The Green Light
These sorts of capers happen in cities like Baltimore. Charm City, home of The Ravens, The Orioles, John Waters, and the late Edgar Allen Poe. It’s where the “beehive” and “Natty Boh” beer linger on in perpetuity. It is a quirky city full of quirky people. My kind of people.
Of the friends we made while living there, Steve and Mary were the most prone to frequent quirkiness. Steve St. Angelo, AKA Shop Boy, and wife, Mary Mashburn AKA Belle Pica, live in Bolton Hill, a grand neighborhood of town homes dating from as early as 1830. As a matter of fact, their home is just blocks from where Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald rented a home at 1307 Park Avenue in the 1930s.
It was The Baltimore Sun that brought us together there in 1996. Steve was a copy editor and Vic was the design director for features. Mary and I were free to create our professional lives as we saw fit. Mary was a graphic designer and I cooked.
Flash forward to 2002. Vic is managing editor for the Statesman Journal in Salem, Oregon and I’m a Realtor. Steve plies his trade at U.S. News & World Report in Washington DC and Mary, the artist, keeps the presses inked and rolling at Typecast Press in Baltimore. Steve rides the rails from Baltimore to DC on work days and emerges from Penn Station at home as Shop Boy, ready and willing to do Belle Pica’s bidding in the press room.
It seems that sometime after we left Charm City on the east coast for Cherry City on the west coast, our charming friends went to the shady side – “tipping” if you will. I’m not talking loose pocket change here but their attempt to force something new on an unsuspecting world of imbibing.
Seems Mary’s Wednesday Night Book Club had been reading Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point.” Suddenly Mary’s impish light bulb begins to glow and with horns too. The mission – invent a new cocktail and begin ordering it from unsuspecting bartenders around town as if they had been sipping them all summer at Harry’s Bar in Venice. Clearly a sly, cunning and willful perpetration.
First order of mischief: Create a cocktail. Our clever operators decided to alter an innocent cocktail called The White Lady, AKA Delilah, Chelsea Sidecar and Lillian Forever. Innocent in this context, but if you ask me, all including the perps suggest mischievous, naughty behavior or malizioso as the Mob would say.
Now they needed a believable name and a story about its history. “The Green Lady” just didn’t work and frankly, it sounded a bit scary so they christened it “The Green Light.” Voilá! “Legend” has it that a frustrated screenwriter in Hollywood finally gets a project “green-lighted” and asks his favorite barkeep to invent a drink in celebration. Before long his film is screened in Cannes and the drink spreads up and down the Mediterranean hopping from yacht to yacht.
Now, a tipping we will go. Our fashionably dressed couple strolls into the Owl Bar at the Belvedere Hotel acting as if they’re Nick and Nora Charles and slide into a cozy booth.
“Two Green Lights please,” Nick (Shop Boy) says as he lights Nora’s (Belle’s) cigarette.
The waiter looks somewhat puzzled but leaves to place the order. He returns saying, “You’ve stumped the bartender. Can you tell us how it’s made?”
“Oh, perhaps it hasn’t reached Baltimore yet,” Shop Boy er Nick innocently tells the waiter. “Tell him it’s equal parts Bombay Sapphire Gin, Cointreau and fresh lime juice.”
Our two perps continue to visit local bars periodically – Zodiac, John Steven Ltd, Ixia, The Brewers Art, The Club Charles, and the Waterfront Hotel. There was no end to their relentless “tipping.” They even had accomplices follow up at each bar on multiple occasions until the baffled barkeeps added The Green Light to their repertoire. It wasn’t long before Shop Boy and Belle targeted their crown jewel, the bar at The Brass Elephant, an elegant, uptown restaurant in a grand home on Charles St. To their amazement, there were strangers lined up at the bar already sipping Green Lights. Mission accomplished! The Green Light had finally taken off and soon after it was featured in an airline magazine on flights in and out of Baltimore.
No names in this story were changed to protect the guilty.
The Green Light
1 1/2 ounces (45 ml) Bombay Sapphire Gin
1 1/2 ounces (45 ml) Cointreau
1 1/2 ounces (45 ml) freshly squeezed lime juice
Shake or stir with ice until cold and serve in a chilled martini glass
Shop Boy and Belle Pica have been spotted around town sipping drinks made with, ahem, Beefeater so I hardly doubt they would object to substituting one of Oregon’s fine new gins. A word of caution, it will be a smooth ride through the light made with Bendistillery’s Cascade Mountain Gin but the color may be suggest “Chartreuse Light.” Aviation Gin from Portland would be a good, clear choice. Shop Boy, an expert mixologist, may have something to say about my suggestions here and if so, I’m sure we’ll hear from him.
Cheers and here’s hoping that Shop Boy is flattered that I lifted, er, a few, ahem, of his clever literary mannerisms.
The Grooved Spheres
Over the last few decades, miners in South Africa have been digging up mysterious metal spheres. Origin unknown, these spheres measure approximately an inch or so in diameter, and some are etched with three parallel grooves running around the equator. Two types of spheres have been found: one is composed of a solid bluish metal with flecks of white; the other is hollowed out and filled with a spongy white substance. The kicker is that the rock in which they where found is Precambrian - and dated to 2.8 billion years old! Who made them and for what purpose is unknown.
The Dropa Stones
In 1938, an archeological expedition led by Dr. Chi Pu Tei into the Baian-Kara-Ula mountains of China made an astonishing discovery in some caves that had apparently been occupied by some ancient culture. Buried in the dust of ages on the cave floor were hundreds of stone disks. Measuring about nine inches in diameter, each had a circle cut into the center and was etched with a spiral groove, making it look for all the world like some ancient phonograph record some 10,000 to 12,000 years old. The spiral groove, it turns out, is actually composed of tiny hieroglyphics that tell the incredible story of spaceships from some distant world that crash-landed in the mountains. The ships were piloted by people who called themselves the Dropa, and the remains of whose descendents, possibly, were found in the cave.
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The Ica Stones
Beginning in the 1930s, the father of Dr. Javier Cabrera, Cultural Anthropologist for Ica, Peru, discovered many hundreds of ceremonial burial stones in the tombs of the ancient Incas. Dr. Cabrera, carrying on his father's work, has collected more than 1,100 of these andesite stones, which are estimated to be between 500 and 1,500 years old and have become known collectively as the Ica Stones. The stones bear etchings, many of which are sexually graphic (which was common to the culture), some picture idols and others depict such practices as open-heart surgery and brain transplants. The most astonishing etchings, however, clearly represent dinosaurs - brontosaurs, triceratops (see photo), stegosaurus and pterosaurs. While skeptics consider the Ica Stones a hoax, their authenticity has neither been proved or disproved.
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The Antikythera Mechanism
A perplexing artifact was recovered by sponge-divers from a shipwreck in 1900 off the coast of Antikythera, a small island that lies northwest of Crete. The divers brought up from the wreck a great many marble and and bronze statues that had apparently been the ship's cargo. Among the findings was a hunk of corroded bronze that contained some kind of mechanism composed of many gears and wheels. Writing on the case indicated that it was made in 80 B.C., and many experts at first thought it was an astrolabe, an astronomer's tool. An x-ray of the mechanism, however, revealed it to be far more complex, containing a sophisticated system of differential gears. Gearing of this complexity was not known to exist until 1575! It is still unknown who constructed this amazing instrument 2,000 years ago or how the technology was lost.
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The Baghdad Battery
Today batteries can be found in any grocery, drug, convenience and department store you come across. Well, here's a battery that's 2,000 years old! Known as the Baghdad Battery, this curiosity was found in the ruins of a Parthian village believed to date back to between 248 B.C. and 226 A.D. The device consists of a 5-1/2-inch high clay vessel inside of which was a copper cylinder held in place by asphalt, and inside of that was an oxidized iron rod. Experts who examined it concluded that the device needed only to be filled with an acid or alkaline liquid to produce an electric charge. It is believed that this ancient battery might have been used for electroplating objects with gold. If so, how was this technology lost... and the battery not rediscovered for another 1,800 years?
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The Coso Artifact
While mineral hunting in the mountains of California near Olancha during the winter of 1961, Wallace Lane, Virginia Maxey and Mike Mikesell found a rock, among many others, that they thought was a geode - a good addition for their gem shop. Upon cutting it open, however, Mikesell found an object inside that seemed to be made of white porcelain. In the center was a shaft of shiny metal. Experts estimated that it should have taken about 500,000 years for this fossil-encrusted nodule to form, yet the object inside was obviously of sophisticated human manufacture. Further investigation revealed that the porcelain was surround by a hexagonal casing, and an x-ray revealed a tiny spring at one end. Some who have examined the evidence say it looks very much like a modern-day spark plug. How did it get inside a 500,000-year-old rock?
Ancient Model Aircraft
There are artifacts belonging to ancient Egyptian and Central American cultures that look amazingly like modern-day aircraft. The Egyptian artifact, found in a tomb at Saqquara, Egypt in 1898, is a six-inch wooden object that strongly resembles a model airplane, with fuselage, wings and tail. Experts believe the object is so aerodynamic that it is actually able to glide. The small object discovered in Central America (shown at right), and estimated to be 1,000 years old, is made of gold and could easily be mistaken for a model of a delta-wing aircraft - or even the Space Shuttle. It even features what looks like a pilot's seat.
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Giant Stone Balls of Costa Rica
Workmen hacking and burning their way through the dense jungle of Costa Rica to clear an area for banana plantations in the 1930s stumbled upon some incredible objects: dozens of stone balls, many of which were perfectly spherical. They varied in size from as small as a tennis ball to an astonishing 8 feet in diameter and weighing 16 tons! Although the great stone balls are clearly man-made, it is unknown who made them, for what purpose and, most puzzling, how they achieved such spherical precision.
Impossible Fossils
Fossils, as we learned in grade school, appear in rocks that were formed many thousands of years ago. Yet there are a number of fossils that just don't make geological or historical sense. A fossil of a human handprint, for example, was found in limestone estimated to be 110 million years old. What appears to be a fossilized human finger found in the Canadian Arctic also dates back 100 to 110 million years ago. And what appears to be the fossil of a human footprint, possibly wearing a sandal, was found near Delta, Utah in a shale deposit estimated to be 300 million to 600 million years old.
Out-of-Place Metal Objects
Humans were not even around 65 million years ago, never mind people who could work metal. So then how does science explain semi-ovoid metallic tubes dug out of 65-million-year-old Cretaceous chalk in France? In 1885, a block of coal was broken open to find a metal cube obviously worked by intelligent hands. In 1912, employees at an electric plant broke apart a large chunk of coal out of which fell an iron pot! A nail was found embedded in a sandstone block from the Mesozoic Era. And there are many, many more such anomalies.
What are we to make of these finds? There are several possibilities:
In any case, these examples - and there are many more - should prompt any curious and open-minded scientist to reexamine and rethink the true history of life on earth.
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