Quotes in the news

"You do not want a varmint up in the wiring areas and what-have-you on an airplane."
-- American Airlines spokesman John Hotard, on the stowaway Eastern gray squirrel that forced a trans-Pacific flight to make an unscheduled landing in Honolulu.

"People who celebrate Valentine's Day should be pelted with shoes!"
-- Chanted by Hindu fundamentalists during their annual Feb. 14 protest in India.

"Uh, I, I can only tell you what people on the ground -- It's hard for me, you know, living in this beautiful White House, to give you an assessment, a firsthand assessment."
-- President Bush at his Feb. 14 press conference, in response to ABC's Martha Raddatz, who asked him of Iraq, "Do you believe it's a civil war, sir?"

A coal statistic

According to the cutline beneath this front-page photo in the Cumberland Times-News, a single high school in Cumberland, Md., burns about 700 tons of coal a year.

According to the "Coal Train" chapter of John McPhee's latest book, Uncommon Carriers, a typical rail car holds 115 tons of coal.

That means Allegany High School requires a bit more than six rail cars full of coal per year to keep the pipes (and kids) from freezing. Let's pull a seventh car onto that (imaginary) siding behind the boiler room, in case of a hard winter.

Keep that once-a-year seven-car coal train for a single building in mind, the next time you hear coal touted as America's energy salvation.

Gravita-tas

I enjoy reading the daily celebrity-birthday roundup in the Cumberland Times-News, and Saturday's prompted an interesting breakfast-table discussion: Who is the more talented actor, Jim Brown (age 71) or Denise Richards (age 36)? My opinion, which I unwisely expressed to Sydney, was, "Jim Brown clearly has the edge in gravitas, but Denise Richards clearly has the edge in ta-tas." This will haunt me for some time, I'm sure.

Among my faithful readers ...

... I am pleased to hear from Donovan S. Brain. The quote at the bottom of his/its blog is worth the click.

Fuzz bunnies

Phil "Dr. Phil" Kaldon writes:

Were you in Greensboro during the era of the famous Greensboro police department "fuzz bunnies"? They actually made a national ad for the relevant company, Dr. Phil writes coyly. (smirk)

Given your smirk, Phil, I sense another conversation coming on that I will have to distance myself from, but nevertheless -- Tell me about the Greensboro, N.C., "fuzz bunnies." I'm clueless.

A harsh truth

I'm sure the T-shirt worn in this photo by Megan Hott, winner of a high-school Voice of Democracy contest in Keyser, W.Va., speaks for millions.

And such a bargain

Little did I know, when I bought a Handy Can of WD-40, just how handy it was! Look at the grand claim on the back.Shoot, we ought to send cases of it to the White House, to Capitol Hill, to the Pentagon ...

The Southern model

The Taliban say they will open private schools in defiance of their nation's government. That sounds familiar.

In the lucky third

I read in today's paper that in any given year, only a third of the Earth gets any snow. We definitely now live in the lucky third.

Attentive readers will be able to guess where this snowball wound up.

The long road of George Jones

"I would have played for nothing as long as somebody would have fed me."

Sydney's faculty page

I haven't decided what to charge her for the photos.

The Assemblies of Yahweh

Also on my Sunday drive, I passed radio station WMLK in Pethel, Pa., which caught my eye because I wondered whether the call letters stood for Martin Luther King. But no; the billboard said this was the broadcasting arm of the Assemblies of Yahweh, which I looked up when I got home.

Based in Bethel, Pa., this is the largest church in the Sacred Name Movement, a Depression-era outgrowth of the Adventist movement that asserts the authority of the Old Testament, the observance of Jewish festivals and -- you guessed it -- the correct name of the divine. At the Assemblies of Yahweh website, the Statement of Doctrine reads, in part:

We affirm that it is necessary and most important to our salvation that we accept the revealed, personal Name of our Heavenly Father YAHWEH and the Name of His Son, our Savior YAHSHUA the MESSIAH. We affirm also that the most accurate transliteration of these Names from the Hebrew into the English is by the spellings employed above, Exodus 3:14-15; Psalm 68:4; Psalm 83:18; Isaiah 42:8; Isaiah 52:6; Acts 4:12.

The Assemblies of Yahweh was founded in 1969 by Jacob O. Meyer, who was fed up with the other Sacred Name churches; since then, other Sacred Name churches have been created by folks fed up with the Assemblies of Yahweh. Such is the story of Protestantism.

Roadside America

While driving through Shartlesville, Pa., yesterday, intent on getting home before night and snow fell, I passed Roadside America. Next time through, I'll do my best to stop at this venerable attraction, a 6,000-square-foot miniature village that was the life's work of self-taught artist Laurence Gieringer. Here's the writeup at the invaluable (if unrelated) Roadside America website.

For a very different miniature-village experience, I recommend my hero Jeffrey Ford's excellent novella "Botch Town," in his excellent collection The Empire of Ice Cream.

1 a.m. Feb. 3, 1959, 5 miles northwest of Mason City, Iowa

That's the time, date and place of the Beechcraft Bonanza crash that killed rock stars Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson, as well as 21-year-old pilot Roger Peterson.

Now Richardson's son Jay, who does tribute shows as "The Big Bopper Jr.," is having his dad's body examined by forensic anthropologist Bill Bass, founder of the University of Tennessee's "Body Farm." The younger Richardson says he hopes to put some longstanding rumors and doubts to rest.

With all due respect to a son who lost his father -- one whose grief is made even more complex by the fact that he wasn't born until after his father died -- it's hard to imagine what more there is to know, after all these years. The Sept. 15, 1959, Civil Aeronautics Board report on the crash concluded, on ample evidence, that the disoriented pilot, flying only on unfamiliar instruments, simply flew the plane into the ground.

In the decades since, conspiracy theorists have made much of the fact that Holly carried his handgun aboard the plane, saying he might have shot the pilot by accident while horsing around, leaving a bullet wound that the local coroner might have overlooked when presented with an obvious plane-crash victim. No evidence whatsoever supports this theory, which moreover contradicts all the evidence of Holly's previous behavior that evening, and on the bus earlier on the tour. Far more likely to assume that Holly boarded the plane and immediately tried to get some sleep.

The younger Richardson says he's also intrigued by the fact that his father's body was found 40 feet from the plane to the northwest (in an adjoining cornfield, actually), while Holly's body and Valens' body were found 17 feet from the plane to the south and southwest. (The full coroner's report is here.) He wonders whether his dad crawled free of the crash. But the plane hit the ground at full speed and tumbled until it came to rest against a barbed-wire fence, and investigators found that most of the seat belts had broken; surely that's explanation enough for the scattering of the bodies.

Sometimes -- indeed, most of the time -- accidents just happen. Even if the victims are famous.

From the Land of Pleasant Living

This Baltimore Examiner article about the city's beer-brewing heritage introduced me to National Bohemian, a.k.a. Natty Boh, for generations the city's favorite home brew. Its irresistible slogan: "From the Land of Pleasant Living." The beer's mascot, Mr. Boh, looks like a German-American saloonkeeper circa 1885, the year the beer first appeared. He has a handlebar mustache and a single visible eye -- is he winking, perhaps, or did he break up one saloon brawl too many?

Natty Boh is no longer a home brew, alas; it's now brewed in North Carolina and shipped by Pabst to the die-hards in Maryland, Pennsylvania and Delaware, and apparently nowhere else. Here's the official website, with a helpful list of distributors that carry the beer, and here's the Wikipedia entry. Mr. Boh merchandise is on tap at NattyBohGear.com, while a fellow named Shayne has devoted an entire blog, and presumably much of his life, to all the cultural manifestations of Natty Boh.

Brazelton's mom

I was pleased to read on the wires that influential pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton is still going strong, age 88. I met Brazelton and interviewed him for the News & Record of Greensboro, N.C., in the late 1980s, and I liked him a lot. What I did not know before this profile was published was that his mother founded perhaps the first abortion clinic in Texas. A 1996 profile in the alumni publication at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center says the year was 1940. It also says Mrs. Brazelton was the first woman elder in the Presbyterian Church. There are two resume items you don't often see side by side!

In her blog at I'mNotSorry.net, Patricia Beninato says that in a talk in Richmond several years ago, Brazelton said:

If a baby isn’t going to be born to parents who will be passionately in love with it, then it has a right to be aborted.

To get to the quote, click here and search for Brazelton's name. I can't find online the write-up of the talk that Beninato is quoting, but I'd be keen to read the whole thing.

"The Chief Designer" on CD

I was pleased to receive in the mail today two copies of the new audio edition of my story "The Chief Designer," a two-CD set in the Great Science Fiction Stories series from AudioText Inc. The exterior of the package shows the real-life Korolev (pictured); inside, on the CDs themselves, are photos of Korolev, Gagarin and Sunrise One. The copy on the box reads:

This story, an alternate history masterpiece, is told from the viewpoints of Korolev, the 'Chief' who managed the most crucial years of the secret Soviet space program, and his assistant and eventual successor, Aksyonov. The story spans from World War II, when Korolev was released from a prison camp to design rockets, to 1997 and the Mir space station. This endearing story is many tales in one: an historical story that captures the true mood of the period; a science fiction story that resonates on multiple levels with plenty of technology and cosmonaut bravado; and finally, a ghost story as the tale fades away.

This 132-minute "unabridged reading by Jared Doreck" is the first audio edition of any of my stories. On our next car trip, I look forward to popping this into the dash and, in effect, listening to myself.

The woolly bear watch

Dr. Phil Kaldon writes:

We get woolly bears migrating across our driveway here in West Michigan. They tend to look like our cats, some are more orange and some are more black. The greater the number of darker ones you see, the more you know you are about to be screwed by the Gods of Winter.

Phil, did you see mostly dark ones this season, or mostly orange? We've had a mild winter so far, for what it's worth. And I haven't seen woolly bear One, but I haven't gone looking, either ...

In the buttocks, Bob

My hero Bob Devney -- eight-time Hugo Award nominee in the Best Fan Writer category, and author of the best convention reports ever written -- writes:

One of my favorite headlines is a golden oldie (though perhaps a falsie), supposedly from a British paper during World War II:

Eighth Army push bottles up Germans

Ha!

You remind me, Bob, of the marvelous headline all of us at the Greensboro, N.C., paper so enjoyed circa 1990, mainly because it was published by one of our bitter rivals, the High Point, N.C., paper. During a drug bust, as the offenders scrambled to ditch or hide or otherwise distance themselves from their illegal goods, one brave fellow who had been smoking cocaine in its crystalline form shoved the "rocks" up his own rectum. The police, however, had brought along rubber gloves in anticipation of this ploy, and their search of each suspect was thorough indeed, so the contraband ultimately was found. The newspaper headline read:

Police find crack in buttocks

I can't say how the staff of the High Point paper reacted, but at the Greensboro paper this headline occasioned daylong merriment. Just as the newsroom had quieted down, some newcomer would walk in, be handed the headline, and everyone would erupt in laughter again. I'm surprised we got a paper out that day at all. Finally, after we settled down and got back to work, my colleague Stan Swofford stood, hitched up his pants and muttered: "I don't know what we're laughing about. Greensboro police couldn't even find that." And we all howled anew.

Ah, journalism!

Fun with headlines

My hero Gwenda Bond had a good response to my confusion over this headline:

I think "mad" here is being used in the sense of wicked cool.

To which Dr. Phil Kaldon replied:

Why... YES!

Dr. Phil

"Everything is Physics"

Sharing my fascination with headlines is Charlie Ewers, who teaches journalism at Frostburg State University; he clips and passes me gems from time to time. For example, this: