O is for Octagons

or Man-made Octagons

When I think of octagons, I first think of stop signs. Did you ever wonder why a stop sign has an octagon shape? Well, I never did until Theo was talking about it the other day. Not surprisingly, early roads didn't have traffic signs at all because there was no need for them. However, as there more cars on the road, the need for control increased. Thus the stop sign. The first stop signs were posted in Detroit, Michigan in 1915. They were square and white with black lettering. By 1923, stop signs were standardized to be octagonal. With a standardization of shapes you could tell what the sign was signifying even if you saw it from the back.

As for the octagonal shape to the sign, there was a bit of logic to it. The theory was that the more important the sign information was, the more sides it would have. A circle, with infinite sides, was used at railroad crossings where a car doesn't have much of a chance with a train. Next up is the stop sign with eight sides where stopping is important to avoid a collision with another car. Following that is the diamond, with 4 sides, indicating information like pedestrian crossing, and last is the rectangular sign also with 4 sides, but oriented in a more traditional way with information like speed limits. Where does that leave the yield sign with only three sides? It seems to me yielding is more important than the speed limit. However, the yield sign was not added to the highway signs until 1954, long after the other shapes were established.

By JERRYE & ROY KLOTZ MD - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0,
 https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24260904

Also when I think of man-made octagons, I think about a church near where I grew up that was built as an octagon. There have been several stories as to why it was built this way the most logical one being that that shape gave it the most capacity inside for the fewest number of materials, in other words, cost effective construction. However, the story I like best is that it was built "round" so that the devil could never trap you in a corner.

There are probably lots of other man made octagons out there, but it's time to move onto P.

https://didyouknowfacts.com/stop-signs-8-sides/

http://www.trafficsign.us/yellowyield.html

N is for Nothing

Nothing. I've got nothing. I've hit a brick wall with this A-Z Challenge. I've been thinking a couple of days now for an N topic and have been drawing a blank.

I thought about telling you something about my Nose, but could only come up with I've never had a nose bleed. And it's never been broken, but it was black and blue once when I was a kid and fell while I was playing volley ball. That really hurt!

I thought I might talk about my Name, but that would be a problem with the anonymity that I'm trying to keep on this blog. I guess I could tell you that after two girls, my parents only had a boy's name picked out because they were sure that I would be a boy. Didn't happen. So after the nurse insisted that it was time to fill in the birth certificate, they named me after a neighbor they liked.

I thought I could talk about Navy beans and how I cook them to avoid the gas problem with them. However, everyone already knows that, so I thought I could tell the story when I was a kid I called them Army beans and all the grownups thought it was very cute. To this day, I'm still annoyed with them smiling and laughing at me for that mistake even though they did it in a nice way.

I thought I might share how I am very prone to motion sickness along with my other sisters and how we all got Nauseated riding along the crooked roads to visit my grandmother. However, I thought it would be too gross to develop that story.

I considered doing something about Needles and sewing, but that topic was covered pretty well in the knitting post. One of the things would have been that my mother had a rule that you couldn't be on the sewing machine until you were in fourth grade. My fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Hildreth, had had a sewing machine needle pierce all of the way through her finger which made a big impression on me. I was very cautious when I started on the machine.

If I had wanted to leap out of my Neutral position here on my blog, I could have talked about the News today. But that subject too infuriating to many, and I just didn't want to go there.

Actually, Nature would have been a good topic for me. It's a subject that makes me happy and is important for everyone. If only I had thought of it earlier, I would have done a post about it. But now it's time to move on to O is for... It will be interesting to see what I will do for that one. So far, it's a lot like N and I've got Nothing.

But until then, here's the start of a nature post. If only I had thought of it in time to make it my N post

The ornamental pear in the front yard is in full bloom.
In the bottom of the picture is Ward with the neighbor resetting our mailbox.

I turned around yesterday and found our neighbor's cherry tree in full bloom.
Our apple tree in front of it is not quite there yet.

M is for McDonald's Pizza

McDonald's is known for fast service and predictability. That's why people eat there even if they're not big fans of the food. You always know what you're going to get. However from time to time they waver from this predictability and try new menu items. Sometimes those work or sometimes they don't. For example, breakfast burritos are going strong but the Hula Burger isn't.

Source

One of the new items they tried was pizza in the late 1980s. However, it was gone by the early 1990s. It didn't seem to fit the fast food model since it took 10 minutes to prepare and it literally didn't fit through some of the drive through windows. The plan was that it would be a dinner item and families would come into the restaurant to eat, but they didn't. Thus it was discontinued.

That is all except two places--one in Ohio and one in West Virginia. Both stores were owned by the same owner and year after year he kept making pizzas. And people kept eating them. One of those McDonald's was in my home town. I had already moved away by the time they started serving pizza, but ate it many times while visiting my parents. In fact that was one of the things we'd do, get a pizza from McDonald's when we visited. There were other places to buy pizza in town, but Micky D's was my parents' favorite. They had their little ritual. They'd order a pizza with everything and my mother would pick off the meat and give it to my father and he would pick off the veggies and give them to her. The McDonald's pizza was not bad and certainly a bargain at $6 for a large.

These two locations served these pizzas for years with no fuss until they got word of it in Canada where the McPizza was first tested. Three young men made a trip to WV to try the pizza and the idea went viral. Traveling to have McDonald's pizza became the thing to do. And when the corporate office got wind of the whole thing, and they said the pizza had to be discontinued. That was how they could control the predictability that was one of their trademarks.

Last summer the last pizzas were served and my mother got one of them. Her friend got her one and brought it to her in the nursing home for lunch. Sadly, this time my father wasn't around to exchange toppings with her, but she enjoyed it all the same.

Time marches on and things change. That's the way it was for the Micky D's pizza and as trivial as it seems, the pizza is missed.

Note: There is a McDonald's in Orlando that started serving pizza in 2016. The store is 18,000 square feet and is one of the largest McDonald's in the world. There are many other items on the menu besides pizza that are not on a regular McDonald's menu.

L is for Left-Handed

I mentioned yesterday that being left-handed made it hard for me to learn how to knit. That is just one of many things that are harder for left-handers who are living in a right-handed world. It seems as if everyone else is getting attention for differences today, but not so for the 10% of us who are left-handed. I'm not sure that's right.  There, that's my political statement for the day. :)

Apparently left-handers have been in the minority for a long time, at least as far back as the  Neanderthals. Researchers found the right hand was used more often than the left hand among this group when they looked at how their teeth were worn. Neanderthals softened hides by chewing and the shape of their teeth determined whether they picked the hides up with their right or left hand.

Why should we prefer one hand over the other? One theory is that handedness evolution had to do with cooperation vs. competition. Cooperation among people was important for progressing society.  If the same hand was used from person to person for tools and other objects, things would work more efficiently. Preferred handedness evolved for this reason. (Why the right hand? That's not explained.) Some people remained left-handed because competition was still important for fighting and protection.

To test the competitive part of the above theory, researchers analyzed data of professional players in several competitive sports. They found there were more left-handed people playing these professional sports than in the general population, meaning greater than 10% of the athletes were left-handed with baseball and pro boxers having about 50% left-handers.  This correlates with the idea that left-handers evolved to be competitive and fight to protect the tribe.

That theory was interesting, but there's got to be more to developing a preferred hand than cooperation and competition in our early ancestors, because both apes (except orangutans) and dogs prefer their right hand/paw.

To really understand handedness, we need to understand our brains and how to sort out the nature vs. nurture question. Scientists are working on it and have identified some genes associated with left-handedness. They are studying how these genes affect brain development among other things. However, that's only a small part of a very complicated question.

What I do know for now, is that my left hand works better than my right hand. And I guess that's all I really need to know.

Are you left-handed or right-handed? Do you ever think about why?

https://www.livescience.com/17009-left-handedness-ambidexterity.html

https://www.everydayhealth.com/emotional-health/0504/why-are-lefties-so-rare-blame-society.aspx

http://www.anythingleft-handed.co.uk/fighters.html

https://www.sciencefriday.com/articles/do-other-animals-show-handedness/

K is for Knitting

I know some very skilled knitters, but I am not one of them. I am in the beginner category and have been since I started. The first time I knitted, I was 8 years old and learned from reading a book my mother had. It was a very frustrating process. Every time I tried, the stitches got tighter and tighter on the needle until they could not be worked. With a little more practice, I was finally able to do a garter stitch (straight knit stitch). Eventually, I learned to purl.

One of my earliest creations--a dress for Midge.

However it remained a difficult process because of this basic problem. I knit left-handed. I did what came naturally when I taught myself and by the time I figured it out, I couldn't switch. I have never found another left-handed knitter to help me. I know they are out there, but they are few and far between. I had forgotten until recently that my mother signed me up for a knitting class with a neighborhood knitter when I was trying to learn. The teacher used a mirror trying to help me reverse the stitches. Maybe that's how I learned to purl. I don't remember.

I went along for years being confused by many directions and pictures and didn't really progress much. At one point, I asked my sister to help me learn how to crochet and that didn't fair any better. She used her right hand and I used my left hand. This resulted with all of my stitches having the tension on the wrong side of the stitch and I wound up with a loosely bound, holey, mess of yarn.

One of my felted purses at the community fair
that is very generous with ribbons.

I eventually learned the basic patterns you could do with knit and purl stitches and made several things. I looked for simple patterns and went through a phase where everyone got a hat and scarf I had knitted. After that, I knitted felted purses until I had once again exhausted my relatives and craft shows with my wares.

If I were learning to knit today, it might be easier with all of the tutorials that are on You Tube for left-handed
knitters. Maybe I'll watch them and see what I can learn. Or maybe I'll be happy with the status quo. There are other things calling for my attention these days like learning about post-mortem photography during Victorian times. :)

Do you knit or crochet? How did you learn?