T. Buckingham Thomas Archive 2024 August

Sometimes I'm not hungry but my mouth is feeling lonesome, so I put a drop of Tabasco on my tongue.

Frank's RedHot, another pepper sauce, is currently produced by McCormick & Company. It's advertised by Ethel, an uninhibited elderly character who claims she puts it on everything.

I'm not Ethel, nor do I grill steaks, but there's a different McCormick product that I do use on everything — sometimes. Montreal Steak Seasoning includes coarse salt, black and red pepper, garlic, onion, paprika extracts, and other spices. To enhance bland foods, I like to add a tiny sprinkle of this mixture.

AUGUST 26, 2024 SNAKE OIL

Does drinking a little wine help us live longer? A new study of older adults says no. “We did not find evidence of a beneficial association between low drinking and mortality,” said Dr. Rosario Ortolá. On the other hand, she added, alcohol probably raises the risk of cancer “from the first drop.”

And revisiting old research also seems to deny any benefit from alcohol. It's all a matter of Where Do We Draw the Line?

(Lights flash)

Tom: “What is Korinna?”

Alex: “That is correct!”

Early in 1984, Betsy Overly and I were planning the graphics for Pittsburgh Pirates cablecasts. We needed a fresh look and a new font style.

Chyron, the company that manufactured the character generator, provided a “font library” for their machine on 8-inch floppy disks. A few dozen styles were available. Some were offered in only one size, but there were several that came in five different sizes, providing flexibility.

One of those, called Korinna Bold, caught our eye. It was a fresh, relatively new font; the modern version had been introduced only ten years before. It had some flair, with the distinctive shapes of the P and the N and especially the U, yet it was sufficiently bold for sports television. So we chose it to build the full screens and lower thirds that we’d need for baseball. Our new look premiered on a road game on April 6.

Unfortunately, by the time the team returned to Pittsburgh, the network was out of business, and our graphics package was never seen again. More details are here.

That same year, however, a long-running game show was being updated with a new host and a new look for syndication. And the producers made the same Chyron choice that Betsy and I had made.

Thirty years ago next month, Alex Trebek introduced Jeopardy! with the clues given in Korinna. The font’s still there three decades later. You can’t keep a good idea down.

Korinna, which was designed in the 1970s, also appeared on The Simpsons in 2006. Here are some other notes.

• Korinna was also used for the intertitles and closing credits on the 1993-2004 comedy Frasier.

• Ken Jennings claims that when he had his winning run 10 years ago, the name of the show was still pronounced “jee-OP-ur-dee.”

• And why is it called Jeopardy anyway? Alex could say, “I told you that on the very first program, when I explained how the game is played. Weren’t you listening? Do I have to repeat the rules every 30 years?”

AUGUST 21, 2024
PET MEMORIALS

A couple of blocks north of my apartment is the former Krynicki Funeral Home, which provides services for deceased pets as well as humans. It now has a new director.

At first I didn't know the new name of the establishment, and the sign on the corner of the parking lot was misleading.

The graphics reminded me of my childhood pet, which looked something like this lovebird on final approach for a landing.

The sign began with a stylized lovebird that might represent a letter or two, maybe a blue P or a gold V. The bird was followed by four more blue symbols that were undeniably letters. So should the bird be considered merely artistic embellishment? Is this the Ereb Funeral Home Inc.?

No, actually it's owned by "P. Vereb." That's Patrick Vereb to you. It's the Vereb Funeral Home, as the revised sign makes clear.

Mr. Vereb provides viewings of deceased people. There are no viewings of deceased animals. However, private cremation services for pets start at $125 and a burial can be as little as $25.

In his first six weeks of operation, he served 31 clients. Only two wanted services for humans. The other 29 were for pets. That shouldn't be surprising. Although American households include 72 million children, they're home to twice as many dogs and cats!

AUGUST 19, 2024
PÚCA TOWN

Before I venture out, I occasionally consult the thumbnail weather radar map on wunderground.com. There might be thunderstorms in the area.

But what's that “Sligo” four miles upriver? I've never heard of it. There is a borough by the same name an hour north of here, population 686, but this isn't it.

To investigate my nearby “Sligo,” I sent up a drone. No, actually, I consulted Google Earth.

At the alleged location, indicated by a red arrow, there's nothing. No houses, no streets. Karns Road approaches but veers sharply away. There is a ravine, down which rainwater presumably drains — a creek, perhaps. A similar feature 600 yards further upriver is called Rachel Carson Run.

On the shoreline is a railroad with a siding. The Pennsylvania Canal ran along here two centuries ago.

We can imagine that once a ferry stopped here at a landing labeled Sligo. Or maybe an Irish pioneer once built a cabin at the mouth of one of the creeks. But his little settlement is now only a ghost.

There's a Japanese dish I like, but I keep forgetting its name. It's a medium-length word which was not in my vocabulary when I was growing up. It begins with T, probably. Teriyaki? No, something different. Tetrazzini? Tiramisu? Tabbouleh? Tahini? Tapenade? Taleggio?

I think the name resembles a music-related term. Tunamelt? Timpanioli? No, I've got it: Tempura!

I also like South Asian dishes beginning with T. But I live alone, so I usually ignore recipes, especially the complicated ones like the one on the left below. It serves four and takes all day to prepare including the slow cooking. It requires 18 separate ingredients, not including the rice. Many ingredients need to be fresh.

I can live without the creative experience of food preparation. When I do my grocery shopping, I choose the single-serving package on the right. It microwaves in five minutes, and it's plenty good enough for me.

AUGUST 16, 2024 LOWER BURL

When I was describing Washington & Jefferson College football games on cable TV 45 years ago, one of our student-athletes hailed from Lower Burrell, Pennsylvania — which I mistakenly called Lower BurrELL, with the accent on the final syllable. No one corrected me, but I still regret the error. Now I live across the river from that town, which is actually Lower BURRell — like a wood burl.

Yesterday, the Veterans of Foreign Wars hosted a political event over there which was covered by the Pittsburgh news stations. Their closed captioners, listening to the announcers, tried to figure out how to spell what they were hearing. One thought it must be LOWER BOROUGH, which sort of makes sense. Another captioner tried LOWER BERLE. Close, but no cigar.

Perhaps we should be inquiring rather than guessing.

Burl Ives and Milton Berle

AUGUST 13, 2014 R.I.P. MORK

Last month I quoted some of Eric D. Snider’s Twitter remarks, so it seems appropriate to pass on his tweets from Monday:

Marin Co. Sheriff's Office reports that Robin Williams has died, apparently by suicide. Very, very sad.

Suicide is devastating to those left behind, yes, but don't call it “selfish.” You don't know what it was like in that person's head.

Some of you know that I struggle with depression. I wish that made me special, but the sad fact is that I have a lot of company.

Depression is a real illness. It can be serious. Please don't be afraid to get help if you need it. Medication, therapy — whatever it takes. And if anyone tells you anti-depressants are a crutch, or that needing them makes you weak, kick that person directly in his or her balls.

I've been thinking about it lately anyway because the 5th anniversary is coming. Here's my column about depression.

Eric linked to a Robin Williams story by Norm Macdonald and also wrote an essay yesterday. “His death on Monday at the age of 63 would have been a blow however it came. But the manner of it — alleged suicide as the result of severe depression — hit me in the gut in a ‘there but for the grace of God go I’ sort of way. Even now, five years later, recalling the lowest days of my depression (unequivocally the worst time of my life) rips me apart, the mere memory of it enough to produce a shudder. And yet I didn’t have it as bad, or for as long, as Williams did. Remembering how awful it was and realizing it could have been worse makes me weep with sadness and gratitude.”

Many people’s first reaction was “Why was Robin depressed? He had everything.” But depression doesn’t mean sadness. To Eric’s tweets, Damien Owens added, “Please remember that ‘What are you depressed about?’ makes no more sense that ‘What are you diabetic about?’”

UPDATES: As Eric described in detail in his column about depression, he did get help in 2009 after his friend Jeff's wife steered him to the Clinic for the Poor and Crazy. He seems fine now. Below we see him with Jeff in July 2024. The next month, he was at the Outside Lands music festival (right). His only complaint: “Omg it's so loud.”

When someone gets depressed, a lot of their usual energy moves to the brain. Persistent rumination may have evolved as a strategy to think our way out of despair, wrote Gary Stix for Scientific American in 2021.

“Scholars suggest humans may become depressed to help us focus attention on a problem that might cause someone to fall out of step with family, friends, clan or the larger society — an outcast status that, especially in Paleolithic times, would have meant an all-but-certain tragic fate. Depression, by this account, came about as a mood state to make us think long and hard about behaviors that may have caused us to become despondent because some issue in our lives is socially problematic.”

Arizona State professor Randolph Nesse added, “When an organism, not just a human, is wasting energy trying to pursue a goal and not making progress, it's best to wait and slow down and not waste energy. Then if nothing works — even when you try to find a new strategy — it's best to give up that goal completely.” Just don't give up on life.

When I was the program director of college station WOBC-FM, I had access to discs containing pre-recorded public service announcements. These were essentially unpaid commercials for non-profit organizations. I've recalled elsewhere that “if you played one, you heard something like ‘This is Arthur Godfrey. I'd like to talk to you about pesticides.’ Or maybe ‘Hello, dahling. This is Eva Gabor in Hollywood. Did you know that pesticides are dangerous?’ Our campus listeners weren't into farming and gardening. Nor were they impressed by hearing those celebrities. Therefore, we had no use for the PSAs.”

I gave away one such record as a Valentine's Day gag gift. The recipient played it, of course, and the other women in her dorm found it both amusing and frustrating. Each announcement ended with a “lock groove” preventing the needle from moving on to the next cut, thus eliminating the possibility of the disk jockey accidentally airing two in a row. So when the gals clamored “play another one,” my friend had to pick up the needle each time and set it down again.

Three months later, needing to fill a hole in WOBC's schedule between 10:45 and 11:00 PM, I played more of the PSAs on a one-time-only program I called The Discard Pile. There were also brief songs by someone I dubbed the Armenian Nightingale, my classmate Jim Gertmenian.

You can hear that music in this month's 100 Moons article. Incidentally, Jim grew up to become a hymn writer, and from 1996 to 2015 he was the Senior Minister of Plymouth Congregational Church in downtown Minneapolis.

Years ago, when I needed to do some research as an Oberlin College student, I walked over the repository of all knowledge on the campus: Carnegie Library. There, working back and forth between the card catalogs and the “stacks,” I eventually identified two or three books that contained some information on my subject. I carried them to a desk and turned the pages. When I found something I could use, I transcribed it in my notebook. Eventually these notes became the foundation of my little report.

But now there’s an easily available repository of all knowledge in the world: the Internet. And it’s searchable by keyword! There’s no need to travel to a big library, no need to locate books using a card catalog, and no need to turn their pages. I can’t get over how much easier this is.

This week, I was preparing an article that will appear on this website Monday. A small part of it concerns an obscure 19th-century preacher named John Ingersoll. He couldn’t hold a job. None of his congregations liked him. However, I discovered, he was associated with a more famous revivalist named Charles Finney. And Finney later became the second president of my alma mater, Oberlin College. I'd discovered a connection with personal relevance!

Consulting the Internet, I opened a lengthy biography of Finney and asked my browser to find all the appearances of the word Ingersoll. And it did. Besides confirming his incompetence, the bio mentioned that in 1840 Ingersoll actually lived in Oberlin. Nothing was said of his activities there — he didn't seem to have a pastorate — but if he was in town, it seemed likely that at some point his friend Finney must have invited him to speak.

So I turned to the Internet again and searched for “John Ingersoll” and “Oberlin.” As it turns out, Google Books has helpfully indexed a volume buried in the periodicals collection of the University of Minnesota. The book consists of reprints of a semi-monthly newspaper The Oberlin Evangelist, beginning with the first issue on November 1, 1838. Google highlighted my search terms. Oberlin was highlighted on every page, but where was Ingersoll? Did I have to examine the 224 pages of fine print? No, I merely refined the search and found he was mentioned exactly once, on page 158.

Quickly checking my 1840 calendar (via an Internet application, of course), I determined that “Thursday last” would have been September 17. So now I had the exact date of a sermon that Ingersoll preached at Oberlin — in Finney’s presence— as well as the text he used.

It would have been very difficult for me to unearth this nugget of history as a college undergraduate. We had no Internet access in the library in those days. We had only one computer, in a basement across the street. Now I have a home computer, and I can use it to do the research in a few minutes! I find this marvelous.

I agree. Excluding holidays and weekends, there are 250 days in a year, but since 1990 our Representatives have averaged only 112 days in session during the second year of their two-year terms. They’re on vacation 55% of the time.

But let’s look at it another way. Is it the goal of legislators to enact legislation, or is it to get re-elected? I suspect that it’s the latter. A Congressman’s job is to keep his job.

Excerpts from David Boling’s piece in the Washington Post a couple of months ago:

Our politicians are not on vacation. They’ve left Washington so they can devote full time to their true occupation.

Practitioners of every endeavor need to communicate using precise language. If the necessary terms don’t exist, they have to be invented.

Terms. Terms. Elsewhere on this site you can find a chemistry spoof I wrote in high school. Complaining about contradictory terminology, I quoted an ancient Greek philosopher: “As Plato said, ‘Kynosis anopodes acthykus!’” Did Plato actually say that? I don’t know Greek, so how could I have known the phrase?

After 50 years, I couldn’t remember the source of the quote, so I Googled it. Google returned only one result — my own “scientific” paper! So then I put the quote into a translation engine, and I discovered it was gibberish. In the manner of Sid Caesar, this high school junior produced what only seems to be Greek. So there. Now I’ve set the record straight.

Anyway, let’s get back to real terminology, specifically involving motor sports.

In high-speed performance rallies like this, the navigator warns the driver about what sort of curve is coming up next, how many meters away, requiring what suggested speed and gearing.

I was a navigator for far less strenuous rallies (described here). Nevertheless, I needed concise terminology to tell my driver Terry Rockhold where he was going.

Suppose my map revealed we were coming up to a situation like the one below. Normally the first turn would be described as “right at T” onto Claibourne Road. The next would be “left at sideroad” onto Snyder Road.

But in this case, the rallymaster has covered these two intersections with a single instruction: “jog right.” That’s the correct term if the right and the left are less than a tenth of a mile apart. The rallymaster wants the rallyists to ignore Snyder Road’s brief detour and resume the original heading on Snyder.

(Why is there a detour at all? Back when the farms and fields were first laid out, they didn’t conform to a strict grid, so the roads that were later built between the fields couldn’t conform to a grid either.)

Now in the situation below, I needed to inform Terry that he would make a left followed by a right. But this isn’t a “jog left,” because there are no other roads involved. Concord Road swerves around the big field all by itself. I invented a term for this: NORI, for No Other Roads Involved. I’d tell Terry he’d make a NORI left. I also would warn him that soon afterwards he’d make a NORI right, lest he think he was supposed to continue straight ahead into the driveway.

And now, though no one knows what acthykus means, at least you know about NORI.