T. Buckingham Thomas Archive 2025 January

I heard a Pfizer radio advertisement for a campaign that sounds like “No & Go.” Seems self-contradictory.

However, radio listeners can't see the wayze that wurrds are speld in commercials. It turns out that “No” in this case means “forget the anti-vaxxers' disinformation and learn the facts before you proceed.”

And even television can be misunderstood.

A local attorney's firm is hosting a kids' coloring contest. The web address is displayed in all capital letters, and a slash looks a bit like a capital I, so at first I thought the contest must be called COMICOLOR. Like Comic-Con, you know?

They should follow Internet convention and use mostly lower case as in “EdgarSnyder.com/color”.

“Mommy, you studied engineering. When I make a right turn on my bike, it leans to my right. When you make a right turn in your car, it leans to your left. What’s the difference?”

When your bike turns right, you keep your balance by leaning into the turn. Inertia is trying to keep you going straight and seems to be pushing you > this way, so you lean and let gravity pull you < that way. But I can't bank my car, because it has four wheels on the ground. I have no way to offset what people call centrifugal force. It’ll roll my car over onto its side if I take the corner too fast.

“Oh. Another thing: I was looking at pictures of airplanes with propellers. All the way back to the Wright Brothers, the first props had two blades. Then they had three blades, four blades, and now even more. The engineers must have figured out that more blades are more efficient, right?”

In general, yes.

It’s the same with windmills on the ground. Dutch windmills had four blades.

But the windmill on Grandpa’s old farm had 18, to extract momentum from as many of the passing air molecules as possible.

“So on modern wind farms, why do the windmills have only three blades? And skinny ones at that? They’re letting a lot of wind go by unused.”

Uh, I know the answer, of course, but maybe you should figure it out yourself. It’ll be a good learning experience.

Imagine you're a dog walking on solid ground, but you suddenly notice that your paws are freezing and your feet are sinking into soft mud or snow. You've learned how to handle this situation. You react by stepping higher to lift your feet up out of the frigid muck.

Imagine you're a dog whose owner has put protective booties on your paws. Your feet no longer touch solid ground, or even the floor. You react the same way, stepping higher. But this doesn't pull your paws free from their uncomfortable captivity, because the booties are strapped onto your feet and you can't escape them.

You don't understand why your owner is laughing at your comical gait. It's their fault, not yours!

Ideally, the messages of television commercials should be directed to the audiences that will see them. During a break for local commercials, viewers in the Carolinas might see an advertisement for North Carolina Blue Cross Blue Shield while viewers in Ontario might learn about Scotiabank. If those ad placements were reversed, the advertising would be useless. The sponsors would get no benefit.

But sporting events also include ads that are seen not during breaks but during the actual competition. If a hockey game is being telecast from Toronto, can Carolina telecasters hide the arena's logos and sell the space instead to their local sponsors? They could make a lot of money that way. And yes, it is possible! And it's being done!

My new article on Digitally Enhanced Dasherboards explains how I think this trick must be accomplished. I could be wrong.

UPDATE, LATER ON JANUARY 23: Mark Vidonic responds, “You are correct how it's done; it's the same basic concept as calibrating for first and 10 line on football.” And he sends a link to a 2024 video by San Jose broadcaster Brodie Brazil; one comment says that the fix for the earlier glitches “requires quite the digital investment mapping the expensive camera in each rink.”

This is Inauguration Day, but it's also a federal holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr. He spoke at my college four times beginning in 1957. I was not yet enrolled there for any of those occasions, although I did meet his father a few years later.

Recently a few alumni, two years older than I, recalled speeches that Martin Luther King delivered in 1963 and 1964.

There are 1,200 seats in Finney Chapel, and for the first of those appearances an estimated 2,500 people overflowed the building. Students and faculty were fervent supporters of civil rights.

Then came the college commencement ceremony on Tappan Square in the spring of 1965, at which Dr. King encouraged the members of the graduating class to be, in today's terminology, “woke.” A great social revolution was taking place, and they must not sleep through it.

Let's turn back the clock. Way back — some 23,934 days back. The year was 1959, and I was 12 years old. My parents and I had driven west, and our vacation trip had reached Southern California.

We were staying at the Lamplighter Motel in Anaheim (above) and had visited Knott's Berry Farm the day before. Now, on July 10, we again ventured out.

The famed four-year-old theme park called Disneyland was just on the other side of the avenue.

At the entrance we bought books of tickets of varying value, ABCDE (the latter designation having been introduced only the month before). We walked down Main Street to Tomorrowland with its mockup of a TWA Moonliner and its simulated Rocket to the Moon ride, one of the popular 50¢ E-ticket attractions checked above.

We ate lunch in Frontierland, but then the “heat got miserable around 1:00,” I noted at the time. The thermometer reached 103 degrees, a temperature that still stands as the record for July 10 in Los Angeles. We abandoned Disneyland to relax in our air-conditioned motel for four hours.

That afternoon, a brush fire broke out 33 miles to the northwest in Laurel Canyon. Residents had only enough time to gather a few belongings before evacuating their homes, many fleeing on foot.

We saw local television coverage, some of it from a helicopter. (The first news chopper had been introduced by KTLA only 14 months before.) According to a post-mortem report, narrow tree-filled canyons with steep canyon walls were covered with dense brush. Nearly every possible building site was occupied by a home fronting on a narrow street. The flames spread. However, winds were a manageable 10 to 15 miles an hour, so the fire burned only 300 acres while destroying 38 houses including the homes of actors Steve McQueen and Charles Coburn. It caused far less damage than the widespread January 2025 disaster.

1959 was also the year when the U.S. gained an additional S. and then another one. According to all the newspapers, the 50th state was going to be Hawaii.

More recently, I’ve noticed that the preferred spelling seems to include an apostrophe before the final letter. Even closer inspection reveals that it’s a reverse apostrophe.

The bend is up and to the right, in the fashion of an “open single quote,” rather than in the other direction (down and to the left) that’s used in contractions. I don’t know why.

Nor do I know why Bluesky seems to think a regular apostrophe is an abbreviation for ’

The tutor parsed the question

It looks as though it should be carefully enunciated like this:

But we say it this way, with a tiny pause in the middle:

   Kids, do you want to
get a bottle of water
for your father before
he goes to the airport?

   Kidss, doo yoo want too
gehtt ay bottuhl of watter
forr yoor fahtherr beforr
he gohss too thee airport?

   Kidze, dooyuh wannuh
gidduh boddluv wadduh
feryuh fadduh ... buhfor
he goze tuh-thuh airport?

Unlike languages such as German, in which words are pronounced approximately the way they're spelled, English speakers in America need to slur the letters the way their neighbors do. Likewise French speakers in France, where it would be a foe paw (spelled faux pas) to say “fox pass.”

JANUARY 11, 2025
ADDING 13 SNOWBALLS TO OUR HELL

Incoming President Donald Trump has threatened to make the neighboring nation of Canada our 51st state. Would it fit? By area, Canada's 3.9 million square miles surpasses even the 3.8 million of the entire existing United States. And by population, Canada would become our largest single state, slightly bigger than California (41 million people versus 39 million).

But wait a minute. Let's cut Canada down to size. It's already divided into 13 states, although up there they don't call them “states” but rather provinces and territories. Nevertheless, those areas would undoubtedly want to retain their traditional identities.

Let's invite each of them individually into the United States, with two United States Senators of their very own.

Each would also have at least one Congressperson in the House of Representatives; the largest, Ontario, would claim about 18 of the 435 existing House seats. It's believed that the majority of these new legislators would be Democrats.

By descending order of population:
                        Ontario
                      Quebec
                    British Columbia
                  Alberta
                Manitoba
              Saskatchewan
            Nova Scotia
          New Brunswick
        Newfoundland and Labrador
      Prince Edward Island
    Yukon
Northwest Territories
Nunavut

Of course, this isn't going to happen. “Workers and communities in both our countries,” Canada's Justin Trudeau has tweeted, “benefit from being each other's biggest trading and security partner. There isn't a snowball's chance in hell that Canada would become part of the United States.”

I bought quilts yesterday in the mega 72" regular size. Consisting of three cozy and warm “ultra plush premium comfort” layers, they appeared to be just what I need, specially adapted for chilly Northern winters. (This morning, the feels-like temperature outside was 11° above.)

True, I was curious about why the package was labeled not simply QUILT but rather QUILTED, but I assumed it was for EDucated consumers singing “We Quilt This City.”

Nowhere on the packaging did I see the product called anything else. But I soon discovered that the quilts were impractical for spreading upon my bed.

I'm noticing a shift in the way that football analysts describe what they've just seen. They used to make value judgments about a “good” defensive alignment or a “great” play call. Now they express their personal feelings: I “like” that alignment. I “love” that play call.

As I mentioned earlier, I “like” documentaries that answer questions scientifically. Specifically, documentaries that dramatize airplane crashes. What went wrong?

It's usually possible to sort out the evidence in 15 or 20 minutes and, in the final minute, describe what changes have been made to lessen the possibility of the same things going wrong in the future. A one-hour program can solve three such mysteries.

However, TV channels have lots of time on their hands, so usually a single case is stretched out to fill a full hour. That requires a lot of repetition. Several times we hear the co-pilot saying “V1; rotate.” Several times we hear an alarm sounding. Several times we see an animation of the plane smashing into the ground. Yes, we know, it was a major disaster, but let's find the black boxes and get on with the investigation.

Lately I watched two extreme examples of this sort of stretching, one about Amelia Earhart and the other about D.B. Cooper.

• While attempting to fly around the world in a Lockheed Electra in 1937, Earhart planned to refuel at tiny Howland Island in the south Pacific. But she radioed, “We must be on you, but we cannot see you. Fuel is running low. Been unable to reach you by radio. We are flying at 1,000 feet.” The plane presumably crashed, but the wreckage has never been found.

Military historian Michael Carra became intrigued with the story of an Australian patrol that encountered airplane wreckage in the jungles of Papua New Guinea during World War II. Could that be the remains of Earhart's Electra? Of course not; PNG is 2,500 miles west of Howland, so it would be unreachable if “fuel is running low.” But we're only asking questions. Folks still wonder about Amelia, so such speculation can still draw interest.

Carra filmed a two-week expedition to PNG which did uncover some scattered aircraft wreckage from the war, but not the Electra. He also painstakingly authenticated the Australian patrol's map, down to an analysis of the graphite in its pencil notations. Though interesting, that proves nothing. But now we have a two-hour documentary of his ultimately meaningless project.

• In 1971, an airline passenger calling himself Dan Cooper hijacked a 727, demanded money and parachutes, jumped out the rear door, and vanished. Who was he, really? The FBI processed more than a thousand “serious suspects.”

A couple of researchers decided that Cooper must have been one Robert Wesley Rackstraw. They spent five years compiling a list of 93 circumstantial reasons. Those don't prove anything, said the FBI. Rackstraw's attorney called the allegation “the stupidest thing I've ever heard.” In 2016 the FBI suspended active investigation of the case because the Bureau had more important things to worry about.

Nevertheless, documentarians put together a TV program fingering Rackstraw. It was two hours long and included a lot of repeated interviews. No, wait, that was only Part One; a similar Part Two followed. Four hours of television. A tale told by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

A sports headline told me the “Panthers” are playing the “Cardinals” today.

Are the Pitt Panthers kicking off against the Louisville Cardinals in another of those bowls? Or are the Florida Panthers skating into the St. Louis Cardinals ballpark for another of those outdoor hockey games? No, this is the National Football League, so it’s the Carolina Panthers against the Arizona Cardinals.

As a landlubber, I've always had trouble remembering which side of a boat is port and which is starboard. And which side is marked by a red light and which by green? A little research, and the fact that Portugal produces a red wine called “port,” led to this suggestion.

Simply group together the four-letter words
“left: port wine.”

Contrast them with the longer words
“right: starboard Gatorade.”