T. Buckingham Thomas

At Oberlin, a liberal arts college, I was a physics major. In addition to our department’s rigorous studies, a simple non-technical course was offered for humanities students who needed to fulfill their science requirement. We patronizingly called it “poet’s physics.”

In a tweet last Friday, Ken Jennings intended to mention my alma mater. But he failed.

He was imagining a space traveler unable to find words to express the wonders around him.

In July, I began to see online ads for
senior men like me, offering to show us
how to use a 3D printer to make
our very own PRINTABLE CHAIR.

Is available this month only!
PRINT IT NOW!
Then sit in your new chair and follow
our guide for your tai chi workout!

Or maybe I misunderstood. It's not the chair that's printable, it's the workout guide.

So should the headline be arranged this way instead?

But no matter how much I might tai and chi, I'll never look like this gentleman.

And why am I still receiving these ads in August?

Nineteen miles south of my former Ohio home is the headquarters of the Scotts Miracle-Gro Company in Marysville, Ohio, where O.M. Scott began selling lawn seed in 1868.

Our favorite president seems to have something against lawns, at least around his temporary residence in Washington, D.C. He paved over the Rose Garden. Then he tore up the back yard for a UFC arena and a heliport.

Nevertheless, advertising for the lawn care company was right there on the octagon during the UFC fights. Why? The company contributed a million dollars, of course.

     Can you imagine Donald Trump advertising grass seed?
     Robert Elisberg can. He wrote a blog post Friday called
     We'll Be Back in 60 Seconds.   Here it is.

When most presidents leave office, they have a challenge: what they're going to do and how they will manage their time, whether or not they're going to set up foundations or what? Trump has no such decisions to make. I'm sure he's already been contacted and signed contracts.

"Hi, you know me. I'm Donald Trump, your favorite president. Elected three times. But although I'm not in office anymore, my days are still busy. Believe me, eighteen holes of golf takes a lot of time. And many people say, 'Sir, you're one of the best golfers we've ever seen.' That's why I won 34 club championships. So, I've played on a lot of courses. And I've built a lot of courses, all around the world. So, I know grass. I'm very good at grass.

"That's why I know Scott's Miracle-Gro is the best fertilizer you can buy. It'll make your lawn almost as beautiful as my courses. No one's grass can be as beautiful as mine — many people say mine is the best — but yours will be the envy of your neighborhood. And it doesn't get better than that. All because Scott makes great products, and they're a great company. They gave my campaign a million dollars, so I know them very well. And they love Trump. And I love them. And I really love their Miracle-Gro. It just works. And believe me, I know fertilizer. I know fertilizer better than anyone in the world. Many people say, 'Sir, when I think of fertilizer, I think of Trump.'

"And when you see how green your lawn becomes when you use Scott's Miracle-Gro — which I think they should call 'Trump's Scott's Miracle-Gro,' to be honest — you're going to want to show it off to your neighbors all the time and have parties in your front yard, so everyone can see you enjoying it. And enjoying your meal — like when you serve delicious Goya refried beans. Goya, the most honored name in Mexican food. If it's Goya, you know it's good, boya. George Washington served Goya refried beans to his troops at Gettysburg. Goya products are the one thing from Mexico I'm always happy to have in my home. They gave my campaign a million dollars, so I know them well.

"Just be sure to take care of your beautiful lawn when you throw your party, because you don't want a parade of people trampling over your beautiful grass, so beautiful thanks to Scott's Miracle-Gro. Which is why you might want to protect it by building a path and patio with magnificent granite, and the best is from MSI Surfaces. It will last you hundreds of years. You'll love it then, as much as you love it now. And I know granite. Many people say, 'Sir, you know granite better than anyone.'

"So, it will be a great party, thanks to your Scott's Miracle-Gro fertilizer, your Goya food products and your MSI Surfaces granite. I endorse them all. You can take it from me, Donald Trump, your favorite person in the history of the world. My word is unimpeachable. And to make your party the best party ever, you'll want a swimming pool for everyone to take a dip in! I recommend Green Water Solutions. There's no one better. Believe me. And I own resorts all over the world. I know pools. Believe me. Believe me.

Software can transcribe speech into text. Mistakes can happen, but they're becoming less frequent.

I was watching a documentary on the Pennsylvania Cable Network (PCN) describing a village north of here that was settled by Germans at the beginning of the 19th century.

The show was recorded in 2013 at the local history museum, apparently using closed captioning automatically created by transcription software with no human intervention.

What makes me think that? The captioning often called the town Our Money, Pennsylvania. That's how PCN's avaricious computer interpreted the word “Harmony”: Our Money. And a nearby granary was referred to as the Grand Jury.

Another PCN program four years later detailed the 1756 attack on an Indian village some 30 miles up the Allegheny River from where I live now. The settlement was and is called Kittanning (accent on the “tan”). The closed captioning's best guess was Contending.

In college, I used to rip the news off our campus radio station's UPI teletype and read it on the air. Often my shift was the 5:30 pm newscast on Thursday. What sports stories break at that hour on a Thursday?

Nowadays we're told that the Associated Press is allowing a computer program to begin filling in the blanks. It uses the data from minor league box scores to generate baseball stories automatically. No human sportswriters are required to actually watch the games.

However, the robot isn’t taking away anyone’s job. In this era of budget cutbacks, as I noted earlier about high school football, there’s less and less actual in-person newsgathering going on these days. No reporter would have been assigned to these particular minor league games anyway.

Do you have trouble watching an entire movie at one sitting? More and more of us do.

• Rose Horowitch of The Atlantic spoke with 20 film-studies professors who say they can't even get film students — film students — to sit through feature-length movies.

• Malcolm Turvey of Tufts University officially bans electronics during film screenings. Still, about half the class ends up looking furtively at their phones.

• According to Matt Damon, Netflix has started encouraging filmmakers to get viewers hooked with action sequences in the first five minutes, then have characters repeat the plot three or four times so that multitasking audiences can keep up with what's happening.

I never chose to take a film class. I rarely go to a theater, preferring to get comfortable in front of my large TV. But if I become bored, I might glance at a smaller adjacent screen next to it that's showing a different channel, or I might glance at the news on an even smaller third screen down below.

Even if I avoid those distractions, my mind often wanders after half an hour or so. A few minutes later, I realize I haven't been paying attention, so I need to rewind the video to find out what I missed.

Often, therefore, after watching a TV movie for half an hour I'll choose to stop it. I'll return for the next “episode” the following day.

Perhaps TV executives could emulate me and program “mini miniseries.” They could break up some of their longer motion pictures into edible chunks and get ratings for four days instead of just one.

Vin Scully is drawing closer to the end of an amazing 67 years of broadcasting Dodgers baseball. Yesterday he called his final Pittsburgh at Los Angeles game.

I crossed paths with Vin only once. It was ten years ago in the restroom of the Dodger Stadium pressbox. But his assistant — now there’s a different story.

Boyd Robertson’s specialty is the position we call “stage manager,” overseeing various details in the announcers’ booth.

In 1987 I started traveling as part of the KDKA broadcast team covering the Pittsburgh Pirates, and I relied on his help any time we televised from L.A.

As the graphics operator, I couldn’t actually see the game. I was out in the parking lot, sitting behind a keyboard in a truck called the mobile unit. My view of the ballpark was limited to what the cameras were shooting. If a pinch-hitter came out on deck or a reliever started warming in the bullpen, the stage manager needed to notice it and alert me via headset.

I also required his assistance in other situations. He’d bring me the starting lineups as soon as they became available. When I forgot to mark something on my scorecard, he’d help me fill in the gaps. And late in the game we’d discuss which pitcher would be awarded the win and which would take the loss, barring any further scoring.

Boyd was always great to work with. I was glad to see him on a few other occasions when he came East or when we were televising a sport other than baseball.

But starting in 1989, he rarely had to deal with visiting broadcasters like us because he had joined Vin Scully’s crew. I didn’t see him much after that, except on a July 2005 edition of HBO’s Real Sports in which Bryant Gumbel followed Vinny behind the scenes.

This article from last month, when the Dodgers were on the road at Anaheim, brings us up to date on the Boyd Robertson story. Good luck to him, wherever he goes from here!

The news ratings have fallen for CBS Television under Bari Weiss and anchor Tony Dokoupil. And their local affiliate in Pittsburgh isn't helping.

CBS-owned KDKA-TV has added a fancy new Augmented Reality / Virtual Reality news studio. It's basically a huge empty room with all-green walls and floor and ceiling. Video can be inserted in place of the green, allowing reporters to virtually walk through the scene. I'm told that they have big plans for this toy, but for now they're using it for the weather report. And it's terrible.

There's not enough information and also too much information. Not enough: are these the current conditions, or if not, what time in the future are we representing? Too much: it's fine to depict hills and such, but their contrasty topography makes it difficult to read the overlaid geographical references which are distorted because of the angle. North should be at the top!

And where am I on this map? I live in the northeast corner of Allegheny County, so I need to find Pittsburgh and the county lines around it. That's harder than usual.

When I do find my spot — below I've superimposed a blue star — I see that my sky is sort of white. Snow? No, probably fog from the river, I guess.

Other angles make my location even harder to find. In the image below, I think I'm at the blue star. But what does it mean that my sky is light green? And what are those ominous yellow and orange stripes in Indiana and Ohio supposed to represent?

Local newscasts break away for weather reports every ten miinutes, so I think I'm going to be switching to an easier-to-understand channel. Sorry, CBS.

Yesterday I watched the IndyCar race from Portland. The command to “start your engines” was given by a representative of a new sponsor: ONLY BULLS.

A little research reminded me that stock-market traders who gamble that a stock will increase in value are called “bulls.” ONLY BULLS pitches its trading software to these optimists who dream of becoming rich. Their cowering counterparts are called not cows but “bears.”

On February 22, 1969, the week of my 22nd birthday, the song “Build Me Up Buttercup” by The Foundations reached #3 on the Billboard magazine's Top Hot 100 list. On my college radio station WOBC-FM, we played it along with the other hits.

The usual procedure for DJs in those days was to announce the artist and the name of a song as we started to play it. Alternatively, after one or several tunes we could “back-announce” the information. We needed to keep our listeners informed.

Customs have changed. I've heard this music numerous times on WDVE-FM but never knew it was by Pink Floyd, because most modern radio stations never tell us that information. Also, since most modern singers don't enunciate clearly, I could make out little of the lyrics after the opening “Hello.” I had no idea of the song's title.

Now I do know the details, thanks to a cover by multi-talented author John Scalzi. By the way, he works out of a former church near his rural Ohio home, where he took the picture below.

AUGUST 5, 2016 OBRIGADO! EU SOU RICO!

As you may have heard, the Olympic Games are getting under way down in Brazil. The opening ceremony will be tonight.

My most recent summer Olympics telecast was in 1996, when I provided a small part of the graphics for the international feed.

That year in Atlanta, my first assignment was the opening ceremony (at right).

There was much speculation about which celebrity might receive the honor of lighting the flame. For a few minutes I was one of the only people in the world who knew the secret; they told me in advance so I could prepare a lower-third identifier. Even Bob Costas didn't know who it was going to be until Muhammad Ali stepped out to take the torch.

Once the competition began, my assignment changed to events on the stadium track.

For example, there was the 200-meter dash. In the final, Michael Johnson set a new world record by more than a third of a second.

Once again I knew in advance. I could tell several strides before the finish that he was going to surpass the old mark, and I exclaimed to my coordinator, “That's a world record!”

Today, however, I’m recalling another gathering of nations for a different festival of athletic competition. There a stranger from Brazil gave me money. For no reason at all, he handed me 100,000 Cruzeiros!

That sounds like a lot, but due to inflation at the time, the large-denomination bill was barely worth a couple of bucks American. Due to subsequent inflation, nowadays the souvenir isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.

2026 UPDATE: Speaking of "money" that has become effectively worthless, consider Donald Trump fans who eagerly snapped up $TRUMP memecoins at $75 on the eve of his second inauguration. They found that the coins were worth only $63 the next day, only $20 by the end of the month, and only $3 now.

The President amassed $636 million from the cryptocurrency, but many of his followers who gambled on purchasing the coins came out losers.

“Or hardly working?” That was my father's favorite joke when greeting someone on the streets of our little hometown.

Nowadays, the rule is that everyone is hard-working. (Except me, of course. I'm retired.) That's according to politicians who make sure to flatter potential voters by describing them as “hard-working.”

Government agencies do likewise. Last month, the Department of Homeland Security said in a social media post that it was “ending policies that encouraged dependency on the backs of hard-working American taxpayers.” The new requirement — applicants for green cards must prove they won't need public benefits like food stamps or Medicaid — is set to go into effect on Sept. 18.

We also hear from members of Congress. According to Senator Patty Murray (D-Washington) and Representative Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), “This administration has now admitted in court what has long been obvious: It terminated nearly 300 cost-cutting energy projects for no reason other than the fact that the states they were in did not vote for the President in the 2024 election. This is an astounding admission that the President and his team corruptly abused their power to kill good jobs and punish hard-working families because of their political views.”

In other government pronouncements, I've noticed that press releases from the Executive Branch almost always begin by ascribing their ideas to the Great Leader. They're like the sycophants around the table at a “cabinet meeting.”

For example, when the Fish and Wildlife Service rescinded a 1975 rule protecting species that are threatened with extinction, the Interior Department said this was necessary to “advance President Donald J. Trump's directives to strengthen American energy independence.” (And of course to strengthen rich corporations that mine and drill, baby.)

Some other statements from government agencies: ““Under the leadership of President Trump, America is again the world's most powerful nation, with the bravest and most skilled warfighters the world has ever seen.” “President Trump signed a National Security Presidential Memorandum to bolster the cybersecurity of America's National Security Systems.” “President Trump is promoting a key technology that will protect American systems in the quantum era.” “President Trump continues to set the global standard for secure technology and advanced cybersecurity in the U.S.”

When I consider the possibility of Donald Trump becoming Commander in Chief, two specters haunt me. One is Donald Trump’s incompetence. The other is his voters’ hostility.

“There is nothing on Mr. Trump’s résumé,” the Washington Post editorialized between the conventions, “to suggest he could function successfully in Washington. The lack of experience might be overcome if Mr. Trump saw it as a handicap worth overcoming. But he displays no curiosity, reads no books, and appears to believe he needs no advice ... whether he convinces himself of his own untruths or knows that he is wrong and does not care.”

Paul Krugman wrote, “You can’t run the U.S. government the way he has run his ramshackle business empire. We know about his stiffing of vendors, his profiting from enterprises even as they go bankrupt, his seeing contracts as mere suggestions and clear-cut financial obligations as starting points for negotiation. We also know that he sees fiscal policy as no different; he has already talked about renegotiating U.S. debt. So why should we be surprised that he sees diplomatic obligations in the same way?”

“He has made clear,” the Post continued, “that he would drop allies without a second thought. The consequences to global security could be disastrous.

“Most alarming is Mr. Trump’s contempt for the Constitution. ...He doesn’t seem to care about its limitations on executive power. He has threatened that those who criticize him will suffer when he is president.

“...We have criticized the presumptive Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, in the past and will do so again when warranted. But we do not believe that she ... represents a threat to the Constitution. Mr. Trump is a unique and present danger.”

Other commentators have even questioned the mental health of the man who would have his finger on the proverbial button. Keith Olbermann used the Hare Psychopathy Checklist to diagnose Trump as a borderline psychopath. Stephen F. Hayes of The Weekly Standard wrote, “Donald Trump is crazy. This isn't the behavior of a rational, stable individual.”

I remember 1972, when the Democrats nominated Sen. Thomas Eagleton of Missouri for Vice President. Two weeks later, we learned he was on the anti-psychotic drug Thorazine and had received electroshock therapy for clinical depression. His doctors said Eagleton's depression could recur and might endanger the country. He was forced to withdraw on August 1. The Democratic National Committee had to nominate a replacement.

Although only one out of every 24 Americans cast a ballot for him in the primaries, that still amounts to 13,300,472 votes — a total that Trump proudly trumpets. Why do so many support him?

Typically the response is, “Trump understands what it’s like to be me. In this economy, I’m having a hard time making ends meet. I know it’s not my fault. So whose fault is it? Somebody has to be blamed! I blame blacks and foreigners. Also those elite politicians in Washington. Trump is not a know-it-all politician. He speaks his mind. He talks the way I talk.”

Trump does talk like an egotistic white male — not a statesman. His voters cheer for a demagogue who will bully the rest of the world into doing whatever benefits them. He exploits their fears, slams the door in the face of outsiders, demeans dissenters with crude nicknames.

Even if he loses in November, his supporters will still be with us. “The election must have been rigged. Find a scapegoat! And lock her up!” Their seething anger might be a greater long-term threat to the nation than crazy Donald himself.

What can be done? It’s up to us.

We Americans have always seen ourselves as bright, optimistic, friendly. We have always professed a decent respect and charity for all. Even for “poor,” “tired” foreigners. Even for “the homeless.”

But sometimes, as Charles Dickens wrote in 1841,

“The shadows of our own desires
stand between us and our better angels,
and thus their brightness is eclipsed.”

Are we going to allow selfishness to block the light of our better angels? Are we going to listen to those better angels, or to our hateful demons?

The temptations are illustrated in this image by C.F. Payne, which I have Trumpified.

An actually competent President reminded us in 1861:

“We are not enemies, but friends.

“We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.

“The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”