Housepainting Blues… Or Browns

The back of my house faces south and so gets baked by the sun. Accordingly, while the exterior paint on the window trim and doors elsewhere on house lasts five to seven years on the back of the house it lasts only two. I repaint the surfaces myself for the same reasons I mow my own lawn: I’m cheap and the task is within my skill set. I’ve purchased the brown paint. I’ll probably break out the drop cloths and brushes sometime in the next month. (I didn’t say I was ambitious.)

 
The paint purchase raised the question (because why wouldn’t it?) of how long homeowners have been slathering protective paints on their walls and trim. It seems like something even ancient Sumerians would have done but apparently this is not the case.
 
Painters as artists expressed themselves far back in prehistory, sometimes with stunning results such as in the caves at Lascaux. Yet they didn’t just paint the walls a monocolor (white, blue, or red, or whatever) in order to brighten up the cave. Nor were later huts and houses so decorated. They were left natural mud or brick or wood or whatever the walls happened to be. By early Greek times colors were sometimes mixed into the finishing plasters, but those are not house paint in the usual sense. I’m referring here to private residences, by the way. Public buildings and palaces received special paint treatment, as did statuary. The stately white marble of ancient Greek and Roman temples looked quite different back in the day. The Parthenon, the archetypical stately temple, originally had garishly painted friezes and architectural elements. It must have been awful. The private homes of the wealthy in classical times often had elaborate interior murals, but again that is quite different from simply painting a wall (inside or out) a solid canary yellow.
 
The reason was the difficulty in ancient times of producing paint in anything more than small batches using animal blood, charcoal, ochre, oils, colored clays, minerals, egg whites (really), and various other organic materials. If you are going to go to all that trouble you might as well do something more with the end product than smear it on a wall. So, paint was mostly for art and the ornamentation of public structures. It had to await better large batch production techniques to be affordable for average homeowners, which didn’t come along until after 1200 CE. Medieval housepainter guilds formed about this time to protect their secrets, restrict competition, and keep up prices – a clear indicator housepainting finally had caught on, particularly after 1500. Those fun-fearful Puritans, of course, objected: in 17^th century colonial Massachusetts they made colorful paint jobs illegal since they displayed vanity and frivolity. The non-Puritan colonies were more experimental.
 
In the 19^th century chemistry became more scientific and paint mixing was largely mechanized. Several major paint producers still in business today got their start then. Safety and environmental concerns (notably the removal of lead from housepaints) altered the mixes in the 20^th century.
 
I don’t know how the Puritans would have felt about my window trim. Brown isn’t very colorful really. It is not far off the natural color of the wood. Somehow I suspect they would have found something objectionable. The most objectionable paint is inside the house, but it is hidden. The housepainter (deceased for decades now) who painted my house when it was new had an artistic streak and a personal quirk. He also hung wallpaper, but he always painted and signed a mural somewhere in a house before he covered the wall with paper. We all hope to have an impact beyond our time on earth, and this was his way. He knew that eventually the wallpaper would be replaced, and his artwork and name would appear again. So somewhere underneath the grasscloth paper in my living room is a mural signed by Lenny. I don’t expect ever to see it, but someone someday probably will. My window trim paint, on the other hand, will need another coat in only a couple of years.
 
 

Robbie Robertson – I Hear You Paint Houses

An Even More than Usually Self-Involved Blog Post, But at Least There Are Trees in It

My case of COVID-19 some months ago (yes, I was vaccinated and boosted but got it anyway) was mild enough that I didn’t bother to mention it in my blogs or social media. The weather was still sufficiently unwelcoming at the time that staying at home for a while (longer than the CDC protocols) was not a big departure from what I would have done anyway. I felt lousy for a week (much like a standard cold) and then felt fine. Almost. There was one lingering aftereffect: my energy and stamina took a hit that did not recover on its own. I felt perfectly normal when sitting or just standing around, but just walking 100 feet was as taxing as it previously would have been to run an all-out 100-meter dash. I needed to stop and catch my breath – no exaggeration. It was such a mortality reminder that I actually was motivated to revise my will and end-of-life documents – though if the stock market and consumer prices continue to perform the way they have lately, those won’t be of much consequence to anyone anyway.
 
My response was to attempt to build stamina back with daily walks. Many people much older than I run multi-kilometer races and work out in gyms, of course; back on April 3 I blogged about Edward Weston who in 1909 walked from New York to San Francisco in 105 days at age 70 and then walked from Los Angeles to New York in 78 days the following year. I’m not as ambitious as any of those people. I just wanted again to be able to walk from my car to the supermarket door without wondering if I’d be able to walk back. Lots of my neighbors walk on my street – a lightly trafficked cul-de-sac – for exercise, usually with their dogs, but I prefer a more solitary hike. I live on five acres (two hectares), four of which are wooded. Years ago I hacked a trail through my woods with enough twists and turns to make a fairly lengthy path.

The trail

c. 200 y.o. stone hedgerow. Someone
once worked very hard on this.

 
Did walking in the woods help? Yes, though for a few weeks I wasn’t sure it would. At first I literally (not figuratively) would have to stop every 50 or 100 feet (depending on the slope) to catch my breath. Sometimes more often. But by the end of a month I could walk the full circuit without stopping or gasping. Now I’m pretty much back to normal. (Normal by the standards of my pre-COVID 2022, that is: I’d prefer normal for my 1973, but we take what we can get.) The wood trail also promotes personal serenity, or so I’ve always found, which is why I made it in the first place. There is something about being surrounded by leaves and trees instead of people that eases the tensions.
 
With the exception of four college years in downtown DC, I’ve been fortunate always to have woods a few meters from my door – not always deep woods but thick enough to enter and see only trees, at least in spots. A good part of my first 6 years was spent actually in a tree: there was a tree at the edge of woods by our house with branches that made it ideal for climbing. In 1959 my family moved to Brookside. In back of the house was a hillside stretch of woods with a marvelous path that went all the way to the elementary school I attended. It was my most common way to get there and back when the weather wasn’t bad. This is now a linear park, but at the time it was still the R.O.W. of the long defunct Rockaway Valley Railroad, so I rarely encountered other walkers. The school itself abutted woods with trails and a stream (which the kids for unknown reasons dubbed Balboa); we were forbidden to enter it during unsupervised (!) recess so of course that is where we went. My own first home (sold in 2000) was a cabin in the woods. What of those four years in DC? Sometimes I would walk from 19^th St NW (near F) across Arlington Memorial Bridge all the way to Theodore Roosevelt Island, a wooded park in the Potomac with an entrance on the Virginia side. It was a bit of a hike (check a map) but I did it without a thought, which explains my nostalgia for my 1973 stamina.
 
Anyway, (once again) I’m not ambitious enough to try to emulate Mr. Weston or even some of my dog-walking neighbors. However, I need to stop at the supermarket today. It’s a simple joy to be able to do it again without gasping for breath in the parking lot. Afterward the woods trail beckons. It’s no Appalachian Trail, but for my purposes it is long enough.

Rival Sons – Back in the Woods Again

Getting It Wrong

t may come as a surprise to the reader that I’m occasionally wrong. I presume there is much about which I’m wrong all the time, though I could be wrong about that.
 
There are many ways to be wrong. There are moral wrongs, but these can be fuzzy since there are different moral systems. (The Nietzschean view is that those out of power devise moral definitions that make it only “fair” that they gain power, while those in power embrace moral definitions that make it only “fair” that they stay there.) People sometimes experience religious or political conversions and decide their former views were wrong. (These are often deeply unsettling in a way analogous to the five stages of grief, since former views are typically integral to sense of self.) In my experience, to the extent such conversions are philosophical rather than just emotional reactions to some event, they usually involve a reexamination of first principles about what it means to be human in the presence of other humans. (Goethe: "Once you have missed the first buttonhole, you'll never manage to button up.”) First principles can differ. One simply can be mistaken about facts (e.g. believing an object is closer or farther away than is actually is), either from misperception or misinformation. (This implies that there is an objective reality – a truth about which to be wrong; this is a matter of more philosophical contention than one might think, but it is useful to posit it as true in ordinary circumstances.) We can misspeak and we can make false assumptions. My mom, who was spontaneous in social settings, was famous for both.
 
Three of my favorite mom “oops” moments also illustrate why we hate being wrong. Decades ago she was at a neighbor’s backyard tennis party where all the women (except her) wore bright white tennis outfits. She had intended to say, “It looks like everyone here has been using Clorox,” which she later admitted itself would have been a somewhat snippy remark. What she in fact said was, “It looks like everyone here has been using Clairol,” which was met by silence. Not long afterward at a meeting of local businesspeople (she was a real estate broker), she spoke to a local storeowner [I’ve changed his name]: “Hi Brad. Is this your mother?” It was his wife. At another business association dinner a waiter placed a bowl in front of her. She sampled the contents with a spoon and assumed it was some kind of gourmet cold spicy soup. After a few more spoonfuls, another person at the table spoke up, “Robina, are you really going to eat all of our salad dressing?” Each of these was a minor faux pas in the scheme of things but each was also mortifying in a way we’ve all experienced at some time or other but never want to experience again.
 
Much as we hate being wrong, we find pleasure in pointing out the wrongness of others. We don’t even seem to care if it is our own knowledge and skill that prevails. Who has not had one’s statements (say, on the price of a new Tesla) fact-checked in real time by someone Googling on a cell phone? If any discrepancy turns up, no matter how small, the satisfaction of the Googler is as real as if he personally had memorized the MSRPs of every model beforehand.

 
There are many books on error, but there is one in particular I enjoyed reading this past week. In her book Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, author Kathryn Schulz examines all the various ways we get it wrong, how we acknowledge it, how we (all too often) deny it, how we (also all too often) blame the error on others, how we persist in error against solid evidence (e.g. confirmation bias and sunk cost bias), and how we (at best) grow from the experience. Schulz, journalist for Rolling Stone, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, the Nation, et al., has an informative but breezy style that doesn’t talk down even while she shows genuine erudition. She relies heavily on recent research but is just as likely to discuss a classical author. When she writes about Sully, or Plato, or Shakespeare, or Freud, or Proust, or whomever she always has something interesting to say without an assumption that the reader is unfamiliar with the works in question.
 
Many of our errors result in ultimately minor humiliations. Others can be truly destructive. Take the wrongness of memory. Many minor arguments are over conflicting memories. Schulz mentions an overheard argument at the train station between a husband and wife because the husband bought pound cake instead of crumb cake. “You said ‘pound cake,’” he said. “I said ‘crumb cake,’” she answered. “You said ‘pound cake,’” he repeated. “I said crumb cake.” The exchange went on. One of them was wrong – maybe both if she said “round cake.” I had a similar incident the other day. I recounted to a friend a story involving my dad and uncle during World War 2. Against policy after the Sullivan brothers died in the same sinking, they by pure chance had been assigned to the same ship. Taking place in the port of Naples, the story includes the Shore Patrol and a German air raid. “You told me this story before, but you said it was Marseille,” my friend said, happy to correct me. “I said it was Naples,” I answered. “I always say it is Naples. The story wouldn’t even make sense in Marseille.” “You said it was Marseille,” he insisted. One of us remembered wrong. I’m quite sure it was my friend who was wrong, but absolutely 100% sure? After all he is almost certainly right that I told him the story before (I’ve told it enough times over the years that I don’t remember who has heard it and who hasn’t), so one must admit the possibility (though I still regard it as unlikely) that I misspoke rather than that he misremembered.
 
That example is of little consequence, but there can be devastating consequences to the faulty memories of eyewitnesses. For more than a century (early experiments were conducted in 1900) it has been known how poor and malleable eyewitness testimony can be. Witnesses primed with mugshots, for example, commonly pick from live lineups someone from the mugshots rather than anyone who was actually at the scene of a crime, and the false memory hardens with time. Vividness of memory has little to do with its accuracy. The Innocence Project reexamines cases of people convicted of crimes based primarily on eyewitness (sometimes face-to-face eyewitness) testimony by testing DNA evidence when it still exists. So far 375 convictions have been overturned, often after the falsely accused person had spent years in prison. In the 1980s there was a spate of convictions based on “recovered memories.” Within a decade it became clear just how unreliable such memories were, leading to the most egregious cases being reopened.
 
Schulz in her final chapter has an optimistic message: “We get things wrong because we have an enduring confidence in our own minds; and we face up to that wrongness in the faith that, having learned something, we will get it right the next time.” I hope she is right about that.
 

Depeche Mode – Wrong

Milkshake Slake

Spring arrived late this year in my part of the world. Chilliness long outstayed its welcome. Something approaching summery weather at last has arrived, however: enough so that I treated myself to a milkshake the other day. (Vanilla, no apologies; I don’t dislike chocolate or more exotic flavors but in truth I prefer vanilla.) At one of my favorite diner haunts, it came garnished with whipped cream in a container that was fairly common (not typical, but fairly common) when I was a kid though infrequent today: still in the tall stainless steel mixing cup rather than a glass. It was a generous serving and a satisfying one.
 
Naturally it caused me to wonder (because why wouldn’t it?) just how long ago one could order a milkshake. After all, iced drinks date to ancient times. Runners in ancient Rome, China, and Mesoamerica would bring snow down from the mountains for sale in town; if they were fast enough, some wouldn’t melt. Milk has been drunk since prehistory. Ice cream in the modern sense dates to the 1600s. So all the ingredients have been in place for a long time. Yet, there is no mention of it in Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language (1785) or in 19th century recipe books. The current Oxford English Dictionary tells us that the word “milkshake” can be documented by 1885. If you ordered one in 1885, however, you would be in for a surprise. It was milk, egg, and whiskey – a sort of rough-and-ready eggnog. Ice cream was not an ingredient. There still are milk-based alcoholic beverages, of course, but they have other names such as White Russian (vodka, Kahlua, and milk or cream) and Cow Shot (Southern Comfort and milk). [Digression: de gustibus and all that, but IMO Southern Comfort is dreadful on its own (what was Janis Joplin thinking?) but makes an excellent mixer in lieu of bourbon.] Nonalcoholic (and non-egg) “milkshakes” appeared in soda shops by 1900, but they did not include ice cream either; the ingredients were milk, malt, and various favored syrups.
 
It turns out there is a precise answer as to when, where, and by whom the modern milkshake was created. In 1922 Ivar “Pop” Coulson was working the soda fountain counter at a Chicago Walgreens. Malted milk (milk, malt, and chocolate syrup) was already on the menu, but he decided to add two scoops of vanilla ice cream to the blend. The concoction was a hit and by 1930 this version of a milkshake was offered at soda fountains nationwide. The malt was optional and different flavors (primarily chocolate and strawberry) and garnishes appeared almost immediately. In the 1930s Fred Waring invented a dedicated blender to speed the making of milkshakes, and that is pretty much where things still stand today.

Love Finds Andy Hardy (1938)

Soda fountains and malt shops were once much more prevalent than today. Some were specialized shops but up until the mid-60s almost every drug store had a soda counter that offered milkshakes as well. My parents, who met in high school in the 1940s, got to know each other over milkshakes after movie dates. (He was a chocolate man, she usually ordered strawberry.) Dedicated malt shops have become rarer since then, but they have not entirely disappeared. Milkshakes are readily available elsewhere, of course, such as at fast food outlets and diners.
 
So, since this year happens to be the 100^th anniversary of the modern milkshake, on June 21, which is not only the solstice but National Vanilla Milkshake Day (really), I’ll drink a milky toast to Pop Coulson.

 

Jerry Lee Lewis - Milkshake Mademoiselle (1957)