Dr. Bruce Smith

So Here We Are...

So we wake up in the morning, sit up, swing a leg over the side and begin the day. We have some breakfast and the morning cup of tea. Okay, okay. Some of you still drink coffee. The first thing we do is look at the daily situation report followed by the daily question.  So here we are. What do we do next? Doesn't this apply to every day of our lives, or even to every hour of every day?  We must constantly address our situation and decide what we will do next. 

Russia v. Ukraine 2022 is like Germany v. Soviet Union 1941

Lots of people have their knickers in a twist over this Ukraine vs. Russia story. But it reminds me of a very similar situation from June, 1941. People had their knickers in a twist then, too. Germany had already dominated or captured the Rhineland, Austria, the Sudetenland, Poland, France and the Low Countries, Yugoslavia, and Greece. Adolf Hitler had been in power since 1933. He had become the absolute ruler of a reborn Germany, crushing political opponents, religions, and ethnic groups he didn’t like. His campaign to eliminate all Jews in Germany and other conquered territories began in earnest in 1941. Nobody liked him, but most everyone feared him

Sakrete Days

It’s a great ad. The old duffer out there in his coveralls looks like he’s confused about how much gravel and how much cement to put into each batch of concrete he’s making. Then he adds too much water and has to add some more sand and gravel and a little cement to get it to come out right and oh, gosh! This is hard! What a mess! In the second frame the old duffer is smiling and in control. He only has to dump a bag of Sakrete in his wheelbarrow, add water, and presto! It’s the perfect mix. Ahh! He even has a proper tie on now, along with his suit. No muss, no fuss! Duffers everywhere love Sakrete!

We Were Made For Difficult Times

The human condition has never been an endless sequence of bunnies, rainbows, and picnics in the park, although those delights are more common now than they used to be. In our time, as we enjoy the blessings bestowed by industrialization and market economics, it’s easy to forget about the difficulties and struggles that brought us here. We don’t have to go back very far in history to see some pretty ghastly events. Just in the last century there was Vietnam, Korea, two world wars, polio, Soviet and Chinese communist butchery, the killing fields, the Holocaust, and on and on. How have people survived these things?

Everything Is Interesting In Its Own Way

There was a song written by Ray Stevens titled Everything is Beautiful from 1970. It began with little children singing Jesus loves the little Children, then the lyrics and music are from Stevens himself. Everything is beautiful
In its own way,
Like the starry summer’s night,
Or a snow covered winter's day.

And everybody's beautiful
In their own way.
Under God's heaven
The world's gonna find a way.

There is none so blind
As he who will not see.
We must not close our minds.
We must let our thoughts be free.

For every hour that passes by
You know the world gets a little bit older.
It's time to realize that beauty lies
In the eyes of the beholder.

Essential Science Ground Water and Glaciation

Britannica tells us the Pleistocene epoch, the great ice age, began about 2.5 million years ago and ended about 11,000 years ago. There were four glacial advances during the Pleistocene, illustrated in the chart below. The last great glacial advance of the Pleistocene began about 75,000 years ago and ended (way up in the True North) about 9,000 years ago. That last glacial advance, the one that built the moraine where my family lived, we call the Wisconsin Glacial Stage or the Wisconsin Glaciation. That’s the one that shows the green moraine areas on last week’s map. It’s the one that is most recognizable on the landscape today. Go to southern Illinois or southern Iowa to see the remains of the Illinoian glaciation. Trust me, the Wisconsin deposits are way more interesting.

Essential Science III Ground Water Is A Blessing

East of the 100th Meridian in the United States and in nearly all of Canada we have always taken abundant fresh water for granted. The Great Lakes, we used to learn in school, constitute the greatest inland waterway in the world, and is 750 miles long. Lake Superior alone holds three quadrillion gallons of fresh water, 10% of the world’s total. Together, the Great Lakes ecosystem contains 21% of the world’s fresh water. Canada, besides sharing the shoreline and much of the surface of the Great Lakes, has two million freshwater lakes of its own. Those lakes and rivers contain 20% of the world’s supply. There may be some overlap in these percentages, but the point is that we are blessed with a great quantity of fresh water in North America. Over the years, I have taken several steps backward into how the Midwest landscape got to be the way it is. The process went something like this.

Give Us This Day Our Daily Dose of Humility

There are different names for the daily dose of humility we all need. Sometimes it’s perspective we should consider. Sometimes it’s thanksgiving, and what a shame we only use that term about once a year! Sometimes it’s judgment. It can be interpretation, a vantage point, a bird’s eye view, conviction, an angle, or perhaps better information. There’s empathy, pity, charity, mercy, understanding, meekness, and nobility. Devotion is a good one.  If we seek to understand the world around us, there are plenty of facts to learn and file away somewhere, and I mean plenty. Real facts increase every day, and these days there are also plenty of facts that just aren’t true, and they like to keep company with the verified facts we have saved.  Sorting one from the other is a full-time occupation. This sorting is a duty we all have. We must consider all the information and decide what we will believe. This is true of what we hear, what we read, and what we collect with our senses. 

Essential Science part II Working Smart

The definition must have been in a chemistry book about the 11th grade. It’s the only positive thing I can recall about that wasted year-long class. Forgive my old-fashioned symbols. To me, X still means ‘times.’ It’s the symbol for multiplication. We were taught the asterisk * just means another exception to a rule, or Roger Maris hitting 61 home runs in a season against way better pitching isn’t the real record. It’s a symbol that means things are way more complicated than I thought. Great. That helps.

Give Us This Day Our Daily Routine

They say there are people who thrive on chaos, on adrenaline, on thrills. I'm pretty sure I'm not one of those.  Adrenaline hounds actually pay money to be scared. On purpose! They go to a fair and instead of looking at beautiful animals or prize winning poultry or replacement windows, they go on rides that are designed by sick people to scare the hell out of you. Seriously! They really do that.  I went up on a Ferris wheel once at a county fair. I can tell you that there's absolutely no reason to pay people to scare you more than that. I couldn't even get a refund! 

Sharing Food is Primal part II

Food is essential to our existence. Because humans have such a long postnatal development period before they can reasonably provide for themselves, but also because our culture has extended that period even further, sharing food has long been a way of life. Combine these factors with Depression parents raising children in the aftermath of a great war. Perhaps this gives a clearer picture of the world of the 1950s. Hardship and war always serve to bring out the best and worst in us. There was plenty of the worst in the decade of the 1940s. These columns will usually look toward the better parts of our history along with what we can learn and pass on from them to nurture the better parts of our natures.

Sharing Food is Primal--Part I

Something primal is essential, necessary, fundamental, and often goes way back in human culture. We can all recall the satisfaction of staring at a campfire or relaxing in front of a fireplace with a well-tended flame. So also we should recognize that sharing of food is a primal practice of past generations far removed in time and place. In our world we see this practice repeated daily, but I wonder how often we stop to appreciate its importance? From mothers nursing newborns to smash cakes to s’mores around a bonfire, and from little girls with tea sets and EZ-Bake ovens to camp stoves and wood fires on a family vacation, sharing food has always been a part of family life. From fancy restaurants to fast food, the ritual of sharing food, of breaking bread together has been a feature of human culture for as long as there have been human cultures.

Essential Science For Everyday Life part I

One day in the ninth grade in my little rural junior high school in Boston, Indiana, I saw a demonstration in the science class that has stuck with me ever since. When we came into class, the science teacher had an aquarium set up on the front table. The aquarium had a glass divider which fit down into two channels to keep what was in once side separate from the other. We came in and got quiet. Well, okay, we came in and mostly sat in the chairs behind our tables. When we were sort of paying attention the science teacher poured one side full of cold blue water, then poured the other side full of warm red water. He reminded us to watch what happened when he pulled the divider straight up out of the water. At first nothing happened, but within five or ten seconds, the cool blue water began to spread across the bottom of the aquarium while the warm red water rose in the tank and spread the other way across the top. I was transfixed. Before a minute was up, the top half of the aquarium was all red and the bottom half was all blue. The water didn't even mix much. 

Depression Parents Part II

Last week I waxed somewhat nostalgic about my parents who experienced the depression of the 1930s in their teen years. As they began their 20s, they experienced World War II. When the war ended, my dad was 24 and my mother was almost 23. When my dad came home from the war in Europe in December of 1945, their firstborn was 16 months old. My dad had not been home for nearly two years. Already at that young age, they were forever changed by the challenges and the horrors they had seen.

Depression Parents

There were many things I took for granted growing up. We were a family of five, the folks and we three brothers. Both sets of grandparents lived in the same small town with us. My dad worked to support us and my mom worked at home to take care of us. One brother went to the elementary school down the road and the other attended the junior high school in town. While we lived in that small town, I was too young to go to school.  Both grandfathers worked at the Chrysler plant in town and had done so since the early 1930s. One grandmother was at home, never having worked outside the home, and the other began cooking at the clinic in town during the war, then later became an LPN.

Frugality Is Suddenly Back In Style!

When times are a little difficult, it just makes good sense to be more careful about how we allot our limited resources. These days there are plenty of reasons to be concerned about our resources, what with inflation a serious concern, international conflict that affects energy prices, covid restrictions, political upheavals, etc. Take inflation, for example. If you regularly do the shopping for your clan you have seen, especially over the past two months, that prices are changing in a major way. During the first two years of covid there were spotty shortages and supply problems that resulted in certain items going up. Beef was a good example. Where I shop, filet mignon is $27.99 per pound now, down from $29.99!. Ground beef is $5.99 or more. Chuck roast is $6.99 per pound. Chicken breast is $5.99 per pound. Bread suddenly went up by nearly a third. Practically everything in the store has gone up noticeably. Inflation results in higher prices across the board, not just on a few things.

Take Action on the National Pie Shortage

The looming national pie shortage has been developing for a long while. I first noticed the trend when I went away to school. For the first time in my life, there was no mom or grandmother nearby to supply fresh pie, that important staple of a boy’s life. For a while I bore up under it as best I could, putting in special requests for holidays at home then resolving not to miss it too much at other times.  Dreaming about my favorite pies became more common. Black raspberry is and will always be the finest fruit pie in the world. Nothing else comes close. Apricot, peach, cherry, and rhubarb are firmly in second place. Custard is heavenly. A pecan pie is remarkable so long as there is enough whipped cream on the top. Pumpkin is really good, and even better if a friend’s grandmother makes it using butternut squash. Apple and blueberry are okay, along with sugar cream. There were fuzzy memories of just one or two raisin pies my grandmother had made in the late 1950s or early 1960s. All made for great pie nostalgia.

Understanding The Advantages Of Prepaid Energy Versus Energy On Credit

Peace of mind is very important and often hard to secure. One of the very best ways to have peace of mind in uncertain times is to understand the advantages of prepaid energy versus energy on credit. Simply put, any energy sources that can be purchased in advance can be stored at least for the short term. Should a storm devastate your area, block roads, or bring down power lines, prepaid energy can be a lifesaver. The more prepaid energy one has, the longer we can hold out while recovery efforts are underway.

Dishwashers

There are some really smart people in the world. When I run across one of them, I make every effort to keep quiet, pay attention, and take notes. I save up questions for when I might find someone who knows the answers. Random wisdom is why I always try to have scrap paper and a pencil nearby. One of the best things that ever happened to me was snagging a job at Nelson Hardware in Boston, Indiana. That store’s hinterland was southern Wayne County, northern Union County, and western Preble County, Ohio. It’s beautiful farm country with grain, hogs, and dairy farms everywhere one looks.

When the going gets tough, the well-prepared can keep going!

Sooner or later, we were going to have to talk about plumbing. Among the great advances that came out of the Industrial Revolution was the development of sanitary sewers and indoor plumbing. We take it all for granted now, of course, but things have not always been the way they are today. Among the inventors who made life better for us who came after him was the celebrated Thomas Crapper. Now there were others who worked on the development of the water closet, or loo, and its sturdy fixtures, but Crapper was actually in the ceramics business and thought to put his name on his own monument to a better world.