George Rothert – GEORGE ROTHERT

The 45 Turns 75

Some of you probably remember when your music came on vinyl discs. You brought your purchase home from the record store, placed the record on a turntable and dropped a needle into the grooves embedded in it. As the record spun, the needle, attached to a mechanical arm, transferred the vibrations in the groove to speakers.

Compact discs, storing sound electronically, replaced vinyl records. CDs, in turn, were soon made obsolete by the Internet. You now download the digital ones and zeroes, and play back the music from a smartphone.

What goes around comes around. Vinyl records have made a resurgence. They outsold CDs in 2023, the second time since 1987. Audiophiles claim they deliver better sound, warm and round compared to the cold sterility of digitized recordings.

The first sound recordings, developed by Thomas Edison in the 1870s, came on wax cylinders. These were too fragile for extended playing, though. Edison continued tinkering with the format, but others developed what we recognize as the disc record. By the 1900s, a shellac disc — very brittle — spinning at 78 revolutions per minute became the standard. A record ten inches in diameter could hold three minutes of sound per side; a twelve-inch disc, up to five minutes.

RCA Victor introduced the 45-rpm record in 1949. The seven-inch disc, with an inch-and-a-half hole in the center, carried one song per side. Arch rival CBS/Columbia Records introduced the long-playing record at about the same time. At 33 ⅓ rpm and twelve inch diameter, the LP could hold twenty minutes of sound. The LP was the medium for serious music for grown-ups.

Durable, easy to carry and easy to distribute to disc jockeys and inexpensive enough for a teenager’s allowance, the 45 became the vehicle for the rock-and-roll explosion. Portable 45-rpm record players made it easy for teens to share and enjoy their own music.

If you want to go down this particular rabbit hole, you can search 45database.com for artist, title, label and year for most 45-rpm records released — they weren’t “dropped” in those days — from 1949 to 1989.

Easter Bunnies

On Christians’ resurrection holy day, animal-rescue volunteers have an earnest plea for parents: “Please don’t get your kid a bunny for Easter.”Bunnies are cute and fluffy but require care, exercise and a specialized diet. A rabbit’s typical lifespan is about twelve years, about eleven years, eleven-and-a-half months longer than a typical family’s interest in caring for the furry pet. Animal-care groups estimate eighty percent of rabbits bought as Easter gifts will die or be abandoned within the first year.

Cannon Beach, on the Oregon Coast, is overrun with rabbits. The so-called “beach bunnies” breed like, well, rabbits. They attack garden vegetation and decorate local yards with their bunny waste. Cannon Beach residents are calling for action from the city, but the popular tourist destination does not want be known for rabbit massacres.

For an overview of how bunnies and eggs – chocolate and other – became part of Easter celebrations, take a look at this previous post.

Food Innovators’ Legacies

The world recently lost two pioneers who made important contributions to civilization’s eating habits: Bob Moore, founder of Bob’s Red Mill whole grain products and William Post, co-inventor of Pop-Tarts breakfast pastry. Both were in their mid-nineties, proof that proper diet leads to longevity.

Bob Moore and his wife, Charlee, started their business in 1978. Their innovation was a back-to-the-future story. They purchased stone grinding wheels and moved them into an old flour mill that they painted red. The business now makes more than two-hundred products and has international distribution. Bob’s trademarked visage, with his white beard and cap, looks out from every package. The company’s retail store in Milwaukie Oregon also sells baked goods and offers informal dining.

The Moores had many offers to buy the business. Instead, to celebrate Bob’s 81st birthday, in 2010, they converted the company’s shares into an employee stock ownership program, benefiting its 700 employees.

William Post managed a Kellogg’s plant where in 1964 he helped develop Pop-Tarts. The trend-setting breakfast snack consists of a sweet filling layered between two rectangles of dry pastry — presumably not whole-grain — to be heated in a toaster. Mr. Post’s three children tested the product and its original four flavors. Several years after Kelloggs introduced Pop-Tarts, Post developed a new innovation, frosting, adding icing to the pastry’s outside.

Billions of Pop-Tarts are sold every year in more than thirty flavors.

The frosting, however, made a warning necessary, cautioning people to use the lowest toaster setting, to avoid burning the house down. Dave Barry researched the likelihood of strawberry Pop-Tarts being set aflame in the toaster. Read his report from 1993 here.

“The thing I like best about being a journalist, aside from being able to clip my toenails while working, is that sometimes, through hard work and perseverance and opening my mail, I come across a story that can really help you, the consumer, gain a better understanding of how you can be killed by breakfast snack food.”

(Dave Barry is also known for his annual month-by-month “Year in Review.” Here is his 2023 report.)

MAGA Travel News

Dennis Prager, pundit for the MAGA crowd, kicked off 2024’s Black History Month by declaring he would not fly on United Airlines because they have too many Black (and women) pilots.

He just learned that United issued a statement in 2021: “Our flight deck should reflect the diverse group of people on board our planes every day. That’s why we plan for 50% of the 5,000 pilots we train in the next decade to be women or people of color.”

Mr. Prager asserts that United has lowered standards to recruit pilots of color. There are no facts to support this idiotic claim – and no matter that all pilots are trained to the same quantifiable FAA standards.

Prager sprinkled his fact-free rant with favorite MAGA buzzwords: “affirmative action”, “woke”, “DEI” (diversity equity inclusion).

In other travel news, Senator Ted Cruz, who was famously photographed in the Cancun, Mexico airport, on vacation while his constituents in Texas suffered through freezing weather and power outages, has proposed legislation to avoid such embarrassments in the future. Sen Cruz’s amendment to a transportation bill would mandate T.S.A. to provide VIP lawmakers a dedicated security escort at airports, along with expedited screening outside of public view, thus avoiding scorn from citizens and ridicule from late-night comedians.

What To Eat on Ground Hog Day

The world’s most famous groundhog, Punxsutawney Phil, has predicted an early spring in 2024. Phil ended his hibernation on February 2, as he does every year. When he emerged from his burrow, he did not see his shadow, thus signifying the end of winter.

Groundhog Day shares the date with another important observance: National Tater Tot Day.

National Tater Tot Day was not created by an act of Congress, nor by Presidential proclamation. A food writer from Birmingham, Alabama, John-Bryan Hopkins, originated the holiday in 2009.

The Tater Tot is an Oregon invention. Ore-Ida foods, was looking for a profitable way to dispose of potato scraps from their production of frozen French fries than livestock feed. By chopping the scraps, mixing in a little flour and seasoning, then pushing the mush through an extruder and cutting into bite-sized pieces. Fried, then frozen, Tater Tots landed in grocery stores in 1956.

H. J. Heinz – now Kraft-Heinz – purchased Ore-Ida in 1965. Americans consume 70 million pounds of the frozen delicacy each year.

What Snakes Are Teaching Us

As an alumnus of the University of Oregon (Ducks), I couldn’t help smirking upon learning that Oregon State University (Beavers) is home to 26,000 garter snakes. Not slithering, though. The snakes, accumulated over three decades, are brined in alcohol and stored in glass jars.

I’m not smirking any more. The specimens are useful in studying the effects of earth’s changing climate. Snakes are cold-blooded reptiles. They cannot regulate their internal body temperature and so are more quickly susceptible to their environment. As one OSU researcher put it, they “evolve rapidly in response to climate change.”

With specimens spanning decades and records of where the snakes were collected, scientists can measure how the reptiles have adapted to a warming climate. Snakes from drier areas have larger scales, but fewer of them, a response to the stress of dehydration. Larger scales retain moisture better than smaller scales. Scientists also track changes in immune system over the years.

This information is useful to humans, because, according to the scientists, “We actually share more in common with reptiles than we have that’s dissimilar.”

Meanwhile, in a refuge near the San Francisco International Airport, garter snakes are so far winning their battle for survival. The protected 180-acre site in this dense urban area, is home to 1,300 snakes and increasing numbers of deer, foxes and birds, along with thousands of invertebrates. SFO is improving its infrastructure to protect the airport from rising sea level. Wildlife in the adjacent refuge are also susceptible to encroaching salt water, which would be fatal to the California red-legged frog, a mainstay of the garter snake’s diet.

And unlike birds, the snakes do not pose a danger to aircraft taking off.

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