The Friday Letter 6/22/07

Hot news of the week: The Exxon-Valdez (our antique Ford truck) has once again lived up to her name.

It all started a long, long time ago in Detroit.

Rose (her nickname) was made with a heavy cast iron structure to house her oil filter. This filter assembly came perpendicularly off the engine block, made a right-angle, and hung there in mid-air, filtering some of her oil, leaking other amounts.

I rebuilt the device back in 2000, torqued the hold-down bolts using Loctite metal glue, and sure enough, it still leaked.

The solution appeared in an old-truck magazine: an adapter plate. So we upgraded to a modern cartridge filter and got rid of the clumsy original equipment.

Fast forward to last winter, 2007. I didn't relish the thought of rolling around under the truck when it was so icy cold. So we went off to Grease Monkey and had the dirty oil change deed done indoors.

Then last week it was time to change to summer oil. The grease monkey at Grease Monkey had put the filter on so tight, I had to destroy it to remove it.

Unbeknownst to me, my violence in removing the filter also damaged the adapter plate gasket.

So I drove off blithely from the house down to the mobile court. On the way back I noticed some fool had spread motor oil all over the highway. A lot of oil. Something like you might imagine when the Exxon-Valdez split in two.

I followed the trail of oil, and it had begun . . . in my driveway. I had one more disciplinary session under Old Red Rose, the Exxon-Valdez, and solved the problem.

We lost half a quart of oil -- a pint, 16 ounces in American measurement. Ah, another day in the life of the operator of an antique vehicle.

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Word of the week, Fetus:

Webster's New World Dictionary '' [Latin fetus, foetus, a bringing forth, bearing, progeny] 1. The unborn young of an animal while still in the uterus. 2. in man, the offspring in the womb from the end of the third month of pregnancy until birth; distinguished from embryo.''

Darn. I was hoping the dictionary would more closely match with church teaching.

Word of the week for next week: expatriate.

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The first man I ever knew of who wore his hat backwards was Yogi Berra, or maybe it was Babe Ruth. Baseball hat with bill pointed backwards meant the guy was a catcher.

The catcher gets a special mask, and is the only team member thus privileged to wear his hat backwards.

Soon, I saw another type of man wearing his baseball cap backwards: A welder. Welders do this for a similar reason.

Many years passed before I saw the third classification: A biker. He explained he did this so that the wind wouldn't take his hat. Makes sense, in a way, though a biker would do better to wear gear protecting his eyes and forehead from the sun and wind.

So we have three types of guys who can honestly rationalize, to one degree or another, the wearing of the hat backwards.

There is a fourth type of man who will have been seen since about 1970 wearing his baseball cap backwards. For the sake of simplicity, we will call him "The Buffoon."

It sure sends a signal. It says, "I am too stupid to know that, worn properly, my hat is designed to protect my eyes from the sun."

It says, "I am a potential criminal, and to warn you of that fact, I wear my hat backwards."

It says, "I am pretending to be from the ghetto, where hats are worn backwards as an outward sign of a rebellious non-conformity."

It says, "I am a boy under the age of 6 whose grandparents think it is cute."

It says, desperately, "If I don't wear my hat backwards, girls won't think I'm a hunk."

To compound all these errors, many hats-backward guys wear their hats backward indoors, outdoors, in church, in the presence of a lady.....

Why does this ''stylish'' aberration persist into this century? What happened? I'm not sure, but I think it has to do with the introduction of the birth control pill and the popularity of abortion. It is a mark of the decline in morality during these last 30 years.

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Response record: Well heck. We gained some, we lost some. It appears that some of my deathless prose, innocuous as it seemed to me, was offensive in some quarters of the world.

My response I'll take from the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 6 verse 23: "The lamp of the body is the eye. If your eye is sound, your whole body will be filled with light but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be in darkness. And if the light in you is darkness, how great will the darkness be.''