Trivial Knowledge: Station Wagons

-- by Micheal

Okay, I know that compared to a global economic slowdown, leftover word trivia from childhood is pretty, well, trivial. But still, I found myself dancing around with glee (metaphorically speaking) like the old woman in the Bible who found her lost penny when I found my answer.

Did you ever have one of those nagging little questions as a kid, which no one ever answered? I don't mean big stuff like why is man here on the earth. I mean trivial stuff, like my friend Randy and I used to argue about in the back seat. "Is glass clear or is it really 'white' because it passes all colors?" Proof that a little bit of 3rd grade science is a dangerous thing.

One of my naggy little questions was: Why do they call square-backed cars "station wagons"? A related question was why was woodgrain somehow associated with them such that they'd bother to put wood-grain printed metal trim on them, or wood-grain printed vinyl wallpaper on their doors? It made no sense to me. No one I asked seemed to know why. They just accepted it and moved on.

The other day, quite by random, I remembered my childhood question so set about researching it. The answer turned out to be rather easy to find, once I started looking.

Station Wagons: These predate the automobile, actually. They were wagons with several bench seats and a space behind for luggage that ferried passengers from the train station to their hotels. The courtesy vans at today's airports are doing the exact same job. Hence the name station wagons. Train-station wagons.

In the early days of the automobile, station wagons also went horseless. Automobiles in that day had bodies made mostly of wood, in the carriage-making tradition. On consumer-grade automobiles, sheet metal was overlayed and painted to protect the wood. As bare-bone utility vehicles, they left off the shmancy metal. They had just the bare wood.

People with the time and money to be railroad passengers and hotel guests tended to be more upscale, understandably. They thought the bare-bones utility cars used by the train stations were quaint and started buying them to do the grunt work around their vacation homes. Thus began the association of wood bodied cars with rich folks, hence the snob appeal of the wooden trimmed cars in the suburbs.

After WWII, real wood bodies were impractical to build. Factories could make steel bodies much more efficiently. Still, the need to "look" like wood was still there. So wood printed steel trim was applied. The association of wood trim with upscale station wagons persisted until well into the 1980s at least.

Well, there you have it. Another of life's trivial mysteries solved. No need to thank me. It's my job, ma'am.

Infamy is Fleeting

---by Micheal

President Roosevelt said that December 7th would be "a day that will live in infamy." He was speaking about the attack on Pearl Harbor, on December 7th, 1941. For a great many years, he seemed to have been right. People remembered. It was one of our nation's shared experiences, rather like 9/11 has become.

Infamy, however, seems to be fleeting, much like fame is said to be. A few years ago I noticed that the major networks didn't mark the day like they used to. Today, I asked people if they knew what day this was. "Sunday?" I even gave them the hint of saying it's a day that will live in infamy. They still didn't get it. One older man finally did catch on. "Oh, Pearl Harbor Day."

Maybe it's a healing process or something benign like that. Still, I can't help but lament at how much our culture is able to forget the lessons of its own past. Since we're able to forget history, we're pretty much setting ourselves up to repeat it.

For now, however, I still want to remember and salute all those men and women who died on that Sunday morning in 1941. The nation as a whole may be forgetting, but I haven't. God bless your families.

Detroit Bailout: Trabant Reborn!

---by Micheal

For those of you who are not car geeks, the Trabant was a small East German car. It was the product of GDR government's auto industry from the late 1950s until 1991.

At the end of WWII, the communists took control over existing automobile factories in eastern Germany. To supply automobiles for their masses, and provide jobs for their laborers, they developed the Trabant in the late 50s. It had room for four (barely) and plastic body panels integrating soviet industrial byproducts, such as cotton fibers, wool or even paper fibers. The Trabi's two-cylinder engine gave it all the power of a medium-sized garden tractor.

It was small, cramped, noisy and weak, but, it was all the people had. That's what their government decided they would get. Even then, people had to wait years, sometimes, to get a Trabi they'd ordered. Used western cars fetched a better price than a new Trabi. When introduced, it was already technologically 10 years behind its times. Engineers proposed improvements and upgrades now and then, but the government controllers turned them down. Keep costs down. Even in the 1980s, the Trabant factories were turning out a car that was little changed from its debut in 1957. Production remained a largely labor-intense affair. Modernizing would hurt jobs.

This, I fear, is what we'll get if the Big Three bailout amounts to government control over Detroit. Not that I think Detroit's 3 have done such a good job on their own. They've basically bungled their way into a deep hole. But would government control be better, or just a different sort of bungling?

I can see the socialist agenda of the new administration thinking that control over Detroit would mean they could dictate what kind of cars should be built for American masses. No more SUVs (not that I like SUVs). Hybrids for Everyone! Maybe they'll dictate a hybrid be produced by their new National Motors factories. But, much like the Trabant was a feeble compromise of conflicting government agenda, a new "green" People's Hybrid will be a similarly feeble, labor intense, set of compromises. When has a government agency been able to produce something simple and efficient?

Maybe the Democrats will make sure we all get our People's Hybrids so we can reduce greenhouse gasses and keep the autoworker's unions happy. What we'll ultimately get, though, is a new Trabant. All the charm of a bread box and all the power of a lawn tractor. And if it follows the Trabant's pattern, our People's Hybrids won't change much for many years. Innovation is not something government committees are good at.

We'd best not complain, though. To want anything else will be deemed unpatriotic.

Ban Cartoon Parents?

---by Micheal

A "watchdog" group in England has spoken out against food company cartoon characters like Tony the Tiger and the Quick bunny. The group (called "Which?" -- that cannot help but remind us of Abbott and Costello's "Who's on First" routine) has called Tony and the others "cartoon villains." (click here for the Skynews.com story)

Why? Because they feel these cartoon characters promote childhood obesity. How can a printed tiger on cardboard affect the 3D world, you might wonder. The group says that happy, attractive cartoon characters promote eating the wrong foods and do not promote healthy eating habits in youngsters. The group stops short of demanding an outright ban on Tony and his gang. Instead, they want the food industry to be forced to make Tony promote healthy eating.

This proves that some "watchdog" groups really do not have anything useful to do.

Where in the blazes have the parents been all this time? Are these fat kids buying cereal and chocolate milk mix on their own? Where'd they get the money? What with child labor laws, they can't have jobs. Are these kids selling drugs or stealing to get cereal money? And, as long as I've got a rant going, since when has a product box become a kid's legal guardian? A whole 'nother scary thought is whether we are seeing the dawn of the Food Police Era. "Good" foods are permitted to have pretty packaging, but foods deemed "bad" must wear black or brown paper wrappers, or (in a nod to Hawthorne) a big scarlet "B"?

Now, maybe things have deteriorated to this sorry state in the UK. I don't know. I've not been there. Perhaps in the UK, cereal boxes really have become kids' parents. If this is true, then the UK has much larger problems to solve than fat kids. Oprah should be told. Liberalism needs to create another tax-funded agency or at least hold a benefit rock concert.

But for now, here in the US, parents are still supposed to be in charge -- not the kids, and certainly not the cereal boxes. If a child has an eating problem, such as over eating, look first to the parents. Of the few families I know with overweight kids, the parents also have a problem with food (bad choices and far too much consumed). The kids are not learning to overeat or eat fatty foods from Tony. They're watching what mom and dad eat and how much.

The silly group in the UK might force Kelloggs into drawing Tony with a fork of broccoli and saying, "It's Grrrreat!", or force him to wear the scarlet B, but it will have no effect. The kids are not looking to Tony for diet advice. They never were. Talk to the parents. Junior is not fat because Tony made him eat Frosted Flakes, or six bowls of them. That's mom and dad's doing.