LIST OF THE MONTH: CHEAP BUT GOOD

LIST OF THE MONTH: CHEAP BUT GOOD

My wife and I share an interest in making things work and figuring out why they don’t and exploring what might make them work again. We knew we were headed for marriage when we realized we not only both had a workbench packed with hardware, we both had the same screw size chart on the wall.
So I didn’t roll my eyes when she presented me with a list she had gleaned from This Old House magazine about household uses for baking soda. Scanning it, my eyes leaped to the phrase “Banish book odors.”
If you’ve ever been to a library book sale, you know the smell. Musty, dusty and moldy, it isn’t all that bad, but you hesitate, wondering if it would make all your other books smell that way, at least if you never got around to reading them. A lot of worthwhile books perish that way, euthanized as unadoptable.
So here’s bicarbonate of soda, once again riding to the rescue: “Seal musty-smelling books for a few weeks in a plastic bag with baking soda sprinkled inside to eliminate mildew and odors.”
This Old House observes that the reader may very well have some baking soda in their refrigerator to fight odors. (What do you do with it afterward? I’ll bet it has garden uses, too; or you could give it to your kid for his or her birthday together with a bottle of vinegar if they promise never, ever to log onto http://www.eepybird.com.) But there are other useful uses, they say. Here they are:
1. Remove tape residue by putting on a thick paste of baking soda and water.
2. Put out small fires by sprinkling baking soda (so have a box at your workplace as well as the kitchen).
3. Exterminate roaches, by leaving out a mixture that is half sugar (which they greedily eat) and baking soda (which makes their digestive systems burst; see www.eepybird.com)
4. Spot clean a rug by putting it on a greasy spot, leaving for an hour, scrubbing gently with a damp sponge or brush, then vacuum.
5. Dehumidify the work room by leaving a box open to absorb water (which probably won’t hurt if you have to toss the contents on a fire—see no.2)
6. Keep the kitchen sink drain from clogging by pouring in a cup of baking soda and a cup of vinegar, once a week. This will also keep housecleaning days from getting boring; if the results are particularly effective and you videotape them, it will also work to clog You Tube.)
7. Clean a shower door by putting baking soda on a damp sponge, wiping, and washing with warm water.
8. Rehabilitate your grill by sprinkling baking soda on directly, leaving overnight, then removing (along with the grime) with a wire brush and warm water.
9. Get odors off your hands, with a palmful of the stuff and warm water.
10. –book odors.

I almost wrote for no. 10 “This is where I came in.” If you ever hear an older person say that, it means they date from the days when local movie theaters showed double features. If you arrived a little bit late for one movie, of course you stayed after the second movie to see how it began. Then you would start to recognize footage, and you might say to the person whose feet you had to walk over to reach the aisle, “This is where I came in,” meaning that was where you were getting out. Life makes such sense sometimes.

Veterans Day: Remembering Iron Bottom Sound

VETERANS DAY: REMEMBERING IRON BOTTOM SOUND

Back in 1942, between Nov. 12 and 15, United States forces in the South Pacific turned the tide of the war by blocking Japanese reinforcement of their forces on the island of Guadalcanal.
The Naval Battle of Guadalcanal capped a half year of fierce combat on land, on the sea, and in the air, during which the Armed Forces, at least, realized that all those cartoons about dwarfish Japs with bad eyesight were pure fiction. Japanese fighter pilots trained for spotting enemy planes by looking for the star Sirius during the daytime. At sea, Japanese naval commanders had far better binoculars than their Americans counterparts. Today’s official military history of that period puts it this way: “Inside and just outside Iron Bottom Sound, five significant surface battles and several skirmishes convincingly proved just how superior Japan's navy then was in night gunfire and torpedo combat
The Solomon Islands, of which Guadalcanal was one, run in two roughly parallel lines, and the seas between those lines became known as The Slot. It was like certain bars: if you wanted a fight, that was where you went. John F. Kennedy’s heroic actions after his torpedo boat went down resulted in a medal, and gave him a boost toward a career that included writing “Profiles in Courage”—a title that could have been applied to many during the time when, as “Tales of the South Pacific” put it, the Americans had to fight destroyers with PT boats, cruisers with destroyers, and battleships with cruisers.
James Michener’s “Tales,” which led to the musical “South Pacific,” should be mentioned in the same breath as Norman Mailer’s “The Naked and the Dead” and James Jones’ “The Thin Red Line,” both of which also evoke the war against Japan. Michener’s book is unlike his later bloated epics, a set of linked stories filled with unforgettable characters, vivid depictions, and sharp symbolism. I recommend it to those who are, like me, fascinated by the period; it is not tightly gripping as Audie Murphy’s ghostwritten “To Hell and Back,” one of our unheralded classics, and doesn’t have the scope of Anton Myrer’s “Once an Eagle” (who incidentally fought three years in the Pacific Theater as a Marine) but to my mind it deserves major literary status.
The Americans also learned to respect their native scouts, especially Guadalcanal’s Jacob Vouza, who brought a downed American pilot through the Japanese lines then agreed to be a scout. He was captured while in Japanese territory, tied to a tree, and bayoneted in the arms, shoulder, throat, face and stomach to make his tell what he knew about the Americans—he said nothing—then left him to died. He freed himself, kept going through miles of jungle to the America base, and warned them about an impending Japanese attack, which led to the key American victory at the Battle of the Tenaru River.
Elsewhere in the South Pacific, the Allies went to Fiji to see if the men there would be good scouts. They set up an exercise during which the they would guard the base’s buildings during the night, and the Fijians would try to sneak up and mark the buildings with white chalk X’s.
They waited and they watched and no Fijians appeared. Lazy natives, they’re like children, you have to watch them all the time, why did we think they might make good scouts. Then, as a new day dawned, they began to see the white X’s: on doors, on equipment, and on each other’s backs.
This Veteran’s Day, I think of the men and women who fought and often died on and under and around Iron Bottom Sound, but also I think of the Japanese who died for their country, and of the natives, and of the Australian coastwatchers who reported Japanese movements up and down The Slot “Good luck,” they would say, “and good hunting.” Too often their luck was to become the hunted themselves and to die, sometimes very painfully.
World War II was the Olympics of warfare, a time when all nationalities showed that they were courageous and capable of great sacrifices, and should have gained each other’s respect. Much more than a big war, that era’s great cataclysm mixed what had been separate, and the flash of the atomic bomb fused together everyone’s fates. Now, as we go on pretending that we are better than the Iraqis and Afghanis, and creating bigger and stronger backlashes the harder we push, I’m glad my father, who flew in B-24’s as one of the Flying Tigers in China, doesn’t have to watch so many lessons from that time being washed away by waves of sentimental patriotism and silenced by the noisy cheerleaders of reflexive chauvinism. Allah help us all.

Beware: Poet at Work

BEWARE: POET AT WORK

Writing poetry can be hazardous to your health, and perhaps to others as well. I’ve been fortunate enough to have spent some years writing poems rather than articles, and I can testify that doing so can put the creator in an altered state of mind where he (and possibly she, though I think of women as being more sensible than this) bumps into things, drops things, forgets appointments, and makes all sorts of bizarre mistakes.
A case in point: this morning I was looking out our back window at the Havahart trap, which we had set to catch whatever was stealing the sunflower seeds from our bird feeders, and which had finally caught something the day before.
“Honey, we got something in the trap.”
“What was it?”
“Well, it was gray, and white, and it had two wings.”
“A grosbeak.”
“I saw it at lunchtime, frantically flitting and hopping, so I threw on some clothes and went out and opened the trap, and it flew out. It made a beeline for the woods. Didn’t seem too much the worse for wear.”
“Remember the time we caught the neighbor’s cat?”
This morning, I was making my breakfast, and those two words “hopping” and “flitting” set off a poem—which turned into something about us complicated people wanting the birds to have a simple happiness—which the grosbeak certainly got, because it was damned happy to get out. Meanwhile, I realized, I had poured 10 too many artificial sweeteners into my cereal, acting out of habit as if I were making a full pot of coffee.
Let me reassure you, when this sort of thing happens while I’m driving, I pull over. The Leicester River turnoff, for instance, has seen a LOT of short poems written in its lifetime, and I told the people at the Leicester general store this was among the many public services they had provided the community.
At my alma mater’s graduate school, there’s a lady who first succeeded in slowing light to something like 38 miles per hour, then for an encore managed to stop it entirely before sending it on its way (probably not grateful like the grosbeak, but certainly making a beeline in a different direction). Poets do something like that with their subjects, slowing the stream of life to the point where everyone can perceive it more clearly, then releasing again.
Meanwhile, as a handful of lines get written, hours go by—not to mention whatever was on the calendar for such periods. If there were more people in the household, I’d put up a sign, “Beware: poet at work.”

BACK PAGES: THE -BER MONTHS

BACK PAGES: THE –BER MONTHS

Here’s the original:

Thirty dayes hath November,
April, June, and September;
Of XXVIII is but oon,
And all the remenaunt xxx and I.

That’s from “Middle English Lyrics,” a W.W. Norton Critical Edition, which drew it from a 15th century manuscript. By “the 15th century” we mean “the 1400’s,” that makes the grandfather of our “Thirty days hath September” more than 500 years old.
In case the last two lines of Middle English aren’t clear—it may have been a few years since studying Roman numerals in elementary school—they say (own translation) “Of 28 is but one, and all the remnant 30 and one.”
Earlier in our history, rhyme aided memory. All sorts of adages, saws, morals, and so forth rhymed because repetitive endings can be cues for recollection. “Red at night, sailor’s delight;/ Red in the morning, sailor take warning,” would be a classic example of rhyming with tutorial significance. But now, educators have caught on that children go through a rhyming phase early in their language learning, so teaching materials frequently lean on rhyme to convey concepts about phonetics, syllables, and the like. Often this drifts into gibberish: “The fat cat sat on the mat,” and so forth. In the process, the old type of rhyming—rhyme with reasons—has been overwhelmed and radically devalued.
At the same time, we are still in the grip of an old historical mistake: assuming all languages shared a similar structure. During the Renaissance, with its excitement over rediscovering the Ancients, it was “logical” for people to try applying the well-developed Roman descriptions of their own language and poetry to English. (The college prep curriculum in Robert Frost’s day, around the turn of the last century, concentrated on the classics, meaning those of Greece and Rome.) But English is not an inflected language (it does not use word endings to indicate case and tense), and compared to post-Roman languages like Latin or Spanish, it is very poor in rhymes. Thus many amateur poets handicap their own efforts by thinking poetry has to rhyme and anything that rhymes has to be poetry—when mere rhymed lines are better described as verses.
We’ve strayed away from the turn of the seasons, which brought the “30 days” rhyme to mind. For an older native Vermonter, the onset of goldenrod and asters and “good sleeping weather” makes the bones grind. Here’s my own, new rhyming verse:

September and October,
November and December—
They all end in brrrrrrrrrr
When fire turns to ember.

Quivers, shivers and slivers can be sent to outabout@sover.net

THE CHINESE NEED CHECKERS

THE CHINESE NEED CHECKERS

Lee Houston was right: the mess in China is our mess, too.

Brandonites may remember Lee as the manager brought in to begin the turnaround of the Vermont Tubbs Furniture plant and keep it competitive with lowball furniture from abroad, a task his successors have accomplished to an extraordinary degree. At a time when so many manufacturers have rolled over and died, Tubbs supplies big name stores with, rarity of rarities, something Made in America.

Lee got that job because he had a long record of working with companies in trouble, one that included several years helping companies in China—which gave him a broad view of the situation. He had lived with air pollution so bad you couldn’t see from one side of the city to another, had witnessed workers living in prison-like barracks under robotic conditions, and knew firsthand about dealing with corrupt officials.

Three years ago, he emailed me and told me that if I wanted a good book project, or a team of journalists wanted to do a news series, there was a big story to be told about the hazardous nature of many products the Chinese were sending our way. “It would take a great deal of work, but if a group of reporters were to do a story, a book, on all of the potential problems Chinese products may cause, the nation would be well served,” were his exact words.
I didn’t have the contacts and credibility in the publishing world to change my whole way of life and dive into these murky waters, but boy, was he ever spot on. Any such book would be old news now, because a far-flung “team” of reporters have made headlines with news about poisonous dogfood, contaminated toothpaste, sicko seafood, and lately toxic toys. Lee had been worried about the toys. “Our
daughter works in a pediatrician's office and they have noticed an upswing in lead poisoning symptoms and tested blood levels and are seeing high levels of lead in kids that they KNOW do not live in houses that have lead,” he wrote.

Lee had his own example of the true cost of cheap goods: mirrors. When he wrote about our toxic orientations, he was president of two companies in the South, one making particle board and one making mirrors. The particle board was safe from overseas competition, he said, because it would cost too much to ship such a heavy but relatively low-cost commodity. But at the mirror factory, the Chinese were “after us,” he said.

“It is the same old story,” he wrote. “We Americans work at a decent wage and produce products that meet or exceed all governmental standards. The Chinese are sending in mirrors made with near slave labor using aluminum coating backed-up with paint whose lead content is 2.4 to 2.6 times our country's maximum limit.

“The problem is that our laws only affect the guy that ultimately takes the broken mirror to the dump years in the future. So, they can flood our market with the cheap stuff, and we'll pay the environmental bill years from now.

“We use silver and low lead content paint. In fact, we are 60% below EPA standards. Washington doesn't give a damn – we do not want to upset the Chinese.”

And the Chinese, though our largest source of imports, do not have a monopoly on environmental degradation. “I have been in 21 countries, mostly on business.” Lee said. “Without thinking very hard, I have seen pollution in both China, Russia, Taiwan and Malaysia that would turn your stomach.”

Here’s one I’m going to look into: apple juice. Have you tried to buy juice lately? Look at the label and you will probably find apple juice listed high up, even if it’s supposedly cranberry juice or peach juice, for instance. Juicy Juice used to be a trusted source—100 percent juice, not water as the first ingredient or lots of high-fructose corn syrup (which I’ll talk about in a later posting). Now it’s been taken over by Nestle. They still don’t add corn syrup or sugar or artificial flavors or preservatives, but here’s the list of ingredients for “All Natural 100 percent Grape: “apple juice, grape juice and pear juice (water, juice concentrates), natural flavors, ascorbic acid (vitamin C), citric acid.”
It’s apple juice, flavored with grape juice, folks. Why? Presumably because apple juice is a lot cheaper. And is that because it’s coming from China, where the trees are sprayed with who knows what that may have been banned in this country decades ago?
There’s a number on the Juicy Juice can for “Questions?” which I’m going to call: 800-510-6763, Monday-Friday 8 a.m.-8 p.m. I would be DELIGHTED to learn that only domestic apple juice goes into those cans, and will report that here—or will report that the person didn’t know and couldn’t provide me with a way to find out. By all means call, too, if you want, and please let me know how it turns out. As it says on the Juicy Juice can, “IT’S GOOD TO KNOW.”

Yearns, concerns, and stomach turns can be shipped to outabout@sover.net.