Modest Suggestions for Los Angeles

As I write this, the fires are—once again—burning in Los Angeles.  So far, an estimated 20,000 homes and businesses have been lost, the fires are still burning, and the weather forecast predicts the high winds, that so rapidly spread the conflagration early on, will return this weekend.

I have a few suggestions for California.

First, before the fires, consider that several communities were already experiencing a severe housing shortage, which has been now made much worse as close to a hundred thousand people have just been made homeless in three days.  The fastest method to help these people is to stimulate the private sector of the economy by dropping rent control.  While there has never been a sound economic reason to impose rent control, right now there is an obvious reason to end it.

In cities where rent control has been dropped, large numbers of previously unavailable rental units quickly enter the market when the owners are no longer worried about government control of their property.  When Buenos Aires dropped rent control, available housing increased by more than 175% in the first six months afterward.  A more modest increase in housing occurred when Cambridge, Massachusetts eliminated rent control.  There is no reason to believe that Los Angeles would not have a similar outcome.

Note.  While Los Angeles needs more housing right now, regardless of cost, it is worth noting that the increase in the number of housing units in Buenos Aires created competition and lowered the cost of housing.  Price controls, whether on goods or housing, always, always, always creates shortages at higher prices.

California will rebuild.  Though there are places where homes have repeatedly burnt down in the last half century, it’s a given that, human nature being what it is, reconstruction of those homes will probably start within weeks.  Perhaps the county might consider mandating the new homes be more fire-resistant.  I would suggest the following:

• Fire-Resistant Roofing: Using Class A, fire-rated materials like metal, concrete, or slate for roofing can dramatically decrease the likelihood of fires spreading.  Compared to the common composite shingles widely used, Class A roofing costs twice as much but the roofs last at least twice as long.  Much of the cost difference will be recouped through lower utility bills since Class A roofing keeps the house cooler in summer, thus requiring less air conditioning.  

• Landscaping and Design: Creating defensible spaces, using non-combustible materials like rock mulch, and ensuring proper ventilation can also prevent fire spread.  In neighborhoods with extensive loss, perhaps every other lot should remain vacant.  The replanting of pine or palm trees should be prohibited.  

• Exterior Materials: Materials like brick and fiber cement siding are inherently fire-resistant.  Brick walls, for instance, can withstand fire for one to four hours, depending on construction.  Insulated concrete form construction is already used in commercial buildings; the county should encourage its use in residences, too.  While roughly 5% more costly than stucco, the improved insulation will lower utility bills and quickly recoup the investment.

• Government should get out of the insurance business.  While government should continue the existing coverage for current homeowners, no new policies should be issued.  If private companies won’t offer insurance for a high-risk construction project, perhaps the building should not be built. 

• And keep the damn brush in the canyons cut.  Perhaps you could employ some of the homeless to do this.  If the land is privately owned, create stiff fines for the failure to keep the brush down.

One last comment:  We all saw the television coverage about fire hydrants not having enough water pressure to fight fires, and I’m sure that there will be long and heated discussions about how to correct this in the future.  But everyone should be aware of how little protection those neighborhood fire hydrants actually offer.  

That typical red fire hydrant in your neighborhood can deliver—at most—500 gallons per minute.  That may sound like a lot of water, but it is barely enough to fight a single-house fire.  Suppose we have a two-story home that’s fully ablaze. The amount of water required to extinguish a fully involved fire in a 2,000-square-foot, two-story house depends on several factors, such as the fire's intensity, the structural materials, and the fire department's strategies.  However, we can estimate water needs by using standard firefighting guidelines.

A common formula used in firefighting is the National Fire Academy (NFA) Fire Flow Formula:  The necessary water flow (in gallons per minute or GPM) = Square footage of the home divided by 3.  As a general guide, for a fully involved fire, add an additional 25%. So, for our arbitrary 2,000 square foot home, we need 667 gallons per minute, which is more than the typical neighborhood fire hydrant is capable of delivering.  If it is a fully-involved fire that we want to suppress before it spreads to neighboring structures, we would need 834 gallons per minute.

If several houses are burning at once, the typical neighborhood fire hydrant provides only a drop in the bucket (no pun intended).  Such a hydrant is better than nothing at all, but it is inadequate to handle the kind of disaster that is occurring in California.

Fire hydrants have a color code.  A red bonnet or cap on a fire hydrant means it delivers up to 500 gallons per minute.  An orange bonnet means it delivers twice that—up to 999 gallons per minute.  A green hydrant can deliver up to 1499 gallons per minute, while a blue hydrant can deliver between 1500 and 2000 gallons per minute.  

In those California canyons, where the dangers from Santa Ana winds are an annual occurrence, perhaps the city should think about either putting in higher capacity water lines and hydrants or limiting the number of homes that can be built there, as well as rewriting construction codes to bring them in line with current fire resistance technology.

The Tube of Paint

What do Stephen Perry, George McGill, Johan Vaaler, George de Mestral, Walter Hunt, and John Goffe Rand have in common?

Each of the men listed invented an everyday common item, that while modest as far as technology goes, had a profound impact on how we live.  The effect was so profound that they were all immeditately forgottein and chances are that you’ve never heard of any of them.  Sic transit gloria mundi.

Perry invented the rubber band, McGill gave us the stapler, Vaaler developed the paper clip, de Mestral invented Velcro, and Hunt invented the safety pin.  It is kind of hard to imagine life without any of those, and all have a fascinating story, but I want to focus on the seemingly modest contribution of John Rand.

Painters from the medieval period to the early Renaissance used tempera paints— made by mixing pigments with water adding an egg yolk or whole egg as a binder, sometimes with other additives like vinegar or wine to extend the drying time or alter the consistency.  Tempera paint dried quickly to a dull matte finish, so artists had to work on relatively small areas of the canvas and could not build up layers of paint.

Oil painting, which became popular in the 15th century, particularly through artists like Jan van Eyck, mixed pigments with linseed oil and offered advantages like slower drying time which allowed for blending and more nuanced color gradations, and was more forgiving on a variety of surfaces.   Gone was the dull matte finish, replaced by a finish that could vary from satin to glossy, with a a depth and luminosity due to the paint’s ability to be layered and blended while wet. This can create a sense of three-dimensionality and light within the painting that matte tempera does not naturally achieve

There was no doubt that oil paints in the hands of a skilled artist created a more satisfying painting, but the paints still had to be produced by the artists.  Artists prepared their own paints by grinding pigments (from minerals, plants, or other sources) and mixing them with a binder like linseed oil.  These mixtures were typically stored in animal bladders or glass jars.  However, these methods were inconvenient, messy, and poorly suited for travel or long-term storage, meaning that the artist was generally confined to working in his studio with a limited range of colors.  

This changed in 1841 when John Goffe Rand was issued U.S. Patent #2522 for an “Improvement in the Construction of Vessels or Apparatus for Preserving Paint.”  His apparatus was an airtight metal tube made of malleable tin for holding paint.  Originally Rand sold empty tubes to artists who could fill the tubes then crimp the open end using the brass cap to access their paints.  Within a year, art companies such as Winsor and Newton were selling paint tubes with preloaded paint.  (And they still sell both preloaded and empty tubes from their site here.)

This had several profound effects for artists.  No longer did an artist have to be a part time naturalist gathering pigments, then had to turn into a chemist trying to come up with the same shade of blue as the previous week to finish a painting.  And since the tubes would stay fresh for months or even years at a time, the artist could keep a variety of shades and tints and several colors.  The sale of such tubes even provided an incentive for art stores to begin experimenting with new synthetic colors such as cobalt blue, cadmium yellow, and emerald green.

For the first time, artists could leave their studios, packing up their brushes and art supplies and could paint outdoors.  This innovation was instrumental to movements like Impressionism, where artists such as Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir embraced painting outdoors, or as they called it, en plein air.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir's son, Jean Renoir, quoted his father as saying:

"Without colors in tubes, there would have been no Cézanne, no Monet, no Sisley or Pissarro, nothing of what the journalists were to call Impressionism."

There was one more far-reaching change brought about by Rand’s little tin tubes.  In 1850, Lucius Sheffield was studying art in Paris.  When he returned home, his father, Dr. Washington Sheffield had just perfected a dental cream that he thought far superior to the existing tooth powders sold on the market.  His problem was how to package his new product.  When Lucius demonstrated the ease of applying paint from a tube, Dr. Sheffield knew he had found a solution to his problem.

It might surprise you that Dr. Sheffield’s original toothpaste in a tube is still on the market.  Amazon will sell you a tube in seven flavors, including chocolate.  (Yuck!). 

Dr. Sheffield’s company freely admits the idea for toothpaste in a tube came from the paint tubes for sale in in Paris, but John Rand is given no credit.   Not surprisingly, Rand was unable to protect his patent and received only small licensing fees for his invention.

The 14th Amendment is Alive and Well

The 14th Amendment is in the news.   Well, to be fair, it has been in the news constantly since it was ratified back in 1868.  It has been the basis of almost every major Supreme Court case in the last 150 years, influencing the court’s decisions on birth control, abortion, the right to own guns, same sex marriage, interracial marriages, school segregation, and whether the states can limit free speech.  If you have watched any television in the last 50 years, you can probably recite at least some of the “Miranda Rights” that are guaranteed to individuals during police interviews (the Court decided that the Amendment guaranteed those rights to everyone.

Currently, the 14th Amendment is being discussed in newspaper editorials in conjunction with whether the United State should continue the practice of birthright citizenship and if Article 3 of the Amendment prohibits Donald Trump from being eligible for the office of the presidency.  Perhaps this is a good time to review just why the 14th Amendment was written and what it says.

The 14th Amendment was initially written in 1866, during the period knows as “Reconstruction”, following the Civil War.  While the 13th Amendment had just months earlier eliminated slavery within the United States, it did not guarantee the freed slaves any rights—even those normally guaranteed by the Constitution or the Bill of Rights.  Were the freed slaves even citizens and if not, were non-citizens entitled to civil rights?  While this was being debated, most of the former Confederate states enacted "Black Codes," which severely restricted the rights of African Americans and attempted to maintain a harsh system of racial subjugation.  Northern states questioned why the war had been fought and why so many Americans had been slaughtered if slavery was to continue under a different name.

During the period following the war, when the former Confederate States were still not represented in Congress, Northern Republicans quickly passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which granted citizenship and equal rights to African Americans.  However, some feared that without a constitutional amendment, the Supreme Court or future Congresses could overturn the Act.  While the 14th Amendment was passed by Congress in the summer of 1866, it still required ratification by three-fourths of the states to become law.  Congress guaranteed the eventual ratification by requiring the former Confederate states to ratify the Amendment as a condition for their elected officials being readmitted to the Senate and the House of Representatives.  

Note.  Yes, congressional reinstatement hinging on ratification of an amendment was both coercive and ethically questionable—particularly when you remember that the South was militarily occupied by Northern troops at the time.  The Supreme Court, while not ruling specifically on the ratification of the 14th Amendment, has ruled several times that the process and details of how the states ratify an amendment is entirely up to Congress.  The rules may have been dishonest, but the rules are the rules.

It would be fair to say that the Amendment was a catch-all bill to address several concerns by the Republican Congress.  If Southern society was not permanently altered, why had the Civil War been waged?  Southern Democrats, including President Andrew Johnson, fought against the Amendment, but could not marshal sufficient support to block the passage.

The Amendment has several key provisions which:

• Declared that all persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens, effectively overturning the Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) decision, which had denied citizenship to African Americans.
• Guaranteed that no state could "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the “equal protection of the laws."
• Prohibited states from depriving any person of "life, liberty, or property without due process of law."
• Declared that the federal government was not responsible for Confederate debts.
• Disqualified from holding office any person who had violated his prior oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States.

Today, that first provision concerning citizenship is being questioned in the context of immigration.  Is citizenship automatically given to anyone born in the United States regardless of the citizenship of the parents?  This has been settled law for well over a century.  In United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), the Supreme Court ruled that a child born in the United States to Chinese parents, who were not U.S. citizens, was nonetheless a U.S. citizen by birth.  This case firmly established the principle of birthright citizenship.  Short of a new amendment or a new ruling by the Supreme Court overturning the 1898 case, birthright citizenship will remain in place.

Note.  Birthright citizenship, or unrestricted jus soli is primarily established only in the Americas.  Most of the countries in both North and South America allow birthright citizenship while it is very rare in the rest of the world, where at least one of the parents must be a citizen for child to qualify.

The last provision, barring office for those engaged in rebellion, is currently in the news because several people claim that Congress could bar the presidency to Donald Trump due to his actions of January 6, 2021.  Here is the wording of Article 3 of the 14th Amendment.

"No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability."

During the Civil War, many officials in the federal and state governments—who had previously sworn allegiance to the U.S. Constitution—defected to the Confederacy.  Section 3 was designed to hold these individuals accountable by disqualifying them from holding public office unless Congress explicitly lifted the ban.  The drafters of the 14th Amendment wanted to ensure that those who had supported the Confederacy could not easily regain political power and undermine Reconstruction efforts.  This measure was also symbolic, emphasizing the need for loyalty to the Union.

Initially, Section 3 was enforced broadly to exclude many former Confederates from office.  Over time, as Reconstruction policies softened and efforts to reconcile with the South gained traction, Congress used its power to grant amnesty to most individuals affected by Section 3 in 1872, effectively ending the broad application of Section 3.  

Section 3 remains in the Constitution but is rarely invoked.  However, it has resurfaced in discussions concerning those who participated in the events of January 6, 2021, particularly regarding the actions of President Donald Trump.  It has been suggested that the January 2021 impeachment of Donald Trump, as well as the House investigation of the events of January 6, are sufficient grounds for Congress to refuse to certify the election, preventing Donald Trump from becoming president on January 20, 2025.  It should be remembered that the impeachment bill passing the house was the equivalent of an indictment, he was not convicted in the Senate.

Supporters of Trump have pointed out that Section 3 lists the offices specifically denied to insurrectionists but fails to include the office of the presidency.  On the other hand, the general language of the clause—prohibiting officeholders who have engaged in insurrection from holding "any office, civil or military, under the United States"—would have been interpreted to include the presidency, even though it was not named specifically.

The argument is unlikely to be settled by January 20, 2025–although I doubt that there will be any serious attempt to use the 14th Amendment to stop the inauguration of Trump.  In the eyes of American voters—particularly those who voted for Trump—such a maneuver would be seen as an act of insurrection in itself and their protests would almost certainly lead to violence.

Perhaps we should remember why Congress passed the Amendment in the first place:  It was trying to bind the country together, to heal the divisions caused by the war and to secure stability.  We should also particularly remember that, though it took over a century, Congress eventually pardoned even Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy.

UFOs and the Butt-Head Astronomer

It has been too many years, so I no longer remember why my brother and I were driving through San Antonio’s Brackenridge Park that night.  Since we were in a ‘57 MGA with the top down, it might have been just to enjoy the fun of riding around in a convertible on a warm summer night.  

Just as we passed the zoo, we saw it:  It was impossibly long, with red, white, and green lights in front and about a hundred yards farther back, it had a mass of flashing white lights, flying way too low over the park.  It was 1966 and just like about half of the country, we were seeing a UFO.  (No—I don’t really have a picture of it, since this happened decades before everyone carried a cell phone so they could take a picture of what they had for lunch.  The photo at left was generated by AI.)

Naturally, we chased it, trying to catch up with the UFO to get a better look at the mysterious object that didn’t seem to be moving very fast, but that seemed to make impossible turns, hovering at times, then speeding up.  I’m not sure about the statute of limitations but let me say that at one point, a white convertible may have driven across Olmos Basin Park in hot pursuit.  

Eventually, we managed to catch up with the tail end of our UFO, just close enough for that mass of flickering lights to spell out the message “GRAND OPENING SALE…”. About 100 feet in front of the flashing banner was the faint outline of a small Cessna.

We felt like idiots, of course!  I don’t remember us ever discussing the event again—we were too embarrassed to admit how foolish we had been.  It wasn’t really our fault, of course—we were preconditioned to expect to see a UFO.  All over the country, people went out every night looking for them and since they were looking for them, they found them.  Newspapers and television reported these sightings daily.

The UFO hysteria of the 1950s through the 1960s was a period marked by widespread fascination, fear, and speculation about UFOs, which were believed to be alien spacecraft. This phenomenon reached its height during the Cold War, as a combination of geopolitical tension, the rise of modern media, and the human inclination to explore the unknown coalesced into a weird cultural moment.  The hysteria was fueled by reports of strange sightings, government secrecy, and a growing fear of technological advances (particularly, the potential for extraterrestrial threats).

This period was also one of intense national and international paranoia, as Americans lived under the constant threat of nuclear war.  Our government, which needed to respond to this growing paranoia, first retreated behind a shield of silence or secrecy.  By the time the government finally did respond, there was widespread distrust of the government…a distrust fueled—in part by the Vietnam War.  The more the government said there were no UFOs, the more the public was convinced the government was lying.

Actually, there were Unidentified Flying Objects (with the emphasis on “unidentified”).  The fact that you can’t identify what someone saw doesn’t mean it was extraterrestrial—it just means the government doesn’t know what it was or if you saw it.

The media played a central role in amplifying the UFO hysteria of the 1950s.  Newspapers and magazines, eager to sell stories and appeal to public interest, sensationalized UFO sightings, creating a narrative that UFOs were an imminent threat or a mysterious puzzle to be solved. This coverage often lacked skepticism and led many readers to believe in the reality of extraterrestrial visitors.

Hollywood also capitalized on the UFO craze. Films like The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and War of the Worlds (1953) tapped into public anxieties about alien life, portraying extraterrestrials as both potential saviors and terrifying invaders. These movies reflected and reinforced the conflicting emotions of wonder and fear that characterized the era.  On one hand, UFOs represented the possibility of contact with advanced civilizations, and on the other, they symbolized the unknown dangers of space and technology.

Television, which became more widespread in the 1950s, also played a significant role in spreading the UFO phenomenon. Shows like The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits tapped into the growing cultural interest in the supernatural and the unknown, contributing to the atmosphere of uncertainty and paranoia that surrounded the UFO hysteria.

This was a period of profound social change, with the women’s liberation, the sexual revolution, civil rights protests, and the protests against the war all occurring simultaneously.  Psychologists suggest that UFO sightings may have been a projection of collective anxieties about the future, particularly the fear of nuclear war and the unknown possibilities of space exploration.  The idea of seeing actual extraterrestrial visitors may have provided a way for people to externalize their fears, making the feared unknown more “manageable” and less threatening.

As more and more sightings were reported, an ever-growing number of people began searching the sky for something they didn’t understand, and naturally, they found what they were looking for (or thought they did).  

Lots of scientists (like Carl Sagan) came out and tried to calm the public by stating that the events needed to be looked at calmly, with logic and common sense.  These scientists were generally ignored.  The ability to use common sense and logic is so rare in society that we need a law requiring the few people still capable of rational thought to wear capes in public so they can be identified and consulted during an emergency.

By the end of the 1960s, UFO sightings began to decline, and the hysteria surrounding them started to subside.  Several factors contributed to this shift.  As the U.S. government continued to deny the existence of extraterrestrial life and further studies revealed more mundane explanations for many UFO reports, public interest began to wane.  Eventually, even the hysterical calm down.

That calm recently ended with hundreds of reports of drones flying over New Jersey.   Every night, people went out looking for the mysterious drones…and found them!  It didn’t matter that every damn photo or video taken of the “mystery drones” showed the FAA-mandated aircraft lighting pattern—they just had to be drones!  Probably Chinese drones!  Somebody should shoot them down!

Between 5:00 PM and 9:00 PM on any given night in New Jersey, there are over 1600 scheduled airline flights passing overhead.  Add to this the number of light aircraft, helicopters, and military aircraft and you will realize that at any given time anywhere in New Jersey, and there are a lot things moving in the sky.  

It didn’t take long before drones were sighted in other states across the country.  Politicians briefly stopped looking down their noses at their constituents long enough to look up in the night sky and notice there were “things” moving up there!  The former governor of Maryland announced that he had taken a photo of a formation of drones hovering over his house.  (An examination of his photo revealed an amateur photo of Orion’s Belt.)

Every aspect of the current drone hysteria matches the earlier UFO mania.  The government is being criticized for not “solving” the mystery even as their explanations are being ridiculed.  This seems to be a time of social change challenging long held beliefs.  The press is reporting even the wildest claims without any investigation or review.  And the hysteria seems to be spreading.

There is however, one big difference between today’s drone hysteria and the earlier UFO mania.  My brother and I could not have launched our own UFO—we probably couldn’t have put anything bigger than a rubber band powered balsa wood toy into the air.  But today, any teenage boy can buy a $10 drone from Temu, tape a glow-stick to it, and try to terrify his neighbor.  

This drone nonsense will eventually run its course, and the press will move on to the next sensation.  In the meantime, remember:  Fantastic claims require fantastic proof.

Biphasic What?

One of the great insights I gleaned from studying history was the realization that everyone throughout history, no matter when or where they lived, was basically the same as us if you learned enough about them.  This is probably fairly basic for most people but came as a great surprise to a poor dumb ol’ country boy.

That doesn’t mean you can’t occasionally be surprised by some alarming differences, however.  I just discovered something about the people of medieval Europe that is so strange it makes you want to rethink that first paragraph.  Those weirdos.

While we take it for granted that a perfect night’s sleep is eight hours of uninterrupted sleep, until about the late seventeenth century, people engaged in something called biphasic or segmented sleep.  Depending slightly on the time of the year, people went to bed around 9:00 PM, slept until about 11:00, then woke up for two hours before going back to sleep until dawn.  

The two periods of rest were commonly called first and second sleep.  During those two waking hours, people might finish chores, talk with their family, or—if they listened to the urgings of the church—engage in prayer.  And I suppose for some people, that holy suggestion was actually true.  For most married couples the most obvious activity was engaging in sex, particularly since it was widely believed that the healthiest children were conceived after first sleep.

People worked hard and usually came home too exhausted to make love, so a brief nap first made sense.  It also explains the high birth rate of Medieval Europe.   (Thirty-five years ago, when I was doing research in Tegucigalpa, the city turned off the water supply for more than twenty hours a day.   The water was turned back on at 4:00 AM, the air escaping from the pipes created a moaning sound all over town.  Locals said this resulted in an incredibly high birth rate because it was too early to get up and too late to go back to sleep.)

This segmented sleep pattern was not just a social convention, it occurred naturally.  Long term experimental studies where people lived in environments without clocks and no access to natural lighting have been conducted.  The subjects slept or worked when they wanted to and were free to set their own schedules.  Over time, they developed a form of polyphasic schedule with some of the subjects developed a midday siesta and others developed the segmented schedule described above.  They also slowly evolved into a 25-hour day, a phenomenon for which I have no explanation.

While there are sufficient references to first and second sleep in medieval records for us to be certain about their sleeping patterns, whether this pattern extends to other cultures is still not clear.  When people set down to record the events of their daily lives, there is a tendency to only record the unique events, not the prosaic.  As an inveterate journal writer, I’ve filled countless Moleskin notebooks, but I doubt that I have ever described how I sleep at night.  We tend to only record the out of the ordinary, and nothing is more routine or boring than our bedtimes.

Pliny left us hints, so it is likely that the Romans had similar biphasic sleep patterns.  About the earlier Greeks—we don’t have a clue.  As for other cultures and times, it seems that some pattern of segmented sleep periods, such as divided nocturnal sleep or a daily siesta seems to be the norm.  Much more research is needed and I expect we will hear more about this in the years to come.

The biphasic sleep patterns of Medieval Europe came to end with the Industrial Revolution and the expansion of artificial lighting.  The invention and increasing availability of affordable candles, oil lamps, and later gas and electric lights allowed people to extend their evening activities, allowing people to stay up later and to slowly consolidate the first and second sleep periods into a single uninterrupted period.

Urbanization and industrial schedules required a more regimented approach to time, with fixed work hours making consolidated nighttime sleep more practical and necessary.  At the same time, the industrial revolution made clocks cheaper, which regimented daily routines further, eroding the natural segmented sleep habits.

The Industrial Revolution also changed society.  Evening activities such as theater, social gatherings, and reading gained popularity, leading people to stay awake later and skip the earlier phase of segmented sleep.  Over time, society came to believe that an interrupted eight-hour sleep period was the healthiest.  Even today, most people believe the single long period of sleep is the best choice, despite the lack of conclusive medical studies supporting that view.

This was all new information to me, and the evidence for biphasic sleeping during medieval times still seems to be making its way through the various academic disciplines.  This made me wonder if this relatively new information would made any changes in art history.  Have we interpreted medieval depictions of sleeping people correctly?  Should certain paintings be reinterpreted?

The painting at right is The Land of Cockaigne, by Pieter Bruegel, the Elder.  The painting shows a peasant, a soldier, and a clerk asleep under a tree.  I won’t bore you with all the competing—and totally contradictory—interpretations of the painting, but I can assure you that none of the competing theories take in the possibility that these are people in their first sleep period.  This was just the first medieval painting depicting sleep that occurred to me, there are countless others.

How will this realization change our interpretations of paintings like this?  How many paintings will need to be reexamined?  I’m looking forward to reading some new interpretations.

The Sinking of the San Telmo

A few weeks ago, I told half of the story about the loss of the Spanish ship San Telmo.  Now, I want to recount the other half of the story.

When Napoleon invaded Spain in 1808, it set off a chain reaction across Europe and the Americas.  The resulting Peninsular War lasted for six long years leading to the abdication of Napoleon and start of wars for independence for most of the Spanish colonies in the Americas.  Thought Spain would not formally admit the loss of their colonies for years, by the time the Spanish monarchy was restored to the throne, it was almost impossible for Spain to stop the revolutions in Venezuela, Argentina, and Mexico, but Spain was desperate to retain Peru and the silver mines that furnished a third of the royal Spanish income.

By 1819, the Spanish situation was critical.  In a desperate last-ditch effort to squash the revolutions in Chile and Peru, Spain sent a fleet of warships under Brigadier Rosendo Porlier to Peru with the mission of holding on to the mines and the important seaports in Chile and Peru.  While the flagship of the squadron was the San Fernando, among the ships of the convoy was the ill-fated San Telmo, a second-rate ship of the line.

This was the golden age of sailing ships, when warships were rated primarily by their size, how many gundecks, and the total number of cannons on those decks.  Large scale sea battles, like the Battle of Trafalgar were carried out by the largest ships, usually first and second rate ships of the line.  A first-rate ship of the line had three decks and might carry as many as 130 large cannons.  A second-rate ship of the line, the true workhorses of a navy, had two decks and carried 70-80 cannons.

If you are familiar with the movie Master and Commander, the ship used was the HMS Surprise, a frigate and 5th rate ship of the line.  If such a ship was to do battle with either a first- or second-rate ship, it would be roughly equivalent to a nine-year-old having a fist fight with the heavy weight champion of the world.  The child might be able to outmaneuver the boxer for a while, but the fight would be over as soon as soon as the boxer successfully landed his first blow.  Similarly, a single broadside from a second-rate ship of the line would destroy a smaller frigate.

Sailing southwestward from Spain, the ships had to sail around the southern tip of South America, the dreaded Drake Passage, where some of the most violent storms imaginable occur frequently, particularly in winter.  Even today, with modern steel ships and weather forecasts supplied by satellites, ships still suffer accidents in these water, though thankfully they are usually minor.

The San Telmo, a second-rate ship with 74 large guns on two decks was an older ship and was a poor choice to make the difficult voyage.  Launched in 1788, the San Telmo was reaching the end of her useful life.  While the ship had never been involved in a major fleet action, she had been sent several times to the ‘Spanish Main’, the Caribbean, where wooden ships quickly became damaged due to the warm humid climate and the sea worms that burrowed into the hull.  

The fleet arrived in the Drake Passage on September 1, just barely out of the Southern Hemisphere’s winter.  In good weather, the San Telmo could have made it through the Drake Passage in nine days.  Unfortunately, the small fleet of ships found anything but good weather.  While ships of the early 19th century carried a weather glass (a crude form of barometer), they had no way of recording accurate weather conditions.  From the descriptions later given by sailors on the surviving ships, it is likely that the fleet sailed directly into full hurricane conditions.  

The San Telmo, fifty feet wide and two-thirds the length of a football field, carried a crew of 644 men.  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.

I asked AI to generate a picture of the San Telmo in the Drake Passage and the best I could get was the incorrect image at right.  (AI flatly refused to do any better, falsely claiming that to do so would violate community standards!). There are several things wrong with the image, particularly that no sailing ship in a storm would have this much canvas flying.  Not only would steering the ship be impossible, but the high winds would have destroyed both the rigging and the sails, probably demasting the ship in the process, leaving the ship helpless and doomed.

More likely, the ship would have hauled in her main sails and unfurled smaller triangular storm staysails.  These sails were just large enough to enable the ship to head into the crashing waves, reported by other ships to be as high as 65 feet.  If the ship couldn’t maneuver and turned sideways to the waves, the ship would quickly founder.  At left, is an image of a ship with storm staysails set.

Though explorers would later find evidence that a few survivors might have made their way to Livingston Island, there is no proof that any of crew survived the storm.  Even if a few of the crew managed to land on the island, they either eventually starved to death or died of exposure.

Meanwhile, in Peru, when word of loss of the ship reached Peru, the revolutionaries quickly took advantage of the situation.  Lord Thomas Cochrane, the daring British sailor who would become the model for the Horatio Hornblower series of books and movies as well as the Jack Aubrey novels, had left England to offer his services to the revolutionaries of Chile and Peru.  (Actually, Cochrane was in disgrace, falsely accused of crimes that he would later, in a typically courageous style, receive a pardon and return to England as a hero.)

Valdivia was one of the most fortified locations in South America, with a series of heavily armed forts guarding its approach by sea.  Known as the "Key to the Pacific," it was vital for Spain's control of the region.  The fortress was considered impregnable, with strong natural defenses and a heavily armed garrison.  The long-range guns of the fort were capable of destroying an approaching vessel long before an enemy ship could enter the harbor and turn to fire a broadside.  If troops were landed on shore, there were a series of small defensive forts surrounding the fortress.  Any attacking forces, denied a dock to unload, would only be able to land small cannons, no match for the powerful cannons in both the forts and the main fortress.

Cochrane, leading the newly formed Chilean Navy, devised a bold plan to surprise the Spanish defenders, one that relied on stealth, speed, and deception.  With only 300 marines aboard his flagship, the O'Higgins, and a small support vessel, he decided to use the loss of the San Telmo to his advantage.

Cochrane approached the port in darkness, using captured Spanish flags to disguise his ships as friendly.  Using signal flags, Cochrane claimed his ship contained reinforcements from the San Telmo.   Under cover of night, he landed his small force of marines far from the main fortress, marching them overland to launch a surprise assault on the least-defended positions.

Cochrane's men attacked the outermost forts one by one, moving swiftly to overwhelm the defenders.  Their element of surprise and disciplined aggression allowed Marines to capture each of the small forts before the Spanish could organize a counterattack.  Once all the outer defenses fell, Cochrane’s forces moved on the central fortress, which surrendered after realizing resistance was futile.

The loss of Valdivia was a major loss to the Spanish government and helped pave the way for Chilean Independence, after which the forces in Chile moved northward to help secure Peruvian Independence.  Linking up with the army of Simon Bolivar as he moved southward from Columbia and Venezuela, Spain eventually would lose Peru, too.

Like dominoes falling one by one, the loss of the San Telmo led to the loss of the Valdivia, which led to the loss of Chile and later Peru.  With the loss of the silver mines of South America, Spain, once the most powerful nation in Europe, was no longer even a second-rate power.  Though it would take another 80 years for the United States to deliver the final blow, the Spanish Empire was over.

How Did They Come Up with That?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When you find yourself in the thick of it,

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

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

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

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

City Founding

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Pencil

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Annual Bitch about Daylight Savings Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Astronomer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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