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whew !!!

IN THIS ISSUE

• As threatened, here is another story from my childhood
• Jim Olson and Verda Cook encourage me to reprint my stories
• Here are descriptions of more of the top physics experiments of all time
• Miriam Ockenden forwards a cheerful poem
• Don Henderson explains why women take so long in the washroom
• Anita Henderson sends a story about a rose
• Dixie Augustjein is celebrating a birthday on Thursday
• Ernest Blaschke and Jack Peaker suggest websites to check out

Why do they call it the "great" depression? I don´t remember it being at all great! Here´s what I do remember about

THE GREAT DEPRESSION

It was the `Dirty Thirties´, when hobos rode the rods, and family men lived and worked in relief camps for $1 a day. In small towns, it seemed as if the whole world was poor. Tradesmen and professionals took part of their payments in produce; men knocked on doors offering to work for a meal. As I remember it, there was a different feeling to that depression: most people were in the same boat, if not actually floundering in the water; doors were always open; people helped one another. There was not the stigma associated with poverty that is a sign of these less-kindly times. No-one thought it was your own fault if you were poor.

After living in a number of logging camps around the Shuswap Lake, our Mother insisted that Nell and I should be going to a regular school, so on a summer day we left the camp, our belongings piled high on a raft towed by one of the boats that were always available. (The horses and logging equipment were not with us; I guess Dad had sold them to some other logging outfit. I am also assuming that small spreads like ours were no longer viable, or Dad would not have abandoned it so readily.)

The day we left the camp was cloudless, with a light wind. The Shuswap can breed sudden storms that have taken many lives over the years, but that day remained calm. I towed a hand-carved wooden boat behind the raft. I don´t remember looking back nostalgically at the camp I would not see again for many years; I didn´t know then how much influence the bush would exert on my life.

We moved into an empty house about five miles from Salmon Arm, on Engineer´s Point. A big old house, it was a far cry from the log houses of the camps, but there was still no running water, no electricity, no phone. It was still on the lakeshore, and we drew our water directly from the lake. Beside the property ran the main line of the CPR, and Nell and I waved at every train that went by. In those days, trainmen always waved, and some of the men in the cabooses used to throw us bundles of funnies and chocolate bars. They probably had a regular host of children living beside the tracks who awaited their coming. We always waved at the hobos riding the rails, and they waved back.

We walked three miles along that track to Canoe (uphill both ways, of course), where there was a two-room school. Nell went into grade 3, in one building, and I went into grade 4 in the larger building. With four grades in one room, we got a circular education; by the time one reached grade 7, one had heard all the lessons for all the grades four times. Not a bad system. By the time I left there in the middle of grade 7, I had a thorough grounding in grammar, poetry, history, and arithmetic. There were few frills. No wonder - how could any teacher offer lessons in the basics to four grades and have time left for much else. We did learn a few crafts, but I suspect these served the purpose of keeping us occupied while the teacher was busy with other classes.

We were poorer now than we had been in the camp. Mother received $20 a month for a family of four, and even with the low prices that prevailed at that time, it was slim pickings. She still baked her own bread and pies (no meal was considered complete without dessert, either fruit or cake or pie), canned berries and jam, and made countless stews composed more of vegetables than meat. Our diet consisted mainly of starchy foods: bread, porridge, pancakes, potatoes. Cheap and filling.

Nell and I needed more formal clothing now that we were going to school. I remember we received a box of clothing from a church group that supplemented our very basic wardrobe. I don´t remember ever being cold, though the winters were so hard that the lake froze over, but I do remember being self-conscious in a dress my mother had sewn for me. She was no seamstress.

To be concluded.

CORRESPONDENCE

Jim Olson encouraged my retelling my stories:

Just a note to tell you how much I enjoyed your too-short three-part memoir pieces. Seems to me there is an outline of an autobigraphy that needs to be written.

Too bad your sister can no longer help with memory, although I am sure she still provides inspiration.

The least you could do for us is to fill out the outline with more narrative of specific incidents from those days, personal experience, or a story about one of the characters that inhabit your memory of the time.

Not only would this add to our reading delight but might also inspire some of us who contribute from time to time to retaliate with something more than a rehash of well traveled net tidbits.

Ed. Note: Thank you for the kind words, Jim, and amen to the final paragraph.

~~~~~~~

Verda Cook wrote:

Keep them coming. Your stories are so delightful.

Ed. Note: These two notes were all the encouragment I needed to print still another story which long-time readers have already read, but which may interest newer readers. Or perhaps you are like me - you forget stories you have read almost as soon as the last page is turned, and can reread them with equal pleasure at a future date. I hope this is the case with most of you, because it is a talent I cherish.

Here is the second part of the article forwarded by Bruce Galway about the

BEST OF THE BEAUTIFUL MINDS

Galileo´s Experiments with Rolling Balls down Inclined Planes

Galileo continued to refine his ideas about objects in motion. He took a board 12 cubits long and half a cubit wide (about six metres by 25 centimetres) and cut a groove, as straight and smooth as possible, down the centre. He inclined the plane and rolled brass balls down it, timing their descent with a water clock - a large vessel that emptied through a thin tube into a glass. After each run he weighed the water that had flowed out - his measurement of elapsed time - and compared it with the distance the ball had travelled.

Aristotle would have predicted that the velocity of a rolling ball was constant: double its time in transit and you would double the distance it traversed. Galileo showed that the distance is proportional to the square of the time: Double the time and the ball goes four times as far. The reason is that it is being constantly accelerated by gravity. (Ranking: 8)

Newton´s Decomposition of Sunlight with a Prism

Isaac Newton was born the year Galileo died. He graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1665, and then holed up at home for a couple of years waiting out the plague. He had no trouble keeping himself occupied.

The common wisdom held that white light is the purest form (Aristotle again) and that coloured light must therefore have been altered somehow. To test this hypothesis, Newton shone a beam of sunlight through a glass prism and showed that it decomposed into a spectrum cast on the wall.

People already knew about rainbows, but they were considered to be little more than pretty aberrations. But Newton concluded that these colours - red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet and the gradations in between - were fundamental. What seemed simple on the surface, a beam of white light, was, if one looked deeper, beautifully complex. (Ranking: 4)

Cavendish´s Torsion-bar Experiment

Another of Newton´s contributions was his theory of gravity, which holds that the strength of attraction between two objects increases with the square of their masses and decreases with the square of the distance between them. But how strong is gravity in the first place?

In the late 1700s, an English scientist, Henry Cavendish, decided to find out. He took a six-foot (1.8 metres) wooden rod and attached small metal spheres to each end, like a dumbbell, and then suspended it from a wire. Two 350-pound (about 159 kilograms) lead spheres placed nearby exerted enough gravitational force to tug at the smaller balls, causing the dumbbell to move and the wire to twist. By mounting finely etched pieces of ivory on the end of each arm and in the sides of the case, he could measure the subtle displacement.

To guard against the influence of air currents, the apparatus (called a torsion balance) was enclosed in a room and observed with telescopes mounted on each side.

The result was a remarkably accurate estimate of a parameter called the gravitational constant, and from that Cavendish was able to calculate the density and mass of the earth. Eratosthenes had measured how far around the planet was. Cavendish had weighed it: 6.0 x 1024 kilograms, or about 13 trillion trillion pounds. (Ranking: 6)

Young´s Light-interference Experiment

Newton wasn´t always right. Through various arguments, he had moved the scientific mainstream toward the conviction that light consists exclusively of particles rather than waves. In 1803, Thomas Young, an English physician and physicist, put the idea to a test. He cut a hole in a window shutter, covered it with a thick piece of paper punctured with a tiny pinhole and used a mirror to divert the thin beam that came shining through. Then he took "a slip of a card, about one-thirtieth of an inch in breadth" and held it edgewise in the path of the beam, dividing it in two.

The result was a shadow of alternating light and dark bands - a phenomenon that could be explained if the two beams were interacting like waves.

Bright bands appeared where two crests overlapped, reinforcing each other; dark bands marked where a crest lined up with a trough, neutralising each other.

The demonstration was often repeated over the years using a card with two holes to divide the beam. These so-called double-slit experiments became the standard for determining wavelike motion - a fact that was to become especially important a century later when quantum theory began. (Ranking: 5)

To be concluded.

Miriam Ockenden forwards this cheerful poem:

I´M FINE; HOW ARE YOU?

There´s nothing the matter with me,
I´m just as healthy as can be.
I have arthritis in both knees,
And when I talk, I talk with a wheeze.
My pulse is weak, my blood is thin,
But I´m awfully well for the shape I´m in.

All my teeth have had to come out,
And my diet I hate to think about.
I´m overweight and I can´t get thin,
But I´m awfully well for the shape I´m in.

And arch supports I need for my feet.
Or I wouldn´t be able to go out in the street.
Sleep is denied me night after night,
But every morning I find I´m all right.
My memory´s failing, my head´s in a spin.
But I´m awfully well for the shape I´m in.

Old age is golden, I´ve heard it said,
But sometimes I wonder, as I go to bed
With my ears in a drawer, my teeth in a cup,
And my glasses on a shelf, until I get up.
And when sleep dims my eyes, I say to myself,
Is there anything else I should lay on the shelf?

The reason I know my youth has been spent,
Is my get-up-and-go has got-up-and-went!
But really I don´t mind, when I think with a grin,
Of all the places my get-up has been.

I get up each morning and dust off my wits,
Pick up the paper and read the obits.
If my name is missing, I´m therefore not dead,
So I eat a good breakfast and jump back into bed.

The moral of this as the tale unfolds,
Is that for you and me who are growing old,
It is better to say "I´m fine" with a grin,
Than to let people know the shape we are in.

Don Henderson passes along this explanation of why it takes women so long to go to the washroom:

FOR ALL THE LADIES AND THEIR MOTHERS

My mother was a fanatic about public toilets. As a little girl, she´d bring me in the stall, teach me to wad up toilet paper and wipe the seat.

Then she´d carefully lay strips of toilet paper to cover the seat, saying, "Never, never sit on a public toilet seat."

And then she´d demonstrate "The Stance," which consisted of balancing over the toilet in a sitting position without actually letting any of your flesh make contact with the toilet seat.

But by this time, I´d have peed down my leg. And we´d go home. That was a long time ago. I´ve had lots of experience with public toilets since then, but I´m still not particularly fond of them - especially those with powerful, red-eye sensors. Those toilets know when you want them to flush. They are psychic toilets. But I always confuse their psychic ability by following my mother´s advice and assuming The Stance. The Stance is excruciatingly difficult to maintain when one´s bladder is especially full. This is most likely to occur after watching a full-length feature film. You know what I mean.

You drink a two-litre cup of Diet Coke, then sit still through a three-hour saga because you´d miss the pivotal part of the movie or the scene in which they flash the leading man´s naked derriere. So, you cross your legs and you hold it. And you hold it until that first credit rolls and you sprint to the bathroom, about ready to explode all over your internal organs. And at the bathroom, you find a line of women that makes you think there´s a half-price sale on Mel Gibson´s underwear in there.

So you wait and smile politely at all the other ladies, also crossing their legs and smiling politely. And you finally get closer. You check for feet under the stall doors. Every one is occupied. Finally, a stall door opens and you dash, nearly knocking down the woman leaving the stall.

You get in to find the door won´t latch. It doesn´t matter. You hang your handbag on the door hook, yank down your pants and assume The Stance.

Relief. More relief. Then your thighs begin to shake.

You´d love to sit down but you certainly hadn´t taken time to wipe the seat or lay toilet paper on it, so you hold The Stance as your thighs experience a quake that would register an eight on the Richter scale.

To take your mind off it, you reach for the toilet paper. Might as well be ready when you are done.

The toilet paper dispenser is empty. Your thighs shake more. You remember the tiny napkin you wiped your fingers on after eating buttered popcorn. It would have to do. You crumble it in the puffiest way possible. It is still smaller than your thumbnail.

Someone pushes open your stall door because the latch doesn´t work and your pocketbook whams you in the head. "Occupied!" you scream as you reach out for the door, dropping your buttered popcorn napkin in a puddle and falling backward, directly onto the toilet seat. You get up quickly, but it´s too late!

Your bare bottom has made contact with all the germs and life forms on the bare seat because you never laid down toilet paper, not that there was any, even if you had enough time to.

And your mother would be utterly ashamed of you if she knew, because her bare bottom never touched a public toilet seat because, frankly, "You don´t know what kind of diseases you could get."

And by this time, the automatic sensor on the back of the toilet is so confused that it flushes, sending up a stream of water akin to a fountain and then it suddenly sucks everything down with such force that you grab onto the toilet paper dispenser for fear of being dragged to China.

At that point, you give up. You´re finished peeing. You´re soaked by the splashing water. You´re exhausted. You slink out inconspicuously to the sinks. You can´t figure out how to operate the sinks with the automatic sensors, so you wipe your hands with spit and a dry paper towel and walk past a line of women still waiting.

One kind soul at the very end of the line points out that you are trailing a piece of toilet paper on your shoe as long as the St. Lawrence River! You yank the paper from your shoe, plunk it in the woman´s hand and say warmly, "Here. You might need this."

"What took you so long?" your spouse asks.

This is dedicated to all women everywhere who have ever had to deal with a public toilet.

And it finally explains to all you men what takes us so long.

Anita Henderson sends this story of

THE ROSE

Two elderly women were in a beauty parlor getting their hair done, when in walked a young chick with a low-cut blouse that revealed a beautiful rose tattooed on one boob.

One woman leaned over to the other and said, "Poor thing. She doesn´t know it, but in 50 years she´ll have a long-stemmed rose in a hanging basket."

BIRTHDAY WISHES

Dixie Augusteijn will celebrate her 95th birthday on Thursday, July 6th. I know you all join me in wishing Dixie a wonderful day, and all good things for the coming year.

THIS WEEK´S SUGGESTED WEBSITES

Ernest Blaschke posted this site:

This photo from National Geographic is worth looking at: http://tinyurl.com/hdrjl

Jack Peaker sends more sites to check out:

Photo Journalism: http://oxfordproject.com/

Food: http://www.cookingbread.com/

Scotland: http://www.talkingscot.com/

Ed. Note: For those interested in pictures of one of my dad´s logging camps, go to the pictorial page on Jay´s website. You can also read this newsletter online at http://members.shaw.ca/vjsansum/index.htm and http://www.nw-seniorsonline.org/stories.html

For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.