End of an era

I vaguely remember, sometime back in the Dark Ages, using an online service called CompuServe. I had completely forgotten it until I read today that they just shut down after thirty years of service. Apparently I’m not the only one who thought it had died years ago.

Thirty years ago my only exposure to a computer had been in an astronomy class at Talcott Mountain Science Center in 1975. They had a time-sharingarrangement giving access to a mainframe (for all I know, that connection might have been managed by Compu-Serv Network, which had been formed in 1969 to provide computer time-share services), and getting “online” involved putting a phone handset in an acoustic coupler. There was no screen; input and output both appeared on the printer. (I’m pretty sure it was not dot matrix, as the letters didn’t always line up – perhaps it was a teleprinter.)

I suppose we must have used this technology for astronomy, but I only remember playing a moon landing game (I always crashed, either from coming in too fast, or using up all my fuel with the reverse thrusters, and then crashing) and a game called BAGEL that is similar in concept to Mastermind. Sometimes the computer was also used to print out banners – do you remember those text-based banners that were popular in the 70’s? I don’t know whether the technology was cutting edge, but it was daunting enough to me that I let the tech-savvy boys (I was the only girl in the class) do most of it.

The situation was very different in 1989, the year CompuServe became the first online service provider to offer some limited Internet connectivity. I had a certificate in computer programming from a local community college, and I worked for a small manufacturing company where I was the computer expert. Most of what I did would be categorized as computer operations and help desk, but I also had access to the company’s only modem, which I used to transfer the biweekly payroll to ADP.

Support the economy – enjoy some ice cream

Ehow.com really does tell “How To Do Just About Everything.” For instance, in case you were wondering how to celebrate National Ice Cream Month, here are six easy ways, complete with ingredients list and instructions. I particularly like #4, making an ice cream sandwich. (I would advise, however, to let the ice cream soften some before smooshing it between the cookies, and then freezing it before eating, so you can savor the taste without having to eat in a hurry before it makes a big mess.)

I have eaten very little ice cream in the past year and a half, and don’t miss it a great deal. It used to be my biggest temptation, but after a few months of abstinence I discovered it didn’t taste as wonderful as I remembered. Lately I have been enjoying a bowl of vanilla yogurt mixed with fresh fruit (strawberries or blueberries) as my evening treat. It’s just as delicious as ice cream, and it doesn’t leave me longing for seconds.

Still, I wouldn’t want to let down the dairy industry - or Ronald Reagan, who designated July as National Ice Cream Month in 1984. The International Dairy Foods Association explains that

The U.S. ice cream industry generates more than $21 billion in annual sales and provides jobs for thousands of citizens. About 9% of all the milk produced by U.S. dairy farmers is used to produce ice cream, contributing significantly to the economic well-being of the nation’s dairy industry.

Last month, to celebrate the end of my stint in the Tot Lot at day camp – and to enjoy a cold treat on a very hot day – I treated myself to a small bowl of ice cream at Culver’s. I selected their flavor of the day, which happened to be Berries and Cream. I used to have to drive by to learn their flavor of the day, or stop in and pick up the monthly calendar, but I just discovered that they have a widget on their website that lets you look up the day’s flavor where you live. To make it even more handy, Culver’s lets you email or blog the widget, so here it is.

Today’s flavor, at our local store, is Double Marshmallow Oreo. Mmmm! Now if I drove to Davenport, I could have Georgia Peach today. If I lived in Ankeny or Des Moines, I could get Mint Brownie.

I used to think that mint cookies and cream was the best ice cream flavor I could think of, followed by coffee mixed with Heath Bar bits. Ben & Jerry’s makes both, with Mint Chocolate Cookie voted twelfth most popular (it scores 4.46 out of 5), and Coffee Heath Bar Crunch close behind (sixteenth and 4.42). Today, though, I am thinking their Berried Treasure sounds very good (blueberry and blackberry chunks with lemon sorbet swirls), even if it only scores 3.84 from customer voting. It’s even recommended in Eat This, Not That.

Fortunately, I’ve found that I can enjoy thinking about ice cream – and then enjoy eating my yogurt and blueberries (both of which are in the list of eight foods to eat every day in Eat This, Not That). Besides, the yogurt industry may be miniscule compared to the ice cream industry, but eating yogurt supports the economy too.

Classic movies: West Side Story

After watching this DVD last night, I wasn’t sure I wanted to post any kind of review. The ending is so sad and so bleak, and just thinking about it seemed likely to start the tears flowing again. But after a good night’s sleep I can think about it a bit more objectively.

This had long been on my mental list of classic films I ought to see someday. When I am actually looking for a movie to rent, however, I’m looking for entertainment – usually something a bit more escapist, with comedy and or adventure but not such serious themes as permeate West Side Story.

My older son rented it (if you can call it a “rental” when it’s free, that is – Family Video gives free rentals for A’s on report cards), and as I had never seen it I decided I should watch it. I’ve always liked some of the musical numbers – we played “Maria” and “Tonight” in my high school orchestra, and besides being beautiful music they were easier to play than some other contemporary music, such as by Aaron Copland.

I had a general idea of the story, both from having read it growing up and knowing that it was based on Romeo and Juliet. The ending was hardly a surprise, therefore, but being so affected by it was. I don’t remember how old I was when I read the book (i.e. the script, in book format) – perhaps too young to really understand it. I remember reading Romeo and Juliet in ninth grade and finding it boring, and thinking how foolish the two teenagers were to throw away their lives that way.

Perhaps it is because I have more experience of love and of loss in relationships that I now find it so moving. Perhaps it is the difference between reading words on a page and seeing them brought to life by talented actors. Perhaps it is because West Side Story succeeded so well on so many levels (as evidenced by its numerous Academy Awards).

The science and art of pyrotechnics

Like millions of other Americans, my younger son and I watched a fireworks display last night. I won’t agree with him that it’s the best part of the 4th of July, but it is fun to watch. Having him with me also made me take a new interest in the different shapes and effects and how they were made.

He asked at one point, “Which do you like best?” I hadn’t thought about it, and started paying closer attention to pick one out. There’s the kind where there are parts that keep twinkling as they fall in trails down through the sky, there are the ones that have different colors in a specific pattern (such as a red line across a blue circle), and there are the ones where at first nothing much seems to happen, but then there are a whole lot of white swirly twinkly patches with a tinkly sound rather than a boom.

I’m sure all those shapes and effects have names, but I had no idea what to call them, and it’s hard to say what you like when you don’t know what to call it. And I didn’t want to detract from the pleasure of just sitting and watching the beautiful display by saying how well I liked particular ones as they appeared.

He also asked, “How do they work?” I realized I really didn’t know much about that except that they use gunpowder, and they start off in paper tubes that, if you should find one that didn’t fully explode lying on the ground, you don’t want to pick it up. But I knew we could easily enough find out the answer at home, whether from the internet or one of our “how things work” books.

National treasure

“National treasure” was the theme of our Cub Scout day camp this summer. As I am a member of the planning committee, I spent a good deal of time thinking about what kinds of national treasures to try to work into the camp program. National parks? Natural resources? Our flag? Our history? Our people?

Mostly we focused on nature and the national parks. I spent evenings coming up with clues, then ideas where to hide the clues, and more clues to point to those hiding places. Since I didn’t work with the Scouts directly during camp, and my own son was at College for Kids instead of camp, I never did hear how well some of my clues worked out.

I figured a yellow crayon and a stone should be a fairly easy reference to Yellowstone. That one was for the youngest group; the older boys had to figure out that a picture of a bald man’s head, a feather, and a quarter were clues to “bald eagle” (the only answer that wasn’t a national park). For Mount Rushmore, they got a picture of a mountain, and three coins: a penny, a nickel, and a quarter. I was going to include a dime, then someone pointed out that it had the head of the wrong Roosevelt.

The theme for today’s July 4 parade was “Stars and Stripes Forever.” At the last Cub Scout pack meeting, some of us expressed an interest in making a float for the parade, and I was wondering if there was a way to somehow show the history of the American flag. But I was too busy with day camp to work on it. So were other parents, I guess. The boys just walked next to a trailer pulled by an old (1945) tractor, handing out ice pops to the children along the route. (Another float in the parade did display the history of the flag.)

Today we celebrate one of our nation’s greatest treasures – the commitment to liberty embodied in the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration was at once an eloquent statement of values around which the new country would form, and a bold political action that set in motion the battle for America’s self-government. Googling for more information on this historic document, I was happy to find this website at the National Archives: The Declaration of Independence: Our National Treasure.

Movies: Garfield’s Pet Force

I don’t remember where we bought the first of Jim Davis’ Pet Force books, but once we read that we had to find and buy the rest. I had never cared for Garfield, and couldn’t understand the appeal of the comics, but Garfield and his friends as superheroes are funny.

When I saw the DVD of Garfield’s Pet Force at Wal-Mart today, I decided the movie would be a perfect rental for a holiday weekend. (So I went put it back on the shelf and went to Blockbuster to rent it.) It’s hard to find a movie that the whole family can enjoy, with plenty of action but not scary, and humor that all ages can appreciate. This one worked very well.

Garfield fans who aren’t Pet Force fans probably wouldn’t appreciate it much. Looking at customer reviews of one of the other CGI Garfield movies released in the last couple years, a user complained that these new Garfield movies just don’t work at all. You can’t take the Garfield from the comics with all his obnoxious habits and attitudes, and combine him with the cartoon style appealing to and suitable for young children, and have something anyone will appreciate. (Well, my younger son might – he likes anything to do with Garfield, whether he understands the humor or not.)

The movie is – like most adaptations from books – different in significant ways. Whether or not you like the movie, you could still enjoy the books. If I had to choose between books and movie, I’d take the books. But the movie is good, just in a different way. This is no doubt in large part because Jim Davis was both the writer and executive producer for the movie himself. He uses the same basic premise as the books, and most of the same characters, but goes off in new directions.

Two paws up!

Books, metaphors, and the march of history

Today my sister sent me a link to the transcript of a very interesting speech, given in 1872 upon the occasion of the centennial of the New York Library Society. Of course, one reason I found it very interesting is the possibility that the speaker was one of our ancestors. The name is the same as that of our great-great-grandfather (Thomas Ward), who was a printer and would certainly have had an interest in the library, and we do have ancestors from the New York area. But even aside from that possible connection, I enjoyed the speech for its own merits.

Margaret had mentioned Ward’s comments about the importance of books, and how loving books seems to “be in our DNA.” I certainly liked Ward’s descriptions of books, which included intriguing metaphors. It’s common enough to call books treasures of knowledge, but Ward also speaks of books as “granaries wherein the mental harvests of past generations are safely garnered” and “ancient bottles, where in skins of the goat, the calf, and the sheep are stored the rarest wines, expressed and fermented, of the teeming human brain.”

I was reminded throughout the speech (considerably longer than I expected – people had somewhat longer attention spans then) of the more literary style appreciated by listeners in that era. In books “we find the pure grain of wisdom winnowed of the chaff of mortal infirmity, the flowers of song shorn of the thorns of human fretfulness, and the perfect thought, no longer shapeless ‘in its infant dew,’ but crystallized into forms of imperishable beauty.”

Ward didn’t stick to talking about books, however. From discussing the history of books and writing in general, and of the New York Library Society in particular, he launches into extolling the wonders of the modern era (for him, the last third of the nineteenth century). Well over a hundred years later, it is enlightening to see what was then considered the height of mankind’s achievements.

What a dessert can teach

We ran out of ice cream sandwiches, so we had to get inventive to make dessert. Of course, my younger son had been wanting to make a dessert, ever since I brought home the book Boredom Blasters, which I had checked out from the library in search of ideas for playing with the children at day camp last week. It gave us fun both at camp and at home doing Slapstick Story Time (similar to Mad Libs). Then he noticed the Alien Candy Factory.

It has recipes for Marzipan Monsters, Saturn Swirls, Martianmallows, Chocolate Space Spiders, Plutonian Pretzels, Asteroidough, Rocket Raisin Balls, Truffle UFOs, and Interstellar Space Junk. (Also fortune cookies, but they looked like too much work, just to make something we can get anytime at the local Chinese buffet.) Some of the recipes called for ingredients I didn’t have (almond paste, chow mein noodles), or ingredients my son doesn’t like (raisins). But Saturn Swirls sounded perfect.

When I was a child, I used to try mixing chocolate chips and peanut butter to try to approximate the delicious taste of Reese’s peanut butter cups. Now I see what my mistake was – I used too much peanut butter and too little chocolate. Saturn Swirls are made using four parts chocolate chips (by volume, not weight) to one part of peanut butter. Melt the chips in the microwave, mix in the peanut butter (but not completely – you should still see swirls of lighter brown), drop by globs onto wax paper, and freeze.

The instructions say to freeze until they reach the atmospheric temperature of Saturn or until they become solid, whichever comes first. I suspected it would be the latter, but just to be sure I had to look up the temperature of Saturn. Not surprisingly, it’s extremely cold up in the clouds above the “surface” of the planet (being a gas giant, that word doesn’t apply very well), dropping to about 285 degrees below zero (Fahrenheit) at the top of the clouds. But it gets a lot warmer lower down.

I found estimates of “surface” temperature anywhere from 140 degrees below zero (Celsius) to minus 20 (Fahrenheit). It turns out that Saturn actually generates heat, 2 1/2 times as much as it receives from the sun. NASA explains that “Many astronomers believe that much of Saturn’s internal heat comes from energy generated by the sinking of helium slowly through the liquid hydrogen in the planet’s interior.” I didn’t understand why that would generate heat, but another site explains that

Like an oily salad dressing, the gases in Saturn’s atmosphere are very slowly separating, with the lighter gas rising up and the heavier gas falling down. As this happens, friction between the molecules heats the gas, accounting for the extra heat.

I learned a few other things from this experiment. The commercial freezer in our basement freezes Saturn Swirls very quickly (but not to the temperature of Saturn’s surface, unless you use the highest estimate). Fingers melt them even more quickly, so make them small enough to pop in your mouth in one bite. And I think they could use just a little more peanut butter.

Books: Calendar

I remember learning, as a child, how the date of Easter was determined each year: the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. Besides being complicated (compared to Christmas, or even Thanksgiving, which just required counting Thursdays in November), it seemed foolish to make the holiday move around so much every year. I couldn’t imagine why they – whoever “they” were – had decided on that formula.

And apparently not everyone could even agree on that, as our calendar always showed a separate date for the “Orthodox Easter.” I didn’t know anyone who was Orthodox, but presumably there were such people around, since the date was included on the calendar (our calendar didn’t include foreign holidays, as some calendars do).

Eventually, in some history class or other, I must have learned about the Gregorian calendar, but it wasn’t an important enough topic to spend much time on. I knew that different civilizations had used different calendars (in a class on the Middle Ages we learned about the rise of Islam, with their calendardated to Muhammed’s Hegira in our year 622 A.D., and I also knew that the Jews had their New Year in September), but I had little idea how we had come to have the one we do.

Several years ago I read Waiting for the Weekend (a fascinating book, as is everything I have read by Witold Rybczynski), which is primarily about the development of the two-day weekend and attitudes toward work and leisure. Rybczynski starts, however, by looking at the origins of the seven-day week, which was far from universal in the ancient world. That whetted my appetite to learn more about the origins and development of the calendar we live by today.

Games: Farkle

This game is on facebook, so if you don’t have a facebook account … well, there’s another reason to get one. (I also just got a message from someone I went to elementary school with, who remembers my mother as “a nice woman” – I always appreciate hearing from people with positive memories of her.)

Farkle is a dice game, somewhat like Yahtzee in that you try to get three of a kind or other combinations. There are six dice instead of five, and ones and fives can get points even by themselves. Mostly you score by getting three of a kind, ones, and fives, but you can also get points for three pairs, or for a sequence of all six numbers. That last combination is of course the hardest to get and worth the most points. I’ve had three pairs two times now, but not one through six.

What’s different is that when you set aside one or more dice and re-roll the remaining dice, you don’t get to add them to what you already rolled, only to the points those other dice give. So saving two 5’s from the first roll gives you 100 points, fifty for each 5, and a third 5 on the second roll gives another fifty points, but it doesn’t count as three of a kind (which would be 500 points). So the only way to get the three pairs or the sequence one to six is on a single roll.

The other thing is that if you don’t get any dice that score when you roll, you “farkle” – which means you get zero points and the roll is over, even if you had scoring dice set aside before you re-rolled. This means that when you have dice that score, you have to decide whether to take the points you have, or risk losing them by re-rolling to try to get more points. Three farkles in a row, and you actually lose points. Ouch!

I’m not sure whether I’ll enjoy this enough to keep playing it the way I do Yahtzee. (I have an electronic Yahtzee that I like to play at bedtime – the intense focus on a video game screen helps me get sleepy.) But for now I’m having fun with it.