It’s Good to Be The Queen

Since it is Christmas, it is time for the annual message from Queen Elizabeth II, and as a semi-loyal ex-colonist….I listened to it.  It was, as expected pretty much as follows:

Yada, Yada, Yada….we are all in this together….Covid….We are inspired….next year.

It was a nice speech, and at 94, the Queen looked great and did it well.  I will admit to being a little partial to the Queen.  I’m not exactly a monarchist, but a woman who has dealt with a couple of dozen presidents and Prime Ministers, who slapped down Winston Churchill a few times, and is—extraordinarily—the last head of state in the world to wear a uniform during World War II, deserves a little respect.

Having said that, the Queen is not exactly in this with the rest of us.  If the rich are different from us, the Queen is different even from the rich.  According to Forbes, Jeff Bezos of Amazon is the richest person in the world at $230 billion (which shows you how incorrect Forbes can be).  The queen easily has several times the wealth of Bezos.  

I did a little back of an envelope figuring and not even bothering to list the assets worth less than a measly billion dollars, such as those piddly minor items like the shiny trinkets in the Tower of London or the diaries and notebooks of Queen Victoria.  I stopped adding up the big stuff when the total topped $505 billion.

The Queen owns BIG stuff…. like Antigua and a half dozen other Caribbean Islands.   And as the monarch, she owns the English seacoast and the seabed under the seas surrounding the country (In fact, she owns about 1.4% of all the land in the UK).  The value of mining rights to this property has been estimated at more than $100 billion.  And back in the 17th century, Charles I started a royal art collection every monarch since then has added to it.  Today, the collection consists of some 150,000 pieces, valued at more than $10 billion.  There are more than 600 Faberge eggs.

The monarch has six castles, three shopping centers, and more real estate than anyone could visit in a lifetime, over six billion acres.  And who cares?  That’s not the interesting stuff that fascinates me.  Because of tradition, archaic and forgotten laws, and the longevity of the royal family, the Queen owns some really cool stuff that you have probably never heard about.

On the vast Balmoral estate, valued at more than $50 billion, there is a bat colony.  These are not your regular cave dwelling bats—these bats inhabit Balmoral Castle.  While most property owners would chase them off, the Queen likes the bats and has ordered the castle staff to leave the windows open so the bats can come and go as they wish (except when she catches them in a butterfly net to release them outside).  Cool!—especially in winter.

Actually, the Queen owns a lot of animals.  Besides a stable of race horses—and the Ascot Racetrack—the queen owns a couple of Corgis, two black jaguars, a sloth, all the dolphins in the United Kingdom, and two giant Aldabra tortoises.  Though no one knows exactly how many of them there are—the queen owns all the swans on the River Thames.  And while she technically does not own all the mussels and oysters in Scotland, she does own the fishing rights to them.  

It is almost impossible to list all the incredible classic cars the Queen owns.  Evidently, the monarchy rarely sells any of their cars.  So, the girl who worked as a truck mechanic during the war, now owns three Rolls-Royces, two Bentleys, a couple of Aston Martins, and a gold Royal State Coach.  What the Queen may not own, however, is a driver’s license.  There is some question whether the license she was issued during the war is still valid.  In any case, she’s not likely to get a ticket.

I guess you could say that the Queen has her own money, since her picture is on it.  According the Guinness Book of World Records, her likeness has appeared on more currency than anyone else’s in history.  And if she needs access to any of that cash, her bank had conveniently installed her own personal ATM in the basement of Buckingham Palace.  I’m at a loss, however, to come up with a reason why she would ever need to get any cash.  If she wanted to sneak out of the palace one night for a hamburger, she could go to a nearby shopping center where she owns the local MacDonald’s franchise.  

The Queen’s grandfather, King George V, started a stamp collection in the 1890’s and when the public learned of the King’s hobby, he received large numbers of gifts to add to this collection.  The Royal Philatelic Collection is now the largest stamp collection in the Commonwealth, comprising hundreds of albums.  Leafing through the volumes must be sort of like looking at a family album, since a sizable portion of the stamps bear the image of someone in her family.

I have no idea how big the Queen’s closets must be, since she has an incredible collection of gowns and uniforms.  Besides her own clothes and an estimated 200 Launer handbags, she owns the wedding dress of Queen Victoria and the suit of armor for King Henry VIII.  And somewhere, she has to keep the 40 leather suitcases and 9 leather briefcases she travels with, each with a yellow luggage tag that says “The Queen”.  (You have to ask yourself why she bothers with the tags, it’s not like she has to identify her bags on an airport carousel.)

If you are wondering what the Queen carries in her handbag, you might be surprised to learn that she always has a camera with her to “take pictures of celebrities”.  And though it is now against the law in England, the Queen has carried a pocket knife in her purse since the days when she was a ‘Girl Guide’ in 1937. 

Regardless of how many luggage carts the Queen needs when she travels—she also owns the award for the “most-traveled head of state in history”.  Traveling over a million miles, she has been to over 120 countries—a list far too long for this blog so it’s far easier to just say she has not yet visited Madagascar, Cuba, Peru, or Israel.

Yet, despite all of her travels, there is one thing that the Queen does not own now and never has owned:  a passport.

The Atlantic Crossing

As soon as the sailboat rounded the point of land that for generations sailors had called “The Lizard”, Steve raised the sails and cut the small diesel engine.  With any luck, for the next three to six weeks, the crossing would be done with wind power alone.

As soon as the diesel died, Steve was struck by how comparatively quiet the boat was.  To be sure, there was still plenty of sound, but each sound meant something:  it was if the waves and the boat were talking to him (and it was not just the pounding racket of what his father had called the ‘iron spinnaker’).  

Steering south, Steve thought the 42’ ketch should reach the Canaries in roughly a week.  From there, it was roughly a month to Fort Lauderdale.  The long-range weather forecast was favorable—not that Steve really trusted it for more than a few days into the future—and as long as the November winds stayed favorable, the small boat should average roughly 7 knots throughout the crossing.

Steve made minute—and admittedly, probably unnecessary--adjustments to trim the sails, then reached a hand over to the instrument panel.  For long seconds, his hand hovered just over the switch, as if the hand itself, was unwilling to flip it on.  “Quit being stubborn,” he thought to himself and flipped the switch with more force than necessary.

For a moment, the only sign that the electronic brain was working was a green light on the instrument panel, then Steve heard the soft hum of electric motors as the autopilot adjusted the sails.  Steve felt, rather than saw, the bow of the ship move slightly to port.  For the next few weeks, Steve’s main job was to watch the computerized autopilot like a hawk, for all of the steering and navigation would be accomplished by a computer relying on GPS data provided by satellites circling the earth.

Steve’s main navigation job was to select the three waypoints for the computer to plot a course.  The first was 50 miles south of the Canary Islands, the second was the channel marker buoy outside Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and the third and last waypoint was a mile past the channel marker when manual control would be returned to him.  Other than hovering over the computer like a worried mother, Steve’s main jobs would be keeping an eye on the weather and feeding himself.  Well, that and the other endless maintenance jobs required by any vessel afloat. 

Though impressed with the accuracy of the new computerized system, Steve wasn’t really sure he trusted the new autopilot.  A writer by trade, Steve knew all about the old mechanical wind vane autopilots he had used ever since his father had taught him how to sail.  You could watch one of the old contraptions and within five minutes, could learn exactly how it worked and intuitively could know what it could and could not do.  A relatively simple system, its very simplicity inspired trust.  These new systems, however, bordered on magic.  At any given moment, the computer brain could tell you exactly where you were, your present speed, your average speed, and even make an accurate prediction of when you would arrive at your next waypoint.  But, the entire operation happened inside its little computer chips, something no captain of a ship could watch.

Steve had written an article praising the old mechanical steering systems for a popular sailing magazine, admitting his bias and stating that the main reason he didn’t like the new computerized steering systems was that he probably didn’t understand them.  He had pointed out that in the early days of sailing, man had trusted to magic to guide his ships.  Then for hundreds of years, sailors had increasingly used technology and math to navigate:  their compasses, sextants, and chronometers were scientific instruments.  Now, with computers and satellites whose workings you couldn’t see—it felt like a return to magic.

Almost immediately, one of the larger manufacturers of GPS navigation devices had made him a proposition he really couldn’t refuse.  The company would install a new computerized autopilot on his boat and would retrofit it to handle the automatic steering system, in return for which, Steve would sail his boat across the Atlantic, then write a new magazine article about the trip.  The magazine was equally enthusiastic and Steve really couldn’t afford to pass up the opportunity.

In due time, his boat was modified to accommodate the new system, the largest changes having been the installation of solar panels and additional storage batteries to power the system.  Unless the weather changed and the solar panels didn’t get enough sun to sufficiently recharge the batteries, it would probably not be necessary for Steve to start up the diesel motor at all.

While waiting for November (the start of the best season for Atlantic crossings), Steve had spent his time learning about the new self-steering system and planning for his crossing.  While this was his first solo crossing, he had been a crew member on a similar crossing three years earlier, as well as on numerous shorter trips between England and the Canary Islands.  Waiting for the weather to be right for a crossing, Steve had found himself increasingly excited about the trip.

Now, with the boat underway and being piloted by a computer that Steve both admired and feared, he decided to do something useful and eat lunch.  Making his way to the companionway leading below deck, he took the first two steps and disconnected the safely line from his harness.  Since Steve was sailing alone, he had no intention of taking a single step above deck without wearing the harness securely attached to the safety line.

The safety line was connected to a jackline that ran down the centerline of the ketch.  If he somehow still managed to fall overboard, the harness also had a CO2-inflatable flotation device.  He had once talked to the captain of an American Coast Guard Cutter who told him that fully half of the bodies the Coast Guard fished out of the Gulf of Mexico were men with the fly of their pants down.  The assumption was that the men had walked to the stern to relieve themselves when sudden motion of their boats had sent them overboard.  Steve had no intention of dying so foolishly.

Until he had rounded the Canary Islands, Steve had done little more than double check the systems, tracking the boat's progress on an old-fashioned paper chart.  Now, on course from there to Fort Lauderdale, Steve had twice inputted small corrections into the system to avoid squalls in the distance, neither of which was a serious threat to his crossing.  Steve knew that he had decided to input the two small detours into the system more to play with the computer than for any actual necessity.  He was forced to admit that he was having some doubts about who the captain of the vessel really was.

Five weeks into the crossing, Steve was just 5 nautical miles off the US coast when his cell phone rang for the first time in weeks.  Answering the call, Steve learned that the magazine had arranged for a photographer to meet him at the marina, Bahia Del Mar, in Fort Lauderdale.  For the first time since leaving Portsmouth, Steve suddenly thought about his appearance and how the photos would look in the magazine article.

Steve unclipped the safety line from his harness and rushed to the head to do a quick wash and shave—he would have to hurry, as the boat was nearing the next-to-last checkpoint, the channel marker buoy.  A single mile past that point, the self-steering system would turn itself off, returning manual control of the ship back to Steve.

Steve was on his hands and knees desperately searching the head’s small locker for his razor when the collision occurred.

Three weeks later, at the Coast Guard hearing in conjunction with the Broward County Sheriff, it was determined that the self-steering mechanism had (as it had been programmed to do 3,000 miles earlier), steered directly to—and right over—the channel marker buoy, rupturing the sailboat’s fiberglass hull in multiple locations.  The collision had probably knocked the captain of the sailboat—the only occupant—off his feet and knocking him unconscious.  He had drowned when the vessel sank in the channel within sight of the shore.

-------------------------

Note.  This is a work of fiction, based loosely—very loosely—on an actual accident that occurred near Fort Lauderdale about a decade ago.  And, the part about sailors falling off the sterns of their ships while relieving themselves?—It’s also true, unfortunately.

This blog was started 12 years ago on a whim that turned into a stubborn habit, and since then has become an obsession.  It so happens that the first story was about a sailboat.  Since this is the 600th entry in a row without missing a week, it felt only right to make up another story about a sailboat.

O Canada, O Canada

There is a great line in the movie Paint Your Wagons where Ben Rumson is discussing ethics with his partner, Clint Eastwood.  “I’ve coveted my neighbor’s wife whenever I had a neighbor and whenever he had a wife.”

This pretty much encapsulates America’s view on territorial expansion.  Far more often than is comfortable to recount, America has desired a little elbow room.  Call it empire building or manifest destiny, or whatever you like, but at one time or another America has seriously considered annexing all of North America and even parts further south.  

President Polk wanted to try Nicholas Trist—our negotiator to peacefully settle the Mexican-American War—for only acquiring California, Texas, and the rest of the Southwest to end an unjust war we started.  Polk thought such a puny settlement was treason, as he had wanted all of Mexico, at the very least.

Congress has at various times discussed annexing Cuba and the Dominican Republic, as well as making a state out of Puerto Rico.  One senator even took to the floor to make an impassioned speech that once the US flag had started “it’s march southward, it was inevitable that it would reach the southernmost tip of Argentina”.  And we have indeed invaded southward more often than most Americans realize.  The U.S. has invaded Mexico so many that times I’m kind of surprised our neighbors to the south aren’t the ones insisting on a wall.  We even invaded Mexico once with a streetcar.  

America has occasionally glanced northward with a little envy, too.  Everyone remembers the War of 1812, but that wasn’t the only time we tried to wrest Canada away from Great Britain.  

During the Civil War, both the North and the South tried to curry the favor of Great Britain.  The South desperately needed the English to continue to buy its cotton, to officially recognize the Confederate States of America, and perhaps most of all, to use the powerful British navy to keep Southern ports open for trade.  When the war started, the pitiful US Navy was more of a threat to itself than to any potential enemy.

The North, on the other hand, desperately wanted the English to stay neutral and not recognize the South.  As long as the Brits didn’t formally recognize the Confederacy, the merchants of England were forbidden by international treaty from selling military goods to the South.  Since establishing a naval blockade of Confederate ports was a major part of the North’s strategy, if the South could continue to export its cotton and import necessary military supplies, the chances of the South being successful in the war improved enormously.

If the South had really wanted to win, say if it were really focused on issues like state’s rights….All it had to do to gain British recognition was to abolish slavery.  Great Britain had fought the slave trade around the world and was never going to recognize the South until it emancipated its slaves.  And freed slaves could have been enticed to enlist and help relieve the manpower shortage hindering the Southern Army.  You know, if I didn’t know better, I’d almost think the South was just fighting to preserve slavery…

The Confederates couldn’t buy war goods from England, but they could buy non-military supplies.  Of course, there was the small problem of getting anything past that the growing number of Yankee ships guarding every port, making blockade running possible only if you had a sea captain with the skills of a Rhett Butler.  

Still, the South could purchase goods that weren’t going to be sent home...Say, a large, fast ship that had no cannons, but had empty gun ports, could be sailed to a different country where Confederate gold might buy black market cannons that could turn a peaceful ship into a powerful and fast warship.  Technically, the British merchants weren’t breaking any laws, just bending the crap out of them.  

Great Britain did everything it could to help the Confederacy without technically violating its neutrality.  It didn’t take a genius to see that the United States was growing more powerful with every passing year, and the prospect of splitting America into two nations would help assuage England’s growing fear of an enfant terrible just across the Atlantic Ocean.

So, the Confederacy bought ships in England, sailed them to the Azores and refitted them with cannons, turning fast merchant ships into warships.  These auxiliary cruisers or commerce raiders, like the CSS Alabama (right), were very successful in attacking unarmed Northern merchant ships.  In its first 21 months after being launched in England, the Alabama cruised 75K miles and took 64 Northern ships worth more than $6.5 million.  All this happened without its ever once getting within 100 miles of the South, much less the state of Alabama.  The Alabama was the most successful commerce raider among the small fleet the South developed using this same method.  The  US Navy was thus forced to divert ships from the blockade to patrol shipping lanes around the world.

After the end of the Civil War, the United States was a little angry with a few nations.  It was angry with France for violating the Monroe Doctrine and seizing Mexico while we were a little busy killing each other.  President Johnson sent 50,000 troops to the Southern border and suddenly Napoleon III decided to pull his troops out of Mexico.

Besides France, America was also a little peeved at Great Britain, for having sold the Confederacy ships that any fool would have known the South would convert to warships.  In the case of the Alabama, the American ambassador to England, Charles Francis Adams, son and grandson of American presidents—had explicitly warned Prime Minister Lord Palmerston not to allow the ship to be was Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.  Sumner demanded that Britain not only pay for the loss of the ships and cargo, but pay punitive damages for extending the Civil War and increasing the number of Americans who died.  For this, Sumner demanded that Great Britain pay $2 billion! 

Today, Washington throws money around in large denominations—a billion here, a trillion there—but in 1869, this was not only more money that Great Britain would pay, it was more than she could pay.  Senator Sumner understood this and had a simple solution—the United States would accept Canada in lieu of a cash payment.  

This was not quite as insane as it sounds.  Remember, just twenty years earlier, we had accepted California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and a chunk of Oregon in payment of a debt that Mexico didn’t really owe us.  And though a decade earlier, we could not have militarily enforced such a measure, after the Civil War, we momentarily had the largest navy and the most powerful army on Earth.  True, our navy was mostly a coastal defense force, but Canada was just up the coast.

The idea was popular with a number of politicians, even drawing the support of Secretary of State William H. Seward, who had just finished purchasing Alaska from Russia, and when it came to northern territories, Seward obviously wanted to collect the whole set.

The situation might have resulted in a war, but several things occurred that cooled down the situation.  First, the United States rapidly de-militarized, mothballing ships and disbanding army units.  By the middle of the 1870’s, the US Army was down to 17,500 men, making it slightly smaller than the Bulgarian army (or to put this in more modern terms, roughly equal to the number of servicemen that today are stationed in Anchorage, Alaska).  After the horrors of the Civil War, the American people were in no mood to fight a country in Europe.

In 1871, the United States and Great Britain signed the Washington Treaty, in which England paid $15 million to settle claims.  This is generally recognized as the beginning the “special relationship” between the two countries.  Since then, the United States has abandoned any plans to annex our northern neighbor.

For now.

A Sense of Decency

Every American deserves to feel secure in their vote, to believe that their vote was counted and that it wasn’t “stolen” or lost.  It is the duty of government to ensure that our votes are counted honestly and fairly.  And is the duty of every American to aid in this process.

Personally, though I live on the US-Mexico border and know quite a few immigrants, I don’t think the occasional immigrant voting illegally—either maliciously or mistakenly—is really a large enough problem to worry about.  I’m sure that voter fraud occasionally takes place, but not to an extent that it changes the outcome of any election.  And though I think requiring voter identification is a solution in search of a real problem, the practice is all right with me if it will help reassure voters and can be accomplished without suppressing voter participation.  If requiring voter ID will increase voter confidence in the process, I’ll play along.

Voting machines have been shown to be far more accurate than any paper voting system.  Eliminating human math errors while tabulating results pretty much ensures better voting accuracy.  Extensive studies have been done on whether the machines are more accurate than paper ballots, and the machines always come out on top.  But, there appear to be a number of people who think that these machines are being hacked by little green men in spaceships or something—so if it will make everyone feel more secure—let’s use paper ballots until the technophobes get over their irrational fear of overgrown adding machines.

I’m sure that somewhere a mail-in ballot was used by a recently deceased family member to send in an illegal vote.  I do not believe that people have ever gone to graveyards and written down the names of dead people so they could be used for fraudulent voting purposes.  The whole idea is ludicrous—there wouldn’t be enough recently dead people still on the voting rolls to matter, and if you are just looking for made up names to register—there has to be a better way to make up names than wandering around a cemetery with a clipboard.  Computer generated lists of random names are within the means of anyone with moderate technical skills and the everyone else could just use out of town phone books available at any public library.

There have been countless studies done trying to find any real proof that dead people have voted in any significant numbers—and it simply hasn’t happened.  Though having said this, I can guarantee that someone will write me telling be about a cousin who had a friend whose first job on the police department of a small Southern town in New York was to write down the names on tombstones…  But, I am certain no one will write me with hard evidence about an actual case.  

America needs to rest assured that we still have the most honest, fair, and accurate elections possible.  There are occasional errors:  after all, in the last election, over 167 million people voted.  If the odds of an accident happening were only one in a million, then there statistically had to be occasional errors.  Errors that most likely balanced themselves out.

Relax, America.  We can live with this and work together to improve our elections.

But, we cannot fix the problem if high ranking election officials—And yes, I mean President Trump—seek to further their chances in a future election by trying to convince us that this last election was stolen.  Or is it simply the need to be the center of attention that forces the President to scream about a fraud that never was?

Creating serious doubt—unfounded and ludicrous doubt—about the accuracy of our electoral process is not only immoral, it is deliberately damaging to the foundations that our society is built on.  As Edward R. Murrow once said, “Accusations are not proof.”

Trying to convince the governor of Georgia to overthrow the results of the election, while technically legal, is a heinous act.  And it’s fairly stupid, too, since the governor does not have the legal right to do so.  (Something that the governor, to his credit, has wisely admitted publicly).

During the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings, Senator Joseph McCarthy publicly defamed an innocent, good man to make political points.  And, in a nation that had more than grown weary of the constant chaos of McCarthyism, a brave man, Joseph N. Welch, finally said publicly what so many had been thinking.  Joseph N. Welch spoke for all of America when he asked the senator, “At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"

It is now time for someone, preferably in the Republican Party—a party long held hostage by a man who is obviously more concerned with himself than his country—to have another Road to Damascus moment and publicly denounce our president’s continued undermining of the democratic process.  

Mr. President, at long last, have you left no sense of decency?

Bottle Trees

You’ve seen them, and if you are from the South, you probably know someone who has one in their yard.  Take a tree (preferably a crepe myrtle) and start shoving empty bottles over the ends of the branches.  You can use blue bottles if you are a traditionalist, and damn near any color bottle if you’re more artistic.  The result is a Southern Bottle Tree.  

You’d be surprised at just how long man has been playing around with glass.  Long before he could make it himself, he could find small pieces of decorative clear glass in deserts, the remains of where meteorites that had exploded in the silica-rich sand millions of years earlier.  There were examples of this in King Tut’s tomb.

Man-made glass dates back to roughly 3500 B.C., in the Middle East, with the first hollow shapes created after 1600 B.C., in Egypt and Mesopotamia.  Glass production advanced dramatically, becoming an important trade good throughout the Mediterranean world.  By 100 A.D., clear glass was being produced in Alexandria and the Romans had begun mass producing both cast and free blown glass objects using tank furnaces that could hold as much as a ton of melted glass at a time.  

These early Roman bottles were obviously designed as much for their aesthetic appeal as for their utility.  The bottles range in color from pale blue-green to brown and are both spherical and bell shaped, with long tapering necks.  Several of the bottles have a separate decorative rope lip applied around the mouth...And those mouths may be the start of the real story of our bottle trees.

The wind blowing over the tops of those bottles produced an eerie sound that had to be obviously the work of demons and evil spirits.  This is roughly about the same time that the stories of genies in bottles started appearing.  And then, poor Jeannie had to wait over a thousand years for Major Nelson to show up and…. Oops!  Wrong story!

The bottles—and the belief in trapped spirits—made their way south into Africa, eventually reaching the Congo, where there was already a custom of decorating the graves of family members with plates and various household goods.  It was here that the custom of bottle trees was born.  And when slaves were brought to the new world, they brought the custom with them.

The “logic” of bottle trees is easy to understand.  The light of the sun shone through the glass, attracting the evil spirits lurking around houses.  Once inside, the spirits were caught like flies in a bottle, unable to find their way out again before the intense sunlight killed them.  Think of it as home security—spirit-catching bottle trees around a house would protect you from evil.

It didn’t take long before the plantation slaves were placing bottles on trees, especially crepe myrtle trees (probably because the crepe myrtle is linked in the Old Testament with slaves seeking their freedom).  And the custom spread and endures to this day.

Before some damn Yankee writes me about the quaint customs of hillbillies, I should point out that at the same time those stories of genies spread south into Africa, a related custom was spreading north into Europe, eventually reaching England.  Witch balls were round glass balls containing a single strand of hair or string.  Hung in windows to catch the morning light, an inquisitive witch would enter the ball and become entangled with the strand of hair, unable to escape before the sun killed them.  European immigrants brought the custom to New England, where they are still being made three hundred years later.  Sometimes these witch balls are called ‘watch balls’ or ‘gazing balls’ and are the source of those strange shiny bowling ball thingys you can see atop pedestals in people’s yards.

If you spend fifteen minutes online looking at photos of bottle trees, you’ll notice that about half of them use only blue bottles—cobalt blue bottles.  About five thousand years ago, someone accidentally noticed that if you added little lumps of various metals to molten glass, you got pretty colors.  I can just picture it:  Groups of Bronze Age glass makers running around trying to find something different and interesting to throw into the vat of molten glass to see what would happen.  (Was this one of the first, “Here—Hold my beer and watch this!” moments?).  Eventually, someone tried a lump of brittle gray cobalt—and got a brilliant blue cobalt glass for his trouble.

I’ll bet a dollar that you didn’t know the word cobalt came from the German word, kobald, which means “demon”.  Unfortunately for this story, the Germans named it for the bad spirit that gave them lung ailments when they tried to refine the silver containing cobalt.  It would have been so cool to picture early Germans placing empty bottles of Liebfraumilch onto trees…  Nah, it won’t stretch.

Today, you can generally tell the age of a bottle tree by looking at the bottles on the branches.  If there is a pretty blue, rectangular bottle—then it was made before 1980—back when the Phillips company was still selling Milk of Magnesia in glass bottles.  If there is a straight-sided Skyy Vodka bottle up there in the branches, it was made after 1992.

Bottle trees are the epitome of Southern folk art…. Well, they were the epitome for a couple of hundred years.  Today, they are so popular, you can find them just about anywhere, including in all fifty states.  I spent a little time amusing myself doing Google searches like “Boston Bottle Tree”.  (There are eight there.... And there are twelve in New York City).  You can find them in London, Paris, and Hong Kong.  Well, to be fair, I couldn’t actually find one on display in Hong Kong, but they make them there and sell them on Amazon.

I doubt that very many people are still making bottle trees in order to to catch evil spirits.  (If they were, they’d be all over Washington D.C.)  Maybe bottle trees are popular because Eudora Welty, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, took a photo of a bottle trees in front of an old Southern house.  The image inspired the short story Livvie, where she wrote:

Solomon had made the bottle trees with his own hands over the nine years, in labor amounting to about a tree a year, and without a sign that he had any uneasiness in his heart, for he took as much pride in his precautions against spirits coming in the house as he took in the house, and sometimes in the sun the bottle trees looked prettier than the house did.

Maybe.  Or maybe bottle trees are so popular today because, like the artist Jenny Pickford said, she is “holding glass up to the light, where it can sing.”

About Time to Shove the Cob

Enema U is an ag school, so I guess technically, I’m an Aggie.  Yeah, I’ve heard all the Aggie jokes.  (Did you hear about the Aggie coyote that got caught in the trap?  Chewed off three legs and was still caught in the trap.)  

Strangely, about the only people who ever tell me Aggie jokes or even use the word around me are university administrators hired from back east who are obviously a little embarrassed at finding themselves working at Harvard on the Rio Grande.  These are the people who sign their constant stream of nonsensical email with the phrase, “Go Aggies!”  

While the vast majority of faculty and students at Enema U have never been within a hundred yards of a tractor, it is still hard to spend a few decades at an agricultural school without learning something about growing crops.  I guess if you went back in time and plucked up a reasonably intelligent Neanderthal and dropped him down in the middle of a modern nuclear power plant for thirty or so years, he would eventually figure out a few things.  That’s me—an agricultural Neanderthal.

I’ve learned a few things about corn, probably the most genetically modified crop grown today.  At archaeology sites, I’ve seen some ancient examples of what corn used to be like.  Most people would not even recognize corn’s cultigen (original form).  Looking more like bumpy okra that corn, the cob was originally only a few inches long and had only five rows of tiny kernels.

Thousands of years ago, some farmer must have noticed that one of the ears of corn in his crop had seven rows instead of five and wisely decided to save it for seed.  Over a long time, such tiny selective processes have led to the monster ears of corn I like to roast in my BBQ grill.  (As Nero Wolfe said, people who boil ears of corn should themselves be boiled.)  

What originally got me to thinking about all of this was a conversation I had with my neighbor, Chuck—who is also an Aggie (though I think of him more as an autodidact).  We were talking about mechanization of troops in WWII, which eventually led us to discussing the rapid adaptation of tractors in the 20th Century.  If we hadn’t run short of beer...and if our good friend, Jack, had been present...we eventually would have balanced the national budget and brought about peace in the Middle East.

For some reason, people seem to believe that when new technology is invented, the old tech magically vanished instantly.  Worse, some politicians think that by outlawing the old tech, they can speed the adoption of new technology.  (California’s banning new gasoline-powered cars will not cause a dramatic increase in sales of electric vehicles, it will cause a dramatic increase in the sale of gasoline cars in neighboring states.)  In any case, the incorporation of tractors in farming was slower than most people think.

Among the “benefits” of the mechanization of farming wasn’t just the increase in efficiency:  mechanization also dramatically increased the amount of land being used to grow food for the table.  Before tractors, fully 40% of the cropland in America was being used to grow fodder for draft animals.  As the use of tractors grew, increasingly more of that land was used for the production of human food stuffs, which, while it dropped prices for consumers, also brought about agricultural overproduction that aggravated the Great Depression.

Eventually, Americans found markets for the surplus...which was good...but they also found other uses for the surplus, such as for corn, and this has turned out to be something of a problem.  Slowly, more and more corn was used to produce ethanol and high fructose corn sugar.  Today, the vast majority of corn production is used for these two products, so that the area of farmland used to produce corn  is roughly the size of California and 40% of that is to grow corn for the ethanol industry.

Ethanol production has not proved to be the environmental solution that most of us were promised.  It is bad for most engines, it is more expensive to produce than gasoline, and perhaps worst of all, it has totally warped the political landscape of the United States.  As every American is currently (and somewhat painfully) aware, presidential politics revolve around the Electoral College, which means that candidates must do well in the early primaries (particularly in Iowa, the golden buckle of the Corn Belt).

Every politician, whether Democrat or Republican, who hopes to do well in Iowa eagerly takes the Corn Pledge.  That’s a political promise to continue government subsidies for corn.  Today, largely because of the political power of the Midwest states in determining early primary races, the federal government spends more on subsidizing corn through direct payments, tax credits, low cost crop insurance, and subsidies for ethanol production, than on any other crop.  This is currently about $100 billion a year.  With these subsidies, corn is profitable, prompting even more farmers to switch their agricultural production from foodstuffs to non-food corn, slowly raising the prices of the food.  Today, corn is produced in all fifty states, and every year the total number of acres producing corn increases about 3%.

As more and more of the Midwest is devoted to producing a single crop, the risk to the economics of the agricultural community increases.  A bad year resulting from a worse than normal drought, a crop disease, or a flood would mean wide-scale disaster to the entire industry, and enormous cost to the taxpayers (who fund the federal crop insurance).

In addition, there are indirect costs of corn production:  Roughly six million tons of nitrates from fertilizer annually wash down the Mississippi River into the Gulf of Mexico, helping to produce a “dead zone” that is seven thousand square miles this year.  This growing dead zone kills fish, shrimp, and oysters, raising the price of seafood to the consumer.  And every year, America’s burgeoning corn crop requires the use of more groundwater than the year before.

Worse, while ethanol is “cleaner” than gasoline, that is not the whole story.  To produce really large and profitable crops, corn farmers must use a lot of fertilizer, pesticides, and herbicides—all of which require even more petroleum for their production, transportation, and application.  Further, for reasons that are too involved for this blog, processing corn releases a lot of carbon into the atmosphere.  Increasingly, economists who have studied the net result of all of this have concluded there is little, if any, benefit to the environment from switching to ethanol.

The worst part of all of this is that the type of corn grown for ethanol and high fructose corn syrup isn’t even edible.  It’s a special variety of corn that you would have to boil for a day to get it soft enough to chew, and even then, it would have no flavor.  Even an Aggie knows this  stuff is not only not meant for humans, it hardly qualifies to be called corn.  

But, I’m just a poor dumb ol’ country boy:  Maybe you should ask a real Aggie.

The Queen of Washington D.C.

As we begin to once again change the occupants of the White House, we are starting to see stories about both outgoing and incoming First Ladies.  Predictably, not all of the stories are either complimentary or even kind, as if is okay to blame the wives of presidents for the political policies of their husbands.

Being the First Lady has to be right down there on the shit list of the most horrible jobs imaginable—somewhere between being Wolverine’s proctologist and Donald Trump’s speechwriter.  No one would want to volunteer to do that rotten job, much less be forced into the role by an overly ambitious spouse.  Still, the job today is better than it used to be, and for that we can thank the woman who really created the role—Dolley Madison.

Dolley, Dolly, Dollie--no matter how you spell her first name, you’re probably correct, as even Mrs. Madison kept changing the spelling.  This was back in a glorious time when only the truly ignorant could only think of one way to spell a word.  And technically, in Dolley’s day, you didn’t refer to the wife of the president as the First Lady, a term that didn’t exist until President Zachary Taylor used the term to refer to Dolly at her funeral.  While her husband was president, society was still debating exactly what term to use—Presidentess or Presidentress were considered before a more informal title was used, Queen Dolley.

During the two terms of President Washington, his wife Martha worked diligently to make her role the social head of the government.  Though she staged parties, as the wife of the president, she eschewed European fashions, wearing instead homespun American clothing envisioning her role as making the head of a new socially conscious American government.  Her successor, Abigail Adams, had a different vision, and sought to make her role as the political partner of her husband, the President.  

The Adams were the first to live in the newly completed White House, and perhaps the city of Washington was just not yet up to the role of grand capital.  The streets were rutted muddy swamps with vast open distances between the few buildings and houses.  Poor Abigail had to hang the laundry up in the East Wing to get anything to dry.

Thomas Jefferson was a widower, and once again, had a different idea about White House parties—mostly, he didn’t want any.  Nor was Jefferson a great believer in bipartisan efforts, usually inviting the men of his party to the White House—without their wives—to argue and hammer out policy.  Then Jefferson would invite the men of the opposition to the same kind of meeting.  The results were predictable—fistfights and the occasional duel and damn near no cooperation between the parties.  Believing that formal protocol and courtly fashions had no place in a democracy, Jefferson went out of his way to act informally, frequently answering the front door in slippers and casual clothing—a deliberate ploy to demonstrate that he thought that even the President

 should be a common man.

Even Jefferson had to host a few parties a year where the wives were invited, and the customs of the time required the president to have a female hostess as a chaperone.  When this happened, he usually asked the wife of his Secretary of State—Dolly Madison—to handle the chore.  Jefferson’s biographers are still debating whether he didn’t know proper protocol or was just deliberately ignoring it to make a political point.  At a state dinner, the President was supposed to take the arm of the British ambassador’s wife and escort her to dinner, but chose instead to escort Dolly.  Anthony Merry, the British ambassador was so indignant at the insult, called the Merry Affair, that he arranged a social boycott among the European diplomatic corps.  Jefferson ignored them and eventually the affair was dropped.

After Jefferson, James Madison became the president and he and his wife moved in to finally begin the process of turning the White House into a home suitable for the functions required by the head of state.  For the first time, the government bought furniture for the building and began decorating it for the state dinners and social functions that had to be conducted there, all under the personal supervision of Dolley Madison.  In essence, she was the first wife of a president to realize that the job required the social functions of Martha Washington and the political partnership of Abigail Adams.  Washington benefitted greatly from this, and during these parties a lot of important business was conducted.

Dolley ignored the American homespun cloth, and imported French silk for her gowns, which were cut scandalously low.  Much like Jacquelyn Kennedy, who later admitted Dolley was her inspiration, Dolly Madison was a fashion trendsetter.  Under her guidance, the large drafty Executive Mansion became a stylish home that hosted large and formal parties.

Unfortunately, this was work she had to do twice, as we all know that during the War of 1812, the British burned the White House as poor Dolley fled after rescuing the famous Washington portrait.  Well, sort of...Actually, she had the White House slaves gather up the best china and some important papers (including her husband’s notes on drafting the Constitution), sending everything away on carts.  While the slaves were doing the real work, Dolley was writing a letter to her sister, detailing the events.  (Not that it matters, but the Washington portrait that Dolley saved was a copy.)

While the White House was being rebuilt, the Madisons moved into the Octagon House, about two blocks from the ruined executive mansion.  This house survived the general destruction because the owners had arranged to have the French flag flown on the building, indicating it was part of the French embassy.  The British were temporarily at peace with the French, so they left the house standing.

After the Madisons left the White House, they returned to their beloved home, Montpelier.  Following the death of her husband, Dolley eventually moved back to Washington, becoming something of the social queen of the city, famous for her ability to work with politicians from both parties.  The House of Representatives, in recognition of her bipartisan work, gave her an honorary seat in Congress.  When Henry Clay said, “Everyone loves Dolley Madison,” she answered, “That is because she loves everyone.”

Dolley Madison was famous for creating conditions in which the two parties could work together, both formally and informally.  Perhaps it is time for a little more of the Madison spirit—and a little less of the Jefferson system—to return to Washington.

Once Upon a Time In Westerns

The other night, The Doc and I were watching the new Tarantino movie and I had a hell of time figuring out who was who.  I’m face blind, and as far as I can tell, about half of the actors in all Hollywood movies are Brad Pitt, and this movie actually had Pitt in it, and Leonardo DiCaprio was his stunt double and made up to look just like him—unless it was the other way around—so the plot was sort of hard for me to follow at times.

To me, it looked like Brad Pitt was in all the movie scenes, except occasionally, when he was joined by Brad Pitt.  I was very surprised not to see Scarlett Johansen, since she is in almost every other movie I watch.  (Brad Pitt would understand all of this, since he, too, is face blind.)

What I did notice however, were the horses in the Western scenes.  I have no idea how many different horses were used in total, but most of the scenes featured the same three bays and a single sorrel.  There was even one particular scene where Brad Pitt was talking to Brad Pitt, and both were seated in front of what looked like a crowded corral of horses—BUT, if you watched carefully, there was a guy in the corral that would walk across the screen from the left leading a bay followed by a sorrel, then he walks back the other way leading the sorrel followed by a couple of bays….  If you pay attention, there are even a couple of scenes where Brad Pitt is riding the sorrel.  

It’s a good movie, Brad should get an Oscar for Best Actor.  And another one for Best Supporting Actor.  (The Doc just told me the movie came out last year and Brad Pitt got an Oscar for Best Producer.)

As a child of the fifties and sixties, with about a zillion hours of television under my belt, I have a Ph.D. in Westerns, so I have always known that it wasn’t all that strange to see the same horse in several different television shows.  Matt Dillon, for example, rode the same buckskin horse in Gunsmoke as Ben Cartwright in Bonanza.  Thankfully, so as not to confuse the poor animal, he was named Ol’ Buck on Saturday night in Kansas and just plain Buck when he was in Nevada on Sunday nights.  And Little Joe’s appaloosa would occasionally wander off the set of Bonanza and appear on The Virginian.  

If you looked close, a lot of movies in the early fifties featured Roy Roger’s Trigger.  Occasionally, the horse even showed up in the credits, but never using his real name.  Trigger was a stage name; the palomino was registered as Silver Cloud.

A few Western stars actually owned their own horses.  Besides Roy and Trigger, Dale Evans owned Buttermilk.  (This prompted the show’s co-star, Gabby Hayes to call Dale ButterButt on the set.)  Tom Mix owned Tony, Gene Autry owned Champion, and Hopalong Cassidy owned Topper.  

You could just about fill a phonebook with all the horses that John Wayne rode in various movies.  Wayne was pretty candid about the fact that he was not exactly a horse lover, though he was a good rider and spent a considerable amount of time in the saddle.  The only movie horse that he actually liked was one called Dollar, a chestnut quarter horse Wayne rode in several of his last movies.  Wayne, like most actors didn’t actually own the horse—by the time a horse was trained enough to stand the noise and confusion of movie set, the trainers were very reluctant to sell their talented animals.  Though Wayne claimed he didn’t particularly like horse, he did arrange for an exclusive contract so that no other actor could use Dollar in a movie.   And in several movies (in particular, The Shootist), Wayne had the script altered so the horse would be mentioned by name. 

The Duke wasn’t the only actor to get attached to his horse, when Bonanza ended, Lorne Greene was afraid that Buck would end up in the glue factory—the poor animal had been hauling two big men around the West for almost two decades and his career was about over.  Greene bought the horse and arranged for the animal to be used in horse riding therapy classes.   Buck lived longer than some of the stars that had ridden him, passing away at the age of 49—an unusually long life for a horse.

Perhaps no actor formed as close a bond with his equine co-star as James Stewart and a sorrel named Pie.  If you’ve watched a western with Jimmy Stewart, chances are you have seen Pie—they were together in at least 17 movies.  The exact number is a little confusing, since officially, the last movie Pie was in was Bandolero, but you can clearly see the horse (right) in Cheyenne Social Club, released two years later, when the horse was at least 30 years old.  Let’s just say the two were together a long, long time.

Stewart didn’t own Pie, though he tried to buy the horse multiple times.  The owner, a young girl whose family had been training horses all the way back to the days of Tom Mix and William S. Hart refused to sell the animal, since they made their living hiring the horse out to lots of assorted movies and television shows.  The sorrel was a trifle small for a quarter horse, and was supposedly difficult to ride—he almost killed Glenn Ford by running deliberately into a tree.

With Stewart, however, Pie was a different animal; the actor claimed the horse understood the business of making movies and always hit his mark, standing still until the shot was over.  In one famous episode, Pie was supposed to slowly walk down the middle of the street without a rider.  On the day of the shot, the trainer wasn’t around, so Stewart simply explained what was needed to the horse, who did his solo scene flawlessly.  You can see the scene for yourself in the 1954 movie, The Far Country.  

While they were filming their last movie together, Pie was obviously in bad health.  Stewart’s co-star, Henry Fonda was a talented amateur artist and while they were filming in Santa Fe, Fonda painted a portrait of Pie for his friend.  Shortly after the painting was finished, Pie passed away.  Though Stewart didn’t own the horse, he arranged for a private burial of the horse at an undisclosed location, so that no one would be able to bother the grave.   

It’s kind of sad that we don’t make many Westerns any more.  There probably aren’t that many trainers devoting the years it takes to produce horses like Pie, any more.  Out of work horses should start a union.

And I can already hear the criticism from my own family, “How can you tell these damn horses apart and you can’t remember which granddaughter you’re looking at?”

The horses are bigger and have four legs.

Strange Things I’ve Learned Studying Art

Now that I’ve been studying art history, I’ve noticed that it is hard to stop being a historian.  I find myself frequently studying the artist’s personal history more than the aesthetics of the artist’s work.  Though it is just a subtle difference, I’m probably doing it wrong.  

Take Vincent Van Gogh, for example: I spent a couple of days reading about whether or not he was murdered or committed suicide, despite the fact that there is no way to definitively prove it one way or the other.  (Though the lack of gunpowder residue on his hands is very interesting:  It is almost impossible to fire a black powder weapon without having…. there I go again.)

Van Gogh was assuredly batshit crazy, with more than one infamous example of looney behavior to prove it.  He once put his hand directly over a candle, threatening to leave it there until his first cousin (who by all accounts was terrified of him) agreed to marriage.  This might have been an interesting experiment had not her father simply blown out the candle and banished Vincent from the house.

You have to wonder if Van Gogh’s streetcar hadn’t originally jumped the tracks, so to speak, at a young age.  On his daily walk to school, Vincent passed a grave where a tombstone bore his own name.  The grave was that of his own brother, who had died before the artist was born, and his parents gave their next child the same name.

This recycling of names may indeed warp the sanity of artists.  Salvador Dali not only carried the name of a deceased older brother, but his parents both encouraged and shared his lifelong belief that he was the reincarnation of his brother.  

The backstory about art frequently fascinates me more than the actual art.    I’ve written several times about how art has changed hands because of wars or royal marriages, and I confess to being fascinated by art forgeries and art theft.  A good example would be the Mona Lisa.  The painting itself is rather boring and every time I see a copy of it, I wonder why the artist never gave the poor woman any eyebrows.  But, the idea that the only men in history who could claim the painting as their personal property are the artist, the King of France, Napoleon, and the Italian peasant who stole it and admired it in his one room apartment, is endlessly fascinating.  

Or take the work of Christo for example:  As an artist, Christo is known for huge extravagant works of art, such as building a cloth wall 24.5 miles long, constructing floating Styrofoam bridges linking islands, or erecting 3,100 blue umbrellas in California—then moving the whole installation to Japan.  Hell, if the artist had lived long enough, he would have filled the Grand Canyon with multicolored ping-pong balls and wrapped the moon in purple chiffon.  His works were outrageous and challenged even a poor dumb ol’ country boy like me to think about what is art.

Note.  Christo did not work alone, for most of his professional life he was partnered with his wife.  Properly, the work should be credited to Christo Vladimirov Javacheff and Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon.  And now, you know why their work is usually just credited to Christo.

For all his grandiose projects, when I think of art, the piece that first comes to mind is that of a simple wheelbarrow.  In the late Fifties, Christo began to create artwork that consisted of wrapping objects.  Called the work his Inventory, his first object was to wrap a simple can of spray paint.  Over time, the objects kept increasing in size and complexity.  Christo died this last May, before his last great installation could be completed, but the project is going forward in his memory.  If all goes well, about this time next year L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped will be ready for viewing—assuming that someday the virus will be gone and we get to travel to Paris again.

In November, 1963, however, Christo was still doing relatively smaller objects and had not yet earned an international reputation.  After blocking a Paris alley with 240 barrels, a work he called Berlin Wall, Christo was invited to have a show at the Galleria del Leone, in Venice, the only contemporary art gallery in the city at that time.  Gallery workers were surprised when Christo arrived with more tools than finished pieces, obviously intending to create new work for the show.

In the courtyard of the gallery, Christo spotted an aging wheelbarrow, the metal tarnished and rusting, the wood splintered and stained by the countless loads the wheelbarrow had transported.  The handles were worn smooth by the rough hands of the workmen who had used it over the years.   Having escaped oppressive Communist rule in Bulgaria, Christ identified with the wheelbarrow—it, too, was a stateless nomadic object constantly on the move. 

Christo wrapped a formless old mattress in an opaque cloth, securing the bundle in the wheelbarrow with rough ropes.  He called the work, Package On Wheelbarrow.  Christo is challenging the viewer’s imagination.

The gallery put the work in the window, and it rather quickly drew lots of criticism, some of it from other galleries who thought a common wheelbarrow was not a fitting display on a street where the other gallery windows displayed some rather expensive art work.  It was more of an assault on the economics of the art world than the aesthetics.

That type of criticism was to be expected, but the gallery was surprised to learn that the Bishop of Venice was also deeply offended.  Eventually, the Bishop ordered the local police to close the gallery, which they did under the pretext of claiming the gallery was acting dishonestly for presenting a common tool of a workman as an object of art.  Only after several appeals was the gallery allowed to reopen, and then only after they had removed the offending wheelbarrow.  

The real reason the show was halted and the wheelbarrow was removed was simply because the bishop claimed the unknown wrapped object was “obscene”.  And, every time I hear about Christo, my mind races to that wheelbarrow and I ask myself the same unanswerable question:

Just what the hell did the bishop think was wrapped up in that tarp?

A Day in the Park

It was a beautiful fall day, and as his destination was only a few blocks past the other side of Central Park, the man decided to forego using the subway and enjoy a walk in the park.

Taking a short cut across the center of the park loosely paralleling 72nd Street, he was only about a hundred yards into the park when he spotted the man in the electric wheelchair, squarely centered in the middle of the path.  As he got closer, he noticed that the man was pushing hard against the large rear wheels of the chair, desperately trying to get the stalled chair to move forward.

As he walked closer, he asked, “Having a problem?”

“Yes, my chair just stopped and now everything is dead.  I think it’s an electrical problem, but I can’t disengage the gears.  I’ve got to meet my sister in front of the museum.”  Once again, the chair-bound man used both of his arms to push on the wheels on either side of his chair, but only managed to move the heavy chair forward about a foot.

Looking past the wheelchair, the man could see the top of the Museum of Natural History directly ahead, but it was still more than halfway across the park.  Looking at his watch, he realized that he still had some time left before his appointment, and he really couldn’t ignore the plight of the man in the chair.

“Hi, my name’s Jack.  Let me give you a hand.”  

Walking behind the chair, he grasped the two handles and pushed towards the museum in the distance.  Immediately, he was surprised to see that despite pushing forcefully against the chair, it would just barely move.

“Thank you.  I’m Ben.  I really appreciate this, I don’t know what I would do if I missed my sister.  We’re visiting and I don’t know this city at all.”

Grunting with effort, Jack leaned into the chair, pushing as hard as he could.  Though the chair moved, it felt like the chair had no wheels, and that he was pushing a boulder across the sidewalk.

“Can you disengage the motor or something? It just barely moves.”

“It doesn’t release,” Ben answered.  “This is a new chair, and everything is electric, even the transmission.  I don’t know what’s wrong.”

Jack continued to push the chair, but it was slow hard work and no one was volunteering to help.  “Damn,” Jack thought.  “I can’t leave him now, but this is impossible.”

Little by little, the two men and the chair inched down the sidewalk, getting closer and closer to Central Park West.  As they inched past the Turtle Pond, Jack glanced between the trees and noticed a man admiring the statue of the two lovers.

Standing alone in a small clearing, the wizard admired the statue of a pair of lovers, a man and a woman holding hands, staring lovingly into each other’s eyes.  Just by looking at the pair, he could tell that the sculptor had managed to capture a moment in time:  the two were just about to fall into each other’s embrace and share a kiss.

Year in and year out, through all the seasons, the pair were the epitome of unfulfilled love.  Everyone could see the beauty of a great love in their eyes, but, being especially empathetic, the wizard could feel the endless sadness that the two lovers could never complete that for which they had desperately yearned for years.

Though the wizard had frequently admired the statue, today he had a little free time on his hands.  It was a beautiful fall day, and the wizard was in an exceptionally good mood.  As he walked closer to the statue, he was suddenly overwhelmed by the pathos of the pair and acted impulsively.   

Glancing around, he discovered that, except for a man focused on pushing a wheel chair down the sidewalk, he was completely alone.   Drawing his wand out from beneath his jacket, he waved the wand towards the two lovers.

“AD VITUM!”, he chanted.

And instantly, the statues began to move, as the pair of lovers awakened, as if from a deep sleep, coming to life.

“My friends,” said the wizard.  “I am afraid that even my magic can only give you life for a single hour.  I suggest you use your time wisely.”

Immediately, the two lovers giggled and jumped behind some nearby bushes. For quite a while, all the wizard heard was the rustling of the bushes and quiet happy giggles.  Respecting their privacy, the wizard waited on a nearby bench, satisfied that finally the two young lovers would find happiness together.

Finally, the two lovers, hand in hand, came out of the bushes with big smiles on their faces.

“I see you have used your time well," said the wizard. "But, you still have almost 30 minutes left if you would like to do it again.”

With huge smiles on their faces, the pair nodded their heads and hurriedly jumped back behind the bushes.  "This time," the male statue said, "You hold the pigeon down while I shit on him."

Meanwhile, Jack had sweated through his shirt, but they were finally nearing the museum. He could hardly believe that he had pushed this cumbersome chair all the way across the middle of the park.  

“Where are you going to meet your sister?” Jack asked.  He really didn’t want to push that impossible chair a foot further than he had to.

“She said to meet her in front of the museum and we could go look at the paintings together,” Ben answered.  “She’s an art historian.”

Jack froze and the chair stopped moving instantly.

“Art work?  This is the Museum of Natural History.  There’s no artwork in there.  Was she meeting you here or at the Metropolitan Museum of Art?”  Even as Jack said the words, he knew what the answer was going to be.

“She was going to meet me at the art museum.  But, I didn’t know where it was.”

Jack bent over, putting his hands on his knees, breathing deeply.

“This is Central Park and the Met is on one side of the park and the Natural History Museum is on the other side, on Fifth Avenue, pretty close to where we started.”

Ben, obviously upset, answered, “What am I going to do?  I have to meet my sister...”

“I have an idea,” Jack interrupted.  It was an idea born of desperation, for he knew damn well he could never push that damn wheelchair back across the entire park.  Pulling his wallet from his back pocket, he pulled a couple of bills out and thrust them into Ben’s hands.

“Look, I have to go, but New York has special wheelchair accessible taxis.  You’re on Central Park West, and it should be no problem to flag one down.  Have them take you to either the Met or back to your hotel.”

And with that, Jack rushed off, while behind him, Ben was profusely thanking him.

Ben continued to watch the man rush off as he pocketed the bills.  Wondering why the men never looked back, he slid his right hand under the armrest and flipped the recessed switch.  Immediately, the chair began to hum and slightly vibrate.  Resting a single finger on the joystick, Ben quickly maneuvered the chair around and moved a hundred yards back into the park, stopping in the middle of the sidewalk where he had a good view of the top of the three-story Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Once again flipping off the power to the chair, Ben thought to himself, “It really is another beautiful day in the park.”

They Had It Coming

I love the musical Chicago.  It’s a great play, a good CD for the car, and I even enjoyed reading the play, but none of that compares to watching the movie starring Renée Zellweger, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Richard Gere.  

Yes, I know the movie is almost twenty years old, but let’s face it—there is kind of a shortage of good movies being released this year.  And since next year’s movies aren’t being filmed right now…  I suppose that we will have to get used to the old movies, and Chicago is as good a place to start as any.

There is one scene that always gets me:  the musical number, the Cell Block Tango, where the prison inmates are all singing “He had it coming!”.  Watch Catherine Zeta-Jones face as she sings it—I have no trouble at all believing that she could kill an unfaithful lover.  If filming Fatal Attraction, didn’t convince Michael Douglas to stay faithful, that number should. It is also worth remembering that the actress filmed all those difficult dance numbers while pregnant, deserving more than the Oscar she earned for her performance.  (And if that doesn’t impress you, she performed one of the dance routines the night of the Oscars, just ten days before the baby was born.)

Watching the movie got me to wondering, is any of it true?  

Maurine Dallas Watkins wrote Chicago in 1926, originally titled as Brave Little Woman, as a homework assignment while attending Yale Drama School.  The first thing every writer learns is to write what you know, and in this case, Watkins had been the beat reporter covering crime for the Chicago Tribune for eight months.  (No: The character Mary Sunshine was not a self-portrait—it was the author’s way of making fun of her female colleagues that Watkins believed were suffering from a near fatal case of bleeding heart because of their seemingly endless stories about young women becoming victims of “hot jazz and cold gin.”)

Watkins modeled the play after two spectacular crimes she had covered for the newspaper.  The first was that of Beulah May Annan.  (Try really hard not to think Roxie Hart as you read the next couple of paragraphs.)  Beulah was born in Kentucky and came to Chicago with her second husband, who worked as a mechanic at a garage.  Beulah worked as a laundress and was soon having an affair with Harry Kalstedt, a bookkeeper at the laundry.

One night, in the bedroom she shared with her husband, she shot and killed Kalstedt.  Exactly what happened depends on which story Watkins told, but the gist of it was there was a gun on the bed and while fearing for her honor and/or her life, they both reached for the gun and she was little quicker.  Since Kalstedt was shot in the back….Well, the police were a little skeptical.

It didn’t help Beulah’s flimsy alibi that, after shooting her lover, she sat down and listened to a foxtrot record, “Hula Lou”, for four hours while drinking cocktails and smoking cigarettes.  Four hours is about the time the coroner estimated that it took for Kalstedt to die while his moans and cries for help were drowned out by the sound of the foxtrot.

Somehow, her husband believed her, paid for an attorney (emptying his bank account) and stood faithfully by when Beulah said at her trial that Kalstedt had tried to kill her after she told him she was pregnant by him, forcing her to defend herself and her unborn child.  The jury believed her, and found her not guilty.  The day after the trial, she announced that she had separated from her husband and was seeking a divorce.  There was no mention of a child’s ever being born.  Beulah died of tuberculosis in 1928.

The other sensational murder story involved Belva Gaertner, an oft-married cabaret singer whom Watkins turned into Velma Kelly.  Belva had already been married once when she met and fell in love with William Gaertner, who she married, divorced, and remarried.  The two were separated when she met Walter Law and—despite Walter’s being married and having a child—they began an affair.  

On March 11, 1924, Belva was arrested after the police found the blood-soaked body of Walter sprawled across the front seat of Belva’s car.  When the police searched her apartment, they found a pile of Belva’s clothes, soaked in blood.  Belva, clearly drunk, said all she could remember was driving—and drinking—with Walter, but had no memory of the rest of the evening.  She admitted to carrying a gun, saying it was necessary to protect herself from robbers.

Watkins interviewed Belva, “No woman can love a man enough to kill him. They aren't worth it, because there are always plenty more. Walter was just a kid—29 and I'm 38. Why should I have worried whether he loved me or whether he left me? Gin and guns—either one is bad enough, but together they get you in a dickens of a mess, don't they?”

At her trial, Belva had the simplest of defenses:  Maybe Law shot himself.  Somehow, the jury believed her and she was acquitted.  

The next year, Belva married William for the third time, but he promptly divorced her, saying she had threatened to kill him.  The next year, she and William remarried and they moved to Europe.  After that, the trail gets a little cold, but the two were still together, presumably celebrating all of their anniversaries, when William died in 1948.  

By the time Belva died in 1965, she had been able to watch two different movies based on Watkin’s play, in 1927 and 1942.  When the play opened in Chicago in 1927, Belva was there on opening night.

In the movie, poor Katalin Helinski, a Hungarian immigrant, is found guilty and hanged.  Actually, the character was based on Sabella Nitti, an Italian immigrant, who was accused of holding down her husband while her boyfriend beat him to death with a sledgehammer.  However, unlike Katalin, Sabella escaped the hangman:  The jury acquitted both Sabella and her boyfriend and they quickly married after the trial.  Later, her new husband vanished under suspicious circumstances.

There is not a real-life counterpart to Roxie’s and Velma’s attorney, Billy Flynn.  In real life, there were two different attorneys, although the same prosecuting attorney tried both cases.  After his second loss, reporters asked him for a comment.  His terse reply was, “Women—just women!”

Oh, yes!  If you are wondering, when Watkins turned in her homework assignment, she received a grade of 98 percent.