Mr Moore and the Pineapple Bomb

I'll bet no one has recently told or heard the story of Mr Moore and the pineapple bomb.

Mr Moore was my 11th grade honors chemistry teacher at McDowell High School in Erie, PA.

Mr Moore told this story each year: One day he returned to his classroom after lunch and saw a suspicious item on the front lab table which served as his lectern. He saw batteries and wires and assumed the worst. He notified the principal, who notified the police, who notified the bomb squad, who evacuated the school and subsequently discovered that the suspicious item was a pineapple from the cafeteria with wires and batteries affixed to it.

He was very embarrassed by the mistake, and I think he told the story each year to work through the embarrassment.

This was long before 9/11, in a day when people thought "How could I be so gullible?” instead of "Better safe than sorry."

The world has changed.

Too bad too many of you reading this now don't know what those days were like. It wasn't all war and protests and drugs. There was a lot of that, to be sure, but there were many more pleasant things.

Mr Moore always talked about "the Big Boys," by which he meant professional chemists, and would occasionally regale us with anecdotes about the chemical conundrums real chemists deal with in the real world.

I saw Mr Moore at Millcreek’s annual 4th of July parade a number of years ago; he was quite elderly. I ran up to him to say hello, as he often welcomed greetings from former students when I was in high school. He was polite, but he didn't remember me, and he knew he didn't remember me; he wanted to move along quickly, and I let him.

I was fond of him, as I was Mr Saunders, my honors physics teacher, but both men were distantly erudite to my empty head. I pictured myself then as a scientist; I persisted in that delusion into my sophomore year in college, at which point I discovered there were more than 10 numbers, and particle physics would be a little difficult after I ran out of fingers.

Started: 2012-05-28

0dds & Ends for National Senior Health and Fitness Day

(Hey all you seniors, "Get Moving... Start Improving!" )

 

1
Yahoo publishes its private key during fumbled browser release.

I understand how things like this can happen, but this is really a monumental oversight, of the sort that removes any incentive at all for considering this browser.

2
MSNBC: More workers are opting out of company health plans. You know why? Because they can't afford it.

Fact is, until the indigent sick are left to die, you and I will always bear the cost. How about we face that fact and start caring for each other now.

 

3
That's Not Good Enough

In one day, approximately an hour apart, on two different Christian radio stations, I heard ministers say that the baby steps some Christians need to take are not good enough.

One said just believing in God isn't good enough, even the demons believe.

The other said just believing in Jesus isn't good enough, you have to believe only in Jesus and no one and nothing else.[1]

This is a common rhetorical strategy among ministers, and I liken it to a fishhook. Once you have a fish interested in your hook, you tug a bit. It embeds the hook a bit deeper; if the fish is only nibbling, the tug will sometimes give the impression the bait is trying to get away, which interests the fish more.

I think preachers do the same thing. If you happen to be nibbling, they want you to take a bigger bite; it's a gentle tug, but one that lacks sensitivity, and not everyone responds well to it.

I don't.

In Fundamentalist circles, this approach is often delivered in a stern, low, soft voice, lips close to the microphone and serious eyes scanning the sanctuary: "Now brothers and sisters, I want you to get serious with Jesus this morning. You know who I'm talking to."

That may fill a stringer with emotionally vulnerable Christians, but the thoughtful ones will get away. Emotional decisions don't make for long-term commitment; thoughtful ones more often do.

If you don't want thoughtful Christians in your pew, keep it up.

[1]
It's not the message, it's the presentation. (Obviously spiritual journeys have steps toward greater enlightenment.) Try this next time: "If you're here today and just beginning to think Hey, there's something to this, or I'm with you so far, then come with me a little further, I've got something to show you."

Take my hand. Leave the hook in the tackle box.

Started: 2012-05-26

How Google+ and Facebook Blogger Sharing Differ...

Look at the picture Facebook chose to use when I shared my post on my childhood memories of Erie, PA:

Google+ chooses this for it's image:

I'll bet Google scanned my post, alt tags, and images and determined a pretty girl would be better than a child scattering dandelion seeds.

It may work differently for others, but Blogger’s Facebook applet will not let me choose a different picture, it defaults to the first.

Started: 2012-05-25

Use Memorial Day to Remember

Skip the malls, the beach, the boat.

Take 2 minutes to hear Harrison Wright talk about blowing taps over a valley in Belgium. Go here and click on the Play button.

Take a moment to read about what Memorial Day is about.

Now go to the cemetery and put some flowers on a grave of someone who served. If you don't know anyone, pick a stranger. He didn't know you either.

If you aren’t able to do that, just play this clip and offer a moment of silence.[1]

This is my dad's gravestone, was just placed a few days ago. This is in Laurel Hills Cemetery in Erie, PA off Sterrettania. I'll get some better shots next time I'm home. I have seven relatives there now, I think, if I'm counting correctly, all within view of each other: Cairns, Grandy and Andrews.

(I believe the reflection belongs to Art Detisch of Ericson Memorials. The three birds represent Dad’s three children – myself, Tom, and Linda.)

[1]
When I was in grade school, the issue of prayer in school was a hot topic. My 5th grade homeroom teacher at Vernondale Elementary School, Mr Veith, insisted on a moment of silence after the pledge to the flag. He said regularly that we weren’t being asked to pray, just be silent, but if we wanted to use that time to pray, that was up to us.

(This was in 1974-5 and shortly after Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971) and probably would have passed the Lemon test.)

Started: 2012-05-25

"The science of the soul makes me want to vomit."

I heard those words on a progressive radio show sometime during the morning of Sunday May 20. I don't want to look up the schedule because I'd prefer not to put a name with the host that said it or learn if he's local or syndicated.

I'm realizing ever more clearly how angry some atheists are.

My issue is not with the opinion, but the hostility, which is probably rooted in a painful encounter with religion and religious people.

Most of us carry angry baggage of some sort. We've developed special words for some angers - such as misanthrope, misogynist - or we say something "left a bad taste in our mouth" if that thing has ruined an experience some others still enjoy it.

But just because the bad taste in our mouths was left by religion doesn't mean we can use that as an excuse for angry pontification.

To the man on the radio: I was once an angry Christian. Perhaps even angrier than you. I still have my moments. Time will likely soften your perspective until you can discuss the "science of the soul" in the same manner you might discuss the science of art or language or any other human expression.

Besides that, it's distracting. Anger doesn't cure ignorance.

Started: 2012-05-20

Was Columbus Secretly a Jew?

A new good friend of mine shared this news story with me: Was Columbus Secretly a Jew? (thank you Jamie J).

It made me recollect an incident in my own life that was quite revealing:

A family member on my dad's side speculated that a great uncle or some such was Jewish and we may have some Jewish blood in us. Great Grandpa Bauer (Grandma Cairns's father) was a German immigrant and it wasn't inconceivable. However, my Aunt Dottie Young (Dad's sister) has done a lot of research into that side of the family and there's simply no evidence to support the idea.

But for an instant, when I heard that story - and I remember it distinctly - there was a marked shift in my perspective on who I was, and an upwelling sense of kinship with a culture with which I have no first-hand experience, but rather only images and facts irregularly collected from Bible stories and movies.[1]

It was delightful, however fleeting, and more importantly, enlightening.

How quickly our picture of others can change when we are part of the picture.

[1]
Want to hear something sad? Many years ago, while waiting in line for breakfast at Calvin College, I said to a friend, "I love bagels so much, I must have a little Jewish in me." She looked at me like I had horns growing out of my head, so I said, "You realize I'm joking," but apparently she didn't, and wouldn't, and treated me thereafter very differently; the change was palpable.

I come from the most racially tolerant home you could imagine. I didn't know what anti-Semitism was until I got to college. I never heard a cross word about anyone or any group based on their color or religion. Though my folks were clear on whether or not other religions were "right," that judgment never extended to people, but stopped at the ideas held by those people.

Started: 2012-05-25

Things I Miss from Childhood in Erie, PA

This list could go on forever if I inspected my childhood closely enough, as it could for all of us, I’m sure. I started jotting these down over a month ago. I'll stop here for now.

• Milkweed on the wind.
• Yellow dandelions up and down the whole block for the first few weeks of summer.
• Blowing dandelion seeds into the air.
• Grasshoppers I captured in my metal Adam-12 lunch box walking through Ford field on the way home from school.
• Grasshopper tobacco spit in my Adam-12 metal lunch box.
• Neighbors on Grant, Ford and Montpelier.
  (DiTullio, Mahler, Clutter, Kahil, Yosten, Bricker, Goss, Chipoletti, Campbell, Nickel. Tommy Kahil moved away when I was very little. Rich Nickel was my best friend for years. I was also very close to Mike Guyton. I’ve lost track of them all.)
• The smell of lake water.
• The smell of standing puddles on humid summer days.
• Wasps hovering over standing puddles on humid summer days. 
• The crack of frozen puddles under my feet on frigid days.
• Larry Pintea and the Erie Times-News.
• We Love Erie Days. I did and still do.
• Love Boat and Fantasy Island and Gene Rayburn and Charles Nelson Reilly and Karen Valentine and a million others. Oh my, Karen Valentine.
• There is a sweet grass that blooms in summer that I can only rarely and briefly smell in Michigan; I wish I knew what it was, but when you live with it, you don't describe it, it just touches you and drifts away.
• Cicadas singing loudly in tall maple trees.
• Cicada exoskeletons clinking to craggy old maple tree trunks.
• Mom and Dad working in the yard when I come home from school.
• Patchy clouds against a blue sky.
• Cold mornings and dew in summer.
• The canary yellow house with white trim on my paper route that cooked bacon and eggs every Sunday morning.
• Waiting for the school bus.
• Staying home from school and watching game shows and daytime talk shows like Mike Douglas.
• Dad saying "Verrrrrrry interesting, but schtoopid." He liked funny German characters like Arte Johnson (Laugh-In) and John Banner (Hogan's Heroes).
• Thunderous, torrential storms.
• Power outages, candle light, oil lamps, and playing board games with mom and my brother Tom and sister Linda.
• The crisp edge of an old oil lamp wick and the smell of one burning.
• Candles that drip.
• The smell of an extinguished candle.
• Wet woolen mittens drying on the heat register at school.
• Mom telling me not to eat all the nuts and mints she set out for company.
• The smell of moth balls.
  (The Shrine Circus came to town once a year, and my Grandpa Cairns took me and my little brother Tom each year. One year Grandpa bought me and Tom little gifts of our choice. I chose a little plush stuffed monkey. I slept with it in their house that night, and many nights after in my own house. It smelled of moth balls. My guess is the Shriners mothballed them between seasons. Or they bought a batch that someone else had mothballed. It's a delightful smell for me to this day.)
• Grandmas and grandpas.
• Bethel Baptist Church.
• Strawberry shortcake made with drop biscuits.
• Children on bicycles.
• The sound of children playing.
• Security, hope, optimism; a fortress of caring adults that never let anything harmful near.
• Summers that seemed to last forever.
• My own room.
• My own time.
• My mom and dad.

I don't expect anyone who doesn't know me to care about this stuff, but I think someone someday a few rungs down the DNA ladder will, just as I do my own parents, and their parents. If you stayed with me this long, perhaps you miss things like this too.

Started: 2012-04-15

0dds & Ends for National Medical Transcriptionist Week

(Bet you didn't know this is National Medical Transcriptionist Week  . God bless 'em.)

1
My favorite coffees, in descending order, are Citavo (which I had in Florida near Daytona), Douwe Egberts (which used to be served by Burger King and was the only reason I went there, but no longer do), and MJB (ground coffee in a can that I just found out is carried by Big Lots, but not near me, and MAY be carried by Walmart, but I guess I'll never get to know that for sure. Anyone shop at Walmart or know where else to buy MJB?.)[1]

I just tried Marathon gas station coffee for the first time; it comes in a cup branded "Sunrise Convenience Stores." It's good. May just be a replacement for Burger King, but there are no Marathon stations on my normal routes. I've emailed Marathon, no reply yet; I guess they're busy cleaning up a spill or something.

(Sunrise Convenience Stores has a Facebook page , but no way to email them or write on their wall; I presume they simply wanted to secure the spot. )

2
I was raised a Baptist. There were only three general categories of art representing Jesus - the ministering Jesus prior to his death, the crucified Christ and the risen Lord. (We often refer to Jesus differently in these contexts; I didn't realize that until I typed this sentence, it just naturally came out that way.)

They look like this:



Fundamentalist Baptists like myself are primarily exposed to the first and last images of Jesus and see only the the crucified Christ around Easter. We’re told that crucifixes are bad because we believe in a risen Jesus; a Baptist minister's wife went so far as to tell me Catholics believe Jesus is dead.

Today [05-20-2012] I discovered something new, the "Fontanini cross," a combination of the two...

I think this is Marco Fontanini ; it's a very nice integration of two sensibilities, each somewhat inadequate by itself, but together something different and more satisfying. (Not that iconography needs to satisfy me, of course, but it does help and there's no harm that it does.)

This is no small issue even among Catholics. I heard a caller on a Catholic talk show say her priest had removed the crucifix from the alter, for the same reason I'd been told as a boy. I'd wager that caller's priest was struggling with his Catholicism and was more comfortable with a Protestant perspective on that point.

More on how I found this cross later.

3
The most easily misunderstood profession is writing, because sometimes you are judged without being read or fully understood. Reading is work. It's one thing to listen to a song, look at a painting, a sculpture, a TV show or a movie. It's something different to read.

Shelley once wrote "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." I'm not so sure we aren't just journaling in the asylum.

4
Hey Microsoft, stop moving %&#@ around!

Seriously. Design 101: Don't move %&#@ around when the user resizes a window, and don't change menu settings without a %&#@ good reason.

I've been using the Microsoft Office ribbon interface since it was introduced and STILL can't remember where %&#@ stuff is that I only use once a week or month or so, like how to apply a color to a sender in Outlook. Right click? Nope. Organize? Not there anymore. Help. Oh, that's right, it's under Conditional Formatting, like in Excel. Sure, THAT's where I'd put an email filter.

That's like putting brain surgeons and proctologists in the same hospital wing because both ends are attached to the same patient.

[1]
Coffee I don’t like: Seattle's Best, Starbuck's, and McDonald's. I'll drink it, but I don't enjoy it. I'd rather brew my own store-brand at home.

Started: 2012-05-18

Obama's Three Biggest Mistakes

I once told a friend in all sincerity that Obama is the greatest president since Abraham Lincoln.

I still believe this, and I'm a registered Republican, but I think he has made three very big mistakes:

1. Obama expressed a critical opinion on the Henry Louis Gates arrest.

Henry Louis Gates is the Harvard professor who was arrested outside his home after refusing to provide formal identification to a responding police officer (Wikipedia article on Henry Louis Gates).

The events resulted in a "Beer Summit" in the White House Rose garden that from the outside looked like a happy ending to a series of unfortunate events. IMHO, the responding officer, Sgt James Crowley, did what we pay police officers to do: when Gates refused to prove he lived there and became belligerent, Sgt Crowley said Okay, we'll solve it downtown.

Both men were right in their own way. The President was wrong.

The whole thing could have been avoided if Gates had laughed and said "Oh man, you're gonna love this one, Officer; I just got back from China and I'm locked out of my own house. Here, let me show you my driver's license."

2. Obama expressed a personal opinion on the Trayvon Martin shooting, saying if he had a son, he would look like Trayvon.

This reinforced a racial facet of an already racially-charged case. The only connection between Obama and Treyvon (outside of those the rest of us share) is color. Imagine if the situation were reversed and a white president said the same thing about a white shooting victim.

3. Obama is supporting aspects of the Health Care reform bill that requires Catholic institutions to offer medical services contrary to the Church's moral teaching (sterilizations and contraceptives, including those that cause abortions ).

I support national health care. I oppose any mandated support of practices contrary to one's conscience.

It is an unwitting (at least I hope so) attack on religious liberty for the sake of political expediency. It doesn't matter what the issue is and what side anyone is on. It forces a faith community to support practices it opposes.

Period.

End of story.

Some additional information, in anticipation of any criticism:

1. Henry Louis Gates had good reason to be indignant, I may have been too. But when a police officer asks you for identification, you shut up and do it. Incidentally, Gates makes an enjoyable host of PBS's Finding Your Roots . I wish him well.   .

2. There is no reason for a young man to face lethal force because he is walking down a public street. George Zimmerman, the man who shot him, should not have been carrying a gun. The justice system should decide what happens to Zimmerman, not public opinion. Had there been no fear, and no gun, Treyvon would still be alive.

I have a son not much older than Trayvon. Please don’t think I don’t understand this pain.

3. I applaud the use of birth control. I vehemently oppose forcing people to fund it against their principles.

I fully expect the Catholic legal challenge to succeed.

I still do plan at this time to vote for Obama, despite this philosophical difference.

Why?

Romney sees (almost) everything through a financial filter. You and I are economic principles to him, not people, jobs, families, homes, a hamper full of dirty laundry or a pot of spaghetti boiling on the stove. The flannel and denim he wears came off the rack yesterday so you could see him in flannel and denim today.

(Many of those who support Romney the loudest use the same filter. Watch Fox News and see how much of the political coverage is financial; that should tell you a lot about who's watching Fox News.)

On a level that is difficult to explain, I believe Obama's heart is genuine and he cares deeply about the everyman[1] who schleps to work every day to put food on the table and pay the bills and buy the unnecessary somethings we all buy.

[1]
Or woman.

Started: 2012-05-22