Poems

Watson Hears A Hallooo

65 Comments

This is the anniversary of the day in 1876 when Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas A. Watson conducted a significant experiment in Boston.

Technology has advanced so much since then, you can now sit in your pajamas and with a computer and some phone wire, read an account of the historic events as written in Bell’s own hand. Amazing. But each time I’ve heard this story, there has been one particular aspect that troubles my Midwestern sensibility.

It’s a small detail, and it seems trite to bring it up. Such a big advance and such a tiny complaint!

Fortunately, by running Bell’s notebook through the Seussifier, I was able to distill my problem down to three verses.

On the tenth day of March in a lab by the bay,
Mr. Bell said a First in the History of Say.
When he called his assistant as scientists do:
“Mr. Watson come here – I want to see you!”

Mr. Watson came running to be seen, of course.
Both to help Mr. Bell and upset Mr. Morse.
For the call that he answered went not through the air
but through vibrating wires as thin as your hair.

So hats off to Bell, so inventive and bold
And Watson, who did everything he was told.
But good children know that in times such as these
One should never say ‘come here’ without saying ‘please’!

Would it have been terribly difficult to say “Watson, PLEASE come here. I want to see you, if it’s not too much trouble”? They say brilliant people lack social skills. Maybe so.

Jim Ed Poole always likes to point out that Alexander Graham Bell’s idea for how we would answer this new invention was NOT to say “Hello”, but rather, “Ahoy”, as they do at sea. Too bad it never caught on. Maybe in recognition of the importance of this anniversary we should all answer our calls with “Ahoy” today.

It might even sound better than “hello”, especially if you answer the phone for a business that sells comforting, egg shaped playthings made from impure metals.

Ahoy! Boyd’s Ovoid Alloyed Toys! Avoid being paranoid. Enjoy an ovoid toy today! How may I help you?

When has an unlikely personal experiment succeeded?

65 thoughts on “Watson Hears A Hallooo”

  1. Ahoy, there ‘Boons and Dale, thanks for the great Suessifying of the event. love the poem, but you totally lost me on the ovoid impure metal thingys – i must say that i am easily lost though.

    gotta think awhile on the question – need coffee.
    a gracious good morning to You All.

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  2. Rise and Shine BAboons:

    A brief hello, then off to the day. I will be very scarce today as I have a demanding schedule. I’m unsure of how to answer this one. Do I carry out unlikely personal experiements? Besides this blog, of course.

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  3. My shaved head comes to mind. Did that for a couple of years
    I was in a hot tub in Florida in December and there was a moment of inspiration, I knewi would br there two weeks to tan the orb and if I hated it I had two weeks to grow it back. I liked it but didn’t enjoy the maintenance. And none of my hats fit right either.

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      1. Me too , not so. 5 o’clock shadow runs rampant ant the thought of skipping the 15 minute daily shave was not one I considered too often. Little nubs everywhere bothered me all day. Felt like wearing construction paper on you head

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  4. Good morning to all:

    I remember a meeting I had with two very socially capeable people I new when I was in graduate school. I was never in the same class as these two when it came to social skills. We did have one thing in common, we were war protestors. It was casual meeting and getting near lunch time. No one seemed to have a plan for the noon hour. I became the organizer for a trip by the three of us to a nice Chinese restaurant near the campus. I was very suprised that these two would let me lead them around like that. Even people who always seem to want to be the leaders can be lead at times and I was very suprised by that.

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  5. I have such an experiment ongoing, yea, even as we speak. I have issued a cry of distress, “Wells Fargo, come to my aid. I need you!” So far, to condense days of conversation into a paragraph, Wells has sometimes said, “If we can assume ownership of everything you thought you owned, we might throw you a few crumbs.” But then Fargo calls to say, “You gotta be KIDDING, silly boy! (sound of giggling) This is a joke, right?”

    Years ago I tried an experiment worked better. I began working at home, taking care of my daughter and writing freelance articles. And because my wife was commuting to her office, I began buying the groceries and cooking so she could come home to a hot meal.

    Alas, “hot” was the kindest thing that could have been said of those meals. I was trying to duplicate dishes my mother used to serve, and she was a lousy cook. Molly didn’t know the difference, but Kathe was riding jets all over Europe and Asia, eating in four star restaurants, and she pretty much needed three stiff scotches each evening before trying to eat the stuff I was serving.

    I vowed to learn to cook. In time, I began enjoying it, and now I serve meals that my picky ex-wife can enjoy even when sober. I have thrown away the Chinese cookbook that started each recipe with equal portions of garlic, ginger and MSG. I even wrote a cookbook once. And this, truth to tell, es an “unlikely” conclusion to my cooking experiment.

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    1. Steve on a scale of 1 to 10 wells fargo is a 12 when it comes to useless in helping its clients. I have another suggestion or two if you’d like for bankers with a much higher give a crap factor.
      Msg gives me the yips I use soy sauce instead. Teach me Chinese cooking I would love to be good at it.

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    2. On the first experiment, I know people who have had success with a big banking company by getting a nonprofit like Neighborhood Development Alliance into the conversation. Their counselors have a lot of experience with Wells Fargo.

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    3. I think I may remember seeing MSG in the store when I was young. Must have been when we took my grandmother shopping in St. Paul, because the Asian section of the grocery store in the suburbs was still a double shelf of Chun King (which probably had more than its share of the monosodium glutamate). Besides or along with soy sauce, try a bit of miso (white miso is good to start off with, but there are many kinds) for richness in either a stirfry sauce or soups.

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  6. I see we have another word for our dictionary, Seussifier! Reminds me of Calvin’s transmogrifier.

    Just yesterday Lola and I checked out back to see if our animal cubbies had had any takers. Lola is “my” 8-year-old granddaughter on the block whose parents are going through a divorce, and she comes over on Wednesday afternoons after school to see what we can cook up. Sometimes we do cook, but last week we went out back to the woodpile and found several “hidey-holes” and a hollow log that, we thought, would be great places for chipmunks, squirrels, or bunnies to use for shelter against the weather. We “fixed them up” a bit (and created some new ones), and came back yesterday to see if there had been any takers. Although we can’t be sure, we think we saw tracks of some kind, and decided to call it a success. We also found some more places to check on next week. I have photos, wish I knew how to post here.

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    2. Try learning Facebook and post them there ( said he who has a Facebook account but doesn’t know how to post photos)

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  7. When I was little, I had to spend a lot of time at my dad’s coffee shop. It got kind of boring at times, and my dad didn’t mind if I made “concoctions” in empty pop bottles with water, spices, and the various condiments the customers put on their sandwiches. It was fun to see the gruesome colors that I could come up with. Once I came up with a particularly interesting one that I wanted to save so I pounded the metal cap back on the pop bottle and put it in the fridge. It must have fermented or something, since it exploded and spewed all over the inside of the fridge. My dad thought it was really funny but asked me to not put anything like that in the fridge again because it a real chore to clean up.

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    3. So you started putting them where after that? I think the fridge is much better than the condiments cupboard.
      I had forgotten about the concoctions. My brother an I used to spend hours in the bathroom making all sorts of concoctions that we hoped would bubble and fizz or do something after watching mr wizard on tv in the black and white mornings of the 60’s when 9 am meant soap opera for the next 6 hours unless Mel jaws had a movie worth watching at noon. Long summers were wonderful with neighborhood kids in the garages and streets everywhere, pick up baseball games and heading down to the elementary school for box hockey four square and theatherball until enough guys showed up for a ball game. Riding bikes off to the distant reaches of the burbs to walk the river bottoms crawl around in caves and muck through swamps to find catfish spawning grounds. All great experiments that seemed like the stuff kids would do. A millenium kid would get put a way for trespassing and running away from home if ever he was allowed to ride a bike a mile from home. What a screwed up time. Come to think of it I could use mr watsons help too. Come here mr Watson hit the button on my Wahhabi machine and take me and my kids to suburban Minneapolis in 1960 on a June afternoon right over by the farmers field where it ends near the woods that roll down to the river bridge over by the masonic home. Help mr wizard……….

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      2. I also did a lot of roaming a round and getting into things when I was a kid in the early 50s. There was an old gravel pit, swamps, a rail road, and lots of other stuff to explore in Jackson, Michigan. I remember walking in an old field with some kids who I knew and who weren’t really my friends and they were setting little fires with matches in the grass and weeds. The fires weren’t spreading very fast and I kept trying to put them out, but they spread a little too much and fireman had to come and put out the start of a more rapidly spreading grass fire.

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      4. I lived there from age 5 to 20, with a gap of two years when I lived in St Clair Shores in my early years of high school. I graduated from high school at Jackson High in 1959.

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      5. My husband attended Bloomfield Elementary and lived on Durand(t)? street. His dad was a treasurer or something like that for the Hays-Albion company.

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      7. Renee, I lived for many years on Cooper St across from the elementary school that I went to which was Austin Blair Elementary. We lived a couple of other places latter on.

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    4. That reminds me of an experiment by a character in a John Stienbeck novel. This guy was having a bad day and decided to try to do something to lift his spirits. He decided to have a milk shake made with beer. It didn’t work.

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      2. They might be okay. I’ve sometimes thought I should try one. In the story the beer milk shake was just one more dissapointment for the main character.

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  8. Morning all… spent the early hours in the kitchen (Soup Swap tomorrow night – 2 large pots of Carrot Cashew Soup) and am not catching up.

    I’ve always been a big “might as well try it” kind of person. (Except where bunging jumping is concerned.) One of my earliest “experiments” was raising money for a candidate who was running for the local city council. I was 9 and I convinced a couple of other kids to help me collect glass pop bottles from around the neighborhood (yes, I’m old enough that we didn’t have pop in cans when I was young). We made several hauls in my wagon up to the Kelloggs store and turned them in for the cash. I think we probably collected all of $10-$15 over the course of a week, but it caught the attention of the store manager, who called the local newspaper. He came out and did a little story on us, so while we didn’t make or break the candidate’s campaign fun, we got a little glory.

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      1. Carrot Cashew from “Diet for a Small Planet” (slightly adapted)

        1 T butter
        ¼ c oil (not all olive oil or it will change the taste)
        1½ c chopped onion
        4 c grated carrots (packed tightly)
        3 oz tomato paste
        1 c chopped apples
        6 c stock/water
        2 t salt
        ⅓ c uncooked brown rice
        1 c raw cashew pieces
        1-3 t honey (optional)
        1-2 c. dairy product (yogurt is good)

        1. Melt the butter and oil in a large soup pot or pressure cooker; sauté the chopped onions for 1 minute, stir in the carrots ad sauté until the onions are soft and transparent. They will be orange – not the usually dark gold or brown.
        2. Stir in the tomato paste, apple, stock and salt. Bring the mixture to a boil and stir in the brown rice.
        3. Cover and pressure cook for 15 minutes, OR cook regularly for about 45 minutes, until the soup is a beautiful orange and the carrots are tender, but not mushy.
        4. (Optional step – remove one cup of soup from the pot; put itin the blender and buzz until smooth; return it to the pot.)
        5. Add the cashews (& optional honey), bring to a boil again and simmer about 5 minutes.
        6. You may now EITHER
        Add the daily products and heat through
        -or-
        Serve as is but add a dollop of dairy to each bowl
        -or-
        Serve the soup cold w/ a dollop of dairy
        -or-
        Serve the soup cold after the 1-2 c of dairy has been added
        Makes 2½ quarts

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  10. Many years ago when I was a new homeowner I had a winter crisis when the circulator pump providing the radiator heat failed on a cold day, on a weekend of course. The boiler was working, but the hot water it was supplying just wasn’t going anywhere. I wanted to avoid the extra charges for getting someone out to fix it on a Saturday, so I thought I’d try to make it through till Monday. This was risky, because my 125-year-old house has radiator pipes that run through unheated crawlspaces, in peril of freezing. But I reasoned that if I bled some water out of the last radiator in the series, then went down to the basement and added more water at the boiler, it was logical to think that the heated water would have to circulate.

    I started this experiment thinking that if it worked, I’d be in for a pretty dreary weekend, dumping buckets of water drained out of the radiator, but something completely unexpected happened – the circulator pump kicked in when the water started moving. I had heat again. Don’t know why it worked.

    I had the pump replaced later, and it was still spendy, but at least it was done on a weekday.

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  11. OT for today but it took until this morning before I remembered my all time great naming achievement. When I was a kid, I had two imagainary friends, Bosadaysis and her boy cousin Bosaloke. No one has any idea where the names came from but they were around for quite a few years.

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    2. My sister had an imaginary brother (does that mean I did too?) named Alexander, not nearly as fun as these, OC.

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    4. I would put together a personality profile for those two and write a little ditty about them and see where it takes you. Awesome names for friends

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      1. First thought was Lewis Carroll rip-off, Bosadaysis and Bosaloke resolved to have a battle . . . This could take some time.

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  12. I am a recipe tinkerer – but that is not so unusual. Also was fond of concoctions as a kid – haven’t quite gotten over that urge as a grown-up, so it’s good to have a six-year-old in the house so I have an excuse to get back into that (did you know you can get a cool rainbow effect with milk, food coloring and dish soap?).

    I rebuilt a carburetor once – that was fun, and I did get it back into the car and got the car to run (which was more than it had done prior to the rebuild), but only long enough to get it to a real mechanic. Haven’t attempted much car repair since then, but I do have appreciably less fear of opening something up to see if there is something obviously broken or askew that I can correct before I call in the pros…

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  13. I think I have mentioned steve gross before who had a great knack for taking things apart to discover how they worked but not such a knack for putting than back together. No big deal though they were almost never his…still laugh about the tube radios with the covers off glowing in the dark of the bedroom evenings wher prior to steve they had been housed in hard plastic boxes with grill cloth over the speaker hole. Funny what a different perception you have with a little piece of junk speaker hanging off a metal tray of tubes and wire on your headboard.

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  14. Ahoy, Babooners! I think Jim Ed has a great idea there. I especially appreciate ‘Ahoy’ because I am listening to the Master and Commander series of (21!)books by Patrick O’Brian. May I recomend O’Brian as an author? He is to me the 20th century Charles Dickens in his style, characterization and ability to weave together plot and sub-plot. Yes, you have to become accustomed to the lingo of sailing ships, but think of it as learning another language! There are many other useful naval phrases in the books besides ‘Ahoy’. I am going to practice shouting, “Silence, fore and aft!” so that I can get the attention of my family when they assemble to celebrate birthdays, etc.

    Thirty years ago I was forced to experiment with ways to get enough water into our home to use in our daily living. We had built a new house, but the township we lived in in Michigan had not come through on their promise of sewer and water lines. We lived for one year without running water. We tried driving a point, but our home was positioned above a rock ledge, and we could not get the point through the ledge. We ended up using three stainless steel milk cans to store water for drinking, perparing food and washing dishes. My husband filled the cans at a public park adjacent to a cemetery. Friends offered us their saunas for use twice a week. The kids were 4 and 5 years old, so out of diapers, thankfully! Ironically, my husband is a plumber. (What do they say abour the shoemaker’s family?) He was able to shower daily at work : ) A year was a long time to live without running water – hope we don’t ever have to do it again – but our unlikley family experiment did prove successful.

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    1. You are a trooper. Ahoy ye little swabbies. Get your arses over aft before I having ye walk the plank ya bunch of barnacles. I kinda like sea talk eh salty

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      1. If you’re on FaceBook, did you know that you can change your language to English-Pirate? Makes everything read like Cap’n Billy.

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  15. Did you know asked Mr Clavens that Alexander Bell’s wife was deaf and one of the reasons he was interested in the telephone was that it might help the hearing impaired? Ironically it was responsible for lots of discrimination against deaf folks because of their inability to use phones.

    With the advent of texting the phone has proved to be a valuable communication device for deaf folks. Do we have a record of the 1st texted call? Did the texter say , “Please”?

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  16. Greetings! Been busy with working overtime and a busy weekend, too. Every time I step into the kitchen is an experiment with my cooking! A few years ago when I was working part time, I figured I should learn to do some decent cooking since I had time, so we could save money and eat more healthfully. I bought a cookbook I saw called “Cheap. Fast. Good!” which turned out to be an excellent guide for me.

    It has a full repertoire of dishes with lots of guidance on how to shop, plan meals, batch cooking, making broth, poaching chicken (who knew?) and just basic stuff that I never learned from my dear mother. I’ve actually realized that I don’t even have to follow a recipe exactly and it usually turns out OK. Now I’m fairly comfortable in the kitchen and enjoy looking for recipes I think might work for my family — and I was NEVER a recipe person before.

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    1. good for you joanne, glad to hear you are getting to work. i was concerned there for a bit when they hired you then sent you home for three weeks r whatever the deal was. tired is better than wishing you had somethig to do huh? poached chicken? i also heard chincken it perfect microwave food. something about just exactly the right moisture to meat ratio. there is a way to browen it so it looks better but microwaving it is supposed to be quick easy tasty etc…

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