Raining Cats & Dogs

Keeping with this rain theme that I’ve blogged about for the past two days, today it’s a look at a popular idiom, “raining cats and dogs’’ and unless you’ve read up a little on the origins of this idiom, be ready for a surprise.

First of all, it is not related to the well-known antipathy between dogs and cats like in the expression, “fighting like cats and dogs” (and probably no way connected to Bill Murray’s utterance in Ghostbusters—“dogs and cats living together”). Nor is this idiom in any literal sense about cats and dogs falling from the sky due to some meteorological freak storm—where smaller creatures such as frogs and fish have been carried up into the sky, by a tornado for example, to later “rain” down.

One interesting possibility of the idiom’s origin is from Norse Mythology. Dogs and wolves were attendants to Odin the god of storms and sailors associated them with rain. That doesn’t really explain the cats in the idiom, so maybe we’ve got to look at witches who often took the form of a cat, and yes, rode the wind. Not quite falling from the sky with dogs, so we can pretty much forget about this one.

One very strong possibility, at least one that made the rounds a few years back, was that cats and dogs were washed from roofs during heavy weather, specifically thatched roof houses. Supposedly, according an account of life in the 1500’s, these thatch roofs were an ideal place for small animals to live, including cats and dogs. And then of course, when it rained, the roof would become slippery and those little animals would slip and fall off the roof, including the cats and dogs. Thus the saying, “it’s raining cats and dogs.”

Well, this theory doesn’t hold water (pun intended) because in order for us to believe this tale, we would also have to believe the dogs live in roofs. Now, I’ve heard about a cat on a hot tin roof, but if we were to accept this bizarre idea—for dogs to have slipped off a roof in the pouring rain—one would have to wonder, what the heck is a dog doing sitting on the roof in the rain? If you require further debunking, hardly the place for man’s best friend to head for shelter in bad weather, right?

Another suggestion for all you etymologists out there is that “raining cats and dogs” comes from a version of the French word catadoupe, meaning waterfall. Well, my French is limited to Perrier, French fries and chaise lounge, so I can really say one way or another if this suggestion is also valid.

Now we can come to the truth behind this idiomatic chestnut. The most likely source of “raining cats and dogs” is the “prosaic fact that, in the filthy streets of 17th and 18th century England, heavy rain would occasionally carry along dead animals and other debris.” Although cats and dogs did not fall from the sky, perhaps the sight of these animals floating by after a storm caused the coining of this idiom. To be sure, Jonathan Swift described such an event in his satirical poem “A Description of a City Shower” (1710)

“Now from all Parts the swelling Kennels flow,
And bear their Trophies with them as they go:
Filth of all Hues and Odours seem to tell
What Street they sail’d from, by their Sight and Smell.
They, as each Torrent drives, with rapid Force,
From Smithfield or St. Pulchre’s shape their Course,
And in huge Confluent join’d at Snow-Hill Ridge,
Fall from the Conduit, prone to Holburn-Bridge.
Sweeping from Butchers Stalls, Dung, Guts, and Blood,
Drown’d Puppies, stinking Sprats, all drench’d in Mud,
Dead Cats and Turnip-tops come tumbling down the Flood.”

While Swift’s poem—a denunciation of contemporary London society—is metaphorical and doesn’t describe a specific flood, it is likely with his description of water-borne animal corpses, he was referring to an occurrence that many readers would know.

However, Swift wasn’t the first one to make such a reference. In 1653 the phrase was used in a modified form in Richard Brome’s comedy The City Wit or the Woman Wears Breeches (that must have been a real shocker back then) with a reference to stormy weather: “It shall raine…Dogs and Polecats.”

But let’s turn our attention to Swift again. He would use the expression again, in a form that we all have come to enjoy to use in his A Complete Collection of Polite and Ingenious Conversation (1738) when he writes, “I know Sir John will go, though he was sure it would rain cats and dogs.”

Therefore, Swift’s allusion to the streets flowing with dead cats and dogs in 1710 and his explicit use of it again in 1738 suggests the most likely origin. So, the next time it rains cats and dogs you have poor sanitation and Jonathan Swift to thank for this colorful expression.

Rain on me

It’s another rainy day in Daejeon—the kind of rainy day when you know it’s going to rain on and off all day. There are the occasional cloudbursts, not what you would call “raining cats and dogs” but more along the lines of a swirling, blowing rain that is accompanied by gusts of wind rushing down from the hills and mountains that make up so much of Korea’s topography/terrain.

Now when you talk about some real cloudbursts—when it rains so hard you can’t see anything in front of you—well that reminds me of this time when I was stationed at Howard Air Force Base in Panama and I got caught, better yet, stranded in one of them. I was working in the After Hours Support Unit—this section in the 24th Supply Squadron—where I took supply requests and delivered whatever had been ordered “after hours” (on weekends, holidays, and night). It was a real cushy job, one day on and three days off, but on the weekends or a holiday it was a 24-hour shift.

One Saturday afternoon, this call comes in from maintenance for a C-130 radome (a large, black cone-shaped covering for the radar on the front of the aircraft). This C-130 was from a squadron of Air Force National Guard C-130’s on TDY (temporary duty) rotation as part of the Southern Command’s mission in Central and South America. The radome came in a wooden box about the size of a Volkswagen and I had to use this enormous forklift to deliver it to the aircraft.

It was a beautiful day, the sun was shining, and the sky was this lovely azure blue accented with clumps of white, billowy clouds. Just a glorious day on the Isthmus of Panama. I started chugging down the flightline with this radome, soaking in the sunshine and humidity. Didn’t notice at first how those lovely, fleecy white clouds had turned gray and ominous. And when I did glance up the sky, wondering what the heck had happened to the sun that had been hidden by those clouds, it was too late.

The skies just opened up with a torrential downpour. There was nothing I could do but stop where I was. I turned off the engine and waited. The rain came down so fast and hard,  I couldn’t see beyond the forklift. It rained for about 10-15 minutes and then stopped. Those gray clouds turned white and fleecy and then the sun reappeared along with that lovely azure sky. I swear I could see the steam rising from the flight line.

As for myself, I was soaked but once the sun came out; my fatigues started to dry. I started the forklift and continued on my merry, chugging way down the flight line to the C-130’s. By the time I arrived, about 10 minutes later, my fatigues had pretty much dried.

Fan Death

Summer has arrived with a vengeance and time for one of my favorite Urban Legends in Korea: Fan Death. Although this story has made the rounds in Korea and has been proven to have some validity, it is still worth reading. This was originally written in 2006.

There was a time in Korea, when the dog days of summer rolled around and started hounding everyone here, that you could count on someone bringing up one of the more interesting urban legends associated with Korea during the hot summer months—“fan death.”

Most assuredly there would be a news story or two about how someone had died while sleeping with a fan on in a closed room as well as an essay or two in the Op-Ed section from some foreigner refuting the notion that a person could die from sleeping with a fan on.

These days I don’t hear about it as much as I did when I first came here (maybe more people are using air conditioning or that people just got tired of hearing about it every time summer arrived); nonetheless, fan death is one of the more quirky urban legends that, as far as I know originated in South Korea. The belief is that an electric fan, if left running overnight in a closed room, can result in the death (by suffocation, poisoning, or hypothermia) of those inside the room.

Interestingly, this belief also extends to air conditioners in cars (maybe that explains why some taxi drivers will have the air conditioner running in a taxi with one or two windows open). Moreover, fans manufactured and sold in Korea come with a timer switch that turns them off after a number of minutes so a person can go sleep—and if you can excuse the pun—rest assured that the fan will shut off and thereby preventing one from dying in their sleep.

South Korea, as far as I know, is the only country that believes in this so-called phenomenon of fan death. To be sure, most of the Koreans I have talked to over the years about fan death from students, teachers, and friends have insisted that fan death does occur. Once, when I mentioned to my students that I slept with a fan on, many of them said I was lucky to be alive.

If you ask any Korean about the validity of fan death they will almost certainly argue that it is indeed true even though they probably couldn’t tell you how and when this phenomenon of fan death first started in Korea. It has become a cultural axiom—a weird and absurd one at that—but nonetheless one that is accepted as being true.

How does fan death occur? There is any number of theories, which might make any nonbeliever of a fan death a believer (if you really want to buy into these theories). Supposedly an electric fan creates a vortex, which sucks the oxygen out of the room and creates a partial vacuum or uses up all the oxygen in an enclosed room and creates fatal levels of carbon dioxide. Other theories suggest that if a fan is put directly in front of the face of a sleeping person, it will suck the air away, preventing one from breathing. (How many people actually would sleep with their face right up against a fan?)

Then there’s hypothermia, which results when one’s metabolism slows down at night and makes one more sensitive to temperature. Supposedly, if a fan is left on all night in a sealed and enclosed room, the room’s temperature will be lowered. However, the temperature does not really fall inside the room; instead, the fan would make someone cooler by increasing the convection around a person’s body so the heat dissipates more easily as perspiration evaporates from the body.

Often, believers claim that a combination of these factors is responsible for fan death. Although there is no documented medical proof that sleeping in a closed room can actually cause “fan death” (I haven’t found anything online) this urban legend has been perpetuated by those claiming it actually occurs over the years. Someone is found dead in a room with a fan on and the fan is blamed.

Maybe we ought to check with the guys on Myth-Busters. I’m sure they’ll be able to figure it out.

Shanghai’d in Shanghai

No, I am not talking about that rockin’ Nazareth tune (hear below) but what I am referring to is the meaning of the verb “shanghai” or “shanghaiing.”

The word came up in class the other day; actually, I brought it up when I was explaining—after I learned that one of the students lived in Shanghai, China—how the term was once used in English to refer to the practice of conscripting men as sailors by coercive techniques such as trickery, intimidation, or violence. (I also explained that a related term, “press gang” referred to the impressment practices of Great Britain’s Royal Navy.)

What I didn’t know was that those involved in shanghaiing were called “crimps” and that they were predominantly found in port cities like San Francisco, Portland and Astoria in Oregon and Seattle and Port Townsend in Washington. The role of crimps and shanghaiing resulted “from a combination of laws, economic conditions, and practical considerations in the mid 1800’s.

Back then, “once a sailor signed onboard a vessel for a voyage, it was illegal for him to leave before the voyage’s end.” The penalty was imprisonment (the result of federal legislation enacted in 1790); however, later acts such as the Maguire Act of 1895 prevented this from happening and sailors could leave causing shortages.

Another reason for shanghaiing was the shortage of labor, in particular when many crews abandoned ships during California’s Gold Rush. No doubt, any able bodied seamen who stayed onboard a ship was literally “worth his weight in gold.”

Finally, shanghaiing came into its own when boarding masters had to find crews for ships. They were paid “by the body” and had a strong incentive to find as many seamen as they could. The pay they received was called “blood money” and in order to place as many seamen on a ship as possible no doubt set the stage for crimps who used “trickery, intimidation, or violence to put a sailor on a ship.”

Some of these crimps were some pretty smooth operators (and were well positioned politically to protect their lucrative trade) and according to one source, the most infamous examples of crimps included Jim “Shanghai” Kelly and Johnny “Shanghai Chicken” Devine of San Francisco and Joseph “Bunco” Kelly of Portland. In one classic story, “Bunco” Kelly “passed off a wooden Cigar Store Indian as a much-needed crewman to a desperate ship’s captain.” That would have been something to see. Wonder what happened when there was muster or roll call on board that ship. That Cigar Store Indian must have had a lot of explaining to do.

From what I learned, the most widely accepted theory of the how the word originated was that it came from Shanghai a common destination of the ships with abducted crews.

Today, the term means to be “induced to do something by means of fraud.”

Okay, got all that?

Now, here’s Nazareth’s “Shanghaied in Shanghai.”

Yep, it’s Changma

Summers in Korea.

Hot, stifling heat. Humidity. A constant state of wet. Tropical nights.

Cicadas (mae-mi) whirring away in trees. Children chasing after dragonflies with large nets.

Special summer treats—a Korean-style sundae called pat-ping-su (a cool, sweet concoction of red beans over shaved iced topped with fruit cocktail, jujubes, and syrup); sam-kae-tang (broiled chicken stuffed with rice and ginseng).

And it’s also the rainy season, or changma as it is called in Korean.

Looks like Pusan (Busan) had its share of changma the other day judging from this photo. (For all my friends in the Illinois Valley, now this is what I would call Water Street!)

Folks, be careful out there.

Robert S. McNamara, Vietnam War Architect, dead at 93

If the names of the soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines listed on the Vietnam War Memorial could speak, they might say something like this, “McNamara is dead, pass it along.”

Check out the Op-Ed piece in the New York Times.

Essential reading: The Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam

Vietnam, a Television History, Stanley Karnow

Essential viewing: The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003)

UFO over Seoul?

This is definitely one for the X-Files.

I snapped this photo back in February 2002 while taking some photos of downtown Seoul during the Lunar New Year.

After visiting Toksu Palace, I walked to Namdaemun and took a couple of the old Namdaemun Gate (it was set on fire by an arsonist in 2008 and it burned to the ground). Later, when I looked at this photo I could have sworn that was a UFO in the sky above the billboard.

I forgot all about the photo until today when I was looking at some old photos that I had loaded on a memory stick.

You be the judge. A UFO or some paper in the air? If I remember correctly, it was a windy day, but if it is a piece of paper, that’s pretty high up in the air. Incidentally, this photo is untouched, no PhotoShop tweaking other than sharpening and an auto level quick fix.

National Enquirer, get your checkbook out. I am ready to sell. Maybe we can even tie it in with the Norks firing their missiles; you know, Kim Jong-il was abducted by aliens, that sort of thing. That would explain a lot.

Gatorade

You know, while I was sipping a cool plastic bottle of Gatorade®, sheathed in beads of condensation, it suddenly dawned on me that I remember when this thirst quencher first came out. I can still see that trademark glass jug that it originally came in, but what I didn’t know, until I did a little online research today, was the origins of this unique mix of water, sodium, phosphate, potassium and lemon juice:

In early summer of 1965, a University of Florida assistant coach sat down with a team of university physicians and asked them to determine why so many of his players were being affected by heat and heat related illnesses.

The researchers — Dr. Robert Cade, Dr. Dana Shires, Dr. H. James Free and Dr. Alejandro de Quesada — soon discovered two key factors that were causing the Gator players to ‘wilt’: the fluids and electrolytes the players lost through sweat were not being replaced, and the large amounts of carbohydrates the players’ bodies used for energy were not being replenished.

The researchers then took their findings into the lab, and scientifically formulated a new, precisely balanced carbohydrate-electrolyte beverage that would adequately replace the key components lost by Gator players through sweating and exercise. They called their concoction ‘Gatorade’.”

Well, how about that? Gatorade® was named after the University of Florida Gators. The team credited Gatorade® with their first Orange Bowl win and the drink became an instant phenomenon. And that was probably right around the time, when a young boy in Oglesby, Illinois first heard of this sports drink and pestered his mother and grandmother to buy it the next time they went to the store.

Knee-high by the 4th of July

I wrote this blog post a year ago and the other night, I looked at it again after a friend had mentioned “knee-high by the Fourth of July.” Like a fine wine, it reads so much better now than when I first wrote it. I like this essay a lot. It’s one that I feel deserves a much wider audience.

It was back in the summer of 1981, right around this time in late June and I was riding in a van with Dick Verucchi and Alan Thacker on our way to Dixon, Illinois for a gig at a youth center. The owner of the youth center knew Dick and Alan from their Buckacre days and had been trying to get them—now as The Jerks—to play in Dixon for some time.

That was the summer—that rock and roll summer—of roadying for The Jerks, hang-ing out with Chris, going to Chicago Fest, and later a road trip to Atlanta.

As we drove to Dixon that hot, humid, summer afternoon, crisscrossing through America’s heartland of corn and soybean fields, Dick remarked that the corn seemed a bit taller than usual for this time of the summer.

“I remember growing up and listening to old timers say, ‘knee high by the Fourth’ but it’s not the way anymore,” said Dick. “Look at that corn out there, Sparks. That’s some mighty tall corn for June.”

“What do you think is the reason?” I asked, wondering if this was either another Dick Verucchi joke, or if he was really serious.

It wasn’t a joke. And Dick wasn’t really being that serious. He was just talking about corn and that it just seemed taller than in the past.

Today I was wondering what I’d be writing about or blogging about if I were back home right now? Would I be thinking about going on the road to Dixon with The Jerks and writing about Dick’s quip about the corn? Or would I be writing about an-other time and another place?

Sometimes when I am thinking about what I am going to write my mind and my soul begin to wander and invariably I am brought back to the Midwest; brought back to places like Cherry, Oglesby, and LaSalle three towns that I grew up in before I left home once and for all (or so I thought), but three towns that I still call home.

I guess it’s only natural to want to go back in your mind; kind of like some invisible umbilical cord to your past. But it’s more than that. It’s more than being a little wistful. It’s more than waxing nostalgic.

The death of one of my childhood friends this past week brought me closer to “back home” and reminded me of my humble roots. It really shook the tree as it were and made me think about “home” a lot.

I was thinking that if I were back home right now, how much I would love to go for a ride in the country. Of course, that is some really wistful thinking—not just for me, but for anyone back home with the price of gas the way it is now—but I was thinking how nice and perhaps how romantic it would be to head down some lonely stretch of blacktop, between the fields of corn and soybeans with the windows rolled down.

Perhaps in the distance there would be some giant gray and black thunderheads rolling in from the west. Maybe you know the kind I am talking about, this amor-phous rumpled black and gray mass of clouds filling the sky and reaching to the heavens. And if so, I’d probably be able to detect a hint of the impending rain in the stifling afternoon heat.

And later, if I could still find one somewhere, I would sit outside a Tastee Freeze with its yellow and pink neon framed against the night and enjoy a banana split or maybe—as that John Mellencamp mantra about Jack and Diane went—sucking on a chili dog.

And just about then, with those storm clouds overhead and mottled purple flashes and streaks of lightning shooting across the sky, you could feel the night getting cooler and smell that rain in the air and hear crickets chirping away—sounding the alarm before the first crack of thunder resonates across the land.

And you know, right now that would seem more exotic and charming than all the Golden Buddhas, mountain temples, and ancient Khmer ruins that I can see over here.

I haven’t had my fill yet of these things because I a migratory bird by nature and I need to see what is out there to report, document, catalog, interpret and under-stand. You know, the unexamined life is not worth living and all that stuff.

I am happy that I have had both worlds as it were, but right now this Friday evening in Korea I am wondering if the corn is already knee-high back home in Illinois.

Jeremy Aaron & National Blog Posting Month

It’s National Blog Posting Month and I can think of no better way to get started by posting a blog about Jeremy Aaron (one is supposed to blog every day). After all, I am missing the little fellow a lot these days and all I can think about, the only thing that gets me through one day to the next is when I am back with Aon, Jeremy Aaron and Bia in December.

Five months and 17 days.

The trick is to keep busy which is what I have been doing. This past week I have gone to the gym every day for three hours. I had a light teaching load the past three weeks, but next week I will be teaching every day.

Every day Aon gives me the play-by-play of Jeremy Aaron’s day, which helps me get through these long days and nights. Today, she told me that when she says “pa, pa, pa, pa” (which can be roughly translated as “let’s go) and when Jeremy Aaron hears her, he starts crawling to the bathroom. He just loves baths a lot. He loves to play in the water, splashing and kicking his legs.