I'm writing this note from my living room in the moments before the kids wake up and come downstairs. The last couple days we were up in the mountains taking the kids to the snow and what a time we had. We came right at the end of a good storm, making it to the cabin just in time before the roads became impassable and awoke to a spectacular scene of white! We came home late last night and although it is Christmas, the kids are too tired to be up yet.
Since I am usually the first to awake, I turned on the computer this morning to get a few things done. My Internet browser has a homepage set to a news site. I need to change this. In my stupidity, I browsed the recent headlines. The news is just awful. For example, in a town in New York where a friend of mine was a pastor, a man set fire to his house and then ambushed and killed two firemen coming to put out the blaze. I was going to give a few more examples, but they're mostly depressing and terrible too and it seems as though the reaction by pundits and governments is to call for the removal of liberty in the name of "safety" and create some kind of Orwellian police state. So I checked my e-mail box and it was stuffed with e-mails (sent today) from merchants telling me how I can spend my money. They wanted to make sure that they sent it Christmas Day because the stores open tomorrow. How very nice of them (sarcasm, of course).
So the the world is messed up! Filled with selfish and wicked people. But not entirely. I recently read about a couple of English scientists that designed a gravity powered light in hopes of trying to reduce the reliance on dangerous kerosene in African villages. There is both good and bad in humanity and there resides in the heart a longing for a better world that should be.
This is why I love Christmas. It is a time of pause when people remember that there was a moment when God became man and physically entered our world. The Powerful One who created everything beautiful and ideal (who wept over our sinful choices that have ruined everything) who left the splendor of Heaven, came down and chose to be born in a poor forgotten corner of our planet, revealing himself first to lowly shepherds, carpenters, and fishermen.
And it astounds me that His purpose in coming was to ultimately sacrifice Himself for us that he might provide a way of salvation to those who repent of their sins and follow Him. Yes, the good news is our Redeemer has come, making a way to escape the righteous judgement to come on this world.
Yesterday's Person-of-Mystery was Sir Francis Galton, the man who first coined the term "nature versus nurture."
Francis Galton might best be described as a Renaissance Man. He had a penchant for observing, counting and measuring and over his life, made significant contributions to a number of disparate fields. Although while in college, Galton had prepared for a career in the medical profession, after leaving Cambridge, he traveled extensively first through Eastern Europe and then up the Nile to the Sudan. He then journeyed through the Middle East and in 1850 he embarked on a groundbreaking expedition through what is now Namibia in southwestern Africa.
Through his travels, he developed an interest in geography, anthropology and meteorology (Galton would be the first to discover anticyclones and publish the first popular weather map based on charted data of air pressure). His penchant for data collection would lead him to introduce the concepts of regression, correlation, and standard deviation to statistical study.
Unknown to me before reading more on Galton, Charles Darwin was a first cousin of his. After the publication of Origin of Species, Galton became increasingly interested variations of human populations and their behaviors. He studied the possibility of inherited ability or behaviors among humans and created the study of differential psychology. His studies dabbled in eugenics and inheritance of behaviors including criminal behavior – Galton also invented a system for classifying fingerprints. He was the first to pose the question of "nature versus nurture," and was one of the first to gather information on twin studies.
Francis Galton "mug shot" taken when visiting Alphonse Bertillon in 1893
It seems as though the "nature versus nurture" debate always seems to raise its head whenever some evil individual commits some horrid act. Anyone care to share their thoughts in this matter?
The other day, I noticed an article on the Washington Post website about Gallup creating an emotional map of the world based on their polling data.
You can check out the article yourself, but I always have a hard time with maps like this. I start thinking of people I know from different countries to see if they fit the map. Of course, this is nonsense as there are more and less emotional people in every country, but in general I still enjoy thinking about these things (and an excuse to look at a map in a new way is always fun).
According to Gallup, Singapore is the least emotional country whereas nearby Philippines is the most emotional. There are other trends that can be witnessed here. Russia and the old Soviet Bloc nations tend to be less emotional. The Americas tend to be more emotional.
One thing I wish was that the map for the United States was broken down by state. As I've traveled around our country, I've noticed that the upper Midwest in particular tends to be rather stoic.
Now that I'm home, I'm going through the mail I missed. As I was doing so, I ran across a piece of junk mail that I set aside last month that I wanted to share with you.
The junk mail that almost got through
Mail used to be one of the things I looked forward to. As I would spy the mailman in the neighborhood, I would wonder who might have written. Today, it's not so thrilling. Almost all the stamps are generic and with the stick-em backs, you can't even save them if you collect. Since e-mail almost no one sends a personal letter and the box is filled with mostly bulk mail junk. The worst I think are the supermarket circulars. They're not even addressed to me, but the mailman just jams them into the box. A few years ago, they stopped delivering mail to the individual houses in the neighborhood and the post office gives you a little lock box and the end of the street, so if you don't empty the junk mail every couple of days, the real letter that happens to come still gets crumpled in a pile of advertisements.
Junk mail has become a horrible game of cat and mouse with the junk mailers trying to get you to open their letters before just tossing them. I don't really know why they do this. I'm not more likely to buy something from junk mail if I happen to be tricked into opening it.
So this is my story about how I was almost recently tricked into opening junk mail. I was going through the pile of worthless advertisements, when the corner of a letter caught my eye.
Suspicious return address
At first it looked like one of those cutesy family return address stamps, "From all of us – Brandon, Anne, Cole, Jake." But wait! It had a odd printing error running through the middle. Why?
Wait a minute! There's a bulk mail stamp, a generic "mailed from zip code" cancelation stamp, and a presorted bar code. It's junk mail! Nice one, sneaky junk mailer. You almost got me.
Just for kicks, I looked at Google Maps to see where the Brandon, Anne, Cole and Jake family lived in Plano...
Yep, wasn't the sweet little single family home I had originally envisioned.
It's too bad. I would almost go back to using postal mail for nostalgia sake if it weren't for things like this (oh, and the half dollar price tag to mail a letter).
There were plenty of good comments the other day about Olympic annoyances, but Jules touched on another, cheerleaders, which I had overlooked in my post.
I first noticed Olympic cheerleaders at the 2008 Beijing games. At the time, they seemed oddly out of place for a few reasons. For starters, I thought the basic reason for cheerleaders was to work up the crowd, but are Olympic spectators so bored that they need entertaining to keep their spirits up? Secondly, I thought the purpose for cheerleaders was to support a specific team, but these seemed to just be out there to dance around (the shift between cheering and dancing will be discussed later). Finally, I guess if the purpose was just to be an attractive diversion, it seemed odd that the cheerleaders came out during the beach volleyball event where the contestants already were wearing skimpy outfits.
All of these questions led me to explore, just where did cheerleading come from in the first place? It may surprise many to learn that the first cheerleaders were not women, but men, and it didn't originate in a warm weather location, but in frigid Minnesota.
Johnny Campbell
Although Princeton University is recognized as having the earliest crowd cheers, it wasn't until November 12, 1898, that a University of Minnesota student, Johnny Campbell, became the world's first recognized cheerleader when he directed the crowd during a game against Northwestern using the cheer, "Rah, Rah, Rah! Ski-u-mah, Hoo-Rah! Hoo-Rah! Varsity! Varsity! Varsity, Minn-e-So-Tah!" Other universities quickly caught on and by the next season, cheer squads had been formed at a number of schools.
The 1899 University of Kansas Cheer Squad
The primary purpose of these early cheer squads was to motivate the crowd and encourage the team particularly when enthusiasm began to wain. Many of the earliest cheerleaders were selected primarily for their energy and loud voices. Megaphones were their primary accessory and looks certainly weren't a consideration.
A 1909 Ohio State Cheerleader
Cheerleading remained largely male dominated in the earliest years as men typically had the loudest voices.
The 1913 University of Puget Sound Cheer Squad
As schools began to officially organize cheer squads, preppy outfits in school colors soon followed. By the 1920s, women began joining cheer squads. As their voices weren't generally as strong, but as they were usually lighter and more flexible, they became more often used in the jumps and stunts in increasingly mixed squads.
Throughout the 1930s and 40s, women began joining cheer squads in increasing numbers and of course during World War II many of the men were away in the military, so a gender shift naturally occurred in larger numbers.
The person most responsible for cheerleading as we know it today was Lawrence "Herkie" Herkimer, a cheerleader at Southern Methodist University, who formed the first cheerleaders association in 1948 (National Cheerleaders Association) and held the first cheerleading camp. Herkie is also credited with creating a number of traditional cheerleading acrobatics and adding many elements we associate with traditional cheerleading today, including: patenting the pom pon (now often called the pom pom), the first uniform company, the spirit stick and of course the classic cheerleading jump – the Herkie.
Lawrence Herkimer doing his Herkie Jump
As more women became involved in gymnastics in the 1960s and 70s, ever increasing acrobatic maneuvers were introduced into cheerleading, but just as it was gaining recognition as an athletic endeavor, the Dallas Cowboys football team greatly increased the sexualization of cheer in 1972 by introducing its first all female squad with the smallest outfits ever.
The CowBelles & Beaux, Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders from the 1960s
1972 Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders
National television played a big role in popularizing the image of the Cowboys Cheerleaders and other teams soon copied their model. As cheerleading became seen as an exclusively female role and as the outfits became increasingly more revealing, men mostly dropped out of cheerleading.
Which brings us to where we are today. I see cheerleading going two directions. There is a 1950s and 60s version of cheerleading which is what most of our high schools perform. This is an increasingly athletic and acrobatic sport. Then there is a more recent dance type of cheerleading where it is usually very little cheering and it's primarily a group of women dressed in revealing outfits dancing for the crowd.
Our local university, Cal Poly, has two cheerleading squads, neither of which they call cheerleaders. One is the Cal Poly Stunt Team (these are the ones in skirts and bows in their hair) and the other is the Cal Poly Dance Team. Both perform at the same events. You can see the difference in this video where they're performing at the same time:
I don't go to many sports events, but when I do if I'm unlucky enough to be seated closer to the play and cheerleaders or dancers suddenly come out and start performing right in front of me, it certainly makes me uncomfortable. I know they've put a lot of hard work into their routines, so I don't want to be rude and ignore them, but I really don't want to watch a bunch of people I don't know in tiny outfits dancing right in front of me either.
Which brings me back to the Olympics. I watch the Olympics for the sport, so it seems strange to see more events gaining cheerleaders. One of my questions is if beach volleyball wants to be taken seriously, do they really think it's so dull that they need to liven things up with a bunch of cheerleader performances. Another thing I wonder about is how do they pick the sports to add cheerleading to? Here in America it started with Football in which the play stops so often that it really could use something to keep the crowd rooting, but why not ping pong (heck, I'll bet you have a hard time even seeing what's going on if you're watching from the actual stadium).
So what's my solution? Make cheerleading a real Olympic sport with real rules. That way, they won't feel like they need to include it at the sidelines of other sports. And while they're at it, why not bring back Tug-of-War? It would be really neat to see what country produces the strongest squad.
Oh, and one last thing about that image problem with cheerleading. Perhaps you may not know this but we've already had one go on and become President of the United States...
George W. Bush was the head cheerleader during his high school days at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts.
Perhaps it's returning from the beautiful forested hills and lakes, or maybe it's because summer is going by too quickly for my liking, or maybe I'm just hitting middle age, but I'm finding more slight annoyances in life. I returned from our camping trip looking forward to watching a little of the olympics, but I think I'm already annoyed.
London 2012: Winning the gold for worst logo ever
There are of course plenty of things to annoy me. Firstly, the logo is atrocious! It reminds me of some kind of bargain brand soda logo from the 80s. Then there's the font! You'd think that they could have adopted some kind of updated neoclassical design, but the font continually assaults my eyes.
I feel like Max Headroom should be trying to sell me New Coke with this font. And I don't care if the Olympic rings are round, it doesn't make the round O in this font any more hip. As one columnist said, it's what the Brits call "dad dancing." That is something akin to a middle aged man trying way too hard to still be cool.
But it's not just the Brits that mangled the Olympics. What was with our outfits at the opening ceremony?
I suppose it matched the 80s throwback theme, but really berets? Yeech! Kind of like some kind of odd flight attendant uniforms from yesteryear.
And while I'm on my rant, here are a few other things that irk me...
I don't like watching our goofy American network television hosts and now they've got them over in the UK being equally ignorant of British history, culture, and sports in general. Perhaps it's just a TV thing, but it seems as though television keeps shooting for an ever lower mental age. Another thing that bothers me is how the television broadcasts cut between events as though they were live or talk in a giddy excited fashion when the events have been posted half a day earlier on the Internet. Just show the event in realtime and allow people to watch if they'd like.
Maybe my discontent is just my noticing our degraded popular culture. I still find tattoos rather trashy and it seems as though more and more of society is getting them. That bothers me a little too and I've seen more during the olympics than I seem to remember.
Maybe it's time for me to just stop watching the olympics. It certainly seems as though people have stopped attending them. I do find it funny that Britain has enlisted the military to serve as seat fillers at the games.
Someone should tell them though that camouflage only works if you look like your surroundings – they should have probably told them to come in civilian clothes as it would have looked more realistic. I can only imagine what our press would have said if the Chinese had filled their stadiums with uniformed soldiers instead of the general public.
Well, thanks. I think I have that off my chest. I'll still watch the games, but thank goodness I have a DVR and can fast forward through much of the nonsense.
Following my earlier post on Burney Falls (and my designation as the prettiest waterfall I'd seen), Rob from Amersfoort questioned whether I had seen Niagara Falls and if I did if I liked them. Well, yes, I have seen Niagara Falls. I visited them without the family during the summer of 2005. I was attending a historical conference in Pennsylvania and my wife was staying with the boys at her parents in Wisconsin. Following the conference I rented a car and drove with a slight detour to meet up with them.
The American Falls at Niagara in 2005
The Niagara Falls are certainly magnificent. It's a matter of personal opinion certainly, but I found Burney Falls to be more intricate and beautiful to behold. It's in a much more natural setting and isn't as commercialized. I saw both in peak season, but Burney Falls was certainly less visited. Though we passed a few other people, we pretty much had the place to ourselves and you could watch the falls in solitude. My experience at Niagara was that it there were more distractions around the falls.
The viewing angles of Burney Falls were also a bit better. Owing to the large amount of water coming over Niagara, the mist, while fun, prevented you from seeing the falls well up close.
I did not take the time to see the falls by boat, which did seem like it would be interesting, but I thought the most fun (and free) viewing angle was from the top of the falls watching the water tumble over the precipice.
So, Niagara Falls still gets 9.7 stars on the Nate's Nonsense Waterfall Rating Scale, which is remarkably high, but slightly lower than the 9.9 rating for Burney Falls.
And I know you are all having a difficult time putting the height of the falls in perspective, so I've added Niagara Falls to the handy info graphic below:
Yesterday, I posted a piece on the historic reason for the counterintuitive shape of ketchup bottles.
If ketchup gets stuck in the bottle, why make the neck so narrow? Alert reader Ellena from Quebec wrote to me that she saw an article the next day in the German language magazine Der Spiegel about students at MIT who had developed a nano coating that could be applied to bottles (such as ketchup) that they've dubbed LiquiGlide. It allows the contents to slide effortlessly out of the container.
Although I applaud their efforts, I have to wonder how many of us old bottle types will wind up with a pile of ketchup in our laps when we flip the new coated bottle over and give it a good shake.
Earlier this week, I wrote about the tragic life of Eleanore Dumont. Old West beauty, turned gambler and Madame. I received an e-mail reply from one reader who seemed to think that her facial hair was the greatest tragedy of her life. The letter got me thinking. How sad that facial hair for a woman can be considered such a tragedy, while in many cases facial hair is the defining characteristic for a man. Today I am forced to think about Adolf Hitler. You see, as a school teacher this is one of my least favorite days of the year. For the last several years, the number four-twenty has been increasingly used by potheads as a badge of honor and today is April 20 (4/20). Another sad coincidence is that it is also anniversary of Hitler's birth (a fact that my students somehow also know is associated with 4/20). While searching for photos of Eleanore Dumont, I came across this curious photo of Hitler, photoshopped to remove his moustache:
The evil dictator without his characteristic moustache by Lyonlamb
When I tried to find the original photo, I noticed that there were plenty of other online images where famously hairy people (e.g., Salvador Dali,Albert Einstein, etc.) had their whiskers removed to provide a different perspective. Some of them even looked a little like other people. For example, Groucho Marx looked a little more like Bob Saget.
Graucho Marx without his moustache
As a younger man, I would watch Tom Selleck in the TV show, Magnum, P.I.Plenty of people I knew even started growing moustaches to imitate his manly appearance.
Selleck as Magnum, P.I.
When he shaved his moustache, I think it took fans a long time to adjust to his new look.
Facial hair can be co iconic that when you see a photo of a famously whiskered man without his moustache it seems strange. A case in point would be this photo of clean shaven Clark Gable below:
Not exactly the dashing (and mustachioed) Rhett Butler we all associate him with.
Maybe I'm off though and it's all one big trick of the mind. The German hat manufacturer ran the following ad claiming that head attire trumped the moustache:
Hut Weber Advertisement
Chaplin duly considered, I'm afraid that Hitler killed the toothbrush moustache for all time. I know in more recent years, Robert Mugabe tried to bring it back in vogue, but as Mugabe is another pathetic dictator, I'm afraid he's just going to reinforce the stereotype.
Robert Mugabe, not the facial hair trend setter he might imagine
When I first started writing this blog, I did it just for the kicks and it's been a lot of fun. I've enjoyed reading your comments and sharing my thoughts and items of interest I come across. Just out of curiosity, I've been tracking the number of visitors to Nate's Nonsense and I've watched it grow from about three thousand visitors a month to a recent average of about fifteen thousand per month – five hundred visitors a day has been pretty average.
Every once in a while I've noticed a spike in visitors that is typically attributable to one of my blog posts being picked up by an Internet news site. The other day, I noticed something pretty amazing (for Nate's Nonsense). Someone submitted one of my older posts on the head of Henry IV from January 2011 to Reddit. In one day alone (March 1) Nate's Nonsense had 129,636 hits! All over a post from over a year ago.
I'm both humbled and grateful to my readers who keep me writing. To my regulars, thanks for the constant encouragement!
Warning: This post is a little weightier than many discussed on this site, so if you're not in the mood for some deep thinking, perhaps skipping this post may be in your best interest.
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This morning I was scanning some headlines when the following story caught my eye:
Dead bodies to be burned to heat UK swimming pool...
My response was one of disbelief until I clicked on the link and came to the actual article in The Telegraph perhaps slightly more appropriately titled:
My first thought was absolute revulsion! Heating public pools with with the heat generated by crematoriums. Could I allow my kids to take swim lessons at such a facility? It brought back images of Nazi death camps burning bodies and making a profit off of death.
Smoke rising from Hadamar, a Nazi eugenics facility
However, after reading the article, it spoke about heat in excess of 1,400 °F from the crematorium being vented to the atmosphere and the waste involved. Furthermore, a local authority estimated a savings of about $23,000 a year in heating costs to the town by diverting currently wasted energy.
What are your thoughts on the matter? I'm still trying to work this one out in my mind.
George Washington was born today, February 11, 1732! That date is not a typo, England added 11 days to their calendar during his lifetime, so he actually had two birthdays, February 11 and February 22. Celebrations were made on both dates during his lifetime.
George Washington's birthplace was destroyed by a fire and flood on December 25, 1779, but you can still visit a recreated memorial house on the same property. The recreated home was built near where the
George Washington Birthplace National Park
Washington lived at the residence at Popes Creek until he was about three years old. The primary home he lived in until a teenager (known as Ferry Farm) was located across the Rappahannock River from Fredericksburg, Virginia. Washington lived here until 1743, when his father died. The Union Army destroyed this home during the Civil War, but the foundations were discovered in 2008 and archaeological work continues at the site.
Ferry Farm Archaeological Site
At nineteen, Washington moved to Mt. Vernon, the home with which he is best associated.
Mt. Vernon
Mt. Vernon is certainly the best preserved of Washington's homes and where he's buried.
Even his residence in Philadelphia at 190 High Street, where Washington lived when he was President was demolished for development in 1832 (with the final remaining walls being removed in 1945). Today an exposed open structure provides a window into the historic site.
President's House, Philadelphia
For someone so integral to the founding of the country and his impact on the world, our nation has done a pretty poor job preserving artifacts from his life. After his death, Washington's adopted son, George Washington Parke Custis, kept many of relics of his father's life at his home in Arlington, Virginia, as kind of a living museum. His daughter Mary was Mrs. Robert E. Lee. During the Civil War, the Union Army seized the estate from the Lees and looted the home (they also turned the property into Arlington Cemetery so the Lees couldn't return to a working farm after the war). Mrs. Lee saved what she could including the bed on which Washington died, but some of the remaining relics were taken as trophies of war and placed in the Patent Office for display - others just disappeared altogether or were destroyed.
