I’m happy for Mr. Tressel (although I will always think of him as Coach Tressel) and I have no doubt that he will do a good job for one of Ohio’s largest universities.  The NCAA “tattoogate” scandal that led to his resignation as Ohio State’s coach involved some unfortunate lapses in judgment on his part, but it shouldn’t mask his accomplishments with the Buckeyes.  Tressel not only took a moribund football program and quickly turned it into a powerhouse, he also made tremendous progress in the academic performance of his student-athletes.

I still respect Tressel’s efforts and achievements, even if I regret his missteps at the end of his tenure at Ohio State.  I suspect I’m not alone in that regard, and that many Ohioans will be interested in meeting with Tressel and hearing his ideas for the future of the University of Akron.  He’s an intelligent, hard working individual who dedicates himself to his job, and I’m sure he will bring those attributes to his new position.

I know one person who is thrilled to have Tressel in Akron:  Buckeye Bebe, who always has been one of his biggest supporters.  Aunt Bebe will be very happy to share the air of the Rubber City with the man who led the Buckeyes for so many years.  Who knows?  Perhaps they can meet and talk about football — or even strategic engagement.

Masters of Achievement was published by the Frontier Press Company of Buffalo, N.Y. in 1913.   To quote its title page, it seeks to tell the stories of “the World’s Greatest Leaders in Literature, Art, Religion, Philosophy, Science, Politics, and Industry.”  It tells you something about the people of that era, and what they considered to be important, that figures from literature, art, religion, philosophy, and science all take precedence over politics — and that leaders of “industry” are included at all.  Of course, 1913 was a time when Americans welcomed industry and celebrated the bursting economic growth of a still-young, rapidly growing nation.

The breadth of the book also is surprising.   It does not focus only on Americans or modern figures.  The first hundred pages are devoted to writers, starting with Homer, Aeschylus, and Sophocles.  The section on religious figures discusses Zoroaster, Confucius, Buddha, and Mohammed, and the philosophers include Socrates, Plato, Descartes, and Spinoza.  The political and military leaders come from a broad range and feature Alexander the Great, Charlemagne, Alfred the Great, Charles V, and Peter the Great.

Finally, you notice who isn’t included.  Masters of Achievement does not discuss sports stars, or actors, or musical performers.  Obviously, they weren’t considered figures who made significant achievements.  American culture — so overwhelming and pervasive today — receives nary a mention in a volume that is hundreds of pages long.

If a book like Masters of Achievement were published today, what do you think it would look like?  How many pages would be given over to NFL players, rappers, and people like Paris Hilton or the Kardashians who are “celebrities” for some inexplicable reason that has nothing to do with actual accomplishment?

From Grandpa’s Bookshelf:  A Noble Horse

From Grandpa’s Bookshelf:  Optimism Amidst The Great Depression

From Grandpa’s Bookshelf:  Grandma’s Book Of Sayings

The book

You sheepishly admit that you didn’t talk about any of that stuff — or anything else of significance, besides.  And your wife, arms crossed, fixes you with a withering glare of disbelief — causing you to shrivel inwardly with intense embarrassment, realize for the first time the full and tragic extent of your brutish insensitivity, and vow that you will finally become a decent, nurturing member of human society.

Well, we all know the last part doesn’t really happen.  After your wife gives you her amazed reaction, you actually think:  why would I want to talk about any of that stuff that when I’m playing golf?  Still, the encounter with your wife was somewhat unpleasant, and it would be best to avoid similar occasions in the future.  But how?

Here’s a suggestion.  The next time, spend the first five minutes exchanging high-level family information with your friend.  Nessie has been named citizen of the week at the juvenile detention facility!  Sally’s aunt has developed a powerful rash of unknown origin!  The Jones family had a grand time at their bullfighting camp!  Seize on those drab nuggets of personal information and lock them away in the recesses of your brain, because they will be your lifeline when you get home.  Then, turn to more interesting conversational areas — like sports and which episode of Seinfeld was definitive.

At home that night, when your wife asks the inevitable questions, you can retrieve and the casually throw out the stored personal information, perhaps with a little embellishment.  Sure, your wife will have countless detailed follow-up questions that you can’t possibly answer.  Don’t even try.  Just shrug and say that Ken said he didn’t know — and then add, with a hint of sadness, that you sensed that he really didn’t want to talk about it, and you didn’t want to intrude into what might be an area of intense personal concern for him.  Who knows?  Your wife might actually conclude that you are making progress as a human being and now possess more sensitivity than a gnat.

Now researchers, too, are looking at the genetics of longevity.  Recently maps of the genomes of two 114-year-olds — 114 years! — were published, and scientists are examining the data, trying to figure out what has made the two so amazingly long-lived.  So far, the answer is:  who knows?  The supercentenarians don’t seem to have different genetic structures, or genes that perform different functions.  Yet, somehow, they have lived far longer than the average person.

Obviously, there is an environmental component of extreme age.  If you live in a war zone, or a disease-ridden area, you are less likely to live a long life. As time passes, however, genetics plays an increasingly significant role.  The super-old don’t experience dementia.  They don’t have problems with cardiovascular disease, or Parkinson’s disease.  They’ve managed to avoid other diseases and conditions that routinely fell individuals who make it past 80, too.  But what is it that they have that others don’t?

Figuring out whether there is a genetic key that allows people to live longer is likely to be a focus of medical research in the future.  If drug companies will spend billions developing allergy medication and sexual performance drugs, what would they spend to discover a drug that approximates the effect of special genetic conditions of supercentenarians and allows humans with “average” genes to live super-long lives?

In the meantime, the rest of us will just hope that we inherited the genetic secrets of our most long-lived ancestor.

I don’t know much about this horse, except that it is a beautiful little piece — about eight inches high and eight inches long, from the tip of the horse’s head to the end of its tail.  The horse has been expertly cast and appears to be made of bronze; it stands, nobly, on a plain pedestal of off-white marble.  Unfortunately, there are no markings of any kind on the marble or the horse that identify where it was made, when, or by whom.

Perhaps Grandpa had an affinity for horses.  He grew up in a rural area, in an era before automobiles, and may have ridden horses as part of his chores.  Or perhaps he was given this horse as a work-related present and kept it at his office.  He may have considered it to be some kind of good luck token; the metal on the horse’s back and belly seems to have been rubbed more frequently than the rest.

I look at this horse, and I think that I would like to know its back story — but I almost certainly never will.  In the meantime, I’ll just appreciate it, and think of Grandpa as I do.

From Grandpa’s Bookshelf:  Optimism Amidst The Great Depression

From Grandpa’s Bookshelf:  Grandma’s Book Of Sayings

Unfortunately, the life spans of those unlucky eyewear items tend to be as fleeting as that of the common mayfly.  They inevitably end up lost, or destroyed, or otherwise discarded, left to join their brethren in the Great Sunglasses Beyond, where they fondly reminisce about their brief but crucial days of service in shielding the eyes of sensitive humans from the sun’s cruel glare.

If these two new pairs of sunglasses turn out to be anything like their predecessors, their likely fate is as follows:

Left on a restaurant table — 10%

Pulverized by heavy items in an enormous handbag — 15%

Chewed to smithereens by Penny — 22%

Fallen apart after cheap screw falls out of flimsy frame and can’t be found, even with use of magnifying glass — 17%

Inexplicably lost within 48 hours of purchase — 35.9%

Last long enough to become unfashionable — .1%

Penny is up and alert in her crate, famished and aching to be fed.  You put out food, and she bolts it down with gusto.  In the meantime you conclude that raincoat, ball cap, and umbrella are the best defenses against the crappy weather given what you must do when you are outside.  Already, you are dreading it.

You put on Penny’s leash, open the door, and head out into the elements.  Boy, this weather blows!  Penny, who doesn’t relish the rain, takes care of her first chore straightaway — but there is a cadence and a rhythm to a dog’s life, and the principal outdoor responsibility can’t be rushed.  So she noses around for a seeming eternity, zig-zagging here and there, until canine sensibilities tell her that the right moment and right spot have arrived.

You fish the little plastic bag out of your back pocket, turn it inside out over your hand, and perform pick-up duty with one hand while you are trying, ineffectively, to hold the leash and the umbrella in the other.  My God, what did she eat yesterday?  The familiar, disgusting odor is overpowering.  Then you reverse out the bag and tie it off, rain coating your face and glasses.  While you are performing this delicate task Penny circles around with renewed, lighter than air energy, helpfully binding your legs with the leash.

After you are back inside, one final job remains — toweling off Penny so that you can add that eau de wet dog odor to the fine symphony of scents you’ve endured already this morning.  To add a final element of insult, Penny does the wet dog shake and splatter as you are down in the wipe-off zone.

She trots off, happy and contented, and you stand there, water-coated and nostrils still befouled, and realize that people without dogs are still happily abed.

The Diamond Grille is found at 77 West Market Street.  The exterior is unpretentious — and the inside is no different.  It’s a throwback place, from the neon sign to the interior decor, unchanged and unaffected by the outside world, as if it were shielded from the ravages of time by some protective bubble.  Pass through the black double doors and you find yourself in days gone by.  It had special significance for me, because “the Diamond” was one of my father’s favorite places when we lived in Akron — and I’d wager the restaurant and its menu hasn’t changed much since our family moved from Akron 40 years ago.

The Diamond Grille specializes in steak.  In fact, this little restaurant is a temple of steak worship, where the cuts of beef are prime, big and juicy, and served to be savored by people who appreciate a really fine steak and a well-made cocktail.  Being there for lunch on a work day, of course, I really couldn’t reasonably exercise either of those options, so I went for the chopped steak and white bean soup — both of which were excellent and bursting with flavor.  Having lunch there just whetted my appetite for a steak dinner, with all the trimmings.

Come to the Diamond Grille for the Rat Pack atmosphere, if you want, but stay for the steak — you won’t be disappointed.

For a while we had quite an assembly line going, particularly as I finished the white chocolate ginger stars, which were fun to make and taste pretty good, too.

As always when I have one of my baking days, I end up with a new appreciation for people whose jobs require them to be on their feet all day.  After standing in the kitchen for hours, my dogs are really barking.

This began because I needed the key to Russell’s car, which is on Kish’s key ring — along with 50 other keys, tokens, and bric-a-brac.  I think the key to the diary she kept in 7th grade may be on there somewhere.  Her key ring features a small tag, added at the insistence of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, that reads:  “To avoid back injury, please lift with your legs.”  The heft of the key ring is such that, wielded by an expert, it could stun a charging rhino.

Why is this so?  I’m convinced it’s all about purses.  There has been a clear correlation between increasing size of the key ring and the increasing size of the purse.  Long gone are the days of the small clutch.  No, we are in a period of purse proliferation, where women seem to be competing for the largest, roomiest purse.  Kish’s latest skirts the fine line between purse and duffel bag.

If your purse is huge, there is no incentive to edit the key ring and remove the stray key from a car sold five years ago.  With the luxury of near-infinite space, you can lug around every key you’ve ever used — secure in the knowledge that you’ll never be caught embarrassingly keyless at a crucial moment.

Did the need for a weighty key ring lead to the development of gigantic purses, or did advances in purse technology produce hernia-inducing key rings?  Forget the chicken and the egg — what came first, the enormous purse or the heavyweight key ring?

The egg nog has not been touched by anyone.  Perhaps the fact that the label describes it as “ultimate” egg nog is the reason.  Regular egg nog is intimidating enough without having to deal with the “ultimate” variety — whatever it may be.  Or perhaps it is because every rational person knows that egg nog is undrinkable.  Its grotesque thickness, cloying sweetness, and overpowering odor . . . could anyone have come up with any less appealing holiday drink?

Occasionally you will run across those egg nog defenders who look at you knowingly, lower their voices to a conspiratorial whisper, and say that everyone knows you need to spike the egg nog with, say, Captain Morgan’s Spiced Rum.  That’s how they drank it in the old days, such people will say.  Why do you think Old Fezziwig was so jolly in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol?

Such comments simply confirm that the long-dead Brits who came up with the idea of combining milk, sugar, eggs, and rum were seriously troubled individuals who probably, deep down, hated the holidays.  It’s bad enough to be left furry-tongued after a night of pounding rum; combine that rum with the awesome, near-permanent coating properties of egg nog and I’d be scraping my tongue for days.  No one who really wanted to celebrate the holidays would develop a drink that is just going to compound and prolong the morning-after awfulness.

What a pleasant surprise!  After they finished, we thanked them and wished them happy holidays.  They looked like they were having a good time, and they made our evening a bit more merry, too.  Kish and I both recalled going out caroling when we were kids, and how much fun it was to be outside, singing those old familiar songs.

The group was affiliated with GnG Music Instruction, 45 Second Street, Suite B, here in New Albany, which all kinds of vocal and instrumental music instruction.  They deserve a plug after brightening our evening and bringing back some great childhood memories.

This is probably, oh, I don’t know, the thousandth time we have broken a glass coffee pot.  Why do they have to be so absurdly delicate?  I wonder whether we might just be better off returning to the stainless steel percolators of my youth.  Those sturdy devices could be dropped by a clumsy kid charged with drying the dishes — or, for that matter, hurled full force against a brick wall by an angry Dick Butkus — and still be fully operational.  Now that I think of it, I might be willing to endure a subtle metallic tang in the morning roast in exchange for the security of increased durability.

Of course, we can get a replacement pot.  However, it is a Cuisinart coffeemaker, so you can’t get the pot just anywhere.  We’ll now have to brave the parking space hell and frenzied hordes of holiday shoppers at Easton, thereby raising our blood pressure and stress levels to stratospheric heights.

In the meantime, the coffee maker looks kind of forlorn, sitting there with a gaping void at its black heart. And the absence of coffee in the morning leaves a pretty huge hole in the morning routine.

I smoked for years.  I started in 1975, after I graduated from high school.  When I was in college everyone smoked, and I did, too.  I continued smoking through my first post-college job at the Toledo Blade because every reporter smoked.  Shortly after Kish and I moved to Washington, D.C., I quit.   After about a year, I went to law school and started smoking again.  I smoked throughout law school, then quit when I began my judicial clerkship after graduation.  When we moved to Columbus and I started at the law firm, I took up smoking again.  In 1992, I quit again — this time for good.  I haven’t smoked a cigarette for about 20 years.

My cigarette of choice was Salem Lights.  I smoked about half a pack a day.  I lit up first thing in the morning because it gave me a kick start (and also seemed to encourage certain plumbing functions, if you know what I mean).  I smoked later in the day, when I would hit that attention wall in mid-afternoon and needed a jolt.  I smoked when I watched crucial football games.  I smoked when I went to bars and parties.  For the most part, it was a method of dealing with stressful situations — but I never felt like I had to have a cigarette. It really was more of a habit than an addiction, one that seemed to help me focus.

It wasn’t hard to quit.  I decided I didn’t want to smoke anymore — the impact of smoking on the longevity of Webner males is horrendous — and I just stopped.  I quit cold turkey, without patches, hypnotism, or gaining 100 pounds.  I avoided temptation for a few weeks, and then really didn’t miss it anymore.

I think people are very different in that regard.  For some people, like me, quitting really isn’t that tough.  For others, who are in thrall to nicotine cravings, it is impossible chore.  I don’t think we should judge those who smoke — they clearly know that it poses health risks, but they either don’t care or are in the grip of a powerful addiction that they just can’t shake.  Either way, it’s not for me to browbeat them about their personal habits.

To those Webners who still smoke, I would only say that I have been a heck of a lot happier since I quit.  I feel better, cleaner, and healthier.  Quitting smoking was one of the very best decisions I ever made, and I recommend it.