Today’s Word of the Day is a word you almost never hear anymore. Well, except in the famous Shakespearean phrase “Beware the Ides of March.” On This Day In History, 44 BC, Julius Caesar was murdered. I wonder if it was because he didn’t know the meaning of the word “Ides?” Well, in any case, here’s a word to the wise dictator: Vocabulary matters! Actually, it matters to us all. Or at least, it should.
For ancient Romans, days that marked the position of the moon were named. The calends was the first day of the month, or new moon. The ides was the middle of the month, or full moon. Every few years an extra month was added. This ensured that agricultural festivals and holidays remained at the appropriate time of year.
Ever wonder why look-ups for ‘ides’ always spike on March 15? Julius Caesar was murdered on this day in 44 BC. Just sayin’.
For people who prefer food (and puns) to math, it’s also known as Pie Day, for obvious reasons. Unfortunately for those people, I’m gonna focus on the math first. (Sorry, guys: All things come to those who wait. You’ll get over it!)
In plain English, π (pi) represents the ratio of a circle’s circumference (c) to its diameter. And since a circle’s diameter is twice the radius (r), the formula is:
c = 2 π r
Simple, see?
For the area (a) inside a circle, it gets more complicated, but only by a little:
a = π r2
Which brings us to our first π joke/pun, because in English, that’s pronounced “Pi – r – squared” … but of course, as everyone knows, “Pie(s) are round.”
One of an infinite series of Pi Day images on the Internet.
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Another thing noteworthy about March 14th – nothing to do with math – is that it’s the birthday for several great people. One is my mother-in-law (Happy Day, Dede!). Another 3/14 notable is Albert Einstein, born in 1879. I’ll let you figure out which of the two bakes better pies, and which has wilder hair.
Hint, hint…
Which brings us back to math. (Sorry, pie-lovers: Patience is a virtue!)
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The really cool thing about Einstein’s work is that – just based on the math – he predicted a whole bunch of stuff that actually turned out to be true in real life. For instance, his hypothesis that light behaves simultaneously as both wave and particle was an important step in the development of quantum theory. And the photoelectric effect, a phenomenon in which certain solids emit electrically charged particles when struck by light, helped prove his point. It also earned him the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Even cooler was his prediction that light passing through the vacuum of space actually could be bent by gravity. History.com summarizes it this way:
According to Einstein, gravitation is not a force, as Newton had argued, but a curved field in the space-time continuum, created by the presence of mass. An object of very large gravitational mass, such as the sun, would therefore appear to warp space and time around it, which could be demonstrated by observing starlight as it skirted the sun on its way to earth. In 1919, astronomers studying a solar eclipse verified earlier predictions Einstein made in the general theory of relativity. As a result, he became an overnight celebrity. Later, other predictions of general relativity, such as the probable existence of black holes, were confirmed by scientists.
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Just as the best pies are often the simplest – mine’s apple, what’s yours? – so too, the best scientific insights often can be expressed with utmost simplicity. Einstein said that matter and energy are actually just two forms of the same thing, related by the following elegant formula:
E = m c2
where “E” is energy, “m” is mass, and “c” is a constant representing the speed of light (approximately 186,000 miles per second) squared.
All this, and black holes too? How cool is THAT!
As for apple pie recipes, there are probably as many of those in the world as there are Pi-Day memes on the Internet. I leave it to you to bake one yourself.
According to The Weather Channel (also according to news outlets all the way from the Denver Post to the NY Times) a bomb is set to go off in Denver today. Yes! A so-called “Bomb Cyclone” is coming. Indeed, according to my wife, it has already arrived. Even as we speak it has shut down airports, schools, and roads across a wide swath of Colorado. Soon, if you’re in Kansas or Nebraska, it will come to darkening skies near you too. Watch out!
6856 Surrey Trail
Far be it from me to minimize any severe weather event, least of all one where some number of human beings are likely to die. Yet even as I sit here under brilliant 60-degree California sunshine, the media hubbub surround this thing set me to thinking… about terminology in general… and weather terminology in particular. I mean, “Bomb Cyclone?” Really?
Used to be, we’d call this thing “a blizzard.” Such a term connotes a particular winter mix of snow + wind we all remember from childhood. In the middle of March, hoping for a day off school, we’d turn on the TV (no Internet back then of course). Scanning the scroll at the bottom for cancellations, we’d see our own institution-of-higher-learning listed. “Two hour delay?” Alright! And if the weather gods were really smiling? “School’s closed.” Yahoooooo!
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According to the NY Times article link above quoting Russ Schumacher, a climatologist and professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University:
A storm may become a “bomb” depending on how fast the atmospheric pressure falls. Drops in atmospheric pressure are a characteristic of all storms. But barometric pressure must fall by at least 24 millibars in 24 hours for a storm to be called a bomb cyclone. “It is a huge drop,” he said. “It speaks to the speed at which the storm intensifies.”
Don’t get me wrong. I’m good with all of that – really I am. Specific and scientifically measurable criteria: What’s not to like?
Well, it’s this “bomb” thing, see. Using terminology like that takes an impersonal characteristic of the natural world and imbues it with man-made, even moral, connotations. Is it Zeus, the Roman god whose moods once-upon-a-time were thought to control the weather, dropping this “bomb” on us? Of course not. Nobody believes that anymore, not even little kids in Rome. But, like, there’s gotta be a cause – right? It’s only human to look for reasons, after all.
That’s where the climate change debate tends to get us all derailed, IMHO. It’s indisputable that, when the atmosphere and the oceans warm even slightly, certain kinds of weather events naturally follow. If one such event is called “a blizzard,” it’s a bit harder to see it as “human-caused.” But, if we call it, say, “a bomb?” Well, those sorts of things don’t just grow on trees. Do they?
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There are other new weather terms too, like “Polar Vortex.” Back in the day we’d just have called this “a cold snap.” OK, maybe we’d have called it “colder-than-hell,” but still. I’ve got a theory, based on my in-depth understanding of markets, media, and human psychology. It helps explain this new meteorological lingo, and it goes something like this:
In olden times, TV weather guys wore mustard-colored jackets with loud ties. Whether bloat-bellied or trimly-athletic, they stood with a laser-pointer in front of a map that zeroed in to whatever locale was served by the local network affiliate. They told us what to expect, weather-wise, over the coming 24-to-72 hours. Depending on where you lived, their predictive accuracy varied. In California, mid-summer, they’d hit it right about 98% of the time: Sunny and hot – sure as shootin’. In Colorado, where as the saying goes “If you don’t like the weather, just wait an hour, it’ll change” maybe it was somewhat less of a slam dunk. But in any case, they kept us more-or-less entertained, and gave out useful information. What could be simpler?
Trust me, the jacket is definitely mustard, even though the map is all wrong!
A few years back – with the ascendancy of Fox challenging the Big Three networks – news shows started changing. “Fair and Balanced” may have been the buzzwords, but the real agenda was “Incite and Inflame To Increase Market Share.” As a result, not only the news got transformed – so did the weather. Or at least, how the weather was presented did. And that was as true for The Left as is was for The Right. Don’t believe me? Read on!
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Best case scenario: A weather guy has a science background and a slightly nerdy air. But, with the weaponization of media at the dawn of the Internet Age, weather guys were suddenly required to take a marketing class. And not just any marketing class, mind you, but the same marketing class: “Making Weather Sound Weirdly Compelling, 101.” In this class, they learned to use terms like “Bomb Cyclone” and “Polar Vortex.” And let me tell you, it was a watershed event in the annals of modern meteorology.
The weather hadn’t changed all that much, of course. But now, all of a sudden, were were under siege! The number of hurricanes or blizzards may have stayed roughly the same or gone up slightly. But what went up astronomically were the number stories about the human costs and the dire consequences of such storms: Katrina was a disaster. Sandy was awful. Harvey was a nightmare. And the next storm? It’s gonna be freakin’ Armageddon, folks. Count on it.
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Weather guys are not alone in using language to gin up business. Hell, I could probably go off on any number of tangents showing how terminology has morphed to maximize conflict – and profit – in the past decade or so. But if I did, I’d violate one rule of media messaging that remains unchanged from time immemorial: Keep it simple. Keep it short. And above all, keep ’em on the edge of their seats. OK, that’s three rules, not one. But you get the idea.
Oh, and also? There’s a BOMB ticking… <details at 11>.
Credo comes straight from the Latin word meaning “I believe.” The word can be applied to any guiding set of principles, not just religious ones. For instance:
The shop-keeper’s credo was “The customer is always right.”
P. T. Barnum’s was “There’s a sucker born every minute.”
Sam Walton’s? “Always the low price. Always.”
Anyway, you get the idea.
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Of course, one may choose a different credo when you’re 61 than when you’re 16. Here’s the credo of the writer H. L. Mencken, written after he had lived quite a few years: “I believe that it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than to be ignorant”.
For a guy as eminently quotable as H .L. Mencken, that’s pretty lame as far as credos go. First off, it’s way too long. Credos need to be memorable… and short. That’s why I’m partial to the credo of Shakespeare’s Polonius, who said in Act 2 / Scene 2 of Hamlet, “Brevity is the soul of wit.” Of course, what makes that statement doubly hilarious is that Polonius is the most long-winded gasbag in the entire Shakespearean canon. So, we see that credos can be sly as well as sincere – just as long as they’re also focused and pithy.
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Sir Francis Bacon is reputed to have said “Knowledge is power.” This wins the prize for credo brevity in my book. But, according to Wikipedia:
The phrase “scientia potentia est” (or “scientia est potentia” or also “scientia potestas est”) is a Latin aphorism meaning “knowledge is power“. It is commonly attributed to Sir Francis Bacon, although there is no known occurrence of this precise phrase in Bacon’s English or Latin writings.
So, for me, that leaves Bacon out of the credo sweepstakes. <Though not, of course, out of a BLT – but I digress.>
What’s YOUR favorite?
I recently came across a boxed set of postcards called “Bibliophilia,” produced by an outfit called Obvious State Studio. Each card pairs a famous quote, aphorism, or credo with a stylized black-and-white image that somehow relates. You can see a few examples below, or click the link above for all:
— John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn
There’s also this one, and note the attribution: NOT Bacon!
— Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
One of my all-time favorites, probably apocryphal, but attributed to Papa Hemingway:
— Ernest Hemingway (???)
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Best of all? You can buy them individually for only 35 cents each on the discount rack at Beer’s Books on S Street in Sacramento. Plus, there’s a 20% discount on the second Saturday of each month. All that and Virginia Woolf too? What a deal! <Sam Walton has got no shot here, folks.>
On This Day in History, 1935, Thomas Wolfe published his second novel, “Of Time and the River.” His debut novel, “Look Homeward Angel,” had been published six years earlier. What traits do these two works have in common? Well, pardon me for saying it, but despite what some folks might say, neither one was very good. And I get to say that because… well, we’re family.
“WHAT’S THAT?” I hear you say. Yep, read on for the full story – you can get the History.com version here if you want – but believe me, the family stuff is much juicier.
First, there’s the family resemblance:
Wolfe was 6’5” and couldn’t sit comfortably at normal desks. He did most of his writing standing up, using the top of his refrigerator as a writing surface.
OK, I’m 6’4″. Check. My son is 6’7″. Double check. Next?
But wait! I hear you say. His name’s spelled different. What’s with the “e”?
Easy. Our common ancestors came from Germany. “Wolf” is the German spelling. The “e” makes the name look more “English.” It was added after Wolfe’s stone-cutter father (inspiration for the title of “Look Homeward Angel,” the “Angel” being one carved on a tombstone) changed it when he moved south to Asheville, NC. The idea was to make the name more highfalutin’. Thus the rough-hewn stone mason’s family would be more acceptable in polite society. Whether or not the ploy worked? Not sure.
OK, so where did Thomas Wolfe’s father live before North Carolina?
The Wolf family came to Pennsylvania from Germany in the early 1700’s. At that time, land west of the Susquehanna River where they settled was considered “Indian” country. So much so, that, when my Grandpa’s second cousin Edna Albert wrote a children’s book in 1930 called Little Pilgrim to Penn’s Woods (this was a German family’s immigrant tale based on stories she’d heard about growing up on the “frontier”) there were plenty of harrowing accounts of Redskins whooping it up outside the cabin door.
The house where I was born was one such cabin, originally built of logs in the 1860’s. The family farm where I grew up was founded on 160 acres in Latimore Township, PA. And that area is where, records show, Thomas Wolfe’s father lived – along with much of the rest of the extended clan – before he headed south: First to Baltimore, then to Asheville. That’s where his youngest son Thomas was born in 1900 – two years after the birth of my Grandpa Wolf, a farmer with no earthly use for an extra vowel on the end of his last name.
And we know all this HOW?
Glad you asked. Somebody did a genealogy search in the wake of Wolfe’s literary fame and traced our family’s roots all the way back to the Black Forest in the 1600’s. Lo and behold, there’s my grandfather Howard (b. 1898) and my father Harold (b. 1921) – both of them distant cousins several times removed from the great author himself. Turns out, I was born the same year (1958) that the stage adaptation of “Look Homeward Angel” won the Pulitzer Prize. Thomas Wolfe had been buried 20 years by then. He died of tuberculosis in 1938.
OK, so what’s the story with all the negative reviews then?
Have you ever actually tried to read any of this stuff? I mean, c’mon man! REALLY? Pulitzer or no Pulitzer… plowing through it is like trying to wade through a vast vat of cold molasses. It’s like pulling teeth – A WHOLE LOTTA TEETH – with a rusty old pair of pliers and no anesthetic. The literary consensus in a nutshell? Too wordy. Overwrought. Don’t believe me? Well, then believe his contemporaries Hemingway and Faulkner, both of them with axes to grind, but still…
Despite early admiration of Wolfe’s work, Faulkner later decided that Wolfe’s novels were “like an elephant trying to do the hoochie-coochie.” Hemingway’s verdict was that Wolfe was “the over-bloated Li’l Abner of literature.”
Comments about Wolfe are sprinkled throughout Hemingway’s letters and most of them are snide, snarky, and insulting. In a 1951 letter (to publisher Charles Scribner III): “Tom Wolfe was a one-book boy and a glandular giant with the brains and the guts of three mice.”
Or, as Malcolm Cowley of The New Republic said so pithily about “Of Time and the River”:
“It would be twice as good if half as long.”
OUCH!
Guess I better wrap this up then. Two out of three mice surveyed say they are growing restless… And the third? His poor little brain has fallen asleep. <No word on his guts.> Blood may run thicker than water, but – to quote perhaps Wolfe’s most famous line – “You can’t go home again.” I guess when it comes to literary pretensions I’ll stick with Papa Hemingway. No “e” needed at the end of the last name. At least not for THIS blue collar workingman’s offspring.
John Shelby Spong once accused Williams of being a “neo-medievalist,” preaching orthodoxy to people in the pew but knowing in private that it is not true. In an interview with the magazine Third Way, Williams responded:
I am genuinely a lot more conservative than he would like me to be. Take the Resurrection: I think he has said that of course I know what all the reputable scholars think on the subject and therefore when I talk about the risen body, I must mean something other than the empty tomb. But I don’t. I don’t know how to persuade him, but I really don’t.
On This Day in History, 1899, Bayer patents aspirin. Click the link to read the full story – or, read on if you dare.
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According to ads, aspirin is “The Wonder Drug That Works Wonders.” That’s mostly due to its pain relieving and fever reducing properties which have made it the most common drug in medicine cabinets world wide today. Not even mentioned in the link to History.com is aspirin’s wide-spread use, in low-dose form, for heart patients. In addition to its many other side-effects – which include an unpleasant after-taste and damage to the lining of the stomach – aspirin also acts as an anti-coagulant. That’s because it inhibits platelet formation. This can be useful for those with atherosclerotic heart disease. “Thinner” blood is less likely to result in coronary artery occlusion and thrombosis which is a common cause of heart attacks.
But back to the marketing campaign…
Aspirin has a long tortuous history. Originally discovered in antiquity in willow bark, it was mentioned by Hippocrates in ancient Greek texts. Over the centuries it has enjoyed enduring popularity in folk medicine. But the story also includes a bit of a 20th century detour between the two World Wars.
Bayer was a German company. After Germany lost WW1, the Allies auctioned off the U.S. and Canadian rights to aspirin for $5.3 million. Meanwhile, back in Germany, Bayer became part of IG Farben, a conglomerate which lay at the financial heart of the Nazi war machine. After Germany’s WW2 loss, the Allies again intervened, slitting up IG Farben, thus making Bayer an independent company once again.
During the merger mania of the 1980’s and 1990’s, Bayer bought out companies such as Miles Laboratories and Sterling-Winthrop which controlled U.S. rights to market aspirin. In so doing, the famous brand became re-united with its most enduring product.
The predecessor of today’s Bayer Cross, linked to the German company’s history.
Traveling back and forth between Colorado and California, it has been my privilege to drive across the state of Nevada a number of times recently. Usually I take I-80. This Interstate runs from Reno on the western edge of the Silver State to Wendover on the east, which is the last outpost of legal gambling and prostitution before you hit straight-laced Utah. It’s also where the mountains give way to the Bonneville Salt Flats. But today I came across a piece in National Geographic about an alternative route, U.S. 50:
Where the state of Nevada folds in half—from the elbow on its western arm at Lake Tahoe across to its Utah border—you’ll find the most direct route across the state. It crosses several communities, a handful of mountain ranges, a national park, and one reservoir, where bobcats, foxes, and wild horses roam free. There’s life, yes, but not a familiar way of life for many. It’s a place where the lines between John Wayne Westerns and everyday life blur, where ghost towns bleed into living ones. This is Route 50, the Loneliest Road in America.
I must say, it sure sounds familiar. That’s probably because each town on the Interstate (Reno-Winnemucca-Elko-Wendover) has its corresponding twin on U.S. 50 (Tahoe-Austin-Ely-Baker). Nowadays a lot more traffic passes through the towns on I-80 than on U.S. 50, but it wasn’t always so:
Before it was known as the Loneliest Road in America, Route 50 was anything but. In the 1850s, the Gold Rush sparked a caravan of wagons to head West along the thruway. According to the Highway 50 Association, the Roaring Road (as it was called) became so congested at times that hopeful miners and their families would have to wait days before they could access it — a Panama Canal of sorts, standing between the new frontier and the old.
Destination: California’s gold fields
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Last word goes to Danish photographer Mathias Svold, whose photos accompany the U.S. 50 article. You just can’t have a National Geographic piece without at least one shot of the natives in situ…
Spencer’s Hot Springs, near Austin, NV.
Loneliness has its advantages – at least with no photographers around.
Have you ever received an email that begins this way? Usually it goes on – complete with poor grammar and misspellings – to explain how the rich ruler of some poverty-stricken African nation has died recently. And he has named YOU as his sole heir. You (yes, YOU!) can have millions of U.S. dollars wired directly into your bank account… IF ONLY you will just 1) share all your private banking information (so we can send you the fortune of your dreams, see?), or 2) divulge your mother’s maiden name along with your company email address and password (for verification purposes only, mind you), or 3) send a thousand bucks (for postage and handling, of course) to our embassy’s P.O. box in Nigeria… or Algeria… or Eritrea… or someplace similarly sandy.
Of course you have. We all have. It’s so ubiquitous, it has come to be known by a name that everybody recognizes: “The Nigerian Prince Scam.” But what most people don’t know… Well, read on if you dare – and would like to find out.
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Did you ever wonder about all those misspellings and bad grammar? Are the bad guys really so dumb, or so desperate, that they can’t at least hire somebody to do a decent spell check? The fact is, the grammar and spelling are an important part of the scammers’ business model. Most people recognize the “Dear Beneficiary” salutation for what it is: Danger! Warning! Scam Alert! My email provider not only recognizes, but also quarantines, such messages in a separate “Spam” folder – yours probably does too – so we never even have to see them if we don’t want to. Only the most credulous – and poorly protected – could possibly be taken in. Right?
But that is preciselythe point. Phishers and scammers cast a wide net on the Internet these days, and for them, time is money. So, any time spent reading replies from folks saying “Quit sending me this bulls**t!” or “I’m gonna report yer worthless butt to the Better Business Bureau!” is, for them, not just upsetting: It’s time wasted. The grammar, the spelling, even the transparent and utterly bogus “Dear Beneficiary?” It acts as a screening mechanism. It ensures that only the most naive – and therefore, the most easily taken in – need reply. Sneaky, eh? Also, apparently, cost-effective. Go figure.
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I have a friend who shall remain nameless, but she asked me the other day if I could make the link for my daily blog entry look “less ominous.” By that I think she meant I should make it look less like a scam, and more like… well, what exactly? Something other than a scam? Whatever the heck that might be?
I told her there were a couple of options: The long link, which uses the full name of my blog’s website, dewconsulting.net/blog. Or, the short link, which is an alias (i.e. a translation) of the first, usually in the form of something like https://wp.me/this-that-or-the-other. I told my friend that, short of replacing “this-that-or-the-other” with “honestly-Lisa-this-is-not-a-scam,” there was precious little I could do to make it look “less ominous.” And in any case, she’s been getting these emails from me every single day for the last six months. So, like, did she really expect that I’d undergone a personality transplant in the past 24 hours? That I’d suddenly become a sociopathic spear-phishing scam artist? I mean, REALLY?
What we decided on finally – because I am nothing if not completely client-focused and also a nice guy – was a hyper-link. That’s where you say, “See Dithering Dan’s Delightfully Bombastic Blog Entry, here. And when you click on the here, it takes you to where ever: In this case, it takes you behind the scenes to one or the other of the two link addresses I outlined in the previous paragraph. Which, when you think about it for even half a second, is totally hilarious. Given that – if I really WERE a secretly scamming spear-phisher… well, you know. <Cue ominous movie music here – i.e The Theme from Jaws.>
Bottom line?
The Internet is every bit as dangerous as the sidewalk outside your home. The only way to be absolutely sure you’re 100% safe in either case is to completely sequester yourself away from all art, commerce, and human interaction. But then, would that really be a life worth living? Maybe the best course might be to keep your incredulous eyes peeled for obvious tip-offs: You know, like “Dear Beneficiary.” Well, that plus a hyper-link. Let’s not forget that one.
