The Astronomer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Weird Little Art Stories

Being a graduate student at Enema U mostly means languishing in the library for long hours, reading long articles.  While these can be interesting, most of you are unlikely to keep a scholarly article about the iconography of some painting on your nightstand for a bit of leisure reading, even though some are very effective at inducing sleep.

Still, while reading various monographs, I keep discovering little tidbits of humor that are usually hidden away in footnotes… tiny little stories that are too weird not to be true.  I’ve been collecting them in the Moleskin notebook that is my constant companion, and this week I’ve decided to share a few.  Everyone of these is absolutely true (give or take a lie or two).

• Vincent Van Gogh, while an incredible artist, obviously had a few inner demons.  (Or as we would say in Texas, “the jalapeño had slid off the top of his nacho”.)  We’ll never know for sure, but perhaps he developed those demons at a young age.  As a child, he walked to school in the village of Zundert in the Netherlands and had to walk past the cemetery containing the grave of Vincent Van Gogh, his older brother.  After his brother died in infancy, his parents decided to recycle the name for the next child.

• Clementine Churchill wanted her tombstone to read:

Here Lies a Woman Who was Always Tired

For She Lived a Life Where Too Much was Required.

Proving that those requirements continue after death, here is what the family actually put on her tombstone:

Wife of Winston Churchill

The Life of the Nation is Secure

• There are at least two documented cases of a family mistakenly using a Ming vase as an umbrella stand.  The Duke of Wellington used a larger than life statue of a nude Napoleon to hold wet umbrellas.

• 
  In 1955, Salvador Dali borrowed a Rolls-Royce Phantom II from a friend because he needed to drive to Paris to give a lecture.  He neglected to tell the friend that he was taking with him 1100 pounds of cauliflower—enough to fill the interior of the priceless car to the ceiling. 

• Louis XVI didn’t lose his head; it is still around.  Well, kind of:  When Louis XVI was beheaded, only his body was buried.  His head was displayed but  later went missing.  At roughly the same time, the life-size statue of him was toppled and beheaded, and once again the head was seized by the mob.  After the restoration of the monarchy, the body of Louis XVI was buried at Basilica of Saint-Denis, alongside the headless remains of Marie Antoinette, while the headless remains of the statue were melted down.  Eventually, the head of the statue was recovered and today is on display at the Musée Carnavalet in Paris.

• In 1880, Édouard Manet was commissioned to paint A Bundle of Asparagus by Charles Ephrussi for 800 francs.  When the painting was delivered Ephrussi was so delighted by the work that he insisted on paying 1000 francs.  Manet then painted a smaller work, A Sprig of Asparagus depicting a single stalk of asparagus.  Along with the second painting Manet included a note:  "There was one sprig missing from your bundle."  Both valuable works are now in art museums.

• The portrait painter, John Singer Sargent, had a peculiar habit of asking his subjects to pose in uncomfortable or awkward positions, which he believed would help capture their true character and personality.  He also liked to read all the works of an author, one after the other.  He called this “reading in a wedge.”

• 
  When the avant-garde artist Cristo displayed his Package on a Wheelbarrow at the Galleria dell'Obelisco in Rome, in 1969, he left to the imagination of the viewer what the lump was under the tarpaulin.  The local bishop, who evidently possessed a vivid imagination, ordered that the exhibition be closed on the grounds of indecency.  Exactly what the bishop believed remained hidden was never explained.

• The most famous painting in the world, the Mona Lisa, was missing for 24 hours before the Louvre realized it had been stolen.  Four different men hung the Mona Lisa in their bedrooms for their own enjoyment.  Leonardo da Vinci kept the painting for four years before gifting it to Francis I, the King of Spain, who displayed it in the royal bedchamber.  After the death of Francis, the painting was moved to the Louvre.  When Napoleon became Emperor, he moved the painting to his bedroom.  In 1911, Vincenzo Peruggia, a handyman at the museum, stole the painting and kept it in his one room apartment for two years.  

• Some of the sketchbooks and notebooks of Gustav Klimt are missing.  The artist, who kept several cats in his studio, used cat urine as a fixative on his drawings.  The resulting sketch books reeked.

• Pablo Picasso famously doodled on some of his checks, often adding small sketches or drawings.  He would sometimes write a check for a relatively small amount, knowing that the recipient might never cash it.  One of those checks recently sold at auction for $10,000.

• The Two-For-One Van Gogh painting.  The Boston Museum of Fine Arts had its Van Gogh painting, Ravine, x-rayed with astounding results.  It turned out that the penniless Van Gogh depended on his brother Theo to provide the necessary funds to purchase art supplies.  In 1889, Theo was late and Van Gogh had an overpowering urge to paint, so Ravine was painted on top of a finished work, called Wild Vegetation.  

• An Andrew Wyeth painting, Braids, was incorrectly labeled at the Farnsworth Art Museum attributing the work to his father.  The mistake was not caught for thirty years.  

• The Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen art museum in Germany recently admitted that a modern art piece by Piet Mondrian has been displayed upside down for 75 years.  The piece, New York City I, was discovered to be upside down after comparing the work to a photograph of Mondrian working on the painting on an easel.  Despite discovering that the work had been hung incorrectly for over seven decades, the museum plans has no plans to correct the mistake for fear of damaging the aging work.

• In the 1920s, Picasso created a fake artwork and signed it with the pseudonym "Léon," which was a name he used when he wanted to remain anonymous.  He then had a friend take this piece to a gallery and present it as a genuine work by a "new artist."  The gallery staff admired it and accepted it, unaware that it was actually Picasso's own work under a false identity.  The whereabouts of the Léon artwork is unknown today.

I don’t know of any scholarly work on the humor of art history.  Maybe I’ll work on that.

Up to Snuff

Without a doubt, my favorite movie is Secondhand Lions, a movie that could have only been made in Texas.  I like this movie so much that I have forgiven Michael Caine for imitation Texas/Cockney accent.  According to Caine, the secret to talking like a Texan was “to let the words lean on each other”.

Note.  Yes, I have a Texas accent.  I prefer to believe that after decades of education--not to mention having given over 6000 lectures--my Texas accent only comes out when I tell stories or jokes.  The reality is that I’m probably kidding myself.  A few years ago, I started the semester in one of my history classes by going over the syllabus for five minutes, then launching into the first lecture.  At the end of the lecture, I asked the class if there were any questions.  A young female exchange student from Japan politely asked in an impeccable British accent, “Will you ever be teaching in English?”

There is a scene in the movie, in which Robert Duvall gives a young Haley Joel Osment his first—and probably last—taste of a pinch of Beechnut chewing tobacco.  The rest of the scene shows a bent-over Osment imitating a wing-flapping chicken as he pukes his guts out.  

Been there, done that.

My experience wasn’t with chewing tobacco—it involved a brown glass bottle with a real cork, containing Levi Garret Scotch Snuff.  I don’t remember how old I was, but it was definitely before I started school.  Periodically, my father would take me to his grocery store where I was put to work sweeping the produce department and prying bubble gum off the floor with a single-edged razor blade.  (Yes, I know—children shouldn’t be allowed to use razor blades.  Back then, we must have been smarter than children today.  I also walked to school past a field that held a half dozen buffalo and never once felt an urge to climb the fence and try to pet one.)

One of the men who worked in the produce department used snuff, taking a pinch and deeply inhaling it.  I think I was more impressed with his ability pull the cork out of the bottle with his teeth more than with the actual dipping snuff followed by the inevitable sneeze.  In any case, I just had to try snuff for myself.  As soon as he left the back room where I was sweeping, I located the forbidden brown jar and helped myself to a generous amount that I snorted deeply into my lungs.

Almost immediately, I felt like someone had just inflated a basketball inside my head.   I accomplished a minor medical miracle by simultaneously sneezing and vomiting at the same time.  Each time my head went down, my elbows went up behind my back, and I choked out what was left of my breakfast.  Finally exhausted, I just sat on the concrete floor and let the tears run down my face while, I tried to breathe again.  I’ve never, ever been tempted to try any other form of snuff or chewing tobacco since that day more than six decades ago.  There are some lessons (like peeing on an electric fence or working with a single-edged razor blade) that no boy has ever had to learn twice.

I was reminded of my brief encounter with snuff by studying art.  You would not believe the number of elaborately jeweled or hand-painted snuff boxes displayed in the world’s art museums.  If you go to the online index of the collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, there are just under 6000 entries.  It seems that every 18th and 19th century member of royalty collected, gifted, and occasionally stole elaborate snuff boxes.  And as a historian, I wanted to know how all this got started.

The indigenous people of Brazil were the first to produce snuff.  Tobacco leaves were finely ground up with a rosewood mortar and pestle to produce a fine powdered tobacco that could be inhaled.  These same people were also the first to produce a form of snuff box—actually a wood-stoppered tube made from bone—to keep the tobacco from drying out and losing the delicate rosewood aroma.  

The use of this finely ground tobacco spread across Central and South America and on the second voyage of Columbus, a Franciscan friar traded with the Taino and Carib natives for some of the tobacco, which he brought back to Spain.  The Spanish Crown, eager to make money, quickly established a monopoly on the product and established the Real Fábrica de Tabacos (Royal Tobacco Factory) in Seville.  The king’s snuff factory quickly grew in size to become the second largest building in Spain.  Obviously, tobacco quickly became popular.

By 1563, Jean Nicot, whose name was given to nicotine, a French diplomat discovered the joys of snuff while stationed in Lisbon.  The ambassador not only wrote of the great medicinal properties of ground tobacco, but he convinced Catherine de Medici that it was a wonder drug capable of curing her persistent migraines.  She was so impressed that she decreed that  (the Queen’s Herb).

The name didn’t take off, but the use of the tobacco certainly did.  With the influential blessing of Catherine, the use of powdered tobacco became a royal fad across Europe.  Part of the appeal, of course, was that it was both exotic and expensive.  By 1560, it reached Flanders where it acquired the name “snuff.”   It won’t surprise you to learn that the word comes from the Dutch “snuffen,” which means to “sniff.”

Ironically, powdered tobacco was never used by Native Americans in North America.  It was introduced to North America by John Rolfe, the husband of Pocahontas.  While never very popular among the ordinary colonists, like in Europe, it became popular with the wealthy and aristocrats.  It was not until the Great Plague of London (1665-6) that the use of snuff became popular with ordinary people.  The widespread belief that using snuff would provide medical relief from a host of medical ailments soon spread fromEngland across Europe.

With the popularity of snuff in both of the two great trading nations of the day, the English and the Dutch, the use of snuff quickly spread to Africa, China, and Japan.  And everywhere that snuff went, so did snuff boxes.  Once snuff has dried out, it becomes harsh and loses whatever aroma has been added to it.  By the 17th century, you could purchase snuff scented with everything from whiskey to chocolate.  

To keep the snuff from drying out, it was stored in large containers called “mulls”.  Traditionally, the best mulls were ram’s horns decorated with silver, but frequently, snuff was stored in boxes much like a cigar humidors.  An apple slice or a damp cloth kept in the container ensured the tobacco would not dry out.  Every morning a quantity of snuff sufficient for the day was transferred from the mull to a small airtight snuff box.

It did not take long for those individual snuff boxes to become highly decorated gold or silver works of art that were decorated with jewels.  The presentation of these ornate snuff boxes became a prominent display of wealth and prestige by nobility.  Denied the option of  compensating for sexual inadequacy by purchasing either an expensive sports car or a massive pickup truck, the rich could pay a small fortune for a jewel-encrusted box of snuff.

Frederic the Great, for example, became a enthusiastic snuff taker.  When a snuff box deflected a bullet during battle, he became an ardent collector of snuff boxes.  After his death, one of those fabulously expensive boxes became the property of, first the Romanovs, then of the Communist government.  When the Russians were desperate for cash, the box was sold at auction and then passed through several hands until it was purchased by Queen Mary of England, the wife of King George V.  (Yes, there were a lot of Kings named George, so let me make it easy for you, these were the grandmother and grandfather of Queen Elizabeth II, the mother of the current King Charles III.)

By the beginning of the 19th century, it seemed like everyone of note was using snuff.  Pope Urban VIII was so angry at parishioners using snuff during services that he banned the use of snuff on church grounds and threatened to excommunicate users.  A century later, Pope Benedict repealed the ban and encouraged the use for medical purposes.  Queen Charlotte was such an enthusiastic user that she converted a room at Windsor Castle into her personal tobacco storeroom.  The people of England privately referred to her as “Snuffy Charlotte”.  Marie Antoinette, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison were all snuff users.  And at the battle of Waterloo, both Napoleon and the Duke of Wellington dipped snuff while they observed the battle.  

By the 20th century, the use of snuff was…well…being snuffed out.  The rise in cigarette smoking all but eliminated the use of snuff.  While my father’s grocery store sold the brown bottle of snuff that I had sampled, today snuff is available only from specialty tobacco stores.  

While I was researching the history of snuff boxes, I found dozens of fascinating stories about who used them, who gifted whom a box, or how much they spent for a tiny airtight box.  I can’t end this without one more story.

After smoking became common in England, the clouds of dense smoke in the House of Commons became so annoying that smoking within the chamber was banned in 1693.  The ministers, however continued to use tobacco in the form of snuff.  A special floral-scented snuff, English Rose, was kept by the door in a communal snuff box.  During World War II, the Palace of Westminster was the target of a German bombing raid.  While Westminster Hall suffered little damage due to a strong medieval timber roof, the House of Commons was destroyed by fire.  When it was rebuilt, Winston Churchill gifted the chamber with a new communal snuff box, made from the salvaged timber of the old hall.  It is still kept full of snuff, at the personal expense of the doorkeeper, but has not been used by a member in several decades.  When a member of the Green Party recently tried to have the box removed, noting that since 2006 it has been illegal to publicly offer free tobacco, his request was denied since Westminster is still technically a royal palace, thus exempt from acts of Parliament.  

The U.S. House of Representatives, with no appreciation of tradition much less a sense of humor, got rid of both its communal snuff box and its spittoons back in 1914.  The Senate, composed of more somber members, still maintains itsp spittoons and the two snuff boxes installed by Vice-President Millard Fillmore 175 years ago, one for Democrats and one for Republicans.  

The Wreck of the San Telmo

If you are a fan of adventure and expedition stories, you probably know that credit for  the “discovery” of Antarctica (in February, 1819)  south of the 60° south latitude, part of the Antarctica Treaty Area.  Close enough.

The second caveat is that he didn’t actually initially land on the distant island, since 

the area is known for tricky fog banks and, frankly, when he reported the sighting of the land, no one believed him.  So, several months later Smith went back and landed on an island (Which he promptly named for his monarch, King George, the Batshit Crazy.)  Mapmakers (being known for their puritanical nature) just recorded it as King George Island, which is the northern-most island of the Southern Shetland Islands, now also known as the Smith Islands.

William Smith also reported that he found the washed-up wreckage of a sailing ship.  We will never know if Smith found anything else because his logbook has never been located.  Since there was only one recent missing ship from the area, everyone assumed that this was the wreckage of the San Telmo.

A year later, the Royal Navy financed a larger expedition by William Smith and his ship.  On this third expedition the rest of the Southern Shetland Islands was charted and the landmass of Antarctica was spotted for the first time.  

But, what of the San Telmo?

Napoleonic France took King Ferdinand VII of Spain captive in 1808, touching off the Peninsular War.  It was during this time that most of the Spanish colonies in the new world took advantage of the power vacuum and launched their revolutionary wars for independence.  By the time the king was returned to his throne by the British Army, most Central and South American nations either had achieved independence, or had started revolutions that had progressed too far along to be quelled.

By 1819, both Argentina and Chile had broken free and were united to help Peru achieve independence.  Since Spain depended on Peruvian Silver to maintain what was left of her empire, the fighting was fierce.  In 1818, Spain sent the San Telmo, a 74-gun ship of the line to Peru—in part to carry enough soldiers to reinforce the garrisons there, as well as to escort a load of silver back to Spain.  The San Telmo was the flagship of a Spanish naval squadron under Brigadier Rosendo Porlier y Asteguieta.

Although Spain had lost a significant portion of her navy in the 1805 battle of Trafalgar, she still maintained a powerful navy of excellent warships, including the San Telmo, which was listed as, “a second-rate ship of the line”.  At two-thirds the length of a football field and 52 feet width, she was a floating, heavily armed castle, with 24-pound guns on her upper deck and 18-pound guns on the lower deck.  Including officers, sailors, and marines, she carried a  crew of 644 men.

In order to reach Peru, the San Telmo had to sail around Cape Horn, at the southern tip of South America, then through the tempestuous waters of the Drake Passage—one of the most dangerous sea passages in the world.  The San Telmo would also have to sail head-on into a strong eastward current, against fierce winds and avoid floating ice while encountering constantly choppy seas.  This frigid area is known for its bad weather and the constant threat of rogue waves as high as 65 feet.  A wave like that would have towered forty feet over the deck of the San Telmo.

On September 2, 1819, another ship in the convoy observed that a powerful wave had knocked out the tiller of the San Telmo, rendering the ship impossible to steer.   While the sails could have been set to compensate for the loss of the tiller in calmer seas, in the rough waters of the Drake Passage, the ship was doomed.  The ship was thus presumed to have sunk with her entire crew.

But the mystery remains:  where did the crew perish?

William Smith knew that he was being credited for discovering a new land mass and it was very much to his advantage to be recognized as the first man to set foot on a land whose existence had been theorized but that had never actually been seen.  But could the San Telmo have drifted far enough south to have reached the island first?

The British made several expeditions to the area, in part for exploration, and in part in search of good hunting areas for both whaling and seal hunting.  James Weddell, who was in those locations between 1822 and 1824, recounted that, on Livingston Island, a great number of seal bones were found dispersed on a beach on said island along with the scattered timbers of a wrecked vessel.  As he later wrote:

On a beach  in  the  principal  island,  which  I  named  Smith’s  Island,  in  honour  of  the discoverer, were found a quantity of seals’ bones, which appeared to have been killed some years  before,  probably  to  sustain  the  life  of  some  ship-wrecked  crew ;  suggesting  the melancholy reflection that some unfortunate human beings had ended their days on this coast.

The bones had to be relatively recent, since while there are no timber-eating worms in the far southern seas, but there are worms that eat both whale and seal bones.  For shipwrecked sailors, surviving any length of time on the island would be very tough, with the average daytime temperatures hovering around the 32 degrees Fahrenheit, and dropping below freezing at night, accompanied by strong winds, frequent rain and snow.  There are not enough trees or other vegetation to provide a significant source for fuel. 

Did the surviving crew of the San Telmo reach the Southern Shetland Islands and manage to survive for a short time before they died of exposure?  If so, they were the true first discoverers of Antarctica…and they were the first to die there.

Hoarding Toilet Paper

Evidently, the local stores are out of toilet paper…again.  There is not really a shortage, but we have a panic.  Despite the fact that the vast majority of toilet paper used in the United States is made domestically, the port strikes brought up fears of a supply line disruption which caused people to begin panic buying.  Other shoppers, noticing the steadily decreasing supply, joined the stampede.  The strike is over…for now, but it may take a few days for the shelves to be full again.

To start with, I’ll confess:  I have a three-month supply of toilet paper in the garage.  This is not something new, nor did I start hoarding because of Covid, I’ve bought such non-perishable commodities in bulk and kept a large supply on hand ever since I lived on Galveston Island and kept the house stocked for potential hurricanes.  I still keep candles in the freezer and have a couple of gallons of kerosene for the lanterns stowed away in the shed, too.

Come to think of it, each of the cars has an emergency roll of TP safely stored in a one-pound coffee can.  Since Folgers moved to an 11.5 ounce can a couple of decades ago, it might be time to change the rolls.  Does toilet paper go bad?

According to the people at Cottonelle, however, I’m running perilously low on TP.  Their research, independently confirmed by several other studies, shows that the average American uses between 130 and 150 rolls of wiping paper a year.  Some of the other data collected is interesting.  Women use a little more than five times as much toilet paper as men, and people in the South use 16 rolls a year more than people living in the West.  

Periodically, toilet paper is hard to find, and usually it’s for a good reason.  When I lived on Galveston, if a hurricane’s track in the Gulf showed there was a significant chance of the storm landing near the island, days before the storm hit, people flocked to the stores and bought up all the flashlight batteries, bottled water, Spam, and toilet paper available.  The shortages were only local, and everyone in Galveston knew that even after a bad storm, the stores would be stocked up again within a month or two.

Residents of the island expected this, and if you were smart, you bought such items in bulk during the spring, and if a storm didn’t hit, you slowly consumed the extra items over the fall and winter.  This was a regular cycle and everyone on the island expected it.  Just like we knew that you could pick up a good deal on a second-hand Honda generator—never used and still in the box—right around

And then, of course, there was The Great Toilet Paper Shortage of 2020, due to Covid.  This was both a panic and a shortage.  While there is no doubt that some people began panic buying:  some stores were shut down and some factories shut down, so at least some of the shortage was real.  I suspect that the shortages of 2020 will always be on our minds every time there is a hint of a potential disruption of the supply line.  We’ll once more rush out and fill a grocery cart with crap we don’t really need.

The first panic I remember occurred back in 1973 and came from a surprising source:   there was a genuine gasoline shortage.  OPEC—particularly the Arab member countries—was angry over our support of Israel in the Yom Kippur War and had stopped exporting oil to us.  Gas prices shot up and there were shortages.  This in turn caused a devaluation of the dollar, resulting in foreign countries buying up large sums and amounts of American beef creating another shortage.  Faced with these very real shortages, consumers were already nervous.

In December of 1973, Congressman Harold Frolich was concerned about the paper industry in his district.  At a press conference, he announced that "The U.S. may face a shortage of toilet paper within a few months," adding that the only solution might be rationing.  This was all nonsense as there was no shortage, nor was the government even remotely considering rationing it.

This was a joke, whether Frolich intended it as such or not.  A week later during his monologue, Johnny Carson told his television audience "There is an acute shortage of toilet paper in the good old United States. We gotta quit writing on it!"

Carson had an audience of 20 million people and evidently every one of them rushed out the next day and started buying toilet paper.  The news spread and people across the nation started buying up toilet paper as fast as the stores could stock it.  Since Japan bought most of their paper products from the United States, the panic reached their country.  Japanese women stood in long lines for hours to buy small packets of paper.

After a few weeks, officials from the Scott Paper Company had several press conferences trying to reassure the nation that there was no shortage.  For the most part, these notices were ignored.

The problem, of course, was that people could see that there was a shortage, since there was no toilet paper on the shelves.  As fast as the factory could ship it, and as fast as the stores could put it on the shelves, people were grabbing it up.

CBS had Walter Cronkite, the most trusted man in America, make an announcement on the evening news, “Unfounded rumors of a shortage has caused excessive demand at retail outlets.”  Several nights later, Johnny Carson told his audience, "For all my life in entertainment, I don't want to be remembered as the man who created a false toilet paper scare.  Apparently, there is no shortage!"

Perhaps these televised reassurances worked, or maybe people just observed that every week, more toilet paper was on the shelves, no matter how temporarily.  Or maybe everyone eventually just had enough toilet paper to last them for a while.  The panic was over.

Economists have studied why people willingly engage in such panics even though they suspect they aren’t real.  Our willingness to participate is rooted in something called “zero risk bias”.  When uncertainty threatens, people find comfort in taking action, even if they understand that the action does little to reduce the overall risk.  Effectively, we are saying that maybe we can’t control the big picture, at least we can wipe our ass.

Nancy Drew, USN

Let me start with a simple fact:  The Hardy Boys books were much better than the Nancy Drew books.  I can say this on the basis of having read 40-odd Hardy Boys books and one Nancy Drew book.  That’s a more than adequate sample size if you are both prepubescent and male.

My parents learned that, for $1.98, they could throw me a cheap mystery book and I would be (mas o menos) well-behaved for several hours.  This was peace and quiet at a price they could afford.  I later understand this concept very well when, at the age of eighteen, I ran a small café on the South Texas border and the eatery, unfortunately, had a jukebox.  After listening to Freddie Fender singing Wasted Days and Wasted Nights approximately a million times, I put a blank record in the jukebox and titled the two songs, Life After the Bomb and After Infinity.  For only a quarter, I could purchase fifteen minutes of peace and quiet.

One day (evidently because the only bookstore in our small town was out of the Hardy Boys series), my mother bought me a Nancy Drew book, written by Carolyn Keene.  Though I never told my mother, I enjoyed the book.  I still preferred Hardy Boys books, but the book was okay.  At that age, reading a book “written for girls” was like riding a mini-bike—it might be okay, but you don’t want any of your male friends seeing you do it.

I doubt that any boy ever read all 178 of the Hardy Boys books, or that any girl ever read all 175 Nancy Drew books.  Depending on how you count the books in each series, there may be many more than that, since the books were written, rewritten, restarted, and issued in hardback, paperback, and graphic novel format several times.  This is not counting the multiple movie, television series, and video games that have appeared since the first book was published in 1930.

That brings up the usual question:  Did the Hardy Boys appear before or after Nancy Drew?  Neither, both series are publications of the Stratemeyer Syndicate.  In 1896, the first series, the Rover Boys, was established along a set formula:  Each series featured set characters, a formulaic plot, a fictitious pen name for an author, and a ghost-writer who was paid a pittance to flesh out an outline handed to him by the syndicate.  The first series was so successful, that many more followed.  The Bobbsey Twins started in 1904, Tom Swift in 1910, the Hardy Boys in 1927, and Nancy Drew began publication in 1930.  The latest new series from the company is the Three Investigators, which began in 1964.  All of the above series are still in publication.

After the success of the Hardy Boys series, Stratemeyer approached the same publishers and offered them a new series, featuring a young female detective named Stella Strong.  The publishers accepted the offer and the first three novels were contracted out to Mildred Wirt Benson.  Following a strict outline, Benson wrote the stories for a flat fee of $125 without royalties.  The series was immediately successful and Benson was contracted to write five additional books for the same price.

By the time of publication, Stella Strong had turned into Nancy Drew, who was a blue-eyed blonde who had graduated from high school at sixteen, and who was the daughter of a wealthy and successful lawyer whose clients frequently paid the expenses as Nancy solved crimes associated with the cases her father defended.  Of course, that was the original series—Nancy changed over the decades.  In the early series, Nancy drove a roadster and by the fifties she drove a convertible, but in the latest books, she owns an electric car.

Note.  Somewhere, over the years, I lost most of the those early Hardy Boys Books, possibly because of how cheaply-made the books were.  I gave one of my last remaining copies to my nephew, who eagerly read it.  About forty pages into the book, he had a question, “What’s a jal-o-py?”  Now that I think of it, I wonder how many of today’s readers know what a “roadster” is?

Mildred Wirt Benson wrote the first eight books, but when the depression hit   Stratemeyer realized that, with so many writers out of work, he could lower the pay offered to his ghostwriters.  When Benson learned that the new fee would only be $75, she quit, so Stratemeyer needed a new stand-in for Carolyn Keene.

Walter Kariq was an American art student in Paris when World War I started in 1914.  Kariq wanted to fight, but the United States wouldn’t join the war for three years, so he joined the French Foreign Legion, ending the war as a Captain of Infantry.  When the war ended, Kariq worked as a writer, a columnist, and a cartoonist while he traveled the world.  He visited Mexico and Canada, spent weeks in Japan in 1935, and sent dispatches back from the Philippine Islands, the Malay Peninsula, Ceylon, India, Egypt, Italy, and France. 

Somehow, in his spare time, Kariq wrote twenty books for children, under a variety of pen names.  And, as you probably have already guessed, he was the next Caroline Keene, writing volumes eight through ten of the Nancy Drew series, starting with Nancy’s Mysterious Letter.  

When World War II started, Kariq joined the Navy, eventually rising to the rank of Captain.  During the war, he wrote numerous battle reports and articles, as well as serving on the USS Texas.  By the war’s end, he was an aide to Admiral Nimitz.  After the war, Kariq remained in the Navy, writing history books and some of the scripts of the Victory at Sea television show.  Following the war, Kariq also continued writing novels, including one of my personal favorites, Zotz!, which was made into a movie of the same name.

Walter Kariq, a combat veteran of the French Foreign Legion, a naval captain who served on convoys in the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean, and who was an aide to Admiral Chester Nimitz—somehow managed to serve over a decade in the US Navy without anyone ever knowing that he was the author of several Nancy Drew books.

One last point:  In 2025, it will be 95 years since the first Nancy Drew book was published, meaning that the copyright on the name expires and anyone can publish their own Nancy Drew novel. Nancy Drew in Space. Nancy Drew CSI. Nancy Drew in the Dallas Cowgirls.  You should start now.

The Last Bombing

When was the last time aircraft dropped bombs on the United States?  When was the last time Americans at home were targeted and killed by attacking aircraft?

Certainly, thousands of Americans were killed by aircraft on September 11, 2001, but that is not what I am talking about.  When was the last time military aircraft attacked Americans at work or in their homes with bombs?

Pearl Harbor immediately comes to mind.  On December 7, 1941, 353 Japanese planes attacked American military targets on Hawaii, propelling the United States into World War II.  Less well known is that shortly after the Pearl Harbor attack, the Japanese attacked the Aleutian Islands, bombing Dutch Harbor before invading Kiska.  

In September, 1942, in the Lookout Air Raids, a Japanese submarine with a watertight hangar, the  I-25, launched a single floatplane off the coast of Oregon, that dropped two incendiary bombs near the town of Brookings.  One caused a small fire that was spotted by fire watchers in a lookout tower and was quickly extinguished; no trace of the second bomb was ever discovered.  The following day, the plane dropped two more bombs, neither of which ignited any forest fires.

Far less well known is the Japanese Fu-Go balloon attacks of World War II.  The Japanese launched 9,300 paper balloons that were filled with hydrogen; each carried four incendiary bombs and a single anti-personnel bomb.  After traveling in the jet-stream from Japan across the Pacific Ocean, a timer was set to  release the bombs over the Pacific Northwest, with the intent of starting large forest fires that would divert manpower from the war effort.  The Fu-Go was the first intercontinental weapon ever deployed.

The program was a failure, however:  No forest fires were started by the bombing program, in part because the bombs were falling during the rainy season.  Out of 9,300 bombs launched, approximately 300 were later located.   These were not exactly “smart bombs”, since the remains of the balloons were found in Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming, Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, the Northwest and Yukon Territories, and at sea.  One of the balloon bombs did kill six civilians in Oregon—a party that included a pregnant woman and five children on a Sunday School picnic, who were the only civilian casualties of World War II in the contiguous United States.  

This, however, was not the last time that aircraft bombed targets in the United States.  That occurred in October, 1950, in Puerto Rico, which was an American protectorate.  Though the targets were American citizens on American soil, the bombs were dropped by American planes flown by American pilots.  In other words:  We bombed us.

Puerto Rico became an American territory in 1898 when Spain ceded the island in the Treaty of Paris.  (If you are ever on a game show and asked to name the treaty that ended a specific war, just say the Treaty of Paris, there are more than a dozen such treaties so chances are you’ll get lucky.).  By 1917, Puerto Ricans officially became US citizens—mostly so they could be drafted to serve in World War I.  They can vote for president, if they are residing in one of the fifty states at the time of the election.  (Since only 40% of Puerto Ricans still live on the island, this isn’t much of a problem.)

Though technically part of the United States, we haven’t always treated the islanders fairly, nor have the Puerto Ricans always enjoyed the protections promised them by our constitution.  While many of the islanders wanted independence—a desire that is perfectly legal under our laws providing that such desire is expressed peacefully—our government has usually reacted to such expressions in a draconian fashion.

The problems started back in the 1930’s.  The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party advocated for the island to become independent, much as Cuba had done.  Though this advocacy was legal, the US-appointed governor of the island began cracking down on the organization, arresting the leaders under the charge of sedition.  After two farcical trials—the first was declared a mistrial after the jury refused to convict and the second had a hand-picked jury—the leaders were sent to federal prison for ten years.  A few years later, the police opened fire on a Nationalist parade, killing 19 in what became known as the Ponce Massacre.  Though the police started the shooting and killed unarmed civilians, the President of the Nationalist Party was tried and sentenced to ten years in a federal prison for conspiracy to commit murder.

In 1948, the governor signed a law that became known as the Ley de la Mordaza (gag law) that made it a crime to “print, publish, sell, or exhibit any material intended to paralyze or destroy the insular government; or to organize any society, group or assembly of people with a similar destructive intent.”  You could be fined $10,000 and sentenced to ten years in a federal prison for singing a patriotic song or displaying the Puerto Rican flag.  (And remember, those were 1948 dollars, back when a new Cadillac was $2,900.)

Needless to say, this law is a complete violation of the US Constitution, particularly the First Amendment.  Feeling that they had no recourse left, the Nationalist Party called for an armed revolution, for independence to begin in 1952, on the date that the United States was going to legally change Puerto Rico from a territory to a commonwealth.  Before the uprising was set to start, the Puerto Rican police began surrounding the homes of the party’s leadership, opening fire without warning, killing several people, and arresting anyone inside the homes, charging them with ambushing the police.

The uprising started on October 28, 1950, in San Juan and seven small towns and villages.  Other than holding a few small villages, cutting a few telephone lines and burning down a post office, the revolution was a total failure.  The heavily armed police had several days’ advance warning of the revolution and were not at all hesitant to use overwhelming force to put down the revolution, usually before the Nationalist Party even acted.  Those who were not killed were prosecuted.  Typical of the results was one party leader’s  being sentenced to 20 years in federal jail for the possession of a Puerto Rican flag.

The governor declared martial law.  The United States sent ten P-47 fighter planes to drop 500 lb. bombs on the town of Jayuya, a small town with a population of 9,000.  While the planes then strafed the town, hitting almost every building, the Puerto Rican National Guard moved in, attacking with artillery, mortars, and grenades.  The town was destroyed.  There were 28 deaths in Jayuya, but there would have been much more if the townspeople had not fled.

The revolution was over almost before it was started.  A few years later, the remaining revolutionaries attempted to assassinate President Truman followed by an attack in the House of Representatives, both attacks were unsuccessful.  President Truman later reduced the lengthy prison sentences for those revolutionaries still in jail, at least one of whom had been sent to Alcatraz.  The last of those still in prison were pardoned by President Carter.  

Today, over 85% of Puerto Ricans  prefers that the island remain part of the United States, perhaps because the island residents participate in Medicare and Social Security but do not pay federal income tax.

Enema U After 55 Years

Fifty-five years ago, I was a college student.  Though still in high school, I took a single class at the community college two nights a week.  Today, I’m retired and I am once again a college student, but there have been a few changes in the last half century.

Perhaps the best change in education in the last fifty years is that college is multicultural today.  Enema U is in the arid deserts of New Mexico, but there are students from everywhere—literally from all around the world at the university.  And there are students from every imaginable background attending, too.  There were a lot of barriers to a good education back in the sixties, and thankfully, most of them have now been lowered dramatically, if not eliminated.

But I want to talk about the other changes to college.  These are mostly just the things I see as I attend class, study in the library, or walk across campus to hear a really good lecture about the painting styles of Hieronymus Bosch.

First, the classrooms are absolutely different.  In 1969, the classroom had bright fluorescent lights, open windows, a couple of fans, blackboards, and  (frequently) ash trays on the tables.  Today’s classrooms are dimly lit by LED bulbs so as not to wash out the electronic screens and projected images.  White boards and smart boards have almost completely replaced the blackboards.  And while there are still a few smokers on campus, they have all been moved to the entrances of buildings where their second-hand smoke can be enjoyed by everyone.

Today, an air-conditioned classroom with windows that still work is a rarity.  One of my classes was moved to a zoom meeting last week because the classroom’s air conditioning had failed and, though it is a beautiful classroom, due to its modern design, it would have been intolerable without air conditioning.  This is new to me:  thinking back, I believe I was a sophomore at the University of Houston before I ever saw an air-conditioned classroom.  

The most obvious change, of course, is technology.  The most sophisticated thing I owned used to be a slide rule, which is something so useless today that even my instructors have never heard of one.  Today’s students have calculators, computers, iPads, and smart phones.  The number of students still taking notes by hand on paper is a small minority.  In both of my classes today, some of the students attending are physically hundreds of miles away.  In my art history class, one of the students—previously a friend of mine—was attending a zoom class from a bench in the middle of the Metropolitan Museum of Art!  He was actually sitting in front of a painting by the artist we were studying.  (Bill, I’m so jealous I’ve decided to hate you for a few weeks!)

With only two courses left before completing my degree in Economics, I have yet to purchase a textbook in that field.  All of my course work has been delivered electronically, with online sources.  Once they’ve graduated, if any of the former economic students needs a reference book…. Well, evidently books are becoming irrelevant.  Students do their research online, rarely using the library anymore.  In a few decades, if you look up the word ‘library’ in the dictionary, the definition will say:  “li-brar-y (noun) Warehouse of yet to be scanned bound paper.”

There is a little noted side effect of all this technology:   No one can do math anymore.  In my economics class, we work with fairly complicated formulas, but in working with them you still have to know how to do simple math—something that today’s students simply cannot do in their heads anymore.  As I grew up before calculators and my instructor grew up in Kurdistan where calculators were relatively scarce, we found no problem performing simple math problems like multiplying 16 by 22 in our heads.  The rest of the class looked like they had been asked to perform magic—every hand reached for a phone to use the calculator.  After class, one of the students told me his elementary school no longer taught the multiplication tables.  If there is ever a shortage of batteries, the world will return to the dark ages in a week.

There is another  change brought about by technology:   I never hear any music on campus anymore.  There are no students playing guitars on the quad, no music in the student center, and as I walk by the dorms I hear no one playing their stereo too loud.  That’s not to say the students aren’t listening to music—they are—but it is all being done with wireless ear pods.  You see students everywhere (even during classes), sitting there with little white buttons in their ears.  Whatever they are listening to doesn’t seem to make them very happy, as they have a look of intense concentration as they live in their private worlds.

Students are different these days, too.  Back in 1969, it was the middle of the protests against the Vietnam War.  There was a general sense of involvement—students were engaged and truly believed that they were changing society.  Even at Enema U, students believed that their protests were bringing about change.  If you look at the sidewalk just outside of the administration Building, Abattoir Hall, you can dimly see scratched in the sidewalk the words “Stop the Bombing”.  Evidently messing up that freshly poured concrete worked, since it’s been more than fifty years since the US Air Force bombed any part of Southeast Asia.

Today, I can’t imagine a single cause that riles the students into a fury.  The university has raised the tuition into the stratosphere, has leased out the cafeterias to a company that serves swill at high prices, has turned a thriving bookstore into an empty t-shirt shop, and has generally ignored the welfare of the students.  All without a student protest.  I’m not sure these students would protest if you set fire to them.

Fifty years ago, students were dirt poor.  Today, a walk through the student parking lot shows a whole lot of very nice, expensive cars.  According to the Wall Street Journal, more students today are working while going to school—perhaps because of the higher tuition.  Despite the stories of students surviving on bottom ramen, every student seems to have an expensive phone and a relatively new laptop.  Perhaps this is because of the ready availability of student loans.

Okay, enough comparisons.  Who has/had it better—students today, or students half a century ago?

Well, I have to take the Vietnam War and the draft out of the equation.  There was a certain pressure to pass that calculus exam so as not to lose your student deferment back in the sixties that has no parallel today.  There was nothing to motivate a study session like knowing that if you blew the exam you would get drafted.  

Other than that, I think being a college student in the sixties was easier than today, if only because it was more affordable.  Even with the advances in technology that exist today, I think the opportunities to learn are about equal.  I guess there is one thing that has never changed:   if you apply yourself, and you work at it, you can still get a good education if you want it bad enough.

The Royal Principality of Enema U

Late night television the other night was airing the Cary Grant movie, To Catch a Thief.  It’s a great old classic, but what grabbed me was the scene where Grace Kelly was driving her car a little recklessly down a twisting coastal road.  Twenty-five years later, Princess Grace died when she missed a sharp turn on a similar road and her car plunged off a cliff.

This, of course, got me to thinking about Monaco—the tiny, strange, little kingdom that served as a home to Princess Grace.  Then, from Monaco, I started thinking about Enema… What can I say?—I have a mind like a ping pong ball (which, if you have been reading this blog for long, you already know).

In any case, it turns out that Enema U and Monaco have a great deal in common.  Once that occurred to me, the similarities became obvious.  In reality, Enema U is a small medieval fiefdom.

First off, there are the matters of size and content.  Monaco is a small, self-contained little country with its own government, laws, permanent population, police department, fire department and a migrant work force—all fitting into 482 acres.   Enema U, in comparison, has its own governing body, with separate laws, a permanent population, an independent fire department, a police force, and a migrant work force—all fitting into 900 acres.  

Yes, Enema U is slightly larger than Monaco, but this is a ag school, so we need a little more room for the cows.  

Monaco has an art gallery and a museum.  Enema U has an art gallery and a museum (as well as an excellent art department).  Monaco has a hospital, a clinic, and doctors.  Enema U has a hospital, a clinic, doctors, a medical school, and a nursing school.  Monaco has fine restaurants and hotels.  Enema U has a hotel and…. Well, Monaco is ahead on that one.  No one outside of administration has ever said that Enema U had even fair dining facilities.  The campus restaurants are leased out to a company that specializes in providing food for universities, airports, and prisons.  (I’ve always suspected that the best food goes to the prisons:  after all, no psychology major has ever shivved a cafeteria worker because there wasn’t enough ketchup.)

For centuries, Monaco has been ruled by the head of a royal family, the Grimaldis, with various ministers under him to set policy.  While Enema U does not have a royal family, we do have royalty.  Enema U has a football coach, who must be the ruler, since he is the highest paid employee on campus.  Under His Royal Coachness, there is a bus load of minor officials:  a chancellor, a provost, a dozen deans, and enough vice-presidents to form a healthy chorus of yes-men.

Monaco has a state flag and a national anthem and it is a voting member of the United Nations.  Enema U has a school song, a mascot, official colors, and is a full-fledged member of the NCAA—an organization that is far more powerful than the United Nations.  Monaco is multicultural and plays host to people from around the world, many of whom speak languages from all over the world.  Enema U has both students and staff from all across the globe and even teaches a variety of foreign languages.  

Monaco has a luxurious casino that provides most of the operating capital to run the monarchy.  Enema U would open a casino in a flash if the state government would allow it—it could be run as a joint operation by the Math Department and the Economics Department.  Until the state gives the green light, the school has a foundation that collects donations from alumni, but how the monies are spent is kept so secret that the CIA could take lessons in security.

Once a year, Monaco has a spectacular Grand Prix auto race.  Enema U has almost daily races by the students all over the surrounding community.  Hell, one student even managed to roll his car in the parking lot—let’s see Monaco top that.

Monaco has thousands of tourists daily, whose sole purpose is to spend money and leave quickly.  Enema U has the same thing, but they are called students.  Monaco has a large workforce that lives outside its border.  Enema U has a small army of staff members who commute daily, work for small wages, then leave the campus to return home.  Monaco has limited housing, but there are thousands who live within the small realm.  Enema U has thousands of freshmen who are required to live on campus in housing that is, at best, limited.

The main business of Monaco is gambling.  People come from all over the world to play the games of chance, winning and losing large sums of money in a palatial casino.  And here is the biggest difference between Enema U and Monaco.  While Enema U has a palatial football stadium where games are played, the cost is at such a high price that there are only losers.

Pigs is Pigs

Almost sixty years ago, when the original Star Trek television series was being aired, David Gerrold submitted a humorous episode that was quickly accepted by the producers.  Entitled “The Trouble With Tribbles”, the episode dealt with the crew of the Enterprise acquiring a tribble—a strange little furry alien that was both lovable and harmless.  

Unfortunately, it seemed that Tribbles multiplied so rapidly, that within days, the ship contained hundreds of them, each multiplying rapidly.  Where one of the featureless little balls of fur was lovable, thousands of tribbles were a menace.  (Actually, Spock calculated that there were 1,771,561 tribbles).  How poor Captain Kirk handles this lighthearted crisis is the substance of the plot.  (You can watch an excerpt here.) 

Shortly before the episode aired, the producers of the show became aware that there was more than a passing resemblance between the tribbles and a creature in a story written by Robert Heinlein in his 1952 book, The Rolling Stones.  In Heinlein’s version the crew of a spaceship, the Stone Family, acquire a lovable furry alien while visiting a mining camp on Mars.

Angelo tickled it with a forefinger; it began to purr like a high-pitched buzzer. It had no discernible features, being merely a pie-shaped mass of sleek red fur a little darker than Castor's own hair. "They're affectionate little things and many of the sand rats keep them for pets - a man has to have someone to talk to when he's out prospecting and a flat cat is better than a wife because it can't talk back. It just purrs and snuggles up to you."

Soon after the flat cat arrives on spaceship, the flat cat has eight “kittens”, each of which soon delivers a kitten of its own.  And so forth.  In the Heinlein version, the Stone family solves the problem by banishing the flat cats to a refrigerated cargo hold that puts the little Martian critters into hibernation.  Eventually, the surplus flat cats are sold off to lonely miners in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.  (You can read the entire book here.)

When the producers questioned David Gerrold about the origin of the story, he admitted that he may have unintentionally borrowed the idea from Heinlein.  (Gerrold may have unintentionally borrowed ideas from other authors as well, one of his other scripts bears a striking resemblance to West Side Story.)  As T. S. Eliot said, “Good writers borrow; great writers steal.”

Gene Coon, one of the producers of Star Trek reached out to Heinlein, sending him a copy of the script and asking the author for his approval.  Heinlein, a fan of the television show, graciously waived his rights, not even asking for a credit line when the episode aired on television, saying that he had borrowed the idea for flat cats from Ellis Parker Butler’s book, Pigs is Pigs.

At this point, you’re probably asking, “Who the hell is Ellis Parker Butler and what is Pigs is Pigs?”

A century ago, Butler was a well-known humorist, writing books and magazine articles.  Though he was primarily known for his day job as a prominent New York banker, he also published over 30 books and more than 2,000 short stories (the stories were published in leading magazines, alongside works of such contemporary authors as Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Arthur Conan Doyle.  He created the character Philo Gubb, a detective who solved crimes while murdering the English language.  

Sadly, we frequently forget the works of authors soon after they die.  As Mark Twain once remarked, “The very memory of the departed author is frequently lost, and even the works of many, once in great favor, are soon forgotten.”  

In the case of Ellis Parker Butler, this would be a mistake, because there is a timeless humor about most of his works and his writing is eminently readable.  If you can find them, that is…I checked the local libraries and found but one single copy of any of his books.  Luckily, they are all available online as electronic editions.  I bought the complete works of Butler from Amazon for $2.  (By “complete”, they meant 32 books and short stories, but it is a nice collection.)

By far the most famous of Butler’s works is the short story, Pigs is Pigs.  First published in American Illustrated Magazine in 1905, it was published as a short, illustrated book the following year.  I was able to find a great first edition copy for $10 at a used bookstore in New Jersey, but you can read it online for free here.

In the original story, Mike Flannery is the railway agent in the small town of Westcote.  A devoted company man, Flannery operates strictly by the rule book of the Interurban Express Company.  When a consignment of two guinea pigs arrives, Flannery wants to charge the freight rate for pigs, thirty cents per head.  The consignee, a skinflint Scotsman named Morehouse, refuses to pay more than twenty-five cents per head, the published rate for pets.  When neither man will budge, Morehouse leaves, promising to complain to the home office.

As you have probably guessed, the guinea pigs rapidly multiply while correspondence to and from the home office slowly debates whether ‘pigs is pigs’ or ‘pigs is pets’.  By the time the matter is resolved, there are tens of thousands of guinea pigs.  This is a slight exaggeration, of course.  If Spock can do the math on tribbles, I can do the math for guinea pigs.  Assuming that the first two guinea pigs were both female, both pregnant, and both delivered the day they arrived in Westcote, by the end of a year, the maximum population possible would be 3,636 guinea pigs.  (I’ll spare you the calculations, but guinea pigs mature in 60 days and can have five litters a year.)

In 1910, Edison labs made a movie based on the story.  Another film and an animated cartoon soon followed.   Since these were published in the early days of cinema, Butler didn’t receive any screen credit (let alone, any pay) for use of his work.   Finally, in 1954, Walt Disney produced a high quality color cartoon of the story, that was nominated for an Academy Award.  Though the opening scene briefly displays an animated image of the book, the author’s name is so dim that I had to enlarge the picture to see the faded words, “Ellis Parker Butler”.  I doubt that even a few who watched the cartoon noticed it.  In the opening credits, Disney even says the story is by Leo Salkin.

The Star Trek episode about the tribbles was so popular that later Star Trek series—Star Trek Next Generation and Deep Space Nine—referenced the original episode.  One of the world’s best-selling science fiction authors used Butler’s plot.  And two movies and two cartoons (one of which was nominated for an Academy Award) were published based on the original story. 

And all of this was done without anyone’s giving Ellis Parker Butler any credit.

It’s a New Semester at Enema U

For days now, the residents of my sleepy little town on the high desert of New Mexico have known that a new term was about to start at Enema U, the rather bad football team with a university attached to it like a barnacle on the Titanic.  Almost overnight, our streets turned into racetracks, and it became impossible to drive anywhere without a four-wheeled proctologist six inches off your rear bumper.

The start of classes had the familiar feel—impossibly packed parking lots, lots of strange, leaflet-wielding people who are standing in the hot sun, telling you that their God was the only true God, and students wandering aimlessly around, trying to find the correct building that is represented by only two code letters on their class schedules.  The latter task was made much more difficult because, for some reason, the names had been removed from the outside of several buildings.

After a few decades of being a faculty member, I enjoy being a student again.  And why not?  I hear good lectures on interesting subjects, I have the luxury of being able to use faculty parking, I do my studying in a well-maintained parklike setting, and most importantly of all, retired faculty are allowed to take classes without paying tuition.  Currently, I’m simultaneously a senior in pursuit of degree in Economics and I’m a grad student in pursuit of a degree in Art History.  

Taking a somewhat eclectic mix of classes means that besides being probably the only student to carry a graphing calculator into the art building, I get to talk to a wide variety of students.   Perhaps one of the most frequent topics brought up is student loans.  It seems that almost everyone has borrowed money to attend classes, but—interestingly enough—no one has mentioned the idea of the government’s forgiving those loans.  Since these are students still in college, I assume they have confidence that their future careers will enable them to easily pay back those loans.

Regarding some of them, I have no doubt that they are correct, but as for too many others, I’m a little worried.

Most of the students majoring in business, accounting, and economics seem to have a well-thought-out plan of what they intend to do:  whether they intend to go on to grad school, whether they intend to leave the state after graduation (depressingly, almost all of them do), and what kind of jobs they want.  A surprising number of them have already made strong connections with their future employers.  

One student had a very well-thought-out plan.  Raised in Juarez—his home is literally within sight of the U.S. border—he was labeled a foreign student on a student visa.  Perhaps one of the brightest students I have met recently, he had a double major in math and economics, he was graduating at the end of the semester, and he was already being courted by a number of prestigious companies.  He confided to me that while he wanted to accept the job offer he had from a New York bank, he probably was going to accept the offer from a company in London.  The reason?  His student visa expires after graduation, and he is not assured of being able to secure a new visa that would allow him to work in the US.

In a time when millions and millions of people from all over the world just walk by that young man’s house on their way across the border, we allow one bright young man to come to America long enough to earn two college degrees at a college heavily subsidized by both state and federal tax dollars—then force him to work in Europe before he is able to pay income tax!

New Mexico proudly grows green chili, pecans, and cotton.  We also produce microchips, aircraft parts, and an amazing amount of petroleum.  Our most significant export, however, may be the college-educated young men and women who must flee our state each year in search of employment.  If that wasn’t bad enough, now we are exporting them to London.

Perhaps equally heartbreaking was the young girl I met who was pursuing a degree in music with an emphasis on vocal performance.  This was a very bright young lady who had excelled in school and had been told from an early age that she must go to college and “do something good with your life.”  So, she went to college and for lack of any idea what to do, had ended up studying music.  She’s a senior and has received absolutely no job offers from anybody.  She is currently thinking about going to graduate school in education so she can teach school but is a little concerned about the mounting debts she is accumulating with student loans.

Please don’t misunderstand me:  I am not advocating for turning universities into trade schools—and there is absolutely nothing wrong with vo-tech education.  (And there is also nothing wrong with a liberal arts degree—Hell, I have half a dozen of them!)  If the only way you can be happy is studying some obscure field with few employment prospects, then you should go ahead and pursue that career.  What bothers me is how many students pursue college education without knowing anything about the cost or future benefits of a career in that field.

If I can go down to my local Lowe’s to buy a refrigerator—and that is the only reliable place to buy a household appliance today—Lowe’s and the manufacturer are required by law to provide me with energy information, warranty information, safety information, and the size, capacity, available features, and model number of the refrigerator.  I must be told an estimation of the cost of running the refrigerator for a month, and all of this information must be given to me in an obligatory manual, so that I know precisely what my money is buying.

On the other hand, if I want to pursue a degree in philosophy (which nationwide leads to employment in that field a whopping 9.1% of the time), the university will never give me any information about my chances of future employment, the average salaries in that field, or even what the average monthly payments will be for the student loans I’ll be forced to take out to pay for my education.  Give me at least the same kind of information you would if I were buying a fridge.

I’m not advocating that universities should stop teaching any particular classes.  (Well, they could burn down the College of Education and the average IQ on campus would dramatically improve.).  I just think that before universities help students take out large student loans, they should provide a little information about the likelihood of employment in that field and the average salary.  

Do you want to know a staggering statistic that is NEVER shared with students?  The average lifetime earnings of students who successfully received a college degree in Early Childhood Education, Fine Arts, or Human Services and Community Organization is, on average, lower than that of high school dropouts.  

And high school dropouts don’t have any student loans to repay.