Tag: Walt Disney

Zippity Doo Dah

 

In a perfect world where people are always well-behaved and courteous and the bluebird of happiness accompanies them throughout their day, the zipper merge would work as harmoniously as traffic engineers envision it working. In practice, the zipper merge rarely works well, and instead it becomes a place where jerks can take advantage of the polite behavior of others in order to cut in line. Everyone who drives is familiar with the traffic setup, but not everyone may be acquainted with the term “zipper merge”.

 

A zipper merge refers to the area of road where one or more lanes end, and all traffic must move into the remaining open lane or lanes, such as in a construction zone. A similar situation presents itself where one lane of a road becomes an exit, with warning signs posted that the lane is for exiting only. Traffic engineers refer to these areas as zipper merges because ideally that is how they want drivers to conduct themselves where a lane closes down or where an exit lane is about to leave the main roadway. Like a closing zipper, cars in adjacent lanes should politely alternate merging together into the one open lane, making use of the closing lane as much as possible.

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Every driver recognizes these orange barrels as the lane markers in road construction zones, but not every driver reacts to them the same way, much as traffic engineers would like them to.

It’s a neat theory, and when it works as proposed it is a fine thing. “After you, sir.” “No, I insist, madam, you go first.” “Ah, very well, I shall do so then, and a fine day to you, sir.” “My pleasure, madam.” And a tip of the hat to you, too. Usually, however, most drivers who see the warning signs about a lane closure will move over to the through lane early, queuing up. The zipper merge happens in a sense, but farther back from the closure than engineers envisioned it. This polite behavior by most drivers is admirable because it invokes the manners ingrained in many people from early in life, but it has the effect of leaving a stretch of open road in the closing lane, and that is a temptation for jerks.

Not all drivers who take advantage of the open lane are jerks in their own eyes, because it is as hard for a jerk to recognize his own jerky behavior as it is for a fish to understand it is swimming in water. There are many rationalizations available to jerks, after all, the most prominent one provided by the traffic engineers who designed this scenario. The jerk reasons as he zips past everyone waiting patiently in line and then cuts in at the front “We’re supposed to use all of the closing lane up until the very end, but the idiot sheep lined up over there don’t understand that!” he would be more hesitant to try the same maneuver in a long store checkout line, but here in this situation traffic engineers have by default endorsed predatory driving, and therefore the jerk sees it as okay.

The exit lane situation is designed into the roadway, rather than being an ad hoc situation due to construction, but it promotes the same kind of selfish behavior. A multiple lane road in town loses one lane to an exit, and at times when the traffic is heavy there may be a long line of slowly moving cars in the lane which will eventually veer off the main road. The opportunistic jerk assesses the situation and, instead of dropping into line at the back, where cars are moving slowly and obviously intend to exit, continues at speed in the lane adjacent to the exit lane until he sees his opening near the front, shortly before the exit lane leaves the road, and swoops in, as often as not using his turn signal, as if that made his shark move alright. “Hey, I’m signaling! Let me in!”

There’s not much that can safely be done about zipper merge jerk behavior other than rage against it or hope that traffic engineers get their heads out of the clouds and figure out a better way to design merge zones, one that takes into account actual human behavior in the real world. Tom and Ray Magliozzi, the auto mechanic brothers who conducted the Car Talk call-in radio program on NPR until 2012, when elder brother Tom’s failing health forced them to discontinue the show, had a caller on one show that they reran in 2015 who had a question for them about using the open lane in a zipper merge. The show was Episode 1538: “Aberrant Behavior Syndrome”, and the caller was Brian, from Kentucky, who called in at about the 11:30 mark of the show. Brian wasn’t absolutely a jerk, even if he did rationalize using the open portion of a closing lane at the expense of his fellow drivers, but Tom and Ray – especially Tom – set him straight in a most definitive and entertaining manner, and their reasoning goes beyond the misconceptions of traffic engineers and the pushiness of jerks who look out only for themselves.
— Ed.

 

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The Nose Knows

 

“A lie keeps growing and growing until it’s as plain as the nose on your face.”
― spoken by The Blue Fairy in the 1940 Disney film Pinocchio.

This coming Monday at 5pm, Supreme Leader has promised to announce the winners of the Fake News awards, according to him. Media personalities are lining up for the most prestigious of the Fakies awards, because to be called a liar by the biggest liar of them all is quite an honor. Stephen Colbert of the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) talk program The Late Show has taken out an ad in New York City’s Times Square to promote himself and his show for Supreme Leader’s top honors. This is becoming a big deal.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend – that’s the operating principle here. To be called out for Fake News by the biggest liar in the country is not only praise of a kind, but an endorsement. And now Supreme Liar will be bestowing awards of some sort on the highest honorees, though what that might be he has not made clear yet. Suffice to say that any news organization would be satisfied with the honor alone because of the boost to their ratings or readership, never mind the additional prestige. This must have been what Supreme Egotist meant in his recent New York Times interview when he suggested the media needs him around for the re-election campaign in 2020 to boost their income.


Awards and trophies have been a part of western civilization for millennia, at least since the ancient Greeks gave out laurel wreaths and cash gifts to winning Olympic athletes. In the twentieth century, the awards and trophies business really took off since entertainment businesses in particular found out giving them away in publicized ceremonies was a great way to let the tasteless public know what publications, movies, television shows, what have you, had the imprimatur of good taste from supposed authorities within the business, raising more revenue from the public, who now knew how to impress their friends and neighbors when they bought culture.

BBAward
The Big Brother Award from the United Kingdom based organization Privacy International. Near the end of George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, the representative of state power, O’Brien, says to the protagonist, Winston, “‘If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.'”

The Fakies, as proposed by Supreme Dotard, promise something a little off kilter from the usual awards bestowing because they will be more in line with the Razzies, an anti-award for bad movie making. But since the Razzies awarders do not take themselves or their task too seriously, there will still be a difference in solemnity between the granting of Razzies and that of Fakies, because the awarder of the latter prizes takes himself all too seriously, as do many of his more die hard supporters. There are the cynical supporters among the upper classes who were only interested in seeing through the enactment of things like the recent tax cut package for themselves and their rich friends, and then there are the true believers among the lower classes who are mainly in it to spite leftists, with their definition of leftist being anyone to the other side of Dwight Eisenhower, who if he were alive today would himself be suspect.

The great Spike Milligan accepted a lifetime achievement award in 1994.

One important point that needs addressing here is that this very website has been first and foremost in denouncing the regime of Der Lügner since it started, and should therefore be in line to receive a Fakie as a promulgator of Fake News by light of how the regime judges these things. If this website receives a Fakie on Monday, rest assured the glow of its bestowal will shower contributors and readers alike with a penumbra of honor from an unimpeachable source – or an impeachable one, as may be the case.
― Vita

 

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A Spoonful of Honey

 

In 1964 when the Walt Disney Studio made Mary Poppins, a spoonful of sugar may have helped the medicine go down in the most delightful way, but today honey has proven healthier and more effective in treating the symptoms of the common cold. Cough drops made with honey for soothing the throat, and mint or eucalyptus to clear sinuses are popular, as are herbal teas with a spoonful of honey added. Unlike sugar then, honey is a soothing remedy as well as a sweetener.

Linus Pauling
Linus Pauling in 1954.

Vitamin C is for many people another component of fighting off the effects of a cold, despite evidence it has no specific role in the fight. Being otherwise healthy and well nourished, a person with a cold has no need of supplementing their diet with extra vitamin C. Linus Pauling, an American who won two Nobel prizes in the mid twentieth century, the first for chemistry and the second for peace, exerted tremendous influence from the 1960s until his death in 1994 in asserting the value of vitamin C in alleviating cold symptoms or preventing the onset of a cold altogether. Pauling’s influence was so great that he not only boosted sales of vitamin C supplements, but inadvertently set the ball rolling for the entire nutritional supplement industry, resulting in the enormous sales displays at today’s grocery stores and drug stores.

Considering the variety of foods now available year round to consumers in wealthier countries, it’s questionable whether most nutritional supplements are necessary. Many people will nonetheless take a multi-vitamin every day on the grounds that it can’t hurt, as insurance. In addition to the outsized influence wielded by Linus Pauling, it could be that the idea of combating a cold with vitamin C is a holdover from the time when people in colder countries did not have ready access to fresh fruits and vegetables in the winter cold and flu season. Poorer people in particular would have seen their health deteriorate in the winter due to poor nutrition and a consequently weakened immune system.

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A store vitamin supplement sales display. Photo by Raysonho.

Canja de galinha
A bowl of Canja de galinha, or Portuguese chicken soup. Photo by Flickr user Sebástian Freire.

At such a time, the gift of an orange in a sick person’s Christmas stocking would have been most welcome. As long as the difficulties of transport to the north could be overcome, oranges, one of the few fruits available fresh after November, could supplement diets starved for fresh fruit all winter, not just at Christmas. Oranges are higher in vitamin C than other fruits commonly available in temperate countries, and therefore people might naturally jump to the conclusion that it was the lack of vitamin C, rather than poor nutrition generally, that contributed to susceptibility to colds.

An old remedy for cold symptoms that science has found real value in is chicken soup, due to its chemistry and the healthy effects on the respiratory system of steaming liquid both before and after ingestion. Doctors say liquids in all forms except those containing caffeine or alcohol are a good remedy for a cold. Herbal tea, chicken soup, hot chocolate, all are good. An aspirin or other pain reliever now and then for an adult is okay, but not for infants and toddlers, and aspirin not at all for children under 16. Honey also is not recommended for infants. Meanwhile, all the vitamin supplements in the world, vitamin C included, won’t help unless poor nutrition was a problem before the cold came on. The best way to avoid coming down with a cold in the first place? Good hygiene and healthy eating, including when a cold settles in despite everything. Feed a cold, and feed a fever. Starving never helped anyone overcome anything, unless they called the starving fasting, but then that’s a whole other story.
― Izzy

 

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O Great Pumpkin

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Pumpkin vines in flower.
Photo by H. Zell.

Few fruits or vegetables have as much lore associated with them as the pumpkin. To begin with, is it a fruit or a vegetable? Botanically it is a fruit, because the part we use and eat develops from a flower and contains seeds. Vegetables come from the leaves, stems, buds, and roots of plants. For cooks and the eaters who enjoy the fruits of their labors, however, a pumpkin is to all practical purposes a vegetable.

The nursery rhyme “Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater,” like many nursery rhymes seems nonsensical at first, and perhaps to young ears and minds it is best left that way because upon delving into its meaning there is darkness at the core, which may or may not yield life lessons, depending on individual interpretation. Charles Schulz’s It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, is more enjoyable for young and old alike, with more accessible life lessons. The 1966 TV special is, at 50, still a favorite for holiday viewing and is a masterwork of the animator Bill Melendez.


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Pumpkin flower with bees. Photo by H. Zell.

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Ripe pumpkin on the vine. Photo by H. Zell.

Jack O’Lanterns started in Ireland with the carving of turnips, potatoes, and beets long before people there were aware of pumpkins. Pumpkins are native to the Western Hemisphere, as are potatoes, but the introduction of potatoes to Ireland made a much bigger impression because of their culinary usefulness and ease of growth and storage. The subsequent ubiquity of the potato in Irish fields would have devastating consequences when a blight affected the crop for several years in the mid-nineteenth century, giving rise to the Potato Famine. Using pumpkins for Jack O’Lanterns did not catch on until the wave of Irish immigrants fleeing the Potato Famine came to the United States and found the pumpkin most suitable to the purpose.

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A display of pumpkins for sale at Halloween.

John Quidor - The Headless Horseman Pursuing Ichabod Crane - Google Art Project
The Headless Horseman Pursuing Ichabod Crane, a painting by John Quidor.

The variety of pumpkin most often grown for decorative carving is the ‘Howden’, developed by Massachusetts farmer John Howden in the 1960s. The pumpkin filling sold in cans for making pumpkin pie is often made from squash varieties which, while belonging to the same genus as pumpkin, Cucurbita, are not from the species we recognize as pumpkin.

One more bit of lore has given us this common image of the pumpkin, and especially its association with spooky autumn nights, and it comes from Washington Irving’s short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” The original story is a bit unclear on whether the Headless Horseman carries around his own head or a pumpkin as a sort of substitute head, but at any rate the version most people are familiar with today and are probably most comfortable with comes from the 1949 Walt Disney short film. As with the Walt Disney version of Cinderella (where a pumpkin also makes an appearance, as Cinderella’s stagecoach), which was taken from a rather dark fairy tale by The Brothers Grimm, story events become more pleasant and less threatening than in the original. Put another way, the treats are nicer and the tricks less scary, or scarry, if you will.
– Izzy

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