Sarah Angleton's Blog, page 19

Socially Distant Zombies

In August of 1905 author Albert Neely Hall published his very helpful handbook, The Boy Craftsman: Practical and Profitable Ideas for a Boy’s Leisure Time. I can’t find a lot of information about Hall except that he was born in 1883, he wrote a number of books about handicrafts for both boys and girls, and he was probably not a guy I would have hired to babysit.

His book for boys with too much time on their hands in some ways reads a bit like a Boy Scout manual with instruction about tool safety, clubhouse building, photography, and animal trapping. It includes suggestions for ways boys can use their time to earn a little cash by shoveling snow, making simple home repairs, and editing and printing a neighborhood newspaper.

[image error]Ok, Mr. Hall. I can be down with this. Image by Victoria_Borodinova from Pixabay.

It also provides helpful tips for how your average, rambunctious early 20th century boy can celebrate the 4th of July by making his own pyrotechnics. To be fair, Hall does recommend against designing one’s own Roman candle because that could be dangerous. Instead, he suggests a handy method of lighting firecrackers suspended from a kite and a grand finale involving a kerosene-soaked board stuffed with firecrackers. Because safety is important.

But it’s the section on Halloween that has me most concerned today. After a brief introduction about the history of Halloween which, as a sort of history blogger who does consistently shoddy research, I can safely say is pretty shoddy, it begins: “This is the only evening on which a boy can feel free to play pranks outdoors without danger of being ‘pinched.’”

[image error]But if some little monster were to carry off my front gate, I wouldn’t be as down with that. Image by roneidaselva from Pixabay

Hall goes on to list such pranks as scaring passers-by, ding-dong ditching, carrying off neighbors’ gates, and piling garbage in front of doors. It’s worth it, he says, because even if he catches some heat, “the punishment is nothing compared with the sport the pranks have furnished him.” He then presents plans for building and pulling off pranks that will both frighten and enrage your neighbor.

I realize that an occasional prank has long been associated with our spookiest holiday, but for those of us who stock the good candy and hand it out without question to six-foot-tall ghosts, it’s not usually much of a problem. And usually, there’s lots of more innocent fun, of the variety Albert Neely Hall would certainly not approve, to go around and keep kids with too much time on their hands from engaging in pranks that, despite claims to the contrary, put them in danger of getting pinched.

[image error]Is anything really all that scary if it can’t get closer to you than six feet? Image by Tyler Buchanan from Pixabay

But now that it’s October and my neighborhood is sprouting Styrofoam gravestones, the pumpkins are wearing toothy grins, and Halloween is looming, I find myself wondering about what the holiday might look like this year.

A lot of municipalities are planning to cancel trick-or-treating amid concerns of spreading Covid-19, clubs and churches are avoiding the large gatherings encouraged by trunk-or-treating, and even haunted houses are inflicting social distance rules on their ghouls, goblins, and chain-saw-wielding mass murderers, effectively placing their guests inside a decidedly not scary safety bubble with a six-foot radius.

[image error]It could be a strange Halloween.

I’m not suggesting that these are bad ideas. I just wonder, as I encounter advertisements touting thoroughly sanitized blood and guts and socially distant zombies at the local Townhouse of Terror, if the restrictions and strangeness of the holiday will encourage a return to the pranks of the past that probably gave rise to many of the less harmful alternative activities in the first place.

What I do know is that when Albert Neely Hall wrote his book he was in his very early twenties and probably didn’t have children of his own, or at least not ones old enough to celebrate Halloween by terrorizing others. As the mother of a couple of boys, I can assure you (and my neighbors) that in my house the sport would most certainly not be worth the punishment.

A Not-So-Sticky Post

Forty-three years ago, in 1977, the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company, known today as 3M, rolled out a new product in four American cities. This, several years after product developer Spencer Silver worked to create a stronger adhesive than the world had yet seen. He failed.

What he came up with instead was a mildly sticky adhesive that could be removed and re-stuck on smooth surfaces. That wasn’t going to work for the project he had in mind, but Silver wasn’t convinced his not-so-sticky glue wouldn’t eventually be good for something.

[image error]I have no idea how much time Post-Its have saved me over the years. But it’s a lot.

It took someone else to come up with the something. Art Fry was a forty-three-year-old 3M developer and committed church choir member who used scraps of paper to mark the weekly songs in his hymnal. The problem he ran into is that his makeshift bookmarks fell out of place all the time. He needed something sticky, but just not sticky enough to damage the pages of his hymnal.

Fry remembered hearing about his coworker’s sticky-but-not-too sticky glue and began to formulate an idea. He grabbed some yellow scrap paper from the lab next door, applied Silver’s glue and started scribbling away.

What hadn’t appealed to the test markets in the original four cities as Press ‘n Peels, took off when it was rebranded as Post-It Notes and given out as samples in Boise, Idaho where ninety-four percent of the people who gave them a go said they’d happily buy their own pad.

[image error]My household includes me and three guys, two of whom are teenagers. Other people are grateful I use Post-It Notes, too. Or at least they should be.

Suddenly office workers had a way to quickly make a note on a coworker’s report, label their sandwich in the break room fridge, and bookmark their choir music on the weekends. The more people used the Post-It, the more they realized they weren’t sure what they’d ever done without it.

I get it that. The Post-It Note is a staple in my world. I use them to write messages to my family and stick them in in their line of sight. They mark important places in my research tomes and endless collections of notes. When knee deep in revisions, Post-Its feature scribbled reminders that if I’m going to kill off so-and-so in Chapter 11, I need to drop a hint of his terrible illness into Chapter 3.

[image error]I admit I occasionally find Post-Its I clearly wrote, but cannot for the life of me figure out what they mean. I think this was a story idea. Obviously an awesome one. Being in one’s forties does have its drawbacks.

These little scraps of sticky paper seem like such an insignificant thing, and while I’m sure I could manage to get a long without them, I’m glad I’ve never had to. And I really haven’t, because we grew up together.

I’m about to turn forty-three myself, which seems like a fairly insignificant birthday. I’m at that age when I have to do the math to even remember how old I really am. But I do hope that like the Post-It Note I’m pretty handy to have around, that I stick to the important things, and that I’d be a hit in Boise if I ever had the inclination to go there.

And I hope that like the then forty-three-year old Art Fry, I’ve still got a few good ideas up my sleeves.   

A Pretty Good Citizen for an Emperor

Today marks the 161st anniversary of the ascension to power of the first and only emperor of the United States. On September 17, 1859, San Francisco newspapers carried the declaration of Joshua Abraham Norton that “At the peremptory request and desire of a large majority of the citizens of these United States,” he was officially declaring himself emperor.

Today it’s probably fairly obvious, as it was then, that this “Emperor Norton” was most likely dealing with a mental health crisis, but the declaration captured the attention of the boom-or-bust, gold-crazed city for a couple of reasons. First, prior to an investment three years earlier that hadn’t panned out, Norton had been a somebody of importance in San Francisco.

[image error]I mean, he kind of looks like someone with authority. Unknown author / Public domain

London-born, he’d spent most of his early life in South Africa where his father operated a highly successful shipping business. Joshua Norton made and lost a good deal of money himself in that part of the world before moving to San Francisco in 1849 after suffering the deaths of both parents and two siblings.

Despite these setbacks, Norton didn’t seem to have any trouble building up his fortune once he reached California where he became an influential presence among influential people. So, when he went bust, then quiet, then reemerged as the Emperor of the United States, people were interested in the story.

Newspapers certainly were. They continued to print Norton’s imperial proclamations including a series which abolished the Congress, by force of the Army, because in its actions he saw that “fraud and corruption prevent a fair and proper expression of the public voice; that open violation of the laws are constantly occurring, caused by mobs, parties, factions and undue influence of political sects; that the citizen has not that protection of person and property which he is entitled.”

This after Congress had failed to respond to his summons to convene in San Francisco in order to “make such alterations in the existing laws of the Union as may ameliorate the evils under which the country is laboring.”

The United States of Emperor Norton’s day was one of great political upheaval, with a rapidly expanding western frontier and a war between states that pitted cousin against cousin and brother against brother.

[image error]If Emperor Norton could have had a Facebook account, I’m betting this would have been his profile picture. Beinecke Library / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)

And that brings me to the second reason I think the proclamations got play in the media. Because I think the reading public sort of got what he was saying.

If he’d had a Facebook feed, I have no doubt it would have been filled with people he loved and respected screaming at each other over their differing political ideologies. That’s enough to threaten the stability of anyone’s mental health. And I mean, really, who of us hasn’t, at one time or another, thought it might just be easier to declare ourselves emperor, abolish Congress, and start from scratch?

Not that I want the job. Just to be perfectly clear. But the sentiment? Well, there are days.

Emperor Norton’s reign extended beyond the immediate violence of the American Civil War and his proclamations, penned at the Mechanic’s Institute Library on Post Street in San Francisco, continued to find their way into print.

[image error]Oakland Bay Bridge. All thanks to Emperor Norton. Kind of.

Over the years he called for public school and public transportation access for African Americans, fair treatment of Chinese workers in American courts, and the extension of numerous rights to Native Americans. He even proclaimed the need for a bridge to be constructed between Oakland and San Francisco, of the variety that definitely exists today.

He regularly participated in political meetings, attended lectures, and spent time getting to know his community while attending the theater and frequenting local saloons. For an emperor, Joshua Norton was a pretty good citizen. When he died, penniless, in January of 1880, his funeral was allegedly attended by more than ten thousand people, and San Francisco’s business community made sure Norton was buried in style.

Because that’s what you do for an emperor.

Hat Smashing Shenanigans

School has begun, Labor Day has come and gone, the pumpkins have ripened too early, and there’s a hint of cool in the air. Despite the calendar’s insistence that there are still eleven more days of summer, it’s starting, in my corner of the world, to feel a little bit like fall. That means it’s time to put out the scarecrows, trim up the flower beds, and think about trading out your straw hat for one made of felt or silk.

[image error]These are the kind of big, beautiful pumpkins that will make great Jack-o-lanterns. Too bad someone forgot to tell them that Halloween is still almost two months away.

Or at least that’s what you would have done had you been a gentleman living in the US in the first couple decades of the twentieth century and you cared about such things. Most men didn’t. Not really anyway. But there was a fun tradition highlighted by an article from the Pittsburgh Press in September of 1910 in which stockbrokers jovially destroyed one another’s straw hats if their colleagues were careless enough to wear them after September 15.

That’s all in good fun, I guess, if you find that sort of thing amusing. But the same article mentions an incident in which the police had to intervene on behalf of the straw-hat-wearing average Joe on the street who occasionally found himself unexpectedly bareheaded.

By 1922 the straw hat smashing shenanigans had risen to a new level. On September 13 of that year, two days prior to the unofficially official straw hat smashing day, a group of boys decided to get the party started at Mulberry Bend in the Five Points Region of Manhattan.

[image error]So wait, how do the scarecrows get away with such a blatant fashion faux pas? Image by Steve Buissinne from Pixabay

As factory and dock workers left work for the evening, the boys began yanking straw hats off passersby and smashing them in the streets. Probably not surprisingly, some of the hatless victims got upset and a brawl broke out.

The police managed to bring the crowd under control without much more than a couple of arrests, but the conflict didn’t end there. Over the next few nights, riots broke out all over the city. There were more arrests, a lot of angry parents accompanying their teenage children home from jail, and some pretty brutal beatings in the streets. Many men were treated for injuries and least one was hospitalized. Over straw hats.

What began as kind of a quaint tradition used by businessmen to razz one another at work became a serious public safety issue in New York over the next several years when September rolled around. 1924 saw the first murder attributed to the unforgivable sin of wearing a straw hat out of season.

[image error]I’m sure that like me, and any other reasonable person, you find this picture completely infuriating. Maybe even worthy of a riot. Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay

Fortunately, the straw hat rioting eventually died out. In 1925, then President Calvin Coolidge commented that he didn’t much care about switching hats, which seemed to calm everyone down a bit. It also helped that straw hats fell out of fashion and so it wasn’t long until no one was wearing them anyway. Then the Great Depression hit and people had more important things to worry about.

But for a while in US history, the kind of violence and destruction that shutters businesses, damages property, and endangers innocent people, occurred at the literal drop of a hat.

Boy, I sure am glad we’re past that.

I Can Can. Can You?

It was the promise of 12,000 francs that first inspired French chef and confectioner Nicolas Appert to experiment with food preservation methods in 1795. Napoleon Bonaparte astutely realized that keeping an army fed was a good way to ensure its success and offered the pretty substantial (my very rough calculation suggests maybe around $150,000 in today terms) reward.

It took fifteen years of effort, but Appert eventually claimed the prize with his method of sealing food into glass jars with cork and wax and boiling them. He then went on to produce the world’s first recipe book focused on canning preservation. It’s called L’Art de Conserver les Substances Animales et Végétales, in case you speak pretty good French and don’t mind a good case of botulism.

[image error]When I read that Appert was a confectioner by trade, I pictured this, although it would take a lot more than a sealed lid to preserve candy in my house.

Even though his method heated food to flavorlessness and is no longer deemed entirely safe, Appert was onto something, and earned himself the title of “Father of Canning.” He believed the enemy of food preservation was air exposure, but along the way discovered that it was actually heat that prevented spoilage, a good fifty or so years before the “Father of Microbiology” Louis Pasteur explained why.

While Appert was busy jarring up fruits, vegetables, and in one case the meat of an entire sheep, Englishman Peter Durand translated the process to less breakable tin cans, which only two years later spawned the canned food industry in the United States as well.

Initially slow to produce, and hard to open since the can opener wasn’t invented for another forty years, canned foods eventually lined grocery store shelves. That is until March of 2020, when canned goods became almost as difficult to find as bread and toilet paper.

[image error]Ladies at a home demonstration meeting learning that they can can. By Cornell University Library. No restrictions, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=81522280

There are still a few quirky products that don’t seem to get restocked, but food supply lines in my corner of the world have pretty much stabilized by now. I don’t think they were ever seriously threatened, except by the fear of the average hoarding consumer. Still, the combination of barren canned soup aisles and more time spent at home with more people out of work and fewer places to go anyway, has led to a growing interest in food preservation skills.

My local stores now contain plenty of mushy canned peas and spring water packed tuna, but there’s not a Ball Mason jar or Kerr sealing lid to be found, nor can you order a set for a reasonable price from Amazon.

In the grand scheme of things, I don’t think this is a huge problem. I don’t live on a homestead out in the middle of nowhere and have to rely on my own homegrown preserved veggies and my root cellar to get me through the long winter. But we do have a few prolific apple trees and last fall, my husband canned a whole lot of applesauce, something neither of us had ever done before. It’s been nice to have it throughout the year.

[image error]It really is excellent sauce.

It’s been so nice, that I even decided this summer that I would give it a try with some excellent sauce made from our garden tomatoes and some pickled peppers as well. I admit, it’s kind of made me feel like a bit of a superwoman, or like maybe I could live out in the middle of nowhere and rely on my homegrown preserved veggies and root cellar to get me through the long winter.

Home canning surged in the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and then fell off when refrigeration became more prevalent. The skill enjoyed a brief resurgence in the DIY movement of the 1970s, and it seems to be experiencing a similar resurgence now.

As long as home canners are carefully sanitizing and following recipes and boiling times exactly, I think that’s great. It does maybe concern me just a tiny bit that historically, cases of botulism rise whenever the prevalence of home canning does, and that in 2005 a USDA survey found that 57% of home canners weren’t using safe methods.

And I’m a little saddened that now that I know that, it might take the modern-day equivalent of 12,000 1795 francs to motivate me to trust myself enough to eat my excellent tomato sauce. Maybe it’s not so bad that I can’t find all the lids and jars I want. It’s possible I’m not quite ready to move to a homestead in the middle of nowhere after all.

So, About King George . . .

1774 was a pretty big year for George Washington. He co-authored a call for the recognition of the fundamental rights of colonial British citizens in the midst of fallout from the Boston tea party. He did some important Continental Congressing. And he built a pretty fantastic porch onto his ever-expanding house.

[image error]That’s a great porch. Mount Vernon.
By Martin Falbisoner – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28359040

Washington designed the two-story piazza at Mount Vernon to look out over the Potomac and catch a breeze off the river on a hot Virginia summer day. It’s where he often welcomed guests and served lemonade to friends seated in Windsor chairs, while grumbling about King George III.

The piazza was not an entirely unique structure. The iconic columns were based on the designs of Englishman Batty Langley, and the idea of an expansive outdoor space connected to a home has roots in Ancient Greece. But prior to Washington’s porch addition, such an expansive space was uncommon in America. It inspired some copycats.

The popularity of the porch has waxed and waned a bit throughout the history of the United States, reaching its height between 1880 and through the 1920s, when people sat in the evening to catch a cool breeze, wave hello to a neighbor strolling by, or even invite a friend to sit for a spell and enjoy a glass of lemonade while the kids played together in the front yard.

[image error]Another great porch!
Image by Gretta Blankenship from Pixabay

Then as the family began to gather in the evenings around the radio and later the television, porches began to sit empty a little more often. Pretty soon, house designs became less likely to feature a front porch, or at least certainly not a wide one with columns and a porch swing, or even a collection of simple Windsor chairs. Still, although we may have gotten a little distracted, I don’t think the appeal of the front porch has ever really gone away.

I have an embarrassing confession to make. I love watching real estate shows on HGTV. I’m sure you know the ones. I heard them described once as those shows where people want to buy a house and then they do. There are a lot of versions—House Hunters, Tiny House Hunters, Hunters Off the Grid, My First Place, Lakefront Bargain Hunt, House Hunters on Vacation, etc.

[image error]I have to assume the show just fails to mention that at least one of the buyers is also the sole heir to the fortune of his elderly Uncle Moneybags. I hope. photo credit: Gino Barista via photopin (license)photo credit: Gino Barista via photopin (license)

I love them all, from the introduction in which we’re told that she’s a preschool teacher and he’s a part-time barista at Starbucks and that they have a budget of $4.7 million for their second home in Southern California, to the moment this couple with highly questionable financial judgement makes the wrong choice.

I love seeing the houses and thinking about the priorities of the buyers. I appreciate seeing how home considerations vary in different parts of the world. And though I’m happy with my home, I like dreaming about what I might be looking for in a house several years from now when my family enters a different phase of life.

I’ve noticed one thing that remains fairly consistent in the episodes. The majority of these home buyers, regardless of budget or location, are looking for great views, outdoor space, and a gathering spot. In all the episodes I’ve watched (a truly embarrassing number), not once have I seen a potential home buyer make a negative comment about a porch. In fact, they are overwhelmingly positive about such spaces and often spin dreams of hosting friends and neighbors on mild summer evenings with glasses of lemonade while the kids play together in the front yard.

[image error]I could go for some of that.
Image by graywendya from Pixabay

My current house doesn’t have much of a front porch, but many of the homes in my neighborhood do, and over the last many months of pandemic and social distancing, I’ve seen more neighbors sitting on them, waving hello to passersby.

The front porch seems to be experiencing a resurgence, I think probably because we humans miss each other. Social distance, that has at times felt more like isolation, has made us realize that even if we don’t always agree or sometimes get annoyed by one another, we really benefit from face-to-face interaction.

And outdoor spaces remain some of the safest places to spend time with others. A great big, expansive porch with simple, individual Windsor chairs will fit the bill. So, grab a glass of lemonade and sit on the porch with me. We probably still can’t share a swing, but we’ll catch a breeze and chat. We might even complain about King George and that ridiculously catchy song from Hamilton that’s been stuck in our heads for months.

Everybody . . .

The Greatest Travel Monkey Ever

It’s finally here—that wonderful time of year when my family’s crazy, busy, fun summer days wind down and my kids head back to school. My sons are in high school and middle school now, so we’ve done this a few times, but this year, of course, has been different.

Really, it just snuck up on me, because it’s been a strange summer. For one thing, the boys have been at home since early March. Also, there haven’t been a lot of traditional summer activities. Camps were cancelled, family get-togethers went digital, and time with friends slowed to a trickle. There wasn’t any baseball for most of the summer, and now that there finally is, it’s weird and a little uncomfortable to watch.

[image error]Steve chased a lot of waterfalls in Smoky Mountain National Park.

Even our long-planned family vacation had to get indefinitely postponed. But thankfully we did get the opportunity a few weeks ago to take a smaller trip together. We rented a fairly isolated cabin in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, which isn’t a terrible drive for us, loaded up the family truckster, grabbed our travel mascot Steve the Sock Monkey, and away we went.

We had several good days of hiking and playing in chilly mountain streams. We did our own cooking, played games, and spent good family time together, because, you know, we’ve had so little time to spend stuck together as a family lately. So yes, it was pretty much like our routine at home, except with more mountains and a greater threat of bear encounters. It was a nice getaway.

After a few days of mountain exploration, we dropped down to Huntsville, Alabama to see the US Space & Rocket Center, which none of us had visited before. At the museum you can get up close and personal with the Saturn V rocket, walk through a replica of the International Space Station, and take small steps and giant leaps across a fake moon surface, pretending you are in league with Stanley Kubrick and the mass hallucination of 400,000 of the most rock solid conspirators in the history of the universe. The museum is well worth a visit, and at limited pre-ticketed capacity, felt very safe and spacious.

[image error]After exploring a replica of the International Space Station, Steve is ready to volunteer to become the first US sock monkey in space.

We all had our favorite parts, even Steve. If you’ve followed this blog for a long time, you may have encountered Steve before. He got his start as a family travel mascot when the boys were small, and my husband and I left them with grandparents to enjoy a trip to Hawaii without them. We posted pictures of Steve’s Hawaiian Adventure for Grandma to share with the boys each day we were gone.

The monkey was a hit, not just with the boys, but with our friends and family tuning in on Facebook. Since then he’s been all over the place, telling the stories of our adventures, both when we travel separately and when we all travel together. He’s been to every corner of the continental United States and has left the country a few times.

But he’s never made it to space, and unbeknownst to us, this had apparently been bothering him a little. So on this trip to Huntsville, Steve was really excited to learn about the greatest travel monkey ever, Miss Baker.  

[image error]I’m pretty sure Steve just wants the fame and glory.

Baker was a squirrel monkey who, along with Rhesus partner Able, became the first US animal to successfully launch into space and return unharmed to the earth. Chosen from among twenty-five squirrel monkey candidates for her ability to remain pretty chill while confined to a small space connected to a bunch of electrodes, and because she looked really good in a tiny space helmet, Miss Baker went to space on May 28, 1959.  

When she landed, the slightly bewildered squirrel monkey was given a cracker and a banana before she took a well deserved nap. Then it was on to Washington DC for a press conference and fame. Along with Able, who sadly passed away a few days later during a surgical procedure to remove electrodes, Baker posed for the cover of Life magazine. Always gracious, she later received a Certificate of Merit for distinguished service from the ASPCA.

[image error]Steve didn’t know he was supposed to bring a banana. Next time he’ll be prepared.

After her big trip into space, she lived for about ten years at the Naval Aerospace Medical Center in Pensacola, Florida where she met and married her long time companion Big George. The happy couple moved to the US Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama in 1971, where Baker delighted scores of fieldtripping school children until 1984 when she died a very old squirrel monkey.

Today she rests on the grounds of the museum that was her home. Steve got to pay his respects to his hero, where admirers often leave a banana or two as a thank you for her service.

Steve does realize that as well traveled as he is, he’s unlikely to make it into space. But as he spends a lot of his time stuffed into a backpack, he’s pretty chill about small spaces. He also loves smiling for the camera. And he would definitely rock a tiny space helmet. Who knows? It’s been a strange year.

Shake It Off

On Friday, January 14, 2011 in Times Square in New York, Alastair Galpin and Don Purdon shared a really long handshake. Brothers Rohit and Santosh Timilsina were there shaking hands, too, attempting to set the new world record for longest handshake recorded by the Guinness Book of World Records. The two pairs decided after thirty-three hours and three minutes that they would all four share the record, and then hopefully washed their hands.

[image error]Image by Shutterbug75 from Pixabay

It’s a pretty impressive feat, if you’re one to be impressed by such things. Personally, I’m just curious how one words his status as handshake world record holder on a resume or brings it up on a date, which I’m guessing doesn’t last that long after such an impressive credential slips into the conversation.

One person that would definitely not have been impressed to see such a triumph would have been nurse Leila Given, who in 1929, lamented in the American Journal of Nursing that handshaking had become the preferred greeting style in the United States. She argued that shaking hands transfers disease agents from person to person and she recommended that we all keep our hands to ourselves.

[image error]There’s plenty of handshaking in Homer’s work and not a single mention of hand sanitizer. What a dangerous world it was. Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

While the handshake is certainly not the only human greeting behavior in the world, it has long been one of the most common. Its roots reach as far back as the 9th century BC when Assyrian King Shalmaneser III and an unidentified Babylonian ruler sealed a deal and someone grabbed a quick carving for posterity. Homer mentions handshaking in the Iliad and Odyssey. If Ancient Greek funerary art is to be trusted, the Greeks shook hands a lot.

Many historians suspect that the primary motivation behind the development of the handshake was to both indicate that one was not bearing a weapon and to check that the other guy wasn’t either. It’s possible, even, that the up and down motion of the handshake developed as a way to shake loose any weapons that might be hiding up sleeves and that might cause an otherwise friendly encounter to sour.

In America, the handshake took hold as the dominant form of friendly greeting probably as a result of the Quakers in the 17th century, who favored it over forms such as bowing or hat tipping, which often indicated an inequality in power.

Of course, in recent years, as we have become a bit more germ-aware, some have favored the fist bump. Though it has been shown to transfer fewer germs from hand to hand than does a traditional handshake, it does look vaguely ridiculous and occasionally causes inexplicable, and much more definitely ridiculous, explosions.

[image error]Friends Winning GIF by Pan Pivo

I assume it’s because of this that many people are now opting for the elbow tap, including politicians and the fully grown men who play professional baseball. I have to say, as silly as it looks in the latter group, it definitely beats the maybe too friendly tap on the backside.

But I suppose all greeting behaviors take a little getting used to. We’ve been shaking hands for a long time. In the post-Covid world of someday, maybe we will shake hands again. Or maybe we won’t. Maybe, ninety-years later, we’ll finally heed Leila Given’s warning.

The last time I shook someone’s hand, more than a month ago now, was at an outdoor book signing. Both of us used hand sanitizer immediately after contact. It also didn’t last thirty-three hours and three minutes, but I am secure in the knowledge that neither of us had any weapons up our sleeves.

Authors Recognition Award

If you follow along with this blog fairly regularly you may have noticed that I have been taking it a little easier this summer than I normally do. 2020 has brought plenty of strangeness and with that, I’ve found it useful to have the flexibility of trading my normally weekly post for an every two weeks schedule. At this point I anticipate returning to a weekly posting schedule when school starts at the end of August. But it’s 2020, so I may be carried off by murder hornets or blown away in a dust storm by then. I’m not making any firm promises.

[image error]Or maybe I’ll be be eaten by carnivorous plants grown from mystery seeds. What a strange year. Image by MarcosJH from Pixabay

In the meantime, with this “off” week, since I’m not researching any weird historical tidbits to share with you, I’m going to participate in an award/tag that I received recently.

The Author’s Recognition Award was originally created by Beverly at her Becoming the Oil and Wine Blog. She wants to support fellow bloggers who have written and published books, or who are somewhere in that process, to give them an opportunity to write about their work. Thanks, Beverly. That’s pretty super cool of you!

Thank you also to the Dippy Dotty Girl who nominated me for this award, and who is furiously querying agents in hopes of publishing a book about her “dippy-dotty travels through Cornwall.” As somewhat of a dippy-dotty traveler myself, I’m anxious for the someday when I can read it.

[image error]This is the image to which the rules refer, but feel free to use the Venus Flytrap picture if it works for you.

Like any blog award, there are few rules:

Create a new post on your blog with the above logo or with one of your own creation.Include both the purpose of the award and the rules of the award.Thank the person who nominated you and link to their blog.Include links to the creator of the award and to the inspiration post Celebrating and Supporting our Fellow Writers.Write a brief description of the books you have written or the book you are currently writing.Include a link to your published books or the potential timeline of release.Nominate at least five bloggers who have published books or who are writing a book.Support at least one of the bloggers you nominated by either purchasing one of their books or sharing the links to their books. If they haven’t written a book, share one of their blog posts

My books:

Launching Sheep & Other Stories from the Intersection of History and Nonsense is a collection of humorous essays about quirky history, viewed through the lens of modern-day family life. Released in the spring of 2017, it is a celebration of the first five years of this very blog, which was originally called The Practical Historian: Your Guide to Practically True History. The blog title grew up a little as my writing career became more developed, but the posts have not matured at all. You can find more information about the book at this link.

Gentleman of Misfortune is a historical novel about a 19th century gentleman criminal who commandeers a shipment of Egyptian mummies, attempts to make his fortune by taking them on the road, and gets more than he bargained for. You can find out more and read an excerpt at this link.

Smoke Rose to Heaven is a historical novel that tells the 19th century coming of age story of a girl with a unique gift and a dangerous secret. It is a companion novel to Gentleman of Misfortune, but as the timelines intersect, the two books can be enjoyed in either order. You can find out more and read an excerpt at this link.

My Work in Progress is another historical novel that does have an actual working title, but one never knows how it will go with titles. It was inspired by a 19th century diary discovered by my aunt in the false-bottom drawer of a desk that once belonged to my grandmother. Close to completion now, this novel will soon attract an influential agent, a large advance from a major publisher, and inevitable fame. And since I’m dreaming big anyway, I might as well sell the film rights, too.

Now for the nominees:

Jane Olandese (Book ‘Em Jan O)M.B. HenrySteven Baird (Ordinary Handsome)Tammie PainterMatthew Wright



[image error]Image by Fathromi Ramdlon from Pixabay

I know a lot of writers, many of them wonderfully creative people I have met virtually in the blogosphere. I’ve listed five here, and I suggest you check them all out because they’re great. But please also know that if you are a writer and I didn’t list you, that was in no way an intentional slight. I know we’re all busy blogging away about anything other than our books so people don’t get sick to death of us writing endlessly about our books and begging them to buy our books and love our books and write thoughtful reviews about our books, but sometimes, it’s nice to get to just share. Also, I want to read about your books. So please consider yourself nominated and carry on.

Thanks for stopping by! I promise next week I’ll post something about a little piece of history you never knew you wanted to know, but that might come in handy at your next cocktail party, which will probably be swarmed by murder hornets so you should probably just stay home to be safe.

The Official Flaming Underpants of the 2020 Covid Olympics

This week our local schools revealed their plans for the fall. There are as many different approaches as there are school districts involved, but the one thing that is fairly consistent is that if students return to the classroom, they’ll be wearing face masks.

[image error]It’s going to take some adjustment and patience, but I suspect most kids will do okay with this. Image by Leo Fontes from Pixabay

I don’t think that comes as such a shock. Also this week, most stores in our area began requiring masks inside, a mandate that has not come from our governor in the state of Missouri, but has been left up to county health officials, local governments, and business owners. A good number of people were wearing them anyway, but now it’s official policy.

That’s led to a little bit of grumbling, as there are still some people who question the practice, but for the most part, the folks in my little corner of the world are handling any conflicts with calm discussion and a touch of humor.

[image error]

Mostly, we talk about underwear.

It’s all over my social media feeds as clever memes that draw parallels between wearing a face mask and wearing a bra or panties or boxer briefs. A mask, they say, should be treated like underwear—it should be kept dry, worn clean, and not adjusted in public. Many ladies add to the discussion by proudly proclaiming that even though it’s uncomfortable and kind of a pain, they wear a bra in public for the benefit of others. Unfortunately, outside of social media, and in the sticky summer St. Louis heat, the resolve of some seems to fall away and that particular metaphor doesn’t always hold.

But the point is still valid. And what else do we have to talk about?

Because on this day in 2020, when the world should be sharing in the celebration of the parade of nations and the end of the Olympic torch relay at the opening ceremony of the Summer Olympics in Tokyo, instead we’re sharing a virus.

[image error]One of many great disappointments in 2020. photo credit: Tim Schofield IMG_0965 via photopin (license)

And when we should be watching with pride as the torch is run into an Olympic stadium filled with the best elite athletes the world has to offer, anticipating gymnastics floor routines, swimming medley relays, and (in my household particularly) epic fencing bouts, we’re stuck instead with endless conversations about the fallout of Covid-19. And underwear.

In 1956, the topics actually overlapped, because that’s when the great underwear torch relay occurred. The Olympic torch, of course, is the symbol of connection and continuity from the Olympics of Ancient Greece and the modern-day event, which draws the world together in a spirit of friendly competition, cooperation, and good fun.

[image error]I can’t help but wonder how many people have touched this and whether or not their hands were clean.

The relay, however, which sees the lighted torch carried from Olympia, Greece to the host city, making appearances in cities around the world on the way, has much shallower roots, only dating back to the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. It was a tradition begun by Nazis.

For this and probably lots of other geopolitical reasons, the torch relay and the torch itself, has at times been the target of protests. In 1956, one such protest carried out by eight students from St. John’s College at the University of Sydney, involved a fake torch made from a silver-painted wooden chair leg, a plum pudding can, and a flaming pair of underpants.

Approximating the dress of an official torch runner, and accompanied by a uniformed buddy on a motorcycle, one student carried the flaming drawers ahead of the official torch and even managed to hand it off to then Lord Mayor of Sydney Pat Hills, who, flustered at the earlier than expected arrival of the torch, proceeded to give a prepared speech to an expectant crowd. By the time he learned of the deception, the student had disappeared.

The real torch did make its way to the handoff at Sydney Town Hall amid a little bit of mayhem. It went on from there to Melbourne where it burned brightly over the Olympic Games that year. The student who’d handed off the flaming underwear, a young man named Barry Larkin, went on to establish a successful veterinary practice, and as is so often the case, no one really seems to know what he and his friends were actually protesting.

[image error]photo credit: pburka Mask required via photopin (license)

But I suppose people will always find a reason to get a little riled up. It might be that we disagree with the way our local school districts have decided to try to navigate an impossible situation. Or it might be that we have deep-rooted personal beliefs about whether or not people should be required to wear face masks into WalMart.

I wish we could all be watching the Olympics. But I guess instead we’ll talk about underwear.