Why Do Our License Plates Cost So Much?

The State of New Mexico just sent me a postcard reminding me that it is time to renew the license plate for my car and that they would offer me a small discount, amounting to a whopping $1.25, if I would do this online.  Knowing that the average turn around on anything you mail the state is over 90 days, I immediately sat down at my computer and renewed my car’s registration.

Sure enough, they gave me $1.25 discount for going online...Then, they charged me $1.55 for paying the registration fee online.

This whole license plate routine has gotten way out of hand.  (Shouldn’t surprise us:  the whole idea of hanging a permit plate on a car started in France in 1893.)  Registration and regulation of cars for the sake of safety may have started out well and good, but over the years, the primary reason for this has become simple greed.   Some states charge outrageously high fees, and while they are pushing everyone towards electric vehicles, many states charge very high additional fees to register electric cars!  In the states that base their fees on the value of your car, you can easily spend over a thousand dollars to hang a license plate on your new Tesla.

These states with ridiculously high fees also usually have state income taxes.  So, as you work to earn the money to buy a car, the state taxes your income, then collects a sales tax on the purchase of the car, charges you a registration fee plus an additional annual fee based on the value of the car, then, finally charges you additional taxes every time you gas up your car.  And while insurance companies don’t like to talk about it, every state collects sales taxes on your car insurance premiums.   At this point, you’re probably wondering why owning a car isn’t mandatory.

I think I might have a partial solution to this problem.

Back in 1915, three men worked together to better the lives of ordinary sailors—particularly the lives of civilians working aboard merchant vessels, where conditions were akin to slavery.  Sailors back then were expected to work long shifts over extended periods of time, with only short breaks, all the while subsisting on poor rations and living in absolutely horrible conditions.  For all of this, the sailor was all too often denied his wages and occasionally was  abandoned in some foreign port.  Robert La Follette, Lincoln Steffins, and Andrew Furuseth were instrumental in passing the Seaman’s Act, sometimes called the Emancipation Act for sailors.

Unfortunately, this act only extended to ships registered in America and flying the American ensign.  All too quickly, shipping companies realized that they could bypass these regulations by registering their ships in countries not covered by those measures.  At approximately the same time, countries starting raising the annual price of registering ships—think of it as license plates for boats.  Some countries, particularly Panama and Liberia, had very low registration fees and didn’t particularly care if a ship’s captain keel hauled his crew daily.  

Over time, these somewhat more malleable countries have made a few demands—a local office, a local bank account, a few employees and so forth—but even with these modest demands, the shipping companies save a fortune.

Two events hastened the re-registering of American ships.  During both world wars, ships registered in neutral countries could trade with any country they chose without fear of seizure.  And during Prohibition, a passenger ship flying an American flag was not allowed to serve alcohol.  With restrictions like this, it is not hard to see why it didn’t take long for over half the merchant vessels in the world to be registered in Liberia, Panama, and the Marshall Islands.  At one time, almost all of the income to the Liberian government came from ships that flew her flag.  

If you doubt that these registries are done just for convenience and economy, I would point out that most of these ships have never come within a hundred miles of the countries whose flags they fly, and the Liberian Ship Registry is run out of offices in Virginia.  

Today, over half the world’s maritime fleet is registered to eleven countries.  About a quarter of the vessels are registered in Panama, followed closely by Liberia, the Marshall Islands, and the Bahamas.  Panama alone has 100 times more merchant ships flying her flag than does the United States.  Mongolia is a landlocked country, yet her fleet of merchant vessels is five times the size of the fleet of the United States!

There is a general term for a ship’s flying the flag of a country for purely economic reasons:  this is called a “flag of convenience”.

Which brings us back to automobiles.  If Exxon oil tankers can register in countries without oil wells…. Well, why can’t my car be registered in a state willing to issue me license plates at a reasonable price?

There are 250 million cars in the United States.  If only 10% of those cars bore license plates from New Mexico at a reasonable price of $50 a year, that would net $1,250,000,000 a year, equal to roughly 15% of the current state budget.

Of course, New Mexico would argue the matter for two decades and appoint a commission to study it, then the commission would spend millions of dollars on legal fees. By the time our state government got around to making a decision, the only cars left would be in museums.  So, let Montana do it:  that $1.25 billion a year is about half of the state budget.

I happen to have a great name for these new and cheaper license plates: “Tags of Convenience”.

  

Tom Keating and Sexton Blake

It started with my fascination with art forgery.  I suppose it reveals a little of my own nature that as soon as I started studying art history, I became fixated on the forgers.  I would explain this by saying that these are the artists who are still producing the types of art that I like—but it has more to do with my slightly larcenous nature, I suspect.

I’ve read everything I could find on Elmyr de Hory, Han van Meegeren, Robert Driessen, Wolfgang Beltracchi, Yves Chaudron, Ely Sakhai, John Myatt and the rest of the great forgers.  It didn’t take me long to discover the autobiography of Tom Keating, the British author who flooded the market with fake Samuel Palmer paintings.  Titled The Fake’s Progress, Keating describes in detail his long career.

Keating would usually buy an old, but worthless, painting, cover the original artwork with a coat of glycerin, then put his version of a masterpiece on top of the dried glycerin.  This would insure that the first time the oil painting was cleaned, the entire fake painting on top would vanish.  Occasionally, Keating would paint “You’ve Been Had” in lead-based paint under his work, so that if the painting was X-rayed by an expert, the message would clearly show up.

The book was fascinating, but I was a little confused as to why Keating referred to his…. copies...as ‘Sexton Blakes’.  Who was Sexton Blake?

As it turns out, Sexton Blake is a fictional character, a detective living on Baker Street in the upper story of a townhouse that is run by a widowed housekeeper.  When not solving bloodthirsty murders with his constant sidekick, Blake lounges around in a chemical-stained housecoat while smoking massive quantities of tobacco.  If all this sounds a little familiar, Blake is obviously intended to be a copy—without royalties—of Sherlock Holmes.

Keating referred to his forgeries as “Sexton Blakes” in part because they were knockoffs of the real thing.  The fact that Sexton Blake is also Cockney rhyming slang for ‘fake’ was simply serendipity.

Naturally, as soon as I learned all this, I just had to read some of stories.  And there are far more of them than you would believe.  Sexton Blake has figured in short stories, feature length books, radio shows, a comic strip, stage plays, movies, and a British television show that ran for five years.

The stories aren’t hard to find:  Amazon sold me several for my Kindle, but reading them requires a little work to decipher some of the dated references and obscure terminology.  Unless you know that “taking a dekko through the scugs in the local for a Peterman” translates out as “looking for a safecracker among the crooks in a bar”, you’re going to spend a little time googling some of the references.

Blake is the result of several things happening in England simultaneously.  An increase in a more literate and urban populace created a market for cheap mass-produced literature that was made possible by technological improvements in printing.  As a result, the “Penny Dreadfuls” were created—cheap magazines printed with tiny print on even cheaper paper featuring bloodthirsty tales, poorly written by underpaid authors.  Collectively, the Penny Dreadfuls really suck and although they were financially successful, their only literary merit is in their incredibly apt name.

Occasionally, even a blind squirrel finds an acorn.  There were a few good stories that got their start in these cheap magazines.  Sweeney Todd first started in a story called A String of Pearls.  And who could forget the story of Varney the Vampire?   (Well, you probably never heard of it, but trust me, it was the inspiration of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.)

In time, the Penny Dreadfuls (sometimes called Penny Bloods), drew their own competition, a magazine called the Halfpenny Marvel.  This weekly magazine was not only cheaper, but the stories were a little more wholesome, if not still incredibly badly written.  The pages may have still featured gore and blood, but the ‘good’ side always won.  It is not a coincidence that the week in 1893 when Sherlock Holmes died in an issue of Strand Magazine, was also the very week when Sexton Blake appeared in Halfpenny Marvel.  

By 1915, the Sexton Blake Magazine was featuring a new story every month—a run that has lasted more than fifty years.  

Like “the author” of the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and other popular pulp fiction, there was not a single author, though several authors contributed more than once.  The result is that the stories vary in tone, style, and quality.  One constant is that the stories abound with errors in spelling and grammar, and reflect an era when people routinely accepted the kind of terminology that today would be termed horribly racist.  Occasionally, the stories end abruptly—the result of some poor editor’s taking a hatchet to cut down a story so it would fit into a limited space.

If you read enough of the stories, you can get a general sense of contemporary history.  German spies come and go, to be replaced by war profiteering industrialists, followed by Nazis and, eventually, Communists—Blake and his youthful sidekick, Tinker, vanquish all of them.  Over time, Blake slowly morphs into a crime-fighting James Bond-like hero with a bullet-proof Rolls Royce and an airplane that he designed himself.  Think Batman...but with a top hat instead of a cape.  

By the Seventies, perhaps Blake had become an overused commodity or, maybe, he simply lost out to the competition from action movies and superheroes, but for whatever reason, the stories just stopped selling.  After an eighty-year run, no new stories of Sexton Black fighting crime were being published, no new movies were being made, and his British television show was never available in the United States (though you can watch the first episode here).

There hasn’t been a new Sexton Blake book published in decades, though it wouldn’t surprise me to see a revival.  I would think a movie starring Blake, set sometime in the mid-Twentieth Century would be interesting today.  It would a refreshing change from the usual movie recycling that I’m pretty sure we haven’t seen the last of Sexton Blake.

After all, there is already a revival of Tom Keating.  Though the artist passed away in 1984 after producing by his estimate some 2000 Sextons as well as an uncounted number of his own works.  Today, his paintings sell for as much as $30,000 each, occasionally worth more than the works he was counterfeiting.  I wonder what Keating would call that? 

The Ming Umbrella Stand

It started somewhere between 45-100 million years ago when water running down the mountains to the lake began eroding rocks with a high silicone content.  As the deposits built up, the tropical temperature and steady rainfall produced deep deposits of fine clay, rich in kaolinite.

Potters quickly discovered that the fine clay was excellent for producing high quality ceramic vessels.  As trade in the region increased, the demand for these pots increased.  By two thousand years ago, a permanent settlement was founded, and as the profitable trade increased, so did the size of the community.

Over time, the quality of the pottery grew.  A thousand years after the community was first established, the artists learned that if the clay was fired at very high temperatures (well above 2000 degrees F), the local clay would turn into porcelain, a very hard and almost translucent form of pottery.

Over time, the artists learned that if the unfired pottery was painted with a special coating, called a slip, the fired porcelain would have a milky white finish, perfect for painting.  If a cobalt blue paint was applied before firing, the resulting ceramic was strong, translucent porcelain with a beautiful deep blue design.  

At first, those blue lines were a little fuzzy, making finely detailed drawings impossible, but by the 15th Century, the artists had discovered that by adding a small amount of manganese to the paint, fine blue lines could be produced, allowing for intricate and delicate paintings to be produced on the porcelain.

It was during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) that these ceramics reached the height of perfection and that small village had grown to the thriving commercial center known as Jingdezhen.  By this point, the porcelain pottery was in high demand all over the world, particularly in Europe.  In England, the name for these high-quality ceramics became synonymous for the country that exported it:  China.

About 1430, a large vase, slightly over 20 inches tall, was created for Emperor Xuande, depicting a large blue dragon wrapped around the vase.  As the property of the emperor, the dragon was depicted with five claws on each foot, an imperial prerogative.  (A dragon for a prince would show only three claws.)

In 1602, almost two centuries after the pot had been created for the emperor, it was part of a large consignment of trade goods purchased by Portuguese merchants.  Called Kraak, for the Carracks that brought the goods to Europe, the porcelain ceramics were loaded aboard the Santa Catarina for the long difficult journey back to Portugal around the southern tip of Africa.  The voyage had hardly begun when three Dutch ships of the Dutch East India Company captured the ship off the coast of Singapore.  When the Dutch sold the valuable contents in Amsterdam, the value of the Dutch East India Company went up 50%.

The prize sale included several hundred ounces of musk, twelve-hundred bales of raw silk, and hundreds of items of fine China.  Among the purchasers of the ceramics were agents acting for James I, the King of England and among the items purchased for the monarch was the large vase with the cobalt blue dragon design.

From here, exactly what happened to the vase is a little hazy, but it was eventually part of the Nightingale estate at Lea Hurst in Derbyshire when Peter Nightingale died in 1815.  Under the terms of his will, his estate passed to his niece, Mary Evans, who in turn left the estate to her son, William Shore.  Under the terms of the will (and this only makes sense in old English Law), William inherited the house, the family fortune, and the name Nightingale.  And yes, it is THAT Nightingale family—Florence was his daughter.

Now suddenly wealthy, Nightingale purchased Embley Park, a grand estate, and moved the family into the much larger home.  It is likely that during this move, as items were packed, moved, unpacked and relocated in the new home, that the provenance of the blue and white porcelain vase was simply lost.  It is also probable that no one in the family had any idea of its significance, since by the 19th Century, blue and white porcelain was being manufactured all over the world.

Sometime in the 1860’s the Nightingale family gifted the vase to a young couple upon their marriage, and like so many other wedding presents, it was kept by the family but not exactly cherished.  According to the family history, it moved from room to room in the house and was generally used as storage.

In 2004, the house contained so many antiques that the family finally had a representative from Christie’s do an evaluation of the various odds and ends collected over the decades.  The vase, not included on the list of items to be inventoried, was in the home’s hall, being used as an umbrella stand.  At the insistence of the appraiser, it was evaluated by experts, and subsequently, in 2016, Christies sold the Ming vase at auction in for $20,447,642 to an undisclosed buyer in Hong Kong.

That is, undoubtedly, the highest price ever paid for an umbrella stand.

It is at this point that I should probably stop my story, however, I feel duty bound to continue with some important advice:  How to tell if a vase is a genuine Ming vase.  (After all, you, too, might inherit an umbrella stand one day.)

First—and I can’t stress this too much—if you ever find yourself in the position of having to determine whether or not a vase is actually made during the Ming Dynasty—it wasn’t.  The chances of your finding a previously undiscovered priceless artifact at a garage sale are exactly equal to my chances of dying in a tsunami here in New Mexico.

But, miracles do happen, at least in books and on television, so I will gladly continue.  If the vase is a blue/white piece of porcelain (and Ming vases can be any color, not just blue and white), look at that cobalt blue design on the vase.  In the mining of both the cobalt and the manganese used to create that paint, some iron was inadvertently added.  Over the last 500 years, that iron should have oxidized, giving the blue a slightly blackish hue (see photo). 

Second, look at the foot of the vase, where the slip covering stops.  Along the edge, the kaolin clay used to make the ceramic should have turned reddish brown during firing.  Forgers frequently forget this since photographs of the bottom of artwork seldom appear in books or art catalogs.

Finally, feel the surface of the glazing.  Modern kilns usually use coal, natural gas, or some other form of sulfur-bearing petroleum product.  That sulfur, when heated to the temperatures necessary to fire the glaze, makes the glaze seem dry to the touch.  

If the pottery you are being offered passes all three tests—still walk away.  I just finished reading an article about the shops in Jingdezhen.  It’s still a center of porcelain production but now it’s a thriving city of over a million people, who crank out near-perfect replicas of Ming Pottery for sale all over the world...  

And Amazon will sell you an umbrella stand for $30.

The Last Widow

Gee, if only some important event had happened this week so I would have something to write about...

Well, there was one small event that everyone probably missed—the last surviving Civil War widow died.  Yes, more than a century and a half after the end of the war, the last surviving widow has passed away.

Military pensions are an old, old custom started not so much for the welfare of the aging soldier, as for the comfort of their military leaders.  There has always been an inherent problem with training and equipping young men to fight, and then at the war’s end, telling these same men they are unemployed and their services are no longer needed.  Historically, some unemployed soldiers sought employment with new revolutionary leaders.

Julius Caesar understood this problem and used newly conquered lands to build new cities for his former soldiers, simultaneously rewarding faithful service while moving them far from Rome and strengthening new border towns by populating them with citizens of proven loyalty.  Augustus Caesar was forced to change the system slightly, as there was only so much new territory even Rome could acquire.  Upon retirement, a soldier received an honesto missio, an honorable discharge, and a lump sum payment equivalent to thirteen times a legionnaire’s annual salary.  More importantly (and this is something that today’s military might consider as a way of increasing recruitment), the retired Roman soldier received a lifetime exemption from Roman taxes.

The logic behind this was obvious:  Pay a man off and he’s less likely to overthrow you.  In addition, a lump sum payment would allow all but the most spendthrift of soldiers to live comfortably long enough to become less of a physical threat.  This program was so expensive that Augustus was forced to supplement part of the cost with funds from his own pocket.

In the United States, military pensions were originally only for veterans who had become disabled as a result of their military service and not for retirement.  One of the first acts of the Continental Congress was an act to provide for the soldiers, “providing that every commissioned officer, non-commissioned officer and private soldier who shall lose a limb in any engagement, or be so disabled in the service of the United States of America as to render him incapable of afterwards getting a livelihood, shall receive during his life or the continuance of such disability the one-half of his monthly pay from and after the time that his pay as an officer [or soldier] ceases.”

During the Revolutionary War, the pay of a captain was $26 a month while a private received $6 a month.  Even in the late 18th Century, a pension of $3 a month was, at best, barely enough to live on.  Until the 20th Century, neither the recipients nor their dependents could claim the pension if they were able to work.

Over the years, Congress periodically changed the amounts received, the terms of qualifications and added provisions to provide for the veteran’s dependents.  Though the amounts of the pensions were steadily raised, they never exceeded the bare minimum needed for survival.

After the Civil war, only the soldiers who had been disabled by injuries incurred during their service could apply for a pension.  If the veteran fought on the side of the Union, the pension was paid by the Federal Government, while Confederate veterans had to apply to their respective Southern states.  By the end of the 19th century, the widows and dependents of these veterans could also apply.  

Immediately after the fighting, the citizens of the United States were in no mood to pay pensions to anyone in the South, especially to the veterans.  While each state of the former Confederacy eventually established its own individual pension, most of the states did not begin these pensions until decades after the war, and even then, the amount of the pensions and rules for qualification varied.

Early in the 20th century, during the Depression, the Federal Government assumed the responsibility of paying all of the remaining pensions for the Southern States.  There was an ever-dwindling number of veterans still receiving the pension—the last surviving veteran of that tragic war did not die until 1951.

During the Depression, when so many people were starving, that pitifully small pension became vitally important and was a cherished source of cash for many impoverished families.  Aging Civil War veterans began marrying young women to be able to pass on that pension to their spouses.  In some cases, the new spouse was a distant relation of either the Veteran, or occasionally, a relative of his first wife.  These May/December marriages were usually marriages of convenience, with the partners rarely actually living together.

A typical example was Gertrude Grubb, 18, who married John Janeway, 81, in 1927.  Janeway, a Union veteran passed away in 1937 and his wife continued to collect $70 a month until her death in 2003, meaning that the modest pension spanned three centuries.  Gertrude Janeway was the last surviving widow to receive a pension.  The last child of a Civil War veteran receiving a pension died last year. 

The last surviving widow, Helen Viola Jackson, married her 92-year-old neighbor, James Bolin in 1937.  Bolin, who had enlisted in the U.S. Army’s 14th Missouri Cavalry three days before Lee’s surrender following the battle at Appomattox Court House, was bed-ridden and refused to accept charity, so he offered to marry his 17-year-old neighbor in exchange for the care the teenager was providing.  A marriage of convenience, Jackson kept her own name, never lived with Bolin, and after his death, never applied for his pension.  Jackson, who never remarried, died in December at the age of 101.

As far as is known, she was the last surviving widow of a Civil War soldier.

Corny New Year Musings

A new year.  A perfect time to reflect on…. Why you drank so much last night after midnight and why you are too tired to think coherently today.  The last thing I remember from last night was the thought that Congress would probably cancel the stimulus check and just send out t-shirts that said, “I Survived 2020”.

No, this is not yet the day for tackling anything new.  I’ve been thinking about the past for most of the day.  And my email today indicates that many of my friends are thinking about the past, too.   A childhood friend of mine, just posted on Facebook about the time his wife ate a dozen ears of corn at a party and suffered all the next day.

About thirty years ago, I was in Tegucigalpa doing historical research on a revolution that had taken place about eighty years earlier—one of those nameless little revolutions that swept through Central America about as regularly as summer rains.  This revolution had profound consequences—until a counter-revolution fourteen months later succeeded in returning everything to the antebellum status quo.  

Having exhausted all the sources about the revolution available in the United States, I had flown to Honduras to pick through the archives there.  I can give you a valuable tip about the value of archives in a poor country—there isn’t much.  When a country runs out of money, libraries and archives are the first agencies to shutter their doors.

Arriving in Tegucigalpa, I had a reservation at the nicest hotel in the city, but when I arrived, I discovered the hotel was also the town casino and there was a sign that said locals weren’t allowed:  the hotel and casino were only for tourists.  (And members of the Honduran military—as some animals are more equal than others.)

I found an alternate hotel.  Unfortunately, it wasn’t nearly as nice: there was no casino, the electrical power went off so frequently that the desk clerk gave me a candle and matches when I checked in, and the water ran only two hours a day, early in the morning.  Bigger hotels had water tanks on the roof that allowed twenty-four-hour usage, but mine didn’t have that luxury.

When the town water supply was turned on every morning at 5:00, the air hissing out of the pipes and faucets all over town made an eerie moaning sound that was responsible for a very high local birth rate. (Five in the morning being too early to get up and too late to go back to sleep).

The town was short of water because it wasn’t raining, even though it was summer:   I spent weeks in Honduras during the rainy season, and it never rained once.  It appears that if you cut down most of the rainforest, you lose both the rain and the forest.  In the years since I was there, the water is now turned on only once a week.  I wonder how this has affected the birth rate.

Tegucigalpa is actually two cities divided by a river, the Choluteca River, which crosses the city from south to north, physically separating Tegucigalpa and Comayagüela.  There is a series of bridges that crosses the river, and since there is no rain, the river is about as dry as Lubbock on Sunday night.

Besides Catholicism, the other two major religions were lottery tickets and soccer, and of the three, it is arguably true that the latter two had the most adherents.  Honduras is so lottery crazy that for a while, when Louisiana outlawed lotteries, instead of shutting down, the state lottery just moved to Honduras and continued to sell tickets.  

Lotteries are not much fun to watch, so one Sunday when the libraries and government offices were all closed, I went down to one of the bridges across the Choluteca and watched a spirited soccer match.  Since the riverbeds below the bridges were not otherwise engaged, soccer fields had been bulldozed in the dry ground between the bridges.  Spectators were gathered along the river and up on each of the bridges at the ends of the field.  

I would normally rank my interest in a soccer game slightly below my curiosity about Nigerian waste treatment plants, but I was encouraged by an enthusiastic crowd of spectators, who cheered and whistled and screamed periodically.  I was even more encouraged by the incredible number of street vendors selling exotic food to spectators.  

Street vendors selling exotic food are a strict travel no-no—a wise rule I have violated with gusto on multiple continents.  I would rather eat street tacos from a truck than dine in a Michelin rated restaurant.  Some of the best meals in my life were from curbside carts in Hong Kong, at canal-side stands in England, and from street peddlers throughout Central America.  Yes, I have paid a small price for these indiscretions a few times—I remember longing for death in an airport restroom in Hong Kong after eating coffee flavored peanuts—but that is a small price to pay for great food.  The old Takee-Outee Chinese food stands in the French Quarter that had ginger curry chicken kabobs…

In any case, on that bridge in Tegucigalpa, I ignored all the peddlers selling various forms of bananas as in the previous week, I had eaten them prepared just about every way possible.  It was damn near impossible to get a meal without them.  But, there was this guy roasting fresh ears of corn that caught my eye.

This was fresh sweet corn that was being roasted over a charcoal fire in a six-gallon galvanized trash can right there on the sidewalk.  The ears were cooked inside the shuck, then peeled and roasted over the charcoal fire until the kernels were just starting to blacken, then doused liberally with fresh lime juice and dusted with chili powder and salt.  Wrapped in a paper towel, a fresh hot ear could be purchased for less than a quarter.

I was definitely this vendor’s best customer, because I slowed down eating that corn only long enough to drink from the bottle of real cane sugar Coca-Cola I had purchased.  I have no idea how many ears I ate in a row, but I know that I only stopped eating when he ran out of corn.  

The next day, Monday, I spent the morning working in the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Honduras library, hurrying back to the bridge for lunch.  Unfortunately, the street vendors were nowhere to be found.  Over the course of the next week, I went to the town market, a couple of basketball games, and a fiesta, but never found anyone else selling fresh roasted corn.  

Before the next soccer game was held, I had to ride the only remaining railroad left in the country to the Chiquita Brands banana plantation to finish my research.  I can assure you that when you visit one of the largest banana plantations on the planet—one so large it is guarded by the Honduran Army, while there is an overabundance of yellow food—none of it is corn.

I’m still looking for that roasted corn.  If any of you run across someone roasting fresh ears over a galvanized trash can—don’t hesitate to let me know.  And Ruthie, tell Kent to stop teasing you about your love of corn.  (We corn aficionados stick together!)