Jan and Superman

In the words of one of the characters in the play Charley's Aunt I acted in my freshman year at Stetson University, I'm nervous, naggy, and nonplussed. I dropped by to visit Martha at her office before going to work myself and I called to everyone there by name. I leave the office, I drive down the road, Martha calls me and says her boss asked her when will I call her by her correct name (this is the second time I've messed up, and HER NAME'S ON THE OFFICE DOOR). It didn't offend her, but it embarrassed me, who's usually so good with matching names and faces after I've seen a person once or twice! Oy vey.

Today was also the first day of punishing Sarah and Jeffrey by removing their morning electronics privileges. School starts here the day after tomorrow, and I can't really ground them -- I have to take the kids to Grandma's before I go to work -- so when they get edgy on each others' nerves as brother and sister are wont to do (remember the sixth commandment, "Thou shalt not kill") and they get a mite on Mom and Dad's nerves, we have to take away something important to them, like money from their allowance or any electronics -- Wiis, DSes, Nooks, iPads with major spider web cracks from a few weeks ago (not the kids' fault), laptops -- that they like using. And I need time off too.

Creepies! That bus driver sure got angry when I tried to pay a nickel for the fare! Wonder when they raised it to thirty-five cents? (all italicized quotes from the June 1974 Superman story "Make Way For Captain Thunder!")

Ok, working back to Monday, after the kids got to bed (we've already got them on nine o'clock bedtime) Martha who's been taking a few hours a day the last two days after work to clean out parts of our basement -- she's done when I get home, so no I'm not slacking -- and enjoying a dinner of cubed steak, butter noodles, and chips and having the kids BFF (Brush, Floss, and take Fluoride), Martha got on one of her games while I went to our clean -- and it's gonna stay that way! -- dining room table and finished reading a biography of Jan Matzeliger, Shoes for Everyone by Barbara Mitchell and illustrated by Hetty Mitchell (ISBN 0876144733).

Prior to picking this up Sunday at Main Street Books the only mention I remember of Jan Matzeliger was as honoree on a 1991 postage stamp. KNEECAP (I didn't call the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People that then, of course, for I had that level of needing social justice that replaces your ... eh, bullshit detectors removed in college) had some complaint about how his name was rendered -- they thought Jan was a nickname? -- but evidently it's never been rendered any other way. And strictly speaking he's not "African-American" (born in present-day Suriname, sailed to Philadelphia in 1873 and moved to Lynn, Massachusetts four years later for life).

Hunh! More tourists from all over the world just to catch a glimpse of the Superguy! (from a man in Metropolis breaking the fourth wall -- speaking to the reader -- as Superman flies by)

Jan Matzeliger you may not know. But if you slipped or laced or Velcroed shoes onto your feet this morning, you have every reason to be grateful for his work, for his invention of the shoe lasting machine, a machine that attached the top and bottoms of shoes far faster than could be done by hand, in the late nineteenth century AND now revolutionized shoemaking and sent the price of shoes dropping as mass production most often does for any item. It's a great story. And though I'm certainly not ignorant of race prejudice -- we're in a multimedia where that is impossible unless you live thoroughly isolated -- and Matzeliger certainly experienced his share in life, he went on anyway.

In real life, no matter what skin color you are, that is what you need to do. And one of the stories in Superman in the Seventies introduced by Christopher Reeve (ISBN 1563896389) actually has Lois Lane step into a "Plastimold" which Superman had handy to become a black person for a day. (Seriously, this was a story.) Two of the other twelve stories I remembered reading when I was a kid in one of those pocket digests, one with a knock-off of Captain Marvel (DC didn't own that superhero at the time, but he needed someone to go toe-to-toe with) and the other against Lex Luthor's latest creation, a Galactic Golem that wipes out everyone on Earth to get the Man of Steel!

I know now how I got lost ... by accelerating my torque on a radius of 6N [to the negative eighth power] along a 19-dimensional Mobius curve ... 

But nobody's getting wiped out today! David