T. Buckingham Thomas Archive 2025 July

I've mentioned my trip in the summer of 1960 to see a road show of a “Broadway musical.” My father, the automobile dealer, took several of us to Detroit to see a production starring Florence Henderson. It was designed to gin up enthusiasm among Oldsmobile salesmen for the upcoming introduction of the new 1961 model year.

While Olds was adapting musical theater for these occasions, competing automakers were making parodies of motion pictures. In particular, when musical satirist Tom Lehrer passed away this week, I discovered (thanks to journalist Sarah Weinman) that he put a gun holster on his piano to appear for Dodge in a 1966 Western. He even included a reference to Byron J. Nichols, the general manager of the Chrysler Corporation's Dodge Division. Click the image.

Last year, only 37% of U.S. adults attended religious services at least once a month. The attendance has been dropping by about 10 points each generation, according to the General Social Survey by NORC at the University of Chicago.

From 1960 to 1974, I sometimes played the organ for the Sunday morning service at the First United Methodist Church of Richwood, Ohio, my home town. At some point in the hour, the minister would invite the four ushers to come forward and pick up the collection plates stacked on the altar.

Then they'd walk up each of the four aisles, stopping at the ends of each pew so that the people could pass the plates down the row while adding currency and coins.

Nothing else was happening for several minutes, so my assignment was to play quiet filler music called an “offertory.” When I reached the end of the piece, I'd look in my mirror to confirm that the ushers had visited all the occupied pews and were now standing at the rear of the sanctuary. If they were ready, I'd boldly play the first two measures of Old Hundredth to signal the congregation to stand. Then I'd start again from the beginning while everyone sang the Doxology (“Praise God, from whom all blessings flow”) and the ushers brought the overflowing plates forward to place them back on the altar, after which the minister would pray over them.

My offertories tended to be about 2½ minutes long. This spring I happened to see a portion of the church's online telecast of its weekly service (above). The Doxology began much sooner than I expected, so I rewound the video in order to time the offertory. With reduced attendance these days, it had taken the two ushers only 30 seconds to locate the parishioners and pass the plates.

JULY 25, 2025
GOOD PLACE TO START A FAMILY?

Five years ago, a pair of robins searching for an out-of-the-way niche decided to build a nest atop my porch light. In the ensuing years they didn't return.

That is, not until this May, when they began reconstructing the nest. At first it was just a few dry leaves and strings. Some of the construction material littered the floor of my porch.

A week later, while exiting my apartment and locking the door, I encountered a robin sitting on the porch railing like this.

He was eyeing me from maybe eight feet away. Usually birds avoid approaching that close to humans, but the porch light was behind me and I was an intruder.

The robin stared at me. I stopped in my tracks and stared at him. He cheeped, and I mimicked the sound. This went on for maybe half a minute. Then he took off and perched on a utility line higher up. I proceeded to my car, but I thought to turn around and look back. That's when I noticed that the nest construction project had been completed.

The encounter was repeated a couple of days later. Throughout the month of June, the robin flew up and yelled at me anytime I went in or out of my door. A couple of times he flew directly at my face before soaring over my head. Obviously he was protecting his family's home.

I went about my business as expeditiously as possible. I couldn't see into the nest, but one time the father robin had a worm in his beak, and another time the mother robin perched on the rim of the nest while three hungry babies peeked out.

The noisy flyovers ended around the end of June, and I presume my guests had moved on. I saw no particular reason to raze the temporary home they had constructed. But I don't expect them to return next year. If a human was going to unexpectedly emerge from a door within arm's length of your nest and engage in a chirping contest, this might not be a sufficiently secluded neighborhood for raising youngsters.

I've stopped paying attention to the local baseball team, the Pittsburgh Pirates. As of the beginning of this week, they'd lost 11 of their last 12 games while being outscored by an average of 5.6 to 1.9.

So when a Mac Miller bobblehead giveaway was announced for last Saturday, I wasn't interested. But I did wonder who Miller was. The name wasn't familiar. What position did he play?

Although his bobblehead depicted him in a Pirates uniform, more or less, note the number on the back: 412. That's not a uniform number; it's our area code! He must not have been a player at all.

It turns out he was a rapper. No wonder I'd never heard of him; I don't listen to that genre of music.

Mac grew up in the local neighborhood of Point Breeze. According to Wikipedia, his early lyrics celebrated “partying, smoking marijuana, and lusting after fame, money, and women.” TribLIVE columnist Mark Madden remarked, “That's an odd choice of somebody to promote heavily. Miller died of a drug overdose [in 2018]. If that's a ‘hometown hero,’ he was a tortured one.”

“Hometown Hero” is what it said on his jersey when he threw out the first pitch at PNC Park ten years go. One fan, Sidney Lucia, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette this week that she's been listening to Mac Miller since seventh grade. “I ended up just falling in love with his music,” Lucia said. “Even since he's passed I've tried to honor him whenever I can. His music can get you through a lot of tough times. There's songs you want to cry your eyes out to, and there's songs you want to party all night to.”

Saturday's game was scheduled for 6:40 PM against the woeful White Sox. But the Pirates estimated it would draw the season's largest home crowd, and they promised a bobblehead to the first 20,000 fans. The announced attendance was 38,041. (Of course, the team would lose by the score of 10 to 4.)

Knowing that only the earliest half of the fans would receive bobbleheads, people started camping out as early as 7:00 AM.

Sean Yee was on hand to sell water outside PNC Park, and as he told WPXI-TV, “The lines were stretching halfway across the bridge by 2:30 in the afternoon. It was not a safe situation.”

After the gates opened, some fans began fighting over the giveaways.

Trisha and Nick Briggs told WPXI they had waited for more than two hours but walked away empty-handed. They complained that other guests took multiple bobbleheads at once to resell both outside and inside the stadium.

According to the TV station, Mac Miller's likeness is now being sold online for as much as $2,000. To me, that seems like a lot for a plastic statuette of a dead person I never heard of.

JULY 20, 2025     VIRGINIA MONTANEZ SEZ . . .

The problem with modern politics is
the people who want to be politicians are the politicians,
and the people who don't want to be politicians are not,
               but the best people to be politicians
               are the people who don't want to be politicians.

This made complete sense, I assure you. ¶

July 18:
“Dearest Pittsburgh, please consider stepping up with me to be there for [public TV station] WQED.

“This isn't an ad. I have no relationship with them. They didn't ask me to ask you.

“I simply refuse to let Mister Rogers' TV home fade away, especially not due to a funding cut.”

Earlier this week, the following situation happened to me for the third time in the last 20 years. (One remembers such scares.) That’s me in the red car, merging onto the expressway.

I match my speed with the 50mph blue car and see that there’s a space for me in front of him, so I switch on my left-turn signal and begin to merge.

But the green car is in a hurry. He’s closing in on the 55mph orange car in front of him, and he perceives the unoccupied space in the slow lane as an opportunity to zip around the orange car by illegally passing him on the right.

The green car and I head for the same empty spot. Not expecting an intruder from two lanes over, I don’t notice him until we almost sideswipe!

I swerve violently to the right to avoid a collision, then back to the left and back to the right to regain control, and finally drop in behind the green car just before running out of room on the entrance ramp.

In the future, how do I avoid these near misses? I don’t know. I'll just have to continue to be vigilant behind the wheel.

I've learned a new word from TV. I was watching a British police procedural in which two former lovers unexpectedly met again. Their awkward words were frequently interspersed with the nervous filler “um,” expressing hesitation or uncertainty. The syllable was unstressed, and normally the closed captioning might ignore it. However, in this case it revealed the characters' state of mind, and the BBC captioner faithfully included it. And the meaningless interjection was given its British spelling “erm.”

The Cambridge Dictionary's English Grammar Today claims that “erm” and “um” are discourse markers with separate functions.

We can use “erm” to pause before continuing, especially when we're unsure about what to say:
He's, erm, he's not very pleased with your work, I'm afraid.
Her last book was called, erm, what was it? I can't remember the name.

We can use “um” to change the subject, carefully introducing a new topic:
Um, could I ask you a personal question?
Um, there's something else we need to talk about.

JULY 13, 2015
HE'D BUILD A GREAT, GREAT WALL

I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that Donald Trump quickly shot to the top of the polls in the race for the Republican nomination for President. For one thing, name recognition is a major factor. Trump is a celebrity running against politicians (14 of them so far). At this early stage, low-information voters may not know much about the others, but they have heard of The Donald.

Nevertheless, in a letter to the editor published today, Oren Spiegler of Upper St. Clair does register surprise. “I find it stunning and sad that Donald Trump, the coarse, crude, arrogant, condescending loudmouth of the Republican Party, has soared to first or second place in polls.”

I’m not that stunned, because I think there’s a second reason. A significant portion of Republican voters are themselves coarse, crude, arrogant, condescending loudmouths. Let’s call them CCACLs. They’ve found in Trump a champion who speaks their language. He promises easy, simplistic answers.

Mr. Spiegler wonders “whether any candidate is willing to display sufficient courage and decency as to challenge and attempt to disassociate the party from Mr. Trump.”

Some have in fact registered disagreement with Trump’s rantings. But I suspect his typical opponent doesn’t want to denounce him too strongly, because after Trump drops out of the race, the opponent will need some Trump CCACLs to switch their votes to him. He doesn’t want those voters to have written him off as a coddler of immigrants, an unpatriotic Donald hater.

Can all three of these divinely approved equations be true simultaneously? Solve for T, or ask Zoey.

From time to time, I find interesting images that I can't resist adding to previously written articles on this website. Chances are that you haven't revisited those articles recently. For example, I've posted a few images of matchbooks from eating establishments in the mid-20th-century Ohio city where I was born, and that recently led me to post a view of Zanesville's Main Street. Here are links to ten additional updates.

A photo has turned up of Frank Zirbel tending the bratwurst grill.

On the day of last spring's solar eclipse, it was unfortunately cloudy in Amherst, New York.

MaryLou often walked home with me after class. We were in graduate school.

Our national debt continues growing by more than five million dollars per day.

Also in 1970, a favorite cute redhead appeared in a motion picture.

How could radar show an UFO climbing to within 100 feet of an airliner? I offered one possibility; here's a simpler one.

Here's a new angle of the WOBC radio control room in the early 1980s.

I've found a view from the scary-tall cameraman's tower overlooking the U.S. Open at nearby Oakmont.

Tom Huet and I weren't the only Pittsburgh TV techs at the 1996 Summer Olympics. Others were featured in a local news story.

And we need another angle of this brick wall, otherwise known as the steepest streeet in America.

JULY 6, 2015
HOW WILL IT AFFECT ~~ME?~~ YOU?

On Twitter, for some reason I’ve been following Scott Renshaw, the longtime arts and entertainment editor and film critic for Salt Lake City Weekly.

So the holiday weekend is behind us. Is the bombardment over? Has your cat found its way back home after fleeing the noisy celebrations? Has the dog dared to crawl out from underneath the bed? Has the all-clear sounded?

Here’s part of what Scott has been griping about lately.

I wish I had the kind of relationship with my neighbors where I could tell them to knock it the hell off with the fireworks.

I wonder if my neighbors would be as patient with me setting off fireworks at 8 in the morning as I was with them at 11 last night.

Watch Independence Day today and celebrate the American tradition of making bad choices thinly rationalized by patriotism.

Sitting out in the heat waiting for the 4th of July parade and fireworks because I love my family more than I love my own comfort.

Parade float throwing peanuts instead of candy: You're like the Halloween house handing out raisins. If raisins were a fatal allergen.

O hai! Ominous clouds! Gusty winds on the 4th of July, because for a little while there I was worried some moron with homemade bottle rockets wouldn't cause a wildfire.

Marvel must be feeling pretty cocky that Captain America T-shirts have now become acceptable “patriotic” clothing.

“Boom Boom Pow” has replaced Neil Diamond's “America” in the fireworks show. I want my country back.

Yes, I know you want to be setting off fireworks at 11:30. But see, your “want to” exists in a world of laws and other people. Dickhead.

Here's the thing: I generally think, “How will my behavior affect other people?” And I foolishly expect it should be a universal principle. And so I fume impotently on Twitter when I'd love to be sleeping. Lucky you.

“When you think about it, the 4th of July would be the best time to shoot someone.” —my wife, insuring I will not sleep at all tonight.

[2-minute-long period of silence] Me: “Dare I even hope?” Laura: “You shouldn't. You'll just be even more pissed off.”

You know it's love when someone cares enough to remind you that hope is a futile endeavor.

Early enough on a Sunday morning after a holiday that I might as well rant into the emptiness.

I make what jokes I can about the “hey I'm launching fireworks at midnight” thing, but it's one of many symptoms of a societal sickness. It's hardly a brand-new one — I refuse to get all “kids these days” about it — but it feels like it's getting worse all the time. It's an overwhelming brand of narcissism: What I want and what I feel are the only thing that exists.

When I see some a-hole weaving through traffic, there's no other conclusion to be drawn but “Nothing else matters but my needs.”

So much public debate seems to revolve around conflicts where people refuse to acknowledge that their position affects others negatively.

I'm rambling. Sorry. It just feels sometimes like the idea of a society is waved off as utopian by radical individualists.

No “right” is limitless. We can disagree on which rights have which parameters, but at least consider that parameters should exist. You do not have a 1st Amendment right to a religious practice that involves human sacrifice. You do not have a 2nd Amendment right to a nuke. Once we acknowledge those things, we can start having reasonable discussions about the responsibilities of living in a society.

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.

When a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce [the people] under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security.

The History of the present King is a History of repeated Injuries and Usurpations, all having in direct Object the Establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public Good.

He has endeavoured to prevent the Population of these States; for that Purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their Migrations hither.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice. He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone.

He has combined with others to subject us to a Jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution, and unacknowledged by our Laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

>>For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

Works of Tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty and Perfidy, scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous Ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized Nation.

A Prince, whose Character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the Ruler of a free People.