T. Buckingham Thomas Archive 2023 June

JUNE 30, 2023
COUGH IN THE SMOKE

In downtown Pittsburgh on the morning of May 5, 1940, coal smoke hung heavy over the Steel City. I've heard stories, including one from my uncle, that businessmen had to take a second white shirt to work so they could change to a clean shirt at lunch.

Man's pollution gradually went away, and now one writer can claim that with its surrounding rivers and hills, “Pittsburgh just might be the most beautiful city in the entire country.”

However, now we have nature's pollution, exacerbated by climate change. For a brief time yesterday morning, I had to breathe the worst air in the nation. These are the Air Quality Index numbers from 7:00 Thursday morning.

This photo by the AP's Gene J. Puskar shows the Pittsburgh Pirates game being delayed for 45 minutes while officials debate whether it's safe to proceed.

Take a look from my back porch. That's not fog; it's smoke from Canadian wildfires. I could barely see the house across the street. I closed my windows. As Mike Wereschagin tweeted, the Smoky City was wearing its throwback jersey.

JUNE 29, 2013
STEVE & EDIE

Singer/songwriter Edie Brickell (Paul Simon’s wife for the past 21 years) will be in Pittsburgh tomorrow night along with comedian/banjoist Steve Martin. Their concert at Heinz Hall will promote their album “Love Has Come for You.”

Do you remember Edie from her 1988 debut single, “What I Am”? “I’m not aware of too many things,” she sang, “but I know what I know. Don’t let me get too deep” into topics like philosophy or religion.

Philosophy? The song dismisses the speculations of philosophers as merely “the talk on a cereal box” and a dangerous “walk on the slippery rocks.”

Religion? It's “the smile on a dog.” People may like to believe that dogs smile, but they don’t. Their mouths aren’t built that way, so dogs use body language like wagging tails to express pleasure. Religion is also “a lie in the fog.” People may like to believe in it, but it isn’t real either.

At least that’s the way I heard it. Although the official lyrics are “a light in the fog,” pop singers like Edie don’t always pronounce their consonants clearly. What I heard is a bold metaphor: “Religion is a lie in the fog.” Could be the title of a book.

During the third week of June 2023, I could not escape the Breaking News. Contact had been lost with five men who were trying to explore the remains of the sunken ocean liner Titanic, 12,500 feet below the surface of the Atlantic.

We were constantly reminded that their submersible, called Titan, contained only 96 hours of air. Could they be rescued before that deadline?

Only occasionally were we given snippets of technical details, from which I've hazarded a guess of what could have happened. The thick plexiglass window on the nose of the craft, the viewport, was only certified by the manufacturer to a depth of 4,265 feet.

After descending for nearly two hours, the sightseers had gone twice that far. Possibly the porthole, fatigued from three previous visits to the wreck, began to “crackle” under the enormous pressure — not a good sign — and the crew immediately released ballast, trying to return to the surface.

However, their vessel imploded, instantly killing everyone. Hydrophones picked up the sound, and the Navy suspected what had happened but couldn't be sure. No one wanted give up hope based on that slim evidence.

The frenzied search-and-rescue efforts soon involved military and research vessels from multiple countries. Mysterious banging was heard, and we imagined that the Titan might be entrapped in the Titanic's wreckage. Every few hours we received updates on how much air presumably remained before the men would suffocate. One news source pinpointed the end of the 96 hours to 7:18 AM EDT Thursday.

Just as the clock was running out, pieces of the Titan were found on the ocean floor, and the sad truth became known. The story that had fascinated the nation for four days began to fade away, though extensive discussion would follow.

During the first week of February 1925, my future father could not escape the Breaking News. A 37-year-old explorer was trapped in a limestone cave nearby.

Vernon Thomas had been born in Livermore, Kentucky, where he went to school until the end of his junior year. Then his father moved the family to Glasgow (G), the home of his father. Glasgow was not far from the tourist attraction called Mammoth Cave (M).

After the family bought the American Café, the 15-year-old Vernon learned to be a short-order cook. He would graduate in 1926 from Glasgow High School. My mother and I joined him at his 50-year reunion (right).

On January 30, 1925, Floyd Collins decided to explore another potentially profitable cavern in the area. It was called Sand Cave (the yellow star on the map), only 14 miles northwest of Glasgow as the crow flies.

According to the National Park Service, Collins “found himself squeezing through tight passageways — at one point so tight that he had to inch through on his stomach, with one arm stretched out ahead of him, pushing his lantern, and the other arm at his side. Beyond this crawl, the cave began to open up, but his lantern suddenly began to flicker. As he returned through the tight crawl, his foot dislodged a 27-pound rock which wedged his ankle in place. Try as he might in his awkward position, he could not remove his foot. Engineers, geologists, and cavers were called in from all over the local area and state. Rescuers worked long hours day and night. They could reach the trapped man, but they had no way of getting him out.”

By February 3, the rescue operation to save Collins had become a news sensation, not only in Kentucky but across the nation. On February 4, it was the top story in the New York Times.

Newsreel cameras arrived, and the story was one of the first to be broadcast on the radio. A young Louisville Courier-Journal reporter named Skeets Miller made several daring trips into Sand Cave to interview Floyd, interviews which would later earn him the Pulitzer Prize.

On the eighteenth day, rescuers finally reached Collins via a 55-foot vertical shaft, but it was too late. The explorer was dead, and the story that had held the nation's attention for nearly three weeks faded away. But there was a hit record.

As I age, I'm relearning how to stand and walk. If I lift one foot preparing to take a step, I'll be standing on only one leg. My brain has reverted to the mind of a one-year-old, warning me that I'm in danger because I could lose my balance and “faw down an’ go boom.”

I hesitate to raise my foot. To overcome my nervousness, I like to reassure myself that I'm upright by touching a nearby object that's in contact with terra firma, such as a wall or piece of furniture or even a cane or walking stick.

My normal gait involves alternately swinging each
leg straight forward.

The toe of one shoe passes very close to the heel of the other, which is on the ground.

But I'm beginning to think that a King Kong gait would be better. Lifting each knee in turn, picking each foot up, and stomping it down in its new location makes it less likely that I'll stumble and trip over small obstacles. And the wider stance with arms spread apart allows me to alternate my weight from left to right, helping to maintain my sense of balance.

This new way of walking requires concentration. I'm about to lose my mind! I lift my foot? And then I plop it down? It's hard to overcome the muscle memory of more than seven decades of marching straight ahead.

Author Howard Jonas took out a full-page ad in Wednesday’s newspapers promoting his book Faith and Depression. The ad includes an excerpt from the book, in which — as a naïve teenager — he comes up with a novel reason for believing in God.

“The laws that people write are always written to serve the particular interest of the party in power,” he observes somewhat cynically. “But the laws in the Bible favor neither the rich nor the poor. One law stood out so clearly that ... I realized that the Bible was a work of Divine genius. It is the law of the Jubilee year.”

Leviticus 25:10 commands “Ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.” All farmland is to be returned to its original owners or their heirs, and all slaves are to be returned to their families.

“Now who wrote that?” demands Jonas. “Not the landowners; none of them were going to give back their land every fifty years. Not the poor; there is no way they were going to wait fifty years. The priestly clan? If this group wrote the Bible, why did they exclude themselves from the distribution of the land?”

For my part, I too thought this was an ill-advised regulation. Who would buy property in Year 40 knowing that in Year 50 he would have to give it back?

But then I read further. Leviticus explains (25:14-16), “When you sell or buy land amongst yourselves, neither party must exploit the other. You must pay your fellow-countryman according to the number of years since the Jubilee, and he must sell to you according to the remaining number of annual crops. The more years there are to run, the higher the price.” In effect, you’re not buying the land in Year 40; you’re only taking out a ten-year lease.

A little extra-biblical research reveals that centuries earlier, the Babylonians had a similar procedure. Their problem was that buying and selling eventually left many farmers hopelessly in debt, while the land was controlled by a few very rich landowners.

Economist Michael Hudson writes that the ancient Sumerians and Babylonians knew that debts had to be periodically forgiven, because the amount of debts will always surpass the size of the real economy. “Mesopotamian economic thought c. 2000 BC rested on a more realistic mathematical foundation than does today’s orthodoxy.” Therefore, to restore balance to society, from time to time the Babylonian king decreed a “clean slate”: debts were canceled, and people could return to the lands they had sold.

The Bible’s 50-year cycle was a major improvement because it was regular and predictable, allowing the pro-rating of prices as in my Year 40 example. The Jubilee also preserved the original division of land among the Israelite tribes. It was a product not of divine genius but of practical planning.

But young Howard Jonas did no extra research about this passage from the Bible. He merely “read it and thought about it.” He didn't even read further in the same chapter. Having failed to come up with a reason why a rich or poor or priestly person would write it, he then used the Argument from Ignorance: I know of no other explanation, so the explanation must be God.

“Then it hit me. The undeniable reality. The Bible was really G-d’s revealed law. It was the source of all morality in the world. I decided then and there as a teenager that G-d was running the world.”

JUNE 17, 2023 MY LORD!

I remember a summer like this long ago, when I was a little boy about ten years old dutifully attending Vacation Bible School at the local First Methodist Church.

Once my VBS craft project was to make a plaque that looked something like what you see on the right below.

Following instructions, I hammered a thin sheet of copper into a mold, then carefully painted the background flat black.

It's said that early Christians interpreted the Greek word for “fish” (ichthus), with its five letters Iota Chi Theta Upsilon Sigma, to be an acronym for the Greek phrase Iesous Christos Theou Uios Soter which means “Jesus Christ, God's Son, Savior.”

Some Christians still use a fish-shaped symbol as a secret sign to identify each other.

At VBS each morning, before heading off to the church basement or a tent for Bible stories and crafts, we kids would assemble in the first few pews of the church sanctuary to sing. We were led by Beulah Ballard, the pastor's wife.

One fun song was “Do, Lord.” I assume that it was composed by 19th-century African-Americans whose ancestors had been kidnapped from their homes across the ocean. Although in America they tolerated their slave quarters, nevertheless they looked forward to the heavenly home promised by their Savior. They prayed that God wouldn't forget about saving them.

Later, the spiritual was revived by 20th-century gospel groups. To the chorus, “Do, Lord, oh do, Lord, oh do remember me,” they added the three missing bass notes depicted in red, singing “Oh lordy!” We'd heard recordings like this, so we loudly sang out likewise, feeling the rhythm, ending the chorus with “Oh lordy, do!”

Mrs. Ballard was scandalized. We mustn't refer to our Lord and Savior as “Lordy!” How disrespectful! That was almost blasphemy! We were chastened.

JUNE 14, 2023
NOTHING COULD CONVINCE YOU?

Somehow, Las Vegas has won the championship of the National Hockey League! The Vegas Golden Knights overpowered the Florida Panthers to win the Stanley Cup Final in five games by a total score of 26-12.

Las Vegas is an unlikely home for ice hockey. Overnight low temperatures drop below freezing only about ten times a year, and ice is almost unknown except in the drinks.

I've visited Vegas four times dating back to 1959, but not for hockey and not to gamble. My most recent trip was to help televise a boxing match in 1989. Thus I haven't attended any of the annual “CSICon” conferences held there recently by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.

• Magician Penn Jillette once thought people will make good decisions if they're given adequate information, but recent events convinced him this isn't always the case. Now he speculates that belief systems such as QAnon are a desperate attempt to fill the vacuum left by more traditional forms of religion, a severe sense of “crushing loneliness.”

• Harvard's Naomi Oreskes reported that polls show trust in science remains high among the general population, though it has been declining among a specific subgroup: right-wing conservatives. They often act like science deniers but are in fact “implication deniers.” They dispute scientific research only when they don't like its implications, such as vaccine requirements and CO₂ emission restrictions, which conflict with their conservative identity.

• John Petrocelli from Wake Forest contrasted lying (the assertion of falsehoods) with simple B.S. (the deliberate disregard of truth and evidence). Political scientist Joseph Uscinski said B.S. is one of the weapons of choice in spreading conspiracy theories and other beliefs and predispositions.

• Philosophy professor Lee McIntyre said that having a respectful discussion about the cause of a belief rather than just the evidence for it, if any, tends to have longer-lasting impact. “My key question here was one that I tagged from Karl Popper: ‘What evidence, if I had it in my back pocket, would convince you to change your mind?’ And they couldn't answer this ... and I was happy to just shut my mouth again and let them sit with that discomfort. They had said their beliefs were based on evidence, but were they really?”

• Author Timothy Caufield called misinformation one of the “defining issues of our time,” which should be debunked as early as possible for the benefit of the general public.

• And CSI's chief skeptical investigator Kenny Biddle (above) said he enjoys “busting beliefs” — not to show how smart he is or how dumb other people are, but to calm people's fears, keep them from being swindled, and help them understand more about how things work.

Recently I've been leaving the smallest of my three TV screens set to CNN, in case anything important happens. On Friday the big story was the federal indictment of Donald Trump. CNN's talking heads dissected the case monomaniacally for hours, all day and all night.

Would they ever move on to another subject? Surely there must have been a mass shooting somewhere.

I kept checking. Finally at 4:13 AM Eastern Time, they reported on some international events: a Colombian rescue, the Ukraine war, and so on.

I miss the days when HLN mentioned all the stories every half-hour.

If it’s a good thing, we try to identify a cause — because repeating it might replicate the result. “I aced that test! I studied hard the night before. Guess I should study again when the next test is due.”

If it’s a bad thing, we try to identify a cause — in hopes of avoiding it. “I burned my finger! Guess I shouldn’t touch a hot stove.”

When superstitious people can’t find a cause for a bad thing, they make one up. “The day I sprained my ankle, I was wearing my green shirt! I’m not wearing that shirt again.” Or they mutter the mantra, “Everything happens for a reason.” In other words, the inscrutable Spirit in the Sky must have His own secret motives which are hidden from us mere mortals.

However, it seems unlikely that God concerns himself with the playoffs of the National Hockey League. Does every result happen for a reason?

In the first round of the 2013 postseason, writes Peter May of the New York Times, the Boston Bruins “found themselves trailing, 4-1, midway through the third period of Game 7. Then, something happened — the Bruins cannot explain it — and they have never been the same.” They reached the Stanley Cup finals by winning nine of their next ten games, including a four-game sweep of the Pittsburgh Penguins last week.

In the regular season, the Penguins had scored 3.38 goals per game, easily leading the NHL. Against the Bruins they scored only two goals in the entire series. Stars like Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, Jarome Iginla, and James Neal were held without a point. Boston goaltender Tuukka Rusk is good, but his 0.44 GAA and .985 save percentage against Pittsburgh were beyond rational explanation. Hockey experts were left scratching their heads, struggling to find an answer.

“It felt like something was keeping the puck out of the net,” Pens coach Dan Bylsma said. “It certainly wasn’t lack of opportunity or scoring chances or situations for our team, for our players, for our power play. We did have them. And at the end, it felt like ... there was a force around the net.”

Does everything happen for a reason? We can’t always find a reason. Sometimes the puck just takes funny bounces.

JUNE 8, 2023
MORE ON 'BOOM! BOOM!'

When two smokestacks, no longer needed, were taken down last Friday, Joe Kern of Springdale, Pennsylvania, recorded a video. He lives a bit closer to the former power plant than I do.

Watching and waiting on his roof, he listened to the birds calmly chirping for a couple of minutes. But then the “implosion” of the 750-foot tower attacked the town with the roar of a jet fighter/bomber.

When you hear the word implosion, what do you think? I'm no dictionary, but I thought the "im" implied inward.

Apparently, implosion can also mean just knocking something over and creating a disastrous dusty mess that blows out windows, sends debris flying, knocks out the power and makes a huge chunk of the area surrounding the "implosion" look like the surface of Mars.

I speak, of course, of the "implosion" of the Cheswick Generating Station stacks. But let's be real — it was a toppling.

JUNE 7, 2023 AN ODD WEDDING

It's the month for marriages! But the ceremonies don't always go exactly as planned.

I have a letter from someone named Phil (not my late Uncle Phil) who describes a wedding he attended. One large group of guests included a woman and her five sons, one of whom brought five of his friends. Unfortunately, the ceremony was delayed for several hours. That meant that half of the bridesmaids ran out of supplies and had to go to the store for more. Moreover, the wine was also in danger of running out.

Happily, one of the guests
solved the latter problem.
The story is this month's
100 Moons article.

In the town where I grew up, Richwood, Ohio, the First United Methodist Church celebrated its building's centennial 20 years ago.

Young acolytes lit the altar candles. I provided some of the music, as did the combined youth and adult choirs. The sanctuary was almost full. An older plaque once boasted of Sunday attendance approaching 300.

As it happens, I haven't visited that church since. But they do stream their services online nowadays. I've combined two frames from last Sunday's webcast into the rather empty panorama you see below.

The “on-stage” participants are now only two people. One is the pastor. He lit the candles himself and came down from the pulpit to aim the camera. The other is the organist. She came down from the choir loft to play a patriotic piano medley for Memorial Day. The pastor said, as he always does, “Thank you, Peggy. That was beautiful.”

It sounded like there were at most a couple dozen people in the pews. The United Methodist website reports that the typical attendance here is 40.

JUNE 2, 2023 BOOM! BOOM!

It's not every day that within a mere six miles of my home (indicated near the top of this view), two massive towers rivaling the Washington Monument suddenly collapse.

However,this morning I was an earwitness. It really happened, as subsequent news coverage revealed.

Conservationalists will note that the Rachel Carson Homestead in Springdale, Pennsylvania, is not far downstream (marked by the green pushpin).

For environmental reasons, the nearby Cheswick Generating Station stopped burning coal for electricity last year. There was no further need for its two smokestacks (shown in the inset), 552 and 750 feet tall. Plans were announced to detonate explosives at the base of each stack and drop them into the ten-acre coal yard (the black rectangle above the gold arrow).

As the appointed time of 8:00 approached, I turned off my air conditioner and opened my windows to listen. I was also watching TV with the sound turned down, but on the hour all the Pittsburgh stations cut away from their morning newscasts to rejoin their respective networks.

Nevertheless, presumably half a minute after the first explosion, the sound of a thunderous boom reached my ears. It was followed about five seconds later by another. As each smokestack impacted the earth, there was another thud, not so loud this time.

The taller cylindrical stack was flattened when it hit the ground, and the air inside it was squeezed out. That air blast leveled trees and electric poles on the edge of the power plant property, but new poles arrived a couple of hours later. Fortunately, my utility service was uninterrupted.

BRIAN RITTMEYER, TRIBUNE-REVIEW

SEAN STIPP, TRIBUNE-REVIEW

A thick layer of dust covered much of Springdale and some folks donned masks, but the cloud dissipated well before reaching my apartment. Life goes on.