Paul Simons

Phil it's always a reward to see you take up something I mentioned and run with it, expand on it. So, and with the greatest respect for the sanctity, the emotions, the glory of love and marriage, it appears thatyou and your wife started off with an out-of-the-park home run, congratulations!

First the poem. I am exceedingly poorly read in that department - just the occasional New Yorker poem by W.S. Merwin or one of their other masters - so I will say my favorite is a friend of mine, Scott Edwards, and here's one of his that hits the nail on the head:

"When people don’t believe you
Try as you might to plead your case
Might it be a scant self serving?
Perhaps a bit.
But lies are lies.
And I wasn’t built to completely lie.
That would be a lie against me.
How I live with that.
Ever wonder how when you are screaming the truth
You are scorned
I feel the hot blooded ignorance of people who I thought had intelligence
Come to find out they dumber than dumb
Not that I’m not but I swear
I think I got a bit more in the brain
Not trying to be narcissistic but just confounded by misguided energy.
You tell me Brother
Am I wrong?"

About novels - again, I'm pretty much of an ignoramus. Philip Roth's "The Plot Against America" is the one I put at the top of the list - again it hits the nail on the head. Here are a few quotes:

“To have enslaved America with this hocuspocus! To have captured the mind of the world's greatest nation without uttering a single word of truth! Oh, the pleasure we must be affording the most malevolent man on earth!"

“And how long will the American people stand for this treachery perpetrated by their elected president? How long will Americans remain asleep while their cherished Constitution is torn to shreds”  

“--nor had I understood til then how the shameless vanity of utter fools can so strongly determine the fate of others”  

He wrote it in 2004. About 14 years ago. He was born in 1933. So, in 1945 he was about 12 years old - old enough to know what he was seeing and hearing. He had seen something that had earned the response "Never Again". He knew that of course it could happen again.

Dale Gieringer

 Speaking of baseball, what's up, or rather down, with the Reds?   After finishing in last place last year  they've stumbled out to the worst record in the majors at 3 - 15.  And to think they made a serious run at the pennant in 2012, before losing the playoffs, firing their coach, and letting go of their best players. The ignominy!    I can't remember when the Reds have done so poorly in our lifetime.   Speaking of which, tomorrow I celebrate my 72nd.  Happy 4-20! 

Steven Levinson

Dale, being the math prodigy that you were and are, I'm sure that it's occurred to you that your new age will be two cubed times three squared.  I think that's exciting.  And I've been noting the Reds' crash-and-burn with horror from afar.  What an embarrassment.

Chuck Cole

Happy Birthday Dale. You share a birthday with my deceased father, my deceased grandmother, and the very deceased Adolph Hitler.  And perhaps being a 4-20 person, you were destined to play the role in public policy that you so capably played.

And regarding Philip Roth and his retelling of today on a 1940s stage, perhaps his prescience about America today turning towards totalitarianism will earn him what I've long thought is a well-deserved Nobel Prize in Literature. 

Finally, regarding the Reds-most who analyzed what would likely happen this year predict that the Reds will end the season with the worst record in baseball. 

Steven Levinson

Speaking of which, Dale and Chuck, I'm marrying a couple from Japan today, whose only regret about the date is that April 20 is Hitler's birthday, in fact, his 130th birthday.  We took solice in the fact that their wedding time, 4:00 p.m. Hawaiian Time will be roughly 4:00 a.m. on April 21 in Germany.

E. Churchill McKinney

Gail Weintraub (Stern)

My son's birth due date was April 20--Hitler's birthday. I was relieved when he arrived early on April 8--Buddha's birthday.

Ann Shepard (Rueve)

Very proud of The Cincinnati Enquirer's win of the Pulitzer for reporting on the opioids epidemic. We deserved!  

Not to trivialize drug abuse, April 20 is also known as 420 Day, a.k.a. Weed Day (probably a fact not unknown to Dale - and Happy Birthday - sursum ad summum). 

On another note, here's a Friday Funny for our alumni:

Stephen Collett

That cartoon is a scream, Anne, thanks. I have been trying to copy it to send to my sister (Jane! your big sister) but can´t get that. It has finally taken my 37 yr old daughter Ida, a professional rocker in Stavanger, to illuminate 20.04 for me (European dating). How long have I missed this? 

Bruce Fette

Paul,

Very good material. Surely worth reading.

Ann,

I have been learning a tiny bit of Spanish as I drive to work this week. And sure enough they conjugate their verbs as well, quite similarly I might add. It brought back that very same declension :).

Happy Birthday to Dale - Our Math Wizard! And another leader in many things.

Richard Winter (Winter)

My wife, Jan Stigberg, has returned to making jewelry after taking some time off.  This weekend she has a booth at the American Craft Show of St. Paul, Minnesota.   This is a show of very high quality craft with hundreds of artists: https://craftcouncil.org/shows/acc/american-craft-show-saint-paul , which is at the St. Paul River Center through 5pm on Sunday.  Here is one example of what she is showing this time:

If you are near St. Paul this weekend, I urge you to check out the show.   And, if you do that, I hope you will stop and say hello to Jan Stigberg, in booth 1066.

Richard

Philip Spiess

To those of you who connect with -- or narrowly missed -- Adolf Hitler's birthday, I'll just say that my own, very personal (no offense to anyone else), view of what turned Hitler askew in life was that he was both a teetotaler and a vegetarian, aside from the fact that he never got over getting rejected by a major art school (Vienna) and was heavily drugged up in the latter part of the war with spurious pills by his quack physician. What a mess!

I won't even mention here, relative to "conjugations", that one of the English language's former parts of speech (it was demoted, possibly for obvious reasons) was "ejaculation" (yeah, go and look it up).

Jeff Daum

Really nice Richard.  Hope the show goes well and glad that your wife has returned to doing what she has such an artistic skill for.

Jerry Ochs

Porkapocalypse?   I read in The Nation that the taxpayers will soon be paying for a soccer stadium.  Really?

Paul Simons

Richard Winter (Winter)

Thank you, Jeff and Paul.

Mary Benjamin

Thanks for letting us know, Ann and Churchill, about the Enquirer's Pulitzer - that is very exciting and great to know!

Thanks again for that. BTW April 20th, I found out via an email from my son's high school, was also Senior Ditch Day as well as a national Walk-Out Day in honor of Parkland students.

Big day all around!

Mary

David Buchholz

Richard, your wife's jewelry is beautiful.  I encourage all of you to post images of your artistry.  We have words aplenty; I'd love to see more images.

Two "local" newspapers have won Pulitzers.  Congratulations to the Enquirer and congratulations to the smallish Santa Rosa Press-Democrat, a newspaper that won a Pulitzer for its coverage of the wildfires last October that destroyed over five thousand houses.  And for Santa Rosans, the fat lady isn't even close to singing.  Benzyne has penetrated many of water pipes and they need to be replaced.  The fat lady can sit for a couple of years, as people can ill afford to wait to rebuild.

And as far as 4/20 goes, unbeknownst to me, (and Dale, did you know this?) the connection between the date and marijuana can be traced back to several high school students from San Rafael HS who graduated in 1971, at least according to the San Francisco Chronicle, which ran this article yesterday.http://digital.olivesoftware.com/Olive/ODN/SanFranciscoChronicle/Default.aspx

Whoops, I see that the link takes you to the current newspaper, not the article about 4/20.

Steve:  if you have an Apple computer the proprietary app "Grab" allows you to copy part of a page, say the cartoon only.  It becomes a jpeg that you can attach to an email.  PC owners.  You can add a suggestion for Steve, too.

Stephen Collett

Phill, how would that work as a "part of speech", I mean like grammatically? Like someone coming with an ejaculatory (hey, spellcheck accepted that!) statement, confession....? Or like a pop-up? How exactly will they police this demotion?

Stephen Collett

Thanks Dave. I have Apple and that is going to help me -when I learn a little more about APPs. But I´m gonna.

Philip Spiess

Stephen:  According to what I learned in 6th Grade at Cifton School (in what was styled in those days as "Language Arts & Social Studies"), the "Ejaculation" was a form of exclamation, inevitably without subject or predicate, and usually followed by an exclamation point.  This left it kind of hanging out there on its own, as a kind of sub-sentence; thus (I suppose) its demotion, much like the (former) planet Pluto.  I daresay it had its brief return to the limelight in the late 1960s in the days of Op and Pop Art, when artists were garnishing retro-Sunday comics art with such ejaculations as "Bam!", "Eureka!", and "Pow!"

I cannot speak for other 6th Grade students at Clifton School in 1957-1958 (we were just eleven or twelve years of age), but I knew of no other meanings of the word at that time.

Oh, and Paul, Rimbaud, as we know, had his own demons -- including Verlaine and absinthe, the "Green Fairy."

Ann Shepard (Rueve)

Steve, email me at crueve@gmail.com and I’ll reply with a copy of the picture!

Richard Winter (Winter)

Replying to Phil and Steve, in Windows there is an accessory called the “Snipping Tool” which lets you capture an image of whatever is on your screen - or on any rectangular section of your screen.

Philip Spiess

Stephen:  A further thought on "parts of speech":

I suddenly recalled that another former part of speech also has hit the "demoted" list.  This is the "article," of which I believe there are only three:  "a," "an," and "the."  The relative importance of each of these, one to another, is suggested by a knock-off "Footnote" (1929) by the critic H. L. Mencken to his 1920 article on "[Walt] Whitman":  "The real objection to Whitman is that he was a vulgar and trashy fellow.  He wrote 'A Woman Waits for Me.'  A civilized man would have put the in place of a."

Philip Spiess

Forgive me if I impose too much on this site, but I am moved at the moment to recount the glorious and various water towers and reservoirs of Cincinnati; most of them are wonderful evocations of German castles, thus adding a Romantic fancy and picturesqueness to the city's landscape, even as they serve a practical purpose, and may be compared favorably with the water towers of Chicago, New York, St. Louis, and Milwaukee.

The first in prominence is, of course, the Eden Park Water Tower (1894), rising above the heights of Eden Park and visible to those navigating the Ohio River, as it is 172 feet in height and its base is 825 feet above sea level.  It was designed by Samuel Hannaford & Sons, which, in my opinion (and I am, among other things, an architectural historian), was Cincinnati's greatest 19th-Century architectural firm.  Originally used as a pressure tank for Cincinnati's High Service, serving the Walnut Hills area, it was dropped from service about 1907, when modernization of the Water Works system came into being.  Formerly there was a pointed pinnacle roofing the smaller turret on the tower, and a spiral staircase and elevator led to the top.  The pinnacle was removed in 1943, when its copper was donated to a World War II scrap drive, and at the same time the huge steel tank, the elevator, and other metal elements were removed.  The tower was then transferred from the Cincinnati Water Works to the Cincinnati Park Board as a landmark (it has been declared a "Water Landmark" by the American Waterworks Association and has a tear-shaped bronze plague commemorating this fact).  For many years hundreds of visitors to Eden Park paid an admission to ride the elevator to the top, which offered a unique view of the Ohio River valley.

The second Cincinnati water tower in prominence is undoubtedly the Elsinore Tower (1883), located on Gilbert Avenue at Elsinore Place, and one of the entrances to Eden Park and Mount Adams (the road formerly went through the tower arch, but now goes to its side).  This great twin-towered limestone gateway was built by the Cincinnati Water Works to serve as a valve house at the termination of an extension of the effluent mains from the Eden Park Reservoir to Gilbert Avenue, and as an ornamental entrance to Eden Park.  Control valves in the tower regulated the flow of water to the city below; their use has long since been discontinued.  The castle's design resulted from the stage set of an 1883 performance of Shakespeare's Hamlet, which so impressed the superintendent of the Waterworks, A. G. Moore, that he implored Charles E. Hannaford (one of the sons of the architectural firm of Samuel Hannaford & Sons -- see above) to design the valve house from it.  The Cincinnati "castle" (rather 19th-Century Irish in nature) bears no resemblance to Hamlet's castle of Kronborg, which stands outside Elsinore, Denmark (Shakespeare mistook the town's name for the castle).

The Eden Park Reservoir (1866-1878), located in the center of Eden Park, off of Martin Street, was designed to provide water and pressure for the Middle Service, later the Central Service, supplying the central and lower portions of the city from Linwood to Fernbank and from Winton Place to the river; it had a capacity of 96 million gallons of water, and had a west basin (1872) and an east basin (1878).  The reservoir was designed by Arthur G. Moore, superintendent and engineer of the Cincinnati Water Works.  Although much of its south wall has now been destroyed, the impressive remains of this reservoir give testament to the strength of its retaining wall, which originally consisted of eight elliptical arches, each rising 18 feet and spanning 55 feet.  The length of the wall was 1,251 feet, and the width of the base was 48.5 feet; it tapered to 25 feet in width at the top, and this top carried a road and walkway lined with ornamental planters.  In the late 1960s the retaining wall was torn down by the city, except for the portions which remain, as the west basin had been covered over several years before (dead dogs, suicides by drowning, and other bodies being found in it during its periodic cleanings when it was uncovered), and the east basin was drained and baseball diamonds were installed in it.

The Eastern Hills Water Tanks (1914-1915), at Bantry Street and Glen Avenue in Kennedy Heights, comprising five tanks joined by a castellated concrete structure, served the Eastern Hills with a total capacity of 4,700,000 gallons of water.  [I wrote in 1978 that "It seems they have not been used for the past five years."]

The Winton Road Reservoir (1925), used for the Eastern Hills service, supplies water to ten cities and three townships (cf., Hamilton County's "patchwork quilt").  Covered in 1957, the 400-foot square concrete structure holds 34,650,000 gallons of water.  An ornamental railing that formerly ran around the ledge at the top of the structure, contributing to its castle-like appearance, was removed sometime in the 1960s.

The Western Hills Water Tanks (1911-1912), located at Ferguson Road near Tower Avenue, Western Hills, is yet another set of Cincinnati water tanks that are castle-like in appearance.  Built on a concrete base that elevates them 35 feet above ground level, they are 35 feet in diameter, 65 feet high, and the four tanks have a total capacity of 1,300,000 gallons of water.

The Mount Airy Water Tanks (1927) (my favorites), located on Colerain Avenue at North Bend Road, the last of the great castellated water towers of Cincinnati, are a cluster of fourteen tanks, with a total capacity of 8,500,000 gallons of water; they serve the Northern Hills.  Covered over in 1963, they stand 1,030 feet above sea level.  In design these tanks are very similar to the Mount Auburn Water Tanks (two in number), built in 1894 and remodeled in 1923-1924 by having an ornamental castle-like black brick (rather than red) and concrete structure built around them; they stood in the triangle north of the Mount Auburn Presbyterian Church (near Corryville) to serve the High Service; they were demolished in 1953.

And, yes, there is the Western Hills Water Tower (circa early 1950s), by no means a Germanic castle, but looking very much like a solid depiction in steel of the Atomic bomb set off at the Bikini Atoll! 

And finally, the Cincinnati Water Works Intake Pier, upstream from the Cincinnati Water Works main station (located at California, Ohio), and on the Kentucky side of the Ohio River, is a masonry construction on a timber caisson, surmounted by a stone tower.  The pier is reached by a Pratt-truss span 320 feet long; within the pier are two wells opening to the river, the intake tunnel being 1,425 feet long.  The stone tower on top of the intake pier holds the operations for the sluice valves and screens.  This tower is commonly called the "Mouse Tower," after a tower so-called on the River Rhine in Germany, an island-based toll-collection castle connected with the legend of Bishop Hatto, Bishop-Elector of Mainz, who was consumed by mice after having prohibited his constituents from using the grain he had garnered into his barns (this is a brief summary of the legend).  Longfellow refers to this legend in his poem "The Children's Hour" (1860).