ここはアメリカ，莫迦と阿呆の特産地だ！
まぁ，こんな報道見ると，確かにバカとアホの特産地に思えてしまいますが．．．
ビンラディン死亡、ホワイトハウス前で「USA！USA！」の大合唱で大騒ぎ中のムービー＆フォトまとめ - GIGAZINE
先日，中編集の一つを読み，残りを後日読んでみました．
コニー・ウィリス「インサイダー疑惑」 - なぜか数学者にはワイン好きが多い
連休中，高熱に苦しんでいたために，せいぜい本を読むことくらいしかできなかったのです．
というわけで，「マーブル・アーチの風」を全部読んでみたのですが，悲しいことに，余りにも「インサイダー疑惑」が面白かったために，それ以外に一つも面白いと思ったものがありませんでした．
第一話．20ページ余りの短編「白亜紀後期にて」
恐竜の絶滅と大学の学部スリム化による経費節減をひっかけたシャレだそうですが，これ，法人内部のことを知らないと笑えないでしょうねぇ．．．
第二話．60ページ程度の中編「ニュースレター」．
クリスマスと地球外生物の侵略もの（帽子を被っているかどうかで分かるなんてわかりやす過ぎる．．．）で，スティーブン・キングが高校生の頃に書いたような感じ．
第三話．70ページ程度の中編「ひいらぎ飾ろう＠クリスマス」
未来のクリスマスとその近辺産業を描いているようなのですが，クリスマスにまつわる伝統的なキリスト教イベントや伝統文学などが散りばめられて，日本人の私にはどうもピンと来ません．．．
第四話．80ページ余りの中編「マーブル・アーチの風」
年に一度ほど集まる親しい仲間たちの間に横たわる，何か不思議な出来事．これもキングみたいです．．．そうとうなどんでん返しがないとツマンナイと思って読んでいたら，特になにも無かった．．．
「インサイダー疑惑」は100ページ余りになります．
「トンデモ本の世界w」では，
http://www.amazon.co.jp/%E3%83%88%E3%83%B3%E3%83%87%E3%83%A2%E6%9C%AC%E3%81%AE%E4%B8%96%E7%95%8C-W-%E3%81%A8%E5%AD%A6%E4%BC%9A/dp/4903063364/ref=pd_sim_b_3
楽天ブックス: トンデモ本の世界（W） - と学会 - 9784903063362 : 本
山本弘氏はH. L. メンケンを知ったのは「ナンセンスの博物誌」を読んだときとのことだそうです．
僕（＝山本）がH.L.メンケン（1880〜1956）という人物のことを初めて知ったのは，バージェス・エヴァンス「ナンセンスの博物誌」（大和書房）という本に載っていたエピソードだった．
1917年12月28日付の「ニューヨーク・イブニング・メール」紙に載せた記事の中で，メンケンは「アメリカの歴史における最も重要な記念日」が無視されていると嘆いた．
「ナンセンスの博物誌」については，唐沢俊一氏が「トンデモ本の世界S」で紹介しております．
http://www.amazon.co.jp/%E3%83%88%E3%83%B3%E3%83%87%E3%83%A2%E6%9C%AC%E3%81%AE%E4%B8%96%E7%95%8CS-%E3%81%A8%E5%AD%A6%E4%BC%9A/dp/4872338480
楽天ブックス: トンデモ本の世界（S） - と学会 - 9784872338485 : 本
と学会の活動に先立つこと30年以上にして，この本は理性による懐疑主義の大事さをわれわれに教えてくれた，まことに重要な本である……もっとも，教えてくれたのは懐疑主義思想ばかりでなく，
「清潔さという点を除けば，温水浴も冷水浴も健康増進の役には立たない．風呂桶の中で死んだ人の方が，そのために長生きした人よりも多い」（160ページ）
と，いうようなミもフタもない文章の書き方もあるかもしれないが．
私がH. L. メンケンについて知ったのは，
http://www.amazon.co.jp/%E3%82%A6%E3%82%BD%E3%81%AE%E6%AD%B4%E5%8F%B2%E5%8D%9A%E7%89%A9%E9%A4%A8-%E6%96%87%E6%98%A5%E6%96%87%E5%BA%AB-%E3%82%A2%E3%83%AC%E3%83%83%E3%82%AF%E3%82%B9-%E3%83%90%E3%83%BC%E3%82%B6/dp/4167651599/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1304593661&sr=1-1
楽天ブックス: ウソの歴史博物館 - アレックス・バーザ - 9784167651596 : 本
以下，文春文庫2006年7月10日第1刷から転載．
浴槽の話
1917年12月28日，毒舌で知られる批評家H.L.メンケンは，浴槽がたどった数奇な歴史についての一文を《ニューヨーク・イブニング・メイル》に発表した．メンケンによれば，アメリカにはじめて浴槽が登場したのは1842年12月10日だが，国民はこの新しい習慣を導入するのに消極的で慎重だったという．医者は公衆衛生に害があると非難した．多くの市で浴槽の使用を禁止する条例が可決された．状況が打破されたのは1850年代にミラード・フィルモア大統領がホワイトハウスに浴槽を設置してからだ．大統領の後ろ盾を得て国民感情が好転すると，浴槽はたちまち普及した．
この話には落ちがある．浴槽の歴史はまったくのこしらえ事だった．メンケンもただちに読者からはったりを暴かれるのを待っていた．
ところが，正反対の反応が起こったのだ．偽の歴史は野火のごとく国中にひろまり，あちこちで言及された．公衆衛生の歴史についての学術誌にも転載された．1926年には，フェアファックス・ダニーという男が作り話をほとんど引用して，浴槽の歴史を大真面目につづる始末．メンケンはうろたえた．種明かしの記事を何度も書き，作り話がそれ以上ひろまるのを食い止めようとしたが無駄だった．浴槽の歴史はすでに生命を得ていた．メンケンは悄然として「アメリカの国民はなんでも鵜呑みにしてしまう」と記事を結んだ．
ミラード・フィルモア大統領が浴槽を採用したという作り話に敬意を表して，ニューヨーク州モラヴィアでは1975年から毎年，町の目抜き通りで”浴槽レース”が開催されている．レースはフィルモア記念日と呼ばれる祝典の余興の一つだ．
メンケンのオリジナルらしき文がネットにあります．
これを読むと，メンケンが医学会の怠惰とともにホメオパシー業界なども同時に皮肉っていることが分かります．
A Neglected Anniversary | Hoaxipedia
A Neglected Anniversary
On December 20 there flitted past us, absolutely without public notice, one of the most important profane anniversaries in American history, to wit, the seventy-fifth anniversary of the introduction of the bathtub into These States. Not a plumber fired a salute or hung out a flag. Not a governor proclaimed a day of prayer. Not a newspaper called attention to the day.
True enough, it was not entirely forgotten. Eight or nine months ago one of the younger surgeons connected with the Public Health Service in Washington happened upon the facts while looking into the early history of public hygiene, and at his suggestion a committee was formed to celebrate the anniversary with a banquet. But before the plan was perfected Washington went dry, and so the banquet had to be abandoned. As it was, the day passed wholly unmarked, even in the capital of the nation.
Bathtubs are so common today that it is almost impossible to imagine a world without them. They are familiar to nearly everyone in all incorporated towns; in most of the large cities it is unlawful to build a dwelling house without putting them in; even on the farm they have begun to come into use. And yet the first American bathtub was installed and dedicated so recently as December 20, 1842, and, for all I know to the contrary, it may still be in existence and in use.
Curiously enough, the scene of its setting up was Cincinnati, then a squalid frontier town, and even today surely no leader in culture. But Cincinnati, in those days as in these, contained many enterprising merchants, and one of them was a man named Adam Thompson, a dealer in cotton and grain. Thompson shipped his grain by steamboat down the Ohio and Mississippi to New Orleans, and from there sent it to England in sailing vessels. This trade frequently took him to England, and in that country, during the ‘30s, he acquired the habit of bathing.
The bathtub was then still a novelty in England. It had been introduced in 1828 by Lord John Russell and its use was yet confined to a small class of enthusiasts. Moreover, the English bathtub, then as now, was a puny and inconvenient contrivance―little more, in fact, than a glorified dishpan―and filling and emptying it required the attendance of a servant. Taking a bath, indeed, was a rather heavy ceremony, and Lord John in 1835 was said to be the only man in England who had yet come to doing it every day.
Thompson, who was of inventive fancy―he later devised the machine that is still used for bagging hams and bacon―conceived the notion that the English bathtub would be much improved if it were made large enough to admit the whole body of an adult man, and if its supply of water, instead of being hauled to the scene by a maid, were admitted by pipes from a central reservoir and run off by the same means. Accordingly, early in 1842 he set about building the first modern bathroom in his Cincinnati home―a large house with Doric pillars, standing near what is now the corner of Monastery and Orleans streets.
There was then, of course, no city water supply, at least in that part of the city, but Thompson had a large well in his garden, and he installed a pump to lift its water to the house. This pump, which was operated by six Negroes, much like an old-time fire engine, was connected by a pipe with a cypress tank in the garret of the house, and here the water was stored until needed. From the tank two other pipes ran to the bathroom. One, carrying cold water, was a direct line. The other, designed to provide warm water, ran down the great chimney of the kitchen, and was coiled inside it like a giant spring.
The tub itself was of new design, and became the grandfather of all the bathtubs of today. Thompson had it made by James Cullness, the leading Cincinnati cabinetmaker of those days, and its material was Nicaragua mahogany. It was nearly seven feet long and fully four feet wide. To make it water-tight, the interior was lined with sheet lead, carefully soldered at the joints. The whole contraption weighed about 1,750 pounds, and the floor of the room in which it was placed had to be reinforced to support it. The exterior was elaborately polished.
In this luxurious tub Thompson took two baths on December 20, 1842―a cold one at 8 a.m. and a warm one some time during the afternoon. The warm water, heated by the kitchen fire, reached a temperature of 105 degrees. On Christmas day, having a party of gentlemen to dinner, he exhibited the new marvel to them and gave an exhibition of its use, and four of them, including a French visitor, Col. Duchanel, risked plunges into it. The next day all Cincinnati―then a town of about 100,000 people―had heard of it, and the local newspapers described it at length and opened their columns to violent discussions of it.
The thing, in fact, became a public matter, and before long there was bitter and double-headed opposition to the new invention, which had been promptly imitated by several other wealthy Cincinnatians. On the one hand it was denounced as an epicurean and obnoxious toy from England, designed to corrupt the democratic simplicity of the Republic, and on the other hand it was attacked by the medical faculty as dangerous to health and a certain inviter of “phthisic, rheumatic fevers, inflammation of the lungs and the whole category of zymotic diseases.” (I quote from the Western Medical Repository of April 23, 1843.)
The noise of the controversy soon reached other cities, and in more than one place medical opposition reached such strength that it was reflected in legislation. Late in 1843, for example, the Philadelphia Common Council considered an ordinance prohibiting bathing between November 1 and March 15, and it failed of passage by but two votes. During the same year the legislature of Virginia laid a tax of $30 a year on all bathtubs that might be set up, and in Hartford, Providence, Charleston and Wilmington (Del.) special and very heavy water rates were levied upon those who had them. Boston, very early in 1845, made bathing unlawful except upon medical advice, but the ordinance was never enforced and in 1862 it was repealed.
This legislation, I suspect, had some class feeling in it, for the Thompson bathtub was plainly too expensive to be owned by any save the wealthy; indeed, the common price for installing one in New York in 1845 was $500. Thus the low caste politicians of the time made capital by fulminating against it, and there is even some suspicion of political bias in many of the early medical denunciations. But the invention of the common pine bathtub, lined with zinc, in 1847, cut off this line of attack, and thereafter the bathtub made steady progress.
The zinc tub was devised by John F. Simpson, a Brooklyn plumber, and his efforts to protect it by a patent occupied the courts until 1855. But the decisions were steadily against him, and after 1848 all the plumbers of New York were equipped for putting in bathtubs. According to a writer in the Christian Register for July 17, 1857, the first one in New York was opened for traffic on September 12, 1847, and by the beginning of 1850 there were already nearly 1,000 in use in the big town.
After this medical opposition began to collapse, and among other eminent physicians Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes declared for the bathtub, and vigorously opposed the lingering movement against it in Boston. The American Medical Association held its annual meeting in Boston in 1849, and a poll of the members in attendance showed that nearly 55 per cent of them now regarded bathing as harmless, and that more than 20 per cent advocated it as beneficial. At its meeting in 1850 a resolution was formally passed giving the imprimatur of the faculty to the bathtub. The homeopaths followed with a like resolution in 1853.
But it was the example of President Millard Fillmore that, even more than the grudging medical approval, gave the bathtub recognition and respectability in the United States. While he was still Vice-President, in March, 1850, he visited Cincinnati on a stumping tour, and inspected the original Thompson tub. Thompson himself was now dead, but his bathroom was preserved by the gentlemen who had bought his house from the estate. Fillmore was entertained in this house and, according to Chamberlain, his biographer, took a bath in the tub. Experiencing no ill effects, he became an ardent advocate of the new invention, and on succeeding to the Presidency at Taylor’s death, July 9, 1850, he instructed his secretary of war, Gen. Charles M. Conrad, to invite tenders for the construction of a bathtub in the White House.
This action, for a moment, revived the old controversy, and its opponents made much of the fact that there was no bathtub at Mount Vernon, or at Monticello, and that all the Presidents and other magnificoes of the past had got along without any such monarchical luxuries. The elder Bennett, in the New York Herald, charged that Fillmore really aspired to buy and install in the White House a porphyry and alabaster bath that had been used by Louis Philippe at Versailles. But Conrad, disregarding all this clamor, duly called for bids, and the contract was presently awarded to Harper & Gillespie, a firm of Philadelphia engineers, who proposed to furnish a tub of thin cast iron, capable of floating the largest man.
This was installed early in 1851, and remained in service in the White House until the first Cleveland administration, when the present enameled tub was substituted. The example of the President soon broke down all that remained of the old opposition, and by 1860, according to the newspaper advertisements of the time, every hotel in New York had a bathtub, and some had two and even three. In 1862 bathing was introduced into the Army by Gen. McClellan, and in 1870 the first prison bathtub was set up at Moyamensing Prison, in Philadelphia.
So much for the history of the bathtub in America. One is astonished, on looking into it, to find that so little of it has been recorded. The literature, in fact, is almost nil. But perhaps this brief sketch will encourage other inquirers and so lay the foundation for an adequate celebration of the centennial in 1942.
