I Hear You Knockin’

Last night, Mischief Night (aka Devil’s Night, Gates Night, Mizzy Night, et al.), passed relatively uneventfully in my neighborhood – no signs of eggings and the like. As far as I can tell by the news, places with a history of more serious offenses (e.g. arson) have been fairly quiet too. This is one case in which the modern teen’s preference for the virtual world over the real one is a positive benefit to the rest of us: they can smash digital pumpkins to their hearts’ content in video games. (I always wondered, by the way, where the parents thought their teens were going when they left the house on Mischief Night.) The pranks continued on Halloween itself. These have eased up in recent years too.
 
While I trick-or-treated with the other kids when growing up (we traveled in unsupervised packs in those more innocent days), my teens were spent without Halloween parties. My dad was a builder and there was always a need to guard separate construction sites, which were a special draw to marauding kids and teens. If you want to spend a truly spooky Halloween, spend it (with no cell phone) in an unlit, unfinished house on a dark wooded lot. I didn’t fear ghosts. I worried about encounters with the all-too-human, but I guess my mere presence was scary too, because I never saw anyone. Any damage was always on a property that was unguarded – we couldn’t be on all of them all of the time.

Sharon and I, probably 1955

I don’t have to worry about that anymore. Nowadays I just have to remember to buy candy. Odds are I will not have any kids at the door tonight. Years pass between that happening. My driveway is well over 300 feet (100m) and flanked by dark woods in an area frequented by bears. Kids simply do not walk up it. When I do get them at the door they were driven up the driveway by parents who live in the immediate neighborhood. I keep a candy bucket at the ready just in case that happens. It probably won’t, so I’ll need to pace myself on consuming the contents of the bucket in the coming months.
 
I might hear knocks that seem to come from the door, but that happens every night and there rarely is anyone there. My house groans, creaks, and knocks as it expands and contracts with the weather and with the vagaries of the forced air heating system. Guests, less accustomed to the sounds than I, sometimes tell me the house is haunted. I don’t believe in such things, but even if I’m wrong I don’t mind. Any spirit that meant me ill-will would have demonstrated that intent sometime in the past 21 years that I’ve owned the place. Just as in my teen years I worry more about the all-too-human, the tax-collector for one. Fourth Quarter property taxes are due tomorrow. Now that’s scary.
 

John Fogerty - Haunted House

 

It's a Lock

I do a better (not great, but better) job of patching my aging house than my aging self. My leaking shower is in the process of being replaced. (The cat got into the newly exposed studs and then into the basement ceiling beneath, but that is another story.) Since the front door of my home provides the shortest access to the shower during the rebuild, I have discovered that my front door lock needs to be replaced. (Have you priced front door locks? Google them. They are simply ridiculous.) My door’s bolt locks solidly on the inside, so it serves its purpose of locking people out, but a key from the outside is useless. This normally doesn’t matter (which is why it has gone unnoticed) because the geography of my lot and floor plan funnels people to the back door. In the past 20 years I don’t think I ever have come home and entered the house via the front door. It is the rare rare visitor who rings at the front door rather than the back, and of course the door opens fine from the inside to let them in. Just in principle, though, I feel my door should unlock in both directions. At least a lock replacement is a minor repair compared to the shower.
 
The reader may have heard folks of a certain age (such as mine) remark that when they were kids no one ever locked their doors. Unlike the stories about walking five miles to and from school through four feet of snow uphill both ways, this has a small kernel of truth. “No one ever” is a wild exaggeration of course. Lock usage also was very neighborhood dependent, and even in the safest neighborhood people locked up sometimes, such as when they went away for the weekend. Nonetheless, in rural areas, smaller towns, and outer suburbs (including the one where I grew up in the 1950s) it was pretty typical most of the time for doors to houses, garages, and sheds to be left unlocked day and night. This may not have been the most intelligent practice, but it was a common one.
 
Today we are more cautious – or at least we intend to be. Sometimes we are careless, which is why even in 2022 nearly 30% of burglars gain access through an unlocked first floor entrance. The most common point of entry is the garage. (My garage doesn’t have a door directly into the house; the garage is attached to the house only by an open breezeway.) Odds are that the burglar won’t be a complete stranger (though that does happen): typically the burglar lives within two miles (3.2 km). I’m not sure if that is comforting or not.
 
This is hardly a new problem. As soon as people began acquiring personal property there have been others eager to relieve them of it. So, defensive measures are wise and always were. If an owner is inside the house, a simple slide bolt is very effective and difficult to defeat, but one can’t stay inside all day. Sometimes we want to leave but still keep out intruders. Accordingly, keyed locks are as old as civilization. A 4000-y.o. example found in Nineveh consists of an interior wooden slide bolt held in place by wooden pins that drop into holes on the top of the bolt. To unlock it, insert a key through a horizontal slot in the front of the door into a hole in the bolt beneath the pins; the key has vertical pegs that match the holes with the pins. Lift up so the key pegs push the pins out of the bolt; the bolt (key and all) then can be slid open. It’s quite clever really. To this day most door locks use a pin system, albeit with a rotating metal cylinder. Similar ancient locks have been found in Egypt, Zanzibar, and Japan. This design was bulky and easy to pick however so inventors kept working on the concept. The Romans (who needed to protect their loot) made iron locks with wards (interior tracks) operated with rotating bronze keys. They look very familiar. The Romans and ancient Chinese invented padlocks as well – apparently independently though it is possible a sample padlock traveled the trade routes in one direction or the other and inspired copiers. Most current mechanical locking systems (including a revamped pin system) were designed in the 19^th century, as was so much of industrial civilization. As for modern electronic locks such as those in hotel rooms, the less said the better.

Ancient Roman Key

 
In any event, no lock will do any good if is left unlocked. No alarm system will deter if it is turned off. So, I’ll take the precautions my parents and their neighbors ignored in the ‘50s. Though the bolt works fine, I’ll replace the front door lock too, just on principle.
 

Lydia Lunch – Lock Your Door

On Another Scale

A few years ago the unexpected tightness of my jacket (I seldom wear business or semi-formal jackets anymore) alerted me that I had allowed my weight to exceed my previous record high. So, I aimed to drop 40 pounds (18 kg) to get back to my old 1990s level. Though discipline in these matters is not normally my forte, over the next two years I slowly shed more than 30 pounds (14 kg) but found the final 10 pounds above my target weight to be stubbornly resistant. Then covid struck early last spring. Those 10 pounds vanished in little more than a week. Best diet ever? Not really. I would trade the covid for the pounds and consider it a great bargain. The week-long illness itself wasn’t bad (I’ve experienced worse colds) but the aftermath was awful. I felt fine if just sitting or standing but was exhausted and nauseated by even minor exertion. This loss of stamina lingered for months. Things got better week by week, but the effect lasted to some degree all through summer. Only in the past month have I felt fully normal again.
 
During the past several months I ignored the bathroom scale and forewent any calculated calorie restriction while rebuilding strength. So, it was with some trepidation this morning that I took a breath and stepped on the scale to assess the damage. I stepped off and stepped on again but the result was the same. Not even a single kilogram change since last spring. Those last 10 pounds shaved off by covid remained off – OK, 9 pounds stayed off, but that is close enough. The challenge now is to keep them off without the unwelcome assistance of a viral infection.
 

fat cells

Weight is a challenge to people around the world. Far more people today are overweight than undernourished. This is, of course, far better than the reverse, which was the case for most of human history. Hunger hasn’t vanished by any means, but the reduction of it deserves noting and celebrating. Nonetheless, the flip side to that achievement is that The World Health Organization calls obesity a global epidemic. It is not contagious in the usual sense – you will not catch obesity from a fat man who sneezes on you – yet it is socially communicable: an oft-cited study in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that your friend-group affects your weight. A friend becoming obese increases your risk of doing the same by a whopping 57%. Oddly, the effect (though present) is much less among family members than among friends. It is speculated that friends tend to copy each other’s eating and exercise habits while contributing to one’s notion of what is or isn’t fat.
 
The usual definition of obesity used by both the WHO and CDC is a Body Mass Index (BMI) of more than 30. (Merely overweight is a reading over 25 but under 30.) The BMI is calculated by dividing your weight in kilograms by the square of your height in meters. BMI is a rough and ready tool for describing people of average fitness or when comparing populations. It has some obvious problems when applied to any one individual. For example a 5’10” (1.76 m) person weighing 210 pounds (95.45 kg) has a BMI over 30 and is therefore obese. Yet, those numbers could describe either a tautly muscled body builder or a flabby couch potato: the BMI is the same for either even though it is silly to call the former obese. Those anomalies cancel out however when studying a lot of people, so it has statistical utility anyway.
 
There are always articles and news items about this or that in the environment “causing” obesity, for example the “significant” hormonal effects of chemicals in certain plastics. The news articles (in popular publications anyway) rarely point out that the correlations (not necessarily causes) are statistically significant (i.e. unlikely to be due to chance) rather than significant in the sense of large. In fact, most such effects are tiny in actual weight. Somewhat better-known risk factors for obesity include lack of sleep and a non-optimal mix of gut bacteria.
 
Ultimately, however, we gain weight when we eat more calories than we burn. (We’ll put to the side the question of what foods are healthier in ways other than calories.) According to the Department of Agriculture adult Americans consume 23% more calories per capita than in 1970. (I remember 1970 and we didn’t starve ourselves then.) It’s hardly surprising that we weigh more. We lose weight when we eat less and exercise more. We all know this. We don’t like to hear it. I don’t like to hear it. It’s a bummer.
 
So, I’ll continue to reconsider second helpings. Maybe I’ll even catch up on some sleep.  What I will not do is seek another round of covid. I’d rather regain 10 pounds.
 

A ditty from a less “body positive” era:

The Andrews Sisters – Too Fat Polka

On the Fritz

Every moment in history (or in an individual life) is an inflection point. One always can point to a single choice made by someone(s) somewhere that would have made a world of difference had it been made the other way. Yet, some eras really are more stable than others – a more momentous choice than usual would have to flip in order to make a real difference. It is why our attention is more readily drawn to unstable eras when things are unusually in flux; there are so many more obvious “if only” moments when the touch of a finger could tip the outcome. The 1960s are one such era – and not just for nostalgic Boomers narcissistically reminiscing about their youths, though it’s hard to deny I am one of those. 1968 was a world apart from 1963 in popular culture, social mores, and public affairs. Those five years really were revolutionary, but easily could have gone very differently for better or for worse. The revolution was broader than five years, of course. “The 1960s” as we think of them had all of their roots in the 1950s and reached their fullest expression in the 1970s, but the most glaring surface transformation was smack in the middle of the ‘60s proper.
 
Comic book author/artist Robert Crumb probably didn’t affect the big picture of the decade very much even though in a sense he painted it. In other words the social trends of the ‘60s would have been little changed without him, but the visual representation of them would be different and probably poorer. Then (as now) I was rarely in step with the times and never ahead of them, so my first awareness of Robert Crumb was as the artist who drew the cover of Cheap Thrills, a must-have 1968 album by Big Brother and the Holding Company featuring Janis Joplin. Fortunately, my sister was a couple years older than I and infinitely hipper, so she then supplied me with underground comics by Crumb. I enjoyed them but was not enough of a fan to seek out more and collect them.

 
One of Crumb’s recurring characters was Fritz the Cat, who first appeared in 1959. The cat’s backstory was not always the same. Sometimes he was a pretentious liberal arts student. Sometimes he was an international spy. Sometimes he was a famous rock star. But always Fritz was an obnoxious self-involved egotist in (despite the feline form) all too human fashion. His real interests are sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll. Side characters deliberately, ironically, and unabashedly exaggerate stereotypes of the day, whether racial, social, or political. Why are the characters all animals? Crumb just felt freer using them: “I can put more nonsense, more satire and fantasy into the animals.” Nonetheless, as he mentions in a comic, they are “not unlike people in their manners and morals.” Considering the era, Crumb’s vision of humanity is ultimately a dark one: surface idealism and altruism have crass selfish underpinnings in nearly all his characters.
 
In 1972 legendary animator Ralph Bakshi produced the movie Fritz the Cat, which mashes up storylines from a few comics but mostly relies on “Fritz Bugs Out.” Fritz in the film version is a college student who is far less intellectual than he thinks, and whose ideological rhetoric encourages a riot that turns him into a fugitive. Oh, yes: the cartoon is X-rated. The movie was a box office success, but Robert Crumb hated it. He hated it so much that he killed off Fritz in the comics in 1972 in order to discourage a sequel. (It didn’t work: the sequel The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat was produced anyway.)
 
None of this had crossed my mind in a very long time until a couple weeks ago when I stumbled across an online reference to Cool World (I no longer remember where), another Bakshi animation from 1992. Though it had nothing to do with Crumb, the reference brought him to mind anyway and prompted me to look him up on Amazon. The collection The Life and Death of Fritz the Cat caught my eye and a few days later it arrived at the door. It contains tales from Fritz’ first 1959 appearance to his untimely 1972 death. Someone reading Crumb for the first time is likely to ask the same question as a first time viewer of the movie: Is this an homage to its era or a venomous send-up of it? The answer is yes. It is both.

 
Is there any relevance in the Fritz comics to the 2020s? Perhaps, at least if we consider what a similarly representative comic about our own time would look like. If the comic is honest the answer to the same question surely again would be yes. And in half a century folks will ponder what would have happened if this person or that in 2022 simply had made another choice.

 

Caleb Janssens’ vlog on Fritz

 

Twelve Factoids

There is no subject that we of the current age have not managed to politicize – even the most random ones from fly fishing to botany. We argue over “false facts” (the ultimate oxymoron) and call each other anti-science for believing or disbelieving the wrong ones. But while I despair of finding any that are truly apolitical, there are facts and factoids which are at least non-partisan, which is to say they can be spun in almost any direction. So, just for fun and relief, here are a dozen for today.
 
The ancient Egyptian word for cat is “miaow.” (The current Coptic, which derives from ancient Egyptian, transliterates as “emou.”) One has to admire the ready intelligibility.
 
The slogan on the first coin minted as US currency (1787) was “Mind Your Business.” I like it.
 

According to Public Policy Polling, 28% of Americans believe a secretive elite conspires to run the world. Only 28%?
 
When neurologist James Fallon compared his own brain scan to those of known psychopaths, he discovered he was one. I hate when that happens.
 
Gavisti, Sanskrit for “war,” literally means “desire for more cows.” I’m still not turning vegan.
 
Five countries have no national debt: Singapore, Taiwan (yes I know its status as a country is ambiguous), Brunei, Palau, and Liechtenstein. Those governments just aren’t trying.
 
There is a word for someone who never had a haircut: acersecomic. I wouldn’t have thought there were enough folks to need a specific word.
 
Nocturia is the need to get up at night to urinate. OK, I get why there is a word for that.
 
Edgar Allan Poe was paid $9 for the publication of “The Raven.” No wonder his midnight was so dreary.
 
The mother of Matt Groening (creator of “The Simpsons") was named Marge. Sigmund would approve.
 
Jaguars are attracted to the scent of Calvin Klein’s Obsession for Men. Wildlife photographers bait them with it. Wrong New World big cat.
 
Research from the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University indicates that falling in love typically will cost you two close friends. Is one of those friends the beloved?
 
Those are twelve, which incidentally is the point value of the word “twelve” in Scrabble.
 

Alice Cooper – Grim Facts