T. Buckingham Thomas

DECEMBER 6, 2025 TOOL BEHAVIOR

Can animals use tools? Why not?

One example is a crow that finds a stick, pokes it into a termite nest, pulls it out crawling with bugs, and eats them.

I saw a video purporting to be another example, but I'm not so sure.

A female wolf probably had observed a human retrieving a crab trap from deep water. She realized, “I can do that! And there's food in that thing!” She swam out and pulled the buoy to shore, then grabbed the attached rope and reeled that in as well. The crab bait was soon on land for her dining convenience.

But that wasn't tool use, strictly speaking. The wolf hadn't invented a new purpose for the buoy and rope, bringing them in from elsewhere and making serve as her “tools.” When a chimp unwraps a banana, is it converting the peel into a “tool” to access the sweet fruit inside? She had merely taken advantage of an existing situation and used it for her own benefit.

When I was in grade school, kids had no trouble reading Sally's letter to the North Pole in this classic Peanuts cartoon, with each letter smoothly connected to the next.

When I reached college, I was still writing in cursive, though I would gradually abandon it over the next few years.

Nowadays I'm told that kids can no longer read this type of handwriting. What is this world coming to? Is it the fault of present-day brute-force writing instruments?

Public-school teacher Josh Giesbrecht writes, “My own writing morphed from Palmerian script into mostly print shortly after starting college, when I regularly had to copy down reams of notes. But fountain pens want to connect letters. Ballpoint pens and No.2 pencils need to be convinced to write, need to be pushed into the paper rather than merely brush against it.”

When I was a high school student in semi-rural Ohio more than 60 years ago, the plan was this: If the weather was going to be bad on Tuesday, school was canceled.

Here in western Pennsylvania today, we're expecting several of inches of snow. It will be hazardous for the buses to run their routes. But education must go on! Practically every district has announced that they'll hold classes as usual, but on a two-hour delay.

That got me thinking. Under these conditions, are the first and second periods simply eliminated, starting the day with the third period instead? That would make things difficult for students and teachers who have second-period algebra, since that class would fail to meet at all for a percentage of winter days.

Or does the entire schedule play out as usual, only two hours later? That would delay lunch until late afternoon, and the students wouldn't be dismissed until sunset.

So I went online to learn how delays are actually handled at Highlands High School down the street.

It turns out that they move the first two periods to the end of the day so the half-hour lunch remains at approximately noon. Then they shorten all the periods by 40%, from 42 minutes to 25.

Study faster, everybody!

BAA, aside from ovine utterances, can stand for a Business Associate Agreement or possibly the Boston Athletic Association or maybe a Bachelor of Applied Arts degree. What do we call abbreviations like this?

As memory slowly fades with advancing age, I find myself sometimes unable to recall a bit of common knowledge. A string of initials pronounced as though they form an actual word is called ... not an anagram, but what? I asked Google last week and was reminded that the term is acronym, from roots denoting a name “nym” whittled down to a point “acro.”

Further searching revealed that many acronyms were invented by telegraphers in order to use fewer characters. One example was “SCOTUS” for Supreme Court Of The United States, which the United Press teletype at my college radio station often printed as a header for news stories.

Yet further research revealed that in 1974, NASA scientist Jack Cover invented a stun gun to shock and disable airplane hijackers. Remembering a 1911 novel about a weapon for elephant hunting, Dr. Cover named his device the “Tom Swift Electric Rifle” or TSER. Tom's name was soon modified to Tom A. Swift. The resulting acronym happily rhymes with the names of “laser” and “phaser,” which could be considered similar devices.

And who was this fictional Tom Swift? A tinkerer like Tom Edison who developed inventions by trial and error. His ideas were depicted in more than a hundred young adult novels during the 20th century: flying submarines, airplane-engine silencers, synthetic diamonds, house trailers, portable movie cameras.

In dialogue, the books often appended an apt adverb to the simple verb “said.” That gave rise to “Tom Swifty” parodies that were popular in the 1960s. For example, the title of this piece. Or “‘I forgot what I needed at the store,’ Tom said listlessly.” Or “‘We're out of flowers,’ Tom said lackadaisically.”

2021 FLASHBACK: Late one night, my TV set with the sound down happened to be showing a 1962 Perry Mason episode on MeTV. The closed captioning kept mentioning a murder victim named XXXXIE DURHAM. That's an odd name, I thought. How would one pronounce it?

I finally gave in and turned up the audio, and the next morning I looked up the episode on IMDB. It seems there were two Durham brothers, Russell W. and Richard W., the latter known as “Dickie.” A prudish spell-check program, cleaning up the captions file, must have detected what it thought was a forbidden four-letter word and X'ed it out.

2024 UPDATE: This week, I again encountered that politically-correct closed captioning filter.

First came a 1969 Mannix episode in which a lurker arousing suspicions was described as a SUXXXXIOUS character. It took me a couple of minutes to realize that the redacted four letters represented an ethnic slur about a Hispanic person.

The next Mannix I watched ended with another lurker with a rifle being identified as a SXXXER, thereby concealing another slur from the 1940s against a Japanese person from Nippon.

2025 UPDATE: The redactions proved successful, and both objectionable expressions have faded from common use.

But various networks still need to update their captioner's dictionary. An all-news channel (CNN? MSNOW?) mentions “PARTIZAN” viewpoints. And last week, HBO insisted on the official international spelling for the Thanksgiving “TÜRKÍYE.”

Speaking of the holiday ... if you're going to televise the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, wouldn't you prefer a relatively unobtrusive background for the main performance area? But no, back and center stands a very obtrusive open-beaked logo character, apparently elbowing his way onto almost every float.

Here are examples from two different years, with 2025 on the right. When viewers scan the floats to see what's on them, there stands the photobombing türkiye.

I like to explore my surroundings. When I used to travel to faraway cities in oder to telecast events, I'd walk out of my hotel and check out the next several blocks of Boston, San Francisco, Santa Monica, Tokyo, Montreal, London, Miami Beach, two Portlands, and so on.

Now that I've become less spry, I do my sightseeing in my car instead of on foot. As a child, I used to ride with my parents up and down the roads surrounding our rural village. As an adult, I drive the roads northeast of Pittsburgh, passing fields and pastures and Ekastown and Chicora and Walkchalk and other exotic places you've probably never heard of.

Recently, on the two-lane Mushroom Farm Road, I observed something I'd never noticed before.

Most road signs are on my right. However, when deciding whether to pass someone, I'll glance to my left to check for oncoming traffic. Therefore, on my left is where they've cleverly placed the pennant marking the start of the no-passing zone.

In the middle of such roads in late August, I encountered four dead groundhogs in the space of one hour. Then I saw an office with an Acrisure sign.

I'd never before seen such a symbol in the wild. Until then, I'd only known “Acrisure” as the name of an obscure firm offering cybersecurity, payroll, employee benefits, mortgages, and insurance. Though based in western Michigan, that financial technology company has somehow bought the naming rights to the stadium where the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Pitt Panthers play.

(ESPNU still doesn't know the name. On a college telecast, their closed captioning's best guess was Arkansas Stadium.)

One day I decided on a route through the village in Buffalo Township seen below. But I couldn't remember its name. Was it “Shaler”? No, that's closer to Pittsburgh. But I felt confident the town's name did began with S and did contain two syllables. I knew I'd eventually come up with it, just as I always do.

Several minutes later, as I turned onto the road that leads to the road that leads up to the town, my brain dug up the answer.

Sarver.

Memories are easier to retrieve if they're linked to connections. Therefore, I resolved to associate the town's name with this holiday image.

On October 12, 2025, President Donald J. Trump admitted, “I want to try and get to heaven, if possible. I'm hearing I'm not doing well. I am really at the bottom of the totem pole. ...I don't think there's anything that's going to get me into heaven.”

After death, will good people go to heaven while others won't? Don't be childish, says the Bible. Everyone dies. “All share a common fate — the righteous and the wicked, the good and the bad, the clean and the unclean, those who offer sacrifices and those who do not. As it is with the good, so with the sinful; as it is with those who take oaths, so with those who are afraid to take them. The same destiny overtakes all.” (Ecclesiastes 9:2-3 NIV)

Christian preachers, of course, ignore this part of God's Word. They assure us that a fraction of us are in fact bound for eternal paradise. However, entry into heaven doesn't depend on a scorecard of being naughty or nice. It requires only a profession of faith, accepting what the preachers tell us. “If you declare with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” (Romans 10:9 NIV)

Episode 12 of season 6 of South Park discussed our “fragile innocence in believing we could all get to heaven.” Perhaps by building a ladder? A very tall ladder?

“People make us kids believe that heaven is this white place with fluffy clouds and angels. But now we think that maybe heaven isn't a place you can get to. Maybe heaven is just an idea, a frame of mind.

“The only heaven we can hope for is one here on earth, now. We should stop waiting to get into heaven and start trying to create it.”

I was a morning radio disk jockey, briefly, when I was a college senior back in 1969. One day a week on campus radio station WOBC near Cleveland, I played Top 40 hits on Sunrise! from 6:00 to 8:00 AM.

The station had been silent for several hours when I fired up the transmitter at 5:59, read the sign-on continuity, and played my first record. Almost all of my fellow students were still in bed, upstairs in their various dormitories, and I was theoretically waking them up. I imagined myself as their alarm clock.

What was that first record? It varied from week to week, of course. But when Gordon Lightfoot released a certain album the following year, the thought occurred to me: Had this been in the record library when I was a DJ, the first song on it would have been a good opening theme.

It begins quietly, without introduction. Gordon Lightfoot breaks the morning silence by proclaiming:

     The minstrel of the dawn is here
     To make you laugh and bend your ear.
Up the steps you'll hear him climb,
All full of thoughts, all full of rhyme.

     Listen to the pictures flow.
     Across the room, into your mind they go.
Listen to the strings;
They jangle and dangle while the old guitar rings.

“He’s trying to get into things more happy than blue,” Lightfoot sings of the minstrel.

Then his 12-string guitar picks up the tempo, getting into the happier, more energetic rock tunes I would play on Sunrise!

But I worried about the mention, later in the lyrics, of Stepin Fetchit. That shambling black character, portrayed in old movies by Will Rogers’s friend Lincoln Perry, pretended to be "The Laziest Man in the World." Should we be celebrating this racist stereotype? It wasn't until recently, more than four decades later, that I did a little research on Stepin Fetchit.

By the 1960s, Perry had left that character behind. Now, he said, “I do stand-up comedy. No takes from the old movies. That age is gone.” (Quotes from Shuffling to Ignominy: The Tragedy of Stepin Fetchit, by Champ Clark.)

Once he was performing in Cleveland. “My wife and I were just voted the good-neighbor award. We even went out and burned our own cross. My grandfather was one of the first politicians in Mississippi. Yeah, he ran for the borders.” Lightfoot was singing in another club across the street and caught Perry’s act several times. This information allows us to have a poignant perspective on the lyrics, which I’ve rearranged somewhat.

A minstrel of the dawn is near,
Just like a Step'n Fetchit here.
     He's like an old-time troubadour,
     Just wanting life and nothing more.
A minstrel of the changin' tide,
He'll ask for nothing but his pride.
     Like me and you,
     He's tryin' to get into things more happy than blue.

The minstrel of the dawn is he.
Not too wise, but oh so free.
     He'll talk of life out on the street.
     He'll play it sad and say it sweet.
Look into his shining face;
Of loneliness you'll always find a trace.
     Just like me and you,
     He's tryin' to get into things more happy than blue.

The minstrel of the dawn is gone.
I hope he'll call before too long.
     And if you meet him, you must be
     The victim of his minstrelsy.
He'll sing for you a song,
The minstrel of the dawn.

“Why is the music on some television shows so loud that you can hardly hear the talking?” That's the No. 1 most-asked question received by Pittsburgh's Rob Owen during two decades of writing a TV Q&A column.

How to fix the situation? Rob doesn't have a one-size-fits-all suggestion. But as for me, I haven't yet developed hearing problems, I don't think.

And I keep my TV's audio-equalizer mode set to Clear Voice, even during the ominous music in the horror films which Svengoolie inflicts upon MeTV viewers.

Not only that, I keep the TV's closed captioning set to On. That was helpful, for example, when a cowboy rode into an echoing canyon at the beginning of the old movie on November 8. (That canyon would later turn out to be populated with even older prehistoric creatures, lost in time.) Through cupped hands the rider called out for his partner, and I thought I heard him shout “Lou Darr,” but the captioning informed me that he was yelling for “Miguel.”

One of the creatures that Ray Harryhausen animated for this film was a cute miniature horse the size of a dog. The humans placed it in a cage, allowing the lead cowboy to observe that the mini-horse's hooves were adaptations of four toes on its front feet and three on its hind feet. Therefore, he explained, it must be an Eohippus from about 50 million years ago.

I was aware of the “dawn horse” as an evolutionary predecessor of modern equines. However, I wasn't familiar with the toe count.

The cowboy obviously had read his Thomas Huxley.

On a couple of occasions those competitions involved golf or tennis, but I never really followed either sport.

I'm told there are international men's team competitions for each, and one is called the Davis Cup and the other is called the Ryder Cup, but I can't tell you which is which.

> > > This just in:

In golf, Europe defeated America to win the 2025 Ryder Cup this September.

And in tennis, the Final 8 of the 2025 Davis Cup will be held in Bologna, Italy, next week.

Both championships are big events, prominently reported in the American press — except this year, when the United States didn't qualify for the Final 8. However, it's only in odd-numbered years that one of them is contested (I can't remember which one).

Yesterday, on a day when two government bodies simultaneously came to their senses — when holdout legislators in the Capitols of both the United States and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania at last gave up and allowed a Federal shutdown to end after 43 days and a state budget to be adopted after a 134-day impasse — I pivoted from that news to appreciate a minor feat of television technique.

Pittsburgh's WPXI-TV sent a reporter to describe an incident that had taken place in three locations in the borough of Dormont. She began by standing in front of the first building.

After a couple of sentences she moved to our right, exiting the frame while still talking.

The picture cut to a main street. Still talking, she walked into the new scene from our left and explained what had happened downtown, then again walked out of the frame to our right.

Finally the picture cut to a different building, and she walked into that frame while concluding her report.

Obviously we were seeing three separate “takes,” but her voice quality matched perfectly: pitch, volume, pace, everything. The edited pauses between sentences sounded completely natural, neither too clipped nor too long. And we never caught sight of the moments when her narration stopped or resumed. If I had not been watching the screen, I would not have noticed the cuts; the piece sounded seamless. Nice trick, WPXI-TV newspeople!

I've recently rediscovered a recording of a memorable episode of a TV panel quiz show which I viewed as a teenager more than six decades ago.

As an eighth-grade student in 1960, I followed the unusually close Presidential election campaign. From school I had obtained the map you see below. I added little rectangles for the states of Alaska and Hawaii, which were too new to have outlines of their own. For each state I wrote in its number of electoral votes.

Then on November 8 of that year, 55 years ago tonight, I was glued to the TV as the returns came in. Whenever Walter Cronkite and his colleagues called a state for Republican Richard Nixon, I colored in that state with a red pencil. And when they declared that Democrat John F. Kennedy had won a state, I used a green pencil. (Had I been aware of 21st-century coloring rules, these would have been blue states, not green.)

When I had to go to bed — we did have school the next day, you know — the results of some far western states were still uncertain. Alaska hadn’t been called at all, and California and Hawaii had been called incorrectly, as it turned out.

What about that area in Mississippi and Alabama that I colored chartreuse? Most people there had sworn never to vote for a hated Yankee from the Republican party, “the party of Lincoln.” But they didn’t like the liberal Democratic nominee either. Their uncommitted electoral votes eventually went to a conservative Democrat, Harry Byrd of Virginia. Nevertheless, Kennedy was elected, in large part because the key state of Illinois narrowly remained green.

The liberal Democrats subsequently passed civil rights legislation. That provoked Southern bigots to abandon the party and actually vote Republican. Eight years later, when Nixon ran again, only two states south of West Virginia went to Democrat Hubert Humphrey. Even today the South consists mostly of red states.

In yesterday's election, three justices of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court were each up for another 10-year term on the bench. Some folks wanted them to be retained, while others did not. Why the difference? The three sitting justices were all Democrats.

Yes No Yes No Yes No
Y No Yes No Yes No

Construct an empty tube from here to there. Insert a cylinder containing documents, or even people. Use compressed air to push the cylinder from one end to the other.

It’s a simple concept that powered New York City’s first subway. It also powered New York's pneumatic tube mail, which carried letters from downtown to Harlem in only 20 minutes under the streets. The early subway closed in 1873 and the mail system in 1953, but when I was a boy, an Ohio department store still used pneumatic tubes to whoosh customers’ money upstairs to the office and return with their change.

Many bank branches employ this technology even today. We used to drive up to a bank branch's window and pass things back and forth to the teller using a sliding drawer. Nowadays tubes and intercoms allow us to interact with a teller who can be somewhere else inside the building.

This bank in nearby Russellton, PA, needed a drive-through like that, but the only available land was across the river. Excuse me, across Little Deer Creek. Solution: bridge the creek with an 80-foot tube. Mega-pneumatics in action.