A double whammy and some trivia for October 31st

Rather than linking you to Wikipedia (at least until the last paragraph), my post today uses information from The Writer’s Almanac entry for Friday, October 31, 2008:

“Today is Halloween. Halloween’s origins date back about 2,000 years, to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain. The Celts lived in the cold parts of Northern Europe -- in Britain, Ireland, and the north of France -- and so for them, the new year began on November 1st, the end of the fall harvest and the beginning of winter. The night before the new year, on October 31st, the division between the world of the living and the world of the dead dissolved, and the dead could come to earth again. This was partly bad and partly good -- these spirits would damage crops and cause sickness, but they also helped the Celtic priests, the druids, to tell the future, to make predictions about the coming year. The druids built huge bonfires, and regular people put out their own fires in their homes and crowded together around these fires, where they burned sacrifices for the gods, told each other’s fortunes, and dressed in costumes -- usually animal skins and heads. At the end of the celebration, they took a piece of the sacred bonfire and relit their own fires at home with this new flame, which was meant to help them stay warm through the long winter ahead.

“First the Romans co-opted Samhain and combined it with their festivals, and then the Christians co-opted both the Celtic and Roman celebrations. In the ninth century, the pope decided that these pagan festivals needed to be replaced with a Christian holiday, so he just moved the holiday called All Saints’ Day from May 13 to November 1. All Saints’ Day was a time for Christians to honor all the saints and martyrs of their religion. The term for All Saints’ Day in Middle English was Alholowmesse, or All-hallowmass. This became All-hallows, and so the night before was referred to as All-hallows Eve, and finally, Halloween [or, more accurately, Hallowe’en --RWP].

“It was on this day in 1517 that Martin Luther posted his 95 Theses on a church door in Wittenberg, Germany. Martin Luther was a monk who disagreed with the Catholic Church’s practice of selling indulgences, which forgave the punishment for sins. Luther thought that God offered forgiveness freely without having to pay for it, and he wanted to reform the Catholic Church. He posted the theses as points to be argued in a public debate. He had no intention of creating a new branch of the Church, but that is what he did, more or less. He set in motion a huge rift within the Church, which eventually led to the Reformation.”

Now for the trivia (and the Wikipedia links). October 31st also happens to be the birthday of Chiang Kai-shek (1887), Dale Evans (1912), Barbara Bel Geddes (1922), Dan Rather (1931), Michael Landon (1936), and Vanilla Ice (1967).

If that isn’t enough trivia for you, here’s a little more. Dale Evans’s real name was Frances Octavia Smith, and her fourth husband, Roy Rogers, was really Leonard Sly from Ohio. Michael Landon’s real name was Eugene Maurice Orowitz. Vanilla Ice’s real name is Robert Van Winkle.

Just how many lists have you ever read that began with Chiang Kai-shek, included Dale Evans, and ended with Vanilla Ice?

Underwhelmed

As of a little past noon today, eight (8) people have responded to the test in yesterday’s Tuesday Ramblings. Two of the people didn’t even leave answers (well, Putz reiterated all of the possible answers, making it impossible to discern what his choices were). I am, as the title says, underwhelmed. Just think, Pioneer Woman would probably have received 3000 responses by now. I considered leaving the quiz open for one more day, but it turned out to be what it is and a day is a long time in the blogosphere. Be that as it may, for all six (and possibly eight) of you who are breathlessly awaiting the correct answers, here they are, along with the original questions:

1. Cauliflower is a good source of:
a. Vitamin A
b. Vitamin C
c. Vitamin D

The correct answer is b, Vitamin C. There are other benefits to be derived from eating cauliflower also. Since it is a cruciform vegetable (like broccoli), it has anti-carcinogenic properties as well.

2. Before the invention of the electric light, how many hours of sleep did an average American get each night?
a. 8 hours
b. 10 hours
c. 12 hours

The correct answer is b, 10 hours. Today, Americans sleep, on average, 6.9 hours per night on weeknights and 7.5 hours per night on weekends. I have no idea how they came up with these statistics.

3. How many pounds of potatoes does an average American eat in one year?
a. 10 pounds
b. 50 pounds
c. 127 pounds

The correct answer is c, 127 pounds. I know. I was shocked too. But even more shocking is the fact that for every person who eats only ten pounds of potatoes per year, there has to be another American who eats around 250 pounds of potatoes per year, which would require consuming almost five pounds of potatoes every week. It’s simple mathematics, if 127 pounds is the “average.”

4. True or false: In women who have had migraine headaches, the headaches tend to increase after menopause.
a. True
b. False

The correct answer is b, false. I got the right answer, but for the wrong reason. I thought a decrease might be related to blood circulation. But one of the triggers of migraine headaches is thought to be a high level or fluctuating level of estrogen. Ergo (as in cogito, ergo sum*), migraines tend to decrease in women after menopause.

So here are the class scores:
Ruth - 50%
Pat - 100%
Angela - 50%
Yorkshire Pudding - 100%
Jay - 100%
Egghead (Vonda) - 50%
Putz - 0%, seems to be exploring new ground in telepathic testing theory
dr.john - 0%, forgot the questions

Thanks to each and every one of you for participating. It appears that people in England (Yorkie and Jay) remember their lessons better than Americans, or at least are better guessers, unless you live in Arkansas.

It may be a long time before I try to do another quiz!

*I think, therefore I am. --René Descartes. I like my own twist on Descartes’ saying better: I am, therefore I think.

Tuesday ramblings

Yesterday Mrs. RWP and I went to the Cherokee County Health Department to get our annual flu shots. The shots are free if you’re covered by Medicare, which we are. Otherwise, each shot costs twenty dollars. That’s one of the perks of getting old, I guess.

Last year when we went for our shots, we were in and out in a matter of minutes. This year, however, we had to wait for over and hour, and while we waited we watched a television set that was showing a series of features on health. I try to learn something new every day, and I learned a number of new things sitting there watching that health channel for an hour. I thought I would put together a little test for you, dear reader, so that you might learn something worthwhile as you jump from blog to blog in search of entertainment. Here’s the test. Good luck, and no fair looking anything up:

1. Cauliflower is a good source of:
a. Vitamin A
b. Vitamin C
c. Vitamin D

2. Before the invention of the electric light, how many hours of sleep did an average American get each night?
a. 8 hours
b. 10 hours
c. 12 hours

3. How many pounds of potatoes does an average American eat in one year?
a. 10 pounds
b. 50 pounds
c. 127 pounds

4. True or false: In women who have had migraine headaches, the headaches tend to increase after menopause.
a. True
b. False

Put your answers in a comment at this post, and I’ll reveal the correct answers in my next post.

Our plan was to vote early yesterday after we received our flu shots. Four public libraries in our county have been designated as early voting places. But the lines were very long and the parking lots were full to overflowing at the two libraries we passed, and after already waiting for an hour at the Health Department we were not eager to wait some more. So we’ll attempt to vote later in the week. Oh, get this: The reason there was such a long wait at the Health Department yesterday was that only one nurse was on duty. When we mentioned to her that we were on our way to vote, she told us that most of the County Health Department nurses were at the polling places, providing flu shots to people waiting in line to vote! A “vote and vacs” (vaccinate) drive, she called it. A good idea, but too late to matter to us.

We did stop on the way home to buy dog food for Jethro, though. Just so you know we have kept our priorities straight.

But enough about me

Let’s turn the microscope away from moi and ma famille -- French is so confusing; I’m male so I would think mon famille is correct, but it turns out the French don’t care about the gender of the person speaking, only the gender of the noun in question, and since famille is a feminine noun (and why that should be, nobody has ever explained to my satisfaction) a feminine adjective is required -- for a change and talk about...what?

Autumn? Every second blogger and her cousin are now busy this week showing you photographs of autumn leaves in their neck of the woods. Well, although the leaves are certainly beautiful in my neck of the woods also, I will refrain in the name of overkill.

Politics? Um, no. That’s all we’ll be hearing or reading about until this quadrennial thing of ours is over for another six months or so, and I wouldn’t add to the cacophany on a bet.

Literature? Not unless I want to put you to sleep.

Sex? Not even on a dare.

Jethro? Now there’s a possibility. He is an inexhaustible supply of joy. He keeps us laughing. Take, for example, his stash of toys. No hard plastic ones for him. His toys are all soft, plushy ones that he throws up in the air whenever the mood strikes him. And he always brings one to us in his mouth to indicate that he needs to go outside and do what dogs do. We are well-trained; we attach his leash to his collar and off we go. He doesn’t take his toys very far, usually dropping them just beyond the patio and retrieving them on his way back. I think some enterprising doggie psychiatrist should write a doctoral thesis on why Jethro chooses what toy he chooses to take with him on his jaunts, because it constantly changes. Sometimes it’s Whitey, the white plush doggie that is either a Samoyed or a Siberian Huskie. Sometimes it’s Croaky, the green plush frog. Sometimes it’s Charlie, the brown plush gorilla. Sometimes it’s the long, blue, plush, Smurf-like surfer thingie. Sometimes it’s Squiggy Piggy, which looks and feels like a lamb’s fleece (plush, of course) except that it has a curly little pink tail. But, as Gilda Radner’s character Rosanne Rosannadanna used to say every week to Jane Curtin on Saturday Night Live, “It’s always something.”

He also likes to ride in the car. He doesn’t stick his head out the window, though. He likes to stand between Mrs. Rhymeswithplague and me on the console and put out one paw to balance himself whenever the car makes a turn. Left paw on my right arm for right turns, and right paw on Mrs. Rhymeswithplague’s left arm for left turns. He usually winds up sitting in her lap and going to sleep. But if he hears the click of the turn indicator, he’s up on his feet again with paws at the ready.

There must be a doggie parable in there somewhere. I will have to think further on the subject.

And now for the official portrait, which is almost one year old (the portrait, not the dog -- the dog is four, and handsome as ever):

One man’s family (continued)

And you thought I was through! Not quite yet.

In the last post, I didn’t tell you much about my wife’s family or anything at all about my Dad’s. I have posted previously about the Albanians and even their cooking (which see, or, as the research papers would put it, q.v.) but I didn’t tell you that Mrs. Rhymeswith-plague’s brother is named Michael, that he is married to Mary B. from North Carolina, and that they have two children, Rhonda and James.

Now we come to my Dad. He was born in Wisconsin in 1906, the fifth and youngest son of Elmer and Edith Lillian B., who moved the family to Iowa when he was fifteen. It has been there ever since, pretty much, except for the branch that moved to California. Dad’s four older brothers were Arthur (Art), John, Leo, and Daniel (Dan). He also had a sister who died in infancy. Art and John both served in the U.S. Army during World War I; Leo and Dad both served in the U.S. Navy during World War II. Art and his wife Anna had six children (Richard, Shirley, Peggy, Isabel, Sandra, and Barbara). John and his wife Martha had three girls (Trudy, Elaine, and Daveen), and later in life John married Gladys. Leo married Genevieve, but they had no children. Dan, who died of a brain tumor at 32 in 1936, left Leila to raise their two small children (Donald and Evelyn). Uncle Art’s girls are scattered around; I know that one is in Oregon. One of Uncle John's girls is in Minnesota. In that whole group of cousins, there were only two boys, my cousin Dick and I, to carry on the family name. Dan’s wife, Leila, married again and her new husband adopted Donald and Evelyn and changed their last name to his. Dick was old enough to serve in the Navy in World War II; after the war he had a son named Donovan, who died in his thirties. Of this entire crowd, I met only John, Gladys, Leila, Sandra, Barbara, and Elaine.

Dad was married at one time before he met my mother, but his wife filed for a divorce while he was at sea in the Navy during World War II. They had no children. He met my mother in 1945 and was married to her for eleven years, from 1946 until her death in 1957. Then he was married to my stepmother, Mildred, for nine years, from 1958 until his own death in 1967. Mildred married John F. in 1968, and they traveled life’s road together for 35 years. John died in 2003 and Mildred died in 2004.

My genealogy software, Family Tree Maker, tells me it has information on file about -- brace yourself -- 848 people who are or were, in one way or another, related to me.

I never told it any information, though, about my biological father. By his own actions, he became irrelevant. He may have been there at the moment of my conception, but in all other respects pertaining to being a real father, he never existed. I know who my “real” father was. He never had any biological children of his own, but he raised me from the time I was four years old, he became a second father to my stepbrothers and stepsister during their teen and young adult years, and became a grandfather several times over. He once said to me, “When I die, don’t spend money on an expensive monument. I won’t need one. You will be my monument. When people meet you, they will know what sort of man I was.”

Now there’s a father a person can look up to.

One man’s family

In 1875, Nathan S. was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Both of his parents had come to this country on ships from Germany. In 1878, Rose A. was also born in Philadelphia. Both of her parents had come to this country on ships from England. In 1898, Nathan and Rose married, and between 1899 and 1910 they had five children, Marion, Solomon (who was called Sol), Rachael (who died in infancy), Jacob (who was called Jack), and Ruth. I was born to Ruth in 1941, her only child and the youngest of a total of five first cousins. My biological father was not in the picture. When I was five, a different man married my mother, and my birth certificate was amended by the state to add his name where there had been a blank place. I believe he adopted me legally, but I don’t really know that for certain. There is no document that I am aware of. When I was six, the three of us moved to Texas.

Mama didn’t come from a warm, fuzzy family. Everyone pretty much kept to himself or herself. Geographically, we were far flung. My two uncles and my aunt died during the eighties. My cousin Philip married Virginia and moved to Illinois, had three children, divorced Virginia, moved to Colorado, and married Donna. Joan married Herman and moved to California. Eileen married Bud and moved to Connecticut. Jack Jr. married Sylvia, had twin girls, divorced Sylvia, and moved to Florida. Today I have no idea what became of any of them or even whether they are still alive. In 1963, I married Mrs. Rhymeswithplague in Florida. Her family was small like mine. Besides her mom and dad, she had one brother, one sister-in-law, one niece, one nephew, one aunt, one uncle, and three cousins.

We moved to Nebraska and had a child, moved to New York and had two more children, moved back to Florida for several years, then moved to Georgia in 1975. We have been here ever since. Our little immediate clan of five has grown to fourteen, having added a son-in-law, two daughters-in-law, and six beautiful grandchildren. Long may we wave.

But I want to tell you about another family.

Russ W. was born in a small town in central Texas in 1894. In August 1912, when he was fifteen, he married Pearl C., who was eighteen. They didn’t have to get married; they wanted to. About every two years for the next twenty years, they had a child. There was Cleo (1913), Mildred (1915), J.D. (1917), Margaret (1919), Russ Jr. (1921), Marvin (1924), Billy (1927), Faye (1929), Kenneth (who died in infancy, 1931), Freddie (1932), and Sue (1934). For a while Russ farmed and all the children who who were big enough helped him. Later he moved to the big city and became a bellman at the Adolphus Hotel in downtown Dallas. After Pearl died in 1951, he married Virginia who operated the hotel’s switchboard.

My mother died in 1957. A few months later, Dad, who worked at an aircraft factory in Fort Worth, met Mildred through Fritz, a co-worker who happened to be married to Margaret. Mildred’s husband Clarence had died the year before from a sudden heart attack. In June 1958, when I was seventeen, Dad and Mildred married. Suddenly I had three brothers and a sister. I went from being an only child to being the middle one of five children. There were also twenty or so first cousins living nearby because eight of Mildred’s nine brothers and sisters lived in Dallas County. Only one adventurous sibling had moved away to Houston. Every weekend there were lots of relatives around. If I had been in a shell, I came out of it really fast. Today Russ’s and Pearl’s descendants must number sixty or seventy. There were some interesting stories in there. Freddie married Martha; Sue married Jack; Martha and Jack were sister and brother, so the children of both marriages are what is called “double first cousins,” meaning that the two sets of cousins don’t share one set of grandparents, they share both sets of grandparents. Junior’s wife, Dorothy, is the aunt of Billy’s wife, LaWanda. So when Dorothy speaks about “Jewel and John” she is speaking of her sister and brother-in-law, but when LaWanda says “Mother and Daddy” she also means Jewel and John. Dorothy is not only the aunt of LaWanda’s children because Junior and Billy are brothers, but she is also the great-aunt of LaWanda’s children because LaWanda is Jewel’s and John’s daughter. It gets a bit confusing at times. Sometimes you can’t tell the players without a program.

Of the ten original siblings, only Junior, Freddie, and Faye are still living. We don’t get to see one another very often these days. My younger stepbrother and stepsister are both gone now, but my two older stepbrothers are still around. One is in Texas and one is in Arkansas.

I have been blessed. I was born into a family. I gained another family through my Dad’s marriage to Mildred. I gained still another family, an Albanian one, when I married my wife. And together my wife and I were able to have a family of our own.

God is good all the time.

Tuesday ramblings

A camera is a wonderful thing. It’s really too bad that I don’t own one, because our front yard is awash right now in the brilliant pinks of our multitudinous (okay, nine) encore azaleas and our wonderfully full camellia bush that has more blooms and buds than you could shake a stick at (to quote my father). Our yard looks more like spring than fall. I would love to be able to show it to you but, alas, I cannot. I searched Google for a possible substitute photo to include in this post, but nothing I saw even came close to the splendor in our grass. Actually, I think no photograph would begin to do our blossoms justice, unless Ruth Hull Chatlien happened to be the photographer.

My first camera, a Brownie Hawkeye, was given to me by my Aunt Marion, my mother’s older sister, who visited us in Texas along with my thirteen-year-old cousin Philip the summer I was seven. They had boarded a bus in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and after riding for three days, my aunt’s first words upon arriving were, “Now I know why they call it Greyhound -- because you feel like a dog when you get off.” That Brownie Hawkeye served me well for many years, until I married someone who owned a real, live, Polaroid Land camera.

In the interest of full disclosure, Mrs. RWP didn't spend any hard-earned money on her camera. She had entered a drawing at a supermarket and when they drew her name she won either ten thousand or one hundred thousand S&H green stamps (she can’t remember) and chose the camera, a chord organ, and a complete set of Corning cookware as her prizes. The Polaroid stayed busy until the company stopped making film for it and the chord organ was eventually replaced by a real piano, but Mrs. RWP is still using the Corning cookware.


When I was ten, my aunt and cousin visited us a second time, riding the Greyhound bus again for three hot, dusty days. My gift that year appeared to be a maroon -- I suppose it would be called burgundy today -- faux alligator-skin, attaché case, but when I opened the lid, it turned out to be a portable record player! Before then, we had a huge, wind-up Victrola monster that we had brought with us all the way from Rhode Island (I am not even kidding. My earliest recollections of listening to music from the Victrola include John Charles Thomas’s rendition of Albert Hay Malotte’s “The Lord's Prayer” and Gene Autry’s rendition, I think it was, of “The Mockingbird’s A-Singin’ in the Lilac Bush.”) Thanks to my aunt, I was able to play 78, 45, and 33-1/3 rpm recordings on my portable player for years, all the way through college.

[Update: You will get extra credit if you listen, right now, to a few songs from the most romantic LP ever made. Then come back here and read the rest of this post. And you guys in the back row, “rpm” is short for revolutions per minute, kind of like on the tachometer in your car. I will assume your grunting indicates comprehension. There was a 16-2/3 rpm speed, too, but that type of record is really rare. By the way, on the test at the end of the course, you will be asked to give an example of alliteration. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.]

Those two gifts from my aunt are among my favorite childhood memories. To be fair, though, my grandfather -- who also lived in Pennsylvania and whom I didn’t meet until I was fourteen -- sent me an enormous chocolate-covered coconut egg every year for Easter. I sent him cans of Prince Albert pipe tobacco for Christmas. Our family was (were?) really into the giving of gifts. Also the writing of thank-you notes.

So I’m sorry, but you’ll just have to use your imagination to picture those azaleas and camellias because I have yet to buy a video camcorder or a digital camera or one of those expensive all-purpose cellphones that can upload photographs to the Internet while simultaneously cooking your supper and waxing your car. And the longer I wait, the more expensive today’s gadgets seem to become. Instead of lowering prices, the manufacturers just add a few more bells and whistles to their products and continue to charge an arm and a leg. That just doesn’t seem right, somehow. At our house, we are concentrating more these days on paying our mortgage and buying food and renewing prescriptions. Acquiring more “stuff” is not a priority. Just in case you’re wondering, I composed this post on a kerosene-fueled personal computer with a monitor powered by a hamster running on a treadmill.

One thing that has gotten cheaper, though, is telephone calls. When I was young, long-distance calls were a rarity unless there was a death in the family. But every year on New Year’s Eve, at exactly 11:00 p.m. Central Standard Time, my aunt called from Pennsylvania to wish us all a happy new year. She was an hour ahead of us. Even after I was grown, telephone calls were not cheap. In 1969, when my annual salary was around nine thousand dollars, my employer sent me to Stockholm, Sweden, for a month and I remember that a three-minute call home to my wife cost sixteen dollars. I wish the camera-makers (and big-screen-TV makers, too) would take a note from those nice telephone people.

Speaking of notes, the choir director at our church has decided to include a piece of my music in this year’s Christmas program. I composed a new tune to “Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus,” an eighteenth-century hymn written by John Wesley’s brother Charles, and combined it with the more-familiar tune called Hyfrodol. So it is partly old and partly new. The choir ran through it for the first time last Wednesday night and seemed to like it. The musical-composition software that I use is called Finale; it was given to me by my son.

It was an even better gift than my old Brownie Hawkeye camera.