four flights longest
57 seconds, in-
form press, home Christmas

Okay, okay, okay, so I really really had to fudge this one and break inform in half to get my 5-7-5 and as always my comment is, my blog, my rules.

ANYWAY 122 years ago today, down here on the seacoast of North Carolina, about 500 miles north of where I am on the seacoast of South Carolina, the Wright Brothers fly their Wright Flyer for the first time in a powered take off and flight of a heavier than air machine.

They made 4 flights and crashed, as most writers agree, because they didn’t know how to fly which is a lot like the saying the first guy to catch a fish ate it raw because he didn’t know how to cook it.

Flight took off.

And the Orville and Wilber were so excited they rushed off to send a very odd telegram.

See back then in 1903, the average cost for a Western Union message was approximately 30 cents, down from over one dollar in the 1860s. The rate typically included a set number of words (ten words), with an extra charge for each additional word.

The message they sent was: “Success four flights this morning all against twenty one mile wind started from Level with engine power alone average speed through air thirty one miles longest 57 seconds inform Press home Christmas”

I am just curious as to why they used the words twenty one and thirty one instead of the numbers 21 and 31. They did use 57 at the end.

Did the telegrapher pad the bill?

Hemingway makes the point, over and over, that his prose style of using as few words as possible was ingrained in him by hears of being a foreign correspondent and the Newspaper he worked for had to pay the cablegram bill for his stories by the word, so he learned to be brief.

Just got me thinking as I looked it.

Nevertheless, it happened 122 years ago today.

It should be noted that they had problems with their self designed and built gasoline engine and on that cold morning and it took a couple of hours to get it running satisfactorily.

So it can be said, with a great deal of truth, the Wright Brothers invented Flight Delay before they invented flight.

was without Christmas
spirit – the world that used to
nurse us keeps shouting

I was without Christmas spirit
so I made three cow dogs,
Lola and Blacky and Pinto,
cheeseburgers with ground chuck
and French St. André cheese
so that we’d all feel better.
I delivered them to Hard Luck Ranch
and said, “Chew each bite 32 times.”
They ignored me and gobbled.
The world that used to nurse us
now keeps shouting inane instructions.
That’s why I ran to the woods.

Xmas Cheeseburgers by Jim Harrison in Songs of Unreason as published in the Complete Poems of Jim Harrison (Copper Canyon Press: Port Townsend, WA 2021).

The world that used to nurse us
now keeps shouting inane instructions.
That’s why I ran to the woods.

From the foldings of its robe, it brought two children; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment.

“Oh, Man! look here. Look, look, down here!” exclaimed the Ghost.

They were a boy and girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.

Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.

“Spirit! are they yours?” Scrooge could say no more.

“They are Man’s,” said the Spirit, looking down upon them. “And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!” cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. “Slander those who tell it ye! Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse. And bide the end!”

“Have they no refuge or resource?” cried Scrooge.

“Are there no prisons?” said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. “Are there no workhouses?”

The bell struck twelve.

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (Chapman and Hall: London, 1843).

hope everlasting
peace bliss except inventor
of the telephone

In 1890, the Editors or somebody at the New York Evening World, reached out to some of the literary notables of the time, Oliver Wendall Holmes, James Whitcomb Riley and others, requesting a thought or two about Christmas.

The responses were printed in the Newspaper on Christmas Day, 1890 under the slug lines:

GREETING TO ALL

Sweet Singers Send Words of Cheer to the People

Christmas Sentiments from Men and Women of Renown

Gathering of Well-Wishers from All Over the Land.

Mark Twain sent in this response.

“It is my heart-warm and world-embracing Christmas hope and aspiration that all of us –

the high,

the low,

the rich,

the poor,

the admired,

the despised,

the loved,

the hated,

the civilized,

the savage –

may-eventually be gathered together in heaven of everlasting rest and peace and bliss-

except the inventor of the telephone.”

This, again, was in 1890.

Alexander Graham Bell got his first patent 1874.

It took just 14 years …

The thin end of the wedge.

The camels nose under the tent door.

The slippery slope.

The tip of the iceberg.

The Pandoras Box of all Pandora’s boxes.