After More Than Two Centuries, Why Is This Still A Problem?

Years ago, I used to give my students the example of three men standing on the courthouse steps.  The first man is attempting to burn the American flag, the second is trying to stop the first man from burning the flag, and the third man is trying to stop the second man from preventing the first man from burning the flag.

“Now,” I would ask my class.  “Which man is defending the constitution?”

Thankfully, most of my students knew that the third man is the one defending the ideals of our constitution, as he is protecting the first man’s right to free speech.  While many of us might sympathize with the second man and deplore the act of burning our nation’s flag, the right of free speech is among the basic rights that our flag represents.  

If we are to have free speech, it means that even speech we find truly objectionable must also be protected.  We must allow even speech that we hate, if we are to have any right to express our opinions freely.

While most of us understand this, I have noticed among some of my more conservative friends some hesitation to equate flag burning with free speech.  I, too, feel uncomfortable with the idea.  It reminds me of that apocryphal tale of the priest who was asked to reconcile the idea of a loving God with the tragedy of infant mortality.  “Sometimes,” the priest answered.  “God must officially condone actions that he privately abhors.”  So it is with free speech.

Unfortunately, a few of my friends on the left have the same problem.

I remember going to a bookstore with a colleague and being somewhat amazed at her reaction to a display of popular history books written by a conservative television personality.  Clearly outraged, she placed other books in front of each of the editions, effectively hiding them.  This same person would have been horrified at a library’s banning books, she regularly lectured about Nazi book burning, and she would have been outraged at being compared with either group, but she was, nevertheless, personally preventing people from reading some books just because she disagreed with the opinions of the author.

Note.  Without going into too much detail, I will admit that the books were phenomenally poor history books.  At the request of a friend, I read one of the books and had returned it with so many corrections and explanations scribbled along the margins that it might have been easier to just have written my own edition.  The author had clearly done his research in such a manner as to only include the data that reinforced his preconceived and frequently erroneous opinions.  My friend should have hidden the books because they were crap, not because of the politics of the author.

Somehow, censorship has become acceptable as long as you are doing it for a “good cause”.  Social media bans or “fact checks” opinions “they” disagree with.  A friend of mine had a piece consisting entirely of a paragraph taken from Wikipedia fact-checked on Facebook—with a paragraph almost identical with the original post—because Facebook claimed the author was “punching down”.  

If you—like me—are unfamiliar with the phrase, Urban Dictionary defines it as “For someone of higher rank, power, status, and position to engage someone of much lesser and/or inferior rank, status, power, and position in debate and/or argument. Not limited to just status, power, position, and rank but can and often do include intellect, capability, competence, and acumen.”

Outrageously rude, but the speech of a boor still sounds like speech to me.

MailChimp, the service that handles marketing and mass mailings for organizations and companies, has started cancelling accounts if they don’t like what is being emailed through their service.  Though every piece of email they send out has a mandatory “unsubscribe” button, they are evidently reading everyone’s email and passing judgement on what meets their standards.  One of the groups that they have recently blocked specialized in political satire.  According to MailChimp, "Indeed, humor can be an effective mode of communicating hateful ideas."

MailChimp, Facebook, Twitter and the rest are private companies, and they can refuse to do business with people if they don’t want to, though I’m just not sure why they would feel any need or desire to do so.  I will admit that if I were the president of MailChimp and the KKK wanted to open an account, I would have to consider the proposition for a long time, but in the end, even hate speech is still speech.  

Brandeis University has a panel of twits that have come up with a long list of words they no longer want their students to use.  “Trigger warning” invokes a mental image of a gun, so Brandeis wants faculty and students to say “content note”.  The list of banned words also includes “victim, survivor, freshman, picnic”, and the phrase “Ladies and Gentlemen”.  “People of Color” is wrong, so you should instead use “BIPOC” (Black, Indigenous, People of Color).  “Walk-In” is too “Ableist”, and these Speech Nazis suggest the substitution of “Drop-In”.  This insults me because it suggests that some people can fly and I can’t.

My favorite banned phrase on the list is “rule of thumb”.  According to Brandeis, this is because of the widely held belief that the phrase refers to an old English law that allowed a husband to beat his wife with a stick no larger than his thumb.  Brandeis worded this so carefully that they obviously know that no such law ever existed.  The true source of the phrase dates back to the 17th Century when brewers tested the temperature of beer by sticking their thumbs into the vat.

Using Google and searching through the last twelve years of this blog, I found that I have used well over half of the banned words.  I promise that, in the years to come, I will use the rest.

I don’t know when it became fashionable, or even acceptable, to censor the speech of others, but we need to stop.  As we restrict language, ban opinions, and cancel the thoughts of even the fringe, we water down the value of the remaining opinions.  After all, no one is punching down as much as the person who says “Shut up!”

Besides, if only one opinion is allowed, what makes you think it will be yours?

Suddenly, I’m an Art-ist

Well, it’s here!  Though I graduated a month ago, it took the university about six weeks to actually mail me my degree.  I was a little surprised to see that though I majored in Art History, the diploma simply says ‘Art’.  

I have a degree in Art.  Hilarious.

This diploma would astound my mother, who truly was an artist and though she certainly tried to teach me how to paint, eventually admitted that my talents (if indeed I had any) lay elsewhere.  Well, ‘lay’ was probably incorrect, ‘stampeding away’ might be a more accurate description.

From a very early age, I remember accompanying my mother as she set up her easel in a field and began to sketch the landscape.  That she could quickly produce brilliant drawings in charcoal and India ink of trees and barns was always an amazing feat that I envied, but could never reproduce.   The ability to draw is a skill that I have always wished to possess, but though I have worked and practiced at it, it has successfully eluded me.

Note.  My mother once predicted that I would never finish college.  In turns out that she was correct:  The university has just accepted my application to be readmitted.  In the fall, I will join many freshmen in pursuit of a degree in Economics.  

Having retired from the university, one of my retirement perks is the ability to take classes without having to pay tuition—a benefit that, evidently, few retired faculty members actually use.  I decided to study art history primarily because I thought it was about as far out of my usual wheelhouse as possible.  Frankly, I had no idea that art history would be so much fun.  The classes were enjoyable chiefly because of the great faculty who tolerated my relatively flat learning curve.  Professors Goehring, Marinas, Fitzsimmons, Salas, and Zarur:  thank you for tolerating my intrusion in your classes.

One of the requirements for a degree in Art History was a studio art class and I chose Drawing, which I took from Professor Tauna Dole, who showed infinite patience as she struggled to teach me the rudiments.  I really enjoyed this class, and actually did improve to the point where it is now possible for the viewer to usually be able to figure out what it is I am drawing badly.  

In my art history classes, I kept hearing about ‘brush strokes’ and other technical terms.  Many of these concepts were very confusing to me, so I bought art paper and a set of watercolors and began experimenting.  While this hands-on experience did help explain many of the art terms I found difficult, my “paintings” looked like the rejects from a parent’s refrigerator.  So far, they have all been safely curated into the backyard chimenea.   My rate of improving, if any, makes the progress of glaciers resemble a jackrabbit pursued by coyotes.  

Still, these experiments have been great fun.  My repeated failures remind me of a tiny booklet by Winston Churchill, Painting as a Pastime.  It is rather strange that this book is not more widely distributed.  I found a paperback first edition for $900, a $30 hardback copy on Amazon, or you can do what I did, read it for free at Project Gutenberg.  (I have no idea why anyone would pay $12 to Amazon for the Kindle edition when the Project Gutenberg version works perfectly on my Kindle.)

Churchill took up the hobby of painting after he resigned from the Admiralty in 1915, believing firmly that he must do something, and he wanted a change to keep his brain fresh.  As he said:

"To have reached the age of forty without ever handling a brush or fiddling with a pencil, to have regarded with mature eye the painting of pictures of any kind as a mystery, to have stood agape before the chalk of the pavement artist, and then suddenly to find oneself plunged in the middle of a new and intense form of interest and action with paints and palettes and canvases, and not to be discouraged by results, is an astonishing and enriching experience. I hope it may be shared by others. I should be glad if these lines induced others to try the experiment which I have tried, and if some at least were to find themselves dowered with an absorbing new amusement delightful to themselves, and at any rate not violently harmful to man or beast."

Churchill had a great many hobbies, besides painting:  he loved to make brick walls, even going to the extreme of joining the bricklayers’ union (though they canceled his membership when he rejoined the Conservative Party).  Churchill also raised butterflies and usually kept cats, dogs, and pigs as pets, saying that “cats look down on us and dogs look up to us, but pigs treat us as equals.”  Without a doubt, however, it was painting that gave him the most enjoyment.

During his life, Churchill created hundreds of paintings—some under his own name and others under the pseudonym Charles Marin.  He once gave a small hint why he used the pseudonym while commiserating with an artist whose work had been rejected from a show.  “Your work is very good, but unlike mine, is judged strictly on its merit.”

No one will ever mistake a work by the prime minister as a great masterpiece, but the majority of the hundred or so paintings that I was able to find online are not bad, and far better than anything I have achieved.  Still, Churchill planned on improving.  "When I get to heaven I mean to spend a considerable portion of my first million years in painting, and so get to the bottom of the subject.”

In my case, it might take a tad longer.

Little Wars

There is a common party game in which you are challenged to list the books you would take to a desert island as your sole reading material for the rest of your life.  The number of books you can take with you varies from one book to ten books or a dozen.  The obvious answers—The U.S. Navy SEAL Survival Handbook or even Dafoe’s Robinson Crusoe—are considered cheating.

If I could take only a single volume, it would have to be Three Men In a Boat, the masterpiece by Jerome K. Jerome.  Written more than a century ago, it is the single best repository of knowledge concerning the human condition.   Jerome’s best-known book not only quickly sold a million copies, but it was largely responsible for the Thames River becoming a tourist attraction.

Further down the list of books that have to go to the island with me—past several volumes of books by Mark Twain and a couple of works by Robert Heinlein—I would add War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells.  This is a great book, even if Hollywood types keep using minute sections to make bad movies.  Perhaps someday a Hollywood director will read the entire novel before he starts filming.

I guess it is not terribly surprising that Jerome and Wells were good friends—both men seem to have known just about everyone in England at the time.  Jerome even wrote a sequel to Three Men in a Boat, titled Three Men on a Bummel.  The latter work describes a bicycle trip the men take through turn of the century Germany, with frighteningly accurate predictions of Germany two generations later.  Jerome was probably inspired to write the work after reading Wells’ own book on cycling, The Wheels of Chance.

That the two men knew each other and served as literary inspiration for each other’s writing is perfectly natural.  What is surprising is where the result of the two men’s friendship can still be seen today.

One day after lunch at Wells’ home, Jerome began idly playing….Well, let me let Wells tell it:

The present writer had been lunching with a friend—let me veil his identity under the initials J. K. J.—in a room littered with the irrepressible debris of a small boy's pleasures. On a table near our own stood four or five soldiers and one of these guns. Mr J. K. J., his more urgent needs satisfied and the coffee imminent, drew a chair to this little table, sat down, examined the gun discreetly, loaded it warily, aimed, and hit his man. Thereupon he boasted of the deed, and issued challenges that were accepted with avidity....

Naturally, it didn’t take long before the contest between the two men escalated as they played with the cast lead soldiers and the small spring-loaded cannon capable of throwing an inch-long wooden stick about three yards.  The little soldiers were set up repeatedly, and just as quickly knocked down by the toy cannon.  Before long, the two men began proposing alternative methods of play.  What if the soldiers could move between shots?  Could they capture the cannon?  The two men made up new rules, added conditions, and were really getting caught up in the spirit of the new game when calamity struck.  As Wells wrote:

Primitive attempts to realize the dream were interrupted by a great rustle and chattering of lady visitors. They regarded the objects upon the floor with the empty disdain of their sex for all imaginative things.

The sight of two grown men, respected in society, crawling around on the floor playing with the toys that belonged to Wells’ son evidently put a swift end to the project, but the next day, Wells continued to expand the possibilities of the game.  He added more lead soldiers, including men mounted on horseback.  Then he added crude barriers to create a “country”.  In the earliest experiments, the country consisted of volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica and blocks of wood.

The limitations of playing in the parlor led Wells to appropriate a better room: the household nursery.  Picked primarily because the cork floor was a better foundation than the parlor carpet for the toy soldiers, Wells discovered than the cork floor also allowed him to use chalk to draw in rivers, roads, and certain other geographical features.  (Obviously, Wells had an incredibly patient and tolerant wife.  In fact, even a casual reading of a biography of Wells reveals that last sentence to be a massive understatement.  By any measure, Wells was a friendly outgoing man with an incredible imagination.  He was also a poor husband and, using the parlance of the time, a constant Lothario.)

 

Before long, the books gave way to model houses fashioned from cardboard, and miniature trees were created by placing the ends of twigs and branches into holes drilled into blocks of wood.  Mountains were represented by repurposed garden rocks.  The game commenced with one player designing the country, placing models and rocks as he saw fit.  The other player then selected which side of the country he preferred.  Both players had an equal force of infantry, cavalry, and artillery to be placed within their territory.  

When play commenced, each side took turns either moving or firing their pieces.  Using precut pieces of string for measurement, an infantry unit could move one foot, a cavalry unit could move two feet, and a cannon accompanied by at least four infantry units could move one foot.  Each player had a limited time to move his pieces, then it was the other player’s turn.  

One impressive feature was that the outcome of combat was decided not by chance, but by calculating the relative strengths of the units involved, resulting in a game determined strictly by strategy instead of random chance.  There were no dice, no flipping of coins, and no shuffled deck of cards.

Obviously, the players needed a large country estate house without cats, small children, or overly fussy spouses—or as Wells put it, “the invasion of callers, alien souls, trampling skirt-swishers, chatterers, creatures unfavourably impressed by the spectacle of two middle-aged men playing with "toy soldiers" on the floor, and very heated and excited about it.”

It took several years to work out all the rules for the game, but eventually Wells published the rules in a book, Little Wars.  The game invented by Jerome K Jerome and H. G. Wells is the prototype of the tabletop war game played strictly for enjoyment.  It is the ancestor of not only most boxed war games, but served as a guide for the development of the game Dungeons and Dragons.

The book has been reprinted several times, and as you can imagine, to purchase a first edition would be a sizable investment.  You can, however, read it for free here.

Wells developed his game and held several tournaments at his house, Number 17 Church Row, Hampstead.  Years later, the house was owned by Peter Cook and the nursery was used by Cook and his comedic partner, Dudley Moore to work on material.  The dining room no longer hosted lunch for Jerome K. Jerome, but held cocktail parties for Keith Richards, John Lennon, and Paul McCartney.

Today, the house is still standing, and it would be nice to say that if you were to visit, the nursery floor would be laid out for one of the many games Wells played.  Unfortunately, all of his lead cast soldiers were confiscated from his son, the pacifist Anthony West, during World War II by the police who angrily considered such possessions unsuitable for someone opposed to war.

The year after Little Wars was published, World War I (or “The Great War) started.  Though both Jerome and Wells supported the war, perhaps we need one more excerpt from Wells’ book.  This is from Chapter IV of Little Wars:

“Great War is at present, I am convinced, not only the most expensive game in the universe, but it is a game out of all proportion. Not only are the masses of men and material and suffering and inconvenience too monstrously big for reason, but—the available heads we have for it, are too small. That, I think, is the most pacific realization conceivable, and Little War brings you to it as nothing else but Great War can do.”

Realizing this, it seems sad and counterproductive that Wells’ lead soldiers were “conscripted” to serve in the Great War so that they could no longer serve their educational role in the Little Wars.

Per Your Directive

Though I never really wanted to, I have run several bars.  As a teenager, I worked for a crazy woman who sold Mexican imports that she warehoused in the back of a motel in Cotulla, Texas.  My boss, an oil heiress from a family who had long stretched the confines of the definition of the word ‘eccentric’, owned the little motel/restaurant/bar in the small border town because her wildcatter father had seen one like it in Hawaii and decided he had to have a copy.

I had just turned 18 and had graduated a little early from high school when my boss sent me to Cotulla to temporarily manage the place until she could find a replacement for the manager who had died suddenly from a heart attack.  As it turned out, I ran that fandango in hell for months and eventually fully understood what had killed my predecessor.  

Chief among my management problems was how to run a bar I wasn’t legally old enough to enter during operating hours.  Texas liquor laws back in those days were a nightmare maze of contradictory laws written, amended, repealed and rewritten by drunken Baptists who prayed each Sunday to close the bars and private clubs they had enthusiastically patronized the night before.  Technically, the state was semi-dry and public drinking was only legal in private clubs, not bars.  I quickly learned that one of my management duties was to liberally scatter “Guest Membership” cards along the sidewalk in front of the “club” every night.

Let’s just say it was a learning experience, and among the hard-earned lessons was that bartenders frequently stole so much that breaking even was almost impossible.  Bartenders drink, and with each drink consumed, the house rules become increasingly irrelevant.

Over the next decade, I worked in a lot of hotel (after all, I had great management experience, at least on paper).  As part of running a hotel, I ran a variety of bars:  small intimate bars with jazz music, a country western bar with a mechanical bull, and even a few nice quiet bars with  decent wine lists.  About all these bars had in common was that hiring a good bartender was really difficult, and that even the best of them were going to drink as much free liquor as they wanted.  The best bartender I ever employed, judging solely by the number of customers he brought in and the profits the bar made, told me the day I hired him that he was going to drink a bottle of Christian Brothers Brandy every night that he worked.   About that, at least, he was perfectly honest.

Rules—and even laws—can’t change human nature.  This has been common knowledge for centuries, but politicians and bureaucrats persist in trying to change it.  You can look at Adam Smith’s writing about the folly of governments’ passing “sin taxes” on whiskey some 270 years ago for confirmation.  

This was a lesson in human nature that I have seen reinforced many, many times.  At one point in my early college days, I remember a sergeant patiently explaining to a group of wanna-be future lieutenants that as leaders, we should never tell our men to do something we knew for a fact that they would never do because issuing orders that would never be followed always erodes respect and authority.  

While at Enema U, I saw legions of administrators who never understood this simple lesson.  There was such a perpetual deluge of memoranda, directives, and policy changes that if total compliance ever actually occurred, it was probably accidental.  I remember one newly-appointed department head bemoaning over one such impossible to fulfill mandate.

“What are we going to do?  They expect us to do this enthusiastically.”

An older and more experienced faculty member sighed and answered, “Relax.  Enthusiasm can be reported.”

One of the best examples of altering a policy to fit the realities of human nature was sent to me by one of my better students.  During World War II, the very existence of the refined uranium needed to build the atomic bomb was top secret.  When some of the precious material was sent to machine shops to be milled and shaped into the appropriate shapes, a warning was sent with the material:

“We can’t tell you anything about this material, but it’s vital to the war effort that ALL of it including all swarf be returned to us.”

Swarf is the residue or chips and filings produced by the machining operation.  Despite the warnings, however, the folks at the Manhattan Project could determine that the amount of material returned to the authorities was less than projected.  Alarmed at the possibility of espionage, an extensive investigation was conducted to determine the cause of the loss.  Investigators were sent to talk to the shop foremen and the machinists.

The machinists who had worked with the uranium had noticed that when machined, the metal threw a bright spark, and since wartime rationing restrictions made securing flints for cigarette lighters impossible, the machinists had ignored the official guidelines and diverted what they considered to be trifling amounts of the strange material to be used in their cigarette lighters.

The people that ran the Manhattan Project were obviously very smart, and knew that human nature couldn’t be changed by fiat.  Accordingly, the officials used the special status of the Project and issued highest priority requisitions so that the personnel of the machine shops be furnished cigarette lighter flints.

We should all be so wise.

Picture This….Or Not

Art as a tool for propaganda has been recognized by rulers since the earliest times.  Pharaohs, Alexander the Great, and Roman leaders erected statues bearing their likenesses to constantly remind their subjects of their majestic form, their dignified nature, and their larger than life—at least their larger than the lives of their subjects—nature.

As soon as kingdoms created coins, leaders started stamping their images on them.  Roman generals, not politically powerful enough to warrant stamping coins depicting their own images, would stamp their names on the coins they used to pay their troops.  

It was Napoleon* who was the first to fully understand the potential of using the arts as a tool for propaganda, particularly via newspapers, paintings, and the theater.  Napoleon not only followed the examples of previous effective leaders, but took advantage of new technology such as etchings and improved printing presses to maximize his efforts to sculpt exactly the message he wanted.

As Napoleon wrote, “To attach no importance to public opinion is a proof you do not merit its suffrage”.

From his earliest military victories, Napoleon carefully crafted his reports not only to cast himself in the best possible light with the powers that were, but to mold public opinion by publishing them in the newspapers, too.  When several newspapers cast his exploits more factually than the general desired, Napoleon wrote the Directorate suggesting that the offending newspaper have its presses destroyed.  When the Directorate proved slow to implement this suggestion, Napoleon used his troops to accomplish the task himself.

To more effectively ensure that he received good press, Napoleon started his own newspaper and after seeing how effective the tool was for shaping public morale, eventually founded and ran six such newspapers.  Occasionally, the general even wrote the articles himself.   (A century later, Porfirio Diaz, the most successful of the Mexican dictators, not only copied Napoleon’s idea of owning newspapers to control the press, but took the idea a step further by secretly owing the underground opposition papers.)

Napoleon was very careful of the power of French theaters, a traditional source of dissent disguised as comedy.  During the years of Napoleon, the number of theaters decreased and those remaining had to be licensed, with strict limits on the number of days a performance could run.  In addition, any new material had to be read by the Minister of Justice before it could be performed.  

Napoleon took full advantage of such tried and true methods such as commissioning statues, placing his image on gold coins, on letterheads, and on a wide assortment of official documents.  He also introduced the concept of medals commemorating military victories, to be sold to the public.  Napoleon eventually even controlled architecture and art, implementing an offshoot of the classical style, that was known as Empire and was named after the Napoleon’s First Empire.

For centuries, the paintings political leaders commissioned could be seen only by those fortunate enough to be allowed to tour royal palaces.  Artists so famous that their very names are synonymous with their countries today, were almost unknown while they were alive because there was no effective method of reproducing and disseminating their art.  At best, small collections of their art could be painstakingly copied by apprentices and loosely bound together, to be sold as expensive ‘copy books’ for other artists.  

With the advent of copper plate engravings, artwork could be more easily copied and the metal engraved plates could be used countless times to make enough copies of the art that far more artists and patrons could see images of important paintings.  Napoleon was quick to take advantage of this medium, supporting multiple artists, the most influential of whom was Jacques-Louis David.

David had been very politically active during the Revolution, including voting for the death of the royal family (even though Louis XVI had been a generous patron of the arts).   Like many other supporters of the revolution, David changed his mind after his own arrest.  After a lengthy prison sentence, during which he only narrowly missed being sent to the guillotine with his friend Robespierre, David lost his revolutionary zeal and accepted many commissions from Napoleon, eagerly crafting images that supported an image that while not historically accurate, was exactly what Napoleon wanted to convey.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the painting, Napoleon at the Saint Bernard Pass.   The original painting by David was commissioned by Carlos IV, the King of Spain, who was trying desperately to reestablish relations with his militarily stronger neighbor to the north.  When Napoleon learned of the painting, he commissioned David to make four more copies of it, each slightly different (most noticeably in the colors of the horses).  Those five paintings have traveled extensively due to various wars, the original being seized by Napoleon’s brother Joseph when he was (briefly) the King of Spain.  With the fall of Emperor Napoleon, Joseph fled to the United States, taking the painting with him.  Today, the original and two of the copies are back in France, while the remaining two paintings are on display in Vienna and Berlin.

The paintings depict the 1800 crossing of the Alps by Napoleon to reinforce the French Armies in Italy.  Undertaken during the winter, Napoleon is obviously trying to portray a heroic leader, inspired by the spirit of Hannibal’s feat two millennia earlier, leading his troops to glory.  

Unfortunately, like many such stories, it’s total nonsense.  Oh, Napoleon certainly led his troops over the Alps in winter, and it was certainly a brilliant strategic move, but it was nothing like the scene David painted.  A more accurate version, but one not nearly so stirring, is Bonaparte crossing the Alps by Paul Delaroche in 1848.  

Painted 27 years after Napoleon’s death, Delaroche was safe to paint a more accurate version.  Though the artist admired the late emperor, he portrayed Napoleon in a plain wool coat, obviously suffering.  His face is unmistakably downcast and visibly sad from the cold, miserable journey and he’s leading his men across the snow-covered mountains while riding a mule led by a peasant.

Today, after decades of television and movies, a more sophisticated audience instantly recognizes the theatrical artificiality of David’s version of the crossing and that it is Delaroche’s painting that conveys a sense of who Napoleon really was.

*Yes—I’ve written yet another blog about Napoleon…and I’ll probably write more.

UFO, UAP, or AWB

When Commodore Matthew Perry arrived in Japan in 1853 to force the Tokugawa shogunate to open their ports to American trade, the news rocketed across Japan.  After being almost completely isolated from the outside world for over two centuries, Japan was visited by the ‘Black Ships’ of the United States, a steam powered fleet that displayed obvious technological advantages.

Within two weeks, nearly everyone on the island nation of Japan had learned of the visit, knew of the technological and military advantages of the visitors, and even had an idea of who was aboard the strange ships.  The sudden arrival had profound effects on the culture of Japan, eventually bringing about the downfall of the shogunate, the restoration of the Emperor, and the nation’s rapid adoption of modern technology.

Within a month of Perry’s arrival, there was not a soul on the island who was not completely aware of the American fleet’s arrival.

Currently, news programs on multiple networks are carrying stories about the possible existence of Unidentified Flying Objects, or UFOs.  Wait, excuse me:  the military no longer wants to use that term, they currently prefer Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, or UAP.  Presumably, the Pentagon wanted a less pejorative term so that people over the age of fourteen (known as lieutenants) could discuss the phenomena without giggling.

Since the end of the Second World War, every decade or so there has been a new wave of hysteria over saucer sightings.  From 1952 to 1969, the U.S. Air Force even had a task force to investigate such sightings, Project Blue Book, which eventually concluded that all of the sightings had earthly explanations.  Naturally, no one believed this, since a silver foil-covered weather balloon illuminated by a setting sun was wildly improbably compared to the likelihood that extraterrestrials that were smart enough to develop the technology that would enable them to travel lightyears across space, were nevertheless still dumb enough to decide that Roswell, New Mexico, as the intellectual center of Earth, was the visitor’s center. 

Note.  I really admire Roswell, a place that only has two things going for it.  First, they have the remains of two World War II bomber training bases with truly impressive runways, one of which was converted into a couple of nice golf courses.  But, what do you do with the other huge airport, with big, wide runways in the middle of an arid desert?  You charge rent for airlines that want to store airplanes they don’t currently need.  The only other asset the

town has is a wild myth about aliens.  The town has gone to tremendous lengths to accommodate the gullible tourists: there are UFO museums, there is a saucer-shaped McDonalds, and even the town’s streetlights are made to resemble little space aliens.  If life gives you lemons, make dilithium crystal flavored lemonade.  

I can understand the mania.  Unidentified flying objects are real, but the emphasis should be on the word unidentified, which is not a synonym for alien.  Newspapers seldom report the sightings of Identified Flying Objects.

During the craze of the sixties, my brother and I were caught up in the hysteria.  While driving across the north side of San Antonio, suddenly we spotted an oblong dark shape flashing strange white lights in a random pattern.  Convinced that we had spotted a UFO, we attempted to follow it.  The shape seemed to accelerate while turning, and it was extremely difficult to catch up with the object as it circled around the town.  My brother and I were absolutely convinced that what we were chasing was not of this earth.  

I won’t go into all the traffic laws my brother broke that night, but we may have left tire tracks from a small British sports car across a popular local golf course as we chased those lights.  Eventually, we could see that the letters did have a pattern:  if you were directly under the shape, the mysterious lights suddenly arranged themselves into an advertisement for a wrestling match at the downtown arena.  The sign was being pulled by a small plane.  And just like that, our mystery UFO became an IFO.  

Which, I am sure is what will happen to all of the strange reports currently filling the news.  That strange object that can travel 13,000 mph and turn 90 degrees mid-flight will turn out to be a bug in the radar system or something similar.  If this planet were actually being visited by visitors from another planet, it would make at least as big an impact as and be noticed by the locals at least as much as did Commodore Perry’s arrival in Japan.

But, how can we be sure that the government isn’t hiding other worldly material at a secret research laboratory in a remote corner of Area 51?  How do we know the government doesn’t  already know for certain that we are being visited by life from another solar system?  There is a very easy and sure-fire test that will answer the question reliably.

Is NASA still having to fight for its meager annual budget?  Do our astronauts still hitch rides on Russian rockets and rent capsule space from Elon Musk?  Has the Space Force started drafting people?  Has the Congressional Committee on Space removed as a member the moronic Congresswoman from Houston who asked for the Mars Rover to drive over and take a photo of the flag Neil Armstrong left on the moon?  Does Congress fight to give an ever-increasing amount of money to research space flight?

If the answer to any of those questions is still ‘no’, then you can rest assured that any UFO is probably just another AWB.  (A weather balloon.)

A Question of Taste

Two cannibals are eating a clown when one turns to the other and says. “Hey.  Does this taste funny?”

Forgive me, but I’ve earned the right to stoop that low—I just finished an Art History course on cannibalism in art, a subject that probably doesn’t mean what you think it does (It, in fact, being concerned with cultural transfers of power more than any given dinner menu).  Still, the course did frequently touch on the subject of anthropophagy—the technical term for ‘Sam:  he’s what’s for dinner’.

The class was interesting and I enjoyed it, but the course never definitively answered the obvious question:  What do we taste like?  (The answer to this question must not be confused with whether humans have good taste.)

After extensive research, I can definitely say that it is not the obvious answer:  humans don’t taste like chicken.  Of the dozens of first-hand accounts I was able to track down, not one single person thought human flesh tasted like any form of poultry—a surprising answer since everything from rattlesnake meat to fried armadillo has been described as similar to what you would find at KFC.    

Archaeologists have confirmed that human cannibalism has probably always existed, in that since Homo Neanderthalensis engaged in the practice, it probably predates the arrival of Homo Sapiens.  At a minimum, people have been chowing down on people for at least 100,000 years, so by now, you would think that not much about the practice would remain a mystery.

There are a few hints.

In Polynesia, the native word for human flesh traditionally translates out as ‘long pork’, suggesting that humans taste a little like ham.  Though there is a long list of Protestant missionaries who perished trying to give the islanders a taste of religion—a few as recently as 20 years ago—there are few accurate reviews from verified diners.  I checked on Yelp and was unable to find a single review.

There is even a little medical evidence to back this up; the anatomy and tissue of pigs is so similar to that of humans that surgeons ‘practice’ some new procedures on (anesthetized) pigs.  When ‘The Doc’ went off to learn new laparoscopic surgical techniques, she returned with a video tape of her operating on a pig that so fascinated the boys that for a whole week it replaced the ‘The Lizard of Oz’ as the obligatory video of the day.

There should be lots of accounts from people who have eaten human flesh, giving their opinions as to what it tastes like, since there is no shortage of people who have tried it.  Contrary to what you might think, it is not against the law to chow down on human flesh in most countries:  the legality of the culinary event is generally limited to how you obtained the main course.

There are a number of artists who have tried cannibalism.  The Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, while an art student in Paris, bought various body parts from a medical supply house and cooked and ate them.  The Peruvian artist Marco Evaristti hosted a dinner party at which the main course was agnolotti pasta that was topped with a meatball made from his own fat, removed earlier in the year in a liposuction operation.  The sculptor Rick Gibson has on several occasions eaten man meat, usually as a form of performance art.  The last such display was in Toronto in 1988 when he devoured a slice of testicle.  

In 2012, a Japanese illustrator named Mao Sugiyama, decided that he was asexual and had his penis and testicles removed surgically.  Sugiyama then invited four friends over for dinner.  Afterwards, everyone agreed that the penis tasted hard and rubbery, though that could have been due to the method of preparation.  As Sugiyama confessed, “I’m an artist, not a chef.”

William Seabrook, an author who traveled through Africa in the 1920’s, described his dinner with cannibals in great detail in his book, Jungle Ways:  

It was like good, fully developed veal, not young, but not yet beef. It was very definitely like that, and it was not like any other meat I had ever tasted. It was so nearly like good, fully developed veal that I think no person with a palate of ordinary, normal sensitiveness could distinguish it from veal.  It was mild, good meat with no other sharply defined or highly characteristic taste such as for instance, goat, high game, and pork have. The steak was slightly tougher than prime veal, a little stringy, but not too tough or stringy to be agreeably edible. The roast, from which I cut and ate a central slice, was tender, and in color, texture, smell as well as taste, strengthened my certainty that of all the meats we habitually know, veal is the one meat to which this meat is accurately comparable.

Issei Sagawa, who having served his prison time is now a free man, spent two days eating a 25-year-old woman he had killed while a student in Paris. According to Sagawa, the buttocks melted on his tongue like raw tuna but his favorite were the thighs, which he described as “wonderful.” However, he also said that he didn’t like the breasts because they were too greasy.  In a very real sense, Sagawa was a leg man.

We could turn to the testimony of Alferd Packer.  Or it might have been Alfred Packer, since there is evidence the mountain man was born Alfred, but changed it to Alferd after a tattoo artist spelled his name wrong.  In any case, Packer got caught in a blizzard while crossing the Colorado mountains in 1874, and when he emerged two and a half months later, he confessed to having devoured his five companions.  Packer served 18 years in prison for his crime and when interviewed after his parole, claimed that his companions had tasted like the sweetest beef.  Packer’s accounts however, should be ignored, for by the time he was interviewed, Packer had become a vegetarian, and thus, was suspect.

Note.  Unlike Enema U, some universities have a sense of humor.  The University of Colorado at Boulder named the student cafeteria after Alferd Packer.  An even stranger story of a restaurant named after the Colorado Cannibal is the employee dining room at the Department of Agriculture.  When the GSA prevented the Secretary of Agriculture from firing the unpopular vendor running the restaurant, he promptly renamed it the Alferd Packer Memorial Grill and invited the press to the unveiling of a brass plaque in Packer’s honor.  The embarrassed vendor promptly left.  Today, the plaque is hanging on the wall of the dining room of the National Press Club, where an angus beef burger named for the cannibal is served.

When questioned by the FBI, Jeffrey Dahmer said the taste of human meat was close to that of filet mignon.  His opinion was seconded by a neighbor who once enjoyed a sandwich prepared by the mass murderer.  I wonder if that neighbor still accepts invitations to attend neighborhood cookouts.

That people taste like beef is supported by George Scithers, the author of the human cookbook, To Serve Man, obviously named after the infamous Twilight Zone episode.  Among the recipes is one for Texas Chili that contains the following comment: 

Some argue that cowboy meat is too tough to be served any other way, especially since the spices tend to kill the taste of whatever the donor may have been smoking, drinking, or chewing. Others discount this argument, but agree that Chili is a practical, quick way to serve Man in well-disguised form.

When cooking large batches, the author suggests using at least 15 pounds of onions per Texan.  Scithers’ inclusion of kidney beans in his recipe, is a grave error, since adding beans to Chili is a felony in Texas.

Omaima Nelson killed her husband of one month in 1991 and barbecued his ribs.  Nelson, too, described the taste as very sweet, but that could be because she liberally used barbecue sauce while the ribs were cooking on her grill.  

Obviously, the taste is subjective and we need more research on the subject to reach a definitive answer.  Enema U is an ag school, so perhaps someone there should apply for a government research grant.  The administration is on record as saying it supports research.  Recent broad budget cuts could make monetary support difficult, but personnel donations may well be critical to the success of the project.

The Re-Gifted King

Ever get one of those presents that while it was nice enough, there just wasn’t a place for it in your home, but then you remember you've been invited to that wedding of people you don’t really know but still need to give a present?  With a new card and some wrapping paper, the problem is solved.

This is kind of like that fruit cake that used to make the rounds during the holidays.  I’m convinced there was actually only one of them in the country, each recipient just passed it along to the next poor victim.  If you were wondering why you haven’t seen that fruit cake in a while, that tinned monstrosity is sitting in a police evidence locker, marked Exhibit A in a Yuletide assault case.  

Our regifting story starts with King Louis XVI of France, an indecisive foolish king and a prime example of royal inbreeding, Louis had ascended to the throne at the age of fifteen, and promptly married the fourteen-year-old Marie-Antoinette, his cousin, from Austria. The king was ridiculed throughout the country because it took him seven years to consummate his marriage and France being France, this lapse damn near qualified as treason.

Adding to the general dissatisfaction among the peasants, as an ally of Austria during the Seven Years War, France had lost the war.  Quelle surprise! La France a perdu une guerre!  Forced to pay an indemnity he could not afford, the king promptly raised taxes again.  The peasants were revolting—in every sense of the word—and the king and the queen rather quickly became short with each other.  Sort of lost their heads over taxes, so to speak.

Poor Louis had spent a little money wisely, at least from the American point of view.  The king had sent money and arms to support the American Revolution.  Louis certainly wasn’t a fan of democracies, but he was wholeheartedly in favor of anybody who wanted to fight the British.  Because of this, when John Rogers Clark founded a new city in Kentucky, he named it after Louis, though a recent survey showed that most residents of the city incorrectly believe the city was named after Louis XIV a far more capable monarch.

Eventually, France tried to collect the entire set of governments, passing quickly through absolute monarchy, republic, anarchy, dictatorship, Imperial monarchy, and eventually reinstalling the same original inbred royal family back on the throne.  As we say in Texas, they went around three sides of the barn to get at the horse at the end of the rope in their hand.

With her uncle safely on the throne, Princess Marie-Thérèse, the eldest daughter of Louis and Marie-Antoinette toured France, and while visiting Montpellier promised the city a special gift—a larger than life statue of her father.  Evidently second prize would have been two such statues.  The people of Montpellier were too polite to refuse, so in 1829, the large marble statue was erected in the center of town, where it stayed for an entire year before France had yet another revolution that overthrew the monarchy.  

The statue of Louis was crated up and placed in a military dungeon where it was promptly forgotten while France once again played musical chairs with various forms of government, eventually settling for a parliament of prostitutes and bloated plutocrats.  In 1899, a military officer doing an inventory rediscovered the crated statue and it was promptly dragged from the dungeon and gifted to the town’s mayor.

Nobody really wanted a statue of Louis—a monarch so incredibly inept that he touched off the terrors of the French Revolution.  As far as I can tell, the only other statue of the king is the memorial to Louis and Marie-Antoinette above their graves at the Basilica of St Denis.  People were not exactly lining up in Montpellier to see the statue, so the mayor gave it to the town’s university, who sent it to the university museum, who promptly sent it back to the city, where it stood in the basement of the city archives, serenely watching over dusty bookcases and bundles of slowly rotting paper.

More than half a century later, the city of Montpellier became a sister city to Louisville, Kentucky, and someone remembered the unwanted chunk of white marble littering the basement of the city archives.  If Louisville liked old Louis that much, they would just love to have his statue, which was promptly dragged out of the cellar and trucked to Marseilles, where the United States Navy obligingly stowed it in the cargo hold of an aging old freighter, the USS Aldebaran.

Unloaded at Norfolk, the statue spent a week on the pier before the city of Louisville had it trucked to the city square.  Wisely, the people of Montpellier had not told the mayor of Louisville about the present in advance.  Just before Christmas 1966, Louis was erected in the center of town, close to the statue of Thomas Jefferson. The two statues stand with their backs to each other—ironic, since in life the two were friends.

Louis, finally having found a permanent home, was left alone for more than fifty years.  Recently, when statues across the country have been attacked and destroyed to make the country safe from…. something, an angry mob once again attacked the poor king.  Paint was splashed over him, and once again, the monarch felt the sting of a cold blade.  This time, instead of his head, Louis lost a foot and his right hand.  

Currently, the city of Louisville is having the statue repaired, with the intention of once again placing the King back near his old post in the center of town.  I have a suggestion for the people of Louisville.  In the last fifty years, they have also become the sister city of Quito, Ecuador, and I would bet anything the people of Quito would just love a Christmas present.  Just don’t tell them about it advance, let it be a surprise.

Oh, and one more thing:  It is incorrect to say that Louis XVI lost his head.  He knows exactly where it is, since, when France finally buried his coffin in St Denis, his head was carefully placed between his feet.

Qwerty Who?

Like so many other everyday items of our modern world, the beginnings can be traced back to the American Civil War.  In 1860, just before the start of the war, the entire United States Army had about 16,000 men, or roughly the size of today’s Ohio National Guard.  

Everything changed in 1861, of course, after the secession of the southern states and the start of the war.  The Confederate Army grew to a peak of roughly 465,000 men, with over a million men having served at some point in the four years of fighting.  The Union army was roughly twice that, with a peak of just over a million men and a total of over two million having been in uniform during the war. 

The rapid growth in size of the armies was a logistical nightmare for both armies, but it was a windfall for manufacturers who were awarded huge contracts for the vast array of goods needed by troops in the field.  Most factories hired new workers and added shifts to meet the demand for a veritable flood of supplies.

In the manufacture of handguns, Samuel Colt’s company, Colt's Patent Fire-Arms Manufacturing Company held a patent that prevented most manufacturers from producing a viable competitor to his revolver.  When the Colt patent expired in 1857, several companies began producing excellent revolvers.

Perhaps the best revolver manufactured during the war was the .44-caliber Remington Army revolver with an eight-inch barrel, an uncommon length today, but in the 19th century provided a barrel long enough for the slow burning black powder to completely combust while providing an excellent sight radius.  The Remington firearm had a more solid frame and because it used a cylinder pin instead of a lug like the Colt revolver, was a little easier to reload by swapping out a spent cylinder with a previously loaded cylinder.  (Watch Clint Eastwood do just this with a Remington revolver in the movie Pale Rider.)

Remington tooled up to make the revolvers as fast as possible, eventually selling over a hundred thousand of them to the army.  Then, just as Remington had fully expanded its manufacturing process…the war ended.  Once again, the size of the military shrank, eventually numbering only slightly more than fifteen thousand.  Since surplus firearms were as common as ants at a picnic, it was a tough time for Remington and a lot of other firearm companies to stay afloat.

If only there were something else that those machines could make!  Take, for example, those small metal working lathes that had been turning out the eight-inch barrels for revolvers.

Remington continued to make some revolvers, but also branched out into other forms of manufacturing, such as the production of sewing machines.  The Remington Lock-Stitch sewing machine was reliable and was cheaper than a comparable model from Singer.  (In a strange reversal of events, both the Remington and Singer sewing machine factories would shift over to manufacturing firearms for the U.S. Army during World War II.)

For more than a decade, Christopher Sholes had been independently working on a mechanical typewriter, but the biggest problem he faced was that the average typist could type fast enough to jam the mechanical keys of the mechanism.  Contrary to the popular myth floating around on the internet, Sholes was not looking for the least efficient arrangement of keys in order to slow down a typist, but a layout that separated the most commonly used combinations of letters (such as ST and ON) further apart, thus lessening the chances that keys would strike each other.

Note.  It occurs to me that my generation may be the last generation to have any idea what I am talking about when I mention “typewriter keys”.  Mechanical typewriters vanished in the 1970’s, replaced by electric typewriters that couldn’t jam, which were, themselves, completely replaced by computer printers a decade later.  To anyone born after about 1980, a typewriter is as quaintly obsolete as a butter churn.  (I wonder if that old IBM Selectric stored away in our spare room closet is a valuable antique yet?)

Sholes came up with a keyboard layout that looks fairly familiar to everyone today.  When he sold what became known as the Qwerty keyboard to Remington in 1873, the layout looked like this:

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 - ,

Q W E . T Y I U O P

Z S D F G H J K L M

A X & C V B N ? ; R

Now, Remington got interested in manufacturing typewriters when it noticed that they already possessed most of the machines necessary for production and the casing used for sewing machines could also be used for typewriters, so it purchased the patent for the keyboard layout from Sholes and the rest (as they say) is history.  Remington made a few changes—in particular, swapping the positions of the period and R, and the A and the Z.  (Of course, there were no lower-case letters then.)  

When the Remington typewriter went on the market in 1874, it was the first time a good typist could produce legible text faster than a person could write.  Four years later, Remington introduced a more robust model—complete with lower case letters—that sold at a price reasonable enough that the machines quickly took over the workplace.  (If you are curious, typewriters didn’t routinely include a numeral one until late in the sixties, just before typewriters started to be replaced with computer printers.)

To use these early typewriters, people bought the biggest piece of paper that would comfortably fit on the platen (the large rubber-coated roller that was manufactured on those old gun-making lathes that had once produced pistol barrels).  Over time, this piece of paper became a standard of eight and a half inches wide, and folders, notebooks, and filing cabinets were all manufactured to accommodate this size of paper.

Typewriters usually used either ten or twelve-point type, which allowed for a one-inch margin on each side of the paper, making an average line of monospaced print on a page about 65 to 78 characters per line. Given the average distance between the written page and the reader’s eyes, this turned out to be ideal.  

That ideal number of characters per line has long been observed by book publishers.  Select a book at random off a shelf and you will probably find that the average number of characters per line is fairly close to that number or less.  Publishers also know that sufficient margins are necessary to “rest” the eyes while reading.  If there are too many characters per line, or that margin is cut, the reader develops eye strain and will probably stop reading.  It is something of a challenge to find a book, newspaper, magazine, or even an online blog that violates this rule.

And then, the computer printer came along.  Since printers are capable of true proportional spacing, the average number of characters per line quickly increased to a more-than-uncomfortable 100.  It was too late to narrow the paper, and the paper wasn’t wide enough to allow two columns...

What was needed for the comfort of the reader was either more white space on the page, or a somewhat dramatic increase in the size of the font used.  Widening the margins to two inches per side seemed wasteful, and increasing the size of font produced an unattractive page, so the most commonly used remedy is to double space the document.  While most people believe this is done to make it easier for teachers to edit and grade students’ papers, tests show that the readers actually read faster, and remember more of what they have read on double-spaced documents.  The extra white space between lines rests the eyes of the reader—a job once done by the margins.

This means that this weekend, as I write my research paper for my final art history class, the reason that I double space the increasingly lengthy document is, in part, due to the requirements of black powder burning in the elongated barrels of Civil War pistols.  As a historian, I find that somehow comforting.

How Woke was Mark Twain?

Once again, the works of Twain are being banned by people who have obviously never read them.  When I hear of book banning, I immediately envision puritanical zealot in Boston or a group of Appalachian hillbillies so poor the whole town shares a single set of teeth, but this time the books are being banned by an overly woke group of do-gooders in California.

Naturally, the offended/offending group is a school board—an institution whose universal nature was aptly summed up by Twain, himself: “In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.”

Calling Mark Twain a racist is not exactly new.  (Okay, technically his name is Samuel Clemens, but brain patterns set by the age of ten are not easily overcome six decades later.)  Lately, calling anyone a racist is not even unusual:  the term is thrown around so liberally that it no longer has any context.  This blog receives a fair amount of hate mail.  I was once called a racist for a post about the history of a naval ship.  A more accurate term would be ‘shipist’.

It is amazing the number of fools who think Huckleberry Finn a racist novel.  I’ll admit to being somewhat biased, as I reread the work at least once a year.  I regularly refer to the book in my writings, and discover that it is almost impossible to check a reference without getting caught and reread the entire book.  Having read the book, I know that it is impossible to label the author as a racist.

There must be some minimum IQ level for someone to understand and recognize satire.  Below that, you have the religious fundamentalists, school boards, and the people who read the National Enquirer for the news.  These are the people who somehow read Huckleberry Finn and don’t realize that the star of the novel is Jim, the runaway slave, not Huck.  

Huck Finn has always been condemned by the small-minded, but not always for the same reasons.  Early on, some libraries refused to shelve the book because it supported racial equality.  The Brooklyn Library objected to the verb ‘scratch’, deemed offensive at the time.  When a New York librarian objected to the book as unsuitable material for the young, Twain promptly answered:

I am greatly troubled by what you say. I wrote 'Tom Sawyer' & 'Huck Finn' for adults exclusively, & it always distressed me when I find that boys and girls have been allowed access to them. The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean. I know this by my own experience, & to this day I cherish an unappeased bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my young life, who not only permitted but compelled me to read an unexpurgated Bible through before I was 15 years old. None can do that and ever draw a clean sweet breath again on this side of the grave.

If you have read the above paragraph and are unable to discern the satire in it, you probably work for the New York Times, the federal government, or the College of Education at Enema U.

Mark Twain seems to have known everyone.  He was a close friend of President Grant and he entertained General Sherman in his home.  Helen Keller devoted a full chapter of her autobiography to Twain (who coined the phrase ‘The Miracle Worker’ to describe Anne Sullivan, her teacher and companion).  Twain was one of the few people who were friends of both Edison and Tesla.  He knew Kipling, Stevenson, Bret Harte, Conan Doyle, and when Winston Churchill made his first speech in America, he was introduced by Twain.  (In addition, Mark Twain and Teddy Roosevelt both knew—and despised—each other!)

Perhaps those who are so quick to label Twain a racist might be interested in the story of Warner T. McGuinn, one of the first black attorneys in America.  McGuinn was born in Virginia in 1859, to free black parents—a relative rarity in the pre-war South.  Education for slaves was illegal, but as a free person, McGuinn was able to attend a small segregated school, then after the war, when educational benefits expanded slightly, McGuinn excelled as a student.  In 1884, he graduated from Lincoln University, an all-black college.  (Ashmun Institute, renamed Lincoln College in 1866, was the first degree granting college for blacks in America, and for over 100 years, was the alma mater of more than 20% of the nation’s black physicians and more than 10% of its black attorneys.)

McGuinn briefly attended a black law school before receiving an incredible offer:  he was accepted as a student by Yale University.  Though the cost of the tuition seemed impossible, McGuinn accepted.  Working as many as three jobs at once and living in a tiny room in the home of the school’s janitor, McGuinn struggled to raise the funds necessary to stay at Yale.

When Yale University conferred an honorary degree upon the famous author, he was escorted on a tour of the campus by McGuinn.  Impressed with the young man, the two began conversing and Twain learned about the varied jobs the student was working to pay for his tuition.  Weeks later, on Christmas Eve, Twain wrote a letter to the Yale Law School Dean, Francis Wayland, offering to pay McGuinn’s expenses for the year.  The author actually paid McGuinn’s expenses until he graduated in 1877.  Twain closely followed the well-being of the young student, regularly corresponding with Dean Wayland for almost two years.  Later, Twain would maintain a correspondence friendship up until the author’s death in 1910.

Relived of the necessity of working multiple jobs, McGuinn could concentrate on his studies, and graduated number one in his class.

As a lawyer, McGuinn had a distinguished career, working as both a lawyer and as an editor of a Black newspaper.  In 1892, he moved to Baltimore, where he opened a very successful law practice that, among other causes, worked to give the vote to women.  McGuinn’s most notable case was in 1917, when in a federal court, he successfully challenged the city’s segregation policy, setting a legal precedent that was used in subsequent court cases.  Elected twice to the Baltimore city council, McGuinn was also a director of the regional NAACP.

Working in the law office adjoining McGuinn’s was a struggling young lawyer, who was also a graduate Lincoln College.  McGuinn became a friend and mentor to the young man, helping him establish a successful private practice.  Eventually that young lawyer would prevail in his own landmark legal case, overturning segregation in public schools in Brown v. Board of Education.  A decade later, that young lawyer became the first African American on the Supreme Court.

Justice Thurgood Marshall later said that McGuinn was one of the finest lawyers in the country, and that had he been white, he would have been a judge.

The Clock is Ticking

Has the word “normal” lost all meaning?  Does it seem like reading about wildly impossible events is now a daily occurrence?  I’m not talking about fake news…. I talking about actual events that defy logic and math by actually happening.

Here are a few random examples:

• A $200 investment in Bitcoin ten years ago is worth over $6 million today.
• Douglas Tompkins, the founder of North Face (the premier source for premium winter outdoor clothing), died of exposure.
• On the day Jimi Heselden took over control of the Segway company, he reversed his two-wheel scooter to make way for a dog walker and drove off a cliff, backwards and died from the fall.
• 
  A digital photograph of a copying machine by the artist Mad Dog Jones is being auctioned by the Phillips auction house.  Anyone can have a copy of the digital photo—though I don’t know why you would want to—but this auction is for the original NFT version.  The current bid is $2.4 million.  I’d show you a copy of it, but the whole thing terrifies me, so the photo at right is of my copying machine.  I will sell you the original photo for the bargain price of only $100,000.  I’ll even throw in the copying machine.
• An Italian doctor, Silvano Gallus, has found evidence that eating pizza will help prevent cancer, but only if the pizza is made in Italy.  
• The governments of both India and Pakistan have confessed that they have on numerous occasions ordered embassy personnel to ring their rivals’ doorbell in the middle of the night and run away before the door is answered.  (If nuclear capable nations prefer to settle differences with Ding-Dong-Ditch, I suppose this is a good thing.) 
• In a group project, scientists in England, France, Poland, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Australia, Norway, and Italy are currently researching to find a relationship between a country’s national income inequality and the average amount of mouth-to-mouth kissing.
• A 36-year-old California man lived for more than three months in the highly restricted security area of Chicago’s O’Hare airport for fear of catching Covid on the flight home. 
• A Connecticut man bought a small blue bowl at a garage sale for $35.  In a story similar to a blog post a few weeks ago, the Ming porcelain bowl sold at Sotheby’s for $721,000. 
• And lest we forget—as I mentioned just last week—the New Mexico legislature actually passed a sensible piece of legislation ending the illegal liquor license cartel in the state.  Astronomers are still searching for the bright star in the East.

If you are wondering what the actual probability of any of those events were, all I can tell you is that according to Heisenberg, nothing can be verified to a probability smaller than Planck's Constant (roughly 6.6 divided by 10 to the power of 34), where absolute certainty has a probability of 1.  Well, that’s what the probability was before the event happened.  After the fact, the probability is 1.

Which brings us to another incredibly unusual event.  A while back, I wrote about the Paris guerrilla art group, UX, and their activities at the Paris Pantheon.  You can read the full account here, but to summarize their actions, the group surreptitiously created a clandestine workshop in the dome of the Pantheon where they slowly repaired an ancient clock that authorities had allowed to remain broken for decades.

Note.  Guerrilla art is nontraditional art, usually created by anonymous artists and tied to a specific geographic location.  Banksy’s graffiti art is an example of guerrilla art.  Gorilla art is completely different.  Koko’s acrylic painting of a bird ( below right) is an example.  

It is widely believed that the daily chore of climbing a long flight of stairs to wind the clock mechanism led to someone’s administering some “preventive maintenance” by way of several blows with a crowbar.  The clock was neither repaired nor maintained, so for decades, the stopped clock simply gathered dust while the delicate machinery was allowed to rust.  Still, compared to the rest of the French government, the clock was a miracle of effectiveness, for it still managed to be correct twice a day. 

The artists of UX (Urban Experiment) labored secretly for almost a year to repair the ancient clock, in the process fabricating from scratch a replacement escape wheel—an essential clock part.  When the clock was finally repaired and set in motion, the ever-alert officials in the mausoleum failed to notice…. even when the chimes announced the passing of each hour.

Eventually, UX told the managing director about the repairs, who—after reporting it to his bosses at the Centre des Monuments Nationaux—was promptly fired for the sin of allowing something broken to be repaired.  The French government then removed the new fabricated part, once again stopping the clock.  The UX responded by stealing back the escape wheel and secreting it away while they waited for a more amenable government minion.

This is pretty much where my last blog post on the topic ended.  A few years have passed and I can report that the French government has been active.  First, they arrested the members of UX responsible for the dastardly repair, asking the court for long prison sentences for those responsible and demanding that the illicit clock repairman pay over 48,000 Euros in “damages”.  The prosecution failed since the defense proved that it was not illegal to enter a public facility and that, if anything, the clock had been repaired not damaged.

For over a dozen years, that was the end of the story:  The clock hands were stuck at 10:51, the chimes were silent and the directors of the Pantheon evidently went back to sleep.  Today, however, that is no longer the case.

The government finally allocated the funds to repair the clock and hired clock restorer Jean-Baptiste Viot, so that the clock has now been completely restored and is in excellent condition, once again chiming away.  According to Viot, had the UX not intervened and stopped the ongoing decay that had plagued the ancient clock, restoration would have become impossible.  In a very real way, the UX saved the clock.

And Viot should know....He was the member of UX who repaired the clock a dozen years ago.