Please Do Not Smoke The Declaration Of Independence

                     

I help Charles Koehler teach a class at St. Louis Community College.  The class is called "Re-Live the 1904 World's Fair". 

The Fair was held in the largest urban park in the country, Forest Park, not very far from the College.

Our job is to make the Fair come alive for the attendees.  Charles, who is an audio-visual expert, has taken stereopticon pictures from the Fair and figured out how to project them in 3-D on a special silver oxide screen.  The attendees put on 3-D glasses and look at the buildings at the Fair 109 years ago.

"Building" is an understatement.  The smallest building was 8 acres in size; the largest was over 20 acres. So, they are called Palaces.

And there was not enough steel in the United States of America to build the Palaces at the St. Louis World's Fair.  The Palaces were built of wood frames covered in staff, a material that can be shaped and sculpted.  For the class, Charles pulls a piece of staff out of his pocket and holds it up.

He mentions that staff is a mixture of plaster and hemp.

Industrial hemp used to be a major export of Missouri, centered on the port town of Glasgow.  The wealth from hemp helped build the mansions of Glasgow overlooking the Missouri River.

Industrial hemp has many practical uses: rope, cloth, paper.  Then there is a type of hemp which is not industrial; it is recreational.  Charles has to explain that the World's Fair hemp is not the type you smoke.

However, the Federal government has declared both types of hemp illegal to grow in the United States.

One morning, I heard on public radio that the Declaration of Independence was printed on paper made from hemp.  I mentioned that fact at lunch that day, and I also mentioned that I have been puzzled why industrial hemp is banned in the United States.  

Someone at the lunch table knows a botanist who is gives expert testimony in the Missouri court system.  It turns out that industrial hemp is virtually indistinguishable from recreational hemp.  For court rulings, you need a complete plant, roots and all, to distinguish the two types of hemp.

Hence, it was simplest for the Federal government to just ban all types of hemp.  Industrial help became a controlled substance in the 20th Century, and the glory days of Glasgow, Missouri were over.

While Charles is holding up his piece of staff in class, I ask him how he found it.  He explains that he was walking through Forest Park on a sunny day and there was some construction going on.  He looked in a ditch and found the staff, long buried since the World's Fair Palaces were demolished in December 1904.

I then spoof Charles and tell the class that the real story involves being under cover of darkness and the wearing of infrared goggles and the use of a small pickaxe, accompanied by the sound of police sirens as Charles escaped from Forest Park with his staff specimen, which contains a controlled substance.

Hemp once boosted Missouri's economy.  Now it is something to smirk about.  I sure hope nobody tries to smoke the Declaration of Independence.

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A 1-minute video of Judy Garland singing "Meet Me In St. Louis":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JARDvdrAxk

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NOTE: Doug's best stories have been collected into a book: Puppy Out Of Breath.  Price = $11.  You can purchase a copy at  http://www.puppyoutofbreath.com

Getting To The Other Side Of The Ocean

I first crossed the ocean on a jet plane a year before jet lag was invented.  My first plane flight, from New York to Africa, was in 1965; the term "jet lag" was coined in 1966.

When the plane landed in Africa, I bounded off of it, ready to spend the next two years of my life there.  I was not sure what my living situation would be, I was not sure of what my teaching job would be like, but I was energized.

I next crossed the ocean from Hamburg to New York.

A mix-up in the Hamburg Airport put me in first class, compliments of Lufthansa.  They seated me next to Miss German-America.  First class was delightful; they even gave me a complimentary long-stem red rose, which I saved.  I gave it to my mother, after I bounded off the plane, energized and eager to see the US after two years away.

Then it was time to go back to Africa.  This meant flying from New York to London, having a long layover, and then on to Africa.  British Airways was putting me up at a hotel for the long layover.  The plane landed at Heathrow, I arrived at the hotel, and that is when it hit me.  Jet lag.

At first, I did not recognize it as jet lag.  I recognized it as grogginess, a sense of a large weight bearing down on me.  I dragged myself to the hotel restaurant for lunch.  I worried about being too groggy to catch the next leg of my flight, but I did catch the flight, and got back to Africa.

Then I read a magazine article that talked about how to combat jet lag.  The focus was on what to do before you before you got on the plane.  You must confuse your body, so that when you got off the plane, your body would gladly accept  the daily rhythm in the new time zone.

I tried it out: the plan was to have heavy greasy fatty food for all 3 meals one day, then light meals of vegetables and fruits the next, then grease the next day, and then vegetables and then get on the plane.  The plan seemed to work well, or maybe I thought it worked well because it gave me a good excuse to eat greasy breakfasts before going on vacation.

Then the literature changed.  

I read a magazine article about combatting jet lag; it said that the focus should be on what to do after you get off the plane.  You must not hide in a hotel room and sleep off the flight.  You must socialize, which will make your body accept the daily rhythm in the new time zone.

I stopped confusing my body with food.  When I got to a destination, I socialized and fell in with the local rhythm.  The new plan worked pretty well, and I avoided jet lag.

However, I was wondering if the new plan would work for my longest flight ever: 24 hours from Boston to Singapore.  The flight included a stopover at LAX in Los Angeles, and a dangerous stopover at Narita in Tokyo.  

The stopover in Tokyo was dangerous because there were benches in the international waiting room.  I had spent many hours sitting vertical in an airplane seat, fantasizing about being horizontal.  But I knew if I lay down on a bench in Narita Airport, I would fall fast asleep and miss the last leg of my journey.

I arrived in Singapore after 24 hours.  The taxi driver taking me to my hotel asked where I had flown from.  I said I had come from the east coast of the United States.

The taxi driver said, "Oh, you have traveled a long way.  This means you must meet some local people.  I know a lovely lady who would like to socialize with you"

I didn't take the taxi driver up on his offer.  But I was tempted to ask him if he had read the same magazine article I had about what people should do when they get off an airplane.


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A nice 3-minute YouTube video showing the lyrics to a song called "Jet Lag".  This is a cover sung by some young women with a guitar:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDdgUX2cNQw

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NOTE: Doug's best stories have been collected into a book: Puppy Out Of Breath.  Price = $11.  You can purchase a copy at  http://www.puppyoutofbreath.com

Lying On My Back While Climbing A Stairway To Heaven

The way I tell the story: The Pacific Science Center saw that there were a lot of hippies on the streets of Seattle but there weren’t a lot of hippies inside the Science Center. 

How do you get hippies to come inside?  The answer: play rock music, use that new device called a “laser”, and put on a light show.

The laser shows became a hit – and spread to science centers and planetariums all around the country.

When I lived in Seattle in the 1970s, I went to a laser show.  I didn’t qualify as a hippie; the hippies were a pretty closed group with rigid rules for clothing, appearance, and behavior --- and no one would ever have mistaken me for one, unless it was my mother or my father. 

As I entered the Laser Dome at the Pacific Science Center, it seemed like a lot of the audience had prepped themselves chemically for the show.  There were no chairs.  I lay down on the floor amidst the chemically-prepped hippies, and let the music and laser lights cast their spell.

A laser show is actually a live show.  The music is recorded but a laserist runs the lights that dance across the dome.

It was a nice experience.  At the end of the laser show, I got up from the floor, stretched, and strolled out into the Seattle night.  That was over 30 years ago.

I now live in St. Louis, where the Planetarium has decided to revive its laser shows from the good old hippie days.

Of course, I had to go.  The website said we were allowed to bring pillows.  I thought that might be a joke; I showed up at the Planetarium on a Friday night expecting someone to confiscate my pillow.

Nobody confiscated my pillow as the audience filed into the Planetarium.  We had a choice of a chair or a floor mat.  I took a floor mat, flopped down on it with my pillow, and waited for the laserist to start the show. 

I glanced around: everybody at the show was either an adult about my age or the grandchild of an adult about my age.  Some of the audience might have been chemically prepped, but it would have been with high blood pressure medicine. The adults were clearly looking forward to the show, probably because they had been to one in the dim past. 

The chairs were empty.  Everyone had decided to lie on a mat.

The laserist began the show.  The grandchildren stayed remarkably silent as the lasers formed patterns on the dome of the Planetarium.  Pink Floyd was playing and lasers were dancing when the Planetarium’s Zeiss star projector was turned on.  The night sky was projected on the dome as the lasers simultaneously danced across the dome.

The lasers kept on dancing overhead while the night sky started revolving – revolving rather fast.  I was on the mat with my head on my pillow realizing that I was having a vertigo episode while lying down.

The show continued.  Jefferson Airplane.  The Beatles.  Led Zeppelin playing Stairway To Heaven.  I was transported.  It was just like being back in Seattle.

Then the show was over, and it was time to get up from my mat.  Creak.  Groan.  One lady in the audience verbalized what we all felt: “This was a lot easier thirty years ago.”

OK, so it wasn’t exactly like being back in Seattle.

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Here is a YouTube Trailer for the current Laserium show at the St. Louis Science Center (2 minutes long):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dDEaGtESGs

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NOTE: Doug's best stories have been collected into a book: Puppy Out Of Breath.  Price = $11.  You can purchase a copy at  http://www.puppyoutofbreath.com

The Brewmaster And The World's Largest Pig Farm

Nigeria had a newspaper that was the equivalent of The National Enquirer, and one week it ran a sensational headline: “I SMOKE, I DRINK, I EAT PORK”.

The newspaper interviewed a popular female singer who is Muslim, and she shocked the country by publically admitting that she breaks three Muslim taboos: cigarettes, alcohol, and pig meat.

I lived in Kano, deep in the heart of the Muslim section of Nigeria.  Kano was the site of the largest pig farm in the world.  It puzzled me why a huge pig farm would be located where most of the people never eat pork.  Then I realized: the pig farm did not have to worry about livestock disappearing.  It only hired Muslims and no Muslim employee would ever sneak a pig out of the farm to take home.  The pigs were shipped 450 miles by railroad to be slaughtered and processed in the Christian section of Nigeria.

So, when a beer brewery was built in Kano, there was a similar logic: hire Muslim employees because they would not sneak bottles of beer out of the brewery. 

The new brewery used the same advertising approach as American breweries: drink our beer and attractive females will flock to you.  This new beer was named Double Crown, and the gimmick was that if you drink Double Crown beer, attractive female twins will flock to you.  “Double your pleasure with Double Crown Beer”.

The brewery hired a brewmaster named Dieter from Germany.  Dieter noticed that Kano had the largest pig farm in the world and, being German, turned part of the brewery into a small sausage making facility.  This was the only sausage within 450 miles.

When Dieter heard that I gave evening Hausa lessons for foreigners who wanted to learn the local language, he started coming to my lessons.

I was hoping that my friendship with Dieter would pay off some day. 

I was hoping to get invited to the legendary Friday Beer Evaluations at the Double Crown Brewery.  The Evaluations were famous for providing a wonderful spread of food, including sausage, while soliciting judgments about the latest batch of beer.  A select group of brewery employees attended and a handful of outsiders were invited.

I finally got an invitation.  Two friends from California were visiting Kano at the time, and I talked Dieter into three invitations.

That Friday came, and I felt so special.  The Double Crown beer makers wanted to hear my opinions, and they wanted my opinion so much that they would serve me some sausage. 

There were 2 Germans, 5 Nigerians, and us 3 Americans at the Friday Evaluation.  At the start, we were each given three glasses painted black so we could not determine the color of the beer inside them.  The glasses were labeled A, B, C.  Two glasses contained Double Crown and one contained a competitor’s beer.

We tasted, and wrote down which glass held the competitor’s beer.  Then we were given a clear glass of Double Crown from a recent batch and we filled out a questionnaire about that beer.  Then we had some food, and then they announced which black glass held the competitor’s beer.

It was glass B!  All the Germans and all the Nigerians got it right.  All the Americans had gotten it wrong.  I had chosen glass A; my California friends had chosen glass C.  We had humiliated America in the eyes of the beer world.

I am pretty sure it was the last time that Americans were invited to a Beer Evaluation at the Double Crown Brewery.  It was certainly the last time I had sausage in Kano, Nigeria.

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In case you haven't seen it before, here is an 11-minute YouTube video of Doug telling how he came to buy a mud house in Kano -  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jw16p1HQnc8

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NOTE: Doug's best stories have been collected into a book: Puppy Out Of Breath.  Price = $11.  You can purchase a copy at  http://www.puppyoutofbreath.com

An East Coast Guy Living In The Middle Of The Continent

I am reminded that I am living in The Middle Of The Continent every time I watch the nightly news on television, every time I am outside on a summer afternoon, and every time I drive on a road with a lane closure.

Back on the East Coast, the Eleven O'Clock News comes on at eleven o'clock.  Here in the Midwest, the Eleven O'Clock news comes on at ten o'clock.  One channel even does the Eleven O'Clock news at nine o'clock.

Since the trend is for people to go to bed right after the news, that means that St. Louisans go to bed earlier that East Coast people.  And get up earlier.  That suits my metabolism just fine, but it was not my pattern back East.

Back on the East Coast, you would swelter on a summer morning, but around 1:30 PM, the temperature would start to fall.  You could feel the sea breeze.  The Sun would heat up the land and by 1:30 PM the land would be warmer than the sea.  The land air would rise, and be replaced by cooler air from the sea.  So, the temperature would fall. 

When I am standing outside and sweltering on a summer day in St. Louis and I notice that the time is 1:30 PM, I do not expect the temperature to fall.  I expect the St. Louis temperature to keep rising into the late afternoon.  There is no sea nearby for the Sun to heat up.  The only relief the Midwest can look forward to is watching the Sun drop below the horizon.  That’s when the Midwest temperature will start to fall.

Back on the East Coast, the drivers know how to merge when a highway has a lane closure.  When East Coast drivers see a sign saying “Right lane ends – 2 miles”, they wait 2 miles and then the two lanes merge.  There is a common merge point.  A driver from the left lane lets in one driver from the right lane; the next left-lane driver lets in the next right-lane driver, and so on.

This means that an East Coast merge is expected, measured, co-operative, and safe.

Midwesterners see the “Right lane ends – 2 miles” sign and the right lane drivers start to merge immediately.  They do not wait; each right-hand driver darts over into the left-hand lane whenever they spot an opportunity.  This creates hundreds of merge points.  This means that a Midwest merge is unexpected, erratic, individual, and unsafe.

I have to follow this pattern because Midwesterners consider it arrogant to continue driving in the lane that will end.  I do not want to be the object of road rage if I wait until the merge point and try to get in the left-hand lane.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has a regular column about traffic, highway construction, and transportation news.  A former New Yorker wrote a letter to the columnist, describing how East Coast people merge at a common merge point.  The St. Louis columnist could find only one response when faced with such a sane, safe, and common-sense way to merge.

The columnist, who lives in The Middle Of The Continent,  responded: “This is not New York.”

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Here is a newspaper report on the famous 1996 U. S. Geographic Survey Expeditionary Force, whose goal was to discover if the land between New York and California was inhabited: 

http://www.theonion.com/articles/midwest-discovered-between-east-west-coasts,1686/

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NOTE: Doug's best stories have been collected into a book: Puppy Out Of Breath.  Price = $11.  You can purchase a copy at  http://www.puppyoutofbreath.com

The Brancusi Sculpture On The Staircase

My friend Marion realized that I needed a little coaxing.  “Go ahead, push the doorbell.”

We were standing on the doorstep of a rather large house on Castle Street in Cambridge, England.  The house was formed from three adjoining sixteenth-century cottages.

I pushed the doorbell. The door was opened.  For a few hours every weekday afternoon, the public is welcome to come and roam around inside this house. 

Marion and I roamed.  I immediately recognized a painting by Joan Miro hanging in the dining room...and I noticed that there were two guys sitting at the dining room table writing in notebooks. 

In the living room there were British folk art paintings on the wall and some twentieth-century sculptures sitting on tree stumps.  Amidst the art and sculptures, three women were sitting on a sofa, chatting.

When we passed a bookcase, somebody grabbed a book, sat down in a nearby chair, and started reading.

As we walked down a small stairway, I spotted a small Brancusi sculpture sitting on the next-to-top step.

What was this place?  It was filled with art --- but it was not exactly a museum.  It had lots of furniture --- but it was not exactly a house.

Marion saw the bewilderment on my face, and explained.  This house had been owned by a man who once worked at the Tate Museum in London back when modern art was struggling to be accepted by the art community.  This man, Jim Ede, encouraged the Tate to buy modern artists.  The artists were so grateful that they gave Ede artwork as presents for his house.  That explained the Miro on the wall and the Brancusi on the staircase.

The house is called Kettle’s Yard.  It is being maintained exactly as it looked when Jim Ede and his wife retired to Scotland in 1957.

Marion pointed out that the house is not all art.  She showed me a table where smooth stones had been arranged in a spiral.  Jim Ede would pick up objects when he went walking with his grandchildren.  He integrated the everyday objects into the house. 

Me:         “I wonder what is in this drawer.” 

Marion:   “You can open it.”

Me:         “Can I really open it?”

Marion:   “Go ahead.”

I don’t remember what was in the drawer, but I do remember that I felt like a guilty child and expected a guard to come swooping down on me the moment that I opened it.  No guard swooped down.  In fact, I don’t remember any guards whatsoever.

A woman sat down at the piano, played a tune, and moved on.

I realized that people do not visit Kettle’s Yard --- they hang out in Kettle’s Yard.  Marion and I were hanging out.  We were hanging out with a bunch of strangers in a place of art and found objects and books and inviting furniture and a tranquility only interrupted by piano music.

When my friends tell me they are planning a trip to England, I always mention Kettle’s Yard.  When asked to describe the place, I can only say that there is no place like it on this side of the Ocean and there is no place like it on the other side of the Ocean.

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Here is a 2-minute YouTube video about Brancusi, the sculptor:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oj5jpMpuml8

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NOTE: Doug's best stories have been collected into a book: Puppy Out Of Breath.  Price = $11.  You can purchase a copy at  http://www.puppyoutofbreath.com

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