Word: kitcheners
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...scientists did not periodically correct the difference between the atomic clock and Earth's rotation, within a few hundred years the position of the sun in the sky would noticeably differ with the time on your kitchen clock, an aspect of earthly timekeeping that has caused much consternation historically, vexing everyone from Julius Caesar to Pope Gregory XIII. So, in 1972, an international agreement decreed that instead of continually revising the definition of a second, atomic clocks would be adjusted by adding a leap second each time an appreciable discrepancy was detected by observations made at the International Earth Rotation...
...madness: "Maybe you, the normal man, walk into the kitchen in the wee hours and eat jelly by the tablespoon right out of the jar, and have no memory of it in the morning, only the weird evidence in the sink. Or maybe when you wake, you turn to your wife and say, "I had the strangest dream last night. I was flying in a tiger suit over Wall Street and your mother was wearing a turban...
...Roosevelt's sons were fantastic scoundrels," says Bonnie Angelo, author of First Families: The Impact of the White House on Their Lives. They would sneak around behind the lamplighter on Lafayette Square extinguishing the lamps he lit. They'd slide down the grand staircase on kitchen trays. "When Archie was sick, his brother Quentin - with the aid of a White House staffer - brought their pony Algonquin up to his room in the elevator to make him feel better," says Angelo. These pranks were tolerated, she notes, because the President enjoyed them more than anyone. "The only thing he stopped...
...them go on all the rides. They quickly outgrew the little trains but could ride the bumper cars; then they outgrew those but could take on the climbing wall. Now they prefer the roller-skating rink, where boys and girls hold hands. As with the pencil lines on the kitchen wall, we've watched them grow through their small rituals. If ambition and opportunity spin us off in every direction, traditions reel us back to where we came from so we can see how we've grown...
...grandfather dies, a house burns down--but the traditions survive; they are made of love and longing for what we value, and so we hold them close and take them wherever we go. They are wonderfully portable, as anyone who has ever improvised a Thanksgiving in someone else's kitchen knows...