“Henry VIII bathed often and changed his undershirts daily, he was a royal rarity.“
Coronavirus has put sanitation into our collective mind. Keep your distance from others; wash your hands; don’t touch your face. Back in the sixteenth century, King Henry VIII (voted “worst monarch” by the Historical Writers Association, had the same worry. His fear of the dreaded sweating sickness caused him to sleep in a different bed every night.
Without warning, a person would be overcome with headache, neck ache, general weakness and a cold sweat covering the entire body. Then came fever, dehydration and heart palpitations. In less than twenty-four hours, half of those afflicted were dead. The infection was blamed on foreigners — sound familiar? — specifically mercenaries Henry’s father had brought to England to help him seize the throne.
“Imagine how dangerous sailing the high seas would be if all the ships ever lost in history were still drifting on top of the water.”
The Soviet Union set off the space race in 1957 with its launch of the Sputnik satellite into orbit. The U.S.S.R.-U.S. competition culminated in 1969 with Apollo 11’s landing on the moon and planting the American flag.
Sputnik circled earth for about four months until the one-hundred-eighty-pound satellite’s elliptical orbit deteriorated. It incinerated when it re-entered the atmosphere. Since that time thousands of objects have been hurled into space, nearly five-hundred in the last year. Only a few met Sputnik’s end. Most of it is still up there.
ClearSpace-1
An estimated thirty-four-thousand man-made objects are orbiting earth: five-thousand satellites — mostly non-functioning — and all sizes and shapes of miscellaneous debris. All this junk is cluttering orbital paths, leaving little room for newer satellites.
(Elon Musk’s Tesla roadster is presently somewhere between Mars and Jupiter, on its way back from a turn around the sun.)
The European Space Agency has decided to do something about it. (You didn’t think the U.S. or Russia would, did you?) E.S.A. has contracted with a Swiss company to develop a space garbage collector. The target date is 2025 to launch ClearSpace-1. This initial mission will be to capture a two-hundred-fifty-pound piece of debris left behind from a rocket launched in 2013.
The project manager says ClearSpace-1 will use a “Pac-Man system” to collect the trash.
March 8 is International Women’s Day. But why do women need their own day? The Seattle Times found out why when it began research for a story about Continental Mills, a local company, owned and operated by the third generation of the Heily family. Continental is known for its Krusteaz brand of pancake, pie crust, biscuit and other mixes.
The Krusteaz web site features a “History” page with a photo of four women at a card table and a heartwarming story of the women of a Seattle bridge club who invented a just-add-water pie-crust mix. They called it “Crust Ease.” (Krusteaz — get it?) Except no one at Continental Mills knew who these women were.
The Boeing Company named David Calhoun its new Chief Executive Officer a few weeks ago. The company, once the pride of Seattle, is trying to get back on course after discarding its engineering focus and putting the company’s direction in the hands of bean counters. The end result, as we know, was the crash of two aircraft, killing 346 people, and the grounding of the 737 Max — the latest iteration of its venerable workhorse.
Arch-rival Airbus took orders for more than a hundred aircraft at the 2019 Paris Air Show. Boeing left the show without an order. None. Zero. Nada.
The new chief executive Calhoun, a protege of former General Electric CEO “Neutron Jack” Welch, was an ardent defender of his predecessor at Boeing. He now says the company was in worse shape than he thought, already deflecting blame. “It’s more than I imagined it would be, honestly,” Calhoun said. “And it speaks to the weaknesses of our leadership.” (Welch got his nickname for his reputation of firing people but leaving buildings intact.)
Calhoun will be paid $1.4 million salary and guaranteed(!) cash bonus of $2.5 million and $10 million in restricted stock and another $7 million cash if the 737 Max gets back in the air. (“Bonus” does not mean the same thing in corporate execu-speak as it does to the rest of us.)
Boeing announced that its fired CEO Dennis Muilenburg will not receive severance pay. In addition, the company stated he is forfeiting his $14.6 million performance bonus for 2019. Muilenburg will still receive pension, deferred compensation benefits and long-term incentive awards totaling $62.2 million. Boeing paid the now-disgraced chief executive $23.4 million in 2018.
Muilenburg also holds options to purchase nearly 73,000 shares of Boeing stock at approximately $76 per share. Boeing’s share price currently hovers around $265, its twelve-month low. Still, not bad: an immediate profit of about $14 million when he exercises his options.
“If we kill all the owls, for example, someday we’ll be up to our ribcages in mice.” – Republican Governor Tom McCall
Tom McCall Waterfront Park borders the Willamette River as it flows along downtown Portland. The park opened in 1978, replacing Harbor Drive, a semi-freeway that separated the city from the then severely-polluted river. Waterfront Park was given its name to honor Tom McCall who served two terms as Oregon’s governor, from 1967 to 1975. Gov. McCall’s enduring legacy is his advocacy of land-use planning and his anti-pollution leadership.
The history of the United States is the story of opposition to the immigration of ethnic or socioeconomic groups, one after another. Beginning with the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, those who had previously immigrated fought against the succeeding wave of newcomers whom they perceived as less worthy than themselves.
Founding Father Benjamin Franklin railed against the “Stupid, Swarthy” Germans coming into Pennsylvania. Irish, Italians, Chinese, Japanese, Muslims, Mexicans have all been subjected to anti-immigrant backlash. During the Depression, California tried to keep out “Okies” who were fleeing dust-bowl oppression.
Digression: Noted journalist and food writer Calvin Trillin maintains that the high point of U.S. immigration policy is the Immigration Act of 1965, which allowed a greater influx of people from third-world countries. Previously, quotas favored the British over Asians. “I guess the idea was that people who like bland food make good citizens.” He said. “In food terms, it wasn’t a good policy.”
A half-century ago, upstanding citizens tried to fight off another invading scourge: hippies. Humboldt County, on California’s northern coast, felt it was being inundated by long-haired, unwashed hordes. So much so that local citizens got up a petition to keep the hippies out. The entreaty, with 111 signatures submitted to the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors demanded relief from a “mass infiltration of hippies” into their communities.
“Many residents have come upon them bathing in the nude and having intercourse on the beaches of our rivers and ocean,” the petition complained. “We are concerned with their utter lack of regard for the moral, health, and sanitary codes.” The appeal also complained that many of the interlopers were said to be receiving welfare payments.
Fifty years later, life goes on in Humboldt County. Along with Mendocino and Trinity Counties, the area has become known as the Emerald Triangle, so named because it is the largest cannabis-producing region in the U.S. Since the hippie invasion, marijuana has become a strong force in the region’s fiscal health, first as part of an underground economy, then legal and mainstream in recent years.
