Fast away the old year passes

It always has and it always will. Fa la la la la, la la la la.

Or perhaps that truism is not true at all. Perhaps there was a time before the earth existed when it did not make a trip around the sun every year. And perhaps there will come a time when the earth will no longer exist when it won't make a trip around the sun every year, and such trips will be only a memory.

To whom?, you may be asking. To whom will they be only a memory?

Or perhaps the earth will continue to exist and make trips around the sun but they will be significantly longer or significantly shorter than at present. The planet Mercury orbits the sun once every 88 earth-days. The planet Neptune, on the other hand, orbits the sun once every 164.8 earth-years. Why not us? What would our lives be like in other scenarios?

Well, for one thing, on Neptune we definitely wouldn't be singing "Fast away the old year passes" and our auld lang synes would be very auld indeed. And in the southern parts of the United States of Mercury, would we be eating black-eyed peas and collard greens for good luck in the New Year every three earth-months or doing something far more exotic?

It's the stuff out of which science-fiction novels are born.

Perhaps you will write one in 2023.

Trust me, stranger things have happened, even stranger than this, my final post of 2022.

Happy New Year to each and every one of you.

Do you say ‘slow cooker’ or ‘crock pot’ or something else?

Im my last post (We Three Soups) I mentioned slow cookers. It occurred to me that some people call them crock pots, hence the title of this post. Here are some more things that people refer to in different ways:

• trousers, slacks, pants
• soft drink, soda, pop, tonic, Coke
• potluck meal, covered dish meal
• dinner, supper, tea
• pants, underpants, skivvies, knickers, bloomers, drawers, panties
• chick peas, garbonzo beans
• navy beans, northern beans
• Lima beans, butter beans

Most of those are regional differences within the US, but there are also many differences between American English and British English: chips/crisps, fries/chips, trunk/boot, hood/bonnet, truck/lorry, elevator/lift, diaper/napkin, zucchini/courgette, eggplant/aubergine. The list goes on and on.

Can you add any multi-named items to the list for our enlightenment? I can't think of a better thing to do on a cold winter day except long for Spring to arrive.

We Three Soups

The current size of Ye Olde Rhymeswithplague Family including hangers-on, wannabes, in-laws, and various and sundry fiancées hovers at 19. Not too big and not too small. Goldilocks-like, it is just right, at least for now, although we are certainly open to the idea of expansion.

And so it was, that while they were there (over the Christmas weekend), the days were accomplished that she should be delivered the family decided to start a new tradition.

But what? We put on our thinking caps. We thought and thought and came up with...

What else? Soup!

On Sunday night, a good time was had by all at our oldest son's house when three families brought slow cookers containing enough of the following deliciousness for everyone:

• Southwest Soup (an old recipe found in Southern Living magazine many years ago)
• Greek Egg Lemon Soup with orzo, fortified with a mirepoix of diced celery, carrots, and onions
• Jambalaya with three proteins (shrimp, chicken, and andouille sausage) served over cheese grits

There were other enticements as well but I don't want to divulge all of our secrets to having a great evening together.

At Thanksgiving, the highlght of the day was the announcement by our oldest grandson and his bride of 13 months that they are expecting their first child (our first great-grandchild) next July.

At Christmas, even three slow cookers full of wonderful soups couldn't top that!

Weather report

According to my trusty weather app, it is currently 5°F (-15°C) outside where I live (about 50 miles north of Atlanta's airport) but because the wind is blowiing at a speed of 12 mph (not too bad, really) it feels like -11°F (somewhere in Antarctica C) out there. We will have a heat wave today and the high is expected to be 24°F (-4.4°C).

The warmest place in the US yesterday was 84°F (28.8° C) in Boca Raton, Florida, where we lived for seven years when I was with IBM.

I'm beginning to wonder for the first time ever if we made the right decision when we decided to move.

Global warmng is the pits. Global warming is for the birds.

Penguins.

P.S.- It just came to my attention that yesterday, December 23rd, was Festivus (look it up if you weren't a Seinfeld fan) and my previous post easily qualifies as "airing of grievances."

Random thoughts at yuletide, or Keeping It Real

This was the year that Kiev (kee-EV) became Kyiv (keev), parts of Ukraine were taken over by Russia, the long reign of a beloved monarch in the UK came to an end, and the president of the US and his minions lackeys loyal appointees continued to insist that the southern border with Mexico is not open even as people continue to pour across it unabated (2.5 million in fiscal year 2022, with 5 million projected for fiscal year 2023, representing a doubling from 7,000 per day to 14,000 per day).

In other words, as Robert Browning once wrote, God's in His heaven; all's right with the world.

In spite of what you have just read, I am not in a "Bah, humbug!" mood this Christmas. Some might accuse me of being in a "Bah, humbug!" mood all year long. I beg to differ.

I am a realist. I call them like I see them, which brings me to the subject of life insurance.

For years on American television there has been a very misleading pitch by a certain life insurance company to the effect that anyone -- 54 years old, 67 years old, even 80 years old -- can get life insurance for the fixed price of $9.95 per month. "You cannot be denied coverage for any health reason and the price is fixed; your rate will never go up," they say. What they don't tell you is that the rate is PER UNIT and the amount of insurance per unit decreases as one gets older. So while your monthly premium stays the same, the amount of coverage becomes less and less. At age 40, one 'unit' may represent (these are my own figures just for example, they are not mentioned in the commercial) $10,000 worth of insurance, at age 60 it may represent $5,000 worth of insurance, and at age 80 it might represent $1,000 worth of insurance. So if you decided to buy five units at age 40 at $9.95 per unit (let's call it $10.00 to keep the math simple), you would be paying $50 per month to have $50,000 of insurance coverage. At age 60 you would be paying $50 per month for $25,000 worth of insurance coverage, and at age 80 you would still be paying $50 per month but receive only $5,000 worth of insurance coverage for your five units. At this company that shall remain nameless the actual cost of one unit ($1,000 of insurance) is closer to $300 at age 80, making it cost-prohibitive for a great portion of the population. The whole scheme as presented seems not only misleading but downright devious, fraudulent, unethical, and several other adjectives.

To summarize, then, while other insurance companies may charge you more and more for your insurance as you get older, the company on whom today's spotlight shines offers you instead less and less insurance for your money.

So while the world constantly seems to be going to hell in a handbasket, let us remember here two days before Christmas that the angels proclaimed peace on earth, good will to men. The earth could use a whole lot more of both.

I hope a certain insurance company is listening.

Do you hear what I hear? (not a Christmas post)

I repeat, this is not a Christmas post. What it is is a post about how easily one song can be mistaken for another.

For example, several years ago my friend Ellis D. (God rest his soul) asked me why an organist in a church would play the old pop song "Now Is The Hour (When We Must Say Goodbye)". I hasten to inject here that I was was not the organist in question. The song was very popular back in the day and such artists as Gracie Fields, Bing Crosby, and Vera Lynn all recorded it. I told Ellis that what he had heard was not "Now Is The Hour" but a Maori folk tune from New Zealand (Wikipedia now says it actually isn't) to which someone else had put these religious words based on the 139th Psalm:

Search me, O God
And know my heart today
Try me, O Savior
Know my heart, I pray
See if there be
Some wicked way in me
Cleanse me from every sin
And set me free.

Ellis had not heard "Now Is The Hour" at all but "Search Me, O God".

I have had a couple of similar experiences myself. Because I am a Christian and a musician, I probably watch more religious programming on television than the average person. So it was with great surprise that I began hearing violins playing "Arrivederci, Roma" as station-break music on one Christian network. Turns out it was not "Arrivederci, Roma" at all; it was "There came a sound from heaven like a mighty rushing wind" which is the opening line of the first verse of a song called "There Is A River." Who knew?

I learned a lot of new (to me) songs listening to that network, so when Mrs. RWP retrieves ice from the automatic dispenser on our new refrigerator and it makes a faint, far-off, French-horn-like sound consisting of the first and sixth tones of a major scale (I told you I was a musician), others might hear the opening of "My Bonnie Lies Over The Ocean" and Americans of a certain age might hear two-thirds of the 1-6-4 combination of tones the National Broadcasting Company used for many years for its identifying chimes (N-B-C). What I hear instead is an old hymn written by African-American pastor G.T. Haywood around 1912:

I see a crimson stream of blood
It flows from Calvary
Its waves, which reach the throne of God
Are sweeping over me.

Johnny Carson (remember him?) used to get "Autumn In New York" confused with "Moonlight In Vermont".

I know many of you have thought from time to time in the privacy of your own homes that I am a bit weird. Now I have provided you with actual proof.

Has anybody out there in Blogland had similar experiences of mistaking one song for another?

Report it in the comments if you dare.

On Beethoven’s birthday, thoughts that have absolutely nothing to do with Beethoven

Sixty-five years ago when I was 16, I took two semesters of shorthand, Gregg Diamond Jubilee Shorthand to be exact, during my senior year of high school. My new skill came in very handy for taking notes while in college in the days before tape recorders, and often I was able to give back to the professors their exact words on written assignments and examinations.

I shall now seem to some to be taking off in an entirely different direction, but hold your criticism for a moment.

I became a church organist at the age of 13 or 14 at the First Methodist Church of Mansfield, Texas, where Mr. Thomas McDonald, who was also the band director at the local high school, led the choir. All of the hymns sung by the congregation were found in the old Cokesbury Hymnal, a slim volume that was the predecessor of today's Methodist Hymnal. I came to know most of those hymns very well, but there were many well-known hymns absent from the Cokesbury with which I remained unaware until much later when I was no longer attending Methodist churches, such hymns as T.O. Chisholm's "Great Is Thy Faithfulness" and Fanny Crosby's "To God Be The Glory" and Frances Ridley Havergal's "Like A River Glorious".

Over the years other beautiful hymns entered my consciousness too, such as "Lo, How A Rose E'er Blooming" and "Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus" and "Abide With Me, 'Tis Eventide" and scores of others. By now I must know several hundred hymns.

There is a verse in the 35th chapter of the book of Job where Elihu says to Job that God, our maker, gives songs in the night. I find that it is true. I can't tell you how many times I have awakened in the night and have an old hymn running through my head. Often it is one of the hymns from the old Cokesbury Hymnal and I surprise myself by still knowing several verses of, such as "We're Marching to Zion (Come, We That Love The Lord)" or "My Jesus, I Love Thee" or "Blessed Assurance" or "I Am Thine, O Lord" or "Come, Thou Fount Of Every Blessing" or "Give Of Your Best To The Master" or "Dear Lord And Father Of Mankind" that invariably take me back to my days in Mansfield. I find the phenomenon fascinating. It has happened so often that I no longer find it unusual.

What is unusual, though, is what happened last night. As one song, then another, then another filled my mind, I found myself writing them out in my mind in Gregg Diamond Jubilee Shorthand. I hadn't even thought about shorthand in years, but apparently once you know it you never forget it.

Somehow it seems appropriate to end this post by saying, what else, "Roll over, Beethoven!"

Tell Tchaikovsky the news.

The Prodigal Pig

December is filled with such events as St. Nicholas Day; St. Lucy's Day; Beethoven's birthday; the winter solstice; Hanukkah; Christmas Eve; Christmas Day; Boxing Day; Kwanzaa; New Year's Eve; 38 of the 43 post-season American football bowl games (the other five will take place in January); the quarter-final, semi-final, and final games of the FIFA World Cup in Qatar; and the presentation in Oslo, in the presence of the king and qieen of Norway, of the Nobel Peace Prize, which has been awarded jointly this year to Belarus human rights activist Ales Bialiatski, the Russian human rights organisation Memorial, and the Ukrainian human rights organisation Center For Civil Liberties.

That's a pretty full docket for a single month to have to bear. I'm not going to write about any of those events in this post except to suggest that the prize-receiving trio at the end of the previous paragraph seems rather ironic given the current state of affairs in the world.

I want to tell you instead the story of the Prodigal Pig. I heard J. Vernon McGee tell it on the radio many years ago.

When the Prodigal Son came to himself and decided to leave the pigpen where he had been working in a far-off country after wasting his substance in riotous living and return to his father (full details in the 15th chapter of St. Luke's Gospel), one of the pigs thought the father's house sounded pretty neat and decided to go back with him. When they arrived at the father's house, the son was joyfully received and so was the pig. Both of them received a ring and a robe and new shoes, and both of them sat down to a sumptuous feast after the fatted calf was killed in their honor.

And the Prodigal Pig tried his best to fit in, he really did. But as the days and weeks went by, the Prodigal Pig enjoyed his new surroundings less and less. He didn't like having to bathe so often; he longed to roll in the mud of his old home. He didn't particularly enjoy having to learn to eat roast beef with a knife and fork; he missed rooting in the slop of the pigpen. He resented having to wear clean clothes every day; he wanted to be free to do as he liked. So one day he announced that he was leaving the Prodigal Son's father's house and was going back to the far-off country, where he could once again live the life he longed for. And he did.

J. Vernon McGee ended his story by saying he believed that if a person stands at the crossroads long enough he will find that all the Prodigal Sons will return to their father and all the Prodigal Pigs will return to their father.

It's a sobering thought that explains a lot of things you might have found confusing.