God said to Abram, “Down on your knees, boy!” so Abram dropped.  “I want to talk to you about something.  I got big things in mind.” “What’s that, my Lord?” asked Abram. “What I’m thinking is that I want to put you in charge of everyone in Canaan, so sooner or later you’re going to have to drive all the locals out, I guess.  I want to make you fertile and have a whopping number of children.  You’re going to be the ancestor of kings and nations and the like.  Sound good?” “Sounds good so far, yes.” “All I ask is that you get circumcised…” “I knew there was a catch in there somewhere—“ “Quiet!  Now I’m asking you to get circumcised, and get all your friends to get circumcised, and that you make sure every male who’s eight days old get circumcised.  Otherwise, they’re out.  Get it?” “Sure.  But do You really think the guys are going to go for this circumcision?” “Tell them that I said to do it, and they’ll do anything.  You’d be surpris...

The United States Capitol Building, Capitol Hill, Washington, DC. A common typo, particularly among Americans, comes from confusing capital and capitol.  It’s an easy mistake to make, since both words mean something similar, and both are pronounced exactly the same.  But there’s a crucial difference, and one that means more in America than it does in other English-speaking countries. The word capital is an indirect descendant of the Latin word caput, which means head.  Its descent from Latin is indirect because it came to English, like so many words, from French.  Capitale was an Old French word that entered English sometime around the 13th century.  Its original meaning was “pertaining to the head”.  By the 15th century, the word had taken on the meaning “of chief importance”, and by the 18th century it came to mean “first rate” or “excellent”.  Around the early 16th century, the term capital crime came into use, meaning basically what it mea...

You know this station is on the West Coast.  Probably. If you’ve ever crossed the United States, you might have noticed that the call letters of the radio and TV stations tend to start with W in the east and K in the west.  The reason for this actually predates any of the radio stations that have ever operated on land.  It started at sea. In the 1880s, merchant ships were starting to use letter-coded signal flags to identify themselves.  Besides the ship’s national flag and other identifying flags, a series of four flags, each one representing a letter of the alphabet, would fly from the ship.  For example, the word “flag” would be written like this: Navy signal flags: Foxtrot, Lima, Alfa, Golf Those are the flags representing the letters F, L, A and G.  These letter flags were used to communicate with other ships in the time before radio.  The above wouldn’t have been any ship’s code, though, since the codes that ships used were ...

Image from the 1984 film Cannonball Run 2. Long have Americans embraced the automobile, and even longer have we embraced the open road.  Roads have been around for millennia, as essential links between population centers, holding civilization itself together.  The Roman Empire could not have managed its size without roads holding its farflung provinces together, and the United States is no different.   Following the invention of the automobile, roads had to be reinvented.  Before World War I, the United States had about 18 miles of paved roads from coast to coast.  The US Route System was spurred on in 1916 with the Federal Aid Road Act, which was government spending that footed half the bill for US highways across the country.  Automobile associations and manufacturers were starting to promote recreational driving, which went hand in glove with the US Route System.  Paved roads are much more appealing to drive on. One inspiration for improv...

Abram and his wife, Sarai, wanted kids but couldn’t have them.  Since there were no fertility clinics anywhere nearby, Sarai decided the only way to save the marriage was to do what would destroy a lesser marriage: Abram was to have sex with the maid.  The maid’s name was Hagar, a lovely name by ancient Egyptian standards, and proved to be much more fertile than Sarai.  Hagar got pregnant quickly and started to get uppity with Sarai.  Sarai blamed Abram, who was in a great position.  He told Sarai, “You told me to sleep with her.  This is all your fault.  I’m blameless.  Now go get me another beer.”  Thus the problem was resolved. Sarai’s problem was not resolved, though, so she dealt with it the best way she knew how: she started heaping abuse on Hagar, who eventually got so fed up with the situation, she ran off.  While running off, a messenger of God appeared before her and told her to go back to work and all the abuse that work ent...

Long have our supermarket shelves borne products with the name Betty Crocker.  This name has long since lodged in our heads an essential part of americana.  It seems to evoke the past.  It seems to always have evoked the past, a past when life was simpler and Mother and Grandmother cooked at home, using time tested recipes and only the purest ingredients.  We can’t go back to that simpler, wholesome past, but we can give ourselves a Proustian shot of nostalgia by tasting the past we remember, or the past we only wish we could remember, but know must be so good.  That is the Betty Crocker brand.  You might have seen drawings of her, but have you ever actually seen the legend herself?  Here’s an image of Miss Crocker from a 1953 television ad: “Betty Crocker” in a 1953 TV commercial for Betty Crocker™ Marble Cake Mix. The full "Betty Crocker" TV commercial. Okay, that’s actually actress Adelaide Hawley, who played Betty Crocker in a n...

Maybe it’s true that you never know you love someone until you start complaining about them.  If that’s so, then Gary Dahl drew the wrong conclusion from his friends he heard complaining about their pets.  It was 1975, and not only had we put a man on the moon, we’d also invented the 8-track cassette.  So why couldn’t we invent a way to make walking, washing, feeding and grooming our pets easier?  Why couldn’t technology catch up? Dahl was no scientist or engineer, so there wasn’t much he could do to develop technology.  But he was in advertising, which requires a different kind of creativity.  Instead of innovative machines, advertisers’ skills run more toward a field of human endeavor that probably predates machines by millennia: getting people interested in something they neither want nor need.  But what could Gary do? The solution, he figured, was to create a better pet.  At least, to create a lower-maintenance pet for our busy, deman...