Something today reminded me of the time my older brother was practicing the song Hava Nagila on his trumpet. I guess I was 9 or 10 years old. A catchy tune, that. I of course had no idea what the title meant or what the lyrics were, but when he started playing the refrain, I started bouncing around the room singing:

Have a banana
have two bananas
have three bananas
walk around the room once more!

As I recall, we both thought that was the funniest thing ever, and we laughed for what seemed like hours. It’s such a strong memory that I often smile whenever I see a banana.

When I was seven years old, my dad moved us to a house that had a swimming pool. We five children, ages four to ten when we moved in, spent the next five or six summers in the back yard, swimming in the pool, jumping on the trampoline, sunning ourselves, or running around like a pack of yard apes as kids are wont to do.  It was a wonderful way to grow up.

The back yard also contained a very large covered patio with two huge (hey, I was a little kid) picnic tables, some lounge chairs, and an outdoor fireplace where we’d sometimes roast marshmallows at night. Every afternoon, Mom would make a plate of sandwiches and bring them out to the patio, setting them on the picnic table and calling us and whatever friends were there to sit down and eat.

I’d sit down prepared to dig in and Mom would say, “Jim, where is your shirt? You know you can’t eat lunch without your shirt on.” Whenever we sat at that picnic table, we wore shirts. Even my sisters had to put on shirts to cover their bathing suits before they were allowed to sit and eat.

Almost 40 years later, at my own house now and making lunch to eat out by the pool, I sit down at the table and hear my mother’s voice in my ear: “Jim, where is your shirt?” Honestly, I get up to find a shirt, even if that entails walking back into the house and digging one out of the dresser drawer. I think I just might experience a mental break were I forced to eat lunch without my shirt on.

I think others have similar tales: times when they hear a parent’s voice in their heads, or rituals that they engage in due to upbringing.  We all have them: the way we tie our shoes, the food we call “comfort food,” the way we brush our teeth or groom ourselves. The shirt at the dinner table thing is one of my favorites to relate because it shows how seemingly insignificant things from our upbringing affect our lives in so many ways.

Anybody else have random things like that? Things that you don’t even think about, but strike other people as odd?

I got my first calculator in 1976 or 1977–a Casio castoff from my dad.  It was no great shakes, just your basic four-function calculator with a single memory.  Not that I really needed the thing.  None of the problems I had to solve up through trigonometry required the calculator.  We had trig and logarithm tables, slide rules, and knew how to interpolate.  Come to think of it, I’m not sure we were allowed to use electronic calculators during tests.

In the summer of 1978 I saved up enough money (and $80.00 was quite a lot to a 16 year old kid back then) from my part time furniture moving job to buy a Radio Shack EC-4000 programmable calculator, which was a re-branded TI-57.  What a fascinating piece of equipment!  I bought the thing a couple of days before my family headed out on a driving trip to Disneyland.  I spent the three traveling days curled up in a corner of the truck going through the book, learning how to program the thing.  I even spent a little time with it at the campground there by Disneyland.  By the time I’d had the thing for two weeks, I knew that I was going to be a computer programmer.

The TI-57 was kind of an odd beast in the world of programmable calculators in that it was relatively inexpensive but had branching instructions.  Other programmable calculators in its price range lacked branching instructions, which limited their usefulness quite a bit.  I remember that it took me a day or so to understand the usefulness of branching instructions, but once I did…wow!  I wrote all kinds of cool little programs for the thing, drawing flow charts and testing my logic like the manual taught me before painstakingly keying the instructions into the calculator and testing the program.  The only program I can remember well is my prime finder:  given a number, it would go through the calculations to tell you if it was prime.  I was quite impressed with myself when I reduced the time required to determine the primeness of the number 1,000,003 from 35 minutes to a little less than eight minutes.  Oh, the joys of program optimazation.

I just stumbled across the Datamath Calculator Museum today while I was looking for something else, and seeing that old calculator brought back lots of good memories.  The Web really is a wonderful thing.

20 years ago today, I ran the Pike’s Peak Marathon.  That is by far the most physically challenging thing I have ever done.  Starting in Manitou Springs, you travel 13.9 miles up the mountain; first on a pretty decent 4-wheel-drive road, and then a mule trail that winds its way across the mountain and up.  The elevation of the starting line is about 7,500 feet.  The peak itself tops out at 14,110.  The last three miles of the climb are above timberline, with an average rise of 1,000 feet per mile.  It took me three hours and 45 minutes to get to the top of the mountain.

The 14.1 miles back down the mountain weren’t a whole lot easier.  I slipped and fell several times on the way back down the first three miles, and after that the steep grades made me backpedal to keep from going too fast and falling over.  I finished the last 10 miles in a mental fog.  Even 20 years ago, I remembered very little of the descent.  Other than my falls, I have two very distinct memories:  the woman with whom I shared most of the last 5 miles, and the spectators all along the last mile to the finish yelling “It’s just around the next corner!”  By the time I finally turned a corner and saw the finish line, I wasn’t entirely sure it was real.

I was completely exhausted after a little over 6 hours of running.

Where were you 20 years ago?

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, the answer is 2.5 pounds per year.  I’m trying to get that down to about 1.5, but it’s a tough go.

A former girlfriend of mine named Stacie had this albino cat that she named Faux Pas.  Everybody called the cat “Paws” for short.  Stacie lived in a first floor apartment facing the parking lot.  Every day almost without fail, Paws would sit in the window waiting for Stacie to come home, and when he saw her drive up and get out of the car he’d let go with a loud and happy “meow”.  I, of course, didn’t know about this when I first started dating her.  One day I came by and Stacie’s roommate Cindy let me in saying that Stacie had run down to the store for something or another.  We sat on the couch by the window, the cat between us, talking and waiting for Stacie to return.  When her car drove up, just before the cat let out his announcement of Stacie’s arrival, Cindy said “Meow, Paws, for Stacie identification.”

I was talking with my older brother and sister a while back and the conversation turned to cartoons.  All three of us remembered a cartoon in the late 1960’s called Batfink¹.  It was a spoof of the popular Batman series.  The hero (Batfink) was a real bat who had steel wings, a “super sonic sonar radar,” and super powers.  He and his sidekick Karate fought all kinds of evil villains, especially the dastardly Hugo A Go Go.  Batfink’s most memorable line, which he uttered in almost every one of the 100 episodes was “Your bullets cannot harm me, my wings are like a shield of steel.”

None of us had ever talked to anybody else who remembered the cartoon.  Worse, my wife and my sister’s husband always accused us of making the whole thing up.   Today I had a similar conversation and decided to go search the web.  I found quite a bit of information, most of it available at this web site, proving once again that you can find anything on the Internet.

If anybody knows where I can get videos of the episodes, please let me know.  I’ve found one possible source, a comic book shop in California, but I’m not sure they’re reputable.  I’d prefer a reputable dealer selling “official” goods.

1. Batfink copyright Hal Seger Productions ↩︎