Cart Thief, No Bananas, Grab Bar - Uncle Orson Reviews Everything

It was the day before a threatened snowstorm, and my wife was rushing to run errands. She had just enough time to stop by the Harris-Teeter at Friendly Center and pick up some needed items.

She already had toothpaste in the cart when she remembered that we were low on eggs. Because of the impending snow, the egg display was crowded, so she left her cart some distance away as she worked her way to the egg cartons.

Then she quickly got the rest of the items -- a month's supply of Cottonelle Ultra toilet paper, a half-dozen boxes of Kleenex. She was standing in the checkout line when she happened to see that at the bottom of the cart there was a package of ground beef.

Her first (admittedly insane) thought was that someone was going around the grocery store dropping meat in people's carts. Then rationality returned, and she realized that when she returned from getting eggs, she must have put them in someone else's cart and taken off with it.

Immediately she left the line and went in search of the unidentified ground-beef buyer. Going up an aisle, she saw an elderly woman ("elderly" means "about ten years older than us" these days) coming down the aisle pushing an empty cart. My wife recognized her as being one of the people who had been choosing eggs.

Profusely apologizing, my wife transferred all her toilet paper, eggs, and Kleenexes to the lady's empty cart and then gave the cart with the ground beef in it to her. The lady recounted her saga; after searching for her own cart, she solicited help from a store employee, who brought her a new cart -- what else could he do?

"There's a cart near the eggs with some toothpaste in it," said the lady. "Could that have been yours?"

Later, my wife imagined what it must have been like for the old lady. If she's at all like us, she questions her own memory, and certainly, with her white hair, some of the people witnessing her quest for her missing cart must have been thinking, "Poor old dear, she's losing her mind; I hope I never get like that."

So my wife wanted me to tell this story so it could go on the record. The elderly lady in Harris-Teeter who was searching for her cart was not losing her mind. Her cart really had been taken.

As my wife points out, the people who thought the old lady was losing her mind were only half wrong. They just had the wrong old lady.

Speaking of grocery stores, I wonder what we'll all do when grocery stores no longer contain bananas.

Think about it. How many varieties of apple are there in the grocery store? Now, how many types of banana? If a blight were to strike golden delicious apples, we might still have Granny Smiths, honeycrisps, golden russets, and McIntoshes.

But in all our stores, all our bananas are of one breed: Cavendish. And a fungus is killing them all. It has wiped out the Cavendish bananas of many tropical countries; it has not yet reached Latin America, but speaking realistically, it's just a matter of time.

I read about this in the current (January 10, 2011) issue of The New Yorker. (Yes, their editorial comments are so far left they make Nancy Pelosi look sane, but they still publish superbly fact-checked, well-written articles about important but out-of-the-way subjects that nobody else is covering.)

Mike Peed's article "We Have No Bananas" follows the work of scientists who are trying to curb the blight. But what startled me was his history of bananas in America.

Did you know that we've already had one blight that wiped out all the bananas imported into our country?

When bananas were first imported into the U.S., starting in 1870 when fishing boat captain Lorenzo Dow Baker brought 160 bunches into Jersey City, the kind he brought was not our familiar Cavendish, it was a variety he found in Jamaica: Gros Michel.

Gros Michel could be eaten raw -- many varieties of bananas (plantains and others) have to be cooked to be edible. But its flavor was far superior to what any of us today have ever tasted. The skin was resilient and the bananas did not bruise.

By 1910, 40 million Gros Michels were being brought into the U.S. every year. And Baker's company, United Fruit (now Chiquita) was so rich and powerful that it was toppling uncooperative "banana republic" governments -- or getting the U.S. government to do it for them.

Before cocaine, it was bananas that took over Latin American economies because of the high profits from American demand.

Then there came the Tropical Race One blight, and it became impossible to grow Gros Michel bananas; it's a fungus that is transmitted with dirt, which tracks everywhere that banana workers and executive go. It was sheer good fortune that the Cavendish variety was found growing in a garden in China; Americans soon learned to settle for the less-tasty, easily-bruised, faster-ripening Cavendish, and all the banana plantations for the export market made the switch.

But monocultures can be wiped out by a single blight; the one killing the Cavendish bananas today is Race Four. Now that it exists, it seems impossible to stop. Quarantine is working so far to protect Latin America, but the thing about quarantines is that over time, if the infestation can't be destroyed at the source, something leaks through. All it takes is one Race Four intrusion anywhere in Latin America, and in a few short years the Cavendish will be gone.

When I lived in Brazil, I was astonished to discover that there really are dozens of varieties of bananas that are regularly available in markets in tropical countries. Many of them can't be exported -- they ripen too fast or don't travel well. Others don't fit our banana-eating habits -- plantains are fibrous and unsweet until they're cooked, so there's no joy in peeling them to eat them raw (or, as our granddaughters call it, "monkey-style").

When the Cavendishes are gone, they'll probably find some other kind that makes a decent second-rate substitute and start bringing it into the U.S. But my hope is that this time, they'll find five different varieties and import them all, so we can get to know and use several kinds of bananas.

Why set ourselves up for another wipeout by establishing a new monoculture? We may discover that we like having a choice of bananas the way we have a choice of apples.

When you suddenly find yourself prone to tipping over at unpredictable moments, you begin to think about safety features in your home. For instance, our stairway was designed with a gap in the handrail -- three steps where there's nothing to hold on to.

While I was still in the hospital with my recent stroke, my wife called our friend and remodeling contractor, Tim Davis of Tim Davis Home Improvement, and asked him if there was any way he could add a short length of railing to that gap, so I could safely get up and down the stairs. Tim created a large enough hole in his schedule that the railing was already in place when I got home.

But I soon found another safety gap -- the shower. Fortunately, we have never remodeled the master bathroom, so we don't have the currently-fashionable all-glass enclosure (which we would certainly have installed if we had remodeled). Tim hates putting those in, because when people fall in the shower, there's a good chance they'll go right through the glass and get cut to ribbons by eh shards.

Our shower is safe enough -- it even has a built-in seat so if we go down, we can usually keep ourselves from going all the way to the floor, and if we fall into glass, it's a door that pushes open instead of a wall that breaks.

Still, there's that awkward moment of stepping into the shower, when you put your weight on a floor that may or may not be slick, and then the moments when, eyes closed to keep soap out, you need to turn around. I used to be fine with that. Now I worry that my left leg will buckle under me and I'll go down.

I assumed that what I wanted was the same kind of matte-finished metal bars that they have in hospitals. But Tim pointed out that with soap on your hands, you still can't be sure of your grip.

And I was definitely not going with a suction-cup design. "Maybe for delicate old people who way 90 pounds," I said, "But I'm three times that weight. Think 'ox,' not 'gazelle.'"

"No bar is going to be able to bear all your weight," Tim said. "Not unless we bolt it to studs, and the way your shower was constructed, we'd have to tear out the wall on the other side to get to them."

So he went in search of a safety bar with a good grip even when your hands are soapy, which can be attached securely enough to allow you to keep your balance. He found it.

Moen makes a grab bar in their Home Care line, and its "securemount" technology seems convincing to us. Certainly it feels solid. And my hands never slip on the plastic surface.

It does the job of making me feel safer in the shower, because I actually hold on as I step in and whenever I turn around. (Safety features are pointless if you don't use them.)

Once again Tim Davis came through for us. We've never gone wrong following his advice, he has found far better solutions for various problems than we thought of ourselves, and his workmanship has never been less than excellent -- whether he was building us a new mailbox, supervising a driveway pour or a new fence, or building wagons or balconies as set-pieces for plays.

That's the nice thing about living in the same place for decades: when you find people who are good at their job and a joy to work with, you can stick with them.

Every Day Is Special

First appeared in print in The Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC.

Cash, Cans, Gorillas, and Chimps

Thursday, January 13^th -- Johnny Cash Day

On this day in 1968, Johnny Cash put on two shows for 2,000 inmates in the Folsom Prison cafeteria in the Central Valley of California. Backed by the Tennessee Three, he was joined in performance by his soon-to-be wife, June Carter, and Carl Perkins, and the Statler Brothers. The concert was recorded as a live album, which became a worldwide hit.

Cash had wanted to perform at the prison since releasing his hit song "Folsom Prison Blues" in 1955. He sang that song at the prison and it was released as a single, which became Cash's first top 40 hit since 1964. This sparked Cash's comeback after his career sank for a while under the weight of his drug problems.

The songs were chosen for the inmates, not for the general public. Songs like "Busted," "Dark as the Dungeon," and "I Got Stripes" spoke directly to being in prison; "Send a Picture of Mother" hit their sentimental side, along with the self-pitying "Green, Green Grass of Home." There were songs to appeal to inmates' sense of humor -- "Flushed from the Bathroom of Your Heart" and "Dirty Old Egg-Suckin' Dog." And "Greystone Chapel" got cheers for declaring that "God had a place here at Folsom."

But these songs for inmates worked for the general public far better than any of the label execs were likely to have anticipated. Precisely because they showed the honesty of the concert, Cash's choice to play for prisoners cemented his reputation as a hero to the downtrodden -- and as a genuine "outlaw" of country music. This is why I think of Cash as the real thing, and Elvis Presley as a mere entertainer who started with a fake tough-kid image.

On this day in 1910, radio pioneer and electron tube inventor Lee De Forest arranged the world's first radio broadcast to the public in New York City, NY. He succeeded in broadcasting the voice of Enrico Caruso along with other stars of the Metropolitan Opera to several receiving locations in the city, where listeners with earphones marveled at wireless music from the air. Though only a few homes were equipped to listen, it was the first broadcast to reach the public and the beginning of a new era in which wireless radio communication became almost universal.

Notice that the goal of the first broadcast signaled the noble intention of bringing culture to the masses. This attitude of condescension lasted only until advertisers took control. The public didn't want elite culture, they wanted their own culture, and the sponsors saw to it they got it -- comedies, soap operas, westerns, mysteries, comic book heroes, and popular singing stars. Then they started playing records.

Music publishers were furious that radio stations were broadcasting their recordings for free, and put a stop to it -- as with Napster. They didn't realize that radio was selling their songs for them. Later they made accommodations by collecting a small fee for every broadcast, just as the music business is now making money from iTunes and Amazon.com.

Let this be a lesson for Congress. Corporate America will always try to get you to legislate for the benefit of the status quo; but if you refuse to coddle and protect them, the resilient corporations will end up making more money than every -- and the public will be far better served. American culture cannot be legislated or prescribed: Culture is what the people choose.

Friday, January 14^th -- Today Day

Today premiered on NBC on 14 January in 1952, but the show didn't take off until a chimp named J. Fred Muggs was added as a co-host the following year. Still, Today was serious about news, sports, and weather, and even the shows that have topped Today's ratings now and then have done it by copying the same format.

This is Ratification Day, marking the date in 1784 when the Continental Congress, meeting in Annapolis, MD, ratified the Treaty of Paris, officially ending the Revolutionary War and establishing the United States of America as a sovereign power. The Declaration of Independence was a statement of intent; this marked its fulfilment.

Saturday, January 15^th -- Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, Real Birthday

By the time Congress got around to commemorating the birth of Martin Luther King, Jr. (15 January 1929, in Atlanta, GA), they were already moving holidays to Mondays whenever possible, so Americans could have three-day weekends for traveling and spending money. So we commemorate his birth on the "third Monday in January" instead of on the day.

But at least he gets a day all to himself; poor Washington and Lincoln have to share a day. However, holiday-wise, this saves money for the federal government, and pleases the unions, too, because now there's a holiday each in January and February, instead of two in February and none in January, the way it used to be.

King is the first (and only) private citizen to have a federal holiday in his honor; he never held government office. (Columbus eventually became Admiral of the Ocean Sea.) There are those who still think he shouldn't have had such an honor (Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina led the opposition to the holiday in Congress).

In my opinion, though, King fully deserves the day. Washington won the war to create our nation; Lincoln won the war to stitch it back together when slavery split it; King may well have prevented another civil war. Without King's civil disobedience, his commitment to nonviolence, who knows what might have happened when American blacks finally rose up to resist the reign of terror, humiliation, and discrimination that had been imposed on them throughout the country (not just the South) for generations after the momentary hope the Lincoln and the radical Republicans brought them after the Civil War.

This is also Bald Eagle Appreciation Day. I want everyone to know how grateful I am for everything bald eagles have done for me.

Bald eagles are not bald -- "bald" used to mean "white-headed" but became a euphemism for hairlessness later. They live near open water where there are tall trees for nesting. It was on the brink of extinction in the 48 contiguous states (though it flourished all along in Alaska and Canada); it was removed from the list of endangered and threatened wildlife in the lower 48 states in 2007.

On this day in 1967, the Green Bay Packers won the first NFL-AFL World Championship Game, defeating the Kansas City Chiefs, 35-10 at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Packers quarterback Bart Starr was named the Most Valuable Player. Pro football's title game later became known as the Super Bowl.

Sunday, January 16^th -- Religious Freedom Day

Religious Freedom Day commemorates the adoption of a religious freedom statute by the Virginia legislature in 1786. Drafted by Thomas Jefferson and introduced by James Madison, it was later the model for the First Amendment to the US Constitution.

This day is all the more important today, when, in the name of the Constitution, the Leftist elite of America is waging a relentless crusade to give everyone but Christians the freedom to exercise their religion in public in America.

We have seen professors fired or denied tenure from universities because of their private Christian beliefs, and Christianity nearly expunged from many school history courses (though Islam, which contributed exactly nothing to American history, unless you count the pirates of Tripoli, is now given units in many such courses).

It's about time that our courts and Congress started insisting on the language of the First Amendment instead of Jefferson's never-ratified language about the impossible and undesirable "separation of church and state." The amendment not only forbids the establishment of religion, but also bans Congress from "prohibiting the free exercise" of religion.

I'm very worried about the savage persecution of Christians in Nigeria, Sudan, China, and many other countries; but I'm also worried about the more polite but also more shameful limits placed on Christians by supposed "liberals" in America. Today it seems that the one group that "dare not speak its name" without instantly being attacked in American universities and political life today is believing Christians.

Tonight you can watch the Golden Globe Awards, sponsored by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and honoring achievement in film and television. No one cares that the Foreign Press Association otherwise has no qualifications or influence anywhere -- it's a great party and the awards are often better than the pretentious Oscars.

My favorite awards are the annual Christine Lahti Prize for being in the john when they call your name for an award, and the Ving Rhames Medal for trying to give your award to one of the other nominees.

Dian Fossey, famous for her work as a scientist studying, writing about, and protecting gorillas, was born on this day in 1932. Her solitary work among the gorillas of the Virunga Mountains in Rwanda, Africa, was groundbreaking in its methodology and results. Fossey was a vigorous crusader against the poachers who decimate the gorilla population, and her murder in 1985 was probably their answer.

This is Appreciate a Dragon Day; in libraries, children will have the opportunity to choose dragons from popular literature and participate in activities to share their enthusiasm for the dragon of their choice. What's next, Appreciate a Vampire Day? They have both traveled the road from monster to cuddly pal.

Monday, January 17^th -- Benjamin Franklin Day

This is the Martin Luther King, Jr., holiday, but it's really the birthday (in 1706) of Benjamin Franklin, the writer, entrepreneur, and renaissance man who may be credited with creating the idea of a common identity as Americans for all the colonists along the Atlantic coast of NorthAmerica. He lived to be the oldest signer of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. He died in 1790, but 62 years earlier, he had written for himself this epitaph:

The Body of Benjamin Franklin, Printer,

Like a Covering of an old Book

Its contents torn out

And stript of its Lettering and Gilding,

Lies here, Food for Worms;

But the work shall not be lost,

It will (as he believ'd) appear once more

In a New and more beautiful Edition

Corrected and amended

By the Author

To celebrate National Fresh-Squeezed Juice Week I don't expect you all to buy oranges and squeeze them -- that's so much work -- but at least make it a point to buy some not-from-concentrate orange juice. Or make lemonade by squeezing the juice of a lemon or two into a tall glass of ice-cold water. Add sugar if you're a wimp.

Tuesday, January 18^th -- Pooh Day

A.A. (Alan Alexander) Milne, the creator of Winnie the Pooh as a literary character, was born on this day in London in 1882. Though Milne was a noted playwright, once he wrote Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner, recounting imaginary tales of his son, Christopher Robin, and his stuffed animals (and a book of nursery rhymes, Now We Are Six), his other work was completely overshadowed. He had no reason to expect this -- his earlier book of children's poems, When We Were Very Young, had taken a modest place among his much more famous works -- and the vast success of these later children's books became a burden to him.

In my opinion, however, any writer is astonishingly lucky if even one of his works not only supports his family during his lifetime but continues to find new readers after his death. It can be frustrating to see later and (you suppose) better works seem to vanish in the reputation of having written That One -- but Milne and his heirs ate the bread of Pooh for many years.

It was his son, Christopher Robin, who had grounds for complaint.

This is also the birthday of comedians Cary Grant (born Archibald Alexander Leach in 1904), Oliver Hardy (1892), and Danny Kaye (1913). (My father attended a performance of Danny Kaye's for American military personnel during World War II, and attests that he heard Kaye deliberately sing an entire song exactly one half-step out of tune.)

This is also the birthday of noted American lawyer and politician Daniel Webster (1782), a Whig who opposed Andrew Jackson. He served in the U.S. Senate and as Secretary of State.

Wednesday, January 19^th -- Tin Can Day

On this day in 1825, Ezra Daggett and his nephew Thomas Kensett obtained an American patent for a process for storing food in tin cans. Daggett actually learned the secret in England, where food was already being canned, the process having been devised in France, spurred by a prize offered by Napoleon.

In those days inventors were more likely to rely on secrecy to protect the exclusivity of their inventions, because patenting requires a complete disclosure of the method. But when secrecy alone is your protection, you have no recourse when industrial espionage carries away your secrets.

Regardless of where the process started, in those days before refrigeration, this was a transformative technology, allowing food to be stored for months or years after harvest, and distributed and sold in place far removed from where it was grown. Salmon, lobster, and oysters were among the first foods packed in cans by Daggett and Kensett.

Astonishingly, the invention of the can opener -- any dedicated can opener -- did not come until 1858, and it barely worked. The original instructions when canning began were to open the "case" by cutting around the top with a chisel and hammer -- which works, but ends up ducking the chisel into the tin.

And it helps to have a vise holding the can in place (if a person holds it, he is at grave risk of losing his hand). Cans were stabbed with knives and bayonets and the tops pried back, and you can bet the much of the food inside was splashed everywhere.

The usable crank-and-wheel can opener was invented by American William Lyman in 1870, and finally you could get to your tinned food without getting it all over yourself -- and without savagely cutting yourself.

But don't sneer at our ancestors for being content with cans for so many years before getting can openers. We've been using personal computers for thirty years and we're still waiting for a practical intuitive universal operating system. When we get one, we will think of our current software as the equivalent of prying open cans with a bayonet.

Like the tin can, the neon tube used in signs was invented by a Frenchman -- in this case Georges Claude (1870-1960), considered by many to be the "Edison of France." He invented a system for liquefying air in 1902, which allowed industry to transport and use nitrogen, oxygen, and argon in bulk. His company, L'Air Liquide, is today a multinational with headquarters in Paris.

Neon was a byproduct of his production of other gases; Claude developed neon tube lighting and first demonstrated it at the Paris Motor Show in December 1910, and it was patented in France that year. It was not patented in the United States until 19 January 1915 -- and, with typical American chauvinism, you will find many sources that list that as the date when the neon tube was patented.

True enough -- but that doesn't mean it was invented here (any more than the tin can) or that it had not been patented already in other countries. Contrary to American myth, we did not invent everything.

Back to M. Georges Claude: The sad denouement of his story is that in World War II, he collaborated with the Nazi occupiers of France (after all, that was good business and nobody seriously thought the Germans would ever be booted out of France).

After the war he was imprisoned and stripped of all his honors. His corporation, of course, continued because corporations are never given the death penalty for their crimes, though the free market has been known to impose the death penalty on corporations that did not commit the crimes of the corporations that prevailed over them.

The free market has no conscience; that is why societies that have a public conscience must corral the ruthless free market within fences of regulation so we can milk it without letting it trample us.

On this day in 1943, Janis Joplin was born, bringing us soul-searing performances of great songs until she cut her own life short with drugs. Her greatest hits album is still unmatched in power and brilliance by any other singer, in my opinion.

American writer Edgar Allan Poe, born today in 1809, likewise prepared himself for early death, though his drug of choice was alcohol. But perhaps his biggest problem was that he was the first American to live entirely from his earnings as a writer, always a chancy project even today.

On this day in 1966, Indira Gandhi was elected to be India's third prime minister. Much was made of the fact that she was a female head of government, but many Indians saw the more significant fact: She was daughter of the first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and continued his socialist policies, which kept India from any serious economic growth for decades.

Indira got the last name Gandhi by marrying Feroze Gandhi, a student at the London School of Economics when she met him; she was no relation to Mahatma Gandhi. She was bent on establishing a family dynasty and cared little for democracy -- she took the standard course toward dictatorship by fixing elections, and then, when caught at it, declaring an emergency and arresting most of the political opposition. She also ruthlessly purged her own party of any potential rival.

In effect, she united all her opponents into a single party; meanwhile, her only rival inside her party was now her son, Sanjay, but he died in a plane accident. She eventually lost to her united opponents, but they stupidly arrested her and made her seem a victim, winning her sympathy and eventual reelection to the top job.

When she was assassinated by Sikhs in 1984, her hopes for a family dynasty bore fruit in the election of her son Rajiv Gandhi, who was assassinated in turn by Tamils in 1991. His widow got control of the party's political apparatus but declined to become prime minister herself. Several of Gandhi's children are now active in politics -- on both sides of the aisle (if India can be said to have an aisle). Hopes (or fears) of a dynasty are still alive.

Gandhi is still revered as the First Woman, but her contempt for democracy should not be overlooked. When heads of democratic governments attempt to subvert electoral rebuffs and uncooperative legislatures, the danger of dictatorship is real and must be actively opposed to avoid losing all but the mere semblance of democratic government.