12.19.24 Reindeer Magic

When you see a white-tailed deer, you can easily distinguish between a male and a female: the buck has antlers and the doe does not.

But another member of the deer family, the caribou, is harder to figure. BOTH sexes grow antlers, but they shed them at different times. The males lose their antlers in the early winter, by mid-December, while the females keep theirs until spring. This is pretty unique; only one other member of the deer family shares this  trait. It’s a cousin of the caribou that lives in the northern stretches of Eurasia and North America, stands about three and a half feet tall, weighs 300 pounds, and runs about 15 miles an hour. Nine of them have been known to fly.

Let’s put all that together and state it more plainly: If you see a reindeer on your roof in late December, and it has antlers on its head…it’s a girl.

Yup, Santa’s got an all-doe team working for him! Now, you could have expected Dasher, Dancer, Prancer and Vixen to be ladies, but Comet, Cupid, Donner (which means “Thunder” in German), and Blitzen (“Lighting”)? Pretty macho names for she-deer.

Some cynics might argue that Santa’s team might be younger bull reindeer; they tend to keep their antlers later into the winter, sometimes as late as December 24. However, our knowledge of the reindeer goes back a long way; they must be at least 100 years old. Another possibility is that, in some parts of world, folks don’t use reindeer bulls to pull their sleds, they use steers. And steers keep their antlers similar to does. But in order to create a team of reindeer steers, Santa would have to…oh, no, he wouldn’t!

Now, let’s consider the case of Rudolph. There’s no doubt that the other reindeer, “used to laugh and call HIM names.” And in the famous animated version he ends up married to Clarice and having kids of his own. So you gotta conclude he’s a guy. On the other hand, he has a luminescent nose – and hangs out with a dentist, a prospector, and the Abominable Snowman – so maybe the normal rules don’t apply to him.

And, if you take that a step further, since all of Santa’s reindeer are clearly magical, perhaps the “normal” rules don’t apply to them either.

Maybe therein lies the moral. It’s all part of the allegory. Perhaps it doesn’t matter whether you’re a buck or a doe. Whether you were born that way or were, um, altered.

Perhaps the message is, no matter who we are or appear to be, we are all equally capable of magic.

As the big elf himself says, “Happy Christmas to ALL, and to ALL a good night.”

 

12.12.14 Spirit of the Season

Here’s one way to find the spirit of the season.

To get to the magical spot, you’ve got to travel a very long way, walk through wooded hills and past a crystal clear lake. Step into a building which has been in use since 1923. Move through a huge cellar, where some 2000 barrels, specially crafted of Spanish oak and previously used for storing sherry, are slowly aging the product. Finally, you arrive at the tasting room. A bartender artfully carves an ice cube the shape and size of a baseball and places it in a glass. And pours over it a serving of golden liquor. You take a sip, and are immediately overwhelmed by a taste that has been described as “near indescribable genius.”

You just enjoyed the finest whisky in the world, which was just chosen by the world’s most prominent critic, Jim Murray, in his Whisky Bible 2015.

But here’s the thing. You’re not in Scotland. Or Canada. Or Kentucky.

You are in Japan. That’s right, the finest whisky on Earth is being created in a distillery just outside Kyoto. It’s Yamazaki’s Single Malt Sherry Cask 2013, which is created by chief blender Shinji Fukuyo. He’s been honing his craft here since the 1980’s, when globe-trotting Japanese executives first acquired a taste for whisky. And he claims his whisky gets its character from a combination of the local water, which has an incredible mineral softness, and hot summers which make for a complex, deep aroma. But whether it’s the water, the weather, those sherry casks or Fukuyo’s talent, Yamazaki beat out over 1000 other distillers to become Japan’s first-ever whisky champion.

And what do they think of this back in the home of whisky? Well, not only did Scotland not win this year’s competition, they didn’t even make the top 5. The second and third place finishers came from the same distiller, Buffalo Trace, out of Kentucky. And there are award-winners from such places as New Zealand and Taiwan. It’s a dizzying diversification of distilling.

So, perhaps not coincidentally, the news recently featured another story, out of a small Scottish town called Dreghorn. Here a local craft brewer called Arran has been making award-winning beers for over a decade. And they’ve never distilled whisky. But lately they’ve been importing some unique equipment from Japan, and making sizeable purchases of rice.

They’ve just applied for approval to become Scotland’s first brewer of sake.

12.5.14 Lot of Hope

Times have been tough lately.

But stop for a moment and consider what life must have been like in, say, 1931. At that time, the country was two years into the Great Depression, and it would be another two years before there would be any sign of recovery. Approximately 25% of all working-age people were without jobs, and would remain unemployed for years. Throughout the country, one-third of all farmers had lost their homes, their lands, or their lives. And in the cities, the epicenter of the pain was the construction industry; almost no new building projects had been started since the crash of ’29.

In New York City, on Christmas Eve, a group of men had gathered in an empty lot at the intersection of 6th Avenue and 50th Street. They were a desperate-looking bunch, dressed in ragged overalls and tattered hats which barely kept them warm. They could easily have been mistaken for hobos or vagabonds. But, incongruously, they weren’t milling about hopelessly; they were ordered in a line that led up to a wooden box. Stranger still, behind that box stood a few more men, dressed in suits and ties. As each of the desperate men stepped up to the box, he was greeted with a handshake. And handed a piece of paper that must have seemed like a miracle.

These men were the lucky ones, the few that actually had something to celebrate. That’s because, two years earlier, this site had been chosen to be the home for a new Metropolitan Opera House. A development syndicate had leased the property from Columbia University, and had almost begun construction. But then the market crashed, and all of their plans, and indeed the syndicate itself, were destroyed. And that would have been the end of the story, had it not been for one of the investor’s refusal to quit. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. took another look at the site, and drew up a new plan for developing a commercial complex that would include 14 buildings spread over 8 acres. It was an audacious project, which no banks or investors would support. Undeterred, Rockefeller decided to fund the entire thing himself. It would cost over $250MM and turn out to be the largest private development in modern times.

Work began slowly in 1930. By 1931, much of the demolition had taken place and new construction was ready to begin. And so it was, on Christmas Eve, 1931, that this empty lot was actually a sign of hope. The men that had gathered weren’t there for a handout, they had come to pick up a paycheck. And to celebrate such rare good fortune, someone had rounded up a 30-foot tall balsam tree and set it up in the empty lot. To decorate it, the men fabricated some garlands out of paper and tin cans.

Miraculously, the moment was captured in a photograph.

It’s all there. The empty lot. The desperate times. The ragged men. The wooden box.

And standing beside them – a symbol of hope, and a harbinger of the great prosperity that would one day come – the first Christmas Tree in Rockefeller Center.

11.28.14 The Black Offer

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*Offer valid from 5:59 AM to 6:00 AM EST, November 28, 2014. Limit one per customer. Good while supplies last at participating restaurants. Not valid when combined with any other offer, especially any other offer of greater value. Offer should not be used by women who are pregnant, or may become pregnant. Ask your doctor before taking advantage of this offer, or any offer, and seek emergency medical attention if your desire for marketing is painful or lasts longer than 4 hours. This offer has not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration, and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Offer not available in all states. This offer is sold by weight, not volume; some settling of contents may have occurred during shipment and handling. Offer takes place rain or shine, no refunds, substitutions or cancellations. When you take advantage of this offer, we collect personally identifiable information about you that we share and monetize with our partners. Requires 30-month, 24-month, or 20-month 0% APR installment agreement and qualifying credit. Tags, title, administration fees, destination fees, and license fees not included in price; see dealer for complete details. Respondents are entitled to one (1) carry-on bag plus one (1) personal bag; additional bags must be checked for an additional fee. If you’re not completely satisfied, you may cancel at any time within 30 days and return the offer to us; just pay separate processing and shipping charges. Shipping charges are estimated and will be calculated and added when your order is processed. The term, “complimentary” is a registered trademark of quickSilver, which is solely responsible for the interpretation of this offer’s content. Offer not valid to former, current or future customers or prospects of quickSilver. Offer definitely not valid to friends and family of quickSilver.  Offer details subject to change at any time without prior written notice.

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11.14.14 MSG, Wrong By Three

This is the odd history of the famous thing with the name that’s wrong, three times over.

The story begins pretty dreadfully, in New York City in the 1700’s. At the north end of the city, there is a swamp which is being used as a potter’s field. As the city grows and develops, the swamp is drained to make room for a military barracks and a home for juvenile delinquents. When the home burns down in 1839, it is replaced by a roadhouse which serves as the last stop in the city for folks travelling north. To give the place some cachet, the owner names the joint “Madison Cottage” after the former President (who ironically always hated New York). It only lasts until 1853, when it is razed to make room for a hotel, but by that point the area has become synonymous with the roadhouse. And so we get – quite indirectly – today’s “Madison Avenue,” and along its length from 23^rd to 26^th Streets, “Madison Square Park.”

As the city grows and expands northward, the area is redeveloped. In 1871, a large train depot at the north end of the park is abandoned when Grand Central Station opens. Seeing an opportunity, an entertainment entrepreneur named P.T. Barnum leases the depot from Cornelius Vanderbilt, and transforms it into an open-air “hippodrome” for circus performances. It is then sublet – for only 2 years – to a concert promoter, who fills the place with fountains and flowers and renames it “Gilmore’s Concert Garden.” And later it serves as a communal meeting place for political events, boxing matches, and, famously, the site of the first Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, in 1877. And, somewhere along the way, it becomes known as “The Garden.”

In 1890, the drafty old building is purchased by a consortium that includes Barnum, J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, and W.W. Astor. They then hire the most famous architect of the day, Stanford White, to design a replacement. And he comes up with a colossus that features the largest main hall in the world, a concert hall, seating for 8000, the largest restaurant in the city, and a roof garden cabaret. Though it is designed in Beaux Arts style, it is has a Moorish feel and a bell tower modelled after the minaret of the Cathedral of Seville, atop of which is an 18-foot sculpture of Diana, which turns in the wind 32 stories above the ground. The structure is a modern marvel and the second-tallest building in New York, but – as you might expect in such a twisted tale – becomes best known for a murder, which occurs in 1906, when Henry Kendall Thaw shoots Stanford White in the rooftop restaurant for having an affair with his wife.

The rest of the story is almost an afterthought. In 1925, the famous building is torn down to make room for the New York Life building. The venue is moved away from Madison Square, one the city’s swankiest neighborhoods, to Hell’s Kitchen. Here a boxing venue is built, with seating for 18,000, but other sporting events are held here. In 1968, it is replaced by a fourth incarnation, which is built, ironically, atop a railroad station. Today, as you stand outside and look at it, you immediately see its defining aspect: it’s round.

It’s a roadhouse, born in a swampy cemetery fit only for soldiers and criminals. Transformed by a showman and multiple millionaires. Four times built, three times destroyed. Witness to the crime of the century. Home to politicians, purebreds, pugilists and power forwards.

It’s not named for James Madison. It’s not Square. It’s not a Garden. But it endures. Madison Square Garden, the world’s most famous arena.

11.7.14 Congressional Calculations

“What do you get when put 100 women in Congress?”

No, it’s not the first line of a joke, but a reference to the mid-term elections. Given the results of Tuesday night, the number of women in the House will increase to 80 and the number in the Senate will increase to 20. Which means that, when the 114th Congress begins on January 3rd, it will be the first in U.S. history with 100 women. Compare that to just 30 years ago, when there were only 25 women in Congress. In addition, the 114th will feature the first black woman Republican (Representative Mia Love of Utah), and the youngest-ever woman (30-year-old Elise Stefanik, Representative from New York). Pretty impressive stuff.

Which raises a question: how well are various demographic groups represented in Congress? Well, if you assume that the House and Senate are equal in value, and you do a little research and number crunching, you can calculate what we call the CRI, or “Congressional Representation Index,” for any group. For example, Asian Americans now hold 13 House seats (out of 435 total) and 2 Senate seats (out of 100), which equals 3% of the House and 2% of the Senate, for a total of 2.5% of the total Congress. Seems pretty low. But when you factor in that Asians are only 5% of the total U.S. population, you realize they hold exactly half the seats they should (2.5% v. 5%), which means Asians get a .50 CRI. Other groups have it worse. For African Americans (13% of population), there are 43 Representatives (10%) and 2 Senators (2%), for a .46 CRI. For Hispanics (16% of population), 35 Representatives (7%) and 3 Senators (3%), yields a paltry .35 CRI. And, worst of all, Native Americans are only 1% of the U.S. population, and they have only 1 Representative and no Senators, giving them a .11 CRI.

Meanwhile, on the other end of the spectrum, there’s this: 343 Representatives are White, as are 93 Senators. Which gives Whites control of 86% of Congress. And, since they are 65% of the U.S. population, Whites enjoy a CRI of 1.32.

Taken all together, it means the following, math-o-demo-graphically speaking: 2/3 of Americans (White) are way overrepresented in Congress, while 1/3 (Non-White) of Americans get only half, or much worse, of the representation that they should.

And finally, what does it mean, math-o-gender-graphically speaking? Well, to answer the question we started with, 80 Representatives and 20 Senators equates to 19% of Congress. And Women are 51% of the population. So when you put 100 women in Congress, you get a CRI for Women of just .37.

Versus a CRI for Men of…1.65.

Look at it again: .37 versus 1.65. Representationally speaking, each Man in America is 4.5 times more influential than each Woman.

See? It’s not a joke. It’s just math, and it’s not very funny.

10.31.14 Sweet Repeat

It’s hard work making a simple icon.

Imagine you’re a factory worker in Cincinnati way back in 1880. It’s mid-summer, there’s no air conditioning, and the temperature inside the plant is well over 100 degrees. You’re dressed in a heavy leather apron, and carrying a 45-pound pail of boiling hot white liquid. Starting at the head of an assembly line, walking backwards, you have to carefully fill a set of metal molds exactly 1/3 full. Next, you grab a second 45-pound pail of hot liquid, this time colored orange, and walking backwards, you fill the same molds to the 2/3 mark. And then, to complete the process, you go back to the start, get a third 45-pound pail of yellow liquid, and, walking backward, fill the molds right up to the top. The full molds are then taken away, you’re given a fresh empty set, and you repeat the process. About 50 times a day, 10 hours a day, 6 days a week.

Thus was born candy corn. It was first made by the Goelitz Company of Cincinnati in the 1830’s. The company was successful for almost a century, and moved to a larger facility in Chicago in 1912 to keep up with demand. Then came the Great Depression, and candy corn prices dropped from 16 cents a pound to just over 8 cents. Somehow the company survived. The market rebounded after World War 2, but in 1975 a spike in sugar prices forced the company to close the Chicago plant and relocate to California. Soon after, the company invented Jelly Bellies, which exploded in popularity when Ronald Reagan became president.

Today candy corn is still made the same way (though now by machines and computers), and with the same basic recipe of sugar, water, egg whites, coloring and flavoring. Each piece has 6 calories, 1 gram of sugar, and no fat. There are other flavors and color varieties, but the original tri-color version remains the standard. Candy corn is an almost entirely American institution and is virtually unheard of outside the U.S. and Canada. Goelitz of California has been challenged by only one other company, Brachs of Texas, and these two companies make every one of the six billion “kernels” that are made each year, weighing in at over 20 million pounds.

Candy corn’s only purpose in life is to help celebrate Halloween: more than 90% of all candy corn eaten this year will be consumed in the next few days.

Don’t miss out. Candy corn may be hard to make, but eating it is easy.

10.24.14 Good Gourd!

OK, we’re coming up on Halloween. Time to head to the nursery and buy some harvest decorations. And a good time to weigh in on a few slightly relevant things.

Let’s start with something rather small, like… hay bales. Most hay bales are 3-4 feet long and about 2 feet square. They weigh about 100 pounds, making them a little hard to pick up and move around, but manageable. Unless, of course, by “hay bale” you mean one of those huge wheels you might see standing out in a field. Those weigh well over 1000 pounds; you’d need a forklift to pick one up and if you put one on your porch it would probably crush it.

Now, hay is for horses. And when you think “horse,” you naturally think of… Secretariat. Secretariat won the Triple Crown in 1973 and set race records for all three events which stand to this day. He could run 49 miles per hour. He stood about five and half feet tall at the withers. And he weighed 1,175 pounds.

If you put 50 such horses together, you’d expect they would weigh about 60,000 pounds. But they don’t. Consider that the most-manufactured automotive engine in the history of the world had the power of 50 horses. It was a strange air-cooled contraption mounted in the back of a car that looked kinda like a big round pumpkin and that was barely faster than Secretariat. That car was…the Volkswagen Beetle, and over 21MM of these oddities were manufactured in different parts of the world between 1938 and 2003. And the classic Beetle (think 1967), weighed 1,850 pounds. Almost a ton.

And finally, if you think “1967” and “Volkswagen Beetle,” your mind naturally goes to California, the Summer of Love and perhaps some commune along the beach near San Mateo. Maybe a beautiful place like… Half Moon Bay. Where at this time each year they hold the Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Festival, which features a contest. And this year, a farmer from the Napa Valley named John Hawkley came to the contest. He came with a pumpkin. A rather large pumpkin.

It was too big to pick up with a forklift, so they used a crane. They had to be careful not to break it.  They hoisted it up, and set it down. And as the scale settled, it showed the pumpkin weighed more than 20 bales of hay.  More than 1.7 Secretariats. More than a Volkswagen.

It’s the heaviest pumpkin ever grown in North American. It weighs 2,058 pounds.

Good Gourd! It’s a one-ton pumpkin.

10.17.14 Shotgun Shake

Sometimes you are a witness to history, and sometimes you step up and grab it by the hand.

George Shuba was by any measure a good ballplayer. He grew up on the tough side of Youngstown, Ohio, dreaming of the big leagues. His father was a Slovakian immigrant who did little to encourage his son, and at Catholic school a nun once hit George so hard that he lost some of his hearing. But he was determined to make it; each day in his room he would take 600 practice swings at a rope he hung from the ceiling, using a bat filled with lead. In 1943, when he was 17, he was signed by the Brooklyn Dodgers. Throughout the 1940’s, he worked his way up through their farm system, playing mostly in New Orleans and Mobile. In 1947, he hit 21 home runs, batted .389, and earned the nickname “Shotgun” for the way he sprayed line-drives all over the field.

And so, in 1948, he was called up to play in Brooklyn. Over the next 7 years, Shotgun Shuba enjoyed a solid career as a utility player on one of the best teams in baseball. He came to the plate a total of 814 times, had 211 hits, 125 RBIs, 24 home runs, scored 106 runs, and batted .259. In his best year, 1952, he batted .305, but a knee injury slowed him down thereafter. His personal moment of glory came in 1953, when, in the opening game of the World Series against the Yankees, he became the first person to pinch-hit a home run in the Series for a National League team. Unfortunately, the Yankees won the game 9-5 and the Series 4-2. Two years later, Shuba’s fate was reversed; in his final career appearance, in Game 7 of the ’55 Series, he grounded out to end the sixth inning, but the Dodgers went on to win the Series, the only title they ever won in Brooklyn. Look it up: you’ll see Shuba’s name on that legendary championship roster alongside names like Koufax, Hodges, Campanella, Lasorda, Reese, Podres, Snider, and, oh yeah, Robinson.

Yes, Jackie Robinson. And therein lies the real story. You see, Shuba and Robinson had crossed paths, literally, almost 10 years before they won the Series together. In 1946, they were both playing for the Dodgers’ farm team from Montreal. On April 18, 1946, in the third inning of an away game in Jersey City, with two men on base, Robinson slammed a three-run homer over the left-field fence. As he neared home plate, neither of Robinson’s teammates who had been on base waited to publicly congratulate him. But another man did: Shotgun Shuba was the next hitter, and he had been warming up in the on-deck circle. He stepped up to the plate and offered his hand to Robinson, who shook it with a small celebratory hop and a huge smile. It was a charged moment, one that probably displeased many in the crowd, and on both team benches. And it was captured by the Associated Press. It is the first photograph of an interracial handshake in professional baseball history.

The moment was dubbed, “A Handshake for the Century,” and it remains the defining image of Jackie Robinson’s arrival in the white leagues. For better or worse, it is also the image that came to define Shuba’s career. After he retired and went back to Youngstown, he kept a low profile. Few people remembered his achievements as a Dodger, but everyone wanted to talk to him about the handshake. He often downplayed it, saying, “As far as I was concerned, Jackie was a great ballplayer – our best…I couldn’t care less if he was black, white or Technicolor.” But Shuba also recognized the moment’s importance. The only baseball memento he displayed in his living room was that photograph, and he carried it with him when he visited local schools to talk about racial tolerance.

In 2005, Shuba attended a 50th Anniversary celebration with many of his surviving teammates at Dodger Stadium. Then he quietly returned to Youngstown, where last month, he passed away, aged 89, in his home.

His son Michael, when asked about the historic handshake, recalled that his dad would routinely say, “Look at that photo. I want you to remember what it stands for. You treat all people equally.”

10.3.14 Moon Mania

Each month, the moon makes us all go a little crazy.

Take next Tuesday for instance. On that night there will be a full moon. It’s called the Hunter’s Moon, which is the full moon AFTER the Harvest moon, which is the full moon closest to the Autumnal Equinox, either before the Equinox or after it. (This year the Harvest Moon occurred fairly early, on Sept 9, about 12 days before the Equinox, and the Hunter’s Moon will occur about 17 days after it.) Both the Harvest and Hunter’s moons are special in that, due to the elliptical orbit of the moon around the earth, they rise in the sky about 20 minutes earlier than other full moons, making moonrise and sunset happen concurrently.

But this isn’t just any Hunter’s Moon. It’s also what some folks call a Blood Moon. That’s because there will be an eclipse of this moon that will be partial in the Eastern U.S. and total in the Western U.S. and all the way to Hawaii. During a lunar eclipse, the Earth’s atmosphere throws a shadow on the moon, turning it various shades of copper, orange and red.

And it’s not just any Blood Moon, oh, God, no. As was previously reported, this is one in a series of four Blood Moons, each spread out six lunar months from the next, from April 2014 to October 2014 to April 2015 to October 2015. It’s a fairly rare event called the Tetrad which some folks fear has apocalyptic significance. But let’s just try to stay calm. Either that’s a bunch or hooey or, at worst, we all have six more months. Let’s just use the less dramatic synonym “Red Moon.”

This full moon will NOT also be a Super Moon. You may have heard this term used to describe a full moon that occurs when it is very close to the earth. (Technically speaking, its distance has to be within 90% of its closest point in its elliptical orbit around Earth.) The proximity makes the full moon truly look Super, about 10% larger than the average full moon. This makes astrologers go crazy and predict all sorts of geological disasters like earthquakes and tsunamis. Which in turn makes true scientists go nuts and remind everyone that the term Super Moon was invented by an astrology kook and that folks should use the true astronomical term, “a moon in perigee-syzygy.” Regardless, next week’s full moon will be a rather large one, but it won’t meet the definition of Super Moon.

So let’s take a step back look at all this rationally. Next Tuesday night we’ll have a spectacular moon. It won’t be quite super-sized, and it won’t be a harbinger of the end of the world.

But it will be a Red Hunter’s Moon in Total Eclipse. That’s pretty cool, and that’s enough.

Unless, of course, you wanna get completely insane and talk about the Moon Wobble…