"Goblinproofing One's Chicken Coop"... "God's Doodle: The Life and Times of the Penis"...

"How Tea Cosies Changed the World"... "How to Sharpen Pencils"... "Lofts of North America: Pigeon Lofts"... "Was Hitler ILL?..."

I'm going to recommend "How to Sharpen Pencils," which actually has a subtitle, so it's "How to Sharpen Pencils: A Practical & Theoretical Treatise on the Artisanal Craft of Pencil Sharpening for Writers, Artists, Contractors, Flange Turners, Anglesmiths, & Civil Servants."

You're probably thinking what's the point?, but go to the link and check out the table of contents. I, for one am pleased to see a separate chapter on the wall-mounted, hand-crank pencil sharpener (though as long-time readers of this blog know, my personal "wall-mounted" pencil sharpener is mounted on a horizontal surface, so I'm concerned about whether the author recognizes that what he terms "wall-mounted" can indeed be rotated for attachment to a shelf or table-top)).

Also, there's an appendix: "Wines That Taste Like Pencils."

(And by the way, Hitler was not mentally ill and therefore fully responsible for his actions, according to"Was Hitler ILL?: A Final Diagnosis.")

(And here's "God's Doodle: The Life and Times of the Penis." Excerpt (displaying fact-filled but awkward prose): "The classical Roman term for penis was mentula, which one might think had a certain resonance equating as it does to 'little mind.' But eighteenth-century wordsmiths preferred the idiomatic penis, meaning tail, not just to mentula but to the most popular Roman slang of gladius, or sword — which as vagina meant sheath or scabbard, fitted nicely.")

Have a ritualistic sip of fracking fluid with Governor Hickenlooper.

"You can drink it. We did drink it around the table, almost rituallike, in a funny way. It was a demonstration.... they’ve invested millions of dollars in what is a benign fluid in every sense."

(Maybe it will help if you ever get the Hickenloop-ups.)

"Meet the 'Cuomo.' It’s a new printed magazine for your AR-15 rifle..."

"... soon to be available for download, and it holds 30 bullets."

Why does a telephone have 1-2-3 at the top instead of at the bottom, like a calculator?

Because "a modest man" with "variegated accomplishments (he had a doctorate in mathematical psychology, was trained in electrical engineering and had been a professional violinist)" applied behavioral science to telephone design. He was John E. Karlin, who died on January 28th at the age of 94.

Karlin also determined "the optimal length for a phone cord":

Telephone company executives wondered whether the standard cord, then about three feet long, might be shortened. Mr. Karlin’s staff stole into colleagues’ offices every three days and covertly shortened their phone cords, an inch at time. No one noticed, they found, until the cords had lost an entire foot.

From then on, phones came with shorter cords.

Mr. Karlin also introduced the white dot inside each finger hole that was a fixture of rotary phones in later years. After the phone was redesigned at midcentury, with the letters and numbers moved outside the finger holes, users, to AT&T’s bewilderment, could no longer dial as quickly.

With blank space at the center of the holes, Mr. Karlin found, callers no longer had a target at which to aim their fingers. The dot restored the speed.

Despite these efforts at helping, he found himself referred to as "the most hated man in America," because his name was attached to the decision — made in the 1960s — to switch to all-digit phone numbers instead of things like PEnnsylvania 6-5000." The phone system was running out of numbers made from pronounceable words, and it was Karlin figured out that people would be able to remember 7 digits.

I'm old enough to have lived through the big switch from named "exchanges" to all numbers. There was a lot of anguish, back then, over whether the human individual was being turned into a number. It was also in the 60s — 1963 to be exact — that the post office forced ZIP codes on us. Before then, you had a number in between the city and the state names. I remember the last line of my address being Wilmington 3, Delaware. The government tried to soothe us by personifying the number as a human character, Mr. ZIP:



It's hard to imagine the government today using such an obvious, laughable technique as it pushes us into a life of regimentation. Mockery would be made. But those were simpler times.

The man who played trombone with Glenn Miller and the theremin with The Beach Boys...

... was Paul Tanner, who has died at the age of 95.

Tanner's involvement with electronic musical instruments began in the '50s, when he was drawn to the sound of the theremin, with its eerie, sliding notes. (It was notably present in the film scores for "The Lost Weekend" and "Spellbound.")

Fond of its unique tonal qualities, he was bothered by the theremin's playing technique, which required the performer to control it by waving one's hands. Working with inventor Bob Whitsell, Tanner designed an instrument that initially he called the electro-theremin. Eventually, it also received the name Tannerin, although Tanner preferred the title Paul's Box. Unlike the theremin, its method of playing was closer to that of traditional keyboard instruments.

Much as I understand the ease of the keyboard, I love the hand waving used on the original Theremin, which you can see played here by its inventor Leon Theremin:



Here's a terrific documentary about the Theremin. And here's how it looked when The Glenn Miller Orchestra played "In the Mood":



Not an electronic instrument in sight. This was my parents' favorite music, and I wish I had videos of the arguments I had with my father in the 1960s in which he took the position that if the instruments were electrified, it was — as a matter of definition — not music at all, and I got extremely exasperated, staunchly refused to submit to the playing of his old records, and repeatedly asserted that I liked rock and roll because of "the sound." The sound? Define your terms!

Here's a 10-CD set of Glenn Miller music for less than $20. You'll have to use electricity to play it, but I think my father would approve.

"Because of its shortcomings — driving range, cost and recharging time — the electric vehicle is not a viable replacement for most conventional cars..."

"We need something entirely new." Said Toyota’s vice chairman, Takeshi Uchiyamada.

Robot news.

1. "The Rise of the Robots Has an Upside." Adapt!

2. "British troops are using... state-of-the-art handheld tiny surveillance helicopters, which relay reliable full motion video and still images back to the devices' handlers...." Close your windows!

IN THE COMMENTS: Chef Mojo said:

3. Kia "Respect The Tech" Super Bowl commercial.

Iran sends a monkey into space.

And — it says — "returning its shipment intact."

In 2010, Iran successfully sent a rat, turtle and worms into space. But an attempt to send a monkey up in a rocket failed in 2011.

Did this new monkey return alive and in good shape? Can't tell from "shipment intact" (which may be a translation).

Quite aside from concerns about the monkey, Iran's space program may be part of developing a delivery system for a nuclear bomb.

Harvard prof isn't advocating gestating a Neanderthal.

He's just saying it's "technically possible someday" and "we need to start talking about it today."

[George M.] Church said he has done perhaps 500 interviews about his research during more than two decades and this is the first one to spiral out of control quite like this.

But he said, “I’m not going to run away. … I want to use it as an educational moment to talk about journalism and technology.”

I bet Neanderthals would be better journalists. Let's get some, pronto, to help us with our endless fuckups.

"Did the Framers have batteries, or did they have to plug everything in?"

A wisecrack question of mine, just now, in the middle of a long conversation about the theory of original intent. Meade — who is not a lawyer — was engaging me — a law professor —  on the topic because he's off somewhere in the forum section of the local alternative newspaper website arguing with people about the 2d Amendment and so forth and we got to talking about how much of the modern world the Framers could have envisioned.

"Or did they get their electricity from lightning?" I quipped before looking up the history of batteries and seeing:

The usage of "battery" to describe electrical devices dates to Benjamin Franklin, who in 1748 described multiple Leyden jars (early electrical capacitors) by analogy to a battery of cannons.

Footnote 6 at the link quotes "Memoirs of Benjamin Franklin," Volume 2:

"Upon this we made what we called an electrical battery, consisting of eleven panes of large sash-glass, armed with thin leaden plates, pasted on each side, placed vertically, and supported at two inches distance on silk cords, with black hooks of leaden wire, one from each side, standing upright, distant from each other..."

"The toothbrush moustache (also called Hitler moustache, Charlie Chaplin moustache, 1/3 moustache, philtrum moustache, the postage stamp, or soul (mou)stache)..."

"... is a moustache, shaved at the edges, except for three to five centimeters above the centre of the lip. The sides of the moustache are vertical rather than tapered."

I found this Wikipedia article — "Toothbrush moustache" — last night after asserting that Hitler adopted the Hilter mustache to emulate Charlie Chaplin. The topic came up in connection with the array of photographs — Obama/Hitler/Stalin — that we're talking about in the previous post. Meade didn't believe me, and my belief — even if it's wrong — is at least common enough that I could easily do the research. (A couple weeks ago, the roles were reversed: Meade asserted a misconception common enough to have a Snopes article declaring it false.)

So, according to Wikipedia, the toothbrush mustache "originally became popular in America in the late 19th century."

It was a neat, uniform, low-maintenance style that echoed the standardization and uniformity brought on by industrialization, in contrast to the more flamboyant moustaches typical of the 19th century such as the Imperial, Walrus, Handlebar, Horseshoe, Pencil and Fantastico moustaches.

Brought on by industrialization? Is that some stray unsupported — Marxist? — opinion that needs editing out of Wikipedia? There is a citation. It's to a 2007 Vanity Fair article by Rich Cohen called "Becoming Adolf" ("Hitler's Toothbrush mustache is one of the most powerful symbols of the last century, an inch of hair that represents infinite evil. The author had his reasons for deciding to wear one.") All Cohen says is that the toothbrush mustache was "a bit of modern efficiency," replacing the old style mustache, which paralleled the way "the old, monarchical world... was about to be crushed by the rising tide of assembly-line America."

There's a big sidetrack here about whether the taste for the modern — clean lines, low ornamentation — corresponds to a loss of individuality inherent in assembly line production. And we've got to get back to the question at hand: whether Hitler adopted the mustache to look like Chaplin. But I must take this sidetrack long enough to say that in the 1940 movie "The Great Dictator," when Chaplin exploits his resemblance to Hitler by playing a Hitler character and a Jewish man who looks like him, he concludes with a big speech that is mostly about overcoming, not fascism, but machines.

[M]achinery that gives abundance has left us in want.... More than machinery we need humanity.... Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men, machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts. You are not machines....

(I've read Chaplin's Autobiography, and it is full of fretting about modern machines. (And in the movie "Modern Times," the Chaplin character goes nuts doing assembly line work and then gets caught up inside a big machine.))

Now, back to the question: Did Hitler try to look like Chaplin? I'm sticking with the Rich Cohen article, because the writing is better than Wikipedia's generic style.

Ron Rosenbaum, perhaps the only historian to give the mustache its proper due, fixes its appearance with confidence. "It was Chaplin's first, before Hitler's," he writes in an essay from The Secret Parts of Fortune. "Chaplin adopted a little black crepe blot beneath the nose for his Mack Sennett silent comedies after 1915, Hitler didn't adopt his until late 1919...."

But, Cohen says, there's some conflicting material. Someone who served with Hitler in WWI wrote an essay saying he cut a bigger mustache down so it would fit under the gas mask. And then there's Hitler's sister-in-law Bridget.

Bridget Hitler was Irish and lived in Liverpool, where, according to the memoir, the young Adolf spent a lost winter. 

I'm reading this out loud and Meade shouts "The Fifth Beatle!" — which suggests a fantastico idea for a photoshop using this iconic early Beatles pic, adding Hitler, and dabbing the Fab Four with little black smudges across the philtrum. I continue with the dubious tale of Bridget Hitler:

Bridget (or whoever) says she often bickered with her brother-in-law. Because he was disagreeable, but mostly because she could not stand his unruly 'stache. In one of the great inadvertent summaries of historical character, she writes that in this, as in everything, he went too far.

The year in question was 1912–13. So we're currently observing the 100th anniversary of the mustache, if Bridget Hitler — not the gas mask or Chaplin — inspired distinctive shaving.  But we do know that...

[Hitler] was wearing the Toothbrush at the first Nazi meetings, when there were just a few people in a room full of empty chairs. One day, an early financial supporter of the Nazi Party advised Hitler to grow out his mustache. He did this delicately but firmly, in the manner of a man trying to protect an investment. The mustache made the Nazi look freakish. Hitler was advised to grow it at least "to the end of the lips." Hitler was a vain man, and you can almost feel him bristle. Here's what Hitler said: "If it is not the fashion now, it will be later because I wear it."

The exact opposite became true: It can never be in fashion, because he wore it. You can't even indulge a love of Chaplin, because as Rich Cohen puts is: "If you dress like Chaplin, you run the risk of being mistaken for Hitler, as, if you dress like Evel Knievel, as I do when it rains, you run the risk of being mistaken for Elvis."

Ron Rosenbaum argues that the presence of Chaplin's 'stache on Hitler's face encouraged Western leaders to underestimate the Führer. "Chaplin's mustache became a lens through which to look at Hitler," he writes. "A glass in which Hitler became merely Chaplinesque: a figure to be mocked more than feared, a comic villain whose pretensions would collapse of his own disproportionate weight like the Little Tramp collapsing on his cane. Someone to be ridiculed rather than resisted."

So, it can't be ascertained whether Hitler first shaved his mustache down because of Chaplin, but the resemblance to Chaplin certainly mattered. I think it's more likely that Hitler was not trying to look like Chaplin — even if it's true that Hitler — like most people — loved Chaplin. First: Why would a political leader choose to look like a clown? Even if it helped him to have some people not take him seriously, he needed to be taken seriously to acquire power. Second: The toothbrush mustache was a big fashion in Germany early enough that the New York Times published an item in 1907: "'Toothbrush' Mustache/German Women Resent Its Usurpation of the 'Kaiserbart.'"

"Man is naturally very ugly," [wrote one German woman.] "The only natural adornment he ever had was his mustache, and that he is now ruthlessly mutilating. Instead of the peaceful hirsute ornament of the past he is marring his face with a lot of bristles."

Peaceful! An interesting association. To bristle is — I'm quoting the OED — "to display temper or indignation, to 'show fight.'" Imagine blaming the mustache. But that is how some people like to think. It's not the human being, but the inanimate thing that is the source of evil. Cohen lampoons that kind of thinking:

... I had seen Richard Dawkins, the author of The God Delusion, interviewed by Bill O'Reilly, who, citing Stalin and Hitler, said he thought atheists, because of their lack of restraining faith, were more susceptible to evil. To which Dawkins (in essence) replied: both Stalin and Hitler wore mustaches — do we therefore think the mustache was the cause of their behavior? I experienced this as an epiphany: By Jove! I said to myself. It was the mustache!

"There are three things in life that people like to stare at: a flowing stream, a crackling fire..."

".... and a Zamboni clearing the ice."

"What we found was that people are pretty patient for up to two seconds..."

All right then.

IN THE COMMENTS: Levity over my forgetting to include: the link.

Curiosity brushes off a rock.

On Mars.

"The first key to thinking about 3-D printers is this: Do not think printer."

"Think magic box that creates any object you can imagine."

Old news about "news" and dog-powered machines.

In the 19th century, there were lots of inventions like this:



I discovered that as a result of having looked up the word "news" in the Oxford English Dictionary and run across this sentence in Richard Burton's 1621 book "Anatomy of Melancholy": "As a horse in a mill, a dog in a wheele, they run around without alteration or newes." I could picture working horses harnessed to a mill, trudging around in a circle, but what was the corresponding situation for a dog?

How about a dog-powered car?



The reason I was looking up the word "news" was that it was the last word in today's Gatsby sentence, and Meade, reading what I wrote, asserted that "news" was a word that dated back to the early days of movie newsreels and was an acronym for "north, east, west, south." No way, I said, dashing into the OED for confirmation. The idea of the pluralizing the word for "new" to mean news, is quite old, much older than English:

Spec. use of plural of new n., after Middle French nouvelles (see novel n.), or classical Latin nova new things, in post-classical Latin also news (from late 13th cent. in British sources), use as noun of neuter plural of novus new (compare classical Latin rēs nova (feminine singular) a new development, a fresh turn of events).

Meanwhile, Meade found a Snopes item, which established a pedigree for the misconception.

Electronic devices on planes are dangerous...

... but not for the reason the FAA seems to want you to believe.

If progress [toward changing the rules] is slow, there will eventually be an episode on a plane in which someone is seriously harmed as a result of a device being on during takeoff. But it won’t be because the device is interfering with the plane’s systems. Instead, it will be because one passenger harms another, believing they are protecting the plane from a Kindle, which produces fewer electromagnetic emissions than a calculator.

The notion that technology is the reason the murder rate has fallen by half.

"I witnessed light sexual play among officers, a lot of e-cigarette vaping, and a whole lot of officers laughing and clowning in regard to some of your nude images, dear passengers."

What goes on in those sealed rooms where TSA agents look at X-ray images of passengers in screening machines? The agents are isolated where they won't see the in-the-flesh individuals being screened, but they will see them naked. How would you expect human being to act while doing a job like that?

I love the placement of e-cigarettes in the scenario, as if they make the TSA workers more disreputable and sleazy — in a high-tech kind of way that meshes with the high-tech way they are peeping at nudity.

Quite aside from the TSA and its awful problems, vaping e-cigarettes can be amusing way to do something with your mouth and hands. Here's a kind that doesn't even deliver nicotine.

"What we are seeing are the early stages of what I call, 'The Appification of Everything.'"

Says Anthony Wing Kosner:

This is not about adding more icons to your home screen, though, but about a fundamental shift in how we metabolize information and entertainment. The web as the universal storage medium is being superseded by the internet as universal flow medium. Instead of thinking about the web as a hierarchical tree of documents — a Wikipedia of Wikipedias — we need to start thinking about all of that content as an underlying service layer for application-based interfaces.