[Vhfcn-l] Monday musings

[gthewlis at comcast.net]

It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things.
Terry Pratchett

To recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.
Oscar Wilde

I really do think we're going through a period of concentration of ownership of media, and we're starting to see the effects at the editorial level, and it's all bad. This increased pressure for profits every quarter, smaller news hole, less coverage of important stuff - the extent that it's become one giant infotainment industry.
Molly Ivins (note that she passed in 2007, and said this a good while earlier)

I'm not going to buy my kids an encyclopedia. Let them walk to school like I did.
Yogi Berra

I think it's wrong that only one company makes the game Monopoly.
Steven Wright

I bought a seven-dollar pen because I always lose pens and I got sick of not caring.
Mitch Hedberg

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Through the grapevine

To hear something through the grapevine is to learn of something informally and unofficially by means of gossip and rumor. The usual implication is that the information was passed person to person by word of mouth, perhaps in a confidential manner among friends or colleagues.

There are several expressions of this type, of which a well-known couple are bush telegraph and jungle telegraph. These are historically rather odd, because both were created well after the era of the telegraph. But that’s because both are imitations of the first such expression, grapevine telegraph, which is where our term comes from.

The phrase was invented in the USA sometime in the late 1840s or early 1850s. It provided a wry comparison between the twisted stems of the grapevine and the straight lines of the then new electric telegraph marching across America. The telegraph was the marvel of the 1840s (Samuel Morse’s first line was opened between Washington and Baltimore on 24 May 1844 and rapidly expanded in the following decade), vastly improving the speed of communication between communities. In comparison, the grapevine telegraph was by individual to individual, often garbling the facts or reporting untruths (so reflecting the gnarled and contorted stems of the grapevine), but likewise capable of transmitting vital messages quickly over distances.

The first recorded usage, according to Jonathan Lighter in The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, was in a political dictionary of 1852, which included the sentence “By the Grape Vine Telegraph Line ... we have received the following”. Various early references suggest that it was associated with clandestine communication among Southern blacks, especially slaves. For example, a writer named Samuel Bowles wrote a book in 1865 called Across the Continent in which he remarked that Colorado ladies seemed to have some secret method of learning about the latest fashions from the East: “How it is done I do not understand — there must be a subtle telegraph by crinoline wires; as the southern negroes have what they call a grape-vine telegraph”.

The term became widely known during the American Civil War period, so much so that the phrase permanently entered the standard language. Soldiers used it in the sense of gossip or unreliable rumor, as was made very clear in a diary note of 1862 reproduced in Major James Connolly’s Three Years in the Army of the Cumberland: “We get such ‘news’ in the army by what we call ‘grape vine,’ that is, ‘grape vine telegraph.’ It is not at all reliable”. However, it was widely acknowledged that the blacks’ communications network was extremely useful to the Union cause, as John G. Nicolay and John Hay reported in Abraham Lincoln: A History in 1888, calling it “one of the most important and reliable sources of knowledge to the Union commanders in the various fields, which later in the war came to be jocosely designated as the ‘grape-vine telegraph’ ”.

The telegraph is long defunct, but the grapevine seems never to have been more active ...

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The average person spends about 2 years on the phone in a lifetime.

Every human spent about half an hour as a single cell.

The first full moon to occur on the winter solstice, Dec. 22, commonly called the first day of winter, happened in 1999. Since a full moon on the winter solstice occurred in conjunction with a lunar perigee (point in the moon's orbit that is closest to Earth), the moon appeared about 14% larger than it does at apogee (the point in it's elliptical orbit that is farthest from the Earth). Since the Earth is also several million miles closer to the sun at that time of the year than in the summer, sunlight striking the moon was about 7% stronger making it brighter. Also, this was the closest perigee of the Moon of the year since the moon's orbit is constantly deforming. In places where the weather was clear and there was a snow cover, even car headlights were superfluous.

Human thigh bones are stronger than concrete.

Earth is the only planet not named after a god.

The flea can jump 350 times its body length. It's like a human jumping the length of a football field.

The archerfish knocks its insect prey out of over-hanging branches with a stream of spit.