We could adopt both those conveniences and greatly simplify our measuring system. My proposal is the Decimal English Measurement Units (DEMU) System (DEMUS).

For the basic unit of length, the foot is most agreeable. It’s one we’ve been used to for over 200 years. Ask someone how long a foot is, and he’ll hold his hand up to within an inch or so of the right distance.

English units are bogged down with far too many basic units. For starters, there’s inch, foot, yard, and mile. To get from miles to inches, multiply by 5280 to get feet (or 1720 to get yards), multiply that by 12 to get inches (or multiply yards by 3 to get feet). (There are 63,360 inches in a mile.) Once you get to inches, you start dividing by 2 until you get to 64ths. Some fanatics (mostly engineers and craftsmen) may go down to 128ths.

Besides those, there’s cable, chain (2 varieties), ell, fathom, furlong, league, rod – and that’s not all the English units for length.

Let’s rip it all up and start over. We’ll keep the foot, because we all know what a foot is. Most adult humans are between 5 and 6 of them.

All we have to do to make life simpler is go decimal. Smaller units: 1/10 of a foot is the decifoot. 1/10 of a decifoot is a centifoot (1/100 of a foot). 1/10 of that is a millifoot (1/1000 of a foot).

Here’s how those eminently sensible units compare to the current awkward system:

1 decifoot = 1/10 foot = 1.2 inches (about 1 3/16”)
1 centifoot 1/100 foot = .12 inch (about 1/8”)
1 millifoot = 1/1000 foot = .012 inch (about 1/64”)

Now we can easily convert, for example, 250 millifeet to centifeet (25) or decifeet (2.5), and vice versa.

Now for the other direction: 10 feet make a dekafoot, 10 dekafeet make a hectofoot (these last two hardly ever used), 10 hectofeet make a kilofoot (1000 feet).

So far, from millifeet to kilofeet gives us a range of a million to one.

Standard paper is about 0.003”. In DEMU, that would be 0.25 millifeet. The old-fashioned mile is 5.28 kilofeet.

To measure longer distances, it’s convenient to jump to megafeet: 1000 kilofeet (a million feet). A megafoot is a little over 189 miles.

So far, we’ve covered lengths from a piece of paper to 189 miles. The distance from Los Angeles to New York (airline) is 2470 miles, close to 13 megafeet. Or about 13,000 kilofeet. The distance around the equator is about 10 times that: 24901.5 miles. That’s about 130,000 kilofeet, or 130 megafeet.

This simple adoption of a simple system will greatly improve our ability to work with lengths both short and long.

It happened in the year 1911, and will again in the year 2111.

There’s something fascinating about all those “1″s. There are lots of other “repeating number” dates – December 2012 will give us 12:12:12,12/12/12. But that’s not nearly as interesting as this one, with the single digit, “1″.

That instant will occur 24 times around the world (just like New Year’s Day), in each local time zone. (So if you miss it on the West Coast, all you need do is hop over to Hawaii.)

Some say you get another chance that evening. This is simply not true. The nighttime signature would be “23:11:11,11/11/11″, or worse: “11:11:11 pm,11/11/11″, both of which break the simple symmetry of the real signature.

Armistice Day

November 11th marks the anniversary of Armistice Day. On that day in 1918, World War I ended. A truce was signed with Germany, to go into effect at “the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month”. (“Armistice” means “truce”; Germany didn’t officially surrender, but the terms of the truce were so punitive upon Germany that they may well have set the groundwork for World War II.)

The day was renamed “Veterans Day” in the U.S. after World War II. In Britain, it’s called “Remembrance Day”, also known as “Poppy Day”.

It has been a long tradition to observe 2 minutes of silence every November 11, at 11 o’clock.

Poppy man

Poppies have long been a symbol of veterans day. It began after WW I, with a poem by John McCrae: In Flanders Fields.

In England, there’s a guy called “Poppy Man”, who goes around supporting the Royal British Legion, an organization that serves British ex-servicemen.

That website hasn’t been updated since 2007, but the work goes on: Poppy Appeal 2011.

Cassette player has been stricken from the Concise Oxford English Dictionary” (Sept 5, 2011)

I don’t suppose we’ll find “eight-track player” there, either.

Maybe on the freeway, you might go 60 miles in an hour, but it’s very likely that you’ll be going 55 part way, then 65, then 60.

Unless, of course, you have cruise control, in which case none of this matters to you.

Besides that, there’s the matter of the ridiculous unit: miles. A mile is 5280 feet, or 1720 yards, A yard is 3 feet, and a foot is 12 inches. The inch was originally defined as 1/12 of a foot (though where the “12″ came from is anybody’s guess. The inch is nowadays divided into 1/2, 1/4, 1/8. 1/16, and so on). Some say the word “inch” is related to the word for thumb: in Sanskrit, for example, “angulam” = “inch’; “anguli” = “finger”.

“Mile” comes from the Latin “mille”, or “thousand”, because the average Roman soldier’s pace was 5 feet, and at that time, a mile was 5000 feet. Since then, inflation has taken effect.

In the interests of improving the world. I present a much more meaningful way of describing automobile speed: meters per second (m/S).

We’re much more likely to drive a meter at a constant speed. (I resist the temptation to do something about our awkward system of time units: seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years. The French tried, during the Revolution, but that failed miserably.)

During the brief time before everybody adopts this unquestionably superior system, it will be useful to have a conversion factor.

To convert miles per hour into meters per second, multiply by 0.44704. To go the other way, multiply by 2.237. If you use 0.45 and 2.2, you’ll only be off by less than a percent or so.

The test of a good system of units is whether or not we can represent common quantities in a manageable number of digits. This is why we switch from pounds to tons once the measurement of pounds goes past 4 digits.

So then, the average highway speed of 65 mi/hr is 29 m/S. Quite manageable. 20 mi/hr = 9 m/S. (Actually 8.94/S, but certainly close enough for road work.)

Since speed limit signs don’t include units (points off, there), there will naturally be a few cases of people driving 65 m/S, or 145 mi/hr, but, as this is perfectly understandable, little more than a warning and information booklet need be issued.

(There was a case, some years back, where a car driven by foreign tourists was stopped for going about 100 mi/hr on the freeway. When the Highway Patrol finally pulled them over, the driver explained that the sign clearly read “101″.)

This isn’t a sign made in somebody’s back yard. Somebody had to write the words, somebody else had to set the word up on the sign-printing machine, and somebody had to approve the sign.

On the other hand, it is a lot easier to do remodeling on something that’s temporally close, rather than far away (as in the distant past or future).

This is the first part of a “book report” (more than a review, less than a thesis).

It’s a “tepid sequel” (Amazon review, but I haven’t read “Ark of Fire”), involving the Ark of the Covenant, Knights Templar, Freemasons, and much of the other Dan Brown material.

If you’re coming in without preconceived ideas, it’s not all that bad (at least, not up to page 116, where I left off). The writing isn’t exceptional; there’s an occasional howler:

The main characters are talking about the Big Secret. Then this:

“Loose lips sink Templar ships,” Edie deadpanned. Or something equally asinine. (p. 27)

The dialog is supposed to report what’s happening in real time (even though it’s all in the past tense). Mr Palov: Is that what she said, or not?

A bit later, the protagonist is in hand-to-hand combat with the assassin who’s trying to kill him. Our hero lands a severe blow on the Bad Guy.

“Argh!“, the assassin bellowed. (p. 39)

I might have gone with “Ouch!” or “Damn!”, but then, it’s not my book.

On through to page 220. The writing improves. No more howlers to report.

One rule of good writing is that each character has his own voice – his own speech patters. Mr Palov goes a little overboard here. The hero, Caedmon Aisquith (British, naturally) talks like a typical English butler. His helping hand, his Dr Watson, Edie (of the possible quote above), talks like a precocious teenager.

Along the way, they meet an East Coast Indian. His first name is Tonto. Really. Tonto has a grudge against the white man for something that happened in the 1600s.

The Bad Guy, the assassin of the quote on page 39, is chasing our intrepid heroes across the country. It’s beginning to look a little like a Roadrunner cartoon. Every time he tries to kill Caedmon, something goes wrong, and Caedmon and Edie get away.

Overall, though. Palov’s web of historical intrigue – pulling together the Knights Templar, the Inquisition, the Freemasons. a hidden treasure buried in America – aren’t just a story cobbled together from unconnected parts. They are historically connected.

Palov spins a yarn that makes the tenuous connections seem plausible.

Le Grande Thanksgiving.

Here are a few exerpts:

One of our most important holidays is Thanksgiving Day, known in France as le Jour de Merci Donnant .

Le Jour de Merci Donnant was first started by a group of Pilgrims (Pelerins) who fled from l’Angleterre before the McCarran Act to found a colony in the New World (le Nouveau Monde) where they could shoot Indians (les Peaux-Rouges) and eat turkey (dinde) to their hearts’ content.
. . .
Every year on the Jour de Merci Donnant, parents tell their children an amusing story about the first celebration.

It concerns a brave capitaine named Miles Standish (known in France as Kilometres Deboutish) and a young, shy lieutenant named Jean Alden. Both of them were in love with a flower of Plymouth called Priscilla Mullens (no translation).
. . .
And so, on the fourth Thursday in November, American families sit down at a large table brimming with tasty dishes and, for the only time during the year, eat better than the French do.
. . .

Truman took over a almost a complete outsider – FDR never took him into his confidence, and rarely met with him in person. However, Truman was determined to do the job, learned quickly, and earned a place in history as one of the better Presidents.

One of the most difficult tasks he faced was the problem of the Jews in Europe, and their desire for a homeland in Palestine. The history of Truman’s involvement in this cause is detailed in a cerfully-researched book, A Safe Haven: Harry S. Truman and the Founding of Israel. It tells of the intransigence of the Arab leaders – particularly of King Ibn Saud (1876 – 1953), and their determination to prevent any Jewish settlement in Palestine. The quotes below are taken from the book.

In February of 1945, FDR met with Ibn Saud, on board a Navy cruiser, at Great Bitter Lake, on the Suez Canal. Every effort was made to impress the King, including dozens of oriental carpets on deck. Even though weakened by the ever-present polio, and the stress of the Yalta Conference a few days before, FDR was still a man on considerable charm and charisma. The famous smile had no effect on the King, who said

… the Jews should return to the lands from which they were driven … or give them living space in the Axis countries which oppressed them … Arabs would rather die than yield their land to the Jews.
- Safe Haven, p.27

Winston Churchill had also met with the King, during which the King told him

[any concession would result in] … a struggle to the death between Arabs and Jews if unreasonable immigration of Jews to Palestine is renewed.
- Safe Haven, p.29

Roosevelt later told Rabbi Stephen Wise

Every time I mentioned the Jews [Ibn Saud] would srink and give e some answer as this – ‘I am too old to understand such ideas’.
- Safe Haven, p.31

When FDR told the King what had been done in Palestine with irrigation and planting trees, the King replied

My people don’t like trees; they are desert dwellers. And we have enough water without irrigation.
- Safe Haven, p.31

From the Yalta Conference in 1945, to the establishment of a Jewish state in 1948, was a rough road. But it was done, and it was Truman who did most of the heavy lifting in the U.S.

Donald Robert Perry Marquis was an American newspaperman, writer, columnist, humorist, playwright, social critic, journalist, poet, parodist, historian, novelist, skeptic, cynic, satirist and philosopher, who lived and worked in New York up until his death in 1937. (His name, of Scotch/Irish origin, is pronounced “MAR-kwiss”. If you thought “mar-KEE”, go back and read the title again. It’s the title of a memorial article by his friend Christopher Morley; it would be hard to find a more fitting one.)

He is best known today as Don Marquis, creator of Archy and Mehitabel.

Archy is a cockroach, into whose small body was reincarnated the soul of a poet. (Archy “is”, because he lives on in the pages of four books of collected stories, still in print after 75 years.) Archy lived in Marquis’ newspaper office, and at night hammered out stories by hurling himself onto the keys of Marquis’ typewriter. (It was a standard Underwood; the effort was considerable.) Beside Archy – but usually at a safe distance – was Mehitabel, a cat, who wandered in one day from New York’s back alleys. Mehitabel tells a skeptical Archy that she is the reincarnated soul of Cleopatra. Through the eyes of Archy and Mehitabel, Marquis looked at society and the human condition, from “the under side now”.

In the 1920s, Marquis was New York’s most popular columnist. His column in New York’s Evening Sun ran from 1912 to 1922, when he moved to the New York Tribune, and continued there until about 1925. His columns ran six days a week, for about thirteen years. In 1917, Marquis thought highly of a song lyric by an up-and-coming young song-writer named Ira Gershwin, and ran it in his column.

In the years from 1921 to 1931, he suffered a series of family tragedies: his 5-year old son died; his first wife died; his 13-year old daughter died; and in 1935 and 1936 he was hit with a series of strokes that left him unable to write. In 1936, his second wife, who had been caring for him, died. He never recovered from that loss, and a year later, on December 29, 1937, Don Marquis died.

A friend of his, the writer and poet Benjamin DeCasseres, wrote a
eulogy comparing Marquis, a just man beset by tragedy, to Job. But Job’s reward came here on earth; Don’s would have to come later.

Part of what makes Achy and Mehitabel timeless is that Marquis didn’t focus on individuals. His aim was wider. And he had other characters to expose the follies of the times. Prohibition – our disastrous fourteen-year experiment in social engineering – gave rise to Clem Hawley, the Old Soak. Hawley first appeared in Marquis’ column five years before Prohibition went into effect. The Old Soak eventually became a Broadway play in 1922 (during Prohibition), and was one of the most successful plays of the time.

Archy too took on Prohibition. In one episode, Archy is talking to the mummy of an Egyptian pharaoh, at the Metropolitan Museum. The pharaoh speaks:

     you must be respectful
     in the presence
     of a mighty desolation
     little archy
     forty centuries of thirst
     look down upon you

     i am dry
     i am as dry
     as the next morning mouth
     of a dissipated desert
     as dry as the hoofs
     of the camels of timbuctoo
     little fussy face
     i am as dry as the heart
     of a sand storm
     at high noon in hell
     i have been lying here
     and there
     for four thousand years
     with silicon in my esophagus
     as gravel in my gizzard
     thinking
     thinking
     thinking
     of beer

Archy breaks the bad news to him.

     well well said the royal
     desiccation
     my political opponents back home
     always maintained
     that i would wind up in hell
     and it seems they had the right dope

     and with these hopeless words
     the unfortunate residuum
     gave a great cough of despair
     and turned to dust and debris
     right in my face
     it being the only time
     i ever actually saw anybody
     put the cough
     into sarcophagus

Again, in “Certain Maxims of Archy”, a sort of modern-day “Poor Richard’s Almanack”:

     prohibition makes you
     want to cry

     into your beer and
     denies you the beer
     to cry into

Marquis on Marquis

From an autobiographical sketch:

Height, 5 feet 10 ½ inches … weight, 200 pounds … has always been careful to keep thumbprints from possession of police …

From a letter to a journalism student, asking for information:

… I have been a promising young man in literary circles for at least thirty years …

I was born in a small town in Northern Illinois of poor but honest parents, and the poverty and honesty which I inherited from them I have preserved intact throughout life…

He was conscious of his own mortality, and he lamented that he had left so much work undone. In this exerpt from a poem titled
“Lines From a Gravestone”, we see a little way into his soul:

Naught that I have been or planned
Sails the seas or walks the land:
. . . .
Naught that I have dreamed or done
Casts a shadow in the sun:
. . . .
Nothing I have caused or done,
But this gravestone, meets the sun:

A group of his friends proposed a 50th birthday party/celebration. He wrote back:

“I could not go through with [it]. …. It means … that half a dozen novels, which I planned in my 30s, will probably never be … 40 and 45 are bad enough; 50 is simply hell to face; 15 minutes after that you are 60; and then in 10 minutes more you are 85.”

In the last year of his life, he got a letter from Hillaire Belloc, who wrote:

It is a permanent addition to the furniture of my mind. It is a masterpiece and rare indeed.

This is the piece that Belloc praised so highly.

At one point, he has Shakespeare say

     grind grind grind
     what a life for a man
     that might have been a poet

That may well have been Marquis talking.

Marquis the Poet

archy and mehitabel is partly a satire on “free verse” poets – who were abundant in those days. But Marquis was an able craftsman with more serious poetry. This one, Only Thy Dust…, published in 1922, is a far cry from the humor of archy or The Old Soak.

For technical virtuosity, few poems come close to Wireless Telegraph, from 1906. Look at the introduction and first stanza:

Dead priests that have sung when the world was young at Mercury’s temple-place,
Your myth, it was true. It is born anew in the death of time and space!

MORE swift, more fleet, than the sun-stained feet of the Dawns that trample the night–
More fleet, more swift, than the gleams that lift in the wake of a wild star’s flight–
Through the unpathed deeps of a sea that sweeps unplumbed, unsailed, unknown,
Where the forces untamed, unseen, unnamed, have ruled from the First, alone,
Now the Ghosts of Thought, with a message caught from the tales of the dreaming past,
Unheard, unseen, with nor sound nor sheen, speed through the ultimate vast.

Marquis the epicure

We don’t know much about Marquis’ eating habits. I think it’s safe to assume that he was a meat-and-potatoes man, and a hard drinker. He was, after all, a newspaperman.

I’ve read that he didn’t particularly care for beans. This may be a clue – in archy and mehitabel, he often writes of the Pythagorean theory of reincarnation – as in

     this is the song of mehitabel
     of mehitabel the alley cat
     as i wrote you before boss
     mehitabel is a believer
     in the pythagorean
     theory of the transmigration
     of the soul and she claims
     that formerly her spirit
     was incarnated in the body
     of cleopatra
     that was a long time ago
     and one must not be
     surprised if mehitabel
     has forgotten some of her
     more regal manners

… and one of the rules of the Pythagoreans was that they were forbidden to eat beans.

However, he did leave one beautiful recipe for baked beans.

In The Almost Perfect State, he points to beans as the cause of the world’s ills, but at the end – in a recipe like no other, he tells you the way they should be prepared.

If you will eat beans, here is the way to prepare them.

First, you must have an earthenware Bean Pot, about six hands high, and of a dark bay colour. It is better if this Bean Pot is inherited from a favourite grandmother, with a porous texture (the Bean Pot, not the grandmother) that has absorbed and retained the sentimental traditions of at least three generations. But if you own no such heirloom (more precious than the rubies of an imperial crown!) a new one can be made to do.

Procure your white navy beans, and pick them over on a Friday night, not hastily or cursorily, but with love and care, one bean at a time, for this is both an art and a science on which you have embarked–it is more; it is almost a religious rite. Cast from you all split beans, all rusty or spotted beans, all too-wrinkly beans; save only such superior beans, smooth, hard, and shining, as a twelve-months’ old child would love to poke up his nose.

Marquis on World Affairs

The “under side now” gave him the opportunity to look at the human race from a different perspective. He wasn’t impressed with the ability of governments to solve world problems:

     ... i have noticed that conferences
     to establish international good will
     always break up with another row
     there is no hope for the world
     unless politicians of all sorts
     are completely abolished
     you cannot get a millennium by
     laying a whole lot of five year plans
     end to end if governments would just let people alone
     things would straighten out of themselves
     in the due course of time

Archy figures that the human race hasn’t gotten quite as advanced as the insects:

     i do not see why men
     should be so proud
     insects have the more
     ancient linege
     according to the scientists
     insects were insects
     when man was only
     a burbling whatsit

There are occasional journeys into deep philosophy:

     i once heard the survivors
     of a colony of ants
     that had been partiallly
     obliterated by a cow s foot
     seriously debating
     the intentions of the gods
     toward their civilization

Marquis in Hollywood

In 1929, he took a job in Hollywood as a screenwriter. The experience was a disaster – he left after a few months and never returned. He did leave a scathing, vitriolic poem, Ode to Hollywood, which was unprintable then, and practically unprintable today.

Marquis the Old Softie

The poem of his that has stayed with me ever since I read it, many years ago, is from the viewpoint of another character, Pete the Pup. It’s an absolute delight:

          pete at the seashore
    i ran along the yellow sand
    and made the sea gulls fly
    i chased them down the waters edge
    i chased them up the sky

    i ran so hard i ran so fast
    i left the spray behind
    i chased the flying flecks of foam
    and i outran the wind

    an airplane sailing overhead
    climbed when it heard me bark
    i yelped and leapt right at the sun
    until the sky grew dark

    some little children on the beach
    threw sticks and ran with me
    o master let us go again
    and play beside the sea
	                         pete the pup

References

There are two excellent Marquis websites:

Jim Ennes’ donmarquis.org focuses more on Marquis’ works, and John Batteiger’s www.donmarquis.com focuses more on his life and times. Both have an extensive collection of his stories, poems, and essays. Between the two, there’s a wealth of Marquis’ writings, from archy and mehitabel to The Old Soak to his scathing diatribe against the Hollywood movie industry.

abebooks.com lists about 1100 copies of his books. They range from first editions – a signed copy of archy and mehitabel for $350, around $250 for unsigned first editions – to recent ones for about $2.

archy and mehitabel is still the favorite: 287 copies.

There are four books on the Project Gutenberg online text library. Both of the web sites above have links to those books.

This is taken from an older blog, first published in July, 2004