The Blog of Stickles

Cucaracha Cha-Cha

2012-01-29T14:51:00.000-08:00

This is a typical morning at MIT, circa 1976. While most students were usually sound asleep until 9 or 10am, the cockroaches were already awake when the sun came up. That's because they were nocturnal.

MIT had roaches for the same reason most urban spaces had roaches: there were plenty of things for a roach to eat. In addition, the roaches bred faster than we could kill them off. They knew how to get into any space, and their adaptability made them indestructible. We did not have medicine cabinets in our dorm rooms, just open shelves, so roaches could get into our toiletries. Fortunately, we had dresser drawers, so we never found roaches in our personal effects, although I did end up squashing one inside my sneaker once (yecch!)

The cockroach is one of those creatures, like the shark, that has been around almost since the beginning of time and will be one of the last creatures remaining on Earth when it gets swallowed up by the supernova-ing Sun. In fact, if Christian potboiler novelist Tim LaHaye wanted to be factually accurate, his end-times milieu would have an Earth inhabited by nothing but sinners - and cockroaches.

A Dirty Little Secret

2012-01-28T21:07:00.000-08:00

MIT has a Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. The Department is home to the Wright Brothers Wind Tunnel and the Flight Transportation Lab, and that Lab is home to one of the four university campuses of the National Center for Excellence in Aviation Operations Research, better known as NEXTOR (the other campuses being at the University of California at Berkeley, Virginia Tech and the University of Maryland). In addition to that, MIT sits under one of the departure tracks for Boston Logan International Airport, which was and still is one of the busiest airports in the country. Logan Airport is located just east of downtown Boston in a community known as East Boston, separated from Beacon Hill by the Harbor. In our day, 1974-78, there were two parallel tunnels that brought traffic from Boston out to the Airport; thanks to the Big Dig, there is now a third tunnel, named for Ted Williams, that crosses the Harbor. There is also the Blue Line, a creaky old subway not as creaky as the Green Line (nothing could possibly be that creaky), that brings passengers to a depot where they catch a shuttle bus to the airport terminals. And recently, there has commenced a new sort of bus/subway combination that runs between South Boston, Downtown and the Airport.

Logan Airport's location means that airplanes cross to the north, the south and across the MIT campus. In fact, when the wind is from the south, one can look south across the Charles and see the 747's come swooping in a low turn south of the Prudential Building, then thunder north above the Green Building and East Campus on their way to Europe or the West Coast. There may have been louder airplanes (the DC-9 and the 727 were plenty loud), but nothing was quite as menacing.

The toilets on aircraft are not supposed to vent to the outside the way old trains did (in fact, they warn you not to flush the toilets while the train is in the station), but airplane toilets do have vents to the outside that are used by siphon trucks that suck out all that blue liquid in the plane's toilet holding tanks and take it somewhere to get disposed of. Occasionally those vents malfunction, and if the malfunction occurs when the airplane is in the upper atmosphere, the blue goo leaks out and freezes to the outside of the airplane...and sometimes those frozen chunks of goo break off and fall from the airplane; people whose houses lie under the approach to an airport have reported being pelted with "blue ice".

Plane toilets present other hazards, but mostly to the passengers who use them. Some passengers have reported sitting down on the seat, doing their business, then flushing the toilet - and getting sucked in so tightly that they need help being dislodged. New model aircraft toilets have a vacuum boost that enables them to carry away waste products with minimal use of flush water. Buildings that are designed to environmentally responsible standards have a similar toilet hazard; they also come equipped with toilets that reduce water consumption by use of suction. You can tell a vacuum-assisted toilet by its flush, which sounds like the approach of a tornado. Again, anyone who sits too firmly on the seat is at risk of having their posterior sucked in. However, Man is an ingenious animal who has discovered that the suction can be defeated easily by dropping a cellphone in the toilet (this is what is meant by a dropped call)...which must explain why so many people insist on taking cell phone calls in restrooms.

Look What the Cat Dragged In

2012-01-21T09:58:00.000-08:00

I introduced Walden to Stickles readers about one semester after I had introduced Cindy, the cat's owner (I say "owner" because I've yet to find anyone who is a cat's master; "owner" defines someone who pours the cat food out of the bag). Walden was modeled after a real cat named Woodstock, and Woodstock had become famous for being a write-in candidate for president of the Class of 1978 in my sophomore year (I wrote about Woodstock in an earlier blog post).

Walden was a male cat, and males of the feline persuasion are known by a particular characteristic.

Veterinarians will tell you that male cats that are not neutered will continue to engage in marking activity even after they have been spayed. It's a sort of an instinctive action that does not turn off once it has been turned on.

Walden was also a curious cat. Curiosity will get a cat into all kinds of trouble...

Nitrous oxide was a hot commodity in our dorm; it was usually dispensed in little canisters called Whippets which were used to discharge whipped cream on top of ice cream sundaes. It could also be procured in balloon quantities. It livened up many a party; people who inhaled it would fall down laughing (or just plain fall down). Helium, by contrast, just made you talk funny.

I've owned many cats in my life. I've only owned one dog, and he tends to drive my current cat nuts.

Rush Limbo

2012-01-19T21:12:00.000-08:00

In Boston, there is a ritual that is as old as time and as regular as clockwork. Just as the swallows return annually to Capistrano and the buzzards return to Hinckley, Ohio, the college students return to their various campuses in the Boston area. It is a congregation that can be detected in the increased traffic on I-95 and the larger than usual clusters of backpacked, unruly ragamuffins clustered around the bag claim at Logan Airport.

The freshman arrive at MIT, usually in the last week of August (Stanford, being on a more relaxed, California-style timetable, usually doesn't see its first students until the third week of September). They begin the unusual mating process known as Rush Week, at which time they will decide their living arrangement for the next four years. The frats choose first, rushing their picks of the young, peach-fuzzed frosh who wander by looking for a good time and a warm place to sleep for the night. The leftovers stumble their bewildered way into the dorm system, and the dregs drift into Bexley to plot their careers as MoveOn organizers (okay, we didn't have MoveOn in my day, but there were any number of radical causes about, including thursday).

You'll notice I haven't mentioned the co-eds (ladies, if you will); in the '70s, MIT did not have sororities, so the fairer sex was doomed to end up in McCormick, although there were options - Baker, East Campus, Senior House, WILG, Burton, No. 6, and so on. One of the fraternities, Sigma Nu, actually decided to admit women - and was promptly drummed out of the national fraternity by its incensed elders, whereafter it became known as Epsilon Theta. No other frat followed in their footsteps, formally, although some informal living arrangements were arrived at by consenting couples in both the fraternities and the dorms. One dorm acquired a Combat Zone hooker that way.

Bag claim is always an interesting place; it is the only time you will see your fellow passengers in an upright position. It's always entertaining to play Match the Passenger With the Bag. Airport adminstrators are no fun at all, though; they warn you politely that some bags may look alike, so be sure to check the claim tag first before grabbing your suitcase. Except in Philadelphia, where in true Brotherly Love fashion, there is a rather stern warning that "This Is Not Your Bag!" affixed to the ugliest green Samsonite ever manufactured.

Two end notes: as I mentioned before, I have a terrible time drawing dark faces in a comic strip, which explains why Stickles had no African American characters. This strip has one, and as my father hastened to point out in politically-correct tones, it is one of the baggage porters. I corrected that injustice by casting a dark-faced Harvard student in a later 8-panel strip - also set at an airport. The second has to do with the intro; it never happened to me, but one of my colleagues from my early consulting days told me that It Actually Happened to Him that a flight attendant mixed white wine and red wine together to produce rosé. He also told me a story, about a young man with a severe lisp who wanted to become a Fuller Brush salesman, that I shall not relate here, but I will tell it to you sometime in a bar somewhere after a half-dozen beers.

The Dismal Science

2012-01-14T12:07:00.000-08:00

To show you how little things change over the years, here is one of the earliest "Stickles" cartoons to ever be printed in the MIT student newspaper.

According to the notation, the date is March 17, 1975. The economy is in recession (sound familiar?). We have a president who is coming up for re-election. And gas prices are high ("high" in those days meant over a dollar a gallon). Because the price of oil is on the increase, inflation is a concern.

On the other hand, America in the '70s had not experienced the kind of mortgage meltdown that was to occur in 2008. In fact, the first time American banks got into trouble was in the '80s, when a rogue office of the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation (FSLIC for short) decided to practice extreme laissez-faire regulation, cozied up to the Texas banking industry and allowed them to engage in acts of finance you can't show on television or print in a family newspaper. However, instead of home mortgages, the catastrophe was precipitated by commercial lending. Billions of dollars were lent to build office buildings, subdivisions and shopping malls with money presumably set aside to finance homes, to the point where there were not enough tenants to fill all the spaces. When the price of oil suddenly and precipitously dropped in 1986, the real estate brokers ran out of tenants to fill their properties and went bust, and their problems became the problems of the Texas banks and savings and loans. In the end, the taxpayers were called in to bail out the lenders (to the tune of about $500 billion), a new agency called the Office of Thrift Supervision was created to clear up the muck, and the FSLIC was no more. The taxpayers were probably still paying to untangle the mess when 2008 came along and with it a new set of problems. It seems we never learn from our mistakes.

But that was not the proximate cause of our miseries in 1975. Instead we had runaway inflation - nothing like what we would experience in 1980, but bad enough, and triggered by gasoline getting expensive. In those days, we did not have solar and wind power, and we didn't have hybrid cars; the average Chevy got about 15 miles to the gallon, which is about what the average Hummer gets today. Our leaders vowed to Whip Inflation Now and our Fed raised interest rates, which led to a sharp, nasty recession in 1974 that spilled over into 1975. The cycle would repeat itself in 1980, which is when we experienced interest rates that briefly touched 20% (try getting a home mortgage at those rates!)

Today, of course, inflation is under 3% and interest rates, which were sky-high all throughout the '80s, are so low that you can get a 30-year mortgage for less than 4% fixed. But the bankers give you the stink-eye when you come in looking to borrow for a home. They ask you for everything but a blood test and your next of kin. Hence demand for homes continues to drag along. And people who depend on homebuilding for a living can't find work. But if you want to borrow $20 billion for a leveraged buyout, bankers can't do enough for you. After all, debt is therapeutic.

Gerald Ford lost the election in 1976; the electorate remembered how bad things were a year earlier and gave the Republicans a thrashing. Barack Obama stands for president again in 2012, having only a marginal amount to show for all his efforts since 2009 to revive the economy. That he stands any chance at all of re-election is testament to the quality of his opposition.

The Merits of Scholarship

2011-09-06T19:17:00.000-07:00

I was one of those people. I had a merit scholarship. It paid a nice chunk of my tuition, so it was nothing to sneeze at. The National Merit Scholarship Program was and probably still is one of the most prestigious programs for young scholars, providing stipends to gifted students for tuition at the college of their choice. Many students who went to MIT in my day had the benefit of a National Merit Scholarship. For some, it was $500 a year, but some received stipends as high as $1,500 a year (and as tuition got progressively more expensive, that limit was raised to $2,000 a year).

Getting a National Merit Scholarship was nothing more difficult than scoring well on the National Merit Scholarship Qualify Test. Most students know this is the Pre-SAT or PSAT. It's supposed to be a warm-up for the Scholastic Aptitude Test or SAT, which students take in their junior or senior years (or both; some students try to improve their scores so they can improve their chances of getting into the college of their choice). But, if you were intent on qualifying for the scholarship, that practice SAT was anything but, and it gave you a good reason to sweat out the spring months of your sophomore year.

Like the SAT, the PSAT came in two parts - English and Math, but unlike the SAT, the English score counted for twice what the math score counted (and I understand that the SAT as administered these days is scored differently than it was in my day). The emphasis on the verbal score did not work to my advantage, since my math score was about 80 points higher than my verbal score. My total score was not good enough for the National Merit people to give me a stipend, but there were several companies that pitched in with scholarships of their own that they handed out to the children of their employees based on their NMSQT scores. I was fortunate enough to score a scholarship through Shell Oil, and because I was bound for MIT, they were especially generous; they had heard horror stories about MIT's tuition.

As I mentioned, the scholarship paid a substantial portion of my tuition. Of course, this was back in the '70s, when tuition at MIT was about $3,500 a year (and it was still Too Damn Much), so a four-year scholarship that paid $1,500 a year went pretty far. Since those days, tuition at MIT has soared into the stratosphere - to over $50,000 a year. Room and board hasn't gotten any cheaper, either. And then there are books, computer accessories, lab materials, condoms (this assumes that the average MIT student was ever going to be in a situation where usage was going to be a concern) and all the other things you need to succeed at MIT. Plus, you need some walking-around money, especially if you intend to go out on the town with your sweetie (which also presumes you might need condoms).

I'm not sure if the merit scholarships have kept up with inflation, much less tuition increases and the prices of books and condoms (don't laugh - I was one of those young men who got the condom lecture from my father on my way to the 'Tute). These days, most students still have to find an after-class job, and even then, they will still take out a sizable student loan, to which they will be enslaved for many years. Even then, the scholarships, loans and the extra money from the after-hours job may not be enough to cover everything, so many colleges end up subsidizing tuition for the students they want. This they do by hitting up the alumni for money and by soliciting research grants and cranking out publications and patents. That's why it's a publish or perish world in academia. A college administrator's lot is not a happy one.

While the National Merit Scholars still have to struggle to make ends meet, there is one group of scholars that, then as now, continue to do well - the student athletes. Their scholarships not only pay tuition, but they also get their meals taken care of; they have the training table. And if you believe those nice folks at Ohio State and the University of Miami, there are any number of business opportunities that enterprising student athletes can avail themselves of. One day, MIT will be a nationally-ranked football powerhouse and can make those sorts of enterprises available to its students. Till then, there's always Draper Labs.

Shakedown Street

2011-08-24T18:26:00.000-07:00

We had an earthquake in Washington, DC, yesterday. Not just a slight trembling of the ground, mind you. This one was a magnitude 5.8 (or 5.9), which is a good-size temblor, even for places that get earthquakes regularly. For us, it didn't feel like anything unusual, but then, my office is on the first floor and our building has only one floor. At first, I thought the airconditioner in our building, which is on the roof and had been having issues for the past month or so, had kicked on with a vengeance. But then our emergency crew evacuated the entire building to the parking lot (later, we learned that's not what you're supposed to do in an earthquake). I've been through quakes before, when I was at Stanford, and I didn't think this was much of a shake - until news reports came in and said it was 5.8 and centered around Mineral, Virginia, which is not far from Fredricksburg. The news also mentioned that this one was felt as far north as MIT.

DC reacted the way it usually does to things like this - or snow events. Everyone went into a controlled panic, which is kind of like the controlled skid an SUV does on black ice - right into the guardrail. An hour later, all the Federal employees were sent home, and that's when the chaos began. Metro was first shut down and then reopened at slower than normal speeds - trains were running at 15 miles an hour. Freeways and downtown streets clogged up suddenly and so firmly that people didn't get home for hours. The next morning, several school districts decided to close; it seems they hadn't determined that the buildings were structurally safe. The Feds went on liberal leave. Three of the parapets on the National Cathedral had cracked and fallen off (it took them 90 years to finish the building, and look what happens!), and even the newly restored (in 2000) Washington Monument had developed cracks in some of the marble blocks.

Sure it sounds bad, but the Loma Prieta earthquake in San Francisco was worse. Occurring in 1989 at the very moment the World Series game between the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland Athletics was in progress, the temblor heralded the birth of my nephew and Barely Brothers bassist, Earthquake Sam, in a Bay Area hospital. It measured 6.9 on the Richter scale, which is a pretty good jolt. Buildings collapsed, water lines and gas lines ruptured, a section of the elevated freeway in Oakland collapsed onto the level below it, huge fires started in various rowhouses and a section of the Bay Bridge collapsed, snarling the commute from Oakland to San Francisco for months thereafter. Portions of the Stanford campus were damaged as well, but my aunt's bungalow stayed upright. There were only 63 deaths reported, which is incredibly fortunate.

I missed it all, being in Texas. But when I was at Stanford, there were no fewer than three earthquakes. These were not terribly big shocks; I don't think there was anything greater than a 5.3 magnitude. But I did get to spend an ominous couple of minutes one afternoon on the 12th floor of a San Mateo office building watching the light poles in the parking lot outside swaying back and forth like a metronome set on 212. And my supervisor's bookshelf collapsed onto what would have been his head had he not been in St. Louis on business.

Texas does not get earthquakes. Or rather it didn't - until the Barnett Shale got drilled. About ten years ago, a very lucrative deposit of natural gas was discovered under the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, and every exploration company wanted a piece of it. The problem was getting the gas, given its location. The gas companies had always been capable of directional drilling (which in the '50s was called "slant hole" drilling and was a clever bit of piracy that allowed an enterprising wildcatter to filch his neighbor's oil or gas deposits) to get at the gas without disturbing the airport, but the gas was trapped in rock layers that wouldn't yield very easily - unless high pressure fluids were pumped in to break the rocks and push the gas out. This process - hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking" - is sort of like a power enema and has proved very good at dislodging the gas deposits. But recently, residents of Tarrant County noticed that a whole lot of "fracking" earthquakes were occurring, as the ground settled into the pockets where the gas had been. These were not big shakers - averaging no more than 3.0 on the Richter Scale, but they were noticeable, and they occurred with unnerving frequency. The same thing has also happened in places in Arkansas where gas deposits have been tapped, and appears likely to happen in Pennsylvania when those gas fields get drilled.

That's Fort Worth. Houston is very seismically inactive - probably because it sits on a thick layer of sedimentary clay, or gumbo. It doesn't shift so much as it oozes, and it has a tendency to shrink and swell with the amount of groundwater that accumulates during the rainy season. When it oozes (which it does constantly), it plays havoc with foundations and pavements - so much so that homes have been known to slowly grow wall cracks and cracked foundations (and for some reason known only to the shoddy workmanship of the local homebuilders, those show up rather quickly on homes built within the past ten to twenty years).

Meanwhile, back on the East Coast, earthquakes, while infrequent, have been known to occur and to be intense enough that there are seismic requirements in the building codes for communities in the Washington region. This seems prudent, given the worst earthquake to occur east of the Mississippi hit Charleston, South Carolina, in 1886 and registered 7.3 on the Richter scale. The Mississippi River itself was the scene of the strongest earthquakes in the Lower 48, which hit New Madrid, Missouri. There were at least four them over a one-year period beginning in 1811, with the strongest being perhaps an 8.0, or greater than the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. And the grand-daddy of them all was the Good Friday Earthquake that hit Alaska in 1964 and measured 9.2. While we were not hit as hard as either San Francisco or Charleston or Alaska or Missouri this time, the odds are that we were be due for one. And when the next big one hits, people will again react like there's 10 inches of snow on the ground.

A New Weird Order

2011-08-18T20:57:00.000-07:00

The '70s were a good time for cults of personality and conspiracy theorists. It had nothing to do with whatever nefarious devices the folks at the Charles Stark Draper Labs were working on at the moment (and indeed, they had come up with a secret weapon that could bulldoze entire neighborhoods in East Cambridge and disguise it all as urban renewal). No, we're talking about the really kooky stuff. Sun Myung Moon was head of a weird cult, but he was not a conspiracy theorist (he was more likely to hatch the conspiracies). L. Ron Hubbard was out there (and I mean really out there), and he and his merry band of Scientologists were all about self-help and science fiction. Hubbard wrote a whole series of best-selling books of very bizarre science fiction, and he also wrote "Dianetics", a self-help book that was being revised into new editions long after Hubbard's death in 1986. You always knew you had encountered a Scientologist on the street if they offered you the opportunity to take a free psychoanalysis test. The ads for "Dianetics" were always hard to miss; they always asked profound questions like "Why does life suck?" (Page 11), followed by the erupting volcano.

But when it came to off-the-wall conspiracy theories and dogged persistence, no one could touch the followers of Lyndon LaRouche, the third member of that Unholy Trinity. In the early '70s, LaRouche became convinced that Henry Kissinger and Nelson Rockefeller were plotting the end of the world; by the mid-70's, he decided it wasn't world destruction they were plotting, but the wholesale de-industrialization of America (and damned if that didn't happen!), for the benefit of that secretive world order that included the Queen of England, the Bilderbergers, the Council of Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission. In 1984, LaRouche decided that the worst thing that could happen to America would be to freeze all our nuclear weapons production; he preferred to build defensive beam weapons in space to shoot down the incoming nukes of the bad guys (because it was high technology, man!) He was also convinced that movements like Greenpeace were part of the Trilateral conspiracy, because nothing symbolized deindustrialization like environmental stewardship.

LaRouche's minions could be found in some of the largest airports in the country hawking their wares and trying to warn the rest of the world about the coming global conspiracy. And they could be found on college campuses like MIT, trying to get nuclear power plants built over the dead bodies of baby seals. They were the sworn enemies of the Clamshell Alliance, which was trying to stop the building of a nuclear power plant in Seabrook, New Hampshire. And they were the only thing standing in the way of the Queen of England's plot to take over the world by getting us hooked on drugs.

You could always tell LaRouche's followers by their neat JC Penney dress pants, no-iron white shirts, clip-on ties, short hair and glasses. And you could never get rid of them. Once they glommed onto you, they woudn't let go until you'd bought something, anything from them. And signed a petition. They claimed to be Democrats; LaRouche himself ran against Congressman Frank Wolf of Virginia in 1990 while he was serving a prison sentence for tax evasion. LaRouche has largely dropped out of sight in the last couple of years - although some people maintain that he is secretly Lou Dobbs.

Technology Squared

2011-08-17T18:14:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the '80s! It is a time before BlackBerries, Kindles and Facebook. Bill Gates and Paul Allen have yet to create Windows, but DOS exists and Steve Jobs has already been hard at work in his Cupertino garage with another fellow named Steve Wozniak, and together they have created the first portable computer, the Apple (actually, they're already up to the Apple IIe, a nifty little box with a typewriter and a whole 8 kilobytes of memory!). The rest of us are still used to doing things like tapping out punch cards in a language called FORTRAN to use on one of those big, massive IBM mainframes. There is no Excel, but there's Lotus 1-2-3. There is no PowerPoint, but we have Harvard Graphics. And while there is no Word, or even WordPerfect, there is a nice little gadget known as a Selectric typewriter, and it can type in different fonts! (All you need to do is pop in a different ball). And we can all network socially, thanks to a wonderful thing called Prodigy!

But all is not rosy with this wonderful new high technology. First of all, your KayPro is a heavy sucker. You might have one of those newfangled Compaq boxes, but when Texas Instruments perfects the TI-99/4A, it's going to blow away that Compaq (why did I ever buy 100 shares at $10 a share? I must've been crazy!). The second problem is that those IBM PC's that Charlie Chaplin sells, which are the gold standard, don't have accuracy beyond 8 significant digits (you can get a co-processor that boosts that accuracy to 16 significant digits, but that's money, and who's doing higher-order regressions, anyway?)

Moore's Law has yet to really kick in. We had random access memories, but they had yet to develop amazing superpowers. Bubble memories are only a couple of years old.

Within ten years, computers will have 128k of memory on the hard drive and 16k of RAM, and won't we be flying then? As it is, we've still got the 8086 chips, but pretty soon we'll be moving up to the 80286 (and with an 80287 math co-processor, you'll be able to run those 1-2-3 spreadsheets without having to turn off the automatic recalculation). Those guys at Lotus are geniuses. I don't know what you can do with Symphony, but I hear that Jazz is even better than Symphony.

Actually, that's not what was so amazing about the '80s. Steve Wozniak was one cool guy; he got a whole bunch of bands together and created the US! Festival - three days of fun in the Inland Empire east of Los Angeles and west of the Joshua Trees. The Clash were there, and so was Van Halen, and I hear that U2 played an amazing set. On the other end of the country, this guy named Grandmaster Flash was doing absolutely weird things with a couple of turntables, and kids were break-dancing in the streets (did you ever think you'd see someone spin around on their heads?). Cum on, feel the noize!

The '80s also made a bona fide celebrity out of Erland van Lidth de Jeude. If you did not go to MIT, you remember him as the big, mean, bald-headed dude who sang "Down in the Valley" in Stir Crazy. Those of us who took Computer Lab remember him as one of the TA's, a resident of East Campus, an imposing Greco-Roman wrestler (he weighed in excess of 300 pounds, had Size 18 dress shoes and was once measured to have more explosive power than a horse). He was also The Voice, whose larger-than-life presence filled many a Musical Theatre Guild production. When he sang a tune from "1776" in Building 10, they could hear him in Lobby 7. When he wasn't in films, he was a highly paid computer consultant (although he could have made a mint on the WWF circuit). This was probably the only Stickles cartoon that pictured him.

These days, we use Control-Alt-Delete instead of Control-C to unstick a frozen computer.

One of the great MIT hacks dates back about ten years, when the first voice recognition software was introduced. Supposedly (and I was not there to witness it, so I am going strictly on news reports), the software was being demonstrated before a rapt audience, when a lone voice in the audience barked out, "Format C, Enter!" It was followed almost immediately by a second voice in the audience, "Yes, Enter!" The software worked perfectly.

Random Killings

2011-08-11T20:12:00.000-07:00

We hung out in the hallways a lot. Standing or sitting, it didn't seem to matter; as long as the carpet was dry and reasonably free of foreign substances, the hallway was our hangout. It was a place for eating, drinking, consuming various substances, card games, hall frisbee or even just passing out. But often, it was good for the random conversation or two - complete with random distractions.

In fact, this cartoon was suggested to me by a couple of residents on my floor, complete with one of those "you gotta put this in a cartoon!" hints that I seemed to get every so often. As it was told to me, two of them were sitting in the hallway having a rather serious discussion of Bessel functions, when a roach happened to crawl by.- and the discussion sidetracked almost immediately into frenzied chants of "Kill That Roach!", accompanied by the kind of frenzied stomping that would have made a flamenco dancer proud. The bloodletting having concluded, the two resumed their positions on the floor and returned to their discussion of Bessel functions, which I'm guessing included suggestions to stomp a few of those into the ground.

And like many Stickles cartoons of that era (1978), it was so nice I hadda draw it twice...

Boom Times

2011-08-04T19:26:00.000-07:00

MIT is known for explosions. Or rather, MIT is known for chemical reactions that result in the sudden release of large amounts of heat energy. Or if not that, then the sudden release of pressurized gases from a container that may or may not undergo catastrophic failure in the process. We're not talking about what happens when you drop a Mentos candy in a glass of Diet Coke. MIT undegraduates, especially but not limited to the chemistry students, made a recreational habit of combining ordinary materials in ways that caused extraordinary chaos. In fact, it was possible to be awakened at 3 in the morning by a gaggle of Third East students (hackito ergo sum) making thermite flares up on the East Campus roof.

Everyone knows what happens when you combine water with sulfuric acid. In fact, you're warned to add the sulfuric acid to water and never to add water to sulfuric acid. But there are other chemicals that when mixed together cause a volatile reaction.

My first encounter with the properties of pure sodium in water actually occurred in a high school chemistry lab, when one of my classmates made the mistake of dropping sodium into a beaker of water. We never did find that beaker.

Frozen carbon dioxide, or dry ice, was also a fun item, specifically because it was colder than normal ice and it sublimed rather than pass into a liquid state. In the process of subliming, it would expand rather rapidly, with predictable consequences. It should also be noted that in real life, Ross could never have held a pellet of dry ice without his fingers suffering frostbite.

A final element that has interesting properties is magnesium, which was used to great effect in World War II. Burning magnesium was difficult to extinguish because it reacted violently to most typical fire-extinguishing agents. Throw water on it and it produced magnesium hydroxide and a whole lot of heat. It also burned hotter when either carbon dioxide or nitrogen were thrown on it. In short, magnesium fires had to be smothered with inert ingredients. Volatile reactions could also result from combinations such as picric acid and sodium hydroxide or ROTC students and SACC activists.

Grease Trap

2011-07-31T14:48:00.000-07:00

There were many layers of student politics at MIT. I'm not referring to the radical activism that paraded through the door of the thursday offices with hot leads on one Institute outrage or another. I'm not referring to the Campus Crusade for Ayn Rand or the ever-present conspiracy theorists who adhered to Lyndon LaRouche. Student politics meant the Undergraduate Association and the various groups associated with it. It also meant the various and sundry different agencies that affected campus life and to which student representatives were nominated - an outgrowth of the '60s liberalism, in which the Institute attempted to cater to its restless student body through reforms that gave them a modicum of participation in the process of education.

But we were not children of the '60s. We were, instead, children of the '70s. By the time I got to MIT, the Vitenam War was over and Nixon had resigned from office, so all the big battles had already been fought. So we settled down to the usual pursuits of trying to get good grades and partying till we puked on the weekends. Thursday itself was less interested in campus radicalism and more interested in promoting the cultural and counter-cultural doings in its midst, which meant lots of pinball, Bruce Springsteen ("Born to Run" came out in my sophomore year) and Marvel Comics (oh, we still had plenty of that hippie material R. Crumb penned, but none of it could compare with Howard the Duck!). We had an Arts Section, a literary corner (RSV-P!), a wildly popular back page feature of famous quotes called The Last Word and a couple of feature columns of social commentary and non-specific rants authored by a couple of our managing editors. But the political activism of the Battering Ram (a Dean's Office takeover in the late '60s) was mostly gone, except as a reminiscence.

Student politics - at least the official kind - was an Undergraduate Association affair. In my senior year, I actually became a participant in UA politics when I decided to become a member of the Student Center Committee. I think my motivation was the chance to DJ the Strat's Rats mixers, but I found myself engaged in other activities such as helping select Midnight Movies and picking furniture for the Coffeehouse. In those days, you didn't just join the Student Center Committee, you had to be nominated and approved by the Committee for membership. The way you got your card punched was to be a volunteer and do all the gruntwork that comes with running Student Center events. In that regard, it was much like a committee of the Transportation Research Board - with a vast network of friends and a limited number of official members. If the Student Center Committee liked your spirit (and was reasonably assured that you were not one of those campus radicals from the Social Action Coordinating Committee), they'd approve your membership. I know, because I had to be nominated twice, and one of my friends went through three rounds of voting before he was admitted to membership.

People weren't very interested in the rest of the Institute committee structure. In fact, we had a name for all forms of student politicking, from UMOC (ugliest man on campus) to the various student committees; we called it "grease" (yes, "grease" was the word). "Grease" was anything that had to do with any form of involvement in things like the Technology Community Association, the Student Center Committee, the Lecture Series Committee and the administration of the Institute. A lot of it was the province of the fraternities (and Delta Upsilon was regarded as the frat most heavily involved in the committee structure). The only people who cared about the committees were the pre-law and pre-med students (and even the business school wannabes), for whom serving on a committee was a credential that you could put in your application for grad school. If grade-grubbing hadn't given you enough of an edge, serving on something like the Committee for Visual Arts might be just the thing to get the attention of the Johns Hopkins Medical School. At least that's what a number of Course 7's (biology majors) always claimed. One member of our class managed to parlay his chairmanship of the Nominations Committee all the way to a seat on the Federal Communications Commission.

Incidentally, this cartoon is based on a rather incensed letter to the editors of the Tech that complained about the tendency of nerds to arrive at the class lectures early and take all the aisle seats. This behavior was mightily inconvenient for all of us slackers who would arrive just as the class began and would have to negotiate our way over the bodies of the extraordinarily diligent to get to an empty seat.

One would have thought the entire student body would be falling all over themselves to capture a plum position on one of the Institute committees, but the truth is that most of us had other things on our minds, and serving on a committee was a chore. Consequently, the Nominations Committee, or NomComm had a bit of a challenge finding well qualified students to serve.

I should mention that the "you're not a racist, are you" quip dates to the Harvey Grogo incident. As I mentioned in a previous posting, Grogo the gorilla is a long-standing mascot of Technique, the student yearbook. In 1977, he was pictured in the freshman yearbook as a member of the Class of 1981 from Kampala, Uganda. White students saw it as a poke at then-dictator of Uganda, Idi Amin. Black students saw it as more institutional racism, in which insentivities to black stereotypes were clearly on display in an official MIT publication. After much uproar, one student on the Technique staff was disciplined; coming so soon on the heels of the thursday "Consumer Guide to MIT Men", the Institute was on high alert to avoid more examples of political incorrectness.

There were other committees of interest besides NomComm. The Finance Board, or FinBoard, handled the Undergraduate Association's money and parceled out stipends to each of the campus activities. Thursday was one of those activities, and if their politics didn't raise hackles with the FinBoard, the balance on their books was always a source of consternation. Thursday never made money, even in the best of times, and they would occasionally have to go begging to FinBoard for more. There was a Facilities Use Committee (FUC, according to one Bexley wag) that made spaces in various buildings available to student groups and others, and there was a Committee on Academic Performance (cue the "Dragnet" music). There were doubtless other committees, but my inability to recall any of them is a testament to their importance in my life back then. But don't be surprised to see a medical student with a membership on the Committee to Assess the Length of the Infinite Corridor on his resume; it means he's special.

Bela and Vivian

2011-07-15T13:43:00.000-07:00

I've been toying with the notion of creating a new cartoon, one that's nothing like Stickles. A hobby, if you will, since it's not something I could ever make money from. I've actually been putting some ideas down on paper, enough for about 20 strips at this point and sufficient to define the major characters. The idea of a dynamic between a dog and a cat is not new (in this instance, it is very close to home), but this tiny little mutt has Alpha-Dog ambitions and opinions that he appears to have acquired while pursuing an MBA somewhere, while the cat is a bit older and more genteel; she lives life at a slower pace and is not at all enamored of this new upstart in her midst.

Within the next couple of weeks, there will be a separate blog created for these two (and hopefully more cartoons to post in it), and the Blog of Stickles will get back to that fascinating trip down Memory Lane at MIT.

Nadia's 'Toon

2011-07-06T19:57:00.000-07:00

And now a word from our sponsor:

(Say "hello" to Bruce Rauscher and Felicity the Cat, appearing in "Visit to a Small Planet")

I am a cartoonist, but I started out a musician (a Baskir Musician at that). These days I have a spare-time career in the theater. In fact, a show I'm involved in, Gore Vidal's "Visit to a Small Planet", will be opening at the American Century Theater this Friday in Washington, DC (or rather, Arlington, Virginia). I have a small but crucial role. I don't play the lead, I'm not a supporting actor, I don't even have a bit part. I'm not the producer or the director or the sound man or the lighting designer or even the guy who builds the set. But if you need five bags of dry ice and two coolers, I'm your man! Mind you, it's better than my last gig. That one was a musical in which I played a bishop who gets beaten, choked with a cane, stomped on and set on fire at the end of the first act (It's also a musical that reliable sources tell me had its debut at the Alley Theater in Houston back in 1991; see if you can guess the name of the show).

Now on with tonight's post:

The 1976 Olympics were the only Olympic Games that occurred while I was at MIT. I was a sophomore in high school in 1972, and I was already off to my professional career by 1980, the year of the Miracle on Ice, when a team of US amateurs went up against the mighty Red Army and defeated the Russians on the field of ice hockey, thus proving once and for all that our system of government was better than theirs, so there! It was also the Year Without a Summer Olympics for the Americans. Back in those days, the Summer and Winter Olympics were scheduled for the same year; recently the Winter and Summer Olympics have been scheduled two years apart, and we are due for a Summer Olympiad in 2012 in London.

For many years, US sports fans tended to ignore the Winter Olympics, because the US team was not very good at things like curling and biathlon, while the Evil Red Menace was. MTV had not given us snowboarding yet (it wasn't even around), but we could be counted upon to occasionally produce a decent figure skater or two, and they captured our interest.

No, the action was always in the Summer Games, when we could be counted upon to bring home a huge haul of medals - Mark Spitz personally brought home seven Golds as a swimmer in the 1972 Olympics in Munich. The Munich Olympics are indelibly linked with tragedy and terrorism, after members of the Israeli team were kidnapped and died violently at the hands of Palestinian terrorists. But there was one bright spot - 16-year old Olga Korbut, who won 3 Gold medals and a Silver with a stunning display of gymnastics that had most of us awestruck (and later led to a tour of the United States, a small victory for Henry Kissinger's Kremlin Strategy).

Korbut was the darling of the world of gymnastics - until someone came along who was not just better; she was perfect. In Montreal in 1976, the world got to see a 14-year-old nymph from Romania (Ceaucescu's Romania!) named Nadia Comaneci, and she made us forget all about Olga Korbut. Nadia Comaneci was the first gymnast in Olympic history to record a perfect 10.0 - and she did it six times. She won three Golds and a Bronze, and became the youngest Olympic champion the sport had ever known. And will ever know; because of the stresses placed on young gymnasts by taskmasters such as Bela Karolyi, the rules for the Olympics were revised to require that all athletes be 16 years old in order to compete. And that all female gymnasts stay away from helium balloons.

Nadia Comaneci went on to win a couple more Golds at the 1980 Moscow Olympics, which we boycotted to protest the Russian invasion of Afghanistan (why did we ever go to all that trouble, when we could have simply enlisted a young eager fighter by the name of Osama bin Laden?) She largely disappeared behind the Iron Curtain after those 1980 Olympics, only to emerge rather suddenly in 1994, when we all found out she had defected, was living in Montreal (where she'd been for five years), and had become engaged to an American after having lived a life worthy of the Kardashians for the previous decade. Her coach, a Svengali named Bela Karolyi, had defected some years earlier in 1981 and was best known for having set up a boot camp for gymnasts just outside Houston. These days, he has moved a bit further north - to New Waverly, Texas, and many an aspiring gymnast has come there seeking the moves that will gain them entry onto the American gymnastics team. His camp can be found not far from Joe Tex's old place in the woods, and he will only pick you up from Bush Intercontinental Airport, so no flying Southwest, you peasant!

Nadia Comaneci will always be remembered for perfection - and for having had a montage of her routines broadcast by ABC Sports to the theme from "The Young and the Restless", which subsequently hit the Billboard charts under its new working title, "Nadia's Theme". I have often toyed with the thought of setting up my own radio station on Pandora, playing nothing but the absolutely worst music ever to have been written; "Nadia's Theme" will be there in rotation, in between "You're Having My Baby" and "The Pina Colada Song".

Bike to Work Days

2011-07-05T20:55:00.000-07:00

I am (or was) a rider of bicycles. I did not own a bike in Cambridge, but I used to ride around town when I was growing up in Houston. When I lived in Palo Alto, I not only had a bike, but saddle bags and a couple of traffic tickets. The preferred mode of transportation on the Stanford campus, then as now, is the bicycle, and the break period between classes can see traffic jams worthy of Amsterdam.

I did not ride as much when I moved back to Texas (that would have been taking my life in my hands), but when I had settled into a house that I actually owned in DC, I would ride my bike to work during the Summer, all the way from Mount Vernon to National Airport. This was 1995. We didn't have bike racks, but we had showers, and I could always stash my bike in the stairwell (the Drug Enforcement Agency and Customs people we shared our building with were not likely to steal a bike, and the building was secure from outside access). I kept up the custom until 2001, when my office moved out to Dulles Airport, and the ride - over 33 miles - was a bit too forbidding, especially since it was not possible to get a bike onto the grounds of the airport without risking being flattened by a dump truck. National Airport was different; the bike path for the George Washington Parkway went right to the hangar and was similarly close to the complex of offices the Airports Authority Engineering staff used, up on what was known as the Hill (it is literally on top of a hill overlooking the terminal complex).

Riding a bike to work was, well, work. In Houston, though, I would go out on Saturday morning jaunts. One memorable winter, my father, the Renaissance Man, and a bike-to-work kinda guy in his own right, decided to take me on a trip. Not your lazy trip around the block, but a two-day long-distance trek, all the way from Houston proper down to Lake Jackson and Freeport, home of a massive petrochemical complex belonging to Dow Chemical, right on the Gulf of Mexico and about 40 miles away as the crow flies. We were not crows, though, so we had to take the roads, and that meant detours that tacked on extra miles. It also meant two-lane roads with gravel shoulders. pickup trucks and neighborhoods with barking dogs not constrained by leashes. At one point in the ride, after we had gone about 18 miles and I was completely winded, my father took off down the road. So I gave chase. But I couldn't catch him. He disappeared over the top of a rise in the road, and I thought for sure I'd been abandoned out in the middle of nowhere. So I set off down the road, trying to find him, and as I topped the rise, there he was with a camera, snapping pictures of me coming up the road with my tongue dragging on the pavement. All that bike-riding back and forth to work had given him all kinds of energy.

But that was a diversion. The civil engineer in me had a curiosity to see what was being built in my neighborhood, since these were the boom times when the greater metropolitan area of Houston was adding close to 2,000 new residents a week - all of them chasing jobs in the oil industry. All those new jobs meant lots of new construction, and it seemed like a new skyscraper was getting built either downtown or uptown near the Galleria, which was a massive shopping mall, hotel, office and entertainment complex with a skating rink in the middle of it. The Galleria was near the intersection of two freeways, and before the oil industry collapsed in 1983 and took down the Houston real-estate market, the Galleria was abuzz with construction activity.

Getting to the Galleria, though, was challenging. Houston is not exactly known for bike paths, and in the '70s, they were even rarer than they are today (the City has very thoughtfully paved some nice paths that follow the local bayous, which are slow-moving trash strewn mosquito breeding laboratories that course ever so slowly and languidly through town). Consequently, the only way to get to the Galleria from my neighborhood was to set off along the city's thoroughfares, which were four lane divided roads full of traffic. Adding to the fun were the pavements, which had heaved and buckled in the high termperatures that characterized Houston's summers. There were also open drains...

Summer in Houston also meant thunderstorms, so it was possible to go out in the morning, when there were only a few little cottony puffs of cloud in the sky, and be chased home by some angry purple storm clouds flashing the occasional lightning bolt just for good measure. I also made a short-lived habit of setting off on my bike jaunts wearing nothing but shorts and tennis shoes (no tee-shirt for macho-man Geoff!). That lasted as long as it took me to come home with a nice crimson sunburn on my back, for which I endured a few sleepless, itchy nights.

I found out about all kinds of road hazards, and not just uncovered manholes. The Stanford campus had these wonderful trees that dropped thorns that could puncture a tire in nothing flat. The Parkway bike path occasionally has trees fall over in rainstorms. I encountered one by accident; I survived, but my rim didn't, so it was a long walk to work that morning. When it rains, the roads get slick and your backside gets wet; you get used to racing stripes up the back of your shirt. And I have been stung by the occasional wasp that got wedged inside my pants-leg.

I don't bike much anymore. I meet plenty of cyclists on the W&OD bike path that winds from Sterling, Virginia, all the way to Rosslyn, but I'm usually on foot enjoying a brisk morning run (lazy amateurs jog, I run). I suppose I'll have to invest in a nice Cannondale and plot a trip across Europe, sometime when I'm an empty-nester and retired from the working world. I'd have to arrange meeting points along the route so my wife can catch up with me, but I'd get to see the countryside up close and personal. Most of my friends from my school days have that same dream, only it involves seeing the world through their Harleys (if the chain don't break).

Another Fifth of Fourth

2011-07-05T07:28:00.000-07:00

One thing I forgot to mention about the Pops concerts on the Charles River Esplanade is the number of small craft that can be seen bobbing in the Charles River itself. This picture, shamelessly ripped off from the MIT Alumni Association's blog, shows a couchboat that was spotted sometime yesterday evening. MIT students can be inveterate sofa surfers.

Hope you had a Happy Fourth!

A Fifth of Fourth

2011-07-04T16:58:00.000-07:00

It's the Fourth of July. If you're in DC, it's a time for fireworks on the Mall, which means traffic jams all over town as people try to find a good spot to watch. In Boston, the same ritual is played out on the south side of the Charles River, on the Esplanade where there is a bandshell, and that's the place where Arthur Fiedler's Boston Pops set up for their annual Fourth of July shindig. It's a time for picnics, sparklers, mosquito repellent and all the things that make Summer a patriotic season. It's a time when half a million Bostonians gather - which, given the muck on which the Back Bay was founded, is helpful for surcharging the grounds.

In July, MIT students are back at home or otherwise away from the campus, but a few hardy souls (those with summer jobs or nothing better to do) hang around all summer. They're as patriotic as the next person, although the next person in Cambridge is likely to be a Young Spartacist and determined to smash the state. That doesn't mean they can't enjoy a nice fireworks display, especially when it is accompanied by all your favorite pop ditties rendered senseless by the Pops. John Philip Sousa, W.C. Handy, Burt Bacharach, Lee Greenwood (okay, maybe not him) - the Pops will play them all. Plus, they will render a stirring rendition of Tchaikowsky's "1812 Overture", complete with cannon.

I went to a performing arts high school - with some serious classical musicians. They were serious cut-ups. They had no respect for the Pops at all. They considered Fiedler and his Pops akin to Percy Faith and his orchestra - who could still be found in the Classical section of certain Texas record shops even into the 1980's. As every serious classical musician knew, Percy Faith made elevator music.

But Arthur Fiedler had one champion in our high school - Edward Trongone, who was a teacher of instrumental music and conductor of our orchestra, wind ensemble and stage band. Trongone was known to us as "Mr. T" and he looked like this...

"Watch that intonation, sucker!"

Er, this...

"I pity the foo' who interrupts my rehearsal!"

Trongone was short, animated Bostonian who looked a bit like a penguin when he was conducting the orchestra. He had a thick accent ("Hahns! What am I heah foh!?") that I only figured out when I got to Boston and heard others of its type. But Mr. T knew a lot about the music business and had a lot of stories to tell about being a musician and a conductor. He could talk about greats like Stan Kenton and Mitch Miller (who we even got to meet personally), and he aspired to send his students on to careers as storied as theirs. But first they were going to have to work on their intonation and get rid of those scrapey horn sounds. He told us about the bad old days, when the musicians had to form a union and fight to get royalties on their recordings. He also told us about the Pops. Mr. T was a big fan of Arthur Fiedler, even if we weren't.

Arthur Fiedler died in 1979, a year after I graduated from MIT, but the Pops play on. Fiedler's immediate successor was John Williams, which meant a lot of "Jaws" and "Star Wars" themes were added to the program. These days, Keith Lockhart holds the baton, as he has since 1995. If you hurry, you can still make it over to the Esplanade from the 'Tute before the festivities begin.

But what is it we celebrate on this day? A lot of the holiday is given over to fireworks, patriotic music and above all military displays. Advertisers seem to find this holiday (and Memorial Day) as a good time to recognize the troops, whom they can't seem to recognize at any other time of the year. Our patriotic merchandisers find this holiday a good time to honor America by putting everything on sale (in a similar vein, they honor George Washington and Abraham Lincoln with big bargains on new cars). But it seems only appropriate to honor the founding documents on which this country was based, supposedly. Politicians come, politicians go, the economy goes up, the economy goes down, but one thing remains constant - the idea behind the United States, which was embodied in a Declaration of Independence some 235 years ago today, and in a Constitution that is still the law of the land over two centuries later. Even in the worst of times, they remain as the documents that bind us together. After all, we've had bad times before, but the country did not fold.

The cartoon above was drawn in 1982, when unemployment skyrocketed to 10.8% by Christmas. A year earlier, the Yankees, Dodgers, Phillies and Royals had won their respective divisions during a strike-shortened season, but the summer of 1982 was very cruel to them, and none of them made the playoffs.

The Heat Is On

2011-07-02T14:48:00.000-07:00

It's been a brutal summer in Houston already. While the calendar says summer officially arrived on June 21, it appears that Summer started in Houston on April 1. Most summers, the temperature stays below 100 degrees, even in early August. This year, the mercury went to 104 on June 5, tying as the hottest June day ever recorded (and someone on Wikipedia claims 105 was reached in one location). And it's been worse in other parts of Texas; Austin was over 100 degrees in May, and Laredo has been having weather reminiscent of Laughlin, Nevada.

What's happening is that Texas has been having a drought - one the weather service describes as extraordinary. The rains that normally cool Houston off in the afternoons haven't been coming this Summer, which allows the temperature to soar into the upper 90's. To see this effect, the average Houstonian only has to remember last June, when the temperatures were low because almost ten inches of rain fell in the month (granted, Houston can get that much from an afternoon monsoon, but then the freeways don't move). Then the winds shifted and there was very little rain in August, so the temperature went up over 100.

While Houston was cool and rainy, last Summer in Washington, DC, was dry and hot. DC can have hot weather; one afternoon in 1997, it went up to 104 before a line of afternoon thunderstorms brought the temperature down. But 2010 was unusually hot - it was over 90 degrees almost every afternoon and 100 degrees on perhaps a half dozen occasions. What's happening? There are those who say the climate is being changed by global warming brought on by carbon dioxide emissions being spewed by power plants, cars, factories and other sources. Then there are those skeptical types who claim the pattern of sunspots has cycled through and we're now in a warm period with higher amounts of solar irradiation of the planet occurring, in line with natural processes. Whatever's going on in the US was last seen in the Dust Bowl Days, which portends big trouble for farmers and people trying to avoid wildfires. There will be no fireworks in Texas this Fourth of July; it's just too hot. And the drought goes on.

The Summer of 1978 was a hot one in Houston, too. I was in between college and grad school, which meant I was moving from Boston to California, but I spent the interim in my parents' Texas home. I had taken to riding my bike around town because there was a building boom of seismic proportions underway, and I liked to observe the construction work (these days it's possible to do the same thing from a distance by visiting sites like SkyscraperPage.com or Swamplot). The tallest concrete structure west of the Mississippi was being constructed downtown for one of the large local banks (Texas had large local banks until they all collapsed during the savings and loan scandal of the late 1980's - you thought TARP was a new phenomenon?) and there were other skyscrapers of various sizes going up in other neighborhoods. At each bank office, there was usually an electronic sign that advertised the time and the temperature. The problem was that none of the thermometers agreed.

As I said, 1978 was a hot Summer in Houston. It went to 100 several times that summer, and one day the temperature topped out at 102 at the airport (being a few miles north of town and farther from the Gulf of Mexico, Bush Intercontinental, the bigger of the two airports, usually got a couple of degrees hotter than Downtown). Two years later, the infamous Summer of 1980 brought a temperature of 108 one August afternoon, and that record stuck as the hottest day ever observed at the city's major airport - until September 4, 2000, when the mercury went to 109. That September day, the mercury also went over 110 degrees in Dallas, and is best remembered as the day the Philadelphia Eagles blitzed the Dallas Cowboys on their home turf, because they took to drinking pickle brine on the sidelines.

Marathon Man

2011-06-29T20:36:00.000-07:00

I've been a distance runner for a number of years now - pretty much since high school. In ninth grade, I was on the cross-country team for my school, and I actually competed in a steeplechase or two. But the crowning moment was the last meet of the year, when our team went from Texas to Oklahoma City to compete in the conference championships. They put me in the two-mile, making it the longest race I had run that year, and of the three runners my school entered in the event, I was the only one who finished.

Then at the beginning of my sophomore year, I transferred to a performing arts magnet school which had no varsity athletics (well, unless you consider stage band a varsity sport), and that was pretty much the end of my athletic career.

But I continued to run. And compete in races. I ran the San Francisco Bay to Breakers, which is a 12k race, in 1980 and again in 1982. And again in 1985. Bay to Breakers attracts a loony-tunes cast of characters, from brides with full beards to guys who run the way the early Greek Olympians competed - completely in the buff. Some of them will even bind themselves together in a chain-gang for a chance at a prize; one group came dressed as the San Francisco Bay Bridge. To this date, no one, individual or group, has come dressed as San Francisco International Airport. The 1980 race attracted close to 100,000 runners, and the numbers kept escalating every year, so the race officials cut off registration at 125,000. Even with the limit, it would sometimes take half an hour just to cross the starting line, and you walk it for the first four miles due to the crowds.

The longest distance I ever ran in my life was 10 miles - until I registered for my first marathon. When I hit my 50th birthday, I promised myself I was going to complete a marathon. I registered for the Marine Corps Marathon, an event that brings out thousands and essentially closes Downtown DC for half a day. My brother had run a marathon ten years earlier and had actually turned in a decent time. Joe Strummer, lead singer of the Clash, had actually run two marathons, including the prestigious race in London, but he died suddenly when he was 50. Nevertheless, I was determined to go the whole 26 miles and 385 yards, even though my wife thought I was nuts.

So I started training, eight months before the race. And to make it more challenging, I got myself diagnosed as a diabetic. I started doing 5 miles around the neighborhood in Spring, and by June, 5 miles had become 7, then 9, and by 4th of July, I was running 11 miles in sweltering 95-degree heat. My wife was convinced I was going to drop dead on the footpath, and one evening I came pretty close. I went out for an 18-mile circuit, and by the 14th mile I was sweating pretty hard. By the 14th mile I was walking, and I walked the last 4 miles. I went to bed a zombie, but still woke up the next morning and ran ten miles. By Labor Day, I had dropped 20 of my 150 pounds and I looked as skinny as a starving cat. My right ankle was sore after every run, but I persevered on.

The last Sunday in October was race day. It started out in the 40s at 8 in the morning, but by mid-day it was 60 with a pleasant breeze. The Marines had very thoughtfully provided blocked-out areas for runners who thought they were going to set a certain pace (6 minutes a mile, 6:30 a mile, 7 minutes a mile and so on) and each block was accompanied by Marines who were going to set that pace themselves. It was all very orderly - right down to the men's and women's bushes (yes, they had Porta-potties, but no one wanted to brave the lines). The time approached for the race. They played the National Anthem, lined the runners up, fired the starting gun and we were off.

The tallest hill on the race course was no more than 300 feet above sea level and it was within the first five miles of the race. We started on the north side of the Pentagon and proceeded northward through Roslyn, an office district in Virginia opposite Georgetown. After an uphill jaunt, we doubled back and crossed the Key Bridge into Georgetown, then into the hills, back past the Reservoir, then along the Whitehurst Freeway and across the Mall to Capitol Hill. They had water stations every half mile or so, and I noticed that if I had a quick swig of G2 (Gatorade with half the sugar), it gave me a short burst of energy that lasted until I reached the next station. I also noticed that I was running comfortably at about 8 minutes a mile.

That did not last. I had just crossed the 14th Street Bridge from DC back into Crystal City, in Virginia, when my right knee started to lock up. I gritted my teeth and soldiered on, down and back up Crystal Drive and into the last couple of miles before the Hill. The last mile of the race was uphill going back again into Roslyn, and I could feel it with every step. The final portion of the race, that last 385 yards, was the incline up to the Iwo Jima Memorial, otherwise known as the Hill. I may have crawled those last yards, but I don't remember. I do recall getting one of those heavy iron medals - which is now pinned up in my office. Later, when I read the race results, I noticed that Gerry Epstein, also MIT Class of '78, had finished within ten minutes of my time; for whatever reason, I never saw him out on the course.

I drew several strips about the runner's high. I've encountered the kibitzer with the stick. Usually, it's a car full of teenagers. Sometimes it's teenage boys heckling me, but occasionally I've had girls whistle at me. They're less of a hazard than the cyclists, who come whizzing by at high speed. If they don't like my pace, they need to stay out of the middle of the street.

A word about coincidence. It turns out the idea for the strip above was also used in Mad Magazine, which used to have movie satires penned by Mort Drucker. He did a spoof on the movie "Rocky" that featured a Sylvester Stallone character who described his training routine as waking up early, cracking three raw eggs into a glass, drinking the eggs and then vomiting. It would not be the first time that a Stickles joke would show up somewhere else. The following joke turns out to have been a favorite New Year's Day joke of Johnny Carson for many years.

And why is it that Jews take up recreational running? Well, I already explained it...

Live From New York...

2011-06-27T20:04:00.000-07:00

If you are under the age of 40, Saturday Night Live has always been on TV. That was not always the case. When I was in high school, Saturday nights were defined by professional wrestling live from the Houston Coliseum and hosted by Paul Bosch on Channel 39, one of the only two UHF stations in town. Sure, professional wrestling could be found everywhere in the United States, but while we didn't have Bruno Sammartino or Fred Blassie, we had Ernie Ladd and Wahoo McDaniel - and a whole bunch of masked wrestlers from Mexico.

But that's off the subject. When I was a freshman at Tech, there really was nothing on TV on Saturday nights, and that meant that if you weren't at a mixer or otherwise engaged with a person of the opposite sex (or, for those who prefer, the same sex), life could be kind of boring. Friday nights at least had the Midnight Special on NBC and In Concert on ABC - two competing televised rock concerts (and Martin Mull once forgot which one he was on). Weeknights were given over to Carson and to Tom Snyder, whose Tomorrow Show came on after midnight and featured very intellectual hour-long discussions with some person of relevance in either news, sports or entertainment - The Daily Show without any of the humor (well, except for the evening Snyder decided to show off a walking stick made from the petrified penis of a bull). Sunday nights were given over to homework. But Saturday nights - well...

Then one October evening in 1975, the news came on, and after the news was this new variety show featuring comedy sketch material introduced by gameshow host Don Pardo. Onto the stage strolled Chevy Chase ("I'm Chevy Chase, and you're not!"), and before he could plant himself in front of the microphone, he fell flat on his ass. Then he gave us a big grin and announced those famous words, "Live from New York, it's Saturday Night!" Chase had not intended the pratfall, but thereafter, it became his signature move.

Saturday Night Live was off and running. The brainchild of Lorne Michaels of National Lampoon fame and Dick Ebersol, who handled all of NBC's sports programming, it featured comedians from Chicago's Second City (and "The Kentucky Fried Movie" and "Groove Tube" - look them up on Netflix) who were collectively known as the Not Ready For Prime-Time Players; they were Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Jane Curtin, Garrett Morris, Larraine Newman and Gilda Radner. There was always a guest host, who was somebody famous at the moment; one of the early episodes featured Gerald Ford, who was coaxed to say "I'm Gerald Ford, and you're not" (his press secretary, Ron Nessen, an ex-NBC newsman, was host that weekend), which was ironic, because a good bit of Chevy Chase's humor those first couple of years was him bumbling around the Oval Office as Ford.

That first cast would go on to bigger and better things as the years rolled on, and new faces - Eddie Murphy, Martin Short, Joe Piscopo, Jim Belushi and Bill Murray would step in. The show had its ups and downs; in the early '80s the routines weren't quite as fresh, and in one episode, someone actually said "fuck" on the air (and they weren't pulling the chain to turn on a light, either), but by the mid '80s, the show had regained a lot of its mojo, with Billy Crystal doing his Fernando Lamas impression ("you know, dahling, it's better to look good than to feel good")and Buster Poindexter leading the band and recording "Hot, Hot, Hot" (not a bar-mitzvah party since has been without that song). There was also Mister Grimley...

Then the show nose-dived again, and suddenly, we were seeing professional wrestling on Saturday nights in 1986 (deja vu all over again!). It was probably appropriate that Stickles was out of print by then. It took a heroic effort and a whole new line-up with Dana Carvey, Dennis Miller and Jon Lovitz to save the show, and SNL would go on to some of its best years with the Church Lady and Wayne's World among its featured sketches. In 1990, a serious challenge would emerge in the form of the entire Wayans family, whose In Living Color may be one of the funniest things Fox ever put on its network, so SNL discovered Chris Rock, who was himself the funniest black comedian since Eddie Murphy.

(And those of you who remember back that far probably also know that the line is, "I hate when that happens")

And the show has continued ever since - through the presidencies of two Bushes, a Clinton and an Obama. Every so often, one of the old cast members shows up again to guest-host, but a steady supply of young comedians continues to rotate in to make sketch comedy on Saturday night as the older names on the show move on to bigger and better things. At the end of geologic time, it is entirely possible that the only three shows left on television will be Saturday Night Live, the Simpsons and Sixty Minutes.

The Official Airline Guide

2011-06-21T21:02:00.000-07:00

For those of us in the aviation business, the Official Airline Guide is the Bible of air travel. Perhaps it's more correct to say it's the CRC Handbook of Air Travel. It was about the same size, thickness and weight as a Boston metropolitan telephone book. In the days before electronic reservations systems, it listed every scheduled flight made by every airline known to the travel industry worldwide. It also listed fares. It also identified every aircraft and every airline, and it had the itineraries of every flight number. In short, it had everything anyone would ever want to know about air travel (you are wrong, Kerosene Breath; some of those obscure Soviet and African airlines were not in there, but that's because they were on the blacklist).

When I was growing up, the Guide was published in three flavors. The Green Cover listed all the North American flights in effect at the 1st of each month. The Tan Cover listed the flights in effect at the 15th of the month. The Purple Cover listed all the global flights. There was also a Red Cover (maybe it was a Blue Cover) that listed the all-freight schedules, and another that listed hotel rates. The folks who made the Guide also offered data tapes with flight schedules that they sold to the airports and the consultants; these were data files that could be sorted by chronological order, by airline or by aircraft, depending on need. This was important because the FAA in 1978 had made available to the consulting community a simulation model that purported to run a day's worth of flight operations through an airport coded into it using numbers and letters. In 1988, the FAA made available to the consulting community an even better model that showed a graphic representation of a day's worth of flights traveling through an airport coded by using numbers, letters and lines on a grid. The one element both models relied on was a complete schedule of the day's flights, coded in an ASCII delimited format, which only the Official Airline Guide, or OAG, could supply.

I wasn't interested in that; I simply wanted to count how many flights went through a particular airport on a particular day. But around 1995, the airlines started sharing codes on flights, which meant they could sell tickets on the flights of other airlines with whom they had a code-sharing agreement. What was a revenue-generating convenience for them quickly became a counting nuisance for me; when the Guide showed Continental Airlines flight 27 and Northwest Airlines flight 27 and Cathay Pacific Airlines flight 27 and Bashkirian Airlines flight 27, all departing Chignik, Alaska, for Cabumsk, Alaska, at the same time of day, they were all the same airplane, one airplane instead of four. It was exhausting weeding out the duplicate flights.

Not only that, but the publishers of the Guide wanted an arm and a leg for their flight schedules. When the Internet got to be a household convenience, there were soon other ways to get the same sort of flight information. Many airports took to listing their daily flights in chronological order, though they still listed every single duplicate code-share flight. So other sites sprung up. The first was Flightarrivals.com, which listed every flight at an airport within a two-hour time window. They were helpful, but the two-hour limitation was, well limiting, and they didn't always identify the type of aircraft in service. Another site, Flightaware.com, offered a chronological listing of flights at each airport, including a history going back at least a week. It also showed flights in the vicinity of a particular airport, on what looked like a radar monitor. Again, the site showed everything...but the flights at airports outside the United States. A third site, Flightstats, completed that piece of the puzzle, showing arrivals and departures at every airport in the world (it even had a button that allowed users to "hide" the codeshare flights). And the information could be downloaded onto an Excel spreadsheet, where it could be sorted and filtered. The Promised Land had been reached. I now know that during the Summer tourist season, the airport in Antalya, Turkey, handles more flights daily than Boston Logan.

So why am I boring you with all this? Because I am an aviation consultant and I do this for a living. And I am Pud Stickles.

That Old Gang of Mine

2011-06-20T20:04:00.000-07:00

As you probably noticed, most of the characters that made their way into Stickles were caricatures of real people. People from high school. People from MIT. Even people from Stanford. In most instances, they were happy to let me give them a little notoriety...as long as it couldn't be traced back to them.

Believe it or not, I used to work with these guys. The time was 1986 - a lifetime ago, it seems. Most of them have moved on - some to other organizations, others to more senior positions in the same location. I moved on to DC. But I never drew a group portrait like this again - in part because the project I moved to had a steady stream of personnel changes over 20 years, and it was hard to keep up with the new faces. As it was, it took me six months of off-and-on work to get this portrait completed, and it was kind of a labor of love.

So who are they? One day I'll remember all of their names. And to the three on the far right side of the picture, I'm sorry I cut your heads in half.

The Legend of Fritts Botwell

2011-06-19T20:57:00.000-07:00

I've never considered myself a fan of country and western music. And this is despite my upbringing in Texas, where the twang of a pedal steel guitar and the sonorous drawl of a country love song were hard to avoid. In 1975, the film "Nashville" was made by Robert Altman, and it proceeded to dig into the background and the underground of the making and selling of country music (and to take a dig at Jimmy Carter, the non-candidate candidate for president). It was fun story-telling for Altman and for Hollywood stars such as Lily Tomlin, Henry Gibson and others, but for me it defined the intersection of the genuine and the cheesy that has made country music so frustrating for me to listen to. Country music for me was Glen Campbell's "Rhinestone Cowboy" (which Johnny Carson proceeded to warble late one night before falling off a wooden horse) and Jerry Reed, who made a hit out of "Amos Moses" in 1971 and proceeded to make a career out of rewriting it in several different versions before becoming a TV miniseries mainstay.

At the same time, I spent a lot of late evenings my freshman year listening to a bluegrass show on WTBS that came on prior to "The Ghetto", which filled the midnight hours with good soul and funk in the days before disco fever. I knew enough about country and bluegrass to win a few pizzas by answering the station's call-in contest questions. There were some good bluegrass bands out there - the Country Gentlemen, the Holy Modal Rounders (well, okay, the Rounders were not your normal bluegrass band, unless you listened to KFAT in Gilroy, California, in 1980) - and some good slices of Americana out there, such as "Six Days on the Road", which was a genuine, authentic truck-driving tune by Dave Dudley (recast by Sawyer Brown more recently), to which C.W. McCall's "Convoy", which was a much bigger hit and started the CB craze in 1976, could not hold a candle.

In 1975, a whole new brand of music came out of Texas that would redefine country music for at least a decade. Willie Nelson released "The Red-Headed Stranger", a collection of spare ballads that featured Willie, his guitar and his voice, with his backing band somewhere off in the distant background. These were pure songs of lovin', fightin' and heartache, and they were the first wave of what would be known as outlaw country, a sound that merged the short-haired Nashville sensibilities of Nelson and Waylon Jennings with the long-haired, alternative stylings of Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen, the New Riders of the Purple Sage and others who took their trips on LSD. Waylon, Willie and Jerry Jeff Walker came to represent the outlaw sound and to make country cool enough for Woodstock-size festivals. Little watering holes in Texas named Luckenbach and Terlingua would become famous as cowboy hangouts (long before Michael Dell built his first PC in an Austin garage).

Into this milieu wandered David Allan Coe, straight out of prison. He was made to be an outlaw musician - he was a big, bad hombre, and he had a habit of both name-dropping and telling people who he was and wasn't. He established his brand with a Steve Goodman song called "You Never Even Call Me by My Name" that was described as "the perfect country and western song". It was on the Nashville charts about the time that Fritts Botwell, who was not Johnny Cash or Charlie Pride or Willie Nelson, arrived.

Fritts Botwell was destined to become the savior of the MIT Undergraduate Association spring concert series, as chronicled in a series of Stickles cartoons. Every Spring, the UA became concert promoters, bringing famous and not so famous bands to the MIT campus (the Grateful Dead had played a free concert on the MIT Student Center steps back in the '60s). The year before I got to Tech, a little band from Boston named Aerosmith had played the Rockwell Cage, although the results were regarded as somewhat disastrous, since all the urchins in Cambridge showed up in force, to consume beer and puke on the dirt floor. The concerts thereafter had been less than stellar successes, despite the fact that a graduate of the Class of '69, Tom Scholz, would go on to form a little band called Boston. With all the talent that resided within a 25-mile radius of 77 Mass Avenue, the UA just couldn't make money promoting concerts.

Part of the problem was the UA couldn't afford any big headliners, and those musicians they could afford were not very well known. It would be at least two years before new wave music would take hold on college campuses, thus providing schools like MIT with a steady source of bands that were obscure to everyone else in the world but college students. So it was up to Pud's friend Ross to hit upon the idea of bringing in a country musician.

Jim Croce was a easy-listening balladeer who burst on the scene in 1972 with "You Don't Mess Around With Jim", about a bar-room brawler who picked one too many fights, and followed it up in 1973 with an even bigger hit called "Bad, Bad, Leeroy Brown", about a bar-room brawler who picked one too many fights. Had he not died in a plane crash in late 1973, no fern bar could have contained him. As it was, he would go on to have a string of hits after his death (including "Time in a Bottle", which was about a bar-room brawler who...no, that's not right), becoming almost as legendary a posthumous performer as Jimi Hendrix and Tupac Shakur (although Tupac's not dead; he's just living in New Zealand).

Arkadelphia is a little town in Arkansas, not far from Hope - or the I-30 Interstate. It became something of a running joke in our family, for reasons known only to my youngest brother.

I don't recall if any of these comic strips ever saw the light of day or the page of a newspaper (I cranked out a lot of material in 1976, when these strips were drawn, and thursday only published once or twice a week, depending on the ad revenues). I'm not even sure if MIT's students are still in the concert promotion business. But country music is still with us. It has bounced back and forth between the sublime (Joe Ely, Steve Earle), the ridiculous (Lee Greenwood, Toby Keith) and the Parrotheads (Jimmy Buffett).

The John Hancock Tower

2011-06-13T18:35:00.000-07:00

The tallest building in Boston was (and still is) the Hancock Tower. Designed by I.M. Pei & Partners in 1968, it served as the headquarters for John Hancock Insurance, hence the name. The Hancock displaced the Prudential Tower (the other insurance company) with its glassed-in top floor observatory and flashing white strobe beacon as the tallest vantage point in town, although the Pru remained the backdrop for many a Strat's Rat while I was in Cambridge.

The Hancock was a glass monolith with the footprint of a parallelogram and blue as the Boston sky. It was just about completed when I arrived at MIT in the Fall of 1974, but it didn't officially open until 1977, due to a certain number of engineering snafus.

One of them was that the windows kept falling out. Not just a couple and not all at once, but one here, one there, one somewhere else - on a continuous basis for almost three years. Things got so hazardous that a scaffold was erected to protect the patrons of the Trinity Church next door from falling glass. It seemed necessary; rumor has it that one day a workman on one of the upper floors of the Hancock happened to drop his lunchbox - right through the church roof.

As the panes of glass fell, they were replaced with plywood. Some of the plywood was black and some of it was a natural wood color, i.e., yellow. With windows popping out on a frequent basis, the effect created was a blue, black and gold checkerboard pattern towering into the sky. It was pretty to look at, in its own quirky way, but the building owners were concerned that someone would want to look out of those nice big picture windows, and while the glass was reasonably transparent, plywood is opaque, which makes viewing difficult. The architects search for a solution, but none could be found. Replacement windows popped out just as readily as the original 4 x 11 panes. The architects replaced every pane of glass in the building, but windows would still pop out. Eventually it was determined that wind was not a factor in the detachment of the windows; what caused the glass to pop out was a condition of thermal oscillation. Each window was two panes of glass with a pocket of air sandwiched in between the panes. When it was warm, the air between the glass expanded and popped the outer window pane out of its mounting. This didn't happen immediately; it took several cycles of heating and cooling to loosen the outer glass.

The Hancock had some other problems. First, the foundations were compromised by the Back Bay muck the building rested upon. Then the building exhibited a tendency to sway in the wind. To counteract this force, the building's engineers installed some gigantic mass dampers, which seemed to check the swaying characteristics. The final calamity was not engineering, but financing; the building was sold for north of a billion dollars five years ago, but the real estate trust that bought the building went broke in the 2009 financial panic, and the Hancock Tower was auctioned off. It now belongs to another trust known as Boston Properties (appropriate); the Hancock insurance company itself is now in the hands of Canadians. I.M. Pei went on to design many other structures, some of which were located at MIT (including the Green Building and the "Pei Toilet", AKA the Wiesner Building - it is covered in white tiles and looks like a...)

Incidentally, this strip was redrawn; the original version looked like this:

There was a problem that made this cartoon unsuitable for publication in a family newspaper; I placed the hyphen between the "Han" and the "cock". A similar problem would plague the original "Outtada pool" cartoon about roaches. There is a reason why cartoonists never write the word "FLICK" in a comic strip when they show a light being turned on, and you can probably guess what it is. So I substituted the word "CLICK" instead.

Moonies

2011-06-12T18:44:00.000-07:00

Right about the time I arrived at MIT was also the time when the Unification Church first started gathering up willing converts. The Church was the vision of Reverend Sun Myung Moon, a Korean preacher who fancied himself the second coming of Jesus. It would eventually collect large sums of money, mostly by convincing its converts to stand on freeway off-ramps and sell roses, and use that money to accumulate real estate and start the Washington Times (the Times itself was created as something of a conservative counterbalance to the Washington Post, which was left as the only newspaper in the Nation's Capital by the demise of the Evening Star, a more traditional, conservative-leaning daily), among other enterprises.

The Unification Church was a cult. There were other cults in our day - the Scientologists, the Hari Krishnas, the Children of God and Guru Maharaj Ji - but none would have the staying power of the Moonies. I once wrote a paper on cults for one of Professor Louis Menand's political science classes (Professor Menand being the father of Louis Menand, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and contributer to such publications as the New Yorker), and it focused rather heavily on the Moonies. The Unification Church had a way of homing in on bewildered and lonely students, inviting them to come visit one of their "houses" to share camaraderie with a community of loving individuals, and then sucking them in and keeping them there. Many parents reported losing their sons and daughters permanently to the Church, which taught its converts to distrust family and friends, especially those who tried to talk them out of staying with the church. Some parents, desperate to break the Church's influence on their children, went so far as to enlist "deprogrammers" to undo the brainwashing that the Church had supposedly done; it was an effort that met with mixed results, with some followers leaving the Church and others denouncing their parents for having attempted to break the Church's hold on them.

Sun Myung Moon himself had very grandiose visions of himself. He thought of himself as the Messiah. He was given to holding massive weddings in places like Yankee Stadium, where he would pair up 50,000 converts to each other and then marry off the resulting 25,000 couples. This was supposed to showcase the Church's power and convey the bliss experienced by the followers of this Messiah. The mass weddings were also intended to bind the newlyweds even more deeply to the Church and to fuel their zeal to find more converts and more donors to the Church's coffers. Moon was also given to hosting policy conferences on worldly subjects and inviting serious thinkers and credible intellectuals to come speak at them, as a way of boosting his credibility. When United Press International was in danger of folding, he bought them and added them to his media empire. When the University of Bridgeport was ready to go under, the Church dangled money in front of them and annexed them. Moon was building an empire and credibility, all at the same time.

But credibility has remained elusive. In 1982, Sun Myung Moon went to jail for tax evasion, in part because even Ronald Reagan's IRS refused to believe the Unification Church was really a church and that all of its various enterprises were Church-related. And the "cult" label has been impossible for the Church to shake, although these days they don't have college students standing beside freeway off-ramps; they've found immigrants to take those jobs (which seems to confirm the opinions of those who think that without immigrants, there are all kinds of menial dead-end jobs that would never be filled).

Fish and Strategic Gamers, Again

2011-06-07T20:49:00.000-07:00

I wrote a couple of paragraphs about these guys a couple of months ago, but I missed a strip.

You can tell it's the '70s because the Strategic Gamers were occupying a squash court. In the '60s, it would have been a handball court. By the '80s, squash was passé, and all the squash courts had been converted to racquetball courts. Evolution continued, and by the latter half of the '80s, the racquetball courts were now wallyball courts (wallyball was simply volleyball in a confined space, with the walls in play - you could bounce the volleyball off one wall, but not off two). These days, enclosed spaces are given over to Nintendo Wii and look very much like your living room.

A Glass of Yeast Piss

2011-05-29T21:27:00.000-07:00

Ed, the Hall Tutor, was the consummate preppie from Downeast. He had his obligatory Topsiders (worn without socks, of course) and corduroys, but what distinguished him from the others of his kind was his choice of shirt. In most strips, he was pictured wearing a tee-shirt that was an homage to his favorite beer, which was Coors.

Today, Coors is a pretty ordinary beer - you can get it anywhere - but in 1977, Coors was not made outside its home state of Colorado. It also was not preserved, which meant that it was not widely available. In the early '80s, Coors built a brewery in North Carolina, and ended up destroying its mystique. Today, Coors is foreign-owned (Molson's of Canada bought the brand in 2005, and SAB Miller, a South African brewery that bought the legendary Miller Beer brand, went into a joint venture together a couple of years later to brew Coors in the United States), and other beers have captured the attention of beer connoisseurs. The thought of Miller and Coors together would have horrified purists in the '70s. Miller Time, it might have been back then, but not if we could help it.

In 1972, it was the rare Coors bottle that made its way to the East Coast. Texas was able to get occasional imports of the beer, and it was prized by Texas liberals who took their vacations in places like Rocky Mountain National Park (in fact, Coors was the only beer served in our household). Coors was cold-filtered and made with Rocky Mountain water, which meant that the beer was as pure and fresh as the mountains. Other beers were heat-pasteurized, and though it's hard to fathom how heat pasteurization could kill the taste of a glass of urine, cold-filtering was considered to be natural. Naturally, anyone who treated his body as a temple but still loved a good beer buzz early in the morning would drink Coors. It was an easy beer to drink - perhaps too easy. In fact, it was said that the only difference between Coors and piss was 30 minutes. At least there was a time difference involved, as opposed to Shiner Beer, which was concocted in a little brewery in Shiner, Texas, and could strip your innards.

What was ironic about the liberal worship of the Coors brand was the fact that the Coors brewery was owned by some of the most fanatical conservatives to venture into politics. Adolph Coors had started the brewery in Golden, Colorado, back in 1913, and it had stayed in the family until the 21st Century. There was an unwritten rule that no outsiders were allowed in the brewery, which essentially meant no blacks and no Mexicans. It was also an anti-union shop, which also rankled those trying to organize the brewery workers. On top of that, there were the outspoken politics of Joseph Coors, who formed the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress in the '70s (later, it became the Free Congress Foundation) and was an early backer of Ronald Reagan's run for president in 1976 and again in 1980. The Committee's principal mission was bashing liberals and liberal causes, which was basically Coors thumbing their noses at their biggest beer-drinking constituency.

The attempts to organize the Coors brewery, and the rumors of their discriminatory practices against Hispanics led to a boycott effort in California, and that boycott was a heated topic on the Stanford Campus in 1979. The esteemed Senate of the Associated Students of Stanford University decided that the issue required further study, and in early 1979, the Senate sent a delegation to Golden, Colorado, to discuss the boycott with the Coors family. They came, they saw, they quaffed, and they left. The four student senators came back to Stanford and issued a final report: "Burrrp!"

The delegation also reported back to the Senate that they had found out, among other things, the secret to Coors Light, which was a light beer that managed to produce a nice, foamy head when poured into a glass (supposedly, Lite Beer, which was Miller Beer's pioneering brand, had no head). Miller Beer had captured the attention of beer drinkers with its "everything you wanted in a beer - and less" ads, featuring any number of personalities from the worlds of literature, motion pictures and especially sports. The other brewers tried to counter the runaway popularity of Lite Beer by introducing their own light brands; I'm not sure of the origins of this ad, though I suspect it was Coors again. Whatever it was, a cartoon was sure to follow.

Now, I already mentioned my skepticism that heat pasteurization could kill the taste of urine. When someone says, "This beer tastes like piss", they are not far off the mark. The brewing process essentially consists of introducing yeast into a porridge of malt, barley, hops and a few other choice ingredients. The yeast, who cannot believe their good fortune at having been invited to an all-you-can-eat buffet of their favorites, proceed to gorge themselves, and then their tiny little bodily functions take over. The food acts as a powerful diuretic, and the yeast piss themselves until they drown. You drink the piss. Now, while you may be tempted to tell your bartender, "I'd like a glass of yeast piss, please", you may want to refrain.

And let's end this essay with a story about Budweiser's mascot. In 1988, before the Budweiser Frogs had been created, Anheuser Busch came up with another cute little animal to sell their beer products - a lumpy, nondescript bull terrier named Spuds McKenzie. Spuds was described as a party animal, and he was competition for Alex, the beer-fetching dog popularized in commercials for Stroh's Beer. But Spuds had a decidedly Jamaican lilt to his attitude, which was kind of hard to fathom in a bull terrier. Nonetheless, I was inspired to come up with a poster that played on the brief popularity of Spuds McKenzie.

I've got to admit - the potato looks like that dog.

The Barely Brothers Band

2011-05-23T21:40:00.000-07:00

It is said that the legend of the Baskir Musicians is strong. It was also said of my family that when we were still young and in school, one brother (me) played the flute, another brother played the piano and the third brother played the stereo. My youngest brother would develop quite a CD collection once he got out into the working world and settled in North Carolina, and his son would learn to play bass and join a band. If you happen to be in the Massachusetts Berkshires, near Hampshire College, you might eventually run into these guys. They are the Barely Brothers Band - at the far left, Sam Baskir: center, Ian Schenholm; near right Daniel Peck; and far right, Nick Anschuetz. Also in the picture is Scott Murawski of Max Creek and the Mike Gordon Band.

The Barely Brothers Band has been turning out some good music recently, and some of it can now be found online. These songs were recorded at Snowzees a year ago but are just now available:

Wolfman's Brother

Bathtub Gin

Just a reminder - this is the Stickles music tradition:

Don't Touch My Coke!

2011-05-22T19:41:00.000-07:00

I miss the golden age of air travel. For me it was probably more golden than for most because I can remember a time when there was no airport security. In the '60s, when I was a mere lad, passengers walked in the front door at the airport terminal, bought their tickets, checked their bags (as many as they wanted, for free!) and (in some cases) walked across the tarmac to get into the airplane. The passenger boarding bridge, which allowed people to walk onto the airplane directly from the holdroom without going outside was still a relatively new invention, and despite the introduction of the Boeing 707 (and later the 727), there were still plenty of piston-driven propeller aircraft around - Convair 440's, Douglas DC-6's and 7's, and Lockheed Constellations. For an airplane enthusiast (and I was one), it was a time when I could go to the airport on a Saturday afternoon, just to watch the airplanes take off and land. There were even observation decks - outdoor observation decks! - on the roofs of some terminals, so you could look out at the airplanes with only a chain link fence holding you back (for your protection, not to protect homeland security).

Then in 1968, the first American got on board an airplane and decided in mid-flight to change his travel itinerary to include Havana, Cuba. He would soon be joined by others, some of them fleeing conscription into the Vietnam War and others motivated by their solidarity with Fidel Castro. All were enabled by handguns they had toted onto the airplane with them (because happiness is a warm gun). In 1970, a quartet of American aircraft were hijacked in Europe and flown to the desert (I think it was Egypt). This time, the aircraft had been hijacked by Palestinians in what would be the first of many incidents that were intended to liberate their homeland. The airplanes were later incinerated.

After a sufficient number of these incidents, the US authorities, and those in other countries decided that perhaps they needed to restrict the carriage of weapons onto aircraft, and the first laws were enacted to prohibit persons from walking onto airplanes armed. They set up the security procedures that we all came to know and, if not love, then accept. Metal detectors were hastily developed, tested and installed at all airports, and everyone who wanted to go out to where passengers were boarding airplanes had to pass through one - to prove they were weapon free. The detectors were simple - they shone X-Rays through the person who was passing through them and emitted a loud warning beep if anything suspicious were detected. Crude, they were, but they were effective. And security screeners trained and employed by the FAA or hired by private contractors working for the airlines made sure that no contraband got through. It was easy, it was simple, it was no big deal. Then came 9-11.

The destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York was an unexpected shock that changed everything about air travel. Suddenly, we were all on hair-trigger alert. Airplanes that had previously been quarantined from us by a thin line of metal detectors were now suddenly more vulnerable than anyone had ever conceived, and their potential to be used as bombs had us all spooked. No one was more spooked than our government, which now fretted how to reliably keep us safe from terrorists bent on committing suicide by ramming an airplane into a building. Thus was born the Transportation Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security, and the burdensome rigamarole of having your bags sniffed by explosives detectors and of taking off your shoes, your belt, your metal jewelry and all your other junk. The plain vanilla metal detector now takes pictures of you (and sells them to Penthouse), and if you don't like it, the security agents will play "I feel your fingers, touching my shoulder" (fans of Jekyll & Hyde: The Musical already know the tune). If you don't like getting your junk touched (and I have many friends in Hong Kong who are very possessive of their junks), it can be hard to find a seat on a flight. For the airlines, life has never been the same. As soon as they dug out of the hole caused by skittish passengers abandoning flights after 9-11, oil prices went through the roof, and it took a recession to bring prices down, which meant no one was flying airplanes. Now, flights are full and ticket prices are up, but so is fuel again. The airlines just can't catch a break. American Airlines, the one carrier that knew how to make money in the '80s and '90s, hasn't seen a profit in a decade. And every other airline except Southwest has gone bankrupt at least once (maybe that's what American has done wrong!).

We had other worries in 1980. For one thing, the Iron Curtain had not yet fallen. For another, oil prices had gone up to $40 a barrel, which pushed the pump price well over $1 a gallon. The cause of that was a third worry: Iran had seized Americans as hostages. And finally, the economy was in the doldrums. But the airlines had been deregulated, and we could be reasonably certain that flights were safe from the specter of hijacking. We just couldn't be confident of the ingredients in Coca-Cola.

Go Go Pogo

2011-05-19T21:11:00.000-07:00

Cartoonists who do it for a living publish 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The Monday through Friday comics page in the typical newspaper is filled with four-panel black and white strips, but on Sunday, the cartoonist gets a half page and produces what is typically an 8-panel cartoon, in glorious living color. Most of my cartoons were four panels, but I did experiment with the Sunday 8-panel format, only I didn't colorize them. Because Stickles was appearing in the Tech at the time, I didn't have a whole lot of space for my cartoons, and so consequently, it is likely that the larger format strips were not published. But I managed to create a half dozen of the Sunday format strips in the early 1980's, and this is the first of them.

What a line-up, indeed. The year is 1980, the last year of the presidency of Jimmy Carter, and in England, it is early in the term of a political ideologue named Margaret Thatcher, a prime minister who would become an example and the muse of Ronald Reagan. On the East and West Coasts of the United States, where economic malaise had settled in, punk rock and new wave music are just beginning to leave their mark. I was in Palo Alto at the time and settling into my first permanent 40-hour-a-week job, and the Bay Area, like Boston, was teeming with young bands playing aggressive music that sounded just like the music happening in the night-clubs in London (no, not the discos!). It was a time of Turning Japanese and Dancing With Myself, of Urgh! A Music War, skinny ties, skinny-legged jeans and sleeveless tee-shirts, when bands such as the Dead Kennedys, the Circle Jerks and X were just beginning to establish a name for themselves, and KROQ in Los Angeles was beginning to shake up the airwaves. You could still see Greg Kihn and his band performing in the Stanford Student Center, in the days before "The Break-up Song" and "Jeopardy" made him a nationwide phenomenon (Kihn hailed from Beserkeley and his band was a Bay Area favorite - at least among the skinny tie, skinny-legged jean and sleeveless tee-shirt set).

Boston had its own favorite haunts for music, promoted by WBCN and a host of college radio stations. Because I was on the West Coast, I had no idea who the big names in underground music in Beantown were, but if I had to guess, new wave bands in Boston got named the same way new wave bands in Berkeley got named. Hence, the strip above.

Incidentally, the typical 8-panel strip always had a 2-panel joke followed by a 6-panel joke. That 2-panel was kind of a warm-up act for the headliner. In the strip above, the reference to "three-out-of-ten" is an homage to Darryl Martinie, the Cosmic Muffin, who was a long-time reader of Zodiac signs for the star-struck and star-crossed, on the radio in Boston and elsewhere. He would come on every evening, usually late at night, with his cosmic predictions for the coming day, replete with references to rising signs, moons in seventh houses, cusps and other astrological phenomena. Before he signed off with his customary salutation, "It's a wise man who rules the stars. It's a fool who's ruled by them", he would summarize with a numerical prediction for the coming day. If he gave you a 7 or 8 out of a possible ten, it was going to be a good day to take that all-important final or call that chick from McCormick that you thought was giving you the eye in the 8.03 lecture. But woe be unto you if he only gave a 3 or less out of a possible 10; then it was a good time to hole up in your room and avoid direct sunlight for a while. When the '90s came around, so did Miss Clio, who could be summoned up by phone - which kind of dimmed Darryl Martinie's star.

Mad Man and Englishmen

2011-05-18T18:41:00.000-07:00

Yes, I was in the advertising racket. You've already seen this ad I did for Dick's Deli in thursday.

Dick's got these cartoons for free (aside from what they paid to thursday, which wasn't much when you figure they stiffed the newspaper out of $100 when they closed unexpectedly). So did a lot of my MIT colleagues, for whom I drew posters advertising parties, mixers, special movie showings and other things. But I had at least one client that paid me for my drawings. As I mentioned, my cartoons were used to sell vitamins (or rather supplements) to kids. Thus was created the GOPHER Gang, a group of cool kids and one funny-looking doctor (and a gopher, of course). The GOPHERs were created to promote good nutritional habits to a younger audience, which everyone knew was going to be a hard sell given the typical youngster's preference for soda pop, fast food, chips and candy. However, it didn't help that the first attempt to reach them was a newsletter filled with dense print, along with the cartoon characters.

This was the one and only issue (and I'm leaving out the inside pages of this four-page newsletter).

This was as far as the project got. It had everything it needed to become a hit, but then, so did the Carolana Colony Mystery Package, for which I also drew a cartoon. The most I'm going to say about the Carolana Colony Mystery Package is that it commemorated the Carolana Colony, a heretofore undiscovered British Colony that was found in Texas in 1987 when a backhoe operator digging in a parking lot just north of downtown Houston happened upon some undisturbed black earth graves. A friend of mine - a Brit who had moved to Texas almost two decades earlier to promote unregulated offshore radio (pirate radio, mateys!) - took an interest in the graves, as did a professor and archaeologist at the University of Houston. The professor researched the history of the graves, and determined that they were indeed from an English Colony that tried to establish itself in Texas at a time contemporary with the Carolina Colony at Jamestown. My friend tried to turn that history into a pop culture item by putting together a package consisting of 8 miniature flags representing the Eight Flags Over Texas (France, Spain, Mexico, Texas, Confederacy and the United States - and England and Carolana), a booklet with a condensed history, a cartoon that I drew, and a baggie full of dirt (taken from the parking lot where the graves were found). These were taken to Trader's Village in Grand Prairie, Texas, and offered for sale, and in one afternoon exactly zero were sold (on the other hand, some lucky customers walked away with bargains on Blaunkton car stereos and Alphine speakers).

So what did Houston do with this astonishing bit of history that was right under their noses? They did what Texans usually do with historic artifacts - they paved it over with asphalt.

Moving in Stereo

2011-05-17T18:42:00.000-07:00

Stereos. They were almost as ubiquitous as fire extinguishers in a student's room. Just about everyone had one. And roaches (everyone had many, many more than one).

Stereos provided our high-fidelity musical entertainment. Today's systems are quite different from what we had in the '70s. Whereas today's units are indeed a unit (receiver, amplifier, tape deck, CD player and sometimes even speakers in a single plastic body), high fidelity in the '70s was built on components (and Bang & Olufsons are still built on that principle today). You didn't buy everything in one box (well, you could, but the sound reproduction was, well, Heathkit quality). No, you bought everything separately - receiver, amplifier (most receivers were the amplifier, but a really sophisticated set-up required a separate amplifier to really give the sound a boost), speakers and a turntable. Those with the money would get a cassette tape player to go with the system, but frequently the turntable was all you needed, especially in the days of 33 1/3 long-playing records. I later found the tape player to be a useful feature because I liked to rip my music off the radio, and somehow recording the ambient sound coming through the air tended to lose something - and gain something (like a coughing fit in the middle of a song you were recording). Connecting it all together were jacks and wires, and you had to plug the right jack into the right hole, otherwise you wouldn't get sound to your speakers. It was red jack to red hole, black jack to black hole, and so on. It was a little like trying to patch together all the components of a desktop computer (but who uses those anymore?)

In the '60s, stereo receivers would frequently come from places like RadioShack. My father, the Renaissance Man, actually brought home a kit from RadioShack and carefully soldered the whole thing together, giving us our first stereo system. When I bought my first system, in 1977, I carefully researched Consumer Reports (my high-brow neighbors on the floor went for the electronics magazines with the reports on stereo equipment that were prepared by experts in the field, supposedly), and developed a plan for a system with everything I needed for about $400. In those days, $400 would buy you about 100 watts of power, a turntable with a clean sound coming through the tone arm and needle, and a set of speakers that could faithfully reproduce just about anything recorded on Deutsche Gramophon. I went with a Harman Kardon receiver/amplifier, a B-I-C turntable with an AudioTechnica cartridge and needle on the tone arm and Avid speakers - all of which came highly recommended by Consumer Reports. It was plenty powerful; in fact I could stick my speakers into the window and bounce an echo off the Landau Building (a Chemical Engineering lab right next to East Campus) from my Goodale dorm room.

As powerful as my system was (and it had enough power to blast Hoyt Axton's "You're the Hangnail in My Life" clear up Ames Street), it was no match for Norm Sheppard's system with its floor-mounted speakers. Ed, our hall tutor, also had a massive sound system that was just perfect for listening to the heartbeat at the end of Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" broadcast at 100 decibels. Various people on Third and Fourth East also had the ability to crank it up and annoy those peaceful souls on First West, and when it was time for a party, we could string all the stereos together in parallel so that they'd all play the same record in unison. Of course, doing that would blow all the fuses, so we simply removed them and stuffed a large wad of aluminum foil into the fuse socket. When we cranked up the sound, the foundations of West Campus literally moved.

When I became a disc jockey (and I was the house DJ for a few of the Strat's Rats in my senior year), I found out about different types of turntables. The set-up in my dorm room had a belt-drive turntable, which was typical for most consumer applications, but disc jockeys needed something more heavy-duty. For them, there were direct-drive turntables, in which a gear in the base of the unit spun the turntable, rather than a belt. This was essential because disc jockeys, whether in a broadcast studio or a night club, needed the ability to cue records by hand so that the music started the instant the needle was placed on the record (there were little tricks to this; you could let the turntable spin while holding the record in place on the felt pad that was the turntable top, then gently releasing the record so that it would start to spin without the needle skipping). Belt drives were too jerky and unreliable for this task; for one thing, holding the record still could screw up the belt, and even if that weren't a problem, the jerk of the record when the belt engaged could cause the needle to skip off the disc. In the early '80s, Grandmaster Flash would learn how to slide records back and forth on a direct drive turntable, producing the "scratching" sound that has become so familiar to hip-hop enthusiasts.

As I mentioned, I did not buy a tape player for my stereo system until a few years later. I had acquired a car with a cassette player in it, and I wanted to record my LP's (and certain songs I heard on the radio) onto cassette tape so I could play them in my car. The first tape players had a single slot, or "deck", for the cassette tape, which meant that they recorded from either the turntable or the radio, then played back. There was no cutting and pasting possible; you got only what you recorded directly off the other units. Then, in the early-to-mid '80s, the first dual tape decks appeared...and the recording industry had a cow. "These dual decks will lead to music piracy" they screamed in unison, and the din got even louder when Aiwa made a dual dubbing deck that could record from one cassette to another at high speed. There were dire predictions of lost sales and attempts to restrict the use of the dual decks, but eventually, common sense and the consumer won out. The next threat was just about to emerge - the dual deck VCR, capable of dubbing from one VHS tape onto another. This was 1990. Within 20 years, everyone was loading MP3's onto their iPod's and Smartphones, and the music industry would never be the same again.

Tunafish

2011-05-16T19:10:00.000-07:00

Tunafish. It's a favorite of human beings and cats alike. I mean, it's a real convenience food - it comes out of a can. The only thing you have to do to it is open it into a bowl (draining off the water first), put in some mayonnaise and mash it up. The result can be spread between two slices of bread with either a leaf of lettuce, a little butter, maybe some pickle relish and served as part of a healthy and delicious lunch (or you can put a tunafish sandwich or two into a baggie and save it for lunchtime). Cats, being none too particular, will eat tunafish without any special preparation; all you need to do is open a can and set it in front of them. Many cats will even lick out the can once the tunafish is out of it. Tunafish is the one thing that cats are dreaming of when they're chowing down on the kibble that their owners typically set in front of them. About the only thing a tunafish doesn't do well is smell like a bouquet of peonies. No, it smells like tunafish, and the longer it smells like tunafish the worse it smells - except to pussycats, who would eat it even if it had been fermenting in the sun for a week.

I've had tuna in many different forms. I've had tunafish on rye (yum). I've had tuna melts on rye, on the presumption that warm tunafish always tastes better with a little melted cheddar cheese on it. I've had tuna salad, which in most restaurants is a whole lot of lettuce, some tomato and maybe a few bits of fish hiding underneath it all on the plate. I've eaten tuna sushi, which presumes that Americans can be suckered into eating a raw piece of fish on a finger of rice if you make it expensive enough (this is also the French theory of cooking that created steak tartar). And I've had tuna steak, which is premium eating with very little fat and cholesterol.

Tuna steaks are tasty for the same reason that swordfish, shark and marlin are. These are gamefish. They are not small; in fact, the full-grown bluefin tuna is often over one thousand pounds, making it one of the biggest fish in the ocean. It is also a voracious eater. It has to be; it spends a lot of time and energy just swimming from one end of the ocean to the other. As a result, it is a very lean and muscular fish (despite its almost oval shape), which is not something you would imagine looking at a six-ounce can of it on a store shelf.

Tuna come in many varieties - about 50 in all. The ones we see on store shelves are yellowfin and skipjack, but there are other varieties. Bluefin is a favorite - so much so that it is at risk of overfishing. Then there is the albacore, which is the premium white tuna you see in a can. I am told there is also a variety called emocore; it swims mostly in the darker corners of the ocean and wonders why its life always sucks.

Tuna is just about a perfect source of protein for both man and feline, but there are some caveats. First of all, in the process of eating other fish, tuna tend to collect a whole lot of mercury; in fact, pregnant women are warned not to eat tuna, and even us mere mortals are warned to not make a habit out of eating albacore. Second, there was a time when tuna were fished in these large purse-seine nets that trawled up just about everything in the water - tuna, other fish, and dolphins, which are intelligent mammals that die in the nets and are discarded by fishermen afterwards. Lately, a lot of the major canners have been touting their tuna as "dolphin safe", so some of the furor has died down. Now, it's the tuna themselves that are in danger of being overfished, so a lot of well-meaning organizations have tried to get the fishing industry to adopt protocols that avoid the wholesale slaughter of tuna. It only makes sense; we have to think about what future generations of pussycats are going to eat if there aren't any tuna.

And You Thought This Meant...

2011-05-15T20:34:00.000-07:00

Another new cartoon, ripped straight from the land of advertising. Laptops didn't exist in the '70s, and the Internet was the province of the military, which kept it away from the public until the '90s. These days, though, you can find everything on the Web, and there is plenty of advertising online, for stuff like mortgages for a full percentage point and a half below the current market rate for 30-year fixed mortgages. And there are ads for flattening your belly (or whitening your teeth; take your pick). Here's one weird old tip I learned for losing weight - get diabetes. There are some drawbacks, though.

The Kids in the Hall

2011-05-15T18:41:00.000-07:00

We played games in the halls of our dorm. In fact, we invented games to play in the hall. We once converted the Walcott end into a bowling alley - complete with pins. That was good for an evening's worth of fun. We also played golf and Wiffle softball in the corridor. But most of the fun was had with frisbees, which only required two players. We'd set up at opposite ends of the corridor and fling the frisbee back and forth, trying to catch it as it caromed off the walls. There was only one little problem with hall frisbee...

Of course, the games most often played in the hallway were watersports. All I need to tell you about that is that Third East had 40 students and 42 fire extinguishers. There was one memorable evening in which the Third Easters got into it, and there was literally a waterfall running down the Goodale stairwell. Of course, water wasn't the only liquid or semi-liquid to decorate the carpet in the Third East hallway. Among the other items were shampoo, dish soap, various soft drinks, beer (of course), plain ice, dry ice, jellies and jams, chocolate syrup and a full jar of mustard. I think we kept our carpet a little cleaner, if for no other reason than to give the mah-jongg players a clean surface to play on.

Setting off the fire alarm was one of the trivial inconveniences of dorm life. Not only did it make an obnoxious sound until it was shut off, but on occasion, the fire department would respond to the alarm. They were not too appreciative of false alarms, and once they emptied out the entire dorm in response to a call. Later in life, I learned that this particular gag can be played in corporate offices, though typically it is pre-arranged by management without the knowledge of the employees. And the employees, having learned the game, will often stay in their cubicles working while the alarm is blaring. I mean, it beats standing in a parking lot in 15-degree weather.

What Would Stickles Look Like Now?

2011-05-10T11:09:00.000-07:00

I realize it has been many moons since I've tried drawing a cartoon, and I've never attempted Stickles using a computer-based drawing tool. I say that knowing some of you remember the cartoon I drew back in 1998 for the 20th Reunion of the Class of '78. That particular cartoon was drawn using drafting software known as MicroStation, which is sort of like trying to shoot a fly with a blunderbuss. After that 1998 reunion, I was inspired to draw some one-panel strips, which now reside on a defunct computer somewhere in my basement (doesn't every discarded item in the world end up in a basement somewhere?). Those strips were sent to places like the New Yorker, which sent back a polite "thanks, but no thanks" letter. One of them did get published in a religious satire magazine which was somehow associated with John Bloom, the man behind Joe Bob Briggs, Drive-In Movie Critic and "God Stuff" (an old Daily Show feature, back when Craig Kilborn was the host). It was worth about $75 to me.

Anyway, here is the fruit of my labor. You may recognize it as a current-day beer commercial that's been getting a lot of airplay on Comedy Central and other youth-oriented television networks.

One thing I like about PC Paint is its ability to copy and paste, which allows me to cheat. You'll notice three of the panels look alike. I've never denied being lazy.

Visit From a Small Planet

2011-04-29T17:55:00.000-07:00

We get visits from extraterrestrials every so often. At least that's what the people who take their family vacations in Roswell, New Mexico insist. The Area 51 types are convinced that space aliens have come to Earth, and that's not just because they've witnessed Burning Man. If the little green men do indeed like to come visit, they picked a strange place to land in early 1977 - Meldrim Thomson's New Hampshire. It's not known what exactly happened, but witnesses claim they saw an unidentified craft crash into a lake in New Hampshire...where it was promptly swallowed up by the Loch Ness Monster, who must have been visiting his cousin Sasquatch somewhere near Bretton Woods (I guess New Hampshire lakes look so much like Scottish lakes). I kid you not; is the Manchester Union Leader ever wrong about anything?

In 1977, most ships were registered by their owners in Liberia. The reason Liberia was popular is the same reason Delaware is a popular place for businesses to incorporate: the rules in Liberia are incredibly lax, especially for seagoing vessels. Consequently, there were a number of rather messy accidents involving oil tankers and their cargoes in the '70s. Oil tankers with Liberian registrations (until Manuel Noriega was deposed, Panama was also a popular place for merchants to flag their vessels, for similar reasons). People who claim that businesses would be much better off with fewer regulations have never seen a Liberian oil tanker sink. Double hulls? Sure they keep oil from spilling into the ocean when a ship springs a leak, but who wants to go through the expense? Anyway, the cartoon above was inspired by the synthesis of crashing spaceships and sinking steamships flying the Liberian flag. (I should note in passing that a good chunk of the cruise ship industry uses boats registered in Norway, which makes me suspicious of Norwegian maritime regulations).

This strip gives me an opportunity to comment on the artist's technique for a moment. The comic strip above was drafted with a dark blue pencil (remember, blue did not reproduce on a film negative back then) and then inked using a quill pen and India ink. India ink was a favorite of most cartoonists because it was nice and black, and it produced a nice, clean, solid line. It also set very quickly. For a time I was inking my cartoons with a Rapidograph (a pen much preferred by draftsmen for making a line on a sheet of mylar, which is a clear plastic film rather than a woven sheet of paper) and Chinese ink. China ink is a more dilute ink than India ink, which would clog a fine-point pen like a Rapidograph, but it has issues when it is used in a quill pen. For one thing, you can't control the ink flow like you can with India ink; you may be drawing a line or writing letters on a piece of paper when suddenly a large bead of ink will come out of the pen, ruining your work. All you can do is either let it dry (or try to blot it dry without it spreading), and then paint it over with white-out. We had two kinds of correction materials - liquid and tape. The tape came in rolls and covered in strips, but there were seams between each strip of tape. The liquid had no seams, but was occasionally so thin that the line underneath shone through. And occasionally it would smear the ink. To avoid all that, I typically used India ink.

While I could work very quickly and efficiently with the Rapidograph (most of my early strips were done with one), it offered only a single line-weight; to vary the thickness, I typically had to trace a line multiple times. I could have switched to a pen with a thicker line weight, but that would have meant switching pens every time I changed lines, which would have been a pain. I would also have had to invest in multiple pens, which is an expense a modest college student really doesn't need. No, I needed a pen that could make a line sing and give it a personality, and that meant using a crow quill pen.

Just as there are multiple Rapidographs, quill pens came with multiple styles for the nibs, or tips of the pen. Some had a chisel tip, some had a ball tip and some had feather tip. The only problem with a quill pen was the need to dip the pen in the ink on a frequent basis, since the pen surface really didn't hold much ink. But it was possible to get a quill pen with a reservoir in the tip, which meant you didn't have to dip as often. The only problem was that a reservoir could occasionally release a bead of ink, which is exactly what you don't need when you're lettering a drawing.

Just as there were different types of pens and inks, there were also different types of paper that could be used. Typing paper is good and cheap, but ink tends to bleed on it, producing a messy line (some of the strips I drew in 1980 were done on cheap paper, and it showed). Card stock is a little heavier (and more expensive), but ink doesn't bleed as much on it. A third type of paper was a clay-backed paper (cotton fabric mixed with a clay slurry). It had a nice smooth slick surface, and the ink dried on top of it, rather than getting absorbed into the page. It could be a wonderful medium, but a bead of ink would smear so easily on that. On the other hand, you could make a nice solid black fill and then use the quill of the pen to etch a white line on the black fill. If you look carefully at the comic strip above, it has some of those white etchings on a black ink fill; that strip was drawn on clay-back paper.

When I come back in a few days, I will try to explain the blue lines in hockey.

Other Kinds of Roaches

2011-04-28T21:19:00.000-07:00

Here's a little eye test. You remember those puzzles in the Kids section of the Sunday paper where two pictures are shown that look almost identical except for a couple of differences? This is the same exercise. As I mentioned, I redrew some of my cartoons. Aside from the differing line weights, can you spot the differences between the two cartoons? Bonus question: in this instance, what is a "roach"?

Coincidentally, Dave Browne, our long time secretary and editor of the Class of 1978 Notes for Technology Review included a nice little shout-out about the Blog in this month's edition, which goes to the MIT alumni. I knew bribing him would bring positive results!

Pinball Wizards

2011-04-25T20:28:00.000-07:00

Now, everyone knows that's not what you go to Wellesley for. Wellesley is the place to go for one of the finest liberal arts educations you can get outside the Ivy League (in fact, Wellesley is one of the Seven Sisters, so it is no slouch). MIT had a co-op arrangement with Wellesley in which students from either campus could cross-register for certain courses, and many students from one campus availed themselves of the offerings on the other campus - including those offerings of the opposite sex. In addition, the Wellesley parties also had Tuborg Gold on tap, so it was just like home. I never did take any courses at Wellesley, but I did find myself out there at a few of their mixers (there was a shuttle bus between the two campuses that trundled students back and forth during school hours - and fairly late into the evening for the party-goers). I also took advantage of the opportunity to put up flyers announcing our dorm's parties to the Wellesley co-eds. Some even showed up for a few minutes.

But why pinball? Well, it was a popular sport among the college crowd in Cambridge, and it wasn't because the Who's "Tommy" (the first rock opera!) had been made into a movie in 1975 with Elton John as the Pinball Wizard in huge, towering platform shoes. No, for some of the thursday staff, pinball had the same allure as Howard the Duck and Kiss. It was Old School and countercultural, all at the same time. In fact, the runs to the printer on Wednesday nights were all characterized by the same routine - a trip in our managing editor's car to the Harvard Square offices of the Crimson, where Louie, our printer, would take the negatives and hand us his customary request for a "Sprite, no ice", which we would dutifully fulfill at one of the pubs nearby. Then we'd order a midnight snack and play pinball for an hour while we waited for the issue to be printed. Gottlieb always seemed to have the hottest games, though maybe it was Stern that had the Reggie Jackson (did I mention that most of the thursday senior staff hailed from New York City?).

Pinball would remain king until sometime around the height of the disco era, in 1979, when the first video games started infiltrating the arcades (actually, Pong had been around since my high school days, and a home version showed up in my freshman year, but it wasn't until Space Invaders that the video games started muscling out the pinball machines). By 1981, Pac-Man arrived on the scene, and that was the end of the pinball era. Today, if you are in a fit of retro nostalgia, you can find all kinds of pinball games online, but it's not the same thing as feeling the flippers in your fingers and learning how to impart an English on the ball by banging the table just firmly enough to alter the ball's course, but not so firmly that you cause a "tilt".

The Architect's Dilemma

2011-04-24T14:21:00.000-07:00

Actually, this is not such an unusual problem. Architects have to answer questions like this all the time in their professional lives. The quick answer is, "Call in the structural engineer."

I had a choice between engineering and architecture when I was in college (or as they say at MIT "a choice between Course 1 and Course 4). Architecture had two strikes going against it - first, the career prospects for an architect are heavily dependent on the economy of the construction industry, which tends to be more boom-bust than other professions. For a second, architects tend to have grand ambitions all out of proportion to what is achievable in the real world, and that clash between ambition and reality tends to become rather heated at times. Case in point was a graduate from the Masters Program in Architecture at MIT in 1975. He had a grand ambition to develop a string of settlements in Judea and Samaria. His name was Binyamin Netanyahu.

Food, Inglorious Food

2011-04-23T21:39:00.000-07:00

Believe it or not, there was something nearly as bad as Commons. In the middle of Cambridgeport (a neighborhood just up Mass. Avenue from MIT), there was a McDonald's. You could find its Golden Arches tucked into Inman Square behind Hi-Fi Pizza, about a block away from Purity Supreme (which MIT students called "Puberty Supreme"; it was one of three grocery chains in the Boston area and competed for the MIT undergraduate food dollar with Stop 'n' Shop, which was on the river). This Cambridge McDonald's was famous for hockey-puck hamburgers, soggy fries and shakes the consistency of wet concrete, and it made Twenty Chimneys look good. You could eat there, at your own risk.

In 1977, McDonald's had instituted an advertising campaign for their hamburgers with the tag line, "You - you're the one - having your Big Mac Attack", suggesting that ordinary innocents could develop a sudden irresistible craving for Big Macs at almost anytime. A local comedian turned that into a "Big Smack Attack" ("smack" being the street slang for heroin). I turned it into a cartoon about acute food poisoning instead.

If I were still cartooning, I could have all sorts of fun with slogans such as "Run for the Border" or done a send-up of the attempt by Taco Bell to invite its patrons to snack on high fat, high calorie food late at night during "Fourth Meal" (as if their patrons didn't have enough opportunities to gain weight). But I would have had to disclose a certain conflict of interest on my part - I got into the advertising racket myself. In the same November 1977 issue that contained the cartoon shown above was an advertisement for a local Somerville eatery called Dick's Deli that featured some familiar artwork.

Dick's not only paid for this half-page ad in thursday, but Dick himself showed up at the thursday offices personally to drop off a complimentary selection of overflowing roast beef and corned beef sandwiches, loaded with lettuce, tomato, pickles and dressing, on these huge slices of marbled rye. Dick made the tastiest sandwiches in town for a very reasonable price (even in 1977, a $2 sandwich was a comparative bargain, especially when it was easily triple the size of the typical fast food burger). The only problem was that Dick was not much of a businessman; about three weeks after this ad came out, we called over to Dick's, and he was now driving trucks. The newspaper was out about $100 in unpaid advertising, which wasn't a whole lot for anyone except a struggling student newspaper that lived hand-to-mouth, as it was.

I ended up getting a lot of requests for my art services while at school, and even after I had retired from the comic strip business in 1985, I ran into people willing to pay good money for my artwork. Among other things, my cartoons were used to sell vitamins to kids; however the product was not fated to become popular, so the paychecks were not very big.

When the "Big Mac Attack" cartoon came out, thursday was still riding the notoriety of the Consumer Guide to MIT Men, and had actually attracted a stable of five different cartoonists. Stickles was still the featured comic, but there were other popular strips such as Dybosphere, Snails, Goldberg and Ornblatt on the back page.

When thursday folded in 1979, both Stickles and Dybosphere were transferred to the Tech, which actually had a robust comics page in the '80s. One could say it was Super-sized.

Music For All Tastes

2011-04-21T21:04:00.000-07:00

I went to a performing arts high school when I was growing up, the result of being a Baskir Musician and minimally proficient on a musical instrument. I could blow air into a flute in such a way that a sound was produced, thus allowing me to be mistaken for Ian Anderson (of Jethro Tull, for any of you Miley Cyrus fans reading this). That ability gave me an appreciation for classical music - as long as I didn't hear it on a classical music radio station. Today, there is a wonderful broadcast medium called the Internet and a source called YouTube that are able to bring the sound and sight of all kinds of music to anyone who desires it (and who doesn't desire to hear a mash-up of Tuvan throat-humming with Lady GaGa's "Born This Way" over the Finale of Tchaikowsky's Fifth Symphony played backwards?). This veritable feast for the ears was not available when I was growing up. In my day, which was the '70s, music was only available on phonograph records or magnetic tape, and there was only one source for broadcast music - radio. The divide was pretty stark - all the pop music and rock and roll, the stuff that played on 45 RPM records known as "singles" - was broadcast on the AM radio band, while the really esoteric stuff that the hippies liked was broadcast on progressive rock stations on the FM band.

AM radio was great because the sound bounced off the ionosphere, and if the station had a powerful transmitter, you could hear it for hundreds of miles. The drawback was that the sound was kind of staticky, especially whenever there were thunderstorms nearby. FM radio, by contrast, had no static and was clean, clear and crisp, but the broadcast waves only traveled in a straight line, so the signal would peter out if you got more than 75 miles away from the transmission tower. Therefore AM radio tended to be noisy music, noisy advertisements and noisy disc jockeys, while FM was either delicate music or spacy art rock, presented in hushed tones by announcers who felt compelled to tell you vague little details about what you were listening to - either because they had gotten a PhD in 17th Century Baroque Music or because the brownie they had just consumed had opened their eyes to a heretofore hidden and unknown world that everyone in the listening audience just had to be told about, man.

What I was unaware of at the time was that the '70s were the opening salvo in a battle for supremacy between the AM and FM formats. The tinny, blaring Top 40 stations on the AM band had been king in the '50s and '60s, but as stereo equipment became more sophisticated and more powerful, FM began to take over, and by the '80s, the music stations had largely abandoned the AM band in favor of the cleaner sound on the FM band. That left an opening for the likes of Rush Limbaugh to find himself a constituency to talk crap to. Today, the choices have expanded even further. Into the mix have come satellite and Internet broadcasters, and it is even possible for listeners to go completely "off the grid" by plugging an iPod into a dock outfitted with speakers, programming it to play a thousand or so of your favorite tunes and setting it on "shuffle" mode, essentially creating your own radio station - only without the DJ's and the commercials. In a way, this has put all the power back into the hands of the listener (as opposed to the music director who programs the radio station and picks out the 40 or so tunes that will play in rotation that week). But it also has made the life of the musician much harder, because there are no mass groupings of individuals who can be reached from one radio station in each city, and therefore no sales of records in the millions. "Thriller", which sold 35 million copies (mostly in vinyl, which is really impressive) for Michael Jackson in 1983, would not have the same success today.

Along with radio, musical genres have evolved over the decades. New wave did not exist in 1975, but by 1995, it had driven out most of the other formats that existed in the '70s and morphed into alternative rock. Then by 2005, alt rock had largely succumbed to the influence of 'Tweens - those 12 and under who tended to like the boy bands and girl singers plucked from obscurity by Disney Studios. Oldies music used refer to songs that were hits in the '50s; now it refers to songs that were hits in the '70s and '80s. And "beautiful music" became "easy listening" became MOR became New Age, but never ceased to be boring.

Music has changed since the early days of rock and roll, but the appreciation for a nice, slow love song in those romantic late night hours has never faded.

Incidentally, "Tear the Roof Off the Mother..." was a big hit for George Clinton and his band, Parliament-Funkadelics, back in early 1976 (and that line could have been "We're Gonna Turn This Mother On"). The classic funky style of that record would eventually find its way into other P-Funk hits in the '70s and '80s such as "Atomic Dog", whose signature line, "Bow-wow-wow, yippie-yo, yippie-yay" would get borrowed by Snoop Doggy Dog when he hit the rap scene in 1993. His drummer had a townhouse in Alexandria, Virginia; I found myself there one Sunday afternoon when I was looking to buy a residence close to my office. The giveaway was the Gold Record for "Flashlight" (a P-Funk hit from 1977) that was hanging on the wall.

I could not sign off without acknowledging a certain debt I owe to country music. The sound may have been cotton-pickin' awful, but the lyrics have always been pure genius. In fact, I collected a whole page of my favorite lyrics and submitted them to The Last Word, which was thursday's immensely popular back page of familiar and often amusing quotations. Many of them ended up gracing the walls of the MIT dormitories, including this popular lament, heard often on the old variety show Hee-Haw:

Where, o where are you tonight

Why did you leave me here all alone?

I searched the world over and thought I found true love.

You met another and -pfft!- you was gone.

Standards of Learning

2011-04-20T19:52:00.000-07:00

As I have gotten older, I have found it much easier to take tests. Throw anything at me and I can usually get a passing score, whether it's an ethics test (which we have to take every year), a test to get my LEED certificate or a test to get permission to drive on the airfield. Thanks to testing, I am a Certified Member of the American Association of Airport Executives and qualified at administering CPR. I find the tests largely useless and irrelevant, but I know how to get a passing grade!

Ross took his share of tests while at MIT, and there always seemed to be some pitfall. Either he'd lose his notes or he'd forget to sign his name. He would qualify as a solid "B" student, but test-taking always seemed to create problems for him.

Indeed, when I was in school, I met someone who aced a three-page test and would have done even better overall if he had noticed the fourth page. Fortunately him and those of us who went to MIT in the '70s, there were second chances. Some classes, particularly 18.01, which was the first of two freshman calculus courses, gave you two chances to get a passing grade on the exam. In addition to that, you would review each exam with the proctor afterwards, so it was possible to raise your score by showing how you solved the problem to the proctor's satisfaction. In true Tom Lehrer "New Math" fashion, it was more important to understand what you were doing, rather than to get the right answer.

This could occasionally get you into trouble because it was possible to answer the question correctly on the test and not be able to adequately explain to the proctor how you did it. There were no allowances for dumb luck. In much the same fashion, it was also possible to score worse on the make-up test than on the initial test...

I should also mention one last test that allows for second chances - the SAT test. It is actually the first test, since it's the one that determines early on whether you are MIT material, and you take it in high school. You can take that test as many as three times. In sophomore year in high school, there is the Pre-SAT, which is also the National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test. It lets you know what areas you might want to bone up on in order to raise your score. Then in December of your senior year, you take the SAT, and if you don't like your score, you can take it again in February. My SAT's indicated that I was proficient enough at mathematics (I was soon disabused of this notion when I started taking Differential Equations and courses in Probability and Statistics) but my English comprehension skills were woeful. In short, I had the proper skill set to become a consultant.

The Family Oblast

2011-04-19T21:23:00.000-07:00

My brother came up with this one. Unfortunately, it turns out to have been inaccurate. Not only was there a Stickles coat of arms, but there is an entire racket that has grown up around the selling of that coat of arms - and all other Scottish and English memorabilia. In fact, you have to put up good money to buy even a JPG image of the Stickles coat of arms (Thank you, HouseofNames.com!). But it must be good business; there are several sites that will sell you the Stickles coat of arms, including Amazon.com, which will put it on a tee-shirt and mail it to you. If you look at the historic background that accompanies the sample images, you will learn that the Stickles family can be traced all the way back to Somerset, England, and to William Sticlegh who established an estate there sometime around 1327, intending to eventually send his fictional great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandson to MIT.

But that's small potatoes, which are more an Irish delicacy than anything English (or even Scottish - they tend to go for inedibles such as haggis). The Baskir family has not only its own coat of arms, but even an entire country, complete with its own university and an airline (which for me is a perfecta, given my presence in the aviation business). I only found out about the airline, Baskirian Airlines, because one of their planes collided with a DHL cargo plane over the Alps six or seven years ago, an unfortunate incident made possible by the sophisticated and seamless European air traffic control system, which somehow managed to lose track of the two planes. I also found out that there is a horse called the Baskir Curly; it is known for its calm, friendly and intelligent personality and for its work ethic. It also has a curly-haired mane.

Bashkortostan these days is a Republic inside Russia (equivalent to a state in the U.S.), but many centuries ago, before the Mongols came, it was a country all to itself. It is nestled up against the Ural mountains on the European side of Russia and its capital is Ufa, a city of almost 1 million. In olden days, the country was known as Baskiria (pronounced Bashkiria), and the original Baskirs can trace their origins back almost 25 centuries. This is their coat of arms:

Largely a Muslim state, Bashkortostan claims to have about 2,000 Jews. At least one of them ended up in Kiev in the late 19th Century; that was my great-grandfather.

I found out about the land of the Baskirs the way anyone finds out about anything these days - through the Internet (that was also the source of the Napoleonic diary, in which the Emperor's valet recounts being entertained by a traveling band of Baskir musicians). There are not many Baskirs in America, but there seem to be quite a few in places like Turkey. In fact, I do not own rights to my name on the Internet; the site Baskir.com belongs to a Turkish photographer.

Happy Passover

2011-04-18T20:48:00.000-07:00

There were a couple of Jewish jokes in Stickles. It was only fitting, since MIT had a robust Hillel Society and Stickles' creator was Jewish. But these were not your typical Jewish jokes. They were inspired by the rituals we went through as kids in a Jewish family. Three brothers meant three bar-mitzvahs, in the days when a bar-mitzvah was a simple ceremony as opposed to the gaudy spectacle it has since become. For one thing, my parents had a party for the three sons in the house, whereas today requires the rental of a ballroom in a hotel or country club, at a minimum. There were no limousines, no fancy catered lunch, no socks and tee-shirts as party favors and no throwing of candy after the haftorah reading at the synagogue. And the cantor's rendition of the haftorah was recorded on a vinyl long-playing record as opposed to a CD, for home study. But it was still a celebration of a boy becoming a man, and the grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins still came from near and far to witness it. Which meant we didn't have to go to school that week.

My brother came up with this joke. If you're a Jew, you get it, and if not, one of your Jewish friends will explain the words to you.

Passover was an entirely different celebration with an entirely different set of little quirky traditions, at least at our house. Everyone knows about the four cups of wine and the eating of raw horseradish - a delicacy so powerful we referred to it as Jewish Dristan, due to its uncanny ability to clear even the stuffiest sinuses. In Texas, they have hot pepper-eating contests; we had horseradish-eating contests (and no fair eating the wimpy pink stuff that comes in a bottle!).

Passover had other rites that would always amaze any non-Jewish guests we had at our Seders. I will skip the folk dancing, which seems to have been an affectation of liberal New York Jewish emigres and tended to sop up a good chunk of the evening after the Passover meal had been eaten (but before the afikomon hunt). Usually there was a time in the service where the kids, being full from dinner and bored with the after-dinner songs, would start casually dipping their fingers in the wine-goblets and then running their fingers around the rim of the glass. One of my friends asked what the religious significance of the exercise was. I told her it was to make the glass whistle.

As the service wound down to a finale, it was time for the Feats of Strength. There were a couple of songs at the end of the service, one of which had thirteen verses. If the folk dancing had not worn us out, it was our challenge to sing all thirteen verses in one breath. It wasn't until I was ready to go off to MIT that I developed the breath control to get through all thirteen verses, and I had run cross-country track in high school. It became the stuff of a Stickles strip.

Presidential Politics - 1976

2011-04-17T19:47:00.000-07:00

My sophomore year on campus, 1976, was an election year. It was the second year of the presidency of Gerald Ford, the Liberator of Poland. Gerald Ford was made possible by Richard Nixon, who resigned in August 1974, promptly taking a good chunk of the Republican Party with him. November of 1974 had seen so many Democrats elected to the House and Senate that the more liberal among us began to imagine a Democrat in the White House in 1976. Massachusetts had been the only state in the nation to vote for George McGovern in 1972, and it became the only state in the nation to say, "I told you so", when Nixon resigned. I could replay the whole sorry, sordid story of Watergate, the Burglars and everything else, but you know it already and it's just too embarrassing an American story to recount. Suffice it to say that I knew something odd was going on in Texas when every billboard advertising George McGovern's candidacy was being defaced with a hammer and sickle; only later did I learn that the graffiti was the handiwork of Donald Segretti and his Dirty Tricksters (and only much later did I learn that George McGovern's Texas campaign in that awful autumn was led by an energetic young man named Bill Clinton).

Anyway, you've already heard about New Hampshire and its wacky conservatism (and how the state, tailor-made for the Reagan Revolution, turned against him in the '76 primary). I was more interested in the Democrats, though, and one Democrat in particular - Senator Fred Harris of Oklahoma. Senator Harris had a wife, LaDonna, who was a full-blooded Native American, also from Oklahoma and almost as famous as him. He also was a populist, preaching a brand of economic democracy that had been popular in the days of Bob LaFollette, a senator from Wisconsin who ran a third-party campaign for president. Harris' campaign manager, Jim Hightower, would go on to write books, get elected agriculture commissioner in Texas for two terms and then host a radio show and write a newspaper column. What endeared Fred Harris to me was that he was approachable - I got to meet him up close and personal in a friend's living room with about a dozen other supporters, and I would see him out on the campaign trail in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. This was not true of the other candidates.

With one exception. In the winter months of 1975, I was invited, as one of two thursday staffers, to ride the bus from Boston to Providence, Rhode Island, with an obscure governor from Georgia named Jimmy Carter. He brought two busloads of student newspaper reporters with him to see the Allman Brothers, who were Close Personal Friends of his. Carter was different from anyone else in the race - he was folksy and homespun, he had been on a nuclear submarine and he was a peanut farmer. And he preached folksy, downhome honesty and integrity, which was refreshing after four years of Nixon and Ford. His whole campaign featured him, his toothy grin and his peanuts. He had positions on the issues, but some of us on the bus were convinced that the answers he gave to questions we students asked him were different from the answers he gave when professional reporters from the city newspapers joined us in the conference room. That would become the trademark of his presidency, according to more than a few observers. His brand of outsiderism would resonate with the voters in 1976, but not with the Washington insiders, who were every bit as persnickety a bunch then as they are now. Hence, after a dramatic series of events in Iran that concluded with US hostages being taken, and a short, sharp economic free-fall that consisted of high interest rates and a disconcerting run-up in oil prices and unemployment, Carter became a one-term president, losing the 1980 election to Ronald Reagan. But he would go on to become one of the most influential ex-presidents we've ever had, surpassed only by (you guessed it) Bill Clinton.

Anyway, back to Fred Harris. Presidential primaries in 1976 were nowhere near as short and decisive as they are now. The Iowa caucuses were a relatively new phenomenon, intended by some to try to steal away some of the influence New Hamsphire had on the primaries. They succeeded in putting Jimmy Carter on the map; after pouring the bulk of his resources into the state, Carter won the caucuses and used that victory to springboard himself to the top of the heap on the Democratic side. But Fred Harris managed a decent-enough showing that he could campaign hard in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, which held primaries on successive Mondays in late February and early March. That's when I got involved. I organized an MIT student chapter, hoping to put Harris over the top in Massachusetts.

I also went to New Hampshire one weekend. A dozen of us carpooled up to Manchester, New Hampshire, slept in sleeping bags on the floor of someone's apartment, and trudged into the cold, snowy winter of the Manchester suburbs, stuffing mailboxes and sticking flyers under screen doors - hoping to sway a few votes. In the end, Fred Harris ended up coming in woefully back in the pack; Jimmy Carter went on to win the state's Democratic primary, followed by Morris Udall and George Wallace, the segregationist. Harris and Birch Bayh would battle for one of the also ran slots, which fell to Bayh as the night wore on. Harris limped on into Massachusetts and ended up folding his campaign after picking up only 8 percent of the vote (Massachusetts selected Henry "Scoop" Jackson, senator from Washington State, as its favorite - with 24%).

If nothing else, I felt good about having convinced 17% of the MIT student body that Fred Harris was worthy of becoming president (according to a referendum sponsored by one of the non-partisan student groups), besting the rather enthusiastic campaigners lined up behind Birch Bayh. In 1980, I would help organize Stanford University for John Anderson when he ran for president in the Republican primary - and later I would work for his third party candidacy. That was another glorious lost cause that should have succeeded; instead, Ronald Reagan would fulfill a lifetime quest to become president, and nothing in America was ever the same again.

I learned some things from my participation in the 1976 presidential campaign. For one thing, most students didn't want to be bothered. They had other things on the mind - studying, athletics, UMOC (Ugliest Man on Campus - a charity fundraiser in which students campaigned to see who could bring in the most money based on how ugly they were in a costume - or not in a costume) and student politics (known to most of us as "grease"). Most were conventional liberals, which meant that they liked the politics of Morris Udall, an environmentalist congressman from Arizona (try finding that these days!), but not the populism of Fred Harris (in the thursday offices, however, Fred Harris was regarded as a liberal sell-out, and besides, the new Howard the Duck comic book had Kiss in it!). They also found the whole thing irrelevant to their day-to-day lives. Nowhere was that attitude more prevalent than in the West Campus dormitories (McCormick, Burton and MacGregor), which led to this cartoon...

(One day I shall have to discuss nitrous oxide, which has certain amusing properties known only to dentists).

That Allman Brothers concert we saw in Providence was actually pretty decent - except that Gregg Allman had a huge bandage on one hand that interfered with his guitar-playing. There were rumors about it - drugs, Cher, a motorcycle accident. We didn't know or care; as long as he was vertical and singing, it was a great show.

Everybody Loves Ralph

2011-04-16T10:25:00.000-07:00

While MIT in the '70s had plenty of unusual characters, I still had to invent Ralph. He was not as back-to-nature as Grogo, he was not as venomous as the Batterfiend and he really wasn't the pinball-playing, Springsteen-adoring Marvel Comix character that The Rat was. Unlike the denizens of Bexley, he really didn't have a political viewpoint.

His perception of reality came from a slightly different perspective.

He could be quite a shocking eyeful sometimes.

Everyone had their own theories about him.

But they were just theories. He could have fit in at Bexley, except Bexley was too political. He was at once nihilistic, capitalistic, boisterous, sullen, laid-back and manic, with his feet on the ground yet floating through life. You just couldn't pin him down...

Incidentally, the word "random" was used to refer to somebody of little importance or interest. In the theater or the movies, they would be the "extras" - people who just fill up space behind the main characters. MIT had a large number of randoms. When they get out in the working world, they end up as assistance vice presidents.

Carson

2011-04-13T19:29:00.000-07:00

For studious types, we MIT students watched a lot of television. There were three mainstays. "Monty Python's Flying Circus" was the British counterpoint to the American "Firesign Theater" - only Firesign made records, while Python had a weekly television show. Then there was "Star Trek" - already in reruns for eight years, but still popular with Trekkers and Trekkies alike.

The final name in our television Trinity was Carson. Whereas Star Trek would come on just before the evening news and just after the awful evening dinner at Walker (or for the more unfortunate West Campus types, Lobdell), Johnny Carson came on just after the late news, at 11:30pm. We had just concluded our prime-time problem sets and we were ready for a break. Carson was our nightcap. He was host of the "Tonight Show" and a television icon in his own right. He was not the first Tonight Show host - Jack Paar had been keeping the chair warm on that Beautiful Downtown Burbank set way back in the early '60s, and Steve Allen before him. But the Tonight Show was identified with Johnny Carson, and it stayed that way even after Carson retired and Jay Leno took over for him in the '90s.

Carson's longtime sidekick was Ed McMahon and his bandleader was Doc Severinsen. Together, they created any number of other regular characters, including Floyd R. Turbo (American). This raises the question, "Kiss my Rapidograph". Or rather, what does any of this have to do with Stickles?

They also created a number of routines that they repeated on a regular basis from show to show. "How ___was it, Johnny?" was one of them. Carson would say something like, "Last night I stayed in a room at the Beverly Wilshire that was so small!" To which Ed and almost the entire audience would respond, "How small was it, Johnny???" Carson would then conclude with, "It was so small, the mice were round-shouldered!" And if the audience response to the joke was something less than Carson hoped for, he'd start explaining it, "Well, you see, if the mice were round-shouldered, then it must have been a really small room." It was a routine that could be done with almost anything. "Yesterday, I completed a problem set on Bessel functions that was really tough!""How tough was it, Johnny??""It was so tough, I filled out a drop card for the course the next day!" Yuk,yuk.

Carson also would appear regularly as Carnac the Magnificent, a magician who could "read" the answers to questions printed inside letters sent to him. He'd hold the envelope to his forehead and pronounce, "William F. Buckley, Pierre of Paris and Noam Chomsky". Then he'd tear open the envelope, pull out a card and read the question, "Name a master debater, a foreign caterer and a cunning linguist".

The final Carson routine was his compendium book. For example, he'd pull out a CRC Manual and start reading from the molecular formulas for different hydrocarbons or cite the molecular weights of different elements. At the end of Carson's exposition, Ed McMahon would chime in with a customary, "You know, Johnny, I'd be willing to bet that your book has every fact known to science! Nothing has been left out! That book has everything in it!!", to which Johnny would respond, "You are wrong, hydrogen-sulfide breath!" and proceed to read off a series of made-up facts that were not included in the CRC Manual.

Anyway, what does this have to do with Stickles? Well, I borrowed some of his material...

Extinguishing the Flame

2011-04-12T19:53:00.000-07:00

There are some questions you don't want the answers to...

One of the more ubiquitous items in the East Campus dormitory was the fire extinguisher. Each floor had two issued officially to it and they were located in recesses built into the hallways. At least that's where they were supposed to be located. Sometimes they disappeared into the dorm rooms of individual students. There were no worries; they would always be replaced. Not only that, but there were spares. Third East had 40 students and 42 fire extinguishers. On Second East, there were not only multiple extinguishers charged with plain old water, there were even a few CO2 extinguishers. Those were the nuclear option; they spit smoke and dry ice and they made a horrendous sound when their contents were discharged. The water extinguishers were just wet - and lots of it. After all, if that obnoxious freshman in the lounge were on fire, you wanted to be able to douse the flame. And they were convenient; if they lost their charge, you could recharge them with a bicycle pump.

Fire extinguishers were good offensive weapons - and good defensive weapons. I even acquired one. I'm not saying where it came from, but there was a laboratory somewhere in the Infinite Corridor that needed a replacement. I never had to use it much, but I could if I had to (make my day!). And you could have had my fire extinguisher - the moment you pried my cold, dead fingers off the trigger.

Oh, Those Wacky Kids!

2011-04-11T20:54:00.000-07:00

Before we get to this day's cartoon, a brief PSA for any MIT alums living in the Washington, DC area. And for my friends at LTA or one of the other community theaters that I happen to haunt:

The MIT Concert Band (http://band.mit.edu/) is giving two outdoor performances this weekend in the DC area, the first on Saturday April 16 at 6:45 p.m. in Market Square in front of the City Hall in Alexandria, and the second on Sunday April 17 at 1:30 p.m. at the Sylvan National Theater, next to the Washington Monument. Musical selections include works by Holst, Jager, Mennin, and others. Both concerts are free and open to the general public.

We don't usually get the MIT Band in town, and what makes it even more special is that it's MIT's Sesquicentennial Anniversary. The other special event is Teens n' Theater, who are recreating HELLZAPOPPIN (and for any of you who remember the famous expression, "Tech is Hell", this is most appropriate) on Friday at 2pm and 7:30pm, Saturday at 2pm and Sunday, also at 2pm (April 15-17). Then on Monday, April 18, you get to pay your Federal Income Tax, which is its own special form of Hell.

Anyway, I don't recall how many showers I took when I was a student. It was certainly more than I had intended (and I'll get to that in a future post). There were certain hazards that awaited anybody who bathed - such as mischievous dorm mates...

There was actually one student on our floor whose towel was ripped off, so he came out of the men's room wearing nothing but a Time magazine. Professor Diamond would have been disappointed it wasn't Newsweek.

Finally, I cannot conclude without mentioning another particular hazard of the dormitory bathrooms - Springfield Oval. Things may have changed in the intervening 35 years, but in our day, the toilet paper used in the dormitories was the Oval, and it made Black Cat feel comfortable by comparison. Oval was reconstituted sandpaper - brown and scratchy. It was not for delicate skin, but it was cheap and it got the job done - sort of. I never drew a strip about Springfield Oval, which I realize was a gross misfeasance on my part - in hindsight.

Things That Go Bump in the Morning

2011-04-10T18:58:00.000-07:00

The year is 1975. The month is November. It's a couple of months into my sophomore year at MIT, and I'm starting to find out about all the little nuisances that make campus life so interesting. For one thing, sophomores receive grades for the first time (freshman, at least in our day, were graded "pass-fail"). For another, you learn when the truck arrives to pick up the garbage. Usually, it's 7 in the morning, when most reasonable persons are already awake. MIT students, being unreasonable (especially about their late night hours) are mostly sound asleep when the truck arrives, and even though they could sleep through their neighbor's stereo cranking out "Physical Graffiti" by Led Zeppelin, they tended to be disturbed by the truck.

An artistic note: you probably have noticed the blue lines that shadow the inked drawings on most of the cartoons. Having pretensions to being a good artist, I sketched all my cartoons before inking them. Instead of using a Number 2 pencil, I used blue pencils. Blue was preferred because most copiers in those days could not reproduce a blue line. It disappeared, leaving a clean cartoon. When we created the newspaper, each edition was laid out on a storyboard, which was a ruled page that corresponded to the actual newspaper page. It was all black and white in those days, and we made photo plates - negatives - of the finished storyboards, which we would take to the printer at the Harvard Crimson, who would collate the negatives, turn them back into positives, put them on a press and then print the newspaper. The photo camera that made the negatives also could not read blue pencil, so the finished cartoons had no tell-tale blue lines (and neither did the storyboards, which were often covered with blue edit-marks). Since I kept only the originals, they all have blue marks, which show up on the scanned color images. I never drew Stickles in color; that would have been an extra complication in my life, and MIT provided plenty of those to its undergraduates, as it was.

A Musical Interlude

2011-04-09T21:11:00.000-07:00

I was born into a musical family. In fact, one of Napoleon's diaries recounts a concert he witnessed by the Baskir musicians...

"...Certainly more barbaric music had never resounded in His Majesty's ears, and this strange harmony, accompanied by gestures at least as savage, produced the most burlesque spectacle that can be imagined..."

Later, that burlesque spectacle would be recreated by my father on The Unexpurgated Folk Songs of Men, which was the subject of a previous blog post. My father was inspired by folk singers like Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie to learn to play guitar and sing folk songs. He, in turn, inspired his three sons to take up musical instruments. I learned enough piano to be able to play it without breaking it, whereas my brother became quite proficient at waking me up with Chopin's "Marche Militaire", played at concert-hall volume. I was a flutist, which was good enough to get me into a performing arts high school and drafted to play in the orchestra pit for several high school musicals. I also got a chance to play "Bourree", by Jethro Tull, before a packed house at my high school. One thing that all flutists in the early '70s got used to was chants of "play Jethro Tull"; it was kind of like the long-haired guy who shows up at every rock concert and demands to hear "Free Bird".

My father also inspired this particular cartoon...

Traffic and Weather Together

2011-04-06T05:57:00.000-07:00

In 1982, the Weather Channel went on the air, providing a ready source of weather information around the clock and providing a career opportunity for Warren Madden, Class of '85. The early versions of TWC, which didn't have nationwide radar coverage and were kind of choppy in their reportage, nevertheless were a marked improvement over what was then available. In the '70s, weather radar, when it was available on the local newscast, was monochrome white-echoes-on-a-black-background, refreshed by a slow sweep. Color radar would not start appearing on local television until the early '80s, and when it did, those stations that had it promoted it to high heaven. In the '70s, weather radar, even in its grainy form, was something of a novelty. But it had the same drawbacks as today's modern air traffic control system has, which was that there was a tendency for "ground clutter" to appear on the radar picture, sometimes interfering with echoes showing actual areas of rain.

About the same time weather radar became the fashion on television, traffic broadcasts from a helicopter were added to broadcast radio. Now, they have all sorts of enhancements, including stationary CCTV cameras that broadcast freeway congestion to central monitoring stations or even your laptop, if you know where to look. Google can even show you the level of congestion on the major thoroughfares - which is handy, since it allowed me to figure out which roads were passable when one of those Nor'easter snowstorms hit in January. People still drive like maniacs in the snow, but at least you can get a little advance warning.

Those early traffic copters were little helicopters that looked like bugs. They were annoying as bugs, and I'm not talking about the sound of the rotors. Occasionally, you'd get a traffic jock who'd feel like bantering with the DJ, and that meant that they would tell you nothing about the wreck that was causing the backup that you had been sitting in for the last twenty minutes. Not much has changed on that front...

The Spirit of '76

2011-04-04T21:08:00.000-07:00

One of the significant events of my college years was the Bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence, considered to be the birthday of our country. In Boston (where it all began), the hoopla began at least a year earlier, in 1975, when the Bicentennial of Paul Revere's Midnight Ride was celebrated. And it gathered momentum, as the first of the Bicentennial Quarters was issued (one design for each state). Everyone was getting into the spirit - even TimeLife Books, which decided to issue a serial collection of Beethoven's best known compositions - in honor of the Bicentennial. I had no idea what linked the two. It was like two entirely dissimilar objects in a pod...

Beethoven's bicentennial birthday had already occurred in 1970. The bicentennial of his death will occur in 2027. The Bicentennial of Tchaikowski's "1812 Overture" will occur next year - an event that will be celebrated by the flying of a flag at Fort McHenry, noting the defeat of Napoleon by the Czar's army.

But I digress.

In true countercultural fashion, there were not one but two Bicentennial celebrations. Ordinary people, fueled by the patriotic consumption of Coca Cola (it adds life!), decided to visit all the epic historic sites. Usually in the daylight hours, they'd pack their kids and their Kodak Brownie cameras in their station wagons and trundle off to the battlefields at Lexington and Concord to see where the intrepid Minutemen had fought the mighty British Redcoats to a standstill. However, this was not adventurous enough for Jeremy Rifkin. These days he rhapsodizes about Life Without Fossil Fuels as head of the Foundation on Economic Trends, but back in the '70s, he was a hairy populist (yes, he had hair at one time) and he promoted the idea of a People's Bicentennial, free from the grasp of commercialism, capitalism and Coca Cola.

The first salvo in the War of the Bicentennials was fought in late April during the commemoration of Paul Revere's midnight ride. Culturalists and counter-culturalists alike gathered at the Old North Church to hear stirring speeches about the events that occurred exactly 200 years ago that night. Then the counterculturalists dashed off to Concord for the re-enactment of the Woodstock Festival. We arrived just before midnight - and just after the rains had hit - and proceeded to camp out in a big muddy field to listen to Utah Phillips and Arlo Guthrie and other populist faves. Long past midnight, all ten thousand of us (the numbers may have been plus or minus 50 percent; I've never claimed to be able to estimate the size of a crowd - especially in the dark) were still awake, though considerably punch-drunk. Then, as the first rays of sun began to appear, a cannon-shot rang out. And another. And another - all at ear-splitting volume. The Official Bicentennial Committee had arrived with their flags, their 18th-Century Revolutionary uniforms, their marching bands - and Gerald Ford, the Accidental President. He may have been wearing a Whip Inflation Now lapel pin and he may have spoken on the historic occasion we were here to witness, but none of us on the Counter-Cultural side of the divide quite knew. At some point it all ended, and the cold, sleep-deprived and hungry Counter-Revolutionaries decided that it was time to go home.

There was one problem, though. The Official Committee had brought with them ten or twenty or fifty or two hundred marching bands and fife and drum brigades (we lost count), and both mighty armies had to cross the same bridge to get to their cars. So as the players tried to leave the field, the marching bands refused to yield. A stand-off soon ensued over who was going to cross the bridge first, and after a tense half hour in which nothing moved, both groups crossed in a chaotic double-time. It was two in the afternoon, and as Air Force One soared overhead carrying President Ford back to the White House, I was sound asleep, lying with my head on my knapsack, next to my friend's station wagon. I went back to MIT and slept the rest of the day. After all, it was Patriot's Day.

But I digress.

My father was a Renaissance Man. He was a carpenter, auto and appliance mechanic, scientist, petroleum geophysicist, patron of the arts, reader of plays, moutaineer, avid cyclist, and he had even recorded a song for "The Unexpurgated Folk Songs of Men" (recorded one sweaty evening in an undisclosed location in Houston, Texas, by Bicentennial Folklorist Mack McCormick, it was a recording of drinking songs, bawdy sea chanties and playground taunts featuring the likes of Alan Lomax, Buster Pickens and Lightnin' Hopkins, and you can buy a used copy for $200 on Amazon.com).

He hoped to share his Renaissance ambitions with his sons, which meant that I would get phone calls of inspiration bright and early at 7am, when I was in no mood for inspiration.

But I digress.

The crowning moment of the Bicentennial Year was not the big celebration on July 4, but in November, when America was freed from the last legacy of the Nixon years. Gerald Ford, having liberated Poland from the Russians, went down to defeat at the hands of Jimmy Carter, who made an improbable rise to President after having been a crewman on a nuclear vessel, a peanut farmer and a governor. Carter would go on to suffer an improbable series of misfortunes that included winning the Nobel Peace Prize, and the euphoria of 1976 would give way to the ennui of 1977...

But I digress...

The Miracle of Birth

2011-04-02T22:49:00.000-07:00

Some cartoons were just not meant to be completed. This is one that got, er, aborted...

Now, I'm not sure where the text for this particular mechanics problem came from, mainly because I never knew this cartoon existed (actually, I forgot I had even started drawing it). But I think somebody showed me this problem in a textbook at one time, and I just couldn't resist.

On the other hand, there was this cartoon...

Believe it or not, if you were watching TV in 1978, this commercial was actually on the air rather frequently, courtesy of Preparation H. Now, I have no idea how Madison Avenue works; the hamster wheels that turn in the heads of those who write television advertising are more mysterious than anything Rube Goldberg could have imagined. But somehow this advertisement got written and actually broadcast on television. And now I know that hemorrhoids are a problem for women who've given birth (Thanks a lot for TMI!). A generation later, Madison Avenue has filled the evening news with ads about overactive bladder, Low T (er, they now are so bold as to refer to it as low testosterone) and Bob, the Enzyte Guy. These are things I never knew were medical problems that needed urgent attention; I always thought our biggest concern was toenail fungus. Fortunately, my medical insurance provides excellent coverage.

Maxwell's Equations

2011-03-27T19:50:00.000-07:00

If you were on the MIT campus for any length of time, sooner or later you would encounter Maxwell's Equations. Usually the moment occurred in Spring semester of the freshman year, in 8.02 class, which was Electricity and Magnetism and was a requirement (Well, it or one of the other related classes - 8.021, 8.022 or 8.023; we always called them Physics for Poets, Eight-oh-Two-Screw or Physics for Pre-Meds). Those who entered Course 6 would live with them for the rest of their undergraduate years. There were four of them, and they all had significance in the field of electromagnetic theory. They were named for James Clerk Maxwell, and they described electromagnetic fields. The first was Gauss's Law, the second was Gauss's Law for Magnetism, the third was Faraday's Law and the final one was Ampere's Law.

In their ordinary physics form, the integral form, Maxwell's Equations looked like this:

In the form that most electrical engineers found them, which was the differential form, they looked like this:

Or they could be found like this:

But there were other forms of the equations, as demonstrated by Ross:

There was one final form:

By the way, the funny round black object is called a long-playing record. It was used to play recorded music on something known as a record-player (hip-hop and techno DJ's call them turntables or wheels of steel and use them to make scratching sounds in noisy nightclubs where alcohol, hookahs and funny green tablets are passed around and consumed). Records were popular back in the days before compact discs and MP3 files existed and they played strange music called rock-and-roll that certain religious officials objected to. There were even claims you could play records backwards and hear voices from Satan, but everybody knew it was just Ozzy Osbourne. No one has yet tried to play an MP3 file backwards.

A popular shirt, sold by the Hillel Society, had the following message printed on it:

And God Said:

and there was light

and there was much rejoicing.

Pud Meets His Maker

2011-03-26T22:05:00.000-07:00

The common assumption of most Stickles readers is that Pud was related to me in some sort of way. And there may have been a small grain of truth to that. However, I did appear in one cartoon, dispensing beer at a Strat's Rat, the Student Center Committee's once-a-fortnight mixer. It was the only time Geoff Baskir was seen in cartoon form in Stickles or anywhere else. And probably the only time Chris Tracey (Class of '76, crew jock and also an SCC honcho) was seen in a cartoon, also. She's the lady next to me in the first frame.

One thing you'll notice is the goatee. I had hair on my face, dating from the time I slipped and fractured my ankle on the East Campus ice and decided I didn't have time to learn how to shave my face while standing on one leg. I also parted my hair down the middle - the better to impress record distributors (I wrote record and concert reviews for thursday, and all the major labels had representatives in the greater Boston area). Both of those affectations ended as soon as I entered the job market. Till then, my nickname on the intramural flag football gridiron was "The Weasel". Today, I am clean-shaven, and some in my family claim my hairline is receding.

The beer of choice at Strat's Rat was not Miller, but Tuborg Gold. Tuborg was imported - all the way from the Carling Brewery in Baltimore. There could have been worse beers on tap, but there couldn't have been anything cheaper. When the drinking age in Massachusetts was raised to 21 in 1979, Tuborg was off the menu, and Strat's Rats were no more. I'm not sure if many people were crying in their beers over that.

Spring Training

2011-03-26T07:59:00.000-07:00

Baseball season is almost upon us - which means that all good Red Sox fans will soon go into their annual vigil that will be disturbed not once by such trivia as eating, sleeping or proper hygiene. It also means that it's Spring, when the trees bud, the birds sing and the clocks spring forward. Daylight Savings time used to begin in mid-April, but global warming has caused it to gradually appear much earlier in the year - like the second weekend in March.

Spring weather in Boston is famously unpredictable. It can be hot and unbearable one day, say, 90 degrees in the shade, and then the breeze comes in off the Bay and the next day is only 55. There can be fog, rain, snow, sleet, thunder, lighting, hail and even volcanic eruptions - all in the same week (actually, the nearest volcano is in Iceland, and the prevailing winds carry the ash plume over Europe instead of New England). But there is one blessing - the layer of snow that covers the MIT campus from December to March finally melts away, revealing such wonders as sculptures that the students buried under snow in January. One of my dorm-mates also took note of the freeze-dried dogshit that appeared in the grass when the snows had melted.

Snowmelt meant it was possible to play softball. We could get in a good practice on the oval in front of the Green Building, where a few of our mighty sluggers would try to bounce a fly ball off the Sail. But because the weather was tricky, we never knew when practice could be held...

Characters: Meldrim Thomson, Jr.

2011-03-25T21:23:00.000-07:00

Today's New Hampshire is a suburb of Boston known for its breathtaking mountains and winter skiing, but in our day, New Hampshire was a wild frontier just north of the Massachusetts border. It was perhaps best known for its liquor stores, which were tax-free and therefore cheaper than those in Massachusetts - a fact that lured many an MIT undergraduate to visit the bucolic town of Nashua, back in the days when the drinking age was only 18. Revenue from liquor sales (and a crappy schools system) meant that New Hampshire did not have an income tax, and every governor was required to Sign The Pledge that he would not introduce an income tax if elected. Property taxes were another thing altogether, and residents of New Hampshire paid dearly for their property. Nonetheless, New Hampshire would forever sing the siren song of "no income tax" to residents of the metropolitan Boston area, hoping to lure them over the border.

Fiercely independent and hide-bound conservative, New Hampshire was fertile territory for loopy extremists, although it broke Ronald Reagan's heart in 1976 by dallying with him before ultimately casting its vote for President Gerald Ford in the primary (the Democrat it picked was Jimmy Carter, and we know the rest of that story). New Hampshire also played footsie with Pat Buchanan in a couple of elections, and it even cast couple of votes for a candidate named Vermin Supreme (he finished ahead of Tom Tancredo in the 2008 GOP primary). New Hampshire has a town called Dixville Notch, and every Election Day, its citizens - all 40 of them - march down to the polls at midnight to cast their vote.

New Hampshire had also voted Republican in just about every election - until John Kerry and Barack Obama came along. Lately, the state has been trending Democratic, having elected two of them governor in the past ten years and having cast one of them, Jean Shaheen, into the Senate after she defeated a favorite son of MIT named John Sununu. Current governor John Lynch seems destined to be around as long as Queen Elizabeth, but in the time I was at MIT, the governor was a fruitcake named Meldrim Thomson, Jr., and he kept the governor's chair warm for six years. Thomson was militantly conservative and militantly anti-Massachusetts (Taxachusetts, he called it). His patron was William Loeb, the slightly less wacky and slightly more dopey publisher of New Hampshire's biggest and most conservative newspaper, the Manchester Union Leader. Loeb's anointment routinely nominated the Republicans who would run in the Fall elections, and most times they won.

Meldrim Thomson was proud of New Hampshire's motto, "Live Free or Die". It was on their license plates. If you covered it up, they'd throw you in jail. Thomson also expressed the desire that the State of New Hampshire should acquire nuclear weapons. But he was perhaps best known for trying to quell a demostration against the building of a nuclear powerplant in Seabrook, New Hampshire, by throwing everyone involved in jail. I thought it only prudent to warn the incoming Class of 1981 all about Meldrim Thomson. Only I spelled his name wrong.

In 1978, New Hampshire held an election and unceremoniously threw Meldrim Thomson out on his ear, in favor of a Democrat named Hugh Gallen. A few years later, they would elect John Sununu (the father of the Senator) as governor, and he would serve there before ultimately being called to serve George Herbert Walker Bush as Chief of Staff. In 2001, Meldrim Thomson was inducted into Heaven, a place teeming with liberals.

Controversies - the Lecture Series Committee

2011-03-24T20:50:00.000-07:00

Some of you may remember the Lecture Series Committee. They were a student activity group that showed movies on the campus every weekend. These were usually feature films that had recently finished their runs at the box office, at a time when VHS and Beta had not yet finished duking it out for supremacy as THE format for home video. LSC was the principal source of cinema on the MIT campus, charging a nominal fee to students for the privilege of sitting in Kresge Auditorium (or Room 10-250, when circumstances warranted) to see "Dirty Harry" or "Star Wars". As a result, LSC was among the elite of the service organizations, along with the Technology Community Association (TCA), service fraternity Alpha Phi Omega and the Student Center Committee (SCC), which ran the Stratton Student Center (naturally). The SCC, which I was privileged to become a member of in my senior year, also ran the Coffehouse in the Student Center and sponsored a number of free events, such as Strat's Rat (all the beer and chips you could consume and all the disco you could stand), occasional live acoustic music performances, and their own Midnight Movies, which were free (just bring a blanket).

Running the campus movies was a major enterprise for the LSC, but that was all in support of their primary mission, which was (wait - it will come back to me soon enough) bringing guest lecturers to MIT. In that vein, they had brought us Henry Kissinger, David Frye (a comedian who sounded like Henry Kissinger on occasion) and Peter Schickele of PDQ Bach fame (he played music like Henry Kissinger). These were serious thinkers and policymakers, and without the money raised by those feature films, LSC could not have brought them to the campus.

At least that was their argument for retaining a monopoly on the showing of feature films at MIT. And they had a nice, lucrative racket going - one that the Social Action Coordinating Committee (remember them?) wanted in on. In 1976, they challenged LSC's monopoly before the Assembly of the Undergraduate Association. This seemed like a slam-dunk; one of their own, Phil Moore, had just been elected Undergraduate Association President, and he had reconstituted a defunct representative parliament of undergraduates elected from all the dorms, fraternities and living groups on campus, to legislate on such matters. Even Bexley had a representative in the Assembly. It couldn't lose. But somehow it did. The proposal to let SACC show feature films in competition with the LSC was voted down by the only deliberative democratic body comprised solely of MIT undergraduates. SACC skulked off and returned to its primary mission in life - harrassing the editors of thursday into running another serialized feature on the Battering Ram.

Of course, it made perfect sense for LSC to have a monopoly. After all, there were only a limited number of films that could be had from New Line catalogue, and two organizations showing films on the same night would have split the campus apart. I think the argument was summed up like this:

Back in 70's, the phone company was AT&T and AT&T was the phone company. It was a monopoly. It controlled all the local service, it controlled long distance and it provided all the phones. In 1983, a lawsuit ended this monopoly and broke AT&T up into multiple pieces, in an effort to foster competition (actually, AT&T agreed to the split-up; they gave away the local services and retained the more lucrative long distance). This effort worked so well that today there is a monopoly phone company. Its name is AT&T.

Rite of Spring

2011-03-23T20:59:00.000-07:00

Winter in Cambridge, Massachusetts, could be especially cruel to plants as well as students. One afternoon in 1977, several crates of turf arrived on the MIT campus, destined for the Kresge Oval, which was a greenspace in between the MIT chapel and Kresge Auditorium, a domed performance space designed by Eero Saarinen.

Spring at MIT was always unpredictable. In March 1976, after a horrendous winter in which the temperature dipped to 4 below zero, we awoke one Saturday afternoon to a temperature of 94 above zero. In May of 1975, there was a late season snowstorm that brought down trees in Burlington, Mass. And there were occasionally thunderstorms in April. But if you stuck around until June, you would occasionally be rewarded with a nice sunny day that was just right for picnicking - or for melting vinyl records in the exposed sunlight, as one unlucky member of the Student Center Committee found out.

John Silber

2011-03-23T20:33:00.000-07:00

One of the more curious cause celebres for MIT's small but vocal coterie of Ayn Rand worshipers was John Silber, who became president of Boston University in the '70s and later ran for governor of Massachusetts in 1990 - and lost. His defeat brought in Massachusetts' first Republican governor since the Cabots had stopped talking to the Lodges, or at least since the days of Richard Nixon. The reason Silber was such a favorite of the pointy-headed purveyors of ego(t)ism was that he was seen as the Rugged Individual determined to bring Academic Excellence to his campus, even if it meant running roughshod over his faculty, which had exhibited the audacity to actually form a union and demand its collective bargaining rights. Excellence, in Silber's case, meant pocketing a nice little retirement package worth about $6 million, which he did in 2006, after having paid himself $800,000 a year, a salary that would normally only be permitted to the football coach at the University of Texas (in the humble opinion of those who preach Libertarian thought and Selfishness as a Virtue, nothing connotes Academic Excellence like having a university president who gets paid huge gobs of money while pleading poverty for his school).

The reason I mention the University of Texas is that John Silber was a professor of philosophy (no wonder the Objectivists all loved him!) and the Dean of the Arts Department there, before he ended up at BU. This was in his more liberal years, when he actually promoted ideas like racial equality and ending capital punishment. Ideas like that could get you skinned in Texas in 1970, but that's not what ended his tenure in Austin. Silber, the rugged individualist, happened to run afoul of an even more rugged individualist by the name of Frank Erwin, who ran the Board of Regents and was the nearest thing to God that anyone could think of (these days his name adorns a basketball arena - one that the local wags used to call the Super Drum because of its round shape, until Erwin threatened to sue). Silber was outta there like spit through a tuba, landing on the BU campus.

Because his exploits made him a hero to the Ergomaniacs, I felt compelled to knock John Silber down a peg. The voters of Massachusetts would not get that privilege until 14 years later.

Point of Beginning

2011-03-22T21:55:00.000-07:00

When the first Stickles cartoons were published in thursday, Pud was still a high school student. I'd been drawing cartoons about my high school and posting them on the bulletin board in math class for almost two years, so when I had an actual newspaper in which to get them published, I decided to stick with what I knew.

I went to a performing arts high school in Houston, Texas. In fact, I was in the very first graduating class. We were already regarded as misfits and oddballs, but I took it even further by being the one student in the high school who successfully got into MIT - a fact that was noted obliquely by one of the local newspapers, which wrote that not only was our class sending graduates off to places like Berklee and Julliard, but also MIT (we also sent our share of students to the University of Houston, but that was expected; "Cougar High" claimed many of the college-bound locals, as did the University of Texas).

For those who can't remember back that far, the jingle is from a commercial for Contac Cold Capsules ("give your cold to Contac!") I think you can still buy the Tiny Time Pills at your local pharmacy.

Obviously, a campus full of MIT undergraduates was not really going to be interested in comics about high school students, especially high school students from Texas. So I had to find generic subjects to draw cartoons about, including the terrible stagflation of the '70s.

I even drew a couple of cartoons about Akira Endo, who conducted the Houston Symphony Orchestra for a brief stint, prior to ending up in the orchestra pit at the American Ballet Theatre. He didn't quite have the heft of Seiji Ozawa, but his concerts certainly left their mark.

But I knew I would have to shift the locale, which meant Pud had to graduate high school and get himself into MIT.

It was not easy for him; in what was a true-life story, there was a city election in my senior year that placed the school board in the hands of what today we would call members of the Tea Party. Only then, they were called the Concerted Action for Responsible Education (CARE, get it?). They did not get our high school at all. Or MIT, for that matter.

One of them ran a car dealership and one of them was a minister who had actually been elected on the slate that previously held power, but then switched sides.

And then, there was Hazel Bracken. At a time when Sarah Palin was still in her chubby stage, Hazel Bracken was the equivalent. She was a batty right-wing extremist given to making off the wall comments on any number of subjects and proudly demonstrating her profound ignorance of all things cultural and intellectual, and she had a daughter whose great ambition in life was to go to Lamar High School and sing with the Choralettes. She could not tell a flute from an oboe, but she claimed to love rhythm and blues. Places like Harvard, Yale and Princeton were just too pointy-headed for her, and MIT was a place she could not fathom. All she knew was that dinosaurs had walked the Earth with humans just like the Bible said, and any book learning that taught otherwise was just un-American poppycock, and she was not going to stand for that. She also didn't understand high schools devoted to the performing arts, perhaps because neither of the two (no, make that three) "Fame" movies had been released yet, and no one had come up with either "Glee" or "High School Musical".

All of this made her an easy caricature, much like the real Sarah Palin. I did several cartoons about a radio interview she once gave. But she lived in a time when there was no Fox News Channel (well, there wasn't even cable TV), so being on the school board was her only source of power, and a heady source it was. She made all kinds of noises about closing down our high school, but after we'd won a raft of artistic honors and our students had brought home any number of academic awards and National Merit scholarships, she left the school alone. I'm not sure how many students my high school has sent to MIT over the years (for a time it was sending one a year to the 'Tute), but I do know that Beyonce Knowles had other plans after high school.

By the way, there really was a Whataburger Institute of Technology, a fact that was documented by the Texas Monthly in its 1974 "Bum Steer" Awards.

Pud eventually did find himself at MIT, despite the odds. I'm still trying to find that strip of him on the airplane with his dad.

Ping to the Pong

2011-03-21T20:12:00.000-07:00

I was a half-decent table tennis player. At least I thought I was. We had a fancy table at home that my dad built (the base was all lumber, with sturdy four-by-four legs; none of that folding metal crap for him), and that's where I learned to play. I also honed my skills on the table at the Y Camp of the Rockies, which was in rarified air 8,000 feet above sea level in Estes Park, Colorado. If anyone was going to get a nice bounce out of the ball, that was the place to do it.

But then I found myself at MIT, and I couldn't compete with the Chinese students who dominated the tables in the Student Center. For that matter, I wasn't even at the top of the depth chart on Second East. That honor belonged to John Richardson, who graduated in 1977, after having beaten most of us into submission over three years. Not only did he play barefoot, but he could put an English on the ball that was unbelievable. And he had hair like Andre Agassi.

Ping-pong was a pastime we all indulged in - frequently when we were stoned, or drunk, or trying to forget an upcoming thermo exam. We also played variations, such as Fling-Flong, which reversed all the normal rules of ping-pong by requiring players to bounce the ball once on their side of the net and once on the other side, and a game that was half ping-pong and half Chinese fire drill (no, the Chinese students who dominated the tables at Stratton did not play it), in which players would hit the ball while running around the table. But mostly, we played conventional ping-pong. Most of us used the "shake hands" grip that every kid learns starting out. Some were practiced enough to use the "pen-holder" grip that made the Chinese such ferocious competitors. And then there was Paul Alfille, who found a broken paddle with no handle on it and played every game gripping it around the outside edge with his fingertips. He got so good at it that he never played ping-pong again with a paddle that had a handle.

When I was a senior, I actually got to manage a ping-pong tournament for the Student Center Committee. I almost regretted it. At the last minute, I let in a Chinese player who hadn't signed up by the deadline; when I did, his colleagues shook their heads, "You know he's going to win the tournament..." He would have - except after demolishing three successive foes, he took a lengthy lunch and missed his quarter-final match, for which he was disqualified.

I drew my share of Stickles cartoons that featured ping-pong ("Jump the Net", for example). I also drew my share of cartoons whose humor was slightly blue. However, because I still entertained dreams of cartooning in family newspapers when I got out of school, I had to make them family-friendly...which meant I had to Bowdlerize a few of the off-color words.

This was not even the final version; I changed the word to "lucky", just in case someone knew the homonym to that word. If I ever draw the strip again, though, I'm not going to f%$#&^g sanitize it.

So who was really the best player in our dorm?

Commons

2011-03-20T16:01:00.000-07:00

Some of you may remember this as a riff on a famous Cheech and Chong routine. Some of you who ate Commons at MIT for any length of time probably regard this as the truth. Commons was not something to be savored, like fine French cooking or vintage wine, but something to be endured. And the same was probably true of any college campus in those days, and true even today. Commons was probably the one thing that could make Domino's Pizza seem like a blessing.

Commons was an activity that MIT largely contracted out. ARAServ must have been the low bidder because they were responsible for everything - including Flank Steak (we always called it Flake Stank), Raunch (er, Ranch) Style Stew and the one Indian dish that I'm sure must shame every Indian who has ever eaten it - Mulligatawney Stew (I am convinced "Mulligatawney" means "leftovers" in whatever language it was coined). Commons was famous for chopped sirloin burgers that looked like hockey pucks, oatmeal that would glue the roof of your mouth to your tongue, and vegetables that always included a surprise seasoning in them (the spiced rice appeared to have been seasoned with floor sweepings, while the flaky green stuff that flavored the peas appeared to be grass clippings). Breakfasts were okay if you stuck to the packaged cereals and the skim milk (which some wag changed the spelling of by changing the "i" to a "u"), but the eggs...

Not only was Commons just plain awful, it had a great effect on those students who ate it. Undergrads fed a steady diet of Commons starting at the beginning of September had usually gained 10 pounds or so by Christmas.

That was about as long as it took most students to develop defensive eating habits. When I arrived on the campus, I had fretted because the most comprehensive meal plan covered only 19 meals a week, leaving breakfast on Saturday and Sunday mornings off the menu. In the end, I opted for 15 meals a week, on the theory that I had enough money to get a cheap pizza in Cambridge on the weekends. At the end of the year, I opted to buy a book of meal tickets instead, and when I found I wasn't using very many of my tickets, I went off Commons for good. To facilitate the transition, I bought a hot plate, a can opener and a mini-fridge. I ate like a king...and so did the roaches. On the weekends I would leaven my home-made fare with burgers from Pritchett Lounge (their milkshakes were heaven, but their Frispos must have been the only fries that were not actually fried, but rather extruded from a Frispo machine) and pizzas from the truck that visited our dorm late at night. And there was ice cream from Steve's, which at the time was the best in the area. By the time I left MIT, my weight had ballooned - all the way up to 130 pounds. And I had developed a skill that would take me through my single years. Microwave ovens would be invented a scant two years later, forever changing the game of cooking in the dorm room.

My mini-fridge, by the way, was bought for $25, American. When I graduated, I sold the same fridge for the same $25, so I considered that a decent return on investment.

More Strips About Roaches and Food

2011-03-12T21:07:00.000-08:00

Did I mention we had a lot of roaches in our dorm? Did I mention that all the dorms had a lot of roaches? In 1975, East Campus became the national test-bed for the rollout of the Roach Motel, a little cardboard box with two openings, one at each end, and a super-powerful bed of sticky glue inside. A roach crawled in, got stuck and stayed stuck until death. Which could be a while; have you ever seen a roach poop? This method has proven so successful that they've now made mouse-traps on the same principle. I still prefer traditional killing methods - like a cat.

Of course there were roaches in the dorms. How could there not be? We had lots of food - on shelves in our rooms, in the lounge areas and in the wastebaskets half-eaten. We also had garbage of various types, dirty piles of clothing and even such delicacies as loose leaf paper, newspapers and, of course, textbooks. Did I mention that a roach can subsist on almost anything?

Roaches are different from one part of this country to the other. I know that because the Texas cockroach - which we euphemistically called a palmetto bug - was easily twice the size of the traditional MIT roach. What the MIT roaches lacked in size, however, they made up for in just plain old toughness. They always knew when danger was coming, and they never moved in a straight line. Try to stomp them and they were already under the refrigerator before you could get a shoe on them. They didn't fly, which was fortunate because the Texas roaches did, but they could get into any small space. And they ate whatever they found. I know that because I could occasionally hear them chewing.

But there were some things that even a roach could not eat.

Spring Break

2011-03-12T15:52:00.000-08:00

Spring break. At MIT, it usually occurred in the second or third week of March, at about the midpoint of the semester. For us, it was a week off when we could escape the campus. Some of us would head south to the beaches, others would go skiing. My freshman year, I went to visit relatives in New York and took a train trip to DC to try to get a summer position with the FAA. In the Spring of 1975, global warming had yet to set in, and it had snowed in DC the day I went down there. In subsequent years, I would return to my home in Texas, and in fact I did some rehab on my fractured ankle by doing some bicycle touring around Houston.

These days, Spring Break is the busiest time of the year in places like Daytona Beach, rivaled only by the annual visit of the Harley Davidson enthusiasts. Those of us who were students in the '70s are probably the biggest market for Harley Davidson motorcycles of any age cohort, which is odd, because we would have had trouble balancing a Harley in our younger days. Besides, Bob Seger was a relatively new phenomenon on Top 40 radio in the '70s and "Don't Fear the Reaper" would not be released on record until Spring 1976, so the cachet of a lone dude on a hog cruising down A1A had not been established.

Those who stayed behind had lots of free time to engage in hacks. In fact, when the hall tutor was away, some of the floor residents put their carpentry skills to work and proceeded to plasterboard over his doorway, so that he could not find his room when he came back. A more famous story involved the owner of a nice sports car who came home to find his car had been dissassembled and transported up to his fifth floor dorm room, where it was reassembled. Sometimes the hacks were well received, but in one case, a student had come home to find his dorm room completely filled with computer paper. He proceeded to remove it in a most inelegant way - he set fire to it. Not only was the paper completely gone,as a result, but so was his room, which was later converted into a second lounge. If you went up to Fifth East, the Goodale Lounge was not in its customary spot, having been shifted by the fire.

My Spring Break is going to be spent at a conference in Chicago, which isn't quite Daytona Beach, but it promises to be interesting nonetheless. I'll have more cartoons to post after that.

Campus Radicals and Social Action

2011-03-06T16:51:00.000-08:00

In addition to the usual collection of Marxists, Maoists, Spartacists and Objectivists, MIT had just plain old garden-variety social activists. The origins of the Social Action Coordinating Committee (SACC, for short) predated my arrival at MIT and probably predated the origins of thursday. They probably were motivated to action by the Vietnam War in the '60s, and since every other college campus was ablaze with unrest, they didn't think MIT should be left out of the party. However, the most they could muster was the invasion and occupancy of the President's Office, which was accomplished when a small group of students, no doubt inspired by outside agitators (like Richard Nixon), proceeded to break open the door with a battering ram one evening. If anyone got killed, maimed, arrested, investigated or even had their chocolate rations suspended as a result of this action, it certainly was not Kent State or Berkeley by any stretch of the imagination.

When I got to MIT, Nixon had just resigned and the Vietnam War was over for the US (and would soon be over for the Vietnamese in a few months). That left SACC with nothing really to complain about. Campus controversies, such as MIT's decision to train nuclear engineers for the Shah of Iran in 1975 and missile technicians for Chiang Kai Shek in 1976, failed to ignite the student body the way Transparent Horizons did when it showed up at East Campus.

Lacking a motivating cause, SACC decided that their purpose in life was to prevent backsliding at thursday. To that end, they waged epic battles for control of the editorial content of the paper between 1975 and 1978. They also led an effort to elect one of their own President of the Undergraduate Association, which succeeded in 1976 (as good and well-motivated a UAP as Phil Moore was, nothing really changed). SACC would not find a raison d'etre until Ronald Reagan was elected President in 1980.

Three Cheers for the 'Tute!

2011-03-05T08:21:00.000-08:00

It has come to my attention that not only is it possible for Caltech to win a basketball game, but that MIT has made the Division III playoffs of the NCAA. And beaten their first round opponent, Ithaca College (a subset of Cornell, I presume). I am almost certain this phenomenon occurred because the intrepid roundballers were expert in calculating the precise trajectory that a basketball departing the hand at a certain speed and at a certain vector angle would travel when acted upon by the forces of gravity, and how to plot that angle of decay so that the spheroid would pass precisely between the metal rim of a hoop without touching either side, given the circumference of a basketball is known and allowing for a certain amount of wind resistance. Either that or they just knew how to throw down on those wusses from New York.

Since 1983, MIT has been busily expanding its athletic facilities, and students from our day and age (1978) would not recognize the place. For us, athletic facilities consisted of at least one gymnasium, the Rockwell Cage, which had a dirt floor that Steve Tyler of Aerosmith once puked on, so I am told. It was a great place to play flag football and intramural lacrosse. There was a basketball court on top of Walker Memorial, too, and while it didn't have the panache of the Boston Garden, it certainly had the parquet floor - loose floorboards and all. Walker also had some tennis courts, on whose surfaced played some of the greats of macroeconomics. And there was a tennis bubble on the West Side of Campus that collapsed in the Great Blizzard of '78.

There is also the Steinbrenner track, which annually hosts the alumni reunions.

As I explained earlier, Steinbrenner's name is not on that building. And so far, MIT has been fortunate not to be gifted by Donald Trump.

More Characters: Evan the Red

2011-03-04T20:58:00.000-08:00

I've been having a bit of a debate. Not with myself, mind you, but with the various members of the Ayn Rand Worship Society. When they were much younger, they had their own publication dedicated to flanneling free market principles, Romantic literature and Star Trek (I think I told this story already). Today, they are all alumni, they publish blogs and run endless debates on MIT's Linked-In site devoted to the postulation that they are so much smarter than everyone else when it comes to economic thought, and therefore policymakers should take them seriously.

What separated the denizens of Ergo from the denizens of thursday was that whereas we were a bunch of smelly, hairy, pimply-faced leftists in flannel shirts and bluejeans, they were a bunch of smelly, clean-shaven, pimply-faced libertarians in short-sleeved button-down shirts and khaki pants from JC Penney. And they had discovered Brylcreem. Not that either of our respective groups was ever going to find romance with a partner of the opposite sex. We were just two sides of the same bad penny.

Speaking of flannel shirts and blue-jeans, there was one particular Marxist who happened to live on Second East - next door to me. And he was as dyed-in-the-wool as it gets. If you've ever seen the Young Ones on BBC America, the most obnoxiously leftist member of the foursome, Rick, can be recognized by the Soviet-style heroic paintings that he applied with a brush and a roller to his wall. This is not exaggeration. My Marxist neighbor actually did that to his dorm room interior.

So who was this person? We called him Evan the Red.

He really was everyone's favorite socialist. He was always telling us oppressed masses how we could better ourselves. In addition, he had liberated himself from Food Service by acquiring a hot plate and buying in bulk.

Evan had been doing this long before Costco made it popular with the bourgeoisie. The only problem was that Evan had developed a cooking style that was essentially to put a pot of vegetables on low flame and then rush off to the Marxist Lecture Series. This form of cooking was known as The Slow Burn. Evan had been blackening food long before Paul Prudhomme had perfected the technique and made New Orleans a gastronomic landmark.

However, when Evan made a blackened dish, it remained blackened for a long time. And the Fire Department usually had to be called in.

But when Evan was around, nothing went to waste.

A final note: the old joke among Jews is four rabbis, five opinions. Among the small community of radical activists, it was 12 leftists, 13 different (and fiercely distinct) leftist groups...

The only thing that united them was Doctor Marten's boots. Never, ever get them confused...

One day, I will have to explain the Social Action Coordinating Committee. They were a bit more, ahem, mainstream.

More Characters: Cindy and Walden

2011-02-28T20:06:00.000-08:00

Today's MIT is completely coeducational - the ratio of male to female students is about 1:1. But MIT did not always have such parity. In the days of Stickles, the ratio was closer to 3:1, and it was even worse on Second East, East Campus - an all male floor in a dorm where only 4 of the 10 floors was co-ed. Actually, not even the single-sex floors or dorms were truly all of the same sex; in fact, the Freshman Pop Quiz, administered to all the newbies on the last day of Orientation, has one question that reads: of these four locations, which one is not co-ed?
1) MacGregor (all-male barracks in the west end of the campus)
2) McCormick (home to the distaff)
3) Bexley (Campus head shop - also all male)
4) Room 7-103.
(The answer is Room 7-103, which is a Men's Room just off of Lobby 7)

Into the all-male bastion that was Second East wandered one lovely young woman during Orientation Week of 1975. Her name was Cindy...

...and her presence discombobulated the guys.

Cindy was the owner of a cat named Walden. Walden is actually a take-off of Woodstock, who was the cat that lived on Third East, one floor above us (Walden is also, coincidentally, the name of the puddle where the Doonesbury clan settled into the commune that would be their home after college). As I mentioned early on, Woodstock had a very brief but very notorious life, having run for President of the Class of 1978.

Walden was Cindy's constant companion. Perhaps a little too constant.

Walden also tended to get himself out on a limb on occasion.

Or get his nose into things he shouldn't.

He also made friends easily.

But not even he could reckon with MIT's large, extended colony of squirrels.

The "mutant" squirrels were almost as much a bane of our existence as the roaches. Like the roaches, they were everywhere, and they had the added extra feature of being clinically insane. I once saw one hanging from one of the lintels above the dorm entrance, screeching at the top of its little lungs. Others have, on occasion, been found scurrying down the hallways of the dorm. We're not sure what created them; there are some theories surrounding the Whitehead Institute of Biomedical Research, and others involving the Bexley Drug Factory (sorry, but it predates Stickles, so anything I know about it is by word of mouth). What I do recall is coming back to MIT several years after I'd graduated and having lunch with my brother-in-law in the faculty dining room, where I was offered "chocle squirrel" ice cream by one of the wait-staff. I didn't inquire further.

More Characters: Ralph

2011-02-27T19:30:00.000-08:00

MIT had its own collection of heads in the '60s and '70s. Most of them collected at Bexley, the last dorm that anyone mainstream wanted to be assigned to. But there were those for whom the allure of the place fit their profile, and they gravitated there - and eventually worked for thursday and avoided the Undegraduate Association and partied in the Bexley basement on Saturday nights while listening to One (which was a house band that played Grateful Dead covers and jam music). Some time in late 1977, thursday became mainstream, and so did Bexley - so it started to be cool for undergrads to come to the Bexley parties from places like MacGregor and Burton and McCormick.

Part of Bexley's counter-culture charm were the various hallucinogens that the residents would consume on occasion. But every dorm had at least one or two students who enjoyed a little cannabis here and there - and they could do without the counter-culture, thank you very much. Everyone - even the ROTC kids - had done a little something at least once in their time at college; if this stuff was supposed to be mind-altering, they were just as Republican after that one joint as before.

East Campus had a small group that would get themselves into a mind-altering haze and either play Mah-Jongg until morning - or play frisbee bowling, complete with plastic bowling pins, on a lazy Sunday afternoon during Independent Activities Period. Their best friend, at least as far as Stickles was concerned, was Ralph. Ralph was a Straight-A student majoring in (what else?) chemistry. And nothing else - sex, politics or sports - mattered to him but the Beatles and Firesign Theater, from whom he drew deep spiritual meaning with every inhalation. He was also just a little bit off the latch; gonzo, I think, was the word.

He also had a way of discovering things through experimentation.

To say he was a character probably did not do him justice.

He was more than a phenomenon; he was that one odd monument in the town square that you brought all the tourists to see.

But time catches up with us all. Ralph graduated and so did everyone else, and each successive crop of frosh was more buttoned-down and boring than the seniors they replaced. Even the ROTC kids.

More Characters: Ross

2011-02-26T21:39:00.000-08:00

The fellow with the curly hair is Ross. Ross was Pud's sidekick, Kato to Pud's Green Hornet, Robin to Pud's Batman. The two of them would be found chatting in the hall, doing problem sets or perhaps playing ping-pong together.

Ross was also the sophomore with the "sophomore single".

Unlike Charlie the Tuna, Ross did not have a double lip. And Ross was probably a solid "B" student, but it was not without some effort.

Maybe that was because unfortunate things had a way of happening to him.

In many ways, Ross was an Everyman. Upon graduation, Ross would probably find himself in a cubicle at a large high-technology firm, serving as a mid-level engineer. And he'd have a house in the suburbs with a garage and a deck - where he and Pud would crack open a couple of cold ones and reminisce about their days at MIT...when their wives weren't asking them to take out the trash.

Epic Fail 3: The Ballad of Charlie the Tuna

2011-02-23T19:18:00.000-08:00

I am informed by reliable sources at both ABC and NBC Nightly News that Cal Tech has won a basketball game. A conference basketball game. For the first time in 26 years. They did it - beat conference rival Occidental, 46-45. I'm sure my brother is ecstatic.

MIT's not in quite such a predicament. In their tenure in Division III, their basketball team has actually appeared in the playoffs and been ranked (if only Cam Lange could be there!). But basketball was never the glamor sport. Before football returned to the MIT campus in 1980, crew jocks got all the attention. If you were on either the men's or the women's crew team, you were varsity, you were MITAA, and life was good.

Stickles dandy Charlie the Tunafish, however, was not MITAA. But he had a lot in common with that Cal Tech basketball team, except his losing streak had been in the academic halls of MIT rather than on the gym floor. So he decided to embark on a deliberate attempt to flunk out, in an epic tale chronicled in an extended series of strips that came out in the first couple of months of 1977. In true Charlie fashion, however, his attempt to fail was itself an epic fail.

Professor Ed Diamond taught political science classes that focused heavily on the media. I took 17.27 my freshman year, though today I could not tell you its exact name. As mentioned previously, Prof. Diamond was also a managing editor at Newsweek, which meant he was very high up in the mass media food chain. As a result, he took a very serious interest in the campus student newspapers and hosted a Friday morning class at which members of the editorial staffs of thursday and the Tech gathered to discuss their newspapers. He'd ask the Tech staffers what their lead stories of the week were, and why. Then he'd ask us if we published that week.

For those not familiar with the '70s, Gary Gilmore was sentenced to death in Utah and elected to have his life taken by a firing squad. He was the first person executed in America after the Supreme Court reinstated the Death Penalty.

As for the Objectivists, they were philosophically aligned with Ayn Rand's writings and believed in the virtue of selfishness. They hated group activities, since those were collectivist behavior, but could still watch "The Fountainhead" without acknowledging the irony of a cast of thousands helping to bring to the big screen an epic tale of rugged individualism. Perhaps they should have watched "127 Hours" instead.

Now at this point, Charlie decided to lock himself in the "Tomb of the Unknown Tool", which is a famous but inaccessible landmark somewhere within Building 7. Or was it Building 10? Charlie sure didn't know...

At this point in the series, there was a final cartoon in which Charlie comes to a truce with the academic powers that be, and reschedules his graduation to "1986, if I'm lucky." I decided to pick a date that was not 1984, so that I could avoid the Orwellian overtones. But 1984 came...and went...and despite Ronald Reagan being in the White House, Big Brother did not arrive. That final cartoon is missing; presumably it is in the Tomb of the Unknown Tool.

Controversies: Genetic Engineering

2011-02-22T21:01:00.000-08:00

People are up in arms about genetically modified foods, cloning and other things that alter the basic chemical building blocks that result in life on this planet. But there are advantages to splicing the DNA from a lobster into a tomato, which one set of genetic engineers has already done - you get a tomato that costs $27.95 a pound (except at the all-you-can-eat lobster-tomato buffet). Or you can splice abalone genes into a crocodile and get a crocabalone. It doesn't matter; Michael Jacobsen and his cronies will still call it Frankenfood, and they won't eat it (and you shouldn't either if you know what's good for you!).

All this ferment actually began in a laboratory at Harvard University, just up the street (and up the creek) from us. They actually were the first to propose genetic experimentation, and that got the good citizens of Cambridge up in arms. All they knew was that a vial was going to spill on the floor of that laboratory and loose some strange new strain of deadly bacteria on the rest of us. Therefore, they wanted the lab isolated...

Later,a laboratory on the West Coast would find a way to make money off all of this genetic synthesis - and Genentech was born.

MIT had its own controversial activities, and I'm not talking about the Consumer Guide. Or Harvey Grogo. My freshman year consisted of protests over MIT's proposal to train Iranian nuclear engineers, which would enable a certain short dictatorial autocrat to provide his country with nuclear power - and perhaps enough weapons-grade plutonium for a bomb or two (sound familiar?). Shah Reza Pahlavi probably would have looked rather silly in a threadbare sportcoat and an open-necked dress shirt straight off the racks at Wal-Mart, but the campus activists didn't trust him and raised enough of a stink about the whole nuclear program to fill several issues of thursday in the Spring of 1975.

But Summer came and went, and by Fall 1975, a new controversy came along. MIT had cut a deal to train missile engineers for Chiang Kai Shek's Taiwan. This one got interesting when Taiwenese students already at MIT decided to hold a rally in opposition to the program, and a couple of visitors (some would say KMT Party secret police dressed up as students) decided to take pictures of the rally - for their "memories". Again, many issues of thursday were filled with breathless news releases about the nefarious details of the secret program, and again a year came and went, and there would be newer and fresher outrages...

More Characters: Charlie the Tunafish

2011-02-21T17:05:00.000-08:00

Charlie the Tunafish was a character who lived in the Goodale end of the dorm, but he could have been any of us. He could have been a good student, but he was a bit preoccupied with other pursuits.

Charlie was one of those undergrads who was always looking for love in all the wrong places. It was the disco era, so of course he had his platform shoes, snaggletooth necklace and a shirt that he always unbuttoned halfway down to his waist for the mixers. He was more a fan of Roxy Music than the Bee Gees, though, so he didn't entirely fit the scene.

But Charlie was always willing to broaden his horizons.

Charlie's bigger problem was that he was always flunking at least a couple of courses each semester. It wasn't that he wasn't MIT caliber; he just had too many other things on his mind.

Charlie once brought home a gorgeous young blonde from the Combat Zone - one who streaked Professor French's physics class one afternoon - but in true Charlie fashion, he happened to lose her to another of the dorm residents. She would become a den mother to us, she cooked a number of spaghetti suppers for the residents of the floor, and she also turned out to be a decent softball player, which was important because otherwise we wouldn't have won many games. She never became a Stickles character, though - probably because Doonesbury already had a character named Boopsie.

Star Trekkin' (Commercial Success, part 3)

2011-02-20T20:16:00.000-08:00

You can tell the age of this cartoon, which came out soon after William Shatner started hawking Promise Margarine. Today, Shatner would be quitting to become the Priceline Negotiator. This after having been TJ Hooker and having hosted Rescue 911. He's also Dad in Sh*t My Dad Says, but we'll forgive him for taking on a role that was clearly meant for Danny DeVito.

East Campus was where Star Trek was watched. In the various West Campus dorms, Monty Python's Flying Circus captured everyone's attention. Star Trek was kind of a touchstone for us in our undergraduate days. The show had already been in reruns for eight years, but it was still Must See TV for us. It was kind of the gateway to the evening's activities - dinner, usually awful, served in Walker Memorial right after the last class of the day let out, followed by Star Trek at 7. The sun had long gone down, so we'd gather in the East Campus lounge in front of the big color console (although we could gather in the Goodale Lounge on Second East and watch the black and white set if we didn't feel like going all the way across to the other parallel). Then we'd all split up - some of us settling in for a long night of problem sets and term papers, some of us departing the building to partake in some extracurricular student activities and some of us sticking around for the prime time line-up. There were even those who'd start in on card games, though the real serious card playing did not begin until after the news and the Carson monologue at 11. Depending on the day, I might join the guys playing cards or spend the evening in the thursday office transcribing articles for the newspaper or, more likely, shooting the bull with Dave Schubert and Tom Ginden until all hours.

Star Trek also held a certain fascination for the members of the Ayn Rand Worship Society. In Ergo, when they weren't extolling the virtues of selfishness, composing paeans to the magnificent music of Richard Wagner and the romantic images of 19th Century literary classics, and saluting the steadfastness of Boston University Chancellor John Silber (who had been run off the University of Texas campus on a rail), they would wax eloquent over the parallels between individual Star Trek episodes and Objectivist thought. Captain Kirk and First Officer Spock were their philosophical heroes, which is odd, because the fourth Star Trek movie, directed by Leonard Nimoy, would celebrate saving the whales a la Greenpeace.

Indeed, none of us could foresee that the three-season oeuvre that was the original Star Trek would grow into a vast enterprise (heh!) in the '80s and '90s. There would be the next generation television series (at least two of them), complete with new characters, the movies and even the song parodies. Meanwhile, the high technologists are busily scrambling to invent devices that replicate those early Star Trek gadgets - wrist communicators, wands that can measure vitals when waved over a body and even phasers that you can set to "stun". Anti-matter has been detected and catalogued, cloaking devices that can bend light rays around objects are being designed, and there are people who are convinced that transporters will eventually be able to beam us from place to place. And the age of the flip-top communicator has come and gone; remember the Flip-Phone and the folding cellular phones that followed a generation later?

By the way, a true Trekker knows what's wrong with the above strip. The correct expression is, "Beam me aboard, Scotty" (and actually it's "Beam me up, Scotty", as in "Beam me up, Scotty, there's no intelligent life down here", usually said of Earth).

Epic Fail 2

2011-02-17T20:22:00.000-08:00

Yes, they did this at the Institute a lot...

Fish and Strategic Gamers

2011-02-16T19:45:00.000-08:00

(Bless me Father for I have sinned. It has been nine days since my last blog post.)

Benjamin Franklin once said that fish and Strategic Gamers always smelled after three days. Well, maybe he didn't say that, but he would have if he'd stopped by the front door of the thursday offices on Sunday and found them into the 52nd hour of a 72-hour marathon session of Panzer Brigade. There were two organizations full of these creatures - the Strategic Games Society and the Society for Creative Anachronism. I mean, who else would make an obsession out of serial Mad Mate? Who else could tell the age of a Risk board by the shape of the Ten-Army piece? And who else could look ridiculous in full chain-mail and tights, yet be authentically smelly?

Anyway, I lived on a floor that had more than its share of Strategic Gamers. We were divided up into clans that roughly paralleled the division of the dormitory itself. Walcott Hall to the south had the stoners, who would get drunk on vodka and play Mah-Jongg until 3 in the morning (or get stoned on hashish and play Backgammon until 4). Goodale had the sex-obsessed - the guys who would play Queen and 10cc while thumbing through Penthouse and fantasizing about the wattage of their stereos. And Bemis had the nerds, who would retreat to one of the lounges and preoccupy their minds with the problem set that was due at the end of the week. Oh, and the Strategic Gamers.

But the best place to find Strategic Games Society members in the wild was in Walker Memorial, whose carpet agreed with their flesh tones. They'd spread out their game boards and their hex dice and their strategy cards, and camp out for a while. They were immovable; not even the sound of Meat Loaf, cranked up to 11, could drive them away. This is not to say they didn't have their own place to gather; it's just that I could never find it...

Strategic Gamers also had another distinguishing quirk to their personality - they were obsessed with the military. Not that they possessed great amounts of brute physical ability that would qualify them as Army Strong. They were obsessed with weapons systems. One person, who lived on my floor and shall remain nameless, actually organized a Saturday night lecture on the merits of the A-10 Tank Killer (which someone in the Army would affectionately and mercifully rename as the "Warthog" when it actually went into service). If you ever wondered who kept Tom Clancy's publishing enterprise going all those years, this was his constituency. Well, that and all the old geezers who still think we could have won the war in Vietnam if it hadn't been for those damned hippies.

There was nothing quite as complex as an Avalon Hill board game. First of all, the game board was not necessarily square. Second, the dice were not necessarily cubes. And third, there were rules in this knife fight.

Many of the Strategic Gamers would go on to long and successful careers, either as Beltway Bandits or as drones in the Skunk Works. I never did find one who would later end up in the Peace Corps.

Super Bowl Sunday

2011-02-06T17:36:00.000-08:00

"Punting" was not just someone kicking the football to the other team on a fourth-and-long situation. Nor was it an activity that one could do on the Charles River on a sunny Spring afternoon (by the way, what were those?). No, "punting" was something every student at MIT learned to do when a situation became completely untenable and there was nothing else that could be done. You could punt a problem set, a lab, a term paper or that month-old pile of dirty laundry with equal dexterity. It was a response that brought relief to the user and allowed him to then focus on something far more serious...like whether or not to go to the mixer at Wellesley or the block party at Simmons/Emanuel/Wheelock. Some things could not be punted, though - like that night shift at Twenty Chimneys. That meant no paycheck, and what student could survive without a little pocket money for the weekend?

"Punting" also referred to the process of dropping a class in mid-semester. We discussed that previously, so I'm going to punt on the explanation.

Epic Fail

2011-02-05T14:53:00.000-08:00

It's happened to each of us. We've failed a test or an exam. Afterwards, we dust ourselves off and soldier on.

Incidentally, 18.03 is a sophomore year mathematics class, Differential Equations. This is what differentiates between the men and the boys. Later, I would find out that much of what we do in the realm of planning, designing and constructing airports does not require higher-order mathematics beyond basic calculus. But if you want to make it at Enron or AIG, this is what you have to know (courses in ethics are optional).

Incidentally, MIT in our day allowed students to drop a course within six weeks after the beginning of the semester. Usually, by then it was possible to tell if you were destined for greatness or going to bite royally. There would be at least one test or a couple of problem sets from which to divine the future. But occasionally...