An Arkies Musings

My An Arkie's Faith column from the January 26, 2022, issue of The Polk County Pulse.  On the mornings that I pick up my auto glass order, the alarm rings at 4:30 A.M. I never worry about the alarm going off. My cell phone knows what time it is and always wakes me up, even if the electricity has been off during the night. But it hasn’t always been so easy to measure time.  Before medieval times, humans measured time with oil lamps, candles, water clocks, and sundials. By the mid-14th century, large mechanical clocks began to appear in the towers of several cities. These clocks were not very accurate. Christiaan Huygens made the first pendulum clock in 1656. His timepiece had an error of less than 1 minute a day, and his later refinements reduced his clock’s errors to less than 10 seconds a day. Even so, time measurement was still haphazard in the 19th century, with time being kept differently in each community. In the United States, there were over 140 local times in 1883, res...

My An Arkie's Faith column from the January 19, 2022, issue of The Polk County Pulse.  What is your favorite color? Most of us have colors that we prefer over others. My favorite color is blue, and if it tends towards teal or turquoise, that is even better. Because I work on cars almost every day, I have noticed a trend in car colors. There are very few colorful cars from the past twenty years. Over 70 percent of vehicles built were painted either white, black, or silver during these twenty years. It wasn’t too long ago, from the 1950s through the 1970s, when cars of all shades of the color spectrum filled U.S. highways. You could see Tropical Turquoise on a 57 Chevy, Tahitian Bronze on a 59 T-Bird, Coral on a 61 Plymouth, Big Bad Green on a 69 AMX, or Plum Crazy Purple on a 71 Dodge Challenger. But the bright, colorful cars of that era are now a thing of the past. During the heyday of the Ford Model T, Henry Ford said, “a customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so ...

My An Arkie's Faith column from the January 12, 2022, issue of The Polk County Pulse.  Have you ever noticed that “garage” and “garbage” are only one letter different? Many of us have garages filled with things other than those intended for a garage. My two-car garage has just enough empty space to hold one car. I sometimes wonder why I keep all the things cluttering my garage. An old expression says, “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” I’m not sure of the origin of the phrase. Sometimes it’s written as “one man’s junk is another man’s treasure.” I did an internet search of the phrase, and the earliest example I could find was in the book from the 1860s, Popular Tales of the West Highlands. The book is a four-volume collection of fairy tales, collected and published by John Francis Campbell and often translated from Gaelic. The introduction to the collection reads, “Practical men may despise the tales, earnest men condemn them as lies, some even consider them wicked. But o...

My An Arkie's Faith column from the January 5, 2022, issue of The Polk County Pulse.  As the clock struck twelve and ushered in the new year, fireworks boomed outside. They were the natural kind of fireworks, with bright flashes of lightning and deep booming peals of thunder. 2022 came in with a bang. The pounding on the roof announced that heavy rain was pouring down. With temperatures in the upper 60s, accompanied by heavy rain, thunder, and lightning, it seemed much more like a spring storm than the first day of the new year. After a toast to the new year, I was off to bed. Midnight is far later than my regular bedtime, but I stayed up to usher out 2021, hoping for something better in 2022. When I got up in the morning, the temperature was still unseasonably warm. Heavy rains had filled the creek behind my house during the night. The rushing water was pushing over the creek bank in several places. We spent the morning preparing for a New Year’s feast. Along with a roast beef, th...