot of stock around, and by the time we had finished the job, we were tired and cold, and we could barely feel our freezing hands.  As we slowly warmed up, my father brought me my very first cup of coffee.  I didn’t really like the taste, but my father had given it to me and I would have gladly drunk it even if it had been on fire.

The second-best cup of coffee was in the basement of an aging and crumbling building on the campus of Enema U.  Fred Dabney, the swing shift DJ at KRWG, the campus radio station, somehow produced an incredible cup of coffee from a pot that hadn’t been cleaned properly since the fifties.  Whether it was because he ground the beans in an ancient hand-cranked antique or because the water he used came from aging basement pipes, his coffee was always spectacular.  While Fred was busy announcing the next jazz record, I’d guzzle his coffee and read news from around the world off the teletype.

For third place, it has to be that cup of coffee at the Honduran plantation.  Freshly roasted and ground just seconds before being placed in the French press, the coffee was consumed within sight of the coffee plants.  I’ve also eaten trout that were grilled beside the stream where they had been caught, and I have this theory that everything tastes better close to the source.   I’m trying to convince The Doc we need to take a trip to a certain distillery in Islay.

Coffee, of course, is not native to Central America, but was introduced to the New World by the Spanish in the 16th century.  For many years, only small amounts were produced, mainly on the islands of Haiti and Cuba until early in the 19th century, when shortly before independence movements swept the Spanish from power in Central and South America, planting coffee was encouraged to bolster the economy.  Though coffee production was most successful in Costa Rica, the mountain slopes of Honduras also had the right combination of soil and climate to grow exceptionally good coffee.

Costa Rica was so successful in exporting coffee that the country developed economically faster and earlier than the rest of Central America, [[a condition that lasts to this day]].  Following the success of Costa Rica, the other countries soon expanded their coffee production, as well.  Though the amount of coffee produced in Central America has never been a very large part of the world market, the coffee has always been known to be of exceptionally fine quality, lending itself to mixing well with beans grown elsewhere.

Particularly valued are the Arabica coffee varieties that grow in the volcanic soil on the sides of mountains at altitudes above 3000 feet.  While the bulk of Honduran Arabica coffee is actually seven different types of Arabica, I’ll just lump them all together as ‘Arabica’.  Coffee makers around the world purchase this coffee and combine it with other types of beans to produce superior blends.

Like a few wines and some scotch, a lot of ‘name brand’ coffee we consume is blended.  The Arabica beans are a little milder and less acidic, and are relatively low on caffeine.  The other major variety of coffees are the Robusta beans, which—while still very flavorful—are a little bitter and have more caffeine.  Traditionally, Robusta beans are used to make instant coffee.  People who will settle for instant coffee just desire a liquid version of caffeine and are probably the kind of heathens who ruin good coffee with sugar and cream, too.

In a typical year, Arabica makes up 60% of the world’s coffee production, while almost all of the the rest is Robusta.  Unfortunately, this is not going to be a typical year.  We are either all going to have to pay more for coffee this year, or we’re going to have to settle for a noticeably different flavor in our coffee.  There is a worldwide shortage of Arabica beans, and those that do reach the market are likely to cost more than last year’s.  There are two reasons for the shortage.

First, we can blame the La Niña weather pattern:  After a year of severe weather that damaged a lot of the Arabica plants, a once-in-a-century severe frost killed a lot of the coffee bushes in Brazil last year.  If that weren’t enough, La Niña is projected to significantly reduce rainfall to both Central America and Brazil, this year, further decreasing production.  As a result of these difficulties, many planters are taking advantage of the off year to replace damaged, older bushes with fresh seedlings that will take at least a year to produce mature beans.

Second, the problems plaguing the supply chains in every other industry are hitting the coffee industry, too.  Since ports in most coffee producing countries are rarely among the most efficient and coffee is shipped in containers of which there is a worldwide shortage, as I write this, millions of bags of green coffee beans are being stored in dockside warehouses, waiting for containers.  On the London commodities market, Arabica bean futures are currently up 80%.

The prices of Robusta beans, however, will probably not see as much of a rise in prices.  Vietnam, the largest exporter of Robusta beans, has produced a bumper crop this year.  And while the ports in Vietnam are also currently congested, those ports are far more modern and efficient than those found in Central and South America.

For the retailers of either the beans or coffee by the cup, there are only two options:  Either the prices are about to rise significantly or the manufacturers of blended coffee are going to change the flavor palette and use more Robusta bans in your morning cup of joe.  

The Greatest Magician You’ve Never Heard Of

Since I doubt that you keep close track of prestidigitators, illusionists, and escape artists, I’ll prove it.  His name was Sigmund Neuberger, but his stage name was The Great Lafayette.

Neuberger was a contemporary of Harry Houdini, who was a close friend:  the two magicians worked together before Neuberger became famous and toured by himself.  At the height of his fame, Neuberger played before audiences of thousands of people and was earning £1000 a week (the equivalent of $4 million a year in today’s money).

Like his act, most of Neuberger’s early life is a mystery, with only bits and pieces available—and much of that information may be fiction that the performer made up to enhance his reputation.  Born in Munich, he immigrated with his family to the United States in 1889.  Within a few years, Neuberger was touring Western mining camps as part of a vaudeville troupe, performing as a trick shot artist with a bow and arrow, who was occasionally billed as a quick-change artist.  Both skills would later be incorporated into his magic act.

By the turn of the century, Neuberger was traveling across America in private railway cars and touring England, billing himself as The Great Lafayette and performing spectacular tricks in which he would vanish, only to reappear seconds later across the theater in a flash of light while a cloud of smoke rolled off the stage towards the audience.  As time went on, the performance included animals (in particular, a lion and a horse).

Neuberger was particularly devoted to Beauty, a dog given to him by Houdini.  When the dog accidentally escaped his handler and ran off the stage towards the audience, people clapped and cheered, believing that it was part of the act.  From then on, the magician not only made his dog an integral part of the act, but quickly realized that the press was far more likely to write favorable articles if his dog was the center of the act.  Beauty wore a diamond-studded collar, stayed in the finest hotel rooms, slept on silk beds, and ate the most expensive items listed on the menus of the finest restaurants, from a custom golden bowl five times a day.  Predictably, the press loved it.

Now highly successful, Neuberger bought a fine London home to which he affixed a plaque that read: “The more I see of people, the more I love my dog.”  Guests were cautioned that they could drink the performer’s liquor and eat his food, and they were free to issue orders to his servants—but they had to treat his dog with respect.

Beauty died on May 4, 1911 (perhaps as a result of an overly rich diet).  Heartbroken—at least in the press—the magician predicted that without his beloved Beauty, he would soon die, himself.  Neuberger turned out to be eerily correct, and his death would result in his most amazing illusion.

The Great Lafayette’s finale was a reenactment of one of Scheherazade’s tales from the Arabian Nights, the story of Prince Ahmed and the Fairy Paribanou.  The 25-minute act included multiple costume changes, with Neuberger appearing, vanishing, and reappearing at multiple points on the stage.  The elaborate act ended with the magician galloping across the stage to rescue the princess, who had been locked in a cage with a real lion.   As the hero leapt from the horse, whereupon the lion’s head came off, revealing the Great Lafayette inside the costume.

On May 11, one week after the death of Beauty, halfway through the finale, a faulty lamp above the stage set some decorations on fire.  The fire quickly spread through the elaborate decorations on the stage, engulfing the front of the theater.  The heavy fire curtain was lowered, but the mechanism jammed with the curtain still three feet above the stage, causing a chimney effect, sucking in a strong draft of fresh air under the curtain, greatly fanning the flames.    

The audience, believing that the flames and smoke were just another illusion, remained in their seats until the orchestra started playing the national anthem.  While the audience safely exited the theater, those working backstage found it difficult to escape as Neuberger had ordered the stage doors locked to prevent escape of the lion.  (And to prevent his rivals from learning the secrets of his tricks.)

Neuberger briefly escaped, then slipped back under the fire curtain in an effort to save his horse.  (Nobody, but nobody, tries to rescue a real lion from a burning building.)  Whether it was the heat or the smoke that killed him was never discovered, a total of eleven people backstage died in the fire, including the Great Lafayette.  

The body of Neuberger was cremated and a ceremony was planned to inter his ashes between the paws of his beloved dog, Beauty.  Shortly before the ceremony, as workmen were picking through the ashes of the theater stage, the real body of Sigmund Neuberger was found under the stage.  The magician evidently had sought to escape the fire by crawling through one of the many hidden trap doors he used during his act.  Eventually it was determined that the first body was actually that of a double the magician had used in his many vanishing and reappearance stunts.  

When the body of the real Neuberger was finally interred, a quarter of a million people turned out to watch the funeral procession.  The Great Lafayette’s last—and greatest—stunt was dying twice in the same fire.

Because he died in 1911, before the age of mass media, it means that Neuberger is not nearly as famous today as Harry Houdini.  There are a few photos, but the only video even remotely connected with the magician is a grainy black and white film—available on YouTube—of workmen recovering the charred body of the unfortunate lion as they pick through the rubble of what had been the stage.

Today, other than the grave marker, the only reminder of the famous illusionist is the Lafayette Bill.  Familiar to anyone who has attended the theater in London, the Bill requires all British playhouses to briefly lower the heavy fire curtain and then immediately raise it back up before every performance, in order to ensure that the safety device works correctly.

Public Domain Day is Coming!

Next week is one of the best days of the year, “Public Domain Day”!  (Or, occasionally known as “New Year’s Day”.)

Every year on January 1, the copyrights expire on books published decades earlier, putting the works into public domain, meaning that anyone can re-publish the works without paying the author’s estate any royalties.  Hollywood can use an author’s work without permission, usually by taking a famous book and turning it to something that would have killed the author had he not already kicked the bucket seventy years earlier (the minimum length of time that it takes for an author’s copyright to expire).

Actually, the copyright law is a little confusing, but it goes something like this:  A copyright expires 70 years after an author’s death or 95 years after the original publication or 120 years from the date of creation.  This law is subject to change as needed, primarily because every few years Disney begins a cash-rich campaign to bribe politicians to protect the cash cow that surrounds all things Mickey Mouse.  We would all be better off if Congress were half as interested in protecting the Bill of Rights as they are in safe guarding the marketing rights of that obnoxious rodent.

How long to protect intellectual property rights has long been an issue.  Mark Twain was an early champion to extend the period of copyright protection.  So incensed at the large number of pirated copies of his work that he seriously considered giving up writing novels in favor of plays, he lobbied Congress to not only extend the period, but to strictly enforce the laws.  It was partly due to his lobbying that Congress passed laws to recognize international copyrights in 1891, but Twain was unsuccessful at obtaining the extension of copyright protection that he wanted—eternity.  

In 1906, Twain made a dramatic entrance before a Congressional Committee, sweeping away his long dark cloak to reveal his trademark white suit.  Twain stated that a copyright of eternity would be no hardship on the public, since less than a half dozen authors in each century produced works still being read a hundred years later.  Congress did not agree, limiting the period of copyright to 28 years with a single 28-year extension.  (As noted above, that period has since changed.)

Twain accepted the change with his usual humor, stating ““A day will come, when, in the eye of the law, literary property will be as sacred as whiskey, or any other of the necessaries of life.”

For most of Twain’s works, anything published before 1923, the copyright has long since expired.  This means you are absolutely free to write a new novel featuring Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn and seek a publisher.  If you were to write a new story featuring a four-fingered squeaky mouse, however, an army of rabid lawyers would chase you to the ends of the earth.

Note.  When Twain died in 1910, he left an astonishing 600 unpublished or unfinished manuscripts.   His will contained instructions that several of these manuscripts could only be published after a specified period of years.  For example, his recently published autobiography could only be published a century after his passing.  The last of these manuscripts cannot be published until 2310.  I can hardly wait.

In 2022, all the books published in 1926 or by authors who died in 1951 will be added to the list of public domain books.  These includes The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie, The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne, My Mortal Enemy by Willa Cather, Soldier’s Pay by William Faulkner, and Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence.

Along with these books, tens of thousands of sound recordings will enter public domain—more musical recordings than the average person could listen to in the span of a normal life.  In movies, the copyright expires for Rudolph Valentino’s final film The Son of the Sheik and one of the very first movies with sound, Don Juan.

Almost daily, I receive emails trying to sell me cheap copies of wonderful books, the vast majority of which are works of great literature old enough to be in the public domain.  These vultures, masquerading as publishing houses, obtain a used copy of some author’s great work, cut the binding off, and feed the pages through a scanner, obtaining at almost no cost a “new” book to peddle to their unsuspecting customers, promising a digital copy of a ‘best seller’ for the incredibly low price of 99 cents.  They advertise through mass emails, selling no physical products whatsoever.  For all the consumer knows, the entire publishing company is a single obese nerd named Phil living in his grandmother’s basement.

It is rather obvious that I love books, particularly bound books.  But, I also love my Kindle and find it useful to keep reference copies of frequently used books on my Kindle.  So yes, I have copies of most of Twain’s works on my Kindle as well as the writing of Herodotus and the collected letters of Lincoln and so forth.  Instead of giving any of these vulture companies any money, however, I prefer to download my public domain works from Project Gutenberg, a non-profit organization that provides great out of print books free of charge.  If you have never searched through their collection, you can find them here.

Phil and his ilk are comfortably waiting in their basement, watching the calendar until they can swoop down on the literary carcasses of great work, snatching up marketable tidbits without any reward for either the author or the publisher of the editions they copy.  This is all perfectly legal, but it still stinks.  If you’ll pardon me while I switch metaphors, as we say in Texas, a skunk might have got an invite to the picnic, but he still wasn’t welcome when he showed up.

How can you, a casual reader, tell if a digital book is probably “borrowed” from an earlier edition?  If you find an error in a book, it can either be a mistake by the author or a mistake at the publishing house as they set the manuscript into text.  In the first Harry Potter book, J. K. Rowling’s list of necessary school supplies accidentally included “1 wand” twice—an example of an author’s mistake that was corrected in later editions.  

An example of a mistake at the publishing house would include the infamous 1631 ‘Wicked Bible’ where the typesetter accidentally changed Exodus 20 to read “Thou shalt commit adultery.”  (Obviously, that was not a mistake by the author).  Another example would be a recent pasta cookbook that inadvertently advised the reader to season their pasta with “freshly ground black people”.  I would be willing to bet that Autocorrect had something to do with that last example.

Errors are certainly understandable, but if a later edition includes the same typographical error as an earlier publication, that is proof that the publishing company is just stealing the work of someone else.  Even if the work is already in the public domain, that is still morally wrong.

I will make a prediction about the new batch of public domain books coming out soon:   I am willing to bet that by the end of January 2022, one of those fly-by-night basement publishing companies will offer to sell me a copy of Agatha Christie’s Murder of Roger Ackroyd.  While the original volume was typographically flawless as far as I can tell, the most widely available recent edition contains a typo on page 261, where the name Ursula is spelled ‘Ursual’.  Since the earlier editions do not contain this error, it is obviously a typographical error at the publishing house.

How much do you want to bet the cheap e-text versions being peddled next month contain the typo, giving clear proof that Phil never left even bothered to leave the basement just scanned someone else’s work?

Rock Paper…What?

In recent weeks, having solved such weighty problems as Covid, politics, and the appropriate boarding weapon for pirates, it is time to discuss a topic with a little more gravitas.  I’m referring, of course, to the game of Rock Paper Scissors.

Having never met a person who does not know how to play the game, I’m not going to waste any time discussing the rules.  If you don’t know how to play, have the person who is helping you read the big words explain it to you.  

I will however, talk about the history of the game.   Quelle surprise!

Depending on where you live, the name of the game varies, as well as the three components used to determine the winner.  In the Western United States, the game is frequently called Rochambeau, after the Count who supposedly played the game during the Revolutionary War.  In reality, the Count never heard of the game, and no one knows exactly how the urban legend began.  

In Japan, the game is jan-ken-pon, which not surprisingly translates out to rock, paper, scissors.  The game is frequently used in soft-porn videos where the loser of each round has to remove an article of clothing.  In the Philippines it is called Jak En Poy and is so popular it is frequently the subject of televised game shows.  Indonesia has a version with slightly different hand signs that translates out as Bear, Hunter, Ninja.  

The earliest written description of the game is about 500 years old, in a Chinese book that dates the game back to 225 BCE.  From China, the game moved to Japan, that through contact with the West, spread the game to Europe, early in the Twentieth Century.  

English newspapers first reported in the 1920’s that the “Teutonic Game” was occasionally used to determine who went first in cricket matches when the referee could not locate a suitable coin to determine who played first.  Within a decade, the game had spread to the United States.

Interestingly, in America, players say that “rock smashes scissors”, while in England the phrase is “rock blunts scissors”.  I’ll leave it to the reader to determine if this indicates anything about the nature of either country.  (I wonder if, in France, the scissors surrender to rock.)

The most important thing to know about the game, however, is how to win.  What most people assume is a game of random chance is actually a game of psychology.  Like poker, it is a game where reading your opponent is the key to winning.  

Or maybe not.  There is a theory floating around that players subconsciously attempt to mimic the play of their opponent.  As the eye catches small movements of the muscles in their opponent’s hand, your brain automatically tries to play the same move—resulting in a tie.  Accordingly, some players suggest that the best strategy is to mimic Luke Skywalker practicing with his lightsaber and just use The Force by playing blindfolded.  Even if you don’t win, you will freak out your opponent.

Assuming that you are not Luke Skywalker, then, if you are playing against a man, you should consider playing paper, as most men choose rock as their first move (presumably because the rock is the most masculine, forceful play).  If you lose, you should remember that winners tend to play the same move twice, so your second play should be whatever would have defeated your opponent’s first move.  If your first move won, your second move should be whatever was not played in the first round.  Subsequent rounds should follow this same pattern.

If you go online, you will find programs that allow you to play against a computer.  The games that use simple programs relying on random choices are impossible to beat, as these programs do not use patterns to anticipate, which means, statistically, you will win roughly as many games as you lose in the long run.  If you play against one of the better programs (those that keep track of your moves and analyze them for patterns), you will lose far more games than you win over the long run, since the human brain is incapable of not establishing a pattern.  In fact, the longer you play against such a program, the more you will lose.

Since a third of the games played should end in a tie, several alternative versions of the rules have been suggested, the most common being the addition of more possible moves.  Sam Kass and Karen Bryla have suggested a version with five possible plays:  Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock.  This version was popularized by the television show The Big Bang Theory.  With five possible moves, only one game in five should end in a tie.  If you search long enough on the internet, you can find versions of the game that use up to 100 possible moves….and no one but a computer could possibly remember which move beats another.

Researchers in Japan have discovered that children can play the game about the time they reach the age of four.  That being the mental age of intelligent chimpanzees, the research project immediately switched its research subjects from children to apes, presumably because they were easier to work with and didn’t require payment.  

According to the latest report by the BBC, the scientists have been successful at getting the chimpanzees to play against a computer (although the computer had to use pictures of chimp hands for the subjects to respond).  Next, the researchers are going to attempt to see if the chimps will play the game with other chimps.

Assuming that the experiment will be successful, I have already written to the scientists with a suggestion on how to extend their experiment.  I think, if the scientists proceed cautiously, they might be able to teach the game to university administrators.

Lest you think all of this is just useless trivia, I would point out to you that the game has been used to settle tied elections, property divisions in divorces, and several civil lawsuits.  Perhaps the most interesting use involved selling the extensive impressionist art collection of Takashi Hashiyama, a wealthy Japanese industrialist.  Both Sotheby’s Holdings and Christie’s International presented impressive proposals to auction off the valuable collection of paintings by such artists as Cézanne, Van Gogh, Matisse, and Picasso.  One of the Picasso paintings was ‘Boulevard de Clichy’ (left).

Unable to choose between the two houses, Hashiyama decided to choose an auction house by letting the two firms play a single round of Rock Paper Scissors.

With a week to select their move, Sotheby’s left the choice to management.  Christie’s, wisely turned to the twin eleven-year-old daughters of its international director.  With millions of dollars in commissions at stake, the girls suggested scissors because, as they said, “Everybody expects you to choose rock.”   

Christie’s won.  I wonder if the girls received a consulting fee.

Boarding Weapons

There is a long list of book subjects that I am hopelessly addicted to: Twain, post WW2 science fiction, late 19th century mysteries, and anything written by Lawrence Block, Rex Stout, or John D. MacDonald.   I compulsively read books about the Civil War, art crime, and almost anything written about naval warfare during the Napoleonic years.

Note.  The Doc, looking over my shoulder, just said that I was addicted to any book that had a cover or a page.  This is an obvious gross exaggeration as I own, and regularly use, three Kindles.

Now that finals are over, I am indulging in my usual end of semester reading binge, having recently devoted all of my reading time to the books required by my classes.  Bernard Cornwell just published a new volume in his superb Sharpe series, and it was first on my reading list.  In the novel, one of Cornwell’s characters is armed with a Nock Volley Gun, and that set me off thinking about some of the strange boarding weapons that were once used by navies and pirates.

For centuries before gunpowder, the main tactics used in naval warfare were ramming and boarding, or a combination of the two.  By the time gunpowder began being used at sea, the tactic of ramming began to wane, but navies still frequently engaged in seaborne artillery duels until one ship was damaged enough that its opponent could come alongside and board the ship, killing or subduing the crew and capturing the vessel.

During boarding, both the defenders and the attackers needed specialized weapons, designed to quickly incapacitate as many opponents as possible, but preferably small enough to be portable, while not setting fire to either ship.  Not surprisingly, most of the weapons used were fairly similar to those used on land—swords, muskets, pistols and the occasional boarding axe or pike.  A few of the weapons—and these are the ones I want to talk about today—were unique.

We can start with the Nock Volley Gun that Bernard Cornwell mentions in most of the Sharpe novels.  This was a massive 7-barrel flintlock musket that fired a volley of .46 caliber balls.  You’ll note from the picture that there is a single trigger and there are no sights.  To use, you pointed the monster in the general direction of the enemy and pulled the trigger, simultaneously firing all seven barrels.   The weapon was thunderously loud, produced a prodigious cloud of smoke, and kicked so hard that the unfortunate person using it probably wondered if he had put the wrong end up to his shoulder.

The British weapon was rejected by the Army, primarily because it broke the shoulder of a few of the men who tested it, but the Admiralty office thought it would make a wonderful boarding weapon, even suggesting that it might be used by sailors ‘in the tops’ to clear the decks of enemy ships.  In the tops meant the sailors precariously balanced on platforms on the mast.  The British Navy used them, but only for a short period, eventually rejecting them in favor of more swivel guns.  The Nock was only in use for about 20 years and fewer than 700 of them were manufactured, meaning that the strange musket was used more by Hollywood than by the British Navy (you can even see one in John Wayne’s version of The Alamo).

Since the Nock was replaced in favor of Swivel Gun, I guess I should explain those.  A naval swivel gun was simply a small cannon that was loaded with grapeshot (bags of musket balls) and was mounted on a swiveling stand.  Less than three feet long, the guns were highly portable and could be quickly moved wherever needed.  In boarding operations, they could be used to devastating effect by either attackers or defenders.  Since they are short-range weapons, you could think of them as very large shotguns.

So far, none of these weapons is truly portable.  A sailor boarding an enemy ship could easily find himself confronting several enemies at once, and it is only in the movies that a single man has a sword fight with four enemies at once.  (Well, almost only:  There is a well-documented account of Captain Edward Hamilton of the HMS Surprise.  During his successful recapture of the HMS Hermione, for what must have seemed like an eternity to him, he successfully battled four Spanish sailors on the Hermione’s quarterdeck until the second wave of his crew finally arrived.)

To fill the need, in the 18th and 19th century, several navies experimented with the ‘Duck Foot Pistol’.  These were multi-barreled black powder pistols that sported multiple barrels—usually three or four but up to six were not uncommon.   Like the Nock, you didn’t actually aim the weapon: you just stuck it out in front of you and pulled the trigger while trying to hang on to the thing long enough for it to fire, then, you dropped the pistol on the floor and drew your sword.  I am unable to find a single instance of anyone reloading and firing such a weapon twice in the same battle. 

Surprisingly, these things were actually fairly successful and were used all over the world until being replaced by more modern pistols such as Colt’s revolver.  Besides being used by boarding parties, they were also prized by prison guards and bank guards.  If you happened to be an innocent bank customer when one of these was used…. well, maybe that is why they developed bank by mail.

The chief problem with the duck foot (other than no one ever being able to hit anything he actually aimed at) was that after you fired it, you were left with a rock for defense until you were able to draw a sword.   In 1837, George Elwin successfully patented the first good answer to that age-old recurring problem of someone who’s brought a knife to a gun fight.  The Elgin Cutlass Pistol married a percussion pistol to a knife Elgin claimed was like the one Jim Bowie used at the Alamo.  The Bowie knife—already popular after the infamous Vidalia Sandbar Duel—was such a popular item that knives claiming to be the Bowie were being mass produced as far away as Sheffield, England.  Was the Elgin copy a true representation of what the actual Bowie knife looked like?  Nobody knows for sure—all we can really say for certain was that Bowie's knife was big. 

Elgin made these weapons in a variety of calibers and blade lengths.  When the U.S. Navy was looking to equip an expedition to explore islands in the southern Pacific, it purchased 150 .54 caliber weapons with  11-inch blades—the first time the American military ever purchased a firearm with the newly-invented percussion caps that replaced the earlier flintlock firing system.

The Elgin weapons actually proved fairly effective but they, like the duck foot pistols, were rendered obsolete by the Colt revolvers.  However, there are several reports of the weapons being used in the Civil War.  

Well, that’s enough of weird old weapons.  The concept of weird boarding weapons hasn’t gone away though, as evidenced by the U.S. Coast Guard using the Saiga-12, a Russian shotgun that basically takes the AK-47 and enlarges it to accept a 12-gauge shotgun shell with a twelve shot box magazine that…  But that is a story for another day.

Whose Turn Is It to Lead?

There is that great line about while Fred Astaire was a fantastic dancer, we should all remember that Ginger Rogers did everything he did, but backwards while wearing high heels.  

It’s a famous quote, but contrary to popular opinion, neither Astaire nor Rogers originated the line—that honor belongs to Bob Thaves, the artist of the 1982 Frank and Ernest comic strip.  In a later interview, Rogers even admitted that the quote belonged to Thaves.

Note.  To those readers born after the sixties, those white things on the top of Fred Astaire’s shoes are called ‘spats’, short for spatterdashes.  The sole purpose of these things was to make it look like you were AWOL from the French Army.

Fred and Ginger came to mind this week after I was channel hopping during the evening news.  The difference in how one story was reported (and misreported) by the various flavors of journalism would almost have you believe that the talking heads on television were reporting about completely different countries.  Of particular note were the stories that repeated every few years and how the two political parties reacted to them.  Within a very few years, both parties seem to completely reverse their reactions depending upon who occupies the White House.

Obviously, it is the other party’s time to lead and the other, other party’s time to wear high heels and dance backwards.

Here are a few examples:

Since it is that time of year, let’s start with the Christmas Trees.  Back in 2018, Melania Trump lined the White House Halls with 40 dark red Christmas Trees, which the Washington Post immediately labeled as hideous blood-red atrocities.  The Republican party, predictably, adored the decorations. This year, Jill Biden lined those halls with green trees heavily festooned with white decorations.  Immediately, the Washington Post praised Jill’s style while the Republicans called the decorations ugly.

Ignoring the fact that even during a pandemic with the worst inflation the country has seen in thirty years, the country can still focus on how a set of halls that almost none of us will actually see is still important enough to show up on the editorial pages of the most important newspapers in the country, actually the two sets of decorations had more commonalities than differences.  Something almost no one reported was that neither Melania’s red trees nor Jill’s green and white trees were what the official indoor Christmas tree actually looked like.  In both cases, their trees on the second floor, in the family’s residence were traditionally decorated, and Melania’s and Jill’s looked almost identical.  (For what it’s worth, I thought both decorations were okay.)

When Donald Trump was president, everything he did to lessen the impact of the Covid pandemic was deemed by his own party as inspired genius.  The Democrats, of course, viewed every action as pure evil.  As a candidate, Joe Biden promised swift, decisive action and tactical moves that would all but eliminate the pandemic from our shores, as opposed to the inaction of President Trump.

Now that Joe Biden is president, however, I’m hard pressed to think of anything he has done to fight Covid that is substantially different than what we were doing last year.  That, of course, hasn’t kept the Republican Party from denouncing everything Biden has done.  I’m not, mind you, saying that either is necessarily wrong—I can’t think of anything different to do, either.

When President Trump withdrew troops from Syria, candidate Biden was aghast.  How could America American abandon its allies?  Just twelve months later, former president Trump was horrified when Biden pulled our troops out of Afghanistan and protested vehemently.  Trump’s protests, however, never included the fact that he had been talked out of doing the same thing by his own military advisors.  

Inflation is caused by too many dollars chasing too few goods.  Our current inflation is caused by many factors: the government pumping out stimulus checks, the supply lines backing up because of Covid, the shortage of workers forcing employers to raise salary offerings…but it is easy to see that most of these factors started in early 2020.  If you listen to the two political parties, however…if you listen to either of the political parties…inflation was caused by the evil, intentional, and diabolical plot of the wicked opposition.  

On January 31, 2020, President Donald Trump issued a Level 4 travel ban on non-Americans coming into the country from China.  Almost immediately, several Democrats, including then-candidate Joe Biden, denounced the move as both xenophobic and racist.  Last week, when President Biden banned travel from Africa…well, the best part of it was watching Jen Psaki, Biden’s press secretary, trying to explain the difference while she talked herself around three sides of the barn, looking for the horse whose reins were in her hand.  

All of us should be extremely angry at this performance.  The dancers are clumsy and out of step with the music.  The act is old and desperately needs to be brought in line with something the viewers could appreciate.  The chief problem with virtue signaling is that it doesn’t take long before the signaling is more important than the virtue.

Obviously, it doesn’t really matter who is leading and who is loudly denouncing each and every move: if we just wait a few years, the two dancers will switch places and do it all over again.  Backwards and in high heels.

Masks and Minecraft

Is anyone else tired of wearing a mask?  I’m certainly not an expert on the subject, but those who are—including The Doc—assure me that my wearing them is important, so I comply.  I wear my mask while attending classes and shopping.  I wear one, but I am really sick and tired of it.

 Part of the problem is that I have no patience for fake kabuki shows.  Crap like the phony airport security that is designed to be more pretense than reality infuriates me.  If you feel reassured that your flight will be safe because of the actions of TSA, you are probably traveling with your first name written on a gummed label firmly attached to your shirt and sitting up front where a stewardess can keep an eye on you.

 

I should probably confess that this week’s blog is being cowritten by three of my grandkids, the children of  What’s-His-Name.  Between marathon bouts of the four of us playing Minecraft on the PlayStation, they have been plying me with questions and incredibly helpful suggestions.   

Regardless of whether wearing a face mask actually works or not, most of the rest of the Covid policy seems to be designed more for show than for reality.  I’m supposed to believe that the state department of health is diligently tracking covid cases around the state, but since they send me daily reminders to get the second vaccination shot—which I received months ago—it is a little hard for me to continue to believe in their efficiency.   I have written them several times to correct this clerical error, but they always promptly write back and tell me the benefits of receiving the second vaccination.

 

“Grandpa Mark?  Have you ever had a job?”

 

“No, I’m a retired government employee.”

 

“Grandpa Mark?  Did you know that there are more fake flamingos in the world than real ones?”

 

The Covid policy at Enema U is equally rigorous.  Students and faculty alike are required to wear masks at all times, and yet, if you look around any classroom, you will discover that although most people actually are wearing masks, about half of them have their masks below their noses, and most of the others have taken them off to drink their coffee.  Other than muffling the voices of the instructors, I can’t see how masks in the classroom are accomplishing anything.

 

“Grandpa Mark, are you writing about masks?,” says the munchkin looking over my shoulder as I write.  

 

“Yes.”

 

“You should tell them to wear their masks above their noses.”

 

“Yes.  ‘Cause wearing a mask below your nose is about as effective as wearing a condom over your nuts.”

 

“What are nuts?” 

 

“Ask your grandmother.”

 

Evidently, I don’t need to worry, as the head squirrels at Enema U have officially decided and have posted online, that you can’t catch Covid in a classroom.  Really! They actually said that.  The university has had hundreds of cases, but the official policy is that no one has yet transmitted the virus by contact in a classroom.   This, of course, officially absolves the university from any legal responsibility for someone who actually catches the virus, and eliminates the burden of tracking the people potentially exposed in classrooms.  It also begs the inevitable question:  If we can’t catch the virus in a classroom, why are we still required to wear masks there?

 

“Grandpa Mark?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“When you write this blog, who reads it?”

 

“People all over the world read it, hate what I’ve written, and write me angry letters.”

 

“Then why do you write it?”

 

Recently, a student who sits next to me in an economics course and begs a daily copy of my notes, called me on the phone to tell me he had tested positive.  While I was very grateful for the warning (and even more grateful that retesting eventually proved the first test was a false positive), I thought it odd that no one at the university ever warned me that I had been exposed to the virus.  Of course, this was before I learned that the virus could not be transmitted from one person to another inside a classroom.  Evidently, you can catch it from dirty toilet seats or something.

 

“Grandpa Mark?  Is the A-word a bad word?”

 

“What A-word?  Audit?”

 

“You know, the A-word.  What you sit on.”

 

“There is nothing wrong with the word ‘ass’. Some of my favorite administrators are asses.  What is obscene is saying such damn fool things as ‘A-word’.”

 

Have you noticed that the state seems to have stopped shutting down businesses where employees have contracted the virus?  A year ago, the newspaper published a daily listing of businesses that were shuttered for weeks at a time.  My local grocery store was shuttered twice within a space of two months.  While there are just as many—and possibly more—Covid cases compared to a year ago, we no longer hear about stores being closed.  Possibly, the state stopped doing this because the governor is in a tough reelection bid?  Or maybe it is just as hard to catch Covid in a store as in a classroom?

 

“Grandpa Mark?  When our Daddy was a little boy, did he tell lies?”

 

“Of course.  Everybody tells lies, especially the people who say they don’t tell lies.”

 

“Who tells the most lies?”

 

“Politicians and preachers.”

 

“What about grandfathers?”

 

“Grandfathers always tell the truth.   Give or take a lie or two.”

 

“What does that mean?”

 

“Ask your grandmother.”

 

Obviously, the university has the amazing ability to pick and choose exactly when and where Covid can be passed from one person to another.  You are safe in a football stadium, but libraries are such death traps that they have to be shuttered for months at a time.  Fraternity houses are safe, but everyone should avoid the campus post office.  And for some reason, you have to wear a mask as you walk into a cafeteria, but you can safely take the mask off as soon as you sit down.  It must be very confusing for the virus to have to remember where it can and cannot go.

 

“Grandpa Mark?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“When you are done writing, will you play Minecraft again?”

 

“As you wish.”

 

The mask un-policy will eventually fade away.   While I am sure that writing the rules and regulations for wearing the damn fool things is profoundly pleasing to the administration of Enema U, eventually we will all have to stop wearing the things, if for no other reason than, at least occasionally, a student may actually want to accurately hear what his professor has to say. 

 

You’ll have to excuse me, I have to go right now to learn how to use red stone to power the mine cart in Minecraft.  I have good teachers. 

This is What Committees Do

Periodically, and for no apparent logical reason, the head squirrels at Enema U required every academic department to rewrite their mission statement.  Perhaps this was an attempt to sidetrack the faculty from noticing that the number of useless bureaucrats in the administration were multiplying more rapidly than rats in a sewer.

At the inevitable faculty meeting to discuss drafting the new mission statement, my suggestion that the department just resubmit the existing statement was immediately rejected.  When I offered $50 to anyone who could recite the existing statement, no one accepted my offer.  When I suggested that the new mission statement be the simple statement of “Teach”, I was ignored.  Well, to be honest, one of my colleagues—someone who also believed that such meetings were a waste of time—suggested that such a statement was too brief and should be amended to “Teach well”.  We were both ignored.

Eventually, after a long and pointless discussion, the department adopted a new lengthy (and still meaningless) mission statement, and promptly forgot about it.  Six months later, if I had repeated my offer of $50 to anyone who could recite the passage, the money would have remained safely in my wallet.

I am reminded of this by a story in the local newspaper about the city’s airport producing a new Strategic Plan.  I will warn you in advance that all of the following is based upon my own sketchy memory, a notoriously and increasingly leaky vessel.  There is no longer any supporting documentation as I gleefully burned all my notes several years ago.  As I have said before:  Everything in this blog is the absolute truth—give or take a lie or two.

My community is blessed with two very nice airports:  one that is maintained by the city and a slightly smaller one that belongs to the county government.  Since my community is not large enough to attract regularly scheduled flights from commercial airlines, neither airport sees the kind of commercial activity found at large airports.  Still, both airports were well managed and properly run.  As a private pilot, I have flown in and out of both of them without any complaints.  Please understand that I have no complaints about how either airport was managed nor am I aware of such complaints from other pilots.

At the recommendation of the manager of the county’s airport, I was appointed to a two-year term on the county’s Airport Advisory Committee.  For two years, I was part of a committee that periodically met, discussed various issues, and then reported to the County Commissioners who never actually listened to us nor cared in any meaningful way about what was happening at the airport.  The most frequent question from any of the commissioners was for clarification on which of the two airports the county government owned and operated.  Seriously, one commissioner asked me that same damn question four times in a single year.

The airport was due to renew its Strategic Plan, which is something the FAA suggests be done every five years, and the county actually did so every eight to ten years—a schedule that is not bad for New Mexico.  And there were a few improvements that would have been welcome at the airport.  The availability of internet, for example, would have meant that pilots would be able to check weather reports and would have meant that the airport manager didn’t have that daily drive of half an hour to turn in reports to the county government.  Some of the tenants were behind in their rent, airport lighting could always be upgraded and so forth.  Like any large ongoing concern, there were periodic problems to be fixed and upgrades to be considered.

Those were not, however, the kinds of things that got reported in the airport’s strategic plan.  I quickly learned that the county contracted the task of preparing the plan out to a large consulting firm, which would take months to eventually draft a professional report outlining the future of the airport.  Since the previous plans were still on file, I was astonished to learn that the airport’s true potential was to become a highly industrialized hub of air freight.  According to the previous plans, the airport was about to become an incredible source of tax revenue because of the rapid expansion of freight operations.

This was rather astonishing, since eight years after the most recent plan, the only evidence of air freight at the airport was an aging DC-3 parked on the tarmac while an engine was being replaced.  The two previously prepared plans had both stressed that the airport would inevitably become a busy hub of air freight—something that not only had not happened, but seemed extremely unlikely to ever occur.

After a little research, I was able to discover a few facts:

• The same consulting company that had prepared the two previous plans were likely to receive the county contract to prepare the new report.  Since the cost of such a report was six figures, the company was extremely active in lobbying the county commissioners for the new contract.  
• The majority of air freight travels on regularly scheduled airline flights.  Since no airline flights landed at the airport, there was absolutely no interest by the airlines in using the airport.
• The airport in El Paso, less than thirty miles away, had recently spent over $2 million dollars constructing new state of the art freight handling facilities.
• No airline company owned any land at the country airport.  Neither UPS nor FedEx was interested in pursuing even an option on land at the county airport.  Both companies had large existing hangars at the El Paso airport.
• No one at the county airport could ever remember any freight hauling company making any inquiries about leasing space at the county airport.

It became obvious that the consulting company was going to be awarded the contract, be paid large sums of taxpayer money to prepare it, and that the report would tell the county commissioners exactly what they wanted to hear:  that the county was about to rake in large amounts of taxes from the soon-to-be-realized booming freight company.

I tried.  I took a county commissioner to lunch at the Faculty Dining Room, and we discussed the proposed contract.  I produced the two previous reports, each of which were demonstrably incredibly inaccurate, and predicted that if the consulting company was successful in securing the upcoming contract, they would, like any well-paid prostitute, tell the customer exactly what he wanted to hear.

“I understand,” the politician answered.  “You know what the airport needs to do?  You should hold some kind a celebration, maybe an airport birthday party.  We can call in the press, and I’ll show up and make a speech.  Which airport is it, anyway?”

The contract was, of course, given to the same consulting company.  The resulting report predicted an imminent growth of air cargo, producing a flood of tax revenue.  The county commissioners published the plan as proof of their effective leadership.  Most importantly, according to Google Earth, the DC-3 is still parked on the tarmac.