Summer's Over (July 7, 2006)

An Open Letter to the children of Long Island:


I’m sorry to have to tell you this, kids, but the summer’s over. Actually, it was officially over on June 28th, when I ducked into Marshall’s to escape the sweltering heat and was greeted by racks of the latest in fall fashions. I should have seen it coming when the Bed, Bath, & Beyond’s Back-to-College displays were already getting dusty the day after high school graduations, while the Christmas decorations were, no doubt, on their way out to the selling floor.


It used to be that summer had three “first days of.” There was Memorial Day, in May, that, when the sun cooperated, drove Long Islanders in droves to Mr. Jones’ Beach on the “unofficial first day of summer.” Then there was the day of the summer solstice, June 21 usually, which was the real “first day of summer.” But everyone knew that summer didn’t truly begin until the July 4th weekend. Then, there were eight weeks of summer camp or summer school, and a week for back-to-school shopping. Summer ended on the Labor Day weekend, always in September, when you had the last barbeque of the year and put away the bathing suits. Never mind that autumn doesn’t begin until September 21 (the 23rd this year); on the Wednesday after Labor Day we would don our woolen sweaters and slacks to greet old friends and face new teachers, while wiping off the sweat with our long sleeves.


There was a rhythm to the seasons: it was hot in the summer, cold in the winter, and delightful (though in polar opposite ways) in spring and fall. But I’m not talking about Global Warming (sorry, Al); I’m talking about the merchants who rush the sales seasons and tease, taunt, and tempt customers with their rush-rush marketing schemes. I wouldn’t want to be a toddler (or a parent of one) and be faced with tantalizing Halloween candy in every supermarket, drug store or department store, only to be told, “Hang in there, you’ve got nearly four months, 100+ days! before you can put on your costumes and fill your tummy with bags with of yummy candy.” And, of course, by the time you are at last celebrating Halloween, the Christmas rush is all but over.


Everyone knows that the calendar we use today was man- (probably-not-woman-) made; there’s no earthly reason why New Year’s isn’t celebrated in August, except for the fact that it coincides with earlier, pagan celebrations; the Hebrew calendar marks late summer/early fall as the beginning of a new year, and the Chinese calendar pegs the depths of the winter in the northern hemisphere as the time of its new year. But our calendar didn’t just fall neatly into place: the days and months had to be massaged, maneuvered, and finally shoved into being by everyone from Popes to Emperors to 18th century officials (who imposed the “eleven day” change in 1752), to whom we have to thank for 7-day weeks, 12-month years, and 365 (but sometimes 366) days a year.


Daylight Savings Time is another of those constructs that seems had always been, but was, in fact, only introduced in 1918, and has been fiddled with many times over the past century. And soon Daylight Savings Time will extend longer, and Eastern Standard Time will be shorter; starting in March 2007, daylight time in the United States will begin on the second Sunday in March (instead of the first Sunday in April) and end on the first Sunday in November, instead of the last Sunday in October). The rationalization for the imposition of Daylight Savings Time that I had been taught as a child, that farmers wouldn’t have to milk their cows in the dark, sounds less and less plausible. I would think that those cows would be mighty confused by now, as am I.


The good news is that Halloween, always October 31, will give sugar-crazed children another hour of afternoon sunlight in which they can extort candy from and play pranks upon their hapless neighbors. But the political campaign season, for those who follow these things, will still begin in the heat of the summer, and will still culminate on a cold, dark November night (not the first Tuesday of November, though, but the first Tuesday after the first Monday).


It would be nice to go back to a time when you could buy a bathing suit in July and snow shovels in November. The most I can hope for, though, is that we will rush the seasons so far ahead that, at least for a few years, our calendars and the marketing seasons will be in synchronicity with each other.


So pack up your newly-purchased backpacks with your newly-purchased school supplies and set your newly-purchased alarm clocks for tomorrow morning, children, because school started, like, yesterday.

A Soap Opera Actor Died this Week

A soap opera actor died this week. But he didn’t just die; he shot himself in the head in his home here in Huntington, New York. His name was Benjamin Hendrickson and he played Lt. Hal Munson on the television soap opera As the World Turns for over 20 years.

Hal Munson was an upright, loyal, dependable cop with a wrinkled shar-pei face and a good heart. He was the kind of man who maybe would forget to buy flowers on your birthday, but would step in to do the dinner dishes when he saw you were tired; who didn’t miss a child’s soccer game or school play; who would take a leave of absence from his job to nurse his mother as she was dying of cancer.

Benjamin Hendrickson took a leave of absence a few years ago, to handle what were announced as “personal problems.” He was replaced by a journeyman actor, but fans were overjoyed to see him return. He hadn’t looked well for several years; but no one knew what was happening inside. Surprisingly, I never ran into him in Huntington (which is really a very small town) although I once answered a telephone call from him when a film he was in was playing at our local art-house cinema.

I wonder if he knew how many fans he had. I don’t know if he had a fan club; he never played the sexy romantic character, and I think that fans of the show just liked to see him around Oakdale (the fictional town that mirrors Huntington), as familiar and re-assuring as the cop on the beat. I wonder if I had had a chance to meet him face-to-face at the Cinema or at the Public Library or at Heckscher Park, if I could have said anything that would have touched his heart and pierced through the depression to make his life worth living.

“Mr. Hendrickson,” I probably would have babbled like an idiot, “You are so cool! Millions of people enjoy seeing you on ‘As The World Turns.’ Watching you has made my life a little lighter. Keep up the good work!”

So what can I take from his sudden death? What is the universal truth that I can learn from his life? I once knew a bright, lovely, kind young man who worked for a newspaper. One day he was in an auto collision and poof! He was gone. He was so full of energy and light that it was hard to accept that he was erased from the Earth. Here’s what he taught me: numbers under ten should be written as numerals, and numbers over ten should be written out in letters. Or maybe it was the other way around. I don’t know. But I remember our conversation that day, and that’s what I carry around with me.

What can I learn from Benjamin Hendrickson, what lesson can I carry around for the rest of my life? Maybe nothing as practical or profound as the finer points of proofreading a newspaper article.

I suppose what I have learned from my friend, my cop on the beat, my Hal Munson, is that you can never know the pain a person is hiding deep inside; a pain mere words can never reach. ‘Benjamin,’ I want to say, ‘Your mother is supposed to die before you. It’s terrible, but it’s the way of the world. Benjamin,’ I want to say, ‘Your life has meaning to millions of people.’ ‘Benjamin,’ I want to say, ‘Give me a call and we’ll talk it out. You can save me and I can save you.’

Would it have made a difference?

July 10, 2006

Book Review: "The Telephone Gambit" by Seth Shulman

A thrill-ride, roller-coaster, can’t-put-it-down detective story you can devour in one day. Seth Shulman, a technology writer working in an office at MIT’s Dibner Institute, inadvertently happens upon a mystery regarding Alexander Graham Bell’s 1876 patent for the telephone.


Documents that had been sealed for more than a hundred years which were now open to the public through the Library of Congress, online, led him from Bell’s home-life and education in Scotland to courtrooms in the U.S. as he faced challenge after challenge to his questionable patent. But it was just a crucial few weeks in Bell’s 1876 notes that piqued Shulman’s curiosity and urged him to dig deeper into this 100+ year-old mystery. Bell paid a visit to Washington D.C., filed his patent, and then returned to Massachusetts with a completely different idea from the one he had been working on before his trip. Interestingly, his notes (when superimposed on inventor Elisha Gray’s own notes) seem to be influenced by Gray’s invention. The question is, did Bell have access to Gray’s notes, and if he did, how and when would he have done so? And what role did his future father-in-law, wealthy investor Gardner Greene Hubbard, play in obtaining the patent?


It’s all water over the Charles River Dam now, of course, with the humble telephone becoming obsolete while cell phones have supplanted what is now called, derisively, a “land phone,” meaning that contraption attached to your wall. Technology is racing so fast that an invention that, while still perfectly serviceable, is more at home in an antique shop than your home/office/media room.


But Shulman raises more important issues than just the possibility of wrong-doing at the Patent Office. Just who is Alexander Graham Bell? A teacher of the deaf, an elocutionist, an inventor. I can stare at photographs of the real Alec Bell, but in my mind he will look a close second to the iconic Alexander Graham Bell, as played by genial actor Don Ameche in the 1939 film, “The Story of Alexander Graham Bell.” The real Bell spoke with a thick Scottish burr, but the voice of Bell for nearly 70 years has been a mid-west American one. And his famous interjection, when he spilled battery acid [what was he doing with battery acid? It’s complicated; read the book] on himself and cried out, “Mr. Watson, come here, I need you!” in my mind’s eye brings forth another mid-westerner, young star-in-the-making Henry Fonda. (Whether that interjection was ever uttered, of course, is up for debate. History is what happened, but time refines, and what serves the story is what will survive as the truth. As with the rivalry between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse, between Nikola Tesla and Guglielmo Marconi, there is the truth, the myth, and what lies between.


What makes a myth? It needs four key components. First of all, a hero. A handsome young man with a vision and the intelligence and resourcefulness to see it through. Second, a storyline that moves inexorably from the beginning to a foregone conclusion: the man has a dream; he faces challenges along the way; then, when he’s almost at the point of despair, Eureka! suddenly his dream is realized! It helps, too, that there’s a villain – in this case, inventor Elisha Gray, of Western Electric, working on the same technology, claiming that the methodology was his, and that he was only thwarted by the time-stamp on his paperwork at the patent office in Washington D.C. And finally, a love interest for our hero. Mabel Hubbard, a lovely young hearing-impaired lass who was Bell’s student; a bright girl with a quick mind who was his cheerleader and champion. It didn’t hurt that Mabel’s father was a wealthy, influential mogul with the contacts to help Bell “jump the line” past Gray, as rumor has it. With a hero, storyline, villain and the girl, you have an irresistible concoction that is easily swallowed by the public.


Bell got his patent, but the years of litigation seem to have left him uninterested in furthering the technology of the telephone. It’s his name, ironically, that survives through all this: Bell. Bells are ringing; Bell Telephone; the symbol of Bell Telephone: a silhouette of a bell.


Shulman wisely limits his own personal details in the story; I was interested in his research methods, and his colleagues and contacts are described briefly, but they fade into the background and it’s Bell who remains on center stage.


When Alec and Mabel Bell at last retire to their estate in Canada at the turn of the last century, Shulman points out, it’s Bell’s scientific bent that leads him to remark on the greenhouse effect that was already causing the Earth’s temperature to rise. The man, after all, was not just a technician, or a scientist, or a lucky, well-connected patent jumper; he was, indeed, a visionary.

Book Review: "Let's Cook Together" by Bernice Stock

It’s not hard to shop or cook healthy foods for a child – the trick is to get them to eat what you have prepared! In “Let’s Cook Together,” a cookbook/guidebook dedicated to helping today’s child to enjoy healthy, nutritious foods. The meals are not simply presented to the child – the child is very much a participant in the process.

As an Early Childhood Educator, I have seen pre-school children go hungry at lunchtime rather than to eat unfamiliar foods. Bernice Stock gives novel strategies to entice the child into the world of natural, whole, organic foods.

In a word? “Relax.” Introduce new foods little by little, and without comment. Eat your salad without discussion. Be creative: Serve snacks on doll’s dishes.

Ready to begin? Begin at the beginning. Stock advises you take the time to plan a shopping trip with your child to your local health food store, farmer’s market, or even a well-stocked supermarket. Once home, explore ways to prepare the food. Stock gives more than 50 recipes to cover breakfast, lunch, and dinner, along with salad, snacks, and special treats. Each recipe lists ingredients and preparation instructions, as well as information on the nutritional value of the dish. The pages are decorated with charming, full-color illustrations by young children.

In her first book, “The Smorgasbord of My Life,” Ms. Stock recounts the ways in which her upbringing, always centered around the Family, both nourished and starved her; in any case, it all came down to Food: the food she was fed; the food she cooked as a young wife and mother; and the food that nearly destroyed her body. Ultimately, though, it was through the thoughtful, intelligent way that she learned to regard food as a friend, not an enemy, and the balm which helped her heal.

Book Review: "101 People Who Are Really Screwing America" by Jack Huberman

Dr. Phil is the LEAST Repugnant Person in this Book

Out of 101+ people in this book, Dr. Phil (#91) comes across as the least repugnant person who is really screwing America. After all, adults who are dumb enough to appear on his show deserve what they get and any child dumb enough to have parents who are dumb enough to appear on his show deserve what they get.

But the rest of the list? Scary. Far from being “Compassionate Conservatives,” the members of the Imperial Presidency (where is Richard Nixon when you need him?) and its Court have pulled a coup against our democratic system, with the result that we have a government of the Bushies, by the Bushies, and for the Bushies.

(To be clear: I am using the term “Bushies” to stand for everyone who stands against whatever I stand for: ending the Iraq War; respecting the environment and the scientific method; First Amendment, Second Amendment – OK, let’s say all the amendments, when interpreted by a fair and balanced Supreme Court – and yes, compassion.)

From the outdoor environment to the privacy of one’s own home, the Bushies do seem to be preoccupied with sex: from raping and pillaging our national natural resources to determining what happens in the privacy of one’s bedroom. Small-minded people, they hoard what they have, and then want more. From Pat Robertson (#55) and his “Christian Coalition” to Bradley Smith 1 (#79) and Bradley Smith 2 (#78), they seem to believe that they are the ones to set the national agenda – and why shouldn’t they? Since January 20, 2001, they have been.

In a prescient and eerie choice, #19, Alberto Gonzales, comes across as the worst Attorney General ever, in a book that was written well before this month’s (March 2007) events: the purge of the U.S. attorneys for purely partisan political reasons. And Condi Rice at #10 ranks even higher (the lower the number, the higher is your Screwing America listing) than Gonzales, most notably for her horrid, heartbreaking joke about 9/11: The Bush government was completely surprised on 9/11, she claimed, despite the title of the President’s Daily Briefing on August 6, 2001: “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States.” It must have been a joke, because she couldn’t have been serious.

Media figures in all forms come in for a drubbing: Rupert Murdoch (#14,) Clear Channel Communications (#50), and even the so-called Liberal Media (#13) are called on the carpet. In a system where a 24-hour news network, proclaiming itself “Fair and Balanced” (#28), is nothing but a mouthpiece for one political party, a confused Average American (#57 – oh, my, is no one spared from Huberman’s wrath?) had better turn off their Ipods and TV’s and cancel their newspaper subscriptions and curl up with a good book. (My Pet Goat would be an excellent choice. Just ask #2.).

My one quibble? #44. I’ll never forget my first time. And I refuse to give it up.

The book is amusing but infuriating. Keep away if you are a Democrat with high blood pressure. Everyone else, read at your own risk. But read it.

Book Review: "The G-d Delusion" by Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins can read my mind. That's the only explanation I find possible, because as I was reading "The G-d Delusion" I kept exclaiming to myself, "That's just what I always thought!" Except his language is more elegant than mine. Although, not always so elegant; his writing is accessible, engaging and clever, and some of his footnotes are LOL (Laugh Out Loud) funny.

[I Don't Know Why: Because of my religious upbringing, in this review I personally write the name "G-d"; observant Jews avoid writing the name casually because of the risk that the written name might later be defaced.]

Who's Got the Whole World in his Hands?: Dawkins, a respected biologist/philosopher, takes his reputation as Charles Darwin's fiercest supporter and asks how a scientist, or any educated adult, can possible believe in religion (the monotheist ones; he gives Buddhism and Confucianism a pass as "ethical systems or "philosophies of life"). I know I should feel insulted when he calls my G-d, the one I grew up believing in, the G-d of the Hebrew Bible, a "psychotic delinquent," (p. 38), but I like to keep an open mind. I was raised by parents who were themselves raised as Orthodox Jews, but as a family we slipped to Conservative Judaism; then I fell backward into Reform for a few years. I've flirted with the Reconstructionists, as well. I believe in Judaism as a culture, but find it hard to believe in the religion. Right now I'm a Jewish-born Questioner, but as a Questioner, for absolutely no reason, I still don't eat pork.

Teach Your Children Well: Dawkins was born an Anglican child, but rightly points out that a child isn't really a member of a religion, but basically a small human mimicking the words, prayers, and beliefs that were taught by his/her parents, who were obviously taught those words, prayers, and beliefs by their own parents. So the game goes on, and for thousands of years the collected weight of all of those maters and paters impress on the child, leaving him too laden by layers of guilt to make a conscious decision to question his faith. Every religion seems to have the same principle: pile on the guilt, until the child-turned-adult is paralyzed by fear of some version of fire and brimstone, and is afraid to declare himself an atheist, agnostic, or just a questioner with an open mind.

Did You Dance Along the Light of Day?: The book is a real page-turner, careening through space and time, language and culture, from a dissection of the Old and New Testaments, quoting from another recently published book, "Misquoting Jesus" (in England titled, "Whose Word Is It?") by Bart Ehrman on the perils of taking a book that had been translated and transcribed (and modified) by hundreds of translators and scribes over thousands of years, as gospel truth; to an overview of the Universe, with its billion billion available planets, and the probability of life on just one of them; to the political battles over creationism vs. science in school curricula, both in Great Britain and the United States. Along the way we, of course, meet some monkey-obsessed fanatics, and for the gazillionth time, Dawkins must explain, as he did in "The Ancestors' Tale," that we did not descend from monkeys, but do share a common ancestor. He most emphatically does not imply that your mother is a monkey.

The Fools on the Hill: The most devastating comparison in the book (although they are discussed at opposite ends of the book) is between Thomas Jefferson and his fellow Fathers who were most responsible for America's Founding, whom Dawkins describes as "passionate secularists" (p. 43) and the recently-disgraced Pastor Ted Haggard - his disgrace revealed too recently to be included in this first edition - as "the interviewee who most appalled the British television audience." (p. 319). In fact, according to Dawkins, the British are horrified by the influence of religious Fundamentalists in the United States. I must have some British genes, because I am equally horrified.

Now I Don't Claim to be an A Student: The worrisome thing about the anti-science bias promulgated by religious fanatics is the way that they need to subvert scientific knowledge to fit in with their religious beliefs. It's as if their Intelligent Designer just created the Earth about 6,000 years ago - the Young Earth theory - populating his arts and crafts project with both dinosaurs and homo sapiens, disregarding any evidence that biologists, geologists, and anthropologists (and many other -ologists) have discovered over the course of human history. If the Bible is a "major source book for literary culture," (p. 341) and the King James Bible "includes passages of outstanding literary merit," Dawkins will admit that the Bibles and holy books of religion are beautifully written stories, allegories, and a glimpse into the minds of the men who wrote them, but they most assuredly are not science. Thus the religious -ologists must twist the scientific facts to fit their faith.

But I'm Trying to Be: The rigorous scientific method demands measurable evidence and experiments that can be replicated independently by others. Expecting a book or series of books written thousands of years ago to explain phenomena that have been discovered in just the past hundred years is like expecting the Albert Einstein of 1905 to fly a rocket to the moon - he was responsible for making moon rockets possible, but in 1905 he could only imagine the dream, not fulfill it.

Fall In to the Gap: "Gap" is the favorite explanation by the religious of events or processes that are not understood right now, leading them to rush to fill in the Gap with their Designer, rather than using objective, impartial inquiry, with the knowledge that is known to date, and pursuing questions that have not been answered yet.

Dites-moi, Pourquoi (Tell Me Why)?: Dawkins doesn't know it all. I don't know it all. Yet.

I'm a Questioner.

Thank you for reading this review. Give yourself 5 points for every song title or lyric that you recognized.

Book Review: "The Merchant of Power" by John Wasik

The Most Famous Man You've Never Heard Of; Subtitled: "The more you know, the more you know you don't know."

Coming across "The Merchant Of Power" by John Wasik, I was intrigued by the title and book jacket, but I half expected this book to be a clever spoof, like a book-bound Zelig. It was hard to believe that one person could have had such an effect on the history of the United States, indeed living a substantial part of his life in New York City, but had been almost erased from history less than a century later. In fact, I Googled Mr. Insull, and found that yes, he did exist, and yes, he was that influential in the modern industrialized America of the late 19th- and early 20th-century.

Insull was the business "brain" behind the eccentric tinkerer, Thomas Edison, who comes across as something of an old fool, and in the New York years, Insull was deeply involved in the Edison/Westinghouse/Tesla/AC/DC controversy, and the bitter J.P. Morgan takeover of Edison Electric (which became General Electric). Getting the heck out of Dodge before things got too dicey, he headed west to a primitive outpost on the edge of the American frontier, Chicago. Finally he was able to work his magic without running up against adversaries like Morgan or George Westinghouse; he bought and consolidated several small electric companies that were serving the city and created the complex electric grid that we know today.

Part biography, part history, part science (or, electrical engineering, at least) and part gossip, the book illuminates a forgotten man, and a never-to-be-forgotten period of the American story.

Book Review: "Dangerous Nation" by Robert Kagan

Be prepared to be shocked (and awed) because Robert Kagan posits some of the most controversial theories about the United States' foreign policy including:

Washington's Farewell Address: a speech not for the ages, but one only intended for the first few years of the young republic Monroe Doctrine: much debated, but not implemented, because of the issue that tore apart the nation in the second quarter of the 19th century Hawaiian Statehood: applied for annexation to the United States in the first half of the 19th century, but because it fell south of the Missouri compromise line, and thus would be classified as a slave state, refused, and had to wait more than 100 years to join the nation as a state The Spanish-American War: perhaps the most popular war in U.S. history?

Kagan takes us on an exhaustive, exhausting thrill-ride through the foreign policy decisions of the United States from its pre-Revolutionary War era to the Spanish-American War at the end of the 19th century. (The reader will have to wait for the next volume to find out what happens in the twentieth century.) Forget your dull high school history books; what you'll find here confounds the complacent reader who can name the Battles of each of our wars, but not the battles that were fought before, during, and after the bloodshed.

The saddest, most shocking section of the book focuses on the issue that eclipsed America's external focus of terroritorial expansion in the 19th century as it imploded in the years from the 1820's to the 1860's: slavery. Kagan describes a time when the United States stood alone among the nations of the world as our shameful sin, slavery, was denounced by intellectuals and the common man throughout the rest of the world community. We were founded on a belief that all men were created equal, and indeed had certain inalienable rights, yet we were hypocritically ignoring the denial of rights to our fellow human beings toiling in our own backyards.

The war that erupted between two sections of the country, sections as diametrically opposed to each other as the primary colors of red and blue, was the most wretched, hard-fought, emotionally-charged conflict in our history. And the aftermath was just as devastating as the lead-up to the war, with the South feeling itself to be an occupied country, with its "colored" population hardly any better off than they were before the War.

Kagan introduces us to characters who were the rock stars of their time (think Bono, not Britney). John Quincy Adams emerges from the shadow of a much-respected Founding Father father to become the leading abolitionist in public office. And William Seward, who, alas, has gone down in history attached to the unfortunate moniker "Folly," is revealed as one of New York State's (and the nation's) most principled, distinguished statesmen. (And Seward's Folly? Hardly. The 20th century Cold War would have heated up to a boil if Russia had still maintained a presence in the North American continent.)

Perhaps the biggest revelation in the book concerns the Spanish-American War, over the issue of Cuban independence. Cuban rebels, in an attempt to repel the Spanish, ceased working in any industry in an effort to force the Spanish out; the Spanish, playing hardball, removed hundreds of thousands of Cubans from their homes and settled them in (re)concentration camps, where as many as 300,000 are believed to have died from starvation. The citizens of the United States, Kagan maintains, demanded military action, fueled not by revenge for the sinking of the Maine, not by the lurid stories of the so-called yellow journalists, but by humanitarian concerns.

Heroes and villains, brilliant minds and darkest hearts, Kagan introduces you to a country, a people, who struggled to create a society that reflected the very best in human achievement, sometimes attaining it, sometimes not.