Mike Causey, RIP

 Wednesday's Washington Post carries an obituary of Mike Causey, who for thirty years wrote the column the Federal Diary, a column covering the federal workforce and matters affecting it. The obituary credits him with popularizing, if not necessarily inventing, the expression "inside the Beltway." It says also that he was one of the first to make a circuit of the Beltway (I-495 and I-95) in 1964, of course for his job. Causey left in the Post in 2000 for the Federal News Network. He died in his offices there on September 26, after filing his last column.

The obituary remarks that Causey often broke news in his column, far back in the newspaper, that would show up a couple of weeks later on the front page with a big headline. If I recall correctly, The Washington Monthly forty years ago regarded this as a scandal. According to the obituary, Causey was mostly amused by it.

Casual Reading: Houses

It must have been about thirty years ago that I read a review of David Owen's The Walls Around Us: A Thinking Person's Guide to How a House Works in The Washington Post, for the book was published in October 1991. I knew of Owen as an entertaining writer, and the topic was one that much occupied me just then, but I did not buy a copy. I must have been too busy in my own dealings with how a row house did and did not work.

Last week, I rectified my neglect, for I found and read a copy. I greatly enjoyed it, and will send it on to my brother, who has undertaken much more ambitious home projects than I would think of. Yet I can't say that practically speaking I have missed out on that much over the thirty years. Probably sixty percent of what Owen writes of I had learned by then or have learned since. The other forty percent involves work I would not undertake--work with copper pipes and blow torches, work with power saws and routers, doing my own drywall work.

But Owen is quite entertaining. He is good on the madness that develops when the upper middle class deals with kitchens--

They live in the apartment just half the year, and when they are in residence they almost always eat out. ... The rest of the kitchen gets a real workout only during parties, when it used not by the couple but by people they have hired.
This couple did not build a drop-dead kitchen because they wanted to create a pleasant working environment for servant and caterers. They did it because they wanted to send the world a message about themselves. Their kitchen is not so much a place to cook as it is an affirmation of their wealth and good taste.

Or, occasionally, when it does its own home renovation:

The only real setback I encountered involved a wallboard screw that made a funny noise as I drove it in. I looked at it for a while and then unscrewed it. A thin column of water streamed horrifyingly through the hole. Like most plumbing disasters, this one occurred late on a Saturday night.

The Walls Around Us seems to be out of print now--I must have contributed to this, in a small way, by my long delay in finding a copy. It does not seem to be hard to find used, though one must distinguish it from a novel of that name by one Nova Ren Suma.

 

 

What Am I Missing?

 John Jay Chapman's preface to the second edition of his William Lloyd Garrison begins

I once knew a man who wrote a brilliant biography of Abraham Lincoln. He himself belonged to the Civil War epoch, and while writing the book in about the year 1895, he became so absorbed and excited by that war as he studied it, and lived it over again, that he could not sleep at night. He paced the room, lost in thought, awed by his subject. It was a contemporary of this biographer who told me that, while the Civil War was in progress, the enthusiastic historian had taken no interest in it; it didn't seem to attract his attention.

I find this odd, yet I have no doubt that there are matters I ignored between say 1975 and 1985 that will interest the future much, and would interest me also--if not to the point of insomnia--were they brought to my attention.

Obstructions

This summer, the city began a project to repair the bridge that carries 16th St. NW over Piney Branch Parkway. The project first closed off the northbound lanes and the sidewalk on that side, the east side. Traffic markers redirected the flow of traffic. Now the work is on the southbound, west side. I don't see what has been done so far on the east side except for the removal of some asphalt. The holes in the screen that prevents the idle from throwing objects onto the road below, and prevents the suicidal from jumping, still has a hole cut in it. The sidewalk is not repaired.

This morning, I noticed that the catwalk beside the bridge is open at the north end. I trust that it is built well--many construction workers are heavier than I am--but I have no real interest in walking on it. Still I liked the idea of crossing on the catwalk, and checked at the south end. There I found it blocked by a chain-link gate, secured by a spike in the pavement. I did not bother to pull at the spike to see how well set it is.

In the summer of 2016, high water in Rock Creek damaged the trail that allows pedestrians and bicyclists to skirt the National Zoo grounds, and avoid going through the tunnel below the Zoo. For a long time there was no sign of work. Then there were signs of work, then signs of near completion. Now from both ends of the tunnel, it appears that the trail--with a new bridge on the downstream side--is all ready. Yet the gates remain closed. I understand that projects take in more work that outsiders imagine. Still, I'm ready for this one to be done.

Many years ago, out running, I got to the downstream Zoo gate on the old trail, and found the gate closed. I suppose the chain that secured it was a bit long, and certainly I was thin: I squeezed through, and then somehow got out at the other end. A few days later I noticed three marks on a bicep, and imagined that they meant an outbreak of shingles, something I had already experienced, and did not enjoy. It was only when the marks did not develop but faded that I remembered squeezing through the gate, and remembered that the ends of some chain link had scratched me.

Units of Measure

 In An Elegant Defense: The Extraordinary New Science of the Immune System, a passage stopped me for a moment:

... Dr. Lambert drained 65 cubic centimeters of fluid from her left knee (about 65 teaspoons).

First, I thought this unhelpful. I know from cooking the size of a teaspoon, but seldom have reason to measure out more than one or two of them--how much room do 65 take? Second, a bit of calculation suggested that something was wrong. Sixty-five is about a sixteenth of 1000; a cubic centimeter is equivalent to a milliliter, and a quart is a bit less than a liter: so 65 milliliters are a bit more than a sixteenth of a quart, two ounces or a quarter of a cup. A teaspoon is a third of a tablespoon; four tablespoons make a quarter cup; 65 teaspoons ought to be a bit more than a cup and a quarter. It appears that the author simply forgot to apply a factor of five: five milliliters make a teaspoon, so one gets 13 teaspoons, 4.3 tablespoons, or a quarter cup and a bit.

All of this assumes that the measure in cubic centimeters is correct. In the kitchen, a quarter cup is small, but in the knee it might be conspicuous and inconvenient. I infer that we are supposed to be impressed by the amount. I have no desire to find out by experience.

 

Discomfiture

 Noticed today in Edmund Wilson's The Thirties, edited by Leon Edel, chapter "Washington, 1934":

[My infected nose became worse, and I had to go to the hospital. There I added to my discomfiture by reading Hegel's Philosophy of History.]

Given the quantity of Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky that Wilson had read or was shortly to read, a bit of Hegel doesn't sound that bad.

Foothills and Thresholds

 The New York Times, writing a few weeks ago of a new documentary on Leonard Cohen, mentioned a phrase occurring in one of his songs, "the foothills of old age". I did not read the article through, or with full attention. But it appeared that the writer, or somebody the writer interviewed, found the phrase telling.

It occurred to me that there is an expression in Homer relating thresholds to old age, γήραος οὐδός. I found that the version of Liddell and Scott available at the Perseus project regards the phrase as meaning "the threshold that is old age", the threshold, that is, leading out of life. Autenrieth's Homeric lexicon supports this reading, as does Cunliffe's. So do the notes to the Oxford World Classics edition of The Republic. On the other hand, an abridged Liddell and Scott on the shelves says "the threshold or verge of old age". W. B. Stanford leaves the question open in the notes to his edition of The Odyssey.

The majority reading--that of the unabridged Liddell and Scott, Autenrieth, and Cunliffe--is distinctly less comforting. It brings to mind Byron's reply to birthday wishes from Thomas Moore: "D--n your nel mezzo cammin--you should say 'the prime of life,' a much more consoling expression." Certainly Stanford's reading is much more consoling.