T. Buckingham Thomas Archive 2023 February

On television these days, half the commercials are for cars. On the programs I watch, two-thirds. Or so it seems. I’ve seen back-to-back ads for competing brands, which used to be a no-no.

One of the commercials depicts a father driving through a parking garage, trying to find an empty space. There’s one spot, but it’s apparently too small. Not for him. He unloads his family, retracts his side mirrors, squeezes into the space with an inch to spare, then exits through the power lift gate.

I had no idea which car this commercial was promoting. (Further checking reveals it’s a Kia Sorento.) But by the third time I saw it, I stopped paying attention to the story and began listening to the accompanying music.

I’m guessing that the creative services department went looking for an appropriate song and somehow discovered an obscure old record called “Beep-Beep-Beep.” That sounds like a car, right? And the first line of the song mentions “lookin’” and “searchin’,” which suggests trying to find a parking space. Perfect. But then I noticed that the lyrics included the word “Sputnik.” What?!?

Sputnik was the first man-made satellite, launched by our mortal enemy the Soviet Union in October 1957. Panicked Americans worried that the Soviets had more advanced missiles than we did. News commentators played recordings of the repeated beeps being broadcast by the “artificial moon.” They explained that it was traveling an incredible 18,000 miles an hour, orbiting far above Earth’s weather, moving from the day side of the planet to the night side and back again every 96 minutes.

Unfortunately, this record did not become a hit in 1957. Perhaps it was because “Beep-beep-beep” was an ominous reminder of our Soviet enemies.

We preferred to listen to the sounds of familiar, comfortable planet Earth, where all the little birdies go “Tweet-tweet-tweet.”

Thus it was that the next year, Bobby Day’s backup singers switched to Tweet, tweedle-lee-dee for his new record “Rockin’ Robin.” That one climbed all the way to #2 on the charts.

When 13-year-old Michael Jackson covered the song in 1972, his version also hit #2.

Multiple-overtime games that seem to go on forever are exciting to fans who actually care which team wins. However, I used to work on television production crews. We only wanted the contest to be over, so we could pack up and go home.

During the final three rounds of soccer's 2022 World Cup, 43% of the games (including the championship final) were tied at the end of regulation plus extra time ... which required playing an overtime, an additional half-hour plus extra time ... but the score was still tied ... so the winner had to be determined by a penalty-kick shootout. The two-hour telecasts became three hours long.

There are quicker ways of deciding a close contest. This season, the G League of the National Basketball Association is playing all of its “overtimes” without actually keeping track of time. Teams deadlocked after regulation simply play to a “target score” of seven additional points, with the first team to reach seven being the winner. Columnist Jake Fischer has reservations, noting that “you can't replace the energy of an entire building seeing the numbers ticking down toward a loud-blaring horn that lights the backboard in a red blaze.”

Many years ago I proposed giving a bonus half-point or half-goal to one of the teams before the game. Later, when time expires, the score might be 3½ to 3, but the two numbers cannot be equal. There's a clear-cut winner with no further play required.

I proposed awarding the half-point tiebreaker to the visitors, thereby offsetting part of the other team's home-court advantage. But there's another method I never considered: a pregame skills competition!

Looking ahead to the 2026 World Cup, additional countries will be invited, and each Group — from which two teams advance to the knockout rounds — might consist of only three teams. Traditionally, there's no overtime for drawn games in the Group round. Instead, each team gets one point in the standings.

Obviously, Alpha should advance to the knockout rounds. But Beta and Gamma each lost to Alpha, and when they played each other, the result was a 2-2 draw. They have the same goal differential and the same number of points. Which of them should advance?

But we don't want to spend a lot of time continuing the games. Overtimes would disrupt the schedule and tire the players, so shootouts alone might suffice. And to expedite matters, “these shootouts could take place before kick-off or at full-time.”

Chris Branch of The Athletic comments, “A pregame penalty shootout? Sign me up. It sounds so dumb but so amazing.”

The local newspaper prints 50-year-old Peanuts cartoons and, apparently, 40-year-old puzzles. I sometimes entertain myself by solving the pun-laden Cryptoquip. This substitution cipher bears a current-year copyright by Kings Features Syndicate Inc., although the cultural references are not very current.

In January 2022, there was a present-tense reference to TV host Tom Snyder, who died in 2007. In September of that year, the Cryptoquip punned about a classic 1903 novel while alluding to an actress born in 1924: “Bacall of the Wild.” In October, I found game references that were old-fashioned when I was a youngster: bridge and “tennis, anyone?” And in January, there was a pun about “Edgy” Albert, the star of the 1965-71 TV comedy Green Acres who died in 2005.

UPDATE: Each Cryptoquip includes a hint: the solution for one character, such as “V equals H.” I've discovered that nearly half of these clues identify the character that stands for G, and those Gs are invariably at the end of words, so the preceding two letters are very likely IN. This makes those Cryptoquips easy to solve.

Somewhere there must be an outdated depository of these puzzles. As a one-time physics major, I recall that my slide rule became obsolete half a century ago with the introduction of quicker and more accurate digital calculators. But recently I decoded a Cryptoquip that asked, “WHAT DID THE MATHEMATICIAN SAY TO HIS SLIDE RULE WHEN HE WAS DONE WITH IT? ‘CALC YOU LATER!’”

I found another anachronism in the June 2023 issue of Games magazine. With my knowledge that there's a Will Rogers Turnpike in Oklahoma, I was able to decipher “SINCE MY KIDS SPILLED ROUND CORN CEREAL ALL OVER THE WILL ROGERS HIGHWAY, I SUPPOSE WE GOT OUR KIX ON ROUTE SIXTY-SIX.”

In 1935, the year Will Rogers died, a congressional resolution to name U.S. Route 66 in his honor was introduced. (However, Route 66 was removed from the official U.S. highway system fifty years later, replaced by Interstates.)

In 1937 the childrens' cereal called Kix was introduced.

In 1946 Nat King Cole recorded a song with Bobby Troup's lyrics, “If you ever plan to motor west, travel my way; take the highway that is best. Get your kicks on Route Sixty-Six.”

That cryptogram could be older than I am!

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here's an even older reference. “TITLE OF A TUNE DEDICATED TO THE DELIGHTS OF DELICIOUS DESSERT FROSTINGS: ‘OF THEE ICING.’”

To understand that pun, you need to recall Samuel Francis Smith's 1831 words, “My country, 'tis of thee ... of thee I sing.”

Or maybe you recall that one century later, George and Ira Gershwin wrote a satirical 1931 Broadway musical that won a Pulitzer Prize for drama. In the title tune, President John P. Wintergreen croons to his love interest Mary Turner, “Of thee I sing, baby!”

I don't recall ever having been a president of anything, except perhaps Latin Club in high school. Nevertheless, America is once again celebrating my birthday as a national holiday. It's today!

How old am I? Well, I recall covering the 1927 World Series for CBS, the new Columbia Broadcasting System. Only the first two games of my press pass for the Pittsburgh games got punched, because Babe Ruth and the Yankees went on to sweep the Pirates that year. The total time of the four games was 8 hours 43 minutes.

(I'm kidding, of course. I wasn't there. That Series took place nearly 20 years before I was born. Keith Olbermann found the credential last month and posted it online.)

FEBRUARY 17, 2023
THE CRAVEN

More than once have I observed that in every script, one character must enter and another must ask, “What are you doing here?” It's a requirement. The reply may provide exposition.

This is also true of other forms of literature, including comic strips and even an Edgar Allan Poe-inspired swim team tale.

Once upon a midday dreary,
suddenly there came a rapping.

The sound heralded the appearance
of a mysterious Craven.

Our poet demanded,
“What the hell you in here for?”

I've quoted that natatorial parody in a new article, leading to the story of a history-making swim meet that took place on this very date 55 years ago. It's called Impossible Mission.

On the day after last November's election, I happened to be checking out the three local 4:00 PM newscasts. Among their lead stories was breaking news from “Scott Township,” which must be in Pittsburgh's Allegheny County because they didn't specify otherwise. A Taco Bell manager had shot and killed a disgruntled employee. Schools were locked down and SWAT teams were summoned, because as it turned out, the gunman was at large until almost 8:00.

The reporters gave whatever information they had, but for me, one burning question remained unanswered. Where exactly is Scott Township? Have I ever heard of it before? Is it near me? Is it anywhere I've ever been? I was slightly worried.

Allegheny County has 130 municipalities, the most per capita of any county in the nation. Scott is relatively obscure. Why couldn't the reporters mention where it is? They might as well have described the location as “the 17th Ward” or “the Lincoln School District” or “behind Mike Tomlin's house.”

Finally one station, the ABC affiliate, deigned to show a graphic map (not this one). It turns out that Scott is southwest of Pittsburgh, comfortably far from my apartment.

Twelve weeks later, the local newscasts reported that safety concerns had forced the closing of the Charles Anderson Memorial Bridge. Emergency repairs would require at least four months, until summer.

Reporters said the bridge links the Pittsburgh neighborhoods of Oakland and Squirrel Hill. The 21,200 vehicles using it daily would now have to find alternate routes. But they didn't mention what street crossed the bridge nor what those alternates might be.

Another burning question remained unanswered. Where exactly is the Charles Anderson Memorial Bridge? Have I ever heard of it before? Is it near me? Is it anywhere I've ever been? Would I need to avoid it?

The next morning's newspaper came to the rescue. It turns out that Mr. Anderson was a city councilman in the 1930s and his bridge connects the Boulevard of the Allies, so named in 1919 to honor our side's victory in World War I, with Panther Hollow Road.

I've marked that bridge in red on this Google Earth view. It spans a ravine in Schenley Park.

There is a suggested detour, but printing it required two whole paragraphs. (Pittsburgh geography is complicated.) Not even the newspaper mapped the alternate route, and I wasn't familiar with many of those streets either, so I traced it. The 1.1-mile affected route is in green and the 2.4-mile detour in gold.

The Roman Catholic church was said to be shocked and stunned by yesterday’s announcement: After serving eight years, Pope Benedict XVI will retire at the end of the month. He will be replaced by a new pope around Easter.

This doesn’t happen often. The last pontiff to resign voluntarily was Celestine V in 1294. Usually the church’s leaders feel obligated to serve until death, fearing that if there were both a pope and a former pope alive, their respective partisans might break the church apart. But Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi insists there’s “no risk” of a schism.

To those of us who live in democracies, this doesn’t seem like such a big deal. In the United States, we change presidents at least every eight years. Since 1976, Republican ex-presidents have pretty much faded away, avoiding making any criticism of their successors. Democratic ex-presidents have remained more in the public eye, but they haven’t torn the nation apart.

Lombardi said that upon his retirement, the 85-year-old Benedict would retreat to Castel Gandolfo, the papal summer residence south of Rome. After a conclave chooses his successor, he will move into a cloistered convent or monastery inside the Vatican walls, where he will “devotedly serve the holy church of God in the future through a life dedicated to prayer.”

As an outsider, that’s the one flaw I see in the plan. Ex-presidents aren’t given their own apartments in the White House to live out their days; they go back to where they came from. If the ex-pope is still in residence at the Vatican, he can be perceived as arguing with the new pope. Couldn’t Benedict do his praying just as well in a cloistered convent or monastery in his native Germany?

UPDATES, TEN YEARS LATER: Obviously, the most recent Republican ex-president did leave Washington, under protest, but did not fade away.

On the other hand, the ex-pope faded away but did not leave Rome. Why didn't he want to return to Germany? Following his death in December 2022, commentaries have noted that he was a traditionalist, but German Catholics are increasingly liberal.

In the Washington Post, Chico Harlan and Rick Noack wrote: “In Germany, the pace of secularization, a force Benedict XVI spent decades warning about, has been dramatic. Abuse scandals ... have hastened the emptying of pews. Attempting to salvage credibility, German Catholic leaders have shown new willingness to reconsider stances on hot-button issues such as homosexuality and celibacy — areas where Benedict saw church teaching as immutable. It's a part of Benedict's legacy, as one of Catholicism's foremost conservatives, that his viewpoint has lost ground above all in his home country.”

FEBRUARY 10, 2023 TED KOPPEL

Edward James Martin Koppel was born in England in 1940, to parents who were refugees from the Holocaust. The family moved to the United States in 1953.

One of young Mr. Koppel's heroes became Edward R. Murrow, the broadcast reporter. On his way to graduating from Syracuse University at the age of 20, Ted was a disc jockey on the university radio station WAER.

So was I, as a graduate student ten years later. But I was never inducted into the WAER Hall of Fame, as Ted was when he became the very first member.

“The WAER Hall of Fame Award is the most valued award I have received,” he fibbed at the ceremony in 2012.

In June 1963, Ted joined ABC Radio News as its youngest correspondent ever, helping to cover the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination that November.

At the age of 26. he learned Vietnamese and went to Southeast Asia to report on the war for ABC Television.

Ted describes his Viet Nam experiences in a recent WAER podcast (listen here).

In particular, he explains that before his film could reach the United States and be prepared for broadcast, two or three days were required. So his reports weren't live. But along with others, they brought the reality of war into American homes for the first time.

In the podcast, Ted recalls the then-new compact cassette recorders that made his job easier. Back in this country, I had one of those. When U.S. support for the war provoked a demonstration, the recorder was used to bring the events into Oberlin College dormitories with a delay of only a couple of hours.

Ted also mentioned an ABC innovation, Radio On-Scene Reports or ROSRs. My cassette recorder likewise was used for those at Oberlin, one partially faked and another real.

If someone is suspected of wrongdoing, the correct order of procedures goes like this: Investigate. Then maybe Prosecute. Then maybe Adjudicate. Then maybe Incarcerate.

Too many partisans want to INVESTIGATE each and every opponent, often on flimsy grounds, then immediately LOCK THEM UP.

Five years ago, Adam Serwer wrote about Donald Trump: “His only real, authentic pleasure is in cruelty. It is that cruelty, and the delight it brings them, that binds his most ardent supporters to him, in shared scorn for those they hate and fear.”

Sometimes on TV I'll find an old episode of The Goldbergs. I soon change the channel. For what is allegedly a comedy, this family displays a lot of rage, and I feel uncomfortable looking at hateful faces.

Troy Gentile, who plays Barry, first appeared as the fat kid in the movie Bad News Bears. He's no longer fat.

All the excess weight apparently went into his eyebrows, which he employs to great effect while throwing a furious fit.

Ah, well. Every other Goldberg on TV seems to be mad at something.

Singular verbs with a final S, like agrees, should be used with singular nouns like Parliament. Plural verbs without the final S, like agree, should be reserved for plural nouns.

In this country, if an entire city metaphorically plays host to the other's football team, we would say “Kansas City welcomes Philadelphia.” But if we speak of the plural 53 roster players making the trip, we omit the final S from the verb, saying “the Chiefs welcome the Eagles.”

I can't get used to the British practice of considering an apparently singular noun as plural if it refers to a collection of multiple persons. In England, when referring to 25 roster players, they say:

Americans would use hosts and introduces. Also, when I start reading the last-quoted sentence, I momentarily interpret host as a noun and expect the meaning will turn out to be “Liverpool's host, Newcastle, is....”

And this week's news? “Manchester City are accused of not providing accurate financial information. The club are second in this season's Premier League table.” It simply sounds ungrammatical.

I must confess I'm no expert at popping a Chinese surveillance balloon using an AIM-9X Sidewinder.

However, if I had been aiming the missile, I would have pointed it at the center of the big white envelope (as depicted by the green arrow). The gasbag would have ruptured and lost its helium, allowing the payload to fall.

But during its fall, the mysterious payload would still be attached to the bag, including the still-inflated ballonet (the “outside air” portion in this diagram). The thousands of square feet of plastic trailing along behind would act somewhat like a parachute. When the payload hit the water it would be traveling relatively slowly and would sustain less damage. Splashdown!

Unfortunately the Sidewinder's infrared tracker looks for the warmest object, like the exhaust from a jet engine. In this case it apparently decided to zero in on the mechanical compressor (see the red arrow above).

That severed the connection and allowed the payload to fall free. Orienting its solar panels like wings, its 12-mile dive quickly hit “terminal velocity.” For a meteor, that would be at least 200 miles per hour. Smashdown!

Technicians are now trying to recover the all the fragments from the ocean and piece them back together.

Look! Up in the sky! Is it snow? Is it sleet? Is it rain? Is it freezing rain? [Is it a balloon?]

No, according to My Yahoo!, it's “Unknown Precipitation.” We'd better don our hard hats.

FIRST DAY OF SPRING: MARCH 20

FEBRUARY 1, 2023 SCARY SHADOW

According to Wikipedia, tomorrow morning's events in Punxsutawney might augur An Early Spring. “If the groundhog pops out from its burrow, sees his shadow, and then disappears again, it will mean that winter is to continue for six more weeks.”

“But if the groundhog does not see its shadow, then it will not be scared to come out of its burrow and winter will soon end” — in only six more weeks!

“Part of the problem with pinning down an accuracy rate for the groundhog is that what constitutes An Early Spring is not clearly defined.”