Anchors aweigh. Never forget.

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There’s an interesting story that’s been going through the emails for a couple of months, but I haven’t read any accounts of it in the blogs. I got around to checking it out and I found out that not only is the story true (and pretty neat), there’s another eerie detail as well.

The main part of the story is that construction is about half-completed on the USS New York, a new amphibious assault ship for the Navy that will be launched next year. There are a couple of details that make this noteworthy: the ship is one of three such craft made to support special operations missions against terrorists, and all three ships bear a name associated with 9/11. The other two ships are the USS Arlington (for the Pentagon) and the USS Somerset (for the county were Flight 93 crashed). The coolest detail is that the New York’s bow is made from 24 tons of scrap steel salvaged from the Twin Towers and reforged. You can read the touching story here.


Artist rendering of USS New York (Northrop Grumman)

While the Navy used to name battleships after states of the union this practice is currently reserved for nuclear submarines, so resurrecting the name for an amphibious assault ship required an exception. In fact, there have been at least seven ships named the USS New York, and the last one was a sub (I know, a sub is really a boat, not a ship).

Here’s the eerie twist: after googling the name of the ship I discovered that prior to the submarine the last USS New York (BB-34) had been a battleship that had seen action in both World Wars. The keel of that battleship was laid on a very interesting date:

September 11, 1911.

Challenging Word of the Week: quotidian

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Quotidian

(kwoh TID ee un) adjective



Quotidian means “daily,” i.e., recurring every day, as in a quotidian report, and in that sense is synonymous with diurnal but only in the first meaning given under that entry, i.e., “daily,” as opposed to “daytime” used attributively. By extension, quotidian has acquired the second meaning of “everyday” in the sense of “ordinary, commonplace,” and in certain contexts, “trivial.” In this extension, it follows its Latin antecedent quotidianus (daily), which acquired the meaning “common, ordinary.” Things that go on day after day do become run-of-the-mill after a while. Variety is the spice, etc. The American poet Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), in The Comedian as the Letter C, wrote: “…the quotidian saps philosophers.”



My example: The best bloggers disprove Stevens, being both quotable and quotidian.



From the book, “1000 Most Challenging Words” by Norman W. Schur, ©1987 by the Ballantine Reference Library, Random House. I post a weekly “Challenging Words” definition to call more attention to this delightful book and to promote interesting word usage in the blogosphere. I challenge other bloggers to work the current word into a post sometime in the coming week. If you manage to do so, please leave a comment or a link to where I can find it. Previous words in this series can be found under the appropriate Category heading in the right-hand sidebar.

What’s in a name? You might want to find out

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Today’s Strib has the details on the sentencing of a man who pled guilty to helping his wife and her teenaged sons kidnap two young women who where then prostituted and used as sex slaves until one escaped and brought the situation to light. Newspaper accounts suggest that the wife was the ringleader.

Lamiea Kerschbaum, Kerschbaum’s wife, has been charged with kidnapping and false imprisonment and is in the Ramsey County jail awaiting a competency hearing on July 26. She recently spent months at the state mental hospital in St. Peter being evaluated…

…Investigators think the Kerschbaums used pistol whippings, drugs and threats of voodoo to keep the girls under their control.

While her husband and one of her sons have pled guilty, Lamiea Kerschbaum’s trial has yet to begin.

Lamiea? That sounds an awful lot like one of the recent “Challenging Word of the Week” entries I posted back in May. An excerpt:

Lamia
(LAY mee uh)noun

The lamiae, in classical mythology, were a race of monsters with female heads and breasts and the bodies of serpents, who enticed young people and little children in order to devour them. The story went that the original lamia was a Queen of Libya with whom Jupiter fell in love. Juno became furiously jealous and stole the children of the queen, who went mad and vowed vengeance on all children. Lamia became a term for any vampire or she-demon. The literal meaning of lamia in Greek is “female man-eater.” In medieval times, witches were sometimes called lamiae.

Note to soon-to-be parents considering names for your impending children: if you see “Lamiea” or something similar in the baby name book you just might want to cross that one off the list.

Good luck, comrade

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Chad the Elder apparently is on assignment in Russia. His post about flying into Chelyabinsk reminded me of some favorite passages about Russia from P.J. O’Rourke’s book, Eat the Rich:

In the old days, the soda pop tasted like soap, the soap lathered like toilet paper, the toilet paper could be used to sand furniture, the furniture was as comfortable as a pile of canned goods, the canned goods had the flavor of a Solzhenitsyn novel, and a Solzhenitsyn novel got you arrested if you owned one. Now the Russians have discovered brand names…

My six-hour flight to Siberia took two days. Airline employees circulated with walkie-talkies. Not satisfied with individual screw-ups, they apparently wanted to coordinate them.

“Everything’s unready to go in the cockpit.”
“Roger that. We’ve got the baggage lost.”
“Seat selection’s a mess.”
“Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Catering’s not f*****d up yet.”

Granted, O’Rourke may not turn a comedic phrase as deftly as Vlad Putin, but I’ve always kind of liked him. I hope conditions have improved since that was written.

Good luck, Chad.

Your mileage may differ

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My first job was pumping gas at my father’s gas station, back in 1970. The price per gallon fluctuated, but was usually around 34 cents. Gas stations competed for customers then, offering full service window-washing and offers to check the oil and tires. We also awarded Top Valu stamps and frequently gave out promotional gifts like glassware and steakknives, or had game pieces to attract repeat customers.

When the ’73 OPEC oil embargo came along the availability of gasoline dropped, the price shot up, and my dad happily trashed the Top Valu stamp machine. The new price of gas was shocking – as much as 42 or 44 cents per gallon (41.9 and 43.9 cents, actually), and consumers were very price sensitive. We once had our price at .41 and our driveway was crammed with cars while the driveway of the station across the street — at .43 — was as barren as the ANWR during the caribou’s non-breeding season. As I recall, I was also making less than $2 an hour back then.

Ah, the good old days, eh?

Not necessarily, even with gas pushing or exceeding $3 per gallon. A National Policy Analysis report by David Ridenour of the National Center for Public Policy Research has an interesting comparison between the price of gas and other commodities in April of 1981 and today. According to data he cites from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average cost of a gallon of regular unleaded gas (sans taxes) in ’81 was around $1.26, which would be $2.83 in inflation-adjusted dollars today. Yet the average cost per gallon of regular unleaded (pre-tax) in May of this year was $2.29, about 19% below the adjusted cost. Furthermore, he indicates that in the late 70s and early 80s the adjusted cost was regularly over $2 per gallon, while the .25 per gallon pre-tax cost of gasoline in 1922 is the equivalent of $3 today.

By comparison, the report shows that a half-gallon of milk in 1981 cost $1.12, and $2.09 in May of this year. Both milk and gasoline have increased at slower rates than inflation over this time, but milk prices have increased at a slightly greater rate than gasoline. I figure we don’t notice this so much because we rarely buy 20 gallons of milk a week. (But can you imagine a “Got Gas?” advertising campaign?)

Another popular commodity, bread, has also increased 103 percent in the past 25 years, which is about 8% below the rate of inflation. Meanwhile, the cost of postage-stamps offered by our government-run monopoly have just about matched inflation over the same period.

While it’s never fun to pay out the big bucks at the gas station, the impact on the family budget hasn’t been as extreme as it might appear. Furthermore, we can be very glad that our cars don’t run on bottled water, which on a gallon-to-gallon basis is nearly three times that of gasoline. As Ridenour notes:

If I’m not mistaken, water is the most abundant resource on the planet, it is not controlled by a cartel, its known reserves are not limited primarily to volatile areas of the world and it requires substantially less refinement than gasoline to bring to market.

Anyone interested in getting into the Big Water bidness with me?

Not the Shoes!

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Hi guys! Wow, it’s been a long time. I almost don’t know what to say! Almost.

So, there’s this Swedish scientist named Jarl Flensmark who thinks that wearing high-heels makes people schizophrenic and subject to other mental disorders (HT: Samantha Burns). I think he’s absolutely nuts. I wear high heels all the time and there’s nothing wrong with me!

I am, however, the girl who puts on her heels right before leaving the house and takes them off right when she reaches her destination, such as church. My pastor asks me if we’re standing on holy ground.

Apparently, “during walking, synchronised stimuli from mechaneroceptors in the lower extremities increase activity in cerebellothalamo-cortico-cerebellar loops through their action on NMDA- receptors.”

Followin’ me here? And no, a mechaneroceptor is not a dinosaur.

“Using heeled shoes leads to weaker stimulation of the loops. Reduced cortical activity changes dopaminergic function, which involves the gangliathalamo-cortical-nigro-basal ganglia loops.”

Basically Jarl is saying that walking in heels can prevent the neuro-receptors in the calf muscles from releasing dopamine, which is a necessary compound for mental well-being. Thanks Jarl. Sure you haven’t been wearing your heels to work lately?

What's up with that?

He also points out that wherever heeled shoes have popped up around the world, so have mental institutions.

Hmmm. You know, I wonder if this has any connecton with me failing the insanity test (if the link makes you laugh, you’re insane).

BONUS! Random stuff!

What is Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia?

What’s that crunching?

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Oh, never mind, it’s just my yard. It’s dry, dry, dry. Walking across my grass sounds like stepping on pretzels. There was more precipitation from the watermelon-seed-spitting contest at the church picnic last Sunday than we’ve had in the last month. I go out to get the morning paper and the voices of the blades of grass cry out to me like a million little William Shatners: “Must…have….water…now. (Khan!)”

I’m not insensitive. I’ve tried to help. The yard is too big to save everyone, but I turned on the sprinkler over the weekend for the sections closest to the house. The ground sucked it up so fast that the vacuum almost pulled me over backwards. Two months ago all was lush and green and the grass would do the wave, taunting me as I mowed. “Na na na, hey-hey! Mulching? We don’t need no stinking mulching!”

Now the only patches of green are the weeds, which are (as always) undaunted. “No, no, it’s cool, man. We like it like this, no matter how hard or dry it gets. One day, us weeds and the cockroaches are going to rule everything!”

Lord, send the rain. Soon.

In who’s words?

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Amy Ridenour is among those wondering why Joe Biden is not experiencing the uproar and outrage over his demeaning remark about Indian-Americans that, say, a conservative radio broadcaster would receive in similar circumstances.

As Biden recently said:

In Delaware, the largest growth of population is Indian Americans, moving from India. You cannot go to a 7/11 or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I’m not joking.

I think the reason is obvious. Okay, two reasons. The second one being that given Biden’s record, everybody just assumes he stole the line from someone else; perhaps Archie Bunker.

Challenging Word of the WeeK: pismire

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Pismire

(PIS mire, PIZ-) noun

A pismire is an ant, but the term has been applied contemptuously to a despicable individual. Robert Penn Warren, the American poet and novelist (b. 1905), used it that way, “What do you think I’d do with a young pismire like you?” Shakespeare knew the word. In Henry IV, Part 1 (Act I, Scene 3), the impetuous young Harry Percy, known as Hotspur, cannot bear to hear the name of Bolingbroke:

Why, look you, I am whipped and scourged with rods, Nettled and stung with pismires, when I hear Of this vile politician, Bolingbroke.

In the same play (Act III, Scene 1) the same Hotspur uses the word ant. In reviling Mortimer’s father, he says:

…sometimes he angers me With telling me of the moldwarp (mole) and the ant…

In the earlier speech, the Bard obviously needed a two-syllable synonym for ant. Pismire is derived from Middle English pissemyre (a urinating ant, based on Middle English pisse, urinate, plus obsolete mire, ant). A pismire, then, is a urinating ant, i.e., an ant exuding formic acid.

My example: From my time living in more southerly parts of the country I am familiar with a colloquial version of this word: pisant, or pissant. The meaning is the same, however, as I always heard it used (or used it myself) to describe someone who is an irritating nuisance. I don’t think any of us knew we were borrowing from Shakespeare or thought in terms of having formic acid released upon us (irritating but not very damaging), but we definitely knew that to use the word was to describe someone who was an irritant completely out of proportion to his or her significance, kind of like ….

Well, I’ll leave the examples this week to you. If you’d like to supply the name of your pet pissant, do so in the comments or include the word and the individual in one of your posts and send me a link so I can see it.

From the book, “1000 Most Challenging Words” by Norman W. Schur, ©1987 by the Ballantine Reference Library, Random House. I post a weekly “Challenging Words” definition to call more attention to this delightful book and to promote interesting word usage in the blogosphere. I challenge other bloggers to work the current word into a post sometime in the coming week. If you manage to do so, please leave a comment or a link to where I can find it. Previous words in this series can be found under the appropriate Category heading in the right-hand sidebar.

Report from the front lines at the Millard Fillmore Open Championship

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Given the stereotype of bloggers as basement-dwelling cave fish, you might be surprised to learn that a goodly number of us emerged, blinking, into the light for an afternoon of golf Friday at Valleywood Golf Course in Apple Valley. The event was the second annual Millard Fillmore Open Championship (which goes by an abbreviation that I won’t use here to avoid attracting the porn-crazed), hosted by Learned Foot.

When you realize that golf is nearly “blog” spelled backwards, however, our interest in the grand sport is more logical. Actually, perhaps “golb” is a better description of the game my threesome played. There are good reasons, for example, why I am known to the golfing Jedi as “O.B. Juan”. My teammates, Triple-A and Surly Dave, meanwhile, can be compared to Jack Nicklaus (as in Bobby Jones saying of Nicklaus, “He plays a game with which I am not familiar.”) Triple-A’s readers won’t be surprised to learn that his tee-shots veer strongly to the right. Dave’s political leanings are harder to discern from his golf game since he seemed to favor left and right equally. His performance around water hazards, however, could be described as “Kennedy-esque”, so we may have to keep an eye on him.

Despite our adventures, we found ourselves on most holes waiting for the walking two-some in front of us to move out of range (vertically and laterally). Nevertheless, somebody two or three groups behind us called the clubhouse to complain about slow play and the ranger paid us a visit. The ranger thought it was somebody two groups behind us who had complained, which would mean it was Foot’s group, and it was Foot, therefore, that Triple-A assigned the blame. Up to that point Triple-A had been content to write the initials of the golf tournament into every sandtrap he encountered; now angered, at the next tee-box he used the seed/fertilizer mixture provided for filling divots to pour out a rude message for LF. And it was perfectly spelled.

I didn’t see enough of anyone else’s game to offer a comment, but I will note that Nihilist-in-Golf-Short-Pants showed up at the course wearing the same outfit as I: navy blue shorts and a white golf shirt. It was hard to tell us apart at a glance; the telling clue was that he was the one wearing dark socks. Meanwhile Bogus Doug, looking for a hobby to replace blogging, showed up looking like a contender for “Whitest Person in America”, but as he forgot his sunblock, was well out of the running by the 18th hole.

Afterwards we caravaned over to Foot’s house for German and Italian sausages and fireworks. Like Foot’s blog, the evening was explosive, highlighted by shrieking outbursts, fiery retorts (and reports), dramatic fizzles and nervous neighbors. Oh, and of course, there were the fireworks, too.

I can’t wait for next year!