T. Buckingham Thomas

Many folks love the musical Wicked and its movie adaptation. I never warmed up to any of its songs except the dramatic “Defying Gravity” and this one, “Popular,” which caught my ear because of the way Stephen Schwartz has inserted an extra lilting syllable into the title — during a chord change, to boot. I couldn't figure out exactly how he did it until I looked at the sheet music.

In real life, most couples get married in their local church or city hall and plan to stay together forever. That's despite the fact that “the whole courthouse and the paperwork and the permanence of it, you know, kind of kills the romance,” to quote one of the characters on the TV series High Potential.

But television characters are not ordinary. Often they decide to have their wedding at home or “right here in the bar.” That's where the supporting characters live, and the studio doesn't need to construct a separate church set. Alternatively, the couple runs off to Las Vegas.

Also, they discuss signing a prenup. “Prenuptial agreements” are drawn up prior to the nuptials (i.e. the wedding) to specify how the couple's money and property will be divided when they divorce. That will be important if one person will contribute most of the wealth to the union.

A Redditor posts, “I always thought prenups were for rich people or celebrities who have millions to protect. Are prenups actually useful for regular middle-class people, or is this just lawyers trying to make money?” Another Redditor replies that a prenup may be useful because it requires “a discussion about how you see money — what you see as ‘yours,’ ‘mine,’ and ‘ours.’ It helps you be financially transparent and to ensure you're entering into a marriage with good communication.”

However, that's not the real reason storybook characters on TV are talking about prenups. It's just another plot point to generate some dialogue.

• Other unreal aspects to TV shows: I understand that to stay consistent from one episode to the next, a series creator prepares a “bible” describing how the writers should have their characters speak and behave. The Big Bang Theory must have decided that Sheldon had to start a speech with “I'm confused” whenever something didn't meet with his expectations. Also, to convince viewers to pay attention, someone in every episode had to react to an event by remarking “That's interesting” or “That's so exciting” or by gushing “That's AMAZING!” Real people don't use those expressions very often.

• And because episodes of procedural shows need to keep things moving, the investigators receive the results of an autopsy almost immediately. One series is called 48 Hours, after all.

But in real life, when a Columbus, Ohio, couple were murdered in late 2025, “the Franklin County Coroner's Office told CNN that autopsy reports can take between eight and 10 weeks to complete.”

Most procedurals solve the mystery within an hour, even when it's based on a real-life cold case that puzzled the authorities for years. We've been conditioned us to expect prompt results. Thus we're frustrated watching news reports about Nancy Guthrie's kidnapping. With little progress, every night this month we've been pondering the same puffy gloves.

Every week I receive a copy of the Richwood Gazette, the newspaper from my old home town in Ohio.

I have no idea where that publication may have been hibernating for the previous three months.

When I was a Richwood High School student 60 years ago, I was one of the managers who supported sports teams. In the winter that meant basketball: varsity, reserves, and freshmen.

All of those teams were for boys. The girls did play basketball — here's the championship intramural team — but not competitively against other schools.

Well, that has changed. The school is now called North Union, and the Lady Cats do compete against other schools. They're in the Mad River Division of the Central Buckeye Conference.

The map below locates the division schools, plus the namesake Mad River shown in blue.

Earlier this month I received a timely edition of the Gazette with the happy news that North Union's girls have completed their fifth straight undefeated conference season at 10-0. The hoopsters have won 51 straight Mad River Division contests since February 3, 2021.

And in the final game, senior Kennedy Harrah, shown here, reached the 1,000-point mark for her career.

But there was also sad news in that paper. The village's Opera House will have to be torn down.

The village council does have $60,000 in the budget for demolition of vacant property, and they've received a $67,630 quote for this project. Esimates for repairing and refurbishing the 136-year-old landmark run as high as five million dollars, so there really was no choice. “It all comes down to dollars and cents,” said Mayor Scott Jerew, who cast the deciding vote.

There's still hope that the clock can be saved, perhaps in a commemorative bell tower.

I'd forgotten that I created this graphic, and I was amazed to find it buried in my files.

During the academic year at Oberlin College (consisting of the September-December fall semester and the January-May spring semester), the student newspaper published twice a week: on Tuesday and on Friday.

A decade or so ago, I found myself searching for old Oberlin Review news from an online site, but to access any particular edition I needed to know the exact date.

Therefore I laboriously constructed this chart. If, for example, I wanted to learn what was happening on campus around my 21st birthday on February 20, 1968, I could refer to the area of the chart that I've highlighted in orange. It says that in that month (02), the Tuesday Oberlin Review should have published on February 13 and therefore also seven days later on February 20 — and so it did. (Also, the paper should have bracketed my birthday by printing Friday editions on February 16 and 23.)

The things that an archivist will do if he's overly organized and has time on his hands!

John Poindexter, the owner of the Texas ranch where Justice Antonin Scalia died, reported that the judge was found in bed with a “pillow over his head.”

Conspiracy theorists took notice. “They say they found a pillow on his face, which is a pretty unusual place to find a pillow,” Donald Trump said Monday. His host, conservative broadcaster Michael Savage, said this might point to murder. There should be an investigation!

No, no, Poindexter told CNN yesterday. “He had a pillow over his head, not over his face as some have been saying. The pillow was against the headboard and over his head when he was discovered.”

A law-enforcement source told CNN that “agents know the difference between someone dying in their sleep and being suffocated to death with a pillow.”

The problem is the imprecise meaning of “over,” particularly when a person is in a horizontal position. In this case I think “over his head” means “adjacent to what would be the top of his head if he were standing up.”

I sometimes encounter this ambiguity when describing graphics. In terms of the y-coordinate, T is over B. But in terms of the z-coordinate, both are over the canvas-like background and casting shadows upon it.

It reminds me of the time my mother described the heavy snows when she was growing up on a farm. This would have been around 1920 when she was seven years old.

They had to dig out an access route from the house to the barn, of course, and she remembered “the snow was over my head!” I pictured a tunnel. If she walked through it, she’d be surrounded by snow on all sides, including the ceiling of the tunnel above her.

But after further review, I realized that they’d merely shoveled the snow into piles alongside the path, and the piles were taller than the little girl. That's still a lot of snow, but the original description had gone over my head.

FEBRUARY 16, 2026
A FIERY NEW YEAR'S EVE

The Chinese Year of the Fire Horse begins tomorrow!

Mark Evanier relates that back in 1962, Stan Freberg put together a New Year's Eve TV special. It aired in the Sunday-night ABC time slot where my father and I sometimes watched James Garner as Maverick. (“As my old pappy used to say, a man does what he has to do — if he can't get out of it.”)

Stan's sponsor was Chun King. That was the brand of canned food established by Minnesota's Jeno Paulucci.

Jeno loved to eat Chinese but found it too bland and thought it would benefit from a little more fire. A little Italian spicing.

Japanese women could be so jealous. Obviously — and I’m not kidding — the title of this print is “Woman Throwing a Snowball at a Girl Reading a Love Letter.”

The 18th-century color woodblock print, by artist Suzuki Harunobu, is part of the collection of the Allen Memorial Art Museum. That's located at my alma mater, Oberlin College. (Motto: On the Forbes list of America's Top Colleges, we’re #46!)

My family has been associated with the Methodist Church since at least as far back as 1837, when my great-great-grandfather Dr. Archibald Thomas, a member in Springfield, Tennessee, sold a lot on which to erect a building for his local church.

Some 120 years later in Richwood, Ohio, my father, who had previously solicited donations door-to-door, explained to the congregation how $80,000 for a new Sunday school wing was going to be obtained via voluntary contributions. The script for his talk is this month's 100 Moons article.

“Why don’t all drivers out there stop at stop signs?” asked Keith Whitmore of Duquesne, PA, yesterday in a letter to the editor. “I am tired of coming up to an intersection and having a jerk come up to the same intersection and blow through a stop sign. Just by the grace of God I see these drivers first and avoid them before they hit me. ...My dad used to say, ‘He must be late for his own funeral!’”

Personally, I haven’t noticed many cars failing to at least come to a “rolling stop.” And almost everyone seems to stop at a red light and wait obediently for it to change, even with no other traffic in sight. (Why do red lights command more respect than red signs?)

On the other hand, my uncle Jim didn’t even slow down for a stop sign if he deemed it unnecessary. If he could clearly see there were no other cars within half a mile of a rural crossroad, he’d fly through it doing 70.

The overall warming climate has changed what we're used to. “People have forgotten just how cold it was in the 20th century,” Texas A&M University climate scientist Andrew Dessler tells the Associated Press. For the U.S. in the 21st century, compared to 1976-2000, Climate Central says the average year has had four fewer days of subfreezing temperatures. And consecutive spells of subfreezing temperatures haven't lasted as long.

Until this year, that is. In Pittsburgh, we're about to emerge from the 5th longest subfreezing streak in local history. After 18 consecutive days below 32°, the thermometer is predicted to reach 52° here tomorrow!

Because of the cold ... and because of more than a foot of snow encasing my car and many roads ... and because of frightening scenes like this Dave DiCello photo of ice-choked rivers ... I have cocooned inside my apartment for the equivalent of two full weeks. That's January 23 through February 2 plus February 6 through 9, a total of 14 days without going outside.

During the three relatively survivable days in the middle, I made it to the pharmacy, the grocery, and the doctor before the wind chill returned to -16°.

Ice killed a local citizen Friday morning. Not ICE, but frozen precipitation on Interstate 79 that caused a fatal 25-vehicle pileup. A Slippery Rock University freshman died when he crashed his Subaru into a pickup towing a trailer. At least 20 other vehicles were disabled.

FEBRUARY 7, 2026
PLEASE, PLEASE, WE IMPLORE THE QUESTION

Pretentious writer:
The Buffalo Bills advanced to four straight Super Bowls from 1990-93. They lost all four. It begs the question: Is the current iteration of the team even more disappointing?

Pedantic editor:
That's an incorrect use of “begs the question.” The phrase attempts to translate petitio principia, which means “presupposes the initial point.” Nobody is begging or pleading. The concept dates back to Aristotle's examination of logical fallacies such as circular reasoning, an argument that begins by assuming the idea it's trying to prove. For example, if a school demands that all students must wear uniforms in order to prevent distractions, someone might say that begs the question as to why uniforms are less distracting. But in this case, say “suggests” or “raises” the question.

Practical reader:
I beg of you: don't use all those extra words about “the question” merely to sound educated. Simply say, “They lost all four. Is the current iteration even more disappointing?”

FEBRUARY 4, 2016
YES, I HAVE HAIR

When my father was drafted during World War II, he was first sent to basic training. But the Army realized that this middle-aged office manager was not cut out to be an infantryman. He belonged behind a desk, not on a battlefield. Therefore, they sent him to basic accountant training. I’ve added three pictures to the early part of this article.

He served overseas but never saw combat. During the year when his age was 35, he was stationed at a base at Chabua in northeastern India and carried the ID card shown above. He was not tall, so he kept his actual height “private.”

By the time he was 36, the war was over, and he sailed home with thousands of his buddies on what could be called a Mediterranean cruise. I’m planning a new picture article about that experience for next month.

“Well, Hello Dolly,” Louie Armstrong sang in 1964. “This is Lewis, Dolly.”

We're of two minds about how to pronounce “Louis.”

A few years ago I encountered a online debate about how to pronounce the middle name of Julia Louis-Dreyfus, the actress who played Elaine on Seinfeld. An internet search led to both correct and incorrect answers.

The right one turns out to be the French version, “Louie.” (Julia's prosperous family comes from Alsace, a region that's not quite French and not quite German. And, just for the record, she's more than 16 years old.)

But nobody seemed to be arguing about the “Dreyfus” part. How does one say “Drey?”

• Neither, surprisingly. Iit turns out to be a long I as in “dry” or the German 1-2-3, “eins-zwei-drei.”
(And “fuss” is German for “foot.”)

Of course, we already knew all that because of the historic Dreyfus affair.

Julia's fifth cousin four times removed, Alfred Dreyfus, was a Jewish officer in the French army. In 1894 he was wrongfully convicted of being a German spy, based on what turned out to be a forged document concerning military secrets.

The French press and its anti-Semitic faction were convinced of the supposed disloyalty of French Jews, so they welcomed his imprisonment. But in 1898 the novelist Émile Zola wrote an open letter under the headline “J'Accuse...!” How could we forget?

"I accuse Lt. Col. du Paty de Clam [an amateur graphologist] of being the diabolical creator of this miscarriage of justice and of defending this sorry deed, over the last three years, by all manner of bizarre and evil machinations. ...I accuse General de Boisdeffre of complicity in the same crime, no doubt out of religious prejudice ...I said it before and I repeat it now: when truth is buried underground, it grows and it builds up so much force that, the day it explodes, it blasts everything with it. We shall see whether we have been setting ourselves up for the most resounding of disasters, yet to come."