Lurching into its third month, the Ingraham Street construction in Hyattsville continues.
Having put in spanking-new sewer-feeder pipes, which required tearing up the street that had been newly paved two years ago, the WSSC’s contractors are hard at work today. They’ve replaced a lot of the concrete curbing that had been damaged in the last two months. They’re replacing driveway aprons that were messed up (including ours). They plan, by the end of the week, to have a newly paved street for us, curb to curb, as they put it.
Isn’t that nice? I think so.
What strikes me as bizarre is that the following week, the Washington Gas contractors plan to tear up a chunk of the brand-new street to replace the gas lines damaged last month; these lines serve the house next door and one across the street.
Honest to God. Tearing up a week-old street.
Hyattsville’s mayor, Marc Tartaro, who is a hard-working and intelligent person, responded to some of us in an email that the city has little control over what the public utilities do to our streets. Marc promised to try to get the utilities to coordinate their efforts to avoid having to patch a brand-new road surface, but I got the sense that he may not be able to do it.
City Communications Director Abby Sandel, Mayor Marc Tartaro. Photo: Chris Suspect.
Sometimes you just have to laugh because crying does no good. Updates to follow!
UPDATE; TUESDAY MORNING:
This is good news!
It appears to me that our mayor, Marc Tartaro, has managed to do what I frankly thought was impossible: The contractors are digging on the street this morning, which implies to me that the gas main is being repaired before the street will be totally repaved!
So, our snazzy new street might stay snazzy looking for a while.
Thanks to Marc, his staff, Washington Gas, WSSC and all the contractors! Good work!
FURTHER UPDATE:
As impossible as this is to believe, today’s giant hole in the street is being dug by the WSSC contractors exactly where the Washington Gas folks need their hole to be dug, but the gas line isn’t being replaced today. This particular hole is to repair a sewage line not the gas line.
So, I spoke too soon! The new street will be torn up according to the original schedule, one week after being totally repaved.
Bureaurocracy wins! How could I have doubted it?!?!?
I suspect so; it seems kinda goofy, too hip by half and annoying. Who really cares what you’re ordering at the coffee shop? I tried it for, I believe, three days.
Many of the folks tweeting around now may not remember how hip Citizen’s Band radios were in the United States around 1976-1978. They were hugely popular in that time before the internet and cell phones.
Perhaps spurred by the C.W. McCall song, Convoy, and certainly spurred by the Smokey and the Bandit movies, folks all over had these radios installed under their car’s dash and sent in their coupon to the U.S. government for a license to use it. Then the hipster had to learn how to talk on the thing, which was an art form. Anything had to be said in a fake Arkansas accent if at all possible.
Here’s The Bandit as played by Burt Reynolds:
Very important was your CB radio name, or “handle.” Much thought was given to this important item, much like screen names today. My handle, of course, was “Boy Howdy.”
Much of the CB radio traffic had to do with highway travel and avoiding police while speeding. Some valuable info, like traffic jams, closed roads, speed traps or other things to avoid, was sometimes provided.
I worked with a guy who couldn’t afford air conditioning for his car, when cars often didn’t come with it as standard equipment, or a CB radio. He bought a broken microphone with a coiled cord, rolled up his windows in the Florida heat and drove around hoping to look cool. Didn’t work. He’s probably a super tweeter today.
Some CB enthusiasts had high-power transmitters on their radios; I knew several people with radios so powerful that keying the mike could make a nearby fluorescent tube light up even if it wasn’t connected to a fixture!
After about 1978, all the excitement was over and CB radios were as old-school and unhip as eight-track tape players, multiple gold chains, mullet haircuts and vinyl tops on automobiles.
CB radios famously had their own lingo. Here’s a sample of what was considered cool twenty-five years before LOL, ROTFL, BRB and so on: 10-4: Affirmative. Can also be used to denote agreement (“That’s a big 10-4.”) 10-7: Out of commission 10-20 (more often simply “20”): Location, as in “My 20 is I-95 at exit 13.” Anklebiters: Children Bear: Police officer Bear in the air: Police aircraft Bear taking pictures: Police with radar Breaker: Telling other CB users that you’d like to start a transmission on a channel. May be succeeded by the channel number, indicating that anyone may acknowledge (“Breaker one-nine” refers to channel 19, the most widely used among truck drivers). Clean and green: No police or obstructions ahead Convoy: Group of three or more truckers in a row, usually exceeding the speed limit County mountie: Deputy sheriff’s car Double nickel: The 55mph speed limit Driver: Polite form of address when you do not know someone’s on-the-air nickname. (See “Handle”) Drop/put the hammer down: Pressing the accelerator pedal to full speed Feed the bear: Pay a traffic fine Handle: Nickname a CB user uses in CB transmissions. Other CB users will refer to the user by this nickname. To say “What’s your handle?” is to ask another user for their CB nickname. Negatory: No Reefer: Refrigerated trailer Smokey: Law officer, particularly state police or highway patrol
UPDATE:
A friend asked me to give some guidance to the CB radio terms in the C.W. McCall Convoy tune that I didn’t already identify, so here goes. I got most of these off Net sites; the plot of the song is that a bunch of truckers are going from California to New Jersey or maybe New York City.
C.W. McCall, by the way, was the fictitious name used by the writer and singer of that song, who was really Omaha ad agency art director, Bill Fries.
10-Roger: Cute form of 10-4
Cab-over: Style of semi-truck tractor with a flat front due to the cab being over the engine
Catch you on the flip-flop: “I’ll talk to you on my return trip (on the way back home).” Chicken coop: Weigh station Chi-town: Chicago, Illinois Copy that: Message received Got a copy?: “Do you hear me?” Flagtown: Flagstaff, Arizona Front door: The first vehicle in the line of a convoy Headin’/huntin’ for bear: Coming up on a police blockade Jimmy: a GMC truck Keep the bugs off your glass and the bears off your . . . tail: The real phrase is “keep the bugs off your glass and the bears off your ass.” A typical CB sign-off that means to drive carefully and watch out for speed traps. Longhaired friends of Jesus: Hippies Microbus: Volkswagen Microbus or van. Very popular vehicle among the hippies during the 1960s and 1970s.* Another popular song that mentions the Volkswagen Microbus is Alice’s Restaurant Massacree by Arlo Guthrie. On the side: A break in the conversation
Rigs: Semi-truck brands, like Kenworth, Peterbilt or White, or types of semi, like cab-overs or reefers Shakeytown: Los Angeles, California Suicide jockey: Driver of a hazardous material truck Swindle sheets: Truckers’ logs. Truckers have to keep logs of what they were hauling; these “swindle sheets” must be presented to Department Of Transportation officers on request. Ten-nine (10-9): Repeat message Tulsa-town: Tulsa, Oklahoma
*My VW Microbus (owned from 1969 to 1974) was a 1963 blue-and-white onewith Budweiser-label fabric curtains and quality eight-track sound pushed through a Fender Showman speaker cabinet. — Jim
FURTHER UPDATE:
This is turning into a mammoth post; there’s more interest than I anticipated!
Now some folks want to know why police, especially state police or troopers, are known as Smokeys or bears. Most of you already know this, but it’s the hat.
When Smokey the Bear was chosen as the cartoon mascot of the U.S. Forest Service in 1947, he was drawn wearing a campaign hat. This cool-looking hat, known in the U.S. Army as the 1911 Hat, Service, M1911, is a broad-brimmed hat, usually made of felt, with a high crown, pinched symmetrically at the four corners (the “Montana crease”). The Montana crease was developed so that rain would not collect in the creases of the hat.
These hats are still worn by Army drill instructors, forest rangers and such, but they’re most often seen on state police or highway patrol officers. In Canada, they’re worn by the Mounties.
So that’s why, in trucker’s and CB lingo, state police are called Smokeys or bears!
My grand-daughter, Maddie, is fascinated by robots. Considering that she’s just over three years old, that’s a good indication, to me at least, of the prevalence of robots in our culture.
The word “robot” was created by a Czech painter in 1920 for his brother to use in a play to describe the machines who did drudge work. It’s a spinoff of the Slovak word for “serf.” Here’s a photo of three robots from that play, Karel Capek’s R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), which debuted in 1920:
So from the beginning, robots had to have some resemblance to humans and be capable of movement. There are many robotic machines in use today but few are what we think of as robots. They’re just machines designed for repetitive tasks.
This cute stamped-metal toy from the 1950s is what a robot looked like to kids of my generation, though not all of them carried little red lanterns:
In the movies, one of the most iconic robots was Robby in The Forbidden Planet from 1956:
Robby was created by the prop makers at MGM and appeared in later TV shows and movies under other names. His best feature was the gears moving inside the transparent dome on his head.
The most famous film robot was probably R2D2 from Star Wars:
His buddy, C-3PO, was more of an android, I guess, but here he is:
Television had had many great robots. The Simpsons creator, Matt Groening, had a robot named Bender on a show called Futurama:
Here’s the 1948 comic book cover that Bender was based upon:
My favorite television robots were the wisecracking Crow T. Robot and Tom Servo from Mystery Science Theater 3000; here they are with their creator, Joel:
In comic books, unrestrained by having to be a physical object, robots were everywhere and of all shapes and sizes. A 1941 Action Comic shows Superman smashing a couple of crude robots:
On the early ’50s television show, The Adventures of Superman, there were a couple of robots. You can see they, too, were crude, reflecting the cheap budget of that truly wonderful show. Superman, as portrayed by George Reeves, was much kinder to this robot than his comic-book counterpart had been a few years earlier:
Side comment: In my opinion, George Reeves’ portrayal of Superman was flat-out the most successful by any actor. We now return to the robots.
In the later 1950s, DC editor Mort Weisinger created a Superman ethos that included a ton of great robots. Superman made an entire platoon of robots to cover for him in emergencies, and, as this Action Comics cover from 1961 shows, he had a few Clark Kent robots, too:
I love the expression on the face of that Clark Kent robot! He is really confounded by his predicament. And how do you like that expository dialog? Weisinger was famous for that and I find it one of the coolest things about the comics he edited; it was so over-the-top. One of his assistants once argued with Weisinger over the editor’s insistence on having a sign over a crook’s secret hideout that said, “Secret Hideout!”
These later Superman comic-book robots looked so much like humans that even close friends of the original subject couldn’t tell they were artificial. These high-end robots often had emotions, and, to my way of thinking, started crossing into what are more properly called androids. An android is a synthetic human being, and folks are busily creating them nowadays!
Here’s one called DER 01, made by the Intelligent Robotics Lab in Japan:
I live in Prince Georges County, Maryland, which has a population of 871,233 and covers 498.45 square miles. There were five designated early voting locations in this county.
Five.
Whomever the Braniac was that figured five early-voting locations were enough for this county should be made to stand in line for, say, the next two years as punishment.
For comparison purposes, the District of Columbia has a population of 617,996 and covers 68.3 square miles. They had eight early-voting locations; that’s with a 30% smaller population and only 14% of the size of Prince Georges County. They had 70% more early-voting sites than PG County.
I tried early voting Saturday at 2pm. The closest early-voting location to me is the College Park Community Center, and I couldn’t get near the place. Police officers were there to attempt to handle the traffic nightmare, but I was stuck on a residential street for thirty minutes in absolute gridlock. When a policeman walked by my car, I asked what in the world was going on; I though that perhaps there had been some sort of accident or catastrophe.
He replied that all the cars were folks trying to get to the polling place, and that we all had to try to turn around and go home; officials hadn’t realized how many people would show up.
When I tried again yesterday afternoon, accompanied by an impatient friend, we stood in line for 45 minutes, and gave it up when we were told that we would have to spend at least another 45 minutes before we’d reach our turns. I was all for staying, but my friend Bob was livid and refused to spend another minute in line. I really couldn’t blame him.
So to Hell with early voting. Maybe one day some official can make an intelligent decision and designate a reasonable number of early-voting sites. I seriously doubt it.
I just submitted this photo to Shorpy.com, my favorite web site, and figured I’d post it here, too.
My dad served with the 82nd Airborne in WWII, and sent home an enormous batch of trophies, as seen in this photo taken on the front porch of our family farm after the war. Many of these guns, flags and uniforms were loaned to a museum in Fernandina Beach, Florida, and went astray. We were able to recover a few of them in the early 1970s and the automatic-weapon stamps from the ATF cost us a fortune; I believe it was $500 per gun. You should have seen it when the Naples police chief, my mom, two of my friends and I carried this stash of weapons into the Bank of Naples to store in their safe-deposit vault!
They were all sold or given away long ago, except for a 7.65mm Walther PPK I’ve kept. Dad picked that pistol up in the bunker in Berlin where Adolph Hitler had committed suicide with a pistol of the same make and caliber. Now, that model pistol is much more famous for being the pistol that James Bond keeps under that well-tailored suit jacket of his. [Edit: just learned that the bunker may have been the one under Hitler’s home, not the one in Berlin. No way of knowing for sure.]
My dad even brought back that dog in the photo; her name was Beulah.
Here’s a photo of Dad showing the campaign ribbons and such that he had earned in that war. I guess he was about 21 years old in this photo taken after the war.
My grandmother had an 8″ x 10″ glossy of the following Associated Press photo on the wall in her den. It shows my dad in WWII; she also had the yellowed newspaper clipping which identified him in the photo. Its headline, I remember, was Local Trooper Advances Under Enemy Fire.
On the 82nd Airborne site, it has this caption:
An infantryman from the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division goes out on a one-man sortie while covered by a comrade in the background, near Bra, Belgium, on December 24, 1944″
The three-week battle, of which the above photo illustrates one brief moment, was later called the Battle of the Bulge or the Ardennes Offensive; one of the last desperate efforts of Nazi Germany to survive. I think that’s a Thompson submachine gun in one of my dad’s hands; those might be wire cutters in the other.
Pretty grim situation for a kid just out of his teens. No helmet, either. No one likes to wear a helmet on Christmas Eve.
Murphy, our Boston terrier, is very interested in the sewer-pipe replacement activity going on in front of our house. As the photo shows, he pays strict attention to all that goes on, though he is sometimes nervous about the loud noises and shaking of the house that are part of this effort.
Here we see Murphy watching as the LBT is smushing the dirt in the big hole dug by the other machines.
I have been on the lookout in case the final resting place of Jimmy Hoffa is discovered, but so far, he has not surfaced. One of the crew said to me the other day, “This is a big pain and inconvenience for the folks on your street, but just think: In a week or so you’ll have brand-new feeder pipes for your sewerage!”
Yes; that is a wonderful thing to contemplate, and I hope that I can restrain myself from lording it over those with lesser sewerage-feeder pipes. They can’t help it, and it would just make them jealous.
As many of you may already know, I’m not an impulse buyer. All my purchases are well-considered and thoroughly thought out far in advance. Still, there are opportunities that arise, chiefly on eBay, that require a snap decision and a firm commitment to furthering one’s stable of useful and necessary items. Hence the auction below, which I just won:
Just click to enlarge!
Yes, within days, I will have my own Little Blue Thing to fool around with. Sometimes Patty isn’t in 100% alignment on the things I buy, but this purchase is sure to meet with her approval. I can see it now:
“Hey, Patty; the LBT and I are up early and rearing to go! Is there anything around the house that you need smushed this morning?”
“Why, yes, my Darling Husband! Howzabout having your new mechanical friend smush that fat ugly empty thing perched on top of your neck?”
“No problem! Where’s my LBT remote control?”
Well, as you know, there wasn’t really a Little Blue Thing for sale on eBay, at least today. But maybe one day . . .
After the street crew parked everything for the weekend, having done as much damage as they could for one week, I didn’t see our old friend, Little Blue Thing.
I walked out to where all the machines, gravel, asphalt and pipe were on the side of the road, and looked around.
Wait a minute! Is that a little blue nose sticking out of that giant steel contraption used to keep the sides of the hole from caving in?
Yes! LBT is hiding inside it. I don’t know if he was driven into it via his remote-control box or if the machine operator placed the contraption over LBT.
You already know what Will Smith movie the header quote came from, so I won’t bother telling you.
The WSSC is tearing up our street again, and the letter they sent to us all promised that, during this project, we’d see “interesting machines.” Patty thought that was a strange thing for them to say, but it has proved to be true.
My neighbors and I– at least the male neighbors– have fallen in love with this little blue thing. We all want one.
It’s about half the size of a car, articulated in the middle, and is radio controlled. When it’s powered up, the round light in front flashes orange and it begins to shudder, like a puppy held tight on a leash:
It isn’t speedy, but it is determined as it moves down the road. It’s shape gives it an R2-D2 quality.
Here it is relentlessly proceeding to the actual holes in the street down our hill:
Here’s the fellow controlling it with a black box about the size of a Lipton’s tea-bag package. He stands pretty far away from this unit, so I couldn’t get them both in the same photo. The controller’s skill is high; we watched him parallel park the thing and it was most impressive.
The technical name for this device, based upon the knobby wide metal wheels, is, I believe, a “smusher.”
FRIDAY MORNING UPDATE:
Here we see Little Blue Thing parked alongside its bigger brother, Somewhat Larger Blue Thing. Go ahead; call them The Blues Brothers.
As happens occasionally even in human families, the smaller brother is the cuter one. The larger one is not unattractive, but its need to have a steering wheel, driver’s seat and roll bar get in the way of its smooth lines. It looks purposeful but not cute.
In addition, the bulging hood on Somewhat Larger Blue Thing, combined with the row of vents at the sides of the hood, give this fellow a more aggressive look. It’s like what happened to the Ford Mustang after it had been out a couple of years.
FRIDAY AFTERNOON UPDATE:
Our hero, LBT (Little Blue Thing) gets a chance to show its stuff as it takes on the challenge of smushing down the red-clay dirt at the bottom of a deep trench. Notice how the crew lowers LBT down into the trench using some large machine:
Once in the trench, you can sense the LBT’s enthusiasm as it trembles in anticipation before the control-person sends it into action. Clearly in its element, LBT blithely rolls back and forth, smushing with abandon. Even the jaded construction crew smiles with joy and– yes– pride as they watch LBT’s antics:
FRIDAY EVENING UPDATE:
The crew working on this sewer project are splendid; they get in early, work steadily all day and clean up before they leave in the evening; not only sweeping the street but washing down where they’ve worked.
And I can’t say “these guys” are excellent; there are women among the crew. They dress the same as the men, including the green safety vests, so it isn’t immediately obvious that they’re female.
Some of our neighbors were initially rather upset that this work wasn’t done a couple of years ago when our street was totally replaced, but the super job that the WSSC contractors are doing has put most of that feeling to rest. After the crew leaves each day, many of us are outside marveling at the way they’ve approached their task.
So it’s become sort of a social thing but then again this is a close-knit community.
I’m constantly astonished at the photos that can be taken with an iPhone. Here’s a spiderweb I saw this morning, taken from 15 feet away:
As one who used to lug the old Speed Graphic, Graflex, Mamiya and other bulky large- and medium-format cameras around, I appreciate what the little iPhone camera can do! And no film processing!!!
Here’s another iPhone photo of that spiderweb, which is above the hedge separating our yard from the one next door. It was taken from five feet:
Ansel Adams was once asked, “What’s the most useful camera accessory?” He replied, “Your feet.”
Jim's World and Welcome To It 