07.16.09
Great Moments in Baltimore History (which never happened)
A law professor at the University of Arizona wrote me last summer, out of the internet ether, to ask about my sources for a Sports Illustrated article I wrote 27 years ago (published 7-12-82) about Thomas Edison. He was interested, he said, because of a book about the legal history of the movie industry that he was writing for Yale University Press. Maybe I no longer had the specific details, he suggested, not knowing that (to my wife’s dismay) I rarely throw anything out.
Today I looked through that file of material again. It includes a copy of the front page of The New York Times from Friday, September 7, 1894, which contains probably my favorite unknown fact I’ve ever stumbled upon in many decades of library research. Nothing to do with Edison, but something I spotted while reeling through a spool of microfilm, trying to get to September 9, 1894.
“Reported Sale of the Eiffel Tower,” the blurb is headlined; the two-paragraph story goes on to say that “a syndicate of Baltimore capitalists has bought the Eiffel Tower,” that the French are going to disassemble it, “and that the immense iron and steel structure will be brought to Baltimore” for that town’s centennial celebration in 1897.
Printed on the front page of the Times? It must be true… although this never seems to have happened. And even a lot of people in Baltimore have never heard the story, as a recent article in that town’s Sun newspaper explains.
No Eiffel Tower, sadly, but Baltimore still can be proud of its famous Bromo-Seltzer Tower.
07.13.09
Let Me Get Back to You on That…
This afternoon on the boat I got into a side riff about the stupid questions tourists ask when they’re on vacation. (Examples: “What do you do with the islands in the winter?” “How long does it take a deer to grow into a moose?”) I encourage questions from our visitors, of course, for how else can you tell what they’d like to know? And even the stupid ones are valuable, since they provide a great deal of entertainment value.
Later, as we neared the dock at the end of the tour, I realized I had never talked personally with some people who’d been standing on the bow, so I went down to say hello. One man, a county commissioner from southern Minnesota, said he’d enjoyed my talk about the questions. He told me his favorite question from work had been asked by a strange woman — “I think she was from Chicago” — who called his office to inquire, “If I ever need 911, what number do I call?”
07.09.09
I Didn’t Know They Flew!
One of the things I dislike about tour guiding in nature: the minute you tell people to look at something — a loon, say, or a harbor porpoise — it often dives down and disappears. Or the reverse: this afternoon out at Great Duck Island, I’d just gotten through explaining how puffins aren’t often seen in these waters, when Captain Larry came on the mike and said, “There’s one right over there.”
An Atlantic puffin (Fratercula arctica), the provincial bird of Newfoundland and Labrador, floating calmly on the water about 50 feet away — first time that’s happened in four years on the tour. Immediately all thoughts of lighthouses were forgotten, as everyone rushed to the port side of the boat. We watched it for a few minutes before it too disappeared, and we went on our way as well.
A few minutes later, Chad came up to the wheelhouse and reported that “One of the women down in the main cabin got all excited when she heard that we’d found a puffin, but said she thought it was a fish. Until it flew away.”
11.19.08
I Should Have Known
Amazingly, when I took our car in to be serviced this morning the dealership had a separate waiting area for grown-ups, quiet, with computer desks, and far removed from the usual place down the hall, with its bad magazines and uncomfortable chairs surrounding an enormous, blaring TV set. It’s hard to go anywhere these days in public without TVs or a radio, which nobody is paying any attention to, disturbing the peace.
Even better, the shuttle driver came by within a few minutes and took me downtown to the city library, so I could escape the place altogether. (And also, happily, came back to get me exactly when he said he would.) Bald on top, with long white hair, obviously a relic of the 60s, he’d left the radio on loud in the van when he went back inside for look for other passengers, so I turned down… whoever it was, Boston I think. It was too early in the morning for Tom Scholz and his pals.
The driver even turned the radio off altogether when he started driving, but couldn’t stand the silence, so before long it was back on — just in time for the 10-minute segment of ads that rounds out any station’s ‘50-minute-classic-rock-music-blocks.’
Right before all the commercial babbling, the DJ had mentioned something about “the new song from Queen!” coming up when he returned. “A new song from Queen?” I asked, thinking maybe the driver kept up with this stuff.
“What?”
“That guy said there’s a new song from Queen. How could that be?”
“Oh,” he said. “I wasn’t listening.”
09.18.08
I Hate Boats
The customer is always right, supposedly, but whenever people coming on board ask, “I get really seasick; where should I sit?” I always want to say, “Maybe you shouldn’t be buying a ticket for a boat trip in the first place.”
Kevin told me this story while we were cleaning the boat after the tour today:
Listen to this, Richard. The other day I was working the ramp of the whale watch boat and, not long before we left the dock, a woman came running up to me and said, “I have to get off the boat. Can I get my money back if I get off the boat right now?”
“Sure,” I said. “We haven’t gone anywhere yet. Just go up to the office and turn in your ticket.”
“I have to get off the boat,” she said again. “I hate boats.”
So there she goes, back up the ramp, and now we’re about to cast off the lines when another woman comes running up to me and says, “Did my sister just get off the boat? She can’t stand boats.” When I told her yes, she said, “Well, if she got off I’m getting off too. I don’t like boats either.”
And that’s it for both of them, except before the second woman starts up the ramp, she turns to me and asks, “By the way, how do we get back to our cruise ship?”
01.25.08
More Fun with Numbers
There’s a full-page photo of Kevin Bacon in this week’s paper, with a little blurb titled No Degrees of Separation, because he’s appearing at Dartmouth College tonight to receive their film award. So I start explaining Bacon numbers to my son, and he (being smarter than me) asks something I’ve never considered — what’s my Bacon number?
I’m not listed in the credits, but I was in Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, part of the crowd during the funeral/fistfight scene in the church (St. Andrew Lutheran in Ellsworth, Maine).
* * *
INT. THE REAR OF THE CHAPEL, FEATURING RACHEL AND DORY
RACHEL screams and starts forward. DORY pulls her back.
RACHEL
Louis! Daddy! Stop it! STOP IT!
INT. LOUIS AND IRWIN
LOUIS is getting up groggily. Hs nose is pouring blood.
IRWIN
How do you like that, you son of a bitch? I should have done it sooner!
IRWIN punches him in the stomach. LOUIS “oofs” and doubles over.
INT. ANGLE ON THE OTHER MOURNERS
* * *
I saw the film way back then on a VCR, not DVD, so I couldn’t slow it down frame by frame and spot the one or two (maybe even three?) frames where I might actually be visible in the congregation. But surely somebody in the cast must have been in a movie with Kevin Bacon.
Herman Munst… I mean Fred Gwynne? Nope. Denise Crosby? Nope. Dale Midkiff? Nope again. Finally I hit paydirt with evil dead Miko Hughes, the murderous three-year-old. Twelve years later he appeared in Apollo 13 as Tom Hanks’s… er, Astronaut James Lovell’s son Jeffrey, while Bacon had third billing as Astronaut Jack Swigert. So my Bacon number is two (tied with Ronald Reagan, it turns out, and one better than than Pope John Paul II).
p.s. Since the accepted wisdom, of course, is often wrong, it turns out that Kevin Bacon is not the center of the Hollywood Universe. He’s not even in the Top 1000 (although, with some 800,000 people listed at IMDB, it’s a pretty large group). My guess for the center would be the great Gene Hackman, and he is currently in the top dozen. And of course the list is constantly changing, but as of today the leader is Rod Steiger.
01.10.08
Number, Please
Cable made an interesting comment on the phone this afternoon — we were talking about sudoku, which I like, he doesn’t. I find it intriguing how the numbers fit together so precisely in rows, columns, and boxes. He says that when he does a crossword puzzle, he might learn a new word, or even be reminded of an old favorite word, but when doing sudoku he never finds a new number, or even a new way to put numbers alongside each other. I.E. “Gee, I never saw a 9 next to a 5 and 4 like that before.” The puzzles don’t interest him, because he never learns anything from them.
(George Carlin, of course, way back when, had that routine: “The Nobel Prize in mathematics was awarded to a California professor who has discovered a new number. The number is bleen, which he claims belongs between 6 and 7.”)
I like sudoku, of course, because when I finish one I feel like I’ve accomplished something, and can take the rest of the day off.
04.10.07
PG-13 (for Parental Guidance)
When my son came to his new school, we heard that the 6th (now 7th) grade class parents group we thus had joined was the most organized, dedicated such group around. I don’t really have experience with any of the other parent groups, of course, but this bunch is remarkably spirited, enjoyable, interesting to spend time with.
Tonight at our regular group meeting, about 30 parents attended, although my favorite attendee — call him Ishmael — was missing. (A lot of fathers and mothers alternate from month to month — one stays at home with the kid[s] while the other comes to the school.)
It turns out Ishmael was there in spirit, however. Near the end of our two-hour meeting, the class teacher reported on a recent series of human sexuality classes that she and two other teachers have been presenting to the 7th grade. Typically, like all her reports, it was well thought-out, moving, considerate, full of information, with a touch of humor — much like the class itself sounds, in fact, a miracle in this day and age in America when most mentions of sex in the classroom bring forth a chorus of parental screeching, uproars, and raving about moral decay.
There was one problem, though, Ishmael’s wife told the group. Their 13-year-old son had come home saddened because somehow, in an odd tangent, the information had leaked out (to coin a phrase) during one class that a family favorite, Pee Wee Herman, had been arrested for illicit behavior in a Florida adult theater.
“Pee Wee did a bad thing, Dad,” Ishmael’s son said, whereupon the father, his wife reported, philosophically told him, “Masturbating in a porno theater? Seems to me that’s kind of like praying in church.”
03.24.07
Not From Around Here
My favorite geography joke comes from Eastern Pennsylvania.
An Amish schoolteacher asks a boy “Where was Jesus born?” and Little Jakey (Amish boys in jokes are always named Jakey) answers, “It was in Allentown.”
“No,” the teacher corrects him. “It was Bethlehem.”
“Well,” Jakey says, “I knew it was somewhere along Route 22.”
* * *
But where was Abe Lincoln born?
Tonight at dinner on the Gulf Coast of Florida, Melissa told me a real-life story about the time her mother came to teach school in the village of Stonington, on Maine’s Deer Isle.
The grade school class, taking an extended look at Mr. Lincoln, was asked to write an essay on the life and times of America’s 16th president.
One boy (probably not named Little Jakey) started out his paper with this classic Down East statement: “Abe Lincoln was born off-island.”
02.22.07
“Roll Over. Play Dead.”
I am known for my antipathy to the news. (In his book Information Anxiety, Richard Saul Wurman has the best term for it: “Violent wallpaper.”) I could not, however, resist a story from Germany I came across today, about a sloth named Mats.
It sounds right out of The Onion, but apparently it’s true that university scientists doing a study on animal movement spent three years trying to train Mats climb up and down a pole, but he refused to move.
For three years! Until finally, Mats — having taught the scientists quite a lot about animal behavior — was removed from the study at the end of January and shipped off to a zoo.
What an inspiration. You’ve got to admire an animal so secure in its inner sloth.
