The Lamorindan
Photos - Bob Hermann -- Rich Shearer- Reporting
The Weekly Newsletter of the Rotary Club of Lamorinda Sunrise
the winning ticket. He didn’t get the white marble, though, proving something
or other about odds, but I’ll be darned if I can figure it out.
Birthdays, Anniversaries & Miscellaneous:
Bill Time again
Guests:
Greg Reeves
David Herbert - Dan’s son
Bill Bishop - for the second
time (hint, hint)
Simone Raeth - Thomas’ #1
daughter
Cameron Shearer - Rich’s #1
teenager
General:
Okay, the bulletin is coming out later than most of you can remember
back. Blame the writer, not the publisher.
WE NEED A FEW GOOD VOLUNTEERS: Come January 22, we,
along with members of the Acalanes High Interact Club, will be helping out at
the Contra Costa County Food Bank. Due to space constraints, they can
only use five - count ‘em, five - Lamorinda Sunrisers. Surely we can get five
of us to commit, right? (I know, I know: yes we can, and stop calling me
Shirley.) Contact Kevin Croak if you can one of the few, the proud, the
helpful.
AND WE ACTUALLY BOTHER TO HAVE THE RAFFLE DRAWING
BECAUSE . . . . ?: David Herbert, Dan’s son, was home for the holidays and
came to visit. A wonderful thing,
as he is always welcome. His
visit, however, provided further
evidence, as if any was needed,
that we as a group are slow
learners. If you will recall, the last
three or four times in a row that
one of Dan’s offspring have
attended, they have walked off
with the day’s raffle prize. At least
once, David himself pulled the
white marble out of the bag. Which
leads to the question posed in the
title of this item. In any event, the
ticket was drawn, and, anticlimax of anticlimaxes, a certain David Herbert had
44 years of wedded bliss is
worth $22. At least it was to Jack
Peers. And just to show that fining
logic is not more predictable during the holidays than during any other time,
$20 was the going rate for Jim Terril for 23 years of marriage and for
Thomas Raeth’s birthday.
Upcoming Programs & Events:
01/07/05 - Bob Agnew, Program Director of KNBR ("THE Sports
Leader") will talk about "Behind the Scenes at a Sports Radio Station."
01/14/05 - The always dynamic Al Frumkin, Program Director of the
Rotary Foundation, has a talk entitled "The Face of Hopelessness/The Face
of Hope."
01/21/05 - Life Coach Thornton Prayer speaks about "Living an
Authentic Life."
01/22/05 - Five of us will be helping out at the Contra Costa County
Food Bank, as will five of the Acalanes High Interacters.
01/23-01/24/05 - The Infamous Annual Reno Train Trip - the most fun
you can have on a locomotive that isn’t grounds for divorce. Contact Steve
Ware for details.
01/28/05 - Steve Ware and Thomas Raeth will be this month’s "Expose
Yourself" victims - er, program.
02/02/05 - The Annual InterClub Meeting, held at Rossmoor again this
year. $18 per. Talk to Rich Shearer about tickets (you can’t get into
Rossmoor without one).
02/25/05 - Bob Riegg tries to make sense of his life in this month’s
"Expose Yourself."
03/12/05 - Our Annual No-Longer-A-Crab-Feed Dinner and Auction
Fundraiser. Mark your calendar.
04/20/05-04/27/05 - We, along with the Lafayette Club, host the Russian
bakers this week. We need host families and, maybe, drivers. Contact
Bruce McDougall.
Program:
Professor John Diestler of
Contra Costa College consented
to do a little slumming today in a
very fun talk about the alphabet,
Johannes Gutenberg, and the
Phoenicians. It all flowed nicely
and covered a bunch of neat
history. I cannot begin to do justice
to it, but what the heck, let’s give
it whirl. It turns out that our alphabet
has its origins in the western
Sinai Peninsula, where a group
of Semites were enslaved by the
Egyptians. The Egyptians had
their system of writing: hieroglyphics. Those glyphs were pictorial,
not phonetic. But these Semites and there is evidence to suggest
that it was really just one of them
having a brainstorm - took the first sound from certain Egyptian glyphs and
converted the glyph into a letter. For example, the glyph for "ox" was "aleph,
so that glyph was used for the "ah" sound. The glyph for "house" - "beth" was used for the "b" sound. Sounds a lot like the Greek letters "alpha" and
"beta" or our own word "alphabet"? Gues s what - that’s not a coincidence. (It
also means that "alphabet" actually means "ox house.") These Semites
came up with 22 letters, and that alphabet is the direct ancestor of Hebrew.
Enter the Purple People - the Phoenicians. They originated in the eastern
Mediterranean, around what is now southern Lebanon. They knew how to
make purple dye from certain clams, something no on else could do.
Naturally, people being what they are, purple became the rage, which meant
it became a color of the rich and powerful - and especially of the royalty. The
Phoenicians became adventurous sailors in order to search out more
sources of the clams that gave them purple dye and their wealth.
(Phoenicians sailed all over the Mediterranean and far out into the Atlantic to
places that modern Europeans wouldn’t visit for many centuries.) They also
needed a way to record their sailing routes and navigational discoveries. Enter
the alphabet that the Hebrews down the road were using, adapted for
Phoenician pu rposes. One of the folks with whom the Phoenicians came into
contact were the Greeks who - surprise, surprise - took the Phoenician
alphabet and adapted it to their use. Up to this time, reading was done right to
left. (Egyptian hieroglyphs could be read either direction, depending the
direction a depicted person was facing.) The Greeks first adapted a back-andforth system, but eventually they settled on the left-to-right system we are
familiar with today. They ancient Greeks were very proud of their alphabet,
but pretty much forgot where it came from. The Romans, of course, took
the Greek alphabet for their own. And being Romans, they couldn’t leave it
alone, dropping the letter "z", adding "g" and re-adding "z". They also
introduced curves into the letters, creating the "italic hand," or italics. This
www.lamorindasunrise.org 2004-05#25, Decemer 24, 2004
allowed more writing to fit on a page, which tied in with another Roman
innovation - the book. Up ‘til then,
writing was preserved on clay
tablets that were then baked or
on paper o r papyrus scrolls.
Both of these were incredibly
awkward means of preserving
information. Books, on the other
hand, allowed for the development
of things like indexes (okay, indices
for the Latin-literate among you)
that made it far, far easier to
locate information. So why is all
this stuff important? Because it
makes it possible to freeze ideas
in time, making it possible for us
to not have to always be reinventing the proverbial wheel. This,
says Professor Diestler, is one of
the key factors that separates
humans form other species. Now for the next step - the Gutenberg
revolution. This, asserts Prof. Diestler, was a revolution in the transmission of
information equivalent in its impact to the Internet revolution. The interesting
thing to realize is that Gutenberg was primarily a metallurgist, and that
machine printing had been done before. He was able to take the previously
existing technologies, put them together and add the critical missing ingredient the right lead al loy to make long-lasting set-ups possible, which in turn made
possible the first true mass-production of texts. The first such text was, of
course, Gutenberg’s Bibles. But therein lies its own tale. Gutenberg was
financed in his Bible venture by Johan Fust. It turned out that the project took
longer than Fust expected or was prepared to wait. (Fust didn’t understand
that Gutenberg had to print all of the page 1's, then all the page 2's, etc.,
instead of being able to produce one entire Bible, then another, etc.) Fust
called the loan, took over the production, and then took the finished Bibles to
Paris to sell to the University students there. The prices were far below those
of the hand-lettered Bibles then produced, and the Bibles sold like hotcakes.
Unfortunately for Fust, people compared their Bibles and found the lettering
to absolutely identical - something simply not possible, they thought. In the
1400's, this could lead to only one possible conclusion - Fust was a witch.
Fust now faced a choice: (1) be burned at the stake or (2) ‘fess up as to how
the Bibles were produced. Not surprisingly, he chose #2. Thus ended
whatever monopoly he or Gutenberg might had, and within 10 years, there
was a printing press in every capitol in Europe, save only Russia. There
ended Professor Diestler’s tale of the evolution and importance of written
communication as it has come down to us. There were other fun details that I
have not been able to work in - hey, there has to be some premium for
actually being here to hear the presentation - but this will, I hope, give you a
fair idea of a fine presentation.