11.15.2025 – still, half a sixpence

still, half a sixpence
better than half a penny
is better than none

Clockwise from the top, a UK 3 penny piece or a thrupence, Buffalo Nickel (also known as an Indian Head Nickel), Steel Pennies from WW2, Franklin Half Dollar, UK Shilling and UK Brass Farthings (KGVI – worth 1/4 of a cent)

Today’s Haiku is based on some verse from the 1963 Musical, Half a Sixpence). According to Wikipedia, Half a Sixpence is a 1963 musical comedy based on the 1905 novel Kipps by H. G. Wells, with music and lyrics by David Heneker and a book by Beverley Cross. It was written as a vehicle for British pop star Tommy Steele.

I had no idea it was a based on a book by HG Wells.

The line in question goes:

Still, half a sixpence
Is better than a half a penny
Is better than a half a farthing
Is better than none

I do remember it was selected as the High School Musical at Grand Rapids Creston High School when my little brother Steve was in the choir and he got the part of the evil brother who tries to steal the fortune of the hero.

Never thought much about the play until years later when I read the autobiography of John Cleese who wrote that in 1963 he and a bunch of his buddies from college took a comedy review to New York City and the shows producer saw him and offered him the role mostly due to his British accent. Cleese writes that was astounded to find himself, at age 24, in a Broadway Musical playing the evil brother.

And it clicked.

Hey, that was Steve’s part!

The idea that the United States Penny with Mr. Lincoln on it is no longer being made go me thinking about coins.

According to some sources, the visage of Mr. Lincoln on the penny is the single most viewed work of art in history.

At one time Branniff Airlines had Alexander Calder paint some of their planes and claimed that one of them, “The Flying Colors of the United States”, christened by First Lady Betty Ford and flown on its inaugural flight to Grand Rapids, Michigan was also a work of art and IT was seen by more people than any other single work of art in the history of the world. There is some question about that number as it would appear that when the plane flew over New York City, Braniff would claim that 8 million people looked up and saw it … as a tiny dot in the sky. As Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright would have said, “There you are.”

But I digress.

Thinking again about coins, I thought back to when I friend of mine was planning a trip to Great Britain and asked if I wanted anything.

I did.

I wanted some British coins.

Thinking of the line from My Fair Lady, whenever Alfred P. Doolittle comes on the scene, everyone prepares for him to ask for money and they cut him off saying, ‘NOT A BRASS FARTHING.”

I had to look it up.

Understand coins had some value based on what they were made of.

Golden Guineas.

Silver Shillings. (I always loved this bit of useless knowledge that Brits use £ and in each £ are 20 silver shillings. Back in the day and I mean Henry Vth days, 20 Silver Shillings weighed … one pound.)

Copper Pennies.

Farthings, worth 1/4 of cent or 4 to a penny were made of brass.

So I asked for some brass farthings.

And maybe a two penny or three penny or even a six penny piece, knowns as Tuppence, Thrupence and Sixpence coins.

My friend returned from her trip and came in my office and slammed the coins down on my desk.

“I had to go to three different antique stores,” she said.

As un aware as any of what happened in Great Britain, the coinage system of the revolutionary war, Dicken’s and Yeats, Forester and Orwell had disappeared in the late 1970’s though it took decades for people to forget about ‘New Money’.

I mean it was time.

As Alistair Cooke wrote about Thomas Jefferson on old money, “His objections to the laboriousness of pounds, shillings, and pence anticipated by two hundred years the wisdom of the British government: the ordinary man or woman “is used to be puzzled by adding the farthings, taking out the twenties and carrying them on; but when he came to pounds, where he had only tens to carry forward, it was easy and free from error.” He suggested that, since “everyone knows the facility of decimal arithmetic,” it should be adopted in the coinage “to the great ease of the community.”

Still hard to understand that we no longer need the penny.

Or that it costs more to make a penny that a penny is worth.

In other words, for every Penny that got minted, the US Government lost 2 cents.

Right there is the old Catch 22 of buying eggs for 5 cents and selling them for 3 cents.

Boy Howdy but it gets confusing.

What was the worth of a penny today?

And the old saying, at one point you reach the age where anything less than a Quarter isn’t worth picking up.

But it was good to hear that up north, Meijer Stores will continue its penny pony rides.

If you grew up in West Michigan, like I did, you rode one of those Penny ponies.

My wife would take our 2 year son, in full Cowboy Regalia, to ride that penny pony.

What’s the worth of that?

To many of us, priceless.

So shines a good deed in a weary world.

Still, half a sixpence
Is better than a half a penny
Is better than a half a farthing
Is better than none.

11.13.2025 – without wondering

without wondering
think about the sunrise and
what sunrise would bring

Adapted from the line, “He thought that he would lie down and think about nothing. Sometimes he could do this. Sometimes he could think about the stars without wondering about them and the ocean without problems and the sunrise without what it would bring.”

From the book, Islands in the Stream by Ernest Hemingway, (Charles Scribner Sons: New York, 1970 – published posthumously).

11.12.2025 – what is a cynic?

what is a cynic?
knows the price of everything
value of nothing

sentimentalist?
doesn’t know market price of
any single thing

Adapted from this exchange:

CECIL GRAHAM: What is a cynic? [Sitting on the back of the sofa.]

LORD DARLINGTON: A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

CECIL GRAHAM: And a sentimentalist, my dear Darlington, is a man who sees an absurd value in everything, and doesn’t know the market price of any single thing.

In the Oscar Wilde play, Lady Windermere’s Fan, Act III, ed. Isobel Murray (New York: Dover Publications, 1997).

In the old TV show, Yes, Prime Minister, in a discussion on rescuing a British Citizen caught in a foreign country.

Sir Humphrey Appleby, the career government man tells the Prime Minister that, “Well, I understand that tomorrow the Foreign Secretary will deliver a strong note of protest.”

Prime Minister Jim Hacker replies that the response seems “Very heartless.”

To which Sir Humphrey replies, “It’s safer to be heartless than mindless. History is the triumph of the heartless over the mindless.”

Such thoughts as I drive east into the sun rising out of the Atlantic Ocean.

Where are we today?

I am reminded of the great Chicago chronicler Mike Royko who once said something like this about being a fan of the Chicago Cubs.

An optimist sees that the glass is half full.

A pessimist sees that the glass is half empty.

A Cub fan wonders, when does it tip over?

11.11.2025 – obscurely fallen

obscurely fallen
by death, something that we can
look upon with pride

Adapted from the poem, Ode in Memory of the American Volunteers Fallen for France.

Ay, it is fitting on this holiday,
Commemorative of our soldier dead,
When—with sweet flowers of our New England May
Hiding the lichened stones by fifty years made gray—
Their graves in every town are garlanded,
That pious tribute should be given too
To our intrepid few
Obscurely fallen here beyond their seas.
Those to preserve their country’s greatness died;
But by the death of these
Something that we can look upon with pride
Has been achieved, nor wholly unreplied
Can sneerers triumph in the charge they make
That from a war where Freedom was at stake
America withheld and, daunted, stood aside.

As published in Poems By Alan Seeger, (New York Charles Scribner’s Sons: New York ,1918).

In the Introduction to the book, Poems, one William Archer, a Scottish author, theatre critic, wrote, “He had hoped to have been in Paris on Decoration Day, May 30th, to read, before the statue of Lafayette and Washington, the “Ode in Memory of the American Volunteers Fallen for France,” which he had written at the request of a Committee of American residents; but his “permission” unfortunately did not arrive in time. Completed in two days, during which he was engaged in the hardest sort of labour in the trenches, this Ode is certainly the crown of the poet’s achievement. It is entirely admirable, entirely adequate to the historic occasion. If the war has produced a nobler utterance, it has not come my way.”

Margraten in The Netherlands, one of 14 permanent overseas military cemeteries set aside for America’s World War II dead that the U.S. government maintains in perpetuity.

Today in the New York Times, is the opinion piece, If Only More Americans Could See This Place by Jonathan Darmen.

It is an article about visiting a cemetery in Holland for US servicemen who died in Europe in World War 2.

Mr. Darmen writes, The American service members buried in the soil of Europe grew up in a country where many respectable politicians claimed America had no business preserving peace on the European continent or promoting freedom in the world. There was no NATO, no United Nations, no American-led global order.

When you stoop down on European soil to read an American soldier’s name on a grave, you see how policies sold as “America First” can lead to unthinkable suffering and loss.

Travel through Europe today and you’ll see the war-forged American-European partnership embedded everywhere — in gleaming embassies and in hulking military bases, in ubiquitous English-language ads and in the YouTube clips streaming on teenagers’ phones. But nowhere does the tie between the people on both sides of the Atlantic feel more intimate as in the World War II cemeteries.

In today’s Europe, the need for such a partner remains. At Margraten that August morning, I spoke with a Dutch woman who’d come to visit the cemetery with her young son. He was learning at school about “the problems in the world,” she explained. He’s a little bit nervous, she said, about what would happen “if the Russians come.” She gestured at the rows of graves all around her: “So it’s very important to see everything.”

My son got blown up in Afghanistan and is banged up in lots of other ways.

I have an Uncle who was blown up in Europe with a lot more visible wounds.

I have a Great Uncle who was shot in France.

My Great Grand Father had a confederate bullet in his chest from the day he was shot in Virginia in 1862 until the day he died, 50 years later.

I take my hat off to their service and to all veterans on this day.

On Veterans Day it it good to remember what Mr. Lincoln said at Gettysburg.

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.

As Mr. Darmen writes: But in their beauty, ambition and scale, the cemeteries have also always sent a message to Europeans, a reminder of the costs Americans were willing to pay to ensure the cause of liberty in the world.

11.10.2025 – experience is

experience is
the name so many people
give to their mistakes

Adapted from the line, “Experience is the name so many people give to their mistakes.” in the Oscar Wilde play, Lady Windermere’s Fan, Act III, ed. Isobel Murray (New York: Dover Publications, 1997).

Oh but where to start?

My recent experiences in books to read?

My recent experiences in things to eat?

My recent experiences in places to go?

Or do we cast a bigger net?

The recent experiences with Presidential elections?

Like I said, where to start.

Just for fun, read over the morning newspapers or watch the morning news and when you read or hear the word experience, say ‘mistakes’ in your head.

But …

In the play’s next lines, Mr. Wilde has another character say, referring to mistakes that, “One
shouldn’t commit any.”

To which Mr. Wilde has someone say in response, “Life would be very dull without them.”