ESTABLISHED
BY
TOM THOMAS
(AS GEOCITIES.COM/TBTHO) OCT. 25, 2000
MAY
20, 2013 
SOME
ASSEMBLY REQUIRED
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Throughout my childhood, I used architectual toys to build models of buildings, from a log cabin to a gymnasium / auditorium to Solomon's Temple. Pictures are in this month's 100 Moons article. |
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MAY
14, 2013
SUCH
STUFF AS DREAMS ARE MADE ON
I fell asleep watching CBS last night. About an hour into my nap, I dreamt I was standing outside a Moscow hotel. (I don't know how I got there in my dream; I've never been there in reality.) I overheard bits of conversation. (They were in English because my Russian isn't that good.) A man reassured a woman, "All you have to worry about now is getting well." A man with an accent and a darker complexion, probably from one of the farther provinces, mispronounced "matzo ball soup." Another man corrected him, and the first man repeated the corrected version. An officious type brushed past the doorman, declaring "The elevators are mine."
When I woke up and opened my eyes, Hawaii Five-0 was on. The scene was in a hospital room, where a woman patient was eating Chinese food for lunch. Wait a minute, I thought; there are similarities with what I just heard in my dream. Could snippets of the TV show have leaked into my semi-consciousness?
Then I realized there was a way to find out. My DVR had been recording CBS all this time. I hit "rewind" to spin back three minutes to the beginning of the hospital scene, then hit "play." The first thing I heard was a Hawaiian man telling the patient that her lunch was an even better cure tham matzo ball soup, and another man correcting his pronunciation. The other lines of dialogue were in there, too. Remarkable! The line between wakefulness and soundlysleepingfulness is a fuzzy one, it seems.
MAY
11, 2013
COMMON
SENSE FROM M.E.
Prolific blogger Mark Evanier has this to say about sports on television: “If you have two top teams with players that are in the news a lot and those teams meet in a game that might determine who wins the pennant, that game will have more tune-in than a game between two last-place teams with unknown players. No one complains that ratings are low because the crew that covers the game — the sportscasters, the director, etc. — didn't do a good job.”
On the other hand, I would add that if a lot of viewers do want to watch a game and the ratings are high, we broadcasters are quick to take credit. “It’s because of our superior production,” we claim. “Our announcers, our bracketologist's predictions, the four analysts back at our studio in New York, our graphics, our music, the cool video effect we use for replays — all these elements lead to higher ratings.” At least that’s what we encourage potential advertisers to believe.
Here are some other Evanier comments from the last year or so which make sense to me.
On allowing gays to marry: “Opponents of this kind of thing keep using the term ‘defend marriage.’ They made up an imaginary war on marriage, deciding letting gays do it would destroy it for everyone. The real point is that it doesn't threaten marriage in any way. But marriage is kinda losing its importance in society. More and more heterosexual couples are opting to live together without the benefit of legal marriage. More and more children are being born to couples who have not officially tied the knot. The divorce rate is also on a slow, steady rise as it has been for decades now. There's hard, inarguable data that this is happening, whereas the notion that Gay Marriage harms marriage in general is at best an unproven, hard-to-articulate theory. So if someone is worried that marriage is ‘threatened,’ aren't they ignoring the real threat? Shouldn't they be working to ban divorces and co-habitation instead of that small group of gay folks who are fighting to get married?”
On crazy political theories: “This is the scary thing to me about someone who gets up and yells that there’s incontrovertible evidence that Barack Obama is a Kenyan-born Socialist Muslim. It’s not that that person is loony. It’s that there are auditoriums in this country where that rhetoric plays well for that person ... places where people cheer their agreement. In most cases, I don’t think people believe rubbish because their leaders say it. I think the ‘leaders’ say it because people believe it. It’s what enables them to retain their status as ‘leaders’ with all the perks (the money, the attention, etc.) that are attached.”
On a family of psychics who admit cheating their clients out of $25 million: “I am of the opinion that all psychics are frauds. Some of them seem to believe their own bull, but that doesn’t mean it’s not bull. It just means they believe it. Over the years, I’ve encountered a range of believers. I had a girl friend who not only believed in psychics but she believed in all psychics. Anyone who called themselves that could sense the future, chat with dead relatives, etc. I’ve also encountered people who say, ‘I don’t believe in psychics,’ and then there’s a pause and they cautiously add, ‘Although my Aunt Helen sometimes knew things she couldn’t have known about....’ I can’t debunk the Aunt Helens from afar but I do think there’s always an explanation — usually either coincidence or a case of the onlooker wanting so badly to believe that they mentally rearrange the evidence.”
On inconvenient truths: “Physicist Richard Muller, once the darling of those who insist Global Warming is bogus, now says it's real and that human activity is its main cause. Kevin Drum makes a good point: ‘Climate skeptics are skeptics because they don't like the idea of global warming, not because there's truly any evidence that it doesn't exist. It's politically inconvenient, economically inconvenient, and personally inconvenient, so they don't want to hear about it.’ I think that's it. This is not about science. It's a battle between reality and denial. One friend of mine will never admit Climate Change might (might) be happening because that would mean Al Gore was right and we can't have that.”
MAY
6, 2013
COMMENDING
THESE COURIERS
Allow me to put in a good word for the United States Postal Service.
For 40 years in my letterbox I've been receiving interest and dividend checks from my investments. For 30 years in my letterbox I've been receiving payment for my freelance work in TV sports, usually a separate check for each event worked. On a very few occasions the checks have failed to arrive, but in every case, it's been because they were not sent. Never once has a check been lost in the mail.
Some people like to gripe about the post office, but I'd like to congratulate them on this perfect performance record.
APRIL
30, 2013
THE
GARAGE
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In a world where college students are locked in their dorms every night to protect their innocence ... in a world where coeds are allowed visitors of the opposite sex for only two hours a week, and then only if the door remains ajar and three feet remain on the floor ... in a world without computers and without cell phones, where music lovers resort to Morse code to flash their requests ... a group of young scientists with names like Edison and Fermi take over an abandoned garage behind an old gabled house. There they conduct experiments that will change their world, experiments that will help bring men and women together. These experiments are called RADIO. Behind Grey Gables ... a new article by T. Buckingham Thomas, now playing on this website. |
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APRIL
26, 2013
MISCONCEPTIONS
In the latest "It's in the Bible" interview, Brother Billy asks three distinguished experts about the Breath of Life. The topic of discussion: When does life begin?
APRIL
20, 2013
THIS
IS "MARION TODAY" CALLING
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"Hi, there! Do you know how much we have in our jackpot today? No? Oh, that's too bad. If you had been watching you would have known that we have $29 On Deposit at National City Bank of Marion. Well, we'll add another dollar to the jackpot, and better luck next time." When we placed these mid-morning calls to cable TV subscribers in the winter of 1972, 40% of those who had their televisions on were able to answer correctly. |
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In this month's 100 Moons article, I remember moments like these from local cable shows of 40 years ago. |
APRIL
15, 2013
DAD
SAYS MORE
I’ve augmented the article Dad Says with more than two dozen additional items from 19th-century editions of my hometown weekly newspaper in Richwood, Ohio. Among them, under the topic of Weather we learn of a June thunderstorm in which even the geese drowned under 12 feet of rain. Or something like that.
The new material is in blue.
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There was one item of interest that I didn’t include because I suspect it doesn’t actually relate to my hometown. Dated May 12, 1887, it begins “Last week, H.W. Conley drove over to the Winnebago Indian Reservation, about 20 miles south.” Measured from Richwood, that would have been in the vicinity of Plain City, Ohio, but I don’t find any references to a reservation there. More importantly, the Winnebagos never lived in Ohio. The geography would make sense if this item were reprinted from a newspaper in Sioux City, Iowa. Here’s the rest of it. I’ve added the illustration of lacrosse from another source. “Some of the Indians are industrious and are becoming industrious farmers, but most of them are still ‘injun.’
“I was an interested witness to their great ball play. It is an indescribable game. Each Indian had a club about 2½-foot long with a pouch on the end which is used for slinging the ball. “The players dispense with what they call unnecessary clothing. They wore a garment abbreviated at both ends and profusely decorated with beads which were very attractive to the young squaws who were there in large numbers.” |
APRIL
9, 2013
I'VE
GOT IT PEGGED
You can’t fit a square peg into a round hole. Nor can you fit a round peg into a square hole. But which comes closer to fitting?
Last Friday night, we broadcasters had just finished televising an exciting hockey game; the Pittsburgh Penguins defeated the New York Rangers in a shootout. As we put away our TV toys, cameraman Chris Dahl reminded me that I had once posed and answered the peg question. It must have been 20 years ago.
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First consider a square hole, one inch on a side. The cross-sectional area is 1.000 square inch. The largest round peg that can be inserted into this hole has a diameter of one inch and a radius of one-half inch, so its cross-sectional area (pi times r2) is 0.785 square inch. Then consider a round hole with the same cross-sectional area as the first hole, 1.000 square inch. Its radius is 0.564 inch (the square root of 1/pi), so its diameter is 1.128 inch. The largest square peg that can be inserted into this round hole measures 1.128 inch along the diagonal. By the Pythagorean theorem, the peg measures 0.798 inch along the side. Its cross-sectional area (0.798 squared) is 0.636 square inch. So 78.5% of a square hole can be filled by a round peg (or dowel), but only 63.6% of a round hole can be filled by a square peg. (Compare the size of the empty space in the corners.) Now we know. Dowels rule! |
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APRIL
3, 2013
FOUND
AT CRACKER BARREL
When my mother was in high school, “a man held to be irresistibly attractive to romantic young women” was called a sheik.
In the spring of 1930, my mother was voted the Prettiest Girl in school for the second straight year, while her boyfriend Durward McKee was voted the Biggest Sheik for the second straight year.
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And the May 17, 1930, edition of the popular Liberty magazine featured an illustration by Leslie Thrasher entitled “The Sheik,” in which a girl draws a monocle and mustache on her little brother to make him “irresistibly attractive.” I noticed a framed copy of this cover hanging on the wall next to my table at a local Cracker Barrel restaurant, and I found an image of the cover on the Internet. What was inside this edition? The Internet knows everything. Further research reveals that in one passage, the humorist Robert Benchley described falling briefly asleep every minute, a phenomenon I would later experience in window seats on airplanes. The article was entitled “Sporting Life In America: Dozing.” |
Dozing before arising does not really come within the range of this treatise. What we are concerned with are those little lapses when we are fully dressed, when we fondly believe that no one notices. Riding on a train, for example.
There is the short-distan
ce doze in a day coach, probably the most humiliating form of train sleeping. In this the elbow is rested on the window sill and the head placed in the hand in an attitude of thought. The glass feels very cool on the forehead and we rest it there, more to cool off than anything else. The next thing we know the forehead (carrying the entire head with it) has slid down the length of the slippery pane and we have received a rather nasty bang against the woodwork. They shouldn't keep their glass so slippery. A person is likely to get badly hurt that way.
However, back again goes the forehead against the pane in its original position, with the hand serving more or less as a buffer, until another skid occurs, this time resulting in an angry determination to give the whole thing up entirely and sit up straight in the seat. Some dozers will take four or five slides without whimpering, going back each time for more with apparently undiminished confidence in their ability to see the thing through.
It is a game that you can't beat, however, and the sooner you sit up straight in your seat, the sooner you will stop banging your head.
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