September 28, 2003
The Bambino's curse
There's a crisp autumnal breeze in the air, baseball's regular season is over, and we may well awake sometime soon to see the skies opening up with a rain of blood: the possibility exists that we could see a Cubs vs. Red Sox World Series. The Cubs won their last World Series in 1908; the Red Sox in 1918 (beating, of course, the Chicago Cubs). The two teams have compiled a remarkable record of futility ever since. The Cubs were crippled by decades of managerial incompetence, penny-pinching owners, and fans who are often content to go see a game at baseball's prettiest ballpark regardless of whether the team wins or loses, a fact that drives more competitive fans absolutely bonkers. Some Red Sox fans -- my grandfather was one of them -- aren't willing to accept mundane explanations like owner apathy or the fact that the Red Sox were the last team in the majors to begin signing Negro League players, a full twelve years after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier. They want a more interesting answer. And so: the curse of the Bambino.
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September 26, 2003
Stormy weather
Hurricane Isabel shut down DC, of course; any weather heavier than a gentle breeze can do that. But even in the Carolinas, where the storm was stronger and the usual band of brave and foolhardy residents refused to evacuate, it didn't do much real damage. Isabel caused less than two dozen deaths (largely due to traffic accidents, although several people died from carbon monoxide poisoning while running generators during blackouts). Hurricanes are still devestating storms, but they're not nearly as deadly as they once were. If another Long Island Express occurs (the practice of giving hurricanes people's names didn't start until the Fifities), the damage will be incredible. The 1938 hurricane devestated a rural Long Island largely made up of farming communities and was still the sixth costliest storm of the twentieth century. But, thanks to meteorologists and hydrologists, people will have warning; that wasn't always the case.
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September 24, 2003
The dark is rising
This summer's outage that hit New York City and much of the Great Lakes region was much more widespread, but the five and a half days I just spent without power in the wake of Hurricane Isabel was plenty of time in the dark, thank you. The earlier blackouts highlighted problems with the power grid, the amazingly complex system of interconnected utilities. England has a single grid operator (not that this helped stop London's summer blackout) compared to the multiplicity of grid operators in America (each composed of many utilities). It's no wonder that people are starting to talk about "smart grid" programs, although those won't do any good against the sort of power outage that I suffered, the sort that results from a very large storm knocking over a great many trees. The hundreds of imported power crews are doing the best they can, but by day four of the outage, I was dredging up old thoughts about green houses and going off the grid (I used to read Backwoods Home the way I now read shelter magazines, and for much the same reason). Thank goodness for battery-operated lanterns. The blackouts in New York get all the attention, but the tedious cleanup required to get power restored after vast numbers of transmission lines have been downed is no fun, even if it doesn't come with widespread rioting.
September 16, 2003
Hang on St. Christopher
Those who fell ill in medieval Europe were in trouble. Medieval physicians didn't know about germs, infections, or, in many cases, the rudiments of human physiology. Medieval surgeons were barbers (who were busy men; in 1450, Parliament felt obliged to restrict English barbers to bloodletting, toothdrawing, cauterization, and "the tonsorial operations"). Doctors couldn't prevent or cure many of the day-to-day maladies that could befall people in the best of times; when an epidemic hit, especially one as devastating and world-shaking as the fourteenth century black death that killed a third of Europe's population, there was little left to do but pray. Several saints, most notably Saint Roch and Saint Sebastian, were thought to have particular power to intercede against plagues. When the going got really tough, they could turn to the Fourteen Holy Helpers, saints thought to be particularly effective at interceding on behalf of sufferers of different ills. The Holy Helper who dealt with plague was Saint Christopher.
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September 11, 2003
Anniversaries
Three years ago last August, I moved back to the East Coast from California. I went about the usual routine, getting phone service taken care of (difficult to do in the middle of the Verizon strike), transferring my auto insurance, getting a driver's license. It took me a while to do that last one. Every day when I look in my wallet, I see a reminder of exactly how long it took: "Issued Date: 09-11-00" I spent the morning of September 11, 2001 in a server room, frantically trying to keep things running. I'd seen the first plume on CNN in the office lobby and assumed that a horrible accident had occured; only on my emergence hours later did I find out what had happened. My boss told me that my face turned gray. I work in northern Virginia; with very little rejiggering, I can imagine myself, my coworkers, my loved ones in the E-ring of the Pentagon that morning.
I know what happened on December 7 and November 22 and, if I squint for a minute, January 28. (It may say something about me that I'm blurriest about the historical details of the event from my lifetime, although I remember my grade school teacher walking in to make an announcement very clearly.) But I don't wake up with them ricocheting in the back of my brain, just as I don't spend the drive to work every November 11 thinking about the armistice that ended what was perhaps the most appallingly bloody war in history. I don't spend the first three days of July thinking about the consecrated ground that marked the Lee's northernmost advance of the Civil War.
I don't want to forget. Three thousand people going about their humdrum business -- checking their email, cleaning an office, writing a PowerPoint presentation, sitting in first class and trying to cram for a meeting, washing dishes and thinking about the lunch crowd, the everyday American business of making a living -- were murdered. As Jim Henley and Anil Dash write in their individual ways, "it's not wrong to try to look forward as much as we look back." I agree. But in what year will I wake up and think that September 11 is just another day? When will I not look at my driver's license and have that jolt of recognition?
September 09, 2003
Giants in the earth
When children think of a very large person, they think of Shaq. Shaquille O'Neale stands 7' 1" tall. Thanks to a nagging toe injury that hampered his training, last season he weighed more than 360 pounds. If a reported weight of 382 pounds before the NBA playoffs was correct, Shaq was the heaviest athlete in professional sports last year (in American major sports, at least; Musashimaru could spot Shaq an Olympic gymnast). And life has been good to Shaq, making him not just wealthy and famous but a film star and recording artist, a man whose exhuberant tastes and daffy immaturities are seized on as somehow meaningful. It's a better fate than he might have had; a half century ago, Robert Wadlow, the world's tallest man, died at the age of 22, slightly under nine feet tall and weighing over 400 pounds. Given that Shaq's majors crimes seem mostly aesthetic and attitudinal (the latter hardly surprising given that tall people are winners in life), one hopes he'd have met a happier fate.
A hundred years ago, Shaq might have found his calling on the midway, performing as a human oddity. A few hundred years before that, perhaps he'd have made a Potsdam Grenadier, a member of the regiment of tall men collected by Frederick Wilhelm of Prussia in the eighteenth century:
Sublime enough, hugely perfect to the royal eye, such a mass of shining giants, in their long-drawn regularities and mathematical maneuverings -- like some streak of Promethean lightning, realized here at last, in the vulgar dusk of things! Truly they are men supreme in discipline, in beauty of equipment; and the shortest man of them rises, I think, towards seven feet, some are nearly nine feet high. Men from all countries; a hundred and odd come annually, as we saw, from Russia... The rest have been collected, crimped, purchased out of every European country, at enormous expense, not to speak of other trouble to his majesty.
Frederick Wilhelm went to great trouble indeed to collect his giant soliders; when recruits and the offerings of tall men from rival potentates weren't enough, he relied upon a network of agents that kidnapped lanky farmers and priests from throughout Europe. The Potsdam Grenadiers were sketched from memory by the king, used as an honor guard and to impress diplomats, and paraded like toy soldiers (dressed in pointed hats that made them look even taller), but they were never used in actual combat. Morale was low among the Potsdam Grenadiers, and keeping them was proving so expensive that Frederick Wilhelm had contemplated recruiting giant women and breeding a giant race. When Frederick the Great, Frederick Wilhelm's son, assumed the throne, he simply disbanded the squad and sent them home. Mitch Kupchak, the Lakers G.M., has signed Gary Payton and Karl Malone to play for the Lakers next year; Kings and Mavs fans can only hope that history repeats itself.
September 07, 2003
X marks the spot
Edgar Allen Poe fancied himself a cryptographer. Like many of his contemporaries, Poe played with the acrostic (1 2). He did a great deal to popularize the cryptogram, he published (and may have authored) the "William Tyler" cryptograms, and in his famous story "The Gold Bug", Poe introduces a theme that has been hovering at the back of the public imagination ever since: solve the puzzles and find the buried treasure.
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September 03, 2003
The tongues of angels
As recorded by the thirteenth century Franciscan Salimbene of Parma, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II engaged in a number of unusual experiments, including collecting orphaned babies and
bidding foster-mothers and nurses to suckle and bathe and wash the chidren, but in no wise to prattle or speak with them; for he would have learnt whether they would speak the Hebrew language (which had been the first), or Greek, or Latin, or Arabic, or perchance the tongue of their parents of whom they had been born.
Frederick's experiment failed to demonstrate that Hebrew was the true prelapsarian language, as "without clappings of the hands, and gestures, and gladness of countenance, and blandishments" the babies promptly died. Psammetichus, the pharaoh who (so Herodotus reports) performed a similar experiment, had slightly better results; based on the similarity between the children's babbling and becos, the Phrygian word for bread, Psammetichus was able to conclude that Phrygian was the oldest tongue. The experiments were probably doomed to failure; feral children generally never learn to communicate at an advanced level.
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