It’s too hot to write a long post

The average person (me, for example) has no (okay, little) grasp of just how large or small a number really is. Case in point, I read the other day that one in every 10,000 persons in the US lives to be 95 years old. Is that a large number or a small number? It sounds significant to outlive 9,999 other people but it depends on how you look at it and what you compare it to. I hope to be one of those persons myself one day (actually less than 12 years hence, in my case) as was my maternal grandfather, Nathan Sulberman of Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, who died on December 20, 1970, having lived 95 years, 8 months, 29 days after having been born on March 21, 1875. But I digress.

Think about it. With 335,000,000 people in the US currently, one in 10,000 works out to 33,500 people who are 95 years old. And in a world of nearly 8.4 billion people (a number that boggles the mind), the rate works out to 840,000 people worldwide who have been alive for 95 years. Gathered into one locality, that group would form a city the size of Liverpool, or one a tad smaller than Indianapolis, or one a tad larger than San Francisco. Any way you slice it (probably not the best metaphor choice), that is a lot of very old people. The rate, however (one in 10,000), is actually a very tiny number, 0.0001 per cent, proving once again (a) figures never lie but liars often figure, (b) whatever it is, it's all in how you look at it, or (c) something else you are invited to expound on in the comments section.

I am not my own grandpa

...but strange things do happen sometimes.

I know a father and son who married sisters. A couple of years after Lee Watson married Lois, his widowed father Gordon married Lois's older sister Lula. So Lee's stepmother was also his sister-in-law, and Lee was both Gordon's son and Gordon's nephew. Put another way, Gordon was both Lee's father and Lee's uncle. Lee and Lois had two sons, Billy and Gordon, whose aunt and uncle on their mother's side were their grandma and grandpa on their father's side. I would have found that very confusing.

Two of my stepmother's brothers, Russ Williams and Billy Williams, married women who were related to each other as aunt and niece. Dorothy Bridges Williams (Russ's wife) had a sister, Jewel Bridges Chumeley, whose daughter became Lawanda Chumeley Williams (Billy's wife). So Russ and Dorothy's daughter Carol was first cousin to Lawanda through her mother Dorothy, and she was also first cousin to Billy and Lewanda's children Barry, Connie, and Cindy through her father Russ. Otherwise they would have been her first cousins once removed, not her second cousins, which is something else entirely. Carol's children and Lawanda's children are second cousins. I hope I have made everything crystal clear.

My stepmother's two youngest siblings, Fred Williams and Sue Williams, had children who were what is called double first cousins because Fred married Martha Perry, and Sue married Jack Perry, Martha's brother. Normally, first cousins have three sets of grandparents between them with only one set in common. Double first cousins are different in that they have only two sets of grandparents between them, and they have both sets in common. I hope that makes sense.

Here's a bit of trivia. The television evangelist Jimmy Swaggart and the bad-boy rock star Jerry Lee Lewis (his hits included "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" and "Great Balls Of Fire"; he was married seven times including once to his 13-year-old first cousin, once removed) were double first cousins, which fact only serves to prove that every person's journey is unique and independent of supposed family influence.

Another bit of trivia: The younger Gordon Watson (that is, Lee's son, not Lee's father) whom you met in this post's opening paragraph was Vanna White's significant other for several years before she moved to California and began turning letters on Wheel Of Fortune. You won't learn this kind of stuff on anybody else's blog.

If you find information about unusual inter-personal relationships as fascinating as I do, I hope you will enjoy hearing Lonzo and Oscar singing "I'm My Own Grandpa" way back in 1947 (3:05).

If three things were different (that is, if Lee Watson had married Lula instead of Lois; if Lee's father had married Lois instead of Lula; and if Lula had been Lois's mother instead of her older sister, as she was certainly old enough to have been), my friend Lee Watson could have given Lonzo and Oscar a run for their money.

T.T.F.N.

Thank you, Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II

I read yesterday that the oldest person in the world, a man in Spain, has died. He was 117 years old. Several hours later, the following song kept running through my head:

Ol' man river, that ol' man river,
He don't say nothin'
But must know somethin',
He just keeps rollin', he keeps on rollin' along.

He don't plant taters, he don't plant cotton,
An' them that plants 'em are soon forgotten
But ol' man river, he just keeps rollin' along.

You and me, we sweat and strain,
Bodies all achin' and wracked withh pain.
Tote that barge! Lift that bale!
You get a little drunk an' you land in jail.

I get weary and sick of tryin',
I'm tired of livin' and scared of dyin,
But ol' man river, he just keeps rollin' along.

(end of song)

It seemeed an odd song to appear so suddenly, full-grown like Athena from the forehead of Zeus, with all lyrics intact, playing on my mental radio station. I put two and two together and decided that it must have been having learned of the death of the world's oldest man that set the wheels turning in my sub-conscious and thrust the song into my consciousness.

No one knows how long one's lifespan will be. Some people die quite young, and some live to a ripe old age. Me, I'm 83 now and my wife just turned 89. She has survived to be the longest-livedp person in her family line, her father and an aunt both having lived to be 88 years, 6 months old. In my own case, I will have to outlast both an aunit who lived to be 88 years, 8 months old and a grandfather who lived to be 95 years, 9 months old to be able to claim "longest-lived member of the family" status. Do I intend to try? You betcha. Do I hope I make it? As Gabby Hayes may or may not have said to various heroes in western movies of the 1940s, "yer durn tootin'." But do I aspire to live long enough to dethrone our recently departed Spanish friend? I'm not so sure. I'll have to think more on that one. I'll get back to you.

In the meantime, as I look back over my life so far, I reflect on the fact that I have never toted a barge, lifted a bale, got a little drunk, or landed in jail (one of those claims is not true), and I will continue to revel in the fact that though I sometimes do get weary, I am not yet sick of tryin', tired of livin', or, since I am a Christian, scared of dyin'. Until the end comes, I will pull myself up by my bootstraps each morning and, like Ol' Man River, just keep rollin' along.

Avastin, Lucentis, Eyelea, Beovu, and Vabysmo

There have been plenty of successful business partnerships, mergers, and joint ventures one could name. Sears & Roebuck. Neiman-Marcus in Dallas. Mercedes-Benz. Daimler-Chrysler. Titche-Goettinger in Dallas. Carson Pirie Scott in Chicago. Goldman Sachs. Merrill, Lynch, Pierce, Fenner, and Beane which morphed into Merrill, Lynch, Pierce, Fenner. and Smith which eventually became just Merrill Lynch. Hewlett-Packard in Palo Alto, California.

There are also many individuals whose businesses became household names without benefit of partners. Henry Ford. J.C. Penney. R.H. Macy. Gimbels. John Wanamaker in Philadelphia. Charles Schwab. F.W. Woolworth. Harris Teeter. S.S. Kresge. Dare I say it, Donald Trump.

Some are still around, but many have passed off the scene and are only a memory.

Avastin, Lucentis, Eyelea, Beovu, and Vabysmo are not partners in a law firm. They are not a brokerage house or an automobile conglomerate or a giant department store or a chain of supermarkets. They are not breeds of goats (shout-out here to hilltophomesteader in Washington state). They are not the names of quintuplets in Venezuela.

No, friends, what they are are five different medications that were developed to treat macular degeneraton. Over the course of the past seven years, I have received all of them. Unfortunately, they are not available in pill form. Instead, they are injected into the whites of one's eyes via a sharp-pointed needle, the term for which procedure is intravitreously (as opposed to the possibly more familiar term, intravenously).

You probably could have lived your entire life without knowimng this information, but now you do. I predict that you will not forget it any time soon.

This has been another public service announcement from your roving correspondent, RhymesWithPlague of Canton, Georgia, USA.

You're welcome.

What a tangled web we weave

He was born in 1906 in a place called Tomah, Wisconsin, and moved twice with his parents and four older brothers, first to LaCrosse, Wisconsin, and then to Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He left school after the tenth grade. He worked at Quaker Oats there as a young man but later found his life's calling working with metals at the Dearborn Brass Works. He drifted around the midwest some in the early years of the Great Depression, living the hobo life and hitching rides on freight trains. Eventually he married a woman named Hildred Putman from Leavenworth, Kansas, and returned to Cedar Rapids with her. He was 35 and working at Dearborn Brass Works when Pearl Harbor was attacked. He enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1942 at the age of 36 when he realized he probably was not going to to be drafted. He wanted to be in the submarine service but was told that he was too old. After completing training at Great Lakes Naval Station in Chicago, the farthesr east he had ever been up to that point in his life, he was assigned to the PCE-869, a Patrol Craft Escort vessel of the "submarine chaser" class, as a Machinist's Mate. He was twice the age of many of his young shipmates, and they called him "Pop". He was even older than the ship's captain, who was 32.

During the war his ship sailed through the Panama Canal in both directions, going up the Pacific coast as far as Portland, Oregon, and up the Atlantic coast as far as Greenland. He never served in either the European or Pacific theaters of operation, but his ship escorted many ships containing people who did. He remembered in his later years that his ship would drop depth charges when German submarines were in the vicinity; he had nightmares of seeing dead bodies rise to the surface of the ocean and woke up screaming a few times. At some point during the war he received notice that his wife Hildred back in Iowa had divorced him. He remembered various shore leaves in San Diego, California; Fort Lauderdale, Florida; and New York City with fondness. His ship's last home port before his honorable discharge from the Navy after the war ended was Quonset Point Naval Station in Rhode Island.

He met my mother in Rhode Island sometime in 1945. I was about four. I thought he was my father returning fron the war. He wore a sailor's white uniform and I called him "Ted" like my mother did until I was encouraged to call him "Daddy." They were married in Seekonk, Massachusetts, on September 2, 1946, but this bit of information was not known to me for many years. I thought he was my biological father and that they had married on September 2, 1939, probably because it meshed nicely with my being born in March 1941. That is what they told me and everybody else, but it was not true. My mother died when I was 16 without ever having told me the truth. I pieced it together after many years and through much research and remembering fragments of conversations that were not meant to be overheard. I remember hearing my mother say to my dad during an argument, "He never asked to be born." I remember hearing my dad say to my mother during another, "I gave him a name." I remember hearing my mother tell someone that she had fallen in love with a sailor suit and found out only later that she didn't care too much for the sailor.

After I completed first grade, our family moved away from Rhode Island for two reasons. First of all, I had developed a pre-asthmatic condition -- I remember my mother using an atomizer to spray something medicinal up my nose each night at bedtime -- and the doctor said a drier climate would be beneficial. Second, the new man of the house thought job prospects would be better for his particular set of skills in the new aerospace industry. After he had considered both Ohio and southern California, we moved by train in August 1947 to Fort Worth, Texas, where he found work at Consolidated Vultee Aircraft (later called Convair and then General Dynamics) as a turret lathe and milling machine operator. He stayed there for nearly 20 years, dying of pancreatic cancer in March 1967 at age 60, just six months before he would have been eligible to retire with a pension. My mother, Ruth Silberman Brague, had died in 1957 of metastatic breast cancer at the age of 47. He had been married for nearly nine years to Mildred Louise Williams Houston Brague, his third wife and my stepmother, at the time of his death. With no visible means of support, neither pension mor Social Security payment, she married again to a man naned John Fuller in 1969 and stayed married to him for 33 years. He died in 2003 and she died in 2004 at the age of 89.

I was born at home. My first bed, I've been told, was a pillow placed in a drawer that had been removed from a chest of drawers and set on a table. I believe that. What I don't believe, what I know in fact cannot be true, is that the only birth certificate I have ever had, which was not issued until I was about to enter public school, indicates that the man in the sailor suit fathered me. And as far as I know, I was not adopted by him. It is simply false information, whatever good intentions they may have had.

Just because a document that is considered official says something doesn't make it so.

If a body meet a body comin' through the rye

I don't know whether you have noticed, but I am a sucker for an avid consumer of demographic information. I don't know why. I just am.

Here are some figures you may find startling. Perhaps you were already aware of them. The table below shows the population of the world by continent in 2024 as well as each continent's population density per square kilometer and per square mile:

Population By Continent 2024

			Density	Density
Rank	Continent	Population	/km2	/mi2
1	Asia	4,927,748,740	100	259
2	Africa	1,494,988,668	49	127
3	Europe	...741,252,853	32	83
4	North America	...608,132,768	25	65
5	South America	...442,860,821	25	65
6	Australia/Oceania	.....46,109,212	5	13
	TOTAL:	8,261,093,062

These figures are, of course, an estimate, a snapshot at a moment in time (who knows when?) based on birth rates, death rates, immigration data, emigration data, and (as Andy Griffith might say) I don't know what all. But using them I can tell you that Asia is home to 61.056% of the people in the world, Africa is home to 18.68%, Europe is home to 9.26%, North America is home to 7.6%, South America is home to 5.5%, and Australia/Oceania is home to 0.58% of the people in the world. Or were at the time these figures were, er, figured.

I don't have a clue as to what it all means or what it all bodes, but I do remember a mid-20th-century saying that has been attributed variously to General Bernard Montgomery (UK), General Dwight Eisenhower (USA), and General Douglas MacArthur (USA): "Never fight a land war in Asia."

Based on the table above, I would call that very good advice indeed, or even a word to the wise, which, as we all know, is sufficient.

P.S. - Today is the 79th anniversary of the dropping of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945 that killed an estimated 160,000 human beings. Three days later a second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, killing 80,000 more human beings. World War II ended a few days later.

People say things

...unless they are deaf-mutes who communicate through writing, drawing, or sign language. Talking is one of the first things people learn to do. Most of the time they don't stop doing it until they are dead.

I do not mean to be crass or insensitive, just factual. How people talk is our subject today.

I don't mean how different sounds are formed with the mouth, nose, lips, and tongue (there's a whole branch of science that deals with that) or the different ways people pronounce the same word in various English-speaking countries (ZEE-bra vs. ZEH-bra; DEB-ree vs. duh-BREE; uh-LOO-mih-num vs. al-yew-MIN-ee-um; good day, mate vs. g'digh, might; and so forth) because, friends, that way madness lies. Instead, we will confine ourselves to a couple of things I have heard with my own ears. One of them is charming and one of them is infuriating.

I know a woman in Cumming, Georgia, who says Sayrah instead of Sarah and Mayry instead of Mary. I find it charming, something I thought only a few older women in Georgia said. But a young man from Sylacauga, Alabama, called my son Cayry (his name is Cary, which rhymes with carry, marry, tarry, Harry, Larry). So it must be at least a Georgia-Alabama thing and it might even be a remnant of speech in the Old South, which you thought had gone with the wind. It hasn't.

What I find infuriating is hearing people on radio and television say Fentanol, rhyming it with "alcohol". The drug's name is Fentanyl, not Fentanol, and its final syllable should be unaccented, what peope in phonetics call the "schwa E" sound. The word ends with the same spelling and the same sound as "vinyl". People don't say vinol and they shouldn't say Fentanol either. It's about to drive me crazy.

Tell the truth now. You thought I was already there, didn't you?

P.S. - August has started off with a bang, blogging-wise. I have published three posts in four days. I don't want to be Debbie Downer, but I doubt that I will be able to keep up the pace. Time will tell. As the man who jumped off the top of the Empire State Building was heard to say as he passed the 50th floor, "So far, so good."

Figures never lie, but liars often figure (Olympic edition )

The Ancient Olympic Games began officially in Greece in 776 BC or BCE (choose one) although it is generally agreed that earlier games did occur even though no on seems to know how many there were or how often they were held. Beginning in 776 BC/BCE the games were held every four years (which period is called an Olympiad) until, it is believed, 393 AD or CE (choose one). If you do the math (776 + 393) you cannot help but see that the Ancient Olympics lasted for a period of 1,169 years. That number is obviously (obviously, I tell you) not divisible by 4, but since the year in which the games are played is the first year of a four-year Olympiad, using 396 (that is, adding three years to 393 AD/CE) we find that the Ancient Olympics lasted 1,172 years, or 293 Olympiads (that is, 1,172 divided by 4 equals 293).

Olympic Games were then not held for 1500 years until the Modern Olympic Games began in 1896 (proof: 1896 minus 396 equals 1500). The Olympiad count started over fresh and the Athens Olympics kicked off Modern Olympiad I (aren't Roman numerals just precious?). The current Paris Olympics mark the first year of Olympiad XXXII (that is, 32). That works out nicely because the year 2024 minus the year 1896 is a period of 128 years and, as we all know, 128 divided by 4 equals 32.

It should be noted here in the interest of accuracy that the 1916 Olympic Games during Olympiad VI were not held because of World War I, and the 1940 and 1944 Olympic Games during Olympiads XII and XIII, respectively, were not held because of World War II.

It should be further noted that if we count Olympiads from the very first one in 776 BC/BCE -- and I think we should, based on the fact that the four-year Olympiads in modern times continue even when the games are not held, as noted in the preceding paragraph -- then the current Olympics in Paris, which are occurring exactly 2,800 years since the Ancient Games began (2024 AD/CE years plus 776 BC/BCE years equals 2800 years altogether), are actually occurring during the 700th Olympiad (proof: 2800 divided by 4 equals 700).

No matter how you slice it, that is a lot of Olympiads.

I enjoy coming up with posts like this one. I hope your head is not spinning, but if it is, it simply cannot be helped, It goes with the territory.

Perhaps I should add a warning in the blog's header. Should it say:

a. PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK
b. ABANDON ALL HOPE, YE WHO ENTER HERE
c. FASTEN YOUR SEAT BELTS, IT'S GOING TO BE A BUMPY NIGHT

or something else that you tell me in a comment?

A new lease on life

I know there are a lot of things going on in the world right now. The Olympics in Paris. Twelve schoolchildren killed in northern Israel by Hezbollah. Retaliatory bombing of Beirut, Lebanon, by Israel. Leaders of Hamas assassinated in Tehran and Damascus. Joe Biden replaced by Kamala Harris in an apparent bloodless coup in the upper echelons of the Democratic Party without a single vote having beien cast for her in any primary election. Three little girls stabbed to death near Liverpool, England, while dancing to Taylor Swift's music.

However, please bear with me for one more post about myself and then I will blog about other things.

I am elated. I am ecstatic. I am still somewhat giddy at the wonder of it all.

i'm referring to the recent surgeries to remove cataracts from both of my eyes..

The great thing about having had surgery to remove cataracts from my eyes is, as you might expect, that I can see so much better, but I had no idea how much better it would be. It is hard to describe. It is rather like Dorothy leaving Kansas and arriving in Oz. I don't mean Australia (but here's a shout-out to kylie, Sue, and Helsie, anyway). I don't try mean that I now live in a place where scarecrows can talk, lions are cowardly, monkeys can fly, or witches melt. I mean it has been rather like going from a black and white world, an increasingly dark, drab, dim world, to a bright, beautiful Technicolor world. I didn't realize fully how poorly I was seeing. I could no longer read a newspaper. To use my smart phone or my desktop computer required me to put my nose about an inch from the screen, and the print kept fading into ever lighter shades of gray.

I feared that my worsening eyesight was due to the macular degeneration I've written about in other posts. It was not. It was due to the cataracts.

There is one small downside to having vastly improved vision. I can now see in the mirror clearly every wrinkle on my face, neck, and brow, and I don't need the mirror to see my wrinkly hands. They are not a pretty sight.

I feel sorry for Mrs. RWP having to look at me every day, although she says she is nor complaining.

I will tell you just what sort of person Mrs. RWP is. Yesterday I was wearing a pair of tan shorts that I hadn't worn since losing quite a bit of weight. They fit quite loosely in the waist and I had to keep hoisting them up. After about half an hour of hoisting I said, "My pants are about to fall off." Did she say, "Change into a different pair, then" or "Put on a belt"? No, she did not.

She said, "Don't stand in front of a window".