THE WEATHER CHANNEL AT 35

Ah, yes. Here's an article printed in our community magazine this month. The weather is endlessly fascinating to me, not only its apparent quirks and the way it is the ubiquitous topic of casual chitchat, but the way we humans have such a great effect on it. Not that our esteemed president agrees, but, hey...  

  

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In the late 40’s, cable TV began as a service to bring broadcast content to mountain and rural areas of Arkansas, Oregon and Pennsylvania. A few clever people raised their antennas to great heights and brought the signals down to their TVs. One enterprising appliance dealer, John Watson of Allentown, Pennsylvania, realized he wouldn’t sell any TV sets if the townspeople couldn’t get the signals. Knowing about those high antennas, he put up one of his own on a nearby mountain, and ran a cable down to the town and in to homes where, for an installation fee and a monthly charge, the residents could watch the three broadcast channels, the affiliates of ABC, CBS, and NBC.

The idea spread country-wide, and gradually, cable network operators offered more and more “stations” or “channels.”  Many of us from the bigger cities and their suburbs had little awareness of the cable networks. One cable channel we heard about though, and wished we had, was The Weather Channel. Customarily, in the early days of television, we watched the local weather as a short spot, usually on around 6:20 p.m., on our favorite broadcast channel. Many of us remember Tex Antoine’s “Uncle Wethbee” on WNBC in New York City. As time went on and weather technology advanced, the forecasts became less hit-and-miss, and we could catch the weather on the morning shows, perhaps a lunchtime news report, and always on the dinner hour news.

Tex Antoine and "Uncle Wethbee"

Thinking that many folks would like to know the weather at any time of the day, or all day long, John Coleman, meteorologist and forecaster for ABC’s “Good Morning America,” had the idea for a channel to provide such information. In May of 1982, 35 years ago, The Weather Channel made its first transmission. While many believed it would be short-lived, the channel is still going strong providing forecasts and regularly running documentaries and other weather-related content. It maintains a website for local, national, and worldwide forecasting information.

Several of the channel’s expert reporters are very well known. When raging snow storms or hurricanes strike, viewers look to Jim Cantore, and Bryan Norcross, among others, for the latest conditions. Viewers can’t believe that the reporters, and the unsung, unseen camera crew, would be out there braving winds and rain and snow as they do.

Jim Cantore, intrepid 30-year veteran of The Weather Channel,
out in the thick of things with, of course, his crew.
Did you think he was out there alone?

One “innovation” of The Weather Channel was the naming of winter storms. In times past we heard, in retrospect, of storms names like “The Great Blizzard of 1947” or the 1993 “Storm of the Century.” Just over four years ago, The Weather Channel started naming every wave of severe winter weather that threatened significant areas of the country. The official governmental meteorological offices do not look favorably on this naming, and it is doubtful that it serves any use beyond being a publicity gimmick for the channel.

The Weather Channel, headquartered in Atlanta, relies on their own technological equipment, as well as information from the National Weather Service, part of NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of the Department of Commerce. Weather and reliable forecasts are vital to commerce.

Old saws like the one that start “Red sun in the morning…” or “If it rains before seven…” are still around for our amusement and amazement, but accurate predictions have become essential in our every-day lives.

One of the pioneers of scientific weather forecasting was Robert FitzRoy, Captain of the HMS Beagle on which Darwin sailed, Vice-Admiral in the Royal Navy, second Governor of New Zealand, and one of the first scientists to recognize, in the mid-1800s, that the study of weather patterns of the past could help predict those for the future. Such predictions, which he named “forecasts” were vital for mariners, fishermen, and commerce in general. At first the idea was ridiculed, but gradually it proved its worth, and our great interest in forecasts began.

600

600 – The first thought that comes to mind when I think of 600 is Alfalfa, marvelous member of Our Gang, reciting The Charge of the Light Brigade. And I remember the firecrackers going off in his pocket – “Canons to the left of me” - bang, bang, bang - “Canons to the right of me” bang, bang, bang. Sitting in front of the TV, waiting for the fireworks, we laughed to kill ourselves each time we saw them go off.  

That’s not how the lines really go, but that’s how I remember them. Years (and years!) ago on TV,  on the local stations, they’d repeat shows so many times that you got to memorize the lines. Because I liked poetry, I always remembered quite a number of lines from the great Tennyson poem. 

Half a league, half a league, 
Half a league onward, 
All in the valley of Death 
   Rode the six hundred. 
‘Forward, the Light Brigade!

Be that as it may, this is my 600^th blog post. Blogspot keeps track of these things. My first one was posted back in September of 2011. I don’t post every day – I’m not that prolific a writer, and my days are relatively uninteresting to others – but once or twice a week I come up with something to share.

I do appreciate all of you who’ve stuck with me. Knowing you’re out there pleases me no end, and keeps me writing and posting. Tak.

EDWARD LEAR AND THE LIMERICK

The twelfth day of May each year is Limerick Day. Why? Because it is the birthday of Edward Lear, the poet and artist who perfected the form of this jaunty, sometimes naughty, type of poem. Scholars say that the name “limerick” was given to the form because Irish Soldiers, home from France where they were serving in the 1700’s, brought back to Limerick a song with a chorus that followed the AABBA rhyme scheme such as in this one from an unknown writer:

A bather whose clothing was strewed   A

By winds that left her quite nude A
Saw a man come along B
And unless we are wrong B
You expected this line to be lewd. A

This modern limerick from author Gary Johnson follows that pattern:

There was an old lady of Queens

Who survived on wieners and beans

Wearing Army surplus

Riding the bus

And stealing from vending machines

There’s a set pattern to the usual number of syllables in each of the five lines of the poem, and to the content of the lines. The first two lines set the scene, the second two tell you what happened, and the last line is “the kicker.”  This one, one of the most widely known, is by “Anonymous”

There was a young lady of Niger
Who smiled as she rode on a Tiger;
They came back from the ride
With the lady inside,
And the smile on the face of the Tiger. This one, also from the prolific “Anonymous,” has a punny ending: There was an Old Man of Nantucket Who kept all his cash in a bucket. His daughter, called Nan, Ran away with a man, And as for the bucket, Nantucket. The Nantucket limerick has spawned many more versions, both funny and lewd. Lear’s limericks were not naughty at all. He created them for children. One of twenty-one children himself, an older sister taught him to draw and paint. He became a drawing teacher, and an illustrator. The London Zoological Society hired him to paint a series of paintings of birds, which he insisted he had to paint from life, not stuffed specimens. Impressed with his work, the Earl of Derby hired him to paint pictures of the animals in his private menagerie. While doing the work and living at Knowsley Hall, the earl’s ancestral home, he befriended the earl’s grandchildren. For them he wrote poems like The Owl and the Pussy Cat, and limericks and other nonsense verse. His limericks are collected in one volume, his Book of Nonsense. There was an Old Person of Mold, Who shrank from sensations of cold, So he purchased some muffs, Some furs and some fluffs, And wrapped himself from the cold. There was an Old Lady whose folly, Induced her to sit on a holly; Whereon by a thorn, Her dress being torn, She quickly became melancholy.

REMEMBERING YOUR TEACHERS

Here's another one I did for the magazine. I changed some of the original "we"s to "I"s, and adjusted it here and there to use it for this posting. I have a few teachers I remember for their quirky personalities alone, but there are three I remember who really made lasting memories of learning something useful. Teacher Appreciation Day falls every May. I did once have the opportunity to thank one of my teachers years after I left his classroom, and I made sure to let him know how much I appreciated his teaching.

When casually questioned about the teachers he remembered and what made them good teachers, my husband immediately said “Mrs. Cohen with the great legs – drove all the boys crazy – not particularly good looking, but great legs.” Well, although it’s a great memory, that’s not really the answer we were aiming for.

The teachers we remember fall into two categories. On one hand, there are those who taught our least favorite subjects, who bored us to tears and put us to sleep as they droned on and on, and whose classes and course content we only dimly remember. On the other, there are the ones who really taught us something and made a difference, the ones whose classes we looked forward to, and whose names, even some of their favorite sayings, we remember today.

My Latin teacher was always looking for "Volunteers: you, you, and you!"

Unless a subject was really right up our alley or the teacher made it interesting to us, the courses we had to take to complete graduation requirements or to fill in a class schedule are usually the ones we least remember. It is no surprise that we wouldn’t remember the teacher or a bit of the Calculus we had to take in order to fulfill the state mathematics requirement for a Teacher’s Certificate, especially when the subject we were going to teach was English.

It’s no surprise we remember the college prof who sprang those quickie quizzes on us to test whether we were “getting” it or not. It’s no surprise that I remember the high school Biology teacher who taught me the way to remember the taxonomic ranks: kingdom, phylum, class order, family, genus, species - King Philip Came Over For Grandfather’s Spectacles – and made dissecting a frog fascinating, not icky.

It’s no surprise that we remember the English teacher who made poetry interesting or enlivened a Shakespeare play for us. It’s no surprise that we remember the teacher who enlivened dry History’s dates and battles and personalities, by relating them to the Arts and Sciences what else was happening in the rest of the world. We remember the teacher who was also a team coach and never brought our classroom triumphs or failings on to the playing field or court. We remember the teacher who set us on the road to the profession we followed, or the pastimes we love to this day.

Don’t you sometimes think that you should have thanked those great teachers for what they gave to you? If nothing else, they gave you some lasting memories.

UNDER THE KNIFE

Here's another one of the essays I wrote for our community magazine. It's a follow up on one I did a good while ago on The Fork. I don't think I'll follow up with an article on The Spoon: after all, the original 'spoons' were our hands. They're still in use today. 

your basic, utilitarian cutting edge

Knives, the cutting edge, have been around since man discovered that the sharp edge of a rock or flint would cut into an animal carcass. What would cut into an animal carcass would also be effective as a weapon for hunting, self-defense, and war, and as a tool for the dining table and the operating table. The cutting edge has been developed and enhanced, from the Stone Age to the age of lasers and waterjet cutting machines we have today.

not the sharpest knife in the drawer

But the knife we celebrate this month is the humble table knife. It is said that on a May day, 380 years ago, in 1637, the French Cardinal Richelieu, churchman and statesman, invented the table knife. “Invented” is probably not the correct word for his ordering the staff to round off the points on all the household’s knives. “Intuited” is probably closer to the mark. He realized that removing the stabbing points would improve table manners, making impossible the picking of teeth. It would stop the eating of meat off the knife points, and, most importantly, deter the occasional stabbing of fellow guests. Forks came into greater use at the table.

In later years, Louis IV banned pointed knives from any table, and banned them from use as a part of a person’s daily attire. Unless he had nefarious notions, a person no longer needed to carry his own knife. His host or his household would supply him with the proper table implements.

fancy or plain - always deadly

Knives for hunting and combat are legion, and as diverse as the cultures that invented them. (And let us mention, in passing, the wonderful Swiss Army knife. Among other blades and tools, there’s a table knife somewhere in there.) Knives for the kitchen are purpose-built, from the butcher knife to the boning knife. Most Michelin-starred chefs have sets of knives that they treat like pampered children. Most household chefs have a few “old reliables” they wouldn’t be without.

In most non-European cultures there are no table knives. Any food item, animal or vegetable, that would require cutting was cut into edible pieces in the kitchen. All that were required at the table were chopsticks, spoons, a rare fork or two, and facile fingers. Before Victorian times, table knives in the west were standard, and their blades were less sharp. In that era’s spirit of invention, where dining became an all-evening event, the upper echelons of society came up with all manner of spoons, forks, and knives. They did it because they could, and because it provided a bit of one-upmanship in a time when it now seems like that was all those folks had for amusement. They had dinner knives, fish knives, game knives, butter knives, and additional knives, as needed, for fruit, cheese or other foods. We’d think they could have used the same knife for meat, fish, or game – but no, each had its own knife.

Laguiole - one of the best steak knives in the world

Any good, sharp knife can be used for steak, but the steak knife, so named, came into common use, and to the table, with the advances in stainless steel after World War II. We’ve kept the butter knife on the table for use at a more formal meal, and on some expansive table settings there are table forks and knives for each of the main courses, to be removed with the empty plate. The rest of the unusual knives, as well as their fellow forks and spoons, are now to be found tarnishing in the silverware box or as collectables on eBay.

WORST USE OF A TREE

On Arbor Day in 2015 I posted an article with the poem “Trees Need Not Walk the Earth” and a story about my oldest granddaughter. I took another look at that blog this week, and I was struck with the almost offhand caption I wrote for the picture below:

“…and the First Prize is awarded for The Best Use of a Tree”

In these recent years, I have become more and more aggravated by the worst use of a tree: junk mail and catalogs. Truly, almost all the paper in our weekly recycling is just that: junk. It comes in and goes right into the bin. It’s a shame. 

PENGUINS

I love penguins. I always did like them, but they became special favorites when my mother made herself a gorgeous wool, portrait-collar dress. The sides and back were black, the front panel and collar were white. She called it her penguin dress. After that, I bought her a penguin or two – a sculpture, which I still have, and a Steff penguin called Peggy among them – and I’ve always been alert to things ‘penguin’.

Penguin

by William Jay Smith

I think it must be very nice
To stroll about upon the ice,
Night and day, day and night,
Wearing only black and white,
Always in your Sunday best—
Black tailcoat and pearl-white vest.
To stroll about so pleasantly
Beside the cold and silent sea
Would really suit me to a T!
I think it must be very nice
To stroll with Penguins on the ice.

IT'S A FUNNY THING YOU SHOULD MENTION THAT

Rock Cakes - this is the first photo to come up in Google Images,
and they look perfect to me. 

How many times has it happened to you: you hear something out of the ordinary in your daily life, and then you hear it again, even the same day? I had that happen twice today.

First case in point. This morning I read in the N.Y. Times email Morning Briefing about the child-molestation scandal at Choat Rosemary Hall. O.K., a cover up, etc. Tsk, Tsk. Later, I was proofreading the May issue of our community magazine. One of our astute writers had written piece on President John F. Kennedy who was born 100 years ago in May, 1917, and went to prep school at, yes, Choat. How often would Choat come up in the daily scheme of things?

Then, Frank was reading one of Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot mysteries. He stopped and asked me "what are rock cakes?" I told him. Being an Anglophile, I know about such culinary delights. Then I started reading a Kindle version of Rise, by Karina Bliss. What were they having for tea? Yes, rock cakes. Another quirky coincidence. 

I love when this happens!  

ERSKINE CALDWELL

This is another article I submitted to our community magazine. Caldwell died just thirty years ago this month. That would mean I was 44 then, but I really had little knowledge of him and hadn't, as far as I remember, read any of his work. Delving into his life and work has been quite interesting. 

Did you ever hear anyone describe a place as being “right out of an Erskine Caldwell novel?” In the musical classic The Music Man, one of the busy-body ladies is describing Marian the Librarian – “She advocates dirty books: Chaucer, Rabelais, Balzac!” If the show had been set in the middle of the 1900’s, the lady might have added Erskine Caldwell.  

Caldwell’s output, which included about fifty novels, dozens of short stories, non-fiction, and editing, was, along with his travels, far reaching. With his second wife of four, the photographer Margaret Bourke-White, he collaborated on three photo documentaries, including Have You Seen Their Faces, a pictorial about the troubles in the rural South. 

The two most well-known of his works, Tobacco Road and God’s Little Acre, both of which were made into movies, are set in that poor, rural south. Caldwell, who died 30 years ago this month, wrote about the social problems, the racism and the poverty, in works that won great critical acclaim. He said: "I could not become accustomed to the sight of children's stomachs bloated from hunger and seeing the ill and aged too weak to walk to the fields to search for something to eat. In the evenings I wrote about what I had seen during the day, but nothing I put down on paper succeeded in conveying the full meaning of poverty and hopelessness and degradation as I had observed it." 

Born in Georgia in 1903, Caldwell’s parents were a Presbyterian minister whose Scots-Irish ancestors were here before the American Revolution, and his schoolteacher wife who was descended from English aristocracy and landed Virginia gentry. Ira Caldwell’s itinerant ministry took them all over the rural south during his son’s formative years. The writer’s maxim is “write what you know,” and Caldwell came to know and champion the rural poor. He wrote of the working men, the farmers and share-croppers, the factory workers. He wrote vivid descriptions of their lives and their living conditions.  

While his works were getting critical acclaim, they were condemned elsewhere for their profanity and explicit sexuality. God’s Little Acre, published in 1933, was banned, where else, in Boston. The Georgia Literary Commission recommended that anyone reading it be jailed. The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice had him arrested and tried. He was exonerated. Caldwell’s fellow southern writers, among them Margaret Mitchell and William Faulkner, condemned him for painting such an awful picture of their beloved South. All that was about 85 years ago, and times and social mores have certainly changed - or have they?

AT THE STORE

At the Store

by Jane Kenyon

Clumps of daffodils along the storefront
bend low this morning, late snow
pushing their bright heads down.
The flag snaps and tugs at the pole
beside the door.

The old freezer, full of Maine blueberries
and breaded scallops, mumbles along.
A box of fresh bananas on the floor,
luminous and exotic…
I take what I need from the narrow aisles.

Cousins arrive like themes and variations.
Ansel leans on the counter,
remembering other late spring snows,
the blue snow of ‘32:
Yes, it was, it was blue.
Forrest comes and goes quickly
with a length of stovepipe, telling
about the neighbors’ chimney fire.

The store is a bandstand. All our voices
sound from it, making the same motley
American music Ives heard;
this piece starting quietly,
with the repeated clink of a flagpole
pulley in the doorway of a country store.

I am not a fan of free verse poems that seem to be sentences broken down and stacked phrase upon phrase, or chunk upon chunk. They tell no story, paint no pictures. This poem, as with much of Jane Kenyon’s poems, paints a picture, sets a mood, and tells a story – a in the space of a few lines. It is lyrical.

OH REALLY?

Image copyrig(This was in this morning's BBC news email. It just struck a silly chord in me. Read the last sentence. Do you know where Syracuse, New York is in relation to Dallas or Albuquerque?)

(This article struck a silly chord in me when I read it on this morning's BBC new email. Note the last sentence. Do you know where Syracuse, New York is in relation to Dallas and Albuquerque?)

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"A pilot died on Wednesday during a flight from Dallas to Albuquerque, New Mexico, American Airlines have confirmed.

The Boeing 737-800 was two miles from landing when the captain declared a medical emergency, an Albuquerque airport spokesman confirmed.

"They landed without incident, taxied to the gate and were met by medical personnel," he told the Albuquerque Journal.

None of the passengers was injured.

American Airlines confirmed the pilot's identity as first officer William "Mike" Grubbs.

US media quoted airline spokeswoman Polly Tracey as saying: "We're taking care of first officer Grubbs' family and colleagues and our thoughts and prayers are with them during this time."

In 2015, an American Airlines pilot died in a medical emergency on an overnight flight from Phoenix to Boston.

The flight was safely diverted by the co-pilot to Syracuse, New York."

SEWARD'S FOLLY

The lower 48’s current fascination with anything Alaskan probably started in 1990, with the first episode of Northern Exposure set in the fictional town of Cicely. Now there are shows from the sublime The Last Alaskans to the ridiculous Alaskan Bush People. Reality shows like Discovery Channel’s Deadliest Catch and Alaska: The Last Frontier, or National Geographic’s Alaska State Troopers, to name just a few of dozens, have carried on to the point where many folks are more familiar with the map of Alaska than the one of their home state.

On March 30, 1867, 150 years ago, under the administration of President Andrew Johnson, the United States agreed to buy the Alaska territory from Russia. Secretary of State William H. Seward negotiated for what seemed like an astronomical cost for what was thought to be useless land. At the same time, when such arguments held little weight with the big governments involved, the native Alaskans, including the Tlingit and Aleuts, argued that the land wasn’t the Russian’s to sell. In August of the next year, after a lot of wrangling in Congress, a check for $7,200,000.00 was given to the Russian Minister to the United States, one Eduard de Stoecki.  Alaska was called “Seward’s Folly” and “Seward’s Icebox” and other less polite names. The price worked out to about two cents per acre, and like such deals as the purchase of the Louisiana territory or the Danish Virgin Islands, “Seward’s Folly” proved to be a wise investment.

The Russians, then ruled by Peter the Great, first went east to Alaska in the mid-1700s. They used the name Alaska, an Aleut word we now use to name the entire state, for just the long Aleutian peninsula and chain of islands that curve westward toward Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula. They had little idea of the vast oil and mineral resources there. Having depleted their own resources of it, they were primarily interested in that great essential in frigid northern countries: fur. They even went as far as the Farallon Islands off the California coast, west of San Francisco, establishing outposts and stations for the harvest of fur seals, sea otters, and other animals. For the Russians, the territory, mostly populated on the coasts, was hard to reach and hard to defend, and eventually they were happy to sell it.

Many Russians married the native people, and they have thousands of descendants. Attesting to their legacy, Russian names identify many places and families. In areas off the beaten tourist path, some people still speak in a Russian dialect, and in certain coastal areas they still adhere to the Russian Orthodox religion. Prime examples of Russian architecture are the onion-domed cathedrals, churches, and chapels, many of which are on the National Register of Historic Places. Located in Sitka, Juneau, Anchorage and hamlets like Ninilchik, they are reminders of the century or more that the Russians occupied the territory.

Alaska, at over 663,000 square miles, is the biggest state in the union. It boasts a lot of impressive statistics. Being the largest, it boasts the longest coastline, the most lakes, the largest oil field, and the smallest population density. Three of its islands were the only places in North America occupied by the Japanese during World War II. North America’s highest mountain, Denali, once known as Mt. McKinley, is in the Alaska Range, north of Anchorage. And of course, Alaska has more Bald Eagles than any other place in the world.