Saturday, September 30, 2006

Fall, my favorite season

That wonderful season–fall–is here. Orange and red leaves on trees, brisk days (with a fire in the fireplace some days), football, the World Series of baseball, the beginning of the opera season, and recollections of aromas.

Aromas? Yes, nostalgic aromas of tobacco being brought to warehouses by farmers for sale at auction in the small North Carolina town where I was born and grew up. Beginning in mid-September and lasting into early November, as I would walk out the front door to go to school, I received a strong whiff of the tobacco. The odor was all over town. The farmers brought the tobacco in, tan in color (having turned from the original green in the fields by the curing in barns heated by fuel oil) and tied in bundles (six or eight leaves about twenty inches long tied together at the top with another leaf).

On my way to school on my bicycle, I would go by two of the six or so warehouses in town where the auctions took place. Often, men working for the warehouses, like carnival barkers standing in the street in front of their entrances, would wave to the farmers approaching in their trucks and shout, "Bring it here! Get the best prices!"

On the way home from school I would sometimes stop by one of the warehouses and watch an auction. The bundles of tobacco were stacked in layers, one on top of another, in flat baskets (about three feet wide on both sides) to a height of about four feet; the baskets were lined up in long rows. The auctioneer was followed by a retinue consisting of buyers from the major cigarette manufacturers, middle men (my town had three local companies that bought for export to foreign manufacturers), clerks to put tags on the stacks showing who bought the stack from what farmer, Federal government graders of each stack, and others. (Old-timers will remember the radio auctioneers who, after several seconds of their chanting, would shout, "Sold to American!", followed by the commercial pitch, "Lucky Strike means fine tobacco!")

Tobacco was the life blood of the community. When I was a young teen (about 14, I believe), I worked several days at a farm where with others I unloaded the tobacco leaves, having been cut and brought in from the fields by mule-drawn slides (with runners on them, like sleds), and put on a long table where other workers tied them into the bundles mentioned above and put them on sticks (about six feet long) to be hung from rafters in the curing barn. Tobacco leaves, freshly cut from the field, have a gum on them, which I held next to my bare chest when unloading the slides; when I finished for the day, my chest and stomach were black from the gum.

I was picked up at my house by the farmer’s wife about 6 A.M. and driven to my day’s work, and then driven back home about 3:30 P.M.; my pay was $1 per day (plus a huge midday meal that was called "dinner"). I suspect that the farmer was in violation of the child-labor law in having me do the work I did.

I have just learned that, for the first time in probably 150 years, there will be no tobacco auctions in that town this year. Since much of the entire world has adopted a no-smoking regimen, apparently there is not enough demand to warrant these auctions. I suppose that the few farmers there who still grow tobacco sell their crops directly to the cigarette manufacturers (much like tomatoes and other farm vegetables that are sold directly to food companies).

Fall foliage. We have some of the most beautiful maple and other foliage right around us in Baltimore County. Although we do occasionally go to New England for the mountains and fall foliage there, we don’t have to, since we have the foliage here and we can go to western Maryland for it and also for the mountains.

Football. I still have my boyhood excitement about college football. In fact, nostalgia plays a large part of my interest in sports. My father and his bachelor brother who lived with us were intense University of North Carolina football fans, their father and they having been students there, as I was later. Every year they went to the home games at Chapel Hill and to the game with Duke, whether at Chapel Hill or Durham (Duke was then a powerhouse, and the Carolina/Duke rivalry was like Harvard/Yale, Army/Navy, and other traditional pairings). My uncle was so passionate that he often went to the freshman* Carolina games on Friday afternoon and then back the next day if the varsity team was playing a home game; he also occasionally went to spring practice sessions of the varsity to get a bead on the outlook for the following fall season. He sometimes took me with him to those events.

* Prior to World War II, college freshman football players could only play on the school’s freshman team, which had its own schedule with other freshman teams. These teams had names such as "Tar Babies" (as related to the University of North Carolina’s "Tar Heels"), "Blue Imps" (for the Duke "Blue Devils"), and "Wolf Cubs" (for the North Carolina State "Wolfpack"). Only in their sophomore year were they eligible for the varsity. For whatever reason, that arrangement was abandoned shortly after the end of the war.

I often wish that, as an adult, I could do something that would give me the wonderful thrill that I experienced when going to Carolina football games with my family. They took me to the game with Duke when I was eleven; the next year they took me to all of the games. All during the week before, I would be thinking about the Saturday game; the Friday before the game I was barely able to keep my mind on school because I was so excited about the next day (especially when the next day’s game was with Duke).

My nostalgic memories of game day are picking up my father at the bank where he worked around 11 o’clock and beginning the 42 mile trip to Chapel Hill, getting into thick traffic over the last 12 miles between Durham and Chapel Hill, while walking through the woods surrounding Carolina’s Kenan Stadium, hearing the cheerleaders warming up the crowd, the deafening roar of the crowd as the Carolina team ran onto the field through a cordon of the student band playing its fight song ("I'm a Tar heel born, I'm a Tar Heel bred, and when I die I'll be a Tar Heel dead..."), the band later playing its alma mater ("Hark the Sound of Tar Heel Voices") and the students singing the words, and course, the game itself.

Also, the losses and the wins. In 1940, during the final minutes of the game with Tulane, with Carolina leading 13-7, a Tulane lineman blocked a Carolina punt around midfield and another lineman scooped up the ball and ran it for a touchdown; Tulane then converted the PAT and won 14-13. My family had long planned to stop off in Durham on the way home, have dinner, and then attend the Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey circus there. Ordinarily I would have greatly enjoyed all of this, but I couldn’t because I was brooding over Carolina’s fluky loss. However, later that year Carolina beat a heavily-favored Duke 6-3; the winning touchdown was scored at our end of the field (we were sitting on about the 20 yard line). I hardly need to say that I was ecstatic for days after that win.

Later, I was able to attend the only Rose Bowl game ever played anywhere other than Pasadena, California. It was played on New Year’s Day 1942 in Durham, N.C., at Duke’s stadium, between Duke and Oregon State. The reason for this relocation was that Pearl Harbor had been attacked by the Japanese the month before, beginning the U.S. involvement in World War II, which caused authorities to decide that it would be unsafe to have a large assembly of people on the U.S. west coast. Oregon State won 20-16. In addition to the excitement of being there for this historic event, I also got the autograph on my game program of Bill Stern, a well-known sports figure of the day who was broadcasting the game on the radio (there was no TV then); I also have this today as well as a pennant (with Oregon State’s name on it). During the game, I was reprimanded by a lady sitting in front of me for rooting for Oregon State, to which I reminded her about it being a free country.

Today, I eagerly anticipate the football season. I spend every Saturday watching the college games of the day on TV; some Saturdays I also attend the home games of Towson University, an NCAA II team whose stadium is a short distance from my home. I also watch the NFL Baltimore Ravens games on Sundays.

-----GO BALTIMORE RAVENS!

----------GO CAROLINA TAR HEELS!

---------------GO TOWSON TIGERS!

World Series. I still watch most of the games even though the Baltimore Orioles haven’t been there in 23 years. They played in the World Series six times, winning three and losing three: they beat the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1966, the Cincinnati Reds in 1970, and the Philadelphia Phillies in 1983; they lost to the New York Mets in 1969 and to the Pittsburgh Pirates both in 1971 and 1979. (I describe some of my World Series memories in my 6/1/06 posting It's June 1st--baseball is here for me.)

The Opera Season. The Baltimore Opera, to which I have been a season subscriber for over 20 years, begins its season in October. Its productions are mostly elegant: fine singers, imaginative props, and a great opera house (the Lyric). Also, radio broadcasts of New York's Metropolitan Opera Saturday afternoon performances begin in late November. (I describe some of my interest in opera in my 4/27/06 posting People dying today ain't never died before.)

Sunday, September 24, 2006

Football is in the air

David vs. Goliath

The 2006 college football season seems to have had an unusually large number of "David and Goliath" games–major college football factories scheduling games against small schools not known as football power-houses. Unlike David in the Bible story, the small schools rarely beat their Goliath opponents.

Mismatches have been going on for decades–the major colleges have used patsies (usually at the beginning of the season to give the former additional practice or, later in the season, as "breathers" before tough games with traditional rivals the following week), but their imbalance seems to be greater and their number higher this year. Some examples from the Saturday, September 23rd games:

Pittsburgh 56, The Citadel 6
Auburn 38, Buffalo 7
Florida State 55, Rice 7
Tennessee 33, Marshall 7
Louisiana State 49, Tulane 7
Oklahoma 59, Middle Tennessee 0
Nebraska 56, Troy 0

How can a major college maintain its integrity when it beats up a small school so badly; how can it not see itself as a bully? How can these small colleges, knowing as they do the likely outcome when they schedule these contests, bear the humiliation of such thrashings?

There appear to be two reasons: (1) The football factories can use the small schools as punching bags early in the season to ready themselves for their games with their equals later in the season. (2) The small schools are willing to take the punishment and degradation in order to make big bucks for their athletic programs--the money coming from the sharing, with the big school, of ticket sales and TV advertising receipts.

As to (2), the New York Times had an article recently as to how these small schools can make enough money from just one football game with a major team to fund most of their athletic programs that don’t provide any revenues (soccer, field and track, baseball, field hockey, etc.) for a school year. (It should be noted that the only other college sport that attracts national attention and huge revenues from TV coverage and attendance admissions–basketball–likewise subsidizes all of these other minor sports.)

My son just pointed out to me that legislation passed by the U.S. Congress in 1972, known as Title IX (which requires schools to provide equal opportunity to female students for access to sports programs available to male students), adds to funding requirements at the small schools--which can be met, at least in part, by the payoff from the shellacking their football teams take when they play against the power-houses.

Never say "never"

The 1958 professional National Football League championship game on December 28, 1958–the Baltimore Colts vs. the New York Giants (played at Yankee Stadium in New York)--has been described as the "Greatest Game of Football Ever Played" by numerous sports writers and others. To me , it was just that: with just two minutes left in the game, and the Colts deep down close to their own goal line and trailing on a 14-17 score, they pulled ahead to tie the game with a field goal at 17-all with less than 10 seconds left. Then, in sudden-death overtime (the first in NFL history), the Colts scored a touchdown and won the championship 23-17. (This game was some eight years before the Super Bowl, which began in January 1967.)

Although I was in my early thirties and in excellent health, I truly thought that, if the Colts couldn’t come through and win that game, I was going to have a heart attack, a nervous breakdown, or both. I was that excited! I said at the time (and have said many times later) that I never expected ever to see such an exciting game again.

But, never say "never." Since that time I have seen two college football games that were as exciting. One was the North Carolina State-Ohio State game on 9/13/03 (played in Columbus, Ohio). In it, N.C. State scored 17 points with 11 minutes left to tie the game 38-all in regulation play. In overtime, N.C. State trailing 38-44, drove to Ohio State’s one-foot line, but couldn’t score the tying touchdown (and perhaps winning an after-touchdown conversion). I was totally limp from yelling (for N.C. State) after that game, and sank motionless in my chair for several minutes.

Another such exciting game was just yesterday: Notre Dame overcame a 16-point deficit with just 8 minutes left to play to beat Michigan State 40-37. It was as exciting as the Colts’ 1958 win and the 2003 N.C. State almost-win, but it didn’t drain me as much as those games because I had no favorite in it.

Sources for college football fans

The website www.CSTV.com carries much detailed info about games still in progress or finished for free (one can view games on TV by subscribing for a fee). I just discovered it yesterday.

The College Football Encyclopedia published in 2005 by the sports TV network ESPN (cover price $49.95, but I got mine for considerably less by shopping among booksellers on the Internet) is a treasury of facts and stats on college football going back to the late 1800's. (It even lists the first game of American football: Princeton vs. Rutgers on November 6th , 1869, won 6-4 by Rutgers). The same two teams played again a week later on November 13th (won by Princeton 6-2). They also played again, once in 1870 and again in 1872, Rutgers the winner in each, 6-2 and 4-1 respectively (those were the only games played by Princeton during those years). How scores were tallied in those early games is not provided in the book–some of the scores would be highly unusual today: e.g., the 4-1 win by Rutgers could only happen if it scored two safeties and nothing else; the one point by Princeton could not happen today.

1 Comment

Anonymous said...
An excellent article! I must say that the two most memorable college football games I have ever seen are:2006 Rose Bowl. In the most remarkable performance I have ever seen by a college football player, Vince Young single-handedly carried Texas to a thrilling last second win over Southern Cal.1984 - Boston College vs. Miami. In his own "Young-like" performance, Doug Flutie threw a Hail Mary pass with no time on the clock to beat Miami in the Orange Bowl 47-45.

Wednesday, September 20, 2006

A (rare) accolade for Bush

Because I oppose President Bush on almost everything, when he does something worthy of approval, I hasten to take sides with him. His brave response to 9/11–which rallied not only the American people but also most of the rest of the world to the battle against terrorists–added tremendously to his stature. But, sadly, he frittered away this admiration and support with his bungling in Iraq and in numerous other ways. (For anyone interested in my assessment of the other ways, see my posting The Worst President in History? of 5/19/06.)

But I strongly support his plain-spoken position of sending in a United Nations military force to stop the brutal genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan (my previous postings on this horrible situation are: The shame of Darfur (4/9/06), The shame of Darfur (more) (4/17/06), and The shame of Darfur continues (5/18/06)). Perhaps he could do more, as the New York Times suggests in an editorial on 9/19/06: "Mr. Bush would begin (to take effective action) if he announced that ending the killing in Darfur was now a first-tier foreign policy concern...(and) if Mr. Bush said the U.S. would take the lead in soliciting troops for the U.N. and recommended making NATO planners available to help draw up contingency plans for a possible forced entry." But I believe that he is due credit for (belatedly) taking the first steps toward addressing the horrible situation.


The idea that the civilized world should defer armed intervention in Sudan to stop the human slaughter because of the lack of permission of the Sudanese government is ludicrous–it would be like, in the Second World War, the allied forces pleading, "Please, Mr. Hitler, grant us permission to bomb your cities and eventually occupy your country."

Friday, September 15, 2006

More on "false friends"; an interesting website discovered

In my Language idiosyncracies posting (8/26/06) I referred to faux amis (false friends): words in other languages which appear to be equivalents of English words but actually are not. Among several examples, I listed asistir in Spanish and assister in French, which seem to be the equivalent of "assist" in English but actually mean "attend" (as to attend a concert or a wedding).

Indirectly, due to that posting, I came across a long list of such false friends; it happened because someone visited my blog through a blog search engine using "false friends" as the search words. When anyone visits my blog through a search engine, I can go back through his search and pick up the hits that he got. Thus, I came across a long list of "false friends" at the website "All Experts" (http://experts.about.com) by doing a search at the home page for "false friends" and being taken to it.

The list is very long and has "false friend" pairings of many languages (French, Spanish, Romanian, German, Polish, Dutch, Portuguese, and many others) with English.

Incidentally, the "All Experts" website has 36 subjects, beginning with "Arts/Humanities" and ending with "TV/Radio." Each subject has numerous subclassifications–I found the "false friends" list buried several links down from the subject "Cultures." Be warned, however, that many of the links are commercial, such as one would find in the Yellow Pages; but others are genuine encyclopedic entries similar to those in Wikipedia.

Monday, September 11, 2006

To be thankful for

I see by my calendar that Thanksgiving this year is still 73 days away, but there are things that we should be thankful for on any day of the year. (I feel particularly thankful this morning because I had the task before me of sowing grass seed and fertilizer on my lawn to enhance its beauty next spring, but it’s raining, so I can’t do it today.) Thus, in the spirit of thankfulness, I offer the following blessings for which we can be thankful.

Foremost is the fact that, on this fifth anniversary of 9/11, we haven't suffered a terroist attack on our homeland. May it be ever so!

George Bush has only 496 more days in office. Since many companies, large and small, offer early-retirement packages to their employees (or sometimes force them on them), why can’t we have the same for U.S. presidents and other politicians? (See more about that below.)

We will be free of any Olympics for 697 more days. That boring, over-hyped event won’t come up again until the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, China.

The hapless Baltimore Orioles, who at the moment are 23 ½ games out of first place in the American League East, have only 20 more games left to play this year.

The Ford Motor Company has kicked out a member of the Ford family as its CEO and replaced him with an outsider; such a move has taken place before with unfavorable results, but could work out better this time. (I offer this reason to be thankful only to anyone who has been stupid enough to buy Ford stock or to anyone employed by the company or by a Ford dealer.)

Joe Paterno, the Penn State football coach, who will become 82 years old later this year, is still doing his thing. He has been assistant coach or head coach there for 49 years. Some observers criticize him for not retiring a few years ago when Penn State was having good years (recent years have not been so good; they were whomped 41 to 17 by Notre Dame on September 9th). Yet he may yet come out on top since he shows no signs of slowing down.

Paterno is already in that league of legendary college football coaches who coached for many decades and lived to very ripe old ages. Lou Little coached at Columbia for 27 years (1930-1956) and died in 1978 at age 86. "Pop" Warner (born Glenn Scobey Warner) coached for 44 years; he was an itinerant who coached at Georgia, Carlisle Indians, Pitt, Stanford, and Temple. He died in 1954 at age 83. Amos Alonzo Stagg, however, topped them all: he was head coach at three colleges for 57 years (1890-1946), his longest tenure having been 41 years at the University of Chicago (1892-1932). As if that were not enough, Stagg was assistant coach to his son at Susquehanna for 12 more years (1947-1958). He died in 1965 at age 102.

We still have 24 days left before we have to start hearing about basketball, and we will have about five months free from it next year. the NBA’s pre-season games start October 9th, the regular games begin October 31st, and the playoffs start April 21, 2007; if they go the full seven games, it will be around May 1, 2007 when we will hear no more about basketball and the NBA until some time in October 2007–about five wonderful months.

No doubt you, Dear Reader, have other reasons to be thankful. If so, feel free to list them in the "Comments" box.

"If only" (Reasons for which I wish we could be thankful)

We had the mechanism that parliamentary democracies have by which a general election can be called at some close future date to keep, or fire, the head of state. A parliament might come up with a vote of "no confidence" in the current head of state (usually called the "prime minister"), or the prime minister might himself/herself foresee such a vote and call for a general election. In a general election the voters of the country vote for a party, not an individual, to be in power; that party then elects its leader as the prime minister. Tony Blair, the British prime minister, has announced that he will resign within a year, at which time a general election will be held to either keep the Labour Party (Blair’s party) in power or to put the Conservative Party in power.

Of course, in the USA we have the impeachment procedure by which a sitting president can be removed from office for "high crimes or misdemeanors." But that involves a trial on specific charges held in the U.S. Senate, whereas a simple "no confidence" vote (or the anticipation of one) brings about a general election, with the public voting, in a parliamentary democracy.

We could go one week without seeing or hearing anything about Paris Hilton, Whitney Spears, Tom Cruse, Madonna, George Clooney, Brad Pitt, et al.

Jay Leno could go one night without telling a joke that included "sexual intercourse", "penis", or "masturbation."

We could go one week without seeing an interview with John McCain.
I like the man for the most part–he is personable, bright, and plain-spoken. But he has that politician-cum-presidential-aspirant disease of overexposuritis. Whenever he comes within ten feet of a TV camera he seems to have to succumb to an interview.

I could one day see the Baltimore Orioles winning the World Series, as they did in 1966, 1970, and 1983, and not wake up and realize that it was all a dream.

Sunday, September 03, 2006

How much math do we need to know?

Do young people really need to learn the four mathematical functions–addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division–in school? Perhaps they may not need this learning. Since it can all be done on a handheld calculator that can be bought for $5 or less, why bother with learning how it gets done?

This might, at first glance, seem anti-intellectual; don’t we want our schoolchildren to learn as much as we did? Well, maybe not. We had to learn these functions (those of us of around my age) because there were no calculators or computers to do them for us; but now we have these conveniences, so why worry about how they work?

I ask these questions because I tutor men in math and reading and writing at the Helping Up Mission in downtown Baltimore. This organization accepts men who have been brought down by drugs and/or alcohol and who are striving to recover themselves through a strict program of rehabilitation; the men whom I tutor are preparing to take the GED exam which, if passed, gives them a high-school diploma.

During this tutoring I am taken back to doing these math functions by longhand, something I haven’t done for years. I have to tell the men that they must learn the multiplication table by heart (something that I did in my early school years but have no recollection of doing) in order to perform these calculations in a straightforward way. (Some of them are clever enough to multiply 5 times 9 by writing the figure 9 five times and then adding 9 plus 9 equals 18, 18 plus 9 equals 27, etc. until they get to 45; others use their fingers to do the work.)

Another set of exercises that I help them with is adding or subtracting a series of fractions, such as 3 5/8 plus 6 2/5 plus 5 4/9; I had to stop and think how to do it–one finds a common denominator (in this case, 360) and proceeds to adjust the numerators, add them, and then reduce back to the least fraction. But, how often do most people have to do this exercise in their daily lives?

I recall when, as a teenager, I worked briefly in an A&P grocery store, where all of us who waited on customers would write the price of each item purchased on the brown paper bag that we put them in, and then add them up manually to get the total to collect from the customer; now supermarket cashiers scan the prices of each item.

It is at these times that I ask myself this question as to why anyone should have to go through this basic exercise when a calculator will do it for them. I pose the question in the realization that we all do many mundane things without knowing their inner workings. I have driven a car for over 60 years (skillfully, I think) without much knowledge of what goes on under the hood; I take pills prescribed by my doctors with almost no understanding of what is in them or how they work. (I have almost no understanding of what a Beta blocker is, or what an inhibitor inhibits, or what a corticosteroid is; I don’t take any of these, as far as I know, but I frequently see references to them.)

So, again, I ask the question, with considerable doubt as to the answer: should schoolchildren be put to the task of mastering the mathematical functions when their calculator will do it for them?
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Location: United States

Mycroft Watson is the nom de plume of a man who has seen many winters. He is moderate to an extreme. When he comes to a fork in the road, he always takes it. His favorite philosopher is Yogi Berra. He has come out of the closet and identified himself. Anyone interested can get his real name, biography, and e-mail address by going to "Google Search" and keying in "User:Marshall H. Pinnix" (case sensitive).

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