Waah Anyway, and So On

The previous post is an example of why it's a bad idea to post from work. It makes me very sad when ancient buildings are thrown down to make way for some self-centered rich person's inferior schemes. It really does and if I lived near there, I'd be protesting and carrying on and all. But, you know. I don't. And I was at work and had checked my heart and soul at the door.

But I'm fixed now. I was just sitting in The Buzzy Chair. The Buzzy Chair is a chair in the living room with a vibrating heating pad on it. I don't normally sit there but the other decent chair was taken. So I sat in The Buzzy Chair and started to play with the controls and wound up vibrating my entire backside and going "A-a-a-a-ah" because it made my voice funny. And then I noticed it was manufactured by HoMedics and immediately pictured a bunch of trashy girls posing in white lab coats.

That's how we are around here.

So is this. I read about the growing trend of video screens being installed on gas pumps and immediately imagine finding a video-less gas station harder and harder to find until one day I finally lose all patience and get arrested for taking a hammer to one of the damn things.

Died eight years ago today: Joe DiMaggio, who said, "They call a man graceful because he hits a little ball with a certain swing. My father hammered piles on a railroad out of Martinez for 10 cents an hour to support a family. That was grace." Amen to that. My grandfather gave a Martinez address when he joined the Army and went to France. Got there after the Armistice. Now there's a green office building there that my mother says my grandfather refused to let them name after him, despite their best efforts (they being the county administrative staff who remained after he retired). There's a transcendent grace in humility.

I wouldn't know. Yesterday, but in 1876, a patent (No. 174,465) for an Improvement In Telegraphy was awarded Alexander Graham Bell. Bell only made it really work by incorporating the ideas of his rival Elisha Gray, who had filed his petition for a patent just two hours after Mr. Bell had filed his. His main intent was to multiplex signals, that is send multiple messages simultaneously along a single wire. But in so doing --

"The method of, and apparatus for, transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically, as herein described, by causing electrical undulations, similar in form to the vibrations of the air accompanying the said vocal or other sounds, substantially as set forth."

-- he happened to invent the telephone. Being me, I'm more interested in the less practical but no less forward-seeing ideas of one Charles Bourseul who published a scheme for the electrical transmission of speech in 1854. Needless to say it didn't work but what did work the year before, believe it or not, was the world's second fixed-wing aircraft. Sir George Cayley did not fly the glider himself, however; he left the small glory and substantial risk to his hired man.

Second? Aye, the first was also of Cayley's design and flew several years before, sometime in the late 1840s, about the time Juana Briones was building her stamped adobe house. But history records neither the date, nor the name, nor the thoughts of the ten-year-old boy who rode in it. In later years, as he sat at the tavern spinning tales, I'm sure no one believed him anyway.