T. Buckingham Thomas Archive 2025 March

All the college basketball excitement this week is about the NCAA Division I men’s tournament. Here in the Pittsburgh area, locals had been following the fortunes of Robert Morris University and West Virginia University, until those teams were eliminated by Duke and Kentucky respectively.

But there are many other tournaments going on, for smaller schools as well as the NIT and for women as well as men. We’ve still had teams to root for.

Three years ago, I described televising games after driving all the way to California — which is only a 60-mile trip. California University of Pennsylvania is located in the Monongahela River town of California, PA. This year, the CalU women’s team made it to the Elite Eight of NCAA’s Division II, played in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. And the Vulcans won it all! With an 86-69 victory in the final game Friday night, they claimed their second Division II national championship in 11 years.

Now it's 2015, and on Saturday afternoon another nearby school, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, almost won it all. IUP was the runner-up in the men's Division II tournament for the second time in five years.

Both games were televised nationally on the CBS Sports Network. I watched the CalU women's game; it was fun, with a lot of scoring. There wasn’t much defense. Players were frequently able to quickly dribble past their defenders and score on driving layups. But contrary to some women’s games I’ve televised, these players actually made those layups, and they were deadly on jump shots.

The venue was the 3,250-seat Sanford Pentagon. When I heard the name, I guessed correctly that it was a five-sided building, but I guessed incorrectly that it must be in Sanford, Florida. Actually, this Sanford refers to Sanford Health, a medical facility in Sioux Falls.

The Pentagon, home to a pro team in the NBA’s D-League, opened only a year and a half ago. Although its design includes modern amenities in the corners like luxury suites and a huge video board, it’s supposed to be a throwback to the look of old-time basketball gyms.

For example, it was not until the 1951-52 season that the NBA widened its lanes from six feet to twelve. The Pentagon’s blue rectangle reminds us of the old days, when the lines on the floor resembled a keyhole and the spot we now call the “top of the circle” was known as the “head of the key.” (However, I think they erred: the blue rectangle is only four feet wide.)

A couple of other features remind me of my high school gym, constructed in 1939: the parquet floor, and the scoreboard with a round analog clock. In this case the clock has only a second hand, protected from errant basketballs by a wire screen. For the minutes, one has to consult the digital display. But the periods are still indicated by light-up numbers 1 2 3 4. Ah, the good old days.

Speaking of fictional TV studios, I have a small problem with the way they're often portrayed.

We've seen dramatizations of movie sound stages where, after a scene, the director says “Aaaaand... cut!” He's telling the actors to stay in character for a couple of extra seconds after completing their dialogue, which will make subsequent editing easier.

However, in a dramatization of a live TV show going to a commercial break, the fictional floor manager imitates a movie director by loudly calling out “Aaaaand...” After waiting to get the word from the control room, he drops his arms and shouts, “We're clear!” That makes the situation obvious.

But what if the studio had not actually been “clear” until he declared it to be? If the mics were still live, the floor manager's “Aaaaand” would have gone out over the air!

Also, on an episode of the shortlived sitcom Kenan, a segment of a fictional live talk show got out of hand. Normally the producer would be in the control room, but in this case the producer was standing right there in the studio and stopped the madness by shouting “Cut!” That was followed by the ringing of a bell, to indicate that silence was no longer required from the crew.

It's my understanding that motion-picture “takes” can be concluded that way, but I've actually worked in broadcast situations and I know we don't have an all-clear bell.

(The TV studio frames above are details from the Annunciation. It was painted 550 years ago by an artist's assistant in his twenties, Leonardo da Vinci, and is now on display at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.)

The title of the novel and movie The Da Vinci Code translates to “The Of Vinci Code.” That's nonsense. It's like naming a gospel “The Of Nazareth Ministry.”

When we learned about the globe in elementary school, we memorized the names of a great number of places. But those names may not be etched in stone, as the saying goes. And some cities are known slightly differently by their natives.

To Italians, Rome is Roma and Florence is Firenze. To Bavarians, Munich is München. To Austrians, Vienna is Wien. To Chinese, Shanghai is .

Other places have modified the English versions of their names to something closer to the native style. For example, Peking became Beijing (although chefs still prepare Peking duck). “The” Ukraine became simply Ukraine. That nation uses the Cyrillic alphabet, as shown on the right, so transliterating their city names into our alphabet results in Odessa becoming Odesa and Kiev becoming Kyiv.

And for political or cultural reasons, other places have changed their names entirely.

• The Soviet Union disunited into Russia but also Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.

• Yugoslavia disintegrated into Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Czechoslovakia separated into its two halves.

Here's an incomplete list of other historic name changes, old in brown and new in green.

EUROPE ...........

ASIA & OCEANIA

Danzig

Gdansk

East Pakistan

Bangladesh

Leningrad

St. Petersburg

Bangalore

Bengaluru

Holland

The Netherlands

Kampuchea

Cambodia

Stalingrad

Volgograd

Cathay

China

MIDDLE EAST ...........

Saigon

Ho Chi Minh City

Angora

Ankara

Batavia

Jakarta

Persia

Iran

Calcutta

Kolkata

Mesopotamia

Iraq

Bombay

Mumbai

Constantinople

Istanbul

Burma

Myanmar

AFRICA ..............

Ceylon

Sri Lanka

Dahomey

Benin

Formosa

Taiwan

Bechuanaland

Botswana

Siam

Thailand

Upper Volta

Burkina Faso

Edo

Tokyo

Zaire

Democratic Republic of the Congo

New Hebrides

Vanuatu

Swaziland

Eswatini

THE NEW WORLD

Abyssinia

Ethiopia

The Argentine

Argentina

Sudanese Republic

Mali

British Honduras

Belize

South-West Africa

Namibia

Gulf of Mexico

Gulf of America

Northern Rhodesia

Zambia

Southern Rhodesia

Zimbabwe

Tonight in the NCAA basketball tournament, the Chanticleers (from Big South champion Coastal Carolina) will play the Badgers (from Big Ten champion Wisconsin).

“Chanticleers,” huh? I remember that the term comes from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, where it’s the name of a proud rooster. So I looked up Chaucer’s description of the bird, which includes these lines:

Hold on, thought I. Azure means sky blue. Was that really the color of his toen — excuse me, his toes? I never saw a blue-legged bird. I never hope to see one.

Nevertheless, apparently a few such breeds exist. On the right is one of them: the French hen called poulet de Bresse, “the queen of poultry and the poultry of kings.”

These birds are said to display the red, white and blue of the French flag, including their pale blue-gray “landing gear” (as my old friend the Air Force veteran Art Plantz would have called their chicken legs).

Whilst Googling this poulet, I discovered some more oddities.

There's a service area named Poulet de Bresse on highway A39 in France.

This photo shows the southbound exit ramp to the rest stop. The caption notes: “On the left, the biggest chicken in the world.”

Sure enough, in a traffic circle next to the parking lot stands a 65-foot-tall sculpture made of one-foot-diameter stainless steel tubing.

I also note with approval the barrier at the point where the pavements diverge. Probably made of a flexible material, it looks safer than our American steel signs on steel posts, non?

In Biblical times, the priests of Yahweh demanded unquestioning loyalty. They required the people to praise their God, especially when good things happened. They required the people to bring their sacrifices to the priests' altar and nowhere else. If something bad happened, that wouldn't be God's fault. It would be the fault of faithless Israelites who had committed idolatry: the sin of turning their back on the jealous Yahweh. His priests couldn't stand competition, so idolaters had to be eliminated from the land. They had to be executed by stoning, as we read in Deuteronomy 13:6-11.

“If your very own brother, or your son or daughter, your beloved wife, or your dearest friend should entice you, saying, ‘Let us go and worship other gods’ — gods that neither you nor your ancestors have known, gods of the people round about you, near or far, at one end of the land or the other — do not yield to them or listen to them. Do not spare them or shield them. Show them no pity. You must certainly put them to death!

“Your own hand must be the first to be raised against them, and then all the people are to follow. Stone them to death, because they tried to lead you astray.

“All Israel when they hear of it will be afraid. Never again will anything as wicked as this be done among you.”

May the wisdom and guidance found in these holy words inspire and enrich our lives.

Today, some Christians want to indoctrinate children in public schools with an official proclamation. In the Texas legislature, Senate Bill 10 has been introduced. It “instructs elementary and secondary school classrooms to conspicuously display a 16-inch by 20-inch poster or framed copy of the Ten Commandments in type large enough to be legible for a person with average vision from anywhere in the classroom.” However, “Sen. José Menéndez, D-San Antonio, voiced concerns about Texas choosing one religion over others and teachers having to explain ‘adultery’ and what it means to covet a ‘manservant’ to young students.”

The nation and I, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., were watching on television 50 years ago tonight.

“What happened in Selma,” President Lyndon B. Johnson told a joint session of Congress, “is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and state of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life.

“Their cause must be our cause, too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.

As a former college radio DJ, I continued to pay attention to popular music until I turned 40 years old. Then, after traveling to Daytona Beach to work a couple of MTV shows, I lost interest.

Thus I didn't really notice when Nirvana introduced “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in 1991. The landmark song is often mentioned, even today. However, I didn't know what it sounds like until I finally gave up recently and Googled it.

It turns out that I've heard S.L.T.S. many times over the years on Pittsburgh classic-rock station WDVE-FM. But DJs no longer introduce records. Not only did I have no idea who peformed this piece of music, I didn't know what it was called.

My ignorance arose from the fact that the title has nothing to do with the lyrics, which “nobody can understand” anyway (according to “Weird Al” Yankovic).

Kurt Cobain should have lifted a line from the lyrics to title the song, calling it something like “Here We Are Now, Entertain Us.” But no. Instead, the title was an inside joke about the cute & girlie deodorant he allegedly used.

The Department of the Treasury estimated that its investigation would produce net savings of more than $215 million over a three-year period. Compared to the total that the Social Security Administration disburses over three years (five trillion dollars), that's a whopping four thousandths of one percent.

After he passed away in 1999, I went through his papers and discovered a detailed letter he'd written to the Social Security Administration in August 1982. The government had “become aware” that he had died in April, so they recalled what they'd paid him in May and June.

“Restore me back to life so I can continue to pay my taxes,” my father pleaded.

Selected lines from a crossword puzzle by Joe O'Neill printed one year ago in the New York Times, apparently abridging “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”:

I know whose woods these are.
My horse is restless.
I have a lot to do.
Giddyup!

As spring approached, poet Robert Frost wrote “To the Thawing Wind” at somewhat greater length.

The memory still haunts me, half a century later. There I was, in front of the whole school, misapplying a quotation from a classic drama. How embarrassing!

Richwood High School would sometimes take a few minutes out of its week for a pep rally. Actually, I think we had to give up the last third of our lunch period. We’d assemble in the gymnasium and the cheerleaders would challenge us to express vocal support for our athletes, in hopes that we would be similarly enthusiastic at the big game that night. A little humorous entertainment was also included.

As nearly as I can reconstruct the incident, the cheerleaders had recruited me for a skit. Sitting on a stool at midcourt, I introduced another character, who was supposed to enter from my left. His entrance was slightly delayed for some reason.

In mock frustration over his absence, I cried, “Wherefore art thou?!” My ad-lib was badly chosen.

Most of my audience probably didn’t realize it, but wherefore does not mean “where.”

So Juliet doesn’t call out, “Where are you, Romeo?” She wonders, “Of all possible names, why are you ‘Romeo’?”

In defense of my audience and myself, in daily life we are no longer required to know the meaning of wherefore. The word is now considered archaic. I think we should expunge it from Shakespeare’s play, where it hampers our modern understanding.

Our heroine walks out onto her balcony and, as young girls will, toys with the name of the boy on whom she has a crush. “Oh, Romeo! Roam-eeeh-ohhh. Why are you ‘Romeo’? Deny your father and change your name.

“Or else tell me you love me, and I’ll change my name. I’ll no longer be a Capulet. I’ll be Mrs. Romeo Montague. Mrs. R.M. ‘Juliet Montague.’ Doesn’t that sound much classier than ‘Juliet Capulet’? I always detested that et-et rhyme.

“What do names mean, anyway? We call this flower a ‘rose,’ but if we called it a ‘stinkbloom’ it would smell just as sweet, wouldn’t it? Ay me!”

MARCH 3, 2025 SCIENCE ALERT

A giant space rock is threatening Pittsburgh!

Astronomers have determined that at 1:25 AM Eastern time on the 30th of this month, a fast-moving object weighing 75 quintillion tons will close to within only 222,530 miles of Earth. (Thanks to Dave DiCello for this photograph of the looming peril.)

As a warning, there's a 100% chance that the huge rock will turn blood-red for more than an hour beginning at 2:26 AM on the morning of March 14. That's called a “lunar eclipse.”

While we're waiting, this coming Thursday is the day to Stand Up for Science. At Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Dr. Randy Moore of the University of Minnesota will talk about Darwin and the Scopes trial of a century ago.

MARCH 1, 2025 THE RULE OF 3

Not that long ago Americans were in favor of three concepts that benefit people: Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, or DEI.

Since a new administration took office, the push has been reversed to favor Uniformity, Unfairness, and Exclusion, or UUE.

And no longer is our concern about people; it's about money. The Republican National Committee's Danielle Alvarez claims that “The President's policies are incredibly popular, and the American people applaud his success in cutting the Waste, Fraud and Abuse of their hard-earned taxpayer dollars.” MAGA and DOGE proponents constantly cite those three targets, in that order. Call them WFA.