T. Buckingham Thomas

Before I reached the age of 77, I recalled the Bible's remark in Psalm 90:10 that “our days may come to seventy years, or eighty if our strength endures.” This blatantly contradicts what we're told about the earliest patriarchs in Genesis. All of them are inerrantly reported to have lived more than 900 years. How could that be possible? Was the author simply lying, fudging the numbers to magnify the reputations of the great ancients?

I'm told that there's an Aramaic word for a period of time like “awhile.” In our alphabet it's spelled iddan and pronounced with the accent on the “dawn.” It's often considered to be a year. For example, Daniel 7:25 prophesizes in Aramaic that “the holy people will be delivered into his hands for an iddan, iddans, and half an iddan,” which is generally assumed to represent “a year, years, and half a year” or 3½ years.

However, I formed a theory which I explained in this article. Perhaps the ancient authors of Genesis used a word like iddan in various circumstances to refer to various appropriate spans of time.

•••••••••••• Sometimes one iddan could in fact mean a year of 365 days.

•••••• But maybe an iddan could represent only 180 days — half a year, either seedtime or harvest.

• Suppose it could denote the period from one new moon until the next, which we call a month.

I used this theory to calculate that Adam, reported to be 130 iddans of age when his son Seth was born, at that time had attained only 33 of our years. Using a different definition of the ancient word, Adam miraculously survived to the age of 930 iddans, a believable 95 years. I managed to make all the other numbers make sense.

And now I realize that my theory can also explain why 700-year-old Grandpapa Noah kept quoting numbers ten times too large.

Also, now I can rationalize the eighth chapter of Deuteronomy. Speaking to the Israelites who had escaped Egypt only to wander in the desert for “40 years,” Moses says:

Remember how the Lord your God led you all the way in the wilderness these forty iddans, to humble and test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commands. ...Your clothes did not wear out and your feet did not swell during these forty iddans.

Barring a miracle, after 40 years clothing does usually wear out. But maybe 40-iddan-old clothing needs to last only 40 months. That's just a bit more than three years. It might not yet have gone out of style! The wandering Israelites might be grumbling, but they would not yet be on the verge of revolt against Moses.

And earlier, if they had been slaves in Egypt for 400 iddans (Genesis 15:13), that could be “only” 30 years — little more than a generation.

APRIL 22, 2026
FLEXIBLE CROCKERY

I've written before that “on March 12, 1974, as I was moving into my first apartment, my mother gave me a 20-piece set of Corelle dishes.” Those relics are still in my cupboard 52 years later, but I rarely use them now because they require washing after use. You see, I live alone and never have dinner guests. I still “do the dishes," but nowadays that task mostly involves forks and spoons.

Instead of the porcelain-like tableware, I use disposable paper plates and bowls. The 10-inch plates are a bit floppy, but if I stack two together the combination is sturdy yet still lightweight, and when the upper plate becomes stained it can easily be replaced. The bowls hold 20 ounces, which is usually plenty for my elderly reduced appetite. A person needs to adapt to the times.

The clues for a Thursday New York Times crossword puzzle assumed knowledge of obscure Asian foods. One was a “steamed dumpling in Tibetan cuisine” and another was a “Sichuan bean curd dish.” As a native of Ohio, I had no idea how to fill in the blanks.

Fortunately, the crossing answers supplied the letters. The foods turned out to be MOMO (left) and MAPO TOFU. Who knew? I certainly didn't. Perhaps the puzzle constructor didn't either. I suspect that the crossing answers forced these strange four-letter words, which the constructor then Googled to learn what they meant.

I did find momo dumplings from Deep Indian Kitchen in the grocery store. They're a little too spicy for my taste.

Fortunately, the crossword clue didn't reference a different meaning of MOMO: a grotesque doll that appears on young folks' phones and sends “a series of challenges, dangerous to their physical well-being, which culminate in the ‘mission’ of suicide.”

Last Sunday, AMC premiered a TV series called The Audacity. The first episode ran little more than an hour, but I spent three hours watching it.

The script is tightly written, and characters appear with no backstory. We have to spend some time with them to figure them out.

There are various plot threads. The main character wants to be a Silicon Valley tycoon, but problems arise. Details about him can be gleaned from the internet and discussions with his therapist somehow leak. This leads to insider trading and major fluctuations in the value of his company's stock.

After dimly understanding the episode, I thought to myself “I've got time. I'm going to watch it again! Right away!” And during the second viewing I mostly knew what was going on.

I've heard movie podcasters withhold their judgment about a new release, saying “I only saw it once and I'll have to watch it again before I can give it a good or bad score.” Were they not paying attention the first time? But now I can sympathize.

I can claim that way back in the fall of 1969, I ad-libbed a bit of improvisational comedy with Edie McClurg, a future member of the Groundlings. It was completely forgettable, except to me.

We were graduate students at Syracuse University, studying radio and television, and Edie was helping teach the audio course as a graduate assistant.

In our first meeting in WAER Radio's Studio C, she began by learning our names.

One of us was scheduled to be Charles Dunn (right). Reading from her roster, Edie called “Dunn.” There was no response. “Dunn?” she repeated. “Who's ‘Dunn’?” Silence.

I couldn't help myself. I piped up, “I haven't even started.”

Again ... silence.

So in the classic 1986 movie Ferris Bueller's Day Off, featuring Edie as the dean's secretary, why was “Bueller” the name chosen for the title character? I think I have a clue.

The teacher played by Ben Stein begins his morning's first class by dryly calling the roll alphabetically, soon reaching Ferris's name. “Bueller?” he asks repeatedly. “Bueller?” But there is no answer, because Ferris has skipped school.

This iconic scene wouldn't have worked had the hero's name come later in the alphabet. For example, we would have had to wait quite a while before the roll call got to “Wheel? Wheel? Wheel?”

In a snobbish April 6 essay for the New Zealand Herald (not on my usual reading list), Rachel Wells wrote in part, “On Thursday, Swedish fast fashion retailer H&M will launch its first ever bridal collection. The most you will pay is $599. The launch of the affordable wedding gowns comes just weeks after fellow fast fashion giant ASOS launched its first bridal collection to the Australian market. Prices for ASOS’s wedding gowns start from as little as $137.

“I think it’s a little tacky. I am well aware that not every bride can afford to spend thousands of dollars on a bespoke wedding dress, but I can’t help feeling that wedding dresses that cost less than your weekly grocery bill somewhat trivialise the significance and sanctity of a wedding.”

A cheaper garment is “ready to wear” or “off the rack,” while a custom gown — the only kind worthy of a bride — evidently is “bespoke.” But that word bothers me.

I guess it’s the proper term if you’re a tailor. “No, you can’t buy this suit I’m constructing. It’s not destined to hang on the display rack. I’m not making it ‘on spec’ to a standard set of measurements. It’s bespoke. I’m making it on the request of a specific client who has already spoken for it.”

But until very recently I’d never heard the word outside Albany’s line in the fifth act of King Lear:

To describe clothing designed for a particular person, let’s use “custom made.” The word “bespoke” is bespoke. (Besides, shouldn’t it be “bespoken”?)

APRIL 8, 2026 SNOW'S ALL GONE
APRIL 8, 2026 THE COOKIES? ALMOST

My grandmother, who lived 120 miles away, baked some cookies for me to take to my kindergarten class more than 73 years ago. I reported to her that nearly all had been distributed, except for three bunnies.

That letter of mine appears in this month's 100 Moons article. So does Doctor Foster..

Shortly after Villanova's exciting victory in Monday night's NCAA Tournament championship, arsonists uprooted campus shrubbery to fuel this celebratory bonfire. A sofa and other small items were also ignited.

Police in riot gear were on hand. At least six people were arrested, two of them for hitting a police horse. One report says that 30 were injured, five of them hospitalized.

This is nothing new. Following the 2002 title game, for example, rioters at both schools assaulted police and committed other mayhem. At joyous Maryland, there were 17 arrests and four injuries; at enraged Indiana, 30 arrests and 40 injuries.

In 2002, Dick Moreland told Ron Cook, a sports columnist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: “People are basically uncivilized. [They’re] held in check only by fear of punishment.” Moreland, a professor of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh, does research on social behavior in groups and organizations.

Cook remarked, “People are nameless and faceless in a mob. That leads to courage they wouldn’t have in another situation.”

Moreland concurred. “Even nice people will do these kinds of things when they’re in a group. To be influenced by your conscience, you have to turn your attention inward. That tends to happen when you’re by yourself. But the acts of a group draw your attention outward. That tends to short-circuit guilt when it comes to your values and beliefs.

“We’re basically selfish people who are prone to misbehave as long as we can get away with it. We’ll try almost anything if we think we won’t get caught. ...And even if [we] are caught, the punishment probably won’t be as severe because, well, everyone else was doing the same thing, weren’t they?”

So go ahead and break the speed limit and cheat on your taxes, right? It’s okay. The rest of the mob is doing it.

APRIL 4, 2026 TRUTHS

Pittsburgh, the city of three rivers, has 446 bridges according to one list. They span the famously uneven terrain of rivers and valleys. Someone has to construct and maintain them.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that to secure these bridges, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Karaj, a city west of Tehran, was building a $400 million bypass that would be 446 feet high. Two days ago, American and Israeli forces bombed the middle of the “B1.” An hour later, when emergency crews were on the site, it was struck a second time. Eight people were killed and 95 wounded. “The biggest bridge in Iran comes tumbling down, never to be used again,” boasted Donald Trump, who had earlier threatened to blast the whole nation “back to the stone ages where they belong” unless a deal could be struck to end the war he started.

I hold this truth to be self-evident: that it is better to bring people together via bridges than to destroy them.

Because sports is merely the “toy department” of news media, sporting types sometimes play hoaxes.

• In 1941, a group of stockbrokers wondered about the many college football results that were listed in tiny “agate” type in the New York Times. They suspected the newspaper was making up games to fill space. “Slippery Rock State Teachers College”? Come on! That can’t be a real school, can it?

So the guys invented Plain

field Teachers College and began phoning in its scores. “Plainfield Teachers?” “That’s right.” “Where is that, in New Jersey?” “Uh, sure.” There’s no fact-checking in the toy department, so Plainfield’s fanciful results got printed. Bill Christine relates in this article how readers were regaled with tales of stellar performers like Johnny Chung, the greatest Chinese halfback ever to wear the mauve and puce.

• A quarter century later, George Carlin as sports anchor “Biff Barf” asserted, “I call ’em the way I see ’em. And if I don’t see ’em, I make ’em up! No games today; however, we’ve got a few late football scores still coming in from the Far West. Guam Prep 45, Tahiti 14. Mindanao A&I 27, Molokai 10. Cal Tech 14.5, MIT 12³. And here’s a partial score: Philadelphia 29.”

In the fall of 1965 I was a freshman on a campus near Cleveland. And this is not fiction: The Cleveland Browns were actually the defending champions of the National Football League. I had no TV in my dorm room, so I listened to local sportscaster Gib Shanley calling the Browns games on the radio.

Cleveland was also the source of my daily newspaper. Every morning, I bought a copy of the Plain Dealer for a window on the wider world.

The PD covered American college and pro football, of course. But it also had its own football scores coming in from the Far West. Each week that fall, columnist Bill Hickey reported on the exploits of the Pusan State Panthers.

The Pusan State fullback was Won Sok Hung, “the Sun Prince of Korean football.” Once Hickey included a photo like this of the 4’11” 128-pound Sok in his golden helmet. I thought he looked more like a Fighting Irishman, but what did I know?

I read with raised eyebrow that the Panthers’ quarterback was Kim Dip Thong and the coach was Nu Rok Nee. Finally, when Hickey quoted an enthusiastic comment from announcer Gib Chan Lee, I caught on.

Pusan State won the Sake Bowl in a thrilling upset but was never heard from again, except for a Scorecard mention in Sports Illustrated.

• That was not the end of imaginative sportswriting, of course. Two decades later, George Plimpton wrote about a Mets rookie with a 168-mph fastball. The story of Sidd Finch ran in SI on this very date in 1985. The date, of course, was April 1.