Meador Manor

Alone Time

Posted on February 13, 2025 by Granger Meador

The modern world is, in many ways, an introvert’s paradise. Technological progress allows me to enact part of the science fiction future I read about in childhood. While practical limits denied us flying cars and human travel beyond the moon, I have at my instantaneous beck and call incredible computing power, world-spanning knowledge, over two hundred million songs, millions of books, and billions of videos.

A cell in The Machine, envisioned with the Microsoft Bing Image Creator

However, unmanaged blessings can devolve into curses, and it is striking how technological innovations as well as services like Amazon, DoorDash, and Instacart provide access to a lifestyle that could approximate the dystopian vision that E.M. Forster shared in 1909 with The Machine Stops. If you’ve never read the tale, it is now public domain, and you might explore what influenced many later works, including George Lucas’s THX 1138, Issac Asimov’s The Naked Sun, and Pixar’s WALL-E.

Back in 2000, Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone documented the decline of social capital in the USA in the second half of the 20th century. He described reductions in many forms of in-person social intercourse, arguing that it undermined civic engagement.

In the February 2025 issue of The Atlantic, Derek Thompson updated the concept in “The Anti-Social Century“, documenting how Americans are now spending more time alone than ever, and arguing that is changing our personalities, our politics, and our relationship to reality.

Consider the change from 2003 to 2022 in average minutes per day spent at home, which spiked during the pandemic and has remained highly elevated:

More time spent at home increased the time spent alone almost three times as much as time spent with family; Source

Granted, time at home does not equate to time spent alone for those with roommates, spouses, and/or children. However, an analysis showed that each additional hour spent at home was associated with an increase of 7.4 minutes in time spent with family, a decline of 5.0 minutes spent with friends, and an increase of 21.0 minutes spent alone.

The same analysis found that activities conducted at home were associated with lower levels of happiness and viewed as less meaningful, although there was a much weaker relationship between time spent at home and sadness and and an inconsistent relationship with stress.

The rise in time spent at home is largest among adults under 35 and smallest among those 55 and older. While younger adults spend less time at home than elders, their time spent at home has risen most sharply, and it is pronounced for those with high levels of educational attainment. Adults are spending more time sleeping and using a computer for leisure and less time shopping, socializing, volunteering, and traveling, but a larger driver was a shift in the location of existing activities.

The shutdowns in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic certainly drove much of that shift in location, including remote work, virtual church services and school, and in-person dining restrictions. The shifts were enabled not only by technology but also by how over my lifetime the size of the average new single-family home has increased by 50% and the share of them with air conditioning has doubled to 98%. Meanwhile, the average number of people per family dropped from 1960 to 1990 before stabilizing.

Note that the y-axis does not start at zero; Source

The shuttering of in-person schools from March through May 2020 by Oklahoma’s State Board of Education forced my wife and I to work remotely, and while we returned to in-person work in August 2020, we also had sixteen virtual days in 2020-2021 unrelated to inclement weather, nine in 2021-2022, and three in each of the later years, many of those in the earlier years due to pandemic-related staffing issues from quarantines and isolations. Some of the folks reporting to me now work remotely during personal or family health issues, while in the past they would have had to take sick leave.

Restaurant delivery

I was startled to read in The Atlantic that 74% of all restaurant traffic came from “off premises” customers in 2023, which means via takeout and delivery. GloriaFood reported that in 2024, nearly 1/3 of people ordered meals online, and the average person ordered delivery 4.5 times per month while dining out only 3 times per month.

The popularity of ordering food online declines with age:

During the pandemic, my wife and I made much greater use of DoorDash for the delivery of restaurant food, and we Gen X introverts have persisted in making frequent use of that service despite its cost.

Online versus in-person retail

The retail industry has about one million stores in the USA and is its largest employment sector, employing about one out of every four workers nationwide. Despite all of the talk of the “death of retail”, in 2022, physical stores still accounted for 87% of all sales.

The next graph shows the number of retail employees in the USA over my lifetime. Notice how it roughly stabilized a bit above 15 million in this century, with dips in the Great Recession of 2008 and the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.

Note how the y-axis does not start at zero; Source

The next graph shows the number of private retail establishments in the 21st century. Again, the Great Recession reduced it from 2008-2011, but notice how it has been growing since the COVID-19 pandemic.

Here are the top retail companies in the USA, ranked by market capitalization:

Amazon is famous as the e-commerce giant which helped doom many department and discount stores. I’ve had an Amazon account since 1998, and it now has about a 40% share of the e-commerce market in the USA, which is over six times larger than that of its nearest rival, Walmart. Amazon does have some physical stores, such as Whole Foods Market, but Walmart has many more physical stores.

I have done most of my shopping online for years, but Wendy still buys many of our groceries at a store. Some of our grocery items, however, have shifted to online. For example, after my paternal grandmother could no longer supply me with homemade black raspberry jelly, I started buying it from Smuckers. They’ve now stopped its production, so I’ve resorted to ordering it from various vendors via Amazon as the small jars available locally were too pricey.

I love my 2020 Kizik Cupertinos, but they stopped making that model, so I’ve tried several later styles

For many years, I bought most of my clothes at J.C. Penney stores in Tulsa, but for well over a decade most of my clothes have been ordered online via Blair Corporation.

I also began buying my Reebok sneakers and Dressports shoes online, although in October 2020 I bought my first pair of hands-free Kizik shoes, and I have bought several more pairs in various styles. I still have a spare unused pair of Dressports as well as of Reeboks in my closet, and it is conceivable that I might never buy any more dress shoes or sneakers, given that I’ll be retiring in June 2026 and after that intend to mostly wear Kizik slip-on shoes except when I’m hiking in my Columbia boots.

The number of retail establishments by market segment shows that collectively the top three of food and beverage, general merchandise, and motor vehicles and parts collectively employ just over half of the retail workers.

Mail order pharmacies

Genetics, time, diet, and stress have led to me having six different daily prescription medications, which is one reason I decided to retire in June 2026. I used to make regular trips to Walgreens to pick up prescriptions, but then the store I prefer closed its pharmacy on weekends. Then I had another slew of medications to pick up at CVS when my mother moved into independent living in town.

I grew increasingly frustrated by frequent trips to Walgreens and CVS, finding the latter especially slow. So I shifted all of our chronic medications to Amazon Pharmacy for automatic refills by mail, which has been a true blessing. Wendy still uses Walgreens, and I still rely on it for some vaccinations and short-term prescriptions, but I’m going to the drugstores far less often now.

Between 2016 and 2021, there was a 95% increase in the number of Americans receiving their drugs from home health care, a 45% increase in drugs received from clinics, and a 35% increase from mail-order pharmacies. Over the same period drugs received from long-term facilities dropped by 17%, federal facilities by 9%, and independent pharmacies by 5%. Independent pharmacies have been squeezed by pharmacy benefit managers, with the Oklahoma attorney general alleging that CVS Caremark has been under-reimbursing them.

Home entertainment

Video games have been part of home entertainment for over 50 years. I was never into them much, although I played a few on my TRS-80 Color Computer in the early 1980s and in the 1990s I did play Railroad Tycoon, Sim City, and Myst games on my personal computers, and this year I’ve played some pinball on my Mac.

Arcades games were a big deal in my teenage years, although I wasn’t a customer. I have noticed retro arcades appearing, but the one in Bartlesville and another I’ve seen on YouTube seem to focus on old games. I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that revenue from arcade gaming collapsed in the 21st century, with most revenue now coming from mobile, then personal computers and consoles.

Back in the mid-1950s, movie studios panicked over the rising popularity of television, implementing wide screen ratios and eventually improved sound, and the gimmick of three-dimensional movies which didn’t last long and made a brief odd resurgence in the early 2000s.

I drastically curtailed my visits to cinemas years ago, and Derek Thompson reported that today the typical American adult buys only three movie tickets a year while watching almost 19 hours of television (about eight movies worth) each week. He also shared, “Men who watch television now spend seven hours in front of the TV for every hour they spend hanging out with somebody outside their home. The typical female pet owner spends more time actively engaged with her pet than she spends in face-to-face contact with friends of her own species.”

You might think that movie ticket sales were okay until the pandemic, but bear in mind that all the while the population was increasing. The per capita movie ticket sales declined from 5.5 tickets per person in 2002 to 2.5 tickets per person in 2023, a 54% decline.

While traditional television viewing has collapsed among younger viewers, the time spent per day with digital media continues to grow.

Teenagers & Smartphones

This year, our school district’s administrators read and discussed The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, which argues that the spread of smartphones, social media, and overprotective parenting have led to a “rewiring” of childhood and a rise in mental illness.

Derek Thompson’s reporting points out, “The typical person is awake for about 900 minutes a day. American kids and teenagers spend, on average, about 270 minutes on weekdays and 380 minutes on weekends gazing into their screens, according to the Digital Parenthood Initiative. By this account, screens occupy more than 30 percent of their waking life.”

“Young people are less likely than in previous decades to get their driver’s license, or to go on a date, or to have more than one close friend, or even to hang out with their friends at all. The share of boys and girls who say they meet up with friends almost daily outside of school hours has declined by nearly 50 percent since the early 1990s, with the sharpest downturn occurring in the 2010s.”

I’m struck by the huge declines after 1990, thus over the course of my teaching career, in the percentages of high school seniors who have consumed alcohol, got a driver’s license, and who work, along with a significant but more modest decline in how many have had sexual intercourse.

Haidt argues that smartphone use by teens correlates with elevated teen anxiety and depression, and provides plenty of data to augment the anecdotal evidence that many teenagers and adults are addicted to their smartphones. It is no surprise that social media can exacerbate self image problems, especially for girls, and that negative consequences of various technologies and societal changes, including economic issues, can sometimes lead to a failure to launch for young adults.

While there is a whiff of moral panic about it all, I agree that restricting smartphone use at school would decrease distraction and increase socialization, and adult smartphone usage often negatively impacts community fellowship and parenting. There are also a number of adults whose smartphone addiction appears to be both a symptom of and contributor to their attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Both stronger and weaker bonds

Derek Thompson points out, “Home-based, phone-based culture has arguably solidified our closest and most distant connections, the inner ring of family and best friends (bound by blood and intimacy) and the outer ring of tribe (linked by shared affinities). But it’s wreaking havoc on the middle ring of ‘familiar but not intimate’ relationships.”

He points out how the erosion of the village, the middle ring, has coincided with poisonous partisanship. In a 2021 poll, “nearly a third of college students who identified as Republican said they wouldn’t even go on a date with a Democrat, and more than two-thirds of Democratic students said the same of members of the GOP.”

Thompson argues, “Social disconnection also helps explain progressives’ stubborn inability to understand Trump’s appeal.”

He adds, “Too many progressives were mainlining left-wing media in the privacy of their home, oblivious that families down the street were drifting right. . . .If progressives still consider MAGA an alien movement, it is in part because they have made themselves strangers in their own land.”

Thompson also points out how the Amish famously shun many modern innovations, such as cars and television, but many do have refrigerators and washing machines. Amish adopt only those innovations that support their religious and communal values. I am reminded of how my maternal grandparents shunned television and movies and restricted the radio to news and religious broadcasts.

Thompson offers this insight: “Although technology does not have values of its own, its adoption can create values, even in the absence of a coordinated effort. For decades, we’ve adopted whatever technologies removed friction or increased dopamine, embracing what makes life feel easy and good in the moment. But dopamine is a chemical, not a virtue. And what’s easy is not always what’s best for us.”

That is something for us to ponder, not only alone at home but in conversation with friends and family…and maybe strangers in our community, before the Machine stops.

Posted in politics, random, technology | Leave a comment

Treks Not Travelled

Posted on February 6, 2025 by Granger Meador

“This is not your father’s Star Trek.”

—2009 ad for a movie reboot

My first glimpse of *Star Trek* was of someone beaming onto a ship

My friends know that I am a big fan of Star Trek, the original series television show that was broadcast from 1966 to 1969. However, I didn’t see it until 1972, when it was in syndicated reruns on weekday afternoons. I was in first grade, and the first scene I saw was someone “beaming” in and sneaking around some corridors. I had no idea what was going on, and I remember thinking, “Is that some sort of ghost?”

I continued to watch, eventually realizing that the person was on a spaceship, but the transporter effect was unexplained. That intrigued me enough to start watching the show, and I was promptly hooked.

The show’s writers had endured World War II and were still mired in the Cold War, which brought threads of realism and moral complexity to an escapist tapestry of soft science fiction and adventure. The leader, Captain Kirk, was always influenced by both Mr. Spock, the alien logical thinker, and Leonard “Bones” McCoy, the cantankerous doctor who wore his heart on his sleeve. That triumvirate set the stage for a show that was clearly influenced by radio dramas and westerns, playing very differently than contemporary shows like Mission: Impossible. It was less utopian and idealistic than some might think, but it did have clear moral messages that I and countless other children readily absorbed.

There were only 79 episodes, which meant that the entire series would play through about three times in a year. So I was excited when a Saturday morning animated series debuted in September 1973. I was only seven years old, but I remember hoping the cartoon would not be just a “kiddie show” and being gratified when it turned out to play somewhat like a fourth season of the original show, albeit in an abridged format with Filmation’s typical limited animation.

I was 13 when Star Trek: The Motion Picture was released as the first of six movies starring the original cast, and I enjoyed each of them over the next dozen years. I was more than willing to give Star Trek: The Next Generation a chance when it premiered in 1987, watching the first seasons on a 19″ television in an apartment in Norman during my junior and senior years of college.

I knew several of those responsible for the original series were involved in the new show, but while the original series was great in its first two seasons and slipped in quality in its third and final one, the new series inverted that, struggling to find its footing for a couple of seasons but then improving greatly under new leadership.

I continued to watch each series after that: Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise, along with the ten movies based on the original series and the Next Generation.

I watched 724 episodes of *Star Trek* between 1972 and 2004

Deep Space Nine was grittier but still fun to watch with an emphasis on war, intrigue, and character development. Voyager squandered much of its premise, but it did creatively explore more way-out science fiction concepts. Enterprise, which was created as a prequel to the original series, had some inconsistencies with the hundreds of episodes that preceded it in broadcast but came after it in the franchise’s timeline. It didn’t really take proper advantage of its premise until a new showrunner revamped its fourth and final season, which aired from October 2004 to May 2005.

By then, I had seen 724 Star Trek episodes and 10 movies. It would have been 725 episodes except that I refused to watch the Tsunkatse episode of Voyager, as the preview showed it was a way to have Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson fight the show’s former Borg character in her catsuit, which was too silly for me at that point. Skipping an episode showed how my enthusiasm was noticeably waning, and afterward I could honestly say that I hadn’t seen every episode of Star Trek.

A friend convinced me to attend multiple Star Trek conventions in the 2000s, and traces of my decades of fandom linger at home. I have a top-quality original series communicator and phaser from The Wand Company along with a decent tricorder, and I’ve signed up for updates on The Wand Company’s promised tricorder.

I also have a bookcase filled with Star Trek tomes, including a first edition I received as a child of the first Star Trek novel ever published (Mission to Horatius) and the ten Star Trek Log novelizations of the animated series that were written by Alan Dean Foster and which I read avidly in my youth. Those are joined by the technical manuals, Marc Cushman’s splendid These Are the Voyages books, and much more.

My Star Trek books (and some toys and a few old science fiction novels)

Finally, a set of shelves above my home computer display seven toy ships, a combination of gifts and purchases representing the original series and the Next Generation, and later this year I’ll get to add an expensive die-cast model of the refit Enterprise.

My “little ships“, as Alfre Woodard playing Lily Sloane would describe them

However, what you will not find in my collections are references to Star Trek after Enterprise was cancelled in 2005. The Star Trek I knew and loved faded away twenty years ago…and that’s okay.

Cinematic Reboots & Remakes

Some reboots and remakes are better than the originals: I much prefer Ronald D. Moore’s Battlestar Galactica to Glen Larson’s, and I’d rather watch 12 Monkeys than La Jetée. But having completed 734 treks, it was unlikely that I’d appreciate any reboots of Star Trek.

In 2009, J.J. Abrams directed a new Star Trek film, set in an alternate timeline with new actors playing the roles of the original series. One of its promotional spots promised, “This is not your father’s Star Trek.” Well, with J.J. Abrams as director, a guy born only a month before me, that was guaranteed. I’d heard about but not viewed different things he had directed, written, or produced, such as Lost, Alias, Armageddon, and Mission: Impossible III, and I figured his take on the franchise wouldn’t suit me, but I did go see the film a couple of times.

The dynamism and special effects were interesting, and I enjoyed Karl Urban’s portrayal of Doctor McCoy, but my primary impression was that it was a shallow action film marred by distracting lens flares and the off-putting use of a brewery as a starship engine room.

The poster for this awful movie was symbolic in ways the makers did not intend

Four years later, I suffered through the miserable and aptly named Star Trek: Into Darkness. I found it notably inferior to its inspiration, The Wrath of Khan, although I do always enjoy watching Peter Weller at work.

Most remakes these days are dark and gritty. While that worked for Battlestar Galactica, which always had genocide as its premise, Star Trek traditionally spoke to our better angels. The original show had some great dark episodes such as Balance of Terror, which was based on The Enemy Below, itself a great 1957 war film. However, when the show went dark it included important lessons about racism, sacrifice, honor, and loss which helped youngsters like me grow up. The Wrath of Khan had powerful themes about aging, the futility of revenge, and self-sacrifice, while any such lessons in Into Darkness were lost amidst action set-pieces and spectacle.

Nevertheless, I showed up for Star Trek Beyond in 2016, and was treated to its incorporation of a Beastie Boys song in the absurd plot, which reminded me of enduring hippie songs in the original show’s The Way to Eden decades earlier. I’m not surprised that thus far it was the franchise’s last cinematic outing.

Star Trek sometimes trod the same depressing reboot path forged by Batman Begins in 2005 and followed by Henry Cavill’s portrayals of Superman. Little from those movies appealed to me, having grown up watching Adam West, the Bright Knight, in the fun 1960s Batman spoof and the sincere portrayal of Superman crafted in the late 1970s by Christopher Reeve and Richard Donner. The best thing for me in the Batman reboots was Heath Ledger’s Joker, and after watching 2013’s Man of Steel, the only DC movies I watched were the 2017 Wonder Woman and 2019 Shazam!, which appeared in their marketing to have a lighter tone.

I much prefer the happier and more colorful superhero depictions of the 1960s and 1970s to the dark imaginings of this century

I’m not put off by all dark takes on superheroes — I’m a fan of Zack Snyder’s 2009 Watchmen. However, having grown up in the 1970s with bright, happy, and colorful depictions of the DC comics characters aimed at children, dark remakes aimed at teenagers and adults aren’t my thing. I suppose that if I had grown up reading Charlton Comics, I might have also objected to the reworking of its characters by Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, and John Higgins.

The Small Screens

That brings me to the rebirth of the franchise on small screens under Alex Kurtzman, who helped write the first two reboot movies. He has been involved with six new series: Discovery from 2017 to 2024, Short Treks from 2018-2020, Picard from 2020-2023, Lower Decks from 2020 to 2024, Prodigy from 2021 to present, and Strange New Worlds from 2022 to present. While I liked the Watchmen film, which he did an uncredited script polish on, I’m just not in tune with Kurtzman’s vision.

Back in 2017, I did sample the first episode of Discovery, and that was more than enough for me. I didn’t like any of the characters, and the bizarre portrayal of the Klingons and unbelievable premise that Spock had an adopted sister we knew nothing about were deal breakers. However, the show persisted for 65 episodes, so it obviously had a fan base.

Five years after its premiere, I still haven’t finished watching the first season of *Star Trek: Picard*

I have stayed away from Kurtzman’s various shows except for Picard, which premiered in 2020. I purchased access to its first season, watched the first half, and then gave up. It was too dark and ugly for my taste, although after a few years I watched three more episodes, and I will eventually watch the two-parter that ends the first season.

I haven’t heard anything about the second season, but I saw many reports that the third season was a welcome goodbye to the Next Generation cast, so I do plan to eventually watch those two seasons, although I’m certainly not in any hurry to do so.

My apathy for and aversion to the new series are based on a nostalgic preference for long-gone shows, dissatisfaction with the tone, look, acting, and storylines of what I’ve seen of recent offerings, and my own maturity. After all, my tastes are far different than they were fifty years ago, and I’ve seen a lot of the good, the bad, and the ugly in entertainment.

Rewatches

I have revisited The Original, Animated, and Next Generation series in recent years, thanks to a podcast and then a YouTube channel.

From 2012 to 2018, I thoroughly enjoyed listening to Ken Ray and John Champion’s Mission Log podcast as they watched and discussed each episode of the series in order. I didn’t rewatch any episodes, as I had already rewatched the Original Series from 2006 to 2009 when the remastered episodes with better imagery and reworked special effects were broadcast, and I could remember the Animated and Next Generation series well enough to follow along. However, I dropped out when they reached Deep Space Nine, as I didn’t remember those episodes as well and didn’t want to take the time to rewatch them.

A couple of years ago, another round of revisiting the first three series began, thanks to Target Audience on YouTube. Alex and Josh, who initially knew very little of Star Trek and are about 30 years younger than I am, react to each episode in release order. They are now in season five of The Next Generation, and I continue to enjoy their takes and support them on Patreon.

Recently they watched the final movie featuring the entire original cast, The Undiscovered Country from 1991. I was intrigued by how much they disliked it. I appreciate how they explain what they like and dislike, and I value the differences in their perspectives from my own.

However, when Target Audience wraps up The Next Generation, I’ll likely again drop out, at least for awhile. Perhaps sometime after my retirement I would be willing to rewatch Deep Space Nine so as to enjoy the related episodes of both Mission Log and Target Audience, but I am dubious about ever rewatching Voyager or Enterprise. There are so many other novel things I could pursue…none of which are related to the Trek franchise. For example, I’ve been getting great book ideas from Bookpilled, The Library Ladder, and J. Scott Phillips.

Star Trek jumped to an alternate timeline back in 2009, and I’m content to leave most of those treks to others. Recently a Star Trek television film called Section 31 was released to many negative reviews, and the funny guys at Red Letter Media trashed it. They built their initial reputation on criticisms about the Star Wars sequels, and Mike and Rich are old-school Trek fans who are only a little over a decade younger than I am, so it gives me hope that they evidently didn’t hate season three of Picard.

One of these days I’ll watch the rest of the Picard series and check out what Mike and Rich thought about it. But I’m sure I’ll watch more back episodes of The Best of the Worst before that. For me in these troubled times, laughter is the best medicine.

Posted in books, movie, nostalgia | Leave a comment

Staying Stoic

Posted on January 30, 2025 by Granger Meador

The dichotomy of control of the Stoics is what a modern psychologist might refer to as an “internal locus of control”. Here is an illustration:

A more popular form of The Dichotomy of Control is Reinhold Neibuhr’s Prayer of Serenity:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.

That formulation was popularized first by the YWCA and then Alcoholics Anonymous.

In 125 CE, Arrian compiled The Enchiridion of Epictetus, which translates to Epictetus Ready to Hand. That handbook of Stoic philosophy opens thusly:

Τῶν ὄντων τὰ μέν ἐστιν ἐφ’ ἡμῖν, τὰ δὲ οὐκ ἐφ’ ἡμῖν. ἐφ’ ἡμῖν μὲν ὑπόληψις, ὁρμή, ὄρεξις, ἔκκλισις καὶ ἑνὶ λόγῳ ὅσα ἡμέτερα ἔργα: οὐκ ἐφ’ ἡμῖν δὲ τὸ σῶμα, ἡ κτῆσις, δόξαι, ἀρχαὶ καὶ ἑνὶ λόγῳ ὅσα οὐχ ἡμέτερα ἔργα.

Yeah, that’s Greek to me too. In the 1750s, Elizabeth Carter made the first translation of it into English as follows:

Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.

Epictetus urged us to focus on our thoughts, emotions, and actions and recognize that the actions of others and external events and outcomes are not under our control.

Personal Applications

In recent years, I have come to rely on the Dichotomy of Control to help me navigate in troubled times.

When I am frustrated by a U.S. president, for example, I note how the Electoral College and the lopsided political make-up of Oklahoma have ensured that no vote I ever cast in a presidential race ever mattered one whit. So while it is a thing that matters it is certainly not a thing I can control, so I should avoid focusing too much on presidential elections.

A mix of stoicism and realpolitik, valuing practical objectives over ideals, is also why I base my political party registration not on my alignment with a party’s platform but instead to maximize the tiny influence of my vote in Oklahoma’s semi-closed primary system.

Two particularly stressful periods of my administrative career were the state educational funding crisis in 2018 and, a couple of years later, the COVID-19 pandemic. I wielded my influence in both situations for the common good, but some blowback was inevitable. I dealt with that by regularly revisiting two touchstones.

The first came from the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. He was a dedicated Stoic, and offered plenty of tailored advice in his Meditations. A statement he made in Book 4 helped me keep things in perspective, which is shown in the graphic.

The second came from Stephen Covey, the author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, which I studied in my master’s degree program back in the 20th century. I appreciated how his advice helped me avoid a potential trap in carelessly applied stoicism: while it encourages accepting things outside your control, the Dichotomy of Control does not urge passivity. Instead, it urges that you actively focus on what you can control, thereby taking a proactive approach to life instead of simply resigning yourself to external circumstances. Stoicism urges you to direct your energy where it can truly make a difference.

Below is Stephen’s advice:

I am composing this post in a time of intense political turmoil, and my Facebook Feed was inundated with posts that amply illustrated something Mark Twain dictated in 1907 for his autobiography:

Rather than simply ignore Facebook, which is still useful in some ways and is still part of my job, I opted to curate it. Every time I saw someone posting about religion or politics in a manner that ignored the Dichotomy of Control, I snoozed that person, page, or group for 30 days. I wound up hitting the snooze 30 times, and my Feed improved noticeably.

In a couple of cases, I went further and unfollowed someone or something, but most of my curation was temporary. In a few weeks, I will undoubtedly notice when my snoozes end, and I can then unfollow anything that remains overly distracting.

If Stoicism interests you, here is a potential resource, but there are also free translations of Epictetus and Aurelius.

Posted in politics, random, religion | Leave a comment

Edwin E. Foster’s Spiral Spring

Posted on January 22, 2025 by Granger Meador

One of my favorite tools is from the early 1960s and has been superseded by its cousins. My parents received it around 1963, when Mid-States Supply Company of Kansas City, Missouri opened a warehouse in Oklahoma City. It’s a metal roll-up yardstick.

It is similar to what one finds in a retracting cased tape measure, but when you roll it out to be read, its convexo-concave blade rolls downward against the surface, not upward, and it needs no case. When unrolled completely, it stays extended and when you’re finished with it, you just flex one end and it will roll up into coil two inches in diameter.

My only complaint is that it is so old that it has 1/8 and 1/16-inch scales, and I would sometimes prefer a finer scale in millimeters. I had no luck finding a roll-up meterstick on Amazon, but I was able to set up an account and order uncased metric roll-up tape measures from the Hoffman Group in Germany, which were delivered by DHL some weeks later.

So now I have three of these gems, which will serve me for the rest of my years. I would much rather carry one of them in my pocket than wear a bulky cased measuring tape on my belt when I am headed to a store where I will need to check dimensions.

My examination of the yardstick did turn up the patent on its design: U.S. Patent 2,956,795 filed in 1958 by Edwin E. Foster of Austin, Texas and awarded in October 1960. He held a number of patents on various springs and similar mechanisms. I perused them and was surprised to find dozens of them filed over a 66-year period from 1923 to 1989. Egad!

Metric and imperial uncased measures — My vintage uncased measure flanked by new metric rules

Foster was born in Athens, Texas in 1903 and went to Austin to study at the University of Texas toward the end of World War I. By then he had already invented a pump to inflate Model-T tires. He took it to Chicago to sell, but removable rims were about to come on the market and that negated the appeal of his pump.

Foster didn’t give up. Instead, he rented some space in a machine shop and turned his pump design into a new kind of shock absorber. However, manufacturers feared the shocks might be susceptible to mud caking, so he struck out again.

He next put his inventiveness with springs to work on a system to allow one to iron clothes while sitting down. It had springs counterbalancing the iron, which was held in place by an arm above the ironing board.

He was still toying with ironing boards, with no reported great success, by the time World War II began. Some U.S. tanks had a clutch pedal that took five times as much force as normal to operate since Chrysler had chained together five engines for them. Foster devised a new clutch with his springs and the army used it in 50,000 medium tanks. General Eisenhower recognized him for the role his “clutch booster” had in the war in North Africa.

That was a success, but he didn’t profit greatly from it. He next devised a steel spring for window balances, but it wasn’t until the 1950s that he patented his real “money maker” — the “spirator” steel band. It had just the right curvature so that when rolled out and released, it rolled back up again. It was used in seatbelt retractors, tape measures, and my roll-up yardstick.

Mr. Foster died at age 93 in 1997. He had been awarded over 100 patents, from wind-up baby swings to toys to the devices used in gas pumps, seat belt retractors, wheel covers, cameras, windows, early spaceships, and…roll-up yardsticks.

Figure from Patent 2,956,795 — Diagrams from U.S. Patent 2,956,795

Figure from patent 79,965 — The Fellows tape measure patent

The first spring-loaded tape measure U.S. Patent was #45,372 by William Bangs Jr. of Connecticut back in 1864. In 1868, Alvin J. Fellows, also of the Constitution state, patented a spring-click tape measure which included a locking mechanism and metal case.

Their tapes were not concavo-convex, so they had little standout or reach distance, which refer to how much the tape can be extended without buckling. I used to have a little tape measure of that sort, and enjoyed pressing a center side button that caused the long white flexible tape to whip back into the case.

Reach and standout explained — What is meant by a tape measure’s reach and its standout

Hiram A. Farrand received a patent for concavo-convex tape in 1922, although his version had no locking mechanism or spring. Instead, the tape was manually coiled inside an open-ended can.

Stanley tools purchased the rights to produce Farrand’s push-pull tape from him, and he went to work for them in 1931. Their tapes were all in closed housings and in the late 1930s Stanley released a model that locked, but it still did not self-retract.

Later innovations included the floating hook to ensure a correct measurement whether you push the end of the tape against a surface or hook and pull it. Stanley finally added a retracting spring in 1956. I presume that it was the self-retracting nature of Foster’s spring that made it special, but I’m no patent examiner with all of the answers.

Before World War II, metal retracting tape measures were still relatively expensive, and many carpenters still used those yellow folding rulers. My father had one, but I never liked using it.

Stanley’s PowerLock patent was awarded in 1963, allowing you to extend and lock the tape in place one-handed. Back in 2013, Stanley celebrated 50 years of selling tape measures. It noted how at that time it was manufacturing 31 versions of their PowerLock tape in seven different sizes and producing over nine million tapes each year in its Connecticut plant.

I yanked open my main tool drawer and noticed three retractable locking measuring tapes: a 9′ Craftsman, a 16′ Stanley, and a 25′ Lufkin plus one 5′ sewing tape. I have at least two more cased measuring tapes at work, and I wouldn’t be surprised if another is lost somewhere in the garage.

That conforms to how retractable cased tapes are far more popular than roll-up yardsticks or metersticks these days, which have become obscure and far harder to source. I’m so proud of my old-fashioned uncased tapes that I refuse to toss them in the drawer with their more popular cousins. Instead, I keep them at hand beside my desk. Thanks, Edwin E. Foster!

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Molded for Play

Posted on January 15, 2025 by Granger Meador

Children’s toys usually require materials that are cheap and durable. My dad, who was born a century ago, recalled playing marbles with his cousins, mumblety-peg with a pocketknife, spinning tops, darts, yo-yos, jacks, and stilts. He later graduated to bean shooters, rubber guns, and a Daisy air rifle, but the only item that survives with us today is a sturdy cast iron bank.

Cast Iron

My dad’s penny coin bank from the 1920s weighs 1.3 pounds empty and is in the form of a colonial house. Such banks were produced from 1910 to 1931 by the A.C. Williams Company of Ravenna, Ohio. Their miniature banks were available in several hundred types and styles and distributed through F.W. Woolworth’s, S.S. Kresge’s, and other five-and-dime stores.

To create cast iron toys, iron ore was melted in a blast furnace and poured into molds made from tightly packed sand. The casting sand used in the old days was often finer than what is used today, yielding a smoother surface with finer details.

Bartlesville 1920s — Downtown Bartlesville long ago

Perhaps my father’s bank came from one of the five-and-dime stores in Bartlesville; his parents had a custom of driving the four miles from Dewey to Bartlesville on Saturday nights after his father got off work at the Dewey Portland Cement Plant. They would do a bit of shopping, but downtown Bartlesville was also cheap entertainment. They would find a good parking spot in front of the lighted stores and watch the people come and go. As my late father once wrote, “This type of entertainment has been replaced by radio, television, and now the internet. It was a slower pace back then.”

As for me, one of the first of the kids born into Generation X, I don’t recall having any cast iron toys; mine were mostly wood, Masonite, and, of course, plastic.

Plastics

Eventually, plastics displaced cast iron as the moldable material in children’s toys. My wife, Wendy, enjoys re-rooting the hair in new and vintage Barbie dolls. In her childhood, she loved Mattel’s Pink & Pretty Barbie from the early 1980s. That doll, which includes an outfit with 20 different configurations, is now a collector’s item. Some time ago, Wendy snagged one at a good price and re-rooted its hair.

The types of plastic used in Barbie dolls varies by body part. Early dolls were mostly polyvinyl chloride, with phthalate-based plasticizers added to improve its flexibility and durability. Later ones tended to have ethylene-vinyl acetate arms, acrylonitrile butadiene styrene torsos, polypropylene leg armatures, outer legs of polyvinyl chloride, and heads formed of a hard vinyl compound.

The first synthetic plastic, celluloid, was invented in 1863. Bakelite, a fully synthetic plastic, was invented in 1907, the same year that Oklahoma achieved statehood. By 1967, plastics had revolutionized consumerism such that they were what Mr. McGuire advised Benjamin Braddock to pursue. Of course, in that context, plastics were also symbolic of a cheap, meaningless, and ugly way of life.

Celluloid

By the 1850s, the industrial revolution had begun to strain animal-derived materials like horn, ivory, and turtleshell. In 1862, Alexander Parkes patented in England the first man-made plastic, a semi-synthetic thermoplastic material made from cotton fibers dissolved in nitric acid, intending it for waterproofing woven fabric clothing.

Across the Atlantic, John Wesley Hyatt acquired Parkes’ patent and experimented using cellulose nitrate to manufacture billiard balls, which until then were made of ivory. Hyatt admitted that sometimes hitting two of the celluloid balls together could produce “a mild explosion like a percussion guncap.”

Hyatt also noted, “We had a letter from a billiard saloon proprietor in Colorado, mentioning this fact and saying that he did not care so much about it, but that instantly every man in the room pulled his gun.”

Celluloid went on to important uses in film, but its flammability was a significant problem. Many old films shot on nitrocellulose have been lost to fire and decomposition. In 1978, both the National Archives and the George Eastman House had their nitrate film vaults auto-ignite, destroying the original camera negatives for 329 films and 12.6 million feet of newsreel footage.

Films were later shot on acetate, which was once called “safety film” since it melts, rather than burns, when heated. However, heat, moisture, or acids break acetate down into acetic acid, and vinegar syndrome plagues old films and magnetic tapes. It might interest you to know that while polyester, in the form of polyethylene terephthalate, was eventually used for film prints, it was not suitable for actually shooting films because it was so strong that it could damage a camera in a film jam. Polyester also requires tape or ultrasonic splicing, while acetate can be spliced with film cement, so acetate film was easier to edit before almost everything went digital.

Bakelite

In 1907, Leo Baekeland of Belgium beat his rival, James Swinburne of Scotland, to the patent office by one day. Thus I grew up associating Bakelite with molded items like older telephones and radios, which was named for him. Swinburne and Baekeland were intrigued by the product of the reaction of phenol with formaldehyde, with Swinburne unable to produce a good, solid resin but using it for hard lacquer. In 1927 Swinburne merged his Damard Lacquer Company with Baekeland’s English licensees to form Bakelite Limited for United Kingdom products.

Meanwhile, Baekeland systematically experimented with controlling temperature, pressure, and composition until he could produce a hard moldable plastic out of polyoxybenzylmethylenglycolanhydride. Thank goodness he called it Bakelite!

Bakelite’s advantages included excellent heat resistance, high electrical insulation, good strength, moldability into complex shapes, and a distinctive appearance. However, it was brittle and lacked the flexibility and impact resistance of modern plastics. It also had limited color options, is difficult to recycle, and offgases formaldehyde, a known carcinogen.

So Bakelite was superceded by a variety of different thermoplastics such as polypropylene and polyethylene terephthalate (PET). I kept on hand some Bakelite electrical meters and old Dial-An-Ohm boxes in my physics lab at Bartlesville High School, but offhand I can’t think of any Bakelite items at home.

Modern Plastics

ChevronPhillips Plastics Technical Center — ChevronPhillips’ Plastics Technical Center is in Bartlesville, OK

I live in the city where crystalline polypropylene was invented by Paul Hogan and Robert Banks of Phillips Petroleum Company, and I recently toured the ChevronPhillips’ Plastics Technical Center on the west edge of town where 190 chemists, scientists, and technicians focus on the development of new plastics, work to improve existing ones, and provide technical support for customers worldwide with polyethylene, normal alpha olefins, and more.

The most commonly used plastics now include:

Polyethylene (PE): Considered the most widely used plastic overall, including its different densities like HDPE and LDPE.
HDPE (High-Density Polyethylene): Known for its strength and rigidity, commonly found in milk jugs and detergent bottles.
LDPE (Low-Density Polyethylene): More flexible than HDPE, used for plastic bags and food wraps.
PET (Polyethylene Terephthalate): Often used for beverage bottles and food packaging due to its transparency and ability to prevent oxygen from entering.
PVC (Polyvinyl Chloride): Used in pipes, construction materials, and some flexible packaging, but concerns exist regarding its environmental impact.
PP (Polypropylene): Often used for containers, lids, and some food packaging due to its heat resistance.
PS (Polystyrene): Commonly found in disposable cups, food containers, and Styrofoam packaging.

There are others, of course, including polylactic acid (PLA) and acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS), which are commonly used in 3D printers.

The immense utility and low cost of modern plastics brings with them environmental concerns. Over 90% of plastic is not recycled, and there is mounting concern about microplastics.

Many of my favorite toys were plastics, with ABS forming my Tog’l blocks and Legos.

I received my Tog’l blocks when I was two-and-a-half years old, and I first encountered Legos at my spinster aunts’ home some years later. I played so much with the Legos that my mother bought me the 135 and 145 Universal Building Sets with hundreds of bricks, and my aunts eventually gave me all of theirs, so I had about 1,000 bricks to play with.

Back in 2016, when Wendy and I were engaged and cleaning out Meador Manor for her later move-in, she gathered up the Legos and we donated them. In the process, she discovered taped to each box the “Building Specifications for The Super-Deluxe Home” which as a child I had typed out and affixed.

Clearly my Lego constructions were serious business. But, just as only one cast iron bank remains with us from my father’s childhood, I only retained a couple of my childhood items: a bouncy ball made of elastomers and a hippie figurine molded not out of plastic, but of diatom skeletons. However, my ABS Legos may still be in use by some child somewhere. .they certainly held up better than anything else of mine did.