TRENDING NOW

One of the latest additions to my favorite shelter site, Houzz is “Trending Now: 10 Dream Baths That Have it All.”  Ah yes – huge bathrooms with walk-in showers and multiple shower heads, enormous soaking tubs, the latest patterns in tile floors and walls, and views guaranteed to send you to a Nirvana-like state of mind. Plenty of storage, sometimes lots of veined marble, exotic plants, heated towel racks, heated floors, and mirrors galore. And always, always, big, fluffy white towels.

Like any piece in any shelter magazine or website, the homes and décor shown far a far cry from what’s possible for most of us homeowners, especially us senior citizens. Oh, once I might have loved a huge soaking tub – the huger the better, all the better to accommodate my not insignificant embonpoint. Today, I’m happy to have a shower with proper grab bars and a handy place to sit if I need to, or rest my leg on so I can wash my nether parts. With my generally stiff self, and poor legs and knees, there is no way now that I’ll be able to get in or out of a tub.

All of the trendy bathroom things are very nice, and were I in a position to do so, I’d not turn up my nose at any of them with one exception: big, white, fluffy towels. Big? Alright, nice. Fluffy? Well, how do they dry? But White? Get real! White towels are for the desperate homeowner following her realtor’s over-the-top run down of what sells a house. White is for people who never, ever lift a finger, never wear makeup, never do garden work, house work, or work on their car, and never sweat at all.  Well...

This whole Trending Now thing is absurd, even more so on the television news broadcasts. You’re supposed to pay close attention so that you remain “in the know” about what’s important in the not-so-important, superficial world around us. I am quite “in the know” in my own sphere, and have no need to be trendy.

Speaking of useless filler, I’m convinced that the TV station people lie awake at night thinking of how to fill an hour or two of what’s called News. One of my favorite useless things is the Storm Trackers they send out in bad weather. I’d like to know who is driving in their own car while watching the Storm Tracker. And what about the traffic reports? Radio? Good idea, but on TV? Do some commuters have their spouses watch the traffic report and all them on their cell phone to report in? Well, enough of that for today.

THINK ABOUT IT...

Here's a curmudgeonly article I concocted for the magazine. It was meant to be a companion piece to a article about the pulling down of controversial memorial statues, along with a article about one statue honoree whose contributions, in retrospect, are unpalatable to us today. None of the articles saw print. They were deemed to be a bit too controversial for our community content. 

Recent developments have seen the removal from Central Park of that statue honoree, Dr.J. Marion Sims, the "Father of Gynecology," who is now known to have experimented, without anesthesia, on slave women. The stature was moved to Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. Already exiled to that cemetery in 2012 was the statue memorial to Civic Virtue. A cemetery seems like great place for any controversial statues because the residents, including my in-laws in Green-Wood, really won't care, and their visitors are few and far between. 

Now - 

Think about it...

...Is it good – or is it bad - that we live in an age where not only are we aware of past and present injustices, we want to, and have the privilege and the means to, discuss them, dissect them, and deconstruct them? It’s unfortunate that we don’t have a magic wand to right them.

America’s history is, among other things good – and bad – a continuation of the history of the world. Man’s inhumanity to man has been a means of power, profit, and the promulgation of selected ideals and causes since time began.

Very few of us would score well on a test of our aptitude for being a judge, a mediator, or a diplomat. In any given situation, most of us will fall heavily on the side toward which our lifelong-learned biases propel us.

History is rife with injustices. For many reasons, the basic one being lack of widespread and timely communications, past generations knew less, had less to say, and few to say it to. An old Chinese proverb holds that “Heaven is high and the emperor is far away.” And so the local injustices, petty or serious, went on locally, and the emperor’s word, his laws, his injustices, often affected relatively few. We Americans are focused on our own problems, often only casually interested in the injustice going on in the rest of the world. Is that good, or is that bad?

Today we have mass, speedy communications. From the Washington Post in print and online, to Twitter, the word spreads quickly about injustice, perceived or real. Political, social, or economic, it all comes under the heading of human injustice. Every day the rhetoric seems to be more heated.

It is good – or is it bad – that people feel free to comment and criticize from their own personal pulpit and prospective? For example, trivial though it may seem, was it good - or was it bad – that the fashion industry was chastised for not complaining how the Neo-Nazis were dressed at a protest?

Is it good – or is it bad – that there is a movement to remove any statue or monument to those involved in the Civil War?

Is it good – or is it bad – that it has come to the point where our country is up in arms about arms?

Is it good – or is it bad – that our congressional leaders of opposing parties go back and forth with accusations, blame, and partisan posing?

Is it good - or is it bad - that a list of questions like these could go on for pages?

Everyone and anyone is free to voice and justify their opinion about injustice – it’s our right as Americans. More people are voicing and justifying their ideas for solutions, but too few are listening to them with open, educated minds.

Sometimes it’s thought that we really don’t want to wipe out injustice because all we’d have left to discuss would be the wind and the weather and what to have for supper. We’d have no different flags to fly or anthems to sing, no statues to raise or to tear down, no profit to be made. In this age of justification, that’s simplistic, but not far from the truth.

Is that good, or is that bad? Think about it.

TOO MARVELOUS FOR WORDS

 “You’re much too much, and just too very, very

      To ever be in Webster’s Dictionary.”

As Kleenex has become generic for facial tissue, and Vaseline for petroleum jelly, so too has Webster’s become generic for dictionary. We don’t just say “look it up,” we say “check your Webster’s.” It was on April 14, 1828, that Noah’s Webster’s An American Dictionary of the English Language was published. One hundred and ninety years later, we do have Google for a quick look-see, and spell-check for our electronic writing, but there’s nothing like getting your hands on a hefty Webster’s for a complete definition, pronunciation, and the correct spelling of any word in question.

Born in 1758, Noah Webster graduated as a lawyer from Yale and passed the bar. Unable to find work in the law, he opened his own school. It was the teacher in him that was dissatisfied: generally with the state of education in the new Untied States, and specifically with instruction in the English language. He disapproved of having to use British textbooks in the classroom, and set out to correct the situation. At the age of 25, he published the first of three parts of his A Grammatical Institute of the English Language. That first part was The American Spelling Book, later known as “the Blue Backed Speller,” which is still in print. He later published part two, a grammar, and part three, a reader consisting of American pieces written to promote democracy and responsible conduct.

Webster continued on as a journalist, essayist, and lecturer, and in an effort to protect his own rights as well those of other authors, he lobbied extensively for stringent and uniform copyright laws. In 1806, he published the Compendious Dictionary of the English Language. It was the minor precursor of An American Dictionary of the English Language that he began in the following year.

The American Dictionary “Americanized” words in British usage, changing words like colour and neighbour to color and neighbor, musick to music, and theatre to theater. For the first time, it separated the i’s from the j’s, and the u’s from the v’s in the alphabet. It included new words like skunk and hickory, gleaned from the Native Americans, and also included words in languages like French and Spanish that had become common in American usage. The dictionary contained about 70,000 words, small in comparison to the over 200,000 words, current and obsolete, included in the Oxford English Dictionary, the OED, but large in comparison to the common vocabulary of the day. Above all, it began the standardization of spelling. Webster argued that standardized spelling would be a big factor in uniting the separate regions of the new United States. We may speak with regional accents, but we read and write without them.

The dictionary and a later edition never sold too well: In 1828, it sold for about $15 to $20, about $400 in today’s currency. That was too high price for the average American to pay. Webster’s estate sold the rights and the unsold copies of the 1841 edition to the publishers G. & C. Merriam Company.

Billing itself as “the world’s most trusted dictionary,” trusted for spelling, definitions, and pronunciation, the dictionary became The Merriam-Webster Dictionary, currently available in editions priced from $1.98 on up. (By comparison, the OED will cost you around $1,100, but do you usually need to know that many words?) In 1982, the company name was changed to Merriam-Webster, Incorporated, and in a twist of fate, it is now owned by a British publisher, the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Will we Americans go back to colour, neighbour, and theatre? Not ruddy likely.

-------

This is another I wrote for the community magazine. I still don't understand some of Webster's spelling choices, but he isn't around for me to interview. 

THE HUMBLE PENCIL

This is a fun piece I did for our community magazine. My posting is a bit late for National Pencil Day - that was March 30th. When I was googling for pictures this morning, I came upon this entry from Graf von Faber-Castell for the "perfect pencil" Perfect that is if you've a mind to spend a mere $10,000.00 for it. Really?  I'll take two.

Prefect: pencil, sharpener, and eraser.
I'd think folks who own this pencil would make no mistakes.

Behold the humble pencil, an item we take for granted until we need one and can’t find one. Behold the humble pencil eraser, another item we take for granted until we need to erase what we just wrote and find we’ve made so many previous mistakes that the eraser is useless.

Just a pencil

 It’s difficult to pinpoint the exact birthday of the pencil. Man has been using various writing tools for ages, one of them was the stylus, and that was usually made of lead. The people at pencils.com tell us that in 1564, a large deposit of what was thought to be lead was discovered in England. It proved to be graphite, a form of carbon, a mineral that could be processed to form a writing or drawing stick. The first such sticks were wrapped with sheepskin, but soon there came the invention of the wood casing for the graphite. In the late seventeenth century, pencils went into mass production.

Shortly after the discovery of that graphite deposit, there were ideas for holders for replaceable pencil sticks, what we call leads. The earliest known mechanical pencil was found on a ship that sank in 1791. The first refillable mechanical pencil as we know it today was patented in England in 1822. Now there are custom mechanical pencils that sell for hundreds of dollars, not-so-humble solid gold versions that sell for thousands, and the ubiquitous plastic-barreled versions that sell for about five for a dollar. They all write well, they all have erasers. 

It isn’t difficult to pinpoint the exact birthday of the pencil eraser: March 30, 1858. On that day, the clever Hyman Lipman patented the first eraser attached to a pencil. This Philadelphian could be the hero of American school children, but not of European school children: most of their pencils are eraserless. (Pencil tops, caps, or separate blocks, we call them erasers. The British call them rubbers. We wear rubbers or rubber boots, they wear Wellies. But I digress…)

The spread of electronic communication has not diminished the need for pencils. The major pencil manufacturers report that worldwide sales are growing nicely. All this leads us to the fact that the “powers that be,” having an exact date for Lipman’s invention, declared March 30 to be National Pencil Day. Chew on a pencil to celebrate.

This could be a bunch from my husband's workshop.
All carpenters and woodworkers love pencil stubs

Pencil Trivia

·        Lead pencils are now made using a mixture of clay and graphite.

·        Hyman Lipman’s patent, sold for a small fortune, was later invalidated because it was deemed to be only a combination of two existing items.

·        Henry Thoreau, when he wasn’t writing, made pencils.

·        Though many authors preferred writing in pencil, John Steinbeck used over 300 pencils while writing one of his novels. (Who counted them?)

·        Eraser caps were invented to prolong the use of a pencil after its original eraser was worn away.

·        While colored pigments, chalks, and waxes were used for art work from ancient times, they didn’t appear in pencil form until the early twentieth century.

·        Common pencils can be used as pipe tobacco tampers, back scratchers, bookmarks, chignon holders, chopsticks, drum sticks, even splints. (Handy, aren’t they?)

·        One of the few sports that relies on pencils is golf, and golf pencils are short so that they fit easily in a pocket in the golfer’s pants or bag. They are handy to clean off golf cleats, and they’re eraserless, we suppose, to discourage cheating.