T. Buckingham Thomas

Today I'm remembering Jan Olson, my friend from college who passed away ten years ago on this date.

We were physics majors in the 1960s. That was before cell phones. To text each other surreptitiously in class, we had to use scraps of paper.

(stock illustration)

Some of those conversations are preserved in this month's 100 Moons article.

DECEMBER 24, 2025 FILLING IN SOME DETAILS

I was born long ago at a hospital in Zanesville, Ohio. It says so on my birth certificate. But I've lived in Pennsylvania for nearly 52 years. So when the politicians decide to take a census, am I required to drive 150 miles back to Zanesville to be counted? Don't be ridiculous.

However, Luke's gospel tells us that Joseph and his wife Mary did have to undertake such a journey. And she was pregnant at the time. And they didn't have a car.

Actually, I suspect the gospel writers may have made up this unlikely story because Biblical prophecy had to be fulfilled. “Jesus of Nazareth,” well-known to be a Galilean, had to be born not right there in Nazareth (as one would assume) but far to the south in Bethlehem.

We're familiar with the Bible's version of these Christmas stories in Matthew and Luke. But this week, Brother Billy gets an alternative eyewitness explanation from Heli Davidson — Joseph's dad.

Dear Mr. Campbell: I'm enjoying your 15.4-ounce microwavable tomato soup bowls. As a single guy in my seventies, I find this product easier to prepare than your larger-quantity condensed soups. There's no need to use a separate bowl nor to add water nor to refrigerate the leftover extra servings.

However, I do need to unpack my tool kit. Readers of this website may recognize where I'm going with this.

First I use my Magnifying Glass to decipher the microscopic white-on-red instructions on the side of the bowl. (I've included the tip of a ballpoint pen in the photo to show scale.) (After I've opened the bowl, I'll be unable to tilt it to read it, for fear of spilling the contents which you've generously filled all the way to the brim. A full 16 ounces would not have fit.) As nearly as I can tell, I think the instructions say the microwaving time is 1½ minutes — actually “HIGH1 1/2 min.” — but I'll ignore that and use 2½ minutes because I prefer hotter soup.

Next, since my arthritic hands can't pry off the plastic cover, I take advantage of one of the steam holes that you've thoughtfully provided. Poking my Screwdriver through one of the holes, I use it to lever the cover up and off.

The soup is still sealed beneath a plastic film. Being unable to grasp the film firmly with my fingers, I use my Pliers to grab the little tab so I can peel it off.

Now all I have to do is replace the cover loosely, microwave the bowl, lift off the cover, and enjoy. Simple!

Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich likes to compare the average compensations of Chief Executive Officers to that of ordinary workers.

There's no comparison.

He reports that the ratio was a reasonable 20:1 when I graduated from high school but 280:1 today. “Trickle-down economics was always a sham,” he writes. “Nothing has ever trickled down.”

Television manufacturers, having failed to convince enough of us to invest in three-dimensional TVs, have essentially given up on that idea. They’ve moved on from 3D to 4K.

“Ultra HD,” or 4K, boasts over eight million pixels. That's four times as many as HD. To accommodate so many tiny dots, the screen has to be bigger — too large for my little one-person apartment. Besides, as far as I'm concerned, ordinary HD usually offers enough detail.

One exception: classic CinemaScope movies designed to fill huge theaters in a 16:6 aspect ratio, such as 1955’s Oklahoma!

When CinemaScope is letterboxed to fit a 16:9 TV screen, group scenes become too small to clearly show facial expressions.

I move closer to the screen, but I wish I had more pixels.

I also get along fine without 3D, both for TV and for movies. Production techniques can be employed to depict the third dimension without requiring special glasses.

In this clip, notice how lighting, focus, and smooth camera movement clearly separate the King’s Singers from the choir in the background and from the flowers in the foreground. It’s a beautiful feeling of depth.

(Also beautiful: the final verse. Are you listening, white Christians who so furiously rage against any and all Samaritans? “Truly He taught us to love one another. His law is love. And His gospel is peace.”)

¶ A meaningless observation from watching news channels:

Panelists are always asked their opinions about something. “Do you think Donald Trump will run for a third term?”

Some participants will respond directly: “Of course he will.”

But most will stall for a second while mentally composing their answer. “Well, look.... ” Or if they need more time, “Well, look, uh, you know, I mean.... ”

When the President noted that a kid in a financially strapped family doesn't need to receive “37 dolls” this Christmas, the closed captioning on both CNN and MS NOW helpfully autocompleted the gift by adding the missing “ar” and reformatting the result as “$37.”

The same application insists on referring to Susie Wiles, the White House Chief of Staff, as “Siouxsie Wiles.” That spelling seems ridiculous.

But I checked, and apparently they've simply linked to the wrong name in their database. There actually is a Siouxsie Wiles, a British-born microbiologist specializing in infectious diseases.

However, she's unlikely to be a fan of RFK Jr.'s CDC. Having spoken out against anti-vaxxers, she was named Skeptic of the Year by the New Zealand Skeptics in 2016.

An episode earlier this year of ABC’s sitcom Last Man Standing began with a couple trying to sleep. The neighbor’s dog was barking again. The first 17 seconds of dialogue included three very dated jokes.

“Somebody’s got to muzzle that dog, or rescue Timmy from the well.” (The character Timmy first appeared on the TV series Lassie in 1957. He was played by Jon Provost, here on Cloris Leachman’s lap. Lassie was the collie that barked for help.)

“It’s Larabee’s German shepherd. Every morning this week! Damn dog’s giving Germans a bad name.” (Germany was our enemy in 1917-18 and 1941-45.)

“I’m surprised the Shirazis’ French poodle hasn’t surrendered.” (France surrendered to the invading Germans in 1940.)

Are comedy writers so lazy (or elderly) that they can’t come up with more recent references? Perhaps to events that took place during the target audience’s lifetime?

Of course, I shouldn't be complaining. They might fall back on even older allusions, such as “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?”

There used to be a Gothic adverb ufta meaning “repeatedly.” In German and Old English it became oft. Then in the 13th century, the English extended oft to often.

By the 15th century, the pronunciation was often degraded to “offen.” The t had become silent! (Except for performers using a British accent.) And by the 16th century, the original root word oft had become archaic.

The Hartford Courant notes that the t was once actually pronounced in phrases such as “Cristes Maesse” (Christ's Mass), better known now as “Christmas.” But during the 17th century, the t sound was dropped whenever it was preceded by a fricative consonant (such as s or f) and followed by a voiced consonant (such as l, r, m or n). Got that? Anyway, before you could say “misseltoe,” Irving Berlin was writing about a “white Chrissmus” where tree tops “glissen” and children “lissen.”

There are, of course, many silent letters in our orthography. To English speakers, recently acquired Pittsburgh Pirates outfielder Jhostynxon Garcia has a first name that looks as complicated as the random characters in a password. Therefore, “The Password” has become his nickname. However, the h is silent and the x is pronounced like an s, so he's really “Joe-Stinson Garcia.” By the way, today is his 23rd birthday.

There's a major Canadian city that offen loses its second t and becomes “Toronno.”

Other examples skip over an entire syllable. A steak sauce, named after a West Midlands county in England called WoRCEstershire, elides the RCE and is pronounced “Woostershir.” And the midweek day named WeDnEsdAy kicks out the DEA to become “Wensdy.”

Is the opposite true? Do we actually insert and pronounce letters that are absent from the spelling? Or scramble their order?

• Many people mischievously add a second i to turn an adjective into “MISCHIEVIOUS,” as though it were “mysterious.” And folks outside North America add a second i to turn an element into “ALUMINIUM.”

• Over poor connections, it can be hard to differentiate the spoken digits 5 and 9. Some folks append an r to the former to make it “fiver.” Alternatively, when my mother was a telephone operator she was instructed to insert an uh into the latter and pronounce it “ny-uhn.”

• Podcaster John Frederick playfully calls the people of the former Soviet Union “Solviets.” Nor does he “regert” referring to that thing on the right as a “bakset” and to its country of origin as “Englang.”

• And, thanks to the Incans (or Spanish pronunciation), there's an unwritten w in “quinoa.”

“Wake up, America! Some people actually disagree with me! They have attitudes they're trying to shove down our throats!”

That’s the frantic warning in many embittered letters to the editor and postings on social media. For example, someone called dankies213 wrote: “People are always complaining that they don't like religion shoved down their throat, when Hollywood shoves beauty and ‘looking good’ down our throats and no one complains about that really.”

And someone named David Nedlin posted last week: “Maybe now some people will wake up & listen to me when I say we have to deport & eliminate ALL Muslims & Gather up ALL illegal firearms & execute their owners. Think that’s too extreme? Maybe someday a loved one of yours will be SHOT DEAD & then you may change your mind. Wake up, people — or you will be next!”

I’m tired of opinionated people who tell me I need to realize — dare we say I need to be woke up — that I'm somehow being duped into swallowing things that think are obviously evil. At a minimum, we need new metaphors.

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.”