Dr. Bruce Smith

An Antique Shop Is Like A Little Museum

Any kind of interest in the past has the potential to enrich our lives in more ways than we might suspect. To my way of thinking, an antique shop is like a little museum.

Of course, not all museums are alike. There are museums of things that don’t interest me, like umbrellas and dentistry. There’s a museum of moist towelettes. At the present time, it isn’t on my bucket list.

There are museums of things or people that annoy me. Take abstract art or the George Bernard Shaw birthplace museum. Nope. Not going there.

Our Ancestors Comfort Us With Memory

This is not a musical perfection column, but Austin Moody came pretty close. His new song, released just a couple of weeks ago, got me to thinking and remembering. Maybe it will do the same for you.

I remember what they always called the smokehouse at the farm in Henry County. I thought I remembered them building it, but my brother remembers it being there for longer than I can remember. That means I’ve compressed some memories about it.

Don’t Be Fooled

There is lots of talk these days about the state of the nation, and especially about the state of the president. There’s enough talk, in fact, that even Democrats are beginning to make sympathetic noises about whether the incumbent president should run for another term next year.

They worry about his terrible poll numbers, even though they’re propped up and made bearable by a sympathetic (or is it pathetic?) press. Week by week the polls are lower than anybody can remember back to President Fillmore. It’s not right that he isn’t getting credit for all the good things he’s done, they whine. If he could just get the message out better, well, folks would start to understand! In the next sentence, the press flack says the polls don’t matter. That’s when we get closer to the truth.

The Tyranny of the Seasons

The occasion of a storm, especially if it brings a power outage, has always been an opportunity for reflection, at least to me.

On Thursday we had a significant weather event. A bow-shaped line of severe storms plowed left-to-right across our part of the Heartland bringing much needed rain for thirsty crops and gardens. As it arrived, tall trees in the woods bent to their upper trunks under a roaring wind and rain pelted the hard ground.

Why AI is a problem

What, exactly is it? From Investopedia:

“The ideal characteristic of artificial intelligence is its ability to rationalize and take actions that have the best chance of achieving a specific goal. A subset of artificial intelligence is machine learning (ML), which refers to the concept that computer programs can automatically learn from and adapt to new data without being assisted by humans. Deep learning techniques enable this automatic learning through the absorption of huge amounts of unstructured data such as text, images, or video.”

Musical perfection: Snap, Crackle, Pop

Music works its magic in many aspects of our lives and culture

This week perhaps you’d join me, dear reader, on a little journey into American popular culture. We all recall popular songs that, upon first hearing, were favorites we can still remember. Some of those songs mark stages in our lives, while others set moods, suggest joy or fear, or take us back in time. We can recall movie themes, the Twentieth Century Fox fanfare, rock and roll hits, and hymns of faith.

Now there’s something you don’t see every day

I did a double-take recently when driving past a rural driveway near the National Road in western Indiana. There were two Studebaker trucks sitting in a driveway undergoing long-term work. Now there’s something you don’t see every day!

Back in the day Indiana was a powerhouse industrial state where dozens of major and minor automobile companies made cars and trucks. The biggest Indiana-based car company was Studebaker.

Go Back In Time With Oral History

It’s almost summer, so there will be gatherings of family and friends coming soon. With luck you’ll be with friends you know and perhaps some older family members, too. If, like me, you’re getting to be among the older family members present, feel free to initiate storytelling rather than waiting for someone else to ask. Some people will roll their eyes, but that’s okay.

Oral history is just the fancy academic name, of course. It’s pretty much the same thing as talking to older people. Formal oral history has rules and procedures and documentation and lots of other good things, but we can practice the essentials any time and any place. The more you can remember, record, or preserve, the better, of course.

In Every Little Village

I've seen them. In every little village across England and Scotland, they’re there. They’re found across Canada from the Maritimes to the Prairies to British Columbia. Sometimes they are at the crossroads where they can’t be missed, and sometimes they’re off to the side, shielded from the traffic and the bustle. When you know what they are, they become irresistible. When I see one, I have to stop, then approach in reverence. The names are usually toward the bottom where the monument is wider, and often they are on every side. In some towns the list is shockingly long, but in others there may be only a dozen or so. There’s a solemn irony for you. From this tiny village of perhaps three-score houses only a dozen were killed.

Nostalgic Spring Beauty

A wise history professor once told me “Things have not always been as they are today.” This is true in many ways. Certainly the technology is different. We live lives of comparative ease and travel much more than was possible not so long ago.

Our aesthetic notions have changed, too. Animal and plant breeding have brought us many improvements that have changed our lives for the better. Sometimes the world gets better year to year.

Sometimes We Just Need To Raise The Drawbridge

Let’s face it. The world looks like it’s going to hell in a handbasket. We don’t have to embellish daily events to be brought to such a conclusion. Whether one has been watching world events for a long time or only a few months, it surely looks like we’re circling the drain these days.

It’s important to stay informed but it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by events beyond our control. Even when our outlook is rosy, we can feel weighed down by work, relationships, responsibilities, and arbitrary routines. When any kind of an opening occurs, or when our surroundings are closing in on us, it’s important to retreat a ways, pull up the drawbridge, and just enjoy some peace.

Reminds Me Of October ’73, But Only A Little

Those were heady days in October, 1973. I was a junior at Indiana University, back in the dorm, and I had just begun to implement my new strategy for academic success. There was a full load of tough classes, heavily tilted toward upper level history. There was Modern Germany, Eastern Europe, genetics, education. I was in a history honors seminar with my new academic mentor, and every meeting was like opening King Tut’s tomb. What days they were, always to be savored and remembered with a glowing heart.

Musical perfection The Dave Clark Five

Dave Clark’s band came on strong as part of the British Invasion of the early 1960s. For a while, there was speculation about whether they or the Beatles would be the bigger act. Their first big hit, Glad All Over, took over the Number One spot on the British charts from The Beatles’ I Want To Hold Your Hand when it came out in 1964. Because was originally released in Britain as the B side of Can’t You See That She’s Mine? in 1964. Clark insisted that it be released as the A side of a single in the US that year. It peaked at No. 3 on the US charts in September and also reached No. 3 in Canada. It was the band’s fifth single to sell over a million copies in the US.

They appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show just a month after The Beatles debuted there, and they played for Ed Sullivan a total of eighteen times, more than any other British band.

Reverence For the Past, or The Wonders of an Attic

Sometimes it’s a struggle to understand why everyone doesn’t have a reverence for the past. How could it be? Things weren’t always as easy as they are now, at least that’s the way I look at it. Knowing what life was like way back when helps us understand our own times better.

My family was a study in contrasts in the same small town in the Heartland. One side had come from Tennessee coal mines and had struggled during the depression of the 1930s. From 1932 until the end of their lives they were staunch Democrats, but couldn’t really tell anyone why, except to say that Hoover had made their little girls starve. They worshipped FDR. They looked at the world cynically and with much pessimism.

Show Them How It’s Done

Many of these columns are frankly nostalgic. I enjoy going back in my memory to golden moments and those brief videos of the mind where people I knew flit across the screen for a few seconds, alive again so I can savor their lessons.

I go back to these memories because they’re meaningful to me and because I have lots of them. They influenced me and made me who I am. Some of those moments struck me as they happened and have stayed with me ever since. For example, I clearly remember the moment when I first noticed that my dad deeply loved his mother. No words were exchanged. We had arrived at the house for a visit in the cold weather.

Well, There’s Something You Don’t See Every Day!

One of the best things we can do to improve our ability to see and notice the things around us is to learn to use a real SLR camera. I had a Mamiya Sekor 1000DTL. There was no auto button. The camera only did what I made it do with the meter, aperture, shutter speed, focus, strobe, and filters I had chosen. Push the shutter button and whatever the result, good or bad, it was my fault. What a real camera taught me to do was to look at everything inside the frame. The meter only reads the average light, so it’s important to notice if there are light or dark places. Is the subject backlit? Are the shadows too dark? Is it cloudy? Is it diffused light? When you get the print, the credit and the blame are only your own. Nobody else pushed the button.

Give Us This Day Our Occasional Near Miss

There’s an old saying, ‘once bitten, twice shy.’ It means that when we encounter something unpleasant or hurtful, we tend to avoid it in the future. Think of these occasional near misses as unsolicited gifts. Sometimes we don’t appreciate them, especially when they land too close, but they can teach us a great deal.

There have been a steady supply of these over the years.

Musical Perfection: Dimitri Tiomkin

Dimitri Tiomkin was born in Tsarist Russia in 1894. He trained in classical music in St. Petersburg before the revolution, then moved to Berlin in the 1920s. Shortly thereafter, he moved to the United States and then to Hollywood after the crash of 1929. Director Frank Capra asked him to write the score for the film Lost Horizon in 1937. This was his big break into composing for movies.

Doing justice to Dimitri Tiomkin’s music in just one column would be impossible, so this time I will mention and list a few of his works. Some of them you will find familiar, but others may be new to you. We know him best from film scores from the 1940s through the 1960s.

Freedom of Speech for Dummies

Sometimes it helps to review the basics, and it doesn’t get any more basic than this. Here is the wording of the First Amendment to the Constitution.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

To edit this so we address only freedom of speech, try this:

It’s Probably Not About What They Say It’s About

T here’s a terrific comedian who has a routine where every setup line is followed by the same phrase: ‘. . . then you might be a redneck.’ It’s brilliant, and he can go on for hours with every line getting a laugh. I could never be half as funny as this person is, but I’d like to borrow the technique.

In the last years we have heard many justifications for taking away our constitutional freedoms, for giving unwarranted power to politicians, bureaucrats, globalists, and the intelligence community, and for reinventing the country in various ways. Every time I hear one of these justifications, I think to myself,