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!)

It’s Good to Be The Queen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Atlantic Crossing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

O Canada, O Canada

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For now.

A Sense of Decency

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bottle Trees

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About Time to Shove the Cob

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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