Stan Jones

How my Mother’s Chocolate Chip Cookies Saved my Life

I attended college at the University of Kansas, where I lived for four years in the Scholarship Hall system. The first year I lived in Joliffe Hall, where I met some really remarkable people, but which was essentially condemned after that year as being unfit for human habitation. There’s more of a story involved, but that’s not the story I’m going to attempt to tell here.

After the announcement of the decision that Jolliffe would be closed, those residents who were not graduating were offered the opportunity to move to other men’s scholarship halls. Many of the upperclassmen declined the offer. A lot of the underslassmen did move to other men’s halls; I was one of only a few who chose to move to Stephenson Hall, where again I met some remarkable people. In my sophomore year, my roommate was an incoming freshman named Stan Pittman (of course they put both residents with the first name “Stan” in the same room). Anyway, we got along well, and remained friends after that first year, although we did not remain roommates.

In my senior year (Stan Pittman’s junior year), we both lived on the same floor at Stephenson, with two rooms (as I recall) between us. We both went to our respective homes for Christmas vacation. Stan Pittman had started doing some experimentation with home brewing, and before leaving for vacation he had started some test batches fermenting. He used no-deposit glass pop bottles with twist off caps which had originally held store-brand pop from what was then (again, as I recall; my memory may not be entirely accurate) a Kroger Family Center.

My mother frequently sent homemade cookies back with me when I was home for a few days, using a sturdy square box that had originally held several small jars of jelly, jam and preserves that she had received as a present some years prior. She again sent this box back to Stephenson with me, full of homemade chocolate chip cookies. At some point on my first day back, I walked down the hall to see Stan Pittman, who had also returned that day. He explained his brewing experiment, and showed me the bottles he had left to ferment over the break. I believe he may have picked up one bottle and held it up to the light coming in through the window to get a better look at. He may or may not have wiggled it slightly in order to stir the sediment just a bit, but he certainly didn’t agitate it any more than that.

A few minutes later I happened to mention that my mother had sent cookies back with me, and suggested that we walk back to my room to sample them. Not long after we had started in on the cookies, we heard a loud noise, and went to investigate. We soon discovered that the source of the lound noise was Stan Pittman’s room where the pressure in one of his test samples (presumably the one he had picked up) had built up in the sealed bottle to the point where it had exceeded the strength of the glass, and exploded, spraying glass fragments all over the room and embedding some of them in the plaster walls but not, fortunately, in either one of us.

The title of this post may be somewhat inaccurate, since I’m not sure that being sprayed with sharp glass fragments from an exploding bottle would have killed me, but I’m very glad I did not have the opportunity to find out what the effect would have been. This was not the only time in my life when by sheer dumb luck I have avoided circumstances that could have been very unpleasant, to say the least, and at some point I intend to post about one other such time, but that will have to wait for now.

Why I Finally Signed up for Facebook

It’s not really correct to write that for many years I had resisted the temptation to get onto Facebook, because I wasn’t really very strongly tempted. Based on things I had read elsewhere online, it seemed that many people who spent a lot of time on facebook wound up oversharing, and as a general rule I tend feel that most details of my private life are none of anyone else’s damn business. Also, I freely admit that I can be (more than) a little bit OCD at times, and consequently, even without oversharing personal information, just being on Facebook at all could potentially turn into an enormolus time suck. Thus, even though my kids more than once mentioned to me how easy it was to communicate among themselves to share just simple information, such as safe arrival at a travel destination, I never felt that getting onto Facebook would be worth my time.

My attitude finally changed earlier this year, primarily due to an external event. One of the members of my Homeowners’ Association, a retired lady only a few months older than I am, fell down the stairs in her home. She had never married and had no children, and apparently no other relatives she was particularly close to who would have been alarmed at not hearing from her. She survived the fall, but was unable to reach a phone, or summon help in any other way. After a few days, the postal carrier (bless his heart) noticed that mail was accumulating in her mailbox, and contacted some of her close neighbors. This led to her being found and taken, still alive, to a local hospital, where she wound up in Intensive Care; unfortunately she died a day or two later. While I am aware of services like Life Alert, I am also cheap, and for the time being, at least, signing up for Facebook seemed like an acceptable alternative. Every morning I send out a “still alive” message to a group of relatives who live close enough to come look for a body if they don’t receive such a notification.

If I live long enough to get more decrepit than I already am, I may decide at some point that some sort of personal safety monitor may be worth the cost, but for the time being my present system seems to be working. There have also been a couple of events recently (including a road construction project undertaken by the HOA) that have prompted me to post some photos to my Facebook account; I wouldn’t have signed up for Facebook just to be able to do this, but it has been helpful. If I find that this is turning into a time suck, I may be forced to look for a “Facebook Anonymous” group somewhere, but for the time being I seem to be able to control it.

The Nominees Are …

A great deal has been written about the “Liberate [whereveritis]” protests that have been staged in a number of state capitals recently, but there are two words missing from everything I have seen with respect to this phenomenon: “Darwin Award”. More specifically, I’d like to suggest to those participants in these gatherings who cluster together without regard for social distancing recommendations and without wearing protective facemasks of any kind that, while this behavior might certainly wind up earning them nominations for this year’s Darwin Award, this in itself might not be enough to advance them beyond nominations.

Remembering that the point of the Darwin Award is to recognize the sacrifices of those who have chosen to improve the human gene pool by removing their own stupid genes from it, one should keep in mind that a nominee could actually harm his or her chance of advancing if he or she thoughtlessly damages the gene pool by removing from it the genes of other people (such as medical personnel or first responders) who are more intelligent than him/her. With that in mind I would suggest that any of the protest participants who are serious about advancing past the nomination stage should, if they become symptomatic, avoid calling 911 or visiting emergency rooms, and instead follow the advice of their Dear Leader, and chug a couple of bottles of Lysol.

I am not one of the judges for the awards, but I would think that this degree of dedication would almost guarantee finalist status for anyone willing to make the sacrifice. Given our species’ marvelous creativity in identifying spectacularly stupid ways to kill ourselves, I don’t think it’s possible to guarantee anyone’s success. Nevertheless, anyone who chooses to advance the species in this way will have earned my thanks, especially if he or she does so before this year’s election.

This Really Did Happen

I should perhaps add the phrase “to the best of my knowledge and belief” to the title of this post, since I was not directly involved in the incident which I will describe below, and it was not described to me by anyone who was directly involved. However, I was told about this by a person who knew both me and the person involved, the person who related this story to me had no reason to make it up, and it is not at all hard for me to believe that the perpetrator person involved actually did this, given his somewhat offbeat sense of humor. I’ll identify him only by his first name, Theron.

Before describing the incident, I need to add that, in addition to having an ideosyncratic sense of humor, Theron was slender to the point of being skinny, had dark hair and a pale complexion, and in general looked a bit like he might have died recently, after a long struggle with some wasting disease. It’s easy to imagine his being cast in a vampire movie.

With that out of the way, I will explain that the event I’m about to describe resulted from the intersection of two different needs. First, there are always needy college students who need to find ways to save money. Second, because people have an inconvenient habit of dying at all hours of the day and night, rather than only within normal business hours, funeral homes find it necessary to make arrangements to have their phones answered 24 hours every day. In an arrangement that I suspect is not unique, one funeral home in Lawrence, Kansas met both needs by having a small apartment on premises, and making this available rent free to a college student, in return for that student’s promising to be available at specified hours to answer the business’ phone. This is where Theron came in, as the student in this arrangemtnt.

As I mentioned above, Theron had a somewhat offbeat sense of humor, and this got the better of him one night. He knew that a body was to be brought in at a particular time, and a few minutes prior to this time he lay down on the slab and pulled the sheet up over himself. When, shortly thereafter, the two individuals escorting the body wheeled the gurney into the room, they found the slab already occuopied. One said to the other”Oh, they already have a body; what are we going to do?” At this point Theron very slowly sat up, while slowly saying “I’d … be … happy … to move.” Two people then very quickly left the room, only to return shortly thereafter and explain to Theron, in forceful terms, that if he ever did that again he would need the slab. I have to assume, since he lived to tell this story to the person who related it to me, that he was able to restrain himself enough not to tempt fate by trying this again.

Voter suppression

My local newspaper, the Topeka Capital-Journal, carries the comic strip Dilbert, which occasionally features a character known as Mordac, the Preventer of Information Services. Mordac earns his title by being so obsessed with the security of his company’s systems that he makes it essentially impossible for anyone to access them. In Kansas, we have a real-life counterpart to Mordac – Kobach, the Preventer of Voter Registration. In his excessive zeal to prevent non-citizens from being able to register to vote in Kansas, our esteemed Secretary of State has advocated policies that have prevented more than twenty thousand individuals from being able to register to vote. In a debate with his opponent in the recent election, Mr. Kobach justified this by pointing out that it had been determined that at least twelve of these individuals had been determined not to be citizens. Not twelve thousand, or twelve hundred, or even twelve dozen – twelve individuals, as compared to the twenty thousand people, deemed guilty by Mr Kobach until proven innocent, who were unable to register to vote. Mr. Kobach claims his intention is to protect the integrity of elections in Kansas, but as I see the situation, he is doing exactly the opposite. Twelve votes will seldom be enough to swing even a local election, but twenty thousand people denied the right to vote because they are unable to jump through the hoops that have been set up to make it difficult for them to do so could make a real difference in even some statewide elections. Mr. Kobach and his supporters insist that the twelve individuals they have been able to identify represent only the tip of the iceberg, and that there must be many more illegal immigrants just waiting to decide the outcome of elections in Kansas if given the opportunity to do so. I believe that the most appropriate reply to this contention is a word coined by Theodore Roosevelt – BULLfeathers. The hordes of non-citizens desperately awaiting an opportunity to hijack our elections exist only in the paranoid fantasies of the reactionary bigots who seek to use alleged voter fraud as an excuse to deny the right to vote to as many young, poor and minority voters as they can manage to disenfranchise. I have seen Mr. Kobach quoted in print as insisting that he is not a bigot. This may well be true; I do not claim to know the inner workings of his mind. However, if this really is true, then his actions suggest that he is instead an opportunistic demagogue, pandering to the bigotry of others in order to advance his own political future. In either case, it is about as appropriate to have Mr. Kobach safeguarding the voting rights of Kansans as it is to have a fox guarding a chicken coop.

How did they die?

When I was younger (long, long ago), newspaper obituaries most often stated that the person who was the subject of the obitiuay had died, although in some cases they stated instead that the deceased had passed away. This second usage actually offended some people, who felt that it was an attempt to deny the reality of physical death, but that is not the point I am trying to address here. Instead, I have noted that in recent years, perhaps as newspapers have begun to treat obituaries more as a profit center than as a news item, obituaries have become somewhat more florid, referring to the deceased as having gone to be with Jesus, departed this vale of tears, crossed the rainbow bridge, etc. I don’t necessarily have a problem with this, since those paying for the obituary should be allowed to phrase it in a way that is meaningful to them, but it has occurred to me that another way to approach this matter would be to phrase the information in a way that relates to the decedent’s occupation, since in many cases this is one of the things that most defined the person’s life. With this in mind, I offer the following list, which attempts to identify how in at least some cases a person’s obituary might be worded to reflect that person’s occupation in life:

Occupation	Manner of Death
Building custodian	Kicked the bucket
Agribusiness owner	Bought the farm
World poker tour participant	Cashed in his/her chips OR Folded his/her hand
Motel operator	Checked out
Bounty hunter	Went to his reward
Rodeo cowboy	Bit the dust
Working cowboy	Rode into the sunset OR Went to his last roundup
Casino card dealer OR Vaudeville song & dance man OR Shakespearean actor	Shuffled off this mortal coil
Test pilot OR Astronaut	Slipped the surly bonds of earth
Sea captain	Sailed into the sunset
Professional mover	Relocated
Musician	Began decomposing
Football quarterback	Passed
Football field goal specialist	Kicked off
Movie director	Faded to black
Professional boxer	Went down for the count
Realtor	Moved to a quieter neighborhood
Astronomer	Became one with the universe
Attorney	Rested his/her case
Librarian	Closed the book
Travel agent OR Lifelong resident of Alaska	Went south
Professional singer	Joined the choir invisible
“Survivor” participant	Was voted off the island
Navy frogman	Croaked
HVAC Technician	Assumed room temperature
Geometry teacher	Became horizontal
Watch repair person	Ran out of time
Orchestra conductor	Laid down his/her baton
Professional truck driver	Reached the end of the road
Respiratory therapist	Expired

The items below were added after the original posting of this entry:

Building Demolition Contractor	Imploded
Surgeon	Suspended operations
Agricultural Custom Cutter	Met the Reaper
Plumber	Went down the drain

Postal Carrier	Completed his/her appointed rounds
Anesthetist	Began sleeping the big sleep
Railroad engineer	Left the tracks
Professional genealogist	Joined his/her ancestors
Nuclear reactor technician	Went offline
Paranormal Investigator	Gave up the ghost
Ornithologist	Sang his/her swan song

I would be happy to receive suggestions for additions or revisions to this list.

This could have happened

One branch of my family, on my father’s side, did a fair amount of genealogical research in order to try to determine whether any of our ancestors in that lineage had fought in the Revolutionary war. They confirmed that at least one ancestor, a man named William Sexson, had in fact served under George Washington in the war. William had been born in Virginia, and was therefore doubly proud of his connection with General Washington, so he took every opportunity to tell his children stories about him, including the story about the cherry tree, which even then, and even though it was fictitious, was well known.

Some time after the end of the war, William moved his family, including his son Frederick Free Sexson (my direct ancestor, who appears in the family history as Free Sexson) from Grayson County, Virginia to Whitley County, Kentucky. Although the area was at that time sparsely settled, there were other families around, and young Free got to know, and become friends with, other boys of about his age.

As sometimes happens even now, boys of a certain age got together on Halloween and performed pranks that seemed like a better idea at the time than they did the following morning. This was the case on the morning of one November first, when William, obviously very angry, approached young Free and said to him, in a stern voice “Son, I’m going to ask you a question, and I want you to give me an honest answer: did you and your friends push our outhouse off the cliff last night?”

Young Free realized that he could be in serious trouble, but he remembered the story of George Washington and the cherry tree, which his father had told him many times, so he answered “Father, I cannot tell a lie. Yes, my friends and I did push the outhouse off the cliff last night as a foolish Halloween prank.” Whereupon William gave his son the worst beating of his young life.

Afterwards, young Free, with tears in his eyes, said to his father “Pa, why did you do that? I told the truth. George Washington’s father didn’t beat him after he told the truth about cutting down the cherry tree.”

William answered “Son, that is true. George Washington’s father did not beat George Washington when he told the truth about chopping down the cherry tree. But George Washington’s father was not IN the cherry tree when George Washington chopped it down.”

A malady no one wants to talk about

During the latter part of the 2012 Presidential campaign, President Obama several times noted that his Republican opponent seemed to be affected by a previously-unknown medical condition, characterized primarily by loss of memory concerning political positions that Mr. Romney had only recently endorsed. This condition, identified by President Obama as “Romnesia”, has affected other political candidates over the history of this country, although Mr. Romney did seem to have a particularly virulent strain of the disease.

However, President Obama, most likely in order not to offend those voters who do not feel that such conditions should be publicly discussed or even alluded to, did not mention a much more severe medical condition, which did not affect Mr. Romney, but did seem to be affecting a number of conservative political candidates and pundits. This malady is characterized on one hand by a complete denial of facts which one does not wish to acknowledge and, on the other by an absolute conviction that what one devoutly wishes to be true must therefore be true. This condition appears to have been responsible for a large number of Republican pollsters and officeholders convincing themselves that their own polling results absolutely must be correct, and that any evidence to the contrary from polls conducted by others must be the result of either seriously flawed methodology or outright dishonesty by those conducting those polls. This led, for example, to a number of political pundits on FAUX News making complete fools of themselves in the days leading up to the election, and even as the election results were being reported, even arguing with their own staff members that it could not possibly be true that President Obama was winning the election.

Donald Trump’s deranged, ranting tweets on election night suggested that he, too, was affected by this same unfortunate medical condition. The President chose not to discuss this situation in public, perhaps for the reason I suggested earlier, or perhaps for other reasons. I am also reluctant to mention this matter publicly. However, more recent events, in which some Republican members of Congress remarked that it would no big deal if the government of the United States were to default on its debt, when almost everyone else, including wealthy Republican campaign donors, realized that such a situation would be disastrous for the economy of the entire world, not just for the United States, leads me to conclude that someone must bring this matter out into the open, in the hope that this malady will not infect more individuals than it already has.

I confess that I have not had any medical training, and that I am used to referring to this condition in layperson’s terms, but I believe that the proper medical term for the condition to which I am referring is Rectocranial Inversion, or RI for short. Although it can certainly affect Democrats and Independents as well as Republicans and other conservatives, recent outbreaks of RI that I am aware of seem to have been concentrated mostly at the exteme right end of the political spectrum. One can only hope that a cure for this malady can be found before its victims manage to do irreparable damage.

Note: Since I am not the junior senator from Kentucky, I feel that I should acknowledge my sources when possible. In that regard I need to mention that I first became aware of the formal medical name of the condition I have mentioned here in an episode of the early 1990’s TV series Nurses.

“Our Customers are Idiots!”

Like many people, I find that I really enjoy some TV commercials, and I really dislike some others. I have noted, however, that some people seem to be really annoyed by commercials that I find inoffensive or even entertaining, while I some commercials that really aggravate me don’t seem to bother other people. A few weeks ago, I did a brief Google search for the phrase that I used as the title of this posting, and found a lot of discussions that suggested to me that I am not the only person who is generally annoyed by commercials that suggest that the company advertising its products or services thinks of its customers as fools. One set of such commercials that was often mentioned in this regard was the series plugging the Sonic drive-in chain. Strictly from my own personal point of view, no individual one of these commercials is so outrageously annoying that it would prevent me from ever patronizing Sonic (although I don’t much care for Sonic anyway), but the sheer number of different, mildly to moderately annoying commercials in this seemingly endless series definitely gets on my nerves.

However, rather to my surprise, in the (admittedly not exhaustive) searches I performed I did not find a single reference to the small set of commercials that, to me at least, represented far and away the most irritating example of the “our customers are idiots” genre: the (thankfully) brief series of Staples’ “Wow! That’s a LOW Price!” commercials that appeared a few years ago. This series of commercials was so aggressively annoying(not to say insulting) to me that I found myself regretting that Topeka, where I live, did not have a Staples store, because I had a strong desire to walk into a Staples, find the Customer Service counter, and convey the message (in a restrained way; I didn’t want to be as obnoxious as these commercials were) that I would not spend a penny in a Staples for as long as this ad campaign was running.

Given the fairly short duration of this ad campaign, I don’t think I was the only person who was annoyed, and perhaps someone in a city that did have a Staples store did actually take the step that I had only fantasized about, and convey this annoyance to the company in person. I would like to think that Staples even found a different ad agency – one that didn’t think that insulting the company’s customers was the way to attract more business – and even, perhaps, that the person responsible for this campaign may have realized that he or she was in the wrong line of work, and went on to seek employment better suited to his or her talents. (I won’t suggest an appropriate line of work, because to do so would be an insult to anyone who is currently earning a living doing whatever I might suggest.)

Anyway, this is more than enough about this particular annoying series of commercials, but I hope to write at least one more post addressing some of the other more annoying TV commercials I have encountered in recent years. That may take a while, however, so in the mean time, I hope that readers of this post might respond by citing commercials that they find particularly annoying (or even by defending those two Sonic dolts, if they wish to do so). And if anyone reading this piece did find those Staples commercials as irritating as I did, and actually did convey this sentiment to the employees in a Staples store, please identify yourself and accept my sincere gratitude, since you may have helped get those commercials off TV, and therefore helped lower my blood pressure.

About the title of this blog

In order to try to head off any possible confusion, I feel that I should explain that I am not affiliated in any way with the rock band Kansas. To my knowledge, I have never met any member of the band, or anyone directly associated with any member of the band.

I bring this up because Kansas included the song “People of the South Wind” on its album “Monolith”, in 1979. As people who were educated in schools in this state may know, and most other people probably do not know, the word “Kansas” comes from the language of the Kaw tribe, and is normally translated as “people of the south wind”. Thus my source for the phrase “… of the south wind”, is not the band’s song, but the same source that the band used for the title of the song. As to the use of the word “rant”, I’m sure that will be appropriate for at least some parts of at least some of the postings I plan to add here. Those who disagree with the sentiments I express may consider the word “rant” appropriate for the entire blog, but I would like to believe this is a matter of opinion.

On the subject of words that come from the language of the Kaw tribe, another of those words is “Topeka”, which is of course the name of the city that is now the capital of the State of Kansas. It used to be written routinely that the word “Topeka” meant “a good place to dig potatoes”, but in recent years I believe that some doubts have been expressed in at least some quarters about the accuracy of this translation. One school of thought (not often voiced) is that a more accurate translation might be “these honkeys will believe anything you tell them if you keep a straight face while you’re doing it”. Another possibility, also seldom voiced, is that the word “Topeka” was created by a shaman of the Kaw tribe who had a prophetic dream that a city in this location would one day become the state’s capital, and that the word should actually be translated as “behind schedule and over budget”.

To return to the alleged topic of this posting, I don’t believe I can be considered to have stolen the title of this blog from the band Kansas. I prefer to think that we have both drawn upon a shared cultural heritage.