A Question of Taste

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

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

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

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

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

There are a few hints.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Re-Gifted King

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Qwerty Who?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 - ,

Q W E . T Y I U O P

Z S D F G H J K L M

A X & C V B N ? ; R

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Woke was Mark Twain?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Clock is Ticking

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

Here are a few random examples:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even A Blind Squirrel

Defying all the odds, voter expectations, and a long sad history—the New Mexico state legislature did something intelligent!

No, I’m not talking about the recent legislation to legalize recreational marijuana—this state will legalize damn near anything they can slap a tax on.    We’re taxing gambling and drugs, if we ever cure AIDS, taxing prostitution won’t be far behind.

The state legislature miraculously ended the long-standing cartel on liquor licenses.  For reasons that only a bureaucrat would understand, the state decided years ago that the total number of liquor licenses in the state would be limited to one for every two thousand residents.  Since the population of New Mexico is fairly stable—due to a lack of jobs—the number of liquor licenses has been fairly stable (currently set at 1,411 licenses).

If you limit the number of licenses, thus prohibiting competition, you have created a cartel.  And regardless of the product being sold, cartels mean an increase in price above the competition level, and a dramatic rise in the cost of purchasing one of those few available licenses.  Cartels, of course, are illegal under the federal anti-trust laws, unless the cartel is set up by the government (like Major League Baseball, gambling licenses, state run liquor stores, and in New Mexico—a license to sell alcohol by the drink).

Surprisingly, government-created cartels are more common than you think.  Businesses “lobby” elected officials to set up strict or limited licenses for the “good” of the consumer.  This is why cities have limited number of cab licenses or a state limits the number of permits to be in the home moving business.  After all, it’s not like just anyone can get a truck and hire a couple of guys to pick up boxes—you need professionals to lose your stuff!

The price of those New Mexico liquor licenses fluctuated, but frequently approached the $1,000,000 mark.  Two recently sold for $975,000 each, but remember—the purchaser is buying the license not from the state, but from a previous owner.  So, if a new bowling alley or large chain restaurant wanted to build in the state, they had the choice of either waiting until an existing restaurant went out of business and sold its license or give up the idea of building in New Mexico and just go build in Arizona.  Guess which one happened most frequently.

Everyone knew this was wrong and everyone knew that the reason you had to pay $10 for a poorly made martini was that you were helping the restaurant owner pay for that expensive license, but year after year, nothing happened.  Thi$ wa$ partly becau$e the bu$ine$$e$ holding tho$e licen$e$ were very $ucce$$sful at “lobbying” politician$ not to correct an obvious$ problem.  No one know$ how they did that.

The argument has been that it wouldn't be fair to issue more licenses, since the currently operating bars and restaurants had paid over half a million bucks for theirs.  Notice lately how the word “fair” can mean just about anything?  Those people who already own licenses didn’t pay the state or the taxpayers for those licenses:  they bought them from speculators and businesses who had invested in those limited licenses.  Investment firms in Chicago evidently speculated and bought up lots of those licenses so they could “lease” them to the highest bidder—a bidder who was absolutely not a local pub within walking distance of my house.  

Nothing makes a $10 martini taste better than knowing that about half the price goes to some out-of-state investor who’s profiting from my state’s ignorance.

Imagine the gall of a few restaurants, tearfully pleading for the right to continue their monopoly, limiting consumer choice while overcharging for a product, just because of the expense of their setting up their cartel.  It is kind of like a mugger demanding a surcharge for the bullets in his gun.  Or the Sinaloa drug cartel protesting the legalization of cannabis because it ruins its business plan.

“Wait,” you say, “Doesn’t New Mexico have an incredible drunk driving problem?  Wouldn’t allowing more bars to open just make this worse?”

No, because the state has limited liquor licenses for years and it obviously hasn’t solved the problem.  Limiting the number of bars available doesn’t reduce the desire to drink—it just forces people to either buy liquor by the bottle, or to drive farther to a bar.  And while it is extremely politically incorrect to say this, a disproportionate number of DUI-related incidents happen in a limited number of historically economically deprived areas.  If those areas are not included in the state averages, New Mexico drops down in the rankings to the level of one of those Midwest flyover states with too many vowels in its name.  

Let me put that another way.  Providing more good jobs in Grants will lower the DUI rate a lot more than preventing the opening of a new steakhouse in Albuquerque.

However unlikely it was, the state legislature acted correctly.  The time to fix a past wrong is always now.  There is no need to limit economic opportunity to a select few wealthy individuals.  The new legislation places the price of a liquor license low enough to encourage opportunity but still high enough that the holder would not willingly risk behavior that invite the state’s canceling the license.  This was smart and well done.

I commend the state legislature for doing the right thing.  Now, I’m going to go look in the backyard and check for unicorns.

Graduation at Enema U

Suddenly, I am a desirable and sought-after individual!  Just today, I have received offers from both the New Mexico National Guard and the U.S. Navy, each wanting me to consider enlistment.  And several headhunter firms would like me to sign up with them.  

Since I am old enough to remember President Eisenhower, this is relatively surprising.  Although I have been retired for years, suddenly people other than the endless horde of merchants trying to sell me canes, hearing aids, and Medicare insurance are desperately trying to get my attention.

All of this is because this May, I’m graduating from college—I am just finishing a degree in Art History.  I should explain—no, that will take too long, so let me sum up.  As a retiree of Enema U, I can take classes for free, and I thought it would be interesting to study something different.  The nice people of the Art Department have tolerated my presence, and I have really enjoyed studying something not normally in my wheelhouse.  Taking one or two courses at a time, eventually I accumulated enough credits for a degree.  (This is easier than you might think, since I have long since already finished all of the required courses, a few of which I used to teach.)

The hardest part of going back to being a student is the challenging task of communicating with my impossibly younger fellow students—and frequently even with faculty young enough to be my grandchildren.  We no longer share a common vocabulary—I don’t even have any “personal pronouns”.

Evidently, the university has sold my name and information to marketers, all of whom are interested in making a quick buck off of me.  Most of this junk mail comes in one of two forms:  People who want me to buy “Official Graduation” swag and people who want me to pay them to help me find a job.

By far, most of the offers are to sell me overpriced crap associated with graduation.  The first offer came over a month ago, addressed the “The Family of Mark Milliorn.”  I gave it to The Doc, who promptly threw it away without even considering spending $745 to buy her husband a graduation ring.   Actually, that’s for the cheapie silver ring—if she really loved me, she’d shell out $2245 for the gold version.

If I would prefer, the school will also sell me a wide variety of necklaces, cuff links, watches, and bracelets, all festooned with the school crest and each costing more than any of my first three cars.  The stores around town are still mostly closed and the town seems like it has been on an endless summer break since the thousands of students who normally crowd our streets and fill the stores have been absent during the pandemic, but the online t-shirt and trinket store for the university is alive and busy.

I can buy officially sanctioned announcements, party invitations, ball point pens, desk plaques, briefcases, hair brushes and just about anything else made in China—all emblazoned with the Insignia of Enema U.  Somehow, I managed to graduate from this university four previous times (not to mention working there for a couple of decades), without ever learning that there was an official school tie.  (I told a former colleague in the History Department about this and she suggested that it was actually 30 feet of good rope fashioned into a noose.)

This is all in addition to the cap and gown that I can buy for only $60, so that I can be suitably attired as I cross the stage at an outdoor graduation ceremony—attended by no more than two masked and socially distant relatives—at which I can receive an empty paper tube symbolizing the diploma that the university will eventually mail, suitably framed for an optional $207.  I’m going to pass on all of that, since as a former faculty member, I’ve sat through countless such ceremonies while I read a book and waited for the stupid speeches to end.  (Every single time that I pulled a book out from underneath my robe, my colleagues seated near me would give me a disapproving shake of the head, indicating that I was not displaying the proper respect for the ceremonies.  Long before the speeches ended, those sitting near me would whisper, “Don’t turn the page yet!”)

If you have never actually sat through those graduation speeches, let me sum them all up for you.  The speaker—someone who has usually contributed significant money to the governor’s political party—will excruciatingly slowly tell thousands of people dressed identically that the key to success in life is individuality.  Then, everyone claps.

Enema U holds its graduation ceremony in the intellectual center of the university, the football field.  This is Southern New Mexico in late May.  Nothing says you have earned a college degree better than sweltering under the relentless desert sun while dressed like a Sith Lord from the Medieval Ages.

The second form of solicitations I’m getting are from people who want me to go to Grad School, to enlist in the Armed Services, or to pay them to help me find a job.  I’m not terribly interested in grad school, as I’ve already been there and done that.  I’m willing to serve in the military, but doubt that I will get much further than that ‘date of birth’ question.  Ironically, if they did take me, I might be the only person in the US military who still has a draft card.

Somehow, I don’t think I need the services of a headhunter agency, either.  I really enjoyed teaching, but I don’t want to do it anymore, nor do I think that there are many corporations out there that desperately need the services of aging curmudgeon with a handful of Liberal Arts degrees.  With degrees in History, Anthropology, and Art History, the only place I’m qualified to work is in Ancient Greece.

But, one such organization caught my eye:  the one that promised to help me develop my “diversity package”.  My first thought was that I was being recruited by the porn industry.

What is a diversity package?  How do I know if I have one?  And why would a corporation want to hire one?  Will I need those personal pronouns?

Broke but Woke

The governor of New Mexico is about to call a special session of the New Mexico state legislature.  The entire state should be afraid...very afraid.  Whenever this group of people gets together, there is no telling what might happen.  The Law of Gravity might be repealed or the state might join the Delian League and declare war on Persia.

Supposedly, the foremost legislative priority is to pass legislation legalizing recreational marijuana.  Unfortunately, this measure failed during the regular session because there was no consensus on how to tax it.  Well, to be honest, there was also a spirited debate on whether a citizen should be allowed to grow six plants or eight.  

Why is it that our legislature immediately presumes that any human activity that is permissible must also be taxed.

I’m probably wrong, but I’ve never thought the role of government was to regulate and control every aspect of its citizens’ lives.  I must be wrong, since evidently the sole responsibility of citizens is to provide an ever-increasing amount of tax money to our elected nannies.

Money, of course, is the primary motivation for the state’s justifying the legalization of marijuana.  Proponents of marijuana legalization have inundated the voters with ads and mailings claiming that if New Mexico will just legalize pot, it will magically bring in tens of thousands of jobs, will flood the treasury with new tax money, and probably will make it rain more often.

There is also the expectation that legalized pot would eliminate the criminal sale of marijuana.  Somehow, I’m skeptical to think illegal weed from Mexico—a country so close that I can see outside my office window—is going to be forced out of the market by a product regulated, licensed, inspected and taxed by the anti-business trolls from Santa Fe.

Supposedly, if the state will just legalize recreational pot, New Mexico will suddenly have 11,000 new jobs.  I live in a relatively small town, but if my math is correct, that means that my little town will suddenly have 550 people selling pot.  I’m curious: Is that about 100 little neighborhood pot shops (roughly one on every other street corner), or is that going to be one big, giant super Wal-Mart-like store?  Like a monster Cost-Co where I can just walk around and sample the chewables offered to me on a tray by some little old lady trying to supplement her Social Security check?

All of this sounds like that time about a dozen years ago when the state was going to legalize Indian gaming (Which is more aptly described as, “building tacky little casino wannabe bingo and slot machine parlors on every reservation”).  According to the out-of-state gambling corporations fronting for the various tribes, legalization would permanently solve the state’s entire budgetary problems with enough money left over to build an unused Spaceport and an empty tourist train.  

The horse racing industry took out ads that claimed that racetracks employed one out of every ten people in the state, all of whom would immediately become unemployed if people were able to play slot machines.  Actually, I don’t know anybody who works in the horse racing industry.  I don’t even know someone who knows someone who works with racehorses.  I still don’t know where those one in ten people are hiding.

The state legalized Indian gaming.  Aaaaannnd:  The horses still run around the race track and the promised the tax money did not appear.  I think the state may actually spend more money policing the gaming than we receive, though we went ahead and built the stupid Spaceport and the train, anyway.  If the state had built the stupid tourist train so that it connected the casinos to the race tracks….  Nah, I better not joke about that, the state legislature is still in session.

Then, there was the time that, if the state would only authorize a state lottery, it would provide so much revenue that the state could give every college student in the state a scholarship to cover tuition.   Now we have a state lottery, and the state allocates a measly 30% of the proceeds towards education.  Maybe the rest goes to cover the million dollars a month the stupid train loses.  (Which is a real bargain compared to the tab for the empty Spaceport.)

I hope you have noticed a couple of trends here.  First, the state keeps looking for an easy fix, since we know that actually expanding the state’s economy, creating jobs, and collecting taxes would violate the unofficial state motto:  We’ll try anything but hard work.  

Second, the state prefers to pass so-called ‘sin taxes’ that are primarily paid by people in the lowest economic strata of the state.  We have liquor taxes, lottery tickets, cigarette taxes, and casino taxes, and now we want to pass a marijuana tax?  All of these are incredibly regressive taxes for a state that prides itself on being so progressive.  

All of these taxes are aimed at products used primarily by the poor, the uneducated, and (at least traditionally) minorities.  We may be a state crammed full of schizophrenic hypocrites, but we be woke.  

In reality, the state lives and dies on the price of oil and gas, which provides one-third of the state government’s annual income.  We hate oil and gas, we despise fossil fuels, but we love the money.  The state pretends to be oh so progressive, but would secretly sell blood by the pint from the last surviving unicorn.  

Note:  Dear state legislature, I’m kidding.  There are no unicorns.  The last one was eaten by a wild jackalope.

Senate Ethics, Almost Equal to Whorehouse Morals

I see news every day about how partisan and contentious the politics in our nation’s capital are.  According to multiple stories, the bickering in the Senate between the two parties has reached epic proportions, said to be ”unique in our nation’s history”.

Horse hockey.

Today, politics is utterly tame in comparison to the politics of the 19th century.  Our august representatives may argue on the Senate floor, but there hasn’t been a fistfight in more than a century.  What happens in Senate offices is a topic best left alone, of course.

From the very beginning, the Senate drafted a set of rules designed to promote good behavior and polite discourse.  Of the first twenty Senate rules passed, ten dealt with the behavior of the members.  Most of these rules were influenced by Vice President Thomas Jefferson’s now-classic Manual of Parliamentary Practice.  One particularly telling passage reads as if it had been taken from a schoolroom wall: 

"No one is to disturb another in his speech by hissing, coughing, spitting, speaking or whispering to another; nor to stand up or interrupt him; nor to pass between the Speaker and the speaking member; nor to go across the [Senate chamber], or to walk up and down it, or to take books or papers from the [clerk's] table, or write there."

Reading this, I’m immediately reminded of a diversionary tactic Winston Churchill once used in Parliament.  Wanting to divert attention away from the speech of an opposition member, Churchill lit a long cigar and merrily puffed away.  As the speech droned on, the ash of Churchill’s cigar grew longer and longer and impossibly longer.  Soon, most of Parliament was watching the cigar and waiting for the ash to drop...Waiting in vain, since Churchill had inserted a long thin wire up the middle of the cigar to hold the ash on.  Jefferson would have been pissed.

Well, a lot of things have happened in the Senate chambers that Jefferson wouldn’t like.  Ted Cruz once did Darth Vader imitations, Jim Inhofe threw a snowball, and Strom Thurmond staged a 24-hour filibuster against Civil Rights during which he was forced by hydraulic pressure to urinate into a bucket while he spoke.  All of this pales in comparison to that small incident in 1854, when Congressman Preston Brooks barged into the Senate chambers and beat Senator Charles Sumner senseless with a stout walking cane.  Incensed at Sumner’s anti-slavery stance, Brooks beat the senator so severely that the cane broke.  Despite the fact that the senator had collapsed, Brooks lifted the stricken man up by his coat lapel and continued to beat the man about the head with the brass tipped end of the broken cane.  Other senators rushed to help Sumner but were held back at gunpoint by Congressman Lawrence Keitt.  

Sumner was unconscious and never completely recovered either emotionally nor physically, not returning to his sear in the Senate for three years.  Brooks also needed medical attention as he had beat Sumner so savagely that as he swung the cane backwards to deliver another blow, he had inflicted several blows against his own forehead.  (He was passionate, but not overly intelligent.)

Both Keitt and Brooks were forced to resign, and in the next election, both were sent back to the House of Representatives.  It may give the reader some satisfaction to learn that almost immediately after returning to the House, Brooks caught the croup, and as he painfully died, he was so desperate for air that he tried to rip open his throat with his bare hands. 

There have been, other, occasionally violent, memorable moments on the Senate floor.  During the debate over the Missouri Compromise, Senator Henry Foote pulled a pistol on Senator Foote, who screamed "Let him fire! Let the assassin fire!", as Foote was wrestled to the floor.  Fifty years later, the senior senator from South Carolina had a fistfight with the junior senator from the same state, despite the fact that the two men were both in the same party.  The fight was so violent that most of the senators who tried to stop the fight suffered blows requiring first aid.  And at the start of the first World War, Senator La Follette lost his temper and had to be physically restrained from hurling a brass spittoon at Arkansas’ Joseph Robinson.

If you are like me, at this point you are probably wondering when the spittoons left the Senate.  The answer, of course, is that they haven’t—there are still two on the Senate floor, though no one has actually used one in the last forty years.  And though smoking in the Senate has been banned since 1914, there is still no rule against chewing tobacco.  The two snuff boxes installed by Millard are still present but are no longer filled:  the last Senator to avail himself of snuff was Senator Overman in 1930. (Overman once staged a filibuster to prevent the passage of an anti-lynching bill, saying that passage would give ignorant black people in the South permission to "commit the foulest of outrages.”  Overman died in 1930, I hope it was the snuff that killed him.)

Sadly, there have been a few times when a good cane or a well-aimed spittoon would have been useful, but no senator had the nerve to provide it.  A monstrous (and unfortunately all too recent) example would be when the deranged racist, Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi, who was inspired by the example of Adolf Hitler to rise in 1938 to make an impassioned plea for Congress to set aside $250 million dollars for his pet project:  the deportation of twelve million African Americans to Liberia.  

It will surprise no one to learn that Bilbo—a dedicated, lifelong member of the KKK—was so inept an administrator that while governor of Mississippi (and despite starting the first state sales tax in America), he left the state millions of dollars in debt with slightly less than $1300 in the state treasury at the end of his tenure.  Recently, his statue was removed from the statehouse rotunda to a room used the Legislative Black Caucus, whose members use the statue as a coat rack.  This is probably the best example of Mississippi humor since Mark Twain steamed past the state on a riverboat.

Lest you think the Senate has always been sort of a reform school for overaged children, I would point out that the two political parties have occasionally been capable of remarkable cooperation.  Between 1953 and 1954, during the 83rd Congress, the Senate was so incredibly balanced between the two parties, that the death of a single Senator could tip the majority to the opposite party.  Normally, the death of a senator is such a relatively rare thing that a single death is an outlier and a statistical anomaly.

But, in 1953, the average age in the United States Senate was slightly higher than that of Great Britain’s House of Lords, where membership is a privilege for life.  Over the next 24 months, there were nine deaths and one resignation (the latter probably for fear of being a member of a legislative body that had a mortality rate similar to that of the units that assaulted Normandy Beach on D-Day).

Majority control of the Senate changed so many times, switching back and forth between the two parties, with each switch prompting a new election for majority leader and the requisite change of offices and stationery, that finally, the Republicans, despite being technically the majority party, just told the Democrats to keep the office and pretend they were in the majority.  This made perfect sense, since before they could actually vote on any important piece of legislation, somebody else was likely to die.

As for bipartisan cooperation today, if the 1953 model is the only way we can achieve it, I’m for it.

And So Was His Grandfather

Every so often, Americans become fascinated with royal lineage, family heritage and race.  The current craze is due to the recently televised interview of a couple of royal multimillionaires discussing oppression with a multibillionaire while comfortably seated in the garden of the billionaire’s estate.  

The story was titillating only because the royal family were supposedly horrified at the prospect of a black member of the royal family.  Why the royal family should be upset by this, when they so clearly are not bothered by the fact that somewhere in Prince Charles’ ancestry there is a horse, is never explained. 

Maybe I missed it, but the press never got around to reporting that according to some historians, the royal family already has a black member of the family, Queen Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, the wife of mad King George III, was descended from Black Portuguese royalty.  Even the records of the queen’s private physician recorded that Her Majesty was a mulatto.  

Of course, all such nitpicking at our DNA is complete nonsense.  If you look at the history of royal families, it doesn’t take long to realize that monarchs were far more concerned with keeping property concentrated within a single family than about who actually descended from whom. 

The foolishness of ‘royal heritage’ was superbly caricatured by the great Spanish artist, Francisco Goya, in an etching he produced in 1797, which is number 39 in his “Los Caprichos”.  Titled, “Hasta Su Abuelo” (which means “So Was His Grandfather”), it shows a well-dressed royal jackass looking at what is presumably a collection of pictures of his ancestors, all of whom were also jackasses (albeit, not well-dressed, but resembling livestock).

 Goya used the recurring image of an ass to represent the aristocracy in Spain, and one possible interpretation of this etching is that it shows the general preoccupation of the aristocracy with establishing noble lineages.  Considering the power of the royalty when Goya produced this image, it represents an amazing act of courage for any artist—much less the official court painter to the king—to lampoon the aristocracy.

When Goya produced this etching, it was at the tail end of the Enlightenment, which marked a shift in the way most people thought. The Enlightenment was generally characterized by a growth of logical reasoning and a return to ‘naturalism’—but this arrived a little late in Spain.  There was a general awakening to the belief that the old, established ways of doing things—founded in superstition and questionable religious dogma that favored one group over others—needed to be reexamined under “the light” of logic and reason.  

This was, of course, a direct challenge to the status quo and to tradition, particularly for the Spanish Crown.  Remember the “divine right of kings”? Remember that the French Revolution was ongoing right next door was so popular that people were losing their minds.  Or at least their heads. The Spanish Crown’s fear was not that unreasonable, under the circumstance.

The causes of the Enlightenment were as numerous as they were varied.  Tens of thousands had traveled the world, and ironically, it was frequently the Spanish who brought back with them new ideas and observations.  Travel exposed people to other cultures—frequently those in which people placed less importance on ancestry.  They also brought the new fruit and vegetables of the New World back to Europe, dramatically altering diets and the ways agriculture had been done for millennia.  Merchants, miners, and tradesmen suddenly had wealth enough to challenge—if not exceed—that of some aristocrats.

The Spanish monarch, King Charles IV, was terrified of these new ideas—especially a philosophy that said the common men were equal to aristocrats—so he ordered his soldiers to inspect all mail coming south from France, seeking to keep the ideas of Rousseau, Locke, and Voltaire north of the border.  This attempt at censorship did not work, of course.

A plausible alternative explanation is that the ass depicted examining his heritage represents Manuel Godoy, the Spanish Prime Minister who had (by remarkable coincidence) just recently had his family lineage published, claiming to trace his noble ancestry back hundreds of years to the time of the Visigoths. 

 Godoy, the son of a noble but penniless family, had come to Madrid in 1784, at the age of 17 to join the palace guards.  Handsome and with a talent for singing and playing the Spanish guitar, he soon came to the attention of the Queen, Maria Luisa de Palma.  Godoy’s phenomenally rapid rise to power undoubtedly was the result of talents that, while understood by later historians, were nevertheless not fully documented.  

By the end of 1788, Godoy was the Captain of the palace guards and six months later, he had been promoted to the rank of colonel in the Spanish Army.  In rapid succession, he was promoted to general, he was knighted, he was made a Gentleman of the King’s Chamber and he was promoted to Field Marshall.  By the end of 1792, he was the nation’s Prime Minister at the tender age of twenty-five.  Godoy was a very talented young man!

As Prime Minister, Godoy involved Spain in several disastrous wars, eventually inciting the invasion by Napoleon that resulted in the abdication of King Charles and the destruction of the Spanish Empire.  Surprisingly, Charles IV remained a faithful friend of Godoy until the monarch’s death.

All of Godoy’s ministerial misadventures were done with the blessing of King Charles IV, who had neither any aptitude nor any interest in governing his realm.  This was a direct result of the long practice of limiting royal marriages to first cousins and nieces, in order to keep property inside the family.  After a surprisingly few generations of marriages where your own children were also your first cousins, you get a monarch who can sit in a corner and lick his own eyebrows.

Goya, who painted several portraits of Godoy and executed several commissions from him, was as openly contemptuous of the foolish aristocrat as possible—which was a remarkable act given that Goya depended on the favor of the court for the continued sales of his works.  Less remarkable was that within weeks of publication of Los Caprichos, Goya pulled all remaining copies from sale and ‘gifted’ them to the king.

Goya worked at the royal court, so he was well acquainted with the king and queen and the rest of the royal family.  Despite his background and the strict rules of society, Goya could recognize that the royal family were simply privileged jackasses.

So, three hundred years after the Enlightenment and more than two centuries since Goya so magnificently pointed out that all royalty are jackasses, why do we still give these fools so much of our attention, if not respect?  

Twas Best Done Slowly

Two weeks ago, I wrote about a French corporation’s attempts to resurrect sail powered cargo ships.  Almost immediately, I received emails about a different French company that already has such a ship crossing the Atlantic, carrying French wine to America and chocolate back to Europe.

While the Grain de Sail is really cool, I doubt that she is going to revolutionize the cargo ship industry.  On her maiden voyage, the aluminum-hulled sailing vessel was able to transport 15,000 bottles of cognac to New York.  For the sake of comparison, if just the French champagne annually consumed by Americans were shipped this way.... They’re gonna need another 5000 sailboats.

That’s assuming that each sailboat can make the scheduled 4 voyages a year.  It also assumes that the crew of four on each boat won’t sample the wares on a 30-day crossing.  Nah, no sailor would do such a thing.  

The company claims that the gentle voyage, the natural rocking of the ship, and the far better conditions of their cargo hold as opposed to a being locked inside a hot closed cargo container, will deliver a better bottle of wine.  I admit to being a contrarian by nature, but in this case, I bet they are right.  And by some back of an envelope figuring and total guess work, this method of shipping probably adds a minimum of $10 in shipping cost to each bottle.  

I will probably never know, since $10 is getting pretty close to the top of my wine price range.  My personal wine philosophy says it doesn’t take an oenophile to find a good $25 bottle of wine, but a true connoisseur can find a decent bottle for $15 that doesn’t come with a label reading “Australian Fighting Wine”.

Still, I like the idea of those sailboats and I really hope the sailing ships are a great success.  Maybe, it is time for travel to slow the hell down.  If the only point of travel is to get to the destination quickly, why bother?

There is a great passage in the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant where he describes his journey to West Point.  Having just been appointed to the academy, Grant left Ripley, Ohio for Pittsburgh by steamer.  At that time, riverboats had no defined schedule and would stop as frequently, and for as long as necessary, to pick up passengers and freight.  Today, the trip will take about five hours by car, but for Grant, the trip up the river took three leisurely days.  

From Pittsburgh, Grant took the Pittsburgh-to-Harrisburg Mainline Canal to Harrisburg, deciding against traveling by stage, since he described travel by canal as the most comfortable method of travel possible.  I heartily agree.  While traveling through the Oxford region of England, I once got off a canal boat, turning the duty of steering the 60’ boat over to my twelve-year old son, The-Other-One.  (It wasn’t like he could get lost on a canal:  it wasn’t even wide enough to turn the old boat around, and if he really messed up, he had his fourteen-year-old brother, What’s-His-Name, to help him.)

Once on the tow path, I slowly stretched my legs, stopping frequently to admire the magnificent gardens.  When I got tired of walking, I took a short nap on a waterside bench.  Presently, the canal boat caught up and I boarded again.  The only things lazier than a canal boat are stalagmites and congressmen.

Where was I? Oh, yeah.  When Grant arrived in Harrisburg, he boarded a railroad train bound for Philadelphia.  This was the first train Grant had ever seen.  As he wrote:

In travelling by the road from Harrisburg, I thought the perfection of rapid transit had been reached.  We travelled at least eighteen miles an hour, when at full speed, and made the whole distance averaging probably as much as twelve miles an hour.  This seemed like annihilating space.

How wonderful!  Twelve to eighteen miles an hour is fast enough to get somewhere, but slow enough to see the countryside, and occasionally read a book while the scenery races past a window.  In travel, speed is the antithesis of enjoyment.

I made a list of my favorite writings by Mark Twain and quickly found an obvious pattern.  Twain’s stories of traveling by riverboat in Life on the Mississippi, his account of traveling across the American West by stagecoach in Roughing It, and his remarkable and unforgettable accounts of Huck and Jim’s raft floating down a languid river in Huckleberry Finn…. All are about slow, dignified travel.

I cannot imagine anyone writing as memorable a story involving someone traveling across an ocean in a 747.  If Marco Polo had gone to China by plane, his book would have been a forgotten pamphlet.  Travel used to be a way of broadening the mind; today it is just a way of lightening the wallet.  Traveling by air has all the dignity of being sentenced to a weekend in the county jail.

Perhaps we have made travel too easy.  I remember when my wife and I took our sons from London to Paris.  The Chunnel had just opened, and we took the train.  For a while, the signs in the little towns that flew by the windows were in English, then we went into a tunnel for a few minutes and when we came out, the signs were in French.  My sons were only dimly aware that we had journeyed to a new country.  We never even saw the water.

Think of the history of what crossing the English Channel used to mean.  Monarchies rose and fell on crossing that strip of water.  Countless thousands of men died in the attempt.  All the power and military might of Hitler and Napoleon couldn’t cross that channel and their failure changed the future history of the world.  And my sons had just done it in the time it took to drink a coke (and I wasn’t even sure if they knew we had done it).

Half a century ago, I used to drive my aging pickup down to the beach at Corpus Christi.  The old highway took you through every little town and village along the way.  The town of Beeville was about an hour away from the beach, and I’d stop at the town square and admire the Navy Skyraider up on a pedestal in the town square.  You couldn’t get too close, since the aging old naval jet was also home to a thriving bee hive.  Then, I’d stop in at a charming bookstore next to the diner that served a damn fine chicken fried steak.  

The last time I drove that route, the new highway was done, bypassing all the old picturesque little towns.  As we zipped down the multilane highway, I couldn’t even find the exit for Beeville.

I think we are all aware that the faster you drive a car, the narrower your cone of vision of the road ahead becomes.  Today, travel has become so fast, that I fear we can just barely see beyond the tips of our noses.  We can travel so far and so fast that we have just enough time to turn around and hurry back home.  

I don’t have any immediate plans to return to France, even if the pandemic would allow it.  But, if I do go again, I want to go on the Grain de Sail.  I’ll help them take care of the cargo.