Inflation - A Puff Piece

 

I started smoking Marlboro cigarettes when they first came on the market as a filtered cigarette in a flip-top box in 1954.  It isn't much of an exaggeration to claim that, if I had put my money in stock instead of cigarettes, I could own the Phillip Morris Tobacco Company by now.

When I bought cigarettes today - I shop at a discount tobacco store and use a membership code for additional savings - I paid $75 and change for a carton.  For non-smokers, a carton contains 200 cigarettes, ten packs of twenty smokes. Doing the math - $75÷200 equals roughly 37₵ a cigarette or about 16 cents more than I paid for a pack when I first started smoking.

What Happened Next?

 

In the tale I told yesterday, I failed to mention that, after the destruction of his marvelous bush, the Emperor ordered the stadium razed and baseball prohibited throughout China.  That is why you probably never knew the game was invented there, and why it is still not played in China today.

Baseball is popular in Korea and Japan, and teams from the Republic of China (Taiwan) dominated the Little League World Series throughout the 1980s and 90s, but there is no baseball on the Chinese  mainland.

Was Khalid able to restore the marvelous rock crystal mulberry bush to its former glory?  We may never know. 

As was customary in those times, when the Emperor died there was a massive public funeral that went on for days. While that was going on, the Emperor's body was quietly interred in a secret location.  It is believed We Le Hung had the mulberry bush buried with his father. We do know it was never seen or heard again.

The Emperor's Marvelous Rock Crystal Mulberry Bush

 

From late in 1967 until I left the Army in August of 68, I hosted a radio show called Post Time.  It was broadcast from my studio at the Ft Hood information office via a local Killeen radio station.  Often, after the show was over, friends would gather in the studio for some adult beverages, etc. and general camaraderie.  It was here that Bruce Glassner first told the story of the Emperor’s Marvelous Rock Crystal Mulberry Bush. 

Obviously, I’m going to paraphrase, but to the best of my memory, what follows is the story he told that evening 54 years ago.

Several hundred years ago, in the early days of the Hung dynasty in China, the fantastically wealthy Emperor Hung ruled the land.  He had several castles, 22 wives and 150 concubines, but his most treasured possession was a marvelous mulberry bush in the courtyard.  Made entirely of crystal, it was constructed in such a way that the slightest breeze would stir the leaves and create beautiful, soothing music.  It was so old that nobody knew who had made it or how – the secret of its magnificent sound lost in antiquity.  The Emperor spent many an afternoon just listening to the bush.

Perhaps his second most treasured possession was the baseball stadium.  Yes, baseball was invented in China several centuries before being reinvented in the United States.  The Emperor’s personal team was the Cheng Du Dragons, the perennial league champions, and their star player was We Le Hung, the team captain, second baseman and the Emperor’s son.

One fateful day, it was the bottom of the fourth, two on when We Le Hung came to bat.  He had two balls and one strike when he got a fastball right over the plate. His swing was perfect, and from the crack of the bat everyone knew he had hit a home run.  The ball rocketed from his bat, over the wall, over the left field bleachers and out of the stadium.  Everybody looked on in awe until they heard the sound of a horrible crash….

We Le’s homer had destroyed the marvelous crystal mulberry bush.

Immediately, the finest artisans in the empire were summoned, and they were eventually able to reassemble the bush.  Unfortunately, it sounded horrible; like fingernails on a chalkboard.  Instead of the soothing sounds it was so famous for, the noise it made literally grated on the nerves. It was enough to drive a strong man mad.

Finally, the Emperor called his Grand Vizier and sent him on a mission.  “Search all the known world and find someone who can fix my bush.  If you cannot, I will have it destroyed and you along with it.”

The Vizier took him at his word and left immediately.  He searched through Tibet and India, through Persia and finally into what is now Turkey.  There he heard of a man known as Khalid the Inscrutable who was famous for his perfect pitch.  It was said that he could tune a harp or lute and could adjust a bell to a perfect tone with a few strokes of his file.

They met at Khalid’s tent in the desert, surrounded by shaggy goats and one ragged camel.  The Vizier made Khalid an offer he couldn’t refuse.  He realized the overweight musician would not be easily swayed by talk of material wealth, so, instead he waxed poetic about the marvelous fare he would find at the Emperor’s table.

He told of the emperor’s vast forests, and hunts where wild boar were driven into pits lined with apple wood coals to be roasted whole, and of the aviary where thousands of hummingbirds were raised for the Emperor’s chef.  How only the finest pieces of pork and the delicate throats of the hummingbirds served on a bed of lotus blossoms made it to the Emperor’s dining room.

“That sounds intriguing” said Khalid,  “What else could I expect?”

The Vizier replied “That should be enough.  For surely it is written ‘The bird and the ham is worth tuning the bush!’”

Rogue

 

I started to write about something else entirely, but got sidetracked.  

I was going to share a story told to me in 1966 by Bruce Glassner, a fellow soldier at Ft. Hood. Then I realized that he was easily worth a post of his own.

Of the many interesting young men in the 502nd Admin Company back then, Bruce stands out for several reasons.  

First of all, he never should have been drafted in the first place - he had suffered a brain injury in an accident and took phenobarbital to prevent seizures.  That eventually went to court and he was released from the military after about six months of service.

Prior to being drafted, Bruce was an associate editor at Rogue Magazine in Chicago.  Rogue was a very successful men's magazine, second only to Playboy. A check of Rogue on Wikipedia shows that he worked alongside a sort of "who's who" of current American fiction, and he was hired there at the age of twenty.

His next door neighbor in Chicago was John Sebastian of the Lovin Spoonful who gave the Glassners a mouton bedspread for a wedding present.

Shortly before he left the service, his wife came down for a visit.  I let her borrow my car and when she picked us up that evening the entire back of the little Valiant station wagon was filled with boxes of lime Jello. When I asked, she explained that they were going to mix it up in the hotel bathtub and "f--- in it."

I tried looking him up on line, and it appears he went on to a highly successful career in advertising.  He is apparently still around and I reached out to him this morning.  I hope he replies.

Genie

 

Seeds

 

The store was out of our usual birdseed, so I bought a cheaper brand, a generic bag labeled wild bird food.  It has produced mixed results. 

For one thing, we now have blue jays trying to to eat from the feeder. They are almost too big, and watching them try to balance on the feeder dish gets pretty comical.

On the other hand, the new feed has a large percentage of cracked corn - somewhere between 25 and 30% by volume - and a lot of the birds, cardinals in particular, don't seem to like corn.  We've watched the male cardinal we call Fred circling the feeder dish for as much as two minutes at a time just throwing corn onto the ground.

Question of the Day

 

Through uncharted time the universe flows

On a digital stream of 1’s and 0’s

How can we ever hope to see

Religion or philosophy

While we still count on our fingers and toes?

Mothers Are Like That

I was feeling pretty smug.  

I had avoided posting anything about May Day or Cinco de Mayo and almost dodged May 4th.  Then something reminded me of this commercial.  

It isn't even Mothers Day yet, but here goes....

Hummers 3 - Squirrels 0

As I reported back in  April, after over a dozen years, the squirrels decided to raid our hummingbird feeders.  The results of that post -  Sweet Toothed Squirrel -  were not particularly effective. The 410 cured that squirrel, but the word had spread - eight squirrels later the feeders were still being emptied several times a day.

A couple years ago, I had installed a squirrel excluder on our bird feeder, and it has worked like a charm - so I bought two more shepherd's crook hangers, installed squirrel excluders on them, and  moved the hummingbird feeders from the trees to the crooks.

The original squirrel stopper (on the left) was ugly but effective.  The new ones look a bit more professional.  Instead of 6 inch galvanized duct, I used 4 inch aluminum, mounted on a 4inch plastic drain grate.

The lighter weight aluminum sways in the breeze, and when it hits the pole it sounds like I installed wind chimes - an unexpected bonus.

I Refuse

 I don't care how tempting it might be, I will not post May the 4th be with you,

Norma

 I recently learned that my oldest surviving cousin, Norma Byrd Hauser, passed away last week.  

I always liked her although we were never particularly close - The Byrd family lived in Denison, she was six years older, and when we did get together I was usually with her younger brother, Mike, who was my age.

Thinking back, two incidents stand out in my memory.

First, she sang "In the Garden" at my mother's funeral.  I had no idea that she had such a pure, beautiful voice.  I was truly moved and amazed. At her mother's funeral, I joined in with the congregation singing the University of Texas Fight Song, but that's another story.

The second memory was actually from several years earlier.  

I was ten or eleven, so she was sixteen or seventeen.  Their family was visiting and we went to our weekend place at Chocolate Bayou.  Norma had a brand new, lily white, one piece bathing suit and when she went in the water it disappeared.  It was still there, but it became so transparent that she could have shucked the suit and gone skinny dipping in the altogether without displaying any more.

Twisters

 

H E B has recently introduced a series of cookies they call Twisters.  They range from the "My Home Town Twister" which is a vanilla cookie sandwich with a cream filling with a touch of cinnamon, to "Mexican Hot Chocolate" which adds cinnamon to its chocolate filling.  

Both are good, but what may be the greatest cookie of all time is the "Mochaccino Twister."  It is a dark chocolate cookie reminiscent of Oreos with a cream filling that is flavored with just the perfect amount of Colombian Coffee.  Just opening the package smells like brewing a fresh pot of coffee, and they taste as good as they smell.