1891 English Muffins

Sam Thomas was a genius. He hasn't been around for a long time, but you know him, even if you don't know you know him.

He's the guy who either invented or stole the idea for the English muffin.

Thomas arrived in New York from England around 1880 and immediately started baking. Some say the thing's been around since maybe 1710 or so, but everyone associates the name Thomas' with English muffins. And even if he did borrow the basic idea, he should be credited with breaking the laws of physics.

That's because a 12 ounce pack of six muffins can (and usually does) produce 40 pounds of crumbs. No one but Thomas knows how that happens. But it happens in millions of toasters across America every day.

Maybe it's biology, not physics. English muffins may reproduce at a rate that would turn Peter Rabbit (or Bugs Bunny) green with envy. But biologists don't know whether all those crumbs are embryonic muffins or new matter, like, say, positrons.

When you buy the package, it weighs 12 ounces.

If you leave the package standing for a couple of months, it may weigh a little more, because eventually the bread molds and mold has weight. But just a LITTLE weight. When you pick it up to throw it away, it doesn't feel any heavier than the day you bought it.

But if you do what most of us do, you open the package within a day or so of its purchase. And that's when the new matter starts to form, or the embryos spread.

Cut one to put in the toaster and all of a sudden you have an acre of crumbs. (How you cut it makes a difference. If you use a knife, you only get three quarters of an acre. If you stab the edges with a fork -- as the packager recommends -- you get the full acre.)

We've consulted with two or three science guys and they agree that this form of creation does not generally work with other items, such as bananas, inner tubes or your kids. Here at the Wessays(™) Secret Mountain Laboratory, we tried it with a hard roll and got a fair result, and with an apple and just got wet, but no crumbs.

You open the muffin, the muffin doesn't seem to get heavier -- and certainly doesn't seem to get lighter. But there they are. A million crumbs. On the countertop, on the floor, in the sink.

You toast the thing and it STILL doesn't much change size. But there's a whole new set of crumbs on the bottom of the toaster. They weren't there before. They are there NOW. The only thing we can tell for sure is once you eat the main muffin, it stops making new matter (or emitting embryos.)

We need to know two things: (1) how does this process work, and (2) how can we build cars and furnaces that run on English muffin crumbs. It's an amazingly prolific form of self renewing fuel, if we can only figure out how to harness it.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

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© WJR 2018

1890 Ronald Ray-Gun

1890 Ronald Ray-Gun

That’s what we called him in the Liberal Media Newsroom on Rockefeller Plaza back when he was running for President.  Ronnie was brimming with bad ideas he tried to turn into bad policies and sometimes he succeeded. His bolts may have started coming loose long before we knew for sure.  And he may have napped during cabinet meetings, but with the exception of Iran Contra and the HUD bid rigging case, Deaver the liar, he ran a pretty clean ship.

Oh, and the Meese scandals and a small number of others.

That is to say there were relatively few high ranking officials who landed in prison, if you take the figure as a per capita percentage.

And the people who weren’t jailed were relatively well credentialed and tried to more or less stay the course in keeping with American values as they saw them.

There were no Dulles Brothers.  There were none of the German Shepherds of the Nixon years.  There was no lurking constitutional crisis.  And no one who made his bones in the Reagan years considered a 25th Amendment takedown, at least in public.

Whatever else he was -- or wasn’t -- Reagan was presidential.  If he was an egomaniac in need of constant adulation from his subordinates, it didn’t show.

Fast forward to today.  There’s wide speculation about trump’s bolts.  He may or may not implode.  His crime family/immediate family may end in the witness protection program and/or behind bars any day now.  And that’s a problem.

There is no bench. There is no net. The people he’s hired are to a man or woman zeros. Does the brilliantly hand-eye coordinated Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Ben Carson, MD, know Thing One about housing and urban development?  Does the Secretary of Education know anything about education that’s not in the bible? Does the Secretary of State, perhaps the most important cabinet member know anything about anything?

Secretary ReXXon seems to be trying to do the right thing without honking off The Boss.  But his main qualification for the job is that he accepted the nomination.

The president has put in a lot of cronies with the word “acting” before their titles.  These are positions where the Senate has to confirm a real nominee but any worm in the garden can do the job as long as he (or she) is merely “acting.”

If we become trumpless, there is no one who knows anything who will be in a position to run the country’s business.

Pence?  A failed talk show host who sent a wrecking ball through the halls of the Indiana state house.

All this is far more of a worry than what tweety does or doesn’t state.

Our friend and fellow observer Ellis Henican called Twitter “trump’s virtual primal scream room.” He’s right.  And running the country from a cell phone and bragging about his intelligence does not inspire public confidence. Not even among his ignorant and gullible base.

Ronald Reagan, for all his flaws, did not degrade America in the eyes of the rest of the world. You can’t make that case for trump and his merry band of future jailbirds.

Book ‘em, Danno.

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I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

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© WJR 2018

1889 Pressure Cookers and Bad Teeth

1889 Pressure Cookers and Bad Teeth

Pressure cookers weren’t always weapons of mass destruction.  But they always were explosion prone.

A couple of pre-teen kids, a brother and sister are about to surprise their parents with a delicious spaghetti dinner.  They fill the pressure cooker with uncooked spaghetti, put in sauce from a jar, close the pot and put it on the stove.

Closed? Not so fast.  The pot looks closed.  But soon after as the pressure builds, they find out it isn’t.  The way they find out is by walking into the kitchen just as sufficient pressure has built up to pop the lid and send a Vesuvius of pasta and red sauce all over the stove.  And the wall. And the floor. And the ceiling.

Cleanup was neither easy nor complete.

So it was a surprise, alright. Just not the kind the kind they planned.

The nature of pressure cooking has changed.  Now you can get machines that plug in, eliminating the need for stoves.  And you can get pressure cookers that won’t start pressurizing unless both the top and the relief valve are locked tight.

A major advance in modern technology.  

Using a pressure cooker has become foolproof.  Well, maybe not foolproof, but at least fool-resistant.

Pop stuff into the pot, lock the top, lock the relief valve, set the timer and presto! Dinner.

Modern cookware has turned the painting of kitchen walls from mandatory to optional.  

But parts of the cooking have remained untamed.

Rice and beans in nine minutes is fictional, even though that’s what the makers claim in their sales pitches.  The timer doesn’t start its countdown until sufficient pressure builds in the pot.  Sufficient pressure is something we mere humans can’t measure. But we can time it.  It takes longer to build pressure than the nine minutes to cook the rice and beans.

So while you may save your walls and ceilings, and stuff inside will indeed cook faster, you never really know how much time to give your recipe.  If there’s meat or poultry in your dish, you want to make sure that it’s hot enough to kill lurking germs. No one wants e-coli or salmonella.  So you give it a little more time than the cookbook recommends.

The result often is tasty, if industrial cooking is your thing.  But it also will turn your dish into mush.

Mush has its advantages for the tooth-deprived.  If eating a cracker is a source of pain, then pressure cooking a saltine or a Ritz will solve the problem.  Most people don’t pressure cook crackers.  But there are those of us who have contemplated such.

Most people also don’t like eating beef stew with a spoon.  But when you open the pot and find a sea of glop, eating it with a fork becomes impossible.  There are those of us with what the dentists call “compromised” mouths that are grateful mounds of mush. But to most, it’s not a treat no matter how good it tastes.

But at least you don’t have to worry about rice pocks, pasta and red sauce on the ceiling.

GRAPESHOT (pressure cooker edition):

-The dishes never come out just perfect like Wolfgang Puck, Bobby Flay and even Guy Fieri say they will.

-A sudden intentional release of pressure will be accompanied by superheated steam and probably liquid… almost as cringe worthy as the exploding pot that ate Mom’s ceiling.

-Cook the rice separately unless you like rice-like glop.

-Counter intuitively, put the chopped onions in last or they will vanish in the cooking.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

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© WJR 2018

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1888 Today in History

When NBC started The Today Show in 1952, it had nothing to lose and the world to gain.  It gained the world.  Now, here we are 66 years later and things have changed.  And haven’t.

The announcement this week that Hoda Kotb (KOT’-bee) would be the new “permanent” co anchor of the the show’s core, the 7-9am hours, set tongues a-wagging.  “A two woman anchor team! Wonderful!”  “A two woman anchor team? Needs more testosterone.” “A two woman anchor team? Okay, what’s the weather gonna be?”

NBC probably isn’t all that aware of what makes this program a consistent winner even when it’s #2.  Here’s the Dirty Little Secret: You don’t have to watch it.  You can run around doing whatever it is you do in the morning, shave, shower, make breakfast, put on your makeup, and get the kids ready for school.  Anything. Leave the sound up and still catch the drift of the broadcast.  You do not have to sit there trance-staring into the TV set.

That has not changed. Ever.  And it’s not a fully conscious policy.  The competition, ABC’s Good Morning America” and “CBS This Morning” are not as ear friendly.

Without competition, Today had to attract customers. It did that with a combination of NBC News which in 1952 was Very Serious Journalism with severe technical limitations and some entertainment features including an amiable host, Dave Garroway, who combined the virtues of Arthur Godfrey and Garrison Keillor without Godfrey’s politics and Keillor’s monotone.

Oh, and J. Fred Muggs, the chimpanzee.

Now, back to the major issue: can a two-woman team work?  Sure, why not? It did at the competition.  Good Morning America did OK with it, ratings and revenue-wise. They did it on the PBS Newshour.  Why wouldn’t it work?  

On the Serious Scale, Today is right in the middle, between the relatively dour CBS This Morning and the flippant GMA. NBC’s is the best possible positioning.  But since they supersized Today -- this time to four hours from three -- they’ve made it far more labor intensive and far more prone to duchies than in earlier years, and that can be a worry.

Some NBC watchers are not too sure that Hour Three with Megyn Kelly was packaged with a long shelf life.  The fourth hour with Kotb and Kathie Lee, already battered by Kelly’s misery-level lead-in ratings is likely to be without Kotb more often.  She’ll be flying here there and everywhere for what’s still considered the “real” show, 7-9 local time.

Where in the World is Hoda Kotb?  Sounds like a good feature.  The hour-four audience may not take an oft-missing Hoda too well.

But Kotb is doing good things for the main show.  Ratings are up after the departure of Matt Lauer. But please remember that ratings also ballooned when Lauer replaced Bryant Gumbel 20 years ago.

We wish Hoda good luck. She’s a good person, a good newsie and a grown up presence without being showy or stuffy about it. She works well with the Katie wannabe, Savannah Guthrie… their interaction is attractive.

And former NYTimes/NBC/PBS reporter Gwen Ifell wasn’t available.

TODAY’S QUOTE:

“(Undisclosed kind words and good wishes)” -Matt Lauer in a text to Hoda Kotb on being named permanent co-anchor of Today.

SHRAPNEL:

--Has Steve Bannon gone off the deep end, or was he there all along and we didn’t recognize it? First he’s trump’s insider brain, then he’s trump’s outsider helpmate and now he’s trump’s turncoat.  Who is to blame for that, bannon or trump?

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

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© WJR 2018

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1887 Everything's Normal in Nassau County

1887 Everything’s Normal in Nassau County

In Nassau County, Long Island, New York they’ll elect a bunch of carrots to public office as long as they’re Republican carrots.  They have done this for the better part of the last 119 years.  It is the richest county in New York State (eat your heart out, Westchester) [1] and also one of the highest taxed. [2] It manages its finances so brilliantly that the State of New York has taken over that job which is unusual because that means some actual work will have to be done in Albany.

The largest geographical sub-entity in Nassau is the Town of Hempstead, which pretty much ran things its own way for the first 90 years the county existed.  Little has changed.  This is a gang that takes care of its own. Here’s the latest example of politics, Hempstead style:

The head guy is called the Supervisor. Until the last Friday of December 2017, the office was occupied by one Anthony Santino who is paid about $160-thousand a year for his trouble.  He was temporarily replaced by his deputy who will then undoubtedly got a raise to match Santino’s pay grade at least for the four days he was in office.

The election last November went to a Democrat. A woman! A Democrat. A woman. In Hempstead Town.  Unthinkable in the insular world of the tax and spend Republicans, though it has happened on rare occasions.  But don’t feel sorry for Tony.  He already has a new job lined up.  He will become the Administrative Assistant to the Board of Elections.  And he will be paid give or take what he has been paid as supervisor, which is more than the Commissioner of Elections he’ll administratively assist.

Those jobs -- called patronage elsewhere in America -- amount to “OK, hire the loser and then we’ll figure out something for him to do on those days he shows up to do stuff.”

The temp hired to be Town Supervisor, Anthony Esposito, will be able to use another trick that was invented at home:  Next election he can run for the job he’ll hold now for only a few days and his campaign signs will legally be able to say “Return Supervisor Esposito to Office.”  That would make him seem at casual glance to be the incumbent which ain’t what happened.  But an incumbency -- real or fake -- often is a leg up in an election because who pays attention to this nonsense in the off season.

SHRAPNEL:

--A possible stupid pet trick to watch for: The story goes that in 1961 when  Eugene Nickerson became the first Democrat elected Nassau County Executive, he opened his desk drawers for the first time to find his Republican predecessor had left them pristine and empty. No paperwork, not even a paper clip or a key to the men’s room.

--Politicians of every stripe give out little campaign trinkets like ballpoint pens, bumper stickers and maybe potholders.  The Town of Hempstead Republicans used to give out sponges imprinted with the names of their candidates.  How apt.

Footnotes:

1.    Source: US Census Bureau

2.    Source: Attom Data Solutions via Long Island Business News.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

All sponsored content on this page is parody.

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© WJR 2017

1886 Gone Fishin' (Update 1) 12/31/17

Merry Christmas. Happy Holidays and best wishes for the New Year.

Wessays will return on Wednesday, January 3, 2018.

Brooklyn Bluegrass Collective

1885 Dumbed Down, Numbed Up

Let’s take a new look at Occam's razor.  It’s an old saw that says the simplest answer is usually right and the simplest method is usually best.

Maybe. But it’s hard to judge nowadays because we have run out of simple.  Cutting the Gordian Knot was a fine and true example of simplicity. King Solomon’s splitting the baby to resolve a conflict between two women each claiming it was her kid was not, even if it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Today, everything is a production number.  Maybe we have a biological need for moving parts.  At one time you could fix those parts with a little duct tape, a hammer and a screwdriver. Now when you look under the hood of your car or the workings of the government or some corporations and nonprofits, you scratch your head as you ask “what is all that stuff?”

But there’s a problem.  Not only has life become over complicated, it has become digital.  And that means fewer moving parts. So if our need for them is biological, we have to manufacture our own.

Show of hands: what does an MP3 look like? No hands?  No surprise. Like gravity, we know what it does but we don’t know what it is.  We can hear it played, but we can’t fiddle with it. Or touch or smell or taste it.

So we complicate other things.

The simple way around complicated telephone trees is to make the first option “For an operator, press 0.”  Of course if that happened, no one would listen to the rest of the choices because nobody wants THOSE kinds of moving parts.

Tuning a television set is another of these kickline-like techno- processes.  It’s time for another show of hands. Raise your hand if your TV remote didn’t work and you wanted to change channels with the controls on the set itself.  Do you even know where they are?

A few hands up this time.  Y’all must be geeks.  When was the last time you heard that satisfying mechanical click of a knob that turned the set on?  

A faulty knob on a radio or TV or record player could be unsoldered and replaced.  Okay… no duct tape involved. Real moving parts, though, get mechanical fixes.

The refrigerator had a similar simplicity and mechanical satisfaction: One knob.  Two fields of settings, “colder” or “warmer.”  Today’s refrigerators -- smart fridges -- are amazing feats.

“You have two pounds of hamburger meat in the freezer.  It will expire in 21 days.”  Thank you but I’ll wait to use it.  The next day, SmartFridge tells you “You have two pounds of hamburger meat in the freezer.  It will expire in 20 days.”  When the countdown gets to a week, the refrigerator will start to get nasty. “Hey, George, that meat in the freezer has only a week to go, you’d better get a move on.”

And on the eighth day it yells at you.

Marvelous.  Of course you can disable that feature. Oh. Wait. No you can’t. It’s built into the box’s electrical system and behind a wall that runs the height of the machine so you can’t get at it.

Once upon a time if your cat got stuck up a tree, you’d call the firehouse and they’d send over a guy with a ladder and a net. Now you have to jump through 911 hoops and it takes forever.  Not dissing the emergency phone system, but people have started clogging the lines with stuff like “McDonald’s is out of chicken nuggets. I need a cop.”

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

All sponsored content on this page is parody.

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© WJR 2017